The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism [1st ed.] 9783030445706, 9783030445713

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The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism Edited by  Jon Stewart

Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism

Series Editor Matthew C. Altman Philosophy & Religious Studies Central Washington University Ellensburg, WA, USA

Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism is a series of comprehensive and authoritative edited volumes on the major German idealist philosophers and their critics. Underpinning the series is the successful Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism (2014), edited by Matthew C. Altman, which provides an overview of the period, its greatest philosophers, and its historical and philosophical importance. Individual volumes focus on specific philosophers and major themes, offering a more detailed treatment of the many facets of their work in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and several other areas. Each volume is edited by one or more internationally recognized experts in the subject, and contributors include both established figures and younger scholars with innovative readings. The series offers a wide-ranging and authoritative insight into German Idealism, appropriate for both students and specialists. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14696

Jon Stewart Editor

The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism

Editor Jon Stewart Slovak Academy of Sciences Bratislava, Slovakia

Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism ISBN 978-3-030-44570-6    ISBN 978-3-030-44571-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar ­ ­methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or ­omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: The Print Collector / Alamy Stock Photo. ‘Seine River in Paris’, Paul Ambroise Valery. Jacket concept: Katalin Nun Stewart This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism is a publication series dedicated to studying German Idealism in its different aspects. The present Handbook takes up the relation of German Idealism vis-à-vis the existentialist movement. The goal of this collection is thus to explore the many connections between these two major schools in Continental philosophy. The relation between these intellectual traditions has rarely been explored at the macrolevel since a handful of clichés have long reigned about it. In standard histories of philosophy, existentialism is commonly presented as a critical reaction to and a radical rejection of German Idealism. Existentialism is often seen as an attempt to return to immediate life and the lived experience. While existentialism tends to focus on issues such as despair, anxiety and crisis situations, German Idealism, by contrast, is often seen as engaging in a dry and sober analysis of reason. The existentialists are thus thought to have rejected the idealist way of doing philosophy and the traditional palette of questions posed by German Idealism. Instead, they wanted to develop a new way of thinking that was appropriate for their own time, which was characterized by political oppression, war, social upheaval and the collapse of traditional values. This meant getting away from abstractions that seemed to explain nothing since they were so distant from the experienced reality of the real world. Sometimes this is seen in nuce in Kierkegaard’s famous critique of Hegel’s speculative philosophy. According to the traditional narrative, this is the moment when classical German Idealism comes to an end and the school of existentialism begins. The way in which this is often portrayed in overviews of the history of philosophy is that there is an abrupt break in the development of philosophy that began in the nineteenth century with Kierkegaard and the emergence of existentialism. v

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The present volume represents an attempt to revisit this traditional view with a critical eye. In the first half of the volume the contributors explore ways in which the individual German idealists anticipated some of the key ideas commonly associated with existentialism. The second half examines concrete instances where the leading theorists of existentialism made use of the German idealists as sources of inspiration. With these two approaches a number of common features emerge that connect these two philosophical traditions. Instead of seeing a radical break between these two philosophical schools, the present volume presents a picture of continuity and smooth transition. Bratislava, Slovakia December 2019

Jon Stewart

Series Editor’s Preface

The era of German Idealism stands alongside ancient Greece and the French Enlightenment as one of the most fruitful and influential periods in the history of philosophy. Beginning with the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and ending about ten years after Hegel’s death in 1831, the period of “classical German philosophy” transformed whole fields of philosophical endeavor. The intellectual energy of this movement is still very much alive in contemporary philosophy; the philosophers of that period continue to inform our thinking and spark debates of interpretation. After a period of neglect as a result of the early analytic philosophers’ rejection of idealism, interest in the field has grown exponentially in recent years. Indeed, the study of German Idealism has perhaps never been more active in the English-­speaking world than it is today. Many books appear every year that offer historical/interpretive approaches to understanding the work of the German idealists, and many others adopt and develop their insights and apply them to contemporary issues in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, among other fields. In addition, a number of international journals are devoted to idealism as a whole and to specific idealist philosophers, and journals in both the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophies have regular contributions on the German idealists. In numerous countries, there are regular conferences and study groups run by philosophical associations that focus on this period and its key figures, especially Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. As part of this growing discussion, the volumes in the Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism series are designed to provide overviews of the major figures and movements in German Idealism, with a breadth and depth of coverage that distinguishes them from other anthologies. Chapters have been vii

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specially commissioned for this series, and they are written by established and emerging scholars from throughout the world. Contributors not only provide overviews of their subject matter but also explore the cutting edge of the field by advancing original theses. Some authors develop or revise positions that they have taken in their other publications, and some take novel approaches that challenge existing paradigms. The Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism thus give students a natural starting point from which to begin their study of German Idealism, and they serve as a resource for advanced scholars to engage in meaningful discussions about the movement’s philosophical and historical importance. In short, the Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism have comprehensiveness, accessibility, depth, and philosophical rigor as their overriding goals. These are challenging aims, to be sure, especially when held simultaneously, but that is the task that the excellent scholars who are editing and contributing to these volumes have set for themselves. 

Matthew C. Altman

Acknowledgement

This work was produced at the Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences. It was supported by the Agency VEGA under the project Synergy and Conflict as Sources of Cultural Identity, No. 2/0025/20.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Questions of Identity and Difference in the Traditions of German Idealism and Existentialism  1 Jon Stewart Part I Anticipations of Existentialism in the German Idealists  25 2 The Stumbling Block of Existence in F. H. Jacobi 27 Paolo Livieri 3 Kant and Existentialism: Inescapable Freedom and Self-Deception 51 Roe Fremstedal 4 Fichte and Existentialism: Freedom and Finitude, Self-Positing and Striving 77 Steven Hoeltzel 5 Schelling as a Transitional Figure from Idealism to Existentialism103 Zoltán Gyenge 6 “Return to Intervention in the Life of Human Beings”: Existentialist Themes in the Development of Hegel’s Social and Political Philosophy129 C. Allen Speight xi

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7 The Existentialist Basis of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism149 Robert Wicks 8 An Early Ally of Existentialism? Trendelenburg’s Logical Investigations in the Mirror of Kierkegaard’s Literary Project169 Heiko Schulz Part II The Existentialists’ Use of the German Idealists 207 9 Kierkegaard: A Transitional Figure from German Idealism to Existentialism209 Jon Stewart 10 “The Honeymoon of German Philosophy”: Nietzsche and German Idealism241 Daniel Conway 11 Buber and German Idealism: Between Philosophical Anthropology and Philosophy of Religion267 Peter Šajda 12 Historicism, Neo-Idealism, and Modern Theology: Paul Tillich and German Idealism287 Christian Danz 13 “The Last Kantian”: Outlines of Karl Jaspers’s Ambivalent Reception of German Idealism305 István Czakó 14 Beyond the Critique of Judgment: Arendt and German Idealism339 Matthew Wester 15 Heidegger and Kant, or Heidegger’s Poetic Idealism of Imagination363 David Espinet

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16 Heidegger and German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel): Subjectivity and Finitude387 Sylvaine Gourdain and Lucian Ionel 17 Jacques Maritain: A Thomist Encounters Existentialism419 Lee C. Barrett 18 The Ethics of Resistance: Camus’s Encounter with German Idealism439 Thomas P. Miles 19 Merleau-Ponty and Hegel: Meaning and Its Expression in History473 David Ciavatta 20 Hegel and Sartre: The Search for Totality499 Bruce Baugh 21 Women, Jews, and Other Others: The Influence of Hegel on Beauvoir and Levinas523 Claire Katz 22 Conclusion: Anticipations and Influences555 Jon Stewart Author Index561 Subject Index569

Notes on Contributors

Lee  C.  Barrett  is the Mary and Henry Stager Professor of Theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary. He is the author of Abingdon Pillars of Theology: Kierkegaard (2010), and Eros and Self-Emptying: Intersections of Kierkegaard and Augustine (2013). He has edited Kierkegaard as Theologian (2018), co-edited Kierkegaard in Context: A Festschrift for Jon Stewart (2019), and co-edited Kierkegaard and the Bible, vols. I and II (2010), in the Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources series. He has served as an editor for the International Kierkegaard Commentary series, an editorial consultant for Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, and is a past president of the Søren Kierkegaard Society. Bruce  Baugh  is Professor of Philosophy at Thompson Rivers University (Canada). He is the author of French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (2003) and editor and translator of Benjamin Fondane’s Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays (2016). From 2005 to 2015, he was Executive Editor of Sartre Studies International. He has published numerous articles on Jean-­Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, Spinoza and Benjamin Fondane. His articles have appeared in, among others, the Journal of Value Inquiry, the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Continental Philosophy Review, Philosophy and Literature, the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. David Ciavatta  is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto. He specializes in German Idealism and twentieth-­ century Existentialism and Phenomenology. His research has focused primarily on issues in the philosophy of action, ontology, social xv

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­ hilosophy, and aesthetics. He is the author of Spirit, the Family, and the p Unconscious in Hegel’s Philosophy (2009), and he has published articles in such journals as The Owl of Minerva, Hegel Bulletin, and The Review of Metaphysics. His current research involves the exploration of Hegel’s philosophy of art and its implications for understanding Hegel’s epistemology, metaphysics, and politics. Daniel  Conway is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Affiliate Professor of Religious Studies, Film Studies, and Law, and Arts & Humanities Fellow at Texas A&M University. He lectures and publishes widely on topics in Post-Kantian European Philosophy, Political Theory, Aesthetics, and Genocide Studies. His most recent publications include studies of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hannah Arendt, law and humanities, and treatments of genocide in the cinematic genre of science fiction. István Czakó  is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary. He holds a licentia degree and a Habilitation degree in philosophy, and a Ph.D. in theology. He has published a number of articles in the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook and Acta Kierkegaardiana as well as the series Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources and Danish Golden Age Studies. His recent books include Geist und Unsterblichkeit: Grundprobleme der Religionsphilosophie und Eschatologie im Denken Søren Kierkegaards (2014) and Paradoxes of Existence: Contributions to Kierkegaard Research (2016). Christian Danz  studied Protestant Theology at the University of Jena. From 2000 to 2002 he was Professor for Systematic Theology in Essen, and since 2002 he has been Professor for Systematic Theology at the University of Vienna. Since 2006 he has been the President of the German Paul Tillich Society. He is the author of the following works: Die philosophische Christologie F.W.J.  Schellings (1996); Religion als Freiheitsbewußtsein. Eine Studie zur Theologie als Theorie der Konstitutionsbedingungen individueller Subjektivität bei Paul Tillich (2000); Einführung in die Theologie der Religionen (2005); Gott und die menschliche Freiheit. Studien zum Gottesbegriff in der Neuzeit (2005); Wirken Gottes. Zur Geschichte eines theologischen Grundbegriffs (2007); Die Deutung der Religion in der Kultur. Aufgaben und Probleme der Theologie im Zeitalter des religiösen Pluralismus (2008); Einführung in die evangelische Dogmatik (2010); Grundprobleme der Christologie (2013); Einführung in die Theologie Martin Luthers (2013); Systematische Theologie (2016); Gottes Geist. Eine Pneumatologie (2019).

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David  Espinet  is habilitated Lecturer (Privatdozent) at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and currently invited professor at the University of Ulm, Germany. He has been a research fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in 2013–14 and 2016–17. His publications include Phänomenologie des Hörens. Eine Untersuchung im Ausgang von Martin Heidegger (2009, 2nd edition 2016) or Ereigniskritik. Zu einer Grundfigur der Moderne bei Kant (2017) and a number of papers such as “Sittlich vermittelte Lust. Kant über das höchste menschliche Gut” (2018), “Heidegger lecteur de Kant. Points de vues prives et publics à partir de 1930” (2018), and “Freedom and Recognition” (2015). Roe  Fremstedal is Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tromsø—The Arctic University of Norway and Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. He is author of Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest Good: Virtue, Happiness, and the Kingdom of God (2014) and numerous articles in Inquiry, Journal of Value Inquiry, Journal of Religious Ethics, Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, Kantian Review, Religious Studies, and International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. Sylvaine  Gourdain  is Doctor in Philosophy (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) and in German Studies (Université Paris-Sorbonne). Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation at the Institut für Transzendentalphilosophie und Phänomenologie of the Bergische Universität Wuppertal (Germany). She has co-edited the volume Frei sein, frei handeln – Freiheit zwischen theoretischer und praktischer Philosophie and has just edited the book Transformations de l’image. Les images et l’ethos de l’existence, which will appear in August 2020. She has written many articles on Schelling and Heidegger, but also, notably, on Merleau-Ponty and Maldiney. She is the author of two books on Heidegger and Schelling in French, L’Ethos de l’impossible. Dans le sillage de Heidegger et Schelling and Sortir du transcendental. Heidegger et sa lecture de Schelling. Zoltán Gyenge  is Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Szeged (Hungary). He is the co-editor of the Hungarian Søren Kierkegaard Edition. A leading expert on nineteenth-century Continental philosophy, he has published several books on Kierkegaard, Schelling and Nietzsche, including Søren Kierkegaard (2017, in Hungarian), Kierkegaard’s Life and Philosophy (2007, in Hungarian), Schelling’s Life and Philosophy (2005, in Hungarian), and Kierkegaard and German Idealism (1996, in Hungarian). Other p ­ ublications include “Diesseits oder Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Gott und das Irrationale

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bei Böhme, Schelling und Kierkegaard” (2013), “Ähnlichkeiten und Diskrepanzen: Nietzsche und Kierkegaard in der ungarischen Rezeption” (2012), “The Heteronomy of Sin: Richard, Agamemnon or perhaps Abraham?” (2009), “Zur Erörterung der Seinslehre in der Kierkegaard-Nachschrift” (2005), “Die Wirklichkeit der Existenz. Über die Seinsanalyse Kierkegaards” (2001) and “Existenz und Ewigkeit. Über die Zeitauffassung von Schelling und Kierkegaard” (1992). Steven Hoeltzel  is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at James Madison University. He is the editor of The Palgrave Fichte Handbook (2019) and the coeditor of Transcendental Inquiry: Its History, Methods and Critiques (2016) and Kant, Fichte, and the Legacy of Transcendental Idealism (2015). He has published widely on Fichte’s philosophy, with particular attention to its ontological implications, its value-theoretical dimensions, and its connections to Kant’s critical philosophy. Lucian Ionel  is Research Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He recently obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg and the University of Strasbourg. His thesis is currently being published under the title Sinn und Begriff: Negativität bei Hegel und Heidegger (2019). He was also Research Assistant at the University of Freiburg where he lectured on Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. He has translated Heidegger into Romanian. Claire  Katz is currently Associate Dean of Faculties and Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. She holds the Murray and Celeste Fasken Chair in Distinguished Teaching in the Liberal Arts. She is the author of three monographs: Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: the Silent Footsteps of Rebecca (2003), Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism (2013), An Introduction to Modern Jewish Philosophy (2014) and the editor, with Lara Trout, of Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments, vols. 1–4 (2005). She is completing Growing Up with Philosophy Summer Camp, an edited volume for Rowman and Littlefield, and Unrepentant Women: Gender, Justice, and the Limits of Forgiveness. She is the founder and director of P4C Texas, which introduces philosophy to K-12 teachers and students in the Bryan-College Station school districts and surrounding areas, and the Aggie School of Athens Philosophy Summer Camp for Teens. Paolo Livieri  is Research Fellow at Hosei University (Tokyo). He formerly worked at the Institut für Katholische Theologie at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen. He obtained a first Ph.D. from the University of Padova (Italy) and a second Ph.D. from McGill University (Canada). He

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has authored The Thought of the Object: Genesis and Structure of the Section “Objectivity” in Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (2012, in Italian) and several essays on the philosophy of Kant, Hegel, and Jacobi. He is currently working on an English edition of Jacobi’s Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihre Offenbarung that will appear at McGill-Queen’s Press. Thomas  P.  Miles  holds the position of Visiting Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department of Assumption College. He is a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy. He has published widely on ethics and existentialism, and is the author of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the Best Way of Life: A New Method of Ethics (2013). Peter Šajda  is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He is the co-editor of the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook and the series Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources. His research focuses on the philosophy of Kierkegaard and its reception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and more broadly on anthropological, ethical, philosophical-­ religious and social-political themes in German Idealism, existentialism, Neo-Marxism and modern Catholicism. His books include Buber’s Polemic with Kierkegaard: On the Relation of Religion to Ethics and Politics (2013, in Slovak) and The Kierkegaard Renaissance: Philosophy, Religion, Politics (2016, in Slovak). Heiko  Schulz  teaches Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. His research areas include Søren Kierkegaard and modern philosophy of religion. He is co-editor of the Deutsche Søren Kierkegaard Edition, Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook and Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. His recent publications include Natur, Religion, Wissenschaft. Beiträge zur Religionsphilosophie Hermann Deusers (2017, co-­ editor); The Problem of Miracles. Jewish, Christian and Islamic Perspectives (Toronto Journal of Theology, Supplement, 2017, editor); Evangelische Theologie. Eine Selbstverständigung in enzyklopädischer Absicht (2016, editor); Kritische Theologie. Paul Tillich in Frankfurt (1929–1933) (2015, co-editor); Aneignung und Reflexion II: Studien zur Philosophie und Theologie Søren Kierkegaards (2014). C. Allen  Speight  (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. A recipient of Fulbright, DAAD and Berlin Prize Fellowships, he is the author of Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (2001); The Philosophy of Hegel (2008) and of numerous articles on aesthetics, ethics and politics in German Idealism; he is also the editor of Philosophy, Narrative and Life (2015); co-editor/translator (with Brady Bowman) of Hegel’s Heidelberg Writings (2009); and co-editor (with Sarah

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Vandegrift Eldridge) of Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” and Philosophy (forthcoming). Jon  Stewart  is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He is the founder and general editor of the series, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Texts from Golden Age Denmark, and Danish Golden Age Studies. He is the co-editor of the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook and Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. He has authored a number of works, including The Emergence of Subjectivity in the Ancient and Medieval World: An Interpretation of Western Civilization (2020), Hegel’s Interpretation of the Religions of the World: The Logic of the Gods (2018), Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity (2015), Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century European Philosophy (2010), A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tomes I-II (2007), and Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (2003), and The Unity of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Systematic Interpretation (2000). Matthew  Wester  is a Lecturer in Philosophy at South Texas College. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century European philosophy and social-political philosophy more generally. His current research project is a reappraisal of Hannah Arendt’s unfinished account of reflective judgment. His work has appeared in Arendt Studies, The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, and The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt. Robert  Wicks is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of Schopenhauer (2008), Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Representation” (2011), Kant on Judgment (2007), and Introduction to Existentialism: From Kierkegaard to “The Seventh Seal” (2020), among other books and articles on Kant, nineteenth-century European philosophy, aesthetics, Buddhism, and existentialism.

1 Introduction: Questions of Identity and Difference in the Traditions of German Idealism and Existentialism Jon Stewart

There is thus a tendency to characterize German Idealism as a tradition that ended in the first half of the century, and which was challenged by later schools of thought which were critical of it (Löwith 1964; Copleston 1967). Trends such as Marxism, positivism, pragmatism, scientific naturalism and analytic philosophy are often seen as negative reactions to the tradition of German Idealism. Of the members of this school, Hegel in particular is often singled out for criticism. His theory of the categories and his notions of Spirit and the Idea were regarded as abstractions that had nothing to do with the real world. Feuerbach, Bauer, Marx, Kierkegaard, Bakunin and others stood in line to criticize him on this point. This meant that they were all keen to present a new philosophical program which avoided this problem. These thinkers were educated in the repressive period leading up to the Revolutions of 1848, and their orientation was shaped to a greater or lesser extent by these conditions. They struggled with the question of the meaning of philosophy in a world where there was widespread suffering due to political oppression and economic exploitation. In this context, abstract epistemological discussions rang hollow. As an old man writing in 1888, Friedrich Engels complains of

This work was produced at the Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences. It was supported by the Agency VEGA under the project Synergy and Conflict as Sources of Cultural Identity, No. 2/0025/20.

J. Stewart (*) Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_1

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the state of German academic philosophy, which he claims is moribund and irrelevant. He argues that university philosophy, dominated by careerism and lacking any critical view of the world, had become self-absorbed in its own meaningless abstractions (Engels 1888, p. 307; 1941, pp. 60–61). It can be argued that a century later, the feeling of empty abstraction in German Idealism was again acutely felt in the context of the World Wars and the Holocaust. These events seemed clearly to demand of philosophy something more concrete and relevant to the urgent events of the day that shocked the sensibilities of the world. This picture can lead to the conclusion that German Idealism was simply a philosophical school that lived and died in a certain period, after which it was abandoned forever. This is the image that is conveyed in a number of studies of the history of philosophy. In a sense this is natural since such histories of ideas operate at a fairly high level of generalization. They are thus keen to paint the contours of the different philosophical directions by means of contrast. This practice can of course serve some general purpose, but it is important to be aware that it is also distorting in its details. It fails to recognize the myriad points of contact and influence of German Idealism on the individual existentialist thinkers, as is outlined and documented in the present volume. This general reading of the development of Continental philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth century presumably explains the lack of interest in comparing German Idealism and existentialism.1 However, upon closer examination, the relation between these two schools of thought is far more complex than the traditional understanding allows. It is well known that many of the leading figures of the existentialist movement, such as Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty drew great inspiration from the works of the leading figures of German Idealism. With the publication of new materials from the hand of these thinkers, such as lectures, letters and Nachlass, new information is now available about their use of the German idealists.2 Recent work has also shown how Kierkegaard, who is often regarded as the father of existentialism, in fact appropriated a number of key ideas from Hegel and other idealists in the development of his own thought (Taylor 1980; Grøn 1997; Stewart 2003, 2007b). So there is good reason to return to the broader issue of the relation of German Idealism to existentialism. One of the problems involved in tackling this issue is circumscribing the area of study. This is a problem on both sides of the relation. While there is a standard textbook story about the development of German Idealism from Kant to Fichte to Schelling to Hegel and finally to Schopenhauer, the matter is not so simple. These thinkers mutually criticized one another, and it is not clear that they would have consented to the idea that they all should be

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counted as members of the same school of thought. In addition, there are other thinkers from the period such as Schleiermacher or the younger Fichte who also held doctrines that can be regarded as idealist, but who are not usually counted as members of this school. Moreover, it is little recognized that German Idealism continued well into the second half of the nineteenth century with figures such as Lotze and Trendelenburg (Beiser 2013). Thus it is by no means a straightforward issue to define which thinkers, strictly speaking, belong to the tradition of German Idealism and which do not. On the other side of the relation, there has long been an issue of what exactly defines existentialism as a movement. Some thinkers commonly associated with it, such as Heidegger, explicitly rejected the label. Other thinkers, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, lived well before the development of the movement as a self-conscious school, but yet are often counted as belonging to it. The nature of existentialism as a movement became so problematic during its heyday that Sartre complained that the term had come to be used to describe anything and everything (Sartre 1948, pp. 25–26). He thus felt the need to identify its key dogmas more precisely. As is well known, Sartre proposed, as the defining doctrine of existentialism, the claim that there are no fixed essences and that existence precedes essence (Sartre 1948, p. 26). Instead of resolving the problem, this definition only served to create new controversy since many of those associated with the school rejected it and hastened to distance themselves from him. While historians of ideas are compelled to work with broad labels such as German Idealism and existentialism, it is clear that these terms always involve a certain degree of simplification and thereby distortion of the actual thought and ideas of the individual figures involved. This poses the question of how the relation between these two movements can be meaningfully explored at all. Indeed, if it is impossible to define or circumscribe either of them clearly and unambiguously, then how can it be possible to compare them? The strategy employed in the present collection is a cautious one dictated by the demands of modern research specialization. Instead of trying to take on directly the relation of German Idealism to existentialism as a whole, the articles presented here try to approach this issue in a piecemeal fashion by exploring specific connections in the work of specific thinkers. In other words, the authors try to investigate the relation of a specific philosopher in the one school with the thought of the other. With this strategy, the hope is that a general picture of the relation between these two traditions of thought will emerge based on specific well-founded arguments and evidence concerning the thought of the individual thinkers. In this way, it is possible to talk about

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this relation in a meaningful way without engaging in clichés, oversimplifications and distortions. One goal of the present volume is, among other things, to problematize the traditional understanding of the relation of these two traditions as something generally negative. The contributors have been enjoined to find positive points of overlap or contact between the leading thinkers of these schools. This involves, on the one hand, identifying specific existentialist elements in the writings of the German idealists and, on the other hand, tracing the concrete reception of the idealists in the work of specific thinkers from the existentialist tradition. However, the authors have also been encouraged to identify and articulate the important differences in the two movements in ways that are insightful and promote further study. One of the main aims of the collection is to provide advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields with a comprehensive overview that will enable new connections to be made. The goal is thus to open up new research possibilities instead of fix new interpretative dogmas that distort the material and shut down further thinking. Each article featured here represents an original contribution to the broad research fields of German Idealism and existentialism.

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 revious Works on German Idealism P and Existentialism

While much has been written on German Idealism and existentialism as individual schools, very little has been written on them together. Apart from broad studies covering the entire history of modern philosophy, there is almost nothing that treats specifically the relation between these two traditions. One reason for this lies presumably in part in the nature of modern research which dictates a high level of specialization and discourages broader undertakings that try to come to terms with entire schools of thought. Unless one is writing a textbook or a history of philosophy, the question is never really raised about the relation of two large traditions of thought. Those who try to engage in discussions about such questions are often regarded as overly ambitious and academically reckless.

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5

General Studies

With regard to the absence of literature on the broad topic, one exception to the rule is Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-­ Century European Philosophy (Stewart 2010). This work, however, is in no way systematic. It is limited in its scope, focusing primarily on episodic points of contact between Hegel and the existentialist movement. It dwells on the grey area between German Idealism and existentialism in the transition from Hegel to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This study argues that while there was, to be a sure, an important shift that took place, the transition between German Idealism and existentialism was by no means a radical break or something characterized by discontinuity. In its objectives the book Idealism and Existentialism is more humble in its ambitions than the present volume, which provides much broader and more systematic coverage of the numerous relations and points of contact between the two traditions. Somewhat similar in concept to Idealism and Existentialism is Robert C. Solomon’s From Hegel to Existentialism (Solomon 1987). This book consists of a series of episodic chapters (from previously published articles) on different figures and subjects in the tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century Continental philosophy. Beginning with a handful of pieces on Hegel, the work continues with chapters on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Camus and Sartre. A smooth transition is thus traced between the traditions of idealism and existentialism, with Hegel’s influence being a key determining factor. Like Idealism and Existentialism, this work does not aim at systematic coverage but instead tries to hone in on key topics in the development of European philosophy. A work much closer to the general concept of the present volume is the anthology, The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, vol. 1, Philosophy and Natural Sciences (Boyle et al. 2013). The first volume of a series, this outstanding collection features a series of articles assessing different aspects of the influence of German Idealism on later philosophical and scientific thinking. Treating the reception of this tradition in the fields of religion, science, and culture, The Impact of Idealism is broader than the present volume in that the latter is concerned only with the field of philosophy. Moreover, The Impact of Idealism explores the importance of German Idealism for a number of different schools of thought such as British idealism, phenomenology, pragmatism and French postmodernism, whereas the present volume is limited to exploring German Idealism’s relation to the existentialist movement alone. But, by contrast, The Impact of Idealism is also narrower

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than the present volume since the former is confined to the history of reception more strictly speaking. However, this constitutes only the second half of the present volume, which is also dedicated to exploring different conceptual similarities and ways that the German idealists can be said to anticipate existentialism, independent of any de facto point of reception or appropriation. The present volume allows for a more systematic approach by circumscribing the field of study more precisely.

1.2

 tudies on the Relation of the German Idealists S to Existentialism

Apart from the works mentioned above there are specific studies on individual figures from the tradition of German Idealism and their relation to existentialism. To date there exists no monograph-length work on Kant’s relation to existentialism as a school of thought. There are only individual books and articles treating Kant’s relation to specific figures of the existentialist tradition, although this does seem to be a topic that is currently attracting research interest. Most notable among these are Roe Fremstedal’s Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest Good: Virtue, Happiness, and the Kingdom of God (Fremstedal 2014) and Sorin Baiasu’s edited volume Comparing Kant and Sartre (Baiasu 2016). There are only individual articles suggesting Fichte’s relation to existentialism (Wright 1975; Kangas 2007; Breazeale 2010; O’Neill Burns 2017). This thus still remains a broadly unexplored topic. The same situation seems to apply with regard to Schelling, where there are only a few articles that try to see him in relation to the tradition of existentialism in general (Hayes 1995). It should be noted that the work of Zoltán Gyenge has tried to present Schelling as an important forerunner of existentialism by identifying points of similarity with the thought of Kierkegaard (Gyenge 1996). Despite the keen interest in the relation between Hegel and Kierkegaard, there does not seem to have been much work done to trace the connections between Hegel’s thought and existentialism in general. To date there is no book-length monograph but only a few articles on this topic (Lessing 1968; Ciavatta 2014). This is somewhat odd since the potential of such a study has already been noted by Merleau-Ponty’s thought-provoking article “Hegel’s Existentialism” (1992). The historical connection between Kojève’s seminars on Hegel in the 1930s and the French existentialists is a subject worthy of further investigation (Marmasse 2013).

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Another area with great unexplored potential is Schopenhauer’s relation to existentialism. Nietzsche’s use of him as a source of inspiration suggests an important connection that might well be extended to the later existentialists (Simmel 1991). Schopenhauer could thus possibly be regarded as an important link between the two traditions. Given this, it is safe to say that specialists in German Idealism have not been particularly interested in seeing this movement as a forerunner of existentialism.

1.3

 tudies on the Relation of the Existentialists S to German Idealism

Although there has not been much written about the relation of the German idealists to existentialism, there has been, however, more interest in exploring the inverse relation, that is, that of the individual existentialists to the tradition of German Idealism. From a purely quantitative perspective, the field of Kierkegaard studies represents the most developed research area along these lines. There are a handful of studies that examine Kierkegaard’s relation to German Idealism in general: Wilhelm Anz’s Kierkegaard und der deutsche Idealismus (Anz 1956), the edited volume, Kierkegaard und die deutsche Philosophie seiner Zeit (Anz et  al. 1980), Zoltán Gyenge’s Kierkegaard és a német idealizmus (Gyenge 1996), and Lore Hühn’s Kierkegaard und der deutsche Idealismus. Konstellationen des Übergangs (Hühn 2009), and Lore Hühn’s and Phillipp Schwab’s “Kierkegaard and German Idealism” (Hühn and Schwab 2013). Mention should also be made of Michelle Kosch’s Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard (Kosch 2006), Robert Stern’s Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard (Stern 2012), and Roe Fremstedal’s “Kierkegaard’s Use of German Philosophy: Leibniz to Fichte” (Fremstedal 2015). Also relevant is the collection Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy (Stewart 2007a), which contains substantial articles on Kierkegaard’s relation to and use of the leading figures of the German idealist movement (Green 2007; Kangas 2007; Stewart 2007b; Olesen 2007; Davini 2007; González 2007). Much of the recent work Faust, Romantic Irony, and System: German Culture in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard is also relevant for Kierkegaard’s relation to this school of thought (Stewart 2019). There is also a wealth of research on Kierkegaard’s relations to and points of contact with the individual German idealists. If we confine ourselves just to book-length studies, there are a number of works on his relation to Kant

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(Green 1992; Fendt 1990; Phillips and Tessin 2000; Knappe 2004; Kosch 2006; Rapic 2007; Stern 2012; Fremstedal 2014), Schelling (Gyenge 1996; Olesen 2003; Kosch 2006; Hennigfeld and Stewart 2003; Basso 2007), Hegel (Thulstrup 1967; Taylor 1980; Grøn 1997; Stewart 2003), Schopenhauer (Cappelørn et al. 2011), and Trendelenburg (Come 1991).3 The large number of works on Kierkegaard and these thinkers in contrast to the general paucity of works comparing other existentialists to German idealists seems to suggest that the Danish thinker plays a special role in the relation of these two traditions. There is still no single-author monograph on Nietzsche’s relation to German Idealism in general. However, there has recently appeared an anthology that seeks to establish connections along these lines: Nietzsche, German Idealism and Its Criticism (Hay and dos Santos 2015). Moreover, there are a few book-­ length studies on Nietzsche’s relation to Hegel specifically (Houlgate 1986; Dudley 2002; Williams 2012). There is also a developed research area dedicated to Nietzsche’s criticism of Schopenhauer (Janaway 1998). There seems to be virtually a complete absence of studies on Martin Buber’s relation to German Idealism. By contrast, there have been a few attempts to connect the theology of Tillich with some of the key figures of German Idealism, especially Schelling (Steinacker 1989; Neugebauer 2007; Loncar 2012) and Hegel (Cameron 1976). There are likewise no detailed studies of Karl Jaspers’s or Hannah Arendt’s respective relations to German Idealism. Heidegger studies represents a large field, and there are individual works on Heidegger’s use of German Idealism. Several of the articles in Tom Rockmore’s collection are relevant to this topic: Heidegger, German Idealism and Neo-­ Kantianism (Rockmore 2000). In addition to several articles, there are also a number of books dedicated to Heidegger’s relation to specific idealists, especially Kant (Declève 1970; Sherover 1971; Schalow 1986, 1992, 2013; Weatherston 2002). This cannot be regarded as too surprising given Heidegger’s direct and explicit analyses of Kant. There has also been valuable research done on Heidegger’s relation to Hegel (Ionel 2020) and Schelling (Yates 2013). For the French existentialists, with the exception of Sartre, there is a surprising lack of research done in this area. For example, there is no extended work on the use of German Idealism by Jacques Maritain or Camus. Despite Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of Hegel and other idealists there are no research monographs dedicated to this topic. With regard to Simone de Beauvoir, there are only a few scattered articles that attempt to connect her ethical thinking to Kant and Hegel (Altman 2007; Wilkerson 2012). Of the French existentialists, it is clearly Sartre who has attracted the most interest in

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connection with the tradition of German Idealism. While there is no single monograph dedicated to this relation in general,4 there are a number of works that link his thinking with individual figures of that tradition, such as Kant (Baiasu 2016), Fichte (Waibel 2015), Schelling (Gardner 2006), and Hegel (Fry 1988). Although Levinas is not usually included among the main thinkers of existentialism, he has been included here since he was in dialogue with the French existentialists about the key issues. Hegel’s theory of self-consciousness and recognition clearly plays an important role in Levinas’s thought, and this is reflected in the secondary literature. While there is very little about Levinas and the other German idealists, there are a number of works dedicated to exploring his use of Hegel (Bernasconi 1982, 1986; Fox 2007; Irwin 2007; Shuster 2019). From this brief overview it seems clear that work on the relation between German Idealism and existentialism has only just begun. Apart from research on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre, there is no meaningful body of literature that explores the connections of the German idealists to existentialism or vice versa.

2

The Organization of the Present Volume

The present volume has been divided into two parts, reflecting two different perspectives on the relation between German Idealism and existentialism. Part I features individual articles on the leading figures of the German idealist movement. These articles are organized chronologically thus tracing the movement from beginning to end. The authors have been asked to identify elements of existential thinking that can be found in the work of these figures. In order words, how might these thinkers be conceived as anticipating existentialism in the same way that, for example, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche are often hailed as forerunners of it? This has been done based on a close reading of the primary texts of the German idealists themselves and independent of the actual history of reception of their thought by the existentialists. Thus the methodology employed here is that of comparative conceptual analysis. Part II features individual articles on the best-known thinkers of the ­existentialist movement. As was the case in the first part, here the articles are organized chronologically based on the period of the individual thinkers treated. The authors in this section have been asked to do a kind of source-work study by identifying how these figures have been influenced by German Idealism. Thus, the focus is on the German idealists as de facto sources

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of inspiration for existentialism. The goal of this section is to document that inspiration as carefully as possible, answering questions such as: When did Camus or Sartre read Hegel? What editions or translations did they use? How specifically did they incorporate the thoughts from Kant or Hegel in their own works? With the focus on the individual figures of each tradition, this volume allows for the authors to treat their topic thoroughly with a minimum of overlap. Care has also been taken to avoid points of repetition with the other volumes in this series, as much as possible. The authors have been free to establish points of connection in a number of different fields and areas. Thus, the volume is interdisciplinary. The articles represent new research and treat many issues and connections that have traditionally been overlooked. The two parts of the collection serve to paint a broader picture of the development of the history of ideas, as concerns German Idealism and existentialism, than is usually given in standard overviews.

3

The Present Collection

3.1

Part I: German Idealism

As noted, Part I of the present collection treats the relation of German Idealism to existentialism with a close study of the potential existential features in the thought of the German idealists. The first article is Paolo Livieri’s “The Stumbling Block of Existence in F. H. Jacobi,” which outlines some key issues in Jacobi’s critical assessment of German Idealism. Although his contribution has not been generally acknowledged, Jacobi can be seen as an important forerunner of existentialism with his criticism of the way in which he believes that German Idealism had lost touch with the real world in its attempt to explain things by means of abstract ideas. The idealists’ zeal for explanation had led them to forget their immediate experience with the world. The actual individual objects that surround us remain outside their accounts since such objects cannot be captured by ideas. Jacobi proposes a return to our more immediate experience of the world by focusing on individual objects as the starting point. It is only when we abstract from these that we arrive at ideas. But the idealists have it the other way around, mistakenly believing that the ideas can be used to explain the particular things. Roe Fremstedal’s article explores the relation between the thought of Kant and existentialism. It is argued that there are a handful of key ideas in Kant

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that can be seen as anticipating the existentialist movement. Perhaps most importantly, the issue of autonomy and freedom is central to Kant’s thinking. Like the existentialists, Kant sees the awareness of human freedom as being a source of anxiety. Kant also develops a theory of self-deception which parallels some of theories among the existentialists such as Sartre’s account of bad faith. Fremstedal also identifies Kant’s focus on the finitude of the human condition and the limitations of human knowledge as anticipations of key existentialist motifs. Kant’s notion of a transcendent and hidden God aligns with some of the dominant ideas in the tradition of Christian existentialism. Steven Hoeltzel’s article “Fichte and Existentialism: Freedom and Finitude, Self-Positing and Striving” focuses on Fichte’s “theory of science” (Wissenschaftslehre). The author enumerates a number of points where Fichte’s thought can be said to anticipate existentialism in some significant way. Perhaps most important is Fichte’s understanding of the nature of selfhood or subjectivity as a central philosophical issue. This anticipates the existentialists’ rejection of abstract forms of explanation and their focus on the primacy of the immediate lived experience of the individual. Like the existentialists, Fichte conceives of the self not as some fixed and static essence, but rather as an ongoing process, which involves self-actualization. For Fichte, the individual strives to realize him- or herself in actuality, which is a never-ending struggle. In this context, Hoeltzel also sees in Fichte an anticipation of the existentialists’ preoccupation with the notion of authenticity. Zoltán Gyenge treats Schelling’s relation to the existentialist movement, arguing that the late philosophy of Schelling had a much greater impact on existentialism than previously thought. This influence came through the work of Kierkegaard, who attended Schelling’s lectures in Berlin and was inspired by them. Despite previous views that claimed that Kierkegaard rejected Schelling’s thought, with the exception of the latter’s criticism of Hegel, Gyenge argues that there is a much more profound connection between the late Schelling and Kierkegaard. Specifically, Kierkegaard seizes on Schelling’s focus on being and actuality. It is argued that this is the beginning of the existentialist interest in time, the lived experience, and the contingency of human existence. Here we can see the existentialist rejection of logic and abstraction. Gyenge thus claims that the missing link between German Idealism and existentialism is Schelling’s late philosophy and Kierkegaard’s Notes to Schelling’s Berlin Lectures. This means that the idea of a radical break between these two traditions is overstated, and in fact in Schelling’s late philosophy it is possible to see the smooth transition from the one school to the other. C. Allen Speight’s article treats Hegel’s complex relation to existentialism. The article demonstrates that the less known writings of the early

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pre-systematic Hegel contain important elements which can be regarded as anticipations of existentialism. Particularly striking here is the young Hegel’s interest in the notion of alienation. Taking a hint from Merleau-Ponty, Speight, argues that the Phenomenology of Spirit contains in its methodology a theory of human experience that was of interest to the existentialists (Merleau-Ponty 1992). This focus on experience runs against the grain of the caricatured picture of Hegel as an abstract thinker lost in a fruitless meditation on the categories of metaphysics. In addition, Hegel’s rich account of Antigone and the Romantic conscience can be regarded as relevant for existential topics. The early existential dimension of Hegel’s thought is also carried over into his later social-political philosophy in the Philosophy of Right, where we can find a developed theory of human agency, conscience and responsibility that all find an echo in existentialist thinking. Perhaps due to his merciless criticisms of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, Schopenhauer has often been regarded as the odd man out in traditional accounts of German Idealism. In his article Robert Wicks seizes on the elements in Schopenhauer’s thought where his differences from his contemporary idealists can be seen as anticipations of existentialism. In particular Schopenhauer’s pessimism in many ways seems akin to the existentialist ­conception of existence. Like the existentialists, he is concerned with the deeper issue of the meaning of life and the contingency or fragility of human existence. He sees suffering as a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Schopenhauer’s focus on the will and the central role of human desire in a sense takes human beings down from the pedestal where they had been put by the earlier idealists with their lopsided focus on the faculty of reason. With these points of connection, Schopenhauer can be regarded as an connecting link between the traditions of German Idealism and existentialism. Heiko Schulz’s article attempts to uncover existentialist elements in the work of the late idealist F. A. Trendelenburg. It is argued that in order to claim that Trendelenburg is important for existentialism, one must identify authors who draw on him in the context of their own existentialist projects. If this is the criterion, then it seems that Kierkegaard is the only one who corresponds to the desired role since Kierkegaard does indeed heap praise on Trendelenburg in some of his works. However, the conclusion of the article is that, despite Kierkegaard’s praise, there is nothing that can be found in Trendelenburg that can count as anticipating existentialism. Although he was perhaps the last of the German idealists, Trendelenburg cannot be properly regarded as building a bridge to the existentialist tradition.

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Part II: Existentialism

Part II of the present volume examines the relation of German Idealism to existentialism from the side of the individual existentialist thinkers. The first article in this section treats the thought of Søren Kierkegaard who is often regarded as a leading figure in the existentialist movement. It is argued that Kierkegaard occupies a key position since German Idealism was still a living tradition during his lifetime, and he himself had first-hand experience with Schelling and formative members of the Hegelian schools. The article argues that the Dane can be seen as representing in persona the transition from German Idealism to existentialism. At first a detailed account is given of Kierkegaard’s fairly extensive use of a number of different ideas from all the main figures of the tradition of German Idealism. This establishes that there can be no doubt that Kierkegaard was influenced by this tradition in many different aspects of his thinking. But this raises the question of whether there are any specifically idealist elements in his thought or if he was simply receptive to other things in the writings of the idealists. The article points out that a handful of key Kierkegaardian ideas, such as irony, despair or anxiety, can indeed be conceived as evidence of idealist thinking. Moreover, The Concept of Irony displays a Hegelian conception of history that develops in accordance with underlying ideas which appear in the world in the form of historical events. This conclusion calls into question traditional views of Kierkegaard as a great critic of German Idealism and by extension the notion of the great break in the development of Continental philosophy between German Idealism and existentialism. Daniel Conway describes Nietzsche’s ambivalent and changing relation to German Idealism. While the early Nietzsche was positively disposed towards Kant, as his own philosophical intuitions developed, he became more critical over time. Initially Nietzsche found attractive the Kantian distinction between appearance and reality or representation and thing-in-itself. This appealed to Nietzsche’s skeptical side and appeared to him to be more satisfying than the more abstract idealism of Plato. However, as Nietzsche’s thought progressed, he turned against the otherworldly promise of Christianity. Seen in this context, Kant’s epistemology appeared to be yet another result of a culture of Christian decadence. Like the idea of heaven, the notion of the thing-in-itself from which we were forever cut off was just one more myth that served to diminish the value and meaning of the real world and to alienate individuals from themselves.

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Peter Šajda’s article treats the complex and varied reception of German Idealism in the thought of Martin Buber.5 Buber’s most intensive occupation with German Idealism can be found in his study of Kant. As a young man, Buber read Kant’s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics and was moved by the interpretation found there of space and time as human faculties. However, as Buber’s own views began to emerge, he became more critical of Kant. Specifically, Buber rejects Kant’s subordination of religion to ethics. Moreover, in his early thinking Buber was particularly interested in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. This work was surprisingly important in the revival of Jewish nationalism. Finally, Buber was also interested in Hegel’s social-­political philosophy and philosophical anthropology. He criticizes Hegel’s philosophy of religion for offering an account of God that does not have an interpersonal character of the I and Thou. Although Buber seems to criticize idealism for its abstraction and to distinguish it from his own dialogical philosophy on this score, there are nonetheless undeniable points of positive influence. Christian Danz traces Paul Tillich’s engagement with German Idealism. Tillich learned about the specific thinkers of the German idealist movement when he was a young student at the University of Halle during the first decade of the twentieth century. In the wake of a general revival of idealism in German philosophy and theology at the turn of the century, he made a careful study of both Fichte and Schelling, but it was especially the latter who had a lasting influence on him. The degree of Tillich’s interest is testified by the fact that he wrote both a philosophical and a theological dissertation on Schelling. He was particularly interested in Schelling for theological reasons. During this time theology was in a state of crisis due to the rise of historicist thinking which focused on the cultural and historical relativity of values and beliefs. Tillich believed that Schelling’s philosophy had the resources to establish a firm new foundation for theology in this context. As an old man, Tillich openly acknowledged the important role that Schelling played for the development of his thought (Tillich 1987–1998, I, p. 392). In his article István Czakó uses as the central motif a contemporary reference to Karl Jaspers as “the first and the last Kantian.” Jaspers was profoundly inspired by Kant’s transcendental philosophy and especially by Kant’s epistemology that defined the limits of reason. Jaspers believed that Kant’s successor Fichte misconceived Kant’s basic principle and betrayed the critical philosophy. Although due to this Jaspers is consistently critical of Fichte, he is receptive to different ideas in the works of the other German idealists, Schelling and Hegel. This picture of Jaspers’s quite positive assessment of German Idealism and contemporary neo-Kantianism clashes with received views about the alleged critical relation of existentialism to these traditions.

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Matthew Wester’s article investigates Hannah Arendt’s critical assessment of the tradition of German Idealism. Arendt was consistently dismissive of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Yet, despite her critical disposition, she was interested in the theories of history in the German idealist tradition, which contained important implications for politics. She criticizes Hegel’s philosophy of history for rendering insignificant the affairs of individual human beings since the true meaning of history can only be perceived at the macrolevel. The modern view of history that she ascribes to him thus means that the specific goals and actions of individual political leaders are unimportant—a view that she strongly rejects. However, she is positively inclined towards Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which she also makes use of in the context of political philosophy. Like the post-Kantian German idealists, Arendt can be seen as trying to use Kant’s basic insights and go beyond him. She was specifically attracted to Kant’s account of the autonomy of the faculty of judgment, which she believed could be used as a model for understanding the specific nature of political speech and action as something different from cognitive or moral judgment. The author argues that Arendt can be seen as offering a modification or correction of Kant’s theory by applying his concept of judgment in the political sphere. Although Heidegger rejected the label of an existentialist, he is usually classified with the thinkers of that movement in histories of twentieth-century philosophy. Due to his own stature and his extensive study and use of German Idealism, the present volume dedicates two different articles to him. In the first of these David Espinet examines specifically Heidegger’s use of Kant. The author notes the complex issue of the relation of Heidegger’s thought to existentialism and argues that the moments when Heidegger appears to be most existentialist correspond to the aspects of his thought that appear most indebted to Kant. The article traces and documents three different stages in Heidegger’s changing relation to Kant. It is argued that Heidegger’s philosophy can be understood as a form of idealism, which bears a similarity to some of the basic ideas in Kant. In particular, Heidegger can be seen as developing further Kant’s argument that time is not something objective in the external world but rather something subjective, constituting a faculty of the perceiving subject. Moreover, Kant’s conception of objectivity as something constructed by the human mind is reflected in Heidegger’s understanding of the history of being. Ultimately, Heidegger’s philosophy can, it is claimed, be conceived as a kind of subjectivist idealism. In the second article on Heidegger, Sylvaine Gourdain and Lucian Ionel explore Heidegger’s use of the other major German idealists: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. The article points out that Heidegger generally rejects idealism for

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its claim that being is something produced by the human subject and not something that is revealed or disclosed about the world. In his attempt to get at our most primary experience and understanding of the world, Heidegger can be conceived as revising the conception of philosophy as primarily conceptual analysis. It is argued that Heidegger was particularly inspired by Schelling’s Freiheitschrift, which he taught on three occasions. Heidegger discusses Schelling’s distinction between being as “ground of existence” and “the nonground,” in the development of the conception of the metaphysics of Dasein. Lee C. Barrett examines Jacques Maritain’s reception of German Idealism. Maritain has been traditionally characterized as a Catholic existentialist (Horton 1938, pp. 48–65; Herberg 1958, pp. 27–96), but his relation to his contemporary existentialists was by no means straightforward. Maritain’s religious commitments led him to criticize the atheist existentialists for solipsism, arbitrary decisionism and relativism. Somewhat counterintuitively, Maritain claims that Aquinas is the true existentialist since he focused on the lived experience of the individual. Aquinas is thus used as the benchmark by which Maritain measures his contemporary existentialists. With regard to German Idealism, Maritain rejects the idealists’ prioritizing epistemology over metaphysics. He is further critical of what he regards as the Hegelian attempt to conceive of ethical collectivities that undermine the value of the individual. Maritain claims that idealism ends in abstraction and neglects the concrete lived experience that can best be found in the thought of Aquinas. Thomas Miles treats Camus’s evaluation of German Idealism with a special focus on Camus’s ethics of resistance in The Rebel. Camus was especially interested in Hegel, who was a common point of departure for many of the French existentialists. Camus made a careful study of Hegel, who appears repeatedly in The Rebel. Camus’s evaluation of him is ambivalent. While he recognizes certain valuable insights in Hegel’s philosophy, nonetheless Hegel is held responsible for providing the foundation for Stalinism and some of the atrocities of the twentieth century. This criticism should be seen in the context of Camus’s critique of what he perceives as Sartre’s hypocrisy. While Sartre is vehement in his criticism of the crimes committed by the Nazis and the collaborators, he turns a blind eye to those perpetuated by the communists. The author shows how, in spite of Camus’s critique, Hegel is in fact important for Camus’s attempt to develop an ethics of rebellion. David Ciavatta explores Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with the tradition of German Idealism, which seems to be generally limited to the figures of Hegel and Schelling. Merleau-Ponty gave a lecture course on Schelling, but this does not seem to have left any clear mark on his written work. By contrast, Hegel’s

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philosophy of history was a topic that exercised him in many ways. Merleau-­ Ponty appreciates Hegel’s analysis of human beings as historically situated beings. He believes that this account of history could usefully supplement the existentialist focus on the lived experience of the individual. Merleau-Ponty also focuses on the important role of artistic creation which is able to give new meaning in specific historical contexts. Artists can thus lead the way into the future with their works. There is an analogy here to Hegel’s account of the fruitfulness of specific key historical events which give rise to and determine subsequent events. Thus while Merleau-Ponty is critical of Hegel’s notion of an abstract autonomous meaning in history in the form of world Spirit, there is much in Hegel’s account that he believes can be usefully appropriated for the existentialist program. Bruce Baugh treats Sartre’s engagement with German Idealism. As was the case with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s interest in this tradition of thought focused primarily on Hegel. Sartre was both inspired by Hegel and critical of him. In many ways, Sartre’s theory of consciousness owes much to Hegel, although he rejects the notion of a group consciousness or spirit, which he regards as impossible. Sartre believes that Hegel’s account of some final truth about consciousness or the totality of consciousnesses mistakenly characterizes human beings as fixed and static. Instead, it lies in the nature of human beings constantly to go beyond themselves into the future. Since the future holds an infinite number of possibilities, the human being is always unfinished and indeterminate. This is true not just for the sphere of individuals in the context of philosophical psychology and anthropology, but also for the sphere of nations and groups of people in the philosophy of history. Thus, history is never a complete or closed totality but instead constantly changing and developing every day with the passage of time. Sartre agrees with Hegel’s systematic conception that a totality of relations that are mediated with one another would theoretically provide a kind of absolute truth; however, Sartre claims that this totality is forever out of reach and what we are left with is a picture that is incomplete and forever changing. In the final article of the present collection Claire Katz jointly treats the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir with respect to German Idealism. This might at first glance appear an odd approach, but in fact there are many parallels in the response of these two thinkers to this tradition and in their respective theories of ethics and social justice. Both Levinas and de Beauvoir were inspired by Hegel’s famous theory of recognition and the relation of the lord and the bondsman in the Phenomenology of Spirit. They both try to revise and supplement Hegel’s somewhat negative picture of human relations that sees the other as a threat to one’s own existence. Instead,

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they try to develop a positive picture of ethics based on a fundamental responsibility of the individual to the other. De Beauvoir uses Hegel’s account for her critical analysis of the struggle of women to win a meaningful form of recognition from their male peers. Similarly, Levinas develops a theory of Jewish identity and ethics that uses as its point of departure the relation of the individual to the other and their reciprocal obligation of ethical responsibility.

4

The Nature of the History of Ideas

This volume shows the complexity of the history of ideas and the history of reception. Although the standard picture about the relation of German Idealism to existentialism is one of discontinuity, every single article in this collection documents important connections. These concern both German Idealism’s many anticipations of existentialism and the numerous points of reception by the existentialists of specific ideas and analyses from the idealist tradition. This suggests that the older picture of the history of the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy is largely a distorting cliché. When we talk about the history of ideas, it is rarely the case that the one view is radically and utterly rejected, while a completely new one replaces it. Instead, the history of ideas can best be understood as one of appropriation, development, modification, and revision as new thinkers take the ideas they inherit from the past and apply them to new contexts from their own time. This new application demands that the ideas be revised to fit the new context. Ideas thus develop and evolve but rarely die out completely. In the history of philosophy as in modern philosophy there is, of course, no shortage of posturing. Philosophy is by its nature a polemical discipline. Philosophers tend to overstate the differences of their views from that of their predecessors in order to emphasize the novelty of their own ideas. But we would do well not to take this kind of rhetoric so seriously since this can lead to the mistaken view that philosophical ideas are black and white, right and wrong. Instead, if we truly wish to understand the development of ideas, it is best to see such philosophical polemics as dialogues in which ideas are appropriated, revised and given new forms. But this is a complex process that has many aspects and can rarely be described as simply the replacement of one view with another. The articles in the present collection, although different from one another in various ways, all demonstrate this point about the

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complex relation of the constellation of ideas that has traditionally been associated with the traditions of German Idealism and existentialism.

Notes 1. It should also be noted that there are some valuable studies on the development of philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century and in some cases into the twentieth century that attempt to discern the continuities and to see the long shadow cast by German Idealism (Schnädelbach 1984; Beiser 2013). 2. See, for example, the articles in Hay and dos Santos 2015. 3. With regard to Trendelenburg, there are (in addition to Come’s book) also a number of valuable articles: Dietz 1992; Message 1997; Magri 2004; Purkarthofer 2005; González 2007. 4. Note that Sebastian Gardner’s article points in the direction of a broader interpretation of Sartre vis-à-vis the entire tradition of German Idealism (Gardner 2005). 5. Šajda builds on his earlier works on Buber (see Šajda 2003, 2010, 2013a, b).

Bibliography Altman, Meryl. 2007. Beauvoir, Hegel, War. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 22 (3): 66–91. Anz, Wilhelm. 1956. Kierkegaard und der deutsche Idealismus. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Anz, Heinrich, Peter Kemp, and Friedrich Schmöe, eds. 1980. Kierkegaard und die deutsche Philosophie seiner Zeit. Vorträge des Kolloquiums am 5. und 6. November 1979, Text & Kontext, Sonderreihe. Vol. 7. Copenhagen and Munich: Fink. Baiasu, Sorin, ed. 2016. Comparing Kant and Sartre. Basingstoke and New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Basso, Ingrid. 2007. Kierkegaard Uditore di Schelling. Milan: Mimesis. Beiser, Frederick C. 2013. Late German Idealism: Trendelenburg and Lotze. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bernasconi, Robert. 1982. Levinas Face to Face – With Hegel. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 13 (3): 267–276. ———. 1986. Hegel and Levinas: The Possibility of Reconciliation and Forgiveness. Archivio di Filosofia 54: 325–346. Boyle, Nicholas, Liz Disley, and Karl Ameriks, eds. 2013. The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, Philosophy and Natural Sciences. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Breazeale, Daniel. 2010. How to Make an Existentialist? In Search of a Shortcut from Fichte to Sartre. In Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition, ed. Violetta L. Waibel, Daniel Breazeale, and Tom Rockmore, 277–312. Berlin: De Gruyter. Cameron, Bruce J.R. 1976. The Hegelian Christology of Paul Tillich. Scottish Journal of Theology 29 (1): 27–48. Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen, Lore Hühn, Søren R.  Fauth, and Philipp Schwab, eds. 2011. Schopenhauer – Kierkegaard: Von der Metaphysik des Willens zur Philosophie der Existenz, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 26. Berlin: De Gruyter. Ciavatta, David. 2014. Hegel and Existentialism. In G.W.F. Hegel: Key Concepts, ed. Michael Baur, 169–181. London and New York: Routledge. Come, Arnold B. 1991. Trendelenburg’s Influence on Kierkegaard’s Modal Categories. Montreal: Inter Editions. Copleston, Frederick. 1967. A History of Philosophy, Modern Philosophy: Bentham to Russell, Part II. Vol. 8. Garden City, New York: Image Books. Davini, Simonella. 2007. Schopenhauer: Kierkegaard’s Late Encounter with His Opposite. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 277–291. Aldershot: Ashgate. Declève, Henri. 1970. Heidegger et Kant. The Hague: Nijhoff. Dietz, Walter. 1992. Trendelenburg und Kierkegaard. Ihr Verhältnis im Blick auf die Modalkategorien. Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 34: 30–46. Dudley, Will. 2002. Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engels, Friedrich. 1888. Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie. Mit Anhang: Karl Marx über Feuerbach vom Jahre 1845. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz. ———. 1941. In Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, ed. C.P. Dutt. New York: International Publishers. Fendt, Gene. 1990. For What May I Hope? Thinking with Kant and Kierkegaard. New York: Peter Lang. Fox, Christopher. 2007. The Apotheosis of Apotheosis: Levinas on Escape, Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness, and Us. Epoche: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (1): 185–204. Fremstedal, Roe. 2014. Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest Good: Virtue, Happiness, and the Kingdom of God. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2015. Kierkegaard’s Use of German Philosophy: Leibniz to Fichte. In A Companion to Kierkegaard, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 58, 36–49. Malden, Massachusetts, Oxford, and Chichester: Blackwell. Fry, Christopher M. 1988. Sartre and Hegel: The Variations of an Enigma in “L’être et le Néant”. Bonn: Bouvier. Gardner, Sebastian. 2005. Sartre, Intersubjectivity, and German Idealism. Journal of the History of Philosophy 43 (3): 325–351.

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———. 2006. Sartre, Schelling, and Onto-Theology. Religious Studies 42 (3): 247–271. González, Darío. 2007. Trendelenburg: An Ally against Speculation. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 309–334. Aldershot: Ashgate. Green, Ronald M. 1992. Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2007. Kant: A Debt both Obscure and Enormous. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 179–210. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Grøn, Arne. 1997. Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Gyenge, Zoltán. 1996. Kierkegaard és a német idealizmus (Kierkegaard and German Idealism). Szeged: Ictus. Hay, Katia, and Leonel R. dos Santos, eds. 2015. Nietzsche, German Idealism and Its Criticism, Nietzsche Today. Vol. 4. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Hayes, Victor C. 1995. Was Schelling an Existentialist? In General Introduction of Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation. Three of Seven Books, trans. V.C.  Hayes. Armidale: The Austral Association for the Study of Religions, University of New England. Hennigfeld, Jochem, and Jon Stewart, eds. 2003. Kierkegaard und Schelling. Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 8. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Herberg, Will. 1958. Four Existentialist Theologians. Garden City, New  York: Doubleday. Horton, Walter Marshall. 1938. Contemporary Continental Theology. New  York: Harper and Brothers. Houlgate, Stephen. 1986. Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hühn, Lore. 2009. Kierkegaard und der Deutsche Idealismus. Konstellationen des Übergangs. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Hühn, Lore, and Phillipp Schwab. 2013. Kierkegaard and German Idealism. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison, 62–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ionel, Lucian. 2020. Sinn und Begriff: Negativität bei Hegel und Heidegger, Quellen und Studien zur Philosophie. Vol. 140. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Irwin, Christopher. 2007. God, Otherness, and Community: Some Reflections on Hegel and Levinas. The European Legacy 12 (6): 663–678. Janaway, Christopher, ed. 1998. Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kangas, David. 2007. J.G.  Fichte: From Transcendental Ego to Existence. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard

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Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 49–66. Aldershot: Ashgate. Knappe, Ulrich. 2004. Theory and Practice in Kant and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 9. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Kosch, Michelle. 2006. Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lessing, Arthur. 1968. Hegel and Existentialism: On Unhappiness. The Personalist 49: 61–77. Loncar, Samuel. 2012. German Idealism’s Long Shadow: The Fall and Divine-Human Agency in Tillich’s Systematic Theology. Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 54 (1): 95–118. Löwith, Karl. 1964. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in 19th-Century Thought. Trans. David E. Green. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Magri, Giovanni. 2004. Il salto della libertà. La critica di Trendelenburg alla dialettica hegeliane nella ricezione di Kierkegaard. Rivista di Filosofia Neo-scolastica 1: 87–143. Marmasse, Gilles. 2013. The Hegelian Legacy in Kojève and Sartre. In Hegel’s Thought in Europe, ed. Lisa Herzog, 239–249. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1992. Hegel’s Existentialism. In Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus, 63–70. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Message, Jacques. 1997. Kierkegaard, Trendelenburg; la logique et les catégories modales. In Kairos, Retour de Kierkegaard, retour à Kierkegaard: colloque franco-­ danois/sous la direction de H.-B.  Vergote. Actes du Collque franco-danois, Université de Toulouse-Le mirail, les 15 et 16 novembre 1995, vol. 10, 49–61. Neugebauer, Georg. 2007. Tillichs frühe Christologie. Eine Untersuchung zu Offen-barung und Geschichte bei Tillich vor dem Hintergrund seiner Schellingrezeption. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. O’Neill Burns, Michael. 2017. Kierkegaard, Fichte and the Subject of Idealism. Russian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities 1 (2): 135–154. Olesen, Tonny Aagaard. 2003. Kierkegaards Schelling. Eine historische Einführung. In Kierkegaard und Schelling. Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, ed. Jochem Hennigfeld and Jon Stewart, vol. 8, 1–102. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 2007. Schelling: A Historical Introduction to Kierkegaard’s Schelling. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 229–276. Aldershot: Ashgate. Phillips, Dewi Z., and Timothy Tessin, eds. 2000. Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion, Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Basingstoke: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin Press. Purkarthofer, Richard. 2005. Trendelenburg. Traces of a Profound and Sober Thinker in Kierkegaard’s Postscript. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, pp. 192–207.

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Rapic, Smail. 2007. Ethische Selbstverständigung. Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit der Ethik Kants und der Rechtsphilosophie Hegels, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 16. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Rockmore, Tom, ed. 2000. Heidegger, German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism. Amhurst, New York: Humanity Books. Šajda, Peter. 2003. Náčrt kritiky Kierkegaardovho konceptu lásky v diele M. Bubera, T.W.  Adorna a K.E.  Løgstrupa (An Outline of the Critiques of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Love in M.  Buber, T.W.  Adorno and K.E.  Løgstrup). Filozofia 58 (7): 484–493. ———. 2010. Problém náboženského akozmizmu: Buberova filozoficko-politická kritika Kierkegaarda (The Problem of Religious Acosmism: Buber’s Philosophical-­ Political Critique of Kierkegaard). In Náboženstvo a nihilizmus: z pohľadu filozofie existencie a fenomenológie (Religion and Nihilism: From the Perspectives of the Philosophy of Existence and Phenomenology), ed. Martin Muránsky et al., 44–57. Bratislava: Filozofický ústav SAV. ———. 2013a. Kierkegaardov príspevok k Buberovej filozofii židovstva, teórii vlastenectva a teórii politických skupín (Kierkegaard’s Contribution to Buber’s Philosophy of Judaism, Theory of Patriotism and Theory of Political Groups). Filozofia 68 (1): 5–16. ———. 2013b. Buberov spor s Kierkegaardom. O vzťahu náboženstva k etike a politike (Buber’s Polemic with Kierkegaard: On the Relation of Religion to Ethics and Politics). Bratislava: Kalligram. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. Philip Mairet. Brooklyn: Haskell House. Schalow, Frank. 1986. Imagination and Existence: Heidegger’s Retrieval of Kant’s Ethic. Lanham: University Press of America. ———. 1992. The Renewal of the Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought, and Responsibility. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2013. Departures: At the Crossroads Between Heidegger and Kant. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Schnädelbach, Herbert. 1984. Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933. Trans. Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherover, Charles. 1971. Heidegger, Kant, and Time. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shuster, Martin. 2019. Levinas and German Idealism: Fichte and Hegel. In The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, ed. Michael L. Morgan, 195–215. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1991. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Trans. Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Solomon, Robert C. 1987. From Hegel to Existentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Steinacker, Peter. 1989. Die Bedeutung der Philosophie Schellings für die Theologie Paul Tillichs. In Paul Tillich. Studien zu einer Theologie der Moderne, ed. Hermann Fischer, 37–61. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum. Stern, Robert. 2012. Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, Jon. 2003. Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. New  York: Cambridge University Press. ———, ed. 2007a. Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources. Vol. 6. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2007b. Hegel: Kierkegaard’s Reading and Use of Hegel’s Primary Texts. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 97–165. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2010. Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-­ Century European Philosophy, Continuum Studies in Philosophy. New York and London: Continuum International Publishing. ———. 2019. Faust, Romantic Irony, and System: German Culture in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Danish Golden Age Studies. Vol. 11. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Taylor, Mark C. 1980. Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Thulstrup, Niels. 1967. Kierkegaards forhold til Hegel og til den spekulative idealisme indtil 1846. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. (English Translation: 1980, Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel. Trans. George L. Stengren. Princeton: Princeton University Press). Tillich, Paul. 1987–1998. Main Works, vols. 1–6, ed. Carl Heinz Ratschow. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Waibel, Violetta L., ed. 2015. Fichte und Sartre über Freiheit: Das Ich und der Andere. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Weatherston, Martin. 2002. Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilkerson, William S. 2012. A Different Kind of Universality: Beauvoir and Kant on Universal Ethics. In Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler, ed. Shannon M.  Musset and William S.  Wilkerson, 55–74. Albany: State University of New York Press. Williams, Robert R. 2012. Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, Walter E. 1975. Existentialism, Idealism, and Fichte’s Concept of Coherence. Journal of the History of Philosophy 13 (1): 37–42. Yates, Christopher. 2013. The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling. London: Bloomsbury.

Part I Anticipations of Existentialism in the German Idealists

2 The Stumbling Block of Existence in F. H. Jacobi Paolo Livieri

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) was one of the most influential intellectuals of the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany. Although he is not as widely known in the English-speaking world as other figures of his time, cultural and academic debates of the period are indebted to his polemical writings and philosophical essays.1 An acquaintance of many of the most prominent intellectuals, Jacobi had the ability to analyze and discuss crucial theoretical and political issues by turning preexistent highly sophisticated philosophical systems into clear-cut arguments.2 In his hands, Spinoza’s ethics, Kant’s transcendental philosophy, and Fichte’s early doctrine of knowledge—to mention only the most illustrious examples—undergo a process of synthesis aiming to outline their foundational theses while diagnosing frictions and problematic aspects of these landmarks of human intellectual achievement. By virtue of his analytical acumen, his texts have the general merit of explaining how the German Enlightenment, modern metaphysics (in the form of Spinozism), and transcendental idealism (whose potential is fully expressed, so argues Jacobi, by the first version of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre) maintain a similar abstract conception of reality that obliterates concrete individualities. Moreover, in Jacobi’s view, the apprehension of what is true, good,

P. Livieri (*) Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_2

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and beautiful opposes those grandiose philosophies of intelligence—as he once called Fichte’s thought—simply because philosophical systems lack connection to the real. In general terms, Jacobi’s main thesis shows how philosophy is merely grounded on abstract concepts that result from an enthusiasm for explanations: explanations are supposed to justify our knowledge of reality, yet they draw their force from the principle of sufficient reason that provides a network of relations through which everything is defined by its dependency on something different from itself. Therefore, singular realities— in the form of autonomous subjects and objects—are expelled from scientific understanding because they cannot be conceptualized according to this grid of relativity. In his view, modern philosophers—from Spinoza to Fichte— build systems of concepts where basic individual identities lose their contours and fade into a whole of interlaced units, as in the case of the Spinozian system of determinations. As a consequence, since system consists of this abstractly conceived architecture of thought whereby everything is not per se but through others, Jacobi concludes that the real gets eventually banished from conceivability. By contrast, Jacobi proposes a different approach to knowledge that he apparently seems to draw from common sense: individual things are everything that exists, and, therefore, they represent the very basis of our knowledge of reality. To be sure, Jacobi was not blind to the exceptional clarity and consistency of Spinoza’s and Fichte’s philosophies—as opposed to the incongruities of the Enlightenment thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn—but, at the same time, he met the peril that systematic philosophy arouses: the annihilation of existence. A young student under the tutelage of Georges-Louis Le Sage in Geneva, Jacobi was first influenced by the Lockean psychology of Charles Bonnet and the philosophy of nature of Willem Jacob Gravesande. He later developed a comprehensive understanding of the French Enlightenment and Scottish philosophy.3 The latter undoubtedly helped Jacobi assert the primacy of immediate certainty in the field of epistemology, but his refined analysis of Spinoza’s and Kant’s texts warned him of the methodological requirements of justified knowledge.4 Although oblivious to individual substances, systematic philosophy seems to provide a consistent foundation for our knowing. Therefore, if justifications are given by means of systematic explanations only (Jacobi 2009, pp. 370–378), the existence of individual things appears to be deprived of any such justifications. Ultimately, Jacobi devoted himself to pinpointing the problems that those abstract systems entail, aiming to retrieve from his critical analyses a philosophical ground plan for a theory of existence. The following remarks will guide the reader through a selection of Jacobi’s texts to explain the peculiar rationality of this theory. It will become clear that

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Jacobi’s theory of existence appeals to a specific way of understanding the relation between human beings and their world, a way that represents a pivotal point of connection between Jacobi’s thought and Martin Heidegger’s remarks concerning the dawn of Western philosophy.

1

The Distinctiveness of Metaphysics: Methodology

Though often used to label Jacobi’s philosophical contribution, the mutual defining immediacy of “I” in front of “Thou” is not the first step that Jacobi takes in displaying his ideas about existence. It is likely the last. The dialogue David Hume (1787) offers a clear passage about this: I experience that I am, and that there is something outside me, in one and the same indivisible moment; and at that moment my soul is no more passive with respect to the object than it is towards itself. There is no representation, no inference, that mediates this twofold revelation (Offenbarung). There is nothing in the soul that enters between the perception of the actuality (Würklichen) outside it and the actuality (Würklichen) in it. There are no representations yet. (Jacobi 2009, p. 277)

To be sure, Jacobi maintains that mutual immediate contraposition between two existent parties is the only source of certainty, as he declares at the end of 1789: “the source of all certainty (Gewissheit): you are, and I am” (Jacobi 1968, p. 224).5 The revelation of the mutual defining existence of two distinct identities is the definition of certainty. But such a simple—perhaps even simplistic—cornerstone lies at the center of a complex theoretical inquiry that extends over decades of private disputes and open controversies.6 We need to remember that the problem in determining the existence of singular things draws on a much wider debate that engaged intellectuals in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, actively involving the young Jacobi. This debate was about methodology in metaphysics and ethics. We cannot detail two hundred years of treatises and pamphlets, but we need to bear in mind that the possibility of certainty in metaphysics and ethics was the core issue that prompted the inception and development of a wide range of philosophical disputes.7 With thousands of pages penned over the different ways in which certainty in metaphysics and ethics may or may not be obtained, the Leibniz-Wolffian school appeared to gain the upper hand in the first half of the eighteenth

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century. Broadly speaking, this school maintained the necessity of applying the mathematical method to all sciences, metaphysics included.8 As early as in his Kurtzer Unterricht von den vornehmsten mathematischen Schriften (1710–1711) Christian Wolff identifies the philosophical-scientific method with the mathematical method.9 According to Wolff, knowledge is grounded on definitions, from which both axioms and postulates are immediately derived; these three groups of propositions do not need any proof, for they are “propositiones indemonstrabiles.” Thus, according to Wolff, these first three groups of propositions (definitions, axioms, and postulates) are the basis of a correct claim. After these propositions are assumed, by inferring from them one finally deduces theorems and problems. It is important to note that in the German Logic and in the Metaphysics Wolff states that the syllogism is introduced as the prime tool to infer theorems and problems from propositions that are self-evident. This is particularly significant for our purpose. In fact, the “cogitationes se mutuo ponentes vel tollentes” constitute a systematic connection between propositions (Kette) that draws conclusions from self-­ evident principles.10 Hence, premises should be self-evident definitions and reasoning should be syllogistic; these are the keys for metaphysics and ethics to be scientific. In light of the debate over Wolff’s achievements, Jacobi’s famous admission of his struggling with mathematics could either be taken as a point of trivia about his juvenile study, or it might be read as a hint of a sort of spontaneous siding with a group of philosophers reacting against the morbus mathematicus (More 1966, p. 108). To tell the truth, if it is clear that Jacobi himself lamented the seizure of the Berlin and Paris Academies at the hand of intellectuals who resisted any criticism of the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition of thought (Pistilli 2008, pp. 87–88), it is also true that the debate was much more complex and multifaceted. However, if we had to name the one event or text that—among a few others—had a decisive impact on Jacobi’s growing interest in the methodology of metaphysics, we should name the essay that Kant submitted on the occasion of the famous Preisfrage that the Berlin Academy of Sciences announced in 1761 (Jacobi 2009, pp.  281–285): Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral (1764). As clearly appears from the title of the Preisfrage, the Academy tried to address the international concern about methodology in metaphysics: It is asked, if metaphysical truths in general and in particular the first principles of Natural Theology and Morality show the same evidence as mathematical truths, and if they do not, what the nature of their certainty is, to what degree this certainty can be achieved, and if this degree is sufficient for conviction.11

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Kant’s essay replied to the Academy’s question by showing the peculiar method of metaphysics and by emphasizing its independence from mathematics. Among the issues that Kant tackles in his essay, two in particular are of interest for an understanding of the fundamental character of metaphysics and for clarifying Jacobi’s point of departure in conceiving a theory of existence.12 First, Kant observes that the mathematical sciences proceed via synthesis starting from a clear and simple definition that is fabricated by the human mind (the aforementioned self-evident premises). On the contrary, metaphysics proceeds via analysis through the progressive scrutiny of what is immediately given as a premise. As a consequence, if mathematics puts at the beginning of demonstrations a simple conceptual keystone that is constructed, metaphysics works its way backwards through the analysis of unclear assumptions eventually to define the simple principle that sustains the entire design. While in mathematics arguments do not raise any question about the definitions out of which they develop, metaphysics is called to look for those very definitions that are not known, though immediately assumed “in a confused fashion” (Kant 1992a, p. 250). Thus, while mathematics starts with the definition of its object and proceeds by combining and comparing concepts related to that definition, metaphysics starts with what is unknown only to find at the end of its analysis the definition of what grounds its entire orbit. Mathematics puts at the beginning of its chain of reasoning an indemonstrable yet solid key; metaphysics does not lay its foundations on sound and clear grounds but relies on the power of analysis only. As a consequence, metaphysics aims at unearthing the determination of what appears to be immediate and basic for our understanding, but which is utterly unclear—e.g., it is led by questions such as “what is existence?” or “what is time?”. The progress of metaphysics is thus slow, and the distance covered is short. It seems as if metaphysics, for its lack of definite foundations, adheres to the utterly active and ambulatory nature of pure thinking, which appears to be deprived of a beginning because it only dwells in the beginning. Like pure thinking, metaphysics is deprived of the kind of perspective that arises after the principle of a doctrine has been defined and its consequences constructed. Metaphysics does not look back to the principle from where metaphysics moves, nor does it list a connection (Kette), nor does it look forward to possible combinations and permutations; metaphysics only questions the beginning of thinking itself. Second, the way we err in metaphysics is different from the way we err in mathematics: a mistake in metaphysics does not entail a vice in argumentation—like mathematics—but the judgement that one gives on an unknown matter; applying the synthetic method to metaphysics is what makes philosophers err: “we venture to make judgments, even though we do not know

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everything which is necessary for doing so” (Kant 1992a, p. 266). In metaphysics we make mistakes when we insist on extracting definitions out of the unknown subject matter. Notwithstanding, it is not true that metaphysics does not have certainty. Metaphysics holds as certain those primary data from which it moves. Metaphysical certainty, in fact, relies on the immediacy of those primary data. For instance, natural theology (or, as Kant calls it in this text, “natural religion”) having its object in the “first cause” (Kant 1992a, p. 270) starts with the notion of existence, for it seems to be the necessary presupposition for any possibility to be given. But if, on the one hand, existence is the immediate principle for anything to be determined, on the other hand, existence is initially not properly defined: it is just the given and confused concept that sustains the entire architecture of reality. This thesis is acquired and further expanded in a different text by Kant, who elaborates a more thorough account of the notion of existence in the contemporary essay Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (1763). This work, more than the abovementioned Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral, stimulated Jacobi’s intellectual fertility. This text enquires about the notion of existence as it represents the only possible ground for the demonstration of the existence of God. Strictly speaking, the text is not about the proof of God’s existence per se; rather it sheds light on the metaphysical problems that the notion of existence gives rise to. And this is precisely the point that Jacobi seems to inherit. A closer look at Kant’s essay reveals that the concept of existence is inquired via elenchos, or, as it were, it is shown by negating what existence is not. Among the rich panorama of topics that this essay addresses, most of Jacobi’s attention focuses on what Kant says about existence in general. Kant maintains: “if all existence is cancelled, then nothing is posited absolutely, nothing at all is given, there is no material element for anything which can be thought; all possibility completely disappears” (Kant 1992b, p. 123). It seems that existence is not something which we can represent to ourselves or something of which we can have experience; existence is rather a concept that gives form to the possibility of objects. Thus, existence lies at the beginning of the conceivability of experience, or, in other words, it manifests itself neither in experience nor in our knowledge of experience, but rather only in pure thinking. As Jacobi clearly mentions in his last book, On Divine Things and their Revelation, one may have an intuition and a representation of an object of experience, but existence is rather the unconditional through which everything is thought (Jacobi 2000, pp. 82–88).

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Therefore, if philosophy’s business is “to analyze concepts which are given in a confused fashion, and to render them complete and determinate (ausführlich und bestimmt)” (Kant 1992a, p. 250), and if metaphysics is the part of philosophy that tries to make complete and determine “the fundamental principle of our cognition” (Kant 1992a, p. 256), and if existence is the presupposition of any given object, it follows that a theory of existence—which represents that unconditional “through which” anything is thought—must adopt the metaphysical method to enquire what is presupposed in the very act of cognition. As it looks now somewhat clearer, Jacobi’s first steps into philosophy are thus connected to what Kant calls natural religion, but they do not ultimately emerge from a religious urge. They rather display a precise metaphysical agenda since they are defined according to a methodological concern that the concept of existence as such generates. Yet Jacobi’s interest in philosophy is not confined within the boundaries of epistemology. Doing justice to the essence of metaphysics—that extends well beyond the foundation of epistemology—Jacobi does not treat the theory of cognition as a theory about the ways in which we represent reality. His personal quest towards the particular status of existence leads him beyond those boundaries and their related disputes. From his first enthusiasm for philosophy, Jacobi does not primarily aim to arbitrate between the different epistemologies of Scottish common sense, Humean skepticism, or British idealism as his dialogue David Hume might suggest. In fact, as he further validates in the 1815 Preface to his collected works, the unconditional object that existence represents is not attained by abstracting from representations or the senses, but by removing a deceptive aspiration: to determine what is unconditional by abstracting data from our cognition of experience. He states: The illusions are twofold by which sensualism or materialism, by changing its name and form in a variety of ways while in truth always remaining the same…, has tried to cover up for its one-sidedness and weakness, thus giving the impression that the concept of freedom and the conviction about the supersensible are also not strangers to it. The first of these illusions rests on the belief that the concept of the unconditional is obtained through protracted abstractions of the understanding. (Jacobi 2009, p. 570)

As regards the notion of unconditional, what Jacobi writes in 1815 looks Kantian (the pre-critical Kant) in fashion and purpose. Existence is accepted as the fundament of reality:

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The “is” of the exclusive reflective understanding is equally an exclusive relative “is”; it expresses no more than the being like something else in concept, not the substantial “is” or “being.” The latter, the real being (Seyn), being pure and simple, is given to know in feeling alone; in it the certain spirit manifests itself. We confess to our incapacity to define in which form the spirit certain of itself presents itself to man in feeling (objective and pure feeling), and makes him ready to cognize what is only equal to itself, i.e., to cognize the True directly and exclusively in the True, the Beautiful in the Beautiful, the Good in the Good, and thereby to acquire consciousness of a knowledge which is not merely a dependent knowledge subject to demonstrations but stands independent above all demonstration, a truly sovereign knowledge. (Jacobi 2009, p. 582)

But the “is” also represents a challenge to our thinking for it is not an object of representation. To define existence, in fact, we need to appeal to a specific methodology that does not comply with the process through which we define objects of experience. It requires an analysis of the fundament through which we know objects of experience. As much as Kant in the Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral and Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes, Jacobi embarked on an investigation of what thought assumes without representing it. Thus, it is not very implausible to sustain that Jacobi’s method does not diverge much from the methodology that Kant illustrated in his 1763–1764 essays. Jacobi’s method of inquiring into the assumption of our knowledge is, in fact, quite similar to Kant’s metaphysical investigation. One might even go so far as to identify Jacobi as a reformed metaphysician insofar as he assumes that it is impossible to apply a method different from that of analysis once the logos approaches existence. If by “metaphysics” we understand neither the metaphysica specialis—that analyzes the notion of soul, world, and God—nor the simple combination of natural theology and ethics—which analyzes the nature of God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom—but the Kantian reformation of the metaphysica generalis—which delves into the notion of Dasein per se—we can maintain that Jacobi employs notions such as “revelation” (Offenbarung) as part of a terminology that defines how we have to think the foundation of our cognition.13 The Spinozabriefe provide a great panorama of issues that cannot be taken into consideration here, though some remarks might be useful for our inquiry. In this text Jacobi assumes that the geometrical method produces proofs as long as it demonstrates similarities or differences, but that “[e]very proof presupposes something already proven, the principle of which is Revelation” (Jacobi 2009, p. 234).

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Like Kant before him, and as he himself seems to maintain in the long excerpt from the 1815 Preface cited above, in the Spinozabriefe Jacobi announces that geometry’s systematic method might provide a sound representation of reality, but it is of no use when it comes to the foundation of that representation. On the contrary, revelation provides what metaphysics looks for: the presupposition to representations, that is, the element that is necessary for predicates and their combinations. In fact, the term Offenbarung implies that the content revealed is neither the result of a Kette of composing and combining, nor a construction, as happens in the case of a definition. Revelation, instead, seems to exclude the subjective contribution to the content and form of the revealed. The content made available through revelation is, in fact, intended to be the objectively true, which appears to the subject’s sight or “feeling,” as Jacobi often puts it. Revelation does not hint just at the form—immediacy—of the manifestation of the “is,” but it says much about the kind of object that is revealed. What is made available by revelation is not like any object. The specificity of revelation consists in its making available the object of metaphysics, which is not “what we know,” but the “through which” we know. We do not have to be distracted by the most common usage of this term; Offenbarung neither refers to a religious content nor expresses Jacobi’s ideas concerning the process through which a subject knows a distinct religious entity. Primarily, it refers to the way in which a subject is immediately connected with the foundation of cognition in general. As Jacobi says in his work David Hume: We ordinarily say in German that objects reveal themselves to us through the senses; and the same form of expression is to be found in French, English, Latin, and several other languages as well. We cannot expect to find it in Hume with the special emphasis that I have put on it, among other reasons because he leaves it everywhere undecided whether we actually perceive things outside us or merely perceive them as outside us. Thus, he says in the passage that I have just read to you: “…the real, or what is taken for such.” And in keeping with his whole mode of thinking he must be more inclined in speculative philosophy toward sceptical idealism than toward realism. The committed realist, on the other hand, unquestionably accepts external things…his only thought is that all concepts, even those that we call a priori, must have derived from this fundamental experience. (Jacobi 2009, p. 272)

Thus, Offenbarung cooperates in defining how the object of metaphysics— existence—comes to be the fundament of cognition. Offenbarung excludes all

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proofs. It seems that Jacobi moves towards an investigation of Dasein, which remains “unquestionable” and independent of proofs or external grounding. In the Spinozabriefe Jacobi finds Plato’s words illuminating with respect to the issue under consideration: “[f ]or regarding divine things, there is no way of putting the subject into words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period of attendance to instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship with it, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining” (Jacobi 2009, p. 214).14 Since this immediate self-sustaining Dasein is the principle of our cognition, Jacobi entrusts himself with the task of re-shaping metaphysics as a theory of existence, eventually to ascertain the ethical profile thereof. According to Plato’s quotation, “divine things” wait at the end of this investigation.

2

The Certainty of Existence

In this same work, the Spinozabriefe, Jacobi also tries to define his personal contribution to surpassing the analytical method of metaphysics, so as to make explicit the identity of existence. Right after mentioning Offenbarung he declares: “faith (Glauben) is the element of all human cognition and activity” (Jacobi 2009, p.  234). Following Jacobi’s steps, we may try further to define existence by means of a few explanatory passages from David Hume that better explain the profile of Glauben. In fact, purposively set to explain the usage of the term Glauben, this dialogue is the text that, among the early works, uses more effectively both the notion of Glauben and the notion of Offenbarung to define how existence manifests itself and what existence is. Obviously, as it happened with the Spinozabriefe, we do not have enough space to delineate the many issues that the dialogue offers. We will just select a few passages that are beneficial for our purposes. So far, we have seen that the notion of Offenbarung emerges from Jacobi’s analytical method of inquiry into the concept of existence, an examination that leaves no room for a synthetic construction of definitions. We will now look into the same notion to analyze some important theses concerning the subject’s relation to existence. This trajectory will help us understand Jacobi’s interpretation of Dasein. It will appear that Dasein, more than being a characteristic of any given object—as the pre-critical Kant and Jacobi after him seemed to maintain—shows itself as the subject’s proper activity. Our route will eventually lead us to the connection between Jacobi’s early speculation

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about existence and his theory about the so-called divine things, as it is advanced in his last published text, On Divine Things and their Revelation (1811). As is now common knowledge, Jacobi’s notion of Glauben critically draws on Hume’s notion of faith, eventually to oppose Hume’s skepticism. But beside Jacobi’s interaction with Hume’s epistemology, the point that Jacobi holds onto pertains to a general definition of faith: faith, as Hume maintains, consists “not in the peculiar nature or order of ideas, but in the manner of their conception” (Jacobi 2009, p. 271). To be sure, Glauben states that the external thing that the “I” perceives is “a being external to us, one that is independent of our representation, and only perceived by us” (Jacobi 2009, p. 273). In short, faith does not target the Gegenstand; rather, it pertains to the Dasein of the Gegenstand. We do not have “faith in” an object, yet we have “faith in” the existence of that object. The process of cognition may well begin its constitutive and synthetic manufacturing afterwards, but the condition of cognition does not fall prey to the same process. The conclusion might appear as a dubious subtlety; instead, it pinpoints the special commitment that faith carries. In fact, Jacobi distinguishes his philosophical investigation from other kinds of epistemological discourses precisely on the ground of the metaphysical goal that his usage of the term “faith” unearths. Jacobi deals with the existence that any Dasein possesses. But, at the same time, Glauben shows that the Dasein is not merely the “through which” of cognition as it is revealed; Glauben refers to the “element” that constitutes the entirety of existence, objective and subjective. Moreover, faith does not open our understanding towards the ultimate, sacred object, nor does it welcome any other kind of phenomenon. Glauben refers to something different from the simple manner in which we apprehend an object because it does not simply take over the function usually assigned to perception. In fact, faith points to something that evades the sheer boundaries of perception and involves the whole spectrum of human activity, for faith is the “element of all cognition and action” (Jacobi 2009, p. 272).15 More than the immediacy of manifestation, the subjective relation to Offenbarung is key to understanding the principle of cognition. The notion of Glauben further expands our comprehension of existence in light of its reference to the totality of the subjective involvement in revealed existence. In other terms, Glauben affects our discourse about existence because it affirms that existence is not only immediately revealed as the fundament of any given object, but as it pertains to our activity as subjects as well. Since the notion of Dasein cannot be explained scientifically but can be only analyzed metaphysically, Jacobi first uses the notion of Offenbarung to assert how analysis has brought the epistemology of understanding to turn

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towards a new philosophical vocabulary. But—and this is remarkable—Jacobi uses Glauben in order to show that Dasein is not merely an objective “through which” we know, but also the subjective “through which” we act. We act through existence, as well as we know through existence. The apparent platitude of this conclusion stands in contrast with the seminal character of its consequences. The immediacy of existence states not only the priority of revelation in the process of knowing the world around us, but also it affirms that existence is the core of our actuality (or Würklich-keit, as he writes in David Hume) as subjects. Jacobi maintains: “It seems to me that whoever has doubts about this only need to think of his dreams. Whenever we dream, we are in some state of madness. The principle of all cognition, of all feeling of truth, of every correct combination, the perception of the actual, abandons us, and the moment it forsakes us, or ceases to dominate, we can make things (i.e., the representations that we take as things, as happens in dreams) rhyme in the wildest fashion” (Jacobi 2009, p. 303).

3

The Problem of Freedom

Dasein is the only thing that prevents us from making things and actions rhyme in the wildest fashion. In different places of his works Jacobi clearly holds the aforementioned epistemological and moral madness in contempt, so as to shrink back from such a boundless being that has no actual identity or limits. The limitless apeiron, as he identifies it, in which every single identity is obliterated, contradicts both common experience and pure conceivability. It posits a Kette of beings with neither beginning nor end. The nihilistic essence of this scientific view—as Jacobi defines it—has embodied the compulsion to continuity where interruption is banned and concrete existence is annihilated. According to this limitless scientific apeiron, both end and beginning are the pointless luxury of fanatic religious belief. Conversely, Jacobi sees in the actual being an anchor to reality; the Wirklich carries the burden of keeping both knowledge and actions within the real, and it prevents us from dissolving them in the harmful illusion of science. Not that we cannot conceive a different panorama for actions and knowledge from the one Jacobi defends. Up until the end of his life, his thought took shape in a polemic against different forms of that apeiron, but he also recognizes the integrity of such an illusion. Nevertheless, Jacobi’s theory of Dasein points to what frees the human world from its dependency on what does not comply with its highest (though not sole) form: the concrete true,

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good, and beautiful. Unfortunately, no system can emerge from that. But this is no surprise for metaphysics. Jacobi’s notion of existence is the element revealed to us by our special faculty of perception, which guides our faith in acting and in acquiring knowledge of external reality. The essential trait of both actions and objects is thus defined around Jacobi’s understanding of what a true principle is: existence is absolute beginning. This decisive characteristic of Dasein should not be confused with other kinds of principles, like the first number of a series or the first definition of a theorem. In contrast to the pre-critical Kant, Jacobi’s understanding of existence stresses how existence cannot simply be the ultimate condition of possibility. In order to be the real “through which” everything else happens and is thought, existence should be more than a condition, it has to be an active principle, the absolute beginning whose most irreducible trait is spontaneity. So, we can re-frame our interpretative accomplishments as follows. The absolute beginning of my cognition of reality lies in existence as long as the object before my senses is the absolute beginning of my knowledge. To capture the real identity—and not an illusory one—of the object that stands in front of me, the object must be conceived as independent from both its relations to other objects and to myself as a knowing subject. By the same token, I need to be deemed responsible for the meaning of my deeds; they should not represent the fulfillment of a universal law guiding my activity, but they should manifest the virtue of a true creator. Both realities, objective reality and subjective reality, are therefore freed from the Kette of being that systemic thinking purports. In more simple terms, Dasein is pure spontaneity. This is perhaps the ultimate definition of Dasein. Our faculty to perceive this spontaneity is the highest faculty of our intimate sense, threatened to be blinded by our enthusiasm for explanations, but eventually unburdened by our impulse to give birth to an exhaustive doctrine. The character of Jacobi’s texts shows here the reason for their polemical nature: Jacobi’s intellectual attitude seems always to react to systematic philosophy only because his ideas are persuasive as long as they emerge out of unresolved issues of systematic thinking. The same idea of the spontaneity of Dasein is expounded in the writing that better analyzes the perfect geometry designed to annihilate existence. Jacobi dedicates himself to describing the unmatched freedom of Dasein in a work devoted to the analysis of the true cradle of modern scientific thinking, Spinoza’s Ethics. Spontaneity is one of the main topics of the second edition of the Spinozabriefe, where he analyzes the problem of human identity by expounding the real character of freedom.

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The problem of freedom thus provides a good example of Jacobi’s polemical stance, but it says much—as we will see—about the nature of freedom itself. Jacobi delves into the conundrum of this notion by opposing and developing two strains of propositions: twenty-three in support of the thesis “Man does not have freedom,” and twenty-nine in defense of the antithesis “Man has freedom.” Their correctness depends on the kind of existence we take to be true: the thesis (Man does not have freedom) is based on the first proposition of its set: “The possibility of the existence of all things known to us is supported by, and refers to, the coexistence of other individual things. We are not in a position to form the representation of a being that subsists completely on its own” (Jacobi 2009, p.  341). The antithesis (Man has freedom)—which shows Jacobi’s own position—lies on the opposite assumption regarding existence: It is undeniable that the existence of all finite things rests on coexistence, and that we are not in a position to form the representation of a being that subsists completely on its own. It is equally undeniable however, that we are even less in a position to form the representation of an absolutely dependent being. Such a being would have to be entirely passive. Yet it could not be passive, since anything that is not already something cannot simply be determined to be something…indeed, not even a relation is possible with respect to it. (Jacobi 2009, p. 344)

With respect to freedom, it might appear as if Jacobi presents an antinomy as Kant did in his Critique of Practical Reason, which was published only one year earlier. But Jacobi’s argument is not antinomic in nature, nor does it refer to the dialectic between freedom and happiness as the Kantian practical antinomy does. Jacobi does not confront the problem of the connection between the noumenal and historical side of the subject as in Kant’s Critique. Nevertheless, as in the case of Kant’s analysis of the antinomies of pure reason—whose structure the antinomy of practical reason follows—Jacobi’s two sets of propositions allude to the general necessity of assuming an unconditional principle for our knowledge to be consistent. Thus, instead of developing two conflicting lines of reasoning out of two antithetical assumptions, Jacobi explains the antithesis (Man has freedom) in light of the problems that arise from the notion of co-existence, as it is presented in the thesis (Man does not have freedom). Therefore, Jacobi’s argumentative strategy shows the dependence of his ideas about freedom on their opposite: they are, in fact, defined through contrast. But this strategy is not just Jacobi’s usual need for constructive polemic mentioned above; it rather

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shows the proper definition of spontaneity. In fact, in the end, Jacobi’s reasoning stretches over 52 propositions showing the advantage of assuming independent existence as the basis of reality and promoting the rational superiority of spontaneity in defining existence. “Completely mediated existence is not conceivable,” reads proposition XXV (Jacobi 2009, p. 344); complete mediation—i.e., absolute co-­existence— would produce an “Unding,” (literally, a no-thing) because the network of relations that would support the determination of a single thing would completely annihilate the singularity of the thing in question. But, likewise, it is equally impossible to know an absolutely independent thing, for the rejection of any relation would make the determination of a thing impossible (Jacobi 2009, p. 345). Thus, my thinking needs both relation and independence to determine the peculiar status of the spontaneous interaction between entities. Since Jacobi’s apparent dialectic is not an antinomy, his solution is similar neither to Kant’s solution to the antinomies of pure reason nor to the solution of the antinomy of practical reason. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that while Kant applies different strategies to solve the antinomies of pure reason, a group of them, the dynamical antinomies, provides a significant backdrop to decipher the connection between co-existence and independent existence that Jacobi’s notion of spontaneity involves. If in the case of the mathematical antinomies of pure reason, Kant shows that both thesis and antithesis are wrong because of the confusion between phenomenon and noumenon when the unconditioned is assumed as an object of experience, in the case of the dynamical antinomies of pure reason Kant positively certifies a distinct domain for each of the claims (the laws of nature/ freedom, and existence/non-existence of unconditioned being). In the case of the dynamical antinomies of pure reason, our reason is rescued from the conflict in the moment Kant shows how transcendental idealism provides reason with two distinct domains: the phenomenal in which the mechanism of nature rules, and the noumenal that makes free actions possible. Apparently, Jacobi opposes this strategy, although he accepts the double planes of reality in which human beings exist. In fact, his analysis of the thesis Man has freedom leads him to conclude that autonomous action seems to be as unacceptable as absolute dependence. In the end, since both thesis and antithesis are not entirely wrong, this conflict—either nature or freedom, either co-existence or absolute beginning—appears as if it called for the same solution as the one introduced by Kant in the dynamical antinomies. But Jacobi immediately shows dissatisfaction with the twofold reality that transcendental idealism eventually offers, although freedom and necessity need to be taken together.

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Jacobi finds a way out: the notion of freedom is defined by correlations that any Dasein must sustain in the phenomenal world, but, at the same time, Dasein is not conditioned by its relations: “this autonomous activity is called freedom inasmuch as it can be opposed to (entgegen setzten), and can prevail over (überwiegen kann), the mechanism which constitutes the sensible existence of an individual being (Dasein)” (Jacobi 2009, p. 345). Jacobi cannot but recognize the absolute dependence of existence on co-existence; but at the same time, he affirms the absolute independence of existence when it comes to the proper understanding of what is certain about it, beyond doubts or progressive knowledge. This reign of certainty is secured only if the activity, the Wirklich of the Dasein, is the absolute beginning. In the end, the absolute beginning labors its way out of nothing and defeats the nihilism of a purely materialistic order of reality. For Jacobi, freedom is equal to spontaneity, which identifies the character of an entity that gives rise to its own action. True freedom is mirrored by action that does not provide legitimation via explanation, for action emerges from nothing while being ready to plunge again into nothing. It echoes the pulse of a purely living being. Jacobi is thorough in conceiving the spontaneity of freedom as it is shown by the lack of reasons that freedom displays: free action is not prompted by law or desire (Jacobi 2009, p. 345). In contrast to Kant, Jacobi does not claim that moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom because true freedom rejects universal justification. Since existence receives its fundamental trait from the spontaneity of its unbidden acting, this nothingness surrounding the absolute beginning is the only horizon for true existence to be. The independence of the will is, in fact, not based on the practical law (Jacobi 2009, p. 517) but is rather based on a “divine element” that produces human “virtue” experienced with an ultimate “feeling of honour” (Jacobi 2009, p. 348). With his notion of existence Jacobi faces the problem raised by Kant’s discussion of the “Third Conflict of the Transcendental Ideas,” the so-called third cosmological antinomy, related to “unconditioned causality” (Kant 1998, p.  486). This conflict is the theoretical basis for the antinomy of practical reason, and it represents the fundamental background to Jacobi’s notion of spontaneity. And now that Jacobi’s peculiar way of proceeding is more explicit, one can understand why, for Jacobi, freedom is not just a transcendental problem. The beginning conceived as absolute beginning is not only what must be presupposed a priori for a certain chain of events to be identified; rather it is the only thing that we experience when a phenomenon is given to us to know, and it is also what happens when we “give” shape to actions. Jacobi’s epistemological and ethical concerns concur in aiming to save this true form of reality from dangerous illusions.

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Jacobi would agree with Kant in considering absolute freedom as the “real stumbling block for philosophy” (Kant 1998, p. 486); but if freedom represents the “stumbling block for philosophy,” Jacobi feels confident in abandoning modern thinking to give voice to a Dasein for which freedom is not a problem but its undisputable essence. He would therefore require his reader to stick to the reality of freedom and reject the abstractions of philosophy.

4

Concluding Remarks

We might wonder whether Jacobi’s discomfort and reaction are simply a display of his pulling back from modern thinking, or if they rather show evidence of what the history of modern thinking itself would appeal to in its subsequent developments. We might, therefore, ask if this attentive reader of classical German philosophy was just taking leave of his age, or if he was foreshadowing the awakening of an ancient judgment that was about to break the illusions of systematic thinking and to take the shape of a new question. There are few indications that Jacobi was coming closer to one of the contemporary ways that define the human task of revealing the truth about existence. But beside this general understanding that would associate Jacobi’s philosophy with a tradition that runs from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, what is most striking is that the task of revealing the truth about existence sets the individual permanently apart from any other kind of object; if reality is conceived in the form of relatedness and co-existence, then the Dasein of the human being becomes impossible to define. This surely does not allow us to put Jacobi in dialogue with Kierkegaard or Heidegger directly, but a few remarks on this matter will definitely help us to consider Jacobi’s efforts in a more fruitful light. In fact, the singularity of Jacobi’s philosophy appears less equivocal once we peruse a few pages of Heidegger’s interpretation of some ancient Greek fragments; it is in fact with the help of Heidegger that Jacobi’s exceptional character in the panorama of German philosophy seems to reach a more defined profile. Heidegger’s analysis of Heraclitus’s fragments sheds light on the function that the human being fulfills in saving reality from being a shapeless matter, and in this context Heidegger makes Jacobi’s theory of freedom an unexpected herald of this philosophical tradition.16 In a famous course held in 1966–1967, Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink led participants through the difficult interpretation of Heraclitus’s fragments. More than the two seminars on Heraclitus given at the University of Freiburg over the summers of 1943 and 1944, this course offered Heidegger several opportunities to reflect upon his own thought while moving both towards

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and away from Heraclitus’s fragment 64: “Lightning steers the universe” (τα δε πάντα οιακίζει Κεραυνός).17 As the course develops, the core theme of fragment 64 appears in all clarity: the ancient metaphysical problem of the relation between the one and the many. The lightning—the one—is separated and detached from the rest of reality; its overwhelming power is alien to the objects—the many—that it dazzles. Its sudden appearance illuminates the world; this world, the many, eludes the bleak night of haziness to gain form and sharpness only under the sudden blaze of that superior power. The relation between the one and the many is a distinct topic that continues to animate discussion throughout the course, even when seemingly absent. In general, we may maintain that the one is not conceived as the sum total of the many taken together, nor is it conceived as a singled-out part of the many. Instead, the one lies outside the “relatedness” that keeps the many together; this is what makes the one, one. In the text of the course lectures, it looks as if Heraclitus and Heidegger jointly address the climax of the tension that the one produces when it relates to the many: if not in relation, the one and the many vanish. If the one and the many do not oppose each other, the one disappears and the many become the whole; and in the whole, any identity loses its distinct contours. For this reason, the peculiar status of the one is repeatedly stressed, which can be simply described as the “bringing forth” the many. Heraclitus and Heidegger seem to join forces in giving “lightning” the function of being that one, which is nothing but the subject that, while relating to the many, remains outside it. Heraclitus and Heidegger suspend the process that causes the relation between the one and the many to dissolve, while holding the one and the many separate in order to look into their identity and mutual connection. On the one hand, the universe that the many presents is “quintessential relatedness,” that is, it is all what it is; on the other hand, the lightning is what, by appearing, reveals the single identity of each thing that the many include (Heidegger and Fink 1979, p. 10). At the same time, the lightning actually reveals its diversity from both the many and the single objects included in the many. The lightning is not part of the many. The lightning fulfills the function of revealing identities (Heidegger and Fink 1979, p. 21) and, by doing so, confirms its diversity from them. This is why the relation that each item of the many has with its other is not the same relation that the one, the lightning, establishes with the many. The relation that the one establishes with the many is not included in the relatedness of the universe; it is rather the action of bringing to light the parts of the many that would otherwise fall into indistinct wholeness (Heidegger and Fink 1979, p. 134).

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The action of the lightning is the destiny of the Dasein that the human being is. This destiny makes of the human being the lone ruler over the existence of things. The human being is revealed in its essence once it is caught while bringing forth existence, distinctness, and identities (Heidegger and Fink 1979, pp. 127–136). Dasein governs over existence because it provides the means to save the relatedness of the many from disappearing into shapeless darkness, and eventually it gives the universe the form of a cosmic order. But cosmic order does not affect the law of the lightning. With the same solitary status, Jacobi’s subject seems to perform the same function as lightning, that addresses relatedness but only insofar as it rules over reality without being essentially conditioned by it. In the end, Jacobi’s notion of freedom seems to introduce a constant reminder of the responsibility of the one. This responsibility can only be lived with the tension of a self-conscious isolation, lest the dissolution of the I occurs in the appearing of the whole.

Notes 1. The volume Friedrich Henrich Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, ed. by George di Giovanni (Montréal: McGill-Queen University Press, 1994) represents the major source of Jacobi’s works in the English-­speaking world. Not much of Jacobi had been translated in English prior to George di Giovanni’s edition, which in the long prefatory essay provides both an overview and an analysis of Jacobi’s philosophical achievements. 2. The impact of his intellectual activity is one of the reasons behind the current project “Jacobi-Wörterbuch-online” supported by the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Leipzig). In view of a thorough understanding of the complexity of the period, mapping the lexicon of his works and extensive correspondence will shed light on debates, controversies, and figures that gave shape to a stormy age of European intellectual history. 3. The debate on the different sources that influenced Jacobi’s early philosophy is still open. On this topic see Pistilli 2008; Bowman 2004; di Giovanni 1997; Baum 1969; de Booy and Mortier 1966. 4. Cf. Bowman 2004. Bowman’s essay successfully provides an insight into the historical sources of Jacobi’s confrontation with Scottish philosophy, aiming to deflate the alleged impact the latter had on him. 5. This excerpt comes from the fourth part of the so-called Fliegende Blätter, whose first part only was published in Minerva by Jacobi himself in 1817. Cf. Jacobi 2007. The remaining three parts were first published by Friedrich Roth and Friedrich Köppen in the sixth volume of the edition of Jacobi’s complete works (1812–1825) and will be included in the forthcoming Denkbücher

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Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis edited by Sophia Victoria Krebs in the series of Jacobi’s critical edition. 6. The paragraph containing the abovementioned excerpt refers to a letter that Jacobi wrote at the end of 1789 to Kant, in which he briefly mentions the root of his theism. He maintains that his theism comes from the “Daseyn” of reason and freedom, which provides the “as evident as inexplicable (unbegreiflich) connection between the sensory and a suprasensory” (Jacobi 2015, p. 324). 7. For an overview see Wundt 1993 and Frängsmyr 1975. The most relevant objection to the Leibniz-Wolffian method in metaphysics focuses on the distinction between the object of logic (the possible) and the object of philosophy (the actual), as it is presented as early as 1737 by Hoffmann 2010, §21. On Leibniz, Wolff, and method in philosophy, see Arndt 1971, especially pp. 128 and ss. 8. As one might expect, the bibliography on this topic is extensive, but for a first orientation see Wolff 1983b, especially §115, §139, and §167; Wolff 1983a, §§7–11; Wolff 1978 and Wolff 1981, especially §§671–716. On methodology in Wolff and the German Enlightenment in the eighteenth century see Fülleborn 1968; Tonelli 1959; Engfer 1983. More recently Dunlop 2013; Jesseph 1989; Sutherland 2010. 9. This method will later be thoroughly developed in both his German Logic and the Discursus praeliminaris of his Latin Logic. Cf. Engfer 1983, p. 55. 10. On the difference between “analysis” and “synthesis” in Wolff’s method see Tonelli 1976. 11. “On demande, si les vérités métaphysiques en général et en particulier les premiers principes de la Théologie naturelle et de la Morale sont susceptibles de la même évidence que les vérités mathématiques, et au cas qu’elles n’en soient pas susceptibles, quelle est la nature de leur certitude, à quel degré elle peut parvenir, et si ce degré suffit pour la conviction.” See Harnack 1970, pp. 306–307. The English translation is my own. The German version was published in June 1761 in Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und Gelehrten Sachen. The French word “évidence” is translated with “Deutlichkeit,” which is the term Kant uses in his essay in contrast to Mendelssohn who opts for “Evidenz.” Cf. Campo 1953, pp. 244–252. 12. Cf. Sandkaulen 2015. 13. Cf. Sandkaulen 1997. 14. My italics. See Plato 1961, especially 341 c–d. 15. My italics. 16. For an analysis of the relation between Jacobi and Heidegger, see Sommer 2015. 17. Cf. Heidegger 1994. For the English translation I remain faithful to the rendering offered by C.H Seibert in his edition of Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink’s Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67.

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Bibliography Arndt, Hans Werner. 1971. Methodo scientifica pertractatum. Mos geometricus und Kalkülbegriff in der philosophischen Theorienbildung des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: De Gruyter. Baum, Günther. 1969. Vernunft und Erkenntnis. Die Philosophie F.  H. Jacobis. Bonn: Bouvier. Bowman, Brady. 2004. Notiones Communes und Common Sense. Zu den Spinozanischen Voraussetzungen von Jacobis Rezeption der Philosophie Thomas Reids. In Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: ein Wendepunkt der geistigen Bildung der Zeit, ed. Walter Jaeschke and Birgit Sandkaulen, 159–176. Hamburg: Meiner. Campo, Mariano. 1953. La genesi del criticismo Kantiano. Varese: Editrice Magenta. de Booy, Jeans, and Roland Mortier. 1966. Les Années de formation de F. H. Jacobi d’après ses lettres inédites à M. M. Rey (1763–1771) avec Le Noble, de madame de Charrière. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. di Giovanni, George. 1997. Hume, Jacobi, and Common Sense: An Episode in the Reception of Hume in Germany at the Time of Kant. Kant-Studien 88: 44–58. Dunlop, Katerine. 2013. Mathematical Method and Newtonian Science in the Philosophy of Christian Wolff. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44: 457–469. Engfer, Hans-Jürgen. 1983. Zur Bedeutung Wolffs für die Methodendiskussion der deutschen Aufklärungsphilosophie: Analytische und synthetische Methode bei Wolff und beim vorkritischen Kant. In Christian Wolff 1679–1754. Interpretationen zu seiner Philosophie und deren Wirkung, ed. Werner Schneiders, 48–65. Hamburg: Meiner. Frängsmyr, Tore. 1975. Christian Wolff’s Mathematical Method and Its Impact on the Eighteenth Century. Journal of the History of Ideas 36: 653–668. Fülleborn, Georg Gustav. 1968. Zur Geschichte der mathematischen Methode in der deutschen Philosophie. In Beyträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie, 108–130. Züllichau und Freystadt (originally 1795; reprint, Aetas Kantiana, vol. 77, no. 3). Harnack, Adolf. 1970. Geschichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin: Bd. 2, Urkunden und Actenstücke zur Geschichte der Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Hildesheim: G. Olms. Heidegger, Martin. 1994. Heraklit. In Gesamtausgabe, ed. Martin Heidegger, vol. 55. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann (English Translation: Heidegger, Martin. 2018. Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, ed. Julia Goesser Assaiante and S.  Montgomery Ewegen. London: Bloomsbury Academic.). Heidegger, Martin, and Eugen Fink. 1979. Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67. Trans. Charles H. Seibert. University, Alabama: Alabama University Press. Hoffmann, Adolf Friedrich. 2010. Vernunftlehre. Hildesheim: Olms.

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Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 1968. Fliegende Blätter, erste bis vierte Abteilung. In Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Werke, ed. Friedrich Roth and Friedrich Köppen, vol. 5, 395–418. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ———. 2000. Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung. In Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Werke, ed. Walter Jaeschke, vol. 3, 1–136. Hamburg and Stuttgart: Meiner/Frommann Holzboog. ———. 2007. Fliegende Blätter. In Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Werke, ed. Catia Goretzki and Walter Jaeschke, vol. 5,1, 393–415. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 2009. The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, ed. George di Giovanni. Montreal: McGill-Queen University Press. ———. 2015. Briefwechsel, Reihe I, ed. Manuela Köppe, vol. 8. Hamburg: Meiner. Jesseph, Douglas. 1989. Philosophical Theory and Mathematical Practice in the Seventeenth Century. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20: 215–244. Kant, Immanuel. 1992a. Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (1764). In Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, ed. David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote, 243–275. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1992b. The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. In Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, ed. David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote, 107–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W.  Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. More, Henry. 1966. Epistola H. Mori ad V.C. In Opera Omnia II. Hildesheim: Olms. Pistilli, Emanuela. 2008. Tra Dogmatismo e Scetticismo. Fonti e Genesi della Filosofia di F.H. Jacobi. Pisa-Rome: Fabrizio Serra. Plato. 1961. Letter VII.  In Collected Works of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 1574–1598. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sandkaulen, Birgit. 1997. ‘Daseyn enthüllen’. Perspektiven und Strukturen der Philosophie Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis. Philosophisches Lesebuch 6: 133–202. ———. 2015. Letzte oder erste Fragen? Zum Bedürfnis nach Metaphysik in einer Skizze zu Kant und Jacobi. In Das neue Bedürfnis nach Metaphysik, ed. Markus Gabriel, Wolfram Hogrebe, and Andreas Speer, 49–58. Berlin, New  York: De Gruyter. Sommer, Konstanze. 2015. Zwischen Metaphysik und Metaphysikkritik. Heidegger, Schelling und Jacobi. Hamburg: Meiner. Sutherland, Daniel. 2010. Philosophy, Geometry, and Logic in Leibniz, Wolff, and the Early Kant. In Discourse on a New Method: Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and Philosophy of Science, ed. Michael Friedman, Mary Domski, and Michael Dickson, 155–192. Chicago: Open Court. Tonelli, Giorgio. 1959. Der Streit über die mathematische Methode in der Philosophie in der ersten Häfte des 18. Jahrhunderts und die Entstehung von Kants Schrift über die ‘Deutlichkeit’. Archiv für Philosophie 9: 37–66.

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———. 1976. Analysis and Synthesis in 18th Century Philosophy Prior to Kant. Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 20: 178–213. Wolff, Christian. 1978. Theologia Naturalis. In Gesammelte Werke, Abt. II. Lateinische Schriften, ed. Jean École et al., vol. 7. Hildesheim: Olms. ———. 1981. Theologia Naturalis. In Gesammelte Werke, Abt. II.  Lateinische Schriften, ed. Jean École et al., vol. 8. Hildesheim: Olms. ———. 1983a. De Differentia Nexus Rerum Sapientis et Fatalis Necessitatis. In Gesammelte Werke, Abt. II.  Lateinische Schriften, ed. Jean École et  al., vol. 9. Hildesheim: Olms. ———. 1983b. Philosophia Rationalis sive Logica. In Gesammelte Werke, Abt. II. Lateinische Schriften, ed. Jean École et al., vol. 1.1–3. Hildesheim: Olms. Wundt, Max. 1993. Die deutsche Schulphilosophie im Zeitalter der Aufklärung. Hildesheim: G. Olms Verlag.

3 Kant and Existentialism: Inescapable Freedom and Self-Deception Roe Fremstedal

1

Human Subjectivity and Finitude

Although Kant’s critical philosophy is often contrasted with existentialism, the present chapter argues that Kant anticipates nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century existentialism in several respects.1 Instead of giving a full overview of Kant’s philosophy, the present text gives a selective presentation of Kant as a forerunner of existentialism by emphasizing his account of freedom, self-­ deception, despair, anxiety, anthropology, religion, and theodicy. In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Kant anticipates the emphasis on human finitude in existentialism by analyzing the limits of human reason. In the “Transcendental Analytic,” Kant suggests that traditional metaphysics seeks a divine standpoint that allows knowledge of things in themselves (Neiman 1997, p. 38). Kant argues that such a divine standpoint is fundamentally inaccessible to us as finite beings since we can only know how things are given to us in experience. There is no sub specie aeternitatis view of the world accessible to us, as we only know the world from our human perspective (cf. Kant 2007, A276–277/B332–333). Like the existentialists, Kant holds perspectivality in general, and the first-­ person person perspective in particular, to be crucial to both human

R. Fremstedal (*) Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_3

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experience and agency. Kant not only describes our world (or existence) from the inside, but he even anticipates the crucial idea that all human existence is defined by self-referentiality or mineness (Jemeinigkeit). More specifically, he argues that I must be able to recognize that all my representations are mine, since “the I think must be able to accompany all my representations” (Kant 2007, B131–132). All consciousness thus involves self-referentially, if only implicitly. Partially because of this, Kant contributes to making human subjectivity one of the main topics of existentialism and Continental philosophy. Like Sartre, he holds that we “cannot pass beyond human subjectivity” (something Sartre characterizes as “the deeper meaning of existentialism” (Sartre 1975, p. 350)). The first Critique argues at length that we cannot have knowledge of God or the soul, as claimed by traditional metaphysics (particularly in the Rationalist tradition). Neither can we have knowledge of the supernatural and supersensual, including our own dispositions (Gesinnungen). Partially because of this, Kant argues that all theoretical proofs for the existence of God fail. His critique of the ontological proof for the existence of God is particularly important since it denies that existence is a predicate (Kant 2007, A592–602/ B620–630). Whether or not something exists, is a contingent matter that cannot be known a priori. Necessity and essentiality, by contrast, can be known a priori. Kant here anticipates the crucial distinction between being and thought, actuality and possibility, existence and essence, the concrete and abstraction, developed by (the late) Schelling and Kierkegaard. The idea is that being, existence, and actuality are fundamentally contingent, whereas thought, essences, and possibilities are not (Pinkard 2010, pp. 320–329; cf. Stewart 2010, pp. 80–81, 93–94). Pure reason can know the latter but not the former, since the former involves historical contingencies and free agency that initiates new causal chains that cannot be known a priori.

2

 uman Freedom and the Central H Philosophical Issue

In the 1780s and 1790s, Kant develops a theory of freedom that is extraordinarily influential and controversial. Kant’s account is highly modern, since it salvages freedom and responsibility from both scientific determinism and theological predestination (cf. Madore 2011, p.  20). He describes freedom not only as the highest principle, but also as the cornerstone of the system of reason (Kant 1900ff., vol. 5, pp. 3–4). By placing human freedom at the very

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center of his philosophy, Kant anticipates not only German Idealism and Romanticism but also existentialism. However, as far as existentialism is concerned, the importance of Kant’s account of freedom lies more in its general focus, and its emphases on autonomy, anxiety and Willkür (the power of choice), than in its details (e.g. intelligible and empirical character). It is not so much the content and rules of Kant’s ethics that anticipates existentialism, as his view that freedom is inescapable.2 In 1781, Kant argues that human freedom is possible, given transcendental idealism. That is, human freedom is conceivable and compatible with causal determinism. However, Kant is hardly a compatibilist about freedom in any ordinary sense. Rather, he is an incompatibilist and libertarian about freedom, as most existentialists are. More specifically, Kant understands freedom as the ability to start a new causal chain (Kant 2007, A445/B473). This makes it necessary to distinguish between the causality of freedom and the causality of nature. The latter follows the causal laws of nature, whereas the former starts new causal chains that may (or may not) intervene successfully in nature. One of the most debated aspects of Kant’s theory is the dualism between freedom and nature developed in the first Critique. Kant describes nature in deterministic, Newtonian terms, whereas human freedom is interpreted in teleological terms. Human beings are then described as either natural beings determined by natural laws or as free moral beings. We can see ourselves either as unfree beings who are products of causal processes in nature or as free beings who initiate new causal chains. The former alternative is favored by a description of human beings from a third-person perspective, whereas the latter alternative is favored from a first-person perspective in which human agents must act and choose. We tend towards the former alternative when we are passive spectators who observe the world. We tend towards the latter when we are agents who participate and intervene in the world. Both of these perspectives are essential to us, but both Kant and existentialism give priority to the practical perspective (Burnham and Papandreopoulos 2011, Part 1E). They both suggest that our practical agency cannot be objectified or denied without self-estrangement and self-deception. In The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant goes beyond the first Critique by assuming the reality of moral freedom (Wille). More specifically, he argues that the moral demand presupposes the reality of human freedom, although the latter can only be shown through our awareness of the former. Freedom is the foundation for the existence of the categorical imperative, but the latter is only known from our experience of freedom (Kant 1900ff., vol. 5,

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p. 4n). Based on a somewhat phenomenological analysis of moral consciousness, Kant then argues for the necessity of postulating moral freedom.3 In addition, he assumes that a free will and a moral will reciprocally imply each other. A free will and a moral will (following the categorical imperative) is the same thing, Kant argues in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the second Critique (Kant 1900ff., vol. 4, p. 446; vol. 5, p. 29). The problem with this approach (i.e., the reciprocity thesis) is that, according to this view, it is far from clear how moral evil is either intelligible or imputable (Allison 1995, pp. 133–136; Kosch 2006, pp.  56–65). It seems that either agents act morally, or they are unfree. In order to escape this dilemma and to account for alternative possibilities, Kant introduces the notion of Willkur (the power of choice) and the incorporation thesis (in 1792–1797).

3

Inescapable Freedom: The Incorporation Thesis

In the “incorporation thesis,” Kant claims that [F]reedom of the power of choice [Willkür] has the characteristic, entirely peculiar to it, that it cannot be determined to action through any incentive [Triebfeder] except so far as the human being has incorporated [aufgenommen hat] it into his maxim (has made it into a universal rule for himself, according to which he wills to conduct himself ); only in this way can an incentive, whatever it may be, coexist with the absolute spontaneity of the power of choice (of freedom). (Kant 1900ff., vol. 6, pp. 23–24; 2001a, p. 73)

Even actions that are based on inclinations presuppose freedom, since I must prioritize inclinations above morality by freely incorporating inclinations into my maxim. Whether I act morally or not, I am always free and responsible for my actions. Indeed, we are not only responsible for our actions but also for our maxims and moral characters.4 Even if I follow my desires, or give in to pressures, this still represents a free choice for which I am responsible. Kant therefore anticipates Sartre’s view that I am responsible for my passions (Sartre 1975, p. 353). For Kant and Sartre, even self-deception and weakness of will involve a free choice (although the agent may not be aware of it). Like the existentialists, Kant emphasizes the idea that we cannot choose not to be free; we can only choose how to make use of our freedom. Kant’s incorporation thesis therefore anticipates the Sartrean dictum that we are condemned to be free. More specifically, it implies that we always stand at a

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crossroads, at which the power of choice must choose between alternative possibilities. We can either prioritize morality over sensuousness or prioritize sensuousness over morality. However, the choice between these two alternatives is inescapable. Any attempt to avoid choosing will therefore involve a tendency towards self-deception and moral corruption that effectively prioritizes sensuousness over morality.

4

Autonomy and Meta-Ethics

In the history of ethics, Kant introduces the concept of moral autonomy (self-­ legislation) in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. This concept represents one of Kant’s most influential ideas. Although post-Kantian interpretations of autonomy often differ from Kant’s interpretation of autonomy, it still seems that the latter anticipates ideas of autonomy and authenticity in existentialism (Stewart 2010, pp. 168–197). Kant’s account of autonomy in The Groundwork and the Second Critique relies on the reciprocity thesis. An autonomous will is then identical to a free moral will (Wille) that follows its own practical reason and the categorical imperative. On this account, any failure to be moral implies heteronomy or unfreedom. Someone who fails to be moral is therefore ruled either by external forces or by his own inclinations and desires. Still, even Kant allows for a form of non-moral autonomy, at least in the later writings from the 1790s (Allison 1995, pp. 95–96). More specifically, the incorporation thesis, and the doctrine of radical evil, implies that even evil agents freely prioritize sensuousness (or prudence) above morality. The power of choice (Willkür) is then free to choose between good and evil, morality and immorality. This involves a form of self-determination (autonomy) that goes beyond the moral autonomy of the reciprocity thesis. Although only a moral will follows its own reason consistently, it is still the case that an evil will is free to prioritize sensuousness above morality (or prudence above pure practical reason). The latter represents a free choice that may or may not involve reflection or deliberation. It does not represent our rationality and freedom as fully as moral action does, but it must still involve some freedom if immoral actions are to be intelligible and imputable. However, there are different interpretations of Kantian autonomy. The most influential interpretation views Kant as a moral constructivist in meta-­ ethics. Moral constructivists typically see a moral norm as valid because it is arrived at through a valid procedure. That is, valid norms are created, constructed, or legislated by passing through a certain procedure. Particularly the

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Formula of Universal Law and the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends seem to support this reading. Paul Formosa explains: [W]e can read Kant as saying that there is decision procedure for testing maxims from which, by running our proposed maxims through this procedure and testing them for universality, we can construe rational maxims. Alternatively…the stance of the members of an ideal kingdom of ends defines what is right. (Formosa 2013, pp. 174–175)

However, the moral realist objects to this by arguing that norms can only pass the procedure if norms are antecedently valid (Formosa 2013, p. 170; Stern 2012, chapters 1–3). The Formula of Humanity in particular seems to support a realist reading of Kantian autonomy. Here Kant appears to claim that in order for there to be a categorical imperative there must be “something the existence of which in itself has an absolute worth,” and that something by elimination must be persons in virtue of their capacity for rational agency. The absolute worth of persons or rational agents comprises an independent order of value which precedes and grounds the moral law. (Formosa 2013, p. 174)

However, many readers of Kant have pointed to a dilemma inherent to Kantian autonomy.5 The first horn of the dilemma takes the form of self-­determination being based on practical reasons that are antecedently valid and therefore have normative authority prior to self-legislation. As a result, autonomy is constrained by standards that are not self-imposed, something that seems to involve not only moral realism (and rationalism and intellectualism about ethics) but also heteronomy. The second horn of the dilemma, by contrast, only recognizes the authority of autonomy. It establishes normative principles that are themselves unprincipled. On this account, it is contingent decisions that create rules with normative content. There are no external constraints, or antecedent justificatory reasons, that limit decisions or hinder them from being valid. Any decision that is self-imposed by contingent fiat is authoritative, irrespective of normative content (at least if it follows a valid procedure). Still, the normative content can change at any time since it is always possible to change one’s will. As a result, any normative content is only provisionally valid. On this latter account, autonomy collapses into a decisionism and voluntarism that is motiveless, arbitrary, and groundless. Normative content is created ex nihilo by a decisionistic bootstrapping operation that constitutes itself. However, this form of decisionism is closer to Sartre’s notion of radical choice

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than Kant’s concept of autonomy (cf. Fremstedal 2014, chapter 10; Stern 2012, chapter 1). Still, this dilemma was identified in discussions of Kantian autonomy, and his view anticipates Sartre’s “radical choice” and existential autonomy (cf. Pinkard 2010; Fremstedal 2020). More specifically, anti-realist and voluntarist readings of Kant’s ethics radicalize Kantian autonomy and anticipate twentieth-century existentialism by separating Willkür (the power of choice) from Wille (practical reason) (cf. Sartre 1975; Burnham and Papandreopoulos 2011; Stewart 2010, p. 169).6

5

F reedom, Anxiety, Self-Deception and Moral Evil

In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), Kant anticipates the influential existential distinction between fear and anxiety. Kant claims that fear and anxiety are qualitatively different: “Fear concerning an object that threatens an undetermined ill [Übel] is anxiety [Bangigkeit]. Anxiety can fasten on to someone without his knowing a particular object for it: an uneasiness arising from merely subjective causes (from a diseased state)” (Kant 1900ff., vol. 7, p. 255; 2009, p. 357). Rather than saying that anxiety is a form of fear, Kant is saying at that it is a form of “aversion [Abscheues] to danger” that is undetermined (Kant 1900ff., vol. 7, p. 256; 2009, p. 358). Anxiety thus concerns undetermined danger or ill, whereas fear concerns determined danger or ill. Elsewhere, Kant claims that the awareness of freedom leads to anxiety. In his discussion of the Fall of man into sin in “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,” (1786) Kant writes: [Man] discovered in himself a faculty of choosing for himself a way of living and not being bound to a single one, as other animals are. Yet upon the momentary delight that this marked superiority might have awakened in him, anxiety and fright [Angst und Bangigkeit] must have followed right away, concerning how he, who did not know the hidden properties and remote effects of anything, should deal with this newly discovered faculty. He stood, as it were, on the brink of an abyss; for instead of the single objects of his desire to which instinct had up to now directed him, there opened up an infinity of them; and from this estate of freedom, once he had tasted it, it was nevertheless wholly impossible for him to turn back again to that of servitude (under the dominion of instincts). (Kant 1900ff., vol. 8, p. 112; 2009, p. 166)

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Like Kierkegaard, Kant uses anxiety in order to shed light on how human volition can fall into evil.7 More specifically, he argues that consciousness of freedom (Willkür) leads to anxiety (Angst), and that anxiety in turn precedes the fall into evil. Indeed, the passage above suggests that we are anxious about plunging into the abyss rather than accidentally falling into it. This idea clearly anticipates the interpretation of anxiety in Schelling’s Freiheitschrift, Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.8 In order to explain the possibility and imputability of immoral action, Kant develops the controversial doctrine of radical evil (1792–1794). Although this doctrine is accused of reintroducing the Christian notion of original sin, it views the fall into evil not so much as an historical event that affects humanity in general, as a fall performed by each single individual. Kant’s emphasis is therefore not on Adam’s fall into evil, but on each individual’s fall. This individualistic account of original sin anticipates Kierkegaard’s interpretation of original sin in The Concept of Anxiety (Fremstedal 2014, chapter 2). More importantly, Kant anticipates the existential notion of bad faith by taking moral evil to involve self-deception (and self-conceit). Kant argues that immoral actions involve self-deception that takes the form of an evaluative mistake (or illusion) that prefers heteronomy to autonomy, and sensuousness (prudence) to morality. This mistake involves practical irrationality that corrupts the characters of moral agents, leading the agents to have a propensity or tendency (Hang) towards evil that can never be eradicated completely. This is a propensity that is self-inflicted by each individual, Kant argues. As a result, each individual is prone to self-deception by valuing personal inclinations and sensuousness above morality and rationality. Hence, radical evil rejects rational, moral constrains on inclinations, sensuousness and prudence. It chooses to be ruled by contingent, arational inclinations instead of moral freedom (Wille), something that involves heteronomy and self-deception. This analysis anticipates the analysis of bad faith and self-deception in existentialism.9 Both bad faith and radical evil involves a self-handicapping by which the agent deceives himself. Instead of facing up to the responsibility that comes with freedom, one tries to abdicate and to avoid free choice. To both Kant and Sartre, this self-deception does not represent an isolated incident but a general disposition (Kant 1900ff., vol. 6, pp. 20–25; Sartre 1998, p. 68; cf. Stewart 2010, p. 224). Kant assumes that the propensity towards evil results from a free choice that corrupts the agent’s entire moral character. He describes this choice of evil as a choice made beyond time. Henry Allison comments:

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Unlike ordinary, first-order maxims, however, the meta-maxim [character] or propensity cannot be thought as self-consciously adopted at a particular point in time. On the contrary, it is found already at work when moral deliberation begins and must be presupposed in order to conceive of the possibility of immoral actions in beings for whom the moral law provides an incentive. It is in this sense alone that it is to be viewed as timeless and intelligible. (Allison 2002, p. 341)

Formosa explains: Kant only claims that such a supreme choice must be “posited” and thus “represented” as being present at birth. It is not as if we adopt our supreme maxim [character] first, at birth say, and then reason downward. Rather the reverse is the case. We begin to use our freedom by adopting some lower-level and unimportant maxim….But any maxim already presupposes a complex hierarchy of maxims, in terms of which that maxim can be understood, which the agent may not, indeed is very likely not to be, explicitly aware of at the time. (Formosa 2007, p. 233)

Much like Allison, Formosa argues that it “must be possible in subsequent reflection to discover and articulate…the maxims on which one acts” (Formosa 2007, p. 233). Subsequent reflection typically discovers that one has always already deceived oneself, by prioritizing sensuousness without being fully aware of it at the time of choosing. We only become aware of this choice retrospectively (Muchnik 2009, p. 108). When we consciously start to exercise our moral freedom, we realize that we have already chosen an evil maxim (or character). We find ourselves in a situation and we cannot know how it originated, something that is reminiscent of Heideggerian phenomenology and hermeneutics.

6

Choosing Oneself: The Moral Conversion

As a response against self-deception, Kant calls for the necessity of choosing oneself. Allison writes: …Kant’s conception of Gesinnung…reflects his partial agreement with a tradition in moral psychology that stretches at least back to Aristotle and that includes, in addition to Leibniz and Hume, contemporary thinkers who insist that moral responsibility be connected with the character of the agent. Where Kant breaks with this tradition…is with his insistence that, like the specific

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maxims adopted on the basis of it, an agent’s Gesinnung is itself somehow chosen. In insisting on this point, Kant appears to go well beyond the widely shared intuition that, to some extent at least, we are responsible for our characters as well as for our deeds and to affirm a paradoxical…doctrine of a timeless act of self-constitution. (Allison 1995, p. 137)

The idea that the agent can choose his fundamental disposition (Gesinnung) involves an atemporal act of self-constitution that seems to break with traditional moral psychology. However, Kant’s point is not that we create ourselves or that we cause our inclinations. Rather, we only choose or constitute ourselves insofar as we are moral beings who are good or evil. More specifically, we freely choose our moral characters and maxims (Allison 1995, pp. 140–142). Kant describes the choice of character both as a gradual reform in time and as a sudden atemporal revolution, which concerns life as a whole. He thinks that a revolution is necessary since mere reform of behavior is compatible with radical evil (Allison 1995, p. 169). A reform that reduces evil is insufficient, as morality requires that we become new, reborn persons who avoid evil entirely. The latter requires a revolution that existentially transforms the agent by radically changing his principles, identity, and way of thinking (Denkungsart). It is this idea that breaks with traditional moral psychology (cf. Allison 1995, p.  137) and anticipates the idea of existential choice in existentialism (cf. Schulte 1991, pp.  119, 278–279; Fremstedal 2014, chapter 3; Madore 2011, p. 20). In this context, Kant suggests that we can overcome self-deception by converting from evil to good (Kant 1900ff., vol. 6, pp. 50–51, 74, 117–120). This anticipates Sartre’s idea that a “radical conversion” can overcome bad faith through “an ethics of deliverance and salvation” (Sartre 1998, p. 412n, cf. 627). For Sartre (1998, p. 70n), this conversion takes the form of a “self-­ recovery of being which was previously corrupted,” something that amounts to authenticity. For Kant, the conversion represents a revolution in the way of thinking that has both moral and religious aspects. It is a moral conversion from evil to good, which establishes moral character, and a religious conversion, by which the agent may hope for divine assistance if and only if he does moral good with all his power (cf. Kant 1900ff., vol. 6, p. 109). This conversion requires not only full moral commitment, but also a personal independence and maturity (Mündigkeit) that has the courage and resolve to think for itself by overcoming self-incurred minority (Unmündigkeit) (Kant 1900ff., vol. 7, p.  229). As such, it involves a non-conformism that courageously and resolutely uses its personal understanding without direction from another (Kant 1900ff., vol. 8, p.  35). Kant characterizes this as true

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enlightenment, although it is reminiscent of existential authenticity.10 Still, existentialism goes beyond this by developing richer notions of selfhood and practical identity than what can be found in Kant. More specifically, Kant is less concerned with the narrative and temporal form of practical identity than Kierkegaard and later existentialists are (cf. Rudd 2012; Davenport 2012).

7

Philosophical Anthropology as a New Discipline

In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant analyzes the establishment of moral character in anthropological terms. Character requires that, as a free rational being, the agent takes responsibility for himself as a natural or sensuous being. Kant describes the latter as the “physical character,” which includes temperament (Temperament), the mode of sensing (Sinnesart), natural predisposition (Naturanlage) and natural aptitude (Naturell).11 This physical character represents “what nature makes of man,” something that is studied by “physiological anthropology” (Kant 1900ff., vol. 7, p. 119). “Pragmatic anthropology,” by contrast, concerns what the human being “as a free-acting being makes of himself, or [what he] can and should make of himself ” (Kant 1900ff., vol. 7, p.  119; 2009, p.  231). This anticipates Heidegger’s view that “Rather than being an object among others, Dasein is a “relation of being” [Seinsverhältnis…] …that obtains between what one is at any moment and what one can and will be” (Varga and Guignon 2017, Part 3.1). It also anticipates Sartre’s (1975, p. 349) view that “[man] will be what he makes of himself ” (although Kant and Sartre differ when it comes to formal and rational constraints on choosing oneself ). Jon Stewart writes: Kant breaks with classical moral theory by largely rejecting the conception of a human being with a fixed essence which has a determinate content. To be sure, he conceives of humans as essentially rational, but he limits this conception to the rational will [Wille] that demands self-consistency. Kant thus prepares the ground for thinkers like Sartre who categorically deny any a priori human essence that could serve as the basis of a moral theory. (Stewart 2010, p. 169)

Kant agrees with existentialists who maintain that accounts of what it means to be human are necessarily largely formal and general (Crowell 2017). More specifically, accounts of human nature may indicate human possibilities and ideals (that overcome self-deception). As such, these accounts may help us to acquire self-knowledge (Neiman 1997, pp. 196–202). But how we actually

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use our freedom is a contingent matter that we only have limited knowledge of, insofar as freedom shows itself in actions that are empirically accessible. In his anthropological and historical writings, Kant assumes that human beings are characterized by “unsocial sociability,” in which our social relations are fundamentally ambiguous and conflicted (Kant 1900ff., vol. 8, pp. 20–21). We cannot stand others, yet we cannot do without them either. The result is an antagonism between human beings that leads to social conflict and competition that propels historical development. At this point, Kant’s analysis partially anticipates the existentialists’ interpretation of the social dynamics of competition and comparison, although Kant did not analyze the dialectics of recognition like Fichte and Hegel did. Kant’s pragmatic anthropology studies what we make of ourselves by focusing on our way of thinking (Denkungsart), as represented by our moral characters (Kant 1900ff., vol. 7, pp.  119, 285, 292). We are not only objects shaped by nature (studied by physiological anthropology) but also free, rational beings that take over and reform our physical characters in light of our ideals. Kant’s pragmatic anthropology concerns how we use (or should use) our freedom to (1) revolutionize our thinking by adopting moral character, (2) take over ourselves, and (3) attempt to reform ourselves in light of our ideals (Fremstedal 2014, chapter 3). This implies that moral agents are embodied individuals with certain personalities and temperaments. Kant’s pragmatic anthropology here anticipates the central existentialist idea that each individual must take over himself consciously by choosing himself not only as a free being but also as a concrete, embodied being. More specifically, Kant suggests that individuals must take over not only their own physical character but also inherited features of society, partially by appropriating skills and knowledge acquired by earlier generations (cf. Kleingeld 1999, p. 66; Wood 2003, pp. 52–53). Kant suggests that we need to take over facticity since freedom is situated. However, this point is not systematically developed since Kant lacks a systematic analysis of facticity (as such), something that has the result that historicity and contingency tends to play a somewhat unclear and unsettled role in his account (Fremstedal 2014, chapter 3). The discipline of philosophical anthropology represents another part of Kant’s legacy that prepared the ground for existentialism. As an academic discipline, anthropology was introduced by Kant, Herder and Platner in the late eighteenth century (and later became institutionalized in the first half of the nineteenth and reestablished in the early twentieth). Whereas the physiological anthropology of Kant’s contemporary Ernst Platner anticipates Biological and Physical Anthropology, Kant anticipates Existential and

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Phenomenological Anthropology (Louden 2011, p. 67, p. 81). Kant’s pragmatic anthropology particularly anticipates Max Scheler’s anthropological view that the human being goes beyond animals by being “a ‘spiritual’ being” [ein ‘geistiges’ Wesen] that is “no longer tied to its drives and environments, but rather ‘free from the environment’ [‘umweltfrei’] or …‘open to the world’ [‘weltoffen’].”12

8

Philosophy of Religion as a New Discipline

Another part of Kant’s legacy is his influential and controversial philosophy of religion. Together with other German idealists, Kant established philosophy of religion as a new philosophical discipline that goes beyond traditional natural theology (Dorrien 2012; Collins 1967). This discipline prepares the ground for both secular and religious existentialism. On the one hand, Kant anticipates secular existentialism by criticizing both theodicies and traditional justifications of religious faith. Kant is here typically seen as someone who destroys natural theology by limiting knowledge in the first Critique. On the other hand, Kant makes new room for religious faith by stressing the practical and moral functions of religion, something that anticipates religious existentialism. More specifically, Kant is clear that religion concerns practical, moral questions about how to live our lives rather than epistemic questions about what we can know. As a result, religion concerns faith, hope, and charity rather than mythology or cosmology. Religious texts should therefore be read morally and existentially as something that concerns how I should live my life instead of being read literally or in a historical-critical manner. Kant thereby anticipates the existential interpretation of scripture developed by Kierkegaard and Bultmann (cf. Bayer 2007, pp. 161–168). However, both secular and religious readings of Kant tend to agree that our ideals differ clearly from reality. More specifically, human history does not represent the highest good, a moral world in which only the virtuous are happy. Even Kant’s notion of historical progress (towards legality, morality and the highest good) is not based on a naïve enlightenment belief in progress as something inevitable. Instead, it is based a regulative (heuristic) notion of progress that is humanly necessary if we are to understand history as a system rather than a planless aggregate of action (Kant 1900ff., vol. 8, p. 29). Kant’s point is not that the world contains progress or teleology. Rather, these are only regulative notions that are humanly necessary, even if the world itself is ruled by blind, amoral causal laws. Hence, Kant points to a fundamental

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discrepancy between human reason and the world that anticipates Camus’s notion of the absurd. Susan Neiman writes: Kant offered a metaphysics of permanent rupture. The gap between nature and freedom, is and ought, conditions all human existence….Integrity requires affirming the dissonance and conflict at the heart of experience. It means recognizing that we are never, metaphysically, at home in the world. This affirmation requires us to live with the mixture of longing and outrage few will want to bear. Kant never let us forget either the extent of our limits or the legitimacy of our wish to transcend them. (Neiman 2004, p. 80)

9

Overcoming Despair: Moral Faith and Hope

In the first Critique, Kant tries to reconcile religion and science by limiting knowledge in order to make room for faith (Dorrien 2012, chapters 1–2). However, knowledge (Wissen) and faith (Glaube, sometimes translated belief ) are both technical notions, explained in “The Canon of Pure Reason” (Kant 2007, A822–829/B850–858). Knowledge requires sufficient evidence. Faith, by contrast, is not based on evidence since it concerns issues that we cannot have knowledge about (e.g., the existence of God and immortality). That is to say, we cannot have sufficient epistemic reasons either for or against faith (or belief ), according to Kant. Still, there can be perfectly good reasons to have faith. Instead of being justified epistemically (as knowledge is), faith is justified by practical (and moral) reasons. Kant is therefore a pragmatist (non-­ evidentialist) about faith, although he is an evidentialist about knowledge (Chignell 2007). Faith only requires a subjective, practical justification, whereas knowledge requires an objective, theoretical justification. However, the theoretical content of faith does not provide any knowledge but only serves to guide action (Neiman 1997, p. 158). In one variant of the moral argument for the existence of God and immortality, Kant argues that the alternative to religious faith and hope is demoralization that involves despair and a loss of moral resolve. This seems to be a point about the moral psychology of ordinary agents, who do not know if they are making a difference for the better by being moral. Without faith and hope, agents tend to become demoralized when their moral efforts do not seem to be making a difference. More specifically, Kant argues that moral agents who face serious, inescapable injustice, in which virtue leads to unhappiness and vice to happiness, tends to be demoralized, in the sense that their moral motivation is weakened

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or deteriorated (cf. Adams 1987, pp.  151–156). First, there is a tendency towards general moral despair in the face of such injustice.13 Second (and partially because of this), demoralization involves a psychological loss of resolve to continue to be moral.14 In the face of injustice and personal unhappiness, moral agents then tend to lose moral resolve. Kant (1900ff., vol. 28, pp. 1076, 1151) therefore concludes that, without faith in a God who makes possible a moral order (which provides justice), we are led to an unstable condition (“schwankender Zustand”), in which we continuously fall from hope into doubt, mistrust, and despair. In the “Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason,” from the second Critique, Kant analyzes the conflict between morality and happiness. Instead of merely invoking empirical evidence that indicates injustice, Kant sketches a transcendental argument in which morality must differ from our prudential striving for happiness (Kant 1900ff., vol. 5, pp.  146–147).15 Jens Timmermann explains: [If we] cannot experience any tension between prudence and the demands of morality [we] cannot be moved by, or take a pure interest in, the moral law as such….We need the “subjective antagonism”…of moral law and inclination for the law to affect our subjectivity. When we perceive that selfishness and moral judgement conflict, we realize for the first time that we are not enthralled by inclination, and that there is something within us that is active and radically free. This inspires respect, which in turn enables us to act independently of self-­ regarding considerations. (Timmermann 2013, pp. 674–675)

We cannot chose morality only for its own sake, unless it deviates from prudence. Morality would serve self-interest if it coincided perfectly with prudence. Still, Kant argues that we should promote the highest good, a moral world in which only the virtuous are happy (Kant 1900ff., vol. 5, pp.  113–119, 126–133; vol. 6, pp. 97–124). We have moral reasons to minimize injustice since injustice tends to produce demoralization and despair. However, this means morality is committed to an end, the highest good, the realization of which lies beyond human powers. More specifically, divine assistance is needed for morality to cause happiness and for uniting the forces of separate individuals so that they participate in the ethical commonwealth (Kant 1900ff., vol. 6, p. 139). Kant concludes that faith in God and immortality is morally necessary and not some arbitrary assumption we could do without (1900ff., vol. 5, pp. 132, 142–146; vol. 8, pp.  137–139). He justifies religious faith on the grounds

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that it resolves the antinomy of practical reason. This antinomy represents a form of moral despair, in which the highest good appears both necessary and impossible simultaneously (Fremstedal 2014, chapter 6). Kant resolves the antinomy by arguing that the impossibility of the highest good is only apparent if God and immortality exist. In his reply to critics, Kant concedes that he postulates the existence of God and immortality based on a human need. However, he denies that this involves wishful thinking since the postulate is based on a need of reason rather than inclinations (Kant 1900ff., vol. 5, pp. 143–144). Despite lack of evidence, reason must make a judgement based on practical reason in order to orient itself (Kant 1900ff., vol. 8, p. 137). Kant concludes that “I will that there be a God…this is the only case in which my interest, because I may not give up anything of it, unavoidably determines my judgment” (Kant 1900ff., vol. 5, p. 143; 1999, p. 255). The proof for the existence of God lies “merely in the moral need” (Kant 1900ff., vol. 27, p. 718; 2001b, p. 441). Dieter Henrich comments: To believe that the world order does not allow moral life would be to precipitate absolute despair. For that reason I do not believe it. Even if I think that I believe it, I am wrong. I do not believe that this is the case, no matter what I say. To read Kant this way is to encounter a sort of existential philosophy: there are well-­ founded beliefs that precede and survive all arguments. (Henrich 2008, p. 102)

The existential philosophy Henrich sketches here comes close, not only to religious existentialism, but also to fideism and pragmatism about religious faith. However, Kant insists that belief, faith, and hope can be justified by practical reason, although they go beyond evidence. Instead of being a fideist or irrationalist, Kant sketches a reductio ad absurdum argument that reduces the alternatives to religious faith and hope to despair and demoralization, something that clearly anticipates Kierkegaard (Fremstedal 2014, chapter 6). Kant also anticipates Kierkegaard by stressing the personal nature of faith: I see myself necessitated through my end, in accordance with the laws of freedom, to accept as possible a highest good in the world, but I cannot necessitate anyone else through grounds (the belief is free)….[O]n account of its merely subjective grounds, believing yields no conviction that can be communicated and that commands universal agreement, like the conviction that comes from knowledge. (Kant 1900ff., vol. 9, pp. 69–70; 2004, pp. 573–574)

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Faith cannot be commanded, since it is only authentic if each individual freely accepts it personally (Kant 1900ff., vol. 5, p. 144). Kant does not deny that faith should be universal but he insists that every individual must reach faith on his own by realizing that he must believe in order to avoid despair and demoralization. In this context, Kant warns not only against demoralization but also against passivity and undecidedness: [N]o more miserable condition for man can be thought…than the condition that leaves us undecided [unentschloβen]…particularly…when it affects our interests. Everything that holds us up and makes us inactive, leaves us in a certain kind of inaction, is quite opposed to the essential determinations of the soul. (Kant 1900ff., vol. 24, p. 203; 2004, p. 160)

Kant then uses Socrates as an example, “Even in the context of utter uncertainty in speculation there can be complete decisiveness in action. Socrates was uncertain [about immortality], but he acted as if he were certain” (Kant 1900ff., vol. 24, p.  433; Zammito 2002, p.  277). This interpretation of Socrates clearly anticipates Kierkegaard’s interpretation of him in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Stewart 2015, p.  154). It suggests that Socrates stakes his life on his faith, although the faith is based on practical reasons instead of evidence. To Socrates, philosophy is then not so much a theoretical doctrine as a way of life based on moral faith. To Kant (and Kierkegaard), Socrates is a proto-existential philosopher who unifies thought and life to the extent that he risks his life for his faith. Kant distinguishes between two types of philosophy, one of which is proto-­ existential. Philosophy according to the Schulbegriff represents theoretical philosophy that is scholastic, whereas philosophy according to the Weltbegriff represents practical philosophy that is cosmopolitan (Kant 2007, A838/ B866). The former represents theoretical knowledge of the world that belongs to a spectator. The latter, by contrast, represents practical philosophy that participates actively in the world based on practical reasons that go beyond possible knowledge. This is philosophy as a way of life, which Kant favors.

10

Anti-Theodicy and the Hiddenness of God

An integral part of Kant’s critical philosophy is his influential critique of theodicies. A theodicy is an attempt to excuse (or justify) God for allowing suffering and evil in the world. Kant says that theodicies defend God for allowing

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either (1) moral evil, (2) natural evil (suffering, pain, sickness) or (3) the relation (proportion) between moral and natural evil in the world (cf. Kant 1900ff., vol. 8, pp. 255–257). Sami Pihlström and Sari Kivistö comment: …Kant’s rejection of theodicies is a crucial part of his critical philosophy: on the one hand, insofar as theodicies aim at theoretical (metaphysical, speculative, transcendent) knowledge about God, they are…impossible and must fail, given the limitations of human reason; on the other hand, it is precisely by limiting the sphere of knowledge that Kant, famously, makes room for faith. (Pihlström and Kivistö 2016, p. 30)

In “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” (1791) and Religion within the Boundaries of Bare Reason (1793/1794), Kant maintains that evil is widespread and that it cannot be eliminated, justified or explained theoretically. Rather, evil represents a practical, existential problem that we must cope with as agents (Pihlström and Kivistö 2016, p. 48). In the critical philosophy, Kant uses reason to determine, and acknowledge, the limits of reason. He rejects theoretical efforts to defend God in light of moral and natural evil in the world, because we cannot know God’s relation to good and evil by inferences from the physical world. Kant argues that human rationality is so limited that we neither have reasons to defend nor accuse God. Rather, we have reasons to avoid defending or accusing God (Welz 2008, pp. 14–17, 83–87, 176–178; Neiman 2004, pp. 18–36, 61–111). In “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy,” Kant sketches a powerful critique of theodicies more generally. In the first part of the text, Kant claims that (doctrinal or rationalizing) theodicies must fail since they overstep the limits of human reason (Kant 1900ff., vol. 8, pp. 255–264). Kant’s reasons for holding this view seem to be the following. First, theodicies make unwarranted assumptions about God since we cannot have theoretical knowledge of God or view the world from His point of view, given the limits of human reason (as argued in the Critique of Pure Reason). God must be hidden to us, since there cannot be any possible experience of God’s existence or a priori knowledge of him. Even if God revealed himself, we would only experience a finite being, not an infinite being or anything perfect. Kant writes: [I]f God should really speak to a human being, the latter could still never know that it was God speaking. It is quite impossible for a human being to apprehend the infinite by his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and be acquainted with it as such. (Kant 1900ff., vol. 7, p. 63; 2001a, p. 283)

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Kant concludes that a direct revelation of God would be a supersensible experience, which is impossible (Kant 1900ff., vol. 7, p. 47, cf. p. 58). Second, we cannot have exhaustive knowledge of the relation between moral and natural evil, or vice and unhappiness. There are both theoretical and practical reasons why this is so. We lack knowledge of this relation, and even if possible, such knowledge would result in demoralization (Kant 1900ff., vol. 5, pp. 146–147). More specifically, we cannot choose morality only for its own sake, unless morality deviates from prudence—something that would be prevented by a divine judge who always rewards virtue. Standing before such a judge would prevent moral purity because morality would then serve prudence. It is therefore not only morally preferable but also necessary that God is hidden because we can only act morally in an imperfect world, in which morality and prudence diverge (Timmermann 2013; Fremstedal 2014, chapter 4). Third, moral evil is extremely common, although it is inscrutable and mysterious, since it results from the contingent use of the power of choice that cannot be explained causally or be made intelligible in a theodicy (cf. Kant 1900ff., vol. 6, p. 21). It can be neither eliminated, nor justified nor predicted. Finally, natural evil belongs to the realm of nature, not the realm of freedom. It therefore results from natural causes, rather than moral reasons or theological concerns. It cannot be justified morally since it results from blind natural processes that are amoral. The second part of “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” sets aside the traditional, theoretical approach to theodicy and focuses on the Book of Job instead (Kant 1900ff., vol. 8, pp. 264–271). This second part presents the Book of Job as an allegory of theodicy and virtue that focuses on ethical questions rather than theoretical questions. Kant contrasts Job’s frankness and sincerity with the hypocrisy and malice of his friends. Job’s honesty and integrity is contrasted with the flattery and vices of his friends. The friends assume that Job must have sinned since God would not allow him to suffer unless he were guilty. Put differently, the friends present a theodicy that actually increases the suffering of Job by putting forward false allegations against him (Pihlström and Kivistö 2016, p. 39). In Kant’s text, Job’s friends are associated with philosophical theodicies, whereas Job is associated with Kant’s critique of theodicies. Kant suggests that theodicies not only overstep our cognitive limits but also that they involve insincerity when they try to excuse and justify evil. Kant contrasts ordinary, doctrinal theodicies with his own “authentic theodicy,” which represents a “matter of faith” (Kant 1900ff., vol. 8, pp. 264, 267; 2001a, pp. 31, 34). As we have seen, Kant rejects theodicies that claim to be

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based on sufficient evidence. But he is not opposed to a theodicy that is based on religious faith and hope that goes beyond theoretical evidence, by relying on decisive moral reasons. Still, Kant’s authentic theodicy is so limited that it may be viewed as an anti-theodicy that does not try to justify or excuse God for allowing evil or suffering. Rather, it sees evil and suffering as a practical, moral and existential problem that we must face as agents rather than something that we can explain theoretically (Pihlström and Kivistö 2016, p. 48). Moral evil is something we must fight, whereas natural evil should be relieved (where possible) and endured (where necessary). Kant’s critique of doctrinal theodicies, and his anti-theodicy, anticipates existentialism more than his authentic theodicy. But even the latter involves a pragmatism about religious faith and hope that anticipates religious existentialism. Kant’s view is neither that we should despair nor accept the world as it is. Rather, we should hope for progress that overcomes alienation and reconciles us with the world in its potentiality for good, without succumbing to evil. Instead of assuming that we are progressing towards our ideals, Kant holds that such progress is possible and that we should try to the uttermost of our ability to make progress, even if we can never reach our ideals completely (cf. Beiser 2006, pp. 602–604; Caswell 2006, pp. 185–190, 204; Fremstedal 2014, chapters 4–6). However, this indicates that human existence involves infinite striving towards regulative ideas that are transcendent since they exceed the bounds of all experience (cf. Kant 2007, A327/B384). By developing the regulative use of ideas, Kant may therefore be said to anticipate an existential subject that endlessly strives towards rest or completion, without ever reaching it completely (cf. Verstrynge 2004).

11

Conclusion

As one of the most important modern philosophers, Kant anticipated existentialism in several respects, although he did not develop a systematic existential philosophy. It seems clear, at least in retrospect, that Kant’s critical philosophy represents a proto-existentialism in the following respects: He emphasizes human finitude, limits our knowledge, and argues that human consciousness is characterized by mineness. He introduces the influential concept of autonomy, something that led to controversies about constructivism and anti-­ realism in meta-ethics and anticipates problems concerning voluntarism and decisionism in existentialism. Kant makes human freedom the central philosophical issue, arguing that freedom is inescapable for human agents. He even holds that the awareness of freedom leads to anxiety (as opposed to fear), and

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that anxiety in turn precedes the fall into evil. In the doctrine of radical evil, he argues that human agents are always already suffering from self-deception because of this fall. In order to overcome self-deception and moral evil, Kant prescribes a radical self-choice in which the agent takes over himself and society by thinking independently and consistently. However, this is not only a moral issue for Kant but also something that concerns religious faith and hope since Kant argues that we need religion to overcome not only moral evil but also despair. Although he criticizes traditional natural theology, Kant develops an existential interpretation of religion and an influential critique of philosophical theodicies, in which God is necessarily hidden. By doing this, and by introducing philosophy of religion and philosophical anthropology as new disciplines, Kant prepares the ground for existentialism. However, Kant does not distinguish between authenticity and inauthenticity as twentieth-century existentialists do. Still, he anticipates several aspects of these two categories. Kant’s analyses of anxiety, despair, self-deception, minority (Unmündigkeit), and moral evil anticipate inauthenticity. Authenticity, by contrast, is anticipated by the maturity that dares to think for itself and the fundamental self-choice that takes responsibility for itself as an embodied individual. For both Kant and the existentialists, this existential choice requires that one be true to oneself for its own sake. Particularly voluntarist and anti-realist readings of Kant anticipate existentialism since these interpretations radicalize Kantian autonomy by separating the power of choice from pure practical reason. Still, Kant would not accept forms of authenticity that go “beyond autonomy by holding that an individual’s feelings and deepest desires can outweigh…the outcome of rational deliberation in making decisions” (Varga and Guignon 2017, Part 2).

Notes 1. The present text draws partially on Fremstedal 2014 (a book that deals with Kierkegaard’s relation to Kant). References to Critique of Pure Reason use the pagination in the A and B editions (e.g., Kant 2007, A445/B473). All other references to Kant use the volume and pagination in the German Academy edition of Kant’s works (e.g., Kant 1900ff., vol. 6, p. 24). 2. Yet Kant’s ethics anticipates Sartre’s idea of man as a “legislator deciding for the whole of mankind” as well as his view that “the act of lying implies the universal value which it denies” (1975, p. 351). Sartre (1975, p. 366) explicitly agrees to Kant’s view that “freedom is a will both to itself and to the freedom of others.” For Kant’s importance for Kierkegaard’s ethics, see Fremstedal (2014).

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3. Although Kant did not develop a phenomenology, he is still one of the forerunners of twentieth-century phenomenology (cf. Engelland 2010). 4. Moreover, Kant argues that “Another can indeed coerce me to do something that is not my end (but only a means to another’s end) but not to make this my end; and yet I can have no end without making it an end for myself ” (Kant 1900ff., vol. 6, p. 381). 5. My interpretation here is based on Fremstedal (2020), except that that the present text does not focus on Kierkegaard. 6. Kierkegaard represents an exception here since he tends towards moral realism (Fremstedal 2014, chapter 10). 7. To describe the fall into evil, some Kant scholars rely on the Kierkegaardian notion of a leap of volition developed in The Concept of Anxiety (Muchnik 2009, pp. 93–94; Morgan 2005, p. 77; Fremstedal 2014, p. 250n123). 8. See the chapters on Schelling, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre in the present anthology. 9. Kant is concerned with self-deception that tries to ignore the demands of moral freedom. He is hardly concerned with forms of self-deception that exaggerate freedom and understate facticity. Nor does he give a taxonomy of self-­deception, as Kierkegaard does (Fremstedal 2014, chapter 3). 10. Like many existentialists, Kant was also highly concerned with freedom of speech, although he struggled with censorship and religious orthodoxy (cf. Kuehn 2001). 11. Kant 1900ff., vol. 7, p. 285; vol. 25, pp. 1367–1368. Sinnesart or “empirical character” belongs to the phenomenal realm and is the sensual sign (sinnliche Zeichen) of man’s “intelligible character,” his noumenal Denkungsart (Wimmer 1990, pp. 101, 130, 151–152, 188). 12. Scheler (1928, p. 51); translated in Louden (2011, p. 67). 13. Both Kant and his commentators seem to describe the antinomy of practical reason in terms of (moral) despair (Kant 1900ff., vol. 28, p. 1076; Marina 2000, p.  354; Kuehn 2001, p.  313; Henrich 2008, p.  102; Wood 1970, p. 160; Wimmer 1990, pp. 68, 156–159, 206). 14. I am indebted to Andrew Chignell and Darrel Moellendorf here. 15. Transcendental arguments represent one of Kant’s most discussed contributions to philosophy. Pereboom (2009) explains, “In Kant’s conception, an argument of this kind begins with an uncontroversial premise about our thought, experience, or knowledge, and then reasons to a substantive and unobvious necessary condition of this premise. Typically, this reasoning from uncontroversial premise to substantive conclusion is intended to be a priori in some sense.” Transcendental arguments can be found in both Kierkegaard and twentieth-century existentialism. Some accounts even identify transcendental and phenomenological methodology (see Engelland 2010, Part III). For Kierkegaard, see Fremstedal (2014, pp. 229–230).

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Bibliography Adams, Robert. 1987. The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Allison, Henry. 1995. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. On the Very Idea of a Propensity to Evil. The Journal of Value Inquiry 36: 337–348. Bayer, Oswald. 2007. Theology the Lutheran Way. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Beiser, Frederick. 2006. Moral Faith and the Highest Good. In The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, ed. Paul Guyer, 588–629. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burnham, Douglas, and George Papandreopoulos. 2011. Existentialism. In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. James Fieser and Bradley Dowden. http://www.iep. utm.edu/existent/. Accessed 1 February 2019. Caswell, Matthew. 2006. Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good, the Gesinnung, and the Theory of Radical Evil. Kant-Studien 97: 184–209. Chignell, Andrew. 2007. Kant’s Concept of Justification. Noûs 41: 33–63. Collins, James. 1967. The Emergence of Philosophy of Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press. Crowell, Steven. 2017. Existentialism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/existentialism. Accessed 8 January 2019. Davenport, John. 2012. Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality: From Frankfurt and MacIntyre to Kierkegaard. London: Routledge. Dorrien, Gary. 2012. Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Engelland, Chad. 2010. The Phenomenological Kant: Heidegger’s Interest in Transcendental Philosophy. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 41: 150–169. Formosa, Paul. 2007. Kant on the Radical Evil of Human Nature. The Philosophical Forum 38: 221–246. ———. 2013. Is Kant a Moral Constructivist or a Moral Realist? European Journal of Philosophy 21: 170–196. Fremstedal, Roe. 2014. Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest Good: Virtue, Happiness, and the Kingdom of God. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020. Søren Kierkegaard’s Critique of Eudaimonism and Autonomy. In Perfektionismus der Autonomie, ed. Douglas Moggach, Nadine Mooren, and Michael Quante, 291–308. Munich: Fink. Henrich, Dieter. 2008. Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Kant, Immanuel. 1900ff. Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–29. Berlin: Reimer (later de Gruyter). ———. 1999. Practical Philosophy. Ed. and Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2001a. Religion and Rational Theology. Ed. and Trans. Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2001b. Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and Jerome Schneewind. Trans. Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. Lectures on Logic. Ed. and Trans. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. Anthropology, History, and Education. Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert Louden, Trans. Mary Gregor, Paul Guyer, Robert Louden, Holly Wilson, Allen Wood, Günter Zöller and Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kleingeld, Pauline. 1999. Kant, History, and the Idea of Moral Development. History of Philosophy Quarterly 16: 56–80. Kosch, Michelle. 2006. Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuehn, Manfred. 2001. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Louden, Robert. 2011. Kant’s Human Being: Essays on His Theory of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madore, Joël. 2011. Difficult Freedom and Radical Evil in Kant: Deceiving Reason. London: Continuum. Marina, Jacqueline. 2000. Making Sense of Kant’s Highest Good. Kant-Studien 91: 329–355. Morgan, Seiriol. 2005. The Missing Formal Proof of Humanity’s Radical Evil in Kant’s Religion. The Philosophical Review 114: 63–114. Muchnik, Pablo. 2009. Kant’s Theory of Evil: An Essay on the Dangers of Self-Love and the Aprioricity of History. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Neiman, Susan. 1997. The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pereboom, Derek. 2009. Kant’s Transcendental Arguments. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2009/entries/kant-transcendental. Accessed 4 April 2014. Pihlström, Sami, and Sari Kivistö. 2016. Kantian Antitheodicy: Philosophical and Literary Varieties. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinkard, Terry. 2010. German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudd, Anthony. 2012. Self, Value, and Narrative: A Kierkegaardian Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1975. Existentialism is a Humanism. In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman, 345–369. London: Penguin. ———. 1998. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Routledge. Scheler, Max. 1928. Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos. Darmstadt: Otto Reichl. Schulte, Christoph. 1991. Radikal Böse. Die Karriere des Bösen von Kant bis Nietzsche. Munich: Fink. Stern, Robert. 2012. Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, Jon. 2010. Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Twentieth-Century European Philosophy. London: Continuum. ———. 2015. Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Timmermann, Jens. 2013. Divine Existence and Moral Motivation. In Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht. Akten des XI.  Internationalen Kant-­ Kongresses, ed. Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, Claudio La Rocca, and Margit Ruffing, vols. 1–5, vol. 3, 669–678. Berlin: de Gruyter. Varga, Somogy, and Charles Guignon. 2017. Authenticity. In The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2017/entries/authenticity. Accessed 25 January 2019. Verstrynge, Karl. 2004. The Perfection of the Kierkegaardian Self in Regulative Perspective. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 473–495. Welz, Claudia. 2008. Love’s Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Wimmer, Reiner. 1990. Kants kritische Religionsphilosophie. Berlin: de Gruyter. Wood, Allen. 1970. Kant’s Moral Religion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2003. Kant and the Problem of Human Nature. In Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain, 38–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zammito, John. 2002. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

4 Fichte and Existentialism: Freedom and Finitude, Self-Positing and Striving Steven Hoeltzel

1

 heory of Science as a Philosophy T of Striving

Fichte named his philosophy after its principal aim. The Wissenschaftslehre, or “theory of science,” sets out to strictly determine the basic sense, structure, and scope of all well-grounded knowledge, via the rigorous disclosure of the latter’s ultimate foundations. In its distinctively Fichtean form, however, the theory of science is transformed into a “philosophy of striving”—a Strebungsphilosophie (Fichte 1971, p. 265). Its overarching goal remains that of “demonstrating the first principles of all the sciences which are possible— something which cannot be done within these sciences themselves” (Fichte 1993, p.  108). Yet the new routes that Fichte forges toward that goal lead away from traditional epistemology and toward existentialism in profound and provocative ways. In particular, Fichte offers sophisticated, original arguments for all of the following claims, each of which this chapter will examine: (1) The nature of selfhood or subjectivity is an issue of fundamental philosophical importance. (2) The self is not a thinking substance or knowing subject; it is a self-conscious

S. Hoeltzel (*) James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_4

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project of self-actualization. (3) Qua self-conscious project, the being of the self is an ongoing interrelating of freedom and finitude. (4) Qua project of self-­ actualization, the self is not a causally conditioned object but a self-­ transparently self-realizing activity. (5) This activity involves a striving for the self ’s actuality. (6) Knowing is an activity founded upon and steered by that striving. (7) Qua striving for the self ’s actuality, the self ’s activity harbors an orientation toward authenticity. (8) Qua striving for the self ’s actuality, this activity aims for a humanly unreachable goal. To be sure, the Wissenschaftslehre’s abstract inception, transcendental-­ dialectical formation, and anti-individualistic implications situate this system at several removes from the resolutely anti-systematic, individually focused, concretely descriptive projects characteristic of existentialism. Nevertheless, if what follows is essentially correct, then we can credit Fichte with having powerfully prefigured existentialism, at least with respect to its core topics and their basic topology, and in spite of his own thought’s radical difference, methodologically and substantively, from the work that took place in his wake. In what follows I work to conceptually substantiate those comparative claims, not to historically document Fichte’s influence. The story of his reception by the major existentialists—and of the role played in that reception by other major thinkers also influenced by Fichte (the list includes Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Husserl, and others)—is too complicated to pursue here. I do, however, occasionally note some historical connections that may help to clarify certain conceptual relations.

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I-Hood as Self-Conscious Self-Actualization

According to the Wissenschaftslehre’s earliest and historically most influential presentations (those belonging to the so-called “Jena Wissenschaftslehre” of roughly 1794–1800), the ultimate enabling conditions for knowledge are accomplishments integral to the active self-articulation of the self—and thus, in the final analysis, accomplishments of the transcendental subject: “the I.” This I, on Fichte’s account, is not a distinctively mental sort of “thing”—a collection of introspectible mental contents, for example, or an enduring immaterial soul—that somehow underlies the indicated accomplishments. “I do not even want to call the I an acting something,” Fichte says, and this is because “the I is not something that has capacities, it is not a capacity at all, but rather is active; it is what it does, and when it does nothing, it is nothing” (Fichte 2000, pp. 3n, 23). Thus the Wissenschaftslehre “considers the intellect to be a kind of doing and absolutely nothing more” (Fichte 1994, p. 26).

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This “doing,” moreover, is not of a narrowly cognitive kind: it does not reduce to and is not finally founded upon any purely passive beholding or purely descriptive conceptualizing. As we shall see below, Fichte’s transcendental epistemology implies that “mere intelligence does not constitute a rational being, for it cannot exist on its own”; instead, “willing is the genuine and essential character of reason; according to philosophical insight, representing…is posited as the contingent element” (Fichte 2000, pp. 21, 22). In the transcendentally final analysis, “willing”—the projection of a possibility or the setting of an end—is basic to the I’s awareness of itself and prior to any positing of determinate objects. Thus, the I is principally constituted by a commitment to actualizing its own inmost possibility, and this commitment precedes and makes possible the I’s determination of what is salient and significant in its own situation. Fichte’s analyses of the transcendental underpinnings of experience and of the I as “pure activity, in contrast to all subsisting” (Fichte 2005, p. 42) are discussed in more detail below. First, we should more generally observe that “the I” that is the focus and founding element of Fichte’s philosophy is neither a thinking substance nor a purely (or primarily) knowing subject, of the sort typically assumed in traditional epistemology. Instead, on Fichte’s account, the I exists as a self-conscious project of self-actualization—albeit one whose most basic elements are not phenomenologically accessible in any straightforward way, because they are the underlying enabling conditions for the opening-­up of the experiential space within which phenomenological description operates. As Fichte puts this, the most radical stratum of the I’s self-initiated self-articulation “does not and cannot occur among the empirical determinations of our consciousness, but rather lies at the basis of all consciousness and alone makes it possible” (Fichte 1982, p. 93).1 The existence of the I thus does not coincide with the set of facts, or with the series of phenomenologically accessible acts, that constitute the life-story of the individual (cf. Fichte 1994, p. 33). The I is the transcendentally constituting activity of which all experience—and therefore all experience of an empirically specified, individualized self, which self is “had” by this or that instance of I-hood—is an already-­ constituted (fixed, fossilized) product (cf. Fichte 1994, pp. 89, 100–101). The existence of the I, then, is itself accomplished, at the transcendentally most basic level, by an act of pure self-positing that precedes and preconditions all experience; this act, and the self-regulated self-articulation which it animates and enables, constitute I-hood (Ichheit) as self-reverting activity. “‘I’ and ‘self-reverting acting’ are completely identical concepts” (Fichte 1994, p. 45). Self-conscious self-actualization is self-reverting in the sense that (1) it discloses itself in the midst of all else that it intends and, equiprimordially, (2) it

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determines itself by setting goals for itself and orienting and exerting itself accordingly. Hence, “I-hood (i.e., self-reverting activity or subject-­ objectivity—call it what you will) is originally opposed to the it, to mere objectivity” (Fichte 1994, p. 87). To phrase these ideas in another, presumably more familiar way, the being of the I is a being-for-itself. Qua I, this entity necessarily is not only aware of itself, but aware of itself as existing for the sake of itself: its awareness of itself is, indissolubly, its awareness of its being called upon to complete itself by realizing possibilities of itself. To say this as Sartre might, “the law of being of the for-itself…is to be itself in the form of presence to itself ”—but at the same time, “human reality as for-itself is a lack and…what it lacks is a certain coincidence with itself….Thus the for-itself cannot appear without being haunted by value and projected toward its own possibles” (Sartre 1992, pp. 124, 147). This entity’s very actuality is partly constituted by its own unrealized possibility, and the resulting meaningful situation—its own being as an ongoing, unsettled existing—is disclosed to itself as such. Or, as Kierkegaard writes: “Actual subjectivity is not the knowing subjectivity…it is the ethically existing subjectivity” (Kierkegaard 2009, p. 265; cf. Kangas 2007). Heidegger, of course, endorses a similar analysis: “Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontologically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger 1962, p. 32). Heidegger reserves the term “Existenz” for this distinctively personal and projectival mode of being, and this usage harks back to Kierkegaard, who pointedly distinguishes Tilværelsen (human life, considered more or less generically) from Existents (the unsettled, singular situation into which life thrusts each individual), characterizing the latter in broadly philosophical terms. He writes, for example: “Since the existing subject is existing…he is indeed on the way to being”—and, in a statement strikingly reminiscent of Fichte: “Existence itself, existing, is a striving” (Kierkegaard 2009, pp. 68, 78).

3

I-Hood as Uncharted Territory

Because it partly consists in a continual relating to its own constantly renewed possibility, existence (in the above, technical sense) involves freedom, insofar as there are, at any given moment, no already-fixed facts with regard to (1) who exactly one will finally be, or (2) what exactly one’s past choices, taken individually or as a whole, will finally mean. In other words—to cite existentialism’s best-known slogan—existence precedes essence. As Sartre unpacks this, the

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existing individual “is at the start a plan which is aware of itself….Nothing exists prior to this plan…Man will be what he will have planned to be” (Sartre 1985, pp. 15–16). Such statements distinctly echo Fichte’s earlier account of the necessary conditions for genuine self-determination. For Fichte, whereas any merely thing-like entity “cannot be thought of as determining itself, since it does not exist prior to its nature (i.e., the sum total of its determinations),” any genuinely self-determining entity would, by contrast, have to “exist in advance of its nature, so that it may determine the latter itself ” (Fichte 2005, p.  40, p. 39). Such an entity therefore “would, in a certain respect, have to be before it is, before it has properties and any nature at all” (Fichte 2005, p. 40). And the indicated mode of being is, Fichte argues, properly thinkable only as that of a purposively self-actualizing intelligence: “As an intellect with a concept of its own real being, what is free precedes its real being, and the former contains the ground of the latter” (Fichte 2005, p. 40, cf. p. 42). Accordingly, whereas “all animals are complete and finished; the human being is only intimated and projected [angedeutet und entworfen]” (Fichte 2000, p. 74). The for-itself…Dasein…The existing individual…The I—regardless of the many ways in which these concepts diverge, each of them names an entity which neither thoughtlessly subsists as an already-actualized object, nor placidly persists as essentially contemplative subject, but instead concernfully exists as a self-conscious project. With his post-Kantian conception of I-hood, understood as a “self-reverting activity” always comprising a “striving,” Fichte crafts a new philosophical category, out of which novel possibilities and problems unfold. First and foremost, these are (1) the ontological problem of better understanding what exactly it is to be such an entity; (2) the epistemological problem of rethinking what it is to know, given that all knowing is founded upon a prior striving, and (3) the axiological problem of clarifying the basic relations between the striving that one is and the norms or ideals by which this striving might be regulated or oriented. With Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, these take their place among philosophy’s most pressing problems. Existentialism, in the work of some of its best-known proponents, can be seen as (among other things, to be sure) an attempt to improve upon Fichte’s proposed solutions, in part by more concretely reformulating the associated problems.

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 elf-Positing and Felt Finitude (Freedom S and Facticity)

The principal “task of philosophy,” according to Fichte, is “to indicate the basis or foundation of experience” (Fichte 1994, p.  33). Consequently, he argues, “philosophy’s object must necessarily lie outside of all experience” (Fichte 1994, p. 9). Transcendental philosophy, in its Fichtean form, begins by abstracting from and reflecting upon our prephilosophical outlook in its entirety, provisionally suspending and philosophically analyzing the basic commitments that configure it (Fichte 1993, pp. 432–435). These are commitments that ordinarily we just unreflectively uphold: a kind of by-default outlook according to which there exist purposive intelligences like ourselves, plus mindless things and aimless processes of the sort characteristic of material nature, plus a mélange of intentional and causal relations by which mental life and the material world are interwoven. The Wissenschaftslehre does not attempt to improve upon this picture by making adjustments to it from within it. Instead, Fichte seeks radical and all-­ encompassing insight into the origins and overall significance of this whole way of representing reality. But in thus stepping back from our unconsidered, everyday outlook, has he not set foot on a path that straightaway leads far from existentialism, forsaking the lived experience of the existing individual? Viewing matters from that angle alone, the answer is definitely yes, insofar as existentialism is devoted to the illuminating analysis, from within, of the standpoint that Fichte transcendentally abandons. Thus Kierkegaard, for example, writes that the ‘I’ at the heart of Fichte’s philosophy is “a mirage”— “a mathematical point that doesn’t exist at all” (Kierkegaard 2009, pp. 165–166, emphasis added). This is not the whole story, however. For it would be difficult to overstate the extent to which Fichte’s philosophy anticipates—expressly at a tremendous level of abstraction—existentialism’s analyses of the tensions and tendencies that are constitutive of existence, in the individually-concretized sense that the existentialists stress. Structural parallels along these lines should gradually (but, because space is limited, far from exhaustively) emerge in what follows. To cite one such parallel to begin with: although Fichte expressly claims that the I is not manifest within experience, because it actively constitutes all experience as such, he by no means holds that the I is something altogether indeterminate or that it somehow freely fabricates experience in its entirety. His view, instead, is that the I just is activity of a highly specific (albeit not empirically specified) kind, and that such I-like activity only ever occurs as an

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activity of confronting and coping with something not of its own creation. I-hood transpires only where a creative capacity to understand and to set ends finds itself up against conditions which it has not thought or willed into being—in other words: only where freedom and finitude interrelate within a single, self-aware, existing. Notwithstanding its very high degree of abstraction, Fichte’s view here distinctly prefigures the outlooks articulated in Being and Time (“thrown projective Being-in-the-world”—Heidegger 1962, p. 188) and in Being and Nothingness (“at once a facticity and a transcendence”— Sartre 1992, p. 98), and it has distinct echoes in Kierkegaard’s work as well (“a human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity”—Kierkegaard 1983, p. 13). Now to rejoin Fichte’s fundamental argument: Reduced to its essentials, experience of the sort that the Wissenschaftslehre proposes to explain is cognition of determinate objects that are taken to exist independently of the mind. Accordingly, Fichte thinks, a philosophical explanation of experience will have to take one or the other of two contrary forms: “idealism” or “dogmatism” (Fichte 1994, p. 11). The latter, which he rejects, claims that in the final analysis, completely mindless things subject to aimless causal connections are what constitute and control all experience (Fichte 1994, pp. 20–21). Idealism, which he favors, instead postulates an autonomously self-actualizing I, by which all objects are actively constructed—not in the sense that the I magically generates reality or secretly authors experience’s given contents, but insofar as the I autonomously originates and instates the pure ordering forms upon which any reference to putatively mind-independent objects (and therefore any agency engaged with such objects) transcendentally depends. The first principle of Fichte’s idealism states: “The I originally absolutely posits its own being” (Fichte 1982, p. 99). “Posit” is an important technical term for Fichte, but one which he never explicitly defines. Clearly, however, his version of the concept is importantly indebted to Kant’s—thus, to posit some entity in the “absolute” sense is simply to affirm that this entity is—but Fichte’s notion also importantly involves the original, nontechnical sense of setzen: to put or to place (cf. Franks 2016, pp. 377–382). Accordingly, to posit something is not only to affirm its existence; it is also to position it within some larger picture: to locate it within some more comprehensive conception of what there is. For the I to posit its own being, therefore, is not merely for the I to affirm its own existence; it is for the I to do so in such a way as to position itself within a broader picture of what there is—its own broader picture, the basic intelligibility of which is originally effected in and by this act. As noted above, the I is not some kind of distinct and enduring thing from which one’s mental activities issue or within which these mental processes take

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place. The I just is mental activity, but of a special sort that “cannot occur among the empirical determinations of our consciousness, but rather lies at the basis of all consciousness and alone makes it possible” (Fichte 1982, p. 93). Fichte says this because, on his view, it is pure (non-sensory, affect-­ independent) mental activity, not any of the empirical (sensory or affective) contents of consciousness, that principally “makes consciousness possible,” in the sense that pure mental activity is necessary for the articulation of the abstract armature that organizes any representation of the subject’s being confronted with, or aspiring to alter, some putatively mind-independent object or objects. On Fichte’s analysis, consciousness’s empirical contents, by themselves, disclose no such pure, polarized structure of subject-object differentiation-­relation; thus they do not suffice for “consciousness,” in the technical sense in which he uses that term. This sense derives from Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s “Principle of Consciousness,” according to which all consciousness comprises, as an immanent organizing element, the aforementioned subject-object differentiation-relation. Fichte accepts this principle, but he also holds that the indicated structure, which Reinhold has accurately described, needs to be transcendentally explained. The basic principles of the Wissenschaftslehre are designed to provide that explanation (Fichte 1993, p. 65; cf. Hoeltzel 2020b). The first of these principles states that the I originally absolutely posits its own being. In light of the above, we can conclude that insofar as the I posits its own being, it affirms this being in a such a way as simultaneously to position this being within some broader picture of what there is. And insofar as the I posits its own being, what it thus locates is precisely pure mental activity, positioned over against the empirical contents of consciousness. We therefore can aptly describe this act of “self-positing” as that transcendentally elementary act whereby pure mental activity singles itself out as pure mental activity, in contrast with all impassive, adventitious manifestation. Before more closely considering the resulting differentiation-relation (pure activity vs. adventitious manifestation), we should note some additional distinctive features of the act of self-positing, as Fichte understands it. First, the I originally absolutely posits its own being, which is to say that the I exists, qua I, only if precisely this mental accomplishment occurs—not as the temporal inception of a lifetime of introspectible episodes, but as the continually reactivated transcendental foundation for each lived experience of existing in the world (cf. Zöller 1998, chapter 3). Second, for Fichte, the I originally absolutely posits its own being, which is to say that the I’s non-sensory singling-­ out of its own pure activity is unconditioned, or occurs freely, at least in the following sense: it cannot be rationally required by any prior commitment on

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the part of the I (because, transcendentally speaking, there are no more-basic rational commitments), and it is not epistemically mandated by any adventitious empirical contents of consciousness (because it is a commitment affirming the existence of pure, self-initiated mental activity) (cf. Neuhouser 1990). To be sure, we might still speculate that this act is causally compelled by something that is extrinsic to it and undetected by it. According to Fichte, however, that conjecture comprises the idea of “a not-I that is not opposed to any I,” and this idea is without foundation, supposing that the Wissenschaftslehre’s basic principles are correct (Fichte 1993, p. 74). And—again, according to Fichte—the only alternative to a philosophy grounded in those principles is a “dogmatism” that inevitably founders in its attempt to explain I-hood on the basis of mindless objects and aimless processes (Fichte 1994, pp. 20–24). Here, then, we have another noteworthy anticipation of existentialism— albeit, once again, at a higher level of abstraction. On Fichte’s account, the I does not exist as a causally conditioned thing, but as a self-transparently self-­ realizing activity—much as Dasein exists for Heidegger, much as the for-itself does for Sartre, and so forth. To think of the I as a causally configured thing— that is, as something whose determinations flow from some mindless influence upon it that originates from something outside it—is to make a category mistake. It is to “posit our I outside of ourselves, as a thing existing without our cooperation, and who knows how; and now, without any cooperation from us, some other thing is supposed to act upon it, as the magnet does on a piece of iron” (Fichte 1982, p. 162). But “the I is nothing outside of the I,” which means that in the case of the I, “to posit itself and to be are one and the same” (Fichte 1982, p. 163). Note also that Fichte—once again, much like Heidegger and Sartre— maintains that most of us harbor a tendency to overlook our own I-hood and to mistake ourselves for mere things: “machines of nature,” as opposed to freely self-actualizing, meaning-making existings. “The majority of men,” he writes, “could sooner be brought to believe themselves a piece of lava in the moon than to take themselves for an I” (Fichte 1982, p. 162n). Heidegger stakes out a similar but subtler position, in his critique of the misguided outlook on existence that “takes its orientation in the first instance from the Being of entities within-the-world” and therefore supposes, erroneously, that “Dasein too is present-at-hand as Real” (Heidegger 1962, p.  245). Sartre warns against this tendency as well, for example in his critique of transcendence-­ repressing “bad faith” (Sartre 1992, pp. 101–105). According to the Wissenschaftslehre, then, the I is only as self-transparent, self-actualizing activity that has singled itself out as such—and Fichte’s idealism further foreshadows existentialism in affirming this activity’s ineluctable

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finitude (see Breazeale 2013, chapter 7). “The I must be finite and limited” (Fichte 1982, p. 258). As we saw above, Fichte’s overarching task is to uncover the basis or foundation of experience, in which we take it that we are perceptually presented and actively engaged with things that exist outside of our own minds. That the I “originally absolutely posits its own being” is a necessary condition for this, but by no means a sufficient one: it is also necessary that the I posit a not-I—that is, that the I affirms the existence of something that it takes to exist independently of itself. This latter act, however, qua act, just is a continuation and complexification—not a limitation—of the I’s own mental activity. Nevertheless, this act is the consequence of such a limitation—not as the limitation’s causal result, but as the I’s free and rational response. The basic limitation in question, non-dogmatically construed, must be the manifestation within the I (“im Ich”) of something “not immediately posited through the I’s own positing of itself ”—“something heterogeneous, alien, and to be distinguished” from such activity (Fichte 1982, p. 130, p. 240). Insofar as this is pure and self-initiated activity, what is paradigmatically other would be consciousness’ adventitious empirical contents: “simple sensation,” in the form of “sweet or bitter, red or yellow,” and the like (Fichte 1982, p. 272).2 Not authored by the I’s activity, “the determinacy in question appears to be something absolutely contingent,” and Fichte’s idealism forswears any attempt to account for it: “all transcendental explanation comes to an end with immediate feeling” (Fichte 1994, p. 75).3 Below, I more closely consider Fichte’s account of the basic significance that this unbidden limitation has for the I, and of the further activities whereby the I strives to make its limitation more thoroughly intelligible. As should then further emerge, the basic principles of Fichte’s transcendental epistemology are, at the same time, the rudiments of an existential ontology. Of course, because his project is not to revealingly describe lived experience, but to transcendentally account for only its most basic abstract organizing elements (non-sensory self-identification, the subject-object differentiation-relation, and the like), the ontology that eventuates—his account of the I as free, self-­ transparent self-actualization, and so forth—is rudimentary and quite rarefied, relative to the later work of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and so forth. Still, Fichte’s account strikingly prefigures the basic outlines of its better-­known successors.

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“ Without a striving, no object at all is possible”

The second basic principle of the 1794–1795 Foundation states that that “a not-I is absolutely opposed [entgegengesetzt] to the I” (Fichte 1982, p. 104). Considered in context, this entails that “opposition in general”—the differentiation of subject and object, I and not-I—“is absolutely posited [gesetzt] by the I” (Fichte 1982, p. 103). In this act, the I judges that there exists something other than itself—a thing is “posited opposite” the I, by the I—as the putative basis or bearer of the merely factical (empirical) contents of consciousness. Fichte characterizes this act as materially conditioned but formally unconditioned (Fichte 1982, p. 104). By this he means, first, that this act’s content is partly fixed by what transcendentally precedes it—namely, pure mental activity’s (1) positing itself and (2) finding itself faced with adventitious empirical content—and, second, that this act’s performance is not compulsory, even in the light of those precedents. This is because the latter, taken together and considered in context, do not themselves disclose anything other than the indicated mix of mental contents: pure activity (das Ich) and passive sensation (Empfindung). “The senses merely provide us with something subjective,” according to Fichte, but “this determination of yourself, you straightaway transfer to something outside you” (Fichte 1982, p. 275). Said “transfer” occurs insofar the I supplements the given, sensory contents of consciousness with the self-originated, non-sensory notion of a not-I—that is, of an object that subsists independently of the I and is the basis of the I’s sensations. Heidegger, is one among many who will eventually reject this whole framework—“in its very approach to the problem, with the isolation of sense-data as the elements to be explained or eliminated as unclear residues alien to consciousness” (Heidegger 2008, p. 68)—as a relic of epistemology, where “epistemology” is taken to be defined by certain substantive assumptions, of a broadly Cartesian kind, regarding what a mind “really” is and how it might interface with whatever “really” exists outside of it. Nevertheless, Fichte’s transcendental theory points beyond traditional epistemology and toward existential ontology in a number of other important respects: for instance, in its claim that whatever distinctly cognitive stance the I can take up toward objects is transcendentally founded upon the I’s prior constitution of itself as a project—more precisely, upon its constantly reconstituting itself as an endeavor to actualize its own essential potential. (Compare Heidegger: “Knowing is a mode of Dasein founded upon Being-in-the-world”—Heidegger 1962, p. 90, cf. p. 88.) One of Fichte’s key claims in this connection is the following:

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The I demands that it encompass all reality and fill the infinite….Here the meaning of the principle, the I posits itself absolutely, first becomes fully clear. This makes no mention of the I given in actual consciousness, for that is never absolute, but its condition is always…based on something apart from the I. This speaks rather of an Idea of the I, which must necessarily be based on its practical, infinite demand. (Fichte 1982, p. 244)

This is not a psychological claim concerning any pathos (romantic yearning, etc.) latent in I-hood. Instead, such statements express the upshot of a transcendental argument regarding what—or, more to the point, how—the I must be, if its positing of a not-I is to be properly explicable. On Fichte’s analysis, as we saw above, that act is not compulsory in the light of its transcendental precursors. To that extent, the act must take place freely. Nonetheless, the success of Fichte’s broader explanatory project requires that this not be an instance of “completely lawless acting” that would hinge upon chance or caprice (Fichte 1994, p. 27). Fichte’s transcendental epistemology is modeled on (but aims to improve upon) Kant’s; accordingly, he must figure the I’s positing of the not-I as an instance of specifically rational acting, on a duly Kantian conception thereof. This means that experience’s organizing abstract structure must be understood to eventuate from “a free, but law-­ governed, act of thinking” (Fichte 1994, p. 33)—that is, from an act that (1) freely complies with a self-legislated requirement and (2) proceeds by authoring and instating some pure (non-sensory) ordering form. In Kant, these ordering forms are, inter alia, pure categories deployed by the understanding, regulative ideals (“Ideas”) projected by theoretical reason, and the categorical imperative pronounced by practical reason. In Fichte, these ordering forms include (to mention only the most basic) the non-sensory notion of the I as self-initiated pure-rational activity, and the non-sensory notion of the not-I as the extra-subjective basis of sensation. In consequence, the act that authors and instates the notion of the not-I must be one that responds to a self-imposed rational requirement. And considering the context, the only possible source for that requirement is this act’s sole pure-rational predecessor: the act in which the I originally absolutely posits its own being. That transcendentally prior self-positing, therefore, must not only comprise the I’s non-sensory identification of itself as a factically qualified instance of pure, autonomous, order-inducing mental activity. Self-­ positing must also, simultaneously and indivisibly, comprise the I’s affect-independent projection of itself as ideally unqualified activity of that kind. In other words, self-positing must position rational activity, in its strict purity and unmitigated autonomy, as both essentially constitutive of and

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unconditionally normative for the I’s existence—thereby prescribing a striving whereby the I endeavors to make itself actually what it posits itself as essentially: the self-active, sole determinant of what is and ought to be. “Insofar as the I is restricted by the not-I,” Fichte writes, “it is finite; in itself, however, as posited through its own absolute activity, it is infinite” (Fichte 1982, p.  137). Originally and always, then, the I is the disclosedness to itself of an ongoing project; it is an entity whose very actuality is configured and made meaningful by its own essential possibility. Now, relative to that essential possibility of the I, the factical (empirical) content of consciousness is not just indifferently present; it is what Fichte calls an Anstoß—a “check” or “affront” to the I’s basic vocation. Adventitious, conceptually unstructured sensation thus takes its place (transcendentally speaking) as the opaque negation of pure ordering activity: “the manifestation of a compulsion, an inability” (Fichte 1982, p. 254), via the appearance of an “alien element” that “conflicts with the striving of the I” (Fichte 1982, pp. 233–234). At the same time, this check and affront is also a “stimulus”—another tenable rendering of “Anstoß”—to perseverant pure-rational activity. “Since…the I cannot relinquish its independence, a striving is engendered” (Fichte 1993, p. 75), through which the I endeavors to bring its unchosen condition under the sway of its self-wrought ordering forms. As a fundamental first step in that self-imposed project, the I posits a not-I. Thus, “without a striving, no object at all is possible” (Fichte 1982, p. 233). Self-positing gives arational, adventitious sensation the significance of a limitation, and the transcendentally posterior positing of a not-I proffers an explanation for this limitation—putting said limitation in its rationally-­ appointed place, thereby effecting its further intelligibility, and thereby making progress toward the I’s self-set goal of pure-rational self-sufficiency. The progress made here is only incremental, but it is also transcendentally fundamental to the I’s understanding of itself and its world. This is an understanding whose further categorial contours the I will actively elaborate in order to further stabilize and clarify the basic opposition that is originally introduced when the not-I is posited—which, as we have just seen, occurs only because the I is a pure project of self-actualization that finds itself inexplicably limited. “Objects are objects,” on Fichte’s account, “solely because, and insofar as, they are not supposed to exist by virtue of the I’s free activity; and this free activity must be curbed or held in check and limited, if the objects are to exist” (Fichte 2000, p. 20). Accordingly, objectivity as such has an originally and principally practical valence and salience, grounded in the I’s transcendence toward its own essential potential: “Bare pure being that does not concern me and that I should intuit just for the sake of intuition does not exist

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for me at all” (Fichte 1987, p. 77). According to the Wissenschaftslehre, therefore, the basic salience, principal significance, and categorial organization of cognition’s object domain all derive from the I’s fundamentally projectival orientation. Heidegger advances a similar view when he describes the world as “the whole ‘workshop’…wherein concern always dwells,” or “the context of equipment…as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection”— circumspection being more primordial than “theoretical behaviour,” which “is just looking, without circumspection” (Heidegger 1962, pp.  99, 105). As Sartre later phrases his own, kindred conception, the intelligible arrangement of the objective domain “is the image of my possibilities projected in the in-­ itself,” such that “this world is a world of tasks” (Sartre 1992, pp. 199–200). Or, as Fichte himself would have it, “My world is the object and sphere of my duties and absolutely nothing else….Everything that exists for me imposes its existence and reality on me only through this relation, and only through this relation do I apprehend it” (Fichte 1987, p. 77). Fichte further argues that fully unfolded I-hood positions the I as a purposive intelligence that is both carnally enmeshed in the world and rationally answerable to others. This is not the place to recount the related reasoning (see Fichte 2000, §§2–3), but its basic upshot is that fully-fledged self-­ consciousness, on the Fichtean model, is possible only for an I that posits itself (1) as a circumscribed locus of awareness and efficacy, vitally embedded within an alterable material world (see Zöller 2006), and (2) as one among indefinitely many other freely self-determining, reason-responsive beings (see Wood 2016). For present purposes, however, the key point is that, on Fichte’s account, “the need to act is first, not consciousness of the world, which is derived” (Fichte 1987, p. 79). That claim is part and parcel of Fichte’s commitment to the so-called “primacy of practical reason.” Unfortunately, his best-known proclamations on the latter subject—for example, that “practical reason is the root of all reason” (Fichte 1987, p. 79)—can make his view sound more one-sided than it actually is. His considered position, more carefully phrased, is that pure reason—non-sensory, autonomous, order-inducing mental activity—is equiprimordially theoretical and practical (see Breazeale 2013, chapter 14; cf. Zöller 1998). In other words, pure-rational activity is equally fundamentally productive of comprehension and of orientation, in a way that the above analysis of the I’s absolute self-positing may help to explicate. Nevertheless, on Fichte’s account it remains the case that any properly theoretical stance toward objects—any principally cognitive reckoning with something “posited opposite” the I—is not only transcendentally preconditioned, but also ontologically contextualized and qualified, by the I’s own originally and permanently

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projectival way of being, which comes before all cognition of objects and which does not itself appear within such cognition’s object-domain. As Fichte phrases this point, “There can be no intelligence in man, if he does not possess a practical capacity; the possibility of all representation”— that is, of all reference to objects, in the sense specified above—“is founded in the latter” (Fichte 1982, p. 233). Or, as Heidegger will eventually put his own version of this basic idea, “Existence is indeed more than mere cognition in the usual spectator sense of knowledge, and such knowledge presupposes existence” (Heidegger 1988, p. 276).

6

Acting (Handeln), Being (Sein), and Philosophical Knowing

It follows from the foregoing that we totally misapprehend our own basic nature if either (1) we mistake ourselves for some item actually present within cognition’s object-domain (a bundle of perceptions, for example, or a set of physically-realized functional states), or else (2) we misconstrue our own existing as principally consisting just in cognizing (so that, first and foremost, we are what we are just by beholding and conceptualizing, with all acting and evaluating occurring only afterwards and electively—if not indeed “merely apparently.”). Fichte emphatically combats this kind of confusion by sharply distinguishing between I-like acting (Handeln) and thinglike being (Sein): The I is infinitely determinable; the object, because it is an object, is determined all at once and forever. The I is what it is in acting, the object in being. The I exists in a state of endless becoming, there is nothing permanent in it at all; the object is as it is forever, it is what it was and what it will be. (Fichte 2000, pp. 27–28)

The I, otherwise described, is “nothing but pure activity [reine Tätigkeit],” of the pure-rational sort specified above, “in contrast to all subsisting and being posited” (Fichte 2005, p. 42, cf. p. 101). Thus the I exists but lacks being, in the technical sense of “being” upon which Fichte insists. So defined, the term specifically denotes “something fixed and enduring” (Fichte 1994, p. 55)— something “lacking any inner movement, passive and dead,” by comparison with the I (Fichte 2005, p. 12). Strictly speaking, then, Fichte holds that the I neither has nor passively apprehends being. Instead, as recounted above, the I posits the being of objects:

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the presence to the subject of anything like being is principally founded in, and derives its basic sense from, the I’s (factically conditioned) acting: The essence of transcendental idealism as presented in the Wissenschaftslehre is that the concept of being is by no means considered to be a primary and original concept, but is treated purely as a derivative one, indeed, as a concept derived through its opposition to activity. (Fichte 1994, p.  84, cf. p.  40; cf. Fichte 2005, p. 23)

Fichte’s claim that such thinglike being is only finally intelligible with reference to a more-basic, active self-articulating seems to be echoed—notwithstanding the noteworthy methodological and doctrinal differences—by Heidegger’s contention that “Reality” (where this term signifies “constant presence-at-hand” for “that kind of knowing which is characterized by beholding”) is “only one kind of Being among others” and “has a definite connection in its foundations with Dasein” (Heidegger 1962, pp. 129, 245, 246). Indeed, one of the main motivations for Heidegger’s turn away from transcendental phenomenology à la Husserl, toward phenomenology as existential ontology, is his related conviction that the “primacy of the theoretical must be broken” (Heidegger 2008, p. 47). On this view, our understanding of what there is has been distorted by a longstanding unquestioned equation of the real with only that which is enduringly available and paradigmatically intelligible from the standpoint of a supposedly disinterested knowing of things (Heidegger 2008, pp. 66–71). And this is a mistake, Heidegger maintains, in more than one way. First, we have a decidedly practical, distinctly pretheoretical way of originally involving ourselves with things, and this more basic way of engaging with what there is precedes and preconditions any detached “knowing,” in a way that contextualizes and qualifies whatever “reality” the latter reveals. “We become theoretically oriented only in exceptional cases,” on Heidegger’s account, and we do so only via the “cancellation of the meaningful dimension of the environing world” (Heidegger 2008, pp.  68–70). Moreover, philosophy’s fixation on that stance and its correlated object-­ domain ensures that we overlook not only our own more basic ways of being but also that wider field of more primordial phenomena by which the whole domain of the knowable is circumscribed and qualified. “The ultimate problems remain concealed when theoretization itself is absolutized without understanding its origin in ‘life,’” Heidegger argues; thus, philosophy itself ought to be reconstituted as “a genuinely primordial science from which the theoretical itself originates” (Heidegger 2008, pp. 71, 75).

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It is tempting to suppose that Heidegger is consciously channeling the Wissenschaftslehre here: Fichte’s work was not unknown to him, and, as we have seen, its basic principles offer one way of isolating the pretheoretical context and conditions of the theoretical standpoint itself (cf. Denker 2000). Fichte is quite explicit about that standpoint’s derivative nature: “It is not in fact the theoretical faculty which makes possible the practical, but on the contrary, the practical which first makes possible the theoretical” (Fichte 1982, p. 123). According to Heidegger himself, however, although Fichte’s theory of self-positing as “the essence of the Being of the entity having the character of the I” achieves an ontological breakthrough (Heidegger 1997, p. 65), and although the philosophy built on that basis brings our facticity and finitude vividly into view, nonetheless Fichte mishandles these fundamental phenomena, thanks to his adherence to an outmoded methodology (cf. Heidegger 1997, pp. 91–92). As we saw above, that methodology requires that philosophy first constitute itself via abstract detachment from our whole prephilosophical outlook (thus, not via clarified immersion in our own, principally pretheoretical comportment). In his early lecture course on the idea of philosophy, Heidegger describes the former, higher-order stance as one that—supposedly—“points out problems” that “cannot be seen by clinging to immediate life experience. One must rise to the critical standpoint. One must be free and able…to place oneself over oneself. In this way one enters a new dimension, the philosophical” (Heidegger 2008, p. 63). Obviously Heidegger scorns such an approach, but his description of it is not especially tendentious. Compare Fichte: One cannot have knowledge of that in which one is oneself caught up, of what one is oneself. One must separate oneself and must adopt a standpoint different from the standpoint of what one wishes to know. “Speculation” is the name for this separation from actual life: the standpoint which lies outside of the standpoint of life is the standpoint of speculation….One can live without engaging in speculation…for one can live without having any knowledge of life. But one cannot have any knowledge of life without engaging in speculation. (Fichte 1993, p. 435)

On Heidegger’s account, “critical-transcendental idealism,” having already positioned itself outside of the standpoint of life, “poses the problem: how, remaining within the ‘subjective sphere,’ do I arrive at objective knowledge?” (Heidegger 2008, p. 63). And the proffered solution, as outlined by Heidegger, sounds remarkably akin to Fichte’s position: “Objectivity and reality,” or what Fichte would call “the not-I” and “being,” respectively “are correlates of

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consciousness as such, of the epistemological subject as such. All Being is only in and through thought…[and] there are objects only as objects of consciousness” (Heidegger 2008, p. 65; cf. Fichte 2000, p. 4). According to Heidegger, however, such mistaken claims are foreordained by such a project’s problematic metaphilosophical and methodological formation. Heidegger’s critique of “critical-transcendental idealism” thus spotlights one respect in which Fichte’s thought remains very distant from the later existential ontology that it otherwise so strikingly anticipates. On the one hand, as we have seen, the Wissenschaftslehre dismantles and surpasses modern philosophy’s malformed models of subjectivity (as some introspectible object, permanent substrate, knowing subject, etc.), and in the process, it crafts novel categories that echo resoundingly in existential thought (I-hood as opposed to thinghood; self-reverting activity; existing as a free-but-finite striving; and so on). On the other hand, as Heidegger’s remarks highlight, Fichte’s philosophy itself does not bring these phenomena to light as ontological constituents of our pretheoretically existing, by contrast with transcendental conditions of a methodologically truncated “experience”—conditions that are postulated for essentially epistemological reasons and positioned “outside of all experience” (Fichte 1994, p. 9) by a philosophy whose standpoint “transcends life” (Fichte 1993, p. 435). Still, such considerations count against the Wissenschaftslehre only if Heidegger is quite correct, and Fichte quite mistaken, concerning what ought to count as preeminently enigmatic, as paradigmatically real, as superlatively evident, and so forth. This chapter takes no position on those questions.

7

I-Hood (Ichheit), Individuality, and Divinity (Gottheit)

Post-Kantian epistemology and the nascent existential ontology are fused in Fichte’s claim that “without a striving, no object at all is possible” (Fichte 1982, p. 233). According to the Wissenschaftslehre, as we saw above, the striving in question transcendentally precedes and preconditions the opening-up of the objective world as such. Accordingly, this striving cannot be (nor can it presuppose) an endeavor that aims for some determinate, worldly goal. It must, instead, be an “absolute tendency toward the absolute” (Fichte 2005, p. 33): an unconditional aspiring, by the I, to “unconditioned being” as an I (Fichte 1987, p.  99). Thus, on Fichte’s account, an ideal of “absolute self-­ sufficiency, absolute undeterminability by anything other than the I” (Fichte

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2005, p. 58) is projected by and via the pure self-reverting activity that the I originally and essentially is, in spite of its finding itself enmeshed in unchosen conditions (cf. Fichte 1982, p. 138). I-hood as such, Fichte says, “possesses a goal of its own. Yet it does not obtain this goal from without; instead, it posits it through itself ” (Fichte 1994, p. 147). More specifically, the I “charges itself to determine itself freely,” as opposed to acquiescing in determination by outside influences (Fichte 2005, p. 54). Via this charge, the I is “challenged to act in an absolute manner, the sole foundation of which should lie in the I itself and nowhere else” (Fichte 1994, p. 49). Purely and simply qua I, then, the I appoints itself to exert itself for the sake of its own inmost possibility. Put another way, the I demands of itself that it be true to itself: that it steer itself by and toward some potential that is purely and simply its own, and that it rise above or resist whatever outside forces would hinder or hijack its self-directed self-articulation. This seems to be tantamount to claiming—in the context of an abstract, transcendental analysis (and with a further Fichtean twist, more about which below)—that, for an entity that just is a self-conscious project of self-actualization, the first and highest norm is, or encompasses, a norm of authenticity. Within the Wissenschaftslehre, this abstract ideal of authenticity coincides with a norm of self-sufficiency. The associated optimum—projected by the factically conditioned I, and present for that I only as an unrealized, perhaps unrealizable ideal (see Fichte 1994, pp. 100–101)—is an ideal of consummate self-actualization, in which the I’s self-initiated, self-transparent self-­ articulation is not bound, coopted, or corroded by anything other than the I. “All bounds must fall away” (Fichte 1982, p. 138)—but Fichte’s claim here is not as outlandish as his chosen ways of phrasing it (in terms of unconditioned being, boundlessness, and the like) may make things sound. The idea is simply this: for any free, self-transparently self-actualizing entity, existence’s optimum is the pinnacle of free and intelligent self-actualization, where both (1) the self itself (not merely some compromised or counterfeit counterpart) is actualized, and (2) the self itself is actualized (not just fleetingly and incompletely enacted, but completely and incorruptibly constituted). Note also that this optimum—which, within the conceptual confines of Fichte’s philosophy specifically, fuses strict authenticity with unmitigated actuality—might then be further fleshed out in interestingly different ways, depending upon which of its two main aspects one might emphasize: the imperative of self-direction (authenticity) or the task of self-completion (actuality). Existentialism harbors several such divergent developments. On Fichte’s account, the challenge to pure self-activity is voiced by “the ethical law within us,” which is itself self-wrought, not externally sourced

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(Fichte 1994, p. 49). Heidegger presents an interestingly similar picture in his account of the “call of conscience.” This call, he says, “has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self ” (Heidegger 1962, p. 314). Notably, he also holds that “the caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world” (Heidegger 1962, p. 321) and, therefore, that the call attests to an orientation toward authenticity that is integral to Dasein as such and accomplished by Dasein itself. Absent some such attestation, it would remain uncertain whether authenticity is ontologically normative in and for Dasein, over and above its being valued (perhaps idiosyncratically) by certain individuals. But the call of conscience settles this question, insofar as Dasein here “gives testimony, from its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, as to a possible authenticity of its existence, so that it not only makes known that…such authenticity is possible, but demands this of itself ” (Heidegger 1962, p. 311). This is not the place to further flesh-out Heidegger’s account, but its basic isomorphism with Fichte’s position is noteworthy. In Fichte, we have the I’s challenging itself—by transcendentally appointing itself, not by overtly expressing itself—to restore its original freedom and purity, by first mastering, and finally transcending, the sensible world as such. In Heidegger, we have Dasein’s overtly (albeit enigmatically) calling itself back into its primordial uncanniness, as pure, thrown possibility, and thereby recovering itself from its accustomed absorption in historically specific, humanly contingent social roles and shared practices. Here again, then, what begins, in Fichte, as a highly abstract, essentially transcendental model eventually morphs into a structurally similar, but substantially more concrete, existential analysis. To be sure, these two accounts, with their kindred “demands,” may reflect some shared inspirations (Kant’s doctrine of the fact of pure reason, for instance). Still, Heidegger’s recounting of the call of conscience seems to echo Fichte’s position in particular, insofar as both accounts envision a self that calls upon itself to reassert or recover itself by overcoming or interrupting contingent influences that obscure or inhibit its pure potential. Nevertheless, there remains the crucial difference that for Fichte, such self-mandated self-­ consolidation ultimately requires a radical disregard for one’s own empirically qualified (concrete, historical) individuality. By the lights of Fichte’s transcendental idealism, the latter is ultimately only an artefact of “the limitations of sensibility,” and thus an unbidden encumbrance or “assemblage,” essentially alien to the I (Fichte 1994, pp. 89, 100). Here, then, we see another way in which Fichte is profoundly out of step with the later movement which his own work anticipates: the Wissenschaftslehre, in the final analysis, accords no real value to individuality. This philosophy, Fichte says, is “a system whose

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entire essence, from start to finish, is aimed at overlooking individuality within the theoretical realm and disavowing it within the realm of practice” (Fichte 1994, p. 101). One noteworthy consequence of this is that in Fichte’s work, there are as yet no signs of the fissure, which will open up within much later existentialist thought, between the imperatives of self-actualization—commitment, authenticity, and so forth—and the requirements of ethics. According to the Wissenschaftslehre, the final goal set by the I is “the self-sufficiency of all reason as such and thus not the self-sufficiency of one rational being, insofar as the latter is an individual rational being” (Fichte 2005, p. 220). Commitment to that goal then entails respect for the autonomy of all others, along with various other duties (cf. Kosch 2018). Still, in depicting the ethical law as the self ’s challenge to itself to act in an absolute manner, Fichte is not merely repackaging Kant’s notions of rational self-legislation and respect for autonomy. In fact he is revising that framework, in such a way that (to begin with) the indicated ideal of self-­determination comes to coincide with a certain ideal of authenticity. This point was noted above; but now, note also that the indicated authenticity takes the specific form of faithfulness to an original. And in the Fichtean context, the original in question is the essentially pure and self-active I, which only contingently finds itself factically conditioned; consequently, the requisite fidelity takes the form of unceasing, ever more all-encompassing pure-rational activity. As we saw above, the I’s absolute self-positing comprises the I’s projection of perfectly pure and unlimited order-inducing activity as its ideal, and this pure projection is the ground of a challenge, to the I qua factically conditioned, to strive—specifically, to strive to make itself the sole determinant of what is and ought to be. The ideal set by the I for its striving is thus “the idea of divinity [Gottheit]” (Fichte 1993, p. 76). It is an “absolute decree of reason,” Fichte says, that “finitude itself must go, all bounds must fall away, and the infinite I must alone remain” (Fichte 1982, pp. 137–138). Or, to state more precisely what is being claimed: “The complete annihilation of the individual and the fusion of the latter into the absolutely pure form of reason or into God [in die absolut reine Vernunftform oder in Gott] is indeed the ultimate goal of finite reason” (Fichte 2005, p. 143; cf. Hoeltzel 2018). To be sure, this goal is humanly unachievable, at least insofar as consciousness of worldly conditions as such—and with it, any agency aiming to alter such conditions—necessarily involves the self ’s subjection to various kinds of constraint and limitation. Consequently, Fichte maintains, “the final end of a rational being necessarily lies in infinity; it is certainly not an end that can ever be achieved, but it is one to which a rational being, in consequence of its

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spiritual nature, is supposed to draw nearer and nearer” (Fichte 2005, p. 142). The very nature of I-hood, on this account, is such that the human being “must approximate, ad infinitum, to a freedom he can never, in principle, attain” (Fichte 1982, p.  115). Compare Kierkegaard, writing half a century later: That the existing subjective thinker is constantly striving does not, however, mean that he has a goal in the finite sense, towards which he strives and reaching which would mean he was finished. No, he strives infinitely…. Existence is that child born of the finite and the infinite, the eternal and the temporal, and is therefore constantly striving. (Kierkegaard 2009, pp. 77–78)

And here is Sartre, another hundred years further on: The best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God…. God, value and supreme end of transcendence, represents the permanent limit in terms of which man makes known to himself what he is. To be man means to reach toward being God. (Sartre 1992, p. 724)

Evidently, then, another item that Fichte’s philosophy puts on existentialism’s agenda is the task of thinking through and responding to our ontologically uncanny condition: our existing as entities that are partly constituted by possibility and constantly striving for an unmitigated actuality which our continually renewed possibility places permanently out of reach. Fichte himself conceives of the striven-for “actuality” as only a German idealist could—as a final fusion into the pure form of reason—but there are alternatives, some of which existentialism explores. Kierkegaard, for example (in various pseudonymous writings), problematizes the individual’s longing for everlasting complete coincidence with his or her own ideal self (“not immortality in general…but his own immortality” (Kierkegaard 2009, p. 146)) and suggests that this is something for which we can hold out hope only by passionately embracing a paradoxical faith. “The self,” Kierkegaard writes, “is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God” (Kierkegaard 1983, pp.  29–30; cf. Loncar 2011). But if despair is to be thus averted, then reason’s requirements must eventually be suspended. This is because “continued striving is the expression of the perpetual realization that at no moment is it done with, as long as the subject is existing” (Kierkegaard 2009, pp. 103–104; cf. p. 252 on “the predicament of the existing individual”). And an entity for which becoming is done with, being having been achieved (cf. Kierkegaard 2009, p. 68) is

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thinkable only as a subsisting thing, not an existing individual. Hope therefore hangs on “the contradiction…that, humanly speaking, downfall is certain, but that there is possibility nonetheless” (Kierkegaard 1983, pp. 39–40). A human existence that is not caught up in human existence’s constitutive predicament is incomprehensible—but hope for such an existence can be sustained, “by virtue of the absurd, that for God everything is possible” (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 71). Sartre, like Kierkegaard, sees the self ’s basic project as a striving, not to unmake its individuality through some sort of pure-rational apotheosis, but purely and simply to actualize its self. “The self as being-in-itself is what human reality lacks”; thus, “the being toward which human reality surpasses itself is not a transcendent God…it is only human reality itself as a totality” (Sartre 1992, pp. 138–140, see also. p. 724 on “the desire to be God”; cf. Breazeale 2010). But “this self as a substantial being” is—in light of the clarified ontology that begins its rise with Fichte—a contradiction in terms. “The being of human reality is suffering,” Sartre therefore maintains, “because it rises in being as perpetually haunted by a totality which it is without being able to be it, precisely because it could not attain the in-itself without losing itself as for-­ itself ” (Sartre 1992, p. 140). As we have seen, for Fichte, too, the ultimate goal of our self-constituting striving is, in the final analysis, humanly unachievable. Nonetheless, Fichte would have us gladly receive this teaching. “Let us rejoice,” he writes, “because we feel our own strength and because our task is endless!” (Fichte 1993, p. 184).

Notes 1. All quotations that reference Fichte 1982 are my own translations; I provide the references for the benefit of Anglophone readers who wish to examine the indicated claims in context. 2. In later writings, Fichte supplements this idea of a merely sensory “check” or “affront” (Anstoß) with which the I finds itself confronted, with the more complex notion of a conceptually structured “summons” (Aufforderung) or “demand” (Anforderung), by which the I finds itself addressed. This is a noteworthy innovation, but it introduces complications that need not detain us here (see Hoeltzel 2020a). 3. Incidentally, it appears that Fichte himself first coined the term “Facticität,” around 1800 or 1801, and that Heidegger picked up the term from Emil Lask’s 1902 dissertation, Fichte’s Idealism and History (Kisiel 2000, p. 243). However, facticity is stressed even in the first (1794–1795) presentation of Fichte’s system, long before the coinage of the term.

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Bibliography Breazeale, Daniel. 2010. How to Make an Existentialist? In Search of a Shortcut from Fichte to Sartre. In Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition, ed. Violetta L. Waibel, Daniel Breazeale, and Tom Rockmore, 277–312. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 2013. Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Denker, Alfred. 2000. The Young Heidegger and Fichte. In Heidegger, German Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism, ed. Tom Rockmore, 103–122. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1971. Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Vol. II, 3: Nachgelassene Schriften 1793–1795. Ed. Hans Jacob and Reinhard Lauth. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. ———. 1982. The Science of Knowledge. Ed. and Trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1987. The Vocation of Man. Trans. Peter Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1993. Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings. Ed. and Trans. Daniel Breazeale. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1994. Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings. Ed. and Trans. Daniel Breazeale. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 2000. Foundations of Natural Right. Ed. Frederick Neuhouser, Trans. Michael Baur. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. The System of Ethics. Ed. and Trans. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Franks, Paul. 2016. Fichte’s Position: Anti-Subjectivism, Self-Awareness, and Self-­ Location in the Space of Reasons. In The Cambridge Companion to Fichte, ed. David James and Günter Zöller, 374–404. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper Collins. ———. 1988. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. Alfred Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1997. Gesamtausgabe: Abteilung II, Band 28: Der deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel). Ed. Claudius Strube. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 2008. Towards the Definition of Philosophy. Trans. Ted Sadler. London: Continuum. Hoeltzel, Steven. 2018. Fichte and Kant on Reason’s Final Ends and Highest Ideas. Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte 16. https://journals.openedition.org/ref/827. Accessed 1 April 2019. ———. 2020a. Anstoß and Aufforderung (‘Check’ and ‘Summons’). In The Bloomsbury Handbook to Fichte, ed. Marina F. Bykova, 353–361. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2020b. The Three Basic Principles (drei Grundsätze). In The Bloomsbury Handbook to Fichte, ed. Marina F. Bykova, 327–335. London: Bloomsbury.

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Kangas, David. 2007. J.  G. Fichte: From Transcendental Ego to Existence. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 49–66. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1983. The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Ed. and Trans. Howard V.  Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs. Ed. and Trans. Alastair Hannay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kisiel, Theodore. 2000. Heidegger—Lask—Fichte. In Heidegger, German Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism, ed. Tom Rockmore, 239–270. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Kosch, Michelle. 2018. Fichte’s Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loncar, Samuel. 2011. From Jena to Copenhagen: Kierkegaard’s Relations to German Idealism and the Critique of Autonomy in The Sickness unto Death. Religious Studies 47 (2): 201–216. Neuhouser, Frederick. 1990. Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1985. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Trans. Bernard Frechtman, Reprinted as “Existentialism”. In Existentialism and Human Emotions, 9–51. New York: Citadel Press. ———. 1992. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. Wood, Allen W. 2016. Deduction of the Summons and the Existence of Other Rational Beings. In Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right: A Critical Guide, ed. Gabriel Gottlieb, 72–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zöller, Günter. 1998. Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right and the Mind-Body Problem. In Rights, Bodies, and Recognition: New Essays on Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, 90–106. Aldershot: Ashgate.

5 Schelling as a Transitional Figure from Idealism to Existentialism Zoltán Gyenge

1

The Turn in Schelling’s Philosophy

The relationship of Kierkegaard and Schelling has been a problematic issue in both the research on Schelling and that on Kierkegaard. Although the Danish thinker attended Schelling’s lectures and had several of Schelling’s books in his library (Gyenge 2017, pp. 335–379), still, Michelle Kosch is right to say that “the standard view of Kierkegaard’s relation to Schelling (if there can be said to be a standard view of this issue) is that there was nothing in Schelling’s late philosophy beyond his critique of Hegel that could have held any positive interest for Kierkegaard” (Kosch 2006, p. 122). Schelling’s philosophy ends right where Kierkegaard’s philosophy begins. Maybe that is why Schelling falls silent. He does not take the next step. More precisely, he does not fall silent, but rather he gives lectures, that is, he returns to the modus vivendi of philosophy that was somewhat forgotten since Socrates: verbality. Still, we may well call this a “virtual silence” (Kosch 2006, p. 126). Why does he publish almost nothing? Maybe the classic representative of German Idealism was himself shied by the turn of his own thinking? Since this turn leads from reason to existence. With the examination of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Schelling, the first question to arise is where Schelling’s late philosophy begins,

Z. Gyenge (*) University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_5

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where is the turn in his philosophy from early to late since, from the point of view of Kierkegaard, it is his late philosophy that plays the decisive role. If we follow the work of Kuno Fischer, which has virtually attained the status of a classic, Schelling’s philosophy is to be divided into several periods (Fischer 1902). In my view, however, his work can be essentially segmented into three distinct phases. The first one lasts from the 1790s until the beginning of the 1800s. During this time, he published works influenced by Kant, Fichte and Reinhold, in the realm of transcendental philosophy (On the Possibility of a Form of All Philosophy or Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge) and natural philosophy (e.g., Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature or General Deduction of the Dynamic Process). This period is followed by a transitional one, spanning from the writing of the System of Transcendental Idealism until an almost complete cessation of publications. The major work of this period is the Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom. The third period is that of the late philosophy, the beginning of which is somewhat difficult to define. Some date the turn from the Erlangen lectures, the years between 1821 and 1825 (Kasper 1965, p. 87), or from the three great lecturing periods, still others trace it back to as early as 1801. However, the beginning of the “new philosophy” is habitually linked to the “Freiheitsschrift” (that is, Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809)) (Fuhrmanns 1954, p. 177). There are some, though, who mark the end of the Fichtean period, that is, the beginning of the 1800s as the turn (with works such as Philosophy and Religion (1804) and Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom (Schulz 1975, pp.  95–96, 113). But the approach closest to the truth is probably not one linking the turn to a given event or work but one that treats it as a complex issue. According to this view, the late philosophy is made up of several components (Fischer 1902, p.  795), among which we can find the debate with Jacobi (Gyenge 2005, pp. 93–96) as well as the period of the Freiheitslehre or the Stuttgart Private Lectures, and last but not least, the philosophy of The Ages of the World. The latter is also important because it is the first work in which Schelling distinguishes between the ontological and ontic notion of existence in clear terms. Although it may be added that from this respect, his previous work, the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) could be considered a sort of departure from pure essentialism. This work focuses on the notion of the unconditioned (Unbedingtes) known from the first period, and this unconditioned is none other than the self which constitutes self-­ consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein) through the notion of intellectual intuition (intellektuelle

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Anschauung); yet in this work a certain shift in emphasis can be detected, especially in the third part concerning the questions of freedom and fate, for example, when he writes: “The absolute acts through each single intelligence, whose action is thus itself absolute, and to that extent neither free nor unfree, but both at once, absolutely free, and for that very reason also necessary” (Schelling 1993, p. 210, SW I.3. p. 602). And if we look at the lectures, the birth of Schelling’s late philosophy is linked to an important event. Ludwig I (King of Bavaria from 1825) called Schelling back to Munich in 1827, thus starting the period of the Munich lectures, in which Schelling focused on the philosophy of mythology and the so-called “newer philosophy.” As early as 1832 he was giving courses with titles such as the “Philosophy of Revelation,” and “Positive Philosophy.” In 1833, he became a knight of the French Legion of Honor and a corresponding member of the Academy of Paris (with Savigny and Schleiermacher being the other German members). After the revolutions of the 1830s, the university was drawn under tight state control, which was not at all to Schelling’s liking. So, the next step was the acceptance of the invitation of Humboldt and Bunsen, who had been trying to persuade him to come to Berlin since 1834. After the start of the reign of Frederick William IV, he finally complied. Let us not forget that Hegel, his former classmate in Tübingen and his adversary later, who had also been the rector of the University of Berlin, died in 1831. Ten years had passed since that time. With the acceptance of the invitation to Berlin in 1841, a third and final period of great lectures begins. In Berlin, Schelling gave lectures pronouncedly on positive and negative philosophy, and it is not by chance that the learned world took notice of these. Kant had long been dead, as had Fichte, and, as mentioned, Hegel; now only Schelling remained. At that time, he was the only living classic thinker of German Idealism. This last period of lectures ended in 1843–1844. The end of this period was disgraceful due to Heinrich Paulus, who published the lectures without asking permission from Schelling, and whom Schelling actually sued for this. Views were divided on the lectures. Arnold Ruge and the left Hegelians in general had a critical opinion of Schelling. They were indignant about the criticism of their teacher Hegel, and they found Schelling’s views eclectic and confused, and so did Engels and, following him, György Lukács. Kirchhoff is right in stating that the research on Schelling shared this opinion for all intents and purposes until 1954, when the conference in Bad Ragaz took place, which marked a shift of interest toward Schelling’s later work on being and existence (Kirchhoff 1982, p. 56). As for the content of the late philosophy, however, there can be no doubt that it, on the one hand, marks a break with the Cartesian tradition of rational

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philosophy and, on the other hand, poses a number of problems that lead much further. Schelling differentiated between positive and negative philosophy, and, indeed, he not only classified the post-Cartesian rational philosophy as negative but his own previous philosophy as well. For this reason, he did not accept the notion of the self based on rationality (Fichte) either. In contrast to this, the emphasis shifted to being and having being, especially following his The Ages of the World (Schelling 1946, 2000a) and afterwards increasingly in other works in his late period (Wirth 2000a). In his Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom (Schelling 2000b), Schelling examined the question of freedom and being from a real-ontological perspective, although it is true that he was still reflecting on Spinoza. However, the pantheism debate, especially the train of thought of Jacobi was also central for him. According to Jacobi, faith stands above pure rationality (Verstand), and, therefore, it can only be approached via faith based on reason. This is the “Vernunftglaube.” He claims that for every being, there lies an existence as a basis that was not created; for every creation (Entstandenes), there is one that was not-created (nicht Entstandenes), for everything that changes, there is one that is unchanged (Jacobi 1819, p. 172; Gyenge 2005, p. 94). According to Kierkegaard, it is evident that it is exactly the question of freedom that rational philosophy cannot handle. The remark of Wilhelm Dietz on Schelling’s notion of freedom being a historical antecedent to Kierkegaard’s notion of freedom is completely justified (Dietz 1993, p. 353). Apart from being, the other critical question is the notion of time and becoming (Werden). It is not a coincidence that, on the one hand, Schelling intended The Ages of the World to be his masterpiece, which demonstrates the importance of the problem, yet, on the other hand, he never finished it. He embarked on it several times, but of the three volumes envisaged he only managed to write the first one. The question of time undermines the logical system built by Hegel, and maybe even the one built by Schelling, precisely because of the category of becoming. Even Platonic philosophy could not deal with it (see the Parmenides), since Plato could not account for the relationship between becoming and time, as Kierkegaard explains in detail in The Concept of Anxiety. In another work (e.g., Philosophical Fragments), Kierkegaard also pointed out that Hegelian logic could not deal with either time or becoming (Vorden, Werden). Hegel established that becoming is the unity of being and nothing: “Nothing, if it be thus immediate and equal to itself, is also conversely the same as Being is. The truth of Being and of Nothing is accordingly the unity of the two: and this unity is Becoming” (Hegel 2009, §88).1 But according to Kierkegaard, this does not solve the problem. On the contrary, he writes: “But such a being, which is nevertheless a nonbeing, is precisely

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what possibility is; and a being which is being is indeed actual being or actuality; and the change of coming into existence is a transition from possibility to actuality” (SKS 4, p. 274/PF, p. 74). Schelling’s thoughts bear an astonishing resemblance to those of Kierkegaard on this issue. Schelling separated that which generates change from that which the changing changes into. Kierkegaard phrases his thoughts in an almost identical manner: “Not so with coming into existence, for if that which comes into existence does not itself remain unchanged in the change of coming into existence, then the coming into existence is not this coming into existence, but another” (SKS 4, p. 273/PF, p. 73). As Schelling says, that which becomes (becoming) is different from that which is. We may add that, according to the Aristotelean concept, being in possibility is preceded by being in actuality: Obviously, then, the actuality or the formula is different when the matter is different; for in some cases it is the composition, in others the mixing, and in others some other of the attributes we have named. And so, of the people who go in for defining, those who define a house as stones, bricks, and timbers are speaking of the potential house, for these are the matter; but those who propose a receptacle to shelter chattels and living beings, or something of the sort, speak of the actuality. (Aristotle 1924, 1043a, 1049b)2

Becoming a reality verifies the possibility, in other words, the potential reality, while the unrealized possibility is nothing. Actually, Kierkegaard explains this with utmost clarity in his dissertation in relation to Socratic negativity (in The Concept of Irony). Regarding the late philosophy, Schelling moves only slowly toward the study of being, a point which Xavier Tilliette correctly notes (Tilliette 1970, p. 643). The first step is the concept of time in The Ages of the World, where the question of being and having been is prominent. The main aspect of thought can be stated in simple terms: the φύσις τοῦ ἀνθρὼποϛ expressed by the Greeks is linked to the essence of φύσις τοῦ παντόϛ (Jaeger 1953, p. 199). In the interpretation of Schelling, this is the connection between world time (Weltalter) and human time (Schelling 1946, pp. 34–35). Schelling’s solution anticipates, indeed, informs, for example, Søren Kierkegaard’s (and later Martin Heidegger’s) analysis of the moment (Øieblikket, das Augenblick). In the view of Jason M. Wirth, it is actually The Concept of Anxiety that proves this (Wirth 2000b, p. XIV). The question of φύσις τοῦ ἀνθρὼποϛ is raised by Schelling in another work, the Stuttgart Private Lectures. Man as a being suddenly gains

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importance, interestingly just when Schelling examines the relationship between madness (Wahnsinn) and autonomous being (SW I.7, p. 470), and the questions of existence and madness are clearly linked (Gyenge 2007, p. 86). The Stuttgart Private Lectures are a series of lectures held in two parts, starting at the beginning of 1810 at the request of E. F. von Georgii, immediately after the death of Schelling’s wife. Schelling subsequently wrote his dialogue, Clara, and in the same year he started the above-mentioned treatise which he meant to be his main work, but which he never finished, The Ages of the World. These thoughts (namely, the human being and existence) are closely related and show precisely the train of thought followed by Schelling from the abstract concept of being in German Idealism to the concept of being in reality. Although he already dealt in detail with the ontological position of God and the world in Stuttgart, this time the being, man and the relationship between God and man is given a special emphasis, precisely through revelation (SW I.7, p. 463). The single man, man as an emotional creature became the focus of attention in the analysis which is already very close to his own late philosophy and that of Kierkegaard. With Schelling madness is one of the important preconditions of existing (Stuttgart Private Lectures), since “Verstand ist geregelter Wahnsinn,” that is, the understanding is regulated madness (SW I.7, p. 470). Kierkegaard shares this thought almost completely: the objective way of thinking “is of the opinion that it avoids a danger that lies in wait for the subjective way, and at its maximum this danger is madness. In a solely subjective definition of truth, lunacy and truth are ultimately indistinguishable, because they may both have inwardness” (SKS 7, p. 178/CUP1, p. 194). For Kierkegaard, this inwardness is a decisive factor. Schelling, however, was preoccupied with the revelation of religion in relation to the single man. It was Schelling who turned revelation into a real philosophical term if, indeed, he was not the first to use it. For Lessing (in The Education of the Human Race), revelation was an educational process: “Education is revelation” (Lessing 1883, §2), but, for Schelling, it is an act expressing the notions above reason. Revelation is, therefore, that which man could never be able to understand with reason; it is that which is beyond reason (Übervernünftiges), just as faith itself is. Although, as we have seen, it is rather difficult to determine which date or which work can be pinpointed as the start of Schelling’s late philosophy, at the same time, one must deal with the late period since we can plainly establish that the late works of Schelling had a much larger influence on Kierkegaard than that proposed by several authors. Mirko Koktanek’s remark that Kierkegaard did not become acquainted with the core of Schelling’s thoughts

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is unconvincing (Koktanek 1962, p. 68). If nothing else, Kierkegaard’s notes expressly contradict this (Gyenge 1996, p. 144), as we will see later. On the whole, it can be said that the late period is not defined primarily by a specific period of time but by content. This content is linked neither to any given point in time nor to a given work. Examining the influence of Schelling’s thinking (the late philosophy) on Kierkegaard, we have to consider the Berlin lectures, partly because Kierkegaard listened to them in person, and also because we deem The Ages of the World vital with regard to Schelling’s late thinking and to Kierkegaard; moreover, Schelling referred to this work several times in Berlin. It shouldn’t be ignored that, as Karl Löwith very accurately observes, Kierkegaard received the motivation from Schelling’s lectures that “he did not find in Hegel” (Löwith 1964, p. 148).

2

Schelling’s Late Philosophy

It is peculiar that György Lukács was almost the first to notice that Schelling could be a link between German Idealism and existentialism. He regards existentialism as a mistaken direction in philosophy, and for this reason Schelling also belongs to the group of “guilty” philosophers. In 1954, in The Destruction of Reason he writes: “In Germany it was already the older Schelling who instigated the attack against the rationalism founded by Descartes” (Lukács 1981, p. 28).3 Naturally, Lukács who stood on the grounds of Bolshevik ideology, drew the conclusion: “As we shall see in due course, this attack subsequently assumed its supreme form during the time of Hitler with the repudiation of all progressive bourgeois philosophies and the canonization of all out-and-out reactionaries” (Lukács 1981, p. 28). There is a thesis in Schelling’s late philosophy which establishes the foundations for separating rational and existential thinking (SW II.3, p. 58). Lukács preceded others in identifying this thesis: “This irrevocable inner conflict stands out in the basic methodological ideas of his later philosophy. The whole famous division of negative and positive philosophy hinges on the fact that Schelling divides sharply and metaphysically the essence of things (their What) from the existence (their That)” (Lukács 1981, p. 185). We will have to return to this sentence since its meaning is decisive for the later concept of existence. It has to be noted that Lukács noticed very correctly that this was a fundamental turn in the history of modern philosophy, even if he was not keen on it. The Berlin lectures started with unprecedented preparations. Schelling, as we have already mentioned, showed up in Berlin exactly ten years after the

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death of Hegel in order to fight against the spirit of Hegelianism. Bruce Matthews is almost poetic in stating that “Hegel’s brilliance dazzled Berlin, and like a supernova his death in 1831 left behind a black hole in the intellectual and cultural life of Prussia’s capital” (Matthews 2007, p. 6). It was a rare moment in philosophy. Schelling was not young: he was already sixty-six. Yet, at the invitation of King Wilhelm IV, he embarked on the challenge to “put an end to the ‘dragon seed’ of Hegelian Pantheism” (Kasper 1965, p.  23) in the hotbed of Hegelian philosophy. The audience consisted of rather well-known figures: apart from Kierkegaard, there was Jacob Burckhardt, Savigny, Droysen, Bakunin, and Friedrich Engels. Though some claim, erroneously, that Marx was also present (Hannay 1982, p. 3). But Leopold Ranke was there, and so were last but not least Alexander von Humboldt and Trendelenburg. People flocked to hear Schelling’s lectures. “Schelling is lecturing to an extraordinary audience” (SKS 28, p.  151/LD, p.  104). Probably Schelling himself was fully aware of the extraordinary moment. If we take a look at the tone of the first lecture, we can see that a certain poignancy is not foreign to them. So, revelation is not merely a philosophical term but can be applied to his own lectures as well (SW II.3, pp. 3–5; SKS 19, p. 305, Not11:2/SBL, p. 335). In these lectures, Schelling wanted first and foremost to clarify the content of “being” and “having being” not only from an ontological but also from a historical perspective. His terminological system, therefore, was largely transformed, and it obtained a new content. The concepts previously used by him, such as subject, object, and the Unconditioned (Subjekt, Objekt, Unbedingtes) were increasingly driven into the background,4 and their place was taken by certain forms of being (Sein) and having being (Seiendes): real being (das wahrhaft Seiende), that which has being as such (Seiendes selbst), the capacity to be (Sein-Könnendes), that is, a terminology closely related to the concept of being and having being. From this point of view, the previous concept of the subject became a presupposition that is only potential (a negative concept), and which can only become an existence, a being according to Schelling’s notions by a step into reality (in actu). The basic condition for real existence is, therefore, an entrance into the actualitas, reaching that which is more than pure being (pure potential). This thought is already a genuine elaboration of an earlier one,5 the content of the παιδαγογία εἰς Χριστόν, that is, the “teachings of Christ,” which is accompanied by a readjustment of the role of experience (Erfahrung) because experience became the basis of positive philosophy, and divine existence itself is an empirical experience. The question of experience was actually one of the turning points in this train of thought since experience is not only the control of thinking but also a condition for real existence. It is

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also not by chance that Schelling himself refers back to Kant in discussing this issue. For to say that pure reason is nothing else but pure cognitive knowing does not, however, give an answer to the most important questions. Cognition by reason has its limits, and it has to acknowledge these limits. Maybe that is why Schelling says that Kant was the last honest philosopher who showed that there is a point from where it is impossible to go further, a point where pure reason fails, and this point is God (SW II.3, p. 62). God is not the object of reason but that of experience. Schelling’s notion is more than and different from the previous ones in that for him experience differs from the notion of experience in Anglo-Saxon empiricism, and it is also distinct from negative philosophy since negative philosophy is a priori empiricism, while positive philosophy is empirical a prioritism or the empiricism of a priority inasmuch as God’s existence is primary in it (das Prius) (SW II.3, p. 57). Thus, all this implies rather an inner world displayed as experience. That is not the immanent but much rather the intelligible world. This train of thought was followed by Kierkegaard, too, when he made a strong link between the term inwardness (Inderlighed) and the concept of the individual or that of existence.

3

The Two Kinds of Knowledge

The above-mentioned basic thesis of positive philosophy is phrased by Schelling (in its original version, not the one cited by Lukács) as follows: “Here we should note that in everything that is real there are two things to be known: it is two entirely different things to know what (was) a being (ein Seiendes) is, quid sit, and that (daß) it is, quod sit.” Schelling continues: The former—the answer to the question: what (was) it is—affords me an insight into the essence (Wesen) of the thing, or it provides that I understand the thing, that I have an understanding or a concept of it, or have the thing itself within the concept. The other insight however, that (daß) it is, does not accord me just the concept but rather that goes beyond just a concept, which is existence (Existenz). (Schelling 2007, pp. 128–129)6

The What-being (das Was-sein) and the That-being (das Daß-sein) allude to two different kinds of knowledge and also two directions in philosophy. Schelling observed that reason can only relate to the first one. Since Kant, reason was the infinite potency of cognition (unendliche Potenz des Erkennens) and as such nothing else but the infinite potency of being (unendliche Potenz des

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Seins) (SW II.3, p.  64). This means that the “a priori science of reason” (a priori Vernunftwissenschaft) is only a possibility not insignificantly because it is devoid of experience that would make real existence possible. Reason, therefore, presupposes a condition before direct experience, so it is only a presupposition. The difference between the What-being (or Whatness) and the That-being (or Thatness) is the difference and contrast between concept (Begriff) and experience (Erfahrung) (Schulz 1975, p. 21). In Schelling’s view, negative philosophy is not negative in the sense of being bad or inappropriate but in the sense that, in negative philosophy, being is only a concept, not a reality. Concept and reason are potencia, or, in Aristotelean terms, δύναμιϛ, while real being is actu, reality itself, ἐνέργεια. A being is not an entity determined by reason but a process, perpetual change. It is not by chance that in his Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard elucidated these thoughts in a dispute with Hegel with regard to the concept of becoming or “in being” (Væren) (SKS 4, p. 273/PF, p. 73). We can find the That-being at the center of positive science in contrast to the “a priori science of reason” (a priori Vernunftwissenschaft). In this way reason (What-being) sets out from itself (von sich aus) and describes the world without experience. Summing up the arguments above, the basic structure of the two philosophies can be represented schematically as follows: Negative philosophy

Positive philosophy

Science of essence/Wesenswissenschaft Ground: Logical thinking Character: das Was-sein (ὄν) Essence/Wesen/essentia

Science of being/Seinswissenschaft

Modality: δύναμιϛ/potentia (Possibility) Explication: Logic God: End (Endursache)

Experience das Daß-sein (ὄντως ὄν) Being or having being/Sein oder Seiendes/ existentia ένέργεια/actu (Actuality) Revelation Beginning (Anfang)

Both Schelling’s and Kierkegaard’s philosophy bid a final farewell to the logical construction (negative philosophy), and from this point on it is true that they have a perpetual debate with Hegelian philosophy. This dispute lasts virtually until the death of both Schelling and Kierkegaard.

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Yet both Schelling and Kierkegaard were ambivalent towards Hegel. For Kierkegaard, it is unquestionably true that, when we talk about his anti-­ Hegelian polemic, much of this polemic is not only aimed at Hegel but also at the Danish Hegelians, and primarily at Martensen and Mynster (Stewart 2003, 2007). It would, however, be inaccurate to draw the conclusion from this observation that Kierkegaard was not well acquainted with the philosophy of Hegel. Although he met it first indirectly (through Martensen, Heiberg), he read his works in the original first in 1838–1839 (Theunissen and Greve 1979, p. 21), and it definitely had a great impact on his thinking. The Danish obsession with Hegel is demonstrated by the “fatal” undertaking of Heiberg with his dramatic work Fata Morgana. Heiberg wrote Fata Morgana for the birthday of the Danish monarch (January 28th, 1838), and he called it a “speculative play” in an attempt to bring the philosophy of his idol Hegel to the stage. Failure was inevitable and spectacular: the piece was played only five times (Stewart 2007, vol. 2, p. 148). According to some, this was exactly five times more than the bearable number of performances. The play had, in the words of Klaus Müller-Wille, a “catastrophic reception” (Müller-Wille 2012, p. 88). To mention only one example of Hegel’s influence: one of Kierkegaard’s interpretations of time from the point of view of existence, the one of crucial importance, is actually based on a Hegelian concept. This is similar to that of Schelling. This interpretation is laid out in intricate detail in Chapter III of The Concept of Anxiety. “The possible corresponds exactly to the future. For freedom, the possible is the future, and the future is for time the possible” (SKS 4, p. 395/CA, p. 91). Time conceived as future corresponds to Schelling’s ideas. In the 35th note of the lectures, Schelling refers to the concept of the ages of the world in relation to time. On this Kierkegaard records the following thoughts: “Consequently, there are two periods: (1) Father eon; the Son is not outside the Father, but only in the Father; (2) the Son’s period, which is the entire time of this world” (SKS 19, p.  356, Not11:35/SBL, p.  399). Schelling says exactly the same thing in The Ages of the World: “die ganze Zeit aber ist die Zukunft” (Schelling 1946, p. 82), that is, the whole time is the future. It is certainly true that Kierkegaard’s notions about Hegel were determined by Hegel’s Science of Logic, Philosophy of History, and Philosophy of Right. It is beyond doubt though that his interpretation of Hegel is in some places rather schematic and in others very profound.

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Schelling’s Berlin Lectures

We have summarized the most important theses of Schelling’s late philosophy. Now it is necessary to examine to what extent Kierkegaard knew and absorbed the Schellingian thoughts discussed above. As we have already mentioned, after the break-up with Regine Olsen in 1841, Kierkegaard travelled to Berlin partly to escape the negative fallout from the break-up of his engagement, partly to be able to work in peace, and partly to attend lectures at the University of Berlin. It is a lucky coincidence that this was the period when Schelling held his series of lectures on revelation and the philosophy of mythology. Research on this issue is largely facilitated by the fact that Eva Nordentoft-Schlechta published Kierkegaard’s notes on Schelling’s lectures. The original version of Kierkegaard’s lectures notes were recently published in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS 19, pp. 305–367). The publication of these notes makes possible the comparison with the specific manuscripts and also with the text of the original lectures.7 First of all, it is evident from the notes from November 1841 to February 1842 that Kierkegaard attended several lectures (41 according to his own records), at first with the greatest enthusiasm (pertaining to the first lectures), and then with ever growing disillusionment. We know from his lecture notes (and his journal) that in January 1842, the lectures on theism, pantheism, and mythology did not appeal to him. Although he had planned to stay in Berlin for a year, he cut short his visit and returned to Copenhagen much earlier than intended. This, however, is only partly due to his discontent with the philosophical lectures, which he recounts to his brother Peter Christian in a letter from February 1842: “I have nothing more to do in Berlin. My time does not allow me to ingest drop by drop what would hardly willingly open my mouth to swallow all at once” (SKS 28, p. 18/LD, p. 141). He concludes: “I am too old to attend lectures, just as Schelling is too old to give them. His whole doctrine of potencies betrays the highest degree of impotence (hans hele Lære om Potenser røber den høieste Impotens)” (SKS 28, p. 18/LD, p. 141). His other reason is, as Rhode remarks, that he received news of Regine being sick (Rhode 1992, p. 74). Yet at the beginning of Schelling’s lecture series (in the autumn of 1841), he rather eagerly took notes. These lectures were about the differences between positive and negative philosophy, and the theory of being outlined above. Kierkegaard writes,

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I am so happy to have heard Schelling’s second lecture—indescribably (ubeskrivelig). I have been pining and thinking mournful thoughts long enough. The embryonic child of thought leapt for joy within me, as in Elisabeth, when he mentioned the word “actuality” in connection with the relation of philosophy to actuality. I remember almost every word he said after that. (SKS 19, p. 235, Not8:33/SBL, pp. XXI–XXII)

And he continues with great zeal: “Here, perhaps, clarity can be achieved” (SKS 19, p. 235, Not8:33/SBL, p. XXII). To establish whether it is true that Kierkegaard did not get to know the decisive position of Schelling’s philosophy (see Koktanek 1962; Thulstrup 1972; Dempf 1957), one first has to decide what this position is, and then to what extent Kierkegaard was actually familiar with it. In my opinion, the decisive thought in Schelling is the theory of being, the notions of being and having been, existence, and the transcendence of rationality, and not the system of mythology or theism or the issue of revelation. In this case, the texts themselves can verify that the lectures explored these issues in detail, and Kierkegaard diligently followed these explanations. As for the second question, if we examine the lectures Kierkegaard attended, we will see that there is a direct link between him and Schelling. This link is different from that proposed by Karl Jaspers concerning the relation between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which he claims to be a relationship solely of spirit since, in fact, they did not really know the philosophy of each other (Jaspers 1935, p. 5). In the case of Schelling and Kierkegaard, it can be stated with certitude that the philosophical foundations of Kierkegaard’s concept of existence show a strong affinity with Schelling’s late philosophy. We know that from the lectures of Martensen from 1838–1839 Kierkegaard obtained information not only about Hegel but also about the philosophy of Schelling (Hong and Hong 1989, p. XIX; Stewart 2007, vol. 2, pp. 284–287), and the above-mentioned notes attest to even more than that. The most important fact is that it can be proved that Kierkegaard was acquainted with the gist of negative and positive philosophy and the difference between the two since he listened to Schelling’s detailed statements about the train of thought leading to positive philosophy (including the critique of Hegelian philosophy, and a very detailed introduction to Kantian philosophy). He became acquainted with the essence of Schelling’s theory of being; he listened to the outline of the concepts of being and having been, and the concept of being in negative philosophy. Of course, the major motivation for him could have been, and this is revealed in some of his remarks, that in his philosophy, the precursor of thinking creates substantial differences,

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whether it is essence (what is essential), that which is, or existence (existential), that it is. This thought is reproduced in a clear fashion in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, where Kierkegaard uses explicitly Schellingian terms: “Objectively the emphasis is on what (hvad) is said; subjectively the emphasis is on how it is said (hvorledes det siges)” (SKS 7, p. 185/CUP1, p. 202). He adds to this sentence: “At its maximum, this ‘how’ is the passion of the infinite, and the passion of the infinite is the very truth (Sandhed)” (SKS 7, p. 185/CUP1, p. 203). He emphasizes the words “what” and “how,” which, following the Schellingian approach, differentiate between the two types of thinking. Reference to existence, to being (Seiendes) is clear with the use of inwardness (Inderlighed) since, for Kierkegaard, this expression corresponds to existence. But a parallel can also be detected in the mention of the negative and positive philosophy, or the first and second (or “new”) philosophy, in The Concept of Anxiety. The essence of the first ethics for Kierkegaard is immanence. By contrast, of the second ethics he writes the following in accordance with the aims of positive philosophy: we could “by secunda philosophia (second philosophy) understand that totality of science whose essence is transcendence or repetition (Gjentagelsen)” (SKS 4, p.  329/CA, p.  21). According to Michael Theunissen, at this point, Kierkegaard quite clearly and expressly follows Schelling’s concept of the two different philosophies, more precisely, the distinction between the two philosophies corresponds to the Schellingian reminiscences (Theunissen 1993, p. 19). For example, in Philosophical Fragments, the philosophy of Hegel and Schelling can be observed almost everywhere, and it is precisely the spirit of the Berlin lectures that can be detected in them.

5

Kierkegaard’s Notes

Let us see then how profoundly Kierkegaard knew the Schellingian way of thinking. The most important source for this inquiry is his own notes. By comparing them with notes on other lectures (e.g., the “Mittermair Nachschrift” (Koktanek 1962)), with other works by Schelling (e.g., The Ages of the World) and with the text of the lectures published later (SW II.3), we can look for the consistency or inconsistency of the two ways of thinking. Apart from the philosophical theses, Kierkegaard also became acquainted with the philosophy of theism and mythology but only partially, and he was not excited by it at all. This is proven by the superficiality of his notes taken during this period. He also gave titles to some of his notes, which can orient us with regards to which thoughts he found relevant for his own thinking. The first

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dated set of notes is from November 22nd (this is his third numbered set of notes), and the last one is from February 3rd of the following year. Examining the notes, we can see that he captures the gist of the lectures if not word by word but with fair accuracy, and at some points with interpretation. But the really important feature is how he relates to Schelling’s theory of being, because we think this is the decisive issue in the late philosophy. Every other issue (e.g., God or faith) depends on all the topics clustering around being and having been. “The philosophy may be called ἐπιστήμη τοῦ ὄντος,” wrote Kierkegaard in his notes of November 22nd, 1841 (SKS 19, p. 305, Not11:3/SBL, p. 336). How can we define the content of this ἐπιστήμη τοῦ ὄντος more precisely? Following the notes of Kierkegaard, we can see that this is nothing other than the teaching on having been, the Schellingian theory of being itself, more specifically, the part on the difference between What-being (das Was-sein) and That-being (das Daß-sein). The use of Aristotelean terms is justified since this ontological problem can be described by the duality of possibility (δύναμιϛ) and reality (ἐνέργεια). The process, if examined in general terms, takes place as τὸ ἐνέργεια ὄν. The ἐνέργεια ὄν is nothing else but the concept of a reality of a full that being, that is, a being as that (Daß) instead of what (Was). This is congruent with Kierkegaard’s observation that the “how” of truth differs from the truth itself (SKS 7, pp. 176–177/CUP1, p. 192). The primary concern is not with essence (Wesen) but with being (Sein). We can see that Kierkegaard accurately follows Schelling’s train of thought which is confirmed by none other than his own notes (especially from the first period): “The pure science reason (den rene Fornuft-Videnskab) is, then, only negative, has nothing to do with existence. But existence can also be the object of science (men Existents kan nu ogsaa blive Gjenstand for Videnskab)” (SKS 19, p. 312, Not11:9/SBL, p. 344). Later, in a note dated to December 13th, 1841, he deems it important to record Schelling’s thoughts on the relationship between positive and negative philosophy being successive, that is, the questions raised in negative philosophy become a reality in positive thinking: Positive philosophy, therefore, is required by negative philosophy. Negative philosophy posits positive philosophy outside itself. Consequently, it is important that negative philosophy be formulated properly, that it receive its due and enjoy the satisfaction that it in its true modesty (Beskedenhed), which will not encroach upon positive philosophy, deserves. In this respect, too, I differ from Hegel, since by him negative philosophy was not adequately formulated either. (SKS 19, p. 321, Not11:14/SBL, pp. 354–355)

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Regarding Kant, he writes, “But pure rationalism is nevertheless contained only indirectly in Kant’s critique. This should be set forth. Only when this has been done will it be possible for positive philosophy to appear” (SKS 19, p.  321, Not11:14/SBL, p.  355). As we have seen, Schelling deduced the essence of negative philosophy from Kantian philosophy. “Kant’s Critique was therefore negative philosophy,” wrote Kierkegaard in his notes (SKS 19, p. 312, Not11:8/SBL, p. 344). Kierkegaard realized correctly that the most significant lesson of Schelling’s lecture is that negative thinking remains enclosed in the concept, as we have shown above in relation to Schelling’s philosophical turn. Therefore, positive philosophy does not have the truth only as a conclusion, as negative philosophy does; “für sich” (by itself ) negative philosophy cannot be called philosophy; it becomes philosophy only in connection with positive philosophy; negative philosophy is prima scientia (first science); positive philosophy is the highest science; negative philosophy has primum cogitabile (the first object conceivable); positive philosophy has summum cogitabile (the highest object conceivable). (SKS 19, p. 329, Not11:19/SBL, p. 365)

A study of his notes reveals that the first third of them are clearly the most important. His second set of notes bears the title “Philosophy and Actuality” (Philosophie og Virkelighed) and under the title one can read: “Philosophy and Being” (Philosophie og Væren), already alluding to the gist of the lectures (SKS 19, p. 305, Not11:2/SBL, p. 335). Comparing the notes with the original lectures of Schelling, we see that it is the fourth lecture in which Schelling outlines his major (fundamental) theses on the theory of being, and these thoughts can be tracked in the notes as well. The well-known sentence, for example, is summarized by Kierkegaard in the following manner: “Everything actual has a double aspect: quid sit (what it is), quod sit (that it is)” (SKS 19, p. 305, Not11:2/SBL, p. 335). Kierkegaard sees the essence of positive and negative philosophy and their relationship to each other just as accurately: But how is the transition made from negative philosophy to positive philosophy? Negative philosophy deals not with the actually existent but with Existiren-­Könnende (being able to exist)….This is the seyende (that which it is) potency, but it is first possessed only in the concept, since it is always about the Existiren-­Könnende, about which everything revolves. (SKS 19, p.  331, Not11:20/SBL, p. 368)

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All this corresponds to the table above. In the second set of notes, for instance, he writes about the explanation of the differentiation between “das Was-sein” and “das Daß-sein,” and also about the association between the concept and potentiality. This thought is continued in the third set of notes, where he deduces the following from Schelling’s words: “Consequently, philosophy became doctrine either about essence, as it has customarily been called, or about existence (Existents), as some more recent thinkers have called it. That which exists could be known in experience” (SKS 19, p.  306, Not11:3/SBL, p.  336). As opposed to this, reason belongs to logic. He adds that its content is a priori. Kierkegaard saw clearly that a departure from the Hegelian position has much greater implications, namely, a differentiation between the science of essence (Wesenswissenschaft) and the science of being (Seinswissenschaft), and not just within German Idealism but in the entire history of philosophy. He writes in his notes: “The a priori content of reason is, then, the whole of actuality, but only what it is, not that it is, and it has no temptation in that direction….If it wants to demonstrate existence, then it must turn to another science, and this must resolve to presuppose that which is außer der Vernunft (outside reason)” (SKS 19, p. 310, Not11:7/SBL, p. 341). Later he adds that its content is purely a priori given. Earlier, in 1800 Schelling had defined the philosophy of identity and the two possible paths of philosophy as follows: If, then, there is a transcendental philosophy, there remains to it only the opposite direction, that of proceeding from the subjective, as primary and absolute, and having the objective arise from this. Thus nature-philosophy and transcendental philosophy have divided into the two directions possible to philosophy, and if all philosophy must go about either to make an intelligence out of nature, or a nature out of intelligence, the transcendental philosophy, which has the latter task, is thus the other necessary basic science of philosophy. (Schelling 1993, p. 7)

Here he already speaks of two possible philosophies, but it is clear that neither could be identical with positive philosophy. The identity of the self or the intelligence means something else, that is, the Schellingian philosophy of the former periods belongs to the realm of negativity, despite building on identity theory and intellectual intuition (SW I.3, p. 339). Indeed, positive philosophy is actually a critique of this since Kantian philosophy also belongs to negativity: “Kant has been charged with idealism in the invidious sense especially with regard to sensible things. In order to counteract this, he provided a defense in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This was a mistake” (SKS 19, p. 312, Not11:9/SBL, p. 344).

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The main point is that Kantian philosophy has nothing to do with existence. Therefore, it is a shortcoming in Kantian philosophy that it does not access the reality of existence but only the potential of existence. This is also the case with Hegelian philosophy. Actually, several notes contain Schelling’s remarks on Hegel, augmented by Kierkegaard’s own ideas. He summarizes Schelling’s opinion on Hegel in the following way: “In Hegel, Seyn (being) is perhaps what may be called essence, not potency. Not at all—Seyn is only as actus (actuality), as purus actus (pure actuality)” (SKS 19, p. 315, Not11:11/SBL, p.  347). Hegel says that being is immediate certainty. Later Kierkegaard writes, “Seyn is the most remote from the concept (fra Begrebet Fjerneste)” (SKS 19, p. 315, Not11:11/SBL, p. 347). Of course, he refers to the first volume of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and the process whereby a subjective concept becomes an idea (see Hegel 1986, §§163–236). The abstract Idea takes the place of existence. The Idea appears at the end of logic and is followed by nature emanating from the Idea (emanation): “Hegel assigns pure thought to logic, thus it is thought about thought, but such thought finally annuls actual thought” (SKS 19, p. 316, Not11:11/SBL, p.  349). That is, the system was created by method; however, the method (dialectics) means openness and perpetual progress, whereas the system itself is closed. Therefore, Kierkegaard believes it important to record that Hegel was the founder of a system “that finally became too ponderous even for him” (SKS 19, p. 315, Not11:11/SBL, p. 348). From the conceptual world of negative philosophy, a real, genuine existence is born in the Kierkegaardian sense of gaining a reality from experience. Consequently, the basis of existence is not in reason but ensues from it. Likewise, the issues of religion and God do not derive from reason. Kierkegaard’s personal notion of faith is close to Schelling’s conception of religion. Kierkegaard knew that, although Schellingian philosophy grew from German Idealism, it led from there to Christianity, to a Christianity conceived in freedom and based on the divine personality (Persönlichkeit Gottes). In his treatise on freedom, Schelling formulates the following ideas: “True freedom is in harmony with a holy necessity, the likes of which we perceive in essential cognition, when spirit and heart, bound only by their own law, freely affirm what is necessary” (Schelling 2000b, p. 56). Spirit (Geist) and the heart (Herz) also represent two worlds: the heart is beyond rationality, the emotional, whereas spirit embodies the rational world. This is how “freedom” can be in close connection with the notion of the “necessary”; they do not negate but presuppose each other. Incidentally, Schelling laid out the novel concept of Christianity even earlier, in his lectures at the beginning of the 1800s. This is probably what is

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meant by his son in his introduction to the Philosophie der Offenbarung when he says that the first ideas on positive philosophy were outlined during this period, in the first half of the 1800s (SW II.3, pp. VI–VII). The lectures implied are probably the eighth and ninth lectures in the Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (Religion und Theologie), which have the declared aim of creating a philosophy of religion (Religionsphilosophie). The central idea of his concept is that it is essential to have a historical reconstruction of Christianity. Pagan religion is exoteric, whereas Christianity has to be esoteric. The former is characterized by the mysterious character of nature, but in the latter the notion of God incarnated is prominent. Thus, the first idea of Christianity is inevitably the incarnate God. The treatise on freedom augments this idea by saying, “In the divine understanding there is a system; yet God himself is not system, but rather life” (Schelling 2000b, p. 62). It follows from this: “All existence demands a condition so that it may become real, namely personal, existence” (Schelling 2000b, p. 62). For Kierkegaard, the person of Christ was significant for the same reasons since it is Christ who represents the divine and the human aspect at the same time. He is God and man or existence at the same time, both perfect and imperfect, infinite and finite. According to Schelling, the biggest fault of theology is that it becomes philology and exegesis, which means the triumph of science over theology. As it is evident in Kierkegaard’s attacks on Danish Protestantism at the end of his life,8 there was almost nothing he hated more than abstract speculation disguised as a sermon, and for him this practice was represented by the most prominent disciples of Hegelianism in the Danish church. That is why Jon Stewart is right in differentiating between Hegel and the Danish Hegelianism when studying Kierkegaard. According to him, Kierkegaard’s clearly most Hegelian work is the dissertation in which he enters a discussion with Hegel himself and the Danish Hegelians. Kierkegaard “attempts to carve out a position for himself as someone inspired and positively influenced by Hegel, while at same time being careful to distinguish himself from Martensen and his clique of Hegelian students” (Stewart 2007, vol. 2, p. 507). Stewart underlines the prominent role Hegelian philosophy played in Danish culture. It is clear that in the case of Kierkegaard, only emphasizing his hostility towards Hegel without seeing the influence Hegel had on him easily leads to error. Hegel’s role is much more important than that of Kant or Schelling: “Hegel’s philosophy enjoyed a more lengthy and extensive reception than that of any of these thinkers” (Stewart 2007, vol. 1, p. 2). The Concept of Irony is undoubtedly a Hegelian work but the same can be said of the Philosophical Fragments, especially the “Interlude,” in which

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Kierkegaard poses the question: “Is the Past More Necessary than Future? Or has the Possible, by Having Become Actual, Become More Necessary than It Was?” (SKS 4, p. 272/PF, p. 72). These questions test the boundaries of the Hegelian system. However, the late philosophy of Schelling, as opposed to the early period, which had a “significant impact in Denmark” (Stewart 2007, vol. 1, p. 2) only reached Danish culture through the mediation of Danish students. This is not by accident since the notes of Kierkegaard, as we have mentioned, remained unpublished until the second half of the twentieth century. The aim of the late philosophy is “das ewige Evangelium” which becomes an “absolute gospel” for Schelling, in the image of the esoteric religion. This is described by Schelling in his Berlin lectures first from the aspect of concept and reality (not willing to pass over—das Übergehen-Wollende, and willing to pass over—das Nicht-Übergehen-Wollende), then in mythology and through a philosophical reinterpretation of the Christian Trinity. We think especially of the notes dated January 24th, 26th, and 28th, 1842 (SKS 19, pp. 349–355, Not11:31–34/SBL, pp.  391–397). This idea bore a lot less interest for Kierkegaard. As noted, by the beginning of the new year, he grew tired of Berlin and went home.

6

Conclusions

The notes are much more significant than they were previously thought to be. Kierkegaard’s approach to German philosophy was predominantly considered to be critical, or it was, as I have indicated, ignored. In my view, though, it is clear that Kierkegaard understood the message of the late lectures accurately: that one must break from the structure of logic, break from thinking based on pure reason. Schelling wanted to show a new reality, which does not mean a logical being but a real one, whose alpha and omega is existence. In a remark in the often cited The Concept of Anxiety, we can find a crystal clear summary of Schelling’s late philosophy: Schelling called attention to this Aristotelian term in support of his own distinction between negative and positive philosophy. By negative philosophy he meant “logic”; that was clear enough. On the other hand, it was less clear to me what he really meant by positive philosophy, except insofar as it became evident that was the philosophy that himself wished to provide. However, since I have nothing to go by except my own opinion, it is not feasible to pursue this subject further. (SKS 4, p. 328/CA, p. 21)

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Kierkegaard recapitulates Schelling with complete accuracy. Schelling’s work is marked by a steady stream of books until the 1810s, and then there is a sudden silence when he publishes almost nothing. “Schelling did not publish anything of significance after the May 1809 publication of his famous work, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom)” (see Wirth 2000b, p. VIII). Kierkegaard is consistent since his thinking is the creed of the single person (existence) set against systematic thinking. Just like Schelling, Kierkegaard also dares to articulate this. For Kierkegaard, Schelling’s late philosophy, positive philosophy meant actual positive features, which became part of his way of thinking. Lukács was right: the late period of Schelling is the existential turn in the history of European philosophy. Or as Hayes writes: “We might best conclude, however, that Schelling is both essentialist and existentialist at the same time in his Last Philosophy. He brings German Idealism to this completion, its limit, and in that very moment he heralds the philosophy of existence. Reason becomes ‘ecstatic,’ ‘mythological,’ and Mythology becomes ‘rational’” (Hayes 1995, p. 29). It is worth pondering whether pure essentialism or pure existentialism exists at all? Hayes shares the opinion of Paul Tillich concerning whether Schelling was existentialist: “I say: fifty-fifty” (Hayes 1995, p. 30; cf. Tillich 1967, p. 245). As opposed to this I think that first of all we have to distinguish Schelling’s early philosophy from his late philosophy. The first period is characterized by a way of thinking in the spirit of German Idealism, that is, it is expressly an essentialist or, as he calls it later, a negative philosophy. By contrast, in the late period, essentialism is pushed into the background, and although his philosophy does not become existentialist, it is certainly a way of thinking based on existence, on the subject. Kierkegaard’s philosophy and later the existentialism founded on Kierkegaard support exactly this claim.

Notes 1. In original German: “Die Wahrheit des Seins sowie des Nichts ist daher die Einheit beider; dieser Einheit ist das Werden” (Hegel 2009, §88). 2. This is the difference between δύναμιϛ and ἐνέργεια, that is a distinction between “being in possibility” and “being in actuality.” This of course corresponds to the duality of potentia and actu. 3. The work was published in 1954. From a discussion with Ágnes Heller I found out that Lukács finished the part ending with Nietzsche much earlier, and he

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taught primarily that part. Consequently, Lukács’ view was formed much earlier than the conference in Bad Ragaz. However, many people questioned even at the end of the 1990s my remark that Kierkegaard’s notes on Schelling’s Berlin Lectures show a marked influence of the late works of Schelling on the Danish thinker and through him on existentialism. 4. At this point one must refer primarily to the works written in the 1790s when Schelling wanted to rephrase the thought of the Wissenschaftslehre following Fichte but from a different point of view (e.g., Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge, Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, etc.). 5. The related work of Schelling is one that was also part of Kierkegaard’s library. (Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums). 6. The sentence in German runs as follows: “Hier ist nämlich zu bemerken, daß an allem Wirklichen zweierlei zu erkennen ist, es sind zwei ganz verschiedene Sachen, zu wissen, was ein Seiendes ist, quid sit, und daß es ist, quod sit. Jenes—die Antwort auf die Frage: was es ist—gewährt mir Einsicht in das Wesen des Dings, oder es macht, daß ich das Dinge verstehe, daß ich einen Verstand oder einen Begriff von ihm, oder es selbst im Begriffe habe. Das andere aber, die Einsicht, daß es ist, gewährt mir nicht den bloßen Begriff, sondern etwas über den bloßen Begriff Hinausgehendes, welches Existenz ist” (SW II.3, p. 58). 7. When I translated the text to Hungarian in 2001, I faced a number of terminological difficulties. One example is “das unvordenkliche Sein,” which is “the being absolutely antecedent to thought” in English, but this expression does not reflect the original content to the fullest. 8. There are ten such papers written in the year of his death, the last one of which (Øieblikket) he sent to print from his deathbed.

Bibliography Aristotle. 1924. The Metaphysics. Trans. W. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dempf, Alois. 1957. Kierkegaard hört Schelling. Philosophisches Jahrbuch 65: 147–161. Dietz, Wilhelm. 1993. Søren Kierkegaard. Existenz und Freiheit. Frankfurt am Main: Hain. Fischer, Kuno. 1902. Schellings Leben, Werke und Lehre. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Fuhrmanns, Horst. 1954. Schellings Philosophie der Weltalter. Schellings Philosophie in den Jahren 1806–1821. Zum Problem des Schellingschen Theismus. Düsseldorf: Schwann. Gyenge, Zoltán. 1996. Kierkegaard és a német idealizmus (Kierkegaard and German Idealism). Szeged: Ictus. ———. 2005. Schelling. Gödöllő-Máriabesnyő: Attraktor.

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———. 2007. Rendszerkritikai vázlatok (Critical Sketches of System). In Stuttgarti magánelőadások (Stuttgart Private Lectures 1810), ed. F.W.J. Schelling, trans. János Weiss and Zoltán Gyenge, 73–92. Gödöllő: Attraktor. ———. 2017. Søren Kierkegaard. Globe: Saarbrücken. Hannay, Alastair. 1982. Kierkegaard. London: Routledge. Hayes, Victor C. 1995. Was Schelling an Existentialist? In General Introduction of Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation. Three of Seven Books, trans. V.C.  Hayes. Armidale: The Austral Association for the Study of Religions, University of New England. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1986. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I. In Werke in 20 Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 8. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2009. Logic. Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830) by G.W.F.  Hegel. Trans. William Wallace. New  York: Oxford University Press 1975. Hong, Howard V., and Edna H. Hong. 1989. Historical Introduction. In Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony. Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vii–xxv. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 1819. Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an Herrn Moses Mendelssohn. Leipzig: Fleischer. Jaeger, Werner. 1953. Die Theologie der frühen griechischen Denker. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Jaspers, Karl. 1935. Vernunft und Existenz. Groningen-Batavia: J.B. Wolters. Kasper, Walter. 1965. Das Absolute in der Geschichte. Philosophie und Theologie der Geschichte in der Spätphilosophie Schellings. Mainz: Matthias Grünewald. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1978. Letters and Documents. Trans. Henrik Rosenmeier. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation LD). ———. 1980. The Concept of Anxiety. Ed. and Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation CA). ———. 1987. Philosophical Fragments. Ed. and Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation PF). ———. 1989. The Concept of Irony; Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures. Ed. and Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviations CI and SBL). ———. 1992. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992. KW, vol. 12.1. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation CUP1). ———. 1997–2012. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 1–28, K1–K28. Ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup and Alastair

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McKinnon. Copenhagen: Gad Publishers. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation SKS). Kirchhoff, Jochen. 1982. Schelling. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Koktanek, Mirko. 1962. Schellings Seinslehre und Kierkegaard. Mit Erstausgabe der Nachschriften zweier Schellingsvorlesungen von G.M.  Mittelmair und Søren Kierkegaard. Trans. Eva Nordentoft-Schlechta. Munich: Oldenburg. Kosch, Michelle. 2006. Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard. New York: Oxford University Press. Lessing G. E. 1883: The Education of the Human Race. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench & Co. Löwith, Karl. 1964. From Hegel to Nietzsche. Trans. D.E. Green. New York, Chicago, San Francisco: Holl, Rinehart and Winston. Lukács, György. 1981. The Destruction of Reason. Trans. Peter Palmer. London: Humanities Press. Matthews, Bruce. 2007. The Singularity of F.W.J.  Schelling. In The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, The Berlin Lectures, ed. F.W.J. Schelling, trans. Bruce Matthews, 1–6. Albany: State University of New York Press. Müller-Wille, Klaus. 2012. Ghostly Monarchies: Paradoxical Constitution of the Political in Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s Royal Dramas. In The Heibergs and the Theatre, Between Vaudeville, Romantic Comedy and National Drama, ed. Jon Stewart, 67–95. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. Rhode, Peter P. 1992. Sören Kierkegaard in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1856–1861. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. K.F.A.  Schelling, Section I, vols. 1–10, Section II, vols. 1–4. Stuttgart: Cotta. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation SW). ———. 1946. Die Weltalter. Ed. V.M. Schröter. Munich: Biederstein und Leibniz. ———. 1993. System of Transcendental Idealism. Trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 1994. Stuttgart Private Lectures. In Idealism and Endgame of Theory. Three Essays by F.W. J. Schelling, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2000a. The Ages of the World. Trans. Jason M. Wirth. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2000b. Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom. Trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2007. The Grounding of Positive Philosophy. Trans. Bruce Matthews. Albany: State University of New York Press. Schulz, Walter. 1975. Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings. Pfullingen: Neske. Stewart, Jon. 2003. Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. New  York: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2007. A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome I, The Heiberg Period: 1824–1836, Tome II.  The Martensen Period: 1837–1842. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel. Theunissen, Michael. 1993. Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Theunissen, Michael, and Wilfried Greve, eds. 1979. Materialen zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Thulstrup, Niels. 1972. Kierkegaards Verhältnis zu Hegel und zum spekulativen Idealismus. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Tillich, Paul. 1967. Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology. Ed. Carl E. Braaten. New York: Harper and Row. Tilliette, Xavier. 1970. Schelling: une philosophie en devenir. Paris: J. Vrin. Wirth, Jason M. 2000a. German-English Lexicon. In The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth, 121–129. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2000b. Translator’s Introduction. In The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth, vii–xxxii. Albany: State University of New York Press.

6 “Return to Intervention in the Life of Human Beings”: Existentialist Themes in the Development of Hegel’s Social and Political Philosophy C. Allen Speight

There are many differing versions of existentialism and likewise many differing accounts of Hegel’s relations to it as a philosophical movement.1 Some of the most extreme oppositional accounts—on which Hegelian idealism is sharply divided from later developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that produced a notion of philosophy presumably “closer to the lived experience of the individual human being”—have been rebutted.2 Even the most oppositional accounts, however, acknowledge that Hegel was developmentally crucial to existentialist thought at least in the sense of providing its formative philosophical provocation—the supposed “iron cage” of systematic reason out of which existentialist thought had to break free. The existentialist note within Hegel that is missing from the most decisively oppositional accounts has perhaps most often been located in his early (1807) Phenomenology of Spirit. Merleau-Ponty’s well-known essay on “Hegel and Existentialism,” for example, claimed that the philosophy of Hegel visible in the Phenomenology of Spirit was “existentialist in that it views man not as being from the start a consciousness in full possession of its own clear thoughts but as a life which is its own responsibility and which tries to understand itself ” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 65).

C. A. Speight (*) Boston University, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_6

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Merleau-Ponty’s remark takes us part of the way to exploring certain existentialist tendencies discoverable in Hegel, but only part. On the one hand, it begins in media res, with a Hegel whose view of social phenomena and philosophical and literary techniques for engaging the “lived experience” of alienation and estrangement had already been in development for at least a decade prior. In the search for connections to the anti-systematic tendencies of existentialist thought, it might make sense to turn to this earlier, pre-systematic period of Hegel’s development, yet these writings are often marginalized by their characterization as theological. Since at least the time of Lukács, however, the significant political import of these writings has also been acknowledged—and the relevant political import is one which bears useful comparison to existentialist thought. In addition to the religious and political dimensions of these early writings, there is as well as a third highly relevant perspective for comparing Hegel and existentialism—the aesthetic and literary—that may prove a useful way of exploring Hegel’s connections to a movement that stretches from the religious thought of Kierkegaard to the highly secular writings of Sartre and Camus. On the other hand, a focus on the Phenomenology of Spirit alone may take out of consideration some important concerns for understanding the larger Auseinandersetzung between the systematic Hegel and existentialism. In particular, in the last few years, Hegel scholarship has put a very different face on the social and political Hegel than the mid-twentieth century existentialists allowed. Not only has this involved a reconstrual of the supposed Prussian authoritarianism associated with Hegel by twentieth-century existentialists but also a new understanding of key terms—such as agency, conscience and responsibility—that are shared both by Hegelian and existentialist social philosophy.3 In what follows, the first section of this essay will explore several key themes that emerge in Hegel’s earliest writing that have a bearing on the connection to later existentialism. Remarkably, both the young Hegel and later existentialist writers share an ability to isolate an individual figure in a moment of agency that is both decisive and in some sense not fully accounted for by the norms in the world around them at the time. The elements thus unaccounted for can involve what is taken to be “irrational” (the emotions, the feeling of illness) but also what can simply not be understood to be construable in an action itself until it is performed. The second section of this essay will then turn back to Merleau-Ponty’s insight into the relevance of the Phenomenology of Spirit for a connection between Hegel and existentialism. In particular, it will examine two figures crucial to the trajectory of Spirit within that work: first the tragic figure of

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Antigone, whose deed breaks open a set of consequences that spell the downfall for the norms of the world she inhabits, and secondly the figure of Conscience, including the various iterations of the Beautiful Soul, that offer some mode of connecting action and authenticity. The third section will draw on recent reconstruals of Hegel’s systematic social philosophy, and particularly the notions of agency, conscience and responsibility available in Hegel’s later work in a way that offers both a useful comparison—and potential challenge—to the claims of existentialist thinkers. Hegel’s developed notion of spirit is one which shares with existentialism an irreducibility both to natural scientific and purely moral categories.4 In connection with an exploration of these questions about Hegel’s developed notion of spirit, the essay concludes with a question about the historical and cultural inheritance associated with these two philosophical approaches: Hegel has been said by various parts of the philosophical world to be dead for some time, and few write about existentialism without coming to terms with the difference between the cultural currency that the movement had in mid-­ twentieth century thought and what some regard as a spent heritage in the early twenty-first. What is the contemporary cultural force of these two approaches to philosophy?

1

Existentialism and the Young Hegel

Given the anti-systematic character of existentialism, it might make sense to begin a search for potential Hegelian connections in his pre-systematic work. The set of fragments and short writings that Hegel produced in the years prior to the development of his systematic philosophy in Jena (i.e., pre-1801) have been viewed by many as one source of distinctively Hegelian existential insights. It is important to emphasize upfront, however, that there are some important restrictions on exploring these writings with anything like an eye to their developmental influence for existentialism: Hegel’s early works were only discovered in the early twentieth century, and so were not known to any of the nineteenth-century figures associated with existentialism—and they were for that matter not always part of the Hegel taken up by twentieth-­ century existentialists.5 Their background, however, is important for getting a sense of currents within Hegel that have connections to existentialist themes and in particular what Hegel took to be his most urgent philosophical motivations at this early point of his career. From what we can tell of his early biography, this is an exploration well worth making. In a remarkably searching autobiographical letter that he

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wrote to his friend Schelling as he looked for an academic position just prior to his move to Jena, Hegel characterized his work as being at a turning-point: In my scientific development, which started from [the] more subordinate needs of the human being, I was inevitably driven toward science, and the ideal of [my] youth had to take the form of reflection and thus at once of a system. I now ask myself, while I am still occupied with it, what return to intervention in the life of human beings can be found….6

What are the “needs of the human being” that lay behind the “ideal” Hegel pursued as an early thinker and what sort of “intervention” in human lives might they be connected to? It is important to clear up some key misconceptions about this early work. Initially published by Herman Nohl in 1907 as Hegel’s Early Theological Writings, these texts have been taken to center on theological and religious issues. But, as readers have also noticed, many of the persisting social and political questions that remain within the later systematic Hegel can be found in these works, as well. The truth is that Hegel’s pre-Jena writings are both theological and political.7 A developing critique of what Hegel terms in this period “positivity”— claims to authority that are merely posited in religious or political order—develops more widely into a critique of Kantian morality. And, in its appeal to modes of reconciliation available in notions of love, life and religion (Hegel appeals to each of these at different times in his revisions to the fragments) there is moreover an emerging set of aesthetic interests in these writings as well, as Hegel explores the appeal of notions such as the beautiful soul (in the set of fragments Nohl published under the title “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate”) and the possibility of a mythology of reason (in the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” whether he is the ultimate author of this or not). In addition to exploring a set of questions that have religious, political and aesthetic resonances, Hegel employs in “The Spirit of Christianity” fragments a striking technique that bears interesting comparison with later existentialist literary practice: the portrayal of individual figures in varying stages of alienation, estrangement and decisive action.8 In the development of the fragments that Nohl published as “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” two figures important for existential comparison emerge as motifs Hegel appears to have thought about at great length: the provocative figure of Abraham and the reconciling but history-bound figure of Jesus. It is important to emphasize (as Stewart 2003 points out with respect to the comparison offered by Taylor

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1977) that Hegel’s pre-Jena description of these figures has no influence on the development of the Abraham at the center of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.9 But Hegel’s Abraham is a figure which deserves some consideration in an account of existentialist themes, if only because it has been cited as a precursor to what later existentialists would see as among the most resonant moments within Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—namely, the sections on Lordship and Bondage (so central to Kojève’s seminars in the 1930s) and the Unhappy Consciousness. The fragments show that in the pre-Jena period Hegel wrote and revised his account of Abraham, with a final version that reads as follows: Abraham, born in Chaldaea, had in youth already left a fatherland in his father’s company. Now, in the plains of Mesopotamia, he tore himself free altogether from his family as well, in order to be a wholly, self-subsistent, independent man, to be an overlord himself [um ein ganz selbstständiger, unabhängiger Mann, selbst Oberhaupt zu sein]. He did this without having been injured or disowned, without the grief which after a wrong or outrage signifies love’s enduring need, when love, injured indeed, but not lost, goes in quest of a new fatherland in order to flourish and enjoy itself there. The first act which made Abraham the progenitor of a nation is a disseverance which snaps the bonds of communal life and love [eine Trennung, welche die Bande des Zusammenlebens und der Liebe zerreist]. (Nohl 1907, p. 245; Knox 1948, p. 185)10

While Mark C. Taylor has emphasized the links between the alienation in this Abraham story and Hegel’s ultimate portrayal of the Unhappy Consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, it is worth stressing that Hegel’s account here stresses both the singularity of the “lived experience” of Abraham as Hegel’s beginning point, as well as the independence being sought in the world (Taylor 1977). Hegel places Abraham in a comparative account of singular ancient figures responding to a hostile and even catastrophic natural world: “the impression made on men’s hearts by the flood in the time of Noah must have been a deep rupture [Zerreissen], and it must have caused the most prodigious disbelief [der ungeheuerste Unglaube] in nature” (Knox 1948, p. 182).11 Hegel sets the context for his focus on Abraham by examining the various ways in which early figures, both Hebrew and Greek, came to terms with this new sense of the world’s hostility: Noah himself turned to a notion of God that placed human beings under subjection (but offered recompense in a law-bound mastery over animals); Nimrod, by contrast (“a rash man and one boasting in the strength of his arm”), subjugated others around him by force. Both of these

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Biblical figures made their peace with necessity, Hegel claims (and thus “perpetuated the hostility” with nature)—unlike the Greeks Deucalion and Pyrrha, who sought, in the wake of similar disaster, a post-diluvian connection of beauty to nature. What is striking about Hegel’s treatment of Abraham is that he takes on this estrangement with nature: Abraham “was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men alike [Er war ein Fremdling auf Erden, wie gegen den Boden so auch gegen die Menschen]”; “The whole world Abraham regarded as simply his opposite; if he did not take it to be a nullity, he looked on it as sustained by the God who was alien to it” (Knox 1948, pp. 186–187; Nohl 1907, pp. 246–247). If Hegel’s Abraham in “The Spirit of Christianity” fragments expresses alienation and independence in a way that is reminiscent of existential figures, Hegel’s description of Jesus, by contrast, is a figure who elevates human subjectivity and the primacy of need against the positivity of commandments and laws. On Hegel’s reading, Jesus aims to replace the commands of the Mosaic law with “a human urge [Trieb] and so a human need [Bedürfnis]”; “the satisfaction of the commonest human want rises superior to actions [done from command], because there lies directly in such a want the sensing or the preserving of a human being” (Knox 1948, pp.  206–207). Hegel’s exegesis of several passages in the Gospel of Matthew—in which the disciples pluck ears of corn on the Sabbath, Jesus heals on the Sabbath—places an affirmation of human subjectivity as at the heart of Jesus’s relation to the law: “Against purely objective commands Jesus set something totally foreign to them, namely, the subjective in general”; “he made undetermined subjectivity, character, a totally different sphere” (Knox 1948, p. 209). As has been argued elsewhere, Hegel now includes in his critique of the positivity of external law a similar critique of Kantian moral lawgiving (a departure from Hegel’s earlier interpretation of Jesus as a figure embodying Kantian morality).12 The Jesus of “The Spirit of Christianity” fragments, a “spirit raised above morality” (Knox 1948, p. 212) seeks to move away from a Kantian dichotomy between universal law and what Hegel calls here “the particular—impulses, inclinations, pathological love, sensuous experience” (Knox 1948, p.  211): he preaches instead the notion that love is a “fulfillment” of the law, an “inclination so to act as the laws command, i.e., a unification with the law whereby the latter loses its form as law” (Knox 1948, p.  214). Likewise Hegel’s Jesus preaches an insistence on moving from the language of rights (the right to divorce, the right to retribution) which are permitted under the law, but which disappear from the perspective of love:

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An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, say the laws [Matthew 5:38–42]. Retribution and its equivalence with crime is the sacred principle of all justice, the principle on which any political order must rest. But Jesus makes a general demand on his hearers to surrender their rights, to lift themselves above the whole sphere of justice or injustice by love, for in love there vanish not only rights but also the feeling of inequality and the hatred of enemies which this feeling’s imperative demand for equality implies. (Knox 1948, p. 218)

While Jesus’s teaching of love offers a potential reconciliation to conflicts implicit in the realms of positive right and morality, it is not the highest level of reconciliation. The fragments in fact appear to be structured according to a four-part series of such levels of reconciliation: right, duty, love, religion/life.13 The latter level of reconciliation enters Hegel’s discussion in his consideration of the notion of punishment under law: Hegel suggests in this context an alternative in the experience of (Greek) tragic fate that he thinks offers a kind of reconciliation: Punishment is the effect of a transgressed law from which the trespasser has torn himself free but on which he still depends; he cannot escape from the law or from punishment or from what he has done. Since the characteristic of the law is universality, the trespasser has smashed the matter of the law, but its form— universality—remains….Punishment represented as fate is of a quite different kind. In fate, punishment is a hostile power, an individual thing, in which universal and particular are united in the sense that in it there is no cleavage between command and execution; there is such a cleavage, however, when law is in question, because the law is only a rule, something thought, and needs an opposite, a reality, from which it acquires its force. In the hostile force of fate, universal is not severed from particular in the way in which the law, as a universal is opposed to man or his inclinations as the particular. (Knox 1948, pp. 228–229)

By contrast, “punishment as fate”—Hegel thinks here of the Eumenides or Banquo’s ghost—is a concrete and equal reaction “of the trespasser’s own deed, of a power which he himself has armed, of an enemy made an enemy by himself ” (Knox 1948, p. 230). It may seem odd that Hegel would draw on a notion of tragic fate in the context of the possibility of modes of reconciliation, but his argument is that the tragic hero remains in connection with his deed in a way that punishment does not allow: “in fate…the man recognizes his own life, and his supplication to it is not supplication to a lord but a reversion and an approach to himself ” (Knox 1948, p. 231). Hegel appeals in this context to a notion of beauty of soul that will return in a more developed way both in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the

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Philosophy of Right. For “The Spirit of Christianity” fragments, the beautiful soul is construed with the figure of Jesus in mind and explicitly linked both to “highest freedom” (i.e., the potentiality of renouncing everything in order to maintain one’s self ”) and to Hegel’s early conception of forgiveness (“such a heart is open to reconciliation, for it is able forthwith to reassume any vital relationship, to re-enter the ties of friendship and love, since it has done no injury at all to life itself ”).14 The creative application of fate in these fragments extends to a couple of other important considerations—both connected with elements of alienation. The teacher of love himself and his followers encounter a fate in the world which does not allow for reconciliation within the terms of love—one of the issues that clearly engaged Hegel as he revised the fragments.15 And Hegel’s concern with the notions of alienation and strangeness in this period extend not merely to striking individuals such as Abraham and Jesus, but also to social phenomena—the “more subordinate needs of man”—which can themselves involve alienation. Remarkably, Hegel has already identified property right at this point as one such alien and resistant element within human life: “The fate of property has become too powerful for us to tolerate reflections on it, to find its abolition unthinkable” (Knox 1948, p. 221).16 If we step back from Hegel’s specific engagements with the figures of Abraham and Jesus and with questions like the “fate” of property, there are several important characteristics worth noticing in his earliest writing that have a bearing on what we can say about Hegel’s relationship with existentialism. Assuming that our argument is correct that the pre-Jena writings represent an important window onto Hegel’s pre-systematic motivations, one can in fact read these early works (as Lukács and others have suggested) in terms of Hegel’s larger intellectual biography, and in particular with a beginning in a conception of lived experience. It is remarkable that Hegel’s early reflections on these topics involve a turn both to philosophy and literary characterization as a way of articulating the conflicts and unreconciled elements within that lived experience. As will be seen in the next section, these elements remain important for Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, as well.

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The Phenomenology of Spirit and Existentialist Elements in the Shaping of Hegel’s Notion of Experience

To return to the quotation cited at the beginning of this essay: Merleau-Ponty claims that the thought of the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit should be viewed as “existentialist in that it views man not as being from the start a consciousness in full possession of its own clear thoughts but as a life which is its own responsibility and which tries to understand itself ” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 65). Merleau-Ponty’s description refers in some sense of course to the broad trajectory of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a whole—from the inarticulate beginning of “Sense Certainty” to the moment of clarity and appropriation that is “Absolute Knowing.” It emphasizes two key Hegelian notions that are pertinent, however, not just for making sense of the larger development across the Phenomenology as a whole, but also to individual sections. The first of these notions, implicit in Merleau-Ponty’s notion that “full possession” of one’s own “clear thoughts” is something that is not available to consciousness “at the start” points toward the element of retrospectivity involved in Hegel’s philosophical approach—an aspect most clearly in evidence in the experience of the various shapes of consciousness within the Phenomenology of Spirit, which encounter in their attempts to articulate a particular claim elements that were not previously clear to them. With respect to the second, underlying the progression of the Phenomenology is the Hegelian sense that some form of self-appropriation or responsibility is also required from within that retrospectively understood development. On Merleau-Ponty’s view, the notion of “experience” in the Phenomenology of Spirit is not just one that is similar to the experience of a “lab test” but rather in the broader sense of a “trial of life,” and hence one involving a tragic dimension (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 65). The distinctive method of the Phenomenology of Spirit—with its presentation of shapes of consciousness which experience conflicts within their attempt at self-articulation—draws, as did the earlier “Spirit of Christianity” essay, on a mode of philosophical writing that bears interesting comparison with the literary efforts of the existentialists. Together the notions of retrospectivity and self-appropriation have encouraged readers to think of the work in terms of its being a kind of Bildungsroman, a novel of development, even if Hegel himself was more careful about the use he made of literary modes and figures in the Phenomenology.17 This section will focus particularly on two well-known figures whom many have taken to reflect the existentialist sides of agency emphasized by Merleau-Ponty and whose portrayals drew heavily on Hegel’s

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engagement with literary modes and which, if we look at them together, offer a sense of the move that Merleau-Ponty suggests from lack of full clarity to self-appropriation and responsibility: the first of these is Hegel’s Antigone, whose decisive act of burying her brother opens—or perhaps better, breaks open—the development of the “Spirit” chapter as a whole; the second is the shape (or actually multiple shapes) of the so-called “Beautiful Soul” which unfold in the self-appropriative moment of Conscience that concludes the “Spirit” chapter. Hegel’s appropriation of Antigone has drawn a multitude of commentators, and there are many elements of Hegel’s account which have a resonance with later accounts of explicitly existentialist agents. Hegel begins the “Spirit” chapter with an account of the world in which Antigone appears and the conflicts (male and female, human and divine) which lie inherent in it. Antigone’s action breaks open those conflicts which have lain implicitly present. Hegel describes the transition from the quiet oscillation of forces not yet brought into play as something that is effected by the action of Antigone herself: As yet, no deed has been committed; but the deed is the actual self. It disturbs the peaceful organization and movement of the ethical world. What there appears as order and harmony of its two essences, each of which authenticates and completes the other, becomes through the deed a transition of opposites in which each proves itself to be the non-reality, rather than the authentication of itself and the other. (Hegel 1977, §464)

Strikingly, like Sophocles’s Antigone, Hegel’s is a figure of decisiveness or Entschiedenheit. Sophocles’s heroine is not shown deliberating about what she should do, but immediately tells her sister that there is no other course of action but for her to bury her brother. For Hegel likewise “[t]he ethical consciousness…knows what it has to do, and has already decided whether to belong to the divine or the human law. The immediate firmness is something implicit” (Hegel 1977, §465). Despite the decisiveness which characterizes her and the clarity with which she has taken on the deed—in contrast with Oedipus’s situation, which involves an inherent darkness and cannot be construed in modern terms as fully intentional—there is still a lack of clarity for an agent like Antigone about what her action fully will involve. Hegel’s rendering of Sophocles’s line captures this element of what emerges in action: “Because we suffer, we acknowledge that we err” (Hegel 1977, §470). The trajectory of the “Spirit” chapter opens with the decisiveness of a deed whose ramifications the agent does not fully understand and concludes with

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the consideration of a figure whose claim about her action involves a new level of agentive self-appropriation. If Antigone’s deed “breaks open” the development of the “Spirit” chapter, the Beautiful Soul, as a figure of Conscience, is meant to conclude it. The two sections are not just coincidentally connected as book-ends of the “Spirit” chapter, but are related in precisely the manner suggested by the two sides of the Merleau-Ponty remark: what Conscience attempts to resolve is precisely the issue of the relation between an agent and knowledge that the tragic case of action in Antigone poses. Hegel’s treatment of Conscience and the various figures of the Beautiful Soul in the final section of the “Spirit” chapter has also been much discussed. Hegel’s notion of conscience shares with the existentialists an anti-Kantian stance on agency: unlike the Kantian-inspired figures that immediately precede the appearance of Conscience in the “Spirit” chapter—the “moral view of the world” and “dissemblance or duplicity”—conscience is a figure which actually acts in the world. Conscience “renounces that consciousness which thinks of duty and reality as contradictory” (Hegel 1977, §637); it is “awareness of the fact that, when the moral consciousness declares pure duty to be the essence of its action this pure purpose is a dissemblance of the truth of the matter” (Hegel 1977, §637). With conscience, “[t]here is…no more talk of good intentions coming to nothing, or of the good man faring badly” (Hegel 1977, §640); by contrast, conscience “is simple action in accordance with duty, which fulfills not this or that duty, but knows and does what is concretely right” (Hegel 1977, §636). The figure of Conscience is crucial to Hegel’s larger argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit precisely because it involves the sort of self-­ appropriation that Merleau-Ponty has described. Hegel stresses, in fact, the achieved selfhood that conscience represents: as the self of conscience, it is “directly aware of itself as absolute truth and being” (Hegel 1977, §633). The further development of the notion of conscience leads to the figures that Hegel calls the Beautiful Soul and ultimately to the dialectic between the hypocritical acting subject and the “hard-hearted” judging consciousness. Hegel’s resolution of this dialectic between the two modes of the beautiful soul—a confession followed by forgiveness—may seem quite distant from existentialism, but the way in which it emerges from Hegel’s argument—not with any moral compulsion of one agent by another but rather as a relation of ventures on the part of agents who run the risk of being arbitrary or stiflingly judgmental—offers an important window onto the Hegelian space in which claims about existentialism might be made.18 The Phenomenology of Spirit famously moves from the resolution of the dialectic of Conscience in the moment of forgiveness between the two

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beautiful souls directly to Religion, without an account of the contemporary ethical practices of Hegel’s day. But the Philosophy of Right lays out a systematic account of these practices, and an exploration of Hegel’s potential relations to existentialism needs to consider this latter account. The question in the final section is what challenge Hegel’s situating of modern notions of agency, responsibility and conscience might offer to later existentialist views.

3

 he Systematic Hegel and the Challenge T to Existentialist Views of Agency, Responsibility, Conscience and History

The preceding sections have focused on Hegel’s pre-systematic writings and key figures within the development of shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit—both moments whose potential connection to existentialism seems palpable. In both cases we have noted Hegel’s technique of presenting decisive figures—Abraham, Antigone, the Beautiful Soul—in a way which, as we have seen, bears comparison with the existentialists’ literary attempts to question more discursive and systematic approaches to ethics. But what of the systematic ethics and social theory that emerges in Hegel’s mature work? Here the questions have seemed different to most scholars of the history of philosophy. Some of the harsher versions of the relation between this later systematic Hegel and existentialism have of course been put aside: Hegel today is rarely represented as the sort of totalitarian figure that many figures within mid-twentieth century existentialism assumed. Moreover, if we look at the social and political philosophy of the Philosophy of Right as following in the wake of the Phenomenology of Spirit, it is possible to sketch a reading of Hegel’s mature ethical concerns as ones which emerge from out of the consideration of the aspects of action’s retrospectivity and the need for forgiveness that were central for the Phenomenology. Within the context of the new systematic project that characterizes the end result of Hegel’s Jena philosophizing, one can see a range of important questions and figures which have developed out of the early concerns. Three notions of particular importance to Hegel’s systematic account of social and political philosophy—agency, responsibility and conscience—are central to existentialist thought in ways that bear useful comparison. Each of these notions has been recently reconstrued in contemporary Hegel scholarship (see particularly along these lines Quante 2007 and Yeomans 2011 on the

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question of agency, Alznauer 2015 on responsibility, and Moyar 2011 on conscience). As has been suggested in the interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit in the preceding section, each of these three concepts for Hegel is connected to the broader existentialist issue of the relationship between inner and outer. Thus agency’s retrospective and expressive dimensions, the notion of conscience as involving an account of its social situatedness, and the larger connection of responsibility within the historical framework facing an agent have been central to recent accounts of these notions. In some cases, there is an apparent proximity that seems suggestive. When, for example, Hegel claims in the “Morality” section of the Philosophy of Right that “What the subject is, is the series of his actions” (Hegel 1991, §124), one may well be reminded of Sartre’s famous comment that “Man is the sum of his actions” (Sartre 1948, p. 41). But while for Hegel this claim is part of the articulation only of the “subjective” satisfaction due an agent in his action— thus leaving aside the objective range of commitments that structure an ethical agent in his relations to family, civil society and state—such a claim represents presumably for Sartre a greater potential mutability in the notion of selfhood. Hegel’s ultimate characterization of Sartre’s sharper dichotomy between self and world in fact bears a resemblance, as Merleau-Ponty suggested, to Hegel’s portrayal of Stoicism as a moment of abstract opposition between interior and exterior (Stewart 2010, p. 204). With respect to conscience, one may similarly see a surface proximity but a more determinate challenge between Hegelian and existentialist approaches. The notion of conscience that Hegel considers in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the Philosophy of Right suggests the importance of authenticity in a way that bears comparison with the existentialists’ notion, but in the Philosophy of Right Hegel offers a careful contextualization of conscience that criticizes a number of contemporary exponents of conscientious authenticity—e.g., the ethics of subjective conviction such as his rival Fries, as well as various forms of romantic appeal to notions of “moral genius” and “beautiful” selfhood that he found potentially hypocritical and damaging.19 Hegel also clearly distinguished between what he called “formal” conscience (the mere appeal to be acting on one’s own conviction) and “true” or “actual” conscience: the latter requires not only the familiar “subjective” side of the first-personal authority associated with conscience, but also, rightly understood, an “objective” side of answerability to justified norms. As Moyar has argued, the “true” conscientious agent on Hegel’s view does not simply choose from among her given desires but rather views the broader normative landscape in terms of the

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“standing purposes (commitments) one has developed over the course of one’s life” (Moyar 2011, p. 68). The notion of answerability or responsibility implicit in Hegel’s view again can sometimes seem close to existentialists’ view of what an agent chooses in the midst of her historical circumstances. But Hegel has, as Moyar suggests, a notion of “performative freedom”—a view that ethical content can only be secured under the conditions of the “here and now, under conditions in which others can witness and assess one’s performance” (Moyar 2011, p. 42). We can have no grasp of conscience without seeing how that conscience is expressed within the context of particular norms (as Hegel famously urges in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right the ancient challenge to boasting about feats achieved in Rhodes is “here is Rhodes, jump here” (Hegel 1991, pp. 21–22). Hegel’s quotation might prompt a further question about the role that history plays contrastively for him and the existentialists with respect to these notions of agency, conscience and responsibility. If on Hegel’s view these notions all require as conditions a consideration of the norms required for such action—norms that, as Alznauer has argued, require the recognitive structure of a certain political order to be present (Alznauer 2015)—it might seem that the more interruptive and alien characteristics of action associated with existentialist agents would have no place in the larger scheme of Hegelian history. Yet Hegel himself seems to acknowledge that there are moments in history when something more Sartrean is involved. In the Philosophy of Right he suggests that the subjective side of agency involved in conscience functions alternatively in evaporative and expansionary modes. The moments when subjectivity “evaporates every content into itself ” are those “ages when the actual world is a hollow, spiritless and unsettled existence”—and it is precisely under these circumstances when the agent may be “permitted to flee from actuality and retreat into his inner life” (Hegel 1977, pp. 166–167). Hegel singles out Socrates and the Stoics as figures in whom this sort of evaporation in especially hostile or unsettled circumstances has historically taken place.20 It does not seem a stretch to suggest that the periods in which existentialism has flourished—the 1930s, the 1960s—have also been times when subjective agency finds itself in such circumstances. If this reading is correct, it might also offer a way of thinking about how we might view the relative positions of both Hegelianism and existentialism with respect to history at the current moment. Both movements, after all, have faced questions about how and whether they remain viable within present historical circumstances. It is difficult in writing about existentialism not to consider what has been called its “cultural fate” (Crowell 2019)—i.e., the difference between the cultural currency that the movement had in

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mid-twentieth century thought and what some regard as a spent heritage in the early twenty-first. And Croce’s infamous question of what is living and what is dead in Hegel is likewise (even despite the proliferation of recent work) not always answered in affirmative terms. Yet the historical perspective suggested in Hegel’s view of evaporative and expansive agency might offer a way in which the two can be shown to retain important philosophical viability—existentialism, for its part, in terms of remaining a recurrent option but one sought out especially when social and political circumstances are most urgent, and Hegelianism for its challenge as to whether any such moments can be understood apart from the attempt to construe their connection over time.

Notes 1. Previous efforts, among others, have included Stewart (2010), Ciavatta (2014), Merleau-Ponty (1964), and Lessing (1968). 2. Stewart (2010, p.  1), who cites the separationist accounts of historians of philosophy like Karl Löwith (1964) and others. 3. One might think about the development of this reconstrual of Hegel in three waves: the first, starting with the attempt by Avineri 1972 to make a case for the liberal side of Hegelian politics; the second, in the ground-breaking work of Robert Pippin (1989, 1997) and Terry Pinkard (1994, 2000, 2002) as it bears on political and social philosophy; finally the series of recent books by Moyar, Yeomans, Quante, Alznauer and others discussed in the final section of this essay. 4. A helpful formulation of existentialism’s resistance to both natural scientific or moral terms can be found in Crowell 2019. 5. The rediscovery of the “young” (pre-Jena) Hegel in the first years of the twentieth century was due particularly to Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1905) re-­consideration of Hegel’s life and the publication of crucial new material by his student Herman Nohl (1907; translation in Knox 1948). 6. From Hegel’s Letter to Schelling, 2 November 1800, Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner 1952), I, pp. 59–60. Much has been written about this crucial turning-point in Hegel’s life and his appeal to Schelling, who had achieved early academic success in a way that Hegel had not yet. Of relevance also in this connection is the so-called “System Draft,” translated in Knox (1948, pp. 309–319). 7. There was a long dispute after their rediscovery about whether these writings should be regarded as primarily religious or political in nature. Nohl’s titles both for the volume of pre-Jena writings (Hegels Theologische Jugendschriften) and for the particular fragments he brought together in “The Spirit of

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Christianity and its Fate” suggested the former, and Lukács’s well-known interpretation (The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics) the latter, for example, but later readers have been less dualistic in their views. See Otto Pöggeler, “Hegel, der Verfasser des ältesten Systemprogramms des deutschen Idealismus,” in Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, ed. Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1984), p. 141, and Christoph Jamme, Ein ungelehrtes Buch: die philosophische Gemeinschaft zwischen Hölderlin und Hegel in Frankfurt, 1797–1800 (Bonn: Bouvier 1983), p. 280. 8. Tracing Hegel’s development across these fragments has been difficult because it is only relatively recently that there has been a critical edition of them (see Jaeschke 2010, p. 85 and Frühe Schriften II). Nohl treated them as a unity, as does the most widely-used English translation (published in Knox’s Early Theological Writings). 9. Hegel’s employment of Abraham in this context has been compared (see Taylor 1977) to Kierkegaard’s (1983), although, as Stewart points out, there is no connection of influence between them since Hegel’s fragments were not published until Nohl’s edition in 1907 (Stewart 2003). 10. In an earlier draft (see Frühe Schriften II, p. 29; Nohl 1907, p. 371) Hegel had begun with the same initial phrase but had not stressed the complete break with his family or the motivating desire for independence: “Abraham, born in Chaldea, left his fatherland with his father and family and lived for a long time on the plains of Mesopotamia….” 11. I have amended Knox’ translation here slightly: Knox translates Zerreissen as “distraction,” but I have emphasized with “disruption” the harshness of the human break with nature that the flood and other events evidently caused. 12. Hegel had written during his Bern years (1795–1796) a “Life of Jesus” in which Jesus is treated as a Kantian moral exemplar. The new critical approach Hegel took to Kantian morality in “The Spirit of Christianity” fragments corresponded particularly to the close reading of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals he did during the period at Frankfurt (1797–1800) and his sense of the need to understand the relationship between law or right and morality in a different light—a critique we can reconstruct, even though the commentary that Hegel apparently wrote on the Metaphysics of Morals has been lost (see Speight 1997). In one of the most famous passages, Hegel makes clear that he now views Kantian morality as an internalized form of the positivity of law: “We might have expected Jesus to work along these lines against the positivity of moral commands, against sheer legality, and to show that, although the legal is a universal whose entire obligatoriness lies in its universality, still, even if every ought, every command, declares itself as something alien, nevertheless as concept (universality) it is something subjective….By this line of argument, however, positivity is only partially removed; and between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own com-

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mand of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave” (Knox 1948, pp. 210–211). 13. Knox 1948, p. 253: “Morality cancels domination within the sphere of consciousness; love cancels the barriers in the sphere of morality; but love itself is still incomplete in nature.” 14. Knox 1948, p. 236. In the fragments, beauty of soul is discussed as the “truth of both opposites, courage and passivity”: “the life in the former remains though opposition falls away, while the loss of right in the latter remains, but the grief disappears….There thus arises a transcendence of right without suffering, a living free elevation above the loss of right and above struggle. The man who lets go what another approaches with hostility, who ceases to call his what the other assails, escapes grief for loss, escapes handling by the other or by the judge, escapes the necessity of engaging with the other” (Knox 1948, pp. 234–235). 15. On Jesus’s fate: “since the state was there and neither Jesus nor his following could annul it, the fate of Jesus and his following…remains a loss of freedom, a restriction of life, passivity under the domination of an alien might” (Knox 1948, p.  284); on the fate of Christianity: “This is the point at which the group is caught in the toils of fate, even though, on the strength of the love which maintained itself in its purity outside every tie with the world, it seemed to have evaded fate altogether. Its fate, however, was centered in the fact that the love which shunned all ties was extended over a group; and this fate was all the more developed the more the group expanded and, owing to this expansion, continually coincided more and more with the world’s fate…” (Knox 1948, p. 295). 16. Nohl 1907, p. 273: “Das Schicksal des Eigentums ist uns zu mächtig geworden, als daß Reflexionen darüber erträglich, seine Trennung von uns, uns denkbar wäre.” 17. Pace Josiah Royce, Hegel did not think of the Phenomenology of Spirit as itself a Bildungsroman, but Hegel’s incorporation of novelistic features remains part of the interesting literary challenge of the work (see Speight 2001, chapter 4). 18. The development of Hegel’s views on the Beautiful Soul, from Frankfurt to Jena to Berlin would need more development than space here affords, but what is characteristic of the latter moments is Hegel’s presentation of a kind of typology of such moments: both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right offer competing notions of the figure and suggest (though in different ways) how these competing accounts may be compared with one another. 19. On Kierkegaard’s engagement with Hegel’s typology of these types of conscience, see Stewart 2010, pp. 120–141. 20. For a fuller account of Hegel’s notion of conscience’s alternating evaporative/ expansive moments within history, see Speight 2006.

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———. 2000. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert. 1989. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pöggeler, Otto. 1984. Hegel, der Verfasser des ältesten Systemprogramms des deutschen Idealismus. In Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, ed. Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Quante, Michael. 2007. Hegel’s Concept of Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rush, Fred. 2016. Irony and Idealism: Rereading Schlegel, Hegel and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sartre, Jean Paul. 1948. Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. Philip Mairet. London: Methuen. Speight, Allen. 1997. The Metaphysics of Morals and Hegel’s Critique of Kantian Ethics. History of Philosophy Quarterly 14 (4): 379–402. ———. 2001. Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. Hegel on Conscience and the History of Moral Philosophy. In Hegel: New Directions, ed. Katerina Deligiorgi. Oxford: Acumen Press. Stewart, Jon. 2003. Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-­ Century European Philosophy. London and New York: Continuum. Taylor, Mark C. 1977. Journeys to Moriah: Hegel and Kierkegaard. The Harvard Theological Review 70: 305–326. Yeomans, Christopher. 2011. Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7 The Existentialist Basis of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism Robert Wicks

Providing an exact definition of “existentialism” or “existentialist thinker” is challenging, since the concepts are vague. One can nonetheless state that existentialist perspectives are grounded in the world as we perceive it immediately before us, as this world appears in its concreteness, contingency, sensory richness and intensely-felt tangibility. Such perspectives recognize this immediately-­experienced world as a fundamental reality, if not the fundamental reality, and they resist philosophical theorizing in reference to dimensions that are beyond the spatio-temporal world. Existentialism conflicts with Platonism, for instance. Existentialist perspectives are also grounded in an acute awareness of the uncertainty and finitude that attends our situation as beings who wonder about their place in the cosmos. In this respect, when we consider the outlooks of well-known thinkers who are usually associated with existentialism, either as predecessors or modern representatives—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, among others—a cluster of concepts emerges that further characterizes the existentialist outlook. The respective degree of emphasis varies with the philosopher under consideration, but we can include “freedom,” “anxiety,” “death,” “meaning of life concerns,”

R. Wicks (*) University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_7

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“absurdity,” “responsibility,” “authenticity,” “contingency,” “alienation,” and “individuality.” Given this conception of existentialism, it remains puzzling, if not interpretively provocative, to suggest that Arthur Schopenhauer is an existentialist thinker, or that his position has an existentialist quality that is vital for understanding his philosophy. Contrary to existentialist thought, he maintains that the world of daily experience, viz., of our physical bodies, tables, chairs, trees, and the like, is neither the basic nor ultimate reality, for he regards its ontological status as closer to that of a bad dream. Strongly influenced by Kant’s theory of knowledge, he holds that the spatio-temporal world is largely an artefact of our own construction, and moreover, that it should be regarded as a penitentiary whose basic architecture and walls, so to speak, are constituted by space, time, and logical thinking styles. It would be misleading to include Schopenhauer equally among the more well-known existentialist figures, but despite these differentiating factors, his philosophy contains at its very foundation, features that later characterize existentialist thought. This essay will outline these, progressing from the more straightforward to the more unexpected. The general aim will be to clarify Schopenhauer’s position in the history of existentialism by showing how, in addition to his metaphysics of will, there is a sense in which Schopenhauer has an intensely existential attitude towards the spatio-temporal world—an attitude that is crucial for appreciating his renowned pessimism. The recognition of this attitude allows for a more plausible understanding of his seemingly melodramatic assertion that “life is suffering” (Schopenhauer 1969, p. 310)—an assertion that appears at first sight to be exaggerated, implausible, and open to easy criticism. Schopenhauer accentuates suffering as a leading feature of the human condition as he observes how we typically want far more than we can ever have, believing that having unsatisfied desires is painful. Why he believes that having unsatisfied desires is painful, is a question that determines the plausibility of his view. It will be explained here by ascribing to him in a certain respect a fundamentally existentialist attitude towards the spatio-temporal world. A wider point to emerge will be that to understand a philosopher, it helps to grasp the philosopher’s fundamental orientation towards the world—an orientation that informs the philosopher’s basic tenets and renders them plausible when understood through that perspective. In Schopenhauer’s case, this perspective is an existentialist attitude that he appears to have had towards the spatio-temporal world, characterized phenomenologically rather than metaphysically, which this essay will describe.

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The World as Will

Schopenhauer was born in 1788, on February 22, and was less than two weeks short of his sixteenth birthday when Kant died on February 12, 1804, at age 80. He was also a younger contemporary of Hegel, who was his senior by 18 years. In 1813, at age 25, Schopenhauer completed his doctoral dissertation, and published a book five years later that is at the heart of his philosophy— The World as Will and Representation—in 1818, at age 30. These dates provide a perspective for appreciating Schopenhauer’s place in the history of philosophy, for although he lived until 1860 and published a second volume of The World as Will and Representation in 1844, the year Nietzsche was born, his philosophical views did not significantly change from those expressed in his 1818 work. In effect, his philosophy dates from the second decade of the nineteenth century, before the era of Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. This is not a shortcoming; it renders his position that much more significant in its far-sighted anticipation of twentieth-century existentialist thought. Schopenhauer was a thinker out of step with his times in at least two noticeable ways. If we situate ourselves in the early nineteenth century, he stands as a throwback to Kant and the Enlightenment, for he was neither a historically-­ centered nor a progress-oriented theorist, as was true for cutting edge philosophy during the early nineteenth century. His thought does bear the positive mark of his times insofar as he, like many post-Kantians, developed a metaphysical view that opposes Kant’s position that knowledge of ultimate reality is in principle impossible. Unlike his contemporary post-Kantians, however, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics was a century ahead in its proposition that the world is the manifestation of a senseless, non-rational being—a view that a reason-respecting, developmental thinker such as Hegel, could only regard as implausible, precisely because its insights were in advance of the optimistic spirit of Hegel’s times. Not only, then, was Schopenhauer anachronistically out of sync with the early nineteenth-century intellectual milieu as a non-historical thinker in the eighteenth-century mold, he was out of sync with the rationalistic and optimistic spirit of that time by espousing a non-rationalist metaphysics that did not become fashionable until after his death. It is understandable that he felt alienated throughout his life, always with the hope of achieving widespread philosophical recognition—a desire that remained mostly unfulfilled during his lifetime. His brief attempt to teach at the University of Berlin in 1820 was a disappointment, partly because he overconfidently scheduled his classes in

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competition with Hegel’s popular lectures, but also partly because the times were not ready for his philosophy. He needed to wait until the 1850s, with only a decade left to live, before he could begin to enjoy the recognition that, for the preceding thirty years, he felt he deserved. In accord with the nineteenth-century intellectual style, Schopenhauer was philosophically drawn to the concept of life, with its attendant concepts of organic unity and instinct. He was also a keen and sympathetic observer, inquiring about the nature of the world, not merely with an external, scientific eye, but with a consideration of what, from the first-person standpoint, it is like to be the various items he observed, whether they happened to be rocks, plants, animals, or people. Realizing that he was just as much a part of the cosmos as anything else, and that whatever ultimate and permeating principle of the universe there might be, it must also pervade his own being, Schopenhauer sought that metaphysical principle within, rather than outside, himself, expecting that it could be directly and immediately experienced and presented suitably for explaining the world around him. He sought an inner avenue to characterize positively Kant’s supposedly unknowable thing-in-itself. Since consciousness and rationality are absent in rocks and plants, at least on the face of things, Schopenhauer disregarded these aspects of his inner being in his quest for the general principle that underlies all existence. In the end, he discovered in himself a principle that was sufficiently broad, namely, a simple urge, or raw impulse, that is blind, driving, non-rational, essentially meaningless, without a final end, merely striving, open-ended, and without determination—an impulse that he regarded as constituting and permeating himself as well as everything else in existence, as H2O constitutes and permeates ice cubes. The most appropriate word he could find for it was “will,” which he described as follows: “In fact, absence of all aim, of all limits, belongs to the essential nature of the will in itself, which is an endless striving….Every individual act has a purpose or end; willing as a whole has no end in view” (Schopenhauer 1969, p. 165). Schopenhauer does not speak here exclusively of the willpower that can be associated with individual animals and people, but of a general metaphysical impulse of which each instance of will in an individual is a manifestation. He regards all aspects of being as the expressions of a single, blind, striving impulse. Herein resides a metaphysical outlook from the early nineteenth century that anticipates mid-twentieth-century existentialism and in particular, that of Jean-Paul Sartre, who described the world, albeit less voluntaristically, as a sheer existential presence—he referred to it as “being-in-itself ”—that is equally absurd and meaningless:

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[Being-in-itself ] is an immanence which cannot realize itself, an affirmation which cannot affirm itself, an activity which cannot act, because it is glued to itself….We may summarize these first conclusions by saying that being is in itself….In fact, being is opaque to itself precisely because it is filled with itself. This can be better expressed by saying that being is what it is….Being-in-itself has no within which is opposed to a without and which is analogous to a judgment, a law, a consciousness of itself. The in-itself has nothing secret; it is solid. (Sartre 1966, pp. 27–28)

Later Sartre continues, Being-in-itself is never possible or impossible. It is. This is what consciousness expresses in anthropomorphic terms by saying that being is superfluous [de trop]—that is, that consciousness absolutely cannot derive being from anything, either from another being, or from a possibility, or from a necessary law. Uncreated, without reason for being, without any connection with another being, being-in-itself is de trop for eternity. (Sartre 1966, p. 29)

A difference between Schopenhauer and Sartre is that Schopenhauer conceives of “will” as a non-rational, unitary being that underlies the appearances of the daily world, whereas Sartre recognizes only the appearances of the daily world as no less absurd, but without any underlying substrate. If we were to regard the entire physical universe upon analogy to an individual person’s physical body, where that person’s body is understood to have an accompanying psychical reality, we can say that Schopenhauer’s “will” intends to characterize the physical universe’s inner being—a being that also characterizes the depths of each person’s psyche. His notion of will anticipates how Freud described the unconscious as a non-rational locus of energy, which he called the Id: [The Id] is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality….We call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations….it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring out the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle. The logical laws do not apply in the id, and this is true above all [for] the law of contradiction. Contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other out or diminishing each other….There is nothing in the id that corresponds to the idea of time…. The id of course knows no judgments of value: no good and evil, no morality. (Freud 1965, pp. 65–66)

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One of the motivations for Schopenhauer’s metaphysical outlook is his interest in understanding the position of human beings in the universe and the meaning, if any, of our existence. At an early age he was struck by the widespread suffering that life involves and was convinced that our world could not be the work of an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful being. Combining this existential interest with his technical knowledge of Kant’s epistemology, he arrived at the view that the daily world is the appearance of an insensate and meaningless impulse or “will” as it appears articulated through the structure of our minds—minds whose structure kaleidoscopically generates the appearance of a set of independent individuals in space and time, organized according to cause and effect relationships. In this regard, Schopenhauer’s view is not existentialist in spirit, for his account of the physical world is seamlessly deterministic and contrary to the idea—one emphatically advocated by Sartre, but is also implicit in Kierkegaard—that each person has, from moment to moment and from circumstance to circumstance, the power willfully to interrupt past conditioning by choosing a radically alternative path than the one previously lived. As a great opponent of this liberum arbitrium indifferentiae—a “monstrous fiction” as he called it (Schopenhauer 1974a, p.  122)—he wrote the following: “motives, like all causes, are only occasional causes on which the character unfolds its nature, and reveals it with the necessity of a natural law. For this reason we positively denied freedom as liberum arbitrium indifferentiae” (Schopenhauer 1969, p. 402). Virtually word-for-word, Schopenhauer anticipates Sartre’s existentialist slogan “existence precedes essence” and displays an impressive feel for the logic of Sartre’s view that consciousness is a nothingness, and hence, is absolutely free. He finds the entire philosophical arrangement, however, to be implausible: The assertion that a being is free, that is to say, can act under given circumstances thus and also otherwise, implies that it has an existentia without any essentia, in other words, that it merely is without being something and hence that it is nothing, but yet is, consequently that it simultaneously is and is not. Therefore this is the height of absurdity. (Schopenhauer 1974a, p. 122)

In contrast to the hallmark doctrine of individual freedom that characterizes the well-known existentialist writers, Schopenhauer is at the opposite end of the spectrum. He is in no position to accept this feature of existentialist thought, and indeed condemns it. Nor does he accept the proposition that each of us is a metaphysical atom, or pure individual. To apprehend the

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ultimate truth, his view—one that issues from his interpretation of Kant’s theory of knowledge—is that it is essential to appreciate that our individuality is merely an appearance. Since Schopenhauer rejects individual freedom along with the ultimate reality and individuality of physical bodies, one can wonder how his view of the spatio-temporal world could be described as existentialist, and how this could be essential for rendering understandable, his pessimistic claim that “life is suffering.”

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Schopenhauer’s Theory of Desire as a Lack

In the following excerpt, Schopenhauer intimates that life is filled predominantly with suffering: We have long since recognized this striving, that constitutes the kernel and in-­ itself of everything, as the same thing that in us, where it manifests itself most distinctly in the light of the fullest consciousness, is called will. We call its hindrance through an obstacle placed between it and its temporary goal, suffering; its attainment of the goal, on the other hand, we call satisfaction, well-being, happiness. We can also transfer these names to those phenomena of the world-­ without-­knowledge which, though weaker in degree, are identical in essence. We then see these involved in constant suffering and without any lasting happiness. For all striving springs from want or deficiency, from dissatisfaction with one’s own state or condition, and is therefore suffering so long as it is not satisfied. (Schopenhauer 1969, p. 309)

Schopenhauer’s statement that the hindrance or frustration of the will through an obstacle placed between it and its goal is “suffering,” invites criticism. In his 1909 book, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) presented an objection that has resonated with commentators ever since: It is of overriding psychological importance to recognize that we experience the happiness of the goal not only and exclusively in the touchdown, but also, through anticipation, in the approach. The happiness of anticipation is not an illusion in which we pretend to contain the uncontained and are stimulated by phantasy rather than reality; instead, quite legitimately and undeceivingly, the hope for happiness turns into the happiness of hope. (Simmel 1991, p. 56)

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Simmel continues later, Now we can grasp Schopenhauer’s obvious error when, for the sake of pessimism, he denounces as suffering the entire phase of not-yet-possessing in every process of willing: it is the partitioning, with what appear to be logical concepts, of life into having and not having the desired object. (Simmel 1991, p. 58)

Simmel rejects the sharp “either/or” conceptualization of desire, wherein it is supposed that we are either in a state of painful frustration when a desire is not satisfied, or are in a state of satisfaction when it is. His view is that there can be pleasure in the very anticipation of a desire’s satisfaction. Following in Simmel’s footsteps, Christopher Janaway adds the following criticism: we often feel positive enjoyment at the prospect of attaining what we actually lack, and the actions through which, while lacking it, we strive towards it, may also be pleasurable. Many human practices consist of arrangements designed to prolong a struggle: for instance mountaineering, where to be lifted without effort to the summit would remove not just striving and pain, but the very pleasure which gives the activity its point. So Schopenhauer’s model of willing as movement from a wholly painful lack to its mere obliteration is unrealistic. Even states of unfulfilled striving cannot always be set down on the side of suffering pure and simple. (Janaway 1999, p. 333)

Julian Young proposes similarly that if one has the desire to complete some task—say, writing a book—and if one has completed most of the task, then although one’s desire to complete the task still involves a lack and obstacle, the discomfort of facing this obstacle is typically outweighed by the feeling of contentment or accomplishment that accompanies having satisfied the bulk of the desire (Young 2005, p. 217). These objections attack the basis of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, and at their core resides an example of the following kind: one anticipates a long-awaited vacation, has one’s desire filled with imaginative and pleasurable scenarios of, for example, resting on the beach, swimming in the ocean, and enjoying a peaceful dinner, and is not in a state of suffering. One is not yet on vacation, but the desire is pleasurable in the anticipation of its realization. Since we have all had such experiences, it is tempting to conclude that Schopenhauer was not thinking carefully when he maintained that unfulfilled desires always involve significant frustration, discomfort, and a kind of suffering. Ivan Soll expresses this clearly:

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Admittedly, we do tend to suffer in striving for goals when this striving occurs under certain negative conditions: when the goal proves to be unattainable, or achieving it reveals itself to be unlikely, or our progress toward it seems insignificant, or “painfully slow,” or disproportionately laborious or costly. Schopenhauer’s claim, that all striving toward a goal, directly entails suffering, depends upon an unjustified generalization from these negative cases of willing to all cases of willing. Whatever initial plausibility his thesis may possess depends upon unjustifiably taking the negative scenarios of desiring and striving as typical of all cases. (Soll 2012, p. 304)

In all of the above counterexamples, changing circumstances could dissolve the pleasure involved. One might have satisfied the bulk of a desire such as writing a book, but if one were unexpectedly to be prohibited from finishing the book, perhaps due to illness, the frustration could at that point overshadow whatever satisfactions had been experienced in completing the earlier portion of the task. Moreover, if achieving the desire’s goal is central—suppose that two mountaineering teams are competing to reach a summit—then the feeling of satisfying the bulk of the desire when nearing the summit would transform to dissatisfaction, were the other team to reach the summit first. The disappointment would be intensified, if the losing team had been competing with the attitude that being in second place is tantamount to a complete loss. In these cases, the desire intensifies as one approaches the goal, and if the approach is frustrated near the end of the approach, the pain is proportionally intense. This consideration does not show that the examples described above do not occur; they do. They occur, however, typically within the context of presupposing a certain attitude towards the world, namely, a natural, relatively secure and reasonably confident one where there is an anticipation that ordinary, realistic desires will typically be satisfied, such that the value of any already-­ satisfied component of a desire is not likely to be threatened, damaged, dissolved, or otherwise undermined. There are reasons to believe that the assumption of a different, intensely existential attitude towards the world would render the kinds of examples offered above less frequent or simply unlikely. Akin to the example that involves the frustration of a book writing project, and to reiterate the basic situation, consider someone who, nearing the end of life, learns that a long awaited vacation that had been planned for at considerable length, will be impossible. The plans were made, the tickets were bought, the vacationland was studied, and due to unforeseen circumstances, everything but the actual trip was achieved. One can imagine the disappointment. There is a certain attitude towards the world—an existentially-centered attitude and one that we will now describe—that precipitates this kind of frustration as a matter of course, rendering most desires frustrating.

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 chopenhauer’s Existentialist Attitude S Towards the Spatio-Temporal World

It may seem strange to suggest that Schopenhauer’s attitude towards the spatio-­temporal world is “existentialist,” since he describes it with words such as “dream,” “illusion,” “appearance,” and “phantasmagoria.” Despite this metaphysical assessment, there are reasons to believe that he had phenomenologically what we can call a “concretist” orientation towards the world, where one’s attention is absorbed in the immediate moment, oriented perceptually rather than conceptually, and immersed in the perceptual field’s sensory details. For Schopenhauer, it is an aesthetically focused attitude in its plainness, somewhat Zenlike, without being overly filled with imaginative constructs, situated distinctively in the here-and-now. His characterization of the aesthetic attitude conveys this: Further, we do not let abstract thought, the concepts of reason, take possession of our consciousness, but, instead of all this, devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception. (Schopenhauer 1969, pp. 178–179)

Schopenhauer intends this kind of aesthetic attitude to invoke the apprehension of non-sensory, otherworldly Platonic Ideas, but if we consider the above characterization as it stands, it directs us to focus entirely on the present, to resist projections and anticipations of the future, to minimize the construction of imagery of whatever objects of desire there might be, and to reduce conceptual, or abstract thought. Within this kind of perceptual awareness, the “thisness” or “suchness” of the object to which one attends comes to the foreground. Schopenhauer here presents an attitude that compares to the enlightened awareness that we find in Zen Buddhism. It is plain-minded, highly sensitive to sensory details, resistant to abstract thinking, and profoundly non-­ imaginative. A Zen anecdote illustrates the mentality: to show that a

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particular Zen master had yet to reach a complete state of enlightenment, an insightful student, Tao-hsin, tested the master by inscribing the Buddha’s name onto a rock where the master had been sitting. When the master returned and saw the Buddha’s inscribed name, he hesitated respectfully to sit on the inscription. The student, aiming to convey that the inscription was in itself nothing more than a set of scratches on a rock, mentioned to the master that the master’s hesitation revealed that he had not yet attained a truly enlightened state (Daoyuan 1971, p. 18). A similar anecdote tells of the Zen master, T’ien-jan (d. 824), who, while spending an extremely cold night in a temple, decided to burn some wooden Buddha statues to warm the room. Upon being chastised the next day by a temple worker for having destroyed the statues, he explained that the statues were, in reality, nothing more than pieces of wood (Hu 1953, p. 16). These examples show how the Zen attitude does not privilege conceptual thought and imaginative constructs over the plain, immediately-presented perceptual reality of the present moment. In reference to desire, frustration, and suffering within this phenomenological context, it is consequently appropriate that Zen Buddhists, as well as Buddhists in general, prescribe that one should minimize desire in order to minimize suffering. Within the form of awareness described here, if one is immersed in the present moment, then the acute awareness that one is not in the future, but is here only now, would have the effect of accentuating how the object of any future-oriented desire is not present in any significant sense, and thus would lead to dissatisfaction in its perceived non-existence. This contrasts with how a person who imagines an upcoming vacation could be filled with constructs of upcoming pleasurable experiences, virtually experiencing the vacation in an imaginative satisfaction of the desire. In the here-and-now-oriented attitude, however, one becomes acutely aware that one is not on vacation now, where the future is not powerfully imagined as a reality, and where the vacation itself remains distant, unrealized, and unreal. Although the existentially-oriented person and the highly imaginative person may have essentially the same mental image of the vacation, the latter regards the image pleasurably, as partially satisfying the desire as an imaginative substitute for the actually desired object, whereas the former regards it frustratingly and realistically, as the merely imaginative object it is, underscoring how the actually desired object has not yet been attained and has no real existence as of yet, if ever. Continuing with the vacation example, consider how the person who imagines the upcoming vacation derives pleasure from the effort. It is revealing that this kind of situation does not constitute a convincing

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counterexample to the view that lacking the object of one’s desire tends to produce discomfort, for something else is happening in this case of the highly imaginative person, as alluded to above: when imagining the vacation, the person goes a long way towards satisfying the desire with a mentally constructed stand-in, thereby significantly diminishing the dissatisfaction that would be otherwise involved. The suffering associated with desire to which Schopenhauer refers, though, arises exactly when one does not satisfy the desire in this kind of psychologically effective way. If one were to have desires without satisfying them imaginatively, then one would feel the pain of the non-satisfaction. If one is very hungry, images of food arise—it is natural to create the images of that which we desire to decrease the pain involved—but there are two ways to interpret the image: the image of food might offset the hunger, at least for a time, or the image of food can remind one that one’s stomach is still hurting. If we understand Schopenhauer as having phenomenologically a plain-­ minded, extremely down-to-earth, non-projective, non-imagination-­ immersed, present-moment-oriented outlook towards the spatio-temporal world, then it would not be surprising for him to maintain that unfulfilled desires typically generate pain, for the lack of the desire’s satisfaction would be experienced more intensely than would be the case for most people, who tend to diminish the inherent frustration by imagining the objects of desire to satisfy the desires. If one critically approaches Schopenhauer’s view with an attitude of the latter, ordinary kind, then his claim that desire generates pain will appear to be exaggerated and unbelievable, since the common, pain-relieving tendency is to derive pleasure, not pain, from the imaginative satisfaction of our desires, often to the point where the lack of the desired object is obscured by the imaginative construct, as when pleasurably daydreaming what it will be like to relax on an upcoming vacation. If as noted, however, the vacation were suddenly to become impossible, thereby undermining the expectation that the images will be realized, then disappointment and frustration would immediately set in. One can suspect that Schopenhauer was in this state of mind most of the time, in his extreme, reality-oriented state of mind. This realistic, sensory-focused attitude is an existentialist attitude that remains focused on the concrete reality of perceptual objects. It is one that Sartre, whom we can refer to as another “philosopher of frustration,” presents in his novel, Nausea, in reference to perceiving a tree root: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other

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hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. In vain to repeat “This is a root”—it didn’t work anymore. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all. This root, with its color, shape, its congealed movement was…below all explanation. (Sartre 1964, p. 129)

Notwithstanding the quotation from Schopenhauer’s aesthetics that presents us with a down-to-earth perceptually-focused attitude, it is fair to question whether Schopenhauer indeed had such a concretist, existentialist attitude towards the spatio-temporal world, since it still may seem speculative to assert so. In addition to the attitude Schopenhauer describes in his aesthetic theory, there are three further thematic areas of his outlook that support the attribution to him of an existentialist, down-to-earth attitude towards the spatio-­ temporal world. The first is his empiricist epistemological orientation. The second is his attitude towards time. The third is his understanding of enlightenment. First, in his epistemology, Schopenhauer distinguishes between two kinds of representations, namely, “abstract” representations and “perceptual” representations. The former are concepts that are derived through a process of abstraction from direct sensory experience. Perceptual representations are fundamental; abstract representations are derived from perceptual representations. Schopenhauer draws his theory of concept formation from Locke, self-­ consciously trying to render it compatible with an acceptance of Kant’s theory of space and time. He achieves this by setting aside eleven of Kant’s twelve categories of the understanding and retaining only causality—a cognitive function that he ascribes to animals as well, and consequently by not regarding it as an abstract concept. His disposition is primarily observational, directly experiential, and down-to-earth. Second, in his discussion of time, Schopenhauer emphasizes the present moment above all, prescribing an attitude wherein the “standing present” or nunc stans is best for apprehending the truth: Past and future contain mere concepts and phantasms; hence the present is the essential form of the phenomenon of the will, and is inseparable from that form. The present alone is that which always exists and stands firm and immovable. That which, empirically apprehended, is the most fleeting of all, manifests itself to the metaphysical glance that sees beyond the forms of empirical perception as

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that which alone endures, as the nunc stans of the scholastics. The source and supporter of its content is the will-to-live, or the thing-in-itself—which we are. (Schopenhauer 1969, p. 279)

Third and closely related to this present-oriented, anti-conceptual attitude is Schopenhauer’s characterization of the enlightened state of consciousness, where he associates enlightenment with the removal of illusions—it is an “enlightenment as disillusionment” position, in both senses of disillusionment—that compares well with the Zen anecdotes mentioned above, wherein one apprehends the “thisness” or “suchness” of things. In Schopenhauer’s own example, one sees through the illusions that inhere in the spatio-temporal world, as when, during an evening carnival, one is frightened by a person wearing a costume, but sees in the morning that it was only a costume. It occurs when one sees a person with attractive make-up and fine clothing in a public setting, but later observes the person in a private domestic setting with greater reality, without the make-up and clothes; or when one reads the newspaper with interest, but later appreciates that the letters that one was reading were nothing more than spots of ink; or similarly, when one works on a computer, and later appreciates that the images on the computer screen were nothing more than sets of electrical impulses. These realizations and disillusionments issue from an intensely down-to-earth, existential attitude towards the world. It compares to the characterization of the enlightened outlook found in Tibetan Buddhism, seen here in an excerpt from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, set in comparison with Schopenhauer’s carnival example: He now looks back calmly and with a smile on the phantasmagoria of this world which was once able to move and agonize even his mind, but now stands before him as indifferently as chess-men at the end of a game, or as fancy dress cast off in the morning, the form and figure of which taunted and disquieted us on the carnival night. Life and its forms merely float before him as a fleeting phenomenon, as a light morning dream to one half-awake, through which reality already shines, and which can no longer deceive; and, like this morning dream, they too finally vanish without any violent transition. (Schopenhauer 1969, pp. 390–391)

Compare this to the view of Tibetan Buddhism: Through the instruction of his guru, when he recognizes the frightening visionary deities as his own projections, the play of the mind, he will be liberated. It is just like seeing a stuffed lion, for instance: he feels very frightened if he does not know that it is really only a stuffed lion, but if someone shows him what it is, he is astonished and no longer afraid. So here too he feels terrified and bewildered

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when the blood-drinking deities appear with their huge bodies and thick limbs, filling the whole of space, but as soon as he is shown he recognises them as his own projections or as yidams; the luminosity which arises later, mother and son, merge together, and, like meeting a man he used to know very well, the self-­ liberating luminosity of his own mind spontaneously arises before him, and he is self-liberated. (Karma-Lingpa 1987, p. 64)

These references to the enlightened state of awareness present a tension that merits further reflection, namely, the supposed existential, concrete, down-to-­ earth, here-and-now oriented, Zenlike attitude towards the spatio-temporal world that we are attributing to Schopenhauer, situated within a context in which he nonetheless regards that world as an illusion, dream, or phantasmagoria. Of use here is the earlier distinction between a phenomenological orientation towards the world that is concretist and existentialist, coincident with Schopenhauer’s empiricist dispositions, in contrast to a metaphysical and epistemological orientation inspired by Schopenhauer’s understanding of Kant, that regards the phenomenologically-experienced world, despite the reality it presents, as mostly illusory. The compatibility of the two orientations is evident in Schopenhauer’s concluding paragraph to The World as Will and Representation, where he refers to the spatio-temporal world in its concrete appearance, essentially as nothing more than a dream (i.e., his metaphysical attitude towards it), and indeed as “nothing,” and yet as a world that is experienced as “so very real” (i.e., his phenomenological attitude towards it): we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this so very real world of ours [diese unsere so sehr reale Welt] with all its suns and galaxies, is—nothing. (Schopenhauer 1969, pp. 411–412)

If we ascribe to Schopenhauer an existentialist attitude towards the spatio-­ temporal world in a phenomenological sense, there are two results. The first is that we can understand Schopenhauer’s claim that “life is suffering” more plausibly as the expression of an extremely here-and-now orientation where objects of desire expected to be attained in the future are frustratingly and unfortunately “not here now”; the second is that Schopenhauer’s authorial standpoint when composing The World as Will and Representation was informed by the enlightened awareness that he describes. His concluding remark states explicitly that not everyone will understand what he is describing, precisely because the ordinary perspective on the world is not as

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existentially-­centered and enlightened as his, but is rather steeped in illusions of the kind presented above in the Zen Buddhist anecdotes—illusions that involve being deceived by the equivalent of empty carnival costumes and stuffed animals that misleadingly stimulate our desires. People are, first of all, naturally steeped in the illusions that desire generates. These are illusions that define a world-outlook filled with hopes and satisfying anticipatory imaginative constructs that are based on a future-­ oriented confidence in the satisfaction of desires. The initial step towards a more enlightened attitude is phenomenologically, again, coincident with Schopenhauer’s empiricist tendency, to adopt a more intensely existential attitude, Zenlike, that reveals the illusions that desire generates as being comparable to the carnival dress that is cast off in the morning. The second step towards a more enlightened attitude is, recognizing Schopenhauer’s advocacy of Kant, metaphysically to see that this “so very real world,” even in its intensely existential presentation, is itself an illusion, again, much like the carnival dress that is cast off in the morning. Schopenhauer’s characterization of the world as Mâyâ describes the latter, metaphysical level of enlightenment, similarly using the images of a mirage and a piece of rope on the ground that looks like a snake: Kant opposed to the thing-in-itself that which is known as mere phenomenon; finally, the ancient wisdom of the Indians declares that “it is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which covers the eyes of mortals, and causes them to see a world of which one cannot say either that it is or that it is not; for it is like a dream, like the sunshine on the sand which the traveler from a distance takes to be water, or like the piece of rope on the ground which he regards as a snake.” (These similes are repeatedly found in innumerable passages of the Vedas and Puranas.) (Schopenhauer 1969, p. 8)

The broader point emerging is that it is important to have a sense of a philosopher’s basic orientation towards the world when evaluating the philosopher’s central claims—claims such as Schopenhauer’s remark that “life is suffering,” which sound implausible to anyone with an ordinary, pragmatic, future-­ anticipating, desire-filled, and imaginatively desire-satisfying, orientation towards the world, but which make sense from a more intensely existential, here-and-now, Zenlike orientation. Correspondingly, it is important to have a sense of one’s own presuppositions when offering counterexamples to a philosophical position.

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To cite some other examples of philosophical claims that initially sound implausible, consider Michel Foucault’s conclusion of The Order of Things (1966): as the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared…as the ground of classical thought did at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. (Foucault 1971, p. 387)

Foucault’s claim sounds exaggerated and implausible upon initial hearing, since one might assume that people—what he seems to be referring to as “man”—have been around for millennia, and have not been “invented” by anyone. Only when we understand that Foucault is referring to what he calls “anthropological universals,” among which he includes the idea of a timeless essence to humanity, and that he maintains a skeptical and social-­constructivist attitude towards them, does his claim make sense. Similarly, when Jacques Derrida intimates that “everything is a text” (Smith 1998, B7), it sounds implausible to the ordinary ear, since we read books and newspapers, not rocks; only when we understand that he has in mind a deep-seated style of interpretation that is grounded on linguistic structures, does his position acquire some plausibility. Likewise, when Sartre states that love is impossible, it sounds exaggerated in view of the millions of people who, every day, profess their love for each other. Only when we understand how his existential orientation regards each person as a profoundly isolated individual does his claim give us pause. This may all sound unremarkable, but it leads to an important point: the standard method of introducing counterexamples to refute a philosophical theory should not be employed uncritically as an assumedly foolproof method; the very counterexample introduced, when launched from an orientation that sharply differs from the philosopher who is being criticized, can beg the question against the philosopher in a way that is easily overlooked. The counterexamples offered as refutations of Schopenhauer that we saw above by Simmel, Janaway, and Young, are like this: they are grounded upon a natural, ordinary, usually unquestioned outlook towards the world where the mental imagery that we generate in view of our desires goes a long way towards imaginatively satisfying the desire. They consequently appear to be plausible, and almost unquestionable, just as the spatio-temporal world appears to be “so very real” from the unreflective standpoint that Schopenhauer describes in his concluding remark in The World as Will and Representation.

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What remains unnoticed in these apparently persuasive criticisms of Schopenhauer, are two ways to interpret the mental imagery that desire generates: the ordinary way, where we derive partial and pleasurable satisfaction from imagining, for instance, an upcoming vacation, and the existentially-­ oriented way, where the images of the upcoming vacation only show us unhappily that we are not yet on vacation. The situation recalls the popular images of the optimist and the pessimist, one of whom positively describes a glass of water as being half full, and one of whom negatively describes the glass as half empty. The claim here is that Schopenhauer’s intensely existential orientation towards the spatio-temporal world led him to regard the mental imagery that desire generates as interpretively analogous to the perception of the glass of water as half empty. If we understand him in this way, then his existentialism can be seen to inform his pessimism in a way that renders his pessimism worth considering seriously, especially if we regard as insightful, his conception of enlightenment as disillusionment.

Bibliography Daoyuan, Shi. 1971. Original Teachings of Ch’an Buddhism, Selected from The Transmission of the Lamp. Trans. Chung-yuan Chang. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 1971. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1965. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Hu, Shih. 1953. Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism in China Its History and Method. Philosophy East and West 3 (1): 3–24. Janaway, Christopher. 1999. Schopenhauer’s Pessimism. In The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Christopher Janaway, 318–343. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karma-Lingpa. 1987. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo. Trans. Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa. Boston and London: Shambhala. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1964. Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions. ———. 1966. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation. Vol. 1. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. ———. 1974a. Parerga and Paralipomena. Vol. 1. Trans. E.F.J.  Payne. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Simmel, Georg. 1991. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Trans. Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Smith, Dinitia. 1998. Philosopher Gamely in Defense of His Ideas. The New York Times National Edition, May 30, 1998: B7. Soll, Ivan. 2012. Schopenhauer on the Inevitability of Unhappiness. In A Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Bart Vandenabeele, 300–313. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Young, Julian. 2005. Schopenhauer. London and New York: Routledge.

8 An Early Ally of Existentialism? Trendelenburg’s Logical Investigations in the Mirror of Kierkegaard’s Literary Project Heiko Schulz

At first sight the story about idealism and—or more precisely, in—existentialism (and also vice versa, about the latter in the former) seems fairly easy to tell: there is obviously both a direct historical succession and a close doctrinal link between some preeminent modern, mostly German thinkers to be observed, such that the predecessors, who almost without exception are deeply steeped in the tradition of German Idealism, exert a considerable—and most often openly admitted—influence on their former students and/or successors. In doing so they simultaneously pave the way, perhaps inadvertently, to the epicenter of one of the preeminent philosophical movements of the twentieth century: existentialism. The succession in question can be traced back—or so at least the argument goes—to Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–1872), professor in Berlin and one of the leading figures in German post- and anti-Hegelian philosophy between the early forties and seventies of the nineteenth century, as its starting-­ point and catalyst.1 As is well known, Trendelenburg left a deep and lasting impression on his student Franz Brentano (1838–1917) who shared with his teacher an equally impressive knowledge of and admiration for Aristotle, This chapter has been published within the framework of the Hessian Ministry for Science and Art funded LOEWE research hub “Religious Positioning: Modalities and Constellations in Jewish, Christian and Muslim Contexts” at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen.

H. Schulz (*) Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_8

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whose thought he absorbed, in particular, by drawing on the latter’s logic, metaphysics and psychology (Fugali 2009; Baumgartner 2006). Now, Brentano’s philosophy, especially his theory of belief, was obviously instrumental for the genesis of Edmund Husserl’s thinking, especially the latter’s idea of intentionality (Belussi 1990). Husserl in turn exerted a strong influence on both Martin Heidegger—who in his early days was also directly drawn to Brentano and his account of the Aristotelian categories (McCarthy 2011, p. 99)—and Jean Paul Sartre, who in turn found himself and remained under the spell of the German master thinker, at least to some extent, throughout his life. Finally, as is well known, both Heidegger and Sartre came to be leading figures of the so-called existentialist movement in the mid-twentieth century (although Heidegger refused to be put in that camp), and this, roughly, by “ontologizing” Husserl’s idea of intentionality: the latter was now meant to refer to a specifying property of the human being, conceived of as “Dasein” (“existence”) or “being for itself (être pour soi).” Now, since it can hardly be denied that Trendelenburg’s thought is firmly rooted in the (Greek and) German idealist tradition, one might be tempted, considering the brief historical narrative so far, to conlude that the history of existentialism is always and inevitably a history of idealism also. There may have occurred substantial modifications, perhaps even distortions of the latter’s original ideas in the process of its transmission, but eventually one has to admit that basic idealist motives and assumptions survived, perhaps inadvertently, in existentialism, even in the latter’s most radical anti-idealist variants. At the same time, a correlative hypothesis suggests itself as plausible, which is in fact more relevant in the present context: if idealism, at least in its Trendelenburgian version, more or less directly leads to, perhaps even anticipates or foreshadows existentialism, then one might also expect, vice versa, to find certain proto- or crypto-existentialist motifs and ideas in Trendelenburg and/or his direct predecessors and succecessors. This double assumption appears somewhat rash upon closer inspection, however. For one might object—and rightly so in my opinion—that the story thus told seems rather coarse-grained, if not overly simplistic, for it ignores the reception-historically formative role of Søren Kierkegaard who, notoriously, but not without reason, has been called the “father of existentialism.” Now, although we can exclude for sheer historical reasons that Trendelenburg ever took notice of the Danish thinker,2 and although so far no evidence has surfaced either that things were different with Brentano, we still know for sure that Husserl was at least an occasional (Malik 1997, p. 391), whereas Heidegger

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and Sartre—as is well-known and well-documented—were in fact long-time and avid Kierkegaard readers and admirers.3 Hence, at least prima facie it seems much safer to infer that apart from the second obvious factor, Schelling’s later philosophy (which as a whole can be read both as the consummation and downfall of German Idealism (Schulz 1955)), the roots of existentialism are to be located primarily in Kierkegaard, rather than in the idealist tradition— much less in thinkers like Trendelenburg—so that in turn the search for pre-­ existentialist motives in the latter (and/or other idealists) is doomed to fail, or worse still, to be a rather futile undertaking right from the start. To make matters worse, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms, as is well known, harshly criticized German Idealism (in particular, Hegel and/or Hegelianism)4 time and again, so that the conclusion just mentioned suggests itself as even more plausible, in fact compelling. However, in my opinion we are well advised not to jump to rash conclusions in this case, either. Not so much because ever since Adorno infamously stigmatised Kierkegaard as an involuntary proponent and final executor of German Idealism (Adorno 1933), the latter has repeatedly been accused of clinging to and inadvertently perpetuating the very idealism he openly rejected; the point is, rather, that in Trendelenburg we find a rare, perhaps the sole and unparalleled instance, where the Danish father of existentialism is reported not only to have taken note of and explicitly referred to an author known to him as a representative of (late) idealism, but also to have done so in a surprisingly affirmative manner, and this, in particular, by acknowledging the actual and profound debt he owed to the German thinker.5 Now, even though author B cannot always (perhaps hardly ever) be considered an unconditionally reliable authority when it comes to assessing the nature and extent of author A’s impact upon the former, I nevertheless suggest that we briefly pay attention to what Kierkegaard and/or his pseudonyms have to say about Trendelenburg. Not so much for introductory, much less reception-historical, but rather for hermeneutical and methodological purposes. On the one hand and perhaps surprisingly—yet, in any case all but accidentally—Kierkegaard’s judgments about Trendelenburg will indirectly inform us about, in fact they will take us right into the center of what might be coined Kierkegaard’s own “existentialism.” Secondly, they will help us address and respond, in a hopefully elegant and persuasive way, to a serious methodological question which looms large in projects like the present one; the question, namely, how to arrive at an adequate notion of existentialism, which then might serve as a standard for adjudicating whether or not idealist philosophers like Trendelenburg anticipate, at least tacitly, certain proto-­ existentialist motives and ideas.

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Accordingly, my subsequent analysis will elaborate upon four themes: a methodological problem concerning the measure or standard for adjudicating Trendelenburg’s distance from or proximity to existentialism (Sect. 1); Kierkegaard’s view of Trendelenburg, in the context of his own literary project, as a possible solution to the problem (Sect. 2); the adequacy of his account in light of basic tenets of Trendelenburg’s own philosophy (Sect. 3); the upshot of the previous analysis regarding Trendelenburg’s alleged “proto-­existentialism” (Sect. 4).

1

A Methodological Problem

What we are looking for in accordance with the overall theme of the present volume is a certain historical dialectic or double (perhaps implicit, but in any case existing) reflection: on the one hand, the idealist tradition—in which, among others, also Trendelenburg’s philosophy has its undeniable roots—is said to have developed in such a way as to allow for, in fact even promote, perhaps unwittingly, the genesis of certain ways of thinking we usually associate with existentialism. However, existentialism itself, although often found to be critically minded toward and even explicitly polemical against the tradition of (not only German) idealism, reflects and actually transmits a number of genuinely idealist motifs and ideas. This latter inquiry is to be pursued here, and it takes us straight to the methodological problem just mentioned, which comprises three aspects. First off, what we need in order to be able to carry out the task at hand is an adequate, in any case semantically unified notion of existentialism. Of course, in a certain sense the latter is easily to be had—for instance by consulting a pertinent encyclopedic account like one recently provided by Steven Crowell who sorts out four fundamental tenets: First, [w]hat makes…[the existentialist] current of inquiry distinct is not its concern with “existence” in general, but human existence; and here the chief claim is, secondly, “that thinking about human existence requires new categories not found in the conceptual repertoire of ancient or modern thought; human beings can be understood neither as substances with fixed properties, nor as subjects interacting with a world of objects. (Crowell 2015, p. 1; my emphasis)

Hence, in order to make sense of being human (perhaps also and indirectly, of “being,” as such) it is, according to Crowell’s account of the existentialist philosophers, not enough to specify all the truths that either natural science, including psychology, could tell us; for even though existentialism does not in

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principle “deny the validity of the basic categories of physics, biology, psychology, and the other sciences (categories such as matter, causality, force, function, organism, development, motivation, and so on), …[it] claims…that human beings cannot be fully understood in terms of them” (ibid.). Moreover, such understanding can just as little be reached by supplementing our scientific picture with an ethical one; for although [c]ategories of moral theory such as intention, blame, responsibility, character, duty, virtue, and the like do capture important aspects of the human condition, …neither moral thinking (governed by the norms of the good and the right) nor scientific thinking (governed by the norm of truth) suffices. (Crowell 2015, p. 1; my emphasis)

What is needed instead and has to be supplemented, according to leading existentialists like Sartre and Heidegger, is a new set of categories, exclusively pertaining to the human being as “existence” categories, which—and this is the third and final element—respond to and are actually “governed by the norm of authenticity” (ibid.). Roughly speaking, authenticity refers to the ability of living in self-conscious and self-transparent agreement with all and only those overall goals of existence one has deliberately chosen and thereby instantiated as (one’s own) ultimate ideals or norms. Fourth and finally, all other tenets of existentialism—its “anti-system sensibility,” the “idea that philosophy cannot be practiced in the disinterested manner of an objective science,” a general preference for existential core phenomena and experiences like “dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, …nothingness” (ibid.) etc.—have to be functionally subordinated to these three central ideas, according to Crowell. Hence, they find their philosophical significance only “in the context of the search for a new categorial framework, together with its governing norm” (ibid.), authenticity. Now, encyclopedic and/or conceptual accounts like the one briefly paraphrased here are certainly fine in and of themselves—indeed, they can be excellent, as in Crowell’s case. However, once we aim at utilizing them in the service of historical, in particular sourcework and/or reception-historical understanding, things get a bit more intriguing. For what is at stake here is not only and not even primarily, whether or not the respective account can pass for comprehensive and convincing in itself; the pressing issue is, rather, whether it maintains a certain equilibrium or, more precisely, whether it manages to steer clear of two hermeneutic vices or extremes which historical understanding in general all too easily falls prey to, since it constantly oscillates between their tempting presence: understanding too much or too little,

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and in doing so either exceedingly to assimilate or to distance the object of understanding from oneself as its subject. Consider the familiar case of (reception-)historical inquiry; here one frequently stumbles upon statements like this: “what Heidegger has to say about anxiety is already there, more or less completely, in Kierkegaard and as such has been exploited by the former to the point of mere plagiarism.” Now, what scholars making statements like this usually overlook is the fact that even though Heidegger’s doctrine of anxiety might indeed, in some pre-formative or embryonic manner, “be there” in Kierkegaard already, it can only so be or appear to be there after Heidegger—that is “after the fact,” in retrospect, or more precisely, by virtue of perceiving Kierkegaard in continuity with or through the lens of certain doctrines attributed to or associated with Heidegger’s own name. In other words, we can only find (or pretend to find) Kierkegaardian reflections in Heidegger, if and as long as we are able and willing to utilize something which we take to be (the philosophy of ) Heidegger as the very mirror for that reflection. Yet, this is only one side of the coin. The flipside is that any claim to such retrospectively constituted continuity in turn depends, both logically, genetically and epistemically, on a certain gap or break as its necessary counterpart: the gap-like event, namely, of coining or giving birth to a new category, such as “existentialism” or “Heidegger” (used as an abbreviation or label for certain philosophical doctrines). “Giving birth” to that category—just like giving birth in general—expresses a dialectical paradox: what comes into being “has been” there already in some sense (just like the newborn child is invariably born: as a human being); yet, that it has been there makes it into something new (just like humanity as such exists only as and in the succession of newborn individuals). As Kierkegaard puts it in corresponding fashion, the dialectic of repetition “is easy, for that which is repeated has been—otherwise it could not be repeated—but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new” (SKS 4, p. 25/R, p. 149; my emphasis). Now, in light of this somewhat paradoxical dialectic of repetition the methodological problem which looms large in every (reception-)historical analysis becomes fully apparent: on the one hand, we obviously need a concept or category (like, for instance, “existentialism”) in order retrospectively to be able to discover traces of its referent in history, so that the latter might reveal (as, for instance, in Trendelenburg) certain pre-formative elements of the former and hence indicate historical continuity. On the other hand, the historical lines we draw will bear upon the very concept—both in terms of the latter’s content and the event of instantiating it—that we need in order to make that

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move. And in both directions we cannot help but constantly oscillate between the two corrrelative dangers of “understanding too much or too little.” The line we draw may either be too wide or too narrow; likewise, the concept we apply for making sense of it may extensionally turn out to be either too wide or too restrictive in its application. Thus conceived, historical understanding—just like understanding in general—bridges a gap between the incomprehensible (or at least that which for the time being resists understanding) and the self-evident; hence, it requires permanently drawing a fine line or establishing a delicate, fragile balance or equilibrium between familiarization and alienation, assimilation and dissociation, proximity and distance in relation to the object of understanding.

2

 ierkegaard’s “Existentialist” Reception K of Trendelenburg as a Solution to the Problem

Now, in general the problem just described could (not necessarily only, but at least always and perhaps also best) be defused, if our understanding of author A (here, as a purported proto-existentialist) could be mediated by some other author B’s reception of A, such that the latter meets four conditions: (a) it grapples with themes and issues, which even under the strictest referential prerequisites deserve to be called existentialist; (b) these issues and themes are all but marginal, in fact they are to be found among author B’s own major authorial intentions; (c) B has not only read, but also and explicitly comments on A, and this (d) with regard to the central problems and themes just mentioned. In the present case, where Trendelenburg’s proto-existentialism is at stake, we are in a favorable, in fact somewhat privileged position; for all the conditions just mentioned are actually (perhaps exclusively) met, namely by Kierkegaard and/or his pseudonymous authors. Hence, it makes sense, in order to circumvent or at least defuse the methodological problem described above, at least briefly and for heuristic purposes to address some key tenets of Kierkegaard’s Trendelenburg reception. For even if this reception turned out to be deeply flawed, it might nevertheless help us pave the way for assessing Trendelenburg’s major philosophical concerns and here, in particular, the actual extent and systematical importance of proto-existentialist motives and ideas within the confines of his thought. So how does Kierkegaard speak about Trendelenburg—and does the way in which he speaks about him pertain to central tenets of his own literary

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enterprise, at least insofar as the latter comprise genuinely existentialist themes? The short answer is that Kierkegaard both praises and criticizes his German contemporary, and he does so chiefly because, in his opinion, Trendelenburg both fostered and solidified his own (that is, Kierkegaard’s) understanding of the overall project he and his pseudonyms are pursuing; however, at the same time Trendelenburg seems to have missed the point regarding some of latter’s major (viz. existential/ist) implications. I will briefly dwell on both aspects in turn, but before doing so I want to emphasize again that I will not provide any comprehensive reception-historical account.6 Nor will I treat all the instances, in which Trendelenburg is explicitly referred to in Kierkegaard’s authorship7 (much less the implicit ones)—and in fact not even all those which might seem important or at least interesting in some way or other. Instead, I restrict myself to a handful of selected references pertaining to the two issues just mentioned in order to prepare for the final step of my analysis. As mentioned in the previous paragraph Kierkegaard explicitly and repeatedly praised Trendelenburg—something which otherwise rarely happened throughout the authorship—and he did so mainly in the mid- to late 1840s, while and shortly after working on major pseudonymous works such as The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Philosophical Fragments (1844) and Unscientific Postscript (1846).8 During that time he purchased, read and repeatedly referred to several of Trendelenburg’s publications (ASKB M 842–848, 1079), especially to Logische Untersuchungen (1840; ASKB M 843), Elementa Logices Aristotelicae (2nd ed., 1842; ASKB M 844), Erläuterungen zu den Elementen der aristotelischen Logik (1842; ASKB M 845), Die logische Frage in Hegels System (1843; ASKB M 846) and, last but not least, Geschichte der Kategorienlehre (1846; ASKB M 848). Now, what must strike the reader as highly significant in the present context is that most of the more substantial comments and references circle (a) around one and the same topic: the concept of movement (bevægelse; Bewegung), spelled out in light of what both Trendelenburg and Kierkegaard take to be its Greek equivalent and origin (kínesis). Moreover, they tackle this notion in a way, which not only (b) provides us with a good glimpse both of Kierkegaard’s affirmative and critical stance towards Trendelenburg, but also (c) takes us straight to the heart of what might be dubbed Kierkegaard’s existentialism. To begin with, Kierkegaard and/or his pseudonyms find in Trendelenburg a most welcome ally against Hegel’s speculative logic, which as Johannes Climacus puts it “simply confuses logic” (SKS 7, p. 106/CUP1, p. 109). It

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does so, in the latter’s opinion, by erroneously introducing (the idea of ) movement into this fundamental realm of thought; yet, this idea or concept (in Hegel, qua becoming, Werden), which is supposed to make possible and intelligible, in fact to manifest the speculative unity of being and nothingness, on the one hand, and thought and being, on the other, and which, thus conceived, serves to found and back up the speculative enterprise as a whole, turns out to be the sole notion or category, which remains and must remain unexplained, in fact incomprehensible within the confines of that very logic itself. On the one hand, Climacus not only agrees with Trendelenburg, but also with Hegel himself (plus, with Trendelenburg’s judgment about Hegel): “movement [Bevægelsen]” is “the common denominator in which being and thinking are united” (SKS 7, p.  107/CUP1, p.  110). On the other hand, both Climacus and Trendelenburg (as read by the former) insist, against Hegel, that this “common denominator” itself functions as the—nota bene, logically—“inexplicable presupposition” (ibid.; my emphasis) of logic, inasmuch as the latter is being construed as a science of (presupposing as well as explaining) the unity of thought and being (SKS 7, p.  106/CUP1, pp. 109–110). Kierkegaard confirms and comments upon both (a) the foundational status and function and (b) the logical and/or philosophical inexplicability of movement in his journals also, and this repeatedly by invoking Trendelenburg, especially the latter’s Logische Untersuchungen. As for (a) he writes, for instance, in 1849: “Trendlenburg [sic!] quite properly points out that we ought to begin with ϰινησις”—namely, by presupposing it; for if “we do not begin by presupposing ϰινησις, we never get away from that [sc. Hegelian] point with Seyn” (SKS 22, p.  427, NB14:146/KJN 6, p.  434; my emphasis). However (and regarding (b)), motion [Bevægelse] itself “is inconceivable” (Pap. VI B 38/JP 1, 632)—within the confines of logic, at any rate—and as such belongs in the class of first or “basic principles” of both thought and being, which, according to Kierkegaard, must simply be presupposed hypothetically and as such “can be demonstrated…indirectly (negatively)” (SKS 18, p.  225, JJ:266/KJN 2, p. 206) at best. Based on these and related findings in Trendelenburg Kierkegaard arrives at four conclusions and/or further observations, which directly lead both to his criticism of the former and the key idea/s of his own “existentialist” project: (1) Far from being presuppositionless, Hegel’s speculative logic rests, albeit tacitly and without being acknowledged as such, upon the possibility and actuality of movement as necessary presuppositions of its own possibility; yet, none of these presuppositions can be explained by or adequately accounted

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for within the confines of that logic itself. Thus, movement (here, qua becoming/Werden) remains a largely unfounded, in fact usurped category in Hegel’s logic. (2) Hegel’s misconception of logic prompts the need for spelling out the fundamental “relationship between logic and ontology” (Pap. VI B 54,21/JP 1, 199), a task, which in turn calls for “an examination of the concepts: possibility, actuality, and necessity” (ibid.). In genuinely Greek fashion this latter examination has been carried out by Trendelenburg in his Logische Untersuchungen already (ibid.). Here the upshot is that logic exclusively operates within the realm of necessity as a pure form of ideality, as opposed to actuality—or more precisely, the transition from possibility to actuality— which defines movement (kínesis) and as such exclusively pertains to the realm of factual being qua existence: every (and only the) transition from possibility to actuality is a kínesis—and vice versa. (3) For a logical system to be possible, nothing may be incorporated into the latter “that has a relation to existence, that is not indifferent to existence”; moreover, 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” (SKS 7, p. 107/CUP1, p. 110; my emphasis). (4) This does not preclude a limine the possibility of a logical system; on the contrary, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms firmly believe that a logical system can “be given”; however, “a system of existence [Tilværelsens System] cannot be given” (SKS 7, p.  105/CUP1, p.  109; my emphasis). Or more precisely, the latter is at least humanly impossible—not “for God” though (SKS 7, p. 114/CUP1, p. 118). As mentioned earlier, Kierkegaard seems to have recognized and welcomed in Trendelenburg a kindred spirit and valuable ally, not only in the attempt to find a firm philosophical grip on criticizing Hegel, but also and in particular for supporting key constructive ideas of his own authorship. It is in this latter context, however, that an increasing dissatisfaction with Trendelenburg’s philosophy, especially with the latter’s logical investigations, is to be observed. Major problematic aspects and implications of Trendelenburg’s thought from the perspective of Kierkegaard and/or his pseudonyms (in particular, Climacus) have been spelled out with great rigor and hermeneutical subtlety by Klaus Schäfer (Schäfer 1968, pp. 267–270). They pertain to Trendelenburg’s understanding of logic—in particular, modal logic and its basic categories; to the concept of category itself; to the nature and ontological realm of movement and here, especially, Trendelenburg’s failure to account for the significance of qualitative (= dialectical and/or pathetical) “leaps” (spring) in nature and human action; finally, to the overall lack of ethical awareness and

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sensitivity in his philosophy—a lack reflecting that missing attention to the leap. Of major importance are the latter two aspects, on which I will solely focus in the present context. In a journal entry from 1844 Kierkegaard writes: Trendlenburg [sic!] resorts all too frequently to examples from mathematics and the natural sciences. Regrettably one finds almost no examples of the ethical in [sc. his] logic, which arouses in my thought a suspicion about logic and serves to support my theory of the leap [Springet], which is essentially at home in the realm of freedom, even though it ought to be metaphorically suggested in logic and should not be explained away, as Hegel does. (Pap. V C 12/JP 3, 2352)9

According to Kierkegaard, the term “leap” pertains to logically underivable and/or ontologically and genetically irreducible transitions from a given state or quality to another within nature or human action; thus conceived, they are paradigms of movement (kínesis) in the sense of actualizing some potential or possibility (see, for instance, SKS 27, pp. 275–277, Papir 283:1/JP 3, 2345) or of making a transition in being, qua existence, not essence. Thanks to their being logically underivable and ontologically or historically irreducible with regard to the respective “emergent” quality—just like movement itself, of which they are paradigmatic instances—they present serious dialectical obstacles to every attempt at explaining their facticity and/or possibility. At best they can be “explained away” (just like in Hegel’s case)10 by carelessly underestimating the explanatory challenge, in fact the logical, ontological and historical riddle posed by them. Now, Kierkegaard not only criticizes the fact that Trendelenburg apparently disregards the phenomenon and its manifold significance, but it is also clear from the entry just quoted that his own focus is not so much on leap phenomena in nature (qua transitions from one physical state or quality to another, e.g., from inanimate substance to living organism), but rather within the realm of human existence, such that the respective leaps are instantiations of freedom qua voluntary action or acts of (in particular, moral) choice.11 Thus conceived leaps do not only represent “dialectical” transitions, but also “pathetic transition[s] [pathetisk…Overgang]” (SKS 18, p. 241, JJ:318/KJN 2, p. 221)—they require emotional and volitional engagement, and hence their execution (plus the insight that and when they must be executed) pertains to the individual; in other words: it cannot be delegated. Thus conceived, the notion of the leap takes us straight to what might be dubbed Kierkegaard’s existentialism. In a journal entry from 1842 to 1843 he asks rhetorically: “Can there be a transition from quantitative qualification to a qualitative one without a leap [Spring]? And does not the whole of life rest in that?” (SKS 27, p. 269, Papir 277:1/JP 1, 261) As indicated by the concept

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of the leap Kierkegaard seems to be concerned about a structurally formative and ontologically fundamental instability in life. In particular, when it comes to describing human life or existence it does not suffice simply to point to certain specifying properties (e.g. the reasoning capacity) ascribed to a corresponding genus proximum qua substance (e.g. animal). Of course, Kierkegaard takes it for granted that humans actually possess a reasoning capacity, but in his opinion that does not set them apart from other animals in such a way as to adequately account for their humanity; in other words, the reasoning capacity is a necessary, but not a suffient condition of possibly being human. The latter, rather, amounts to something else, something far more specific, which, following (my reading of ) Kierkegaard, can and has to be explained both structurally (existence as a task), typologically (existence as a form of consciously relating to that task) and normatively (existence as an art or as the ability to actually comply with the task at hand). Let us begin by addressing the first and second aspect en ensemble. To exist, in particular, to exist humanly, is, first and foremost, to be exposed to a fundamental task, together with a variety of possible and actual ways in which one might expose oneself to that task. More precisely, existing amounts to (a) the task of having to make, plus (b) actually making plus (c) acknowledging that as a human being one has to make and live by and with certain momentous or life-shaping decisions plus the latter’s consequences (in particular, suffering). In other words, to exist is—ideally or de dicto, consciously—to be exposed to the (undelegatable) requirement to live by and with deliberate leaps or conscious transitions from certain “quantitative qualifications” (= imaginative and more or less vacillating deliberations about desirable and non-desirable implications of deciding or choosing at all, and of choosing either X or Y) to qualitative ones (= choosing X/choosing Y). Thus conceived, a deep and ineradicable instability or unstableness, an always at least vaguely felt uneasiness about and interest in one’s own moral and/or metaphysiscal and/or religious status quo looms large in the way (at least) humans lead and have to lead their lives. And this instability or uneasiness, coupled with the corresponding interest in overcoming it, is not marginal, accidental, insignificant or transitory; rather, it functions—and is experienced—as a defining element of (in any case, human) life and existence. Moreover, it does not only or primarily, much less exclusively rest upon the fact that despite our inability to avoid the life-shaping decisions just mentioned we can just as little avoid to make (what we retrospectively will consider) the wrong ones. Even more disquieting is the fact that we can obviously fail to acknowledge that, as human beings, we are in the inevitable position of having to make those decisions. Hence, the concept of human existence or of

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living a genuinely human life points to both a certain underlying structure and the (various forms plus their metaphysical, religious and/or moral value of an) actual conduct or particular way of behaving within that structure—in the attempt, namely, to either perfectly realize or else to simply deny and refuse to comply with the latter’s inherent conditions. As far as the third aspect is concerned, it is indeed telling that Kierkegaard also speaks of “the art of existence [den Kunst at existere]” (SKS 18, p. 277, JJ:411/KJN 2, p. 256; my emphasis). Here the point of comparison is that existence, just like art or virtue, “cannot be taught,” namely as “a doctrine [en Lære]”; for, rightly understood, each of these is “an ability [en Kunnen], a practice, an existing [en Existeren]” (SKS 23, p. 186, NB17:33/KJN 7, p. 188). As is well known, one can only learn the art of playing the violin by actually playing it; likewise, one can only adopt and learn a virtue by actually performing virtuous acts—or else learn to exist by virtue (!) of actually existing. Moreover, just like rehearsing for the performance of a stage-play one might wish (and believe oneself able) to rehearse existence prior to and in order to prepare for actually existing. Yet, here the analogy breaks down, for the purported rehearsal would in fact be a (nota bene, self-deceptive, hence misguided) mode of existence or factual being itself. Accordingly, there remains a crucial difference between art simpliciter and existence: the former—and only the former—can be rehearsed without and prior to actually performing something as an (or a piece of ) art. In this respect the art of existing is closer to adopting or learning a skill: just as swimming can only be learned by actually swimming (without, strictly speaking, being able to swim and hence by virtue, for the time being, of acting as if one were already capable of it), so also with life or existence in general.12 Again, however, there remains a crucial difference between a skill simpliciter and living or existing, which should not be overlooked: one can do without swimming, but avoiding to exist is impossible. Or more precisely, any attempt at avoiding it is in fact nothing but a self-­ deluded and misguided mode of existence, in other words, of actually living the very life one seeks (and believes and wishes to be able) to avoid. But why misguided? If one cannot even try to avoid or to circumvent (the task of ) existence except by virtue of always already existing; and if every such attempt must be deemed self-deceptive, in fact performatively inconsistent and hence deeply misguided, then also every attempt at avoiding facing the task of existence must be considered deeply and perhaps tragically misguided. Summing up, we might say then that, according to Kierkegaard, the term “existence” plus its synonyms (see below) primarily, if not exclusively denote a mode of being; as such they refer to (a) being exposed to a certain task; (b) the various forms of failing in it and, finally, (c) the ability or skill to comply

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with it. Thus conceived, the concept of existence both points to certain structural conditions of being human and to various modes of actualizing the latter (including its deliberate, albeit eventually futile evasion, denial or refusal).13 In a seemingly paradoxical, yet dialectically consistent manner one might say that to exist eventually coincides with the mere task of existing—in other words, with the task of acknowledging that existence must be considered a task. So far I have largely talked about the intensional dimension of “existence” in Kierkegaard. Let me conclude by briefly tackling the latter’s extension plus the word-field, in which the term appears in the authorship. As mentioned earlier, Steven Crowell observes a common trait in most existentialist thinkers: they insist, almost without exception, on the need for sorting out a set of categories and concepts exclusively or at least primarily pertaining to the description of human existence. If I am not mistaken, Kierkegaard endorses a similar idea and in that sense can be considered a paradigmatic proponent of existentialism—in fact its probable inaugurator. Among the terms introduced or reinterpreted by him for the purpose in question is one mentioned and briefly explained already (the leap); others that come to mind immediately are the moment, repetition, paradox, self, spirit, freedom, anxiety, despair, suffering, repentance, sin and faith.14 As far as “existence” (existents) is concerned things are a bit less obvious, however, and as such merit special attention. For it appears to me that similar to “leap” (and perhaps also “repetition”)—but unlike paradox, spirit etc.—existence is used both inside and outside the human realm by Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms. In general, they utilize at least four terms referring to one and the same phenomenon synonymously: existents/existere (see, e.g., SKS 23, p. 322, NB18:98/KJN 7, p. 328); tilværelse/at være til (see, e.g., SKS 18, p. 288, JJ:441/KJN 2, p. 266); faktisk væren (see, e.g., SKS 4, p. 246/PF, p. 41); finally, væren i virkeligheden (see, e.g., SKS 21, p. 148, NB8:7/KJN 5, p. 154).15 As a supplement to my previous analysis I will at this point merely add a few remarks on the extension of “existents.” It goes without saying that Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms are well aware of the fact that terms like “existents” (“existence,” “Existenz”) or its Latin equivalent and origin “existentia” have their own history, ranging, in terms of its formatively most important stages within the history of (here, Western) culture, at least from the Middle Ages, in particular Thomas Aquinas, to the late/r Schelling.16 This notwithstanding, they deliberately adjust the traditional usage/s of the term as they see fit in accordance with their own purposes. Invoking the previous analysis we might say then that, intensionally speaking, “Peter exists” does not, from Kierkegaard’s perspective, simply mean “Peter is real as a spatio-temporal entity”; or “he is real as being outside and independently of what caused him to be”; it means, rather, that Peter has (and

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has to have) a specific way of being, a way considerably different from the way other entities (e.g. pebblestones, apple trees or chimpanzees) are, are real and are what they are; for these exist merely as exemplars of their own species and thus by invariably and immediately being—and being able to be—identical with what they are supposed to be. By contrast, Peter, as a human being, is more than just an exemplar of the human species: he exists as an individual, to the effect that he “is” and has to be (plus, has to be aware of and acknowledge) his “being human” in his own special, i.e., unmistakable and undelegatable way.17 As we saw earlier, (human) existence implies and corresponds to a fundamental task and as such depends on at least three structural conditions: Peter exists by (a) having to be and (b) having to be aware of having to be what he essentially is, such that (c) both prerequisites are in fact part and parcel of that very essence itself. He exists by “being” (in some way) what he is, and he is what he is only “in existence,” namely, by consciously relating to (= questioning, doubting, fearing, wishing or longing for, believing or despairing in something as a manifestation of ) what he is. This yields a first important and philosophically far-reaching conclusion: according to Kierkegaard, existence does not so much precede essence (as Sartre infamously holds (Sartre 1979, pp. 9–10)); it rather functions as a necessary condition or as an intrinsic element of and within the latter: human beings can only be human by having (and actually trying) to be what being human means or appears to them to mean. Secondly and next to this intensional insight an important extensional point can be added: according to Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms, also pebblestones or chimpanzees “exist,” albeit in a preliminary or improper way.18 And not only these; for also thoughts (viz. their content) and ideals are said to exist, though also in a rather restricive sense.19 Accordingly, “existence” functions as an umbrella term in Kierkegaard: additional specifications (like the ones introduced and explained above) are necessary on the basis of a case by case study, in order to make sense of the respective implications of using the term, just like, for instance, in “human existence.”20

3

Trendelenburg, A Proto-Existentialist?

In light of the two foregoing paragraphs we are probably in a better position now, both methodologically and conceptually, to adjudicate whether or not (and if yes, to what extent) Trendelenburg may in fact be considered a proto-­ existentialist. Before setting out to formulate a more specific judgment, we

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should first and foremost keep in mind what I myself will henceforth take for granted as a basis for such judgment: (a) the tenets of Kierkegaard’s overall literary project include themes and ideas which can be labelled existentialist; (b) thanks to the previous analysis, it is at least roughly clear what these themes and ideas actually consist in; (c) Kierkegaard draws on Trendelenburg in the context and with the intention of further probing into (some of ) these themes and ideas—and this partly with appreciative, partly with critical results. It is important in my opinion to keep these three points in mind, and this mainly for two reasons: on the one hand, and logically they are supposed to function as premises for the argument to follow; on the other hand, they facilitate the latter methodologically and hermeneutically, since they narrow the scope of what has to be taken into account as relevant concerning the textual basis for a final judgment: we are entitled to restrict that basis to all and only those writings and passages in Trendelenburg’s work, which have to be considered pertinent for the assessment in question in light of the three conditions just mentioned. Accordingly, a full-fledged account of Trendelenburg’s work is neither necessary nor should it be expected: for one thing such accounts have been provided by others in the past, often with excellent results21; for another it can hardly be denied that according to the methodological principles just explained most of what Trendelenburg—who was, indeed, a highly prolific writer22—published over the course of his lengthy career proves irrelevant for the restricted and rather modest project at hand. Still, one might ask what actually counts as relevant in the present case. Before answering head-on, let us briefly recall what I mentioned earlier: Kierkegaard used and possessed (1) Trendelenburg’s Elementa Logices Aristotelicae (2nd ed., 1842; ASKB M 844), (2) Erläuterungen zu den Elementen der aristotelischen Logik (1842; ASKB M 845), (3) Geschichte der Kategorienlehre (1846; ASKB M 848), (4) Logische Untersuchungen (1840; ASKB M 843) and (5) Die logische Frage in Hegels System (1843; ASKB M 846). Whereas (1), (2) and (3) were often consulted by Kierkegaard to cope with and assess the value of Greek philosophy, in particular Aristotle, he seems to have drawn his main inspiration for criticizing and projecting alternatives to Hegel’s speculative thinking, in particular his logic, from (4) and (5).23 It also turned out that both the appreciation for and reservation against Trendelenburg, which Kierkegaard expresses in the attempt to sharpen the profile of his own “existentialist” project, build upon and explicitly refer to the resources he found in the former’s Logische Untersuchungen.24 That being said, it seems natural to start with and concentrate on a brief survey of Trendelenburg’s magnum opus, in order subsequently to focus on five questions, which appear to be essential in the present context: Do

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Kierkegaard’s partly affirmative, partly critical references to Logische Untersuchungen do justice to the latter, hermeneutically? Regardless of whether or not they actually did, do these resources themselves bear witness to some kind of (conscious and/or material) proto-existentialism? Does Kierkegaard read and interpret them to this effect? Are there other texts from Trendelenburg’s pen, which might possibly support the (proto-)existentialist claim—texts, which Kierkegaard either failed to take note of or which were simply not available at the time of his Trendelenburg reception? Finally, what general conclusion/s can be drawn from the preceding answers with regard to the latter’s purported proto-existentialism (cf. Sect. 4)? Although Trendelenburg’s Logische Untersuchungen hold out the prospect of “logical” investigations, the reader should neither expect a treatise on (or in) formal nor on (or in) dialectical logic. What the author intends and claims to present, instead, is, in modern terms, a theory of (the natural) science(s)—a meta-science of scientific cognition, as it were—which as such aims at an “[e]xplanation of the factual procedures…of the individual sciences from the basic method of all cognition, recognizable only by analysis of these individual sciences.”25 As a logician in the sense described, Trendelenburg holds that, on the one hand, scientific cognition is less than (and cannot adequately be explained as a result of ) pure thought alone; for contrary to what Hegel claims the purportedly a priori and as such purely intra-conceptual dynamic of speculative logic turns out, upon closer inspection, to be dependent on perception26 throughout: “without the quiet help of the imagination…the category…would be a motionless word.”27 Time and again the author inculcates that Hegel’s logic is subject to an inescapable dilemma: either the latter operates on a purely immanent and a priori plane; then it would have to be able to construe and anticipate the totality of scientific insights and results— which it is obviously not; or it (tacitly) depends upon what is openly denied by it: a posteriori knowledge and/or perception (e.g., ibid., pp. 81–82).28 However, scientific cognition is more than (and can just as little be explained as the result of ) formally correct reasoning alone. Against Herbart and his school, as self-proclaimed spokesmen of the Kantian tradition, Trendelenburg urges that form and content can never be separated in cognition (except for tacitly presupposing their inseparability); on the contrary, they are mutually dependent, such that every content or object of scientific reasoning not only corresponds to, but also requires and in fact helps to bring about and epistemically establish the specific form in which it lends itself to being known— and vice versa (Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 1, pp. 9–11). Now, the sciences build upon the assumption of some kind of conformity and/or correspondence between thinking and being (Trendelenburg 1840,

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vol. 1, p. 102), subject and object, and thanks to the undeniable success in applying their methods under this guiding assumption they are apparently fully justified in doing so. However, logic requires a trans- or meta-­pragmatical justification—it needs to demonstrate that and how the guiding assumption of science could possibly be true, as merely pointing to the latter’s—admittedly, actual—success will not do. Here lies the crucial challenge for Trendelenburg’s philosophical ingenuity, and he sets out to meet it by boldly claiming that the concept of movement (Bewegung) provides the missing link and hence closes the epistemical as well as the ontological gap between knower and known, thinking and being (Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 1, Chapter IV).29 However, movement, conceived as a simple, indivisible and generative activity (Tätigkeit, cf. ibid., p. 120), is known, since Aristotle, to be a necessary condition of, in fact the most fundamental phenomenon in nature, hence within the realm of spatio-temporal or physical being in general: no movement, no nature or finite, physical being; wherever the latter, there also the former (cf. ibid., p. 111). Thinking, by contrast, functions as the internally corresponding counterpart to the external type of movement in nature. Equally defined as a “generating activity” it creates perceptions, concepts and propositions—entities, in which the blind external process of nature is not only taken up into, internalized and assimilated by human consciousness, but also (and often unconsciously30) mirrored and re-enacted: Whoever thinks about Kepler’s law: the planet moves in an elliptical orbit—he must do in himself what he says the planet does….The mind describes the ellipse in question in the space of thought. It is therefore the same movement in the inner thinking as in the external nature.31

Whether perceiving, reasoning, judging or inferring, all these and other mental activities are essentially nothing but internal reflections and re-enactments of some external physical movement—hence themselves forms of movement: “we think in a similar way to how we move.”32 Invoking a well-known Platonic principle, according to which the similar is known or recognized by the similar—and by the similar alone (similia similibus cognoscitur)—Trendelenburg then concludes that (especially scientific) knowledge is possible, precisely because and wherever knower and known, consciousness and being, subject and object, mind and nature essentially and also structurally resemble each other. And they do resemble each other qua movement, in his opinion. Thus conceived, the latter is not only common to both thinking and being, but as such also unites and mediates between them. Here is the full-fledged argument:

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Because the movement is an in itself simple activity, which [sc. as such] can only be generated, not analyzed, it will at the same time be the last that [sc. as such] does not originate from any other, and therefore it will also [sc. only] be ­recognized out of itself; because it is the last one, it must be universal and underlie every activity; and if thought rises as the highest flowering of the activities in the world, but this flower presupposes the others as nourishing soil and supporting root, then for the sake of this universality the movement will belong to thinking and being in common.33

This is a rather complex argument, indeed a whole nest of arguments and its underlying claims and hypotheses. If we split it up into its essential components it comprises at least five major theses: (1) Movement is a specific form of activity, one which cannot, ontologically, be reduced to other activities. (2) Movement can only be known through itself. (3) Movement is an integral part of all other activities. (4) Thinking presupposes and integrates movement. (5) Both thinking and (mundane or finite) being jointly belong to and participate in movement. Parallel to these five claims the argument supporting them comprises five sub-arguments. Number one: (a) Movement is a simple activity. (b) Simple activities can be generated, but not dismantled. (c) Any activity, which can be generated, but not dismantled, is an ultimate activity. (d) Ultimate activities cannot, ontologically, be reduced to other activities. (e) Therefore movement cannot, ontologically, be reduced to other activities. Number two: (f ) Any activity which cannot be reduced ontologically to any other activity cannot be reduced to any of them epistemically either. (g) Anything which cannot be reduced epistemically can only be known through itself. (h) Movement cannot be reduced ontologically to any other activity. (i) Therefore movement can only be known through itself. Number three: (k) Every ultimate activity is a universal activity. (l) Every universal activity is an integral part or element of all other (sc. particular) activities. (m) Movement is an ultimate activity. (n) Therefore movement is an integral part of all other (sc. particular) activities. Number four: (o) Thinking is a particular, in fact the highest particular form of activity. (p) The highest form of any activity presupposes and integrates all lower particular—plus the ultimate and as such universal—form/s of activity. (q) Movement is a form of, in fact the ultimate and as such a universal form of activity. (r) Therefore thinking presupposes and integrates movement.

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Number five: (s) Thanks to any shared property p in some entity e–1, e–2 … e–n the latter jointly belong to or participate in p. (t) Both thinking and (mundane) being share the property of presupposing and integrating movement. (u) Therefore both thinking and (mundane) being jointly belong to and participate in movement. It goes without saying that I cannot do justice to these theses and sub-­ arguments hermeneutically in the present context, much less assess their feasibility in detail (in particular, nos. (a), (i), (o) and (u), which seem to me to be particularly worthy and in need of clarification and evaluation). Suffice it to say that Trendelenburg himself seems fully convinced to have demonstrated that movement is “an activity identical to spirit and nature”34 or, more precisely, (a) an ultimate reality, which as such (b) can and can only be known through itself (so that the knower herself must be moving, namely, by way of thinking), and, thus conceived, (c) unites thinking and being. With few exceptions (see below) the remaining parts of Trendelenburg’s magnum opus are of lesser interest: not only, because Kierkegaard does not refer to them, but also, because, to the best of my knowledge, they do not (or at best marginally) touch upon themes and issues, which are relevant in the present context. Chapters V–VII (from vol. 1) and VIII–XX (from vol. 2) have in common that they draw major categorical, metaphysical, ethical and theological consequences from the results achieved in the fundamental introductory chapters (I–IV). The bulk of the first volume expands upon the unity of thought and being through movement by tackling (a) space and time (Chapter V),35 (b) the a priori objects of pure and applied mathematics in relation to matter (Chapter VI), and, finally, (c) categories pertaining to and deducible from movement (causality, substance, quantity, quality, measure, totality, parts, interaction (Chapter VII)). The second volume starts with a lengthy chapter on the concept of purpose (Chapter VIII in Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, pp. 1–71), which appears to be just as systematically important for the author as the concept of movement in the first volume: drawing mainly on Aristotle, he argues that, contrary to Kant’s “regulative” reading of purpose (ibid., pp. 46–52), the latter has to be considered a metaphysical principle of (the reality of ) nature, thus being as “constitutive” for its understanding as the notion of movement; for, correctly understood, the latter is but “the organ of purpose.”36 Accordingly, the category of purpose is also constitutive for an “organic” and overall teleological world-view like the one Trendelenburg subscribes to: “The purpose in its world-ruling meaning forms the baselines of our organic world-view, according to which the mind is the formative soul of things and the things are

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instruments of the mind. In it the interaction of thinking and being is completed.”37 Just as he did with the categories pertaining to movement (in Chapter VI), Trendelenburg then goes on to discuss the categories pertaining to purpose (Chapter IX), followed by a detailed, Aristotle-inspired account of the modal categories (possibility, actuality, necessity), in particular (Chapter XI). An intriguing parallel between the categories, especially those pertaining to movement, on the one hand, and the basic notions of logic (concept, judgment, conclusion), on the other, is spelled out in Chapters XII–XVI.  Here Trendelenburg contends: “just as in being the substance proceeds from action, and again from the substance [proceed] actions: likewise judgments become concepts, and concepts become judgments. The relation of reason and consequence in thinking corresponds in being to the relation of cause and effect.”38 Finally, any organic world-view culminates, according to Trendelenburg, in the idea of a system, in particular, a system of sciences, which is supposed to guarantee the interconnectnedness of concepts and judgments, on the one hand, substance and movement on the other: “The connection of concepts and judgments forms the system, just as the connection of substances and activities forms the world.”39 In fact, organic world-views depend upon and thus naturally tend to construe a teleologically consummate, prestabilized harmony of parts and whole, substance and function, being and thought, movement and purpose, the empirical and the ideal. In doing so they are also inclined and in fact fully justified in introducing the idea—and postulate the reality—of an absolute qua God, supposed to establish and sustain the organic totality in question.40 Trendelenburg is well aware that more would be required here than mere logical and metaphysical compatibility of all parameters involved, in order for any such construal to be convincing. However, according to the author of Logische Untersuchungen a direct and positive proof or demonstration of the reality of God is impossible—the latter can at best be given indirectly (Chapters XVIII–XX): The unconditional, to which the systems of the finite sciences point, goes beyond the concepts that apply to the conditioned mind and conditioned things. The right of [applying] these finite categories in the infinite cannot be determined. But indirectly the mind meets with the necessity to posit the absolute and to posit it so that the unity of the world-view becomes, as it were, the physical counterpart of the creative spirit, inasmuch as it is visible to us….In such a view, the world is the glory of God and God the presupposition of the world.41

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Summing up, we may say that an organic totality, in which movement and purpose are and rightly appear as the founding principles for uniting thought and being, whole and parts, science and religion is what Trendelenburg’s logic ultimately aims at—not only, but primarily in the service of the sciences; for the latter it seeks to provide both an underlying principle or presupposition and an ultimately unifying telos for their methodically varying operations, which are and should be guided throughout by the assumption of a unity not only of perception and reason, but also of thought and being: As the movement enlivens the material, the purpose enlivens the movement. Concept and [sense] perception correspond and interpenetrate one another, ground and appearance, unity and multiplicity, …the idea of the whole and the reality of the parts, the universal forms of thinking and the individually bound forms of being—all reveal in their own way the same contradiction and the same unity….Thus the mind generates the concept for [sense] perception and perception for the concept.42

After this brief survey of Trendelenburg’s magnum opus let us return now to the (first of the) five questions formulated above: does Kierkegaard’s partly affirmative, partly critical references to Logische Untersuchungen do justice to the latter, hermeneutically? In my opinion, they do, indeed, at least in large parts, as will become clear shortly. In order to explain and support the opinion let me first recapitulate the results of my analysis above by utilizing the following chart:

Kierkegaard’s agreement with Trendelenburg Concerning Hegel erroneously introduces (the idea Hegel’s of) movement or philosophy motion into logic. Hegel’s logic rests, albeit tacitly, upon the possibility and actuality of movement.

Kierkegaard’s disagreement with Trendelenburg

Kierkegaard’s expansion on ideas he seems to have picked up from Trendelenburg

–

–

(continued)

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(continued)

Kierkegaard’s agreement with Trendelenburg Concerning other issues

Kierkegaard’s disagreement with Trendelenburg

Kierkegaard’s expansion on ideas he seems to have picked up from Trendelenburg

Logic exclusively Certain aspects in Movement is the operates within Trendelenburg’s common the realm of understanding of denominator in necessity as a logic—in particular which being and pure form of modal logic—plus his thinking are united. ideality, as concept of category Movement functions opposed to itself are problematic. as the—nota bene: actuality—or As regards the doctrine logically— more precisely: of movement, inexplicable the transition Trendelenburg resorts presupposition of from possibility all too frequently to logic. to actuality— examples from Philosophy as a whole which defines mathematics and the ought to begin with movement or movement, by simply natural sciences— motion and as almost no examples of presupposing it. such exclusively the ethical are to be Movement belongs in pertains to the found. the class of first realm of factual Trendelenburg principles of both being qua disregards the leap thought and being, existence. and its manifold (in which as such can be For a logical system particular ethico-­ demonstrated to be possible, religious) significance. indirectly at best. nothing may be incorporated into the latter that has any relation to existence. A logical system can but a system of existence cannot be given (except for God).

The chart suggests, together with the preceding analysis, that in many cases Kierkegaard believes himself to be in full agreement with Trendelenburg— and rightly so. This notwithstanding, there are in my opinion at least two instances, where he misreads his German contemporary (whether criticizing him or not), or more tentatively, there are instances, where the adequacy of his reading can at least be called into question. First, he seems to suggest that Trendelenburg shares two of his basic convictions regarding the concept of movement—and ex post it seems to me at least doubtful that these suggestions are well founded: (a) the possiblity of movement is inexplicable, not only from

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a logical, but from a philosophical vantage point in general; (b) if the concept has to play any significant or even indispensible role in thinking, then the latter’s reality and/or possibility simply have to be presupposed: one has to accept or lay claim to, at least hypothetically or tentatively, the meaningfulness and reality of (the concept of ) movement, while at the same time knowing full well that the latter can never be fully accounted for philosophically. Second and also contrary to what Kierkegaard has us believe, Trendelenburg does not completely dismiss the concept and philosophical significance of the leap, as is evident from the context of Logische Untersuchungen.43 This notwithstanding, the former correctly observes that his German contemporary does not pay any attention to the ethical or ethico-religious dimension of the concept and phenomenon in question: when mustering the resources in greater detail the sheer absence of any ethical considerations regarding the leap phenomenon is indeed striking. Now, regardless of whether or not (and if so, to what extent) Kierkegaard’s account of Trendelenburg’s resources is in fact hermeneutically reliable: do these resources themselves bear witness to some kind of (conscious and/or material) proto-existentialism? On the whole the answer must be negative. It is obvious from the outset that Trendelenburg’s philosophical ambition is devoted to a single purpose: specifying the fundamental tasks and subsequently also realizing the project of a fundamental philosophical discipline called logic, which is supposed not only to sketch the overall contours of an organic metaphysics, but also, in fact primarily, to provide an epistemically solid—and at the same time, scientifically informed—foundation for present and future scientific research. This major intention finds itself clearly expressed in the foreword of Logische Untersuchungen already: “I was motivated by the desire to make logic more experienced, in itself more significant, and thus externally more fruitful, in its ultimate grounds, through the consideration of the individual sciences.”44 Logische Untersuchungen thus displays a strictly theoretical or (theory of ) science-oriented profile. This is not supposed to mean, however, that Trendelenburg lacks any trans-scientific or ethical sensitivity or that in his writings ethical and/or anthropological issues and concerns are completely absent. In fact, Logische Untersuchungen contains a number of, albeit usually brief passages dealing with ethical aspects and implications of his teleological doctrine.45 And yet, in none of these passages the respective issues are considered or discussed in what at least remotely resembles a distinctively existentialist framework—not even tacitly or involuntarily. Accordingly, it seems rather unproblematic, in fact most natural and rational, from Trendelenburg’s perspective, to perceive and describe a human being, its nature and telos, as an

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integrated part of the organic whole—moreover, and in particular, to perceive it as actually adopting (at least being able and seeking to adopt) that perspective self-referentially. Not unlike Leibniz centuries earlier, Trendelenburg is firmly convinced that a divinely established and as such pre-established harmony connects “the realm of nature and the realm of ethics”46—a harmony, which is reflected and preformed already in nature itself47 and which ultimately strives to realize “the cognizing free personality”48 of the moral subject as its highest purpose. To the best of my knowledge, however, it is precisely this allegedly unproblematic integration, this seemingly objective and purely rational universalization of the individual, which is radically called into question within existentialist frameworks in general, Kierkegaard’s existential dialectics in particular. With that being said, it seems relatively easy to answer the fourth question: does Kierkegaard read and interpret Trendelenburg as a proto-existentialist? Again, the answer must be negative. We saw in the preceding paragraph that, a few exceptions notwithstanding, Kierkegaard’s Trendelenburg reception can be considered hermeneutically accurate. Its scope, however, seems pretty eclectic, as the Dane’s interest is either restricted to Trendelenburg as a critic (here, of Hegel’s philosophy, in particular, his logic) or, positively, to the former’s logic itself, yet only insofar as the concept of movement and/or the modal categories are concerned. But not only the scope of the reception might be dubbed eclectic, but the latter also and more importantly appears to be heavily idiosyncratic, with regard to both form and content. As Klaus Schäfer so brilliantly shows (Schäfer 1968, pp.  115–117, 267–270) Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms read and utilize Trendelenburg’s resources for their own purposes and with the very narrow focus of proposing and sketching out a “hermeneutical”—or alternatively, existential/ist—ontology of human existence, and this from start to finish. In terms of question 2.4 the decisive point remains, however, that even though the reception might seem equally eclectic and idiosyncratic, Kierkegaard can hardly be accused for exploiting or usurping Trendelenburg. On the one hand, he and his pseudonyms do hermeneutical justice to those Trendelenburg sources they actually refer to or draw on, at least in large parts; on the other hand, they themselves seem well aware that they use these sources in such a way as to possibly deviate from the original intentions of their author. Are there perhaps other texts from Trendelenburg’s pen, which might eventually support the (proto-)existentialist claim—texts, which Kierkegaard either failed to take note of or which were simply not available at the time of his Trendelenburg reception? Two promising candidates come to mind

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quickly: first, Trendelenburg’s Naturrecht auf dem Grunde der Ethik, published in 1860, second, a lengthy paragraph added to the second edition of Logische Untersuchungen, titled “Der Zwecke und der Wille” (Trendelenburg 1862, vol. 2, pp. 77–122). Unfortunately, both texts must count as unproductive, in fact irrelevant in the present context. For one thing they were published after Kierkegaard’s death, so that if we accept the latter’s source- and reception-historically formative role in bringing about existentialism (which I do), these texts cannot be considered relevant. Second, and more importantly, these texts also turn out to be unproductive and irrelevant with regard to content: Trendelenburg’s treatise on law and ethics presents, in two large parts (analytic and synthetic), a philosophically sober and rather conventional argument for the Plato- and Aristotle-inspired idea of natural law. Law is thus said to be founded in some eternal, trans-positivist ethical norm, so that, against the likes of Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau and Kant, both realms (law and ethics) are claimed to be in unison and therefore ought to be separated neither conceptually nor ontically. Each human individual actualizes—or is at least supposed to actualize— its own nature as a potentially free, rational and moral agent or personality within and under the confines of ethically (family) and juridically normative communities and institutions (society, state, people), all of which, hierarchically structured, form a coherent organic totality, in which the whole dominates and has both logical and normative priority over the parts. Evidently, this metaphysical account of law and ethics has hardly anything in common with an existential dialectics à la Kierkegaard. The additional passage from Trendelenburg’s second edition of Logische Untersuchungen does not fare any better. We saw earlier that ethical issues are only marginally touched upon in the first edition. In the added paragraph of the second Trendelenburg expands upon the idea of purpose as the underlying principle not only of nature, but also of (a) the free and as such both (b) the moral and (c) the rational will, hence of ethics. Accordingly, free will is defined as the capacity for transforming the cognitively entertained idea of the moral good (conceived of as the ultimate purpose of being human) into the one and only motivating factor for action (Trendelenburg 1862, vol. 2, p. 122). This, roughly Kantian, account is then utilized as a weapon against Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the will, in which, much to Trendelenburg’s dismay, the latter’s irrational and anti-teleological implications are highlighted (Trendelenburg 1862, vol. 2, pp.  101–121)—implications, which, as I might add, seem a much more promising springboard for dialogue with existentialism than Trendelenburg. At any rate, the latter’s counterargument culminates in the verdict that Schopenhauer’s philosophy

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is the result of an idealism that…disdains the inner purpose, as an original principle, that [further] establishes the will without the end and seeks to draw the intelligible freedom from the will before the intellect, an idealism that [finally] grounds all things, without the intelligible idea, in the blind will to life.49

4

Conclusion

We are prepared now to address our fifth and final question, concerning the result/s of the preceding analysis: what general conclusion/s can be drawn from the latter with regard to Trendelenburg’s purported proto-existentialism? In my opinion, the upshot of reading the relevant writings themselves and of reading them in light of the Danish “father of existentialism” turns out to be rather sobering—or so at least I argue. In other words, there is not much to be had on account of Trendelenburg’s purported proto-existentialism. In fact, I would like to go one step further even, namely, by invoking a famous thesis by Karl Löwith who diagnosed a philosophical revolution, that is, a radical shift from Hegelian to post-Hegelian thought in the mid-nineteenth century (Löwith 1965). After having inspected Trendelenburg’s writings more closely, in comparison with and in light of Kierkegaard’s references to them, I tend to believe that Löwith’s claim stands uncontested and will pass the test of time—here, in particular, with regard to Trendelenburg’s overall pre-­ revolutionary status. Sure enough, there is obviously an element of continuity, perhaps even of foreshadowing the future here: Frederick Beiser correctly observes that philosophers like Trendelenburg or Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) functioned as “the missing links, the bridge connecting the idealist tradition of the early nineteenth century and the intellectual movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Beiser 2016, p. 7); moreover, he rightly mentions “neo-Kantianism, British absolute idealism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics” (ibid.) among those to be connected to the idealist tradition thanks to these links.50 Nevertheless, Beiser would be hard-pressed, I suppose, to identify, in retrospect, more than marginal and largely superficial traces or reflections foreshadowing genuinely existentialist ideas in these and/or related figures in nineteenth-century philosophy—at least as far as Trendelenburg is concerned. This is the major, admittedly rather modest claim that I have argued for in the present article. Of course, I do not mean to imply hereby that the radical shift suggested by Löwith occurs in any strict chronological order; quite on the contrary, we may observe, at least in the present case (which upon closer scrutiny would perhaps turn out to be far from

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exceptional in this respect) that the two philosophical realms or traditions of idealist/Hegelian versus post-idealist/post-Hegelian thought do not so much follow, but rather run parallel to and historically overlap each other—at least for a certain period of time. With that being said, I would like to emphasize what should be self-evident anyway: I am far from ignoring or refusing to acknowledge Trendelenburg’s substantial philosophical merits; nor do I want to downplay his (in fact, considerable) importance in the history of thought, especially in the nineteenth century—an importance, which Beiser succinctly summarizes by highlighting the following points: Trendelenburg marks the end of Hegelian hegemony in logic and metaphysics… Though Schelling and Feuerbach also made influential criticisms of Hegel, their criticisms were not as thorough or telling. Trendelenburg’s main work on social and political philosophy…was the classical philosophical statement of German liberalism in the nineteenth century. All the basic values of the liberal constitution of 1848 find their rationale within it….Trendelenburg was the last great Aristotelian, the father of the Aristotle revival in the nineteenth century. He was probably the greatest scholar of classical philosophy since Schleiermacher….One of the most exacting philosophical historians of his age, Trendelenburg set new standards for the interpretation of historical texts, both modern and ancient….In this respect his work had a lasting influence…. Trendelenburg was one of the originators of what is now called Begriffsgeschichte, the investigation of the origin of a philosophical concept in ordinary discourse. (Beiser 2016, p. 13)

However, all these impressive philosophical achievements plus their far-­ reaching reception-historical impact notwithstanding, the conclusion seems hardly avoidable in the present context (provided my preceding account can pass for basically correct) that Trendelenburg’s impact did in fact not reach so far as to trigger or stimulate, much less to foster and strengthen the development of what later became known as existentialism. Still, the project of closely investigating his writings with the hope of discovering traces of (proto-)existentialist thinking in them, has been worthwhile and by no means superfluous—and this at least for a specific, Kierkegaardrelated reason: Trendelenburg’s example teaches us that author A can trigger and foster the (self-)clarification of author B’s thought in a highly significant way, which I would call “productive reception.”51 This is precisely the case with Kierkegaard and his relation to Trendelenburg. As was shown above, there is a genuinely “productive” twist in the manner he and his pseudonyms attend to, select, use and partly transform (the intention/s of ) their primary sources in the interest of developing their own existential dialectics.

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As a case in point I finally quote, without any further comment, two short passages, which demonstrate the strikingly different approaches, in which both authors address the meaning and function of postulating (the existence of ) God. First Trendelenburg: In an indirect way the mind encounters the necessity to posit the absolute and to posit it in such a way that the unity of the world-view becomes, as it were, the physical counterpart of the creative spirit, visible to us….In such a view, the world is the glory of God and God the presupposition for the world.52

By comparison Kierkegaard’s (more precisely, Climacus’s) approach: 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 [Nødværge], self-defense; in this way God is not a postulate, but the existing person’s postulating of God is—a necessity [Nødvendighed]. (SKS 7, p. 183n/CUP1, p. 200n)

Whether or not this juxtaposition of both authors and their respective intentions plus the upshot of my previous account in general seem convincing, the truth of Löwith’s overall historical diagnosis, which I approvingly referred to above, remains largely unaffected. At least this is what I think. In other words, even if my comparative analysis would have yielded more promising and less sobering results, there can be no doubt as far as Trendelenburg’s overall place in the history of modern thought is concerned: he clearly remains “pre-­ revolutionary”—contrary to both Kierkegaard and modern existentialism.

Notes 1. Cf. Tillich’s judgment about Trendelenburg’s overall historical role and significance, perceived in light of the reception of the latter’s magnum opus: “Trendelenburgs ‘Logische Untersuchungen’ scheinen auf die Nach-Hegelianer ähnlich gewirkt zu haben wie Husserls ‘Logische Untersuchungen’ auf das philosophische Denken in der Zeit nach den Neu-Kantianern” (Tillich 1961, p. 150). As for major trends of Trendelenburg’s reception in detail see Hartung and Köhnke 2006.

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2. Trendelenburg died in 1872; by then, only four (late) writings of Kierkegaard had been translated into German (Kaminski et al. 2016, p. 4). Moreover, and to the best of my knowledge, Trendelenburg neither spoke nor understood Danish. 3. As for the details see McCarthy 2011 (Heidegger) and Hackel 2011 (Sartre). For a comprehensive reception-historical account of Kierkegaard and/in existentialism the complete volume, in which these articles appear (Stewart 2011), is to be consulted. 4. For an in-depth, in fact-groundbreaking account of the various intricate relation/s of Kierkegaard to Hegel and (in particular, Danish) Hegelianism see Stewart 2003. 5. Regarding Kierkegaard’s acknowledgement of Trendelenburg and his philosophical merits the most important reference is SKS 7, pp.  106f./CUP1, p.  110; cf. also SKS 18, p.  231, JJ:288/KJN 2, p.  212; SKS 19, p.  420, Not13:55/KJN 3, p. 418; SKS 20, p. 93, NB:132/KJN 4, pp. 92–93; SKS 22, p. 427, NB14:146/KJN 6, p. 434; Pap. V B 49,6; Pap. VI B 38/JP 1, 632; Pap. VI B 54:21/JP 1, 199. 6. Meanwhile numerous authors have dealt with (general and/or special aspects of ) Kierkegaard’s Trendelenburg reception; see, for instance, Come 1991; Dietz 1992; González 2007; Message 1997; Purkarthofer 2005, 2007; Schäfer 1968, pp. 115ff., 267–270. 7. Explicit references are to be found in: SKS 7, pp. 106–107/CUP1, p. 110; SKS 18, p. 157, JJ:51/KJN 2, p. 145; SKS 18, p. 225, JJ:266/KJN 2, p. 206; SKS 18, p. 225, JJ:267/KJN 2, p. 206; SKS 18, p. 231, JJ:288/KJN 2, p. 212; SKS 19, p. 420, Not13:55/KJN 3, p. 418; SKS 20, p. 93, NB:132/KJN 4, pp. 92–93; SKS 22, p. 427, NB14:146/KJN 6, p. 434; SKS 27, p. 277, Papir 283:2; SKS 27, p. 323, Papir 315:2/JP 3, 3306; Pap. IV A 205/JP 4, 4252; Pap. V B 49,6; Pap. V C 11/JP 5, 5742; Pap. V C 12/JP 3, 2352; Pap. VI B 29, p. 110; Pap. VI B 38/JP 1, 632; Pap. VI B 54,21/JP 1, 199; Pap. X-6 C 6/JP 6, 6829. 8. For instance, he writes: “Praised be Trendlenburg [sic!], one of the most sober-­ thinking philosophers I know” (SKS 18, p. 231, JJ:288/KJN 2, p. 212 [1844]). Or “It is unbelievable what a benefit Trendlenburg [sic!] has been to me; I now have the apparatus for what I have been working out for several years” (SKS 19, p. 420, Not13:55/KJN 3, p. 418 [1847]). Cf. also the directly following entry: “There is no modern philosopher from whom I have profited so much as from Trendlenburg” (SKS 20, p. 93, NB:132/KJN 4, p. 92 [1847]); he then goes on expressing his regret for not having taken the chance to attend Trendelenburg’s lectures while staying in Berlin during the winter of 1840–1841 (cf. ibid.). 9. As to the latter aspect cf. also SKS 18, p. 225, JJ:266/KJN 2, p. 206 (1844): “Trendlenburg [sic!] does not seem to be at all aware of the leap.”

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10. See Schäfer 1968, pp. 261–263, for a detailed account of (Climacus’s judgment on) Hegel’s failure to do justice to the idea of the leap and its philosophical significance. 11. See Schäfer 1968, pp.  229, 261–263, 298–299, 307–308 for a detailed account about meaning and function of the leap in Kierkegaard/Climacus. 12. This is the reason why Kierkegaard urges that with “respect to existing [existere], there is one teacher for all who exist [Existerende]: existence [Existentsen] itself ” (SKS 18, p. 277, JJ:411/KJN 2, p. 256). In other words: one can only be taught how to exist by (and through the conditions and circumstances of )—existing. 13. Hence, when it comes to giving a full-fledged account of (here, human) existence we need, according to Kierkegaard, both a descriptive and a normative approach. The former comprises two parts—a structural and a phenomenological analysis—whereas the latter may either be carried out from an ethical, a theological and/or a metaphysical perspective. This three-layered analysis of “existence” closely resembles the account of the self as a (in fact, always already distorted, hence desperate) self-reflective relation or synthesis, as it is presented in The Sickness unto Death: here Anti-Climacus combines a structural analysis (=  structure and elements of despair and/or the self: SKS 11, pp.  129–130/SUD, pp.  13–14; SKS 11, pp.  145–157/SUD, pp.  29–42 (= Part One, A A. and C A.)) with a phenomenological (= the self and despair “as defined by consciousness”: SKS 11, pp. 157–187/SUD, pp. 42–74 (= Part One, C, B.)) and a theologically normative, or more precisely: edifying approach (not only, but also and in particular to be found in Part Two = despair as sin: SKS 11, pp. 191–242/SUD, pp. 75–131). 14. Another one that should not be overlooked (and has especially been emphasized by Crowell, see above) is “authenticity.” There is no direct equivalent in Danish, but in Kierkegaard’s usage “ejendommelighed” (peculiarity) or “primitivitet” (primitivity) at least come close; cf., e.g., SKS 25, p. 305, NB29:13/KJN 9, p.  307. As to the overall meaning and function of authenticity in Kierkegaard, see Schulz 2014, Chapters 6 and 17; more recently Pickett 2017, Chapters 3 and 4. 15. The English language provides direct equivalents for three of them (existence, factual being, being in actuality), but unlike, for instance, German (Dasein) it does not have a separate term for tilværelse at its disposal, so that the latter is commonly rendered as “existence,” too; cf. the entry “Exist, Existence, Existential” in JP 1, pp. 448–466. 16. Highly pertinent in this respect are Schäfer’s poignant observations and analyses (Schäfer 1968), demonstrating, among other things, that the (Climacean) existence qua “factual being” is not synonymous with the medieval “existentia” (ibid., p. 320, note 237). 17. Accordingly, Kierkegaard emphasizes that “existence [Existents] corresponds to the individual [det Enkelte, den Enkelte]” and as such is not and cannot be

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“submitted into the concept” (SKS 22, p. 435, NB 14:150/KJN 6, p. 440) or the nature or essence of some given entity. 18. Cf., for instance, SKS 21, p. 129, NB7:99.a/KJN 5, p. 134, where Kierkegaard juxtaposes “natural existence [Naturtilværelsen]” and “hum. [sc. human] society” implying thereby that tilværelse (which, as I presume, is being used synonymously with “existents” in Kierkegaard’s authorship) can rightfully be used to refer to non-human entities also. 19. See for instance, SKS 27, p. 355, Papir 340:11/JP 1, 1043; SKS 22, p. 435, NB14:150/KJN 6, p. 440. 20. In my opinion Wilde fails to do justice to the function of “existence” as an umbrella term, due to his rash extensional restriction of “existence” to “human existence”: “Kierkegaard versteht unter Existenz die daseinsverflochtene Vorgegebenheit (das Perfektum), die der Mensch immer schon ist, die aber, weil er werdend und denkend ist, ebenso imperfektisch als sittliche Aufgabe vor ihm steht und ihn in der so aufgegebenen Bewegung von der Vergangenheit zur Zukunft sowohl vor sich selbst wie auch vor die Zukünftigkeit seiner transzendenten Eigentlichkeit bringt” (Wilde 1968, pp. 162–163). As for a more sophisticated account see Engmann 2019, pp. 106–107. 21. Cf. Beiser 2016, pp.  9–123; Bratuschek 1873; Köhnke 1986, pp.  23–57; Petersen 1913; Rosenstock 1964. 22. His main works include: Logische Untersuchungen, vols. 1–2 (1840, 2nd ed. 1862); Die logische Frage in Hegel’s System. Zwei Streitschriften (1843); Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie, vols. 1–3 (1846–1867); Naturrecht auf dem Grunde der Ethik (1860); Kleine Schriften, vols. 1–2 (1871). Although Trendelenburg’s systematic focus was clearly on logic, ontology and epistemology, he also made significant contributions to practical philosophy and aesthetics; historically the main areas in which he worked and excelled were Greek and modern, in particular Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy. 23. I skip detailed references at this point: a quick survey of the (almost) complete list of Trendelenburg references to be found in Kierkegaard’s published works and journals (see note 7 above) would yield the expected results. 24. See also Schäfer 1966, vol. 2, p. 292 (note 293): “Der für Climacus sachlich entscheidende Text ist das während der Vorarbeiten zur ‘Nachschrift’ und zu den ‘Brocken’ studierte Hauptwerk, die ‘Logischen Untersuchungen.’” 25. “Erklärung der faktischen…Verfahrensweisen der Einzelwissenschaften aus dem nur durch Analyse dieser Einzelwissenschaften erkennbaren Grundverfahren allen Erkennens,” Schäfer 1968, p. 267 (Schäfer writes “Erfahrensweisen,” but that seems to be a typographical error: cf. the correct term in Schäfer 1966, vol. 2, p. 292 (note 293)). Cf. Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 1, pp. VIf. Cf. also Köhnke 1986, pp. 24f., 29. who points to Trendelenburg’s teacher Erich von Berger as an important source for the former’s approach. For a brief instructive account

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of Trendelenburg’s understanding of logic in its historical context see ibid., pp. 35–39. 26. In particular, the perception of (becoming qua) movement: see Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 1, pp. 26f.; see ibid., pp. 30–44, 45–56, where similar arguments concerning the hidden role of perception in (the progress of ) Hegel’s logic are presented with regard to the concepts of negation and identity (see also Trendelenburg 1843, pp.  14–15, 45–46). The upshot is formulated as follows: “Die Logik ist kein Erzeugnis des Denkens, wie sie behauptet, sondern …eine sublimirte Anschauung, eine anticipirte Abstraction der Natur” (ibid., p. 68); cf. also Trendelenburg 1843, pp. 6–7, 12–14, 48–49. 27. “Ohne die stille Hülfe der Vorstellung…wäre die Kategorie…ein regungsloses Wort,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 1, p. 29; cf. also ibid., p. 94: “Die Logik will nichts voraussetzen, als den nackten Begriff, der nur sich besitzt. Aber sie setzt stillschweigend das Princip aller äußern Anschauung, das Bild der räumlichen Bewegung voraus.” 28. For a detailed account of Trendelenburg’s Hegel critique in its historical context see Köhnke 1986, pp. 48–57. 29. See also Köhnke 1986, pp.  25–27, who points to Trendelenburg’s teacher Erich von Berger as a possible source for the former’s doctrine of movement. 30. See Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p.  334: “Die Formen des Denkens wirken geistig, wie leiblich die Muskeln. Wir üben beide, ohne sie zu sehen und zu kennen.” 31. “Wer etwa das keplersche Gesetz denkt: der Planet bewegt sich in einer elliptischen Bahn—der muß das in sich thun, was er sagt, daß der Planet thue….Der Geist beschreibt im Raume des Gedankens die fragliche Ellipse. Es ist also im innern Denken der Art nach dieselbe Bewegung, wie in der äußern Natur,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 1, p. 112 (my emphasis). 32. “Wir denken in ähnlicher Weise, wie wir uns bewegen,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p. 334. 33. “Weil die Bewegung eine in sich einfache Thätigkeit ist, die sich [sc. als solche] nur erzeugen, nicht zerlegen läßt, wird sie zugleich die letzte sein, die [sc. als solche] aus keiner andern stammt, und wird darum auch [sc. nur] aus sich erkannt werden; weil sie die letzte ist, muß sie allgemein sein und jeder Thätigkeit zugrunde liegen; und wenn sich das Denken als die höchste Blüte der Thätigkeiten in der Welt erhebt, aber diese Blüte die übrigen gleichsam als nährenden Boden und tragenden Stamm voraussetzt, so wird um dieser Allgemeinheit willen die Bewegung dem Denken und Sein gemeinschaftlich angehören” (Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, pp. 121f.). I have made some additions (in brackets) with the purpose of spelling out more clearly what Trendelenburg himself actually means. 34. “[E]ine dem Geist und der Natur identische Thätigkeit,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p. 364. 35. Which, as opposed to Kant, follow and are subordinate to movement.

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36. “[D]as Organ des Zwecks,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p. 369; see also ibid., p. 5: “Der Zweck regiert das Ganze und bewacht die Ausführung der Theile.” 37. “Der Zweck in seiner weltbeherschenden [sic!] Bedeutung bildet die Grundlinien unserer organischen Weltansicht, nach welcher der Geist die bildende Seele der Dinge ist und die Dinge Werkzeug des Geistes. In ihr vollendet sich die Wechselwirkung des Denkens und Seins,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p. 366. 38. “Wie im Sein aus der Thätigkeit die Substanz hervorgeht und wiederum aus der Substanz Thätigkeiten: so werden aus Urteilen Begriffe, aus Begriffen Urtheile. Das Verhältnis von Grund und Folge im Denken entspricht im Sein dem Verhältnis von Ursache und Wirkung,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p. 367. 39. “Der Zusammenhang der Begriffe und Urtheile bildet das System, wie der Zusammenhang der Substanzen und Thätigkeiten die Welt bildet,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p.  335. As for a brief account of the concept of system in Trendelenburg plus its historical context, see Köhnke 1986, pp. 30–31. 40. As for the function of (the idea of ) God in Trendelenburg’s system, see Köhnke 1986, pp. 33–35. 41. “Das Unbedingte, auf das die Systeme der endlichen Wissenschaften hinweisen, geht über die Begriffe hinaus, die für den bedingten Geist und die bedingten Dinge gelten. Es läßt sich nicht sagen, welches Recht diese endlichen Kategorien im Unendlichen haben mögen. Aber auf indirektem Wege tritt dem Geiste die Nothwendigkeit entgegen, das Absolute zu setzen und zwar so zu setzen, daß die Einheit der Weltanschauung gleichsam das uns sichtbare leibliche Gegenbild des schöpferischen Geistes wird … In einer solchen Ansicht ist die Welt die Ehre Gottes und Gott die Voraussetzung der Welt,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p. 368 (my emphasis). 42. “Wie die Bewegung den Stoff belebt, so begeistigt der Zweck die Bewegung. Begriff und Anschauung entsprechen sich und durchdringen einander, Grund und Erscheinung, Einheit und Vielheit, …die Idee des Ganzen und die Wirklichkeit der Theile, die allgemeinen Formen des Denkens und die im Einzelnen gebundenen Formen des Seins—alle offenbaren in ihrer Weise denselben Gegensatz und dieselbe Einheit….So erzeugt der Geist zu der Anschauung den Begriff und zu dem Begriff die Anschauung,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p. 369. 43. The term appears occasionally in the context of Trendelenburg’s Hegel critique; he writes, for instance: “So geschickt auch die [sc. logisch-dialektische] Vermittelung angelegt ist, in den Prämissen liegt soviel nicht wie herausgezogen wird….Oben sollte das räumliche Außersichsein verneint werden. Es geschah durch einen Sprung in das geistige Beisichsein. Hier soll der Widerspruch zwischen der Gattung und dem Exemplar…verneint werden. Es geschieht durch einen Sprung in die geistige Einheit des Allgemeinen und Einzelnen” (Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 1, p. 44). See also ibid., p. 56: “Wo…in die Totalität umgebogen wird, um den neuen Begriff zu fassen: da geschieht es nur durch einen weiten Sprung.” Invoking an utterance by Chalybäus, Trendelenburg adds that in general “die dialektischen Übergänge die Gliederkrankheiten des [sc. Hegelschen]

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Systems [sind]” (ibid., p. 44). See also Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 1, p. 129, and vol. 2, p. 56, where the term leap is used in order to criticize Kant. 44. “[M]ich leitete der Wunsch, die Logik durch Berücksichtigung der einzelnen Wissenschaften in den letzten Gründen erfahrener, in sich selbst bedeutsamer und dadurch auch nach außen fruchtbarer zu Machen,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 1, p. viii. Cf. also ibid., p. 3: “Die Reihe der Untersuchungen soll den Kreis der logischen Fragen durchlaufen und eine Ansicht der ganzen [sc. logischen] Wissenschaft zu gewinnen streben”—namely in the service of the sciences. 45. See in particular Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, pp. 36, 41–43, 87–88. Later on Trendelenburg published a whole monograph on (natural law and) ethics (Trendelenburg 1860). 46. “[D]as Reich der Natur und das Reich der Sitten,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p. 13. 47. As to the divine as the mediating factor between the two realms of natural and spiritual (viz. ethical) purposes see Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p. 88: “Der göttliche Zweck, welcher in der Natur gebundene, in dem Menschen freie Organe besitzt, verknüpft das Reich der Natur und Freiheit und ist der lebendige Mittelbegriff zweier ansonsten getrennten [sic!] Welten.” 48. “[D]ie erkennende freie Persönlichkeit,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p. 88. 49. “[I]st das Ergebnis eines Idealismus, der…den inneren Zweck, als ein ursprüngliches Princip verschmäht, der den Willen ohne den Zweck gründet und die intelligible Freiheit aus dem Willen vor dem Intellect schöpfen will, eines Idealismus, der ohne die intelligible Idee den blinden Willen zum Leben den Dingen zum Grunde legt,” Trendelenburg 1862, vol. 2, p. 121. 50. See also Köhnke 1986 who considers Trendelenburg an “Archtitekt eines neuen, nach-idealistischen Verständnisses von Philosophie, das historisch zwischen Kant und dem Neukantianismus vermittelte” (ibid., p. 23). 51. See the basic reception typology in Schulz 2011, p. 29. 52. “[A]uf indirektem Wege tritt dem Geiste die Nothwendigkeit entgegen, das Absolute zu setzen und zwar so zu setzen, daß die Einheit der Weltanschauung gleichsam das uns sichtbare leibliche Gegenbild des schöpferischen Geistes wird…. In einer solchen Ansicht ist die Welt die Ehre Gottes und Gott die Voraussetzung der Welt,” Trendelenburg 1840, vol. 2, p. 368.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. 1933. Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Baumgartner, Wilhelm. 2006. Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburgs Kategorienlehre—Ein Wegweiser für Franz Brentanos Ontologie. In Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburgs Wirkung, Eutiner Forschungen, ed. Gerald Hartung and Klaus Christian Köhnke, vol. 10, 205–219. Eutin: Eutiner Landesbibliothek.

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Beiser, Frederick C. 2016. Late German Idealism: Trendelenburg and Lotze. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Belussi, Felix. 1990. Die modaltheoretischen Grundlagen der Husserlschen Phänomenologie. Freiburg: Alber. Bratuschek, Ernst. 1873. Adolf Trendelenburg. Berlin: Henschel. Come, Arnold B. 1991. Trendelenburg’s Influence on Kierkegaard’s Modal Categories. Montreal, Quebec: Inter-Editions. Crowell, Steven. 2015. Existentialism. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, pp. 1–15. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism. Accessed 20 July 2019. Dietz, Walter. 1992. Trendelenburg und Kierkegaard. Ihr Verhältnis im Blick auf die Modalkategorien. Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 34: 30–46. Engmann, Matthias. 2019. Das palimpsestische Selbst. Zur Genese, Struktur, Darstellung und Vermittlung von personaler Identität nach Sören Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, pp. 103–135. Fugali, Eduardo. 2009. Toward the Rebirth of Aristotelian Psychology: Trendelenburg and Brentano. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind 8: 179–202. González, Darío. 2007. Trendelenburg: An Ally Against Speculation. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 309–334. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hackel, Manuela. 2011. Jean-Paul Sartre: Kierkegaard’s Influence on His Theory of Nothingness. In Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 9, 323–354. Farnham: Ashgate. Hartung, Gerald, and Klaus Christian Köhnke, eds. 2006. Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburgs Wirkung, Eutiner Forschungen. Vol. 10. Eutin: Eutiner Landesbibliothek. Kaminski, Eva, Gerhard Schreiber, and Heiko Schulz. 2016. Søren Kierkegaard in deutscher Sprache. Eine Gesamtbibliographie der Quellen und Sekundärliteratur von 1855–2015, Forum Religionsphilosophie. Vol. 34. Münster: LIT. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1909–1948. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. Vols. 1–16. Ed. P.A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, and E. Torsting. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation Pap). ———. 1967–1978. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. Vols. 1–6. Ed. and Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation JP). ———. 1980. The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation SUD). ———. 1983. Repetition. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation R). ———. 1985. Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation PF).

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———. 1992. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Vol. 1. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation CUP1). ———. 1997–2012. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Vols. 1–28, K1–K28. Ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, and Alastair McKinnon. Copenhagen: Gad Publishers. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation SKS). ———. 2007. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. Vols. 1–11. Ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K.  Brian Söderquist. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation KJN). Köhnke, Klaus Christian. 1986. Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Löwith, Karl. 1965. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought. Trans. David E. Green, London: Constable. Malik, Habib C. 1997. Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. McCarthy, Vincent. 2011. Martin Heidegger: Kierkegaard’s Influence Hidden and in Full View. In Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 9, 95–125. Farnham: Ashgate. Message, Jacques. 1997. Kierkegaard, Trendelenburg; la logique et les catégories modales. Kairos 10: 49–61. Nun, Katalin, Gerhard Schreiber, and Jon Stewart. 2015. The Auction Catalogue of Kierkegaard’s Library, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources. Vol. 20. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation ASKB plus the entry number). Petersen, Peter. 1913. Die Philosophie Friedrich Adolph Trendelenburgs. Hamburg: Boysen. Pickett, Howard. 2017. Rethinking Sincerity: The Ethics of Theatricality in Kant, Kierkegaard and Levinas. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Purkarthofer, Richard. 2005. Trendelenburg: Traces of a Profound and Sober Thinker in Kierkegaard’s Postscript. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, pp. 192–207. ———. 2007. Trendelenburg und Kierkegaard: ‘Eine wunderliche Beziehung’. In Kierkegaard and Great Philosophers, Acta Kierkegaardiana, ed. Roman Králik, Abrahim H. Khan, Peter Šajda, Jamie Turnbull, and Andrew J. Burgess, vol. 2, 23–35. Mexico City, Barcelona and Šaľa: Sociedad Iberoamericana de Estudios Kierkegaardianos, University of Barcelona and Kierkegaard Society in Slovakia. Rosenstock, Gershon. 1964. F.A.  Trendelenburg. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1979. Drei Essays, with an afterword by Walter Schmiele. Frankfurt a.M., Berlin, Vienna: Ullstein. Schäfer, Klaus. 1966. Untersuchungen zu ontologischen Problemen in den Climacus-­ Schriften Sören Kierkegaards. Vols. 1–2. Ph.D. Tübingen.

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———. 1968. Hermeneutische Ontologie in den Climacus-Schriften Sören Kierkegaards. Munich: Kösel. Schulz, Walter. 1955. Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Schulz, Heiko. 2011. Aneignung und Reflexion I.  Studien zur Rezeption Søren Kierkegaards. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. ———. 2014. Aneignung und Reflexion II.  Studien zur Philosophie und Theologie Søren Kierkegaards. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Stewart, Jon. 2003. Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. Preface. In Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 9, ix–x. Farnham: Ashgate. Tillich, Paul. 1961. Philosophie und Schicksal. Schriften zur Erkenntnislehre und Existenzphilosophie. Vol. 4 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Renate Albrecht. Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk. Trendelenburg, Friedrich A. 1840. Logische Untersuchungen. Vols. 1–2. Leipzig: Hirzel. ———. 1843. Die logische Frage in Hegel’s System. Zwei Streitschriften. Leipzig: Brockhaus. ———. 1846. Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie, Geschichte der Kategorienlehre. Zwei Abhandlungen. Vol. 1. Berlin: Bethge. ———. 1855. Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie, Vermischte Abhandlungen. Vol. 2. Berlin: Bethge. ———. 1860. Naturrecht auf dem Grunde der Ethik. Leipzig: Hirzel. ———. 1862. Logische Untersuchungen. 2nd ed. Vols. 1–2. Leipzig: Hirzel. ———. 1867. Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie, Vermischte Abhandlungen. Vol. 3. Berlin: Bethge. ———. 1871. Kleine Schriften. Vols. 1–2. Leipzig: Hirzel. Wilde, Frank-Eberhard. 1968. Kierkegaards Verständnis der Existenz. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger.

Part II The Existentialists’ Use of the German Idealists

9 Kierkegaard: A Transitional Figure from German Idealism to Existentialism Jon Stewart

Existentialism is usually understood as a twentieth-century school of thought made famous by figures such as Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. Søren Kierkegaard is often hailed as the father of existentialism or categorized as an existentialist avant la lettre. During his lifetime German Idealism was still an active philosophical movement with contemporary thinkers such as Schelling, Schopenhauer and Trendelenburg. Thus from the perspective of the development of the history of philosophy from the school of German Idealism to that of existentialism, Kierkegaard occupies a special position (Stewart 2003, pp. 618–622). His first-hand acquaintance with, for example, Schelling and members of the Hegel school gave him an intimate familiarity with the key doctrines, methodologies, and insights of this school. His criticisms of it, for example, as being overly abstract and neglecting the lived experience of the individual were frequently echoed by the later existentialists. In the present article, I wish to argue that, due to the special historical position that he occupied, he can be seen as representing in persona the transition from German Idealism to existentialism. Despite the fact that he is usually

This work was produced at the Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences. It was supported by the Agency VEGA under the project Synergy and Conflict as Sources of Cultural Identity, No. 2/0025/20. I am grateful for the useful feedback on this article that I received from the following Kierkegaard experts: Roe Fremstedal, István Czakó, and Peter Šajda.

J. Stewart (*) Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_9

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categorized as a member of the existentialist school, there are clear elements of his thought that can be traced back to the German idealists even though he develops them in his own unique manner. He thus represents an important transitional figure in the history of philosophy who defies unambiguous classification. The implication here is that the traditional view of him as a straightforward existentialist or as a forerunner of existentialism is one-sided and misses an important dimension of his thought. A word of caution is in order here at the start. Historians of philosophy who try to make sense of entire periods and long stretches of time invariably have recourse to certain labels. Given the difficulty of their task of summarizing a large number of heterogenous ideas from many diverse thinkers, this is an understandable and even necessary procedure. It seems to make sense to categorize different thinkers as belonging to the one or the other school of thought. However, with the assignment of individual thinkers to large rubrics a distortion occurs which one needs to be wary of. Obviously no complex or original thinker can be reduced to a simple label. While every undergraduate knows that Kierkegaard was an existentialist, the Danish philosopher of course never conceived of himself in this manner. He did not define himself in terms of a school of thought that would only be readily identifiable a century or so after his death. There is thus a kind of anachronism that arises from associating him with the existentialist movement, strictly speaking. Moreover, even on its own terms, existentialism itself is so diverse, that during its heyday, there was dispute about what exactly it stood for. It proved impossible to identify the key doctrines that were shared by all its theorists. Many thinkers who were commonly associated with the movement explicitly rejected the label. Thus the idea of existentialism as a coherent or circumscribable body of thought seemed impossible. Rather, the term simply came to designate loosely a number of thinkers who were occupied with common themes, such as freedom, alienation, and anxiety. Although Kierkegaard has traditionally been associated with existentialism, recent scholarship has called this into question (Stewart 2011c; Söderquist 2015). While there can be no doubt that the later exponents of existentialism such as Heidegger (McCarthy 2011; Thonhauser 2011), Sartre (Hackel 2011), de Beauvoir (Green and Green 2011), and Camus (Stan 2011) were in some ways inspired by Kierkegaard and appropriated some of his ideas, it is unclear whether he would accept the directions in which they took his thought. Indeed, the very point that Sartre identifies as the defining dogma of the school (Sartre 1948, pp.  26–30), namely, the rejection of essentialism, would be problematic for Kierkegaard (Hong 1997, p. 8). Sartre’s most extensive direct statement on Kierkegaard was his essay “Kierkegaard: The Singular

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Universal” (Sartre 1979, pp. 141–169). However, this piece is overly focused on some clichés concerning Kierkegaard’s biography and offers considerably less philosophical substance than one would wish and expect. Given all of this, it would be prudent to proceed with caution and refrain as much as possible from bandying about labels. Instead, we would like to be as specific as possible in determining which ideas Kierkegaard found valuable in the thought of the German idealists and which ones he was keen to dismiss or criticize. With regard to Kierkegaard’s association with existentialism, a historical note should be added. His work became known outside Denmark only around the turn of the century when German translations began to appear (Schulz 2009). At that time he was studied by German writers and theologians long before existentialism became a household word. When existentialism began to establish itself as a school during the Second World War and immediately thereafter, it was exposed to criticism from different sides. Its spiritual leaders such as Sartre and Camus reacted by trying to legitimize the movement by showing that it was something genuinely philosophical. They thus highlighted figures from the past, such as Kierkegaard, and dubbed them forerunners of their school.1 Although there are many reasons to call this claim into question, most historians of philosophy have simply followed this categorization of Kierkegaard uncritically despite the fact that it was somewhat ideologically motived at the time. Most commentators presumably thought that if the existentialists themselves said that they were influenced by Kierkegaard, they must have known what they were talking about. Surely they knew their sources better than anyone else. This general claim, however, prevented historians of ideas from investigating the matter further in order to determine precisely what the points of influence were. There can be no doubt that the association of Kierkegaard with existentialism played an important role in the reception of his thought and served to make him better known internationally than he had ever been before (Stewart 2009, pp. 431–450). However, there was also a downside to this since some of the dubious views of the school, such as Sartre’s irrationalism or relativism, were immediately ascribed to him (MacIntyre 1981, pp. 39–43). This caused a backlash in Kierkegaard studies, as scholars rushed to defend him and portray him as a thinker who still values and respects the power of human reason (Evans 1992; Bogen 1961). All of this leads us too far away from the task at hand, but suffice it to say that the association of Kierkegaard with existentialism is a far more complex issue than is usually assumed. In what follows I will pursue my task by first exploring Kierkegaard’s explicitly demonstrable reading and use of the leading figures of the German idealist

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movement. This will help us to identify specifically which strands of their thought he found either valuable or worthy of criticism. Then in the next section I will try to determine what, if any, elements of idealism as such can be found in Kierkegaard’s thought. I will argue that it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Kierkegaard is committed to some form of idealism to some extent.

1

Kierkegaard and the Individual German Idealists

Kierkegaard read German fluently, and German culture in many different areas, such as literature, criticism, theology, had a profound influence on him (Stewart 2019). He had an extensive interest in Germanophone philosophy and was familiar with the writings of the leading German philosophers from the past, such as Leibniz (Løkke and Waaler 2009), Jacobi (Rasmussen 2009), and Lessing (Thompson 2009). Moreover, Kierkegaard was engaged in a wide range of discussions surrounding German philosophy and theology in his own day (Stewart 2011b). He refers to the works of thinkers, such as Philipp Marheineke (Schulz 2007b), Carl Daub (Stewart 2007g), Johann Eduard Erdmann (Bitter 2007), Karl Rosenkranz (Schulz 2007a), Franz von Baader (Thulstrup 1982; Koslowski 2007), I.  H. Fichte (Rosenau 2007; Schreiber 2013), Heinrich Gustav Hotho (Barfoed 1967; Grage 2008), David Friedrich Strauss (Pattison 2007), Ludwig Feuerbach (Czakó 2007), and Bruno Bauer (James and Moggach 2007). It is not possible to treat all of these figures here, nor it is necessary since not all of them are necessarily counted as belonging to the tradition of German Idealism, strictly speaking. Instead, I will confine myself to an overview of Kierkegaard’s reading and use of the main idealist philosophers from this time. Although much of the early research in Kierkegaard studies cast him as an opponent of most any form of systematic German philosophy (for example, Thulstrup 1967), more recent studies have demonstrated that his philosophical interests included all of the main thinkers traditionally associated with German Idealism (Gyenge 1996; Hühn 2009; Fremstedal 2015; Stewart 2007c, 2015b; Hühn and Schwab 2013).2 This conclusion is clearly vindicated when we gain an overview of the many concrete examples of the positive influence that these figures exerted on Kierkegaard.

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Kant

Kierkegaard’s relation to Kant has been explored in some detail in a handful of works in the secondary literature (Green 1992, 2007; Fendt 1990; Phillips and Tessin 2000; Kosch 2006; Stern 2012; Fremstedal 2014). While there is of course some debate about key issues, there is a general consensus that Kant played an important role especially with respect to Kierkegaard’s Works of Love and “Purity of Heart” from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Much of the literature thus focuses on the connection between Kant and Kierkegaard in the field of ethics (Verstrynge 2004; Knappe 2004; Rapic 2007; Benbassat 2012). Kierkegaard owned copies of Kant’s key works, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Judgment, as well as the first three volumes of the collected edition of Immanuel Kant’s vermischte Schriften, and there is evidence that he was familiar with other Kantian works as well.3 However, Kierkegaard only quotes directly from Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” and The Conflict of the Faculties, the latter of which might also be a quotation from the article “Perpetual Peace” (Green 1992, pp. 9–31). The degree to which Kierkegaard was apparently inspired by Kant goes well beyond the relatively few explicit references to him that can be found in the Kierkegaardian corpus. Ronald M. Green has referred to this as Kierkegaard’s “hidden debt” to Kant (Green 1992, p. xviii). Green suggests that there was some kind of anxiety of influence at work, and Kierkegaard was thus reluctant to acknowledge explicitly the full extent of his use of Kant. It has been pointed out that Kierkegaard seems amenable to Kant’s critique of the metaphysical approach to religion (Fremstedal 2015, p.  41). Kant argued that it is impossible to know the objects of religion such as God and immortality since they transcend human experience. Kant can thus be said to defend a subjective approach to religious belief, which he claimed does not constitute objective, theoretical knowledge (Wissen) but instead represents faith (Glaube), that is justified on subjective, practical (moral) grounds (cf. the Canon of Pure Reason). In works such as the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard also performs his own critique of the faculty of reason, by defining and circumscribing the realm of what he calls “objective knowing,” that is, the sphere of science and discursive thought. Contrary to the tradition of Christian apologetics, he claims that nothing that comes from the sphere of objective knowing can have any relevance for Christian faith. While there is no exact pendant in Kant to Kierkegaard’s special notion of subjective faith, it

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might be argued that the Dane was inspired by an appreciation of the limits of human reason as determined by Kant. Along these same lines, in the Philosophical Fragments (SKS 4, pp.  242–252/PF, pp.  37–48), Kierkegaard’s criticism of the proofs for the existence of God might well be taken to have had their point of departure in Kant, who is known for his famous analyses of these traditional proofs in the Critique of Pure Reason and other texts. Kierkegaard hails Kant for his “honest” approach to the limitations of human knowing (SKS 6, p.  142/SLW, p.  152) in contrast to the overly enthusiastic views of the Hegelians. In a journal entry Kierkegaard also refers to Kant’s doctrine of radical evil, which he criticizes for not understanding the nature of the paradox as a category (SKS 20, pp. 88–89; NB:125/KJN 4, p. 88). In another journal Kierkegaard likewise criticizes Kant’s conception of autonomy (SKS 23, p. 45, NB15:66/KJN 7, pp. 42–43). There are thus a number of scattered references to individual points in Kant that can provide the basis of a general interpretation, but much of the work is left to the interpreter.

1.2

Fichte

It has also been argued that Kant’s successor Johann Gottlieb Fichte was an important figure for Kierkegaard (Kangas 2007; Fremstedal 2015, pp. 44–46; O’Neill Burns 2017), although direct references to him in Kierkegaard’s corpus are rare. Kierkegaard owned a copy of Fichte’s collected works, edited by the philosopher’s son Immanuel Hermann Fichte.4 Unfortunately, Kierkegaard gives no extended or systematic assessment of Fichte’s philosophy, and so scholars have tended to try to focus on conceptual similarities in their thought. The longest sustained account of Fichte in Kierkegaard’s writings comes in The Concept of Irony (SKS 1, pp. 308–321/CI, pp. 272–286). Here the Danish philosopher follows Hegel by seeing Fichte as the forerunner of Romantic thinkers such as Friedrich von Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and Solger. They are said to have appropriated Fichte’s theory of subjectivity for their own purposes. Specifically, they have taken his abstract analysis out of its original context in epistemology and have applied it in the context of concrete life in the actual world. This results in the views of Romantic irony which are universally critical of bourgeois life and contemporary ethics in society. Here Kierkegaard again follows Hegel and criticizes Fichte’s theory of the self, the I = I, as overly abstract. According to Kierkegaard’s view, Fichte’s conception of the self-positing ego is merely an abstract principle that lacks all content. This criticism is

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repeated in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (SKS 7, p.  180/CUP1, p. 197).5 Kierkegaard also refers critically to Fichte’s theory of repentance (SKS 4, p. 421/CA, p. 118; SKS 6, p. 438/SLW, p. 476). But a closer examination of the matter seems to suggest that this is not a reference to Fichte’s own work but rather a somewhat misleading presentation of it by Kierkegaard’s Danish contemporary Hans Lassen Martensen (Kangas 2007, pp.  73–74). Perhaps more significant is Kierkegaard’s reference to Fichte in The Sickness unto Death (SKS 11, p.  147/SUD, p.  31). The passage in question seems to show an appreciation of Fichte’s theory of subjectivity. According to Fichte’s conception, the infinite imagination produces not just the forms of thought (as in Kant) but also the matter. Kierkegaard seems receptive to this idea of what he calls “infinitizing reflection” (SKS 11, p. 147/SUD, p. 31). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the problem of the proper beginning of philosophy was a key issue that exercised a number of thinkers. This was an especially acute issue for the systematic philosophers in the tradition of German Idealism since it was natural to ask where the proper starting point was for any system. As is well known, Fichte attempted to establish such a foundational point with the self-positing ego, the I = I. With regard to this analysis, connections have been drawn to Kierkegaard’s unpublished work Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est (O’Neill Burns 2017). Kierkegaard portrays the naïve student Johannes Climacus contemplating the arguments of philosophers about this issue, and his use of terms such as “immediate consciousness” can be seen as an echo of Fichte’s argument.

1.3

Schelling

The importance of Schelling for Kierkegaard has been the subject of quite varying opinions (Gyenge 1996; Olesen 2003, 2007; Kosch 2006; Hennigfeld and Stewart 2003). One of the best-known episodes of Kierkegaard’s reception of German Idealism is his attendance of the lectures of Schelling in Berlin in 1841–1842 (Stewart 2007b, pp.  641–678; Basso 2007). Kierkegaard’s notes to Schelling’s lectures appear in his Notebook 11 (SKS 19, pp. 305–367, Not11:1–42/KJN 3, pp. 303–366). These notes are often used as the point of departure for considerations of Schelling’s influence on Kierkegaard. But, as is evinced by the books in his library, Kierkegaard was also clearly familiar with Schelling’s written works from the different periods, and so the question of influence cannot be confined to the Berlin lectures.6 On the whole, there is no detailed account of Schelling’s philosophy in Kierkegaard’s works, and thus, as

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was the case with Fichte, commentators are left to try to speculate about their relation based on scattered individual passages. It is not easy to assess the importance of Schelling’s Berlin lectures for Kierkegaard since Kierkegaard’s notes are generally confined to recording what Schelling said. They thus represent Schelling’s thought and not Kierkegaard’s own. With regard to these lectures, it has been argued that Schelling’s emphasis on actuality and his criticism of Hegel’s philosophy for abstraction was a key point of inspiration for Kierkegaard (Stewart 2011d). However, despite his initial enthusiasm, it was precisely on this point that Kierkegaard became disappointed with Schelling since as the lectures progressed, it became abundantly clear that Schelling’s notion of actuality was as abstract as anything found in Hegel. Kierkegaard thus felt duped by being misled by Schelling’s use of the term, a point which is referred to in Either/Or (SKS 2, p. 41/EO1, p. 32).7 The two published works in Kierkegaard’s corpus that refer to Schelling most often are The Concept of Anxiety and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. With regard to the former Kierkegaard alludes to Schelling’s Berlin lectures and the distinction made there between negative and positive philosophy (SKS 4, p. 328n/CA, p. 21n). Schelling uses the term “negative philosophy” as a part of his critical campaign against Hegel. A consistent point of criticism in Kierkegaard’s work is what he refers to as movement in logic. This is usually taken to be a reference to Hegel’s dialectical analysis of the categories in the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard discusses this briefly, and in this context he refers to Schelling (SKS 4, p. 337n/CA, p. 30n). These references seem a bit ad hoc, but the more substantive point for the theme of Kierkegaard’s work is the issue of freedom and hereditary sin (SKS 4, pp. 363–64n/CA, p. 59n; see also SKS 4, p. 416/CA, p. 114; SKS 4, p. 437/CA, p. 136). Schelling was of course known for his early work, On Human Freedom, which Kierkegaard seems to draw on. It will be noted that this work belongs to the early Schelling and not the Schelling of the Berlin lectures. The references to Schelling in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript are generally confined to the issue of the concept of intellectual intuition. Kierkegaard refers to this concept from Schelling as a point of contrast with Hegel’s speculative method (SKS 7, pp. 102–103/CUP1, p. 105; SKS 7, p. 139n/CUP1, p.  150n; SKS 7, p.  306/CUP1, p.  335; SKS 4, p.  319/CA, p.  11). But Kierkegaard (or if one prefers, his pseudonymous author) is critical of both notions. Here Lessing’s image of a leap is hailed as a more appropriate understanding of Christian faith than what can be found in the epistemology of either Schelling or Hegel.

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217

Hegel

Of the German idealists, it was clearly Hegel who interested Kierkegaard the most. There are considerably more references and allusions to Hegel in Kierkegaard’s writings than to any other German philosopher. During Kierkegaard’s time there was in Denmark a quite extensive reception of Hegel’s philosophy (Stewart 2007a, b; Czakó 2012), and his writings are full of references to different figures, such as Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Hans Lassen Martensen,8 who played a role in this. While Kierkegaard has traditionally been understood as a rabid Hegel critic (Thulstrup 1967), recent research has demonstrated a more positive relation (Taylor 1980; Grøn 1997; Stewart 2003, 2007e). The most convincing connections have been made between Hegel and the thought of the young Kierkegaard. Early works such as From the Papers of One Still Living, The Concept of Irony, and Either/Or demonstrate clear signs of a positive Hegelian influence. In this context one can also mention the many references to Hegel in the early journals (Stewart 2007e, pp. 98–100). In his library Kierkegaard owned copies of most of the volumes of the influential collected works edition of Hegel’s writings that appeared after Hegel’s death in 1831 (Hegel 1832–1845).9 Kierkegaard also made use of the works of many of Hegel’s students and followers. For example, when he was in Berlin, he attended the lectures of Karl Werder on Hegel’s Science of Logic (Stewart 2007f ).10 The earliest mention of Hegel in a published work by Kierkegaard appears in his first short monograph From the Papers of One Still Living. Here he discusses the issue of the beginning of philosophy, which was thematized above in connection with Fichte. There the young Kierkegaard describes the attempt to make a presuppositionless start to philosophy: If we meet this phenomenon in its most respectable form, as it appears in Hegel’s great attempt to begin with nothing, it must both impress and please us: impress us, in view of the moral strength with which the idea is conceived, the intellectual energy and virtuosity with which it is carried out; please us, because the whole negation is still only a movement inside the system’s own limits, undertaken precisely in the interest of retrieving the pure abundance of existence. (SKS 1, p. 17/EPW, p. 61)

The obvious reference here seems at first glance to be Hegel’s attempt to determine the most basic category with which the system can begin. As is well known from the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, he begins with the category of pure being, which then is negated by

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nothingness and then dialectically sublated in becoming, thus forming the first dialectical triad of the logic. In this account the young Kierkegaard has nothing but praise for this aspect of Hegel’s thought and indeed his methodology in general (see SKS 1, p. 20/EPW, p. 64). It has been suggested that some of this praise can be conceived as directed towards Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who was interested in promoting Hegel’s philosophy in Denmark (Stewart 2007a, pp. 123–134). Heiberg was a powerful figure in Danish cultural life, and for a time the young Kierkegaard courted his favor. Kierkegaard’s master’s thesis, The Concept of Irony is clearly the work where he makes the most extensive use of Hegel (Stewart 1999, 2003, pp. 132–181; 2007b, pp. 564–634; 2011a). Citing extensively the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Lectures on Aesthetics, the Philosophy of Right and Hegel’s review of Solger’s posthumous writings, Kierkegaard makes no attempt to hide his use of Hegel, who was a key source of inspiration for his main theme of the development of irony in the thought of Socrates and German Romanticism. In his analysis of irony in both of these contexts, Kierkegaard closely follows Hegel’s accounts. The young Kierkegaard is thus clearly appreciative of Hegel as a historian of philosophy. Hegel interprets Socrates as a key figure in the development not only of Greek philosophy but of Greek culture in general. While Greek life had long been dominated by a blind obedience to custom and tradition, Socrates enjoined his fellow Athenians to use their critical reason to investigate the world. This inevitably led to conflicts with traditional values and ways of thinking. This struck many people as something threatening since this new principle seemed to undermine everything that Greek life was based on. Most importantly, according to Hegel, Socrates introduced the principle of subjective freedom. Instead of blindly obeying what had been handed down by family or tradition, the individual had the right to decide for himself based on his own judgment. It is in this context that Hegel interprets Socrates’s daimon, the voice in his head that serves as his guide by warning him against doing certain things (SKS 1, p. 211/CI, p. 162). Hegel claims that the daimon represents the first inkling of the recognition of the value of subjectivity and individuality. In contrast to the oracles which were public, the daimon was an individual divinity that spoke only to Socrates. This implied that there was something divine in the human being. But the fact that the daimon spoke exclusively to Socrates struck his fellow Athenians as sacrilegious. Kierkegaard follows Hegel in his analysis of Socrates as introducing a new principle into Greek life. For this reason, he quotes Hegel,11 referring to Socrates as “the founder of morality” (SKS 1, p.  268/CI, p.  225). By

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“morality” here he means the subjective right of the individual, which stands in opposition to what Hegel refers to as Sittlichkeit or the traditional ethical life of the community. This was a defining feature in Kierkegaard’s subsequent thought. In The Moment Kierkegaard says explicitly that he made use of Socrates as a model for his own work (SKS 13, p. 405/M, p. 341; Himmelstrup 1924; Kloeden 1991; Daise 1999; Howland 2006; Stewart 2015a). This might seem surprising at first glance since Kierkegaard is known as a Christian thinker, and it would be fair to ask why he would take a pagan thinker as his model. The key is found in the fact that Socrates represents for Kierkegaard the principle of subjectivity. Although Socrates lived before Jesus, he developed a model for the importance of the individual subject that Kierkegaard developed in his subsequent writings in connection with Christian faith. Given this, in the context of Kierkegaard’s development, the importance of The Concept of Irony as a work should not be underestimated (Söderquist 2007, pp. 201–230). The issue of Socratic irony is the key in Kierkegaard’s analysis. As is well known, Socrates went around Athens asking people about whatever they claimed to have knowledge about. By means of his questioning, he showed that in fact they did not know the things that they claimed but instead were confused. They had accepted certain beliefs uncritically and then, when exposed to critical questioning, were compelled to admit that they were in error. In order to draw out people, Socrates assumed a posture of ignorance, claiming to know nothing. He then humbly asked his interlocutor to teach him what he wanted to know. This flattered the vanity of people and motivated them to tell Socrates what they thought they knew. Socratic irony can be found in his purported claim to ignorance and his flattery of his interlocutor as someone who is in possession of knowledge. We can see in Socratic irony a key source of inspiration for Kierkegaard. Like Socrates’s interlocutors, Kierkegaard’s fellow Danes claimed to be in possession of knowledge, specifically knowledge of Christianity. Kierkegaard, however, believed that what they thought they knew about Christianity greatly diverged from what was actually written in the New Testament. In fact, what passed for Christianity in Denmark was an utterly confused distortion of the actual teachings of Jesus. Kierkegaard thus made use of Socrates’s irony to feign a posture of ignorance, claiming not to know himself what Christianity really is. But then at the same time he, again following the Socratic model, pointed out what he perceived to be the contradictions in the image of Christianity presented by his contemporaries. Thus Kierkegaard appropriated Socratic irony as a methodological tool for his own program.

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The second part of The Concept of Irony concerns the use of irony in the German Romantic writers. Here again Kierkegaard closely follows Hegel’s critical account, giving brief treatments of Fichte, Friedrich von Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck and Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger. These thinkers also claimed to be inspired by Socratic irony which they used to criticize bourgeois values. Instead of issuing their criticism directly, they believed that they could undermine bourgeois thinking more effectively by ironically seeming to go along with it. In this way they could subtly criticize any idea, belief, tradition, custom, or institution that they found reactionary. Hegel never missed an opportunity to criticize the Romantic authors as relativists who rejected any form of objective truth and who thus undermined their own position in a way that was entirely antithetical to true philosophical thinking. Kierkegaard is perhaps slightly more forgiving, but he too rejects Romantic irony as indiscriminate. He writes, “But just as the irony of the Schlegels had passed judgment in esthetics on an encompassing sentimentality, so Hegel was the one to correct what was misleading in the irony. On the whole, it is one of Hegel’s great merits that he halted or at least wanted to halt the prodigal sons of speculation on their way to perdition” (SKS 1, p.  302/CI, p.  265). Kierkegaard sees Romantic irony as unjustified in the following sense. Socrates used irony in a specific historical context in order to introduce and develop the legitimate principle of subjective freedom. By contrast, the Romantics use irony in a flippant and arbitrary manner in order to criticize whatever they like. There is no deeper historical value or mission in their use of irony. At the end of the work, Kierkegaard tries to sketch his own conception of the appropriate form of irony in his own time, which he dubs “controlled irony” (Stewart 2008a, 2012). By this he means that irony should be used not indiscriminately as in the case of the Romantics but rather in a controlled manner. It can be applied effectively in specific cases when one is combatting, for example, corrupt institutions or hypocritical individuals. This use of irony still follows the Socratic spirit and can be used in different contexts as a tool for reform. After his dissertation, Kierkegaard’s interest in Hegel continued. From 1841 to 1842 he read Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (Stewart 2007e, pp.  127–131). Heiberg had developed a theory of dramatic genres, which seems to have interested Kierkegaard. This is perhaps the reason why Kierkegaard’s reading is particularly focused on Hegel’s analysis of drama. As with his use of Hegel in The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard is keen to appropriate specific ideas for his own writing. He thus makes use of Hegel’s interpretation of Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone in his next book, Either/Or (1843). In the chapter “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic of Modern

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Drama,” Kierkegaard has his aesthetic author rewrite Sophocles’s text in order to make it into a modern drama (Stewart 2003, pp. 218–225; Rancher 2014). Here he can be seen as taking up again the main motif of his interpretation of Socrates as the founder of inwardness and subjectivity. In his rewriting of the tragedy, Kierkegaard tries to portray the conflict of the work not as something external, between the family and the state, but rather as something internal, that is, in the mind of Antigone herself. Kierkegaard refers to Hegel again in another chapter of the first part of Either/Or. Specifically, Hegel’s figure of the so-called unhappy consciousness from the “Self-Consciousness” chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit is mentioned in connection with the figure Kierkegaard refers to as “the unhappiest one,” in the chapter of the same name (SKS 2, pp. 215–216/EO1, p. 222). Kierkegaard’s author proposes a contest to determine who is the most unhappy person ever to have lived, and in this context he refers to Hegel’s representative of religious alienation. Presumably at around the same time as he was working on Either/Or, Kierkegaard wrote a satirical work entitled Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus dubitandum est, which he left unfinished. This work satirizes elements of student life at the University of Copenhagen during the time when Hegelian philosophy was a hot trend. In this work, Kierkegaard makes use of the “Consciousness” chapter from Hegel’s Phenomenology (SKS 15, p.  56n/JC, p.  169n). According to Hegel’s analysis, we empirically perceive individual things in the world. These all have the characteristic of being particulars. We thus wish to capture these things to confirm our knowledge of them, and the primary way in which we do this is by means of language. We say that this is a house or a tree, etc. But Hegel notes that in these statements a shift takes place. We perceive particular things, and this is what we mean or intend to describe. But the moment that we verbalize this, the particular character of the thing is lost since the words we use are always universals. He writes, “Immediacy is reality; language is ideality; consciousness is contradiction. The moment I make a statement about reality, contradiction is present, for what I say is ideality” (SKS 15, p. 55/JC, p. 168). The word “house” can in principle refer to any house at all and not just the specific one that I mean. It is thus futile to think that I can capture the particularity of the empirical world in this manner. Kierkegaard seizes on this and, following Hegel, points out the contradiction that appears in consciousness between the awareness of the particular and the attempt to describe it with a universal. Although Kierkegaard did not develop this idea in any depth here in De omnibus, it can be argued that he did make use of it later in The Sickness unto Death, where he sketches a series of forms of despair. In that analysis he

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describes what he calls “spirit” as being characterized by contradictory categories, which stand in a dialectical relation to one another, such as infinity and finitude or eternity and temporality. The finite and the temporal represent the empirical world of particulars that we perceive with the senses. By contrast, infinity and eternity represent the world of names, ideas or universals that we think. Since humans are beings that both perceive and think, we always have both elements in our minds in some way. Although Kierkegaard does not refer to Hegel explicitly in The Sickness unto Death, this can be seen as an echo of Hegel’s original analysis from the Phenomenology. There are very few direct references to Hegel after Either/Or.12 From this it seems clear that Kierkegaard’s main study of Hegel’s primary texts took place during his years as a student and immediately thereafter from around 1838 until 1843. However, this is not to say that Hegel’s ideas are absent from his mind after this time. As in the case just mentioned with The Sickness unto Death, it is possible to identify specific Hegelian ideas that continue to motivate and inspire Kierkegaard even later. The Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) is often hailed as Kierkegaard’s philosophical magnum opus and his tour de force with regard to his critique of Hegel. This is, however, a more complicated matter than it might appear at first glance. What is deceptive here is that Kierkegaard constantly refers to speculative philosophy and to Hegelians, but he almost never mentions Hegel himself explicitly in this text. It has been argued that this can be explained by the fact that these references are best understood to refer to specific figures in the Danish Hegel reception and have little to do with Hegel’s actual works (Stewart 2003, pp. 448–523). In any case, there can be no doubt that in general Kierkegaard made a careful study of many of Hegel’s writings and was inspired by many aspects of his thought. Although it might seem somewhat counterintuitive, his polemical relation to the Danish Hegelians is largely a separate issue.

1.5

Schopenhauer

In Kierkegaard’s general reception of the German idealists, Schopenhauer stands out as a special case in many respects (Davini 2007; Cappelørn et al. 2011). As noted, it was during his years as a student and during the first half of his authorship up until 1846 that Kierkegaard, generally speaking, read the works of the German idealists and was engaged in their thought. By contrast, he only discovered Schopenhauer quite late, that is, in 1854. By the time he read Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard had already clearly developed his own ideas

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and agenda, and so there was little room left for new influence in the way there had been many years earlier when he was reading Hegel and Schelling for the first time. Another idiosyncrasy of Kierkegaard’s use of Schopenhauer is that this comes exclusively in his journals (specifically the journals NB29, NB30, NB32, and NB35) and never in his published writings. In general, Kierkegaard seems quite receptive, lauding Schopenhauer as “an important writer” (SKS 25, p. 352, NB29:95/KJN 9, p. 356).13 He believes that Schopenhauer’s criticism of Christianity might well be valuable (SKS 25, pp. 389–390, NB30:12/KJN 9, pp. 393–394). Looking at what Kierkegaard writes about him, one might be tempted to conclude that it was more Schopenhauer’s eccentric character than his philosophical thought that was attractive to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s assessment of Schopenhauer tends more towards a character analysis than a philosophical discussion. Kierkegaard clearly found in Schopenhauer a kindred spirit. This is counterintuitive since one might think that Schopenhauer’s brazen atheism would immediately alienate him. Indeed, Kierkegaard himself acknowledges this: “despite total disagreement, I have been surprised to find an author who affects me so much” (SKS 25, p. 352, NB29:95/KJN 9, p. 356). But instead Kierkegaard identified with Schopenhauer as something of a loner and an outsider to the academic world. Although in contrast to Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer did briefly hold an academic position, he was, like Kierkegaard, independently wealthy and was thus not dependent on such a position for his livelihood. Kierkegaard praises Schopenhauer’s independence of character in this regard (SKS 25, p.  355, NB29:95/KJN 9, pp.  358–359). Kierkegaard shared with Schopenhauer a rejection of the mainstream university philosophy of the day. Kierkegaard also points out similarities in his writing to Schopenhauer’s style (SKS 26, p. 233, NB32:137.a/KJN 10, p. 236). Instead of seeing Schopenhauer as a source for new ideas, Kierkegaard finds in him a confirmation of some of his own views and opinions.

1.6

Trendelenburg

The tradition of German Idealism is often thought to have ended with Schopenhauer, but recent work has rightly pointed out that in fact this tradition continued well into the second half of the nineteenth century, albeit in a less illustrious form (Beiser 2013). This tradition of late German Idealism includes the philosopher Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, who played an important role for Kierkegaard (Come 1991; Dietz 1992; Purkarthofer 2005; González 2007). It might be easy to dismiss this connection, were it not for Kierkegaard’s

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strikingly positive appreciation of Trendelenburg. Uncharacteristically, Kierkegaard openly acknowledges his use of Trendelenburg (SKS 20, p. 93; NB:132/KJN 4, p. 92; SKS 19, p. 420, Not13:55/KJN 3, p. 418). This has given rise to the question of exactly what it was in Trendelenburg’s thought that Kierkegaard found so attractive. Trendelenburg’s logic or metaphysics seems to have been the main area of interest for Kierkegaard. In the auction catalogue of his library there are two works by Trendelenburg that are particularly relevant, namely, the two-­volume Logische Untersuchungen from 1840 (Nun et  al. 2015, no. 843) and Die logische Frage in Hegel’s System: Zwei Streitschriften (Nun et al. 2015, no. 846). The former might be regarded as Trendelenburg’s magnum opus, which contains an extended criticism of Hegel’s philosophy which Kierkegaard was attentive to (Beiser 2013, pp.  27–68). The latter was a short work, which simply collected two of Trendelenburg’s previously published articles. The word Streitschriften refers to the fact that these articles were polemical responses to some of the critics of Logische Untersuchungen. Kierkegaard seems to take Trendelenburg to represent a contrastive approach to logic to that of Hegel. Trendelenburg thus appears in Kierkegaard’s critical analysis of the dialectic method, which involves a movement from one category to the next (SKS 7, pp.  106–107/CUP1, p.  110). Similarly, Trendelenburg is mentioned in connection with a discussion of the transitions in Hegel’s logic and the role of the concept of existence (SKS 7, p. 274n/CUP1, p. 301n). As was noted above, Kierkegaard idolized Socrates and regarded him as a model. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, this positive disposition is extended to Greek philosophy in general. In that context, Greek philosophy is contrasted to the German philosophy of the day (SKS 7, p.  175/CUP1, p. 191; SKS 7, p. 302/CUP1, p. 331; SKS 7, p. 304/CUP1, p. 333; SKS 7, pp. 280–283/CUP1, pp. 308–311). While Greek philosophy keeps sight of the existential dimension of life and the lived experience of the individual, modern German philosophy loses itself in abstractions and tedious academic games. In the contrast of different approaches to philosophy, Kierkegaard regards Trendelenburg as working in the spirit of the ancient Greek philosophy (SKS 7, pp. 106–107/CUP1, p. 110).14 In a draft Kierkegaard writes “The Greek sobriety is seldom found in the philosophers of our day, and exceptional ingenuity is only a mediocre substitute. Good comments are to be found in Trendelenburg’s Logische Untersuchungen; but Trendelenburg was also shaped by the Greeks” (Pap. VI B 54.21, 150/JP 1, 199). Kierkegaard thus takes Trendelenburg to have managed to avoid the traps of abstraction and to keep his focus on existence.

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There are thus numerous mentions of the individual German idealists in Kierkegaard’s works. Scholars have pointed out many points of influence from them on Kierkegaard. He uses the German idealists like he uses his other sources as points of departure for his own reflections. He finds in them ideas and insights that he can use for his own program. This means that he does not simply make use of them uncritically. Thus, characteristic of Kierkegaard’s use of them is a mixed positive and critical appropriation.

2

Idealism in Kierkegaard’s Thought

Given the many direct and indirect references to the German idealists in Kierkegaard’s work as outlined in the previous section, it seems absolutely irrefutable that the tradition of German Idealism exercised an influence on the development of Kierkegaard’s thought on any number of different points. The open question, however, remains about whether or not he was influenced by the doctrine of “idealism” itself in the one form or another. Does Kierkegaard’s thinking evidence elements of idealism as such? Some scholars have argued that Kierkegaard was an idealist or at least that some elements of idealism can be identified in his work (Gyenge 1996; Stewart 2003; Binetti 2015; O’Neill Burns 2017). While this still must probably be regarded as a minority view, it has been gaining increasing support in recent years. While this interpretation runs against the mainstream of Kierkegaard studies today, it in fact has a longer tradition. Indeed, it can be traced back to Adorno’s influential criticism in Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (Adorno 1933). There Adorno argued that, despite his intentions, Kierkegaard ended up as an exponent of German Idealism. This is an important issue, since if this could be established, then it would represent a much more substantial link between Kierkegaard and existentialism, on the one hand, and the tradition of German Idealism, on the other. It has been argued that idealist elements in Kierkegaard can be found in his most Hegelian text, The Concept of Irony (Stewart 2011a; Söderquist 2007, 2012). Specifically, Kierkegaard’s attempt to give a historical account of the development of the notion of irony closely resembles Hegel’s speculative philosophy of history. As is well known, for Hegel, the driving force in history is not the material conditions, class conflicts, or technological innovations but rather an idea, specifically the idea of subjective freedom (Hegel 2011). He argues that it is possible to trace the development of the idea from the ancient cultures, where it was unknown, up to his own day, when it had become a dominant principle. The key is that freedom is not a thing but rather an idea.

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Kierkegaard can be seen to follow this in his methodological considerations in The Concept of Irony. He explains that he wants to investigate how the idea of irony appears in changed forms in the different historical contexts of ancient Greece (in the philosophy of Socrates) and modern Europe (in the work of the German Romantics). The difficulty in giving a philosophy of history (or even a straightforward history) is of course to examine the vast number of phenomena and actions that constitute history and then to try to give them some general meaning or logos. There is thus always an empirical element and an ideal one. The challenge is to find some abstract explanation principle or idea that does justice to all of the phenomena. Kierkegaard recognizes this and discusses it in his introductory comments. He makes a plea for finding the right balance between the empirical phenomena and the ideal structure proposed by philosophy (SKS 1, pp.  72–73/CI, pp.  10–11). He claims, like Hegel, that ideas can be seen in their historical instantiations and can be traced in their development: “Concepts, just like individuals, have their history and are no more able than they to resist the dominion of time” (SKS 1, p. 71/CI, p. 9). Thus there can be no doubt that Kierkegaard recognizes irony as an idea that is embodied in concrete actions in the world. In this sense his idealism sounds very much like that of Hegel, who claims exactly the same thing with regard to the idea of subjective freedom. Both thinkers clearly believe that these ideas have some kind of truth and reality. A parallel to this can be found in Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est, where, as noted above, Kierkegaard draws explicitly on Hegel’s account of “Sense Certainty” from the Phenomenology of Spirit (SKS 15, pp.  51–59/JC, pp.  161–172).15 Here Kierkegaard distinguishes between the realm of empirical experience and the realm of ideas or “ideality.” Like Hegel, Kierkegaard discusses the tension between these two spheres. Most importantly, he follows Hegel in seeing the necessary dialectical relation between them. Once again, this reveals precisely Hegel’s notion of the Idea, which is, on the one hand, a thought, but, on the other, something instantiated in the real world. Along the same lines, it could be argued that Kierkegaard’s analysis of the concept of “anxiety” displays some of the same characteristics of idealism. In his work of the same name, he analyzes different examples of anxiety which all fall under the concept or idea of anxiety. This seems to imply once again that there is an overarching idea, which is embodied concretely in the thought and actions of specific individuals in the real world. But the fact that it is an idea, like the idea of irony, does not undermine its importance. Kierkegaard’s famous notion of “repetition” can also be regarded as evidence for his idealism (Glöckner 1998; Eriksen 2000; Kemp 2015). A

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repetition involves the comparison of two events that resemble one another. The individual events themselves are, to be sure, particulars, which belong to the realm of empirical experience. However, to put the two together and grasp the one as a repetition of the other requires an act of thought. The concept of repetition is thus an idea that abstracts from some aspects of the empirical experience and focuses on their similarity. The Sickness unto Death is known for its famous analysis of the stages of “despair”: despair as lacking finitude, as lacking infinity, as lacking necessity, as lacking possibility, etc. These are intended to be variants of the general concept or idea of despair. Once again these are embodied by specific individuals in their real lives, and so there is an empirical element involved. However, the key is the idea of despair itself that encompasses all of these variants. This can be seen as another clear idealist element in his thinking. For however much Kierkegaard wants to emphasize the concrete experience of anxiety and despair in the lives of concrete individuals, there seems no escaping the fact that these are ideas in his presentation and analysis, and that it is important for him to define them as ideas. One might also argue that Kierkegaard’s concept of “the moment” reveals exactly the same features of being both an empirical particular and a universal at the same time (McDonald 2014). Every second of our lives could be experienced as a moment, but we can only understand these as individual discrete moments since we have the general concept or idea of the moment in our minds. Kierkegaard frequently plays on this duality, referring to the moment as both something temporal and something eternal. It has also been argued that the key term “spirit” (Aand) from this work can best be interpreted as a form of idealism (Binetti 2015, pp. 29–31). According to Kierkegaard’s account, spirit always contains contrary pairs of concepts that exist in a dialectical tension. This is, however, an idea or thought. This idea does not define any particular person, but qua idea defines human beings in general. Readers are familiar with the reflections of the young Kierkegaard in the summer of 1835 as he contemplated the direction of his life. In his Journal AA he writes the famous words, “What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know….It is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is a truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die” (SKS 17, p. 24; AA:12/KJN 1, p. 19).16 It is interesting to return to this passage and read it in the context of the question of idealism since this text is almost invariably understood to be a statement of Kierkegaard’s budding existentialism. What is striking here is that Kierkegaard does not say that he wants

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to have a particular concrete experience that will serve as the direction of his life. On the contrary, he says that he is searching for an idea. This seems to imply that for him an idea has some deeper reality or status than simply transitory empirical particulars. But what was this idea? When we see this in the context of his later thought, it might be argued that this was the idea of Christianity itself. As is well known, he had a different conception of this from his contemporaries, who, he believed, suffered from the illusion of a watered-down version that eliminated the difficulty and radicality of what he referred to as New Testament Christianity. This is, of course, a major issue both in Kierkegaard’s effort to get his fellow Danes to reflect on their religious beliefs and in his attack on the Danish State Church. While, to be sure, he believed that Christianity also involved an aspect of concrete practice and a specific kind of life in imitation of Christ, nonetheless it is difficult to escape the fact that there is also an idea at work here. In other words, the kind of Christian ethics or life that he wants to promote is clearly grounded in an idea of what Christianity is, and this idea stands in contrast to other competing ideas, such as the version preached by those whom he regards as the corrupt pastors of the Danish Church. This structure of an abstract idea that is embodied or realized in concrete action mirrors exactly Hegel’s notion of the Concept or the Idea. It is a unity of the universal (the thought or idea) and the particular (the concrete action in the world). This is usually taken to be the basic structure of Hegel’s idealism, and so if this same structure is also present in Kierkegaard, the conclusion can only be that he too is an idealist at least in some regard. Thus we should not be misled by his rhetoric about rejecting abstraction and focusing on existence and actuality (Stewart 2010, pp. 94–119; 2011c). Clearly, his point is that precisely the focus on our concrete empirical condition must be informed by ideas, not least of all the idea of Christianity. It might be objected that Kierkegaard’s idealism is not something explicitly stated or argued for in his texts. This can be explained by the fact that his general project was only in part philosophical. In other words, while the German idealists all conceived of themselves primarily as philosophers and were at pains to present philosophical arguments and defend philosophical positions, this was not the case with Kierkegaard. His self-image was more that of a religious writer than as a philosopher (Hannay 1997, 2000; Stewart 2003, pp. 640–652). His project concerned inspiring his fellow Danes to a deeper conception of Christian faith and religiosity. When we see his work from this perspective, it is hardly surprising that he does not try to formulate a philosophical theory of idealism in any explicit way. But this is not to say

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that elements of such a theory are entirely absent. Indeed, as noted here, they are evident for those who care to see them. There is a tendency in the research to emphasize Kierkegaard’s rejection of abstraction and his focus on the concrete lives and concerns of individuals (Stewart 2010, pp. 94–119). A part of this involves a criticism of idealism for dwelling in abstractions and losing touch with the real world. For many years this idea served to calcify the picture of Kierkegaard as a hardened anti-­ Hegelian. This picture is often accompanied by an emphasis on Kierkegaard’s conception of subjective faith in contrast to any form of objective approach (Stewart 2011c). However, with examples like the ones just outlined, it seems clear that the criticism of idealism and abstraction is overstated. In fact, it seems that there are clearly identifiable elements of idealism in Kierkegaard’s thought itself. In The Sickness unto Death (and many of his other works as well), Kierkegaard is critical of people who dwell too much in the real world (characterized by finitude, temporality, necessity) at the expense of the world of thought and imagination (characterized by infinitude, eternity, possibility). It will be noted that this latter world is that of ideas. Kierkegaard has a sustained criticism of the unthinking bourgeois philistine (Spidsborger), that is, the person who is focused entirely on the realm of immediacy, concerned with the trivialities of daily life. Such a person lacks self-reflection and is unable to see what is truly valuable. Kierkegaard criticizes this mindset for complacency with regard to Christian faith. Given this, it seems clear that there is some idealist element in Kierkegaard’s conception of Christian religiosity. Kierkegaard thus occupies a special place as a transitional figure between the broad traditions of German Idealism and existentialism. In a sense he can be seen as having one foot in both camps. This would seem to suggest that the initial assumption of a radical break between German Idealism and existentialism is mistaken.

Notes 1. This appears most clearly in Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism (Sartre 1948, p. 31). See also Sartre’s essay, “Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal” (in Sartre 1979, pp. 141–169) and Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus 1991, pp. 23, 25, 26, 39–41). 2. See also the collections Stewart 2007c, d, 2008b. Mention should also be made of the pioneering work by Wilhelm Anz (1956).

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3. The books that Kierkegaard owned are listed in The Auction Catalogue of Kierkegaard’s Library (Nun et al. 2015). Here the following works by Kant are listed: Critik der Urtheilskraft, 2nd edition, Berlin: F. T. Lagarde 1793 (entry no. 594); Critik der reinen Vernunft, 4th edition, Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch 1794 (entry no. 595); Immanuel Kant’s vermischte Schriften, vols. 1–3, Halle: Rengersche Buchhandlung 1799 (entry nos. 1731–1733) [vol. 4, Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius 1807]. See also Green’s useful overview of Kierkegaard’s sources in this respect (Green 1992, pp. 9–31). 4. The Auction Catalogue of Kierkegaard’s Library (Nun et al. 2015) lists Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s sämmtliche Werke, vols. 1–8, ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Berlin: Veit und Comp. 1845–1846 (entry nos. 489–499); Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s nachgelassene Werke, vols. 1–3, ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Bonn: Adolph Marcus 1834–1835. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, new edition, Berlin: Voss’sche Buchhandlung 1838 (no. 500). 5. This criticism appears several times in this text: SKS 7, pp.  114, 177, 314/CUP1, pp. 117, 193, 306. 6. The Auction Catalogue of Kierkegaard’s Library (Nun et al. 2015) lists the following works: Victor Cousin, Victor Cousin über französische und deutsche Philosophie, trans. from French by Hubert Beckers, with a preface by Schelling, Stuttgart and Tübingen: J.  G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung 1834 (no. 471); F.  W. J.  Schelling’s philosophische Schriften, vol. 1, Landshut: Philipp Krüll 1809 (no. 763); Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode des academischen Studium[s], 3rd unchanged edition, Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung 1830 (no. 764); Schelling, Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürliche Princip der Dinge. Ein Gespräch, 2nd unchanged edition, Berlin: G. Reimer 1842 (no. 765); Karl Rosenkranz, Schelling. Vorlesungen, gehalten im Sommer 1842 an der Universität zu Königsberg, Danzig: Friedrich Samuel Gerhard 1843 (no. 766); Schelling’s Erste Vorlesung in Berlin. 15 November 1841, Stuttgart and Tübingen: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung 1841 (no. 767). 7. See also the reference to Schelling in connection with aesthetics in the second volume of Either/Or: SKS 3, p. 135/EO2, p. 136. 8. Martensen was seen as a promoter of German speculative thought in general. See, for example, his participation in the contemporary debate on speculative mysticism that also played an important role in German Idealism (Šajda 2009, 2012). 9. The Auction Catalogue of Kierkegaard’s Library (Nun et al. 2015) lists the following works by Hegel: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophische Abhandlungen, ed. Karl Ludwig Michelet, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1832, vol. 1 of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe, vols. 1–18, ed. Philipp Marheineke et  al., Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1832–1845 (no. 549); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Schulze, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1832, vol. 2 of Hegel’s Werke (no. 550); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Grundlinien der

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Philosophie des Rechts, oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, ed. Eduard Gans, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1833, vol. 8 of Hegel’s Werke, vols. 1–18 (no. 551); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik, vols. 1–3, ed. Leopold von Henning, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1833–1834, vols. 3–5 of Hegel’s Werke, vols. 1–18 (nos. 552–554); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s vermischte Schriften, vols. 1–2, ed. Friedrich Förster and Ludwig Boumann, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1834–1835, vols. 16–17 of Hegel’s Werke (nos. 555–556); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, vols. 1–3, ed. Karl Ludwig Michelet, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1833–1836, vols. 13–15 of Hegel’s Werke (nos. 557–559); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophische Propädeutik, ed. Karl Rosenkranz, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1840, vol. 18 of Hegel’s Werke (no. 560); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, vols. 1–3, ed. Leopold von Henning, Carl Ludwig Michelet and Ludwig Boumann, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1840–1845, vols. 6–7.2 of Hegel’s Werke (nos. 561–563); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. Nebst einer Schrift über die Beweise vom Daseyn Gottes, vols. 1–2, ed. Philipp Marheineke, 2nd revised edition, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1840, vols. 11–12 of Hegel’s Werke (nos. 564–565); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, vols. 1–3, ed. Heinrich Gustav Hotho, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1835–1838, vols. 10.1–3 of Hegel’s Werke (nos. 1384–1386). 10. Kierkegaard’s notes to Werder’s lectures appear in SKS 19, p. 245, Not8:50/KJN 3, p. 239; SKS 19, p. 246, Not8:52/KJN 3, p. 239; SKS 19, pp. 278–282, Not9:2–9/KJN 3, pp. 274–278; SKS 19, p. 415, Not13:50/KJN 3, p. 413. He also owned a copy of Werder’s book Logik. Als Commentar und Ergänzung zu Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik. Erste Abtheilung, Berlin: Veit und Comp. 1841 This work appears in The Auction Catalogue of Kierkegaard’s Library (Nun et al. 2015) as entry no. 867. 11. Kierkegaard refers to Hegel’s account in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, where one reads, “…it was in Socrates, that at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, the principle of subjectivity—of the absolute inherent independence of thought—attained free expression. He taught that man has to discover and recognize in himself what is the right and good, and that this right and good is in its nature universal. Socrates is celebrated as a teacher of morality, but we should rather call him the inventor of morality” (Hegel 1944, p. 269). 12. For example, in Fear and Trembling (SKS 4, pp. 148–149/FT, p. 54), Practice in Christianity (SKS 12, p. 96/PC, p. 87). 13. See also SKS 25, pp.  389–390, NB30:12/KJN 9, pp.  393–394; SKS 26, pp. 141–142, NB32:35/KJN 10, pp. 140–141.

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14. Trendelenburg authored and edited works on ancient philosophy. The Auction Catalogue of Kierkegaard’s Library (Nun et al. 2015) lists Erläuterungen zur den Elementen der aristotelischen Logik, zunächst für den Unterricht in Gymnasien Berlin: Bethge 1842 (no. 845). (ed.) Platonis de ideis et numeris doctrina ex Aristotele illustrata, Leipzig: Vogel 1826 (no. 842). (ed.) Elementa logices Aristotelicae: in usum scholarum ex Aristotele excerpsit, convertit, illustravit, [new revised edition], Berlin: Bethge 1836 (no. 844). (ed.) Aristotelis de anima libri tres. Ad interpretum græcorum auctoritatem et codicum fidem recognovit commentariis illustravit, Jena: Walz 1833 (no. 1079). 15. See Stewart 2003, pp. 268–288. 16. It should be noted that it has been argued that it is a mistake to interpret this passage as a genuine self-reflection since this comes from what was a draft of an unfinished epistolary novel that Kierkegaard was supposedly writing. This is, however, a broader question that cannot be taken up in this context, but suffice it to say that this view has by no means met with general acceptance. See Fenger 1980, pp. 81–131.

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Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen, Lore Hühn, Søren R.  Fauth, and Philipp Schwab, eds. 2011. Schopenhauer – Kierkegaard: Von der Metaphysik des Willens zur Philosophie der Existenz, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 26. Berlin: De Gruyter. Come, Arnold B. 1991. Trendelenburg’s Influence on Kierkegaard’s Modal Categories. Montreal: Inter Editions. Czakó, István. 2007. Feuerbach: A Malicious Demon in the Service of Christianity. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 25–47. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2012. Die kritische Rezeption der Philosophie Hegels in der dänischen Debatte über die Unsterblichkeit. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, pp. 235–266. Daise, Benjamin. 1999. Kierkegaard’s Socratic Art. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press. Davini, Simonella. 2007. Schopenhauer: Kierkegaard’s Late Encounter with His Opposite. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 277–291. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dietz, Walter. 1992. Trendelenburg und Kierkegaard. Ihr Verhältnis im Blick auf die Modalkategorien. Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, vol. 34, 30–46. Eriksen, Niels Nymann. 2000. Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 5. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Evans, C. Stephen. 1992. Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments”. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Fendt, Gene. 1990. For What May I Hope? Thinking with Kant and Kierkegaard. New York: Peter Lang. Fenger, Henning. 1980. Kierkegaard, The Myths and Their Origins: Studies in the Kierkegardian Papers and Letters. Trans. George C. Schoolfield. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Fremstedal, Roe. 2014. Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest Good: Virtue, Happiness, and the Kingdom of God. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2015. Kierkegaard’s Use of German Philosophy: Leibniz to Fichte. In A Companion to Kierkegaard, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 58, 36–49. Malden, MA, Oxford, and Chichester: Blackwell. Glöckner, Dorothea. 1998. Kierkegaards Begriff der Wiederholung. Eine Studie zu seinem Freiheitsverständnis, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 3. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. González, Darío. 2007. Trendelenburg: An Ally Against Speculation. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 309–334. Aldershot: Ashgate. Grage, Joachim. 2008. Hotho: A Dialogue on Romantic Irony and the Fascination with Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries,

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Tome III, Literature and Aesthetics, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 139–153. Aldershot: Ashgate. Green, Ronald M. 1992. Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. ———. 2007. Kant: A Debt Both Obscure and Enormous. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 179–210. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Green, Ronald M., and Mary Jean Green. 2011. Simone de Beauvoir: A Founding Feminist’s Appreciation of Kierkegaard. In Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 9, 1–21. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Grøn, Arne. 1997. Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Gyenge, Zoltán. 1996. Kierkegaard és a német idealizmus (Kierkegaard and German Idealism). Szeged: Ictus. Hackel, Manuela. 2011. Jean-Paul Sartre: Kierkegaard’s Influence on His Theory of Nothingness. In Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 9, 323–354. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Hannay, Alastair. 1997. Why Should Anyone Call Kierkegaard a Philosopher? In Kierkegaard Revisited: Proceedings from the Conference “Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It,” Copenhagen, May 5–9, 1996, Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Jon Stewart, vol. 1, 238–253. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 2000. Kierkegaard and What We Mean by ‘Philosophy’. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8: 1–22. Hegel, G.W.F. 1832–1845. Hegel’s Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe, ed. Ludwig Boumann, Friedrich Förster, Eduard Gans, Karl Hegel, Leopold von Henning, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, Philipp Marheineke, Karl Ludwig Michelet, Karl Rosenkranz, and Johannes Schulze, vols. 1–18. Berlin: Verlag von Duncker und Humblot. ———. 1944. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. New York: Willey Book Co. ———. 2011. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822–3, ed. and trans. Robert F.  Brown and Peter C.  Hodgson, with the assistance of William G.  Geuss. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hennigfeld, Jochem, and Jon Stewart, eds. 2003. Kierkegaard und Schelling. Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 8. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Himmelstrup, Jens. 1924. Søren Kierkegaards Opfattelse af Sokrates. En Studie i dansk Filosofis Historie. Copenhagen: Arnold Busck. Hong, Howard V. 1997. Three Score Years with Kierkegaard’s Writings. In Kierkegaard Revisited: Proceedings from the Conference “Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning

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It”, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Jon Stewart, vol. 1, 1–12. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Howland, Jacob. 2006. Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hühn, Lore. 2009. Kierkegaard und der Deutsche Idealismus. Konstellationen des Übergangs. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Hühn, Lore, and Phillipp Schwab. 2013. Kierkegaard and German Idealism. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison, 62–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, David, and Douglas Moggach. 2007. Bruno Bauer: Biblical Narrative, Freedom and Anxiety. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome II, Theology, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 1–21. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kangas, David. 2007. J.G.  Fichte: From Transcendental Ego to Existence. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 49–66. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kemp, Ryan. 2015. Repetition. In Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome V, Objectivity to Sacrifice, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald, and Jon Stewart, vol. 15, 225–230. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1909–1948. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. Ed. P.A.  Heiberg, V. Kuhr, and E. Torsting. Vols. 1–16. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. (Cited by volume number and entry number with the customary abbreviation Pap.) ———. 1967–1978. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. Ed. and Trans. Howard V.  Hong and Edna H.  Hong. Vols. 1–7. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. (Cited by volume number and entry number with the customary abbreviation JP.) ———. 1978–2000. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Trans. Howard V.  Hong and Edna H. Hong. Vols. 1–26. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation KW.) ———. 1980a. The Concept of Anxiety. Trans. Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. KW, vol. 8. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation CA.) ———. 1980b. The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. KW, vol. 19. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation SUD.) ———. 1983. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Howard V.  Hong and Edna H.  Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983. KW, vol. 6. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation FT.) ———. 1985a. Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. KW, vol. 7. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation JC.)

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———. 1985b. Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. KW, vol. 7. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation PF.) ———. 1987a. Either/Or 1. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. KW, vol. 3. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation EO1.) ———. 1987b. Either/Or 2. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. KW, vol. 4. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation EO2.) ———. 1988. Stages on Life’s Way. Trans. Howard V.  Hong and Edna H.  Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. KW, vol. 11. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation SLW.) ———. 1989. The Concept of Irony; Schelling Lecture Notes. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989. KW, vol. 2. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation CI.) ———. 1990. Early Polemical Writings: From the Papers of One Still Living, Articles from Student Days, The Battle Between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars. Trans. Julia Watkin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. KW, vol. 1. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation EPW.) ———. 1991. Practice in Christianity. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991. KW, vol. 20. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation PC.) ———. 1992. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992. KW, vol. 12.1. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation CUP1.) ———. 1997–2012. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, and Alastair McKinnon. Vols. 1–28, K1– K28. Copenhagen: Gad Publishers. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation SKS.) ———. 1998. The Moment and Late Writings. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. KW, vol. 23. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation M.) ———. 2007. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. Ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H.  Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian Söderquist. Vols. 1–11. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. (This work is referenced by its standard abbreviation KJN.) Kloeden, Wolfdietrich von. 1991. Kierkegaard und Sokrates. Sören Kierkegaards Sokratesrezeption, Schriftenreihe der Evangelischen Fachhochschule Rheinland-­ Westfalen-­ Lippe. Vol. 16. Rheinland-Westfalen-Lippe: Evangelische Fachhoch-schule. Knappe, Ulrich. 2004. Theory and Practice in Kant and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 9. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

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Kosch, Michelle. 2006. Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koslowski, Peter. 2007. Baader: The Centrality of Original Sin and the Difference of Immediacy and Innocence. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 1–16. Aldershot: Ashgate. Løkke, Håvard, and Arild Waaler. 2009. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Traces of Kierkegaard’s Reading of the ‘Theodicy’. In Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 5, 51–76. Aldershot: Ashgate. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. McCarthy, Vincent. 2011. Martin Heidegger: Kierkegaard’s Influence Hidden and in Full View. In Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 9, 95–125. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. McDonald, William. 2014. Moment. In Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome IV, Individual to Novel, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald, and Jon Stewart, vol. 15, 173–181. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Nun, Katalin, Gerhard Schreiber, and Jon Stewart. 2015. The Auction Catalogue of Kierkegaard’s Library, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources. Vol. 20. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. O’Neill Burns, Michael. 2017. Kierkegaard, Fichte and the Subject of Idealism. Russian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities 1 (2): 135–154. Olesen, Tonny Aagaard. 2003. Kierkegaards Schelling. Eine historische Einführung. In Kierkegaard und Schelling. Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit, ed. Jochem Hennigfeld and Jon Stewart, 1–102. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 2007. Schelling: A Historical Introduction to Kierkegaard’s Schelling. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 229–276. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pattison, George. 2007. D.F. Strauss: Kierkegaard and Radical Demythologization. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome II, Theology, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 233–257. Aldershot: Ashgate. Phillips, Dewi Z., and Timothy Tessin, eds. 2000. Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion, Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Basingstoke: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin Press. Purkarthofer, Richard. 2005. Trendelenburg. Traces of a Profound and Sober Thinker in Kierkegaard’s Postscript. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, pp. 192–207. Rancher, Shoni. 2014. Antigone: The Tragic Art of Either/Or. In Kierkegaard’s Literary Figures and Motifs, Tome I, Agamemnon to Elvira, Kierkegaard Research:

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Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, vol. 16, 49–64. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rapic, Smail. 2007. Ethische Selbstverständigung. Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit der Ethik Kants und der Rechtsphilosophie Hegels, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 16. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Rasmussen, Anders Moe. 2009. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: Two Theories of the Leap. In Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 5, 33–49. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rosenau, Hartmut. 2007. I.H.  Fichte: Philosophy as the Most Cheerful Form of Service to God. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 49–66. Aldershot: Ashgate. Šajda, Peter. 2009. Does Hegelian Philosophy of Religion Distort Christian Dogmatics and Ethics? (The Debate on Speculative Mysticism). Acta Kierkegaardiana 4: 64–83. ———. 2012. Martensen’s Treatise Mester Eckart and the Contemporary Philosophical-Theological Debate on Speculative Mysticism in Germany. In Hans Lassen Martensen. Theologian, Philosopher and Social Critic, Danish Golden Age Studies, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 47–72. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. Philip Mairet. Brooklyn: Haskell House. ———. 1979. Between Existentialism and Marxism. Trans. John Mathews. New York: Pantheon Books. Schreiber, Gerhard. 2013. Die philosophische Verflüchtigung des Glaubensbegriffs. Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, pp. 345–376. Schulz, Heiko. 2007a. Rosenkranz: Traces of Hegelian Psychology and Theology in Kierkegaard. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome II, Theology, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 161–196. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2007b. Marheineke: The Volatilization of Christian Doctrine. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome II, Theology, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 117–142. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2009. Germany and Austria: A Modest Head Start. The German Reception of Kierkegaard. In Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 8, 307–419. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Söderquist, K. Brian. 2007. The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s “On the Concept of Irony”, Danish Golden Age Studies. Vol. 1. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel. ———. 2012. Contemplative History vs. Speculative History: Kierkegaard and Hegel on History in On the Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, pp. 101–116.

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———. 2015. Kierkegaard and Existentialism: From Anxiety to Autonomy. In A Companion to Kierkegaard, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 58, 83–95. Malden, MA, Oxford, and Chichester: Blackwell. Stan, Leo. 2011. Albert Camus: Walled within God. In Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 9, 63–94. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Stern, Robert. 2012. Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, Jon. 1999. Hegel’s Presence in The Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, pp. 245–277. ———. 2003. Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007a. A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome I, The Heiberg Period: 1824–1836, Danish Golden Age Studies. Vol. 3. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel. ———. 2007b. A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome II, The Martensen Period: 1837–1842, Danish Golden Age Studies. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel. 3. ———, ed. 2007c. Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources. Vol. 6. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———, ed. 2007d. Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome II, Theology, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources. Vol. 6. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2007e. Hegel: Kierkegaard’s Reading and Use of Hegel’s Primary Texts. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 97–165. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2007f. Werder: The Influence of Karl Werder’s Lectures and Logik on Kierkegaard’s Thought. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 335–372. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2007g. Carl Daub: Kierkegaard’s Appropriation of a Hegelian Sentry. In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome II, Theology, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 53–78. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2008a. Heiberg’s Speculative Poetry as a Model for Kierkegaard’s Concept of Controlled Irony. In Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker, Danish Golden Age Studies, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 5, 195–216. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel. ———, ed. 2008b. Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome III, Literature and Aesthetics, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources. Vol. 6. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2009. France: Kierkegaard as a Forerunner of Existentialism and Poststructuralism. In Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 8, 421–474. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate.

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———. 2010. Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-­ Century European Philosophy, Continuum Studies in Philosophy. New York and London: Continuum International Publishing. ———. 2011a. Hegel’s Historical Methodology in The Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, pp. 81–100. ———. 2011b. Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion and the Question of ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ Hegelianism. In Politics, Religion and Art: Hegelian Debates, ed. Douglas Moggach, 66–95. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2011c. Kierkegaard and Hegel on Faith and Knowledge. In The Blackwell Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 501–518. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2011d. The Notion of Actuality in Kierkegaard and Schelling’s Influence. Ars brevis anuari de la Càtedra Ramon Llull Blanquerna (Barcelona) 17: 237–253. ———. 2012. Kierkegaard’s Enigmatic Reference to Martensen in The Concept of Irony. In Hans Lassen Martensen: Philosopher and Speculative Theologian, Danish Golden Age Studies, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 6, 219–238. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. ———. 2015a. Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015b. Kierkegaard’s View of Hegel, His Followers and Critics. In A Companion to Kierkegaard, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 58, 50–65. Malden, Massachusetts, Oxford, and Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. ———. 2019. Faust, Romantic Irony, and System: German Culture in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Danish Golden Age Studies. Vol. 11. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Taylor, Mark C. 1980. Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Thompson, Curtis L. 2009. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Appropriating the Testimony of a Theological Naturalist. In Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions, Tome I, Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 5, 77–112. Aldershot: Ashgate. Thonhauser, Gerhard. 2011. Über das Konzept der Zeitlichkeit bei Søren Kierkegaard mit ständigem Hinblick auf Martin Heidegger. Freiburg and Munich: Alber. Thulstrup, Niels. 1967. Kierkegaards forhold til Hegel og til den spekulative idealisme indtil 1846. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. (English Translation: 1980. Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel. Trans. George L. Stengren. Princeton: Princeton University Press). Thulstrup, Marie Mikulová. 1982. Baader. In Kierkegaard’s Teachers, Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, ed. Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, vol. 10, 170–176. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel. Verstrynge, Karl. 2004. The Perfection of the Kierkegaardian Self in Regulative Perspective. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, pp. 473–495.

10 “The Honeymoon of German Philosophy”: Nietzsche and German Idealism Daniel Conway

Nietzsche’s primary point of engagement with the tradition of German Idealism was his reception—initially, quite positive—and subsequent evaluation—eventually, quite negative—of Kant’s defense of his founding distinction between reality and appearance. Already familiar with Plato’s various attempts to draw a similar distinction, in defense of a kindred expression of idealism, Nietzsche preferred to recast Kant’s founding distinction in terms of the contested relationship between the “true world” and the “apparent world.” As we shall see, doing so allowed Nietzsche to situate Kant’s idealism—and, by extension, German Idealism more broadly—in a far more sweeping historical context. At least initially, Nietzsche preferred Kant’s idealism to Plato’s, in large part because Kant’s idealism maintained only a minimal commitment to the characterization of ultimate, objective reality. Whereas Plato furnished the “true world” with various forms and essences, knowledge of which was attainable by those philosophers who managed to escape the hindrances and distractions of the “apparent world,” Kant, or so Nietzsche understood, simply acknowledged the Ding an sich without attempting to characterize it. Despite this initially favorable reception, as we shall see, Nietzsche eventually determined that Kant’s idealism, like Plato’s before it, was implicated in the perpetuation

D. Conway (*) Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_10

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of a dangerous, décadent “myth” or “fable,” on the strength of which the world of becoming has been deemed inhospitable to the task of sustaining a meaningful human existence.

1

Nietzsche’s Influences

The recipient of a classical education at Schulpforta, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) approached his university studies in Bonn with the ambivalent intention of pursuing a degree in theology.1 After deciding instead on a course of study in classical philology, which claimed much of his time and attention, he developed (or renewed) an interest in philosophy, which, owing to his other obligations, he pursued as an autodidact.2 He likely received his formal introduction to German Idealism in 1865, when he enrolled in Schaarschmidt’s survey course on the history of philosophy, “Pre-Socratics to Kant.”3 Around the same time, he is believed to have undertaken a serious study of Karl Fortlage’s Genetic History of Philosophy Since Kant.4 Later in 1865, Nietzsche transferred to Leipzig to pursue a course of study in classical philology. In October or November of that year, he happened upon a copy of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in a Leipzig bookshop.5 By all accounts, including his own, he immediately became a “Schopenhauerian” (Young 2010, p.  81),6 going so far as to hail Schopenhauer as his “master” (Blue 2016, pp. 223–224). Although his discovery of Schopenhauer was in every respect a turning point in his life, it is especially important for our present purposes because Schopenhauer provided Nietzsche with a lucid (if partisan) interpretation of Kant and a possible (if not entirely plausible) characterization of the Ding an sich.7 According to Schopenhauer, the Ding an sich is in fact the will, the rumblings of which afford us an oblique, non-cognitive, somatic connection to ultimate reality.8 Nietzsche’s discovery and embrace of Schopenhauer thus enabled him to deepen his understanding of Kant’s idealism, albeit indirectly, and at the expense of receiving the imprint of Schopenhauer’s idiosyncratic interpretive aims. In this respect, it is hardly surprising that Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer before him, would focus his critical attention on Kant’s distinction between reality and appearance and his “failure” to characterize the Ding an sich. The influence of Schopenhauer only intensified when, in 1868, Nietzsche made the acquaintance of Richard Wagner, himself an avowed Schopenhauerian.9 In the summer of 1866 Nietzsche discovered F.  A. Lange’s History of Materialism,10 in which he was introduced to an interpretive approach that would come to inform the neo-Kantian school in German philosophy. This

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event was important not only for acquainting Nietzsche with yet another appreciation of Kant’s philosophy, but also for alerting him to the possibility of a promising philosophical alternative to the tradition of German Idealism (Beiser 2014, pp.  356–359). Rather than follow Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, et al. in working within the idealist framework established by Kant, Lange sought to revisit (and revise) Kant’s founding distinction between reality and appearance, with the specific intention of accommodating the most recent advances in the natural sciences.11 From Lange, Nietzsche learned that an acceptable alternative to Kant’s idealism would involve attempting to banish the troublesome distinction between reality and appearance.12 Inasmuch as human beings are blessed with no cognitive routes of access to the matter or stuff of ultimate reality, Lange proposed to dispense with any talk or concern about things as they are in themselves, independent of the organizing principles and constructive properties of the mind (Stack 1983, pp. 202–204).13 As Stack makes this point on Lange’s behalf, “It is perfectly possible to eliminate the idea of things in themselves and still retain meaningful knowledge and scientific advance” (Stack 1983, p. 203). Under Lange’s influence, Nietzsche also rejected Schopenhauer’s characterization of the Ding an sich (Young 2010, p. 91), opting instead to develop a hybrid position that would combine elements of both idealism and materialism (Stack 1983, pp. 90–98), along the lines of the “material idealism” developed by Lange (Stack 1983, pp. 95–102). Finally, Lange’s influence is also evident in Nietzsche’s receptivity to the science-friendly criticisms lodged and developed by several Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophers whom he subsequently encountered (or re-encountered), including Kuno Fischer, Otto Leibmann, Gustav Teichmüller, and Afrikan Spir.14 As presented to Nietzsche by Schopenhauer and Lange, Kant’s “failure” thus appeared to be both inexplicable and avoidable. Of course, the concern here is not simply that Nietzsche received from Schopenhauer and Lange a derivative, pre-formed interpretation of Kant’s idealism. The particular interpretation he received is also objectionable to some readers. Nietzsche’s view of Kant is broadly consistent, for example, with what Henry Allison has identified as the “standard picture” of Kant’s transcendental idealism, which, according to Allison, fails to capture either the aspirations or the achievements of his project in the Critique of Pure Reason (Allison 1983, pp. 3–13). In the writings from Nietzsche’s “early” period (1872–1876), Kant receives a generally favorable and respectful hearing, owing in no small part to a consistent pairing with Schopenhauer. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy From the Spirit of Music (1872), Nietzsche praises the “extraordinary courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer…in gaining the most difficult

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victory…over the optimism concealed in the essence of logic” (Nietzsche 1967, p. 112). This victory, he proceeds to explain, “inaugurated…a culture” that he “ventured to call a tragic culture” (Nietzsche 1967, p. 112), the stewardship of which, he hoped, would fall to Richard Wagner. Nietzsche later came to regret such words, explaining in 1886 that he had “tried laboriously to express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulae strange and new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s spirit and taste!” (Nietzsche 1967, p.  24). In one such “formula,” scholars have detected what they take to be Nietzsche’s attempt, mediated by Schopenhauer, to reproduce Kant’s basic distinction between reality and the world of appearances.15 While accounting for the experience of the Dionysiac, Nietzsche writes, “Each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity [Ur-eine]” (Nietzsche 1967, p. 37).16 In the writings from Nietzsche’s “middle” period (1876–1882), which scholars often characterize as a flirtation with positivism, Kant’s idealism receives mixed reviews. In Human, All-Too-Human, for example, Nietzsche wonders if Kant perhaps belongs among the ranks of those “obscurantists” who “darken the understanding” by arranging for it to “appear in a veil of light” (Nietzsche 1986, pp. 220–221). (As we shall see, he later develops this line of criticism by impugning Kant as a dabbler in the dark arts.) In Daybreak, Nietzsche avers that “to demand that duty must always be something of a burden—as Kant does—means to demand that it should never become custom and habit” (Nietzsche 1982a, p.  163). Concealed in this imperious “demand,” he notes, “is a remnant of ascetic cruelty” (Nietzsche 1982a, p. 163). As these complaints suggest, he has grown increasingly uncomfortable with the extended ramifications of Kant’s idealism, to the point that he now questions whether ulterior motives are at work in Kant’s philosophy. In the writings from Nietzsche’s “mature,” i.e., post-Zarathustran, period (1886–1887), Kant is subjected to outright ridicule for being “old,” quaint, out of date, and generally representative of a philosophical status quo that will (and should) not endure. No longer paired with Schopenhauer, Kant is made to bear the brunt of Nietzsche’s dissatisfactions with traditional approaches to philosophical inquiry. In Beyond Good and Evil, for example, Nietzsche snickers at the “stiff and decorous Tartuffery of the old Kant as he lures us on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his ‘categorical imperative’” (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 13).17 Later, he names Kant and Hegel as exemplary of those “philosophical laborers” whom he (faintly) praises for their preparatory efforts in anticipation of the advent of “genuine philosophers,” who, he assures us, will gladly

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shoulder the burdens of legislation and command (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 136). In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche pokes fun at Kant for finding “beauty” in that “which gives us pleasure without interest” (Nietzsche 1989b, p. 104), which he chalks up to Kant’s allegiance to the ascetic ideal (Nietzsche 1989b, pp. 155–156). In the writings from 1888, his final year of sanity, Nietzsche escalates his ridicule of Kant into full-blown invective. In Twilight of the Idols, for example, Nietzsche outs Kant as “an underhanded Christian,” while exposing his “division of the world into a ‘true’ one and an ‘apparent’ one” as “a symptom of the decline of life” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 484). In The Antichrist, he includes “Kant and so-called German philosophy” among those “enemies” in whom he “despise[s]…every kind of conceptual and valuational uncleanliness, of cowardice before every honest Yes and No” (Nietzsche 1982c, p.  654). Kant’s signal contribution to this “uncleanliness,” the Ding an sich, is identified not simply as a regrettable error of the kind philosophers typically commit, but as “the horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 495). Rounding into view here is the judgment that Kant’s idealism is not simply risible, but actually dangerous, inasmuch as it props up an increasingly untenable philosophical status quo. As this brief introduction indicates, Nietzsche’s direct and firsthand knowledge of Kant’s philosophy was minimal.18 While some think that he may have read and studied Kant’s Critique of Judgment,19 scholars are generally agreed that he acquired his (limited) familiarity with Kant from other sources. As Thomas Brobjer reports, “There is no work by Kant in Nietzsche’s library, and almost certainly Nietzsche never owned any work by Kant” (Brobjer 2008, p.  37). Indeed, scholars are generally agreed that Nietzsche’s reception of Kant’s idealism was both derivative of other sources and colored by the partisan interpretations and evaluations of other thinkers.20 In the words of Tom Bailey, “Nietzsche’s relationship with Kant was broad and dynamic, mediated by secondary sources, often left implicit and undecided, and not always fair to Kant himself ” (Bailey 2013, pp. 134–135). Perhaps the most noteworthy consequence of Nietzsche’s second-hand reception of Kant’s idealism is its likely contribution to his decision to forego a serious, first-hand engagement with the most influential of Kant’s heirs and critics in the tradition of German Idealism.21 His mature writings rarely mention the successor idealisms developed, respectively, by Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, despite their standing in the pantheon of German philosophy, and it is possible that he had imbibed Schopenhauer’s disdain for what he regarded as their speculative foolishness (Houlgate 1986, pp. 24–29).22 When Nietzsche does name these successor idealists, moreover, he typically mentions them in

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passing,23 subjects them to faint praise, or dismisses them in summary fashion, as if German Idealism itself were a philosophical dead end or, even worse, a comic misadventure. As we shall see in the next section, in fact, Nietzsche suggests in his mature writings that German Idealism amounts to a kind of youthful infatuation orchestrated by none other than Kant himself. This is not to say, of course, that no other points of contact with German Idealism can be identified in Nietzsche’s philosophy. For example, he was generally opposed (and occasionally hostile) to the speculative turn that he and others associated with the tradition of German Idealism. He was similarly critical of the teleological view of history favored by Hegel, whom he mocked for believing that “the climax and terminus of the world-process coincided with his own existence in Berlin” (Nietzsche 1983, p. 104). He roundly criticized the teleological historians whom he associated with the “Hegelian” school (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 104–107),24 and he absolutely excoriated Eduard von Hartmann—that “rogue of rogues”—for producing “a parody of world history” (Nietzsche 1983, p. 109).25 This opposition to teleology did not stop him, however, from helping himself on occasion to an account of history that predicted an outcome favorable to his guiding allegiances.26 For all of his animosity toward expressions of the undeserved optimism arising from teleological treatments of history, he rests his own “genealogy of morality” on an appeal to a seemingly wondrous (and suspiciously Hegelian) process of Selbstaufhebung, on the strength of which he then concludes his own forecast for “the next two centuries in Europe” on a cautiously “hopeful” note (Nietzsche 1989b, p. 161). Finally, although he was concerned with many of the issues and problems that are central to the tradition of German Idealism—e.g., the nature and limits of freedom, the constitution of the ego or self, the construction of our knowledge of the world, the proper bounds of reason and science, etc.—he is perhaps best described as having pursued these issues and problems along a track that afforded him very few opportunities for productive convergence or contact. In this respect, his reception of a second-hand, pre-formed interpretation of Kant’s “failure” appears to have been decisive.

2

The Prejudices of Kantian Philosophy

Nietzsche devotes Part One of Beyond Good and Evil (1886) to a survey of the “prejudices” (Vorurtheile) that have motivated various philosophers and philosophies of influence. Having earlier floated the “supposition” that philosophers to date have been inept lovers of truth, ill suited to the pursuit of those

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truths that might invite or require a more creative and elaborate courtship (Nietzsche 1989a, pp. 1–3), he aims in Part One to reveal the unacknowledged assumptions and untested presuppositions at work in major philosophical traditions and schools. Following a more general consideration of “the eagerness and subtlety…with which the problem of ‘the real and apparent world’ is today attacked all over Europe” (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 16), he zeroes in on Kant, who, we know, distinguished sharply between the worlds of reality and appearance, while insisting nonetheless that the Ding an sich is and shall remain unknowable. Nietzsche begins his analysis by noting the lengths to which Kant’s philosophical heirs have gone in their efforts “to divert attention from the actual influence Kant exerted on German philosophy” (Nietzsche 1989a, p.  17, emphasis added). In particular, he notes their determination to “ignore”— prudently, he adds—the pride, verging upon narcissism, which Kant’s critical project manifests: “Kant was first and foremost proud of his table of categories; with that in his hand he said: ‘This is the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics’” (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 17). According to Nietzsche, that is, Kant recommended his table of categories not only on the strength of the validity (or plausibility) of his proffered deduction, which was and remains a disputed matter, but also as a token of his mastery of the difficulties he encountered along the way. While his deduction of the categories was (and is) hailed as an important step toward the restoration and/or reinforcement of human pride more generally, it is Kant’s own pride—for he alone completed the difficult deed in question—that compels Nietzsche’s attention here. In effect, that is, Nietzsche proposes to illuminate a second, as-yet-unacknowledged vector of influence, which will permit his readers to account more honestly for Kant’s seminal contributions to the constitution and development of German Idealism. In other words: Even if it is the case that Kant was genuinely interested in erecting a firewall that materialism and determinism would never breach, thereby sealing the spheres of human freedom and dignity against the encroachments of modern science, the altruism implied by this noble endeavor also bespeaks a robust egoism. Nietzsche traces Kant’s pride to its source in his (supposed) discovery of “a new faculty in man, the faculty for synthetic judgments a priori,” the exercise of which would allow for the practice of science and, possibly, of metaphysics.27 According to Nietzsche, Kant’s pride was communicated to the “younger generation” of philosophers and theologians, who were inspired in turn to discover “faculties” of which they, too, could be proud (Nietzsche 1989a, p.  18). Although he does not say so explicitly, the implication here is that Kant’s expression of pride in the difficulty of his achievement licensed his

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eager disciples to overlook or set aside any concerns they might (or should) have had with his actual arguments. Thus ensued the period Nietzsche calls “the honeymoon of German philosophy” (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 18), which is his term of disdain for the heyday of German Idealism. Nietzsche avails himself in this section of the hyperopic historical perspective that is characteristic of his post-Zarathustran writings. His general aim in this Part of Beyond Good and Evil is to achieve a measure of critical distance from the philosophers and philosophies under consideration, so that their enabling “prejudices” may emerge in sharper, bolder relief. Representative of this approach is his attempt in this section to account in social and cultural terms for both the initial reception of Kant’s philosophy and its impact over the longer term, including its seminal role in the development of German Idealism. The guiding idea here is that a proper reckoning of the relevant historical and social conditions will position him and his readers to account for both the rise and the fall of the (naïve) excitement surrounding Kant’s supposed victory over materialism and determinism. Nietzsche proceeds to describe two distinct periods in the career of modern German philosophy28: First, the “honeymoon of German philosophy,” wherein “all the young theologians of the Tübingen seminary went into the bushes—all looking for ‘faculties’” (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 18); and second, a post-honeymoon (=  stale marriage?) period, wherein formerly enthusiastic idealists, having grown older, have come to realize that the humanity-­ redeeming “faculties” in question were but “repetitions” of the question they were supposed to have answered (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 18). In other words, these no-longer-young acolytes have realized that Kant “discovered” the faculties in question by elaborately helping himself to them. By following his lead, they now understood, they had done likewise. Having situated the influence of Kant’s idealism in its proper historical context, Nietzsche proceeds to survey the expanse of post-Kantian German philosophy. In doing so, he attempts to account for the influence of Kant not simply as a function of the philosophical sophistication and rigor he displays, but also of his timely satisfaction of the psychological-emotional needs of a nervous, agitated century. Faced with the uncertainties attendant to political upheaval and the rise of modern science, Kant’s disciples, and especially the still-religious Tübingen seminarians, needed a champion of morality, someone who could stake out and defend a realm in which human beings may know themselves to be free from the determination of natural laws and material forces and causes—a realm, in short, in which they too might feel the pride expressed by the great Kant.29 To the delight of his impressionable readers, or so Nietzsche offers, Kant claimed to have discovered the

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“faculties”—heretofore unknown and uncharted—that empower human beings to preserve a space of resistance and an occasion for the pride he so magnificently displayed. In accounting for the nature of Kant’s actual influence on the development of German philosophy, which, as we have seen, philosophers have been reluctant to acknowledge as such, Nietzsche gestures here toward the unhealthy, extra-philosophical bond that developed between Kant and the “younger generation” of philosophers and theologians. On the one hand, he suggests that Kant exploited the naïve, yearning enthusiasm of this “younger generation,” whose members, he knew or intuited, would respond with a rousing validation of the pride he communicated to them. On the other hand, Nietzsche insinuates that Kant’s heirs among the German idealists were (to some unspecified extent) willing parties to this exploitation, owing to their anxieties with respect to those advances in the natural sciences that threatened to nullify their claims to freedom and dignity. Had they acknowledged the depth of their vulnerability, of their own need to feel proud once again, they might have received Kant’s too-good-to-be-true deduction of the categories with an appropriate measure of philosophical consideration (or even skepticism). But this they did not (and perhaps could not) do. Imbued with the spirit of romanticism, they formed the “youthful” wish to believe in the desired efficacy of the “faculties” discovered by Kant. The apparent fulfillment of this wish buoyed them for a time, as they happily pledged themselves, in “eager rivalry,” to the difficult task of discovering and cataloging the “faculties” that would restore their pride (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 18). As this profile confirms, Nietzsche understood German Idealism as a movement united not only by a common set of philosophical commitments and concerns, but also, and more fundamentally, by the common need (or desire) to restore pride in humanity, even at the expense of a potentially humiliating commitment to a human nature endowed with a bounty of as-yet-undiscovered “faculties.” He thus likens the tradition of German Idealism to a “dream,” conjured by Kant and communicated by him to the “younger generation,” in which the threat posed to their humanity by the materialistic and deterministic impulses of modern science is heroically repelled (Nietzsche 1989a, p.  18). As characterized, of course, German Idealism cannot be considered a promising ground on which the future of “German philosophy” will rest.

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Virtus Dormitiva

Nietzsche’s point here is twofold: First, Kant’s solution to the “problem of the real world and the apparent world,” which Nietzsche here reduces to the discovery of a suite of wondrous “faculties,” is no solution at all. As Nietzsche sees it, Kant’s appeal to these “faculties” simply restates the problem in a temporarily satisfying way: How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? Vermöge eines Vermögens—or, as Kaufmann offers in his translation, “by virtue of a virtue,” “by means of a means,” and so on (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 18, n. 12). To drive home this point, Nietzsche compares the “faculties” discovered by Kant and his epigones to the virtus dormitiva conjured by Molière’s duplicitous physicians (in Le malade imaginaire) to account for the sedative properties of opium (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 19).30 As this unflattering comparison suggests, Kant is presented as a sham healer while the German idealists are portrayed as willing dupes, perhaps even as hypochondriacs. Deploying Molière-grade satire, Nietzsche thus reduces the whole of German Idealism, at bottom an “exuberant and enthusiastic movement,” to a youthful infatuation (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 18). Rather than “take it seriously,” much less “treat it with moral indignation,” Nietzsche determines that German Idealism belongs in comedy, alongside Molière’s satires (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 19). Second, and more seriously, Nietzsche observes that Kant has asked and answered (or not) the wrong question: [I]t is high time to replace the Kantian question, “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” by another question, “Why is belief in such judgments necessary?”—and to comprehend that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course, be false judgments for all that….Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life. (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 19)

The pivot Nietzsche recommends, to the question of “why belief in such judgments is necessary,” attests to the influence of Lange, as does the decisive final sentence in the passage cited above.31 Rejecting altogether the perceived need, which he ascribes to Kant, to establish the possibility of true beliefs, Nietzsche contends that “only…the belief in their truth is necessary” (Nietzsche 1989a, p.  19). In other words, holding out for beliefs that are verifiably true—as opposed to settling for beliefs that are verifiably believed to be true—is presented here as antithetical to the spirit of idealism (or of what Lange called “material idealism”).32

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If we wish to build a genuinely idealist theory of knowledge, Nietzsche apparently means to say, we would do well to resist the siren song of perspective-­ independent truth and accommodate ourselves instead to the “visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life” (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 19). As this rebuke of Kant is apparently meant to convey, the position known as “perspectivism,” the precise characterization of which is a source of contention among Nietzsche scholars, is preferable to any elaboration of idealism that suffers itself to be contoured by a “true world” (or Ding an sich) that is in principle and in fact unknowable.33 As presented, this historically contextualized diagnosis of Kant is meant to implicate the whole of German Idealism. If Kant is guilty (as charged) of posing and pursuing the wrong question, then all those who follow in his footsteps—Nietzsche calls out Schelling by name—are similarly involved in barking (however proudly) up the wrong tree. Indeed, his throwaway reference to “the young theologians of the Tübingen seminary,” whose ranks included Schelling and Hegel, may be meant (and can be taken) as a shorthand designation for German Idealism as a whole. The effect of this throwaway reference is to provide rhetorical confirmation of what Nietzsche understands to be the unhealthy, infantilizing influence of Kant on the development of German Idealism. His characterizations of Kant as “old,” and of the unsuspecting, impressionable Tübingen seminarians as “young,” serve to cast Kant in the villainous role of the pied piper, who enthralls the young with a tale that will ensure their ongoing devotion via the “rivalry” he has sparked between (and among) them. Indeed, here we are invited to think of Kant in the predatory mold of the erotic Socrates, whom Nietzsche all but convicts of the charge of corrupting the youth of Athens (Nietzsche 1982b, pp. 478–479).34 Like Socrates, whom Nietzsche describes as having “fascinated by appealing to the agonistic impulse of the Greeks,” and as having “discovered a new kind of agon” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 477), Kant appealed to the gnawing anxiety of the “younger generation” by apprising them of a new kind of “faculty,” the discovery and exercise of which, he promised, would allay their discontents and restore their pride. Like Socrates, whom Nietzsche accuses of wielding his irony to cultivate the loyalty and dependency of his youthful interlocutors, Kant is described here as attaching significant (albeit invisible) strings to his gift of the table of categories. Just as Socrates recruited his interlocutors to confirm in their own lives the success of his self-medicating prescription of hypertrophic reason (Nietzsche 1982b, pp. 477–478), so Kant aimed to see his pride replicated—and, so, validated— in his youthful disciples. In both cases, moreover, Nietzsche documents an immediate period of euphoria, punctuated by claims of success, followed by a

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predictable collapse of excitement and a sobering realization. In both cases, that is, what was promised (and, initially, hailed) as a cure turned out to be an alternate manifestation of the affliction it was supposed to treat.35

4

Kant and/as the Ascetic Priest

There are echoes here as well of Nietzsche’s profile of the ascetic priest, who, compelled by his own illness to infect the wounds he is tasked to dress, excites his unsuspecting clients at the expense of their long-term health.36 According to Nietzsche, the ascetic priest urged the unfortunates entrusted to his care to scan their souls for the cause(s) of their suffering (Nietzsche 1989b, pp. 126–128). Here we learn that Kant similarly urged the “younger generation” to look within themselves for evidence of the “faculties” that would secure for them an inviolable sphere of freedom and dignity. And just as the priest’s impressionable (= desperate) clients claimed to find in their souls the causes (e.g., unpaid debts, broken promises) of their suffering, so the “young theologians” whom Kant mobilized were able to discover within themselves the “faculties” he had encouraged them to find. Schelling, we learn, went so far as to discover a “faculty for the ‘suprasensible,’” which he called “intellectual intuition” (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 18). Nietzsche’s disdain (or sympathy) for the German idealists is crystallized in his joking reference to their lack of familiarity with the distinction between finden and erfinden: emboldened by the example set by Kant, they invented the “faculties” they claimed to have discovered. The same may be said of those sufferers whom the ascetic priest persuaded to turn their gaze inward: they, too, invented the “sins” (and, subsequently, the “guilt”) they claimed to have discovered in their souls. As this comparison with the ascetic priest is meant to suggest, Nietzsche presents the actual influence of Kant as that of an ersatz healer, who correctly diagnosed in others the depletion of pride that had led him to undertake the difficult task of deducing the table of categories.37 Only ever able to dispense “affect medication,” the priestly Kant enrolled his youthful clients in a temporarily exhilarating search for “faculties,” the discovery and exercise of which, he promised, would secure the bases of their self-respect and thereby restore their pride in their humanity. And although it cannot be denied that they derived transient bursts of pride from the rigor and tenacity with which they conducted their own search for “faculties,” the benefits that accrued to them were predictably short lived and costly to their well-being. As they grew older and wiser, they realized that the “faculties” in question were phantoms, wills

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of the wisp, utterly useless to them in their (meek) efforts to resist the totalizing impulse of modern science. As is generally the case with the ministrations of the priestly type, these flashes of insight and realization arrived too late in the game. The priest is believed to be a healer because the therapies he prescribes are destined to habituate his clients not to the salvation or cure he promised them, but to the faux salvation or cure he actually can and does deliver. In the vernacular: the priests have perfected the technique of bait-and-switch, by means of which they capture the attention of their clients and subsequently adjust (= lower) their expectations to conform to their prospects. So, too, for Kant, at least on Nietzsche’s interpretation: Although the pride he displays to the “younger generation” can and will be theirs, its actual source lies elsewhere than in the spheres of freedom and dignity that modern science threatens to extinguish. If Nietzsche’s comparison is apt, however, Kant’s failure to discover a faculty for synthetic judgments a priori is not the end of the story. As the ascetic priest fashioned his chastened charges into a tranquil, misery-loving herd, thereby transforming hopeless sufferers into goal-directed sinners, he chanced upon the realization that these pliant sinners could be mobilized in the service of grander (and darker) ends—most notably, his long-simmering campaign of revenge against the knightly-aristocratic nobles. Upon orchestrating the “orgies of feeling” that he reserved for “guilty” sinners (Nietzsche 1989b, pp. 139–141), the ascetic priest deputized his guilt-besotted charges, authorizing them to accost wellborn nobles and apprise them ad nauseam of their crimes.38 Thus arose the “slave revolt in morality” (Nietzsche 1989b, pp. 33–34), masterminded by the ascetic priest and carried out by the “guilty” sinners whom he had weaponized. If Kant is understood to have cut a similarly priestly figure, we may expect to learn that he, too, acted on ulterior motives to further his predatory aims. Nietzsche’s concern with Kant’s priestly role in the constitution of German Idealism is conveyed most vividly by his occasional characterizations of Kant as the guardian of a “secret path” to freedom, pride, and dignity. After leveling this charge in Beyond Good and Evil, he picks up the thread of this criticism in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). As he explains there, the price of passage along the “secret path” illuminated by Kant is that one must agree to partake—philosophically, of course—of the pride modern science derives from its efforts to dislodge human beings from their presumed place at the center of the cosmos (Nietzsche 1989b, pp. 153–156). This is the very same pride, we should note, that produced in Kant’s disciples the agitation that led them to seek him out in the first place. Wary of the formidable explanatory power of modern science, and despairing of its cavalier attitude toward morality,

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religion, spirituality, and all other vestiges of the pre-scientific world-view, they eagerly received Kant’s invitation to discover (and exercise) the “faculties” that would revive their claims to self-respect and restore their pride. In other words, Kant bade his young followers to do as he had done, and to validate his pride in the bargain. He encouraged them to derive their renewed sense of pride from their seconded assertions of scientific contempt for humanity, i.e., from the rigor with which they denied to human beings (including themselves) the self-respect that formerly vouchsafed their importance in an otherwise indifferent cosmos. According to Nietzsche, that is, Kant derived his sense of pride from the unrivaled stringency of the asceticism to which he subjected himself, which is why he trumpeted the “difficulty” of his deduction of the categories. In effect, Kant turned against himself the contempt of humanity that is encoded in the practice of modern science. He took pride in no longer being the kind of creature for whom pride was considered viable, and he communicated this pride, albeit shrouded in priestly euphemisms, to the younger generation. This, in a nutshell, is the unspoken truth of Kant’s predatory influence on the development of “German philosophy.” While no doubt effective in the short run, this diversionary gambit cannot be judged to deliver a serious challenge either to modern science or to the ascetic ideal lurking at its core (Nietzsche 1989b, pp. 153–156). As with all priestly ministrations, Kant’s idealism produced in its adherents a merely transient experience of freedom and agency, which was delivered to them at a prohibitive cost to their health and welfare. As their excitement subsided, the “young theologians” whom he had mobilized reverted in exhaustion to their former condition of uncertain agitation. Having accepted his invitation to indulge their science-inspired contempt of humanity, moreover, they were likely to be more concerned than ever with their status and place in a world increasingly reduced to configurations of inert matter. What is even worse, they finally may have realized that they had allowed themselves to be enrolled in a philosophical enterprise that actually served to reinforce, rather than challenge or disrupt, the worst impulses—e.g., materialism, determinism, nihilism, asceticism, etc.—of modern science. Formerly convinced that they were fighting for their souls against the incursions of modern science, they now understood that they had been recruited and dispatched as agents of (and apologists for) modern science. As we shall see in the next section, in fact, Nietzsche treats Kant’s formative influence on the development of German Idealism as emblematic of his ideological support for an increasingly untenable philosophical status quo.

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The Décadence of “German Philosophy”

Nietzsche thus attributes the influence of “German philosophy” to the appeal it holds for an undistinguished and motley clientele, which includes “the noble idlers, the virtuous, the mystics, artists, three-quarter Christians, and political obscurantists of all nations” (Nietzsche 1989a, p. 19). (He elsewhere offers a similar (and similarly spiteful) explanation of the influence of Wagner, whose priestly appeal, he insists, was inversely related to the health and strength of his admirers.39 In both cases, and in others as well, Nietzsche attempts to account for a quantitatively impressive sphere of influence while casting doubt on the general quality of those who fall within this sphere.) Here we encounter what emerged in Nietzsche’s post-Zarathustran writings as his go-to diagnosis of late modern European culture: Without saying so explicitly in this section, though he does so elsewhere, he judges the whole of “German philosophy” to be a décadence movement, by which he means a coordinated (but unacknowledged) effort to provide comfort, relief, diversion, and meaning to a tribe, people, nation, or multitude that has begun its inevitable descent from the apex of its cultural preponderance. Other décadence movements identified by Nietzsche in his post-Zarathustran writings include Christianity, Wagnerism, imperialism, anti-Semitism, feminism, and democracy. The leaders of these movements typically prey upon the weak and infirm by issuing irresponsible promises of redemption and orchestrating artificially amplified experiences of freedom and agency. Everywhere he turns, it seems, Nietzsche encounters shadowy priestly types ministering to those who by all rights should be allowed to suffer in peace.40 It is in the context of his diagnosis of European décadence that Nietzsche occasionally juxtaposes Kant and Goethe. As he explains, “What [Goethe] wanted was totality; he fought against the disjunction of reason, sensuality, feeling, will, preached in the most repulsively scholastic way by Kant, his antipode); he disciplined himself into a whole [Ganzheit], he created himself ” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 554). Nietzsche’s comparison of Kant with Goethe sheds additional light on his diagnostic profile of German Idealism. Despite encouraging his “youthful” followers to aspire to lives predicated of wholeness, of which they could be legitimately proud, Kant surreptitiously groomed them to settle for lives predicated of permanent disjunction, of which they could be, at best, temporarily and falsely proud. Writ large, this fanciful juxtaposition of Goethe and Kant informs Nietzsche’s more general understanding and evaluation of nineteenth-century European culture. Whereas Goethe represents what might have been, had the

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nineteenth century aspired in fact (and not merely in theory) to the totality and wholeness he embodied, Kant represents what in fact transpired, as the nineteenth century embraced his recipe for affirming the non-negotiable disjunction that was its lot.41 In other words, the example set by Goethe was too grand for Nietzsche’s contemporaries, while the example set by Kant fit them all too well. For this reason, Nietzsche wonders if we should regard “the nineteenth century, especially at its close, [as] merely an intensified, brutalized eighteenth century, that is, as a century of décadence” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 555). In sum, Nietzsche exposes Kant’s idealism as an exercise in décadent philosophy. In his pursuit of an unobjectionable end—the restoration of human pride—Kant latches onto any means available to reassure the rising generation of German philosophers and theologians of the validity of their claims to freedom and dignity. Lacking access to any real or genuine “faculties,” the discovery of which might have enabled “German philosophy” to repel or counter the advance of modern science, Kant had no choice but to appeal, underhandedly, to the authority of science, which trades, as Nietzsche explains, on its contempt for the folk psychology pertaining to freedom, faith, God, the soul, salvation, and so on (Nietzsche 1989b, pp. 154–156). In effect, Nietzsche claims, Kant “delivered” his followers from the twin threats of determinism and materialism by deputizing them in his campaign to limit the reach of human knowledge and aspiration. Like him, they took pride in policing the bright lines drawn by the critical philosophy and in debunking familiar appeals to formerly authoritative bases of self-respect. As a décadence movement, Nietzsche advises, the Kant-inspired search for humanity-redeeming “faculties”—aka “German Philosophy”—must be relegated to the domain of comedy, alongside Molière’s satires. True to form, Nietzsche concludes his diagnosis of German Idealism by implicating the whole of “German philosophy” in an effort, presumably unwitting, to put to sleep the senses that had been aroused and agitated in the previous century (Lampert 2001, pp. 39–40). The serious work of philosophy, represented here by the question Nietzsche proposes in place of Kant’s question, has been conducted, and will be continued, elsewhere.42

6

The History of an Error

Nietzsche’s final word on the subject appears in Twilight of the Idols (1888), where he outlines “The History of an Error,” over the course of which the “true world” has become (i.e., has been revealed to be) a “myth” or “fable.” As

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we know from his earlier remarks in Twilight, he interprets the positing of the “true world” as symptomatic of the decay that afflicts those philosophers and sages who are responsible for launching and maintaining the “error” in question (Nietzsche 1982b, pp. 479–480). What is important for our present purposes is that he also attempts to place German Idealism in the larger context of the history of Western philosophy, which he presents as a progression through various stages in the ongoing negotiation (and renegotiation) of the distinction between reality (the “true world”) and appearance (the “apparent world”). The transition from Stage 1 to Stage 2 of this progression transports us from the “dogmatism” of Plato (Nietzsche 1989a, pp. 1–2) to the advent of Christianity. Nietzsche thus escorts his readers from the confident attestations of the ancient sages to the promise, extended by the wily priests, that someday “the sage, the pious, the virtuous man” will attain the truth (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 485). The experience of truth as an immediate, spontaneous expression of one’s very being—e.g., “I, Plato, am the truth”—thus gives way to the experience of one’s estrangement, whether temporary or permanent, from the “true world” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 485). In Stage 3 of this progression we arrive at Nietzsche’s evaluation of Kant’s position.43 Owing to the progress of reason, especially within the gathering paradigm of modern science, the “true world” is now acknowledged to be “unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 485). At the same time, however, the “very thought of ” the true world is held to betoken “a consolation, an obligation, an imperative” (Nietzsche 1982b, p.  485). Despite being acknowledged to be “unpromisable,” that is, the “true world” is promised nonetheless, even if unwittingly (or “underhandedly”).44 Here Nietzsche alludes to the contradiction-cum-temptation that he locates at the heart of Kant’s idealism. If the idea of the “true world” (or Ding an sich) is retained, despite heartfelt assurances that it is in fact unknowable, this idea eventually will acquire and impart an indirect metaphysical (or religious) significance. As characterized here, Kant’s idealism is understood to appeal to those who, like the anxious Tübingen seminarians, feel torn between the competing claims of science and religion. They will be made whole, albeit only temporarily and at great expense to their health, by those scholars, e.g., Kant, who have usurped the role of the priests as guardians of the secret pathways to the “true world.” Again referencing the legacy of Plato’s idealism, Nietzsche wryly observes that German Idealism worships “the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 485).45

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If we may assume that Kant stands here (as he does elsewhere) for the whole of German Idealism, at least as Nietzsche was inclined to engage with its animating concerns, we may conclude that Nietzsche views the German idealists as stranded and stalled between the promissory Christianity described in Stage 2 and the dawning of “positivism” in Stage 4 (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 485). The placement of Kant in Stage 3 of this progression furthermore confirms Nietzsche’s contention that German Idealism represents but a chapter in the much longer historical unraveling of the fabulous idea of the “true world.” As such, Nietzsche believes, German Idealism may be understood to have served, like Platonism and Christianity before it, as a historically specific—and, so, disposable—vehicle for the will to truth, which, he explains, draws its impetus from a heretofore unacknowledged faith in truth (Nietzsche 1989b, pp.  151–153). Hence the irony of Kant’s famous vow to limit the jurisdiction of reason in order to make room for faith: According to Nietzsche, the pursuit of truth always has been (and will continue to remain, even within the newly rigorous practice of science) an expression of a civilization-defining faith in the redemptive power of truth (Nietzsche 1989b, pp. 151–153). And although Kantians might protest that this is not the faith for which Kant sought to make room, Stage 2 in this progression identifies faith in the God of Christianity as a derivative (and veiled) expression of the will to truth (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 485). Nietzsche’s reference to “positivism” in Stage 4, along with his characterization of its alleged triumph in Stage 5, signals the end of the historical relevance of German Idealism in the progression he describes. Having tarried ever-so-­ briefly with Kant and his successor idealists, reason has moved on. The triumph of positivism, Nietzsche explains, lies in its articulation of the insight that the “true world” is “an idea which has become useless and superfluous— consequently, a refuted idea” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 485). Drawing the conclusion that was prefigured, or so Nietzsche believes, in Kant’s initial formulation of his idealism, the positivists propose to “abolish” the idea of the “true world” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 485), thereby following through on their general promise to reject any idea or proposition that fails to pass scientific muster. Although he is not named here, August Comte is very likely the “positivist” whom Nietzsche has in mind. Elsewhere in Twilight, Nietzsche finds Comte guilty by association, for he is said to have “found his inspiration” in De imitatio Christi, by Thomas à Kempis. The proof of this “inspiration,” Nietzsche explains, is evident in Comte’s wish “to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the detour [Umweg] of science” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 515), which is an oblique reference to the “religion of humanity” that Comte believed was compatible with his elaboration of positivism.46 Not unlike Kant, that is, Comte wished

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to restrict the jurisdiction of science in order to make room for a kind of faith, even if doing so required him, again like Kant, to conduct his followers along a previously untested pathway. If Nietzsche is correct, moreover, Comte’s “religion of humanity,” had it ever come to fruition, would have been powerless to repel the (supposedly unwanted) metaphysical-theological-­ eschatological accretions that his positivism had so firmly and scrupulously ruled out of bounds.47 Indeed, Nietzsche’s larger point here is that the abolition of the “true world” will not suffice to abolish the metaphysical-religious impulse that motivated its fabrication in the first place. (Here, I would argue, Nietzsche is closer to Kant’s actual position than he would care to acknowledge. But that is an argument for another occasion.) In other words, the positivists may have succeeded in discrediting this version of the “true world,” but they have failed as yet to identify, much less master or vanquish, the will to truth that Nietzsche identifies as responsible for the creation of this and all other versions of the “true world.” As the example of Comte may be meant to demonstrate, moreover, the positivists are at risk of relaxing their signature vigilance, for they are prepared neither to anticipate nor to identify the successor versions of the “true world” that are bound to arise. Despite Comte’s assurances, or so Nietzsche apparently believes, his envisioned “religion of humanity” eventually would have sprouted and nourished a “true world” of its own making, owing to the will to truth operative within positivism itself. In other words, the positivists are in all likelihood destined to remain stranded at Stage 4 of the progression Nietzsche describes. The emerging complexity of Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s idealism may help to explain the intensity of his hostility toward the Ding an sich. Having earlier focused his attention on the seemingly obvious logical blunder involved in maintaining a metaphysical commitment to an inaccessible ultimate reality, Nietzsche may feel rather foolish for missing what he now understands to be the bigger picture. As he now realizes, Kant implicated himself in the cultural project of propagating the foundational “myth”—here we might prefer the word ideology—pertaining to the non-negotiable (or fated) estrangement of humanity from reality itself. The “error” in question, around which the prophylactic “fable” grew and consolidated itself, concerned the conjecture that humanity’s true home lay not in the world of flux and becoming but in another world, a “true” world, in which, it was believed, the impermanence and imperfections of becoming would be redeemed (Nietzsche 1982b, pp. 479–481).48 If we can never come to know reality with the unshakeable certainty that characterizes our grasp of, e.g., abstract geometry, or so goes a familiar version of the myth, we cannot consider our mortal existence to be

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sufficiently meaningful so as to warrant our ongoing volitional investments in its indefinite continuation. With respect to this “error,” Nietzsche now realizes, the canard of the Ding an sich served as an effective distraction. Like other philosophers before and after him, Nietzsche had been content to challenge Kant on the question of the meaningfulness of a metaphysical commitment to an unknowable reality, as if that were the most important issue at hand, while largely neglecting (or perhaps even accepting) the underlying assumption (or “myth”) that human beings are not at home in the real world. Nietzsche’s acquired habit of referring to Kant as “old,” predatory, and priestly, especially in relationship to the “young” theologians who fell under his spell, thus reflects his understanding of Kant as an ideologue, i.e., as an unwitting champion of a status quo resistant to change. Accordingly, Nietzsche pays short shrift to the tradition of German Idealism, implicating its leading lights—unfairly, to be sure—in the diversionary swindle perpetrated by Kant. Much like Marx and Engels in their own takedown of German philosophy, Nietzsche dismisses German Idealism as exerting a conservative (or contractionary) force on the development of philosophy and the advancement of humanity. According to Nietzsche, as we have seen, the real work of post-Kantian philosophy thus falls to those “legislators and commanders,” the philosophers of the future, to whom Nietzsche assigns the task of reclaiming the reality (Wirklichkeit) of the world of becoming. Here we gain additional insight into Nietzsche’s curious ambivalence toward the Kantian Ding an sich, which he criticizes, alternately, for promoting an indefensible attachment to an unknowable ultimate reality and as blocking a genuine (if arduous) route of access to ultimate reality.49 As a metaphysical commitment, which is the form in which Nietzsche initially encountered it, the Ding an sich detracts from an otherwise bold formulation of idealism. As an ideological construct, which is the form in which Nietzsche eventually came to receive (and revile) it, the Ding an sich exaggerates the limitations of the world of becoming, prompting nervous, death-fearing mortals to flee the only reality to which they are assured access. It is in this latter role that the Ding an sich may be said to perpetuate the “myth” or “fable” in question.

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Conclusion

Finally, it bears noting that “The History of an Error” appears in a book in which Nietzsche identifies himself (and signs off) as “the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus” (Nietzsche 1982b, p.  563). What this benediction means, among other things, is that he wishes to renew his commitment to a tragic appreciation of the real world, i.e., the world of becoming, which he may achieve (and apparently has done so) by becoming one with the “eternal joy” it manifests (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 563).50 That we cannot know reality with the certainty that attaches to our knowledge of other, more abstract domains need not be an objection to the world of becoming, especially for those who, following Dionysus, affirm the impermanence of becoming as yet another “seduction” to the finite, painful, mortal existence they have been granted. For our purposes, that is, Nietzsche’s assertion of his Dionysian discipleship means that he intends to reclaim and bear witness to a tragic (i.e., limited, partial, immersive, and perspective-dependent) mode of access to the real world. The flux of becoming, which philosophers and sages have either cursed or fled, simply is the ultimate reality of which we uneasily partake. Nietzsche’s Dionysian world-view qualifies as tragic not because it denies human beings access to the real world (or ultimate reality), which is the position he attributes to Kant, but because the access it acknowledges is available only to those who, secure in their mortality, have affirmed (and not merely tolerated) their place, their home, in the world of becoming. Put somewhat crudely: there is plenty of truth to be had in the real world, i.e., the world of becoming, but not enough, and none of the desired redemption-grade, to exempt anyone from its impermanence and imperfection. Indeed, even if reality (Wirklichkeit) cannot be known through the conceptual organization of perceptual inputs that delivers our world(s) of experience, its impress upon us can be apprehended, acknowledged, witnessed, suffered, and, by the best among us, affirmed.

Notes 1. Hayman 1982, pp.  58–60; Young 2010, pp.  51–53; and Blue 2016, pp. 187–194. 2. Brobjer 2008, pp. 48–50; and Blue 2016, p. 205. 3. Hayman 1982, pp. 60–62; Brobjer 2008, pp. 22, 47; and Blue 2016, p. 216. 4. Hayman 1982, pp. 60–62; Brobjer 2008, pp. 22, 47; and Blue 2016, p. 216.

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5. Hayman 1982, pp. 72–73; Brobjer 2008, pp. 28–32; Young 2010, p. 81; and Blue 2016, pp. 216–219. 6. See also Hayman 1982, pp. 72–77; and Blue 2016, pp. 216–221. 7. Hayman 1982, pp.  72–73; Young 2010, pp.  82–83, and Blue 2016, pp. 218–220. 8. See Young 2010, pp.  82–85; Blue 2016, pp.  216–221; and Beiser 2016, pp. 30–35. 9. Hayman 1982, pp. 99–101, 108–109; Young 2010, pp. 76–78, 95; and Blue 2016, pp. 300–301. 10. Hayman 1982, pp. 86–88; Brobjer 2008, pp. 32–36; Young 2010, pp. 89–90; Blue 2016, pp. 236–241. 11. Hayman 1982, pp.  86–88; Young 2010, pp.  89–90; and Blue 2016, pp. 241–242. 12. Stack 1983, pp.  217–223; Hussain 2004, pp.  350–355; Young 2010, pp. 89–90; and Blue 2016, pp. 236–243. 13. See also Hayman 1982, pp. 86–88; and Blue 2016, pp. 237–240. On Lange’s failure to eliminate the thing-in-itself, see Beiser 2014, pp. 379–381. 14. See Brobjer 2008, pp. 37–39, 49–51; Blue 2016, pp. 222–223; and Bailey 2013, pp.  138–141. For instructive treatments of Spir’s influence on Nietzsche, see Green 2002, pp.  46–53; Hussain 2004, pp.  341–350; and Clark and Dudrick 2012, pp. 16–22. 15. See, for example, Stack 1983, pp. 196–197; and Bailey 2013, pp. 136–138. 16. Later in BT, Kant receives credit for exposing the unwarranted “elevat[ion of ] the mere phenomenon, the work of maya, to the position of the sole and highest reality” (BT 18). 17. Kant is called (or depicted as) “old” in BGE 11, 188, 210; and GM II:6. The provocative claim that Kant “lures his readers onto dialectical bypaths” is reprised in GM III:26 and A 55. 18. According to Brobjer 2008, “We have no definite evidence of Nietzsche’s firsthand reading of Kant between 1869 and 1887, although his references to him in the early 1870s may suggest such reading” (p. 38). 19. See Hill 2003, pp. 20–21; Brobjer 2008, pp. 36–37; and Blue 2016, p. 222. Bailey (2013, p. 134) remains skeptical. 20. See Hill 2003, pp. 13–20; Brobjer 2008, pp. 36–39; Blue 2016; Young 2010; Bailey 2013; and Loeb 2019, pp. 110–113. 21. Here I follow Houlgate 1986, pp. 24–26; Brobjer 2008, 32–36; Young 2010, pp. 89–91; Blue 2016, pp. 238–243; and Bailey 2013, pp. 135–139. 22. On Schopenhauer’s criticism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel (among others) as “servants of religion and the state,” see Beiser 2014, pp. 415–418. 23. Hegel, for example, consistently appears in various iterations of Nietzsche’s list of German (and/or European) philosophers of note. With the notable exception of Nietzsche’s tirade against the “Hegelian” school of teleological

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historiography (Nietzsche 1983, pp.  100–107), we find very little direct engagement with the principles of Hegel’s idealism. 24. For a detailed reconstruction and analysis of Nietzsche’s critique of “Hegelianism,” see Jensen 2016, pp. 127–135. On Hartmann’s understanding of his relationship to the tradition of German Idealism, see Beiser 2016, 122–129. 25. I am indebted here to Jensen 2016, pp.  135–143. According to Brobjer, Nietzsche read Eduard von Hartmann intensively in 1869–1870 (Brobjer 2008, p. 52). 26. In his review of his “good books” in Ecce Homo, he says of The Birth of Tragedy that it now “smells offensively Hegelian” to him, inasmuch as “the antithesis of the Dionysian and the Apollonian…is sublated [aufgehoben] into a unity” (Nietzsche 1989b, pp. 270–271). This particular criticism is nowhere to be found in “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” which he added as a Preface to the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy. 27. See Hill 2003, pp. 20–24. 28. Here I follow Lampert 2001, pp. 38–40. 29. That Kant was aware of the role of modern science in eroding the basis of human pride is explained at Nietzsche 1989b, pp.  155–156. That Kant addressed this erosion by adopting the “priestly” approach described in BGE 11, enrolling the “younger” generation in a pride-swelling search for humanity-­redeeming “faculties,” is Nietzsche’s own contribution. 30. See Lampert 2001, pp. 39–40; and Clark and Dudrick 2012, pp. 73–80. 31. Here I follow Stack 1983, pp. 208–218. 32. For a characterization of Nietzsche as a kind of idealist, see Guyer and Horstmann 2018. 33. Here I follow Stack 1983, pp. 203–206; Green 2002, pp. 95–99; Hussain 2004, pp. 345–350; and Clark and Dudrick 2012, pp. 80–85. 34. See Conway 2017, pp. 46–51. 35. In the context of his attempt to account for “the problem of Socrates,” Nietzsche remarks that the “means” chosen by “philosophers and moralists” to “extricat[e] themselves from décadence…is but another expression of décadence” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 478). 36. See Ridley 1998, pp. 44–50; and Conway 2008, pp. 112–122. 37. I am indebted here to Loeb 2019, pp. 98–103. 38. See Ridley 1998, pp. 54–57; and Conway 2008, pp. 128–134. 39. See Conway 2012, pp. 294–299. 40. On the question of Nietzsche’s “philanthropy” toward the weak and infirm, see Reginster 2006, pp. 260–263. 41. See Loeb 2019, pp. 110–113. 42. Clark and Dudrick forward the intriguing suggestion that Nietzsche aims in BGE 11 “to establish himself—as opposed to both the naturalizers of Kant

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and the idealists who invented more ‘faculties’—as Kant’s true heir” (Clark and Dudrick 2012, p. 85). See also Guyer and Horstmann 2018. 43. Here I follow Hussain 2004, pp. 340–344; and Bailey 2013, pp. 138–141. 44. Here we recall that Nietzsche came to see Kant as “an underhanded Christian” (Nietzsche 1982b, p. 484), a sentiment confirmed by the stage of the progression under consideration. 45. See, for example, BGE 48, where Nietzsche also invokes the image of the “pale sun of the north” (Nietzsche 1989a, pp. 62–63). 46. I am indebted here to Bourdeau 2018 and Large (in Nietzsche 1998, pp. 91, 101). See also Hussain 2004, pp. 340–345. 47. This reference to positivism also could be meant to target Eugen Dühring, who was influenced by Comte (among others). On this point, see Brobjer 2008, pp. 66–70. 48. See also Nietzsche 1989a, pp. 62–63. 49. I am indebted here to Bailey 2013, pp. 138–141. 50. See also Reginster 2006, pp. 242–250.

Bibliography Allison, Henry E. 1983. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bailey, Tom. 2013. Nietzsche the Kantian? In The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. Ken Gemes and John Richardson, 134–159. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beiser, Frederick C. 2014. The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blue, Daniel. 2016. The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Quest for Identity: 1844–1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdeau, Michel. 2018. Auguste Comte. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N.  Zalta, Summer 2018 ed.. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2018/entries/comte/. Brobjer, Thomas. 2008. Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Clark, Maudemarie, and David Dudrick. 2012. The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conway, Daniel. 2008. Reader’s Guide to Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. London: Continuum Books. ———. 2012. The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner. In A Companion to Friedrich Nietzsche: Life and Works, ed. Paul Bishop, 285–307. Rochester: Camden House.

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———. 2017. Twilight of an Idol: Nietzsche’s Affirmation of Socrates. In Nietzsche and the Philosophers, ed. Mark T. Conard, 40–62. London: Routledge. Green, Michael S. 2002. Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Guyer, Paul, and Rolf-Peter Horstmann. 2018. Idealism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2018 ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2018/entries/idealism/. Hayman, Ronald. 1982. Nietzsche: A Critical Life. New York: Penguin. Hill, R. Kevin. 2003. Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of his Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Houlgate, Stephen. 1986. Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hussain, Nadeem J.Z. 2004. Nietzsche’s Positivism. European Journal of Philosophy 12 (3): 326–368. Jensen, Anthony K. 2016. An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. London: Routledge. Lampert, Laurence. 2001. Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil. New Haven: Yale University Press. Loeb, Paul S. 2019. Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Priestly Philosophy. In Nietzsche and the Antichrist: Religion, Politics, and Culture in Late Modernity, ed. Daniel Conway, 89–116. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House/Vintage Books. ———. 1982a. Daybreak. Trans. R.J.  Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1982b. Twilight of the Idols. In The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Penguin. ———. 1982c. The Antichrist. In The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Penguin. ———. 1983. Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J.  Hollingdale. Introduced by J.P. Stern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1986. Human, All Too Human. Trans. R.J.  Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1989a. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House/Vintage Books. ———. 1989b. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J.  Hollingdale. Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New  York: Random House/Vintage Books. ———. 1998. Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Duncan Large. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reginster, Bernard. 2006. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Ridley, Aaron. 1998. Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the Genealogy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Stack, George J. 1983. Lange and Nietzsche. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Young, Julian. 2010. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11 Buber and German Idealism: Between Philosophical Anthropology and Philosophy of Religion Peter Šajda

When situating dialogical philosophy and Martin Buber’s thought in a broader historical-philosophical context, Michael Theunissen claims that “dialogicalism is at root, and as such, a movement of opposition” (Theunissen 1984, p. 257). He shows that dialogical thinkers repeatedly referred to their philosophy as “the new thought” and contrasted it to earlier philosophical traditions and approaches. They identified their main “opponents” as idealism and metaphysics. Against idealism as “the philosophy of the ‘universal’ subject or of ‘consciousness in general’” they placed a philosophy that starts “from my factical I, which…is always at the same time also a human I” (Theunissen 1984, p. 258). In continuity with Theunissen’s description of the origin and nature of dialogical philosophy, Edith Wyschogrod suggests that the “exorcism, as it were, of the twin demons, idealism and metaphysics,” must be considered as intrinsic to Buber’s philosophy (Wyschogrod 1996, p.  729). Also Lorenz Wachinger confirms Theunissen’s diagnosis and shows how Buber’s opposition to German Idealism led him to post-idealistic thinkers, such as Kierkegaard and Feuerbach (Wachinger 1970, p. 56). In what follows I trace the main lines of Buber’s explicit reception of the German idealist thinkers’ intellectual legacy. I focus on his discussions of

This work was produced at the Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences. It was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract No. APVV-15-0682.

P. Šajda (*) Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_11

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Kant, Fichte and Hegel, which are at the center of this reception. While Buber devotes almost no attention to Schelling,1 Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation played an important role in his pre-dialogical thinking.2 Buber’s treatment of Hegel—especially in the context of political philosophy and philosophical anthropology—is even more substantial.3 The most extensive and diverse is Buber’s reception of Kant’s philosophy which had a profound and lifelong effect on his thought.4 Buber’s assessment of the ideas of the German idealist thinkers is very varied ranging from enthusiastic affirmation to harsh criticism.

1

F ichte and the Double Wave of German and Jewish Nationalism

Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation had an intense effect on the German-­ speaking Jewish intellectuals who were part of the double wave of German and Jewish nationalism in the early twentieth century. In a letter from 11 May 1915 Hugo Bergmann wrote to Buber that it was through Fichte that many German-speaking Jewish intellectuals rediscovered their Jewish roots and culture. He even suggested that their recently formed ties to Biblical and Hasidic Judaism would never be as natural as those to Fichte (Buber 1972–1975, vol. 1, pp. 388–389). Five months later Buber received a letter from the university student Siegfried Lehmann who described Fichte’s concept of national education as an important source of inspiration for the Jewish youth movement (Buber 1972–1975, vol. 1, p.  402). Buber was part of the double wave of nationalism, which clearly manifested itself in his enthusiasm at Germany’s entry into World War I and in his interpretation of the war as a unique chance for the unification of European Jews. For the 1914 Christmas issue of Wiener Kunst- und Buchschau Buber composed a list of ten books entitled “Bücher, die jetzt und immer zu lesen sind” which contained works dealing with the issues of war and German national identity. It included Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (Buber 2001ff., vol. 1, pp. 280, 330) which Buber recommended for a deeper understanding of “what the German war has to do with the German man’s spirit” (Buber 2001ff., vol. 1, p. 280, my translation). In the short text “Ein Dankeswort an Alfons Paquet” (1916) Buber invoked Fichte’s idea of Germanness as a task and insisted that in the present moment the fate of the German people was intertwined with the fate of the Jewish people (Buber 2001ff., vol. 1, pp. 280, 289). The idea of national identity as a task guides several of Buber’s wartime writings. A notable example is

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Bewegung. Aus einem Brief an einen Holländer (1915),5 in which he distinguishes two kinds of individuals: those, who passionately realize their convictions and those, whose convictions have little effect on their actions. The actions of the former are marked by kinesis (movement) in which the absolute manifests itself. These individuals belong to different nations and fight in different armies, but they are united by the passion with which they live out their convictions. They share the same willingness to die for the fatherland, which is the visible form of the absolute (Buber 2001ff., vol. 1, pp. 282–286). In his essay Die Losung (1916) Buber applies the theory of kinesis to the situation of the Jews fighting against each other in the different armies of the continent. Their outward fragmentation is in stark contrast to their inward unity. They are connected by the invisible ties of passionate engagement and readiness to make the utmost sacrifice for the fatherland (Buber 1916, pp. 1–3). Buber’s interpretation of the tragic war events through the prism of a metaphysical kinetic community of committed individuals was harshly criticized by his close friend Gustav Landauer (Buber 1972–1975, vol. 1, pp. 433–436). This criticism deeply affected Buber, who abandoned his positive rhetoric about the war and began to alter the overall direction of his thought. As Paul Mendes-Flohr demonstrated, Buber’s philosophy underwent a profound reorientation in 1916, which marked the transition from his pre-dialogical to dialogical thinking (Mendes-Flohr 1979, pp. 139–145). After his intellectual conversion Buber referred to Fichte only sporadically, returning briefly to his concept of national education in National and Pioneer Education (1941) (Buber 2001ff., vol. 8, p. 312).

2

Buber’s Early Encounters with Kant

Buber’s earliest in-depth encounter with German Idealism was through Kant at the age of fourteen (Buber 1960, pp. 16–19; 2002b, pp. 33–36).6 Buber was then a student of a Polish secondary school in Lviv and was undergoing a spiritual crisis which started shortly after his bar-mitzvah. After a period of intense religious life, he experienced a period of spiritual instability and aimlessness. His sense of inner confusion was aggravated by the reunion with his father who had in the meantime remarried (Shapira 1999, pp. 75–76). At the age of fourteen Buber began to wrestle with the issue of time and space which turned out to be much more than just a theoretical pursuit. Especially the problem of time—its limits or limitlessness—had an existential impact on him. It affected the deepest levels of his psyche and filled him with intense anxiety. He saw himself in the danger of going insane, and there were moments

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in which he even contemplated suicide (Buber 1962, p. 328; 2002a, p. 162). The psychosomatic effect of his preoccupation with the problem of time can be seen in the suggestive images in his recollections: If I wanted to take the matter seriously…I had to transpose myself either to the beginning of time or to the end of time. Thus I came to feel the former like a blow in the neck or the latter like a rap against the forehead—no, there is no beginning and no end! Or I had to let myself be thrown into this or that bottomless abyss, into infinity, and now everything whirled. (Buber 1960, p. 17; 2002b, p. 34)

Buber searched for answers to his questions about the nature of time in works of mathematics and physics but did not find solid ground in them. He was still faced with a world that appeared to him as terrifying and absurd. He therefore turned to philosophy and began reading Kant’s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. This proved to be a turning point. The Kantian interpretation of time and space as “nothing more than formal conditions of our sensory faculty,” and “mere forms of our sensory perception” had a soothing effect on Buber’s psyche and helped him find inner peace (Buber 1960, pp. 17–18; 2002b, p. 34). He discovered a new approach to the problem of time which was meaningful for his own existence. The Kantian perspective helped him redirect his attention from the abstract notion of infinity to the existential notion of eternity. He was able to formulate a series of new anthropological questions: “[I]f time is only a form in which we perceive, where are ‘we’? Are we not in the timeless? Are we not in eternity?” (Buber 1960, p. 19; 2002b, p. 36). The “discovery” of eternity ultimately helped Buber overcome his spiritual crisis, as it prompted him to renew his relationship with the personal and eternal God of the Bible. Thus, Buber was able to see the world from a new perspective in which it no longer appeared as absurd or terrifying. Buber continued to be interested in Kant after his move to Vienna and later to Germany and Switzerland for his university studies. At the University of Leipzig he attended two courses on Kant’s philosophy: Max Heinze’s “Explanation of Kant’s Prolegomena” in the Winter Semester of 1897–1898 and Wilhelm Wundt’s “The Philosophy of Kant and the Kantian Schools” in the Winter Semester of 1898–1899. He also attended several courses which treated German Idealism, most notably Georg Simmel’s “Nineteenth-Century Philosophy” in the Winter Semester of 1899–1890 at the University of Berlin (Buber 2001ff., vol. 1, pp. 301–303; Schmidt 1995, pp. 127–129). In the Winter Semester of 1897–1898 Buber attended Paul Barth’s seminar “Introduction to Philosophy Starting from Schopenhauer’s World as Will and

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Representation” for which he wrote the paper “Zu Schopenhauers Lehre vom Erhabenen” (Buber 2001ff., vol. 1, p.  310). The paper represents a largely Kantian critique of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime. Buber distinguishes monist and dualist theories of the sublime subscribing to the latter due to their clear distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. He tracks the development of the dualist view from Longinus to Edmund Burke, Kant, Schiller and Schopenhauer. He highlights Kant’s precise distinctions between the sublime and the beautiful, the feeling of the sublime and the feeling of the beautiful, the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime. He shows how these distinctions were later adopted and modified by Schopenhauer and argues for the superiority of Kant’s doctrine due to its consistency and authentic reflection of human experience (Buber 2001ff., vol. 1, pp. 131–145). He criticizes Schopenhauer’s doctrine for ambiguous concepts, unconvincing examples, contradictory interpretations of Kant’s positions and deviations from the basic dualist distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Buber’s final verdict is that “Schopenhauer’s theory of sublimity represents no progress” when compared to Kant’s theory (Buber 2001ff., vol. 1, p. 147, my translation). The paper shows the deep appreciation of the 19-year old Buber for Kant’s Critique of Judgement, and Buber’s discussion of sublimity as infinity is reminiscent of his earlier reflections on the problem of time and space.

3

 he Critique of Kant’s Subordination T of Religion to Ethics in Religion als Gegenwart

Buber delivered the lecture series Religion als Gegenwart between January 15 and March 12, 1922 at the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt am Main (Horwitz 1978, p.  39). The importance of this series of eight lectures lies especially in the fact that it formed the basis for Buber’s best-known work Ich und Du (1923). The verbatim transcript of the lectures is deposited in the Martin Buber Archive in Jerusalem and was first published by Rivka Horwitz in 1978. Horwitz divides the lectures into two groups, one of which played little role in Buber’s composition of Ich und Du, while the other “became the very source of the book, and maintains considerable parallels to it” (Horwitz 1978, p. 33). Horwitz points out the ambivalent character of Buber’s reception of Kant in the lectures as well as in other texts that served as a basis for Ich und Du. Buber’s positive reception is especially manifest in the fact that the working title of the Ich und Du manuscript was Prolegomena to a Philosophy

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of Religion. It was changed to Ich und Du only in May 1922 in the contract with the publisher (Horwitz 1978, pp. 22, 163). The working title undoubtedly reflects Buber’s high regard for Kant’s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. In Religion als Gegenwart Buber discusses Kant in the second lecture from January 22, 1922, and his reception is mostly critical. He follows the line of thought from the first lecture in which he argued that a characteristic feature of modernity is the relativization and functionalization of religion. Religion is understood “not as an independent quantity, but rather as something that depends on another quantity” which leads to the religious sphere losing its independence (Horwitz 1978, p. 50, my translation). Religion is not considered an end in itself but a means to promote other ends, such as biological survival, social cohesion or cultural production. Buber criticizes Kant for turning religion into an auxiliary sphere of ethics.7 Kant is part of the intellectual tradition that views “the religious as a function of the ethical” (Horwitz 1978, p. 61, my translation). The crudest form of this approach is the position that religion is to be promoted in order to prevent the moral degeneration of the people. To be sure, Kant’s postulates of practical reason represent a much more sublime form of the subordination of the religious to the ethical, but even then religion loses its autonomy and authentic existence. The access to religion is through moral law, which virtually abolishes religion. An existential contradiction arises, as religion becomes something indirect, while directness remains an essential feature of the individual’s relation to God. Furthermore, the limitation of religion to the ethical sphere makes it too specific and narrowly focused on a single area of life. God is no longer seen primarily as the creator of all things but as the guarantor of the moral law, thus a substantial part of God’s self-revelation is disregarded (Horwitz 1978, pp. 61–62). The religious content, which is deemed useless for ethical purposes, loses relevance. By contrast, Buber’s own philosophical project aims to balance the relation between religion and ethics by avoiding any reductionism or hierarchization. Although the second lecture was ultimately not included in Ich und Du—in which Kant appears only once—the relation between religion and ethics remained an important topic in Buber’s philosophy. He expanded his critique of Kant’s view of religion in The Love of God and the Idea of Deity (1943) and Religion and Reality (1951) which were included in the anthology Gottesfinsternis (1952).

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273

Kant and the Role of the Social Thinker

Following the rise of Nazism, Buber emigrated in 1938 to Palestine, where he was promptly offered a teaching post as professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In his inaugural lecture Die Forderung des Geistes und die geschichtliche Wirklichkeit (1938) he reflected on the role of the social thinker in the present age. Buber’s point of departure is the observation that modern sociology was born out of social criticism. Precursors to sociology and early sociologists, such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte and Lorenz von Stein, were deeply affected by the crisis of their age and responded with social analyses that proposed changes to the dysfunctional social status quo. Buber contrasts the approach of these thinkers—who “wanted to know in order to change”—to the approach of Max Weber and some contemporary German sociologists, who seek to construct sociology as an “objective” and “value-free” science (Buber 1962, pp. 1055, 1058; 1957, pp. 178, 180). The efforts of the latter provoked contradictory reactions. Buber quotes Ferdinand Tönnies’s claim that “sociology is first of all a philosophical discipline” (Buber 1962, p. 1058; 1957, p. 180) and uses it to support his interpretation of sociology as social philosophy. He refuses to disconnect sociology from the pursuit of social change and uses the terms “sociological thinker,” “social thinker,” and “social philosopher” as synonyms. When examining the ways in which the social thinker can inspire social change, Buber discusses the social thinker’s relation to political power. He compares three interpretations of this relation presented by Plato, Kant and the prophet Isaiah. Plato sees only two ways in which social evils can be eliminated and a just society achieved: either the philosopher becomes the ruler or the ruler adopts an authentic philosophical way of life. However, Plato’s vision did not prove itself in practice, as can be seen in the case of his student Dion who aspired to rule Syracuse according to Platonic principles. Dion repeatedly failed to come to power, and after he acquired it he was overthrown and killed by his fellow student from the Platonic Academy, Callippus (Buber 1962, p. 1061; 1957, pp. 182–183). Kant was deeply skeptical of Plato’s ideal of the philosopher-king and openly rejected it in Perpetual Peace. Kant maintained that the combination of philosophy and political power is not only unrealistic but even undesired, as “the wielding of power inevitably corrupts the free judgment of reason” (Buber 1962, p. 1061; 1957, p. 183). Thus, the philosophical element is ultimately paralyzed. Instead, Kant proposed a much looser connection between philosophy and political power based on the idea of the former being a source of inspiration for the latter. He argued that

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“kings…should not dispense with or silence the class of philosophers, but let them express themselves in public” (Buber 1962, p.  1061; 1957, p.  183). Buber affirms Kant’s criticism of Plato’s utopian view of the relation between philosophy and politics but considers Kant’s skepticism excessive. He views the principle “the philosopher should be heard” as a form of resignation, which confirms Kant’s loss of “faith in the spirit’s ability to achieve power and, at the same time, to remain pure” (Buber 1962, p. 1062; 1957, pp. 183–184). A more optimistic view of the spirit as a corrective to power is presented by the prophet Isaiah. The key message of Isaiah’s prophetic activity is that God is the true king of Israel and his sovereignty supersedes all political power. Isaiah teaches by his own example that the man of spirit should not seek political power but remain a voice of criticism and demand (Buber 1962, p.  1066; 1957, p. 188). He is to remind the ruler of his accountability to God for his use of the power that has been entrusted to him. The man of spirit also reminds the people of their common responsibility for the fate of the nation. His criticism and demand is thus addressed not only to those in power but to every individual, as justice cannot be achieved merely by the force of institutions. Although the modern social thinker is not a prophet and does not have a divinely sanctioned mission, he can commit himself to “the prophetic task of criticism and demand” in a philosophical way (Buber 1962, pp. 1068–1069; 1957, p. 190). He can take upon himself the role of an educator and call both those in power and those without it to their common responsibility for society.

5

 ant’s Role in the History K of Philosophical Anthropology

Buber’s treatise on philosophical anthropology What is Man? (1943) originated as a series of lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Buber discusses in it fundamental issues of philosophical anthropology against the historical background of philosophical attempts to answer the question posed in the book’s title. He sees the origins of the modern debate about philosophical anthropology in the four questions presented by Kant in the Handbook to his lectures on logic: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? What is man? Buber describes these questions—of which the last is the most important—as “[t]he most forcible statement of the task set to philosophical anthropology” (Buber 1962, p. 310; 2002a, p. 141). Buber presents a historical overview of philosophical-anthropological approaches to the question What is man? He claims that the question appears

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most relevant in times marked by pervasive solitude, spiritual homelessness and lack of security. In this context Buber distinguishes two kinds of epochs in the history of human spirit: “epochs of habitation” and “epochs of homelessness” (Buber 1962, p. 317; 2002a, p. 150). He claims that the former are not conducive to man’s self-reflection, as the anthropological question is considered unproblematic and settled. By contrast, the latter inspire interest in philosophical anthropology, as different crises make the problem of man relevant. In the chapter “From Aristotle to Kant” Buber provides an outline of the “pre-history of philosophical anthropology” (Buber 1962, p.  317; 2002a, p. 150). He presents Aristotle’s philosophy as a system in which the world is understood as an ordered universe of things. Man is integrated into this universe and is seen as a thing alongside other things. The philosophical focus is on man’s place in the outer world, not on his inner world. Wonder as the source of all philosophizing concerns man only as a part of the world. Thus, man is not motivated to become a question for himself (Buber 1962, pp. 317–318; 2002a, pp. 150–151). In contrast to Aristotle’s neutralization of the anthropological question, Augustine situates the issue of man into the center of intellectual discourse. Augustine’s view of man is dynamic and dualistic; man is a composite being, who can choose between good and evil and is characterized by a constant inner struggle. He is not merely a thing among other things, but rather a question, a wonder and a task for himself. Augustine formulates the anthropological question in a personal way: quid ergo sum, Deus meus? (Buber 1962, p. 319; 2002a, p. 152). The character of this question—which is both dialogical and theological—is much closer to Buber’s way of thinking than the impersonal character of Kant’s question. The rise of Christendom in the Middle Ages provided man with a new security and a new understanding of the universe. Dante’s structured description of the different spheres of the material and spiritual world combined with Thomas Aquinas’s conceptual instrumentarium provided an intellectual basis for a world-view in which man was able to find himself at home: “Once again there is a self-enclosed universe, once again a house in which man is allowed to dwell” (Buber 1962, p. 320; 2002a, p. 153). This epoch of habitation, which includes much of the Renaissance, comes to an end with Copernicus’s scientific discoveries and Pascal’s reconsideration of man’s position in the unlimited cosmos. With the focus on the unlimited and the infinite—both in macrocosm and microcosm—the status of man increasingly loses its significance. In this time of change Pascal resuscitates the anthropological question by addressing the issue of man’s uniqueness vis-à-vis the cosmos in which he appears negligible. Pascal acknowledges man as homeless in the infinity of the cosmos

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and rejects the idea of returning to a cosmological or a theological house for man to inhabit. This decision creates the basis for future forms of anthropological thought: “work is carried out on a new image of the universe, but a new house in the universe is no longer built” (Buber 1962, p. 324; 2002a, p. 157). Buber sees Kant’s philosophy as a response to the anthropological issues raised by Pascal. Buber identifies with Pascal on a personal level, admitting that he too was filled with deep uncertainty when faced with the infinity of the universe. The uncanniness of unlimited time and space, which can be neither imagined nor understood, tormented both philosophers. They struggled with the issue of the significance and meaning of human existence in the boundless universe. Buber recalls his early reading of Kant’s Prolegomena which helped him overcome his anxiety by explaining space and time as forms of human sensory perception. Buber believes that Kant’s interpretation can be useful also in addressing Pascal’s concerns about man’s place in the universe: “Kant’s answer to Pascal may be formulated after this fashion: what approaches you out of the world, hostile and terrifying, the mystery of its space and time, is the mystery of your own comprehension of the world and the mystery of your own being. Your question What is man? is thus a genuine question to which you must seek the answer” (Buber 1962, p. 329; 2002a, p. 162). Although Kant contributed greatly to philosophical anthropology becoming prominent in modern philosophy, he failed to answer the anthropological question that he himself posed. Buber argues that the distinctive feature of anthropology as a philosophical discipline is that it aims to consider man in his wholeness. If philosophical anthropology is to remain true to itself, it must not follow other philosophical disciplines and reduce its scope of study to some particular aspect of man. However, this is precisely what happens in Kant’s reflections on man. He focuses on a number of aspects of human life— such as wit, honesty, lies, egoism, dreams—but avoids a holistic interpretation of man (Buber 1962, pp. 310–311; 2002a, pp. 141–143). He does not even attempt to answer the question What is man? Thus, from Buber’s perspective, Kant’s legacy for the future of philosophical anthropology consists primarily in the highlighting of the anthropological question. Buber sees himself as part of the tradition of modern philosophical anthropology and provides his own answer to Kant’s question which decisively shaped the thinking of his age.

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277

 ant’s and Cohen’s Ambiguous K Concepts of God

In Gottesfinsternis (1952) Buber returns to the issue of Kant’s view of religion, which he discussed already in Religion als Gegenwart. He analyzes Kant’s concept of God within his broader critique of reductionist concepts of God. In the chapter “Religion and Reality” Buber divides history into two kinds of epochs according to the prevalent view of God’s reality. Some epochs are characterized by a substantial consensus that God is a being “absolutely independent” of man (Buber 1962, p. 511; 2016, p. 8), which radically transcends human existence and can be known only to a limited extent. In other epochs there is an increasing consensus that God is not an independent being, religion is an “intra-psychic process” and prayer is a form of soliloquy (Buber 1962, p. 511; 2016, p. 8). The weakening of the human capacity to relate to God as an independent being is accompanied by the production of reductionist images of God. Buber argues that in modernity there has been a series of attempts to define God as purely immanent to human experience. He sees the epitome of these attempts in Kant’s dictum “God is not an external substance, but only a moral condition within us” (Buber 1962, p. 515; 2016, p. 12). Buber, however, points out that Kant’s late writings, from which the dictum stems, are characterized by an intellectual restlessness and an ambiguous view of God. On the one hand, Kant reduces God to a factor of human morality, on the other hand, he searches for God who is the authoritative “source of all moral obligation.” The encounter with this source is hardly an encounter of human consciousness with itself (Buber 1962, p. 515; 2016, p. 12). Kant’s reductionist description of God as an immanent moral principle provoked a wave of criticism that emphasized the external and transcendent reality of God. Buber returns to Kant’s concept of God in the chapter “The Love of God and the Idea of Deity” in which he explores Pascal’s distinction between the God of Abraham and the God of the philosophers. Buber examines Kant’s and Hermann Cohen’s concepts of God against the background of this distinction. He focuses on Kant’s posthumously published notes to an unfinished work on transcendental theology. He reiterates his claim that Kant provides contradictory treatments of the issue of God that reflect his inner confusion. At first Kant poses the questions “What is God?” and “Is there a God?” claiming that they are still unresolved and the reply to them is a crucial task of his philosophy. Then he suggests that it is “preposterous to ask whether there is a God” (Buber 1962, p. 541; 2016, p. 42). An even deeper confusion is manifest in Kant’s discussions of God’s reality. In one instance he describes

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God as “merely a moral relation within me” and explicitly denies that God is “an entity outside of me” (Buber 1962, p.  541; 2016, p.  41). In another instance, however, he develops a concept of a living and personal God. He begins by distinguishing two kinds of belief regarding God: to believe God and to believe in God. While the former is an intellectual act of incorporating the idea of God into one’s system of knowledge, the latter is an act of genuine religious faith that involves a dialogical relationship with a living personal God. Kant presents this relationship positively but later devalues his insight by claiming that “[t]he idea of God as a living God is nothing but the inescapable fate of man” (Buber 1962, p. 541; 2016, p. 42). In highlighting the elements of fate and necessity, he distances himself from the dialogical concept that he developed. Buber maintains that Kant’s late notes are a testimony to his inner struggle with the issue of God which he failed to address in a satisfactory way. Buber traces a similar intellectual and spiritual struggle in the life and work of Hermann Cohen, “the last in the series of great disciples of Kant” (Buber 1962, p. 542; 2016, p. 42). Buber follows the development of Cohen’s concept of God from his early articles in the 1860s to his seminal work Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (1918). On the one hand, Cohen aims to disambiguate the concept of belief and therefore makes a clear choice between the two options proposed by Kant: to believe God and to believe in God. He affirms the former, describing God as a human idea and a moral ideal that plays an important role in ethical thinking. He insists that God is neither a person nor an existence and refuses to connect the concept of God to the concept of life in any way (Buber 1962, pp. 542–543; 2016, pp. 43–44). On the other hand, Cohen’s study of the sources of Judaism led him to an ever deeper internalization of the commandment of love for God. Beginning with the treatise Religion und Sittlichkeit (1907), Cohen reflects on the nature and forms of human love for God. While he rejects the notion of a personal and living God, he appropriates some traditional attributes of God which cause a split in his view of God. Inspired by the Hebrew Bible, Cohen claims that God is to be loved as “[the] avenger of the poor” and “the father of man” (Buber 1962, p. 544; 2016, p. 45). These attributes make sense in relation to the living and personal God of Abraham but are hardly compatible with the abstract God of the philosophers. The rift in Cohen’s view of God deepens with time as he continues to approach God in two contradictory ways: he thinks of God as an idea, but he loves God as a person (Buber 1962, p. 546; 2016, p. 48). Buber believes that the notion of a personal God in the end implicitly prevails: “Cohen did not consciously choose between the God of

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the philosophers and the God of Abraham, rather believing to the last that he could succeed in identifying the two. Yet his inmost heart, that force from which thought too derives its vitality, had chosen and decided for him” (Buber 1962, p. 549; 2016, p. 51).

7

 egel’s Problematic Abstractions in H Anthropology and Philosophy of Religion

Buber presents Hegel’s philosophy as an intellectual project that negates Kant’s philosophical legacy in several key areas. In philosophical anthropology Hegel begins as an intellectual heir of Kant but ultimately embraces a position that is a negation of Kant’s anthropological question. The young Hegel follows the line of thought proposed by Kant and is even more consequent in answering the question What is man? While Kant focuses on partial characteristics of man, Hegel emphasizes the “unity of the whole man” (Buber 1962, p. 330; 2002a, p. 164).8 He takes seriously the concrete human person without devoting excessive attention to details of human existence. However, Hegel’s focus gradually shifts from the human person to the general concept of man to the universal reason. For the later Hegel the concrete man represents merely a medium through which the universal reason comes to perfect self-consciousness. Buber points to the section “Anthropology” in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in which Hegel’s point of departure is not the human person but the universal reason. Hegel speaks of man in most abstract terms without explaining how the presented insights are related to concrete human life. The question What is man? completely disappears from Hegel’s intellectual horizon (Buber 1962, p. 331; 2002a, p. 165). Thus, Hegel negates Kant’s anthropological legacy by relocating the philosophical focus on the universal reason, which prompts “such a radical alienation from the anthropological setting of the question as has probably never happened before in the history of human thought” (Buber 1962, p. 329; 2002a, p. 163). Furthermore, Hegel attempts to a build “a new house of the universe” in order to overcome the spiritual homelessness of modern man. He undertakes “the third great attempt at security,” following in the footsteps of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (Buber 1962, p.  332; 2002a, p.  166). While Aristotle’s attempt is cosmological and Aquinas’s theological, Hegel’s attempt has a logological character. It differs from the previous ones also in its focus on time instead of space. After the Copernican discoveries, space no longer seems subject to the logic of the spirit, and, therefore, Hegel seeks security in time by

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proposing the law of dialectic as the principle of history. Hegel’s project, however, fails, and the house he has built proves to be uninhabitable. This is largely due to his problematic concept of time, which disregards subjective anthropological time and relies entirely on objective cosmological time (Buber 1962, p. 334; 2002a, p. 168). Hegel negates Kant’s intellectual legacy also in the area of philosophy of religion. In Gottesfinsternis Buber presents Hegel’s philosophy of religion as a reaction against philosophical efforts which aimed to reduce God to a human idea or an immanent moral principle. Hegel affirms unequivocally God’s reality and independence. Thus, he defends religion against its critics, including Kant, but his defense gives rise to a new problem. As he aims to free religion from anthropomorphic elements, which make it susceptible to criticism, he develops a highly abstract concept of God. God as the absolute, universal spirit or universal reason reveals himself in human culture and history but does not enter into a personal relationship with the individual. Hegel “ignores the existential reality of the I and of the Thou,” since he does not presuppose a reciprocal partner relationship between God and man (Buber 1962, p. 516; 2016, p. 13).9 Since God does not seek a dialogue with man, religion loses its interpersonal character. Divine love becomes merely God’s play with himself. The concrete person’s joys and worries are irrelevant to the universal spirit that is only concerned with its own perfection.

8

Hegel’s Absolutization of the State

Buber discusses Hegel’s political philosophy in Zwischen Gesellschaft und Staat (1951) in the context of the relation between the social and the political sphere. Buber opposes the confusion of the two and criticizes especially the attempts to present power as the basis of social processes. He sees this tendency manifested in Bertrand Russell’s Power and Plato’s Republic. Buber rejects Russell’s thesis that power is as fundamental a concept in social science as energy is in physics. While Buber does not deny that the element of power is present in social structures, he maintains that it is not essential in unpolitical structures. Russell confuses the primary and the secondary moments in social structures by setting subordination and domination over association and fellowship (Buber 1962, p. 1006; 1957, p. 161). He prioritizes the vertical political dynamic over the horizontal social dynamic. The problematic aspect of Plato’s theory in The Republic consists in his ignoring of the qualitative difference between social and political structures. When he describes the division of labor in the polis, he includes the rulers

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among the essential occupations. Thus, he confounds the horizontal labor relations with the vertical power relations without addressing the difference in their dynamics. The parallel structure of complementary occupations is fundamentally transformed by the introduction of the hierarchical structure of “those who give orders and those who obey them…those who possess the instruments of coercion and those who are subject to them” (Buber 1962, pp. 1006–1007; 1957, p. 162). Buber interprets Plato’s inclusion of the rulers in the essential occupations as a utopian element which does not correspond to the actual structure of the historical polis. Buber points out that the revolutionary developments of the late eighteenth century enabled for the first time a full development of civil society and a clear differentiation between state and society. Early philosophical analyses of this differentiation were produced by Saint-Simon and Hegel. Saint-Simon introduces the productive distinction between two kinds of leadership: social leadership based on administration and political leadership based on government. He advocates the limitation of the latter to the areas of security and defense and an expansion of the former in order to free citizens from excessive coercion and to intensify various modes of collaboration (Buber 1962, pp. 1014–1015; 1957, pp. 169–170). Thus, Saint-Simon proposes a diminished role of the state and a stronger role of the society. Hegel represents the opposite view, since he argues for the strongest possible role of the state in regulating the society. He sees the society as “an incomplete and disunited multiformity” that stands between the relative whole and unity of the family and the absolute whole and unity of the state (Buber 1962, p. 1015; 1957, p. 170). The substance of the society is private interest which renders it incapable of regulating the conflicts between different groups and classes which pursue contradictory goals. Only the state can moderate the clashing passions of individuals and groups. Hegel contrasts the state as the guarantor of reason and common good to the society as a formless and unstable middle-term. Buber criticizes this opposition for its utopian notion of the state and for disregarding positive aspects of the society, such as “social consciousness, solidarity, mutual aid, loyal comradeship, spirited enthusiasms for a common enterprise” (Buber 1962, pp. 1015–1016; 1957, p. 171). Hegel’s view of the state is the object of Buber’s criticism also in Geltung und Grenze des politischen Prinzips (1953). Buber points out that Hegel abolishes the separation of the spiritual and the political by absolutizing and divinizing the state. Hegel claims that God realizes himself in the state and describes the fact “that the state is” as the “walking of God in the world” (Buber 1962, p. 1101; 1957, pp. 212–213). As a result, the divine becomes the political, and the individual owes his existence no longer to a personal God but to an

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anonymous human institution. Hegel’s divinization of the state is largely due to his absolutization of history and historical time. By limiting the walking of God to history, Hegel loses sight of the transcendent eternal God: “Time is not embraced by the timeless, and the ages do not shudder before One who does not dwell in time but only appears in it” (Buber 1962, p. 1104; 1957, p. 215). When God is confined to human history the temptation arises to identify him with a creation of the human spirit.

9

 ore than Just Opposition: The Complex M Nature of Buber’s Reception

Buber’s explicit reception of the ideas of German idealist philosophers focuses primarily on the intellectual legacy of Fichte, Kant and Hegel. His reception of these philosophers, however, varies substantially. While his reception of Fichte is limited to a relatively short period of time, his reception of Kant and Hegel is long-term. The intensive reception of Fichte is positive, but it is part of the pre-dialogical writings from which Buber later distanced himself. The reception of Hegel is much more extensive and predominantly negative. The reception of Kant is positive even enthusiastic in the initial phases, but later becomes increasingly ambivalent. Buber drew inspiration from Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation during World War I when he felt most intensely part of the double wave of German and Jewish nationalism. He developed the idea of a metaphysical kinetic community of committed individuals passionately fighting for their fatherland. This community represented a new chance for the unification of European Jews. Buber abandoned this idea after his clash with Gustav Landauer in 1916, and Fichte played only a marginal role in his dialogical thinking. Buber’s reception of Kant was lifelong and concerned several key issues of both his pre-dialogical and dialogical thinking. Buber credited Kant with saving his life at the age of fourteen, and this strongly positive experience remained an important determining factor in his later relations to Kant. Kant’s interpretation of time and space in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics helped Buber resolve his existential crisis. Buber’s respect for this work is reflected in the fact that he originally entitled the Ich und Du manuscript Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion. As a university student Buber attended two courses on Kant and wrote a student paper in which he criticized Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime from a Kantian perspective. Buber considered Kant the founder of modern philosophical anthropology and

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devoted an entire work to Kant’s fundamental question What is man? Although Buber emphasized Kant’s role in promoting anthropology as a philosophical discipline, he criticized Kant for avoiding to answer the anthropological question he himself posed. Kant addressed numerous partial questions of human existence but failed to accomplish the distinctive task of philosophical anthropology: to provide an interpretation of man in his wholeness. Buber repeatedly discussed Kant’s interpretation of religion which he found problematic in two important respects. First, Kant developed a functionalist view of religion, as he interpreted it merely as a means to an end. Kant subordinated religion to ethics, thus substantially limiting religion’s role and rendering many of its aspects irrelevant. Religion was transformed into an auxiliary sphere of ethics. Second, Kant developed an ambiguous concept of God, which gave rise to contradictions that he was unable to resolve. On the one hand, Kant presented God as a moral principle within man and denied that God is an independently existing entity. On the other hand, he defined God as the source of all moral obligation and described man’s relation to God in a dialogical way. His descriptions of God were marked by intellectual restlessness, due to which he did not identify with any of them wholeheartedly. Buber traces a similar inner struggle in the life and work of Hermann Cohen. Although Cohen began as a strong advocate of the view of God as an immanent moral principle, he gradually shifted toward a dialogical understanding of God. Under the influence of the Hebrew Bible, he developed a concept of God that corresponded to the Pascalian God of Abraham rather than the God of the philosophers. Buber’s reception of Hegel’s philosophy concerns primarily the areas of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of religion and political philosophy. In anthropology Buber presents Hegel as a counterpoint to Kant, as he constructed a system that entirely disregarded the concrete man. Although the young Hegel addressed the anthropological question even more consequently than Kant himself, his later philosophy gradually lost its anthropological character. Its focus shifted from the concrete individual to the general concept of man to the universal reason. Buber argues that Hegel’s philosophy of religion suffers from a similar problem as his anthropology. Hegel begins with a legitimate criticism of reductionist concepts of God, but his solution to the problem is an utterly abstract concept of God. His definition of God as the universal spirit avoids the pitfalls of anthropomorphism but simultaneously divorces God from man’s lived experience. Thus, Hegel ultimately replaces one version of the God of the philosophers with another.

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In the area of political philosophy Buber criticizes Hegel for absolutizing the role of the state. Hegel presents the relation between the society and the state in an unbalanced way by describing the former as formless and unstable and thus in need of a strong regulation by the latter. Hegel exaggerates the problematic nature of the society and employs a utopian notion of the state. Furthermore, Hegel abolishes the distinction between the spiritual and the political sphere by identifying the existence of the state with the walking of God in the world. As a result of the divinization of the state, the individual’s responsibility to personal God is confused with his responsibility to a political institution. It is clear from the preceding analyses that the descriptions of Buber’s opposition to German Idealism quoted at the beginning of this chapter are correct but represent only a part of a larger picture. It is true that speculative idealism and metaphysics are repeatedly targets of Buber’s criticism. This is especially obvious in his critical reception of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology, philosophy of religion and political philosophy. But it can also be seen in his critique of Kant’s interpretation of religion or in his later rejection of the Fichte-inspired metaphysical community from his pre-dialogical thought. However, there is a positive side to Buber’s reception of German Idealism, too. Buber was enthusiastic about Kant’s epistemological insights already in his youth and relied on them in a number of later writings. He saw Kant as a key figure in the history of philosophical anthropology which was a central field of his own philosophy. He was attentive to Kant’s and Cohen’s long-term intellectual struggles which included dialogical elements. He was also able to recognize positive aspects of Hegel’s philosophy, such as his early commitment to consequently answering the anthropological question or his opposition to reductionist concepts of God. Thus, Buber’s explicit reception of the ideas of German idealist philosophers has a complex character and concerns crucial issues of his thinking.

Notes 1. Buber refers briefly to Schelling in Zur Geschichte des Individuationsproblems (Buber 1904, p. 31), Franz Rosenzweig (Buber 1953, p. 247) or Zu Bergsons Begriff der Intuition (Buber 1953, p. 221). He also discusses Schelling in his correspondence with Rudolf Pannwitz in early 1937 (Buber 1972–1975, vol. 2, pp. 633, 637, 640–641). 2. Buber’s probably earliest reference to Fichte is found in Über Jakob Böhme (Buber 1901, p. 252).

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3. There are brief discussions of Hegel’s philosophy also in other works than those examined in this chapter. See, for example, Franz Rosenzweig (Buber 1953, pp. 244–245), Die Frage an den Einzelnen (Buber 1962, pp. 221–222), Die Forderung des Geistes und die geschichtliche Wirklichkeit (Buber 1953, p. 129), Pfade in Utopia (Buber 1962, pp. 846–847, 863). 4. Buber discusess Kant in more than a dozen works. I follow here the main lines of his reception. 5. A detailed contextual analysis of Buber’s metaphysical interpretation of the war is provided by Mendes-Flohr (Mendes-Flohr 1979, pp. 131–139). He mentions also Buber’s inspiration by Fichte. See Mendes-Flohr (1979, pp.  145, 172 n159). 6. See also Maurice Friedman’s and Hans-Joachim Werner’s interpretations of Buber’s early encounters with Kant (Friedman 1991, pp. 15–18; Werner 1994, pp. 22–29). 7. Buber directs similar criticism against Hermann Cohen’s view of the relation between religion and ethics. For more detail see (Casper 2002, pp. 303–304; Horwitz 1978, pp. 166–169). 8. A more extensive analysis of Buber’s picture of Hegel in What is Man? is provided by Nathan Rotenstreich. Cf. (Rotenstreich 2009, pp. 43–50). 9. An outstanding examination of Buber’s theory of reciprocity is found in (Bizoň 2017). A much more complex picture of Hegel’s philosophy of religion than the one presented by Buber can be found in (Stewart 2018).

Bibliography Bizoň, Michal. 2017. Vzájomnosť medzi Ja a Ty. Dialogická filozofia Martina Bubera. Trnava: UCM. Buber, Martin. 1901. Über Jakob Böhme. Wiener Rundschau 5 (1): 251–253. ———. 1904. Zur Geschichte des Individuationsproblems, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Vienna. ———. 1916. Die Losung. Der Jude 1 (1): 1–3. ———. 1953. Hinweise, Gesammelte Essays. Zurich: Manesse Verlag. ———. 1957. Pointing the Way: Collected Essays. New York: Harper & Brothers. ———. 1960. Begegnung. Autobiographische Fragmente. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. ———. 1962. Werke, vols. 1–3. Munich: Kösel & Lambert Schneider, vol. 1. ———. 1972–1975. Martin Buber. Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, ed. Grete Schaeder, vols. 1–3. Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider. ———. 2001ff. Werkausgabe, vols. 1–22. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. ———. 2002a. Between Man and Man. Trans. Ronald Gregor-Smith, Ed. Maurice Friedman. London and New York: Routledge.

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———. 2002b. Meetings. Autobiographical Fragments. Ed. Maurice Friedman. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2016. Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Casper, Bernhard. 2002. Das dialogische Denken. Franz Rosenzweig, Ferdinand Ebner und Martin Buber. Freiburg and Munich: Verlag Karl Alber. Friedman, Maurice. 1991. Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A Life of Martin Buber. New York: Paragon House. Horwitz, Rivka. 1978. Buber’s Way to I and Thou. Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider. Mendes-Flohr, Paul R. 1979. Von der Mystik zum Dialog. Martin Bubers geistige Entwicklung bis hin zu “Ich und Du.” Königstein/Ts.: Jüdischer Verlag. Rotenstreich, Nathan. 2009. Immediacy and Its Limits: A Study in Martin Buber’s Thought. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers. Schmidt, Gilya Gerda. 1995. Martin Buber’s Formative Years: From German Culture to Jewish Renewal, 1897–1909. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Shapira, Avraham. 1999. Hope for Our Time. Key Trends in the Thought of Martin Buber. Trans. Jeffrey M. Green. Albany: State University of New Your Press. Stewart, Jon. 2018. Hegel’s Interpretation of the Religions of the World: The Logic of the Gods. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Theunissen, Michael. 1984. The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wachinger, Lorenz. 1970. Der Glaubensbegriff Martin Bubers. Munich: Max Hueber. Werner, Hans-Joachim. 1994. Martin Buber. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Wyschogrod, Edith. 1996. The Demise of the Aufhebung and the Rise of the Between: From Ethics to Philosophy of Religion in Martin Buber. In Philosophie de la religion entre éthique et ontologie, ed. M. Marco, 727–746. Olivetti, Padova: CEDAM.

12 Historicism, Neo-Idealism, and Modern Theology: Paul Tillich and German Idealism Christian Danz

On the 26th of September 1954, in Stuttgart, at the congress of the “Allgemeine Gesellschaft für Philosophie in Deutschland,” on the occasion of the commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the death of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Paul Tillich gave the ceremonial address “Schelling and the Beginnings of Existential Protest.” Right at the beginning of his talk, Tillich makes clear Schelling’s significance for his own thought: “He was my teacher although the beginning of my studies and the year of his death are 50 years apart. In developing my own thought I have never forgotten my dependence on Schelling.…My work on the problems of systematic theology would be unthinkable without him” (MW I, p. 392). Schelling’s philosophy does indeed play a foundational role in the formulation of Tillich’s theology. Tillich dedicated two dissertations to it: in 1910 a philosophical dissertation with the title The Religio-Historical Construction in Schelling’s Positive Philosophy (EW IX, pp. 156–272) and two years later his so called theological licentiate dissertation about Mysticism and Guilt-Consciousness in Schelling’s Philosophical Development (GW I, pp. 13–108). But Schelling alone is not decisive for the development of Tillich’s early theology (cf. Mokrosch 1976; Danz 2000, pp. 134–152). Also important is the work of another philosopher of German Idealism, namely Johann Gottlieb Fichte. This would be clear if we look at

C. Danz (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_12

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Tillich’s excerpts from the Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge from 1794, which are preserved together with Tillich’s posthumous writings at Harvard. These texts hearken back to Tillich’s last school time as he mentioned in his autobiographical sketch On the Boundary from 1936 (GW XII, p.  31). Tillich started with Fichte during his four-semester stay at the Theological Faculty of the University of Halle between 1905 and 1907 and went on to Schelling in 1909. Concerning his time in Halle, Tillich remarks almost 40  years later in a letter to Thomas Mann that it was “the greatest period of my life” (GW XIII, p. 26). In Halle it was the young Privatdozent in philosophy, Fritz Medicus, who introduced Tillich to German Idealism. Medicus was one of the central intellectuals around 1900 in the debate about neo-idealism, especially the so-called Neo-Fichteanism (Graf and Christophersen 2004; Medicus 1930). In 1905, the year in which Tillich went to Halle, Medicus published his famous book J.G.  Fichte. Thirteen Lectures held at the University of Halle (Medicus 1905). The book returns to lectures which the young philosopher gave a year before. Tillich’s lecture from 1954 also makes mention of this. The analyses of his “esteemed teacher and guide to Fichte and Schelling, Fritz Medicus” (MW I, p. 395), are what initiated him into German Idealism. The engagement with Fichte’s philosophy as well as the significance of his philosophy for the genesis of Tillich’s theological thinking has hitherto been left unexamined (Neugebauer 2012; Danz 2012). Yet, posthumous texts published in recent years—a seminar paper from 1906 entitled “Fichte’s Philosophy of Religion in its Relation to the Gospel of John” (EW IX, pp. 4–19) and the doctoral lecture from Breslau in 1910 (EW X, pp. 55–62), “Freedom as a Philosophical Principle in Fichte”—make clear that Tillich’s entry into German Idealism is mediated by Fichte’s philosophy as interpreted by Fritz Medicus. This picture is further confirmed by the examination paper from 1908, “What is the Significance of the Opposition of the Monistic and Dualistic World-View for the Christian Religion?” (EW IX, pp.  28–93, 94–153), as well as Tillich’s correspondence with Friedrich Büchsel (cf. EW VI, pp. 14–27, 62–74) and the scarcely known article from 1912, “Knowledge and Opinion,” on the occasion of Fichte’s 150th birthday (Tillich 1912). “The necessity of moving beyond Kant,” according to the programmatic opening of the monism text, manifests itself as “a necessity of moving in the direction of Fichte” (EW IX, p. 28). With this program, the young theologian, like others of his time (such as Emmanuel Hirsch, Friedrich Gogarten, Emil Lask), builds upon the idealism

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renaissance around 1900, one of the most important representatives of which was Tillich’s teacher and promotor in Halle, adjunct professor of philosophy Fritz Medicus. Tillich’s occupation with Fichte’s philosophy during his studies is in no way to be seen merely as a stopover on his way to Schelling. Rather, the engagement with Fichte established fundamental convictions for the young theologian on the basis of which he takes account of Schelling’s philosophy, and which remain fundamental for his further work, for example, the form-substance schema, constitutive for the later theology of culture, that stems from the interpretation of Fichte given by his teacher, Medicus (Barth 2008, pp. 210–211). But for what reason does the young Tillich study German Idealism? There are two fundamental aspects to this. On the one side, the so-called “crisis of historicism” (Ernst Troeltsch), which means the awareness of the relativity of all values and truths in history. Around 1900 the culture was differentiated in diverse subsystems. The process of the development of modern culture led to autonomous systems such as science, law, art, politics, religion and etc., all without a unity. In his famous essay Georg Simmel calls this “the tragedy of culture,” while Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch named this “process rationalization.” Against this background on the other side for theology arises the question of the task of theology. The differentiation of culture led also to a differentiation of religious studies, in which we see the emergence of many academic disciplines of religion, such as the science of religion, sociology of religion, and psychology of religion. Therefore, theologians must give a new answer to the question of what theology as a science deals with. Both aspects we can find in Tillich’s early writings. He uses German Idealism for an answer to both questions. First, he works out a theology for his own time, and secondly he tries to give an answer to the problem of the foundation of truths and values against the background of historicism. In the first part, we must have a look at Tillich’s academic teachers in Halle who introduced him to both theology and philosophy. Tillich’s idea of a modern concept of theology in the spirt of German Idealism is the topic of part two. In the third part, we discuss Tillich’s reception of the philosophy of Schelling, and Tillich’s new interpretation of the absoluteness of Christianity. Finally, it must be shown how Tillich uses German Idealism in his own work. In his later writings after World War II, as we have seen in the beginning, Tillich understood his own theology to be in line with the German Idealism.

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Theology and Neo-Idealism Around 1900

“In the case that authorities such as Schlatter and Schmuhl carry weight with you, then I inform you that I have arrived at the philosophical presupposition of both: the second Schelling” (EW VI, p. 76). This comment is taken from a letter of Tillich from 1909 to his student friend and later brother-in-law Alfred Fritz, in which he tells of his reading of Schelling’s works. It is revealing that the philosophy of the later Schelling is referred to as the philosophical presupposition of the theology of his Tübingen and Halle teachers, Adolf Schlatter and “Schmuhl,” that is Wilhelm Lütgert. Both theologians, as the quotation above from the letter from 1909 shows, were very important for the theological development of the young Tillich. Schlatter (cf. Neuer 2004) and Lütgert (cf. Müller 2011) were so-called modern-positive theologians. This was a conservative school of theologians with a broad influence in the theological debates of their own time. The Theological Faculties of Halle, Greifswald and also Tübingen were the centers of this theology. These theologians begin from the Bible and not from the Lutheran Creeds like the Neo-­ Lutheran theologians from Erlangen, or from the doctrine of justification like Albrecht Ritschl and his school. In their dissertations and in their later work many young followers of these theologians had connected the motives of modern-positive theology with the thinking of German Idealism, for example, Friedrich Brunstäd, Erich Schaeder (cf. Rieger 2017) and others. This is also the case for Tillich, for whom modern-positive theology from Schlatter and Lütgert forms the background for his engagement with German Idealism. Tillich uses the philosophy of Fichte and later Schelling for an interpretation of the theology of his teachers. What makes the theology of Schlatter and Lütgert important for the young student Tillich? Against the background of the problems of modern cultures, both theologians work out a theology on the basis of a universal revelation. The starting point of the theology is not the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, but the revelation in nature and culture. With this conception they reject the theology of Albrecht Ritschl, who restricted the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. For if we find God only in his revelation in Christ, then neither nature nor culture plays any real definitive role in theology (Schlatter 1911). That’s the reason for Schlatter and Lütgert to work out a conception of theology that starts with God’s universal revelation, and to then integrate the revelation in Christ within this framework. It is significant for both theologians that they connect their theology with philosophical motifs from German Idealism (cf. Schlatter 1906; Lütgert 1923). The young Tillich follows such a conception

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of theology. In his early writings he begins from a universal concept of revelation and criticizes the theology of Albrecht Ritschl. Tillich argues in his text from 1908 about monism against Ritschl’s differentiation of theology from metaphysics (EW IX, p. 28). Likewise, in his later work, Tillich uses the concept of a universal revelation, for example, the differentiation of a groundand a salvation-revelation in his lecture Justification and Doubt from 1924 (Danz 2018). Such a conception of theology is quite different from the theology of Martin Kähler. On the one side, Kähler is also a modern positive theologian, but, on the other side, as his main work Die Wissenschaft der christlichen Lehre (Kähler 1905) shows, he begins his theology from the concept of justification, which meant salvation in Christ. As mentioned above Schlatter and Lütgert connected their theologies with elements from German Idealism. Especially in Lütgert we can see that he uses the interpretation of Fichte from his colleague in Halle, Fritz Medicus. In Lütgert’s book The Religious Crisis of German Idealism from 1922, which, as Lütgert had written in his Preface, goes back to his lectures in Halle from 1908, the philosophy of Fichte is understood as the “doctrine of conviction” (Überzeugungslehre) (cf. Lütgert 1923, p. 37). This is exactly the line in which Fritz Medicus interprets the idealistic thinker in his book from 1905. This book is also decisive for Tillich’s understanding of German Idealism as we see in his early texts. For Medicus, the central point of the philosophy of Fichte is the concept of conviction (Überzeugung). In the concept of conviction Medicus sees the importance of Fichte for his own time and for the crisis of historicism (cf. Medicus 1905, p. 14). There are three central aspects in Medicus’s interpretation of the philosophy of Fichte. First, the understanding of the “I” as conviction. That means the “I” is an action (Tathandlung), which has a reflexive knowledge about himself. Medicus made—with Fichte’s work Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre—a distinction between form and content (Gehalt), and understood the “I” as action and as content. In this action lies the foundation of the certainty of the “I” (cf. Medicus 1905, p. 70). But in the consciousness, this certainty is only present as form, as conviction of the certainty as a proposition (cf. Medicus 1905, p. 71). Against the background of this structure, Medicus interprets the conviction as the self-disclosure of the “I.” The realization of the “I” is to take up the “Not-I” in the “I.” In his book about Fichte, Medicus deals not only with the early Wissenschaftslehre from 1794. The philosopher from Halle interprets the late Wissenschaftslehre as a further development of the early conception. This is the second important point. The later philosophy of Fichte, especially the so-called Wissenschaftslehre from 1804 made a differentiation between the absolute and the absolute knowledge.

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Significant for the later Fichte is that the self-disclosure of the “I” is now understood as content, and the knowledge as form. The “I” is the picture (Bild) of the absolute. Medicus calls the later philosophy of Fichte with respect to the Gospel of John the “Johannine period” of Fichte. It is very interesting that Medicus meant with a quotation of Wilhelm Lütgert’s book The Johannine Christology (Lütgert 1899) that Fichte’s interpretation of the Gospel of John is wrong (Medicus 1905, p. 225). First of all, Fichte’s understanding of sin as a lack of autonomy is different from the Gospel of John. Sin for Fichte meant that the “I” remains to himself as “I” (Medicus 1905, p. 226). Rather against such a negative understanding, according to the Gospel of John, sin is an act and something positive. The third aspect is Fichte’s conception of history. Medicus interprets Fichte’s philosophy of history as a construction of the consciousness of history. There is no connection between empirical history and the philosophy of history (cf. Medicus 1905, p. 220). Rather, the philosophy of history is a history of the self-consciousness. What is meant by that statement is that the philosophy of history gives a structure of the way of self-­ consciousness to its own self-disclosure. One finds in Medicus such an understanding of history as a construction of the knowledge of history, and we would see also beyond the young Tillich the solution for the contemporary crisis of historicism.

2

 he Fichte of Halle, or Theology in the Spirit T of the Wissenschaftslehre

During his first semester in Halle in 1905–1906, the young theologian Tillich visited a seminar of Fritz Medicus on the theme of “Philosophical Exercises (Fichte)” (cf. EW IX, p.  1). It is this seminar to which the paper “Fichte’s Philosophy of Religion in its Relation to the Gospel of John” hearkens back. The paper sets itself the task of “working out the main ideas” of Fichte’s philosophy of religion, “and comparing them with those of the Gospel of John” (EW IX, p.  9). For this, Tillich assumes a concept of religion according to which religious consciousness is the “most central, all determining expression of the spirit” (EW IX, p. 4). The functions of thought and will are constitutive for the life of spirit (cf. EW IX, p. 4). For the theology student, these pre-­ conditions result in two fundamental types of religion or notions of God: a voluntaristic type and an intellectualist type. While Judaism produced a voluntaristic notion of God, an intellectualist formulation was more significant for the ancient Greeks. Tillich ultimately understands Christianity as a

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synthesis of voluntarism and intellectualism: “God reveals himself in Christ as a God of grace and truth” (EW IX, p. 5). Against the background of this constellation, Tillich compares Fichte’s philosophy of religion with the Gospel of John on the basis of three “aspects”: the metaphysical basis (i.e., the notion of God and his relation to the world), the “historical significance of Christ and Christendom,” as well as its “moral-­ religious consequences” (EW IX, p. 9). At this point, a detailed engagement with Tillich’s deliberations must be left aside. Although I will limit myself to a systematic aspect of his interpretation of Fichte, it should nevertheless be pointed out that the 19-year-old theologian mainly refers to what he, following Medicus, calls the third phase of the development of the history of Fichte’s philosophy. By this is meant the Instruction for the Blessed Life from 1806. Furthermore, the citations which the theologian procures from the works of the philosopher likely do not go back to his own extensive reading of Fichte, but rather to Medicus’s book from 1905, J.G.  Fichte. But now for Tillich’s early image of Fichte. According to the young theologian, Fichte’s philosophy of religion had indeed overcome Kant’s “subjectivism and skepticism” (EW IX, p.  7), and, namely, in the last phase of his works, the Johannine period, he had propounded a concept which accounts equally for the subjective and objective sides of religion. However, his interpretation of Johannine Christianity excludes all voluntaristic moments. Thus, his philosophy of religion is intellectualist and does justice neither to the synthesis arrived at in Christianity nor (as Tillich shows by going through the three above named aspects) to the Gospel of John. The young theologian’s image of Fichte, as expressed in the seminar paper from 1906, is quite critical and thus similar to Medicus’s interpretation. In the comparison of the philosopher with the fourth evangelist, he thoroughly determines Fichte’s intellectualism. Above all, this is reflected in Fichte’s concept of sin. In Fichte, evil is “something totally other than the negative. It is the positive, indeed the powerful positive, which rules the world” (EW IX, p. 13) and no mere “not-I.” The seminar paper from 1906 represents an intermission. This is most clearly visible if we look at the seminar paper from 1906 compared to the examination paper about monism from 1908. Its concern is a rehabilitation of idealism for theology, and it carries distinct traces of his teacher, Fritz Medicus’s interpretation of Fichte (cf. Neugebauer 2007, pp. 146–155). The young theologian is concerned with a monism of spirit which takes dualism up into itself as a necessary moment of passage. “This is the idealistic interpretation of reality. It moves through a dualism and ends in the monism of the spirit” (EW IX, p. 54). In this program, the motifs emerge which will occupy

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him in all his further works. However, here they are still accomplished thoroughly on the basis of Fichte’s philosophy (cf. EW IX, p. 61). Yet we must also leave a detailed reconstruction of the monism text aside, and limit ourselves to how Tillich carries both of the above-mentioned critiques of Fichte forward—intellectualism, on the one hand, and the notion of sin, on the other. While the theology student interpreted Fichte’s philosophy as intellectualism in his seminar paper, the examination paper completely revokes this image. Now, Fichte’s philosophy appears as a synthesis of intellectualism and voluntarism on the basis of practical reason, the freedom of self-­determination. The accusation of intellectualism is now turned on Hegel. “In Fichte and Schelling, idealism still has both moments [sc. the intellectual and the voluntaristic side of the life of the spirit] in itself, while Hegel already falls back into intellectualism” (EW IX, p. 72). As a result, the concept of sin appears in a new light. “Sin is the limitation of the spirit, which is to be overcome. Or, put more sharply, the lack implied in the “not-I, the lack of intellectual personhood behind its telos” (EW IX, p. 68). Though Tillich had criticized Fichte’s understanding of sin as negation in the seminar paper from 1906, he now takes it up. Sin is an act of self-positing in which the I takes up the not-I into its self-understanding. Thus neither self-recognition nor a representation of God in the overcoming of the “not-I” is achieved (cf. EW IX, p. 61). In sin, the human misses autonomy. Tillich’s image of Fichte had changed during the short time between the seminar paper from Halle and the examination paper from Berlin. We could understand this as a distinction between the time of the Gospel of John and Tillich’s own time. Like theology as such, as well as religion, the interpretation of sin underlies a change. Therefore, in modern times sin must be understood against the background of autonomy. Fichte’s conception of reason in terms of freedom, in Medicus’s interpretation, advanced to become the basis of the theological system.

3

Formal and Material Freedom

Like Tillich’s reception of the philosophy of Fichte, the reception of Schelling stands in the horizon of the debates of a modern positive theology in Halle. Tillich had engaged with the thought of the philosopher from Leonberg in the context of his dissertation project since 1909 (cf. Neugebauer 2007, pp. 155–158). As is well known, he handed in the dissertation in Breslau as a philosophical dissertation, although it was originally planned for the attainment of a theological licentiate degree in order to obtain a secular stipend

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offered by the city of Berlin. It is no longer possible to determine who proposed the theme of the dissertation from the surviving sources and documents. Against the background of the course of his studies and his early Fichte reception, an engagement with Schelling did not immediately suggest itself, even if it was undoubtedly within the sphere of the contemporary renaissance of idealism. Although the examination paper from 1908 documents a strong affinity with German Idealism, Schelling in particular does not play a fundamental role in it. That changed, however, in the years around 1909, as the above quoted statement from the letter to Fritz documents. “On every page” in Schelling, writes Tillich in the letter, “I discover a new cornerstone of Schmuhl’s thought, up to the very last psychologumena: I am utterly surprised that we should rediscover one another here” (EW VI, p. 76). The engagement with Schelling leads to a new placement of Fichte. It has to do with a question which already surfaces in the seminar paper from 1906, and which does not find a fitting solution in the monism text. I mean the concept of freedom and the correlative understanding of sin as negation. Tillich’s reading of Schelling leads to a deepening of his concept of freedom. But not only this, Tillich’s new understanding of freedom, which he learns from Schelling, is at the same time the basis for a new philosophy of history and religion. The foundation of both history and religion is the absolute. The dissertation turned in at Breslau, The Religious-Historical Construction in Schelling’s Positive Philosophy, and the series of theses from 1911 indicate the new understanding of the concept of freedom. I would like to discuss this new understanding by reference to the philosophical dissertation on Schelling from 1910 and the Breslau post-doctoral lecture, “Freedom as a Philosophical Principle in Fichte” (EW X, pp. 55–62), from August 22nd 1910. Tillich construes Schelling’s philosophical development as a whole as the result of the critical questions raised by Immanuel Kant (cf. EW X, p. 12). Thus the two basic phases that Tillich distinguishes in Schelling’s development are understood both to take place within the horizon of the questions that Kant posed. The difference Tillich sees between these two phases is a matter of the changed way in which the philosophy of history is understood. Concerning Schelling’s late philosophy Tillich says, “The knowledge of God is also the knowledge of history and not, as in the earlier Schelling, the knowledge of nature” (EW X, p. 20). Tillich believes that Schelling’s new assessment of history—an assessment that Schelling arrived at in his work of 1809, Of Human Freedom—is the consequence of Schelling’s new idea of God. What is new in this concept of God is that Schelling no longer conceives the Absolute as an immediate identity, as in his early philosophy of identity. Rather, he takes up contradiction and difference into the concept of the absolute. “When

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we describe the absolute not as thesis, but as synthesis, we thereby take up contradiction into the absolute. In so doing we also take up the irrational into the absolute. Just why it is the case that the absolute should posit itself as determined both by unity and by contradiction is something that is absolutely underivable” (GW I, p. 78). Schelling’s new conception of the absolute is connected with a new understanding of freedom. His concept of the potencies leads to an interpretation of the absolute spirit as freedom which could contradict itself. Freedom is not only autonomy as in the theories of Kant and Fichte, but freedom is the possibility of self-contradiction. “Without self-contradiction (Selbstentgegensetzung) is no lively self-positing (Selbstsetzung) and without lively self-positing is no entire freedom and without entire freedom is no spiritual personhood of God” (EW IX, p. 175). If freedom is the possibility of the self-contradiction of freedom, then sin is a positive and not merely negative act. Therefore, for the concept of freedom, it is necessary to complete the material concept of freedom through a formal understanding of freedom. Sin is, as Tillich wrote in his draft “God and the Absolute by Schelling” from 1910, “freedom and not lack, disharmony, not lack of harmony, separateness, which would be unity” (EW X, p. 32). In the dissertation lecture from August 1910, Tillich pronounced his new understanding of freedom, which led him to an interpretation of Fichte’s philosophy as the completion of Kantian critical philosophy. The theologian, still following Fritz Medicus, perceives the pre-condition for this claim in the notion of autonomy, which makes up the foundation of the system. “An observation of the principle of Fichtean philosophy, the concept of freedom in Fichte, teaches us that this process, does indeed have an inner congruity. In it, the motifs of critical philosophy take full effect” (EW X, p. 55; cf. Medicus 1905, p. 57). And yet, the completion of critical philosophy means simultaneously “a narrowing of scope” (EW X, p.  55). The lecture works out this thesis in two lines of argument: first, with reference to Fichte’s “consistent implementation of Kantian anti-empiricism,” and second, with reference to “Kantian anti-dogmatism” (EW X, p.  56). In both sequences of thought, which cannot be considered here, it is the notion of autonomy that bears the whole weight of explanation. The “I” is not an object, but an act, inasmuch as it grasps itself in its unconditional validity through its self-positing. Of importance for our line of inquiry is a distinction which Tillich introduces in this context as an aside (Danz 2012, pp. 200–204). “In the Critique of Practical Reason, the postulate of freedom is posed as the faculty of the arbitrary incorporation of maxims. In contrast to the principle of rational autonomy, formally characterized, this concept of freedom disappears in Fichte. It has no

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place in the implemented system of reason” (EW X, p. 58). The basis of the completed system of reason is a material concept of freedom, namely, freedom in the sense of moral autonomy. Against the background of this concept of freedom, sin can only be conceived of as negation. Herein lies the reductionism of Fichte’s conception. In order to understand sin as positive, the material concept of freedom must be supplemented by a formal concept of freedom (cf. EW IX, pp. 174–176). Freedom is only fittingly conceived of when it is understood as the power of self-contradiction, and not merely as submission of the will to the moral law. To have introduced that concept of freedom in continuation of Kantian critical philosophy is the accomplishment of the “second Schelling.” “Idealistic philosophy can be grouped around these two focal points of the doubled concept of freedom. At the one focal point, stands Fichte and the principle of his system, freedom as the self-positing of reason. At the other, Schelling and the principle of his philosophy of religion, freedom as the power of self-contradiction” (EW X, p. 62).

4

 illich’s Interpretation of the Absoluteness T of Christianity in His Dissertations on Schelling’s Philosophy

Tillich’s new understanding of freedom as the possibility of self-contradiction solves the problems of his interpretation of sin in his seminar paper and also in his examination paper about monism. Sin is not only a lack of autonomy, but rather sin now is a positive act, namely, contradiction. At the same time this new concept of freedom gives Tillich the possibility for a construction of history and religion in a universal dimension. But this universal history is similar to Medicus’s abovementioned understanding of history as a structural description of the religious consciousness. Tillich discovers such a concept of the history of religion in the philosophy of Schelling. Since his 1809 book On Human Freedom, Schelling understood, as Tillich wrote, the absolute as a synthesis. Schelling constructs God as an identity into which the irrational contradiction is taken up. The concrete and individual, whose character as “posited” cannot be derived from God, is at once both the necessary and the contradictory representation of the self-relatedness of God (EW IX, p. 175). Taken up in this manner into the identity of its own self-­ relatedness, the concrete and individual is in unity with God. According to Tillich, Schelling’s concept of history results from the irrational contradiction of the individual against essential being, and the reaction of essential being

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against the contradiction of the individual (cf. EW IX, p. 174). History thus understood is a history of self-consciousness in which consciousness understands itself in the reflexivity and the historicality that is internal to itself. The inner structuring of this history of self-consciousness, as it takes place both in mythology and in revelation, is something that Schelling interprets as a gradual increase in reflection. Whereas the mythological consciousness does not become transparent to itself in its own historicality, things are different where revelation is concerned. In God’s revelation in Christ, self-consciousness understands itself in the inner reflexivity of its self-relatedness. As Tillich expresses this, “In Christianity God becomes, for consciousness, personal, spiritual, and historical. In Christianity God can only be intuited in a historical personality. To be historical, however, means to surrender oneself in one’s status as nature in order to find oneself in one’s status as spirit. The awareness of this truth was provided in Christ. That is why it is the case that God has become personally human in him” (EW IX, p. 271). Thus Tillich defines revelation as the event in which a definite concrete being brings to expression, for itself, the reflexivity that is constitutive of spirit, that is, constitutive of spirit’s relation to itself. However, Tillich differs at this point from Schelling’s construction. Tillich makes the criticism that it is not necessary for God to become empirically incarnate (cf. EW X, p. 272). The content of the history of religion is the process in which spirit relates to itself, and spirit accomplishes this in concrete acts of self-positing—in acts in which it becomes conscious of its own inner reflexivity and historicality. Religion is the happening, or the coming to pass, of reflexivity in concrete, self-positing acts of spirit. Tillich identifies this process, which he calls with Hegel the returning of the finite to the infinite, with the Holy Spirit. Only for this reason is it the case that history is “in its most inward character the history of religion” (GW I, p. 100). History for Tillich is no outwardly unfolding process. Rather, history is the history of self-consciousness in which self-consciousness understands itself in its inner historicality. Tillich read the later philosophy of Schelling against Ernst Troeltsch as a new foundation of the absoluteness of Christianity. The absoluteness of Christianity is not a content of the Christian religion, rather the consciousness of history is the absoluteness of Christianity. Therefore, as Tillich wrote, the philosophy of history “was the first and from time beginning the important form, in which Christianity obtained a consciousness of its own absoluteness. The judgement (Urteil) “Jesus is the Christ” includes at bottom all philosophy of history” (EW X, p. 53).

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299

Tillich and the Heritage of German Idealism

Tillich’s own theology already existed in its basic character prior to the First World War. He first put it forward in a debate with historicism in his effort to provide a basis for the certainty of Christian faith. He does this by linking up what he has to say to the connection that Schelling had already worked out between self-consciousness and history. Systematically basic for Tillich’s early theology is a theory of spirit that is characteristic of the philosophy of identity. He sets forth this philosophy of history both in his 1911 thesis, “The Christian Certainty and the Historical Jesus” (EW VI, pp. 31–50, pp. 50–61), and in his 1913 draft, Systematic Theology (EW IX, pp. 278–434). The theology that the early Tillich works out in this way is based on a concept of truth that belongs within the frame of the absolute as identity (cf. EW VI, p.  41; cf. Wittekind 2004, pp. 135–172). This concept of truth is intended to give a foundation for Christian certainty. It is also designed, by means of a theory of consciousness, to provide a basis for the absoluteness of Christianity. According to this theory of truth, the acts of the consciousness of self-positing are truth. These acts are the carrying out of the “synthesizing of the manifold in the unity of consciousness” (EW VI, p. 41). On this assumption the certainty of consciousness is to be found in the relation of the consciousness to itself: that is, this certainty is found in the relation of consciousness to itself when the spirit says “Yes” to the idea of truth (cf. EW IX, p.  278; cf. Danz 2004, pp. 74–80). The consciousness posits the determinate qualities that characterize individual and concrete beings. Tillich understands the individuality and concreteness that are posited in this way to be simultaneously necessary and contradictory; and he believes this necessity and this contradictoriness make up the very nature of historical truth. There can be certainty with respect to the individual only to the extent that the individual is “taken up into the synthesis of consciousness,” as Tillich puts it (EW VI, p. 41). In this manner the individual becomes a representation or a medium of the self-relatedness of the absolute spirit. Starting from this basis of theoretical principles, Tillich conceives a philosophy of history that is not only designed to overcome the criticism that historicism brings to bear against historical elements of religious faith. This philosophy of history is also intended to interpret religion as the knowledge of the necessarily concrete character of historical truth, and to describe religion as the place where history is constituted as history (cf. EW VI, p. 42). As Tillich works out all of this, religion is understood as a certain kind of consciousness. Religion is the consciousness for which the inner reflexivity of its

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own self-relatedness has become transparent. Faith is our consciousness of history becoming reflexive. Tillich has a special name for the contingent self-­ understanding of consciousness in its historicality. He calls it “paradox,” and he connects paradox in this sense with religion and the theological standpoint. “The sphere of paradox is religion; because religion is the return of the freedom to the truth, the relative to the absolute without suspension (Aufhebung) of the freedom and the relative” (EW IX, p. 315). This means that religious certainty has the character of an antinomy. The antinomy resides in this fact about the spirit: even though the spirit is absolute truth on the grounds of its being constituted in a self-reflective manner, the spirit can only understand absolute truth as a concrete truth that is the content of its own awareness (cf. EW IX, p. 281). Sheer concreteness and sheer historicality are, as such, moments of absolute certainty. But the necessarily concrete character of truth that Tillich insists upon stands in tension with his definition of the spirit as “a gradually increasing reaction of essential being against ‘contradiction,’ against that which contradicts it” (EW VI, p. 41; cf. GW I, p. 100). This way of basing theology on an absolute concept of truth does not remain static and unchanged. During the First World War, Tillich subjects it to a transformation. The outcome of this transformation is that the concept of meaning becomes the frame within which theology and the philosophy of religion are to be explained (cf. Danz 2004, pp.  73–106; Wittekind 2004, pp. 135–172; Barth 2003, pp. 89–123). To be sure, Tillich continues to hold firmly to a certain presupposition that belongs to his theory of the consciousness or the spirit. He continues to hold to the conception of a “system.” However, he holds to the idea of system in such a way that the absolute, which he understands to be absolute truth, is shifted into the religious act itself. We recall the antinomy of which we spoke earlier, namely, the antinomy in which essential being and its contradiction oppose one another. This antinomy is now understood as a component part of the self-determining act. Tillich still believes strongly that religious consciousness is the true consciousness of history. Religious actualization, the carrying out of the religious act, is self-­ consciousness in the process of becoming obvious to itself with regard to its historical character, its historicality. But as a result of the changes Tillich has made in his theory of principles, he gives a new interpretation to the consciousness of truth that he believes is a determinate content of awareness. He no longer understands this determinate consciousness of truth as something against which essential being is constantly asserting itself. Instead, he now believes that concreteness and determinateness are the appropriate form whereby the spirit is able to represent its self-relatedness. In religion, consciousness becomes transparent in the inner reflexivity of its relation to itself.

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As consciousness becomes transparent in this way, it grasps the determinate character it has given to itself as a content of its own awareness. That is to say, consciousness grasps its own determinate character as an historically changeable form in which the dimension of the unconditioned expresses itself—and this unconditioned dimension is the self-relatedness of spirit. Thus Tillich’s concept of God encompasses the form in which the spirit expresses itself. His concept of God comprises the form in which the consciousness has become evident in the inner reflexivity of its relation to itself. And his concept of God comprises also the form in which spirit has become transparent in the inner reflexivity of its historically determinate character. In his theology after the First World War, Tillich thus connects two things, the philosophy of history and the concept of God, and transfers both of them into the sphere in which religion actualizes itself (cf. Danz 2000). He works out such a conception of theology in his System of Sciences from 1923 (GW I, pp. 111–293), the Philosophy of Religion (GW I, pp. 297–364), written in the same year, but published in 1925, and also in his further writings until his late Systematic Theology. The absolute as foundation of the consciousness, which is only given in consciousness, and religion as self-disclosure of the absolute or unconditioned as a presupposition in and for consciousness, is the structure Tillich uses in his whole later work as a background for a construction of a modern systematic theology. He found this structure in the philosophy of the late Schelling, which he understands as the philosophical presupposition of the theology of his teacher Wilhelm Lütgert. But at the beginning stands, as we have seen, the philosophy of Fichte. The reception of Schelling leads Tillich to the solution of a problem with which he had wrestled in his early studies of theology in the shadow of Fichte. It is the question of how sin, as the difference and contradiction of the absolute, is to be construed against the background of a monism of spirit. The young theologian finds the solution in the later Schelling’s philosophy and his thesis of freedom as the power of self-­ contradiction. This leads to a new classification of Fichte and a rehabilitation of Kant’s philosophy. Fichte’s significance for theology consists in the formulation of freedom as autonomy. It is wholly in this sense that Tillich interprets the relation of Fichte and Schelling in the previously mentioned ceremonial address from 1954: While Fichte derived a monism of the moral self-realization of the absolute from the principle of the self-positing of the “I” as “I,” Schelling, in his earlier writings, saw the inner conflict of any philosophy of the absolute. He saw that freedom, when equated with the absolute, voids itself and leads to a Spinozist or mystical annihilation of the individual self. He saw—and this brings him close

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to Kant, to a surprisingly existential element in Kant—that actual freedom is only possible through arbitrary choice (Willkür), i.e., through the ability of the rational will to enter into contradiction with itself. (MW I, p. 395)

Bibliography Barth, Ulrich. 2003. Die sinntheoretischen Grundlagen des Religionsbegriffs. Problemgeschichtliche Hintergründe zum frühen Tillich. In Religion in der Moderne, 89–123. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. ———. 2008. Religion und Sinn. In Religion – Kultur – Gesellschaft. Der frühe Tillich im Spiegel neuer Texte (1919–1920), ed. Christian Danz and Werner Schüßler, 197–213. Vienna: LIT Verlag. Danz, Christian. 2000. Religion als Freiheitsbewußtsein. Eine Studie zur Theologie als Theorie der Konstitutionsbedingungen individueller Subjektivität bei Paul Tillich. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. ———. 2004. Theologie als normative Religionsphilosophie. Voraussetzungen und Implikationen des Theologiebegriffs Paul Tillichs. In Theologie als Religionsphilosophie. Studien zu den problemgeschichtlichen und systematischen Voraussetzungen der Theologie Paul Tillichs, ed. Christian Danz, 73–106. Vienna: LIT Verlag. ———. 2012. Theologischer Neuidealismus. Zur Rezeption der Geschichtsphilosophie Fichtes bei Friedrich Gogarten, Paul Tillich und Emanuel Hirsch. In Wissen, Freiheit, Geschichte. Die Philosophie Fichtes im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Beiträge des sechsten internationalen Kongresses der Johann-Gottlieb-Fichte-Gesellschaft in Halle (Saale) vom 3.–7. Oktober 2006. Vol. II, Fichte-Studien, ed. Jürgen Stolzenberg and Oliver-Pierre Rudolph, vol. 36, 199–215. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. ———. 2018. Paul Tillich. Rechtfertigung und Neues Sein. Leipzig: EVA. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Alf Christophersen. 2004. Neukantianismus, Fichteund Schellingrenaissance. Paul Tillich und sein philosophischer Lehrer Fritz Medicus. Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 11: 52–78. Kähler, Martin. 1905. Die Wissenschaft der christlichen Lehre von dem evangelischen Grundartikel aus im Abrisse dargestellt. Leipzig: A.  Deichert’sche Verlags buchhandlung. Lütgert, Wilhelm. 1899. Die johanneische Christologie. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann. ———. 1923. Die Religion des Deutschen Idealismus und ihr Ende, Die religiöse Krisis. Vol. 1. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann. Medicus, Fritz. 1905. J.G.  Fichte. Dreizehn Vorlesungen gehalten an der Universität Halle. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard. ———. 1930. Neufichteanismus. In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 4, 2nd ed., 498–499. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

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Mokrosch, Reinhold. 1976. Theologische Freiheitsphilosophie. Metaphysik, Freiheit und Ethik in der philosophischen Entwicklung Schellings und in den Anfängen Tillichs. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Müller, Peter. 2011. Alle Gotteserkenntnis entsteht aus Vernunft und Offenbarung. Wilhelm Lütgerts Beitrag zur theologischen Erkenntnistheorie. Münster: LIT Verlag. Neuer, Werner. 2004. Das Verständnis von Geschichte bei Adolf Schlatter. Theologische Beiträge 35: 39–54. Neugebauer, Georg. 2007. Tillichs frühe Christologie. Eine Untersuchung zu Offenbarung und Geschichte bei Tillich vor dem Hintergrund seiner Schellingrezeption. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. ———. 2012. Freiheit als philosophisches Prinzip—Die Fichte-Interpretation des frühen Tillich. In Wissen, Freiheit, Geschichte. Die Philosophie Fichtes im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Beiträge des sechsten internationalen Kongresses der Johann-Gottlieb-­ Fichte-Gesellschaft in Halle (Saale) vom 3.–7. Oktober 2006. Vol. II, Fichte-Studien, ed. Jürgen Stolzenberg and Oliver-Pierre Rudolph, vol. 36, 181–198. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Rieger, Klaus-Dieter. 2017. Heiliger Geist und Wirklichkeit. Erich Schaeders Pneumatologie und die Kritik Karl Barths. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Schlatter, Adolf. 1906. Die philosophische Arbeit seit Cartesius. Ihr ethischer und religiöser Ertrag. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann. ———. 1911. Das christliche Dogma. Stuttgart: Verlag der Vereinsbuchhandlung. Tillich, Paul. 1912. Wissen und Meinen. Zu Fichtes 150. Geburtstag am 12. Mai 1912. Neue Preußische Zeitung 232: 2. ———. 1959–1975. Gesammelte Werke. Vols. 1–14. Ed. Renate Albrecht. Stuttgart: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. (This work is referenced with its usual abbreviation: GW.) ———. 1971ff. Ergänzungs- und Nachlassbände zu den Gesammelten Werken von Paul Tillich. Vols. 1–20. Ed. Ingeborg Henel, et al. Stuttgart: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt and Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. (This work is referenced with its usual abbreviation: EW.) ———. 1987–1998. Main Works. Vols. 1–6. Ed. Carl Heinz Ratschow. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. (This work is referenced with its usual abbreviation: MW.) Wittekind, Folkart. 2004. ‘Sinndeutung der Geschichte’. Zur Entwicklung und Bedeutung von Tillichs Geschichtsphilosophie. In Theologie als Religionsphilosophie. Studien zu den problemgeschichtlichen und systematischen Voraussetzungen der Theologie Paul Tillichs, ed. Christian Danz, 135–172. Vienna: LIT Verlag.

13 “The Last Kantian”: Outlines of Karl Jaspers’s Ambivalent Reception of German Idealism István Czakó

Although the existentialist movement is widely known for its sharp criticism of neo-Kantianism for formalism and the inability to grasp the real problems of actual life in a philosophical way, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), the illustrious German philosopher of Existenz, was notoriously and eminently a Kantian thinker; indeed, he has been characterized by Heinrich Barth (1890–1965), a colleague at the University of Basel, as “the first and the last Kantian” (Ehrlich 1975, p. 211). One commentator goes even further by claiming that “Jaspers is more Kantian than Kant” himself (Walker 2013, p. 77). Although these claims may sound a bit like rhetorical overstatements, Jaspers in fact declared that, for him, “Kant has become and has remained the foremost philosopher”1 (Jaspers 1951c, p. 339), and he even stressed that “Kant’s work is unique in the history of philosophy. Since Plato no one has created such a revolution in Western thought”2 (Jaspers 1962a, p.  153). According to Jaspers, both German Idealism and neo-Kantianism have fundamentally misunderstood the original Kantian philosophy even though the two currents were based on Kant’s ideas directly (see Jaspers 1962a, p. 153).3 As we shall see, Jaspers criticizes very sharply the thinkers of German Idealism as “young enthusiasts” and “philosophical conquerors” for transforming and distorting the “clear operations of transcendental thinking into speculative constructions” (Jaspers

I. Czakó (*) Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_13

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1962a, p. 151) as well as for abandoning from the very beginning Kant’s basic attitude and ignoring the limits of reason as he established them. (As a somewhat similar effort from the nineteenth century we can mention Arthur Schopenhauer’s sharp criticism of German Idealism and his conscious recourse to Kant’s original critical philosophy.4 It is well known that Jaspers attended Kuno Fischer’s lectures on Schopenhauer in Heidelberg as early as in 1901 and also studied the texts of the German philosopher.5) It would be, however, highly misleading to think that Jaspers’s attitude towards Kant would have been exclusively positive and uncritically receptive,6 whereas his relation to the thinkers of German Idealism would have been just the opposite. Contrary to this one-sided conception, the fundamental aim of the present essay is not only to show how deeply Jaspers was inspired by Kant and how critical he was towards the speculative “magic” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 152) of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but also to sketch a possibly holistic and detailed picture of these complex relationships with a special focus on their different aspects and even ambiguities in order to explore both the positive, appropriative and the negative, critical sides.

1

Rolling Away the Stone from Kant’s Tomb

As a conclusion of his commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Kant’s death, Jaspers stresses: “We do not need to admire him as a stranger. We can live together with him. We would like to follow him”7 (Jaspers 1968c, p. 250). This formulation clearly shows that Kant was for him not only one of the most significant Western thinkers, “the absolute indispensable philosopher” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 154), but also and perhaps primarily an important source of personal inspiration and a representative of a philosophical life and attitude, the main characteristics of which were a radical “openness to ideas and facts” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 8) as well as a deep sense of morality and humanity. Therefore, it is rightly stressed that “Jaspers’s philosophy is virtually unthinkable apart from the influence of Immanuel Kant” (Olson 1979, p.  72). Jaspers’s sharp criticism of German Idealism and of its false attitude towards Kant was perceived by some commentators as the beginning of a new and authentic approach to the original Kantian thinking. As Heinrich Blücher (1899–1970) claims in one of his letters to Jaspers in connection with his book on Schelling: “[Y]ou have found the point of leverage that has enabled you to roll the stone away from Kant’s tomb. By systematically confronting Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel with Kant on crucial questions, you draw a sharp line that separates Kant from his ‘followers’ and frees him from them so that

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he can again emerge with full clarity” (Kohler and Saner 1993, p.  277). Jaspers’s former student, Hannah Arendt goes even further and writes enthusiastically to her beloved mentor: “When you go to heaven—and if things are there the way Socrates pictured them, with all of us continuing our conversations but now with the best minds of all time—then old Kant will rise from his seat to honor you and embrace you. No one has understood him as you have” (Kohler and Saner 1993, p. 317). According to Arendt, Jaspers is “the only disciple Kant ever had” (Arendt 1989, p. 7). Even though it would obviously not be easy to step over the exalted style of these sentences, they must not be interpreted simply as unfounded overstatements. As we shall see, from the very beginning of his carrier Jaspers actually pays particular attention to Kant’s philosophy and not only receives fundamental insights from him but also elaborates a number of original approaches to the Kantian system. He considers the Copernican turn the very core of Kant’s critical philosophy8 and also the beginning of a new, revolutionary way of thinking which has as its basic thoughts the phenomenality of being, the doctrine of ideas, and the concept of freedom. At the same time he also goes beyond Kant on some points, claiming that philosophy begins where science ends and also accentuating that philosophy must be existential, since the question “What should I do?” “is answered through faith in the act of self-transcending from existence (Dasein) to Existenz” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 197). The parallels between Jaspers and Kant have been delineated in many ways in the secondary literature. Alan M. Olson focuses on the matter of transcending-­thinking. He compares Jaspers’s and Kant’s understanding of reason and claims that, for both of them, “that which we call experience is meaningful only when it is coupled with cognitive transcending, that is, experience that is experientially self-conscious or reflective” (Olson 1979, p. 75). Olson, however, also reveals a certain modification in Jaspers’s interpretation of Kant: In fact, when the commentary in The Great Philosophers is compared with earlier commentary in Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, one sees how Jaspers’s original attitude concerning the Kantian “Ideen als die Ganzheiten der Erfahrungsrichtungen…und Erfahrungsinhalten” is abandoned for Jaspers’s notion of das Umgreifende…Even though Jaspers, in Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, is clearly aware that Kant’s “transcendental ideas are not constitutive of objectivity,” this awareness is sharpened in his later works where Vernunft is always understood as “rational consciousness,” which is…the encompassing ground of Transcendence-Itself. (Olson 1979, p. 77)

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Jaspers takes the latter concept as a counterpart to the Kantian supersensible (Übersinnliche). He thinks that Kant was not only concerned with delineating the limits of knowing but also with laying the foundations for what might be called a metaphysics of transcendence. As an important parallel, Olson also points out that “for Jaspers, as in the case of Kant, the final resolution of the moral dimensions of critical philosophizing is the development of rationally grounded religious belief or philosophical faith” (Olson 1979, p. 88). In his paper “Ist Jaspers ein Kantianer?”,9 Ulrich Diehl claims that Kant was for Jaspers much more important than for all the other existentialists. According to Diehl, while Jaspers cannot be simply characterized as a Kantian thinker, there are basic convictions in his philosophy, which are undoubtedly of Kantian origin. He outlines five central issues of Jaspers’s philosophy whose elaboration seems to prove that Jaspers was a true follower of the Kantian conceptions: (1) God and the demonstrations of his existence; (2) the issue of the soul and its immortality; (3) the question of free will and the possibility of its demonstration; (4) the essence and origin of evil; (5) the political realization of the good. In his recent paper “Kant—Gegentypus zu Heidegger? Was Jaspers mit Kant verbindet und von Heidegger trennt”,10 Anton Hügli not only elaborates a very detailed picture of the main differences between Jaspers and Heidegger with regard to Kant but also outlines Jaspers’s conception of Kant’s basic attitude (Grundhaltung) as well as the central topics of Kant’s philosophy such as the doctrine of ideas and the concept of freedom. Hügli claims that “in Jaspers’s view to follow Kant means exactly not to fulfill the radical break which was introduced by Fichte and completed by Schelling and Hegel” (Hügli forthcoming). In his analysis Jaspers’s whole philosophizing is fundamentally a “thinking further” (Weiterdenken) of Kant, while in Jaspers’s own view Heidegger’s speculation on Being (Seinsspekulation) is closely related to Fichte.11 In his thorough contribution to the volume Karl Jaspers on Philosophy of History and History of Philosophy Raymond Langley argues that Jaspers “goes back to Kant’s intentions and conclusions for the basic premises of his own systematics; and, second, that Jaspers’s conception of philosophizing and of philosophy goes beyond Kant” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 194). According to Langley, central conceptions of Jaspers’s thinking such as the Encompassing (Umgreifende), the illumination of Existenz (Existenzerhellung), and philosophical faith (philosophischer Glaube) are both continuations and transformations of original Kantian thoughts. In Jaspers’s philosophy Kant’s conclusions are not uncritically preserved but also contested and transformed into premises. His attitude towards Kant can be

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characterized as a “sympathetic criticism” in the sense that in his view “Kant failed to realize that his negative critique of knowledge was in practice a genuine act of transcending. Overall, Jaspers’s interpretation accounts for the contradictions between the spirit of Kant’s critical project and the letter of his dogmatic and uncritical system” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 197). After this short overview of the relevant secondary literature in the first part of the paper, I will now attempt to reconstruct Jaspers’s readings, reception and interpretation of Kant historically. The hope is that this will facilitate an understanding of his predominantly critical attitude towards the thinkers of German Idealism.

1.1

 nderway to Kant: From the Beginnings U to the Doctrine of Ideas

Jaspers’s way to professional philosophy and to Kant was rather atypical. In his Philosophical Autobiography he declared that he never had an academic training in philosophy.12 However, he showed a vivid interest in philosophy from an early age (he read Spinoza when he was 17 years old), and, according to his Autobiography, he was permanently philosophizing also during his long and diverse university studies (in jurisprudence, medicine, psychiatry, psychology), though not systematically (Jaspers 1957a, pp.  3–4). Philosophy exercised a decisive importance for him during this period: “it was the path to philosophy that determined the choice of my studies” (Jaspers 1951b, p. 326). As a student Jaspers spent some of his free time studying philosophy, but he also occasionally participated in seminars in philosophy as well. In the summer term of 1902 he studied jurisprudence at the University of Munich. Since he was rather dissatisfied with the professors there, his interest turned to, among others, Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), a highly influential psychologist and philosopher of the time, who was famous for his theory of aesthetics, particularly for the concept of empathy (Einfühlung). According to Ehrlich, it was Lipps who firstly awakened Jaspers’s interest in Immanuel Kant (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 174). Due to Lipps’s influence Jaspers continued reading the philosopher from Königsberg during his stay in Sils Maria in August 1902 (Saner 1970, p. 19), and this interest for Kant proved to be decisive for the whole of his later philosophizing. In one of his letters from the same year he reveals the existential relevance of philosophy for his life: “Philosophy is of immense value. If it would not be there, life must be abominable” (Saner 1970, p.  31). Therefore, he started (re)reading philosophical texts from Spinoza, Lucretius, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Plotinus, Schelling and Kant

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very early, and later on (from 1913) he also read Kierkegaard and Hegel (Saner 1970, p. 31). Primarily, his readings of Spinoza helped him to develop a subjective state of mind in which he was able to accept or even affirm the grave illness that accompanied his life. Then, between the 1910s and 1920s Jaspers’s interest in philosophy became more intensified due to his personal contact with some of the philosophers of the time such as Emil Lask, Heinrich Rickert, Edmund Husserl, Moritz Geiger, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, Ernst Bloch, György Lukács and Martin Heidegger. The intellectual contact and confrontation with them helped Jaspers significantly to elaborate his own conception of philosophy. Jaspers occasionally attended the lectures and seminars of Lask whose logical capacities and clear methodology impressed him very much. However, he remained critical towards Lask’s and Rickert’s neo-Kantianism because of their formalistic methodology and abstract logical categories, and also because he believed that they lost sight of the concrete problems of Existenz. Against their scientific concept of philosophy Jaspers emphasizes first and foremost its existential significance: “philosophy has to show the truth, the meaning and the goal of our life” (Jaspers 1951b, p. 325). Beyond or rather prior to these professional philosophers, it was, however, the iconic figure of the great thinker and sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) whose importance for Jaspers surpassed that of the contemporary intellectuals in all respect and who represented “the true (leibhaftig) philosopher of our times” (Jaspers 1951b, p.  330). Weber significantly contributed to Jaspers’s later choice of philosophy as a profession. In 1913 Jaspers published his General Psychopathology (Allgemeine Psychopathology), which was later highly acknowledged, and in the same year he obtained his second doctorate (Habilitation) in psychology from the Philosophical Faculty at the University of Heidelberg under the supervision of Wilhelm Windelband. In the inaugural lecture (Antrittsvorlesung), which was attended by a number of illustrious professors such as Alfred Weber, Max Weber, Wilhelm Windelband, Franz Nissl, Ernst Troeltsch and Hermann Oncken, he discussed the limits of psychology and argued for its separation from philosophy and other sciences in order to confirm psychology as an autonomous science. In the following years, however, starting from Aristotle’s famous dictum “in a sense the soul is all the existing universe” (anima quodammodo omnia)13 (Aristotle 1935, p. 179), he extended the concept of psychology and gave seminars in psychology, where he dealt with philosophers and philosophical topics and works such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kant’s ethics and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Saner 1970, p. 35). Initially, Jaspers was a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg and later associate professor (Privatdozent) of psychology. In 1916 he was appointed to professor extraordinarius, and three years later he published one of his lecture

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courses on Psychology of World Views (Psychologie der Weltanschauungen). In this transitional work his psychological method was already clearly shaped by philosophical ideas and issues, which anticipated a number of topics of his later existential philosophy, among others, his theory of limit-situations (Grenzsituationen). In 1922, after the departure of Heinrich Maier, Jaspers became full professor at the Department for Philosophy II of the University of Heidelberg. His appointment was considered by his colleague Heinrich Rickert, a leading neo-Kantian philosopher, and chair of the Department for Philosophy I, to be a clear sign of the decline of philosophy itself (Saner 1970, p. 37). Rickert did not think that Jaspers was a real philosopher and worked to prevent the appointment (Jaspers 1957a, pp. 23–24). As regards Jaspers’s reception of Kant, the importance of his protophilosophical work Psychology of World Views can hardly be overestimated. The opus contains his earliest publication in genuine philosophy in the form of an essay with the title “Kant’s Doctrine of Ideas” (Kants Ideenlehre). The essay was originally composed as a paper (Referat) for Emil Lask’s seminar on Kant, which Jaspers attended in Heidelberg. The papers was given around 1913–1914.14 In the first two footnotes he explicitly refers to Lask, acknowledging him for some of the explanations concerning Kant (Jaspers 1919, pp. 408–409). Since the text “was conceived as deliberate (and not ‘hidden’) philosophy,” it “could not be presented as ‘objective, factual psychology’” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 174), which was obviously the general purpose of the Psychology of World Views. That is the reason why Jaspers did not insert his first philosophical essay into the book as an individual chapter but published it rather as an appendix to the work (Jaspers 1919, pp. 408–428). Now, if we raise the question why Jaspers chose exactly the theme of the theory of ideas for his very first philosophical paper, it is clear that this is the core of Kant’s philosophy “insofar as it makes its appearance in every work” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 189). The essay begins with a short recapitulation of the basic teachings of Kant’s first Critique (intuition and understanding; the categories of the understanding and the ideas of reason; the denial of all metaphysics; the systematization through ideas; totality and unconditionality as essential traits of the idea). The essay deals with three main issues: (1) the types of the ideas, (2) the threefold meaning of the idea, and (3) the theoretical, practical and aesthetic ideas. Although this early study contains numerous quotations from all three Critiques, it was far from being a mere scholastic recapitulation of their main theses, but rather it served for Jaspers “to consolidate his reception of Kant and to clarify what he saw as Kant’s significance” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 174).

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To begin with, Jaspers states that Kant presents three ideas which he derives from the types of synthetic thinking: “The way to the subject stands under the idea of the soul, the way to the totality of the series under the idea of the world as a whole, the way to the system under the idea of the whole of experience as such” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p.  178). These ideas as such are purely theoretical constructions to be realized in praxis in the form of the ideas of immortality, freedom and God. The “whole” (Ganze), represented by every single idea, can have two meanings, namely, the whole sphere of experience and the whole content of experience. Next, Jaspers goes on to elaborate schematically both meanings. As regards the ideas as the totalities of the spheres of experience Jaspers claims first that there appear to be three principal ideas: mechanism, organism and soul. From the point of view of the idea of mechanism the world appears as a closed system. This idea exists as a challenge to increase experience and to question it constantly, as if the world as a whole were a mechanism. The idea of organism or “the idea of life is an idea of the infinity of the purposeful in contrast to the infinity of the mechanically regulated” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 179). In order to make clear the difference between mechanical being and organic being, Jaspers points out their different purpose. Whereas in a machine the existence of its purpose always depends on us since it cannot help itself and its parts are received from us, in the organism the whole is practically the full cause of the parts, and it does help itself. “The purposiveness of the organism is therefore an infinite problem” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 180). In this context Jaspers quotes a long passage from Kant’s Critique of Judgement, the conclusion of which is: “Hence an organized being is not a mere machine. For a machine has only motive force. But an organized being has within it formative force…” (Kant 1987, p. 253). The idea of soul is the totality of experience concentrated in the subject. After having recapitulated the relevant passages from the Critique of Pure Reason, Jaspers claims critically that “Kant did not concern himself in detail with the idea of the soul while he was analyzing mechanism and organism so precisely” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 182). Therefore, he develops further this idea especially because it belongs to psychology. He claims that the idea of the soul contains a whole range of ideas from which he picks two: (1) the idea of consciousness as the idea of the totality of phenomena actually experienced or able to be experienced, and (2) the idea of personality as the idea of the totality of intelligible relations. According to Jaspers, there are three principal spheres of experience under such ideas: (a) the totality of mechanistic experience of the world, (b) the totality of biological experience, or life, and (c) the totality of the experience of the intellectual soul or personality (see Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 182).

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Jaspers claims that these totalities connect one another in different relationships, and they have also the tendency to become absolutized and reified (hypostasiert). According to him, Kant considers this tendency a delusion (Täuschung), which is inevitable; however, he insists that it should be transcended (aufgehoben) in a critical way. In discussing the ideas as totalities of the content of experience, Jaspers first recapitulates Kant’s relevant teachings both on pure understanding (bloßer Verstand) and on the categories of “thingness” (Dinghaftigkeit) and “particular thing” (Einzelding) from the first Critique. The problem of the particular thing exists only for reason (Vernunft), and therefore it can be treated only in the context of the doctrine of ideas. The concept of a particular thing is indeterminate: in order to know it completely, one must know the whole of possible experience, and thereby determine the particular thing either by affirming or by denying it. The whole of possible experience is like the concept of a totality, which is both an idea and an infinite project. According to Jaspers, Kant teaches that “every individual is infinitely an idea, that is, insofar as it becomes an object of cognition” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 184). The idea of the individual is no less infinite than the idea of the world as an all-­ encompassing individual, to which we are directed in the idea of the totality of experience as such. Thereafter Jaspers briefly touches on the idea of personality (Persönlichkeit) and claims that it includes two ideas: the idea of personality as a sphere of experience and the idea of personality as the idea of the particular, concrete personality. One of the most basic claims in his interpretation of Kant’s theory of ideas is that it is impossible to know the ideas in a direct, theoretical way: “One cannot grasp ideas in any other way than by living in them. Whoever wants to reach them directly, instead of indirectly, in the medium of the finite and the particular, travels in fantasy and thereby futility” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 184). Neither God, nor the soul nor the goal of ethics can be grasped and known directly. This idea clearly anticipates Jaspers’s later conception of indirect communication as well as his teaching about the ciphers of transcendence. Although the ideas cannot be directly known, the Kantian doctrine of ideas is in no way meaningless since “direct commerce with them is still possible….It is a contemplative approach to those powers which can be felt in the particular movement of living” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p.  185). According to Jaspers, the term “idea” has a threefold meaning in Kant, which the philosopher from Königsberg did not separate sharply: the subjective or psychological meaning, the methodological meaning, and the objective or metaphysical meaning. In the subjective meaning the ideas appear “as powers, as sources, as processes within the subject” (Koterski and Langley 2003,

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p. 185). With regard to the methodological meaning he writes: “in the course of theoretical cognition, it points to the systematic, the schematic, the heuristic fictions in their methodic use” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p.  185). Finally, in the objective meaning “the ideas are not merely technical constructs and psychological powers, but must themselves somehow have a meaning in the original world of objects” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p.  185). According to Jaspers, since Kant saw something objective in the ideas, he finally acknowledges his debt to Plato’s idealism.15 The three meanings of the idea are, however, in the end inseparable: if one wants to grasp the essence of an idea, one must at least grasp it in one of these three meanings, and if one wants to understand one of them, then one must understand all three (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 189). In conclusion, Jaspers draws attention to the fact that Kant’s doctrine of ideas cannot be reduced to the theoretical idea and to the sphere of cognition, but, on the contrary, it “runs to all spheres” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 189). Accordingly, he briefly recapitulates the relevant passages concerning the practical and the aesthetic ideas from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement. As regards the practical ideas, Jaspers first claims that in morals the ideas become real causes and serve both as prototypes and as concepts of completeness. He recalls Kant’s distinction between ideas (Ideen) and ideals (Ideale): Virtue, and therewith human wisdom in its complete purity, are ideas. The wise man (of the Stoics) is, however, an ideal, that is, a man existing in thought only, but in complete conformity with the idea of wisdom. As the idea gives the rule, so the ideal in such a case serves as the archetype for the complete determination of the copy; and we have no other standard for our actions than the conduct of this divine man within us, with which we compare and judge ourselves, and so reform ourselves, although we can never attain to the perfection thereby prescribed. Although we cannot concede to these ideals’ objective reality (existence), they are not therefore to be regarded as figments of the brain; they supply reason with a standard which is indispensable to it. (Kant 1965, pp. 486–487)

Next Jaspers points out that neither the ideas nor the ideals can be identified with the well-known postulates of pure practical reason (immortality, freedom and God), which cannot be realized for speculative reason but obtain objective reality only for practical reason. Finally, in order to define the aesthetic ideas, Jaspers quotes Kant’s third Critique: “[b]y an aesthetic idea I mean a presentation (Vorstellung) of the imagination (Einbildungskraft) which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever,

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i.e., no determinate concept, can be adequate” (Kant 1987, p. 181). On this point we can also see the essential difference between the aesthetic idea and the idea of reason (Vernunftidee): the latter is a concept (Begriff) to which no imagination (Anschauung) can be adequate. That means that the aesthetic idea is just the counterpart (pendant) of the idea of reason (Jaspers 1919, p. 427). By way of summary, we can state that Jaspers’s paper which was given around 1913–1914 and appeared as an appendix to his Psychology of World Views provides a thorough overview of Kant’s doctrine of ideas. This text was not only Jaspers’s earliest publication on Kant but also on philosophy in general. It was undoubtedly more than a mere scholastic recapitulation of the relevant passages from the critical works, since it also reflected his own basic attitude towards the thinker from Königsberg and philosophy in general. Jaspers’s central methodical claim according to which “one cannot grasp ideas in any other way than by living in them” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 184) shows the clear existential feature of his early thinking: one cannot relate oneself to the idea directly, objectively, theoretically, but only indirectly, by way of a lived, existential relation.

1.2

Kant on Jaspers’s Philosophical Path

In the confines of the present paper it would of course be impossible to identify and analyze every single passage from Jaspers’s œuvre where Kantian topics are dealt with. Instead of giving a detailed overview, I will pick out some of the main texts in order to illustrate Kant’s presence in Jaspers’s thought. First of all, it should be noted that during Jaspers’s activity as a professor in Heidelberg Kant’s philosophy continued to be one the most frequent subjects of his lectures and seminars. A short glance at the records of the University of Heidelberg can convince us about his commitment to Kant: between 1914 and 1948 he announced altogether 17 courses on the philosopher from Königsberg.16 This is significant especially in comparison with the only two courses on Schelling17 or the single lecture on Fichte18 from the same period. (Remarkably enough, Jaspers gave also a great number of lectures on Hegel: he announced 13 courses on him in Heidelberg.19) (Leonhard 1983, pp. 103–106; cf. Saner 1970, p. 41). After having taken over the chair of the Department for Philosophy II in 1922, initially Jaspers published some smaller works only, such as the analysis Strindberg and Van Gogh (1922) and The Idea of the University (1923). In 1931, however, he published a famous diagnosis of the age Man in the Modern Age (Die geistige Situation der Zeit), and then, the next year he produced his

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fundamental work Philosophie, the first volume with the title “Philosophical World Orientation” (Philosophische Weltorientierung) containing an important chapter on Kant’s concept on the phenomenality of being. Contrary to the appendix of Psychology of World Views the style of this chapter is far from being a recapitulation but rather a mature interpretation and continuation of Kant’s transcendental thinking which is at the same time an important step towards the elaboration of Jaspers’s own philosophy.20 Starting from the classical philosophical problem of the subject-object dichotomy, Jaspers first points out that in order to grasp this relationship “we must try to go beyond all objectivity,” and we have to transcend to nonobjectiveness (Jaspers 1986, p. 22). As a matter of fact, in this chapter Jaspers develops his concept of transcending as well as of its different forms with special reference to Kant and the “Transcendental Deduction” in the Critique of Pure Reason. In Jaspers’s view “transcending thought” does not mean a conceptual grasping of what lies beyond the empirical world as in pre-Kantian, dogmatic metaphysics but rather “an act of freedom out of one’s absolute consciousness” (Jaspers 1986, p. 24). Transcending gives no insights which one can possess but brings forth a change in consciousness and in one’s attitude towards everything objective. The act of transcending opens the horizon for true philosophy: “To enter into transcending means…to climb the path to the freedom of philosophizing” (Jaspers 1986, p. 24). In the act of transcending we come to be aware of the limits of mundane existence: “With its help I can ascertain that the world is not all, that it is not being-in-itself, that it is not the very ultimate. But since I can neither cross the limits to reach Being that is not world nor have in the world an adequate expression of transcending, that thought lies solely in transcending itself ” (Jaspers 1986, pp. 23–24). Jaspers sharply distinguishes false and true transcending: whereas false transcending “takes me to an object beyond the boundary, an object which I then ‘have got,’” true transcending “only occurs on the borderline of object and nonobject, in passing from one to the other” (Jaspers 1986, p. 23). In conclusion, Jaspers’s fundamental teaching on transcending thinking is clearly based on the Kantian distinction between the “thing-in-itself ” (Ding an sich) and the “thing-in-its-appearance” (Ding als Erscheinung)21; however, by focusing on the act of transcending, he elaborates an essential implication, not only of Kantian thinking, but also of his own. In 1935 Jaspers delivered a lecture in Zürich entitled “Radical Evil in Kant” (Das radikale Böse bei Kant) (Jaspers 1951a, pp. 90–114; 1968b, pp. 183–204). Radical evil in human nature is one of the most important issues of Kant’s philosophy of religion, and it is thoroughly elaborated in the first chapter of his later work Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Kant 2009, pp.  17–61). Similarly to his analysis of Kant’s concept of transcending,

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Jaspers’s discussion of the problems of radical evil cannot be reduced to a mere reconstruction of Kant’s position, but rather it also contains an original and intensive interpretation. First, Jaspers claims that regarding the question of the evil in human nature, Kant held neither the position of the optimistic humanism of the German Aufklärung nor the pessimistic one of orthodox Christianity. Moreover, Kant’s position differs not only from Christian humility (Demut) but also from Stoic confidence (Hochmut) (Jaspers 1968b, p. 193). In the wake of Kant, Jaspers claims that “evil lies in the will alone” and that the propensity to evil “belongs to our rationality itself and to our freedom” (Jaspers 1968b, p. 186). If in Kant’s thinking evil does not lie either in a naturalistic or in a psychological or in a metaphysical dimension, then where is it actually located? “In the intelligible dimension of my being-oneself (Selbstsein). It belongs to my freedom” (Jaspers 1968b, p. 189). Although Kant constructs a magnificent conceptual hypothesis on the origin of radical evil as a non-­ temporal, intelligible act, his major contribution to the issue is still to reveal that this origin is essentially unknowable. It is clear that the origin of radical evil lies in the nature of our rationality, whereas the main result of Kant’s approach is not so much an elaboration of a theoretical solution to the problem but rather a motivation for a “revolution in the way of thinking” (Revolution der Denkungsart) (Jaspers 1968b, pp.  195, 197). According to Jaspers, Kant’s whole philosophizing is a highly original “illumination of reason” (Erhellung der Vernunft) and its limits (Grenzen), and within this framework the origin of radical evil appears as an essentially inconceivable mystery (Rätsel) (Jaspers 1968b, p. 196). Grasping this constitutes an “unsurpassable demand for human inwardness” (Jaspers 1968b, p. 202). The claim that the essence of Kant’s critical philosophy is a “revolution of mentality” and a “spiritual transformation (Umwendung)” (Jaspers 1968c, p. 247) also turns up in Jaspers’s commemoration lecture on the 150th anniversary of Kant’s death, which was broadcasted by Radio Basel on February 14, 1954. In this speech Jaspers first of all states that Kant’s philosophical impact significantly declined since the beginning of the twentieth century and “his spirit seems to have sunk” (Jaspers 1968c, p. 242). In order to outline Kant’s thinking Jaspers briefly interprets the basic Kantian questions: (1) What can I know? (2) What ought I to do? (3) What may I hope? (4) And finally, What is man? In Jaspers’s view, Kant not only completed the movement of German Aufklärung but also surpassed it. Although Kant was considered by his contemporaries as “all-destroyer” (Alleszermalmer) of any metaphysics, Jaspers stresses that Kant himself “raised our thinking over all experience to the ideas,” and “he based us rationally in the supersensible (Übersinnlich),” which cannot be theoretically known by us, but of which we

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can be certain (vergewissern) in the sense (Sinn) of our actions (Jaspers 1968c, p. 245). Jaspers criticizes sharply both the thinkers of German Idealism and the representatives of neo-Kantianism for their misleading interpretation of Kant. Whereas Fichte and Schelling sacrificed Kantian reason (Vernunft) for the “brilliant magic” (genialer Zauber) of their systems, in neo-Kantianism philosophy became epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie) and as such a servant of the sciences. Therefore, it is an important task to discover and to re-appropriate Kant’s original thinking since its importance in the history of philosophy is no less than that of Plato. In Jaspers’s view, Kant’s significance exceeds the framework of philosophy: he is “a culmination (Gipfel) of what each man as rational being (Vernunftwesen) can be,” and he is a “carrier (Träger) of the humanity of Enlightenment” (Jaspers 1968c, p. 249). Some years after World War II, deeply displeased by contemporary German political developments, Jaspers accepted a professorship at the University of Basel in 1948. He thus left Germany, relinquished his German citizenship and became a Swiss national. In the political and intellectual climate of the Cold War and because of the threat of nuclear warfare Jaspers delivered a radio speech on November 10, 1957, which was broadcasted by 11 German-­ speaking radio channels across Europe. The topic of the speech was Kant’s sketch On Perpetual Peace (Kant 2003; Jaspers 1968e, pp. 233–241) and it was also published in the same year (Jaspers 1968d, pp.  205–231; 1968e, pp. 233–241). The text portrays Kant as a political thinker whose thoughts concerning the peace of Basel in 1795 are still relevant for the present age, even if in his partly “ironical,” “satirical” sketch (see Jaspers 1968d, p. 229) he does not offer “any program which declares how [perpetual peace] can be achieved” (Jaspers 1968d, p. 224). Rather, he tries to spell out the conditions and principles of peace that can be considered eternal (Jaspers 1968d, p. 205). Now, if we try to summarize briefly Jaspers’s interpretation of Kant’s conception, first we can emphasize that for him the state of peace is not natural, but it has to be established (gestiftet) by means of a cooperation of free individuals as well as by means of establishing a juridical state (rechtlicher Zustand) (Jaspers 1968d, pp. 206, 209). The conditions of perpetual peace have to be realized by virtue of a natural necessity (Naturnotwendigkeit), experienced in the form of anxiety (Angst) (Jaspers 1968d, p. 219). However, anxiety and the need for safety in itself are not enough for perpetual peace, but we also need an inner conversion in the moral nature of the individuals (Jaspers 1968d, p. 220). The last part of the paper is entitled: “Kant Today.” Here Jaspers states that Kant’s thoughts seem to be as much true today as in Kant’s time. There is, however, an essential difference between Kant’s own age and the contemporary

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situation. For Kant took it as obvious that to achieve the state of perpetual peace we have an infinite amount of time at our disposal. Even if there are catastrophes in history, a certain part of humanity will survive. In Jaspers’s time, however, the historical situation changed substantially. In the time of the threat of nuclear war it became wholly possible that all of mankind might well be exterminated completely. Jaspers considers the historical situation of the Cold War as a dramatic one: if humanity cannot maintain peace by means of anxiety and the rule of law, the decline of mankind seems to be inevitable (Jaspers 1968d, pp. 232–233).

1.3

Kant as a “Great Philosopher”

Although Jaspers never published a monograph on Kant, the first volume of his monumental work entitled The Great Philosophers (Die grossen Philosophen) contains so much comprehensive insight on Kant as an eternal founder of philosophizing (fortzeugender Gründer des Philosophierens) that this particular section of the work was later edited in English by Jaspers’s former student and lifelong friend Hannah Arendt in the form of a separate book (Jaspers 1962a).22 The significance of this text can hardly be overestimated. Jaspers here not only delineates a very detailed picture of Kant’s philosophical beginnings, his way to critical philosophy, his theory of knowledge, his conception of reason, politics and history, but he also discusses extensively the different forms of critique of Kant, explaining his own critical remarks, too (Jaspers 1962a, pp. 135–150). Here he also reflects on the varieties of what he regards as inauthentic criticism (uneigentliche Kritik) of Kant (Friedrich Schlegel, Schlosser, Fichte), and he comprehensively argues against them (Jaspers 1957b, pp. 585–589).23 This text clearly show that although Jaspers considers Kant to be “a nodal point in modern philosophy,” “the absolute indispensable philosopher,” without whom “we have no basis for criticism in philosophy” (Jaspers 1962a, pp.  153–154), his reception and interpretation of Kant is anything but uncritical. His critical reading of Kant has, however, many different aspects. At first glance it may seem that his treatment of Kant’s transcendental logic falls into a negative, destructive position, revealing that Kant’s system is not free from certain forms of logical discrepancy such as tautology, vicious circle and self-contradiction (Jaspers 1962a, pp.  37–42). As an example of the “obvious contradictions,” Jaspers claims,

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Kant circles round the noumenon (the intelligible, the thing in itself ) by means of negations. The noumenon is without sensuous qualities, space and time, or categories. Hence our idea of it does not partake of knowledge. Objectively its content is nothing. Yet this nothing figures as something. The void has a content. (Jaspers 1962a, p. 38)

Then he goes on to list other examples of contradictions in Kant’s system, which, however, we do not need to treat individually here. For, according to Jaspers, “[i]t is impossible to set forth a construction of being or even, as in Kant, a construction of being as it is disclosed to cognition, in a system free from contradiction” (Jaspers 1962a, p.  38). It is a specific characteristic of transcending thinking (which is in Jaspers’s view the core of Kant’s method) that some of its contents appear to be contradictions for the discursive, categorical understanding (Verstandesdenken). This implies that in revealing the inner contradictions of Kant’s transcendental logic (which Kant himself was also aware of ) Jaspers does not aim to destroy Kant’s position in any way but rather to highlight its transcending character: in such context the logical discrepancy “serves a very good and necessary purpose” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 37). If one wishes to gain awareness of the Encompassing (Umgreifende) then— somewhat similar to Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor of ladder24—“with the help of clear insights one has to go beyond them. I must let my clear insights collapse, like ladders that I no longer need once I have climbed to a certain height” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 38). Regarding the true appropriation of Kant’s philosophy, Jaspers considers the criticism to be indispensable: “No one has ever taken over the Kantian philosophy without contradicting Kant in essential points. No one can understand him without correcting some of his statements” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 135). Therefore, in addition to unfolding some forms of immanent logical discrepancy in Kant’s philosophy, Jaspers also sets forth his own critical remarks. He finds in Kant three questionable positions which are rooted in the very nature of Kant’s thinking. They are problematic because their truth is not straightforward: (1) “Kant’s philosophy lays claim to the character of a science possessing the same universal validity as mathematics and physics.” (2) “It claims to provide fundamental a priori insights in regard to the material of the natural sciences and compelling insights in regard to the content of the ethical law.” (3) “Kant’s philosophy lays claim to systematic completeness; it is permeated with a multiplicity of systematizations” (Jaspers 1962a, pp.  135–136). In opposition to these Kantian positions, Jaspers stresses that “philosophizing with the transcendental method is not a science like other sciences, because it has no object and because the method itself cannot be clearly defined,” and

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therefore “Kant’s transcendental philosophy cannot be termed scientific if by science we mean what modern science aims at and achieves” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 138). Moreover, Jaspers is quite critical towards Kant’s later effort to go over from “critique” to “doctrine” (Jaspers 1962a, pp. 138–144). In conclusion we can say that Jaspers’s reception of Kant bears several critical traces, and he also explicitly considers this critical attitude essential because “even though the fundamental insight of the Kantian philosophy is fully convincing, its doctrinal derivations are subject to correction and refutation. But this does not detract from the fundamental insight” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 141). In other words, Kant’s critical philosophy cannot but be critically appropriated even if this comprehensive work “is unique in the history of philosophy” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 153).

2

 urning Away from Kant: The Speculative T “Magic” of German Idealism

In the same chapter on Kant in The Great Philosophers Jaspers also expounds his view of the reception of Kant in German Idealism. It is typical of Jaspers’s evaluation in general that when discussing Fichte, Schelling and Hegel individually, he makes positive comments about them sporadically; however, his statements concerning the whole movement of German Idealism are almost exclusively critical. First of all, he highlights that, although Kant elaborated “‘a metaphysics of metaphysics, ’”he remained “magnificently unaware of the forms and methods of his thinking” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 151). According to Jaspers, that was exactly the reason why the young enthusiasts and philosophical conquerors of the next generation were able to take him as their starting point. They did not suspect the discipline of his method. They transformed and distorted the clear operations of transcendental thinking into speculative constructions, intellectual visions in which they tell us what God was thinking before and during the Creation. They were responsible for the disastrous transformation of reason into spirit and the confusion between reason and spirit. They ignored the limits set by Kant. In their thinking, which had begun with Kant, Kantian reason was submerged. From the very start they abandoned his basic philosophical attitude. It is in this sense that German Idealism began with Kant. Hegel drew up a schema of philosophical development: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel; and to this day it is accepted by most historians of philosophy. (Jaspers 1962a, pp. 151–152)

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From this pointed formulation it comes to light that in his view the idealist turn from Kant’s critical, transcendental method to the varieties of speculative knowledge of the Absolute is fully disastrous and actually a misuse of Kant’s original thoughts. (This is the reason why Kant publicly distanced himself from Fichte in 1799: see Jaspers 1957b, pp. 588–589.) In addition, Jaspers stresses that the thinkers of German Idealism tacitly dropped or expressly rejected Kant’s decisive positions from the first. Multidimensional reason was replaced by derivation from a principle; awareness of the finite, discursive character of human reason gave way to a supposed intuitive understanding. Elucidation of reason as the place where being is manifested was set aside in favor of an immediate knowledge of being. Casting off Kant’s humility, these philosophers thought the thoughts of God. (Jaspers 1962a, p. 152)

By criticizing and neglecting the basic Kantian teaching concerning the unsurpassable limits (Grenzen) and finiteness (Endlichkeit) of the human capacity of knowledge (Erkenntnisvermögen), the thinkers of German Idealism managed to establish a new way of philosophizing as well as a new way to build a philosophical system. However, their speculative projects led in the end to idle speculations and to a conceptual “magic” (Zauber). In Jaspers’s view the method of the uncritical neglect of the Kantian limits of reason (Vernunft) was ab initio false. “This common trait of those who had fallen away from Kant admitted of fascinating, mutually antagonistic works: the penetrating constructions of Fichte, the gnostic visions of Schelling, Hegel’s magnificent vision of all being in a system of dialectical operations” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 152). In his famous monograph on Schelling Jaspers formulates his criticism of German Idealism perhaps even sharper than in The Great Philosophers.25 In this fundamental work, published in 1955, Jaspers claims that although the thinkers of German Idealism believed that they were carrying on with Kant’s philosophy, in fact they did not understand his way of thinking (Denkungsart) at all. Their actual relation to Kant can rather be characterized as a radical turning away (Abkehr) from him and a break (Bruch) with his original thinking (Jaspers 1955, p. 313). For this reason Jaspers rejects the standard view, according to which the systems of German Idealism arose by way of a continuous evolution from Kant’s critical philosophy and received their final form in Hegel’s absolute system.26 With German Idealism the spirit of magic (Zauber) appeared in philosophy, which resulted in a general confusion of knowledge. The great German philosophy was up to Kant rational (vernünftig): thereafter, however, it did “somersaults” (Purzelbäume) (Jaspers 1955,

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pp. 314–315). Furthermore, Jaspers points out that there is also a vast difference between the personal life (Dasein) of Kant and the German idealists: whereas Kant himself spent his whole life in the same town of Königsberg where he had an ordinary and fixed life style, the thinkers of German Idealism had a (more or less) restless life. They were nowhere at home and were always underway throughout Germany and also beyond its borders. Contrary to Kant they were modern wanderers of a disintegrating Europe (Jaspers 1955, p. 316). Through Kant a new philosophical situation arose which implied a significant task (Aufgabe). Kant described his own philosophy as a “propaedeutic” (Propädeutik) which aims to open up new possibilities. Although his new, revolutionary way of thinking (Denkungsart) cannot be rationally surpassed, still one has to surpass Kant in the sense that his thinking “demands completion and the realization of what he made possible” (Jaspers 1955, pp. 316–317). According to Jaspers, the “great truth” of German Idealism was exactly to conceive this important task against the orthodox Kantians. It was the “German disaster,” however, that the thinkers of German Idealism abandoned the original Kantian way of thinking. Their supposed solution of the Kantian task was both ingenious and totally inverted (verkehrend): namely, in their systems genuine philosophy was replaced by a speculative magic which was therefore fully misleading although it also contained some true elements (Jaspers 1955, pp. 317–318). The idealistic unbinding of the Kantian shackles (Fesseln) did not result in absolute freedom and knowledge of Being in itself—as it was promised and hoped for. Instead, it lost itself and dissolved into the void (Erguß ins Leere). Because the thinkers of German Idealism abandoned the Kantian transcendental logical idea of unity (Einheit) for the sake of a speculative unity, which can be grasped, they became slaves of their own projects of unity (Einheitsentwurf). This was independent of whether they conceived of this as a knowledge (Wissen) of a dialectical totality or as an undialectical story (Erzählung) about an allegedly factual process of Being (Seinsprozess). According to Jaspers, this was one of the reasons for the collapse of German Idealism in all forms (Jaspers 1955, p. 322).

3

Jaspers on the Thinkers of German Idealism

Now, after having surveyed Jaspers’s reception of Kant as well as his general view of German Idealism, next I shall outline his treatment of the individual thinkers. Although it is well known that in the era of German Idealism a

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number of significant philosophers participated in different discussions, we shall follow the received scheme that was used also by Jaspers and treat the figures of German Idealism in the following order: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.

3.1

F ichte: A “Titan of Thinking” and a “Caricature of Kant”

As a matter of fact, Jaspers dealt with Fichte’s idealist project rather rarely in his œuvre. He never published any work on Fichte and also the vast number of his unpublished manuscripts contain very little material on the issue (as for Jaspers’s manuscripts on Fichte, see Jaspers 1981a, pp.  1044–1045). As a young professor of philosophy, Jaspers dedicated to Fichte only a single lecture course in Heidelberg, in the spring of 1925 (Leonhard 1983, p. 104). The reason for this was, however, not simple lack of interest or ignorance on Jaspers’s part; it was precisely Fichte towards whom Jaspers felt the greatest antipathy among the thinkers of German Idealism. What Jaspers notes about Marx in one of his letters can also be applied to Fichte: “I have not up to now been able to meet this man with anything but hatred on my own part” (Kohler and Saner 1993, p. 186). But what was the reason for this unconcealed lack of sympathy? It was not only Fichte’s speculative “magic” (Zauber), his (mis) interpretation of the Kantian philosophy and his radical break with Kant which provoked Jaspers’s sharp criticism but also his philosophical and human attitude which can be characterized as “prophetical: egocentric, demanding, declaiming, violent” (prophetisch: egozentrisch, anspruchsvoll, wetternd, gewaltsam) (Jaspers 1981a, p. 703). Jaspers’s hatred towards Fichte was so intense that by formulating his sharpest criticism of Heidegger and of his speculation on Being (Seinsspekulation), Jaspers drew a parallel between him and Fichte (Jaspers 1978, p. 87 see also p. 105).27 In his famous monograph on Schelling, Jaspers characterizes Fichte as an “intellectual plebeian” (Jaspers 1955, p. 283) whose attitude in the period of the Atheism Dispute in Jena (1799) was “unphilosophical” and a “fully unfounded brazenness” (ganz unbegründete Unverschämtheit) towards the state (Jaspers 1955, p. 275). According to Jaspers, Fichte is a “boring designer, fanatic and dogmatic, nationalist and moralist, activistic as a rhetorician” whose “decency is questionable” and “not seldom untruthful” (Jaspers 1955, p. 282).28 His thinking and attitude lead permanently to absurd consequences. In Jaspers’s view it is exactly Fichte with whom the fundamental misinterpretation of Kant and the radical break with Kant began.

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As we have seen, Jaspers was fairly critical towards Kantian philosophy, and he himself criticized and completed Kant’s teaching on certain points. He considered Fichte’s criticism of Kant fully inauthentic (uneigentlich) and misleading (Jaspers 1957b, pp. 588–589). Fichte’s effort to go beyond Kant was, for Jaspers, entirely unacceptable. The records in the Nachlaß which are relevant for Fichte do not provide coherent picture. On the one hand, one can prima facie notice that Jaspers’s picture of Fichte has many positive features. He acknowledges Fichte’s greatness and his “philosophical genius,” calling him a “titan of thinking” (Jaspers 1981a, p.  702).29 He also highlights the “power of [Fichte’s] visionary glance,” the “lucidity of [his] speech,” his “wild energy,” his “force as a pedagogue, preacher, and rhetorician” (Jaspers 1981a, p. 702). On the other hand, however, he also emphasizes Fichte’s “aggression” (Gewaltsamkeit), “great immodesty,” and despotism. He shows up as a “representative of the will of God” (Jaspers 1981a, p.  703). In addition to such negative characteristics, Jaspers perceives an explicitly totalitarian moment in Fichte’s thinking which was probably the most disturbing for him (Jaspers 1981a, p. 1044). He interprets Fichte’s metaphysics as a kind of “subjective rationalism” which was conceived by its author as a “compelling science” (zwingende Wissenschaft). According to Jaspers, Fichte’s “inhumanity” towards other people corresponds to his aggressive way of thinking, from which his inability for true communication also follows. By absolutizing Kant’s practical philosophy and binding freedom into the net of logical deductions, Fichte appears to be a “caricature of Kant” (Jaspers 1981a, p. 703). Furthermore, he can be dangerous as an apologist of a “violent lie in the service of the truth”; in this way he becomes “an idol for fanatical and violent people” (Jaspers 1981a, p. 703).

3.2

Schelling: Greatness and Fate

While Fichte was treated by Jaspers rather sporadically, his interest in Schelling increased significantly, especially in the period of the centenary of Schelling’s death in 1954. Although as a young professor, Jaspers dedicated only two lectures to Schelling in Heidelberg (1924, 1926), in 1954 he participated in the high-profile international conference on Schelling in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, which drew renewed attention in Europe to Schelling’s works. In the same year he published his conference paper (Jaspers 1954, pp. 12–38) and also delivered a commemorative speech on Schelling (Jaspers 1968g, pp. 278–286), which was broadcasted by Radio Basel on October 24, 1954. Then, in the following year he composed a comprehensive monograph: it was

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the only book which he ever published on a German idealist thinker (Jaspers 1955). (His volume on Kant, as we have seen, was originally a part of his magnum opus, Die grossen Philosophen.) As for the content of the book, Jaspers not only interprets Schelling’s works and main teachings, but he also critically evaluates his philosophy and betrays his ambivalent attitude towards Schelling which contains elements of appropriation and polemics alike.30 In the first chapter he delineates Schelling’s biography, his relationship with Caroline, his personality, as well as the basic feature of his œuvre. The second chapter is dedicated to Schelling’s concept of philosophy, with a special regard to its substance, method, the distinction between negative and positive philosophy and his system. Chapter three discusses Schelling’s conception of Being (Erdenken des Seins). This is undoubtedly the central part of the monograph which discusses not only Schelling’s famous question of Being (Seinsfrage), his fundamental doctrine of potencies (Potenzenlehre), the doctrine of God (Gotteslehre) and the history of Being (Seinsgeschichte), but also contains his thorough critique of Schelling’s concept of God and of the objectification (Objektivierung) which he takes to be the basic feature of Schelling’s methodology. In the fourth chapter he examines the substance of Schelling’s philosophy, and, in chapter five, he outlines Schelling’s position in the historical context of German Idealism. Jaspers’s thoroughly elaborated conference paper “Schelling’s Greatness and His Fate” (Schellings Gröse und sein Verhängnis) from 1954 anticipates some fundamental insights from the later monograph. Jaspers, who characterizes Schelling as a “gnostic dreamer” (gnostischer Wahrträumer), focuses first on Schelling’s concept of philosophy, which is for him basically a “work of freedom” and “will” (Wille) (Jaspers 1993, pp.  143–144), then on the central concept of intellectual intuition (intellektuale Anschauung), and, finally, on his basic metaphysical question: “What is Being?” (Jaspers 1993, p. 147). It is remarkable that Jaspers criticizes Schelling’s speculative concept of freedom on the basis of his own existential concept of freedom. He claims that by “objectivizing freedom,” Schelling takes a “perilous leap” and ignores that “[t]here is no freedom without transcendence” (Jaspers 1993, p. 150). Another basic methodological problem, according to Jaspers, is that Schelling relinquishes “transcending…in favor of a fixation of transcendence” (Jaspers 1993, p.  151). Furthermore, Jaspers considers Schelling’s speculative reply to the question of Being problematic: “Is that true? Is it not possible to stand at the limit with this question, without answer but also without despair, and not plunge into the bottomless void? …An answer such as that of Schelling’s gnosticism is untrue for philosophic cognition and disastrous for Existenz” (Jaspers 1993, p.  152). Jaspers’s general view is that “no matter how

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philosophically exciting Schelling’s thoughts are, the descent from the peaks always leads to failure” (Jaspers 1993, p. 152). Schelling makes reflection the subject of his philosophizing. But Jaspers warns: “if reflection becomes its own purpose and goal, then it is deadly” (Jaspers 1993, p.  154). It seems that Schelling “did not become master of reflection because it arrogated dominance to itself ” (Jaspers 1993, p. 154). He loves the externalized reflexivity, the gesture, “the solemnity of appearance, prophetic dignity” (Jaspers 1993, p. 154). With him a new tone enters the history of philosophy. His aristocratic gesture is, however, “twisted into philosophical demagoguery. He claims a certain nobility for himself and yet may lack an unfailing nobility of the heart” (Jaspers 1993, p. 154). Schelling’s style is no longer a match for the clarity, purity and moderation of Kant. Nevertheless, “in his capacity to attract and repel, Schelling remains exciting for us. Even in his mischievous absurdity, we view him with an amazement, attributable to our awe before greatness” (Jaspers 1993, p. 155). Another great problem with Schelling’s philosophy is that of objectivizing. “Surprisingly Schelling believes he has overcome the ties to the object, as well as dogmatic thinking, solely by thinking Being not as object but as becoming. But becoming is no less objective than being-object, the system of becoming no less objective than the system of unchangeable Being” (Jaspers 1993, p.  157). But what motivates Schelling’s leap to the objectivization of the supersensible? “Aside from the theosophic intuitions, which were ever-present second nature to Schelling, it may have been the reflexivity of his mode of thought and existence” (Jaspers 1993, p. 158). In addition, Schelling “confounds conjuring something up in order to make it present with objectification, or illumination of Existenz with gnosis” (Jaspers 1993, p. 159). His leap into the ground of Being may be seen to be a “forced leap ending in a fall into bottomlessness, while he conjures up phantasmagoria. Or we may liken his ascent to Being to the flight of Icarus ending in his downward plunge” (Jaspers 1993, p. 160). Jaspers also found Schelling’s conception of his mission quite problematic. He points out that philosophy is destined to save the times, and he feels himself to be the one who will be the bearer of philosophy (Jaspers 1993, p. 161). In doing so, Schelling not only misunderstood his own age, but he was also mistaken about the scientific, political and religious realities: “he had no conception of the meaning of the natural sciences and their achievements,…he made foolish assertions with regard to matters scientifically verifiable” (Jaspers 1993, p. 163). Moreover, he was estranged both from the political realities and the actual religion (Jaspers 1993, p.  163). Although Jaspers critically rejects Schelling’s inversions (Verkehrungen), he claims that one has to find and preserve the truth in which

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they are grounded. Against Schelling’s immoderate claims for his philosophy he stresses that no one can possess the true philosophy because man’s life, “looked at in honesty, is set within a realm of forces that cannot be exhaustively surveyed by any human being” (Jaspers 1993, p. 165). The only possible way to truth is communication: “that is true which unites us” (Jaspers 1993, p. 165). In summary, in Jaspers’s view Schelling’ philosophy is ambiguous. On the one hand, he admits that “the treasures embedded in his thinking are indeed precious” (Jaspers 1993, p.  166). On the other, however, “in dealing with Schelling we must be prepared to appropriate and reject, to alternate between gratefulness and irritation, to feel close to him and yet end up at the farthest distance” (Jaspers 1993, p. 166). Still, Schelling’s philosophy can be helpful to us. He awakens our sense of greatness in philosophy and frees us from the accepted commonplaces. His importance “lies in his actualization of seduction itself. A great error, committed in grand style, has become visible once and for all, so that it will not be repeated” (Jaspers 1993, pp. 166–167).

3.3

Hegel: A Great Shaper of System

Whereas, as we have seen, Jaspers has shown only a modest interest in Fichte’s philosophy and a periodical, albeit highly intensive and fruitful interest in Schelling’s thinking, he dedicated to Hegel an entire chapter even in his protophilosophical work Psychology of World Views (Koterski and Langley 2003, pp. 205–222). Moreover, as a young professor he gave 13 courses on the subject in Heidelberg. The courses were given mainly on the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. In the following period, leading up to the publication of Philosophie (1932), which coincided with his move from a chair in psychology to a professorship in philosophy, Jaspers again gave frequent lecture courses as well as seminars on Hegel, this time adding Hegel’s Science of Logic. (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 205)

Although, as we shall see, Jaspers’s decisive turn from Hegel to Kierkegaard took shape as early as in the Psychology of World Views, Hegel indisputably remained one of the main philosophers informing his thinking as one of the great shapers of systems. He openly claims: “Hegel’s philosophy is incomparably instructive for us, and, seen in this way, we owe him much” (Jaspers 1993, p. 206). Jaspers’s major treatment of Hegel is to be found in a posthumous fragment published in the impressive work The Great Philosophers (Jaspers 1993, pp. 221–298).

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In his protophilosophical work Jaspers discusses Hegel’s thinking as a Weltanschauung. As he sees it, “Hegel’s philosophy is the utmost that rationalistic observation of the world can achieve; but it wants to be more than it is if it wants the Weltanschauung to be power, support, something positive” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 215). In order to characterize Hegel’s philosophy, Jaspers quotes and interprets a number of passages from the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. To begin with, Jaspers outlines Hegel’s concept of thinking (Denken) and claims that life is for Hegel essentially thinking. Then he explains Hegel’s distinction between the different forms of thinking; thinking (Denken), reflective thinking (Nachdenken), and thought following reflective thinking (nachfolgendes Denken). Another important distinction is that between reflecting thinking (reflektierendes Denken) and reasoning thought (vernünftiges Denken). The former is rationalistic thinking, whereas the reasoning, speculative thought is a “reflective thinking of ideas, which are intuitable, and as such can be conceived but not cognized, and hence such thought cannot be carried out in a purely rationalistic manner” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p.  208). Here Jaspers finds the opportunity to call attention to the “absolute opposition” between Hegel’s speculative and Kant’s critical philosophy: whereas Kant unfolds the unsurpassable limits of reason, “Hegel is able, by means of speculative thought, to contain the infinite in concepts” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p.  208). Thereafter he deals with Hegel’s basic hermeneutical principle: “The true is the whole. But the whole is only the essence completing itself through its development” (Hegel 2018, p.  11). In Jaspers’s interpretation, this whole, which is the true, is a circle and, as a circle, it is infinite. This infinite, however, is for Hegel not a task, but a present here and now. Here comes to the fore, again, another “complete opposition” between Hegel and Kant, since by Hegel “everything can be known and is known,” “the absolute can be and is being cognized” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 211). He continues, “Hegel lowers the barrier before infinity. Where everything is known, there is no Idea in the Kantian sense, there is no living ignorance, no infinite movement” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 211). Later on, Jaspers becomes openly critical of Hegel: he “balks especially at considering the Ought a mere postulate that is not but is to be actualized,” moreover “he is strangely insensitive to empirical reality, indeed he is indifferent and contemptuous toward it” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 212). Remarkably enough, however, Jaspers’s criticism of Hegel reflects not only his Kantian standpoint but also his intensive reception and appropriation of the thinking of Søren Kierkegaard, whom he considered “the eternal antipode to Hegel: The Either/Or over against the as-well-as; despair over against a thinking of conciliatory harmony; religiosity over against philosophical speculation” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 214).

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Although Jaspers considered Hegel an indispensable “teacher of the totality of life” who can provide us “the richest education” (Koterski and Langley 2003, pp. 218–219), his own thinking was clearly more developed in his protophilosophical work by Kant and Kierkegaard, whom he regarded the “prophets of indirect communication” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 219). In the posthumous fragment on Hegel, Jaspers mainly focuses on the fundamental concept of dialectic because he is convinced that “in order to understand Hegel we have to understand dialectics” (Jaspers 1993, p.  289). But what is actually dialectics? According to Jaspers, “Hegel is convinced that dialectic is not just a method of our thinking, but is also the movement of Being itself; it is that through which everything is out of the ground of things. Dialectics does not think in relation to another, an object; rather, it considers what, as thinking, is the nature of God and all that is created” (Jaspers 1993, p. 289). The starting point of Jaspers’s explication of Hegelian dialectics is the interpretation of some fundamental issues from the Phenomenology of Spirit (sense-certainty, the becoming of self-consciousness, lordship and bondage, the further progress of self-consciousness) and from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (being, nothing, becoming). Then Jaspers provides a thorough analysis, characterization and critique of the dialectic supporting Hegel’s position against the criticisms by Feuerbach and Trendelenburg (Jaspers 1993, pp. 225–226, 228–229). Here he contrasts Hegel with Kant (Jaspers 1993, p. 287). Similar to the Psychology of World Views, Jaspers also acknowledges Hegel’s significance as a “great creator of system” (Jaspers 1993, p. 298). His critical distance from Hegel and ambivalent attitude towards him is, however, given a much greater emphasis here: For us, Hegel is the magnificent, unique, irreplaceable adversary. By understanding him completely we gain self-understanding: Two people who philosophize can never be objectively identical. But we who are not creative feed off the greats, who lead us by the hand. Thus Kant, Kierkegaard, Max Weber may appear utterly disparate to us, yet in confrontation with Hegel they appear a unified front. (Jaspers 1993, p. 297)

4

 onclusions: Between Critical Appropriation C and Consequent Polemics

A short review to the main results of the present article can convince us that German Idealism was for Jaspers a highly significant period in the history of Western philosophy, although his relationship to the individual thinkers of this movement was rather different. To be sure, Kant remained for him during

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his entire philosophical path “the foremost philosopher” (Jaspers 1951c, p. 339). However, despite Jaspers’s philosophical orientation, his reception of Kant was not at all uncritical or epigonic. Instead, he adopted Kant’s critical philosophy in some respects decidedly critically, especially in his monumental late work The Great Philosophers, for he considered criticism indispensable for any true appropriation: “No one has ever taken over the Kantian philosophy without contradicting Kant in essential points. No one can understand him without correcting some of his statements” (Jaspers 1962a, p. 135). Jaspers, however, not only points to logical discrepancies in Kant’s transcendental philosophy, but he also goes beyond Kant by emphasizing the existential relevance of transcendence or of the Ideas: “One cannot grasp ideas in any other way than by living in them. Whoever wants to reach them directly, instead of indirectly, in the medium of the finite and the particular, travels in fantasy and thereby futility” (Koterski and Langley 2003, p.  184). Ultimately, Jaspers’s appropriation of Kant can be characterized as a positive and productive, although not uncritical reception which served as an indispensable foundation for his own philosophy of Existenz. His philosophy can surely be considered as surpassing Kant’s due to the exploration of the problem of Existenz. On the other hand, it remains firmly within the Kantian confines insofar as it draws on his fundamental thesis. In Jaspers’s view, the relation of the German idealists to Kant is just the opposite: their systems are based actually on the speculative surpassing of Kantian limits. This methodological break with Kant and the inauthentic criticism of him, especially by Fichte, were for Jaspers ab ovo unacceptable. To his mind the whole project of German Idealism in all of its forms is based on a fundamental misunderstanding und misuse of the original Kantian philosophy. However, as we have seen, although Jaspers was highly critical towards the speculative “magic” of German idealists, he openly acknowledged their achievements as thinkers. Jaspers’s characterization of Schelling may also be applied to Fichte and Hegel: they free us “from accepted commonplaces” and awaken “our sense of greatness in philosophy” (Jaspers 1993, p. 166). Their relevance for Jaspers is clearly witnessed in his important monograph on Schelling (Jaspers 1955), as well as by the substantial fragment on Hegel (Jaspers 1993). Since the thinkers of German Idealism surpassed the Kantian limits, their fall was, in Jaspers’s view, inevitable. He criticized them not only from a Kantian perspective but also from his own existential standpoint. Unsurprisingly, his whole reception of German Idealism remained ambivalent and critical in every respect. His permanent criticism was, however, never intended to be a mere rejection, quite the contrary: it was a sign of intellectual respect towards thinkers whose philosophical greatness was a priori intertwined with their inevitable fate.

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Notes 1. Jaspers 1951b, p. 339: “Kant wurde mir zum Philosophen schlechthin und blieb es mir.” I am indebted to Anton Hügli for his valuable advice for my work as well as for generously making available to me his unpublished article “Kant— Gegentypus zu Heidegger? Was Jaspers mit Kant verbindet und von Heidegger trennt.” I am also grateful to my colleague Péter Lautner for having checked my manuscript. 2. As Olson puts it: “Jaspers believes that in Kant, for the first time in the history of Western philosophy, we are shown that critical philosophizing is necessarily existential; that the imprint of subjectivity upon what is thought is not just accidental but formally inevitable” (Olson 1979, p. 72). 3. Jaspers clearly points out: “As a Kantian, I stand in opposition to neo-­ Kantianism” (Jaspers 1981b, p. 856). 4. Whereas Schopenhauer declares that his point of departure is Kant’s teaching whose effect can be considered an intellectual rebirth his opinion on the philosophy of German Idealism is purely negative: “So, working in this spirit and all the while seeing the false and the bad enjoying universal prestige, and in fact windbags’ dronings [Fichte, Schelling] and charlatanism [Hegel] held in the highest honour, I have long since renounced the approbation of my contemporaries” (Schopenhauer 2010, p. 14). 5. See Saner 1970, pp. 18–19 and also Jaspers’s commemoration on Schopenhauer in Jaspers 1968h, pp. 287–295. As a matter of fact, however, Jaspers found Schopenhauer’s criticism of Hegel irrelevant: “A critique such as Schopenhauer’s is meaningless: he merely scolded” (Jaspers 1993, p. 295). 6. Langley also emphasizes the immanent ambiguity of Jaspers’s reception of Kant: “His continuations of Kant are clear but critical. For both thinkers the domains of knowledge and being are mediated by faith. But Jaspers’s original conception of philosophical faith as a dialectic between immanent Existenz and transcendent being goes far beyond this dependence…[Jaspers] goes back to Kant’s intentions and conclusions for the basic premises of his own systematics” but his “conception of philosophizing and of philosophy goes beyond Kant” (Koterski and Langley 2003, pp. 193–194). 7. Jaspers 1968c, p. 250: “Ihn brauchen wir nicht als ein Fremdes zu bewundern. Mit ihm können wir leben. Ihm möchten wir folgen.” 8. Olson 1979, pp.  73–74: “Adapting the critical epistemological insights of Kant to the language of Existenz, Jaspers recovers what he believes to be the essential intent and purpose of Kantian Kritik, namely a disclosure of the limits of objectifying thinking which does not put an end to thinking, but permits transcending or true metaphysical thinking to begin at a critical level.” 9. Diehl 2008. 10. Hügli forthcoming.

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11. In one of his notes Jaspers evaluates Heidegger’s philosophizing highly critically: “ist es faktischer Nihilismus, der durch falsche Versprechungen sich verschleiert—und dazu der ungeheure Ehrgeiz und Machtwille, der den Zauberern, aber nie den spekulativ wahrhaften Philosophen eignet?—äußerster Gegenpol: Kant, Spinoza,—verwandt: Fichte—” (Jaspers 1978, p. 87). 12. Jaspers 1957a, p. 24: “Im Kreise der Berufsphilosophen galt ich als Fremder…Ich besaß nicht einmal den Dr. phil., war Dr. med. Die traditionelle philosophische Ausbildung fehlte mir. So blieb ich outsider, auch als ich nun Ordinarius geworden war.” 13. Aristotle, De anima. III.8, 431b21. 14. Presas 1974, p. 783: “Es ist in der Tat sehr bedeutend, daß Jaspers als ‘Anhang’ dieses Buches ein Referat über Kants Ideenlehre hinzufügen ließ, das er fünf oder sechs Jahre früher für das Kant-Seminar von Emil Lask verfasst hatte.” See also Koterski and Langley 2003, p. 174 and Jaspers 1968a, p. 512. 15. Kant 1965, pp. 310–311: “Plato very well realized that our faculty of knowledge feels a much higher need than merely to spell out appearances according to a synthetic unity, in order to be able to read them as experience. He knew that our reason naturally exalts itself to modes of knowledge which so far transcend the bounds of experience that no given empirical object can ever coincide with them, but which must nonetheless be recognized as having their own reality, and which are by no means mere fictions of the brain.” 16. 1920, 1921–1922, 1922, 1924–1925, 1925–1926, 1927–1928, 1928–1929, 1931, 1931–1932, 1932, 1932–1933, 1933–1934, 1934–1935, 1945–1946, 1947, 1947–1948, 1948. 17. 1924, 1926. 18. 1925. 19. 1919–1920, 1922–1923, 1923–1924, 1924–1925, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1930–1931, 1932–1933, 1933, 1935, 1935–1936. From Jaspers’s correspondence appears that he gave some lectures on Hegel also in Basel: see Kohler and Saner 1993, pp. 315, 350. 20. Jaspers 1986, p. 22: “Jaspers’s preoccupation with Kant is in fact…a foundation of Jaspers’s philosophy….” 21. Jaspers explicitly refers to this Kantian distinction in his university lectures in Frankfurt in 1937: “Kant begriff weiter, wie alles Gegenstandsein für uns unter der Bedingung des denkenden Bewußtseins steht…; oder anders: daß alles ‘Sein für uns’ Erscheinung des ‘Seins an sich’ ist, wie es sich dem für uns alles Sein umfassenden Bewußtsein überhaupt darstellt. Die Entwicklungen der ‘tranzendentalen Deduktion’ gehen auf den einen Ruck des Seinsbewußtseins: sie erzeugen und erhellen das Wissen um die Erscheinungshaftigkeit allen Weltseins durch das Innewerden des Umgreifenden des Bewußtseins überhaupt” (Jaspers 1974, p. 16). 22. See Arendt’s first enthusiastic impressions about the chapter on Kant of the book in her letter to Jaspers on August 29, 1957 (Kohler and Saner 1993, pp. 316–319).

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23. Oddly enough, this part of the German original is lacking in the English edition. 24. See the proposition 6.54 of his Tractatus logico-philosophicus: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it.)/He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly” (Wittgenstein 1960, p. 189). 25. Jaspers 1955, p. 284: “Die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus in ihrer vielfachen Gestalten hat das Gemeinsame, eine Philosophie des Sichabschließens, der Kommunikationslosigkeit zu sein in der Behauptung und systematischen Darstellung des absoluten Wissens. Es ist…eine Philosophie, die man als Anhänger in gehorsamer Unterwerfung glauben und fanatisieren,…die aber unfähig ist, zu Dasein und Lebensform durch den Ernst einer sie ergreifenden Existenz zu werden.” 26. As for this received view see, for example, Kroner 1921. 27. Anton Hügli elaborates this aspect of Jaspers’s attitude towards Fichte very clearly (Hügli forthcoming). Contrary to Hügli, Franco Gilli apparently ignores this negative aspect and focuses on the similarities between the two thinkers (Gilli 2013, pp. 340–353). 28. Jaspers 1955, pp. 282–283: “Fichte ist ein bohrender Konstrukteur, fanatisch und dogmatisch, nationalistisch und moralistisch, aktivistisch als Rhetor, mit der Neigung zur Sensation im Dreinschlagen, Barbar, von fragwürdigem Anstand, nicht selten unwahrhaftig. In seiner Konstruktion hat er eine Unablässigkeit des Weiterfragens, eine erstaunliche Denkenergie. Er berührt das Letzte, zumal in späteren Schriften, manchmal, nicht oft, echt und ergreifend. Aber er bleibt im Versprechen dessen, was noch kommen soll, und er gerät ständig in absurde Konsequenzen der Haltung und des Gedankens. Wo er hinkommt, macht er Krach.” As for Fichte’s relation to Schelling, see Jaspers 1955, pp. 285–299. 29. Jaspers calls Fichte a “ingenius figure” also in his Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung. See Jaspers 1962b, p. 423. 30. Jaspers 1955, p.  338: “In Umgang mit Schelling geschiet Anziehung und Abstoßung mit ungewöhnlicher Stärke…Man erfährt durch ihn Beschwingung und Lähmung. Man steht vor ihm mit Bewunderung und Empörung.”

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1989. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Aristotle. 1935. On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath. Trans. Walter S.  Hett. London and Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press.

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Diehl, Ulrich. 2008. Ist Jaspers ein Kantianer? In Karl Jaspers  – Philosophie und Psychopathologie, ed. Knut Eming and Thomas Fuchs, 169–181. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Ehrlich, Leonard H. 1975. Karl Jaspers: Philosophy as Faith. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Gilli, Franco. 2013. Fichtesche Anklänge im Denken Karl Jaspers. Versuch einer hermeneutischen Lektüre. Fichte-Studien 37: 340–353. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2018. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Michael Inwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hügli, Anton. forthcoming. Kant—Gegentypus zu Heidegger? Was Jaspers mit Kant verbindet und von Heidegger trennt. Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Karl Jaspers Gesellschaft 33. Jaspers, Karl. 1919. Psychologie der Weltanschauungen. Berlin: Julius Springer. ———. 1951a. Rechenschaft und Ausblick. Reden und Aufsätze. Munich: Piper. ———. 1951b. Mein Weg zur Philosophie (1951). In Rechenschaft und Ausblick. Reden und Aufsätze, 323–332. Munich: Piper. ———. 1951c. Über meine Philosophie (1941). In Rechenschaft und Ausblick. Reden und Aufsätze, 333–365. Munich: Piper. ———. 1954. Schellings Größe und sein Verhängnis. Studia Philosophica 14: 12–38. ———. 1955. Schelling. Grösse und Verhängnis. Munich: Piper. ———. 1957a. Philosophische Autobiographie. In Karl Jaspers, ed. Paul Arthur Schipp, 1–79. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. ———. 1957b. Die grossen Philosophen. Die maßgebenden Menschen: Sokrates, Buddha, Konfuzius, Jesus; Die fortzeugenden Gründer des Philosophierens: Plato, Augustin, Kant; Aus dem Ursprung denkende Metaphysiker: Anaximander, Heraklit, Parmenides, Plotin, Anselm, Spinoza, Laotse, Nagarjuna. Vol. I. Munich: Piper. ———. 1962a. Kant. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New  York: Harcourt, Brace & World. ———. 1962b. Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung. Munich: Piper. ———. 1968a. Aneignung und Polemik. Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze zur Geschichte der Philosophie. Ed. Hans Saner. Munich: Piper. ———. 1968b. Das radikal Böse bei Kant (1935). In Aneignung und Polemik. Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze zur Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Hans Saner, 183–204. Munich: Piper. ———. 1968c. Immanuel Kant. Zu seinem 150. Todestag (1954). In Aneignung und Polemik. Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze zur Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Hans Saner, 242–250. Munich: Piper. ———. 1968d. Kants ‘Zum ewigen Frieden’ (1957). In Aneignung und Polemik. Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze zur Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Hans Saner, 205–232. Munich: Piper. ———. 1968e. Kants Schrift ‘Zum ewigen Frieden’ (1957). In Aneignung und Polemik. Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze zur Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Hans Saner, 233–241. Munich: Piper.

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———. 1968f. Schellings Größe und sein Verhängnis (1954). In Aneignung und Polemik. Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze zur Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Hans Saner, 251–277. Munich: Piper. ———. 1968g. Schelling. Erinnerung an seinen Tod vor hundert Jahren (1954). In Aneignung und Polemik. Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze zur Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Hans Saner, 278–286. Munich: Piper. ———. 1968h. Arthur Schopenhauer. Zu seinem 100. Todestag (1960). In Aneignung und Polemik. Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze zur Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Hans Saner, 287–295. Munich: Piper. ———. 1974. Existenzphilosophie. Drei Vorlesungen gehalten am Freien Deutschen Hochstift in Frankfurt a. M. September 1937. 4th ed. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 1978. Notizen zu Martin Heidegger. Ed. Hans Saner. Munich: Piper. ———. 1981a. Die grossen Philosophen. Nachlaß 1. Darstellungen und Fragmente. Ed. Hans Saner. Munich and Zurich: Piper. ———. 1981b. Reply to My Critics. In The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, 748–869. Lasalle: Open Court. ———. 1986. Basic Philosophical Writings: Selections. Ed. Edith Ehrlich, Leonard H. Ehrlich, and George B. Pepper. Athens, Ohio and London: Ohio University Press. ———. 1993. The Great Philosophers. Xenophanes, Democritus, Empedocles, Bruno, Epicurus, Boehme, Schelling, Leibniz, Aristotle, Hegel. Vol. III. Ed. Michael Ermath and Leonard H. Ehrlich. New York, San Diego, and London: Harcourt Brace. Kant, Immanuel. 1965. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ———. 1987. Critique of Judgement. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 2003. To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Trans. Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. ———. 2009. Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Kohler, Lotte, and Hans Saner, eds. 1993. Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969. New York: Saunders College Publishing/Harcourt Brace. Koterski, Joseph W., and Raymond J. Langley, eds. 2003. Karl Jaspers on Philosophy of History and History of Philosophy. Amherst and New York: Humanity Books. Kroner, Richard. 1921. Von Kant bis Hegel. Vols. I–II. Tübingen: Mohr. Leonhard, Joachim-Felix, ed. 1983. Karl Jaspers in seiner Heidelberger Zeit, Heidelberger Bibliotheksschriften. Vol. 8. Heidelberg: Heidelberger Verlagsanstalt und Druckerei. Olson, Alan M. 1979. Transcendence and Hermeneutics: An Interpretation of the Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, Studies in Philosophy and Religion. Vol. 2. The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff. Presas, Mario A. 1974. Kantischer Ursprung und existentielles Ziel der Philosophie Karl Jaspers. In Akten des 4. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses Mainz 1974, ed. Gerhard Funke, 782–788. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

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Saner, Hans, ed. 1970. Karl Jaspers in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2010. The World as Will and Representation. Vol. 1. Trans. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, Chris. 2013. Form and Content in Jaspers’s Psychopathology. In One Century of Karl Jaspers’s General Psychopathology, International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry, ed. Giovanni Stanghellini and Thomas Fuchs, 76–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1960. Tractatus logico-philosophicus, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell. 8th ed. London: Routledge & Kegan and Paul.

14 Beyond the Critique of Judgment: Arendt and German Idealism Matthew Wester

In this chapter, I will discuss the relationship between Arendt and German Idealism. To talk about this relationship is an interesting task because Arendt positioned herself against almost every aspect of German idealist philosophy that she discussed. Further, she produced no systematic consideration of the writings of Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel. What little she said about these thinkers was negative, and in many cases the consideration she gave of these thinkers was superficial. It comes as no surprise, then, that few contemporary commentators on Arendt’s work have taken up the task of discussing Arendt and the German idealists. Nonetheless, there is much to be said about Arendt and German Idealism because there is more to it than her own dismissal of it. Arendt belongs with the German idealists in the sense that she was profoundly influenced by the same text that was of great importance to the development of German Idealism: Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Thus, while Arendt was critical of German idealist philosophy, she nonetheless belongs to the group of thinkers who were inspired by and went beyond Kant’s third Critique. In the third Critique, Kant provided a speculative bridge between two realms of human experience: nature (the subject of the Critique of Pure Reason) and freedom (the subject of the Critique of Practical Reason). The union of nature and freedom, Kant thought, could not be known; instead, it was experienced as a feeling of purposiveness. To be sure, Kant believed that

M. Wester (*) South Texas College, McAllen, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_14

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teleology (the a priori principle he assigned to the faculty of judgment) played an important role in the moral vocation of human beings. As Paul Guyer has noted, Kant believed that “aesthetic experience is conducive to moral conduct” (Guyer 2014, p.  46). Aesthetic experience was related to moral life indirectly in that it taught us to appreciate objects without having a vested interest in those objects. Should we choose to cultivate our taste, our disinterested investment in beauty could help us, Kant believed, to respect the moral law without interest or investment in the benefits that following it might bring. What’s more, beautiful objects and the disinterested pleasure they bring forth suggest to us “a harmonious fit between the mind and the object contemplated…” (Naragon 2014, p. 27). The experience of beauty suggested to us through a feeling that we belong in this world, that the sensible world was indeed created for creatures such as us. Thinkers such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel tried to go beyond Kant, to show that Kant’s transcendental idealism had not gone far enough. Where Kant, for instance, had insisted that it was a necessary structure of human thought to impute progress to human history, Hegel claimed that history was the process of reason unfolding. The relationship between German Idealism and the Critique of Judgment was no different. Again, in the words of Paul Guyer, the response of the German idealists to Kant’s third Critique was to attempt “to break down the barrier between humans and nature more fully than Kant did” (Guyer 2014, p. 57). Like the German idealists, Arendt took inspiration from the Critique of Judgment; and like the German idealists, Arendt went well beyond the critical insights that Kant offered therein. Arendt and the German idealists were closely related in that they took major theoretical insights from Kant’s aesthetics and attempted to push them further, albeit in radically different directions. My goals in this chapter are threefold. First, I shall outline Arendt’s misgivings with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In doing so, I shall be careful to contextualize these misgivings in relation to the basic theoretical categories developed by Arendt. Second, I turn to the reasons for Arendt’s own appropriation of the Critique of Judgment. Finally, I will sketch the most important aspects of Arendt’s reading of Kant’s “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment.”

1

Arendt’s Critique of German Idealism

The concept of history is a particularly appropriate place to begin discussing Arendt’s relationship to German Idealism because Arendt believed that German Idealism represented the culmination of modern philosophy of

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history. I will (briefly) outline Arendt’s views on history as well as her misgivings of important aspects of German idealist philosophy and philosophy of history. I want to note that Arendt’s criticism of the philosophy of history associated with German Idealism was not limited to Hegel, although the majority of her criticisms are aimed at Hegel’s writings. She was also highly critical of Fichte and Schelling, both of whom she thought trivialized what is referred to as natality and downplayed the importance of the common world to human life. In the essay, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” Arendt discussed the similarities and differences between ancient and modern history. Ancient history, Arendt thought, was fundamentally about human speech and action. Ephemeral in itself, human speech and action required commemoration in the form of poetry or, later, history in order to be immortalized. The Greek world-view situated mortal human individuals in the midst of the endless cycles of the natural world. The only way for human beings to break out of the mortality to which their bodies were doomed was to do or say something of sufficient significance to be memorialized in words or on the page. In Arendt’s words, “The concern with greatness, so prominent in Greek poetry and historiography, is based on the most intimate connection between the concepts of nature and history. Their common denominator is immortality” (Arendt 2006a, p. 48). In contrast to ancient history, modern history downplayed the importance of individual action and speech and instead placed emphasis on historical development and the notion of progress. Modern history, Arendt believed, focused on processes and their development rather than on the exemplary greatness of individual human beings. In the same essay, Arendt wrote that modern history “became a man-made process, the only all-comprehending process which owed its existence exclusively to the human race” (Arendt 2006a, p. 58). Modern historiography presented the individual words and deeds of historical actors as inconsequential to the larger meaning and significance of the historical event in question. For Arendt, the shift from the ancient mode of history to the modern mode had dramatic consequences for the relation of philosophers to politics. “The modern concept of history,” Arendt wrote, “especially in its Hegelian version, has given the realm of human affairs a dignity it never enjoyed in philosophy before” (Arendt 2005, p. 430). In antiquity philosophers turned away from human affairs in favor of eternal truths because politics was the realm of ever-shifting opinion. By contrast, the modern period brought with it a new philosophical interest in human affairs precisely because of the view that human affairs must, in the long run, be comprehensible as a rational process of development.

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In most of her writings, Arendt attempted to restore what she called the “dignity of politics” (Arendt 1998, p. 35). One of her major goals was to talk about politics in such a way that it had a dignity and significance of its own. An important part of this goal was to avoid reducing politics to a sub-species of other, more theorized realms of human life, such as the search for truth or the pursuit of goodness. In Arendt’s view, politics needs to be understood on its own terms, according to an internal standard. Given that Arendt was so concerned with recognizing what was unique and important about politics as well as delimiting it from others realms of human life, we might be tempted to think that Arendt viewed the importance of politics to modern history in a positive light. In fact, quite the opposite was the case. In her notebooks, Arendt took aim at Fichte’s concept of Gattung (species).1 In her notebooks she quoted Fichte as being representative of the modern world-view in which “the human—singular—becomes ‘species being’ in the nineteenth century” (Arendt 2002, p. 686).2 In this fragment, we find two important claims. First, there is the general association of the modern world-­ view and German idealist philosophy. Arendt believed that German Idealism was of fundamental importance to any understanding of the modern world. Second, there is the claim that the defining aspect or characteristic of humanity lies in the development of the species, and not with individuals. Arendt opposed Fichte’s normative notion of species in which he contrasted the species with “the individual existence of human beings.” In the same fragment, she quotes Fichte (in English): “the species—the only thing which truly exists” (Arendt 2002, p. 686). Fichte’s philosophy of history and his theory of the state develop these themes. For Fichte, history entailed a “world plan [that] both determines the succession of the different ages and, at the same time, unifies ‘the progressive life of the species’” (Aichele 2016, p.  250). To talk about Arendt’s evaluation of the philosophy of history produced by German Idealism, I turn to her reception of Hegel. In On Revolution, Arendt wrote that “the most far reaching consequence of the French Revolution was the birth of the modern concept of history in Hegel’s philosophy” (Arendt 2006b, p. 51). It would be hard to understate the theoretical importance that Arendt accorded to Hegel’s thinking, which she considered constitutive of the modern world-view. However, Arendt believed that Hegel’s thesis that the meaning of history and politics could be discerned rationally as a process through which something like “reason” unfolded entailed a serious misunderstanding both of what human action was and of politics. Writing in 1954 about Hegel and his influence on French Existentialism and the European Left, she wrote “In Hegel’s solution, individual actions remain as meaningless as before, while their process in its

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entirety reveals a truth that transcends the realm of human affairs” (Arendt 2005, p. 430). Ancient philosophers such as Plato, for instance, downplayed the importance of politics because they viewed it as a haphazard power play that was unconnected with the search for eternal truths. Yet, Arendt believed that modern historiography was just as dismissive of human speech and action. She did not believe that the newfound philosophical significance enjoyed by human affairs in the early nineteenth century in Germany brought about an adequate understanding of human action or politics. In fact, Arendt believed that Hegel’s philosophy of history all but obliterated the decisive role that human natality played in political action and speech. Arendt was wary of the methodological assumptions of the modern of view history, many of which, she believed, were most clearly articulated in Hegel’s philosophy. Consider the following passage, found in the first volume of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. “In history,” Hegel wrote, “we must look for a general design, the ultimate end of the world, and not a particular end of the subjective spirit or mind; and we must comprehend it by means of reason, which cannot concern itself with particular and finite ends, but only with the absolute” (Hegel 1981, p. 28). For Hegel, the job of the philosopher was not to focus on “subjective” elements such as the motivations, intentions, principles, or goals of historical or political actors. Instead, the philosopher was to discern the larger process of the development of reason, to which historical actors contributed unawares. Indeed, Arendt worried that the Hegelian view of history meant that the individual intentions or actions of individual political actors were more often than not irrelevant to the larger meaning and significance of the unfolding of spirit. Her notebooks show that Arendt also believed that Hegel’s fundamental assumptions about the meaning and significance of human affairs downplayed one of the most important characteristics of human action: its unpredictability. She believed that human beings could act in ways that were unpredictable and that the results of collective or individual human action could never be fully anticipated or calculated. Arendt called this natality. In the words of Hauke Brunkhorst, “natality signifies the new beginning inherent in human life and human action, as well as the contingency (of time and place) in which life and action unfold” (Brunkhorst 2000, p.  188). Arendt used the term “natality” to describe, among other things, the spontaneity of human action. Politics was the realm in which the unpredictability and natality inherent in the human condition was most apparent. Given the central place that this term occupies in Arendt’s theoretical work, it is easy to understand her reservations about Hegel’s downplaying of the so-called “subjective” element in human affairs.

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In Arendt’s view, the spontaneity of human beings, the articulation of principles of action, the forming of political goals, and the working together to change the common world were of central importance to properly understanding politics. For her, the so-called “subjective elements” of human affairs that Hegel dismissed were the constitutive elements of politics. Dismissing them, in her view, amounted to a total misunderstanding of what politics was and how it ought to be understood. It should come as no surprise, then, that Arendt viewed Hegel’s philosophy of history through a critical lens. Although philosophers in the modern period no longer ignored human affairs altogether, they also came no closer to understanding what made politics valuable per se. This was because the philosophy of history produced by the German idealist tradition minimized the actors themselves in favor of a larger process to which the actors could never know they were contributing. Hegel’s philosophy of history viewed human affairs as the arena in which reason unfolded, and was therefore ill equipped to reflect politics in its true significance. I want to end my discussion of Arendt’s view of German Idealism by talking about the development of modern ideology, to which Arendt believed thinkers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel unwittingly contributed. Let us return briefly to Arendt’s misgivings with the philosophy of history produced by German idealist thinkers. We have seen that Arendt was wary of the tendency to interpret the significance of human affairs by way of developmental processes that were unknown even to those who contributed to them. One reason for her misgivings was her belief that it downplayed the spontaneous nature of human action, individual and group intentions, principles, etc. However, Arendt’s misgivings with German Idealism went further than theoretical disagreements about the nature of history and how history ought to be understood. Arendt thought that the philosophy of history produced by German Idealism played an integral role in the development of ideological frameworks that would be associated with totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Arendt understood that Hegel’s philosophy of history was entirely retrospective. By retrospective, I simply mean that Hegel did not believe that the course of history could be intentionally predicted or directed by human action. The job of philosophers, according to Hegel, was to interpret what had already happened such that the gradual unfolding of reason became apparent. She also believed that Hegel saw the danger of trying to use his system in order to attempt to direct the course of human history towards particular ends. In the Denktagebuch, she wrote that “As outrageous as Hegel’s satisfaction with the present state of affairs might seem, his political instinct was to keep his method in what is purely contemplative and not to use it for the

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purposes of the political will or to improve the future” (Arendt 2002, p. 72).3 The decisive difference that Arendt believed she saw between Hegel and those who came after him (such as Marx), was that the present came to be seen as a “springboard” (Sprungbrett) to the future. The crucial conclusion that Arendt drew was that Hegel provided the ideological framework for movements that would try to channel human action so as to facilitate the progression of supposedly “necessary” historical processes. In her notebooks Arendt noted that one of the most important conclusions that Marx drew from his study of Hegel was the identity between human action and the larger processes of historical development. She wrote, “If all being is dissolved into a process of becoming and all thinking is only the process in which being comes to consciousness, then there is no longer any action—neither as thinking nor as doing.” (Arendt 2002, p. 288).4 Viewing history as the necessary unfolding of a larger process was tantamount to denying the spontaneity inherent in political action. Continuing, she noted that “Marx pulled this conclusion out of Hegel. The sentences: the world changes, or: we change the world, become identical. It is the process of lawful “changes viewed from one side or the other” (Arendt 2002, p. 288).5 While Arendt’s interpretation of Hegel and his colleagues may be superficial, it bears noting that Arendt was not accusing them of totalitarianism. However, Arendt was wary of the model of history that German Idealism produced because she thought that it took responsibility away from the individuals who determine the course of human affairs and framed human beings as subject to processes and laws in the same way as was the natural world. Instead of emphasizing the importance of freedom, goals, principles, or collective action to human affairs, modern history (according to Arendt) focused on larger processes that unfolded through the individual’s action. In her notebooks she used the image of a swimmer in order to describe these concerns. She wrote The forms of movement of spirit and the forms of movement of the events and destinies of the human race are the same. The human being is no longer arranged in the world, but floating in the stream of events. His swimming movements are fitted a priori, as it were, to the current movements of the flow of world events…the question is just how can one avoid swimming in the stream at all?6 (Arendt 2002, p. 44)

I would like to emphasize one aspect of this fragment in particular: Arendt’s remark about the worldliness of human life. Arendt believed that human life was characterized by a stable world of institutions, identities, and

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relationships. In The Human Condition, she compared the world to a table, writing that “to live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time” (Arendt 1998, p. 52). Politics, she believed, was the process in which we take care of the world in which we live. The world that we take care of through political action served to stabilize human life, literally to prevent human life from being swept up in the larger processes that consume the natural world. Arendt worried that the world-view she associated with German Idealism presented human beings as fundamentally worldless, being carried along in the stream of history. The question with which she ends this fragment was in her mind a propaedeutic to understanding the worldly, political aspect to human existence. For Arendt, Hegel and his colleagues covered over these aspects of human existence. In this section, I have discussed Arendt’s interpretation of some important elements of German Idealism. Because she never produced a systematic interpretation of Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel, I have focused on those aspects she did discuss. In the following two sections I turn to another dimension of the relationship between Arendt and the German idealists: Kant’s Critique of Judgment. While Arendt’s evaluation of the German idealists was highly critical, she nonetheless belongs to the school of thinking that was profoundly influenced by the final installment of Kant’s critical project. In the following sections of this chapter, I shall discuss the reasons for and the nature of Arendt’s appropriation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

2

Arendt and the Critique of Judgment

In both of his introductions to the Critique of Judgment, Kant insisted that the faculty of judgment was autonomous. In Kant’s view, each faculty of cognition had its own distinct ground that was not reducible to that of any other faculty. To the ground of each faculty corresponded a distinct transcendental principle (Kant 2001, p. 177). In other words, Kant understood the faculty of judgment as autonomous and this autonomy meant that the faculty of judgment had its own a priori principle distinct from those of reason and the understanding. To be sure, judgment did not function autonomously all of the time. Moral and cognitive judgments were made at the behest of other faculties of cognition. In determining judgment, the faculty of judgment applied a given category to an appearance at the behest of either the cognitive or the moral faculty. However, in its reflective capacity, judgment operated

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only according to its own principle. Kant composed the Critique of Judgment in order to give an account of the faculty of judgment in its autonomy. It is no coincidence that Arendt was attracted to Kant’s account of an autonomous faculty of judgment. Keeping Arendt’s suspicion of truth and goodness as standards capable of comprehending political speech and action in mind, it is not difficult to see that Arendt believed that politics required an autonomous model of judgment. Political words and action needed to be understood on their own terms and, for Arendt, this meant that political judgment needed to be distinct from cognitive judgment and moral judgment. Because Arendt did not live to finish her account of political judgment—she died before writing the projected third volume of The Life of the Mind—she never fully articulated her reasons for turning to Kant in her published writings. However, her notebooks contain the original notes that she kept as she began to read Kant’s Critique of Judgment as a political work. In this section I shall examine these notes. My goal is to explain clearly what Arendt understood the “structure” of a political model of judgment to entail. Arendt’s attraction to the autonomous faculty of judgment that Kant offered in the third Critique did not mean that she would remain faithful to the vision of judgment to which he committed himself. There is little more striking in Arendt’s writings on judgment than their heterodox Kantianism. However, the fact that Arendt incorporated non-Kantian elements into her account of political judgment does not necessarily mean that she misunderstood Kant or that she was uninterested in his stated project in the third Critique. Arendt’s use of the third Critique ought to be understood as a correction of him.7 As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, an integral part of Kant’s system was the fact that the faculty of judgment (in its reflecting capacity) offered a kind of speculative bridge between two distinct realms: the natural world and the human experience of freedom in moral life. The experience of beauty offered a tentative unity between nature and freedom; however, this unity was never known and could never resuscitate the speculative metaphysics that Kant had put to an end with the Critique of Pure Reason. Instead of being known, the unity between nature and freedom was felt in experiences such as beauty. Arendt abandoned two important facets of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. First, she believed that Kant’s emphasis on purposiveness was misguided, a relic from the time period in which Kant wrote. According to Arendt, purposiveness—the a priori principle that Kant assigned to the faculty of judgment— had little, if anything, to do with the central insights contained in the Critique of Judgment. She wrote,

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How closely related art and politics are because both of them have to do with the world can also be seen in that Kant pushed the importance of judgment first of all into the area of the aesthetic. He took exception to the “capriciousness” and “subjectivity” of the judgment of taste because it injured his political sense. He assumes that taste “expects the same satisfaction from others,” that it “ascribes agreement to everyone.” Naturally, this all has nothing to do with teleology, as Kant thought. (Arendt 2002, p. 571)8

Arendt presented a Kant who was guided by a powerful “political sense” (politischen Sinn) and but was incapable of recognizing the fact that most, if not all, of his central insights in the Critique of Judgment were political, rather than teleological or even aesthetic.9 Arendt’s Kant was a first-rate political thinker, paradoxically incapable of recognizing the political nature of his most political work. In other words, Arendt believed that Kant was attuned to the worldly character of human life but was not able to articulate his insights in such a way that did justice to their depth. She wrote The fact that Kant’s actual political philosophy emerges out of the argument about the phenomenon of beauty indicates the degree to which world-­experience outweighed life-experience for him. He loved the world substantially more than life, which was rather annoying to him. This is precisely the reason why he was so seldom understood. (Arendt 2002, p. 575)10

In my view, Arendt was not far off in her assessment. Kant would have expressed this fact in different terms but would have agreed. In the following passage from the Critique of Judgment, Kant claimed that the experience of beauty was a social phenomenon and would not be possible outside the context of human communal life: “someone abandoned on some desolate island would not, just for himself, adorn either his hut or himself; nor would he look for flowers, let alone grow them, to adorn himself with them. Only in society does it occur to him to be, not merely a human being, but one who is refined in his own way” (Kant 2001, p. 297). In other words, Kant believed that we appreciate beauty not as knowers (searchers after truth) or doers (moral legislators), but as members of some community to whom we feel the need to communicate our judgments. While Kant did believe that the experience of beauty was related to the search for truth and the pursuit of goodness in that it suggested a world created for creatures such as us, he did not believe that reflective judgment was a function of moral or theoretical judgment. Arendt recognized this facet of his thinking but believed that Kant missed the fact that he was describing a fundamentally political form of judgment.

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All of which raises the following question: why, according to Arendt, was Kant unable to recognize the political nature of his aesthetic theory? In her view, the answer was because for all Kant’s strengths, he had no actual political experience to inform the political insights that he had no choice but to express in social terms. In a telling fragment, Arendt wrote, “It will always remain memorable that Kant exemplifies the tremendous phenomenon of the power of judgment in taste. However much this speaks to his worldliness, it remains characteristic of political cluelessness” (Arendt 2002, p.  576).11 When she returned to Kant and the question of judgment in the early 1970s, she had tempered her assessment somewhat, and seemed to think that it was the benevolent dictatorial political conditions under which Kant lived and wrote that rendered him incapable of recognizing the political nature of his aesthetics. In Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, she wrote, If you ask yourself where and who this public is that would give publicity to the intended act to begin with, it is quite obvious that in Kant’s case it cannot be a public of actors or participators in government. The public he is thinking of is, of course, the reading public, and it is the weight of their opinion he is appealing to, not the weight of their votes. In the Prussia of the last decades of the eighteenth century—that is, a country under the rule of an absolute monarch, advised by a rather enlightened bureaucracy of civil servants, who, like the monarch were completely separated from “the subjects”—there could be no truly public realm other than this reading and writing public. (Arendt 1982, p. 60)

Kant was not able to fully appreciate the political nature of his exposition of aesthetic judgments of taste, in Arendt’s view, because he did not have the experience of living in a community in which he could participate politically. The community in which he lived was entirely social, with politics left to the King and his army of civil servants. Thus, according to Arendt, to read Kant’s real political philosophy (that is, his aesthetics) is akin to reading a philosophical text for an esoteric teaching of which even the teacher was unaware. At any rate, in “clarifying” the political insights that she saw as embedded in Kant’s aesthetic theory, Arendt made a number of claims that Kant would have never recognized as having anything to do with his critical philosophy. Despite seeing herself as remaining faithful to a fully autonomous, worldly (and hence according to her, political) faculty of judgment that she saw Kant as being the first to announce, Arendt embedded her account of the faculty of judgment in a non-Kantian understanding of truth and goodness. Unlike Kant, who insisted that the faculty of concepts (the understanding) and the

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faculty of reason had distinct a priori principles, Arendt claimed that truth and goodness shared the same root. Arendt’s views on truth may be found in the essay “Truth and Politics,” in which she argued (among other things) that the concept of truth was an inadequate standard by which to measure political things. Unfortunately, she did not live to develop her account of why moral goodness was similarly insufficient. However, her claim was that truth and goodness were insufficient for the same reason: namely, that they shared the same root. That Arendt believed truth and goodness shared the same root means that we may plausibly reconstruct her views on the insufficiency of goodness. In her notebooks, Arendt made it clear that her account of the autonomy of the faculty judgment was to be rooted in the fact that she thought that cognitive truth and moral goodness shared the same ground: the self. Arendt announced this claim only once in her published works and did not dwell on it in any detail. In “The Crisis in Culture,” she claimed that the pursuit of goodness and the search for truth were premised on the “principle of agreement with oneself ” (Arendt 2006a, p. 217). Citing Socrates’s saying from the Gorgias that, “Since I am one, it is better for me to disagree with the whole world than to be in disagreement with myself,” Arendt stated that, “from this sentence both Occidental ethics, with its stress upon being in agreement with one’s own conscience, and Occidental logic, with its emphasis upon the axiom of contradiction, took their starting point” (Arendt 2006a, p. 217). In order to more clearly see why Arendt believed that what made political judgment so different from epistemological and moral judgment, the best place at which to begin is Arendt’s gloss of a famous passage from the third Critique where Kant offers the three maxims of “common human understanding” (der gemeine Menschenverstand) (Kant 2001, pp.  293–296). In Kant’s mind, each maxim corresponded to one of the faculties of rational cognition. Maxim one (“to think for oneself ”) corresponded to the faculty of concepts, the understanding. Maxim two (“to think from the standpoint of everyone else”) corresponded to the faculty of judgment. The third maxim (“to think always consistently”) corresponded to the faculty of reason. Arendt based her claim about truth and morality sharing a common ground (the self ) on her reading of these three Kantian maxims. According to her maxims one and three—the maxims corresponding human thought as it was oriented towards the search for truth and the pursuit of goodness—implied that both theoretical and practical cognition was self-enclosed. “Self-enclosed” is not term Arendt’s term, it is mine. But I believe it captures nicely Arendt’s interpretation of Kant’s three maxims. Specifically, she meant that (for the most part) the Western philosophical tradition posited

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that the search for truth and the pursuit of goodness (logic and ethics) did not require extra-rational resources. The rational faculty of the soul, in other words, was sufficient for both theoretical and practical knowledge. In her notebooks, but not in any of her published writings, we find this claim multiple times. “In determining judgment,” she wrote, “I start from the experience of the ‘I think’ and thus from self-given (a priori) principles”12 (Arendt 2002, p. 569). Arendt understood that in Kant’s system both practical and cognitive judgment was always judgment in its determining function. Likewise, in the same fragment, Arendt explicitly stated that moral judgment is not a suitable model of a theory of political judgment because it is self-­ enclosed. Speaking again in Kantian terms, she wrote that, “because “legislating reason” proceeds from the non-contradictory self, it excludes others. That is its flaw” (Arendt 2002, p. 570).13 This passage concerns only judgment in its practical capacity and is the perfect complement to “Truth and Politics” because it demonstrates Arendt’s clear rejection of truth and goodness as sufficient evaluative criteria for political action and speech. Arendt rejected moral goodness for the same reason she rejected truth: it is self-enclosed in that it did not require the presence of others. Arendt’s reason for this position is straightforward and stems from her commitment to politics being based in human plurality. Neither the search for truth nor the pursuit of goodness, Arendt believed, required the presence of others in the same way as did politics. In making this claim, Arendt departed from the vast majority of thinkers in Western moral theory. Traditionally speaking, the realm of philosophical theory that is thought to be other-directed is ethics and moral philosophy. However, in works such as “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Arendt made it clear that she believed that ethics was equivalent to one of two things. First, it could be the following of culturally arbitrary norms and mores, in which case it was little more than habit and the internalization and identification with rules. Second, when the norms and mores that represented common sense morality broke down and began to sanction immorality (as was the case in Germany during the Third Reich), morality could manifest itself in the refusal to conform with immoral norms and mores. According to Arendt, such refusal did not come primarily out of a concern for the other, but out of a concern for the self. When morality was not equivalent to habit, Arendt thought that it was a sort of self-care. To be sure, the self-centeredness of morality did not mean that it could not take on political significance or that moral life did not affect others. However much a refusal to conform with immoral rules affected others, Arendt believed that such action was not taken primarily on behalf of those others, but on behalf of the refusing self, which

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was afraid of having to live with itself after conforming. Arendt thought that such refusals were very politically significant—but only accidentally so insofar as they were grounded in a primary care for the self, and not the world or other individuals. At bottom, Arendt’s claim was that both moral goodness and truth were inadequate standards with which to approach politics because these concepts were based in a philosophical anthropology that only considered the human being in its singularity. As she put it in “Introduction into Politics”: Politics is based on the fact of human plurality….Because philosophy and theology are always concerned with man, because all their pronouncements would be correct if there were only one or two men or only identical men, they have found no valid philosophical answer to the question: What is politics? (Arendt 2005, p. 93)

In other words, philosophy considered of human beings in the way(s) in which they were identical with one another. Politics, on the other hand, had to do with human beings as unique beings capable of speech and spontaneous action and who required each other in order to decide how to change the world. Politics had to do with humans insofar as they were distinct from one another and needed one another in a non-instrumental capacity.

3

Arendt’s Use of Kant’s Critique of Judgment

Thus far, I have introduced some of Arendt’s misgivings with the German idealist tradition, and I have also discussed Arendt’s reasons for returning to the Critique of Judgment in order to develop an account of political judgment. In this section, I turn to Arendt’s appropriation of Kant’s third Critique. Arendt’s account of political judgment is well-documented in the secondary literature so I will limit myself to discussing some of its most important characteristics. In doing so, I will focus on the importance of appearance, the uniqueness of human speech and action, and the extra-epistemological, extra-­ moral mode of political validity that Arendt sought to excavate from the resources of Kant’s aesthetics. In the previous section, I emphasized the fact that Arendt’s unique reading of the Critique of Judgment was motivated by her concern to develop an account of political judgment that was autonomous. We have seen that she found Kant’s third Critique attractive because of his commitment to a worldly, autonomous faculty of judgment that operated according to its own a priori

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principle. Where Kant saw a tentative union between freedom and nature, Arendt saw a powerful account of judgment in its distinctly political mode. Arendt’s writings on judgment were an attempt to use Kant’s aesthetics as political theory. An excellent place at which to begin an examination of Arendt’s use of Kant is her suspicion of truth and goodness as appropriate standards for the evaluation of political things. To be sure, Arendt did not think that truth and goodness had nothing to do with politics or that political action and speech could not be evaluated by its truth content or moral value.14 However, she did think that reducing political action and speech to its truth content or moral value entailed a fundamental understanding of the political. Arendt believed that politics was a distinct sphere of human activity and that political philosophies that presented it as derivative of other realms of human life inevitably misconstrued and misunderstood politics. However, that she rejected truth and goodness does not mean that she rejected all standards for the evaluation of political speech and action. In other words, Arendt was wary both of the thesis that politics was simply a sub-species of the search for truth and the pursuit of goodness and the thesis that politics and political discourse was a purely relative affair. Arendt thought that political words and deeds had a mode of validity entirely their own. In discussing the particulars of her appropriation of Kant’s aesthetics, I will place special emphasis on how Arendt took these particulars to constitute not just an account of political judgment, but an account of political judgment that was characterized by an extra-moral, extra-­ epistemological mode of validity. In The Human Condition, Arendt argued that speech and action reveal human beings in their uniqueness. Arendt understood human “uniqueness” as distinct from the fact that human beings are different both from each other human and each other thing. Whereas everything that exists is different in either kind or degree from everything else that exists (Arendt called this fact “Otherness”), human beings are the only creatures that articulate their ‘Otherness’ into words and deeds, becoming not just different from one another, but unique. Politics was not the only human activity that thematized the uniqueness of human speech and action, but Arendt did believe that politics thematized it the most. Political institutions relied upon the words and deeds of political actors in order to persist to a greater degree than did other human activities that were also dependent upon human speech and action. In Between Past and Future she wrote that “Political institutions, no matter how well or how badly designed, depend for continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the same means that brought them into being” (Arendt 2006a, p.  152). The almost total reliance of political

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institutions upon words and deeds led Arendt to suggest that the activity most closely related to politics was the performing arts. Like works of art, evaluating politics primarily according to epistemological or moral categories would entail a fundamental misunderstanding of what was being evaluated. Because of the close relationship she perceived between art and politics, Arendt believed that political words and deeds (like works of art) needed to be evaluated primarily according to the manner in which they appeared in the public sphere. The primacy of appearance to politics did not mean that Arendt viewed politics as unrelated to truth or goodness, but she did think that the tendency of Western thinkers to try to subsume politics under one of the two indicated a fundamental inability of philosophers to understand politics. Given the primacy of appearance that Arendt imputed to politics, it is no surprise that she turned to aesthetic resources in order to describe politics and political judgment. The fact that Kant rigorously separated his aesthetic theory from his cognitive and moral theory made the Critique of Judgment a natural fit for Arendt’s purposes. Arendt believed that political thinking (and judgment) was structurally distinct from other forms of thinking (and judgment). In her writings, she took care to distance political judgment from moral and epistemological judgment. Evaluating political words and deeds according to a political standard entailed more than evaluating them for truth content or moral value. Thus, the validity that characterized political judgment was distinct from the validity of moral and epistemological judgments. Political thinking, Arendt insisted, was guided by the presence of other opinions and viewpoints, and its purpose was not to compel others into agreement but to persuade them. In Arendt’s view, the result of proper political thinking was not a factually true statement, although she believed that factually true statements were the proper starting point of political thinking. In “Truth and Politics,” Arendt described political thinking in the following terms. “Political thought is representative,” she wrote, “I form an opinion by considering an issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of others who are absent; that is, I represent them” (Arendt 2006a, p. 237). The goal of political thinking, according to Arendt, was not to generate a true proposition, but to produce a persuasive opinion. It is of great importance to emphasize that by “persuasive,” Arendt understood an ideally formed political opinion (or judgment) that was factually based and capable of forging relationships between individuals and groups characterized by different viewpoints and perspectives. Arendt did not view successful political discourse as an exercise in rhetorical manipulation or sophistry. A political judgment was not, in her view, persuasive because it preyed on common fears, enemies, superstitions, etc. Arendt

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looked to Kant in order to find an internal standard of evaluation for political speech and action capable of distinguishing political discourse from other non-relative judgments and of explicating how and why political discourse was not just rhetorical manipulation. The first important component of Arendt’s model of political validity is her adaptation of Kant’s notions of common sense and enlarged mentality. What was a transcendental exercise for Kant became an empirical, political exercise for Arendt. For Kant, common sense was an ability to “take account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing (Vorstellungsart) in thought” (Kant 2001, p. 293). In its Kantian mode, common sense did not consider any particular person’s representation of an object, but rather human representation in general. Kant believed that a disinterested aesthetic judgment of taste was formed by purging a judgment of subjective conditions that might render it biased. Common sense, he thought, was the exercise in which what he called “private conditions” were purged from such a judgment. The result was a judgment whose ground was a feeling caused by a particular relationship between transcendental faculties of cognition. He characterized this feeling of pleasure in beauty as a “free play” between the understanding and the imagination. The “subjective universal validity” that characterized such a judgment was a justified expectation of agreement that rested on a feeling that could reasonably be expected of others when confronted with the same object precisely because the feeling did not rest on anything particular to the individual who formed the judgment. In contrast, Arendt presented common sense as a political faculty that served to fit us into existence as worldly beings, that is, into political life. She believed it entailed a receptivity to the state of the common world. In Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, she described common sense as being “like an extra mental capacity that fits us into a community” (Arendt 1982, p. 70). Like many aspects of Arendt’s account of political judgment, her use of common sense and enlarged mentality did not resemble Kant’s use of these terms. Arendt stripped reflective judgment of its transcendental elements, leaving an empirical, political exercise in which an individual reflected on the standpoints and perspectives of those one hoped to convince. In “Truth and Politics,” Arendt wrote, “In matters of opinion, but not in matters of truth, our thinking is truly discursive, running, as it were, from place to place, from one part of the world to another, through all kinds of conflicting views, until it finally ascends from these particulars to some impartial generality” (Arendt 2006a, p. 238). Arendt’s common sense resembled Kant’s in that it was a process whereby personal prejudice and bias were removed from a judgment or

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opinion. However, the way in which this was accomplished was entirely different. Following Kant, Arendt called the validity that characterized her model of political judgment “communicability.” Like Kant, she also characterized communicability as the degree to which a political judgment or opinion was unfettered by personal bias and prejudice. A judgment or opinion, Arendt believed, was properly political when it was grounded in that which was common (viz., the world) rather than that which was particular to one or more individuals situated within that world (viz., prejudice). However, since Arendt rejected epistemological validity as an appropriate standard for politics, her account of political validity could not (primarily) be a measure of the degree to which a judgment or opinion corresponded to facts about the world. She could also not rely upon the degree to which political discourse conformed to common sense morality because, as we have seen, Arendt also rejected moral categories for her model of political judgment. Communicability, as Arendt described it, characterized judgments or opinions that were rooted in factual truths about the world and that were able to build relationships between disparate individuals and group because they were able to appeal widely to varying perspectives and viewpoints. At the end of the second section of this chapter, I pointed out Arendt’s belief that politics corresponded to human plurality. Arendt believed that the validity of what Kant called aesthetic judgments of taste was a truly political mode of validity in that she perceived it to rely on the presence of others. Her reading of Kant was incorrect, and intentionally so. In turning the process of reflection into an empirical process of using other viewpoints and perspectives in order to condition the content of one’s judgment, Arendt went well beyond the transcendental reflection described in Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

4

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter, I have sought to elucidate the relationship between Arendt and German Idealism. I have situated Arendt and the German idealists as being related by way of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Arendt and thinkers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all turned to Kant’s third Critique in an attempt to overcome the transcendental idealism of Kant. Despite significant divergence in the content of their philosophical writings, they were united in their conviction that the Critique of Judgment contained insights that Kant did not recognize or sufficiently develop. In attempting to develop these insights,

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these thinkers went well beyond the critical limits of Kant’s philosophical system. The German idealists believed that Kant was mistaken to limit teleology to reflective experience. They took Kant’s emphasis on purposiveness and teleology and crafted a view of history in which spirit or reason gradually unfolded over time and across cultures and through which the human species gradually came of age. Kant located the tentative union of nature and freedom in the experience of beauty and the disinterested pleasure he believed it brought. The German idealists pushed beyond Kant, insisting that the union of nature and freedom could be known in the unfolding of reason. While Arendt was highly critical of most aspects of the German idealist philosophy, she also took Kant’s Critique of Judgment and pushed past its boundaries. Disregarding the importance Kant placed on purposiveness and teleology, Arendt argued that Kant’s third Critique contained powerful political insights that he was unable to recognize. Whereas the German idealists took issue with the critical limitations that Kant placed on reason, Arendt took issue with the social provenance of Kant’s theory of taste. Arendt used Kant’s description of aesthetic judgments of taste in order to generate a theory of political judgment.

Notes 1. There is no English translation of Arendt’s Denktagebuch. All of the translations are my own. The corresponding German can be found in subsequent end notes. For all references to the Denktagebuch I use the abbreviation D, followed by notebook number (i.e. I, II etc.) and fragment number in brackets. 2. D XXV [63]: “Der Mensch—Singular—wird im 19. Jahrhundert zum ‘Gattungswesen’” (Arendt 2002, p. 686). 3. D III [28]: “So empörend Hegels Zufriedenheit mit den gegenwärtig bestehenden Zuständen erscheinen mochte, so richtig war sein politischer Instinkt, seine Methode in dem zu halten, was rein kontemplativ erfassbar ist, und sie nicht zu benutzen, um dem politischen Willen Zwecke zu setzen oder die Zukunft für ihn scheinbar aufzubessern” (Arendt 2002, p. 72). 4. D XII [24]: “Wenn alles Sein in einen Werden-Prozess aufgelöst ist und alles Denken nur der Prozess ist, in dem Werden zum Bewusstsein kommt, so gibt es im Grunde kein Handeln mehr—weder als Denken nach als Tun” (Arendt 2002, p. 288). 5. D XX [24]: “Diesen Schluss hat Marx aus Hegel gezogen. Die Sätze: Die Welt verändern sich, oder: Wir verändern die Welt, werden identisch. Es ist der Prozess

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des gesetzmässig Sich-Ändernden von der einen oder andern Seite betrachtet” (Arendt 2002, p. 288). 6. D II [19]: “Hegel: Die Bewegungsformen des Geistes und die Bewegungsformen der Ereignisse und Schicksale des Menschengeschlechts sind die gleichen. Der Mensch nicht mehr in der Welt eingeordnet, sondern im Strom des Geschehens schwimmend. Seine Schwimmbewegungen sind gleichsam a priori den Strombewegungen des Flusses des Weltgeschehens eingepasst…” (Arendt 2002, p. 44). 7. See Wester (2018). 8. D XXII [19]: “Wie nahe verwandt Kunst und Politik [sind], weil sie beide es mit der Welt zu tun haben, kann man auch daran sehen, dass Kant die Bedeutung der Urteilskraft im Bereich des Ästhetischen zuerst aufstiess. Er nahm an der ‘Willkür’ und ‘Subjektivität’ der Geschmacksurteile Anstoss, weil sie seinen politischen Sinn verletzten. Er geht davon aus, dass der Geschmack ‘anderen eben dasselbe Wohlgefallen zumutet’ (50), dass sie ‘jedermann Einstimmung ansinnen’ (54). (Cf. Kritik der Urteilskraft, 28) Das alles hat natürlich nichts mit Teleologie zu tun, wie Kant meinte” (Arendt 2002, p. 571). 9. Arendt’s remarks on purposiveness and teleology in Denktagebuch XXII underscore its importance to understanding her orientation to Kant’s third Critique. The fact that in her published writings (“The Crisis in Culture,” “Truth and Politics,” and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy) downplay purposiveness and teleology has puzzled some commentators, who rightly recognize that Arendt appeared to be disregarding one of the most important facets of Kant’s view of judgment. Robert Dostal, for instance, writes that “Throughout her lectures Arendt studiously avoids the theme of purposiveness, which is the single dominant and unifying theme of the Critique of Judgment” (Dostal 2001, p. 150). 10. D XXII [25]: “Die Tatsache, dass Kants eigentliche politische Philosophie aus der Erörterung des Phänomens der Schönheit hervorgeht, zeigt, wie sehr bei ihm Welterfahrung die Lebenserfahrung überwog. Er liebte auch die Welt erheblich mehr als das Leben, das ihm doch eher lästig war. Dies gerade der Grund, warum er so selten verstanden wurde” (Arendt 2002, p. 575). 11. D, XXII [27]: “Es wird immer denkwürdig bleiben, dass Kant das ungeheure Phänomen der Urteilskraft gerade am Geschmack exemplifiziert. Wie sehr dies auch für seinen Weltsinn spricht, so bleibt es doch auch charakteristisch für die politische Ahnungslosigkeit” (Arendt 2002, p. 576). 12. D, XXII [19]: “In der bestimmenden Urteilskraft gehe ich von der Erfahrung des ‘Ich denke’ und der also im Selbst gegebenden (apriorischen) Prinzipien ... aus” (Arendt 2002, p. 569). 13. D, XXII [19]: “Denn die ‘gesetzgebende Vernunft’ geht nur von dem sich nicht widersprechenden Selbst aus, lässt also die Anderen aus. Das ist ihr Fehler” (Arendt 2002, p. 570). 14. For an extensive consideration of Arendt’s discussion of the relation between truth and politics (and its shortcomings), see Beiner (2008).

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Bibliography Aichele, Alexander. 2016. Ending Individuality: The Mission of a Nation in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. In The Cambridge Companion to Fichte, ed. David James and Günter Zöller, 248–272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1977. The Life of the Mind. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company. ———. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2002. Denktagebuch. Munich: Piper Verlag. ———. 2003. Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Schocken Press. ———. 2004. Essays in Understanding. New York: Schocken Press. ———. 2005. The Promise of Politics. New York: Schocken Press. ———. 2006a. Between Past and Future. New York: Viking Press. ———. 2006b. On Revolution. New York: Viking Press. Beiner, Ronald. 2008. Rereading “Truth and Politics.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34 (1–2): 123–136. Benhabib, Seyla. 2000. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. New  York: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2001. Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Hannah Arendt’s Thought. In Judgment, Imagination, and Politics, ed. Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky, 183–205. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Berkowitz, Roger, and Ian Storey, eds. 2017. Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch. New York: Fordham University Press. Bernstein, Richard J. 1990. Judging—the Actor and the Spectator. In The Realm of Humanitas: Responses to the Writings of Hannah Arendt, ed. Reuben Garner, 235–254. New York: Peter Lang. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2000. Equality and Elitism in Arendt. In The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana R.  Villa, 178–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cane, Lucy. 2015. Hannah Arendt on the Principles of Political Action. European Journal of Political Theory 14 (1): 55–75. Canovan, Margaret. 1974. The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt. New  York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Chacòn, Rodrigo. 2013. Arendt’s “Denktagebuch.” History of European Ideas 39 (4): 561–582. Degryse, Annalies. 2011. Sensus Communis as a Foundation for Men as Political Beings: Arendt’s Reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Philosophy and Social Criticism 37 (3): 345–358. Dostal, Robert J. 2001. Judging Human Action: Arendt’s Appropriation of Kant. In Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, ed. Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky, 139–164. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Enaudeau, Corinne. 2007. Hannah Arendt: Politics, Opinion, Truth. Social Research 74 (4): 1029–1044. Ferrara, Alessandro. 1998. Judgment, Identity, and Authenticity: A Reconstruction of Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of Kant. Philosophy and Social Criticism 24 (3): 113–136. Fine, Robert. 2008. Judgment and the Reification of the Faculties: A Reconstructive Reading of Arendt’s Life of the Mind. Philosophy and Social Criticism 34 (1–2): 157–176. Flynn, Bernard. 1998. Arendt’s Appropriation of Kant’s Theory of Judgment. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 19 (2): 128–140. Gottsegen, Michael G. 1994. The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt. Albany: State University of New York Press. Guyer, Paul. 2014. Kant’s Legacy for German Idealism: Versions of Autonomy. In The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, ed. Matthew C.  Altman, 34–60. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hegel, G.W.F. 1981. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Trans. H.W. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hummel, Ralph P. 2016. Arendt, Kant and the Beauty of Politics: A Phenomenological View. In Political Phenomenology: Essays in Memory of Petee Jung, Contributions to Phenomenology, ed. Hwa Yol Jung and Lester Embree, vol. 84, 93–120. Cham: Springer. Kant, Immanuel. 2001. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kateb, George. 1983. Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil. Totowa: Rowman & Allanheld. ———. 1999. The Judgment of Arendt. Revue Internationale de Philosophie 53: 133–154. Marshall, David L. 2010. The Origin and Character of Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Judgment. Political Theory 38 (3): 367–393. McGowan, John. 1998. Hannah Arendt: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Naragon, Steve. 2014. Kant’s Career in German Idealism. In The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, ed. Matthew C.  Altman, 15–33. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nedelsky, Jennifer. 2001. Judgment, Diversity, and Relational Autonomy. In Judgment, Imagination, and Politics, ed. Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky, 103–120. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Norris, Andrew. 1996. Arendt, Kant, and the Politics of Common Sense. Polity 29 (2): 165–191. Passerin D’Entrèves, Maurizio. 1994. The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt. New York: Routledge.

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———. 2000. Arendt’s Theory of Judgment. In The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana R.  Villa, 245–260. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. To Think Representatively: Arendt on Judgment and the Imagination. Philosophical Papers 35 (3): 267–385. Peeters, Remi. 2009a. Truth, Meaning and the Common World: The Significance and Meaning of Common Sense in Hannah Arendt’s Thought—Part One. Ethical Perspectives 16 (3): 337–359. ———. 2009b. Truth, Meaning and the Common World: The Significance and Meaning of Common Sense in Hannah Arendt’s Thought—Part Two. Ethical Perspectives 16 (3): 411–434. Tavani, Elena. 2013. Hannah Arendt—Aesthetics and Politics of Appearance. Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics 5: 466–475. Taylor, Dianna. 2002. Hannah Arendt on Judgment: Thinking for Politics. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10 (2): 151–169. Villa, Dana R. 1999. Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2000. Introduction: The Development of Arendt’s Political Thought. In The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana R. Villa, 1–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weidenfeld, Matthew C. 2012. Visions of Judgment: Arendt, Kant, and the Misreading of Judgment. Political Research Quarterly 66 (2): 254–266. Wester, Matthew. 2018. Reading Kant Against Himself: Arendt and the Appropriation of Enlarged Mentality. Arendt Studies 2: 193–214. Wild, Thomas. 2017. “By Relating It”: On Modes of Writing and Judgment in the Denktagebuch. In Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch, ed. Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey, 51–73. New York: Fordham University Press. Yar, Majid. 2000. From Actor to Spectator: Hannah Arendt’s “Two Theories” of Political Judgment. Philosophy and Social Criticism 26 (2): 1–27. Young-Breuhl, Elizabeth. 1982. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press. Zerilli, Linda M.G. 2005. “We Feel our Freedom”: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt. Political Theory 33 (2): 158–188.

15 Heidegger and Kant, or Heidegger’s Poetic Idealism of Imagination David Espinet

1

Through Kant Away from Kant

Heidegger was not willing to consider his fundamental ontology of “Dasein” or, later, his “thinking of Being” as a variety of existentialism (cf. Heidegger, vol. 9, pp. 328–340; Heidegger 1993, pp. 232–243), nor is Kant, in the standard reading, known as a precursor of existentialism. Nevertheless, let us begin with three observations: First, there are certainly profound differences between Heidegger’s ontology and existentialism broadly construed. However, Heidegger’s explicit differentiation from existentialism does not mean that there are no similarities. For Heidegger, who is deeply convinced of the singularity of the philosophical project he carries out, most frequently differentiates himself from those with whom he shares similarities.1 Second, Kant is certainly not an existentialist thinker like, say, Kierkegaard or Sartre, and yet Kant’s conception of critical philosophy, as Roe Fremstedal develops it in this volume (cf. Chap. 3; cf. also Crowell 2012, pp. 8–9), does anticipate a number of fundamental assumptions that will subsequently be crucial for Kierkegaard, Schelling, Heidegger and the (other) twentieth-century existentialists. Third, and most important for the considerations to be made in this chapter, Heidegger is closest to existentialism where he is also closest to (a

D. Espinet (*) Department for Philosophy, University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_15

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certain reading of ) Kant, i.e., in and around Being and Time (1927) and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929). Having said this, I will argue in this chapter that there is a form of existentialism in Heidegger closely linked to his reading of Kant. More precisely, I will argue that “Heidegger’s existentialism,” like existentialism in general, is a specific variety of idealism and, in Heidegger’s case at least, with decidedly but unacknowledged tendencies towards subjectivism or constructivism. This assessment of (a tendency towards) subjectivist idealism in Heidegger, which I share with other exegetes (cf. Blattner 1999, pp. 302–310; Gabriel 2015, pp. 197–207; Moore 2012, pp. 485–492), is particularly well supported by Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, both in relation to Heidegger’s early thesis on the temporality of subjectivity and in relation to the later thesis on objectivity as a possible but contingent figuration of the history of Being, e.g., in Heidegger’s The Question Concerning the Thing. On Kant’s Doctrine of the Transcendental Principles (1935–1936). Whereas Blattner sees Heidegger’s “temporal idealism” limited roughly to the period of Being and Time (cf. Blattner 1999, p. xvi), I will hold that things do not fundamentally change thereafter (cf. also Gabriel 2014). An even cursory glance shows that Heidegger’s intellectual trajectory can be described biographically as well as genetically as a path away from Kant—through Kant. Kant, like perhaps only Aristotle, occupies an equally distinguished and ambivalent position in the development of Heidegger’s own thinking, which is formulated first along (a certain interpretation of ) Kant, and then subsequently in increasing opposition to Kant. Thus in a reflection from 1938–1939 leading up to his troubling nationalistic reading of Kant (cf. Espinet 2018), Heidegger asks: Wherefore still Kant? … does there still happen in this work something futural, something so “present” that it concerns the current present time in the latter’s concealed essence? Insight into the transcendental subjectivity of the subject—is that not an essential step by which the subject as such is set forth more profoundly and thus more ominously and thus more intensely? Does this thinking not make visible a domain which the overcoming of modernity must still traverse explicitly, if this age is not to perish through blind self-mutilation? … As one still untrodden path in order to keep meditation on modern humanity at the correct depth? … Because he is a German thinker who in the most German way thought of “humanness” as Western—i.e., in his sense, thought of the essence of the human being? … Because he is an impetus in our history, one of those thrusts which first gather their power when they come to strike …. (Heidegger 1975, vol. 95, pp. 32–33, 2017, pp. 25–26)

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In Heidegger’s trajectory through Kant away from Kant, we can discern three basic phases: From 1924 to 1929, a first phase of identification with Kant’s critical philosophy that culminates in a peculiar appropriation or, more precisely, appropriative transformation. From 1930 until approximately 1940, a second phase in which Heidegger’s view of Kant becomes more distant, critical, and during which Kant starts to serve as Heidegger’s “battle ground” with metaphysics. Finally, beginning in the early 1940s and clearly articulated by 1944, a third phase of rupture with both Kantian and post-Kantian idealism as a metaphysics of transcendental subjectivity or will.

2

F irst Phase: Heidegger’s Appropriative Transformation of Kant

In the first phase, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason serves as a starting point for Heidegger to attempt to think the “subjectivity of the subject” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, p. 33, 2010a, p. 23) in a more fundamental way.2 Although critical elements are already apparent, Kant is presented as more of a comrade-in-­ arms who “shrinks back from … the problem of temporality” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, p. 32, 2010a, p. 23). In a programmatic passage from Being and Time, Heidegger states that his philosophical project picks up the red thread where Kant had left it. Interpreting Kant as his sole forerunner in the discovery that “all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time” (Heidegger 2010a, p. 18), Heidegger announces in §6 of Being and Time, “The task of a destruction of the history of ontology”: Kant is the first and only one who traversed a stretch of the path toward investigating the dimension of temporality [Temporalität]—or allowed himself to be driven there by the compelling force of the phenomena themselves. Only when the problem of temporality is pinned down can we succeed in casting light on the obscurity of his doctrine of schematism. Furthermore, in this way we can also show why this area had to remain closed to Kant in its real dimensions and in its central ontological function. Kant himself knew that he was venturing forth into an obscure area.

Heidegger continues, quoting Kant form the Critique of Pure Reason, A 141/B 180–181: “This schematism of our understanding as regards appearances and their mere form is an art hidden in the depths of the human soul, the true devices of which

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are hardly ever to be divined from Nature and laid uncovered before our eyes.” What it is that Kant shrinks back from here, as it were, must be brought to light thematically and in principle if the expression “being” [“Sein”] is to have a demonstrable meaning …. In pursuing the task of destruction along the guideline of the problem of temporality the following treatise will attempt to interpret the chapter on the schematism and the Kantian doctrine of time developed there. At the same time we must show why Kant could never gain insight into the problem of temporality [Temporalität]. Two things prevent this insight: first, the neglect of the question of being in general, and second, in conjunction with this, the lack of a thematic ontology of Dasein or, in Kantian terms, the lack of a preliminary ontological analytic of the subjectivity of the subject. Instead, despite all his essential advances, Kant dogmatically adopted Descartes’ position. Furthermore, although Kant takes this phenomenon back into the subject his analysis of time remains oriented toward the traditional, vulgar understanding of it. It is this that finally prevented Kant from working out the phenomenon of “transcendental determination of time” in its own structure and function. As a consequence of this double effect of the tradition, the decisive connection between time and the “I think” remain shrouded in complete obscurity. It did not even become a problem. By taking over Descartes’ ontological position Kant neglects something essential: an ontology of Dasein. (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, pp. 31–32, 2010a, pp. 22–23)

The distribution of roles and the overall storyline in Heidegger’s history of philosophy are as simple as the task is radical: First, and in contrast to standard interpretations, especially against Neo-Kantianism (e.g., Hermann Cohen, Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, etc.), Heidegger holds that Kant’s transcendental philosophy is to be emphasized as an “ontology” of the subject, that is, “of Dasein,” defined by Heidegger as practical self-­relationality, as “being … which is essentially concerned about this being itself in its being” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, p. 113, 2010a, p. 83). Heidegger sums up here what he had, in his first lecture course from 1918, held against the neo-Kantians from the Marburg school: philosophy would have to overcome the “general prevalence of the theoretical” in order to stop the “de-vivication” of experience (Heidegger 1975, vol. 56–57, pp.  84 and 86, 2000, pp.  66 and 68). Thus, from his early lectures on, one leitmotiv in Heidegger’s agenda consists in refuting neo-Kantianism’s theoretical Kant. Instead, Heidegger is concerned with showing that Kant’s theoretical philosophy is practical at its core: “Insofar as freedom belongs to the possibility of theoretical reason, however, it is in itself as theoretically practical” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p.  156, 1997a, p. 109). In apparent proximity to Kant’s primacy of practical reason Heidegger

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here is in fact and in sharp contrast to Kant primarily referring to freedom of imagination as we shall see below (cf. IV.). Second, Kant’s hidden ontology of subjectivity is to be liberated from a “vulgar understanding of time” and, closely linked to it, from the Cartesian dogmatism that was the reason “why Kant could never gain insight into the problem of temporality [Temporalität].” According to Heidegger, it is the Cartesian or rationalist heritage that prevented Kant (and the neo-Kantians) from recognizing the “decisive connection between time and the ‘I think,’” thereby misjudging the true significance of the “transcendental determination of time.” For this reason, Kant missed the real rendezvous with the history of philosophy at a crucial moment of transcendental philosophy, falling back into the timeless subjectivity of rationalism. Third, Heidegger wants to make up for this missed opportunity by repeating Kant on a more fundamental level, treating his “transcendental determination of time” not only as a constitutive element for empirical knowledge, but as the transcendental determination of subjectivity itself and, as we shall see, for both theoretical and practical reason. Thus, following his fundamental critique of the Cartesian extemporal “I think,” Heidegger proposes also to undercut Kant’s transcendental apperception as the ground for the categories in Kant’s hierarchy of pure reason. As already indicated in the first phase, and increasingly obvious in the second phase, this destructive work also aims at the subversion of pure practical reason and the primacy of understanding for morality. Fourth and finally, the “ontology of Dasein” carried out in Being and Time is only a “preliminary” step towards a more fundamental “ontological analytic of the subjectivity of the subject.” This step leads towards the foundation of transcendental philosophy as a temporal ontology of the subject, but is not yet the intended new ontology. In a sense, Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, is a large-scale instruction manual on how (not) to read Kant in order to adequately undertake the task of an analysis of the subjectivity of the subject. In other words, the “ontology of Dasein” is a starting point primarily meant to intervene in the history of philosophy by eliminating obstacles that prevented Kant’s clear view of the “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit) of the subject. This clearing of vision, as it were, is supposed to lead to the “Temporality” (Temporalität) of Being, which Heidegger distinguishes from the “Zeitlichkeit” of Dasein (in order to distinguish both terms, I use the lower case for the temporality of Dasein, the upper case for the Temporality of Being). It is remarkable that Heidegger believes Kant had this insight into Temporality— and not only into the temporality of existence—but it remains unclear here, and later, exactly how he envisages this insight.

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Be that as it may, the “task of destruction of the history of ontology” is then threefold: it is, in Heidegger’s view, a matter of dismantling Kant’s Cartesian deformations in a first destructive step, and then, in a second, constructive step, it consists in carrying out a new ontology of temporal subjectivity within the vacated area, upon which, in a third step, an ontology of Temporality is supposed to take shape. During this first phase, Heidegger believes that he begins to accomplish this sketched procedure of de-con-struction3 with an interpretation of the “chapter on the schematism” from Kant’s first Critique, in which Heidegger sees the kernel of Kant’s critical philosophy as a whole. Like the schematism chapter in the first Critique, which mediates between the transcendental aesthetic and logic, Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant here stands as a transitory, but necessary step, between the temporality of Dasein and the Temporality of Being. According to this storyline, Heidegger has to write Being and Time before giving us his explicit version of Kant’s schematism. More precisely, he has to write, as the “Outline of the Treatise” explains, the first three divisions of “Part One,” that is, “1. The Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein,” “2. Dasein and temporality [Zeitlichkeit]” and “3. Time and Being,” before confronting explicitly Kant in “Part Two” with the introductory division on “1. Kant’s Doctrine of Schematism and of Time, as a Preliminary Stage of a Problem of Temporality [Temporalität]” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, p.  53, 2010a, p. 37). These outlines are, in Heidegger’s case, not secondary details; they correspond to a dramaturgy with systematic meaning. The first two sections from “Part One,” Being and Time as we know it (as the rest has never been published in the announced form), have merely a “preparatory” character. In Heidegger’s understanding then, the truth of the first two, published divisions lays somewhere else. It lays in an ontology still to come, giving the only “preparatory ontology of Dasein” in Being and Time, as we know it, its real significance. As Heidegger did not write the third division of “Part One,” “Time and Being,” but instead, two years later, published Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (with an interpretation of Kant’s schematism and the role of productive imagination in it), one can assume that Heidegger reveals here something that Being and Time is supposed to have in common with the anti-­ Cartesian, transcendental idealism proper to (Heidegger’s) Kant.

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369

Realism or Idealism in Being and Time?

This leads us to a consideration of Heidegger’s understanding of being in Being and Time. As the preliminary work Heidegger sees it, Being and Time does not reveal straightforwardly Heidegger’s full conception of being. Indeed, if one were to attempt to interpret Heidegger’s view from the two published sections of “Part One” of Being and Time alone, this would be as meaningful as drawing final conclusions about Kant’s transcendental idealism from his empirical realism developed in the transcendental aesthetic. To understand properly the published first two divisions of Being and Time according to Heidegger’s own progress of thinking, one has to go one step further to reveal the unsaid truth of the previous standpoint. As we shall see in the following section, however, this next step is the step into subjectivist idealism. This is a specific form of subjectivist idealism that one may call a “poietic idealism of imagination” or, considering Heidegger’s identification of poetry with thinking from the mid-1930s on (cf. e.g., Heidegger 1975, vol. 39, pp. 52, 53), “poetic idealism.” Like for Kant, for Heidegger the truth of (pragmatist or phenomenological) realism (in Being and Time) is idealism. Unlike Kant’s transcendental idealism, however, Heidegger’s poetic idealism of imagination contains less resistance to constructivist or subjectivist transgressions. Before turning to this next step, however, let’s take a brief look at how Heidegger prepares this interpretation of Kant in Being and Time, and more specifically at the role that Heidegger’s implicit interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism plays there. Whereas some have tried to read out of Being and Time a pragmatist or a realist position (cf. Dreyfus 1991, pp. 253–265; Carman 2003, pp. 157–203), others have seen in it a form of Kantian transcendental idealism (cf. Blattner 1999; Han-Pile 2005). In the following, I argue that even in Being and Time, Heidegger cannot be regarded as the “ontic realist” that Carman, radicalizing Dreyfus, sees in him. Heidegger is in no way a “realist with regard to physical nature” in the sense of “some fixed totality of mind independent objects” as Carman holds (Carman 2003, pp. 17, 167). On the contrary, I agree with Han-Pile and Blattner that, in Heidegger’s case, we are dealing with a variant of transcendental idealism—though with a substantial caveat. Han-Pile and, to a certain extent, Blattner argue for a “deflationary”—Allisonian— “interpretation of transcendental idealism” (Han-Pile, p.  92), in which we would attribute:

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to Heidegger a position broadly similar to Kant’s, namely a combination of transcendental idealism and ontic realism, where ontic realism has a very different meaning from the one suggested by Carman as it combines a limited form of epistemological realism (we can know phenomena/entities as they are at the empirical level/from Dasein’s perspective) with the idealist epistemic claim that we cannot know things as they are in themselves, i.e. from the transcendental (in the strong sense) standpoint. (Han-Pile 2005, p. 91)

Such a deflationary reading may work for Kant, as Henry Allison and others argue, but I do not think that in the case of Heidegger this interpretation is ultimately conclusive. Unlike Han-Pile, who excludes “subjectivist idealism” (Han-Pile, p. 91) in Being and Time altogether, at the end of his own investigation Blattner detects a subjectivism lurking in Heidegger’s temporal idealism (cf. Blattner 1999, pp. 291, 303–310). Instead of reconstructing Blattner’s rather blurry argument here, let’s take a look at several passages from Being and Time where Heidegger’s subjectivism is quite clear, namely, where he deals with the “objective presence” of ontic beings as dependent on the understanding of being by Dasein. Heidegger states that concerning the “independence” of “reality”: [O]nly as long as Dasein is, that is, as long as there … is understanding of being, “is there” being [Sein]. If Dasein does not exist, then there “is” no “independence” either, nor “is” there an “in itself.” Such matters are then neither comprehensible nor incomprehensible. If Dasein does not exist then innerworldly beings, too, can neither be discovered, nor can they lie in concealment. Then it can neither be said that beings are, nor that they are not. It can now indeed be said that as long as there is an understanding of being und thus an understanding of objective presence, that then beings will still continue to be. (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, p. 281, 2010a, pp. 203–204)

Subtleties left aside, Heidegger states here that the existence of apparently standpoint-independent, objectively present ontic beings is dependent on “an understanding of objective presence.” As Adrian Moore has pointed out, this means that the “independence of beings with respect to us and our ontic sense-making,” “one of their essential features,” is “determined by Dasein” (Moore 2012, p. 491). In other words, “being ontic,” that is, being objectively present in the world, is a sense itself determined by the understanding of Dasein. Such a position, which is clearly closer to (subjectivist) idealism than to realism, leads Heidegger to remain agnostic on the question if there is something “in itself ” independent at all, for “such matters are then” outside the realm of understanding of being, “neither comprehensible nor incomprehensible.”

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However, if Heidegger does not merely want to argue for the tautology that there can only be understanding (or truth) of being if there is understanding of being (holding something as true), and that existence is nothing more than this, and finally if, as Blattner rightly holds, Heidegger’s project is to transform transcendental philosophy into “ontology” (Blattner 2012, p.  166), then Heidegger must support a more substantial ontological connection between ontic being and the sense that Dasein makes of it. For a more substantial theory on what there is, there must be more inside the realm of understanding than just understanding or any other way of disclosure of being. Thus, as the last line of the quotation supports, the sense that is made in terms of “Dasein-­ independent ontic objective presence” is a temporal determination of the sense of what there is. Heidegger himself emphasizes the temporal adverbs: Only if “now” “there is an understanding of being and thus an understanding of objective presence,” that is, only if “Dasein exists … now,” can it be said “that then beings will still continue to be” independent of my understanding. Obviously, Heidegger is describing the way in which, on his view, Dasein-­ independent ontic being is made sense of as situated in a temporal structure emerging from Dasein. However—and I take this as a clear sign of anti-realism—the sense-making described here is presented as the production of an illusion; the illusion that there is Dasein-independent being, being independent from the temporal relation stretching from “now” to “then.” What is supposed to be (or having been) there “then” as a subject-independent, objectively present entity or matter of fact is, in Heidegger’s account, described as only appearing as if it would exist apart from (the understood) temporal relation from “now” to “then.” Taking Dasein’s comprehension of what there is as the limit of what can be sensibly said about ontic being, the assumption of a truly standpoint-independent being having existed or continuing to exist without Dasein would be full-­ blown nonsense, “neither comprehensible nor incomprehensible.” According to Heidegger, even his sole forerunner, Kant, would have been subject to this (Cartesian) illusion of treating res cogitans on the ontological model of res extensa: [W]e must explicitly note that Kant uses the term “existence” [“Dasein”] to designate the kind of being which we have called “objective presence” [Vorhandenheit] in our present inquiry. “Consciousness of my existence” means for Kant consciousness of my being present in the sense of Descartes. The term “existence” means both the presence of consciousness and the presence of things. (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, p. 270, 2010a, pp. 195–196)

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For Heidegger, however, this is not just some inner affair of existential philosophy missing the ontological specificity of the subjectivity of the subject. Heidegger’s existential philosophy intends to be a philosophy of science too, be it a science of logic or of nature. In Heidegger’s view, objective truth, physical and logical alike, has to be understood as grounded in human existence, that is, in time and finitude. With his assumption of the illusory character of Dasein-independent existence as objective presence then, Heidegger contends that any empirical or logical realism that assumes standpoint-independent existence of laws of nature or laws of thought rests equally on the same illusion. In other words, like temporality, laws of physics and laws of logic belong to the inner realm of comprehension, that is, they belong to the misconception of subject-independent being being there anyway. These falsely supposed “‘eternal truths’” (Heidegger puts them in quotation marks), like “Newton’s laws” or “the law of contradiction,” are also truths of Dasein, true only “as long as Dasein is”! “There is” truth only insofar as Dasein is and as long as it is. Beings are discovered only when Dasein is, and only as long as Dasein is are they disclosed. Newton’s laws, the law of contradiction, and any truth whatsoever, are true only as long as Dasein is. Before there was any Dasein, there was no truth; nor will there be any after Dasein is no more. For in such a case truth as disclosedness, discovering, and discoveredness cannot be. Before Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not “true.” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, p. 300, 2010a, p. 217)

Although understanding, disclosure and truth refer primarily, for Heidegger, to being and not to ontic beings or entities, the question remains as to what positive ontological status the matters of nature or logic that are independent of a viewpoint can have. There is much to suggest that Heidegger regards this ontological area as the emanation of world-views; and if not completely projected by world-views, then in no way separable from them.

4

Heidegger’s Poietic Idealism of Imagination

If these moves appear to dispel concerns that Heidegger ultimately endorses a subjectivist idealism and is interpreted to support instead a critical idealism, Heidegger’s subsequent interpretation of Kant’s philosophy challenges such a reading. Heidegger’s next major publication in 1929, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, restricts the scope for such moves considerably. Here and, to some extent, in the earlier lecture course, Phenomenological Interpretation of

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Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1927–1928), Heidegger introduces the notion of a “transcendental power of imagination” as the “formative center of ontological knowledge” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 127, 1997a, p. 89). Reflecting on the explanations in Being and Time concerning the derivative, illusory, ontological status of physical and logical objectivity from the vantage of the subsequent Kant book and lectures, it is clear that Heidegger’s “temporal idealism” aims far beyond a mere temporal idealism in the critical or classical Kantian sense of transcendental philosophy (if one does not think that Kant’s critical philosophy is a full blown constructivism anyway). I argue that it aims at a variation of subjectivist or constructive idealism that one might call a poietic idealism of imagination. This is supported both by the present reading of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant from 1929 and in looking forward to Heidegger’s later identification of poetry and thinking in the second and third phases of his work to be discussed below. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger qualifies the “investigation” on Kant as both “a ‘historical’ introduction to … the problematic treated in the first half of Being and Time,” and “as a preparatory supplement” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. xvi, 1997a, p. xix, GA 3 translation modified) to Being and Time’s missing sections of “Part One” and “Two.” Heidegger formulates the hypothesis here that the transcendental synthesis of imagination would be the element from which “the inner rupture in the foundation of Kant’s problem” could be overcome, that is, the “the lack of connection between time and the transcendental apperception” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 25, p. 358, 1997b, p. 242). Moving towards a more adequate understanding of a properly temporal “I think,” the key element of Heidegger’s appropriation of Kant is the assumption that the “transcendental power of imagination,” “[a]s original, pure synthesis … forms the essential unity of pure intuition (time) and pure thinking (apperception)” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 127, 1997a, p. 90). In this interpretation, Heidegger proposes no less than to discover and illuminate Kant’s famous “unknown root” for the “two stems of human cognition,” “sensibility and understanding” (Kant 2007, A15/B29; cf. Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, pp. 137–171, 1997a, pp. 97–120). Despite calling his interpretation of Kant an “overinterpretation” in a late retrospective from 1973, which he wanted “to retract” because “Kant’s question” was “foreign” to the “questioning set forth in Being and Time” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. xiv, 1997a, p. xviii), the fact remains that in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger wanted to elucidate something in Being and Time, a “question” that although perhaps “foreign” to Kant’s question can nevertheless still be seen in 1973 as “conditioning it [sie bedingende Fragestellung]” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. xiv, 1997a, p. xviii, translation

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altered). Not considering Heidegger’s multiple strategies of interpretation in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, the main features concerning the question of Heidegger’s existentialism as a form of constructive idealism in the 1920s are as follows: First, by giving sensible intuition in his transcendental aesthetic a crucial role in the constitution of objective knowledge, Kant would have been the first to introduce into metaphysics the human, and thus finite standpoint: “humanness of reason, i.e., its finitude,” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p.  21, 1997a, p. 15). Thus Heidegger observes that “[i]n order to understand the Critique of Pure Reason this point must be hammered in, so to speak: knowing is primarily intuiting” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 21, 1997a, p. 15). Second, by giving human cognition a decisively temporal character, Kant would have introduced, at least in an operative way, the same kind of transcendence in the very determination of human reason that Heidegger develops in Being and Time as the transcendence of time and world (cf. Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, pp. 463–485, 2010a, pp. 334–349).4 Thus Heidegger states, “As universal, pure intuition, it [time] must for this reason become the guiding and supporting essential element of pure knowledge, of the transcendence which forms knowledge” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, pp. 49, 1997a, p. 34). This kind of transcendence “of a basic faculty of a turning-toward … which lets[something]-stand-in-opposition” would be “none other than the transcendence which marks all finite comportment to beings” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 71, 1997a, p. 50) well known from Being and Time. In both cases, the transcendence consists in forming a “structural totality” (“Strukturganzheit,” Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, pp. 239–244, 2010a, pp. 175–78) within the distention of time. Unlike Being and Time, however, this transcendent configuration of the ecstatic temporality of Dasein is not described in terms of disclosure. Instead, the disclosure of being is further explicated as productive imagination following the new (with respect to Being and Time) basic “thesis” that “the transcendental power of imagination is original time” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, pp. 187, 1997a, p. 131). Heidegger bases his interpretation here on the following passage taken from the first version of the transcendental deduction from 1781 (the “A-deduction”): “The principle of the necessary unity of the pure (productive) synthesis of the imagination prior to apperception is thus the ground of the possibility of all cognition, especially that of experience” (Kant 2007, A118; cf. Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 80, 1997a, p. 56). The “pure synthesis of the imagination” is “productive” because it “unifies … time”; it is “prior to apperception” because the unity of outer and inner experience and of unified objects standing against a unified subjective self depends on the unity of time. Heidegger, quoting the A-deduction, states: “all ‘modifications

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of the mind … are subject to time … as that in which they must all be ordered, connected, and brought into relation with one another’” (Kant 2007, A99; cf. Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 81, 1997a, p. 57). Whereas Kant in the A-deduction tends to remain ambivalent concerning the final deductive hierarchy between imagination and apperception (correlation? subordination?), Heidegger opts for a clear subordination of apperception to imagination. Third, Heidegger holds that pure and productive transcendental imagination would indeed be the “unknown root.” This root would have been partly discovered by Kant in the A-deduction, but not grasped, indeed pushed back into the ground, as it were, from the first to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, with its new, second deduction (the “B-deduction”). Thus, Heidegger draws on the fact that whereas in the B-deduction Kant treats imagination as a subordinate faculty of understanding, in the A-deduction Kant describes it as one among three distinct forms of transcendental synthesis: the “synthesis of apprehension in intuition,” the “synthesis of reproduction in imagination,” and the “synthesis of recognition in the concept” (cf. Kant 2007, A98–110). In order to let Kant appear as his forerunner, Heidegger indicates that these three forms of synthesis correspond in their respective character and inner connections to the threefold temporal, “horizonal schema” of past, present and future, developed in Being and Time (cf. Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, pp. 482f., 2010a, pp. 347–48). Whereas in Kant’s “Architectonic of Pure Reason” the production, understanding and application of concepts as categories of empirical knowledge are situated in clear contrast to intuition and sensible experience, in Heidegger’s account the synthesis of recognition that “explores the horizon of being-able-to-hold-something-before-us” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, pp. 186, 1997a, p. 130) becomes the articulation of temporality: the ecstatic dimension of future. Heidegger states, “if finally all representing including thought is to be subject to time, then this third mode of synthesis must ‘form’ the future” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 183, 1997a, p. 128). Accordingly, what seemed in Kant’s account less likely to be affected by time—namely, the faculty of concepts—becomes, following Heidegger’s temporal hierarchy from Being and Time, the first ecstatic dimension of time. The synthesis of recognition in the concept becomes the synthesis of precognition that “forms the future”: Thus the third mode of synthesis also proves to be one which is essentially time-­ forming. Insofar as Kant allocates the modes of taking a likeness, reproduction, and prefiguration [Ab-, Nach- und Vorbildung] to the empirical imagination, then the forming of the preliminary attaching as such, the pure preparation, is

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an act of the pure power of the imagination. (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 186, 1997a, p. 130)

This means that the world-picture of objectively present, Dasein-­independent, ontic being is itself dependent of an imaginative prefiguration of possible and thus transcendent future forms or images of being. Furthermore, Heidegger argues, now going beyond the explicit accounts given in Being and Time, that within this threefold structure the disclosure of future is conditioned by the transcendental power of imagination. It is no longer, as developed in the A-deduction, a reproductive faculty (reproducing forms encountered in perception), but in Heidegger’s account—and here we hit on the poietic character of Heidegger’s idealism of imagination—it is the productive faculty. As such, for Heidegger it is also the driving force of the faculty of understanding, its higher function in the illusory Kantian hierarchy. This is because the synthesis of recognition in the concept is only “the apparent achievement of the pure understanding in the thinking of the unities” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p.  151, 1997a, p.  106, my emphasis). By contrast, in Heidegger’s account understanding and thinking are primarily achievements of “a pure basic act of the transcendental power of imagination”: Now if Kant calls this pure, self-orienting, self-relating-to …“our Thought” [“unseren Gedanken”] then “thinking” [“Denken”] this thought [Gedankens] is no longer called judging, but is thinking in the sense of the free, forming, and projecting (although not arbitrary) “conceiving” [“Sichdenkens”] of something. This original “thinking” is pure imagining. (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p.  151, 1997a, p. 106)

In other words, reason, as the ability to think for oneself, is identified not only with temporality, but is, in order to be temporal, transformed into a function of imagination: “This original ‘thinking’ is pure imagining.” In this sense, Heidegger holds that imagination is the common root of time and reason. Fourth, because time and thinking are produced by imagination, “as the ground for the possibility of selfhood, time already lies within pure apperception.” In other words, “the I” and “pure reason,” as the effect of imagination, are “essentially temporal.” In this way, “Time and the ‘I think’ no longer stand incompatibly and incomparably at odds; they are the same” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 191, 1997a, p. 134). Against the background of this identification of reason and intuition as time, a series of profound transformations of Kant’s transcendental philosophy are taking place. Indeed, Heidegger even goes so far as to claim that not only “the possibility of theoretical reason”—the

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spontaneity of concepts—springs forth from the transcendental power of imagination,” but that “practical reason is also grounded therein” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 156, 1997a, p. 109; my emphasis). So Heidegger shares with Kant a certain primacy of “practical” freedom, but unlike Kant Heidegger takes the spontaneity of imagination as the root of both theoretical and practical freedom in the Kantian sense. So while Kant asserts the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason (because the former cognizes the categorical imperative as an unconditional law that applies regardless of experience whereas the laws of theoretical reason are only of objective value if they apply to experience), Heidegger also subordinates practical reason to the power of imagination. In short, for Heidegger the fundamental forms of rationality— the categories and the moral law—rest on the constructive force of imagination. Fifth and finally, Heidegger gives a genuine Kantian—that is, moral—reason why Kant “had to shrink back” from the “abyss” of such a temporal foundation of reason. Heidegger observes, “It was not just that the transcendental power of imagination frightened him, but rather that in between [the two editions] pure reason as reason drew him increasingly under its spell” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 168, 1997a, p. 118). More precisely, Heidegger suggests that what drew Kant “increasingly” under the “spell of reason as pure reason” would have been an evolution in his “ground-laying” of “Moral Philosophy,” which indeed had taken place between the two editions of the Critique of the Pure Reason from 1781 and 1787. In 1785, Kant published the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and, in 1788, the Critique of Practical Reason. It is not impossible then that Kant, under the impression of his own deepening insights into practical or “moral reason,” in which imagination cannot and must not play any role,5 would have been driven to considerably restrict the scope of imagination from the A- to the B-deduction. If this was the case, then Kant, under the spell of moral reason, would have retrospectively tried to adapt the necessities of theoretical philosophy formulated in the first Critique to the moral necessities formulated afterwards in the Groundwork and the second Critique. In other words, because there cannot be what must not be—namely, a subordination of unconditionally practical reason to the freedom of productive transcendental imagination—Kant ultimately avoided the finite and temporal character of reason and thus the problem of metaphysics, which he had nevertheless recognized: Kant awoke to the problem of now searching for finitude precisely in the pure, rational creature itself, and not first in the fact that it is determined through “sensibility.” Only in this way was ethicality able to be grasped as pure, i.e., as neither conditioned by nor even made for the factical, empirical human being.

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This personal-ontological problem of a finite pure reason in general admittedly was not able to tolerate in proximity to itself that which recalls the specific constitution of a determinate kind of realization of a finite rational creature in general. Such, however, was the power of imagination, which was reputed to be not only a specifically human faculty, but also a sensible one. The problematic of a pure reason amplified in this way must push aside the power of imagination, and with that it really first conceals its transcendental essence. (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 168, 1997a, p. 118)

According to this claim, the foundation of reason in sensibility, finitude and transcendental imagination was not pushed aside by Kant for objective reasons to be found in theoretical reason itself, but for fear of the truth that the transcendence of morality was actually “founded” in transcendental imagination and, thus, in the transcendence of time. No matter what conclusions we draw from this for the interpretation of Kant’s philosophy, we can conclude that Heidegger is concerned with a form of unbound freedom at the root of metaphysics unrestricted by logic, categorical necessities of understanding, or categorical obligation of moral principles. What Heidegger has in mind is the “poietic” freedom of a radical idealism of imagination—an idealism in which what there is is ontologically dependent on the images that thinking produces.

5

 econd Phase: Heidegger’s Critique S of Freedom and Objectivity in Kant

From 1930 onwards, there follows a second phase in which Heidegger’s criticism of Kant becomes sharper and leads to a fundamental distancing from Kant. This occurs in broadly three ways. The first is most visible in the 1930 lecture course on The Essence of Human Freedom, in which Heidegger develops a comprehensive interpretation of Kant’s concept of theoretical and practical freedom. These lectures mark a first and indeed decisive step away from Kant. Specifically, Heidegger drops the concept of transcendental imagination (but not the idea of a formative power), and does not provide a determination of the formative freedom of imagination, which would have been expected. Instead, Heidegger offers a sharp criticism that Kant did not grasp the essence of human freedom. Similar to his later reading of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift in 1936, Heidegger holds that “the essence of freedom comes only into view if we seek it as the ground of the possibility of Dasein, as something prior even to being and time.” This

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critique of Kant—or self-critique of Heidegger (reading Kant)—is intensified by the claim that we must effect a complete repositioning of freedom, so that what now emerges is that the problem of freedom is not built into the leading and fundamental problems of philosophy, but, on the contrary, the leading question of metaphysics is grounded in the question concerning the essence of freedom. (Heidegger 1975, vol. 31, p. 134, 2002, p. 93)

Instead of investigating the essence of finite human freedom, Kant would have understood practical freedom as a “kind of causality” in the sense of a variation of the physical causality of nature, that is, as a constructed mode of ontic “objective presence [Vorhandenheit]” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 31, p. 190, 2002, p.  133, translation altered according to Heidegger 2010a). In other words, what has been described rightly elsewhere as Kant’s “procedural moral realism” (cf. Korsgaard 1996, pp. 34–37) is transformed into a constructivist standpoint of the subjectivist sort. Like the laws of nature or of logic, the law of practical freedom, the categorical imperative, is in Heidegger’s view, a metaphysical construction resting on the essence of human freedom which is, now, neither time nor Dasein, but will. The lecture culminates in a thorough form of “existential voluntarism” (cf. Davis 2007, p. 66). Interpreting the categorical imperative as “the fundamental law of finite pure willing” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 31, p. 280, 2002, p. 133), Heidegger undertakes a far-reaching transformation of practical freedom that looks like a preformation of Nietzsche’s will to power, a will willing itself. Here, Heidegger’s explicit criticism of Kant is somehow silenced, but remains operative in the interpretation of a supposedly Kantian will through depictions such as the following: “Qua will, i.e. insofar as it only wills willing, a good will is absolutely good”; “the essence of pure practical reason” is “pure willing,” “What is genuinely law giving for willing is the actual pure willing itself and nothing else”; A “pure willing” that “wills itself,” etc. (Heidegger 1975, vol. 31, pp. 277–280, 2002, pp. 189–191). In this way, freedom is unbound from the practical law and declared as that under “which is rooted even the question of being” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 31, p. 300, 2002, p. 203). Even more primordial than being or time, “freedom” is now overtly declared to be “the condition of the possibility of the manifestness of the being of beings, of the understanding of being” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 31, p. 303, 2002, p. 205). It is in this freely chosen “understanding of being” that Heidegger locates the condition of possibility that “beings can show themselves as objects,” the will “letting something stand-over-against as

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something given” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 31, p.  302, 2002, p.  205). While Heidegger pretends to speak here in the name of Kant, the violence of the interpretation is such that the appropriation is, in fact, an act of distancing and alienation. Second, in the lecture course from 1935–36 published in 1962 under the title, The Question Concerning the Thing: On Kant’s Doctrine of the Transcendental Principles (cf. Heidegger 2018), Kant is presented as the thinker in which the modern, i.e., physical, conception of being as the objectivity of the object finds its philosophical perfection. Here, Kant is no longer presented as an ally who only “shrinks back” before the decisive step, or who is held back by a Cartesian dogmatism, but as the primary adversary for Heidegger’s own path to a more fundamental answer to the question of being, now increasingly concerned with a practical relation also to the “thingness of things.” As the subheading indicates, Heidegger’s interest shifts from Kant’s understanding of schematism, productive imagination and time as self-affection to the “principles of pure understanding,” that is, to the Critique of Pure Reason’s closing part of the “Transcendental Analytic,” in which the final conclusions concerning the conditions of possibilities of objective knowledge are drawn. These principles of pure understanding are now declared by Heidegger to be, “in the most proper Kantian sense, the inner foundation of the entire work” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 41, p. 130, 2018, p. 89). According to Heidegger, Kant now has to be seen as the thinker for whom “the question concerning the thingness of those things that [immediately] surround us … has no weight” and whose “gaze,” instead, “fastens at once on the thing as object of mathematical-­ physical science” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 41, p. 131, 2018, p. 90). This passage as well as a brief remark on Van Gogh’s painting show, that (and to some extent also how) Heidegger is now interested in letting appear a more existential relation to the thingness of things, a scenario in which Kant appears as a major obstacle in establishing such a relation: Kant “leaps right away over that domain of things in which we know ourselves [to be] immediately at home, things as the painter also shows them to us: the simple chair with the tobacco pipe, just laid down or forgotten, in van Gogh” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 41, p.  214, 2018, p.  145; my addendum). Probably shortly after this lecture course, in the Contributions to Philosophy (1936–1938), Heidegger explains his new methodical approach to Kant. It is, Heidegger explains, “[b]ecause” the reduction of “beyng” to “objectivity” is “carried out in the purest way in Kant,” that “one can therefore attempt to make visible in his work something still more original and thus something not derived from his work, quite different from it” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 65, p. 93, 2012, p. 74). That is the place Kant will occupy for Heidegger in the history of Being from now on as the

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modern thinker of “Objectivity” (cf. Heidegger 1975, vol. 10, p. 82, 1991, p. 80). However, this does not mean that Heidegger leaves the wild shores of idealism behind. Rather, the “grounding” of “Da-sein,” of “truth” and of the “Time-space” (cf. Heidegger 1975, vol. 65, pp. 291–401, 2012, pp. 229–310) remains Heidegger’s central project throughout the second half of the 1930s. However, this is no longer achieved through an encounter with Kant, but is often pursued beyond the limits of what can be said in the language of philosophy. Indeed, it is in this context that Heidegger’s turn to poetry occurs, especially to Hölderlin, whom Heidegger describes in a lecture course from 1934–1935 “as the poet of the future German beyng [als Dichter des zukünftigen deutschen Seyns]” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 39, p.  220). From now on Hölderlin takes Kant’s place, so to speak. Heidegger endows Hölderlin’s poetry thus with “the creative power [schöpferische Gewalt]” of founding not only a thinking of a “historical Dasein [geschichtliches Dasein],” of a single people, in the case of the Germans, but from this very standpoint of facticity and particularity, Hölderlin’s poetry is even credited with the impulse of “constituting” altogether the “future historical beyng [Stiften des künftigen geschichtlichen Seyns]” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 39, pp.  143–151, 220). A recurring figure of thought in Heidegger’s philosophy of history from the 1930s, containing audible nationalistic undertones, corresponds to this: after the first beginning with Greek understanding of being, the “historical German Dasein” was to provide another beginning to the history of “beyng” (cf. Sommer 2017, pp. 31–60).

6

 hird Phase: Rupture with Kant—Another T Poetic Idealism?

Beginning in the early 1940s and clearly articulated by 1944, Heidegger’s thinking undergoes a third phase of rupture with both Kantian and post-­ Kantian idealism interpreted as a metaphysics of transcendental subjectivity or will. Trying to twist free from the grip of metaphysics altogether, Heidegger declares in the Country Path Conversations (1944–1945) that his former notions of “transcendence” and “horizon” still belong to “the transcendental [das Transzendentale].” Such underpinnings of metaphysics would still require a “transcending or climbing over [Übersteigens] and going-out-beyond [Hinausgehens]” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 77, p. 98, 2010b, p. 63; translation altered). Instead of trying to think metaphysics more fundamentally in order to decipher its last, hidden origins, Heidegger turns now to his conception of

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“releasement [Gelassenheit]” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 77, p. 109, 2010b, p. 71), that is, of “not-willing” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 77, p. 51, 2010b, p. 33), and of “something open, which does not have its openness from the fact that we see into it” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 77, p. 112, 2010b, p. 72). Yet, Heidegger still considers the way to this turning point to be essential. On his view, the individual stages of thought leading to a certain standpoint must not and cannot be left behind like a useless ladder once a new prospect has been reached. This is why, even years later, Heidegger publishes certain texts that were written before this turning point, e.g., his second book on Kant, The Question Concerning the Thing from 1962. This sometimes leads to systematic inconsistencies, or at least unresolved—unacknowledged—tensions between earlier and later positions. The mentioned text is particularly paradigmatic for such an unacknowledged idealism that is now silently operative: On the one hand, this lecture develops a hypothesis that has only persuasive power if we assume that being (or the truth of being) can be grounded. It is the hypothesis that mathematical-physical objectivity is only one constructive possibility among others in the history of Being as Heidegger develops, for example, in his lecture on The Principle of Reason from 1955–1956 (cf. Heidegger 1975, vol. 10, pp. 112–123, 1991, pp. 76–83). However, while rejecting the idealism that was at the base of the constructive hypothesis in the second phase, Heidegger in the third phase continues to endorse the result, that is, the radical historization of being as objectivity emerging from the “process determining a new epoch … in which being adapts itself to the objectness of objects, but which, in its essence as being, thereby withdraws. This epoch characterizes the innermost essence of the age we call modernity” (cf. Heidegger 1975, vol. 10, p. 83, 1991, p. 55). In the same sense of an equally unacknowledged but operative poietic or poetic idealism, we might say that while Heidegger rejects his former subjectivist idealism of imagination, he still holds that poetry and thinking are closely connected as two sides of the same being, and that this is intended to give shelter to the “transcendental power of imagination” that, as he notes already in 1929, would be “homeless” in Kant (Heidegger 1975, vol. 3, p. 136, 1997a, p. 95). For this reason, against the background of Heidegger’s silence both on the Shoa and, even more, on the debt towards the Hebraic heritage (cf. Zarader 2006), I read Heidegger’s late (1957–1958) interpretation of Stefan George’s verse, “Where word breaks off no thing may be” (cf. Heidegger 1975, vol. 12, pp. 152–160, 1982 pp. 60–67) as the continuation of a poietic idealism of imagination, albeit with disturbing implications that it did not have in 1929.6

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Conclusions

If the present reconstructions are conclusive, it was shown that Heidegger’s existentialism as a philosophy of human freedom and rationality in the horizon the temporality, facticity and finitude is based on a constructive—poietic or poetic—form of idealism. Further elucidations would have to make visible parallels between Heidegger’s idealism and the romantic paradigm of art as the creative power of individual, collective and even natural realities. For in many respects Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant repeats the transformative appropriation of Kant through Romanticism, especially by Schelling. Furthermore, one would have to ask to what extent Heidegger’s existentialism, which recognizes world and temporality as the only transcendence and remains thus dependent on the normative force of facticity and history, makes the “thinking of being” susceptible to time-bound nonsense such as nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism. As the passage quoted above from the Black Notebooks about an alleged “German universalism” in Kant already makes clear, there is much to suggest that Heidegger’s demarcation from humanism and thus from Sartre’s existentialism, both of which would not have “set the humanitas of man high enough” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 9, p. 330, 1993, pp. 233–34), rather outlines the depths of a void to be filled constructively with facticity and history than to be bridged by a properly Dasein-independent higher truth of being.

Notes 1. For concise reconstruction of “Heidegger’s existentialism” see Blattner 2012. 2. For a more precise reconstruction of the first phase, see Römer 2018, pp. 333–347. 3. As Adrian Moore points out, just as in Derrida’s “deconstructive project” that follows Heidegger on this point, “for Heidegger the repudiation of traditional metaphysics involved appropriating traditional metaphysical concepts and traditional metaphysical methods. It was not, in other words, a simple matter of turning one’s back on the tradition. It was a matter of using the tradition’s own resources to subvert it from within” (Moore 2012, pp. 528–529). 4. “And if the being of Dasein is completely grounded in temporality, temporality must make possible being-in-the-world und thus the transcendence of Dasein” (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, p. 481, 2010a, p. 346).

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5. Cf. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: “Thus the moral law has no cognitive faculty other than the understanding (not the imagination)” (Kant 1996, p. 169 (5: 69)). 6. I discuss this in a forthcoming text, cf. Espinet 2020.

Bibliography Blattner, William. 1999. Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Heidegger: The Existential Analytic of Dasein. In The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, ed. Steven Crowell, 158–177. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carman, Taylor. 2003. Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in Being and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crowell, Steven. 2012. Existentialism and its Legacy. In The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, ed. Steven Crowell, 3–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, W. Bret. 2007. Heidegger and the Will. On the Way to Gelassenheit. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Dreyfus, Hubert. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge: MIT Press. Espinet, David. 2018. Heidegger lecteur de Kant. Points de vues prives et publics à partir de 1930. Archives de Philosophie 81 (2): 353–372. ———. 2020. Quand se taire c’est faire. L’écoute heideggérienne et l’o(n)to-­ polémologie du silence. In Heidegger aujourd’hui. Actualité et postérité de la pensée de l’Ereignis, ed. Sophie-Jan Arrien and Christian Sommer. Paris: Hermann. Gabriel, Markus. 2014. Is Heidegger’s ‘Turn’ a Realist Project? Meta. Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy, Special Issue: 44–73. ———. 2015. Fields of Sense. A New Realist Ontology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Han-Pile, Béatrice. 2005. Early Heidegger’s Appropriation of Kant. In A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall, 80–101. Malden: Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin. 1975. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 1–102. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1982. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter Hertz. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1991. The Principle of Reason. Trans. Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1993. Letter on ‘Humanism’. In Basic Writings. Revised and extended edition David. F. Krell, 213–265. New York: Harper Collins. ———. 1997a. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans. Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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———. 1997b. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2000. Towards the Definition of Philosophy: 1. The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview; 2. Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy of Value. Trans. Ted Sadler. London: Continuum. ———. 2002. The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy. Trans. Ted Sadler. London: Continuum. ———. 2010a. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh and Rev. Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: State of New York University Press. ———. 2010b. Country Path Conversation.Trans. Bret W.  Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2012. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2017. Ponderings VII–IX.  Black Notebooks 1983–1939. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2018. The Question Concerning the Thing: On Kant’s Doctrine of the Transcendental Principles. Trans. James D. Reid and Benjamin D. Crowe. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Kant’s Practical Philosophy. Ed. and Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, Adrian. 2012. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Römer, Inga. 2018. Les interpretations heideggeriennes de Kant. Archives de Philosophie 81 (2): 329–352. Sommer, Christian. 2017. Mythologie de l’événement. Heidegger avec Hölderlin. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Zarader, Marlene. 2006. The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

16 Heidegger and German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel): Subjectivity and Finitude Sylvaine Gourdain and Lucian Ionel

From early on, Heidegger’s philosophical work is driven by a dissatisfaction with the prevailing neo-Kantianism of his time, which he identifies with a transcendental account of the experience of the world that gives priority to the theoretical attitude of human consciousness, thereby overlooking the primacy of our practical interaction with and implicit understanding of things. His work begins with a deconstruction of the idea that the human world is constituted in judgments, made possible by categories belonging to a transcendental subject, and tailored to the quantifiable presence of perceivable things. Against this backdrop, Heidegger’s treatment of German Idealism largely consists in a sharp criticism of its subjectivist outlook, which sees the world as the bare presence of extended things, waiting for the subjective projection of meaning. If Being and Time (1927) still operates within the boundaries of a certain hermeneutical idealism, insofar as beings are disclosed only within the human understanding of being—which is not the same as tracing back “all beings to a subject or a consciousness” (SZ, p. 208, trans. p. 193)—the disempowerment of the Dasein after Being and Time and the exaltation of historicity intensify Heidegger’s critical relation to the figures of German Idealism.

S. Gourdain (*) Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany L. Ionel University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_16

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Heidegger’s charge against the idealist quest for self-certainty, which, he argues, seeks to draw a systematic and exhaustive conceptual map of our experience of the world but thereby fails to recognize the radical finitude of human existence, amplifies over time—this is why he has practically no interest in Fichte, the epitome of the subjectivist project of self-foundation. Nevertheless, beginning at the end of the 1920s, Heidegger finds decisive sources of inspiration in the works of Schelling and Hegel. On the one hand, his account of truth as a concealing disclosure of meaning comes unexpectedly close to Hegel’s concept of negativity, which leads Heidegger after 1940 to radicalize his charge against the Hegelian understanding of the conceptual realm (the λόγος) and in the end to redefine the nature of philosophical thinking beyond conceptual philosophy. On the other hand, he finds a great ally in Schelling, and especially in his concepts of “ground” and of the “nonground,” in his efforts not only to undermine the logocentric project of classical philosophy in its search for the fathomable ground of being, but also to define the ethical task of the human being in the world. In the following, we will elucidate Heidegger’s explorations in the territory of German Idealism by mapping out, on the one hand, their chronological evolution and by outlining, on the other hand, the systematic relevance of Heidegger’s main interpretative efforts.

1

Heidegger and Schelling

Among the three most famous idealists, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, Heidegger preferred the last, and this during his whole philosophical work. In a letter from 1972 to Hannah Arendt, he wrote: “You are right: Schelling is much more difficult than Hegel; he risks more and sometimes leaves dry land entirely behind. Hegel always stays safely on the rails of the dialectic” (Heidegger and Arendt 1998, p. 226, trans. p. 191). Indeed, Heidegger considered Schelling as the most creative thinker of the tradition of German Idealism. Therefore, on three separate occasions, he gave in his courses extensive interpretations of Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom of 1809, which appears to be the text that inspired his own thinking the most. Although he had read Schelling already during his early theological studies,1 only Karl Jaspers, who sent him a volume of Schelling’s work in 1926,2 could really draw his attention to Schelling and especially to the Freedom Treatise of 1809. In a letter from April 24, 1926, Heidegger wrote to Jaspers:

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I must expressly thank you once again today for the little Schelling volume. Philosophically, Schelling dares to go much further than Hegel, even if he is conceptually sloppier (begrifflich unordentlicher). I have only begun to read the treatise on freedom. It is too valuable for me to want to become acquainted with it for the first time by roughly skimming it. (Heidegger and Jaspers 1990, p. 62, trans. p. 65)

Another letter, from September 27, 1927, shows that Heidegger was so fascinated by the Freedom Essay that he immediately planned to teach this text: “Since you gave me the little Schelling volume, I haven’t let go of the essay on freedom. In the coming semester, I will hold lessons in it—and, to do this, I hope for your help” (Heidegger and Jaspers 1990, p. 80, trans. p. 80). Apart from the three courses on the Freedom Treatise, other remarks on Schelling are published in volume 28 of the Gesamtausgabe, where Heidegger only alludes to “the young Schelling” in a “brief consideration,” and in volumes 86 and 88, of which the former also contains Heidegger’s latest notes on Schelling dating from the middle of the 1950s and dealing with Schelling’s late philosophy. It is admittedly difficult to know precisely which texts of Schelling Heidegger carefully read, but a closer inspection of the Gesamtausgabe shows that the number and the diversity of occurrences of Schelling’s texts he quotes are remarkable,3 proving that he had knowledge of almost the entire work of Schelling. Thus, by assessing Heidegger’s various references to Schelling as a whole, we could draw a short portrait of “Heidegger’s Schelling.” To begin with, the young Schelling represents for Heidegger the philosopher of nature who—against Fichte—raised nature above the Ego (GA 28, pp. 183–194). If Heidegger rarely mentions Schelling’s identity philosophy (GA 88, pp. 133–34), which he did not really value but nearly identified with Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (GA 88, p. 133), he appreciates Schelling as the philosopher of myths and mythology, referring both to his late Philosophy of Mythology and to the young Schelling of Über Mythen, historische Sagen und Philosophie der ältesten Welt (1793): Schelling is in his eyes “one of the few philosophers who has elaborated an important, original insight into mythical existence (einer der wenigen Philosophen, der sich eine große ursprüngliche Einsicht in das mythische Dasein erarbeitet hat)” (GA 27, p. 361). Furthermore, Heidegger sees Schelling as the one who for the first time highlighted and developed the ecstatic dimension of temporality, especially in the Ages of the World. Although Schelling’s late philosophy proves an attempt to take account of the positive as such and so of the real, Heidegger considers it to be a regression into metaphysics. Last but not least, as we will see below, Heidegger is interested in Schelling’s project to integrate freedom in the system by thinking the latency of evil at the

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origin of every existence, even if Schelling, according to Heidegger, ineluctably failed in this task. Schelling represents for Heidegger a privileged interlocutor, even a “contemporary incognito (Zeitgenosse incognito)” (Scheier 1996, p.  29), who accompanies him on his own path of thinking,4 particularly in the periods of self-questioning, hesitations and turning points. As a matter of fact, Heidegger’s three courses on the Freedom Treatise5 are situated at three pivotal moments in his work. The first seminar of 1927–1928 was held between the course on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GA 24) from the summer semester 1927 and The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (GA 26) from the summer semester 1928 as well as the treatise “On the Essence of Ground” (GA 9a) from 1928. Accordingly, this first seminar inaugurates the period of the “metaphysics of Dasein,” which indeed exhibits some Schellingian motifs, such as the “ground” (Grund), even if Kant—mobilized against neo-Kantianism—is probably the most important thinker at this time for Heidegger. In 1936, as he starts to write the Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (GA 65), that is, in the period of the so-called “turn” (Kehre), Heidegger returns to Schelling’s Freedom Treatise and gives a lecture course on it. The courses on Schelling in 1941 also contribute to the development of Heidegger’s late philosophy, during the phase of the already well-advanced Kehre: Heidegger namely  identifies in Schelling a counter-model to his own conception of “non-willing.” The three following subsections are dedicated to the three Schelling-courses. Our goal here is to examine and elucidate the key points of Heidegger’s interpretation in each course and to emphasize the echoes of Heidegger’s reading of Schelling in each period of his thought. In the last subsection, we will endeavor to shed light on Heidegger’s understanding of Schelling’s late philosophy.

1.1

1927–1928: Heidegger’s First Seminar on Schelling

Heidegger’s first seminar on Schelling was conceived as a “tutorial (Übung) for advanced students.” Three sets of minutes (Protokolle) by Heidegger’s students (Werner Bohlsen, Wolfgang-Günther Friedrich and Elisabeth Krumsiek) and eight sets of notes handwritten by Heidegger himself are published in volume 86 of the Gesamtausgabe and in the book Heideggers Schelling-Seminar (1927/28) (Hühn and Jantzen 2010), which also contains five seminar presentations written by well-known students such as Hans Jonas, Walter Bröcker, Gerhard Krüger, Käte Oltmanns and Hans Reiner.

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Looking at these notes, one notices few significant interpretative differences between this course and the 1936 lecture course. Nevertheless, the approach of this seminar differs from the later lecture course inasmuch as Heidegger does not proceed here sequentially and his interpretation is rather preliminary. The most remarkable difference concerns the concept of “nonground (Ungrund),” which is here a key concept, whereas in the lecture course of 1936 Heidegger almost ignores it. The interpretation of this concept is twofold.6 On the one hand, Heidegger interprets the nonground as a “unity” in tension (Hühn and Jantzen 2010, p. 338; GA 86, p. 534) and identifies it with the final unity of love, whilst Schelling carefully distinguishes between the indifference of the nonground and love as the unity of all opposites. On the other hand, Heidegger describes the nonground as “the idea of what has absolutely disappeared (Idee eines schlechthin Verschwundenen)” (Hühn and Jantzen 2010, p. 339; GA 86, p. 535), thereby linking it with a fundamental dimension of withdrawal. Yet Heidegger interprets the disappearance differently from Schelling. For Schelling, only the opposites, that is the two forces of the ground and of the existent, disappear in the nonground, whilst for Heidegger, what disappears is the nonground itself. Although Heidegger neglects this concept of nonground in 1936, he mentions it several times in his first seminar on Schelling. In 1927–1928 Heidegger is at the threshold of his “metaphysics of Dasein,” questioning the relations between ground, freedom and existence. In this phase, he attempts to complement his fundamental ontology, which has proved insufficient, with a “metontology,” that is, a “metaphysical ontics (metaphysische Ontik)” (GA 26, p. 201, trans. modified p.  158), in order to highlight the ontic fundament of the Dasein as the ontological condition for the possibility of every ontology. In this sense, he tries to dig below the existence of Dasein, and there is no doubt that Schelling was an important interlocutor in this interrogation.

1.2

 936: Heidegger’s Main Lecture on Schelling’s 1 Freedom Treatise

Heidegger’s 1936 lecture course on Schelling is not to be taken as an exegetical commentary on Schelling’s Treatise, for Heidegger also articulates a self-­ interpretation in his course. According to Heidegger, in his Freedom Essay Schelling gives “a new, essential impulse (Stoß)” “into philosophy’s fundamental question of Being” (GA 42, p.  169, trans. p.  98). Correspondingly, Heidegger emphasizes and develops in his commentary the issues representing Schelling’s most important contributions to the question of being. In that

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sense, Heidegger seeks an understanding of the Freedom Treatise “which could bring about a creative transformation (das … schöpferisch überwindende Verständnis)” (GA 42, p.  17, trans. p.  11) of the Freedom Treatise. In this respect, three main issues should be highlighted: A. the question of system and of identity, B. the “jointure of Being (Seynsfuge),” C. the possibility of good and evil and the human freedom. It should be noted that Heidegger refers to the “introduction” of the Freedom Essay in depth and at length (Erster Teil of his commentary, 160 pp.), while the rest of the text is examined in less detail (Zweiter Teil, 100 pp.). A. There is a tension in Heidegger’s interpretation of the meaning of system in Schelling. On the one hand, Heidegger appreciates that Schelling’s system corresponds to “the jointure of Being (das Gefüge des Seyns)” (GA 42, p. 55, trans. p. 32), but, on the other hand, he seems to identify Schelling’s conception with a logical system, like the other systems of German Idealism. This is why Heidegger concisely states: “A ‘system of freedom’—that is like a square circle, in itself it is completely incompatible (eine völlige Unverträglichkeit)” (GA 42, p. 38, trans. p. 21). If, according to Heidegger, Schelling succeeds in thinking freedom in a novel and post-Kantian way—that is not as autonomy, but rather as the force within every being—his conception of the system must ineluctably fail, because the concept of system is itself problematic. In the Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger explicitly refuses this notion, preferring instead the word Fuge.7 But his rejection of any system as such leads him to misunderstand Schelling’s opposition between necessity and freedom. If Heidegger acknowledges that Schelling’s system is based on a strife between necessity and freedom that cannot be assimilated to the classical opposition between nature and spirit, he does not grasp that this opposition is situated between all existent beings, on the one hand (the human being, but also God), and the ground as “the boundary of beings,” on the other hand (GA 42, p.  100, trans. p.  57), and not between God and all human beings. For Heidegger, the Freedom Treatise is an ontotheology built on the ontological necessity of the system and on the theological necessity of God, on the one hand, and on the freedom of the human being, on the other hand. Schelling’s own understanding of his system pertains to a conflict between the necessity of the ground and the freedom of every existent. God is also bound by the necessity of his ground, no less than the human being, even though, unlike the human being, he has already overcome it. Schelling’s conception of identity allows us to elucidate his idea of a system of freedom. Heidegger’s commentaries on this topic are particularly judicious and enlightening because they disclose the ontological and dynamical structure of identity in Schelling. Heidegger insists on the importance of this

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passage in Schelling’s Freedom Treatise: “What is explained there on the side is an essential foundation for the whole treatise” (GA 42, p. 130, trans. p. 75). Heidegger underlines first that identity in Schelling must be conceived from the copula, considered as the “ribbon” gathering both terms of identity. Far from being reduced to “mere sameness and identicalness (bloße Selbigkeit und Einerleiheit)” (GA 42, p. 134, trans. p. 77), identity is defined as “the belonging together of what is different in one (die Zusammengehörigkeit von Verschiedenem in Einem)” or as “the unity of a unity and an opposition (die Einheit einer Einheit und eines Gegensatzes)” (GA 42, p.  133, trans. p.  77). Instead of falling into relativism, Heidegger on the contrary states that identity is only possible on the basis of a radical difference. It is in this sense that Schelling writes: “The perfect is the imperfect” (GA 42, p. 134, trans. p. 77) or “the good is the bad (das Gute ist das Böse)” (GA 42, p. 135, trans. p. 78). Good and evil consist of the same forces of the ground and the existent, but their opposition results from an inverted constellation of these two forces. “This means evil does not have the power to be of its own accord, but it needs the good above all. And this is what is truly existent in evil” (GA 42, p. 135, trans. p. 78). For Schelling, identity is asymmetrical: evil can be only on the basis of the root of good that is in it, but the good is neither the cause nor the foundation of evil, but only its “ground of possibility (Grund der Möglichkeit)”: “The correct concept of identity means the primordial belonging together of what is different in the one (This one is at the same time the ground of possibility of what is different)” (GA 42, p. 136, trans. p. 78). Identity is ontological, but ontology in Schelling has a fundamental ethical stake. B.  Heidegger develops his particular interest in Schelling’s distinction between “being in so far as it exists” and “being in so far as it is merely the ground of existence” (SW VII, p. 357, trans. p. 27) because he recognizes that the Schellingian concept of ground shakes up the metaphysical conceptions of foundation.8 Indeed, Heidegger describes the Grund in Schelling very rigorously as “under-lying, substratum, ‘basis’ (Grund-lage, Unterlage, ‘Basis’)— ὑποκείμενον” (GA 42, p.  187, trans. modified p.  107). The Schellingian ground does not mean ratio as the reason for this or that, but, on the contrary, “the nonrational,” which should not, however, be simply identified with the “irrational” (GA 42, p. 187, trans. p. 107). As such, this ground is rather a soil that erodes, an abyssal base for every being or existence. In contrast, “Ex-sistenz” is characterized by Heidegger as “what steps outside of itself and in stepping outside of itself reveals itself (das aus sich Heraus-tretende und im Heraus-treten sich Offenbarende)” (GA 42, p. 187, trans. modified p. 107). Heidegger underlines that the difference between the ground and the existent is not a simple conceptual distinction but rather a real conflict of forces. Note

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in this respect that the term Seynsfuge, that is, “jointure of Being” (GA 42, p. 185, trans. p. 106), used by Heidegger to describe Schelling’s disjunction between the two principles within the same being (Wesen), overlaps with the way he describes his own conception of Ereignis in Contributions to Philosophy, namely as Fuge des Seyns (GA 65, p. 18, p. 228, trans. modified p. 16, p. 180). On closer inspection of Heidegger’s commentaries on the Seynsfuge, it should be remarked that there are actually two levels in the Heideggerian interpretation of the opposition between the ground and the existent, even though they are not clearly separated by Heidegger himself. Distinguishing between these two levels will allow us to propose a parallel with Heidegger’s own thought. On the one hand, Heidegger examines the opposition between the ground and the existent within creation, which corresponds, in Schelling, to the conflict between gravity and light: “Gravity is what burdens and pulls, contracts and in this connection what withdraws and flees. But light is always the ‘clearing,’ what opens and spreads, what develops. What is light is always the clearing of what is intertwined and entangled, what is veiled and obscure” (GA 42, p. 199, trans. p. 114). Gravity as a force of weightiness and of contraction, attracting everything toward a dark ground and withdrawing, opposes the light as that which is rendered clearer, lighter, and what unfolds and diffuses around itself. A first resonance with the conflict between the ground and the existent can be seen in the idea of a “strife between the world and earth” (GA 5a, p. 36, trans. p. 27), developed in Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art.” The third version of this text, published in volume five of the Gesamtausgabe and dating from 1936, is from the same year as the lecture on Schelling. By contrast, in his reading of Schelling, Heidegger analyzes another form of the jointure of being within God himself and thus before creation. The conflict between “understanding (Verstand)” and “longing (Sehnsucht)” in God can be compared with the original strife of concealing and unconcealing, of Verbergung and Lichtung, in Heidegger’s own thought. Indeed, Heidegger defines the understanding as “the faculty of clearing (das Vermögen der Lichtung)” clarifying “what is confused and obscure” (GA 42, p. 207, trans. p. 119). Only from the conflict between Verstand and Sehnsucht does the Word, the λόγος, emerge. Similarly, in Heidegger the strife between Lichtung and Verbergung makes phenomenality possible, which is closely linked with the nature of λόγος as disclosing and concealing at the same time. Heidegger thus recognizes in Schelling the idea of a double strife inherent to phenomenality, an idea that he tries to develop in this period, especially in “Origin of the Work of Art” and in Contributions to Philosophy. The original struggle between Lichtung and Verbergung, designating the unfolding of the truth of being, enables the conflict between earth and world by opening the

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space of phenomenality. But Heidegger also observes that, for Schelling, the highest unity is not the unity of λόγος, which is a bound unity, but a free unity, the unity of love. Only love ensures the truth of being, because in love each force is linked freely to the others. The importance of λόγος and of language has been extensively documented in the secondary literature, but the significance of love has been neglected.9 Yet it is precisely this point that Heidegger underscores in his Schelling reading. In this lecture course of 1936, Heidegger mentions Schelling’s notion of “nonground (Ungrund)” (GA 42, p. 213, trans. modified p. 122) only once. This marginal treatment of the nonground is surprising because it is not only by means of the notion of Grund, as the force of withdrawal but also of the Ungrund as the immemorial and unprethinkable origin of any being, that Schelling exceeds the metaphysical conception of ground and avoids a dualism between the two opposing forces. However, Ungrund, for Schelling, is also a way to safeguard the internal unity of God insofar as it indicates God before God, that is, the divine being in its origin even before the scission between the principles. Therefore, it is very likely that in 1936 Heidegger interprets the Schellingian nonground as a theological concept, which thus had no place in a strictly ontological framework. Moreover, in this phase of his work, Heidegger’s focus is on the dynamic structure of Wesen split between ground and that which exists, which is probably why he simply ignores the nonground, understood as that which stabilizes the opposition between the two forces. C. Although the most famous part of Heidegger’s commentary concerns his interpretation of the Freedom Treatise as a “metaphysics of evil (Metaphysik des Bösen)” (GA 42, p. 169, trans. p. 98), Heidegger’s analysis of Schelling’s conception of evil is often misunderstood. Heidegger’s insistence on the role of evil and on its positivity is at the same time one of the most essential results of Heidegger’s commentary and one of the most controversial points. Heidegger emphasizes that Schelling does not consider the issue of evil only in a moral framework, but rather from a theological and above all ontological perspective. Evil is not the lack or the absence of good: it cannot be considered as a privatio boni, as a simple and thus harmless negation, but on the contrary it has a tremendous and disastrous positivity. Heidegger describes evil as “reversal (Verkehrung)” (GA 42, p. 247, trans. p. 143), which corresponds to the situation when man inverts “the jointure of Being of his existence (die Seynsfuge seines Daseins)” and turns it into “dis-jointure (Ungefüge)” (GA 42, p. 249, trans. p. 144). Schelling clearly distinguishes the possibility of evil from its actuality, and Heidegger adds that neither the possibility nor the actuality of evil are “modalities of Being (Modalitäten des Seyns)” (GA 42,

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p. 256, trans. p. 148). In this respect, Heidegger points out the ambiguity of evil in Schelling’s conception, which is not always detected by commentators on Schelling. Admittedly, evil can only be “realized” (“the real realization (die wirkliche Verwirklichung),” GA 42, p. 263, trans. p. 152) by a human being, but it is already effective and operative (wirksam) before the presence of man through the “prefiguration of evil (Vorzeichen des Bösen)” (GA 42, p.  259, trans. p. 149) in nature. “Where evil is possible, it is also already operative (wirksam) in the sense of a thoroughgoing attraction of the ground in all beings” (GA 42, p. 264, trans. p. 152). This latency of evil embodies the danger inherent in being, the threat haunting it from the roots, and it also explains the “inclination to evil (Hang zum Bösen)” (GA 42, p. 258, trans. p. 149), inciting the human being to do evil. We propose to understand Heidegger’s interpretation of evil in Schelling in connection with his 1931 lecture course on Metaphysics Θ 1–3 of Aristotle. Evil can be considered as a δύναμις κατὰ κίνησιν that has an actuality as δύναμις, because, as Heidegger stresses in his commentary of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, every δύναμις has an actuality as δύναμις and not only as ἐνέργεια. This means that the force of evil is already effective, already real in its latency. Moreover, we recall that in his Aristotle lecture course Heidegger translates δύναμις μετὰ λόγου with the word Vermögen. In that sense “the capability of good and evil (Vermögen zum Guten und zum Bösen)” (GA 42, p. 167, trans. p. 97) turns out to be the Vermögen per se, insofar as it gathers all characteristics of the δύναμις μετὰ λόγου and especially insofar as it is a “conversant force (kundige Kraft)” (GA 33, p. 130, trans. p. 111) that is intrinsically “doubly directed and bifurcated (zwiegerichtet and zwiespältig)” (GA 33, p.  157, trans. p.  134). As such, it is a capacity for opposite forces, which underlines its essential finitude. To sum up, we can say that evil is already effective as a δύναμις, and that the δύναμις becomes a δύναμις μετὰ λόγου with the action of human being, because human beings are the space of manifestation for the λόγος. Thus human beings are responsible when they do evil, but evil is already latent in the nature before man acts. Heidegger’s interpretation of “the decision for good and evil (Entscheidung für Böses und Gutes)” (GA 42, p. 265, trans. p. 153) has been discussed extensively in the secondary literature. Thomas Buchheim stresses that the version of Schelling’s text consulted by Heidegger was inaccurate because Schelling did not use “and” (“the decision for good and evil”), but rather “or” (“the decision for good or evil”) (Buchheim 1999, p. 190). Indeed, Heidegger tends to exaggerate the role of evil, for instance when he writes that “evil is metaphysically necessary” (GA 42, p. 277, trans. p. 160). Only the possibility of evil is necessary, not its actuality, and this necessity is not a teleological one, as if

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God would need evil to reveal himself in contrast to it. The possibility of evil is necessary because God cannot help but tolerate the possibility for evil, that is, accept the ground which is “that which in God himself is not He Himself (was in Gott selbst nicht Er Selbst ist)” (SW VII, p. 359, trans. p. 28). This possibility of good and evil is the sign of the finitude of being itself. Accordingly, to make “the decision for good and evil” means to engage in the “historical” (geschichtlich) struggle of good against evil; it means not to succumb to the temptation of believing we are able to do good by simply avoiding evil because each time we do good, evil is involved too. To do good means to fight evil; to ignore “the co-presence of evil in good and good in evil (Mitanwesenheit des Bösen im Guten und des Guten im Bösen)” (GA 42, p. 272, trans. p. 157) is nothing other than to let evil be. It becomes clearer that Heidegger’s and Schelling’s conceptions point in the same direction of a fundamental ethos.10 In this 1936 lecture course, Heidegger describes Schelling’s Freedom Treatise as “his greatest accomplishment and at the same time … one of the most profound works of German, thus of Western, philosophy” (GA 42, p. 3, trans. p. 2). In this work, Schelling “drives German Idealism from within right past its own fundamental position (von innen her über seine eigene Grundstellung hinaustreibt)” (GA 42, p. 6, trans. p. 4). But for this very reason, Schelling could not go further, and his project of building a “system of freedom” was doomed to suffer a “great breakdown (große Scheitern),” which is, however, “nothing negative at all,” but “the sign of the advent of something completely different, the heat lightning of a new beginning (das Anzeichen des Heraufkommens eines ganz Anderen, das Wetterleuchten eines neuen Anfangs)” (GA 42, p.  5, trans. p.  3). For Heidegger, the incompatibility between the inquiry on freedom and the integration of it into a system causes Schelling’s failure. But through this failure, the Freedom Treatise performs the function that Heidegger believes every philosophical work should, that is, it “open[s] a new realm, set[s] new beginnings and impulses by means of which the work’s own means and paths are shown to be overcome and insufficient” (GA 42, p. 18, trans. p. 11, grammatically adapted). If Schelling opened the possibility of a new beginning, it is incumbent upon another thinker to really initiate this new beginning: “Whoever really knew the reason for this breakdown and could conquer it intelligently would have to become the founder of the new beginning of Western philosophy” (GA 42, p. 5, trans. p. 3). It is of course to himself that Heidegger assigns this task and this responsibility.

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 941: Heidegger’s Last Seminar and Lecture 1 on Schelling

In 1941 Heidegger held a lecture course and a seminar on Schelling, which were conceived as a unity and are both published in volume 49 of the Gesamtausgabe. Heidegger’s notes from his 1941 lecture and from the 1941–1943 seminars are published in volume 86 of the Gesamtausgabe (GA 86, pp. 185–262, particularly pp. 217–262). The title of volume 49 already suggests a modification in the adopted perspective: instead of elucidating the Freedom Treatise in detail as he did in 1936, Heidegger now situates Schelling in the context of an analysis of “the metaphysics of German Idealism.” This different approach reveals a change in Heidegger’s assessment of Schelling. And Heidegger’s view of Schelling has indeed shifted.11 Whereas Schelling is described in 1936 as “the truly creative and boldest thinker of this whole age of German philosophy” (GA 42, p. 6, trans. p. 4), he now falls back into the metaphysical tradition. Schelling is henceforth considered to be a paradigmatic figure in the metaphysics of subjectivity and of will. In this respect, he still remains an important thinker for Heidegger, but now as a counter-model, as we will see below. A first displacement can be observed in Heidegger’s interpretation of Schelling, since the concept of the will—and no longer the notion of evil— occupies the center of the course: the jointure of being is now systematically understood in the framework of the metaphysics of will. From 1941 on, Schelling only appears as the “summit of the metaphysics of German Idealism (Gipfel der Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus)” (GA 49, p. 1) and thus as a precursor to Nietzsche’s thought of will to power. Several times Heidegger quotes Schelling’s well-known expression that “will is primal Being (Wollen ist Ursein)” (SW VII, p. 350, trans. p. 21). Whilst it was interpreted in 1936 as the sign of the dynamics of being, it now has a definitely negative connotation. For Heidegger, insofar as the sentence “Wollen ist Ursein” is the root of the difference between the ground and the existent, the ground as longing and the existent as understanding are for him only two modes of the will as “subjectum”: on the one hand subject as “ὑποκείμενον … ‘basis,’” on the other hand subject as “egoity (Egoität), conscience, spirit” (GA 49, p. 90). In this sense, the will is only a synonym for “self-willing (Sich-selbst-Wollen)” (GA 49, p.  88). Therefore, Heidegger sees in Schelling’s and Nietzsche’s works two modalities of this “self-willing”: “self-willing as coming to oneself and thus revealing oneself and appearing to oneself (das Sichwollen als Zu-sich-selbst-­ kommen und so Sich-offenbaren und Erscheinen vor sich selbst)” in Schelling and

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“self-willing as going beyond oneself (das Sichwollen als über-sich-hinaus-­ gehen)” (GA 49, p. 101) in Nietzsche. So even the Schellingian notion of love as will to love would be a prefiguration of the Nietzschean will to power since every will, according to Heidegger, wants itself, that is, wants to reveal and to manifest itself. However, with this interpretation, Heidegger misses Schelling’s intention, because, for Schelling, it is clear that “a primal and fundamental willing, which makes itself into something and is the ground of all ways of being (das Ur- und Grundwollen, das sich selbst zu etwas macht und der Grund und die Basis aller Wesenheit ist)” (SW VII, p.  386, trans. pp.  50–51), can become evil, as soon as a subject tries to monopolize it for himself. In other words, Schelling, like Heidegger, condemns this “self-affirmation (Selbstbejahung)” (GA 49, p. 84) when it takes the form of a “real self-positing (reales Selbstsetzen)” (SW VII, p.  386, trans. p.  50), as in the Fichtean Tathandlung. Through his definition of “the primal Being,” Schelling stresses the fatality intrinsically linked to being, which is a synonym of the “malheur de l’existence,” “the shackles of being (Fesseln des Seyns)” (SW Xb, p. 267) in his late philosophy. Contrary to what Heidegger states, Schelling insists on the fact that this will that wills itself has a potentially destructive and catastrophic character for the whole humanity. Moreover, in this 1941 course Heidegger dedicates a very long chapter to a reconstruction of the history of the concept of existence from the Greeks to his own concept in Being and Time. In 1927–1928 and above all in 1936 Heidegger’s explanations allowed him to bring his own concept of Ek-sistenz closer to Schelling’s,12 since he designated Schelling’s existence as “Ex-sistence,” that is, as “what steps outside of itself and in stepping outside of itself reveals itself (das aus sich Heraus-tretende und im Heraus-treten sich Offenbarende)” (GA 42, p. 187, trans. modified p. 107); in contrast, he now indicates the incommensurability between the two concepts: “Schelling’s conception of existence, which remains entirely within Western and at the same time modern metaphysics, has no relation (ohne jeden Bezug) to the conception of existence in Being and Time” (GA 49, p. 75). In Heidegger’s view, Schelling’s notion of existence occupies a kind of intermediate position between the traditional concept of existentia and the concept of existence in the sense of Kierkegaard and the existential philosophy. Although Schelling—according to Heidegger— means by existence the selfhood of beings as subjectivity or egoity and as such remains in the framework of metaphysics, he does not limit the notion of existence to human beings, but extends it to every being, and in that sense he also points beyond the metaphysics of German Idealism, but insufficiently. Thus Schelling marks for Heidegger the end of a decline that reaches from Plato through Descartes and Leibniz to Fichte, Hegel and Schelling himself.

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While Heidegger’s 1936 lecture course noted a failure in Schelling’s Treatise, which was, however, the sign of another beginning, the course of 1941 relegates Schelling’s conception to the ruinous history of the Western metaphysics of subjectivity and of will, which leads beyond Nietzsche to the situation of the twentieth century, that is, to the primacy of technology in every social area and to the will to instrumentalize, master and thus dominate the beings in the world.

1.4

Remarks and Notes on Schelling’s Late Philosophy

Volume 88 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe contains some references to Schelling’s late philosophy and especially to the distinction between negative and positive philosophy. Although Heidegger recognizes “Schelling’s basic thrust towards the positive (Grundzug zum Positiven)” (GA 88, p.  140) as decisive, he also considers his late philosophy to be a retrograde step into metaphysics, as a “‘restoration’ of the Christian-Aristotelian-Platonic experience of beings as existent (‘Restauration’ der christlich-aristotelisch-platonischen Erfahrung des Seienden als existierenden)” (GA 88, p. 138). Insofar as he retains a “negative” philosophy as the first stage in his late philosophy, Schelling is for Heidegger entangled in a contradiction, and he fails to overcome rationalism: “Schelling wants to go beyond Descartes—Kant—Hegel, in order to make the existent the basis of philosophy, but in such a way that he nevertheless wants at the same time to retain rational philosophy since Descartes and the earlier ontology as what cannot be avoided although it can never be sufficient” (GA 88, p. 138). Consequently, Heidegger draws the following conclusion: The growing opposition to Hegel makes Schelling more and more dependent on him, and the positive becomes ever rougher and more reactionary. Thus what is stimulating in Schelling’s thought is not in the late philosophy; in the realm that it enters (the Christian-Aristotelian-Platonic world) it is only the safe harbor for the ship sailing in the storm of the Freedom Treatise. Why didn’t Schelling “remain” on the high seas? (GA 88, p. 139)

In spite of this explicit criticism of Schelling, Schelling’s late philosophy and Heidegger’s late thought show many more affinities than Heidegger would recognize. Above all, if we try to reconstruct their conception of ethos beyond a perspective of the history of reception, a close convergence between the two thinkers can be pointed out.13 Moreover, Heidegger’s late work contains some

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hidden Schelling quotations. We can find for instance several allusions to the Schellingian “unprethinkable” (das Unvordenkliche) in “late remarks and notes” (GA 86, p. 519, p. 521, p. 523) and in a passage in volume 73.2 from the period after 1945 (GA 73.2, p. 933). In the volume Gedachtes, Heidegger wrote a poem entitled Das Unvordenkliche dedicated to the relationship between Seyn and Denken (GA 81, p. 200). In this poem he resorts—albeit tacitly—to Schelling’s expression, “thinking never comes beforehand (kommt … nie zuvor das Denken)” (GA 81, p. 200), that Schelling used to designate the unprethinkable.14

2

Heidegger and Hegel

Hegel is the foil against which Heidegger defines the object and the nature of philosophical thinking throughout his work. At the end of his habilitation thesis (1915), the young Heidegger sketches out a draft for a “philosophy of the living spirit,” in which he points to the urgency of a major confrontation with Hegel (GA 1, pp.  410–11). But the language in which Heidegger describes his own program is very Hegelian: “Spirit (Geist) can be conceptually grasped only when the total fullness of its accomplishments, i.e., its history, is lifted up (aufgehoben) within it, and with this constantly burgeoning fullness that is in the process of being philosophically conceptualized a continually developing means for gaining a living conceptual grasp of the absolute spirit of God is provided” (GA 1, p. 408, trans. pp. 66–67). The conclusion of the habilitation thesis—which, incidentally, begins with a quotation from Hegel and ends with his name—reveals that the young Heidegger identifies in Hegel an ally in the project of (a) unifying philosophical knowledge, that is, the categories of thought, with the living, concrete and historical world of experience; (b) overcoming the standpoint of mere “epistemological subjectivity” and the “meagerness” of the Kantian table of categories; and (c) bringing out the historical development of philosophical thought (GA 1, p. 407).15 In the following years, however, Heidegger would sharply differentiate his understanding of philosophy from that of Hegel. Outlining the project of a primordial, pre-theoretical science of the everyday world (Lebenswelt), a science which appeals to the immediacy, or rather the originality, of experience, Heidegger states in 1919: “So we stand at the front against Hegel, in one of the most difficult confrontations” (GA 56/57, p. 97, trans. modified p. 81). The distinction between immediacy and mediation might appear suitable for keeping apart Hegel’s and Heidegger’s philosophical standpoints. Heidegger criticizes Hegelian dialectics for being “blind against givenness” (GA 58,

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p.  225) and for “making the theoretical, the logical absolute” (GA 56/57, p.  97). But he nevertheless considers the attempt to avoid or diminish the theoretical task of philosophy to be pointless, even stating that “there is no immediate grasp of experiences” (GA 56/57, p. 101). This is representative of Heidegger’s ambiguous relation to the nature of the concept. For one thing, conceptual rigorousness is required precisely in order to grasp the precarious nature of concepts, as Heidegger underlines in “On the Essence of Truth” (1930), the text in which he introduces the notion of concealment (GA 9b, p. 199). Then again, there is a need for caution or “mildness” so that the concealment intrinsic to every conceptual disclosure is kept in view. This ambiguity, which is indicative of the disclosing and concealing nature of concepts, will pervade Heidegger’s entire philosophy, representing  its core  problem, which Heidegger tackles precisely in his explicit references to Hegel. By the same token, Hegel plays a crucial role in Heidegger’s late writings (1957–1964), where he aims to redefine the task of philosophical thinking by opposing the notion of ἀλήθεια to the centrality of λόγος in traditional philosophy. On the one hand, the notion of ἀλήθεια, the Greek term for “truth” which Heidegger translates as “unconcealment,” appears to highlight a pre-­ discursive or pre-logical disclosure of meaning. On this account, Heidegger repeatedly argues that the original place of truth is not the judgment; rather, judgments about what there is are possible only insofar as being—or rather the meaning of being  (Sheehan 2015)—is already disclosed in a non-­ conceptual way. In “Hegel and the Greeks” (1958), where Heidegger tackles the question of whether the disclosure of being has its place in mind (Geist) or whether ἀλήθεια is the horizon in which mind can first take a determinate shape, that is, a certain historical understanding of itself and of the world, Heidegger states: “It is not that unconcealment is ‘dependent’ upon saying; rather, every saying already needs the realm of unconcealment. Only where unconcealment already holds sway can something become sayable, visible, showable, capable of being apprehended” (GA 9c, p. 443, trans. p. 335). On the other hand, the notion of ἀλήθεια does not merely point to a primordial, non-conceptual horizon of meaning but defines the very nature of λόγος as such and implicitly the nature of the conceptual. Heidegger defines ἀλήθεια as a concealing disclosure or a disclosing concealment—a formula which describes the dynamics of the conceptual. In his text on the Heraclitean notion of λόγος (1951), Heidegger concisely formulates this thought: The Ἀ-Λήθεια rests in Λήθη, drawing from it and laying before us whatever remains deposited in Λήθη. Λόγος is in itself and at the same time a revealing and a concealing. It is Ἀλήθεια. Unconcealment needs concealment, Λήθη, as

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a reservoir upon which disclosure can, as it were, draw. Λόγος, the Laying that gathers, has in itself this revealing-concealing character. (GA 7, pp. 225–226, trans. p. 71)

In “What is that—Philosophy?” (1955), Heidegger reinforces this significance of λόγος as ἀλήθεια: “Being is gathering (Versammlung)—λόγος” (GA 11b, p. 14). In contrast to classical translations of λόγος as reason or concept, Heidegger opts for its meaning as language, which he grasps starting not from judgments—the locus of conceptual synthesis in the Kantian tradition—but from words, to which Heidegger ascribes the synthetic function of the λόγος. Λέγειν does mean to say and to speak, but Heidegger insists that it also has the sense of selecting and gathering (German auslesen, Latin legere), bringing forward and laying down. If the comprehensive meaning of λέγειν is to harbor, that is, to store something picked out in order to preserve it, then in every harboring, says Heidegger, a concealing is involved: what is gathered becomes implicit; it does not stand out but is easily overlooked, precisely because of its familiarity. This is in Heidegger’s view the fate of words. As a result, ἀλήθεια does not describe the pure presence of beings or their primordial condition of possibility but the way in which the presence of being occurs in the realm of language. In this framework, concepts—or words as such, as far as Heidegger is concerned—are pervaded by a dimension of latency (λήθη) or concealment (Verbergung). This is the decisive thought that brings Heidegger to a systematic confrontation with Hegel’s conception of negativity. Hegel and Heidegger share a similar approach to the way in which meaning is historically and linguistically constituted, although they fundamentally disagree on the role of concepts in the constitution and articulation of meaning. Hegel gives an account of the realm of meaning by mapping out the logical, inferential and holistic structure of concepts constituting the realm of “spirit” (Geist), which he also depicts as a historical development of cultural practices and normative understandings. For Heidegger, the meaning of particular beings is constituted by language and practices but profoundly determined by an historical paradigm of what it means to be. The means of articulating meaning are dependent on this pre-established, overarching understanding of the world. And the dependence of particular concepts on a preordained sense of being entails a break between the concrete historical constitution and the conceptual reconstruction of meaning. If for Hegel concepts express the living structure of nature and spirit, Heidegger sees them as instruments of a theoretical framework to reduce our experiences and possibilities to a restrictive, already historically established configuration of meanings.

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The similarity of their approaches consists in the insight that our understanding of the world, shaped by language and history, is characterized by the oblivion of its sources and that the constitutive layers of meaning are concealed in our immediate experience of the world. Hegel expresses this thought by the notion of “negativity,” while Heidegger uses the term “concealment.” In Hegel, the categories of our thought are immediately intelligible because they abstract from other constitutive categories. In Heidegger, words render phenomena intelligible insofar as they conceal the sources of intelligibility. In this sense, for both Hegel and Heidegger concepts and linguistic expressions are defined by the paradox of being simultaneously revealing and concealing.16 In this light, Heidegger’s efforts to distance himself from Hegel cannot be understood merely as a radical criticism of logocentrism. The relation between λόγος and ἀλήθεια does not refer to a mere opposition between being and subjectivity, realism and idealism, ontology and transcendental philosophy, but concerns the relation between the linguistic-conceptual disclosure of meaning and its inherent concealment. Therein lies the paradoxical relation of proximity to and distance from Hegel, in the words Hans-Georg Gadamer used to describe it (Gadamer 1971, pp. 87–104). Having said that, there has been much speculation about a possible entanglement of Heidegger’s thinking with Hegelian themes. Gadamer was a pioneer of this approach, considering that Heidegger’s proximity to Hegel consists in the awareness of the historicity of their own philosophical thought and in “the secret and inscrutable dialectics that characterize all essential statements of Heidegger” (Gadamer 1968, p. 230). Attempts to find a common ground have generally focused on Hegel’s and Heidegger’s views of history, an influential contribution being made by Michel Haar in “Structures hégeliennes dans la pensée heidéggerienne de l’histoire” (Haar 1980), who highlighted the eschatological features of Hegel’s and Heidegger’s conceptions. But Hegel and Heidegger have also been compared in respect to the topics of death, animality and language (Agamben 2006). However, their philosophical views have also been considered to be fundamentally incompatible and opposed. Dominique Janicaud has argued that a dialogue is impossible (Janicaud 1988), while Otto Pöggeler described dialectics as the “mortal enemy of hermeneutics” (Pöggeler 1995, p. 157). It has been stressed that Heidegger’s and Hegel’s approaches to the issue of finitude are irreconcilable, the very blueprint of Heidegger’s philosophy consisting in dismantling the idea that time, the historical, and the singular could be recovered, preserved and overcome conceptually, that is, sublated (Großmann 1996, De Boer 2000). In the same spirit, Anton Friedrich Koch (2014) has highlighted Hegel’s and Heidegger’s opposed

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stances on the issue of negativity, that is, on the Heraclitean interplay between concealment and unconcealment: on the one hand, the logical triumph and the transparency of the conceptual in Hegel; on the other hand, Heidegger’s thought that the sources of meaning are not objectifiable and fixable but inexhaustible and unfathomable. In “Heideggerian Historicity and Metaphysical Politics” Robert Pippin has argued that the Heideggerian exaltation of finitude and concealment leads to the hypostatization of a mysterious ground of history and to a radical criticism of the modern Enlightenment from the standpoint of a historical relativism, which views our familiar realm of λόγος as a mere version of being, accidentally disclosed in the Greek antiquity (Pippin 1997). This mystification of an inscrutable principle in history goes along not only with a distrust of human reason and autonomy but also with a peculiar political mysticism and obscurantist speculations about the modern age, to say the least. But if there is a philosophically relevant thought in Heidegger’s talk of finitude and concealment, then it concerns the nature of λόγος—the dimension of latency (λήθη) in the constitution of historical meaning (ἀλήθεια). This thought has to be systematically clarified and understood against the background of a proximity to Hegel’s notion of negativity and thus of an urgent need for distancing.

2.1

1918–1930: Concept and Life

Heidegger’s reading of Hegel can be divided into three phases. We can first distinguish the early phase of delimitation between 1918 and 1930, in which, despite Heidegger’s initial sympathy, Hegel is seen as the main exponent of modern idealism. On these grounds, Heidegger criticizes the centrality of the concept in Hegel’s philosophy, contrasting it with the facticity of life and the finitude of time. In his lecture course on German Idealism (1929), Heidegger states that, for Hegel, “every being in itself, in the essence of its being, is a ‘concept’” (GA 28, p. 213). Postulating the unity between concept and reality, the program of absolute idealism consists in “becoming the master of finitude, making it disappear, instead of working it out” (GA 28, p.  47). The problematic relation between concept and finitude will be developed first in Heidegger’s later reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology and in his approach to Hegel’s notion of negativity. The main objection in this early phase is summarized in a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1925, where Heidegger complains about Hegel’s treatment of the category of becoming (Werden):

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Hegel from the beginning failed categorially to grasp life—existence—process and the like. That is, he didn’t see that the traditional stock of categories from the logic of things and the world is fundamentally insufficient, and that we must question more radically, not only about becoming and motion, happening and history—but about being itself. (Heidegger and Jaspers 1990, p. 59)

From early on, Heidegger’s reading of Hegel is driven by the project of an adequate description of the lively, historical and finite character of human existence, that is, by the project of unfolding the “categories of life,” as he puts it in his early lectures on Aristotle—a project which, strangely enough, is reminiscent of Hegel’s early philosophical impetus, in which he criticizes the Kantian conceptual apparatus for its insufficiency to articulate the liveliness and the historicity of concrete ethical life.17

2.2

1930–1942: Concept and Negativity

The middle phase of Heidegger’s reading of Hegel is concerned with the relation between concept and sublation (Aufhebung). This phase begins with a course on Hegel’s Phenomenology in 1930–1931, ends in 1942 with the paper on “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” and includes, more particularly, the notes on Hegel’s concept of negativity, written between 1938 and 1941, right after the Contributions to Philosophy (1936–1938), where Heidegger recognizes a possible proximity to Hegel, formulating the question: “The intimacy of the ‘not’ and also what is in strife in being—are these not what Hegel means by ‘negativity’?” (GA 65, p. 264, trans. p. 208). On the one hand, Heidegger links his understanding of the entanglement between concealment and unconcealment to the Heraclitean notion of strife, διαφερόμενον (GA 7, p. 225). On the other hand, he also traces back Hegel’s conception of negativity “to the idea of being torn (Zerrissenheit) and thus, objectively speaking, … to Heraclitus (διαφέρον)” (GA 14c, p.  58, trans. p.  49). In order to delimitate himself from Hegel’s notion of negativity, Heidegger repeatedly insists on the subjectivist assumptions of Hegel’s understanding of λόγος. For instance, at the same place where he associates Hegelian negativity with the notion of διαφέρον, Heidegger underlines that “the fact cannot be ignored that the modern point of departure from consciousness has contributed a great deal to the development of negativity” (GA 14c, p. 58, trans. p. 49). In his notes on Hegel’s concept of negativity (1938–1942),18 Heidegger extensively argues that Hegel grasps negativity only as the “energy of

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(absolute) thinking” (GA 68, p. 27, trans. p. 21), dissolving the negative in the positivity of thought. Accordingly, Hegel cannot take death seriously because there is “no downfall and no overthrow possible” in his framework, but everything is “contained and compensated,” “already unconditionally secured and accommodated” (GA 68, p. 24, trans. p. 19). In Hegel “there is no nothing at all” (GA 68, p.  24), but only negations of logical determinations. Against Hegel’s conceiving of negativity in the realm of thinking, Heidegger describes nothingness as a source of the realm of meaning. The question about nothingness is “the only question” that has never been asked: “If the truth of being does not stem from beings, from what does being ever receive its truth and in what is this truth grounded?” (GA 68, p. 41, trans. p. 32). On the one hand, nothingness stands for the significance of death in the constitution of the human world. On the other hand, Heidegger associates nothingness with the primordial horizon in which meaning is disclosed, given that this horizon cannot be fathomed and traced back to a ground but exceeds the realm of determinable and mediated being: it is in this sense that the “ground” of the meaning of being is nothing.19 Heidegger not only criticizes Hegel’s conception of negativity for its putative subjectivism, as a result of which negativity represents an internal split in natural consciousness,20 but he also targets the means by which philosophical thinking is supposed to exempt itself from the negativity of consciousness in Hegel: that is, conceptual sublation. Heidegger expands this critique, according to which the Hegelian operation of sublation consists in the trivialization, suppression and oblivion of the negative, in his interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology, where he portrays the relation of his own philosophy to Hegel as the crossroad of finitude and infinity (GA 32, p. 92). The Hegelian infinity of the concept consists in an absolution or a detachment from the finite. According to Heidegger’s reading, the conceptual description of the one-sided and contradictory shapes of natural consciousness is meant to absolve phenomenological consciousness of the inherent negativity of human consciousness. The knowledge that knows its own one-sidedness is absolute knowledge in the sense of being absolved of its finitude, once it conceptualizes it. The absolution consists in the “overcoming of the disunity and disruption of consciousness in its own one-sidedness” (GA 32, p. 107, trans. p. 76). This means that, insofar as consciousness grasps its dichotomous relation to objectivity, it absolves itself of the relation to the objective as such. By recognizing the constitutive otherness of consciousness, self-consciousness appropriates and sublates the otherness itself (GA 68, p. 26). According to Heidegger, the dialectical method of the Phenomenology, inasmuch as it is a movement

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towards absolute self-certainty, aims at absolving subjectivity of the correlative structure of knowledge. Absolute knowledge consists in shifting away from objectivity (GA 5b, p. 136), while absolute negativity “affirms that which is differentiated as the other in its belongingness to the one and thereby makes the one itself into the other” (GA 68, p. 26, trans. p. 20). Summing up this interpretation, Heidegger states: “Absolute knowing is the absolute self-­ preservation in the tearing; this is ‘life.’ Negativity is therefore at the same time sublation” (GA 68, p. 28, trans. p. 21). Against the sublating function of the Hegelian concept, Heidegger affirms the irreducibility of finitude: the concept is not “the power of time,” as Hegel once asserted (GW 20, p. 248), but “the time is the power of the concept” (GA 32, p. 144).21

2.3

1956–1964: Concept and Being

In the late phase of his work, Heidegger refers to Hegel in almost every text in which he attempts to redefine the nature and object of philosophical thinking. This phase begins with a series of presentations and papers that systematically belong together—“The Ontotheological Constitution of Metaphysics” (1956–1957), “The Principle of Identity” (1957) and “Hegel and the Greeks” (1958)—and ends with “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964). The prevailing topic of these texts is the relation between ἀλήθεια and λόγος, which goes together with the question concerning the role of the human subject within the disclosure of being. In “The Principle of Identity” (1957), Heidegger articulates the idea that being is dependent on man as the “thinking being.” The presence of being needs the openness of a clearing, and by this need remains appropriated to human being. This does not at all mean that Being is posited first and only by man …. We stubbornly misunderstand this prevailing belonging together of man and Being as long as we represent everything only in categories and mediations, be it with or without dialectic. Then we always find only connections that are established either in terms of Being or in terms of man. (GA 11a, p. 40, trans. pp. 31–32)

Instead, in order to grasp the belonging together of being and man, we have to shift away from “the attitude of representational thinking” and from “the habitual idea of man as the rational animal who in modern times has become a subject for his objects (GA 11a, p. 41, trans. p. 32). This also involves the “leap away from Being” inasmuch as being has been understood in Western thought “as the ground in which every being as such is grounded” (GA 11a,

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p.  41, trans. p.  32). Moving away from the ground of beings leads us “to where we already have access: the belonging to Being. Being itself, however, belongs to us; for only with us can Being be present as Being, that is, become present” (GA 11a, p. 41, trans. pp. 32–33). For Heidegger, the dependence of being on human existence points to the radical finitude of being itself. In the transcript, a seminar in Le Thor in 1969, where he still insists that “we must therefore begin a confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Hegel, so that Hegel speaks to us” (GA 15, p. 286, trans. p. 10), we read: If being needs something of the human’s kind in order to be, then a finitude of being must accordingly be assumed; that consequently being would not be absolutely for itself, this is the most pointed contradiction to Hegel. For indeed when Hegel says that the Absolute is not “without us,” he says this only in regard to the Christian “God who needs humans.” For Heidegger’s thinking, on the contrary, being is not without its relation to Dasein. (GA 15, pp. 370–371, trans. p. 63)

The realm in which beings appear as beings is the human realm of λόγος. Being has no independent existence apart from the place in which it is disclosed in its meaning–that is, the existence of finite human beings. But, as Heidegger points out in “Hegel and the Greeks” (1958), the fact that being is “for human beings” does not mean that it is “posited by human beings,” recalling that “Αλήθεια, thought in a Greek manner, certainly holds sway for human beings, but that the human being remains determined by λόγος” (GA 9c, p. 442). This statement reinforces the ineluctability of λόγος by pointing out the radical finitude of being itself: the fact that being is disclosed only within the realm of λόγος means that the meaning of being is dependent on mortals. Therefore, Heidegger’s main argument against Hegel is that the constitution of meaning has no autonomous principle which we could reconstruct in a pure categorial account but is radically reliant on the facticity of finite human beings. Heidegger’s arguments are a variation of the idea that the λόγος cannot go beyond the historical paradigm in which it is entrapped, and thus it cannot grasp how meaning is constituted in a distant historical past. This is how Heidegger articulates his fundamental difference from Hegel in “The Ontotheological Constitution of Metaphysics” (1957). Every project of grasping the sources of meaning inevitably ignores the fact that thinking is itself entangled in an already determined understanding of being. Conceptual

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thinking thus overlooks its inherent concealment, that is, the fact that it is always already defined by the world it attempts to reconstruct. However, Heidegger’s reading of Hegel rests upon the assumption that the conceptual realm is essentially limited and subjective. This has a far-reaching consequence, especially because Heidegger’s rejection of subjectivism leads to a renunciation of the conceptual articulation of meaning, as the lectures “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964) and “Time and Being” (1962) attest. In the latter, Heidegger claims that his method of presentation does not make statements, but only indicates, announcing in a marginal note “the disappearance of the ‘as’” (GA 14a, p. 6). The suspicion Heidegger shows from early on towards the philosophical reliance on concepts reaches a climax in his late philosophy: despite his early task of grasping the inherent concealment in the conceptual disclosure of meaning, in his late work he comes to deny the capacity of conceptual thinking to grasp the constitution of meaning—especially its dimensions of finitude and concealment. And despite reassuring us that his late philosophy does not “abdicate thinking,” that it is not “groundless mysticism” or a “denial of the ratio” (GA 14b, pp.  63, 88), Heidegger insists that conceptual philosophy as such ignores the non-­ conceptual sources of meaning and leads to an ontological paradigm that reduces beings to quantifiable entities.22

3

Heidegger and Fichte

There are very few texts of Heidegger on Fichte. The most important is to be found in the lecture course from the summer semester 1928 in Freiburg and published in volume 28 of the Gesamtausgabe, in which the first section is dedicated to Fichte. Volume 88 also contains a few remarks on Fichte in the framework of a tutorial given during the winter semester of 1937–1938. Heidegger’s approach to Fichte is thoroughly critical since, for Heidegger, Fichte’s philosophy is the epitome of a Cartesian, subjective idealism pursuing its own self-grounding. According to Heidegger, Fichte’s Science of Knowledge is paradigmatically a self-contained system articulating an empty, formal subjectivity. Insofar as it knows nothing but itself, it is unable to grasp the importance of the real. Heidegger’s assessment of Fichte is unequivocal: “Science of knowledge = philosophy of metaphysics” (GA 88, p. 129). “Main goal: ‘rigidity’ (Hauptzweck: die ‘Festigkeit’)!” (GA 88, p. 130).

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Conclusion

To sum up, Heidegger’s reading of Schelling and Hegel is not only motivated by his criticism of idealism, be it subjective, objective, or absolute, but Heidegger identifies in their work important sources of inspiration and unexpected proximities. The young Schelling and the intermediate Schelling play an important role in Heidegger’s work: especially the Freedom Treatise represents a crucial impulse for Heidegger’s understanding of the dynamics of being, for his thinking of being as intrinsically split into two opposite forces and thus for his conception of the ethical role of humans insofar as they are involved in a historical conflict of good and evil. However, Heidegger obviously had little consideration for the late Schelling. From 1941 on, Heidegger links Schelling to the metaphysics of will and of subjectivity, which leads to the modern paradigm of the will to power and to the unlimited sway of technology in the modern age. In spite of crucial insights, Heidegger considers Schelling’s negative and positive philosophy as a “fallback into rational metaphysics (Rückfall in die rationale Metaphysik)” and a “flight into Christian dogmatism (Flucht in die christliche Dogmatik)” (GA 66, p. 263). Nevertheless, this critical assessment of the late Schelling hides a deeper proximity: the close affinities between Heidegger’s late philosophy and the late Schelling can be revealed by looking into their conception of ethos. Throughout his work, Heidegger’s relation to Hegel concerns the task of philosophical thinking and the nature of the concept. On the one hand, Heidegger constantly rejects the Hegelian idea that concepts are exclusively responsible for the constitution of meaning, cherishing instead, and distinguishing from conceptual strategies, historical contingency, art, and poetic language. On the other hand, Heidegger recognizes the proximity of his account of the revealing and concealing nature of λόγος to Hegel’s notion of negativity, and, in order to avoid the so-called sublation of the concealment in its very concept, he gradually radicalizes his criticism of the function of concepts in philosophical thinking. Heidegger’s late view of philosophical thinking, resulting from an intensified confrontation with Hegel, insists on the obscuring nature of concepts, which he sees as incapable of doing justice to the finitude of the human realm of meaning and of preserving concealment as such. By relying on concepts, he believes, one hastens to explain the sources of meaning in terms of what can be said and what is already known. From there Heidegger defines the task of thinking—in a minimalist way—as being the custodian of concealment. This thinking  is supposed to “sublate” the

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oblivion of being, that is, the oblivion of the concealing disclosure of meaning, but not the concealment itself: “But now this concealment does not conceal itself. Rather, the attention of thinking is concerned with it” (GA 14c, p. 50, trans. p. 41).

Notes 1. Cf. GA 14d, p. 94, trans. p. 75. 2. Heidegger probably received from Jaspers the following edition: Schelling, F.W.J. 1918. Schellings Philosophie, Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek. 3. I allow myself to refer to my book, in which I try to collect most of Heidegger’s Schelling-quotations: Gourdain 2018, pp. 16–18. 4. Günter Figal underlies the similarities in Schelling’s and Heidegger’s “philosophical biographies” (Figal 2010, pp. 51–52). In the lecture of 1936 a real sympathy for Schelling shimmers through, for instance in this sentence: “But the truth is that there was seldom a thinker who fought so passionately ever since his earliest periods for his one and unique standpoint.” (GA 42, p. 10, trans. p. 6) 5. On these courses, see especially the articles in Hühn and Jantzen 2010, as well as Courtine 1980, Froman 1990, Scheier 1996, Buchheim 1999, Köhler 1999, David 2003, Warnek 2005 and Gourdain 2018. 6. Cf. Schwab 2013, pp. 16–17. 7. Cf. GA 65, p. 81, trans. modified, p. 65: “The jointure is something essentially other than a ‘system’ (Die Fuge ist etwas wesentlich anderes als ein ‘System’).” 8. On the resonances between the Schellingian ground and Heidegger’s conception of “ground” and of “grounding” (Gründung) in the Contributions to Philosophy, see Gourdain 2020. 9. On the importance of love in Heidegger’s later thought, see especially Gourdain 2017, pp. 275–345. 10. Cf. Gourdain 2017. In this book, I develop a conception of ethos from Heidegger’s and Schelling’s late philosophies, and in doing so, I highlight a deep convergence between their late thoughts. 11. Cf. Köhler 2010. 12. The word Ek-sistenz, in this spelling, is already used in the course of 1930 “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit” (GA 9b), and it reoccurs in later texts, especially in “Brief über den Humanismus” (GA 9d). 13. Cf. Gourdain 2017. 14. Cf. SW Xa, p. 35. Schelling mentions “the blind being that thinking can’t get behind (dem blinden Seyn, dem kein Denken zuvorkommen kann).” In another passage, Heidegger refers explicitly to Schelling by quoting this e­ xpression:

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“The unprethinkable (which no thinking can get behind (Das Unvordenkliche— dem kein Denken zuvorkommen kann).” GA 86, p. 519. 15. On Heidegger’s fascination for Hegel cf. Grondin 2003. 16. Cf. Ionel 2020. 17. Cf. Henrich 2003. 18. At the beginning of this manuscript, published first in 1993, Heidegger describes Hegel’s philosophy “as the singular and not yet comprehended demand for a confrontation with it…for any thinking that comes after it or for any thinking that simply wants to—and perhaps must—prepare again for philosophy” (GA 68, p. 3, trans. p. 3). 19. Cf. Dahlstrom 2013. 20. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1983) and Werner Marx (1961) have criticized Heidegger’s assumption that Hegel’s philosophical standpoint corresponds to a subjectivism. 21. Cf. De Boer 2000. 22. Gadamer (1976) has criticized Heidegger for a reductive understanding of concepts, owing to Heidegger’s preference for the tradition of German mysticism and romanticism over the Greek tradition of λόγος.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 2006. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Buchheim, Thomas. 1999. Metaphysische Notwendigkeit des Bösen: Über eine Zweideutigkeit in Heideggers Auslegung der Freiheitsschrift. In Zeit und Freiheit. Schelling—Schopenhauer—Kierkegaard—Heidegger. Akten der Fachtagung der Internationalen Schelling-Gesellschaft, Budapest, 24. bis 27. April 1997, ed. István M. Fehér and Wilhelm G. Jacobs, 183–191. Budapest: Éthos Könyvek. Courtine, Jean-François. 1980. Anthropologie et anthropomorphisme. Heidegger lecteur de Schelling. In Nachdenken über Heidegger. Eine Bestandaufnahme, ed. Ute Guzzoni, 9–35. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg. Dahlstrom, Daniel. 2013. Thinking of Nothing: Heidegger’s Criticism of Hegel’s Conception of Negativity. In A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate, 519–536. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. David, Pascal. 2003. Heideggers Deutung von Schellings Freiheitsschrift als Gipfel der Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus. In Heideggers Zwiegespräch mit dem deutschen Idealismus, ed. Harald Seubert, 125–140. Cologne: Böhlau. De Boer, Karin. 2000. Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger’s Encounter with Hegel. Albany: State University of New York Press. Figal, Günter. 2010. Schelling zwischen Hölderlin und Nietzsche—Heidegger liest Schellings Freiheitsschrift. In Heideggers Schelling-Seminar (1927/28), Die Protokolle

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von Martin Heideggers Seminar zu Schellings “Freiheitsschrift” (1927/28) und die Akten des Internationalen Schelling-Tags 2006, Lektüren F.W.J. Schellings I, ed. Lore Hühn and Jörg Jantzen, 45–58. Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Froman, Wayne J. 1990. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom and Heidegger’s Thought. International Philosophical Quarterly 30: 465–480. GA 1: Heidegger, Martin. 1978. Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. In Frühe Schriften. Gesamtausgabe (abbreviated as GA, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann).  Ed. Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann, 189–411. (In English: Conclusion: The Problem of Categories. In Supplements. Ed. John van Buren, Trans. Roderick M. Stewart and John van Buren. New York: New York State University Press, 2002, 62–68.) GA 11a: Heidegger, Martin. 2006. Der Satz der Identität. In Identität und Differenz. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 31–50. (In English: The Principle of Identity. In Identity and Difference. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1969, 23–41.) GA 11b: Heidegger, Martin. 2006. Was ist das—die Philosophie? In Identität und Differenz. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 3–26. (In English: What is That–Philosophy? Trans. Eva T. H. Brann. Annapolis, Maryland: St. John’s College Press, 1991.) GA 14a: Heidegger, Martin. 2007. Zeit und Sein. In Zur Sache des Denkens. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 3–30. (In English: Time and Being. In On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1996, 1–24.) GA 14b: Heidegger, Martin. 2007. Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens. In Zur Sache des Denkens. Ed. by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 67–90. (In English: The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking. In On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1996, 55–73.) GA 14c: Heidegger, Martin. 2007. Protokoll zu einem Seminar über den Vortrag ‘Zeit und Sein’. In Zur Sache des Denkens. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 31–66. (In English: Summary of a Seminar on the Lecture ‘Time and Being’. In On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New  York: Harper & Row, 1996, 25–54.) GA 14d: Heidegger, Martin. 2007. Mein Weg in die Phänomenologie. In Zur Sache des Denkens. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 91–102. (In English: My Way to Phenomenology. In On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1996, 74–82.) GA 15: Heidegger, Martin. 2005. Seminare. Ed. Curd Ochwadt. (In English: Four Seminars. Trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.) GA 26: Heidegger, Martin. 1978. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz. Ed. Klaus Held. (In English: The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Trans. Michael Heim. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.) GA 28: Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Der Deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart. Ed. Claudius Strube.

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GA 32: Heidegger, Martin. 1980. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ed. Ingtraud Görland. (In English: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.) GA 33: Heidegger, Martin. 1981. Aristoteles, Metaphysik Θ 1-3: Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft. Ed. Hans Hüni. (In English: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force. Trans. Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.) GA 42: Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809). Ed. Ingrid Schüßler. (In English: Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Athens: Ohio University Press 1984.) GA 49: Heidegger, Martin. 1991. Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus. Zur erneuten Auslegung von Schelling: Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (1809). Ed. Günter Seubold. GA 56/57: Heidegger, Martin. 1987. Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. Ed. Bernd Heimbüchel. (In English: Towards the Definition of Philosophy. Trans. Ted Sadler. London: The Athlone Press, 2000.) GA 5a: Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1935/36). In Holzwege. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1–74. (In English: Origin of the Work of Art. In Off the Beaten Track. Trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 1–56.) GA 5b: Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung. In Holzwege. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 115–208. (In English: Hegel’s Concept of Experience. In Off the Beaten Track. Trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 86–156.) GA 65: Heidegger, Martin. 1989. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. (In English: Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event). Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.) GA 66: Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Besinnung. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. GA 68: Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Hegel. Ed. Ingrid Schüssler. (In English: Hegel. Trans. Joseph Areal and Niels Feuerhahn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.) GA 7: Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Logos. In Vorträge und Aufsätze. Ed. Friedrich-­ Wilhelm von Herrmann, 211–234. (In English: Logos. In Early Greek Thinking. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A.  Capuzzi. New  York: Harper & Row, 1984, 59–78.) GA 73.2: Heidegger, Martin. 2013. Zum Ereignis-Denken. Ed. Peter Trawny. GA 81: Heidegger, Martin. 2007. Gedachtes. Ed. Paola-Ludovica Coriando. GA 86: Heidegger, Martin. 2011. Seminare: Hegel—Schelling. Ed. Peter Trawny. GA 88: Heidegger, Martin. 2008. Seminare (Übungen) 1937/38 und 1941/42. Ed. by Alfred Denker.

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GA 9a: Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Vom Wesen des Grundes. In Wegmarken. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 123–176. (In English: On the Essence of Ground. In Pathmarks. Trans. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 97–135.) GA 9b: Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. In Wegmarken. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 177–202. (In English: On the Essence of Truth. In Pathmarks. Trans. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 136–154.) GA 9c: Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Hegel und die Griechen. In Wegmarken. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 427–444. (In English: Hegel and the Greeks. In Pathmarks. Trans. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 323–336.) GA 9d: Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Brief über den Humanismus. In Wegmarken. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 313–364. (In English: Letter on Humanism. In Pathmarks. Trans. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 239–277.) Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1968. Die Sprache der Metaphysik. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, 229–237. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. ———. 1971. Hegel und Heidegger. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, 87–104. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. ———. 1976. Sein Geist Gott. In Heideggers Wege. Studien zum Spätwerk, 152–163. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Gourdain, Sylvaine. 2017. L’ethos de l’im-possible. Dans le sillage de Heidegger et Schelling. Paris: Hermann. ———. 2018. Sortir du transcendantal. Heidegger et sa lecture de Schelling. Ousia: Bruxelles. ———. 2020. Ground, Abyss, and Primordial Ground. Heidegger in the Wake of Schelling. In Paths in Heidegger’s Later Thought, ed. Diego D’Angelo, Günter Figal, Tobias Keiling, and Guang Yang. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grondin, Jean. 2003. Heideggers Verschärfung der Metaphysik. In Heideggers Zwiegespräch mit dem deutschen Idealismus, ed. Harald Seubert. Cologne: Böhlau. Großmann, Andreas. 1996. Spur zum Heiligen. Kunst und Geschichte im Widerstreit zwischen Hegel und Heidegger. Bonn: Bouvier. Haar, Michel. 1980. Structures hégeliennes dans la pensée heidéggerienne de l’histoire. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 85: 48–59. GW 20: Hegel, G.W.F. 1992. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830). Gesammelte Werke (abbreviated as GW), vol. 20. Ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans-Christian Lucas. Hamburg: Meiner. SZ: Heidegger, Martin. 1953. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. (In English: Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.) Heidegger, Martin, and Arendt, Hannah. 1998. Briefe 1925 bis 1975 und andere Zeugnisse, ed. Ursula Ludz. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. (In English:

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Letters 1925–1975. Trans. Ursula Ludz and Andrew Shields. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004.) Heidegger, Martin and Jaspers, Karl. 1990. Briefwechsel 1920–1963, ed. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. (In English: The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence, 1920–1963. Trans. Gary E.  Aylesworth. Amherst: Humanity Books 2003.) Henrich, Dieter. 2003. Between Kant and Hegel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hühn, Lore, and Jantzen, Jörg, eds. 2010. Heideggers Schelling-Seminar (1927/28), Die Protokolle von Martin Heideggers Seminar zu Schellings “Freiheitsschrift” (1927/28) und die Akten des Internationalen Schelling-Tags 2006, Lektüren F.W.J. Schellings. Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Ionel, Lucian. 2020. Sinn und Begriff: Negativität bei Hegel und Heidegger. Berlin: De Gruyter. Janicaud, Dominique. 1988. Heidegger—Hegel: un ‘dialogue’ impossible? In Heidegger et l’idée de la phénoménologie, ed. Franco Volpi, 145–164. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Koch, Anton Friedrich. 2014. Hegel und Heidegger. In Die Evolution des logischen Raumes, 287–302. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Köhler, Dietmar. 1999. Von Schelling zu Hitler? Anmerkungen zu Heideggers Schelling-Interpretationen von 1936 und 1941. In Zeit und Freiheit. Schelling— Schopenhauer—Kierkegaard—Heidegger. Akten der Fachtagung der Internationalen Schelling-Gesellschaft, Budapest, 24. bis 27. April 1997, ed. István M. Fehér and Wilhelm G. Jacobs, 201–213. Budapest: Éthos Könyvek. ———. 2010. Kontinuität und Wandel—Heideggers Schelling-Interpretationen von 1936 und 1941. In Heideggers Schelling-Seminar (1927/28), Die Protokolle von Martin Heideggers Seminar zu Schellings “Freiheitsschrift” (1927/28) und die Akten des Internationalen Schelling-Tags 2006, Lektüren F.W.J. Schellings, ed. Lore Hühn and Jörg Jantzen, 163–191. Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Marx, Werner. 1980. Heidegger und die Tradition: eine problemgeschichtliche Einführung in die Grundbestimmungen des Seins. Hamburg: Meiner. Pippin, Robert. 1997. Heideggerian Historicity and Metaphysical Politics. In Idealism as Modernism, 395–414. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pöggeler, Otto. 1995. Hegel und Heidegger über Negativität. Hegel-Studien 30: 145–166. Scheier, Claus-Artur. 1996. Die Zeit der Seynsfuge. Zu Heideggers Interesse an Schellings Freiheitschrift. In Schellings Weg zur Freiheitsschrift. Akten der Fachtagung der Internationalen Schelling-Gesellschaft vom 14.-17. Oktober 1992, ed. Hans Michael Baumgartner and Wilhelm G. Jacobs, 28–39. Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Schwab, Philipp. 2013. Nonground and the Metaphysics of Evil. From Heidegger’s First Schelling Seminar to Derrida’s Last Reading of Schelling (1927–2002). Analecta Hermeneutica 5: 1–30.

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Sheehan, Thomas. 2015. Making Sense of Heidegger. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. SW VII: Schelling, F.W.J. Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände. Sämmtliche Werke (abbreviated as SW), ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling. Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta. (In English: Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: State University of New  York Press, 2006.) SW Xa: Schelling, F.W.J. Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie. Münchner Vorlesungen. SW Xb: Schelling, F.W.J. Darstellung des philosophischen Empirismus. Aus der Einleitung in die Philosophie. Warnek, Peter. 2005. Reading Schelling after Heidegger: The Freedom of Cryptic Dialogue. In Schelling Now. Contemporary Readings, ed. Jason M. Wirth, 163–183. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

17 Jacques Maritain: A Thomist Encounters Existentialism Lee C. Barrett

1

Maritain’s Reputation as an Existentialist

Ever since Will Herberg’s popular anthology Four Existentialist Theologians appeared in 1958, the English-speaking world has tended to regard Jacques Maritain as a Thomist with a pronounced existential orientation, or perhaps as an existentialist with a Thomist orientation (Herberg 1958, pp. 27–96). In that widely disseminated volume Herberg presented existentialism as a philosophical orientation that transcended religious differences and selected Maritain as the representative Catholic, Nicholas Berdyaev as the exemplar of Eastern Orthodoxy, Martin Buber as the Jew, and Paul Tillich as the Protestant. By choosing Maritain, Herberg was following the lead of Walter Marshall Horton, who in Contemporary Continental Theology of 1938 had described Maritain as a premier Catholic existentialist (Horton 1938, pp. 48–65). That description of Maritain had occasionally been bandied about in European academic circles without triggering much discussion. But because Herberg’s book appealed to pan-religious and even secular audiences, Maritain as an alleged existentialist became a figure familiar well beyond the boundaries of Roman Catholicism. By 1961 it had become common to describe Maritain, along with Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange, Etienne Gilson, and E.  L. Mascall, as a thinker who sought to restate scholastic Thomistic

L. C. Barrett (*) Lancaster Theological Seminary, Lancaster, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_17

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principles in more intelligible modern terms, and who, more than the others, was willing to use existentialism, rather than the other available options of idealism, positivism, or pragmatism, as the vocabulary for doing so (Kingston 1961, pp. 63, 193). Even in Herberg’s era “existentialism” was a fluid and contested concept. For most authors in mid-century, it minimally suggested any philosophy that based itself on an analysis of the lived experience of the individual and eschewed idealism’s focus on the consciousness of the collectivity (Collins 1952). According to the prevalent account, existentialism asserted the primacy of the person and the absolute uniqueness of personhood. Subjectivity and selfhood could not be reduced to anything objective, necessary, corporate, or generalized, as idealism tended to do. In the popular imagination existentialism as a philosophical method was identified with reflection on the existing subject engaged in the act of existing. This act of existing was given primacy over the more traditional philosophic concepts of essence and being, and sometimes entirely displaced them. This act of existing could not be identified with the historical development of human consciousness, as the Hegelians had done. In this sense, existentialists were perceived by almost everyone to be virulently anti-idealist. However, it was obvious that some of those thinkers labeled “existentialist,” including Martin Heidegger, had developed a kind of ontology, redefining ontology as the analysis of the structures and dynamics of being as act. Among such writers, including the early Paul Tillich, the indebtedness to such speculative idealists as Friedrich Schelling was obvious. In contradistinction to this type, it was also clear that other so-­ called existentialists avoided any ontology of any variety and restricted themselves to explicating such “boundary situations” as anxiety, despair, and doubt. Evidently there was no unanimity in the movement. But most commentators agreed that all those who should be regarded as existentialists reconceived human communities in terms of interpersonal relations, rather than in terms of institutional structures (Reinhardt 1952, p.  236). Almost all the alleged existentialists were perceived to be vehement critics of the dehumanization that was thought to be intrinsic to mass society. The fluidity in the concept “existentialism” made Herberg’s assessment of Maritain difficult to evaluate and impossible to deny. The association of Maritain with any form of existentialism, and the extent of his indebtedness to it, have been contested matters. Because Maritain did not base his philosophy and theology on an analysis of the human situation, but rather on the act of existence as the enactment of being, some interpreters have regarded him as a rather traditional metaphysician (Nottingham 1968, pp.  42–80).

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Moreover, according to some, Maritain’s existentialist credentials are rendered suspect by the fact that he defined being as actuality and not as potentiality. This prevented him from emphasizing the range and depth of human freedom, which was seen to be a characteristic of all existentialism. One thing that can be asserted with confidence about Maritain is that he was eclectic and that his encounter with existentialism was only one component of his multi-faceted thought. Raised as a liberal French Protestant (a tradition which he found to be spiritually anemic), Maritain was immersed by his family in the aggressively secular ethos of French positivism and materialism. His early childhood intellectual development was not significantly influenced by either the widespread idealism or romanticism of the nineteenth century. Throughout his later work he denounced naturalism and scientism as the unquestioned dogmas of secular modernity. Disenchanted with the world of Comte, he initially toyed with various forms of idealism as an antidote to the dominant materialism and was then attracted to the metaphysics of Henri Bergson. Maritain converted to Catholicism in 1906 and began to seriously study Thomas Aquinas in 1910. The thought of Aquinas, he concluded, provided the most promising path for the uniting of philosophy and the Roman Catholic faith in a synthesis that could resist the onslaughts of atheistic modernity. As his fondness for Aquinas grew, Maritain progressively distanced himself from the thought of Bergson and quickly became a leader of the Thomistic revival in France and Europe more broadly. Maritain later objected that he had never been a “neo-Thomist,” as he had been labeled, but preferred to think of himself as a “paleo-Thomist” (Maritain 1948, p. 1). But in whatever way he should be identified, he did hope to free the interpretation of Aquinas from the influences of Plato and Descartes that had infiltrated scholastic Thomism. Some aspects of his interpretation of Aquinas were controversial, particularly his theme of the “intuition of being,” which some Thomists claimed was decidedly non-Thomistic. Although during his early Catholic period he had been attracted to ultra-nationalist and monarchist political theory, in the late 1920s he turned away from this to embrace Christian humanism and natural law ethics. By the late 1920s Maritain was familiar with talk about “existential Christianity,” having heard references to “the existential meaning of the Gospel of John” in a lecture by Romano Guardini (Maritain 1948, p. 2). He knew that many philosophers, including Jaspers, Marcel, Berdyaev, and Chestov, were calling themselves “existential” philosophers and distancing themselves from the idealism of the previous century (Maritain 1948, p. 3). During the 1930s he busied himself with reading some of the works of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre. By the 1940s, he remarked that

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the term “existentialism” had become so common that even Sartre was not sure if it signified anything meaningful (Maritain 1948, p. 3). In spite of existentialism’s amorphous character, the movement contained some themes that seemed to him to overlap with his own interpretation of Aquinas and other themes that were inimical to it. From the mid 1930s on Maritain attempted to sort out the similarities and differences between his own work and that of the existentialists. His identification of various points of contact and divergence remained fairly consistent throughout his career, exhibiting some appreciation and much criticism.

2

 aritain’s Appreciation and Critique M of the Secular Existentialists on Being and Existence

Maritain’s earliest references to the authors whom he would associate with existentialism were largely critical. In Integral Humanism, originally a series of six lectures from 1934, he focused on political philosophy, differentiating himself from Christian nationalism and from Marxism. In passing he mentioned Nietzsche as an example of the modern atheism that results from the denial of the spiritual dimensions of the personality (Maritain 1973, p. 34). This denial is the logical culmination of the “anthropocentric humanism” that was encouraged by Descartes’s methodological concentration on the cogito and continued by the German idealists’ focus on human subjectivity. Kant had isolated the individual subject from objective contact with things-in-­ themselves, and Hegel, rather than overcoming this isolation from objectivity, had simply given it a corporate and cultural twist. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, is mentioned not as an anthropocentric humanist, but as a precursor of the anti-humanism of Karl Barth, and as a denier of the Thomistic conviction that grace vivifies nature (Maritain 1973, p. 70). The outlines of Maritain’s thought were evident in Distinguish or Unite: The Degrees of Knowledge (Maritain 1959). In that text he articulated his basic discontent with modern philosophy, which was its tendency to consider epistemology before metaphysics, thereby making epistemology logically prior to metaphysics. Descartes’s turn to the cogito and Kant’s critique of knowledge were major chapters in the unfortunate prioritization of epistemic issues, a trajectory which he feared that both idealism and existentialism had continued. Such a strategy, Maritain warned, tended to sever the bond between thought and reality, and untethered subjectivity from objectivity. Against this

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subjective and epistemic turn, Maritain objected that universal concepts are not mental creations with no basis in objective reality; rather, they are abstracted from the phenomena themselves. By the mid-1940s Maritain’s assessment of what he took to be existentialism had solidified and was reiterated in a variety of contexts. In Existence and the Existent of 1947 Maritain directly dealt with the relation of existentialism and Thomism and their divergence from idealism (Maritain 1948). We shall focus on this volume and consider his other works as they elaborate the themes he articulated in it. Throughout the text he pitted what he called the existentialism of Aquinas, the truly “existential existentialism,” against the excesses of modern existentialism, which he derisively characterized as “apocryphal existentialism,” “atheistic existentialism,” or “academic existentialism” (Maritain 1948, pp. 3–9). Maritain was clearly troubled by the possibility that Aquinas’s focus on existence, which Maritain emphasized, could be confused with the position of authors like Heidegger and Sartre. But he also wanted to demonstrate that many of the positive aspects of the German and French existentialists, aspects that were attracting much positive attention, could be better conceptualized through the lens of Thomism. In spite of his desire to differentiate himself (and Aquinas) from contemporary existentialism, Maritain did not hesitate to enlist it for apologetic purposes when it suited his Thomistic project. Existentialism’s critique of idealism’s abstractions and communalism were particularly suited to this task of revitalizing the spirit of Thomism. According to Maritain, Aquinas can genuinely be regarded as an existentialist, and in fact as the paradigmatic existentialist, because he had asserted the primacy of actual lived experience. Aquinas’s major achievement was to have moved medieval theology and philosophy beyond the Platonic fascination with abstract essences (Maritain 1948, p. 2). Aquinas realized that life is more than the Platonic world of pure essences. In fact, Thomism, Maritain claims, is the only authentic existentialism. He cautiously endorsed the motto associated with the existentialism of Heidegger that existence precedes essence, but only in the sense that a thing’s essence owes its presence in the world to that thing’s existence (Maritain 1948, pp. 6–7). He quickly added that this insight had been most aptly recognized and expressed by Aquinas. Using his interpretation of Aquinas as a gauge, here and throughout his authorship Maritain carefully distinguished that which is valuable in contemporary existentialism from that which is misleading and dangerous. When Maritain was looking for positive aspects of existentialism, he often discovered them by tracing a cursory genealogy of modern existentialism, beginning with Søren Kierkegaard and his critique of German Idealism. However, Maritain’s commendation of Kierkegaard’s existentialism was restricted to

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those aspects of his authorship that, in Maritain’s opinion, paralleled the central insights of Aquinas. Most important was the fact that, like the Angelic Doctor, Kierkegaard had foregrounded the act of existing and had based his thought on what Maritain called an intuition of existential being. This, Maritain claimed, sharply distinguished Kierkegaard from the more impersonal stance of Hegel and subsequent idealists. Maritain typically added the observation that some positive aspects of Kierkegaard’s turn to the subject and the act of existing had been preserved in contemporary secular existentialism. For example, Sartre had rightly resisted the reduction of the individual’s subjectivity to a set of objective characteristics as viewed by others. To see oneself as seen by others is to be known as nothing but an observed object. Any such objectification, even if it is intended benevolently and has benign consequences, is an injustice and severs the individual from herself. Sartre was right that, whether the individual is honored or condemned, in all such cognition the person is still being treated as an object and therefore is being known in a way that violates her unique subjectivity (Maritain 1948, p. 76). When pointing out the deficits of contemporary existentialism, Maritain outlines a brief genealogy of the decline of modern existentialism from Kierkegaard to the relativism, atheism, and nihilism that infect contemporary thought. Unfortunately, the modern existentialists have misunderstood Kierkegaard and have appropriated his thought in a dangerously misleading way. This mistaken reading of Kierkegaard was a function of a broader tendency in modern thought that Maritain traced back to Duns Scotus. Scotus had defined God’s existence as a pure act of will untrammeled by any logically prior divine nature (Maritain 1948, p.  4). In the work of Scotus God was described as a pure act emanating from the abyss of freedom unqualified by any essence. Descartes, Maritain proposed, had continued this tendency to define God as a sovereign will independent of any order of intelligibility, as pure unbounded liberty, contingently creating phenomena. Traces of this theme of abyssal divine freedom were evident in some of the works of Schelling. According to Maritain, the German idealists had begun to ascribe this creative freedom to human consciousness as it evolved through an historical dialectic. Tragically, the idealists grounded this freedom in nothing other than the immanent dynamics of the evolution of human consciousness. Turning to the contemporary world, Maritain concluded that in Being and Nothingness Sartre appropriated this nominalist portrayal of arbitrary freedom that had originally been restricted to God, and simply transposed it to the realm of finite persons. Sartre made the fatal mistake of ascribing abyssal liberty to temporal subjects (Maritain 1948, p.  5). In order to support this

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radical view of human volition, Sartre denied that there is any such thing as essential “human nature,” and even proclaimed that there is no God to posit such an essence (Maritain 1948, p. 8). According to Maritain, Sartre’s valorization of arbitrary freedom was inextricably entwined with his faulty epistemology and ethics. In asserting the primacy of existence Sartre also abolished intelligible essence. The sad result was “the chaos of slimy and disaggregated appearances that make up a radically irrational world” (Maritain 1948, p. 5). Sartre tried to salvage some kind of coherence to human life by substituting the concept of a “project” for “essence,” seeing a “project” as a product of the individual’s sovereign free-will (Maritain 1948, p. 7). Through the power of the individual’s self-generated commitment, a project could stabilize an individual’s existence. Maritain critically observed that this strategy attributed heroic value to any act whatsoever, provided that the act was undertaken in authentic liberty (Maritain 1948, pp. 8–9). For Maritain, that attitude was tantamount to moral nihilism. Maritain was slightly more appreciative of Martin Heidegger and the German existentialist trajectory, which he saw as being inspired by Husserl. Here Maritain did express a qualified appreciation for the phenomenological legacy initiated by Hegel. At least the phenomenological existentialism that Heidegger represented had continued to speak of essences as intentional objects (Maritain 1948, p.  6). Moreover, Heidegger’s philosophy, unlike Sartre’s, was an implicit search for the mystery of being, even though it paradoxically sought the resolution of the quest through the agonized experience of nothingness (Maritain 1952, p. 200). However, according to Maritain even philosophers like Heidegger had exhibited “bad faith” by speaking of essences without situating them in a realistic metaphysic (Maritain 1948, p. 6). Without such a metaphysics, the phenomenologists could not ground their concepts in any extra-mental reality. The strategy of phenomenological description was, Maritain lamented, “a transcendental embezzlement” (Maritain 1948, p. 6). Existential phenomenologists, he complained, are only interested in “the moment of existential actuality actually experienced” (Maritain 1948, p. 31). Heidegger’s “scholasticism corrupted at its root,” with its ambiguous motto that existence precedes essence, could suggest the unfortunate conclusion that the human being has no essential nature (Maritain 1948, p.  6). In the final analysis Heidegger stumbled into the same subjective cul de sac that had stalled Sartre’s project. In general, Maritain concluded, all the modern existentialists, including Heidegger, fall short because they attempt to analyze existence without considering being (Maritain 1948, pp. 24–25). Phenomenological existentialism has wrongly equated subjectivity with existence itself and treated subjectivity

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as a principle upon which to build a new, and sadly inadequate, philosophy. The phenomenology of Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger, indebted to speculative idealism, is an unstable hybrid between ontology and logic, dodging the question of the extramental existence of objects (Maritain 1959, p. 208). In contrast to this “apocryphal existentialism,” Maritain praised Thomas’s much more healthy and robust existentialism. Maritain’s account of the basic contours of Aquinas’s metaphysics and epistemology must be examined in order to highlight the ways in which contemporary existentialism diverged from it. According to Maritain, Aquinas’s work should be preferred for being firmly based on a metaphysics that did not reject the reality of essences and the cognizability of essences. The existentialism of Aquinas differs from modern existentialism in that it firmly links being with intelligibility (Maritain 1948, pp. 10–46). Thomas had realized the crucial role that essences play in all thought, and therefore he had affirmed the intelligibility of existents. According to Maritain, Aquinas had asserted that claims to truth presuppose the existence of things with determinate natures and the conformity of the mind to those things. Maritain asserted that a truth is an “intuition of the thing that I see” (Maritain 1948, p. 11). The intellect does not manufacture its own ideas; rather, the mind seizes upon the objective natures of things (Maritain 1952, pp.  9–10). Any judgment of truth abstracts some sort of essence from material existence in order to determine what sort of thing a phenomenon is. In Maritain’s opinion, idealism had ascribed too much constitutive epistemic power to the structures of consciousness. But Maritain adds that the crucial point that Thomas’s genius (and the aspect of his thought that justifies calling him an existentialist) was to recognize that this cognitive operation of abstraction is accompanied by a judgment that “this exists,” that there is a subject possessing existence through which the subject’s essence is enacted (Maritain 1948, p. 25). This is quite different from the issue of determining a thing’s essence, which concerns the question of what a thing is. In other words, human judgment ascribes the act of existing to something outside the mind and also posits that the extra-­mental thing is informed by an essence (Maritain 1948, pp. 15–19). Maritain sometimes refers to this cognitive act as an intuition of being (Maritain 1948, p. 20). This is an intuition of a superabundance in the existing subject beyond and behind its perceptible attributes. Arguing against Descartes’s introspective turn, Kant’s search for the a priori conditions of experience, and Hegel’s genealogy of human consciousness, Maritain claims that this intellectual intuition of being is necessary for the development of any metaphysics. Without this intuition all knowledge is impossible (Maritain 1948, pp. 129–130). In Maritain’s parlance, “being” is that which exists, that

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which exercises existence, and that whose act it is to exist (Maritain 1948, p. 24). Being is the subject that lies behind the act of existence; it is that which is able to exercise existence. The “subject,” or “suppositum” as Maritain often calls it, is at the heart of Maritain’s metaphysics (Maritain 1948, p. 14). Only individual subjects exercise the act of existing and maintain themselves in existence. The “suppositum” is the supremely concrete reality, the irreducible originality. It is not analyzable into any set of observable attributes or into anything that could be known objectively. As such, the suppositum possesses the essence that is enacted in existence (Maritain 1948, p. 62). In this sense, Maritain sometimes describes “being” as the correlation of essence and existence (Maritain 1948, pp. 22–35). For Maritain, the human subject is a unique type of suppositum. Existing subjects can be arranged according to a scale of being, in which the higher subjects are more inwardly complex. As the complexity is intensified, the individuality of the subject becomes more concentrated, integrated, and denser (Maritain 1948, p. 67). Near the pinnacle of the scale of being the subject attains liberty and autonomy, the capacity to give itself its own ends (Maritain 1948, p.  68). Borrowing the language of existentialism, Maritain observes that at this point the subject achieves inwardness and self-reflection. The thinking and acting self is not a mere object in the universe but is a full-blown subject. As such, it experiences itself as the center of its world, as the center of infinity (Maritain 1948, p. 68). Using traditional religious language, Maritain declares that this type of self-aware and self-regulating subject is called a “spiritual soul” (Maritain 1948, p. 68). Maritain insists that the self enjoys an immediate intuition of its own subjectivity; the human person is directly aware that she is a subject. But, he cautions, this intuition of subjectivity provides no knowledge of an essence of the subject. According to Maritain, subjectivity as subjectivity cannot be conceptualized (Maritain 1948, p. 69). It remains an inconceivable and elusive abyss. In this regard, philosophers like Heidegger are right. Objective concepts cannot grasp the heart of that which is irreducibly subjective. The human subject cannot possibly be known as an object, because to know something as an object is to apply universal categories to it, a strategy which fails to do justice to the human subject’s incommunicable uniqueness. That, Maritain opined, had been the mistake of idealism. Nevertheless, Maritain asserts, the self-­ referential use of the pronoun “I” does suggest that some kind of self-knowing is implicitly present (Maritain 1948, p. 70). The use of the first-person pronoun presupposes an inchoate awareness of the flow of the individual’s states of consciousness as a whole and an awareness of something that unites that flow. For Maritain there is an immediate existential self-knowledge of the

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subject as a totality. The self ’s own subjectivity is not known inductively or inferentially; rather, it is directly felt. This intuitive, imperfect, and fragmentary knowledge of subjectivity often manifests itself through moral self-­ reflection, artistic creativity, and mystical experience. However, none of these modes of consciousness amount to conceptual objectification (Maritain 1948, p. 71). These reflections on being, essence, and existence provided Maritain with a conceptuality to advance beyond the perceived atheism of the contemporary existentialists. Here his divergence from philosophers like Heidegger and his fidelity to Aquinas is most evident. In God, he asserted, the correlation of essence and existence is perfect, for the essence of God is to exist; God simply is the act of existence (Maritain 1948, p. 35). Maritain describes God as the fullness of being, as Pure Act, and as the perfect actualization of all the potencies of being (Maritain 1948, pp. 43, 49). However, for us finite creatures the act of existing is a gift from God. This theistic conviction, articulated through the concept of God as pure being, fueled much of Maritain’s animus toward Sartre and the atheistic type of existentialists and their denial of the “suppositum” as a meaningful category. Maritain even feared that Sartre’s denial of theism pointed to some variety of materialism (Kingston 1961, p. 199).

3

 aritain’s Appreciation and Critique M of the Secular Existentialists on Ethics and Agency

Maritain not only compared Thomas and the modern existentialists on metaphysical and epistemological matters, but also on ethics and human agency. Here Maritain’s assessment of contemporary existentialism was a bit more multi-faceted and even positive, for he did applaud some aspects of what he took to be the existentialist approach to ethics. In these contexts Maritain strongly endorsed what he took to be existentialism’s critique of idealism’s fondness for ethical collectivities. Most importantly, the existentialists appreciated the seriousness of the act of commitment and the weight of the individual’s responsibility to and for herself. Ethical commitments must not be reduced to the evolution of consciousness, or to the dynamics of the unconscious mind, or to class interest, or to nationalistic tribalism, or to social conformity. Over against the various totalitarianisms that threatened the world, the existentialists valued the transcendence of the moral subject over the world of materiality and sociability (Maritain 1948, p.  48). Maritain argued

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throughout an entire book that although the individual is a part of a social whole, the individual person transcends the social whole in value (Maritain 1966). He associated the over-estimation of the value of the collectivity with Hegel’s idealism and its right and left-wing legacies. Existentialism correctly recognized that the person is ordered to something higher than immersion in political and social life. In spite of Heidegger’s flirtation with nationalism and Sartre’s growing commitment to Marxism, Maritain found the existentialists to be a useful ally in the struggle against all forms of collectivism. In spite of this qualified appreciation, much of Maritain’s evaluation of existentialist approaches to ethics and human agency was negative. He did entertain particularly serious reservations about Sartre and his philosophic colleagues. In Maritain’s view, they tended to put action before speculation, and thereby failed to ground action in any grasp of objective reality. Consequently, the modern existentialists regarded the will as indeterminate, as emerging from an abyss of freedom (Maritain 1948, p. 7). But, objected Maritain, the subject is not an unfathomable pit of limitless liberty. Unlike these degenerate contemporary existentialists, Aquinas had rightly put speculation, particularly speculation about human nature, before action (Maritain 1948, p. 47). According to Thomas, the good that humans should pursue is rooted in the requirements of their nature as personal beings. The essential agential structure and purposes of the human subject can be known. Because the substantial form of the subject (or “spiritual soul”) is characterized by intellect and will, the human person is designed to find fulfillment through discovering some purpose and then pursuing it. This conviction had enabled Aquinas to explicate the telos of human nature, which is to love God and neighbor. From that telos objective norms for morality could be deduced (Maritain 1948, p. 52). Contrary to the views of the contemporary existentialists, ethical action is rule-governed, and these rules can be conceptualized. Against any form of relativism Maritain insisted that ethical behavior must be governed by right reason and its grasp of natural law. Hegel’s appeal to the evolution of moral sensibilities had, he feared, inadvertently opened the door to the moral and cultural relativism that he discerned in the contemporary world. However, Maritain qualified this appeal to natural law by claiming that this good of human nature, the telos of love, that should guide ethical action is not known primarily through concepts and inferential reasoning. Rather knowledge of what constitutes the good for human beings is grasped through intuition and inclination. As Maritain expresses it, knowledge of the good is given connaturality (Maritain 1948, p. 54). But once this good is intuited, discursive reason can derive universal ethical guidelines from it, even though those

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guidelines must not function as inflexible rules that ignore the specificities of the contexts of ethical decision-making. Much of Maritain’s critique of existentialist ethics was aimed at its failure to appreciate the universal scope of natural law and to focus exclusively on the specificities of the particular contexts of action. The uniqueness of ethical situations is indeed important, but no situation is utterly sui generis, devoid of any commonalities with other situations. The existentialists’ most fundamental mistake, stretching back to Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical, was to bifurcate universality and particularity in ethical decision-making. (Maritain 1948, p. 56). But, Maritain observed, at least Kierkegaard experienced an appropriate fear and trembling at the prospect of countering the demands of universal obligation. In contrast to Kierkegaard’s laudable angst, in Maritain’s opinion Sartre’s cavalier attitude toward ethics was barbaric, for he, unlike Kierkegaard, gleefully surrendered the universal in order to indulge in arbitrary behavior (Maritain 1948, p. 59).

4

 aritain’s Appreciation and Critique M of the Secular Existentialists on Human Pathos

Maritain exhibited the most enthusiasm for existentialism of any variety when he discussed their exploration of human pathos, particularly anxiety and despair. In this regard the German existentialists fared much better in his estimation than did their French counterparts. The existentialists have uncovered the threat of nothingness that afflicts all finite being. At its best the existentialism of philosophers like Heidegger is the implicit and often misdescribed yearning of subjectivity for God. The existentialists give voice to the anguish of confronting the nothingness that resides within the subject (Maritain 1948, pp. 134–135). Maritain praised the existentialism of Kierkegaard, Chestov, and Benjamin Fondane as a cry of anguish in the face of human brokenness and as a cry of inchoate and struggling faith (Maritain 1948, p. 125). They rightly resisted idealism’s efforts to mitigate the anguish by immersing the individual in some abstract corporate entity. The existentialist exposure of the fissures in human life is really a longing for grace and for a hope that is not contingent upon worldly calculations of probability. But even in the analysis of human pathos most existentialists go astray according to Maritain. Existentialism is really a religious protest in the guise of a philosophy, and by failing to recognize this, it has misunderstood itself

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(Maritain 1948, p. 126). Existentialists like Sartre have probed the nothingness that infects human life, but they have misdiagnosed it as the general absurdity of existence. Even Heidegger’s philosophy is based on a one-­ dimensional intuition of pure nothingness and fails to know anything of God’s creative and redemptive action (Maritain 1948, pp.  133–34). Contemporary existentialism is the intuition of the nothingness of the creature without a creator; it is the recognition of the absurdity of existence uprooted from God. Maritain observes that we do indeed experience being-­ with-­ nothingness, as the secular existentialists claim (Maritain 1952, pp. 88–89). However, they fail to realize that the primordial intuition of existence implies that existence is grounded in Being-without-nothingness (Maritain 1961, p. 60). This Being-without-nothingness must be transcendent and self-sufficient. Maritain argued that the nothingness that the existentialists focus on so intensively and persistently is merely a negation, a privation, and all privations presuppose the existence of something positive (Maritain 1942, pp. 1–46). Maritain warned that while Kierkegaard’s more salutary encounter with nothingness could lead to an apophatic mystical experience in which God is known as unknown, this contemporary fascination with nothingness leads only to a mystical knowledge of Hell (Maritain 1952, p. 46). According to Maritain, such secular philosophers have failed to realize that the anguish that authors like Kierkegaard express is not due to a tragic fissure in an allegedly absurd cosmos (Maritain 1948, p. 123). Kierkegaard’s angst is not simply an apprehension of the non-being that is a dimension of all finite existents. Rather, this anxiety and despair is a symptom of the spiritual nothingness in the individual herself, a nothingness that is the fruit of her own agency. The individual is the cause of this inner vacuity, which Maritain, adopting doctrinal vocabulary, labels as sin. In general, Maritain transferred talk of nothingness as an existential threat from the domain of ontology to the realm of ethics. Contrary to the Hegelians, sin is not a necessary moment of individuation in the evolution of consciousness. According to Maritain, the secular existentialists’ failure to correctly diagnose the source of their despair and anxiety led some of them to not only ignore God, but to militantly rebel against God (Maritain 1954, pp. 97–98). Those whom he labels “absolute” atheists do not merely forget God; rather, they think of God all the time in order to free themselves from God. Their aggressive antipathy to theism betrays the fact that a longing for transcendence still animates their hearts. The absolute atheists are struggling to suppress their natural tendency to orient their lives toward an ultimate end (Maritain 1954, p.  104). Maritain claims that the assertive atheism of

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Nietzsche and many of the contemporary French existentialists is an active battle against God and everything that reminds them of God. However, this is a war that they cannot win. Even the more atheistic followers of Husserl and Heidegger are engaged in a tragically self-defeating struggle (Maritain 1952, p. 9). Although they do haltingly articulate an inchoate apperception of being, they then deny and reject it as being too abstract. Most importantly, in Maritain’s view the secular existentialists fail to do justice to the depths and complexity of human existence by failing to comprehend the importance of the virtue of love (Maritain 1948, pp. 83–84). The most crucial difference between Thomists and contemporary existentialists is that existence for the Thomists is intrinsically oriented toward the telos of love, while for the secular existentialists it is not. The secular thinkers do not recognize that the development of the subjectivity of the individual person demands some sort of communication with other subjects, a reality that the Hegelians of the previous century had often stressed. This not only involves the intelligent communication of knowledge proper to a community of knowers, but also the communication of affection proper to a community of lovers. According to Maritain, the individual subject inherently longs for an affective union with others. This need for union motivates the free choice of being-for-­ the-other and makes such a choice possible; in fact, this need precedes any motivation to choose. The subject’s free agency is revealed to itself through the effort to attain self-mastery in order to pursue the ultimate purpose of self-­ giving. Maritain insists that only by love does the subject attain the supreme level of existence: existence as self-giving (Maritain 1948, pp.  83–84). All individuals intuitively grasp this teleology in an obscure way. In his political reflections Maritain concludes that the dynamics of individual subjectivity tend toward a community of self-giving subjects, a fact that Kierkegaard failed to fully grasp (Maritain 1964, pp. 354–358). The individual’s growth in self-­ giving is a response to the basic generosity of existence and the fact that love is the very significance of her being alive. Sadly, the secular existentialists do not appreciate this, and, as a result, their accounts of subjectivity remain restricted to the description of the passing phenomena of the individual’s inner life and fail to account for the fact that the telos of the self is union with the other. Maritain roots this focus on love in his theism, a strategy that dramatically separates him from the secular existentialists. We humans are called to love others because we have first been loved by God. For Maritain, this divine love is the resolution of a paradox intrinsic to human experience. As a subject, the individual experiences herself to be the center of her universe, but at the same time she also knows that in terms of the universe objectively considered she is

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of no consequence (Maritain 1948, p.  74). The revivifying revelation of Christianity is that the individual subject, and all other subjectivities, are crucially important to God and cherished by God, in spite of the perceived objective vastness and apparent indifference of the universe. When that divine love is experienced, the individual can accept and love herself and rejoice in the community of fellow subjects. Maritain links this theme of divine love to the issue of the accuracy of the subject’s self-knowledge. He feared that this issue had arisen within existentialism without being adequately resolved. According to Maritain, the complex and obscure recesses of an individual’s subjectivity are known only to God (Maritain 1948, p. 77). To God alone is an individual subject uncovered and utterly transparent; to other finite subjects and to one’s own self the individual remains opaque. However, a person can know that she is known and understood perfectly by God. This awareness inevitably provokes fear and trembling because of the sinfulness that infects human beings, something of which Kierkegaard was painfully aware. But, Maritain adds, God knows not only our spiritual nakedness and the severity of our spiritual woundedness but also the beauty and potentialities of the nature that God has bestowed upon us. God can see the luminous sparks of good-will within us, even when they are hidden by our inner darkness (Maritain 1948, pp. 78–79). By striving to see ourselves as God sees us, we look beyond the concatenation of good and evil acts that we have performed. According to Maritain, we can then experience a foretaste of ourselves as known and loved by God. Transformed by this apperception, we can acquire an obscure knowledge of the subjectivities of the other selves whom we love and experience a partial union with them.

5

 aritain’s Appreciation and Critique M of the Christian Existentialists

Maritain carefully distinguished the so-called Christian existentialists from the more overtly secular variety. Although he was much more sympathetic to the work of the Christian existentialists, his response to them exhibited an ambivalence similar to the tension that characterized his attitude toward the secularists. He mentioned them by name very infrequently, often citing Gabriel Marcel and Paul Tillich as their foremost contemporary representatives. Nevertheless, Maritain provided no in-depth analysis of their works, and mostly restricted himself to pointing out where they were preferable to

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the secular existentialists, and where they succumbed to the same problems (Maritain 1952, p. 9). Maritain devoted the most attention to Kierkegaard, the prototypical Christian existentialist, whom he regarded as a kindred spirit. Much of his assessment of Kierkegaard was extremely positive. He writes, “I believe that the central intuition upon which the Existentialism of Kierkegaard lived was, in the last analysis, the very same which is at the core of Thomism: the intuition of the absolutely unique value and primacy of existence …” (Maritain 1952, p. 46). According to Maritain Kierkegaard correctly realized that subjectivity cannot be grasped through philosophical systems that pretend to be purely objective, particularly those of the speculative idealists (Maritain 1952, p. 45). In his polemic against Hegel Kierkegaard rightly objected that such speculative philosophy vainly tries to know subjects as objects (Stewart 2003). In the prevalent modern view, philosophy is the relation of intelligence to an object, and therefore philosophical systems cannot grasp the relation of a subject to a subject. Maritain praised Kierkegaard for recognizing that God is a transcendent subject, whose being is inscrutable. In Kierkegaard’s authorship the divine reality overflows the banks of objective knowledge. Consequently, Kierkegaard rightly concluded that Hegel’s attempt to integrate religion into his system was a gross mystification. Maritain applauded Kierkegaard’s realization that religion is a vital and passionate relation of a finite subject to the transcendent divine subject (Maritain 1948, pp. 72–74). Such a person-to-person relation must involve the unrestricted expenditure of existential blood and sweat. God can only be engaged adoringly, tremblingly, and lovingly. This subjective knowledge of God necessarily involves dread, risk, and mystery, all of which were undercut by idealism and positivism. Maritain commended Kierkegaard’s intense introspection and his willingness to dive into the abyss of the self in order to find God. Going beyond Kierkegaard, Maritain assures the reader that one day, eschatologically, we will know the divine subjectivity immediately as subjectivity, but in the meantime we can experience only a foretaste of that perfect knowing through love and apophatic contemplation. Maritain’s response to the ethics of the Christian existentialists was similarly ambivalent and reflected his attitude to the ethics of the secular existentialists. He exulted that Kierkegaard had rehabilitated ethics and put it back on its feet (Maritain 1964, pp. 357–358). Maritain expressed deep appreciation that Kierkegaard succeeded in reestablishing the individual moral agent, exercising deliberation and choice, as the absolute center of moral value. In Maritain’s opinion, the singular individual as a decision-maker is the most significant thing in Kierkegaard’s philosophy (Maritain 1964, p.  354). In

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Kierkegaard’s works the moral struggles and decisions of the responsible individual did not evaporate into the common mind of Hegel’s collectivity or into the dictates of Kant’s universal reason. Kierkegaard realized the crucial existential truth that in the moment of genuine moral decision the individual is face-to-face with God. According to Maritain, that experience of being a responsible decision-maker alone before God is the most foundational component of the ethical life. Maritain gratefully acknowledged that Kierkegaard had aptly recovered the sense of the pathos of moral decision-making by concentrating on his own anguished subjectivity (Maritain 1964, p. 354). On the other hand, Maritain was sharply critical of several aspects of Christian existentialism. He extended his typical critique of “atheistic” existentialism to include some dimensions of the Christian variety. Maritain even associated Kierkegaard with Böhme, Jacobi, Schelling, and Nietzsche as a thinker who abandoned objective norms and “has run amok and lays waste the field of rational speculation” (Maritain 1955, p. 33). Maritain was ambivalent about the “inward” turn, for, although it aptly highlighted the centrality of subjectivity, it tended to denigrate objectivity (Maritain 1964, p. 361). He claimed that the Christian existentialists are adept at the phenomenological description of faith and the subjective dynamics that precede faith, but they fail to ground this in a metaphysics (Maritain 1948, p. 129). Even Kierkegaard’s faith lacked an intelligible superstructure (Maritain 1948, p. 130). Kierkegaard did appropriately grasp the crucial importance of the transcendence of God and consequently rejected all immanent metaphysical systems that secularize the divine. However, he did so by valorizing irrational leaps and thereby robbed existence of its intelligible structure. Maritain protested that Kierkegaard was right in asserting that being is superintelligible, but he was wrong in claiming that it is contrary to reason. Kierkegaard, like the subsequent Christian existentialists who are indebted to him, remained trapped within subjectivity. Kierkegaard’s preoccupation with singularity prevented him from considering the possibility of knowledge of universals (Maritain 1964, pp. 354–355). Kierkegaard turned his back on rational demonstrations and objective certainty, and thereby laid the foundation for the subsequent drift of existentialism toward nihilism (Maritain 1948, p.  131). Maritain laments that in the name of existence Kierkegaard had rejected legitimate philosophy and failed to reinstate existence to its rightful place in philosophy. According to Maritain, Kierkegaard’s irrationalism bred unfortunate experiential consequences. Cut off from an intelligible universe, Kierkegaard refused to receive the gift of the mystical experience of God for which he so desperately hungered and fell back into the confines of his own restless subjectivity (Maritain 1952, p. 220). Kierkegaard’s existentialism remained stuck

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in the anguish of faith perpetually searching for the incomprehensible divine reality, without ever being able to rest securely in that reality. Against Kierkegaard’s continuing quest for God, Maritain objected that the redeemed human being is elevated by grace and is gradually divinized by participation in God. That process will be completed in the beatific vision of God’s very being (Maritain 1954, pp. 95–102). Human beings are driven by a natural desire to see God in God’s essence, not just in God’s created effects. According to Maritain, this is a thirst for infinite being. It is yearning to know God without the mediation of any concepts; it is a desire to know God intuitively, as God knows God’s own self (Maritain 1948, pp. 77–80). Maritain describes this as a knowledge of God through the divine essence. Although this is beyond the natural powers of a creature, it is paradoxically natural to desire that which is naturally impossible. Maritain, following Aquinas, asserts that there is in the human person an openness to receive a life that infinitely surpasses the capacities of human nature (Maritain 1954, pp. 95–102). God has graciously made it possible to know God in God’s essence through a gratuitous supernatural gift. Sadly, Kierkegaard never actualized this possibility and bequeathed this failure to subsequent generations of Christian existentialists. Maritain’s critique of Christian existentialism extended to its approach to ethics in spite of his enthusiasm for its concentration on the moment of moral decision. Like the later secular existentialists, Kierkegaard unwisely separated universal law from personal conscience and choice. His laudable turn inward should have been matched by a corresponding turn outward, to reason and natural law. Kierkegaard failed to acknowledge the accountability of the individual to the ethical universal (Maritain 1964, pp. 441–445). According to Maritain, Kierkegaard’s biography shows that he felt himself to be outside the universal, and that sense gave him great pain. At least, Maritain observes, he sacrificed the universal ethical categories with anguish, while the French existentialists surrender them wantonly and gleefully (Maritain 1948, p. 56).

6

Conclusion

Maritain’s references to both secular and Christian existentialists were remarkably consistent throughout his mature career; his assessment of them did not vary or change significantly. In general, he was more enthusiastic about the pathos that they reintroduced into philosophy than he was about the cogency of their arguments or the details of their conclusions, about which he showed little interest. A pronounced ambivalence was evident in everything that he

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wrote about them, but the critical pole of this tension was much more powerful than the appreciative one. Maritain applauded the existentialists’ willingness to confront the issue of nothingness directly, for this betokened a salutary concern to take existence seriously, without evasions. In a similar vein he affirmed their concentration on the momentousness of ethical decision-making. He appreciated their valorization of the unique individual and their refusal to dissolve selves into any amorphous collectivity. Most importantly, he empathized with their focus on the lived experience of concrete subjects and their turn away from the contemplation of pure abstractions. In sum, Maritain was partially drawn to the existentialists because they engaged concrete existence with passion. Maritain’s enthusiasm for these aspects of existentialism informed his assessment of the idealist tradition and motivated him to emphasize the disjunctions between the two movements. Throughout his mature career Maritain endorsed most of what he took to be the existentialists’ analysis and critique of idealism. He typically associated idealism with the prioritization of the collectivity over the individual, and with the valorization of an objective analysis of human subjectivity over passionate engagement with individual existence. Both of these tendencies, he feared, subverted the development of genuine faith. However, Maritain’s reservations about both the secular and the Christian existentialists were deep and enduring. He feared that their focus on subjectivity undermined any sense that the mind can grasp external reality and pointed to a deadening solipsism. He worried that extreme ethical decisionism was an invitation to moral relativism, negligent of legitimate norms and virtues. The atheistic existentialists, he was convinced, were identifying human agency with the abyss of arbitrary freedom. For Maritain, even the fear and trembling of the existentialists were problematic, for their despair did not propel them forward to an encounter with God’s love but left them struggling anxiously with the void. Putting all this together, Maritain’s general complaint with the existentialists was thoroughly theological. The overall problem for him was that the existentialists failed to appreciate the objectivities that God has graciously provided for humanity. They fail to perceive the goodness of a structured and very real created order. They fail to discern the goodness of a loving community of self-giving subjects. Most significantly, they fail to recognize the goodness of the human telos, which is nothing less than union with God. Instead of being open to all these objectivities, they remained trapped in their own selfhood. In the final analysis, Maritain’s heart remained squarely with the Thomists.

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Bibliography Collins, James. 1952. The Existentialists: A Critical Study. Chicago: Henry Regnery. Herberg, Will. 1958. Four Existentialist Theologians. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Horton, Walter Marshall. 1938. Contemporary Continental Theology. New  York: Harper and Brothers. Kingston, F.  Temple. 1961. French Existentialism: A Christian Critique. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Maritain, Jacques. 1942. St. Thomas and the Problem of Evil. Trans. Gordon Andison. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. ———. 1948. Existence and the Existent. Trans. Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1952. The Range of Reason. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1954. Approaches to God. Trans. Peter O’Reilly. New  York: Harper and Brothers. ———. 1955. An Essay on Christian Philosophy. Trans. Edward H.  Flannery. New York: Philosophical Library. ———. 1959. Distinguish to Unite; Or, The Degrees of Knowledge. Trans. G.B. Phelan. London: Geoffrey Bles. ———. 1961. On the Uses of Philosophy: Three Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1964. Moral Philosophy: An Historical and Critical Survey of the Great Systems. Trans. Marshall Suther, et al. New York: Scribner. ———. 1966. The Person and the Common Good. Trans. John J. Fitzgerald. University of Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press. ———. 1973. Integral Humanism. Trans. Joseph W.  Evans. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Nottingham, William. 1968. Christian Faith and Secular Action. St. Louis: Bethany Press. Reinhardt, Kurt F. 1952. The Existentialist Revolt. Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company. Stewart, Jon. 2003. Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. New  York: Cambridge University Press.

18 The Ethics of Resistance: Camus’s Encounter with German Idealism Thomas P. Miles

How can we resist and rebel against injustice and tyranny without becoming unjust and tyrannical in our rebellion? How does ideology blind us to the obvious wrongness of moral atrocities? These questions were a central concern of Albert Camus in the years immediately following World War II.  They would lead him to a philosophical encounter with German Idealism, Hegel in particular, who is the central philosophical figure discussed in Camus’s longest philosophical work, L’Homme Révolté (The Rebel). Yet for Camus these questions were foremost personal, cutting to the heart of his identity and conscience, and he thought of The Rebel as a personal confession (Thody 1961, p.  139). Camus began resisting injustice as a young, crusading reporter in Algeria, documenting the unjust and inhumane conditions of the native population there. Later, during World War II, he used these skills as a prominent member of the French Resistance. As editor of Combat, an underground Resistance newspaper, Camus risked his life to report on the injustices of the Nazi occupiers, extol the heroic efforts of the Resistance, and warn French collaborators that their day of reckoning was soon at hand. Camus emerged from World War II a national hero, the “moral conscience” of his generation. Yet Camus’s own conscience was clearly troubled by some of the violence perpetrated by those who were resisting evil. In particular, he seems to have had a crisis of conscience about the épuration, the purge of French

T. P. Miles (*) Assumption College, Worcester, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_18

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collaborators that followed the German occupation of France. In the first, most violent wave of the purge, the épuration sauvage (wild purge), at least ten thousand French citizens were summarily executed in a matter of months. Another several thousand would soon be sentenced to death by the provisional French government as part of the next phase, the épuration légale (legal purge), although most of these were later commuted to lesser sentences. Camus, writing as a voice for the French resistance, had initially expressed support for the purge, declaring it a “necessity.” He even rebuked those who urged mercy. Later, Camus had a change of heart and confessed that he had been wrong (Lottman 1986, p. 143). Camus was troubled by the fact that many of those who did the least to resist the Nazis were now the most fervent in pushing for a purge of French collaborators, his friend Jean-Paul Sartre among them. Camus was also troubled by the fact that Sartre and many others who decried Hitler and his death camps were nonetheless supporters of Stalin and his death camps. In particular, Camus was dismayed at how people like Sartre allowed their adherence to abstract ideology to blind them to the moral evil of condoning or defending Stalin’s industrialized murder. Camus responded to these crises of conscience first with an essay entitled Neither Victims Nor Executioners, and then in the much longer work The Rebel. It is in The Rebel that we find Camus’s sustained, detailed encounter with Hegel. Although Camus was never much of a scholar, during the time he was completing The Rebel, he reports to have been reading Hegel two hours a day (Todd 2000, p. 281). Hegel is the central philosophical figure discussed in The Rebel, where he is mentioned by name nearly a hundred times. Although Camus praises Hegel as among “the great thinkers,” he blames Hegel’s philosophy for sowing the seeds of the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century, Stalinist Marxism in particular. Camus’s foremost task in The Rebel is to articulate a positive ethics of rebellion. Since he portrays every person as facing some kind of injustice or tyranny that they could rebel against (or acquiesce to), for Camus an ethics of rebellion ends up being the foundation of ethics per se. By giving a dialectical analysis of the stance of rebellion, Camus shows that remaining true to an initial moment of resistance always entails a broader commitment to universal human rights, including respecting the dignity of all, abolishing the death penalty, and protecting free speech. Hegel is not mentioned in Camus’s articulation of his positive ethics. Hegel only becomes a prominent figure in The Rebel once Camus turns his attention to explaining how a rebellion can instead go horribly astray from its initial commitments. But, as I will show, Hegel’s thinking is foundational for Camus’s articulation of his positive ethics. In fact,

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Hegel’s influence can be seen here much more clearly and directly than in the forms of rebellion Camus associates with Hegel. Camus offers both historical and philosophical arguments to implicate Hegel’s philosophy in rebellions that go astray. Camus’s historical analysis consists of a kind of Nietzschean genealogy of European rebellion, showing that with Hegel’s influence there is a shift from a virtuous kind of rebellion (e.g. the Decembrists) to a nihilistic and murderous form of rebellion (e.g., Stalin) (Camus 1991c, pp.  53, 150–153). Independently, Camus offers a purely philosophical analysis of how certain ideas in Hegel contribute to these murderous ideologies and the authoritarian states they promote. Admittedly, Camus’s reading of Hegel often indulges in common misunderstandings of Hegel, usually picked up through secondary sources.1 This is not to say, however, that Camus’s reading of Hegel is a complete fabrication. As I will show, despite his lack of close textual work, Camus’s critique does refer to traceable (and even well-known) parts of Hegel’s work. Even if Camus reads and combines these aspects of Hegel’s thought in a way that Hegel would not recognize, he does so in a way that is generally consistent with how the Hegelians of his time understood Hegel (and they are his real targets in this critique). Moreover, Camus is clear that he is not accusing Hegel himself of being a supporter of the kinds of injustices he opposes; he repeatedly makes clear that the thinkers and revolutionaries who use Hegel as an alibi for their injustice have misunderstood and even reversed Hegel’s actual positions. This chapter will seek to clarify and evaluate Camus’s encounter with Hegel and German Idealism. I will begin by discussing Camus’s knowledge of Hegel and the sources behind his encounter with him. I will then trace the historical and biographical context behind this encounter. Next I will detail and evaluate Camus’s critique of Hegel on philosophical grounds. Then, I will explore some of the broader ways that Hegel has influenced Camus’s thinking, especially in his attempts to articulate a positive ethics of rebellion. Lastly, I will conclude with some thoughts on the timeless value of Camus’s ethics of rebellion and how it locates him in the company of thinkers like Henry David Thoreau, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Luther King, as well as his fellow existentialists Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.

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 ources of Camus’s Knowledge S of German Idealism

Although Hegel is the only figure of German Idealism that Camus discusses at any length in his publications, he also had an interest in Johann Gottlieb Fichte and may have read Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Rights. In contrast with his mainly negative view of Hegel, Camus seems to have had a very positive view of Fichte. As a young newspaper reporter, Camus once began an editorial with a quotation about courage that he attributed to Fichte.2 Later, as Camus was writing The Rebel, he became interested in Fichte’s opposition to the death penalty. An entry in his notebooks reads: “Against capital punishment. Fichte. ‘System of Natural Law’” (Camus 1991b, p. 226). Yet the fact that Fichte is not mentioned in the following notes or in The Rebel casts doubt about whether Camus actually read him. Likewise, a passing reference to Schelling in The Rebel, specifically Schelling’s reception by later Russian revolutionaries, indicates that Camus knew of Schelling, but does not indicate any specific knowledge of Schelling’s works. In fact, beyond Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, which is discussed at length in The Rebel, it is not clear what works of German Idealism Camus read. A quotation in The Rebel from Part Three of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences may indicate that he read this text, but was most likely taken from secondary sources (Camus 1991c, p. 157; Hegel 1894, p. 153, §550). As several Camus scholars have noted, his treatment of Hegel mainly relies on secondary sources, especially commentaries by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite (Todd 2000, p. 302). In The Rebel, Camus discusses Kojève and Hyppolite by name and notes Kojève’s Marxist reading of Hegel. We also know that he was reading Hyppolite’s work on Hegel since more than once in The Rebel what Camus presents as a quotation from Hegel is in fact a quotation from Hyppolite’s paraphrasing of Hegel (Camus 1991c, pp. 133, 145; Hyppolite 1974, pp. 372, 151). Foremost, Camus’s knowledge of Hegel, and even his response to Hegel, is indebted to the work of Jean Grenier, his former philosophy professor and life-long friend. (Both The Rebel and The Stranger are dedicated to Grenier.) In his 1941 book Le Choix, Grenier had already advanced several of the ideas that would be central to Camus in The Rebel, including the link between Hegel’s philosophy and Communism and the juxtaposition of this approach to the moderation of Greek thought (Thody 1961, p. 143). Camus’s understanding and views of Hegel were also informed by the discussions of Hegel he found in the works of other philosophers he had read,

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Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in particular. In a footnote to his discussion of Hegel, Camus remarks on the validity of one of Kierkegaard’s criticisms of Hegel (Camus 1991c, p. 145n). Camus’s lengthy treatment of Nietzsche in The Rebel (and elsewhere) suggests he would have been familiar with Nietzsche’s critiques of Hegel. Much of Camus’s response to Hegel can be summed up in Nietzsche’s aphorism from Twilight of the Idols: “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity” (Nietzsche 1990, p. 35, “Maxims” §26).

2

 he Historical Context of Camus’s Encounter T with German Idealism

In the fall of 1949, thirty-six year old Albert Camus had already achieved international fame and the recent success of his novel The Plague now provided him and his family with a measure of financial stability, the first Camus had ever known. Then he received devastating news: his tuberculosis, which he hoped had been cured years ago, flared up again, leaving him feeling hopeless and even suicidal. He feared that he would die without achieving his life’s greatest work (he planned a series of works on love, of which his last, unfinished novel The First Man is an example) (Todd 2000, p. 280). His doctors recommended months of convalescence, and Camus decided to use the time to complete his essay on revolt, eventually published as The Rebel, which he had been trying to find time to work on for five years. Camus now found his work restorative, and he gave himself a strict work regimen, one that included reading Hegel for two hours a day, from 9 am to 11 am (Todd 2000, p. 281). It remains an open question what Camus might have been reading in Hegel during these hours. It is an even more intriguing question why Camus would commit himself to this kind of disciplined reading of Hegel. Given the circumstances of his success and his illness, why would Camus dedicate what could have been the last months of his life to an intense, wide-ranging encounter with the work of an author he had shown little interest in during most of his intellectual life? What explains his sense of urgency to address Hegel and his need to do so carefully, with what for Camus was an unusual level of scholarly care? The most immediate reason for this interest in Hegel is made plain in The Rebel. Camus’s primary contemporary concern in the book is authoritarianism, especially Joseph Stalin’s authoritarianism in the Soviet Union. More particularly, he takes aim at the phenomenon he calls “logical murder,” the

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(supposed) justification of killing on ideological grounds. Contemporary historians estimate that Stalin was directly responsible for sending about 6 million people to their deaths (Snyder 2010, p. 384). As a matter of conscience, Camus felt the need to use his stature and public voice to speak out against these murders. He also felt the need to use his philosophical skills to critique and dismantle any systems of thinking that led to them or might continue to justify them, including certain aspects of Hegel’s philosophy. While Stalin’s reign of terror was the stated context for Camus’s critique of Hegel, the unstated but more immediate context in Camus’s own life was his feud with intellectuals in France that Camus faulted for defending Stalin, especially his one-time friend, Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre had adopted the view of political violence supported by his friend and fellow colleague, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In their view, Stalin’s violence was regrettable but ultimately justified as a necessary part of the Marxist revolution that would one day lead to a world without violence or oppression (Foley 2008, pp. 39–40). Camus’s first response was purely personal, if also intellectual. While at a cocktail party, Camus confronted Merleau-Ponty and angrily accused him of being an apologist for Stalin’s purge trials. Merleau-Ponty apparently replied by repeating his published view, that regretfully all politics is based on violence and that revolutionary violence for the sake of a better world is preferable to imperialist violence for evil ends. Sartre, who was also there, defended Merleau-Ponty, further angering Camus. Camus stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door as he went (Todd 2000, p. 232; Foley 2008, p. 39). Camus’s more considered, public response came first in the form of a series of articles in Combat entitled Neither Victims Nor Executioners. These presented in brief, editorial form many of the ideas later explored at length in The Rebel. As the title suggests, Camus rejects both acquiescence in the face of injustice and executions in the name of justice. What Camus will later present in The Rebel as ethical commitments, derived dialectically from the first moment of rebellion, he here proposes as “Article 1” of an “international code of justice”: “the abolition of the death penalty, and an exposition of the basic principles of a culture of dialogue” (civilisation du dialogue), i.e., free speech. He envisions an international community of intellectuals whose “task would be to speak out clearly against the confusions of the Terror and at the same time to define the values by which a peaceful world may live” (Camus 1986, p. 50). By implication, those who fail to “speak out clearly against the confusions of the Terror” are to that exact extent complicit in it. Neither Victims Nor Executioners contains a critique of the “logic of History” that Camus finds in Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, who remain unnamed. Their argument that Stalin’s

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violence could be justified by some future outcome (in this case a classless, non-violent society) Camus classifies as an “end justifies the means” argument. He points out that this approach to justifying murder can be found “in nihilistic ideologies (anything goes, success is the only thing worth talking about)” or in “those philosophies which make History an absolute end (Hegel, followed by Marx: the end being a classless society, everything is good that leads to it)” (Camus 1986, p. 34). Reading between the lines, Camus is offering a devastating comparison: supporters of Stalin share with supporters of Hitler (including French collaborators) the idea that their inhumanity and mass-murder could be justified by some future outcome, a society that conforms to their ideology. It is not that Camus thinks these two proposed outcomes are equal; he clearly longs for a classless, non-violent society. But he is exposing the inhumanity in which abstract ideology leads otherwise reasonable people to advocate for mass murder. Contemporary readers might think that Camus is obviously right to compare and condemn Stalin’s death camps alongside Hitler’s death camps, despite the very different ideologies supposedly justifying them. But this agreement threatens to mask the extent to which Camus’s position here was so controversial and courageous. (In The Origins of Totalitarianism, written at exactly the same time, Hannah Arendt made the same comparison, and she also faced severe criticism in response.) Many of the most stalwart opponents of Nazism understood themselves to be part of a global struggle against right-wing causes (Fascism, capitalism) and for left-wing causes, notably the Marxist revolution. Yet why does Camus locate Hegel at the heart of this “logic of History” defense of Stalin and his campaign of terror? The short answer is clear enough in the quotation just referenced: Camus traces Marx’s historicism to Hegel. The more extensive answer entails understanding how central Hegelian thinking was for Merleau-Ponty and French Existentialism more broadly. Here we need to reintroduce two figures mentioned above, the Hegel scholars whose commentaries Camus relied upon, and responded to, throughout his encounter with Hegel: Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite. In a 1955 article “A Chronology of French Existentialism,” Hyppolite seeks to trace four periods in the “evolution” of French Existentialism. He locates its origin in a “first or preparatory Period” (before and during “the war of 1939”) that was “chiefly characterized by a renascence of Hegelian studies in France” (Hyppolite 1955, p. 100). He points to the influence of his own work, as well as that of Kojève (and Jean Wahl) in bringing Hegel to prominence in France. Sartre’s early work, “a masterly misinterpretation of Heidegger” he mentions next, as another influence in this initial period (Hyppolite 1955, p. 100). In Hyppolite’s (rather self-congratulatory) account, this initial period was then

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followed by the “triumph of French Existentialism” after the war, with Christian Existentialists now “taking issue with Sartrian Existentialism, which enjoyed fashion’s favors” and Merleau-Ponty appearing “as an original disciple of Sartre” (Hyppolite 1955, p. 100). Alexandre Kojève was one of the most influential Hegel scholars of his era, and his widely-translated Introduction to the Reading of Hegel reached a generation of thinkers. In Paris, from 1933–1939 he offered lectures on Hegel that were attended by Merleau-Ponty and Hyppolite as well as many other members of the French intelligentsia. Kojève had a strongly Marxist reading of Hegel, and he put the “struggle to the death” of Hegel’s Master-slave dialectic at the center of his understanding of Hegel and of history as a whole. Adopting Hegel’s notion of history as dialectically reaching an end point, Kojève wrote of a “final Fight” in which the slave rebels against master, “annulling him or putting him to death,” thereby creating “the free Citizen of the universal and homogeneous State” (Kojève 1969, p. 231). As some scholars have pointed out, it is really Kojève’s Marxist reading of Hegel that Camus aims to critique in his discussions of Hegel (Foley 2008, p. 65). Camus would probably concur with Hyppolite’s omission of any mention of him in his “Chronicle” of French Existentialism. As early as 1945, Camus had forcefully denied that he was an existentialist, ceding this term entirely to Sartre and his followers (Foley 2008, p. 2). Also in agreement with Hyppolite, Camus seems to share this understanding of French Existentialism as fundamentally a kind of neo-Hegelianism. A rare reference to Hegel in Camus’s notebooks shortly before his argument with Merleau-Ponty and Sartre in October 1946 sketches what he thinks is their close connection: “Existentialism kept Hegelianism’s basic error, which consists in reducing man to history. But it did not keep the consequence, which is to refuse in fact any freedom to man” (Camus 1991b, p. 141). Leaving aside for a moment the issue of whether Camus should be considered an existentialist (a point I will return to later), it is important to note that identifying existentialism as a kind of neo-­ Hegelianism challenges a long-lasting conception of existentialism as an antipode to systematic philosophy, Hegel in particular (Stewart 2010). So we see that understanding Camus’s feud with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty opens a new way of understanding Hegel’s relationship with existentialism and allows us to see the broader context behind Camus’s critique of Hegel. But it does not yet explain how The Rebel is a “personal confession” for Camus, nor does it set the stage for seeing how Hegel influenced Camus in the portions of the book in which Hegel is not mentioned, namely, in his derivation of an ethics of resistance (Thody 1961, p. 139). To understand this, we will

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need to delve deeper into Camus’s own experience as part of the Resistance and especially his role in the purge. This will also clear up a potential misunderstanding that may be suggested from the foregoing analysis, namely, that Camus’s negative opinion of Hegel and his influence was merely the result of his feud with Sartre and his “disciples.” To the contrary, Camus had already begun associating Hegel with authoritarian injustice before this feud began. In January 26, 1946 Camus wrote an editorial that presents an early version of his critique of Hegel’s historicism as a source of authoritarianism: “when one believes, like Hegel … that man is made for history and not history for man, one cannot believe in dialogue: one believes in efficacity and the will to power. Ultimately, one believes in murder” (Terre des Hommes, 26 January 1946; quoted in Thody 1961, p. 105).3 In a speech at Columbia University on March 28th, Camus associated Hegel with Hitler and the Nazi occupiers of France, who had “thought and acted according to what he called “Hegel’s detestable principle”: ‘Man is made for history, not history for man’” (Camus 1946, p. 1). These early references to Hegel leave no doubt that Camus’s position on Hegel pre-dated his feud with Sartre and his focus on Stalin’s specifically Marxist authoritarianism. It clearly emerged from his own experiences of resistance, especially his resistance of murderous authoritarianism of the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators. In 1943 Camus was asked to join the Resistance as a reporter and later editor of an underground Resistance newspaper, Combat. Camus thereby became the voice of the Resistance, at least for many French citizens living under Nazi rule (even if they did not yet know the name Albert Camus behind this voice). Later, when he was hailed as a war hero, Camus would always insist that his role in the French Resistance had been minor, incomparable to those who fought and died. Camus was not a member of an “action” group, meaning that he was not asked to carry out acts of violence or sabotage. Yet the role of underground newspapers like Combat were of essential importance to the Resistance, providing a sense of cohesiveness and vitality to the Resistance and a call to conscience to everyone in France to help the Resistance or at least not collaborate with their German occupiers (Todd 2000, p. 180). Importantly, although Camus was spared the demand to kill others, he took upon himself an immense risk of being killed if he were caught. In fact, it was common knowledge that members of the Resistance that were caught were often tortured under interrogation and then tortured to death in lieu of execution (Todd 2000, p. 181). Writing for Combat, Camus articulated a harsh (but in his mind, just) stance toward French collaborators: they deserved death and could be killed

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with “clean hands” since their deaths were a matter of justice, not hatred. Camus continued to believe and publicly promote this view as the war came to an end and the purge of collaborators began. In the first stage of the purge, the épuration sauvage (wild purge), thousands of known collaborators were killed and many women suspected of prostituting themselves to the Germans had their heads shaved. In the second stage of the purge, the épuration légale, the provisional French government put collaborators on trial, resulting in the conviction of about 120,000 people, including almost seven thousand death sentences (of which less than 800 were carried out) (Judt 2007, p. 46). The purge also involved censorship. Like many professions, writers and journalists developed their own purge committees to exclude former collaborators from their profession. Sartre, for example, was one of the members of a committee set up to purify publishing, namely, by circulating a list of collaborationist authors whose writing would be banned (Todd 2000, p. 198). While Camus was not as rabidly enthusiastic about the purge as Sartre, who called for radical vengeance, he did defend and support it. Speaking for the Resistance, Camus assured the French people that the purge was a matter of justice: “Let us first say that the purge is necessary. This is not as obvious as it appears. Some French people would like to leave things as they are” (Lottman 1986, p.  143). When other former Resistance activists publicly called for moderation and mercy, Camus rebuked them, sparking a public debate with one of them, Françoise Mauriac. Mauriac criticized the purge and called for “national reconciliation.” Camus responded by attributing Mauriac’s stance to his religion, and defiantly insisted that “[u]ntil our last moment we will refuse a godly charity that cheats men of their justice” (Todd 2000, p. 199). Camus invoked his friend René Leynaud, a Resistance fighter who was caught and executed just before the liberation, telling Mauriac that he would only forgive “when Leynaud’s wife” would allow him to. Somewhat thuggishly, Camus wrote that, in the case of collaboration, justice should “make mercy shut up” (Todd 2000, p. 199). Yet as the purge trials continued month and after month, and Camus saw how deeply enmired in injustice and absurdity they were, he had a change of heart and began to reverse his position. In 1948, while giving a talk at a Dominican monastery, Camus confessed that he had been wrong in his debate with Mauriac: “I have come to admit to myself, and now to admit publicly here, that for the fundamentals and on the precise point of our controversy François Mauriac got the better of me (Camus 1961, p. 70; Lottman 1986, p. 144). Public confessions like this were rare for Camus, for whom self-consistency was of primary importance. Camus’s change of heart regarding the purge

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forms an important context for his understanding of rebellion and justice in The Rebel. It helps to explain at least one way that The Rebel was a “personal confession” for Camus. Readers who had followed Camus’s opinions during the purge would recognize that Camus had not always promoted or lived by the ethics of rebellion he articulates in the book.

3

Camus’s Critique of Hegel in The Rebel

Having completed a wide-ranging study of the context behind Camus’s encounter with German Idealism, I will now turn to a close study of the most robust part of this encounter, his philosophical critique of Hegel in The Rebel. After examining some of the remarks that frame Camus’s overall understanding of Hegel, I will detail five aspects of Hegel’s thought that Camus portrays as seeds for future authoritarian injustice. Lastly, I will discuss some of the critical responses to Camus’s work on Hegel and how we can evaluate its worth today. Camus groups Hegel among the “great thinkers” and calls his philosophy “the most important German philosophical system of the nineteenth century” (Camus 1991c, pp. 135, 137). Camus admits that his reading of Hegel could be countered by pointing to passages elsewhere in Hegel: “Of course, there is to be found, in the prodigious Hegelian edifice, a means of partially contradicting those ideas” (Camus 1991c, p. 137). Camus also admits that Hegel’s philosophy is ambiguous, “the most ambiguous in all philosophic literature” (Camus 1991c, p. 135). He sometimes faults Hegel for these ambiguities, in that they leave room for the authoritarian reading of his work by later thinkers and revolutionaries (Camus 1991c, p. 142). But he generally presents Hegel as misunderstood and distorted by these later readers. Camus claims that these followers “unmindful of the mystic aspect” of Hegel, whose works Camus thinks “only wanted to proclaim the spirit” (Camus 1991c, pp. 145, 137). Camus notes that it is “strange” to find Hegel as a source for revolutionary thought in that “his work exudes an absolute horror of dissidence: he wanted to be the very essence of reconciliation” (Camus 1991c, p. 135). Camus even goes so far as to claim that Stalin’s “twentieth-century ideology is not connected with” Hegel’s actual philosophy: “Hegel’s face, which appears in Russian Communism, has been successively remodeled by David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Marx, and the entire Hegelian left wing” (Camus 1991c, p. 137).

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So Camus’s position is not that Hegel advocated anything resembling the murderous authoritarian ideologies and states that would plague the twentieth century. He does not think that Hegel’s whole philosophy should be blamed or rejected on account of these murders. Nonetheless, Camus argues that Hegel’s philosophy contains certain specific ideas which form the essential and sufficient seeds of later authoritarianism. Camus says that when Hegel dies “at the height of his glory, everything is, in fact, in order for what is to follow. The sky is empty, the earth delivered into the hands of power without principles” (Camus 1991c, p. 148). So it seems that distortions and misreadings of Hegel’s work do not entirely account for his philosophy’s role in the rise of authoritarian “power without principles”; at its root are aspects in Hegel’s actual philosophy, according to Camus (Camus 1991c, p. 148). Near the beginning of his treatment of Hegel, Camus lists two of these aspects, and as he continues he suggests at least three more. In summary, Camus accuses Hegel of (a) attacking the individual conscience and (b) attacking any notion of transcendent values, both of which undermine virtue, making moral atrocities seem acceptable. In replacing transcendence with historical immanence and (c) introducing historicism into ethics, Hegel further undermines values by making them a goal and not a guide and establishing a dynamic in which power or efficacy is the only thing of importance. This dynamic is further supported by (d) Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, which both reinforces the might-makes-right mindset and teaches a world-view in which violence is essential and inevitable. Lastly, Camus thinks this undermining of values and promotion of violence becomes most dangerous when combined with (e) Hegel’s “deification” of Napoleon and the state as the perfection of value and the “end” of history. Camus’s critique is that added together, these can yield something Hegel never intended: the justification of brutal state violence and the suppression of individualism on the grounds of some historical eventuality, i.e., authoritarianism (or more specifically, Stalinism.) The first aspect of Hegel’s thought that Camus singles out for criticism is his attack on the individual conscience: “the first fundamental criticism of the good conscience—the denunciation of the beautiful soul and of ineffectual attitudes—we owe to Hegel” (Camus 1991c, p. 136). Camus’s phrasing here seems to suggest that he is thinking of Hegel’s critique of the individual conscience in the section of the Phenomenology entitled “Conscience. The ‘Beautiful Soul,’ Evil and its Forgiveness.” In this section, as elsewhere in the Phenomenology, Hegel is critical of various forms of individualism that place the individual’s heartfelt feelings above the moral community and its law. Here Hegel finds fault with the conscience as a moral guide precisely because it is so individual; in contrast, he views morality as necessarily universal,

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applying to everyone. The person acting on his or her conscience might feel its demands as an objective law, and yet even they would not always insist that everyone else have the same demands of conscience. Moreover, someone could easily experience a good conscience about doing something that is in fact wrong. To use Hegel’s example, someone might experience an action as courageous and have a good conscience about it, but to others the action is obviously cowardly (Hegel 1977, pp. 391–392, §644). The important thing for the man of conscience is just that feeling of conviction, which is experienced as if it is an objective moral law, but this feeling can attach to any content. Hegel ridicules the conscience for masquerading as a matter of objective moral law when in fact it is a matter of subjective feeling, and often merely a matter of self-interest. Given how central individualism and the individual conscience is for Camus’s ethics, we know how strongly he opposes Hegel’s view here. In contrast, Camus would seem to agree with Hegel on the next aspect to discuss, his rejection of transcendent values. Camus writes that “Hegel’s undeniable originality lies in his definitive destruction of all vertical transcendence—particularly the transcendence of principles” (Camus 1991c, p.  142). This seems almost like praise, and readers of Camus might be surprised to find that Camus is objecting to this particular part of Hegel’s philosophy since it seems that Camus also rejects the idea of transcendent values. In particular, it seems strange for Camus to take issue with Hegel’s atheism since Camus was also an atheist. Yet there is an important difference in that Camus clearly attempts to replace the ethics of transcendent values with one based on the individual conscience. So Camus’s objection seems to be that by rejecting both the individual conscience and transcendent values at the same time, Hegel’s thinking undermines values altogether, leaving the door open to the “amorality” of later thinkers and revolutionaries: “The political movements, or ideologies, inspired by Hegel are all united in the ostensible abandonment of virtue” (Camus 1991c, p. 143). As with Hegel’s attack on the conscience, Camus does not portray Hegel’s attack on transcendent values as deliberately setting the stage for ideological murder. In fact, Camus acknowledges that Hegel’s rejection of transcendent values was in part a response to the role that the transcendent rational values of the Enlightenment played in ushering in the ‘Reign of Terror’ in the French Revolution. Here Camus seems to be referring to the part of the Phenomenology entitled “Absolute Freedom and Terror” in which Hegel provides his analysis of the French Revolution and how it devolved into the Terror (Hegel 1977, pp.  355–363, §§582–595). This is also the part of the book where Hegel

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makes use of Rousseau’s notion of “the general will,” a connection Camus also notes (Camus 1991c, p. 137n). As a young student in Tübingen, Hegel had welcomed the news of the French Revolution, and he remained a supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution (and Napoleon) for life, but he was deeply troubled by the way the Revolution’s push for freedom resulted in bloodthirsty tyranny during the Terror (Stewart 2000, pp.  349–350). Camus summarizes Hegel’s position: “Hegel thought that he discerned the seeds of the Terror contained in the abstract principles of the Jacobins. According to him, absolute and abstract freedom must inevitably lead to terrorism; the rule of abstract law is identical with the rule of oppression” (Camus 1991c, p. 133). Camus, who also views the Reign of Terror with moral horror, seems sympathetic with Hegel’s analysis. Nonetheless, Camus thinks that Hegel’s response eventually led back to precisely the kind of terror Hegel wanted to avoid: “The repudiation of the Terror, undertaken by Hegel, only leads to an extension of the Terror” (Camus 1991c, p.  136). Hegel’s rejection of transcendent values, coupled with his rejection of the individual conscience, led to the “amorality” behind future Reigns of Terror, including Stalin’s. For Camus, the source of this amorality lies not just in what Hegel rejects, but also in what he establishes in its place, namely, a kind of historicism with respect to values. Camus turns to Hegel’s analysis of the French Revolution to explain this point. He says that to avoid the dangers of abstract transcendent values, Hegel proposed values that are immanent, i.e., situated in a particular historical time: “German philosophy therefore finished by substituting, for the universal but abstract reason of Saint-Just and Rousseau, a less artificial but more ambiguous idea: concrete universal reason,” in which reason is “incorporated in the stream of historical events, which it explains while deriving its substance from them” (Camus 1991c, p. 133). In other words, values need to be grounded in customs and traditions of a particular people in their particular historical circumstances. Moreover, Camus points to Hegel’s conception of progress in history in which history moves inevitably toward a point of perfection, at which time history comes to an end in the sense that no further progress is possible or needed. Camus is particularly concerned with what he takes to be the consequences of Hegel’s historicism about values. First, for everyone not living in a state of perfection, Hegel’s historicism implies our values can only be provisional. If we accept this historicism, we must accept that what we consider good or right might actually be wrong in the perfected understanding of the matter. “Values are thus only to be found at the end of history. Until then there are no suitable criterion on which to base a judgment of value. One must act and

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live in terms of the future. All morality becomes provisional” (Camus 1991c, p. 142). Regarding one’s own values as merely provisional obviously undermines our allegiance to them, contributing to the “abandonment of virtue.” Camus also expresses this point by saying that with historicism “values have ceased to be guides in order to become goals” (Camus 1991c, p. 134). For example, if a value like “justice” is no longer understood as a personal virtue, something governing my actions in daily life, but is instead understood as a future goal, some state of perfection in which the structure of society is perfectly just, then this “justice” can no longer function as a guide for my daily behavior. What is “good” is simply whatever brings about this future state of justice, and there could be no further guidance about what might be right or wrong in pursuit of this goal. If justice is a goal and not a guide, then I will regard myself as justified in doing anything at all in order to help bring about this future state of justice (even committing mass murder and genocide): “Action is no more than a calculation based on results, not on principles” (Camus 1991c, p. 134). Camus also thinks that Hegel’s historicism about values contributes to a world-view of “opportunism” in which might makes right: “If nothing can be clearly understood before truth has been brought to light, at the end of time, then every action is arbitrary, and force will finally rule supreme” (Camus 1991c, p. 146). The idea that moral justification can only be found at the end of history invites either a skeptical quietism, withholding all affirmation of value, “or the affirmation of everything, in history, which seems dedicated to success—force in particular” (Camus 1991c, p. 147). If only what is still victoriously standing at the end of history is justified, it seems natural to have as one’s only goal to be that victor at the end of history, and anything done to get there seems justified in relation to that goal. Camus seems to admit that this is not Hegel’s understanding, but merely what follows when later revolutionaries take this view out of context: “All that they have preserved is the vision of a history without any kind of transcendence, dedicated to perpetual strife and to the struggle of wills bent on seizing power” (Camus 1991c, p. 135). The mention of “the struggle of wills bent on seizing power” brings us to the next aspect of Hegel’s thought to discuss, his master-slave dialectic, which Camus think promotes a world-view of essential animosity and normalized violence. Camus is of course referring to the part of the Phenomenology entitled “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage” (Hegel 1977, pp. 111–119, §§178–196). Here Hegel discusses the need for mutual recognition by others and the power struggle this can create. He imagines a “scene” in which two people encounter each other in an initial moment of mutual recognition (and resultant self-recognition.) Then, Hegel

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says, they “must” engage in a struggle to the death against each other, and “each must seek the other’s death.” For Hegel, this is the only way each can “prove himself ”: “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” (Hegel 1977, pp. 113–114, §187). Assuming neither is actually killed in this struggle, one will emerge victorious and independent (the master), and the other will emerge defeated and dependent (the slave).4 Camus follows Kojève in reading Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as central to the work as a whole and specifically as central to the dialectical progress of history. Noting the widespread influence of this part of Hegel’s work, Camus remarks: Apparently the world today can no longer be anything other than a world of masters and slaves because contemporary ideologies, those that are changing the face of the earth, have learned from Hegel to conceive of history in terms of the dialectic of master and slave. (Camus 1991c, p. 136)

Within the master-slave discussion, Camus takes issue specifically with Hegel’s emphasis on staking one’s life as essential for personhood, noting that at “the heart of this primordial struggle for recognition, man is thus identified with violent death” (Camus 1991c, p. 139). Violence is not only normalized, it is essentialized: deadly violence, “a struggle to the death,” is understood to be at the heart of what it is to be a person. Additionally, Camus thinks Hegel’s master-slave dialectic further reinforces the might-makes-right mindset already supported by other aspects of his thought: “If, on the first morning of the world, under the empty sky, there is only master and slave between a transcendent god and mankind, then there can be no other law in this world than the law of force” (Camus 1991c, p. 136). This discussion of the law of force brings us to the next and last aspect of Hegel’s thought to be discussed, his idolization of Napoleon and his elevation of the state as a moral authority. Camus portrays Hegel’s admiration for Napoleon as a matter of power-worship and connects it to the mindset of might-makes-right: “With Napoleon and the Napoleonic philosopher Hegel, the period of efficacy begins” (Camus 1991c, p. 134). Camus writes of Hegel’s “deification of Napoleon, who would henceforth be innocent since he had succeeded in stabilizing history” (Camus 1991c, p. 147). In a similar vein, Camus ascribes the view to “the aged Hegel” that “the Prussian state was the privileged depositary of the final fruits of the mind” (Camus 1991c, p. 157).

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It is not clear what Hegel texts, if any, Camus is relying on here. It is well known that Hegel was an admirer of Napoleon; in letters to friends, Hegel called Napoleon “the Prince of battles” and “the soul of the world” (Hegel 1985, pp. 596, 114). To be fair, contrary to Camus’s portrayal, Hegel’s admiration for Napoleon should be understood as part of his admiration for the liberal ideals of the French Revolution, not as mere power-worship. Yet there is undoubtedly some truth to Camus’s worry that Hegel admired Napoleon for his “efficacy,” i.e., the power to get things done. In Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel has several positive comments about Napoleon, especially in his role of giving nations a constitution. Perhaps thinking of Napoleon, Hegel writes about the “hero’s right” to create states through the imposition of their individual will, “whether this right be actualized in the form of divine legislation and favor, or in the form of force and wrong” (Hegel 1971, p. 219, §350). The state, for Hegel, is “the actuality of the ethical Idea,” one which better fulfills the aim of family and civil society and which is their “higher authority; its nature is such that their laws and interests are subordinate to it and dependent on it” (Hegel 1971, p. 155, §257; p. 161, §261). Whether Camus read this text is unclear, but in any case it seems quite likely that Camus’s portrayal of Hegel in relation to Napoleon and the state mainly comes from Kojève. Kojève was also a great admirer of Napoleon and placed Napoleon at the center of Hegel’s philosophy (something obviously flattering to his French readers like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty). Kojève took seriously Hegel’s idea that Napoleon and the creation of the Napoleonic state marked the beginning of the end of history (Kojève 1969, p. 98). Reading Hegel’s philosophy of history through the lens of his master-slave dialectic, Kojève wrote, “History will be completed at the moment when the synthesis of the Master and the Slave is realized, that synthesis is the whole Man, the Citizen of the universal and homogenous State created by Napoleon” (Kojève 1969, p.  44). Camus’s portrayal of Hegel as “deifying” Napoleon probably derives from Kojève’s description of “the god-Man Napoleon, who is both Creator-Head of the perfect State and Citizen actively contributing to the indefinite maintenance of that State” (Kojève 1969, p. 73). Having reviewed each of the components of Camus’s critique of Hegel, I will end this section with some remarks evaluating the strength of this critique. Much of the critical reception of The Rebel has questioned the quality of Camus’s scholarship. One Sartre scholar has called Camus’s work on Hegel “abominable from a scholarly standpoint” (quoted in Foley 2008, p.  66). Sartre himself publicly declared: “At least I have this in common with Hegel, that you haven’t read either one of us. What a mania you have for not going back to the original sources” (Todd 2000, p.  309). Although this is an

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exaggeration, this criticism was largely borne out by my analysis. As we saw, Camus does not really engage in careful textual analysis to argue for his critique. He mainly relies on summaries of Hegel from secondary sources. In response to this criticism, Foley has argued that since Camus was targeting secondary sources, especially Kojève, not Hegel himself, it makes sense for him to focus on Kojève and his particular reading of Hegel (Foley 2008, p. 66). In many ways the influential role Kojève played in promoting Hegel and defending the Soviet Union proves the point that Camus is trying to make about the influence of Hegel’s thinking on supporters of twentiethcentury authoritarianism. We don’t need to wonder whether it is plausible that later readers of Hegel would combine elements of his thinking to form an alibi for Stalin’s violence; we know that this actually happened with people Camus knew well. Camus’s case in The Rebel is made as much by how his critics responded to him as by what he says in the book. First Sartre’s follower, Francis Jeanson, and then Sartre himself published long, vitriolic rebukes of Camus’s thinking and scholarship in The Rebel. Jeanson refused to allow that Marx, let alone Hegel, was responsible for Stalinism: “Stalin was the one who created Stalinism” (Todd 2000, p. 307). Yet neither Jeanson nor Sartre really addresses the central argument of Camus’s critique (Thody 1961, p. 146). Far from countering Camus’s case in The Rebel, Jeanson confirms Camus’s worries by arguing that by criticizing Stalin, Camus is unwittingly achieving what is in fact a “reactionary’s task,” i.e., supporting the right wing opposition to social justice (Foley 2008, p.  112). Likewise, addressing Camus’s worry about Stalin’s death camps, Sartre wrote “yes, Camus, I find these camps just as unacceptable as you do. But I find equally unacceptable the use that the so-called bourgeois press makes of them every day” (Todd 2000, p. 309). In other words, while Stalin’s death camps might be objectionable, it is “equally objectionable” to complain about them, since this indirectly supports anti-­ communist reactionaries, thereby delaying the justice that a successful communist state would bring. Within the narrow mindset of entrenched political ideologies, this equivocation between mass-murder and reasoned criticism of it might seem to make sense. But Camus is surely right that this equivocation is both false and potentially dangerous. Jeanson takes this reasoning even further, repeating precisely the kind of thinking that Camus critiqued. Writing about Stalinism, Jeanson makes clear that in his judgment while it is not “genuinely revolutionary” it at least aims to be revolutionary and it has the support of the “the great majority of the proletariat” in France (Thody 1961, p. 151). Like Sartre, Jeanson admits that Stalin’s methods are regrettable, but he refuses to condemn them since he

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thinks they might be a necessary means to an end. If a virtuous “pure revolution” like Camus wants is ineffectual, and only Stalin’s brutal tactics can bring about a universal state of justice, then at the end of history we will see that these brutal tactics are in fact justified. Speaking of the “Stalinist movement,” Jeanson writes: [W]e are at one and the same time against it because we criticize its methods, and for it because we simply do not know whether pure revolution is not simply an illusion, and because we do not know whether, after all, the revolutionary enterprise does not have to take this kind of road before it establishes a more humane social order. (Thody 1961, p. 151)

It is worth noting for context that while this debate was taking place, Stalin’s starvation, torture, and killing of millions continued. Yet without the benefit of the final view of history, Jeanson claims he cannot condemn all of this brutality since it might just turn out to be justified as a necessary means to an end. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear (and even obvious) that Camus was in the right in unequivocally condemning Stalin’s terror. He was also right to be horrified at ideological murder more generally, and to seek to understand its origins and how it can be countered. In this regard, Camus was also correct that ideology can blind otherwise reasonable people to the moral horror that they do or that they support. (Here his work parallels that of Hannah Arendt and Stanley Millgrim.) More particularly, it seems clear that Camus was right in suspecting that elements of Hegel’s thought were being used to justify and normalize “logical murder,” at least among the small but widely influential cohort Camus targets for criticism.

4

 egel’s Influence on Camus’s Ethics H of Resistance

Understanding Camus’s critique of Hegel in its historical context of French Existentialism vindicates him from the charge that he was strangely and unfairly fixated on Hegel in his critique of “logical murder.” But it also opens Camus’s work in The Rebel to the charge that it is outdated and of no contemporary use, a powerful critique of a position that no one holds anymore. In order to see the contemporary value of The Rebel, we need to turn to Camus’s positive ethics of resistance. An important part of understanding this positive ethics will be understanding the extent to which it is influenced by, and responding to, Hegel.

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There are several broad ways that Camus’s thinking bears the influence of Hegel, despite his objections to Hegel’s way of doing philosophy. For example, Hegel’s influence can be seen in Camus’s focus on history and his attempt to trace the dialectical progression of historical events or eras, whether in politics or art. Sounding very much like Hegel, Camus writes of the importance of rebellion that “it would seem that what is at stake is humanity’s gradually increasing self-awareness as it pursues its course” (Camus 1991c, p.  20). Camus’s critics complained that his analysis of rebellion did not pay enough attention to the role of material conditions or circumstances, that Camus made it seem as if history progressed simply due to the unfolding of ideas (Todd 2000, p. 307). This criticism could be rephrased as saying that Camus is too Hegelian. Probably the most significant influence Hegel has on Camus’s thinking can be found in the way that Hegel’s master-slave dialectic frames and informs Camus’s ethics of resistance. Camus grounds this ethics on a conceptual portrait of an encounter between two people, a master and a slave, who engage in a “struggle to the death” where staking one’s life in this struggle brings self-­ awareness and true personhood. So far, this entire framework matches Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. But whereas Hegel’s dialectic traces how two strangers become master and slave, Camus’s dialectic begins with a master and slave and traces the moment of rebellion by which the master-slave relationship is ended and then abolished. Moreover, whereas Camus understands Hegel’s master-­ slave dialectic as suggesting a nihilistic lack of ethics, Camus uses the master-­ slave dialectic to ground universal ethical standards. For Camus, the struggle for one’s own freedom and dignity contains an implicit affirmation of freedom, equality, and dignity for all. Likewise, the struggle against the injustice of one’s own situation implicitly condemns injustice toward anyone, anywhere. Camus attempts to derive, from the concept of rebellion alone, not only general universal values like freedom, dignity, and equality for all, but also specific rights or duties: the abolishment of the death penalty and a guarantee of free press. As other scholars have pointed out, what Camus proposes here seems like some of the standard conclusions of classical liberal theory. What is new in Camus’s approach is not the content of particular standards he derives, but how he derives them. What makes the claim of universal rights and duties so strange for Camus to make, and what would seem to make it impossible for him to prove, is that Camus is a self-proclaimed “absurdist.” He rejects the sort of systematic rational thought that traditionally grounds universal liberal values. Instead, Camus begins with an acknowledgment of ‘the absurd’: the

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experience in which the human need for rational explanations and order will always clash with a world that defies such needs. Even Camus admits that, at first glance, an absurdist rejection of rational order seems to imply a rejection of any ethical order or values: “Awareness of the absurd, when we first claim to deduce a rule of behavior from it, makes murder seem like a matter of indifference” (Camus 1991c, p. 5). Yet Camus recalls the conclusion he had reached earlier in The Myth of Sisyphus, that even in the face of the absurd, one could remain true to oneself as one facing the absurd, i.e., not look away or flee from it. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus had relied on this self-consistency to show why suicide was wrong. Now in the introduction to The Rebel he uses it to show why, by extension, murder is wrong (Camus 1991c, p. 6). This same value of self-consistency then becomes the foundation of Camus’s ethics of resistance, which is entirely a matter remaining true to the implications of the first moment of rebellion. Camus begins his portrait of the rebel by emphasizing that the moment of rebellion contains both a “no” to slavery and injustice, and a “yes” to freedom and justice: “What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion” (Camus 1991c, p. 13). For Camus, the key to understanding this moment of rebellion and all its implications for ethics is the idea of a “limit,” a line that has been crossed, prompting the first act of rebellion: A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by saying “no”? He means, for example, that “this has been going on too long,” “up to this point yes, beyond it no,” “you are going too far,” or, again, “there is a limit beyond which you shall not go.” In other words, his no affirms the existence of a borderline. (Camus 1991c, p. 13)

This sense of a limit, initially no more than a surging feeling of righteous anger at how “the master” has crossed a line, becomes both an impulse to individual rebellion and, simultaneously, an implicit commitment to condemning this kind of injustice on behalf of everyone. Most immediately, the sense that a line has been crossed prompts a righteous indignation that (perhaps for the first time) invokes an awareness of one’s own rights and dignity as a person. Camus characterizes this moral conviction at the heart of rebellion as an intuitive sense of one’s own rights and dignity, something he is willing to die for rather than live without: “As a last resort, he is willing to accept the final defeat, which is death, rather than be

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deprived of the personal sacrament that he would call, for example, freedom. Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees” (Camus 1991c, p. 15). Thus every rebellion against injustice is a rebellion for justice: “every act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value” (Camus 1991c, p. 14). But why does Camus think that this value is a universal value? Why does he think that the rebel must be fighting injustice on behalf of everyone, rather than just for himself? Camus’s account offers answers to these questions in the form of three considerations about rebellion, all of which show a clear indebtedness to Hegel. Like Hegel, Camus emphasizes the importance of being willing to risk one’s life in this struggle since this shows that there is something more important than merely staying alive. For Camus, this willingness to die rather than acquiesce to slavery and injustice shows that the rebel slave must believe in something beyond himself and be motivated by more than his own narrow self-interest. This is quite close to Hegel’s account, in which the willingness to risk one’s life is essential because it allows the realization that we are not merely bodily creatures (unlike animals, in Kojève’s reading of Hegel). Hegel writes, “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 self-­ consciousness” (Hegel 1977, p. 114, §187). In Camus’s account, this willingness to fight and even die for something beyond his immediate survival shows the rebel slave his dignity as a person. In rebellion, he learns to respect himself. (This itself is a victory, even if he dies in the first moment of rebellion.) Moreover, in respecting himself, the rebel posits as a positive value that this dignity ought to be respected by all: In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself. Thus he implicitly brings into play a standard of values so far from being gratuitous that he is prepared to support it no matter what the risks. (Camus 1991c, pp. 13–14)

The rebel slave draws strength from his moral conviction; it is what allows him to risk his life in the struggle for freedom. But as Camus understands it, this moral stance means rejecting not just his own situation of injustice and slavery, but injustice and slavery per se. By aligning himself with a moral cause beyond merely himself, the slave ensures that even if he fails and is killed struggling for freedom, this act of rebellion was still justified: “If the individual, in fact, accepts death and happens to die as a consequence of his act of rebellion, he demonstrates by doing so that he is willing to sacrifice himself

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for the sake of a common good which he considers more important than his own destiny” (Camus 1991c, p. 15). The second consideration supporting the derivation of universal values is the idea that the struggle between master and slave yields self-awareness and even selfhood altogether: “With rebellion, awareness is born” (Camus 1991c, pp.  14–15). For Hegel, the master-slave dialectic was primarily about the need for recognition, specifically the need for recognition of and by others in order for self-awareness and selfhood: “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” (Hegel 1977, p. 111, §178). Likewise, for Camus it is in rebellion that the rebel slave gains self-awareness for the first time: “Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, even if only for a moment” (Camus 1991c, p. 14.) As with Hegel, Camus sees self-awareness as foundational to selfhood altogether, such that with the self-awareness gained in the first moment of rebellion comes true personhood: “In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limit it discovers in itself—a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist” (Camus 1991c, p. 22). In other words, a person only truly finds themselves and becomes a full or mature person within their struggles on behalf of what is right and against what is wrong. Also like Hegel, Camus thinks that this process of recognition contains a complex dynamic with often ambiguous results. Hegel traces the way that the power dynamic involving recognition between two people begins in moment of mutual recognition and of recognition of this mutual recognition: “They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing on another” (Hegel 1977, p. 112). In the next instance they engage in a struggle to the death in which one emerges as independent, the master, and dependent, the slave. But then this dynamic shifts somewhat in the slave’s favor in that the slave finds himself in the work he does (his own kind of mastery) whereas the master fails to find himself in a world simply handed to him without his own effort or skill. Moreover, Hegel suggests that the master loses the ability to get the self-­ recognition that was the original goal of the struggle. This is not just because the slave’s praises are obviously coerced, but because the master necessarily holds the slave to be different and lower than him, a dependent being. The master can’t find in the slave a mirror for himself as master. (Note that this weakness is due precisely to his so-called mastery, i.e. his domination over the person he considers his slave.) Camus follows Hegel is assuming that recognition from others is necessary for self-awareness and that both are necessary for complete personhood.

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Camus is perhaps no more Hegelian than when he discusses the complex and evolving struggle for recognition between the rebel slave and the master: He [the rebel] established, by his protest, the existence of the master against whom he rebelled. But at the same time he demonstrated that his master’s power was dependent on his own subordination and he affirmed his own power: the power of continually questioning the superiority of the master. In this respect master and slave are really in the same boat: the temporary sway of the former is as relative as the submission of the latter. The two forces assert themselves alternately at the moment of rebellion until they confront each other for a fight to the death, and one or the other temporarily disappears. (Camus 1991c, p. 24)

Master and slave are “in the same boat” because their power relationship is “relative” in the sense that the master is only a master insofar as a slave submits; he loses mastery the moment the slave refuses to submit. Camus seems to be suggesting that the master’s existence is established in the moment of rebellion in part because the slave’s rebellion yields universal values and a recognition of the dignity of all, including that of the master. Camus is clear that this rebellion, and the limit or standard of value it implies, creates a sense of “solidarity” and “natural community” from which the master is only excluded qua master, but not as a person per se: “The slave who opposes his master is not concerned, let us note, with repudiating his master as a human being. He repudiates him as a master” (Camus 1991c, p. 23). This idea that with rebellion comes a recognition of a “solidarity” with all other people, i.e., our common humanity, is the third consideration about rebellion that grounds Camus’s claim to universal values. Camus speaks of a “solidarity that is born in chains” and we might think that this solidarity is initially or primarily with those who struggle against (or simply suffer under) slavery and injustice (Camus 1991c, p. 17). Yet for Camus it is important to realize that the sense of dignity and values born in rebellion is not a matter of “us vs. them” tribalism; it overcomes the “master vs. slave” dynamic and includes everyone: It is for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something in him which does not belong to him alone, but which is common ground where all men—even the man who insults and oppresses him—have a natural community. (Camus 1991c, p. 16)

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This is so important for Camus because it establishes the fact that the rebel must now continue to recognize the limit or standard of values implied in his rebellion in the way that he now acts toward the master, both during the struggle and when he is victorious. If the standard of values and sense of dignity achieved in the moment of rebellion applied only to the rebels, then rather than abolishing injustice and slavery, the act of rebellion might only turn the tables, making the master a slave, thereby continuing the original injustice. Camus insists that any rebellion that stays true to its original impulse will take its initial sense of a limit to apply to everyone, universally. Here we find Camus’s foundation for universal human rights and values: “the individual is not, in himself alone, the embodiment of the values he wishes to defend. It needs all humanity, at least, to comprise them” (Camus 1991c, p.  17). The rebel takes strength from the moral righteousness of his cause, a righteousness that will persist even if he dies fighting for it. Genuineness demands that he stay true to the original limit that he insisted on in the first moment of rebellion, and this means never depriving others of their lives or liberty: The rebel undoubtedly demands a certain degree of freedom for himself; but in no case, if he is consistent, does he demand the right to destroy the existence and the freedom of others. He humiliates no one. The freedom he claims, he claims for all …. He is not only the slave against the master, but also man against the world of master and slave.” (Camus 1991c, p. 284)

For Camus, this limit is not only a sense of ethical boundaries, but also a sense of one’s own intellectual limitations. In the conclusion of The Rebel, Camus contrasts a “Mediterranean” approach to philosophy that remains true to this sense of limits, upholding “moderation,” and a “German” or “Gothic” approach to thinking that abandons all moderation and reaches for complete systems and absolute certainties (Camus 1991c, pp. 297–299). As in Neither Victims Nor Executioners, Camus uses this notion of an intellectual limit to argue for specific human rights such as the abolition of the death penalty and the guarantee of free speech. Since a person could never presume to have sufficient knowledge to execute another person on ideological or legal grounds, the death penalty must be abolished. Moreover, since a person could never presume to have complete knowledge of what justice is, freedom of the press must be guaranteed in order to draw from free debate about justice. Camus also shows how the death penalty and restrictions on free speech are contradictory to the initial impulse of rebellion: “rebellion, when it develops into destruction, is illogical”: “The consequence of rebellion … is to refuse to

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legitimate murder because rebellion, in principle, is a protest against death” (Camus 1991c, p. 285). Likewise, restrictions on free speech are inconsistent with the solidarity and mutual awareness born out of rebellion: “The mutual understanding and communication discovered by rebellion can survive only in the free exchange of conversation” (Camus 1991c, p. 283). Thus, starting only with the idea of a moment of resistance and rebellion against some unspecified injustice and oppression, Camus derives quite specific conclusions about what is universally just and virtuous. This establishes not only positive values to live by, but also a standard for judging the actions of others. Specifically, Camus thinks his analysis can be used to judge whether or not rebellions have stayed true to their implicit first principles: “In studying its actions and its results, we shall have to say, each time, whether it remains faithful to its first noble promise or if, though indolence or folly, it forgets its original purpose and plunges into a mire of tyranny or servitude” (Camus 1991c, p. 22). Any rebellion that fails to stay true to its original limit thereby fails to be rebellion and is instead merely one further form of oppression, injustice, terror, and murder. Camus concludes that his analysis of rebellion shows that we have “the right to say that any rebellion which claims the right to deny or destroy this solidarity loses simultaneously the right to be called rebellion and becomes in reality an acquiescence in murder” (Camus 1991c, p. 22). Camus discusses several forms of rebellion that fail to respect their own limit or standard. While he is silent about his indebtedness to Hegel in establishing his positive ethics of resistance, he is not so subtle in associating Hegel with rebellions that fail to abide by this ethics of resistance. One form of failed rebellion would be any in which the oppressed person “begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown” (Camus 1991c, p.  25). Too often what begins in the name of dignity and freedom devolves into submission and tyranny. Yet this kind of vicious rebellion only becomes truly monstrous when it intersects with another form of wayward rebellion, what Camus calls “metaphysical rebellion.” This is not in itself a violent struggle for freedom or a political movement, but simply any philosophy that parallels the rebel slave’s moment of defiance in certain ways: “The slave protests against the condition in which he finds himself within his state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel protests against the conditions in which he finds himself as a man” (Camus 1991c, p. 23). Camus’s critique of metaphysical rebellion is that it denies the intellectual limit just discussed. Instead of the “limited” rebellion of an individual rejecting some concrete, particular injustices of his or her life, this is an

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immoderate, “all-or-nothing” philosophical rejection of the human condition per se in favor of some theorized state of perfection: “Metaphysical rebellion is the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation” (Camus 1991c, p. 23). In many ways, Camus’s point here parallels (and is likely influenced by) Nietzsche’s extensive critique of forms of philosophy he finds nihilistic and life-denying in their yearning for some perfect beyond (either in the realm of Platonic forms, a Christian heaven, or a Kantian rational kingdom of ends). Yet whereas Nietzsche portrays modern manifestations of this philosophical “sickness” in thinkers like Kant and Hegel as being merely a new manifestation of what we find in Socrates and Plato, Camus suggests a timeline in which this kind of philosophy originates with thinkers responding to the French Revolution, i.e., Kant and Hegel: “Metaphysical rebellion, in the real sense of the term, does not appear, in coherent form, in the history of ideas until the end of the eighteenth century—when modern times begin to the accompaniment of the crash of ramparts” (Camus 1991c, p. 26). When a rebellion that has overstepped its ethical boundaries adopts a way of thinking that has overstepped its intellectual boundaries, the result is willingness to do violence that accepts, normalizes, and even encourages the worst injustices out of an allegiance to some theory of future justice. Camus uses the terms “revolution” to describe a rebellion that has become a quest for some such theoretical justice: “Rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope. It is no more than an incoherent pronouncement. Revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas” (Camus 1991c, p. 106). Most scholars agree that the primary example in Camus’s mind is likely the so-called “revolutionary” authoritarian dictatorship of Stalin. What began as a revolution against elites devolved into an absolute dictatorship, and what began as a movement for worker’s rights eventually sent millions to work to death in camps. What Camus is silent about, and scholars might overlook, is the fact that another likely target for Camus’s critique here was the all-too recent purge of French collaborators, including an alarming number of executions and long-­ term restrictions on free speech. As explained above, Camus initially played a public role in the purge by encouraging it. In its subtle way, The Rebel is then both a condemnation of the purge and a confession on Camus’s behalf about his role in it. It is comparable to the public confession Camus had made at the Dominican monastery in 1948, except that now he offers a powerful tool for understanding why it was wrong. The Rebel helps to explain the difference between the (virtuous) acts of rebellion by the Resistance during the occupation and the (vicious) acts of vengeance and “logical murder” of the purge.

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Note that Camus’s ethics of resistance is not necessarily incompatible with all violence. For example, Camus makes a distinction between murder as a “crime of passion” and “logical murder,” which is committed on ideological or legal grounds (Camus 1991c, p. 3). So presumably some of the violence done to resist the Nazi occupiers was justified, if also regrettable, but this justification (if it can be called that) was a matter of passion, not some theoretical or ideological grounds for killing. Once killing became ideological, in the purge, it repeated the original crime being avenged (the Nazi’s own ideological murder and domination), if on a far lesser scale. Camus writes that “[t]he positive value contained in the initial movement of rebellion supposes the renunciation of violence committed on principle,” regardless of what this principle might be (Camus 1991c, p. 286). This does not mean that these positive values suppose the renunciation of violence per se. He acknowledges that violence and deception are often necessary to a rebellion, and so their absolute prohibition would be a contradiction to rebellion (regardless of whether the rebellion aims at ending violence and deception) (Camus 1991c, p. 285). Rather than leaving us with a handy principle for determining when it is justified to use violence (thereby violating his own ethics), Camus simply shows us when it is wrong to use violence and then urges us to accept that it is part of the rebel’s (absurd) condition to “never find peace” about when exactly violence is justified (Camus 1991c, p. 285). So, somewhat oddly, if you are certain that you are justified in killing someone and can point to all the reasons why you are innocent, then you are instead certainly guilty. But if you are not certain about whether you are justified in killing someone, you might be justified. For Camus, the virtuous rebel always remains in a state of suspension about whether her violence for the sake of justice is just or whether it is murder. Violence against others, regardless of the reason, is always at the very least regrettable, and the virtuous rebel will avoid and despise all complacency or rigid self-certainty about the (supposed) justification of this violence. It may help to compare Camus’s position on violence here with that of Martin Luther King, who also formulates an ethics of resistance, specifically non-violent resistance. Camus thinks that only a religious viewpoint, with hopes for another life, could justify complete pacifism, which would also entail acquiescence to murder: “only a philosophy of eternity could justify non-violence” (Camus 1991c, p. 287). This is in part because Camus understands the choice of non-violence as a choice not to resist at all, to passively accept violence against oneself and others. He thereby overlooks the possibility of non-violent resistance, what Thoreau had called a “peaceable revolution” and what came to be known as “civil disobedience.” Interestingly, King,

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who was influenced by both Hegel and existentialism, uses Hegel’s dialectic to explain his path of non-violent resistance as a “third way,” a synthesis between violent rebellion and passive acquiescence: The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way of nonviolent resistance. Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites—acquiescence and violence—while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both. (King 1958, p. 251)

With the benefit of hindsight, we know how powerfully effective King’s non-­ violent resistance was. But it is worth bearing in mind that in King’s time, many civil rights activists doubted that non-violence could accomplish anything, and some rebuffed King for neglecting all hope of meaningful change in order to keep his hands clean of violence. It is not clear whether Camus shared the view of King’s critics that non-violence could never be an effective form of resistance, or whether he simply never conceived of non-violence as a tool of active resistance. In any case, in comparison with the complete pacifism of King, we might say that Camus’s ethics of resistance is semi-pacifist, denying all (rational) justifications for violence without denying the need for violence altogether or the possibility of a virtuous, yet violent, rebellion.

5

Conclusions

At the very end of Camus’s novel The Plague (written just a few years before The Rebel and incorporating many of the same themes) the main character, Dr. Rieux, withdraws from public celebrations of the plague’s end and reflects on what he knows but his fellow citizens do not: “As he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled” (Camus 1991a, p. 308). As a medical professional and diligent scholar, Dr. Rieux knows that “the plague” (Camus’s metaphor for Nazism and injustice more broadly) is never really vanquished once-and-for-all, that it lingers and becomes forgotten before unexpectedly resurfacing, carried by rats (his metaphor for collaborators): “He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years” (Camus 1991a, p. 308). For a long while Camus’s ethics of resistance in The Rebel no doubt seemed outdated, a relic of a bygone era. Sadly, the present age, with its surge of

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authoritarianism, ideological violence, and attacks on the free press, calls for us to seek the kind of wisdom Camus offers in The Rebel. The fact that Camus does not attempt to ground his ethics of resistance on the traditional foundations of Western values (e.g., religion or a rational “system”) is a strength in an era when these traditional foundations are regarded with suspicion. It is in relation to this need for an ethics of resistance that we can appreciate the value of coming to a better understanding of the Hegelian foundations behind Camus’s thinking, and understanding how he is responding to both Hegel and later Hegelians/Existentialists. Since Hegel is just as foundational for Camus’s positive ethics of resistance as he is for the forms of rebellion Camus condemns, The Rebel cannot be fully understood without understanding Hegel’s influence. It is true but somewhat odd to claim that, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that the historical record proves that Camus was right, e.g., in his unequivocal condemnation of Stalin or of his association of Stalin’s French supporters with Hegel. This paradoxically flies in the face of the content of what Camus is arguing, that the value of an action should not have to wait until history bears them out as morally justified. Moreover, locating Camus’s thought entirely within its historical context runs the risk of making it seem outdated and no longer relevant. It is important to see that Camus offers a lucid, cogent case for supporting universal human rights, one that is perhaps as strong and elegantly argued as any other in twentieth century political philosophy. Camus’s version of the state of nature scenario in The Rebel deserves to be studied alongside Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, but also within the whole tradition of state of nature theories, especially Hobbes and Locke. Yet Camus is not really a political philosopher, as many of his critics were quick to point out. Is his strongly opinionated foray into the political issues of his time then mere dilettantism? I think a better way to understand Camus is as an ethical thinker whose ethics happens to coincide with political disputes and issues. Here he could be compared to thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, powerful voices of conscience reminding their readers of the monumental ethical issues at play in the political circumstances of their day. Like Thoreau and King, Camus does not try to establish a comprehensive system of political philosophy or offer a comparison of different forms of government. Like them, he tries to get his readers to think about politics through an ethical lens, as a matter of individual conscience. In Camus’s case, he presents authoritarianism as only secondarily a form of government; it is primarily an abdication of conscience on behalf of each individual who supports it either through ideological blindness, crushing conformity, or unchecked self-righteous fervor. What makes Camus’s work here timeless is

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the same thing that makes the work of Thoreau and King timeless: despite the fact that they are each responding to very particular historical context, their moving calls to conscience in the face of injustice find resonance with anyone in history facing injustice. As long as there is a need to resist injustice, authoritarianism, and ideological violence, there is a need to understand the ethics of this resistance. Is this philosophy, though? Or is Camus merely a pseudo-philosopher offering a pseudo-philosophy as his critics claimed? Camus himself denied that he was a philosopher since he did not have “sufficient faith in reason to believe in a system” (Foley 2008, p. 2). If we think of philosophy this way, then we can agree that Camus is not a philosopher (and neither is Thoreau or King.) On the other hand, we reach the opposite conclusion if we allow philosophy to mean what Socrates meant by this term when he coined it, a love of wisdom that was also a call to conscience, one that brought individuals together to discuss virtue. If philosophy is what Socrates said it was (and lived), then Camus is also clearly a philosopher, as are Thoreau and King (whereas thinkers like Kant and Hegel seem to be remiss in pursuing true philosophy). Like Socrates, Thoreau, and King, Camus was a kind of gadfly to his society, using philosophy as a call to conscience. Like them, Camus not only espoused his ideas about ethics, he lived them (and at considerable personal risk). Comparing Camus to thinkers like Socrates, Thoreau, and King (as well as Arendt, as discussed earlier) helps address the last question to be discussed, whether Camus should be understood as an existentialist. As noted above, Camus vigorously rejected this term for himself. Even when he was friends with Sartre, in 1945, he was happy to allow Sartre to claim this term for himself and his followers. (We can imagine that Camus’s aversion to the term “existentialism” only grew more fervent as his friendship with Sartre became a vicious public feud.) On one hand, locating Camus in the company thinkers like Socrates, Thoreau, Arendt, and King offers a way of understanding his work in a context other than French Existentialism. On the other hand, it could be said that the Socratic nature of his philosophy also makes Camus an existentialist, regardless of his own opinion on this term. After all, Kierkegaard coined the term “existential” as a reference to the kind of philosophy Socrates did, the “Greek of existential-dialectic” (Kierkegaard 1992, pp.  309–310, 352) (and in contrast to the kind of systematic philosophy he found in Hegel) (Stewart 2003, pp.  640–644).5 Following Kierkegaard’s understanding of existential philosophy, Camus is indeed an existentialist. We reach the same conclusion if we instead define existentialism as it is traditionally defined, in reference to the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

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Camus is arguably the twentieth century’s most authentic heir to the tradition of philosophy found in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Like them, Camus explores issues of ethics and responsibility through an individual perspective and often artistically, rather than through a philosophical system. Like them, Camus offers portraits of different ways of life, defined by some fundamental stance toward existence, and like them he traces the internal inconsistencies in ways of life he condemns. Also like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and perhaps existentialism as a whole, Camus’s vocal criticism of Hegel has a tendency to mask a deep indebtedness to Hegel.

Notes 1. For a discussion of these misunderstandings of Hegel, some of which apply to Camus, see Jon Stewart’s “Introduction” in The Hegel Myths and Legends, ed. by Jon Stewart, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1996, pp. 1–16. 2. As Europe veered toward war in 1939, Camus used his position as an editor of an Algerian newspaper to articulate his pacifist position, which was deeply unpopular at the time. He began one such column with a quotation he attributes Fichte: “In order to show courage, there is no need to take up arms. Often in our lives, we must show more courage to remain true to our convictions by rising above the world’s opinions” (Todd 2000, p. 93). This quotation, which may be apocryphal, not only expresses Camus’s view of courage, it also shows it. In the climate leading up to the war, for Camus to quote a German philosopher approvingly was its own act of courage. 3. Similarly, Camus’s unpublished philosophical parody “L’Impromptu des philosophes” from 1946 mentions Hegel (and Marx) as offering a philosophy that “makes an absolute out of history” (Todd 2000, p. 236). 4. The terms Hegel uses in this section “Herr” and “Knecht” are better translated as “lord” and “bondsman,” as Findlay renders them, than “master” and “slave.” Yet to remain consistent with the discussion of this dialectic in Camus and other secondary sources (e.g., Kojève) I have retained the terms “master” and “slave.” 5. For an extended account of Kierkegaard self-conception as a Socratic philosopher, see Jon Stewart’s Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015.

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Bibliography Camus, Albert. 1946. The Human Crisis. Speech Delivered to Columbia University, March 28. Transcript as quoted in https://www.scribd.com/document/341261228/ The-Human-Crisis-Albert-Camus-Lecture. ———. 1961. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Knopf. ———. 1986. Neither Victims Nor Executioners. Trans. Dwight Macdonald. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers. ———. 1991a. The Plague. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Random House. ———. 1991b. Notebooks 1942–1951. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New  York: Paragon House. ———. 1991c. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Random House. Foley, John. 2008. Albert Camus from the Absurd to Revolt. New York: Routledge. Hegel, G.W.F. 1894. Philosophy of Mind, Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). Trans. William Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1971. Philosophy of Right. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V.  Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1985. Hegel: The Letters. Trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hyppolite, Jean. 1955. A Chronology of French Existentialism. Yale French Studies 16: 100–102. ———. 1974. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Judt, Tony. 2007. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Pimlico. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1992. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. King, Martin Luther. 1958. Stride Toward Freedom. Boston: Beacon Press. Kojève, Alexandre. 1969. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Trans. James Nichols. New York: Basic Books. Lottman, Herbert. 1986. The Purge. New York: William Morrow. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1990. Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin. Snyder, Timothy. 2010. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New  York: Vintage Books. Stewart, Jon. 1996. Introduction. In The Hegel Myths and Legends, ed. Jon Stewart, 1–16. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2000. The Unity of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Systematic Interpretation. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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———. 2003. Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-­ Century European Philosophy. New York and London: Continuum. ———. 2015. Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thody, Philip. 1961. Albert Camus 1913–1960. London: Hamish Hamilton. Todd, Olivier. 2000. Albert Camus: A Life. Trans. Benjamin Ivry. New  York: Carroll & Graf.

19 Merleau-Ponty and Hegel: Meaning and Its Expression in History David Ciavatta

1

 erleau-Ponty and the Legacy of Hegel’s M Philosophy of History

Hegel is the German Idealist with whom Merleau-Ponty engaged the most deeply and frequently throughout his career. The only other Idealist with whose work Merleau-Ponty seems to have had any notable engagement was Schelling, whose philosophy Merleau-Ponty took up as one among several figures addressed in a lecture course on nature he delivered in 1956–1957, four years before his untimely death (1995, pp. 36–52). It would no doubt be worthwhile to investigate whether any of Schelling’s insights informed Merleau-Ponty’s own thinking, but it must be noted that aside from the lecture course none of Merleau-Ponty’s own written texts, whether those published in his lifetime or posthumously, shows any explicit engagement with Schelling’s work, and this despite the fact that there are arguably some interesting affinities between Merleau-Ponty and Schelling on a number of issues.1 As for the insights of figures such as Fichte, Schiller and Hölderlin, they do not seem to have had any pronounced impact on Merleau-Ponty’s writing or overall philosophical approach, nor do they seem to have been much on the

D. Ciavatta (*) Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_19

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minds of many of his contemporary interlocutors, such that Merleau-Ponty might have been brought to address these authors in some of his shorter articles written in response to current debates or publications. In contrast, we find Merleau-Ponty returning to Hegel throughout his career, and Hegel’s thought—alongside that of Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger and Sartre—was clearly one of the few consistent reference points in his mental landscape of the most decisive philosophical positions that needed to be wrestled with and responded to as he formulated his own views. One reason for this prominence was no doubt that Hegel was very much in the air in the philosophical milieu in which Merleau-Ponty’s own thought developed. As is well known, there was something of a revival in Hegel studies in France in the 1920’s and ’30’s, with lecture courses and fresh interpretations of Hegel offered by scholars such as Alain, Wahl, Hyppolite, Koyré and Kojève (Mudimbe and Bohm 2010; Kelly 1981). Merleau-Ponty moved in circles in which the impact of this work was present and so in which Hegel’s philosophy constituted a kind of shared language. Thus Merleau-Ponty could in his own writing sometimes refer to certain Hegelian terms of art or lines of thought without any elaboration at all, trusting that his readers would recognize them as familiar and uncontroversial reference points. Of special note in this context is the fact that Merleau-Ponty, like many notable French thinkers of his generation, attended Kojève’s influential lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and the powerful, generally existentialist approach to Hegel’s early thought that Kojève introduced seems to have had a significant and lasting impact on Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the contemporary relevance of Hegelian ideas. However, it is worth mentioning, too, that Merleau-Ponty’s interests in Hegel clearly went beyond the Phenomenology, for his writing suggests that he also had a direct acquaintance with at least some of Hegel’s later texts, most notably Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Lectures on the Philosophy of History, but probably also Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit (from the Encyclopedia).2 It is above all Hegel’s investigations of human experience, practical life, and culture, and in particular Hegel’s thinking concerning the fundamentally historical character of human phenomena, that were at the center of Merleau-­ Ponty’s interest in Hegel. (It is noteworthy, for instance, that Merleau-Ponty’s body of work demonstrates little evidence of any serious engagement with Hegel’s Science of Logic or Philosophy of Nature.) An overview of the various published texts in which Merleau-Ponty explicitly addresses Hegelian lines of thought suggests that Merleau-Ponty regarded Hegel’s philosophy of history and its implications both as Hegel’s most decisive and far-reaching achievement, as well as that dimension of Hegel’s thought, the true significance of

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which had yet to be adequately appreciated and digested by his contemporaries. Thus we sometimes find Merleau-Ponty defending or re-interpreting certain aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of history in an attempt at offering productive new conceptual resources for contemporary debates, or at the very least at providing a helpful framework for helping to clarify what, precisely, is at stake within certain contemporary controversies (see 1964b, g). Indeed, in a short essay entitled “Hegel’s Existentialism” (published in 1948) which he wrote in response to a lecture on Hegel given by Hippolyte, Merleau-Ponty argued that the most urgent task for his contemporary philosophical milieu is that of “re-establishing the connection between on the one hand, the thankless [contemporary] doctrines which try to forget their Hegelian origin and, on the other, that origin itself ” (1964b, p. 63). And in this essay he goes on to defend basic features of Hegel’s essentially phenomenological approach to history, showing that it offers contemporary existentialism resources that can enhance its relation to social history. In terms of the development of Merleau-Ponty’s own thinking about history, and particularly in relation to his concern—one that appears again and again in his work—with the inherently historical character of human cultural expression, Merleau-Ponty seems to have regarded Hegel’s dialectical conception of history as utterly decisive, so much so that at one point Merleau-Ponty declares that “the Hegelian dialectic is what we call by another name the phenomenon of expression” (1964g, p. 73). Given the importance of the concept of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy—indeed, one recent commentator has convincingly argued that the investigation of expression is the most distinctive and central theme unifying all of Merleau-Ponty’s work (Landes 2013)—this appeal to Hegel’s dialectic is especially striking, and stands out as that point of intersection between Hegel and Merleau-Ponty that is perhaps the richest and most worthy of further investigation. Even when Hegel’s overly “idealist” view of history is criticized and treated as a foil for his own view, it is a foil that Merleau-Ponty seems to regard as indispensable, as though his own philosophy of history bears a kind of dialectical relation to it: that is, it seems that the justification of and motivation for Merleau-Ponty’s view of history derives, to some extent at least, by way of a “determinate negation” of Hegel’s view, as though Hegel’s view were not merely one among many possible contenders in this field, but rather served to set forth a decisive standard for what a philosophy of history can be, such that subsequent thinkers cannot move forward in the philosophy of history without reckoning with and moving through Hegel. In this chapter, I aim to examine the various sides of Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Hegel’s philosophy of history, focusing especially on some of the essays published in Sense and Non-Sense (1948) and Signs

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(1960), in which Merleau-Ponty’s express engagement with Hegel is especially pronounced. One of Merleau-Ponty’s consistent preoccupations, from the time of the Phenomenology of Perception onwards, was that of giving an adequate philosophical account of artistic expression, and one of his ongoing concerns in this regard was the distinctive temporality and historical structure of such expression. Rather than being an inessential, merely contingent act of giving voice to something that is already familiar or fully available to thought in advance of its expression—which is what our everyday, prosaic speech tends do, for instance, repeating things whose meanings are already available and settled—for Merleau-Ponty artistic expression serves as an “originary” historical event through which meaning is generated and through which thought first gains access to it: we learn what we mean to say, and what it is meaningful to say, precisely by saying it, precisely by finally finding the right configuration of words, the poignant utterance, that first makes it available to us and to others at once.3 Thus meaning has an intimate relation with the inaugurating, historically-situated movement of expression itself, and so is not something that resides in an ideal, eternal domain that is detached from and indifferent to its historical expressions. Merleau-Ponty’s interest in artistic expression, then, is at once an interest in what we can call the inherent historicity of meaning itself: while he does not deny a certain ideality or universality to meaning—that is, he does hold that the meaning of an originary expressive act transcends its concrete, historical particularity, in the sense that it comes to inform both future acts of expression, as well as shaping our relation to what came before it (this is part of its peculiar temporal structure)—he insists that meaning never fully detaches itself from the concrete, historical processes in which it is born and in which it figures, and so cannot ultimately be considered independent of or impervious to history altogether.4 Since artistic expression is, for Merleau-Ponty, just a heightened form of a movement of expression that runs through all of human life—indeed, in Merleau-Ponty’s account, even sense perception must be understood as a kind of bringing-to-expression of the sensible world, just as the body’s movements involve indispensable, original expressions of lived space (2012, Part 2, Chapters 1 and 2)—when Merleau-Ponty draws attention to the inherently historical character of artistic expression, he is also meaning to point to the inherently historical character of all meaningful human phenomena.5 Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, even our perceptions of the world, though they are grounded in the spontaneous and natural processes of the body in its living and practical interaction with light and color and sound and texture, prove to be essentially mediated by the various historically developing cultural

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institutions (including painting and literature, but also such things as the body’s habitually developed patterns of mobility) that inevitably shape the operative bodily schemas through which alone the world shows itself to us as meaningful.6 So, Merleau-Ponty’s recurrent interest in the historicality of artistic expression—for instance, his focus on the singular event of expression, and on way the artistic gesture necessarily carries forward the work of past artists while at the same time redefining the medium for posterity—is intimately bound up with what we might call a historical ontology, both of meaning itself, and of ourselves insofar as we are distinguished by our peculiar bearing towards meaning. When framed in this way, we can better see the stakes of Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Hegel’s philosophy of history. For what concerns Merleau-­ Ponty above all in Hegel’s thought is the controversy over how to understand the relation between meaning and its history—or, to use terms more suited to Hegel’s thinking, we can speak of the relation between reason and history, or, what is essentially the same thing, between spirit and its coming to be “for itself ” through the stages of world history. Since reason is inherently dialectical for Hegel, we can also say that Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Hegel concerns the dialectical character of history, where the “dialectical” is generally taken to be a process of immanent development in which new concepts or ways of making sense of the world come to be generated from out of the tensions that arise in already established ways of making sense. With respect to the relation of meaning and history, we will see that Hegel appears in Merleau-Ponty’s texts both as a stubborn nemesis who presents a definitive, idealist challenge to his own insistence on the historical contingency of meaning, and, at once, as a profound ally who offers philosophy helpful resources for conceptualizing the historical advent of meaning in various cultural expressions, whether in religion, art, or philosophy, or in political history generally. In what follows, I will lay out the most essential features of this dual relation to Hegel, with an eye towards understanding better how this relation provides a useful context for understanding Merleau-Ponty’s own ontology of meaning. I begin, in the next section, with a basic account of Hegel’s philosophy of history, with the specific goal of setting up those features of it that lend weight to Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of it as problematically idealist. Then I will turn to a discussion of some of the ways that Merleau-Ponty attempts to re-appropriate certain aspects of Hegel’s thinking so as to show how Hegel helps to open up the possibility for thinking meaning’s essential dependency on history. Of particular interest will be the notion of immanent dialectical development—a process that generates its own path from within itself, rather than being guided by external norms or forces—and the notion

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of an exemplary historical action that brings to expression something that exceeds the terms of what it was possible to express in an existing cultural epoch.

2

 egel and the “Idealist” Philosophy H of History

In the “Hegel and Existentialism” essay, Merleau-Ponty finds it useful to distinguish between two Hegels, the early, essentially existentialist Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and the “Hegel of 1827,” by which Merleau-­ Ponty presumably means the Hegel of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the second edition of which Hegel published in 1827 (Merleau-­ Ponty 1964b, p. 64).7 It is likely that he also associates the Hegel of 1827 with some of the posthumously published student notes from lecture courses that Hegel delivered in Berlin in the 1820’s, in which topics briefly sketched out in the Encyclopedia receive a much more elaborate handling. Much of what we have come to regard as Hegel’s developed philosophy of history is from this late period, as presented for instance in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (published by Hegel in 1821, and translated into French in 1940) and more thoroughly still in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History (translated into French in 1937). It would be worth elaborating briefly upon this purported distinction between the early and late Hegel (or between the “phenomenological” Hegel and the “textbook” Hegel, as he puts it in another essay; see Merleau-Ponty 1964c, p. 81), for Merleau-Ponty’s own thinking about Hegel, even beyond the “Hegel’s Existentialism” essay, is typically undertaken with a view to that distinction, and is structured either in terms of an attempt to reclaim some of the contemporary value of the early over the later, or to show how it is that there are elements of the earlier, more existentialist elements still operative in the later Hegel. Hegel’s late thinking about history needs to be understood in the context of its systematic place in Hegel’s overall Philosophy of Spirit (Hegel 1971),8 which is the third and final part of the Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia as a whole claims to be the comprehensive, systematic presentation of everything that warrants philosophical investigation, the complete story of philosophical thought’s engagement with reality. It begins, in the Logic, with the a priori, dialectically unfolding study of all of thought’s most basic, ontological categories—the pure terms of thought itself in its engagement with being—then proceeds to present an account of the most essential dimensions of nature,

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and then of the human spiritual world. Both nature and spirit are broadly conceived in light of the ontological categories of the first part. Indeed, one might say that they are conceived as distinct and necessary stages in the gradually self-realizing movement of pure thought thinking itself, or the movement of what Hegel came, in the Logic, to call “the Idea” (Hegel 1991b, pp. 286–288) Thus nature is the Idea in a purely external, alienated, wholly unthinking form—as embodied, for instance, in spatio-temporal, material things in their brute causal relations to other material things—and spirit is the “truth” of nature, what “idealizes” it, in the sense of both discovering meaning and rationality in it so as to render it intelligible, and also of putting meaning and rationality into play through the actively self-generated domain of a human world—as embodied, for instance, in human languages and memory, as well as various social and cultural practices.9 Philosophy, understood as rational thought’s most evolved and free relationship to itself and the world, is portrayed as that practice, that “form of spirit,” in which spirit becomes conscious of itself in its core essence as rational thought, and finally comes to expressly claim its identity with the movement that had been underlying the Logic and the whole progress through the Encyclopedia all along (see Hegel 1971, pp. 313–315). In the context of his Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel claims to identify all of the most essential features of human experience, from our moods and dreams, to our scientific, observational stance, to our struggles for recognition from other selves, to our generation of social and political reality, and finally to our production of religion, art, and of philosophy itself, and he conceives of each as a distinct stage in the dialectical development of spirit’s overall progress towards self-knowledge. One of the culminating moments of this systematic account of spirit is Hegel’s demonstration of the irreducible and thoroughgoing historicality both of human existence and of the overall world with which humans engage (see Hegel 1971, pp.  277–281). Since what we as self-­ conscious beings actually are depends essentially on the kind of being we collectively take ourselves to be, and since the kind of being that we collectively take ourselves to be—the ways we make sense of both ourselves and, by extension or by contrast, the worlds we live in—changes over time as a result of our various experiences and practices, there is a sense in which the sorts of being we are—what spirit is—itself changes and develops over time.10 Thus Hegel comes to conceive of world history as essentially articulated into distinct and relatively autonomous worlds or epochs, each of which is characterized by its own relation to itself as spirit and, correlatively, by its relation to nature: each, through its distinctive economic, political and cultural institutions, realizes and expresses its own operative sense of what spirit ultimately is and, along

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with it, its own sense of what freedom, as the essence of spirit, ultimately amounts to, how this freedom is to be realized and expressed in action, and how this freedom stands in relation to the natural world that conditions and houses its concrete realization.11 Thus, those ancient cultures that adhered to a form of what Hegel calls “natural religion”—religions that do not fully appreciate the divine freedom of spirit in its independence and distinction from nature, but treat nature as the immediate and direct embodiment of the divine (see Hegel 1977, pp. 416–421)—have a very different relationship to their own freedom and to the natural world than, for instance, a culture shaped by the modern Enlightenment, for which nature is specifically posited as an essentially spiritless, independent reality that solicits our rational mastery of it through scientific experimentation and intelligent use (Hegel 1977, pp. 349–355). The appreciation of this inherent historicality of our being is, for Hegel, itself a decisive moment in the historical development of spirit: that is, part of what it is for spirit to evolve historically is its eventual appreciation of its own essential historicality (an appreciation which comes to fruition, for Hegel, with the dawn of Christianity, a point to which I return below). In a way, even the transition into the final, most evolved shape of spirit—that of philosophical thought itself—is essentially informed by this appreciation of the inescapability of our own historicality, and this is demonstrated by the fact that one of philosophy’s essential tasks becomes that of reconstructing and charting out the historical development of human experience and thought. Thus particularly in his various lectures in Berlin Hegel offers a philosophical reconstruction, not only of human social and political history broadly speaking, but also, more specifically, of the most essential historical developments in the history of religion, the history of art, and even the history of philosophy itself, showing in each case how it is that the philosophical perspective that Hegel himself adopts was dialectically prepared for by the specific practice whose history he is telling. Having provided this general background, we can now start to articulate the core controversy that leads Merleau-Ponty to distance himself from Hegel’s approach to history. The controversy concerns the relationship between history and its meaning, and has to do with the question of whether the ultimate meaning of history is itself historically generated and developed, or whether this meaning is ultimately grounded in something—say, pure reason itself, or perhaps the unchanging essence of spirit—that is purportedly ahistorical. This is related to the question of whether the relationship between history and its meaning is such as to guarantee that human history will unfold in a meaningful, rational manner, such that thought can presume in advance that there

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is a rationality to be uncovered there, and can even, perhaps, know something of the basic shape that history will take or the goals that are to be accomplished in it, in advance of its actual unfolding. And if there is supposed to be such a guarantee, this in turn leads to the question of whether and how this reason is actually efficacious: is it an independent power that somehow “uses” us for the sake of realizing ends that are external and unbeknownst to us as concrete agents, perhaps even ensuring rational progress as a silver lining in our worst historical disasters? Hegel’s ultimate stance on these controversies is arguably more nuanced than is commonly recognized, but certainly some of the ways that Hegel characterizes the rationality of history—perhaps most notably, his likening of it to the providence of God (Hegel 1961, pp.  13–16), and his suggestion that reason cunningly puts concrete historical agents to use for its own purposes without their knowing it (Hegel 1961, p. 33)—do strongly suggest that he regards history as the necessary unfolding of a rationality that is eternal and possessed of itself in advance of all historical change, and that this rationality itself somehow exerts some sort of direct causal force on human affairs independently of our subjectivity or concrete experience. In any case, it is fairly clear that Merleau-Ponty—and probably many of his immediate contemporaries—took these features to be at the core of the late Hegel’s perspective on history, and in the remainder of this section I will fill out some of the implications of this reading. Though Hegel’s detailed account of world history in his Lectures is very much alive to the historical specificities of particular interests and the idiosyncrasies, and inherently situation-specific choices, of individual personalities— and so to the ineradicable contingencies—that inevitably play a role in historical developments, Hegel does seem to hold that history as a whole, or in the broad epochal stages and transitional moments that carve out its broadest and most essential contours, cannot ultimately be merely contingent, cannot just as easily have been otherwise than they have in fact been. For, it seems, that would be tantamount to saying that human reality at this level is fundamentally irrational or at least non-rational, that it is not guided or measured by stable standards by which it could be judged, and so by which it could be rendered determinately meaningful.12 If there is to be what Hegel calls the “judgement of history” (see Hegel 1991a, p. 371)—by which he means, not just “whatever history decides,” but rather a judgement that transcends the more local standards of any particular value, individual, or nation, and instead lays claim to being the universal and supreme court of appeal for establishing the ultimate nature and meaning of all particular actions and events—then for Hegel there must be determinate rational principles and underlying goals at work in the

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unfolding of history. Such principles and goals are necessary if the meaning of events and actions is not merely whatever future generations happen to make of them, only to be transformed by what yet more distant futures make of them in turn. That is, the rationality or meaning that runs through history, it seems, must itself be independent of history, and history must be grounded in something fixed and non-historical. For Hegel, it seems, the rationality that underlies and explains genuine historical developments, and that renders history into relatively determinate developmental “stages,” articulates itself from within and thus develops immanently or organically in logically necessary ways, much in the way that, as Hegel showed, concepts develop in the course of the Logic. Just as our ontological concepts are not simply fixed and static, but develop and “particularize” themselves (that is, reveal their determinacy and limits and so their inherent relations to other concepts) in the very process of their being thought, so too must history be grasped, ultimately, in terms of the logical, dialectical narrative of freedom’s development through “self-particularizing” stages (Hegel 1991a, p. 372). And, just as, in the conceptual terrain, the dialectical movement from one set of categories to the next is rational and necessary, springing precisely from the inner essence and determinacy of the concepts being thought—a process of working out and making explicit only what was already implicit in them, thus bringing concepts through to their logical destiny, as it were—so too is history’s overall progression necessary, and necessarily destined, in a somewhat providential fashion, towards the ultimate realization of freedom (which, for Hegel, also amounts to the gradual realization of self-knowledge).13 Thus one might interpret Hegel’s reference to the “judgement of history” as amounting to the idea that, since human history is fundamentally rational and so essentially destined towards the realization of freedom, history will automatically and necessarily see to it that only what is in service of this goal will ultimately prevail. On this view, history simply cannot go so far “off the rails” of its rational development towards freedom that irrational or regressive forces could possibly dominate so as to actually jeopardize this development.14 The most decisive events of history, then, are in some way eternally prefigured by the very logic of spirit’s development, and so though they might appear in the form of contingent names and drives—for instance, “Julius Caesar” and his personal ambitions for power—these inherently particular and idiosyncratic features mask the underlying rational process that is really at work in and through them. This line of thought seems to give rise to two distinct perspectives on history. On the one hand, we as inherently finite and thus historically conditioned beings are necessarily embroiled in our own particularly and the

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particularity of our situations, and so are necessarily blind to the universal significance that our actions take on from the absolute or universal point of view of world history, understood essentially as the forum of spirit’s rational self-development (see Hegel 1961, pp. 27–31). On the other hand, however, there is the privileged position of the philosopher, who is able to conceive the necessary logic of this self-development, and is, moreover, able to do so in an essentially a priori manner—that is, without having had to be exposed to history’s actual unfolding in fact. The philosopher purportedly stands beyond history, and views history, at bottom, as the inessential, outward exemplification in the externality of time of an inherently inner, rational process. Thus, as finite agents actually embroiled in history, we find ourselves blind to the ultimate, absolute forces that actually move and determine us, and are susceptible to the “cunning of reason” that allows us to think we are merely addressing our local, finite concerns and interests, when in fact we are doing the work of universal reason itself. In contrast, the philosopher, and most particularly the Hegelian philosopher who has become enlightened as to the underlying rationality of history, purportedly attains to a higher, unconditioned freedom insofar as his thinking gains access to the eternal, quasi-providential dialectical logic that alone gives human action its ultimate meaning. Thus Merleau-­ Ponty writes, “in Hegel’s works the theory of the state and the theory of war seem to reserve judgement of historical works for the absolute knowledge of the philosopher and take it away from all other men” (Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 71). At the core of Merleau-Ponty’s construal here is presumably a political concern with elitism, as well as, more broadly, a concern about the purported detachment of philosophical thought from the lived experience of non-­ philosophers—as though this lived experience of history had no truth, nothing that philosophy had to answer to, autonomous and “pure” as it is relative to history.

3

L ived Experience and Immanent Dialectics in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

In contrast to Hegel’s late and explicitly stated philosophy of history, in “Hegel’s Existentialism” Merleau-Ponty claims to find in the early Phenomenology a richer, more promising philosophy of history, though one that is more implicit, and that is put on display more by what Hegel actually does in his phenomenological approach to things than by any explicit, extended discussion of history per se. My goal in this section is to present

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some of the key elements of Merleau-Ponty’s favorable construal of Hegel’s approach in this earlier work. As Merleau-Ponty writes, in contrast to the approach to history operative in the late Hegel, the Phenomenology “does not try to fit all history into a framework of pre-established logic but attempts to bring each doctrine and each era back to life and to let itself be guided by their internal logic with such impartiality that all concern with system is forgotten” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, p. 65). Thus Hegel’s phenomenological study proceeds by entering into each autonomous “era” or “shape of consciousness”—each operative self-­conception and each distinctive form of life that appears in the course of the study—and refrains from judging it according to any external, pre-established conceptual standards. Rather, it lets this shape live, lets it articulate its essential features and its world on its own terms, and lets it evolve immanently and organically, holding it only to its own immanent standards (Hegel 1977, p. 53). When approached this way, each distinct shape of consciousness proves, in the end, to lack full self-possession, or fails to coincide with itself or with the actuality that it itself enacts, and the appreciation of this inner failure comes hand-in-hand with a dialectical transition into a new shape of consciousness which must then be investigated in its own right (Hegel 1977, pp. 50–51). But the particular ways in which shapes of consciousness fall short of themselves and transition into new forms of life arguably cannot be grasped a priori and from the outset, as though the philosophical perspective already possessed the full truth of things in a purely conceptual manner, and need not itself undergo the immanent, living “labour of the negative” (Hegel 1977, p. 10) that brings each shape to its limits and to its ultimate truth. Such a perspective would in effect make of the Phenomenology a kind of ironic farce: rather than sincerely entering into each shape and thus becoming genuinely implicated in its self-conception and goals as though they were one’s very own, philosophy would instead merely parade them before a smug, detached perspective as though they were hapless characters unaware of the inevitable failure that the omniscient narrator can well see is about to meet them. For Merleau-Ponty, the Phenomenology is essentially committed to foregoing such an external, distanced approach, and instead sees the conceptual work of phenomenological philosophy as premised upon, and as growing out of, a concrete, lived experience that cannot ultimately be dispensed with. Certainly part of Hegel’s goal in the Phenomenology is to demonstrate that there is an immanent, dialectical development at work as we move from one shape of consciousness to another—that is, generally speaking, each shape claims to be rationally called for by, and claims to reveal the “truth” of, the tensions at play in the shapes that preceded them (see Hegel 1977, pp. 50–51).

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And clearly at least some of the distinct shapes of consciousness taken up in the Phenomenology are actual forms of life articulated in and by history itself. For instance, in Chapter Six of the Phenomenology, Hegel takes up what he regards as the most essential “spiritual” stages and transitional moments in European political life from Ancient Greece to the French Revolution. On Merleau-Ponty’s reading, it seems that the philosophical thought that brings these forms of life to a conceptual articulation, and that thinks through their transitions, so as to organize them systematically and grasp a necessary progression therein, is essentially beholden to the historical actions and events that brought these shapes and their revolutionary transitions to life. Philosophy, as phenomenology, engages in a conceptual work that does not rise above history and leave it behind, but sees the conceptual work it does as an extension or elaboration of historically evolving forms of articulation and ways of making sense of things that are already very much at work in the practices and institutions by which people live. Thus it is arguably the case that the concepts and dialectical transitions detailed in the Phenomenology can only ultimately make sense to historically-bound agents who are themselves at work in reckoning with the present, a present that is itself essentially informed by, or is a response to, the historical accomplishments of past forms of life. And as Merleau-Ponty notes (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, pp.  64–65), Hegel expressly acknowledges philosophy’s essential dependence upon history in the Philosophy of Right, where he famously claims that philosophy always comes too late to offer any practical instruction, for it can only think through the rationality of what historical actuality itself brought to maturity (Hegel 1991a, p. 23). The philosophical reconstruction of the shapes of consciousness into a systematic, rational whole is thus essentially retrospective or recollective in character, relying as it does on experiences and insights gained only through the self-­ articulating work of history itself. What is compelling to thought at the purely rational level has its ultimate roots in what is compelling to actual, embodied historical agents as they engage in concrete struggles with each other and with the natural world, even if those agents did not themselves formulate the inner force and logic of their struggles in explicit, conceptual form. So, it would be mistaken to presume that the inner logic of this development, along with its structuring meanings and goals, were present and intelligible from the start, and so independently of any actual, historical unfolding—let alone that such a purportedly ideal, non-historical logic were somehow itself efficacious in determining historical agents, wholly unaware of its demands, to undertake the work of reason (or the development of freedom) on its behalf. Rather, what counts as rational, the ultimate terms structuring the meaning of human experiences and actions, itself evolves historically

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along with these experiences and actions, and above all with the actual customs, institutions and laws that give rise to the overall environment in which historical agents experience themselves and on behalf of which they act. Historical agents are typically not themselves involved in conceptual struggles per se, but their lives, struggles and aspirations inevitably make sense to them in certain ways, and, indeed, they struggle in part to preserve the integrity of these ways of making sense when they come under threat—as, for instance, when a traditional form of life comes under threat by the liberalizing forces of modernization. Such historical struggles can lead to wholesale transformations in the ways that we make sense of ourselves, such that we must say that reason itself—what agents count as reasons for acting and what they count as genuine, meaningful experience in the first place—undergoes transformation as a result of such historical shifts, shifts whose precise scale and shape could not have been fully known in advance, and so are in that sense genuinely creative. It is this acknowledgement of the fundamentally creative role of history that serves to link Hegel’s account of history to Merleau-Ponty’s own account of creative expression and its distinctively historical character. In the next and final section, I focus on Merleau-Ponty’s account of artistic expression and on the ways that Merleau-Ponty draws upon the resources of Hegel’s philosophy of history to complement his attempt to think through the peculiar historical character of artworks.

4

 eroic Action, Inaugural Events, H and First-Order Expression

In his long essay, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (originally published in 1952), Merleau-Ponty seeks above all to respond to Andre Malraux’s views on painting, but Merleau-Ponty uses this occasion to articulate and draw out some of the implications of his own theory of expression, and to develop further his long-standing interest in the question of what makes painting and literary works (philosophy included) distinct from one another as modes of expression. But this text also includes what is in effect Merleau-Ponty’s most extended and arguably most original engagement with Hegel in print. Interestingly, there is no attempt to put his own, or Malraux’s, views in dialogue specifically with Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics—which might have been expected, given that Hegel himself offered a powerful account of the distinct expressive possibilities of painting and literature, and given, too,

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that Hegel sees in art a kind of “embodied meaning” that arguably resonates in important ways with Merleau-Ponty’s own account of how meaning dwells in the visible (on the latter point, see Ciavatta 2017). Rather, Merleau-Ponty’s primary concern is with Hegel’s overall philosophy of history, and with the way it helps to provide what Merleau-Ponty regards as the proper context in terms of which to approach Malraux’s thinking on the history of painting in particular. Merleau-Ponty singles out in Malraux’s work traces of one of the problematic dimensions of Hegel’s philosophy of history that, as we have seen above, Merleau-Ponty associates above all with the late Hegel. Malraux’s appeal to a hypothetical “spirit of art” that helps to explain the striking similarities between the work of artists from different cultures and historical periods, Merleau-Ponty notes, resembles the “Hegelian monstrosity” of a self-­possessed, supersensible “world spirit” that exists, fully formed, beyond the fray of the concrete historical world in which it is made gradually manifest, and that somehow guides this concrete world to its proper realization (Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 65). The likening of Malraux’s position to this “idealist” view provides Merleau-Ponty with an instigation to develop, in response to Malraux, an account of history that can account for such similarities as growing immanently from the concrete, bodily practice of expression itself, rather than from some sort of transcendent force. But, apparently paradoxically, in the course of developing his response to Malraux, Merleau-Ponty appeals to distinctively Hegelian lines of thought as an aid. For instance, Merleau-Ponty associates the idealist attempt to detach reason from its historical development with the Christian notion of a “vertical” transcendence, according to which God and the eternal truths associated with Him are wholly independent of human history (Merleau-Ponty 1964g, pp. 70–71). In his response to this notion, Merleau-Ponty appeals to a historical re-interpretation of Christianity that resonates deeply with Hegel’s distinctive approach to the Incarnation. Merleau-Ponty seems to share Hegel’s view that the Incarnation constitutes one of the decisive turning points of human history as a whole. Both regard the Incarnation as inaugurating a decisive shift in humanity’s conception of itself in relation to God and, crucially, a shift in humanity’s conception of the ontological status of history itself. For, rather than the traditional construal of human history as an essentially imperfect domain of constant change and upheaval that is conceived in contrast to an eternal, perfect domain that is ontologically independent of and impervious to it, in the Incarnation God gives himself fully over to human history.15 This “kenosis” in effect transforms the events of history—starting with the Incarnation itself, but followed by the subsequent actions of the community

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of the faithful who act in the name of this event and specifically of its redemption of human life—into the very manifestation or embodiment of the divine. Ontologically speaking, then, history is no longer a sphere of restless becoming that, as such, is inherently devoid of any stable, essential meaning or of substantial, worthwhile ends and their conclusive resolutions; nor is it what Hegel would call a “bad infinite,” consisting of an indefinite accumulation of facts and individual events that are, at bottom, external to one another and that as such never cohere into meaningful historical periods or developmental movements. Rather, history itself becomes the ultimate site in which the birth and fate of meaning and of the essential are determined, and the overarching story whose various individual events take on their ultimate nature and meaning relative to one another in a developing but comprehensive whole. For Merleau-Ponty, then, rather than a vertical transcendence, the event of the Incarnation would have us recognize an ongoing movement of meaningful determination that is immanent to historical action itself, in the sense that we find the meaning of our lives in the present beholden not to an eternal beyond that is of a wholly different order from us, but rather to a future that we ourselves will become, and also to a past that we are no longer but that nevertheless weighs on us and demands that we perpetually re-engage it. In the context of another essay (“Faith and Good Faith”), Merleau-Ponty cites with approval Hegel’s claim that the Incarnation “changes everything,” and that as such it functions as the “hinge of universal history” (Merleau-­ Ponty 1964d, pp. 174–175). Here Merleau-Ponty also seems to be acknowledging, with Hegel, that there can be decisive events that, though located in a specific time and place within history, nevertheless reconfigure history as a whole or in its universality, transforming the very meaning of human life going forward from this event, as well as our whole perspective on the past that led up to it.16 This notion of an event that bears on the ongoing temporal whole is at the very core of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of expression, for part of his concern is to show how original expressive acts reconfigure the whole field of meaning and evaluation going forward. And in the course of making a case for such exemplary expressive events in the “Indirect Language” essay, Merleau-Ponty appeals to Hegel once again, this time offering a reconstruction of a core aspect of Hegel’s philosophy of action as presented in the Philosophy of Right. The particular passage Merleau-Ponty addresses has to do with Hegel’s argument that neither an agent’s intentions in acting, nor the objective forces determining the action and its objective consequences, are by themselves sufficient to determine what an action is in its essence, or what its overall significance is (Merleau-Ponty 1964g, pp. 71–72; Hegel 1991a, pp. 145–146). On

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the one hand, there are inevitably factors at work in any concrete situation of action that are not up to the agent herself, starting from the very fact that the agent was born in the first place, to the fact that her action necessarily draws upon and puts into motion natural and historical forces she does not fully know or control, to the fact that her action, once released into the world, will be taken up by others in ways she cannot fully control or anticipate. In acting, then, the agent necessarily enters into a terrain that exceeds her own particular will and intention, and Hegel argues on this basis that the agent cannot fail to give herself over to the terms of this terrain and so be answerable for what unfolds from her action (Hegel 1991a, p. 145; Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 72). Thus, for instance, the arsonist whose fire accidentally spread beyond the specific building she intended to burn down is responsible for the unintended destruction of other structures even if she could not reasonably have anticipated the freak gust of wind that caused the fire to spread.17 And as Merleau-­ Ponty notes, no one can escape the tragic possibility that, despite one’s best intentions, one’s actions might lead one to infamy or ruin, thus highlighting the fact that we are all susceptible to the open-endedness of history (Merleau-­ Ponty 1964g, p. 72). But, on the other hand, it is not the case that all of the various consequences that unfold from one’s action, including all of the various ways that others happen to take it up in their actions, are, as it were, “proper” or “integral” to the action, for there is something at work in the action itself that sets limits to what properly belongs to it, and also sets limits on which of the responses of other agents count as seeing the action eye-to-eye, as it were. Thus one can under certain circumstances legitimately claim that an action was ahead of its time, for instance, such that those contemporaries who responded to it failed to appreciate the full scope of its power or significance. In such cases, at least some of what we might otherwise call the action’s historical consequences are not really integral to it, and are thus marked off as contingent with respect to it. In other words, rather than simply being judged by the history of its reception, whatever form that reception might take, the action itself stands in judgement of its own history. As Merleau-Ponty writes, claiming to spell out an implication of Hegel’s view, “I submit myself to the judgement of another who is himself worthy of that which I have attempted, that is to say, in the last analysis, to the judgement of a peer whom I myself have chosen” (Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 73, italics in original). And, as Merleau-­ Ponty goes on to argue, those actions that are ahead of their time in effect seek to generate the audience that can properly appreciate and respond to them, and so the “true” consequences of such actions—that is, those that spring

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from the appropriate appreciation of their significance—may not arise until much later, sometimes after their authors have long passed away. Merleau-Ponty argues that this phenomenon is typical in the case of genuine artists who, as such, do not just repeat, perhaps with only minor modifications, existing meanings and existing modes of expression, but whose works give birth to substantially new forms of expression and new ways of making sense. For instance, a painter might revolutionize how the very medium of painting embodies visual meaning by developing new vocabularies of color or line, new ways that paint on a canvas can become “legible” by the eye, thereby allowing us to discover new layers of meanings at play in the visible world generally. Those who continue to judge the painter’s paintings according to previous standards of what painting is, and who thus have not succeeded in giving themselves over to the new ways of seeing that the paintings open up, are not really responding to the works on their own terms, and so their responses are not legitimately considered part of the paintings “proper consequences.” In contrast, a future generation of painters who have come to incorporate the paintings’ new ways of seeing into their own work, and whose sense of the very medium has been informed by them, may, in developing their own new styles, be said to be elaborating some of the consequences of the original paintings, revealing something of their actual historical import. Merleau-Ponty stresses that original expressive acts do not merely express one determinate and self-contained thing, as a prosaic sentence claims to express one and only one logical proposition. Rather, they inevitably put into play a new general orientation or way of being, a new way of making sense of things in general, that others can inhabit and develop for themselves in their own, often quite different, situations and projects.18 Thus, in our example, part of the very meaning of those original, “game-changing” paintings, part of what it means to come to terms with them on their own terms, involves heeding in them the call for, and a suggestive anticipation of, new ways of approaching painting in general that would be unintelligible without reference back to the new historical field they opened up. It is precisely in the work of other artists—that is, in the work of those who themselves are trying to bring reality to expression, to uncover new and better ways of bringing its truth to light, rather than merely accepting settled meanings as final—that we come to appreciate and bring to the fore what previous paintings meant. Thus, coming back to Merleau-Ponty’s specific engagement with Hegel’s philosophy of action, we can see that, though not all de facto consequences are the true consequences of an action, it is not, on the other hand, the author’s intention alone that determines what these true consequences, and so the fuller historical significance, of the action will be. For the significance of the

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action lies, to some extent at least, in the hands of the future generations who take it up. Merleau-Ponty describes this historical movement as the “perpetual conversation carried on between all spoken words and all valid actions, each in turn contesting and confirming the other, and each recreating all the others” (Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 74). It is only in and through this perpetual, ongoing, and open-ended cross-historical, and cross-cultural, conversation— a conversation initiated and sustained by the various individual “monads” that affirm their historical individuality with reference to other monads—that a work can be judged to be saying something genuinely new and illuminating. Merleau-Ponty takes this point about the meaning of an action lying not merely in its immediate material consequences or in its immediate intentions, but in the way it anticipates a new field of meaning and new sorts of actions in the future—and thus in its true or proper consequences—to be an elaboration of Hegel’s way of thinking of decisive historical actions more generally. As Merleau-Ponty writes, the meaning of the action does not exhaust itself in the situation which has occasioned it, or in some vague judgement of value; the action remains as an exemplary type and will survive in other situations in another form …. History according to Hegel is this maturation of a future in the present … and the rule of action for him is not to be efficient at any cost, but to be first of all fecund. (Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 72)

It is not immediately clear how Merleau-Ponty claims to derive this particular idea from Hegel, particularly if one stays within the fairly narrow boundaries of the discussion of moral action developed in the Philosophy of Right, the details of which were the focus of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion just prior to the passage quoted. However, the purportedly Hegelian lineage of the idea becomes more plausible if we consider Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History. In that context Hegel takes up action in a way that goes beyond the narrower boundaries of moral action, for the ultimate historical significance and value of an action could be quite different than what a strictly moral judgement of its value—a judgement necessarily based on existing norms and focused primarily on the particularities of the current situation—might be (Hegel 1961, pp. 32–36). The reason for this is that, at least in the case of the great actions of what Hegel calls “world-historical” figures, what is at issue is precisely the attempt to bring about new forms of human practice, new standards of judgement and a new ethical milieu. In other words, such actions seek to be judged and justified in terms of standards that do not yet exist, the

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standards of a future world which the actions themselves aim at and call for (compare Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 74). It seems likely that it is specifically such actions that Merleau-Ponty had in mind in speaking of action’s fecundity, the way action, for Hegel, is ahead of its time, bespeaking and preparing for a future that does not yet exist. That Merleau-Ponty was familiar with this specific conception of the world-­ historical figure is demonstrated in his earlier essay “Man the Hero” (originally published in 1946), where he says of Hegel’s world historical heroes that they forsake happiness and by their deeds and their example create a law and a moral system in which their time will later recognize its truth. … [T]hey have a presentiment of the future although, of course, no knowledge of it: they sense it in their tastes, their passions, and their being rather than see it clearly before them. Their heroism resides in their having worked out and won for others, with nothing certain to go on and in the loneliness of subjectivity, what will afterwards seem the only possible future, the very meaning of history. (Merleau-Ponty 1964e, p. 183)

It is true that, in this essay, Merleau-Ponty maintains his distance from Hegel’s overall conception of history, taking issue with the fact that Hegel’s historical hero is conceived as acting on behalf of an incipient spiritual world that is rationally destined to appear. He then goes on to contrast the Hegelian hero with the contemporary existentialist hero who acts in the face of the fact that his historical situation is decidedly not heading toward any certain goal, who faces a situation in which the contingency of the future is decidedly apparent, and in which all “duties and tasks are unclear” (Merleau-Ponty 1964e, p. 186).19 This hero is abandoned to the fact that, in the absence of any external supports or already forged paths preparing for his action, it is ultimately up to him to render his life and his situation meaningful, and Merleau-Ponty argues that it is only by expressly affirming, to the very end, this spontaneous capacity of concrete action itself to forge meaning and meaningful connection with concrete others, that the hero can ever hope to be reconciled with himself and his situation: as he puts it, it is only thus that the individual can be “beyond judgement” (Merleau-Ponty 1964e, p. 186), presumably invoking an autonomy with respect to existing moral standards similar to the one that Hegel takes to be at issue when it comes to original historical actions. Interestingly, Merleau-Ponty likens this historical act of giving rise to meaning, and of affirming one’s capacity to do so as one’s highest vocation, to the expressive act of the poet who, not knowing in advance precisely what it is

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that calls to be said or how to say it, and so faced with the indeterminacy of having no clear path to a meaningful expression, nevertheless works on the faith that there is an utterance that, once hit upon, will bring clarity and a kind of lasting, decisive, and meaningful completion to the situation: as Merleau-Ponty says, the hero seeks to “bring the world’s confused talk to an end with a precise word” (Merleau-Ponty 1964e, p. 187). It should be noted, though, that while Merleau-Ponty develops the portrait of the existentialist hero in contrast to Hegel’s conception of the hero, his actual discussion of Hegel’s conception focuses most of all on the hero’s lack of understanding and certainty with respect to the future that his actions in the present hearken toward. From the point of view of the individual hero’s lived experience, this future is very much contingent, and, like the poet who feels compelled to give voice to something that she and her contemporaries do not yet have a full handle on, part of what makes the hero heroic is precisely this passionate willingness to stand alone and risk all despite not having a full, rational grasp of the matter at hand. It is true, Hegel sometimes talks as though the hero’s actions are destined to have the impact they went on to have on world history, as though the hero’s contemporaries could not but be moved by the implicit spirit on whose behalf his words and actions and charisma speak—whereas Merleau-Ponty, in stressing the contingency of the future, clearly wants to make room for the fact that history can witness periods of regress and degeneration, in which the promising potentials contained in the present are not seized upon (see Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 71). But there is little in Hegel’s account that suggests that he specifically envisions some kind of supernatural intervention on human affairs: if the passion and charisma of a leader become infectious to those around him, it is because others can sense in the hero’s vision the promise of something greater, even if they are not in a position to fully articulate for themselves, in words or philosophical thought, what, exactly, moves them.20 These historical followers could still be said to be responsive to meanings, or responsive to reason, without thereby being in a position to say—perhaps not until future generations provide them with the words—what exactly was drawing them forward. That is, we can still regard such followers as full-fledged agents who are answering to their own lived experience—as indeterminate and inarticulate as this experience may be— rather than as the blind play things of some world spirit controlling things from without. Though these agents, or the world-historical hero himself, might not possess clear intentions and foresight of the sort we might expect of an expert craftsperson executing a formulated plan, and though, lacking such mastery and clarity of vision, they might end up pursuing fruitless paths, they can nevertheless—like the artist struggling to find the expression that will

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allow her to behold what it was that she had been trying to say—be said to be alive to the potential import of what they are trying to do. That is, it is not the philosopher, sizing up their actions in terms of some purportedly comprehensive and ahistorical system of rational concepts, who has the only legitimate perspective on the significance of their situations. Hegel seems to acknowledge, in his description of the hero, that historical agents in the midst of acting, and so in the midst of facing all the contingency and open-endedness of a future upon which the significance of their actions depend, constitute an irreducible context in terms of which to appreciate how meaning actually inhabits the human sphere. From this perspective, the attempt of a philosophy of history to size up the meaning of a historical event or period as though its essential meaning were fully determinate and settled would be to betray the concrete life of history itself. For Merleau-Ponty, this open-endedness of historical meaning also infects philosophical thinking itself, and it may very well be that Merleau-Ponty’s main disagreement with Hegel’s philosophy of history springs above all from their differing perspectives, not on history per se, but specifically on the status of philosophical thinking and its relation to history. In the context of discussing Malraux’s notion of a universal museum that transcends spatial and historical boundaries, and in which all artworks can be placed side by side so as to allow their unity and universal themes to reveal themselves, Merleau-Ponty draws comparisons to the way in which Hegel’s own philosophy functions as a sort of carefully curated museum in which all previous philosophical positions are put on display as distinct stages in the development of a comprehensive, unified philosophy—namely, Hegel’s (Merleau-Ponty 1964g, pp. 81–82). Merleau-Ponty’s worry, in the case of both of these “idealist” museums, is that their specimens are essentially embalmed, idealized versions of the concrete, living, and so spontaneously unfolding, originals.21 For Merleau-Ponty the only way to do justice to these past artworks or philosophical texts is to enter into them as living movements of expression, and, since living processes are not fully possessed of all that goes into them, this means appreciating what is indeterminate, unthematized, and open-ended in them, and appreciating the ways they call for further expressive efforts on the part of others, rather than treating them primarily as fully determined, complete, and coherent wholes that are in full command of what they are expressing. That is, the “true consequences” are largely in the hands of future generations who appropriate, reclaim, elaborate, and move beyond them—much as Merleau-Ponty attempts to do in relation to Hegel’s own philosophy. Merleau-Ponty notes that “Hegel is the only one to think that he has no existence ‘for others,’ and that he is in the eyes of others exactly what he knows himself to be” (Merleau-Ponty

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1964g, p. 82). That is, on the basis of what Merleau-Ponty has claimed to show are Hegelian reasons, Hegel should have seen that the meaning of his own philosophy “could not possibly be summed up outside of time, and it is still expression” (Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 82).

Notes 1. See Wirth and Burke 2013 for a recent collection of essays exploring the links between Merleau-Ponty’s and Schelling’s philosophies of nature. 2. For a detailed list of the French translations of Hegel’s work that would have been available to Merleau-Ponty, see Mudimbe and Bohm 2010. I will later on cite various works of Merleau-Ponty in which particular references are made to some of these Hegelian texts. 3. See Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “speech does not translate a ready-made thought; rather, speech accomplishes thought” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, p. 183), and see also pp. 182–190 for core aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of expression. For Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between original or authentic speech and “second-order” speech, see, for instance, 2012 pp. 409, 530 (notes 6 and 7), and Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 44. 4. This is one of the central themes of Merleau-Ponty 1964g, but see also 2012 pp. 408–415. 5. For Merleau-Ponty’s linking of the study of the historical structure of artistic expression to the account of human history more broadly, see Merleau-Ponty 1964g, pp. 69–76. 6. See for instance Merleau-Ponty’s famous discussion of all that can go into the apparently simple and immediate perception of red, in Merleau-Ponty 1968, pp. 132–133. 7. Hegel did publish a third edition in 1830, but the Encyclopedia first attained its mature form in 1827, and there were relatively few revisions made in the 1830 edition. 8. Wallace translates Hegel’s word Geist as “mind,” but I will consistently use the English word “spirit.” So, in referring to Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit I mean to refer to the book Wallace translated as Philosophy of Mind. 9. For a helpful statement of Hegel’s conception of the relation between logic, nature, and spirit, see Hegel 1971, pp. 16–18. 10. As Hegel says, spirit “involves an appreciation of its own nature, as also an energy enabling it to realize itself; to make itself actually that which it is potentially” (Hegel 1961, p. 17). 11. Compare Hegel 1971, p. 277, where Hegel says of spirit’s historical development in time that “its several stages and steps are the national minds (Momente und Stufen die Völkergeister), each of which, as single and endued by nature

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with a specific character, is appointed to occupy only one grade, and accomplish one task in the whole deed.” 12. For Hegel’s defense of the philosophy of history against those who would criticize it for being grounded in a priori presuppositions, and so too unresponsive to the concrete facts, see Hegel 1961, pp.  8–11 and 1971 pp. 277–279. 13. As Hegel writes, “world history is the necessary development, from the concept of the freedom of spirit alone, of the moments of reason and hence of spirit’s self-consciousness and freedom” (Hegel 1991a, p. 372). 14. In addressing this point, Merleau-Ponty takes issue with Hegel’s claim that the “actual is rational,” and argues instead that the philosophy of history must make room for decline and regression as themselves meaningful moments of the whole; see Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 71. 15. As Merleau-Ponty writes, God “is not simply a principle of which we are the consequence, a will whose instruments we are, or even a model of which human values are only the reflection. There is a sort of impotence of God without us, and Christ attests that God would not be fully God without becoming fully man” (Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 71). Merleau-Ponty does not here specifically identify this reading of Christianity with Hegel, but in his essay “Faith and Good Faith” the identification is quite clear: “Hegel said that the Incarnation is ‘the hinge of universal history’ and that all history thereafter has only developed its consequences. … As if the infinite God were no longer sufficient, as if something moved in Him, as if the world and man because the necessary moments of a greater perfection instead of being a useless decline from the originating perfection. God can no longer be fully God, and Creation cannot be completed unless man freely recognizes God and returns Creation to Him through Faith. Something is happening; the world is not futile; there is something to be done” (Merleau-Ponty 1964d, p. 175). It is not clear which of Hegel’s various discussions of Christianity MerleauPonty might have in mind here, but Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Hegel’s claim that the Incarnation functions as the “hinge” on which all world history turns is probably to Hegel 1961, p. 319, and Hegel’s introduction of the historical importance of the revelation in this context is consistent with MerleauPonty’s characterization of Hegel’s view. 16. I take up the issue of Hegel’s conception of reconfiguring historical events in Ciavatta 2014. 17. This is an elaboration of an example Hegel gives both in Hegel 1991a, p. 148, and in 1961, pp. 27–28. 18. As Merleau-Ponty writes, comparing bodily gestures generally with the original gesture of the painter in particular, “[e] ach is both a beginning and a continuation which, insofar as it is not walled up in its singularity and finished once and for all like an event, points to a continuation or recommencements. Its value exceeds its simple presence, and in this respect it is allied or

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accompliced in advance to all other efforts of expression” (Merleau-Ponty 1964g, p. 68) 19. For an especially subtle reading of how Merleau-Ponty is situating himself relative to Hegel here, see Smyth 2010. 20. As Hegel writes, the followers of the great historical individuals “follow these soul-leaders; for they feel the irresistible power of their own inner spirit thus embodied” (Hegel 1961, p. 31). It is noteworthy that, for Hegel, it is primarily in the context of the appreciation of art that the spiritual meaning of something can be intuited in an embodied form, without any appeal to a fully formed, conceptual understanding (Hegel 1975, and Ciavatta 2017). He may be implying here, then, that the appreciation of the hero’s originary import is comparable to our appreciation of the suggestive, non-conceptual ways that artworks embody spiritual meaning, thus complementing Merleau-Ponty’s comparison of the historical hero to the poet. 21. Merleau-Ponty makes a similar criticism of Hegel in the essay “Everywhere and Nowhere”: “Hegel walls history up again in the tomb of his system, but past philosophies keep on breathing and stirring within it—along with them he shut up uneasiness, movement, and the working of contingency” (Merleau-­ Ponty 1964h, p. 127).

Bibliography Ciavatta, David. 2014. The Event of Absolute Freedom: Hegel on the French Revolution and its Calendar. Philosophy and Social Criticism 40 (6): 577–605. ———. 2017. Embodied Meaning in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty. Hegel Bulletin 38 (1): 45–66. Hegel, G.W.F. 1961. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. New York: Dover. ———. 1971. Philosophy of Mind, Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). Trans. William Wallace. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1975. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vols. 1–2. Trans. T.M. Knox. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.  V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1991a. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Ed. Allen Wood, Trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1991b. The Encyclopedia Logic, Part I of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Trans. T.  F. Geraets, W.  A. Suchting, and H.  S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Kelly, Michael. 1981. Hegel in France to 1940: A Bibliographical Essay. Journal of European Studies 11 (1): 29–52.

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Landes, Donald A. 2013. Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964a. Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964b. Hegel’s Existentialism. In Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 63–70. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964c. The Battle over Existentialism. In Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 71–82. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964d. Faith and Good Faith. In Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 172–181. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964e. Man, the Hero. In Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 182–187. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964f. Signs. Trans. Richard C.  McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964g. Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence. In Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary, 39–83. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964h. Everywhere and Nowhere. In Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary, 126–158. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1995. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A.  Landes. New  York: Routledge. Mudimbe, V.Y., and A. Bohm. 2010. Hegel’s Reception in France. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 6 (3): 5–33. Smyth, Bryan. 2010. Heroism and History in Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology. Continental Philosophy Review 43: 167–191. Wirth, Jason M., and Patrick Burke, eds. 2013. The Barbarian Principle: Merleau-­ Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.

20 Hegel and Sartre: The Search for Totality Bruce Baugh

1

The Unhappy Hegelian

It is well known that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir agreed early on in their relationship that although the love between the two of them was essential, they would both be entitled to “contingent” affairs on the side (Rowley 2005, p. 28). Arguably, the same could be said of Sartre’s relationship to Hegel’s thought. From Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1976, 1992) through to Sartre’s final major work, The Family Idiot (Sartre 1971–1973, 1981–1993), Sartre is captivated by Hegel’s dialectic, particularly the mediation of the part through the whole, or the “totality.” Other philosophical partners—Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard—come and go; Sartre’s attachment to Hegel remains constant. Yet it was destined to be an unhappy affair. The dialectical totality that Sartre rightly understood as essential to the dialectical mediation of the part by the whole remained elusive, beckoning but always out of reach. In his own language, Sartre’s ontology is “haunted” by this unreachable totality. Human beings, individually and collectively, attempt to totalize their experience and the world around them but never arrive at dialectical synthesis of opposing views that would allow for the realization of a completed totality. Instead, B. Baugh (*) Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_20

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Sartre has to settle in each case for what he calls “the detotalized totality”: a totality fissured by individuals and groups transcending it toward their own particular and divergent aims. This leaves Sartre’s philosophy very much in the position of Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness,” unable to be the totality of plenitude of being through which it understands itself and yet unable to renounce its pursuit of completion and totality (see Hegel 1977, IV.  B., pp. 126–138, 1986, pp. 163–177). Like the religious believer who finds his real being outside of himself in a transcendent God, Sartre’s philosophy defines itself through a totality that it is unable to be. The reasons for the impossibility of a final, totalizing synthesis vary throughout Sartre’s career. In Being and Nothingness, it is the nature of consciousness itself as open-ended transcendence that precludes any final closure in a completed totality. In this early work, Sartre also allies himself with the existentialism of Kierkegaard, which gives the individual priority over the universal, making the separation and opposition of consciousnesses irreducible. By the time of the Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre 1960, 1982), the materiality of praxis (human practical activity and labour) has become the reason for why totalization remains impossible: the efficacy of human praxis, even when humans are united in a group, depends on the material embodiment and separation of individuals. Finally, in his 1960s essay on Kierkegaard (Sartre 1972, 1974) and The Family Idiot, Sartre is concerned with the individual who is totalized by his era even as he seeks to transcend his era toward his own particular goals. But the “totalization without one totalizer” that Sartre hoped would provide history with a single meaning (Sartre 1960, pp. 131, 754–777, 1982, pp. 35, 817–818) turned out to be a chimera.

2

Hegel and Totality

In Hegel’s Phenomenology, he declares that “the True is the whole,” “the scientific system of such truth” (Hegel 1977, pp. 11, 3, 1986, pp. 24, 14). The systematic exposition of the history of diverse philosophical systems grasps them not as mutually contradictory, but as necessary moments of “an organic unity,” a unitary process of development that together with its result constitutes “the life of the whole,” and it is this living whole that is “the actual whole” (Hegel 1977, p. 2, 1986, pp. 12–13). Only through articulating the accumulated experiences of past philosophies into a system in which each part has a determinate relation to the others can the whole be made fully intelligible (Hegel 1977, p.  7, 1986, p.  19). This means that the whole—the Absolute—is “first a result; only in the end is it what it truly is” (Hegel 1977,

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p.  11, 1986, p.  24). Without the final result, there can be no system, and without a systematic whole, the individual parts have no determinate meaning or function. This organic life of the whole makes the absolute a subject that divides itself into “moments” in order to return to itself from out of “otherness” and alienation from itself (Hegel 1977, p. 10, 1986, p. 24). This is the “hard and endless struggle against itself ” through which humanity tries to overcome its limitations and internal contradictions (Hegel 1988, pp.  58–59, see 1977, p. 6, 1986, p. 18). Truth, then, takes the form of a whole, a living self, that returns to itself from out of divisions that it has created within itself in order to articulate its experience and make it intelligible (Hegel 1977, pp.  7, 485–486, 1986, pp. 19, 582–583, 1988, p. 82), such as the divisions between sensibility and understanding, between inner intentions and outward action, embodied desires and spiritual freedom, individuality and community, self and other. As the return to self from otherness can only take place in time, “time thus appears as the destiny and necessity of Spirit”: “until Spirit has completed itself … as world-Spirit,” through its historical development, scientific and systematic knowledge remains impossible (Hegel 1977, pp. 487–488, 1986, pp. 584–585). “History is knowing, self-mediating becoming—Spirit externalized into time” (Hegel 1977, p. 492, 1986, p. 590; see Hegel 1988, p. 75); it is the record of Spirit’s return to itself after having taken on “the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative” (Hegel 1977, p.  10, 1986, p.  24), “the enormous labour of world-history” (Hegel 1977, p. 17, 1986, pp. 33–34). The whole that is the true, then, is the whole of human history as recollected and comprehended through systematic conceptual thought, and until history with respect to the development of Spirit (philosophy, art, science and religion) has been completed, that whole will remain unattainable. Without this all-encompassing and meaningful whole, differences between points of view, modes of being and aspects of selfhood remain without resolution, caught up in an endless conflict, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Were there no final reconciliation in a Spirit which has definitely returned to itself as a completed totality that mediates and resolves differences, history would be merely “a slaughter-bench upon which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states and the virtues of individuals were sacrificed” (Hegel 1988, p. 24).

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The Unhappy Consciousness in Sartre

This capsule summary certainly does not do justice to Hegel’s thought, but it provides sufficient background in order for us to see what Sartre made of it. The question for Sartre is first, last and always, that of the totality which mediates its component parts. In a paradoxical way, it seems that Sartre wants the dialectic but without the totality that makes it possible. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre states that “consciousness is by nature an unhappy consciousness, with no possible transcendence of its unhappy state” (Sartre 1976, p. 129, 1992, p. 140). He bases this point on Jean Wahl’s influential Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Wahl 1929), who had argued that Hegel’s dialectic presents the process by which the self transcends itself as it is towards its future possibilities, thus dividing itself, and then seeks to return to itself in order to heal its painful internal divisions and become whole (Wahl 1929, pp.  10, 140, 143, 187–188). For Hegel, says Wahl, this process comes to an end when philosophy becomes the scientific system based on the philosophical concept or “notion” (Begriff); it is then that the dualities of sensible and intelligible, changeable and unchanging, and so on are brought back together in a synthesis, a “concrete universal” that preserves their differences while removing their antagonism (Wahl 1929, p. 154). Yet Wahl’s analysis suggests that this longed-for reconciliation never takes place: each time consciousness grasps itself under one category, it is “driven … to the other of these categories by the negative force of reason” (Wahl 1926, pp. 282–283). These reversals leave consciousness with nothing stable it can hang onto: it experiences itself as absolute negativity, a pure process of negation (Wahl 1927, pp. 448–449; see Wahl 2017, pp. 54–89). However, consciousness cannot simply be this negativity: it is both the reality of the act of negation and the nullity of what it negates, both being and nothingness, a doubleness or duplicity that drives it from one category to the other in absolute unrest (Wahl 1927, pp. 444, 448, 451). “Until the moment when consciousness achieves its unity, we are in the presence of a game of ‘loser wins,’ where there is a continual reversal and incessant irony, where consciousness ceaselessly ends up with the opposite of what it sought” (Wahl 1927, p. 467). For Sartre, consciousness is necessarily unhappy because “it is a lack of a certain coincidence with itself ” and “haunted by … that with which it should coincide in order to be itself” (Sartre 1976, p. 140, 1992, p. 153). Because consciousness is intentionality, defined as “consciousness of” by the object it “intends,” consciousness is always transcending whatever aspect (Abschattung) of the object that is present to consciousness toward the total series of

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appearances that would define the object as a determinate totality of its aspects (Sartre 1976, pp. 13–14, 1992, pp. 5–6). The present being of consciousness, then, is defined through a series of future appearances of the object defined by the object’s essence (Sartre 1976, pp. 221–224, 1992, pp. 250–254), appearances which are correlative to future possible consciousnesses of that object. Consciousness thus desires coinciding with the future totality of consciousnesses which would give it determinate and stable being as “consciousness of” its object, the totality of consciousness’ possibilities “congealed into in-itself ” and inert being, a closed totality (Sartre 1976, p. 128, 1992, pp. 139–140). However, since consciousness by its very nature is always transcending its present towards future possibilities, such a totality—a synthesis of open-ended transcendence and determinacy—is impossible: consciousness “cannot attain the in-itself [closure, determinateness] without losing itself as for-itself,” that is, as consciousness (Sartre 1976, p. 129, 1992, p. 140). Consciousness either goes beyond or cannot catch up with the totality of future appearances/consciousnesses through which it defines itself. It both is and is not that totality (Sartre 1976, p. 129, 1992, p. 140) and suffers that lack of self-coincidence as a “lack” of its own being (Sartre 1976, pp. 124–125, 1992, pp. 138–139). The result for Sartre is that consciousness is what it is not and is not what it is (Sartre 1976, pp. 94, 99, 104, 107, 1992, pp. 100, 107, 112, 116). “On all sides, I escape being and yet—I am” (Sartre 1976, p. 97, 1992, p. 103). Consciousness is incessantly driven from being to nothingness and back, without ever attaining a stable synthesis. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre ultimately agrees with Wahl’s statement that “there are no consciousnesses save unhappy ones” (Wahl 1944, p. 68). In trying to fill the “lack” of itself as a closed totality, consciousness is defined as the failure to become the impossible totality of the in-itself-for-itself, a being that “is what it is” and yet remains transcendence, which Sartre identifies with God as a self-caused being (Sartre 1976, pp. 678, 684–85, 1992, pp. 784, 789–790). But the effort to coincide with itself and become self-founding is in vain: “Man is a useless passion” (Sartre 1976, p. 678, 1992, p. 784). This is exactly the position of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness. The stable and self-identical being that consciousness desires and by which it defines itself, and so feels as a lack of its own being, it finds only outside itself in another being: God.

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 elf, Others and Humanity in Being S and Nothingness

The inability to achieve totality found in the being-for-self of consciousness is also found in being-for-others. In the same way that consciousness is never able to attain the totality that would make it be what it is, the self can never coincide with what it is for others and yet can never escape its being-for-others or social being. To use Sartre’s most famous example, I may not be reducible to my role as a café waiter, but it’s undeniable that I am a café waiter rather than a diplomat or a journalist (Sartre 1976, pp.  95–96, 1992, pp. 102–103). The self both is and is not its being-for-others “in a perpetually disintegrating synthesis and perpetual game of escape from the for-itself to the for-others and from the for-others to the for itself ” (Sartre 1976, p. 94, 1992, p. 100). Whatever judgment others place on me, whether explicitly or through how they treat me, whatever I am for them, I can accept or reject, mostly in an implicit manner, through emotions such as shame, pride, anger or contempt. But those same emotions indicate that I accept at least that the object of the others’ judgments or behaviour is me rather than someone else (Sartre 1976, pp. 307–337, 581–587, 1992, pp. 350–384, 671–675). The self can neither be its being-for-others nor escape that being but is driven from one to the other. Sartre’s theory of being-for-others, or the relation between self and other, is the part of his early philosophy most often identified with Hegel’s philosophy, specifically, the dialectic of master and slave in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1977, pp. 104–119, 1986, pp. 137–155; Sartre 1976, pp. 280–289, 1992, pp. 319–329). For Sartre, the main issue is whether a multiplicity of separate and opposed consciousnesses can be fused into a closed totality, or whether starting from “the plurality of consciousnesses … in the form of a double and reciprocal relation of exclusion” in which each consciousness defines itself as not-being the other, one can arrive at a “universal self-­ consciousness, ‘the intuition of the existing self by itself,’” in the form of a collective “we-subject” (Sartre 1976, pp.  281, 284–285, 1992, pp.  319, 321–322). Sartre concludes that such a “we-subject” is impossible. Sartre’s discussion closely follows Hegel’s exposition in the Phenomenology and the “Sketch of the Phenomenology” in Hegel’s Propadeutik der Philosophischen Wissenschaften, using the translation of both these works by Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman in their Hegel: Morceaux Choisis (Hegel 1939, pp. 171–179). Sartre begins from the point of view that each individual self is aware of its individual selfhood (its self-consciousness) in

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virtue of its opposition to other selves: “Each is absolutely for itself and individual insofar as it is opposed to the other” (Hegel 1939, p. 173; Sartre 1976, p. 281, 1992, p. 320), or as the Phenomenology has it, self-consciousness “is identical with itself through the exclusion of every Other” (Hegel 1939, p.  175; Sartre 1976, pp.  281, 1993, 319). As “the Other is the one who excludes me by being himself and whom I exclude by being myself ” (Sartre 1976, p. 281, 1992, p. 319), each self depends on the Other as that which it negates in order to be a self-consciousness (Sartre 1976, p. 282, 1992, p. 321). However, this initial mutual dependency is merely one of reciprocal negation. Things become more complicated when each self-consciousness seeks being recognized as a free subjectivity by the Other. As pure self-identity through exclusion of the Other, the self is certain of itself, but this certainty lacks truth, a truth it could attain only by becoming an independent object for itself (Sartre 1976, p. 281, 1992, p. 319; Hegel 1939, pp. 174–175). As the self is incapable of separating itself from its subjectivity such that it could regard it as an object, it can only be this object for another self, which regards it not as a simple material object, but as its Other self (Hegel 1939, p. 173; Sartre 1976, p. 281, 1992, p. 320). The truth, then, of each self ’s being-for-­ self depends on being recognized by the Other: “As I appear to the Other, so I am” (Sartre 1976, p. 282, 1992, p. 320), that is, a determinate and concrete subjectivity that appears to others in the world, objectively, as well as to itself. What each desires is to be recognized by “an other being,” that is, as another self, that is also “its own self ” (Hegel 1977, p. 111, 1986, p. 146; see Hegel 1939, p. 173). But since each regards itself as the “essential” self and the other as the “inessential” or ancillary self, each seeks to negate what is “other” and inessential in both itself and the other, namely, its attachment to its particular material and biological life (Hegel 1939, p. 175, 1977, p. 113, 1986, p. 148). Each, then, must risk its life to reveal itself as the pure negation of its objective and material life, as a pure freedom that transcends all the perishable moments of its life, and must pursue the death of the other in a “struggle to the death” (Hegel 1977, pp. 113–114, 1986, pp. 148–149; Sartre 1976, p. 282, 1992, pp. 320–321). The one who has not been able to detach himself from life, and so surrenders his freedom in order to continue living, is the slave, the inessential being who is bound to the inessential; the one who risks his life for freedom becomes the master, the essential and free self-consciousness. The slave, then, in surrendering his freedom to the master in exchange for his life being spared, is forced to recognize the master’s freedom as a self-­ determining subject who has negated what is merely natural and contingent within himself, and the master then enjoys the slave’s recognition of his freedom. It seems in that case that the master has attained the recognition he

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desired, and that through the slave’s recognition of his free self-consciousness, he now has consciousness of his freedom as an object for another, and so as an objective truth. However, as the slave himself is only a “person” who is dependent on the master for his life, and not a free and independent self-­ consciousness, this “unilateral and unequal” recognition is ultimately unsatisfactory: the master is not able to apprehend his own freedom and independence through the slave’s dependent, unfree consciousness (Hegel 1939, p. 177, 1977, pp. 116–117, 1986, pp. 152–153; Sartre 1976, p. 282, 1992, p. 321). The only recognition that could validly confer truth on the master’s self-consciousness would have to be that of another free self-consciousness, another master. The resolution of this problem, for Hegel, lies in the slave’s negating external nature through working on it. The worked upon thing is not thereby destroyed, the way an external thing is destroyed when it is consumed in order to satisfy a desire, and so the worked object preserves a relative independence in relation to the laborer, who in any case is working to satisfy the desire of the master rather than his own. Nevertheless, the thing worked upon is reshaped according to the laborer’s purposive activity, its new form thereby becoming an objective and material expression of the slave’s power of negation, that is, of his freedom (Hegel 1939, pp.  178–179, 1977, pp.  118–119, 1986, pp. 153–155). Through negating the existing form of the external object, the slave at one and the same time negates the otherness of the object and discovers in the worked form of the object “his own mind” (seiner eigener Sinn). Through the fear of death, “the absolute master” that caused the slave to become a slave, and through labour on behalf of his master, the slave negates natural and immediate being both within and outside himself and finds his being-for-self in the objective form that makes his subjective self-certainty into truth. In Hegel’s version, then, the struggle for recognition comes to an end through the labour of the slave that reshapes the external world according to human subjectivity, creating a “culture” that expresses the independence in general of humans in relation to nature. It is this that at last allows both master and slave to negate the natural and immediate being within themselves and to recognize each other’s freedom in a way that is genuinely mutual and equal (Hegel 1939, p. 177, 1977, p. 116, 1986, pp. 151–152; Sartre 1976, p. 282, 1992, p. 321). In Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation, the technological mastery of nature initiates a process that culminates in the universal mutual recognition of “a classless society comprising the whole of humanity” (Kojève 1946, pp. 354–356, 1979, p. 34). For Sartre, by contrast, this technological “mastery of the earth” remains only a symbol of the unity of individual

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consciousnesses, an ideal that might inspire some particular consciousnesses rather than constituting a real synthesis of subjectivities (Sartre 1976, p. 477, 1992, p. 550). In sum, the multiplicity of different consciousnesses cannot be overcome in Hegel’s “self-consciousness in general, which recognizes itself in other self-consciousnesses, is identical with them and with itself ” (Hegel 1939, p. 172; Sartre 1976, p. 282, 1992, p. 321). The separation and conflict among consciousnesses remain unsurpassable (Sartre 1976, pp.  288–289, 1992, pp. 328–329). It is not obvious why this should be or why Sartre does not follow Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to its resolution. For Sartre, the end of the master-slave dialectic is the same as the beginning, a relation in which each self-­consciousness defines itself as the negation of the Other, as if the intervening dialectical progression has not even happened. Part of the problem is that Sartre makes the dialectic into a matter of knowledge: not only am I unable to know the Other as the Other knows himself, but the Other is first encountered not as an object but as a subject given in my experience of being an object for another, such as when I experience myself as the object of someone else’s gaze (Sartre 1976, pp. 287–288, 302–307, 1992, pp. 326–27, 344–350). Such a subject is not another “self ” that is a part of my world, but a point of view beyond my world altogether that objectifies both me and the world in which I find myself, a subjectivity that sees me but which I cannot see. The only way in which two subjects can achieve a plane of reciprocity is when both of them become objects for the gaze of a third party, but in that case, they are united as objects, not subjects, and the reciprocity between them is not that of free mutual recognition, but imposed from above. Social categories of class, race, “generation,” gender and the like are examples of two or more consciousnesses being regarded as equivalent by a third party, but far from being a return of consciousness’ own being from otherness, these categories represent my alienation to the Other, and like the totality of consciousness’ future possibilities, are “unrealisables” (irréalisables), limits by which consciousness is defined but with which it can never coincide (Sartre 1976, pp. 581–589, 1992, pp. 671–680). Even this externally imposed reciprocity has its limits: the multiplicity of consciousnesses would not be a collection but a totality—to that extent Hegel is right—because each other (autrui) finds its being in the other (l’autre); but this Totality is such that it is in principle impossible to take the “point of view of the whole.” … Moreover, this totality, like that of the for-­ itself [consciousness], is a detotalized totality, because existence-for-others being

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the radical refusal of others, no totalitarian and unifying synthesis is possible. (Sartre 1976, p. 298, 1992, p. 339)

Rather than humanity being united in the common cultural enterprise of mastering nature, a single enterprise with a shared goal that would give everyone a common apprehension of the whole, there are only individuals and groups whose differing aims “detotalize” the totality of which they form the parts (Sartre 1976, pp. 292–296, 464–465, 470–474; 1992, pp. 332–337, 534–537, 543–555). Hegel, according to Sartre, is guilty of “ontological optimism” for relying on a totality assumed as already given when Hegel relies on the point of view of the whole that resolves conflicting points of view by going beyond what these points of view are “for themselves” to what they are “in themselves” or in their truth as moments of Spirit, that is, “the unity of different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Sartre 1976, pp. 288, 298, 1992, pp. 328, 339; Hegel 1977, p. 110, 1986, p. 145). Such a unified whole could only be constituted from without, by an absolutely transcendent and non-human point of view, and never from within (Sartre 1976, p. 474, 1983, p. 388, 1992, p. 547). Hegel has helped himself to a point of view that is impossible for humans to reach. Despite Sartre’s later declaration, in his Marxist phase, that history can be a single totalization even in the absence of a single subject, “one totalization without one totalizer” (Sartre 1982, p.  817; see pp.  35, 64, 817–818), he never really abandons the view articulated in his post-war Notebooks for an Ethics that “History is not the history of one freedom, but that of an indefinite plurality of freedoms” who totalize it differently and give it different meanings (Sartre 1983, pp.  64–66, 74–75, 144). Even in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre asserts that “we must abandon any idea of humanity historialising itself in the development of a single temporalisation which began with the ‘first humans’ and will end with ‘the last’” (Sartre 1960, p. 633, 1982, p. 666); humanity treated as one Man is an illusion. In his final work, The Family Idiot, he similarly writes that “Humanity is not, and it does not correspond diachronically to any concept. … History is perpetually finite, that is, composed of broken sequences, each of which is the (not mechanically but dialectically) deviated continuation of the previous one”; a previous generation would not recognize itself in the later continuation of enterprises that nevertheless “never ceased to be theirs” (Sartre 1988, pp. 433–436). When the future of the previous generation becomes the past of the current one, its meaning changes into one the previous generation would disavow. For example, what was once

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called “nation-building” and introducing the benefits of civilization to “backwards” peoples is now, in countries such as Canada, understood as the wrongs of colonization for which the Canadian government and people must try to effect redress and reconciliation. Even were human history to come to an end through some catastrophe, this diachronic “deviation” of the projects of earlier generations by later ones would never cease (Sartre 1982, pp. 666–668, 1985, pp. 321–326, 1983, pp. 20, 85–86, 114, 142–143): “each historical conjuncture is relative and the absolute is immanent to the relative … [the relative absolute] is the way in which each person and each concrete collectivity lives its history” (Sartre 1983, p. 437), and there is no way of superseding this relative absolute from some higher standpoint (Sartre 1948, pp. 15, 243, 251–255, 327). Only if in fact humans all adopted the same project would they all totalize the world in the same way such that a totality of particular totalizations would be possible, but for the most part, Sartre dismisses such a unifying project as a fiction. The exception is his claim in the Critique of Dialectical Reason that the project of humanity is that of overcoming scarcity. As we shall see in the next section, however, even in that work, things are not so simple. This emphasis on how different subjects live their experience points to the fundamental reason why Sartre’s version of the master-slave dialectic ends where it began: with a plurality of opposed consciousnesses. For, in addition to accusing Hegel of “ontological optimism,” Sartre accuses him of idealism, of reducing being to knowing (connaissance), and “Here, as everywhere, we ought to oppose Kierkegaard, who represents the claims of the individual as such, to Hegel” (Sartre 1976, p. 285, 1992, p. 324; cf. Hegel 1939, p. 17). The being of human subjectivity, for Sartre, is knowable neither by oneself nor by another (Sartre 1976, p. 287, 1992, p. 327). When consciousness tries to know itself by making itself an object of its own awareness, by that very act it separates itself as knowing consciousness from the consciousness it makes into an object for itself. There is no common ground between the object I am for myself and my opaque and unknowable being-for-self, let alone between the other’s subjectivity and the object that presents itself to my consciousness through which I try to grasp the other’s subjectivity (Sartre 1976, pp. 286–287, 1992, pp. 326–327). A mutual recognition of freedoms is impossible insofar as freedom itself, the pure activity that endures throughout the perishable and transitory contents of experience, is ungraspable. If knowledge of one’s own freedom is impossible, then knowledge of another’s freedom will prove equally elusive. Sartre is so intent on making each individual consciousness “the radical refusal of the other” that he seems to have forgotten Hegel’s point about the

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objectification of freedom in the product of labour. It is through the products of labour that freedom becomes knowable as an object. In fact, it is just this point that Sartre takes up between 1945 and 1960, as he increasingly turns to the Marxist notion of praxis (purposive and transformative human action) as his “guiding thread” along the path to totality.

5

Praxis and Totalization

I noted in the previous section that in Being and Nothingness, Sartre relied exclusively on Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman’s translation of excerpts from Hegel (1939). Lefebvre was the leading Marxist philosopher of the period from 1930 to 1960 and sought to bring about a synthesis of Marx and Hegel in order to grapple with the problem of totality and totalization. For Lefebvre, the notion of praxis is key. Building on Hegel’s analysis of labour as the externalization of human subjectivity (desire, will, thought) in matter, Lefebvre declares that praxis, the purposive human engagement in the material and social world by an embodied subjectivity, is “both the starting point and the end point of dialectical materialism,” a synthetic unity of consciousness and matter (Lefebvre 1939, p.  95). Praxis, as something that is both mind and matter at the outset, should thus take on the dialectical role that Hegel had assigned to speculative thought (Lefebvre 1939, p. 49). Divorced from its external material expression in praxis, negation results in a contentless “absolute nothingness” (Lefebvre 1939, pp. 37–38) and an idealism that can at best grasp the intelligible form of activity, not its real content (Lefebvre 1939, p. 103). By contrast, the concrete interactions between subjectivity and matter in praxis produce a dialectic of human activity and its products (Lefebvre 1939, pp. 74–78, 92–95, 102–119). This dialectic produces real contradictions (“division, destruction, annihilation, death”) and a painful consciousness of contradictions that drives humans to resolve those contradictions through action rather than through mere thought (Lefebvre 1939, pp. 19, 30–31; Lefebvre and Guterman 1938, pp. 20–25, 61). As the divisions that separate humans from each other and from their productive powers are created by praxis, they can be resolved only by praxis (Lefebvre and Guterman 1938, pp. 66–67; Lefebvre 1939, pp. 140–145). Lefebvre, then, praises Hegelianism for being “dominated by the notion of Totality,” an “organic totality” that integrates all forms of human experience (Hegel 1939, pp. 8–9), but it is Marx who grasps the real, concrete totality by basing the dialectic on “the relations of man to nature, that is, on forces of production and social relations … in social praxis, in daily life and in the life of

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the masses” (Lefebvre and Guterman 1936, pp.  57–58; cf. Marx 1934, pp. 28–29). The dialectic begins with a felt organic need leading to human activity working on matter to satisfy those needs (Lefebvre 1939, pp. 51, 100; Lefebvre and Guterman 1938, pp.  13, 52), transcending material givens towards human ends; its contingent and material origin gives the dialectic an openness towards the future that is precluded by the rational necessity governing the conceptual relations in Hegel’s system (Marx 1934, p. 17; Lefebvre 1939, p. 38, 1946, p. 90; Lefebvre and Guterman, p. 27). Yet, as long as social divisions persist, the products of praxis are both the embodiment and deviation of practical intentions, leading to both fulfillment and alienation (Lefebvre and Guterman 1936, pp.  178–179, 253–254; Lefebvre 1939, pp. 52–54, 74–78, 92–95, 102–117). Alienation can only be overcome by a praxis that would give us mastery over ourselves by changing the world: eliminating a class system under which human beings are dominated by the commodities produced by their own labour (Lefebvre 1939, pp. 45–53, 102, 149, 140–142; Lefebvre and Guterman 1934, pp. 24–25, 1936, pp. 180–193, 1938, pp. 25–27, 62). Only then does there arise “the free individual in the free community” (Lefebvre 1939, p.  58), the “Total Man” in full possession of himself and his world (Lefebvre and Guterman 1938, p. 98). Lefebvre’s theory of praxis clearly had a formidable impact on Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. We know that Lefebvre and Guterman’s book of Hegel selections formed the source for all of Sartre’s citations of Hegel in Being and Nothingness; he read Lefebvre’s Dialectical Materialism (Lefebvre 1939) no later than 1949 (Sartre 1949, p. 165). In the Critique, the whole and its dialectic are constituted by a totalizing activity that mediates among parts such that “each part is mediated by all in its relation to each and each is a mediation among all” (Sartre 1960, p. 140n, 1982, p. 48n). Yet Sartre still begins with the individual: “The dialectic, if it exists, can only be the totalization of concrete totalizations brought about by a multiplicity of totalizing singularities” (Sartre 1960, p. 132, 1982, p. 37), the result of the interactions among various ways in which individuals totalize their environment and their materially mediated relations with each other. The totalizing activity in question is none other than the praxis of organic individuals who work upon external matter in order to overcome the material contradiction between a need (or lack) and its satisfaction, the need itself being “the first totalizing relation between that material being, a human being, and the material ensemble of which he is a part” (Sartre 1960, pp. 165–166, 1982, p. 80). The entire material environment is constituted as “the total field of possibilities of satisfaction” that would make possible the continued organic

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life of the individual (ibid.). In order to act upon inert external materiality, the human body has to make use of its own material inertia; it makes itself into a material tool capable of acting on inert matter. Thus, “instrumentality, purpose and labour are given together” in the movement through which the human body uses its own inertia to vanquish the inertia of things (Sartre 1960, p. 167, 1982, p. 82). This transcendence of material inertia and lack through embodied human action is praxis, which totalizes the surrounding world into “a unity of materials and means”— “a field of instrumentality” or “practical field”—in light of the aim of satisfying a need (Sartre, 1960, pp. 171, 199, 1982, pp. 87, 121). It is through this totalizing praxis that the individuals comprehend both their situations and themselves: dialectical comprehension “is simply the translucidity of praxis to itself ” (Sartre 1960, p.  160, 1982, p.  74). Any organic, supra-individual agent or transcendent point of view is ruled out (Sartre 1985, pp. 280–81); the connection among points of view is simply the effect of each individual totalization being connected to other totalizations through the mediation of the physical environment and its laws, not the result of the totalization effected by some transcendent third party observer (Sartre 1985, pp. 311, 317). As the effects of the connections among totalizing praxes sharing a single practical field need not correspond to the aims of any of the agents, the effects cannot be imputed to the praxis of some supra-individual, collective subject in the manner of Hegel’s Spirit. In the Critique, the clearest example demonstrating this concerns Chinese peasants who cleared away forests in order to provide themselves with more arable land. The result, however, was deforestation that in turn led to soil erosion and silted up rivers which then flooded the previously arable valley land. In the end, there was even less arable land than before, and so the peasants’ actions achieved the exact opposite of what was intended. This phenomenon of “counter-finality” results from the effects of different actions being connected to each other through their effects on the material environment as determined by determinate physical laws. The peasants’ intent was not to deprive others or themselves of land, but the inertia of matter connecting their separate practices led to this “deformation” of their intentions in the overall result (see Sartre 1982, pp.  70–71, 174–175, 250–256). The duality of the material separation of agents together with the material connection of the effects of their actions results in this first alienation of praxis from the agent, whereby worked matter, instead of embodying the agent’s desires and purposes, turns against the agent. Sartre’s general term for the material products of past human praxis is “the practico-inert” (Sartre 1960,

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pp. 310–311, 1982, pp. 258–259). To illustrate the alienating effects of the practico-inert, Sartre uses the example of people queued up for a bus. The potential riders are united by a common interest in getting on the bus but separated by their differing ultimate aims and destinations and the scarcity of places on the bus (there might not be room for everyone) (Sartre 1960, pp.  280, 308–309, 312–314; 1982, pp.  221, 256–257, 260–263). Rather than being united by a common project, the commuters are united “from the outside” by the already constituted practico-inert: not just the bus, but also the transit system of which it is a part, the rules and local customs governing queuing and bus-riding. All these relatively inert materializations of previous praxis prepare the behavior of the commuters “in advance” of any intention they might form on their own account (Sartre 1960, p. 317, 1982, p. 267). Rather than collective agency, then, their externally constituted unity is experienced as collective heteronomy: “Everyone is the same as the Others in so far as he is Other than himself ” (Sartre 1960, p. 311, 1982, p. 260). Instead of finding oneself in the Other, what one finds is the Other in oneself. Because of the fixed and limited number of places on the bus, the commuters find themselves in an implicitly antagonistic relationship, whether they want to be or not (Sartre 1960, pp. 280–281, 1982, p. 221). This antagonism is simply “internalized scarcity” as determined by the practico-inert that governs their praxis and “makes everyone appear to the Other as Other” precisely in virtue of their all being “the same” relative to the practico-inert means through which their praxis is defined (Sartre 1960, p. 224, 1982, p. 151). This social collectivity (collectif) determined from the outside by the practico-inert is the contrary of a group acting in concert in pursuit of a common aim (Sartre 1960, pp.  308, 319, 1982, pp.  255, 269). Since their “unity” is passively undergone rather than actively sought (Sartre 1960, p. 308, 1982, p. 255), their resulting behaviour is “passive activity, active passivity” (Sartre 1960, p.  252, 1982, p.  185), “a praxis without an author” (Sartre 1960, p.  235, 1982, p. 166) constituting a practical field “determined on the basis of the Elsewhere of all Elsewheres” rather than the here-and-now praxis of a living individual (Sartre 1960, p. 363, 1982, p. 324). The name Sartre gives to such passively determined and alienated social groupings is “the series” (Sartre 1960, pp. 307–319, 1982, pp. 255–269). Sartre is explicitly attempting to give his own existentialist account of Marx’s theory of alienation under capitalism, in which social divisions created by the private ownership of the means of production result in each person being “the product of their product” instead of seeing in their product the material externalization of their desires, ideas and purposes. Insofar as scarcity is determined by the inert results of past praxis, both it and its internalization

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as antagonism are produced (like the bus and the transit system), rather than given, and whatever has been made by past praxis can be unmade through further praxis. The overcoming of scarcity would then be the only possible basis for the constitution of a collective we-subject in which each recognizes itself in the praxis of the others and in the collective product of their collective praxis (Sartre 1982, pp. 123–125, 137, 151, 701, 792–793, 805, 815, 1985, p. 23). Like Marx, Sartre gives a privileged role to the proletariat in the project of overcoming scarcity and mutual antagonism: it is only the revolutionary oppressed who rise up against their oppressive conditions and try to change the world who are truly united by a common aim, whereas their antagonists are merely passively united in opposition to the revolutionary project, and so remain stuck in externally determined “passive activity” (Sartre 1982, pp. 792–793). In that all activity is in relation to external circumstances, it appears on the face of it that Sartre’s distinction between revolutionary active praxis and anti-­ revolutionary passive praxis is arbitrary. However, Sartre offers an account of how the transition from the passively determined series to active group praxis takes place that provides some justification for this distinction. The “sudden resurrection of freedom” in what Sartre calls “the group-in-fusion” (Sartre 1960, p. 425, 1982, p. 401), “which tends to turn the group into pure praxis by trying to eliminate all forms of inertia from it” (Sartre 1960, p. 307, 1982, p. 255), takes place when not changing the existing conditions amounts to “the impossibility of living” (Sartre 1960, pp. 384–385, 1982, pp. 349–350), that is, when everyone in the series is faced with an urgent threat of death requiring an immediate response. Sartre’s famous example is the transformation of the inhabitants of the Quartier St. Antoine in Paris into the revolutionary mob that stormed the Bastille fortress on July 14, 1789 (Sartre 1960, pp. 386–389, 1982, pp. 351–355). The army of King Louis XVI is due to arrive, ostensibly to keep the peace, and has negatively totalized the inhabitants as potential trouble-makers who are to be contained within a confined space. Rumours circulate among the crowd, inciting individuals to try to save themselves by acting in isolation, “running in the streets, shouting, forming gatherings, burning down the gates of toll houses” (Sartre 1960, pp.  343, 388, 1982, pp.  300, 353). Far from being a concerted action, each tries to save his own skin, at the expense of others if necessary, and refuses to be a means to anyone else’s ends (Sartre 1960, p. 192, 1982, p. 113). Their common fate, as negatively totalized from the outside as potential objects of destruction by the king’s troops, does not in and of itself lead to solidarity (Sartre 1960, p. 388, 1982, pp. 353–354).

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At some point, however, individuals begin to discover that being an isolated individual, not united with others in a common praxis aiming at a collective goal, presents a real and present risk of death (Sartre 1960, p.  401, 1982, p. 369). Isolation—as experienced in the series—means death, but if each person joins a group of ninety-nine others, then each becomes the hundredth member through which everyone else becomes the hundredth member as well: “We are one hundred strong” (Sartre 1960, p. 424, 1982, p. 400). Now the entire group (“one hundred strong”) is apprehended by each agent as a means to the common goal of all of them. Instead of “every person for himself,” a situation in which each regards others as either means or obstacles and refuses to be a means, there is now a “common praxis in response to a common danger” that “allows me to find myself in the Other as myself” (Sartre 1960, p. 418, 1982, p. 392). Everyone is both a willing means and an end of the praxis of all and each. When, in the face of an external danger that renders survival as an isolated individual impossible, individuals join together in a counter-attack against the king’s troops, they are reacting “in a new way: not as an individual, not as an Other, but as an individual incarnation of the common person,” that is, as a new kind of agent correlative to a common praxis (Sartre 1960, pp. 390–391, 1982, p. 357). Instead of an externalized constituted unity, as with the bus queue, the group emerges as an “internalized multiplicity”: each agent projects himself towards a common objective constituted through a common coming-together into a group in which the success of each depends on the success of all (Sartre 1960, pp.  385, 416, 430, 1982, pp.  350, 390, 408). United to others by a common praxis rather than by an external object (Sartre 1960, p. 406, 1982, p. 377), I “find myself in the Other as myself” (Sartre 1960, p. 418, 1982, p. 392), and the Other does the same: “It is not that I am myself in the Other; it is that in praxis, there is no Other, there are only several myselves” (Sartre 1960, p. 420, 1982, pp. 394–395). The Other is no longer my Other-Being but my own freedom, only “over there” rather than “here, now” (Sartre 1960, p. 418, 1982, p. 392). Whereas the series was nowhere in that it is always elsewhere, the group is always here insofar as the others who are elsewhere incarnate the same “here” of a common praxis (Sartre 1960, pp. 419–420, 1982, p. 394). But this unity does not dissolve the separation of individuals that makes them a multiplicity, that is, a unified group. In joining a group so that we may be one-hundred strong, I constitute myself as the 100th of the Other and every Other does the same, but rather than being a direct relation between two individuals, this reciprocity is mediated by the group praxis that makes each individual a “third”: a particular instantiation of group praxis, a

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representative and agent not of his own particular goals, but of those of the group (Sartre 1960, pp. 404–405, 1982, pp. 374–375). “The third is no longer the Other nor is he the identical (my identical): but he comes to the group as I do; he is the same as me” (Sartre 1960, p. 406, 1982, p. 377). In short, the Other is the same insofar as both of us have determined ourselves and our praxis in relation to the group such that our action, instead of being merely that of an individual, is part of the praxis of a group that is “one hundred strong.” In this way, “my praxis is in itself the praxis of the group totalized here by me in so far as every other myself totalizes it in another here which is the same” (Sartre 1960, p.  419, 1982, p.  394; see Flynn 1981, 1984, 1997, 2014). However, the only way in which my praxis can be the “here, now” praxis of the others in the group and their praxis can be my praxis “over there” is if we are materially separated. Being “one hundred strong” requires that the praxis of the group does not depend on any one agent taken in isolation but is distributed across different agents occupying different locations; in that way, the numerical separation of agents becomes a quality of the common praxis, a means to the ends of the group (Sartre 1960, p. 424, 1982, p. 400). If the fusion were complete and resulted in a “hyperorganism,” an indissoluble we-­ subject, then the material-spatial dispersion in which the strength of the group resides would be annulled. Even the group-in-fusion must retain “its original structure as a detotalized totality” in which the distribution of agency over a multiplicity of agents corresponds to “a temporal dislocation of the totalization” rather than the unitary temporal totalization of a single agent (Sartre 1960, p.  563, 1982, p.  577). The alternative, complete totalization into a totality-object, could only occur through the praxis of an agent external to the group rather than reciprocally constituted from within it (Sartre 1960, p. 565, 1982, p. 579). Only when I find my freedom in an Other, who, despite coming to the group in the same way that I do, remains separate and capable of independent agency, does the group achieve an internally determined praxis “of which anyone could be considered the author” and in which the sovereignty of decision-making is distributed across all its members (Gavi et al.1974, p. 350). This “detotalized totality” of the “group-in-fusion” is the closest Sartre comes to a totalized and unified we-subject. However, as we have just seen, this “high-temperature” fusion (Sartre 1960, p. 394, 1982, p. 361) can never be total. Indeed, since the efficacy of group praxis is a matter of turning the material separation of seriality into the advantage of being “one hundred strong,” it is only the passivity of numerical distinctness that is transformed from “serial impotence” into a means of group praxis, but numerical

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distinctness is not thereby annihilated (see Sartre 1960, pp. 325, 401, 1982, pp. 277, 370). The seeds are thus sown for the subsequent fragmentation of the groups into “factions,” as different individuals may come to interpret the ends and means of group praxis in different and conflicting ways (Sartre 1960, pp. 653–657, 1982, pp. 690–697). Since group praxis is a process in which agency is distributed, no single individual can exercise complete control over it (Sartre 1985, pp. 316–320), and through conflicting interpretations of how the praxis should go forward, agents may again find themselves with a result that nobody wanted (Sartre 1960, pp.  631, 659, 1982, pp.  663, 698). Revolution begets the Terror, which begets the Thermidorian reaction, which begets the Directory, which begets Napoleon’s dictatorship. The material inertia and numerical multiplicity of agents is a means that again “deviates” the end and produces counter-finality. Only a total fusion of subjects could avert such an outcome, but at the price of losing the power of being “one hundred strong.” Pure groups and pure praxis never exist; “there is never a totality, but only a developing totalization” of “pluri-dimensional reciprocities” (Sartre 1960, pp. 665, 666, 1982, pp. 705, 708). The totalized totality, as in the case of consciousness in Being and Nothingness, remains only an ideal limit that is never actually reached.

6

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Hegel makes the end of the historical, dialectical development of Spirit the Whole with which his System of knowledge begins. In a 1964 essay on Kierkegaard, “The Singular Universal” (Sartre 1972, pp.  152–190, 1974, pp. 141–169), Sartre makes Kierkegaard’s end, his death, or “the person envisaged as non-knowledge (non-savoir),” the scandal through which we can think “the real relation between man to his being” as “lived, in History, as a transhistorical relationship” (Sartre 1972, p. 168, 1974, p. 153). Rather than being reducible either to an object of historical knowledge, as “a man of his times,” or to a category that Hegel’s system had marked out in advance (“the unhappy consciousness”), Kierkegaard, as he lives his condition with all the ignorance and failure his objective limitations entailed, reveals “the absolute in the relative” (Sartre 1972, p. 171, 1974, p. 155). Instead of being “a dialectical incarnation of the universal moment,” as Hegel would have it, Kierkegaard experienced his deepest reality and the internal necessity of his fate as “the accidental outcome of his facticity,” as the necessity born of “contingent, chance determinations which Hegelian rationalism did not take into account” (Sartre 1972, pp. 172–174, 1974, pp. 156–157). “There can be no historical

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absolute that is not rooted in chance; because of the necessity of [the anchorage of the individual in his time], there can be no incarnation of this universal other than in the irreducible opacity of the singular,” chance lived as necessity (Sartre 1972, pp. 174–175, 1974, pp. 157–158). “The living Kierkegaard,” says Sartre, lived and lives on not as an object of historical knowledge, but as a contingent and opaque existence that eludes the knowledge of both Kierkegaard’s contemporaries and posterity; such an existence can only be lived in inwardness, in passion, through the temporalization and transcendence of the given towards a meaning that is synonymous with human freedom (Sartre 1972, pp. 179, 185, 1974, pp. 161, 165). “The foundation of History,” rather than being the necessary positing of some logical category, “is the freedom in each man”: “I myself am historical to the extent that others also make history and make me, but I am a transhistorical absolute by virtue of what I make of what they have made, by what I make of what they have made of me and will make of me later on—that is, by virtue of my historiality” (Sartre 1972, p.  179, 1974, p.  161). Because “the individual expresses the universal in singular terms, he singularizes the whole of History” as both the necessity resulting from objective and external determinations of his existence (time period, class, race, gender, social norms, etc.) and as the adventure of his singular way of living, transcending and historialising those externally determined factors (Sartre 1972, p. 162, 1974, p. 181). History, then, has no unique beginning, but begins anew with each individual who freely historialises the objective and universal determinants of existence within which he finds himself, thereby making himself “an irreducible existent, a freedom that has become [his] necessity” (Sartre 1972, p. 187, 1974, pp. 166–167). Contrary to Hegel, temporalization, subjectivity itself, is a transhistorical dimension of History that makes it possible to enter into the subjectivity of others—living or dead—as transhistorical absolutes that we can comprehend “only at the very level where each of us is an incomparable absolute” (Sartre 1972, p.  188, 1974, p.  167). At that level, Kierkegaard remains living: our contemporary, in just the way that Kierkegaard thought that Jesus is our contemporary. In this essay, Sartre returns to the position first enunciated forty years earlier in Being and Nothingness and which I have already cited: “Here, as everywhere, we ought to oppose Kierkegaard, who represents the claims of the individual as such, to Hegel” (Sartre 1976, p. 285, 1992, p. 324). Even during Sartre’s Marxist phase, Kierkegaard remains the champion of “the unsurpassable opacity of lived experience” and of “the irreducibility of the real to thought” (Sartre 1960, pp. 18–20, 1968, pp. 8–13). As Sartre puts it in The Family Idiot, each person is “a singular universal,” “totalized and thereby

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universalized by his epoch” which “he retotalizes in reproducing himself in it as a singularity” (Sartre 1971–1973, vol. 1, p. ix). If history begins with the individual understood as a chance and contingent singularity, then it is bound to be detotalized, forever dislocated by a multiplicity of intersecting individual retotalizations and historializations. Each individual, in the inwardness of her existence, is a transhistorical absolute, the adventure of living the necessity of her own contingency, and can be understood—at best—through an empathetic understanding based on the adventure of one’s own existence, not through some supra-individual and transcendent viewpoint. In the end, Sartre refuses the Hegelian Whole or totality that nevertheless operated as the horizon of his thought and represented an ideal of completion and fulfillment. In the absence of a single collective subject that could totalize the whole of history into a coherent narrative with one meaning, there are only individual subjects and their often-contradictory praxes. Each praxis is a partial determination of a never-completed whole (Sartre 1985, p. 308) that would be detotalized into a plurality of divergent significations (Sartre 1985, p. 131). At a deeper level, dialectical reason can grasp praxes only in relation to their results, whether those results are counter-final or a successful realization of the agent’s intention, but not in relation to those aspects of the lived experience of the agent that are without positive results or material externalization: uncertainty, waiting, anxiety, failure (Sartre 1983, pp.  61, 305–314, 483). For all that, Sartre does not seem all that unhappy about not being able to attain the totality that his philosophy constantly sought. Not only did the totalized totality remain impossible from the start to finish of Sartre’s philosophy, but a complete totalization would have subsumed the lived reality of the individual and reduced it to an objective category of thought. Better, from Sartre’s point of view, lived existence with all its failures and self-ignorance than a totality that would subsume or destroy human freedom and subjectivity, or worse, “liquidate” particular individuals (Sartre 1960, p.  28, 1968, pp. 27–28). From that standpoint, the unhappy consciousness, with its internal divisions and painful disharmonies, is preferable to the alternative. A love that never attains its object is a love that never ends.

Bibliography Flynn, Thomas R. 1981. Mediated Reciprocity and the Genius of the Third. In The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, 345–370. La Salle, IL: Open Court.

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———. 1984. Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1997. Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, vol. 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2014. Sartre: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gavi, Philippe, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Pierre Victor. 1974. On a raison de se révolter. Paris: Gallimard. Hegel, G.W.F. 1939. Morceaux choisis. Ed. and Trans. Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1977. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.  V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1986. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michels. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1988. Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Trans. Leo Rauch. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kojève, Alexandre. 1946. Hegel, Marx et le christianisme. Critique 3–4 (1946): 339–366. ———. 1979. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Ed. Raymond Queneau. Paris: Gallimard. Lefebvre, Henri. 1939. La matérialisme dialectique. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1946. Le marxisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lefebvre, Henri, and Norbert Guterman. 1934. “Préface” to Karl Marx (1934). In Morceaux choisis. Ed. Paul Nizan and Jean Duret, Introd. Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman, 7–32. ———. 1936. La conscience mystifiée. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1938. “Introduction” to Vladimir Lenin (1938). In Cahiers sur la dialectique de Hegel. Ed. and Trans. Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman, 1–100. Paris: Gallimard. Marx, Karl. 1934. Morceaux choisis. Ed. by Paul Nizan and Jean Duret, Introduction by Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman. Rowley, Hazel. 2005. Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: HarperCollins. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. Situations II: Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1949. Situations III. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1960. Critique de la raison dialectique, vol. 1, Théorie des ensembles pratiques. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1968. Search for a Method. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1971–1973. L’Idiot de la famille. Vols. 1–3. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1972. L’universal singulier. In Situations IX, 152–190. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1974. Kierkegaard: the Singular Universal. In Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism. Trans. John Matthews, 141–169. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1976. L’être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard.

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———. 1981–1993. The Family Idiot, 1821–1857. Vols. 1–5. Trans. Carol Cosman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1982. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol. 1. Trans. Alan Sheridan Smith. London: Verso. ———. 1983. Cahiers pour une morale. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1985. Critique de la raison dialectique, vol. 2, L’intelligibilité de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1988. L’Idiot de la famille. Vol. 3. Ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1992. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. Wahl, Jean. 1926. Note sur les démarches de la pensée de Hegel. Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 101: 281–289. ———. 1927. Commentaire d’un passage de la Phénoménologie de Hegel. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 34: 441–471. ———. 1929. Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel. Paris: Rieder. ———. 1944. Existence humaine et transcendance. Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière. ———. 2017. Jean Wahl: Transcendence and the Concrete, ed. Alan D. Schrift and Alexander Moore. New York: Fordham University Press.

21 Women, Jews, and Other Others: The Influence of Hegel on Beauvoir and Levinas Claire Katz

In a footnote in the Introduction to her 1949 landmark book, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir takes Emmanuel Levinas to task for his use of the feminine as other in his 1947 book, Time and the Other, a lecture course he gave in 1946–1947 at Jean Wahl’s invitation. It is worth quoting the passage at length. She writes, E. Levinas expresses this idea most explicitly in his essay Temps et l’Autre. “Is there not a case in which otherness, alterity [altérité], unquestionably marks the nature of a being, as its essence, an instance of otherness not consisting purely and simply in the opposition of two species of the same genus? I think that the feminine represents the contrary in its absolute sense, this contrariness being in no wise affected by any relation between it and its correlative and thus remaining absolutely other. Sex is not a certain specific difference … no more is the sexual difference a mere contradiction. Nor does this difference lie in the duality of two complementary terms, for two complementary terms imply a pre-­existing whole. Otherness reaches its full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning.” I suppose that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware of her own consciousness, or ego. But it is striking that he deliberately takes a man’s point of view, disregarding the reciprocity of subject and object. When he writes that woman is mystery, he implies that

C. Katz (*) Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_21

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she is mystery for man. Thus his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege. (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 6, n. 3)1

Beauvoir had just spent the past several years writing an eight-hundred page book in which she details how the history of philosophy has not only consistently cast woman as other but also did so in negative terms. Although we cannot be sure exactly when she read Time and the Other, it would have needed to be between 1947, when Time and the Other was published, and 1948.2 At this time, Levinas was not well known. More significantly, this lecture course was the earliest work in the development of his ethical project. His concept of the ethical relation was not yet named and would not be fully developed until Totality and Infinity, published in 1961. Taking all of these circumstances into account, we should not be surprised that Beauvoir scolds him for doing what all the men before him have done: casting woman as other where the other is negative. In spite of how we might understand why she responds to him as she does, we can still conclude that Beauvoir nonetheless gets Levinas’s project wrong (Katz 2003). From 1933–1939, Alexander Kojève gave a series of lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Those in attendance of these lectures included Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, Jacques Lacan, Raymond Aron, and Eric Weil (Lilla 2003, p. 122).3 Scholars doubt that Jean-Paul Sartre attended these lectures but rather absorbed the influence of Kojève’s lectures through conversations in these intellectual circles. The same is true for Simone de Beauvoir. Although we can speculate that Levinas read Hegel at least in graduate school, since he wrote his thesis on Husserl with Maurice Pradines as his thesis director, one biography notes that he attended the Kojève lectures (Malka 2006, p. 148).4 In 1940 while studying Hegel in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Beauvoir realized that Hegel’s structure of the Master-Slave provided the theoretical framework for her existential insight about how consciousnesses interact with each other (Tidd 2009, p. 60). Significantly, Levinas was not reading Hegel at the Bibliothèque Nationale as Beauvoir was. Rather, a translator for the French Army whose unit was captured in 1940, Levinas spent 1940 until the end of the war in a German labor camp for French officers. It was here that Levinas returned to Hegel—most likely the Phenomenology (Malka 2006, p.  71). Levinas returned to reading Hegel again after the war. This time his study of Hegel was accompanied by a deep study of Judaism and, in particular, the Talmud (Malka 2006, p. 153). Developing themes he undertook before the war, in particular, his philosophical attempt to find an “escape” from the

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identification of the self with either materialism or idealism (Levinas 2003), he published Existence and Existents in 1947. But otherwise during this period, Levinas’s writing stopped and his thinking developed. Totality and Infinity, a mature work on his radical ethics, in which he demonstrates a disruption of Hegelian totality, would be published in 1961. Both Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir are pre-occupied with the other. Although Levinas has been referred to as “the philosopher of the other” (Hand 1989, p. 294), Beauvoir could easily share this title with him.5 For Beauvoir, at least in The Second Sex, the other is woman, the one who lacks subjectivity, who is never viewed as wholly human. For Levinas, the Other holds a privileged position, the one who calls me to ethical obligation. Although Beauvoir was a bourgeois, white European very much aware of her privileged position, she was also a woman, leaving her politically marginal in spite of any other privilege she might have enjoyed. Levinas, was an Eastern European man, naturalized as a French citizen, but he was also Jewish and lived through Nazi occupied Europe, spending five years in a German P.O.W. labor camp from 1940–1945. These experiences influenced the way each approached the concept of the other, especially their desire to reconcile the themes of recognition from, threat by, and responsibility for the other with a history of existential philosophy. My aim in this chapter is not to reconcile these two ways of characterizing the other; rather my aim is to situate the unique position of each philosopher, writing from a politically marginal position, both influenced by a French reading of a Hegelian account of the Other.6 Levinas is not typically included in works on existentialism although he squarely fits into this school of thought, even as he diverges or expands it both with his background in phenomenology and his inclusion of Jewish texts. The themes with which he concerns himself—freedom, responsibility, recognition, identity, the Other—are existential themes and his interlocutors, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche to Sartre to Buber, are existential thinkers. The expansive relationship both philosophers have to German Idealism would be impossible to contain within one essay, even if this essay focused solely on one thinker. The themes that permeate existentialism are rooted in the philosophers German Idealism comprises, but most specifically Kant and Hegel. Even considering those thinkers, the myriad themes that influenced Beauvoir and Levinas could not be covered in a single essay, for example, Levinas’s 1961 book Totality and Infinity can certainly be read as a disruption to the Hegelian system. Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity attempts to reconcile the individual’s freedom, which is fundamental to existentialist ethics with freedom of the other.

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This chapter examines how Levinas and Beauvoir, who were both reading Hegel in the early 1940s and whose work during that decade was deeply influenced by that engagement, try to respond to a Hegelian structure of identity and recognition.7 In both cases, the philosophers attempt to reconcile Hegel’s structure of the other as a threat with a view that we also have a responsibility for that other.8 Although scholars argue that neither philosopher completely overcomes Hegel, and some scholars argue that their projects fail in this regard (Purvis 2003; Shuster 2018), I would submit that their engagement with and respective responses to Hegel illuminate the complexity of intersubjective relations. In Beauvoir’s case, The Second Sex demonstrates the near impossibility for women to achieve a relationship of mutual recognition with men; in Levinas’s case, Jewish identity requires him to go outside this structure of self-­ other even as his radical ethics, wholly defined by our responsibility for the Other underscores the fragility of ethical life, which is always situated on a precipice staring at the possibility of war.9

1

Woman as Other

Ursula Tidd, a biographer of Simone de Beauvoir, tells a story that Beauvoir’s first encounter with “the other,” was her younger sister, Hélène, “against whom she began to define herself.” (Tidd 2009, p. 18). The suggestion here is that with her position in the family threatened by the birth of another girl, Beauvoir’s philosophical analysis of the other is deeply rooted in a personal experience (Tidd 2009, p. 18). Although Beauvoir’s most famous work on the other, The Second Sex, describes the other as woman in relationship to man, Tidd’s account suggests that Beauvoir initially experienced the threat of the other in a more universalized way prior to understanding or theorizing the relationship as one specifically between men and women. The other for Beauvoir is that person who threatens my place in the world. This initial way of viewing the other does not however undermine the fact that Beauvoir’s insight was to recognize the unique position that women occupy within this relationship—they are, according to Beauvoir, the quintessential other. We see Beauvoir’s view of the other change from the woman who threatens her relationship with Sartre (de Beauvoir 1943/1999) to her insight that women need solidarity with each other if they are going to overcome their marginalized status in relationship to men (de Beauvoir 2011). For Beauvoir, the relationship to and with the other evolves through the 1940s as she moves from a hardline existential stance regarding freedom and the other’s threat to it, to a more nuanced view of freedom and my

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responsibility to the other, to finally her landmark work on the status of women, which brings together these insights, and one might say, attempts to resolve the tension of recognition and threat that we find in Hegel’s Phenomenology. One way to track this evolution is through the epigraphs to the books that are published in this decade. The epigraphs foreshadow the most prominent theme in the work and thus provide us with an entry into that text. Before turning our attention to two of the these books in detail, it is worth rehearsing Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology—not the whole of the lectures, but the beginning where he frames humanity—man—as essentially Master and Slave.10 As is well known, Kojève opened his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology with this statement: “Man is Self-Consciousness,” (Kojève 1969, p.  3). Although this is true for Hegel, the discussion of self-consciousness does not appear until later in the Phenomenology. Additionally, Kojève’s focus on self-­ consciousness is driven by the role of Desire—Desire is what brings us out of our absorption in an object and back to ourselves. Self-consciousness comes about only when desire is directed toward a non-natural object, which Kojève ultimately demonstrates is another desire. In order for man to demonstrate that he is more than a mere animal in his desire, his human Desire must win out over his animal Desire (Kojève 1969, p. 6). That is, “there must be a risk of (animal) life for the sake of human Desire” (Kojève 1969, p. 7). In Kojève’s description, to desire a Desire is to want to substitute oneself for the value desired by this Desire. For without this substitution, one would desire the value, the desired object, and not the Desire itself. Therefore to desire the Desire of another is in the final analysis to desire that the value that I am or that I “represent” be the value desired by the other: I want him to “recognize” my value as his value. I want him to “recognize” me as an autonomous value. In other words, all human, anthropogenetic Desire—the Desire that generates Self-Consciousness, the human reality—is, finally, a function of the desire for “recognition.” And the risk of life by which the human reality “comes to light” is a risk for the sake of such a Desire. Therefore, to speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for “recognition.” (Kojève 1969, p. 7)

Significantly, in spite of the original need to risk one’s (animal) life, it becomes apparent that neither can actually die. If even one dies, the other goes without the recognition he seeks. Thus both adversaries must live. Therefore they must behave differently from the original intent to fight to the death. Without being “predestined” one participant must give into the other,

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must refuse to risk his life for the satisfaction of his desire for “recognition.” Now to recognize him thus is “to recognize” him as his Master and to recognize himself and be recognized as the Master’s Slave. In other words, in his nascent state, man is never simply man. He is always necessarily, and essentially, either Master or Slave …. And that is why to speak of the origin of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of “the autonomy and dependence of Self-Consciousness, of Mastery and Slavery.” (emphasis mine, Kojève 1969, pp. 8–9)

Within a few short pages and serving in place of an introduction to his lectures on the Phenomenology, Kojève conditions his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology by framing human consciousness as that which is threatened by another human consciousness, that is, the “Lordship and Bondage” passage, which does not appear in the Phenomenology until Part B.  In other words, by beginning with this passage, Kojève sets up the rest of his lectures on the Phenomenology to be viewed through the idea that fundamentally one consciousness is threatened by the other. This reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology influenced an entire generation of French intellectuals, not only those who attended the lectures, as mentioned above, but also those who did not attend but who traveled in the same intellectual circles. Among those in this category were Sartre and Beauvoir. As Tidd states, Beauvoir’s reading of Hegel in 1940 provided her with the structure to a view of the other she already had. Her close intellectual and personal relationship with Sartre, who was profoundly influenced by Kojève’s interpretation, would have deepened this way of reading Hegel. In her novel L’invitée (She Came to Stay), her earliest work of this period, which she began writing in 1937 and published in 1943, Beauvoir uses this epigraph from Hegel: “Each conscience seeks the death of the other” (de Beauvoir 1999, p. 7). Not subtle in either the influence of Hegel or Beauvoir’s primary concern, this epigraph highlights the darker side of our relationship to the other. The book, which is semi-autobiographical, narrates a fictionalized account of her “open” relationship with Sartre. Published just one year before Sartre’s play, No Exit (Sartre 1989), She Came to Stay, also details the problem of a threesome, the inability of three people to form a community, especially when, as is the case in each of these literary works, each individual fails to receive the recognition sought from the others. Although both Sartre and Beauvoir claimed to be simultaneously committed to each other while also pursuing other intimate partners, the book exposes the emotional toll this open relationship took on Beauvoir. Torn between freedom from the social and legal constraints of a traditional marriage and the inherent risk of losing one’s partner to another lover when those constraints

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are lifted, Beauvoir’s story is the story of many relationships. On one reading, the story is simply about Françoise (Beauvoir), Pierre (Sartre) and Xavière (Olga Kosakievicz), the young woman from Rouen, whom they invite into their lives. Françoise and Pierre each vie for the attention and affection of Xavière. In the end, Pierre falls for Xavière, threatening to upend the relationship he has with Françoise. An existential response to the constraints of traditional marriage, their open relationship challenged the view that the freedom they valued in their open relationship was truly possible—or even desirable. Certainly it was not achieved without its costs. Looking deeper, we can see the existential themes that give rise to the confrontation with an interpretation of Hegel that Beauvoir uses to frame her story. Each consciousness is free—making choices, choosing projects—yet each consciousness also lives in a world with others who are doing the same. How Beauvoir understands and addresses this tension will evolve through the decade, but in this novel, the choices and projects that others choose are presented as a threat to Françoise. In particular, Françoise is caught. On the one hand, she desires the recognition from both Pierre and Xavière. On the other, she cannot control the relationship that Pierre and Xavière pursue with each other, nor can she control the deep feelings between them that develop. The frustration of existentialism is to reconcile oneself with the radical freedom of choosing and taking responsibility for that which we can control and recognizing and living with that which we cannot control, namely, the choices and projects that others choose. The novel however asks us to consider how love, and in particular, erotic love operates within an existential structure.11 When one considers the need for recognition, and this particular point will be significant for Beauvoir’s last work of this decade, The Second Sex, recognition from our lover, which is joined to our need to control and possess the other, is both the quintessential existential theme and the one most threatening to a truth about existential freedom.12 When Xavière leaves Paris, Françoise believes her relationship with Pierre to be safe—at least from the threat of Xavière. However, upon Xavière’s return, and the exchange that takes place between them, Françoise believes Xavière’s threat to her relationship with Pierre is stronger than ever. She confronts Xavière in her apartment and before leaving she turns on the gas. Seeing her existence in direct confrontation with Xavière’s, Françoise believes one of them must go: “Annihilate a conscience! How can I?, Françoise thought. But how was it possible for a conscience not her own to exist? In that case, it was she who did not exist. She repeated, She or I, and pulled down the lever [for the gas]. …” (de Beauvoir 1999, p. 404, emphasis in the original). Beauvoir ends the novel with this passage:

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Alone. She had acted alone. As alone as in death. One day Pierre would know. But even he would only know her act from the outside. No one could condemn or absolve her. Her act was her very own. “I have done it of my own free will. It was her own will which was being fulfilled, now nothing separated her from herself. She had chosen at last. She had chosen herself.” (de Beauvoir 1999, p. 404, emphasis in the original)

Confirming the Hegelian epigraph she used for the book, Beauvoir writes the ending as if only one consciousness can exist—It’s “she or I.” Emphasizing both Hegel and existentialism, Beauvoir ends the novel having us believe that Françoise murders Xavière, but she does so with the recognition that the choice was hers to make. We end the decade with Beauvoir’s landmark book, The Second Sex (1949), in which she brings together many of the themes with which she previously dealt—the threat of the other, the ambiguity of freedom, the need for solidarity, and the responsibility to and for the other. Originally publishing the book in two volumes, Beauvoir uses several epigraphs, which represent these different themes, to frame her discussion. In Volume I, Beauvoir introduces the reader to the problem of woman as other, which she will spend the next eight-­ hundred pages discussing. Here she uses these two epigraphs: From Pythagoras, “There is a good principle that created order, light, and man and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness, and woman.” And from Poulain de la Barre, “Everything that has been written by men about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. v). Beauvoir introduces the complexity of finding a solution to the problem with these two epigraphs: From Kierkegaard, “What a curse to be a woman! And yet the very worst curse when one is a woman is, in fact, not to understand that it is one” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 277). And from Sartre, “Half victim, half accomplice, like everyone” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 277). Although Hegel is noticeably absent from the epigraphs, Kojève’s interpretation of consciousness in the Phenomenology—man to be essentially Master or Slave—drives Beauvoir’s analyses throughout the book. Mimicking Kojève’s format of beginning with the Master-Slave dialectic, Beauvoir uses the Master-­ Slave dialectic to organize her analysis in the Introduction to The Second Sex, thus configuring the status of woman as Other not only as fundamentally, or essentially, understood within the Hegelian framework, but also as the essential problem.13 In her view, the Master-Slave dialectic simultaneously does and does not map onto the male-female relationship. The two consciousnesses that meet in the Phenomenology were independent and free when they meet.

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This is not the case for women, whom Beauvoir describes as never having been free or independent. For Beauvoir, Hegel’s Master-Slave discussion provides an origin story for a situation that in fact has no actual origin: “there has always been woman,” meaning that woman has always existed in relationship to man. The situation in which women find themselves is significantly different from other groups that are political minorities. For example, women are not outnumbered by men and in fact are at least equal in number. Indeed, they are often referred to as the 51% minority. Additionally, unlike Jews or American blacks, who at one time lived independently of the groups that oppress them, women were never separate from men. One can point to a date in history that marked the beginning of their oppression: the Jewish diaspora, Inquisition, American slavery, or colonialism. This is not the case for women. There is no date in history to which women can point and say, “Before this date we lived freely, outside of the chains men have placed on us.” In Beauvoir’s words, “There have not always been proletarians: there have always been women” (de Beauvoir 2011, p.  8). She continues, “[Women] do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects. The proletarians made the revolution in Russia, the blacks in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are fighting in Indochina. Women’s actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 8). More significantly, Beauvoir observes that while the proletariat can both dream of and enact a plan that destroys the bourgeoisie, or Jews could conceivably convert everyone to Judaism, “a woman could not even dream of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in history …. This is the fundamental characteristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other” (de Beauvoir 2011, pp. 8–9). If women refuse to be complicit, they also risk their own livelihood and the privileges they might enjoy insofar as they have formed an alliance with the “superior caste” (de Beauvoir 2011, p.  10). Thus, as Beauvoir summarizes, “woman makes no claim for herself as subject because she lacks the concrete means, because she senses the necessary link connecting her to man without positing its reciprocity, and because she often derives satisfaction from her role as Other” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 10). Yet, for Beauvoir, in other ways the Master-Slave passage fits men and women perfectly (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 74) insofar as it describes the current situation in which men and women find themselves. If subjectivity depends on risking life, then women are already at a disadvantage. Having been

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excluded from the warrior activities, they are not in a position to risk life— instead, they recreate life.14 She is complicit however in celebrating the values that confirm masculine behavior. Echoing Hegel, Beauvoir observes the following: the Master’s privilege arises from the affirmation of Spirit over Life in the fact of risking his life: but in fact the vanquished slave has experienced this same risk, whereas the woman is originally an existent who gives Life and does not risk her life; there has never been combat between the male and her; Hegel’s definition applies singularly to her. (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 74)

In other words, woman has always been the slave. Yet Beauvoir’s insight is to see exactly how women’s oppression and this particular dynamic differs from Hegel’s description in both subtle and yet crucial ways. In the experience of women’s oppression, women aspire to the values that men have attained and defined. Men defined the values for themselves. They then defined women in relationship to those and proceeded to confine women to that space: “Today what women claim is to be recognized as existents just like men, and not to subordinate existence to life or the man to his animality” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 75).15 The larger problem at work here, and this is why the relationship between men and women maps so well onto Hegel’s Master-Slave passage, is the problem of recognition. It is not clear that other oppressed minorities find themselves in a similar situation to the one in which women find themselves. On the one hand, men wish to have recognition from women. On the other, that recognition is meaningless because women are not independent or free subjects. Thus, the very situation men have constructed in order to ensure the recognition of women renders that recognition valueless.16 In other words, Beauvoir realizes that for recognition to have meaning, all the consciousnesses involved must be free, but that freedom means that recognition cannot be guaranteed. Drawing from the analyses in her previous work, in particular, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir understands the flaws in the purely existential approach—the emphasis on radical freedom, the unencumbered self, and independence. Beauvoir directs the women reading The Second Sex to recognize their bad faith: thinking they are not oppressed because they live in a particular social/economic group.17 She implores her readers to consider the significance of solidarity for overcoming women’s oppression—it does not matter if a woman is not directly harmed by any particular strand of oppression. If any woman is harmed, women are still oppressed. For example, a woman who does not need maternity leave—either because she is wealthy or

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because she will not have children—must still recognize the need for women who do.18 Transforming the problem of recognition in the Master-Slave dialectic, Beauvoir ends The Second Sex with a radical new vision. Recognition between men and women would be between free, independent, equal existents. This new vision requires both men and women to relinquish the privileges they have resulting from the current situation, which enslaves half the population, whether they realize this or not. Women who benefit from the current system would need to be willing to give up those benefits. She does not believe this means that women should envision leaving men, a reference to the very beginning of the book. She firmly believes that men and women not only can live together but also that they should. Sexual desire between men and women will not be negated simply because they enter their relationship freely. Beauvoir ends the book with this reference to Marx: “The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 766). Here Beauvoir interprets Marx to mean that within human development, what was “man’s behavior” is now human behavior. Man defines the human. Thus it is natural for woman to “be like men,” to become human. She concludes, “It is up to man to make the reign of freedom triumph; to carry off this supreme victory, men and women must, among other things and beyond their natural differentiations, unequivocally affirm their brotherhood” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 76). That is, they must unite in their humanity, in what makes them both human, which is not and should not be characteristic of only men. Beauvoir, like so many philosophers before her, adeptly diagnoses the problem but is less skilled at providing a cure. Time will tell if Beauvoir’s prescription yields a more harmonious relationship between men and women. Seventy years after the publication of The Second Sex, we have not yet achieved this. One problem identified by many scholars is that Beauvoir does not reject the framing of subjectivity using masculine traits. Beauvoir’s objection is that women have been confined to a position—and a body—that does not allow them to participate in or develop these traits. As a result, Beauvoir’s discussion denigrates those traits that are feminine, regardless of who displays them. To achieve transcendence is to become more like men. In spite of this, Beauvoir’s formulation of the oppression of women within a Hegelian structure did however lay the ground for future feminist theorists, and in particular, French feminists to use this formulation positively, giving rise to the deployment of sexual difference as a powerful wave within feminist theory.19

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Recognition and Jewish Identity

In his 1971 essay, “Hegel and the Jews,” Levinas takes up Bernard Bourgeois’s analysis of “Hegel’s meditations on Judaism and Christianity” (Levinas 1990b) in order to track a history of anti-Semitism that has been nurtured by Hegel’s writings about the Jews. Levinas believes that Bourgeois’s characterization of Judaism as the negation of spirit leads to a “virulent formulae in which the enemy of the Jew will neither bother to understand nor, above all, make understood the ambiguity of the terms. Anti-Semitism is based within the System, which amounts to saying within the absolute” (Levinas 1990b, p. 236).20 Locating the origins of Judaism’s negative position in Abraham’s act of separation—leaving and breaking all ties with his surroundings—Bourgeois claims that Judaism … is the absolute antithesis of the Hegelian ideal of freedom, the fulfillment of ugliness as Hellenism was the fulfillment of beauty … Abraham’s existence is therefore that of a being who separates himself from nature as the object of love and fixes it as the object of need … the Jew is not attached to an idea “but to an animal existence.” In a word, both Abraham and Judaism at bottom involve a fall back into bestiality. (Levinas 1990b, pp.  236–237, emphasis in Levinas’s text)

In this formulation, the Jew is not unlike the woman in Beauvoir’s analysis. Both are unable to transcend, and both are positioned as unable to rise above their animal life. Although Bourgeois’s comments were published in 1970, Levinas had responded to this idea of Judaism and Jewish identity as a negation almost twenty-five years earlier in his response to Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew. Although one could argue that Levinas sets up a structure of subject and other that is similar to the structure of man and woman we find in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, his response differs in form from how both Beauvoir and the feminists who follow her grapple with the definition of woman. In Sartre’s description of the problem, either the Jew succumbs to the anti-Semite’s definition or he rebels against it, but either way, he is not free to construct his own identity. Similarly, with regard to the identity of woman, the feminists argued either that women could achieve these masculine traits or they argued for sexual difference, but in either case they accepted some version of how women were defined in relationship to men. Levinas short circuits the distinction Sartre provides. His method avoids both horns of the dilemma, choosing

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instead a description of Jewish identity that has its roots in pre-modern sources.21 As mentioned previously, Levinas studied Hegel while he was in the German POW labor camp from 1940–1945 (Malka 2006; Bergo 2011).22 The 1940s for Levinas are marked by his struggle to respond to what happened in Europe, and in particular what happened to European Jews, from 1933–1945. The issue of Jewish identity emerges in part because of a lecture Sartre delivered on this theme in 1947 at the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) (Sartre 1999) and in part because the theme of Jewish identity was intimately enmeshed in the events of World War II. Upon his return from the war and without delay, Levinas went to work for the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), and in 1947 he became the director of the École Normal Israélite Orientale (ENIO). Not even a year into his service in this position, Levinas penned a short essay on the reopening of the ENIO, whose operation had been suspended for the previous six years. He writes the following: Our martyrdom, since 1933, gives us a more acute awareness of our solidarity across space but also across time, the need to find in the sources of our being, our reason for being and the mystery of our destiny, the meaning of our hardships. Whether as a return to the land of their ancestors, or in a more general and perhaps more profound form, the recovery of mystical experiences and ethics, on which Judaism is based and from which it could never be banished— there exists in Israel the need for a Jewish humanism. The ENIO must also take that into account. There must be open access to this Jewish humanism …. A long-­ term undertaking, certainly, and full of difficulties, but we must attempt a future worthy of the ENIO the past, creating in the old building on Rue d’Auteuil,23 a center of Jewish Western spirituality [spiritualité juive occidentale] which will once again bring something new to the Judaism of the Orient. (Levinas 1946, pp. 1–2)24

Assimilation was a failure for the Jews since it did not prevent the hatred that led to their mass murder and near destruction. In the ensuing decades, Levinas pursues two interconnected yet parallel projects: a new conception of Jewish identity and a redefined understanding of ethics. Their intersection creates a redefined [Jewish] humanism. These themes of assimilation and Jewish identity that circulate in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1947 lecture sponsored by the Alliance Israélite Universelle summarized the main ideas found Anti-Semite and Jew—a book that one might describe as an extended meditation on “La Question Juive.”25 In addition to publishing long excerpts—maybe even the full talk—in Les Cahiers d’Alliance,

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the AIU published Levinas’s short response to Sartre’s lecture.26 Levinas opens with his praise for Sartre, noting how nice it is to hear someone who is not Jewish speak on these themes in this way. However, he is less impressed with Sartre’s sympathetic response than he is with the new “weapon” Sartre deploys to identify the structure of anti-Semitism. Using existentialism and the structures of existence in the modern world on which to base his response, Sartre is able to escape the trap of those who came before him—those who discussed the Jews’ material condition but who then advocated for anti-Semitism. Linking these anti-Semites to Nietzsche’s legacy, Levinas refers to them as the poets of blood and soil. Although Sartre is able to avoid a characterization of the Jews that is familiar to Anti-Semitism, he nonetheless provides a portrait of the Jew that is derivative of anti-Semitism. It is an identity that either succumbs to the anti-Semite or develops in opposition to it. Sartre opens his lecture with the reflection that he realizes it is difficult to discuss a lived experience that one has not actually experienced.27 Applying Richard Wright’s observation that “There is no black problem; there is a white problem,” Sartre offers the expression used during the occupation: “There is no Jewish problem; there is an Aryan problem” (Sartre 1999, p. 34). He continues, “it is precisely about this problem that Christians must reflect. What I am offering here is the point of view of a Christian—of someone with a Christian education—on this question” (Sartre 1999, p. 34). Before we even begin the lecture we can see some of the themes that Levinas will take up several decades later. How do we understand the contraposition of Jew to Aryan and Jew to Christian? One is a comparison to a race, the other to a religion. What does it mean that Sartre refers to himself as a Christian—not as a believer, clearly, but as someone who received a Christian education? Here Christianity takes on the character of a culture, an ethos, rather than merely a belief system that very specifically requires one to believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah. Summarizing his book-length treatment of the topic, Sartre’s lecture discusses the three “protagonists”—or human types—in the drama—the drama here being anti-Semitism: The anti-Semite, the democrat, and the Jew. The characterizations, although condensed, follow the descriptions he provides in the book. The democrat, or the friend of the Jews (Sartre uses the term, Israelites), adheres to basic French principals of 1789, or the “rights of man.” Significantly, the democrat sees only “men,” not individual Jews nor Jews as a collective. By taking this view, the democrat believes that he counters anti-­ Semitism—how could he be anti-Semitic when he does not see Jews but sees men. As Sartre observes, “the democrat is so afraid that a society might not be made of individuals identical to each other that he kills the Jew in the Israelite

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in order to keep Man” (Sartre 1999, p. 35). Against this view we find the anti-­ Semite. Where the mistake of the democrat is to see the Jew, even if wrongly, as completely assimilated, the anti-Semite sees the Jew as inassimilable. The anti-Semite belongs to the group of Frenchmen “who were not assimilated by the 1789 revolution” (Sartre 1999, p. 36). They see the Jews as Jews and never as men who could be politically equal before the law. The Jew and the non-Jew are different in nature. Whatever flaws the Jew has are had by virtue of being Jewish. Sartre’s analysis helps us understand not only how stereotypes function but why the counter-example does not work to undo the stereotype or the prejudice. If the democrat—the Jew’s defender—says, I know Christians who are avaricious and I know Jews who are not, the anti-­ Semite would not disagree. Rather, the anti-Semite believes that the trait is different when displayed by a Jew. For the anti-Semite there is Jewish avarice. There is nothing the Jew can do to become other than the Jew. Winning a scholarship, getting an education, the Jew will still be the Jew who was not initially exposed to beautiful things, who was not cultivated to display exquisite qualities. For the anti-Semite “history needs to be explained by the action of individuals on the masses, so we have here men who, since—as I said— they don’t own anything, since they are thoroughly evil, are excluded from the society of the good and thus are endowed with the attributes that are required to act on history” (Sartre 1999, p. 38). The anti-Semite-Jew relation sets up the world in a Manichean fight of good versus evil. The human type is fixed— they just need someone to fill it. That is the Jew. For Sartre then, the Jew is the Jew by virtue of the anti-Semite—either the Jew succumbs to the description or rebels against it, but in either case, the anti-Semite defines him. Thus in Sartre’s view, the Jew cannot but start from the position of the anti-Semite. Hence the famous phrase, if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him. In this regard, the relationship resembles the woman-man relationship Beauvoir describes. For Sartre, there is no Jew without the anti-­ Semite, just as for Beauvoir there is no woman without man. In the midst of his short response to Sartre’s lecture, Levinas notes the awkwardness of Sartre’s linking of Jewish destiny to anti-Semitism.28 He responds with a reference to those Jews whose Judaism was not the result of an anti-­ Semitism. This remark seems almost an aside, a glib joke, as if he were to add, “There was Hanukkah before there was Christmas, and Passover is not the Jewish Easter.” Yet I argue that this comment is the central motivation for his sustained philosophical work on ethical subjectivity that extends over the next forty-five years. In other words, the parallel between Sartre’s Jew and Beauvoir’s woman does not hold.

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Although Levinas praises Sartre’s analysis of anti-Semitism, he disagrees with Sartre’s proposed solution that the development of a Marxist state would be sufficient to bring an end to anti-Semitism—even as Levinas appears to agree in later texts that this economic move might be necessary and even as Sartre prefaces his remarks that he is responding to critics who thought he needed to focus more on class. Sartre’s deployment of this new weapon—existentialism—to attack anti-Semitism—viewing the Jew as both material being but not only, or not simply, a material being—provides an effective opposition to anti-Semitism. Levinas sees in Sartre’s philosophy an “attempt to think mankind in its spiritual being, its historical, economical and social situation without treating it as a mere object” (Levinas 1999, p. 28). That is, in Sartre, Levinas finds the roots of an existential humanism. Sartre’s relationship to Hegel, mediated by his classmates and friends who actually attended Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, inspires a view of intersubjectivity grounded not only in recognition, but also negation. Ironically, Sartre, the existentialist, appears to have no choice but to advance a view of the Jew that is contingent on the anti-Semite—the anti-­ Semite makes the Jew, regardless of how the Jew responds (succumbing to the stereotype or actively resisting it). In contrast to this Hegelian view of intersubjectivity, I read Levinas as taking Sartre’s analysis of the Jew vis-à-vis the anti-Semite as a challenge to reclaim a Judaism that is not identified through the anti-Semite but rather finds its identity in pre-modern sources. In other words, he turns to a Judaism that pre-dates modern anti-Semitism. Levinas provides a more extensive response to the problem of the Jew and anti-Semitism in Être Juïf (Levinas 2007), an essay he penned the same year he published Time and the Other.29 He observes, “the most striking feature of Christianity is its capacity to become a state religion and to remain one after the separation of Church and State, to supply the State not only with its legal holidays but also with the entire framework of everyday life” (Levinas 2007, p. 207). But Jewish existence eludes easy characterization. Recalling his 1934 essay on the philosophical foundations of Hitlerism published in Esprit, Levinas recounts the way that Jewish existences become subject to the racial myth perpetuated by Hitlerian anti-Semitism.30 One could not flee one’s condition. The Jew is more like the suffering servant described in Isaiah, or the Book of Job. Claiming this Judaism “cannot fit into the set of distinctions by which Sartre attempts to grasp it” (Levinas 2007, p.  208), Levinas resists Sartre’s characterization of Jewish identity as that which comes about either because one tries to flee or because one cannot but assume an identity that others are determined to bestow on him. Levinas asks, “Is not Jewish ‘facticity’ other than the ‘facticity’ of a world that understands

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itself starting from the present?” (Levinas 2007, p. 208). Here Levinas turns existential freedom on its head. He invokes in this essay the term passivity, which we do not see him explore in detail until his later work in the 1970s. Yet in this essay, he uses the term to complicate the simple dichotomy between choice—not choosing is still to make a choice—and fatalism, where there is no freedom. For Levinas, passivity describes the condition by which “to do the will of God is the condition of facticity” (Levinas 2007, p. 209), that is, the very condition of freedom. For Levinas, even if the Sartrean framework of choice is correct, it is inconceivable without election (Levinas 2007, p. 209). The Jew, according to Levinas, is the very entrance of the religious event into the world; he is the impossibility of a world without religion (Levinas 2007, p.  209). For Levinas, Jewish existence “is situated from the very start in a dimension that Sartre cannot apprehend. It is not situated here for theological reasons, but for reasons of experience. Its theology explicates its facticity” (Levinas 2007, p. 210). The themes with which I opened this discussion continue ideas that Levinas introduced early in his essays collected in Difficult Freedom, but they are poignantly expressed in two essays published within a year of each other. In “For a Jewish Humanism” (1953), Levinas identifies the problem with assimilation and the homogeneity that Jews desired and for the most part achieved as the loss of that which made them unique (Levinas 1990c).31 The Jews had lost their identity. Judaism commands not only the teaching of itself, but also that this teaching has built into it the discovery, preservation, and enactment of a Jewish humanism. Here, in contrast to the characterization of Judaism Hegel delivered, Levinas characterizes Judaism not as parochial or particular, nor as a mechanism for separation, but as precisely the opposite—as that which is indispensable to human harmony. It has a universal appeal. In his 1954 essay, “Assimilation Today,” he ties The Dreyfus Affair to the years of National Socialism, two events that are not only horrifying in the story of Jewish history but which also put into question the relationship Judaism had to the principles of 1789 (Levinas 1990e).32 He painfully reminds his readers that assimilation failed: It failed because it did not put an end to the anguish felt by the Jewish soul. Assimilation failed because it did not placate the non-Jews, or put an end to anti-Semitism; on certain points, it stirred up heated reactions and arguments once more. Anguish and anxiety still surreptitiously alter apparently free behavior and every Jew remains, in the largest sense of the word, a Marrano. (Levinas 1990e, p. 255)33

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Recalling the intellectual claims that he made in his 1934 essay on Hitlerism (Levinas 1990a), Levinas maintains in “Hegel and the Jews,” that there has been a view of the history of intellectual thought that privileged the Greek tradition, nurtured anti-Semitism, and encouraged the events of 1933–1945. He writes, One wonders … if Hitler’s propaganda itself did not draw heavily on [Hegel’s Frankfurt philosophy] which, without adopting the slightest distance from it, a high-class French university lecturer opens up for us again in 1970. We understand the concern for objectivity that motivates the scholar, but does he even know that if Judaism is a movement of ideas incorporated (perhaps) into Christianity, “suppressed” and “preserved” (perhaps) in Hegelianism, it also remains, rightly or wrongly (but certainly) a credo or a spirituality or a principle of solidarity or a reason for living and in any case, the cause of death for millions of his contemporaries? Would the historian of philosophy lack to such a degree an immediate memory and pay so little attention to the present? As for monotheisms, which evolved from Abraham and were reconciled within his paternal breast, they are in a fine pickle indeed …. (Levinas 1990b, pp. 237–238)34

This is not a new idea for him—it is one that dates to his writings in the 1930s shortly after Hitler came to power. What Levinas offers however is a unique response. The intellectual thought that may have produced or sustained antiSemitism also suppressed Jewish thought. The Athens-Jerusalem divide is not benign. He wonders if the history of philosophy believes that a great philosophy is perhaps only a language miraculously found in Greece—or somehow gave itself—a justified point of departure. Its discourse is, from that point on, able to articulate the truth of all other discourses. This is the West’s miracle—or mirage. Is it the source of its science? I do not know. But since Hegel we use a new figure of speech; philosophy speaks the truth of … This is true unless, in the face of the obvious ramblings, undertaken in the name of his sublime schemes, we ask ourselves whether language does not hold another secret to the one brought to it by the Greek tradition, and another source of meaning; whether the apparent and so-called “non-thought” “representations” of the Bible do not hold more possibilities than the philosophy that “rationalizes” them but cannot let them go free; whether the meaning does not stem from the Scriptures that renew it; whether absolute thought is capable of encompassing Moses and the Prophets—that is to say, whether we should not leave the System, even if we do by moving backwards, through the very door by which Hegel thinks we enter it. (Levinas 1990b, p. 238)

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Although many Levinas scholars now acknowledge, even if grudgingly, the relationship between his writings on Judaism and his philosophical project, few scholars of Levinas’s work pay attention specifically to his writings on education. Although references to teaching and education can be found throughout Levinas’s philosophical writings, from 1946 until the 1970s, his writings on Judaism include essays specifically devoted to Jewish education and, in particular, Jewish education as the means to develop the ethical subject that he describes in his philosophical project. It provides a means to develop a Jewish identity that avoids the dilemma Sartre poses. Levinas’s insight about Jewish education reveals the role that alterity plays in midrash, the layers of interpretation that accompany the reading of a Jewish sacred text. The role of midrash is to open up the text and allow voices that are otherwise muted to be heard. Thus, for Levinas, reading Jewishly is precisely to read such that one is open to the Other. This particular kind of education is fundamental to the creation of the subjectivity that Levinas describes. On the one hand, it is a subjectivity for all, an ethical subjectivity that is universal. On the other hand, it is a subjectivity grounded in particular sources—the Jewish sacred texts. If, as Levinas suggests, ethics precedes the political, then it is the Jewish tradition from which Levinas’s own ethical-philosophical project emerges that provides us with a more effective pedagogical model that encourages us first to engage with each other face to face. The aim, then, of Levinas’s philosophical project is to employ an educational method that is informed by his understanding of Jewish education as that which cultivates intellectual acuity and also develops responsibility for the Other. In other words, the development of an ethical subject that recalls the humanism of the Hebrew Bible and thus a Jewish identity that predates the distinction between anti-­ Semite and Jew. His view of education, which encourages resistance to a text, provides a powerful argument for a radically different Jewish subjectivity that not only escapes Sartre’s structure but also becomes a site of resistance in general—one motivated by the dark times between 1933 and 1945 and which might help us now.35 The seeds of Levinas’s ethical project are found in his 1946–1947 lecture course, published as Time and the Other, in which the Other takes on a radically different character from that which Beauvoir describes. The Other, taking the form in this text as death, the feminine, and God, holds a privileged position. As Levinas’s ethical project develops from the 1940s through the 1980s, the Other continues to hold this privileged position. That is, we can see the point of convergence Levinas has with Beauvoir and the complex relationship Levinas has to Hegel. Beauvoir’s and Levinas’s respective views of the other are rooted ultimately in Hegel’s famous portrayal of the master-slave

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dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit. For Levinas, however, it is this threat that provides meaning for and the emergence of the command, “thou shalt not kill.”36 Recalling Beauvoir’s epigraph from She Came to Stay, we see a similar theme in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity in which he writes, “I can only wish to kill an existent absolutely independent, which exceeds my powers infinitely and therefore does not oppose them but paralyzes the very power of power. The Other is the sole being I can wish to kill” (Levinas 1969, p. 198). The face of the other simultaneously evokes in me a desire to murder the other and the ethical responsibility not only not to kill, but also to be responsible for the other, not to let the other die alone (Levinas 1985, 1998, 2001). One would not need the injunction not to kill if there was no desire to do so, if the other’s sheer presence did not threaten me in some way. However, the relationship is more complicated—providing another point of convergence with Beauvoir. The other calls me to be ethical, to respond to her, to feed her. More significantly, Levinas believes that his description of the ethical relation as that where the I puts the other before itself confirms the interruption of Hegel’s totality.37 Radically altering the Hegelian narrative, Levinas’s subjectivity comes into being not because I can dominate or even kill the other but in the ethical response to the other. We cannot help but wonder how relations between men and women might also be radically transformed if Levinas’s view of subjectivity conditioned them, if the relationship between men and women was not a battle for recognition, but an ethical relation that put the other before the self.38 A quick search of either Beauvoir or Levinas and one of the figures from German Idealism yields a dizzying number of articles and books. Both thinkers were deeply indebted in particular to the thought of Hegel and Kant, even if that debt was to position their respective philosophical projects in opposition to these thinkers. Levinas’s ethical relation, his idea of the infinite, is viewed as a disruption to Hegelian totality. His understanding of the ethical obligation as irrecusable, claiming me before I can choose to be claimed, contradicts the characterization of ethics advanced by modern philosophy and especially Kant. Less investigated, though related to his development of this ethical project, is Levinas’s relationship to Hegel vis-à-vis Judaism and Jewish identity. Similarly, Beauvoir’s relationship to German Idealism and in particular Kant and Hegel is well-established, especially in her more famous philosophical works. Focusing specifically on how Hegel influences in particular her structure of the Other allows us to see how the other figures in her work from her earliest literary works even as this concept changes shape. Examining Levinas and Beauvoir together reveals how their focus on the other is influenced by their respective marginal positions within western Europe—as a Jew

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or as a woman. Hegel provides Beauvoir with a structure to examine woman’s marginal position whereas Levinas traces modern anti-Semitism, especially in the suppression of Jewish thought in the academy, back to Hegel.

Notes 1. In this early work (Levinas 1987, first published in 1947), the feminine, in Levinas’s view, is a mode of being that slips away from the light of publicity and, consequently, from reason and knowledge. The feminine is characterized by modesty, as it hides from light. The mystery of the feminine and, therefore, the mystery of the other constitute alterity. However, Levinas wants to avoid the trap of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, wherein the struggle for freedom and recognition results in the consciousness becoming the slave to the other, who becomes master. See Levinas 1990f. For Levinas, alterity does not arise out of an initial characterization of the other as freedom. In its later formulation, the other is other simply because she is not me. Our responsibility for the other, for which no one can stand in, singularizes us. It is in my responsibility for the other, that I become a subject. Levinas’s description of the feminine changes dramatically over thirty years of his writing but from the beginning of this work to the end, the Other maintains a privileged position (See Katz 2003; Chanter 1995, 2001). See Hegel 1977, pp. 111–119. Beauvoir’s footnote is also interesting in light of Sartre’s later comment with regard to Levinas. As the story goes, Levinas wrote to Sartre congratulating him on refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sartre is said to have responded, “Who is this Levinas anyway?” But in his eulogy to Merleau-Ponty, Sartre credits Levinas by name with introducing him to Husserl through Levinas’s thesis published as, A Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (published originally in 1930) (Sartre 1998, p.  567 and Levinas 2001, p.  43). Various sources share an anecdote that Beauvoir and Sartre were in bookstores looking for sources on Husserl. Sartre found Levinas’s book on Husserl and read it so quickly that he did not bother to cut the pages first. This would have happened well before Sartre’s comment. For more on Beauvoir’s life, see Bair 1990. See also Fullbrook and Fullbrook 1994 and 1998. For more on Beauvoir and sexual difference, see Bergoffen 2012 and Heinämaa 1999. 2. The Second Sex was published in 1949—so she would have had to have read this work much before then. For detailed analyses of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex see Bergoffen 1997 and 2012; Moi 1990; Simons 1995, 1999a, 1999b, 2006. 3. The actual roster of those who attended is debated. One source (Malka 2006) for example cites Levinas’s attendance—though when he actually would have done this is uncertain.

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4. See also Williams 1998. Williams argues that “the ‘Hegel’ Levinas seems to attack is Kojève’s ‘Hegel’: that is, the fundamental inequality of recognition reduces the other to same” (407). I am not sure that Williams has the Levinas quite right, but I want to underscore that he believes that the Hegel Levinas attacks is mediated through Kojève. Thank you to Robert Erlewine for this reference. 5. For this particular reference, see the radio interview Levinas did with Shlomo Malka and Alain Finkielkraut in 1982, shortly after the Sabra and Chatila massacre. The interview was published as “Ethics and Politics” in The Levinas Reader (Hand 1989). Beauvoir’s biographer, Ursula Tidd notes that Beauvoir has been concerned with the other since her earliest years (Tidd 2009). 6. Jennifer Purvis (2003) argues that Beauvoir transposed the Sartrean influence into a Hegelian project, and in spite of her best efforts, the primary thrust of that project—to find the way in which women can overcome their immanence, fell short of her aim. In this chapter, I approach Levinas’s response to Hegel in a different way. Much has been written on Levinas’s use of infinity as a disruption or interruption of Hegelian totality. And even as early as 1935 Levinas is referencing Hegel (Levinas 2003). Moreover, there is a common view that given the influence Jean Wahl had on Levinas, the Hegel Levinas responds to is unhappy consciousness more than Kojève’s Master-Slave reading. For this chapter, I chose a different, less traveled path—Levinas’s response to Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, which could be read as a Hegelian problem with subjectivity and recognition. In this case, Levinas’s response to Hegel is mediated through his response to Sartre, who was influenced by Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel. For more on Beauvoir contra Sartre see Le Doeuff 1989. 7. There is already a significant body of work on Levinas and German Idealism (Kant and Hegel) and Beauvoir and German Idealism (Kant and Hegel). My aim in this chapter is neither to survey that literature nor to address all the themes in German Idealism that have influenced these two philosophers. Rather, I wish to approach each of them in relationship to Hegel and also in relationship to other, using the theme of the Other as the point of intersection. In this regard we can see how the structure allows Beauvoir to develop her analyses in her most influential book, The Second Sex, a work that helps us understand or consider how women’s oppression is sustained. On the other hand, we can see how the structure provides a foundation for Levinas to develop his ethics, one that does not do away with totality but provides the means to interrupt it. See in particular Bernasconi 1982, 1986; Bergo 1999; Fox 2007; Shuster 2018; Miller 2000; Miller 2012. See also, Chanter 1998 who positions Levinas’s thought between idealism and materialism, freedom and enchainment. Looking at one of Levinas’s earliest essays—but also an essay written at the dawn of National Socialism—Fox argues that Levinas uses

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idealism as a defense against fascism’s efforts to reduce subjectivity by reducing all subjectivity to the body—blood kinship. 8. As we will see in the discussion, Beauvoir identifies the Master-Slave passage as a useful mapping for relations between men and women. Nathan Rotenstreich, quoting from Hegel’s Early Theological Writings, indicates that Hegel characterized Judaism as the religion of slaves (205). The similarity in descriptions used to describe both women and Jews is far reaching—to the point where the Jew is frequently described in effeminate terms. See for example, Sander Gilman, The Jewish Body. For a detailed account of Hegel and Judaism, see Nathan Rotenstreich, “Hegel’s Image of Judaism” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 15, no. 1 (January 1953), pp. 33–52. 9. There are myriad themes one could use to discuss either Levinas or Beauvoir or both in relationship to German Idealism. Much has been written on this. The chapter focuses on the threat of the other and how that is configured either with regard to women as other or the Jew as other. For scholarship on other themes, see for example, Martin Shuster 2018 and Christopher Fox 2007. 10. This chapter will focus on She Came to Stay and The Second Sex. In between these two books Beauvoir published The Blood of Others and The Ethics of Ambiguity, both significant works in their own right. In The Blood of Others (1945) she uses this quote from Dostoyevsky for the epigraph: “Each of is responsible for everything and to every human being” my freedom is bound up in the other’s freedom, calling me to respond to her (de Beauvoir 1989, p. 5), thus signaling a shift to her focus to an ethics that coheres to a more sophisticated version of existentialism. Rather than a view of ethics focused on the choices made by a free and independent subject, the ethics that Beauvoir begins developing in this book focuses on the intersubjectivity fundamental to human existence. In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948) she uses Montaigne’s quote, “Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil according to what you make it” (de Beauvoir 1964, p. 7). In some ways, this book mediates between Beauvoir’s earlier work of this decade and The Second Sex, the last book of the decade and a book that is mature in its analyses. In The Force of Circumstance, Beauvoir wrote that “of all my books [The Ethics of Ambiguity] is the one that irritates me the most today … the fact remains that on the whole I went to a great deal of trouble to present inaccurately a problem to which I then offered a solution quite as hollow as the Kantian maxims … I was in error when I thought I could define a morality independent of social context” (de Beauvoir 1992, p. 67). Colin Davis’s essay on The Blood of Others nicely situates this book within the development of Beauvoir’s philosophical thought, but especially the development of her moral thinking (Davis 1998). Davis also focuses on the epigraphs of Beauvoir’s books. I came to the conclusion on my own that this was an interesting way to examine her works, but I need to acknowledge that Davis did this also. For

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more on Beauvoir’s ethics see de Beauvoir 2004a and 2004b. See in particular, Wilkerson 2012 for her relationship to Kant and see Kruks 1987 for a discussion of Beauoir and freedom. 11. For excellent discussions on the influence of Hegel on eros or love, see Jessica Benjamin, “The Bonds of Love,” Feminist Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring 1980), pp. 144–174. See also, Scott Jonathan Cowan, “Hegel Between Criticism and Romanticism: Love and Self-Consciousness in the Phenomenology,” Thesis, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, May 2017. For the discussion specifically of this topic in relationship to Antigone, see Luce Irigaray, “The Eternal Irony of the Community, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985). 12. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1984. Sartre clearly describes the erotic relationship in pessimistic terms. The lover wishes to possess the beloved. Levinas appropriates this discussion but does not counter Sartre’s description. Rather, he counters Sartre’s negative reading. In Levinas’s view, erotic love is a possessive love; it is supposed to be possessive, which is what distinguishes it from the ethical relation. See Levinas 1969. 13. For more on the influence of Kojève on Beauvoir, see Elaine Miller 2012. “Saving Time: Temporality, Recurrence, and Transcendence in Beauvoir’s Nietzschean Cycles.” See also, Altman 2007; Mills 1996; Peperzak 1993; Schroeder 1996; Stone 2017. 14. See Shannon Mussett, 2017. “Life and Sexual Difference in Hegel and Beauvoir.” 15. We see a similar sexual division of labor in Levinas’s work, especially the later work and most apparently in Totality and Infinity (Levinas 1969). On the one hand, this work directly confronts Hegel’s idea of totality; on the other, Levinas deploys a structure of sexual difference, which in this book is essential to the analysis, that we also see in Hegel, bringing Levinas’s appropriation of Hegel closer to the view that Beauvoir criticizes. Additionally, and more interestingly for the comparison to Beauvoir, Levinas in this book ceases to place the feminine in the position of the other. Rather, the feminine is a figure solely in an intimate relationship with the male I.  The “other” is reserved specifically for the one for whom I am ethically responsible. 16. It is not clear that the anti-Semite desires the Jew to recognize him. 17. Beauvoir focuses on class, but certainly one could add race or even religion to the privileged position that allows women to believe they are not oppressed and keeps women from achieving solidarity with other women. 18. See the Conclusion to The Second Sex, Beauvoir 2011, pp. 753–766. 19. For example, Irigaray rather than countering Hegel, doubles down on the distinction and then deploys sexual difference and the revaluation of the feminine precisely for this liberatory aim (Purvis 2003). 20. See also, Bernard Bourgeois, Hegel à Frankfort au Judaïsme, Christianisme, Hégelianisme (Paris, Vrin, 1970, p. 126). For more on Levinas and Hegel see

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Irwin 2007 and Kavka 2004. For more Levinas and transendence, especially its connection to ethics see Bernasconi 2005; Cohen 1994; Gibbs 1992; Levinas 1996. 21. My view that Levinas is responding to Sartre originated with a paper I presented at the 2013 Psychology and the Other conference in Cambridge, MA, which was published as “Can one still be Jewish without Sartre?: Levinas, Jewish education, and the crisis of humanism” (Katz 2016). 22. “While interned in the Fallingsbotel camp near Hanover, Levinas studied Hegel and began work on Existence and Existents. There is no doubt that the uncertainty about his wife and daughter, not to mention rumors about the liquidation of the Jews of Lithuania, influenced his work at this time. We need only recall Levinas’s anecdote about “the last Kantian” in Nazi Germany” (Bergo 2011). For an illuminating commentary on Levinas’s time in the P.O.W. camp see Caygill 2010. 23. An early site of the ENIO. It later moved to rue la Bruyère (1937), and then in 2016 it moved to rue Michel-Ange to be housed with the AIU library. The offices of the AIU, also housed at rue la Bruyère (1937), moved to avenue de Ségur in 2016. 24. All translations from this essay are mine; emphasis added. 25. Levinas 1999. The editors’ note to their translation of the essay reads as follows: “Sartre’s second lecture immediately following the publication of Réflexions sur la question juive occurred three days after the first, and it was sponsored by the Alliance israelite universelle. Pierre Birnbaum has just tracked down the typescript of this lecture, typed by a secretary, in the archives of the Alliance. The translation of this lecture, ‘Reflections on the Jewish Question, A Lecture,’ can be found in this issue of October starting on page 33. Some fragments of it were inserted in the June 1947 issue of the organization’s newsletter, the monthly Les Cahiers de l’Alliance. These extracts were warmly introduced by this presentation by philosopher Emmanuel Levinas” (Levinas 1999, p. 27). 26. This paragraph is from Katz 2016, p. 125. 27. It is outside the parameters of this chapter to detail the relationship Sartre had to Hegel—in particular Kojève’s version of Hegel. I mention this briefly at the beginning of the chapter. But it seems clear, especially given the year of the lecture and the publication of Anti-Semite and Jew, that the Hegelian influence of self-other is at work in Sartre’s analysis. Thus, Levinas’s response to Sartre must address this account even if indirectly. 28. This paragraph and the next two are from Katz 2016, p. 126. 29. Emmanuel Levinas, “Being Jewish,” translated by Mary Beth Mader, Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 40, 2007, pp. 205–210. Originally published as “Être Juif” in the French jounal Confluences, 1947 année 7, nos. 15–17, pp. 253–264. It was reprinted in Cahiers d’Etudes lévinassiennes, 2003, Numéro 1, pp. 99–106. Page numbers refer to the English translation.

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30. See Bernasconi 2005. See also Levinas 1990a. Levinas continues this discussion in On Escape (originally published in 1935). Here he demonstrates that the seductive call of freedom presented to us by modern philosophy is a mythology (Levinas 2003). First and foremost, our bodies require food, nurturance, and warmth. Our bodies betray us. Levinas’s ethics, the response to the Other, which recognizes the possibility of sacrificing one’s life for the Other, is prior to any sense of freedom or choice. 31. “For a Jewish Humanism” originally published in 1953. The next few paragraphs summarize a discussion from Katz 2013. 32. This paragraph comes from my book, Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism (Katz 2013). See also Levinas 1990d. 33. In Levinas’s view, the presence of Israel as a state presents an opportunity not available to the Jew previously—an opportunity for life in the State to converge with the life of conscience. But also, as a result of Israel’s reality, “the error of assimilation becomes visible.” Only after Israel becomes a state can the Jew notice the way she “breathed an atmosphere impregnated with Christian essence …” (Levinas 1990e, p. 257). The secular states which are founded on a Christian structure, create a Christian atmosphere that is perceived as secular. Only when the Jew resists this structure is the secular revealed as religious. See Katz 2013 for an extended discussion of this passage. 34. Levinas makes a similar claim in Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Responding specifically to Nemo’s question about the fundamental opposition of the terms “totality” and “infinity,” Levinas replies, “In the critique of totality borne by the very association of these two words, there is a reference to the history of philosophy. This history can be interpreted as an attempt at universal synthesis, a reduction of all experience …. There have been few protestations in the history of philosophy against this totalization. In what concerns me, it is in Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophy, which is essentially a discussion of Hegel, that for the first time I encountered a radical critique of totality.” Responding to Nemo’s follow up in which he queries that this is a route Western philosophy has not explored, Levinas replies, “It is in fact the whole trend of Western philosophy culminating in the philosophy of Hegel …. One can see this nostalgia for totality everywhere in Western philosophy, where the spiritual and the reasonable reside in knowledge” (Levinas 1985, p. 76). In the Preface to Totality and Infinity, the work in which Levinas provides the first detailed account of the ethical relation, he writes: “We were impressed by the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlosung, a work too often present in this book to be cited” (Levinas 1969, p. 28). Thus, we have Levinas’s idea about his own project that the pages are suffused with the work of the first philosopher, in his mind, who has opposed Hegel’s totality.

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35. See Levinas 1990d. This essay was originally published in 1973 in Hamoré—a journal of Jewish teachers and educators. Reprinted in Difficile Liberté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), pp. 385–401. 36. Martin Shuster (2018) argues that Levinas does not truly escape Hegel: “Hegel is a philosopher of totality, while Levinas presents a sophisticated and conclusive ‘explosion’ of such ‘totality,’ and thereby ‘the opening of quite a ­different route in search of what is reasonable’. I think this is too hasty and too simple, or at the very least, it is worth review, especially in light of recent so-­called nonmetaphysical interpretations of Hegel …, as well as Fichte …. In short, my position is that there are important points of commonality between Levinas and Fichte and Hegel, and it is only by understanding these commonalities that the differences between them come into view” (Shuster 2018, p. 2). 37. Bettina Bergo provides a nice summary of this point in her discussion of the Good in Levinas: “It may be that insisting that the Good is prior to, rather than just beyond, Being, is necessary to deconstructing Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousnesses in struggle for recognition, that there are moments of inexplicable generosity, even occasional sacrifices for another (person or group), is otherwise inexplicable within a logic of competing freedoms and reductive desires. In that respect, the trace of the Good is always present within Being, as a possibility that something other than consumption or instrumentalization may take place” (Bergo 2011). For a general discussion of Levinas’s ethics that draws on Kant and illustrates the contrast see Perpich 2008. 38. Gendering the ethical relation raises many serious issues, not the least of which is compromising Levinas’s formulation of ethics before ontology. Additionally, the history of the relationship between men and women has frequently been one where women did put men before themselves. In this regard, one could read Levinas’s reading of the masculine subject as one that needs to learn from the feminine, and learn to put the other before himself thus inverting the traditional relationship, especially the one criticized by Beauvoir (See Katz 2003).

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———. 1985. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1987. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. (Originally published as Le Temps et l’autre. Montpellier: Fata Morgana 1979; 1st ed. 1947). ———. 1990a. Reflections in the Philosophy of Hitlerism. Trans. Seán Hand, Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, 63–71. ———. 1990b. Hegel and the Jews. In Difficult Freedom. Trans. Seán Hand, 235–238. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1990c. For a Jewish Humanism. In Difficult Freedom. Trans. Seán Hand, 273–276. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1990d. Antihumanism and Education. In Difficult Freedom. Trans. Seán Hand, 277–288. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1990e. Assimilation Today. In Difficult Freedom. Trans. Seán Hand, 255–258. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1990f. Judaism and the Feminine. In Difficult Freedom. Trans. Seán Hand, 30–37. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Originally Le judaïsme et le féminin. In Difficile Liberté: essais sur le judaïsme, 51–62. Paris: Albin Michel 1963 and 1976). ———. 1996. Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics. In Proper Names. Trans. Michael B. Smith, 66–74. London: Athlone. (Originally Kierkegaard: Existence et Éthique. In Noms propres, 99–109. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976). ———. 1998. Dying for… In Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. Michael B.  Smith, 207–218. New  York: Columbia University Press. (Originally Mourir Pour. In Heidegger: Questions Ouvertes, 254–264. Paris: Collège International de Philosophie, Editions Osiris, 1988). ———. 1999. Existentialism and Anti-Semitism. Trans. Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, October, vol. 87, 27–31. ———. 2001. In Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2003. On Escape/De l’évasion. Trans. Bettina G. Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2007. Being Jewish. In Continental Philosophy Review. Trans. Mary Beth Mader, vol. 40, 205–210. (Originally published as Être Juif. Confluences, 1947 année 7, nos. 15–17, 253–264. It was reprinted in Cahiers d’Etudes lévinassiennes, 2003, no. 1, 99–106). (The page numbers refer to the English translation). Lilla, Mark. 2003. The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York: New York Review of Books. Malka, Salomon. 2006. Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Miller, Elaine P. 2000. The ‘Paradoxical Displacement’: Beauvoir and Irigaray on Hegel’s Antigone. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 14: 121–137.

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Miller, Elaine. 2012. Saving Time: Temporality, Recurrence, and Transcendence in Beauvoir’s Nietzschean Cycles. In Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler, ed. Shannon M. Musset and William S. Wilkerson, 103–124. New York: State University of New York Press. Mills, Patricia Jagentowicz. 1996. Introduction. In Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel, ed. Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, 1–24. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Moi, Toril. 1990. Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell. Mussett, M.  Shannon. 2017. Life and Sexual Difference in Hegel and Beauvoir. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31 (3): 396–408. Peperzak, Adriaan. 1993. To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Perpich, Diane. 2008. The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Purvis, Jennifer. 2003. Hegelian Dimensions of The Second Sex: A Feminist Consideration. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 13 (1). http://jffp. pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/view/442. Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Rotenstreich, Nathan. 1953. Hegel’s Image of Judaism. Jewish Social Studies 15 (1): 33–52. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1984. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. (Originally L’Être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard, 1943). ———. 1989. No Exit and Three Other Plays. Trans. Stuart Gilbert and Lionel Abel. New York: Vintage. ———. 1998. Merleau-Ponty Vivant. In The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-­ Ponty, ed. Jon Stewart, 565–625. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1999. Reflections on the Jewish Question, A Lecture. October 87: 32–46. Schroeder, Brian. 1996. Altared Ground: Levinas, History and Violence. New  York: Routledge. Shuster, Martin. 2018. Levinas and German Idealism: Fichte and Hegel. In The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, ed. Michael L.  Morgan, 1–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Print version 2019. 195–215. Simons, Margaret A., ed. 1985. Women’s Studies International Forum: Reclaiming The Second Sex, vol. 8, no. 3. ———., ed. 1995. Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 1999a. Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. ———., ed. 1999b. Hypatia: The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, vol. 14, no. 4. ———., ed. 2006. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stone, Alison. 2017. Hegel and Twentieth-Century French Philosophy. In The Oxford Handbook of Hegel, ed. Dean Moyer.

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Tidd, Ursula. 2009. Simone de Beauvoir. London: Reaktion Books. Wilkerson, William S. 2012. A Different Kind of Universality: Beauvoir and Kant on Universal Ethics. In Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler, ed. Shannon M.  Musset and William S.  Wilkerson, 55–74. New  York: State University of New York Press. Williams, Robert R. 1998. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

22 Conclusion: Anticipations and Influences Jon Stewart

The basic hypothesis that the present collection wanted to test was that there are more points of continuity and overlap between the traditions of German Idealism and existentialism than are usually taken to be the case. The contributors were enjoined to look critically at the traditional view about the purported radical break that occurred in the history of philosophy when German Idealism came to an end and existentialism began. On the whole, it can be said that the individual chapters of this collection vindicate the truth of the stated hypothesis. However, some qualifications must be added. Virtually all of the chapters featured in this volume were able to uncover previously unseen points of continuity between the two traditions. Some of these are in fact quite compelling. The first half of the collection reveals the multitude of largely unrecognized existentialist ideas and themes that appear in the work of the German idealists. Roe Fremstedal’s chapter sketches how Kant’s theory of autonomy anticipates the existentialist conceptions of freedom in the work of figures such as Sartre. This is rather surprising since Kant is usually conceived to be anything but an existentialist thinker. Steven Hoeltzel’s chapter shows how Fichte clearly anticipates key ideas in the existentialist tradition concerning the nature of the self and subjectivity. Zoltán Gyenge meticulously demonstrates the important connections between the J. Stewart (*) Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia e-mail: [email protected]

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idealist Schelling and the existentialist Kierkegaard. This is a particularly important connection since Schelling and Kierkegaard were contemporaries, and it is often thought that this was the crucial period when existentialism was born in critical reaction to German Idealism. C. Allen Speight demonstrates that the early Hegel is in fact far more existentialist than one might have imagined. As Robert Wicks’s analysis has shown, Schopenhauer can be seen as an important transitional figure from idealism to existentialism with, on the one hand, his polemic against the other idealists and, on the other, his focus on the human condition as one of suffering and contingency. These articles all document the numerous ways in which the German idealists anticipated and prepared the way for key existentialist ideas. The sole exception to the general thrust of the present volume is Heiko Schulz’s chapter on Trendelenburg. This chapter shows that Trendelenburg was a philosopher whose work did not lend itself to the existentialist agenda. This counterexample to the general trend is thus in harmony with the old view of Karl Löwith about the discontinuity between the two traditions. This is, however, a somewhat complicated matter given the fact that the proto-­ existentialist Kierkegaard explicitly singles out Trendelenburg for high praise and distinguishes him positively from other contemporary German philosophers. Schulz’s chapter makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion about Kierkegaard’s relation to Trendelenburg. The chapters in the second half of the volume document the existentialists’ extensive use of the German idealists as sources. These chapters demonstrate that many of the existentialists made a close study of the German idealists and knew their main works quite well. The chapter on Kierkegaard sketches key points of continuity at precisely the point where the break between the two traditions is thought to occur. Following in the spirit of Zoltán Gyenge’s chapter on Schelling, this chapter shows that Kierkegaard also borrows concretely from Hegel in early works such as From the Papers of One Still Living, The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, and Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus dubitandum est, despite what might appear to be the Dane’s later anti-Hegelian polemic. Moreover, key concepts in Kierkegaard’s thought such as irony, anxiety, repetition, despair and the moment can all be seen to depend on a theory of idealism in some form. Among the German idealists, Kant enjoyed an especially important reception among the existentialist thinkers. Daniel Conway’s chapter outlines Nietzsche’s long-term engagement with Kant’s theory of representations and things in themselves. As is often the case with philosophers who draw on their predecessors as sources, Nietzsche’s use of Kant displays both a positive and a negative element. Kant was also an important source for the thought of

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Martin Buber, as is demonstrated by Peter Šajda’s insightful chapter. Like Nietzsche, Buber began as positively receptive to Kant’s philosophy and then, as his own thought developed, became more critically disposed. At different stages in his career Buber was also engaged with the thought of Fichte and Hegel on different subjects. While this engagement was critical, it cannot be characterized as a straightforward rejection of the tradition of German Idealism. István Czakó also emphasizes the importance of Kant in his study of the existentialist thought of Karl Jaspers. Kant was a lifelong source of inspiration for Jaspers, who saw himself as offering a corrective to what he regarded as the mistaken views of transcendental idealism that were then in circulation in the neo-Kantian school. Jaspers himself openly embraces his Kantian background and sees no contradiction between this and existentialism. Matthew Wester sketches how Hannah Arendt appropriated Kant’s conception of the faculty of judgment for an account of political action. Her responses to Kant’s Critique of Judgment were in many ways parallel to that of the other German idealists, which again speaks for a continuity between the traditions and not a radical break. Religion played an important role in German Idealism, and so it should come as no surprise that the thought of the idealists had a resonance among the religious existentialists. In his chapter Christian Danz shows that Paul Tillich had a lifelong interest in Schelling. Tillich openly acknowledged his debt to Schelling whose thought he positively appropriated in the service of theology. Specifically, he finds in Schelling the possibility of grounding the absolute nature of Christianity vis-à-vis the then current theories of historicism in the work of, for example, Ernst Troeltsch. In this context Tillich draws on Schelling’s theory of consciousness and history. Lee C. Barrett examines Jacques Maritain’s Catholic existentialism with an eye towards its historical origins. Maritain is critical of what he regards as the abstraction of idealism and points to Hegel’s tendency to reify the collective over the individual. Heidegger’s use of the German idealists was known ahead of time, but the authors of two separate chapters in this volume have collectively examined this for the first time in a more or less systematic fashion. There can be little doubt that among the existentialists, Heidegger was the one who studied German Idealism most carefully and made use of it most extensively. The chapters by David Espinet, Sylvaine Gourdain and Lucian Ionel trace Heidegger’s use of all of the main German idealists, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Heidegger both gave courses on these figures and appropriated them in his own work, using them as central figures in his elaborate account of the development of the history of philosophy. Kant’s theory of time and objectivity and Schelling’s account of being are singled out as specific points

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of appropriation by Heidegger. With Heidegger we have yet another case of an ambivalent reception of the tradition of German Idealism that is both critical and receptive. The German idealists also were important for the existentialists in the fields of philosophy of history and social-political philosophy. This is demonstrated by the chapters by Matthew Wester and Thomas Miles. Wester’s chapter on Hannah Arendt shows how Arendt made a close study of Hegel and was critical of his account of the development of world history, which she regarded as indifferent to the role of the individual. Thomas Miles’s article traces Camus’s evaluation of Hegel’s theory of history and politics against the background of the violent political developments of the first part of the twentieth century. Like Arendt, Camus is critical of Hegel, but in both cases there is an ambivalent engagement with him as an important point of orientation. Hegel’s philosophy of history was also a key point of interest for Merleau-Ponty, as David Ciavatta’s chapter demonstrates. While Merleau-Ponty criticizes the abstraction of Hegel’s theory and its neglect of the individual, he appreciates Hegel’s attempt to situate human beings historically. Merleau-Ponty, moreover, explicitly acknowledged the connection between Hegel and the existentialist movement. The ambivalence towards Hegel evidenced by Arendt, Camus, and Merleau-­ Ponty is found again in the work of Sartre. Bruce Baugh outlines the many points of inspiration that Sartre found in the writings of Hegel. Specifically, Hegel’s theories of self-consciousness, recognition and intersubjectivity were developed in different ways by Sartre. It can be said that Sartre’s philosophical psychology would never be what it was without the inspiration of Hegel. Claire Katz’s article shows how Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir share Sartre’s interest in Hegel’s account of the lord and the bondsman, which they draw on in their respective theories of ethics and social theory. Given these studies, there can be no question that most all of the existentialists were influenced in one way or another by the German idealists, especially Kant, Schelling and Hegel. This will come as a surprising conclusion to many readers. Perhaps a part of this surprise can be traced to a mistaken conception of the history of reception. When readers see criticisms of the German idealists in the writings of the existentialists, this is often generalized and taken to imply a complete rejection of them. However, the history of philosophy rarely works in this way. The reception of one philosopher by another is never one of complete acceptance or complete rejection. Philosophy is all about borrowing, criticizing, revising, and appropriating the ideas of one’s predecessor. Commentators are often deceived by the polemical rhetoric that one thinker employs against his or her predecessor, but a closer

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examination usually shows that there are almost always positive points of appropriation together with the negative points of criticism. The case of the existentialists’ use of the German idealists is very often complicated in this way. The one-sided focus on the negative aspect of the relation has misled scholars and caused them to overlook the many positive points of influence. There can be no doubt that the existentialists were inspired by these idealist sources. With that said, there is of course no reason to assume that they were ever uncritical in their use of them. But it would be a mistake to take their criticism as a sign of a complete rejection or dismissal of German Idealism as such. The connections made by the authors here linking the individual thinkers from these two traditions should inspire scholars to more detailed studies in the future. These might also include investigations of figures from both traditions who are not treated in the present volume. Future research might also include more detailed investigations of key figures such as Heidegger or Kierkegaard, where the amount of relevant material is very large and cannot be fully treated in individual chapters or articles. It is hoped that the results of the present volume will enjoin students and scholars to rethink their views on the relation of German Idealism to existentialism and pursue further studies on it.

Author Index1

A

Abraham, 132–134, 136, 140, 144n9, 144n10, 278, 283, 534, 540 Adorno, Theodor, 171, 225 Alain (pseudonym of Émile-Auguste Chartier), 474, 544n5 Allison, Henry, 54, 55, 58–60, 243, 370 Alznauer, Mark, 141, 142, 143n3 Anz, Wilhelm, 7 Aquinas, Thomas, 16, 182, 275, 279, 421–424, 426, 428, 429, 436 Arendt, Hannah, 8, 15, 307, 319, 333n22, 339–357, 388, 441, 445, 457, 469, 557, 558 Aristotle, 59, 107, 169, 184, 186, 188, 194, 196, 275, 279, 310, 364, 396, 406 Aron, Raymond, 524 Augustine, 275 B

Baader, Franz von, 212 Bailey, Tom, 245

Bakunin, Mikhail, 1, 110 Barrett, Lee C., 16, 557 Barth, Heinrich, 305 Barth, Karl, 422 Barth, Paul, 270 Bataille, Georges, 524 Bauer, Bruno, 1, 212, 449 Baugh, Bruce, 17, 558 Beauvoir, Simone de, 8, 17, 18, 149, 210, 499, 523–543, 558 Beiser, Frederick, 3, 70, 195, 196, 223, 224, 243 Berdyaev, Nicholas, 419, 421 Berger, Erich von, 200n25 Bergmann, Hugo, 268 Bergson, Henri, 421, 474 Blanchot, Maurice, 524 Blattner, William, 364, 369–371 Bloch, Ernst, 310 Blücher, Heinrich, 306 Bohlsen, Werner, 390 Böhme, Jacob, 435 Bonnet, Charles, 28 Bourgeois, Bernard, 534 Brentano, Franz, 169, 170

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3

561

562 

Author Index

Breton, André, 524 Brobjer, Thomas, 245, 262n18, 263n25 Bröcker, Walter, 390 Brunkhorst, Hauke, 343 Brunstäd, Friedrich, 290 Buber, Martin, 8, 14, 19n5, 267–284, 419, 525, 557 Buchheim, Thomas, 396 Büchsel, Friedrich, 288 Bultmann, Rudolf, 63 Bunsen, Christian Carl Josias, 105 Burckhardt, Jacob, 110 Burke, Edmund, 271

Diehl, Ulrich, 308 Dion, 273 Dostoyevsky, 545n10 Dreyfus, Hubert, 369 Droysen, Johann Gustav Bernhard, 110 Dühring, Eugen, 264n47 E

Engels, Friedrich, 1, 2, 105, 110, 260 Erdmann, Johann Eduard, 212 Espinet, David, 15, 364, 384n6, 557 F

C

Callippus, 273 Camus, Albert, 5, 8, 10, 16, 64, 130, 149, 209–211, 439–470, 558 Chestov, Leo Isaakowitsch, 421, 430 Ciavatta, David, 6, 16, 487, 496n16, 497n20, 558 Cohen, Hermann, 277–279, 283, 284, 285n7, 366 Comte, Auguste, 258, 259, 264n47, 273, 421 Conway, Daniel, 13, 556 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 275 Croce, Benedetto, 143 Crowell, Steven, 61, 142, 143n4, 172, 173, 182, 199n14, 363 Czakó, István, 14, 212, 217, 557 D

Dante, 275 Danz, Christian, 14, 288, 291, 296, 299, 300, 557 Darwin, Charles, 151 Daub, Carl, 212 Derrida, Jacques, 165, 383n3 Descartes, René, 109, 366, 371, 399, 400, 421, 422, 424, 426, 474

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 1, 196, 212, 267, 330, 449 Fichte, Immanuel Hermann, 212, 214, 268, 284, 292–294, 324, 325, 356, 388, 399, 410, 470n2, 473, 549n36, 555, 557 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, vii, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 27, 28, 62, 77–99, 104–106, 124n4, 214–217, 220, 243, 245, 262n22, 268–269, 282, 284n2, 285n5, 287–297, 301, 306, 308, 315, 318, 319, 321, 322, 324–325, 328, 331, 334n27–29, 339–342, 344, 346, 387–412, 442 Fink, Eugen, 43–45, 46n17 Fischer, Kuno, 104, 243, 306 Fondane, Benjamin, 430 Formosa, Paul, 56, 59 Fortlage, Karl, 242 Foucault, Michel, 165 Fremstedal, Roe, 6, 7, 10, 11, 57, 58, 60, 62, 66, 69, 70, 71n1, 72n5, 212–214, 363, 555 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 151, 153 Friedrich, Wolfgang-Günther, 390 Fritz, Alfred, 290

  Author Index  G

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 404, 413n20, 413n22 Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald Marie, 419 Geiger, Moritz, 310 George, Stefan, 382 Georgii, E.F. von, 108 Gilson, Etienne, 419 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 255, 256 Gogarten, Friedrich, 288 Gourdain, Sylvaine, 15, 557 Gravesande, Willem Jacob, 28 Green, Ronald M., 7, 210, 213 Grenier, Jean, 442 Guardini, Romano, 421 Guterman, Norbert, 504, 510, 511 Guyer, Paul, 340 Gyenge, Zoltán, 6–8, 11, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 212, 215, 225, 555, 556 H

Haar, Michel, 404 Han-Pile, Béatrice, 369, 370 Hartmann, Eduard von, 246, 263n24, 263n25 Hegel, G.W.F., v, vii, 1, 62, 78, 103, 112, 129, 151, 171, 190, 193, 196, 198n4, 199n10, 202n43, 209, 217–222, 243–246, 262n22, 268, 279–284, 294, 298, 306, 310, 321, 322, 324, 329–331, 333n19, 339–346, 356, 388, 399–411, 413n15, 422, 424–426, 429, 434, 435, 439–447, 449–458, 460, 461, 464, 465, 467–470, 470n3, 473–475, 477–494, 496n15, 499, 500, 502–504, 506–512, 517, 518, 524–532, 534, 535,

563

538–542, 544n6, 545n8, 546n15, 547n22, 547n27, 548n34, 549n36, 549n37, 556–558 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 120, 216, 217, 279, 328–330, 442, 474, 478, 479, 495 Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 218, 231n11, 474, 478, 491 Phenomenology of Spirit, 12, 17, 129, 130, 133, 135–141, 145n17, 145n18, 221, 226, 310, 328–330, 474, 478, 483–486, 504, 524, 538, 542 Philosophy of Right, 12, 113, 136, 140–142, 145n18, 218, 474, 478, 485, 488, 491 Science of Logic, 113, 216, 217, 328, 474 Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, 113, 217, 218, 220 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 29, 58, 80, 85–87, 90–93, 96, 106, 110, 117, 149, 151, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 179, 184, 185, 209, 210, 308, 324, 363, 387, 420, 421, 423, 425, 427–430, 432, 445, 474, 499, 557, 559 Being and Time, 58, 83, 364, 365, 367–376, 378, 387, 399 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 364, 368, 372–374 Heinze, Max, 270 Henrich, Dieter, 66 Heraclitus, 43, 44, 406 Herberg, Will, 16, 419, 420 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 62 Hippolyte, Jean, 475 Hirsch, Emmanuel, 288 Hitler, Adolf, 109, 440, 445, 447, 540 Hobbes, Thomas, 194, 468

564 

Author Index

Hoeltzel, Steven, 11, 84, 97, 555 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 381, 473 Horton, Walter Marshall, 419 Horwitz, Rivka, 271, 272 Hotho, Heinrich Gustav, 212 Hügli, Anton, 308, 332n1, 334n27 Hühn, Lore, 7, 212, 390, 391, 412n5 Humboldt, Alexander von, 110 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 105 Hume, David, 35, 37, 59 Husserl, Edmund, 5, 78, 92, 170, 310, 425, 426, 432, 474, 499, 524, 543n1 Hyppolite, Jean, 442, 445, 446, 474 I

Ionel, Lucian, 8, 15, 557 Isaiah, 273, 274, 538 J

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 10, 27–45, 104, 106, 212, 435 Janaway, Christopher, 8, 156, 165 Janicaud, Dominique, 404 Jaspers, Karl, 8, 14, 115, 305–331, 332n2, 332n3, 332n5, 332n6, 332n8, 333n11, 333n19–22, 334n27, 334n29, 388, 389, 405, 406, 412n2, 421, 557 Jeanson, Francis, 456, 457 Jonas, Hans, 390 K

Kähler, Martin, 291 Kant, Immanuel, vii, 2, 27, 51–71, 83, 88, 96, 104, 105, 111, 118, 144n12, 150–152, 161, 163, 164, 188, 194, 201n35, 203n43, 213–214, 241–261, 262n17,

263n42, 268–273, 275–280, 282–284, 288, 293, 295, 296, 302, 305–308, 310–325, 329–331, 332n6, 333n20, 339, 340, 346–350, 352–357, 363–383, 390, 400, 422, 426, 435, 465, 469, 474, 525, 542, 555–558 Critique of Judgment, 15, 213, 245, 339–357, 557 Critique of Practical Reason, 40, 53, 296, 314, 339, 377, 384 Critique of Pure Reason, vii, 51, 68, 71n1, 119, 213, 214, 243, 312, 316, 339, 347, 365, 374, 375, 380 Katz, Claire, 17, 524, 558 Kaufmann, Walter, 250 Kempis, Thomas à, 258 Kierkegaard, Peter Christian, 114 Kierkegaard, Søren, v, 1, 13, 43, 52, 80, 82, 98, 103, 106, 107, 110–112, 115, 116, 118, 119, 122, 130, 149, 169–197, 198n4, 199n14, 200n18, 209–229, 267, 310, 328–330, 363, 399, 421–424, 430–432, 434–436, 441, 443, 470, 499, 500, 509, 517, 518, 525, 530, 556, 559 The Concept of Anxiety, 58, 72n7, 106, 107, 113, 116, 122, 176, 216 The Concept of Irony, 13, 107, 121, 214, 217–220, 225, 226, 556 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 67, 116, 213, 215, 216, 222, 224 Fear and Trembling, 133 Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est, 215, 221, 226, 556

  Author Index 

The Sickness unto Death, 199n13, 215, 221, 222, 227, 229 King, Martin Luther, 441, 466–469 Kirchhoff, Jochen, 105 Kivistö, Sari, 68–70 Koch, Anton Friedrich, 404 Kojève, Alexandre, 6, 133, 442, 445, 446, 454–456, 460, 470n4, 474, 506, 524, 527, 528, 530, 538, 544n4, 544n6, 546n13, 547n27 Koktanek, Mirko, 108, 109, 115, 116 Kosakievicz, Olga, 529 Kosch, Michelle, 7, 8, 54, 97, 103, 213, 215 Koyré, Alexandre, 474 Krüger, Gerhard, 390 Krumsiek, Elisabeth, 390 L

Lacan, Jacques, 524 Landauer, Gustav, 269, 282 Lange, F.A., 242, 243, 250 Langley, Raymond, 307–309, 311–315, 328–331, 332n6 Lask, Emil, 99n3, 288, 310, 311 Le Sage, Georges-Louis, 28 Lefebvre, Henri, 504, 510, 511 Lehmann, Siegfried, 268 Leibmann, Otto, 243 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 46n7, 59, 193, 212, 399 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 108, 212, 216 Levinas, Emmanuel, 9, 17, 18, 523–543, 558 Leynaud, René, 448 Lipps, Theodor, 309 Livieri, Paolo, 10 Locke, John, 161, 468

565

Longinus, 271 Lotze, Hermann, 3, 195 Louis XVI, 514 Löwith, Karl, 1, 109, 143n2, 195, 197, 556 Lucretius, 309 Ludwig I (King of Bavaria), 105 Lukács, György, 105, 109, 111, 123, 123–124n3, 130, 136, 144n7, 310 Lütgert, Wilhelm, 290–292, 301 M

Maier, Heinrich, 311 Malraux, Andre, 486, 487, 494 Marcel, Gabriel, 421, 433 Marheineke, Philipp, 212 Maritain, Jacques, 8, 16, 419–437, 557 Martensen, Hans Lassen, 113, 115, 121, 215, 217, 230n8 Marx, Karl, 1, 110, 151, 260, 324, 345, 445, 449, 456, 470n3, 510, 511, 513, 514, 533 Marx, Werner, 413n20 Mascall, Eric Lionel, 419 Matthews, Bruce, 110 Mauriac, François, 448 Medicus, Fritz, 288, 289, 291–293, 296, 297 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 269, 285n5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2, 6, 8, 12, 16, 17, 86, 129, 130, 137–139, 141, 143n1, 444–446, 455, 473–495, 524, 543n1, 558 Miles, Thomas, 16, 558 Millgrim, Stanley, 457 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 250, 256

566 

Author Index

Montaigne, 545n10 Moore, Adrian, 364, 370, 383n3 Moses, 540 Moyar, Dean, 141, 142, 143n3 Müller-Wille, Klaus, 113 Mynster, Jakob Peter, 113

Poulain de la Barre, François, 530 Pradines, Maurice, 524 Pyrrha, 134 Pythagoras, 530 Q

Queneau, Raymond, 524 N

Napoleon Bonaparte, 450, 452, 454, 455, 517 Neiman, Susan, 51, 61, 64, 68 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 5, 7–9, 13, 115, 123n3, 149, 151, 241–261, 309, 310, 379, 398–400, 422, 432, 435, 441, 443, 465, 469, 470, 525, 536, 556, 557 Nimrod, 133 Nissl, Franz, 310 Noah, 133 Nohl, Herman, 132–134, 143n5, 143n7, 144n8, 144n9 Nordentoft-Schlechta, Eva, 114

R

Ranke, Leopold, 110 Reiner, Hans, 390 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard, 84, 104 Rhode, Peter P., 114 Rickert, Heinrich, 310, 311, 366 Ritschl, Albrecht, 290, 291 Rockmore, Tom, 8 Rosenkranz, Karl, 212 Rosenzweig, Franz, 548n34 Rotenstreich, Nathan, 545n8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 194, 452 Ruge, Arnold, 105 Russell, Bertrand, 280

O

Oedipus, 138 Olson, Alan, M., 306–308, 332n2 Oltmanns, Käte, 390 Oncken, Hermann, 310 P

Pascal, Blaise, 275–277 Paulus, Heinrich, 105 Pihlström, Sami, 68–70 Pippin, Robert, 143n3, 405 Platner, Ernst, 62 Plato, 13, 36, 106, 194, 241, 257, 273, 274, 280, 281, 305, 314, 318, 333n15, 343, 399, 421, 465 Plotinus, 309 Pöggeler, Otto, 404

S

Saint-Simon, Henri de, 273, 281 Šajda, Peter, 14, 19n5, 557 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 3, 5, 8–11, 16, 17, 19n4, 52, 54, 56–58, 60, 61, 71n2, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 90, 98, 99, 130, 141, 149, 152–154, 160, 161, 165, 170, 171, 173, 183, 209–211, 229n1, 363, 383, 421–425, 428–431, 440, 444–448, 455, 456, 469, 474, 499–519, 524–526, 528–530, 534–539, 541, 543n1, 544n6, 546n12, 547n21, 547n25, 547n27, 555, 558 Savigny, Friedrich Carl von, 105, 110 Schaarschmidt, Karl, 242

  Author Index 

Schaeder, Erich, 290 Schäfer, Klaus, 178, 193, 199n16 Scheler, Max, 63, 310, 426 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, vii, 2, 6, 8, 9, 11–16, 52, 58, 78, 103–123, 132, 143n6, 171, 182, 196, 209, 215–216, 223, 243, 245, 251, 252, 262n22, 268, 284n1, 287–290, 294–299, 301, 306, 308, 309, 315, 318, 321, 322, 324–328, 331, 339–341, 344, 346, 356, 363, 378, 383, 387–412, 412n4, 420, 424, 435, 442, 473, 556–558 Schiller, Friedrich, 271, 473 Schlatter, Adolf, 290, 291 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 214, 220, 319 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 3, 105, 196 Schlosser, Johann Georg, 319 Schopenhauer, Arthur, vii, 2, 7, 8, 12, 78, 149–166, 194, 209, 222–223, 242–245, 262n22, 270, 271, 282, 306, 309, 332n4, 332n5, 556 Schulz, Heiko, 12, 211, 212, 556 Schwab, Phillipp, 7, 212 Scotus, Duns, 424 Simmel, Georg, 7, 155, 156, 165, 270, 289, 310 Socrates, 67, 103, 142, 218–221, 224, 226, 231n11, 251, 307, 350, 465, 469 Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, 214, 218, 220 Soll, Ivan, 156, 157 Solomon, Robert C., 5 Sophocles, 138, 220, 221 Speight, C. Allen, 11, 12, 556 Spinoza, Baruch de, 27, 28, 39, 106, 194, 309, 310 Spir, Afrikan, 243 Stack, George, 243

567

Stalin, Joseph, 440, 441, 443–445, 447, 449, 452, 456, 457, 465, 468 Stein, Lorenz von, 273 Stern, Robert, 7, 56, 57, 213 Stewart, Jon, 2, 5, 7, 8, 52, 55, 57, 58, 61, 67, 113, 115, 121, 122, 132, 141, 143n1, 143n2, 144n9, 209–212, 215–222, 225, 228, 229, 434, 446, 452, 469 Stoicism, 314, 317 Strauss, David Friedrich, 212, 449 T

Tao-hsin, 159 Taylor, Mark C., 2, 8, 132, 133, 217 Teichmüller, Gustav, 243 Theunissen, Michael, 113, 116, 267 Thoreau, Henry David, 441, 466, 468, 469 Tidd, Ursula, 524, 526, 528, 544n5 Tieck, Ludwig, 214, 220 Tillich, Paul, 8, 14, 123, 287–302, 419, 420, 433, 557 Tilliette, Xavier, 107 Timmermann, Jens, 65, 69 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 273 Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf, 3, 8, 12, 19n3, 110, 169–197, 209, 223–225, 232n14, 330, 556 Troeltsch. Ernst, 289, 298, 310, 557 V

Van Gogh, Vincent, 380 W

Wachinger, Lorenz, 267 Wagner, Richard, 242, 244, 255 Wahl, Jean, 445, 474, 502, 503, 523, 544n6

568 

Author Index

Weber, Alfred, 310 Weber, Max, 273, 289, 310, 330 Weil, Eric, 524 Werder, Karl, 217, 231n10 Wester, Matthew, 15, 557, 558 Wicks, Robert, 12, 556 William IV, Frederick, 105 Windelband, Wilhelm, 310, 366 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 320

Wolff, Christian, 30, 46n7, 46n8, 46n10 Wright, Richard, 536 Wundt, Wilhelm, 270 Wyschogrod, Edith, 267 Y

Young, Julian, 156, 165, 242, 243

Subject Index1

A

Absolute beginning, 39, 41, 42 Absolute freedom, 43 Absolute Knowing, 137, 291, 407, 408, 483 Absolute, the, 17, 54, 83, 88, 89, 94, 95, 97, 105, 119, 139, 189, 197, 231n11, 269, 280, 281, 291, 292, 295–297, 299–301, 322, 329, 343, 401, 407–409, 420, 445, 483, 500, 501, 509, 517–519, 534, 557 Abstraction, v, 1, 2, 11, 14, 16, 33, 43, 52, 82, 83, 85, 161, 216, 224, 228, 229, 279–280, 423, 426, 437, 557, 558 Absurdity, 150, 154, 327, 431, 448 Absurd, the, 173, 270, 458 Acting (Handeln), 91–94 Actuality, 11, 29, 38, 52, 78, 80, 89, 95, 98, 107, 115, 119, 120, 142, 177, 178, 189, 191, 199n15, 216, 228, 395, 396, 409, 421, 425, 455, 484, 485

Aletheia (àλήθεια), 402–405, 408 Alienation, 12, 70, 130, 132–134, 136, 150, 173, 175, 210, 221, 279, 380, 501, 507, 511–513 Analytic philosophy, 1 Antigone, 12, 131, 138–140, 221, 546n11 Antinomies, 40–42, 66, 72n13, 300 Anti-Semitism, 255, 383, 534, 536–540, 543 Anxiety, v, 11, 13, 51, 53, 57–59, 70, 71, 149, 174, 182, 210, 226, 227, 251, 269, 276, 318, 319, 420, 430, 431, 519, 539, 556 Anxiety of influence, 213 Apeiron, 38 Apperception, 367, 373–376, 432, 433 Artistic creation, 17 Asceticism, 254 Atheism, 223, 422, 424, 428, 431, 451 Atheism Dispute, 324 Authenticity, 11, 55, 60, 61, 71, 78, 95–97, 131, 141, 150, 173, 199n14

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Stewart (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3

569

570 

Subject Index

Authoritarianism, 443, 447, 450, 456, 468 Autonomy, 11, 15, 53, 55–58, 70, 71, 88, 97, 214, 292, 294, 296, 297, 301, 346, 347, 350, 392, 405, 427, 492, 528, 555 B

Bad faith, 11, 58, 60, 85, 425, 532 Bad infinity, 488 Beautiful soul, the, 131, 132, 136, 138–140, 145n18, 450 Being (Sein), 91–94, 110, 117, 366, 370 Being and nothing, 106 Boredom, 173 British idealism, 5, 33 C

Capitalism, 445, 513 Categorical imperative, 53–56, 88, 244, 377, 379 Categories, 1, 12, 71, 81, 85, 88, 94, 106, 131, 161, 170, 173, 174, 177, 178, 182, 185, 188, 189, 193, 214, 216, 217, 222, 224, 247, 249, 251, 252, 254, 310, 311, 313, 320, 340, 346, 354, 356, 367, 375, 377, 387, 401, 404–406, 408, 427, 428, 436, 478, 479, 482, 502, 507, 517–519, 528 Causality, 53, 161, 173, 188, 379 Cause and effect, 189 Christianity, 13, 120, 121, 145n15, 219, 223, 228, 255, 257, 258, 289, 292, 293, 297–299, 317, 433, 480, 487, 496n15, 534, 536, 538, 540, 557

Cold War, 318, 319 Communism, 442, 449 Conscience, 12, 96, 130, 131, 138–143, 145n20, 350, 398, 436, 439, 440, 444, 447, 450–452, 468, 469, 528, 529, 548n33 Contingency, 11, 12, 62, 149, 150, 343, 411, 477, 492–494, 497n21, 519, 556 D

Daimon, 218 Dasein, 16, 36–39, 42, 43, 45, 61, 80, 85, 87, 92, 96, 170, 199n15, 307, 323, 363, 366–368, 370–372, 378, 379, 381, 383n4, 387, 391, 409 Death, vii, 149, 210, 217, 404, 407, 440, 446, 454, 460, 461, 505, 506, 510, 514, 515, 517, 527, 528, 530 Death penalty, 440, 442, 444, 458, 463 Décadence, 13, 255–256, 263n35 Decisionism, 437 Desire, 12, 42, 54, 55, 57, 71, 141, 144n10, 150, 151, 155–160, 163–166, 423, 436, 501, 503, 505, 506, 510, 512, 513, 527–529, 533, 542, 546n16, 549n37 Determinism, 52, 53, 247, 248, 254, 256 Dialogical philosophy, 14, 267 Deucalion, 134 Dionysus, 261 Duty, 244 Doubt, 13, 38, 42, 65, 197, 210, 211, 226, 420, 442, 557

  Subject Index 

Despair, v, 13, 51, 64–67, 70, 71, 72n13, 98, 182, 197, 199n13, 221, 227, 326, 329, 420, 430, 431, 437, 556 Decisionism, 16, 56, 70 E

Empiricism, 111 Enlightenment, 28, 61, 63, 151, 159, 161, 162, 164, 166, 200n22, 405, 451, 480 Evil, 54, 55, 57–60, 67–71, 72n7, 153, 214, 273, 275, 293, 308, 316, 317, 389, 392, 393, 395–399, 411, 433, 439, 440, 444, 537, 545n10 Eternity, 270 Ethics, 272, 428–430, 440, 446, 451, 457–459, 464, 466–470 Existence, 3, 11, 12, 17, 27–45, 52, 53, 56, 64, 66, 68, 70, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 89–91, 95, 96, 98, 99, 103–113, 115–117, 119–123, 142, 152, 154, 159, 160, 170, 172, 173, 178–183, 193, 197, 199n12, 199n13, 199n15, 199n16, 199n17, 200n20, 214, 217, 224, 228, 242, 259, 261, 270, 272, 276–279, 281, 283, 284, 307, 308, 314, 316, 327, 342, 346, 353, 367, 370–372, 388, 390, 391, 393, 395, 399, 406, 409, 420, 422–428, 431, 432, 434, 435, 437, 459, 470, 479, 494, 518, 519, 529, 532, 534, 536, 538, 539, 545n10 Existentialist hero, 493 Epistemology, vii, 13, 14, 16, 28, 33, 37, 77, 79, 86–88, 94, 154, 161,

571

200n22, 214, 216, 318, 422, 425, 426 Ethics, vii, 14, 16–18, 27, 29, 30, 34, 53, 55–57, 60, 71n2, 97, 116, 140, 141, 193, 194, 213, 214, 228, 271–272, 283, 285n7, 310, 313, 350, 351, 421, 425, 428–431, 434, 436, 439–470, 525, 526, 535, 541, 542, 544n7, 545n10, 548n30, 549n38, 558 F

Faith, 36, 37, 39, 60, 63–68, 70, 71, 98, 106, 108, 117, 120, 182, 197, 213, 216, 219, 228, 229, 256, 258, 259, 274, 278, 299, 300, 307, 308, 332n6, 421, 430, 435–437, 469, 493, 496n15 Fascism, 445, 545n7 Feeling, 2, 34, 35, 38, 71, 86, 130, 135, 156, 157, 255, 271, 339, 340, 355, 450, 451, 459, 460, 529 Freedom, 11, 33, 34, 38–43, 45, 46n6, 51–71, 77–99, 106, 113, 120, 121, 145n15, 149, 154, 155, 173, 179, 182, 195, 210, 216, 218, 220, 225, 226, 246, 247, 249, 252–256, 288, 294–297, 300, 301, 307, 308, 312, 314, 316, 317, 323, 325, 326, 339, 345, 347, 353, 357, 366, 367, 377–381, 389, 391–397, 421, 424, 425, 429, 437, 446, 452, 458–460, 463, 464, 467, 480, 482, 483, 485, 496n13, 501, 505, 506, 508–510, 514–516, 518, 519, 525, 526, 528–530, 532–534, 539, 543n1, 544n7, 545n10, 548n30, 549n37, 555 Freedom of the press, 463

572 

Subject Index

French Enlightenment, vii, 28 French postmodernism, 5 French Revolution, 342, 451, 452, 455, 465, 485 G

German Enlightenment, 27, 46n8 God, 11, 14, 32, 34, 52, 64–71, 97–99, 108, 111, 117, 120, 121, 133, 134, 178, 189, 197, 202n40, 213, 214, 256, 270, 272, 274, 277–284, 290, 292, 293, 295–298, 301, 308, 312–314, 321, 322, 325, 326, 330, 392, 394, 395, 397, 401, 409, 424, 425, 428–437, 454, 481, 487, 496n15, 500, 503, 539, 541 Ground (Grund), 31, 32, 56, 61, 65, 66, 81, 97, 165, 190, 192, 213, 307, 327, 330, 346, 350, 355, 367, 374–376, 378, 388, 390–399, 405, 407–409, 412n8, 425, 435 H

Hermeneutics, 59, 195, 404 Heteronomy, 55, 56, 58, 513 Historicism, 287–302, 445, 447, 450, 452, 453, 557 History, v, vii, 2, 13, 15, 17, 55, 63, 140–143, 145n20, 174, 182, 225, 226, 246, 256–260, 274–277, 280, 282, 284, 289, 292, 293, 295, 297–301, 318, 319, 340–346, 357, 364, 382, 383, 401, 404–406, 445–447, 450, 452–455, 457, 458, 468, 469, 470n3, 473–495, 500, 501, 508, 509, 517–519, 531, 534, 537, 539, 548n34, 557, 558 History of being, 15

History of ideas, 10, 18–19, 465, 540 History of philosophy, 2, 4, 18, 109, 119, 123, 140, 151, 209, 210, 242, 257, 305, 318, 321, 327, 330, 332n2, 366, 367, 480, 524, 525, 540, 548, 548n34, 555, 557, 558 History of reception, 6, 9 Holocaust, 2, 382 Humanism, 422 I

Ideality, 191 Identity, 1–19, 28, 29, 36, 38, 39, 44, 45, 61, 119, 295, 297, 299, 345, 392, 393, 439, 479, 525, 526, 534–543 Identity, national, 268 I-hood (Ichheit), 78–81, 83, 85, 88, 90, 94–99 Imagination, 185, 215, 229, 314, 315, 355, 363–383, 420 Immortality, 34, 64–67, 98, 213, 308, 312, 314, 341 Incarnation, 487, 488, 496n15, 515, 517, 518 Incorporation thesis, 54–55 Indirect communication, 330 Individuality, 27, 94–99, 150, 155, 158, 218, 299, 427, 491, 501 Infinity, 270, 329, 407 Intellectual history, 4, 10, 45n2 Irony, 13, 214, 218–220, 225, 226, 251, 258, 502, 556 Irrationalism, 211, 435 J

Jesus, 134, 136 Jesus of Nazareth, 110, 121, 132, 134, 135, 136, 144, 145, 219, 228, 290, 291, 293, 298, 299, 249, 536, 518

  Subject Index 

Judaism, 268, 278, 292, 524, 531, 534, 535, 537–542, 545n8 Judgment, 153, 171, 177, 183, 184, 189, 197n1, 199n10, 220, 247, 250, 253 Job, 69 Judgment, 15, 31, 43, 66, 273, 340, 346–357, 358n9, 387, 402, 403, 426, 452, 456, 504, 557 I

Kepler’s law, 186 L

Latency (λήθη), 389, 396, 403, 405 Leap, 72n7, 178–180, 182, 191, 192, 198n9, 199n10, 199n11, 203n43, 216, 327, 380, 408, 435 Liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, 154 Lived experience, v, 11, 16, 17, 82, 84, 86, 129, 130, 133, 136, 209, 224, 283, 420, 423, 437, 483–486, 493, 518, 519, 536 Logic, 11, 46n7, 106, 119, 120, 122, 154, 170, 176–179, 184–186, 189–193, 196, 200n22, 201n25, 216, 218, 224, 244, 274, 279, 319, 320, 350, 351, 368, 372, 378, 379, 406, 426, 482–485, 495n9 Logos (λόγος), 34, 226, 388, 394–396, 402–406, 408, 409, 411, 413n22 Lordship and Bondage, 133, 330, 528 Love, 132–136, 145n13, 145n15, 165, 278, 280, 391, 395, 399, 412n9, 429, 432–434, 437, 443, 469, 499, 519, 529, 534, 546n11, 546n12

573

M

Marburg school, 366 Marxism, 1, 422, 429 Master-Slave dialectic, 446, 450, 453–455, 458, 461, 462, 468, 507, 509, 524, 527, 530, 532, 533, 541–542, 543n1, 544n6, 545n8 Materialism, 33, 243, 247, 248, 254, 256, 421, 428, 510, 525, 544n7 Mathematics, 30, 31, 179, 188, 191, 320 Maturity (Mündigkeit), 60, 71, 485 Meaning of life, 12 Mechanism, 41, 42, 312, 539 Metaphysics, vii, 12, 16, 27, 29–36, 39, 46n7, 51, 52, 64, 150, 151, 170, 192, 196, 224, 247, 267, 284, 291, 308, 311, 316, 317, 321, 325, 347, 365, 374, 377–379, 381, 383n3, 389, 398–400, 411, 421, 422, 425–427, 435 Metontology, 391 Midrash, 541 Moment, the, v, 38, 41, 107, 139, 182, 221, 227, 425, 435, 436, 455, 496n13, 502, 556 Movement, 176–179, 186–191 Mythology, 63, 105, 114–116, 122, 123, 132, 298, 389, 548n30 N

Naturalism, 1, 421 Natural law, 154, 194, 203, 421, 429, 430, 436, 442 Natural religion, 32, 33, 480 Natural science, 191, 249, 320 Natural theology, 30, 32, 34, 63, 71 Nature, 193, 295, 298, 339, 341, 347, 357, 379, 392, 478, 480 Nazism, 273, 445, 467

574 

Subject Index

Necessity, 189, 191 Negation, 510 Negativity, 107, 119, 388, 403–408, 411, 502 Neo-Kantianism, 14, 195, 242, 243, 305, 310, 318, 366, 387, 390, 557 Nihilism, 42, 254, 424, 425, 435 Nonground, 16, 388, 391, 395 Nothingness, 42, 154, 173, 177, 218, 407, 425, 430, 431, 437, 502–510 O

Ontological proof, 52 Ontology, 86, 87, 92, 94, 99, 178, 193, 200n22, 363, 365–368, 371, 391, 393, 400, 404, 420, 426, 431, 477, 499, 549n38 Organism, 173, 179, 312 P

Painting, 380, 477, 486, 487, 490 Paradox, 98, 174, 182, 214, 300, 404, 432 Passion, 197 Perception, 190 Perspectivism, 251 Pessimism, 12, 149–166 Phenomenology, 483–486, 495n3, 525, 549n37 Phenomenology, 5, 59, 72n3, 92, 195, 426 Philosopher-king, 273 Philosophical anthropology, 14, 17, 61–63, 71, 267–284, 352 Philosophical psychology, 17, 558 Philosophy of history, 15, 17, 225, 226, 292, 295, 298, 299, 301, 340–344, 381, 455, 473–483, 486, 487, 494, 496n12, 496n14, 558

Philosophy of nature, 28 Philosophy of religion, 121, 283, 297, 316 Political philosophy, 284 Politics, vii, 15, 143n3, 274, 289, 319, 341–344, 346–349, 351–354, 356, 358n14, 444, 458, 468, 558 Positivism, 1, 244, 258, 259, 264n47, 420, 421, 434 Possibility, 4, 17, 29, 32, 39, 40, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 61, 79–81, 89–91, 95, 96, 98, 99, 107, 112, 117, 132, 135, 153, 177–179, 189, 192, 227, 229, 243, 296, 297, 308, 323, 366, 374, 376, 378–380, 382, 393, 395–397, 403, 423, 435, 436, 466, 467, 477, 486, 489, 502, 503, 507, 511, 540, 549n37, 557 Postulates of practical reason, 272, 314 Pragmatic anthropology, 61–63 Pragmatism, 1, 5, 66, 70, 420 Principle of sufficient reason, 28 Progress, 341 Propositiones indemonstrabiles, 30 Purpose, 188–190, 194, 312 R

Radical evil, 55, 58, 60, 71, 214, 316, 317 Reason, v, 2, 12, 40, 41, 44, 46n6, 51, 52, 55–57, 59, 64, 66–71, 72n13, 72n15, 79, 88, 90, 94, 96–98, 103, 105, 106, 108, 111, 112, 117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 129, 132, 153, 158, 189, 190, 199n12, 211, 213, 214, 218, 220, 246, 251, 255, 257, 258, 272, 273, 279, 281, 283, 294, 297, 306, 307, 311, 313–315, 318, 319, 321, 322, 329, 333n15, 340, 342–344, 346, 347, 350, 357, 366, 367, 374,

  Subject Index 

376–379, 382, 393, 403, 405, 429, 435, 436, 452, 469, 477, 480, 481, 483, 485–487, 493, 496n13, 502, 519, 539 Rebellion, 16, 439–441, 444, 449, 458–468 Reciprocity thesis, 54, 55 Reconciliation, 135 Relativism, 16, 211, 393, 405, 424, 427, 429, 437 Revelation, 29, 34, 35, 38, 69, 108, 110, 114, 115, 290, 291, 298, 433, 496n15 Romanticism, 53, 218, 249, 383, 413n22, 421 Rationalism, 367 Revolutions of 1848, 1 Recognition, 9, 17, 18, 62, 150–152, 218, 375, 376, 431, 453, 454, 460–462, 479, 505–507, 509, 525–530, 532–543, 543n1, 544n4, 544n6, 549n37, 558 Religion, 5, 14, 33, 51, 63–64, 71, 120–122, 132, 135, 140, 190, 213, 254, 257, 267–284, 289, 292–295, 297–301, 327, 434, 448, 468, 477, 479, 480, 501, 536, 538, 539, 545n8, 546n17, 557 Responsibility, 12, 18, 45, 52, 58, 59, 61, 71, 129–131, 137, 138, 140–143, 150, 173, 274, 284, 345, 397, 428, 470, 525–527, 529, 530, 541, 542, 543n1 S

Schematism, 365, 366, 368, 380 Schelling Lecture Notes, 110, 113, 115, 117–120, 122 Self-actualization, 11, 78–80, 86, 89, 95, 97 Self-consciousness, 9, 90, 221, 279, 292, 298–300, 330, 407, 461, 496n13, 504–507, 527, 528, 558

575

Self-deception, 11, 51–71 Self-knowledge, 61, 479, 482 Sin, 57, 58, 182, 199n13, 216, 252, 292–297, 301, 431 Social-political philosophy, 12, 14, 129–143, 196, 558 Solipsism, 16, 437 Soul, 29, 34, 36, 52, 67, 78, 132, 135, 145n14, 188, 252, 254, 256, 308, 310, 312, 313, 351, 365, 450, 539 Space and time, 14, 154, 161, 188, 269–271, 276, 282, 320 Species being, 342 Spirit, 1, 17, 34, 115, 120, 130, 131, 134, 138, 139, 182, 188, 189, 197, 220, 222–224, 227, 244, 268, 274, 275, 279, 280, 282, 283, 292–294, 298–301, 321, 343, 345, 357, 392, 398, 401, 403, 423, 434, 477, 479, 480, 482–486, 493, 495n8, 495n9, 495n10, 495n11, 496n13, 497n20, 501, 508, 512, 517, 532, 534 Spontaneity, 39, 41, 42, 54, 343–345, 377 Stalinism, 16, 450, 456 Striving, 65, 70, 77–99, 152, 153, 155–157 Subjective freedom, 218, 220, 225, 226 Subjectivity, 11, 51–52, 65, 77, 80, 94, 134, 142, 214, 215, 218, 219, 221, 231n11, 332n2, 348, 364–368, 372, 381, 387–412, 420, 422, 424, 425, 427, 428, 430, 432–435, 437, 481, 492, 505–507, 509, 510, 518, 519, 525, 531, 533, 537, 541, 542, 544n6, 545n7, 555 Sublation (Aufhebung), 300, 406–408, 411 Sublime, the, 271, 282

576 

Subject Index

Suffering, 1, 12, 67–71, 99, 145n14, 150, 154–157, 159, 160, 180, 182, 252, 501, 538, 556 Suppositum, 427, 428 System, 189, 283, 300, 322, 392, 468, 469, 484, 500, 540

U

Unconcealment, 402, 405, 406 Unhappy consciousness, 133, 221, 500, 502–503, 517, 519, 544n6 V

T

Teleology, 340, 348, 357 Temporality, 222, 229, 364–368, 372, 374–376, 383, 383n4, 389, 476 Terrorism, 452 Theodicy, 51, 63, 67–71 Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), 13, 152, 162, 164, 241–243, 245, 247, 251, 257, 259, 260, 316, 320 Tibetan Buddhism, 162 Time, v, 11, 13–15, 17, 27, 31, 37, 42, 56, 58–60, 80, 106, 107, 113, 150, 153, 154, 161, 188, 193, 210, 217, 220, 226, 269, 270, 276, 279–282, 319, 342, 343, 365–367, 373–376, 378–380, 397, 404, 405, 408, 431, 451, 452, 461, 479, 483, 488, 495, 495n11, 501, 518, 557 Totalitarianism, 345

Voluntarism, 56, 70, 293, 294 W

Wille (free moral will), 53, 55, 57, 58, 61, 326 Willkur (the power of choice), 53–55, 57, 58, 69, 71 Will to power, 399 Wissenschaftslehre (theory of science), 11, 27, 77–78, 81–85, 90, 92–97, 124n4, 192, 291, 292, 389 World War I, 268, 282, 299–301 World War II, 211, 289, 318, 439, 535 Z

Zen Buddhism, 158