The German Idealism Reader: Ideas, Responses, and Legacy 1474286666, 9781474286664

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THE GERMAN IDEALISM READER

Also available from Bloomsbury CHINESE AND BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMAN THOUGHT by Eric S. Nelson FAITH AND REASON IN CONTINENTAL AND JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY by Takeshi Morisato METAPHYSICS by Alexander Baumgarten (translated by Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers) REALISMS INTERLINKED: OBJECT, SUBJECT AND OTHER SUBJECTS by Arindam Chakrabarti SKEPTICISM: FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE PRESENT edited by Diego Machuca and Baron Reed TRUTH: A CONTEMPORARY READER edited by Douglas Edwards

Kant’s Sources in Translation Series EXCERPT FROM THE DOCTRINE OF REASON by Georg Friedrich Meier (translated by Aaron Bunch) PREPARATION FOR NATURAL THEOLOGY by Johann August Eberhard (translated by Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers)

THE GERMAN IDEALISM READER IDEAS, RESPONSES, AND LEGACY

Edited by Marina F. Bykova

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Marina F. Bykova, 2020 Marina F. Bykova has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Eltz Castle (oil on canvas), Quaglio, Domenico II (1787–1837) / Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany / Bridgeman Images. 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 editor 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: HB: 978-1-4742-8666-4 PB: 978-1-4742-8667-1 ePDF: 978-1-4742-8668-8 eBook: 978-1-4742-8665-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Nelly V. Motroshilova who has been my continuous inspiration

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CONTENTS

Preface  About the Reader xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction  German Idealism: Mapping the Philosophical Landscape

1

The Age of German Idealism: Chronology

15

PART I  Kant and the First Receptions of Critical Philosophy

27

1

29 29 37 39

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Introduction Chronology of Immanuel Kant’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Selections (1) From Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787): Selections (2) From Critique of Practical Reason (1788): Selections (3) From Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790): Selections

41 57 65

2

71 71 76 78

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) Introduction Chronology of Friedrich Jacobi’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Selections (1) From Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (1785): Selections (2) From Jacobi to Fichte (1799): Selections 3

Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823) Introduction Chronology of Karl Reinhold’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Selections (1) From Letters on the Kantian Philosophy (1786–87): Selections (2) From On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge (1791): Selections

80 87 93 93 98 100 102 106

Contents

4

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) Introduction Chronology of Friedrich Schiller’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

111 111 119 122

Selections (1) From “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner” (1793): Selections (2) From Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795): Selections

124 131

5

139 139 144 145

Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833) Introduction Chronology of Gottlob Schulze’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Selections (1) From Aenesidemus, or Concerning the Foundations of the Philosophy of the Elements Issued by Prof. Reinhold in Jena together with a Defense of Skepticism against the Pretensions of the Critique of Reason (1792): Selections

146

6

155 155 160 161

Salomon Maimon (1753–1800) Introduction Chronology of Salomon Maimon’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Selections (1) From Letters of Philaletes to Aenesidemus (1794): Selections (2) Letter from Maimon to Kant (1789) (3)  Article from the Berlin Journal for Enlightenment (1790)

163 166 168

PART II  Rise of German Idealism. Post-Kantian Idealist Thinkers

175

7

177 177 184 186

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) Introduction Chronology of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Selections (1) From Review of Aenesidemus (1794): Selections (2) From An Attempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre (1797/98): Selections

195

8

211 211 217 219

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Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) Introduction Chronology of Friedrich Hölderlin’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

188

Contents

Selections (1) From “On the Law of Freedom” (1794): Selections (2) From “On the Concept of Punishment” (1795): Selections (3) From Judgment and Being (1795): Selections (4) From [Letter No. 94] To Hegel: Selections (5)  The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism (1796)

220 221 223 224 226

9

229 229 236 238

Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (Novalis) (1772–1801) Introduction Chronology of Friedrich Novalis’s Life and Work Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Selections (1) From Fichte Studies (1795–96): Selections (2) From Logological Fragments I (1797–98): Selections

240 243

10

249 249 253 254

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) Introduction Chronology of Friedrich Schelling’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Selections (1) From Presentation of My System of Philosophy (1801): Selections (2) From Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy (1802): Selections (3) From Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters (1809): Selections

267

11

271 271 278 280

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) Introduction Chronology of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

256 261

Selections (1) From Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): Selections 283 (2) From Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821): Selections 290 (3) From The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (1830): Selections 298 Part III  Post-Hegelian Critics and Responses

307

12

309 309 315 318

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) Introduction Chronology of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

ix

Contents

Selections (1) From The World as Will and Representation (1819): Selections (2) From “On the Basis of Morals” (1840): Selections

319 324

13

331 331 336 338

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804–1872) Introduction Chronology of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Selections (1) From “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy” (1839): Selections (2) From The Essence of Christianity (1841): Selections (3) From Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843): Selections

339 348 355

14

359 359 365 368

Karl Marx (1818–1883) Introduction Chronology of Karl Marx’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Selections (1) From “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” (1843): Selections (2) From Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844): Selections (3) “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845)

369 372 393

15 Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Introduction Chronology of Søren Kierkegaard’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

395 395 401 404

Selections (1) From Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846): Selections (2) From The Sickness Unto Death. A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening (1849): Selections

406

16

417 417 423 426

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) Introduction Chronology of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Life and Works Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Selections (1) From “Schopenhauer as Educator” (1874): Selections (2) From Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886): Selections

414

428 436

Index 443 x

PREFACE

ABOUT THE READER

This volume introduces the intellectual epoch broadly known as the age of German idealism. I would like to present the era in its fascinating manifoldness and enormous complexity. The Reader includes representative selections from key thinkers in the classical German idealist tradition and their immediate critics. In addition to examining the central philosophical discussions which took place during the long, half-century, period from roughly the 1780s into the 1830s–1840s, this book also considers responses to and critiques of German idealist thought by late-nineteenth-century thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. My aim with this Reader is to provide a broad account of the main ideas and arguments developed by leading figures of the German idealist tradition and introduce the most significant critical reactions to their thought. I do this by not limiting the scope of the volume to only the four best-known figures of the movement—Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; I also include such thinkers as Jacobi, Reinhold, Maimon, Schulze, Hölderlin, Schiller, and Novalis, who are often considered “second-tier,” yet are crucial for an accurate account of this vibrant period. This, in my view, presents the intellectual dynamics of the era in all its philosophical complexity. The anthology is intended primarily as a source book for students, instructors, and general readers who would like to have a genuine understanding of German idealism, its intellectual and cultural legacy, and the philosophical challenges to which it gave rise. The Reader opens with the “Chronology of the Age of German Idealism,” which attempts to reconstruct and visually present the most important intricacies of the epoch by providing a broader historical and intellectual context. In addition to entries of philosophical significance (such as the dates of life of the key figures of the period, the dates of publication of their major works, public lectures, and essential debates), it also includes a list of the main historical events of the era. This focused timeline should allow students a glimpse into the epoch by giving them an exposure to the social and historical frameworks needed for an understanding of philosophical debates at the time. In choosing primary texts for this volume, whenever possible, I have tried to apply the following principles: (1) rely on accurate and clear translations, (2) include unabridged sections of the works, (3) select the texts that are central to the thinker’s philosophical position, (4) use the selections relevant to the Reader’s focus on German idealism, and (5) pick the texts that allow for the reconstruction of the spirit of the epoch and theoretical debates central to the historical period and philosophical movement in question. In order to make the texts more accessible to students, I have omitted most of the footnotes that are not essential for an understanding of the authors’ arguments. The selected texts cover a broad range of issues that go beyond the typical focus on epistemology and metaphysics to also engage with writings on ethics, religion, society, economy, art, and literature. Furthermore, the selections are chosen in such a way that they present the thinkers in dialogue with each other, which allows readers to follow and

Preface: About the Reader

appreciate the major philosophical discussions occurring during this period. By selecting texts and structuring the volume in this way, I have employed the principle of temporal succession. I believe that this mode of presentation provides an opportunity to see German idealism in its dynamic development and understand it in its historical and intellectual context. No anthology could do justice to the enormous range of ideas introduced by German idealists and their critics. My hope, however, is that the selections included here will enable readers to comprehend the intellectual rigor and intricacy of German idealist thought. In addition to the selected texts, each thinker is also presented by a brief introduction, which consists of a short biographical note, a concise discussion of the philosopher’s main ideas, a chronology of the thinker’s life and works, and a bibliography for further reading. By offering conceptual introductions to all figures included in the volume, I hope to help students achieve clarity regarding the ideas and theories put forward by each of the thinkers and provide the context needed to navigate their texts. If this volume is successful, its readers will achieve a sound understanding of the ideas central to German idealism, learn to appreciate the philosophical and intellectual richness of the period, and become inspired to continue their examination of the details of this philosophical epoch through the original texts and suggested readings. My major goals with this Reader are to present the epoch in all its complexity and to stimulate further engagement with German idealist thought. Marina F. Bykova

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The publisher and the editor wish to thank the rights holders whose work is included in this book. For permission to reprint copyright material in the Reader grateful acknowledgment is made to the following: Bloomsbury Publishing: for selections from Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, by F. Schiller, trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, published in Friedrich Schiller, Essays, ed. W. Hinderer and D. O. Dahlstrom (Continuum, 1993); for selections from “Letter from Maimon to Kant” and “Maimon’s article from the Berlin Journal for Enlightenment,” both published in Maimon: Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (Continuum, 2010); for selections from The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism, by F. Hölderlin, et al, trans. by D. I. Behler; and for selections from Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters, by F. W. J. Schelling, trans. by P. Hayden-Roy, published in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. by E. Behler (Contrinuum, 2003); for selections from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, by K. Marx, trans. by T. Bottomore, published in Erich Fromm, Karl Marx, Marx's Concept of Man: Including 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts' (Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1967). Reprinted with permission from the publisher. Cambridge University Press: for extracts from Critique of Pure Reason, by I. Kant, ed. by M. J. Gregor, introduction by A. Wood (1996); for extracts from Critique of the Power of Judgment, by I. Kant, trans. and ed. by P. Guyer, trans. by E. Matthews (2000); for excerpts from Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, by K. Reinhold, ed. by K. Ameriks, trans. by J. Hebbeler (2005); for extracts from Fichte Studies, by Novalis, ed. by J. Kneller (2003); for extracts from “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner,” by F. Schiller, printed in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. by J. M. Bernstein (2003); and for extracts from Elements of the Philosophy of Right, by G. W. F. Hegel, ed. by A. W. Wood, trans. by H. B. Nisbet (1991). Reprinted by permission of the editor/translator and publisher. Cornell University Press: for selections from Review of Aenesidemus, by J. G. Fichte.— Reprinted from Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. by D. Breazeale. Copyright @ 1988 by Cornell University Press. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. Dover Publications Inc.: for selections from The World as Will and Representation, by A. Schopenhauer, trans. by E. F. G. Payne, in 2 vols., (1969). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Hackett Publishing Company: for selections from The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge, by K. Reinhold; from Aenesidemus, or Concerning the Foundations of the Philosophy of Elements Issued by Prof. Reinhold in Jena together with a Defense of Skepticism against the Pretentions of the Critique of Reason, by G. E. Schulze; from Letters of Philaletes to Aenesidemus, by S. Maimon, all printed in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. and ed. by G. di Giovanni and by H. S. Harris (2000);

Acknowledgments

for selections from An Attempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftlehre (1797/98), by J. G. Fichte, printed in Fichte: Introductions to the Wissenschaftlehre and Other Writings, ed. and trans. by D. Breazeale (1994); for selections from The Encyclopedia Logic (with the Züsatze), by G. W. F. Hegel, trans. by T. E. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (1991); for selections from Toward a Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’: Introduction, and for Theses on Feuerbach, both by K. Marx, trans. by L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat, in Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. by L. H. Simon (1994). Reprinted with permission from Hackett Publishing Company. McGill-Queen’s University Press: for excerpts from Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herrn Moses Mendelssohn and Jacobi to Fichte, both by F. H. Jacobi, printed in Jacobi: Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. and ed. by G. di Giovanni (2009). Reprinted by permission from the publisher. Oxford University Press: for selections from Phenomenology of Spirit, by G. W. F. Hegel, trans. by A. V. Miller, with foreword by J. N. Findlay (1977); for selections from “On the Basis of Morals,” by A. Schopenhauer, printed in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, trans. by D. E. Cartwright and E. E. Erdmann (2010); and for selections from Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, by F. Nietzsche, trans. and ed. by M. Faber, with an introduction by R. C. Holub (1988). Used by permission of the publisher. Princeton University Press: for selections from Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, by S. Kierkegaard, trans. H. V. and E. H. Hong, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, XII.1 (1992); and for selections from The Sickness Unto Death, by S. Kiekegaard, trans. by H. V. and E. H. Hong, in Kierkegaard's Writings, vol. XIX (1983). Used by permission of the publisher. Stanford University Press: for selections from “Schopenhauer as Educator,” by F. Nietzsche, printed in Unfashionable Observations, trans. by R. T. Gray, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2 (1995). Reprinted by permission from the publisher. State University of New York Press: for selections from “On the Law of Freedom,” “On the Concept of Punishment,” “Judgment and Being,” “Letter to Hegel, 26 January 1795 (No. 94),” all by F. Hölderlin, reprinted by permission from Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. by T. Pfau, the State University of New York Press (1987); for selections from Logological Fragments I, by Novalis, reprinted by permission from Novalis: Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. by M. M. Stoljar, the State University of New York Press (1997); and for selections from Presentation of My System of Philosophy and Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy, both by F. W. J. Schelling, reprinted by permission from The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling. Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800–1802), by J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling, trans., ed. and with an Introduction by M. Vater, D. Wood, the State University of New York Press (2012). All rights reserved. Verso Books: for excerpts from Towards a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy, and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, both by L. Feuerbach, printed in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. and ed. by Z. Hanfi (Doubleday and Company, Anchor Book, 1972). Reprinted by permission from the publisher. Selections from Critique of Pure Reason, by I. Kant, trans. by N. K. Smith as well as selections from The Essence of Christianity, by L. Feuerbach, trans. by G. Eliot are courtesy of Internet Archive.

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Acknowledgments

Every effort has been made to trace and contact all copyright holders but this may not have been possible in all cases. Any omissions brought to the attention of the publisher will be remedied at the earliest opportunity. * * * This Reader could not have been possible without the input and support from a number of people, who helped me at different periods of my work on this project and whose advice, encouragement, and assistance allowed me to assemble and bring the volume to completion. Special thanks goes to Colleen Coalter, the senior editor in philosophy at Bloomsbury for commissioning this project, and for having the patience and confidence in me to produce this Reader. It has been long in the making and well overdue, but Colleen never lost trust in me and was very supportive through all the stages of the project. I am also thankful to the Bloomsbury production team for their effort in converting the PDF files of selected texts into MS Word documents. This conversion made it easier to work with the text files and prepare them for publication. A note of gratitude goes to my several colleagues, whose expertise in the field and knowledge of primary texts helped me in making my final editorial decisions. I would like to thank George di Giovanni (McGill University, Montreal), Kenneth R. Westphal (Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, Istanbul), and Stephen Puryear (North Carolina State University, Raleigh), who have helped me with text selection by giving suggestions on the specific excerpts to include and the translations and editions of works to use. I also greatly benefited from suggestions received from Ken Westphal, who took great pains to read and comment on several of my introductions to individual thinkers included in the Reader. In addition to helping edit some introductions in order to make them more accessible to undergraduate students, Ken also gave me invaluable recommendations on literature for a number of sets of Selected Bibliography for Further Reading. Thank you, Ken, for your help and support with this and several other publication projects I have been undertaking lately! I want to also acknowledge my undergraduate research assistants at North Carolina State University for their help with the project over the last few years. At different semesters I enjoyed assistance of Nathan Ocheltree, Joshua Waters, and Harrison Payne who have worked hard in helping me assemble material, compose chronologies, and in general doing all the little things involved in such a venture, including copying, scanning, bibliography search, as well as proofreading the final manuscript. I owe them a great amount of gratitude. I thank the participants in my undergraduate class “The 19th Century Philosophy” in the last two fall semesters (of 2017 and 2018) at North Carolina State University, who were the first attentive readers of many selections and introductions to several thinkers included in this volume. Finally, special thanks to Sean Douglas for his great help with the index and diligent work on the proofs. I wish to express my indebtedness to my family and, especially, my husband, Andrey Kuznetsov, for the love and continuing support he provides for all my projects. He has encouraged my work on this book from the beginning to the end, even after suffering a few setbacks. I dedicate, in love and gratitude, this book to my former Ph.D. advisor, one of the most influential Russian historians of philosophy, Nelly V. Motroshilova. It was she who xv

Acknowledgments

introduced me to the rich intellectual legacy of German idealism, who taught me Hegel and how to navigate his notoriously difficult philosophical system. I was much encouraged by her approach and interpretation, and our discussions proved to be fertile for me in many ways. Despite us being divided for more than two decades by the Atlantic Ocean, she has been my continuous inspiration.

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INTRODUCTION GERMAN IDEALISM: MAPPING THE PHILOSOPHICAL LANDSCAPE

The end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century was an incredibly exciting epoch in the intellectual history of Germany, and it had a lasting impact on the intellectual and cultural life in Europe and the rest of the world. Germany, which was a political and cultural backwater at the time, suddenly became the center of the most astonishing transformations in philosophy, as well as other intellectual and cultural pursuits. This was largely the result of the advent of German idealism, which ushered in a completely new era for philosophy, poetry, literary criticism, and other intellectual and cultural pursuits. German idealism and Its Key Representatives German idealism is the name for a remarkable philosophical and intellectual movement that arose during the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries in Germany. The emergence of German idealism is usually associated with the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781, and its end—with Hegel’s death in 1831. However, the spirit, philosophical ideas and theories advanced by German idealists reigned supreme into the 1840s and onward. This half-century constitutes one of those few epochs in the history of human thought when philosophy reached its heights by producing the most elaborate philosophical concepts and theories that sought to attain a complex and comprehensive understanding of reality. The philosophical prominence of German idealism and the magnitude of its effects lead some to compare it to the Golden Age of Athens. The best-known figures of the movement are Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all of whom are famous for developing thorough and methodically coherent philosophical systems. Despite important differences between these thinkers, they all share a commitment to idealism, a philosophical position that claims some kind of ontological and epistemological dependence of reality upon the mind (Guyer and Horstmann 2015). The most radical version of idealism is George Berkley’s “immaterialism,” according to which every existing thing can be shown to be spiritual or mental and all that exists are ideas and minds. German idealists reject this view (as well as other traditional idealistic positions) as metaphysical and dogmatic. Idealism developed by German thinkers is not identical to any existing version of the same. Not attempted to establish the ideal as the only true substance of the world, even less concerned with the question of supremacy of the ideal over the material, German idealism is a project of a critical assessment of the reality and its accessibility through human cognition.1 Advancing different forms of idealism, the representatives of this movement – each in his own way – bring to attention the most important ontological and epistemological concerns about the world and our ability to know it.

The German Idealism Reader

The Genealogy of German idealism: Its Emergence and Evolution The questions of the validity and justification of our claims of knowledge and the limits of reason comprise the core of Kant’s conception of (transcendental) idealism pioneered in his Critique of Pure Reason and stated in its most clear form in the famous second edition (1787) section “Refutation of Idealism.” Kant does not deny that external objects exist; he only insists that our “modes of representation” of them—such as spatiality, temporality, and causality—are not the real forms of objects as independent of ourselves, but rather features of our own minds. We do not have access to the true nature of objects (to things-in-themselves or “noumena”); what we know is only perceived phenomena. Kant calls his position “transcendental” or “critical” idealism, conceiving of it as a theory about the possibility of human cognition. Not convinced by Kant’s claim that we could only have knowledge of mere appearances, the nineteenthcentury German philosophers who followed him attempted to eliminate a dualism, that they observed in Kant, between appearances and things-in-themselves (phenomena and noumena), and between concepts and sensory material. Turning his attention to this problem, Fichte transformed Kant’s transcendental idealism into subjective idealism, which within a decade—through the efforts of Schelling and Hegel— became converted into the metaphysical system of absolute idealism. Such an unprecedented transformation leading to the development of one idealist system after another within a span of a few decades is by itself an event of a great philosophical significance, but the details of these philosophical undertakings are even more impressive. Fichte, whose starting point is essentially Kantian (the transcendental subject), finds the source of his idealism in the “I” which he understands as the self-positing self, the free subject of moral action that is always striving for complete self-determinacy. While Fichte agrees with Kant that the objective world exists, he denies its independence from the perceiving and thinking subject. For him, the sensible world owes its existence to the activity of the I, which posits the world as its own limitation (as not-I). Grounding his philosophy, which he calls Wissenschaftslehre (or “Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge”), upon the concept of subjectivity (the pure I), Fichte introduces a rigorous idealist system, which goes beyond a mere emulation of Kant’s critical enterprise, producing novel ideas and prompting new philosophical inquiry. As the most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempts to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic philosophy that would show how all things hang together and how this unity is presented in human cognition. Hegel does not share Kant’s view of human cognition as limited merely to appearances. He also rejects the thing-in-itself, which he notices not only in Kant but also in Fichte’s not-I. Hegel (and Schelling in his latest stages) did not believe that objects as such, or as known to us, are “produced” by, or are, our sensory representations. Such a doctrine cannot do justice to the dependence of finite spirit or nature. But above all, it is also an empty doctrine: it tells us about the ontological status of objects and ideas but nothing about their content. Presenting his philosophy as a response to the questions raised and challenges created by Kant and other German idealists, Hegel develops a comprehensive speculative metaphysics grounded in the notion of the Absolute (or “Absolute Spirit”). He conceptualizes the latter as a fundamental all-inclusive unity that underlines the multiplicity of empirical reality and serves as the ultimate source to explain existing connections among all things. The Absolute 2

Introduction

is historical. It does not merely have history, but it unfolds itself as the history of both the natural world and social reality, thus encompassing all natural phenomena as well as social and historical events. In Hegel’s philosophy, the Absolute obtains its self-realization reaching what Hegel calls “absolute knowing.” This expresses Hegel’s fundamental belief that what is real (reality as such) is rational and that whatever is rational must be real. This often mystified assertion means that reality rationally orders itself, and that there are some rational principles that we are able to grasp in our experience and thinking of the world. Hegel agrees with Kant that the human mind does not find its objects ready-made; rather its objects are in part the contribution of the mind itself. But he goes further, insisting that even realities, which do not come before the senses, are in part a product of the mind. In Hegel’s view, thought and being are united in that being is the activity of thought, and thought finds itself when it explores reality. Hegel’s idealism is thus not restricted like that of Kant and Fichte. Rather, it is an absolute idealism, which claims the possibility of the absolute knowing of the absolute (ultimate) reality.

The Age of German Idealism: the Intellectual Enthusiasm of the Epoch Yet, it would be wrong to view German idealism as solely a philosophical school; its achievement is not limited to a development of a few philosophical theories, however intricate and comprehensive they might be. While the idealist systems of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel form the philosophical crux of German idealism, its preeminent accomplishment and cultural and intellectual significance are a result of the efforts of a host of incredibly talented thinkers who—through their productive criticism, original thought, innovative approaches, and artistic intuitions—inspired each other, creating a highly unique intellectual discourse fertile with new ideas. Not all thinkers at the time were ready to accept Kant’s proposal of a Critical philosophy that pointed to basic limits of knowledge, and many grew even more skeptical about post-Kantian idealists’ substantial reformulation of the original project. Critiques of Kant’s transcendental idealism by Jacobi, Schulze, and Maimon, and the defense and popularization of Kant’s critical project by Reinhold motivated a younger generation of thinkers to engage in philosophical discussions of the time, leading to the development of new philosophical concepts and theories. Simultaneously with the development of idealistic systems, there was a complementary strand of thought unfolding. This was represented by literary contemporaries of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, such giants of German Romantic thought as Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers – August and Friedrich, and some other highly talented intellectuals, who were producing their own philosophical treatises rich with aesthetic and ethical insights (Ameriks 2000a, 2). This strand of thought, which is now known as Early German Romanticism (Frühromantik), originated in Jena in the 1790s and began as an internal critique of philosophical constructions of German idealists, eventually growing into an independent movement largely opposed to German idealism. Indeed, the crisis of idealism became apparent after Hegel’s death, provoking a severe rebuke from such diverse thinkers as Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Yet a significant reaction to the systems of leading German idealists existed already, and it originated from their major literary contemporaries, the Jena Romantics. One of the primary reasons these talented men of letters engaged in philosophical discussion was their dissatisfaction with idealism, and most notably with the systematic constructions that prevailed in philosophical works at 3

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the time. Largely fostering “anti-systematic” attitudes and advancing a nontechnical style of philosophical writing—as opposed to difficult-to-read treatises produced by their philosophical contemporaries—they maintained an enthusiastic support of the “critical” orientation of Kant’s project, promoting philosophical ideas central to German idealism and thus shaping this cultural and intellectual phenomenon and epoch. As a genuine movement, this strand of thought did not develop as a merely “literary school of German Idealism” (Ameriks 2000, 5) or just a parallel movement to a purely philosophical inquiry, but was internal to German idealism, contributing to the complexity and excitingly ingenious spirit of the period. In this context, it is worth recalling such thinkers as Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1822) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), whose texts are not included in the Reader due to space constraints. Important representatives of Jena Romanticism, they significantly contributed to the development and success of German idealism as a philosophical and intellectual movement, and without them the picture of the intellectual era would not be complete.

Schlegel and Schleiermacher: Sketches to Portraits of Two Jena Romantics a.  Crossing Paths While both Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher are typically known in academic circles as nonphilosophical scholars—Schlegel as a prominent literary critic and Schleiermacher as an eminent theologian and pedagogical scholar—they produced original distinctively philosophical contributions that brought them recognition as important philosophical figures of their era. Trained as a “classicist” (a specialist in classical, most notably Greek, literature) Schlegel fell under the spell of philosophy when, in the summer of 1796, on the invitation of his older brother August Wilhelm—also a well-known representative of Early German Romanticism— he moved to Jena. By that time the city, that two years earlier welcomed Fichte, had already become the center of intellectual life in Germany and the breeding ground for genuine devotees of Kant’s Critical philosophy. The city’s intellectual climate and numerous encounters with speculative philosophical thought and its Romantic counterpart had an important impact on young Schlegel. When about a year later he moved to Berlin, he entered into the world of literary salons and established close contact with several key figures of the Romantic movement, including the writers Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). Schlegel was also introduced to Schelling and Schleiermacher. In Berlin, Schlegel also began a romantic relationship with Dorothea Veit, a woman of letters, whom he soon married and who also eventually became an important representative of German Romanticism. Interestingly, Schleiermacher himself went to Berlin only a few months earlier (at the end of 1796) after being appointed as chaplain at the city’s Charité hospital, a position he held until 1802. In Berlin, he, like Schlegel, joined intellectual society and became a frequent visitor of literary salons. This is where the two met and developed a friendship. For two years (1797– 99), Schleiermacher shared an apartment with Friedrich Schlegel. They also collaborated on a number of projects. Schleiermacher helped the Schlegel brothers run their short-lived literary journal Athenaeum (1798–1800), in which appeared his first (anonymous) publication that he 4

Introduction

produced at the urging of Friedrich Schlegel. The unfinished fragment laid down a theory of the salon, which the author interpreted as a specific sphere of sociability which is located between private and civic life and has no purpose on its own. Encouraged by Schlegel’s intention to undertake a project of translating Plato’s dialogues, Schleiermacher began an intensive study of Plato. Originally conceived as a collaborative venture, this project was eventually carried out (in 1804–28) by Schleiermacher alone. Schlegel’s failure to work on Plato translations certainly contributed to the increasingly difficult relations between the two men after 1800. Working single-handedly, Schleiermacher was not able to fully finish the project, only completing several volumes of translation of Plato’s dialogues, which are still widely used and highly recognized today. After the scandal associated with the publication in 1799 of Schlegel’s novel Lucinde which challenged the aesthetic and moral conventions of the past, and Schlegel’s departure from Berlin back to Jena, Schleiermacher’s and Schlegel’s paths diverged. Schlegel remained in Jena until the end of 1801, which roughly coincided with a time that marked the dawn of Early German Romanticism: the so-called Jena circle and its collaborations came to an end. Novalis had died, and Schlegel had distanced himself from his brother and his wife, Carolina Böhmer, another active participant in the Romantic movement. In 1802, Schlegel moved to Paris, where he spent a significant amount of time focusing on figurative arts and offering a series of lectures on art and art history. In the hopes of securing an academic position, he returned to Cologne (1804), where, along with studying German Gothic architecture, he turned his attention to a new intellectual pursuit: the study of Sanskrit and the Indo-European languages as they were depicted in religious writings. His 1808 work On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians became one of the first scholarly publications in the field of comparative grammar (a term that Schlegel coined in the text). Schlegel’s study of Sanskrit and Hindu religious writings somehow influenced his religious and political views. In April of 1808, together with his wife, he converted to Catholicism, and a year later accepted a position in the Austrian civil service in Vienna. He lived there until his death in January 1829. Schleiermacher’s romantic affairs with two women had cost him his chaplain position in Berlin. Eventually, in 1808 he married a young widow, with whom he had several children. Around the same time, he became immersed in academic life, growing in stature as a theology scholar and philosophical thinker. In 1809, he was named a pastor of the protestant Holy Trinity Church in Berlin, and in 1810, he became professor of theology at the newly founded University of Berlin (the current Humboldt University in Berlin), in the establishment and development of which Schleiermacher played a decisive role by drafting a policy for the German university and later proposing reforms of the educational system. After being inducted into the Berlin Academy of Sciences (1811), he obtained the right, in addition to teaching theology, to also give lectures in philosophy at the same university. Since then, he had regularly lectured on a number of subjects relevant to his own scholarly interests and his constantly developing views of a philosophical system and systematic theology. He died in 1834.

b.  Keeping Apart Personally but not Philosophically Although Schleiermacher’s and Schlegel’s collaboration did not last long and their paths did not cross again after 1800, they had elaborated on closely related philosophical ideas that 5

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corresponded with the interests of early Romanticism. Like many of their contemporaries, both Schleiermacher and Schlegel developed a genuine interest in Spinoza and sought to combine Spinozistic views with the transcendental position of Critical philosophy. Yet, their understanding of what portion of Spinozism was most closely related to the task of transcendental idealism, and how to make this combination most productive, varied. Opposed to Jacobi’s anti-Spinozism yet, in some way motivated by his introduction of Spinoza in then-contemporary philosophical debates,2 Schleiermacher argues that Kantianism is necessary “on Spinoza’s side” and that there is an important correlation between Spinozistic views and those put forward by Kant. Spinoza’s philosophy clarifies the central presuppositions of Kant’s Critical philosophy, such as the idea of a being that transcends consciousness and is thus cognitively inaccessible. For Schleiermacher, the most relevant portion of Spinoza’s philosophy is the discussion of the relationship between the infinite and finite. In the Spinozistic system, the finite things are just an “illusion,” yet this illusion is nothing else but a manifestation of the infinite. This, however, does not warrant a simple identity between the two, because finite things do not have any existence apart from (or independent of) the infinite. They exist only in the infinite, like the infinite itself exists only through finite things. This, according to Schleiermacher, provides support for Kant’s most fundamental conviction that phenomenal (appearing) actuality is the appearance of the ultimate (infinite) reality, which remains unknown “in itself.” While Schleiermacher tried to find a way to bring together Spinoza and Kant, Schlegel’s philosophical interests shifted toward Fichte, and he sought to somehow merge Spinoza and Fichte. Like many other members of his generation, in his philosophical view Schlegel was substantially influenced by Fichte yet troubled by his foundationalist tendency articulated in the Wissenschaftslehre. Schlegel’s interest in Fichte was not accidental. Not only did he meet Fichte in person, but he also attended the philosopher’s lectures in Jena in the fall of 1796. This approximately coincided in time with the famous conversation about idealism that Schlegel had with Novalis, the author of Fichte’s Studies, which is considered to be the most important text of the German philosophical Romanticism.2 According to the accounts of many of Schlegel’s biographers, it was Novalis who encouraged and guided Schlegel’s study of the new idealistic philosophy (Speight 2015).

c.  Two Responses to Fichte Schlegel praises Fichte for his uncompromising insistence on the practical certainty of human freedom, but he is not satisfied with Fichte’s inability to explain his presupposition of the original subjective spontaneity and freedom (infinity) of the I. Furthermore, like Novalis, he grows suspicious about Fichte’s attempt to ground his philosophical system in a single first principle. Together with Novalis, he criticizes Fichte’s idea of an unconditioned and selfevident proposition as being in principle ungraspable. He denies that any proposition can be self-evident, claiming that even a “self-evident” one could require demonstration and proof, thus leading to infinite regress. Instead, Schlegel tries to unite the Fichtean freedom of the I with Spinozistic holism. He argues that the task of philosophy must not be restricted to finding an unconditioned and self-evident first principle, but rather should consist in engaging in a holistic process of development and unbounded progression toward the infinite (the Absolute). 6

Introduction

Thus, Schlegel’s approach to philosophy is non-foundationalist and holistic, and because the movement toward the Absolute occurs through history, it is also historical (Beiser 2003, 123ff.). As Schlegel writes, “It is impossible to pursue philosophy piece by piece starting from a first piece which is grounded and explained completely in and through itself. It is a whole, and thus the path to recognizing it is no straight line but a circle” (KA XVIII, 518). It is worth noting that Schlegel’s philosophical contribution is not limited to his contemplation of Critical philosophy and transcendental idealism. In addition to a lucid critique of the new (Fichte’s) idealism, he also offered important insights in response to the central challenges of his epoch in a number of philosophical disciplines, including social and political philosophy, ethics and, most notably, aesthetics. Schleiermacher’s contributions to philosophy were perhaps not as comprehensive as Schlegel’s, but in no way were they less valuable. He saw his goal as the development of a unified philosophical system which, along with pure transcendental philosophy, would also include the natural and historical sciences. However, his philosophy essentially remained “a work in progress,” and he did not finish a comprehensive treatment of any philosophical topic or discipline (Arndt 2015, 27). Schleiermacher develops his own philosophical approach as a critical response to Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, which, in his view, was not able to fulfill the task he assigns to the philo­ sophical system. Contrary to Fichte, who described his first principle as the principle of the self-posited I, Schleiermacher defines his starting point as an original intuition, which, as he claims, penetrates the two philosophical real sciences: philosophy of nature (physics) and ethics. Only they can meet the standards of a highest science. However, beginning in 1811, Schleiermacher’s take on the highest science and the tasks he assign to one change dramatically. In his attempt to clearly set apart his philosophy from Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, he establishes dialectic as a highest science. With this move, “dialectic” comes to be interpreted as a theoretical entity, above physics and ethics: physics and ethics become mediated on the speculative level through the dialectic. Unlike Hegel, who conceives dialectic as the autonomous self-criticism and self-development of the subject matter put first on display in the Science of Logic (Hegel’s famous dialectical logic), Schleiermacher does not devise dialectic as a science or simple knowledge of principles. Rather, it is conceptualized as a “theory of art” (Kunstlehre). With this, Schleiermacher clearly appeals to Plato and his understanding of dialectic as the “art of conversation.” He also seems to accept Plato’s use of dialectic as the correct philosophical method, designed to produce knowledge of forms or ideas, and of the relations between them. Schleiermacher rejects any “self-evident” foundations of knowledge, believing that instead of being presupposed, “the common premises for knowledge” must be “constructed” (generated) through the “process of disputation,” that is, as the result of philosophizing. Dialectic is a theory of the art of this philosophizing, the aim of which is to achieve “inner connection of all knowledge” (KGA II/10, 1, 372, 75).

d.  Schleiermacher’s philosophy and philosophical theology The real center of Schleiermacher’s philosophical work is ethics, which emerges as “objective” philosophy and mediates the individual and the universal (Arndt 2015, 38–39). In line with the classic structure, it is divided into doctrines of goods, virtues, and duties. As the core of 7

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his philosophical system, ethics is connected to a number of special disciplines of two kinds: “technical” and “critical.” He conceives as the technical disciplines, aesthetics and the theory of the state, and as the critical ones, pedagogy and hermeneutics, all of which are given special and relatively detailed treatments in his late works and lectures (most of which had been written for the Academy of Sciences where he frequently lectured.). However, the discussion of Schleiermacher’s philosophy could not be complete without attention being given to his philosophy of religion and theology, which is perhaps his most significant contributions to the development of philosophical thought of his time and afterward. Schleiermacher’s philosophical theology largely deviates from the reformed teachings of the church and certain Christian doctrines, about which he had grown skeptical at the very beginning of his philosophical career and which caused a fair degree of tension in his personal and professional lives (Forster 2017). Schleiermacher’s most influential work in the philosophy of religion, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, was first published in 1799, nearly twenty years before his magnum opus, The Christian Faith (1821–22; 2nd revised ed., 1830–31). As the title of the book implies, Schleiermacher’s goal with On Religion is to save religion from the contempt of “its cultured despisers,” or its critics and skeptics from both circles of the Enlightenment and German Romanticism. Kant’s unwillingness to subscribe to a positive theology or philosophy of religion caused some to condemn his thought as a pathway to atheism, and most thought he had made it impossible to synthesize his views with the prevailing theology. Schleiermacher, however, decided to take an approach that substantially differed from both Kant’s detractors and supporters. He did not believe that Kantianism made theology impossible or religion archaic. To Schleiermacher, every man “is born with the religious capacity as well as with every other basic capacity,” and that the development of this capacity is more individual than institutional (even though no truly pious man can exist in isolation) (Schleiermacher 1969, 183). To this end, he insists that (Christian) religion should be family-centered, rather than enacted by the state. According to Schleiermacher, true faith is “to know oneself to be in possession of religion” (ibid., 143). And religion does not rely on intellect or reason, but rather on feeling, and as such it is not a subject that can be scrutinized epistemologically. This just means that occurrences in the phenomenal realm grant awareness of the existence of the noumenal realm, thus awakening one’s religious sensibilities. But if religion is associated with feeling, then to say that it causes wars based upon ideological conflict would be nonsensical at best. The pious do not seek to “give vent” to their feeling through some action, instead they are more concerned with further cultivating their feeling so as to intensify their experience (Schleiermacher 1969, 104). Those who seek to do harm in the name of religion are, by Schleiermacher’s definition, not religious at all. Hence “religious” institutions that preach outward action over inward examination are sinning against themselves, and the most horrendous example of this is the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and various political establishments. This atrocity is, in Schleiermacher’s view, the fault of the state. The state grants the church special favors in order that it may call in its debts, thus expanding its power and influence among all members of the institution. And when whatever legal issues (e.g., marriage and death) are mediated through a church, this not only distracts the body from its intended purpose but also allows for religiously immature people to be placed in positions of ecclesiastical authority because they are considered “civil servants.” For these reasons, Schleiermacher argues, church and state 8

Introduction

need to be strictly separated, and religious leaders should be truly pious individuals who are genuine and strive “to share their inmost existence within (their) fellowship” (Schleiermacher 1969, 233). While Schleiermacher acknowledges that a genuine religious experience could take place in any religion, he believes that there are faiths that are able to capture the essence of religion better than others. For Schleiermacher, the religion that stands out among the others is Christianity. He views Christianity as promoting a constant striving for all that religion is supposed to be: “an unceasing, insatiable longing for ever greater purification, for ever richer fulfillment both in the particularly spiritual life of Christians and throughout their entire existence” (Schleiermacher 1969, 308). However, he distinguishes between true Christianity and its corrupt versions that had arisen out of human ignorance. The Christianity that many rail against is actually a vulgarized imitation, a form of idolatry that results from people trying to represent the eternal through some finite physical object. The most blatant example of this is the Papacy, which gives one man the nonexistent power to dictate what does or does not constitute the appropriate attainment of religion. Schleiermacher admits that this error is also present in the Protestant Church, although there it takes more subtle, less “seductive” forms. Yet despite the ways in which Christianity and religion in general had been corrupted, they would never cease to exist. History reveals a constant cycle of reformation and amendment regarding such matters, although the ways in which these changes occur are often unpredictable. Even the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism is a necessary element of Christianity, for it reveals the ability of people to seek religion in a multiplicity of ways and through various institutions. The project of defending religion against educated skepticism remains central to Schleiermacher’s later philosophy of religion, and eventually grows into a defense of Christian orthodoxy most prominently articulated in The Christian Faith. Despite some problematic ideas and conclusions (including his unjustified perception of the superiority of Christianity as a religion, which is set even higher than Judaism), Schleiermacher’s project nonetheless constituted an important step toward more consistent and thoughtful philosophical studies of religion by contemporary and subsequent scholars, including Romantics. It also had an immediate effect on the intellectual climate of the epoch itself by contributing to ongoing debates and determining the directions of future philosophical explorations.

On the Historical-Philosophical Significance of German Idealism: a Very Preliminary Note Indeed, the period from the 1780s to the 1830s–40s that is customarily referred to as the age of German idealism saw the most extraordinary revolutions in philosophy, religious studies, literature, and poetry. The thinkers who represented this period, and the ideas they developed, radically changed traditional areas of philosophical inquiry, unequivocally influencing how philosophy is done today. The aftermath of German idealism was felt in Germany and across the European continent, and it paved the way for the Left Hegelians and Marx, phenomenology and existentialism, and hermeneutics and critical theory. The roots of Anglophone analytic philosophy could be also traced back to German idealism, which became instrumental in the revolution of logic largely associated with Gottlob Frege and which—although indirectly— 9

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provoked the linguistic turn in philosophy initiated by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell in the early twentieth century. In this sense, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the new ideas and approaches that emerged in the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century and which associated with German idealism significantly influenced philosophical thought in the successive historical periods, giving shape to the intellectual and cultural discourses that we experience today.

Notes 1. For a detailed discussion about idealism of German idealism, see Ameriks 2000b, 1–17. 2. See Friedrich Jacobi, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herrn Moses Mendelssohn, a substantial fragment of which is included in this Reader. 3. I discuss this conversation in my introduction to Novalis in chapter 9 of this Reader. The same chapter provides some information about Novalis’ Fichte Studies, from which representative excerpts have also been included.

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Introduction

Selected Bibliography on German Idealism for Further Reading A.  Primary Sources (in German)

Schlegel, F. 1958–2002. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, edited by E. Behler et al., 35 vols. Műnchen: F. Schöningh. [Cited in text as KA, following by volume and page numbers.] Schleiermacher, F. 1980. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by Hans-Joachim Birkner, togeher with Gerhard Ebeling. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. [Cited in text as KGA, following by division/volume, sub-volume and page numbers.] A.  Primary Sources (in English)

Behler, E. (ed.). 1987. The Philosophy of German Idealism: Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling. New York: Continuum. Beiser, F. C. (trans. and ed.). 1996. The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bernstein, J. (ed.). 2003. Classic and German Romantic Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. di Giovanni, G., and H. S. Harris (trans. and eds.). 2000. Between Kant and Hegel, rev. ed. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Nisbet, H. B. (ed.). 1985. German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schleiermacher, F. 1969. On Religion: Addresses in Response to Its Cultured Critics. Richmond: John Knox Press. Schulte-Seiss, J. (ed.). 1997. Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stepelevich, Lawrence S. (ed.). 1983. The Young Hegelians: An Anthology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. B.  Selected Commentaries

Altmann, M. C. (ed.) 2014. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Basingstoke/ New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ameriks, K. 2000a. Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ameriks, K. (ed.) 2000b. The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2nd ed., 2017) Arndt, A. 2015. “Schleiermacher (1768–1834),” in The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael N. Forster and Kristin Gjesdal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 26–45. Baugh, B. 2003. The French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Baur, M., and D. O. Dahlstrom (eds.). 1999. The Emergence of German Idealism. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press. Beiser, F. 1987. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

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Beiser, F. 2002. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Beiser, F. 2003. “Friedrich Schlegel: The Mysterious Romantic,” in The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism, edited by F. Beiser. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 106–30. Beiser, F. 2013. Late German Idealism: Trendelenberg and Lotze. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowie, A. 1997. From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory. London: Routledge. Bowie, A. 2000. Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Boyle, N., L. Disley, and K. Ameriks (eds.). 2013. The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, 4  vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brandom, R. B. 2000. Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brandom, R. B. 2002. Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brandom, R. B. 2009. Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bubner, R. 2003. The Innovations of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dudley, W. 2007. Understanding German Idealism. London: Acumen. Dunham, J., I. H. Grant, and S. Watson. 2011. Idealism: The History of a Philosophy. London: Acumen. Förster, E. 2013. The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction, translated by Brady Bowman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Forster, M. 2017. “Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schleiermacher/ Franks, P. W. 2005. All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gardner, S., and P. Franks. 2002. “From Kant to Post-Kantian German Idealism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume, 76: 211–46. di Giovanni, G. 2005. Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guyer, P., and R. P. Horstmann. 2015. “Idealism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/ Hammer, E. (ed.). 2007. German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Henrich, D. 2003. Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Horstmann, R. P. 1991. Die Grenzen der Vernunft: Eine Untersuchung zu Zielen und Motiven des Deutschen Idealismus. Frankfurt: Athenäum. Jaeschke, W., and A. Arndt. 2012. Die Klassischer Deutsche Philosophie nach Kant: System der reinen Vernunft und ihre Kritik 1785–1845. Munich: C.H. Beck.

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McDowell, J. 2009. Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel and Sellars. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Millán-Zaibert, E. 2007. Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Moyar, D. (ed.) 2010. The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy. London: Routledge. O’Hear, A. (ed.). 1999. German Philosophy since Kant. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinkard, T. 2002. German Philosophy 1760–1860; The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, R. B. 1997. Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. New York: Cambridge University Press. Redding, P. 2009. Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche. London: Routledge. Rockmore, T. 2003. Before and After Hegel: A Historical Introduction to Hegel’s Thought. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company Inc. (1st ed., 1993) Sandkühler, H. J. (ed.). 2005. Handbuch deutscher Idealismus. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. Speight, A. 2015. “Friedrich Schlegel,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/ Wood, A. W. 2014. The Free Development of Each: Studies on Freedom, Right, and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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THE AGE OF GERMAN IDEALISM: CHRONOLOGY

Year

Intellectual/Philosophical Figures

1724

Immanuel Kant is born

1729

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is born

Significant Texts

Important Historic/ Social Events

Moses Mendelssohn is born 1739

Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (2 vols.)

1743

Friedrich Jacobi is born

1744

Johann Gottfried von Herder is born

1749

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is born

1752 1753

Britain declares war on Spain

Royal Academy of Sciences established in Berlin Salomon Maimon is born

1755

The Seven Years’ War begins

1757

Karl Reinhold is born

Burke’s On the Sublime and Beautiful

1759

Friedrich Schiller is born

Voltaire’s Candide

1760

British defeat French in Quebec George II becomes king (Great Britain)

1761

Gottlob Schulze is born

1762

Johann Gottlieb Fichte is born

Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Emile

England and Spain sign Treaty of Paris Catherine II becomes empress (Russia) Seven Year’s War ends

1763

Treaty of Paris France cedes Canadian territories to Britain

1764

Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (Continued)

The German Idealism Reader

Year

Intellectual/Philosophical Figures

1766

Significant Texts Lessing’s Laocoon

1767

Wilhelm von Humboldt is born

1768

Friedrich Schleiermacher is born

1769

Alexander von Humboldt is born

1770

Friedrich Hölderlin is born Goethe’s Annette

1772

Important Historic/ Social Events

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is born

Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation

Novalis is born

Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language

Friedrich Schlegel is born

D’Hollbach’s System of Nature

Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia (in 28 vols., final volume)

1773

Christoph Wieland founds Der teutsche Merkur

1774

Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

Louis XVI becomes king (France)

1775

Friedrich Schelling is born

Goethe moves to Weimar

1776

David Hume dies

The United States Declaration of Independence (of the 13 American colonies) from Great Britain

1777 1778

Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia (5 volumes added) Jean-Jacques Rousseau dies Voltaire dies

1779

Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Goethe “crucifies” Jacobi’s Woldemar

Lessing’s Nathan the Wise 1780 1781

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing dies

Lessing’s The Education of the Human Race

Jacobi claims Lessing is a Spinozist

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1st ed., Riga)

America’s War for Independence ends at Yorktown

Schiller’s The Robbers 1782

Herder’s The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry Rousseau’s Confessions, vol. 1

16

German Idealism Chronology

Year

Intellectual/Philosophical Figures

Significant Texts

Important Historic/ Social Events

1783

Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

Treaty of Peace with Britain

1784

Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, vol. 1

Schiller founds Rheinische Thalia

Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” 1785

Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

The pantheism controversy ensues

Jacobi’s Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn 1786

Moses Mendelssohn dies

1787

Prussia’s Frederick II (Frederick the Great) dies; ascendance to throne of Friedrich Wilhelm II Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2nd ed., Riga) Jacobi’s David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism. A Dialogue Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris

1788

Arthur Schopenhauer is born

Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason

1789

Wöllner Edict restricts religious freedom in Prussia Storming of the Bastille; outbreak of the French Revolution France’s “Declaration of the Rights of Man”

1790

Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment Reinhold’s Letters on the Kantian Philosophy Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants

1791 1792

US Bill of Rights ratified Fichte’s An Attempt at a Critique of First French Republic All Revelation established Schulze’s Aenesidemus

Prussia’s revolutionary army takes Mainz (Continued) 17

The German Idealism Reader

Year

Intellectual/Philosophical Figures

1793

1794

Significant Texts

Important Historic/ Social Events

A. von Humboldt’s Florae, Fribergensis, accedunt Aphorismi ex Doctrina, Physiologiae Cheicae Plantarum

Outbreak of the Terror in France

Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone

Prussia at war with France

Execution of Louise XVI and Marie Antoinette Mainz is reclaimed by allied forces

Fichte’s Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre and Review of Aenesidemus

Conservative “Thermidor Reaction” (France); Execution of Robespierre

A.von Humboldt’s Die Lebenskraft, oder der rhodische Genius

Peace Treaty between Prussia and French Republic A. von Humboldt admitted into Weimar Classicism

1795

Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man

Directorate established (France)

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

Freedom of worship established in France

Fichte’s Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre

Schiller founds Die Horen

Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own 1796

1797

Heinrich Heine is born

Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right in accordance with the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, vol. 1

Catherine II (Russia) dies

Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals

Death of Friedrich Wilhelm II; Succeeded by Friedrich Wilhelm III and Queen Luise

The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism anonymously composed Hölderlin, Hyperion, vol. 1 W. von Humboldt’s Plan einer vergleichenden Anthropologie Schelling’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature 1798

18

Fichte’s System of Ethics in Accordance with the Principles of the Wissenshaftslehre

The brothers Schlegel found the Athenaeum

German Idealism Chronology

Year

Intellectual/Philosophical Figures

1799

Significant Texts Jacobi’s Letter to Fichte Hölderlin’s Hyperion, vol. 2 Schlegel’s Lucinde Schelling’s First Plan of a System of the Philosophy of Nature Schleiermacher’s On Religion W. von Humboldt’s Essays in Aesthetics I. On Goethe’s Herrmann and Dorothea

1800

Salomon Maimon dies

Important Historic/ Social Events “Atheism controversy” ends Fichte’s career in Jena Consulate established (French government) Napoleon overthrows the French Directory and makes First Council Goethe and Schiller found the Weimar Theater A. von Humboldt visits the New World under the Spanish flag

Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism Fichte’s The Vocation of Man Novalis’ Hymns to the Night Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies and Confidential Letters Concerning Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde

1801

Novalis dies

Schiller’s Maid of Orleans Hegel’s The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy

1802

Arnold Ruge is born

Alexander I becomes emperor (Russia)

Schelling’s Bruno Hegel’s essay “Faith and Knowledge”

1803

Johann Gottfried von Herder dies

Schiller’s The Bride from Messina

Great Britain declares war on France, thereby igniting the Napoleonic Wars Convention of Artlenburg surrenders Hanover to France after Hanover’s occupation by Napoleon’s forces W. von Humboldt acts as Prussian envoy to the Vatican in Rome (1803–08)

1804

Immanuel Kant dies Ludwig Feuerbach is born

1805

Friedrich Schiller dies

Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell

Napoleon crowns himself emperor (France) Austria, Britain, Sweden and Russia unite against France in war (Continued) 19

The German Idealism Reader

Year

Intellectual/Philosophical Figures

Significant Texts

1806

Max Stirner is born

W. von Humboldt’s Rome

Important Historic/ Social Events Battle of Jena, during which Hegel completes his Phenomenology of Spirit French victory Holy Roman Empire ends Prussia declares war on France

1807 1808

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit David Strauss is born

Goethe’s Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy, Part I

French occupy Berlin

Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation 1809

Bruno Bauer is born

Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom

The University of Berlin established (W. von Humboldt’s project won)

Goethe’s Elective Affinities 1810

Goethe’s Theory of Colours

1811

Jacobi’s Of Divine Things and Their Revelation

1812

Moses Hess is born

Hegel’s Science of Logic, Part I

The failed French invasion of Russia: major French defeat

1813

Søren Kierkegaard is born

Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

Battle of Leipzig (Battle of the Nation)

Richard Wagner is born 1814

Johann Gottlieb Fichte dies

Napoleon withdraws from Germany Napoleon abdicates and is exiled

Mikhail Bakunin is born 1815

Napoleonic War of 1812 ends Napoleon returns and is defeated at Waterloo; his second exile Treaty of Congress of Vienna Congress of Vienna settles Napoleonic Wars

1816

Hegel’s Science of Logic, Part II Goethe’s Italian Journey

20

German Idealism Chronology

Year

Intellectual/Philosophical Figures

1817

1818

Significant Texts

Important Historic/ Social Events

Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1st ed., in one single vol.) Karl Marx is born Jacob Burckhardt is born

1819

Friedrich Jacobi dies

1820

Friedrich Engels is born

1821

Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation

George IV becomes king (UK) Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years

1824

Napoleon dies in St. Helena War of Greek Independence (from Ottoman Empire) begins

Heine’s “Die Lorelei”

1825

Nicholas I becomes emperor (Russia) Decembrist uprising in Russia

1826

Heine’s “Die Harzreise”

1827

Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (2nd ed.)

1830

Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (3rd ed.)

Charles X (France) deposed in July Revolution Simόn Bolίvar dies November uprising in Poland Revolutions in France and Belgium

1831

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel dies

1832

Wolfgang von Goethe dies

Goethe’s Faust, Part II

1833

Gottlob Ernst Schulze dies

Karl Daub’s The Dogmatic Theology of the Present Time

1834

Friedrich Schleiermacher dies

Schelling’s The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures

Slavery abolished throughout British Empire

1835

Wilhelm von Humboldt dies

Strauss’ The Life of Jesus

Ferdinand I becomes emperor (Austria)

Egypt declares independence from Ottoman Empire

Heine’s On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany

Greek Independence

(Continued)

21

The German Idealism Reader

Year

Intellectual/Philosophical Figures

1836

Significant Texts

Important Historic/ Social Events

Schopenhauer’s On the Will in Nature

1837

Ruge founds Hallesche Jahrbücher für deutsche Kunst und Wissenschaft Victoria becomes queen (UK)

1839

Schopenhauer’s On the Freedom of the Will Feuerbach’s “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy”

1840

Schopenhauer’s “On the Basis of Morality”

1841

Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity

1843

Friedrich Hölderlin dies

Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Fear and Trembling Marx’s “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction” Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future

1844

Friedrich Nietzsche is born

Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, 2nd ed. Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (first pub. 1932) Marx and Engels’ The Holy Family

1845

Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology (first pub. 1932) A. von Humboldt’s Kosmos (5 vols. published through 1862)

1846

22

Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Schelling’s lectures on revelation and myth in Berlin (Kierkegaard, Bakunin, Burckhardt, A. von Humboldt, and Engels in attendance)

German Idealism Chronology

Year

Intellectual/Philosophical Figures

Significant Texts

1847

Important Historic/ Social Events Marx and Engels establish first Marxist party, the Communist League, in London

1848

Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto

Feuerbach’s lectures on religion Bruno Bauer establishes Charlottenburg Democratic Society February Revolution in France Second Republic in France Revolutions across Europe fail Franz Josef I becomes emperor (Austria) Dano-Prussian war begins

1849

Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death

1850

Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity

1851

Schopenhauer’s Parerga und Paralipomena

1852

Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

1853

Marx settles in London

The Communist League disbanded after Cologne Communist Trial Tzar Nicholas I of Russia declares war on Ottoman Turks (Crimean war begins)

1854

Friedrich Schelling dies

1855

Søren Kierkegaard dies

1856

Heinrich Heine dies

The Crimean War ends

Max Stirner dies

First Neanderthal remains discovered

1858 1859

Pope Pious IX declares doctrine of Immaculate Conception Kierkegaard’s “Unchangeableness of God”

Alexander II becomes emperor (Russia)

Marx’s Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (pub. 1939) Alexander von Humboldt dies

Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Edmund Husserl is born 1860

Arthur Schopenhauer dies (Continued) 23

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Year

Intellectual/Philosophical Figures

Significant Texts

1861

Important Historic/ Social Events Wilhelm I becomes king of Prussia Kingdom of Italy proclaimed

1862

Hess’ Rome and Jerusalem

Otto von Bismark becomes minister-president of Prussia

1864

First International is founded

1865

Slavery abolished in the United States

1866

Prussia declares war on Austria; Austro-Prussian War begins

1867

Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1

1869

Suez Canal opens

1870

Franco-Prussian War begins

1871

The Paris Commune rules briefly German Unification / German Empire proclaimed Wilhelm I becomes Kaiser and Bismark becomes chancellor

1872

Ludwig Feuerbach dies

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche’s “Truth and Lie” (written)

1874

David Strauss dies

Nietzsche’s “Schopenhauer as Educator”

1875

Moses Hess dies

Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program (pub. 1890)

1876

Michael Bakunin dies

First International is dissolved

1879 1880

Germany and AustriaHungary enact Dual Alliance Arnold Ruge dies

1881

Czar Alexander II (Russia) assassinated; succeeded by Alexander III

1882

Bruno Bauer dies

Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, 1st ed.

1883

Karl Marx dies

Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Parts I and II

Richard Wagner dies 24

First International ruptures between socialist and anarchist factions

German Idealism Chronology

Year

Intellectual/Philosophical Figures

1884

Significant Texts

Important Historic/ Social Events

Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State

1885

Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV (written)

1886

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil Engels’s Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classic German Philosophy

1887

Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, 2nd ed. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals

1888

Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (written) Nietzsche’s Esse Homo (written)

Wilhelm I (Germany) dies and Wilhelm II becomes Kaiser

1889

Nietzsche suffers terminal collapse

1890

Bismark dismissed as German chancellor

1892

Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV (published)

1894

Nicolas II becomes (the last) czar of Russia

1895

Friedrich Engels dies

1897

Jacob Burckhardt dies

1900

Friedrich Nietzsche dies

1901

Nietzsche’s The Antichrist and “Nietzsche Contra Wagner”

Selections from Nietzsche’s 1883–1888 notebooks posthumously assembled and published as The Will to Power

Queen Victoria dies; Edward VII becomes king of the United Kingdom

25

26

PART I KANT AND THE FIRST RECEPTIONS OF CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY

28

CHAPTER 1 IMMANUEL KANT (1724–1804)

INTRODUCTION Immanuel Kant was without a doubt one of the greatest minds of the late eighteenth–early nineteenth century and a philosophical titan of modern times. His work challenged the very foundations of philosophy, and called into question almost every doctrine of metaphysics, ethics, and religion. Nearly every major philosophical movement that emerged after the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason—from German idealism to Early German Romanticism to Hegelianism to Post-Kantianism to Marxism and beyond—was forced to grapple with the issues Kant posed in the work that would mark the turning point in the history of philosophy and serve as the catalyst for its future development. Born on April 22, 1724, into the household of master harness maker Johann Georg Kant and his wife, Anna Regina Reuter, in Königsberg, Prussia, Immanuel was the second surviving child in the family. Of the nine siblings born before and after Kant, only three sisters and one brother survived beyond early childhood. Perhaps this explains why Kant was so proud of his name’s literal meaning “God is with him.” As a craftsman, Kant’s father, along with his family, was a member of the guild, and as such he belonged to the “respectable” class. This social standing was enjoyed by the whole family, which lived a relatively comfortable life, at least during Immanuel’s early childhood. Yet their situation worsened as he grew older as his father’s business suffered from declining harness trade in Königsberg. Although little is known about Kant’s early childhood, as a young boy he first attended the neighborhood’s Hospitalschule that had only one teacher, an unordained minister, from whom the boy learned the very basics of “reading, writing, and arithmetic” (Kuehn 2001, 46). Yet he did not attend this school for long. At age eight, he was sent to Collegium Fridericianum (also known as the Friedrichkolleg), a prestigious gymnasium and model Latin school in his hometown, Königsberg. Like many gymnasia at this time, the Collegium was under the direction of a Protestant sect; this school was controlled by Pietist Lutherans. The institution had a great reputation, especially in preparing children for latter education in theology, but it was a highly regimented institution with a very stiff and unfriendly atmosphere. Kant found the strict environment and narrow curriculum to which he was subjected less than desirable; later he recalled his school years at the Collegium with horror. Perhaps for this reason he later developed a strong enthusiasm for educational reform. The Collegium helped Kant achieve a great command of Latin, his favorite subject, but he also received a solid preparation in theology which served him well in his further studies at the University. At the same time, he became critical of Pietism and the Pietistic way of life that he, being raised in the Pietist family, would eventually refuse to adopt. Furthermore, Kant’s mature moral and religious views would not only “betray a definite anti-Pietistic bias,” they would also

The German Idealism Reader

be developed in opposition to Pietism, demonstrating Kant’s strong rejection of Pietistic values and ideals (Kuehn 2001, 54). In 1740, Kant, at the age of sixteen, graduated from the Collegium and entered the University of Königsberg, commonly known as the Albertina. No record of the course of study Kant declared survived, but with his interest in classics during his final year in the Collegium, it is likely he intended to make study of the classics his occupation. However, one of his fellow classmates later reported that in a theology class they both took, in response to an introductory survey, Kant told the audience that he wanted to become a medical doctor. All of this occurred while many of those close to him assumed he would eventually commit himself to theology. Kant seemed never to settle on either track; instead he began at university by studying classics, soon followed by a plethora of courses in mathematics, science, and philosophy. Interestingly, his first introduction to philosophy occurred in his first semester at the University. Regardless of the chosen course of study, students in all fields were required to take first courses in philosophy before beginning their “professional preparation.” While at Königsberg, Kant came under the influence of Professor Martin Knutzen, who taught metaphysics and logic. As a Pietist, Knutzen followed the methods introduced by Christian Wolff while criticizing many central tenets of Wolffian philosophy. Hence, despite his appreciation for the Wolffian approach, his position was fundamentalist Christian. In addition to his credentials in philosophy, Knutzen also had a reputation of being well versed in mathematical and scientific disciplines, especially astronomy, reportedly for successfully predicting the 1744 comet’s reappearing. While Knutzen’s knowledge of scientific and mathematical matters was largely inadequate, he was sound in philosophy and understood current philosophical and religious debates. The courses in philosophy that Knutzen and his colleagues taught at Königsberg undoubtedly provided Kant with all he needed for a solid grounding in the discipline. Moreover, having attentively followed a number of theoretical controversies sparked by various publications of Knutzen and others, Kant also learned a great deal of new and controversial topics that shaped philosophical discussions in contemporary intellectual circles. These discussions motivated Kant’s first work, a treatise entitled Thoughts on the Estimation of Living Forces. Completed in 1746, prior to his university graduation (though it was not published until three years later), this tract is a critical response to the dispute between Leibnizians and Cartesians about the true measure of force. Both the topic of the work and its content clearly demonstrated Kant’s intellectual independence and confidence in his ability to contribute original material to natural philosophy. By the time Kant graduated from the Albertina, both of his parents had died and he had very little money to support himself. Entirely on his own at the age of twenty-four and facing an uncertain future, he became a private teacher and spent the next six years working for wealthy families in the countryside close to his hometown. He returned to Königsberg in August 1754 in pursuit of a position at his alma mater. Within less than one year, he published two essays, as well as and completed and defended both his Magister dissertation (April 1755) and doctoral thesis (September 1755). He also published (anonymously) Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, A New Explanation of the First Principles of Metaphysics, in which he proposes an astronomical theory now known as the Kant-Laplace hypothesis. “No longer an unknown quantity,” he was finally installed as a Privatdozent (non-salaried lecturer) and allowed to teach courses at the university. Although Kant was a popular lecturer from the very beginning, it was not an easy way to earn a living; without a University salary, 30

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

he had to rely entirely on the fees he could collect from students who attended his lectures. It was a difficult period, especially the first two or three years when the young lecturer needed to establish himself and develop his reputation in hopes this would lead to a higher position at the University. In addition to lecturing twenty or more hours per week on various subjects, he produced several short essays, including “The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, and Essay on Maladies of the Mind.” In 1764, Kant was offered a professorship in poetry, which he declined. He also received offers from the Universities of Erlangen (1769) and Jena (1770), but he continued pursuing his dream of receiving the position of ordinary professor at Königsberg. Finally, after nearly fifteen years of work, including both teaching and writing, in March 1770, Kant was appointed to the professor of Logic and Metaphysics at his alma mater in Königsberg. After achieving financial stability and job security, Kant became largely “silent.” During the next eleven years, known as the “silent years,” Kant did not publish much. He continued teaching and writing short essays; he even served as dean of his philosophy faculty, but his publication output was minimal. He set all of his mental powers toward finally resolving what he considered the crisis of philosophy. The “‘all-crushing’ critic of metaphysics” (Kuehn 2001, 251), Kant believed it would be futile to attempt to justify the metaphysical claims, because the “highest philosophy cannot advance further than is possible under the guidance which nature has bestowed even upon the most ordinary understanding” (A830/B858). He formulated these and other relevant ideas in his epoch-making treatise, Critique of Pure Reason (known as the first Critique), the first (A) edition of which was published in 1781. This work served as a ground for Kant’s philosophical system known as Critical philosophy, which he developed and elaborated in a series of books appearing during his next “great decade.” The main works are the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783), Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the massively revised second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), and his second and third Critiques—Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790)1—and then The Metaphysics of Morals (1798). The works Kant produced in the 1780s and early 1790s not only propelled him to fame, but also marked an enormous achievement securing the author’s place in the world philosophy, and confirming him as the revolutionary who forever changed the philosophical field. These works made Kant one of the most powerful and noteworthy intellectual voices in Prussia (and later Germany), and he soon found himself in the center of the philosophical debates that would provoke philosophical thought nationally and internationally for decades to come. Kant retired from his professorship at Königsberg in summer 1796, though he remained an active writer between then and his death on February 12, 1804, at the age of seventy-nine. He was buried in Königsberg on February 28. Despite the brutal cold in Königsberg, a large crowd attended his funeral. * * * Kant’s philosophical work easily justifies his own claim to have initiated a revolution in philosophy. The philosophical system he produced rightly belongs to the most comprehensive and influential doctrines of the modern age. Kant clearly acknowledged that David Hume’s work “interrupted [his] dogmatic slumber and gave [his] investigations in the field of 31

The German Idealism Reader

speculative philosophy a completely different direction” (Ak 4:260). The culmination of Hume’s system is a very powerful skepticism; recognition of the full force of Hume’s skeptical attack on metaphysics impelled Kant’s own philosophical investigations. Like Hume, Kant was critical of traditional metaphysics, which he associated with the philosophical views of Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and his followers, most notably Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62). Calling their position “dogmatism,” Kant believed it to be “capricious,” unscientific, and closed to rational scrutiny. Yet, while Kant acknowledged that Hume’s ideas contained great merit, he regarded his skepticism as dangerous to the cause of reason. He was also unsatisfied with the empiricism he saw in attempts, notably by John Locke, to ground knowledge on empirical ideas. Yet he also disagreed with the pure rationalism proposed by Gottfried Leibniz and others in this tradition. Kant believed that both approaches—of empiricists who argued that our entire knowledge must be firmly grounded in experience and of rationalists who insisted that we can understand the world by careful use of reason—were one-sided and based upon incorrect assumptions. Thus, Kant saw his goal as moving beyond the traditional dichotomy between these two disparate views—rationalism and empiricism—and thus restoring the reputation of philosophy as scientific and reining in the pretensions of traditional metaphysics. Kant’s aim was threefold. First, he realized the need to lay out a rigorous critique of the dogmatism of traditional metaphysics and substantially limit its scope, demonstrating its ineffectiveness in questions of knowledge. Second, he sought to uphold against skepticism the possibility of knowledge and reconfirm the feasibility of rigorous arguments in its support. Third, he attempted to defend against empiricism the fundamental philosophical claim of the possibility of universal and necessary knowledge, which he himself called a priori knowledge (i.e., knowledge originating independently of experience, in contrast to a posteriori knowledge derived from experience) (Kant 1998, 2–3). This monumental undertaking led Kant to radically reconsider traditional ways of thinking about epistemological problems regarding the relation of the human mind to the objective world. According to the traditional views, ideas possessed by the human mind are either innate (rigorous rationalism) or given to the mind by objects acting upon it, thus allowing ideas of objects to “migrate” into the mind, which otherwise is like a blank slate (rigorous empiricism). Unsatisfied with both approaches, Kant argued that rather than the mind being a passive entity upon which the external world acts, objective reality depends upon mind: the object “conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition” (Bxvii). This dramatic shift in epistemological perspective is known as Kant’s Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Just as the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) completely changed the picture of the then known universe, by putting the sun in the center of the solar system and placing us and our observations on the surface of an orbiting planet Earth, to resolve strange planetary behavior, Kant shook the very foundation of epistemology, by granting to the mind an active role in structuring our experience and knowledge. Kant’s original insight was that our experience and knowledge of the world is possible only if the mind provides a systematic structure of its representations. Kant proposed that the mind necessarily participates in the construction of manifest reality by providing structures and concepts to which perceptions of the objects must conform in order to be representations. That is, the mind acts as a kind of “organizer” of our experience: it supplies structures and concepts that shape sensory experience and thought. Generating the structures of space and

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time as pure (a priori) forms of sensory intuition (sensory receptivity) is a necessary condition for any human perception. Similarly, systematic use of the pure concepts and principles of understanding, such as causality, substance, and modality, is necessary for achieving the unity of apperception and making our experience intelligible. Thus, Kant concluded that the mind’s active role in helping to organize a world into the world of sensible experience must be the focus of any genuinely philosophical inquiry into knowledge. This inquiry, Kant argues, must not be an investigation of the objects of empirical cognition. Rather, it must be presented as a scientific inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of our experience. We must examine the capacities of the mind that are required in order for us to have any cognition of the objects at all. Kant undertakes this “transcendental” inquiry in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), a truly seminal work in the history of Western philosophy. The arguments Kant provides in the book are very intricate, and enormous effort is required to master all the details in their full complexity. In the book, Kant patiently works out his system of transcendental philosophy, which he also calls Critical philosophy. This name signifies not just Kant’s critical stance toward the dogmatism of traditional metaphysics. Rather, this indicates the kind of questions, determined by Kant’s Copernican turn, addressed by his philosophy. If we take seriously the possibility that objects are constituted or structured (at least to an extent) by the mind, we must examine how that constitution takes place. A transcendental investigation is thus an investigation into the structure and functioning of the human mind itself. This immanent (to the mind) investigation is thus the critique of pure reason: the attempt to discern the a priori conditions of experience and knowledge. One central question Kant addresses in the Critique of Pure Reason is whether synthetic a priori judgments can be legitimate, that is, genuine and justified. Kant holds that our mathematical and scientific knowledge requires some judgments that are not “analytic,” but rather “synthetic”—they are genuinely informative statements that go beyond “what can be known solely in virtue of the content of the concepts involved” (Kant 1998, 6). Yet, these meaningful statements about reality are also knowable a priori. Kant claims that all truly genuine knowledge of the world must involve synthetic a priori truths; he points out such truths in the foundations of all theoretical sciences, proving that such truths are possible and indeed necessary for the development of human knowledge. He argues that claims like “Every event must have a cause” are synthetic a priori. They are neither analytically true, nor can they be derived a posteriori through appeal to experience, though they can be strictly justified by Kant’s Critical analysis and proofs. Kant believes that only by demonstrating such truths can Humean skepticism be refuted and philosophy, science, and common sense (and some core features of religion) again be made intellectually respectable. This would be demonstrated by showing that the knowledge Hume denied was, in fact, grounded in synthetic a priori truths, as were the very arguments Hume had mustered against such claims to knowledge. The validity of synthetic a priori judgments may sound odd or incredible. However, Kant’s Copernican revolution made it possible to recognize that we do indeed possess legitimate synthetic a priori judgments. Indeed, if we suppose that objects become the objects of our experience and knowledge only because they are structured in certain ways by the mind, then it should be possible to demonstrate that some synthetic principles guide that structuring.

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Furthermore, these principles could be known a priori. Therefore, if Kant’s Copernican revolution makes sense, there will be synthetic a priori principles for every domain of knowable objects. Kant, however, argues that synthetic a priori structures and concepts apply only to objects as we experience them. If we seek to grasp any nonempirical reality, those synthetic a priori structures become useless. Yet metaphysics as “a wholly isolated speculative cognition of reason” ventures beyond what we can experience, seeking to discover the nature of reality itself (Bxiv). Kant thus set the boundaries of what can and cannot be accessed through experience by distinguishing between phenomena, or the realm of appearances, which included all that could be experienced through use of the senses, and the noumena, the realm of the thing-in-itself, which includes extrasensory, merely rational ideas (specifically those of God, the immortality of the soul, and the harmonious order of the universe). Any number of empirical deductions of phenomena may lead one to the conclusion that the noumena exists (an appearance of the thing, Kant argued, must be caused by the thing-in-itself), yet nothing beyond mere existence of the noumena could be discovered through use of the phenomena (e.g., A249–260/B309– 315). Yet this distinction not only left open the question of the reliability of experience, but also challenged the very claim of the possibility of knowledge of the world as it is and not merely as it appears to us. This and related issues became the subject of ongoing debate in post-Kantian philosophy. Having mastered epistemology and metaphysics, Kant turned to moral philosophy. He believed his Critical methods used to solve the epistemological questions would also bring success in moral philosophy. Kant wrote a number of books specifically focusing on the problems of morality. His main writings on the ethical issues include the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and The Metaphysics of Morals (1798). Prior to Kant, many thinkers based their moral inquiries on religious doctrines, anthropology, or on appeal to some form of sentiment. Kant rejected the notions that these resources provide appropriate foundations for morality, because ethics so conceived, he argued, closes our moral principles to scrutiny by reason and makes them conditional on the inclinations of the individual. He insisted instead that our moral principles must be identified and justified on purely rational grounds, open to criticism and yet able to withstand this scrutiny, similar to that which philosophers offered for the principles of pure logic itself. The distinctive mark of Kant’s ethics is its emphasis on reason. Inclinations, desires, selflove, and any other forms of human sensibility are rather diminished in their importance and effectiveness in moral questions. This should not be misunderstood by supposing that Kant would regard any act motivated by inclination to be bad or morally reprehensible. Instead, he argued that only acts performed from duty, which is how one ought to act, have moral worth and are unconditionally valuable. Thus, any act not motived by moral duty, no matter how noble or beneficial its ends may be, lacks unconditional moral worth. By diminishing the value of inclination in matters moral, Kant sought to emphasize that inclination lacks moral worth because it replaces the motive of duty by whatever sentiment, which is merely conditional and not binding on every rational being (Ak 4:394). Kant believed that the principles of morality must be universal and unconditional. The idea of the universality of moral law persists throughout his argument over the course of all

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his writings on morality. He argues that the moral law is respected because it is universal and must apply to everyone equally. It is also unconditional, and thus is grounded in the principle of duty rather than in any other consideration. Kant’s ethics is a deontological or duty-based theory. The criterion of the rightness or wrongness of actions in such theories does not depend on the result of the actions, but rather on whether these actions are performed from duty. Thus, contrary to many moralists who emphasize the value of the consequences of one’s actions (position known as consequentialism in ethics), Kant believes that the moral worth of the action lies in its motivation which he associates with duty.2 Duty, the central concept of morality, is indifferent to circumstances and to personal inclinations. Duty is what we ought (are obliged) to do despite the circumstances and for no other reason than duty alone. Duty is the motivation of someone who does the right thing from good will, without any other motivation. According to Kant, recognizing what one ought (or ought not) to do suffices also to be moved so to act, simply because so acting is obligatory (dutiful). In other words, duty “determines” what action to favor or, in the face of temptation, perhaps to avoid performing. Kant maintains that “duty is the necessity of an action done out of respect for the law” (Ak 4:400). Ethics for Kant is the command of reason, and the principles of morality must derive not from individual desires or interests, but rather from the disinterested and universally binding dictates of reason. This command is known as a categorical imperative, the supreme principle of morality. The central idea of the categorical imperative is the idea of conformity with the universality of a law. Kant insists that “there is . . . only a single categorical imperative and it is this: act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Ak 4:420–21). Kant’s categorical imperative is a secondorder principle: it evaluates not actions themselves, but their maxims, which are the rules or principles of action that a moral agent adopts for herself and that she uses to act upon. Kant’s theory of the categorical imperative is a system of the principles of morals that serve as the guiding principles of our moral agency. However, these principles are not externally forced upon us, but rather legislated by our own volition (i.e., willing) that is at work in each of us. What governs our moral conduct, what moves us to act from duty (obligation) is the practical reason, that is, the ability to exercise our practical agency. The practical reason in each of us determines the universal maxims of morality that all must obey. Kant tells us that as rational beings we are self-determined (autonomous) and, as such, each of us is “subject to the will of no other” (Ak 4:433). Kant grounds his moral theory in the autonomous (entirely selflegislated) will, and in the existence of freedom that allows for this autonomy. Having the ability to self-legislate the universal moral law (which is the same for all of us) and the ability to act on internally formulated and understood principles, rather than acting because of some external force, makes humans autonomous. But the same autonomous will also makes it possible for us to exercise our moral agency. Kant holds that the existence of the categorical imperative is grounded in autonomy, or the self-determination found in rational beings alone. The ability to determine oneself and one’s principles, the ability to set the ends for oneself and consistently pursue them through one’s agency is to what Kant refers when he says that “the human being and in general every rational being” exists “as an end in itself ” (Ak 4:428). It is this selfdetermination that makes a human being intrinsically valuable. Thus, treating fellow humans as a means, and not as an end, undermines their value and essentially disregards their status as

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rational beings. The acknowledgment of intrinsic value, or the dignity, of one’s fellow human is the central idea of Kant’s Humanity Imperative. Introduced as just another formulation of the categorical imperative, Humanity Imperative obligates us to treat humanity, “whether in your own person or in the person of any other,” never merely as a means, and “always . . . as the end” (Ak 4:429). Humanity for Kant is our rational nature, that is, the capacity of each of us to determine ends through reason. As rational beings, humans are the only creatures who can formulate and obey principles on which to act. Humans formulate the principles to have authority over their moral actions, and obey them so these principles may become the guiding principles of moral conduct. Thus, Kant argues that not only must the moral motivation be autonomous, but all genuinely moral actions must have their roots in the “freely chosen dictates” of an autonomous will. Kant, therefore, concludes that for morality to be possible, human freedom, that in the Critique of Pure Reason he declared to be a postulate of practical reason, must be presupposed. Indeed, freedom plays a crucial role on Kant’s philosophical system. His exploration of freedom is not limited simply to his works on moral philosophy alone; there is a challenging metaphysical element of his conception of freedom as well. After Kant, virtually all thinkers came to recognize the centrality of freedom as a philosophical topic. Yet, this certainly is not the single Kantian topic that produced such an effect. Kant’s Critical philosophy had prompted countless debates by his friends and foes alike. It inspired a myriad of thinkers, first of all the German idealists, to produce their own philosophical systems that would respond to challenges and issues raised or left unsolved by Kant. It is hard to find any single concept Kant addressed or touched that has not attracted the attention of his contemporaries and their successors, including scholars today. Kant’s legacy is vast and the continued discussions of his philosophy underscore the truly profound nature of Kant’s work, both at the time of their publication and beyond.

Notes 1. The title is also translated as Critique of Judgment. 2. In this context, it is worth noticing that Kant does not equate “moral worth” with the criterion of what is obligatory, forbidden, or permissible. These criteria are formulated by the categorical imperative, more precisely, by the test of universality, which is conceived as the obligation to act only on maxims that can hold as universal law.

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Chronology of Immanuel Kant’s Life and Works 1724

Born on April 22 in Königsberg, East Prussia.

1730–32

Attends a primary school—Vorstädter Hospitalschule—in Königsberg.

1732–40

A student at the parochial (Pietist) Collegium Fridericianum, in Königsberg.

1740–46

Attends the University of Königsberg.

1747–54

Serves as a private tutor for families in the vicinity of Königsberg.

1749

Publishes his first work Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces.

1755

Completes and defends his dissertation entitled, “Succinct Exposition of Some Meditations of Fire.” Awarded a doctoral degree by the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Königsberg.



March: Publishes (anonymously) Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens.



September: Essay, A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition presented to the Philosophy Faculty at Königsberg.

1756–66

Publishes an array of short works, including Physical Monadology (1756), The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763), Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Inquiry Concerning the Distinctiveness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals (both in 1764).

1770

Appointed professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg.



Inaugural dissertation, Concerning the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World.

1781

Publishes the first (A) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch Verlag).

1783 Publishes Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. 1784

Publishes two short essays: Ideas Towards a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View and An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?

1785

Composes a review of Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind.



Publishes Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

1786

Elected to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin.



Publishes Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and a short essay What is Orientation in Thinking?

1787

Publishes the second (B) edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch Verlag).

1788 Publishes Critique of Practical Reason.

Composes On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy. 37

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1790 Publishes Critique of Judgment, 1st edition. 1793 Composes On the Proverb: That may be True in Theory but is of No Practical Use.

Publishes Critique of Judgment, 2nd edition.



Publishes Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.

1794

Elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg.



Publishes The End of All Things.

1795

Publishes an essay On Perpetual Peace.

1796

July: Kant gives his last lecture at the University of Königsberg.

1797 Publishes The Metaphysical Elements of Right, first part of the Metaphysics of Morals.

Composes an essay, On the Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives.

1798

Publishes the complete Metaphysics of Morals.



Publication of the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View based on Kant’s lectures on the subject for over twenty-five years.



Finishes The Conflict of the Faculties.

1800

Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche publishes Logic, prepared at Kant’s request and based on Kant’s own notes and comments.

1803

Kant becomes ill.



Publishes his Lectures on Pedagogy.

1804

Kant dies on February 12, in Königsberg.



Kant’s unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Kant’s Writings A.1.  German Academic Editions

Kants gesammelte Schriften. 1900-. Königlichen Preußischen (later Deutschen) Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.), Berlin: Georg Reimer (later Walter De Gruyter). [Cited as Ak following by the volume and page numbers.] A.2.  In English

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. 1992-. Edited by P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Semi-academic edition; currently consists of 15+ vols; one of the volumes is listed below.) Kant, I. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason, edited by P. Guyer and A. Wood. (Part of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant listed above.). [Cited by the standard A and B pagination of the first (1781) and second (1787) editions respectively.] B.  Selected Commentaries

Allison, H. 1990. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allison, H. 2001. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allison, H. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, Revised and Enlarged Edition. Ameriks, K. 2000. Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ameriks, K. 2003. Interpreting Kant’s Critiques. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ameriks, K. 2012. Kant’s Elliptical Path. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Beck, L. 2002. Selected Essays on Kant (Series: North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy), edited by H. Robinson. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Bird, G. 2006. The Revolutionary Kant: A Commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court. Buroker, J. V. 2006. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Reprinted 2011) Förster, E. (ed.). 1989. Kant’s Transcendental Deductions. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Friedman, M. 2013. Kant’s Construction of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gardner, S. 1999. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. London and New York: Routledge. Grier, M. 2001. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guyer, P. 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Guyer, P. (ed.). 1992. The Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guyer, P. 2000. Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guyer, P. 2005. Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Guyer, P. (ed.). 2006. The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guyer, P. 2006. Kant. London and New York: Routledge. Guyer, P. (ed.). 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hill, T. 1992. Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kemp Smith, N. 1923. Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. New York: Humanities Press. (Reprinted 1992) Kitcher, P. 2011. Kant’s Thinker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, C. 1996. Creating The Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuehn, M. 2001. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kukla, R. (ed.). 2006. Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Longuenesse, B. 2005. Kant on the Human Standpoint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Longuenesse, B. 2017. I, Me, Mine. Back to Kant, and Back Again. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Neill, O. 1989. Constructions of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, J. 2000. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, edited by B. Herman. Cambridge and New York: Harvard University Press. Rosenberg, J. F. 2005. Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Oxford University Press. Westphal, K. R. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Westphal, K. R. 2016. How Hume and Kant Reconstruct Natural Law: Justifying Strict Objectivity without Debating Moral Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, A. 1999. Kant’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, A. 2005. Kant. Oxford: Blackwell. Zuckert, R. 2007. Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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FROM CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON (1781, 1787) *

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer. The perplexity into which it thus falls is not due to any fault of its own. It begins with principles which it has no option save to employ in the course of experience, and which this experience at the same time abundantly justifies it in using. Rising with their aid (since it is determined to this also by its own nature) to ever higher, ever more remote, conditions, it soon becomes aware that in this way—the questions never ceasing—its work must always remain incomplete; and it therefore finds itself compelled to resort to principles which overstep all possible empirical employment, and which yet seem so unobjectionable that even ordinary consciousness readily accepts them. But by this procedure human reason precipitates itself into darkness and contradictions; and while it may indeed conjecture that these must be in some way due to concealed errors, it is not in a position to be able to detect them. For since the principles of which it is making use transcend the limits of experience, they are no longer subject to any empirical test. The battle-field of these endless controversies is called metaphysics. Time was when metaphysics was entitled the Queen of all the sciences; and if the will be taken for the deed, the preeminent importance of her accepted tasks gives her every right to this title of honour. Now, however, the changed fashion of the time brings her only scorn. […] It is obviously the effect not of levity but of the matured judgment of the age, which refuses to be any longer put off with illusory knowledge. It is a call to reason to undertake anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims, and dismiss all groundless pretensions, not by despotic decrees, but in accordance with its own eternal and unalterable laws. This tribunal is no other than the critique of pure reason. I do not mean by this a critique of books and systems, but of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive independently of all experience. It will therefore decide as to the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general, and determine its sources, its extent, and its limits—all in accordance with principles.

*

From Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith. Courtesy of Internet Archive.

The German Idealism Reader

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION Whether the treatment of such knowledge as lies within the province of reason does or does not follow the secure path of a science, is easily to be determined from the outcome. For if after elaborate preparations, frequently renewed, it is brought to a stop immediately it nears its goal; if often it is compelled to retrace its steps and strike into some new line of approach; or again, if the various participants are unable to agree in any common plan of procedure, then we may rest assured that it is very far from having entered upon the secure path of a science, and is indeed a merely random groping. In these circumstances, we shall be rendering a service to reason should we succeed in discovering the path upon which it can securely travel, even if, as a result of so doing, much that is comprised in our original aims, adopted without reflection, may have to be abandoned as fruitless. […] Metaphysics is a completely isolated speculative science of reason, which soars far above the teachings of experience, and in which reason is indeed meant to be its own pupil. Metaphysics rests on concepts alone—not, like mathematics, on their application to intuition. But though it is older than all other sciences, and would survive even if all the rest were swallowed up in the abyss of an all-destroying barbarism, it has not yet had the good fortune to enter upon the secure path of a science. For in it reason is perpetually being brought to a stand, even when the laws into which it is seeking to have, as it professes, an a priori insight are those that are confirmed by our most common experiences. Ever and again we have to retrace our steps, as not leading us in the direction in which we desire to go. So far, too, are the students of metaphysics from exhibiting any kind of unanimity in their contentions, that metaphysics has rather to be regarded as a battle-ground quite peculiarly suited for those who desire to exercise themselves in mock combats. […] This shows, beyond all questioning, that the procedure of metaphysics has hitherto been a merely random groping, and, what is worst of all, a groping among mere concepts. […] The examples of mathematics and natural science, which by a single and sudden revolution have become what they now are, seem to me sufficiently remarkable to suggest our considering what may have been the essential features in the changed point of view by which they have so greatly benefited. Their success should incline us, at least by way of experiment, to imitate their procedure, so far as the analogy which, as species of rational knowledge, they bear to metaphysics may permit. Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards 42

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the intuition of objects. If intuition must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility. Since I cannot rest in these intuitions if they are to become known, but must relate them as representations to something as their object, and determine this latter through them, either I must assume that the concepts, by means of which I obtain this determination, conform to the object, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, that the experience in which alone, as given objects, they can be known, conform to the concepts. In the former case, I am again in the same perplexity as to how I can know anything a priori in regard to the objects. In the latter case the outlook is more hopeful. For experience is itself a species of knowledge which involves understanding; and understanding has rules which I must presuppose as being in me prior to objects being given to me, and therefore as being a priori. They find expression in a priori concepts to which all objects of experience necessarily conform, and with which they must agree. As regards objects which are thought solely through reason, and indeed as necessary, but which can never—at least not in the manner in which reason thinks them—be given in experience, the attempts at thinking them (for they must admit of being thought) will furnish an excellent touchstone of what we are adopting as our new method of thought, namely, that we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them. This experiment succeeds as well as could be desired, and promises to metaphysics, in its first part—the part that is occupied with those concepts a priori to which the corresponding objects, commensurate with them, can be given in experience—the secure path of a science. For the new point of view enables us to explain how there can be knowledge a priori; and, in addition, to furnish satisfactory proofs of the laws which form the a priori basis of nature, regarded as the sum of the objects of experience—neither achievement being possible on the procedure hitherto followed. But this deduction of our power of knowing a priori, in the first part of metaphysics, has a consequence which is startling, and which has the appearance of being highly prejudicial to the whole purpose of metaphysics, as dealt with in the second part. For we are brought to the conclusion that we can never transcend the limits of possible experience, though that is precisely what this science is concerned, above all else, to achieve. This situation yields, however, just the very experiment by which, indirectly, we are enabled to prove the truth of this first estimate of our a priori knowledge of reason, namely, that such knowledge has to do only with appearances, and must leave the thing in itself as indeed real per se, but as not known by us. For what necessarily forces us to transcend the limits of experience and of all appearances is the unconditioned, which reason, by necessity and by right, demands in things in themselves, as required to complete the series of conditions. If, then, on the supposition that our empirical knowledge conforms to objects as things in themselves, we find that the unconditioned cannot be thought without contradiction, and that when, on the other hand, we suppose that our representation of things, as they are given to us, does not conform as appearances, conform to our mode of representation, the contradiction vanishes; and if, therefore, we thus find that the unconditioned is not to be met with in things, so far as we know them, that is, so far as they are given to us, but only so far as we do not know them, that is, so far as they are things in themselves, we are justified in concluding that what we at first assumed for the purposes of experiment is now definitely confirmed. But when all progress in the field of the supersensible has thus been denied to speculative reason, it is still open to us to enquire 43

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whether, in the practical knowledge of reason, data may not be found sufficient to determine reason’s transcendent concept of the unconditioned, and so to enable us, in accordance with the wish of metaphysics, and by means of knowledge that is possible a priori, though only from a practical point of view, to pass beyond the limits of all possible experience. Speculative reason has thus at least made room for such an extension; and if it must at the same time leave it empty, yet none the less we are at liberty, indeed we are summoned, to take occupation of it, if we can, by practical data of reason. […] This attempt to alter the procedure which has hitherto prevailed in metaphysics, by completely revolutionizing it in accordance with the example set by the geometers and physicists, forms indeed the main purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason. It is a treatise on the method, not a system of the science itself. But at the same time it marks out the whole plan of the science, both as regards its limits and as regards its entire internal structure. For pure speculative reason has this peculiarity, that it can measure its powers according to the different ways in which it chooses the objects of its thinking, and can also give an exhaustive enumeration of the various ways in which it propounds its problems, and so is able, nay bound, to trace the complete outline of a system of metaphysics. As regards the first point, nothing in a priori knowledge can be ascribed to objects save what the thinking subject derives from itself; as regards the second point, pure reason, so far as the principles of its knowledge are concerned, is a quite separate self-subsistent unity, in which, as in an organized body, every member exists for every other, and all for the sake of each, so that no principle can safely be taken in any one relation, unless it has been investigated in the entirety of its relations to the whole employment of pure reason. Consequently, metaphysics has also this singular advantage, such as falls to the lot of no other science which deals with objects (for logic is concerned only with the form of thought in general), that should it, through this critique, be set upon the secure path of a science, it is capable of acquiring exhaustive knowledge of its entire field. Metaphysics has to deal only with principles, and with the limits of their employment as determined by these principles themselves, and it can therefore finish its work and bequeath it to posterity as a capital to which no addition can be made. Since it is a fundamental science, it is under obligation to achieve this completeness. We must be able to say of it: nil actum reputans, si quid superesset agendum. But, it will be asked, what sort of a treasure is this that we propose to bequeath to posterity? What is the value of the metaphysics that is alleged to be thus purified by criticism and established once for all? On a cursory view of the present work it may seem that its results are merely negative, warning us that we must never venture with speculative reason beyond the limits of experience. Such is in fact its primary use. But such teaching at once acquires a positive value when we recognize that the principles with which speculative reason ventures out beyond its proper limits do not in effect extend the employment of reason, but, as we find on closer scrutiny, inevitably narrow it. These principles properly belong [not to reason but] to sensibility, and when thus employed they threaten to make the bounds of sensibility coextensive with the real, and so to supplant reason in its pure (practical) employment. So far, therefore, as our Critique limits speculative reason, it is indeed negative; but since it thereby removes an obstacle which stands in the way of the employment of practical reason, nay threatens to destroy it, it has in reality a positive and very important use. At least this is so, immediately we are convinced that there is an absolutely necessary practical employment of 44

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pure reason—the moral—in which it inevitably goes beyond the limits of sensibility. Though [practical] reason, in thus proceeding, requires no assistance from speculative reason, it must yet be assured against its opposition, that reason may not be brought into conflict with itself. To deny that the service which the Critique renders is Positive in character, would thus be like saying that the police are of no positive benefit, inasmuch as their main business is merely to prevent the violence of which citizens stand in mutual fear, in order that each may pursue his vocation in peace and security. That space and time are only forms of sensible intuition, and so only conditions of the existence of things as appearances; that, moreover, we have no concepts of understanding, and consequently no elements for the knowledge of things, save in so far as intuition can be given corresponding to these concepts; and that we can therefore have no knowledge of any object as thing in itself, but only in so far as it is an object of sensible intuition, that is, an appearance—all this is proved in the analytical part of the Critique. Thus it does indeed follow that all possible speculative knowledge of reason is limited to mere objects of experience. But our further contention must also be duly borne in mind, namely, that though We cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears. […] if our Critique is not in error in teaching that the object is to be taken in a twofold sense, namely as appearance and as thing in itself; if the deduction of the concepts of understanding is valid, and the principle of causality therefore applies only to things taken in the former sense, namely, in so far as they are objects of experience—these same objects, taken in the other sense, not being subject to the principle—then there is no contradiction in supposing that one and the same will is, in the appearance, that is, in its visible acts, necessarily subject to the law of nature, and so far not free, while yet, as belonging to a thing in itself, it is not subject to that law, and is therefore free. My soul, viewed from the latter standpoint, cannot indeed be known by means of speculative reason (and still less through empirical observation); and freedom as a property of a being to which I attribute effects in the sensible world, is therefore also not knowable in any such fashion. For I should then have to know such a being as determined in its existence, and yet as not determined in time—which is impossible, since I cannot support my concept by any intuition. But though I cannot know, I can yet think freedom; that is to say, the representation of it is at least not self-contradictory, provided due account be taken of our critical distinction between the two modes of representation, the sensible and the intellectual, and of the resulting limitation of the pure concepts of understanding and of the principles which flow from them. […] This discussion as to the positive advantage of critical principles of pure reason can be similarly developed in regard to the concept of God and of the simple nature of our soul; but for the sake of brevity such further discussion may be omitted. [From what has already been said, it is evident that] even the assumption–as made on behalf of the necessary practical employment of my reason—of God, freedom, and immortality is not permissible unless at the same time speculative reason be deprived of its pretensions to transcendent insight. For in order to arrive at such insight it must make use of principles which, in fact, extend only to objects of possible experience, and which, if also applied to what cannot be an object of experience, always really change this into an appearance, thus rendering all practical extension 45

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of pure reason impossible. I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the preconception that it is possible to make headway in metaphysics without a previous criticism of pure reason, is the source of all that unbelief, always very dogmatic, which wars against morality. […] I have observed, with pleasure and thankfulness, in various published works—alike in critical reviews and in independent treatises—that the spirit of thoroughness is not extinct in Germany, but has only been temporarily overshadowed by the prevalence of a pretentiously free manner of thinking; and that the thorny paths of the Critique have not discouraged courageous and clear heads from setting themselves to master my book—a work which leads to a methodical, and as such alone enduring, and therefore most necessary, science of pure reason. To these worthy men, who so happily combine thoroughness of insight with a talent for lucid exposition—which I cannot regard myself as possessing—I leave the task of perfecting what, here and there, in its exposition, is still somewhat defective.

ANALYTIC OF CONCEPTS Chapter II THE DEDUCTION OF THE PURE CONCEPTS OF UNDERSTANDING Section 1 § 13 The Principles of any Transcendental Deduction [. . .] among the manifold concepts which form the highly complicated web of human knowledge, there are some which are marked out for pure a priori employment, in complete independence of all experience; and their right to be so employed always demands a deduction. For since empirical proofs do not suffice to justify this kind of employment, we are faced by the problem how these concepts can relate to objects which they yet do not obtain from any experience. The explanation of the manner in which concepts can thus relate a priori to objects I entitle their transcendental deduction; and from it I distinguish empirical deduction, which shows the manner in which a concept is acquired through experience and through reflection upon experience, and which therefore concerns, not its legitimacy, but only its de facto mode of origination. We are already in possession of concepts which are of two quite different kinds, and which yet agree in that they relate to objects in a completely a priori manner, namely, the concepts of space and time as forms of sensibility, and the categories as concepts of understanding. To seek an empirical deduction of either of these types of concept would be labour entirely lost. For their distinguishing feature consists just in this, that they relate to their objects without having borrowed from experience anything that can serve in the representation of these objects. If, therefore, a deduction of such concepts is indispensable, it must in any case be transcendental. [. . .] We have already been able with but little difficulty to explain how the concepts of space and time, although a priori modes of knowledge, must necessarily relate to objects, and how 46

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independently of all experience they make possible a synthetic knowledge of objects. For since only by means of such pure forms of sensibility can an object appear to us, and so be an object of empirical intuition, space and time are pure intuitions which contain a priori the condition of the possibility of objects as appearances, and the synthesis which takes place in them has objective validity. The categories of understanding, on the other hand, do not represent the conditions under which objects are given in intuition. Objects may, therefore, appear to us without their being under the necessity of being related to the functions of understanding; and understanding need not, therefore, contain their a priori conditions. Thus a difficulty such as we did not meet with in the field of sensibility is here presented, namely, how subjective conditions of thought can have objective validity, that is, can furnish conditions of the possibility of all knowledge of objects. [. . .] That objects of sensible intuition must conform to the formal conditions of sensibility which lie a priori in the mind is evident, because otherwise they would not be objects for us. But that they must likewise conform to the conditions which the understanding requires for the synthetic unity of thought, is a conclusion the grounds of which are by no means so obvious. [. . .] § 14 Transition to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories There are only two possible ways in which synthetic representations and their objects can establish connection, obtain necessary relation to one another, and, as it were, meet one another. Either the object alone must make the representation possible, or the representation alone must make the object possible. In the former case, this relation is only empirical, and the representation is never possible a priori. This is true of appearances, as regards that [element] in them which belongs to sensation. In the latter case, representation in itself does not produce its object in so far as existence is concerned, for we are not here speaking of its causality by means of the will. None the less the representation is a priori determinant of the object, if it be the case that only through the representation is it possible to know anything as an object. Now there are two conditions under which alone the knowledge of an object is possible, first, intuition, through which it is given, though only as appearance; secondly, concept, through which an object is thought corresponding to this intuition. It is evident from the above that the first condition, namely, that under which alone objects can be intuited, does actually lie a priori in the mind as the formal ground of the objects. All appearances necessarily agree with this formal condition of sensibility, since only through it can they appear, that is, be empirically intuited and given. The question now arises whether a priori concepts do not also serve as antecedent conditions under which alone anything can be, if not intuited, yet thought as object in general. In that case all empirical knowledge of objects would necessarily conform to such concepts, because only as thus presupposing them is anything possible as object of experience. Now all experience does indeed contain, in addition to the intuition of the senses through which something is given, a concept of an object as being thereby given, that is to say, as appearing. Concepts of objects in general thus underlie all empirical knowledge as its a priori conditions. The objective validity of the categories as a priori concepts rests, therefore, on the fact that, so far as the form of thought 47

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is concerned, through them alone does experience become possible. They relate of necessity and a priori to objects of experience, for the reason that only by means of them can any object whatsoever of experience be thought. The transcendental deduction of all a priori concepts has thus a principle according to which the whole enquiry must be directed, namely, that they must be recognised as a priori conditions of the possibility of experience, whether of the intuition which is to be met with in it or of the thought. Concepts which yield the objective ground of the possibility of experience are for this very reason necessary. But the unfolding of the experience wherein they are encountered is not their deduction; it is only their illustration.

DEDUCTION OF THE PURE CONCEPTS OF THE UNDERSTANDING [As restated in 2nd edition] Section 2 TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION OF THE PURE CONCEPTS OF THE UNDERSTANDING § 15 The Possibility of Combination in General The manifold of representations can be given in an intuition which is purely sensible, that is, nothing but receptivity; and the form of this intuition can lie a priori in our faculty of representation, without being anything more than the mode in which the subject is affected. But the combination (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come to us through the senses, and cannot, therefore, be already contained in the pure form of sensible intuition. For it is an act of spontaneity of the faculty of representation; and since this faculty, to distinguish it from sensibility, must be entitled understanding, all combination—be we conscious of it or not, be it a combination of the manifold of intuition, empirical or non-empirical, or of various concepts—is an act of the understanding. To this act the general title ‘synthesis’ may be assigned, as indicating that we cannot represent to ourselves anything as combined in the object which we have not ourselves previously combined, and that of all representations combination is the only one which cannot be given through objects. Being an act of the self-activity of the subject, it cannot be executed save by the subject itself. It will easily be observed that this action is originally one and is equipollent for all combination, and that its dissolution, namely, analysis, which appears to be its opposite, yet always presupposes it. For where the understanding has not previously combined, it cannot dissolve, since only as having been combined by the understanding can anything that allows of analysis be given to the faculty of representation. But the concept of combination includes, besides the concept of the manifold and of its synthesis, also the concept of the unity of the manifold. Combination is representation of the synthetic unity of the manifold. The representation of this unity cannot, therefore, arise out of the combination. On the contrary, it is what, by adding itself to the representation of the manifold, first makes possible the concept of the combination. This unity, which precedes a priori all concepts of combination, is not the category of unity (§ 10); for all categories are 48

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grounded in logical functions of judgment, and in these functions combination, and therefore unity of given concepts, is already thought. Thus the category already presupposes combination. We must therefore look yet higher for this unity (as qualitative, § 12), namely in that which itself contains the ground of the unity of diverse concepts in judgment, and therefore of the possibility of the understanding, even as regards its logical employment. § 16 The Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me. That representation which can be given prior to all thought is entitled intuition. All the manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the ‘I think’ in the same subject in which this manifold is found. But this representation is an act of spontaneity, that is, it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility. I call it pure apperception, to distinguish it from empirical apperception, or, again, original apperception, because it is that self-consciousness which, while generating the representation ‘I think’ (a representation which must be capable of accompanying all other representations, and which in all consciousness is one and the same), cannot itself be accompanied by any further representation. The unity of this apperception I likewise entitle the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, in order to indicate the possibility of a priori knowledge arising from it. For the manifold representations, which are given in an intuition, would not be one and all my representations, if they did not all belong to one selfconsciousness. As my representations (even if I am not conscious of them as such) they must conform to the condition under which alone they can stand together in one universal selfconsciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me. From this original combination many consequences follow. This thoroughgoing identity of the apperception of a manifold which is given in intuition contains a synthesis of representations, and is possible only through the consciousness of this synthesis. For the empirical consciousness, which accompanies different representations, is in itself diverse and without relation to the identity of the subject. That relation comes about, not simply through my accompanying each representation with consciousness, but only in so far as I conjoin one representation with another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them. Only in so far, therefore, as I can unite a manifold of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the consciousness in [i.e. throughout] these representations. In other words, the analytic unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a certain synthetic unity. The thought that the representations given in intuition one and all belong to me, is therefore equivalent to the thought that I unite them in one self-consciousness, or can at least so unite them; and although this thought is not itself the consciousness of the synthesis of the representations, it presupposes the possibility of that synthesis. In other words, only in so far as I can grasp the manifold of the representations in one consciousness, do I call them one and all mine. For otherwise I should have as many-coloured and diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious to myself. Synthetic unity of the manifold of intuitions, as generated a priori, is thus the ground of the identity of apperception itself, which precedes a priori all 49

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my determinate thought. Combination does not, however, lie in the objects, and cannot be borrowed from them, and so, through perception, first taken up into the understanding. On the contrary, it is an affair of the understanding alone, which itself is nothing but the faculty of combining a priori, and of bringing the manifold of given representations under the unity of apperception. The principle of apperception is the highest principle in the whole sphere of human knowledge. This principle of the necessary unity of apperception is itself, indeed, an identical, and therefore analytic, proposition; nevertheless it reveals the necessity of a synthesis of the manifold given in intuition, without which the thoroughgoing identity of self-consciousness cannot be thought. For through the ‘I’, as simple representation, nothing manifold is given; only in intuition, which is distinct from the ‘I’, can a manifold be given; and only through combination in one consciousness can it be thought. An understanding in which through self-consciousness all the manifold would eo ipso be given, would be intuitive; our understanding can only think, and for intuition must look to the senses. I am conscious of the self as identical in respect of the manifold of representations that are given to me in an intuition, because I call them one and all my representations, and so apprehend them as constituting one intuition. This amounts to saying, that I am conscious to myself a priori of a necessary synthesis of representations—to be entitled the original synthetic unity of apperception—under which all representations that are given to me must stand, but under which they have also first to be brought by means of a synthesis. § 17 The Principle of the Synthetic Unity is the Supreme Principle of all Employment of the Understanding The supreme principle of the possibility of all intuition in its relation to sensibility is, according to the Transcendental Aesthetic, that all the manifold of intuition should be subject to the formal conditions of space and time. The supreme principle of the same possibility, in its relation to understanding, is that all the manifold of intuition should be subject to conditions of the original synthetic unity of apperception.1 In so far as the manifold representations of intuition are given to us, they are subject to the former of these two principles; in so far as they must allow of being combined in one consciousness, they are subject to the latter. For without such combination nothing can be thought or known, since the given representations would not have in common the act of the apperception ‘I think’, and so could not be apprehended together in one self-consciousness. Understanding is, to use general terms, the faculty of knowledge. This knowledge consists in the determinate relation of given representations to an object; and an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united. Now all unification of representations demands unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently it is the unity of consciousness that alone constitutes the relation of representations to an object, and therefore their objective validity and the fact that they are modes of knowledge; and upon it therefore rests the very possibility of the understanding. The first pure knowledge of understanding, then, upon which all the rest of its employment is based, and which also at the same time is completely independent of all conditions of sensible intuition, is the principle of the original synthetic unity of apperception. Thus the mere form of outer sensible intuition, space, is not yet [by itself] knowledge; it supplies only the manifold 50

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of a priori intuition for a possible knowledge. To know anything in space (for instance, a line), I must draw it, and thus synthetically bring into being a determinate combination of the given manifold, so that the unity of this act is at the same time the unity of consciousness (as in the concept of a line); and it is through this unity of consciousness that an object (a determinate space) is first known. The synthetic unity of consciousness is, therefore, an objective condition of all knowledge. It is not merely a condition that I myself require in knowing an object, but is a condition under which every intuition must stand in order to become an object for me. For otherwise, in the absence of this synthesis, the manifold would not be united in one consciousness. Although this proposition makes synthetic unity a condition of all thought, it is, as already stated, itself analytic. For it says no more than that all my representations in any given intuition must be subject to that condition under which alone I can ascribe them to the identical self as my representations, and so can comprehend them as synthetically combined in one apperception through the general expression, ‘I think’ This principle is not, however, to be taken as applying to every possible understanding, but only to that understanding through whose pure apperception, in the representation ‘I am’, nothing manifold is given. An understanding which through its self-consciousness could supply to itself the manifold of intuition—an understanding, that is to say, through whose representation the objects of the representation should at the same time exist—would not require, for the unity of consciousness, a special act of synthesis of the manifold. For the human understanding, however, which thinks only, and does not intuit, that act is necessary. It is indeed the first principle of the human understanding, and is so indispensable to it that we cannot form the least conception of any other possible understanding, either of such as is itself intuitive or of any that may possess an underlying mode of sensible intuition which is different in kind from that in space and time. § 18 The Objective Unity of Self-Consciousness The transcendental unity of apperception is that unity through which all the manifold given in an intuition is united in a concept of the object. It is therefore entitled objective, and must be distinguished from the subjective unity of consciousness, which is a determination of inner sense—through which the manifold of intuition for such [objective] combination is empirically given. Whether I can become empirically conscious of the manifold as simultaneous or as successive depends on circumstances or empirical conditions. Therefore the empirical unity of consciousness, through association of representations, itself concerns an appearance, and is wholly contingent. But the pure form of intuition in time, merely as intuition in general, which contains a given manifold, is subject to the original unity of consciousness, simply through the necessary relation of the manifold of the intuition to the one ‘I think’, and so through the pure synthesis of understanding which is the a priori underlying ground of the empirical synthesis. Only the original unity is objectively valid; the empirical unity of apperception, upon which we are not here dwelling, and which besides is merely derived from the former under given conditions in concreto, has only subjective validity. To one man, for instance, a certain word suggests one thing, to another some other thing; the unity of consciousness in that which is empirical is not, as regards what is given, necessarily and universally valid. 51

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§ 19 The Logical Form of all Judgments consists in the Objective Unity of the Apperception of the Concepts which they contain I have never been able to accept the interpretation which logicians give of judgment in general. It is, they declare, the representation of a relation between two concepts. I do not here dispute with them as to what is defective in this interpretation—that in any case it applies only to categorical, not to hypothetical and disjunctive judgments (the two latter containing a relation not of concepts but of judgments), an oversight from which many troublesome consequences have followed. I need only point out that the definition does not determine in what the asserted relation consists. But if I investigate more precisely the relation of the given modes of knowledge in any judgment, and distinguish it, as belonging to the understanding, from the relation according to laws of the reproductive imagination, which has only subjective validity, I find that a judgment is nothing but the manner in which given modes of knowledge are brought to the objective unity of apperception. This is what is intended by the copula ‘is’. It is employed to distinguish the objective unity of given representations from the subjective. It indicates their relation to original apperception, and its necessary unity. It holds good even if the judgment is itself empirical, and therefore contingent, as, for example, in the judgment, ‘Bodies are heavy’. I do not here assert that these representations necessarily belong to one another in the empirical intuition, but that they belong to one another in virtue of the necessary unity of apperception in the synthesis of intuitions, that is, according to principles of the objective determination of all representations, in so far as knowledge can be acquired by means of these representations— principles which are all derived from the fundamental principle of the transcendental unity of apperception. Only in this way does there arise from this relation a judgment, that is, a relation which is objectively valid, and so can be adequately distinguished from a relation of the same representations that would have only subjective validity—as when they are connected according to laws of association. In the latter case, all that I could say would be, ‘If I support a body, I feel an impression of weight’; I could not say, ‘It, the body, is heavy’. Thus to say ‘The body is heavy’ is not merely to state that the two representations have always been conjoined in my perception, however often that perception be repeated; what we are asserting is that they are combined in the object, no matter what the state of the subject may be. § 20 All Sensible Intuitions are subject to the Categories, as Conditions under which alone their Manifold can come together in one Consciousness The manifold given in a sensible intuition is necessarily subject to the original synthetic unity of apperception, because in no other way is the unity of intuition possible (§ 17). But that act of understanding by which the manifold of given representations (be they intuitions or concepts) is brought under one apperception, is the logical function of judgment (cf. § 19). All the manifold, therefore, so far as it is given in a single empirical intuition, is determined in respect of one of the logical functions of judgment, and is thereby brought into one consciousness. Now the categories are just these functions of judgment, in so far as they are employed in determination of the manifold of a given intuition (cf. § 13). Consequently, the manifold in a given intuition is necessarily subject to the categories. 52

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§ 21 Observation A manifold, contained in an intuition which I call mine, is represented, by means of the synthesis of the understanding, as belonging to the necessary unity of self-consciousness; and this is effected by means of the category. This [requirement of a] category therefore shows that the empirical consciousness of a given manifold in a single intuition is subject to a pure self-consciousness a priori, just as is empirical intuition to a pure sensible intuition, which likewise takes place a priori. Thus in the above proposition a beginning is made of a deduction of the pure concepts of understanding; and in this deduction, since the categories have their source in the understanding alone, independently of sensibility, I must abstract from the mode in which the manifold for an empirical intuition is given, and must direct attention solely to the unity which, in terms of the category, and by means of the understanding, enters into the intuition. In what follows (cf. § 26) it will be shown, from the mode in which the empirical intuition is given in sensibility, that its unity is no other than that which the category (according to § 20) prescribes to the manifold of a given intuition in general. Only thus, by demonstration of the a priori validity of the categories in respect of all objects of our senses, will the purpose of the deduction be fully attained. But in the above proof there is one feature from which I could not abstract, the feature, namely, that the manifold to be intuited must be given prior to the synthesis of understanding, and independently of it. How this takes place, remains here undetermined. For were I to think an understanding which is itself intuitive (as, for example, a divine understanding which should not represent to itself given objects, but through whose representation the objects should themselves be given or produced), the categories would have no meaning whatsoever in respect of such a mode of knowledge. They are merely rules for an understanding whose whole power consists in thought, consists, that is, in the act whereby it brings the synthesis of a manifold, given to it from elsewhere in intuition, to the unity of apperception—a faculty, therefore, which by itself knows nothing whatsoever, but merely combines and arranges the material of knowledge, that is, the intuition, which must be given to it by the object. This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and only by such and so many, is as little capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other functions of judgment, or why space and time are the only forms of our possible intuition. § 22 The Category has no other Application in Knowledge than to Objects of Experience To think an object and to know an object are thus by no means the same thing Knowledge involves two factors: first, the concept, through which an object in general is thought (the category); and secondly, the intuition, through which it is given. For if no intuition could be given corresponding to the concept, the concept would still indeed be a thought, so far as its form is concerned, but would be without any object, and no knowledge of anything would be possible by means of it. [. . .] 53

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Now things in space and time are given only in so far as they are perceptions (that is, representations accompanied by sensation)—therefore only through empirical representation. Consequently, the pure concepts of understanding, even when they are applied to a priori intuitions, as in mathematics, yield knowledge only in so far as these intuitions—and therefore indirectly by their means the pure concepts also—can be applied to empirical intuitions. Even, therefore, with the aid of [pure] intuition, the categories do not afford us any knowledge of things; they do so only through their possible application to empirical intuition. In other words, they serve only for the possibility of empirical knowledge; and such knowledge is what we entitle experience. Our conclusion is therefore this: the categories, as yielding knowledge of things, have no kind of application, save only in regard to things which may be objects of possible experience. § 23 The above proposition is of the greatest importance; for it determines the limits of the employment of the pure concepts of understanding in regard to objects, just as the Transcendental Aesthetic determined the limits of the employment of the pure form of our sensible intuition. Space and time, as conditions under which alone objects can possibly be given to us, are valid no further than for objects of the senses, and therefore only for experience Beyond these limits they represent nothing; for they are only in the senses, and beyond them have no reality. The pure concepts of understanding are free from this limitation, and extend to objects of intuition in general, be the intuition like or unlike ours, if only it be sensible and not intellectual. But this extension of concepts beyond our sensible intuition is of no advantage to us. For as concepts of objects they are then empty, and do not even enable us to judge of their objects whether or not they are possible. They are mere forms of thought, without objective reality, since we have no intuition at hand to which the synthetic unity of apperception, which constitutes the whole content of these forms, could be applied, and in being so applied determine an object. Only our sensible and empirical intuition can give to them body and meaning. [. . .]

TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF JUDGMENT (Analytic of Principles) Chapter III THE GROUND OF THE DISTINCTION OF ALL OBJECTS IN GENERAL INTO PHAENOMENA AND NOUMENA

[. . .] Appearances, so far as they are thought as objects according to the unity of the categories, are called phaenomena. But if I postulate things which are mere objects of understanding, and which, nevertheless, can be given as such to an intuition, although not to one that is sensible—given therefore coram intuitu intellectuali—such things would be entitled noumena (intelligibilia).

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Now we must bear in mind that the concept of appearances, as limited by the Transcendental Aesthetic, already of itself establishes the objective reality of noumena and justifies the division of objects into phaenomena and noumena, and so of the world into a world of the senses and a world of the understanding (mundus sensibilis et intelligibilis), and indeed in, such manner that the distinction does not refer merely to the logical form of our knowledge of one and the same thing, according as it is indistinct or distinct, but to the difference in the manner in which the two worlds can be first given to our knowledge, and in conformity with this difference, to the manner in which they are in themselves generically distinct from one another. For if the senses represent to us something merely as it appears, this something must also in itself be a thing, and an object of a non-sensible intuition, that is, of the understanding. In other words, a [kind of] knowledge must be possible, in which there is no sensibility, and which alone has reality that is absolutely objective. Through it objects will be represented as they are, whereas in the empirical employment of our understanding things will be known only as they appear. [. . .]

APPENDIX THE AMPHIBOLY OF CONCEPTS OF REFLECTION ARISING FROM THE CONFUSION OF THE EMPIRICAL WITH THE TRANSCENDENTAL EMPLOYMENT OF UNDERSTANDING

[. . .] But […] the concept of a noumenon is problematic, that is, it is the representation of a thing of which we can neither say that it is possible nor that it is impossible; for we are acquainted with no kind of intuition but our own sensible kind and no kind of concepts but the categories, and neither of these is appropriate to a non-sensible object. We cannot, therefore, positively extend the sphere of the objects of our thought beyond the conditions of our sensibility, and assume besides appearances objects of pure thought, that is, noumena, since such objects have no assignable positive meaning. For in regard to the categories we must admit that they are not of themselves adequate to the knowledge of things in themselves, and that without the data of sensibility they would be merely subjective forms of the unity of understanding, having no object. Thought is in itself, indeed, no product of the senses, and in so far is also not limited by them; but it does not therefore at once follow that it has a pure employment of its own, unaided by sensibility, since it is then without an object. We cannot call the noumenon such an object; signifying, as it does, the problematic concept of an object for a quite different intuition and a quite different understanding from ours, it is itself a problem. The concept of the noumenon is, therefore, not the concept of an object, but is a problem unavoidably bound up with the limitation of our sensibility. [. . .]  These latter must not be absolutely denied, though—since we are without a determinate concept of them (inasmuch as no category can serve that purpose)—neither can they be asserted as objects for our understanding.

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Understanding accordingly limits sensibility, but does not thereby extend its own sphere. In the process of warning the latter that it must not presume to claim applicability to things-inthemselves but only to appearances, it does indeed think for itself an object in itself, but only as transcendental object, which is the cause of appearance and therefore not itself appearance, and which can be thought neither as quantity nor as reality nor as substance, etc. [. . .] If we are pleased to name this object noumenon for the reason that its representation is not sensible, we are free to do so. But since we can apply to it none of the concepts of our understanding, the representation remains for us empty, and is of no service except to mark the limits of our sensible knowledge and to leave open a space which we can fill neither through possible experience nor through pure understanding. [. . .] What we are then left with is a mode of determining the object by thought alone—a merely logical form without content, but which yet seems to us to be a mode in which the object exists in itself (noumenon) without regard to intuition, which is limited to our senses.

Note 1. Space and time, and all their parts, are intuitions, and are, therefore, with the manifold which they contain, singular representations (vide the Transcendental Aesthetic). Consequently they are not mere concepts through which one and the same consciousness is found to be contained in a number of representations. On the contrary, through them many representations are found to be contained in one representation, and in the consciousness of that representation; and they are thus composite. The unity of that consciousness is therefore synthetic and yet is also original. The singularity of such intuitions is found to have important consequences (vide § 25).

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FROM CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON (1788) *

Part one Doctrine of the elements of pure practical reason Book one The analytic of pure practical reason Chapter I On the Principles of Pure Practical Reason I. DEFINITION Practical principles are propositions that contain a general determination of the will, having under it several practical rules. They are subjective, or maxims, when the condition is regarded by the subject as holding only for his will; but they are objective, or practical laws, when the condition is cognized as objective, that is, as holding for the will of every rational being. Remark [. . .] In practical cognition – that is, cognition having to do only with determining grounds of the will – the principles that one makes for oneself are not yet laws to which one is unavoidably subject, because reason, in the practical, has to do with the subject, namely with his faculty of desire, which by its special constitution can make various adjustments to the rule. A practical rule is always a product of reason because it prescribes action as a means to an effect, which is its purpose. But for a being in whom reason quite alone is not the determining ground of the will, this rule is an imperative, that is, a rule indicated by an “ought,” which expresses objective necessitation to the action and signifies that if reason completely determined the will the action would without fail take place in accordance with this rule. Imperatives, therefore, hold objectively and are quite distinct from maxims, which are subjective principles. But the former either determine the conditions of the causality of a rational being as an efficient cause merely with respect to the effect and its adequacy to it or they determine only the will, whether or not it is sufficient for the effect. The first would be hypothetical imperatives and would contain mere precepts of skill; the second, on the

From Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. by Mary J. Gregor; general introduction by Allen Wood. Cambridge University Press, 1996, 151–69, 226–46. *

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contrary, would be categorical and would alone be practical laws. Thus maxims are indeed principles but not imperatives. But imperatives themselves, when they are conditional – that is, when they do not determine the will simply as will but only with respect to a desired effect, that is, when they are hypothetical imperatives – are indeed practical precepts but not laws. The latter must sufficiently determine the will as will even before I ask whether I have the ability required for a desired effect or what I am to do in order to produce it, and must thus be categorical: otherwise they are not laws because they lack the necessity which, if it is to be practical, must be independent of conditions that are pathological and therefore only contingently connected with the will. [. . .] 4. THEOREM III If a rational being is to think of his maxims as practical universal laws, he can think of them only as principles that contain the determining ground of the will not by their matter but only by their form. [. . .] 6. PROBLEM II Supposing that a will is free: to find the law that alone is competent to determine it necessarily. Since the matter of a practical law, that is, an object of maxim, can never be given otherwise than empirically whereas a-free will, as independent of empirical conditions (i.e., conditions belonging to the sensible world), must nevertheless be determinable, a free will must find a determining ground in the law but independently of the matter of the law. But, besides the matter of the law, nothing further is contained in it than the lawgiving form. The lawgiving form, insofar as this is contained in the maxim, is therefore the only thing that can constitute a determining ground of the will. Remark Thus freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each other. Now I do not ask here whether they are in fact different or whether it is not much rather the case that an unconditional law is merely the self-consciousness of a pure practical reason, this being identical with the positive concept of freedom; I ask instead from what our cognition of the unconditionally practical starts, whether from freedom or from the practical law. It cannot start from freedom, for we can neither be immediately conscious of this, since the first concept of it is negative, nor can we conclude to it from experience, since experience lets us cognize only the law of appearances and hence the mechanism of nature, the direct opposite of freedom. It is therefore the moral law, of which we become immediately conscious (as soon as we draw up maxims of the will for ourselves), that first offers itself to us and, inasmuch as reason presents it as a determining ground not to be outweighed by any sensible conditions and indeed quite 58

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independent of them, leads directly to the concept of freedom. But how is consciousness of that moral law possible? We can become aware of pure practical laws just as we are aware of pure theoretical principles, by attending to the necessity with which reason prescribes them to us and to the setting aside of all empirical conditions to which reason directs us. The concept of a pure will arises from the first, as consciousness of a pure understanding arises from the latter. That this is the true subordination of our concepts and that morality first discloses to us the concept of freedom, so that it is practical reason which first poses to speculative reason, with this concept, the most insoluble problem so as to put it in the greatest perplexity, is clear from the following: that, since nothing in appearances can be explained by the concept of freedom and there the mechanism of nature must instead constitute the only guide; since, moreover, the antinomy of pure reason when it wants to ascend to the unconditioned in the series of causes gets it entangled in incomprehensibilities on one side as much as on the other, whereas the latter (mechanism) is at least useful in the explanation of appearances, 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. But experience also confirms this order of concepts in us. Suppose someone asserts of his lustful inclination that, when the desired object and the opportunity are present, it is quite irresistible to him; ask him whether, if a gallows were erected in front of the house where he finds this opportunity and he would be hanged on it immediately after gratifying his lust, he would not then control his inclination. One need not conjecture very long what he would reply. But ask him whether, if his prince demanded, on pain of the same immediate execution, that he give false testimony against an honorable man whom the prince would like to destroy under a plausible pretext, he would consider it possible to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would do it or not, but he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him. He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him. 7. FUNDAMENTAL LAW OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law. [. . .] Remark [. . .] This principle of morality, just on account of the universality of the lawgiving that makes it the formal supreme determining ground of the will regardless of all subjective differences, is declared by reason to be at the same time a law for all rational beings insofar as they have a will, that is, the ability to determine their causality by the representation of rules, hence insofar as they are capable of actions in accordance with principles and consequently also in accordance with a priori practical principles. It is, therefore, not limited to human beings only but applies to all finite beings that have reason and will and even includes the infinite being as the supreme

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intelligence. In the first case, however, the law has the form of an imperative, because in them, as rational beings, one can presuppose a pure will but, insofar as they are beings affected by needs and sensible motives, not a holy will, that is, such a will as would not be capable of any maxim conflicting with the moral law. Accordingly the moral law is for them an imperative that commands categorically because the law is unconditional; the relation of such a will to this law is dependence under the name of obligation, which signifies a necessitation, though only by reason and its objective law, to an action which is called duty. [. . .] 8. THEOREM IV Autonomy of the will is the sole principle of all moral laws and of duties in keeping with them; heteronomy of choice, on the other hand, not only does not ground any obligation at all but is instead opposed to the principle of obligation and to the morality of the will. That is to say, the sole principle of morality consists in independence from all matter of the law (namely, from a desired object) and at the same time in the determination of choice through the mere form of giving universal law that a maxim must be capable of. That independence, however, is freedom in the negative sense, whereas this lawgiving of its own on the part of pure and, as such, practical reason is freedom in the positive sense. Thus the moral law expresses nothing other than the autonomy of pure practical reason, that is, freedom, and this is itself the formal condition of all maxims, under which alone they can accord with the supreme practical law. If, therefore, the matter of volition, which can be nothing other than the object of a desire that is connected with the law, enters into the practical law as a condition of its possibility, there results heteronomy of choice, namely dependence upon the natural law of following some impulse or inclination, and the will does not give itself the law but only the precept for rationally following pathological law; but a maxim which, in this way, can never contain within it the form of giving universal law not only establishes no obligation but is itself opposed to the principle of a pure practical reason and so also to the moral disposition, even though the action arising from it may be in conformity with the law. [. . .] Remark II The direct opposite of the principle of morality is the principle of one’s own happiness made the determining ground of the will. [. . .] The principle of happiness can indeed furnish maxims, but never such as would be fit for laws of the will, even if universal happiness were made the object. For, because cognition of this rests on sheer data of experience, each judgement about it depending very much upon the opinion of each which is itself very changeable, it can indeed give general rules but never universal rules, that is, it can give rules that on the average are most often correct but not rules that must hold always and necessarily; hence no practical laws can be based on it. [. . .] 60

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This principle, therefore, does not prescribe the very same practical rules to all rational beings, even though the rules come under a common heading, namely that of happiness. The moral law, however, is thought as objectively necessary only because it is to hold for everyone having reason and will. The maxim of self-love (prudence) merely advises; the law of morality commands. But there is a great difference between that which we are advised to do and that to which we are obligated. [. . .] Book II Dialectic of pure practical reason Chapter I On a dialectic of pure practical reason in general Pure reason always has its dialectic, whether it is considered in its speculative or in its practical use; for it requires the absolute totality of conditions for a given conditioned, and this can be found only in things in themselves. Since, however, all concepts of things must be referred to intuitions which, for us human beings cannot be other than sensible and hence do not let objects be cognized as things in themselves but only as appearances, in whose series of the conditioned and conditions the unconditioned can never be found, an unavoidable illusion arises from the application of this rational idea of the totality of conditions (and so of the unconditioned) to appearances as if they were things in themselves (for, in the absence of a warning critique they are always held to be such), [. . .] But reason in its practical use is no better off. As pure practical reason it likewise seeks the unconditioned for the practically conditioned (which rests on inclinations and natural needs), not indeed as the determining ground of the will, but even when this is given (in the moral law), it seeks the unconditioned totality of the object of pure practical reason, under the name of the highest good. [. . .] IV. THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL AS A POSTULATE OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON The production of the highest good in the world is the necessary object of a will determinable by the moral law. But in such a will the complete conformity of dispositions with the moral law is the supreme condition of the highest good. This conformity must therefore be just as possible as its object is, since it is contained in the same command to promote the object. Complete conformity of the will with the moral law is, however, holiness, a perfection of which no rational being of the sensible world is capable at any moment of his existence. Since it is nevertheless required as practically necessary, it can only be found in an endless progress toward that complete conformity, and in accordance with principles of pure practical reason it is necessary to assume such a practical progress as the real object of our will. 61

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This endless progress is, however, possible only on the presupposition of the existence and personality of the same rational being continuing endlessly (which is called the immortality of the soul). Hence the highest good is practically possible only on the presupposition of the immortality of the soul, so that this, as inseparably connected with the moral law, is a postulate of pure practical reason (by which I understand a theoretical proposition, though one not demonstrable as such, insofar as it is attached inseparably to an a priori unconditionally valid practical law). [. . .] For a rational but finite being only endless progress from lower to higher stages of moral perfection is possible. The eternal being, to whom the temporal condition is nothing, sees in what is to us an endless series the whole of conformity with the moral law, and the holiness that his command inflexibly requires in order to be commensurable with his justice in the share he determines for each in the highest good is to be found whole in a single intellectual intuition of the existence of rational beings. [. . .] V. THE EXISTENCE OF GOD AS A POSTULATE OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON In the preceding analysis the moral law led to a practical task that is set by pure reason alone and without the aid of any sensible incentives, namely that of the necessary completeness of the first and principal part of the highest good, morality; and, since this can be fully accomplished only in an eternity, it led to the postulate of immortality. The same law must also lead to the possibility of the second clement of the highest good, namely happiness proportioned to that morality, and must do so as disinterestedly as before, solely from impartial reason; in other words, it must lead to the supposition of the existence of a cause adequate to this effect, that is, it must postulate the existence of God as belonging necessarily to the possibility of the highest good (which object of our will is necessarily connected with the moral lawgiving of pure reason). We shall present this connection in a convincing manner. Happiness is the state of a rational being in the world in the whole of whose existence everything goes according to his wish and will, and rests, therefore, on the harmony of nature with his whole end as well as with the essential determining ground of his will. Now, the moral law as a law of freedom commands through determining grounds that are to be quite independent of nature and of its harmony with our faculty of desire (as incentives); the acting rational being in the world is, however, not also the cause of the world and of nature itself. Consequently, there is not the least ground in the moral law for a necessary connection between the morality and the proportionate happiness of a being belonging to the world as part of it and hence dependent upon it, who for that reason cannot by his will be a cause of this nature and, as far as his happiness is concerned, cannot by his own powers make it harmonize thoroughly with his practical principles. Nevertheless, in the practical task of pure reason, that is, in the necessary pursuit of the highest good, such a connection is postulated as necessary: we ought to strive to promote the highest good (which must therefore be possible). Accordingly, the existence of a cause of all nature, distinct from nature, which contains the ground of this connection, namely of the exact correspondence of happiness with morality, is also postulated. However, this supreme cause is to contain the ground of the 62

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correspondence of nature not merely with a law of the will of rational beings but with the representation of this law, so far as they make it the supreme determining ground of the will, and consequently not merely with morals in their form but also with their morality as their determining ground, that is, with their moral disposition. Therefore, the highest good in the world is possible only insofar as a supreme cause of nature having a causality in keeping with the moral disposition is assumed. Now, a being capable of actions in accordance with the representation of laws is an intelligence (a rational being), and the causality of such a being in accordance with this representation of laws is his will. Therefore the supreme cause of nature, insofar as it must be presupposed for the highest good, is a being that is the cause of nature by understanding and will (hence its author), that is, God. Consequently, the postulate of the possibility of the highest derived good (the best world) is likewise the postulate of the reality of a highest original good, namely of the existence of God. Now, it was a duty for us to promote the highest good; hence there is in us not merely the warrant but also the necessity, as a need connected with duty, to presuppose the possibility of this highest good, which, since it is possible only under the condition of the existence of God, connects the presupposition of the existence of God inseparably with duty; that is, it is morally necessary to assume the existence of God. It is well to note here that this moral necessity is subjective, that is, a need, and not objective, that is, itself a duty; for, there can be no duty to assume the existence of anything (since this concerns only the theoretical use of reason). Moreover, it is not to be understood by this that it is necessary to assume the existence of God as a ground of all obligation in general (for this rests, as has been sufficiently shown, solely on the autonomy of reason itself). [. . .] The doctrine of Christianity, even if it is not regarded as a religious doctrine, gives on this point a concept of the highest good (of the kingdom of God) which alone satisfies the strictest demand of practical reason. The moral law is holy (inflexible) and demands holiness of morals, although all the moral perfection that a human being can attain is still only virtue, that is, a disposition conformed with law from respect for law, and thus consciousness of a continuing propensity to transgression or at least impurity, that is, an admixture of many spurious (not moral) motives to observe the law, hence a self-esteem combined with humility; and so, with respect to the holiness that the Christian law demands, nothing remains for a creature but endless progress, though for that very reason he is justified in hoping for his endless duration. The worth of a disposition completely conformed with the moral law is infinite, since all possible happiness in the judgment of a wise and all-powerful distributor of it has no restriction other than rational beings’ lack of conformity with their duty. But the moral law of itself still does not promise any happiness, since this is not necessarily connected with observance of the law according to our concepts of a natural order as such. The Christian doctrine of morals now supplements this lack (of the second indispensable component of the highest good) by representing the world in which rational beings devote themselves with their whole soul to the moral law as a kingdom of God, in which nature and morals come into a harmony, foreign to each of them of itself, through a holy author who makes the derived highest good possible. [. . .] In this way the moral law leads through the concept of the highest good, as the object and final end of pure practical reason, to religion, that is, to the recognition of all duties as 63

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divine commands, not as sanctions – that is, chosen and in themselves contingent ordinances of another’s will – but as essential laws of every free will in itself, which must nevertheless be regarded as commands of the supreme being because only from a will that is morally perfect (holy and beneficent) and at the same time all-powerful, and so through harmony with this will, can we hope to attain the highest good, which the moral law makes it our duty to take as the object of our endeavors. [. . .] VI. ON THE POSTULATES OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON IN GENERAL All of them proceed from the principle of morality, which is not a postulate but a law by which reason determines the will immediately; and this will, just because it is so determined as a pure will, requires these necessary conditions for observance of its precept. These postulates are not theoretical dogmas but presuppositions having a necessarily practical reference and thus, although they do not indeed extend speculative cognition, they give objective reality to the ideas of speculative reason in general (by means of their reference to what is practical) and justify its holding concepts even the possibility of which it could not otherwise presume to affirm.

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FROM CRITIQUE OF THE POWER OF JUDGMENT (1790) *

[Second Part: Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment. Second Division: Dialectic of the Teleological Power of Judgment] §76. Remark. This consideration, which would certainly deserve to be elaborated in detail in transcendental philosophy, can come in here only as a digression, for elucidation (not for the proof of what has here been expounded). Reason is a faculty of principles, and in its most extreme demand it reaches to the unconditioned, while understanding, in contrast, is always at its service only under a certain condition, which must be given. Without concepts of the understanding, however, which must be given objective reality, reason cannot judge at all objectively (synthetically), and by itself it contains, as theoretical reason, absolutely no constitutive principles, but only regulative ones. One soon learns that where the understanding cannot follow, reason becomes excessive, displaying itself in well-grounded ideas (as regulative principles) but not in objectively valid concepts; the understanding, however, which cannot keep up with it, but which would yet be necessary for validity for objects, restricts the validity of those ideas of reason solely to the subject, although still universally for all members of this species, i.e., understanding restricts the validity of those ideas to the condition which, given the nature of our (human) cognitive faculty or even the concept that we can form of the capacity of a finite rational being in general, we cannot and must not conceive otherwise, but without asserting that the basis for such a judgment lies in the object. We will adduce examples, which are certainly too important as well as too difficult for them to be immediately pressed upon the reader as proven propositions, but which will still provide material to think over and can serve to elucidate what is our proper concern here. It is absolutely necessary for the human understanding to distinguish between the possibility and the actuality of things. The reason for this lies in the subject and the nature of its cognitive faculties. For if two entirely heterogeneous elements were not required for the exercise of these faculties, understanding for concepts and sensible intuition for objects corresponding to them, then there would be no such distinction (between the possible and the actual). That is, if our understanding were intuitive, it would have no objects except what is actual. Concepts (which pertain merely to the possibility of an object) and sensible intuitions (which merely give us something, without thereby allowing us to cognize it as an object) would both disappear. Now, however, all of our distinction between the merely possible and the actual rests on the fact

From Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. by Paul Guyer, trans. by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge University Press, 2000, 271–79. *

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that the former signifies only the position of the representation of a thing with respect to our concept and, in general, our faculty for thinking, while the latter signifies the positing of the thing in itself (apart from this concept). Thus the distinction of possible from actual things is one that is merely subjectively valid for the human understanding, since we can always have something in our thoughts although it does not exist, or represent something as given even though we do not have any concept of it. The propositions, therefore, that things can be possible without being actual, and thus that there can be no inference at all from mere possibility to actuality, quite rightly hold for the human understanding without that proving that this distinction lies in the things themselves. For that the latter cannot be inferred from the former, hence that those propositions are certainly valid of objects insofar as our cognitive faculty, as sensibly conditioned, is concerned with objects of these senses, but are not valid of objects in general, is evident from the unremitting demand of reason to assume some sort of thing (the original ground) as existing absolutely necessarily, in which possibility and actuality can no longer be distinguished at all, and for which idea our understanding has absolutely no concept, i.e., can find no way in which to represent such a thing and its way of existing. For if understanding thinks it (it can think it as it will), then it is represented as merely possible. If understanding is conscious of it as given in intuition, then it is actual without understanding being able to conceive of its possibility. Hence the concept of an absolutely necessary being is an indispensable idea of reason but an unattainable problematic concept for the human understanding. It is still valid, however, for the use of our cognitive faculties in accordance with their special constitution, thus not for objects and thereby for every cognitive being: because I cannot presuppose that in every such being thinking and intuiting, hence the possibility and actuality of things, are two different conditions for the exercise of its cognitive faculties. For an understanding to which this distinction did not apply, all objects that I cognize would be (exist), and the possibility of some that did not exist, i.e., their contingency if they did exist, as well as the necessity that is to be distinguished from that, would not enter into the representation of such a being at all. What makes it so difficult for our understanding with its concepts to be the equal of reason is simply that for the former, as human understanding, that is excessive (i.e., impossible for the subjective conditions of its cognition) which reason nevertheless makes into a principle belonging to the object. – Now here this maxim is always valid, that even where the cognition of them outstrips the understanding, we should conceive all objects in accordance with the subjective conditions for the exercise of our faculties necessarily pertaining to our (i.e., human) nature; and, if the judgments made in this way cannot be constitutive principles determining how the object is constituted (as cannot fail to be the case with regard to transcendent concepts), there can still be regulative principles, immanent and secure in their use and appropriate for the human point of view. Just as in the theoretical consideration of nature reason must assume the idea of an unconditioned necessity of its primordial ground, so, in the case of the practical, it also presupposes its own unconditioned (in regard to nature) causality, i.e., freedom, because it is aware of its moral command. Now since here, however, the objective necessity of the action, as duty, is opposed to that which it, as an occurrence, would have if its ground lay in nature and not in freedom (i.e., in the causality of reason), and the action which is morally absolutely necessary can be regarded physically as entirely contingent (i.e., what necessarily should happen often does not), it is clear that it depends only on the subjective constitution of our practical faculty that the moral laws must be represented as commands (and the actions which 66

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are in accord with them as duties), and that reason expresses this necessity not through a be (happening) but through a should-be: which would not be the case if reason without sensibility (as the subjective condition of its application to objects of nature) were considered, as far as its causality is concerned, as a cause in an intelligible world, corresponding completely with the moral law, where there would be no distinction between what should be done and what is done, between a practical law concerning that which is possible through us and the theoretical law concerning that which is actual through us. Now, however, although an intelligible world, in which everything would be actual merely because it is (as something good) possible, and even freedom, as its formal condition, is a transcendent concept for us, which is not serviceable for any constitutive principle for determining an object and its objective reality, still, in accordance with the constitution of our (partly sensible) nature, it can serve as a universal regulative principle for ourselves and for every being standing in connection with the sensible world, so far as we can represent that in accordance with the constitution of our own reason and capacity, which does not determine the constitution of freedom, as a form of causality, objectively, but rather makes the rules of actions in accordance with that idea into commands for everyone and indeed does so with no less validity than if it did determine freedom objectively. Likewise, as far as the case before us is concerned, it may be conceded that we would find no distinction between a natural mechanism and a technique of nature, i.e., a connection to ends in it, if our understanding were not of the sort that must go from the universal to the particular, and the power of judgment can thus cognize no purposiveness in the particular, and hence make no determining judgments, without having a universal law under which it can subsume the particular. But now since the particular, as such, contains something contingent with regard to the universal, but reason nevertheless still requires unity, hence lawfulness, in the connection of particular laws of nature (which lawfulness of the contingent is called purposiveness), and the a priori derivation of the particular laws from the universal, as far as what is contingent in the former is concerned, is impossible through the determination of the concept of the object, thus the concept of the purposiveness of nature in its products is a concept that is necessary for the human power of judgment in regard to nature but does not pertain to the determination of the objects themselves, thus a subjective principle of reason for the power of judgment which, as regulative (not constitutive), is just as necessarily valid for our human power of judgment as if it were an objective principle. § 77. On the special character of the human understanding, by means of which the concept of a natural end is possible for us. In the remark, we have adduced special characteristics of our cognitive faculty (even the higher one) which we may easily be misled into carrying over to the things themselves as objective predicates; but they concern ideas for which no appropriate objects can be given in experience, and which could therefore serve only as regulative principles in the pursuit of experience. It is the same with the concept of a natural end, as far as the cause of the possibility of such a predicate is concerned, which can only He in the idea; but the consequence that answers to it (the product) is still given in nature, and the concept of a causality of the latter, as a being acting in accordance with ends, seems to make the idea of a natural end into a constitutive principle of nature; and in this it differs from all other ideas. 67

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This difference, however, consists in the fact that the idea at issue is not a principle of reason for the understanding, but for the power of judgment, and is thus merely the application of an understanding in general to possible objects of experience, where, indeed, the judgment cannot be determining, but merely reflecting, hence where the object is, to be sure, given in experience, but where it cannot even be determinately (let alone completely appropriately) judged in accordance with the idea, but can only be reflected upon. What is at issue is therefore a special character of our (human) understanding with regard to the power of judgment in its reflection upon things in nature. But if that is the case, then it must be based on the idea of a possible understanding other than the human one (as in the Critique of Pure Reason we had to have in mind another possible intuition if we were to hold our own to be a special kind, namely one that is valid of objects merely as appearances),10 so that one could say that certain products of nature, as far as their possibility is concerned, must, given the particular constitution of our understanding, be considered by us as intentional and generated as ends, yet without thereby demanding that there actually is a particular cause that has the representation of an end as its determining ground, and thus without denying that another (higher) understanding than the human one might be able to find the ground of the possibility of such products of nature even in the mechanism of nature, i.e., in a causal connection for which an understanding does not have to be exclusively assumed as a cause. What is at issue here is thus the relation of our understanding to the power of judgment, the fact, namely, that we have to seek a certain contingency in the constitution of our understanding in order to notice this as a special character of our understanding in distinction from other possible ones. This contingency is quite naturally found in the particular, which the power of judgment is to subsume under the universal of the concepts of the understanding; for through the universal of our (human) understanding the particular is not determined, and it is contingent in how many different ways distinct things that nevertheless coincide in a common characteristic can be presented to our perception. Our understanding is a faculty of concepts, i.e., a discursive understanding, for which it must of course be contingent what and how different might be the particular that can be given to it in nature and brought under its concepts. But since intuition also belongs to cognition, and a faculty of a complete spontaneity of intuition would be a cognitive faculty distinct and completely independent from sensibility, and thus an understanding in the most general sense of the term, one can thus also conceive of an intuitive understanding (negatively, namely merely as not discursive), which does not go from the universal to the particular and thus to the individual (through concepts), and for which that contingency of the agreement of nature in its products in accordance with particular laws for the understanding, which makes it so difficult for ours to bring the manifold of these to the unity of cognition, is not encountered – a job that our understanding can accomplish only through the correspondence of natural characteristics with our faculty of concepts, which is quite contingent, but which an intuitive understanding would not need. Our understanding thus has this peculiarity for the power of judgment, that in cognition by means of it the particular is not determined by the universal, and the latter therefore cannot be derived from the former alone; but nevertheless this particular in the manifold of nature should agree with the universal (through concepts and laws), which agreement tinder such circumstances must be quite contingent and without a determinate principle for the power of judgment. 68

From Critique of the Power of Judgment

Nevertheless, in order for us to be able at least to conceive of the possibility of such an agreement of the things of nature with the power of judgment (which we represent as contingent, hence as possible only through an end aimed at it), we must at the same time conceive of another understanding, in relation to which, and indeed prior to any end attributed to it, we can represent that agreement of natural laws with our power of judgment, which for our understanding is conceivable only through ends as the means of connection, as necessary. Our understanding, namely, has the property that in its cognition, e.g., of the cause of a product, it must go from the analytical universal (of concepts) to the particular (of the given empirical intuition), in which it determines nothing with regard to the manifoldness of the latter, but must expect this determination for the power of judgment from the subsumption of the empirical intuition (when the object is a product of nature) under the concept. Now, however, we can also conceive of an understanding which, since it is not discursive like ours but is intuitive, goes from the synthetically universal (of the intuition of a whole as such) to the particular, i.e., from the whole to the parts, in which, therefore, and in whose representation of the whole, there is no contingency in the combination of the parts, in order to make possible a determinate form of the whole, which is needed by our understanding, which must progress from the parts, as universally conceived grounds, to the different possible forms, as consequences, that can be subsumed under it. In accordance with the constitution of our understanding, by contrast, a real whole of nature is to be regarded only as the effect of the concurrent moving forces of the parts. Thus if we would not represent the possibility of the whole as depending upon the parts, as is appropriate for our discursive understanding, but would rather, after the model of the intuitive (archetypical) understanding, represent the possibility of the parts (as far as both their constitution and their combination is concerned) as depending upon the whole, then, given the very same special characteristic of our understanding, this cannot come about by the whole being the ground of the possibility of the connection of the parts (which would be a contradiction in the discursive kind of cognition), but only by the representation of a whole containing the ground of the possibility of its form and of the connection of parts that belongs to that. But now since the whole would in that case be an effect (product) the representation of which would be regarded as the cause of its possibility, but the product of a cause whose determining ground is merely the representation of its effect is called an end, it follows that it is merely a consequence of the particular constitution of our understanding that we represent products of nature as possible only in accordance with another kind of causality than that of the natural laws of matter, namely only in accordance with that of ends and final causes, and that this principle does not pertain to the possibility of such things themselves (even considered as phenomena) in accordance with this sort of generation, but pertains only to the judging of them that is possible for our understanding. From this we at the same time understand why in natural science we are far from being satisfied with an explanation of the products of nature by means of causality in accordance with ends, since here we are required to judge the generation of nature as is appropriate for our faculty for judging them, i.e., the power of reflecting judgment, and not according to the things themselves as is appropriate for the determining power of judgment. And further, it is not at all necessary here to prove that such an intellectus archetypus is possible, but only that in the contrast of it with our discursive, image-dependent understanding (intellectus ectypus) and the contingency of such a constitution we are led to that idea (of an intellectus archetypus), and that this does not contain any contradiction.

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Now if we consider a material whole, as far as its form is concerned, as a product of the parts and of their forces and their capacity to combine by themselves (including as parts other materials that they add to themselves), we represent a mechanical kind of generation. But from this there arises no concept of a whole as an end, whose internal possibility presupposes throughout the idea of a whole on which even the constitution and mode of action of the parts depends, which is just how we must represent an organized body. But from this, as has just been shown, it does not follow that the mechanical generation of such a body is impossible; for that would be to say the same as that it is impossible (i.e., self-contradictory) to represent such a unity in the connection of the manifold for every understanding without the idea of that connection being at the same time its generating cause, i.e., without intentional production. Nevertheless, this would in fact follow if we were justified in regarding material beings as things in themselves. For then the unity that constitutes the ground of the possibility of natural formations would be merely the unity of space, which is however no real ground of generatings but only their formal condition; although it has some similarity to the real ground that we seek in that in it no part can be determined except in relation to the whole (the representation of which is thus the basis of the possibility of the parts). But since it is still at least possible to consider the material world as a mere appearance, and to conceive of something as a thing in itself (which is not an appearance) as substratum, and to correlate with this a corresponding intellectual intuition (even if it is not ours), there would then be a supersensible real ground for nature, although it is unknowable for us, to which we ourselves belong, and in which that which is necessary in it as object of the senses can be considered in accordance with mechanical laws, while the agreement and unity of the particular laws and corresponding forms, which in regard to the mechanical laws we must judge as contingent, can at the same time be considered in it, as object of reason (indeed the whole of nature as a system) in accordance with teleological laws, and the material world would thus be judged in accordance with two kinds of principles, without the mechanical mode of explanation being excluded by the teleological mode, as if they contradicted each other. From this we may also understand what we could otherwise easily suspect but only with difficulty assert as certain and prove, namely, that the principle of a mechanical derivation of purposive products of nature could of course subsist alongside the teleological principle, but could by no means make the latter dispensable; i.e., one could investigate all the thus far known and yet to be discovered laws of mechanical generation in a thing that we must judge as an end of nature, and even hope to make good progress in this, without the appeal to a quite distinct generating ground for the possibility of such a product, namely that of causality through ends, ever being canceled out; and absolutely no human reason (or even any finite reason that is similar to ours in quality, no matter how much it exceeds it in degree) can ever hope to understand the generation of even a little blade of grass from merely mechanical causes. For if the teleological connection of causes and effects is entirely indispensable for the possibility of such an object for the power of judgment, even merely for studying it with the guidance of experience; if for outer objects, as appearances, a sufficient ground related to causes cannot even be found, but this, which also lies in nature, must still be sought only in its supersensible substratum, from all possible insight into which we are cut off: then it is absolutely impossible for us to draw from nature itself any explanatory grounds for purposive connections, and in accordance with the constitution of the human cognitive faculty it is necessary to seek the highest ground of such connections in an original understanding as cause of the world.

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CHAPTER 2 FRIEDRICH HEINRICH JACOBI (1743–1819)

INTRODUCTION Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi rightly belongs to a constellation of great intellectuals whose ideas, writings, and arguments significantly influenced the development of German idealism. The reception of Kant’s Critical philosophy was profoundly shaped by Jacobi’s debate with Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), a leading figure of the Enlightenment period, regarding the role of faith in human knowledge. Jacobi’s open letter, Jacobi to Fichte (1799) challenged not only Fichte’s own radical idealism but also the attempt to systematize transcendental idealism by rational construction from a single self-evident principle. The ensuing heated polemics led thinkers such as Schelling and Hegel to reevaluate their own views, ultimately resulting in a transition from transcendental to absolute idealism. Through his philosophical writings, including two novels—Edward Allwill’s Collection of Letters (1792) and Woldemar (1796)— and massive correspondence with just about everyone of importance in his day, Jacobi stood in the center of the intellectual and cultural life of the era. Not only did he contribute to debates on many topics, but his criticism of Lessing’s alleged Spinozism provoked the pantheism controversy (Pantheismusstreit), which erupted in Germany when Jacobi published his Letters Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785). According to George di Giovanni, an important Jacobi scholar, “if he [Jacobi] did leave a mark on his world, it was precisely in his role as a commentator on the contemporary scene—most of all, as an acute critic of the ideas by which the new socio-political tendencies were seeking legitimization” (Jacobi 1994, 5). Jacobi’s own career spans the Enlightenment, the proto-Romantic Sturm and Drang movement (of Goethe and Schiller), and the rise of Early German Romanticism, yet Jacobi as a thinker cannot be associated with any of these intellectual trends. He was a vocal supporter of the authority of faith in human cognition, but never in opposition to the central ideals of the Enlightenment. He challenged the rationalist assumptions of his contemporaries, but was not an irrationalist. Similarly, it would be a mistake to call him a realist, despite his criticism of Hume’s skepticism and Kantian idealism. The precise nature of Jacobi’s own position remains a matter of scholarly discussion, not only because his ideas are highly distinctive, departing widely from what is considered to be standard, but also—and indeed, more so—due to some vagaries in Jacobi’s philosophical work. In order to be justly understood, Jacobi must be viewed in the context of his epoch which was marked by a crucial shift in German intellectual discourse. His own life provides a number of confirmations of such a dramatic shift (see Jaeschke and Sandkaulen 2004; di Giovanni 1994; Brüggen 1971; Rilla 1973). Jacobi was born in Düsseldorf, on January 25, 1743, as the second son of wealthy merchant parents. Unlike his elder brother, Johann Georg, who studied theology and jurisprudence and would eventually make a name for himself as a poet, Jacobi was educated for a commercial career, which included a brief apprenticeship at a merchant house in Frankfurt-am-Main

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(1759). Thereafter, he was sent to Geneva for three years of general education. His tutor there was a famous mathematician and physicist, Georges-Louis Le Sage (1724–1803). The latter was genuinely interested in philosophy and bonded by friendship with the Swiss philosopher and scientist Charles Bonnet (1720–1793), a central figure of the European Enlightenment. Encouraged by Le Sage, Jacobi became acquainted with both the traditional philosophical schools and the thought of the French philosophes (the intellectuals of the 18thcentury Enlightenment), especially Rousseau, Voltaire, and Bonnet. Influenced by Rousseau’s sentimentalism and his emphasis on human nature, Jacobi developed a distrust for any philosophical attempt to resolve important issues of life based on abstract concepts. He felt uneasy toward any system of thought not rooted in practical life. Eventually, his unease would grow into a criticism of the abstract nature of idealistic speculations and the irreconcilable conflict between this abstract nature and practical life, to which he clearly refers in his open letter Jacobi to Fichte written three decades later. At one time, Jacobi wanted to pursue medical studies. However, his father refused to fund such studies, so Jacobi returned to Düsseldorf, joining his father in operating the family business. Once home, he did not abandon his humanistic interests. He studied Spinoza and came across Kant’s early essays, which, he reports, truly impressed him. In 1764, he married Elisabeth (Betty) von Clermont, a very charming and talented woman, who was admired by many, including Goethe (GSW 16: 660–61). Jacobi enjoyed good relations with Betty’s family, especially with her brother, to whom he eventually entrusted all his business in order to devote his attention to social and political activities. From 1773 to 1779, Jacobi served as a member of the treasury of the duchies of Jülich and Berg along the Rhine. In 1779, he also filled the post of minister and privy councilor for the Bavarian department of customs and commerce. In both posts, he advocated open trade policies and liberalization of local customs. Yet his plans and proposed reforms never saw realization. In addition, in his Bavarian post he soon ran into stiff opposition from his superiors and from enemies at court. Unwilling to engage in a power struggle, he resigned, thus ending his political career and direct participation in practical politics. The two essays from this period—known as “Two Political Rhapsodies” (JWGA 4.1: 209–58)—focus on important issues of political economy and demonstrate Jacobi’s liberal ideas, particularly concerning free trade. During his time in practical politics, Jacobi kept up his interest in literary and philosophical matters by participating in extensive correspondence with a wide circle of intellectuals, both from Germany and abroad. He inherited his father’s country estate in Pempelfort near Düsseldorf. There, with his wife Betty, he established a literary and philosophical salon much frequented by intellectuals and dignitaries from around Europe. Regular visitors included perhaps the most brilliant men and women of letters, such as Goethe (with whom Jacobi had rather complicated relations), poets Wieland and Heine, the novelist Sophie von La Roche, as well as some of the most significant philosophical figures of the epoch—Lavater, Diderot, Hemsterhuis, Hamann, Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and many others. Together with Christoph Martin Wieland, Jacobi organized a new literary journal, Der teutsche Merkur, in which some of his earliest writings, mainly on practical and economic topics, first appeared. Edited by Wieland, the journal, first published in 1773, served as a platform for advancing the ideas of the Enlightenment. Jacobi actively contributed to the journal for a number of years and heavily influenced the dissemination of the Enlightenment ideals to his compatriots and other European intellectuals. His two novels—Allwill (1776) and Woldemar (1779)—which 72

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received their final form only in the 1790s, initially appeared as installments in this journal as well. The novels, whose literary value was questioned from the outset, positioned Jacobi as a philosopher motivated mainly by his evolving interest in metaphysics, not poetic or literary self-expression. Despite Jacobi’s sentimentalism, his focus in the novels clearly shifted to philosophical questions rather than passionate experience. Two events of these years had important and long-lasting consequences for Jacobi’s philosophical career. The first was his personal acquaintance of the then still young Goethe, who paid an unannounced visit to the Jacobi’s estate in July of 1774. This initiated a relationship that would later be marked by periods of close friendship, bitter conflicts, and then culminated in irreparable, sorrowful alienation. Perhaps the most devastating episode in their relations occurred in 1779, when Goethe “crucified” on a tree, in a public park and to the amusement of a large company of friends, a copy of the most recent version of Jacobi’s novel, Woldemar. When the reports of this reached Jacobi, he was furious and broke off with Goethe almost immediately. Although three years later their relation resumed, it was not so intensely and hearty as before. The second event was Jacobi’s visit, on July 5, 1780, to a key figure of the German Enlightenment, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). During this visit, the two thinkers discussed Spinoza, whose philosophy was inspirational to Lessing and of great interest to Jacobi. The conversation with Lessing was not only instrumental in shaping Jacobi’s own philosophical position, but also determined the directions that his philosophy took later. According to Jacobi’s report, in that conversation Lessing admitted to being a Spinozist. This confession then occasioned an exchange of letters between Jacobi and another well-known representative of the German Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), who was at that time also a close friend of Lessing. A few years later, Jacobi would publish these letters, along with his critical commentary, under the title Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn (Jacobi 1994, 173–252; see the selected sections included in this anthology). In 1784, Jacobi lost his wife, whose premature passing came soon after the death of their eleven-year-old son. These tragedies grieved him deeply. He never remarried and spent some years seeking solace in yet more extensive correspondence and personal interaction with his literary companions. The Pempelfort salon remained active until 1794, when Düsseldorf and its environs were occupied by French troops, forcing Jacobi to move north, first to Wandsberg and later to Eutin, where he eventually settled. After years of traveling and financial difficulties resulting from the bankruptcy of the Clermont family, in 1805, he was elected the first president of newly founded (Bavarian) Academy of Sciences in Munich, a post he occupied for eight years. After his retirement, he began working on a new edition of his own writings. This edition, which he supervised until his death in 1819, was completed by his disciples J. F. Köppen and C. J. F. Roth (see JW). * * * Throughout his life Jacobi developed his own philosophical position in only a few philosophical writings—particularly Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn (1785) and David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, a Dialogue (1787). He provoked or exacerbated three major controversies that had significant implications for 73

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the development of German philosophy: the controversies over Lessing’s alleged Spinozism, over Fichte’s alleged atheism, and over Schelling’s alleged pantheism. In fact, all three controversies had their roots in a single, complex theme central to the transitional epoch from the Enlightenment to German idealism: the possibility that an edifice of knowledge be derived from a single self-evident first principle of philosophy (di Giovanni 1989 and 1994; Jaeschke and Sandkaulen 2004; Israel 2006). One central tenet of the Enlightenment is the primacy of reason, declared to be the uncontested foundation for knowledge. Jacobi challenged these rationalist assumptions, which were taken for granted by most of his contemporaries. This he did by revoking ideas of the most radical philosopher of the early modern period, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Spinoza not only expressed enormous optimism about our cognitive powers, manifest in our ability to gain knowledge by means of reason and the sciences, but also identified God with Nature, thus appearing to defend a reductive naturalism and prompting many to regard Spinozism as irreligious and untenable. Jacobi’s position toward Spinoza was very complicated. On the one hand, he praised Spinoza for being the most consistent of all philosophers. On the other, he believed that Spinoza exhibited everything wrong with philosophical reason. He claimed that Spinoza’s doctrine was purely materialistic and would inevitably end in utter atheism. By charging Lessing, the very symbol of the Berlin Enlightenment, with Spinozism, Jacobi attempted to demonstrate the fatal consequences of rationalist epistemology for religion, morality, and philosophical inquiry generally. He believed that consistent rationalism inevitably leads to atheism and fatalism. Another negative consequence that he associated with rationalism was nihilism, a concept which Jacobi introduced into philosophical discourse and which became a key topic for the nineteenth century. His alternative to such rationalism appeared to be a model of reason rooted in faith. According to Jacobi, human knowledge must rest upon a foundation of beliefs justified only by faith. What one can grasp intellectually is not nearly so certain and indubitable as what one acquires through faith, because the claims of faith accepted on the basis of feeling require no mediation, whether by empirical demonstration or by rational justification. Jacobi’s attack on both Kant and the new kind of idealism born of Kant’s critique was also prompted by his interpretation of Spinoza. Despite his genuine admiration for Kant, Jacobi viewed Kant’s idealism as just a variation of Spinozism, which tended to the same fatalism and amoralism as orthodox Spinozism. He voiced this criticism in his 1801 essay, “On the Attempt to Reduce Reason to the Understanding, and in General to Give a New Purpose to Philosophy,” first published in a volume edited by Karl L. Reinhold. Jacobi likewise came to believe that Fichte and Schelling had merely developed other forms of rationalism. He interpreted Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Science) as a type of inverted Spinozism, an idealized science that merely replaced Spinoza’s abstract concept of the one infinite substance with an equally abstract idea of the “I” (Ich), which was just as irreconcilable with individual freedom and our finite selves. Breaking with Fichte, Schelling argued that the infinite substance had to be understood not as an “I”, but rather as an absolute indeterminacy dynamically generating finite individuals. Jacobi saw in this reasoning nothing more than clear evidence of rationalism, ultimately leading not to a self-grounded ground, but rather to what Schelling himself called “non-ground”: a chaos tantamount to nothing (Jacobi 1994, 572–79). As an alternative, Jacobi proposed a salto mortale or a blind leap of faith (Jacobi 1994, 189). Many contemporaries interpreted Jacobi’s claim as purely irrationalistic and theistic, indeed 74

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fideistic. In a new introduction to his dialogue, David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism (1815), Jacobi sincerely attempted to describe more directly and concisely what he stood for. However, even after that attempt, his philosophical position was not easy to understand. Furthermore, his emphatic use of religious language and constant allusions to the Bible and Christian faith were counterproductive. Many of his contemporaneous critics regarded his spirited defense of faith as expressing nothing other than uncompromising disbelief in the power of reason and its instrumental role in obtaining knowledge and establishing first principles of philosophy. In their eyes, this was an open offense against reason which justified the charge that Jacobi was an irrationalist. Only recently have scholars begun to object to this interpretation, arguing that, in fact, Jacobi’s project was intended “to rescue reason from rationalism” (Frank 2000, 96). They claim that he actually rehabilitated reason by “acknowledging it as the source . . . of what he had called the certitude of faith—not the reason of the philosophers . . . but an inward-looking reason that had immediate access to the divine in us” (di Giovanni 1994, 43). Indeed, the faith that Jacobi invoked was not a Christian faith which opposed reason. He made clear that the faith he advocated for constitutes a natural dimension of human existence common to all men and essential to all human enterprise. This was a faith into which “we are all born [just] as we are all born in society” (Jacobi 1994, 230), a faith thoroughly secular in nature, which is akin to a natural instinct, or an “inner light” present in us all. Jacobi struggled to state his own position clearly, since often he was entangled in several disputes over rationalism and rationalist conceptions of reason. This makes it very challenging yet also rewarding to read his texts and attempt an accurate reconstruction and appreciation of his influential thoughts.

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Chronology of Friedrich Jacobi’s Life and Works 1743 Born on January 25 in Düsseldorf to a wealthy merchant family. 1759

Apprenticeship at a merchant house in Frankfurt-am-Main.

1760–63

Sent to Geneva to receive general education under a famous mathematician and physicist Georges-Louis Le Sage.

1763

Returned to Düsseldorf and joined his father in running the family business.

1764

Married Elisabeth (Betty) von Clermont.

1764–94

Hosted a very popular literary and philosophical salon in Pempelfort frequented by intellectuals and dignitaries from around Europe.

1773–79

Served as a member of the treasury of the duchies of Jülich and Berg.

1773

Publication of the first issue of a literary journal, Der teutsche Merkur that Jacobi organized with Wieland who served as the journal editor until 1790.

1774

July: First acquaintance with Goethe who pays an unannounced visit to the Jacobi’s estate.

1776

Fragments of his novel Edward Allwill’s Collection of Letters appear in Der teutsche Merkur.

1779

His novel Woldemar appears in fragments in Der teutsche Merkur.



Appointed as minister and privy councilor for the Bavarian department of customs and commerce.



Writes essays (so-called “Political Rhapsodies”) discussing some questions of political economy.

1780

July 5: A guest at Lessing’s house in the town of Wolfenbüttel; during this visit, Lessing allegedly declared himself to be a Spinozist.

1785

Publication of Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn, which provokes the Pantheism controversy (an expanded version of the work published four years later).

1787 Publishes David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, a Dialogue. 1792 Publishes Edward Allwill’s Collection of Letters in its final form. 1794

French troops occupy Düsseldorf forcing Jacobi to move first to Wandsberg and later to Eutin, where he eventually settles.

1796

Publishes the final version of Woldemar.

1799

Publishes an open letter Jacobi to Fichte accusing the latter of Spinozism and rationalism.

1801

Writes an essay “On the Attempt to Reduce Reason to the Understanding, and in General to Give a New Purpose to Philosophy,” in which he attacks Kant’s

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transcendental idealism. (The essay was completed by Jacobi’s disciple Köppen; and published in 1802.)

Angrily reacts to Hegel’s essay “Faith and Knowledge” [Glauben and Wissen], where the latter gives a critical assessment of Jacobi’s view of knowledge.

1805

Elected the first president of newly founded (Bavarian) Academy of Sciences in Munich.

1813

Retires from his presidency.



Begins preparing an edition of his collected works.

1815

Writes a new introduction to David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, attempting to explain his philosophical position.

1819

Dies on March 10 in Munich at the age of seventy-six.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Jacobi’s Writings A.1.  German Editions

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi‘s Werke. 1812–1825. Edited by J. F. Köppen and C. J. F. Roth, vols. I–VI. Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer. (Reprinted, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968.) [Cited as JW following by the volume and page numbers.] Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: Briefwechsel. Gesamtausgabe. 1981ff. Edited by M. Brüggen, S. Sudhof, R. Lauth, W. Jaeschke, et al., (currently) 15 vols. Hamburg: Meiner and Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: Werke. Gesamtausgabe. 1998ff. Edited by K. Hammacher und W. Jaeschke, (currently) 8 vols. Hamburg: Meiner and Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. [Cited as JWGA following by the volume and page numbers.] A.2.  In English (selected editions)

Jacobi F. H. 1987. “Open Letter to Fichte, 1799,” translated by D. I. Behler, in Philosophy of German Idealism, edited by E. Behler. New York: Continuum, 119–41. Jacobi F. H. 1994. The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, translated by and edited by G. di Giovanni. Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. (Paperback edition with new Preface, 2009.) Jacobi F. H. 2000. “On Transcendental Idealism,” translated by B. Sassen, in Kant’s Early Critics, The Empiricist Critique of Theoretical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 169–75. B.  Selected Commentaries

Beiser, F. C. 1987. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 44–91. Brüggen, M. 1971. “Jacobi, Schelling und Hegel,” in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Philosoph und Literat der Goethezeit. Beiträge einer Tagung in Düsseldorf (16.-19. 10. 1969) aus Anlaß seines 150. Todestages und Berichte, edited by K. Hammacher. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 209–32. Ford, L. S. 1965. “The Controversy Between Schelling and Jacobi,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 3: 75–89. Franks, P. 2000. “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon,” in Cambridge Companion to Idealism, edited by K. Ameriks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 95–116. di Giovanni, G. 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: 75–100. di Giovanni, G. 1994. “The Unfinished Philosophy of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi,” in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill. Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1–167.

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di Giovanni, G. 1995. “Hegel, Jacobi, and Crypto-Catholicism, or, Hegel in Dialogue with the Enlightenment,” in Hegel on the Modern World, edited by A. Collins. Albany: State University of New York Press, 53–72. di Giovanni, G. 2003. “1799: The Year of Reinhold’s Conversion to Jacobi,” in Die Philosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds, edited by M. Bondeli and W. Schrader, FichteStudien, Supplementa. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2003, 259–82. Goethe J. W. 1985ff. Sämtliche Werke, in 19 vols. München: Hanser. [Cited as GSW following by the volume and page numbers.] Israel, J. 2006. “Enlightenment! Which Enlightenment?” Journal of the History of Ideas, 67 (3): 523–45. Jacob, M. 1981. The Radical Enlightenment. London: Allen & Unwin. Jaeschke W., and B. Sandkaulen (eds.). 2004. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: ein Wendepunkt der geistigen Bildung der Zeit. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Rilla P. 1973. Lessing und sein Zeitalter. München: Beck. Snow, D. E. 1987. “F.H. Jacobi and the Development of German Idealism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 25 (3): 397–415.

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FROM CONCERNING THE DOCTRINE OF SPINOZA IN LETTERS TO HERRN MOSES MENDELSSOHN (1785) *

To Herrn Moses Mendelssohn concerning His Memoranda Sent to Me [. . .] So the longer and the more deeply I ponder about it, the more I realize that if we are to get anywhere, or at least to make contact instead of moving further apart, we must above all else be clear about the principal issue, the doctrine of Spinoza itself. That is what I thought after my first reading of your comments, and for this reason I regarded a copy of my letter to Hemsterhuis as the best reply for the time being. That is what I still think, so I shall now again try an exposition of Spinoza’s doctrine. i. At the ground of every becoming there must lie a being that has not itself become; at the ground of every coming-to-be, something that has not come-to-be; at the ground of anything alterable, an unalterable and eternal thing. ii. Becoming can as little have come-to-be or begun as Being; or, if that which subsists in itself (the eternally unalterable, that which persists in the impermanent) had ever been by itself, without the impermanent, it would never have produced a becoming, either within itself or outside, for these would both presuppose a coming-to-be from nothingness. iii. From all eternity, therefore, the impermanent has been with the permanent, the temporal with the eternal, the finite with the infinite, and whosoever assumes a beginning of the finite, also assumes a coming-to-be from nothingness.1 iv. If the finite was with the eternal from all eternity, it cannot be outside it, for if it were outside it, it would either be another being that subsists on its own, or be produced by the subsisting thing from nothing. v. If it were produced by the subsisting thing from nothing, so too would the force or determination, in virtue of which it was produced by the infinite thing from nothingness, have come from nothingness; for in the infinite, eternal, permanent thing, everything is infinitely, permanently, and eternally actual. An action first initiated by the infinite being could not have begun otherwise than from all eternity, and its determination could not have derived from anywhere except from nothingness.2 [vi. Hence the finite is in the infinite, so that the sum of all finite things, equally containing within itself the whole of eternity at every moment, past and future,] is one and the same as the infinite thing itself. […]

From Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni, Montreal & Kingston, London, Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009, 173–252. *

From Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza

x. The first—not in things extended alone, not in things of thought alone, but what is first in these as well as in those, and likewise in all things—the primal being, the actuality that is unalterably present everywhere and cannot itself be a property, but in which, on the contrary, everything else is only a property it possesses—this unique and infinite being of all beings Spinoza calls “God,” or substance. xi. This God therefore does not belong to any species of things; it is not a separate, individual, different, thing.3 Nor can any of the determinations that distinguish individual things pertain to it—not a particular thought or consciousness of its own, any more than a particular extension, figure, or colour of its own, or anything we may care to mention which is not just primal material, pure matter, universal substance. […] xiv. According to Spinoza, an infinite extension and an infinite thought are properties of God. The two infinities together make up just one indivisible essence,4 so that it makes no difference under which of the two we consider God; for the order and connection of concepts is one and the same as the order and connection of things, and everything that results from the infinite nature of God formaliter, must also result from it objective, and vice versa.5 xv. Individual, alterable, corporeal, things are modi of movement and rest in the infinite extension.6 xvi. Movement and rest are also immediate modi of infinite] extension,7 and are just as infinite, unalterable, and eternal as extension is.8 These two modi together constitute the essential form of all possible corporeal configurations and forces; they are the a priori of these. xvii. Connected with these two immediate modi of infinite extension are two immediate modi of the infinite and absolute thought: will and understanding.9 These modes of thought contain objectively what the modes of extension contain formally; and they are, in each case, prior to all individual things, in the order of extended as well as thinking nature. xviii. Infinite, absolute, thought is prior to infinite will and understanding, and only this thought pertains to natura naturans, just as the infinite will and understanding pertain to natura naturata.10 xix. Natura naturans, i.e. God considered as free cause, or the infinite substance, apart from its affects and considered in itself, that is, considered in its truth, does not therefore have either will or understanding, whether infinite or finite.11 […] xxiv. The individual thing can no more be the cause of its concept than the concept can be the cause of the individual thing; or thought can no more derive from extension, than extension from thought. The two of them, extension and thought, are totally different beings, yet are only in one thing; that is, they are one and the same thing, unum & idem, simply seen under different properties. xxv. Absolute thought is the pure, immediate, absolute consciousness in universal being, being kat’exokhen, or substance.12 […] xxxv. Every individual thing presupposes other individual things, ad infinitum, and none of them can originate from the infinite directly. (Eth., Part 1, prop. xxviii). But since the order and the combination of the concepts is the same as the order and the combination of things, so too the concept of an individual thing cannot originate from God directly,13 but must attain 81

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existence in the same way as any individual corporeal thing, and cannot exist in any way except together with a determinate corporeal thing. xxxvi. Individual things originate from the infinite mediately; that is, they are produced by God in virtue of the immediate affections, or modes, of his being. These, however, are just as eternal and infinite as God: He is their cause in the same way as He is the cause of himself. Individual things therefore originate (immediately) from God only eternally and infinitely, not in a transitive, finite, and transitory way; that is only how they originate from one another, by mutual generation and destruction, without thereby any the less persisting in their eternal being. xxxvii. The same applies to the concepts of individual things; that is to say, they are] not produced by God, nor do they exist in the infinite understanding in any way other than as corporeal configurations are present in the infinite extension all at once, and always equally actual, through the intermediary of infinite motion and rest.14 xxxviii. In so far as God is infinite, therefore, there cannot be in him the concept of any actually present, individual, and thoroughly determinate thing; there is such a concept in him, however, (and he produces it) in that an individual thing comes-to-be in him, and its concept with it; that is to say, this concept exists at the same time as the individual thing only once, and outside this one time it is not in God, either together with the individual thing, or before it, or after.15 xxxix. All individual things mutually presuppose one another, and refer to one another, so that none of them can either be or be thought of without the rest, or the rest without it; that is to say, together they constitute an indestructible whole; or more correctly, and properly speaking: they exist together in one absolutely indivisible and infinite thing, and in no other way.16 xl. The absolutely indivisible essence, in which the bodies exist together, is the infinite and absolute extension. xli. The absolutely indivisible essence, in which all concepts exist together, is the infinite and absolute thought. xlii. Both of these belong to the essence of God, and are comprehended in it. Hence God can no more be called an extended corporeal thing in a distinctive sense, than He can be called a thinking one. Rather He is the same substance, extended and thinking at the same time. Or in other words again, none of God’s attributes has some particular differentiated reale as its foundation, so that they could be considered things existing outside one another, each with its own being. Rather, they all are only reifications, or substantial, essential, expressions of one and the same real thing—namely that transcendental being which can only be simply and uniquely one, and in which all things must necessarily compenetrate and become absolutely One. xliii. The infinite concept of God, therefore, of his essence as well as of all that necessarily follows from his essence, is only one single, indivisible, concept.17 xliv. This concept, since it is one and indivisible, must be found in the whole just as much as it is in each part; or, the concept of each and every body, or of an individual thing, whatever it may be, must contain the infinite essence of God within itself, completely and perfectly.18 […] My dear Mendelssohn, we are all born in the faith, and we must remain in the faith, just as we are all born in society, and must remain in society: Totum parte prius esse necesse est.— How can we strive for certainty unless we are already acquainted with certainty in advance, and how can we be acquainted with it except through something that we already discern with 82

From Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza

certainty? This leads to the concept of an immediate certainty, which not only needs no proof, but excludes all proofs absolutely, and is simply and solely the representation itself agreeing with the thing being represented. Conviction by proofs is certainty at second hand. Proofs are only indications of similarity to a thing of which we are certain. The conviction that they generate originates in comparison, and can never be quite secure and perfect. But if every assent to truth not derived from rational grounds is faith, then conviction based on rational grounds must itself derive from faith, and must receive its force from faith alone. Through faith we know that we have a body, and that there are other bodies and other thinking beings outside us. A veritable and wondrous revelation! For in fact we only sense our body, as constituted in this way or that; but in thus feeling it, we become aware not only of its alterations, but of something else as well, totally different from it, which is neither mere sensation nor thought; we become aware of other actual things, and, of that with the very same certainty with which we become aware of ourselves, for without the Thou, the I is impossible. We obtain all representations, therefore, simply through modifications that we acquire; there is no other way to real cognition, for whenever reason gives birth to objects, they are all just chimeras. Thus we have a revelation of nature that not only commands, but impels, each and every man to believe, and to accept eternal truths through faith. The religion of the Christians teaches another faith—but does not command it. It is a faith that has as its object, not eternal truths, but the finite, accidental nature of man. The religion of the Christians instructs man how to take on qualities through which he can make progress in his existence and propel himself to a higher life—and with this life to a higher consciousness, in this consciousness to a higher cognition. Whoever accepts this promise and faithfully walks the way to its fulfillment, he has the faith that brings blessedness. Therefore the sublime teacher of this faith, in whom all its promises were already fulfilled, could with truth say: I am the way, the truth and the life: whoever accepts the will which is in me, he will experience that my faith is true, that it is from God. This therefore is the spirit of my religion: Man becomes aware of God through a godly life, and there is a peace of God which is higher than all reason; in this peace there is the enjoyment and the intuition of an inconceivable love. Love is life; it is life itself; and only the type of love differentiates between the types of living natures. He, the Living One, can only manifest Himself in one who is alive; and only through quickened love can He give Himself in knowledge to one who is alive. This is how the voice of one preaching in the wilderness cries out, too: “In order to do away with the infinite disproportion between man and God, man must partake of a divine nature, and the Divinity take on flesh and blood.” Reason that has fallen into poverty and has become speculative, or in other words, degenerate reason, can neither commend nor tolerate this practical path. It has neither hand nor foot for digging, yet it is too proud to beg. Hence it must drag itself here and there, looking for a truth that left when the contemplative understanding left, for religion and its goods—just as morality must do, looking for virtuous inclinations that have disappeared; and laws must also, looking for the fallen public spirit and the better customs; pedagogy. . . . Let me interrupt here, that I be not swept off my feet by the flood coming my way. The spirit of truth be with you and with me. Düsseldorf, April 21, 1785. […] 83

The German Idealism Reader

[Later] I set about reviewing my papers, and extracted the following brief propositions from them, in order to present a final summary statement of my positions in the clearest terms. I. Spinozism is atheism.19 II. The philosophy of the cabbala, or so much of it as is available to research, and in accordance with its best commentators, von Helmont the younger and Wachter, is, as philosophy, nothing but undeveloped or newly confused Spinozism. […] VI. Faith is the element of all human cognition and activity. […]

Notes 1. “Anyone wishing to determine all the motions of matter up to the present by reducing them and their duration to a certain number and time, would be doing the same as trying to deprive corporeal substance, which we cannot conceive except as existent, of its modifications (movement and rest, which are the equally eternal and essential modi of extension, and the a priori of all individual corporeal configurations), and to bring about that it should not have the nature that it has.” Ep. xxix; Op. Posth., p. 469. 2. Ethics, i, p. 28. Op. Posth., pp. 25 &26. 3. “[. . .] All that needed be noted here is that God can be called one in so far as we separate him from other beings. But in so far as we conceive that there cannot be more than one of the same nature, he is called unique. Indeed, if we wished to examine the matter more accurately, we could perhaps show that God is only very improperly called one and unique. . . .” (Ep. l, Op. Posth., p. 557ff.) 4. Eth., Part i, p. 10. 5. Eth., Part ii, p. 7: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”‡ Op. Posth., p. 46. 6. “Bodies are distinguished from one another by reason of motion and rest, quickness and slowness, not by reason of substance.” Eth., Part ii. Lemma i.19 7. Ep. lxvi, Op. Posth., p. 593. 8. Eth., Part i, Props 21, 22, 23. Rest and movement are opposed to one another, and neither of these determinations can have been produced by the other. God must therefore be the immediate cause of them, just as he is the immediate cause of extension and of himself. Ep. lxx., Op. Posth., p. 596. Ep., lxxiii, Op. Posth., p. 598. 9. Eth., Part i, Coroll. 2, p. 30. “Hence it follows, secondly, that will and intellect stand in the same relation to the nature of God as do motion and rest . . . .” 10. Eth., Part i, p. 29, Schol.: “By natura naturans we should understand that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express the eternal and infinite essence, that is, God, inasmuch as he is considered as free cause. . . . By natura naturata I understand all that which follows from the necessity of God’s nature, that is, all the modes of God’s attributes, 84

From Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza inasmuch as they are considered as things which are in God, and without which God can neither be nor be conceived.” Op. Posth., p. 27. 11. Eth., Part i, p. 31: “Intellect in act, whether finite or infinite, as also will, desire, love etc., should be referred to natura naturata and not to natura naturans.”* Op. Posth., pp. 27–28. 12. The expression, le sentiment de l’être, which the French language put at my disposal in the Letter to Hemsterhuis, was purer and better; for the word “consciousness” appears to imply something of “representation” and “reflection,” and this has no place here. The following passage from Kant might clarify the matter a bit more. “There can be in us no modes of knowledge, no connection or unity of one mode of knowledge with another, without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions, and by relation to which representations of objects is alone possible. This pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception. That it deserves this name is clear from the fact that even the purest objective unity, namely, that of the a priori concepts (space and time), is only possible through relation of the intuitions to such unity of consciousness. The numerical unity of this apperception is thus the a priori ground of all concepts, just as the manifold of space and time is the a priori ground of the intuitions of sensibility.” Critique of Pure R[eason], [A] 107. 13. Once more I must insist, since it is of the utmost importance in Spinoza’s system, that outside absolute thought, which has absolute priority in the concept and is without any representation, every other thought must refer to the immediate concept of an actually present individual thing and its constituent parts, and can only be given in it, so that it is absolutely impossible that there can be any sort of concept of individual things before they are actually present. Individual things have however existed from all eternity, and God has never existed prior to them in any other way save that in which he still exists prior to them now, and will exist prior to them in that way for all eternity, namely simply by nature. 14. Eth., Part 11, p. 8: “The ideas of particular things, or of non-existent modes, must be comprehended within the infinite idea of God, in the same way as the formal essences of particular things or modes are contained in the attributes of God.”* Op. Posth., p. 47. 15. Eth., Part 11, p. 9: “The idea of an actually existing singular thing is caused by God, not in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he is considered as affected by another idea of an actually existing thing, of which he is the cause, in so far as he is affected by a third idea, and so on to infinity.”* Op. Posth., pp. 47ff.32 16. “If one part of matter were to be annihilated, the whole of extension would disappear at the same time.” Op. Posth., p. 404. Concerning this important point one must consult the 12th and 13th proposition in the 1st Part of the Ethics, but especially the scholion of the 15th proposition. Also, the remarkable letter de infinito to L. Mayer, Op. Posth., p. 465; the no less remarkable one to Oldenburg de toto & parte, ibid., p. 439. And so too the 39th, 40th, and 41st Letter to an Unknown, Op. Posth., pp. 519–27. It is hard to understand how anyone could have objected to Spinoza that he had produced the unrestricted out of the sum of restricted things, and that his infinite substance is only an absurd aggregate of finite things, so that the empty unity of substance is a mere abstraction. I say that it is hard to understand how anyone could have accused him of anything of this kind, since his system proceeds from the very opposite position, and this opposite position is its true moving principle. Among philosophers, moreover, no one has taken as much care as he did not to take or give for real what is in fact only a modus cogitandi, or a mere ens rationis. “Totum parte prius esse necesse est”† was already a universal principle of Aristotle which this king of thinkers certainly knew how to apply to the figurative whole of a communal entity (Politics, Lib. 1, cap. 2 [1253a.20]). Spinoza adheres to this sublime and fruitful principle throughout. 17. Eth., Part 11, Props. 3 &4, to be compared with the 45th, 46th, and 47th proposition of this same Part 11, and with the 30th and 31st of Part 1. 85

The German Idealism Reader 18. Eth., Part 11, 45, 46, 47, and the respective scholions; to be compared with the 3rd and 4th prop. of this same Part, with the 30th and 31st of the first part. It is necessary to recall here the proof, which Spinoza so often reiterates, that the essence of a thing does not include number, and that a plurality of things, inasmuch as they have something in common with one another, cannot be considered as plurality, but only as parts of one single thing. He built his inspired and truly sublime theory of true representations, of universal and complete concepts, of certainty, and of human understanding in general, upon precisely this basis. 19. I am far from charging all Spinozists with denying God. But precisely for this reason the demonstration that, when properly understood, Spinoza’s doctrine does not admit any kind of religion does not seem superfluous to me. A certain Spinozistic froth is on the contrary quite compatible with all species of superstition and enthusiasm; one can blow the most beautiful bubbles with it. The committed atheist should not hide behind this froth; the rest must not be deceived by it.

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FROM JACOBI TO FICHTE (1799) *

[v]

preface

[…] What troubles me most in publishing this text are the unguarded, though not unintentional judgments concerning our great Königsberger—his moral philosophy and theology—that occur in it incidentally. A closer determination of these judgments, and a more complete justification of them, will be found in another essay which I hereby commit myself, and now also feel obliged, to have published as soon as possible. In the meantime, I would be distressed if what is to be found here, for instance in the passage where with respect to Transcendental Philosophy I call Kant only the precursor of Fichte, were to be understood and interpreted otherwise than its location, tone, and context require. In the case at issue, the precursor is patently the one more distinguished. Fichte himself, honourable man that he is, has beautifully and emphatically declared himself on this score, showing too much rather than too little modesty.1 But for me the matter presents itself in yet another light. For since I regard the consciousness of non-knowing as what is highest in man, and the place of this consciousness as the place of the true inaccessible to science, so I am bound to be pleased with Kant that he preferred to sin against the system rather than against the majesty of the place. In my opinion, Fichte sins against this majesty whenever he wills to include the place within the domain of science, allowing it to be looked down upon from the standpoint of speculation, allegedly the highest of all, or the standpoint of truth itself.—But if Kant does not do the same, Fichte will say, he is inconsistent and stops half-way.—On that point I agree with him. I said the same myself, twelve years ago. But is not Fichte inconsistent too?—One has accused his philosophy of atheism quite unjustly, because Transcendental Philosophy cannot, as such, be atheist any more than can Geometry or Arithmetic. But for that same reason it cannot in any sense be theist either. If it tried to be theist, indeed in an exclusive sense, it would thereby become atheist, or at least it would take on the semblance of being atheist; for it would show how God too capitalizes on the fact of “non-existence in itself ” in order to become philosophically valid through it alone, yea to become something real at all. So why did Fichte give philosophy the reputation that it wants, and can be, theist? Why did he not guard himself more carefully against the impression that through Transcendental Philosophy a new, unique, theism was to be introduced, and through it the old theism of natural reason was to be banished as thorough nonsense? He has thereby brought himself and his philosophy into disrepute quite unnecessarily. It would not be any reproach to

From Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni, Montreal & Kingston, London, Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009, 498–527. *

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Transcendental Philosophy that it does not know anything about God, for it is universally acknowledged that God cannot be known, but only believed in. A God who could be known would be no God at all. But a merely artificial faith in Him is also impossible as faith; for in so far as it only wants to be artificial—i.e. simply scientific or purely rational—it abolishes natural faith and, with that, itself as faith as well; hence theism is abolished as a whole.—I refer to Reinhold’s Letter to Fichte.2 […] Truly, my dear Fichte, I would not be vexed if you, or anyone else, were to call Chimerism the view I oppose to the Idealism that I chide for Nihilism. I have paraded my not-knowing in all my writings; in my non-knowledge I have prided myself so to be with knowledge, so perfectly and completely, that I am certainly allowed to be contemptuous of the mere doubter. I have wrestled for truth with zeal and fervour since childhood as few others; as few others have I experienced my powerlessness—and my heart has grown tender for that—yea, very tender, my dear Fichte—and my voice so gentle! Just as I have deep compassion for myself, as human being, so I have it for others. I am patient without effort; but that I am truly patient without effort costs me a lot. The earth will be light above me—it won’t be long. My heart grows soft as I write this. I would like to get up and hurry to you, to lay my soul bare to you, eye to eye, heart to heart. This was my feeling, my ardent longing as I read the lines you wrote by hand below the printed letter; they moved me deeply. I was moved and shaken even more, however, by your address [to me] in your writing. The hand you grasp so full of confidence responds to yours with a friendly squeeze. And it would be so, even if I were obliged to call your doctrine atheist, like that of Spinoza; I would still not consider you, personally, an atheist for that reason; nor a godless man. Whoever knows how really to elevate himself with his spirit above nature, with his heart above every degrading desire, such a one sees God face to face, and it is not enough to say of him that he only believes in God. And were his philosophy also atheist; were his opinions atheist by the standard of the (I believe correct) judgment of natural reason that calls a God who is non-personal a God who is not, a non-entity; were he even to give the name “atheist” to his system, still his sin would only be a matter of thought, a bungling of the artist, in words and in concepts, the fault of the brooder, not of the man. Not the being of God, but only his name, would be denied by such a one. This is what I thought of Spinoza when I wrote the following passage to be found in my Justification against Mendelssohn: “Eh proh dolor. . . .3 And may you be blest for me, you great, yea you holy Benedictus! for whatever you may say philosophically about the nature of the Supreme Being, and whatever verbal mistakes you may fall into, His truth was in your soul, and His Love was your life.”4 […] The charge of either atheism or mysticism, and in any case of fanaticism and non-sense, will to the end of time always be made against any philosophy, whichever form it may assume, that invites man to rise above nature in spirit and above himself inasmuch as he is nature, by the huge family of those who call themselves philosophers and teachers of religion. The charge is not to be averted, for it is not possible for man to rise above nature outside him and inside unless he at the same time rises with the spirit above his reason (the temporal one), up to the concept of freedom. As for this concept of freedom surpassing reason, how to define it, what it comprises, its presuppositions and consequences—we can hardly come to a complete agreement about all this. 88

From Jacobi to Fichte

So a certain difference of opinion would also emerge between us regarding the distinction that we both make, otherwise in quite the same manner, between religion and idolatry. I have declared myself on this issue as follows in a still unpublished essay: “In order to seek God and what is pleasing to God, one must already have Him and what is pleasing to Him in one’s heart and spirit, for what is not in some way already known to us we cannot seek, not search after. But we do know about God and about His will, because we are born of Him, created in His image, after His likeness and kind. God lives in us, and our life is hidden in God. Were He not present to us in this way, immediately present through His image in our innermost self, what would announce Him to us? Pictures, sounds, signs that only give us to know what is already understood? The spirit to the spirit: what? “Created after His image. God in us: this is the tidings that we have of Him, and the only possible one; with it, God has revealed Himself to man in a living way, ever propagating, for all times. A revelation through external appearances, call them what you will, can at best stand to internal, original appearances only as language to reason. I say,” at best”; and I add: a false God can no more exist on its own outside man’s soul than the true one can appear there. As man feels and pictures himself, just so does he represent the Divinity too, except as being more powerful. For this reason the religion of men has always been in accord with their virtue, and their moral state. […] Only through moral ennoblement do we rise up to a worthy concept of the Highest Being. There is no other way. Not every fear of the Lord precludes malice and depravity. In order to have worth, that fear itself must be a virtue. And when it is a virtue, then it is the noblest and most beautiful one, presupposing them all—like the flowering of all their drives put together, of their total force. The God we have, therefore, is the one who became man in us, and it is not possible to acknowledge any other, even through better instruction; for how would we ever understand any other? Wisdom, righteousness, goodwill, free love, are not images but forces of which we acquire the representation only in use, in independent activity. Man must already have performed actions with these forces, therefore; he must have acquired virtues and the concepts of virtues, before any instruction about the true God could reach him. I repeat: God must have been born in man, if man is to have a living God, and not just an idol; He must have been born a man in him, for man would not otherwise have sense for Him. The objection that in this way God would only be a fabrication couldn’t be more wrong. For how is the non-fabricated God to be constituted, where discernible as the only true God? [”] Hence do I claim: Man finds God because he can find himself only in God; and he is to himself unfathomable because God’s being is necessarily unfathomable to him. […] The Man has this choice, however, and this alone: Nothingness or a God. If he chooses nothingness, he makes himself unto a God, that is, he makes a phantom into God, for it is impossible, if there is no God, that man and all that surrounds him should be anything but a phantom. I repeat: God is, and is outside me, a living, self-subsisting being, or I am God. There is no third. Were I not to find God outside me, before me, and above me, so that I have to posit Him, the One Being on His Own, then I am myself this so called being, in virtue of my selfhood, 89

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and my first and highest command is that I shall not have other Gods outside Me, i.e. outside that selfhood. […] Decidedly, openly, without hesitation or doubts, I give preference to an idolatry which is only external over this religion which is too pure for me, and has for me every appearance of a self-divinization. And if someone wants to call my weakness irreligion, or the effect of this weakness, i.e. my superstition, atheism, then let nobody be angry if, against the one who confronts me with this uncompromising “either I or Thou” of atheism, I assert the “Thou.” But with you, my friend, I am not in this situation, for in your Appeal (pp. 61 and 62) you explicitly declare that superstition does not exclude morality unconditionally, hence does not exclude true veneration of God either. And as for me, I have likewise already granted that the idolatry which is not of the senses but posits a concept, a thing of thought, a generality, in lieu of the living God (I could almost call it idolatry “by adjective”) does not exclude morality and the true, inner, religion indivisibly conjoined with it. The living God will be denied here—but only with the lips. Anyway, as regards superstition and idolatry, my opinion is this. It is all the same whether I engage in idolatrous practices with images made of wood and stone, whether I do it with ceremonies, stories of miracles, rituals and invocations, or whether I do it with philosophically unalloyed concepts, barren entities of the letter, empty forms of the imagination. Whether I make the shape into the thing in this way or that, I still hold on to the means superstitiously, cheating myself of every true goal. […] We would be infinitely wiser, in my judgment, if we first firmly convinced ourselves, and then strove to convince others as well, that “it is not the idol that makes the servant of the idol, nor the true God that makes the true worshipper. For if God made the true worshipper, then we would all be that, and all in equal measure, since the presence of the true God is common to all.”5 Lucky the man who constantly senses this presence; and for whom the ancient adjuration, “By the living God!” is at every moment the highest prototype of truth. Whoever lays a destructive hand upon the lofty and holy simplicity of this faith, is an opponent of humanity; for no science or art, nor talent whatever its name, could compensate for what would be taken with it. A benefactor of humanity is on the contrary one who, prevailed upon by the loftiness, the holiness and the truth of that faith, will not tolerate its being laid waste. His hand will be strong as he exalts and raises high once more the fallen altars of the one Living and True. […] Every philosophy, without exception, is at some point marked by a miracle. Each has a particular site, its holy place, where its miracle appears and, being alone the True, makes all others superfluous. Taste and character determine to a large extent in which direction we shall look, towards one of these sites or another. You have aptly remarked on this yourself (on p. 25 of your New Exposition) where you say: “The philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of man one is. For a philosophical system is not a dead utensil that one can either take up or put down at will, but is quickened through the soul of the man who has it.”—You may well be surprised that I should quote this passage, and call it apt, for the surrounding context (pages 23 to 26) proclaims with biting wit your contempt, or at least your indifference, for my way of thinking, 90

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and a scarcely restrained ridicule. But for this reason I have thought of this passage with all the greater fondness, as an occasion to note that by writing this letter I have exhibited a strength of spirit at least not contemptible. For the harsh and pointed commands undeniably directed at me, not to speak at all about subjects of this sort, did either occur to me in thought, or, while at work, leapt at my eyes often enough as I was leafing through, and could have disturbed my composure. […] Do me the same courtesy my dear Fichte, and excuse me, just as I have excused you, if you should perhaps find that here or there I have expressed myself with a bit too much animation in this letter. I have deliberately drawn my lines with a heavy hand and applied the most strident colours, so that what should stand out does so boldly, and what is only misunderstanding between us, and what is a really opposite way of thinking, be brought out as neatly as possible. Fare Thee well! This I wish to you from the bottom of my heart, just as from my heart I am your friend and true admirer. F. H. Jacobi

Notes 1. Cf. pp. v–vi of the Preface to his essay On the Concept of the Doctrine of Science, where he says: “The author is to this moment sincerely convinced that no human understanding can penetrate past the frontiers where Kant stood, especially in his Critique of Judgment, but which he never fixed for us, and declared to be the ultimate frontiers of finite knowledge. He knows that nobody will ever be able to say anything which Kant has not already pointed to, whether directly or indirectly, clearly or obscurely. He leaves it to future ages to fathom the genius of this man who, starting from the standpoint at which he found the philosophical faculty of judgment, swept it with great might towards its ultimate end, often as if directed by a higher inspiration.—He is just as sincerely convinced that after the genial mind of Kant no loftier gift could have been made to philosophy than the systematic genius of Reinhold. . . . He truly considers it to be no merit of his own that, by an accident of fortune, he has been called to labour in the wake of such admirable predecessors. And he knows that whatever merit may accrue here does not rest on the luck of discovery but on the honesty of the quest: on this score one can only be one’s own judge and one’s own rewarder.” 2. See Letter to Lavater and Fichte Concerning Faith in God (Hamburg: Perthes, 1799). 3. “Alas, the pain.” 4. What is your God, you, who publicly profess, and never have enough of repeating, that Religion is only a means. Could fools and enthusiasts alone consider it an end? What more can He be to you, your God, than a mere tool for supporting your soul in the service of your body, which is the great thing above all. Truly, it is only external needs, a clever economy of wants and desires, that ultimately constitutes the sum of your philosophy, and of your much-vaunted wisdom. Religion is added to this clever economy only by way of help as seems fit. And she should well be glad that we still find her useful to this extent. If we could ever manage to secure our social relations, and draw up our theories, without the use of God’s name, then away with this tiresome device of our ignorance and incompetence; away with this inconvenient piece of furniture that only takes up space without being in itself of any use. . . 5. From the still unpublished essay cited above. [In the 1816 edition Jacobi simply refers to Of Divine Things. - Trans.]

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CHAPTER 3 KARL LEONHARD REINHOLD (1757–1823)

INTRODUCTION Karl Leonhard Reinhold was an Austrian philosopher, best known as the first effective popularizer of Immanuel Kant and his Critical philosophy. Yet his historical significance cannot be reduced to merely popularization of Kant’s philosophical project, which was largely misunderstood at that time. Reinhold was the first thinker to draw attention to the problems of the epistemological tradition that prevented it from achieving its grand ambition of transforming philosophy as science. Realizing the need to establish firm, indubitable principles of reason, he began investigating the meta-epistemological foundation of philosophy (Beiser 1987, 226). Insisting on the need for a new meta-critical underpinning for Kant’s philosophy, he proposed to ground it on a single self-evident principle. This move largely set the developmental path of German idealism, especially in the form given by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Reinhold’s philosophical insights also inspired and influenced the Early German Romanticism of Schelling, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel, as well as some ideas put forward later by Hegel. Reinhold was born in Vienna on October 26, 1757. After attending a gymnasium, in 1772 young Reinhold entered the Vienna Jesuit Seminary of St. Anna as a novice. When a year later, by the directive of Pope Clement XIV, the Jesuit order was suppressed throughout Europe, the seminary in Vienna closed and Reinhold was forced to take a break from his studies. Eventually, in 1774 he joined the Barnabite seminary. The Barnabite order was active in caring for the sick and educating the young; in 1778, Reinhold began teaching philosophy there. After being ordained as a priest on August 27, 1780, he became a Barnabite monk, a capacity in which he served until 1783. While still at the seminary, Reinhold met thinkers associated with the Austrian Enlightenment and the “Vienna Friends,” a focal point of intellectual life in Vienna at that time. His personal encounters there introduced him to freemasonry, and on April 30, 1783, he joined the Masonic lodge “To True Harmony” (Zum wahren Eintracht) (Reinhold 2013, x). Around the same time, he began working anonymously for the Realzeitung, a local newspaper covering a wide range of topics from commercial to literary events and newly published books. Reinhold wrote book reviews and short articles for the newspaper, which revealed his growing distance from “blind faith” and Catholic dogmas. Due to restrictions on his position as monk and parish priest, he left Vienna, and on November 19, 1783, moved to Leipzig. There he attended lectures by Ernst Platner, an adherent of the Leibnizian-Wolffian school who emphasized the role of representation, the concept that later became central to Reinhold’s own search for the first principle in philosophy (Marx 2011, 25).

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Reinhold’s stay in provincial Leipzig was short; in May 1784 he moved to Weimar. Recommended by his Vienna friends, he was warmly welcomed by Christoph Martin Wieland, the distinguished man of letters who edited in Weimar the influential literary journal Der teutsche Merkur, to which contributed Jacobi, Goethe, Hamann, Herder, and many other notable German intellectuals. Within a few weeks, Reinhold began to write for Wieland’s journal; on May 18, 1785, he married Wieland’s eldest daughter, Sophie. Shortly after reaching Weimar, Reinhold also met another key figure of the German Enlightenment and Weimar Classicism, the philosopher, poet, and literary critic Johann Gottfried Herder who played an important role in Reinhold’s conversion to Protestantism. While Reinhold was formally accepted in the Protestant Church the month he arrived, his earlier intellectual and spiritual development greatly contributed to this decision. Conversion to Protestantism also meant a final break with his Catholic Austrian past, though he remained bonded to his Masonic friends and the Masonic lodge in Vienna his entire life (Marx 2011, 26). However surprising it may appear, it seems Reinhold’s fateful encounter with Kant’s philosophy occurred only in 1785 (Reinhold 2013, xi). A year earlier, he referenced Kant in his review of Herder’s masterpiece, Ideas upon Philosophy and the History of Mankind, favorably contrasting Herder with Kant, whom he then considered nothing more than “an old-fashioned metaphysician” (ibid.). His conversion to the Critical philosophy was sudden, yet genuine and long-lasting. He set the record straight in eight letters on the Kantian philosophy published in Der teutsche Merkur in 1786 and 1787. In these letters, expanded and eventually published under the title Letters on the Kantian Philosophy (1790), Reinhold enthusiastically advertised the positive effects of the Critical philosophy. The Letters were an instant success, so much so that Reinhold established a reputation as an “expositor” and a great popularizer of Kant’s philosophy. Kant himself was also pleased with Reinhold’s interpretation, and in a letter to Reinhold (December 19, 1787) wrote about the Letters that “nothing can surpass them in elegance coupled with thoroughness” (KLRK 4). In the following year, Kant praised Reinhold at greater length in the closing pages of his essay, “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy,” published in Merkur (Kant Ak 8:183ff.). Soon after the publication of the Letters, Reinhold received an offer from the University of Jena, where the Duke of Weimar had specially installed a professorial chair for the study of Kant’s Critical philosophy. As the first holder of this very prestigious position, Reinhold began teaching at Jena in 1787. He was an extremely popular and effective lecturer, highly respected by his students and colleagues alike. More than two-thirds of students enrolled at Jena attended Reinhold’s classes. He never had any problem filling lecture halls and auditoriums, in which he delivered his university courses or public talks. He also attracted the attention of philosophers and intellectuals who would travel to Jena from around Europe to attend his lectures. That the small provincial university town of Jena became “the breeding ground of the apostles of Kantian philosophy” (Ameriks 2000b, 2), which it remained for some decades, largely resulted from Reinhold’s reputation and influence. Yet he was not merely a leading exponent of Kant; as the first genuine critic of Kant’s philosophy, he also claimed to offer a more systematic ground for it, thus taking an important step toward recasting it as a transcendental metaepistemological theory. Indeed, after arriving at Jena, Reinhold’s philosophical focus shifted from mere interpretation and popularization of the practical aspects of Kant’s philosophy to a more thorough examination of its theoretical foundations. Out of this shift in focus would be born 94

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Reinhold’s most lasting and important philosophical impact, now known under the name Elementarphilosophy (usually translated as “Elementary Philosophy” or “Philosophy of the Elements”). Reinhold’s philosophy is most clearly explicated in three works published while in Jena: Essay on a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation (1789), Contributions to the Correction of Previous Misunderstandings of the Philosophers, appearing in two volumes (1790, 1794), and the much shorter On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge (1791). In these writings, Reinhold attempted to unify more simply and clearly the Critical philosophy by founding it upon a single principle of representation. By introducing his conception of a philosophical system, he aimed not only to secure the foundation of Kant’s project, but also to demonstrate how recasting Kant’s core insights in systematic form can productively reveal the liberating character of the Critical philosophy itself. Reinhold’s publications had an enormous effect on a younger generation of German thinkers who became drawn to Kantian philosophy. His efforts met with many varied reactions, ranging from admiration by Fichte and public praise by Kant himself, to intense criticism from thinkers such as Gottlob Ernst Schulze and Salomon Maimon. Before leaving Jena in 1794 to take up an ordinary professorship in Kiel, Reinhold published a second volume of the Letters on Kantian Philosophy (1792), mainly focusing on the practical philosophy proper and developing several concepts notably deviating from Kant’s own. For the next few years after leaving Jena, Reinhold corresponded intensively with Fichte, who next occupied the chair vacated by Reinhold. What the two shared was their various attempts to reformulate Kantian philosophy by grounding it on a single self-evident principle. Eventually, in 1797 Reinhold would publicly acknowledge that his principle of representation was not sufficient to ground the Critical philosophy. Instead, he advocated for Fichte’s proposal of the self-positing I as the most basic foundational principle. Soon after Reinhold’s public acknowledgment of Fichte’s philosophy, Fichte was accused of atheism and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi deemed his philosophy nihilistic (a word he has been credited with coining). In response to a controversy surrounding the alleged atheism of Fichte, in 1799, Reinhold published a pamphlet defending Fichte. However, he soon sought an alternate path to reconcile the positions of Fichte and Jacobi, and when neither of them found this solution feasible, Reinhold quickly changed his view again, this time clearly moving toward the position of Jacobi. This spiritual attachment, however, did not last long, and already the following year, Reinhold found a new philosophical inspiration. In the period from 1801 to 1804, Reinhold published a series of six pamphlets entitled Contributions to an Easier Overview of the State of Philosophy at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. In these works, Reinhold would advocate for the philosophy of “logical realism” proposed by Christoph Gottfried Bardili (1761–1808). Critical of Kantian idealism for not being consistently systematic and rationalistic, Bardili proposed to build philosophy upon pure logic. However, just as he had done a few years earlier, Reinhold quickly withdrew his support for Bardili’s philosophy. In fact, he began to publicly criticize it from a fairly novel standpoint, that of language. The works in which Reinhold explicated this position remained almost entirely unknown during his lifetime; only recently have they begun to be examined in detail. Reinhold died on April 10, 1823, in the city of Kiel at the age of sixty-five. * * * 95

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Reinhold first entered into the philosophical milieu with the publication of his Letters on the Kantian Philosophy. The Letters were indeed of great historical and philosophical importance. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was written in a highly technical style, and its epistemological content, especially of such sections as the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic, were (and are) difficult to understand. As a result, the Critique of Pure Reason was not widely read, and even less understood. The Letters offered a readily accessible and (presumably) accurate commentary on Kant’s work. In his studies, Reinhold had become convinced of the power and usefulness of the methods and results of the Critique of Pure Reason. Specifically, he viewed the Critical philosophy as the correct middle ground between religious revelation and dangerous philosophical skepticism. He praised Kant for resolving the Spinozism dispute— an infamous pantheism controversy initiated in 1785 by Jacobi, who in his critique of the Enlightenment wanted to show that the “unassisted use of reason” inevitably lead to atheism and determinism. Struck by Kant’s ability to resolve the dispute without being forced into moral skepticism, Reinhold argued that Kant had clearly demonstrated that there is no conflict between reason and faith. In the Letters, Reinhold largely focused on issues having more practical relevance, such as questions of morality, God, free will, and immortality of soul, thus attracting a broader readership and making Kant’s masterpiece even more philosophically and historically valuable. However, his appointment at Jena and intensive engagement with Kant’s philosophy inspired his critical inquiry into the foundations of the master’s thought. Reinhold, who clearly recognized the philosophical significance and real value of Kant’s achievement, held that Kant’s work still needed completion. Never questioning the possibility of realizing the critical project—which distinguished Reinhold’s attitude toward Kant’s philosophy from those of Jacobi, Maimon, or Schulze—he criticized it in order to reveal its full potential. One main charge Reinhold made against Kant was the master’s failing to establish philosophy as a “science” by giving it a systematic presentation. Although a systematic developing of philosophy was one of the goals of Kant’s philosophical project, the unity of Kant’s system was derived from its “final end,” from the consequences of transcendental idealism itself. In his Elementarphilosophie, first presented to the public in 1789, Reinhold challenged Kant’s shortcoming regarding the foundation of philosophy’s scientific status and argued that “philosophy cannot become scientific until a convincing derivation from a first principle has been supplied” (Förster 2012, 155). Thus, insisting on the need to derive the unity of the system from its foundation, Reinhold shifted his attention from the consequences to the starting point—the “absolutely first principle of philosophy” (Breazeale 1982, 790; Goh 2014, 244). Reinhold held that a philosophical system could be systematic only if it could be shown to be “generated” or “derived” from logically interrelated principles. To ensure this logical interrelatedness requires a first principle or foundation (Grundsatz), which then “determines” all other propositions of the system and from which each individual principle is consistently generated, so the whole system could be rigorously “deduced” (derived) according to the established rules of logic. This Grundsatz must be necessarily true and completely self-evident. It should not be in need of proof of any sort (even logical proof), since such a principle is the most basic principle and relies on no others; only then could it be the irreducible foundation that philosophy needs. However, Reinhold warned that the first principle should not be a purely formal proposition stripped of any content. It must be a formal (analytic) principle 96

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as well as a material (synthetic) principle. Otherwise, “scientific philosophy” will “turn” into formal logic. Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie is an attempt to recast the Kantian philosophy by deriving it from the first principle, and thus to make it a strict science. In order to provide a foundation for the Critical philosophy, Reinhold proposed the rigorous analysis of consciousness itself, aimed at finding a single self-evident principle, which would express a fundamental and substantive “fact of consciousness.” Taking his clue from Kant, who saw an important correlation between forms of consciousness and representations, Reinhold declared that representation is the most basic fact of consciousness and each particular form is just a derivative of it. Indeed, nobody could deny having representations, that is, that one is conscious and that one’s conscious “ideas” have a variety of apparent contents. The most important of these contents is the ability of each of us to distinguish our own self-awareness from our awareness of extramental things, self-consciousness from consciousness. Based on this “elementary truth” Reinhold formulated his first principle, calling it “the principle of consciousness”: “In consciousness, the representation is distinguished from, and related to, the subject and object, by the subject.” The principle was designed to convey a crucial idea, namely that consciousness is grounded in selfconsciousness. In other words, our awareness of the external world, which Kant had discussed in terms of several separate capacities, such as intuition, conception, judgment, and will, was rooted, according to Reinhold, in a single capacity of representation. He believed that with this first principle, he not only uncovered the “common root” of all our cognitive and conative capacities, which appeared distinct in Kant (cf. Kant CPR A835/B863), but also reconciled theoretical and practical reason, pointing to their “common” foundation. Reinhold argued that being a reflectively known fact of consciousness, the concept of representation must be a fundamental principle known with certainty. He was also convinced that all consciousness is self-evidently “representational” in character. This and other claims of Reinhold’s would be, however, challenged by his contemporaries, most notably by Gottlob Ernst Schulze, who criticized the philosophical insights of the author of the Philosophy of the Elements (Elementarphilosophie) from the position of skepticism, and, a few years later, by Fichte, who sought to overcome the problems he spotted with Reinhold’s first principle. Ultimately, Reinhold would come to disown his own philosophy and for short periods throughout his life, he advocated philosophical systems developed by other thinkers, notably by Fichte. However, Reinhold’s own project attracted the attention of many of his most talented contemporaries, who represented varying philosophical camps and movements. What placed his work in such an important position was not mainly the content of Reinhold’s Philosophy of the Elements itself. The historical significance of his work is rather associated with his ability to uncover the real problem of the Critical philosophy and to offer the methods to remedy it. His effort to find an ultimate basic principle from which to derive transcendental idealism would both enlighten and inspire many philosophers familiar with his work, especially Fichte. Thus, Reinhold remains to this day an important philosopher for both his own ideas and for his role as a transitional figure from Kant’s early idealism to the later idealism of Fichte and Hegel.

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Chronology of Karl Reinhold’s Life and Works 1757

October 26: Karl Leonhard Reinhold born in Vienna.

1772

Studies with Jesuits at St. Anna’s in Vienna.

1774

Studies with Order of the Barnabites.

1780

Ordained as a priest.

1782

Joins Masonic lodge “To True Harmony” in Vienna.



Anonymously publishes numerous reviews on the Enlightenment themes in the Realzeiting.

1783

Abandons priesthood and flees to Leipzig.

1784

Moves to Weimar where he meets Johann Gottfried Herder and befriends Christoph Martin Wieland, editor of Der teutsche Merkur.



Converts to Protestantism.

1785

Begins publishing for Der teutsche Merkur and becomes its coeditor (together with Wieland).



Marries Wieland’s daughter Sophie.



Publishes a favorable review of Herder’s Ideas upon Philosophy and the History of Mankind, with critical comments about Kant.

1786

Converts to Kant’s Critical philosophy upon studying Critique of Pure Reason.



First of a series of eight “Letters on the Kantian Philosophy” appears in Der teutsche Merkur.

1787 Awarded Magister Philosophiae and named Professor Extraordinarius of philosophy at the University of Jena, becoming the first holder of the chair in critical philosophy. 1788

Praised by Kant in “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy” in Der teutsche Merkur.

1789 Publishes On the Previous Fate of the Kantian Philosophy and Essay on a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation (both in Jena). 1790

His work, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, revised and expanded to twelve letters, appears in its first book form.

Publishes Contributions to the Correction of Previous Misunderstandings of the Philosophers, vol. I and Concerning the Foundations of the Philosophy of Elements. 1791 His On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge, Accompanied by Elucidations of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation released in Jena. 1792

Reinhold’s Philosophy of the Elements begins to receive intense criticism.

Publishes Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, vol. II.

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1793

Publication of “Philosophical Correspondence with Salomon Maimon” (published by Maimon without Reinhold’s authorization).

1794

Accepts a professorship offer from Kiel (Denmark).

His Contributions to the Correction of Previous Misunderstandings of Philosophers, vol. II and Concerning the Foundations of Philosophical Knowledge, of Metaphysics, Morality, Moral Religion, and the Doctrine of Taste appear in Jena.

Review of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.

1797

Moves toward the position of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.

1798 Composes The Fundamental Concepts and Principles of Ethics: Deliberations of Sound Common Sense, for the Purpose of Evaluating Moral, Rightful, Political and Religious Matters.

Reviews several works by Fichte.

1799

Moves toward the position of Jacobi.



April: Composes his “Letter to Fichte” (published later as a pamphlet Public Letter to J.C. Lavater and J.G. Fichte Concerning Belief in God) as an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile Jacobi’s and Fichte’s positions.

1800

Moves toward the position of C.G. Bardili.



Writes a review of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism.

1801 Publishes Contributions to an Easier Overview of the State of Philosophy at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (three of the eventual six volumes appear in Hamburg). 1803 His On the Relation of Sound Understanding and of Philosophical Reason to Common Sense and Speculative Reason is published in Hamburg. 1804

C.G. Bardilis and C.L. Reinhold’s Correspondence Concerning the Essence of Philosophy and Absurdity of Speculation, edited by Reinhold comes out in Munich.

1806 Composes Essay on a Critique of Logic from the Viewpoint of Language, which signals his shift toward the standpoint of language. 1808

Moves away from Bardili’s “logical realism.”



Publishes an essay, “On a New Answer to the Old Question: What Is Truth?”

1812

Foundations of a Synonomics for the General Use of Language in the Philosophical Sciences (Kiel).

1823

April 12: Dies in Kiel, at the age of sixty-five.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Reinhold’s Writings A.1.  German Academic Editions

Karl Leonhard Reinhold Korrespondenzausgabe der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 1983ff, edited by Reinhard Lauth, Eberhard Heller, and Karl Hiller, 4 vols. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. [KLRK] Reinhold, K. L. 2007ff. Gesammetle Schriften. Kommentierte Ausgabe, edited by Martin Bondeli. Basel: Schwabe Verlag. A.2.  In English (selected translations)

Reinhold, K. L. 2005. Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, translated by James Hebbeler, edited by Karl Ameriks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reinhold, K. L. 2013. Essay on a New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation, translated by Tim Mehigan and Barry Empson. Berlin: de Gruyter. B.  Selected Commentaries

Ameriks, K. 2000a. Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 81–159. Ameriks, K. 2000b. The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beiser, F. C. 1987. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 226–65. Breazeale, D. 1982. “Between Kant and Fichte: Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s ‘Elementary Philosophy,’” Review of Metaphysics, 35: 785–821. Breazeale, D. 1998. “Putting Doubt in its Place: Karl Leonhard Reinhold on the Relationship between Philosophical Skepticism and Transcendental Idealism,” in The Skeptical Tradition around 1800, edited by J. van der Zande and R. H. Popkin. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 119–32. Förster, E. 2012. The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction, translated by Brady Bowman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (On Reinhold, see pp. 153–58.) Franks, P. 2000. “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, edited by K. Ameriks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 95–116. di Giovanni, G. 2003. “1799: The Year of Reinhold’s Conversion to Jacobi,” in  Die Philosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds, edited by M. Bondeli and W. Schrader, FichteStudien, Supplementa. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 259–82. di Giovanni, G. 2005. Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. di Giovanni, G. (ed.). 2010. Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment. Dordrecht: Springer.

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Goh, K. 2014. “Reinhold and the Transformation of Philosophy into Science,” in The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, edited by M. C. Altman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 243–63. Horstmann, R.-P. 1972. “Maimon’s Criticism of Reinhold’s Satz des Bewusstseins,” in  Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress. Dordrecht: Reidel, 350–8. Marx, K. J. 2011. The Usefulness of the Kantian Philosophy: How Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Commitment to Englightenment Infuenced His Reception of Kant. Berlin: de Gruyter. Pinkard, T. 2002. German Philosophy 1760–1869; The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (For Reinhold, see Ch. 4, pp. 96–104.) Schönborn, A. von. 1999. “Karl Leonhard Reinhold: ‘... Endeavoring to keep up the pace mit unserem Zeitalter,’” in The Emergence of German Idealism, edited by M. Baur and D. O. Dahlstrom. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 33–62.

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FROM LETTERS ON THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY (1786–87) *

B Selection from the First Letter, “The spirit of our age and the present state of the sciences heralds a universal reformation of philosophy” […] The most striking and characteristic feature of the spirit of our age is a shaking of all previously known systems, theories, and manners of representation, a shaking whose range and depth is unprecedented in the history of the human spirit. The most varied and even mutually contradictory signs of our time can be traced back to this feature – signs that herald without exception an ambition, more lively than ever before, to erect new forms on the one hand, and to bolster every old form on the other. The impartial, independent thinker considers whether the old forms might ultimately be displaced by the new, or the new by the old, and whether and what humanity might in each case gain thereby. But he is all the less capable of deciding, for he finds neither the old forms to be as wholly unusable nor the new ones to be as wholly satisfactory as they are proclaimed to be by the zealots in both factions, who, in the spirit of our age, prophesy happiness or unhappiness for humanity according to their unconditioned adherence to the old or new forms and according to their enthusiastic hopes or apprehensions. At all events, the independent thinker is least able to resist this question: Whence did this remarkable shaking come, and what will arise from it? A satisfying answer to this question presupposes an investigation that transcends the limited horizon of individual disciplines. It tracks the power of thinking in the fields that most exemplify its effectiveness, takes the most remarkable events from each of them, and places them all under one viewpoint that is far removed from the viewpoints of both the praisers and condemners of our age alike. The pedant assesses the advances of the human spirit according to his conception of the current state of the individual discipline that he works on, and that, for this very reason, is in his eyes the most important of them all. He congratulates humanity or laments it, depending on whether he believes that what he takes to be theology, jurisprudence, political science, military science, philosophy, etc. is flourishing or decaying. How should he know that the true state of even his own discipline can be correctly judged only by its relation to the state of the human

From Karl Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, ed. by Karl Ameriks, Cambridge University Press, 2005, 129–45. *

From Letters on the Kantian Philosophy

spirit and its needs – just as the entire value of the discipline itself can be correctly judged only by its relation to the proper vocation of man (which, however, must neither be ostensibly presupposed nor vaguely discerned but cognized)? – The shaking that is being discussed here does not manifest itself only in the state of the sciences but also in everything that the power of thinking influences, and it expresses itself everywhere in direct proportion to the magnitude of this influence. It extends as far as European culture, but in such a way that sometimes it appears in scarcely noticeable vibrations and sometimes in violent upheavals. […] Although the shaking of old and new manners of representation that characterizes this spirit is spreading across the domain of human knowledge, it is not equally noticeable in all the individual fields of this domain. The law according to which this shaking increases or decreases can be determined by the greater or lesser role that the capacity for the power of thinking called reason has in the content and the form of a science. Whoever is not sufficiently familiar with this role need only let himself be guided by the increasing noise and thickening dust clouds, and he will soon be convinced that the epicenter of the shaking lies within the region of metaphysics and that its outer boundary is determined by the fields of mathematics, natural science, and description of the objects of nature. That science which, according to its definition, must rank above all others – as the domain containing the first grounds of human cognition, the system of the most universal predicates of things in general, and the science of the principles of all human knowledge – is so shaken at present that not only its rank but even its designation as a science is being disputed. […] There is not a single metaphysics […] that consists in fundamental principles about which the professors [of metaphysics] themselves would be in agreement – something one is certainly justified in expecting from a science of the first grounds of cognition. […] The possessors and guardians of this science are so far from thinking uniformly among themselves even about its first principle that in some well-known and popular textbooks there is not a single discussion about this most essential condition for a science. […] To the same extent that one is busy raising botany, mineralogy, and chemistry to systems, one is allowing metaphysics to degenerate into an aggregate of unconnected, ambiguous formulas with which one presupposes as universally accepted what was to be demonstrated, and demonstrates what was in no need of proof. […] Since a metaphysical principle can have truth only through its connection with universally valid grounds of cognition and can have universal evidence only through being traced back to a universally accepted principle that is evident to all, it is readily understandable that the popular metaphysicians at our universities are preparing a certain demise for this science – by precisely the so-called liberal form through which they fancy that they are procuring its universal acceptance. […] Do not these facts explain in a rather satisfactory manner how it is coming to be that even among genuinely philosophical minds the number is continuing to increase of those who loudly and publicly declare the study of metaphysics to be useless, indeed even corrupting? And would it not be untrue to our age if one wanted to explain this phenomenon with that same characteristic shallowness of spirit without considering whether this very shallowness,

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wherever it actually occurs, is partly a consequence of the condition in which the science that is supposed to constitute the foundation for all other sciences finds itself? Through a further illumination of the present shaking in other scientific fields, it will emerge that there has never been a more universal and pressing need for a first science than there is at the present time – a science, whether it is called metaphysics or not, from which all other sciences would await secure principles that in part guide and in part ground. Consequently, it will emerge that the contempt that metaphysics is experiencing is an effect of the unfulfilled expectations that this science has excited at all times by its lofty promises, unfulfilled expectations that had never become as universally conspicuous as they had some time ago, when independent thinkers from all sides were feeling themselves compelled more than ever before to take metaphysics at its word. The other fields of the sciences are being more or less shaken the more or less remote their domain is from metaphysics proper, and they may be ordered one after another in this regard in roughly the following sequence: rational psychology, cosmology, and theology, philosophy of religion (the science of the ground of our [36] expectations of a future life); the doctrine of taste, morality, natural right, positive jurisprudence and positive theology, and finally history in the strictest sense of the term. The first three fields, which are directly related to metaphysics and usually even count as components of it, share with it the same name and fate, whereas history owes the more tranquil possession and less contested expansion and improvement of its far-reaching domain to its distance from the epicenter of the shaking. The results of modern attempts to reform positive theology and positive jurisprudence were more successful the more the reformers of this science learned to make better use of its proximity to history. It was equally the case, however, that all the attempts of the best minds to come to agreement among themselves regarding the first principles of morality and natural right entirely failed because, in the development of the concepts that were presupposed by this principle, it was impossible to avoid the neighboring [field of] metaphysics. […] Under these circumstances the reputation of history is rising at the same rate that the reputation of metaphysics is sinking. Metaphysics has never before been placed in such stark contrast to history not only with respect to its subjects but also with respect to its reliability, usefulness, and influence. Professional philosophers place history on the throne of the former queen of all the sciences and pay homage to it even in the name of philosophy, as the genuine science of the first grounds of cognition of all human knowledge. […] While mineralogy, botany, zoology, anatomy, chemistry, physiology, and empirical psychology fetch ever new uncontested gains and deliver them as secure profit into the treasury of human knowledge, not a single one of the decisions about the immense questions concerning the rights and duties of human beings in this life or the ground for their expectation of a future life – decisions that the opponents of metaphysics claim to have found in history – has yet to be accepted universally, and not even among themselves. Moreover, consider how little historical criticism is in agreement with itself regarding the value of the raw as well as the already-treated materials of history proper, or regarding the credibility of original sources and historians; and consider how little the philosophy of history is in agreement with itself regarding the form and basic laws for working in this science. It turns out, then, that a shaking is occurring in the field of history as well, which, while less noticeable on the whole, is no less remarkable than the shaking of metaphysics itself. […]

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But this shaking must also become more noticeable the more our historical criticism ceases to be an aggregate of indeterminate, wholly unconnected observations and the more it closely approximates the systematic form that at present it is very far from having. […] [The highest] viewpoint cannot possibly be a result of the history that presupposes it, a history that must elucidate and confirm it but cannot first establish it. The data through which it is alone determinable can be given to us only in and through our mind, and it can be discovered only through the analysis of our mere faculty of representation. To want to seek it outside ourselves in history is to offer clear proof that one does not know what one is seeking. The universal laws of intellectual powers can no more be determined by history than can the universal laws of physical powers, and just as scientific familiarity with the nature of movement is absolutely impossible without mathematics, so too determinate cognition of reason’s distinctive manner of acting presupposes a science that must be as different from history as mathematics is. Hence, the shaking in the field of history that I have indicated must either continue forever, or it must bring about the discovery and recognition of that science from which the highest viewpoint for all history in general is to emerge with universal evidence. And all attempts to give philosophy a better form through history must be entirely futile for, on the contrary, history can receive its form only through philosophy – but only, of course, after philosophy itself has a fixed form.

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FROM ON THE FOUNDATION OF PHILOSOPHICAL KNOWLEDGE (1791) *

[…] Never had philosophy found itself in a more embarrassing position as regards its foundations, and hence as regards the first among the conditions by which it comes to be philosophy, than at the time when, in the name of common sense, the most complete anarchy reigned, and popularity passed as the criterion of truth. Never before had philosophy fallen as far behind the other sciences and especially behind that erudition which displays itself in narrations and descriptions. Philosophical reason seemed finally to have come to a standstill when, in the person of a man in whom are combined the systematic spirit of Leibniz and the skeptical one of Hume, Locke’s sound faculty of judgement and Newton’s creative genius, it made advances such as were never made by any single thinker before. Kant discovered a new foundation of philosophical knowledge that includes the truth found scattered, in onesided forms, in the previous expositions of that knowledge, yet excludes their falsity. Like all of his predecessors he too assumed immutability, which is the hallmark of truth, to be the essential characteristic of the foundation of philosophy as well; unlike Locke, however, who tried to obtain it from the simples borrowed immediately from experience, and unlike Leibniz, who tried to obtain it from innate representations, he derived it rather from the possibility of experience which is found determined in the mind prior to all experience. […] Yet, however successful he was in this, it still cannot be denied that his [newly] uncovered foundation fails to ground the whole of philosophical knowledge; on the contrary it can only ground ONE PART of it. In respect of its foundation this part is, to be sure, the most controversial; and with respect to its consequences, it is the most important. […] There has been a tendency, especially in modern times, to call it simply “philosophy”, sometimes by exclusion, and sometimes in an eminent sense. But for all that it remains only one part – no more and no less–of the science which is entitled by right to that name. The only part of philosophical knowledge that Kant grounded is that philosophical science properly called metaphysics. Not even Kant’s explicit declaration that his –––Critique of Pure Reason is nothing else than propaedeutic to metaphysics has effectively prevented followers who are more faithful to the letter than to the spirit of the master from taking it as constituting the doctrine of the elements of philosophy. A prejudice of this sort could not prevail among the friends of critical philosophy without stifling its spirit and trivializing its mighty aims. The only problem that the Critique of Reason could resolve, and did in fact resolve, by appealing to the possibility of experience, is whether the science of objects proper [eigentlicher

From George di Giovanni & H.S. Harris (eds.), Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, Hackett Publishing, 2000, 61–74. *

From On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge

Objekte], that is to say, of objects [Gengenstände] that are distinguished in consciousness from all mere representations or the properties of representations, is possible or not. This problem concerns the possibility of metaphysics as a science; and this possibility could not be put to the test, and demonstrated, without the foundations of all previous metaphysics being tested at the same time, and the foundation of a future metaphysics being established. […] The Critique showed that if metaphysics is to be the science of knowable, real objects, it has to be metaphysics of sensible nature, i.e., the science of the necessary and universal characteristics of appearances, the sum-concept of which constitutes the sensible world or the domain of experience. […] The one single science for which Kant has discovered and defined the foundation, and which he has therefore fully established as far as analysis goes, is metaphysics qua science of the objects of possible experience. He did not provide a foundation for science whose objects are beyond all possible experience, e.g., for a science of the substance of the soul, or of the cosmos, or of the divinity. On the contrary, he expressly showed that no such foundation is possible. […] This science, which Kant did not establish, would have to be distinguished from the metaphysics he did establish thus: whereas the latter is the science of the characteristics (determined a priori) of objects proper, the former would have to be the science of the characteristics (determined a priori) of mere representations. The metaphysics has as its object the objects of experience, i.e., what can be cognized a posteriori by being represented through the a priori forms of sensible representation and of the concepts; the other science would have for its object these very forms, but precisely as what is originally knowable a priori. Or again, one is the science of empirical nature inasmuch as this can be known a priori; the other would be the science of the empirical faculty of cognition, which is made up of sensibility and understanding. Now, since sensibility and understanding exhaust the empirical faculty of cognition, whereas reason is its pure faculty (i.e., the faculty by which we recognize the forms of representations qua determined a priori), the science of sensibility and understanding, taken together with the science of reason, would be the science of the entire faculty of cognition. This science of the faculty of cognition would have to be preceded by another that establishes its foundation. This other science too would be a science of sensibility, understanding and reason–not, however, inasmuch as these are identical with the faculty of cognition, but inasmuch as they stand in common at its foundation (and indeed, at the foundation of the faculty of desire as well). It would be the science of the a priori form of REPRESENTING through sensibility, understanding and reason; on this form depends the form of knowledge, as well as that of desire. In a word, it would be the science of the entire faculty of representation as such. For this science, which I name general Philosophy of the Elements [Elementarphilosophie] because it serves as the common foundation to both theoretical and practical philosophy, the Critique of Reason has indeed provided materials, but never the idea, let alone the actual foundation. And if it is ever to be realized, philosophical reason must press forward yet another step in its analysis past the point attained in the Critique of Reason. This is the final step that philosophical reason can take, proceeding analytically, on its way to higher principles; through it, and it alone, is the ultimate and proper foundation of PHILOSOPHY discovered. 107

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The object of this science is all that can be known a priori concerning the representations of sensibility, understanding and reason– and nothing else. Its object can consist, therefore, in nothing but the forms of these representations as determined in the faculty of the representation; the science must identify them and how that they are the original being of the representations, i.e., their forms or most essential characteristics, their nature simply qua representations. In this science alone can it be established, through a proof that is universally valid, and will eventually become universally binding, that space and time, the twelve categories and the three forms of ideas, are originally nothing but the properties of mere representations. And on this proof rests the possibility of [another] universally binding proof by which the science of the faculty of cognition must show that the only objects that can be known, through sensibility and understanding are those of experience; that no others can be known through reason, save the forms of representations and whatever can be deduced or derived from them. The proof would also show, therefore, that the only objects that can be known a posteriori are in the form of sensible representation (appearances), and that those that can be known a priori are characteristics of appearances for forms of representations determined in the faculty of cognition; consequently, that things-in-themselves cannot be known either through sensibility and understanding, or through reason. […] If the science of the faculty of cognition is to remedy the confusion, which has been the main pitfall of all previous philosophy, between the predicates of mere representations, that are determined a priori, and those of knowable objects that we derive from experience, it must proceed from the concept of representation as such, and exhaustively identify its essential characteristics; only then will it deserve its name. Of course, from the concept of representation in general, qua generic concept, we cannot derive the concept of sensible representation, or that of concept itself (qua representation of the understanding), or that of idea (qua representation of reason), with respect to their specifying characteristics. Yet, what these concepts have in common can only be cognized from the concept of ‘representation’, and can only be derived from the source from which that generic concept is originally obtained. It is what makes them simply representations, and it does not in any way depend on their specified properties. [For instance,] we cannot have knowledge through a sensible representation, a concept or an idea, of a thing as it is ‘in-itself,’ not because the specifying characteristics of these representations make them unfit to yield such knowledge, but because a thing cannot be known in-itself through any representation simply qua representation.1 Precisely because the science of the faculty of representation must come first in order to ground the sciences of the faculties of cognition and desire – it is the propaedeutic, that is, not just to metaphysics, but to all philosophy (theoretical as well as practical) – it cannot derive the characteristics of the concept of representation from any part of philosophy. I know that critical philosophers have asserted that the concept of representation has been sufficiently determined in the Critique of Pure Reason, or that it can be derived from the concept of sensible representation, the concept of concept, and the concept of idea secured in it. In my view, however, this very claim demonstrates that they still lack a determinate concept of representation. The Critique only deals with the specifying characteristics of the various kinds of representations; the concept of representation qua representation can no more be derived from these specifications than the concept ‘triangle’ can be derived from ‘equal sides’ and ‘unequal sides’, or the generic concept of ‘humanity’ from the gender concepts ‘male’ and ‘female’. Even granted that the Critique were already the authentic science of the faculty of cognition (which is 108

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by no means the case), it would still not be possible to demonstrate the essential characteristics of the concept of representation from it, for the concept of ‘cognition’ presupposes that of ‘representation’; and the form of cognition, although it cannot be derived from the mere form of representing alone, essentially depends upon it nevertheless. What has to stand at the head of the Philosophy of the Elements—and hence of all philosophical explanations and proofs—cannot itself be established through a proof drawn from any part of philosophy whatever, nor for that matter can any philosophy, past or future, prove it. In respect to its essential characteristics the concept of representation cannot be demonstrated, therefore, by the science of the faculty of representation. Those characteristics can, and must, be identified by it by means of an exhaustive analysis, but they cannot be produced by it. The analysis that the science performs on the concept presupposes that they are already joined, with determinacy and necessity. But this is to say: The concept of representation, which the science of the faculty of representation is to determine analytically, must have already been synthetically determined to this end. So determined—independently of all philosophizing, for the latter depends on this original determinateness for its correctness—the concept of representation can only be drawn from the CONSCIOUSNESS of an actual fact [Tatsache]. This fact alone, qua fact, must ground the foundation of the Philosophy of the Elements—for otherwise the foundation cannot rest, without circularity, on any philosophically demonstrable proposition. It is not through any inference of reason that we know that in consciousness representation is distinguished through the subject from both object and subject and is referred to both, but through simple reflection upon the actual fact of consciousness, that is, by ordering together [Vergleichung] what is present in it. The concept of representation, inasmuch as it lies at the foundation of the proposition just stated, is immediately drawn from consciousness; as such it is entirely simple and incapable of analysis. Its source is an actual fact which is suited to yield the last possible foundation for all explanation precisely because, qua fact, it admits of no explanation but is self-explanatory. No definition of representation is therefore possible. The principle of consciousness, far from being a definition, qualifies rather as the first principle of all philosophy precisely because it presents a concept that does not allow definition; it is not itself the highest among possible definitions, yet it makes that highest definition possible in the first place. The concept of representation does not merely stand as a simple concept, at the ground of the principle of consciousness; it is also determined by what the principle expresses, viz., the actual facts of consciousness. And inasmuch as it is so determined, it constitutes (when expressed in words) the definition of representation. It is the scientific concept of representation, and the task of the theory of the faculty of representation is to exhaust its content. The original, unexplainable and simple concept of representation precedes consciousness; it stands at its ground. […] My first principle expresses, qua principle of consciousness, only the actual fact through which the concept of representation is determined; the definition of representation, instead, expresses nothing but this concept. The principle grounds the definition without being in turn grounded by another definition. Its ground is consciousness, and [more precisely], the fact in consciousness which it expresses. […] My foundation is consciousness; and while consciousness itself is certainly not all that I offer as a scientific foundation, what I do offer rests on nothing else but consciousness. I do not pull my definition2 of representation out of thin air, but I ground it upon a principle which 109

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is determined through itself. And since it is so determined in its entirety, it keeps the definition that is determined through it free of any arbitrariness. […] I have called the principle of consciousness “self-determined”. By self-determined principle I understand one whose meaning cannot be determined through any higher proposition. The principle of consciousness can indeed be unfolded analytically (elucidated)—but only on the basis of what is (synthetically) determined through it, i.e., of what follows from it and from it alone, and in respect to which it is therefore presupposed as already established. Not only does the definition of consciousness say nothing that would not be originally included in it; it also says nothing that could be understood without presupposing what the principle expresses. This is the self-explanatory fact of consciousness. It determines the principle immediately, and it is not open to further analysis, or to the possibility that it might be reduced to characteristics simpler than those indicated by the principle itself. It is self-determined in the sense that any possible explanation of the concepts that it exhibits is only possible through it; for its part, on the other hand, it does not allow of any explanation, and it needs none. The principle of consciousness is determined through itself in its entirety; in this respect it stands apart from any other possible principle. […] Of course, the principle of consciousness would not be thought if it did not allow itself to be thought. But on this justification — i.e., because it can be thought, […] — its being thought still does not have a ground. It is not its logical truth but its real truth, not the possibility of thinking it but WHAT is thought in it, that makes the principle of consciousness the fundamental principle—not just a logical or formal principle, but a real or material one—of the science of the faculty of representation. And by being the principle of this science, which is the Philosophy of the Elements, it is also the fundamental principle of philosophy in general.

Notes 1. See my Contributions to the Rectification of Misconceptions Hitherto Held by Philosophers, Vol. 1, pp. 269ff. (Jena: Mauke, 1790). 2. By definition I understand a methodical, indeed scientific explanation. […]

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CHAPTER 4 JOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER (1759–1805)

INTRODUCTION Friedrich von Schiller is well known for his literary works and widely recognized as a literary giant. His intellectual stature is comparable to that of Goethe who is usually viewed as the greatest German literary figure of the modern era. However, Schiller’s philosophical achievements have been largely underplayed, and only recently have scholars begun to give serious consideration to his contributions to philosophy (Beiser 2005; Houlgate 2008; Schindler 2008; Baxley 2008 and 2010). A brilliant scholar, Schiller was a person of wide-ranging knowledge. Primarily a creative writer—lyric poet, imaginative historian, and dramatist—he had a genuine and deep interest in philosophy. He often referred to himself as a poet-thinker, and this description is well warranted. He was never content to remain bound by one discipline, and as a result his work traversed a great variety of themes and areas of intellectual inquiry. While his primary focus was on aesthetics, he also significantly contributed to such fields as ethics, metaphysics, and political theory, formulating ideas that continue to serve as a source of inspiration for contemporary philosophers. Schiller was born on November 10, 1759, in Marbach am Neckar, the Duchy Württemberg (now Germany), as the only son of Johann Kasper Schiller and his wife, Elisabeth Dorothea Kodweiβ. His father was a military doctor who served in the Seven Years’ War (1754–63). Named after King Frederick the Great, at home and among friends, young Schiller went by Fritz. He had five sisters, and all of the children grew up together attending the same primary school in a small town of Lorch, where Johann Kaspar Schiller settled with his family after the war ended. Soon, however, Schiller’s father became dissatisfied with his job in Lorch, and he moved the family to Ludwigsburg, where his teenage son, Friedrich, came to the attention of Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg. While Johann Kaspar had hoped that his son might enter the ministry, the Duke insisted that Friedrich attend the Karlsschule, an elite military academy founded by the Duke in Stuttgart. In 1773, Schiller entered the school with the intention to study law, but soon transitioned to medicine. This decision proved to be critical to Schiller’s intellectual development because the medical field in that period of Germany was dominated by neoplatonic thought. This initiated Schiller’s lifelong fascination with Greek culture, which is reflected in his philosophy just as prominently as it is in his prose and poetry. At the academy, Schiller was broadly educated in a variety of disciplines, developing a deep interest in moral philosophy and literature; among his favorite writers were William Shakespeare and Friedrich Klopstock. Fascinated by the ideals of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Classicism, he also read Plato, Rousseau,  and Goethe, whose works motivated his study into questions concerning the possibility of genuine humanity and freedom.

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After graduating from the Karlsschule in 1780, Schiller served in the military as a regimental doctor. This was also the point in his life where he began creative writing, and within a year, he produced his first play, The Robbers. It premiered in Mannheim in 1782 and was highly acclaimed by the public and critics alike, rocketing Schiller to instant fame. However, the drama’s controversial political content, in which many detected a severe critique of social injustice and revolutionary undertones, marked Schiller as a powerful enemy of Duke Karl Eugen. The Duke ordered to put the author under arrest and banned him from writing anything other than medical treatises. Forced to leave Württemberg, Schiller fled to Mannheim, where, in spite of living in poverty for the next several years, he continued writing. During this period, he produced a short piece called Letter from a Danish Traveller (1785) and the elegy The Gods of Greece (1788). As a great example of Schiller’s engagement with Greek culture, the elegy provides important insights into the author’s attitude toward Greeks, whom he praises for their spirituality and whose world he idealizes as the place where beauty and truth are united in an organic wholeness. The artistic force and emotional impact of The Gods of Greece was so powerful that the elegy soon became a classic poetic expression of the Greek ideal, which helped shaping the consciousness of the entire Romantic generation of Germans, including such thinkers as Hölderlin, Novalis, Schelling and Hegel. Desperate to secure a job that would provide at least relative financial stability, Schiller soon relocated to Leipzig, where he earned the patronage of Christian Gottfried Körner. A lawyer by training, Körner had great love for the arts. His home was a literary and musical salon, which was frequented by such guests as Herder, Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Schlegel brothers, Tieck, Novalis, and Mozart. The genuine interests in arts and culture that Schiller and Körner shared eventually grew into friendship and an intellectual bond, which the two maintained throughout the rest of their lives. Schiller commemorated Körner’s friendship as the “celebration of the brotherhood of man” in his poem “Ode to Joy” (1785), first published in Thalia, the epoch-making literary journal the poet edited. Featured in the choral finale of Ludwig van Beethoven’s legendary Ninth Symphony composed in 1823, Schiller’s poem is now enshrined, about two centuries later, in the “Anthem of Europe.” Although Schiller’s years in Leipzig turned out to be very productive, in 1787, he moved to Weimar, which was one of the most important intellectual centers of Prussia. There he became immersed, almost instantly, into the discourse of Weimar’s dynamic intellectual community enthusiastically engaged in the philosophical and literary debates greatly influenced by postKantian philosophy and the Early German Romanticism movement. In Weimar, Schiller met the important representatives of Weimar Classicism, Christoph Martin Wieland and Johann Gottfried von Herder, and, in September 1788, he was introduced to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the key figure of the movement. Schiller’s first meeting with Goethe, that occurred merely by chance, did not have any important implications, and it would be only about six years later, when the two met again at a scholarly talk in Jena that their ensuing discussion inaugurated their remarkable ten-year-long personal and mutually rewarding poetical-philosophical association and friendship. In Weimar, Schiller undertook an intensive historical study that he began during his last months in Leipzig. The breakout, in 1789, of the French Revolution that shook the very foundation of European culture and society only intensified his interest in history. While Schiller had already begun exploring the themes of social justice and liberty in his plays, dramas, and poems, the political unrest prompted him to tackle these issues in a more direct 112

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fashion. He started collecting material for his two-volume work titled History of the Thirty Years War published in 1792. His credentials and high profile in historical research allowed Schiller to secure, in 1789, a prestigious position of a professor of history at the University of Jena, a position for which he received endorsement from Goethe. Schiller taught at Jena for about ten years offering courses in history and in aesthetics. He also continued publishing his journal— now under the title New Thalia—regularly contributing articles on literature and aesthetics. A year after he assumed his professorship at Jena, he married Charlotte von Lengefeld, a young woman of aristocratic background, who bore him four children: two sons and two daughters. In 1792, Schiller took a break from most of his creative endeavors and began a serious study of Kant’s approach to ethics and aesthetics. During the next few years Schiller produced a number of philosophical essays—among them are “On the Sublime,” “On the Pathetic, and Of the Sublime—Toward the Further Elaboration of Some Kantian Ideas”—which reflect the process of developing his own theory of beauty that was meant to challenge and correct problems Schiller detected in Kant’s conception of beauty. In a letter to his friend Körner on December 21, 1792, he announced his attempt to write a work devoted to this topic and to be entitled Kallias or, On the Beautiful. During the next two months, in his letter exchange with Körner, Schiller would detail his understanding of beauty, contrasting it with different theories of the same. These letters, known as the “Kallias Letters,” are the culmination of a period of intensive study by Schiller of various theories of beauty, and they paved the way for his key philosophical writings “On Grace and Dignity” (1793) and the Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man (1795). In the former, Schiller discusses the possibility of an aesthetic approach to moral action, pioneering his conception of the “beautiful soul.” The latter further elaborates on aesthetic philosophy, largely motivated by Schiller’s thorough study of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. In 1795, Schiller launched a new monthly literary, philosophical, and cultural journal, Die Horen, where many of his philosophical and aesthetic essays were first released. Conceived as the journal of Weimar Classicism, this influential literary periodical published by the Cotta Verlag in Tűbingen from 1795 to 1797 served as a forum for wide literary and philosophical debates. Among its contributors were prominent figures in German culture, including Jacobi, Fichte, Herder, Goethe, the Humboldt brothers, Friedrich Schlegel, and many other intellectuals. During his time in Jena, Schiller also intensively worked on Wallenstein trilogy, the epic drama that is perhaps his greatest literary achievement. The first part of the trilogy was finished and performed in Weimar in 1798, the second and the third followed the next year, and the complete book version of Wallenstein was released in 1800. While Schiller’s fame and recognition among both his fellow intellectuals and the broad public continued to grow, his health began to decline. He suffered from a number of health issues that persisted for the rest of his life. At the end of 1799, he returned to Weimar and devoted himself to creative writing, and as a result, produced a great number of now wellknown dramas and plays, such as Maria Stuart (1800), The Maid of Orleans (1801), The Bride of Messina (1803), and Wilhelm Tell (1804). However, this extremely productive period did not last long. Schiller’s health steadily deteriorated, and he died on May 9, 1805, at the age of forty-five. * * * 113

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While Schiller’s direct engagement with philosophy spans a time period of less than a decade, his theoretical writings of the 1790s—particularly his essays “On the Cause of Pleasure in Tragic Objects,” “On the Art of Tragedy,” “On Grace and Dignity,” as well as the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and “Kallias Letters” on Beauty—offer valuable insights into central questions of a number of philosophical fields. In spite of lacking formal philosophical training, Schiller occupies a recognizable and important place in the history of aesthetics; he also greatly contributed to ethics. Profoundly influenced by Kant’s philosophy, he never considered himself a strict disciple of Kant. He was attracted to Kant’s moral approach to art, yet he rejected much of his asceticism and moral rigor—for Schiller, love for God had always been higher than obedience to universal law. Indebted to Kant for his thorough account of aesthetic judgment and admittedly taking from him ideas concerning the sublime and the beautiful, in his own theory of beauty Schiller went well beyond Kant and his aesthetics advances Kant’s. After beginning his philosophical career with a careful study of Kant, especially Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, Schiller grew unsatisfied with Kant’s treatment of beauty and aesthetic judgment (“judgment of taste”). He found Kant’s claim that there could be no objective principle of beauty and Kant’s insistence that aesthetic experience should be associated with subjective feeling of pleasure, rather than with any property of the object itself, ungrounded. In his view, the subjective-rational theory of beauty developed by Kant, while correctly distinguishing between the logical and the beautiful, “misses fully the concept of beauty” by emphasizing its non-objective character. Schiller, recognizing the need to give reasons for aesthetic judgment, began relating the latter to objective qualities. In the “Kallias Letters” (1793), he proposed a new sensuous-objective theory of beauty, which would overcome Kant’s own. Attempting to clarify the nature of aesthetic judgment, Schiller relied on Kant’s distinction between theoretical and practical reason. While theoretical reason is a faculty that allows one to gain knowledge, practical reason is associated with our ability to act. Similar to moral judgment, aesthetic judgment is for Schiller a product of practical reason, whose primary principle is autonomy or freedom. In his theory, such properties as proportionality, symmetry, balance and harmony do not originate beauty. They are rather characteristics of the beautiful. Beauty is not something established by the sensuous perfection of an object. Instead, this is the freedom with which its sensuous perfection is expressed. As Schiller puts it, “Beauty is nothing less than freedom in appearance” (Schiller 2003, 152). What Schiller means by this is that in the case of beauty, freedom is actually appearing, becoming evident, manifesting itself. Beauty is a real experience of freedom encountered through perceptions. Thus, building on the Kantian conception of freedom, Schiller constructed his own, “antimetaphysical theory” of aesthetic freedom. Seeking “an objective aesthetic” (Beiser 2005, 5) and rejecting the “perfection-aesthetics” of Baumgarten and Mendelssohn, Schiller revealed the full significance of beauty (Beiser 2005, 60), which was for him more than just an aesthetic ideal. Thus by acknowledging the existence of not only moral but also aesthetic freedom, he was able to provide a complete account of moral action. He insisted that “a free action is a beautiful action” and that “the highest perfection of character in a person is moral beauty brought about by the fact that  duty has become its nature” (Schiller 2003, 159). Although Schiller’s deduction of beauty in the “Kallias Letters” has some argumentative flaws, his claim that aesthetic judgment belonged to the realm of practical rather than theoretical reason 114

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provided the necessary framework for his later attempt to overcome the divide between the moral and aesthetic. In addition, his convincing insistence on the objective character of beauty offered a tenable alternative to Kant’s subjectivist account of aesthetic experience (Schindler 2008, 85ff). In the essay “On Grace and Dignity” (1793) Schiller discussed one of the most controversial elements of Kant’s conception of moral agency, namely the question of the possibility of combining duty and inclination in the moral life. Schiller praised Kant for restoring “healthy reason” to moral philosophy (Schiller 1988, 363), but he also found the result of this restoration of reason problematic. His focus was on the role of inclination—the sensuous, emotive side of human nature—in our assessment of moral worth. Criticizing Kant, for whom “inclination is a very ribald companion to moral sentiment, and pleasure a regrettable supplement to moral principles” (Schiller 1988, 364), Schiller called moral commands that are unsupported by inclination “ineffective.” He described pleasure and pain as “the only springs which set the instincts in motion,” insisting that obedience to reason must become “an object of inclination.” Schiller’s central argument here is that the full conception of moral life cannot be attained by focusing on duty alone. It is not sufficient to focus merely on what we ought, or are obligated to do, as Kant advocated. Only if we recognize the moral value of inclinations and their contribution to moral agency can we sustain a more rich conception of moral life (Deligiorgi 2006, 8). Schiller’s aim was to formulate a coherent conception of moral (righteous) action that accounts for this positive role of inclination. His own solution was to establish harmony between inclination and duty, which he attempted to accomplish by introducing the notion of grace. Graceful actions, Schiller claimed, while undertaken deliberately, in direct response to our free (rational) volition, appear to be natural and spontaneous. These “sympathetic movements” occur “at the behest” of moral sentiment as opposed to pure natural instinct or involuntary actions (Deligiorgi 2006, 13). Schiller described such actions as the expression of man’s moral character and moral “inner soul.” Thus, grace possesses a compelling force that has moral significance, which is established not by a moral imperative, but rather by man’s own “moral attitude.” Schiller called a person who lives in this state of grace a “beautiful soul.” A beautiful soul is able to obey reason “with joy,” and not “discard it like a burden.” As one who achieved “mastery of instinct,” this person is in “accord with himself.” For Schiller, the beautiful soul is an ideal of human harmony, which presents the natural “happy contingency” of duty and inclination (Beiser 2005, 100, 158). Balance among the conflicting drives is the key to achieving grace, and the closer one comes to attaining that balance, the fuller one’s moral life becomes. Schiller, however, acknowledged that circumstances sometimes make that balance impossible. Yet this, he claimed, creates an opportunity for man’s “moral greatness” that he associated with dignity. Because man is a natural creature, he has bodily needs which ail him from birth, and he cannot, at any point, deny feeling their effects. Man, however, is more than a beast. Whereas the animal must follow its instincts in every circumstance, man has reason and thus the ability to choose whether to do so. For instance, if the animal is hungry, it cannot choose not to eat, yet a human can purposely starve himself, should he decide to do so. Similarly, the animal’s response to pain is guided purely by its instinct, while humans can resist the force of instinct and act otherwise. Schiller believed that this “mastery of instinct by moral force is freedom of mind, and dignity is the name of its epiphany” (Schiller 1988, 374). As an example, Schiller 115

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described a person who was experiencing painful emotion. While certain aspects of his body reflect his suffering, others do not. His muscles are cramped, but his brow is not burrowed; his chest is swollen, yet his eyes are not tearing. This “composure” in the midst of pain “proves the existence and influence of a force which is independent of suffering” (Schiller 1988, 376). It is this force that defines dignity. Man chooses to express dignity, but this choice can only be made when he is put in a position that forces him to subdue virulent and overwhelming emotions. Schiller made it clear that dignity has to do only with the (cultivated) form of emotion, not the content. Dignity is a response, not a stimulus. Both grace and dignity proceed from freedom. Schiller’s primary distinction between the two qualities is that “grace lies in the freedom of willful movements; dignity in mastery over unwillful movements” (Schiller 1988, 377). Schiller believed that the two complement one another. He claimed that only the person in whom grace and dignity are united manifests the complete expression of humanity (Schiller 2005, 163), which is for him “to be a moral creature.” By making grace and dignity a focus of his discussion, Schiller thus revealed the foundation of moral character, providing further insight into that which is uniquely human. “On Grace and Dignity” has been a focus of an extensive discussion among Kantian scholars as a plausible response to Kant’s problematic account of moral agency and thus as a possible contribution to contemporary theories of moral psychology. This is also considered a reasonable argument for the possibility of a Kantian-based ethics of character (Baxley 2010; Deligiorgi 2011). Despite the openly stated disagreement with Kant’s conception of moral agency, which would underplay the role of inclination in moral action, in “On Grace and Dignity,” Schiller did not attempt to depart from Kant’s (rational) moral psychology. This is the path that Schiller pursued in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (often referred to simply as Aesthetic Letters), where he remarked that Kant’s moral theory can be put into practice only once it touches the domain of the “heart” and “feeling.” Originally written in a correspondence between Schiller and the Danish prince Friedrich Christian, the Aesthetic Letters were published in Schiller’s journal Die Horen in 1795. At the time, political philosophers who adhered to the tradition of Rousseau and Locke were scrambling to make sense of the French Revolution. What was to be the pinnacle of enlightenment democracy had devolved into a bloody terror, and it was baffling to see every attempt at government fail. So this lead many, including Schiller, to ask the obvious question: how are men to form a stable, sustainable state? Schiller did not believe that a mere change of circumstances is the ultimate cure for social ills. Human progress could only occur if man first finds harmony among the conflicting drives within himself. Thus, Schiller’s primary concern was the development of man toward the free and truly moral individual. For him, man’s surroundings, especially the art produced by a genuinely human culture, is what facilitated the realization of man’s moral sensibilities. However, the individual has to come to terms with his own limitations before he can develop an accurate view of reality. According to Schiller, man’s nature is fractured into two opposing “forces” or drives (he also calls them “impulses”): the sense drive and the form drive. The sense drive is linked to man’s physical existence, and its focus is on man’s finite being and his needs in the present. The form drive proceeds from man’s rational nature, and its intent is to find meaning in the world 116

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around him by “bring[ing] harmony into the diversity of his manifestations.” This drive is responsible for the establishment of universal laws that explain the purpose of man’s existence, and it seeks a consistent set of principles that govern the actions taken by man. An individual dominated by this drive may become so ensconced in the realm of thought that he may resist action until he finds a justification for it. Schiller acknowledged that the different orientation of these two drives could make it appear as if they are destined to eternal opposition, fighting within man and forcing him to decide the one to which he will give credence. However, Schiller suggested that when a man experiences both these drives in balance, a new drive can awaken. He calls it “the play impulse” or “the play drive.” That is, the drive that ultimately puts man on the path toward true and genuine freedom. Holding the first two drives in harmony, the play drive “frees humans of the domination of each” by reconciling the ideas of reason with the interests of the senses (Schiller 1993, 127). How does this play drive arise? According to Schiller, this is achieved in the contemplation of that which is beautiful. Beauty can be the object of the play drive precisely because it is neither solely a matter of life, which is the object of the sense drive nor of “shape” or form, which comprises the object of the form drive. Instead, it is an object of both, a combination which Schiller deemed “living shape” or “living form.” The true “living form,” however, is an ideal, which could never be attained in reality. Yet throughout history man had attempted to produce living form, with varying degrees of success. According to Schiller the culture which had come closest to achieving this ideal was the Greek’s. Greek art did not only represent both what man is and what man should be, but it also struck that balance in a way no culture since had managed to replicate. Thus, Schiller concluded that beauty is the eternal pursuit of man, and the path toward that goal is just as essential as the goal itself. Furthermore, he claimed that “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom” and “if man is ever to solve the problems of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic” (Schiller 1993, 90). In the Aesthetical Letters, Schiller attacked Kant’s rigorous rational morality that largely suppresses the role of the sensuous in human moral life. Schiller’s solution to Kant’s challenge was to educate the emotions and sensuous impulses of man, in order to bring them into harmony with reason and eventually elevate man to morality. On this way, man must pass through “the aesthetic,” moving from the mere physical “state of brute nature,” when man is still almost entirely constrained by the sense drive and thus determined by his selfish, infantile emotions, to the rational (moral) state, where the formal drive takes over and when man becomes enthralled by the world of thought. Schiller emphasized the crucial role of “the aesthetic condition” where man “shakes off ” the power of the physical, the control of which he obtains only in the “moral state.” He explained that overcoming the physical and sensuous is possible only through contemplation. Beauty is that which is to be contemplated. Beautiful objects allow man to discover his ability to contemplate and access his formal drive. Schiller explained that beautiful objects can put humans in the state in which we realize our highest potential. Thus beauty can finally serve its true purpose and guide man toward complete humanity, for “it is at once a state of our being and an activity we perform.” The significance of the aesthetic stage is thus defined by its function. It restores “the harmony of man,” so he can fully exercise his own volition. Sensuous man, then, must become aesthetic man before he can be moral man. This transformation is not 117

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something that happens instantly and by chance. Schiller suggested that this process continues throughout an entire human life. A human being who reaches the state of harmony is, for Schiller, a “beautiful soul.” Furthermore, since only such a person is truly free, durable political freedom can be attained by deliberately fostering such an aesthetical education of man’s emotions and inclinations among the population. This is the way of man’s cultivation toward humanity. Yet the exact process of achieving a completed humanity is one that even Schiller admitted has no fully discernible pathway. He goes as far as to say that man decides to explore the aesthetic “on the wings of fancy.” What is clear, however, is that the one essential component of man’s cultivation is beauty. Hence, the primary task of education is to subject all the spheres of human behavior “to laws of beauty.” Man must encounter and acknowledge beauty if he is to ever have a hope of establishing a lasting society, for, according to Schiller, “it may be his needs that drive man into society, and reason that implants within him the principles of social behavior, beauty alone can confer upon him a social character” (Schiller 1993, 176). Schiller’s powerful call for aesthetic education and his emphasis on the crucial role of aesthetic experience and art in the realization of human freedom have been enormously influential. They have been steadily present in scholarly debates on philosophy of art, moral and political philosophy. Many insights that Schiller developed in the Aesthetic Letters were adopted into the ideas and theories by philosophers of such diverse positions as German idealism and Romanticism (especially Hegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt), British Romanticism, American pragmatism (Charles Sanders Peirce), hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer), and the Frankfurt School (Jürgen Habermas). Schiller’s recasting of philosophy as aesthetics and the existing correlation between the aesthetic and the ethical have continued to affect the philosophical debates in philosophy of art, aesthetics, and political philosophy.

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Chronology of Friedrich Schiller’s Life and Works 1759

November 10: Born in Marbach am Neckar, the Württemberg.

1763

The family settles in Lorch, where young Schiller attends a primary school.

1773

Enrolls in Duke Karl Eugen’s Military Academy (Karlsschule) in Stuttgart; begins studying law and later switch to medicine.

1780

Graduates from the Karlsschule with the medical dissertation On the Connection Between the Animal and Spiritual Natures of Man.



Begins the career of a regimental doctor.

1781

Publishes in Stuttgart (at his own expense) The Robbers. A Play.

1782

January 13: First performance of The Robbers in Manheim.



September 22: Flees from Stuttgart to Mannheim.

1783

August: Signs a one-year contract with Mannheim theater to deliver three plays.

1784

The contract with the Mannheim theater runs out;



Founds his journal Rheinische Thalia (later Thalia).

1785

The first issue of the Rheinische Thalia contains the first draft of Schiller’s essay “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution.”



May: Moves to Leipzig (and travels to Dresden).



Works on Don Carlos.



Publication of The Danish Traveler.

1786

Publishes a series of poems, including “Ode to Joy,” Philosophical Letters in the second and third issues of the Thalia.



April: Begins intensive study of history.

1787

May: Finishes the book version of Don Carlos.



July: Moves to Weimar.



Meets Wieland and Herder.



August: First performance of Don Carlos in Hamburg.

1788

March: Publication of “The Gods of Greece.”



Writes reviews for Wieland’s Der teutsche Merkur.



September 7: Meets Goethe for the first time by chance.



October: Publishes History of the Revolt of the Netherland.

1789

January: Publishes a review of Goethe’s Iphigenia.



Publication of The Artists.



May: Appointed as a professor of History at the University of Jena.



Meets Wilhelm von Humboldt for the first time.



Engagement to Charlotte von Lengefeld. 119

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1790

Lectures at Jena on history and aesthetics.



Marriage to Charlotte von Lengefeld.



Begins work on his History of the Thirty Years War.

1791

Attack of a serious illness (probably of a severe type of pneumonia), from which he recovers only partially and recurrences of which eventually leads to his death.

1792 Publishes History of the 30 Years War and On the Art of Tragedy.

Begins serious study of Kant.

1793

January–February: A letter exchange with Christian Gottfried Körner (“Kallias Letters”) on beauty in preparation of his “Kallias” project.



“On Grace and Dignity” and “Of the Sublime” are published in the Neue Thalia.



Publication of “On the Pathetic.”



September 14: His son Karl is born in Ludwigsburg.

1794

Contract with the publisher Cotta (Cotta Verlag) for the journal Die Horen.



July 20: Meeting with Goethe at a scientific lecture in Jena and beginning collaboration and friendship with him.

1795

Publication of Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in Die Horen.



Writes numerous short poems.



November–December, Publication of “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” in three issues of Die Horen.

1796

Begins publishing a literary journal, Musenalmanach, which appeared until 1800, with contributions by Goethe, Herded,  Ludwig Tieck,  Hölderlin  and  August Wilhelm Schlegel.



July 11: Second son Ernst is born.

1797

End of Die Horen.

1798

October 12: First performance of the first part of the Wallenstein trilogy in Weimar.

1799

January 30: First performance of Die Piccolomini in Weimar.



October 11: Daughter Karoline is born.



December, Moves with his family from Jena to Weimar.

1800

June 14: First performance of Maria Stuart in Weimar.



Publishes the book version of Wallenstein.

1801

September 11: First performance of The Maid of Orleans in Leipzig.

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1802

Receives patent of nobility (the nobiliary addition “von” to his name) from the Duke of Saxe-Weimar.

1803

March 19: First performance of The Bride of Messina in Weimar.



Publication of The Pilgrim and Nostalgia.

1804

March 17: First performance of Wilhelm Tell in Weimar.



July 25: Daughter Emilie is born.

1805

May 9: Dies in Weimar, probably from tuberculosis.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Schiller’s Writings A.1.  German Edition

Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe. 1943ff. Edited by Julius Petersen und Gerhard Fricke, 43 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger. A.2.  In English (selected editions)

Schiller, F. 1988. “On Grace and Dignity,” translated by William Wertz, in Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Vol. II. Washington DC: Schiller Institute. Schiller, F. 1993. Essays, edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom and Walter Hinderer. New York: Continuum. Schiller, F. 2003. “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner,” translated by Stefan Bird-Polan, in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, edited by J. M. Bernstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 145–83. Schiller, F. 2005. “On Grace and Dignity,” translated by Jane V. Curran, in Schiller’s ‘On Grace and Dignity’ in Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation, edited by Jane V. Curran and Christophe Fricker. Rochester: Camden House, 123–70. B.  Selected Commentaries

Baxley, A. M. 2008. “Pleasure, Freedom and Grace: Schiller’s ‘Completion’ of Kant’s Ethics,” Inquiry, 51 (1): 1–15. Baxley, A. M. 2010. “The Aesthetics of Morality: Schiller’s Critique of Kantian Rationalism,” Philosophy Compass, 5 (12): 1084–95. Beiser, F. C. 2005. Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curran, J. V. and C. Fricker (eds.). 2005. Schiller’s ‘On Grace and Dignity’ in Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation. Rochester: Camden House. Dahlstrom, D. O. 2008. “The Ethical and Political Legacy of Aesthetics: Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind’,” in Philosophical Legacies: Essays on the Thought of Kant, Hegel, and Their Contemporaries, edited by D. O. Dahlstrom. Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 93–102. Deligiorgi, K. 2006. “Grace as Guide to Morals? Schiller’s Aesthetic Turn in Ethics,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 23 (1): 1–20. Deligiorgi, K. 2011. “The Proper Telos of Life: Schiller, Kant, and Having Autonomy as an End,” Inquiry, 54 (5): 494–511. High, J. L., N. Martin, and N. Oellers (eds.). 2011. Who Is this Schiller Now? Essays on his Reception and Significance. Rochester: Camden House. Houlgate, S. 2008. “Schiller and the Dance of Beauty,” Inquiry, 51 (1): 37–49. Kooy, M. J. 2002. Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education. New York: Palgrave.

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Martinson, Steven D. (ed.). 2005. A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller. Rochester: Camden House. Powell, J. and M. del Rosario Acosta (eds.). 2018. Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Friedrich Schiller and Philosophy, Albany: State University of New York Press. Schindler, D. C. 2008. “An Aesthetics of Freedom: Friedrich Schiller’s Breakthrough Beyond Subjectivism,” Yearbook of Irish Philosophical Society, 2008: 84–109.

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FROM “KALLIAS OR CONCERNING BEAUTY: LETTERS TO GOTTFRIED KÖRNER” (1793) *

Jena, Feb. 8 [Friday] 1793

[. . .] Kant is certainly right in saying that the beautiful pleases without a concept. I can have found an object beautiful for quite a while before I am able to articulate the unity of its manifold, and to determine what power dominates it. By the way, I am speaking here mostly as a Kantian, since it is possible that in the end my theory will not remain immune to this criticism either. In order to lead you to my theory, I must take a double path; one very entertaining and easy path, through experience, and a very dull one, through derivations from reason. Let me begin with the latter; once it has been completed, the rest will be all the more pleasant. We behave towards nature (as appearance) either passively or actively or as both passive and active. Passively if we merely experience nature’s effects; actively, if we determine its effects; both at once, if we represent nature to ourselves. There are two ways of representing appearances. We are either intentionally directed towards their cognition; we observe [beobachten] them; or we allow things to invite us to represent them. We merely watch [betrachten] them. When we watch appearances we are passive in that we receive impressions: active, in that we subject these impressions to our forms of reason (this is postulated from logic). For appearances must appear to representation to accord with the formal conditions of representation (since it is this which makes them into appearances), they must come from us, the subject. All representations are a manifold or matter; the way of connecting this manifold is its form. Sense [Sinn] provides the manifold; reason provides the connection (in the most extended sense), since reason is the power of connection. If a manifold is given to the senses, reason attempts to give it its form, that is, to connect it according to laws. The form of reason is the manner in which it manifests its connective power. There are two main manifestations of this connective power and as many main forms of reason. Reason connects either representation with representation to gain knowledge (theoretical reason) or representation with the will in order to act (practical reason). Just as there are two different forms of reason, there are two types of material for each of these forms. Theoretical reason applies its form to representations and these can be subdivided into immediate (intuitions) and mediated (concepts) types. The former are given through the senses, the latter are given by reason itself (although not without help from the senses). In

*

From Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. by J.M. Bernstein, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 148–59.

From “Kallias or Concerning Beauty”

the first, intuition, it is up to chance whether they agree with the form of reason; agreement is, however, necessary in concepts if they are not to negate [aufheben] each other. The latter therefore agree with their form, but the former are surprised if they find agreement. The same goes for practical (acting) reason. It applies its form to action which can be subdivided into either free or unfree acts, acts either through or without reason. Practical reason demands from the first kind of acts the same thing theoretical reason demands from concepts. It is thus necessary that a free act agree with the form of practical reason; agreement of unfree action with this form is contingent. One is thus correct in calling those representations which do not come from theoretical reason, and yet agree with its form, imitations of concepts. Acts which do not come from practical reason and still agree with its form are imitations of free actions; in short, one can call both types imitations (analoga) of reason. A concept cannot be an imitation of reason, since it exists through reason and reason cannot imitate itself; it cannot be merely analogous to reason, it must be truly in accordance with reason. A willed act cannot be merely analogous to freedom, it must – or at least ought to – be truly free. A mechanical effect (any effect brought about by the laws of nature) on the other hand, can never be truly free, but can be judged to be merely analogous to freedom. [. . .] Theoretical reason aims at knowledge. By subsuming a given object under its form, it examines whether knowledge can be got from it, i.e., whether it can be connected with a representation we already have. The given representation is either a concept or an intuition. If it is a concept, it refers to reason already in its very origin, and the connection which already exists is merely expressed. A clock, for example, is such a representation. One evaluates it only according to the concept through which it has come about. Reason thus needs merely to discover that the given representation is a concept in order to decide whether it agrees with its form. […] I imagine you will be surprised not to find the beautiful under the rubric of theoretical reason and that this will worry you a great deal. But I cannot help you, beauty can certainly not be found in theoretical reason since it is independent of concepts; and since beauty must still be counted in the family of reason, and practical reason is all there is besides theoretical reason, we will have to search and find beauty there. […] Practical reason abstracts from all knowledge and has to do only with the determination of the will, with inner actions. Practical reason and determination of the will from mere reason, are one and the same. The form of practical reason is the immediate relation of the will to the representations of reason, that is, to the exclusion of every external principle of determination; for a will which is not determined purely by the form of practical reason is determined from outside, by what is material and heteronomous. To adapt or imitate the form of practical reason thus merely means not to be determined from the outside but from within, to be determined autonomously or to appear to be determined thus. Now, practical reason, just like theoretical reason, is capable of exerting its form on that which is through it (free actions), as well as on what is not through it (natural effects). If practical reason applies its form to an act of will, it merely determines what it is; reason says whether the action is what it wants to be and ought to be. Every moral action is of this type. It is a product of pure will, that is, a will determined by mere form, and autonomously, 125

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and as soon as reason recognizes it as such, as soon as it knows that it is an action of a pure will, it becomes evident by itself that it accords with the form of practical reason, for it is fully identical with it. If the object to which practical reason wishes to apply its form is not produced by the will or practical reason, practical reason acts just like theoretical reason acted with intuitions which appeared with similarity to reason. Reason lends the object (regulative and not, as with moral judgements, constitutive) a power to determine itself, a will, and then examines the object under the form of that will (not its will, since this would yield a moral judgement). Reason says of the object whether it is what it is, through its pure will, that is, through its self-determining power; for a pure will and the form of practical reason are one and the same. Reason demands imperatively of acts of will, or moral acts, that they exist through the pure form of reason; reason can only wish (not demand) that natural effects be through themselves, that they show autonomy. (Let me here reiterate that practical reason absolutely cannot demand that the object be constituted through it, through practical reason; for then the object would not be constituted through itself, would not be autonomous but through something external, [since every determination of reason acts as external, as heteronomous to it] but through a foreign will.) Pure self-determination in general is the form of practical reason. When a rational being acts, it must act on the basis of pure reason if it is to show selfdetermination. If a mere natural being acts, it must act from pure nature if it is to show selfdetermination; for the self of the rational being is reason, while the self of the natural being is nature. If practical reason observes of a natural being that it determines itself, it ascribes to it (just as theoretical reason would, under similar circumstances, ascribe similarity to the understanding [Vernunftfähigkeit]) similarity to freedom [Freiheitsähnlichkeit] or just freedom. But since this freedom is merely lent to the object by reason, since freedom as such can never be given to the senses and nothing can be free other than what is supra-sensible – in short, it is all that matters here that the object appears as free not that it really is so; thus this analogy of the object with the form of practical reason is not freedom indeed but merely freedom in appearance, autonomy in appearance. This gives rise to a fourfold of judgement and correspondingly a fourfold of classifications of represented appearances. Judgement from concepts according to the form of knowledge is logical: judgement from intuitions according to this same form is teleological. A judgement of free effects (moral action) according to the form of a free will is moral; a judgement of unfree effects according to the form of the free will is aesthetic. The agreement between a concept and a form of knowledge is in accordance with the understanding [Vernunftmäßig] (truth, purposiveness, perfection are merely terms for this), the analogy of an intuition with a form of knowledge is similarity to the understanding [Vernunftfähigkeit] (I would like to call/them Teleophanie, Logophanie), the agreement of an action with the form of pure will is morality [Sittlichkeit]. The analogy of an appearance with the form of pure will or freedom is beauty (in its most general sense). Beauty is thus nothing less than freedom in appearance. […] Jena, the 18. February [Monday] 1793 126

From “Kallias or Concerning Beauty”

[. . .] Let me start by remarking only the following: (1) My principle of beauty has, of course, been only subjective up to now since I have only been arguing from reason itself and have not discussed any objects yet. But it is no more subjective than all that can be got a priori out of reason. It goes without saying both that there must be something in the object itself which makes it possible to apply the principle to it, and that I have the obligation to show this. But that this something (the being-determinedthrough-itself of the thing) must be noticed by reason, and is moreover noticed only by chance, this stems necessarily from the essence of reason, and to this extent, it can only be explained subjectively. I do, however, hope to show adequately that beauty is an objective quality. (2) I must remark that to give a concept of beauty and to be moved by beauty are two completely different things. I would never think of denying that a concept of beauty could be given, since I myself am giving one, but with Kant, I deny that beauty pleases through a concept. To please through a concept presupposes the existence of the concept before the feeling of pleasure arises in the mind [Gemüt], just as is the case with perfection, truth and morality; although the presupposition of these three objects does not appear with the same level of clarity. The fact that our pleasure in beauty does not depend on a pre-existing concept is made clear by the fact that we are still searching for one. (3) You say that beauty cannot be deduced from morality but that both must be deduced from a common, higher principle. I did not expect this objection after what I just said, since I am so far away from deducing beauty from morality that I almost consider the two incompatible. Morality is determination through pure reason, beauty, as a quality of appearances, is determination through pure nature. Determination through reason, perceived as an appearance, is rather the negation of beauty, since the determination by reason of a product that appears is true heteronomy. The higher principle which you demand has been found and had been presented irrefutably. It subsumes beauty and morality under it, just as you require. This principle is none other than existence out of pure form. […] It is certain that no mortal has spoken a greater word than this Kantian word, which also encapsulates his whole philosophy: determine yourself from within yourself. The same goes for theoretical philosophy: nature stands under the laws of the understanding. This great idea of self-determination resonates back at us from certain appearances of nature, and we call it beauty. […] If an object appears in the sense-world as determined only by itself, it will appear to the senses such that one cannot detect the influence of matter or purpose, it will thus be judged to be an analogy of the pure determination of the will (but not as a product of the will). Since only a will which can determine itself according to mere form can be called free, such a form in the sense-world which appears merely through itself, is an exhibition of freedom; and an exhibition of an idea is something which is connected with intuition in such a way that they share one rule of knowledge. Freedom in appearance is thus nothing but the self-determination of a thing insofar as it is available to intuition. One sets it against every outside determination, just as one sets moral action against every determination of material reasons. An object seems less free, however, as soon as one discovers its determination in form which comes either from a physical power or from intelligible ends; for now the determination lies not in the object but outside of it, and it is no more beautiful than an action with an end is moral. 127

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If the judgement of taste is to be absolutely pure, one must completely abstract from it the intrinsic (practical or theoretical) worth of the beautiful object, out of what matter it is formed and what purpose it might serve. May it be what it will! As soon as we make an aesthetic judgement of it, we only want to know if it is what it is through itself. We are so little concerned with its logical constitution that we even ascribe its ‘independence from ends and rules as the highest attribute’. – Not as though purposefulness and regularity were incompatible with the beautiful in themselves; every beautiful object must subject itself to rules: but rather because the visible influences of the end and of a rule appear as constraints and bring along heteronomy in the object. The beautiful object may, and even must, be rule-governed, but it must appear as free of rules. [. . .] A form is beautiful, one might say, if it demands no explanation, or if it explains itself without a concept. [. . .] Beauty always refers to practical reason because freedom cannot be a concept of theoretical reason, since it refers merely to the form and not the material. A moral end belongs to either substance [Materie] or content, and not to mere form. To highlight this difference, which seems to have provoked your objection, I will add this: practical reason requires self-determination. Self-determination of the rational is pure determination of reason, morality; self-determination of the sense-world is pure determination of nature, beauty. [. . .] Moral beauty is a concept to which something [must] correspond in experience even though beauty only exists in appearance. There is no better empirical proof of the truth of my theory of beauty than to show you that even the wrong use of this word only occurs in cases in which freedom shows itself in appearance. I will […] tell you a story. ‘A man has happened upon some robbers who have undressed him and have thrown him out onto the street in the bitter cold. ‘A traveller passes by to whom he complains of his lot and whom he begs for help. “I suffer with you”, says the moved traveller, “and I will gladly give you what I have. I only request that you do not ask for any of my services, since your appearance revolts me. Here come some people, give them this purse and they will help you.” – “That is well meant”, said the wounded man, “but one must also be able to see the suffering if duty to humanity [Menschenpflicht] requires it. Reaching for your purse is not worth half as much as doing a little violence to your tender senses.”’ What was this action? It was neither useful, morally generous nor beautiful. It was merely impulsive, kind-hearted out of affect. ‘A second traveller appears and the wounded man renews his plea. This second man does not want to part with his money but still wants to fulfil his duty to humanity. “I will lose making a guilder if I spend time with you.” he says. “If you will compensate me for the time I spend with you, I will load you onto my shoulders and carry you to a monastery which is only an hour away.” – “That is a clever answer”, the other says. “But one must say that readiness to help does not well become you. I see a courier over there who will give me the help for free that you wanted a guilder for.”’ And what was this action? It was neither generous nor dutiful, neither magnanimous nor beautiful. It was merely useful. 128

From “Kallias or Concerning Beauty”

‘The third traveller stands silently as the wounded man repeats the story of his misfortune. After the story has been told the man stands there contemplatively and battling with himself. “It will be difficult for me”, he says at last, “to separate myself from my coat, which is the only protection for my sick body, and to leave you my horse since my powers are at an end. But duty commands that I serve you. Get onto my horse and wrap yourself in my coat and I will lead you to a place where you will find help.” – “I thank you, good man, for your honest opinion”, the other replies, “but you shall not suffer on my behalf since you yourself are in need. Over there I see two strong men who will provide the help that you could not readily furnish.”’ This action was purely moral (but also no more than that), because it occurred against the interests of the senses, out of pure respect for the law. ‘Now the two men approach the wounded man and start asking him about his misfortune. No sooner has he opened his mouth than both shout with surprise: “It’s him! It’s the one we are looking for.” The wounded man recognizes them and becomes afraid. It is revealed that both recognize in him a sworn enemy and the originator of their own misfortunes, and have travelled after him to revenge themselves on him violently. “So satisfy your hatred and take your revenge”, the wounded man says, “I expect only death and not help from you.” – “No”, responds one of them, “so that you see who we are and who you are, take these clothes and cover yourself. We will pull you up between us and take you to a place where you will find help.” – “Generous enemy”, calls the wounded man full of remorse, “you shame me and disarm my hatred: come embrace me and complete your charity by forgiving me.” – “Calm yourself, friend”, the other responds frostily, “I help you not because I forgive you but because you are wretched.” – “So take back your clothes”, calls the unhappy man, as he throws them from himself. “May become of me what will. I would rather die a miserable death than to owe such an enemy my life.”’ ‘As he gets up and tries to move away, he sees a fifth traveller who is carrying a heavy load approaching. “I have been deceived so many times”, he thinks to himself, “and this one does not seem like someone who would help me. I will let him pass.” As soon as the wanderer sees him, he lays down his load. “I see”, he says of his own accord, “that you are wounded and tired. The next village is far and you will bleed to death ere you arrive there. Climb onto my back and I will take you there.” – “But what will become of your load which you leave here on the open road?” – “That I don’t know, and it concerns me little”, says the carrier. “I do know, however, that you need help and that I am obliged to give it to you.”’ [. . .] 19. February 1793

[…] The beauty of the fifth action must lie in that characteristic which sets it apart from all the previous ones. (1) All five wanted to help; (2) most of them chose an adequate means for the job; (3) several of them were willing to have it cost them something; (4) some overcome their own self-interest in order to help. One of them acted out of purest moral purpose. But only the fifth acted without solicitation, without considering the action, and disregarding the cost to himself. Only the fifth forgot himself in his action and ‘fulfilled his duty with the ease of someone acting out of mere instinct’. – Thus, a moral action would be a beautiful action only if it appears as

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an immediate [sich selbst ergebenden] outcome of nature. In a word: a free action is a beautiful action, if the autonomy of the mind and autonomy of appearance coincide. For this reason the highest perfection of character in a person is moral beauty brought about by the fact that duty has become its nature. [. . .] You can see from this little sample that my theory of beauty will hardly be threatened by experience. I challenge you to find a single theory among explanations of beauty, Kant’s theory included, which resolves the problem of the wrong use of [the term] beauty as well as I hope to have done here.

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FROM LETTERS ON THE AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MAN (1795) *

Eleventh Letter When abstraction rises to the highest level it can possibly attain, it arrives at two ultimate concepts before which it must halt and recognize that here it has reached its limits. It distinguishes in man something that endures and something that constantly changes. That which endures it calls his person, that which changes, his condition. Person and condition—the self and its determining attributes—which in the absolute being we think of as one and the same, are in the finite being eternally two. Amid all persistence of the person, the condition changes; amid all the changes of condition, the person persists. We pass from rest to activity, from passion to indifference, from agreement to contradiction; but we remain, and what proceeds directly from us remains too. [. . .] The person therefore must be its own ground; for what persists cannot proceed from what changes. And so we would, in the first place, have the idea of absolute being grounded upon itself, that is to say, freedom. [. . .] To say that man has first to become, is no objection; for man is not just person pure and simple, but person situated in a particular condition. Every condition, however, every determinate existence, has its origins in time; and so man, as a phenomenal being, must also have a beginning, although the pure intelligence within him is eternal. Without time, that is to say, without becoming, he would never be a determinate being; his personality would indeed exist potentially, but not in fact. It is only through the succession of its perceptions that the enduring “I” ever becomes aware of itself as a phenomenon. [. . .] Now although an infinite being, a Godhead, cannot become, we must surely call divine any tendency that has as its unending task the realization of that most characteristic attribute of Godhead, viz., absolute manifestation of potential (the actualization of all that is possible), and absolute unity of manifestation (the necessity of all that is made actual). A disposition to the divine man does indubitably carry within him, in his personality; the way to the divine (if we can call a way that which never leads to the goal) is opened up to him through the senses. [. . .]

From “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. In Friedrich Schiller, Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, New York: Continuum, 1993, 115–63. *

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Twelfth Letter [. . .] We are impelled by two opposing forces which, since they drive us to the realization of their object, may aptly be termed drives. The first of these, which I will call the sensuous drive, proceeds from the physical existence of man, or his sensuous nature. Its business is to set him within the limits of time, and to turn him into matter—not to provide him with matter, since that, of course, would presuppose a free activity of the person capable of receiving such matter, and distinguishing it from the self as from that which persists. By matter in this context we understand nothing more than change, or reality that occupies time. Consequently this drive demands that there shall be change, that time shall have a content. [. . .] The domain of this drive embraces the whole extent of man’s finite being. And since form is never made manifest except in some material, nor the absolute except through the medium of limitation, it is indeed to this sensuous drive that the whole of man’s phenomenal existence is ultimately tied. But although it is this drive alone that awakens and develops the potentialities of man, it is also this drive alone that makes their complete fulfillment impossible. With indestructible chains it binds the ever-soaring spirit to the world of sense, and summons abstraction from its most unfettered excursions into the infinite back to the limitations of the present. [. . .] The second of the two drives, which we may call the formal drive, proceeds from the absolute existence of man, or from his rational nature, and is intent on giving him the freedom to bring harmony into the diversity of his manifestations, and to affirm his person among all his changes of condition. [. . .] If the first drive only furnishes cases, this second one gives laws—laws for every judgment, where it is a question of knowledge, laws for every will, where it is a question of action. Whether it is a case of knowing an object, i.e., of attributing objective validity to a condition of our subject, or of acting upon knowledge, i.e., of making an objective principle the determining motive of our condition—in both cases we wrest this our condition from the jurisdiction of time, and endow it with reality for all men and all times, that is with universality and necessity. […] Inclination can only say: this is good for you as an individual and for your present need; but your individuality and your present need will be swept away by change, and what you now so ardently desire will one day become the object of your aversion. But once the moral feeling says: this shall be, it decides forever and aye—once you confess truth because it is truth, and practice justice because it is justice, then you have made an individual case into a law for all cases, and treated one moment of your life as if it were eternity. Where, then, the formal drive holds sway, and the pure object acts within us, we experience the greatest enlargement of being: all limitations disappear, and from the mere unit of quantity to which the poverty of his senses reduced him, man has raised himself to a unity of ideas embracing the whole realm of phenomena. During this operation we are no longer in time; time, with its whole never-ending succession, is in us. We are no longer individuals; we are species. The judgment of all minds is expressed through our own, the choice of all hearts is represented by our action. [. . .]

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Fourteenth Letter We have now been led to the notion of a reciprocal action between the two drives, reciprocal action of such a kind that the activity of the one both gives rise to, and sets limits to, the activity of the other, and in which each in itself achieves its highest manifestation precisely by reason of the other being active. Such reciprocal relation between the two drives is, admittedly, but a task enjoined upon us by reason, a problem that man is only capable of solving completely in the perfect consummation of his existence. It is, in the most precise sense of the word, the idea of his human nature, hence something infinite, to which in the course of time he can approximate ever more closely, but without ever being able to reach it. […] Should there, however, be cases in which he were to have this twofold experience simultaneously, in which he were to be at once conscious of his freedom and sensible of his existence, were, at one and the same time, to feel himself matter and come to know himself as mind, then he would in such cases, and in such cases only, have a complete intuition of his human nature. […] Assuming that cases of this sort could actually occur in experience, they would awaken in him a new drive that, precisely because the other two drives cooperate within it, would be opposed to each of them considered separately and could justifiably count as a new drive. […] That drive, therefore, in which both the others work in concert (permit me for the time being, […] to call it the play drive), the play drive, therefore, would be directed toward annulling time within time, reconciling becoming with absolute being and change with identity. [. . .] The sense drive excludes from its subject all autonomy and freedom; the form drive excludes from its subject all dependence, all passivity. Exclusion of freedom, however, implies physical necessity, exclusion of passivity moral necessity. Both drives, therefore, exert constraint upon the psyche; the former through the laws of nature, the latter through the laws of reason. The play drive, in consequence, as the one in which both the others act in concert, will exert upon the psyche at once a moral and a physical constraint; it will, therefore, since it annuls all contingency, annul all constraint too, and set man free both physically and morally. [. . .] Since, moreover, the sense drive exerts a physical, the form drive a moral constraint, the first will leave our formal, the second our material disposition at the mercy of the contingent; that is to say, it is a matter of chance whether our happiness will coincide with our perfection or our perfection with our happiness. The play drive, in consequence, in which both work in concert, will make our formal as well as our material disposition, our perfection as well as our happiness, contingent. […] To the extent that it deprives feelings and passions of their dynamic power, it will bring them into harmony with the ideas of reason; and to the extent that it deprives the laws of reason of their moral compulsion, it will reconcile them with the interests of the senses. [. . .]

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Fifteenth Letter [. . .] The object of the sense drive, expressed in a general concept, we call life, in the widest sense of the term: a concept designating all material being and all that is immediately present to the senses. The object of the form drive, expressed in a general concept, we call form, both in the figurative and in the literal sense of this word: a concept that includes all the formal qualities of things and all the relations of these to our thinking faculties. The object of the play drive, represented in a general schema, may therefore be called living form: a concept serving to designate all the aesthetic qualities of phenomena and, in a word, what in the widest sense of the term we call beauty. [. . .] The term beauty is neither extended to cover the whole realm of living things nor is it merely confined to this realm. A block of marble, though it is and remains lifeless, can nevertheless, thanks to the architect or the sculptor, become living form; and a human being, though he may live and have form, is far from being on that account a living form. In order to be so, his form would have to be life, and his life form. […] Only when his form lives in our feeling and his life takes on form in our understanding, does he become living form; and this will always be the case whenever we adjudge him beautiful. [. . .] Beauty […] can therefore be neither exclusively life nor exclusively form. Not mere life, as acute observers, adhering too closely to the testimony of experience, have maintained; […] not mere form, as it has been adjudged by philosophers whose speculations led them too far away from experience, or by artists who, philosophizing on beauty, let themselves be too exclusively guided by the needs of their craft. It is the object common to both drives, that is to say, the object of the play-drive. This term is fully justified by linguistic usage, which is wont to designate as “play” everything that is neither subjectively nor objectively contingent, and yet imposes no kind of constraint either from within or from without. Since, in contemplation of the beautiful, the psyche finds itself in a happy medium between the realm of law and the sphere of physical exigency, it is, precisely because it is divided between the two, removed from the constraint of the one as of the other. [. . .] Reason, however, declares: the beautiful is to be neither mere life, nor mere form, but living form, i.e., beauty; for it imposes upon man the double law of absolute formality and absolute reality. Consequently, reason also makes the pronouncement: with beauty man shall only play, and it is with beauty only that he shall play. For, to mince matters no longer, man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays. This proposition, which at the moment may sound like a paradox, will take on both weight and depth of meaning once we have got as far as applying it to the twofold earnestness of duty and of destiny. It will, I promise you, prove capable of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful, and of the still more difficult art of living. But it is, after all, only in philosophy that the proposition is unexpected; it was long ago alive and operative in the art and in the feeling of the Greeks, the most distinguished exponents of both; only they transferred to Olympus what was meant to be realized on earth. Guided by the truth of that same proposition, they banished from the 134

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brow of the blessed gods all the earnestness and efforts that furrow the cheeks of mortals, no less than the empty pleasures that preserve the smoothness of a vacuous face; freed those ever-contented beings from the bonds inseparable from every purpose, every duty, every care, and made idleness and indifference the enviable portion of divinity—merely a more human name for the freest, most sublime state of being. Both the material constraint of natural laws and the spiritual constraint of moral laws were resolved in their higher concept of necessity, which embraced both worlds at once; and it was only out of the perfect union of those two necessities that for them true freedom could proceed. Inspired by this spirit, the Greeks effaced from the features of their ideal physiognomy, together with inclination, every trace of volition too; or rather they made both indiscernible, for they knew how to fuse them in the most intimate union. It is not grace, nor is it yet dignity, which speaks to us from the superb countenance of a Juno Ludovisi; it is neither the one nor the other because it is both at once. [. . .]

Twenty-Fourth Letter We can, then, distinguish three different moments or stages of development through which both the individual and the species as a whole must pass, inevitably and in a definite order, if they are to complete the full cycle of their destiny. […] Man in his physical state merely suffers the dominion of nature; he emancipates himself from this dominion in the aesthetic state, and he acquires mastery over it in the moral. What is man before beauty cajoles from him a delight in things for their own sake, or the serenity of form tempers the savagery of life? A monotonous round of ends, a constant vacillation of judgments; self-seeking, and yet without a self; lawless, yet without freedom; a slave, yet to no rule. […] In vain does nature let her rich variety pass before his senses; he sees in her splendid profusion nothing but his prey, in all her might and grandeur nothing but his foe. [. . .] Unacquainted as yet with his own human dignity, he is far from respecting it in others; and, conscious of his own savage greed, he fears it in every creature that resembles him. He never sees others in himself, but only himself in others; and communal life, far from enlarging him into a representative of the species, only confines him ever more narrowly within his own individuality. [. . .] This state of brute nature is not, I admit, to be found exactly as I have presented it here among any particular people or in any particular age. It is purely an idea; but an idea with which experience is, in certain particulars, in complete accord. […] It is, after all, peculiar to man that he unites in his nature the highest and the lowest; and if his moral dignity depends on his distinguishing strictly between the one and the other, his hope of joy and blessedness depends on a due and proper reconciliation of the opposites he has distinguished. An education that is to bring his dignity into harmony with his happiness will, therefore, have to see to it that those two principles are maintained in their utmost purity even while they are being most intimately fused. 135

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The first appearance of reason in man does not necessarily imply that he has started to become truly human. This has to wait upon his freedom. […] [Reason], as we know, through the demand for the absolute (as that which is grounded upon itself and necessary) that reason makes itself known in man. This demand, since it can never be wholly satisfied in any single condition of his physical life, forces him to leave the physical altogether, and ascend out of a limited reality into the realm of ideas. [. . .] As soon as man has begun to use his intellect, and to connect the phenomena around him in the relation of cause and effect, reason, in accordance with its very definition, presses for an absolute connection and an unconditioned cause. In order to be able to postulate such a demand at all, man must already have taken a step beyond mere sense; but it is this very demand that sense now makes use of to recall her truant child. […] Because the life of sense knows no purpose other than its own advantage, and feels driven by no cause other than blind chance, he makes the former into the arbiter of his actions and the latter into the sovereign ruler of the world. Even what is most sacred in man, the moral law, when it first makes its appearance in the life of sense, cannot escape such perversion. Since its voice is merely inhibitory, and against the interest of his animal self-love, it is bound to seem like something external to himself as long as he has not yet reached the point of regarding his self-love as the thing that is really external to him, and the voice of reason as his true self. […] Just as in the explanation of particular natural phenomena he goes beyond nature and seeks outside of it what can only be found in the laws inherent within it, so too, in the explanation of the moral world, he goes beyond reason and forfeits his humanity by seeking a Godhead along these same lines. No wonder that a religion bought by the debasement of his humanity proves itself worthy of such an origin, or that man considers laws that were not binding from all eternity as not unconditional and not binding to all eternity either. His concern is not with a holy, but merely with a powerful, being. The spirit in which he worships God is therefore fear, which degrades him, not reverence, which exalts him in his own estimation. [. . .] Whether it, then, be that reason has not yet made its voice heard in man, and the physical still rules him with blind necessity; or that reason has not yet sufficiently purified itself of sense, and the moral is still at the service of the physical: in either case the sole principle prevailing within him is a material one, and man is, at least in his ultimate tendency, a creature of sense— with this sole difference, that in the first case he is an animal void of reason, in the second an animal endowed with reason. What he is meant to be, however, is neither of these; he is meant to be a human being. Nature is not meant to rule him exclusively, nor reason to rule him conditionally. Both these systems of rule are meant to coexist, in perfect independence of each other, and yet in perfect concord. Twenty-Fifth Letter [. . .] Only when, at the aesthetic stage, [man] puts [the world] outside himself, or contemplates it, does his personality differentiate itself from it, and a world becomes manifest to him because he has ceased to be one with it. 136

From Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man

Contemplation (or reflection) is the first liberal relation that man establishes with the universe around him. [. . .] Beauty is, admittedly, the work of free contemplation, and with it we do indeed enter upon the world of ideas—but, it should be emphasized, without therefore leaving behind the world of sense, as is the case when we proceed to knowledge of truth. […]

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CHAPTER 5 GOTTLOB ERNST SCHULZE (1761–1833)

INTRODUCTION Gottlob Ernst Schulze was born on August 23, 1761, in the castle town of Heldrungen in Thuringia (Germany). A self-proclaimed skeptic who wrote under the pseudonym “Aenesidemus,” he had a respectable career. He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Wittenberg under the Protestant theologian, Franz Volkmar Reinhard, a disciple of Cristian August Crusius—one of the earliest critics of the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy regarding the divine will and human freedom. Crusius’s criticism of Wolff influenced both Kant’s epistemological work and his views on ethics. Crusius’s thoughts are usually associated with the German voluntarist tradition, which he initiated and which leads directly to Schopenhauer. This tradition emphasizes the primacy of the will over the intellect. The discourse of voluntarist thought was a milieu in which Schulze’s ideas developed and in which he—largely through Reinhard—became rooted (Beiser 1987, 267). Under Reinhard’s supervision, Schulze wrote two dissertations in the history of philosophy: his first thesis (1785) focused on ancient Stoicism and the Stoic conception of God, and the second one (1786) was a study of Plato’s theory of ideas. After defending his dissertations, he stayed for two years in Wittenberg, serving two roles: as a deacon at the University Church and as an adjunct lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy. In 1788, Schulze was appointed as a professor of philosophy at the University of Helmstedt, where he worked until the university was disbanded. While at Helmstedt, Schulze was actively engaged in intellectual debates and often attended philosophical salons and meetings with notable people. For example, he was associated with Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, a German philosopher whose writings had been widely read. Feder and his circle decisively countered Kant’s idealism, favoring instead the LeibnizianWolffian school that Kant opposed. Schulze was sympathetic to Feder’s philosophical position and soon grew close to Feder himself, both intellectually and personally. In 1794, he married Feder’s daughter. During his twenty-two years at Helmstedt, Schulze published a number of books. His first was a two-volume compendium of his lectures entitled An Outline of the Philosophical Sciences, each volume appeared separately in 1788 and 1790. He also composed Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy (1801), another two-volume work which strongly criticized dogmatic idealism and provided a theoretical justification for skepticism, a position that the author consistently defended. However, Schulze’s primary philosophical and historical significance is chiefly associated with another work published anonymously in the spring of 1792 under the lengthy title: Aenesidemus—Or Concerning the Foundations of the Philosophy of the Elements Issued by Prof. Reinhold in Jena Together with a Defense of Skepticism Against the Pretensions of the Critique of Reason.

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Aenesidemus (as it is commonly known) was one of the earliest and best-known skeptical attacks on the Critical philosophy. Schulze’s official target was Karl Leonhard Reinhold and his proposed “improvements” on the Critical philosophy just offered in his Philosophy of the Elements (Elementarphilosophie). Yet the most serious target of Schulze’s savage attack remained in effect Kant and his Critical philosophy. The structure of the book is somewhat reminiscent of the structure of David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), where the author presents three characters engaged in dialogue about the existence of God. Each character in this dialogue represents a different position on the issue. Similarly, Schulze’s book is structured as a correspondence (a clear allusion to Jacobi’s correspondence with Moses Mendelsohn that sparked the Spinozism debate raging at the time) between two characters: Aenesidemus, named after the first-century Greek skeptic and representing the author himself, and Hermias, an orthodox Kantian thinker. Aenesidemus is trying to dissuade Hermia from his recently attained faith in the Critical philosophy (di Giovanni 2000, 21). Not only does Schulze attack the possibility of acquiring knowledge of metaphysical objects, he also vigorously argues that Reinhold’s principle of consciousness cannot serve as a self-evident and “absolutely indubitable” foundation of knowledge because it is synthetic. Furthermore, he insists that Reinhold’s theory of the faculty of representation, used to justify his foundationalism, instead “contradicts its own principles” (Schulze 2000, 109) and thus is untenable. The book brought its author almost instant fame and prestige; Schulze was henceforth tagged with the name of the book’s protagonist, Aenesidemus. This, however, it was a scandalous success. Kantians and proponents of the Critical philosophy saw it as an offense and a threat to their philosophical “fortress.” Opponents of Critical philosophy and anti-Kantians considered it one of the best critiques so far, yet some felt uneasy about any regression into skepticism. Almost everyone of importance at the time—whether the friend or foe of Kant—was compelled to consider Aenesidemus seriously; many responded to the challenge with their own treatises. It seemed that nearly overnight, the philosophical scene had changed, making way to new forces defining the future directions of German philosophical development. Indeed, Schulze’s book had a remarkable effect on intellectual life in Germany, and more profoundly on German philosophy. Schulze’s criticisms in Aenesidemus of Kant’s “thing-initself ” and Reinhold’s first principle strongly influenced the development of German idealism, specifically through Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In fact, Fichte, who would insist on his genuine Kantianism and pro-Kantian philosophical commitments, wrote in his letter to the Tűbingen professor J. F. Flatt in the fall of 1793 recognizing the motivational impact of Schulze’s work: Aenesidemus . . . [is] one of the most remarkable products of our decade . . . [It] has shaken my own system to its very foundations, and since one cannot very well live under the open sky, I was forced to construct a new system. (Fichte 1988, 366) And Fichte was not at all alone in praising Schulze’s work and its stimulating effect. He was joined by such thinkers as Salomon Maimon, Reinhold, and other contemporaries, all of whom took Schulze’s criticism very seriously and responded in a variety of their writings. Yet, the response with perhaps the greatest impact on philosophical development in Germany was Fichte’s own Review of Aenesidemus that appeared in early 1794.

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Even Hegel responded to Schulze’s critique of Kant, writing in 1803 an extensive review of Schulze’s Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy (1801), a work that further detailed the attack of Kant’s philosophy undertaken in Aenesidemus. Although Hegel unequivocally rejected Schulze’s position, making his contention as clear as possible, Schulze’s critique of Kantianism stimulated Hegel’s philosophical search. Challenged by Schulze’s skepticism, Hegel had to rethink the proper relation between philosophy and skepticism, which contributed to the development of the dialectic that eventually became a core of his own system. Around the time when Hegel wrote his review, Schulze contributed another notable piece of philosophical writing: a brilliant anonymous parody of absolute idealism entitled “Aphorisms on the Absolute” (1803). In this essay, he challenged the presumption that the intellectual intuitionism invoked by absolute idealism can transcend skeptical questions. This presumption was most strongly presented in Schelling and his version of absolute idealism. This time Hegel recognized that Schulze was right, that like any other philosophical view, absolute idealism is not immune to skepticism and, in order to succeed philosophically, should provide an appropriate standard of justification for philosophical knowledge. That challenge stimulated Hegel’s own philosophical inquiry in his Phenomenology of Spirit and beyond. Though it might surprise a contemporary reader, Schulze remained at the center of German philosophical life for at least a decade, further advancing his career. Thus, when the University of Helmstedt was disbanded in 1810, Schulze became professor of philosophy at Göttingen. He began teaching there in the winter of 1810–11. His first advisee was Arthur Schopenhauer, who studied psychology and metaphysics under Schulze. Schopenhauer was inspired by Schulze’s lectures and, under the teacher’s influence, reportedly abandoned his study of natural science and turned his attention to philosophy. While the young Schopenhauer showed signs of a critical attitude toward his teacher, in his later years, already as an established scholar, he would gratefully acknowledge the positive effect Schulze had on him and his philosophical development. He especially treasured Schulze’s advice to read Plato and Kant before turning to Aristotle and Spinoza. Following that advice, Schopenhauer carefully studied both Plato and Kant; the latter especially influenced his own ideas. Schopenhauer often referred to Schulze’s criticism of Kant in his principal work, The World as the Will and Representation, and even more in the Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). He praised his former teacher as “the most acute” of Kant’s critics (SchSW 2:516; 5:95, 96, 101). At Göttingen, Schulze continued publishing, but most of his late publications were compendia consisting of lecture notes for students, such as his 1814 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Perhaps one of the most significant late writings of his was On Human Cognition published in 1832, but even this book did not attract the same level of attention as Aenesidemus. Schulze died on January 14, 1833, in Göttingen. * * * By using the classical skeptic Aenesidemus as a main character in his work, Schulze presented his views as a defense of traditional skepticism. However, Schulze’s skepticism went beyond traditional forms, whether that of ancient Pyrrhonism or the more recent version of David Hume. The “new twist” that Schulze introduced into skepticism made it “meta-critical” (Beiser 1987, 268). Traditionally, skeptics doubted reason’s ability to know the external world, or to formulate it in a properly philosophical language. They cast doubt on the claim of metaphysics 141

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to know the thing-in-itself, that is, the real world as it is, the problem with which Kant himself wrestled. While Schulze affirmed that the above proposition remained true, he added a new one. He insisted that nothing could be known, or demonstrated with certainty, about the origins and conditions of knowledge itself, thus casting skeptical doubt also upon epistemology as such. In his skeptical criticism of Kant and his Critical philosophy, Schulze seconded Hume, who had found any pretentions of reason fundamentally problematic and never justifiable. In Aenesidemus, Schulze argued that like others before him, Kant was not able to meet the challenge of Hume’s skepticism, and all his attempts to refute Hume ended in only begging the question, a logical fallacy that would render all of Kant’s arguments circular. Schulze’s own skepticism in Aenesidemus boiled down to the three key ideas: (1) his dogmatic rejection of the possibility of knowledge; (2) his questioning of the possibility of knowing things-in-themselves; and (3) his insistence on the unreliability of the concept of cause. These ideas served as a firm ground for Schulze’s skeptical polemic against both Kant’s account of the foundation of knowledge and Reinhold’s attempt to provide a missing foundation for philosophy. While Schulze agreed that to be scientific, philosophy must be grounded in a single fundamental principle, he argued that Reinhold’s principle of consciousness, empirical in its nature, was largely deficient and thus could not be used for this purpose. Schulze’s objections may be summarized in three claims. First, the principle of consciousness is necessarily subject to the rule of (logical) judgment, the law of noncontradiction, and thus it cannot be the first, most fundamental principle of philosophy. Second, it is not true that the principle of consciousness presents the most fundamental fact of consciousness. The principle includes such complex concepts (“relating,” “distinguishing,” etc.) which must rely on consciousness of much simpler and more “elementary” facts. Third, the principle of consciousness that Reinhold conceptualizes as synthetic cannot be a priori; instead, it results from experience. Schulze argues that philosophy should be understood as a science of consciousness. However, his own approach to consciousness and its content is merely introspective and subjectivist. According to Schulze, a fundamental fact of consciousness is that consciousness is in essence nothing more than “consciousness about consciousness.” It contains only the facts that are “present in us.” Thus, contrary to Reinhold, who saw the task of philosophy in its broad practical application, Schulze attempts to limit philosophy to the description of (internal) facts of consciousness, which results in a sort of philosophical phenomenalism (Henrich 2008, 150–51). In many passages in Aenesidemus Schulze objects to Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself, as well as to Reinhold’s handling of it. Schulze thinks that, contrary to the Critical philosophy, skepticism is clearly on the side of common sense in that it does not deny that in principle it should be possible to acquire knowledge of the thing-in-itself. This is to say only that science in its present state might not be able to access and define the limits or extent of such a possibility. But Schulze’s main charge against Kant is his attack on Kant’s (apparent) claim that things-inthemselves cause sensations or representations in mind. Indeed, one of the tenets of Critical philosophy shared by both Kant and Reinhold was the claim that our representations are caused by objects that exist independently of our experience, that is, by things-in-themselves. However, the difficulty was that both Kant and Reinhold—here again, true to the very foundations of Critical philosophy—maintained that causality is one of the a priori forms of 142

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human cognition that shapes our experience of things, and so is applicable only to the realm of our experience. Schulze argues that it is fundamentally inconsistent to claim within Kant’s own philosophical system that the thing-in-itself, which by definition is beyond all experience, could stand in a causal relationship with our sensations. His approach is twofold. First, he states that for Kant to claim that the structure of the mind organizes our experience is incompatible with the claim that we can only have knowledge within our experience. For how could we know that our mind provides the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience if we can only know our experience, and the conditioning of experience transcends experience itself? Thus, Schulze remarks that [the] derivation of the necessary synthetic judgments from a thing-in-itself clearly contradicts the whole spirit of the critical philosophy. . . . For its most important . . . result is that the categories ‘cause’ and ‘actuality’ can only be applied to empirical intuition if their application is to have any sense or reference. (Schulze 122) Second, Schulze asserts that it is also contradictory for Kant to claim that our experiences are somehow the causal result of affection by things-in-themselves. This stands in contradiction to Kant’s understanding of the realm of applicability of the concept of causality. In other words, Kant over-extended his own understanding of causality to a realm of reality to which it is not applicable. Schulze’s critique of both Kant and Reinhold was undertaken from the position of rigorous skepticism. He came to be so caught up in his Humean assumptions that he was unable to see Critical philosophy’s great theoretical potential. At the same time, the success Schulze’s book enjoyed among the learned public clearly showed the intellectual vitality of skepticism. The need to respond to its challenge stimulated debates in post-Kantian philosophy, eventually leading to the creation of philosophical systems less vulnerable to skepticism.

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Chronology of Gottlob Schulze’s Life and Works 1761

August 13: Born in Heldrungen (Thuringia, Germany).

1781

Studies theology and philosophy at the University of Wittenberg under Franz Volkmar Reinhard.

1785

Writes a dissertation on Stoicism.

1786

Writes a dissertation on Plato.

1786

Deacon at the University Church and adjunct lecturer in philosophy at the University of Helmstedt.

1788

Appointed as professor of philosophy at the University of Helmstedt.

1788

Publication of the first volume of the compendium of his lectures, An Outline of the Philosophical Sciences.

1790

The second volume of An Outline of the Philosophical Sciences comes out.

1792

Publishes his major work Aenesidemus, which appears anonymously and without a place of publication.

1794

Marries daughter of Johann Georg Heinrich Feder.

1801

Appearance of the Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy (in 2 vols., published in Hamburg).

1803

Anonymously publishes an essay, “Aphorisms on the Absolute,” in which he challenges absolute idealism.

1810

Appointed as of philosophy at the University of Göttingen, where his first student is Arthur Schopenhauer.

1813

Discusses some questions of philosophy of morality and law in his work, The Guidelines to the Development of the philosophical Principles of Civil and Criminal Law.

1814 Publishes Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences as a supplement of his lectures. The work later appeared in two other editions; the most complete, 3rd. edition came out in 1824. 1816 Publishes Psychic Anthropology that is based on his lecture course in psychology and anthropology. Some revisions were made for the second and third editions of the work that appeared later (3rd ed., 1826). 1817

Another lecture compendium, Philosophical Doctrine of Virtue, is released.

1827 His On the Discovery That Leibniz Was a Catholic published in Göttingen. 1832

Publication of On Human Cognition (Göttingen).

1833

January 14: Dies in Göttingen at the age of 72.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Schulze’s Writings A.1.  German Editions

Schulze, G. E. 1788–1790. Grundriss der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 2 vols. Wittenberg. Schulze, G. E. 1792/1911. Aenesidemus, oder über die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementarphilosophie. Nebst einer Vertheidigung des Skepticismus gegen die Anmassungen der Vernunftkritik. [Reedited by the Kantgesellschaft, in the series of rare philosophical works edited by Arthur Liebert. Berlin: Reuther and Reichard.] A.2.  In English (selected translations)

Schulze, G. E. 1803. “Aphorisms on the Absolute,” translated by K. R. Westphal, J. Sares, and C. Faul, in The Owl of Minerva, 2019 (forthcoming). Schulze, G. E. 2000. “Aenesidemus,” in Between Kant and Hegel, edited and translated by G. DiGiovanni. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. B.  Selected Commentaries

Atlas, S. 1972. “Schulze, Gottlob Ernst,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7. New York: Macmillan. Beiser, F. C. 1987. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 266–84. Fichte, J. G. 1988. “Letter to J.F. Flatt, November or December 1793,” in Early Philosophical Writings, translated by and edited by Daniel Breazeale. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Franks, P. 2000. “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, edited by K. Ameriks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 95–116. di Giovanni, G. 1992. “The First Twenty Years of Critique: The Spinoza Connection,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, edited by P. Guyer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 417–48. di Giovanni, G. 2005. Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. di Giovanni, G., and H. S. Harris (eds.). 2000 Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Henrich, D. 2008. Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, edited by D. S. Pacini. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rosen, M. 1999. “From Kant to Fichte: A Reply to Franks,” in Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, edited by R. Stern. Oxford: Clarendon Oxford Press, 147–53. Schopenhauer, A. 2001. Sämtliche Werke, 5 vols., edited by Wolfgang von Löhneysen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Neuauflage [SchSW].

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FROM AENESIDEMUS, OR CONCERNING THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ELEMENTS ISSUED BY PROF. REINHOLD IN JENA TOGETHER WITH A DEFENSE OF SKEPTICISM AGAINST THE PRETENSIONS OF THE CRITIQUE OF REASON (1792) *

“Where do the presentations that we possess originate, and how do they come to be in us?” This has been for a long time one of the most important questions in philosophy. Common opinion has rightly held that, since the representations in us are not the objects [Sachen] themselves being represented, the connection between our representations and the things outside us must be established above all by a careful and sound answer to this question. It is in this way that certitude must be sought regarding the reality of the different components of our knowledge. Now, it is the thesis of critical philosophy that a large portion of the determinations and characteristics with which the representations of certain objects [Gegenstände] occur in us are to be grounded in the essence of our faculty of representation. This claim combines the opposite explanations that Locke and Leibniz gave for the origin of human representations, and on its truth rest for the most part the soundness and the truth of what critical philosophy says regarding the limits and the determinations of the various branches of the human faculty of cognition. […] In this examination, however, we must also pay special attention to the demands of Humean skepticism. For it is not only a principal goal of the Critique of Reason to refute the Humean doubt in its assessment of the human faculty of cognition; but also the adherents to the critical system claim, indeed unanimously, that by deriving a certain part of human cognition from the faculty of representation this system has in fact conquered all of David Hume’s doubts, once and for all. […] A discussion of these questions, however, requires that we should draw a careful comparison between Hume’s demands and Hume’s problem on the one hand, and the principles of the critical system on the other, as well as the reasons by which the latter tries to establish that certain a priori forms are present in human cognition. To my knowledge, neither friend nor foe of this newest philosophy has so far engaged in such a comparison, even though the admission, on the part of its originator, that it was Hume’s doubt that first interrupted his dogmatic slumber and led him to the search for the principles of his system, provided occasion enough for it.

From George di Giovanni & H.S. Harris (eds.), Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, Hackett Publishing, 2000, 105–33. *

From Aenesidemus, or Concerning the Foundations of the Philosophy

In the search for the sources of the components of our knowledge, the Philosophy of the Elements has followed a course of its own, and appears at any rate to have been led to their discovery by following an entirely different sign-post than the one followed by the Critique of Pure Reason. We shall also have to enquire, therefore, to which of these two sign-posts we can safely entrust ourselves, or with which the danger of being led astray is least great. Thus we shall not only have to examine the proofs by which the Philosophy of the Elements establishes that much of what is in a representation is determined by the mind, but also those advanced for the same purpose by the Critique of Pure Reason. Now, paragraphs v-viii [of the Philosophy of the Elements] state the following preliminaries regarding the nature of the faculty of representation:

(a) The faculty of representation is the cause and ground of the actual presence of representations;

(b) The faculty of representation is present prior to every representation, and is so in a determinate form;

(c) The faculty of representation differs from representation as cause from effect;

(d) The concept of the faculty of representation may be inferred only from its effect, i.e., the mere representation, and in order to obtain its inner characteristics, i.e., its determinate concept, one must develop exhaustively the concept of representation as such. On the face of it, these propositions only concern the determination of the concept of the faculty of representation. But since they imply that by this concept we also think an objectively actual something which is the cause and condition of the actuality of representations, and is present prior to any of them, the question we must raise, before any other indeed, is this: by which means has the Philosophy of the Elements come to its extravagant cognition of the objective existence of this something, and with which argument does it justify it, granted that nothing at all is said about it in the principle of consciousness (for the latter, of course, is only meant to express actual facts)? Nowhere do we find, in the latest exposition of its principal tenets, a proof of the objective actuality of the faculty of representation. […] The Philosophy of the Elements, by deriving actual representations from a faculty which it takes to be something objectively actual, and by defining it as the cause of the representations, contradicts its own principles as well as the results of the Critique of Reason. For according to the latter the employment of the categories is to be restricted to empirical intuitions; knowledge can only be realized in us inasmuch as the categories are applied to objects of empirical intuition. Hence the extension of the pure concepts of the understanding beyond our experiences to objects not immediately represented, but only thought, is totally inadmissible; nor could such an extension instruct us in the least regarding the constitution of any object whatever. And in his Theory of the Faculty of Representation, Mr. Reinhold has not only not altered or otherwise defined the restrictions to the employment of the categories stipulated by the Critique; on the contrary, he wants to establish with even more precision than Kant that absolutely no other application of the categories is possible or conceivable than the one just mentioned. It is, therefore, simply incomprehensible whence the Philosophy of the 147

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Elements obtains the right, in laying down its foundations, to apply the categories of cause and actuality to a suprasensible object, viz., to a particular faculty of representations which is neither intuitable nor given to any experience. Yet, in presuming this right arbitrarily and counter to the results of its own speculations, it actually demonstrates—obviously by applying the real principle of sufficient reason to things outside experience—that this principle can only be applied to objects of empirical intuitions and to these alone. […] Now, as regards the means which the Philosophy of the Elements prescribes and employs to obtain the characteristics of the faculty of representations, they are of no account. In fact, to try to derive the properties of that faculty from the properties of mere representation is altogether unproductive. For, from the constitution of an effect, it is never possible to infer with certainty the constitution of its cause or of the objective ground that supposedly had produced it, or the nature of this ground. Causes even require that they be thought as different from their effects; much can be present in them, therefore, (if there actually are any causes) that belongs to them as property, yet does not occur in the effects at all and would never be manifested through them. This applies also to the effects. How can one possibly hope to discover, therefore, the characteristics of the faculty of representation, even if it were proved that any such faculty actually exists, by an extrapolation of the characteristics of representation? Would not this practice, moreover, consist in the transposition of the characteristics of a thing to something entirely different from it? The definition of the faculty of representation laid down in the Philosophy of the Elements is in fact nothing more than a definition of the characteristics of the very representation which is supposed to be the effect of the defined faculty, adorned however with the entirely empty title of power or faculty. […] The Philosophy of the Elements does not really make the presence of representations in us, nor their nature, any more comprehensible than they already are on their own. It arbitrarily assumes the being of a faculty of representation, and attributes to it as its property and mode of operation what, according to experience, ought to be found in representations instead. Moreover, the definition of the faculty of representation laid down in the Philosophy of the Elements could only make comprehensible those representations that “are referred to an object and subject and are distinguished from both”, if indeed it explained anything at all; for it is drawn only from this type of representations. It would not, however, establish the possibility of anything in us which, even without being referred to an object or subject and being distinguished from both, is nonetheless a representation and rightly deserves to be called so. […]

Has the Critique of Reason Really Refuted Hume’s Skepticism? The deduction of the necessary synthetic judgements from the mind, and the determination of their connection to the cognition of empirical objects, provide the main support in the Kantian system for its specific doctrines and principles. If this deduction and determination were beyond doubt, and grounded on decisively certain principles, the system of critical philosophy would be unassailable. David Hume would then have been refuted once and for all, and his doubts as to whether the concepts of cause and effect can be applied to things would be groundless. The answer to the question posed in this section will above all depend, therefore, on our enquiring whether David Hume could have found Mr. Kant’s proof that the necessary synthetic judgements must originate in mind, in the inner source 148

From Aenesidemus, or Concerning the Foundations of the Philosophy

of representations, and that they are the form of experiential cognition, sufficient and compelling; or, in general, whether Kant’s deduction of these judgements from the essential determinations of the human mind, as well as his assessment of their value, are subject to well-founded or reasonable objections. Now, it is an undeniable conscious fact, and as such open to no doubt, that there are in human knowledge necessary synthetic judgements and that they are an indispensable component of it. It is no less indubitable that the necessity pertaining in these judgements to the subject-predicate combination can be derived neither from the occurrence of these judgments once in our mind, or even several times, nor from the agreement of a given number of experiences. That is to say, our having joined certain representations together once, or several times, does not produce the effect that we must, necessarily, so join them every time. The necessity that attaches to certain synthetic judgements in our knowledge cannot be made comprehensible to us on the basis of mere experience, or from our perception of the presence of such judgements in us. Without prejudice to the undeniable truth of this, however, I maintain all the same that in fact the Critique of Pure Reason tries to refute Humean skepticisim by assuming as already unquestionably certain the very propositions against whose legitimacy Hume directed all his skeptical doubts. For the Critique claims that the original determinations of the human mind are the real ground or source of the necessary synthetic judgements found in our knowledge; but it does this by inferring, from the fact that we can only think of the faculty of representation as the ground of these judgements, that the mind must be their ground in actual fact too. With this claim, however, it has already assumed as indisputably certain [what Hume doubted, viz.,] (1) that for anything present in our knowledge there is also objectively present a real ground and cause differing from it realiter; and, in general, that the principle of sufficient reason is valid not only for representation and their subjective combination, but also for things-[Sachen] in-themselves and in their objective interconnections; (2) that we are justified in inferring from the constitution of something as it is in our representations its objective constitution outside us. And to grasp the fairness of this judgement, one only has to compare impartially the highest principles on which the Critique of Reason grounds its new system of philosophy with what Hume subjected to doubt and declared to be uncertain. For if Hume is to be refuted, surely it can be done only by establishing the contrary of his assertions regarding the concepts and principles of causal connection from indisputably certain propositions; or alternatively, by showing contradictions or non-sequiturs in his assertions about the problematic nature of the use we make of our representations of the relationship of cause to effect. The Critique of Reason has done neither. […] Hume’s skepticism takes its start from a single but supremely important concept of theoretical reason, viz., the concept of the link between cause and effect (hence from the derivative concepts of power, operation, etc. as well). He demanded that reason, which pretended to have generated the concept in its womb, should give him an account of its right to think that something can be so constituted that, upon being posited, something else would also have to be posited necessarily—for this is precisely what the concept of cause and effect says. And he argued quite consequentially that reason is totally incapable of thinking any such combinations a priori, on the base of concepts. For the combination entails necessity, yet it is quite impossible to see how, just because something is, something else must also be 149

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necessarily—how the concept, therefore, of any such link between one thing and another could be introduced a priori. Hence he concluded that, as regards this concept, reason has completely deceived itself; that it has wrongly claimed the concept as its own child; that, on the contrary, it is nothing else but a bastard of the imagination which, made pregnant by experience, has given birth to certain representations under the aegis of the law of association, but has substituted for the subjective necessity that springs from this law (i.e., custom) the kind of objective necessity that would spring from insight. […] However important as a product of acumen and philosophical spirit the explanation given in the Critique of Reason of how necessary principles are possible, it is nevertheless ineffective to prove, or in any way establish, anything against David Hume. For it is obvious indeed that the author of the Critique of Reason arrives at his answer to the general problem, “How are necessary synthetic propositions possible in us?” simply by applying the principle of causality to certain judgements that occur in us after experience. He subsumes them under the concept ‘effect of something’, and in accordance with this subsumption he assumes, and declares, that the mind is their effective cause. And with this move he believes to have also definitively established the true function that these judgements have in our knowledge, and their value. For from the fact that these necessary synthetic judgements derive from the mind, in the inner source of representation, he concludes that they constitute only the form of experiential cognition, and that they only gain reference by being applied to empirical perception. He presupposes as established, therefore, that each segment of human knowledge has a real ground that causes it. Without this presupposition all that is said in the Critique of Reason concerning the origin of necessary synthetic judgements makes no sense at all. […] From the fact, therefore, that we are incapable of representing to ourselves, or to think, how the necessary synthetic judgements found in our knowledge are possible, except by deriving them from the mind, the Critique of Reason proves that they must originate in it is actual fact too, or realiter. It thus infers the objective and real constitution of what is to be found outside our representations, from the constitution of the representations and thoughts present in us; or again, it proves that something must be constituted realiter in such and such a way because it cannot be thought otherwise. But it is precisely the validity of this kind of inference that Hume questioned. And he declared it to be a sophism because we know of no principle by which we can determine to what extent our representations and their characteristics agree with what is objective and its characteristics, or to what extent something present in our thoughts refers to anything outside them. This inference is also the foundation on which every dogmatism is grounded. Philosophy has made use of it from time immemorial to determine the objective nature of what lies outside our representations, or what is really true; by applying it thus, it has justified the contradictory results of all the systems of theoretical metaphysics. In short, in refuting Hume the Critique of Reason avails itself of an inference which, for him, was utterly deceptive and misleading. And to show that we men cannot know anything about the thingsin-themselves, it employs a line of argument which could in fact lead us to the most important discoveries in that immeasurable realm of things-in-themselves. Even less comprehensible, however, is how the Critique of Reason could avail itself of the same inference as it lays down the foundation of its system, considering how often and emphatically it urges on us the distinction existing between representations and the objective things [Sachen] that are supposed to be 150

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there independent of them. And the Critique of Reason even justifies one of the most important parts of its system, the Transcendental Dialectic, above all by assuming that in spite of longsanctioned practice, it will never be possible to infer, from the determinations that belong to our representations and thinking, those to be found outside us. […] The Critique of Reason has not shown that the a priori representations and judgements that we assume to be present in us are just forms of empirical cognitions, and that they have validity and meaning only with reference to empirical intuitions. It has not definitively established this any more than it has demonstrated that anything necessary and universally valid in our knowledge can only originate in the mind and in its mode of operation. In other words, the Critique of Reason has not fathomed the full power, nor the lack of it, of the human faculty of cognition. […] Now in order to confirm our verdict, it is important that we examine whether, and to what extent, that which the Critique of Reason itself states regarding the misuse of ideas and the illusions to which this misuse gives rise, applies as well to the foundations of critical philosophy, particularly to its derivation of the necessary synthetic judgements from the subject behind the representing. By the ‘mind’ which is alleged to be the source of what is necessary in our knowledge, we are to understand according to critical philosophy a transcendental idea. This is apparent from the most unequivocal statements of its most perceptive defenders. To my knowledge, indeed, nowhere in the Critique of Pure Reason has Mr. Kant declared himself clearly and expressly on this matter. […] From a few passages in the Critique of Reason and especially from the Prolegomena (§46), we must nevertheless conclude that by ‘subject of representations’ (inasmuch, again, as this subject is presumed to be the source of what is necessary in our knowledge), the author of the critical philosophy wants us to understand nothing else but a merely transcendental idea. It is only in this sense, moreover, that he attributes the predicate of logical causality to it with respect to the necessary synthetic judgements present in us. Mr. Reinhold, on the other hand, has expressed himself on this matter with particular distinctness and clarity in his Theory of the Faculty of Representation (see especially pp. 530ff.). And according to his explanation, we may and can attribute to the representing subject the thought predicate ‘ground of what is necessary and formal in our knowledge’ only qua idea. […] The Critique of Reason has erected a new system of philosophy on its explanation of the origin of the necessary synthetic principles. We can entertain no further doubt, now that we have reviewed the essentials of that explanation, as to how much we have really gained through it in true insight into the actual origin of these principles, as well as into the actual limits of our knowledge. There is equally no doubt as to the value of the explanation by the Critique’s own standards. For we can turn against it, against its grounds and the insights gained through them concerning the origin of an element of our representations, everything that the Critique of Reason says against the truth of the theses of rational psychology, cosmology and theology, and against the validity of the proofs that dogmatism has so far advanced on their behalf. For to hope, first, that we would know more of an object than what pertains to its possible experience, or to pretend that we can know a thing which is not the object of experience, ought indeed to be in principle totally absurd now that the Critique of Reason has so carefully 151

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investigated, as it claims, the human faculty of cognition. However, neither the genesis of the various components of man’s cognition, nor the mind and its mode of operation, are objects of experience; neither is given to us in some single empirical intuition. According to the Critique of Reason itself, therefore, it is totally absurd to pretend that we shall ever gain insight into the actual origin of our knowledge, particularly its origin in the mind, or into its true mode of operation and what it contributes to actual knowledge. Second, according to the Critique of Reason the only function of all the transcendental ideas is to bring the knowledge that the understanding gleans from experience as near to perfect completion as possible. These ideas impart to us no knowledge at all of anything that does not belong to experience, or is not really to be found there, provided, that is, that we do not misunderstand their function. Even by the Critique’s own standards, it is therefore a misuse of the concepts of reason to apply the idea of ‘absolute subject’ to explain the origin of what is necessary in our knowledge. Moreover, again according to the Critique of Reason, this explanation too would have to be relinquished to the understanding whose proper function, however, does not include applying concepts to objects outside experience. In this respect too, therefore, to apply the ideas of reason to actual facts to make them comprehensible would constitute a misuse. Such ideas may only be used to bestow absolute completeness on the knowledge of the understanding, and to use them otherwise is to remove and restrict the employment of the latter. And third, according to the Critique of Reason, the understanding is indeed only deceiving itself if it imagines that it has reached objectively actual being through thought, and it infers the properties of being from the determinations that pertain to thought. Even by the standards of the Critique, therefore, it is only a deception originating in the understanding’s lack of selfknowledge to believe that, since we can only think of the mind as containing the ground of what is necessary in our knowledge, we have thereby discovered the proper and objective ground of this necessary element. In a word: All that counts against the reality of the insights promised by rational psychology, cosmology and theology, counts also against the truth of those promised by [the attempt to] explain the origin of the necessary and synthetic propositions from the subject of representation. This explanation, and all its proofs and foundations as laid down in the Critique of Reason, is nothing but a sophism whose semblance of truth vanishes as soon as we have duly learned from the Critique itself the only true determinations of the concepts of understanding and reason. And Hume’s skepticism is supposed to have been annulled and exploded by this sophism? Surely we must have a very tenuous grasp of the problem raised by skepticism if we find anything of the sort even likely. The first thing that Hume would have retorted to [the attempt to] derive from the mind what is necessary in our knowledge, as the Critique of Reason has done. […] Another general point to be considered here is: the moment we declare that the real principle of sufficient reason is merely subjective, and that it applies to the connection of our representations only in experience, we can no longer speak of an actual ground of the components of our cognition. Any enquiry about it becomes meaningless, for the principle would not signify anything that pertains to things as they are ‘in-themselves’ outside our representations. Before we can reasonably ask, “What is the genuinely ‘real ground’ and the cause of this or that constituent of the insights we possess?”, we should establish beyond doubt: (1) that ‘causality’ is an objective predicate of actuality, and (2) that the components 152

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of our knowledge are causally joined to something in itself, or realiter. We cannot assume that ‘causality’ belongs only to our representations, or to our way of thinking, yet ask how in actuality our knowledge originates in something different from it, or ask for some true cause of it. As determined by the Critique of Reason, the function of the principle of causality thus undercuts all philosophizing about the where or how of the origin of our cognitions. […] As things now stand, the charge is not unfounded that its boast of victory over Hume’s skepticism is unjustified and hence idle. And if the Critique has not won that victory, it has also failed to establish any claim to lasting validity. Sooner or later it will be robbed of its reputation at the hand of skepticism. Without fail it will be shaken at its foundation just as thoroughly as it once shook many an old dogmatic system whose founder fancied he had constructed for all eternity. Moreover, no deeper wound could have been inflicted on philosophy in its present situation, than by Hume’s attacks on the employment of the concepts and laws of causality. For since Locke and Leibniz, we have based every philosophy on a search for the origin of representations. And so we have been left, after his attacks, with no materials with which to build a system of philosophy. Until we have remedied this loss in full, therefore, we should not presume to say or decide anything about the origin of human knowledge. We must either show from universally valid and indisputable propositions that the principles and the categories of causality also hold for the origin of our representations, or we must establish on some other principle that there is a connection between our representations and something outside them. Before this is done, we ought not to think that whatever we say in philosophy about the reality of the components of man’s knowledge, or about anything that might or might not exist outside the representations, amounts to more than a tissue of arbitrary opinions.

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CHAPTER 6 SALOMON MAIMON (1753–1800)

INTRODUCTION Highly unconventional, both in his life’s trajectory and his philosophical views, Salomon Maimon, through his objections to Kant’s Critical philosophy as well as his own positive “Coalition-system” of skepticism, greatly influenced the formation of German idealism and its future debates. Kant viewed him as the best of his critics, and Mendelssohn and Fichte expressed their admiration for his philosophical talents and the power of his thought. Born in 1753 to a Jewish family of modest means in the small village of Sukoviborg in Lithuania, Maimon’s intellectual prowess was recognized early. As was then customary for Jews, he did not use his family name and was called: Salomon ben Joshua, that is, Salomon, son of Joshua. His father was a rabbinic scholar, and Maimon was expected to follow his father’s example. Maimon received a traditional religious education focused mainly on the study of the Talmud—a central text of Judaism that consists of commentary on Jewish history, law, and practice. Although his father had never encouraged his son to study anything other than the Hebrew Scriptures, the young Salomon, who was naturally curious and possessed an insatiable appetite for knowledge, read everything he could find. He took particular interest in mathematics and astronomy, and, in order to read more widely, taught himself both Latin and German. Unfortunately, in his town there were few opportunities for academic development, and several personal circumstances prevented Maimon from achieving a solid formal education in other subjects apart from his rabbinical studies. However, his Talmudic talents had propelled him in his Judaism classes in various local Jewish schools, and, before he reached adolescence, he had achieved the rank of “full rabbi.” This event made him a local celebrity, attracting the attention of several mothers with eligible daughters, and soon young Salomon found himself in an arranged marriage with a local girl (Thielke 2014, 223). At the time of marriage, both he and his newly wed wife Sarah were no older than eleven, and their first son, David, was born when Salomon just turned fourteen. Maimon made his living as a tutor. He mostly worked for poor and uneducated families; his working conditions were often terrible. He continued reading extensively and had to travel to obtain new books. Both travel and access to new literature exposed him to works and ideas beyond the Talmudic tradition. He grew interested in the teachings of Maimonides (Rambam), a medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages, who in his time was also known for his contributions to astronomy and medicine. Maimon carried a respect and admiration for Maimonides throughout his life, considering him his spiritual teacher and adopting Maimonides (shortened) name as his own surname. At the age of twenty-three, Maimon abandoned his family and traveled to Berlin, in an attempt to compose a commentary on Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. His hope was that as a rabbi he would receive the assistance of the Berlin Jewish community and with its help would be able to support himself and eventually have access to the education he had always

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desired. However, his crude manner and very rudimentary German did not appeal to Berlin society, and he had to leave the city. For several months, he wandered through Germany begging for food and shelter in order to sustain himself. Eventually a rabbi in the city of Posen, who knew his father, took him in and offered him a place to live and a paid job. For the next several years Maimon worked as a private tutor in one the city’s Jewish households in the German countryside. In 1781, he was able to return to Berlin, now in much more favorable circumstances. In Berlin, he quickly established a close connection with Moses Mendelssohn and other representatives of the Jewish Enlightenment who favored a young talented man. He read Wolff, Locke, and Spinoza, and made the acquaintance of Kant’s former student and Mendelssohn’s physician Markus Herz. However, while Maimon was respected in Berlin as an intellectual, his primitive manners and rudeness, inability to communicate well with people from high society and broader intellectual circles, as well as his fondness for wine and his “dissolute behavior” (Maimon 2010, x) alienated many of his friends and patrons. After Maimon began openly advocating Spinozism, Mendelssohn insisted that he leave Berlin. Initially he traveled to Amsterdam, attempting to launch a medical career, but after failing miserably there and even contemplating suicide, he eventually returned to Hamburg and settled in the largely Jewish district of Altona. He was lucky to find a generous benefactor who offered to pay for his studies in the Altona Gymnasium. This is where he learned several languages, improved his German, studied mathematics, and was exposed to classic works in philosophy. After finishing gymnasium studies in 1785, he moved to Breslau where he lived for the next two years. On his way to Breslau he stopped in Berlin, where for the last time he saw and conversed with Mendelssohn, who would die only a few months later. To pay respect to Mendelsohn, while in Breslau Maimon translated Mendelsohn’s last work Morgenstunden, oder Vorlesungen Über das Daseyn Gottes into Hebrew. Still thinking of a medical career, in Breslau Maimon took courses in medicine and was employed as a tutor. It was also around this time that his wife, whom he had abandoned more than decade ago, tracked him down, demanding that he return to Lithuania. When he refused, she insisted on divorce, which seemed the only acceptable conclusion to the previously abandoned marriage. In 1787, after years of wandering, Maimon finally managed to return to Berlin. Here he was instantly immersed in the philosophical and intellectual environment largely dominated by discussion of Kant’s new Critical philosophy. Now Maimon encountered and carefully studied the Critique of Pure Reason. Highly ambitious in his goals, he decided to compose a critical commentary on Kant’s work. As a result, he produced in 1789, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy that he described as “comments and explanations of the Critique.” In the Essay, he established his “coalition system” that, he claimed, would agree with “the systems of Spinoza, Hume and Leibniz.” Eager to publish his work, Maimon sought support from Kant himself. He gave his manuscript, along with a letter summarizing his thoughts about the Critique, to Markus Herz who delivered the package to Kant in April 1789, at the height of the philosopher’s fame. About a month later, Kant responded in a letter to Herz praising Maimon and his Essay. He wrote: Just a glance at [the manuscript] was enough to make me recognize its excellence, and not only that none of my opponents has understood me and the principle question as well as Mr. Maimon, but also that only a few people possess such an acute mind for such profound investigations [as he does]. (Maimon 2010, 231; Ak 11:48) 156

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Although Kant found it inappropriate for him to recommend Maimon’s book for publication because it was directed against him, Kant’s praise allowed the author easily to find the publisher for his Essay, which appeared in 1790. Now recognized by Kant, Maimon gained access to the intellectual circles and salons of Berlin. The next and last decade of Maimon’s life was perhaps the most productive time of his life. He authored seven substantial books and published several articles in principal journals. He also found himself involved in a number of philosophical disputes. One of the most prominent had adverse consequences for Maimon’s standing within the philosophical community: his dispute with Karl Reinhold, a widely recognized interpreter of Kant, with whom Maimon had a very extensive correspondence about Kantian critical philosophy and Reinhold’s own positive program of so-called Philosophy of the Elements (Elementarphilosophie). Maimon criticized Reinhold’s principle of consciousness for its incompleteness and nonuniversal character. He argued that consciousness could not be accurately defined through the category of representation, because a representation always presupposes something that is to be presented, that is, an object of cognitive inquiry. When Maimon published this private correspondence without Reinhold’s permission, Reinhold publicly objected, thus making it difficult for Maimon to continue his critical enterprise. In 1795, Maimon, whose passion for alcohol disturbed his standing within intellectual circles, left Berlin one last time. Invited by a young nobleman, Count Adolf Kalkreuth, Maimon moved to Silesia, where he spent the remaining years of his life living on Kalkreuth estate. He died on November 22, 1800, at the age of forty-seven. * * * While Maimon had, for years, doubted the tenets of his religion, his academic pursuits only reinforced his belief that reason was superior to any form of faith. (At one point, Maimon attempted to convert to Christianity, though only because he thought it would afford him more opportunities in academia.) He developed a genuine interest in epistemology and metaphysics, and his intellectual life underwent multiple transformations. As he described it, I had been an adherent of all philosophical systems in succession, Peripatetic, Spinozist, Leibnitzian, Kantian, and finally Sceptic; and I was always devoted to that system, which for the time I regarded alone true. At last I observed that all these systems contain something true, and are in certain respects equally useful. (Maimon 2001b, 288) However, he refused to label himself an adherent of any particular system. His own position is often described as “skeptical rationalism,” for he attempted to combine the two seemingly incompatible views: rationalism and skepticism. It was Maimon’s central belief that “rationalism in fact leads, at least indirectly, to skepticism” (Thielke 2014, 222), the view he developed in what he called his “coalition system,” which sought to combine the views of many such diverse thinkers as Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant. Yet it seems Kant had the most profound influence on Maimon, as he came to embrace “transcendental philosophy” after his first reading of the Critique of Pure Reason. In his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, Maimon criticized and expounded upon Kant’s system. The Essay is perhaps the best expression of his peculiar skeptical outlook. 157

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To Maimon, “All human activities are . . . more or less thinking,” and humanity strives to “reach [the] maximum in thinking” (Maimon 5). Truth is the highest goal which man can attain, and as such Maimon’s sole objective was to “progress in the knowledge of truth” (Maimon 10). Yet, his standard of truth was directly associated with his skepticism. He argued that even if we trustfully follow the Critical philosophy, there is still reason to doubt the plausibility of Kant’s arguments for knowledge. In his Essay, Maimon turns to the most challenging of Kant’s problems, how a priori concepts apply to experience if they do not derive from it. Maimon claimed that this problem addressed by Kant in the Transcendental Deduction remains unsolved in the Critical philosophy due to Kant’s sharp dualism between understanding and sensibility. According to Kant, knowledge of experience is the result of the work of the two faculties—the understanding and sensibility. While the understanding generates spontaneously universal concepts, sensibility, which relies on the senses, provides particular intuitions. The former supplies the experience with its form, and the latter with its content or matter. Both concepts and intuitions not only correspond with and complement each other, but also the close correlation between them is necessary for experience to occur. As Kant famously asserts: Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is 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 the intuitions understandable (i.e., to bring them under concepts). (Kant CPR A51/B75) Yet, concepts and intuitions derive from different sources: concepts are generated a priori from the understanding and intuitions originate a posteriori in sensibility. How would these concepts then correlate with these intuitions, or, in other words, what makes a priori concepts correctly apply to experience if they do not derive from it? (Beiser 2002, 249). Maimon claims not only that Kant failed to resolve this problem, but that the gap between understanding and sensibility Kant created is in principle unbridgeable; because concepts and intuition cannot correspond, knowledge cannot be obtained. He argues that the understanding and intuition in the way Kant conceives them are so different that they cannot interact at all. While the understanding as purely intellectual is beyond space and time, sensibility exists only as empirical faculty, and so is within space and time. As belonging to different realms— noumenal and phenomenal respectively—concepts and sensibility cannot interact. Yet, as Kant confidently showed, this interaction is necessary for knowledge. If we are to have knowledge, the two faculties must work harmoniously together: understanding must organize intuitions according to concepts, synthesizing their raw content, and sensibility must provide material that the understanding can synthesize. Maimon insists that this gap between understanding and sensibility makes it impossible even to know whether or to what degree the a priori concepts of the understanding apply to the a posteriori intuitions of sensibility. He claims Kant failed to provide a criterion by which to determine whether the categories correctly apply to specific intuitions. Criticizing Kant from the position of (empirical) skepticism, Maimon not only endorses Hume and his insistence that we have no perception of real causal relations but also draws from several rationalist ideas he finds in Leibniz and Spinoza. In fact, Maimon’s goal is to offer an alternative to Kant’s account of transcendental idealism. Thus, while Maimon frequently 158

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states that he denies “the reality of experience” (Maimon 2010, 114), this claim should not be interpreted along the lines of radical Cartesian doubt about the existence of the external world, nor about infallibility of our a posteriori judgments. Maimon’s denial of the reality of experience is rather an argument against objective, especially causal, judgments. He insists that we cannot reach any credible conclusion about the objective structure of the world. Our judgments are not grounded in perception of any real causal or other relations; instead they are purely subjective, and must be understood as “mere perception[s] containing a merely subjective necessity (arising from habit) that is wrongly passed off as an objective necessity” (Maimon 2010, 43). By denying the reality of experience, Maimon thus removes any residue of Kant’s empirical realism from the matter of sensation, a move grounded in his commitments to empirical skepticism. Interestingly, however, contrary to Hume and other classic representatives of empirical skepticism, who, being suspicious of the reliability of reason, defend empiricism regarding the source of knowledge, Maimon’s skepticism is largely rooted in his rationalist commitments (Thielke 2014, 227). He draws upon the rationalist idea of complete cognition, according to which reason always demands a complete explanation according to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, a requirement which necessarily guides rational inquiry. In fact, Kant appeared to use this regulative ideal as a criterion to declare the limitation of reason. Maimon maintains that not only reason but also the understanding is subject to these rigorous rational requirements. According to Kant, the possibility of knowledge requires that our experience of the world be not only perceivable but cognizable as well. Yet he does not (obviously) explain what the standards of knowledge within experience are. Thus, Maimon insists that it is not enough to declare that we have knowledge of empirical reality; we also require a complete explanation of the possibility of knowledge within experience. The challenge is to have insight into the “manner of origination” (Entstehungsart) of cognitive content, which, according to Maimon, requires finding a “criterion” (Maimon 2010, 202) by which to specify how concepts (of the understanding) apply to intuitions—the very question which grounds Maimon’s main charge against Kant. The fact that this “demand for insight” is not met within our experience drives Maimon’s skepticism, supporting his belief in our inability to achieve, even in principle, the level of complete cognition. Though Maimon’s philosophical contribution, thanks to Kant’s approval, was acknowledged by leading intellectuals of the time, as a thinker he never managed to reach the philosophical heights enjoyed by other contemporaries. Yet it would be a mistake to discount his role in the development of German idealism. His critical skepticism aimed not only at Kant and Reinhold but even more so at Schulze. It was one of the first attempts to evaluate the actual results and implications of Kant’s Critical turn in philosophy. Of all the initial critical responses to Reinhold’s first principle, Maimon’s was one of the most original, and it challenged the skeptical argument of Schulze and provided the material basis for Fichte’s reflections, both concerning the foundation of philosophy and his line of defense against skepticism.

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Chronology of Salomon Maimon’s Life and Works 1753

Born to a Jewish family in Sukoviborg, Lithuania.

1764

Achieves the status of “full rabbi”; gets married to a local girl.

1767

Birth of his first son, David.

1776

First (unsuccessful) attempt to settle in Berlin, following by months of begging.

1777

Settles in Posen, where he makes a living working as a private tutor.

1781

First (successful) attempt to settle in Berlin, where he develops friendship with Moses Mendelssohn.

1783

Asked to leave Berlin due to his Spinozism, he travels to Amsterdam.



Eventually settles in Altona (near Hamburg), where he graduates from the Gymnasium.

1785

Moves to Breslau, where he begins a failed attempt to study medicine.



On the way to Breslau, stops in Berlin and meets, for the last time, Mendelsohn.



Divorces his wife, whom he abandoned a decade ago.

1787

Returns to Berlin; begins studying Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

1789

Composes the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, which is highly praised by Kant.

1790

Publication of the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy.

1791

Publication of his Philosophical Dictionary.

1792

Publication of his On the Progress of Philosophy.

1793

Publication of his An Attempt at a New Logic, or a Theory of Thinking.



Composes his Autobiography, in 2 vols.

1795

Takes residence on the Silesian estate of Graf Heinrich Wilhelm Adolf Kalkreuth.

1797

Publication of his Critical Investigations of the Human Mind, or the Highest Faculty of Knowledge and Will.

1800

Dies on November 22.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Maimon’s Writings A.1.  German Editions

Maimon, S. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by Florian Ehrensperger and Ives Radrizzani, 10 vols. [7 vols. of German writings and 3 vols. of the Hebrew writings], Frommann-Holzboog, in preparation. Maimon, S. 1965–1976. Gesammelte Werke, edited by Valerio Verra, 7 vols. Hildsheim: Olms. A.2.  In English (selected translations)

Maimon, S. 2001a. Letters of Philaletes to Aenesidemus, translated by George di Giovanni, in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, edited by di Giovanni and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett. Maimon, S. 2001b. The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, translated by J. Clark Murray. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Maimon, S. 2010. Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, translated and edited by Alistair Welchman, Henry Somers-Hall, Merten Reglitz, and Nick Midgley. London: Continuum. B.  Selected Commentaries

Beiser, F. C. 1987. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 285–323. Beiser, F. 2002. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Bransen, J. 1991. The Antinomy of Thought: Maimonian Skepticism and the Relation between Thoughts and Objects. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Buzaglo, M. 2002. Solomon Maimon: Monism, Skepticism and Mathematics. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. Duffy, S. 2014. “Maimon’s Theory of Differentials as the Elements of Intuitio,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 22: 1–20. Franks, P. 2000. “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, edited by Karl Ameriks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 95–116. Freudenthal, G. (ed.). 2003. Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic: Critical Assessments. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Freudenthal, G. 2006. Definition and Construction. Salomon Maimon’s Philosophy of Geometry (Preprint 317). Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Horstmann, R.-P. 1972. “Maimon’s Criticism of Reinhold’s Satz des Bewusstseins,” in  Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress. Dordrecht: Reidel, 350–58. Melamed, Y. Y. 2004. “Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 42: 67–96. Rosenstock, B. 2014. “God … has sent me to Germany: Salomon Maimon, Friedrich Jacobi, and the Spinoza Quarrel,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 52: 287–315.

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Socher, A. P. 2006. The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Thielke, P. 2001. “Getting Maimon’s Goad: Discursivity, Skepticism, and Fichte’s Idealism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 39 (1): 101–34. Thielke, P. 2014. “Rationalism, Empiricism, and Skepticism: The Curious Case of Maimon’s Coalition-System,” in The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, edited by Matthew Altman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 222–42.

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FROM LETTERS OF PHILALETES TO AENESIDEMUS (1794) *

First Letter What you plan to do in your work, worthy Sir, is to define the relationship of skeptical philosophy to the critical more accurately than has hitherto been done; to declare that the legitimate demands made by the first have been [left] unsatisfied by the other; and finally, to award the victory to skeptical philosophy not only over the dogmatic, but also over the critical. For some years I too have made philosophy my favorite study. I too have thrust myself into the battle between dogmatic and critical philosophy, and as everyone knows I have spoken up on behalf of the latter. Lately I have tried to speak equally in favour of skepticism, and to defend its hereditary prerogatives. It seems, therefore, that we are following exactly the same plan in our philosophical endeavours. From what follows, it will be clear, however, that the plan is common to us only in its bare outline. In spite of our general agreement, we are in fact so far from sharing one and the same concept of the two different methods of philosophizing in question, either per se or in their relation to one another, that I shall even champion against you the cause of the great commander in chief of [the forces of] critical philosophy—the very Mr. Reinhold, that is, whom I have also had occasion to attack (cf. Disputes in the Domain of Philosophy; Philosophical Correspondence). Our agreement regarding the plan but divergence in its execution will serve, I hope, to elucidate the object of our common enquiry all the more and set it in clear light. Your intention (p. 20) is nothing less than to prove that “skepticism is justified in vigorously challenging the [alleged] certainty and universality of the principles and premises on which critical philosophy rests.” Also (p. 24): In my view, skepticism reduces to the claim that nothing in philosophy has been established from indisputably certain and universal principles regarding either the being or non-being of things-in-themselves and their properties, or the limits of man’s faculties of cognition. So it is only in the second half of this definition that you oppose skepticism to critical philosophy, for as far as the first is concerned (i.e., “. . . nothing in philosophy has been established from indisputably certain and universal principles . . . etc. . . .”) the critical philosophy is in complete agreement with your skepticism. Your skepticism only differs from it in that, as regards the being or non-being of things-in-themselves and their properties, critical philosophy not only holds that so far nothing certain has been established about them in

From George di Giovanni & H.S. Harris (eds.), Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000, 159–61. *

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accordance with universally valid principles, but also that nothing can be so established in principle. Your skepticism, although it appears on the surface to stand even more radically opposed to dogmatism than critical philosophy, is in fact much more in sympathy with it. Nowhere does it declare (as critical philosophy does) that the questions posed by human reason concerning the being or non-being of things-in-themselves, their objectively real properties, and the limits of the faculties of cognition, are absolutely unanswerable; it posits nothing definite at all on the question of what reason can achieve in the domain of speculation, or what it will perhaps achieve some day, etc. My skepticism, on the contrary, far from saying anything in support of dogmatism, stands opposed to it even more so than critical philosophy does. It assumes as fact of consciousness two kinds of cognition, viz., knowledge a priori and a posteriori; and it finds the characteristic of necessity and universal validity in one, but not in the other. A priori knowledge is so either absolutely or in a relative sense. In the first case, it is the form of the faculty of knowledge with reference to an object in general; in the second, it is itself grounded on some determinate kind of given objects instead. In the first case, it refers either to an object of thought or to an object of knowledge in general; that is, it abstracts not only from all the particular determinations with which an object is given to thought, but also from the a priori conditions which allow an object to be thought in general under particular determinations (no matter which). In the second case, it abstracts only from the particular determinations but not from the a priori conditions that make these possible. Skepticism is occupied, above all, in seeking out these conditions, and their systematic order, so as to determine and secure the limits of the faculty of cognition. To this extent it marches in step behind the critical philosophy (except for a number of variations and improvements which it feels justified in adopting in the process). But now we come to the point where the two part company. Critical philosophy accepts the actual thinking of objects in accordance with conditions grounded in the faculty of cognition a priori as a fact of consciousness, and only shows in which way they are conditions. Skepticism puts that same fact in doubt, and seeks to establish that on this question the witness of common sense is not valid, since it rests on an illusion that can be accounted for in terms of psychological laws. Moreover, skepticism declares certain representations, which the critical philosophy—in order not to break away from the dogmatic philosophy completely—assumes to be ideas of reason that are grounded in its nature, to be grounded only in the nature of the imagination. We shall have to discuss this in greater detail in the following letters. Of course, the propositions [which you take to be] valid beyond doubt (p. 45), and on which you ground your censure of the Philosophy of the Elements, both can and must be granted in any case. Only the second one requires a qualification. [You say]: “General logic is the touchstone of all truth.” Right you are! But this holds only for every formal truth. You say, further (p. 46, Note), Whenever the skeptics have cast doubt on the certainty of the syllogistic art, their intention was in fact only to doubt whether this art could help us attain to a cognition of things-in-themselves.

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I do not know which kind of skeptics you have in mind here. The truth of the syllogistic art rests on the principle of contradiction; a reasonable skeptic, therefore, will not doubt it even as regards things-in-themselves, since that principle applies to objects in general, and hence also to things-in-themselves. On the other hand, the syllogistic art cannot help us attain to any objectively real knowledge, not only in respect to things-in-themselves, but also in respect to appearances. Thus there is no doubt about this, in any case.

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LETTER FROM MAIMON TO KANT (1789) *

Honourable sir! Filled with the reverence owed to a man who has reformed philosophy (and hence every other science), it was only the love of truth that made me bold enough to approach you. Already destined by birth to live out the best years of my life in the forests of Lithuania, I deprived of every aid in acquiring knowledge of truth, I was finally fortunate enough to reach Berlin, though too late. Thanks to the support of a few noble-minded men I was here put in a position to apply myself to the sciences; and it was natural, I think, that in my eager desire to attain my highest goal, the truth, I should to some extent postpone the subordinate tasks of a linguistic ability, method, etc. For this reason it was a long time before I dared to reveal any of my thoughts to a public whose taste is today so demanding [difficilen], even though I had in particular read several systems of philosophy, thought them through, and from time to time found something new in them. Finally I had the good fortune to come across your immortal work, to study it, and to reconstruct my whole way of thinking in accordance with it. I have tried my utmost to draw out the final conclusions from this work, to imprint them on my memory, and to seek out the traces of its principal train of thought [Ideenganges], in order, so to speak, to enter into the mind of the author. With this goal in mind I wrote down my conclusions, in so far as I was able to make them comprehensible, and added a few comments that bear principally upon the following points. 1) The distinction that you make between analytic and synthetic propositions, and the reality of the latter. 2) The question quid juris? The importance of this question makes it worthy of a Kant; and if it is given the scope that you yourself give it, it demands: How can something a priori apply [applicieren] with certainty to something a posteriori? In this case the answer or deduction that you give us in your writings is completely satisfying, as [only] the answer of a Kant can be. But if the scope of the question is enlarged, it demands: How can an a priori concept apply to an intuition even to an a priori intuition? Now the question must await the master once again before it is satisfactorily answered. 3) A newly identified kind of idea, that I call ideas of the understanding, indicating [hindeuten] material totality, just as the ideas of reason identified by yourself indicate | formal totality. I think I have thereby opened up a new approach to answering the aforementioned question, quid juris? 4) The question quid facti? You seem to have merely touched upon this; but because of Hume’s doubt it seems to me important to answer it satisfactorily.

*

From Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, Continuum International Group, 2010, 228–29.

Letter from Maimon to Kant

These remarks are a summary of the content of the manuscript that I dare to set before you. My kind friends have already urged me for a long time to publish this manuscript, but I did not want to agree to their wish without first subjecting it to your judgement, which is priceless to me. If a Kant finds my endeavour not completely worthless, then he will certainly not despise someone who approaches him respectfully. He will reply to him, instruct him where he errs, commend him if he finds something worthy of this, and so make him doubly happy. Your wholly devoted servant and admirer, Salomon Maymon Berlin the 7th April 1789.

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ARTICLE FROM THE BERLIN JOURNAL FOR ENLIGHTENMENT (1790) *,1

Most worthy friend, I have received your article of the . . . In it you express the wish that I explain the plan of the work I sent you more precisely, and put the reader in no doubt as to which faction [Partei] I belong to, because you think I have failed to do this in a precise enough fashion in the work itself. But to what end? In this case the factions cannot be exactly determined and philosophical I sects cannot be brought under definite classes like objects of natural history. However, because this is what you want, and because you believe that this will contribute to a better understanding and overview of the whole work, I will do as you say. I maintain that the results of the Critique of Pure Reason controverting the dogmatists are irrefutable, and hence that the question: ‘Is metaphysics possible?’ (in the sense that Kant understands it, that is, as a science of things in themselves) must be answered with a ‘No’. But at the same time I maintain that this [Kantian] system is insufficient in two respects. In the first place it is insufficient to overturn all dogmatism as such; this follows from my demonstration that metaphysics, understood not as the science of things in themselves (these cannot be thought at all), but merely as the science of the limits of appearances (ideas), I is not only possible, but is in fact necessary, because no cognition of any object at all would be possible without it; cognition of the objects of appearance necessarily leads us to these ideas that comprise the proper objects of complete [or perfect] thought [die eigentlichen Objekte des vollständigen Denkens]. So I agree with Kant that the concepts of metaphysics are not real objects of experience but merely ideas that one can approach ever closer to in experience; but at the same time I maintain that ideas are not the proper objects just of metaphysics, but of any science that deserves the name. In the second place, this system is insufficient to prevent all further dogmatism. I will explain more closely the grounds for these claims. First, I differ from Kant on the difference between the thing in itself and the concept or representation of a thing. According to Kant, the thing in itself is what the concept or representation refers to outside our cognitive faculty. By contrast, I claim that the thing in itself (understood in this way) is an empty and completely meaningless word because we are unable either to demonstrate its existence or to form any concept of it. For me, things in themselves and concepts or representations of things are objectively one and the very same thing: they differ only subjectively, i.e. in relation to the completeness of our cognition. For example, a triangle, considered in itself, is both a thing (object of thought) and a concept of a thing (of a general distinguishing mark [allgemeines Merkmal]), but it is a concept in relation to this thing

*

From Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, Continuum International Group, 2010, 238–49.

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in itself, and so on. What belongs to the concept of a thing necessarily belongs to the thing itself; but what belongs to the thing itself belongs to its concept only to the extent that the concept is identical with it. A regular polygon is a concept I in relation to the circle (in which or around which it is described); on the other hand, the circle is the thing in itself in relation to the polygon. I can assert of the polygon that I can identify two points (that are the limits of any side of the polygon) such that the straight lines drawn from them and intersecting at the centre are equal to each other, and this is also true of the circle. On the other hand, it is asserted of the circle that all lines drawn from the centre to the circumference are equal; but this can only be true of the polygon to the extent that it is identical to the circle (in the points they have in common [in ihren Vereinigungspunkten]), and similarly in other cases. So the thing in itself is an idea of reason provided by reason itself to solve a universal antinomy of thought in general. For thought in general comprises the relation of a form (rule of the understanding) to a matter (the given subsumed under it). Without matter we cannot achieve consciousness of the form so that matter is a necessary condition of thought, i.e. really thinking a form or rule of the understanding requires a given matter that it refers to; by contrast, what is required for completeness in the thought of an object is that nothing in it should be given and everything thought. We cannot reject either of these requirements as illegitimate, so we must satisfy both by making our thought ever more complete, a process in which matter approaches ever closer to form to infinity, and this is the solution of the antinomy. Secondly, the principle question that the Critique of Pure Reason raised is: ‘How are synthetic a priori propositions possible?’ In the sense that he attaches to it, Kant also resolves this question satisfactorily. On the other hand, I think I am justified in posing this question in a stricter sense, whereby Kant’s solution becomes unsatisfactory. That is to say, for Kant, a cognition is a priori if both its matter and its form have their ground in the faculty of cognition itself, without considering the possibility that the connection of form and matter might already be made comprehensible by another cognition prior to their arising. So when Kant divides this principle question into its subordinate parts and asks, for example, ‘how are synthetic a priori propositions in mathematics possible?’ then his meaning is merely, ‘how do they attain existence in our cognition?’ to which the answer: ‘through an a priori construction (from the cognitive faculty itself)’ is completely satisfactory. For me, on the other hand, this question has the following meaning: their construction certainly convinces us entirely both of the existence of mathematical synthetic a priori propositions and of the nature of this existence, but the question is: ‘How are we to comprehend this existence in us a priori (from a preceding cognition)?’ For example, the concept of an equilateral triangle does not exist merely in the actual construction (in so far as we construct a triangle in general, and think in addition [hinzudenkt] the possibility of the equality of the sides); rather, as Euclid (Prop I) teaches us, we are already convinced of its reality before its actual construction, and it is by means of this that its construction is not only accomplished but is even comprehensible. In the same way, every analytic proposition is already comprehensible from discursive cognition prior to the construction of the concept. By contrast, the truth of mathematical axioms is imposed on us, without being in any way made comprehensible, and this comprises the formal incompleteness of our cognition with respect to them. But our cognition also possesses an inescapable material incompleteness, namely when the construction cannot fully comply with the conditions of the concept (because the concept stretches to infinity). This gives rise to an antinomy: on

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the one hand, reason commands us to attribute reality to the concept only in so far as it is constructible because the reality of what is not constructible is merely problematic. But on the other hand, reason demands that the proposition should hold only for the complete concept as it is thought in the understanding, and not for the incomplete concept as it is constructed by the imagination! The second subordinate question is: ‘How is pure natural science possible?’ According to Kant, its meaning is this: ‘How can the understanding prescribe a priori laws for things outside [of] it?’ According to him, the answer to the question is this: there is no way that the understanding can prescribe laws for things in themselves outside it, it merely prescribes laws for things in so far as they are intuited by sensibility and thought by the understanding. The laws of the understanding are conditions of the thought of an object in general. They must therefore be valid for all objects a priori. So this is how synthetic propositions concerning nature are possible a priori. The foundations of these laws are the familiar logical forms or the [different] kinds of relation of one object to another. Next come the categories or the particular determination of these forms with respect to the objects they are brought into relation with and hence acquire their reality. This particular determination must be found not in the objects themselves a posteriori, but in something a priori that refers to the a posteriori object. And because this determination is not in the logical form itself, it can only be found in the a priori forms of sensibility, etc. All of which must be familiar to you from the Critique of Pure Reason. Again at this point, new deficiencies [in Kant’s argument] are visible. First, I think a distinction needs to be made between the genuine logical forms and what are passed off as such forms in the logic books. Let me explain this using the example of the form of the hypothetical proposition: ‘if a thing a is posited, then another thing b must be posited’. In itself, this form is merely problematic, and so can attain reality only in actual application [Gebrauch]. If its application is unproven, then the form lacks any reality. David Hume denies that this form has any application, i.e. he denies any application for the concept of cause, or the judgement: ‘if a thing b is given, another thing a must be given so that b follows from a according to a rule’; he does this by showing that this form (in relation to determinate objects) is not a judgement of the understanding, but merely a consequence of an association in the imagination; and I think he is right to judge it like this because a judgement of the understanding does not arise gradually, and is not dependent on habit, as is the case with this judgement. Savages ignorant of the use of fire will certainly not make the judgement: ‘the fire warms (makes warm, is cause of the warming of) the stone’ the very first time they perceive a fire and the subsequent warming of a stone; but after they have perceived the one appearance follow the other several times, they will connect them in their imagination in the order they were perceived in, so that if one of these appearances comes before them, then they will imagine the other in the order they have frequently been perceived in. As a result, there is no objective a priori necessity at all in this case, but only a subjective necessity according to an empirical law. Kant has indeed proved that we cannot possess any concept of an object in general (as in this case for example of something arising [das Entstehung eines Dings]), unless the faculty of judgement [Urteilsvermögen] determines the logical form in a judgement (for itself this logical form is undetermined with respect to the object). But if, with David Hume, I maintain that this is not a judgement of the understanding, then I also deny the very fact that is dependent on it, since I claim that, if we should judge that a thing b arises [entstehet] [from a], we only do so by judging that it follows a according to a rule (that a must constantly precede and b follow); but because this is not a 170

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judgement of the understanding (we term the way we have become used to things following one another ‘actual experience’, but others call it a mere play of the imagination), all that Kant has proved is that these two things presuppose one another reciprocally, i.e., in order to think something as actually arising [ein wirkliches Entstehen], we must think the thing that is coming into being [das zuentstehende Ding] with respect to another thing in a rule-governed sequence, and also the reverse; and no one would dispute this. However, what is in question here is not the logical relation of these thoughts, but their real use; and this is just what cannot be admitted. And so, since the concept of cause has no reality in relation to determinate objects of experience, it follows that the concept of cause in general, as an abstraction from this, has no reality. Suppose someone objects: let us concede that the uniformity of the perceptions is the ground of this judgement of habit; but what then is the ground of this uniformity itself? Then I reply: this is no more of a problem for this theory than it is for Kant’s. Kant certainly says that there must be an a priori rule determining perceptions that are related to one another, because otherwise the imagination would find no matter to act on. As a result, the order of the things in relation to one another is determined a priori. But I have to confess that I cannot see the strength of this argument. Suppose that there was no unalterable order of the perceptions, and at the same time no unalterable disorder, then the imagination would still always have enough matter to be effective. This is because its effectiveness does not presuppose an unalterable succession of determinate perceptions, but simply an often-repeated one, such that the degree of its effectiveness is determined by the degree of this repetition. It follows according to this way of presenting things that the concept of cause is not a category, but an idea: we can approach it ever more closely in practice [Gebrauch], but we can never reach it. The more often we have seen determinate perceptions succeed one another, the more precisely they are connected to one another in our imagination, so that the subjective necessity of this succession approaches ever closer to the objective succession, but without ever being able to reach it. And it is the same with all the remaining categories. Now that I have shown the difficulties with Kant’s theory, I will now strike off on a somewhat different path, by means of which I think these difficulties can be, if not completely overcome, at least considerably reduced. The universal antinomy of thought in general obviously contains its own solution in itself, and it is the following: reason demands that what is given in an object must be treated not as something that is in its nature unalterable, but unalterable merely as a consequence of the limitation of our faculty of thought. As a result, reason commands us to progress to infinity, so that what is thought ever increases and on the other hand what is given becomes infinitely small. The question here is not how far we can go in this, but simply: what point of view we must consider the object from, in order to be able to judge correctly about it. But this [point of view] is nothing other than the idea of the most-complete-of-all [allervollkommensten] faculty of thought, to which we must approach ever closer to infinity. Since the mathematical antinomy has a similar origin to the universal antinomy, it will be resolved in a similar way. I will explain this. There are two kinds of construction, namely an object-construction and a schemaconstruction, i.e. either the object itself (corresponding fully to its conditions in the understanding) is presented in the pure imagination a priori; or it can be presented not as corresponding fully to its conditions a priori but rather merely by means of an empirical construction. 171

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If the equation of a circle is expressed algebraically, and an arbitrary number of points are determined that satisfy the equation, then a circle is constructed a priori; but by this method only a few points in the circle are constructed (the loci geometrici of this formula) and not the circle itself as a continuous magnitude, as a single line; to construct the circle as a single line, the points must be joined up by means of straight lines. But then this construction does not fully agree with its corresponding concept because it conforms to the latter only in its determined points. On the other hand, if a circle is described by moving a line about one of its endpoints, then the construction will fully correspond with the concept. I think this is also the reason why the ancient geometers up to Descartes termed curved lines (other than the circle) ‘mechanical’, terming only the straight line and the circle ‘geometrical’, and were reluctant to give the former lines a place in their geometry. Descartes puzzled over this not a little, and was of the opinion that they had no reason for this. For, he says, if the curved lines were supposed to be termed ‘mechanical’ because a machine was required to describe them, then on this ground even the straight line and the circle would have had to be excluded from their geometry because machines must also be used to describe circles and draw lines. By contrast, Descartes believed that whatever permits exact specification [genau angeben] may be correctly termed ‘geometrical’, and that this applies to every line determined either by one continuous movement or by several successive movements. However, it seems that this great man did not notice that there are two criteria for a geometrical line, first it must be a line, i.e., a continuous quantity, or else it does not belong to geometry. Second it must be in some way measurable [ausmeßbar], i.e. be a geometrical line. If a curved line is to be constructed by means of its equation, then this can only happen by determining some points, such that lines drawn from them to intersect the diameter stand to the section of the diameter in the relation expressed by the equation. So in this case only these points and not the curved line itself are measurable. Consequently, I think the ancient geometers were right not to want to call such lines geometrical lines: although they are indeed (in the constructed points) geometrical, they are not lines; if they are to be so, then the connecting straight lines between these points must be added to the simple construction of the points; but this is no longer geometrical because the points that fall on these straight lines, can no longer be determined by the equation. So in this case reason demands that we increase the number of points to infinity so that this construction approaches ever closer to its concept, and only when this is fully accomplished do we get a real object a priori, which otherwise is impossible. For example, if the concept of a circle is determined by its equation, then its construction cannot completely conform to the latter. But if the concept is determined as in ordinary geometry (a line whose points are an equal distance from a given point) and it is constructed in the usual way through the movement of a line around one of its endpoints, then this construction is certainly complete, but it is not complete a priori because the concept of movement is itself a posteriori. As a result, the only way of constructing a concept completely a priori is a progressus in infinitum, as I have already shown. I come now to the third subdivision of the principal question, namely: how is natural science a priori possible? Kant’s explanation of this is the following: natural science contains synthetic a priori propositions (every effect must have a cause, etc.); how then is it possible that the understanding can prescribe a priori laws for a posteriori nature (i.e. that nature must conform to its propositions a priori)? And because I think I have found difficulties in Kant’s solution to this problem, I find myself forced to venture a solution of my own. In the first place, I maintain, with Kant, that time and space are a priori forms of sensibility, and that 172

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they contain nothing that is in sensible objects themselves, but are merely our way of being affected [affiziert] by them. Secondly, I maintain that the logical forms of thought, presuming that they have reality, cannot be used of things in themselves (in so far as these are totally unknown) but merely of their appearances in us so that their absolute totality cannot be used constitutively but only regulatively. So much against metaphysical dogmatism. But I also join my sceptical friend David Hume in maintaining (in opposition to critical dogmatism) that these logical forms of thought do not have any direct application to sensible natural objects (in so far as their pseudo-use [Quasigebrauch] of natural objects can be explained on psychological grounds drawn from experience), but can attain their objective reality only by means of a complete induction (that we can approach ever closer to, but never achieve): by this means their subjective reality approaches ever closer to objective reality, until they are united. Now I want to explain in more detail how this procedure of the doctrine of nature is the same as that of mathematics, and that it is legitimate in both in the same way. Mathematics contains nothing but synthetic a priori propositions, i.e. rules of the understanding that are given with the construction of the objects themselves, or more precisely: the faculty of cognition produces objects in conformity with these rules. So the rules first acquire their reality through the objects themselves being present. Prior to the existence of these objects in the mind, we cannot know which rules they have to be subsumed under after they arise. Here it is not the same as in the case of the analytical principle ‘A thing cannot at the same time be and not be’, where we can already assert something with certainty prior to the construction of a determinate object (a triangle for example), namely that it cannot be the same and not the same. In this respect, the synthetic a priori propositions do not possess any advantage over synthetic a posteriori propositions, the difference lies only in the fact that in the a priori propositions the object itself is produced a priori by the faculty of cognition as their matter, whereas in the a posteriori propositions it is given a posteriori by something else; but the judgements themselves, as forms or ways of thinking these objects, are in both cases a posteriori. The understanding prescribes a rule for the productive imagination to produce a space enclosed by three lines; the imagination obeys and constructs a triangle but sees that at the same time three angles are forced on it, something the understanding certainly did not ask for. At this point the understanding becomes cunning: it learns to see into [einsehen] the previously unknown connection between three sides and three angles, although its ground is still unknown to it. It thus makes a virtue out of a necessity, adopting an imperious manner and saying: ‘a triangle must have three angles,’ as if it were itself the law-giver here, when in fact it has to obey a completely unknown law-giver. As a result, we are entitled to doubt the objective necessity of this proposition: perhaps some thinking being, or I myself under certain circumstances, can construct a triangle with more angles or fewer angles, since in itself this does not involve a contradiction. So the necessity of this proposition is merely subjective, but it can have different degrees up to the very highest degree where (as an idea) it attains objective necessity: the whole advantage of objective necessity (whose opposite involves a contradiction) lies merely in our conviction that it cannot be different in any other construction, no matter what the circumstances. So if I am convinced by means of a complete induction that in a construction a triangle can only have three angles (in so far as I have constructed the triangle under all possible circumstances and other thinking beings have also constructed it under all these circumstances, (assuming this to be possible) and found this to be true) then it would be as good as if I were convinced by the principle of contradiction. But this induction can never 173

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be complete so that subjective necessity can approach ever closer to objective necessity but never completely attain it. It is the same with our judgements about natural objects. I notice that fire is warm (that the sensation of warmth arises in me after the representation of the firelight or some other property of fire); this is merely what Kant calls a perceptual judgement and according to me it cannot be turned into an experiential judgement by means of any direct operation of the understanding as Kant claims. If I notice this again and again, so that these two appearances are ever more strongly connected in me, then at last (through a complete induction) this subjective connection reaches its highest degree, and becomes equivalent to the objective. Concerning the final question, namely: How is metaphysics possible? we must first determine what is meant by ‘metaphysics’. I think I am in agreement with Kant as to the definition of metaphysics, namely, metaphysics is the science of things in themselves. I differ from Kant only in this: according to him things in themselves are the substrata of their appearances in us, and are quite heterogeneous with these appearances so that this question must remain unresolved in so far as we have no available means of cognition of things in themselves abstracted from the way they affect us. According to me, on the other hand, cognition of things in themselves is nothing other than the complete cognition of appearances. Metaphysics is thus not a science of something outside appearance, but merely of the limits (ideas) of appearances themselves, or of the final members of their series. Now these are indeed impossible as objects of our cognition, but they are so closely connected to the objects that without them no complete cognition of the objects themselves is possible. We approach ever closer to cognition of them according to the degree of completeness of our cognition of appearances. But since I think I have expounded all this at length in the Essay itself, and here I only wanted to determine the principle points in accordance with your request, I will now break off, and remain your most eager friend.

Note 1. Published in Berlinisches Journal für Aufklärung (1790), Bd. IX/I, 52–80. – Ed.

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PART II RISE OF GERMAN IDEALISM. POST-KANTIAN IDEALIST THINKERS

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CHAPTER 7 JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE (1762–1814)

INTRODUCTION A founding figure of German idealism, Johann Gottlieb Fichte stands at the crossroads of the revolution in thought. His philosophical work, strongly influenced by Kant’s Critical philosophy, responded both to challenges facing Kant’s philosophical enterprise and to objections raised against it. Seeking to resolve the issues emerging in the wake of Kant’s Copernican Revolution, Fichte developed a philosophical system that allegedly would meet the demands of a rigorous science, a philosophy that came to be known as Wissenschaftslehre. His philosophical model sought to reconcile philosophical standpoint and religious belief, reason and faith, individual freedom and political authority. Throughout his life, he focused much attention on the moral perfection of the individual. In this regard, he remained true to the spirit and ideas of the Enlightenment and Neo-Humanism, thus providing a crucial link between Enlightenment thought and the ideals of German Romanticism. While himself insisting upon being a true heir of Kant, by developing his Wissenschaftslehre as a foundational science, Fichte surpasses the limits of Kant’s Critical philosophy. He concluded that the first task of philosophy is to discover a single self-evident starting point or first principle from which one could then “derive” both theoretical and practical philosophy, which he understood as nothing other than our experience of ourselves as finite cognizers and as finite agents. Not only would such a strategy guarantee the systematic unity of philosophy itself but, more importantly, it would also display what Kant was not able to demonstrate, namely, the underlying unity of reason itself. Rather than advancing a skepticism implied by Kant’s thing-in-itself, Fichte made the radical suggestion of postulating the original unity of self-consciousness; consequently, he developed a more radical form of transcendental idealism than Kant’s own. Fichte was born on May 19, 1762, in the small town of Rammenau, Saxony, as the eldest of eight children of peasant ribbon weavers. Poor but pious, his father Christian Fichte took it upon himself to promote education in his son, who displayed immense intellectual talents. If not for these talents and a lucky twist of fate bringing Fichte to the notice of a neighboring nobleman, Baron Ernst von Militz, the young boy would have probably spent his life mastering his parents’ craft. However, impressed by the young boy’s mental vigor, the Baron offered to pay for the boy’s education, thus expanding Fichte’s opportunities far beyond what his family could provide. After a short stay at the Baron’s estate in Meiβen, during which he studied classics under the guidance of a pastor at Niederau, Fichte enrolled in Pforta (Schulpforta), the elite boarding school near Naumburg. In 1780, he entered the University of Jena as a student of theology. He studied at Jena, Wittenberg, and Leipzig, but as his graduation approached, he no longer desired the priesthood. A few years into his university studies, his sponsor had died and the

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widowed Baroness suspended his financial support, thus forcing Fichte to seek a job in order to sustain himself. Between 1785 and 1794, Fichte would work as a live-in tutor for wealthy families, first in Saxony, and later in Zurich. He became engaged to his future wife, Johanna Rahn, but the marriage was postponed three years due to Fichte’s severe financial difficulties. He tried to resolve them by pursuing a literary career, but his prospects in literature failed, and he soon returned to tutoring. He was still a tutor when, in summer of 1790, he first encountered the writings of Immanuel Kant, in which he found deep personal inspiration and enlightenment. This occasioned a revolution in Fichte’s philosophical mindset. Fichte had previously professed a deterministic view of the world, but he discovered in Kant’s Critical philosophy a way to reconcile freedom and determinism, in such a way that it would preserve freedom and make it a central tenet of his own philosophical inquiry. Determined to meet with Kant, in July 1791, Fichte traveled to Königsberg, but a brief audience with the master was rather disappointing for the young and highly ambitious visitor. With a desire to redeem himself in the Kant’s eyes, Fichte quickly—within a few weeks—composed a manuscript entitled Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792), where he extended Kant’s practical philosophy into the sphere of religion, which Kant had not yet done, discussing the concept of divine revelation. It was initially believed to be Kant’s own work, but Kant willingly and promptly corrected this mistaken attribution, so that Fichte’s first philosophical work had an almost instantaneous impact on his philosophical career. The success of this manuscript soon propelled young Fichte into the philosophical spotlight as a great Kantian philosopher. In the following years, Fichte authored several essays, mainly of a political nature, discussing and defending the principles of the French Revolution. He also delivered a series of private lectures in Zurich and began contemplating his own version of transcendental philosophy, which he called Wissenschaftslehre. By 1794 Fichte was married, and had also accepted an offer from the University at Jena where he was appointed as successor to Karl Reinhold and became the second occupant of a highly prestigious chair in Critical philosophy. During his five years at Jena, perhaps the most productive in Fichte’s philosophical career, he became a central figure in the German philosophical world. Fichte launched his academic career with the public lectures on “Morality for Scholars.” In these lectures, five of which were published in 1794 under the title Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation, Fichte discussed the improvement of society on moral terms. In 1794–95, Fichte explicated the fundamentals of this theory in his first systematic work, Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre. Originally not intended for publication, this work was written as a thorough and systematic synopsis of lectures for students attending Fichte’s private courses during his first two semesters at the University of Jena. Eventually, Fichte published the manuscript in two volumes; the first appeared in 1794, and the second in 1795. In this writing, as its title implies, Fichte established the foundation of his new system, offering the initial presentation of the first principles of his Wissenschaftslehre. As a new foundation of transcendental philosophy he proposed the principle of the self-positing I (Ich). After his first principle met with misunderstanding and criticism from a variety of thinkers, Fichte almost immediately began work on its new presentation, eventually published in his Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo. A lecture course delivered in Jena in 1796–99, never published as a book and 178

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available only in form of student transcripts, this work provides perhaps the clearest exposition of the first principle of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre he ever produced. Yet Fichte continued revising and clarifying his presentation of the foundational principles of the Wissenschaftslehre until his departure from Jena. At the same time, he was also developing the specific parts and components of the Wissenschaftslehre itself. Within a few years, he published Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty (1795), which was meant as an exposition of the “theoretical philosophy”; The System of Ethics (1798), which introduced the “practical philosophy” and dealt with questions traditionally discussed in moral philosophy; and the two-volume Foundations of Natural Right (1796–97), which focused on topics central to philosophy of law. Viewed systematically, these works provide valuable insights into Fichte’s complex program of philosophy that he elaborated in Jena. The goal of this program was to develop the system of the philosophical sciences (Wissenschaften), generated from the single rational principle, where all of the disciplines, while independent and self-sufficient, are interconnected with each other. Highly ambitious in both its aim and execution, this program was Fichte’s response to the challenge of developing philosophy according to the scientific model, the task Kant had formulated, but (apparently) never completed. Fichte was one of the first thinkers to take this as his goal. In spite of Fichte’s extraordinary success as a teacher and his popularity with students, his tenure in Jena was plagued by personal and professional clashes. His reputation as a political radical, founded on his treatises from 1793—Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought and his articles on the French Revolution—triggered numerous conflicts and confrontations in Jena. Misunderstanding of key principles of his Wissenschaftslehre raised concerns about the ability of transcendental idealism to successfully respond to the challenges of the times. One of these misconceptions incited the infamous atheism controversy of 1798–1800 (see Fichte 2010), which found a large public resonance leading to Fichte’s dismissal from his position at Jena. The controversy was sparked by the publication in the 1798 issue of the Philosophical Journal of Fichte’s essay, “On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-Governance.” In this writing, Fichte made an effort to outline his preliminary ideas on philosophy of religion developed within his Wissenschaftslehre, at the same time trying to avoid the misconstruction of his position along the lines of the religious skepticism introduced by his former colleague at Jena, Friedrich Forberg, whose essay appeared next to Fichte’s. Transforming the discussion of God and God’s reality into the discourse about morality and moral action, Fichte insisted that “the living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God” and that “we require no other God, nor can we grasp another” (Fichte IWL 131). As a result of this publication, Fichte was accused of disseminating atheism, and all copies of published journals containing the essay were confiscated. At this point, the atheism dispute became a major controversy involving all key figures in the German intellectual and philosophical milieu. It was no longer merely a debate about the role of religion. Instead, it grew into a serious concern about the moral implications of transcendental idealism, specifically in its Fichtean form. The focus of debate shifted toward the question of whether Wissenschaftslehre promoted social anarchy and personal despair. Despite Fichte’s attempts to rectify the situation, his academic reputation was compromised, and he was forced to flee Jena. Critical attacks against the Wissenschaftslehre contained in open letters published by Kant and Jacobi in 1799, in the aftermath of the atheism controversy, only further damaged the public opinion of Fichte’s system. 179

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After having left Jena, in the summer of 1799 Fichte moved to Berlin. At that time, the Prussian capital had no university; Fichte supported himself by giving private lessons and publishing popular works that largely targeted a wider, non-philosophical audience. In these writings he attempted to clarify his own philosophical position, defending it against misunderstanding and false interpretation. The best example of this kind of work is The Vocation of Man, which Fichte published in 1800. Intended as an indirect response to Jacobi’s harmful critique of the Wissenschaftlehre, this book presents a more accessible version of Fichte’s philosophical position, most notably on questions of morality and religion. During the Berlin period, Fichte continued to revise the Wissenschaftslehre, rearticulating the foundations of his system and refining some of its elements. He produced more than half a dozen different presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre, delivering new versions every year or two, right up to his death. In 1806, the advancing French army occupied Berlin, forcing Fichte to leave the city and take exile in Königsberg. He returned the next year, and in the winter of 1807–08, he delivered his celebrated Addresses to the German Nation that significantly advanced the effort against Napoleon. These lectures are often associated with a significant shift in Fichte’s social and political thought, which allegedly transformed his cosmopolitan view into a more nationalistic position. In fact, the Addresses, which mainly focus on the issues of national identity and national education, are consistent with the chief ideas of Fichte’s practical philosophy, in particular, with his recognition of the importance of cultural and ethnic identity for shaping socially and politically engaged individuals and forming a society able to realize moral order (Bykova 2016). Throughout his life, Fichte had shown notable interest in questions of formal education, and thus it came as no surprise when, along with Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schleiermacher, he played a central role in planning a new university in Berlin, which finally opened in 1811. Although Fichte’s own proposal was rejected in favor of the plan drafted by W. von Humboldt, Fichte was installed as the dean of the faculty of philosophy and the first elected rector of the newly established university (now the Humboldt University of Berlin). As a lector, he offered courses on different aspects of the Wissenschaftslehre, advancing his philosophical system mainly in the area of practical philosophy. He also continued writing and further summarizing ideas and concepts he developed in his lectures. When late in 1813 the Prussian uprising against Napoleon began, Fichte joined the militia. His service in the militia, however, was short-lived. He contracted a fatal typhus infection from his wife Johanna, who volunteered in a military hospital, and died on January 29, 1814. He was buried in the Dorotheenstädtischer Cemetery in Berlin, where he now rests next to Hegel. * * * For the entirety of his philosophical career, Fichte always considered himself a Kantian, an adherent of the Critical philosophy. He saw his task as improving upon Kant’s philosophy by negotiating a philosophical truce between faith and reason and between free will and determinism. One key problem he recognized in Kant’s critical project was the reality of the thing-in-itself coupled with our inability to know it. In addition to raising issues about this dualism, Fichte was even more concerned with Kant’s commitment to the thing-in-itself as the source of representational content. 180

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Very much in accord with Kant, Fichte declared that the purpose of philosophy is to explain experience, yet his understanding of what formed the content of this experience was radically different from Kant’s. While Kant had believed that the content of experience must be given by a thing-in-itself, and the subject is responsible only for the form of that content, Fichte argued that the content of experience results from subjective activity; the subject and its active consciousness make objective representations possible. Rejecting the idea of Kant’s thing-in-itself as being “produced solely by free thought” and without any “reality whatever” (Fichte SK 10), Fichte escaped the dualism postulated by Kant’s opposition between thinking (pure intelligence) and the thing-in-itself (pure object as a noumenal reality), between consciousness and its object. Instead, he attempted to develop a monistic science of knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) that could give a unified account of experience, which would explain the content of both inner sense and objective representation, of consciousness and objects, in their unity. In developing such a science, he rejected a dogmatism that explains experience by referring to mind-independent objects and by emphasizing their activity in the process of cognition while limiting the role of consciousness to merely “epiphenomenal manifestation of material processes” (Altman 2014, 322). For Fichte, however, “the [cognitive] object shall be posited and determined by the cognitive faculty, and not the cognitive faculty by the object” (Fichte SK 4). Thus, he insisted that only idealism, whose starting point is subjective activity itself, is able to provide an account of experience that properly explains how consciousness forms representations of objects. He also believed that the idealistic course alone could secure the freedom required for an adequate account of morality. Fichte saw the goal of his philosophical project in a reconciliation of Kant’s intention to raise philosophy to the level of a science. Two philosophical developments greatly influenced the progress of his thought toward realizing this project. One was Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie (Philosophy of the Elements), which challenged Kant’s inability to provide a satisfactory foundation for philosophy’s scientific status and insisted that “philosophy cannot become scientific until a convincing derivation from a first principle has been supplied.” In order to provide a foundation for the Kantian Critical philosophy, Reinhold proposed the concept of representation. He argued that as a reflectively known fact of consciousness, the concept of representation is a fundamental principle known with certainty. Another great influence on Fichte was G. E. Schulze’s Aenesidemus, a skeptical polemic against both Kant’s account of the foundation of knowledge and Reinhold’s attempt to provide a missing foundation for philosophy. While Schulze agreed that to be scientific philosophy must be grounded in a single fundamental principle, he argued that Reinhold’s principle of representation, empirical in its nature, was largely deficient and thus could not be used for this purpose. Arguments developed by Reinhold and Schulze demonstrated to Fichte the need to search for a satisfactory foundation for philosophy if it was to become a science and survive skeptical doubts. Reviewing Aenesidemus for the Jenaer Allgemeine Literaturzeitung in 1793–94, Fichte found himself in agreement with much of Schulze’s critique and grew confident that the Critical philosophy required a new and unshakable foundation. This rebuilding resulted in Fichte’s philosophical—allegedly all-encompassing—system known as the Wissenschaftslehre, which Fichte set out to develop in his years at Jena. As his specifically philosophical aim, Fichte took it upon himself to reconstruct Kant’s transcendental philosophy so it could avoid the charges of skepticism that had been leveled against it in the 1780s, and to produce the first philosophical system. The most fundamental objective of this 181

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new system was to establish philosophy as science, so it could be rightly positioned at the center of a new configuration of knowledge. There also was a more specific ambition, namely the need to redefine the self (the rational self-reflective individual) as a moral agent. Fichte claimed to remain true to the “spirit,” if not the letter, of Kant’s thought (Fichte, EPW 289, 376) when he, following Reinhold, argued that philosophy must begin with a first principle. Yet contrary to Reinhold, who introduced as this principle a mere fact of consciousness (Tatsache), he insisted that this principle must express the “original unity of self-consciousness,” i.e. a fact/act (Tathandlung), which is known with self-evident certainty, and not empirically. Fichte found such a principle in the concept of the self-positing I: “The I simply posits itself as an I,” and in doing this, “the I posits itself as self-positing.” Despite the somewhat obscure formulation, the principle simply points to the original selfidentity of the I, self-awareness that is posited by the very act of positing. This self-awareness is not something merely “given.” This is one and the same as being an I as such: it is at once an action rooted in the spontaneous (free) activity of the I and at the same time the product of this action. According to Fichte, the I is always active. Yet this activity is not a pure cognitive activity. Striving for self-awareness, the I freely determines itself to be manifested (objectified) in actuality. Hence, the self-positing activity of the I is equally “practical” and “theoretical”: the act described by self-positing is both an act of “doing” and an act of “becoming aware,” a deed as well as cognition. Important here is that both acts cannot occur in isolation from each other; “the I simply posits itself ” requires that the I posits both itself and its world (not-I), and in this way becomes self-conscious, and thus self-aware of its freedom and its limitations. Characteristic of Fichte’s understanding of the I is that its freedom—expressed in its selfpositing—is not absolute, unlimited, and infinite. Contrary to wide spread misinterpretation of Fichte’s first principle in terms of the absolute I, the I is instead only possible as limited and individual, and its freedom is attainable only as finite. Yet, this limitation is not something imposed upon the I externally or even by the I itself. For the I is pure activity and “cannot be grounded in its own passivity.” The I can only “discover” this limitation within itself. The I uncovers and recognizes its own limitations as a necessary means to come to understand itself; the “discovery” is not imposed on the I by the not-I but revealed to the I by its own existence. The freedom of the I, then, is only possible in the realm of limitation, Fichte claimed, both theoretically and practically, and the I, as it actually is, always strives for an absolute freedom that it can never attain. Conceptualizing the original I as a fact/act, Fichte ensures that the first principle of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre is equally theoretical and practical. He is thus able to secure the problematic unity of theoretical and practical reason that Kant declared but never explicitly showed. Furthermore, postulating the original unity of self-consciousness, Fichte also introduces an original unity of theoretical and practical philosophy, of theory and practice, in which the practical is already theoretical and the theoretical already practical. This theoretical-practical unity is presented as pure willing, the original volition, which is prior to all empirical willing and empirical cognition. This “pure” volition is a categorical demand for action, an “ought” or internal urge for an engagement with the world, in both a theoretical and a practical fashion. This “engagement” is the demand, which the I imposes upon itself as its own determinacy. Thus, empirical willing and cognition as well as the world itself (not-I) only manifest the

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freedom and spontaneity of the I. Hence, there is no gap between the I and the world; both are originally united in the notion of the positing I that posits not only itself but also not-I, that is, the world as a “product” of its own activity. In his Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte eliminates all reference to mind-independent things (Kant’s things-in-themselves). Although he does not deny the existence of the mind-independent world, he claims that it is “off limits” to our experience, and thus cannot be represented by consciousness. The world, as it is given in our experience, and the objects of our cognition depend on the I for their existence, and so the world has no independent existence apart from consciousness (the positing I). As Fichte puts it, “[nothing external to me], no alleged ‘thingin-itself,’ can be an object of [my] consciousness; the only object for me is I myself ” (Fichte WNM 332). This understanding amounts not only to transcendental idealism but also to subjectivism. Thus, although Fichte regarded himself a Kantian and a loyal follower of Critical philosophy, he, in fact, significantly modified Kant’s thought by strengthening its commitment to transcendental idealism. His Jena Wissenschaftslehre thus raises the problem of subjectivism Kant sought to avoid. Fichte offers an original philosophical program built upon Kantian Critical philosophy, though differing from it both in content and in results. Fichte’s idealism is more radical than Kant’s. He unequivocally eliminates the thing-in-itself and affirms the unity of the cognitive and empirical. Expanding Kant’s claim about the limits of knowledge, he shows that not only are we unable to transcend experience, but we cannot escape the circle of consciousness, which leaves us with an infinite striving toward ideals we can never achieve. Perhaps Fichte’s main result is the unity of theoretical and practical philosophy which is secured from the very beginning, while manifesting the moral agency of the I as both the constitutive principle and a regulative ideal. According to Fichte, the question of the possibility of experience is not theoretical but rather practical. It can be explained only by the self-consciousness of our freedom. Fichte’s theoretical insights prompted philosophical inquiries by his gifted contemporaries, such as Hölderlin, Novalis, Schelling, Hegel, and many others. His ideas are echoed in phenomenology, existentialism, as well as in contemporary philosophy of subjectivity. During his life, Fichte produced seventeen different presentations of his Wissenschaftslehre, and his later versions often present drastic changes to the original concept of the science of knowledge as developed in Jena. This poses a challenge to contemporary Fichte scholars. As a whole, his body of work requires more textual and conceptual analysis in order to comprehend and appreciate the originality and complexity of his philosophical process, a work which is still ongoing.

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Chronology of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Life and Works 1762

Born on May 19 in Rammenau, Saxony.

1774–80 Attends Schulpforta, the Princely Secondary School at Pforta, near Naumburg, at the funding of Baron Freiherr von Millitz. 1780–84

Studies at the universities of Jena, Wittenberg, and Leipzig.

1785

Begins working as a private tutor in Zurich.



Meets Johanna Rahn, who later becomes his wife.

1790

Reads Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, as well as Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of the Power of Judgment.



Postpones marriage due to his poor financial situation.

1792

Visits Kant in Königsberg.



Composes (in five weeks) Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation.

1793

Returns to Zurich.



Publishes “Contribution to the Rectification of the Public’s Judgment of the French Revolution,” a political discourse in support of German values.



October: Marries Johanna Rahn in Zurich.

1793–94

“Review of Aenesidemus” (published in Jenaische Allgemeine Literaturzeitung).

1794

Accepts the Professorship (Chair in Critical Philosophy, as a successor of Karl Reinhold) at the University of Jena.

Publishes Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre (Part I and II). Published Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation. 1795 Publishes Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre (Part III).

Conflict with Friedrich Schiller over the content of Fichte’s “A Series of Letters concerning the Spirit and the Letter within Philosophy” to be published in Die Horen.

1796 Publishes Foundations of Natural Right (Part I). 1797 Publishes Foundations of Natural Right (Part II). 1798 Publishes The System of Ethics and an essay, “On the Basis of our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World” that causes the atheism controversy.

November: Beginning of the atheism controversy.

1799

Forced to resign his professorship position at Jena; moves to Berlin.

1800 Publishes The Vocation of Man. 1804

Delivers three private lecture cycles on the Wissenschaftslehre.

1805–14

Continues to amend the Wissenschaftslehre.

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1805

Accepts professorship in Erlangen, but resigns and returns to Berlin early next year.

1806

Gives public and private lectures in Berlin.



Publishes two short works, Main Characteristics of the Present Age and Direction to the Blessed Life.

1807

October: Flees to Königsberg due to French occupation of Berlin.



Moves to Copenhagen after Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon’s forces.

1808

Returns to Berlin.



Gives public lectures in Berlin that later published under the title, Addresses to the German Nation.

1810

Holds first chair in Philosophy at the newly established University of Berlin, where he is also named the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy.

1811

First elected Rector of the University of Berlin (resigns in April 1812).

1814

Dies of typhus on January 29 in Berlin, at the age of fifty-one.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Fichte’s Writings A.1.  German Academic Editions

Fichte, J. G. 1845–46. Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sämmtliche Werke, 8 vols., edited by Immanuel H. Fichte. Berlin: Veit. [Abbreviated as SW. – Still widely cited and reprinted edition.] Fichte, J. G. 1964–2012. J. G. Fichte: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 42 vols., edited by Erich Fuchs, Reinhard Lauth, Hans Jacobs, and Hans Gliwitzky. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann. A.2.  In English (selected translations)

Fichte, J. G. 1982. Fichte: Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), edited by Peter Heath and John Lachs. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Abbreviated as SK.] Fichte, J. G. 1992. Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova method (1769/99), translated and edited by Daniel Breazeale. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Abbreviated as WNM.] Fichte, J. G. 1993. Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Daniel Breazeale, 2nd ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Abbreviated as EPW.] Fichte, J. G. 1994. Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (1797–1800), edited and translated by Daniel Breazeale. Indianapolis: Hackett. [Abbreviated as IWL.] Fichte, J. G. 2000. Foundations of Natural Right, edited by Frederick Neuhouser, translated by Michael Baur. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fichte, J. G. 2005. The Science of Knowing: Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, translated by Walter E. Wright. Albany: State University of New York Press. Fichte, J. G. 2005. The System of Ethics in accordance with the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, edited and translated by Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fichte, J. G. 2008. Addresses to the German Nation, translated by Gregory Moore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fichte, J. G. 2010. J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798–1800), edited by Yolanda Estes and Curtis Bowman. Burlington: Ashgate. Fichte, J. G. 2012. The Closed Commercial State, translated by Anthony Curtis Adler. Albany: State University of New York. B.  Selected Commentaries

Altman, M. C. 2014. “Fichte’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense,” in The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, edited by Matthew C. Altman. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 320–43. Breazeale, D. 2013. Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Breazeale, D., and T. Rockmore (eds.). 2008. After Jena: New Essays on Fichte’s Later Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Breazeale, D., and T. Rockmore (eds.). 2013. Fichte’s Vocation of Man: New Interpretative and Critical Essays. Albany: State University of New York. Breazeale, D., T. Rockmore, and V. Waibel (eds.). 2010. Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition. Berlin: de Gruyter. Bykova, M. F. 2010. “Self as the World Into Itself: Towards Fichte’s Conception of Subjectivity,” in Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism, edited by D. Breazeale and T. Rockmore. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 131–47. Bykova, M. F. 2016. “Fichte’s Nationalist Rhetoric and the Humanistic Project of Bildung,” in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation Reconsidered, edited by D. Breazeale and T. Rockmore. Albany: State University of New York, 133–52. Gottlieb, G. (ed.). 2016. Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henrich, D. 1982. “Fichte’s Original Insight,” translated by David Lachterman, Contemporary German Philosophy 1: 15–52. James, D. 2010. Fichte’s Social and Political Philosophy: Property and Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, D. and G. Zöller (eds.). 2016. The Cambridge Campanian to Fichte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. La Vopa, A. J. 2001. Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762–1799. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, W. M. 1997. Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte’s Jena Project. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nakhimovsky, I. 2011. The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Neuhouser, F. 1990. Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rockmore, T. 1980. Fichte, Marx, and the German Philosophical Tradition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Seidel, G. J. 1993. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre on 1794: A Commentary on Part I. Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Wood, D. W. 2011. “Mathesis of the Mind”: A Study of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Geometry. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wood, A. 2016. Fichte’s Ethical Thought. New York: Oxford University Press. Zöller, G. 1998. Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zöller, G. 2014. “A Philosophy of Freedom: Fichte’s Philosophical Achievement,” in The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, edited by Matthew C. Altman. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 289–99.

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FROM REVIEW OF AENESIDEMUS (1794) *

If it is undeniable that philosophizing reason owes all the human progress which it has made so far to the observations of skepticism concerning the insecurity of every resting place yet obtained by reason, and if, in the case of the recent, remarkable advance of philosophizing reason through its critical employment, its illustrious discoverer has himself explicitly acknowledged this debt to skepticism; and if nevertheless the ongoing spectacle presented by the friends of this new philosophy, who become ever more divided among themselves the further they advance in their research, makes it apparent even to an uninformed observer that even now reason has not yet obtained its great aim of transforming philosophy into a science, however near it may be to this goal: then nothing is more to be desired than that skepticism might crown its labors and drive inquiring reason on to the attainment of its lofty goal. And moreover, since it has long been thought that skepticism’s remaining legitimate claims against philosophy have only lacked clear articulation, then nothing is more to be desired than that skepticism might at last find a spokesman who will not relinquish these claims but will have the talent to present them clearly. Whether the author of the book before us is the desired spokesman for skepticism is something which will emerge from an examination of the same. Skepticism, as represented by the author of Aenesidemus, had, of course, to direct its weapons particularly against Reinhold’s Elementary Philosophy, that is, against the latest formulation of this philosophy in Reinhold’s Contributions, because in the opinion of a majority of the admirers of the Kantian philosophy, Reinhold is the author who has either already succeeded in establishing philosophy as a science or else has best prepared the way for such success. But if the skeptical attack really aims at a decisive battle, then, for the benefit of those who would deny both claims concerning Reinhold, the weapons have to be turned against the most credible document of recent philosophy, the Critique of Pure Reason. The book here reviewed consists of letters exchanged between Hermias, an enthusiastic admirer of the Kantian philosophy, and Aenesidemus. Hermias proclaims his complete conviction regarding the truth and universal validity of this philosophy, a conviction based especially upon Reinhold’s Elementary Philosophy. Aenesidemus is of a different opinion and sends Hermias an examination of this philosophy. In order to comply with Reinhold’s well-founded demand, Aenesidemus bases his critique of the Elementary Philosophy on the presupposition that the following propositions are established and valid: (1) (Fact) There are representations within us, and these representations have some features in common, as well as others which serve to distinguish them from each other. (2) (Rule of judgment) Universal logic is the touchstone of everything that is true, and only insofar as any argument concerning facts complies with the laws of logic can it lay claim to correctness. Each section of Aenesidemus’s examination begins with a quotation of those

*

From Fichte. Early Philosophical Writings, trans. & ed. by Daniel Breazeale, Cornell University Press, 1988, 59–77.

From Review of Aenesidemus

paragraphs of Reinhold’s Elementary Philosophy which are to be examined, as they have been most recently presented by Reinhold. […] Examination of Reinhold’s first principles regarding the nature and essential features of an Elementary Philosophy. Aenesidemus begins by admitting that philosophy until now has lacked a highest and universally valid first principle, and that it will be able to raise itself to the level of a science only after it has established such a first principle. Furthermore, it also seems to him undeniable that this first principle can only be that principle which establishes and determines the highest concepts of all, namely, the concept of representation and the concept of that which can be represented. Though the skeptic and the Elementary philosopher are agreed upon this point, it remains questionable to this reviewer whether philosophy itself profits from this unanimity. Suppose, for instance, that those objections which can justifiably be raised against the Principle of Consciousness as the first principle of all philosophy should lead us in the future to suspect that there must be a concept for philosophy as a whole (and not merely for theoretical philosophy) which is even higher than the concept of representation. Against Reinhold’s assertion in his first paragraph (viz., the assertion that in consciousness the subject distinguishes the representation from both subject and object and relates it to both), Aenesidemus remarks: (1) “This is not an absolutely first principle, since qua proposition and judgment it is subordinate to the highest rule of all judgment, the principle of contradiction.” This objection has been raised before, and to it Reinhold has replied […] that “the principle of consciousness admittedly is subordinate to the principle of contradiction, not in the manner in which a proposition is subordinate to a first principle which determines it, but rather as subordinate to a law which it may not contradict.” If the reviewer understands this reply (which does not satisfy Aenesidemus) correctly, Reinhold thus denies that the principle of contradiction has any material validity, as Kant has also done, though only for merely theoretical philosophy, and grants it only a formal and logical validity. Reinhold’s reply is correct to this extent, and amounts to that reply which he has often given to uncalled-for judgments on his Elementary Philosophy: one cannot think about the laws of thinking in any other way except according to those laws. Like any possible reflection, reflection on the Principle of Consciousness is, with respect to its form, subordinate to the principle of contradiction; but its content is not determined by the principle of contradiction. Thus for Aenesidemus’s remark to have any real meaning he must, though he nowhere clearly says so, ascribe material as well as formal validity to the principle of contradiction, that is, he has to assume or conjecture a mental fact upon which the principle of contradiction is originally based. It will become clear at once what this fact should be called, since Aenesidemus remarks: (2) “The Principle of Consciousness is not a principle determined completely by itself. Since the concepts of subject and object, according to Reinhold’s own explanation, are first determined by being distinguished within representation and by their relation to representation, then this distinguishing and relating itself must at least be completely and unambiguously determined in such a way that only one interpretation is permitted. And this is not the case,” as Aenesidemus, in a manner which satisfies this reviewer at least, has demonstrated by enumerating several possible meanings for these concepts and citing the various and even ambiguous expressions which Reinhold has subsequently employed in the attempt to clarify them. But what if it is precisely the indeterminacy and indeterminability of these concepts which point to a higher principle (which remains to be discovered) and to the material validity of the principle of identity and opposition? And what if the concepts of distinguishing and relating can only be determined by means of the concept of identity and its 189

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opposite? Finally Aenesidemus adds: (3) “The Principle of Consciousness is not a universally valid principle nor does it express a fact which is bound up with no particular experience and no specific argument.” Aenesidemus adduces several empirical manifestations of consciousness which, in his view, lack the three elements which are supposedly required for all consciousness [viz., a representation, a representer, and that which is represented]. Later on I will have a few words to say concerning the extent to which this sort of objection based upon experience is at all acceptable and the extent to which it is appropriate to reject it. A close examination of what this principle cannot be raises the question: What kind of principle is it in fact? Aenesidemus answers: “It is (1) a synthetic proposition, one in which to a subject there is added a predicate (viz., consciousness) which is not already included in the concept of the subject, but rather, is first annexed to it in experience.” It is well known that Reinhold claims that this principle is merely analytic. We will here overlook the fact that Aenesidemus denies the universal validity of the Principle of Consciousness, thereby assuming that there is a type of consciousness for which this principle does not hold. But there is a deeper reason for Aenesidemus’s and Reinhold’s differing assertions regarding this question, one which lies in the difference between two ways of regarding the Principle of Consciousness. If no consciousness is conceivable apart from these three elements, then they are of course all included in the concept of consciousness, and of course the proposition which asserts this is, with respect to its logical validity as a proposition based upon reflection, an analytic proposition. Yet since it involves distinguishing and relating, this very action of representing, the act of consciousness itself, is obviously a synthesis, and indeed, the highest synthesis and the foundation of all other possible syntheses. This raises the very natural question: How is it possible to trace all the actions of the mind back to an act of connecting? How is synthesis conceivable without presupposing thesis and antithesis? The Principle of Consciousness is (2) “an abstract proposition which expresses what is common—according to Aenesidemus to some, according to Reinhold to all—manifestations of consciousness.” It is well known that Reinhold denies that this principle is based upon any kind of abstraction. This is very illuminating if it is said against those who think that the Principle of Consciousness is obtained by abstraction from the conditions of intuition, concept, and Idea. For it is illuminating to show that, far from the concept of mere representation being based upon intuitions, concepts, and Ideas, it is only by distinguishing and relating several mere representations as such that the concepts of intuition, concept, and Idea become possible. One can completely determine the concept of representation as such without having to determine the latter concepts. But one cannot determine the concepts of intuition, concept, and Idea without having determined the concept of representation. If, however, Reinhold means to deny not only that the principle is based upon this particular abstraction, but to deny that it is based upon any abstraction at all, then the very opposite of his claim can be demonstrated—insofar, anyway, as the Principle of Consciousness is supposed to stand as the first principle at the summit of philosophy. That is to say, if everything that can be discovered in the mind is an act of representing, and if every act of representing is undeniably an empirical determination of the mind, then the very act of representing, along with all of its conditions, is given to consciousness only through the representation of representing. It is thus empirically given, and empirical representations are the objects of all reflection concerning consciousness. The object of every empirical representation is determinately given (in space, in time, etc.), but in the representation of representing as such (which is what the Principle of Consciousness expresses), abstraction is necessarily made from these empirical determinations of the given 190

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object. Consequently, the Principle of Consciousness, which is placed at the summit of all philosophy, is based upon empirical self-observation and certainly expresses an abstraction. Admittedly, anyone who understands this principle well will feel an inner reluctance to ascribe to it a merely empirical validity. The opposite of what this principle asserts is not even conceivable. But this is just what indicates that it must be based upon something other than a mere fact. This reviewer anyway is convinced that the Principle of Consciousness is a theorem which is based upon another first principle, from which, however, the Principle of Consciousness can be strictly derived, a priori and independently of all experience. The initial incorrect presupposition, and the one which caused the Principle of Consciousness to be proposed as the first principle of all philosophy, was precisely the presupposition that one must begin with a fact. We certainly do require a first principle which is material and not merely formal. But such a principle does not have to express a fact; it can also express an Act[Tathandlung]—if I may risk asserting something which can be neither explained nor proven here. Insofar as Aenesidemus must, as was previously indicated, consider this theorem to be a proposition derived from experience, then one naturally has to admit with him that there could be experiences which might contradict this proposition. If however, this same proposition is derived from incontrovertable first principles and if it can be shown that the denial of the proposition in question involves a contradiction, then any alleged experiences which would be incompatible with the Principle of Consciousness would have to be dismissed as inconceivable. […] [H]ere at the foundation of this new skepticism, we clearly and distinctly have that old mischief which, until Kant, was perpetrated with the thing in itself. It seems to the reviewer anyway that neither Kant nor Reinhold has by any means declared himself loudly and strongly enough against this mischief, which has been the common source of all the objections— skeptical as well as dogmatic—which have been raised against the Critical Philosophy. However, it is by no means ingrained in human nature to think of a thing independent of any faculty of representation at all; on the contrary, it is downright impossible to do so. But Kant did not trace the pure forms of intuition—space and time—back to one first principle, as he did the categories (nor could he have done so, given his intentions, which were merely to prepare the way for science). Since these forms of intuition could appear to Kant to be merely the forms of the human faculty of representation, it of course remained possible after him to think about the properties which things might have for some nonhuman faculty of representation. And Kant himself, with his frequently repeated distinction between things as they appear to us and things as they are in themselves, to a certain extent authorized the thought of the properties which things would have for a nonhuman faculty of representation—though for Kant the distinction between things as they appear to us and as they are in themselves is certainly supposed to have validity only provisionally and only for him. But no matter how often one pretends to the contrary, no person has ever had or can have Aenesidemus’s thought of a thing which has reality and distinctive properties independent not merely of the human faculty of representation, but of any and every intellect. In addition, one always thinks of oneself, as an intellect striving to know the thing. This was why the immortal Leibniz, who saw a little further than most of his followers, necessarily had to endow his thing in itself, or monad, with the power of representation. And if only his inferences had not transcended that circle within which the human mind is enclosed (which was the only thing that Leibniz, who saw everything else, failed to see), then they would have been incontestably correct: the thing would be constituted in itself just as it represented itself to itself. This circle was discovered by Kant. Following Kant, 191

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Reinhold performed an immortal service by calling the attention of philosophizing reason to the fact that philosophy in its entirety has to be traced back to one single first principle, and that one will not discover the system of the human mind’s permanent modes of acting until one has discovered the keystone of this system. (Without Reinhold, philosophizing reason might perhaps have occupied itself for a long time with commenting and recommenting upon Kant, without ever discovering the distinctive character of his system, for this cannot be discovered by anyone who does not open up his own way to its discovery.) Suppose that further advances along the path which Reinhold, to his credit, has cleared for us should reveal the following: that the most immediately certain thing of all, “I am,” is also valid only for the I; that all that is not-I is for the I only; it is only through its relation to an I that the not-I obtains all of the determinations of this a priori being; that, however, all of these determinations, insofar as they can be known a priori, become absolutely necessary upon the mere condition of a relation between a not-I and any I at all. From this it would follow that the notion of a thing in itself, to the extent that this is supposed to be a not-I which is not opposed to any I, is self-contradictory, and that the thing is actually constituted in itself in just that way in which it must be thought to be constituted by any conceivable intelligent I (i.e., by any being which thinks in accordance with the principle of identity and contradiction). It would also follow that what is logically true for any intellect which is conceivable by a finite intellect is at the same time true in reality and that there is no other truth but this. It would then no longer occur to anyone to make the claim, which Aenesidemus repeats: namely, that the Critical Philosophy is idealistic and interprets everything as illusion, that is, that this philosophy assumes that an intellect can be conceived of apart from some relation to something intelligible. Aenesidemus takes up Kant’s proof against idealism from the Critique of Pure Reason and shows, quite correctly, that this proof fails to refute the Berkeleian idealism against which Aenesidemus thinks it is directed. But he could have read in so many words […] [in] the Critique of Pure Reason that this proof is directed not against Berkeley’s idealism (“the foundation of which has already been removed in the Transcendental Aesthetic”), but rather against Descartes’ “problematic idealism.” And this proof clearly shows, against such idealism, that the consciousness of the thinking I, as understood by Descartes himself, is possible only under the condition that there be a not-I which is to be thought. After having demonstrated the untenability of the foundation upon which Aenesidemus erects his skepticism, the reviewer is perhaps justified in excusing himself from mentioning Aenesidemus’s additional objections against the theoretical portion of the Critical Philosophy in general, and in particular, against Reinhold’s exposition of it. The reviewer does so in order to say something about Aenesidemus’s objections to Kant’s moral theology. “This moral theology infers that, from the fact that something is commanded, it follows that the sole conditions under which this command can be fulfilled really do exist.” Aenesidemus’s protests against this mode of inference are based upon his deficient grasp of the true difference between theoretical and practical philosophy. These protests are summarized approximately in the following syllogism: Until we decide whether it is possible to do or to refrain from doing something, we cannot judge that we are commanded to do it or to refrain from doing it. But whether an action is possible or impossible is something that can be decided only according to theoretical principles. Therefore, even the judgment that something is commanded is based upon theoretical principles. That which Kant first infers from the command has got to be already shown and decided before any command at all can be rationally accepted. It is far from being the case that the recognition 192

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of a command can provide the basis for the conviction that the conditions for its fulfillment actually do exist. On the contrary, that recognition can only follow upon this conviction. One can see that Aenesidemus is assailing the actual foundation of Kantian moral theology, namely, the primacy of practical over theoretical reason. But one can also easily see how he has made this assault easy for himself. What we should do or refrain from doing, that is, what we should effectively accomplish in the world of appearances, is of course something which must be governed by the laws of this world. But who is talking here about doing or refraining from doing? Unlike an effective cause capable of producing something beyond itself, the ethical law is not at first directed at a physical force. It is, instead, directed at a hyperphysical faculty of desire or endeavor (or whatever one wishes to call it). The ethical law is not at first supposed to produce any action at all, but only the constant endeavor toward an action, even if this action, hindered by the force of nature, should turn out never to have any efficacy in the material world. In other words, and in order to represent the elements of this mode of inference in their highest abstraction: If, in intellectual intuition, the I is because it is and is what it is, then it is, to that extent, self-positing, absolutely independent and autonomous. The I in empirical consciousness, however, the I as intellect, is only in relation to something intelligible, and is, to that extent, dependent. But the I which is thereby opposed to itself is supposed to be not two, but one—which is impossible, since “dependence” contradicts “independence.” Since, however, the I cannot relinquish its absolute independence, a striving is engendered: the I strives to make what is intelligible dependent upon itself, in order thereby to bring that I which entertains representations of what is intelligible into unity with the self-positing I. This is what it means to say that reason is practical. In the pure I, reason is not practical, nor is it practical in the I as intellect. Reason is practical only insofar as it strives to unify these two. This is not the place to show that these are the first principles which must underlie Kant’s own expositions (granted that he never establishes them specifically). Nor is it the place to show how a practical philosophy arises when the striving of the intelligent I (which in itself is hyperphysical) is represented, that is, when one descends the same steps which one ascended in theoretical philosophy. This unity—an I which, in determining itself, determines all that is not-I (the idea of divinity)—is the final goal of this striving. When the goal is represented by the intelligent I as lying beyond itself, this striving is belief (belief in God). This striving cannot cease short of its goal; that is, the intellect cannot consider any single moment of its existence in which the goal remains unachieved as the last (belief in immortality). In regard to these ideas, however, nothing more than belief is possible; that is, the intellect has no empirical sensation as the object of its representation, but only the necessary striving of the I—and thus it must be for all eternity. But such belief is far from being merely a probable opinion. On the contrary, it is the innermost conviction of this reviewer anyway that this belief has the same degree of certainty as the immediately certain “I am”—a certainty which infinitely transcends that objective certainty which becomes possible only through the mediation of the intelligent I. Aenesidemus, of course, wants an objective proof of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. What can he be thinking of when he wishes this? Does objective certainty perhaps appear to him incomparably superior to—mere—subjective certainty? The I am itself has only subjective certainty, and, so far as we can conceive of the self-consciousness of God, He himself is for Himself subjective. And now even an “objective existence for immortality”! (Aenesidemus’s own words). If any being which intuits its own existence in time could say to itself at any moment of its existence, “Now I am eternal!” then it would not be eternal. Far from 193

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practical reason having to recognize the superiority of theoretical reason, the entire existence of practical reason is founded on the conflict between the self-determining element within us and the theoretical-knowing element. And practical reason itself would be canceled if this conflict were eliminated. This complete misunderstanding of the basis of moral belief also underlies a second remark by Aenesidemus: he claims that there is no difference between the mode of inference in the moral proof [of God’s existence] and the mode of inference in the cosmo-theological proof criticized by Kant; for in this latter proof too it is inferred that, since a world exists, the only conceivable conditions for its possibility must exist as well. The major difference between these proofs is that the cosmotheological one is based entirely upon theoretical reason, whereas the moral proof is based upon the conflict between theoretical reason and the I in itself. Theoretical reason must at least agree with itself concerning that about which it has to prove something. Of course, it first achieves unity within itself only by conceiving the world as an unconditioned totality, and hence by conceiving a first cause for this world. But precisely through this thought of such a first cause, theoretical reason falls again into an insoluble conflict with itself, because, in accordance with the laws of theoretical reason itself, every cause that it can conceive of must have its own cause in turn. Consequently, although the task of seeking a first cause remains, no cause that is discovered can ever be the first one. Thus, without contradicting itself, reason can never actually realize the idea of a first cause, nor can it take this Idea to be something specific and something which has been discovered. But no proof which ends in self-contradiction can be valid. The reviewer has felt duty-bound to assess this book in detail, in part because it really does contain many good and apt remarks; in part because the author has complained in advance about unproved verdicts (of which, it is to be hoped, he will not accuse this review); in part, because this book has actually attracted some attention here and there, and some readers are said to have concluded from it that the Critical Philosophy is a lost cause; in part, finally, to help certain people overcome the prejudice of thinking that the objections to the Kantian philosophy have not been properly appreciated and that one would just as soon forget about them, since one has no well-founded reply to make to them. This reviewer wishes for nothing more fervently than that his assessment might contribute toward convincing a good many independent thinkers that the Critical Philosophy, in itself and in its inner content, still stands as firmly as ever, though much labor is still required in order to arrange the materials into a well-constructed and unshakable whole. May this conviction rouse them—each in his place and to the best of his abilities—to contribute to this lofty goal.

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[First] Introduction 1. Attend to yourself; turn your gaze from everything surrounding you and look within yourself: this is the first demand philosophy makes upon any one who studies it. Here you will not be concerned with anything that lies outside of you, but only with yourself. Even on the most cursory self-observation, everyone will perceive a remarkable difference between the various ways in which his consciousness is immediately determined, and one could call these immediate determinations of consciousness “representations.” Some of these determinations appear to us to depend entirely upon our own freedom, and it is impossible for us to believe that anything outside of us, i.e., something that exists independently of our own efforts, corresponds to representations of this sort. Our imagination and our will appear to us to be free. We also possess representations of another sort. We refer representations of this second type to a truth that is supposed to be firmly established independently of us and is supposed to serve as the model for these representations. When a representation of ours is supposed to correspond to this truth, we discover that we are constrained in determining this representation. In the case of cognition, we do not consider ourselves to be free with respect to the content of our cognitions. In short, we could say that some of our representations are accompanied by a feeling of freedom and others are accompanied by a feeling of necessity. We cannot reasonably ask why the representations that depend upon our freedom are determined in just the way they are determined and not in some other way. For when we posit them to be dependent upon freedom, we deny that the concept of a “basis” (or “foundation” or “reason” or “ground”) has any applicability in this case. These representations are what they are for the simple reason that I have determined them to be like this. If I had determined them differently, then they would be different. But what is the basis of the system of those representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity, and what is the basis of this feeling of necessity itself? This is a question well worth pondering. It is the task of philosophy to answer this question; indeed, to my mind, nothing is philosophy except that science that discharges this task. Another name for the system of representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity is “experience”—whether inner or outer.

From Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, ed. and trans., with Introduction and Notes by Daniel Breazeale, Hackett Publishing Company, 1994, 7–51. *

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We thus could express the task of philosophy in different words as follows: Philosophy has to display the basis or foundation of all experience. […] We have long ceased to lay any claim to the name “philosophy” and have given the name Wissenschaftslehre, or “Theory of Scientific Knowledge,” to the science that actually has to carry out the task indicated. […] 3. A finite rational being possesses nothing whatsoever beyond experience. The entire contents of his thinking are comprised within experience. These same conditions necessarily apply to the philosopher, and thus it appears incomprehensible how he could ever succeed in elevating himself above experience. The philosopher, however, is able to engage in abstraction. That is to say, by means of a free act of thinking he is able to separate things that are connected with each other within experience. The thing, i.e., a determinate something that exists independently of our freedom and to which our cognition is supposed to be directed, and the intellect, i.e., the subject that is supposed to be engaged in this activity of cognizing, are inseparably connected with each other within experience. The philosopher is able to abstract from either one of these, and when he does so he has abstracted from experience and has thereby succeeded in elevating himself above experience. If he abstracts from the thing, then he is left with an intellect in itself as the explanatory ground of experience; that is to say, he is left with the intellect in abstraction from its relationship to experience. If he abstracts from the intellect, then he is left with a thing in itself (that is, in abstraction from the fact that it occurs within experience) as the explanatory ground of experience. The first way of proceeding is called idealism; the second is called dogmatism. As one will surely become convinced by the present account, these two philosophical systems are the only ones possible. According to the former system, the representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity are products of the intellect, which is what this system presupposes in order to explain experience. According to the latter, dogmatic system, such representations are a product of the thing in itself, which is what this system presupposes. […] 4. We will employ the term “object of philosophy” to designate the explanatory ground or foundation a particular philosophy proposes to employ in order to account for experience, for such an “object” appears to exist only by means of and only for the philosophy that proposes it. With respect to their relationship to consciousness as a whole, there is a remarkable difference between the object of idealism and the object of dogmatism. Everything of which I am conscious is called an “object of consciousness.” Such an object can be related to the representing subject in three different ways: It either appears to be something first produced by means of the intellect’s representation of it, or else it appears to be something present without any help from the intellect. In the latter case, either the properties of this object appear to be

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determined along with the object itself, or else what is supposed to be present is the mere existence of the object, while its properties are determinable by the free intellect. The first relationship between the object of consciousness and the representing subject gives us a purely “made up” or invented object—whether invented for any particular purpose or not. The second furnishes us with an object of experience. The third provides us with a unique type of object [viz., the I], the nature of which we wish to establish at once. I can freely determine myself to think of this thing or that—of the dogmatist’s “thing in itself,” for example. If I now abstract from whatever it is I am thinking of and attend only to myself, then I myself become, in this object, the object of a determinate representation. In my judgment, it is because of my own act of self-determination that I appear to myself in just this determinate manner and am not determined in some other way. In the present case, therefore, it is only because I have determined myself in precisely this way that I appear to myself to be engaged in thinking at all; and this is also the reason why, of all the possible thoughts I could be thinking, I am thinking precisely of the thing in itself. I have freely made myself into such an object. I have not, however, made myself “in itself ”; instead, I am required to think of myself as what precedes and is to be determined by an act of self-determination. I am, accordingly, an object for myself, an object whose properties, under certain conditions, depend upon the intellect alone, but whose existence must always be presupposed. The object of idealism is precisely this I in itself. The object of this system, moreover, actually appears within consciousness as something real, although not as a thing in itself; for were the I to appear within consciousness as a thing in itself, then idealism would cease to be what it is and would be transformed into dogmatism. Instead, the object of idealism appears within consciousness as an I in itself. It does not appear there as an object of experience, for it is nothing determinate, but is determined solely by me, and without this determination it is nothing whatsoever and does not exist at all. Instead, it appears within consciousness as something elevated above all experience. In contrast, the object of dogmatism belongs to the class of those objects produced only by means of free thinking. The thing in itself is a pure invention which possesses no reality whatsoever. It certainly does not appear within experience. For the system of experience is nothing but thinking accompanied by a feeling of necessity, and not even the dogmatist, who, like every other philosopher, has the task of providing this system of experience with a foundation, can pretend that it is anything else. To be sure, the dogmatist wishes to guarantee the reality of this thing in itself; that is to say, he wants to establish the necessity of thinking of it as the basis or foundation of all experience. And he will have succeeded in doing just this if he can show that experience is really explained thereby and that it cannot be explained without thinking of this thing in itself. But this is precisely the point in question here, and one may not presuppose what has to be proven. The object of idealism has an advantage, therefore, over that of dogmatism, for the former can be shown to be present within consciousness—not, to be sure, as the explanatory ground of experience, for this would be contradictory and would transform this system itself into a portion of experience; yet it can still be shown to be present, as such, within consciousness. In contrast, the object of dogmatism cannot be considered to be anything but a pure invention, which can be made into something real only by the success of this system. […]

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5. Neither of these two systems can directly refute the opposing one; for the dispute between them is a dispute concerning the first principle, i.e., concerning a principle that cannot be derived from any higher principle. If the first principle of either system is conceded, then it is able to refute the first principle of the other. Each denies everything included within the opposite system. They do not have a single point in common on the basis of which they might be able to achieve mutual understanding and be united with one another. […] The dispute between the idealist and the dogmatist is actually a dispute over whether the self-sufficiency of the I should be sacrificed to that of the thing, or conversely, whether the self-sufficiency of the thing should be sacrificed to that of the I. What, therefore, could drive a rational person to declare himself in favor of either one of these two systems? If a philosopher is to be considered a philosopher at all, he must necessarily occupy a certain standpoint, a standpoint that will sooner or later be attained in the course of human thinking, even if this occurs without any conscious effort on one’s own part. When a philosopher considers things from this standpoint, all he discovers is that he must entertain representations both of himself as free and of determinate things external to himself. It is impossible for a person simply to remain at this level of thinking. The thought of a mere representation is only half a thought, a broken fragment of a thought. We must also think of something else as well, namely, of something that corresponds to this representation and exists independently of the act of representing. In other words, a representation cannot subsist simply for itself and purely on its own. It is something only in conjunction with something else; by itself, it is nothing. It is precisely the necessity of thinking in this way that drives us from our initial standpoint and makes us ask: What is the basis of representations? Or, what amounts to exactly the same question: What corresponds to representations? The representation of the self-sufficiency of the I can certainly co-exist with a representation of the self-sufficiency of the thing, though the self-sufficiency of the I itself cannot co-exist with that of the thing. Only one of these two can come first; only one can be the starting point; only one can be independent. The one that comes second, just because it comes second, necessarily becomes dependent upon the one that comes first, with which it is supposed to be connected. Which of these two should come first? This is not a question that can be decided simply by consulting reason alone. For what we are concerned with here is not how some member is to be connected to a series (which is the only sort of question that can be decided on the basis of rational grounds), but rather, with the act of beginning the entire series; and since this act is absolutely primary, it can depend upon nothing but the freedom of thinking. Consequently, the decision between these two systems is one that is determined by free choice; and thus, since even a free decision is supposed to have some basis, it is a decision determined by inclination and interest. What ultimately distinguishes the idealist from the dogmatist is, accordingly, a difference of interest. One’s supreme interest and the foundation of all one’s other interests is one’s interest in oneself. This is just as true of a philosopher as it is of anyone else. The interest that invisibly guides all of his thinking is this: to avoid losing himself in argumentation, and instead to preserve and to affirm him-self therein. […] 198

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Anyone, however, who is conscious of his own self-sufficiency and independence from everything outside of himself—a consciousness that can be obtained only by making something of oneself on one’s own and independently of everything else—will not require things in order to support his self, nor can he employ them for this purpose, for they abolish his self-sufficiency and transform it into a mere illusion. The I that he possesses and that interests him cancels this type of belief in things. His belief in his own self-sufficiency is based upon inclination, and it is with passion that he shoulders his own self-sufficiency. His belief in himself is immediate. This interest also permits us to understand why the defense of a philosophical system is customarily accompanied by a certain amount of passion. […] The kind of philosophy one chooses thus depends upon the kind of person one is. For a philosophical system is not a lifeless household item one can put aside or pick up as one wishes; instead, it is animated by the very soul of the person who adopts it. Someone whose character is naturally slack or who has been enervated and twisted by spiritual servitude, scholarly selfindulgence, and vanity will never be able to raise himself to the level of idealism. […] 6. […] Dogmatism can do no more than repeat its principle over and over again and in various different forms. It can state it and restate it, but it can never proceed from this principle to a derivation of what needs to be explained. But philosophy consists precisely in such a derivation. It follows that, even viewed from the side of speculation, dogmatism is not a philosophy at all, but is nothing more than a helpless affirmation and assurance. The only type of philosophy that remains possible is idealism. […] 7. As we said above, idealism explains the determinations of consciousness by referring them to the acting of the intellect, which it considers to be something absolute and active, not something passive. The intellect cannot be anything passive, because, according to the postulate of idealism, it is what is primary and highest and is thus preceded by nothing that could account for its passivity. For the same reason, no real being, no subsistence or continuing existence, pertains to the intellect; for such being is the result of a process of interaction, and nothing yet exists or is assumed to be present with which the intellect could be posited to interact. Idealism considers the intellect to be a kind of doing and absolutely nothing more. One should not even call it an active subject, for such an appellation suggests the presence of something that continues to exist and in which an activity inheres. But idealism has no reason to make such an assumption, for it is not included within the principle of idealism, and anything not included within this principle must first be derived. What has to be derived now are determinate representations of a material, spatial, etc. world, one which is present without any help from us—for representations of this sort are notoriously present within consciousness. But nothing determinate can be derived from what is indeterminate, for in that case the formal principle of all derivation, i.e., the principle of sufficient reason or “grounding principle,” could not be applied. Consequently, the acting of the intellect which is supposed 199

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to serve as the foundation of these determinate representations must be a determinate mode of acting; and, since the intellect itself is the ultimate ground of all explanation, this must be a type of acting which is determined by the intellect itself and by its own nature, not by anything outside of the intellect. Accordingly, what idealism presupposes is the following: The intellect acts; but, as a consequence of its very nature, it can act only in a certain, specific manner. If one considers the intellect’s necessary modes of acting in isolation from any [actual] acting, then it is quite appropriate to call these the “laws of acting.” Hence there are necessary laws of the intellect.—At the same time, the feeling of necessity accompanying these determinate representations is also made comprehensible in this way: For what the intellect feels in this case is not, as it were, an external impression; instead, what it feels when it acts are the limits of its own nature. Insofar as idealism presupposes the existence of such necessary laws of the intellect (which is the only rational thing it can suppose, since this is the only way it can explain what it is supposed to explain) it is called “Critical” or “transcendental” idealism. A system of transcendent idealism would be one that purports to derive determinate representations from the free and completely lawless acting of the intellect—which is an utterly self-contradictory supposition, since, as we just noted, the principle of sufficient reason is certainly not applicable to completely free and lawless acting. Just as surely as the intellect’s assumed laws of acting are supposed to have their basis in the unitary nature of the intellect itself, these laws must constitute a single system. This means that the reason why the intellect must act in certain precise ways under certain specific circumstances is because it has certain modes of acting under any circumstances whatsoever, and the former can be derived from the latter. These general modes of acting can, in turn, be further explained by referring to a single, fundamental law. Whenever it acts, the intellect assigns a law to itself, and this act of legislation occurs in conformity with an even higher, necessary way of acting or representing. For example, the law of causality is not a primary or original law; instead, it is only one of the various ways in which a manifold can be combined. The law of causality can therefore be derived from the fundamental law governing such combination, which, in turn— along with the manifold itself—can be derived from still higher laws. […] I have, on a previous occasion, already provided a clear discussion of the method followed by a complete transcendental idealism of the sort established by the Wissenschaftslehre. I cannot understand why people seem not to have understood this account. […] Thus I am obliged to repeat what I have said before and to remind the reader that everything within this science depends upon an understanding of this point. This type of idealism begins with a single basic law of reason, which it immediately establishes within consciousness. In order to do this, it proceeds as follows: It summons the listener or the reader to think freely of a certain concept. If he indeed does this, he will discover that he is obliged to proceed in a certain way. Here we have to distinguish between two different things: [1] The requested act of thinking, which can only be performed freely. The person who does not perform this act on his own will not be able to see any of the things set forth in the Wissenschaftslehre. [2] The necessary manner in which this free act of thinking has to be performed if it is to be performed at all. The basis for this necessity lies in the very nature of the intellect itself and is not a matter of free choice. This is something necessary, even though it only occurs in and by means of a free action. It is something discovered, even though its discovery is conditioned by freedom. 200

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To this extent, idealism establishes within immediate consciousness what it asserts. Nevertheless, it remains merely a presupposition that this constitutes the necessary and fundamental law of reason as a whole, a law from which we can derive the entire system of our necessary representations—not merely our representations of a world in which objects are determined by the subsumptive and reflective power of judgment, but also our representations of ourselves as free, practical beings subject to laws. A complete transcendental idealism has to demonstrate the truth of this presupposition by actually providing a derivation of this system of representations, and precisely this constitutes its proper task. It does this by proceeding as follows: It shows that what is postulated as the first principle and immediately established within consciousness is not possible unless something else occurs as well, and that this second thing is not possible apart from the occurrence of some third thing. It continues in this manner until all of the conditions of the first principle have been completely exhausted and its possibility has become completely comprehensible. It proceeds in an uninterrupted progression from what is conditioned to the condition of the same. Each condition becomes, in turn, something that is itself conditioned and whose condition has to be discovered. If the presupposition idealism makes is correct, and if it has inferred correctly in the course of its derivations, then, as its final result (i.e., as the sum total of all of the conditions of that with which it began), it must arrive at the system of all necessary representations. In other words, its result must be equivalent to experience as a whole—though this equation is not established within philosophy itself, but only subsequently. This is because experience is not something with which idealism is, as it were, acquainted in advance and which it keeps in view as the goal at which it has to arrive. In the course of its derivations, idealism knows nothing of experience and takes no heed of it whatsoever. It commences from its own starting point, and it proceeds in accordance with its own rule, without the slightest concern for what may ultimately result. […] To the extent that these final results of idealism are viewed as results, i.e., to the extent that they are viewed as conclusions of a chain of argument, they are “a priori” and contained within the human mind. To the extent, however, that argument and experience actually coincide and one views these same results as something given within experience, then they can be called “a posteriori.” For a full-blown idealism, a priori and a posteriori are not two different things, but are one and the same thing, simply looked at from two different sides, and they can be distinguished from each other only in terms of the different means one employs in order to arrive at each. Philosophy anticipates experience in its entirety; it thinks of experience only as something necessary, and to this extent the experience of which philosophy thinks is—in comparison with actual experience—a priori. Insofar as it is given, a given number is something a posteriori. The same number is a priori insofar as it is treated as the product of its factors. […] Since the task of explaining the foundations of experience is one that is simply present within human reason itself; since no rational being will assume that reason could contain within itself a task simply impossible to discharge; since there are only two ways to discharge this task, viz., in the manner of dogmatism and in that of transcendental idealism; and since it can be shown without any further ado that the former is unable to do what it promises 201

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to do: for all of these reasons, the resolute thinker will always decide in favor of the latter alternative. I.e., he will always conclude that the error lies only in the inferences made within transcendental idealism and not in what it presupposes, which must surely be correct in itself. He will not allow any unsuccessful attempt to prevent him from making another attempt, until success has finally been attained. As one can see, the path followed by this type of idealism is one that begins with something present within consciousness, though it is present there only as a result of a free act of thinking, and proceeds from there to experience as a whole. What lies between these two extremes constitutes the proper territory of this system. This is not the domain of “facts of consciousness”; it is not part of the realm of experience. How could anything that limited itself to experience be called philosophy? For it is precisely the task of philosophy to indicate the basis or foundation of experience, and the foundation of anything must necessarily lie outside of that for which it provides the foundation. It is something produced by a free, but law-governed, act of thinking. […] Anyone who performs this free act becomes conscious of it and thereby, as it were, stakes out a new region within his own consciousness. Similarly, what is conditioned by this act is simply not present at all for someone who does not perform it. The chemist compounds a body—a specific metal, for instance—from its elements. The ordinary person sees a metal with which he is quite familiar, whereas what the chemist sees is the connection between these specific elements. Do they see two different things? I think not; they both see the same thing, but they view it in two different ways. The chemist sees what is a priori; he sees the individual elements. The ordinary person sees what is a posteriori; he sees the whole.—There is, however, the following difference between the procedure of the chemist and that of the philosopher: The chemist must first analyze the whole before he can compose it, for he is dealing with an object with whose rule of assembly he cannot be acquainted prior to this analysis; whereas the philosopher can engage in an act of composition without first having to engage in any analysis, since he is already acquainted with the rule governing his object, that is, with the rule governing reason. On the condition, therefore, that one wishes to think of something as the foundation of experience, the only sort of reality that pertains to the content of philosophy is the reality of necessary thinking. Philosophy asserts that the intellect can be conceived of only as active, and indeed, can be conceived of as active only in a certain specific manner. Philosophy finds this type of reality to be quite adequate, for philosophy shows that there is no other type of reality at all. The Wissenschaftslehre wishes to establish a complete transcendental idealism of the sort we have now described. […]

Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre For Readers Who Already Have a Philosophical System of Their Own 1. […] The entire structure and meaning of the Wissenschaftslehre is completely different from that of any of the philosophical systems that have preceded it. The exponents of the other systems to whom I am here referring all begin with one concept or another, and they are quite unconcerned 202

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with where they have obtained this concept and from what they have assembled it. They then proceed to analyze this concept and to combine it with others, to whose origins they show an equal indifference. Their philosophy consists entirely in these arguments they themselves construct. Accordingly, theirs is a philosophy that exists only within their own thinking. The situation is quite different in the case of the Wissenschaftslehre. What it takes as the object of its thinking is not some dead concept which is related only passively to the inquiry in question and which obtains its significance only through this very act of thinking. Instead, the object reflected upon within the Wissenschaftslehre is something vital and active, something that generates cognitions out of itself and by means of itself, while the philosopher merely observes what happens. The part played by the philosopher in this process is no more than this: His task is to engage this living subject in purposeful activity, to observe this activity, to apprehend it, and to comprehend it as a single, unified activity. He conducts an experiment. It is up to him to place what is to be investigated in a position that will allow him to make precisely the observations he wishes to make. It is also up to him to attend to these appearances, to survey them accurately and to connect them with one another. But it is not for him to decide how the object should manifest itself. This is something determined by the object itself; and he would be working directly counter to his own goal were he not to subordinate himself to this object, and were he instead to take an active role in the development of what appears. In contrast, the philosopher of the previously mentioned sort is engaged in the manufacture of an artificial product. All that concerns him is the material of which the object upon which he is working consists; he is not at all concerned with any inner, self-active energy or force of this object itself. Indeed, any such inner force must be killed before he can set to work, for otherwise it would resist his efforts. He succeeds in manufacturing something from this dead mass only by employing his own energy, guided solely by a concept he himself has previously constructed. The Wissenschaftslehre contains two very different series of mental acting: that of the I the philosopher is observing, as well as the series consisting of the philosopher’s own observations. The opposed manner of philosophizing to which I have just referred contains but a single series of thinking, namely, the series of the philosopher’s own thoughts, for the content or object of his thinking is not presented as something that is itself engaged in thinking. Many people fail to distinguish these two series from each other at all, or else they confuse them with one another and assign to one of these series something that really pertains to the other. This is one of the main reasons why the Wissenschaftslehre has been misunderstood, and it is also a major source of many of the inappropriate objections that have been raised against this system. A person who makes this mistake does so because he encounters only one series within his own philosophy. The action of the philosopher who manufactures an artificial product is, to be sure, identical with that of the appearance itself, since the object he is considering does not act on its own. But what is reported by the philosopher who has conducted an experiment [in the manner described above] is not itself identical with the appearance he is investigating, but is merely the concept of the latter. 2. […] How does the Wissenschaftslehre propose to go about accomplishing its task? As we know, the question the Wissenschaftslehre has to answer is the following: What is the origin of the system of representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity? Or, how do we come to ascribe objective validity to something purely subjective? Or—since objective validity is designated by the term “being”—how do we come to assume the existence of any being? 203

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Since this last question is one that arises as a result of introspection, i.e., from noticing that the immediate object of consciousness is nothing but consciousness itself, it follows that the type of “being” that is here in question can only be a being for us. It would be completely absurd to consider this question to be the same as the question concerning the existence of a being that has no relation to any consciousness. Yet it is precisely what is most absurd that is most commonly encountered among the philosophers of our own philosophical era. The question now raised—viz., how is a being for us possible?—abstracts from all being. This does not mean that one must think, so to speak, of a non-being; for by doing so one would succeed only in negating the concept of being, not in abstracting from it. Instead, the concept of being is here not thought of at all—either positively or negatively. This is a question that inquires concerning the ground of the predicate of being as such, whether this predicate is attributed or denied in any particular case. But a ground always lies outside of what it grounds; i.e., it is contrasted with or opposed to it. Thus, if one is really to address and to answer this question, then one’s answer must also abstract from all being. […] 3. Who is it then who undertakes the required abstraction from all being? In which of the two series does this act of abstracting lie? Obviously, it lies within the series of philosophical argumentation, for no other series is yet present. The sole thing to which the person who undertakes this act of abstraction continues to cling and proposes to employ as the basis for explaining everything that has to be explained is the conscious subject. Consequently, he must grasp this subject entirely apart from any representation of being, for only in this way will he then be able to show that this subject contains within itself the ground of all being—“being for this subject,” as goes without saying. But if we abstract from all being of and for this conscious subject, then nothing pertains to it but acting. More specifically, in relationship to being, the subject in question is the acting subject. The philosopher therefore has to apprehend this subject while it is engaged in acting. This is the point at which the previously mentioned double series first arises. The fundamental claim made by the philosopher as such is the following: Insofar as the I exists only for itself, a being outside of the I must also necessarily arise for the I at the same time. The former contains within itself the ground of the latter; the latter is conditioned by the former. Our self-consciousness is necessarily connected with a consciousness of something that is supposed to be something other than ourselves. The former, however, is to be viewed as what provides the condition and the latter must be viewed as what is conditioned thereby. In order to prove this contention—not as something established, as it were, by argumentation and supposed to be valid for a system of things existing in themselves, but rather, as something that has to be established by observing the original operation of reason and is valid for reason—the philosopher must first show how the I exists and comes into being for itself. Secondly, he must show that this being of the I for itself would not be possible unless a being outside of the I also arose for the I at the same time. Thus the first question would be: What is the I for itself? And our first postulate would be the following: Think of yourself; construct the concept of yourself and take note of how you do this. 204

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The philosopher maintains that anyone who does even this much will discover that when he thinks of this concept of himself his activity as an intellect turns back upon or reverts into itself, and thus makes itself into its own object. […] 4. […] We asserted that the I reverts into itself. Does this not imply that the I is already present for itself, in advance of and independently of this act of self-reversion? […] By no means! The I originally comes into being for itself by means of this act, and it is only in this way that the I comes into being at all, i.e., by means of an acting that is itself directed at acting; and this specific, determinate way of acting is not preceded by any sort of “acting as such” or “in general.” It is only for the philosopher that the I can be said to be already present in advance, as a fact; for the philosopher has already constituted experience in its entirety. […] Let us begin by looking at the I that is being observed. What is this self-reverting act of the I? […] It is not an act of comprehending anything by means of concepts. It first becomes an act of comprehension only when it is opposed to a Not-I and only insofar as the I itself is determined within this opposition. Consequently, the act in question is a mere intuition.— Accordingly, it also produces no consciousness, not even self-consciousness. It is precisely because no consciousness is produced by this act, considered purely on its own, that we may proceed to infer the occurrence of another act, by means of which a Not-I comes into being for us. Only in this manner is it possible to advance our philosophical argument and thereby to accomplish the desired derivation of the system of experience. The described act of the I merely serves to put the I into a position in which self-consciousness—and, along with this, all other consciousness—becomes possible. But no actual consciousness has yet arisen at this point. The act in question is merely a part of the entire action through which the intellect brings its own consciousness into being. Though the philosopher has to isolate this act, it is not originally a separate part of this whole. […] But in connection with this, the following question can be and has been asked: If this entire philosophy is constructed upon something brought into being by an act of sheer, arbitrary free will, does this not mean that it is nothing more than a figment of the imagination, a pure invention? How does the philosopher propose to ensure the objectivity of this merely subjective action? How does he propose to guarantee the primordial originality of an act that is obviously only empirical and occurs at a specific time, viz., at the time when he himself is engaged in philosophizing? How does he intend to demonstrate that his present act of free thinking, an act that occurs in the midst of the series of his own representations, corresponds to the necessary act of thinking by means of which he came into being for himself in the first place and which initiates the entire series of his representations? To this I reply: This action is, by its very nature, objective. I am for myself; this is a fact. But I can only have occurred for myself by means of acting, for I am free. It is, moreover, only by acting in this specific, determinate way that I can have occurred for myself; for it is by means of this same specific mode of acting that I occur for myself at every instant, whereas something quite different occurs for me through every other mode of acting. This acting is precisely the concept of the I, and the concept of the I is the concept of this acting. These are one and the same, and when we think of this concept, we do not and cannot think of anything but what has just been described. 205

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It is so, because I make it so. The philosopher merely makes clear to himself what he is actually thinking—and has always been thinking—whenever he thinks of himself. But that he actually does think of himself is, for him, an immediate fact of consciousness. […] Does any consciousness arise for the philosopher when he does this? Undoubtedly, for he is not only engaged in intuiting, he is also engaged in comprehending. He comprehends his act as an instance of acting as such or acting in general, of which, as a result of his previous experience, he already possesses a concept; moreover, he also comprehends the act in question as this specific, self-reverting mode of acting, which is how he intuits it within himself. It is this characteristic difference that allows the philosopher to single out, within the general sphere of “acting as such,” this specific type of acting. […] Since it is only in this manner that he can obtain the thought of himself […], one might also hope that he will be able to understand that his thought of himself is nothing other than the thought of this action and that the word “I” is nothing more than a way of designating the latter: i.e., that he will come to see that “I” and “self-reverting acting” are completely identical concepts. Let us assume that he goes along with transcendental idealism in presupposing— albeit in a purely problematic way—that all consciousness is based upon and conditioned by self-consciousness. […] Insofar as he makes this assumption, he will, it is to be hoped, realize that he must think of this act of returning into himself as preceding and conditioning all other acts of consciousness, or, what amounts to the same thing, that he must think of this act of self-reversion as the original act of the subject. Since, moreover, nothing exists for him which is not contained within his consciousness, and since everything else within his consciousness is conditioned by this very act and thus cannot in turn—at least not in one and the same respect—be a condition for the possibility of this act, he must therefore think of this act as an act that is for him entirely unconditioned and thus absolute. Accordingly, he will again discover that the presupposition that self-consciousness is the foundation of all consciousness completely coincides with the thought of the I as originally posited by itself. One would hope that everyone will be able to grasp this as well and will be able to see that if transcendental idealism is to set to work in a systematic fashion, it can proceed in no other way than the way in which it proceeds in the Wissenschaftslehre. […] 5. “Intellectual intuition” is the name I give to the act required of the philosopher: an act of intuiting himself while simultaneously performing the act by means of which the I originates for him. Intellectual intuition is the immediate consciousness that I act and of what I do when I act. It is because of this that it is possible for me to know something because I do it. That we possess such a power of intellectual intuition is not something that can be demonstrated by means of concepts, nor can an understanding of what intellectual intuition is be produced from concepts. This is something everyone has to discover immediately within himself; otherwise, he will never become acquainted with it at all. […] To be sure, anyone can be shown, within his own acknowledged experience, that this intellectual intuition is present in every moment of his consciousness. I cannot take a single step, I cannot move my hand or foot, without the intellectual intuition of my self-consciousness in these actions. It is only through such an intuition that I know that I do this. Only in this 206

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way am I able to distinguish my own acting (and, within this acting, my own self) from the encountered object of this acting. Every person who ascribes an activity to himself appeals to this intuition. It contains within itself the source of life, and apart from it there is nothing but death. Like sensory intuition, which never occurs by itself or constitutes a complete state of consciousness, this intellectual intuition never occurs alone, however, as a complete act of consciousness. Both types of intuition must also be grasped by means of concepts, or “comprehended.” […] In addition, intellectual intuition is always conjoined with some sensory intuition. I cannot discover myself to be acting without also discovering some object upon which I act; and I discover this object by means of sensory intuition, which I grasp by means of a concept. Moreover, I cannot discover myself to be acting unless I also construct an image or a picture of what it is I want to produce [by acting], which image I also grasp by means of a concept. For how do I know what it is I want to produce? How could I possibly know this unless I had immediately observed myself engaged in the act of constructing a concept of a goal, that is, in a type of acting?—Consciousness is a complete whole only in this state in which the manifold in question is unified. I become conscious only of the concepts involved, that is, the concept of the object and the concept of the goal, not however of the two intuitions that lie at the basis of these concepts. […] But anyone who believes that this entitles him to deny the existence of intellectual intuition could, with the same right, also deny the existence of sensory intuition; for sensory intuition is possible only in conjunction with intellectual intuition, since everything that is supposed to be my representation must be referred to me; but consciousness of the I comes only from intellectual intuition. […] If, however, it must be conceded that there is no immediate, isolated consciousness of intellectual intuition, then where does the philosopher obtain his acquaintance with intellectual intuition and his isolated representation of the same? […] The philosopher bases his claim concerning intellectual intuition upon the following inference: First I resolve to think of some determinate thing, and then the desired thought ensues; I resolve to do some determinate thing, and the representation of its occurrence then ensues. This is a fact of consciousness. Insofar as we regard this fact in accordance with the laws of purely sensory consciousness, it contains within itself nothing more than has already been indicated: viz., a sequence of specific representations. All I would be conscious of in this case would be a particular temporal sequence of representations, and this would be all I could claim to be conscious of. I would then be permitted to say no more than this: “I know that the representation of this specific thought, characterized as something that was supposed to come into existence, was immediately succeeded in time by another representation of this same thought, now characterized as something that actually does exist; i.e., I know that the representation of this determinate appearance as one that ought to exist was immediately succeeded by the representation of this same appearance as one that actually does exist.” But this would not provide me with any warrant for advancing the totally different claim that the first representation contains within itself the real ground of the latter and that the latter came into being for me as a result of my thought of the former. I remain purely passive, a quiet stage upon which certain representations are succeeded by other ones; but I am not the active principle that might have produced these representations. Yet I make precisely this latter assumption, and I cannot abandon this assumption without abandoning myself. Why do I make this assumption? No basis for it can 207

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be found among the sensory ingredients we examined above. Accordingly, it must have its basis in a special type of consciousness, indeed, in an immediate consciousness, and hence, in an intuition. The intuition in question certainly cannot be a sensory intuition directed at some materially subsisting thing; instead, it must be an intuition of a sheer activity—not an activity that has been brought to a halt, but one that continues; not a being, but something living. Hence the philosopher discovers this intellectual intuition as a fact of consciousness. (It is a fact for him; for the original I it is an Act [Tathandlung]. He does not, however, discover it immediately, as an isolated fact within his consciousness, but only insofar as he introduces distinctions into what is present as a unity within ordinary consciousness and thereby dissolves this whole into its components. We have here presupposed the fact of this intellectual intuition so that we could then proceed to explain its possibility and, by explaining its connection to the system of reason as a whole, defend it against the suspicion of falseness and deception it brings upon itself because it opposes the dogmatic way of thinking (which also possesses a foundation of its own within reason). It is, however, an entirely different undertaking to confirm, on the basis of something even higher, the belief in the reality of this intellectual intuition, with which, according to our explicit admission, transcendental idealism must commence, and to show the presence within reason itself of the very interest upon which this belief is based. The only way in which this can be accomplished is by exhibiting the ethical law within us, within the context of which the I is represented as something sublime and elevated above all of the original modifications accomplished through this law and is challenged to act in an absolute manner, the sole foundation of which should lie in the I itself and nowhere else. It is in this way that the I becomes characterized as something absolutely active. Our intuition of self-activity and freedom has its foundation in our consciousness of this law, which is unquestionably not a type of consciousness derived from anything else, but is instead an immediate consciousness. Here I am given to myself, by myself, as something that is obliged to be active in a certain way. Accordingly, I am given to myself, by myself, as “active in an overall sense” or “as such.” I possess life within myself and draw it from myself. It is only through the medium of the ethical law that I catch a glimpse of myself; and insofar as I view myself through this medium, I necessarily view myself as self-active. In this way an entirely alien ingredient, viz., my consciousness of my own real efficacy, arises for me within a consciousness that otherwise would be nothing but a consciousness of a particular sequence of my representations. Intellectual intuition provides the only firm standpoint for any philosophy. Everything that occurs within consciousness can be explained upon the basis of intellectual intuition—and only upon this basis. Without self-consciousness there is no consciousness whatsoever, but self-consciousness is possible only in the way we have indicated: I am only active. I cannot be driven from this position. This is the point where my philosophy becomes entirely independent of all arbitrary choice and becomes a product of iron necessity—to the extent, that is, that free reason can be subject to necessity; i.e., it becomes a product of practical necessity. I cannot go beyond this standpoint, because I am not permitted to go beyond it. With this, transcendental idealism simultaneously reveals itself to be the only type of philosophical thinking that accords with duty. It is the mode of thinking in which speculation and the ethical law are most intimately united. I ought to begin my thinking with the thought of the pure I, and I ought to think of this pure I as absolutely self-active—not as determined by things, but rather as determining them.

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The concept of acting, which becomes possible only by means of this intellectual intuition of the self-active I, is the sole concept that unites the two worlds that exist for us: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible or sensory world is what stands in opposition to my acting; and since I am finite, I have to posit something in opposition to my acting. The intelligible world is what ought to come into being through my acting. […] Accordingly, the question of whether philosophy should begin with a fact or with an Act (i.e., with a pure activity that presupposes no object but, instead, produces its own object, and therefore with an acting that immediately becomes a deed) is by no means so inconsequential as it may seem to some people to be. If philosophy begins with a fact, then it places itself in the midst of a world of being and finitude, and it will be difficult indeed for it to discover any path leading from this world to an infinite and supersensible one. If, however, philosophy begins with an Act, then it finds itself at the precise point where these two worlds are connected with each other and from which they can both be surveyed in a single glance.

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CHAPTER 8 JOHANN CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN (1770–1843)

INTRODUCTION Friedrich Hölderlin, like his contemporaries Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), represents a uniquely German intellectual phenomenon known as Early Romanticism (Frűhromantik). At once “a literary sensation,” and a new kind of philosophical discourse, this was a joint effort of especially talented thinkers, literary and philosophical geniuses. The early German romantics strove to create a new synthesis of art, philosophy, and science, and each of them had his own understanding of how it could be achieved (Ameriks 2000, 11–13). Hölderlin lived long enough to be considered one of the last great voices of Early German Romanticism, as his death coincided with early stages of the Industrial Revolution which marked a dramatic change to (and quite possibly the end of) the world that had shaped the views of the early Romantics. Widely known for his poetic and literary work, his philosophical insights remained largely ignored for most of the twentieth century. Only recently, with the revival of interest in German idealism, and the desire to better understand the logic of its progression, have scholars begun to give attention to Hölderlin’s philosophical ideas, recognizing his significance as a philosopher. His philosophical importance, however, is not limited to his personal acquaintance with Schiller, Novalis, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. As a fervent supporter of anti-foundationalism in philosophy, he rigorously refuted Fichte’s first principle, instead proposing the view that would directly influence the “turn” toward absolute idealism most closely associated with Schelling and Hegel. His ethical views grew out of his understanding of the philosophical consequences of Kant’s insistence on the moral irrelevance of inclinations. He also clearly recognized the theoretical futility of the fragile synthesis between claims of reason and sense and between freedom and nature proposed by Schiller in response to Kant’s challenge. He developed a conception of life that is rooted in the original unity of Being, the truth of which, according to Hölderlin, remains unattainable for philosophy and can be expressed only through poetry. While the insistence upon the superiority of poetry over philosophy appeared to be a central trend for all early German Romantics, Hölderlin’s association of this claim with the question of the truth of Being anticipated Heidegger’s metaphysical ontology. It may have also influenced, even if indirectly, the hermeneutic ontology of postmodernist thinkers. Thus, Hölderlin’s philosophical significance is not limited merely to his critical role in the evolution of German idealism, but extends into the twentieth century and beyond. Born on March 20, 1770, Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin spent his early childhood in the quaint countryside of Lauffen am Neckar in Swabia. He always remembered his birthplace with fondness, often alluding to Lauffen in his poems. His father died when he was very young, and his mother remarried to the mayor of Nürtingen, a small town where the boy attended a

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primary school. Originally destined for a career in the Lutheran Church, at the age of thirteen, Hölderlin was sent to a boarding school at the abbey of Dekandorf, later transferring to the Protestant seminary at the monastery of Maulbronn. At the age of eighteen he enrolled in the Tübinger Stift, an educational institution founded in the Middle Ages which since 1560 had become a Protestant theological seminary. At Tübingen Hölderlin was surrounded by brilliant young people destined to become major figures of the German intellectual scene in the first half of the nineteenth century. With two of them—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schelling—Hölderlin formed a close friendship that had a significant influence on Hölderlin’s philosophical development, and, for a while, the intellectual lives of the three were closely intertwined. During his time at Tübingen, Hölderlin also started composing poetry and formed a personal relationship and poetic circle with young Rudolf Magenau and Christian Ludwig Neuffer who went on to become great German men of letters. Hölderlin’s first poems appeared in a popular literary journal Musenalmanach in September 1791. Although he received theological training and was expected to serve as a Protestant minister, Hölderlin quickly abandoned any intentions of ministerial work upon graduation from Tubingen in 1793 (Zweig 2012, 47). By that time, he already began working on Hyperion: Or, The Hermit in Greece, his philosophical novel, the writing of which would become his main literary activity for next few years. Desiring to launch a career in literature, Hölderlin met with Schiller who enthusiastically welcomed the young poet. Schiller also recommended him as a private tutor of the son of Charlotte von Kalb, a job that supported Hölderlin the following two years. Hölderlin’s encounter with Schiller grew into a strong friendship and some of Hölderlin’s works, mainly poetry but also a fragment of his novel Hyperion, appeared in the Thalia, the review journal that Schiller published. Hölderlin admired Schiller as a person and a poet, and his own early poems clearly reveal Schiller’s influence. A staunch supporter of the French Revolution, in his poems Hölderlin celebrated its ideals worshiping freedom, humanity, harmony, friendship, and nature. In 1794, Hölderlin traveled to Jena, where Fichte had just assumed the chair in Critical philosophy after Reinhold. In Jena, Hölderlin was introduced not only to Fichte but also to Goethe and Herder. He also met the neo-Kantian Friedrich Immanuel (Ritter von) Niethammer, another notable graduate of Tübinger Stift, who at that time taught philosophy at Jena. Niethammer’s philosophical ideas would greatly influence Hölderlin’s views of the then current philosophy and the direction of his own philosophical search during next few years. In his letters to friends, Hölderlin often called Niethammer his “philosophical mentor” (Larmore 2000, 113). It was through Niethammer that Hölderlin grew interested in Kant’s Critical philosophy and became acquainted with the challenging ideas of both Reinhold’s Philosophy of Elements and Fichte’s project of Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Science) that emerged as a response to this challenge. In May 1795, when Hölderlin returned to Jena, he attended lectures taught by Fichte and Niethammer and studied Fichte’s philosophy. In addition, he actively interacted with Schiller who also held the professorship at Jena at that time. During this stay in Jena, Niethammer introduced Hölderlin to Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). The meeting that took place in Fichte’s presence was an equally significant event for both Hölderlin and Novalis. Influenced by Niethammer, their philosophical thought moved in

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a similar direction, which was exhibited by their belief in the methodological unsustainability of Fichte’s first principle of Wissenschaftslehre leading to their advocacy for anti-foundationalism in philosophy and attention to “absolute Being” as the only primordial unity with the world that man needed to regain. Hölderlin benefited enormously from his stay in Jena, where he could “have nourished on Fichte’s teaching and Schiller’s company” (Henrich 1997, 113). Thus, when in the next month he moved to Frankfurt, he became fully immersed into philosophy attempting to formulate his own philosophical views. In spring 1796, he received a visit from Schelling, who was eager to hear about Hölderlin’s experiences in Jena, especially about Fichte’s lectures that the latter attended. The two friends had long and extensive conversations about the path taken by contemporary philosophy. It is possible that Hegel, who during this time was also living in Frankfurt, joined the conversations. While Hegel’s participation is a matter of speculation, what seems to be clear is that these conversations, and also a strong desire of the “young creative spirits” to chart a more original pathway toward the philosophical truth, stimulated a conception of a brief unpublished fragment now known under the title, The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism. In perpetual need of money to support himself, Hölderlin accepted a new tutoring job, this time with the family of J. F. Gontard, a wealthy banker in Frankfurt. Yet, soon he became deeply involved with the mother of his pupil, Susette Gontard, a woman of great beauty and sensibility. The attraction was mutual, and Hölderlin himself described their relationship as “an everlasting happy sacred friendship.” He depicted Susette in his poems, and she was the inspiration behind Diotima, a central character of his novel Hyperion. However, this happiness was short-lived, and after a confrontation with Susette’s husband, Hölderlin had to quit his job and leave Frankfurt. The emotional upheaval caused by this heartbreaking event had a detrimental effect on his health, and it eventually triggered Hölderlin’s mental decline. Nonetheless, he managed to continue working. Hölderlin’s most productive period was between 1795 and 1806, during which he composed a number of philosophical treatises, such as Judgment and Being (1795), “On the Law of Freedom” (1794), and “On the Concept of Punishment” (1795). He also wrote the novel Hyperion, the first volume of which appeared in 1797 and the second two years later (1799). His great elegies Menon’s Lament for Diotima and Bread and Wine came out around the same time. In 1798, Hölderlin began working on a drama, The Death of Empedocles, which depicted the final days of the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Empedocles, who, according to legend, perished in the flames of Mount Etna. Hölderlin nearly completed only the first version of the tragedy. There are merely fragments surviving from a second and third version. Despite the period of high creativity, Hölderlin was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. His failure to secure an academic position only added to the overwhelming distress. By 1800, he lost all illusions about philosophy and solidified his decision to focus on writing poetry. He spent the next year recovering while working as a private tutor in Switzerland and France. However, the news of Susette’s death, in June 1802, drove him to near insanity. With support from his friends, he managed to recuperate and acquire a librarian job in Homburg near Frankfurt. In 1805, due to his involvement with a group of Jacobin militants, he was accused of high treason, but soon released on grounds of mental derangements and ordered to leave Homburg and check into a psychiatric clinic. He was still able to continue writing, at intervals, until 1807, when he fell into irreversible madness.

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Hölderlin died on June 7, 1843, at the age of seventy-three, having spent the last thirty-five years of his life in a room at a carpenter’s house in Tübingen. * * * Even though Hölderlin’s presence on the philosophical stage was relatively short-lived, he did provide valuable insights into epistemology, ontology, and ethics. His productive period coincided with the early development of German idealism, and his few surviving philosophical fragments reveal that he had no qualms about expressing discontent with seminal figures such as Kant and Fichte. This can be seen most clearly in his work Judgment and Being, where he interacts explicitly with the concept of Being and its direct relation to consciousness. Judgment and Being is perhaps the most significant philosophical piece that Hölderlin wrote. The text, published only in 1961, was composed in April 1795, after Hölderlin’s thoughtful encounter with Fichte’s philosophy. This work also marks the beginning of a turning point in Hölderlin’s thought, when it becomes more independent from Niethammer’s influences and acquires a firm ontological ground for a radical critique of philosophy. Hölderlin begins with an objection to Fichte’s first principle, claiming that the I, or subjectivity, cannot function as the first principle that is said to be most fundamental and not divided. Instead, the I inevitably involves an “arche-separation.” The I, he explains, is essentially a judging (thinking) I, and thus it must be understood in terms of judgment. Yet, any judgment (Urteil) rests on a primal division (Ur-teilung) between subject and object: the judgment is always a judgment of something. Being defined in relation to an object of judgment (thought) that is distinct from it, the I cannot serve as the foundation for knowledge, at least not in the way that Fichte intended (Larmore 2000, 146). Interestingly, earlier in the same year, in his letter to Hegel on January 26, Hölderlin had already criticized Fichte’s first principle, arguing that the absolute I, which supposedly “contains all reality,” does not have an object distinct from it, and “a consciousness without object cannot be thought” (Hölderlin 1988, 125). He continues this theme in Judgment and Being, now elaborating in more detail on the nature of self-consciousness. He explains that while self-consciousness is necessarily an act of the I that involves a sort of self-relation aimed at grasping one’s own self-identity (Fichte’s original self-awareness, the sense of “oneness”), it inescapably entails distinction between subject and object. Hence, it would be a mistake to claim, as Fichte did, that the original self-identity can be explained in terms of the nature of the I alone. By identifying myself as the “I,” I already put myself in the position of a knowing subject, thus opposing and distinguishing myself from some object. Yet, the very core of selfconsciousness is the ability to grasp subject and object as one. Hölderlin’s solution to this problem is to find a unity that is antecedent to the standpoint of the I itself. This unity is for him “absolute Being” which is the most fundamental and original “essence” that underlies not only the separation of subject and object in self-consciousness but all such distinctions in different kinds of our cognitive attitudes toward the world. In Hölderlin’s view, both subject and object were originally “subsumed” under Being, and that to portray either subject or object as possessing different modes of being is to completely undermine and deny their shared essence. Later he would further develop this idea to claim that Being is what guarantees our harmony with the nature, and in order to reestablish an original sense of life, we must recapture this primordial unity which became disrupted in the real world.

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Hölderlin, however, warns that Being is not the same as identity. While the latter is something that the I itself can guarantee in self-consciousness as the reflective result of selfdifferentiation, the concept of Being is directly tied to that of essence. Hölderlin insists on the unknowability of Being. Otherwise, it should be established as an object of knowledge that must be made distinct from the knowing subject, which would compromise the very idea of an original unity that he tries to establish. For him Being is a ground that has to be presupposed. This is what allows us to make sense of all our cognitive functions, including consciousness and reflection. The above view was Hölderlin’s version of the critique of foundationalism in philosophy, mainly directed against Fichte. And his sharp demarcation between Being and identity appears in clear contrast with Fichte’s position, whose absolute I had encompassed both concepts in an attempt to create a well-grounded and defensible metaphysics. Hölderlin remained much truer to Kant in his belief that an absolute ground for consciousness, if one exists, is ultimately unknowable, and that attempts to find such a ground often make unwarranted assumptions (Henrich 1997, 86). In his philosophical fragments, he combats what many saw as a new dogmatism forming among the post-Kantians. He states as much in his Letter to Hegel in January 1795: “I suspected [Fichte] very much of dogmatism; . . . he wants to move the theory beyond the fact of consciousness; . . . and that is just as certain and even more strikingly transcendent than if the metaphysicians so far would move beyond the existence of the world” (Hölderlin 1988, 125). Ultimately, Hölderlin saw Fichte as developing yet another indefensible system of metaphysics that attempted to produce a teleology that was not even internally consistent. The critique of Fichte served as a starting point for Hölderlin’s own philosophical views that for many appeared too radical. An interesting document is a fragment titled The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism. Found in the notes kept by Hegel and composed in Hegel’s handwriting, this fragment was first published in 1917 by the editor of Hegel’s works, Franz Rosenzweig. At different times the document was variably attributed to Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin. Some even believed that it was rather a collective enterprise, composed by the three men together. However, the fragment is written in first person, which seems to preclude the possibility of the collective authorship. Scholars and the historians of thought now believe that the fragment, written between June and August 1796, is a result of a sustained exchange between Hölderlin and Schelling, the exchange that had probably occurred when the two thinkers met in April 1796 in Frankfurt. While the question of the authorship is not settled yet, the text shows some conceptual similarities with Hölderlin’s essay “On Religion” composed around 1797 (Hölderlin 1988, 182, 90ff.), and even if it might be difficult to state confidently that is authored by Hölderlin, it is certainly inspired by him and largely reflects his philosophical views. The fragment is a sort of philosophical manifesto. It begins with the recitation of Fichte’s starting point, “the conception of my self as an absolutely free being.” Emphasizing the onesidedness of subjectivity conceived in this way, the fragment illuminates the lack of balance between it and a scientific investigation of nature, so it would be possible to transcend the mechanical conception of the state and discover a moral world within ourselves. The idea that unifies all seemingly separated concepts, including those of truth and goodness, of the self and nature, is said to be the idea of beauty. Furthermore, “the highest act of reason” is

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viewed as aesthetic act. The author holds that it is “poetic art alone” that can satisfy the need of the human race, for poetry can move beyond the limits “that philosophy runs up against” (Hölderlin 1988, 162). During the next few years, Hölderlin would work out the details of his views concerning the primacy of poetry over philosophy, putting forward a new conception of life that could reflect human freedom and the unity between the world and ourselves. While Kant’s ethics rests on an irreconcilable dualism between duty and inclination, Romantic thinkers such as Schiller and Hölderlin attempted to overcome this dichotomy, often positing concepts such as “love” or “beauty” as the forces of unification. In Hölderlin’s view, man consistently strives to end the opposition by attempting to move beyond the boundaries imposed upon him by nature. Beauty, which is able to reveal the infinite unity, presents itself to man during his attempts to overcome the finite. He thus continually strives to move beyond these boundaries, “either errantly or with self-understanding” (Henrich 1997, 128). This movement is what Hölderlin termed man’s “eccentric path” through life, which unfolds as a progression from our most simple natural (animalistic) state, when our needs coincide with our natural aptitudes toward a complete development, where we achieve the unity with the world through the abilities that emerge as a result of our own activity. As conscious beings, we move beyond an unreflective unity with the world. Our relation to the world is not just the effort to place ourselves above the world. Our experience in the world, although never complete, is largely a unifying experience: we always aim to be at one with the world. Invoking our original—still unreflective—unity with the world that our manifestation of freedom disrupts, Hölderlin insists that we should strive toward a more encompassing unity, which would guarantee a proper recognition of freedom. Yet we can never accomplish this goal, because Being can never be fully grasped, at least not by the means of philosophy, which can approach this fundamental unity solely from outside. For Hölderlin, only poetry, “the beginning and the end” of philosophy (Hölderlin SW III, 83, 81) has the power to approach Being from within, giving at least a sense of sought unity. But even poetry cannot guarantee that the unity can be achieved. Moreover, we have to embrace the inescapable tension between the fundamental unity (Being) and the attempt to grasp it in thought. These themes would later serve as a starting point for Hegel’s thought. Hölderlin’s concept of Being has also echoed in Schelling’s early work. It was, however, not only Schelling and Hegel whose thought was stimulated by Hölderlin’s philosophical insights. As a thinker of great accomplishment, Hölderlin influenced many of his contemporaries, who both became inspired by his ideas and who began questioning their viability. Not just a poet but also a philosopher on his own terms, Hölderlin was one of the first to ponder the issues relevant to the self. He showed that the world is not something that stands in opposition to the self or something that simply envelops it. The realm of Being is the realm in which the self exists and comes to terms with itself and its own freedom. The humanistic content of Hölderlin’s philosophical search and the impact that his insights had on his philosophically astute contemporaries justify the philosophical significance of Hölderlin that exceeds the boundaries of the nineteenth century.

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Chronology of Friedrich Hölderlin’s Life and Works 1770

March 20: Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin is born in Lauffen (Swabia).

1772

July: Death of his father and birth of his sister Heinrike.

1774

October: Second marriage of the mother, Johanna Christianna, to the mayor of Nürtingen.

1776

Hölderlin starts attending school in Nürtingen; birth of his step-brother Karl.

1779

March: His stepfather dies.

1782

Receives private instruction from the vicar of Nürtingen.

1783

Hölderlin’s first encounter with young Schelling.

1784

Enrolls in the school at the abbey of Denkendorf near Nürtingen.

1786

Moves to the school at the abbey in Maulbronn.

1788

October: Enters the Protestant seminary at Tübingen (Tübinger Stift) and forms friendship and poetic circle with his fellow students, Ludwig Neuffen and Rudolf Magenau.

1790

September: Passes his Magister Artium exam.



October: The young Schelling enters the seminary, and a close friendship forms between Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel who enrolled in the seminary the same year.

1791

September: First publication of poetry for Musenalmanach, edited by Gotthold F. Stäudlin.

1792

May: Begins working on Hyperion; continues publishing poetry in different literary periodicals.

1793

October: Meets Schiller in Ludwigsburg who recommends him to Charlotte von Kalb as a tutor for her young son.

1794

Extensive study of Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophy, and continued work on Hyperion.



Travels to Jena where he is introduced to Goethe, Herder, Fichte, and Niethammer.

1795

Quits his tutoring with von Kalb family.



May: Staying in Jena where he attends Fichte’s and Niethammer’s lectures and meets Novalis.



June: Moves to Frankfurt.

1796

Starts tutoring with the banker Gontard family in Frankfurt.



April: Visited by Schelling in Frankfurt; possible conception of The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism.



May: Falls in love with Susette Gontard.

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1797

Hegel comes to Frankfurt and Hölderlin helps him find a position.



August: The first volume of Hyperion is published.

1798

Works on the first version of the tragedy, The Death of Empedocles.



September: Moves from Frankfurt to the nearby Homburg.

1799

Friedrich Schlegel positively reviews several of Hölderlin’s poems published in Schiller’s Musenalmanach (1796–1800).



Composes his philosophical essays, most of which have been written between 1799 and 1800.



Completes the second version of his The Death of Empedocles.



October: The second volume of Hyperion appears.



Several newly composed poems are published in Neuffer’s Taschenbuch.

1800

Lives for a few months in Nürtingen and later moves to Stuttgart where he lives until the end of the year.

1801

Takes up a position of a private tutor in Hauptwil (Switzerland).



December: Moves to Bordeaux (France) and begins tutoring for a wealthy family there.

1802

May: Returns from Bordeaux, already showing symptoms of his mental derangements.



June: Susette Gontard dies after a short illness.

1803

Another visit by Schelling.

1804

On the way to Homburg, stops in Würzburg where he sees Schelling for the last time.



His Sophocles translations are published by Friedrich Wilmans.



August: Begins working as a librarian in Homburg.

1806

Ordered to leave Homburg.

1807

After a seven months stay in the psychiatric ward of the Tübingen Hospital, he is moved to the carpenter room in Tübingen, where he lives until his death.

1843

June 7: Hölderlin dies at the age of seventy-three.

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Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843)

Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Hölderlin’s Writings A.1.  German Editions

Hölderlin, F. 1943–1985. Hölderlin: Sämtliche Werke, Grosser Stuttgarter Ausgabe, 15 vols., edited by Friedrich Beissner and Beck Adolf. Stittgart: Klett-Cotta. [Cited as Hölderlin SW following by the volume and page numbers.] A.2.  In English (selected translations)

Hölderlin, F. 1965. Hyperion: or, The Hermit in Greece, translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Ungar. Hölderlin, F. 1988. Essays and Letters on Theory, translated and edited by Thomas Pfau. Albany: State University of New York Press. B.  Selected Commentaries

Ameriks, K. (ed.). 2000. The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Constantine, D. 1988. Hölderlin. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donelan, J. H. 2002. “Hölderlin’s Poetic Self-consciousness,” Philosophy and Literature, 26: 125–42. Förster, E. 1995. “‘To Lend Wings to Physics Once Again’: Hölderlin and the ‘Oldest System Program of German Idealism,’” European Journal of Philosophy, 3 (2): 174–98. Heidegger, M. 1996. Hölderlin’s Hymn “the Ister.” Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. 2000. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, translated by K. Hoeller. New York: Humanity Books. Henrich, D. 1997. The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, edited by E. Förster. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Henrich, D. 2004. Der Grund im Bewußtsein: Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Larmore, Ch. 2000. “Hölderlin and Novalis,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, edited by K. Ameriks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 141–60. Waibel, V. 2000. Hölderlin und Fichte: 1794–1800. Paderborn: Schöningh. Zweig, S. 2012. The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche, translated by Cedar Paul and Eden Paul. London: Pushkin Press.

219

FROM “ON THE LAW OF FREEDOM” (1794) *

There is a natural state of the imagination which has in common the lawlessness with that anarchy of representations organized by the intellect, to be sure, yet which, with respect to the law by which it is to be organized, needs to be distinguished from intellect. By this natural state of imagination, by this lawlessness, I mean a moral one; by this law, [I mean] the law of freedom. There, the imagination is considered in and of itself, here in conjunction with the faculty of desire. In that anarchy of representations where the imagination is considered theoretically, a unity of the manifold, an ordering of perceptions was indeed possible yet accidental. In this natural state of fantasy where it [the imagination] is considered in relation to the faculty of desire, moral lawfulness is indeed possible yet accidental. There is an aspect of the empirical faculty of desire, the analogue of what is called nature, which is most prominent where necessity and freedom, the restricted and the unrestricted, the sensuous and the sacred seem to unite; a natural innocence or, one might say, a morality of the instinct; and the fantasy in tune with it is heavenly. However this natural state as such is also dependent on natural causes. It is [a] mere fortune to be thus attuned. If the law of freedom did not exist where the faculty of desire stood together with fantasy, there would never be a fixed state resembling the one that has just been hinted at; at least, it would not be up to us to hold it fast. Likewise, its opposite would occur without us being able to prevent it. The law of freedom, however, rules without any regard for the help of nature. Nature may or may not be conducive to its enactment, it [the law of freedom] rules. Indeed, it presupposes a resistance in nature, for otherwise it would not rule. The first time that the law of freedom discloses itself to us, it appears as punishing. The origin of all our virtue occurs in evil. Thus morality can never be entrusted to nature. For if morality did not cease to be morality, once its destiny’s foundations were located in nature and not in freedom, the legality that could be engendered by mere nature would be a very uncertain thing, changeable according to time and circumstance. As soon as the natural causes would be defined differently, this legality would [. . .]

From Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. by Thomas Pfau, State University of New York, 1988, 33–34. *

FROM “ON THE CONCEPT OF PUNISHMENT” (1795) *

It seems as though the Nemesis of the ancients had been depicted as a daughter of the night less because of her frightfulness than because of her mysterious origin. It is the necessary fate of all enemies of principles that they end up in a circle with all their claims (Proof). In the present case they would sound like this: “Punishment is the suffering of legitimate resistance and the consequence of evil acts. Evil acts, then, are those followed by punishment. And punishment follows where there are evil acts.” They could never offer a selfsufficient criterion for an evil act. For if they are consistent, the consequence has to determine the value of the act. To avoid this, they have to proceed from principle. If they do not, and if they determine the value of the act according to its results, then these results—considered in a moral sense—are not founded in anything superior, and the legitimacy of the resistance is nothing more than a word. Punishment is just punishment, and if a mechanism, chance or arbitrariness do something unpleasant to me, I know that I have acted in an evil manner. I have to ask nothing else; what happens, happens rightly so because it happens. Now, it seems indeed as if something like that was the case where the original concept of punishment occurs, in moral consciousness. There, namely, the moral law announces itself negatively and, as something infinite, cannot announce itself differently. However, as a fact the law is active will. For a law is not active, it is merely the imagined activity. This active will must be directed against another activity of the will. We shall not will something; such is its immediate voice in us. Therefore we have to will something that is opposed to the law of morality. What the law of morality | is we knew neither before it opposed our will, nor do we know it now that it opposes us; we only experience its resistance as a result of the fact that we willed something which is opposed to the law of morality. According to this result, we determine the value of our will; because we experienced resistance, we consider our will evil; as it seems, we cannot investigate the legitimacy of this resistance any further; and if this is the case, we recognize it [the resistance] only in that we suffer; it does not differ from any other suffering. And for exactly that reason for which I deduce an evil will from the resistance which I call the resistance of the law of morality, I also deduce an evil will from any other resistance. All suffering is punishment. There is, however, a difference between the cause of cognition and the real cause. It is nothing less than identical if I say on the one hand: I recognize the law in its resistance and, on the other hand: I acknowledge the law because of its resistance. Those are obliged to perform the above circle for whom the resistance of the law is the real cause. For them the law does not even occur if they do not experience its resistance. Their will is unlawful only because they

From Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. by Thomas Pfau, State University of New York, 1988, 165–66. *

The German Idealism Reader

feel this unlawfulness; if they do not suffer punishment, they are not evil either. Punishment is what follows evil. And evil is what is followed by punishment. Still, the distinction between a cause of cognition and a real cause seems to be of little help. If the resistance of the law against my will is punishment, and if I recognize the law only with the punishment, the question arises: can I recognize the law through the punishment? and then: can I be punished for transgressing a law of which I was not aware? To this it may be answered that, insofar as one considers oneself punished, one necessarily implies the transgression of the law within oneself; that in punishment, insofar as one considers it punishment, necessarily [. . .]

222

FROM JUDGMENT AND BEING (1795) *

Judgment. in the highest and strictest sense, is the original separation of object and subject which are most deeply united in intellectual intuition, that separation through which alone object and subject become possible, the arche-separation. In the concept of separation, there lies already the concept of the reciprocity of object and subject and the necessary presupposition of a whole of which object and subject form the parts. “I am I” is the most fitting example for this concept of arche-separation as theoretical separation, for in the practical arche-separation it [the “I”] opposes the non-I, not itself. Reality and potentiality are distinguished like mediate and immediate consciousness. If I think an object as potentiality, I only repeat the preceding consciousness by virtue of which it really is. There is no potentiality conceivable for us that was not reality. Hence the concept of potentiality does not apply to objects of reason, for they never occur in consciousness as what they are supposed to be, but only the concept of necessity [“. . . applies to such objects of reason.”]. The concept of potentiality applies to objects of the intellect, that of reality [applies] to perception and intuition [. . .] Being—expresses the connection between subject and object. Where subject and object are united altogether and not only in part, that is, united in such a manner that no separation can be performed without violating the essence of what is to be separated, there and nowhere else can be spoken of Being proper, as is the case with intellectual intuition. Yet this Being must not be confused with identity. If I say: I am I, the subject (“I”) and the object (“I”) are not united in such a way that no separation could be performed without violating the essence of what is to be separated; on the contrary, the I is only possible by means of this separation of the I from the I. How can I say: “I”! without self-consciousness? Yet how is self-consciousness possible? In opposing myself to myself, separating myself from myself, yet in recognizing myself as the same in the opposed regardless of this separation. Yet to what extent as the same? I can, I must ask in this manner; for in another respect it [the “I”] is opposed to itself. Hence identity is not a union of object and subject which simply occurred, hence identity is not = to absolute Being.

From Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. by Thomas Pfau, State University of New York, 1988, 37–38. *

FROM [LETTER NO. 94] TO HEGEL *

Jena, January 26, 1795 Your letter was a happy welcome to my second arrival at Jena. I had departed around the end of December with Major von Kalb’s wife, and with my disciple with whom I had spent here two months, for Weimar without suspecting so soon a return. The manifold miseries which I had to experience because of the specific circumstances that occurred with my subject [student], in the educational field, my fragile health, and the need to live at least some time for myself which was only increased by my stay here, caused me even before my departure for Jena to tell the Major’s wife about my wish to leave the position. I let myself be persuaded by her and Schiller to make one more attempt, yet could not bear it longer than 14 days, because it also cost me, among other things, almost my entire nightly rest, and I returned now in full peace to Jena into an independence which I basically enjoy for the first time in my life and which hopefully will not be unproductive. My productive activity is by now almost entirely directed onto the reforming of the materials from my novel. The fragment in Thalia is one of these raw masses. I think that I will finish with it until Easter; let me keep silence about it in the meantime. The “Genius der Kühnheit” which you perhaps still remember, I have revised [and] submitted, together with some other poems, to Thalia. Schiller shows much care for me and has encouraged me to submit contributions for his new journal, Die Horen, and also for his new muses’ almanac. With Goethe I have spoken, [my] brother! It is the most beautiful pleasure in our lives to find so much humanity together with so much greatness. He conversed with me so gently and politely that, quite truly, my heart rejoiced and still does when I think of it. Herder also was very polite, took my hand, yet displayed more the man of the world; he often spoke as much in allegorical manner as you know him too; presumably I will again visit them sometime; the Major von Kalb’s family will most likely stay on in Weimar (for which reason the boy also was no longer in need of me and my leave could be accelerated), and the friendship which I have especially with the Major’s wife, allows me frequent visits at this house. Fichte’s speculative writings—Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge—also his published lectures about the Destination of the Scholar will interest you very much. In the beginning, I suspected him very much of dogmatism; he appears, if I may speculate, to have stood very much at the crossroads, or still to stand there—he wants to move in theory beyond the fact of consciousness; many of his statements show that, and that is just as certain and even more strikingly transcendent than if the metaphysicians so far would move beyond the existence of the world—his absolute “I” (= Spinoza’s Substance) contains all reality; it is everything, and outside of it there is nothing; hence there is no object for this “I,” for otherwise

From Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. by Thomas Pfau, State University of New York, 1988, 124–26. *

From Letter To Hegel

not all reality would be within it; however, a consciousness without object cannot be thought, and if I myself am this object, then I am as such necessarily restricted, even if it were only within time, hence not absolute; therefore, within the absolute “I,” no consciousness is conceivable; as absolute “I” I have no consciousness, and insofar as I have no consciousness I am (for myself) nothing, hence is the absolute “I” (for me) nothing. Thus I took down my thoughts in Waltershausen when I read his first pages, immediately after the reading of Spinoza; Fichte confirmed [. . .]. His dealings with the reciprocal determination of the “I” and the “Non-I” (following his language) is certainly strange, also the idea of striving and more. I have to break off and ask you to consider all this as not written. That you are approaching the concept of religion is surely in various respects good and important. The concept of predestination you will probably treat entirely in parallel with Kant’s teleology; the way in which he combines the mechanism of nature (hence also of destiny) with its purposefulness seems to me to contain indeed the entire spirit of his system; it is certainly the same purposefulness by means of which he reconciles all antinomies. With respect to the antinomies, Fichte has a very strange notion about which I will rather write you another time. I have been dealing for a long time with the ideal of a public education, and because you concern yourself right now with a part of it, religion, I perhaps chose your image and your friendship as the conductor of the thoughts into the outer, sensuous world and write to you what I probably would have written later, at an adequate time, in letters that you shall judge and correct.

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THE OLDEST SYSTEMATIC PROGRAM OF GERMAN IDEALISM (1796) *,1

An ethics. Since all metaphysics will henceforth fall into morals—for which Kant, with both of his practical postulates has given only an example and exhausted nothing, so this ethics will contain nothing other than a complete system of all ideas, or what is the same, of all practical postulates. The first idea is naturally the conception of my self as an absolutely free being. Along with the free, self-conscious being an entire world emerges simultaneously—out of nothingness—the only true and conceivable creation out of nothingness—Here I will descend to the fields of physics; the question is this: How should a world be constituted for a moral being? I should like to give our physics, progressing laboriously with experiments, wings again. So whenever philosophy provides the ideas, experience the data, we can finally obtain physics on the whole, which I expect of later epochs. It does not seem as if present-day physics could satisfy a creative spirit such as ours is or should be. From nature I come to man’s works. The idea of the human race first—I want to show that there is no idea of the state because the state is something mechanical, just as little as there is an idea of a machine. Only that which is the object of freedom is called idea. We must therefore go beyond the state!—Because every state must treat free human beings like mechanical works; and it should not do that; therefore it should cease. You see for yourself that here all the ideas, that of eternal peace, etc., are merely subordinate ideas of a higher idea. At the same time I want to set forth the principles for a history of the human race here and expose the whole miserable human work of state, constitution, government, legislature—down to the skin. Finally the ideas of a moral world, deity, immortality—overthrow of everything ((superstition)) pseudo doctrines, persecution of the priesthood, which recently poses as reason, come through reason itself.— (The) absolute freedom of all spirits who carry the intellectual world within themselves, and may not seek either God or immortality outside of themselves. Finally the idea which unites all, the idea of beauty, the word taken in the higher platonic sense. I am convinced that the highest act of reason, which, in that it comprises all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are united like sisters only in beauty—The philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet. The people without aesthetic sense are our philosophers of the letter. The philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy. One cannot be clever in anything, one cannot even reason cleverly in history—without aesthetic sense. It should now be revealed here what those people who do not understand ideas are actually lacking—and candidly enough admit that everything is obscure to them as soon as one goes beyond charts and indices.

From Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler, Continuum Publishing Company, 2003 (copyright 1987), 161–63. *

The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism

Poetry thereby obtains a higher dignity; it becomes again in the end what it was in the beginning—teacher of (history) the human race because there is no longer any philosophy, any history; poetic art alone will outlive all the rest of the sciences and arts. At the same time we so often hear that the great multitude should have a sensual religion. Not only the great multitude, but even philosophy needs it. Monotheism of reason and the heart, polytheism of the imagination and art, that is what we need! First I will speak about an idea here, which as far as I know, has never occurred to anyone’s mind—we must have a new mythology; this mythology must, however, stand in the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Until we make ideas aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they hold no interest for the people, and conversely, before mythology is reasonable, the philosopher must be ashamed of it. Thus finally the enlightened and unenlightened must shake hands; mythology must become philosophical, and the people reasonable, and philosophy must become mythological in order to make philosophy sensual. Then external unity will reign among us. Never again the contemptuous glance, never the blind trembling of the people before its wise men and priests. Only then does equal development of all powers await us, of the individual as well as of all individuals. No power will be suppressed any longer, then general freedom and equality of spirits will reign—A higher spirit sent from heaven must establish this religion among us, it will be the last work of the human race.

Note 1. (Probably) coauthored with Hegel and Schelling. – Ed.

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228

CHAPTER 9 GEORG FRIEDRICH PHILIPP VON HARDENBERG (NOVALIS) (1772–1801)

INTRODUCTION Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, better known by his pseudonym Novalis, is, like his contemporaries Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel, one of the titans of Early German Romanticism. This might be somewhat surprising, considering his early death (at the age of twenty-eight) and the relatively limited number of writings he managed to publish during his life. Most of his works, which were retained exclusively as collections of notes and fragments, were edited and published only after his death by his friends Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel. Yet, his original insights into the various issues during his time, from his critiques of Kant and Fichte to his general support of the French Revolution and his call for a synthesis of philosophy, art, and politics won him fame and reputation not only as one of the greatest Romantic poets but also as an unordinarily gifted philosopher. His thought, which was full of artistic creativity and imagination, is no doubt important in understanding the development of both the nineteenth-century German philosophy and early Romanticism. A direct descendant of twelfth-century Saxon nobility, Friedrich Novalis was born on May 2, 1772, in Oberwiederstedt, the family estate in Thuringia. Friedrich was the second oldest of eleven children of Heinrich Ulrich Erasmus von Hardenberg and his wife, Auguste Bernhardine von Hardenberg (neé von Bölzig). Friedrich’s father, a man educated in both law and mining, served first as a manager and later as director of the Saxon salt mines. An adherent of Pietism who had a high respect for family traditions, he wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. Friedrich’s mother was good-natured and had a poetic talent that passed on to her children. As a young boy, Friedrich studied with private tutors and developed a genuine interest in literature and poetry. One of his early tutors was Karl Christian Erhard Schmid, who was later appointed as professor of Kantian philosophy at Jena. When Friedrich turned twelve, his mother became seriously ill, and the boy was sent to live for a year with his uncle, an aristocrat of the ancient régime and commander of the Teutonic Order, Gottlob Friedrich Wilhelm von Hardenberg, who resided at the opulent Lucklum castle. The uncle “Grand Cross,” as the family jokingly called him, had wide interests in culture, literature, and philosophy—especially French rationalism—welcoming at his mansion many representatives of Prussian’s civic and cultural elites, to some of whom Novalis was introduced as a child. Around this time, he began to write poetry, still largely mimicking the style of Friedrich Klopstock and Gottfried August Bürger. In May 1789, a meeting with Bürger, a poet and the author of the popular Gothic ballad “Lenore,” which young Friedrich perceived with a great admiration, further intensified his poetic creativity. Yet, his official poetic debut occurred only in 1791, when Christoph Martin Wieland’s Der neue teutsche Merkur published his poem “A Youth’s Lament.”

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After his father moved the family to Weiβenfels, near Leipzig, Novalis entered the Eisleben Luthergymnasium, where he, in line with the general educational curriculum of the time, undertook a rigorous study of rhetoric and ancient literature. In October 1790, he matriculated to the University of Jena as a student of law. The time at Jena was an important formative experience for Novalis. Here he met Friedrich Schiller and attended his lectures on aesthetics, many of which would come to have a great impact on the development of Novalis’s own aesthetic views. Even later, when Novalis moved to Leipzig, he would return to Jena to visit the ailing Schiller and assist him during the difficult periods of his illness. While at Jena, Novalis became immersed into the intense post-Kantian discussions where he came into contact with Karl Leonhard Reinhold, with whom he studied philosophy, and other representatives of his circle, such as his former private tutor, Karl Christian Erhard Schmid, who taught Kantian philosophy at Jena, and Immanuel Niethammer, whose influence is notable in Novalis’s philosophical writings. Despite leaving Jena in the summer of 1791, Novalis stayed well connected to the intellectual circles in Jena—both philosophical and literary—until the end of his life. In October 1791, following Schiller’s suggestion, he transferred to the University of Leipzig, where he met Friedrich Schlegel, with whom he would develop a close friendship and productive collaboration. Two years later, he transferred again, this time to the University of Wittenberg, from which he graduated with a law degree in 1794. The same year he moved to Tennstedt to assume a position in the country’s civil service. Despite the nonacademic nature of his job, he managed to stay engaged with the intellectual life of his time. In May 1795, Niethammer introduced Novalis to Hölderlin and Fichte. The latter had just recently succeeded Reinhold at Jena and proposed a new philosophical system (Wissenschaftslehre) based on the first principle of the self-positing I. A personal encounter with Fichte motivated Novalis to begin a serious study of Fichte’s philosophy that would eventually result in a composed set of manuscripts known today as Fichte Studies. In addition to Fichte, Novalis also undertook a study of Spinoza and of a German religious and social reformer, a major figure of the eighteenth-century Protestantism, Nicolaus Zinzendorf. Shortly after assuming a job in Tennsted, Novalis met and was soon secretly engaged to the then thirteen-year-old Sophie von Kűhn. Sadly, Sophie died two years later. Sophie’s death left Novalis heartbroken and overwhelmed with grief. Yet, ironically, this grief spurred one of the most productive periods of Novalis’s intellectual and professional life. A few months after Sophie’s death, he, following in his father’s footsteps, matriculated at the Mining Academy in Freiburg, and upon graduation he took up an inspector job at the salt mines in Weiβenfels. In 1800, he was appointed circuit director of the salt mines administration for Thuringia. All this time he continued his engagement with poetry and philosophy. In addition to his study of Kant and Frans Hermsterhuis, a new thorough reading of Fichte, and delving into the mystic philosopher Jacob Böhme, materialized in sketches and notes published posthumously. In 1797–1800 he also completed those few works that came out during his life. Novalis’s first serious publication was the famous Pollen (Blütenstaub), a collection of aesthetic-philosophical reflections that appeared in 1798 in the first issue of the journal Athenaeum edited by the Schlegel brothers. It was the first publication to come out under the pseudonym “Novalis” that the author later adopted for all his further writings. The other two works he managed to publish during his life were the controversial Faith and Love (1798) and the lyrical cycle Hymns to the Night (1800), which rocketed him to fame as a Romantic poet. All other works, 230

Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (Novalis) (1772–1801)

including his political-religious tract, Christianity and Europe (1798), his perhaps largest and “all-encompassing” theoretical work, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia (1798/99), as well as his unfinished fragmentary novels Heinrich von Ofterdingen and The Novices at Sais remained unpublished until after the author’s death. In 1798, Novalis’s poor health with which he had suffered since an early age had considerably deteriorated, and in September 1800, he fell seriously ill with tuberculosis. During the last years of his life, he continued to write, while also advancing his mining career. He even became engaged to Julie von Charpentier, whom he would have married had he lived long enough. He died on March 25, 1801, from complications from tuberculosis and was buried in Weiβenfels. In spite of his short life, Novalis was well connected with the dominant intellectual circles of his epoch, enjoying the friendship not only of Schiller but also of other key figures of German Romanticism, including Ludwig Tieck, the Schlegel brothers, and Schelling. He was also acquainted and engaged in conversations with the German Romantic writer Jean Paul (Richter), as well as Goethe, Herder, Hölderlin, and Fichte. All of these interactions greatly affected Novalis’s own work, which is rightly viewed not only as one of the greatest imaginative achievements of the Early German Romanticism but also as a significant contribution to German philosophy of his time. * * * Novalis’s engagement with the philosophy of German idealism is complex and multi­ dimensional. In addition to objecting to the idea of an all-encompassing philosophical system— an attitude he shared with other Romantic thinkers of his generation—and questioning the suitability of the system to capture the evolving nature of reality, he also helped shape a new concept of reason that later became central for Schelling and Hegel. Rejecting a narrow (postEnlightenment) understanding of rationality, Novalis argued for a notion of reason that does not disregard emotions and various kinds of sentiments and that includes the experience of art, literature, and poetry. Such an inclusive interpretation of reason is well correlated with his understanding of philosophy as an “open-ended” activity of thinking that should be developed in close interaction with art, literature, and the natural sciences, and should be aimed at one’s self-mastery and self-reassessment. This rather practical attitude toward philosophy, which also reflects Novalis’s indebtedness and contribution to the late-eighteenth-century and earlynineteenth-century German tradition of self-cultivation in and through culture (Bildung), was largely informed and motivated by his study of Kant and Fichte. Actually, Novalis developed his own philosophical position in critical response to Kant and Fichte’s versions of transcendental idealism and the challenges they created. Among Novalis’s many fragments and notes, there is a set of manuscripts, composed in the period from late 1795 to the fall of 1796, which have come to be known as Fichte Studies. The title of the collection, given not by the author himself but rather by the first editor of the manuscript, Hans-Joachim Mähl, might be somewhat misleading. For the notes do not deal exclusively with Fichte’s philosophy but also address an array of broader philosophical topics, such as the relationship between art and philosophy and the role of science in a philosophical reflection. There is also a substantial portion of the text where Novalis critically evaluates Kant and some central ideas of his philosophical project. In fact, in his critique of Fichte, Novalis deployed several Kantian concepts and categories, which is why some scholars speak 231

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of the thinker’s own position as “a Kantian moderation of Fichte’s idealism” (Gjesdal 2009, see also Frank 1997, 2004; Kneller 2003, x–xi). Not only does Novalis uphold the Kantian idea of the two sources of human experience making it central to his critique of Fichte’s foundationalism, he also endorses Kant’s attempt to establish a scientific model of philosophy by advocating for a development of philosophy as a “meta-discipline.” Despite his—still largely Fichtean—critique of Kant’s version of transcendental idealism, Novalis admires Kant for his lasting achievements in philosophy. Both recognition of Kant’s philosophical accomplishments and Kant’s influence on Novalis should not be surprising, given Novalis’s close interaction with perhaps the most important Kantian philosophers of his time—Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Carl Christian Erhard Schmidt, and Friedrich Niethammer. In this sense, Novalis’s Fichte Studies should be considered within the context of the intense post-Kantian discussions in Jena and can be viewed as an important contribution to these debates. And while it would be a mistake to interpret Fichte Studies merely as a critical annotation to Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, the collection is nonetheless the most coherent account of the author’s critical reading of Fichte. Novalis’s main concern is Fichte’s subjective idealism that arbitrarily “packed everything into the I” (Novalis 2003, xviii, 7 / FS #5). Like Hölderlin, Novalis questions the suitability of the I to serve as the appropriate basis for the first principle of philosophy (Larmore 200, 153). He criticizes Fichte for appealing to the idea of “intellectual intuition” to explain the I’s immediate, still unreflected, self-awareness, which the latter associates with the nature of the I itself as a conscious subject. He argues that intellectual intuition is not just a spontaneity, an ungrounded burst of activity, as Fichte imagines. Instead, this is an act of knowledge, which does not occur apart from reflection, and thus the I’s relation to itself can be understood only in terms of self-reflection. Novalis maintains that in order for the I to reflect upon itself, the I needs to represent itself in some form. He believes that self-reflection requires some kind of external representation: there must be established a subject-object relationship between the reflecting and the reflected pole of the I. This representation, however, cannot be derived from the immediate self-identity. If the I’s self-identity precedes any reflection, then it could be based only in a feeling as a passive registration of the I that is already present (given) and thus grounded in something else than the I itself (Novalis 2003, 12 / FS #11). The impossibility to explain an immediate acquaintance that the Fichtean I has with itself leads Novalis to conclude that the I or, for this reason, any completely autonomous subjectivity cannot serve as the first principle of philosophy. Furthermore, influenced by an anti-foundationalist argument just recently developed by Jacobi (Larmore 2000, 153), Novalis rejects the very possibility of a single self-evident principle of philosophy. Following Kant, he argues that the subject has a dual nature—rational and emotional—and that thought and feeling constitute two irreducible sources of experience. The duality of the source of experience already makes it impossible for philosophy to be rooted in one single principle. Even more problematic is to believe that there can be a self-evident principle that is based on a prereflective self-representation. Not only is the latter possible just by way of feeling, but what is represented must be given prior to self-representation. Hence, Novalis insists that philosophy must begin with a unifying act, feeling, which is a true nature of philosophy. He writes, Philosophy is originally a feeling. The philosophical sciences conceptualize the intuitions of this feeling. . . . Thus philosophy always needs something given. . . . The borders of feeling are the borders of philosophy. (Novalis 2003, 13 / FS #15) 232

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Yet, despite this vigorous criticism and ultimate rejection of Fichte’s problematic construction, Novalis praises Fichte for his approach to philosophy. For him Fichte’s thinking is not limited to the various ideas and principles formulated in Wissenschaftslehre. The most important Fichtean contribution he sees in establishing a certain way of doing philosophy, a specific mode of philosophizing that promotes one’s self-activity, self-thinking, and the intellectual and moral responsibility of one’s agency in the world. In his later works, by referring to Fichte’s philosophy, Novalis often uses a neologism that he and his friend Friedrich Schlegel coined in 1797—“Fichtecize” or “Fichtecizing.” The friends’ playful usage of the term suggests more than simply “an earnest philosophizing in the manner of the master.” It also has a sort of an ironic connotation hinting not at imitating but rather at some distancing (O’Brien 1995, 82). Novalis himself uses the term in both senses, which probably mirrors his complex relation to Fichte that involves both admiration and critical attitude to the extent of a conscious disassociation with the one genuinely viewed by many as a true Kant’s heir. However, Novalis continues to associate his own aspirations with Fichte. His call for “Fichtesizing artistically” nicely captures Novalis’s own ambitions. The idea of a unique synthesis of art and philosophy and the possibility of artistic production that would have as its point of departure a philosophical inquiry becomes central to his own calling in letter and philosophy. In the Logological Fragments, written between 1798 and 1800 as part of Novalis’s philosophical notebooks, he discusses his largely romanticized view of philosophy. He calls his analysis “logological,” which means the process of self-conscious reflection on the practice of philosophy (the true logic of the philosophical discourse reflecting upon itself). For him philosophy is not a sort of metaphysical exercise seeking to explain the world or discover “the intrinsic nature of things.” Instead, he proposes a “self-referential model” for philosophy, which aims at explaining itself (Stolljar 1997, 5). This explanation is possible only due to the ability of the intelligence to act on itself. Thus, philosophy begins with transcending the self (Novalis 1997, 64 / LF #79) and is more a subjective act of self-reflection, but one that takes place through the encounter with the other. Novalis declares that doing philosophy is a conversation with oneself . . . an actual revelation of the self. . . . The decision to do philosophy is a challenge to the real self to reflect, to awaken and to be spirit. (Novalis 1997, 53 / LF #21) Thus philosophy is very much about development of the self and the self ’s capacity that would allow one to take responsibility for oneself and grasp reality in such a way that it would provide an organic unity of both the subject and the world. Novalis draws attention to philosophical knowledge as something that guides our practice and orientation in the world. Noticing, in Miscellaneous Observations, that in search of the Unconditioned (the Absolute) we “only ever find things” (Novalis 1997, 23 / MO #1), he emphasizes the need not only to study these things but also to come up with important insights about the true nature of the world. And while the former is mainly the task of empirical science, the later should be the focus of philosophy. By referring to the Unconditioned, Novalis means the ultimate reality, which serves as an absolute ground for, and on which depend, the various things we distinguish in experience. Although knowledge of this “absolute ground” (the Absolute) lies forever out of our reach, we are impelled to seek it all the time. As a result, we have to recognize that our goal (knowledge of the Absolute) always eludes us: all we ever 233

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come to understand are conditioned things. This “inability to attain and know an absolute” is something that philosophy in its traditional form can only state as the fact, but its capacity ends here. Novalis distinguishes between traditional understanding of philosophy and his own concept of the same, which he calls “philosophizing.” Energetically supporting the latter, he associates this new Romantic philosophy with poetry, by which he refers to imaginative art in general (Larmore 1996, 155). Like Hölderlin (and some other German Romantics), Novalis finds in poetry a deeper expressive capacity than philosophy can muster. For Novalis, the advantage of poetry is its ability to show the elusiveness of the Absolute. He insists that while we will never completely grasp it intellectually, poetry will allow us to apprehend it by artistic means. The poet’s task is to bring his own thinking into proximity with its ultimate ground, and he can do it by resorting to a special poetic technique, notably language, which is able to express more than it explicitly states. A power of “productive imagination” is what makes poetry so unique and what enables it to move beyond the determinate ideas into the ultimate and undetermined. “Poetry dissolves the being of others in its own,” and the poet is a type of genius that is capable of “the elevation of the human being above himself” (Novalis 1997, 56 / LF #40, 36). By emphasizing the productive role of poetry in philosophizing, Novalis refers to the ability of poetry to give people necessary access to the natural world, both in sensible and conceptual aspects. Only then individuals, through their activity, could develop their own understanding of this world. Leading to a great artistic achievement, this would aid spiritual progress, as “to become a human being is an art” (Novalis 1997, 65 / LF #87). Novalis poeticizes philosophy. The kind of poetic philosophy (in his own terminology, “philosophizing”), to which he aspires, and that is both the end and the means of romanticizing the world, is “an all-embracing, creative activity” (Stoljar 1997, 14). He develops a conception of the new art of philosophy as a kind of world-making. The world of nature, he insists, can be consciously transformed by the means of imagination. However eccentric it might sound, it provides a clue about the kind of philosophy that Novalis advocates. Known as “magic idealism”—it is an extension of artistically interpreted philosophical (transcendental) idealism, combined with the idea of romanticizing the world. This synthetic model of philosophizing that unites seemingly opposites is most clearly depicted in Novalis’s unfinished collection of notes intended as “material for an encyclopedia” that was published posthumously, in 1929, under the title Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia (or Das allgemeine Brouillon) (Novalis 2007a). This largely incomplete set of short fragments on the nature of systematic knowledge is a sort of philosophical experiment aimed at demonstrating the efficacy of the unified methodology for the arts, sciences, and philosophy. Novalis’s “magical” or romanticizing move allows one to view the natural world through the Romantic prism when nature itself is interpreted as a work of art. Artists can reshape nature through the deployment of poetic imagination and various moral and aesthetic ideals. The artistic agency is not limited to any specific profession or field. It is rather a responsibility of intellectuals of all sorts. In this sense, when philosophers and scientists become artists or when artists turn into philosophers, they become “magical idealists” (Novalis 1997, 51 / NRE #338). Acting from instinct, imagination and emotions, they can transform the world into a welcoming place that is not threatening or influenced by any possible tension and where every human being feels at home (Novalis 1997, 151 / NRE #820). In some sense, Novalis’s magical idealism is a call for a philosophy of the future that is also art. It is magical, because it is able to transcend what is conditional and penetrate deep 234

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into the world. It is ideal since it is a property of pure spirit to which we all aspire. Novalis is convinced that the universal synthesis he envisions can be achieved. This exhilarating optimism is characteristic of all Novalis’s writings, both poetic and philosophical. His openended thought points forward to the future, providing an array of important intuitions and stunning insights that had a significant impact not only on his contemporaries but also on the following generations of thinkers, in both letter and philosophy. Novalis’s philosophical position was extensively criticized by Hegel, who charged Romanticism in general, and Novalis in particular with misunderstanding of Fichte’s work and overplaying the significance of isolated subjectivity leading to the Romantics’ naive and mythical standpoint in philosophy. However, when one considers philosophical Romanticism proper, it becomes clear that Hegel has much more in common with Romantics than he is willing to admit. Furthermore, it was Hölderlin and Novalis who by their productive critique of Fichte’s subjective first principle influenced Schelling’s and Hegel’s turn toward absolute idealism. As a gifted philosophical mind, Novalis made valuable contributions to post-Kantian thought, and he deserves to be studied in his own right.

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Chronology of Friedrich Novalis’s Life and Work 1772

May 2: Born in Oberwiederstedt, in Thuringia.

1781

Tutored privately by Karl Christian Erhard Schmid, who later become professor of philosophy at Jena.

1783

Sent to Lucklum to live for a year with his uncle, Gottlob Friedrich Wilhelm von Hardenberg.



Meets with Gottfried August Bürger, poet and author of “Lenore.”



First serious attempts at poetry.

1784

Family moves to the town of Weiβenfels, near Leipzig. Father appointed director of the Saxon salt mines.

1790

Sent to the Luthergymnasium in Eisleben.



October: Matriculates at the University of Jena.



Acquaintance with Friedrich Schiller, Karl Reinhold, and Sophie Wieland Reinhold, as well as Johann Benjamin Erhard, among others.

1791

October: Leaves the University of Jena to return to Weiβenfels.



November: Matriculates at the University of Leipzig.



December: Visits the ailing Schiller in Jena.

1792

Meets Friedrich Schlegel in Leipzig.

1793

Enrolls at the University of Wittenberg to study law.

1794

Receives law degree from Wittenberg.



Take position as assistant to the country court bailiff (a legal officer) in Tennstedt.



Meets Sophie von Kühn (b. March 17, 1782) at Grüningen.

1795

March: Secretly engaged to Sophie.



May: Meets Fichte and Hölderlin in the home of Niethammer in Jena.



Fall: Begins study of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.



November: Sophie falls seriously ill.



December: Appointment to Saxon salt mines directorate as assistant.

1796

Chemistry course with Johann Wiegleb in Langensalz.



Summer/Fall: Sophie undergoes a series of surgeries in Jena, and after further deterioration (in December), returns to her home in Grüningen.



Several visits with Friedrich Schlegel.



Study of Spinoza and Zinzendorf.

1797

March: The last visit of Sophie, who dies nine days later.



April: Death of his brother, Erasmus, to whom he was closest.

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Writes the famous diary on “Mourning” and has mystical vision while visiting Sophie’s grave.



Meeting with August and Caroline Schlegel.



Matriculation at the Mining Academy in Freiberg.



Study of Kant, Hemsterhuis, and Fichte again.



Study in Freiberg under the geologist Abraham Werner: takes classes in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and geology.

1798

Meets Julie von Charpentier, with whom he engages later that year.



Meets Goethe in Weimar; continues contact with Schiller.



Publication of Pollen (Blütenstaub) in Athenaeum, under the pen-name “Novalis.” Publishes Faith and Love and Flowers.



His health deteriorates.



Meets author Jean Paul (Ritter).

1799

Returns to Weiβenfels and inspects Saxon salt mines.



Meets and befriends Ludwig Tieck in Jena and together they visit Herder.



Studies Schleiermacher’s work and reads mystic philosopher Jacob Boehme.



November 11–14: Famous meeting of the “Jena Circle” Romantics at the home of August and Caroline Schlegel, with Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, and Jean Paul in attendance.



Appointed associate director of Saxon salt mines.

Writes Christendom or Europa and Spiritual Songs (Song Book), and begins Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Hymns of the Night. 1800 Finishes Hymns and the first part of Ofterdingen. Publishes Hymns of the Night in Athenaeum.

Continues his study of Boehme.



Visited by Tieck in Weiβenfels.



September: Becomes seriously ill with tuberculosis.



Appointed circuit director of the salt mines administration for Thuringia.

1801

March 23: Visited by Friedrich Schlegel, who remains by Novalis’s side until his death.



March 25: Dies in Weiβenfels.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Novalis’s Writings A.1.  German Academic Edition

[Novalis, F.]. 1960–2006. Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs (Historischekritische Ausgabe), edited by Paul Kluckhohn, Richard Samuel, Gerhard Schulz, and Hans-Joachim Mähl. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag. A.2.  In English (selected editions)

[Novalis, F.] 1997. Novalis. Philosophical Writings, edited and translated by Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press. [The edition introduces ten writings including:] Miscellaneous Observations [Abbreviated above as MO.] Logological Fragments [Abbreviated above as LF.] [Novalis, F.] 2003. Novalis: Fichte Studies, edited and translated by Jane Kneller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Abbreviated above as FS.] Novalis, F. 2007a. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, edited and translated by David W. Wood. Albany: State University of New York Press. [Abbreviated above as NRE.] Novalis, F. 2007b. The Birth of Novalis: Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Journal of 1797, with Selected Letters and Documents, edited and translated by Bruce Donehower. Albany: State University of New York Press. B.  Selected Commentaries

Beiser, F. C. 1992. Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Beiser, F. C. 2003. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Frank, M. 1997. “Unendliche Annäherung.” Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik. Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp Verlag. Frank, M. 2004. The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, translated by E. Millán-Zaibert. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gjesdal, K. 2009. “Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg [Novalis],” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, May 21, 2009. Web. Kleingeld, P. 2008. “Romantic Cosmopolitanism: Novalis’s ‘Christianity or Europe’,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46 (2): 269–84. Kneller, J. 2003. “Introduction,” in Novalis: Fichte Studies, edited and translated by J. Kneller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ix–xxxiv. Kompridis, N. (ed.). 2006. Philosophical Romanticism. London: Routledge. Larmore, Ch. 1996. The Romantic Legacy. New York: Columbia University Press. Larmore, Ch. 2000. “Hölderlin and Novalis,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, edited by K. Ameriks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 141–60. Lukács, G. 1974. “On the Romantic Philosophy of Life: Novalis,” in Soul and Form, translated by A. Bostock. London: Merlin Press.

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Molnár, G. von. 1970. Novalis’ “Fichte Studies”: The Foundation of his Aesthetics. The Hague: Mouton. Nassar, D. 2014a. The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early Romantic Philosophy 1795–1804. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nassar, D. 2014b. The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Brien, W. A. 1995. Novalis: Signs of Revolution. Durham: Duke University Press. Pfefferkorn, K. 1988. Novalis: A Romantic’s Theory of Language and Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stolljar, M. M. 1997. “Introduction,” in Novalis. Philosophical Writings, edited and translated by Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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FROM FICHTE STUDIES (1795–96) *

Remarks on the Wissenschaftslehre […] 554. All explanation must begin with a fact. But from which fact must all explanation proceed? It must be a fact that lies at the basis of all other facts and needs no further explanation, but rather itself first makes possible all explanation. The explanation thus proceeds from the fact of all facts, or from the single original fact. It must be inexplicable, that is, its complete concept must be given with it. […] It gives the unity of all knowledge–Everything must be deduced from it. It gives the certainty of all certainty–absolute certainty. The point is simply that everything leads back to it. Its relationships to the unending body of the known are the unity for which our theoretical reason strives. 555. [The] Law of the concept and [the] law of the object must be identical–only separable in reflection–Concept and intuition are identical when referred to the I, separate when one reflects upon both without referring them to the I. If I reflect specifically upon the I, then there is no Not-I–if I reflect without reflecting specifically upon the I, then there is a Not-I. Free reflection is about the Not-I–determinate reflection is about the I. In both cases the I is free and unfree, only in different ways. It is free in that it reflects upon itself as unfree, as a Not-I. It is free in that it reflects upon itself as free, as an I. In the former it is free as intelligence, in the latter as pure I. In the former it separates its reflecting activity from its being–it goes outside itself–in the latter it unites both [reflecting activity and its being]–it goes into itself. […] All knowledge should produce morality–the moral drive, the drive toward freedom occasion knowledge. To be free is the tendency of the I–the capacity to be free is the productive imagination.–Harmony is the condition of its activity–of [its] oscillating, between opposites. Being one with yourself is thus the fundamental condition of the highest end–to Be, or to be free. All being, being in general, is nothing but being free–oscillating between extremes that necessarily are to be united and necessarily are to be separated. […] 556. Morality must be the core of our existence, if it is to be for us what it wants to be. Its end, its origin, must be the ideal of being. An unending realization of being would be the vocation of the I. Its striving would be toward ever more being. […] The highest philosophy is ethics. Therefore all philosophy begins with ‘I am.’ The highest proposition of knowledge must be an expression of the fact that grounds all knowledge as means, that refers to the end of the I that is to be achieved or aimed at through knowledge/ in the broadest sense as existence in the world of sense, namely, total freedom. […] Being, Being I, being free and oscillating arc synonyms–one expression refers to the others–it is simply a matter of a single fact–It is only the predicates of the single concept I–Concept and fact are, however, identical here. I is inconceivable, because it is already its concept in that it is–its only possible concept is given with its being. *

From Novalis, Fichte Studies, ed. by Jane Kneller, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 164–69.

From Fichte Studies

By “fact” one usually thinks of action, something that is proceeding or has happened in time. But the fact that is under discussion here must be thought of as completely spiritual, not singular, not temporal–almost like a moment that encompasses the eternal universe, conceives it in itself–in which we live, move and have our being–an unending fact that transpires completely in every moment–[an] identical eternally acting genius – being I. […] 559. All reality that we can speak of must be a thinkable one. Consequently the principle of all reality, the guaranty of it, the ground of thinking, is – Sum [i.e., I am]. Philosophy is limited strictly to the determinate modification–of consciousness. [Philosophy] is modest – it remains within its borders. It grasps what it contains, or what falls under it. Freedom of reflection leads to a freedom of the acting I. 560. Philosophizing is an activity of intelligence. At what level does philosophy stand? 561. The human being is as much Not-I as I. 562. I is only thinkable through a not-I. An I is of course only an I insofar as it is a not-I–for the rest, it could be what it wants–only it would not be an I. […] 564. When one speaks philosophically of that which is to come, for example, of the annihilation of the not-I, then one guards against the illusion that there would come a point in time where this would take place – In the first place it is in and of itself a contradiction that something could take place in time that supersedes all time, like all transplanting of the non-sensible, thinkable, and subjective into the sensible world of appearances. […] Time can never cease – we cannot think away time – because time is indeed the condition of the thinking being – time ceases only with the cessation of thought. Thought outside time is an absurdity. 565. For the living being the world becomes more and more unending – therefore there can never come an end to the connecting of the manifold, a state of inactivity for the thinking I. The human being should exist eternally and be a beautifully ordered individual and endure – this is the tendency of human nature. * * * 566. Philosophizing must be a unique kind of thinking. What do I do when I philosophize? I reflect upon a ground. The ground of philosophizing is thus a striving after the thought of a ground. Ground is not, however, a cause in the literal sense – but rather a constitution – connection with the whole. All philosophizing must therefore end in an absolute ground. […] Unending free activity in us arises through the free renunciation of the absolute – the only possible absolute that can be given us and that we only find through our inability to attain and know an absolute. This absolute that is given to us can only be known negatively, insofar as we act and find that what we seek cannot be attained through action. This could be called an absolute postulate. All searching for a single principle would be like the attempt to square the circle. Perpetual motion. Philosophers’ stone. […] Abstraction from the absolute ground and validation of the actual absolute ground of freedom through connection (enlargement) of that which is to be explained to a whole. The more manifold the members of the whole, the more vivid will be the sensation of absolute freedom – the more connected, the more whole it is, the more effective, intuitable, clarified, is the absolute ground 241

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of all grounding, i.e., freedom, in it. […] The I becomes effective and determinate in itself only in its opposite. Insofar as I ask “What is that?” I demand the externalizing of the thing in itself – I want to know – what is it? Of course I already know that it is this or that thing, but what sort of a thing? This is what I want to know – and here I step into the sphere of the subjective. […] 567. […] I am for myself the ground of all thought, the absolute ground, whose I is only known to me through actions – the ground of all grounds for me, the principle of my philosophy is my I. I can make this I the ground of all my philosophizing only in a negative way – by trying to cognize / to act as much as possible and to connect these as exactly as possible; The latter through reflection/. The more unmediated and directly I can derive something from the I, the better cognized and grounded it is for me. […] (Fichtean philosophy is a call to self-activity – I cannot thoroughly explain something to someone unless I refer him to himself, unless I bid him to perform the same action that clarified it for me. I can teach someone to philosophize when I teach him to do it as I do it – when he does what I do, he is what I am, is there, where I am.) All art begins with invention or imitation. Now if the actions that I take are natural ones, all other actions are unnatural and do not attain the goal that they have and must have in mind – human beings contradict themselves. They do not contradict themselves when they act in accordance with their nature. For this reason evil people, for example, remain in eternal contradiction with themselves. Different material first brings about differentiation with respect to that for which a ground is sought. Thus the ancients also called the doctrine of nature, etc. philosophy – we have limited it to the thinking of a ground of representations and sensations, in short to the alterations of the subject.

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FROM LOGOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS I (1797–98) *

[…] 7. When one begins to reflect on philosophy—then philosophy seems to us to be everything, like God, and love. It is a mystical, highly potent, penetrating idea—which ceaselessly drives us inward in all directions. The decision to do philosophy—to seek philosophy is the act of selfliberation—the thrust toward ourselves. 8. As well as the philosophy of philosophy there are other philosophies, it is true—which one might call individual philosophies. The method is genuinely philosophical. They start from the absolute—but not from a pure absolute. Hence they are really a mixture of philosophy and nonphilosophy, and the more dense the mixture the more interesting they are. They are entirely individual—they forcefully posit a synthesis as a thesis. The representation of the philosophy of philosophy will always have something of an individual philosophy in it. Equally the poet represents only individual philosophy, and moreover anyone, no matter how vigorously he may acknowledge the philosophy of philosophy, will in practical terms be only more or less an individual philosopher, and despite all his striving he will never be entirely able to step out of the magic circle of his individual philosophy. 9. Should the highest principle include the highest paradox in its function? To be a proposition that would allow absolutely no peace—which would always attract and repel— always become impenetrable again, no matter how often one had already understood it? Which would ceaselessly arouse our activity—without ever tiring it or becoming familiar? According to old mystical legends God is something like that for the spirits. 10. Up to now our thinking was either purely mechanical—discursive—atomistic—or purely intuitive—dynamic. Perhaps now the time for union has come? 11. It might well be possible that Fichte is the inventor of an entirely new way of thinking— for which language has as yet no name. The inventor is perhaps not the most perfect and ingenious artist on his instrument—although I am not saying that this is the case. But it is probable that people exist and will exist—who are far better able to Fichtecize than Fichte himself. Wonderful works of art could come into being in this way—as soon as we have learnt to Fichtecize artistically. 12. In the truest sense doing philosophy is—a caress. It bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom. 13. The crude, discursive thinker is the scholastic. The true scholastic is given to mystical subtleties. He builds his universe out of logical atoms. He destroys all living nature in order to put a mental trick in its place—his goal is an infinite automaton. His opposite is the

From Novalis: Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. by Margaret Mahony Stoljar, State University of New York Press, 1997, 48–65. *

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crude, intuitive poet. He is given to mystical macrology. He hates rules and fixed form. Wild, violent life reigns in nature—everything is vivified. There is no law—but only the arbitrary and the miraculous everywhere. He is purely dynamic. Thus the philosophical spirit stirs at first in completely separate masses. At the second stage of civilization these masses begin to touch each other—in sufficiently diverse ways. Just as it is only the union of infinite extremes that gives rise at all to the finite, the limited, so here too countless eclectics now emerge. The age of misunderstandings begins. At this stage the most limited thinker is the most important, he is the purest philosopher of the second stage. This class is entirely confined to the real, the present world, in the strictest sense. The philosophers of the first class look down with disdain on this second one. They say, all those people amount to very little—and consequently nothing at all. The first class regards the views of the second as stemming from weakness, as inconsequence. Conversely, the second class agrees in pitying the first—whom they hold guilty of the most absurd mystification to the point of delusion. If from one point of view the scholastics and the alchemists seem to be completely at variance with one another, but the eclectics on the contrary to be at one, from the reverse angle everything is exactly the other way round. Essentially the former are indirectly of one mind—namely on the absolute independence and tendency toward the infinite of meditation. Both start from the absolute—on the other hand the narrow-minded ones are essentially at odds with each other and can only agree in derivative matters. The former are infinite, but uniform—the latter limited—but diverse. The former have genius— the latter talent—the former ideas—the latter skills. The former are heads, without hands, the latter hands, without heads. The ascent to the third stage is achieved by the artist, who is at once tool and genius. He finds that this original division of absolute philosophical activities is a deeper division of his own being—whose survival rests on the possibility of its mediation—its combination. He finds that, no matter how heterogeneous these activities are, there is nonetheless a capacity within himself to move from one to the other, to change his polarity at will. Thus he discovers in them the necessary elements of his spirit—he perceives that both must be united in a common principle. He concludes from this that eclecticism is nothing but the result of the incomplete, deficient use of this capacity. It appears to him more than probable that the reason for this incompleteness lies in the weakness of the productive imagination—which at the moment of transition from one element to the other could not remain suspended in contemplation of itself. The complete representation of true spiritual life, raised to consciousness through this action, is philosophy kat exochen. Here that living reflection comes into being, which with careful tending afterwards extends of itself into an infinitely formed spiritual universe—the kernel or germ of an all-encompassing organism. It is the beginning of a true self-penetration of the spirit which never ends. […] 20. There are certain poetic works within us that have quite a different character from the others, for they are accompanied by a sense of necessity, and yet there exists simply no other external reason for them. A person believes he is involved in a conversation, and some kind of unknown, spiritual being in a miraculous way causes him to think the most obvious thoughts. This being must be a higher being, because it communicates with him in a way that is not possible for any being which is bound to appearances. It must be a like being, because it treats him like a spiritual being and only requires the rarest independent activity of him. This higher 244

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kind of self has the same relation to the human being as the human being has to nature or the wise man to the child. The human being yearns to be the equal of this being in the same way as he seeks to make himself the equal of the nonself. This fact cannot be demonstrated. Everyone must experience it for himself. It is a fact of a higher kind that will be encountered only by the higher man. But people should strive to bring it about in themselves. The kind of knowledge that arises in this way is the higher theory of knowledge. Here the proposition: self determines nonself—is the principle of the theoretical part, and the proposition: self is determined—is the principle of the practical part. The practical part comprises the self-education of the self toward becoming capable of that communication [with a higher being]—the theoretical part comprises the characteristics of genuine communication. Rites are part of education. In Fichte the theoretical part comprises the characteristics of a true idea—the practical part comprises the education and formation of the nonself toward becoming capable of experiencing a true influence, a true communion with the self—thereby also the parallel selfformation of the self. Morality thus belongs in both worlds; here, as an end—there as a means—and it is the bond that binds them both together. 21. Doing philosophy is a conversation with oneself of the above kind—an actual revelation of the self—arousal of the real self through the ideal self. Doing philosophy is the foundation of all other revelations. The decision to do philosophy is a challenge to the real self to reflect, to awaken and to be spirit. Without philosophy there is no true morality, and without morality no philosophy. 22. The possibility of all philosophy rests on the fact—that the intelligence endows itself with self-regulated movement—that is, its own form of activity—through acting on itself. […] 30. Writing poetry is creating. Each work of literature must be a living individual. What an inexhaustible amount of materials for new individual combinations is lying about! Anyone who has once guessed this secret–needs nothing more than to decide to renounce endless variety and the mere enjoyment of it and to start somewhere—but this decision is at the expense of the free feeling of an infinite world—and demands restriction to a single appearance of it. Ought we perhaps to attribute our earthly existence to a similar decision? 31. Poetry is the basis of society as virtue is the basis of the state. Religion is a mixture of poetry and virtue—can you guess, then—what it is the basis of? 32. The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal. 33. As the mass is connected to the beautiful outline, so is the passionate with description in the work of art. 34. The artist is completely transcendental. 35. The actor vivifies in himself the principle of a particular individuality by choice. There is a symptomatic and a genetic form of imitation. Only the last is alive. It presupposes the closest union of imagination and understanding. This capacity to truly awaken an individuality not one’s own within oneself—not merely to deceive through superficial imitation—is still entirely unknown—and rests on a most marvelous power of penetration and spiritual acting. The artist turns himself into everything he sees and wants to be. 245

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36. Poetry is the great art of the construction of transcendental health. The poet is thus the transcendental physician. Poetry holds sway with pain and titillation—with pleasure and discomfort—error and truth—health and illness. It mixes everything together for the sake of its great purpose of all purposes—the elevation of the human being above himself. 37. As earlier philosophies are to logology, so earlier forms of poetry are to the poetry that is to come. Earlier forms of poetry were mostly effective dynamically, the transcendental poetry of the future could be called organic. When it is invented it will be seen that all true poets up to now made poetry organically without knowing it—but that this lack of consciousness of what they were doing—had a substantial influence on the whole of their work—so that for the most part they were only poetic in details—but the whole was usually unpoetic. Logology will necessarily bring about this revolution. […] 40. Poetry dissolves the being of others in its own. 41. Transcendental poetry is a mixture of philosophy and poetry. It really embraces all transcendental functions, indeed it comprises the transcendental altogether. The transcendental poet is the transcendental person altogether. 42. From the study of transcendental poetry a tropology can be anticipated—which comprehends the laws of the symbolic construction of the transcendental world. 43. Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet. 44. The true beginning is nature poetry. The end is the second beginning—and is art poetry. […] 71. We shall understand the world when we understand ourselves, because we and it are integral halves. We are God’s children, divine seeds. One day we shall be what our Father is. 72. On nonsensory or immediate knowledge. All meaning is representative—symbolic—a medium. All sense perception is at secondhand. The more particular, the more abstract, one could say, the idea, the description, or the imitation, the less it resembles the object or the stimulus, the more separate and independent is the meaning. If the meaning did not need an external cause at all it would cease to be meaning and would be a congruous being. As such its forms can again be more or less similar and corresponding to the forms of other beings. Were its forms and their sequence to perfectly resemble the sequence of forms of another being— then there would be the purest harmony between them. Meaning is a tool—a means. Absolute meaning would be means and end at the same time. Thus everything is itself the means whereby we can come to know it—to experience it or have an effect on it. Thus in order to feel and come to know a thing completely I would have to make it my meaning and object at once—I would have to vivify it—make it into absolute meaning, according to the earlier definition. If however I were neither able nor willing to do this completely, then I would have to make a part of it—specifically an individual part quite peculiar to the thing—an element of the meaning. What would now ensue? I would acquire mediated and immediate knowledge and experience of the thing at the same time—it would be representative and not representative, perfect and imperfect—my own and not my own, in short it would be both antithetical and synthetic knowledge and experience of it. The element or meaning would be at once an 246

From Logological Fragments I

element and a nonelement, because through vivifying it I would in a sense have severed it from the whole. If I call the whole thing world, then I would have an integral part of the world in myself, and the rest of it outside myself. I would appear to myself in a theoretical respect, with regard to this meaning, as dependent and under the influence of the world. I would further, in connection with this meaning, be obliged to cooperate as an element of the world—for otherwise I would accomplish my intention only incompletely in vivifying it. I would find my meaning, or body, determined partly by itself and partly by the idea of the whole—by its spirit—the world soul, and this so that both are inextricably united—so that properly speaking one could refer neither to the one nor the other exclusively. My body would seem to me not specifically different from the whole—but only a variant of it. My knowledge of the whole would thus have the character of analogy—but this would refer in the closest and most immediate way to the direct and absolute knowledge of the element. Both together would comprise an antithetical synthetic knowledge. It would be immediate, and by means of the immediate it would be mediated, at once real and symbolic. All analogy is symbolic. I find my body determined and made effective by itself and the world soul at the same time. My body is a small whole, and thus it also has a special soul; for I call soul the individual principle whereby everything becomes one whole. I know myself to be as I will and will myself to be as I know—because I will my will—because I will absolutely. Thus within myself knowledge and will are perfectly united. While I want to understand my will—and particularly also my deed—I notice that I also have a will and can do something—without knowing about it—further, that I can and do know something without having willed it. […] 87. To become a human being is an art.

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CHAPTER 10 FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON SCHELLING (1775–1854)

INTRODUCTION Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling was born on January 27, 1775, in the town of Leonberg near Stuttgart, Germany. As a young boy he attended a Latin school in the city of Nürtingen where he met Friedrich Hölderlin who was five years older than Schelling. In 1790, a few months after his fifteenth birthday, young Schelling enrolled in the Protestant seminary in Tübingen known as Tübinger Stift. The seminary had a standard age requirement of twenty years, but Schelling, like Hölderlin and a few other talented individuals, was given a permission to enroll in the seminary early. As a student, Schelling became close friends with Hölderlin and Hegel and later shared living quarters with both of them. While at the seminary, Schelling’s interests slowly began to shift from theology to philosophy. In 1795, at the remarkably young age of twenty, Schelling finished his doctoral thesis at the seminary under the supervision of Gottlob Christian Storr. By this time, Schelling had already begun to be influenced by the philosophies of Kant and Fichte that he thoroughly studied in his spare time. In 1798, at just twenty-three years of age, Schelling moved to Jena, where he received an unpaid position as professor of philosophy at the university. At Jena he met many prominent intellectual figures, including poets of the Romantic movement as well as philosophers, such as the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Fichte. Initially, when he just arrived to Jena, Schelling and Fichte had been on good terms, but as Schelling became more and more involved in the Romantic movement he began to question the abstract nature of Fichte’s philosophy. In 1801, Schelling announced the development of his identity philosophy by publishing the work titled Presentation of My System of Philosophy. Of the two Schlegel brothers, Schelling was closest to August Wilhelm. The closeness of this relationship is partly due to Schelling’s infatuation with August Schlegel’s wife Caroline. After the death of August and Caroline’s daughter Auguste Böhmer, Schelling and Caroline grew much closer. With the help of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom Schelling had befriended soon after arriving at Jena, a divorce between the absent August Schlegel and Caroline was arranged, and Shelling married Caroline on June 2, 1803. While at Jena, Schelling resumed his relations with Hegel whom he helped to attain a position at the University of Jena as a private lecturer (Privatdozent). During this time, Hegel penned his work the Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy, which advocated and promoted Schelling’s philosophy. In early 1802, Schelling, along with Hegel, began publishing the Critical Journal of Philosophy as coeditors. However, this productive collaboration was short-lived. In 1803, Schelling left Jena, and the journal ceased its publication.Next three years Schelling spent as a professor at the University of Würzburg, but in 1806, he moved to Munich to assume a research position at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

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The same year Schelling openly criticized Fichte for the first time. When next year (1807) Hegel sent his manuscript of the Phenomenology of Spirit to Schelling with a request to write a Foreword to be appended to the publication, Schelling was surprised to find critique of his own philosophical ideas and theories. This created a rift between the two thinkers, and thereafter both Schelling and Hegel would criticize one another publicly both in lectures and in published works. In 1809, Schelling’s wife died tragically. This coincided with the publication of his final book, Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters. The following year, though working mainly in Munich, he gave a series of private lectures in Stuttgart. Two years later, in 1812, Schelling found a new wife, introduced to him by Goethe, Pauline Gotter, with whom he would be happily married until the end of his life. For seven years starting in 1820, he also lectured at the nearby University of Erlangen. Although still fairly active within the intellectual community, while in Munich his literary activity would slowly wane. In 1840, Schelling was offered a position at the University of Berlin to fill the chair left empty by the death of Hegel in 1831. This appointment allowed Schelling to deliver a series of lectures on his own philosophy. Among those who attended his lectures were Søren Kierkegaard, Alexander von Humboldt, and Friedrich Engels. Ironically, however, his lectures were not very successful. Furthermore, the lectures were plagiarized by H. E. G. Paulus, who was eager to first reveal Schelling’s positive philosophy to the public. After losing a legal suit on the issue, Schelling gave up lecturing and resigned his position at the University of Berlin. His later philosophy was severely criticized, largely due to political disagreements with its author. Regardless of what some thought of Schelling’s political stances, his philosophy still had influence on the philosophical atmosphere of the time. Schelling died on August 20, 1854, in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland. * * * Historically, Schelling’s philosophy began with his so-called Naturphilosophie, or “philosophy of nature,” motivated by problems inherent in Kant’s new account of nature, communicated mainly in the Critique of Pure Reason. Primary among these was the question of the exact relation between nature and human freedom, or at least, how the new account of nature and human freedom could coexist. There were two primary approaches to resolving the dichotomy between nature and freedom. The first, and perhaps the most straightforward, is to deny Kant’s dichotomy between the thing-as-it-appears and the thing-in-itself. If such a notion is rejected, then the existence of the thing-in-itself is to be rejected. Thus one could argue that the world is produced by the activity of the subject, and therefore is subjective. This approach requires a new theory of subjectivity to build a system which could resolve the dichotomy between nature and human freedom. Alternatively, the second approach was to account for nature as involving or deriving from subjectivity. Schelling sought to take both approaches, contending that nature can be seen as itself a subject, so that nature is a product of its own subjectivity. Schelling worked on this philosophy mainly in the five-year period starting in 1795. The second period of the development of Schelling’s philosophical system dates from around 1801 until near the end of that decade. This new period is generally regarded as beginning around the time of Schelling’s publication of Presentation of My System of Philosophy, and concluding with the publication of Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human 250

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Freedom and Related Matters. The main objective of this new system commonly known as “identity philosophy” was to correctly explain the interrelation between the self-conscious I and the objective world. Fichte, influenced mainly by the work of Reinhold, had chosen to place the self-conscious I at the foundation of his philosophy. However, Schelling held that the self-conscious I cannot be a starting point or generative source of philosophy but must be instead viewed as a result. This proposal led Schelling to consider the proper relationship between the I (subject) and physical reality (the objective world) in a way that allows to resolve the issues that prompted his earlier philosophy of nature. Schelling’s goal was to delineate clearly the nature of the subject and object so this could explain what makes the judgments possible. Essentially, this is the question about how a subject can have thoughts that correspond to an object which is external to and separate from a subject. Schelling argued that for judgments to occur at all, the subject and object unified (synthesized) in the judgment must already be unified , or in some way be identical. The idea of this kind of identity is embodied in the Absolute. If so, one might worry that this all-encompassing Absolute, within which everything is really identical, amounts to no more than that which stands opposed to any differentiation. While this might be a legitimate concern, such an interpretation of Schelling’s project would be incorrect. For him “Absolute identity” is always transitive. He clearly states that “what the unity is, is also the multiplicity, and this necessary and indissoluble One of unity and multiplicity in it is what you call its existence” (SW I/7:56). By appealing to transitivity Schelling sought to show how this one, single Absolute is also really many. More specifically, the Absolute is not only one but also the multiplicity of things, the way in which we, as part of the Absolute, perceive the universe. Thus, material and immaterial things are merely predicates of the Absolute or modes of its being. The next stage commonly recognized in Schelling’s philosophical development is the middle period of his life, primarily characterized by an unfinished work entitled Ages of the World. However, this period really begins with the publication of Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters. The ultimate goal of Schelling’s philosophy of this period is to describe the evolution of the world as we understand it by means of opposing forces. Of primary concern is Schelling’s attempt to create a philosophy that denies fatalism as engendered by a mechanistic worldview and gives human freedom a prominent position in the order of things. For Schelling, evil is not negative in nature but rather a positive fact in relation to human freedom. In view of the importance of freedom, Schelling provides a conception of the ground of nature, that which causes nature but is itself uncaused. To avoid fatalism or determinism, this groundless ground from which nature derives must be understood in terms of freedom. Furthermore, any attempt to explain the existence of the finite world will fail, because such an attempt requires uncovering a cause for the groundless ground of finite nature. No such attempt is realizable, because a cause for a ground which is uncaused is contradictory. Schelling then argues that if freedom is really to be understood or recognized, there must be something which is necessary and can oppose freedom. Ultimately, Schelling realizes that the natural dichotomy created by recognizing both the necessity of deterministic law and the existence of human freedom may not be reconcilable. The final philosophical period of Schelling’s intellectual development is his positive philosophy, which he taught at the University of Berlin starting in 1840. He divided his lectures into three major series. The first was the Grounding of Positive Philosophy, the second was Philosophy of Mythology, and the final was Philosophy of Revelation. Schelling also intensively 251

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criticized Hegel’s philosophy; much of Schelling’s development of his positive philosophy is inextricably tied up with such a critique. The notion of the Absolute is fundamental to Schelling’s and to Hegel’s philosophical systems, yet they approach it very differently. According to Hegel, the Absolute results from synthesizing all finite concepts whose very nature of being is dynamic. For Hegel philosophy aims to describe the nature of the Absolute by accounting for how finite things are transcended. This account is provided by Hegel’s dialectic, by synthesis of opposed concepts (theses and antitheses) and sublation of the opposites. Thus, Hegel attempts to show how the perception of the world has inherent contradictions, which enable the possibility of the dialectic. The development of the Absolute is understood dialectically as occurring in a spiral pattern, “circular” in nature, in which self-reflection of the Absolute is the ultimate process. According to Schelling, Hegel’s conception does not explain why there is a developing world, but instead illustrates the development of the world through dialectic. Schelling holds that such an error, explaining the possibility of the developing world but neglecting why there is any developing world, was a common failure of most philosophies. The positive philosophy is Schelling’s alternative to such failures. In his positive philosophy Schelling aims to demonstrate that human reason is unable to describe or reason out its own existence. Thus, unlike Hegel and others at the time, he declares that there is no system of philosophy by which reason can explain itself and everything else within that system. According to Schelling we must choose between two alternatives when constructing our philosophy. First, we begin with the concept and derive its being as a consequence; this implies that that being is no longer absolute since it is contingent upon the concept. Alternatively, we begin with being and derive the concept as a consequence. Hegel, in his philosophy, attempted to take the middle road by merging the two notions, being and concept, into a larger cohesive self-introspective structure in which being is a structural component. In Schelling’s view, such an attempt ultimately fails, since it assumes that we know about things, or being, and are able to identify its concept. This identifying is not possible because being cannot be known. For Schelling being, or existence, is really the concept, rather than a consequence of that concept, as had been assumed previously, thus ultimately leading to an idealist system. Instead, according to Schelling, we must begin our system with the concept of being, or existence, which presents itself prior to the concept, or the possibility of thought grasping the concept. This “prior” indicates the supremacy of being and illustrates our lack of understanding of the origin of the concept. Such a lack of understanding forces us into awe (Achtung) because we are exposed to the groundless ground, and come to understand our own finitude. Schelling is often considered only as a transitional figure in German idealism, between Fichte and Hegel. Such a view generally contends that Hegel’s system of philosophy is really the culmination of German idealist philosophy as a whole. In some regards this might be true, but one must not underestimate the importance of Schelling’s philosophy, particularly his critique of Hegel’s system. Schelling’s later positive philosophy and critique of Hegelianism influenced a large swath of thinkers who were also critical of Hegel’s claim to have presented a complete philosophical system which culminated all previous philosophy. These thinkers include Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Adorno. Even if Schelling’s philosophy may not be entirely consistent, it should not be ignored. Indeed, Schelling’s philosophy not only provided an important critique of Hegelianism but also aided the development of existentialism. 252

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Chronology of Friedrich Schelling’s Life and Works 1775

January 27: Born in Leonberg near Stuttgart to Orientalist Professor Joseph Friedrich Schelling and his wife, Gottliebin Marie.

1785

Attended Latin School in Nürtingen, which he finished early due to his aptitude.

1790

Matriculated into the Tübinger Stift, a renowned protestant seminary, where he became friends with both Hölderlin and Hegel and shared living quarters with both of them.

1795 Publishes Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge and Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism. 1797

Publishes the Naturphilosophie.

1798

Secures a professorship at the University of Jena (at the age of twenty-three). Comes into contact with Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis.

1800

Publication of the System of Transcendental Idealism.

1801

Presentation of My System of Philosophy comes out.

1803

Marries F. Schlegel’s former wife, Caroline and moves to Würzburg.

1806

Due to the fall of Würzburg to Austria (1803), moves to Münich.

1807

Writes the Foreword to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The philosophical (and personal) tension with Hegel begins.

1804 Publishes System of the Whole Philosophy and Naturphilosophie in Particular. 1809

On the Essence of Human Freedom comes out.



His wife Caroline dies.

1811–54

Writes prolifically; however, most works produced during this period are published posthumously.

1812

Remarries Pauline Gotter, to whom he remains married until his death.

1840

Invited to take the position of Chair of Philosophy at the University of Berlin previously occupied by Hegel.

1854

August 20: Dies in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Schelling’s Writings A.1.  German Academic Editions

[Schelling, F. W. J.] 1856–61. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke, 14 vols, edited by Joseph von Schelling. Stuttgart: Cotta, [Abbreviated as SW and cited by series/volume: page number]. Schelling, F. W. J. 1976–. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, im Auftrag der SchellingKommission der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, edited by H. M. Baumgartner, W. G. Jacobs, and H. Krings. Stuttgart: Fromman-Holzboog. [Schelling, F. W. J.] 1985. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Ausgewählte Schriften, 6 vols., edited by M. Frank. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. A.2.  In English

[Schelling, F. W. J.] 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism, translated by P. Heath, introduction M. Vater. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. [Schelling, F. W. J.] 1988. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature: As Introduction to the Study of this Science, translated by E. E. Harris and P. Heath, introduction R. Stern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Schelling, F. W. J.] 2004. First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, translated with an introduction and notes by K. R. Peterson. Albany: State University of New York Press. [Schelling, F. W. J.] 2006. Philosophical Investigations into Essence of Human Freedom, translated with an introduction by Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press. [Schelling, F. W. J.] 2007. The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures, translated with an introduction and notes by Bruce Matthews. Albany: State University of New York Press. [Schelling, F. W. J.] 2018. Statement of the True Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to the Revised Fichtean Doctrine. An Elucidation of the Former, translated with an introduction and notes by D. E. Snow. Albany: State University of New York Press. [Schelling, F. W. J., and J. G. Fichte] 2013. The Philosophical Rapture Between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800–1802), translated, edited, with an introduction by M. G. Vater and D. W. Wood. Albany: State University of New York Press. B.  Selected Commentaries

Frank, M. 1985. Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hamilton G. I. 2008. Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. London: Continuum. Kosch, M. 2010. Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ostaric, L. (ed.). 2014. Interpreting Schelling: Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Snow, D. E. 1996. Schelling and the End of Idealism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tilliette, X. 1970. Schelling une philosophie en devenir, 2 Vols. Paris: Vrin. Welchman, A. and J. Norman (eds.). 2004. The New Schelling. London: Continuum. White, A. 1983. Schelling: Introduction to the System of Freedom. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Wirth, J. M. 2003. The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wirth, J. M. (ed.). 2004. Schelling Now: Contemporary Readings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Žižek, S. 1996. The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso.

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FROM PRESENTATION OF MY SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY (1801) *

Preface For many years I sought to present the one Philosophy that I know to be true from two wholly different sides—[both] as philosophy of nature and as transcendental philosophy. I now find myself impelled by the present situation of science to publicly bring forward, sooner than I wish, the system that for me was the foundation of these different presentations, and to make everyone interested in this matter acquainted with views which until now were merely my own concern, or perhaps shared with a few others. […] Working from wholly different sides, I sought to prepare for the integral reception of this philosophy, which I have the audacity to regard as the one and only Philosophy, before I dared bring it forward in its entirety. […] I never concealed from myself or from others the fact that I take neither what I term “transcendental philosophy” nor what I term “philosophy of nature,” each in isolation, to be the system of philosophy itself, but instead […] regarded each of them as nothing more than a one-sided presentation of that system. […] I have always presented what I called philosophy of nature and transcendental philosophy as the opposite poles of philosophical activity; with the present exposition I situate myself at the indifference-point [between them], where only the person who has previously constructed [philosophy] from completely antithetical directions can correctly and confidently place himself. […] If I should say, however, that this present system is “idealism,” or “realism,” or even some third combination of them, in each case I might say nothing false, for this system could be any of these, depending on how it is viewed. […] It is self-evident, e.g., that I take as the actually elaborated system of idealism only what I have expounded under that name. […] Now it might very well have been the case, e.g., that the idealism which Fichte first advanced and which he still maintains had a meaning completely different than this; Fichte, e.g., might have conceived idealism in a completely subjective sense while I, on the other hand, conceived it in an objective one; Fichte might have maintained an idealism relative to the standpoint of reflection, whereas I situated myself and the principle of idealism at the standpoint of production: to put this contrast in the most intelligible terms, if idealism in the subjective sense said that the I is everything, idealism in the objective sense would be forced to say the reverse: everything is = I, which are doubtless different views, although no one will deny that both are idealistic. —I do not say that this is really how things stand; I merely pose the possibility; but supposing this is the case, the reader will learn from the word “idealism” simply nothing about the genuine content of a system expounded under this name; rather, to the extent one is interested in the matter one must

 From Presentation of My System of Philosophy, by F.W.J. Schelling. In The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling. Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800-1802), trans., ed. and with an Introduction by Michael Vater, David Wood, State University of New York, 2012, 141–55. *

From Presentation of My System of Philosophy

resolve to study it and only then examine what is understood or properly asserted by this term. The situation may be no different for what used to be called “realism” than it is for idealism, and it seems to me, as I hope the following presentation proves, that until now realism in its most sublime and perfect form (in Spinozism, I mean) has been thoroughly misconstrued and misunderstood in all the slanted opinions of it that have become public knowledge. […] I request that one form an opinion of my presentations of natural philosophy and of idealism, but especially of the following presentation of my system of philosophy, solely from those texts themselves, not from other expositions. […] I especially hope that the reader will resolve provisionally to consider Fichte’s system and my presentation independently, since only through a further development can it appear whether and to what degree the two are, and have been, in agreement all along. I say provisionally, since I think it is impossible that we will not eventually come to agreement, even if now, at least in my opinion, this point has not been reached. […] Have people given Fichte the time to reach the point where he must decide that his system is not just idealism in general (since in my view, all true speculative philosophy is this) but precisely this idealism [which I present]? —I think Fichte has until now achieved only the most general results. Some people may be pleased and others irritated that I consider what has been done up to this point as only the beginning of what will be done, and that the whole matter is therefore far from its “end.” How could this development of which I speak be more effectively delayed than by the eagerness of idle people who, by nature quite remote from the faintest idea of speculation, nonetheless voice their opinion on these matters with the blindest possible self-confidence and who voice either their agreement or disagreement before they have even grasped what the discussion is about? Where must it end when, e.g., Reinhold declares with most naive candor that he “has never understood, either in the beginning or in the middle, not even shortly before the end (he says end) what was the real issue in the latest philosophical revolution”? Where must it end when such a person— who in the beginning of this “Revolution” was a blind follower of Kant, then in a theory of his own making proclaimed infallible, catholic philosophy, and toward the end gave himself over to the bosom of the Wissenschaftslehre (with an equally strenuous protestation of his deepest conviction)—when such a person, after all these proofs of philosophical imbecility, does not lack the courage to again (and as he himself surmises, for the last time) prophesy the “present” end of the philosophical revolution? — We avert our gaze from these sights and for the moment recall only this: all further clarifications of the relation of our system to any other, especially to Spinozism and to idealism, are to be sought in the following presentation itself. I hope this presentation will also put an end to all misunderstandings [of my work]; the philosophy of nature was especially plagued by them. […] Concerning the manner of exposition, I have taken Spinoza as a model here, since I thought there was good reason to choose as a paradigm the philosopher whom I believed came nearest my system in terms of content or material and in form, but I also adopted this model because this form of exposition allowed the greatest brevity of presentation and the most accurate assessment of the certainty of demonstrations. […] § 1. DEFINITION. I call reason absolute reason, or reason insofar as it is conceived as the total indifference of the subjective and objective. It is not the place here to justify this turn of speech, since its only function is to generally awaken the idea that I shall connect with this word. —Just a brief indication must be given, 257

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then, of how one comes to understand reason this way. One gets there by reflecting on what presents itself in philosophy [as occupying a position] between the subjective and the objective, which evidently must be an item standing indifferently over against both extremes. The thought of reason is foreign to everyone; to conceive it as absolute, and thus to come to the standpoint I require, one must abstract from what does the thinking. For the one who performs this abstraction reason immediately ceases to be something subjective, as most people imagine it; it can of course no longer be conceived as something objective either, since an objective something or a thought item becomes possible only in contrast to a thinking something, from which there is complete abstraction here; reason, therefore, becomes the true in-itself through this abstraction, which is located precisely in the indifference-point of the subjective and the objective. The standpoint of philosophy is the standpoint of reason, its kind of knowing is a knowing of things as they are in themselves, i.e., as they are in reason. It is the nature of philosophy to completely suspend all succession and externality, all difference of time and everything which mere imagination mingles with thought, in a word, to see in things only that aspect by which they express absolute reason, not insofar as they are objects of reflection, which is subject to the laws of mechanism and has duration in time. § 2. Outside reason is nothing, and in it is everything. […] Remark. There is no philosophy except from the standpoint of the absolute, throughout this presentation, no hesitation on this matter will be entertained: reason is the absolute to the extent that it is conceived just as we determined it (§ 1); the present proposition, accordingly, is valid only under this assumption. […] § 3. Reason is simply one and simply self-identical. Were this not so, the being of reason would require some additional ground other than reason itself. […] Reason is therefore one in an absolute sense. But if one supposes the reverse of the second clause, namely that reason is not self-identical, then that in virtue of which it is not identical to itself must still be posited in it, and, since outside it (praeter ipsam) there is nothing (§ 2), this other factor must therefore express the essence of reason, and since, moreover, everything is in-itself only in virtue of its capacity to express the essence of reason (§ 1), this other factor too, considered in itself or in reference to reason, would again be equal to reason, united with it. Reason is therefore one (not only ad extra, but also ad intra, or) in itself, i.e., it is simply self-identical. § 4. The ultimate law for the being of reason, and, since there is nothing outside reason (§ 2), for all being (because it is comprehended within reason) is the law of identity, which with respect to all being is expressed by A = A. […] § 6. The proposition A = A, conceived universally, says neither that A on its own is, nor that it is as subject or predicate. Instead, the unique being posited through this proposition is that of identity itself, which accordingly is posited in complete independence from A as subject and from A as predicate. The proof of the first assertion is furnished in the Wissenschafislehre § 1; the second part of the proposition follows of itself from the first and is contained within it. […] § 7. The sole unconditioned cognition is that of absolute identity. […] § 8. Absolute identity simply IS and is as certain as the proposition A = A is. Proof. Because it is immediately posited along with this proposition (§ 6).

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Corollary 1. Absolute identity cannot be conceived except through the proposition A = A, yet it is posited through this proposition as standing in being. Therefore it is by virtue of being thought, and it belongs to the essence of absolute identity to be. […] § 9. Reason is one with absolute identity. The proposition A = A is reason’s law of being (§ 4). […] Cor. Therefore the being of reason (in the sense defined in § 1) is just as unconditioned as that of absolute identity, or: BEING belongs equally to the essence of reason and to that of absolute identity. […] § 10. Absolute identity is simply infinite. —For if it were finite, then the ground of its finitude would lie either in itself or not in itself, outside it; in the first case, it would be the cause of some determination in itself, hence something simultaneously causing and caused, and therefore not absolute identity; in the second case, the ground of its finitude would be outside it. But there is nothing outside it. […] § 11. Absolute identity can never be abolished AS identity. […] § 12. Everything that is, is absolute identity itself. […] § 13. With respect to being in itself, nothing has come into being. For everything that subsists in itself is absolute identity itself (§ 12). This, however, has not entered into being, but simply is; therefore it is posited without any connection to time and outside all time, for its being is an eternal truth (§ 8, Cor. 2). Consequently, everything viewed as being in itself is absolutely eternal. § 14. Nothing, considered intrinsically, is finite. The proof is drawn from § 10 in the same way as that of the preceding proposition. […] Explanation. The most basic mistake of all philosophy is to assume that absolute identity has actually stepped outside itself and to attempt to make intelligible how this emergence occurs. Absolute identity has surely never ceased being identity, and everything that is, is considered in itself—not just the appearance of absolute identity, but identity itself, and since, further, it is the nature of philosophy to consider things as they are in themselves (§ 1), i.e., insofar as they are infinite and are absolute identity itself (§ 14, 12), true philosophy consists in the demonstration that absolute identity (the infinite) has not stepped outside itself and that everything that is, insofar as it is, is infinity itself—a proposition that Spinoza alone of all previous philosophers acknowledged, even if he did not fully carry out its demonstration, nor express it clearly enough to avoid being misunderstood ever after. § 15. Absolute identity IS only under the form of the proposition A = A, or this form is immediately posited through its being. […] § 17. There is an original cognition of absolute identity and this is posited immediately with the proposition A = A. Now if there is nothing outside absolute identity, this cognition is within absolute identity itself. […] § 18. Everything that is, considered absolutely and in itself, is in essence absolute identity, but in its form of being, it is a cognizing of absolute identity. […] § 21. Absolute identity cannot cognize itself infinitely without infinitely positing itself as subject and object. This proposition is self-evident. […]

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§ 26. Absolute identity is absolute totality. […] § 27. Definition. What exists outside totality I designate in this context an INDIVIDUAL being or thing. […] § 30 […] Explanation. Expressed in the clearest way possible, our assertion is this, that if we could view everything that is in the totality, we would perceive in the whole a perfect quantitative balance of subjectivity and objectivity, hence nothing else than a pure identity in which nothing is distinguishable, however much in the perspective of the individual a preponderance might occur on one side or the other, that therefore we would perceive that precisely this quantitative difference is in no way posited in itself, but only in appearance. For since absolute identity—that which simply is and is in all [—] is not in any way affected by the opposition of subjectivity and objectivity (§ 6), the quantitative difference of these two cannot happen with respect to absolute identity or in itself, and the things or appearances that appear to us as different are not truly different, but are realiter one, so that all things together, though none for itself, display clear unclouded identity itself inside the totality in which primordially opposed potencies cancel each other out. This identity, however, is not produced, but original identity, and it is only produced [in the totality] because it is. Therefore it already is in everything that is. The power that bursts forth in the stuff of nature is the same in essence as that which displays itself in the world of mind, except that it has to contend there with a surplus of the real, here with one of the ideal, but even this opposition, which is not an opposition in essence, but in mere potency, appears as opposition only to one who finds himself outside indifference, who fails to view absolute identity itself as primary and original. It appears as a produced identity only to the one who has separated himself from the whole, and to the extent he isolates himself; to one who has not withdrawn from the absolute center of gravity, it is the first being, the being that never was produced but is if anything at all is; it is to such a degree that even the individual being is possible only inside it, while outside it, apart from things separated in mere thought, there is really and truly nothing. But how is it possible for anything to separate itself from this absolute totality or be separated from it in thought, is a question that cannot yet be answered here, since in its stead we prove that such a separation is intrinsically impossible, that it is false from the standpoint of reason, indeed (as can readily be seen) the source of all errors. […] § 35. Nothing individual has the ground of its existence in itself. […] § 36. Each individual being is determined through another individual being. Because as an individual being it is neither determined through itself, since it does not subsist in itself and does not contain the ground of its being (§ 35), nor through absolute identity, since this contains only the ground of totality and of being, to the extent it is comprehended in totality, it can therefore be determined only through another individual being, which again is determined through another, and so on without end. […] § 38. Each individual being is as such a determined form of the being of absolute identity, but not its very being, which is only in totality. […]

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FROM FURTHER PRESENTATIONS FROM THE SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY (1802) *

II Proof That There Is a Point Where Knowledge of the Absolute and the Absolute Itself Are One Without any further introduction to pure intuition, a geometer immediately sets about his construction; and even his postulates are not requirements for this intuition as such, about which it is presumed there can be no doubt or ambiguity, but are requisites for determinate intuitions. In the same way, intellectual or rational intuition is something fixed and decided for the philosopher in rigorously scientific construction, something about which neither doubt is allowed nor explanation found necessary. It is that which simply and without challenge is presupposed, and can in this respect not even be called the postulate of philosophy. Perhaps one might ask of it the question that Plato asked of virtue: can it be learned or not, can it be attained through practice, or is it perhaps to be acquired neither through instruction nor through industry, but is inborn in us by nature, or is it lent to humans through a divine disposition? Clearly it is nothing that can be learned; all attempts to teach it, therefore, are entirely useless in rigorously scientific philosophy, and introductions to it, since they necessarily serve as a doorway to philosophy and fashion preliminary expositions and the like, should not be sought within strict science. Nor is it comprehensible why philosophy should be charged with an inability in this respect; instead, it is appropriate to sharply restrict access to philosophy, to isolate it on all sides from ordinary knowledge, until one could find no road or even footpath leading from it to philosophy. Philosophy begins here [with intellectual intuition], and whoever is not already at this point or shrinks back from it remains distant, or even flees from it. The condition of the scientific spirit in general and in all the divisions of knowledge is not just a transitory intellectual intuition, but one that endures as the unchangeable organ of knowledge. For it is simply the capacity to see the universal in the particular, the infinite in the finite, the two united in a living unity. The anatomist who dissects a plant or an animal body surely believes he immediately sees the plant or the animal organism, but strictly speaking he sees only the individual thing he designates plant or body. To see the plant in the plant, the

From Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy, by F.W.J. Schelling. In The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling. Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800-1802), trans., ed. and with an Introduction by Michael Vater, David Wood, State University of New York, 2012, 206–12. *

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organism in the organism, in a word to see the concept or indifference within difference is possible only through intellectual intuition. For our present purpose we shall determine the nature and essence of intellectual intuition [only] to the extent necessary to understand what it is not, to separate it from what people have called intellectual intuition, but either has nothing in common with it or is but a particular species of it. The presence even in its bare idea of a philosophy in and for itself shows the necessity of assuming that the knowledge one obtains through the usual ways is not true knowledge, and since philosophy strives to discover the grounds and conditions of the science to which evidence is ascribed in another respect, [viz.,] mathematics, this shows that with the postulation of philosophy [as absolute science] we also assume the merely conditioned truth of this other body of knowledge. What follows is the general groundwork for the discovery of philosophy. Of whatever sort our native capacity of knowledge may be, this much at least is clear, it is established in necessary connection to some merely finite existence and is a knowledge reflecting this finite [item]. But finally (this too can be immediately appreciated) this finite existence again subsists only for us [but] in connection to and in contrast with an infinite factor. This infinite factor, which we can also call the ideal, is neither limited nor capable of limitation, while the finite is forever, always, and unto infinity only a determinate something. Thereby is established in consciousness itself the universal opposition of the ideal and the real, the infinite and the finite; for it is necessary that concept and object be opposed to one another in being connected to each other, since more is always contained in the infinite, whose immediate expression is the concept, than in the finite, whose direct expression is the object. Of every alleged philosophy that is not true philosophy, one can say in advance that no matter what form under which it appears, it remains fixed at this antithesis. Geometry, however, and mathematics as a whole are entirely beyond this opposition. Here thought is always adequate to being, concept to object, and vice versa, and never can the question of whether what is correct and certain in thought is also real or in the object, or whether what is expressed in being attains to conceptual necessity, even arise. In a word, there is no difference here between subjective and objective truth, subjectivity and objectivity are absolutely one and there is in this science no construction in which they are not one. […] Indeed, this unity is pure evidence itself, though it appears in geometry and in arithmetic in some determinate subordination, in the first subordinated to being, in the second to thought (this point will be comprehensible only to those who have generally come to understand how everything is contained in everything, and how what is expressed on the one side in being, and on the other in thought, reflects the entire organism of reason): now to perceive this evidence—or the unity of thought and being, not in this or that context but simply in and for itself, consequently, as the evidence in all evidence, the truth in all truth, the purely known in everything known—means to elevate oneself to the intuition of absolute unity and with that to intellectual intuition as such. One who is outside this unity of thought and being or of the subjective and objective, is simply, entirely, and from the very start outside all objective certainty; 5 with this unity, the principle of identity used in demonstration is abandoned all at once or remains at best a principle of the understanding; “proof ” is progression inside [mere] logical identity, inside the 262

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conceptual unity of reflection, without truth or purchase. Reason, even in its more imperfect efforts, has always associated the highest and most immediate evidence with this unity of thought and being. Even for the dogmatist, this opposition between thought and being interwoven through all the concepts and forms of finite knowledge was merely subjectively unsurpassable, and even he recognized as the highest objectivity of knowledge a unity in which being immediately followed from and was joined to concept, and reality to ideality. Connected with this [recognition] was the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God, which the systems of reflection rightly regarded as the point of purest philosophical evidence. It [i.e., dogmatism] did not lack the idea of the absolute, only its mode of knowledge was topsyturvy. Reflection relies in its very nature on the antithesis of thought and being. The unity of thought and being was for these systems only just another case of being (something objective); only in this [objective] unity were thought and being united, and God was absolute insofar as the antithesis was unified in him, insofar as relative to God, being or actuality followed directly from idea or possibility. But thought remained outside this unity and in subjective opposition to it; the antithesis was abolished in God, but not in the cognition of God. In this way, accordingly, the identity of thought and being in the absolute itself was downgraded to a mere case of being, related to the philosopher’s thinking as the real to the ideal, or as objective item to subjective item; the being of God no longer followed from the idea in God himself, but from the philosopher’s thinking [about God]; hence, the very idea of the absolute, to be the identity of thought and being, was as good as lost. This fact, that the reality of the absolute in no way follows from the mere thought of it (because the reality of a golden mountain does not follow from my ability to imagine it, or, to put it in a quite Kantian way, one’s cash balance is not increased by imagining one hundred dollars), and because Criticism has introduced a deep and profound uniformity of opinion on this matter, has grown into a universal prohibition against all positive, categorical cognition of the absolute, and has brought about a situation where, unless one decides to entirely renounce thinking of the absolute, one is forced at very least to begin philosophizing hypothetically, with pure thought or the understanding’s principle of identity, and then see if one might come upon being in addition. The basis for reflection’s effort to take the absolute as absolute but nonetheless fix it as something objective lies in its ignorance of the absolute mode of cognition, but this ignorance is not more, or more evidently, responsible than is the mere apparently opposed tendency of Criticism, which can point out what is contradictory in reflection’s effort, but is unable on its own to point to anything that surpasses this sphere of contradiction, and which is thus shown to be, compared to the true philosophy, merely an impoverished skepticism, itself entirely deformed by reflection, and which thinks it that at one blow it has vanquished philosophy itself and negated it as speculation. True skepticism is entirely directed against reflection’s mode of cognition, but from the principle of true speculation, except that it cannot express this position categorically, since it would then cease to be skepticism; but one can be sure that skepticism will never find any weapons against speculation or absolute cognition except those derived from common sense or relative knowledge, whose reality it must itself impugn since they are not only objects of its doubt but are unconditionally rejected by it. Related in this way, skepticism and philosophy can never be brought together, since the former stands to the latter as its absolute privation, almost the way darkness stands to light, for which darkness simply does not exist and is immediately abolished by it. 263

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The absolute mode of cognition, like the truth that subsists within it, has no true opposite outside itself, and if it cannot be demonstrated [to one who lacks it] just as light cannot be demonstrated to those born blind, or space to someone who lacked spatial intuition (were it possible that an intelligent being lacked it), on the other hand, it cannot be contradicted by anything. It is the dawning light that is itself the day and knows no darkness. Whoever sets foot in the territory of philosophy is compelled by every circumstance to incorporate the living sense of this absolute cognition, which of course can neither be given him nor forced upon him; yet from acknowledging this preliminary, merely formal kind of absolute cognition, it is but a small step to the insight that this cognition is immediately a cognition of the absolute itself, and is accompanied by the abolition of all differences that contrast the absolute as cognized to the subject who cognizes it. With [just] a few strokes we complete the proof that for consciousness there is a point where the absolute itself and knowledge of the absolute are simply one. That thought as such, since it has a necessary opposite in being, neither is nor can become absolute cognition is a matter sufficiently clear, and one placed totally beyond doubt by the preceding remarks. Thus on the whole an absolute cognition can only be conceived as one in which thought and being are not opposed, [a unity] in which they are completely equivalent forms, separated only in reflection or the understanding, but in themselves absolutely inseparable. Furthermore, it is immediately clear to anyone who in some sense has the idea of the absolute (quite apart from whether he ascribes reality to it or not) that in this idea is conceived one identical absolute unity of ideality and reality, of thought and being. Here at the start, we do not want to presume anything about the absolute’s essence, about which we assert nothing here. We speak solely of the idea of the absolute, and set down the following for the sake of explanation: What is united in all being are the universal and the particular; the former corresponds to thought, the latter to being. Now with respect to no finite or individual thing does the particular follow from the universal. The fact that some one individual human exists, or that right now, e.g., just so many humans exist, not more and not less, cannot be understood from the concept of a human being. Here being in no way follows from essence; no individual thing is determined to existence through its concept, but through something that is not its concept. The essence of all things is one, and considered by itself there is in it no ground of the particular: that whereby they are separated and distinguished is form, which is the difference of the universal and the particular and is expressed in them through their existence. In order not to repeat what is already familiar to everyone, that with respect to the absolute being immediately follows from essence, we propose to more closely define this [relation of the universal and particular]. Universal and particular are simply one in the case of what is absolute, its concept (to absolutely be) is at the same time its particularity; it is, of course, absolute in both respects, consequently, it is neither like any other thing (through some universal concept) nor unlike it (through its particularity); it is absolutely and essentially one, and simply self-identical.–Now since it is form by which the particular entity is a particular, [and] the finite item a finite, so too form is one with essence, each of course absolute, since in the absolute the particular and the universal are absolutely one—and here in this absolute unity or identical absoluteness of essence and form lies the proof of our above-stated principle, the

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disclosure of how it is possible that the absolute itself and knowledge of the absolute can be one, of the possibility, therefore, of an immediate cognition of the absolute. Since, according to our assumption that there is in intellectual consciousness a formally absolute cognition, the absolute subsists in cognition in its formal aspect, so, because the absolute indifference of essence and form belongs to its idea, it also subsists in the essential aspect of cognition; the absolute unity of thought and being, of the ideal and the real, not differentiated from its essence, is the absolute’s eternal form, the absolute itself; for, since the difference of the ideal and the real also posits the difference of essence and form, and since the latter are one in the absolute, it follows that the unity of the ideal and the real is necessarily the form of the absolute, and equally that in it, form is itself absolute and identical to essence. Now there is in absolute cognition just such an absolute unity of thought and being (as was shown); the sole opposition that might remain is that cognition, formally defined and as such, might be opposed to the absolute itself, but form is the absolute itself, unity of essence and form pertains to its idea: and, consequently, formally absolute cognition is necessarily a knowing of the absolute itself. Therefore, there is an immediate cognition of the absolute (and only of the absolute, since only in its case is this condition of immediate evidence possible: unity of essence and form) and this is the first speculative cognition, the principle and the ground of possibility of all philosophy. We call this cognition intellectual intuition: Intuition; because all intuition is an identification of thought and being and because only in intuition as such is reality: In the case under consideration, the mere thought of the absolute, granted that this is determined in its idea as that which is immediately through its concept, is in no way yet a true cognition of the absolute. This is found only in an intuition that absolutely identifies thought and being, which because it formally expresses the absolute also becomes the expression of its essence. We call this intuition intellectual because it is reason-intuition, and because, as cognition, it is absolutely one with the object of knowing. Philosophy rests [a] on this point of coincidence between formal absolute cognition and the absolute itself, [b] on its cognizing the mode of this coincidence, and [c] on insight into the uniqueness of the point where cognition can be absolutely one with its object—(this is of course conceivable only in with respect to the absolute). All philosophical certainty follows from this point; it is itself the ultimate evidence. The requirement on which every science bases its reality is that what is absolutely cognized by it: the idea, can also be the real itself; in geometrical construction this coincidence of idea and reality shows up directly, since it is granted to geometry to display the archetypes, as it were, in outer intuition; in philosophical construction this point of coincidence is simple, absolute, context-free intellectual intuition, in which absolute cognition along with the κατ’ έξοχήν [eminently] real, the absolute itself, are recognized as the uniquely true and real things, and so too the modes of this cognition. In this indifference of form and essence lies also the uniquely possible and necessary point of union for idealism and realism. Idealism entirely reduces philosophy to form, to knowledge, to cognition. If this knowledge or cognition is itself absolute knowledge, absolute cognition, then what is needed to correct the view that it is antithetical to realism is merely reflection on the proposition that absolute form (absolute knowledge) is also absolute essence, being, substance. But cognition is not yet

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cognized as absolute if one views it in antithesis to being and does not also recognize it as absolute reality. Realism alleges that it starts from an absolute being, but if this being is really absolute, it directly follows that it is a being located in the ideas, and as simply absolute, in the idea of all ideas, in absolute cognition. This relationship is what we have called the relation of indifference (not some inane synthesis, as many have represented it). The absolute mode of cognition, since it is the principle of all rational comprehension, is also the principle of its own comprehension. The living principle of philosophy and of every faculty by which the finite and the infinite are identified is absolute cognition itself insofar as it is the idea and essence of the soul; it is the eternal concept by which soul subsists in the absolute, neither originated nor transitory, it is simply eternal, without temporal dimension; it identifies the finite and the infinite inside cognition, and is at once absolute cognition and the unique true being and substance. Moreover from this one can conclude that any intuition, in other respects arbitrarily defined, in which the opposition of the finite and the infinite is not absolutely destroyed is not intellectual intuition. Therefore an intuition can never be called intellectual intuition in which something of the empirical subject, or of the I in some sense other than that in which it is universal form (or pure subject-object) remains outside this form; the same goes for any sort of intuition that in the act of intuiting itself reaches only to the identity of the subjective subjectobject (in this case intellectual intuition would be distinguished from all sorts of empirical intuition only in this respect: in the latter something different from the subject is intuited, while in the former what intuits and what is intuited are identical).

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FROM PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN FREEDOM AND RELATED MATTERS (1809) *

[…] According to the usual concept, freedom is posited in an entirely undetermined capability for willing one of two contradictory opposites without any determining grounds except that this is wanted, purely and simply. While this concept of freedom has the idea of the original indecision of human essence to its credit, it leads to the greatest incongruities when applied to individual action. […] The main issue is that this concept introduces the entirely accidental nature of individual actions. […] But accident is impossible and conflicts with reason as with the necessary unity of the whole; and if freedom is to be saved only by the complete accidentalness of actions, then there is no saving it at all. […] It was idealism which first raised the doctrine of freedom to that one region in which it is understandable. The intelligible essence of all things, and especially of man, is, according to idealism, beyond all causal connection, and beyond or above all time as well. […] In fact we are expressing the Kantian concept–not, indeed, exactly in his words, but in the manner in which we believe it must be expressed in order to be understood. But if this concept is assumed, then it seems the following has been correctly inferred as well. Free action follows immediately from the intelligible in man. But this is necessarily a determined action, one that is, for example (to mention what is closest at hand), either good or evil. However, there is no transition from the absolutely undetermined to the determined. The statement that intelligible essence should determine itself from pure, utter indetermination without any basis, leads back to the above-mentioned system of the impartiality of volition. In order for intelligible essence to be able to determine itself, it would have to be already determined in itself, not from outside, of course, since this contradicts its nature, nor from within by some merely accidental or empirical necessity, since all this (the psychological as well as the physical) lies beneath it; but it itself, as its essence, i.e., as its own nature, would have to be its determination. […] By presenting the matter in this manner at least one thing is gained: the incongruity of the accidental nature of individual actions is removed. […] But what is this inner necessity of essence itself? Here is the point at which necessity and freedom must be united, if they can be united at all. […] But precisely this inner necessity is itself freedom; man’s essence is essentially his own deed; necessity and freedom are interrelated as one being which appears as the one or the other only when viewed from different aspects: in itself it is freedom, formally it is necessity. The I says Fichte, is its own deed.

From Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters, by F.W.J. Schelling, trans. by P. Hayden-Roy. In Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler, Continuum Publishing Company, 2003 (copyright 1987), 256–66. *

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[…] But in a sense much more definite than this general one, these truths have immediate pertinence for man. As has been shown, man is an undifferentiated being in original creation (which can be presented mythically as a state of innocence and initial blessedness prior to this life); only he can differentiate himself. But this differentiation cannot occur in time; it occurs outside all time and hence is concurrent with the first creation (though as an act distinct from it). […] As incomprehensible as this idea might seem to common thought, yet there is in every man a feeling that is in accord with it: as if he had been what he is from all eternity and had by no means only become so in time. […] Once evil had been generally aroused by the ground’s reaction to revelation, man apprehended himself from all eternity in ownhood and selfishness, and all who are born are born with the dark principle of evil clinging to them, even though this evil is first raised to their self-consciousness by the entrance of its opposite. As man now is, the good as light can be developed by divine transmutation only out of this dark principle. This original evil in man–which can be denied only by him who has become but superficially acquainted with man as he is within and outside himself–although entirely independent of freedom with respect to present empirical life, is nevertheless in its origin man’s own deed, and is for this reason alone original sin. This cannot be said of that disorder of forces, certainly likewise undeniable, which spread like a contagion once anarchy had entered. For it is not the passions in themselves that are evil, nor do we fight against flesh and blood alone, but against an evil within and outside us which is spirit. Thus only that evil which was contracted by one’s own deed–but this from birth–can be called radical evil. It is noteworthy how Kant, who in his theory did not rise to a transcendental act determining all of man’s being, was led in later investigations by mere faithful observation of the phenomena of moral judgment to the recognition of (as he expressed it) a subjective ground of human actions preceding all acts in the domain of the senses, which itself had to be, in turn, an act of freedom. Fichte, however, who in his speculation had grasped the concept of such an act, again relapsed into the philanthropism then prevalent in his doctrine or morals, and purported to find the evil preceding all empirical activity only in the inertia of human nature. There seems to be only one ground that could be put forward against this view, namely, that it cuts off all of man’s conversions from evil to good and vice versa, at least for this life. But if it should be that human or divine aid – for man is always in need of aid – determines him for conversion to the good, then the fact that he allows the good spirit this influence and does not positively shut himself off from it, likewise is due to that initial action by which he is this man and no other. Hence in the man in whom this transmutation has not yet occurred, but in whom the good principle is not completely dead either, the inner voice of his own and better (with respect to how he now is) essence, never ceases to exhort him to change. For only through an actual and decisive conversion does he find peace within his own self and reconciliation with his guardian spirit, as if only now the idea that was in the beginning had been given satisfaction. It is true by strictest understanding that however man is constituted, it is not he himself who acts, but the good or evil spirit within him. And yet this does no harm to freedom. For this very allowing of the good or evil principle to act within him is the consequence of the intelligible deed by which his being and life are determined.

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Now that we have presented the beginning and the emergence of evil up to its actualization in the individual man, there seems to be nothing left but the description of its appearance in man. The general possibility of evil consists, as has been shown, in the fact that instead of making his selfhood the basis or organ, man can rather strive to raise it to domination and to universal will, and, on the other hand, to make the spiritual within him a means. If in man the dark principle of selfhood and self-will is completely penetrated with light and is one with it, then God as eternal love, or as he who actually exists, is the bond of the forces in him. If both of these principles are in discord, however, then another spirit assumes the position in which God should be, namely, the inverted god: that being aroused to actualization by the revelation of God which never attains to act from potential, which indeed never is, but always wants to be. […] Thus the beginning of sin consists in man’s move from genuine being to non-being, from truth to lying, from light to darkness, in order to become himself the creating ground and to rule over all things with the power of the center within him. […] We have seen how through false imagination and through knowledge directed towards non-being man’s spirit opens itself to the spirit of lying and falsehood, and, soon fascinated by it, loses its initial freedom. From this follows conversely that true good can be effected only by divine magic, namely, by the immediate presence of being in consciousness and knowledge. Voluntary good is as impossible as voluntary evil. True freedom is in accord with a holy necessity, the likes of which we feel in essential knowledge, where spirit and heart, bound only by their own law, freely affirm what is necessary. If evil consists in discord between the two principles, then the good can consist only in their perfect concord, and the bond uniting both must be divine, since they are one not in a conditional but in a perfect and unconditional way. […] For God is the clear knowledge or the spiritual light itself within us. In it all else first becomes clear–far from being unclear itself. And this knowledge does not allow the man in whom it is to be idle or to loaf. Where it is, it is something much more substantial than our philosophers of sensitivity think. We understand religiosity in the original, practical sense of the word. It is conscientiousness, or acting according to one’s knowledge and not contradicting the light of knowledge with one’s actions One calls the man religious, conscientious in the highest sense of the word, for whom this contradiction is impossible, not humanly, physically, or psychologically, but in a divine way. […] When the divine principle of morality as such breaks through in the serious disposition, then virtue appears as enthusiasm; as heroism (in the battle against evil), as the lovely, free courage of a man to act as God instructs him, and in his actions not to fall from what he has recognized in knowledge; and as belief, not in the sense of holding something for true which might be considered meritorious, or which lacks what certitude requires – a meaning which has been appended to this word in its use for common things – but in its original meaning as trust, confidence in the divine, which excludes all choice. If finally a ray of divine love descends in the unswervingly earnest disposition (which is always presupposed), then the moral life is supremely transfigured into grace and divine beauty.

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CHAPTER 11 GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL (1770–1831)

INTRODUCTION The most systematic of post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted to elaborate a comprehensive system of philosophy to grasp reality in all its manifestations and to reveal some fundamental unity underlying the apparent multiplicity of the empirical contents. Hegel’s intellectual legacy is vast yet contentious, due to the highly abstract metaphysical background of his philosophy and the complexity of his undertaking. Hegel’s writings are difficult to read and to comprehend, yet his valuable insights into many topics which remain philosophically significant today, secure him a permanent place in philosophy and its history. Hegel’s distinctive approach has become known as dialectical thinking. It relies on a contradictory process between opposing sides and points of view and their reconciliation in a higher standpoint (the “unity of opposites”). Dialectic is, in Hegel’s work, not only a feature of concepts and holds not only among various shapes of consciousness (forms of thinking), which, at least in part can be traced back to previous theories and thinkers. Distinctive of Hegel’s philosophy is his view that dialectic occurs within and accounts for all movement and change, both in the world and in our thought about it. It also explains why things in the world, as well as our thoughts, systematically cohere with each other. Hegel’s philosophy is both rigorously systematic and also historical. He introduced a dialectical system for understanding the history of philosophy and the world itself: a progression in which each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent at the preceding stages. Hegel’s insights about the history of philosophy prompted the development of that topic into a philosophical discipline in its own right. Despite the unique features of Hegel’s philosophy, it has roots in Kant’s Critical philosophy, specifically Kant’s view of the complex relation between the human mind and reality. It also responds to issues Kant was unable to resolve, most notably the existence of the unknown thing-in-itself, as well as difficulties associated with varying attempts to overcome the restraints that Kant had placed on metaphysics. Hegel’s own response to these challenges is his absolute idealism, which holds that we can gain the absolute knowledge (understood as the process of absolute knowing) of ultimate reality, that is, of “all that is,” which in Hegel’s technical terminology is the Absolute itself. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart, Germany, as the oldest child of a Württemberg revenue officer, Georg Ludwig and his wife, Maria Magdalena Louisa (née Fromm). Georg had two surviving siblings—a sister and a brother; the other four children born into the family died at early age. Hegel’s mother was well-educated and able to teach her children basic Latin. As a young boy, Georg attended German and Latin schools, and for two years he was also educated at the Stuttgart Gymnasium (grammar school), where he developed an interest in reading a wide variety of literature; his favorites were works by Plato, Socrates, Homer, Cicero, Livy, and Aristotle. Young Hegel also wrote essays expressing

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his admiration of the Classical world and literature. He never lost this admiration; his passion for ancient authors was lifelong. In the fall of 1788, at age eighteen, Hegel enrolled in a Protestant theological seminary in nearby Tübingen (Tübinger Stift). However, he soon lost interest in the traditional theology and instead began focusing on the classics. He also intensively read Spinoza, Jacobi, Herder, Schiller, Voltaire, and found a special delight in the writings of Rousseau, a copy of whose Emile, Or On Education he kept on his nightstand for years. For many students, including Hegel, who enthusiastically greeted the outbreak of the French Revolution as the beginning of a new era, the atmosphere at the Tübinger Stift was very rigid and suffocating, yet Hegel continued to excel academically. Perhaps he benefited most, not from official lectures and long hours in reading halls but from various intellectual exchanges with his exceptionally gifted roommates, Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who, like Hegel himself, would become central figures in the German intellectual world. The three developed a close friendship and together discussed an array of topics from literature and philosophy to real politics and social issues causing distress in their home state. They also formulated new doctrines of freedom and reason that later would provide a foundation for Hegel’s own inquiry into philosophy of right as well as social and political philosophy. After graduating from the Tübinger Stift with both a Magister degree in philosophy and a certificate in theology, Hegel began working as a private tutor for middle-class families, first in Bern and, later, in Frankfurt. During this period, Hegel widely read on a variety of philosophical topics, as well as on issues relevant to social studies, politics, economics, and political economy. He discovered Kant’s ethical writings and grew critical of some abstract discussions presented there. He also produced short essays on Christianity, the study of religion, and some social themes. All this time he maintained extensive correspondence with Schelling and Hölderlin, both of whom grew prominent within German philosophy. The three friends are reported to have written a short fragment that came to be known as The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism (1796). While the question of the fragment’s authorship has not been settled, the very existence of this joint work and its topic may help to illustrate how abreast the friends kept of German speculation. Hölderlin’s enthusiasm about Fichte, whom he met in Jena, influenced Hegel tremendously, sparking in him an interest in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. Just two years after Hegel moved to Frankfurt his father died; he used the modest sum inherited from his father to advance his academic career at the University of Jena. In the 1790s, the University of Jena had become a center of Kantian philosophy, mainly due to Karl L. Reinhold and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the first two respective occupants of the university chair in critical philosophy. Schelling began teaching at Jena in 1798; by 1800 he was regarded as the next great philosophical mind, and so was well established at the university. He extended an invitation to Hegel to join him in Jena and helped his old friend secure an unpaid position of Privatdozent. While Hegel’s first academic position was short-lived due to Napoleon’s occupation of Jena and the closure of the university in 1807, the time in Jena had a great significance for Hegel’s future career as a philosopher. In 1801, the year he began his appointment at Jena, Hegel published his first work, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy. Here he attempted to show that whereas Fichte advanced the position that Kant introduced in his Critique of Pure Reason, Schelling succeeded in completing Kant’s transcendental idealism. Hegel criticized Fichte’s idealism for being too abstractly subjective and formalistic and claimed 272

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that Schelling’s philosophy of nature overcame those weaknesses. The historical significance of this work lies in how it affords an understanding of the early development of Hegel’s dialectical method, though sketched there in very general terms. Hegel’s first years at Jena (up to 1804) involved extensive collaboration with Schelling. Their most striking joint project was the Critical Journal of Philosophy, which Hegel and Schelling published together in 1802–03. Hegel wrote several articles for it, including his famous “Faith and Knowledge” (1802). Still largely under the spell of Schelling’s new philosophy of the “absolute,” in the journal Hegel criticized Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte for spending too much effort and yet still not settling the issue of the relation between religious faith and the knowledge provided by philosophy and science. Hegel argues that philosophy must put an end to all its old conflicts with religion and science and instead shift attention to the more important task, i.e., to giving philosophy the true shape it has always sought. As Schelling left Jena in 1803 to take an academic post in Würzburg, Hegel began developing his own views. Besides reading classic and contemporary literature, he also taught logic and metaphysics, and from 1804, he lectured on his whole system, which he continually improved, redesigned, and revised. While working on his new system, Hegel’s views gained clarity, and their divergence from Schelling’s became evident. By the end of 1806, Hegel completed his first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, which would be published in 1807, after he departed Jena to Bamberg. It was a revolutionary book, not only because it was written on the eve of the German “Wars of Liberation” in response to the Napoleonic invasion. This book had tremendous and long-lasting effect on philosophical thought in the nineteenth century and beyond. Genuinely original both in its project, method and execution, this work is a study of the process of mind’s progress from its immediate awareness to highly elaborate scientific philosophy. The Preface to the Phenomenology, all by itself, is viewed as one of Hegel’s major philosophical achievements and a key text in the history of philosophy. Written after the rest of the work was completed, the Preface offers a concise account of Hegel’s philosophical method, clearly differentiating it from the methods of all preceding philosophical programs, including that of German idealists. When Schelling read the book, he immediately realized that criticisms in the Preface were aimed not only at Kant and Fichte but also at him and his philosophy. Offended by Hegel’s critical remarks about his philosophy of the “absolute,” the philosophy that only a few years earlier brought him to fame in German philosophical circles, Schelling ended his friendship with Hegel. At this point, it became clear that Hegel was not a Schellengian anymore. He found his own voice and began to argue for his own distinctive position. Still, before the publication of the Phenomenology, in 1805, Hegel was promoted to a Professor Extraordinarius (irregular professor). That was a low-level lecturer appointment, but it was paid by the university. However, Hegel was able to receive his full salary only once, because the salary depended upon enrollment, and Hegel’s lectures at Jena were not well attended. Forced to leave Jena after its occupation by Napoleon’s troops and the closure of the university, Hegel had to work as an editor for the Bamberger Zeitung, a post he held in 1807–08. In October 1808, his old friend Immanuel Niethammer, then serving as Bavarian minister of education, offered him the position of rector and philosophy teacher at the Aegidien-Gymnasium (high school) in Nuremberg, where Hegel would stay until 1816. As a teacher and schoolmaster, Hegel undertook educational and school reforms then sponsored in Bavaria. Successful as an administrator and as a teacher, he produced a number of papers and essays addressing questions of schooling, education, and other related issues. 273

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In 1812, Hegel married Marie von Tucher, with whom he had three children, two of whom survived: sons Karl and Immanuel. All the while, Hegel continued refining his philosophical system; within a few years, he published the Science of Logic. Composed in three volumes (Books) published in 1812, 1813, and 1816 respectively, the work presented for the first time what became the first and paradigmatic part of Hegel’s triadic system. In the Science of Logic, Hegel sought to identify a system of categories that could adequately describe all reality, all things as they actually are, including that portion Kant labeled the realm of cognitively inaccessible things-in-themselves. Relying upon recent developments in logic, Kant tabulated twelve categories, which he called the categories of understanding and which he believed to be decisive to understanding appearances. Hegel criticized Kant’s table as limited and treating the categories as fixed and static, unsuited to capturing the actual dynamics of reality. He also accused Kant for compiling “his categories haphazardly,” without explaining how they are generated. Instead, Hegel insists that the science of logic generates its concepts internally, without borrowing any principles from outside the concepts themselves. This “power of internal generation” is dialectic. Hence Hegel’s “science of logic” is no traditional formal logic. This dialectical logic of systematic categories can, Hegel contends, describe reality absolutely. The publication of Science of Logic was received with genuine interest and enthusiasm. It brought Hegel into the spotlight, allowing him to return to academia. In 1816, he accepted a professorship in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. While teaching courses on a variety of specific philosophical topics, he also began offering a class on his own philosophical system as a whole. Following the university tradition of the time, to aid students enrolled in his course, in 1817 he published his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, an outline compendium to use at his lectures. This work eventually appeared in three editions—first in 1817; a second expanded and revised edition in 1827; and a third, further expanded edition in 1830. It is the only exposition of the Hegel’s philosophical system as a whole published by Hegel himself. The system consists of three parts. The first part is the abbreviated version of the earlier Science of Logic, here called the “Lesser Logic” or “Encyclopaedia Logic.” The application of its principles to the nature (natural reality) and consciousness in its individual and communal forms constitutes the second (Philosophy of Nature) and the third (Philosophy of Spirit) parts of the system, respectively. In 1818, having been in Heidelberg for only a year, Hegel was offered the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, previously occupied by Fichte, though vacant for four years since Fichte’s death. The time in Berlin was perhaps the most productive in Hegel’s academic career, reaching its peak between 1823 and 1827. All of this while Hegel’s published output was minimal. In addition to the two newly expanded editions of the Encyclopaedia (1827 and 1830), now three volumes instead of one, the only book he published in Berlin was his celebrated Elements of the Philosophy of Right (or the Philosophy of Right as it is usually called). Delayed by censorship for nearly a year, it appeared in 1821. In this work on moral and political philosophy, Hegel elaborated topics concisely summarized in his philosophy of objective spirit, a special section of his philosophy of spirit. In 1831, Hegel also completed a new second edition of the Science of Logic, with extensive revisions to Book 1. However, the work appeared only in 1832, a few months after Hegel’s death. All other output of this period consists in his university lectures on several topics discussed in different parts or sections of his philosophical system. The list of courses Hegel offered in 274

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Berlin is very extensive and includes lectures expanding upon virtually all parts of his already well-elaborated philosophical system. He continued developing details and expanding into areas not yet covered, such as philosophy of fine arts, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of history. During his thirteen years in Berlin Hegel taught more than sixty courses, constantly revising and adding new material to his notes, thus continuing to shape and reshape his grand philosophical system. Hegel’s lectures attracted hundreds of students from across Germany and some European countries, who eventually came under the lecturer’s influence. Despite the notorious difficulty of his philosophy and great effort required to comprehend it, in Berlin, Hegel was not only a respected philosopher but also a very popular lecturer and had no problem filling his large lecture halls to their fullest capacity. This often irritated some of his colleagues, who (like young Schopenhauer, who had just joined faculty at Berlin) could hardly find an audience, and whose auditorium remained almost empty. In 1831, after a month of lecturing on the philosophy of right, Hegel was stricken with cholera and died quickly on November 14. After his death, various versions of his lectures on philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, philosophy of aesthetics, and the history of philosophy, based upon numerous manuscripts and compiled notes of his students, were published. His friends and students also assembled a multivolume collection of Hegel’s complete works (the so-called Freundesausgabe), annotating and adding explanations to some original Hegel’s writings, most notably to the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, which in its newest version, along with Hegel’s own text and Remarks, also includes Additions gleaned from students’ notes and summaries. * * * Although Hegel had been criticized for his abstraction by subsequent thinkers, many of his writings focused on the real epistemological, moral, social, and political problems of his day. Hegel believed that all previous philosophical attempts to explain how the world is and how all things hang together failed. In his view, the philosophy that preceded him was not able to delineate properly the relation between being and thought, the discovery of which he considered the most important project of philosophy through history. Kant was the first to recognize that neither of the traditional approaches succeeded in explaining the true relationship between the human mind and objects of the real world. Responding to the challenge, he claimed that the mind is active and that objects of our experience are in part the contribution of the mind itself. However, Hegel did not find this a satisfactory answer to the challenge. He criticized Kant for failing to recognize that not only objects of perception but also the realities, which do not come before the senses, are in part linked to the activity of the mind. He rejected Kant’s thing-in-itself, which he also detected in Fichte’s not-I. In Hegel’s view, the mind should be able to know reality as it ultimately is; he argues for a kind of identity of thought and being: being is inherently structured, such structure and its worldly instantiation are intrinsically knowable; by research, inquiry, experiment, and critical assessment (in various disciplines), our intellectual activities can identify such structures and how they are instantiated in and by the world. Hence the thought finds itself when it explores reality. Hegel did not believe that objects as such, or as they are known to us, are “produced” by, or are in fact, our sensory representations. Such a doctrine cannot do justice to the dependence of finite spirit on nature. Above all, it is an empty doctrine: though it gives us information about the ontological status of 275

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objects and ideas, it says nothing about their content. This contradiction becomes a vital topic of Hegel’s philosophical program. His idealism is not restricted like those of Kant and Fichte. It is an absolute idealism, which claims absolute knowing of ultimate reality, which is nothing but intelligible structure within the (natural and social) world. Hegel rejects Kant’s view that in the process of cognition thoughts are imposed upon reality. He insists instead that thoughts (ideal-like structures, “thought-determinations,” he says) are embedded in things independently of our thinking of them. Things are self-determined unities and not united solely by the activity that thinks them. This claim has two implications: first, it implies that thoughts are as much objective as subjective—affirming the identity of thought and being central to Hegel’s philosophy; second, the claim also supports Hegel’s epistemological realism by indicating that the world is genuinely independent of our thinking and contains objective structures that can be discovered. Thus to know is not to figure out preordained thoughts; it is to disclose the intelligible structure of the world; these law-like regularities can be systematized and shown to be conceptual or rational in form. In the attempt to gain knowledge, we seek to grasp reality as it actually is—not merely as it appears to, or is experienced by, us. Hegel’s goal is to show how reality (being as such) is ultimately comprehensible in its all-inclusive totality. This quest for “absolute knowing” is the focus of Hegel’s entire system. And this is not merely because such a “system of philosophical sciences” treats a wide range of essential epistemological issues. More importantly, Hegel agues, the most accurate and complete account of absolute knowing is attainable only in the form of an organized totality of cognitions constituting itself as scientific system (Wissenschaft). This system of knowledge develops from a kind of thinking that generates its categories internally and that dialectically— through self-criticism—overcomes its own limitations at each stage. Such knowledge is not produced at any intermediate stage; it is the result of the whole process of philosophizing, which resembles a circle that presupposes its end (goal) but becomes actual only when completed (GW 9:18). Thus, the very process (coming-to-be) of cognition is necessarily an integral part of the result reached. Thus, comprehensive knowing not only involves the exploration of the possibility of absolute knowing, masterfully executed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but also includes the actual grasp of this possibility as provided by the account of thought in and for itself. This investigation of the “pure” structure of thinking Hegel undertakes in the Science of Logic. Yet knowledge results from internalization (active assimilation) of the materials of our historical experience. The philosophical account of knowledge must thus be validated in terms of thoughts’ manifold relations to natural and social givens. This is what Hegel portrays in his Encyclopaedia’s Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit. Hegel’s philosophical system is usually associated with absolute idealism. This idealism is absolute in the sense that it claims the identity of thinking and being, thought and reality. It is also absolute in that it places great importance on the notion of the Absolute making it a key entity of the system. For Hegel the concept of the Absolute is not a concept in the traditional formal-logical sense but a living reality, manifest as Absolute Spirit. This is the absolute ground of being, which is essentially dynamic, i.e., a historical process unfolding through progressive development of increasingly complex forms of being and consciousness, ultimately giving rise to all the diversity in the world—and in our manifold social endeavors, including the various special sciences. To Hegel, the Absolute Spirit not only has a history but actually is 276

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historical development itself. This historical development is not necessarily chronological; instead, this development is logical. The logic in question is dialectical logic. Hegel’s entire philosophical system, including the evolution of the Spirit, is a dialectical progression. Viewed from the perspective of Spirit itself, this progression follows a logical structure that culminates in absolute knowing, wherein Spirit comes to know the world as identical to itself. It comes to realize that all of existence coalesces with its essence, so that there is no alienation between the ideal and the real, between the consciousness of the self and the world as such. They are one and the same; this is the teleological end of Hegel’s system. However, this process is anything but uniform and linear. Rather, it is dialectical; there is an internal drive to reach higher states of understanding and expression, a process animated by contradictions. Contradictions in thought and their overcoming impel the advancement toward realizing absolute consciousness. For Hegel, thought and the reality itself are the history of developing and overcoming these contradictions. In this sense, his philosophy attempts to systematize this very process of overcoming. Hegel’s philosophy marks both the end and zenith of German idealism. Most Continental philosophical theories, concepts and ideas prominent in the decades following Hegel’s death may be viewed as responses or reactions to Hegel’s system or to German idealism generally. Hegel’s immediate followers divided into right- and left-wing Hegelians. The right-wing Hegelians willingly attested to a more conservative interpretation of Hegel’s work, especially the compatibility of Hegelian philosophy with Christianity. The left-wing Hegelians took basically the opposite position, with many of them moving toward atheism or revolution—or both. Most notable among the left-wing Hegelians were Friedrich Feuerbach and Karl Marx. However ironic it may sound, these two thinkers became Hegel’s most consistent critics who produced the most penetrating criticism of his philosophy.

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Chronology of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Life and Works 1770

August 27: Born in Stuttgart, Prussia.

1788–93

A theology student in Tübingen (at Tübinger Stift), where he develops friendships with Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling.

1790

September: Obtains a Magister degree in Philosophy.

1793

September: Graduates from the Tübinger Stift with a certificate in theology.

1794–1801 A private tutor to families in Bern and Frankfurt (wrote early works on religious themes). 1801

Moves to Jena, where he secures an unsalaried position as Privatdozent.



August: Defends his Habilitation thesis (Habilitationsschrift).



A period of extensive collaboration with Schelling (up until 1804).



Publishes his first philosophical work, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy.

1802–03

Publishes (with Schelling) the Critical Journal of Philosophy; among articles published there are Hegel’s essay, “Faith and Knowledge” and “On the Way of Treating Natural Right Scientifically.”

1807 Finishes Phenomenology of Spirit at the eve of the Jena occupation by Napoleon’s troops. 1807–08

Editor-in-chief of the Bamberger Zeitung, a newspaper in Bamberg.

1808–16

Rector and philosophy teacher at the Aegidien-Gymnasium (the secondary school) in Nuremberg; undertakes successful school reforms.



Composes a series of short works (known as the Philosophical Propaedeutic) on a variety of issues of schooling and general education.

1812

September: Marries Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher.

1812–13 Publishes The Science of Logic. Part 1 (Books 1, 2). 1816

Completes and publishes Science of Logic, Part 2 (Book 3).



Appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg.

1817 Publishes Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (1st ed., in one volume), to be used as a text in his lectures at Heidelberg. 1818

Accepts chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin, previously occupied by Fichte and remained vacant since the thinker’s death in 1814.

1821 Publishes Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the book completed the previous year.

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1827

The second edition of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, revised and expanded to three volumes.

1830

Third, further revised, edition of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences; the book comes out in 1831.

1831

Prepares the Science of Logic, 2nd ed., with extensive revisions to Book 1 (published in 1832).



November 14: Death from cholera.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Hegel’s Writings A.1.  German Academic Edition

Hegel, G. W. F. 1968ff. Gesammelte Werke, edited by the Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag [Abbreviated as GW and cited by volume number: page number]. Hegel, G. W. F. 1971. Werke in zwanzig Bänden, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Hegel, G. W. F. 1983ff. Vorlesungen: Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte, edited by Pierre Garniron and Walter Jaeschke. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. A.2.  In English (Selected Key Texts)

Hegel, G. W. F. 2007a. [Hegel’s] Philosophy of Mind, translated from the 1830 edition, together with the Zusätze by William Wallace and Arnold V. Miller, with Revisions and Commentary by Michael J. Inwood. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2007b. Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, 1827–8, translated with an Introduction by Robert R. Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2007–08. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols., edited by Peter C. Hodgson, translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with the assistance of H. S. Harris. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2009. Heidelberg Writings, edited and translated by Brady Bowman and Allen Speight. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2010a. The Science of Logic, translated by George di Giovanni. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2010b. Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part 1: Logic, translated and edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2011. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Volume 1: Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822–3, edited and translated by Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson with the assistance of William G. Geuss. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2018. Phenomenology of Spirit, edited and translated by Terry Pinkard and Michael Bauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. B.  Selected Commentaries

Althaus, H. 2000. Hegel: An Intellectual Biography, translated by Michael Tarsh. Cambridge: Polity Press. Baur, M. (ed.). 2014. G.W.F. Hegel: Key Concepts. Abingdon: Routledge. Beiser, F. C. (ed.). 1993. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beiser, F. C. 2005. Hegel. New York and London: Routledge. Beiser, F. C. 2008. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth Century Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Beiser, F. C. 2014. After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bykova, M. F. (ed.). 2019. Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. A Critical Guide. London: Cambridge. Bykova, M. F. and K. R. Westphal (eds.). 2019. The Palgrave Hegel Handbook. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Burbidge, J. 2013. Historical Dictionary of Hegelian Philosophy, 2nd ed. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Comay, R. 2010. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press. De Laurentiis, A., and J. Edwards (eds.). 2013. The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel. London: Continuum Press. Deligiorgi, K. 2006. Hegel: New Direction. Bucks: Acumen. Honneth, A. 2010. The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory, translated by L. Lob. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Houlgate, S. 2005a. An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Houlgate, S. 2005b. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Houlgate, S., and M. Baur (eds.). 2011. A Companion to Hegel. Oxford: Blackwell. Ikäheimo, H., and A. Laitinen (eds.). 2011. Recognition and Social Ontology. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Inwood, M. 1992. A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell. Jaeschke, W. 2010. Hegel Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Schule, 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Melzler. Lewis, T. A. 2011. Religion, Modernity and Politics in Hegel. New York: Oxford University Press. Longuenesse, B. 2007. Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics, translated by Nicole J. Simek. New York: Cambridge University Press. Moggach, D. (ed.). 2006. The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moggach, D. (ed.). 2011. Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Moyar, D. 2011. Hegel’s Conscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moyar, D., and M. Quante (eds.). 2008. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neuhouser, F. 2000. Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nuzzo, A. (ed.). 2013. Hegel on Religion and Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pinkard, T. 2000. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinkard, T. 2012. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Pinkard, T. 2017. Does History Make Sence? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pippin, R. 2008. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, R. 2010. Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Redding, P. 1996. Hegel’s Hermeneutics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sedgwick, S. 2012. Hegel’s Critique of Kant: From Dichotomy to Identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Siep, L. 2014. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, R. (ed.). 1993. G.W.F. Hegel: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. London: Routledge. Stern, R. 2002. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit. London: Routledge. (2nd ed., 2013) Stern, R. 2009. Hegelian Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, D. 2013. Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit: Imaginative Transformation and Ethical Action in Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press. Westphal, K. R. 2003. Hegel’s Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. Westphal, K. R. (ed.). 2009. The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Blackwell. Westphal, K. R. 2020. Hegel’s Civic Republicanism. Integrating Natural Law with Kant’s Moral Constructivism. London: Routledge. Williams, R. R. 2012. Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche. New York: Oxford University Press. Wood, A. W. 1990. Hegel’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yeomans, C. 2012. Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency. New York: Oxford University Press.

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FROM PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT (1807) *

INTRODUCTION 73. It is a natural assumption that in philosophy, before we start to deal with its proper subject matter, viz. the actual cognition of what truly is, one must first of all come to an understanding about cognition, which is regarded either as the instrument to get hold of the Absolute, or as the medium through which one discovers it. […] For, if cognition is the instrument for getting hold of absolute being, it is obvious that the use of an instrument on a thing certainly does not let it be what it is for itself, but rather sets out to reshape and alter it. If, on the other hand, cognition is not an instrument of our activity but a more or less passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then again we do not receive the truth as it is in itself, but only as it exists through and in this medium. Either way we employ a means which immediately brings about the opposite of its own end; or rather, what is really absurd is that we should make use of a means at all. It would seem, to be sure, that this evil could be remedied through an acquaintance with the way in which the instrument works; for this would enable us to eliminate from the representation of the Absolute which we have gained through it whatever is due to the instrument, and thus get the truth in its purity. But this ‘improvement’ would in fact only bring us back to where we were before. If we remove from a reshaped thing what the instrument has done to it, then the thing—here the Absolute—becomes for us exactly what it was before this [accordingly] superfluous effort. On the other hand, if the Absolute is supposed merely to be brought nearer to us through this instrument, without anything in it being altered, like a bird caught by a lime-twig, it would surely laugh our little ruse to scorn, if it were not with us, in and for itself, all along, and of its own volition. […] Or, if by testing cognition, which we conceive of as a medium, we get to know the law of its refraction, it is again useless to subtract this from the end result. For it is not the refraction of the ray, but the ray itself whereby truth reaches us, that is cognition; and if this were removed, all that would be indicated would be a pure direction or a blank space. 74. Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself? Indeed, this fear takes something—a great deal in fact—for granted as truth, supporting its scruples and inferences on what is itself in need of prior scrutiny to see if it is true. To be specific, it takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition.

From G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by Arnold V. Miller with Analysis of the Text and Foreword by John N. Findlay, Oxford University Press, 1977, 46–53, 111–18. *

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[…] 76. Instead of troubling ourselves with such useless ideas and locutions about cognition as ‘an instrument for getting hold of the Absolute’, or as ‘a medium through which we view the truth,’ […] we could reject them out of hand as adventitious and arbitrary, and the words associated with them like ‘absolute’, ‘cognition’, ‘objective’ and ‘subjective.’ […] Science, just because it comes on the scene, is itself an appearance: in coming on the scene it is not yet Science in its developed and unfolded truth. […] Science must liberate itself from this semblance, and it can do so only by turning against it. For, when confronted with a knowledge that is without truth, Science can neither merely reject it as an ordinary way of looking at things, while assuring us that its Science is a quite different sort of cognition for which that ordinary knowledge is of no account whatever; nor can it appeal to the vulgar view for the intimations it gives us of something better to come. By the former assurance, Science would be declaring its power to lie simply in its being; but the untrue knowledge likewise appeals to the fact that it is, and assures us that for it Science is of no account. One bare assurance is worth just as much as another. […] It is for this reason that an exposition of how knowledge makes its appearance will here be undertaken. 77. […] Because it has only phenomenal knowledge for its object, this exposition seems not to be Science, free and self-moving in its own peculiar shape; yet from this standpoint it can be regarded as the path of the natural consciousness which presses forward to true knowledge; or as the way of the Soul which journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit, and achieve finally, through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself. 78. Natural consciousness will show itself to be only the Notion of knowledge, or in other words, not to be real knowledge. But since it directly takes itself to be real knowledge, this path has a negative significance for it, and what is in fact the realization of the Notion, counts for it rather as the loss of its own self; for it does lose its truth on this path. The road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair. […] This thoroughgoing scepticism is also not the scepticism with which an earnest zeal for truth and Science fancies it has prepared and equipped itself in their service: the resolve, in Science, not to give oneself over to the thoughts of others, upon mere authority, but to examine everything for oneself and follow only one’s own conviction, or better still, to produce everything oneself, and accept only one’s own deed as what is true. The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along this road is, in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science. […] The scepticism that is directed against the whole range of phenomenal consciousness, on the other hand, renders the Spirit for the first time competent to examine what truth is. For it brings about a state of despair about all the so-called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions, regardless of whether they are called one’s own or someone else’s, ideas with which the consciousness that sets about the examination [of truth] straight away is still filled and hampered. […] 80. But the goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion. Hence the progress towards this goal is also unhalting, and short of it no satisfaction is to be found at any of the stations on the way. 284

From Phenomenology of Spirit

Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence; but it is driven beyond it by something else, and this uprooting entails its death. Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Notion of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself. […] 81. In addition to these preliminary general remarks about the manner and the necessity of the progression, it may be useful to say something about the method of carrying out the inquiry. If this exposition is viewed as a way of relating Science to phenomenal knowledge, and as an investigation and examination of the reality of cognition, it would seem that it cannot take place without some presupposition which can serve as its underlying criterion. […] But here, where Science has just begun to come on the scene, neither Science nor anything else has yet justified itself as the essence or the in-itself; and without something of the sort it seems that no examination can take place. 82. This contradiction and its removal will become more definite if we call to mind the abstract determinations of truth and knowledge as they occur in consciousness. Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it, or, as it is said, this something exists for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating, or of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing. But we distinguish this being-foranother from being-in-itself; whatever is related to knowledge or knowing is also distinguished from it, and posited as existing outside of this relationship; this being-in-itself is called truth. […] 83. […] If we inquire into the truth of knowledge, it seems that we are asking what knowledge is in itself. Yet in this inquiry knowledge is our object, something that exists for us; and the in-itself that would supposedly result from it would rather be the being of knowledge for us. What we asserted to be its essence would be not so much its truth but rather just our knowledge of it. […] 84. But the dissociation, or this semblance of dissociation and presupposition, is overcome by the nature of the object we are investigating. Consciousness provides its own criterion from within itself, so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself; for the distinction made above falls within it. […] But if we call the essence or in-itself of the object the Notion, and on the other hand understand by the object the Notion itself as object, viz. as it exists for an other, then the examination consists in seeing whether the object corresponds to its Notion. It is evident, of course, that the two procedures are the same. But the essential point to bear in mind throughout the whole investigation is that these two moments, ‘Notion’ and ‘object’, ‘being-for-another’ and ‘being-in-itself ’, both fall within that knowledge which we are investigating. Consequently, we do not need to import criteria, or to make use of our own bright ideas and thoughts during the course of the inquiry; it is precisely when we leave these aside that we succeed in contemplating the matter in hand as it is in and for itself. 85. But not only is a contribution by us superfluous, since Notion and object, the criterion and what is to be tested, are present in consciousness itself, but we are also spared the trouble of comparing the two and really testing them, so that, since what consciousness examines is its own self, all that is left for us to do is simply to look on. For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth. Since both are for the same consciousness, this consciousness is itself their comparison; it is for this same consciousness to know whether its knowledge of the object corresponds to the object or not. […] Hence it 285

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comes to pass for consciousness that what it previously took to be the in-itself is not an initself, or that it was only an in-itself, for consciousness. Since consciousness thus finds that its knowledge does not correspond to its object, the object itself does not stand the test; in other words, the criterion for testing is altered when that for which it was to have been the criterion fails to pass the test; and the testing is not only a testing of what we know, but also a testing of the criterion of what knowing is. 86. Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience [Erfahrung]. […] 87. This exposition of the course of experience contains a moment in virtue of which it does not seem to agree with what is ordinarily understood by experience. This is the moment of transition from the first object and the knowledge of it, to the other object, which experience is said to be about. […] From the present viewpoint, however, the new object shows itself to have come about through a reversal of consciousness itself. This way of looking at the matter is something contributed by us, by means of which the succession of experiences through which consciousness passes is raised into ascientific progression—but it is not known to the consciousness that we are observing. […] 88. […] The way to Science is itself already Science, and hence, in virtue of its content, is the Science of the experience of consciousness. 89. The experience of itself which consciousness goes through can, in accordance with its Notion, comprehend nothing less than the entire system of consciousness, or the entire realm of the truth of Spirit. For this reason, the moments of this truth are exhibited in their own proper determinateness, viz. as being not abstract moments, but as they are for consciousness, or as consciousness itself stands forth in its relation to them. Thus the moments of the whole are patterns of consciousness. […] When consciousness itself grasps this its own essence, it will signify the nature of absolute knowledge itself.

A. Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage 178. Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged. […] 179. Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self. 180. It must supersede this otherness of itself. This is the supersession of the first ambiguity, and is therefore itself a second ambiguity. First, it must proceed to supersede the other independent being in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being; secondly, in so doing it proceeds to supersede its own self, for this other is itself. 181. This ambiguous supersession of its ambiguous otherness is equally an ambiguous return into itself. […] 182. Now, this movement of self-consciousness in relation to another self-consciousness has in this way been represented as the action of one self-consciousness, but this action of 286

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the one has itself the double significance of being both its own action and the action of the other as well. For the other is equally independent and self-contained, and there is nothing in it of which it is not itself the origin. The first does not have the object before it merely as it exists primarily for desire, but as something that has an independent existence of its own, which, therefore, it cannot utilize for its own purposes, if that object does not of its own accord do what the first does to it. Thus the movement is simply the double movement of the two self-consciousnesses. Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. […] 184. In this movement we see repeated the process which presented itself as the play of Forces, but repeated now in consciousness. What in that process was for us, is true here of the extremes themselves. The middle term is self-consciousness which splits into the extremes; and each extreme is this exchanging of its own determinateness and an absolute transition into the opposite. Although, as consciousness, it does indeed come out of itself, yet, though out of itself, it is at the same time kept back within itself, is for itself, and the self outside it, is for it. […] Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another. […] 186. Self-consciousness is, to begin with, simple being-for-self, self-equal through the exclusion from itself of everything else. For it, its essence and absolute object is ‘I’; and in this immediacy, or in this [mere] being, of its being-for-self, it is an individual. What is ‘other’ for it is an unessential, negatively characterized object. But the ‘other’ is also a self-consciousness; one individual is confronted by another individual. […] Each is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self-certainty still has no truth. For it would have truth only if its own being-for-self had confronted it as an independent object, or, what is the same thing, if the object had presented itself as this pure self-certainty. But according to the Notion of recognition this is possible only when each is for the other what the other is for it, only when each in its own self through its own action, and again through the action of the other, achieves this pure abstraction of being-for-self. 187. The presentation of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life. This presentation is a twofold action: action on the part of the other, and action on its own part. In so far as it is the action of the other, each seeks the death of the other. But in doing so, the second kind of action, action on its own part, is also involved; for the former involves the staking of its own life. Thus the relation of the two self-conscious individuals is such that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle. They must engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for themselves to truth, both in the case of the other and in their own case. And it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won. […] The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent selfconsciousness. […] 287

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188. This trial by death, however, does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally. […] Death certainly shows that each staked his life and held it of no account, both in himself and in the other; but that is not for those who survived this struggle. They put an end to their consciousness in its alien setting of natural existence, that is to say, they put an end to themselves, and are done away with as extremes wanting to be for themselves, or to have an existence of their own. […] 189. In this experience, self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as pure selfconsciousness. In immediate self-consciousness the simple ‘I’ is absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment lasting independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself but for another, i.e. is a merely immediate consciousness, or consciousness in the form of thinghood. Both moments are essential. Since to begin with they are unequal and opposed, and their reflection into a unity has not yet been achieved, they exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord, the other is bondsman. 190. The lord is the consciousness that exists for itself, but no longer merely the Notion of such a consciousness. Rather, it is a consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through another consciousness, i.e. through a consciousness whose nature it is to be bound up with an existence that is independent, or thinghood in general. The lord puts himself into relation with both of these moments, to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness for which thinghood is the essential characteristic. […] The lord relates himself mediately to the bondsman through a being [a thing] that is independent, for it is just this which holds the bondsman in bondage; it is his chain from which he could not break free in the struggle, thus proving himself to be dependent, to possess his independence in thinghood. […] The bondsman, qua self-consciousness in general, also relates himself negatively to the thing, and takes away its independence. […] What desire failed to achieve, he succeeds in doing, viz. to have done with the thing altogether, and to achieve satisfaction in the enjoyment of it. Desire failed to do this because of the thing’s independence; but the lord, who has interposed the bondsman between it and himself, takes to himself only the dependent aspect of the thing and has the pure enjoyment of it. The aspect of its independence he leaves to the bondsman, who works on it. 191. In both of these moments the lord achieves his recognition through another consciousness. […] But for recognition proper the moment is lacking, that what the lord does to the other he also does to himself, and what the bondsman does to himself he should also do to the other. The outcome is a recognition that is one-sided and unequal. 192. In this recognition the unessential consciousness is for the lord the object, which constitutes the truth of his certainty of himself. But it is clear that this object does not correspond to its Notion, but rather that the object in which the lord has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness. What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality the unessential consciousness and its unessential action. 193. The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the servile consciousness of the bondsman. […] But just as lordship showed that its essential nature is the reverse of what 288

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it wants to be, so too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it immediately is; as a consciousness forced back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness. 194. We have seen what servitude is only in relation to lordship. But it is a self-consciousness, and we have now to consider what as such it is in and for itself. To begin with, servitude has the lord for its essential reality; hence the truth for it is the independent consciousness that is for itself. However, servitude is not yet aware that this truth is implicit in it. But it does in fact contain within itself this truth of pure negativity and being-for-self, for it has experienced this its own essential nature. […] In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness. This moment of pure being-for-self is also explicit for the bondsman, for in the lord it exists for him as his object. […] Through his service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it. 195. However, the feeling of absolute power both in general, and in the particular form of service, is only implicitly this dissolution, and although the fear of the lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom, consciousness is not therein aware that it is a being-for-self. Through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is. […] Work […] is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence. […] It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence. 196. But the formative activity has not only this positive significance that in it the pure being-for-self of the servile consciousness acquires an existence; it also has, in contrast with its first moment, the negative significance of fear. […] In the lord, the being-for-self is an ‘other’ for the bondsman, or is only for him [i.e. is not his own]; in fear, the being-for-self is present in the bondsman himself; in fashioning the thing, he becomes aware that being-for-self belongs to him, that he himself exists essentially and actually in his own right. […] Through this rediscovery of himself by himself, the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own.

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FROM ELEMENTS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT (1821) *

Preface The truth concerning right, ethics, and the state is at any rate as old as its exposition and promulgation in public laws and in public morality and religion. What more does this truth require, inasmuch as the thinking mind [Geist] is not content to possess it in this proximate manner? What it needs is to be comprehended as well, so that the content which is already rational in itself may also gain a rational form and thereby appear justified to free thinking. For such thinking does not stop at what is given, whether the latter is supported by the external positive authority of the state or of mutual agreement among human beings, or by the authority of inner feeling and the heart and by the testimony of the spirit which immediately concurs with this, but starts out from itself and thereby demands to know itself as united in its innermost being with the truth. [. . .] Since philosophy is exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the comprehension of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a world beyond which exists God knows where – or rather, of which we can very well say that we know where it exists, namely in the errors of a one-sided and empty ratiocination. In the course of the following treatise, I have remarked that even Plato’s Republic, a proverbial example of an empty ideal, is essentially the embodiment of nothing other than the nature of Greek ethics. […] But he proved his greatness of spirit by the fact that the very principle on which the distinctive character of his Idea turns is the pivot on which the impending world revolution turned. What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational. This conviction is shared by every ingenuous consciousness as well as by philosophy, and the latter takes it as its point of departure in considering both the spiritual and the natural universe. If reflection, feeling, or whatever form the subjective consciousness may assume regards the present as vain and looks beyond it in a spirit of superior knowledge, it finds itself in a vain position; and since it has actuality only in the present, it is itself mere vanity. Conversely, if the Idea is seen as ‘only an idea’, a representation [Vorstellung] in the realm of opinion, philosophy affords the opposite insight that nothing is actual except the Idea. For what matters is to recognize in the semblance of the temporal and transient the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. For since the rational, which is synonymous with the Idea, becomes actual by entering into external existence [Existenz], it emerges in an infinite wealth From G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. by Allen W. Wood, trans. by Hugh Barr Nisbet. Cambridge University Press, 1991, 9–59, 187–97. *

From Elements of the Philosophy of Right

of forms, appearances, and shapes and surrounds its core with a brightly coloured covering in which consciousness at first resides, but which only the concept can penetrate in order to find the inner pulse, and detect its continued beat even within the external shapes. [. . .] This treatise, therefore, in so far as it deals with political science, shall be nothing other than an attempt to comprehend and portray the state as an inherently rational entity. As a philosophical composition, it must distance itself as far as possible from the obligation to construct a state as it ought to be; such instruction as it may contain cannot be aimed at instructing the state on how it ought to be, but rather at showing how the state, as the ethical universe, should be recognized. [. . .] To comprehend what is is the task of philosophy, for what is is reason. As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts. [. . .] What lies between reason as self-conscious spirit and reason as present actuality, what separates the former from the latter and prevents it from finding satisfaction in it, is the fetter of some abstraction or other which has not been liberated into [the form of] the concept. To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to delight in the present – this rational insight is the reconciliation with actuality which philosophy grants to those who have received the inner call to comprehend, to preserve their subjective freedom in the realm of the substantial, and at the same time to stand with their subjective freedom not in a particular and contingent situation, but in what has being in and for itself. This is also what constitutes the more concrete sense of what was described above in more abstract terms as the unity of form and content. For form in its most concrete significance is reason as conceptual cognition, and content is reason as the substantial essence of both ethical and natural actuality; the conscious identity of the two is the philosophical Idea. [. . .] A further word on the subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state. This lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk. Introduction §1 The subject matter of the philosophical science of right is the Idea of right – the concept of right and its actualization. Philosophy has to do with Ideas and therefore not with what are commonly described as mere concepts. On the contrary, it shows that the latter are one-sided and lacking in 291

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truth, and that it is the concept alone, […] which has actuality, and in such a way that it gives actuality to itself. [. . .] §2 The science of right is a part of philosophy. It has therefore to develop the Idea, which is the reason within an object [Gegenstand], out of the concept; or what comes to the same thing, it must observe the proper immanent development of the thing [Sache] itself. As a part [of philosophy], it has a determinate starting point, which is the result and truth of what preceded it, and what preceded it is the so-called proof of that result. [. . .] §4 The basis [Boden] of right is the realm of spirit in general and its precise location and point of departure is the will; the will is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance and destiny [Bestimmung] and the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom, the world of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature. Addition. The freedom of the will can best be explained by reference to physical nature. For freedom is just as much a basic determination of the will as weight is a basic determination of bodies. If matter is described as heavy, one might think that this predicate is merely contingent; but this is not so, for nothing in matter is weightless: on the contrary, matter is weight itself. Heaviness constitutes the body and is the body. It is just the same with freedom and the will, for that which is free is the will. Will without freedom is an empty word, just as freedom is actual only as will or as subject. But as for the connection between the will and thought, the following remarks are necessary. Spirit is thought in general, and the human being is distinguished from the animal by thought. But it must not be imagined [sich vorstellen] that a human being thinks on the one hand and wills on the other, and that he has thought in one pocket and volition in the other, for this would be an empty representation [Vorstellung]. The distinction between thought and will is simply that between theoretical and practical attitudes. But they are not two separate faculties; on the contrary, the will is a particular way of thinking – thinking translating itself into existence [Dasein], thinking as the drive to give itself existence. This distinction between thought and will can be expressed as follows. When I think of an object [Gegenstand], I make it into a thought and deprive it of its sensuous quality; I make it into something which is essentially and immediately mine. For it is only when I think that I am with myself [bei mir], and it is only by comprehending it that I can penetrate an object; it then no longer stands opposed to me, and I have deprived it of that quality of its own which it had for itself in opposition to me. […] Every representation [Vorstellung] is a generalization, and this is inherent in thought. To generalize something means to think it. ‘I’ is thought and likewise the universal. When I say ‘I’, I leave out of account every particularity such as my character, temperament, knowledge [Kenntnisse], and age. ‘I’ is totally empty; it is merely a point – simple, yet active in this simplicity. The colourful canvas of the world is before me; I stand opposed to it and in this [theoretical] attitude I overcome [aufhebe] its opposition and make its content my own. ‘I’ is at home in the world when it knows it,

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and even more so when it has comprehended it. So much for the theoretical attitude. The practical attitude, on the other hand, begins with thought, with the ‘I’ itself, and seems at first to be opposed [to the world] because it immediately sets up a separation. In so far as I am practical or active, i.e. in so far as I act, I determine myself, and to determine myself means precisely to posit a difference. But these differences which I posit arc nevertheless also mine, the determinations apply to me, and the ends to which I am impelled belong to me. Now even if I let go of these determinations and differences, i.e. if I posit them in the so-called external world, they still remain mine: they are what I have done or made, and they bear the imprint of my mind [Geist]. This, then, is the distinction between theoretical and practical attitudes; the relationship between them must now be described. The theoretical is essentially contained within the practical; the idea [Vorstellung] that the two are separate must be rejected, for one cannot have a will without intelligence. On the contrary, the will contains the theoretical within itself. The will determines itself, and this determination is primarily of an inward nature, for what I will I represent to myself as my object [Gegenstand]. The animal acts by instinct, it is impelled by something inward and is therefore also practical; but it has no will, because it does not represent to itself what it desires. It is equally impossible to adopt a theoretical attitude or to think without a will, for in thinking we are necessarily active. The content of what is thought certainly takes on the form of being; but this being is something mediated, something posited by our activity. These distinct attitudes arc therefore inseparable: they are one and the same thing, and both moments can be found in every activity, of thinking and willing alike. [. . .] §5 The will contains (α) the element of pure indeterminacy or of the ‘I’s pure reflection into itself, in which every limitation, every content, whether present immediately through nature, through needs, desires, and drives, or given and determined in some other way, is dissolved; this is the limitless infinity of absolute abstraction or universality, the pure thinking of oneself. [. . .] Addition. It is inherent in this element of the will that I am able to free myself from everything, to renounce all ends, and to abstract from everything. The human being alone is able to abandon all things, even his own life: he can commit suicide. The animal cannot do this; it always remains only negative, in a determination which is alien to it and to which it merely grows accustomed. The human being is pure thinking of himself, and only in thinking is he this power to give himself universality, that is, to extinguish all particularity, all determinacy. This negative freedom or freedom of the understanding is one-sided, but this one-sidedness always contains within itself an essential determination and should therefore not be dismissed; but the defect of the understanding is that it treats a one-sided determination as unique and elevates it to supreme status. […] This form [of freedom] appears more concretely in the active fanaticism of both political and religious life. An example of this was the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, during which all differences of talents and authority were supposed to be cancelled out [aufgehoben]. This was a time of trembling and quaking and of intolerance towards everything particular. [. . .]

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§6 (β) In the same way, ‘I’ is the transition from undifferentiated indeterminacy to differentiation, determination, and the positing of a determinacy as a content and object. – This content may further be given by nature, or generated by the concept of spirit. Through this positing of itself as something determinate, ‘I’ steps into existence [Dasein] in general – the absolute moment of the finitude or particularization of the ‘I’. This second moment of determination is just as much negativity and cancellation [Aufheben] as the first – for it is the cancellation of the first abstract negativity. – Just as the particular is in general contained within the universal, so in consequence is this second moment already contained within the first and is merely a positing of what the first already is in itself. [. . .] Addition. This second moment appears as the opposing one. It is to be apprehended in its universal mode: it belongs to freedom, but does not constitute the whole of freedom. The ‘I’ here emerges from undifferentiated indeterminacy to become differentiated, to posit something determinate as its content and object [Gegenstand]. I do not merely will – I will something. [. . .] §7 (γ) The will is the unity of both these moments – particularity reflected into itself and thereby restored to universality. It is individuality [Einzelheit], the self-determination of the ‘I’, in that it posits itself as the negative of itself, that is, as determinate and limited, and at the same time remains with itself [bei sich], that is, in its identity with itself and universality; and in this determination, it joins together with itself alone. […] This is the freedom of the will, which constitutes the concept or substantiality of the will, its gravity, just as gravity constitutes the substantiality of a body. [. . .] Addition. What is properly called the will contains both the preceding moments. ‘I’ as such is primarily pure activity, the universal which is with itself [bei sich]; but this universal determines itself, and to that extent is no longer with itself but posits itself as an other and ceases to be the universal. Then the third moment is that ‘I’ is with itself in its limitation, in this other; as it determines itself, it nevertheless still remains with itself and does not cease to hold fast to the universal. This, then, is the concrete concept of freedom, whereas the two previous moments have been found to be thoroughly abstract and one-sided. […] Freedom is to will something determinate, yet to be with oneself [bei sich] in this determinacy and to return once more to the universal. [. . .] § 10 This content, or the distinct determination of the will, is primarily immediate. Thus, the will is free only in itself or for us, or it is in general the will in its concept. Only when the will has itself as its object [Gegenstand] is it for itself what it is in itself. […] 294

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Addition. The will which is a will only in accordance with its concept is free in itself but at the same time unfree, for it would be truly free only as a truly determinate content; in the latter case, it is free for itself, has freedom as its object, and is freedom. Whatever is still only in accordance with its concept, whatever is merely in itself, is only immediate, only natural. We are also familiar with this in representational thought [in der Vorstellung]. The child is in itself a human being; it has reason only in itself, it is only the potentiality of reason and freedom, and is therefore free only in accordance with its concept. Now what exists as yet only in itself does not exist in its actuality. The human being who is rational in himself must work through the process of self-production both by going out of himself and by educating himself inwardly, in order that he may also become rational for himself. [. . .] § 30 Right is something utterly sacred, for the simple reason that it is the existence [Dasein] of the absolute concept, of self-conscious freedom.–But the formalism of right–and also of duty– arises out of the different stages in the development of the concept of freedom. In opposition to the more formal, i.e. more abstract and hence more limited kind of right, that sphere and stage of the spirit in which the spirit has determined and actualized within itself the further moments contained in its Idea possesses a higher right, for it is the more concrete sphere, richer within itself and more truly universal. Each stage in the development of the Idea of freedom has its distinctive right, because it is the existence of freedom in one of its own determinations. When we speak of the opposition between morality or ethics and right, the right in question is merely the initial and formal right of abstract personality. Morality, ethics, and the interest of the state–each of these is a distinct variety of right, because each of them gives determinate shape and existence to freedom. They can come into collision only in so far as they are all in equal measure rights; if the moral point of view of the spirit were not also a right–i.e. freedom in one of its forms–it could not possibly come into collision with the right of personality or with any other right, because every right embodies the concept of freedom, the highest determination of spirit, in relation to which everything else is without substance. But a collision also contains this further moment: it imposes a limitation whereby one right is subordinated to another; only the right of the world spirit is absolute in an unlimited sense. [. . .] Part Three Ethical Life § 142 Ethical life is the Idea of freedom as the living good which has its knowledge and volition in self-consciousness, and its actuality through self-conscious action. Similarly, it is in ethical being that self-consciousness has its motivating end and a foundation which has being in 295

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and for itself. Ethical life is accordingly the concept of freedom which has become the existing [vorhandenen] world and the nature of self-consciousness. § 143 Since this unity of the concept of the will with its existence [Dasein], i.e. with the particular will, is knowledge, consciousness of the difference between these moments of the Idea is present, but in such a way that each of these moments has become for itself the totality of the Idea and has the latter as its foundation and content. [. . .] § 145 The fact that the ethical sphere is the system of these determinations of the Idea constitutes its rationality. In this way, the ethical sphere is freedom, or the will which has being in and for itself as objectivity, as a circle of necessity whose moments are the ethical powers which govern the lives of individuals. In these individuals–who are accidental to them–these powers have their representation [Vorstellung], phenomenal shape [erscheinende Gestalt], and actuality. […] § 151 But if it is simply identical with the actuality of individuals, the ethical [das Sittliche], as their general mode of behaviour, appears as custom [Sitte]; and the habit of the ethical appears as a second nature which takes the place of the original and purely natural will and is the allpervading soul, significance, and actuality of individual existence [Dasein]. It is spirit living and present as a world, and only thus does the substance of spirit begin to exist as spirit. [. . .] § 152 In this way, ethical substantiality has attained its right, and the latter has attained validity. […] § 153 The right of individuals to their subjective determination to freedom is fulfilled in so far as they belong to ethical actuality; for their certainty of their own freedom has its truth in such objectivity, and it is in the ethical realm that they actually possess their own essence and their inner universality. […] Addition. Those pedagogical experiments in removing people from the ordinary life of the present and bringing them up in the country (cf. Rousseau’s Emile) have been futile, because one cannot successfully isolate people from the laws of the world. Even if young people have to be educated in solitude, no one should imagine that the breath of the spiritual world will not eventually find its way into this solitude and that the power of the world spirit is too weak for it to gain control of such remote regions. The individual attains his right only by becoming the citizen of a good state.

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§ 154 The right of individuals to their particularity is likewise contained in ethical substantiality, for particularity is the mode of outward appearance in which the ethical exists. [. . .] § 156 The ethical substance, as containing self-consciousness which has being for itself and is united with its concept, is the actual spirit of a family and a people. Addition. The ethical is not abstract like the good, but is intensely actual. The spirit has actuality, and the individuals are its accidents. Thus, there are always only two possible viewpoints in the ethical realm: either one starts from substantiality, or one proceeds atomistically and moves upward from the basis of individuality [Einzelheit]. This latter viewpoint excludes spirit, because it leads only to an aggregation, whereas spirit is not something individual [nichts Einzelnes] but the unity of the individual and the universal.

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FROM THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES IN BASIC OUTLINE (1830) *

INTRODUCTION §1 Philosophy lacks the advantage, which the other sciences enjoy, of being able to presuppose its ob-jects as given immediately by representation. And, with regard to its beginning and advance, it cannot presuppose the method of cognition as one that is already accepted. It is true that it does, initially, have its ob-jects in common with religion. Both of them have the truth in the highest sense of the word as their ob-ject, for both hold that God and God alone is the truth. Both of them also go on to deal with the realm of the finite, with nature and the human spirit, and with their relation to each other and to God as to their truth. Hence, philosophy can, of course, presuppose some familiarity with its ob-jects; in fact it must presuppose this, as well as an interest in these ob-jects. The reason is that in the order of time consciousness produces representations of ob-jects before it produces concepts of them; and that the thinking spirit only advances to thinking cognition and comprehension by going through representation and by converting itself to it. But when we consider something in thought, we soon become aware that thoughtful consideration implies the requirement that the necessity of its content should be shown, and the very being, as well as the determinations, of its ob-jects should be proved. As a result, the familiarity with these ob-jects that was mentioned above is seen to be insufficient, and making—or granting the validity of—presuppositions and assurances, is seen to be inadmissible. The difficulty of making a beginning arises immediately, because a beginning (being something immediate) does make a presupposition or, rather, it is itself just that. §2 To begin with, philosophy can be determined in general terms as a thinking consideration of ob-jects. But if it is correct (as indeed it is), that the human being distinguishes itself from the animals by thinking, then everything human is human because it is brought about through thinking, and for that reason alone. Now, since philosophy is a peculiar mode of thinking—a mode by which thinking becomes cognition, and conceptually comprehensive cognition at that—philosophical thinking will also be diverse from the thinking that is active in everything

From G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic (with the Züsatze), a new translation with Introduction and notes by T.E. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris, Hackett Publishing, 1991, 24–42. *

From The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

human and brings about the very humanity of what is human, even though it is also identical with this thinking, and in-itself there is only One thinking. This distinction is connected with the fact that the human import of consciousness, which is based on thinking, does not appear in the form of thought straightaway, but as feeling, intuition, representation—which are forms that have to be distinguished from thinking itself as form. […] §3 […] The content that fills our consciousness is what makes up the determinacy of our feelings, intuitions, images, and representations, of our purposes, duties, etc., and of our thoughts and concepts. Hence feeling, intuition, image, etc., are the forms of this content, a content that remains one and the same, whether it be felt, intuited, represented, or willed, and whether it be only felt, or felt, intuited, etc., with an admixture of thought, or whether it is thought quite without any admixture. In any one of these forms or in a mixture of several of them, the content is ob-ject of our consciousness. But in this ob-jectivity the determinacies of these forms join themselves onto the content; with the result that each of these forms seems to give rise to a particular ob-ject, and that what is in-itself the same can look like a diverse content. Since the determinacies of feeling, of intuition, of desire, of willing, etc., are generally called representations, inasmuch as we have knowledge of them, it can be said in general that philosophy puts thoughts and categories, but more precisely concepts, in the place of representations. Representations in general [or “notions”] can be regarded as metaphors of thoughts and concepts. But that we have these notions does not mean that we are aware of their significance for thinking, i.e., that we have the thoughts and concepts of them. Conversely, it is one thing to have thoughts and concepts, and another to know what the representations, intuitions, and feelings are that correspond to them.—One side of what is called the unintelligibility of philosophy is related to this. The difficulty lies partly in the inability (which in-itself is just a lack of practice) to think abstractly, i.e., to hold on to pure thoughts and to move about in them. In our ordinary consciousness thoughts are affected by and united with the sensible and spiritual material with which we are familiar; and in thinking about something, in reflecting and arguing about it, we mix feelings, intuitions, and representations with thoughts. […] The other aspect of the unintelligibility of philosophy is an impatient wish to have before us, in the mode of representation, what is in our consciousness as thought and concept. […] We long for an ordinary notion, one that we are already familiar with. […] §4 In its relation to our ordinary consciousness, philosophy would first have to show the need for its peculiar mode of cognition, or even to awaken this need. But in relation to the ob-jects of religion, i.e., to truth altogether, it would have to prove that we have the ability to reach their cognition on our own; and in relation to any diversity that comes to light between religious notions and its own diverging determinations, it would have to justify the latter. […] 299

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§6 It is equally important, on the other hand, that philosophy should be quite clear about the fact that its content is nothing other than the basic import that is originally produced and produces itself in the domain of the living spirit, the content that is made into the world, the outer and inner world of consciousness; in other words, the content of philosophy is actuality. The first consciousness of this content is called experience. Within the broad realm of outer and inner thereness, a judicious consideration of the world already distinguishes that which is only appearance, transient and insignificant, from that which truly and in itself merits the name of actuality. Since philosophy is distinguished only in form from other ways of becoming conscious of this same identical import, its accord with actuality and experience is necessary. Indeed, this accord can be viewed as an outward touchstone, at least, for the truth of a philosophy; just as it has to be seen as the supreme and ultimate purpose of science to bring about the reconciliation of the reason that is conscious of itself with the reason that is, or actuality, through the cognition of this accord. In the Preface to my Philosophy of Right […] the following propositions will be found: What is rational, is actual, and what is actual, is rational. These simple propositions have seemed shocking to many and they have been attacked, even by those who are not ready to renounce the possession of philosophy, and certainly not that of religion. […] In common life people may happen to call every brainwave, error, evil, and suchlike “actual,” as well as every existence, however wilted and transient it may be. […] But when I speak of actuality, […] I distinguish it quite clearly and directly, not just from what is contingent, even though it has existence too, but also, more precisely, from being-there, from existence, and from other determinations. […] This science deals only with the Idea— and further with an actuality of which those ob-jects, institutions, and situations are only the superficial outer rind. […] §7 It is, quite generally, meditative thinking that initially contains the principle of philosophy (also in the sense of “beginning”); and now that (since the times of the Lutheran Reformation) it has once more come into bloom in its [proper] independence, the name of philosophy has been given a wider significance. This is because, right from the start, our meditative thinking did not confine itself to its merely abstract mode (as it did in the philosophical beginnings made by the Greeks), but threw itself at the same time upon the material of the world of appearance—a material that seems to be measureless. Hence, the name “philosophy” was given to all of the knowing that deals with the cognition of fixed measure and of what is universal in the sea of singular empirical data, and with what is necessary, with the laws, in the seeming disorder of the infinite mass of what is contingent. […] §8 This cognition may be satisfactory enough within its own field. But, first of all, another circle of ob-jects shows up that are not part of this field: freedom, spirit, God. The reason that these 300

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are not to be found upon that soil is not because they ought not to belong to experience. It is true that they are not experienced by the senses, but everything that is in consciousness at all is experienced. […] The reason is that these ob-jects present themselves directly as infinite with regard to their content. […] §9 Secondly, subjective reason wants further satisfaction with regard to form; this form is necessity in general (see § 1). In the kind of science mentioned above [see § 7], the universal (the genus, etc.) contained in it is not determined on its own account, nor is it intrinsically connected with what is particular; but universal and particular are mutually external and contingent, just as much as the particularities that are combined are, on their own account, external to each other and contingent. Moreover, the beginnings are immediate, found, or presupposed. In both respects, the form of necessity fails to get its due. Insofar as it aims at satisfying this need, meditative thinking is the thinking that is philosophical in the proper sense, [i.e., it is] speculative thinking. Hence, as a meditation, which in all its community with that first [empirically scientific] meditation is at the same time diverse from it, philosophical thinking has its own peculiar forms, apart from the forms that they have in common. The universal form of it is the Concept. […] What has usually been called a “concept” has to be distinguished from the Concept in the speculative sense. The assertion, repeated many thousands of times, until it became a prejudice, that the Infinite cannot be grasped through concepts, is made only in the customary, or one-sided sense. § 10 This thinking itself in the philosophical mode of cognition needs to be grasped in its necessity, as well as justified in respect of its ability to become cognizant of the absolute ob-jects. But any insight of this kind is itself philosophical cognition, and therefore it can only fall within philosophy. […] One of the main points of view in the Critical Philosophy is the following: before we embark upon the cognition of God, or of the essence of things, etc., we should first investigate our faculty of cognition itself, to see whether it is capable of achieving this. […] But the investigation of cognition cannot take place in any other way than cognitively; in the case of this so-called tool, the “investigation” of it means nothing but the cognition of it. But to want to have cognition before we have any is as absurd as the wise resolve of Scholasticus to learn to swim before he ventured into the water. Reinhold, who recognised the confusion that prevails in beginnings of this kind, has proposed as the remedy for it, that we should commence provisionally with a hypothetical and problematic philosophising, and continue with this—Heaven knows how—until somehow we happen, further along this road, to reach the original truth. When we look at it more closely, we can see that it leads to the usual procedure, namely the analysis of an empirical foundation, or of a provisional assumption that has been 301

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transformed into a definition. We should not overlook the correct consciousness involved in Reinhold’s proposal that the usual course of presuppositions and provisional statements is a hypothetical and problematic procedure. But his correct insight does not alter the way that this procedure is constituted; on the contrary, it directly expresses the inadequacy of it. § 11 The need for philosophy can be determined more precisely in the following manner. As feeling and intuition the spirit has what is sensible for its ob-ject; as fantasy, it has images; and as will, purposes, etc. But the spirit needs also, in antithesis to, or merely in distinction from these forms of its thereness and of its ob-jects, to give satisfaction to its highest inwardness, to thinking, and to make thinking into its ob-ject. In this way, spirit comes to itself, in the deepest sense of the word; for its principle, its unadulterated selfhood, is thinking. But when it goes about its business in this way, what happens is that thinking gets entangled in contradictions; that is to say, it loses itself in the fixed nonidentity between thoughts, and therefore it does not reach itself, but rather stays stuck in its counterpart [in the world of ob-jects]. The higher need goes against this result reached by a thinking that belongs to the understanding alone; it is grounded in the fact that thinking will not give up, but remains faithful to itself even in this conscious loss of its being at home with itself, “so that it may overcome,” and may accomplish in thinking itself the resolution of its own contradictions. The insight that the very nature of thinking is the dialectic, that, as understanding, it must fall into the negative of itself, into contradictions, is an aspect of capital importance in the Logic. When thinking despairs of being able to bring about, from its own resources, the resolution of the contradiction in which it has put itself, then it returns to the solutions and appeasements in which the spirit has participated in its other modes and forms. […] § 12 The coming into being of philosophy out of the need that has been mentioned has experience, the immediate and argumentative consciousness, as its starting point. With these needs as its stimulus, thinking conducts itself essentially so as to raise itself above the natural, sensible, and argumentative consciousness into its own unadulterated element; and it gives itself initially a self-distancing negative relationship to this beginning. Thus, thinking finds its first satisfaction in itself—in the Idea of the universal essence of these appearances; this Idea (the Absolute, God) can be either more or less abstract. Conversely, the experiential sciences carry with them the stimulus to vanquish the form in which the wealth of their content is offered only as something that is merely immediate and simply found, as a manifold of juxtaposition, and hence as something altogether contingent. […] […]There is a correct and more fundamental sense in which the development of philosophy is due to experience. On the one hand, the empirical sciences do not stop at the perception of single instances of appearance; but through thinking they have prepared

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the material for philosophy by finding universal determinations, genera, and laws. In this way they prepare the content of what is particular so that it can be taken up into philosophy. And, on the other hand, they contain the invitation for thinking, to advance to these concrete determinations. The assumption of this content, through which the immediacy that still clings to it, and its givenness, are sublated by thinking, is at the same time a developing of thinking out of itself. Thus, philosophy does owe its development to the empirical sciences, but it gives to their content the fully essential shape of the freedom of thinking (or of what is a priori) as well as the validation of necessity (instead of the content being warranted because it is simply found to be present, and because it is a fact of experience). In its necessity the fact becomes the presentation and imitation of the activity of thinking that is original and completely independent. § 13 In the peculiar shape of external history, the coming to be of philosophy and its development is represented as the history of this science. This shape gives the form of a contingent succession to the stages of the Idea’s development, and it gives a kind of mere diversity to the principles and their exposition in the various philosophies of these stages. But the master workman of this labour of thousands of years is the One living Spirit, whose thinking nature is to bring to consciousness what it is; and when what it is has become ob-ject in this way, it is at once raised above this, and it is inwardly a higher stage. With regard to philosophies that appear diverse, the history of philosophy shows, on the one hand, that there is only One philosophy at diverse stages of its formation, and, on the other, that the particular principles on which each system is grounded one by one are only branches of one and the same whole. The philosophy that is the latest in time is the result of all the preceding philosophies; and it must therefore contain the principles of all of them; for this reason, it is the most unfolded, the richest, and the most concrete one—provided that it does deserve the name of philosophy. […] § 14 The same development of thinking that is presented in the history of philosophy is presented in philosophy itself, but freed from that historical outwardness, i.e., purely in the element of thinking. Free and genuine thought is inwardly concrete; hence it is Idea, and in all its universality it is the Idea or the Absolute. The science of it is essentially a system, since what is concretely true is so only in its inward self-unfolding and in taking and holding itself together in unity, i.e., as totality. Only through the distinguishing, and determination of its distinctions, can what is concretely true be the necessity of these distinctions and the freedom of the whole. A philosophising without system cannot be scientific at all. […] A content has its justification only as a moment of the whole, outside of which it is only an unfounded presupposition or a subjective certainty. […] It is erroneous to understand by “system” a philosophy whose principle is restricted and [kept] distinct from other principles; on the contrary, it is the principle of genuine philosophy to contain all particular principles within itself.

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§ 15 Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle that closes upon itself; but in each of them the philosophical Idea is in a particular determinacy or element. Every single circle also breaks through the restriction of its element as well, precisely because it is inwardly [the] totality, and it grounds a further sphere. The whole presents itself therefore as a circle of circles, each of which is a necessary moment, so that the system of its peculiar elements constitutes the whole Idea—which equally appears in each single one of them. § 16 As an Encyclopaedia, science is not presented in the detailed development of its particularisation; instead, it has to be restricted to the beginnings and the fundamental concepts of the particular sciences. […] The whole of philosophy genuinely forms One science; but it can also be considered as a whole made up of several particular sciences.—The philosophical encyclopaedia distinguishes itself from the other, ordinary encyclopaedia because the latter has to be some sort of aggregate of sciences, which are taken up contingently and empirically; and among them there are also some that are “sciences” only in name, since they are themselves no more than a mere collection of bits of information. In the case of such an aggregate, since the sciences in it are taken up externally, the unity in which the sciences are brought together is itself an external unity—an order. […] The philosophical encyclopaedia excludes, first of all, mere aggregates of information, such as philology at first sight appears to be. Secondly, it also (just as decisively) excludes learning that is based on mere arbitrariness, such as heraldry, for instance. Sciences of this kind are positive through and through. Thirdly, there are other sciences that are called “positive,” too, in spite of the fact that they have a rational basis and beginning. Here the rational component belongs to philosophy; but the positive side is peculiar to each one of them. […] § 17 With regard to the beginning that philosophy has to make, it seems, like the other sciences, to start in general with a subjective presupposition, i.e., to have to make a particular ob-ject, in this case thinking, into the ob-ject of thinking, just like space, number, etc., in the other sciences. But what we have here is the free act of thinking putting itself at the standpoint where it is for its own self, producing its own ob-ject for itself thereby, and giving it to itself. Within the Science this standpoint, which in this first act appears as immediate, must make itself into the result, and (what is more) into its last result, in which it reaches its beginning again and returns into itself. In this way, philosophy shows itself as a circle that goes back into itself; it does not have a beginning in the same sense as the other sciences, so that the beginning only has a relation to the subject who takes the decision to philosophise, but not to the science as such.—Or, to put the same thing another way, the concept of the Science and therefore the first concept—which, since it is the first one, contains the severance that thinking is ob-ject for an (as it were external) philosophising subject—must be grasped by the Science itself. This is even

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its unique purpose, deed, and goal: to arrive at the Concept of its concept and so to arrive at its return [into itself] and contentment. § 18 Just as a provisional, or a general, notion of a philosophy cannot be given, because only the whole of the Science is the presentation of the Idea, so the division of it, too, can be comprehended only from the whole presentation; [at this point] the division is only something anticipated, like the [coming] presentation from which it has to be taken. But the Idea shows itself as the thinking that is strictly identical with itself, and this at once shows itself to be the activity of positing itself over against itself, in order to be for itself, and to be, in this other, only at home with itself. Hence, the science falls into three parts:

I. The Logic, the science of the Idea in and for itself.

II. The Philosophy of Nature, as the science of the Idea in its otherness. III. The Philosophy of Spirit, as of the Idea that returns into itself out of its otherness.

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PART III POST-HEGELIAN CRITICS AND RESPONSES

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CHAPTER 12 ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (1788–1860)

INTRODUCTION Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, in the city of Danzig [Gdansk], Poland. When he was five, his family moved to Hamburg, where Schopenhauer would grow up. His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, had a successful merchant and ship owning business and wanted his son to follow in his steps and eventually take control over the family business. As a young teenager Schopenhauer traveled with his family through Europe and lived in France and England. The varying experiences abroad had a great formative impact on the young Schopenhauer. His happiest memories were those concerning his time in France (1779–99), but he had a terrible experience during his stay at a boarding school in Wimbledon (1803), which turned him away from Anglicanism, and Christianity in general, for the rest of his life. Exposed to new cultures and languages, he became fluent in French and English, and also developed a curiosity and thirst for knowledge. He soon realized that his academic aspirations could not be satisfied by the business career that his father had intended for him. After his father’s death (possibly by suicide) in 1805, Schopenhauer left the family business in Hamburg and enrolled in a Gymnasium (high school) in preparation for university studies. In 1809, at the age of twenty-one, he was admitted to the University of Göttingen, where he started as a medical student, but soon moved into philosophy. At Göttingen he studied philosophy under Gottlob Ernst Schulze, a skeptical philosopher and the author of the Aenesidemus who introduced young Schopenhauer to Plato and Kant. After two years at Göttingen, willing to further delve into philosophy, Schopenhauer transferred to the University of Berlin, where he attended the lectures of the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. In addition to his courses in philosophy, he also took classes in physics, astronomy, psychology, physiology, history, and literature. In 1813, Schopenhauer completed his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In this work, Schopenhauer laid the foundation for his later philosophy, in which he would challenge the prevailing German idealists such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and their fundamental assumption that the universe is inherently rational, coherent, and comprehensible. This dissertation earned Schopenhauer a doctorate in philosophy, in absentia from the University of Jena. Over the years Schopenhauer’s relationship with his mother Johanna Henriette Troisiener Schopenhauer became increasingly strained and ultimately ended in 1814. For the next four years Schopenhauer lived in Dresden, further developing the key ideas of his dissertation and composing his seminal work, The World as Will and Representation, which was completed at the end of 1818 and published in 1819. This work established Schopenhauer’s philosophy not only as deeply pessimistic but also as novel and insightful. After a yearlong trip to Italy, in 1820 he became a lecturer at the University of Berlin. At this time, Hegel, who also taught at Berlin, was at the height of

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his popularity, and his philosophy and philosophical spirit prevailed. When Schopenhauer offered his class at a time that overlapped with Hegel’s popular lectures, only a few students attended, and even those few chose to hear Schopenhauer only because they could not find space in the auditorium where Hegel was lecturing. Just two years later, frustrated and irritated Schopenhauer left Berlin. In 1825, he made a second attempt to secure a lecturer position at the University of Berlin, but it was unsuccessful and he quit with disgust for academia. His disappointment was further exacerbated by a series of fiascos he experienced in his life at that period. Not only did he lose a lawsuit against Caroline Luise Marquet, a woman who rented a room in the same house as Schopenhauer and with whom he had an explosive confrontation over some noise issues—the infamous Marquet Affair, but his private life was also troubled; this included a relationship with a nineteen-year-old singer, which he abandoned at the prospect of marriage, and an interest in another young woman, who rejected his advances. After several years of wandering, in 1833 Schopenhauer finally settled in Frankfurt, where he lived alone for twenty-seven years, studying, amending his old works, and writing new ones. During this period, he published On the Will in Nature (1836) and a thoroughly revised and expanded edition of The World as Will and Representation (1844). He also wrote two essays entitled “On the Freedom of Human Will” (1839) and “On the Basis of Morality” (1840). In 1841 both essays were published together as Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, in which he criticized Kant’s deontological or duty-based ethics and proposed a new moral theory based on compassion. A collection of a variety of essays entitled Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) attracted attention of the wider public. Throughout his life Schopenhauer hoped to be recognized as an original philosopher, but this recognition came only during his final years, when in 1853 an anonymous critic published in the Westminster Review a favorable appraisal of his philosophy of the Will. Schopenhauer died on September 21, 1860, at the zenith of his fame. The third and final edition of his masterpiece The World as Will and Representation appeared only a year earlier. * * * In order to clearly understand Schopenhauer’s philosophy, it is worth beginning with the discussion of his doctoral dissertation entitled On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Largely relying on his study of Kant, but also departing from Kant’s philosophy, Schopenhauer confronts the idea that human beings have a limited and imperfect ability to grasp reality, the subject matter of metaphysics. In order to come to knowledge of anything, one must first presuppose the existence of the subject, distinguishing between the knower and what is known, the object in question. His discovery amends Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason—that there is nothing true or existent which does not have a sufficient reason (explanation) for its being so—by placing at its root the subject-object relationship inherent in every attempt to gain knowledge. He thus suggests that to apply the principle of sufficient reason we must assume both the subject-object distinction and the necessity of the explanation. He then outlines four kinds of necessary connections between objects and types of reasoning: for material things, the correct type of reasoning is causeand-effect; for abstract concepts, the reasoning role is played by logic; for mathematical constructions, the explanation is provided by reference to numbers and spaces (geometry); 310

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and for motivating forces, the justification is to be found in intentions or moral reasoning. These four types of explanations cannot be intermixed; for Schopenhauer, each path of reasoning is distinct, and it is incoherent to cross them, for doing so would pair one type of explanation with an object of dissimilar type. Schopenhauer argues that such a crossing is responsible for many of the mistakes that philosophers make. Rejecting both the ontological and cosmological arguments for God’s existence, he argues that in these arguments, the abstract concept of “God” is being justified either by reference to causality (which has an explanatory power only for material objects) or by undermining the rules of logic (the failed explanation of conceivability and a supreme perfection, as well as an attempt to treat “existence” as a predicate). The work as a whole represents a rejection of many aspects of German idealism. Indeed, within the work one can find reasons for why Schopenhauer attacked well-respected philosophers like Hegel, Schelling, as well as Fichte, whose lectures he attended as a philosophy student. Schopenhauer’s greatest work, The World as Will and Representation completed in 1818, heavily draws from the ideas elaborated in his dissertation. Schopenhauer establishes his conception of the Will as the foundational principle explaining the workings of human beings and of the universe itself. This Will is an instinctive, irrational, destructive drive at the base of everything. Schopenhauer begins with an orthodox Kantian framework: there are noumena, which give rise to phenomena. But Schopenhauer goes much further than Kant in his claims as to what we may know about the noumena. He insists that there is a thing-in-itself, which he calls the Will, and this exists prior to, and primary to, any representation. The book begins with a puzzling statement: “‘The world is my representation’—this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being” (Schopenhauer 1969, vol. I, 1). And a few pages down we find another provocative assertion: “This [deeper] truth is that a man can also say and must say, ‘the world is my will’” (Schopenhauer 1969, vol. I, 5). How to interpret these seemingly paradoxical claims? What Schopenhauer states here is that the two—will and representation—are aspects of the world in our consciousness that we must come to grips with if we are to truly understand the world. The “my” in the statement is more figurative than literal; it serves to point out the process through which we may come to revelation about the transcendent Will, by first examining our individual wills. We should remember, however, that for Schopenhauer, this noumenon is not a personal, individual will, but rather a “wild and impetuous” irrational force driving everything from the human intellect, plant growth, and compass movements. Our individual wills are mere phenomenal aspects of this fundamental Will, which is the supreme principle of the world. Schopenhauer believes that we can philosophically understand the world as various manifestations of this general principle. The single essence of the world as Will is manifest for us as a multitude of conceptual essences that are then displayed as a variety of objects, discoverable by the mind that employs the principle of sufficient reason. All the objects in the world are many representations of the Platonic Forms, and the principle of sufficient reason is the epistemological form of the human mind. Individualization itself depends on this implementation of the principle of sufficient reason and does not exist without the human mind’s creation of it. The process of discovery, that is, the attempt to gain knowledge, objectifies appearances and thereby divides the single world as Will into comprehensible individual objects. 311

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The subject-object relationship, by its fragmentation of the Will, is thus an inherently violent one. Our knowledge, or quest for knowledge, imposes this violence on the world; we, as self-identifying humans, are the result of the fragmentation of the Will, and consequentially are doomed to the Will’s violence upon itself: to desire more than we can achieve, to struggle against others, to subvert even our own ends, to never achieve happiness. The result is a war of individuals, and the birth of something analogous to what Thomas Hobbes termed the state of nature. Yet, while Hobbes describes the state of nature as a situation in which people are at war with each other, for Schopenhauer the fragmentation of the Will is responsible for people also being at war with themselves. Such a double-sided, divided universe is chaotic, a blind striving, an impulse without satisfaction, a seeking without knowledge, with neither a God nor inherent meaningfulness. Neither morality nor progress nor purpose is possible. As Schopenhauer asserted, actions performed by human beings are nothing more than the objectification of the act of the Will translated into perception. In other words, one’s movement is at once the action of the Will, as an internal, subjective experience, and the representation of that Will objectively and externally. He further insisted that our body is the only object which we perceive as both representation and the Will—all others have an objective relation to ourselves, but we lack access to its inner metaphysical state. This inner aspect of things, which we experience within ourselves, exists in every natural object: the duality of our own selves is likewise the state of the universe, at once the inner essence of the thing (the world as Will) and the world of appearances and ideas (the world as representation). Causal interactionism, therefore, is rejected: mental and material substances do not cause effects in each other, but are simply two sides of the same coin. With his conception of the Will, Schopenhauer stood in clear opposition to German idealists, such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who attempted to elevate self-consciousness and everything rational in metaphysics. According to Schopenhauer, the Will is not rational; this is not the principle of self-consciousness either. Instead, the Will is an irrational, mindless, almost instinctual urge at the basis of everything. What makes Schopenhauer’s philosophy unique is not that he portrays the world as Will, acting on its own terms, but that his conception of the Will is devoid of any rationality. Schopenhauer was quite careful to recognize the complexity of the interactions between our individual wills and our intellects. In some sense, the intellect can control the will; thus, if we think of the menace of an actually present danger and the possibility of an unfortunate issue, anxiety at once compresses the heart, and blood ceases to circulate in the veins. . . . [T]he intellect plays, and the will must dance to it. . . . This depends upon the fact that the will is itself without knowledge. (Schopenhauer 1969, vol. II, 104) The will can also control the intellect, for preference and resistance are its domain; strong emotions can prevent careful thought altogether. Moreover, the will may exert this control to its own ends, prohibiting the intellect from entertaining certain ideas so as to not “awaken in it some emotion.” Schopenhauer also recognized that the intellect is often ignorant of the purposes of the will and must determine them by “experiment.” This extends beyond individuals, into groups and societies. In this sense, the will is cunning—learning, keeping secrets, and manipulating us. 312

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People can become aware of the cunning of the will; however, the will—with its instinct toward self-preservation—will go far to prevent this realization. It is only in moments in which the will is silent—when the intellect can act “coolly”—that deep reflection on the nature of the will can be entirely free of this pernicious influence. This occurs only in rare cases, and only in “persons with a special gift.” There are two paths that they must take, by becoming either an ascetic saint or an aesthetic genius. Choosing the path of an ascetic saint allows one to forgo momentary pleasures in order to attain salvation and ultimately suppress the will. An aesthetic genius escapes the will by the loss of oneself in times of aesthetic contemplations. It is through these two paths that one can transcend the Will and its irrational desires. The works following his The World as Will and Representation sought, among other things, a means to combat the Will’s fragmentation. Schopenhauer believed this could be imperfectly achieved through aesthetic perception, which seeks to control the inclination of consciousness to objectify things around it by linking it to the Platonic Idea embedded in the thing. In other words, the universalization rather than individuation of any object or idea is the only path that can lead to tranquility, since it is through this meditation that one’s own individuation disappears, becoming instead the reflection of the object’s universalization. Of course, achieving this state of mind is incredibly difficult, and Schopenhauer voiced his skepticism over how many could truly maintain such a reflection for an extended period of time. For any hope, humanity must turn to geniuses, artists whose visions convey the Platonic Ideas in a more distilled and recognizable form. And unlike architecture, poetry, painting, and sculpture, which Schopenhauer regarded as objective forms corresponding to the world as representation, he considered music as the most powerful of the art forms, a form of the Will itself. Metaphysical, subjective, and rooted in emotions that tie directly, he believed, to the Platonic Ideas, music conveys the structure of the world. Melodies correspond to the human sphere, harmonies to the animal, and bass tones to the inorganic world. Music aids both in revealing the underlying world as Will and in achieving the state of mind required for aesthetic perception. In “On the Basis of Morality” Schopenhauer seeks to establish a new moral system that is rooted in compassion. In this work, his pessimism is tempered by a deep belief, influenced by Eastern religious and philosophical thought, in humanity’s unity, that individualization and differentiation are illusory and ultimately just a product of the world of appearances. Only by recognizing one’s own inner self as identical with another can one find the proper moral outlook—that is, one based on compassion. By identifying the fundamental unity beyond the illusory distinctions between individuals, one realizes that the pain of the entire world is in fact one’s own pain, and one endeavors to enter the life of another, as much as one is able. One’s character is then the subjective, timeless action of the Will objectively constituting one’s inner essence. He believed that any escape from the Will must begin with this true moral outlook (devoid, of course, of any personal utility or feelings of duty), tempered with asceticism, and ending in a denial of the will-to-live’s promotion of the individual against others. True moral reflection produces a disgust with human states of affairs, and only a denial of personal desires can minimize the suffering caused by this repulsion. Such a conclusion seems problematic (the overcoming of the Will’s struggle is to struggle against our own desires, and subdue them) and reveals Schopenhauer’s deeply mystical worldview, where the ascetic character and tranquil consciousness seems to be nothing at all. To give way to the universal manifestation of things by denying the individuation of the self requires an intense battle with one’s self. 313

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The ultimate aim of this struggle is unity with a Will that is itself destructive. This goal seems paradoxical—a consciousness putting itself to death to achieve a greater self-enlightenment, denying the pursuit of knowledge for achieving a higher ascetic attitude that approaches life as art. Above all, his undertaking appears as a philosophical endeavor against human nature itself: he intends to achieve universal tranquility and to save humanity from the violence of its own nature, i.e. to remove the space in which the individuated human perpetuates evil. Schopenhauer’s philosophy was deeply influential among intellectuals in the Germanspeaking world. His turbulent vision of the world captured the imagination of many thinkers and initiated new directions of philosophical thought leading to new valuable insights. The works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Thomas Mann are hardly conceivable without Schopenhauer. His conception of the irrational Will as the general principle of the world and the basis of human activity is clearly echoed in Nietzsche’s famous notion of the Will to Power. Freud’s idea of the id that indicates the noumenal indeterminacy is also modeled after Schopenhauer’s conception of the Will. Indeed, Schopenhauer’s views instigated a radical departure from the consensus of his day, and they remain insightful and challenging. He was among the first to directly confront psychology in his philosophy, to address sexual desire, and to suggest that the world does not operate the way in which it was traditionally assumed.

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Chronology of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Life and Works 1788

February 22: Arthur Schopenhauer is born in Danzig, Poland.

1793

March: The family moves to Hamburg to avoid the Prussian annexation of Danzig.

1797

June 12: Schopenhauer’s sister, Loise Adelaide (Adele) is born;



July: Travels to France with his father and remains in Le Havre, France, for two years with a family of a business associate of his father.

1799

August: Returns from France and enrolls in a private school that educated future merchants.

1803

Travels to England, where he attends a boarding school in Wimbledon.



Upon return from England continues his training as a merchant, instead of enrolling in a university.

1805

January: Begins apprenticeship with a Hamburg merchant.



April 20: His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, dies, possibly by suicide.

1807

May: Encouraged by his mother, Schopenhauer ends his apprenticeship.



June: Enrolls in a Gymnasium (a high school that prepares for university entrance) at Gotha.

1809

February: Receives one-third of his father’s estates as his inheritance.



October: Matriculates as a medical student at the University of Göttingen.

1810

Studies philosophy with Gottlob Ernst Schulze, who introduces Schopenhauer to works of Plato and Kant.

1811

September: Enrolls in the University of Berlin to study philosophy.



Winter semester: Attends Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s lectures.

1812

Summer semester: Attends Friedrich Ernst Schleiermacher’s lectures.



Winter: Regularly observes psychiatric patients at the Berlin Charité.

1813

October: Completes doctoral dissertation entitled On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and earns a doctorate in philosophy, in absentia, from the University of Jena.



November: Moves to Weimar, where he is introduced to Goethe; presents Goethe with a dedicated copy of his dissertation; develops interest in Goethe’s color theory.



December: Starts delving into Eastern thought.

1814

March: First introduction and study of the Indian scriptures, the Upanishad.



May: Ends relationship with his mother and moves to Dresden.

1816

Influenced by Goethe’s theory of color, writes On Vision and Colors.

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1818

December: Completes his seminal work, The World as Will and Representation (with a publication date of 1819).



Starts applying for a lecturer position at the University of Berlin.

1819

Birth of illegitimate daughter, who dies months later.

1820

Secures position as a Privatdozent (an unsalaried lecturer) at the University of Berlin.



Summer semester: Starts teaching a philosophy course, offering lectures at the same time as Hegel schedules his; drastically low student attendance compared to Hegel’s lectures; not able to complete the course.

1821

Falls in love with nineteen-year-old singer; charged with assault of an elderly woman in Marquet Affair.

1823

Falls to illness, depression, and paranoia.

1825

The second attempt to lecture at the University of Berlin, again unsuccessful.

1826

Reads the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

1830

June: The Latin revision of Schopenhauer’s color theory entitled Commentatio undecima exponens Theoriam Colorum Physiologcam eandemque primariam, is published in Scriptores Ophthalmologici minors.

1831

Writes sarcastic work “The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument.”

1833

July: permanently moves to Frankfurt-am-Main, where he spends the last twentyeight years of his life.

1836

March: Publishes On the Will in Nature.

1838

April 17: Schopenhauer’s mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, dies in Bonn.

1839

Schopenhauer’s essay “On the Freedom of the Human Will” received the gold medal from the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in Trondheim; the Norwegian translation of the essay is published a year later.

1840

January: Submits a prize-essay “On the Basis of Morality” to the competition of the Royal Danish Society of Sciences (Copenhagen), but does not receive any award.

1841

September: Publishes the two prize-essays under the title The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, where in his added Preface he criticizes Hegel.

1844

March: The revised and expanded second edition of The World as Will and Representation appears in two volumes.

1847

December: The second (revised) edition of On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason appears.

1849

April 25: Death of Schopenhauer’s sister Adele in Bonn.

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1851 Writes Of Women, describing women as the weaker gender.

November: Publishes Parerga and Paralipomena.

1853

April: A review “Iconoclasm in German Philosophy” by John Oxenford (published anonymously) in the English journal, the Westminster Review.



May: The well-known Vossische Zeitung in Berlin publishes a German translation of Oxenford’s review.



The above publications attract attention to Schopenhauer’s philosophy and launch his fame.

1854

September: The second edition of On the Will in Nature appears.



December: The second edition of On Vision and Colors comes out.

1855

October: The philosophy Faculty at the University of Leipzig organizes the essay contest with the goal to expose and criticize Schopenhauer’s philosophical ideas.

1857

The Universities in Berlin and Breslau begin offering lectures on Schopenhauer and his philosophy.

1859

November: The third edition of The World as Will and Representation is published.

1860

September: The second edition of The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics appears.



September 21: Arthur Schopenhauer dies in Frankfurt-am-Main at the age of seventy-two.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Schopenhauer’s Writings A.1.  German Edition

Schopenhauer, A. 2007. Gesammelte Werke in zehn Bänden in Kassette (detebe – Kassetten), edited by Angelika Hübscher. Diogenes Verlag. [The texts are based on the historical-crtiical Gesamtausgabe, edited by Arthur Hübscher.] A.2.  In English (selected editions)

Schopenhauer, A. 1969. The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. New York: Dover. Schopenhauer, A. 1988. Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, edited by A. Hübscher, translated by E. F. J. Payne. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Schopenhauer, A. 2000. Parerga and Paralipomena Volumes I and II, translated by E. F. J. Payne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schopenhauer, A. 2010. The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, translated by J. Norman, A. Welchman, and Ch. Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, A. 2010. The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, translated by D. E. Cartwright and E. E. Erdmann. Oxford: Oxford University Press. B.  Selected Commentaries

Cartwright, D. 2005. Historical Dictionary of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Lanham, Toronto, and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Cartwright, D. 2010. Schopenhauer: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacquette, D. 2005. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Chesham: Acumen. Janaway, C. (ed.). 1999. The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, N. 2010. Schopenhauer’s Ethics of Patience: Virtue, Salvation and Value. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Mannion, G. 2003. Schopenhauer, Religion and Morality: The Humble Path to Ethics. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Neeley, S. G. 2004. Schopenhauer: A Consistent Reading. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Neil, A., and C. Janaway (eds.). 2009. Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Ryan, C. 2010. Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Religion: The Death of God and the Oriental Renaissance. Leuven: Peeters. White, F. C. (ed.). 1997. Schopenhauer’s Early Fourfold Root: Translation and Commentary. Aldershot: Avebury, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Wicks, R. 2008. Schopenhauer. Oxford: Blackwell. Wicks, R. 2011. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum. Young, J. 2005. Schopenhauer. London and New York: Routledge.

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§ 21. From all these considerations the reader has now gained in the abstract, and hence in clear and certain terms, a knowledge which everyone possesses directly in the concrete, namely as feeling. This is the knowledge that the inner nature of his own phenomenon, which manifests itself to him as representation both through his actions and through the permanent substratum of these his body, is his will. This will constitutes what is most immediate in his consciousness, but as such it has not wholly entered into the form of the representation, in which object and subject stand over against each other; on the contrary, it makes itself known in an immediate way in which subject and object are not quite clearly distinguished, yet it becomes known to the individual himself not as a whole, but only in its particular acts. The reader who with me has gained this conviction, will find that of itself it will become the key to the knowledge of the innermost being of the whole of nature, since he now transfers it to all those phenomena that are given to him, not like his own phenomenon both in direct and in indirect knowledge, but in the latter solely, and hence merely in a one-sided way, as representation alone. He will recognize that same will not only in those phenomena that are quite similar to his own, in men and animals, as their innermost nature, but continued reflection will lead him to recognize the force that shoots and vegetates in the plant, indeed the force by which the crystal is formed, the force that turns the magnet to the North Pole, the force whose shock he encounters from the contact of metals of different kinds, the force that appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, separation and union, and finally even gravitation, which acts so powerfully in all matter, pulling the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun; all these he will recognize as different only in the phenomenon, but the same according to their inner nature. He will recognize them all as that which is immediately known to him so intimately and better than everything else, and where it appears most distinctly is called will. It is only this application of reflection which no longer lets us stop at the phenomenon, but leads us on to the thing-in-itself. Phenomenon means representation and nothing more. All representation, be it of whatever kind it may, all object, is phenomenon. But only the will is thing-in-itself; as such it is not representation at all, but toto genere different therefrom. It is that of which all representation, all object, is the phenomenon, the visibility, the objectivity. It is the innermost essence, the kernel, of every particular thing and also of the whole. It appears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of man, and the great difference between the two concerns only the degree of the manifestation, not the inner nature of what is manifested.

From Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. by E.F.G. Payne, in 2 vols. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1969, 109–14, 428–29.

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§ 22. Now, if this thing-in-itself (we will retain the Kantian expression as a standing formula)— which as such is never object, since all object is its mere appearance or phenomenon, and not it itself—is to be thought of objectively, then we must borrow its name and concept from an object, from something in some way objectively given, and therefore from one of its phenomena. But in order to serve as a point of explanation, this can be none other than the most complete of all its phenomena, i.e., the most distinct, the most developed, the most directly enlightened by knowledge; but this is precisely man’s will. We have to observe, however, that here of course we use only a denominatio a potiori, by which the concept of will therefore receives a greater extension than it has hitherto had. Knowledge of the identical in different phenomena and of the different in similar phenomena is, as Plato so often remarks, the condition for philosophy. But hitherto the identity of the inner essence of any striving and operating force in nature with the will has not been recognized, and therefore the many kinds of phenomena that are only different species of the same genus were not regarded as such; they were considered as being heterogeneous. Consequently, no word could exist to describe the concept of this genus. I therefore name the genus after its most important species, the direct knowledge of which lies nearest to us, and leads to the indirect knowledge of all the others. But anyone who is incapable of carrying out the required extension of the concept will remain involved in a permanent misunderstanding. For by the word will, he will always understand only that species of it hitherto exclusively described by the term, that is to say, the will guided by knowledge, strictly according to motives, indeed only to abstract motives, thus manifesting itself under the guidance of the faculty of reason. This, as we have said, is only the most distinct phenomenon or appearance of the will. We must now clearly separate out in our thoughts the innermost essence of this phenomenon, known to us directly, and then transfer it to all the weaker, less distinct phenomena of the same essence, and by so doing achieve the desired extension of the concept of will. From the opposite point of view, I should be misunderstood by anyone who thought that ultimately it was all the same whether we expressed this essencein-itself of all phenomena by the word will or by any other word. This would be the case if this thing-in-itself were something whose existence we merely inferred, and thus knew only indirectly and merely in the abstract. Then certainly we could call it what we liked; the name would stand merely as the symbol of an unknown quantity. But the word will, which, like a magic word, is to reveal to us the innermost essence of everything in nature, by no means expresses an unknown quantity, something reached by inferences and syllogisms, but something known absolutely and immediately, and that so well that we know and understand what will is better than anything else, be it what it may. Hitherto, the concept of will has been subsumed under the concept of force; I, on the other hand, do exactly the reverse, and intend every force in nature to be conceived as will. We must not imagine that this is a dispute about words or a matter of no consequence; on the contrary, it is of the very highest significance and importance. For at the root of the concept of force, as of all other concepts, lies knowledge of the objective world through perception, in other words, the phenomenon, the representation, from which the concept is drawn. It is abstracted from the province where cause and effect reign, that is, from the representation of perception, and it signifies just the causal nature of the cause at the point where this causal nature is etiologically no longer explicable at all, but is the necessary presupposition of all etiological explanation. On the other hand, the concept of 320

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will is of all possible concepts the only one that has its origin not in the phenomenon, not in the mere representation of perception, but which comes from within, and proceeds from the most immediate consciousness of everyone. In this consciousness each one knows and at the same time is himself his own individuality according to its nature immediately, without any form, even the form of subject and object, for here knower and known coincide. Therefore, if we refer the concept of force to that of will, we have in fact referred something more unknown to something infinitely better known, indeed to the one thing really known to us immediately and completely; and we have very greatly extended our knowledge. If, on the other hand, we subsume the concept of will under that of force, as has been done hitherto, we renounce the only immediate knowledge of the inner nature of the world that we have, since we let it disappear in a concept abstracted from the phenomenon, with which therefore we can never pass beyond the phenomenon.

§ 23. The will as thing-in-itself is quite different from its phenomenon, and is entirely free from all the forms of the phenomenon into which it first passes when it appears, and which therefore concern only its objectivity, and are foreign to the will itself. Even the most universal form of all representation, that of object for subject, does not concern it, still less the forms that are subordinate to this and collectively have their common expression in the principle of sufficient reason. As we know, time and space belong to this principle, and consequently plurality as well, which exists and has become possible only through them. In this last respect I shall call time and space the principium individuationis, an expression borrowed from the old scholasticism, and I beg the reader to bear this in mind once and for all. For it is only by means of time and space that something which is one and the same according to its nature and the concept appears as different, as a plurality of coexistent and successive things. Consequently, time and space are the principium individuationis, the subject of so many subtleties and disputes among the scholastics which are found collected in Suarez (Disp. 5, sect. 3). It is apparent from what has been said that the will as thing-in-itself lies outside the province of the principle of sufficient reason in all its forms, and is consequently completely groundless, although each of its phenomena is entirely subject to that principle. Further, it is free from all plurality, although its phenomena in time and space are innumerable. It is itself one, yet not as an object is one, for the unity of an object is known only in contrast to possible plurality. Again, the will is one not as a concept is one, for a concept originates only through abstraction from plurality; but it is one as that which lies outside time and space, outside the principium individuationis, that is to say, outside the possibility of plurality. Only when all this has become quite clear to us through the following consideration of phenomena and of the different manifestations of the will, can we fully understand the meaning of the Kantian doctrine that time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but are only the forms of our knowing. The groundlessness of the will has actually been recognized where it manifests itself most distinctly, that is, as the will of man; and this has been called free and independent. But as to the groundlessness of the will itself, the necessity to which its phenomenon is everywhere liable has been overlooked, and actions have been declared to be free, which they are not. For every individual action follows with strict necessity from the effect of the motive on the character. As 321

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we have already said, all necessity is the relation of the consequent to the ground, and nothing else whatever. The principle of sufficient reason is the universal form of every phenomenon, and man in his action, like every other phenomenon, must be subordinated to it. But because in self-consciousness the will is known directly and in itself, there also lies in this consciousness the consciousness of freedom. But the fact is overlooked that the individual, the person, is not will as thing-in-itself, but is phenomenon of the will, is as such determined, and has entered the form of the phenomenon, the principle of sufficient reason. Hence we get the strange fact that everyone considers himself to be a priori quite free, even in his individual actions, and imagines he can at any moment enter upon a different way of life, which is equivalent to saying that he can become a different person. But a posteriori through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but liable to necessity; that notwithstanding all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning to the end of his life he must bear the same character that he himself condemns, and, as it were, must play to the end the part he has taken upon himself. I cannot pursue this discussion any further here, for, being ethical, it belongs to another part of this work. Meanwhile, I wish to point out here only that the phenomenon of the will, in itself groundless, is yet subject as such to the law of necessity, that is to say, to the principle of sufficient reason, so that in the necessity with which the phenomena of nature ensue, we may not find anything to prevent us from recognizing in them the manifestations of the will. […] * * * Kant’s style bears throughout the stamp of a superior mind, a genuine, strong individuality, and a quite extraordinary power of thought. Its characteristic quality can perhaps be appropriately described as a brilliant dryness, on the strength of which he was able to grasp concepts firmly and pick them out with great certainty, and then toss them about with the greatest freedom, to the reader’s astonishment. I find the same brilliant dryness again in the style of Aristotle, though that is much simpler. Nevertheless, Kant’s exposition is often indistinct, indefinite, inadequate, and occasionally obscure. This obscurity is certainly to be excused in part by the difficulty of the subject and the depth of the ideas. Yet whoever is himself clear to the bottom, and knows quite distinctly what he thinks and wants, will never write indistinctly, never set up wavering and indefinite concepts, or pick up from foreign languages extremely difficult and complicated expressions to denote such concepts, in order to continue using such expressions afterwards, as Kant took words and formulas from earlier, even scholastic, philosophy. These he combined with one another for his own purpose, as for example, “transcendental synthetic unity of apperception,” and in general “unity of synthesis,” which he always uses where “union” or “combination” would be quite sufficient by itself. Moreover, such a man will not always be explaining anew what has already been explained once, as Kant does, for example, with the understanding, the categories, experience, and other main concepts. Generally, such a man will not incessantly repeat himself, and yet, in every new presentation of an idea that has already occurred a hundred times, leave it again in precisely the same obscure passages. On the contrary, he will express his meaning once distinctly, thoroughly, and exhaustively, and leave it at that. Quo enim melius rem aliquam concipimus, eomagis determinati sumus ad eam unico modo exprimendam,1 says Descartes in his fifth letter. But the greatest disadvantage of 322

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Kant’s occasionally obscure exposition is that it acted as exemplar vitiis imitabile;2 in fact it was misinterpreted as a pernicious authorization. The public had been forced to see that what is obscure is not always without meaning; what was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make vigorous use of this privilege; Schelling at least equalled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and general mystification that has ever existed, with a result that will seem incredible to posterity, and be a lasting monument of German stupidity.

Notes 1. “For the better we understand a thing, the more are we resolved to express it in a unique way.” [Tr.] 2. “An example inducing one to imitate its defects.” [Tr.]

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FROM “ON THE BASIS OF MORALS” (1840) *

§4 On the Imperative Form of Kantian Ethics Kant’s first false statement lies in his concept of ethics itself, a concept which we find articulated most clearly [in this way]: ‘In a practical philosophy it is not a concern to indicate reasons for what happens, but laws for what ought to happen, even if it never happens.’—This is already a decided petitio principii.* Who told you* that there are laws to which we ought to subject our actions? Who told you that something ought to happen, that never happens?—What justifies your assuming this beforehand and thereupon immediately to press upon us an ethics in a legislative-imperative form as the only possible sort? I say, in opposition to Kant, that the student of ethics as well as the philosopher in general must be content with an explanation and interpretation of that which is given, hence, of that which actually exists or happens in order to arrive at an understanding of these, and that he has his hands full with much more than has been done previously, after millennia have run their course. As is consistent with the above-mentioned Kantian petitio principii, right in the preface, which is integral to the subject, it is immediately assumed prior to any investigation that there are pure moral laws. This assumption remains in what follows and is the very basis of the whole system. However, we will first investigate the concept of a law. The actual and original meaning of this term has been restricted to civil law, lex, νόμος, a human institution resting on human choice. A second, derivative, figurative, metaphorical meaning has the concept of law in its application to nature, the constant, invariable processes of which we partly know a priori and partly observe empirically, and which we metaphorically call natural laws. Only a small part of this natural law is that which can be known a priori and comprises that which Kant has wisely and admirably singled out and grouped under the title Metaphysics of Nature. Of course, there is also a law for the human will insofar as the human belongs to nature. And, indeed, this law is a strictly demonstrable, inviolable one, one without exception, rocksteady, one which does not, like the categorical imperative, carry along with it a ‘so to say’, but a real necessity: it is the law of motivation, a form of the law of causality, specifically, causality mediated by cognition. This is the single demonstrable law of the human will, to which this will as such is subjected. The law says that any action can occur only as a result of a sufficient motive. Like the law of causality in general, it is a natural law. In contrast, moral laws, independent of human ordinance, state institutions, or religious doctrine, may not be taken to exist without proof; thus, by this assumption Kant committed a petitio principii. It appears all the more audaciously when he immediately adds, [in] the preface, that a moral law should carry with it ‘absolute

From Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Basis of Morality.” In The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, trans. by David E. Cartwright and Edward E. Erdmann, Oxford University Press, 2010, 136–41, 210–16. *

From “On the Basis of Morals”

necessity’. However, such necessity always has as its mark the inevitability of the result: how, then, can there be talk of absolute necessity of these alleged moral laws? As an example of such, he cites ‘thou shalt (sic) not lie’. For as is well known, and as he himself admits, these laws mostly, indeed, as a rule, remain without result. In a scientific ethics, to assume still other, original laws for the will, independent of all human ordinance, except for the law of motivation, one has to prove and to derive their entire existence if one is intent in ethics not merely to recommend honesty, but also to practise it. Until this proof is provided, I recognize no other source for the introduction of the concept of law, precept, obligation in ethics than one foreign to philosophy, the Mosaic Decalogue.* In the above-mentioned example of a moral law which Kant first asserts, the orthography ‘thou shalt’ even naively betrays this source. A concept which points to none other than such a source must not so readily press its way into philosophical ethics, but will be expelled until it is verified and established through legitimate proof. In it we have Kant’s first petitio principii, and it is important. Just as by means of a petitio principii in the preface, Kant had immediately taken the concept of moral law to be given and undoubtedly extant […] with a closely related concept, that of duty, which is admitted into ethics as belonging without undergoing further scrutiny. But I am compelled here once more to lodge a protest. The concept, along with those related to it, such as those of law, command, obligation, etc., taken in this unconditional sense, has its origin in theological morals, and remains a stranger to the philosophical until it has produced valid credentials from the essence of human nature or from that of the objective world. Until then, for it and those related to it, I recognize no other source than the Decalogue. In general, in the centuries of Christianity, philosophical ethics has unconsciously taken its form from the theological. Since this ethics is now essentially dictatorial, the philosophical, too, has appeared in the form of prescription and doctrine of duty in all innocence and without suspecting that for this, first a further authority is necessary. Instead, it supposes that this is its own and natural form. Just as much as the ethical significance of human action is undeniably recognized by all peoples, times, and faiths, and also by all philosophers (with the exception of the true materialists), just as much as it is metaphysical; reaching beyond this apparent existence and touching upon eternity, just so little is this ethical significance to be understood in its essence in the form of command and obedience, of law and duty. Moreover, separated from the theological presuppositions from which they have proceeded, these concepts actually lose all meaning, and if one, like Kant, believes that one can replace these presuppositions by talking about absolute ought and unconditional duty, then one feeds the reader a line, indeed, actually gives him a contradictio in adjecto to swallow. […] Every ought is necessarily conditioned through punishment or reward, hence, to put it in Kant’s terms, essentially and inevitably hypothetical and never, as he maintains categorical. But if these conditions did not exist, the concept of ought remains empty of sense. Therefore, an absolute ought is simply a contradictio in adjecto. It is simply impossible to think of a commanding voice, whether it comes from within or from without, in any way other than as threatening or promising. Then, however, obedience to it, clever or dumb, depending on the circumstances, is always self-interested, and hence, without moral worth. The complete inconceivability and absurdity of this concept of an unconditional ought, which lies at the foundation of Kant’s ethics, itself enters his system late, specifically in the Critique of Practical Reason, like a concealed poison which cannot remain in an organism, but finally must break out and vent itself. That is, such an unconditional ought still postulates 325

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a condition after all, even more than one, namely a reward, and at that the immortality of the one to be rewarded and the rewarder. Such is by all means necessary as soon as one makes duty and ought into the fundamental concept of ethics, since these concepts are essentially relative and only have any meaning through threatened punishment or promised reward. This recompense, afterward postulated for virtue, which seems only to work gratuitously, enters, however, respectably disguised under the name of the highest good, which is the union between virtue and happiness. At its basis, however, this is nothing other than morality stemming from happiness, or eudaimonism, and, as a result, is supported by self-interest, which Kant had solemnly ejected from the front door of his system as heteronomous, and which sneaks in again at the back door under the name of highest good. Thus the single assumption of an unconditional, absolute ought takes its revenge as a disguised contradiction. Otherwise the conditional ought certainly cannot be a fundamental ethical concept because everything which occurs with respect to reward or punishment necessarily is an egoistic doing and as such is without pure moral worth.—From all of these it is obvious that it requires a grand and more unbiased conception of ethics if one is serious about wanting to fathom the eternal significance of human action, significance which extends beyond appearance. Just as all ought is at least bound to a condition, so, too, is all duty. For both concepts are closely related to one another and nearly identical. The single difference between them might be that ought generally can also rest upon mere compulsion; duty, in contrast, assumes commitment, i.e., the undertaking of a duty. […] Framing ethics in an imperative form as a doctrine of duties and thinking about the moral worth or worthlessness of human actions as fulfilment or violation of duties undeniably stems, along with the ought, only from theological morals and, hence, from the Decalogue. […] Now, however, Kant had silently and surreptitiously borrowed the imperative form of ethics from theological morals, the presuppositions of which (that is, theology) actually lie at the basis of his ethics, and in fact his ethics only has meaning and sense if it is not separated from theology, for indeed, these presuppositions are implicite in his ethics. Afterwards, then, at the end of his presentation, it was easy for him again to develop a theology from his morals, the familiar moral theology. For then, he needed only to draw forth expressly the concepts that had implicite been established by the ought and that lay hidden at the basis of his morals and then explicite to set them up as postulates of practical reason. So then there appeared, to the world’s great edification, a theology which was merely supported by morals, indeed, which had proceeded from morals. But this came about because these morals themselves rested on hidden theological presumptions. I intend no sarcastic comparison, but in form the matter is analogous to the surprise which an artist in natural magic prepares for us when he lets us find a thing there where previously he had slyly slipped it.—Put in abstracto, Kant’s procedure is this: that he makes into a result that which should have been the principle or the presupposition (the theology), and he takes as a presupposition that which should have led to the result (the command). However, then after he had turned the thing on its head, no one, not even he himself, recognized it for that which it was, namely, the old, familiar theological morals. […] Certainly long before Kant, in philosophy the framing of morals in imperative form and as a doctrine of duties had also been in frequent use, but then morals themselves were grounded on the will of God which had already been proved by other means and thereby remained consistent. However, as soon as someone, like Kant, undertook to provide a foundation independent of such a will, wanting to establish ethics without metaphysical presuppositions, 326

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one was no longer justified in any imperative form, any ‘you ought’ and ‘it is your duty’, without laying as grounds some other derivation. […]

§ 16 Statement and Proof of the Only Genuine Moral Incentive After the previous, absolutely necessary preparations, I come to the proof of the true incentive that lies at the basis of all actions of genuine moral worth. […] Since I propose this moral incentive, not as something to be arbitrarily accepted, but as something I will actually prove to be the only one possible, and since this proof requires a combination of many thoughts, I put forth in advance some premises which are the presuppositions of the argument and indeed can be taken as axioms, except for the last two, which refer to the discussions provided above.

(1) No action can take place without a sufficient motive any more than a stone can move without a sufficient push or pull.



(2) No action can fail to take place when a sufficient motive for the character of the agent is present, unless a stronger counter-motive makes its omission necessary.



(3) What moves the will is simply well-being and woe in general and taken in the broadest sense of the word, just as conversely well-being and woe means ‘in accord with or contrary to a will’. Thus, any motive must have a reference to well-being and woe.



(4) Consequently any action refers to a being predisposed to well-being and woe, and has these as its ultimate end.



(5) This being is either the agent itself or another who then takes a passive role in the action since it is done to his detriment or to his advantage and benefit.



(6) Any action that has as its ultimate end the well-being and woe of the agent itself is an egoistical one.



(7) Everything said here about actions applies just as well to the omission of such actions, for which motive and counter-motive are present.



(8) As a result of the discussion given in the preceding sections, egoism and the moral worth of an action completely exclude one another. If an action has an egoistic end as a motive, then it can have no moral worth; if an action should have moral worth, then its motive may not have an egoistic end, immediate or mediate, near or far.



(9) As a result of the elimination of the alleged duties to ourselves carried out in § 5, the moral significance of an action can only lie in its relation to others; only with respect to them can it have moral worth or reprehensibility, and consequently be an action of justice or loving kindness, as well as the opposite of the two.

From these premises, the following is evident: the well-being and woe, which (according to premise (3)) must be the ultimate end lying at the basis of any action or omission, is either 327

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that of the agent himself or that of some other who takes a passive role in the action. In the first case, the action is necessarily egoistic because an interested motive lies at its basis. This is not merely the case with actions that one obviously undertakes for one’s own advantage and benefit, which is most often so, but it occurs just as much when one expects from an action some sort of distant result for oneself, be it in this or another world, or when one has in view one’s honour, one’s reputation among people, anyone’s esteem, the sympathy of witnesses, etc.; no less if one intends to uphold a maxim through the universal observance of which one potentially expects a benefit for oneself such as one of justice or of universal, helpful support, etc.—likewise, when one considers it advisable to follow some absolute command that issues from an authority unknown, but apparently superior, since nothing other than fear of the detrimental consequences of disobedience can move us even if they are only thought of generally and vaguely;—the same is true if someone tries through some action or omission to maintain his own high opinion of himself, his clearly or unclearly conceived worth or dignity, which otherwise he would have to relinquish and thereby see his pride humbled;—and finally when one wants to work by Wolf[f]ian principles toward his own perfection. In short, whatever one wants to assert as the ultimate motivating ground for an action, the result will always be that, in a roundabout way, ultimately the agent’s own well-being and woe is the actual incentive; hence, the action is egoistic and as a result is without moral worth. There is only a single case in which this does not take place: specifically when the ultimate motivating ground for an action or omission lies directly and exclusively in the well-being and woe of some other person who takes a passive role in it; thus, the one taking the active role in the action or omission has in view solely the well-being and woe of another and altogether intends nothing but that this other remain unharmed or even receive help, support, and relief. This end alone presses the stamp of moral worth on his action or omission, which thereafter exclusively depends on the action’s occurring or not occurring simply for the advantage and benefit of another. That is, as soon as this is not the case, the well-being and woe which drives any action or restrains it can only be that of the agent himself but then the action or omission is always egoistic and, hence, without moral worth. But now if my action should occur simply and solely for another’s sake, then his well-being and woe is immediately my motive, just as my own is in all other actions. This expresses our problem narrowly, specifically as this: how is it possible that my will is immediately moved by another’s well-being and woe, i.e., just as otherwise my will is only moved by my own wellbeing and woe, and thus, becomes my direct motive, and sometimes another’s well-being and woe even becomes so to such a degree that I more or less disregard my own, which otherwise is the only source of my motives?—Obviously only through this: that another becomes the ultimate end of my will just as, otherwise, I am; and so through this: that I immediately will his well-being and do not will his woe, just as I otherwise immediately will only that of my own. This, however, necessarily presupposes that I suffer along with his woe, feel his woe, as otherwise I would only mine, and therefore, I immediately will his well-being as, otherwise, I would only my own. However, this requires that I be identified with him in some way, i.e., that the complete distinction between me and the other, upon precisely which my egoism rests, to a certain degree be suspended. Now, however, since I do not live in another’s skin, it is only by means of the cognition that I have of him, i.e., the representation of him in my mind, that I identify with him so much that my deed proclaims the distinction to be suspended. However, the process analysed here is not one dreamed up or snatched out of thin air, but indeed quite 328

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real and in no way uncommon; it is the everyday phenomenon of compassion, i.e., the quite immediate participation, independent of considerations of any other sort, primarily in the suffering of another, and hence the prevention or removal of this suffering is that in which ultimately all satisfaction and all well-being and happiness consist. Only this compassion is the actual basis of all free justice and all genuine loving kindness. Only insofar as an action has originated from compassion does it have moral worth, and anything proceeding from any other motives has none. As soon as this compassion is aroused, the well-being and woe of another immediately lies in my heart, and in just the same way, if not always to the same degree, as otherwise only that of my own lies in my heart. Thus the distinction between him and me is now no longer absolute. Certainly this process is astonishing, indeed, mysterious. In truth, it is the great mystery of ethics, its urphenomenon and the boundary-stone beyond which only metaphysical speculation can dare take a step. We see removed in this process the partition by which, in the light of nature (as the old theologians called reason), being became completely separated from being, and the Not-I to a certain extent becomes the I. However, we now want to leave untouched the metaphysical explanation of the phenomenon and first see whether all actions of free justice and genuine loving kindness actually result from this process. Then our problem will be solved, since we will have demonstrated the ultimate foundation of morality in human nature itself, which foundation can no longer be a problem for ethics, but, like every existing thing as such, for metaphysics. […] I still have two important remarks to add as supplementary.

(1) To aid easier comprehension I have simplified the derivation of compassion, given above as the only source of actions of moral worth, by intentionally not having attended to the incentive of malice, which, like compassion, is disinterested, but which makes another’s pain its ultimate end. […]

In general, there are three fundamental incentives* for human actions, and any possible motive works only through the stimulation of these incentives. They are:

(a) Egoism, which wills one’s own well-being (is boundless).

(b) Malice, which wills another’s woe (extends to the most extreme cruelty).

(c) Compassion, which wills the well-being of another (extends to noble-mindedness and magnanimity).

Every human action must trace back to one of these incentives, although two of these can also work in unity. Since we now have accepted actions of moral worth as factually given, then they must proceed from one of these fundamental incentives. […]

(2) Our immediate participation is limited to another’s suffering and will not, at least not directly, be stimulated by his well-being. […]

The reason for this is that pain, suffering, which includes all want, deprivation, need, indeed, every wish, is that which is positive, which is immediately felt. In contrast, the nature of satisfaction, of enjoyment, or pleasure, consists only in that a deprivation is ended, a pain is stilled. Thus these work negatively. […] 329

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In consequence of the above presentation of compassion as a process of becoming motivated immediately by the suffering of another, I must still correct the often-repeated error of Cassina* (Saggio analitico sulla compassione, 1788; German by Pockels), who opines that compassion arises through an instantaneous deception of the fantasy because we place ourselves in the place of the sufferer, and now, in our imagination, we fancy that we suffer his pain in our person. It is in no way so; rather, it remains precisely clear and present to us at every moment that he is the one who suffers and not we, and it is precisely in his person, not in ours, that we feel suffering, to our sorrow. We suffer with him, thus, in him: we feel his pain as his and do not imagine that it is ours; indeed, the more happy our own circumstances, the more our consciousness contrasts its own happiness with the situation of the other, the more responsive we are for compassion. The explanation for the possibility of this highly significant phenomenon is not so simple that it can be attained in a merely psychological way as Cassina attempted it. It can only be deduced metaphysically, and I shall attempt to give such an explanation in the last section.

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CHAPTER 13 LUDWIG ANDREAS FEUERBACH (1804–1872)

INTRODUCTION In the nineteenth century Ludwig Feuerbach was rightly recognized not only as Europe’s most famous atheist, but also as an opponent of idealistic systematic philosophy. Feuerbach was born on July 28, 1804, in Landshut, Bavaria. His father, the prominent lawyer Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, who studied philosophy and law at Jena in the 1790s with the Kantians, Karl Reinhold and Gottlieb Hufeland, was called to Bavaria to assist with legal and educational reforms initiated by Maximilian von Montgelas. In recognition of his achievement in the modernization of the Bavarian penal code Feuerbach’s father was granted a title of knighthood. Ludwig had two older brothers: Anselm, who distinguished himself as a classical archaeologist and aesthetician, and Karl, a talented mathematician. Raised Protestant, at an early age Feuerbach became interested in theology, and as a gymnasium student in Ansbach, devoted much of his energy to Hebrew and scriptural literature. In 1823, encouraged by his father, he matriculated into the theological faculty of the University of Heidelberg. Feuerbach’s father hoped that his son would develop intellectually under the rationalist theologian Heinrich Paulus, but instead Ludwig came under the influence of the Hegelian speculative theologian, Karl Daub (1765–1836). Attracted by the Hegel-inspired philosophy that Daub taught at Heidelberg, the next year Feuerbach transferred to the University of Berlin, the center of intellectual activities where Hegel himself was lecturing at that time. While at first he still wanted to continue his theological studies, after taking a few semesters of Hegel’s courses and hearing his lectures on metaphysics, logic, and the philosophy of religion, Feuerbach developed a genuine interest in Hegel’s philosophy and soon became a disciple of Hegel. He wrote in September 1824, in a letter to Daub, that Hegel’s lectures, “even borne under the heavy cross of the concept and amid the thunder and lightning of the dialectic” had made his time in Berlin “the significance of an eternity” being “the greatest fortune” that he could have ever encountered (FGW 17/I:53). Under the spell of Hegel’s lectures, Feuerbach refused to continue in his pursuit of theology and delved into philosophy and natural sciences instead. Due to some financial troubles arising from the unwillingness of the Bavarian government to renew his educational stipend, young Ludwig transferred to the University of Erlangen. On July 25, 1828, he defended his doctoral dissertation with the thesis titled De ratione una, universali, infinita (Of Reason, One, Universal, Infinite). The following year he secured a position as Privatdozent (an unsalaried instructor) at Erlangen and began lecturing on the history of modern philosophy and later on metaphysics and logic. However, this low position in the ladder of academic hierarchy turned out to be the last he ever obtained. In his first book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830), he denied the immortality of the soul stating that there could not be life after death. Instead, he advocated for the Spinozistic immortality of reabsorption into nature. For him, it was the recognition of this fact coupled

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with our eventual death that formed the proper basis for a fully lived life. Furthermore, he held that Christianity made this full life impossible because of its emphasis on personal immortality. In fact, Feuerbach’s focus on an earthly life in Thoughts on Death and Immortality perhaps marked the beginning of his separation from Hegelian philosophy, which was largely idealistic. While the book was published anonymously, it proved difficult to hide the author’s identity, and Feuerbach suffered devastating consequences. Viewed as a heretical work that defied Christianity, it destroyed all Feuerbach’s prospects for any advancement in academic career. Although three later books on the history of modern philosophy—History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza (1833), History of Modern Philosophy: Presentation, Development, and Critique of the Leibnizian Philosophy (1837), and Pierre Bayle: A Contribution to the History of Philosophy and Humanity (1838)—established Feuerbach’s professional reputation, he was still refused any academic appointment, both in Germany and abroad. His publications brought attention to his work and in 1833, Feuerbach received an invitation from Leopold von Henning to write reviews for the main Hegelian journal in Berlin, Annals for Scientific Criticism, a task he would continue performing for a number of years. In 1837, Feuerbach married Bertha Löw, who had a large share in a small porcelain factory in the remote Frankish village of Bruckberg near Nuremberg. After years of struggling and desperate to find a job, Feuerbach moved to Bruckberg, where he lived a rural existence for several decades as an independent scholar supported by dividends of the porcelain factory earnings, by a modest pension due to his father’s service to Bavaria, and by royalties generated from publication of articles and reviews he wrote. During his time in Bruckberg, Feuerbach parted ways with Hegelian philosophy even further, and began to associate himself with Young Hegelianism. He contributed essays and reviews to the Halle Annalls for German Science and Art, a journal newly established by the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge. In 1839, this journal published his essay, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy,” where he publically renounced Hegel’s idealism and mystification of the Absolute. The Essence of Christianity that appeared in 1841 not only continued his critique of Hegel, but also brought to attention the true nature of religion and religious concepts. The work became a scripture to a young generation of Germans, propelling Feuerbach to the zenith of his philosophical fame. In the next few years Feuerbach also published Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy (1842) and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843). In these two manifestos he attempted to develop a reliable foundation for his new philosophy, the theoretical underpinning of which was already sketched in The Essence of Christianity and other earlier writings. Feuerbach sought to replace the abstractions of speculative philosophy, which began with Kant and culminated in Hegel, with a “down to earth” materialism and emphasis on the actual man. In the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, he aphoristically formulated “principles” that would lay the foundation for a “new,” naturalistic “philosophy of the future.” He described his new philosophy as “the complete and absolute dissolution of theology into anthropology.” Without ceasing to be theoretical, this philosophy has a fundamentally practical tendency, which he saw in the fact that it “assumes the place of religion” and “is in truth itself religion” (Feuerbach 1986, 73), not the religion of God but rather that which advances man. In 1844, Karl Marx wrote to Feuerbach inviting him to contribute to the  Deutsch– Französische Jahrbücher [German-French Annals], which Marx and Arnold Ruge edited at that time in Paris, and to which Marx contributed his famous politically engaged essay “On the 332

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Jewish Question.” Feuerbach refused trying to avoid any political involvement. He showed a revulsion to political activity, preferring instead to focus on his own anthropologically oriented interpretation of religion. In the seven years following the original publication of The Essence of Christianity three additional editions were released. In 1846, Feuerbach published the first two volumes of his Collected Works and The Essence of Religion. In 1848, during the revolution, Feuerbach decided to leave his relative seclusion at the behest of some students at the University of Heidelberg. They invited Feuerbach to give a series of public lectures on the essence of religion. Held two days per week from December 1848 to March 1849, the lectures drew large multifaceted crowds. About two years later, Feuerbach published the lectures he gave in Heidelberg as Lectures on the Essence of Religion (1851). During the next five years he worked on Theogony According to the Sources of Classical, Hebrew and Christian Antiquity published in 1857. Feuerbach considered Theogony his magnum opus. However, the work did not attract the attention that Feuerbach thought it warranted. In fact, much of Feuerbach’s later works were not that well received. After the failure of the 1848 Revolution Feuerbach’s fame began to wane. In 1859, the pottery factory that supported Feuerbach and his wife went bankrupt. A year later, with the loss of their financial means, they moved to a small house in Rechenberg, on the outskirts of Nuremberg, supported financially by friends. In 1866, Feuerbach published the last volume of his collected works God, Freedom and Immortality from the Standpoint of Anthropology. By this time, his health was failing, and in the summer of 1870, he had his first stroke. Two years later, on September 13, 1872, Feuerbach died at the age of sixty-eight. Both he and his wife, who passed away eleven years later, are buried in Nuremberg. * * * Despite Feuerbach’s somehow different path in the realm of thought than ones of his contemporaries, his views played a vital role in the development of modern ideas. In addition to breaking ground for some of the most significant intellectual and political movements of the contemporary world, Feuerbach, according to Marx, also commenced a “positive humanistic and naturalistic criticism” (MECW 3:232) of the philosophical and religious traditions of his time. He also formulated a humanistic program for the philosophy of the future. In his early works, Feuerbach vigorously defended the Hegelian philosophy against its critics, offering new arguments in support of Hegelianism. Academic Hegelianism had developed in Prussia in the late 1820s, but after Hegel’s death in 1831, it expanded to include intellectuals outside the academy. Not only did Hegel’s spirit still reign supreme influencing the thoughts of the people and the way in which they did philosophy, the Hegelians also attempted to further advance Hegel’s influence by providing new interpretations of his complex notions while still saving the core of his philosophy. However, the Hegelians could not agree about what it meant to “do philosophy.” Not able to reach a consensus, they had broken into two warring camps, the “Hegelian Left” and the “Hegelian Right.” The “Hegelian Right” which included older and more conservative Hegelians, such as Karl Daub, Heinrich Leo and others, were primarily focused on Hegel’s interpretation of religion and morality. In contrast, the “Hegelian Left,” composed of younger and more radical thinkers, who frequently called themselves the “Young Hegelians,” attempted to reveal and develop further what they took to be a “hidden truth” in Hegelian views about social and 333

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political issues. Feuerbach belonged to the Young Hegelians, and would emerge, along with Karl Marx, as one of the most significant figures of this movement. Even a cursory review of Feuerbach’s works reveals his indebtedness to Hegel. Not only did he acquire his historical method from Hegel, but he also adopted the logic of Hegel’s dialectic and incorporated it in his psycho-anthropological analysis of religion. Yet he was one of the first to offer a shuttering critique of Hegel. Feuerbach’s “inversion” of the Hegel’s idealistic philosophy had taken the form of a “transposition” of being and thinking. Whereas, in Hegel, the real material world had been viewed as a mere aspect of the self-subsistent “Absolute,” Feuerbach asserted that ideas and thought were rather subordinate to material reality. The “real” is “that which exists materially”—thought is only its “reflection” (FGW 9:284). Thus in the 1840s, Feuerbach stood at the center of a specifically philosophical radicalism, which had developed out of the seemingly apparent contradictions of Hegelianism. Feuerbach came to see man’s triumph over religion as a necessity for the progression of a scientific society, a common Enlightenment notion. This view of religion was at odds with Hegel’s philosophy and its emphasis on religion as a pivotal part of the dialectical progression of history. In 1835–1836, David Strauss wrote Life of Jesus Critically Examined, which argued that the accounts of Jesus Christ’s life as given in the canonical Gospels are historically unreliable. The views presented in Strauss’s book were enough to cause many in intellectual community to doubt the superficial compatibility between Hegelian philosophy and Christianity. In fact, in response to Strauss’s views the editors of the Annals for Scientific Criticism in Berlin tried to publicly invalidate Strauss’s experience in Hegelian philosophy. Out of this rift in the intellectual community, another prominent Young Hegelian, Arnold Ruge, who would later collaborate with Karl Marx, founded the Halle Annals for German Science and Art. Starting in 1838, Feuerbach began collaborating with this new Young Hegelian journal. In his most famous and far-reaching contribution to the journal, an essay “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy” (1839), Feuerbach publicly announced his break with Hegel and Hegelianism. He also made a clear distinction between his own views and the views put forward by his former allies by calling for a return to nature and naturalistic critique of Christianity. Just two years after the release of this anti-Hegelian essay, Feuerbach published his most celebrated work, The Essence of Christianity. The book propelled him to the zenith of his philosophical fame, and became the most important work for a group of thinkers that included Arnold Ruge, Richard Wagner, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. In The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach did not merely develop a theory of Christian religion but attempted to explain its true nature. He aimed to prove that the essence of religion was not God but man, and that theology, which he viewed as “the reflection of religion upon itself ” (EC xvii), was a “psychic pathology” from which humanity had to be freed. In this effort he went beyond his contemporaries, such as David Strauss and Bruno Bauer, known for their attacks on Christianity. Unlike these and other biblical critics, he chose as his theme not the authenticity and historical value of scriptural records, but the significance of Christianity as an anthropological and psychological phenomenon. While criticizing religion, he did not abandon what he viewed as its core value for humanity. This twofold approach to religion is reflected in the structure of the book. In the first part Feuerbach discusses religion “in its agreement with the human essence” (FGW 5:75), arguing that when religious claims are understood in their proper sense, they express anthropological truths and not perverted theological ideas. Declaring that the idea of God is the perversion 334

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of the idea of man, Feuerbach, in fact, reverses Hegel’s idea of man as God self-alienated. For him, God is the projection of human mind, an imaginary representation of the human-species essence. What religion really worships is not God but human nature, humanity itself, and this is what comprises “the true or anthropological essence of religion.” In the second part Feuerbach considers religion “in its contradiction with the human essence” (FGW 5:316) criticizing the various perversions that necessarily result from our inability to comprehend the true essence of religion. Those “falsehoods, illusions, contradictions, sophisms” arise when the religious projection of human nature is made into an object of reflection, which constitutes the core of theology. Thus “the false essence of religion” that Feuerbach denounces is, in fact, theological, and the God that is a target of his criticism is the God of the theologians. Yet, Feuerbach’s critique is not merely a reduction of religion to a “nonsensical illusion.” Declaring the divinity of humanity in place of God, Feuerbach elevates anthropology to the level traditionally occupied by theology. The book effectively broke the spell of the Hegelian philosophy for many, and refocused much of the philosophical effort of the time on man. Feuerbach framed his arguments from the human perspective, since he saw humans as the source of all religious concepts, including the one presented as the idea of God. In his opinion, the way to get rid of religion and this “misguided” belief in God(s) was for humans to achieve what Feuerbach called their true human essence, which would allow them to reach their true potential in the form of freedom and creativity. This could be done without being hindered with what he saw as a backward and unhelpful idealistic concept of God that they should instead see as a part of themselves. Feuerbach’s anthropological interpretation of religion along with his criticism of Hegel pervaded radical political and philosophical thought that carried out the battle over the meaning of religion and the function of philosophical critique.

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Chronology of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Life and Works 1804

July 28: Born in Landshut, Bavaria.

1820

Attends a Gymnasium in Ansbach.

1823

Matriculates at University of Heidelberg as a theology student.



Begins studying Hegel’s philosophy under Karl Daub.

1824

Enrolls in the University of Berlin as a continued theology student.

1825

Attends Hegel’s lecture courses offered in both semesters.



Drops theology; begins studying philosophy.

1826

Attends additional Hegel’s lectures at the University of Berlin.



Transfers to the University of Erlangen.

1828

July 25: Defends his doctoral thesis, De ratione una, universali, infinita [Of Reason, One, Universal, Infinite] and earns doctorate in philosophy from the University of Erlangen.

1829

Becomes a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) in Philosophy at the University of Erlangen, where he teaches for next three years.

1830

Publishes his first book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality.

1833 Publishes History of Modern Philosophy. From Bacon to Spinoza. 1834

Leopold von Henning invites Feuerbach to write reviews for the main Hegelian journal in Berlin, Annals for Scientific Criticism.



Meets Bertha Löw.

1837 Publishes History of Modern Philosophy: Presentation, Development, and Critique of the Leibnizian Philosophy.

Marries Bertha Löw and moves to Bruckberg near Nuremberg.

1838 Publishes Pierre Bayle: A Contribution to the History of Philosophy and Humanity.

Begins contributing to the new Young Hegelian journal, Halle Annals for German Science and Art.

1839

Writes “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy,” which is published the same year in Halle Annals for German Science and Art.

1841 Publishes The Essence of Christianity (Leipzig: Otto Wigand Verlag). 1842

His work, Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy appears.

1843 Publishes Principles of the Philosophy of the Future.

The second edition of The Essence of Christianity is published in Otto Wigand Verlag in Leipzig (This edition was reprinted in 1848).

1844 Publishes The Essence of Faith According to Luther.

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Karl Marx invites Feuerbach to contribute to the Deutsch - Französische Jahrbücher [German-French Annals] that Marx, together with Arnold Ruge, published in Paris.

1846

The first two volumes of Feuerbach’s Collected Works are published.

Publishes The Essence of Religion. 1848–49

December–March: gives a series of public lectures on the essence of religion at the behest of students at the University of Heidelberg.

1849

The third edition of The Essence of Christianity appears in Ludwig Feuerbachs Sämmtliche Werke [Collected Works], vol. 7 (Leipzig: Otto Wigand).

1851

Publishes the lectures he gave in Heidelberg as Lectures on the Essence of Religion.

1857 Publishes Theogony According to the Sources of Classical, Hebrew and Christian Antiquity. 1859

The pottery factory that supported the Feuerbachs goes bankrupt.

1860

Feuerbach and his wife move to a small house in Rechenberg, on the outskirts of Nuremberg.

1866 Publishes God, Freedom and Immortality from the Standpoint of Anthropology as the last volume of his Collected Works. 1870

Suffers his first stroke.

1872

September 13: Feuerbach dies at the age of sixty-eight; he is buried in Nuremberg (Nürnberg).

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Feuerbach’s Writings A.1.  German Academic Edition

Feuerbach, L. 1981ff. Gesammelte Werke, edited by Werner Schuffenhauer. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. [Cited FGW followed by volume/part (if applicable) and page number.] A.2.  In English (selected editions)

Feuerbach, L. 1957. The Essence of Christianity, translated by G. Eliot with an introduction by K. Barth and a foreword by H. R. Niebuhr. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Feuerbach, L. 1972. The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, translated and with an introduction by Z. Hanfi. Garden City: Doubleday. Feuerbach, L. 1980. Thoughts on Death and Immortality from the Papers of a Thinker, translated by and with an introduction and notes by J. A. Massey, Berkeley: University of California Press. Feuerbach, L. 1986. Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, translated by M. Vogel with an introduction by T. E. Wartenberg. Indianapolis: Hackett. B.  Selected Commentaries

Ameriks, K. 2000. “The Legacy of Idealism in the Philosophy of Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, edited by K. Ameriks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 258–81. Bishop, P. 2009. “Eudaimonism, Hedonism and Feuerbach’s Philosophy of the Future,” Intellectual History Review, 19 (1): 65–81. Breckman, W. 1999. Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gooch, T. 2011. “Some Political Implications of Feuerbach’s Theory of Religion,” in Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, edited by D. Moggach. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 257–80. Gooch, T. 2013. “‘Bruno Reincarnate’: The Early Feuerbach on God, Love and Death,” Journal for the History of Modern Theology / Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte, 20 (1): 1–23. Harvey, V. A. 1995. Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, V. A. 2009. “Ludwig Feuerbach,” in The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, vol. 4, edited by G. R. Oppy and N. Trakakis. New York: Oxford University Press, 133–44. Johnston, L. 1995. Between Transcendence and Nihilism: Species-Ontology in the Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. New York: Peter Lang. Marx, K. 1975. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 3. Moscow: Progress Publishers, in collaboration with London: Lawrence and Wishart and New York City: International Publishers, 229–347. [Cited as MECW following by the volume and page numbers.] Toews, J. E. 1980. Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Wartofsky, M. 1977. Feuerbach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 338

FROM “TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY” (1839) *

German speculative philosophy stands in direct contrast to the ancient Solomonic wisdom: Whereas the latter believes that there is nothing new under the sun, the former sees nothing that is not new under the sun; whereas oriental man loses sight of differences in his preoccupation with unity, occidental man forgets unity in his preoccupation with differences; whereas oriental man carries his indifference to the eternally identical to the point of an imbecilic apathy, occidental man heightens his sensibility for the manifold to the feverish heat of the imaginatio luxurians. By German speculative philosophy, I mean that philosophy which dominates the present—the philosophy of Hegel. As far as Schelling’s philosophy is concerned, it was really an exotic growth—the ancient oriental idea of identity on Germanic soil. If the characteristic inner movement of Schelling’s school is towards the Orient, then the distinguishing feature of the Hegelian philosophy and school is their move towards the Occident combined with their belittlement of the Orient. The characteristic element of Hegel’s philosophy as compared to the orientalism of the philosophy of identity is difference. In spite of everything, Hegel’s philosophy of nature does not reach beyond the involutions of zoophytes and mollusca to which, as is known, acephales and gastropodes also belong. Hegel elevated us to a higher stage, i.e., to the class of articulata whose highest order is constituted by insects. Hegel’s spirit is logical, determinate, and—I would like to say—entomological; in other words, Hegel’s is a spirit that finds its appropriate dwelling in a body with numerous protruding members and with deep fissures and sections. This spirit manifests itself particularly in its view and treatment of history. Hegel determines and presents only the most striking differences of various religions, philosophies, times, and peoples, and in a progressive series of stages, but he ignores all that is common and identical in all of them. The form of both Hegel’s conception and method is that of exclusive time alone, not that of tolerant space; his system knows only subordination and succession; coordination and coexistence are unknown to it. To be sure, the last stage of development is always the totality that includes in itself the other stages, but since it itself is a definite temporal existence and hence bears the character of particularity, it cannot incorporate into itself other existences without sucking out the very marrow of their independent lives and without robbing them of the meaning which they can have only in complete freedom. The Hegelian method boasts of taking the same course as nature. It is true that it imitates nature, but the copy lacks the life of the original. Granted, nature has made man the master of animals, but it has given him not only hands to tame animals but also eyes and ears to admire them. The independence of the animal, which the cruel hand robs, is given back to it by sympathetic ears and eyes. The love of art breaks the chains that the self-interest

From Ludwig Feuerbach, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy.” In The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. and ed. Zawar Hanfi, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company Anchor Book, 1972, 53–96. *

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of manual work puts around the animal. The horse that is weighed down under the groom’s behind is elevated to an object of art by the painter, and the sable that is slain by the furrier for the purpose of turning its fur into a momentary ornament of human vanity is preserved by natural science so that it can be studied as a whole organism. Nature always combines the monarchical tendency of time with the liberalism of space. Naturally, the flower cancels the leaf, but would the plant be perfect if the flower only sat brightly on a leafless stem? True, some plants do shed their leaves in order to put all their energy into bringing forth the blossom, but there are other plants in which the leaf either appears later than the flower or simultaneously with it, which proves that any presentation of the totality of the plant requires the leaf as well as the flower. It is true that man is the truth of the animal, but would the life of nature, would the life of man itself be perfect if animals did not exist independently? Is man’s relationship with animals only a despotic one? Do not the forsaken and the rejected find a substitute for the ingratitude, scheming, and unfaithfulness of their fellow human beings in the faithfulness of the animal? Does the animal not have a power that consoles and heals his broken heart? Is not a good, rational sense also part of animal cults? Could it not be that we regard these cults as ludicrous because we have succumbed to an idolatry of a different kind? Does not the animal speak to the heart of the child in fables? Did not a mere donkey once open the eyes of an obdurate prophet? The stages in the development of nature have, therefore, by no means only a historical meaning. They are, indeed, moments, but moments of a simultaneous totality of nature and not of a particular and individual totality which itself would only be a moment of the universe, that is, of the totality of nature. However, this is not the case with the philosophy of Hegel in which only time, not space, belongs to the form of intuition. Here, totality or the absoluteness of a particular historical phenomenon or existence is vindicated as predicate, thus reducing the stages of development as independent entities only to a historical meaning; although living, they continue to exist as nothing more than shadows or moments, nothing more than homoeopathic drops on the level of the absolute. In this way, for example, Christianity—and, to be sure, taken in its historical-dogmatic development—is determined as absolute religion. In the interest of such a determination, however, only the difference of Christianity from other religions is accentuated, thus neglecting all that is common to all of them; that is, the nature of religion which, as the only absolute condition, lies at the base of all the different religions. The same is true of philosophy. The Hegelian philosophy, I mean the philosophy of Hegel, that is to say, a philosophy that is after all a particular and definite philosophy having an empirical existence—we are not concerned here with the character of its content—is defined and proclaimed as absolute philosophy; i.e., as nothing less than philosophy itself, if not by the master himself, then certainly by his disciples—at least by his orthodox disciples—and certainly quite consistently and in keeping with the teaching of the master. […] Let us […] undertake to demonstrate that the Hegelian philosophy is really a definite and special kind of philosophy. The proof is not difficult to find, however much this philosophy is distinguished from all previous philosophies by its rigorous scientific character, universality, and incontestable richness of thought. Hegelian philosophy was born at a time when mankind stood, as at any other time, on a definite level of thought, when a definite kind of philosophy was in existence. It drew on this philosophy, linked itself with it, and hence it must itself have a definite; i.e., finite character. Every philosophy originates, therefore, as a manifestation of its time; its origin presupposes its historical time. Of course, it appears to itself as not resting on any 340

From “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy”

presuppositions; and, in relation to earlier systems, that is certainly true. A later age, nevertheless, is bound to realize that this philosophy was after all based on certain presuppositions; i.e., certain accidental presuppositions which have to be distinguished from those that are necessary and rational and cannot be negated without involving absolute nonsense. But is it really true that the Hegelian philosophy does not begin with any presuppositions? “Yes! It proceeds from pure Being; it does not start from a particular point of departure, but from that which is purely indeterminate; it starts from that which is itself the beginning.” Is that really so? And is it not after all a presupposition that philosophy has to begin at all? “Well, it is quite obvious that everything must have a beginning, philosophy not excepted.” Quite true! But “beginning” here has the sense of accidental or indifferent; in philosophy, on the other hand, beginning has a particular meaning, the meaning of the first principle in itself as required by philosophical science. But what I would like to ask is: Why should beginning be taken in this sense? Is the notion of beginning not itself subject to criticism? Is it immediately true and universally valid? Why should it not be possible for me to abandon at the start the notion of beginning and, instead, turn directly to that which is real? Hegel starts from Being; i.e., the notion of Being or abstract Being. Why should I not be able to start from Being itself; i.e., real Being? Or, again, why should I not be able to start from reason, since Being, in so far as it is thought of and in so far as it is an object of logic, immediately refers me back to reason? Do I still start from a presupposition when I start from reason? No! I cannot doubt reason and abstract from it without declaring at the same time that both doubting and abstracting do not partake of reason. But even conceding that I do base myself on a presupposition that my philosophizing starts directly from real Being or reason without at all being concerned with the whole question of a beginning, what is so harmful about that? Can I not prove later that the presupposition I had based myself on was only formally and apparently so, that in reality it was none at all? I certainly do not begin to think just at the point when I put my thoughts on paper. I already know how the subject matter of my thinking would develop. I presuppose something because I know that what I presuppose would justify itself through itself. Can it therefore be said that the starting point taken by the Hegelian philosophy in the Logic is a general and an absolutely necessary starting point? Is it not rather a starting point that is itself determined, that is to say, determined by the standpoint of philosophy before Hegel? Is it not itself tied up with (Fichte’s) Theory of Science [Wissenschaftslehre]? Is it not connected with the old question as to the first principle of philosophy and with that philosophical viewpoint which was essentially interested in a formal system rather than in reality? Is it not linked with the first question of all philosophy: What is the first principle? Is this connection not proved by the fact that the method of Hegel-disregarding, of course, the difference of content which also becomes the difference of form—is essentially, or at least generally, the method of Fichte? Is this not also the course described by the Theory of Science [Wissenschaftslehre] that that which is at first for us is in the end also for itself, that therefore the end returns to the beginning, and that the course taken by philosophical science is a circle? Is it not so that the circular movement, and indeed taken literally, becomes an inner need or a necessary consequence where method, i.e., the presentation of philosophy, is taken to be the essence of philosophy itself, where anything that is not a system (taken here in its narrow sense) is not philosophy at all? For only that which is a completed circle is a system, which does not just go on ad infinitum, but whose end rather returns to its beginning. The Hegelian philosophy is actually the most perfect system that has ever appeared. Hegel actually achieved what Fichte aspired to but did not achieve, because he 341

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concluded with an “ought” and not with an end that is also beginning. And yet, systematic thought is by no means the same as thought as such, or essential thought; it is only self-presenting thought. To the extent that I present my thoughts, I place them in time; an insight that contains all its successive moments within a simultaneity in my mind now becomes a sequence. I posit that which is to be presented as not existing and let it be born under my very eyes; I abstract from what it is prior to its presentation. Whatever I therefore posit as a beginning is, in the first instance, that which is purely indeterminate; indeed, I know nothing about it, for selfpresenting knowledge has yet to become knowledge. Hence, strictly speaking, I can start only from the notion of a starting point; for whatever object I may posit, initially it will always have the nature of a starting point. In this regard, Hegel is much more consistent and exact than Fichte with his clamorous “I.” But given that the starting point is indeterminate, then moving onward must mean determining. Only during the course of the movement of presentation does that from which I start come to determine and manifest itself. Hence, progression is at the same time retrogression—I return whence I started. In retrogression I retract progression; i.e., temporalization of thought: I restore the lost identity. But the first principle to which I return is no longer the initial, indeterminate, and unproved first principle; it is now mediated and therefore no longer the same or, even granting that it is the same, no longer in the same form. This process is of course well-founded and necessary, although it rests only on the relationship of self-manifesting and self-presenting thought to thought in itself; i.e., to inner thought. Let us put it in the following way. I read the Logic of Hegel from beginning to end. At the end I return to the beginning. The idea of the Idea or the Absolute Idea contains in itself the idea of Essence, the idea of Being. I therefore know now that Being and Essence are moments of the Idea, or that the Absolute Idea is the Logic in nuce. […] Hegel, in his presentation, aimed at anticipating and imprisoning the intellect itself and compressing it into the system. The system was supposed to be, as it were, reason itself; all immediate activity was to dissolve itself completely in mediated activity, and the presentation of philosophy was not to presuppose anything, that is, nothing was to be left over in us and nothing within us–a complete emptying of ourselves. The Hegelian system is the absolute selfexternalization of reason, a state of affairs that expresses itself, among other things, in the fact that the empirical character of his natural law is pure speculation. The true and ultimate reason for all complaints about formalistic neglect of subjectivity, etc., lies solely in the fact that Hegel compresses everything into his presentation, that he proceeds abstractly from the pre-existence of the intellect, and that he does not appeal to the intellect within us. It is true that Hegel retracts the process of mediation in what he calls the result, but in so far as form is posited as objective essence, one is again left in doubt as to the objectivity or subjectivity of the process of mediation. Hence, those who claim that the process of the mediation of the Absolute is only a formal one may well be materially right, but those who claim the opposite, that is, those who claim objective reality for this process, may not at least formally, be in the wrong. The Hegelian philosophy is thus the culminating point of all speculative-systematic philosophy. With this, I have discovered and mooted the reason underlying the beginning of the Logic. Everything is required either to present (prove) itself or to flow into, and be dissolved in, the presentation. The presentation ignores that which was known before the presentation: It must make an absolute beginning. But it is precisely here that the limits of the presentation manifest themselves immediately. Thought is prior to the presentation of thought. That which 342

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constitutes the starting point within the presentation is primary only for the presentation but not for thought. The presentation needs thought which, although always present within thinking, emerges only later. The presentation is that which is mediated in and for itself; what is primary is therefore never immediate even within the presentation, but only posited, dependent, and mediated, in that it is determined by the determinations of thought whose certainty is self-dependent and which are prior to and independent of a philosophy presenting and unfolding itself in time. Thus, presentation always appeals to a higher authority—and one which is a priori in relation to it. […] The only philosophy that proceeds from no presuppositions at all is one that possesses the courage and freedom to doubt itself, [the philosophy] that produces itself out of its antithesis. All modern philosophies, however, begin only with themselves and not with what is in opposition to them. They presuppose philosophy; that is, what they understand by philosophy to be the immediate truth. They understand by mediation only elucidation, as in the case of Fichte, or development, as in the case of Hegel. Kant was critical towards the old metaphysics, but not towards himself. Fichte proceeded from the assumption that the Kantian philosophy was the truth. All he wanted was to raise it to “science,” to link together that which in Kant had a dichotomized existence, by deriving it from a common principle. Similarly, Schelling proceeded from the assumption that the Fichtean philosophy was the established truth, and restored Spinoza in opposition to Fichte. As far as Hegel is concerned, he is a Fichte as mediated through a Schelling. Hegel polemicized against the Absolute of Schelling; he thought it lacked the moment of reflection, apprehension, and negativity. In other words, he imbued the Absolute Identity with Spirit, introduced determinations into it, and fructified its womb with the semen of the Notion (the ego of Fichte). But he, nevertheless, took the truth of the Absolute for granted. He had no quarrel with the existence or the objective reality of Absolute Identity; he actually took for granted that Schelling’s philosophy was, in its essence, a true philosophy. All he accused it of was that it lacked form. Hence, Hegel’s relationship to Schelling is the same as that of Fichte to Kant. To both the true philosophy was already in existence, both in content and substance; both were motivated by a purely “scientific,” that is, in this case, systematic and formal interest. Both were critics of certain specific qualities of the existing philosophy, but not at all of its essence. That the Absolute existed was beyond all doubt. All it needed was to prove itself and be known as such. In this way it becomes a result and an object of the mediating Notion; that is, a “scientific” truth and not merely an assurance given by intellectual intuition. But precisely for that reason the proof of the Absolute in Hegel has, in principle and essence, only a formal significance, notwithstanding the scientific rigor with which it is carried out. Right at its starting point, the philosophy of Hegel presents us with a contradiction, the contradiction between truth and science, between essence and form, between thinking and writing. The Absolute Idea is assumed, not formally, to be sure, but essentially. What Hegel premises as stages and constituent parts of mediation, he thinks are determined by the Absolute Idea. Hegel does not step outside the Idea, nor does he forget it. Rather, he already thinks the antithesis out of which the Idea should produce itself on the basis of its having been taken for granted. It is already proved substantially before it is proved formally. Hence, it must always remain unprovable, always subjective for someone who recognizes in the antithesis of the Idea a premise which the Idea has itself established in advance. The externalization of the Idea is, so to speak, only a dissembling; it is only a pretense and nothing serious–the Idea is just playing 343

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a game. The conclusive proof is the beginning of the Logic, whose beginning is to be taken as the beginning of philosophy as such. That the starting point is being is only a formalism, for being is here not the true starting point, nor the truly Primary. The starting point could just as well be the Absolute Idea because it was already a certainty, an immediate truth for Hegel before he wrote the Logic; i.e., before he gave a scientific form of expression to his logical ideas. The Absolute Idea—the Idea of the Absolute—is its own indubitable certainty as the Absolute Truth. It posits itself in advance as true; that which the Idea posits as the other, again presupposes the Idea according to its essence. In this way, the proof remains only a formal one. To Hegel, the thinker, the Absolute Idea was absolute certainty, but to Hegel, the author, it was a formal uncertainty. This contradiction between the thinker who is without needs, who can anticipate that which is yet to be presented because everything is already settled for him, and the needy writer who has to go through a chain of succession and who posits and objectifies as formally uncertain what is certain to the thinker—this contradiction is the process of the Absolute Idea which presupposes being and essence, but in such a way that these on their part already presuppose the Idea. This is the only adequate reason required to explain the contradiction between the actual starting point of the Logic and its real starting point which lies at the end. As was already pointed out, Hegel in his heart of hearts was convinced of the certainty of the Absolute Idea. In this regard, there was nothing of the critic or the skeptic in him. However, the Absolute Idea had to demonstrate its truth, had to be released from the confines of a subjective intellectual conception—it had to be shown that it also existed for others. Thus understood, the question of its proof had an essential, and at the same time an inessential, meaning: It was a necessity in so far as the Absolute Idea had to prove itself, because only so could it demonstrate its necessity; but it was at the same time superfluous as far as the inner certainty of the truth of the Absolute Idea was concerned. The expression of this superfluous necessity, of this dispensable indispensability or indispensable dispensability is the Hegelian method. That is why its end is its beginning and its beginning its end. That is why being in it is already the certainty of the Idea, and nothing other than the Idea in its immediacy. That is why the Idea’s lack of self-knowledge in the beginning is, in the sense of the Idea, only an ironical lack of knowledge. What the Idea says is different from what it thinks. It says “being” or “essence,” but actually it thinks only for itself. Only at the end does it also say what it thinks, but it also retracts at the end what it had expressed at the beginning, saying: “What you had, at the beginning and successively, taken to be a different entity, that I am myself.” The Idea itself is being and essence, but it does not yet confess to be so; it keeps this secret to itself. That is exactly why, to repeat myself, the proof or the mediation of the Absolute Idea is only a formal affair. The Idea neither creates nor proves itself through a real other—that could only be the empirical and concrete perception of the intellect. Rather, it creates itself out of a formal and apparent antithesis. Being is in itself the Idea. However, to prove cannot mean anything other than to bring the other person to my own conviction. The truth lies only in the unification of “I” and “You.” The Other of pure thought, however, is the sensuous intellect in general. In the field of philosophy, proof therefore consists only in the fact that the contradiction between sensuous intellect and pure thought is disposed, so that thought is true not only for itself but also for its opposite. For even if every true thought is true only through itself, the fact remains that in the case of a thought that expresses an antithesis, its credibility will remain subjective, one-sided and doubtful so long as it relies only on itself. Now, logical being is in direct, unmediated, and abhorrent contradiction with the being of the 344

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intellect’s empirical and concrete perception. In addition, logical being is only an indulgence, a condescension on the part of the Idea, and, consequently, already that which it must prove itself to be. This means that I enter the Logic as well as intellectual perception only through a violent act, through a transcendent act, or through an immediate break with real perception. The Hegelian philosophy is therefore open to the same accusation as the whole of modern philosophy from Descartes and Spinoza onward—the accusation of an unmediated break with sensuous perception and of philosophy’s immediate taking itself for granted. […] The positive significance of the philosophy of Schelling lies solely in his philosophy of nature compared to the limited idealism of Fichte, which knows only a negative relationship to nature. Therefore, one need not be surprised that the originator of the philosophy of nature presents the Absolute only from its real side, for the presentation of the Absolute from its ideal side had already occurred in Fichteanism before the philosophy of nature. Of course, the philosophy of identity restored a lost unity, but not by objectifying this unity as the Absolute, or as an entity common to and yet distinguished from nature and spirit—for thus understood, the Absolute was only a mongrel between idealism and the philosophy of nature, born out of the conflict between idealism and the philosophy of nature as experienced by the author of the latter—but only in so far as the notion of this unity meant the notion of nature as both subject and object implying the restoration of nature to its proper place. However, by not being satisfied with its rejection of subjective idealism—this was its positive achievement—and by wanting itself to acquire the character of absolute philosophy, which involved a misconception of its limits, the philosophy of nature came to oppose even that which was positive in idealism. Kant involved himself in a contradiction—something necessary for him but which cannot be discussed here—in so far as he misconceived the affirmative, rational limits of reason by taking them to be boundaries. Boundaries are arbitrary limits that are removable and ought not to be there. The philosophy of identity even rejected the positive limits of reason and philosophy together with these boundaries. The unity of thought and being it claimed to have achieved was only the unity of thought and imagination. Philosophy now became beautiful, poetic, soulful, romantic, but for that matter also transcendent, superstitious, and absolutely uncritical. The very condition of all criticism— the distinction between “subjective” and “objective”—thus melted into thin air. Discerning and determining thought came to be regarded as a finite and negative activity. No wonder then that the philosophy of identity finally succumbed, irresistibly and uncritically, to the mysticism of the Cobbler of Görlitz. It was in the context of this philosophy that Hegel’s own philosophizing began, although Hegel was by no means a disciple bound to the originator of that philosophy. Rather, they were friends. Hegel restored philosophy by rescuing it from the realm of imagination. A Hegelian applies with perfect justification to Hegel what Aristotle remarked of Anaxagoras; namely, that he (Anaxagoras), as one among drunks, was the only sober thinker among the philosophers of nature. With Hegel the unity of thought and being acquired a rational meaning, which is not, however, above criticism. Hegel’s principle is the thinking spirit. He incorporated into philosophy the element in which rationalism has its being; namely, the intellect. In spite of the assurance to the contrary, the intellect, both as a matter of fact and with respect to its own reality, was excluded from the idea of the Absolute; in Hegel, it became a moment of the Absolute itself. The metaphysical expression of this state of affairs is the statement that the negative, the 345

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other or that which is an object of reflection, is to be conceived not only as negative and finite, but also as positive and essential. There is therefore a negative and critical element in Hegel even if what really determines his thinking is the idea of the Absolute. Although he recognized that the Absolute lacked intellect or the principle of form—both are to him one and the same— and although he actually defined the Absolute differently from Schelling by attributing to it the principle of form, thus raising form to the level of essence, the fact remains that for Hegel form—and this is indeed necessarily included in its notion—simultaneously means something formal, and the intellect again means something negative. It was assumed that the content of the philosophy of the Absolute was true, speculative, and profound; all it lacked was the form of the notion. The notion—form or intellect—was posited as essential to the extent that its absence meant a defect. However, this defect must be only a formal affair if the content has been assumed as true—herein can be seen the proof of what we said earlier about the method of Hegel. This means that philosophy is not concerned with anything except notion or form. The content—even if it is to be produced internally by philosophy’s self-activity inasmuch as it is contained in the form of the notion—is always given: The business of philosophy is solely to apprehend it by critically distinguishing the essential from the non-essential or from that which is contributed by the peculiar form of intuition or sensuousness. Philosophy in Hegel has therefore no genetico-critical sense, although it certainly has a critical one. A genetico-critical philosophy is one that does not dogmatically demonstrate or apprehend an object given through perception—for what Hegel says applies unconditionally to objects given immediately, i.e., those that are absolutely real and given through nature—but examines its origin; which questions whether an object is a real object, only an idea, or just a psychological phenomenon; which, finally, distinguishes with utmost rigor between what is subjective and what is objective. The genetico-critical philosophy is mainly concerned with those things that are otherwise called secondary causes. Indeed, its relationship to absolute philosophy—which turns subjective psychological processes and speculative needs, for example, Jakob Böhme’s process through which God is mediated, into the processes of the Absolute—is, to illustrate by analogy, the same as the relationship of that theological view of nature which takes comets or other strange phenomena to be the immediate workings of God to the purely physicist or natural philosophical view which sees, for example, the cause of the gallnut in the innocent sting of an insect rather than looking upon it, as theology does, as a sign of the existence of the Devil as a personal being. The Hegelian philosophy is, uniquely, a rational mysticism. Hence it fascinates in the same measure as it repels. The mystical-speculative souls, for whom it is an unbearable contradiction to see the mystical united with the rational, find it repulsive because they find the notion disappointing, and destructive of the very mystical fascination they cherish. It is equally repulsive to rational heads who find the union of the rational and the mystical abhorrent. The unity of the subjective and the objective as enunciated and placed at the summit of philosophy by Schelling, a unity that is still basic to Hegel although placed by him—but only according to form—in the right place; namely, at the end of philosophy as the Result. This unity is both a fruitless and a harmful principle because it eliminates the distinction between “subjective” and “objective” even in the case of particulars, and renders futile the genetico-critical thought, indeed, negates the very question about truth. The reason why Hegel conceived those ideas which express only subjective needs to be objective truth is because he did not go back to the source of and the need for these ideas. What he took for real reveals itself on closer examination to be of a highly dubious nature. He made what 346

From “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy”

is secondary primary, thus either ignoring that which is really primary or dismissing it as something subordinate. And he demonstrated what is only particular, what is only relatively rational, to be the rational in and for itself. […] Hegel disregarded—and not accidentally, but rather as a consequence of the spirit of German speculative philosophy since Kant and Fichte—the secondary causes (which are, however, very often the primary causes and are truly grasped only when they are grasped not only empirically, but also metaphysically; i.e., philosophically) together with the natural grounds and causes of things which form the fundamental principles of the genetico-critical philosophy. From the extremes of a hypercritical subjectivism, we are, in Hegel’s philosophy, hurled into the extremes of an uncritical objectivism. Of course, the natural and psychological ways of explaining things in the early days of philosophy were superficial, but only because one did not see logic in psychology, metaphysics in physics, and reason in nature. If, on the other hand, nature is understood as it should be understood—as objective reason—then it is the only canon equally as true of philosophy as of art. The summum bonum of art is human form (taken not only in the narrowest sense, but also in the sense of poetry); the summum bonum of philosophy is human being. Human form cannot be regarded as limited and finite, because even if it were so the artistic-creative spirit could easily remove the limits and conjure up a higher form from it. The human form is rather the genus of the manifold animal species; it no longer exists as species in man, but as genus. The being of man is no longer a particular and subjective, but a universal being, for man has the whole universe as the object of his drive for knowledge. And only a cosmopolitan being can have the cosmos as its object. It is true that the stars are not the objects of an immediate sensuous perception, but they obey the same laws as we do. All speculation that would rather go beyond nature and man is therefore futile—as futile as the kind of art that would like to give us something higher than human form, but gives us only distortions. Futile, too, is the speculative philosophy that has risen against Hegel and is in vogue now—the speculative philosophy of the positivists. For instead of going beyond Hegel, it has actually retrogressed far behind Hegel in so far as it has failed to grasp precisely the most significant directions suggested by Hegel and his predecessors, Kant and Fichte, in their own characteristic ways. Philosophy is the science of reality in its truth and totality. However, the all-inclusive and all-encompassing reality is nature (taken in the most universal sense of the word). The deepest secrets are to be found in the simplest natural things, but, pining away for the Beyond, the speculative fantast treads them under his feet. The only source of salvation lies in a return to nature. It is wrong to look upon nature as contradicting ethical freedom. Nature has built not only the mean workshop of the stomach, but also the temple of the brain. It has not only given us a tongue whose papillae correspond to intestinal villi, but also ears that are enchanted by the harmony of sounds and eyes that only the heavenly and generous being of light ravishes. Nature opposes only fantastic, not rational, freedom. Each glass of wine that we drink one too many of is a very pathetic and even peripatetic proof that the servilism of passions enrages the blood; a proof that the Greek sophrosyne is completely in conformity with nature. As we know, the maxim of the Stoics—and I mean the rigorous Stoics, those scarecrows of the Christian moralists—was: Live in conformity with nature.

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FROM THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY (1841) *

CHAPTER I. Introduction § 1. The Essential Nature of Man Religion has its basis in the essential difference between man and the brute—the brutes have no religion. […] But what is this essential difference between man and the brute? The most simple, general, and also the most popular answer to this question is—consciousness:—but consciousness in the strict sense; for the consciousness implied in the feeling of self as an individual, in discrimination by the senses, in the perception and even judgment of outward things according to definite sensible signs, cannot be denied to the brutes. Consciousness in the strictest sense is present only in a being to whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought. The brute is indeed conscious of himself as an individual—and he has accordingly the feeling of self as the common centre of successive sensations—but not as a species: hence, he is without that consciousness which in its nature, as in its name, is akin to science. Where there is this higher consciousness there is a capability of science. Science is the cognisance of species. In practical life we have to do with individuals; in science, with species. But only a being to whom his own species, his own nature, is an object of thought, can make the essential nature of other things or beings an object of thought. Hence the brute has only a simple, man a twofold life: in the brute, the inner life is one with the outer; man has both an inner and an outer life. The inner life of man is the life which has relation to his species, to his general, as distinguished from his individual, nature. Man thinks— that is, he converses with himself. The brute can exercise no function which has relation to its species without another individual external to itself; but man can perform the functions of thought and speech, which strictly imply such a relation, apart from another individual. Man is himself at once I and thou; he can put himself in the place of another, for this reason, that to him his species, his essential nature, and not merely his individuality, is an object of thought. Religion being identical with the distinctive characteristic of man, is then identical with self-consciousness—with the consciousness which man has of his nature. But religion, expressed generally, is consciousness of the infinite; thus it is and can be nothing else than the consciousness which man has of his own—not finite and limited, but infinite nature. […]

*

From Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Georg Eliot. Courtesy of Internet Archive.

From The Essence of Christianity

What, then, is the nature of man, of which he is conscious, or what constitutes the specific distinction, the proper humanity of man? Reason, Will, Affection. To a complete man belong the power of thought, the power of will, the power of affection. The power of thought is the light of the intellect, the power of will is energy of character, the power of affection is love. Reason, love, force of will, are perfections—the perfections of the human being—nay, more, they are absolute perfections of being. To will, to love, to think, are the highest powers, are the absolute nature of man as man, and the basis of his existence. Man exists to think, to love, to will. Now that which is the end, the ultimate aim, is also the true basis and principle of a being. But what is the end of reason? Reason. Of love? Love. Of will? Freedom of the will. We think for the sake of thinking; love for the sake of loving; will for the sake of willing—i.e., that we may be free. True existence is thinking, loving, willing existence. That alone is true, perfect, divine, which exists for its own sake. But such is love, such is reason, such is will. The divine trinity in man, above the individual man, is the unity of reason, love, will. Reason, Will, Love, are not powers which man possesses, for he is nothing without them, he is what he is only by them; they are the constituent elements of his nature, which he neither has nor makes, the animating, determining, governing powers—divine, absolute powers—to which he can oppose no resistance. […] Man is nothing without an object. The great models of humanity, such men as reveal to us what man is capable of, have attested the truth of this proposition by their lives. They had only one dominant passion—the realisation of the aim which was the essential object of their activity. But the object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject’s own, but objective, nature. If it be an object common to several individuals of the same species, but under various conditions, it is still, at least as to the form under which it presents itself to each of them according to their respective modifications, their own, but objective, nature. […] In the object which he contemplates, therefore, man becomes acquainted with himself; consciousness of the objective is the self-consciousness of man. We know the man by the object, by his conception of what is external to himself; in it his nature becomes evident; this object is his manifested nature, his true objective ego. And this is true not merely of spiritual, but also of sensuous objects. Even the objects which are the most remote from man, because they are objects to him, and to the extent to which they are so, are revelations of human nature. […] That he sees them, and so sees them, is an evidence of his own nature. The animal is sensible only of the beam which immediately affects life; while man perceives the ray, to him physically indifferent, of the remotest star. Man alone has purely intellectual, disinterested joys and passions; the eye of man alone keeps theoretic festivals. The eye which looks into the starry heavens, which gazes at that light, alike useless and harmless, having nothing in common with the earth and its necessities—this eye sees in that light its own nature, its own origin. The eye is heavenly in its nature. Hence man elevates himself above the earth only with the eye; hence theory begins with the contemplation of the heavens. The first philosophers were astronomers. It is the heavens that admonish man of his destination, and remind him that he is destined not merely to action, but also to contemplation. The absolute to man is his own nature. The power of the object over him is therefore the power of his own nature. Thus the power of the object of feeling is the power of feeling itself; the power of the object of the intellect is the power of the intellect itself; the power of the object 349

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of the will is the power of the will itself. The man who is affected by musical sounds is governed by feeling; by the feeling, that is, which finds its corresponding element in musical sounds. But it is not melody as such, it is only melody pregnant with meaning and emotion, which has power over feeling. Feeling is only acted on by that which conveys feeling, i.e., by itself, its own nature. Thus also the will; thus, and infinitely more, the intellect. Whatever kind of object, therefore, we are at any time conscious of, we are always at the same time conscious of our own nature; we can affirm nothing without affirming ourselves. And since to will, to feel, to think, are perfections, essences, realities, it is impossible that intellect, feeling, and will should feel or perceive themselves as limited, finite powers, i.e., as worthless, as nothing. For finiteness and nothingness are identical; finiteness is only a euphemism for nothingness. Finiteness is the metaphysical, the theoretical—nothingness the pathological, practical expression. What is finite to the understanding is nothing to the heart. But it is impossible that we should be conscious of will, feeling, and intellect, as finite powers, because every perfect existence, every original power and essence, is the immediate verification and affirmation of itself. It is impossible to love, will, or think, without perceiving these activities to be perfections— impossible to feel that one is a loving, willing, thinking being, without experiencing an infinite joy therein. Consciousness consists in a being becoming objective to itself; hence it is nothing apart, nothing distinct from the being which is conscious of itself. How could it otherwise become conscious of itself? It is therefore impossible to be conscious of a perfection as an imperfection, impossible to feel feeling limited, to think thought limited. Consciousness is self-verification, self-affirmation, self-love, joy in one’s own perfection. Consciousness is the characteristic mark of a perfect nature; it exists only in a self-sufficing, complete being. Even human vanity attests this truth. A man looks in the glass; he has complacency in his appearance. This complacency is a necessary, involuntary consequence of the completeness, the beauty of his form. A beautiful form is satisfied in itself; it has necessarily joy in itself—in self-contemplation. This complacency becomes vanity only when a man piques himself on his form as being his individual form, not when he admires it as a specimen of human beauty in general. It is fitting that he should admire it thus: he can conceive no form more beautiful, more sublime than the human. Assuredly every being loves itself, its existence—and fitly so. To exist is a good. Quidquid essentia dignum est, scientia dignum est. Everything that exists has value, is a being of distinction—at least this is true of the species: hence it asserts, maintains itself. But the highest form of self-assertion, the form which is itself a superiority, a perfection, a bliss, a good, is consciousness. Every limitation of the reason, or in general of the nature of man, rests on a delusion, an error. It is true that the human being, as an individual, can and must—herein consists his distinction from the brute—feel and recognise himself to be limited; but he can become conscious of his limits, his finiteness, only because the perfection, the infinitude of his species, is perceived by him, whether as an object of feeling, of conscience, or of the thinking consciousness. If he makes his own limitations the limitations of the species, this arises from the mistake that he identifies himself immediately with the species—a mistake which is intimately connected with the individual’s love of ease, sloth, vanity, and egoism. For a limitation which I know to be merely mine humiliates, shames, and perturbs me. Hence to free myself from this feeling of shame, from this state of dissatisfaction, I convert the limits of my individuality into the limits of human nature in general. What is incomprehensible to me is incomprehensible to others; why should I trouble myself further? It is no fault of mine; my understanding is not to blame, 350

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but the understanding of the race. But it is a ludicrous and even culpable error to define as finite and limited what constitutes the essence of man, the nature of the species, which is the absolute nature of the individual. Every being is sufficient to itself. No being can deny itself, i.e., its own nature; no being is a limited one to itself. Rather, every being is in and by itself infinite—has its God, its highest conceivable being, in itself. Every limit of a being is cognisable only by another being out of and above him. The life of the ephemera is extraordinarily short in comparison with that of longer-lived creatures; but nevertheless, for the ephemera this short life is as long as a life of years to others. The leaf on which the caterpillar lives is for it a world, an infinite space. That which makes a being what it is, is its talent, its power, its wealth, its adornment. How can it possibly hold its existence non-existence, its wealth poverty, its talent incapacity? If the plants had eyes, taste, and judgment, each plant would declare its own flower the most beautiful; for its comprehension, its taste, would reach no farther than its natural power of production. What the productive power of its nature has brought forth as the highest, that must also its taste, its judgment, recognise and affirm as the highest. What the nature affirms, the understanding, the taste, the judgment, cannot deny; otherwise the understanding, the judgment, would no longer be the understanding and judgment of this particular being, but of some other. The measure of the nature is also the measure of the understanding. If the nature is limited, so also is the feeling, so also is the understanding. But to a limited being its limited understanding is not felt to be a limitation; on the contrary, it is perfectly happy and contented with this understanding; it regards it, praises and values it, as a glorious, divine power; and the limited understanding, on its part, values the limited nature whose understanding it is. Each is exactly adapted to the other; how should they be at issue with each other? A being’s understanding is its sphere of vision. As far as thou seest, so far extends thy nature; and conversely. The eye of the brute reaches no farther than its needs, and its nature no farther than its needs. And so far as thy nature reaches, so far reaches thy unlimited self-consciousness, so far art thou God. The discrepancy between the understanding and the nature, between the power of conception and the power of production in the human consciousness, on the one hand, is merely of individual significance and has not a universal application; and, on the other hand, it is only apparent. He who, having written a bad poem, knows it to be bad, is in his intelligence, and therefore in his nature, not so limited as he who, having written a bad poem, admires it and thinks it good. It follows that if thou thinkest the infinite, thou perceivest and affirmest the infinitude of the power of thought; if thou feelest the infinite, thou feelest and affirmest the infinitude of the power of feeling. The object of the intellect is intellect objective to itself; the object of feeling is feeling objective to itself. If thou hast no sensibility, no feeling for music, thou perceivest in the finest music nothing more than in the wind that whistles by thy ear, or than in the brook which rushes past thy feet. What, then, is it which acts on thee when thou art affected by melody? What dost thou perceive in it? What else than the voice of thy own heart? Feeling speaks only to feeling; feeling is comprehensible only by feeling, that is, by itself—for this reason, that the object of feeling is nothing else than feeling. Music is a monologue of emotion. But the dialogue of philosophy also is in truth only a monologue of the intellect; thought speaks only to thought. The splendours of the crystal charm the sense, but the intellect is interested only in the laws of crystallisation. The intellectual only is the object of the intellect. All therefore which, in the point of view of metaphysical, transcendental speculation and religion, has the significance only of the secondary, the subjective, the medium, the organ— 351

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has in truth the significance of the primary, of the essence, of the object itself. If, for example, feeling is the essential organ of religion, the nature of God is nothing else than an expression of the nature of feeling. The true but latent sense of the phrase, “Feeling is the organ of the divine,” is, feeling is the noblest, the most excellent, i.e., the divine, in man. How couldst thou perceive the divine by feeling, if feeling were not itself divine in its nature? The divine assuredly is known only by means of the divine—God is known only by himself. The divine nature which is discerned by feeling is in truth nothing else than feeling enraptured, in ecstasy with itself— feeling intoxicated with joy, blissful in its own plenitude. It is already clear from this that where feeling is held to be the organ of the infinite, the subjective essence of religion,—the external data of religion lose their objective value. And thus, since feeling has been held the cardinal principle in religion, the doctrines of Christianity, formerly so sacred, have lost their importance. If, from this point of view, some value is still conceded to Christian ideas, it is a value springing entirely from the relation they bear to feeling; if another object would excite the same emotions, it would be just as welcome. But the object of religious feeling is become a matter of indifference, only because when once feeling has been pronounced to be the subjective essence of religion, it in fact is also the objective essence of religion, though it may not be declared, at least directly, to be such. I say directly; for indirectly this is certainly admitted, when it is declared that feeling, as such, is religious, and thus the distinction between specifically religious and irreligious, or at least non-religious, feelings is abolished—a necessary consequence of the point of view in which feeling only is regarded as the organ of the divine. For on what other ground than that of its essence, its nature, dost thou hold feeling to be the organ of the infinite, the divine being? And is not the nature of feeling in general also the nature of every special feeling, be its object what it may? What, then, makes this feeling religious? A given object? Not at all; for this object is itself a religious one only when it is not an object of the cold understanding or memory, but of feeling. What then? The nature of feeling—a nature of which every special feeling, without distinction of objects, partakes. Thus, feeling is pronounced to be religious, simply because it is feeling; the ground of its religiousness is its own nature—lies in itself. But is not feeling thereby declared to be itself the absolute, the divine? If feeling in itself is good, religious, i.e., holy, divine, has not feeling its God in itself? But if, notwithstanding, thou wilt posit an object of feeling, but at the same time seekest to express thy feeling truly, without introducing by thy reflection any foreign element, what remains to thee but to distinguish between thy individual feeling and the general nature of feeling;—to separate the universal in feeling from the disturbing, adulterating influences with which feeling is bound up in thee, under thy individual conditions? Hence what thou canst alone contemplate, declare to be the infinite, and define as its essence, is merely the nature of feeling. Thou hast thus no other definition of God than this: God is pure, unlimited, free Feeling. Every other God, whom thou supposest, is a God thrust upon thy feeling from without. Feeling is atheistic in the sense of the orthodox belief, which attaches religion to an external object; it denies an objective God—it is itself God. In this point of view only the negation of feeling is the negation of God. Thou art simply too cowardly or too narrow to confess in words what thy feeling tacitly affirms. Fettered by outward considerations, still in bondage to vulgar empiricism, incapable of comprehending the spiritual grandeur of feeling, thou art terrified before the religious atheism of thy heart. By this fear thou destroyest the unity of thy feeling with itself, in imagining to thyself 352

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an objective being distinct from thy feeling, and thus necessarily sinking back into the old questions and doubts—is there a God or not?—questions and doubts which vanish, nay, are impossible, where feeling is defined as the essence of religion. Feeling is thy own inward power, but at the same time a power distinct from thee, and independent of thee; it is in thee, above thee; it is itself that which constitutes the objective in thee—thy own being which impresses thee as another being; in short, thy God. How wilt thou, then, distinguish from this objective being within thee another objective being? how wilt thou get beyond thy feeling? But feeling has here been adduced only as an example. It is the same with every other power, faculty, potentiality, reality, activity—the name is indifferent—which is defined as the essential organ of any object. Whatever is a subjective expression of a nature is simultaneously also its objective expression. Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature—qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself. There may certainly be thinking beings besides men on the other planets of our solar system. But by the supposition of such beings we do not change our standing point—we extend our conceptions quantitatively not qualitatively. For as surely as on the other planets there are the same laws of motion, so surely are there the same laws of perception and thought as here. In fact, we people the other planets, not that we may place there different beings from ourselves, but more beings of our own or of a similar nature.

§ 2. The Essence of Religion Considered Generally What we have hitherto been maintaining generally, even with regard to sensational impressions, of the relation between subject and object, applies especially to the relation between the subject and the religious object. In the perceptions of the senses consciousness of the object is distinguishable from consciousness of self; but in religion, consciousness of the object and self-consciousness coincide. The object of the senses is out of man, the religious object is within him, and therefore as little forsakes him as his self-consciousness or his conscience; it is the intimate, the closest object. “God,” says Augustine, for example, “is nearer, more related to us, and therefore more easily known by us, than sensible, corporeal things.” The object of the senses is in itself indifferent—independent of the disposition or of the judgment; but the object of religion is a selected object; the most excellent, the first, the supreme being; it essentially presupposes a critical judgment, a discrimination between the divine and the non-divine, between that which is worthy of adoration and that which is not worthy. And here may be applied, without any limitation, the proposition: the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject’s own nature taken objectively. Such as are a man’s thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is selfconsciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man his God; the two are identical. Whatever is God to a man, that is his heart and soul; and conversely, God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of a man,—religion the 353

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solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets. But when religion—consciousness of God—is designated as the self-consciousness of man, this is not to be understood as affirming that the religious man is directly aware of this identity; for, on the contrary, ignorance of it is fundamental to the peculiar nature of religion. To preclude this misconception, it is better to say, religion is man’s earliest and also indirect form of self-knowledge. Hence, religion everywhere precedes philosophy, as in the history of the race, so also in that of the individual. Man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he finds it in himself. His own nature is in the first instance contemplated by him as that of another being. Religion is the childlike condition of humanity; but the child sees his nature—man—out of himself; in childhood a man is an object to himself, under the form of another man. Hence the historical progress of religion consists in this: that what by an earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now recognised as subjective; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshipped as God is now perceived to be something human. What was at first religion becomes at a later period idolatry; man is seen to have adored his own nature. Man has given objectivity to himself, but has not recognised the object as his own nature: a later religion takes this forward step; every advance in religion is therefore a deeper self-knowledge. But every particular religion, while it pronounces its predecessors idolatrous, excepts itself—and necessarily so, otherwise it would no longer be religion—from the fate, the common nature of all religions: it imputes only to other religions what is the fault, if fault it be, of religion in general. Because it has a different object, a different tenor, because it has transcended the ideas of preceding religions, it erroneously supposes itself exalted above the necessary eternal laws which constitute the essence of religion—it fancies its object, its ideas, to be superhuman. But the essence of religion, thus hidden from the religious, is evident to the thinker, by whom religion is viewed objectively, which it cannot be by its votaries. And it is our task to show that the antithesis of divine and human is altogether illusory, that it is nothing else than the antithesis between the human nature in general and the human individual; that, consequently, the object and contents of the Christian religion are altogether human. Religion, at least the Christian, is the relation of man to himself, or more correctly to his own nature (i.e., his subjective nature); but a relation to it, viewed as a nature apart from his own. The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective—i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.

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FROM PRINCIPLES OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE (1843) *

1 The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God—the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology. 2 The religious or practical form of this humanization was Protestantism. The God who is man, that is to say the human God, Christ, this and only this is the God of Protestantism. Unlike Catholicism, Protestantism is no longer concerned with what God is in himself, but only with what he is for man; hence, it knows no speculative or contemplative tendency like Catholicism. It has ceased to be theology—it is essentially Christology; that is, religious anthropology. 3 However, Protestantism negated God-in-himself or God as God—for only God-in-himself is, strictly speaking, God—only in practice; theoretically, it left him intact. He exists; however, not for man; that is, the religious man. He is a transcendent being or a being that will one day become an object for man up there in heaven. But that which is other-worldly to religion, is this-worldly to philosophy; what does not constitute an object for the former, does so precisely for the latter. 4 The rational or theoretical assimilation and dissolution of the God who is other-worldly to religion, and hence not given to it as an object, is the speculative philosophy. 5 The essence of speculative philosophy is nothing other than the rationalized, realized, actualized essence of God. The speculative philosophy is the true, consistent, rational theology. […] 52 The new philosophy is the complete and absolute dissolution of theology into anthropology, a dissolution in which all contradictions have been overcome; for the new philosophy is the

From Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. In The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. and ed. Zawar Hanfi, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company Anchor Book, 1972, 177–78, 241–45. *

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dissolution of theology not only in reason—this was effected by the old philosophy—but also in the heart; in short, in the whole and real being of man. In this regard, it is only the necessary outcome of the old philosophy; for that which was once dissolved in reason must dissolve itself in life, in the heart, in the blood of man; but as a new and independent truth, the new philosophy is also the truth of the old philosophy, for only a truth that has become flesh and blood is the truth. The old philosophy necessarily relapsed into theology, for that which is sublated only in reason, only in the concept, still has an antithesis in the heart. The new philosophy, on the other hand, cannot suffer such a relapse because there is nothing to relapse into; that which is dead in both body and soul cannot return even as a ghost. 53 It is by no means only through thinking that man is distinguished from the animal. Rather, his whole being constitutes his distinction from the animal. It is true that he who does not think is not a man; but this is so not because thinking is the cause, but only because it is a necessary consequence and quality of man’s being. Hence, here too we need not go beyond the realm of sensuousness in order to recognize man as a being superior to animals. Man is not a particular being like the animal; rather, he is a universal being; he is therefore not a limited and unfree but an unlimited and free being, for universality, being without limit, and freedom are inseparable. And this freedom is not the property of just one special faculty, say, the will, nor does this universality reside in a special faculty of thinking called reason; this freedom, this universality applies to the whole being of man. The senses of the animal are certainly keener than those of man, but they are so only in relation to certain things that are necessarily linked with the needs of the animal; and they are keener precisely because of the determination that they are limited by being exclusively directed towards some definite objects. Man does not possess the sense of smell of a hunting dog or a raven, but because his sense of smell encompasses all kinds of smell, it is free and also indifferent to particular smells. But where a sense is elevated above the limits of particularity and above being tied down to needs, it is elevated to an independent, to a theoretical significance and dignity—universal sense is intellect, and universal sensuousness is intellectuality. Even the lowest senses—smell and taste—are elevated in man to intellectual and scientific activities. The smell and taste of things are objects of natural science. Indeed, even the stomach of man, no matter how contemptuously we look down upon it, is something human and not animal because it is universal; that is, not limited to certain kinds of food. That is why man is free from that ferocious voracity with which the animal hurls itself on its prey. Leave a man his head, but give him the stomach of a lion or a horse, and he will certainly cease to be a man. A limited stomach is compatible only with a limited, that is, animal sense. Man’s moral and rational relationship to his stomach consists therefore in his according it a human and not a beastly treatment. He who thinks that what is important to mankind is stomach, and that stomach is something animal, also authorizes man to be bestial in his eating. 54 The new philosophy makes man, together with nature as the basis of man, the exclusive, universal, and highest object of philosophy; it makes anthropology, together with physiology, the universal science. 356

From Principles of the Philosophy of the Future

55 Art, religion, philosophy, and science are only expressions or manifestations of the true being of man. A man is truly and perfectly man only when he possesses an aesthetic or artistic, religious or moral, philosophical or scientific sense. And only he who excludes from himself nothing that is essentially human is, strictly speaking, man. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—this sentence, taken in its universal and highest meaning, is the motto of the new philosophy. 56 The philosophy of Absolute Identity has completely mislocated the standpoint of truth. The natural standpoint of man, the standpoint of the distinction between “I” and “You,” between subject and object is the true, the absolute standpoint and, hence, also the standpoint of philosophy. 57 The true unity of head and heart does not consist in wiping out or covering up their difference, but rather in the recognition that the essential object of the heart is also the essential object of the head, or in the identity of the object. The new philosophy, which makes the essential and highest object of the heart—man—also the essential and highest object of the intellect, lays the foundation of a rational unity of head and heart, of thought and life. 58 Truth does not exist in thought, nor in cognition confined to itself. Truth is only the totality of man’s life and being. 59 The single man in isolation possesses in himself the essence of man neither as a moral nor as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man with man—a unity, however, that rests on the reality of the distinction between “I” and “You.” 60 Solitude means being finite and limited, community means being free and infinite. For himself alone, man is just man (in the ordinary sense); but man with man—the unity of “I” and “You”— that is God. 61 The absolute philosopher said, or at least thought of himself—naturally as a thinker and not as a man—“La vérité c’est moi,” in a way analogous to the absolute monarch claiming, “L’Etat c’est moi,” or the absolute God claiming, “L’être c’est moi.” The human philosopher, on the other hand, says: Even in thought, even as a philosopher, I am a man in togetherness with men. 62 The true dialectic is not a monologue of the solitary thinker with himself; it is a dialogue between “I” and “You.”

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63 The Trinity was the highest mystery, the central point of the absolute philosophy and religion. But the secret of the Trinity, as demonstrated historically and philosophically in the Essence of Christianity, is the secret of communal and social life—the secret of the necessity of a “You” for an “I.” It is the truth that no being whatsoever, be it man or God and be it called “spirit” or “I,” can be a true, perfect, and absolute being in isolation, that the truth and perfection are only the union and unity of beings that are similar in essence. Hence, the highest and ultimate principle of philosophy is the unity of man with man. All essential relationships—the principles of various sciences—are only different kinds and modes of this unity. 64 The old philosophy possesses a double truth; first, its own truth—philosophy—which is not concerned with man, and second, the truth for man—religion. The new philosophy as the philosophy of man, on the other hand, is also essentially the philosophy for man; it has, without in the least compromising the dignity and autonomy of theory—indeed it is in perfect harmony with it—essentially a practical tendency, and is practical in the highest sense. The new philosophy takes the place of religion; it has within itself the essence of religion; in truth, it is itself religion. 65 All attempts undertaken so far to reform philosophy are not very different from the old philosophy to the extent that they are species belonging to the same genus. The most indispensable condition for a really new—i.e., independent—philosophy corresponding to the need of mankind and of the future is, however, that it distinguish itself in essence from the old philosophy.

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CHAPTER 14 KARL MARX (1818–1883)

INTRODUCTION Karl Marx is perhaps the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the nineteenth century. He was not a philosopher in a traditional sense; he was rather a social scientist, a revolutionary, and a socialist practitioner. He was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, the German Rhineland, as the third of nine sons in a middle-class Jewish family. His father Heinrich Guido Marx obtained a law degree in midst of anti-Jews policies and laws in Prussia. As a result he changed his name and converted to Lutheranism in order to be able to practice law. Young Marx was educated at home with his father playing a major role not only as a model to emulate but also as the one who taught his son science, history, language, and literature. As a student at Trier Gymnasium, Marx witnessed a police raid of the school, the seizure of liberal literature distributed there—an act of sedition—and the replacement of several of his teachers. Exempt from mandatory military service due to semi-weak health, Marx followed his father’s steps by enrolling in 1835 in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn. In October 1838, he moved to Berlin to attend the more prestigious and rigorous University of Berlin where he continued studying law. However, his interest in philosophy intensified, and Marx became increasingly serious about his philosophical studies. The spirit of Hegelianism still prevailed, and Hegelianism ruled in the philosophical milieu in Berlin at that time. Marx readily joined a radical group called the Young (or Left) Hegelians, who were both critical and indebted to Hegelian thought. Encouraged by ongoing intellectual debates, he undertook a serious study of Hegel’s philosophy in an attempt to determine his own views and growing affinity for social and political thought. While in Berlin, he would also delve into the history of philosophy, especially Greek philosophy, and write his doctoral dissertation on “Differences Between the Democriten and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” which earned him, in April 1841, a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena. The summer before moving to Berlin, Marx became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, whom he would marry seven years later, and with whom he would father seven children. By the time he completed his degrees, Marx had abandoned his romanticism for Hegelianism. Unable to secure an academic job due to his radical views and involvement in political discussions, in 1842 he transitioned to journalism and began to work for the radical Cologne newspaper Rheinische Zeitung [Rhenish Newspaper], soon becoming its editor-in-chief. When under his direction the paper, which sought to largely promote the interests of the bourgeoisie, became increasingly more revolutionary and democratic. The Prussian government introduced a very stringent censorship and eventually banned it in April 1843, forcing Marx to resign. Desperate to find a constant source of income, he negotiated the publication of a new journal in Paris, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher [German-French Annals], which he coedited with Arnold Ruge (1802–1880), a German philosopher and political writer also

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associated with the Young Hegelians. With his future seemingly secured, in 1843 Marx finally married his fiancé of seven years, Jenny von Westphalen, and later that year, together with his newly wed wife, he moved to Paris. However, the publication of the Deutsch - Französische Jahrbücher became discontinued after only one double issue of the journal, which appeared in February 1844. Once again Marx was unemployed, and only thanks to a settlement that he received from the shareholders of the Rheinische Zeitung could he support his family while focusing his writing on economic and political issues. In Paris, Marx crossed paths with Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) whom he first met in November 1842 when Engels visited the Rheinische Zeitung offices in Cologne on his way to England. In early 1844, Engels sent Marx articles for publication in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. One of them, “Outline of a Critique of Political Economy,” appeared in the first and only issue of the Jahrbücher. Its appearance led to a correspondence between the two men. A personal meeting later boosted the established relationship that grew into a lifelong friendship and collaboration. At different points in Marx’s life, Engels—who came from a wealthy family of textile industrialists and who himself managed his family’s textile manufacture in Manchester—also served as his financial sponsor when Marx struggled to support his fast growing family. Marx’s and Engels’ first joint venture was a publication of The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company (1845), a book that presented a harsh critique of the Young Hegelians and their ideas, still remained popular in academic circles at the time. The title—Holy Family—is a largely sarcastic reference to the brothers Bruno and Edgar Bauer and their supporters among Young (Left) and Old (Right) Hegelians who undertook a critique of Christianity in an attempt to improve it. Marx became the subject of surveillance by both French and Prussian authorities due to his active involvement in a political movement growing among German communists living in Paris. In January 1845, he was ordered to leave France at the request of the Prussian king. He moved to Brussels, where he was forced to promise not to write any political works. Engels, by this time a loyal and devoted collaborator, moved with Marx, and the two later traveled to England together, which Marx used as an opportunity to study economics. During their time in Brussels, Marx and Engels became associated with a radical political organization called League of the Just. After convincing the organization of the necessity of becoming a public party rather than an underground movement, Marx contributed to drafting the principles of the new party, the Communist League. Months later, Marx and Engels published their defining work, The Communist Manifesto (1848), outlining the plan of action for their organization and declaring, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (MECW 6:482). That same year, the Revolution of 1848 would lead France to topple the monarchy and institute the French Second Republic. Marx allegedly spent several thousand francs of his own money to purchase weapons for a Belgian worker’s revolt—an allegation that, whether true or not, instigated the Belgian government to arrest and banish Marx from the country. Marx then returned to Paris and established the Communist League headquarters there. Eventually, he managed to return to Germany, where he founded, again in Cologne, a newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung [New Rhenish Newspaper], for which he would contribute a number of political articles, and for which he would face trial, but avoid conviction. Deported from the country, he found shelter in Paris, but only for a few months. By the end of 1848, Europe would see revolutions brewing in Italy, France, Austria, Hungary, and Germany. 360

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In August 1849, expelled from France once again, Marx moved with his family to London, a city which he would call home for the rest of his life. During this time, from 1850 to 1860, he became a European contributor to the New York Daily Tribune, wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a reflection of the 1848 revolution in France, and began to more heavily invest himself in the study of economics. Marx’s years in London were spent in poor living conditions, and only three of his seven children survived childhood. He regularly used pseudonyms, highly aware of the danger posed by those authorities which sought him out. In 1864, he became an important player in the First International, an organization concerned with uniting political groups and trade unions in the class struggle. Though highly productive during the span of his life, Marx’s last years were marked by a decline of health and productiveness. By 1881, his wife Jenny died at the age of sixty-seven, and Marx fell ill soon after, staying in poor health until his own death, on March 14, 1883, at the age of sixty-four. He is buried at Highgate Cemetery in London. * * * Marx’s works fill over a hundred large volumes. He remains one of the most influential thinkers in history, laying the groundwork for the number of fields within the social sciences and beginning a movement that still shapes world affairs. His achievements are more than academic; Marx’s lifelong activism displays not only the extent of his motivation, but his conviction that the value of philosophy, like any other intellectual enterprise, is measured by its ability to impact the world, to create lasting change, and to affect people’s lives. In that regard, Marx’s life work is perhaps unmatched. Marx’s writings are often divided into early works (a “young” Marx period) and late works (a “mature” Marx period). While there is a disagreement about when Marx’s thought began to mature, the divide is usually associated with Marx’s transition from philosophy to economics. This, however, should not be understood as Marx’s abandonment of philosophy for economics. Instead, his philosophical position penetrates his sociological, economic, social, and political views, allowing him to advance each of these fields. In his years in Berlin, Marx was influenced by Hegel’s philosophy and many of his early writings focus on philosophical issues central to Hegelianism. He also drew on the materialism prevalent in works by Ludwig Feuerbach, another representative of the Young Hegelian movement. Later on Marx distanced himself from both Hegel and Feuerbach, formulating his own materialistic view of the world and dialectical understanding of history. Of Marx’s numerous early writings, four have perhaps the biggest philosophical significance.—The two articles—“On the Jewish Question” and “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction”—that Marx published in 1843 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher; the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, composed in 1844 in Paris; and the “Theses on Feuerbach” written in 1845 in Brussels. All four were completed after 1842, when Marx abandoned Hegelianism and began to find his own voice not only on philosophical issues, but also on questions relevant to political and social matters. In “On the Jewish Question” Marx distanced himself from Bruno Bauer, a leader of the Left (Young) Hegelian movement, who had recently argued against the proposed emancipation of Prussian Jews, viewing it as a political maneuver to legitimate particular religious interests. In his response to Bauer, Marx focused on the question of human emancipation, distinguishing 361

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it from political emancipation and pointing out that the latter is insufficient to bring about the former. He argued that liberal rights are protective, negative liberties—freedom from other people and interference by others. However, real freedom is not possible in isolation, but rather in our “togetherness” with other people. Only positive relations with the human community can engender effective human emancipation. While Marx does not offer a clear program of human emancipation in this work, he does reveal that it is inevitably associated with the idea of non-alienated labor, which he explores in detail only a year later in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. The essay “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction” is another early attempt to settle the score with Hegelianism. The article, which is an introduction to a larger unfinished manuscript devoted not exclusively to the critique of Hegel’s doctrine of the state and right, but also to a broad range of problems in the history and theory of the state and law, as well as world history (MECW 3:3–129), addresses the question of religion. Setting out his account of religion, Marx fully embraces Feuerbach’s claim that God is created in mankind’s image, the claim that Feuerbach elaborated in detail in his Essence of Christianity, published in 1841. However, Marx criticizes Feuerbach for his purely intellectual approach to the subject, and argues that the reason humans become religious is alienation in material life—a means to metaphysical freedom in the midst of physical suffering. Hence, alienation cannot be eliminated until the material life of man is fully emancipated. Only then will religion lose its power and eventually disappear. Marx writes: Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (MECW 3:175) Marx calls attention to social oppression and the “soulless” conditions that masses have to endure in their lives. He insists that individual self-transformation, and the adjacent acknowledgment of the essential communal nature of humanity, is the only means possible by which members of the proletariat can free themselves from social bondage. Marx continued pondering this question, among a wide range of other topics, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, a key work that would remain unpublished until 1927. Most notable in this work is Marx’s implementation of the concept of alienation in his discussion of production—the famous account of alienated labor. Marx identified four types of alienated labor that the worker under capitalism suffers: the worker is alienated from the product he produces; from his productive activity (work) itself; from species-being; and from other human beings within the community. He explained that alienation is found specifically in the space between producer and the product, which the worker immediately loses; in the space between the necessary human desire to work and the torment of working conditions; in the space between what is arbitrarily produced and what the producer ought to exert his capacities toward; and finally, between the essential reliance of human beings on each other and the interaction of exchange, which pits one against the other. Capitalism, as a structure which denies the innate inclinations of communal man, traps both owner and worker in their assigned roles, and perpetuates the oppression of the proletariat. In the same work, Marx also developed a detailed critique of Hegel’s philosophy from the perspective of materialism. 362

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Recognizing the positive merits of Hegel’s philosophical thought that lie, most importantly, in an understanding of the dynamic nature of human being, of the fact that humans create themselves through their labor, Marx showed that Hegel considers this labor as being purely “abstract mental” labor, and not natural practical activity with real objects. Thus his basic charge against Hegel was that his philosophy is concerned only with abstractions, and not with real things. In order to present his criticism of Hegel, Marx used Feuerbach’s work, whom he praised as “the true conqueror of the old philosophy” and as “the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic” (MECW 3:328). Interestingly, his attitude toward Feuerbach and his philosophical views would change dramatically within only a year. In his “Theses on Feuerbach” written a year later, in 1845, Marx would produce a highly critical picture of contemporary philosophy, attacking previous forms of materialism for denying the activity of human beings in shaping the physical world, and idealism for relegating the world exclusively to abstractions and the activity of the mind (cf. MECW 5:6). In the face of philosophical impotence, Marx adopted a historical dialectical materialism, which views man as a natural embodied being, and treats labor, that is, physical activity, and not philosophical thought, as the shaping force of the world. Marx further expanded on the concept of historical dialectical materialism in his 1846 work The German Ideology, which he coauthored with Engels. Like some other works of this period, the book would not pass the censors, finally being published only in 1932, some forty-nine years after the death of Marx. This work signals Marx’s final break from Hegel, Feuerbach, and Hegelianism. It also sets the agenda for Marx’s future work, which would concern economics almost exclusively. Two main works reflecting the results of Marx’s economic study are A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Part I appeared in 1859, and the complete work in 1869) and Capital (vol. I, 1867). In them, Marx describes his labor theory of value: the idea that the value of a given commodity is determined by the quantity of labor, measured by intensity and productivity, required to produce the product. He postulates that capitalism is able to achieve profit only through the exploitation of this labor; that business owners effectively “purchase” a worker’s labor power, and then utilize him in such a way that his daily input exceeds the cost for which he was hired. This, to Marx, is the source of all profit in a capitalist society. Only labor power, unlike commodities, which pass on their value through the system, can exceed its own value, and thus the entire economic enterprise hinges on exploiting this form of capital. This theory has come under criticism ever since its articulation, but it retains two important critiques of capitalism: that the relationship inherent between an owner and a worker is not amiable and that the system has no mechanism that generates a balance in the market. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx elaborates on his economic theory in detail. He points out to a tendency of productive forces to develop over time. He claims that the economic structure of a society is determined by the degree to which these productive forces have developed, and that the nature of a society’s “superstructure”— its political institutions—can be traced to this economic structure. Thus, the ideology of a society—in various forms, including religion, art, and philosophy—is initially forged by that society’s economic structure. Furthermore, the revolutionary cycles of a society are a result of the inability of the economic system to generate further development of its forces of production. This theory encountered criticism as well, such as the apparent dependence of 363

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the economic system on the evolution of productive forces to explain itself, and vice versa. In a Marxian approach to history, societies hold together for as long as they exhibit productive power, and are replaced by revolution as soon as they fail. Support for such an interpretation would require an exceedingly complex explanatory account, which is difficult to provide. Some critics also believe that Marx’s reading of history ignores certain social evolutions of the past. Despite his great understanding of philosophical topics, Marx is first and foremost a social scientist, who in this case was trying to give a theoretical backing to his historical dialectical materialistic position. Marx’s historical dialectical materialism is an attempt to explain historical actions and events not by the prevailing ideas and beliefs of individuals but by the material conditions which influence those ideas and beliefs. This formed the basis of Marx’s belief about the class system, in that individuals who were born into certain distinct classes tended toward a development of the same ideas and beliefs as others in that class system. This demonstrates that ideas are not the result of some unique personal philosophical journey, but rather that they are a human creation, and as such are results of the material conditions of the real individual. This understanding stands in stark contrast with earlier philosophers, such as Hegel, who believed that the idea, and not a real embodied individual, was central to history. According to Hegel, history has a natural order of advancement, and the ideas of men and the development of these ideas is the subject of human history. In contrast to this position, Marx insisted that history starts and ends with man’s activity. Thus, historical materialism proposes that man’s development is based on his material needs and his motivations are based on material interests and gains.

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Chronology of Karl Marx’s Life and Works 1818

May 5: Born in Trier, Prussia.

1830

October: Enrolls in Trier Gymnasium (high school that prepares for university entrance).

1835

September 24: Graduates from Trier Gymnasium and receives his school-leaving Certificate.



October: Enrolls in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn.

1836

Summer: Engaged to Jenny von Westphalen.



Mid-October: Moves to Berlin.



October 22: Enrolls at Berlin University as a law student.

1837

Spring: Starts a serious study of Hegel’s philosophy.



Becomes a member of the Young Hegelian Doctor’s Club, a society of intellectuals led by Bruno Bauer.

1838

May 10: His father dies.

1839–41

Studies the history of philosophy; writes doctoral dissertation, Differences Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.

1841

March 30: Graduates from Berlin University and submits his dissertation to the University of Jena.



April 15: Earns Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Jena.

1842

Moves to Cologne and transitions into journalism.



February: Writes his first piece of journalism: Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction (a critique of the Prussian feudal-absolutist system).



15 October: Becomes editor-in-chief of the influential Rheinische Zeitung.



End of November: first meets Friedrich Engels who visits the Rheinische Zeitung office in Cologne.



Studies the work of Ludwig Feuerbach.

1843

March 18: Forced to resign as editor-in-chief of the Rheinische Zeitung after the paper banned by Prussian government.



January 19: Marries Jenny von Westphalen.



Studies Hegel’s doctrine of state and right and works on Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, a book manuscript that remains unfinished and is first published only in 1927.



October: Moves to Paris, where he starts editing the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.



December: Meets Heinrich Heine.

1844

April–August: Writes The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (of the 1844), which remains unpublished until the 1930s. 365

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May 1: His daughter Jenny is born.



July: Marx becomes acquainted with Proudhon.



August 28: Meets Engels in Paris and develops a lifelong friendship and partner­ ship with him.

1845

January 16: He is expelled from Paris and moves to Brussels.



February: Publishes (coauthored with Engels) The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company.



April: Writes “Theses on Feuerbach”, which is left unpublished during his lifetime.



July–August: Visits England to learn firsthand about England’s economic and political life as well as the English working class movement.



September 26: His daughter Laura is born.



December 1: Renounces his Prussian citizenship due to persecution by the Prussian police.

1846

(Together with Engels) establishes Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels.



Writes (with Engels) The German Ideology, which will not be published until 1932.

1847

His son Edgar is born.



Begins the Communist League.



The Poverty of Philosophy is published in French in Brussels.

1848

February: Publishes The Communist Manifesto, written in coauthorship with Engels.



March 3: Ordered by king of Belgium to leave country within twenty-four hours.



Returns to Paris as revolution breaks out.



Writes political pamphlets.



April–May: Together with Engels moves back to Germany, where he founds, again in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

1849 April: The Neue Rheinische Zeitung prints Marx’s “Wage Labor and Capital”.

May 16: Ordered to leave Prussia by the Prussian authorities, moves to Paris.



August 23: Deported from Paris and moves to London.



Starts writing his major work on political economy, the Grundrisse [Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy].

1850 Writes Address to the Communist League.

November 19: his father, Heinrich Guido Marx, dies.

1851

March 28: Marx’s daughter Franziska is born.

1851–62

Marx and Engels contribute articles to New York Daily Tribune on the economics and politics as well as international liberation movement.

1852 Writes The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 366

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April 14: Marx’s daughter Franziska dies.

1855

January 16: Marx’s daughter Eleanor is born.



April 6: His eight-year-old son Edgar dies.

1857–60

Contributes to The New American Encyclopedia.

1859

June 11: Publishes in Berlin A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part I.

1861 Finishes Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy—the work remains unpublished until 1941. 1861–64 Composes three large volumes, Theories of Surplus Value, which discuss the theoreticians of political economy (Adam Smith and David Ricardo). 1863

November 30: Marx’s mother dies.

1864

Launch of the International Workingmen’s Association.



Elected to the General Council of the First International.

1867

September 14: Vol. I of Capital (Das Kapital) is published by Otto Meissner Verlag in Hamburg.

1868

April 2: Marx’s daughter Laura marries Paul Lafargue, a French socialist.

1869 Completes A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Finishes Vols. II and III of Capital, but continues working on the manuscripts for the rest of his life; these volumes were published posthumously by Engels: Vol. II (1885) and Vol. III (1894).

1872

Attends the Hague Congress of the First International.



October 10: Marx’s daughter Jenny marries French socialist Charles Longuet.

1875 Writes Critique of the Gotha Programme. 1881

December 2: Marx’s wife Jenny dies in London.

1882

February–October: Stays in Algeria and Switzerland for a rest and cure.

1883

January 11: His eldest daughter Jenny dies in Paris.



March 14: Marx dies in London at the age of sixty-four.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A. Marx’s Writings A.1. German Academic Edition

Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1958ff. Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag. [When finished, it is expected to include more than 120 vols.] A.2. In English (selected editions)

Marx, K. 1962. Selected Works, 2 vols. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1975–2004. Collected Works, translated by Richard Dixon et al., 50 vols. Moscow: Progress Publishers, in collaboration with London: Lawrence and Wishart and New York City: International Publishers. (In e-version: London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010.) [Cited as MECW following by the volume and page numbers.] Marx, K. 2000. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. B. Selected Commentaries

Avineri, S. 1970. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berlin, I., and A. Ryan. 1996. Karl Marx: His Life and Environment. New York: Oxford University Press. Bottomore, T. (ed.). 1979. Karl Marx. Oxford: Blackwell. Brudney, D. 1998. Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Carver, T. (ed.). 1991. The Cambridge Companion to Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carver, T. 1998. The Post-Modern Marx. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cohen, G. A. 2001. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Desai, M. 2002. Marx’s Revenge. London: Verso. Elster, J. 1985. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leopold, D. 2007. The Young Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maguire, J. 1972. Marx’s Paris Writings. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. McLellan, D. 1973. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. London: Macmillan. Miller, R. 1984. Analyzing Marx. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rockmore, T. 2002. Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx. Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers. Singer, P. 2000. Marx: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wheen, F. 1999. Karl Marx. London: Fourth Estate. Wolff, J. 2002. Why Read Marx Today? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, A. 1981. Karl Marx. London: Routledge. (2nd ed., 2004)

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FROM “TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT: INTRODUCTION” (1843) *

For Germany the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism. The profane existence of error is compromised when its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis [defense of altar and hearth] has been refuted. Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven where he sought a supernatural being, will no longer be inclined to find the semblance of himself, only the non-human being, where he seeks and must seek his true reality. The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. And indeed religion is the self-consciousness and self-regard of man who has either not yet found or has already lost himself. But man is not an abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of men, the state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world because they are an inverted world. Religion is the generalized theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general ground of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence inasmuch as the human essence possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and at the same time the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as people’s illusory happiness is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to abandon illusions about their condition is a demand to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is thus in embryo a criticism of the vale of tears whose halo is religion. Criticism has plucked imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that man will wear the chain that is without fantasy or consolation but so that he will throw it off and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he thinks, acts, and shapes his reality like a disillusioned man who has come to his senses, so that he revolves around himself and thus around his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun that revolves around man so long as he does not revolve about himself.

From Karl Marx, “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” trans. by Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat. In Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. by Lawrence H. Simon, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994, 28–38. *

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Thus it is the task of history, once the otherworldly truth has disappeared, to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy which is in the service of history is to unmask human self-alienation in its unholy forms now that it has been unmasked in its holy form. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. […] War on German conditions! By all means! They are below the level of history, beneath all criticism, but they are still an object of criticism just as the criminal below the level of humanity is still an object of the executioner. In its struggle against these conditions criticism is not a passion of the head but the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is an enemy it wants not to refute but to destroy. For the spirit of these conditions has already been refuted. In and for themselves they are objects not worthy of thought but existences as despicable as they are despised. Criticism itself does not even need to be concerned with this matter, for it is already clear about it. Criticism is no longer an end in itself but simply a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential task, denunciation. […] As the ancient countries lived their pre-history in imagination, in mythology, so we Germans have lived our post-history in thought, in philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries. German philosophy is the ideal extension of German history. If, therefore, we criticize the œuvres posthumes of our ideal history—philosophy—instead of the œuvres incomplètes of our real history, our criticism is in the center of questions of which the present says: That is the question. That which in progressive nations is a practical break with modern political conditions is in Germany, where these conditions do not yet exist, just a critical break with the philosophical reflection of those conditions. The German philosophy of law and of the state is the only German history which stands al pari with the official modern present. The German nation must therefore join its dreamhistory to its present conditions and criticize not only these present conditions but also their abstract continuation. […] The criticism of the German philosophy of the state and law, which attained its most consistent, profound, and final formulation with Hegel, is at once a critical analysis of the modern state and the actuality connected with it and also the decisive negation of all previous forms of German political and legal consciousness whose most prominent and general expression at the level of science is precisely the speculative philosophy of law. If the speculative philosophy of law—that abstract and extravagant thinking about the modern state whose reality remains in the beyond, if only beyond the Rhine—was possible only in Germany, conversely the German conception of the modern state in abstraction from actual man was possible only because and insofar as the modern state abstracts itself from actual man or satisfies the whole man only in an illusory way. […] The weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates

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From “Toward A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction”

ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem when it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself. […] The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being. [. . .] Theory is actualized in a people only insofar as it actualizes their needs. [. . .] As philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has deeply struck this unsophisticated soil of the people, the Germans will emancipate themselves to become men. [. . .] The only emancipation of Germany possible in practice is emancipation based on the theory proclaiming that man is the highest essence of man. [. . .]

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FROM ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPTS (1844) *

[From] First Manuscript ALIENATED LABOR We have begun from the presuppositions of political economy. We have accepted its terminology and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labor, capital and land, as also of wages, profit and rent, the division of labor, competition, the concept of exchange value, etc. From political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and to a most miserable commodity; that the misery of the worker increases with the power and volume of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus a restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and finally that the distinction between capitalist and landlord, and between agricultural laborer and industrial worker, must disappear and the whole of society divide into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers. Political economy begins with the fact of private property; it does not explain it. It conceives the material process of private property, as this occurs in reality, in general and abstract formulas which then serve it as laws. It does not comprehend these laws; that is, it does not show how they arise out of the nature of private property. Political economy provides no explanation of the basis of the distinction of labor from capital, of capital from land. […] The only moving forces which political economy recognizes are avarice and the war between the avaricious, competition. […] Thus we have now to grasp the real connection between this whole system of alienation— private property, acquisitiveness, the separation of labor, capital and land, exchange and competition, value and the devaluation of man, monopoly and competition—and the system of money. […] We shall begin from a contemporary economic fact. The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces and the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more goods he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things. Labor does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods.

From Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In Erich Fromm, Karl Marx, Marx’s Concept of Man: Including ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1967, 93–103, 169–96. *

From Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

This fact simply implies that the object produced by labor, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object and turned into a physical thing; this product is an objectification of labor. The performance of work is at the same time its objectification. The performance of work appears in the sphere of political economy as a vitiation of the worker, objectification as a loss and as servitude to the object, and appropriation as alienation. So much does the performance of work appear as vitiation that the worker is vitiated to the point of starvation. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is deprived of the most essential things not only of life but also of work. Labor itself becomes an object which he can acquire only by the greatest effort and with unpredictable interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as alienation that the more objects the worker produces the fewer he can possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital. All these consequences follow from the fact that the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For it is clear on this presupposition that (the more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself.) It is just the same as in religion. The more of himself man attributes to God the less he has left in himself. The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the less he possesses. What is embodied in the product of his labor is no longer his own. The greater this product is, therefore, the more he is diminished. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force. Let us now examine more closely the phenomenon of objectification, the worker’s production and the alienation and loss of the object it produces, which is involved in it. The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. The latter is the material in which his labor is realized, in which it is active, out of which and through which it produces things. But just as nature affords the means of existence of labor in the sense that labor cannot live without objects upon which it can be exercised, so also it provides the means of existence in a narrower sense; namely the means of physical existence for the worker himself. Thus, the more the worker appropriates the external world of sensuous nature by his labor the more he deprives himself of means of existence, in two respects: first, that the sensuous external world becomes progressively less an object belonging to his labor or a means of existence of his labor, and secondly, that it becomes progressively less a means of existence in the direct sense, a means for the physical subsistence of the worker. In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a slave of the object; first, in that he receives an object of work, i.e., receives work, and secondly that he receives means of subsistence. Thus the object enables him to exist, first as a worker and secondly, as a physical subject. The culmination of this enslavement is that he can only maintain himself as a physical subject so far as he is a worker, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker. (The alienation of the worker in his object is expressed as follows in the laws of political economy: the more the worker produces the less he has to consume; the more value he creates 373

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the more worthless he becomes; the more refined his product the more crude and misshapen the worker; the more civilized the product the more barbarous the worker; the more powerful the work the more feeble the worker; the more the work manifests intelligence the more the worker declines in intelligence and becomes a slave of nature.) Political economy conceals the alienation in the nature of labor insofar as it does not examine the direct relationship between the worker (work) and production. Labor certainly produces marvels for the rich but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machinery, but it casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns the others into machines. It produces intelligence, but also stupidity and cretinism for the workers. The direct relationship of labor to its products is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of property owners to the objects of production and to production itself is merely a consequence of this first relationship and confirms it. We shall consider this second aspect later. Thus, when we ask what is the important relationship of labor, we are concerned with the relationship of the worker to production. So far we have considered the alienation of the worker only from one aspect; namely, his relationship with the products of his labor. However, alienation appears not only in the result, but also in the process, of production, within productive activity itself. How could the worker stand in an alien relationship to the product of his activity if he did not alienate himself in the act of production itself? The product is indeed only the résumé of activity, of production. Consequently, if the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation— the alienation of activity and the activity of alienation. The alienation of the object of labor merely summarizes the alienation in the work activity itself. What constitutes the alienation of labor? First, that the work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature; and that, consequently, he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labor. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs. Its alien character is clearly shown by the fact that as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion it is avoided like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character of work for the worker is shown by the fact that it is not his own work but work for someone else, that in work he does not belong to himself but to another person. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of human fantasy, of the human brain and heart, reacts independently as an alien activity of gods or devils upon the individual, so the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It is another’s activity and a loss of his own spontaneity. We arrive at the result that man (the worker) feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions—eating, drinking and procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and in personal adornment—while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal. The animal becomes human and the human becomes animal.

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Eating, drinking and procreating are of course also genuine human functions. But abstractly considered, apart from the environment of other human activities, and turned into final and sole ends, they are animal functions. We have now considered the act of alienation of practical human activity, labor, from two aspects: (1) the relationship of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object which dominates him. This relationship is at the same time the relationship to the sensuous external world, to natural objects, as an alien and hostile world; (2) the relationship of labor to the act of production within labor. This is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something alien and not belonging to him, activity as suffering (passivity), strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation, the personal physical and mental energy of the worker, his personal life (for what is life but activity?) as an activity which is directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him. This is self-alienation as against the above-mentioned alienation of the thing. We have now to infer a third characteristic of alienated labor from the two we have considered. Man is a species-being not only in the sense that he makes the community (his own as well as those of other things) his object both practically and theoretically, but also (and this is simply another expression for the same thing) in the sense that he treats himself as the present, living species, as a universal and consequently free being. Species life, for man as for animals, has its physical basis in the fact that man (like animals) lives from inorganic nature, and since man is more universal than an animal so the range of inorganic nature from which he lives is more universal. Plants, animals, minerals, air, light, etc. constitute, from the theoretical aspect, a part of human consciousness as objects of natural science and art; they are man’s spiritual inorganic nature, his intellectual means of life, which he must first prepare for enjoyment and perpetuation. So also, from the practical aspect they form a part of human life and activity. In practice man lives only from these natural products, whether in the form of food, heating, clothing, housing, etc. The universality of man appears in practice in the universality which makes the whole of nature into his inorganic body: (1) as a direct means of life; and equally (2) as the material object and instrument of his life activity. Nature is the inorganic body of man; that is to say, nature excluding the human body itself. To say that man lives from nature means that nature is his body with which he must remain in a continuous interchange in order not to die. The statement that the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature. Since alienated labor: (1) alienates nature from man; and (2) alienates man from himself, from his own active function, his life activity; so it alienates him from the species. It makes species life into a means of individual life. In the first place it alienates species life and individual life, and secondly, it turns the latter, as an abstraction, into the purpose of the former, also in its abstract and alienated form. For labor, life activity, productive life, now appear to man only as means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to maintain his physical existence. Productive life is, however, species life. It is life creating life. In the type of life activity resides the whole character of a species, its species-character; and free, conscious activity is the species-character of human beings. Life itself appears only as a means of life.

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The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified. Conscious life activity distinguishes man from the life activity of animals. Only for this reason is he a species-being. Or rather, he is only a self-conscious being, i.e. his own life is an object for him, because he is a species-being. Only for this reason is his activity free activity. Alienated labor reverses the relationship, in that man because he is a self-conscious being makes his life activity, his being, only a means for his existence. The practical construction of an objective world, the manipulation of inorganic nature, is the confirmation of man as a conscious species-being, i.e. a being who treats the species as his own being or himself as a species-being. Of course, animals also produce. They construct nests, dwellings, as in the case of bees, beavers, ants, etc. But they only produce what is strictly necessary for themselves or their young. They produce only in a single direction, while man produces universally. They produce only under the compulsion of direct physical need, while man produces when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom from such need. Animals produce only themselves, while man reproduces the whole of nature. The products of animal production belong directly to their physical bodies, while man is free in face of his product. Animals construct only in accordance with the standards and needs of the species to which they belong, while man knows how to produce in accordance with the standards of every species and knows how to apply the appropriate standard to the object. Thus man constructs also in accordance with the laws of beauty. It is just in his work upon the objective world that man really proves himself as a speciesbeing. This production is his active species life. By means of it nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life; for he no longer reproduces himself merely intellectually, as in consciousness, but actively and in a real sense, and he sees his own reflection in a world which he has constructed. While, therefore, alienated labor takes away the object of production from man, it also takes away his species life, his real objectivity as a species-being, and changes his advantage over animals into a disadvantage in so far as his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him. Just as alienated labor transforms free and self-directed activity into a means, so it transforms the species life of man into a means of physical existence. Consciousness, which man has from his species, is transformed through alienation so that species life becomes only a means for him. (3) Thus alienated labor turns the species life of man, and also nature as his mental speciesproperty, into an alien being and into a means for his individual existence. It alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life. (4) A direct consequence of the alienation of man from the product of his labor, from his life activity and from his species life is that man is alienated from other men. When man confronts himself he also confronts other men. What is true of man’s relationship to his work, to the product of his work and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, to their labor and to the objects of their labor. In general, the statement that man is alienated from his species life means that each man is alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life.

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Human alienation, and above all the relation of man to himself, is first realized and expressed in the relationship between each man and other men. Thus in the relationship of alienated labor every man regards other men according to the standards and relationships in which he finds himself placed as a worker. We began with an economic fact, the alienation of the worker and his production. We have expressed this fact in conceptual terms as alienated labor, and in analyzing the concept we have merely analyzed an economic fact. Let us now examine further how this concept of alienated labor must express and reveal itself in reality. If the product of labor is alien to me and confronts me as an alien power, to whom does it belong? If my own activity does not belong to me but is an alien, forced activity, to whom does it belong? To a being other than myself. And who is this being? The gods? It is apparent in the earliest stages of advanced production, e.g., temple building, etc. in Egypt, India, Mexico, and in the service rendered to gods, that the product belonged to the gods. But the gods alone were never the lords of labor. And no more was nature. What a contradiction it would be if the more man subjugates nature by his labor, and the more the marvels of the gods are rendered superfluous by the marvels of industry, he should abstain from his joy in producing and his enjoyment of the product for love of these powers. The alien being to whom labor and the product of labor belong, to whose service labor is devoted, and to whose enjoyment the product of labor goes, can only be man himself. If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, but confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to a man other than the worker. If his activity is a torment to him it must be a source of enjoyment and pleasure to another. Not the gods, nor nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over men. Consider the earlier statement that the relation of man to himself is first realized, objectified, through his relation to other men. If therefore he is related to the product of his labor, his objectified labor, as to an alien, hostile, powerful and independent object, he is related in such a way that another alien, hostile, powerful and independent man is the lord of this object. If he is related to his own activity as to unfree activity, then he is related to it as activity in the service, and under the domination, coercion and yoke, of another man. Every self-alienation of man, from himself and from nature, appears in the relation which he postulates between other men and himself and nature. Thus religious self-alienation is necessarily exemplified in the relation between laity and priest, or, since it is here a question of the spiritual world, between the laity and a mediator. In the real world of practice this selfalienation can only be expressed in the real, practical relation of man to his fellow-men. The medium through which alienation occurs is itself a practical one. Through alienated labor, therefore, man not only produces his relation to the object and to the process of production as to alien and hostile men; he also produces the relation of other men to his production and his product, and the relation between himself and other men. Just as he creates his own production as a vitiation, a punishment, and his own product as a loss, as a product which does not belong to him, so he creates the domination of the non-producer over production and its product. As he alienates his own activity, so he bestows upon the stranger an activity which is not his own. We have so far considered this relation only from the side of the worker, and later on we shall consider it also from the side of the non-worker.

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Thus, through alienated labor the worker creates the relation of another man, who does not work and is outside the work process, to this labor. The relation of the worker to work also produces the relation of the capitalist (or whatever one likes to call the lord of labor) to work. Private property is therefore the product, the necessary result, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself. Private property is thus derived from the analysis of the concept of alienated labor; that is, alienated man, alienated labor, alienated life, and estranged man. We have, of course, derived the concept of alienated labor (alienated life) from political economy, from an analysis of the movement of private property. But the analysis of this concept shows that although private property appears to be the basis and cause of alienated labor, it is rather a consequence of the latter, just as the gods are fundamentally not the cause but the product of confusions of human reason. At a later stage, however, there is a reciprocal influence. Only in the final stage of the development of private property is its secret revealed, namely, that it is on one hand the product of alienated labor, and on the other hand the means by which labor is alienated, the realization of this alienation. This elucidation throws light upon several unresolved controversies: (1) Political economy begins with labor as the real soul of production and then goes on to attribute nothing to labor and everything to private property. Proudhon, faced by this contradiction, has decided in favor of labor against private property. We perceive, however, that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of alienated labor with itself and that political economy has merely formulated the laws of alienated labor. We also observe, therefore, that wages and private property are identical, for wages, like the product or object of labor, labor itself remunerated, are only a necessary consequence of the alienation of labor. In the wage system labor appears not as an end in itself but as the servant of wages. We shall develop this point later on and here only bring out some of the (XXVI) consequences. An enforced increase in wages (disregarding the other difficulties, and especially that such an anomaly could only be maintained by force) would be nothing more than a better remuneration of slaves, and would not restore, either to the worker or to the work, their human significance and worth. Even the equality of incomes which Proudhon demands would only change the relation of the present-day worker to his work into a relation of all men to work. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist. (2) From the relation of alienated labor to private property it also follows that the emancipation of society from private property, from servitude, takes the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not in the sense that only the latter’s emancipation is involved, but because this emancipation includes the emancipation of humanity as a whole. For all human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all the types of servitude are only modifications or consequences of this relation. As we have discovered the concept of private property by an analysis of the concept of alienated labor, so with the aid of these two factors we can evolve all the categories of political economy, and in every category, e.g., trade, competition, capital, money, we shall discover only a particular and developed expression of these fundamental elements.

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However, before considering this structure let us attempt to solve two problems. (1) To determine the general nature of private property as it has resulted from alienated labor, in its relation to genuine human and social property. (2) We have taken as a fact and analyzed the alienation of labor. How does it happen, we may ask, that man alienates his labor? How is this alienation founded in the nature of human development? We have already done much to solve the problem in so far as we have transformed the question concerning the origin of private property into a question about the relation between alienated labor and the process of development of mankind. For in speaking of private property one believes oneself to be dealing with something external to mankind. But in speaking of labor one deals directly with mankind itself. This new formulation of the problem already contains its solution. ad (1) The general nature of private property and its relation to genuine human property. We have resolved alienated labor into two parts, which mutually determine each other, or rather constitute two different expressions of one and the same relation. Appropriation appears as alienation and alienation as appropriation, alienation as genuine acceptance in the community. We have considered one aspect, alienated labor, in its bearing upon the worker himself, i.e., the relation of alienated labor to itself. And we have found as the necessary consequence of this relation the property relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labor. Private property as the material summarized expression of alienated labor includes both relations; the relation of the worker to labor, to the product of his labor and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of the latter’s labor. We have already seen that in relation to the worker, who appropriates nature by his labor, appropriation appears as alienation, self-activity as activity for another and of another, living as the sacrifice of life, and production of the object as loss of the object to an alien power, an alien man. Let us now consider the relation of this alien man to the worker, to labor, and to the object of labor. It should be noted first that everything which appears to the worker as an activity of alienation, appears to the non-worker as a condition of alienation. Secondly, the real, practical attitude of the worker in production and to the product (as a state of mind) appears to the nonworker who confronts him as a theoretical attitude. Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the worker which the latter does against himself, but he does not do against himself what he does against the worker. Let us examine these three relationships more closely. [The manuscript breaks off unfinished at this point. – Tr.] [From] Third Manuscript (CRITIQUE OF HEGEL’S DIALECTIC AND GENERAL PHILOSOPHY) (6) This is perhaps an appropriate point at which to explain and substantiate what has been said, and to make some general comments upon Hegel’s dialectic, especially as it is expounded in the Phenomenology and Logic, and upon its relation to the modern critical movement. 379

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Modern German criticism was so much concerned with the past, and was so hampered by its involvement with its subject matter, that it had a wholly uncritical attitude to the methods of criticism and completely ignored the partly formal, but in fact essential question—how do we now stand with regard to the Hegelian dialectic? This ignorance of the relationship of modern criticism to Hegel’s general philosophy, and his dialectic in particular, was so great that critics such as Strauss and Bruno Bauer (the former in all his writings; the latter in his Synoptiker, where, in opposition to Strauss, he substitutes the “self-consciousness” of abstract man for the substance of “abstract nature”, and even in Das entdeckte Christentum) were, at least implicitly, ensnared in Hegelian logic. Thus, for instance, in Das entdeckte Christentum it is argued: “As if self-consciousness in positing the world, that which is different, did not produce itself in producing its object; for it then annuls the difference between itself and what it has produced, since it exists only in this creation and movement, has its purpose only in this movement, etc.”. Or again: “They (the French materialists) could not see that the movement of the universe has only become real and unified in itself in so far as it is the movement of self-consciousness.” These expressions not only do not differ from the Hegelian conception; they reproduce it textually. How little these writers, in undertaking their criticism (Bauer in his Synoptiker) were aware of their relation to Hegel’s dialectic, and how little such an awareness emerged from the criticism, is demonstrated by Bauer in his Gute Sache der Freiheit when, instead of replying to the indiscreet question put by Gruppe, “And now what is to be done with logic?”, he transmits it to future critics. Now that Feuerbach, in his “Thesen” in Anecdotis and in greater detail in his Philosophie der Zukunft, has demolished the inner principle of the old dialectic and philosophy, the “Critical School”, which was unable to do this itself but has seen it accomplished, has proclaimed itself the pure, decisive, absolute, and finally enlightened criticism, and in its spiritual pride has reduced the whole historical movement to the relation existing between itself and the rest of the world which comes into the category of “the mass”. It has reduced all dogmatic antitheses to the single dogmatic antithesis between its own cleverness and the stupidity of the world, between the critical Christ and mankind—“the rabble.” At every moment of the day it has demonstrated its own excellence vis à vis the stupidity of the mass, and it has finally announced the critical last judgment by proclaiming that the day is at hand when the whole of fallen mankind will assemble before it and will be divided up into groups each of which will be handed its testimonium paupertatis (certificate of poverty). The Critical School has made public its superiority to all human feelings and to the world, above which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, content to utter occasionally from its sarcastic lips the laughter of the Olympian gods. After all these entertaining antics of idealism (of Young Hegelianism) which is expiring in the form of criticism, the Critical School has not even now intimated that it was necessary to discuss critically its own source, the dialectic of Hegel; nor has it given any indication of its relation with the dialectic of Feuerbach. This is a procedure totally lacking in critical sense. Feuerbach is the only person who has a serious and critical relation to Hegel’s dialectic, who has made real discoveries in this field, and above all, who has vanquished the old philosophy. The magnitude of Feuerbach’s achievement and the unassuming simplicity with which he presents his work to the world are in striking contrast with the behaviour of others. Feuerbach’s great achievement is:

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(1) to have shown that philosophy is nothing more than religion brought into thought and developed by thought, and that it is equally to be condemned as another form and mode of existence of human alienation; (2) to have founded genuine materialism and positive science by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle of his theory; (3) to have opposed to the negation of the negation which claims to be the absolute positive, a self-subsistent principle positively founded on itself. Feuerbach explains Hegel’s dialectic, and at the same time justifies taking the positive phenomenon, that which is perceptible and indubitable, as the starting point, in the following way: Hegel begins from the alienation of substance (logically, from the infinite, the abstract universal) from the absolute and fixed abstraction; i.e., in ordinary language, from religion and theology. Secondly, he supersedes the infinite, and posits the real, the perceptible, the finite, and the particular. (Philosophy, supersession of religion and theology). Thirdly, he then supersedes the positive and re-establishes the abstraction, the infinite. (Reestablishment of religion and theology). Thus Feuerbach conceives the negation of the negation as being only a contradiction within philosophy itself, which affirms theology (transcendance, etc.) after having superseded it, and thus affirms it in opposition to philosophy. For the positing or self-affirmation and self-confirmation which is implied in the negation of the negation is regarded as a positing which is still uncertain, burdened with its contrary, doubtful of itself and thus incomplete, not demonstrated by its own existence, and implicit. […] The positing which is perceptually indubitable and grounded upon itself is directly opposed to it. In conceiving the negation of the negation, from the aspect of the positive relation inherent in it, as the only true positive, and from the aspect of the negative relation inherent in it, as the only true act and self-confirming act of all being, Hegel has merely discovered an abstract, logical and speculative expression of the historical process, which is not yet the real history of man as a given subject, but only the history of the act of creation, of the genesis of man. We shall explain both the abstract form of this process and the difference between the process as conceived by Hegel and by modern criticism, by Feuerbach in Das Wesen des Christentums; or rather, the critical form of this process which is still so uncritical in Hegel. Let us examine Hegel’s system. [. . .] Hegel’s Encyclopaedia begins with logic, with pure speculative thought, and ends with absolute knowledge, the self-conscious and self-conceiving philosophical or absolute mind, i.e. the, superhuman, abstract mind. The whole of the Encyclopaedia is nothing but the extended being of the philosophical mind, its self-objectification; and the philosophical mind is nothing but the alienated world mind thinking within the bounds of its self-alienation, i.e., conceiving itself in an abstract manner. Logic is the money of the mind, the speculative thought-value of man and of nature, their essence indifferent to any real determinate character and thus unreal; thought which is alienated and abstract and which ignores real nature and man. The external character of this abstract thought . . . nature as it exists for this abstract thought. Nature is

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external to it, loss of itself, and is only conceived as something external, as abstract thought, but alienated abstract thought. Finally, spirit, this thought which returns to its own origin and which, as anthropological, phenomenological, psychological, customary, artistic-religious spirit, is not valid for itself until it discovers itself and relates itself to itself as absolute knowledge in the absolute (i.e., abstract) spirit, and so receives its conscious and fitting existence. For its real mode of existence is abstraction. Hegel commits a double error. The first appears most clearly in the Phenomenology, the birthplace of his philosophy. When Hegel conceives wealth, the power of the state, etc. as entities alienated from the human being, he conceives them only in their thought form. They are entities of thought and thus simply an alienation of pure (i.e., abstract philosophical) thought. The whole movement, therefore, ends in absolute knowledge. It is precisely abstract thought from which these objects are alienated, and which they confront with their presumptuous reality. The philosopher, himself an abstract form of alienated man, sets himself up as the measure of the alienated world. The whole history of alienation, and of the retraction of alienation, is therefore only the history of the production of abstract thought, i.e., of absolute, logical, speculative thought. Estrangement, which thus forms the real interest of this alienation and of the supersession of this alienation, is the opposition of in itself and for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, of object and subject, i.e., the opposition in thought itself between abstract thought and sensible reality or real sensuous existence. All other contradictions and movements are merely the appearance, the cloak, the exoteric form of these two opposites which are alone important and which constitute the significance of the other, profane contradictions. It is not the fact that the human being objectifies himself inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but that he objectifies himself by distinction from and in opposition to abstract thought, which constitutes alienation as it exists and as it has to be transcended. The appropriation of man’s objectified and alienated faculties is thus, in the first place, only an appropriation which occurs in consciousness, in pure thought, i.e., in abstraction. It is the appropriation of these objects as thoughts and as movements of thought. For this reason, despite its thoroughly negative and critical appearance, and despite the genuine criticism which it contains and which often anticipates later developments, there is already implicit in the Phenomenology, as a germ, as a potentiality and a secret, the uncritical positivism and uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later works—the philosophical dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world. Secondly, the vindication of the objective world for man (for example, the recognition that sense perception is not abstract sense perception but human sense perception, that religion, wealth, etc. are only the alienated reality of human objectification, of human faculties put to work, and are therefore a way to genuine human reality) this appropriation, or the insight into this process, appears in Hegel as the recognition of sensuousness, religion, state power, etc. as mental phenomena, for mind alone is the true essence of man, and the true form of mind is thinking mind, the logical, speculative mind. The human character of nature, of historically produced nature, of man’s products, is shown by their being products of abstract mind, and thus phases of mind, entities of thought. The Phenomenology is a concealed, unclear and mystifying criticism, but in so far as it grasps the alienation of man (even though man appears only as mind) all the elements of criticism are contained in it, and are often presented and worked out in a manner which goes far beyond Hegel’s own point of view. The sections devoted to the “unhappy consciousness”, the “honest consciousness”, the struggle between the

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“noble” and the “base” consciousness, etc., etc. contain the critical elements (though still in an alienated form) of whole areas such as religion, the state, civil life, etc. Just as the entity, the object, appears as an entity of thought, so also the subject is always consciousness or selfconsciousness; or rather, the object appears only as abstract consciousness and man as selfconsciousness. Thus the distinctive forms of alienation which are manifested are only different forms of consciousness and self-consciousness. Since abstract consciousness (the form in which the object is conceived) is in itself merely a distinctive moment of self-consciousness, the outcome of the movement is the identity of self-consciousness and consciousness—absolute knowledge—the movement of abstract thought not directed outwards but proceeding within itself; i.e., the dialectic of pure thought is the result. The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology—the dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle—is, first, that Hegel grasps the self-creation of man as a process, objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and transcendence of this alienation, and that he therefore grasps the nature of labor, and conceives objective man (true, because real man) as the result of his own labor. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or the affirmation of himself as a real species-being (i.e., as a human being) is only possible so far as he really brings forth all his species-powers (which is only possible through the co-operative endeavors of mankind and as an outcome of history) and treats these powers as objects, which can only be done at first in the form of alienation. We shall next show in detail Hegel’s one-sidedness and limitations, as revealed in the final chapter of the Phenomenology, on absolute knowledge, a chapter which contains the concentrated spirit of the Phenomenology, its relation to the dialectic, and also Hegel’s consciousness of both and of their interrelations. For the present, let us make these preliminary observations: Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. He conceives labor as the essence, the self-confirming essence of man; he observes only the positive side of labor, not its negative side. Labor is man’s coming to be for himself within alienation, or as an alienated man. Labor as Hegel understands and recognizes it is abstract mental labor. Thus, that which above all constitutes the essence of philosophy, the alienation of man knowing himself, or alienated science thinking itself, Hegel grasps as its essence. Consequently he is able to bring together the separate elements of earlier philosophy and to present his own as the philosophy. What other philosophers did, that is, to conceive separate elements of nature and of human life as phases of self-consciousness and indeed of abstract self-consciousness, Hegel knows by doing philosophy; therefore, his science is absolute. Let us now turn to our subject. Absolute knowledge. The final chapter of the Phenomenology. The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness, that the object is only objectified self-consciousness, self-consciousness as an object. (Positing man = self-consciousness.) It is necessary, therefore, to surmount the object of consciousness. Objectivity as such is regarded as an alienated human relationship which does not correspond with the essence of

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man, self-consciousness. The re-appropriation of the objective essence of man, which was produced as something alien and determined by alienation, signifies the supersession not only of alienation but also of objectivity; that is, man is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being. The process of overcoming the object of consciousness is described by Hegel as follows: The object does not reveal itself only as returning into the Self (according to Hegel that is a one-sided conception of the movement, considering only one aspect). Man is equated with self. The Self, however, is only man conceived abstractly and produced by abstraction. Man is self-referring. His eye, his ear, etc. are self-referring; every one of his faculties has this quality of self-reference. But it is entirely false to say on that account, “Self-consciousness has eyes, ears, faculties”. Selfconsciousness is rather a quality of human nature, of the human eye, etc.; human nature is not a quality of self-consciousness. The Self, abstracted and determined for itself, is man as an abstract egoist, purely abstract egoism raised to the level of thought. (We shall return to this point later). For Hegel, human life, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness. All alienation of human life is therefore nothing but alienation of self-consciousness. The alienation of self-consciousness is not regarded as the expression, reflected in knowledge and thought, of the real alienation of human life. Instead, actual alienation, that which appears real, is in its innermost hidden nature (which philosophy first discloses) only the phenomenal being of the alienation of real human life, of self-consciousness. The science which comprehends this is therefore called Phenomenology. All re-appropriation of alienated objective life appears therefore as an incorporation in selfconsciousness. The person who takes possession of his being is only the self-consciousness which takes possession of objective being; the return of the object into the Self is therefore the re-appropriation of the object. Expressed in a more comprehensive way the supersession of the object of consciousness means: (1) that the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something disappearing; (2) that it is the alienation of self-consciousness which establishes ‘thinghood’; (3) That this alienation has positive as well as negative significance; (4) that it has this significance not only for us or in itself, but also for self-consciousness itself; (5) that for self-consciousness the negative of the object, its self-supersession, has positive significance, or self-consciousness knows thereby the nullity of the object in that self-consciousness alienates itself, for in this alienation it establishes itself as object or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being for itself, establishes the object as itself; (6) that, on the other hand, this other ‘moment’ is equally present, that self-consciousness has superseded and re-absorbed this alienation and objectively, and is thus at home in its other being as such; (7) that this is the movement of consciousness, and consciousness is therefore the totality of its ‘moments’; (8) that similarly, consciousness must have related itself to the object in all its determinations, and have conceived it in terms of each of them. This totality of determinations makes the object intrinsically a spiritual being, and it becomes truly so for consciousness by the apprehension of every one of these determinations as the Self, or by what was called earlier the spiritual attitude toward them. ad (1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something disappearing is the above-mentioned return of the object into the Self. ad (2) The alienation of self-consciousness establishes ‘thinghood.’ Because man equals self-consciousness, his alienated objective being or ‘thinghood’ is equivalent to alienated selfconsciousness, and ‘thinghood’ is established by this alienation. (‘Thinghood’ is that which is an object for him, and an object for him is really only that which is an essential object, consequently 384

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his objective essence. And since it is not the real man, nor nature—man being human nature— who becomes as such a subject, but only an abstraction of man, self-consciousness, ‘thinghood’ can only be alienated self-consciousness). It is quite understandable that a living, natural being endowed with objective (i.e., material) faculties should have real natural objects of its being, and equally that its self-alienation should be the establishment of a real, objective world, but in the form of externality, as a world which does not belong to, and dominates, his being. There is nothing incomprehensible or mysterious about this. The converse, rather, would be mysterious. But it is equally clear that a self-consciousness, i.e., its alienation, can only establish ‘thinghood’, i.e., only an abstract thing, a thing created by abstraction and not a real thing. It is clear, moreover, that ‘thinghood’ is totally lacking in independence, in being, vis à vis selfconsciousness; it is a mere construct established by self-consciousness. And what is established is not self-confirming; it is the confirmation of the act of establishing, which for an instant, but only for an instant, fixes its energy as a product and apparently confers upon it the role of an independent, real being. When real, corporeal man, with his feet firmly planted on the solid ground, inhaling and exhaling all the powers of nature, posits his real objective faculties, as a result of his alienation, as alien objects, the positing is not the subject of this act but the subjectivity of objective faculties whose action must also therefore be objective. An objective being acts objectively, and it would not act objectively if objectivity were not part of its essential being. It creates and establishes only objects because it is established by objects, and because it is fundamentally natural. In the act of establishing it does not descend from its “pure activity” to the creation of objects; its objective product simply confirms its objective activity, its activity as an objective, natural being. We see here how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinguished from both idealism and materialism, and at the same time constitutes their unifying truth. We see also that only naturalism is able to comprehend the process of world history. Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being, and as a living natural being he is, on the one hand, endowed with natural powers and faculties, which exist in him as tendencies and abilities, as drives. On the other hand, as a natural, embodied, sentient, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited being, like animals and plants. The objects of his drives exist outside himself as objects independent of him, yet they are objects of his needs, essential objects which are indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his faculties. The fact that man is an embodied, living, real, sentient, objective being with natural powers, means that he has real, sensuous objects as the objects of his being, or that he can only express his being in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural, sentient and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or to be oneself object, nature and sense for a third person, is the same thing. Hunger is a natural need; it requires therefore a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to be satisfied and stilled. Hunger is the objective need of a body for an object which exists outside itself and which is essential for its integration and the expression of its nature. The sun is an object, a necessary and life-assuring object, for the plant, just as the plant is an object for the sun, an expression of the sun’s life-giving power and objective essential powers. A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being and does not share in the being of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for a third being has no being for its object, i.e., it is not objectively related and its being is not objective. 385

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A non-objective being is a non-being. Suppose a being which neither is an object itself nor has an object. In the first place, such a being would be the only being; no other being would exist outside itself and it would be solitary and alone. For as soon as there exist objects outside myself, as soon as I am not alone, I am another, another reality from the object outside me. For this third object I am thus an other reality than itself, i.e., its object. To suppose a being which is not the object of another being would be to suppose that no objective being exists. As soon as I have an object, this object has me for its object. But a non-objective being is an unreal, non-sensuous, merely conceived being; i.e., a merely imagined being, an abstraction. To be sensuous, i.e., real, is to be an object of sense or sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous objects outside oneself, objects of one’s sensations. To be sentient is to suffer (to experience). Man as an objective sentient being is a suffering being, and since he feels his suffering, a passionate being. Passion is man’s faculties striving to attain their object. But man is not merely a natural being; he is a human natural being. He is a being for himself, and therefore a species-being; and as such he has to express and authenticate himself in being as well as in thought. Consequently, human objects are not natural objects as they present themselves directly, nor is human sense, as it is immediately and objectively given, human sensibility and human objectivity. Neither objective nature nor subjective nature is directly presented in a form adequate to the human being. And as everything natural must have its origin so man has his process of genesis, history, which is for him, however, a conscious process and thus one which is consciously self-transcending. (We shall return to this point later). Thirdly, since this establishment of ‘thinghood’ is itself only an appearance, an act which contradicts the nature of pure activity, it has to be annulled again and ‘thinghood’ has to be denied. ad 3, 4, 5, 6. (3) This alienation of consciousness has not only a negative but also a positive significance, and (4) it has this positive significance not only for us or in itself, but for consciousness itself. (5) For consciousness the negation of the object, or its annulling of itself by that means, has positive significance; it knows the nullity of the object by the fact that it alienates itself, for in this alienation it knows itself as the object or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-self, knows the object as itself. (6) On the other hand, this other ‘moment’ is equally present, that consciousness has superseded and re-absorbed this alienation and objectivity and is thus at home in its other being as such. We have already seen that the appropriation of alienated objective being, or the supersession of objectivity in the condition of alienation (which has to develop from indifferent otherness to real antagonistic alienation) signifies for Hegel also, or primarily, the supersession of objectivity, since it is not the determinate character of the object but its objective character which is the scandal of alienation for self-consciousness. The object is therefore negative, selfannulling, a nullity. This nullity of the object has a positive as well as a negative significance for consciousness, for it is the self-confirmation of the non-objectivity, the abstract character of itself. For consciousness itself, therefore, the nullity of the object has a positive significance because it knows this nullity, objective being, as its self-alienation, and knows that this nullity exists only through its self-alienation. . . . The way in which consciousness is, and in which something is for it, is knowing. Knowing is its only act. Thus something comes to exist for consciousness so far as it knows this something. Knowing is its only objective relation. It knows, then, the nullity of the object (i.e., knows the non-existence of the distinction between itself and the object, the non-existence of the object 386

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for it) because it knows the object as its self-alienation. That is to say, it knows itself (knows knowing as an object), because the object is only the semblance of an object, a deception, which is intrinsically nothing but knowing itself which has confronted itself with itself, has established in face of itself a nullity, a ‘something’ which has no objective existence outside the knowing itself. Knowing knows that in relating itself to an object it is only outside itself, alienates itself, and that it only appears to itself as an object; or in other words, that that which appears to it as an object is only itself. On the other hand, Hegel says, this other ‘moment’ is present at the same time; namely, that consciousness has equally superseded and re-absorbed this alienation and objectivity, and consequently is at home in its other being as such. In this discussion all the illusions of speculation are assembled. First, consciousness—self-consciousness—is at home in its other being as such. It is therefore—if we abstract from Hegel’s abstraction and substitute the self-consciousness of man for self-consciousness—at home in its other being as such. This implies, first, that consciousness (knowing as knowing, thinking as thinking) claims to be directly the other of itself, the sensuous world, reality, life; it is thought over-reaching itself in thought (Feuerbach). This aspect is contained in it, in so far as consciousness as mere consciousness is offended not by the alienated objectivity but by objectivity as such. Secondly, it implies that self-conscious man, in so far as he has recognized and superseded the spiritual world (or the universal spiritual mode of existence of his world) then confirms it again in this alienated form and presents it as his true existence; he re-establishes it and claims to be at home in his other being. Thus, for example, after superseding religion, when he has recognized religion as a product of self-alienation, he then finds a confirmation of himself in religion as religion. This is the root of Hegel’s false positivism, or of his merely apparent criticism; what Feuerbach calls the positing, negation and re-establishment of religion or theology, but which has to be conceived in a more general way. Thus reason is at home in unreason as such. Man, who has recognized that he leads an alienated life in law, politics, etc. leads his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, in contradiction with itself, and with the knowledge and the nature of the object, is thus the true knowledge and life. There can no longer be any question about Hegel’s compromise with religion, the state, etc. for this lie is the lie of his whole argument. If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in it. Thus my own self, and the self-consciousness which is its essence, is not confirmed in religion but in the abolition and supersession of religion. In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of true being by the negation of illusory being. It is the confirmation of illusory being, or of self-alienating being in its denial; or the denial of this illusory being as an objective being existing outside man and independently of him, and its transformation into a subject. The act of supersession plays a strange part in which denial and preservation, denial and affirmation, are linked together. Thus, for example, in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, private right superseded equals morality, morality superseded equals the family, the family superseded equals civil society, civil society superseded equals the state and the state superseded equals world history. But in actuality private right, morality, the family, civil society, the state, etc. remain; only they have become ‘moments,’ modes of existence of man, which have no validity 387

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in isolation but which mutually dissolve and engender one another. They are moments of the movement. In their actual existence this mobile nature is concealed. It is first revealed in thought, in philosophy; consequently, my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion, my true political existence is my existence in the philosophy of right, my true natural existence is my existence in the philosophy of nature, my true artistic existence is my existence in the philosophy of art, and my true human existence is my existence in philosophy. In the same way, the true existence of religion, the state, nature and art, is the philosophy of religion, of the state, of nature, and of art. But if the philosophy of religion is the only true existence of religion I am only truly religious as a philosopher of religion, and I deny actual religious sentiment and the actual religious man. At the same time, however, I confirm them, partly in my own existence or in the alien existence with which I confront them (for this is only their philosophical expression), and partly in their own original form, since they are for me the merely apparent other being, allegories, the lineaments of their own true existence (i.e., of my philosophical existence) concealed by sensuous draperies. In the same way, quality superseded equals quantity, quantity superseded equals measure, measure superseded equals being, being superseded equals phenomenal being, phenomenal being superseded equals actuality, actuality superseded equals the concept, the concept superseded equals objectivity, objectivity superseded equals the absolute idea, the absolute idea superseded equals nature, nature superseded equals subjective spirit, subjective spirit superseded equals ethical objective spirit, ethical spirit superseded equals art, art superseded equals religion, and religion superseded equals absolute knowledge. On the one hand, this supersession is supersession of an entity of thought; thus, private property as thought is superseded in the thought of morality. And since thought imagines itself to be, without mediation, the other aspect of itself, namely sensuous reality, and takes its own action for real, sensuous action, this supersession in thought, which leaves its object in existence in the real world believes itself to have really overcome it. On the other hand, since the object has now become for it a ‘moment’ of thought, it is regarded in its real existence as a confirmation of thought, of self-consciousness, of abstraction. From the one aspect the existent which Hegel supersedes in philosophy is not therefore the actual religion, state, or nature, but religion itself as an object of knowledge, i.e., dogmatics; and similarly with jurisprudence, political science, and natural science. From this aspect, therefore, he stands in opposition both to the actual being and to the direct, non-philosophical science (or the non-philosophical concepts) of this being. Thus he contradicts the conventional conceptions. From the other aspect, the religious man, etc. can find in Hegel his ultimate confirmation. We have now to consider the positive moments of Hegel’s dialectic, within the condition of alienation. (a) Supersession as an objective movement which re-absorbs alienation into itself. This is the insight, expressed within alienation, into the appropriation of the objective being through the supersession of its alienation. It is the alienated insight into the real objectification of man, into the real appropriation of his objective being by the destruction of the alienated character of the objective world, by the annulment of its alienated mode of existence. In the same way, atheism as the annulment of God is the 388

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emergence of theoretical humanism, and communism as the annulment of private property is the vindication of real human life as man’s property. The latter is also the emergence of practical humanism, for atheism is humanism mediated to itself by the annulment of religion, while communism is humanism mediated to itself by the annulment of private property. It is only by the supersession of this mediation (which is, however, a necessary pre-condition) that the self-originating positive humanism can appear. But atheism and communism are not flight or abstraction from, or loss of, the objective world which men have created by the objectification of their faculties. They are not an impoverished return to unnatural, primitive simplicity. They are rather the first real emergence, the genuine actualization, of man’s nature as something real. Thus Hegel, in so far as he sees the positive significance of the self-referring negation (though in an alienated mode), conceives man’s self-estrangement, alienation of being, loss of objectivity and reality, as self-discovery, change of nature, objectification and realization. In short, Hegel conceives labor as man’s act of self-creation (though in abstract terms); he grasps man’s relation to himself as an alien being and the emergence of species consciousness and species-life as the demonstration of his alien being. (b) But in Hegel, apart from, or rather as a consequence of, the inversion we have already described, this act of genesis appears, in the first place, as one which is merely formal, because it is abstract, and because human nature itself is treated as merely abstract, thinking nature, as self-consciousness. Secondly, because the conception is formal and abstract the annulment of alienation becomes a confirmation of alienation. For Hegel, this movement of self-creation and self-objectification in the form of self-estrangement is the absolute and hence final expression of human life, which has its end in itself, is at peace with itself and at one with its own nature. This movement, in its abstract form as dialectic, is regarded therefore as truly human life, and since it is nevertheless an abstraction, an alienation of human life, it is regarded as a divine process and thus as the divine process of mankind; it is a process which man’s abstract, pure, absolute being, as distinguished from himself, traverses. Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject; but the subject first emerges as a result. This result, the subject knowing itself as absolute self-consciousness, is therefore God, absolute spirit, the self-knowing and self-manifesting idea. Real man and real nature become mere predicates, symbols of this concealed unreal man and unreal nature. Subject and predicate have therefore an inverted relation to each other; a mystical subject-object, or a subjectivity reaching beyond the object, the absolute subject as a process of self-alienation and of return from alienation into itself, and at the same time of re-absorption of this alienation, the subject as this process; pure, unceasing revolving within itself. First, the formal and abstract conception of man’s act of self-creation or self-objectification. Since Hegel equates man with self-consciousness, the alienated object, the alienated real being of man, is simply consciousness, merely the thought of alienation, its abstract and hence vacuous and unreal expression, the negation. The annulment of alienation is also, therefore, merely an abstract and vacuous annulment of this empty abstraction, the negation of the

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negation. The replete, living, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification is therefore reduced to a mere abstraction, absolute negativity, an abstraction which is then crystallized as such and is conceived as an independent activity, as activity itself. Since this so-called negativity is merely the abstract, vacuous form of that real living act, its content can only be a formal content produced by abstraction from all content. These are, therefore, general, abstract forms of abstraction which refer to any content and are thus neutral towards, and valid for, any content; forms of thought, logical forms which are detached from real spirit and real nature. (We shall expound later the logical content of absolute negativity). Hegel’s positive achievement in his speculative logic is to show that the determinate concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms, in their independence from nature and spirit, are a necessary result of the general alienation of human nature and also of human thought, and to depict them as a whole as moments in the process of abstraction. For example, being superseded is essence, essence superseded is concept, the concept superseded is . . . the absolute idea. But what is the absolute idea? It must supersede itself if it does not want to traverse the whole process of abstraction again from the beginning and to rest content with being a totality of abstractions or a self-comprehending abstraction. But the self-comprehending abstraction knows itself to be nothing; it must abandon itself, the abstraction, and so arrives at an entity which is its exact opposite, nature. The whole Logic is, therefore, a demonstration that abstract thought is nothing for itself, that the absolute idea is nothing for itself, that only nature is something. The absolute idea, the abstract idea which “regarded from the aspect of its unity with itself, is intuition” (Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, 3rd ed. p. 222[§ 244]) and which “in its own absolute truth resolves to let the moment of its particularity or of initial determination and other-being, the immediate idea, as its reflection, emerge freely from itself as nature”. (ibid); this whole idea which behaves in such a strange and fanciful way and which has given the Hegelians such terrible headaches is throughout nothing but abstraction, i.e., the abstract thinker. It is abstraction which, made wise by experience and enlightened about its own truth, resolves under various (false and still abstract) conditions to abandon itself, and to establish its other being, the particular, the determinate, in place of its self-absorption, non-being, universality and indeterminateness; and which resolves to let nature, which it concealed within itself only as an abstraction, as an entity of thought, emerge freely from itself. That is, it decides to forsake abstraction and to observe nature free from abstraction. The abstract idea, which without mediation becomes intuition, is nothing but abstract thought which abandons itself and decides for intuition. This whole transition from logic to the philosophy of nature is simply the transition from abstracting to intuiting, a transition which is extremely difficult for the abstract thinker to accomplish and which he therefore describes in such strange terms. The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher from abstract thinking to intuition is ennui, the longing for a content. (Man alienated from himself is also the thinker alienated from his being, i.e., from his natural and human life. His thoughts are consequently spirits existing outside nature and man. In his Logic Hegel has imprisoned all these spirits together, and has conceived each of them first as negation, i.e., as alienation of human thought, and secondly as negation of the negation, i.e., as the supersession of this alienation and as the real expression of human thought. But since this negation of the negation is itself still confined within the alienation, it is in part a restoration of these fixed spiritual forms in their alienation, in part an immobilization in 390

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the final act, the act of self-reference, as the true being of these spiritual forms. Further, in so far as this abstraction conceives itself, and experiences an increasing weariness of itself, there appears in Hegel an abandonment of abstract thought which moves solely in the sphere of thought and is devoid of eyes, ears, teeth, everything, and a resolve to recognize nature as a being and to go over to intuition.) But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself, and rigidly separated from man, is nothing for man. It goes without saying that the abstract thinker who has committed himself to intuition, intuits nature abstractly. As nature lay enclosed in the thinker in a form which was obscure and mysterious even to himself, as absolute idea, as an entity of thought, so in truth, when he let it emerge from himself it was still only abstract nature, nature as an entity of thought, but now with the significance that it is the other being of thought, is real, intuited nature, distinguished from abstract thought. Or, to speak in human language, the abstract thinker discovers from intuiting nature that the entities which he thought to create out of nothing, out of pure abstraction, to create in the divine dialectic as the pure products of thought endlessly shuttling back and forth in itself and never regarding external reality, are simply abstractions from natural characteristics. The whole of nature, therefore, reiterates to him the logical abstractions, but in a sensuous, external form. He analyzes nature and these abstractions again. His intuition of nature is therefore simply the act of confirmation of his abstraction from the intuition of nature; his conscious re-enactment of the process of generating his abstraction. Thus, for example, Time equals Negativity which refers to itself (loc. cit. p. 238). In the natural form, superseded Movement as Matter corresponds to superseded Becoming as Being. In the natural form Light is Reflection-in-itself. Body as Moon and Comet is the natural form of the antithesis which, according to the Logic, is on the one hand the positive grounded upon itself, and on the other hand, the negative grounded upon itself. The Earth is the natural form of the logical ground, as the negative unity of the antithesis, etc. Nature as nature, i.e., so far as it is sensuously distinguished from that secret sense concealed within it, nature separated and distinguished from these abstractions is nothing (a nullity demonstrating its nullity), is devoid of sense, or has only the sense of an external thing which has been superseded. “In the finite-teleological view is to be found the correct premise that nature does not contain within itself the absolute purpose” (loc. cit. p. 225[§ 245]). Its purpose is the confirmation of abstraction. “Nature has shown itself to be the idea in the form of other-being. Since the idea is in this form the negative of itself, or external to itself, nature is not just relatively external vis à vis this idea, but externality constitutes the form in which it exists as nature,” (loc. cit. p. 227 [§ 247]). Externality should not be understood here as the self-externalizing world of sense, open to the light and to man’s senses. It has to be taken here in the sense of alienation, an error, a defect, that which ought not to be. For that which is true is still the idea. Nature is merely the form of its other-being. And since abstract thought is being, that which is external to it is by its nature a merely external thing. The abstract thinker recognizes at the same time that sensuousness, externality in contrast to thought which shuttles back and forth within itself, is the essence of nature. But at the same time he expresses this antithesis in such a way that this externality of nature, and its contrast with thought, appears as a deficiency, and that nature distinguished from abstraction appears as a deficient being. A being which is deficient, not simply for me or in my eyes, but in itself, has something outside itself which it lacks. That is to say, its being 391

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is something other than itself. For the abstract thinker, nature must therefore supersede itself, because it is already posited by him as a potentially superseded being. “For us, spirit has nature as its premise, being the truth of nature and thereby its absolute primus. In this truth nature has vanished, and spirit has surrendered itself as the idea which has attained being-for-itself, whose object, as well as the subject, is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, here its alienation has been superseded and the concept has become identical with itself. It is this identity only so far as it is a return from nature.” (loc. cit. p. 392[§ 381]). “Revelation, as the abstract idea, is unmediated transition to, the coming-to-be of, nature; as the revelation of the spirit, which is free, it is the establishment of nature as its own world, an establishment which, as reflection, is simultaneously the presupposition of the world as independently existing nature. Revelation in conception is the creation of nature as spirit’s own being, in which it acquires the affirmation and truth of its freedom.” “The absolute is spirit; this is the highest definition of the absolute” [§ 384].

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“THESES ON FEUERBACH” (1845) *

(1) The chief defect of all previous materialism (including Feuerbach’s) is that the object, actuality, sensuousness is conceived only in the form of the object or perception [Anschauung], but not as sensuous human activity, practice [Praxis], not subjectively. Hence in opposition to materialism the active side was developed by idealism—but only abstractly since idealism naturally does not know actual, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects actually different from thought objects: but he does not comprehend human activity itself as objective. Hence in The Essence of Christianity he regards only the theoretical attitude as the truly human attitude, while practice is understood and fixed only in its dirtily Jewish form of appearance. Consequently he does not comprehend the significance of “revolutionary,” of “practical-critical” activity. (2) The question whether human thinking can reach objective truth—is not a question of theory but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, actuality and power, this-sidedness of his thinking. The dispute about the actuality or non-actuality of thinking— thinking isolated from practice—is a purely scholastic question. (3) The materialistic doctrine concerning the change of circumstances and education forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine must divide society into two parts—one of which towers above [as in Robert Owen, Engels added]. The coincidence of the change of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be comprehended and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. (4) Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, the duplication of the world into a religious and secular world. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But the fact that the secular basis becomes separate from itself and establishes an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavage and self-contradictoriness of the secular basis. Thus the latter must itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. For instance, after the earthly family is found to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then be theoretically and practically nullified.

Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” trans. by Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat. In Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. by Lawrence H. Simon, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994, 99–101. *

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(5) Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants perception; but he does not comprehend sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity. (6) Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the essence of man is no abstraction inhering in each single individual. In its actuality it is the ensemble of social relationships. Feuerbach, who does not go into the criticism of this actual essence, is hence compelled 1. to abstract from the historical process and to establish religious feeling as something self-contained, and to presuppose an abstract—isolated—human individual; 2. to view the essence of man merely as “species,” as the inner, dumb generality which unites the many individuals naturally. (7) Feuerbach does not see, consequently, that “religious feeling” is itself a social product and that the abstract individual he analyzes belongs to a particular form of society. (8) All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and the comprehension of this practice. (9) The highest point attained by perceptual materialism, that is, materialism that does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the view of separate individuals and civil society. (10) The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society or socialized humanity. (11) The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it.

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CHAPTER 15 SØREN AABYE KIERKEGAARD (1813–1855)

INTRODUCTION A Danish thinker and devotional writer, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on May 5, 1813, in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he would spend most of his days. Søren’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a wool merchant. Being successful in wool trade and investment, he was able to retire at the age of forty. He was fifty-six at Søren’s birth. As a child, Kierkegaard attended a well-respected school for boys, and excelled in Latin and history. In 1830, he enrolled in Copenhagen University where he studied theology and philosophy. Dissatisfied with the traditions of both fields—and especially with the entirely abstract, impersonal approach of Hegelian philosophy—Kierkegaard began an individual search for his own (subjective) truth. As he wrote in his famous Journal on August 1, 1835: What I really need is to get clear about what I am to do ... What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. (KJN 19) His entire life’s work would become a quest of this sort. A guarded, reserved person, Kierkegaard never mentioned his mother, Ane Sørensdatter Lund, in writing, an omission that some scholars have suggested betrays some significance. As for his father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, both he and Søren shared not only abilities for creative and sound philosophical thought, but also a feeling of guilt, melancholy, and a sincere attachment to Christianity. Søren was the seventh and youngest child in the family; five his siblings died before reaching the age of thirty-four, the age of Jesus Christ at his crucifixion. Søren’s original anxiety was later replaced with astonishment when he and his older brother Peter survived beyond this age, after insisting that God would curse his family for the sins of his father. In 1834, when Kierkegaard was only twenty-two, his mother died at the age of sixtysix, followed by the death of his father only two years later. Among the major events in Kierkegaard’s life was his engagement with Regine Olsen, a teenage girl he met in 1837. It took him three years to formally propose to Olsen, yet a year later, in 1841—for unclear reasons and in the midst of what most considered a relationship of deep and genuine feelings—he ended the relationship. Regine Olsen later married the literature historian, and one of the central figures in the Early German Romanticism movement, Friedrich Schlegel. There is some speculation as to what led Kierkegaard to break off the relationship. A few factors had certainly contributed to the decision, among which was the death of his mentor Poul Martin Møller, a professor at Copenhagen University, and perhaps Kierkegaard’s lack of self-esteem. Yet it is clear that the breaking of the engagement allowed Kierkegaard to fully devote himself to his religious purpose. However, ordained a minister, he never took a position

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as pastor. For years he had been distancing himself from the official Danish church, preferring to indulge in his writing instead. Eventually, he began to grow concerned about the direction that the Danish church was taking. He even started criticizing a close friend of his father, the Bishop Primate Jacob Peter Mynster and his church politics. Kierkegaard pointed out that the Church of Denmark represented a lackluster, soft interpretation of Christianity; he denounced such features as congregational gatherings and the control of the State. After Mynster’s death, he hoped that the new Bishop would restructure the state church and bring a new order to the church politics. But to his disappointment, the new Bishop also avoided the need, in Kierkegaard’s mind, to renew the church. In 1854, Kierkegaard attacked the state church in his pamphlet The Moment, where he openly criticized the church politics. He thought that the so-called people’s church established in Denmark was “catastrophically usurping the true role of religion.” The problems that he saw he associated with incorrect emphasis with respect to Christianity and the influence of Hegel, whose spirit largely prevailed in official theological teachings of that time. While in his writings on religion, Kierkegaard focused on suffering, guilt, and individual introspection, the official church highlighted the joyful and communal aspects of Christianity. Another factor, of a more personal nature, was Kierkegaard’s desire to be recognized as a religious thinker, which never came to realization. Not willing to be considered a philosopher, he thought of himself as a religious thinker, freelance poet, and writer. In his mostly pseudonymous books, he criticized Hegel and the prevailing Hegelianism of his time and developed numerous concepts and themes that became central for the philosophy of existentialism. The techniques and discourses that Kierkegaard employed in his early writings included irony, satire, and parody. He, however, abandoned his penchant for satire after being mercilessly lampooned in the Danish popular satirical review The Corsair in 1846. After the Danish newspaper had critically reviewed Kierkegaard’s book Stages on Life’s Way (1845), he fired back sarcastically and provoked an attack on himself. The reaction was devastating. The Corsair responded with a months-long mockery of Kierkegaard’s personal characteristics, including his strange appearance. After this incident, Kierkegaard shifted to non-satirical discourse and his writings mainly focused on Christian topics. Kierkegaard’s philosophical commentaries include discussions against collective and stereotypical thinking and in favor of championing the individual, with whom salvation and relation to God solely reside. When working on series of articles on Christendom (1854–1855), Kierkegaard was suddenly stricken with a spinal disease. On October 2, 1855, he collapsed in the streets of Copenhagen and, at his own request, was taken to a hospital. He died a month later, on November 11, 1855, at the age of forty-two. His brother Peter Christian arranged his funeral at the Church of Our Lady, the cathedral of Copenhagen. While this arrangement did not please Bishop Martensen, the funeral attracted people of all classes and social groups, causing a disturbance while benefiting the church. * * * Kierkegaard is considered a forerunner to existentialism. Because of his interest toward the concrete individual and this individual’s existence he challenged his contemporaries, most notably Hegel. Kierkegaard adamantly criticized Hegel, claiming that the thinker’s abstraction of the individual had led to the total dehumanization of philosophy. According to Kierkegaard, 396

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all attempts of speculative thought to explain human existence ultimately failed. Thus, one of the major requirements of Kierkegaard’s existentialism was the abandonment of Hegel’s absolute idealism and systematic philosophy in general. Hegel had attempted to transform human existence into pure thought, and thereby abolish the difference between epistemology and ontology by asserting that “what is rational is real and what is real is rational,” which is another way of saying that existence and thought are identical. For Kierkegaard, existence is the one thing that cannot be thought. In his Platonic theory of meaning, thought is always a form of abstraction; thought (as language-bound) distances us from real existence, which is never abstract but always concrete. Furthermore, no philosophical system can ever hope to achieve “the unity of thinking and being,” for “objectifying” an individual necessarily denies the subjectivity of that individual. It is impossible for humans to step outside of their role as existing subjects. Therefore, existence must be presupposed or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, taken on “faith.” Only after such a presupposition is made could certain philosophical questions, such as the nature of truth, be properly approached. As opposed to the abstraction of Hegelian philosophy, Kierkegaard’s philosophy attempts to return humans to the concreteness of existence. Yet his interest lies in the concreteness of individual human existence, not of things in the world. The central notion of his philosophy is that individual, the self, whom he hopes to elevate to a new philosophical level. For him, the self is essentially subjectivity, and subjectivity is constituted by the individual’s commitment to his or her subjective truths. This commitment is not associated with any objectivity or certainty, but rather holds “fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness” (KW XII, vol. 1: 203). Such an approach to truth is well justified in terms of Kierkegaard’s central theme which is largely associated with the question of how to become a Christian in Christendom (Hannay 2001; Evans 2004; Walsh 2005; Garff 2005; Roberts 2006). In this context, the issues of genuine faith, authenticity, and passionate commitment to one’s belief become increasingly important and urgent. Kierkegaard’s highly original response to the challenge is that the ultimate test of a belief is not its “objective” truth or falsehood, but the conviction with which it is held. At all times, Kierkegaard remained focused upon his religious beliefs. He developed a philosophy often associated with Theological (Christian) Existentialism. The latter does not intend to warrant the religious beliefs of any particular faith. Instead, existential theologians are concerned with the question of how individuals choose religion. They argue that religious belief is a decision, which is made individually and without relying on any objectively justifiable evidence. Kierkegaard crosses the line from rationality to irrationality by defining faith as believing in something which is logically impossible, even absurd. A focus on the individual and a pursuit of spirituality are central topics within Kierkegaard’s philosophical thought which is presented in his numerous discourses and books. Many of these writings employ a highly critical approach to the previous, largely rationalistic, philosophical tradition, with main targets of the critique being the major nineteenth-century thinkers, especially Hegel as well as other German idealists. In his doctoral dissertation On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), that deals with irony, and in particular, Socratic irony, he argues that Socrates’ prolific use of irony intentionally shifted philosophical pursuits from objective “answers” to subjective consideration, forcing individual justification for claims to knowledge. In addition, he criticizes the prevailing Hegelian assumptions and offers an analysis of the employment of irony by 397

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Fichte, Schlegel, Hegel, and Schelling, whose Berlin Lectures of 1841 Kierkegaard attended shortly after he had finished his dissertation. To some extent, the dissertation served as a “probing work,” in which Kierkegaard tried to find, and justify, his own writing style and literary technique that he associated with irony and sarcasm. The work was received as noteworthy but lacking academic seriousness—the writing style, which included satire, humor, and parody, was too great a departure from scholarly works of the day. Nevertheless, this would continue, along with his affection for pseudonyms, to be a hallmark of Kierkegaard’s work. By indirectly communicating with the reader, with disorienting paradox and comical elements, and by undermining his own authority as an author, Kierkegaard sought to encourage the reader to take responsibility for their own interpretation of the text, thereby fostering a genuine engagement with philosophical thoughts, and infusing philosophy with the passion it ought to rightly possess. This technique also highlighted the distance between human understanding and divine truth. In 1843, funded by his family inheritance, Kierkegaard published two thematically connected works: Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. A “fascinating exploration” of Christian existentialism, Fear and Trembling is the biblical story of Abraham given a Kierkegaardian turn, which emphasizes the paradox of faith as well as the anxiety and despair to which radical human freedom inevitably leads. Willing to offer God his own son Isaac, Abraham has to disregard the existing moral norms, and thus live with a contradiction which cannot be resolved by the means of reason and logic. The only solution for this “problemata”—how Kierkegaard calls it—is a teleological suspension of the ethical, a journey beyond the realm of universal ethics that requires an enormous strength of passion and can be achieved only through the leap of faith. In the story of Abraham, the ethical must be suspended because faith is not subject to moral judgment; it cannot be explained in terms of traditional morality or in any rational terms at all. There is a critical distinction, however, between a suspension of the ethical and a total abandonment of ethical principles. Abraham certainly does not abandon traditional morality. In fact, it is precisely because Abraham holds traditional ethics in such high regard that his leap of faith is so profound. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard introduces the concept of the “knight of faith,” using Abraham as a model. As one who acts in complete resignation and total independence from the world, the knight of faith has to follow the paradoxical, irrational dictates of the heart which seek obedience to God with grace, thereby fully embracing life. The knight of faith teleologically suspends the ethical and denies universal law in its objective form. Unlike a tragic hero, for whom desire and wish are forsaken for duty, the knight of faith relinquishes both wish and duty. He takes the leap of faith, forsaking desires of the self for the love of God, and thereby attains eternal consciousness—an action that, under Hegelian philosophy, constitutes unethical behavior. Rather than systematic ethics, law and conformity, Kierkegaard valued subjective insight and divine revelation. He also cherished the capacity of each individual to have the mystery of God revealed to them. For this reason, Kierkegaard proudly stated in the Preface to the work: “The present author is by no means a philosopher”—that is, a systematic Hegelian, a proponent only of the rational. Rather, he “is poetice et eleganter [poetically and with discrimination] a supplementary clerk who neither writes the system nor gives  promises  of the system, who neither exhausts himself on the system nor binds himself to the system” (KW VI:7). He preferred to be viewed as a writer and religious poet, one who examines the human condition 398

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in relation to God, and his persistent examination of literary and biblical characters supports this interpretation of his authorship. Kierkegaard emphasizes the paradoxical nature of both Christianity and the “leap” itself— paradoxical because either decision to leap or not to leap is driven by “fear and trembling,” and because of the nature of desire in self-denial and passionate obedience. This is observable in the case of Abraham, whose sacrifice was a cause of both grief and joy, an act constituting a deeply hidden secret and an exciting opportunity to obey God. This idea is further expanded in Kierkegaard’s much larger work, Either/Or, where the individual either embraces temporal and earthly desire, or their love of God. To achieve the denial of the self for the sake of God, one must pass three existential stages: from aesthetic— the imaginative, ideal, and self-concerned—to ethical, and from ethical—universal—to religious. The transition to each of the stage is not a natural change, but rather requires a serious decision on one’s own. This is the decision to overcome the previous stage, which has to be motivated internally by one’s own inwardness. To transition to the ethical, one must believe in the truthvalue of one’s actions, actively choose one’s behavior in compliance with normative rules applicable to all, and such a choice must be inward, genuine, and serious. The step toward the religious builds upon the established conceptual sense of right and wrong by replacing normative values with the command of God, just as Abraham did. Such a substitution does not represent an abandonment of ethics altogether, since Kierkegaard believes in a twofold understanding of the term: as signifying cultural norms in the second stage, and signifying a true morality in the third. Such a source of ethical mandates transforms ethics from social contract to a subjective exploration, dependent on one’s relationship to God rather than objective “law.” Kierkegaard says: Wishing to be in the wrong is an expression of an infinite relationship, and wanting to be in the right, or finding it painful to be in the wrong, is an expression of a finite relationship! Hence, it is upbuilding to be in the wrong—because only the infinite builds up; the finite does not!” (KW III, vol. 2: 348) Such faith requires submission and acceptance of paradox, and a rejection of reason, which is a form of vanity. Kierkegaard mirrors this three-step development after Hegel’s own system, where the synthesis of two into a higher unity at once rejects and cements the former stages. More specifically, the aesthetic transformation of the world into ideals is integrated in the religious life as the transubstantiation of the temporal world into a reunion with the eternal—a reconciliation that is never fully reached, but consists of a life of faith, constant effort and longing, where an individual wrestles with his own existence. Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christian faith is a pious one, inherited from his father, and full of undertones of guilt and responsibility, as well as passion and persistence. One’s application to the task of faith is the purpose of life—the thing “I must do,” which a young Kierkegaard had written in his journal while at school—and the road to becoming one’s actual self. That self is pursued and maintained only by the repetition of faith, a constant renewing of one’s commitment to God. For Kierkegaard, this is nothing more than the actual self, “the relation which relates itself to itself.” Importantly, this faith is a calling of heart, and not a matter of reason—for if it were reason, it would not be called faith. 399

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Christianity, then, is an embracing of the absurd in the interest of attaining the eternal self. This idea of the absurd, the paradox of life and the self, would come to influence existential and postmodern thought over a century after Kierkegaard’s death. In addition to these two books, Kierkegaard published a number of “discourses,” small works that used both direct and indirect communication. Among his most discussed topics is his critical view of Hegelianism, which he took to be a brilliantly-conceived and comicallymisguided system, the product of a thinker who mistook a thought-experiment for the actual truth. His mirroring of Hegel in Either/Or and in other works represents a form of satire, as Kierkegaard’s work in general seeks to undermine the accumulation of knowledge in favor of internal introspection. Widely accepted as one of the first of existentialist philosophers, Kierkegaard’s work is significant due to the passionate belief it portrays in the importance of the subjective individual and for its philosophical analysis of Christian characteristics. He greatly influenced the work of Martin Heidegger, and was studied by such contemporaries as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Friedrich Nietzsche. His work incorporates philosophy, theology, social theory, literary criticism, satire, psychology, and poetry in unique and bold ways, and represents a confrontation with the norms of Western society and Christianity at large. His themes such as despair, inner voice, anguish, and faith are evident in contemporary philosophy, literature, and psychology.

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Chronology of Søren Kierkegaard’s Life and Works 1813

May 5: Born in Copenhagen (Denmark).

1819

September 14: His brother Søren Michael dies at the age of twelve.

1821

Begins school at Copenhagen’s Borgerdydskole.

1822

March 15: His sister Maren Kirstine dies at the age of twenty-four.

1823

February 15: Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard’s future fiancée, is born.

1828

April 20: Kierkegaard is confirmed in the Church of Our Lady by Pastor (later Bishop) Jacob Peter Mynster.

1830

Graduates from the Borgerdydskole (with distinction in Greek, history, French, and Danish composition).



October 30: Enters the University of Copenhagen



November 1: Enlists in the king’s lifeguard, but four days later is discharged as unfit for service.

1833

September 21: His brother Niels Andreas dies at the age of twenty-four.

1834

July 31: His mother, Ane Sørensdatter Lund, dies.



December 4: The journalistic debut, under the imprint “A,” with an article in Flyveposten [The Flying Post] entitled “Also a Defense of Woman’s Superior Capacity.”



December 29: His sister Petrea Severine dies after childbirth.

1836

Publishes (in Flyveposten, under the imprint “B,” but under his own name) three articles discussing freedom of the press.



His only surviving brother Peter Christian gets married.

1837

May: Meets Regine Olsen (then fifteen years old) in Frederiksberg.



September: Begins teaching Latin at the Borgerdysdskole.

1838

March 13: His mentor and mainstay, Poul Martin Møller, dies at the age of forty-four.



August 9: His father Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard dies.



September: Publishes his first book, From the Papers of One Still Living, attacking Hans Christian Andersen.

1840

Passes his examination for the theological degree.



September 10: Successfully proposes to Regine Olsen, who is now eighteen years old.



November: Enters the pastoral seminary for practical training for ministry.

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1841

July: Finishes his dissertation titled “On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates,” which he successfully defends on September 29.



August 11: Breaks his engagement to Regine Olsen.



October: Leaves for Berlin, where he attends Schelling’s lectures, among others.

1842

March: Returns to Copenhagen.

1843

February 15: Publishes Either/Or: A Fragment of Life.



May 8: Publishes Two Edifying Discourses.



October-December: Publishes four works: Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric, Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology, Three Edifying Discourses, and Four Edifying Discourses.

1844

February 24: Holds, in the Church of the Trinity, the trial sermon required for entry into the Danish church.



June: Publishes three works—Philosophical Fragments or a Fragment of Philosophy, The Concept of Anxiety, and Prefaces.

1845 Publishes Three Discourses On Imagined Occasions and Stages on Life’s Way. 1846

Lampooned in The Corsair.



February: Publishes Concluding Unscientific Postscript.



March: Publishes A Literary Review.

1847 Publishes Edifying Discourses in a Different Tenor and Works of Love.

November 3: Regine Olsen marries her former teacher, a poet, literary critic, and philosopher, Friedrich Schlegel.

1848

April 26: Publishes Christian Discourses.



November: Finishes The Point of View of My Work as an Author and starts working on The Sickness Unto Death.

1849

Publishes the second edition of Either/Or.



July 30: Publishes The Sickness Unto Death under a pseudonym: Anti-Climacus.



November: Publishes Three Discourses at Communion on Fridays.

1850

September: Publishes Practice in Christianity under the Anti-Climacus pseudonym.

1851

May 18: Gives a sermon at the Citadel Church in Copenhagen.

1852–3

Judge for Yourself is completed but not published until twenty-one years after Kierkegaard’s death.

1854

“Discovers” Arthur Schopenhauer, whose works Kierkegaard reads with admiration and mixed appreciation.



February: After the death of Bishop Mynster on January 30 Kierkegaard writes an article attacking the established church, but does not publish it until December.

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1855

January-May: Attacks the church in various articles published in Faedrelandet.



May: Begins his own broadsheet, The Instant, which publishes only nine issues.



October 2: Collapses outside his home.



Dies on November 11, probably of a staphylococcus infection of the lungs.

1859

Kierkegaard’s autobiography, The Point of View of my Authorship, is published by his brother, Peter Christian.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Kierkegaard’s Writings A.1.  Danish Academic Edition

Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. 1997ff. Edited by N. J. Cappelørn, et al. Copenhagen: Gad Forlag. A.2.  In English

Kierkegaard’s Writings. 1978–2000. Edited and translated by H. V. Hong, et al., vols. I–XXVI. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Cited as KW following by the volume and page numbers.] Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. 2007. Vol. 1: Journals AA-DD, N. J. Cappeløm, A. Hannay, D. Kangas, B. H. Kirmmse, et al. (eds.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Cited as KJN following by the volume and page numbers.] B. Selected Commentaries

Carlisle, C. 2005. Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions. Albany: State University of New York Press. Dooley, M. 2001. The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility. New York: Fordham University Press. Emmanuel, S., W. McDonald, and J. Stewart (eds.). 2013–2015. Kierkegaard’s Concepts Tomes I to VI. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. [Reprinted in 2016 by Routledge] Evans, C. S. 2004. Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Requirements. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garff, J. 2005. Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Grøn, A. 2008. The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Jeanette B. L. Knox. Macon: Mercer University Press. Hampson, D. 2013. Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hannay, A. 2001. Kierkegaard: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hannay, A., and G. Marino (eds.). 1998. The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Houe, P., G. D. Marino, and S. H. Rossel (eds.). 2000. Anthropology and Authority: Essays on Søren Kierkegaard. Amsterdam-Atlanta: Editions Rodopi B.V. Jegstrup, E. (ed.). 2004. The New Kierkegaard. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Kosch, M. 2006. Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard. New York: Oxford University Press. Lippitt, J. 2013. Kierkegaard and the Problem of Self Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lippitt, J., and G. Pattison (eds.). 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Lippitt, J. 2015. The Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. London: Routledge. Podmore, S. D. 2011. Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Rée, J., and J. Chamberlain (eds.). 1998. Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Roberts, D. 2006. Kierkegaard’s Analysis of Radical Evil. New York: Continuum. Stokes, P. 2015. The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, M. C. 1980. Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel & Kierkegaard. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Theunissen, M. 2005. Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, translated by Barbara Harshav and Helmut Illbruck. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walsh, S. 2005. Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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FROM CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT TO PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS (1846) *

Section I, Chapter 2 […] (a) A logical system can be given; (b) but a system of existence [Tilvœrelsens System] cannot be given. a. α. If, however, a logical system is to be constructed, special care must be taken not to incorporate anything that is subject to the dialectic of existence, accordingly, anything that is [er] solely by existing [vœre til] or by having existed [have vœret til], not something that is [er] simply by being [vœre]. It follows quite simply that Hegel’s matchless and matchlessly admired invention—the importation of movement into logic (not to mention that in every other passage one misses even his own attempt to make one believe that it is there)—simply confuses logic.1 It is indeed curious to make movement the basis in a sphere in which movement is inconceivable or to have movement explain logic, whereas logic cannot explain movement. […] In a logical system, nothing may be incorporated that has a relation to existence, that is not indifferent to existence. The infinite advantage that the logical, by being the objective, possesses over all other thinking is in turn, subjectively viewed, restricted by its being a hypothesis, simply because it is indifferent to existence understood as actuality. […] β. The dialectic of the beginning must be clarified. The almost amusing thing about it, that the beginning is and then in turn is not, because it is the beginning—this true dialectical remark has long enough been like a game that has been played in Hegelian society. The system, so it is said, begins with the immediate; some, failing to be dialectical, are even oratorical enough to speak of the most immediate of all, although the comparative reflection contained here might indeed become dangerous for the beginning.2 The system begins with the immediate and therefore without presuppositions and therefore absolutely, that is, the beginning of the system is the absolute beginning. This is entirely correct and has indeed also been adequately admired. But why, then, before the system is begun, has that other equally important, definitely equally important, question not been clarified and its clear implications honored: How does the system begin with the immediate, that is, does it begin with it immediately?

From Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1992, 109–24, 169–96. *

From Concluding Unscientific Postscript

The answer to this must certainly be an unconditional no. If the system is assumed to be after existence (whereby a confusion with a system of existence is created), the system does indeed come afterward and consequently does not begin immediately with the immediate with which existence began, even though in another sense existence did not begin with it, because the immediate never is but is annulled when it is. The beginning of the system that begins with the immediate is then itself achieved through reflection. Here is the difficulty, for if one does not let go of this one thought, deceptively or thoughtlessly or in breathless haste to have the system finished, this thought in all its simplicity is capable of deciding that there can be no system of existence and that a logical system must not boast of an absolute beginning, because such a beginning is just like pure being, a pure chimera. […] When a beginning with the immediate is achieved by reflection, the immediate must mean something different from what it usually does. Hegelian logicians have correctly discerned this, and therefore they define the immediate, with which logic begins, as follows: the most abstract remainder after an exhaustive abstraction. There is no objection to this definition, but it is certainly objectionable that they do not respect what they themselves are saying, inasmuch as this definition indirectly states that there is no absolute beginning. “How is that?” I hear someone say. “When one has abstracted from everything, is there not then, etc.?” Indeed, when one has abstracted from everything. Let us be human beings. Like the act of reflection, this act of abstraction is infinite; so how do I bring it to a halt—and it is indeed first when . . . . . that . . . . .. [l]et us even venture an imaginary construction in thought. Let that act of infinite abstraction be in actu [in actuality]; the beginning is not an act of abstraction but comes afterward. But then with what do I begin, now that there has been an abstraction from everything? Alas, at this point a Hegelian, deeply moved, perhaps would collapse on my chest and blissfully stammer: With nothing. And this is precisely what the system declares—that it begins with nothing. […] b. A system of existence [Tilvœrelsens System] cannot be given. Is there, then, not such a system? That is not at all the case. Neither is this implied in what has been said. Existence itself is a system—for God, but it cannot be a system for any existing [existerende] spirit. System and conclusiveness correspond to each other, but existence is the very opposite. Abstractly viewed, system and existence cannot be thought conjointly, because in order to think existence, systematic thought must think it as annulled and consequently not as existing. Existence is the spacing that holds apart; the systematic is the conclusiveness that combines. […] The systematic idea is subject-object, is the unity of thinking and being; existence, on the other hand, is precisely the separation. From this it by no means follows that existence is thoughtless, but existence has spaced and does space subject from object, thought from being. Objectively understood, thinking is pure thinking, which just as abstractly-objectively corresponds to its object, which in turn is therefore itself, and truth is the correspondence of thinking with itself. This objective thinking has no relation to the existing subjectivity, and while the difficult question always remains—namely, how the existing subject gains 407

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entrance into this objectivity in which subjectivity is pure abstract subjectivity (which again is an objective qualification and does not signify any existing human being)—it is certain that the existing subjectivity evaporates more and more. And finally, if it is possible that a human being can become such a thing and that all this is not something of which he at best can become cognizant through imagination, this existing subjectivity becomes a pure abstract coknowledge [Medviden] in and knowledge of this pure relation between thinking and being, this pure identity, indeed this tautology, because here being does not mean that the thinking person is, but basically only that he is a thinker. The existing subject, however, is existing, and so indeed is every human being. Yet let us not do the wrong of calling the objective tendency impious, pantheistic self-worship but rather view it as a venture in the comic, because the idea that from now on to the end of the world nothing should be said except what would suggest a further improvement in a nearly finished system is simply a systematic consequence for systematizers. […]

Chapter II Subjective Truth, Inwardness; Truth Is Subjectivity Whether truth is defined more empirically as the agreement of thinking with being or more idealistically as the agreement of being with thinking, the point in each case is to pay scrupulous attention to what is understood by being and also to pay attention to whether the knowing human spirit might not be lured out into the indefinite and fantastically become something such as no existing human being has ever been or can be, a phantom with which the individual busies himself on occasion, yet without ever making it explicit to himself by means of dialectical middle terms how he gets out into this fantastical realm, what meaning it has for him to be there, whether the entire endeavor out there might not dissolve into a tautology within a rash, fantastical venture. If, in the two definitions given, being [Vœren] is understood as empirical being, then truth itself is transformed into a desideratum [something wanted] and everything is placed in the process of becoming [Vorden], because the empirical object is not finished, and the existing knowing spirit is itself in the process of becoming. Thus truth is an approximating whose beginning cannot be established absolutely, because there is no conclusion that has retroactive power. On the other hand, every beginning, when it is made (if it is not arbitrariness by not being conscious of this), does not occur by virtue of immanental thinking but is made by virtue of a resolution, essentially by virtue of faith. That the knowing spirit is an existing spirit, and that every human being is such a spirit existing for himself, I cannot repeat often enough, because the fantastical disregard of this has been the cause of much confusion. […] For the existing spirit qua existing spirit, the question about truth persists, because the abstract answer is only for that abstractum which an existing spirit becomes by abstracting from himself qua existing, which he can do only momentarily, although at such moments he still pays his debt to existence by existing nevertheless. […] If a German philosopher follows his inclination to put on an act [skabe sig] and first transforms himself [skabe sig om] into a 408

From Concluding Unscientific Postscript

superrational something, just as alchemists and sorcerers bedizen themselves fantastically, in order to answer the question about truth in an extremely satisfying way, this is of no more concern to me than his satisfying answer, which no doubt is extremely satisfying—if one is fantastically dressed up. […] Like the customs clerk who, in the belief that his business was merely to write, wrote what he himself could not read, so there are speculative thinkers who merely write, and write that which, if it is to be read with the aid of action, if I may put it that way, proves to be nonsense, unless it is perhaps intended only for fantastical beings. When for the existing spirit qua existing there is a question about truth, that abstract reduplication [Reduplikation] of truth recurs; but existence itself, existence itself in the questioner, who does indeed exist, holds the two factors apart, one from the other, and reflection shows two relations. To objective reflection, truth becomes something objective, an object, and the point is to disregard the subject. To subjective reflection, truth becomes appropriation, inwardness, subjectivity, and the point is to immerse oneself, existing, in subjectivity. […] Now, then, which of the ways is the way of truth for the existing spirit? Only the fantastical I-I is simultaneously finished with both ways or advances methodically along both ways simultaneously, which for an existing human being is such an inhuman way of walking that I dare not recommend it. Since the questioner specifically emphasizes that he is an existing person, the way to be commended is naturally the one that especially accentuates what it means to exist. The way of objective reflection turns the subjective individual into something accidental and thereby turns existence into an indifferent, vanishing something. The way to the objective truth goes away from the subject, and while the subject and subjectivity become indifferent [ligegyldig], the truth also becomes indifferent, and that is precisely its objective validity [Gyldighed], because the interest, just like the decision, is subjectivity. The way of objective reflection now leads to abstract thinking, to mathematics, to historical knowledge of various kinds, and always leads away from the subjective individual, whose existence or nonexistence becomes, from an objective point of view, altogether properly, infinitely indifferent, altogether properly, because, as Hamlet says, existence and nonexistence have only subjective significance. At its maximum, this way will lead to a contradiction, and to the extent that the subject does not become totally indifferent to himself, this is merely an indication that his objective striving is not objective enough. […] And yet, viewed subjectively, the objectivity that has come about is at its maximum either a hypothesis or an approximation, because all eternal decision is rooted specifically in subjectivity. […] Subjective reflection turns inward toward subjectivity and in this inward deepening will be of the truth, and in such a way that, just as in the preceding, when objectivity was advanced, subjectivity vanished, here subjectivity as such becomes the final factor and objectivity the vanishing. Here it is not forgotten, even for a single moment, that the subject is existing, and that existing is a becoming, and that truth as the identity of thought and being is therefore a chimera of abstraction and truly only a longing of creation, not because truth is not an identity, but because the knower is an existing person, and thus truth cannot be an identity for him as long as he exists. […]

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All essential knowing pertains to existence, or only the knowing whose relation to existence is essential is essential knowing. Essentially viewed, the knowing that does not inwardly in the reflection of inwardness pertain to existence is accidental knowing, and its degree and scope, essentially viewed, are a matter of indifference. That essential knowing is essentially related to existence does not, however, signify the above-mentioned abstract identity between thinking and being, nor does it signify that the knowledge is objectively related to something existent [Tilvœrende] as its object, but it means that the knowledge is related to the knower, who is essentially an existing person [Existerende], and that all essential knowing is therefore essentially related to existence and to existing. Therefore, only ethical and ethical-religious knowing is essential knowing. But all ethical and all ethical-religious knowing is essentially a relating to the existing of the knower. […] In order to clarify the divergence of objective and subjective reflection, I shall now describe subjective reflection in its search back and inward into inwardness. At its highest, inwardness in an existing subject is passion; truth as a paradox corresponds to passion, and that truth becomes a paradox is grounded precisely in its relation to an existing subject. In this way the one corresponds to the other. In forgetting that one is an existing subject, one loses passion, and in return, truth does not become a paradox; but the knowing subject shifts from being human to being a fantastical something, and truth becomes a fantastical object for its knowing. When the question about truth is asked objectively, truth is reflected upon objectively as an object to which the knower relates himself. What is reflected upon is not the relation but that what he relates himself to is the truth, the true. If only that to which he relates himself is the truth, the true, then the subject is in the truth. When the question about truth is asked subjectively, the individual’s relation is reflected upon subjectively. If only the how of this relation is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth.3 Let us take the knowledge of God as an example. Objectively, what is reflected upon is that this is the true God; subjectively, that the individual relates himself to a something in such a way that his relation is in truth a God-relation. Now, on which side is the truth? Alas, must we not at this point resort to mediation and say: It is on neither side; it is in the mediation? Superbly stated, if only someone could say how an existing person goes about being in mediation, because to be in mediation is to be finished; to exist is to become. An existing person cannot be in two places at the same time, cannot be subject-object. When he is closest to being in two places at the same time, he is in passion; but passion is only momentary, and passion is the highest pitch of subjectivity. The existing person who chooses the objective way now enters upon all approximating deliberation intended to bring forth God objectively, which is not achieved in all eternity, because God is a subject and hence only for subjectivity in inwardness. The existing person who chooses the subjective way instantly comprehends the whole dialectical difficulty because he must use some time, perhaps a long time, to find God objectively. He comprehends this dialectical difficulty in all its pain, because he must resort to God at that very moment, because every moment in which he does not have God is wasted.4 At that very moment he has God, not by virtue of any objective deliberation but by virtue of the infinite passion of inwardness. The objective person is not bothered by dialectical difficulties such as what it means to put a whole research period into finding God, since it is indeed possible that the researcher would die tomorrow, and if he goes on living, he cannot very well regard God as something to be taken 410

From Concluding Unscientific Postscript

along at his convenience, since God is something one takes along à tout prix [at any price], which, in passion’s understanding, is the true relationship of inwardness with God. […] If someone objectively inquires into immortality, and someone else stakes the passion of the infinite on the uncertainty—where, then, is there more truth, and who has more certainty? The one has once and for all entered upon an approximation that never ends, because the certainty of immortality is rooted in subjectivity; the other is immortal and therefore struggles by contending with the uncertainty. Let us consider Socrates. These days everyone is dabbling in a few proofs or demonstrations— one has many, another fewer. But Socrates! He poses the question objectively, problematically: if there is an immortality. So, compared with one of the modern thinkers with the three demonstrations, was he a doubter? Not at all. He stakes his whole life on this “if ”; he dares to die, and with the passion of the infinite he has so ordered his whole life that it might be acceptable—if there is an immortality. Is there any better demonstration for the immortality of the soul? But those who have the three demonstrations do not order their lives accordingly. If there is an immortality, it must be nauseated by their way of living—is there any better counterdemonstration to the three demonstrations? The “fragment” of uncertainty helped Socrates, because he himself helped with the passion of infinity. […] The Socratic ignorance was thus the expression, firmly maintained with all the passion of inwardness, of the relation of the eternal truth to an existing person, and therefore it must remain for him a paradox as long as he exists. Yet it is possible that in the Socratic ignorance there was more truth in Socrates than in the objective truth of the entire system that flirts with the demands of the times and adapts itself to assistant professors. Objectively the emphasis is on what is said; subjectively the emphasis is on how it is said.[…] But this is not to be understood as manner, modulation of voice, oral delivery, etc., but it is to be understood as the relation of the existing person, in his very existence, to what is said. Objectively, the question is only about categories of thought; subjectively, about inwardness. At its maximum, this “how” is the passion of the infinite, and the passion of the infinite is the very truth. But the passion of the infinite is precisely subjectivity, and thus subjectivity is truth. […] When subjectivity is truth, the definition of truth must also contain in itself an expression of the antithesis to objectivity, a memento of that fork in the road, and this expression will at the same time indicate the resilience of the inwardness. Here is such a definition of truth: An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person. At the point where the road swings off (and where that is cannot be stated objectively, since it is precisely subjectivity), objective knowledge is suspended. Objectively he then has only uncertainty, but this is precisely what intensifies the infinite passion of inwardness, and truth is precisely the daring venture of choosing the objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite. I observe nature in order to find God, and I do indeed see omnipotence and wisdom, but I also see much that troubles and disturbs. The summa summarum [sum total] of this is an objective uncertainty, but the inwardness is so very great, precisely because it grasps this objective uncertainty with all the

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passion of the infinite. In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth. But the definition of truth stated above is a paraphrasing of faith. Without risk, no faith. Faith is the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am able to apprehend God objectively, I do not have faith; but because I cannot do this, I must have faith. If I want to keep myself in faith, I must continually see to it that I hold fast the objective uncertainty, see to it that in the objective uncertainty I am “out on 70,000 fathoms of water” and still have faith. The thesis that subjectivity, inwardness, is truth contains the Socratic wisdom, the undying merit of which is to have paid attention to the essential meaning of existing, of the knower’s being an existing person. That is why, in his ignorance, Socrates was in the truth in the highest sense within paganism. To comprehend this, that the misfortune of speculative thought is simply that it forgets again and again that the knower is an existing person, can already be rather difficult in our objective age. […] When subjectivity, inwardness, is truth, then truth, objectively defined, is a paradox; and that truth is objectively a paradox shows precisely that subjectivity is truth, since the objectivity does indeed thrust away, and the objectivity’s repulsion, or the expression for the objectivity’s repulsion, is the resilience and dynamometer of inwardness. The paradox is the objective uncertainty that is the expression for the passion of inwardness that is truth. […] Subjectivity is truth. The paradox came into existence through the relating of the eternal, essential truth to the existing person. Let us now go further; let us assume that the eternal, essential truth is itself the paradox. How does the paradox emerge? By placing the eternal, essential truth together with existing. Consequently, if we place it together in the truth itself, the truth becomes a paradox. The eternal truth has come into existence in time. That is the paradox. If the subject just mentioned was prevented by sin from taking himself back into eternity, now he is not to concern himself with this, because now the eternal, essential truth is not behind him but has come in front of him by existing itself or by having existed, so that if the individual, existing, does not lay hold of the truth in existence, he will never have it. Existence can never be accentuated more sharply than it has been here. The fraud of speculative thought in wanting to recollect itself out of existence has been made impossible. This is the only point to be comprehended here, and every speculation that insists on being speculation shows eo ipso [precisely thereby] that it has not comprehended this. The individual can thrust all this away and resort to speculation, but to accept it and then want to cancel it through speculation is impossible, because it is specifically designed to prevent speculation. When the eternal truth relates itself to an existing person, it becomes the paradox. Through the objective uncertainty and ignorance, the paradox thrusts away in the inwardness of the existing person. But since the paradox is not in itself the paradox, it does not thrust away intensely enough, for without risk, no faith; the more risk, the more faith; the more objective reliability, the less inwardness (since inwardness is subjectivity); the less objective reliability, the deeper is the possible inwardness. When the paradox itself is the paradox, it thrusts away by virtue of the absurd, and the corresponding passion of inwardness is faith.

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Notes 1. The light-mindedness with which systematicians admit that Hegel has perhaps not been successful everywhere in importing movement into logic, much like the grocer who thinks that a few raisins do not matter when the purchase is large—this farcical docility is, of course, contempt for Hegel that not even his most vehement attacker has allowed himself. There have certainly been logical attempts prior to Hegel, but his method is everything. For him and for everyone who has intelligence enough to comprehend what it means to will something great, the absence of it at this or that point cannot be a trivial matter, as when a grocer and a customer bicker about whether there is a little underweight or overweight. Hegel himself has staked his whole reputation on the point of the method. But a method possesses the peculiar quality that, viewed abstractly, it is nothing at all; it is a method precisely in the process of being carried out; in being carried out it is a method, and where it is not carried out, it is not a method, and if there is no other method, there is no method at all. To turn Hegel into a rattlebrain must be reserved for his admirers; an attacker will always know how to honor him for having willed something great and having failed to achieve it. 2. To show how would become too prolix here. Frequently it is not worth the trouble either, because, after a person has laboriously advanced an objection sharply, from a philosopher’s rejoinder he discovers that his misunderstanding was not that he could not understand the idolized philosophy but rather that he had allowed himself to be persuaded to believe that the whole thing was supposed to be something—and not flabby thinking concealed by the most overbearing expressions. 3. The reader will note that what is being discussed here is essential truth, or the truth that is related essentially to existence, and that it is specifically in order to clarify it as inwardness or as subjectivity that the contrast is pointed out. 4. In this way God is indeed a postulate, but not in the loose sense in which it is ordinarily taken. Instead, it becomes clear that this is the only way an existing person enters into a relationship with God: when the dialectical contradiction brings passion to despair and assists him in grasping God with “the category of despair” (faith), so that the postulate, far from being the arbitrary, is in fact necessary defense [Nødvœrge], self-defense; in this way God is not a postulate, but the existing person’s postulating of God is—a necessity [Nødvendighed].

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FROM THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH. A CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPOSITION FOR UPBUILDING AND AWAKENING (1849) *

Despair Is the Sickness unto Death A. Despair is a sickness of the spirit, of the self, and accordingly can take three forms: in despair not to be conscious of having a self (not despair in the strict sense); in despair not to will to be oneself; in despair to will to be oneself A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. 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. In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self. Such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must either have established itself or have been established by another. If the relation that relates itself to itself has been established by another, then the relation is indeed the third, but this relation, the third, is yet again a relation and relates itself to that which established the entire relation. 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. This is why there can be two forms of despair in the strict sense. If a human self had itself established itself, then there could be only one form: not to will to be oneself, to will to do away with oneself, but there could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself. This second formulation is specifically the expression for the complete dependence of the relation (of the self), the expression for the inability of the self to arrive at or to be in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only, in relating itself to itself, by relating itself to that which has established the entire relation. Yes, this second form of despair (in despair to will to be oneself) is so far from designating merely a distinctive kind of despair that, on the contrary, all despair ultimately can be traced back to and be resolved in it. If the

From Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death. A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. In The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1983, 13–14. *

From The Sickness Unto Death

despairing person is aware of his despair, as he thinks he is, and does not speak meaninglessly of it as of something that is happening to him (somewhat as one suffering from dizziness speaks in nervous delusion of a weight on his head or of something that has fallen down on him, etc., a weight and a pressure that nevertheless are not something external but a reverse reflection of the internal) and now with all his power seeks to break the despair by himself and by himself alone—he is still in despair and with all his presumed effort only works himself all the deeper into deeper despair. The misrelation of despair is not a simple misrelation but a misrelation in a relation that relates itself to itself and has been established by another, so that the misrelation in that relation which is for itself [for sig] also reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the power that established it. The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.

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CHAPTER 16 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900)

INTRODUCTION Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, a small village near Leipzig, where his father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, served as the church pastor and town minister. Nietzsche’s uncle and grandfathers on both sides were also Lutheran ministers and Christian scholars. Nietzsche had two siblings: his brother Ludwig who died as a young toddler when Friedrich was only five years old, and his sister, Elizabeth, who played a dramatic role in the last twelve years of the philosopher’s life. After the death of his father in 1849, the family moved to the town of Naumburg on the Saale River, where Nietzsche grew up surrounded exclusively by women: his mother, grandmother, two aunts, and sister. From a young age Fritz, as he was called by his family and friends, had a vested interest in learning and thinking about his own experiences. His studious demeanor and religious piety earned him the nickname “the little pastor.” At the age of fourteen, Nietzsche enrolled in Schulpforta, a first-rate boarding school close to Naumburg. Schulpforta had graduated many prominent German intellectuals, including Fichte and the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803). At Schulpforta Nietzsche studied classical and European languages, and developed proficiency in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French. During his school years he also became acquainted with the music of Richard Wagner and works of German Romanticism. He also read the recently published and highly controversial Life of Jesus, Critically Examined by David F. Strauss. With the intention of following in his father footsteps and becoming a Lutheran minister, Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn as a theology and philology student, in 1864. Within a few months he decided against studying theology and began focusing exclusively on classical philology, which then mainly centered on the study and interpretation of classical and biblical texts. In Bonn, Nietzsche came under the powerful influence of Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, a philologist and a brilliant scholar, who recognized Nietzsche’s talents and encouraged his interests in classical philology and literature. In 1865, Nietzsche followed Ritschl to the University of Leipzig. Still a student at Leipzig, Nietzsche published well-received essays on Aristotle as well as the sixth-century BC poets Theognis of Megara and Simonides of Ceos, thus establishing himself as an astute thinker and productive scholar. Despite his academic success, Nietzsche was a lonely individual, often suffering from despondency. When at the age of twenty-one Nietzsche accidentally discovered Arthur Shopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, he responded to the pessimistic philosophical vision of the author very enthusiastically. He became fascinated with the character and ideas of Schopenhauer, whose chaotic and violent vision of the world would significantly influence Nietzsche’s own later work. Two years later, Nietzsche began his mandatory military enrollment in an artillery regiment, where he excelled. Eventually he suffered an accidental chest injury and as a result returned to Leipzig after being released from his military duties. At the end

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of 1868 Nietzsche was introduced to the brilliant German composer and famous polemist, Richard Wagner (1813–1883), whose music he enjoyed. The two men met at the home of Hermann Brockhaus (1806–1877), a prominent Orientalist and a leading authority on Sanskrit and Persian languages, who was married to Wagner’s sister. Personally and spiritually close to Wagner, Brockhaus himself had published (in 1850) an edition of the Vendidad Sade, a Zoroastrian text. Soon after this meeting Wagner became Nietzsche’s long-time acquaintance and intimate friend. The two often spoke as equals on philosophy and music. Sometimes turbulent, the relationship with Wagner would define and obsess Nietzsche for the remainder of his life. Furthermore, a shift from friendliness to disgust in their relationship would largely coincide with the development of the Zarathustrian character in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In 1869, at the age of twenty-four, Nietzsche accepted an offer from the University of Basel, where he was installed as a professor in classical philology, becoming the youngest tenured professor on the University’s record. Nietzsche taught at Basel for ten years, excluding a brief time in the military. During this time he published many books and essays demonstrating an enormous productivity and an abundant creativity of thought. While at Basel, he developed warm collegial relations with the historians Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) and Franz Overbeck (1837–1905) whose lectures he attended. Even after Nietzsche left Basel, he maintained a close relationship with Overbeck, and the two remained lifelong friends and associates. After renouncing his Prussian citizenship, in August–October 1870, Nietzsche voluntarily served in the Franco-Prussian War as a soldier in the Battle of Metz and as a hospital attendant. While serving in the military Nietzsche became physically inflicted, catching both diphtheria and dysentery, which greatly contributed to the variety of health problems from which he suffered for the rest of his life. He resigned from the University of Basel in 1879 due to declining health, but instead of waiting to heal, he continued writing and discussing his ideas publicly and privately. After he left Basel, he became a wanderer, traveling from city to city, staying several months at a time, stateless, largely friendless, yet rigorously elaborating his philosophical views and writing his skillful and now well-known works. In 1882, while in Rome, thirty-seven-year-old Nietzsche met Lou Salomé, a young Russian-born woman who was studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. He quickly fell in love with her, but Salomé resisted Nietzsche’s attempts to foster a relationship, and moved to Berlin that same year. Greatly impacted by this rejection, and suffering from the inability to secure a lecturing position at Prussian Universities and worsening health problems, Nietzsche moved to Genoa, where he wrote the first part of his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for All and None. In the period from 1878 to 1888, Nietzsche traveled to Nice, France Sils-Maria, Switzerland, Messina, Florence, Venice, and various other places in Europe. Those around him reported that during this time, he often appeared in a healthier, better state of mind. Yet, on January 3, 1889, Nietzsche suddenly collapsed in the streets of Turin. While what happened remains unclear, the standard account relates that upon seeing an old horse being brutally beaten in the street, Nietzsche threw himself against the animal and began crying. When the local police arrived, Nietzsche was sent to the hospital, where it was determined that he had suffered a mental breakdown, from which he never recovered. After a brief period at a mental institution in Jena, Nietzsche’s mother took him to his childhood home in Naumburg. However, after his mother died in 1897, he spent his final years in his sister Elisabeth’s care. Despite his mental illness, Nietzsche continued writing, working for the last 418

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decade in his life on his famous conception of the will to power. Being involved in the antiSemitic movement in Germany, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche sought to find in her brother’s work a suitable justification for her own political agenda. Furthermore, highly pragmatic and opportunistic, she wanted to capitalize on her brother’s growing reputation. She oversaw the founding of the Nietzsche Archive and eventually received the trusteeship of Nietzsche’s writings. In this role, she was able to manipulate and edit her brother’s texts to serve her own anti-Semitic purposes. The result of this was a severely altered version of Nietzsche’s works and philosophical ideas that allegedly aligned with anti-Semitic sentiments. Mentally incapacitated for the last twelve years of his life, Nietzsche died of a stroke on August 25, 1900, at the age of fifty-five. Ironically, the man whose life was a powerful example of an anti-Christian attitude received a traditional Protestant burial. He was buried in his hometown of Röcken, next to his parents in the graveyard of the church where his father had served as a pastor. It was contrary to his own well-documented wishes, according to which he had wanted to be buried on the Chasté peninsula in Sils-Maria, in Switzerland, where he had spent many pleasant summers and where he was able to find happiness as a thinker, philosopher, and man. * * * In his time, Nietzsche was the most radical philosopher the Western tradition had ever produced. He argued for a rejection of traditional values, including the Christian religion. His scandalous declaration of “the death of God” drew attention to Western culture’s general abandonment of any authentic commitment to the Christian faith. Nietzsche was the third post-Kantian – along with Marx and Kierkegaard – who responded to the crisis of his time not by demanding a new “critique of reason” but by calling for a new kind of human existence. Nietzsche’s epistemological views constitute a radical return to the sophistic period, and are largely derived from his early training in classical philology. Philological scholars dreamt, while dealing with classical texts, such as the Bible, Vedas, and Iliad, to find the original texts of each of the sources. However, all of them appear to be compilations and fragments of conflicting accounts derived from a dazzling number of sources representing a variety of positions and interpretations. A recognition of this during the attempt at translation resulted in the epistemological position of perspectivism according to which there is no perspective-free and interpretation-free reality. Originally introduced into philosophy by Leibniz, who recognized the notion of perspective in the character of human perception, Nietzschean perspectivism emphasizes the interpretive (or perspectival) nature of human existence and uniqueness of one’s approach to reality. As a result, Nietzsche shifts traditional questions of epistemology into the realms of axiology, morality, and to a specific (largely existential) philosophy of life, thus challenging the Western philosophical tradition from Plato through Hegel and beyond. Just as in philology there is no complete original text, so in reality and knowledge, Nietzsche believes, there is neither “pure being” nor “original datum.” There are no gods, no Platonic Forms, no substances, no “things-in-themselves,” or even any “things.” Not only does perspectivism reject the possibility of objective metaphysics, but it considers the traditional notion of “truth” unsound. There are many possible perspectives from which reality can be approached and judgment of truth be made. While not all of these perspectives are equally valid, our approach to and understanding of the world are informed by the particular perspectives we choose. 419

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Nietzsche insists that there is no objective order or structure in the world except what we give it. There exists only chaos, upon which we must impose our will. Similarly, there are no objective standards or universal rules for human life, no absolute values, and no certainties on which to rely. If truth can be achieved at all, it can come only from an individual who purposefully disregards everything that is traditionally taken to be “important.” Such an Overman (Übermensch), Nietzsche supposes, can live an authentic and successful human life. During his thirty-year career in philosophy, Nietzsche published a large variety of highly acclaimed books and short essays. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), published when Nietzsche was a largely unknown classical philologist at the University of Basel, initially received unfavorable, and even venomous, responses from the mainstream German academy. Many critics believe that this very reaction, which Nietzsche himself had probably anticipated, motivated him to reevaluate his own views and scholarly interests. It served as a catalyst to inaugurate his nontraditional thought and launched the philosophical investigations that would lead to a reassessing and reshaping of the fundamental concepts of Western philosophy. Largely drawing from Schopenhauer and Wagner, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche articulated a new theory of ancient Greek tragedy. By productively invoking the Greek deities of Apollo and Dionysos, Nietzsche proposed a mode of understanding tragedy that sets reason and senses, rationality and sensibility into a dialectical relationship. Nietzsche argued that the Dionysian values of early Greek culture – wildness, emotional openness, and chaos – were inherently healthy, and that the modern loss of such values, replaced by the Apollonian values of logic and order, accounts for the degeneration of European culture and the death of the Renaissance, and signals the need for a continued growth of German arts. In the next three years, Nietzsche published Unfashionable Observations, which evaluated historiography in general and discussed in further detail Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, two giants of nineteenth-century German philosophy and art, whose ideas pointed toward the formation of new cultural values. In 1878, Nietzsche published Human, All Too Human, the last book that he wrote while still employed at the University of Basel. A wide-ranging work, it marked a shift in Nietzsche’s writing style and philosophical approach. It also initiated the end of his relationship with Wagner, whom Nietzsche attacked in the book – in part as an attempt to separate himself from the pessimistic characteristic of Wagner’s and Schopenhauer’s philosophy. As with other works, Nietzsche outgrew himself and some of his former views – yet his penchant for writing non-academically remained, and his aphoristic style continued to prevail. The other two works – Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices (1881) and The Gay Science (1882) – would evoke this style even more. The former contains the beginnings of the author’s “will to power” concept and opposition to the traditional concept of morality, and the latter includes Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead” and the concept of eternal recurrence – the notion of life being lived as if every moment were replayed eternally, and of choosing and willing such a life perpetually. These concepts are linked: the murder of God, the subsequent atheistic world it presents, and the task of expelling all notions of a life beyond our own follow one another. Those that live life without the “fairy tale” of religion exhibit stronger mental capacities, and generate a more worthwhile life – though such a worldview, Nietzsche noted, is difficult to continually affirm.

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Nietzsche’s most influential work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for All and None was published in four parts over the period of 1883-1885, although the first part was completed in only ten days. Originally envisioned as a tripartite work, the book also includes a parodic fourth part that scrutinizes the larger aims and perceived accomplishments of the volume. The book is written in a literary style, recounting the events, thoughts, and speeches of its main character, Zarathustra, whom Nietzsche uses in part as his mouthpiece, and who often speaks in parables and stories. Zarathustra, based on the Persian prophet who founded Zoroastrianism, is a kind of antichrist, whose teachings and stories invert or openly oppose Christian values, and yet, stylistically and thematically, heavily rely on biblical elements. The journey of Zarathustra is meant as an instruction for self-overcoming and joyful, psychologically-healthy living, and the character of Zarathustra (strong-willed, wise, jubilant, perceptive, and free) is meant to portray a model human, or Overman (Übermensch). Incorporated in the work are reflections of nature, which add poetic power as well as universal scope. The work discusses two types of humans. The first includes those who are ready to overcome life, who embrace eternal recurrence, question the truth of traditional thought, who are motivated by their own volition, and live for the cause of improving humanity. Conversely, the ones who belong to the second type are those who are lifeless, tragic, frail, weak-willed, or fraught with self-loathing, unable to express or create life for themselves. The second type of persons represents the majority of the human race, while those who are associated with the first type are rare. Only they have the motivation and power needed for becoming the Overman. In 1886, after the lackluster reception of Zarathustra, Nietzsche, at his own expense, published Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, a book that shares many aspects, including its structure and themes, with Human, All Too Human, but has a different attitude than the work composed eight years earlier. At this point, Nietzsche conceives that a philosopher and philosophical work employ imagination, daring, originality, and self-made values, traits which mark him in a higher status than “scholars.” He attacks the development of academic philosophy, largely aiming at the nineteenth-century German idealists, all of whom (even if not steadily and continuingly) held academic positions at Prussian universities. In his writings of this period, he also shapes the notion of “Will to Power” most clearly, now conceiving it as the inherent drive in all living things to assert their force over life. This is a drive which must be embodied by the individual and set free from traditional morality. People are thus categorized by their ability to manifest this Will to Power: the noble are conceived as powerful, able to bend life to their will, and composing the best of humanity, and the herd as weak, subordinate, dependent, generally lifeless, and constituting the lowest of humanity. Thus, there is no universal morality or any objective criteria of what is good and what is evil. Each individual has freedom to create values from within and is responsible for going through with the choices he makes and the consequences that follow from these choices.  In On the Genealogy of Morals, a Polemic (1887), Nietzsche offers a “historical reconstruction” of the progression of morality by humanity, crediting the rise and prevalence of Christian thought with shaping modern cultural values. In this book, Nietzsche readdresses the noble, master morality as opposed to the slave morality of the herd, and posits that modern Christian morality arose from the resentment of the “base,” i.e. those lacking in the qualities which define nobility. In breeding the desire for revenge, the “base” did not only embed despise and envy into morality, but the emotional explosion of the “base,” which Nietzsche calls the “slave revolt” in morality, resulted in an “inversion” of the “noble” values. The old “noble” morality 421

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was transformed into a new morality that now celebrates the slave-mentality and suppresses natural impulses toward mastery over others and oneself, substituting these impulses for a “bad conscience.” Other conceptions, such as the origination of punishment from the debtor/ creditor relationship, and the status of the priest as inherently weak, counseling the even weaker in order to generate a kind of “master morality” for themselves, pervade the work. It is arguably Nietzsche’s most systematic and thorough work, and punctuates his assertion that universal morality is not only fabricated, but employed to strangle life from the purposeful, self-governing, confident, and powerful. In 1888, the last productive year of his life, Nietzsche wrote frantically, publishing five books in a single year. The Case of Wagner, A Musician’s Problem is Nietzsche’s powerful critique of his former friend and associate. Nietzsche undertakes a serious analysis of Wagner’s music. This evaluation appears in sharp contrast with the philosopher’s early works (such as Birth of Tragedy and the essay “Wagner at Bayreuth” that was published as part of Untimely Meditations), where Wagner was praised for fulfilling a cultural need to go beyond the analytic and dispassionate understanding of music. Nietzsche is unsatisfied with Wagner as a composer and man. He pictures him as embodying the sickness of Western culture’s decadence, a “disease” that is affecting Europe and which Nietzsche calls nihilism. The book shows Nietzsche as a capable music-critic, and provides the necessary framework for some of his further reflections on the nature of art and its need for humanity. Another highly critical work – Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer (1888) – attacks philosophers of the past (including Socrates, Plato, and Kant) and the German culture of the present (as well as Europe in general), making criticisms Nietzsche had touched on before in his career. He also attacks cultural figures –Dante, Rousseau, Hugo, Sand, Carlyle, Mill, Eliot, and Darwin– as weak and unhealthy types, praising instead Caesar, Napoleon, and Goethe. The Antichrist, Curse on Christianity, is an articulate rant against the corruption of the world by Christianity, and how such “degeneration” was perpetuated by certain historical figures, clergy and martyrs in particular. Nietzsche’s last written work, an autobiography, Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is is a kind of retrospective of his work, containing both criticisms and explanations of himself. Its chapter titles reveal as much, with sections headed “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Write Such Good Books,” and, most strikingly, “Why I Am a Fatality.” This work, along with many private correspondences, conveys perhaps the half-serious, half sarcastic self-image shaped by Nietzsche during this time. He imagined history to be divided between two periods: before and after himself. The “after” would be a time where philosophy was destroyed and the world set free as a result of his ideas, where the confusion of humanity was cleared, and where generations to come may, to his dismay, worship his name. After falling ill, for several years he sent correspondence that sometimes suddenly and angrily broke existing ties with his friends and family, whom he saw as failing to understand or respect him. Friedrich Nietzsche remains one of the most impressive of philosophers to date, not only for the content of his work, which so often fundamentally challenged the tradition of the study and of the values of society itself, but for the way in which he managed to continually produce work throughout a life fraught with illness. Such drive gave rise to ideas that would come to shape the twentieth century in a profound way, ushering in an academic era of heightened atheism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and a relativistic understanding of morality. Nietzsche’s body of work is still being explored, and remains one of the most audible challenges against philosophy itself. 422

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Chronology of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Life and Works 1844

October 15: Born in Röcken, in the Prussian province of Saxony.

1846

Birth of his sister Elizabeth.

1848

Birth of his brother Ludwig Joseph.

1849

July 30: His father, a Lutheran minister, dies at age of thirty-six.

1850

Brother Ludwig Joseph dies at the age of two.



Family moves to Naumburg to live with father’s mother and her sisters.

1858

Begins his studies at Schulpforta (in Naumburg), Germany’s most famous school for education in the classics.

1864

Graduates from Schulpforta with a thesis in Latin on the Greek poet Theogonis.



Begins studies of theology at the University of Bonn.

1865

Transfers from Bonn to Leipzig following the classical philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Rietschl.



Begins studies of the classical philology.



Reads Arthur Schopenhauer’s masterpiece The World as Will and Representation.

1866

Reads Friedrich Lange’s History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Importance.

1867–1868 Enlists in artillery regiment in Naumburg, promoted within six months and then discharged after accident. 1868

Meets Richard Wagner, with whom he establishes a friendly relationship.

1869

Appointed as professor of classical philology at the University of Basel (Switzerland) at the age of twenty-four, still before completing his doctorate (which is conferred later, without a dissertation).



Begins frequent visits to the Wagner residence at Tribschen.

1870

Renounces his Prussian citizenship: for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless.



Voluntarily enlists as hospital attendant (medical orderly) in the FrancoPrussian War, where he contracts a serious illness and as a result serves only two months.



Writes “The Dionysian Worldview.”

1871

Publishes his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, dedicated to Richard Wagner; the book receives devastating reviews.

1873

Publishes “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer,” the Untimely Meditations I.

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Writes “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.”



Nietzsche begins losing his sight and starts lecturing without notes.



Writes “Essay on History” (his Untimely Meditations II).

1874

Completes and publishes “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and “Schopenhauer as Educator” (Untimely Meditations III).

1876

Publishes “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” (Untimely Meditations IV), which already has signs of Nietzsche’s moving away from Wagner.



Visits Wagner the last time.

1878

Publishes first two parts of Human, All Too Human (dedicated to the memory of Voltaire), a decisive turn away from Wagner.

1879

Resigns from his chair in Basel (due to severe health issues).



Publishes “Assorted Opinions and Maxims” and the first part of vol. II of Human, All Too Human.



Begins living alone in Switzerland and Italy.

1880

Publishes “The Wanderer and His Shadows,” which later becomes the second part of vol. II of Human, All Too Human.

1881 Publishes Daybreak.

Spends summer in Sils Maria on the Chasté peninsula in Switzerland.

1882 Publishes The Gay Science.

Meets Paul Rée and Lou Salomé; the developed friendship was short-lived and left Nietzsche devastated.

1883

Publishes the first two parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.



Learns of Wagner’s death.



Settles in Nice.

1884

Publishes the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.



Experiences some complications in the relationship with his sister Elizabeth.

1885

Publishes the fourth part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (which is limited to private circulation only).

1886 Publishes Beyond Good and Evil. 1887

Publishes the expanded edition of The Gay Science with a new Preface.

Publishes On the Genealogy of Morals. Publishes Hymn to Life, a musical work for chorus and orchestra. 1888

Nietzsche moves to Turin.

Publishes The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and Nietzsche contra Wagner.

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1889

January 3: collapses in the streets of Turin; admitted briefly into mental hospital in Basel, and later in Jena.



Spends remainder of his life cared for first by his mother and later by his sister in Leipzig.

1895

All rights to Nietzsche’s literary estate transferred to Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, granting her complete control.

1900

August 25: Nietzsche dies in Weimar at the age of fifty-five.

1901

Nietzsche’s sister’s Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche publishes The Will to Power.

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Selected Bibliography for Further Reading A.  Nietzsche’s Writings A.1.  German Academic Edition

Nietzsche, F. 1967ff. Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 40 vols. in 9 parts. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter. Nietzsche, F. 1975ff. Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 20 vols. in 4 parts. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter. A.2.  In English (the most complete edition)

The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. 1995ff. In 19 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press. B.  Selected Commentaries

Acampora, C. D. (ed.). 2006. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Bishop, P. (ed.). 2012. A Companion to Friedrich Nietzsche: Life and Works. Rochester: Camden House. Brobjer, T. 2008. Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Cohen, J. R. 2010. Science, Culture, and Free Spirit: A Study of Nietzsche’s Human, AllToo Human. Amherst: Humanity Books/Prometheus Books. Gemes, K., and S. May (eds.). 2009. Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gemes, K., and J. Richardson (eds.). 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hales, S. D., and R. Welshon. 2000. Nietzsche’s Perspectivism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Hatab, L. J. 2005. Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence. London: Routledge. Hatab, L. J. 2008. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janaway, Ch. 2007. Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaufman, W. 2013. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. With introduction by Alexander Nehamas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1st ed., 1950) Lampert, L. 2001. Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil. New Haven: Yale University Press. Leiter, B. 2002. Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge. Leiter, B., and N. Sinhababu (eds.). 2009. Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. May, S. 2011. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Metzger, J. (ed.). 2009. Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Pearson, K. A. (ed.). 2006. A Companion to Nietzsche. Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell. Rampley, M. 2007. Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reginster, B. 2006. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Richardson, J., and B. Leiter (eds.). 2001. Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ridley, A. 2007. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Art. New York and London: Routledge. Safranski, R. 2002. Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, translated by Shelley Frisch. New York: W.W. Norton. Small, R. 2001. Nietzsche in Context. London: Ashgate Publishing. Solomon, R. C. 2003. Living With Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has to Teach Us. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Welshon, R. 2004. The Philosophy of Nietzsche. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Young, J. 2006. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, J. 2010. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, J. (ed.). 2014. Individual and Community in Nietzsche’s Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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FROM “SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR” (1874) *

1 When a traveler who had seen many lands and nations and several continents was asked what characteristic he discovered to be common to all of humanity, he replied: “They have a tendency toward laziness.” To many it will seem that his reply would have been more accurate and valid if he had said: “They are all fearful. They hide behind customs and opinions.” At bottom, every human being knows perfectly well that he lives in the world just once, as a unicum, and that no coincidence, regardless how strange, will ever for a second time concoct out of this amazingly variegated diversity the unity that he is. He knows this, but he conceals it like a bad conscience. Why? Out of fear of his neighbor who demands convention and who cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a part of a herd instead of taking pleasure in being himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare instances. In most instances it is convenience, indolence—in short, that tendency toward laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: human beings are lazier than they are fearful, and what they fear most are those hardships that unconditional honesty and nakedness would foist upon them. Artists alone despise this lethargic promenading draped in borrowed manners and appropriated opinions, and they expose the hidden secret, everyone’s bad conscience, the principle that every human being is a one-of-a-kind miracle. They dare to show us how every human being, down to each movement of his muscles, is himself and himself alone; moreover, they show us that in the strict consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worthy of contemplation, as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and anything but boring. When the great thinker disdains human beings, it is their laziness he disdains, for it is laziness that makes them appear to be mass-produced commodities, to be indifferent, unworthy of human interchange and instruction. The human being who does not want to be a part of the masses need only cease to go easy on himself; let him follow his conscience, which cries out to him: “Be yourself! You are none of those things that you now do, think, and desire.” Every young soul hears this cry night and day and trembles, for when it thinks of its true liberation, it has an inkling of the measure of happiness for which it is destined from eternity. As long as it is shackled by the chains of opinions and fear, nothing can help it attain this happiness. And how bleak and senseless life can become without this liberation! There is no more desolate or repulsive creature in nature than the human being who has evaded his genius and who then casts furtive glances left and right, behind himself, and all about. In the end we can no longer even take hold of a person like this, for he is all exterior without

From Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator.” In Unfashionable Observations (vol. 2 in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche), trans. by Richard T. Gray. Stanford University Press, 1995, 171–214. *

From “Schopenhauer as Educator”

a kernel, a tattered, painted, puffed-up garment, a decked-out ghost that can arouse no fear, and certainly no pity. And if it is correct to say that the lazy person kills time, then we must seriously be concerned that a time that stakes its salvation on public opinions—that is, on private lazinesses—will one day really be killed: by which I mean that it will be stricken from the history of the true liberation of life. Imagine how great the revulsion of future generations will be when dealing with the legacy of a time ruled not by living human beings, but instead by publicly opining pseudo-human beings. This is why for some distant posterity our age will perhaps constitute the darkest and most unknown—because least human—chapter of history. I walk through the new streets of our cities and think how a century from now none of these atrocious houses the generation of public opinionators had built for themselves will be left standing, and how by then even the opinions of these house builders will have collapsed. How hopeful, by contrast, can all those people be who do not feel that they are citizens of this time; for if they were citizens of this time, they too would be helping to kill their time and would perish with it—whereas they actually want to awaken their time to life, so that they themselves can go on living in this life. But even if the future were to give us no cause for hope—our curious existence in precisely this Now gives us the strongest encouragement to live according to our own standards and laws: the inexplicable fact that we live precisely today and yet had the infinity of time in which to come into being, that we possess nothing but this brief today in which to show why and to what purpose we have come into being precisely at this moment. We are accountable to ourselves for our own existence; consequently, we also want to be the real helmsmen of our existence and keep it from resembling a mindless coincidence. We have to approach existence with a certain boldness and willingness to take risks: especially since in both the worst and the best instances we are bound to lose it. Why cling to this clod of earth, to this trade; why heed what your neighbor says? It is so provincial to bind oneself to views that already a few hundred miles away are no longer binding. Orient and Occident are chalk lines drawn before our eyes in order to mock our timidity. “I want to try to attain freedom,” the young soul tells itself; and it is supposed to be hindered in this simply because by chance two nations hate and wage war on each other, or because two continents are separated by an ocean, or because a religion that did not even exist a few thousand years ago is now taught everywhere. “None of this is you yourself,” the young soul tells itself. No one can build for you the bridge upon which you alone must cross the stream of life, no one but you alone. To be sure, there are countless paths and bridges and demigods that want to carry you through this stream, but only at the price of your self; you would pawn and lose your self. There is one single path in this world on which no one but you can travel. Where does it lead? Do not ask, just take it. Who was it who made the statement: “A man never rises higher than when he does not know where his path may lead him”? But how can we find ourselves again? How can the human being get to know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing; and if the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: “This is really you, this is no longer outer shell.” Besides, it is an agonizing, dangerous undertaking to dig down into yourself in this way, to force your way by the shortest route down the shaft of your own being. How easy it is to do damage to yourself that no doctor can heal. And moreover, why should it be necessary, since everything—our friendships and enmities, our look and our handshake, our memory and what we forget, our books and our handwriting—bears witness to our being. But there is 429

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only one way in which this crucial inquiry can be carried out. Let the young soul look back on its life with the question: What have you up to now truly loved, what attracted your soul, what dominated it while simultaneously making it happy? Place this series of revered objects before you, and perhaps their nature and their sequence will reveal to you a law, the fundamental law of your authentic self. Compare these objects, observe how one completes, expands, surpasses, transfigures the others, how they form a stepladder on which until now you have climbed up to yourself; for your true being does not lie deeply hidden within you, but rather immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your ego. Your true educators and cultivators reveal to you the true primordial sense and basic stuff of your being, something that is thoroughly incapable of being educated and cultivated, but something that in any event is bound, paralyzed, and difficult to gain access to. Your educators can be nothing other than your liberators. And that is the secret of all cultivation: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses, or corrective lenses—on the contrary, whatever might provide these things is merely a parody of education. Instead, education is liberation, removal of all weeds, rubble, and vermin that seek to harm the plant’s delicate shoots, a radiance of light and warmth, the loving rush of rain falling at night; it is imitation and adoration of nature where nature displays its maternal and merciful disposition; it is perfection of nature when it prevents nature’s cruel and merciless onslaughts and turns them to good, when it drapes a veil over the expressions of nature’s stepmotherly disposition and sad lack of understanding. Certainly, there are other ways of finding oneself, of coming to oneself out of the stupor in which we usually float as in a dark cloud, but I know of no better way than to reflect on one’s own educators and cultivators. And hence today I want to remember the one teacher and taskmaster of whom I can be proud, Arthur Schopenhauer—so that subsequently I will be able to recall others. […]

3 […] This was the first danger that overshadowed Schopenhauer’s development: isolation. The second is called: despair of truth. This danger accompanies every thinker whose starting point is Kantian philosophy, provided that in his sufferings and his desires he is a strong and complete human being, not just a clattering machine that cogitates and calculates. But, of course, we all know very well the shameful implications of this presupposition; indeed, it seems to me as though Kant really penetrated and radically transformed very few people at all. To be sure, the work of this quiet scholar, as we can read everywhere, is said to have unleashed a revolution in all fields of intellectual inquiry, but I just can’t believe that. For I don’t see any signs of this in those human beings who first and foremost would have to have been revolutionized before entire fields of inquiry could have been revolutionized. However, should the moment ever arise in which Kant begins to have a popular effect, then we will become aware of it in the form of a corrosive and disintegrating skepticism and relativism.[…] And yet this is necessary before we can gauge what, after Kant, Schopenhauer can mean to us—the guide, that is, who guides us out of the cave of skeptical disgruntlement or of critical renunciation up to the heights of tragic contemplation, the infinite nocturnal sky with its stars above us, and who himself was the first to take this path. His greatness lies in the fact that he dealt with the picture of life as 430

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a whole in order to interpret it as a whole, whereas the most sagacious intellects cannot be freed from the mistaken notion that one comes closer to this interpretation by meticulously examining the colors with which, and the material on which, this picture is painted—only to arrive at the conclusion, perhaps, that it is an intricately woven canvas painted with colors whose chemical composition is inexplicable. To understand the picture one must first divine the painter—Schopenhauer knew this. Now, however, the entire scholarly community in all fields of learning is occupied with understanding that canvas and those colors, but not the picture itself; in fact, we could say that only he who has closely observed the overall painting of life and existence will be able to make use of the individual fields of learning without doing harm to himself. For without the touchstone provided by such a total picture, these fields of learning are threads that have no end and merely serve to make our path through life more confused and labyrinthine. As I said, Schopenhauer’s greatness lies in the fact that he pursues this picture the same way Hamlet pursues the ghost, without letting himself become distracted, as scholars are, or without getting himself entangled in a web of conceptual scholasticisms, as is the fate of uncontrolled dialecticians. […]

5 But I promised, on the basis of my experience, to depict Schopenhauer as educator, and hence it is by no means enough for me to paint a picture, and an inadequate one, at that, of that ideal human being who, as his Platonic Idea, as it were, holds sway in and around Schopenhauer. But the most difficult task still remains: to describe how we can derive a new set of duties from this ideal, and how we can get in touch with such an ambitious goal on the basis of regulated activity: in short, to demonstrate that this ideal educates. Otherwise we might suppose that it is nothing but an enrapturing, indeed intoxicating, vision that grants us individual moments only to let us down all the more immediately afterward and deliver us over to an even deeper sense of disheartenment. It is also certain that we will begin our association with this ideal in this way, with these sudden alternations between light and darkness, intoxication and disgust, and that in this respect we are repeating an experience that has been around as long as there have been ideals. However, we should no longer remain standing on the threshold, but proceed quickly past the initial stage. And we must therefore ask, seriously and resolutely: Is it possible to bring that incredibly lofty goal so near to us that it will educate us while drawing us upward?—so that in us those great words of Goethe will not be proved true: “The human being is born into a limited situation; he is capable of understanding simple, near, and definite goals, and he grows accustomed to using the means that are immediately available to him; but as soon as he goes beyond these limits, he knows neither what he wants nor what he ought to do, and it makes no difference whether he is distracted by the multitude of objects or whether he is transported beyond himself by their loftiness and dignity. He is always unhappy when he is forced to strive for something with which he cannot get in touch on the basis of a regulated, self-initiated activity.” This objection might appear to have a certain justification when raised against the Schopenhauerian human being: his loftiness and dignity are only able to transport us beyond ourselves, thereby transporting us once again outside any community of active people; the coherence of duties, the stream of life vanish. Perhaps someone may eventually 431

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accustom himself despondently to self-division and to living by a double standard, that is, to living in conflict with himself, uncertain both here and there, and hence becoming weaker and less fruitful by the day, whereas someone else principally refuses to act in concert with others and scarcely even notices when others act. The dangers are always great when things are made too difficult for people and when they are unable to fulfill any duties: stronger natures can be destroyed by it; weaker natures—the more numerous ones—sink into a contemplative laziness and ultimately even forfeit out of laziness their ability to contemplate. Now, in reply to such objections I am willing to admit that our work here has barely just begun, and that based on my own experiences I perceive and know only one thing for sure: that starting from that ideal image it is possible to impose upon you and me a chain of fulfillable duties, and that some of us already feel the weight of this chain. However, before I can state without hesitation the formula under which I would like to subsume this new set of duties, the following preliminary observations must be made. Human beings of greater profundity have always felt compassion with animals precisely because they suffer from life and yet do not possess the strength to turn the sting of suffering against themselves and understand their existence metaphysically; indeed, the sight of senseless suffering arouses profound indignation. That is why at more than one place on this earth the conjecture arose that the souls of guilt-laden human beings were trapped inside the bodies of these animals, and that that suffering whose senselessness at first glance arouses indignation acquires sense and significance as punishment and penance when viewed against the backdrop of eternal justice. It is truly a harsh punishment to live in the manner of an animal, subject to hunger and desires, and yet without arriving at any insight into the nature of this life, and we can conceive of no harsher fate than that of the beast of prey, who is driven through the desert by its gnawing torment, is seldom satisfied, and this only in such a way that this satisfaction turns into agony in the flesh-tearing struggle with other beasts, or from nauseating greediness and oversatiation. To cling so blindly and madly to life, for no higher reward, far from knowing that one is punished or why one is punished in this way, but instead to thirst with the inanity of a horrible desire for precisely this punishment as though it were happiness—that is what it means to be an animal. And if all of nature presses onward toward the human being, then in doing so it makes evident that he is necessary for its salvation from animal existence and that in him, finally, existence holds before itself a mirror in which life no longer appears senseless but appears, rather, in its metaphysical meaningfulness. But consider carefully: where does the animal cease, where does the human being begin! That human being who is nature’s sole concern! As long as someone desires life as he desires happiness, he has not elevated his gaze above the horizon of the animal, the only difference being that he desires with more awareness what the animal craves out of blind instinct. But for the greatest part of our lives this is the way it is for all of us: usually we do not transcend animality, we ourselves are those creatures who seem to suffer senselessly. But there are moments when we understand this; then the clouds break and we perceive how we, along with all of nature, are pressing onward toward the human being as toward something that stands high above us. In this sudden brightness we gaze with a shudder around and behind us: here the refined beasts of prey run, and we run in their midst. The tremendous mobility of human beings on the great earthly desert, their founding of cities and states, their waging of wars, their ceaseless gathering and dispersing, their confused mingling, their imitation of one another, their mutual outwitting and trampling underfoot, their cries in distress and 432

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their joyous cheers in victory—all this is a continuation of animality, as if human beings were intended to regress and be cheated out of their metaphysical disposition; indeed, as if nature, having yearned and labored for human beings for so long, now recoiled from them in fear and preferred to return to the unconsciousness of instinct. Alas, nature needs knowledge, and it is horrified at the knowledge it actually needs; and so the flame flickers unsteadily, trembling, as it were, out of fear of itself, and seizes upon a thousand things before seizing upon that thing on whose account nature needs knowledge at all. All of us know in individual moments how the most extensive arrangements of our own lives are made only in order to flee from our true task; how we like to hide our heads somewhere, as though our hundred-eyed conscience would not find us there; how we hasten to sell our soul to the state, to moneymaking, to social life, or to scholarship just so that we will no longer possess it; how even in our daily work we slave away without reflection and more ardently than is necessary to make a living because it seems to us more necessary not to stop and reflect. Haste is universal because everyone is fleeing from himself; universal, too, is the timid concealment of this haste, because we want to appear satisfied and deceive the most perceptive observers about our wretchedness; universal, as well, the need for new-sounding word bells with which life can be adorned and lent an air of noisy festivity. Everyone is familiar with the peculiar state in which unpleasant memories suddenly force themselves upon us and we make an effort to drive them out of our heads by means of violent gestures and sounds; but the gestures and sounds of common life indicate that all of us always find ourselves in such a state of fear of memory and of turning inward. What is it that assails us so often, what mosquito is this that refuses to let us sleep? Ghostly things are occurring around us, every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear this ghostly voice. When we are quiet and alone we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear, and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability. As I said, now and again we realize all of this and are quite astonished at all this dizzying fear and haste and at the entire dreamlike state of our life, which seems to dread awakening and whose dreams become all the more vivid and restless the closer it comes to this awakening. But we simultaneously feel that we are too weak to endure those moments of deepest communion very long and that we are not those human beings toward which all of nature presses onward for its own salvation. It is already no small achievement that we can at least sometimes manage to lift our heads enough to notice the stream in which we are so deeply submerged. And we do not accomplish even this—this coming to the surface and awakening for a fleeting instant—by means of our own strength. We have to be lifted up, and who are those who lift us up? They are those true human beings, those no-longer-animals, the philosophers, artists, and saints; with their appearance and by means of their appearance, nature, which never leaps, takes its only leap; and it is a leap of joy, for it feels that for the first time it has arrived at its goal, arrived at that place where it realizes that it must unlearn its goals and that it staked too much on the game of living and becoming. With this recognition, nature is transfigured, and a gentle weariness of evening—what human beings call “beauty”—spreads across its face. What it now expresses with these transfigured features is the great enlightenment about existence, and the supreme wish that mortals can wish is to participate constantly and with open ears in this enlightenment. When we think about everything Schopenhauer, for example, must have heard over the course of his life, then we may in retrospect say to ourselves: “Oh, these deaf ears of mine, this dull head, this flickering reason, this shriveled heart; oh, how I despise all that I call mine! Not to be able to fly, but only to flap one’s wings! To be able to look up beyond 433

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oneself and not be able to climb up beyond oneself! To know and nearly set foot on the path that leads to the immeasurably unobstructed view of the philosopher, only to come staggering back after a few steps! And if that greatest of all wishes were fulfilled for only one single day, how willingly we would give the rest of life in exchange for it! To climb as high as any thinker ever climbed into the icy purity of the alpine air, to that place where there is no longer any fog or mist and where the fundamental nature of things expresses itself, stark and unbending, but with unavoidable clarity! Just thinking about this the soul becomes lonely and infinite; but if its wish were fulfilled, if its gaze were once to fall precipitously and radiantly on things, like a ray of light, if shame, anxiety, and desire were to die out—what words could possibly describe the soul’s state, that new and enigmatic emotion without commotion with which it then, like Schopenhauer’s soul, would settle over the huge hieroglyphs of existence, over the petrified doctrine of becoming—not as a night, but rather as a radiant crimson light that streams out over the entire world. And what a fate, on the other hand, to have enough of an inkling of the peculiar definition and blessedness of the philosopher to sense all the definitionlessness and unblessedness of the nonphilosopher, he who desires without hope! To know that one is a fruit on a tree that cannot ripen because there is too much shade, and yet to see close by the sunshine one lacks!” This would be torment enough to make such a misgifted person envious and malicious—if he were even capable of envy and malice. But in all probability he will ultimately turn his soul in another direction so that it does not consume itself in vain longing, and it is at this point that he will discover a new set of duties. Having said this, I am now in a position to supply an answer to the question posed earlier: whether it is possible to get in touch with the great ideal of the Schopenhauerian human being on the basis of a regulated, self-initiated activity. One thing, above all, is certain: those new duties are not the duties of a solitary individual; on the contrary, through them one is integrated into a powerful community, one that, to be sure, is not held together by external forms and laws, but by a fundamental idea. This is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it is capable of charging each of us with one single task: to foster the production of philosophers, artists, and saints within us and around us, and thereby to work toward the perfection of nature. For just as nature needs philosophers for a metaphysical purpose, so, too, it also needs artists; for the purpose of its own self-enlightenment, so that it might finally be presented with a pure and finished image of what, in the tumultuousness of its own becoming, it never has the opportunity to see clearly—in short, for the purpose of its own self-recognition. It was Goethe who observed, with arrogant profundity, that all of nature’s experiments are of value only insofar as the artist eventually divines its stammerings, meets nature halfway, and gives expression to what it actually intends with these experiments. “I have often said,” he once exclaimed, “and I will say it over and over again, that the causa finalis of worldly and human affairs is dramatic literature. For otherwise this stuff is of absolutely no use.” And hence nature ultimately needs the saint, whose ego has entirely melted away and whose life of suffering is no longer—or almost no longer—felt individually, but only as the deepest feeling of equality, communion, and oneness with all living things; the saint, in whom that miracle of transformation occurs that the game of becoming never hits upon, that ultimate and supreme becoming human toward which all of nature presses and drives onward for its own salvation. There can be no doubt that all of us are related and connected to this saint, just as we are related to the philosopher and the artist. There are moments and, as it were, sparks of the brightest, most ardent fire in whose 434

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light we no longer understand the word “I”; there, beyond our being something exists that in those moments becomes a here and now, and that is why we long with all our hearts for bridges connecting the here and the there. Of course, in our customary state of mind we can contribute nothing to the production of the redeeming human being, and we therefore hate ourselves when we are in this state of mind, a hate that is the root of that pessimism that Schopenhauer had again to teach to our age, but that is as old as the longing for culture itself. Its root, but not its flower; its foundation, but not its roof; the beginning of its course, but not its goal, for at some point we have to learn to hate something else, something more universal, something other than our individuality and its wretched limitations, its changeability and turmoil, in that heightened state in which we will also love something other than what we are now able to love. Only after, in our present or in some future incarnation, we have been taken up into that most sublime order of philosophers, artists, and saints will a new goal be established for our love and our hate. In the meantime, we have our task and our sphere of duties, our hate and our love. For we know what culture is. When applied to the Schopenhauerian human being, it requires that we continually pave the way for and promote the production of this human being by discovering what is hostile to its development and sweeping it aside—in short, that we tirelessly fight against everything that, by preventing us from becoming such Schopenhauerian human beings ourselves, robbed us of the supreme fulfillment of our existence.—

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FROM BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. PRELUDE TO A PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE (1886) *

SECTION ONE PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS […] 11 People today are trying, it seems to me, to divert attention from Kant’s real influence on German philosophy, trying especially to evade what he himself considered his great value. Kant was most proud of his table of categories; holding it in his hands he said, ‘This is the most difficult thing that ever could be undertaken for the benefit of metaphysics.’ But let us understand what this ‘could be’ really implies! He was proud of having discovered in man a new faculty, the faculty to make synthetic a priori judgements. Granted that he was deceiving himself about his discovery: nevertheless, the development and rapid flowering of German philosophy stem from this pride and from the rivalry of his disciples to discover if at all possible something worthy of even more pride—and in any event ‘new faculties’! But let’s think about it, it is high time. ‘How are synthetic a priori judgements possible?’ wondered Kant, and what did he answer? They are facilitated by a faculty: unfortunately, however, he did not say this in four words, but so cumbersomely, so venerably, and with such an expense of German profundity and ornateness that people misheard the comical niaiserie allemande in such an answer. They were ecstatic about this new faculty, in fact, and the rejoicing reached its height when Kant discovered a moral faculty in man as well. (For at that time Germans were still moral, and not yet ‘real-political’.) There followed the honeymoon of German philosophy; all the young theologians of the Tübingen Stift* headed right for the bushes—they were all looking for ‘faculties’. And what all didn’t they find, in that innocent, rich, still youthful era of the German spirit when the malicious elf Romanticism was still piping and singing, back when no one yet had learned to distinguish between ‘finding’ and ‘inventing’! They found above all a faculty for the ‘extra-sensual’: Schelling christened it ‘intellectual intuition’, thus meeting the dearest desires of his essentially pious-desirous Germans. One can do no greater injustice to this whole arrogant, enthusiastic movement (which was youth itself, however audaciously it may have cloaked itself in grey, senile concepts) than to take it seriously and treat it with anything like moral indignation. Enough, people grew older—the dream vanished. The time came for them to rub their foreheads: they are rubbing them still today. They had From Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. and ed. by Marion Faber; with an introduction by Robert C. Holub. Oxford University Press, 1988, 12–41. *

From Beyond Good and Evil

been dreaming, and the first among them had been old Kant. ‘Facilitated by a faculty’— that’s what he had said, or at least that’s what he had meant. But what kind of an answer is that? What kind of explanation? Isn’t it rather simply repeating the question? How can opium make us sleep? It is ‘facilitated by a faculty’, the virtus dormitiva, answers that doctor in Molière, quia est in eo virtus dormitiva cujus est natura sensus assoupire. But answers like these belong in comedy, and for the Kantian question ‘How are synthetic a priori judgements possible?’ it is high time to substitute another question: ‘Why is the belief in such judgements necessary?’—it is time to understand that for the purpose of preserving creatures of our kind, we must believe that such judgements are true; which means, of course, that they could still be false judgements. Or to put it more clearly, and crudely and completely: synthetic a priori judgements should not ‘be possible’ at all; we have no right to them, in our mouths they are only false judgements. Yet the belief in their truth happens to be necessary as one of the foreground beliefs and appearances that constitute the perspective-optics of life. And, finally, remembering the enormous effect that ‘German philosophy’ exercised throughout Europe (one understands, I hope, why it deserves quotation marks?), let no one doubt that a certain virtus dormitiva had a part in it: amidst the noble men of leisure, the moralists, mystics, artists, the partial Christians, and political obscurantists of every nation, people were delighted that German philosophy offered an antidote to the still overpowering sensualism pouring into this century from the previous one, in short: ‘sensus assoupire’ . . . […] 16 There are still some harmless self-scrutinizers who think that there are ‘immediate certainties’, as for example, ‘I think’, or, in Schopenhauer’s superstition, ‘I will’—as if perception could grasp its object purely and nakedly as the ‘thing in itself ’ without any falsification on the part of the subject or of the object. But I shall repeat a hundred times over that the ‘immediate certainty’, like ‘absolute knowledge’ and the ‘thing in itself ’, contains a contradictio in adjecto: it’s time people freed themselves from the seduction of words! Let the common people think that perception means knowing-to-the-end, the philosopher must say to himself, ‘If I analyse the process expressed by the proposition “I think”, I get a series of audacious assertions that would be difficult if not impossible to prove; for example, that I am the one who is thinking, that there has to be a something doing the thinking, that thinking is an activity and an effect on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that an “I” exists, and finally, that we by now understand clearly what is designated as thinking—that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided it for myself, how could I determine that what is going on is not “willing” or “feeling”? In short, saying “I think” assumes that I am comparing my present state with other states that I experience in myself, thereby establishing what it is: because of this reference back to another “knowledge”, there is, for me at least, no immediate “certainty” here.’ Thus, instead of that ‘immediate certainty’ that the common people may believe in, the philosopher gets handed a series of metaphysical questions: these are actually the intellect’s 437

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questions of conscience, such as, ‘Where does my concept of thinking come from? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to talk about an “I”, and beyond that an “I as cause”, and beyond that yet an “I as the cause of thoughts”?’ Anyone who dares to answer such metaphysical questions promptly by referring to a kind of epistemological intuition (like someone who says, ‘I think, and know that this at least is true, real, and certain’) will be met with a smile and two question marks by the philosopher of today. ‘My dear sir,’ the philosopher may suggest, ‘it is improbable that you are not in error, but then why must we insist on truth?’ 17 As regards the superstition of logicians, I never tire of underlining a quick little fact that these superstitious people are reluctant to admit: namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wants to, and not when ‘I’ want it to; so it is falsifying the facts to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. There is thinking,* but to assert that ‘there’ is the same thing as that famous old ‘I’ is, to put it mildly, only an assumption, an hypothesis, and certainly not an ‘immediate certainty’. And in the end ‘there is thinking’ is also going too far: even this ‘there’ contains an interpretation of the process and is not part of the process itself. People are concluding here according to grammatical habit: ‘Thinking is an activity; for each activity there is someone who acts; therefore—.’ Following approximately the same pattern, ancient atomism looked for that particle of matter, the atom, to complement the effective ‘energy’ that works from out of it; more rigorous minds finally learned to do without this ‘little bit of earth’ and perhaps some day logicians will even get used to doing without that little ‘there’ (into which the honest old ‘I’ has evaporated). […] 19 Philosophers tend to speak about the will as if everyone in the world knew all about it; Schopenhauer even suggested that the will was the only thing we actually do know, know through and through, know without additions or subtractions. But I continue to think that even in this case Schopenhauer was only doing what philosophers simply tend to do: appropriating and exaggerating a common prejudice. As I see it, the act of willing is above all something complicated, something that has unity only as a word—and this common prejudice of using only one word has overridden the philosophers’ caution (which was never all that great anyway). So let us be more cautious for once, let us be ‘unphilosophical’. Let us say that in every act of willing there is first of all a multiplicity of feelings, namely the feeling of the condition we are moving away from and the feeling of the condition we are moving towards; the feeling of this ‘away’ and this ‘towards’; and then a concomitant feeling in the muscles that, without our actually moving ‘arms and legs’, comes into play out of a kind of habit, whenever we ‘will’. Second, just as we must recognize feeling, and indeed many kinds of feeling, as an ingredient of the will, so must we likewise recognize thinking: in every act of will there is a commanding thought, and we must not deceive ourselves that this thought can be separated off from ‘willing’, as if we would then have any will left over! Third, the will is not merely a complex of feelings and thoughts, it is above all an emotion, and in fact the emotion of command. What is called ‘freedom of the will’ is essentially the emotion of superiority felt towards the one who 438

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must obey: ‘I am free, “he” must obey.’ This consciousness lies in every will, as does also a tense alertness, a direct gaze concentrated on one thing alone, an unconditional assessment that ‘now we must have this and nothing else’, an inner certainty that obedience will follow, and everything else that goes along with the condition of giving commands. A person who wills: this person is commanding a Something in himself that obeys, or that he thinks is obeying. But let us now consider the strangest thing about the will, about this multifarious thing that the common people call by one word alone. In any given case, we both command and obey, and when we obey we know the feelings of coercion, pressure, oppression, resistance, and agitation that begin immediately after the act of will. On the other hand, we are in the habit of ignoring or overlooking this division by means of the synthetic concept ‘I’. Thus, a whole series of erroneous conclusions and therefore of false assessments of the will itself has been appended to willing in such a way that the person who wills now believes with complete faith that willing is enough for action. Because in the vast majority of cases, willing has only occurred when there is also the expectation that the effect of the command—that is obedience, action—will follow, this impression has been translated into the feeling that there is a necessary effect; suffice it to say, the person willing thinks with some degree of certainty that will and action are somehow one: he attributes his success in carrying out his willing to the will itself and in this way enjoys an increase in that feeling of power that accompanies any kind of success. ‘Freedom of the will’— that is the word for that complex pleasurable condition experienced by the person willing who commands and simultaneously identifies himself with the one who executes the command— as such he can share in enjoying a triumph over resistance, while secretly judging that it was actually his will that overcame that resistance. Thus the person willing adds to his pleasurable feeling as commander the pleasurable feelings of the successful executing instrument, the serviceable ‘underwill’ or under-soul (our body after all is nothing but a social structure of many souls). L’effet c’est moi:* what is occurring here occurs in every well-structured happy community where the ruling class identifies with the successes of the community as a whole. As we have said, every act of willing is simply a matter of commanding and obeying, based on a social structure of many ‘souls’; for this reason a philosopher should claim the right to comprehend willing from within the sphere of ethics: ethics, that is, understood as the theory of hierarchical relationships among which the phenomenon ‘life’ has its origins. […] 21 The causa sui* is the best internal contradiction ever devised, a kind of logical freak or outrage: but because of man’s excessive pride we have come to be deeply and terribly entangled with this particular nonsense. The yearning for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense that unfortunately still prevails in the minds of the half-educated, the yearning to bear complete and final responsibility for one’s own actions and to relieve God, the world, one’s ancestors, coincidence, society from it—this is really nothing less than being that same causa sui and, with a daring greater than Münchhausen’s,* dragging yourself by your hair out of the swamp of nothingness and into existence. Now, if someone can see through the cloddish simplicity of this famous concept ‘free will’ and eliminate it from his mind, I would then ask him to take his ‘enlightenment’ a step further and likewise eliminate from his head the opposite of the non-concept ‘free will’: I mean the ‘unfree will’ which amounts to a misuse 439

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of cause and effect. One should not make the mistake of concretizing ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ as do the natural scientists (and whoever else today naturalizes in their thinking . . .), in conformity with the prevalent mechanistic foolishness that pushes and tugs at the cause until it ‘has an effect’; ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ should be used only as pure concepts, as conventional fictions for the purpose of description or communication, and not for explanation. In the ‘in itself ’ there is nothing of ‘causal associations’, of ‘necessity’, of ‘psychological constraint’; the effect does not follow ‘upon the cause’, no ‘law’ governs it. We alone are the ones who have invented causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, coercion, number, law, freedom, reason, purpose; and if we project, if we mix this world of signs into things as if it were an ‘in itself ’, we act once more as we have always done, that is, mythologically. The ‘unfree will’ is mythology: in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills. Whenever a thinker sniffs out coercion, necessity, obligation, pressure, constraint in any ‘causal connection’ or ‘psychological necessity’, it is almost always a symptom of where his own inadequacy lies: to feel this particular way is revealing—the person is revealing himself. And if I have observed correctly, the ‘constraint of the will’ is always conceived as a problem from two completely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly personal way: the one group will not hear of relinquishing their ‘responsibility’, their belief in themselves, their personal right to take their credit (the vain races are of this type); conversely, the other group wants to be responsible for nothing, guilty of nothing, and out of their inner self-contempt they yearn to cast off their own selves one way or another. When this latter group writes books nowadays, they tend to take up the cause of criminals; a sort of socialistic compassion is their nicest disguise. And indeed, it is surprising how much prettier the fatalism of the weak-willed can look when it presents itself as ‘la religion de la souffrance humaine’;* that is what it means by ‘good taste’. […] 23 Until now, all psychology has been brought to a stop by moral prejudices and fears: it has not dared to plumb these depths. If we may take previous writing as a symptom of what has also been suppressed, then no one in his thoughts has even brushed these depths as I have, as a morphology and evolutionary theory of the will to power. The force of moral prejudices has reached far into the most spiritual world, a world apparently cold and without premiss—and it has obviously had a harmful, inhibiting, blinding, distorting effect. A real physio-psychology must struggle with the unconscious resistances in the heart of the researcher, the ‘heart’ is working against it; a conscience that is still strong and hearty will be distressed and annoyed even by a theory of the reciprocal conditionality of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ instincts, which seems to be a kind of subtle immorality—and even more by a theory of the derivation of all good drives from bad ones. But granted that a person takes the emotions of hatred, envy, greed, power hunger as conditions for living, crucial and fundamental to the universal economy of life and therefore in need of intensifying if life is to be intensified, he is also a person who suffers from such an orientation in judgement as if he were seasick. And yet even this hypothesis is by no means the strangest or most painful one in this enormous, virtually new realm of dangerous insights—and in truth there are a hundred good reasons for everyone to stay away from it if he—can! On the other hand, once your ship has strayed onto this course: well then! All right! 440

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Grit your teeth bravely! Open your eyes! Keep your hand at the helm!—we are going to be travelling beyond morality, and by daring to travel there we may in the process stifle or crush whatever remnant of morality we have left—but what do we matter! Never yet has a deeper world of insight been opened to bold travellers and adventurers; and the psychologist who makes this kind of ‘sacrifice’ (it is not the sacrifizio dell’intelletto,* quite the contrary!) may demand at least that psychology be recognized once again as the queen of the sciences, which the other sciences exist to serve and anticipate. For psychology has once again become the way to basic issues. SECTION TWO THE FREE SPIRIT […] 42 A new category of philosophers is on the rise: I shall be so bold as to christen them with a name that is not without its dangers. As I divine them, as they allow themselves to be divined (for it is part of their nature to want to remain a riddle in some respects), these philosophers of the future might rightfully—perhaps also wrongfully—be described as experimenters. And this name too is ultimately only an experiment, and, if you like, a temptation.* 43 Are they new friends of ‘truth’, these approaching philosophers? Probably so, for until now all philosophers have loved their truths. But it is certain that they will not be dogmatists. It would surely go against their pride, and also against their good taste, if their truth had to be a truth for everyone else, too—this has been the secret wish and ulterior thought in all earlier dogmatic endeavours. ‘My judgement is my judgement: no one else has a right to it so easily’, as a philosopher of the future might say. We have to rid ourselves of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many others. ‘Good’ is no longer good if our neighbour takes the word into his mouth. So how could there possibly be ‘common goods’! The term contradicts itself: anything that is common never has much value. In the end things will have to be as they are and always have been: the great things are left to the great, the abysses to the profound, tenderness and thrills to the sensitive, and to sum it up in a few words, everything extraordinary to the extraordinary. 44 After all that has been said, must I still make a special point of mentioning that they too will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future—just as surely as they will not be free spirits merely, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different, something that would not go unrecognized or misidentified? But in saying this, I feel even towards them (as towards ourselves, the free spirits who are their heralds and forerunners!) the obligation to dispel for both of us a stupid old prejudice and misunderstanding that for all too long has enshrouded the concept ‘free spirit’ like a fog. In all the countries of Europe and in America now as well, there is something that is misusing this name: a very narrow, trapped, enchained

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sort of spirit who wants more or less the opposite of what we do, by instinct and intention—not to mention that they are bound to be the shut windows and barred doors to those approaching new philosophers. These falsely dubbed ‘free spirits’ belong, short and sour, to the levellers, loquacious scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modern ideas’: they are all of them people without solitude, without their own solitude, plain well-behaved lads whose courage and honourable propriety cannot be denied. It is just that they are unfree and laughably superficial, especially in light of their basic tendency to see, more or less, the cause of all human misery and failure in the structures of society up to now, thus happily managing to turn truth upside down! What they are trying with all their strength to achieve is a common green pasture of happiness for the herd, with safety, security, comfort, ease of life for everyone; their two most often recited tunes and teachings are ‘Equal rights’ and ‘Compassion for all suffering’—and they take suffering itself as something that must be eliminated. We who are the opposite, who have opened an eye and a conscience to the question of where and how the plant ‘human being’ has most vigorously grown tall, we are of the opinion that this has always happened under the opposite conditions: that the precariousness of the plant’s situation had first to increase enormously; that its power of invention and disguise (its ‘spirit’—) had to become subtle and daring through long periods of pressure and discipline; that its life-will had to be intensified into an unconditional power-will. We are of the opinion that harshness, violence, enslavement, danger on the street and in the heart, seclusion, stoicism, the art of the tempter and every kind of devilry, that everything evil, frightful, tyrannical, predatory, and snake-like about humans serves to heighten the species ‘human being’ as much as does its opposite.

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INDEX

absolute  199, 233, 257, 349–50, 352 beginning  406–7 being  131, 133, 212, 214, 223, 264–65, 283 freedom  182, 226, 241 I  152, 182, 214–15, 224, 358, 389 idea  342–4, 388, 390–91 identity  258–60, 343, 353 ought  325–26 postulate  241 reason  257–58 subject/being  131, 133, 152, 358, 389 Absolute, the  2, 6–7, 135, 141, 144, 233–34, 241, 243–44, 251–52, 258, 261, 265–66, 271, 276, 283, 289, 302–3, 332, 334, 342–43, 345–46, 381, 389 and knowledge of  261, 263–65 philosophy of  273 reality of the  263, 271, 274 as Spirit/Absolute Spirit (Hegel)  2, 276, 389, 392 absolute knowing/knowledge  2–3, 247, 265, 271, 276–77, 286, 381–83, 388, 437. See also knowing/knowledge abstraction  85, 131–32, 171, 190, 193, 196, 204, 241, 258, 275, 287, 291, 293, 321–32, 363, 370, 375, 381–91, 394, 396–97, 407–9 act/action (Handlung)  8, 34–35, 48–51, 53, 57, 59, 63, 66–67, 69, 80, 85 n.11, 114–15, 125–26, 128–29, 132–33, 182, 190–93, 199–200, 202–6, 209, 241–42, 266–68, 287–88, 319, 321–22, 324–29, 344, 350–51, 360, 369, 381, 385–86, 388, 408–9, 431 of abstraction  204, 407 moral  2, 35–7, 60, 113–14, 116, 125–27, 129, 179, 327 of reason  215, 226 of reflection  407 of self-creation  389 of self-determination  197 of thinking  196, 200, 202–3, 205, 304 of the will/willing  312, 438–39 activity  84, 89, 117, 132, 181, 199, 203, 205, 207–9, 216–21, 224, 231–34, 240–45, 268, 283, 289, 293–94, 305, 314, 342, 345–46, 349, 353, 364, 374, 385–86, 389, 431, 434 of the I  2, 48, 131–32, 181–82, 250 as practice (Praxis)  363, 393–94 productive (as labor)  362–3, 373–77, 379 of thought/mind  3, 196, 241, 275–76, 303, 437–38 actual/actuality (wirklich/Wirklichkeit)  6, 65–68, 82–83, 85, 102, 107, 109, 114, 131, 133, 142–43, 152, 159, 171, 182, 197, 205, 226,

268–69, 291–92, 295, 297, 299–302, 325–37, 370, 384, 388, 393, 406–7 Aenesidemus  13, 17, 18, 139–42, 144–47, 149, 151, 153, 163, 181, 184, 188–94. See Schulze, Gottlob Ernst aesthetic  3, 5, 7, 8, 11–12, 18–19, 39–40, 50, 54, 56, 96, 111, 113–18, 120, 126–27, 130–31, 133–37, 192, 215, 226, 227, 230, 234, 275, 313, 331, 356, 399 agency  35, 115–16, 183, 233–34. See also autonomy; freedom alienation  73, 277, 362, 369, 372–91, 393 of labor (Marx)  372–79 of man  348–54, 376–77, 382–83 anarchy  106, 179, 220, 268 ancient times/world  90, 141, 172, 221, 229–30, 242, 272, 339, 370, 420, 438. See also classical, antiquity Annals for Scientific Criticism  332, 334 anthropology  34, 332–33, 335, 355–56 Hegelian  381 anti-foundationalism  211, 213 antinomy/antinomies  59, 169, 171, 225 anti-Semitism  419 antitheses  252, 380 antithesis  190, 263–63, 265, 302, 343–44, 354, 356, 380, 391, 411. See also opposites appearance (Erscheining)  2, 6, 34, 43, 45–47, 51, 54–55, 58–9, 61, 68, 70, 89, 90, 107–8, 114, 124, 126–29, 135–36, 165, 168, 170, 173–74, 193, 203, 207, 241, 244–45, 259–60, 268, 274, 284, 291, 297, 300, 302, 311–13, 319–20, 326, 350, 360, 382, 386, 393, 437. See also phenomena apperception  33, 49–54, 322 a priori knowledge  32–34, 42–44, 46–51, 53, 59, 62, 67, 81, 107–8, 127, 142, 146, 149, 151, 158, 164, 166, 169, 170–73, 191–92, 201–2, 303, 322, 324, 343, 436, 437 arbitrariness (Willkűr)  109, 221, 304, 408. See also caprice Aristotle/Aristotelianism  141, 271, 322, 345, 417 art  5, 7, 116–18, 134, 164–65, 215, 226, 231, 233–34, 242–43, 245–46, 313, 339, 347, 351–52, 388, 422, 442 philosophy of  118, 387 ascetic ideal/morality  114, 313–14 atheism  8, 73–74, 87–88, 90, 95–96, 179, 277, 352, 388–89, 422 atheism dispute/controversy (Atheismusstreit)  76, 87–91, 179

Index Athenaeum  4, 18, 230, 237 atomism  438 Aufhebung (sublation, overcoming)  117, 252, 277, 313, 383, 421 authority  8, 36, 71, 177, 284, 290, 293, 325, 328, 343, 398 autonomy  35, 60, 63, 114, 126, 129, 133, 358. See also freedom worth/dignity and  115–16, 358 bad  34, 351, 422, 428, 440. See also good and bad bad conscience  422 Bamberger Zeitung  273, 278 Bardili, Christoph Gottfried  95 Bauer, Bruno  334, 365 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb  114 Bavarian Academy of Sciences  73, 77, 249 beautiful soul (Schiller)  113, 115, 118 beauty  112–15, 117–18, 124–30, 134–35, 137, 213, 215–16, 226, 269, 350, 374, 376, 433 becoming  80, 114, 131, 133, 182, 245, 296, 300, 313, 329, 350, 359–60, 391, 399, 408–9, 417, 421, 433, 434 what one is  422 Beethoven, Ludwig van  112 beginning  53, 80, 131, 198, 226, 244, 246, 250, 257, 268–69, 272, 289, 298, 300–2, 304, 341–44, 361, 390, 406–8, 420, 435 being for-(an)other  286, 288, 328 for-(it)self  204–5, 297 in-itself (Ansichsein)  91, 259 there (Dasein)  292, 294–96 Being (Sein)  292, 294–96 as such (Hölderlin)  204, 276, 384, 386, 387 and thought (Hegel)  275 truth of  211 unity of  211 belief (Glaube)  2, 45, 74, 157, 179, 193–94, 199, 208, 212, 269, 352, 364, 397, 400, 437, 440 Bildung  231. See also education, as Bildung body  54, 70, 240, 247, 292, 312, 339, 356, 375, 385, 391, 439. Böhme, Jacob  230, 249, 346 Bürger, Gottfried August  229 Caesar, Julius  422 Capital (Das Kapital)  44, 363, 372–73, 378 capitalism  362–63 caprice (Willkűr)  32. See also arbitrariness categorical imperative  35, 324, 370. See also moral law formula of humanity/Humanity Imperative  35 formula of universal law  35, 36 n.2 categories  46–48, 52–55, 108, 143, 147, 153, 158, 170–71, 191, 231, 274, 276, 299, 322, 378, 411, 436. See also concepts of causality  147

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Hegelian  274, 276, 299 Kantian  46–48, 52–55, 108, 274, 299, 322 table of  436 Catholicism  5, 9, 355 causality  2, 33, 45, 47, 57, 59, 63, 66–67, 69–70, 142–43, 150–53, 200, 311, 321, 324 causa sui  439 certainty (Gewiβheit)  6, 82, 83, 97, 142, 148, 163–64, 166, 173, 181–82, 193, 240, 257, 262, 265, 287–88, 296, 303, 322, 343–44, 410–11, 437–39 character  44, 68, 90, 95, 114–16, 130, 179, 192, 199, 244, 247, 290, 313, 322, 339, 340, 345, 375, 381–82, 386, 388, 417–19 moral  115–16 choice  60, 89, 116, 132, 198, 200, 208, 245, 269, 324, 399, 421 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christianity  9, 63, 157, 230, 272, 277, 309, 325, 332–34, 340, 348–54, 358, 360, 362, 393, 395, 396, 399–400, 421–22. See also Pietism church  8, 9, 94, 139, 211, 396, 401, 402, 417, 419 circle  7, 168–69, 171–72, 183, 191, 221, 230, 241, 243, 276, 296, 300, 303–4, 341, 359 concept of  172 of consciousness  183 as constructed a priori  171 Jena  237 philosophy/philosophizing as  276, 303–4, 341 civil society (bűrgerliche Gesellschaft)  387, 394 classical  4, 141, 331, 333, 417–20. See also ancient times/world antiquity  333 literature  4, 272 philology  417–20, 423 skeptic  141 world  272 coalition system (Maimon)  156–57 cognition (Erkennen/Erkenntnis)  33–34, 57–58, 60, 66, 68, 103–5, 107–8, 141–2, 146–48, 164, 168–69, 173–74, 181–83, 196, 221, 258–59, 263–66, 276, 283–84, 298–301, 328, 357 comedy  437 common sense  33, 106, 142, 164 community  357, 362, 375, 379, 431, 434, 439 religious  155 Concept (Begriff), the  301, 304. See also Notion, the conscience (Gewissen)  350, 353, 428, 433, 437, 440, 442 bad  422, 428 strong  440 consciousness (Bewuβtsein)  6, 41, 49–53, 58–59, 63, 81, 83, 87, 97, 106, 109–10, 112, 140, 142, 147, 157, 164, 169, 177, 181–83, 189–93, 195–202, 204–8, 214–15, 221, 223–24, 241, 244, 246, 262, 264, 268, 271, 274, 276–77, 284–91, 295–303, 311–14, 319–22, 330, 348–51, 353, 369, 370, 375–76, 379–80, 382–89, 398, 438

Index absolute  81, 277 alienation of  384, 386 dependent vs. independent  288–89 empirical  49 fact(s) of  97, 109–10, 142, 164, 181–82, 202, 206–8, 215, 224 of freedom  322 of God  353, 398 moral/of moral law  58, 221 natural  284 as the Notion of itself (Hegel)  284, 286, 288 ordinary  41, 208, 299 principle of  109–10, 140, 142, 147, 157, 189–91 shapes/forms of  271, 288, 382 unhappy  382 unity of  50–51, 56 n.1, 85 n.12 constitution (Verfassung)  32–33, 42, 57, 66–70, 128, 147–50, 226, 241 content  33, 54, 97, 103, 142, 158, 166, 180–81, 183, 189, 195, 202–3, 216, 256–57, 290–91, 293–94, 298–300, 302–3, 324, 341, 343, 346, 380, 389–90, 422 contingency  66, 68–69, 115, 133 contract  399 social  399 contradiction  41, 43, 45, 69, 131, 143, 149, 164, 173, 189, 191, 192, 241, 242, 252, 263, 269, 271, 275, 277, 285, 302, 326, 334, 335, 343–46, 355, 377–78, 381–82, 387, 393, 398, 409, 411, 413, 439 dialectical  413 n.4 Copernican revolution in philosophy  32, 33, 177 corporation (Korporation)  384 cosmology  104, 151, 152 creation/creativity  143, 226, 267, 268, 311, 364, 375, 380–81, 383, 385, 389, 392, 409 criterion  35, 106, 158, 159, 221, 285, 286 Critical Journal of Philosophy (Kritisches Journal der Philosophie)  249, 273, 278 Critical philosophy  3–4, 6, 31, 33, 36, 71, 93–97, 106, 139, 140, 142–43, 146, 148, 151, 155–58, 163–64, 177–8, 180–81, 183, 191–92, 194, 212, 271, 272, 301, 346, 347 Crusius, Cristian August  139 culture  103, 111–13, 116, 117, 229, 231, 309, 419, 420, 422, 434–5 cunning  173 will  312–13 custom (Sitte)  296, 431 decadence  422 deduction/derivation  34, 43, 45–48, 53, 67, 70, 96, 114, 124, 143, 148, 151, 158, 166, 181, 199, 201, 205, 326, 329, 440 democracy  116 Democritus  359

dependence  1, 2, 60, 133, 275, 286, 363, 414 Der teutsche Merkur/Der neue teutsche Merkur  16, 72, 76, 94, 98, 119, 229 Descartes, René  172, 192, 322, 345. See also Cartesian; dualism; skepticism desire (Begierde)  34– 35, 42–43, 57–60, 62, 85, 88, 91, 107, 108, 132, 156, 166, 177, 188, 193, 205, 207, 211, 213, 220, 286, 288–89, 293, 299, 312–14, 320, 362, 396, 398–99, 421, 428, 430, 432, 434, 436 determinacy/determinateness (Bestimmtheit)  109, 182, 286, 287, 293, 294, 299, 303 determinate  49, 50, 55, 68, 69, 81, 82, 105, 108, 131, 147, 164, 170, 171, 173, 190, 196–200, 205, 207, 234, 241, 261, 262, 285, 292, 294, 295, 381, 386, 390. See negation being (bestimmtes Sein)  131 determinism  96, 178, 180, 251 Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher [German-French Annals]  332, 359–60 development  2–8, 29, 33, 71, 73, 93–4, 104, 111, 116, 135, 140, 141, 144, 155, 159, 181, 203, 212, 214, 216, 227, 229, 230, 232, 233, 251, 252, 257, 271, 273–74, 276, 292, 295, 302–4, 332–33, 339–40, 343, 363, 364, 378, 379, 382, 399, 418, 421, 430, 435, 436 dialectic  7, 61, 65, 141, 150, 252, 271, 273, 274, 276, 277, 286, 302, 331, 334, 357, 361, 363, 364, 379–81, 383, 388, 389, 391, 406, 408, 410, 413, 420, 431 dialectical movement  286 dichotomy  32, 216, 250, 251. See also difference; distinction Die Horen  184 difference  54, 61, 81, 88, 168, 173, 190, 192, 194–96, 198, 202, 206, 221, 249, 258, 260, 261–62, 264–65, 272, 283, 296, 319, 326, 339–41, 348, 380, 381, 397, 431, 432. See also dichotomy; distinction dignity  115, 116, 135, 358, 431 Dionysian/Dionysus  420 distinction (Unterscheidung)  34, 45, 54, 65–68, 88, 114, 116, 150, 166, 170, 191, 208, 214, 221, 285, 292, 293, 298, 302, 303, 310, 313, 328, 329, 334–46, 348, 350, 352, 356, 357, 372, 382, 386, 398. See also dichotomy; difference diversity  116, 132, 276, 299, 303, 428 Divine, the  75, 131, 139, 269, 349, 352–54, 389, 391. See also God dogmatism  32–3, 45, 150–51, 164, 168, 173, 181, 196–97, 199, 201, 215, 224, 263 Doppelsatz (Hegel)  290, 300, 397 doubt  141–42, 146, 149, 158, 159, 164–66, 173, 261, 263, 264, 334, 341–43, 408, 434, 437 drive (Trieb)  116–18, 131–33, 188, 198, 240, 277, 292, 311, 347, 421–22, 433. See also impulse; instinct

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Index dualism in Kant’s philosophy  2, 158, 180–81, 216 duty  34–5, 60, 63–4, 66, 114–15, 128–30, 134, 194, 208, 216, 295, 310, 313, 325–26, 398 education  5, 29, 113–14, 116, 118, 131–37, 155, 177, 224–35, 245, 273, 278, 284, 331, 393, 430 aesthetic  118, 131–38 as Bildung (enculturation)  231, 331 ego (Ich)  343, 434. See also I egoism/egoistic  326, 327–29, 350, 384. See also selfishness Elementarphilosophy [Elementarphilosophie] (Reinhold)  94, 96, 107, 140, 181 empirical  2, 32–34, 41, 43, 45–49, 51–55, 58, 69, 74, 104, 107, 128, 142, 143, 147, 148, 150, 151, 158, 159, 170, 171, 181–83, 189, 190, 193, 205, 220, 233, 266–68, 271, 300–2, 304, 324, 340, 342, 344, 347, 382, 408 knowledge  43, 47, 54 realism  159 empiricism  32, 159, 352. See also realism, empirical Engels, Friedrich  250, 334, 360, 365 Enlightenment, the  8, 71, 96, 98, 111, 177, 231, 324 Austrian  93 German  73–4, 94 Jewish  156 epistemology  11, 32, 34, 74, 142, 157, 214, 397, 419 essence (Wesen)  9, 82, 86, 127, 142, 146, 223, 250, 251, 258–61, 264–69, 285, 287, 291, 296, 301, 302, 311, 312, 320, 325, 332–35, 341–3, 348–55, 357, 358, 362, 369, 371, 381–83, 390, 391, 393, 394 essential, the (das Wesentliche)  42, 62, 81, 106, 108, 148, 151, 264, 285, 286, 288, 346, 348, 349, 351, 353, 357, 362, 412 eternal recurrence/return  420–21 eternity  62, 80, 85, 132, 136, 153, 193, 268, 325, 331, 410, 412, 428 ethical life/order (Sittlichkeit) (Hegel)  295–6. See also good and evil evil/devil  220, 221, 242, 251, 267–69, 283, 300, 314, 346, 374, 421, 442 ethics (Ethik)  xi, 7–8, 29, 34–35, 111, 113–14, 116, 139, 214, 216, 226, 240, 290, 295, 324–26, 329, 398–99, 439 duty-based/deontological (Kant)  34, 310 evolution  1, 211, 251, 277, 363 existence (Existenz)  2, 6, 8, 9, 34–35, 45, 47, 61–63, 75, 81, 83, 87, 114, 116, 127, 131–33, 140, 147, 159, 168, 169, 173, 182, 183, 193, 194, 196, 199–200, 203–4, 207, 215, 224, 240, 245, 250–52, 260, 262, 264, 271, 272, 277, 284, 286–90, 292, 294–96, 300, 310, 311, 320, 325, 332, 339–40, 342–43, 346, 349–51, 369, 370, 373, 375, 376, 380–82, 386–88, 396, 397, 399, 406–12, 419, 429, 431–35, 439

446

existentialism  9, 183, 252, 396–98 experience  3, 8–10, 32–34, 41–48, 53, 54, 56, 58–60, 67, 68, 70, 73, 87, 88, 106–8, 114, 115, 117, 118, 124, 128, 130, 132–35, 142, 143, 147–52, 158, 159, 168, 170, 171, 173, 177, 180, 181, 183, 189–91, 195–97, 201, 202, 205, 206, 213, 216, 221, 224, 226, 230–33, 245, 246, 275, 276, 284, 286, 288, 289, 300, 302, 303, 309, 310, 312, 322, 334, 386, 431, 432, 437, 439 explanation  30, 46, 53, 59, 69, 70, 108–10, 128, 130, 136, 146, 150–52, 156, 159, 172, 189, 199, 233, 240, 250, 259, 261, 264, 275, 310, 311, 320, 324, 329, 330, 372, 422, 436, 440. See also interpretation externality  258, 384, 391 faculty of representation (Reinhold)  48, 104, 107–10, 140, 146–49, 191 faith  8–9, 71, 74, 75, 83, 84, 87, 88, 140, 180, 230, 273, 397–400, 411, 439. See also belief (Glaube) family  88, 125, 155, 177, 213, 224, 229, 271, 297, 309, 360, 381, 393, 395, 398, 417 fatalism/fate  41, 74, 104, 251, 354, 431–32, 434, 440 Feder, Johann Georg Heinrich  139, 144 feeling (Gefűhl)  8, 74, 115–16, 133–34, 232, 245, 268, 290, 298–99, 302, 319, 348–53, 380, 437–39 of duty  313 of guilt  395 moral  132 of necessity  195–97, 200, 203 of pleasure  114, 127 religious  8, 394 Feuerbach, Ludwig  19, 22–5, 252, 277, 331–58, 361–63, 365–66, 380–1, 387, 393–94 life  331–33, 336–37 select works: The Essence of Christianity  332, 336–37, 348–54 The Essence of Religion  333, 337 History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza  332, 336 History of Modern Philosophy: Presentation, Development and Critique of the Leibnizian Philosophy  332, 336 Pierre Bayle: A Contribution to the History of Philosophy and Humanity  332, 336 Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy  332, 336 Principles of the Philosophy of the Future  332, 336, 355–57 Theogony According to the Sources of Classical, Hebrew and Christian Antiquity  333, 337 Thoughts on Death and Immortality  331, 336 “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy”  332, 334, 336, 339–47

Index Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  xi, 1–4, 6–7, 15, 17–20, 71–74, 76, 87–89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 113, 140, 155, 177–215, 217, 224–5, 230–325, 237, 240–45, 249, 251–22, 256–7, 267–8, 272–6, 278, 298, 309, 311–12, 315, 322, 341–43, 345, 347, 417 life  177–80, 184–85 select works: Addresses to the German Nation  180 Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation  178 An Attempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre  195–210 “[First] Introduction to Wissenschaftslehre”   195–202 “Second Introduction to Wissenschaftslehre”   202–209 Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre  178 Foundations of Natural Right  179 Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty  179 “Review of Aenesidemus”  184 Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation  178 The System of Ethics  179 The Vocation of Man  180 Wissenschaftslehre nova method  178 Fichtecize/Fichtecizing  233 finite/finitude  2, 6, 9, 59, 62, 65, 70, 74, 80–83, 85, 91, 116, 131, 132, 177, 182, 192, 196, 209, 216, 244, 251, 259, 261, 262, 264–66, 275, 298, 340, 345, 347, 348, 350, 357, 381, 391, 399, 414 first/foundational principle (Grundsatz)  95, 178, 311. See also philosophy, as science form  1, 3, 9, 34, 43–44, 46–8, 50–51, 53–54, 56, 59, 60, 62, 65, 67, 69, 72, 81, 88, 93, 95, 97, 102–5, 107, 108, 116, 117, 124–28, 132–35, 148, 150, 157, 164, 168–70, 177, 178, 180, 223, 234, 245, 256, 257, 259, 260, 262, 264–66, 276, 288–91, 293, 298, 300–3, 313, 319, 321, 322, 324–26, 334, 335, 339, 340, 342, 344, 346, 347, 349, 350, 354, 355, 363, 375, 378, 380–84, 386–87, 389–91, 393, 394, 397, 399, 400, 414, 421, 430. See also shape (Form) formalism  295, 343 forms of sensible intuition (space and time)  45 foundationalism  140, 215, 232 freedom  6, 17–18, 35–6, 45, 58–60, 62, 66–7, 74, 111, 114, 117–18, 125–28, 131–33, 135, 177, 181–83, 195–96, 198, 200, 208, 211–12, 216, 220, 226–27, 240, 250–51, 268–69, 272, 287, 293, 300, 302–3, 322, 335, 339, 343, 347, 356, 361–62, 376, 392, 398, 414, 421, 429. See also liberation absolute  182, 226, 241 aesthetic  114–15

concept of  58–59, 88, 267, 295–96 and determinism  178, 294, 296 and necessity  220, 267, 414 subjective  291 of the will/free will  58, 63, 96, 126, 180, 205, 292, 294, 349, 438–40 free spirits  441 French philosophy  72 Revolution  112, 116, 178, 179, 212, 229, 272, 293 Freud, Sigmund  314 future, the  140, 189, 234, 235, 246, 332, 333, 355–58, 421, 429, 436–42 Geist (Spirit, Mind) (Hegel)  284, 290, 293, 295, 297 genius  106, 211, 224, 234, 241, 244, 246, 313, 428 genus (Gattung)  301, 320, 346, 358 German  112, 370, 371, 436 nation  20, 180, 185, 370 philosophy  73, 140, 229, 231, 272, 370, 420, 436, 437 goal  8, 32, 96, 117, 146, 158, 166, 179, 181, 193, 201, 203, 233, 242, 243, 251, 276, 284, 314, 431, 435 God  31, 34, 45, 62–63, 74, 81–83, 87–91, 114, 136, 179, 193, 226, 243, 263, 269, 290, 298, 312, 326, 332, 334, 335, 346, 351–55, 357, 358, 362, 373, 388, 395–96, 398–99, 410, 411. See also Divine, the as Absolute  302, 357 concept of  45, 82, 89, 335 existence of  62–63, 140, 193, 262 as moral order  179 as natural order  74, 81 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  3, 71–77, 111–13, 119, 120, 212, 217, 224, 231, 249, 250, 315, 422, 431, 434 Faust  20–21 good/goodness, the  268–69, 297 and evil  14, 421, 424, 436–42 government  116, 226, 331, 359–60, 365 grace  115 and dignity  113–16 Greeks, the  117, 134, 135, 300, 359, 420 guilt  244, 395–96, 399, 432, 440 habit  159, 170–1, 296, 438, 439 Halle Annals for German Science and Art  332, 334, 336 Hamann, Johann Georg  72, 94 happiness (Glűck)  60, 62, 63, 102, 133, 135, 213, 328, 330, 369, 419, 428, 442. See also highest good Hardenberg, Friedrich von. See Novalis Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  xi, 1–3, 7, 19–22, 71, 93, 97, 112, 118, 140–41, 180, 183, 211–18, 224–25, 227, 231, 235, 249–53, 271–305, 309–312, 316, 323, 331–336, 339–347, 361, 363–364, 370–371, 380–384, 386–390, 396–398, 400, 406, 412–413, 419

447

Index life  271–75, 278–79 select works: The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy  19, 249 (Elements of the) Philosophy of Right  21–22, 274, 278, 290–97, 300, 361–62, 365, 369–71, 387 Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences  21, 274–76, 278–79, 298–306, 381, 390 “Faith and Knowledge”  19, 77, 273, 278 Phenomenology of Spirit  20, 83–89, 141, 250, 253, 273, 276, 278, 379, 381–84 Science of Logic  7, 20, 274, 276, 278–79, 302, 305, 334, 341–44, 379, 380–81, 390–91, 407 Hegelianism/Hegelian(s)  333–34, 359 Left/Young  332–34, 359 Right  333 Herder, Johann Gottfried  72, 94, 112, 113, 212, 224, 231, 272 Ideas upon Philosophy and the History of Mankind  94 Hermsterhuis, Frans (François)  230 highest good  61–64, 326 history  104–5, 226, 276–77, 291, 303, 309, 334, 339, 354, 359–64, 369–70, 381, 383, 386, 422, 429 of alienation  382 of the education of consciousness  284 of the human spirit  102 natural  168 philosophy of  104, 275 world  362, 385, 387 history of philosophy  29, 139, 271, 273, 275, 303, 332, 359, 365 Hölderlin, Friedrich  3, 16, 18–19, 22, 112, 120, 183, 211–27, 230–32, 234–36, 249, 253, 272, 278 life  211–14, 217–18 select works: Bread and Wine  213 Hyperion: Or, The Hermit in Greece  212 Judgement and Being  213–14, 223 Menon’s Lament for Diotima  213 The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism  18, 213, 215, 217, 226–27, 272 “On Religion”  213 “On the Concept of Punishment”  213, 221 “On the Law of Freedom”  213, 220 humanity  35, 36, 90, 102, 108, 111, 116–18, 128, 136, 158, 212, 224, 298, 313, 314, 332, 334, 335, 348, 349, 354, 362, 370, 378, 394, 421, 422, 428. See also categorical imperative, formula of humanity human nature  72, 115, 133, 191, 241, 268, 314, 325, 329, 335, 349, 350, 354, 384, 389, 390 Humboldt, Alexander von  16, 250 Humboldt, Wilhelm von  16, 72, 112, 118, 119, 180 Hume, David  31, 73–74, 76–77, 140, 141, 146, 148, 150, 170 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion  16, 140

448

I (das Ich). See also ego (Ich); self-positing as self-posited/self-positing (Fichte)  95, 178, 182, 193, 230 idealism absolute  2, 3, 71, 141, 211, 235, 271, 276, 397 magic (Novalis)  234 subjective  2, 232, 345 transcendental  2–3, 6, 71, 96–97, 99, 158, 177, 179, 183, 200–2, 206, 208, 231–32, 272 identity abstract  409 original  260 imagination (Einbildungskraft) productive  173, 240, 244 reproductive  52 immanent  33, 66, 290, 292, 408 immediacy  287, 302, 344 indeterminacy  74, 189, 293, 294, 314 individual/individuality (Individuum/ Individualität)  132, 245, 287, 294, 297, 320, 350, 435 infinite/infinity  6, 59, 63, 74, 80–85, 90, 131–33, 171, 182, 183, 193, 209, 216, 221, 243–45, 259, 261, 262, 265, 266, 290, 300, 301, 321, 331, 348, 350, 351, 357, 381, 399, 406, 407, 409–11, 414, 415, 430, 434 instincts  115, 440. See also drive (Trieb); interest(s) institutions  8, 9, 300, 324, 363 intellect (Verstand)  8, 84, 85, 191–93, 196, 197, 199, 200, 202, 205, 312, 313, 323, 342, 344–46, 349, 351. See also understanding intelligence (Intelligenz)  59, 63, 131, 181, 233, 240–41, 245, 293, 351, 373, 374, 413 intention (Absicht)  5, 111, 142, 163, 164, 181, 247, 417 interest(s)  5–6, 30, 35, 72, 73, 111–12, 117, 129, 133, 136, 155, 157, 180, 198–99, 208, 211, 224, 227, 229, 249, 271, 272, 274, 295, 298, 310, 331, 339, 340, 359, 361, 364, 382, 396, 400, 417, 420. See also drive (Trieb); good/ goodness, the; instincts interpretation  51–52, 74–75, 94, 180, 182, 189, 231, 277, 324, 333, 335, 364, 396, 398, 399, 417, 419, 430, 438. See also explanation intuition  3, 7, 32, 42, 45–55, 56 n.1, 61–62, 65–66, 68–70, 83, 85 n.12, 97, 124–27, 133, 141, 143, 147–48, 151, 158–59, 166, 190–91, 193, 205–9, 223, 232, 235, 240, 261–63, 265–66, 298–99, 302, 340, 343, 346, 390–91, 436, 438. See also forms of sensible intuition (space and time) intellectual  62, 70, 141, 193, 206–9, 223, 261, 262, 265, 266, 343, 436 irony  396–98, 402 Socratic  397 ‘I think’  49–51, 437

Index Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich  xi, 3, 6, 10, 15, 71–91, 94–96, 113, 140, 179–80, 213, 232, 272–73 life  71–73, 76–77 select works: Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herrn Moses Mendelssohn  14, 80–85 David Hume on Faith  73–77 Jacobi to Fichte  87–91 Woldemar  16, 71–73, 76 Jena  3–6, 19, 20, 31, 94–96, 98, 99, 110, 112, 113, 119, 120, 124, 126, 139, 146, 177–79. See also University of Jena Jenaer Allgemeine Literaturzeitung  181 Jesus Christ  334, 380, 395 Jews/Judaism  9, 155, 156, 160, 333, 359, 361, 393, 421 judgement (Urteil)  31, 33, 60, 65–70, 106, 113, 114, 126–28, 142, 148–51, 159, 167, 170, 171, 173, 174, 213, 214, 419, 436, 437, 440, 441 of taste  127 Kant, Immanuel  xi, 1–4, 6, 8, 15–19, 27–72, 74, 76, 85 n.12, 87, 91 n.1, 93–8, 106–7, 112–17, 120, 124, 127, 130, 139–43, 147–8, 151, 155–59, 166–72, 174, 177–84, 188–89, 191–94, 211–12, 214–17, 225–26, 229–33, 249–50, 257, 268, 271–76, 309–11, 315–16, 319, 321–22, 324–6, 332, 343, 345, 347, 419, 422, 430, 436 life  29–31, 37–38 select works: Critique of Practical Reason  17, 31, 34, 37, 57–64, 184, 325 Critique of Pure Reason  1, 16–17, 29, 31, 33, 36, 41–56, 68, 96, 98, 106, 108, 146, 149, 151, 156–57, 160, 168–70, 184, 188, 192, 250, 272, 316 Critique of the Power of Judgement  31, 65–70, 113–14 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals  17, 31, 34, 37 “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy”  37, 94, 98 Karlsschule  111, 119 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye  xi, 3, 20, 22–3, 250, 252, 395–415, 419 life  395–96, 401–3 select works: Concluding Unscientific Postscript  22, 402, 406–13 Either/Or: A Fragment of Life  22, 398–400, 402 Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric  22, 398, 402 From the Papers of One Still Living  401 Philosophical Fragments or a Fragment of Philosophy  402 Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology  402 The Sickness Unto Death  402, 414–15 Klopstock, Friedrich  111, 229, 417

knowing/knowledge (Wissen) absolute  247, 265, 271, 276, 286, 381–83, 388, 437 immediate  246, 321 phenomenal  284, 285 pure  50 Körner, Christian Gottfried  112–13, 124–30 labor  362–3, 366, 372–79, 383, 389 division of labor  372 language  5, 75, 85, 89, 243 legislative power/legislature  226 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  32, 106, 144, 146, 156 Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy  93, 139 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  15, 16, 71, 73–74, 76 liberalism  72, 103, 136, 340, 359, 361 liberation  273, 366, 428–30. See also freedom life affirmation of  199, 350, 381, 383, 392 life-and-death struggle  287 Locke, John  32, 106, 116, 146, 153, 156 logic dialectical  7, 274, 276 formal  96, 274 and metaphysics  31, 37, 273 logical, the (das Logische)  51, 52, 54, 114, 170–72, 382, 389, 391, 406 lordship and bondage. See master/slave (Herr/Knecht) relation/dynamics love  59, 61, 83, 85, 88, 112, 114, 136, 166, 217, 230, 237, 243, 269, 339, 349, 350, 377, 398, 399, 418, 435 Schelling’s conception of  269 self-  435 machine/machinery  172, 226, 374, 430 Maimon, Salomon  xi, 3, 15, 17, 19, 95–96, 99, 140, 155–60, 167, 174 life  155–57, 160 select works: Essay on Transcendental Philosophy  156–57 Letters of Philatetes to Aenesidemus  163–65 Maimonides (Rambam)  155 Guide for the Perplexed  155 Marx, Karl  xi, 3, 9, 21–24, 237, 277, 332–34, 359–94, 419 co-authored with Friedrich Engels: Against Bruno Bauer and Company  360, 366 The Communist Manifesto  23, 360 The German Ideology  22, 363, 366 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against  22, 360, 366 life  359–61, 365–67 select works: Capital [das Kapital]  24, 363, 367 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy  363, 367 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts  22, 361–63, 372–92

449

Index The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte  23, 361 Grundrisse [Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy]  366–67 “On the Jewish Question”  333, 361 “Theses on Feuerbach”  361, 393–94 “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction”  22, 361–62, 369–71 Marxism  29 Masonic lodge  93–94 master morality. See morality (Moralität), master master/slave (Herr/Knecht) dynamics/dialectic  106, 286 materialism  332, 361–64, 380, 385, 393, 394, 423 mathematics  30, 42, 53, 103, 105, 156, 169, 173, 262, 409 matter (Materie)  58, 60, 70, 71, 84, 85, 127, 132, 133, 159, 169, 171, 292, 319, 326, 391 maxim  35, 36, 57–61, 66, 328, 347 meaning (Bedeutung/Sinn)  29, 33, 53–55, 109, 116, 134, 151, 152, 168–70, 189, 202, 246, 247, 256, 269, 312, 321, 322, 324–26, 335, 339–41, 344, 345, 349, 357, 397, 408, 412, 414, 432 mediation  74, 193, 244, 287, 288, 342–44, 388, 390, 410 medicine  111, 119, 155, 156, 160 memory  166, 352, 424, 429, 433. See also imagination (Einbildungskraft) Mendelssohn, Moses  15, 17, 71, 73, 76, 80–86, 88, 114, 155, 156, 160 Morgenstuden, oder Vorlesungen Über das Daseyn Gottes [Morning hours or lectures about God's existence]  156 meta-epistemology/meta-epistemological  93 metaphysics  2, 17, 18, 29–33, 37, 41–45, 73, 103, 104, 106–8, 111, 141, 150, 157, 168, 174, 215, 226, 271, 273, 310, 312, 324, 329, 331, 343, 347, 419, 436 traditional  32–33 method/procedure  43, 171, 200, 243, 273, 285, 298, 334, 339, 341, 346, 413 mind  1, 3, 32, 33, 47, 54, 68, 91, 106, 127, 129, 143, 149–52, 156, 164, 166, 190, 191, 200, 242, 271, 275, 285, 289, 290, 293, 311, 321, 341, 349, 363, 381, 382, 434. See also Geist (Spirit, Mind) monarchy  360 monism  326 moral (moralisch) consciousness  221 law  34, 35, 58–64, 66, 67, 135, 136, 220, 221, 324, 325 theology  192, 326 theory (die Moral)  35, 116, 310 morality (Moralität) master  421–2 Nietzsche’s critique of  419–22 slave  421

450

morals (Sitten)  31, 34, 35, 37, 62–3, 226, 268, 324–30, 421 motion  82, 84, 115, 241, 353 motive(s)/motivation  3, 6, 30, 34–6, 59, 63, 73, 111, 113, 132, 140, 230, 231, 250, 295, 310, 320, 321, 324, 325, 327–29, 343, 361, 364, 399, 420–21 Mozart, Amadeus  112 Musenalmanach  120, 212 mystical, the (das Mystische)  346, 390 mysticism  88, 345, 346, 394 mythology  227, 251, 370, 440 Napoleon I  19–21, 180, 185, 272, 273, 278, 361, 422 naturalism  74, 385 nature as object  173, 312, 375, 384, 386 Naturphilosophie (Schelling)  250, 253 necessity and freedom  220, 267 negation (Negation)  127, 287, 352, 370, 380, 381, 386, 389, 390 of negation  380, 381, 387, 389, 390 negative, the (das Negative)  60, 269, 294, 302, 345, 381, 384, 391 negativity (Negativität)  289, 294, 343, 383, 389, 391. See also negation of negation Newton, Isaac  106 Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel  212, 214, 217, 230, 232, 236, 273 Nietzsche, Friedrich  xi, 3, 22, 24–25, 314, 400, 417–42 life  417–19, 423–25 select works: The Antichrist  25, 422, 424 Beyond Good and Evil  25, 421, 424, 436–42 The Birth of Tragedy  24, 420, 422–23 The Case of Wagner  422, 424 Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices  420, 424 Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is  25, 422, 424 “Essay on History”  423 The Gay Science  24–5, 420, 424 Human, All Too Human  420–1, 424 Nietzsche contra Wagner  25, 424 On the Genealogy of Morals  25, 421, 424 “Schopenhauer as Educator”  424, 428–35 Thus Spoke Zarathustra  24–5, 418, 420, 424 Twilight of the Idols  25, 422, 424 The Will to Power  25, 425 nihilism  74, 88, 422 nobility/noble(s)  121, 229 non-being (Nichtsein)  163, 164, 204, 269, 385, 390 nothing (Nichts)  297 Notion (Begriff)  284–86, 288, 343, 346, 419. See also Concept (Begriff)

Index noumena  2, 8, 34, 54, 55, 158, 181, 183, 311, 314. See also thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)  3–6, 10, 93, 112, 183, 211–12, 217, 229–37, 249, 253 life  229–31, 236–37 select works: Christianity and Europe  230 Faith and Love  230, 237 Fichte Studies  10 n.2, 230–32, 240–42 Hymns to the Night  19, 230 Logological Fragments  233, 243–47 Miscellaneous Observations  233 Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia  230, 234 Pollen  230, 237 objective mind/spirit  274, 388. See spirit, objective objective/objectivity (objectiv/Objectivität)  205, 260, 262, 296, 319, 321, 342, 354, 376, 383, 386–9, 391, 397, 407, 409, 411, 412 ontological proof  262 ontology  211, 214, 397 opposition/opposite(s)  260, 262, 263, 265, 266, 292, 293, 295, 312, 324, 343, 381, 382, 388, 393, 420 organism  244, 261, 262, 325, 339 organization of masses  360 other/otherness  286, 305, 386 of itself  286 ought (Sollen)  34, 35, 59, 62, 115, 125, 148, 151, 153, 207–9, 245, 291, 300, 324–26, 345, 362, 391, 398, 431 Overman (Ȕbermensch)  420, 421 overproduction  377 Owl of Minerva  291 pantheism controversy (Pantheismusstreit)/Spinozism dispute  71, 76, 96 particular/particularity  264, 292–94, 297, 339, 356, 390 principle of  264 passion  131, 157, 199, 272, 370, 378, 386, 399, 410–12 past, the  5, 364, 379, 422 pathos  370 perception  9, 52, 148, 158, 159, 223, 246, 252, 275, 302, 344, 345, 348, 353, 382, 393, 437 perpetual peace  226 person  36, 106, 111, 114–18, 130–32, 191, 198–200, 202–4, 207, 212, 244, 246, 256, 328, 344, 380, 384, 408, 410, 413, 414, 428, 434, 439, 440 perspectivism (Nietzsche)  419 pessimism  313, 435. See nihilism Pforta (Schulpforta)  177, 184, 417, 423 phenomena  2, 6, 8, 34, 69, 131, 132, 134, 136, 142, 158, 268, 283–85, 296, 311, 319–22, 346, 382, 384, 388 phenomenology  9, 20, 141, 183, 250, 253, 273, 276, 278, 384. See also Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

philology  304, 417–19, 423. See also classical, philology Philosophical Journal (Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft Teutscher Gelehrten)  179 philosophizing  234 philosophy. See also history of philosophy; metaphysics and Christianity  334 content of  202, 299 and its time  271 of mind/spirit  274, 276, 305 of nature  7, 250, 251, 256, 257, 273, 274, 276, 305, 339, 345, 359, 387, 390 positive  250–52 as rational theology  355 of religion  8, 9, 104, 179, 275, 331, 387, 388 as science  96, 142 speculative  31, 257, 332, 339, 347, 355, 370 theoretical vs. practical  95, 107, 127, 139, 140, 177–80, 182, 183, 192, 193, 324 physicalism. See materialism Pietism  29, 30, 229 pity (Mitleid)  244, 428 Plato  5, 7, 141, 261, 309, 320, 419 poet  112, 216, 229, 234, 243, 245, 246, 417, 423 poetry  211, 212, 215–17, 226, 230, 234, 245–46, 400 poet-thinker (Schiller)  111 political economy  23, 24, 72, 76, 272, 360, 363, 366, 367, 372–74, 378, 383 philosophy  7, 118, 272, 274 polytheism  227 positing (Setzen)  65, 182, 183, 216, 259, 294, 305, 380–81, 385, 387. See also self-positing positive, the (das Positive)  381, 389, 391, 414 possession  8, 76, 104, 300, 384 postmodern/postmodernism  211, 400, 422 postulates of practical reason  326. See also belief (Glaube) poverty  83, 112, 132, 351, 366, 380 power  8–9, 25, 43, 53, 65–70, 72, 75, 96, 102, 103, 117, 124, 126, 127, 148, 155, 191, 200, 206, 216, 226, 227, 234, 245, 260, 269, 274, 284, 289, 293, 296, 311, 322, 340, 348–52, 362, 372, 377, 381, 385, 414–15, 421, 439–40, 442. See also will to power practical attitude  231, 292, 293, 379 postulates  226 reason  35, 36, 44, 58–64, 97, 114, 124–26, 128, 182, 184, 193, 325, 326 predicate(s)  67, 103, 108, 149, 151–52, 190, 204, 240, 251, 258, 292, 311, 340, 353, 389, 438 presence/present, the (Gegenwart)  44, 90, 102–3, 116, 132, 148–9, 196, 199, 208, 244, 262, 290, 291, 296, 303, 339, 370, 378, 422 presupposition(s)  6, 49, 61, 63, 127, 150, 188, 191, 200, 201, 206, 223, 285, 298, 303, 320, 326, 341, 373, 392, 397

451

Index priest/priesthood/priestly  93, 98, 177, 226–27, 377, 421–22 principle of consciousness (Satz des Bewuβtseyns) (Reinhold)  97, 109–10, 140, 142, 147, 157, 189–91 principle of determinability  125 principle of representation (Reinhold)  95, 181 principle of sufficient reason  148–49, 152, 159, 199, 200, 309, 310–11, 315–16, 321–2 production  61, 70, 256, 351, 362, 434–35 artistic  233 human  116, 188 process/act of  362, 372–79, 382 self-  295, 434–35 promises/promise-making  43, 63, 83, 104, 134, 152, 179, 201, 326, 360, 398 property rights/rightful possession  45, 69, 80, 81, 114, 148, 174, 235, 356, 372, 374, 376–79, 388 proposition (Satz)  6, 51, 53, 54, 85, 96, 97, 109, 134, 141, 169, 173, 189–91, 240, 243, 258, 259, 265, 349, 437 Protestantism  9, 94, 98, 230, 355 psychoanalysis  422 psychology  141, 144, 309, 314, 347, 400, 440–41 empirical  104 moral  116 rational  104, 151–2 punishment  213, 221, 222, 325, 326, 377, 422, 432 purpose/purposive activity  5, 8, 43, 44, 53, 55, 57, 74, 76, 99, 115–17, 127–29, 134, 136, 142, 147, 180–81, 196, 198, 203, 225, 246, 261, 287, 299, 300, 302, 304, 312, 322, 339, 375, 380, 391, 395, 399, 419–20, 422, 429, 434, 437, 440 quality  70, 127, 169, 292, 322, 356, 413 of human nature  384 and quantity  388 sensuous  292 quantity  30, 55, 132, 172, 320 and quality (see quality, and quantity) of labor  363 rationalism  32, 74–76, 345 French  229 skeptical (Maimon)  157 realism  265, 276 empirical  159 epistemological (Hegel)  276 and idealism  256, 265 logical  95, 99 reality  6, 33–34, 116, 132, 143, 166, 169, 179–80, 202, 214, 223, 231, 233, 241, 262–65, 271, 274–76, 284, 289, 310, 357, 376, 382, 385, 387–89, 419 alienated  382 of cognition  136, 146, 152–53, 285

452

material/objective  32, 55, 63–65, 67, 159, 173, 334, 342–43, 391 not true/illusionary  369–70, 382 relation between the human mind and  271, 276 of the thing-in-itself  180–81, 197 reason (Vernunft)  8, 32, 41–43, 65–67, 70, 74–77, 93, 105–6, 115, 117–18, 133–36, 141–42, 149, 152, 172, 177, 198, 200–2, 208, 211, 215, 221, 226–27, 231–32, 252, 257–58, 260, 262, 265, 272, 291–92, 295, 300, 347–49, 356, 362, 382, 439–40. See also fact of reason; philosophy, theoretical vs. practical; principle of sufficient reason autonomy of  63, 169–71 and Being  341–42 as the capacity of the power of thinking  103 causality of  66 critique of  33, 419 faculty of reason  320 and faith  96, 157, 170 ideas of  65, 117, 133, 152, 164, 166 limits/limitations of  1, 159, 345, 350 philosophical/philosophizing  106–7, 188, 191 power of  75, 96 as the power of connection  124 practical  35–6, 44, 57–64, 97, 126, 326 pure  45–6, 59, 61, 107, 127 speculative  43–5, 59, 64, 83 theoretical and  114, 124–25, 128, 149, 182, 192–94, 240 and understanding  107–8, 152, 159 recognition (Anerkennen)  192, 216, 268, 345, 352, 382 mutual  287–88 reconciliation  135, 181, 268, 271, 291, 300, 399 reflection  42, 46, 55, 68, 85, 109, 136, 159, 189–90, 215, 230–33, 240–44, 256, 258, 263–65, 288, 290, 293, 313, 319, 322, 334–35, 343, 369–70, 376, 390, 392, 406–7, 409–10, 414, 421–22, 433 self-  232–33, 252 unity of  262 Reformation, the  300 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard  xi, 3, 15, 74, 88, 91, 93–109, 139–40, 143–44, 146–47, 151, 157, 159, 163, 178, 181–82, 188–92, 212, 230, 232, 236, 251, 257, 272, 301, 331 life  93–95, 98–99 select works: Contributions to an Easier Overview of the State of Philosophy at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century  95, 99 Contributions to the Correction of Previous Misunderstandings of the Philosophers  95, 98–99 Essay on a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation  95, 98

Index Letters on the Kantian Philosophy  94–95, 98, 102–5 On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge  95, 98, 106–10 On the Previous Fate of the Kantian Philosophy  98 religion  xi, 8–9, 29, 33, 63, 74, 83, 86, 88–91, 136, 157, 178–80, 225, 227, 245, 272–73, 290, 298–300, 340, 356–58, 362, 369, 373–74, 380–82, 387–88, 396–97, 419, 420–21, 429. See also theology criticism of  369–70 essence of/analysis of  331–5, 337, 348, 351–55 as a product of self-alienation  377, 387, 393 religious  155 representation (Vorstellung)  2, 32, 42–3, 45–53, 55, 59, 62–63, 66, 68–70, 82–83, 85–86, 89, 93, 95, 97, 102–4, 106–10, 124–25, 140, 142, 146–53, 157, 164, 168, 174, 180–81, 188–91, 193, 195–201, 203–5, 207–8, 220, 232, 242–44, 275, 283, 290, 292, 295–96, 298–9, 309–13, 319–21, 328, 335 responsibility  233–34, 398–9, 439–40 moral  233 return into itself (Rűckkehr in sich)  286 revelation  17, 20, 22, 80, 83, 89, 96, 178, 233, 245, 311, 349, 353, 392, 398 of God  269 revolution  23, 31, 42, 116, 177–78, 211, 246, 277, 290, 333, 360–61, 363, 430 French (see French, Revolution) Industrial  211 in philosophy/Copernican Revolution  9, 31–34, 257 Rheinische/Neue Rheinishe Zeitung [Rhenish/ New Rhenish Newspaper]  359–60, 365–66 rhetoric  230 Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich /Jean Paul  231, 237 and duties  104 vs. ethics  115, 399, 439 of individuals  46, 296–97 natural  18, 104, 278 right (Recht)  41, 43, 106, 147, 149, 184, 207, 225, 278, 290–92, 295, 300, 343, 362, 365, 440, 442 Romans/Roman Empire/Rome  19–20 Romanticism  8, 93, 111, 177, 235, 259, 402, 417, 436. See also irony; Romantic British  118 Early German/Jena  3–6, 29, 71, 112, 118, 211, 229, 231, 259 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  15–16, 72, 111, 116, 272, 296, 422 Ruge, Arnold  19, 22, 24, 332, 334, 337, 359 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von  xi, 1–4, 16, 20, 22–23, 71, 73–74, 93, 99, 112, 141, 183, 211–13, 215–18, 227, 231, 235, 249–70,

272–73, 278, 309, 311–12, 323, 339, 343, 345–46, 398, 402, 436 life  249–50, 253 select works: Ages of the World  251 First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature  19 Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy  261–66 Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature  18 Of the I as Principle of Philosophy  253 Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters  250–51, 253, 267–70 Presentation of My System of Philosophy  249–50, 253, 256–60 System of Transcendental Idealism  19, 99, 253 Schiller, Friedrich  xi, 3, 15–19, 71, 111–37, 184, 211–13, 216–18, 224, 229–31, 236–37, 272 life  111–13, 119–21 select works: The Gods of Greece  112, 119 History of the Thirty Years War  112, 120 “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner”  113, 124–30 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man  114, 116, 120, 131–37 “Ode to Joy”  112 “On Grace and Dignity”  113–16, 120 “On the Art of Tragedy”  114, 120 “On the Sublime”  113 The Robbers  16, 111, 119 Wallenstein  113, 120 Schlegel, August Wilhelm  3, 18, 112, 120, 231, 237, 249 Schlegel, Friedrich  3–7, 16, 18–19, 93, 112–13, 218, 229–31, 233, 236–37, 249, 253, 395, 398, 402 life  4–5, 16, 18–19 select works: Lucinde  5, 19 On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians  4 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  4–8, 19, 180, 237, 309, 315 life  4–5, 16, 19, 21 select works: The Christian Faith  9 On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers  8 Schmidt, Carl Christian Erhard  232 scholastics  244, 321 Schopenhauer, Arthur  xi, 17, 20–22, 24, 139, 141, 144, 275, 309–30, 402, 417, 420, 423–24, 437–38. See Nietzsche, Friedrich, select works: “Schopenhauer as Educator” life  309–10, 315–17 select works: “On the Basis of Morals”  22, 310, 313–14, 324–30

453

Index On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason  20, 309–10, 315–16 “On the Freedom of Human Will”  310 On the Will in Nature  22, 310, 316–17 Parerga and Paralipomena  141, 310, 317 The World as the Will and Representation  141, 310–13, 316–17, 319–23 Schulze, Gottlob Ernst (Aenesidemus)  xi, 3, 15, 17, 21, 95–97, 139–44, 159, 163, 181, 309, 315 life  139–41, 144 select works: Aenesidemus—Or Concerning the Foundations of the Philosophy of the Elements Issued by Prof. Reinhold in Jena Together with a Defense of Skepticism Against the Pretensions of the Critique of Reason  17–18, 139–42, 144, 146–54 An Outline of the Philosophical Sciences  139, 144 “Aphorisms on the Absolute”  141, 144–45 Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy  139–40, 144 On Human Cognition  141, 144 science  7, 30, 33, 41–44, 59, 74, 87, 90, 93, 104, 142, 166, 168, 174, 181, 200, 211, 226, 231, 234, 256, 261–62, 265, 273, 298, 303–5, 341, 343, 347–48, 441. See also Wissenschaftslehre of consciousness  142 empirical/inductive  233, 301–2 of the faculty of representation  108–10 first/foundational  102–3, 105–7, 177, 188–89 Hegelian  273–74, 276, 383–84 of knowledge  181–83, 196 natural  69, 141, 170, 172, 231, 331, 339, 356, 375, 388 political/of right  290–97, 388 positive  380 of pure reason  46 social  361, 370 standpoint of  283–86 self, the  2, 50, 126, 131–32, 215–16, 233, 245, 277, 287, 313, 339, 386–87, 399–400, 414–15 as abstraction of man  383–84 as the rational individual  181, 397 as subjectivity  397–400, 414 self-consciousness  58, 97, 204–6, 214–15, 233, 268, 288, 297, 312, 321, 348–49, 351, 369, 379, 382–83, 388–89 alienation of  383–87 and consciousness  206, 208, 353, 383–84, 387 of freedom  183, 295 nature of  214, 289, 295 original unity of  49–51, 177, 182 in relation to another self-consciousness  286–87 self-determination  35, 126–28, 197, 294 self-evident principle  71, 93, 95, 97, 232 self-identity  182, 214, 232 selfishness/self-interest  129, 268, 325–26, 339. See also egoism self-knowledge  41, 344, 353–54

454

self-positing  2, 95, 178, 182, 193, 230. See also positing (Setzen) self-recognition  434 seminary  93, 212, 401 Barnabite(s)  93, 98 Tübingen (see Tübinger Stift) sensibility human  34, 44, 46–50, 53, 66, 68, 85, 172, 339, 351, 386, 420 and understanding  107–8, 158, 170 sensuous (sinnlich)/sensible  114–15, 117, 220, 225, 292, 373, 375, 382, 385, 389 activity  387–89, 391, 393–94 drive  131–32 intellect/perception  344–45, 347, 349–50, 356 sex/sexual drive  314 shape (Gestalt)  296. See also form singularity  56 Sittlichkeit. See ethical life (Sittlichkeit) skepticism  9, 32, 97, 139–43, 146, 263, 313, 430 ancient Pyrrhonism  141 Cartesian/Cartesian doubt  159 Fichte’s reply to  159, 177, 179, 181, 191–92 Humean  31–3, 71, 141, 146, 148–49, 152–53 Maimon’s  155, 157–59, 163–64 moral  96 philosophical  96 slave morality. See morality, slave sociality Socrates  271, 397, 402, 411–12, 422 soul (Seele)  34, 45, 63, 88–91, 107, 193, 199, 247, 266, 284, 296, 345–46, 353, 356, 362, 378, 428–29, 432–34, 439 beautiful (see beautiful soul) immortality of  61, 96, 331, 411 inner  115 space  50, 56, 70, 91, 173, 263, 283, 304, 310, 314, 339–40, 351, 362, 407 and time  32, 45–46, 50–51, 53–4, 56, 85, 108, 158, 172, 190–91, 321 speculative  7, 301, 347, 381 philosophy  31, 257, 332, 339, 347, 355, 370 reason/thought  43–45, 59, 64, 381–82, 397, 412 Spinoza, Benedictus de  6, 17, 72–4, 80–81, 83–86, 88, 141, 156–58, 224–25, 230, 236, 257, 259, 272, 343, 345 Spinozism  6, 71, 73–74, 76, 84, 96, 140, 156, 160, 256–57 spirit (Geist), the  83, 88–89, 102, 106, 136, 177, 226, 244, 269, 277, 284, 290, 295, 297, 302, 347. See also mind absolute  2, 276, 389 objective  274, 383, 388 of our age/of the epoch  xi, 1, 102 philosophy of  226, 274, 276, 305 revelation of  392 subjective  388 world spirit  295–96

Index spiritless (conditions)  362, 369–70 state, the (der Staat)  8, 215, 226, 245, 290–91, 295, 362, 369–70, 381–82, 387–88, 396, 433 Strauss, David  20–21, 24, 334, 379, 417, 423 striving (streben)  2, 9, 182–3, 191, 193, 225, 240–41, 243, 312, 320, 386, 409 subject, the  48–49, 52, 57, 65, 97, 109, 124, 151–52, 180–81, 189–90, 196, 204, 206, 223, 232–33, 242, 250–51, 256, 264, 266, 304, 310, 321, 324, 341, 353, 360, 362, 364, 382, 385, 389, 391, 409–10, 437–38. See also I, the subjectivity  2, 183, 214–15, 232, 235, 250, 260, 262, 343, 385, 389, 397, 407–13 abstract  407 subject-object relationship, the  232, 310, 312 sublate (aufheben)  302, 356 sublime  83, 85–86, 113–14, 134, 208, 256, 350, 380, 435 substance  33, 55, 74, 81–82, 84, 107, 224, 265–66, 290–92, 295–96, 312, 343, 379, 381, 419 ethical  128, 297 supernatural/supernaturalism  369 synthetic a priori judgments  33–34, 169, 172–73, 436–37 system, philosophical  1, 5–8, 31, 36, 90, 95–97, 143, 157, 177, 180–81, 196, 199, 202, 230–31, 251–55, 274–77, 397. See also philosophy, as science taste  90, 104, 166, 351, 356, 440–42. See also judgement judgement of  114, 127 Tathandlung (fact-act) (Fichte)  182, 191, 208 Teleology  215, 225 Thalia/Rheinische Thalia/New Thalia  17, 112–13, 119–20, 212, 224 theology  5, 7–8, 29–30, 71, 87, 102, 104, 139, 144, 151–52, 177, 249, 272, 278, 326, 331–32, 334–35, 346, 355–56, 369, 381, 387, 395, 400, 417–19, 423. See also religion, philosophy of as anthropology  355 moral (Kant)  192, 326 philosophical vs. biblical  7–8 thing-in-itself (Ding an sich)  2, 34, 43, 45, 65, 70, 140–43, 168–69, 177, 180–81, 183, 191–92, 196–97, 250, 271, 275, 311, 319–22, 437. See also being-in-itself; noumena thinking/thought  1, 8, 32, 43–44, 47–51, 53–6, 66, 72, 75, 80–83, 85, 88, 90, 110–11, 117, 147–48, 150–52, 155, 157–58, 164, 168–73, 191–92, 198, 206, 214, 225, 232, 241–42, 252, 258, 334, 340–42, 344–46, 348, 351, 353, 388–91, 397–98, 407, 409 abstract  381–83, 389–91, 393, 409 activity of  3, 275 and being  3, 262–65, 275–76, 334, 345, 409 as free  181, 197, 205, 290

speculative  381–82, 397, 412 synthetic unity of  47 Tieck, Ludwig  4, 112, 120, 229, 231, 237 trade  29, 72, 361, 378, 395, 429 tragedy  20, 24, 213, 218, 422–23 Greek  420 tragic hero  398 transcendental deduction  46–8 transcendental idealism. See idealism, transcendental Trinity, the  349, 357 True, the (das Wahre)  87, 89–90, 285, 410 Tübinger Stift  212, 217, 249, 253, 272, 278, 436 unconditional/Unconditioned, the  43, 58–59, 61, 65, 233 unconscious  432, 440 understanding, the (Verstand)  47–50, 52, 54, 65–68, 74, 108, 126, 152, 170–74, 262–64, 293, 302, 322, 350–51. See also categories, Kantian; intellect Maimon’s critique of Kant on  158 and sensibility  158–59 unity (Einheit), the  33, 48–49, 52–56, 68, 70, 96, 124, 183, 216, 240, 265, 291, 294, 297, 304, 321, 345–46, 349, 352, 357–58, 428 of consciousness  50–51, 56 n.1 negative  391, 414 of opposites  271 of thought and being  262–63, 345, 397, 407 universal, the  7, 67–69, 188–89, 261–62, 266, 292, 294–96, 300–1, 331, 336 abstract  381 concept  72, 74 and particular  67–68, 261, 264, 301 will  268 universal antinomy of thought  169, 171 universality  132, 163, 293–94, 296, 303, 340, 356, 375, 390 of man  375 of moral law  34–35, 59, 399 the test of  36 n.2 University of Basel  418, 420, 423 University of Berlin/Humboldt University  5, 20, 180, 185, 250–51, 253, 274–75, 278, 309–10, 315–16, 331, 336, 359, 365 University of Erlangen  250, 331, 336 University of Heidelberg  274, 278, 331, 333, 336–37 University of Jena  20, 94, 96, 98, 112–13, 119–20, 177–79, 181, 184, 212, 224, 230, 236, 249, 263, 272–73, 309, 315, 331, 359, 365 violence  45, 128, 312, 442 of human nature  314 virtue  7, 33, 52, 63, 80, 82, 89, 173, 223, 245, 258, 261, 269, 286, 326, 408. See also highest good the origin of  220

455

Index Wagner, Richard  20, 24–5, 334, 417–18, 420, 422–24 Weimar as an intellectual center  112 Weimar Classicism  18, 94, 112–13 “What is rational, is actual And what is actual, is rational.” See Doppelsatz (Hegel) whole, the/wholeness  69–70, 82, 112, 132, 202, 241, 246–47, 260, 286, 303–5, 319 as circle of circles  303 of nature  70, 319, 375–76, 391 unity of  267Wieland, Christoph Martin  16, 72, 76, 93–94, 98, 112, 119, 229 will (Wille), the  35, 41, 57–64, 83, 124–26, 139, 221, 292–99, 310–14, 317, 319–22, 325–27, 349, 356, 419, 425, 438–40. See also autonomy; choice; cunning, will; freedom

456

autonomy/freedom of  60, 292, 294–95, 349, 438 as causality  47 determination of  57–9, 61, 63–64, 125, 127, 292 Schopenhauer’s conception of  310–13 as thing-in-itself  319, 321 will to power  25, 314, 419–21, 440 Wissenschaftslehre (Fichte)  2, 6–7, 18, 74, 99, 177–84, 195–209, 212, 230, 232–33, 236, 240, 257, 272, 341 Wolff, Christian  30, 32, 156 world history. See history, world Zarathustra  24–25, 418, 420–21, 424 Zinzendorf, Nicolaus  230, 236