WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT

ENLIGHTENMENT INTERRUPTED

Michael Steinberg’s Enlightenment Interrupted is a master class and a rollercoaster ride, all at once. The pitfalls of abstract individualism have been pointed out since Hegel, and explaining them has been central to radical political thought for fifty years by now. But it’s never been easy to grasp concretely how that separation of self and world came about, and what the alternative to it could have been. The extraordinary achievement of Steinberg’s book is to give us a clear view of those horizons. He sets out the key moments of German idealism, and brings out their dramatic intensity by relating them to their own time and our present crisis. The argument is lucid, timely and beautifully composed, and the stakes could not be higher.

Andrew Nash, Associate Professor, Department of Political Studies, University of Cape Town

German idealist philosophers such as Kant, Fichte, and Hegel live on into the present, but they are confined in a cubbyhole visited only by academic philosophers, the occasional literary scholar or intellectual historian, and people looking to make jokes about unfathomable Germanic compound nouns. Steinberg’s book releases them from this place of enforced irrelevance and explains, with striking insight, how they came to be so belittled and ignored. He allows them to speak to us with all the richness of their vision of a connected, active, fulfilled humanity. In limpid, eloquent prose, he gives us the gift of their wisdom in confronting and changing the isolating effects of modernity.

Professor Celia Applegate, William R. Kenan, Jr. Chair of History, Vanderbilt University

First published by Zero Books, 2014
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CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments and note on texts

1. Something happened

2. A task for philosophers

3. The science of the soul

4. The dangers inherent in thinking

5. The limits of knowledge

6. The moral law

7. The elusive point of unity

8. The self posits itself

9. Bliss it was

10. The politics and ethics of freedom

11. Dualism in search of its undoing

12. Separation, unity, differentiation

13. The dance of self-othering

14. The owl of Minerva

15. Things fall apart

16. Enlightenment as a critique of modernity

Notes

Principal works consulted

By the same author

A New Biology of Religion: Spiritual Practice and the Life of the Body

In the Land of Temples: Notes from a South Indian Pilgrimage

The Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning, and the Culture of
Capitalism

Our Wilderness: How the People of New York Found, Changed, and
Preserved the Adirondacks

For Loret

“Philosophy must insist that our age surrender the world it has inhabited until now and find for itself an entirely different one; and it is no wonder if such an exacting demand proves fruitless”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Addresses to the German Nation, 1808

Preface

History writing is a political act; it either confirms or questions the present, and it is all the more necessary if it does the latter. The thought that the world might have become something different may clear the path for critique and action. That aside, tracing the currents that lead from the past to the present helps us see which of our problems may be soluble within our culture’s particular terms and which ones derive from the deep structures of thought and experience that tie a culture together and for just that reason are difficult to undo. Without this preparation we may well grant assumptions which in fact dictate the very practices and ideas which we want to criticize, abolish or transform.

That particular trap is one we are all too apt to fall into today, where the regime of liberal democracy and market economics seems to express nothing less than the natural order of things. Virtually everyone, on the left as well as on the right, takes for granted the primacy of the individual, the self which is logically and ethically prior to anything else and who is or should be protected by fundamental human rights and is or should be free to engage with other free and sovereign individuals in properly leveled playing fields of political and economic life.

From those premises, however, there is little that one can construct except a world much like this one, with a few adjustments here and there to restrain misconduct and corporate power and to assuage the misery of the less fortunate. Neither parliamentary democracy nor market economics is questioned in itself. The future, should we have one, is thus only a kinder, gentler version of the present.

Behind the specific focus of this work, which concerns itself with the philosophical movement in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Germany we call German idealism or classical German philosophy, is a different set of premises. It is that the individuality from which we elaborate our thinking and practice does not exist as a fact of nature but is an element within our cultural history and social milieu. The experience of being an individual is a cultural construct and our introspective self-identification with an apparently inner and pre-social essence is not self-validating. We may be very different from the way we appear to ourselves.

In an earlier book, The Fiction of a Thinkable World, I argued that the separation of self and world in experience is all that is necessary for the emergence of capitalist modernity. The contemporary confidence—or dread—that there is no alternative, that we have reached a point where social process has assumed its final form, arises from the self-evidence of liberal capitalism’s necessary and sufficient conditions. But self-evidence is no proof. Every child believes her parents to be normal, even when they beat her savagely. The members of any community are apt to assume that their way of life reflects the real nature of humanity. We in the modern world are no different, and we are no more justified in thinking this than is any other group.

In one important sense we are deeper in delusion than the Azande, the Greeks of Homer’s day and the sages of the Upanishads. While we humans of whatever group do indeed experience ourselves as separate from others, it is only in the modern world that this notion has been made into the foundation of the social order. In virtually every other human community the independence of the individual has been contested and generally dismissed as illusion. The reality from which human life emerges is thought to be a larger complex of activity which is imagined as the life of the spirit and figured in myth and enacted in ritual, and there are good reasons for thinking that these practices do point to something real. As I have argued in another book, A New Biology of Religion, the omnipresence of religious life is far from being a sign of humanity’s incorrigible fear of reality. It is, instead, testimony to the widespread discovery that everyday experience does not correspond to the deep structures of human life. This is a discovery and not a fantasy; the shape of the world disclosed in religious practices is strikingly close to the shape of the world implied by much recent biology.

This inherently critical perspective is what is most dangerously absent from the contemporary world. To assert the primacy of the individual, even the substantive existence of the individual, seems to us to be nothing more than an obvious empirical truth, but it is simply another metaphysical assertion, and it is most pernicious because it leads us to assert than our world alone is free from metaphysics. Thanks to that metaphysical stance a process which is nothing but the mutual activity of profoundly interconnected beings appears as the movement of a blind force that stands over and against all of its subjects, and that force is made self-destructive thanks to the institutions through which it operates and its placement beyond the conscious life of the community as a whole.

This book concerns itself almost exclusively with a handful of dead white men who wrote some of the most metaphysical texts around; but these were among the few recent figures within the Western tradition to question the construction of experience in terms of self and other. In the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who stands at the center of this book, self and world dissolved into a single process of reciprocal, embodied activity which he conceived of as a collective movement towards absolute equality, absolute freedom and absolute selflessness. Few positions more radical have ever been staked out in the history of Western philosophy, and few have had such potential for upending the common sense of things. Few have had political implications that run so deep.

These are difficult concepts and the idealists wrote difficult texts, but they had important things to say which perhaps could not have been expressed any other way. Their ideas ran so much against the grain that any simpler expression would have been even more open to misunderstanding than was the case. But their very ability to think against the world they were born into, and even more against the world that was to emerge in the early years of the nineteenth century, was a sign that genuine possibilities for radical and liberatory change existed. They had grasped the deepest movement of the Enlightenment, which had aimed at the rational critique of all human institutions, and they did not shy away from the reasoned conclusion that the world they knew and the selves of their experience were both destined to pass away.

It is hard to think that the same is true today. Yet it is possible for me to think these thoughts and write these words, and that too can be taken as a similar sign. We are, in fact, all of us constantly engaged in making and changing the world, though never as consciously or directly as we might wish. The possibility of another world never vanishes. Indeed, we can hardly expect our great-grandchildren to live in anything else. The question is whether we will make that world with some grasp of real human activity or whether we will allow ourselves to be driven by the distorted and ruinous forms through which we channel that activity in the modern world.

Publishers like to ask authors to identify their intended audience. The issues raised in this book should be of everyone’s concern, but I cannot hope that a book on German idealist philosophy will be of wide interest. I have not tried to shy away from the difficulties of the texts. I have, however, tried to explain them in a way that demands no prior study of philosophy and rings comfortably in the ear. There was a time when the “educated reader” felt competent to read works of philosophy, and I would hope that such brave souls still exist and will find this work worth the challenge.

I would also be pleased if this book were of interest or (better yet) of use to both historians and philosophers, too, but I am not unaware of the possibility that it may annoy both groups equally. Historians may think I am overly concerned with ideas and inattentive to the real business of history. Philosophers may expect this to be an historical treatment of Kant and the idealist movement that succeeded him, and by that standard its treatment of the philosophical systems of these thinkers is likely to seem cursory and oddly unfinished.

These may be counted defects, but both are necessary ones. I have tried to read these texts closely, but I am not interested in presenting them in exhaustive detail or evaluating them. I am primarily interested in the problems which these thinkers thought they were solving or were required to solve, and the successes and failure of their solutions are important mostly when that success or failure shaped the tasks to which their contemporaries or successors addressed themselves.

In other words, this is a work of history. The philosophers of a past era may or may not have helpful answers to today’s questions. If that is all that we ask of them, though, we ensure that the problematic out of which our own questions emerged remains unexamined. This does a disservice to some very intelligent and thoughtful writers, of course, but worse yet it enlists the entire history of philosophy in a practice devoted to obscuring the roots of our own thinking and the elements which shape our own understanding. In what only seems to be a paradox, the present-day relevance of past philosophers is only increased by reading them in historical context. It is then that they are most unsettling, and it seems to me that what we should ask of scholarship above all is that it unsettle.

This means taking Kant and the idealists at their word, and it also means facing their clear and deep engagement with religious issues. This is frequently a problem for philosophers, who prefer to think of theirs as a wholly rational enterprise that has only extrinsic forces to blame when it enters into a mésalliance with theology. Yet here, too, a concern with the apparently dispensable is the only way to return us to the object of our study in all its wholeness.

The problematic of philosophy in the European world is no more separate from that of religion than is Confucian thought or Indian philosophy. In the modern era it went from being the handmaid of theology to being its rival, but its movements cannot be understood without taking seriously the fact that its concerns are fundamentally those of Christianity: the proper means of orientation of a responsible and rational individual confronted with an alien universe. This becomes a problem, however, only on the assumption cited above, that human beings are in fact isolated individuals cut off from the universe in which they live and act, and this assertion ultimately descends from Christianity. The history of philosophy from Descartes onwards is most often the history of attempts at developing non-theological answers to questions which have their roots in religion.

The idealists’ turn to the theological is a source of discomfort to many, but it cannot be put off to one side. Addressing explicit questions of theology was the only way in which Kant and his successors could rethink the foundations of the European tradition and of the structuring of experience that emerges within that tradition. In doing this, I would argue, they developed positions more genuinely radical than that of Jonathan Israel’s “radical Enlightenment,” which reaffirmed the primacy of the individual and thus remained tied to the metaphysical foundations of Christianity.

It is perhaps here that the idealists have the greatest contemporary importance. The uniqueness of classical German philosophy was that from Kant onward it problematized those processes through which experience is generated and shaped. By doing so it raised questions of the most profound social and political importance. That, too, is why these philosophers deserve most of all to be treated historically. Theirs was the most thoroughgoing examination of the ways in which experience is generated and shaped that has yet developed within the Western tradition, perhaps the most thoroughgoing to date, and its fate gives crucial clues to the roots of the modern world.

For all their commitment to one form or another of Christian faith, the idealists moved further than any other group of philosophers past or present from the Christian problematic. They did not do this in a cultural vacuum. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century important elements in European thought moved clearly if briefly towards a drastic critique of its very foundations. This movement took place not just in philosophy but in politics, poetry, the research of scholars into Indian thought, the experience and memoirs of travelers and residents abroad and in many other ways. It was cut off after 1815. This was a failure for European culture as a whole, and we still live (and die) with its consequences.

A few final words: I make no excuse for the emphasis that I have placed on Fichte. His neglect is both scandalous and perfectly understandable, because of all the philosophers in the European tradition he points most clearly beyond the assumptions and aporias of that problematic towards a vision of reason as fundamentally embodied and collective instead of discursive and private.

This is not the conventional understanding of Fichte’s work, and readers perhaps need to be warned that what follows comes out of a distinctly heterodox perspective. Yet this is hardly avoidable. My aim in writing this book is to argue for a different understanding of the nature of the Enlightenment, of our relationship with its projects, and of the status of the modern world of individualism, liberalism and capitalism. The only justification I have for adding yet another book to this literature is the possibility that we have not yet understood these subjects, that the Enlightenment, seemingly so well understood, was quite different from what most of us suppose it to have been, and that modernity, so self-evidently the expression of universal and universally-held values, is in fact a horrid and all-destroying sham, an illusion of rationality projected over the collapsing ruins of a moribund civilization whose only remaining power is to frame questions which can no longer find answers.

All this aside, I am aware of how inadequate my own efforts are in comparison to the accomplishments of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel especially. To read these writers’ works is a humbling experience, as it is to read the best of contemporary scholarship on them and the other idealists. I am sure that there are others working today who are better qualified than I am to write this book. None of them is likely to do so, however, and so I have had no choice but to do it myself.

Acknowledgments and note on texts

This book would not have been written without the interest and enthusiasm of Celia Applegate, now at Vanderbilt University, and I am deeply grateful for her support. With her help and that of Joan Rubin an earlier version of this text was accepted as my PhD thesis at the University of Rochester; Professor Rubin and the other members of the thesis committee along with Celia—Daniel Borus, Earl Conee, Edward Wierenga, and Robert Westbrook—all deserve my thanks.

An even earlier version of these ideas was the basis of a course I taught at the University of Rochester, and I am grateful to those who approved my stint there and to the students who braved these texts and my lectures and gave me invaluable feedback.

Andrew Nash of the University of Cape Town supplied much needed encouragement as I set off on this work. Daniel Breazeale, Michael Vater and the other members of the North American Fichte Society have done me the honor of taking in my somewhat unconventional approach with respect; my thanks to them and to all those who have made the NAFS a model of what scholarly societies could be.

I also owe a debt to Haran Aiya and others at the Sri Rajarajeshwari Peetham, who have helped put me in touch with a non-Western way of construing experience which has fruitful resonances with the approach of the philosophers discussed herein. And it is hardly possible to express adequately my gratitude towards my wife Loret and our daughter Sarah Falkner, both of whom have contributed much in the way of wise counsel and wise listening, and to our son Micah Falkner for his good sense and his confidence that his father has something to say.

Those who read footnotes will see that I have quoted almost exclusively from published translations. These are simply easier for most of my readers to find and easier for me to consult. When the translations seem to misrepresent the overall thought of these philosophers as I understand them I have revised their wording or attempted a translation myself, but in general I have found myself comfortable with building on the scholarly efforts of those who have produced usable and accurate English versions of some very knotty German.

For convenience of reference I have cross-cited the major works of Kant to the Akademie page numbering, with the exception of the Critique of Pure Reason, for which I use the customary citations to the first and second editions as “A” and “B.” Fichte references are cross-cited to the 1844-1845 Sämmtliche Werke. References to Hegel’s Phenomenology are to the numbered paragraphs in common editions.

The excerpts from the Chernoff/Hoover translation of Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” are reproduced with the kind permission of Omnidawn Press.

1

Something happened

Cultures crave legitimacy no less than children. But the wise child who knows her father asserts as a fact what is merely a claim, and cultural parentage is no different. This, too, is not a discovery but an assertion, a line of descent most often proclaimed through stories that are passed off as history or, better yet, as self-evident truths. The prestige of Rome was so great that any number of later empires have claimed it as their predecessor. Moscow was the third Rome (Constantinople being the second), and up until 1917 its rulers were styled czars, or Caesars. Further west, the majority of German states were loosely connected in the much-and unfairly-maligned Holy Roman Empire, which lasted from the days of Charlemagne until Napoleon dissolved it in 1806. Wags insisted that it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire, which was substantially true; but the obvious differences did not really stand in the way of the identification and did not disprove it, either. With humans the acorn does sometimes fall very far from the tree indeed, and that is true of historical communities as well. All the same, there are claims that illuminate and claims that conceal, and we are dealing here with the latter.

The modern world makes several claims to legitimacy. A globalized state system where parliamentary democracy, market economics, and individualism, secularism, and legal and cultural respect for human rights are normative, it points not only to the kinds of self-evident truths that Thomas Jefferson set out in the American Declaration of Independence but to a genealogy. It traces its lineage to the culture of the Enlightenment, that international movement of which Jefferson was perhaps the preeminent American representative. More than just a descendant of the Enlightenment, one among many possible progeny, it presents itself as its realization.

This claim is accepted by most of its critics. Horkheimer and Adorno, in their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment, save their critique for the Enlightenment itself. That the project of the philosophes was alive and at work in the modern world went without saying; what launched their work was the conviction that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”¹ More recently a different critique has developed, in the wake of decolonization, the rise of subaltern studies, Edward Said’s Orientalism, and other challenges to Western cultural hegemony. In these works the Enlightenment is attacked for its hubris and its concealed imperialism. Its project of formulating universal principles and its purported belief that it had arrived at a culturally neutral standpoint are here seen as ideology or delusion, the mask over the European project of delegitimizing and annihilating all other cultural forms. In these works, too, however the identity of Enlightenment thought and contemporary practice is accepted as a given. More than that, it is what makes the critique so comprehensive. The tactic of calling the present to the bar by an attack on the past would fail if the two were not ultimately the same.

But the defenders and advocates of liberal modernism, as we may call it, are just as clear and determined in their claim to be the heirs of the eighteenth century. We may take as an example the European Union’s choice for its supranational anthem. It is the universally-recognized tune from the last movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, his setting of Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” in instrumental arrangements by conductor Herbert von Karajan. The EU adopted this anthem because, as its official web site puts it, “Without words, in the universal language of music, this anthem expresses the ideals of freedom, peace and solidarity for which Europe stands.”²

One could hardly imagine a more fitting choice through which to make this claim. Schiller, whose words are clearly meant to be thought as the tune is played, in translation if necessary, was a philosopher of substantial gifts whose most important book looked to the diffusion of enlightened thought and democratic ideals through art. His plays transcended their Sturm und Drang origins and provided inspiration to Verdi, among many others, his poetry earned him the title “poet of liberty,” and he was a friend and collaborator of Goethe’s in the project for a German national theater. Beethoven himself was a strong partisan of the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution. His groundbreaking third symphony of 1804, the Eroica or “Heroic” symphony, which vastly expands and intensifies the dramatic range of European instrumental music, closes with a partially-concealed program of human liberation. (It is based on the final number of an earlier ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, in which Prometheus leads the human race to freedom.) As is well known, Beethoven had dedicated this symphony to Napoleon, then First Consul of the French Republic—itself another claim to the classical past—and the composer angrily scratched out the dedication when he heard that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor. The Ode to Joy thus appears to link, in an uncomplicated and immediately palpable way, the ideals and achievements of the Enlightenment with the community of liberal, democratic and capitalist nations that make up the European Union.

But it only appears to make that connection. The conventional story cannot survive a close look at Beethoven’s final symphonic masterwork. In its musical and dramatic context the last movement of his ninth symphony does not come across as the triumph of Enlightenment ideals. Written in 1824, long after the end of the Enlightenment itself, it reveals instead a huge calamity, an historical breakdown. Something happened on the way to Beethoven’s great tune, something that is not purely musical, and that something is evoked and addressed in the extraordinary opening of that finale.

To appreciate the disturbing uniqueness of Beethoven’s last symphony we need to look, if only briefly, at the symphonic tradition itself. It was not a lengthy one in Beethoven’s day; Haydn’s first symphonies were less than seventy years in the past, and Haydn did not arrive at his mature symphonic style until the 1780s. There could easily have been members of Beethoven’s audience who had witnessed the whole course of its development.

And develop it did, with remarkable speed and consistency. As Charles Rosen demonstrated in The Classical Style, the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven moved towards ever-more-encompassing dramatic forms at every level. The European music of the baroque always modulated away from the tonic, the home tonality, and returned to it, but in the classical era these events were dramatized. Baroque dance movements and even the non-dance-related pieces like Bach’s fugues generally developed a single theme which seamlessly traveled through different keys, all the while weaving a continuous musical texture. In the classical era these continuities were broken, replaced by sudden changes in volume and texture and moments of dramatic silence or startling explosions. The long-breathed melodies of the baroque became short, relatively self-contained and memorable themes that served as signposts in ever-longer and more complex structures. No longer wandering from key to key to arrive at the tonic in the last few bars, the new sonata structures of the classical style first established the home key and then disrupted it, creating a long-term dissonance that cried out for resolution. The return of the home key was delayed, prepared for, hinted at and finally accomplished with a restatement of the main theme and an extended closing of reassuring stability. Moments in the unfolding of a musical structure became events of near-theatrical power.

This shift was the expression of a more general change. The novel structure of the sonata reflected different notions of art and of the articulation of individual lives and experiences within larger wholes. The aesthetic aim of the baroque had been to evoke affects—specific emotional states—with the greatest possible precision and power. The larger structure in which these affects had their source and influence was always in a sense extramusical. In Bach’s Passions, for example, the Gospel narratives bore the burden of the drama and were expressed in the unstructured stylized speech of recitative, while the arias and choruses, formalized and static, presented reflective or illustrative moments within that narrative. Rosen plausibly relates this aesthetic to the providential view of history and the late medieval version of the theory of humors. Each individual was compounded by the hand of the divine, each one was unique, rich in peculiarity and character, and each one was assigned a role to play within the omnipotent’s design. Humanity could attain to knowledge of that design only through revelation, but this was tolerable so long as one shared the confidence that events were in good, indeed, all-good hands. Such faith in the working-out of affairs allowed music to be simply and directly expressive. Drama, on the other hand came with more difficulty. It demanded insight into the overall order of things that ultimately only the cosmic playwright could possess.

The musical structures of the classical era, however, were meant to embrace the whole, and they gained this power by elevating form over specificity of content. Instead of affect there was drama in which conflict or at least difference appeared and was then resolved. This is most obvious in the stereotyped “sonata form” that later generations derived from the practice of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this formalization the “correct” sonata begins with an exposition which sets out two themes, one in the tonic and the other in the dominant, which is the key a fifth above the tonic. After a development section in which these themes are fragmented and harmonic tension builds there comes a recapitulation in which both themes return. This time, however, the second theme is in the tonic, and the tension created by the initial key change is resolved and grounded in a reinforcement of the home key.

This explicit structure hardly does justice to the formal variety of the works of the great classical composers. Haydn, for example, did not always employ two distinct themes and his recapitulations often resemble second developments instead of reprises. The pattern of initial stability, the introduction of difference, the ensuing tension and an ultimate resolution was central to their practice, however. It shaped both individual melodies and the movements within which they appear. Unlike the music of the baroque, where the organi- zation of individual movements and characters fell most often to the librettist, that of the classical style was all about achieving coherence out of apparent discord or diversity.³ Each piece was an almost philosophical demonstration of the ultimate harmony of the part and the whole. If the unity of the baroque world lay in God’s hands, the unity of the classical world lay in the inner coherence between individual and social realms.

In the hands of Haydn the dance movements of the preclassical serenade became parts of the powerful and flexible four-movement symphony. A grand and dramatic first movement in sonata style was followed by two movements in comparatively relaxed form and frequently even content, most often a song-like slow movement and a minuet, which with late Haydn is often a peasant dance. The finale was routinely in sonata style too, but was simpler in structure and lighter in content; its development and the return of the tonic were often occasions for wit and even outright comedy instead of dramatic tension.⁴

Beethoven changed this pattern, but his changes were not a break from the past. Instead, he took the classical tendency to dramatize musical forms one step farther. Haydn and Mozart had turned dance movements and arias into dramatic and even theatrical events. Beethoven now dramatized the entire work, turning the four-movement symphony into a coherent whole and making the finale the real resolution of tensions that could not be worked out in the first movement alone.

This is most clearly shown in the best-known of the symphonies, the fifth symphony in C minor of 1808. The explosive first movement with its famous four-note motif leaves too much tension for the rest of the piece to ignore. The second movement offers something of a respite, but the ghost of the first movement haunts the spectral scherzo, especially in the trio section with its obsessive repetitions of the four-note motif’s rhythmic pattern. The scherzo itself has no close, no rounding off. Instead, it leads to a dark transition passage in which the motif turns into a steady drumbeat while the strings reach towards the light of C major. When it does arrive the triumphant main theme of the finale is brazen with the sound of trombones, symphonic newcomers which had been silent until the transition passage,⁵ and it starts with the notes of the C major chord: C, E and G. The movement saturates the ear with the major key resolution of the first movement’s C minor. Yet this is not all. Near the end of the movement the four-note motif as it was trans- formed in the scherzo recurs once more, only to be swept away in the jubilation that follows.

Events like the fifth symphony’s linking of movements through shared thematic material and through actual transition passages and the irruption of the third movement as an event in the fourth can be found in various works of Haydn’s, especially in the endlessly inventive piano trios. In Haydn, however, these are generally no more than local effects, deliberate toying with the listeners’ expecta- tions. In Beethoven, by contrast, they carry a musical and dramatic weight. They raise the implicit drama of difference and resolution of the classical style by an order of magnitude. They dramatize the form of the symphony itself, which is something Haydn never aspired to do.

The same is true of the physical impact of the orchestral sound itself. Composers tend to love noise and Haydn was counted a noisy composer in his day, but Beethoven is louder yet. The fifth symphony expands his reach in every dimension, not least by adding both a trio of trombones and a piccolo to the orchestra. Its very scale and volume suggested that the drama it implied was something more than an individual matter. The fifth has always sounded like a public work, concerning itself not merely with the experience of an individual but with something indefinably larger. Along with the Eroica it initiated the European tradition of music as a prophetic or oracular art.

The burden of the oracular pose has been crushing. (Brahms, whose first symphony echoes Beethoven’s fifth in its dramatic structure and the ninth in its last movement’s main theme, asked an inquirer once if he understood how it felt to hear Beethoven’s giant steps pacing behind him.) Not all of Beethoven’s later symphonies made similar claims. The sixth or Pastoral symphony that closely followed the fifth was much looser in form, though it too featured linked movements and a finale that addressed itself to the symphony as a whole. In the seventh, completed in 1812, the dance elements, which are never far from the surface of eighteenth-century music, achieve almost daemonic force, all but demanding a visceral response from the listener. The eighth symphony, a work of Haydnesque wit, followed soon after. (It and the seventh were both premiered in 1814). The pace of Beethoven’s production then dropped off precipitously, and after a period of near-silence starting around 1815 he forged a new style and thereafter wrote little but major works: the Missa Solemnis, the intense Hammerklavier and the last three otherworldly and valedictory piano sonatas, the 33 Diabelli variations, the final string quartets so often cited as the epitome of “late style” and the ninth symphony. Most of these strike us today as essentially private works, their greatness bound up with their Innigkeit or inwardness—a very Beethovenian term.

In a number of respects, though, the ninth picks up where the earlier public works left off. It marks an even larger expansion of time scale than the Eroica does; it is the earliest symphony in the repertoire that lasts more than an hour. It expands the sonic range, too, adding a full chorus and four soloists to a large orchestra with trombones, piccolo, and the bass drum, cymbals and triangle which the European musicians of the time used for what they called “Turkish” music. Couched in a minor key, like the fifth—D minor to the fifth symphony’s C minor—it would appear to raise the bar once again, to carry out the fifth symphony’s pattern of challenge and triumph, of dissonance and resolution, on an even vaster scale.

In a sense it does. Certainly there has been nothing since that surpasses the terrifying first movement or the symphony’s choral finale, an extraordinary fusion of the highest formal and technical genius with popular and emotional appeal.⁶ Yet the triumph is not won the way the fifth symphony’s is. Something happens before the work can reach its goal, and Beethoven takes exceptional care to make sure that we notice this. In a way, the finale of the ninth symphony is as much about the impossibility of repeating the fifth symphony’s triumph as it is about anything else.

Its very first chord is a huge, noisily-scored dissonance. Two centuries of ever-louder and more dissonant music have softened its impact to a degree, but not by much; the opening blare and the violent thrashing that passes through the orchestra are still disori- enting and challenging. But these are just a prelude, because what comes next is completely unexpected. The orchestra turns to us and speaks.

It does so only figuratively, of course. The cellos and double- basses respond to the noise of the opening with a recitative, the half- sung, half-spoken kind of melody that from the early baroque through the late nineteenth century was commonly used to set dialogue and narration. At one point in the ninth symphony’s gestation Beethoven had written this passage for solo baritone, with words of his own, but even in its orchestral form the sound of recitative creates a sharp break with what has come before. It makes for a gap in the logic of the whole.

This gap only widens with what comes next. The preceding movements are recalled, and each time the low strings announce their displeasure. (In the case of the slow movement reminiscence the rejection is tinged with regret.) Beethoven had drafted a text for these recitatives, too,⁷ but even without the words their meaning is plain enough. Nothing in the first three movements will allow the ninth to reach its close. It is only when the orchestra offers the first phrase of the famous tune that the interlocutors indicate satisfaction, and they are the first to announce the entire theme.

The last movement of Beethoven’s ninth, then, begins with a breakdown in musical and even dramatic logic and a dialogue about how the work is to proceed. Such self-reflective and self-referential twists were hardly uncommon in the “advanced” art of the day,⁸ but in Beethoven’s hands the sudden irruption of a conversation into the very form which he had turned into a dramatic unity has especial force.

Beethoven’s point—one of them, at least, for it would be foolish to reduce a work of art to something which could just as easily be stated directly—is that the way forward is no longer apparent. The fifth symphony had wrung triumph from tragedy and terror, and the shepherd’s song of thanksgiving at the end of the Pastoral embraced humanity and nature alike. In the ninth, however, there is nothing in the inner logic of the first three movements that allowed even Beethoven to achieve a comparable reconciliation. Composers have always wrestled with finale problems, but the ninth is one of the few works in which the finale problem itself becomes a subject of the work.

But how then is Beethoven’s symphony to find its ending? The answer is found in the text Beethoven sets and the portions he chooses to highlight. It is a cliché by now that the “Ode to Joy” is about human brotherhood, and the “message” of the finale is often bluntly presented as “All men are brothers.” (The too-usual omission of women may be noted.) But this hardly survives an objective hearing of the piece. This is an ode to joy, not an ode to humanity, and Beethoven makes sure that we appreciate Schiller’s claim that joy is a gift from above.

Schiller, and Beethoven after him, do not even say that all men are brothers. In German that would be “Alle Menschen sind Brüder.” Instead, the text reads, “Alle Menschen werden Brüder,” “all men become brothers,” which suggests that men are brothers only under certain conditions or in certain lights. The focus is on joy, the “spark of the gods” (Götterfunken) which makes brotherhood possible. The conclusion of the ninth is no different. It, too, comes as a gift from somewhere or something else.⁹

More than that, its focus is on the heavenly realm from which joy descends and with which humanity is united in its most ecstatic moments. Beethoven omits most of Schiller’s more homely, even slightly vulgar, instances of earthly joy, and his musical setting highlights the theological aspect of the poem. One of the grandest and most impressive moments in the finale comes after the lines “and the Cherub stands/Before God;” Beethoven repeats the words “Vor Gott” and makes them the occasion for a sudden change of key and a moment of silence. Another is the adagio section just before the final peroration, and this, too, is explicitly religious in content; a loving father must live beyond the clouds, the chorus sings, to appropriately and inimitably otherworldly sounds. The same phrase recurs as the symphony moves towards its ecstatic close.

The religious emphasis is clearest at that close, in fact, because Beethoven takes leave of his audience with the words, “Freude, schöne Götterfunken” (joy, beautiful spark of the gods)—the very first words of the poem, in fact. If he had wished to close with an affirmation of human brotherhood he could just as easily have set the phrase, “Alle Menschen werden Brüder;” it fits the music perfectly. He did not, and in his setting the highest note and the rhythmic accent is on the first three syllables of” Götterfunken.” The last word in the last movement of the last Beethoven symphony, then, reminds us not of humanity but of the divine, and that thought bookends the finale as a whole

Put as briefly as possible, the beginning of the ninth symphony’s finale is a problem, not a resolution. We expect a single dramatic progression, the logical unfolding of an idea both musical and dramatic, through which the problems laid out in the first movements could find their answer. No such resolution seems possible. As the instrumental recitative of the finale’s opening discussion tell us, we can’t get there from here. The problem is resolved, in the end, but it is resolved only through an intervention from outside, a tune that drops from the sky—a gift from the gods.

If there were no text this might not be so clear, but the selection that Beethoven made from Schiller’s text and the phrases he chose to bring to the fore all but force this conclusion upon us. If we read back our knowledge of the text into the opening of the symphony, in fact, we will hear that the tentative phrases which the cellos and double basses embrace as the answer to their problem will soon set the same text with which the symphony closes, “Freude, schöne Götterfunken.” There is a resolution available and the symphony will not end in tragedy or collapse, as happens decades later with Tchaikovsky’s and Mahler’s otherwise very different sixth symphonies. But the resolution can no longer be drawn out from the logic of what has gone before.

The ninth is thus hardly an uncomplicated embodiment of “the ideals of freedom, peace and solidarity for which Europe stands.” Nor is it a straightforward representative of the culture of the Enlightenment in which Beethoven came to maturity. It comes across, instead, as testimony to a breach, a collapse in expectations, a failure that is not musical but cultural. The chasm that opens up between the third and forth movements of the symphony is far more than a clever bit of showmanship or a brilliant form of audience manipulation. It is Beethoven’s response to a social and political rupture. It presents us with a dramatized expression of a real aporia. As Beethoven knew, the expectations of the Enlightenment had not been fulfilled and they could not be fulfilled. That way forward had been blocked or had turned out to be a dead end.

This is a large claim and the rest of this book is an attempt at justifying it. The dominant narrative of modernity, though, is so pervasive and so self-evident that the point is half-made simply by asking the question. If nothing else, the example of the ninth symphony’s finale suggests that our relationship with the Enlightenment tradition is far more complex than we take it to be.

I would go farther. What I will argue in the following pages is that we inherit the suppression or the forgetting of the Enlightenment, not the Enlightenment itself. And I include in the Enlightenment tradition the philosophers and poets of the German idealist tradition, figures that are too often cast as enemies of the Enlightenment, even enemies of progress, or as Romantic irrationalists who set themselves against the proponents of reason who were the “real” natural philosophers, philosophes and Aufklärer. I see them instead as the real climax of the Enlightenment project, the thinkers who took that project most seriously and began to weigh its premises and its pretensions by its own internal standards. In doing so they came to threaten the moral and political order that the Enlightenment was supposed to reform but preserve. Yet this was the logical outgrowth of the Enlightenment project itself, which among other ambitions sought to subject all knowledge to the test of reason.

As Kant would argue, reason could not interrogate other claims to knowledge until it had interrogated itself. What he and his successors showed, though, was just how dangerous real philosophical inquiry could be. Reason, it turns out, is a corrosive force, and it is liberatory only insofar as its corrosive force is free to bite at what it wills. This was the final turn of the Enlightenment critique. In the end it came close to taking down the very foundations of the new European order: the sovereign individual, the secondary importance of the social, the dream of a rational order in which individual needs and goals could find reconciliation if not harmony. There was a possibility of harmony, the idealists claimed, but it could not be founded on the articulation of isolated individuals within a value-free rational order. It demanded a transformation of lived experience itself through which the illusory separation of self and world would vanish in an open-ended process that sounded all too much like permanent revolution.

They might have gotten away with their arguments if their thinking had no immediate connection with larger political and social events. But they did not teach in a vacuum. Their different and more radical ideas of progress took shape amid the vast European upheaval of the French Revolution, a period with hopes that were far more millennial and radical than we often assume. What happens between Kant’s first critique in 1781 and the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 was a complex cultural movement that reached towards a different order of things, seeking a genuine renaissance through which European society would set down new roots and grow in different directions, a movement which was ultimately frustrated both by its own internal weaknesses and by the fear it engendered in others.

The scope of that movement is far too large for it to be treated adequately here. What is more, such a transformation as the revolution in France seemed to promise was always unlikely. But this hardly makes the idealists irrelevant. History discloses problems more readily than she gives up solutions, and the autocritique of reason developed by Kant, Fichte, Hoderlin, Novalis, Schelling, Hegel and others carries its own persuasive force and frames its own indictment. That indictment is still before the bar of history.

For most of the eighteenth century the best minds in Europe had taken up the task of providing a foundation for human life and human society in which individual freedom could be secured within a rational public order. This book is the story of what happened when it became clear that this task was based on an illusion, the separation of self and world, and was thus doomed to failure: Just about everyone collaborated in repressing that insight. After 1815 all parties, reactionary and liberal, chose to proceed as if we had achieved what we knew, somewhere, we could not carry off. To secure that false confidence the heterodox voices of the late Enlightenment had to be silenced and its doubts swept under the carpet. The separation which the idealists showed to be an illusion became the basis of the modern world, which justifies itself through its claim to foster the greatest possible freedom for its individual constituents. This book thus concerns a founding act of bad faith and of willed blindness, the enforced suppression of dissidence, the self-forgetting of the rootlessness and the falsity of the basic presuppositions of modernity that have haunted our world from its birth.

2

A task for philosophers

A question before we continue, though. Have we any right to speak of “the Enlightenment project?” Historians are cautioned today to resist the temptation of considering individual thinkers and actors as a group. Doing so lends itself to persuasive or at least tidy narratives, but it misrepresents and even conceals the innumerable conflicts and by-ways of real intellectual life. No individual thinker is consistent, possessed of a single aim, free from conflict and self-contradiction; how could we then speak of dozens or hundreds of individuals as if they were all engaged in a coherent project?

Not all generalizations are false, however. People who know each other do think together, statistically at least; personally-grounded hesitations and individual peculiarities tend to cancel each other out. In the case of the Enlightenment, moreover, we have an additional warrant, for it can hardly be denied that Scottish moralists, French philosophes and German Aufklärer were conscious of both belonging to a transnational community of like-minded men and women and engaging in a common intellectual enterprise.

If evidence is needed for this claim we might look at what happened in 1783 when a minor writer asked, in a footnote to an article in the Berliner Monatschrift, “What is Enlightenment? This question, which is almost as important as what is truth, should indeed be answered before one begins enlightening! And still I have never found it answered!”¹

Answers came back, not only in the Monatschrift but in other journals too, until they made up a small genre in their own right. The question eventually became something of a cliché; everyone felt it necessary to weigh in on it. No definitive answers were reached, of course, but the intensity and volume of the exchange shows at least one thing: the respondents, whatever their individual opinions, saw the mainstream of intellectual activity as advancing enlightenment however that term was defined. It is testimony to the fact that by the 1780s, at least, the Enlightenment was a self-conscious movement. Philosophers and fellow-travelers thought of themselves as workers towards a common goal. More than that, the work that fell to hand was one which had been delivered to them by historical circum- stances. They had inherited a task.

What was that task? The most notable of the responses to the Berliner Monatschrift question came from Kant. (It is the only one that is commonly read today.) What Enlightenment meant, said Kant, was the courage to know. Humanity was to overcome its willingness to submit to authority and each person must learn to judge by her own standards and guide her thinking by her own lights:

Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity …. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.²

It is a fight against “Those guardians, who have graciously taken up the oversight of mankind,” who

take care that the far greater part of mankind (including the entire fairer sex) regard the step to maturity as not only difficult but also very dangerous. After they have first made their domestic animals stupid and carefully prevented these placid creatures from daring to take even one step away out of the leading strings of the cart to which they are tethered, they show them the danger that threatens them if they attempt to proceed on their own³

“Now this danger is not so great,’ Kant insisted, “for by falling a few times they would indeed finally learn to walk.” Yet in spite of this confidence, and in a way most disappointing to the modern reader, Kant’s argument leads to a final encomium not to democracy but to Frederick the Great and enlightened despotism. Most people are not yet ready for self-governance, Kant concedes, and only the hard shell of absolute rule can nurture the growth in spiritual freedom that will prepare them for civic freedom. His was not an enlightened age, therefore, but it was an age of enlightenment, of progress towards the enlightened state. Between immaturity and full adulthood would intervene a period of independent study, a transition of unknown duration in which the proper maxim of government is “Argue as much as you want and about whatever you want, only obey!”⁴

Kant’s distinction between civic and spiritual freedom has its roots deep in German Protestantism, deriving ultimately from texts like Luther’s Of Christian Liberty. In this context, though, it operates within the conventional eighteenth-century understanding of the relationship between social institutions and individual character, a presupposition epitomized by Montesquieu’s comment in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline: “At the birth of societies, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the institutions that form the leaders of republics.”⁵ Kant is not committed to Frederician despotism as such. Rather, he believes that the institutions of European culture had not created the kinds of people who could assume the responsibilities of real civic freedom.⁶ Worse yet, they had bred a population with no strength for spiritual freedom either, and inner freedom was a sine qua non for civic liberty. Humanity thus had to pass through a period of spiritual growth before it could emerge from its chrysalis:

When nature has, under this hard shell, developed the seed for which she cares most tenderly—namely, the inclination and the vocation for free thinking—this works back upon the character of the people (who thereby become more and more capable of acting freely) and finally even on the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat man, who is now more than a machine, in accord with his dignity.⁷

As we shall see, the idealists, Fichte especially, refused to divide human activity between thinking and acting, and partially as a result drew very different political conclusions.

There is another and larger metaphor in Kant’s essay that encompasses and modifies the notion of social structure as a kind of curriculum for the formation of character. It is one of inevitable if often frustrated growth, the passage from sheltered infancy to self-sufficient adulthood at the beginning of the text and of the burgeoning of a seed into a plant or of a caterpillar into a butterfly in the metaphor of the “hard shell” at its close. In this imagery the enlightened state is the realization of humanity’s true nature, not as a machine (the reference is to La Mettrie’s infamous tract Man a Machine of 1748) but as a free being. The implication is that human history is personal and even biological history writ large. History is not necessarily the story of liberty, but it is at least the record of the slow maturation of the human species until liberty becomes a possibility.

This metaphor is a comforting one and lends itself well to the kind of self-satisfaction found in the EU’s list of “European” ideals. As an historical explanation, however, it leaves much to be desired. In fact, it explains little or nothing, especially because it offers no source for the retarding hand of authority beyond laziness, fear, or the inept hand of earlier legislators. As in so many eighteenth-century attempts at theorizing historical change, it eliminates everything specific. Real historical events play no part in the narrative, whether that narrative is one of organic growth or of inevitable decline.

But there is another problem with Kant’s implicit historical explanation that is easier to overlook. It assumes that human life can be ordered on rational principles and, even more, that human beings will do so in the absence of other constraints. Human rationality is a given, at least as a characteristic of human maturity, and it ultimately has no history. It is there as potential, waiting for the day when authority no longer holds it back.

This may seem like a truism. Any other standpoint smacks of irrationalism, opening the door to fundamentalist religion, fanaticism of various stripes, fascism and worse. It is obvious to many people that the only public life that can legitimately be called public involves rational process, the giving of reasons for one’s actions and the debate over the validity of those reasons. The only framework for public life that can be legitimately honored by rational individuals would therefore be one that emerges through a rational process, and the only proper life for human beings would be one in which every individual undertakes to regulate her or his life by reference to reasons which can be stated publicly and defended.

There is no doubt that a life in accord with reason has been an ideal shared by most European thinkers as well as the philosophers of the Classical era. It is less clear that this ideal has meant the same thing throughout its 2500-year history. We consistently overestimate the influence and representative character of the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophers of antiquity and we just as consistently fail to appreciate the extent to which Classical philosophy in general was a form of spiritual practice or therapy rather than a process of dispassionate inquiry.⁸

Beyond that, we take the ideal of a rational life so much for granted that we are unable to see it as a specific cultural artifact. It is by no means self-evident that reason is the only public vehicle for debating motives for action and assigning responsibility, for example. One can do this perfectly well through the retelling of myths and folk tales, by placing human interactions into various contexts, each one suggesting a different interpretation and evalu- ation. Historically (or anthropologically, if you wish), there have been many ways of ordering the social world. Outside of those that were influenced by the theories of the European tradition there are few if any that appeal to rational standards. Yet those communities, too often considered primitive or traditional, are no less open to discussion or contestation of the foundations of social order. It is simply that those conversations are carried out through story and metaphor instead of through chains of statements linked together by appeals to logic.

Not everyone thinks that rationality is the best way of accom- plishing such tasks, and it is very likely that they have reason itself on their sides. Ours purports to be a society where common decisions are arrived at through the public use of reason, but it is hard to believe that the processes of liberal democracy routinely serve up rational solutions to social problems. There are plenty of excuses for these failures, of course. There is the corrupting force of wealth and the imbalance of power between the privileged few and the many, for instance, and the ease with which people can be drawn away from rational considerations and led to act out of fear. It is indeed possible that the failings on the system, which now approach the apocalyptic in the case of looming disasters like global warming, are the result of secondary influences that are susceptible to reform and correction. Yet it is more likely that the failings are inherent in the rationalist project itself. We cannot order human life through explicit, discursive reason because human beings are not rational animals.

A significant number of philosophers and scientists have resigned themselves to admitting that reason by itself is incapable of setting goals; these are inevitably given to us by our inclinations and through complex and generally unconscious social interactions. The preponderance of scientific evidence, moreover, is that we act on the basis of emotional promptings and that our conscious and rational processes are supplementary activities at best and at worst are epiphenomenal or after-the-fact.⁹ If this research is credited, the project of a rational world is mere fantasy. No rational order could serve to integrate or coordinate lives that can never be governed by rational principles.

Such a perspective need not exclude human freedom or individual responsibility. It does change their terms, however, and it demands of us that we find a different way of ordering our lives and subject some fundamental questions about that order to debate—and that we find different ways to debate, too. As we shall see, this is very much what Fichte and early Hegel, at least, were struggling to present, and though they like their philosophical predecessors made frequent appeals to reason, their concepts of reason were sui generis and are to be distinguished from the conventional and still prevalent notions of that term.¹⁰

It is possible, certainly, to respect the insight that humans are not rational creatures but insist that public life continue to adhere to standards of discursive rationality. When there is no other means of discussion imaginable this even appears to be the one tolerable way of coordinating separate lives. This is more or less the system in effect in the modern world, where anything pertaining to the putatively irrational, like aesthetics, sexual preference or religious or spiritual activity, is consigned to the private sphere. But doing so drives a wedge between public and private life.

This is one of Rousseau’s central concerns, as we shall see in a later chapter, but it does not seem to be a problem to everyone who has noticed it. Indeed, thinkers like Arendt have viewed the utter incompatibility of public and private as a given and honored modernity as a world built on respecting that separation.

All the same, there is something obviously paradoxical on building a social or public world that is deliberately bereft of the very activities which motivate human action. The options it offers are few and unappetizing. One can internalize the ideals of reason and commit oneself to a regime of incessant internal self-policing, a kind of autocrucifixion undertaken for the salvation of humanity. One can accept the separation as a virtue, which leads in a positive form to a combination of inner Stoicism and an outward civic repub- licanism. In the industrialized West, however, this most often devolves into a fundamental hedonism excused by moments of “giving back,” and in its least admirable form it deteriorates into self-indulgence.

These compromises all accept the fundamental structures of the modern world as givens. Any attempt at radical change, any wish to reshape the public world so that it better reflects the life one finds within, any positive liberty in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, violates that separation and looks frighteningly like the irruption of either tyranny or uncontrollable irrationality into the public sphere. But this illustrates better than anything else the paradox of the rationalized public world. People’s experiences and emotional orientations have been addressed, critiqued, evaluated, discussed and shaped by various communities in all kinds of public ways—through story telling, ritual, dance, sexual activity and more. Within the split world of modernity, however, none of this can take place in the world at large. It falls into the sphere of the voluntary, the realm of activities like religious life which are precluded from spilling over into the “genuinely” public sphere of rational discourse. There is thus no opportunity for shared or private emotional life to be transformed through a truly public process. Once emotional life is eliminated from the public sphere, genuinely grounded human experience can only present itself as a threat, as the return of the repressed.

This is another of those topics too large for the present work. What the discussion should bring home, however, is that there is nothing axiomatic about the ideal of self-regulation through explicit reason, either individually or socially. It is not the inevitable destiny of humanity to rise to a rational community from the muck and mire of primitive irrationalism. It may well turn out that the passage has gone in another direction, or in two directions at once, that whatever has been accomplished in the way of ameliorating human misery over the past fifteen thousand years has also been accompanied by a plunge from a humane and flexible world order into one where the triumph of rationality does indeed radiate disaster triumphant. It should be clear at the very least that the ideal of a rational world order and of the individual life guided by reason has a past. It is one which needs to be accounted for in any understanding of the course of European history.

The briefest of sketches will have to suffice here. The source of that ideal is usually traced to Periclean Athens, if not to the Ionian philosophers who preceded Socrates, but the most significant agent in this development was the church rather than the schools of the philosophers. The Classical age saw no end of encomia to reason, but the reason of which humanity was capable was limited and few believed that it could reach certainty. The vocation of the individual—meaning, of course, the free male with sufficient property to avoid work—was to participate in the public life of the city and to raise children to perpetuate that city’s divinely-ordained existence. To live according to reason was to accept the processes of civic life and the turnings of fortune as the necessary working out of a cosmic order. One was consciously a citizen of Athens or Alexandria, and one could realize one’s more profound citizenship in the common city of gods and men. It was far more difficult to stand outside the immanent rationality of the cosmos and construct a rival order; indeed, the enclosed cosmos of the Classical imagi- nation meant that there was no external or transcendent standpoint where one could begin.

Christianity, of course, posited a transcendent deity who not only stood outside the cosmos but who created and sustained it as well. This in itself would not have constituted a decisive break from the innumerable cults of the time; something similar was asserted of Mithra, for example.¹¹ If Christianity had offered nothing more it is possible that Jesus might have been slowly assimilated into the pantheon and the other gods reimagined as aspects or avatars of Yahweh. Something like this has happened throughout Indian history, as local deities are “Sanskritized” and recast as manifesta- tions of Great Tradition deities like Shiva, the Goddess, or Vishnu.

Christianity put forth another claim, however, and this one was directed not only at the other gods, soon to be mocked as “pagan” or “backwards,”¹² but at the ordering force of civic life itself. Reason had been unable to ground human experience because it had found no sure foothold in the cosmos, but the life of the city carried enough authority to make it unnecessary to look for such a point of beginning. Christianity had to create that need. Anyone who listens to a traditional hellfire-and-brimstone sermon knows that the minister has to create a sense of sinfulness in order to sell his brand of salvation. What is less obvious is that Christianity had to create the isolated intellect, adrift in a confusing and disorienting world, in order to sell its brand of rational theology. To do that it had to destroy the Classical city.

As Peter Brown has argued, Christianity deliberately set itself against the Classical civic culture. Celibacy became so central to early Christian practice because the celibate repudiated the primary civic duty of perpetuating the city through fathering children.¹³ There was no need to force people out of the cities like Pol Pot did, of course. It was enough for city and social life itself to be desacralized. In the ensuing disorientation Christianity could then step in to provide a new way of orienting oneself to the real.

This alteration went far deeper than the introduction of a new cult. It brought into being a different system of the sacred and a different kind of worshiper, both a new god and a new humanity. One was no longer a citizen and the gods were no longer one’s fellows. The sapping of the civic order and its sacred foundations and rituals left its inhabitants adrift, cut off from one another and from the cosmos—strangers and afraid in a world they never made. But the same corrosive force that dissolved the bonds between man and man and between men and gods offered a lifeline through revelation and reason. Christians preached an historical experience of absolute truth and authority, the full revelation of the divine in the life and death of Jesus. The rational elaboration of these truths in the new science of theology mapped out the proper course for each newly-isolated soul on her or his pilgrimage through life and set the framework through which their earthly interactions should be understood.

To simplify drastically, the Christianization of the Classical world was a move from a process-based order to a discursive one. A world of immanent rationality and mutual obligations and negotiations, where ritual took precedence over doctrine, was replaced by a world of discrete individuals, each one oriented primarily to a transcendent reality through language and conscious belief. In the Christian world, that of Latin Christianity most of all, the individual had no guide but the teachings of the church and no hope but in the salvific word.¹⁴ And “word” must be taken literally. It is not the logos of John’s gospel; it is the concrete text of the Greek testament and the detailed narration of the Creed, with their claimed grounding in historical fact.

This was not a unilinear process. The exuberant multiplication of both theology and story in Medieval Catholicism recovered some of the intimacy and corporeality with which the Classical world lived with the divine. But behind it still lay the demand that the world be made into a knowable whole and the confidence that reason and the secure foundations of revealed truth were adequate to that task. The endlessness of the process was no indication that this approach was flawed; instead, it reflected the inexhaustible richness of the divine that had become available to humanity through Jesus’ sacrifice and that was henceforth visible to the eye of faith.¹⁵

This confidence was unshaken by the Renaissance. Indeed, the cultural and intellectual experimentation of that period rest on it. The encyclopedic discourse which for Medieval thinkers was in some sense pre-existing, and which they aspired to encompass in earthly form, was an equally strong presence in the Renaissance. It supports the transformation of a minor rhetorical technique, the memory theater, into a spiritual discipline in which the adept strove to memorize and pace through an internal representation of the entire cosmos.¹⁶ It helps explain the Renaissance fascination with magic, and it is the background of Pico della Mirandola’s celebrated oration on the dignity of man.

With the Reformation, however, this broke down. The end of Christian unity in the West was a blow to the self-assurance of Medieval and Renaissance thought, and in the light of the revived and intensified Augustinianism of Luther and Calvin it could no longer be easily maintained that the natural, social and spiritual worlds were all merged into a single universe of discourse. The Word was no longer plainly present in the world. It had to be recovered, made explicit once more.

Most crucially of all, though, the content of that salvific word itself was suddenly in doubt. It has been hard for many contem- porary historians to credit the reasons given by the actors of the Reformation themselves. We are generally unwilling to believe that people were so concerned with the doctrine of the Real Presence that they were willing to kill and die for their particular interpretation of what happened at the Mass. Instead, the religious wars that culmi- nated in the continental slaughter of the Thirty Years’ War have been merged into a general crisis of the seventeenth century or given other secular interpretations and the overtly religious claims made by the warring parties are dismissed as ideologies. The past few decades of communal violence and the rise of political Islam, Christianity and Hinduism may have made the religious aspect of the wars of religion appear less peculiar, but the notion that ideas count, religious ideas in particular, continues to seem like a throwback to a style of historical explanation that we have left behind.

In this case, at least, we turn away too soon from the actors’ own reasons. Doctrine was such a life-and-death issue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because the human needs created or shaped by Christianity were still present and demanded to be satisfied. Within the cultural world of those times, a culture formed by Latin Christianity, human experience was still articulated as the confrontation of isolated actor/intellects with an objective world. It was still essential that one stand in a correct relationship to the reality of things, and it still appeared self-evident that this happened only through discourse.¹⁷

Both individual salvation and political legitimacy, then, rested on a theoretical grasp of the authentic order of things. It was important to be correct. It is not that there was unanimity on the essential questions in the Middle Ages; quite the opposite is true. But what effects unity is rarely if ever outright agreement. It is the shared sense that the disputants are unfolding different perspectives on a single truth. The debates of the medieval theologians presumed the ultimate unity and veracity of the tradition embodied in the church. So did the more outré tendencies of the Renaissance. The shock of the Reformation was the proof that this point of ultimate unity could not be counted on or that, at the very least, Christianity could no longer be counted on to provide it.

This was the immediate historical origins of the Enlightenment project.¹⁸ It does indeed go back to Luther and his contemporaries, though not because Protestantism shook off the hand of priestly or textual authority and inaugurated a culture of individual freedom. This claim appears in Heine’s colorful and iconoclastic On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, published in book form in 1835, if it does not appear earlier, and it became a commonplace in much nineteenth-and early twentieth-century scholarship—not surpris- ingly, most of all in scholarship from the Protestant north of Germany. We may safely set this explanation aside. The real connection between the Reformation and the Enlightenment is that the collapse of a unified Latin Christendom created the political, social and intellectual problems which the philosophes and their contemporaries were trying to solve. European states and individuals were left without any generally-accepted system of ideas and it seemed self-evident that new ones needed to be uncovered.

This was not so immediate a problem in the case of individual spiritual commitment, although the slow desacralization of public experience has had a massive impact on the character of religious life. In the case of social order, though, it was a devastating change. The validity of Europe’s social institutions had long rested on the confidence that they emanated from the divine and were conducive to individual salvation. They reflected their divine model and conveyed as well as embodied the truth from above that was present on earth through scripture and authoritative teaching; their obvious failings could be tolerated because human life was necessarily flawed. Once that confidence was lost, however, the entire social world was bereft of the foundation that gave it legitimacy.

The problem Europe faced in its “crisis of conscience,” as Paul Hazard called it, was that there was no longer an authoritative or generally-accepted body of doctrine whereby individual and social life could be structured and directed. But this problem arose because Europeans, raised in the tradition of Latin Christianity, saw the elaboration of a grounded discourse as the only way through which those tasks could be carried out.

It was obvious that as a practical if not a theoretical matter Christianity no longer provided the foundation; Europeans were unable to agree on what its truths were, beyond a handful of anodyne assertions about the overlordship of the Christian god and the indefinable uniqueness of Jesus. For a short time absolutism and the divine right of kings presented itself as the solution, but for obvious reasons this doctrine never had the appeal of its predecessors. What remained was the confidence that reason itself could provide a coherent and universally-acceptable grounding for social and individual life even without the leading-strings of revealed religion. To produce this foundation became the task of philosophy.

3

The science of the soul

The Enlightenment found itself with—or gave itself—the task of developing a rationally grounded foundation for individual and social life and establishing an integrating secular discourse to replace the sacred discourse of Christianity. In light of the mass of dogma and received ideas that remained from the middle ages, this project was as often as not carried out through criticism; as Kant says at the very beginning of his Critique of Pure Reason, “our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit.”¹ The foundational project, however, had an extensive history of its own. It can be said to start with Thomas Hobbes, and with Hobbes, too, came the first doubts about its possible failure. Indeed, Hobbes’ philosophy is premised on its inevitable failure.

Hobbes liked to present himself as a self-made man, and the stereotypical British attitude towards continental over-intellectu- alism seems encapsulated by his frequent claim that if he had read as much as other men he would have known no more than other men.² Yet he was also fully conversant with the most radical European thought of his day. He had lived in Paris and traveled on the continent for many years, first through his employment as a tutor and later as a Royalist exile during the English Civil War. He was in frequent contact with Cartesian philosophical circles and corre- sponded with and then alienated Descartes himself.

The political philosophy of Hobbes’ major work, Leviathan, can most easily be seen as a response to a problem that presented itself most immediately in the turmoil of the English Civil War but which for Hobbes was inherent in all human communities. As Norberto Bobbio writes,

Hobbes is obsessed by the idea of the dissolution of authority, the disorder that ensues from the freedom to disagree about what is just and what is unjust, and with the disintegration of the unity of power, doomed to become reality when human beings begin to contend that power must be limited. In other words, he is obsessed by the threat of anarchy, which he considers to be the return of humankind to the state of nature. The evil which Hobbes most fears is not oppression, which derives from the excess of power, but insecurity, which derives, on the contrary, from the lack of power.³

This is often imagined as a generalization from the state of civil war, but Hobbes was working from an analytical question instead of an empirical one. His political philosophy does not start with any factual observations, although the English civil war was clearly a spur to his thinking. It developed the logical consequences of a theory of human action.

Hobbes’ well-known argument is that each person acts to secure the goods that he or she thinks necessary, and that both the conflict among individuals for the same goods and the fear that others will seize the goods that one has in one’s possession lead to an inter- minable arms race. The perpetual state of insecurity breeds perpetual violence and this is unavoidable; people can never agree on the good or to submit themselves to the authority of any generally-accepted standard.

This is not empirical observation but a philosophical assertion. Hobbes is a materialist, as complete a materialist as it is possible to imagine, and he imagined human activity as the actions of a set of levers, cords and rods—a common metaphor in early modern Europe, where clockwork was the master image of cognition and activity in the same way that the computer is today:

The cause of Sense, is the External Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediately, as in Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling; which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or a counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart, to deliver itself…⁴

Enmeshed in this push-and-pull of sensations, humanity has no foothold in the true:

No discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute knowledge of Fact, past, or to come. For, as for the knowledge of Fact, it is originally Sense, and ever after, Memory. And for the knowledge of Consequence, which I have said before is called Science, it is not Absolute, but Conditional. No man can know by Discourse, that this, or that, is, has been, or will be; which is to know absolutely; but onely, that if This be, That is; if This has been, That has been; if This shall be, That shall be; which is to know conditionally; and that not the consequence of one thing to another; but of one name of a thing, to another name of the same thing.⁵

In many ways this seems a presage of Hume.

As a consequence, Hobbes strives to do without foundational discourse at all. He relishes the challenge; understanding the breakdown of the theological world of the Middle Ages, he has no interest in replacing it. The very idea of a generally accepted social or individual good is alien to the spirit of his work; “good” for Hobbes is simply a name for “desirable:”

Every man, for his own part, calleth that which pleaseth, and is delightful to himself, GOOD, and that EVIL, which displeaseth him; insomuch that while every man differeth from other in constitution, they differ also one from the another concerning the common distinction of good and evil.⁶

Groups of people can agree on social goods if they are compounded in similar ways, but this is mere coincidence. Universal agreement is impossible, and even a few dissenters will destroy the social peace of everyone else.

The problem, then, is that there can never be any universal consensus on the nature of the good or any foundation for social life of any shape in particular. There is no such thing as society, only atomized individuals who can never hope to live in peace with one another. Hobbes’s solution to this problem is, of course, the best-known part of his theory. All power has to be surrendered to an absolute sovereign, who would thus be empowered to keep the peace. There is no room for democracy or even limited monarchy, nor could there be. Once a state admits discussions of common good into the sphere of political authority it plunges itself into endless turmoil. One might think that political unrest could be tolerated as a way of generating consensus or, at the very least, a framework to which all could give assent, no matter how grudging. Given Hobbes’ presuppositions, however, there could be no realistic expectation that debates over the good would ever reach such a terminus. It is better not to begin.

Hobbes’ absolutism is not to be confused with totalitarianism. His sovereign exists to keep the peace, to ensure personal security, protect the rights of property and to regulate the outward relations among subjects. The same power does not exist with respect to matters of conscience, religion, science, or the other activities of a strictly private life. Hobbes posits as strict a separation of public and private as Europe had seen to date, and the absolute surrender of political rights that he believed necessary was joined with an absolute freedom in matters of private thought. His solution to the problem of political order is not so far from Frederick’s, at least as Kant was to portray it. One was free to believe all one chose and to discuss this with others. One’s sole obligation was to obey.

Hobbes’ theories were unpalatable nonetheless. Their implications were so disturbing to his Royalist fellow exiles that after the publication of Leviathan he returned to England, fearing for his own safety. Leviathan became a kind of philosophical bugbear, and most political philosophy after Hobbes sought to escape the iron jaws of its logic, either directly or implicitly. Theorists of natural law, taking their cue from Hobbes’ near-contemporary Grotius, undertook to find rationally-grounded rights and duties that softened the harsh edges of Hobbesian sovereignty, though none of them embraced anything like democratic rule. Influential in their day (and still of importance in the law of nations), occasionally promoted to the status of leaders of a “rival enlightenment,”⁷ these thinkers nonetheless played a minor part in the Enlightenment mainstream. Those of the Scottish common sense school, on the other hand, were widely read, not least in Germany, and their appeal to a moral sense and to sympathy as a motivating force can also be seen as an attempted corrective to Hobbesian individualism.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, though, the Hobbesian terror had faded. Part of this may simply have been the waning memory of the religious wars. The eighteenth century was hardly a peaceful one on European soil, but its repeated conflicts were profes- sional affairs by and large and had surprisingly little effect on the lives of European civilians. Lawrence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey involves a trip to France at a time when England and France were at war, and the only inconvenience that the author/narrator suffers is the need to register his presence with French authorities.

But there is another and more important reason for the declining influence of Hobbes. The Hobbesian state of nature is not an historical hypothesis. (Few if any states of nature are intended to be factual claims about the human past.) Nor is it necessarily a general- ization from Hobbes’ clockwork image of human action. It draws its baleful strength from a providentialist world view that he himself rejected but whose underlying assumptions he could not shake off. Hobbes rejected the guiding hand of providence, but he retained its problematic, its underlying assumption that each person was a unitary and isolated will compounded of a unique blend of humors and passions. He could no longer count on an omniscient and omnipotent deity to shape and harmonize the complex drama of human life, however. As a result, the presuppositions that he shared with orthodox providentialists led him to see human life as perpet- ually prey to chaos and strife. The only solution to the problem of human uniqueness that he could come up with was the imposition of a human sovereign with godlike power, though not godlike knowledge. Hobbes’ political theory, in other words, is providen- tialism with providence left out.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, this picture of humanity had all but vanished. This was part of the same cultural shift that led from the baroque to the classical style, where highly specific and particularized evocations of affect were replaced by individually less distinctive but internally more dramatic structures. It was no longer obvious or even considered as a possibility that “every man differeth from other in constitution, [and thus that] they differ also one from the another concerning the common distinction of good and evil.” Instead, eighteenth century philosophy and psychology assumed a substantial consistency among humanity, a uniform human nature further harmonized by laws and mores in culturally specific ways—a point demonstrated through some of Mozart’s most gorgeous music in his and DaPonte’s Cosí fan tutte. In Rosen’s words, “For the seventeenth century, beneath the mask lie features even more strikingly characterized, more individual; beneath the eighteenth-century mask is only human nature.”⁸

This shift removed one of the key axioms on which Hobbes had rested his apparently irrefutable demonstration; if we were all the same then there were goods that we could all agree upon. It had many other equally important effects. It has often been argued that the seventeenth-century triumphs of natural science (then, of course, considered “natural philosophy”) led to the anodyne deism of the Enlightenment. Natural laws were sufficient to explain the physical universe, making the hypothesis of a divine artificer less likely and less necessary. In spite of his own deep and sometimes peculiar religious inclinations, Newton was quickly claimed as the prophet of this more secular era. From Pope’s famous couplet, “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in Night./ God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light” to Boulée’s imaginary Newton monument of 1784, the scientist appears in the eighteenth century as the great liberator.

Yet there is nothing in the vision of a mechanical universe that contradicts the materialist Hobbes, who himself was an active partic- ipant in the scientific debates of his day. The discoveries of natural science did not cast doubt on the image of the human subject that was implied by providentialist theories; a Newtonian universe was not incompatible with a psychological theory wherein every individual was a particularized and inscrutable entity. The change was worked not by a new understanding of the physical universe but by a new set of presuppositions about humanity.

Nor would the activity of the divine in matters of history be ruled out by the confidence that the physical universe could be explained on the basis of the laws of physics. The change had other roots. God did not step back from the human stage in the Enlightenment because theorists developed and accepted secular explanations for phenomena that were previously ascribed to the operations of the spirit. He took a back seat because human nature was differently conceived and human interactions no longer needed to be managed by an external regulator who operated on a case-by-case basis. God was no longer necessary to explain the workings of the cosmos because natural science did the job without relying on His activity and He was no longer needed to intervene in history because European thinkers had stopped framing the human subject in ways that made His ongoing intervention necessary. Neither of these changes mandates the other.⁹

The theological substrate was still there, it must be added, even in the absence of overtly theological considerations. Self and world were still sundered. The human subject was still construed along the lines of the Christian soul, as an isolated intellect placed in a pre- given and fundamentally alien world while being buffeted by the passions of the body. The essential achievement of such a subject was the acquisition of certain knowledge about the order of things, expressed or mediated through discourse, and efficacious action and individual happiness depended on this.

This problematic could be presented with a specifically theological tone. Just as the watchmaker God of the deists had crafted the laws of physics and set the stars and planets in their orbits, thenceforth leaving them to their own devices, so too the Father of all had compounded the human species so as to find fulfillment in social life, mutual aid and sympathetic understanding. Alternatively, it could be accepted simply as self-evident fact, as it is today. However explained, the assumed uniformity of human nature permitted the theorists of the Enlightenment to presume a sensus communis that defined the good. It underpinned the emotive ethics of the Scottish moralists, such as Adam Smith, and it gave plausibility to the sensationalist and empirical philosophy of Locke, which became the conventional wisdom within the mainstream of the Enlightenment.

D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot is as good an example of this mainstream as any. Less astute philo- sophically than the work of Condillac, to whom it owes much, it reflects the most advanced of the period’s idées reçues. Its starting point is dogmatically sensationalist:

We can divide all our knowledge into direct and reflective knowledge. We receive direct knowledge immediately, without any operation of our will; it is the knowledge which finds all the doors of our souls open, so to speak, and enters without resistance and without effort. The mind acquires reflective knowledge by making use of direct knowledge, unifying and combining it.¹⁰

D’Alembert is apt to conflate strictly genealogical explanations with quasi-historical ones and he not infrequently falls into circular reasoning. For example, he derives notions of good and evil and natural law from the experience of “that barbarian right of inequality called the law of the strongest,”¹¹ a development which presupposes an preexisting standard of right to which experience can be subject.¹² What controls here is more the demand that every mental phenomenon be derived from experience rather than any genuinely philosophical logic.

He also takes a broad and what one might uncharitably consider unphilosophical view of the content of sensations and the reasonable reflections to which he is confident they give rise. The experience of injustice, says D’Alembert, “naturally” turns us to consider our dual nature as thinking and acting subjects, and this in turn compels us to embrace Cartesian dualism and the notion of a supreme being:

It is not necessary to probe deeply into the nature of our body and the idea we have of it to recognize that it [the principle that wills and conceives] could not be that substance, because the properties we observe in matter have nothing in common with the faculty of willing and thinking. Consequently, this being called Us is made up of two principles of a different nature, so closely united that we could neither suspend nor alter the correspondence which prevails between the movements of the one and the reactions of the other, and subjects each to the other. This mutual slavery which is so independent of us, together with the reflections we are impelled to make on the nature of the two principles and on their imperfection, lifts us to the contemplation of an all-powerful Intelligence who is the source of what we are and who consequently requires our worship.¹³

The philosophical naïveté of this passage is almost breathtaking. The Encyclopedists were admittedly playing a cat-and-mouse game with the censors, and most often had to conceal or tone down their more radical ideas. Even when allowances are made for this, however, such passages indicate how frequently their sensationalist theorizing served merely to rationalize received opinions and cultural norms.

The divine plays only a minor role in D’Alembert’s discourse, however. It steps in to supplement the limited knowledge that human powers can acquire. “The nature of man, the study of which is so necessary and so highly recommended by Socrates, is an impen- etrable mystery for man himself when he is enlightened by reason alone; and the greatest geniuses, after considerable reflection upon this most important matter, too often succeed merely in knowing a little less about it than the rest of men.”¹⁴ It is thus necessary to have a revealed religion, which consists of “A few truths to be believed, [and] a small number of precepts to be practiced.”¹⁵

The Preliminary Discourse frequently stresses the modest preten- sions of human knowledge, but D’Alembert is supremely confident that the truths that are within our power to grasp are indeed funda- mentally sound. They are common sense writ large, the disciplined elaboration of those eternal truths recognized by all people of all ages. As he writes in an encomium to Locke:

In a word, he reduced metaphysics to what it really ought to be: the experimental physics of the soul —a very different kind of physics from that of bodies, not only in its object, but in its way of viewing that object …. Reasonable metaphysics can only consist, as does experimental physics, in the careful assembling of all these facts, in reducing them to a corpus of information, in explaining some by others, and in distinguishing those which ought to hold the first rank and serve as the foundation. In brief, the principles of metaphysics, which are as simple as axioms, are the same for the philosophers as for the general run of people.¹⁶

None of this would make sense without the underlying assumption that human beings were uniform. One cannot have an experimental physics if every physical object acted in unique ways. Similarly, there can be no “experimental physics of the soul” unless all souls respond in predictable ways under identical conditions.

Put together, sensationalism and the assumption that people were essentially identical made the project of crafting a rational social order seem plausible. Yet these assumptions could not be combined and developed with any rigor without serious problems cropping up. They were David Hume’s starting points, too, but he was to reach conclusions quite different from those of “the general run of people.” In doing this he was to wake Kant from what the latter called his “dogmatic slumbers.”

Hume is a key figure in the development and transformation of the Enlightenment project, but his contribution was more critical than constructive; he took the presuppositions of the project to their logical conclusions, often to devastating effect. Some recent schol- arship has cast him in a different light, arguing that the destabilizing implications of Lockean sensationalism were well-recognized and that Hume was more concerned with “how we are to get on with our lives” since “the battle to establish reliable links between thought and reality had been fought and lost.”¹⁷ But the reason that Hume has been thought of as the great skeptic for two and a half centuries is that this is how he appeared to his contemporaries. The news that the battle to establish reliable links between thought and reality had been fought and lost would have come as a shock to D’Alembert and to most of Hume’s readers, as indeed it would to most people today. Hume’s skeptical conclusions were far from being current coin. They remain both troubling and fruitful, because they begin from the most self-evident aspects of common experience and deconstruct them through a kind of reductio ad absurdum.

Hume, like Locke and D’Alembert, aimed at producing an exper- imental science of humanity based on inductive principles. In the introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature he wrote, “We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures.”¹⁸ He also shared their sensationalist and empirical epistemology:

All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions: and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning; such as, for instance, are all the perceptions excited by the present discourse, excepting only those which arise from the sight and touch, and excepting the immediate pleasure or uneasiness it may occasion.¹⁹

He is concerned only with these perceptions, and it is not inaccurate to describe this approach as quasi-phenomenological, as David Norton does.²⁰

As in the case of phenomenology proper, however, such a starting point ends up eliminating the subject itself as well as the coherent world which appears to stand over and against the subject. There is nothing but a stream of sensations or perceptions that follow one another in ways which are literally incomprehensible. Nothing final can be said about the connection that any one perception has with any other. Similarly, nothing can be said about the percipient—the self. In one of the more notorious passages of his youthful Treatise Hume confesses:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic’d reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me.²¹

Long before the dissolution of his body, which Hume accepted with great fortitude and peace of mind, his philosophy had led him to recognize the dissolution of the self. With it, of course, went the separation of self and world, in the vanishing of the former in the latter. As Hume appeared to demonstrate, a consistent sensationalism ended by eliminating the subject altogether as a locus of agency.

Just as radical in its way was the effect of a consistent sensation- alism on the notion of a lawful natural order. Hume struck at the very root of this notion, at the principle of causality itself. He clearly saw this as a key move in his argument. In the anonymous Abstract which he published in an attempt to generate interest in the Treatise, a work which he later lamented had fallen “dead-born from the presses,” Hume lays out this argument “as a specimen of the whole.”²²

His conclusion is well-known and is apparently irrefutable. We cannot observe a cause producing an effect. The only experience we have is that certain perceptions are routinely followed by others, and we assume after long habit that the same succession will proceed in the future. That is the source of our belief in cause and effect. It rests on repeated observation and the unprovable axiom that “the course of nature will continue uniformly the same.”²³ For this there is no warrant in reason itself. The Abstract continues:

‘Tis not, therefore, reason, which is the guide of life, but custom. That alone determines the mind, in all instances, to consider the future conformable to the past. However easy this step may seem, reason would never, to all eternity, be able to make it.²⁴

Hume (or whoever wrote the Abstract) adds that the unshakable belief that accompanies each experience of cause and effect is itself a product of experience; it is merely “an idea conceived in a peculiar manner.”²⁵ The laws of nature, then, are simply predictions based on regularities previously observed. In no strict way of speaking could they be considered laws.

What Hume argued, in effect, was that the presuppositions of empiricism and sensationalism deconstructed themselves. The isolated percipient, the tabula rasa of Lockean fame (though not necessarily of legitimate Lockean pedigree), was inherently unstable. It was supposed to be the philosophically refined version of the self of everyday experience, but once it was subjected to consistent rational scrutiny it melted like wax in the fire. Furthermore, we could not know ourselves if we were in fact selves; the awareness which we mistakenly call the self could acquire no certain knowledge about the structure and inherent logic of whatever it was from which those impressions originated.

Most damagingly of all, Hume’s philosophy appears to have no room for agency, individual or otherwise. The elimination of the self except, perhaps, as a passive observer, is enough to eliminate individual agency. But Hume’s more explicit psychological theories provided an additional, interrelated basis for a deterministic view of human activity. Hardly anything in the Treatise of Human Nature is better known than its claim that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”²⁶ The radical nature of this claim is not always noted, however. From Aristotle to the present philoso- phers have lamented the obvious fact that, as Paul put it, the good that we would do we do not do. This failing has often been laid to weakness of the will, Aristotle’s akrasia. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

Hume rejects the idea that the rational mind is weak. In his view it simply has no force at all and it therefore cannot affect our actions. With this argument he tosses thousands of years of moral philosophy in the trash:

Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates. Every rational creature, it is said, is obliged to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, till it be entirely subdued, or at least brought to a conformity with that superior principle. On this method of thinking the greatest part of moral philosophy, antient and modern, seems to be founded; nor is there an ampler field, as well for metaphysical arguments, as popular declamations, than this supposed pre-eminence of reason above passion. The eternity, invariableness, and divine origin of the former have been displayed to the best advantage: The blindness, unconstancy, and deceitfulness of the latter have been as strongly insisted on. In order to shew the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.²⁷

This is why reason is a slave to the passion. Hume was a careful writer, and by “slave” he meant exactly that—one who has no will of his or her own and who can do nothing but what the master orders. The passions that sweep through us dictated our actions. Social passions might war with selfish ones, but reason itself was unable to tip the balance. It could do nothing but give instrumental clarity to the passions, so they could refine their aims as they strove against each other for mastery.

The structural similarity between Hobbes’ and Hume’s psychological theories is obvious. Both consider humans and other animals as discrete biological systems acting to maximize pleasure and avoid pain. Neither gives an active role to reason and both are deter- minists. The logical consequences of their theories are different, however, for at least three reasons. Hume counts on the funda- mental uniformity of the human species, for one thing; he does not share Hobbes’ belief that individual human interests are incom- patible. He also accepts the common Scottish Enlightenment assumption that humans are motivated not simply by self-interest but possess certain social virtues, such as a pleasure in sociability and a degree of pleasure in the happiness and well-being of others. Perhaps most important, however, is his rejection of the unitary will, that locus of self which is the seed from which the entire culture of the Christian west was grown. Humans are certainly separate and discrete organisms, but they have no source of agency that is similarly separate and apart from the activity of the whole.²⁸

Hume’s world is not the cold and bitter war of each against all that Hobbes conjured up so convincingly during the dark years of the mid-seventeenth century. All the same, its warmth was subra- tional, and since there was no independent self to govern the life of the individual there was no room for the self-governance through reason that most previous philosophers had considered the highest of human achievements.

With agency goes any sense of moral struggle or even moral improvement. Hume paid lip service to freedom of the will, but he could do so only by defining that freedom as the absence of external constraint instead of as the freedom to originate a chain of events.²⁹ The difficulty he landed himself in was the impossibility of taking morality seriously; without an inner agent possessed of free will one simply did what one did, and at best the influencing force of external approbation and disapproval made one more pleasant to others rather than less. The process was ultimately out of one’s control.

This makes any call to ethical improvement delusional. As one commentator observes,

While there is nothing incoherent in describing our nature and then saying we must accept it and not violate it, it is incoherent to say this if we are unable to violate this nature. To combine the descriptive with the normative without incoherence, it is necessary to permit freedom of choice in a form for which Hume’s own account of liberty allows no space.³⁰

This is not so much a defect in Hume’s thinking, however, as it is the necessary consequence of the starting points he shared with most other eighteenth-century progressives. Hume was unusual in the rigor and fearlessness with which he worked out those conse- quences, but in that consistency lay his only radicalism. He had begun from the Enlightenment’s generally held assumptions, that humans derived all their ideas from experience, and showed that its generally held goals, that of free individuals acquiring scientific knowledge of the world and of free citizens participating in a rational commonwealth in which human affairs were regulated by the public exercise of reason, could not be reached from that starting point. Science was a set of hypotheses that did no more than gener- alize to the future what had happened most often in the past. Reason was powerless and individual agency was a mirage.

There could be something personally liberating in this vision, and for Hume itself it appears to have had therapeutic benefits. But it called the very idea of Enlightenment into question. Kant was to claim that Enlightenment was a matter of thinking for oneself and implied, at least, that it also meant acting for oneself. But if there were no true selves and no real agency, what hope was there that these goals could ever be accomplished? Hume had taken the critical path of the Enlightenment project so far that there appeared to be nothing at the end of it. The self that stood apart from the world had a nominal existence if it had any existence at all, and its claim to agency was as unreliable as its claim to knowledge.

4

The dangers inherent in thinking

Hume’s skeptical attack was not directed at reason per se. It was essentially self-critique, a carefully reasoned-out analysis that resulted in the demotion of reason itself to the status of an ancillary activity. The solvent that ate away at the unitary self and at human agency was the principle of sufficient reason, the axiom that every- thing that takes place has a cause. Hume’s philosophy suggests how little is left when this principle is combined with a strict empiricism. If everything we know comes from without and every human action is causally determined, the roots of human agency must lie outside the individual. We may not know what choice we would make until we are factually confronted with the necessity of making it, but this does not make our eventual decision any less a product of the external factors that manifest themselves in our passions. Hume has no place for the assumptions of Cartesian dualism, which preserved freedom of the will at the cost of severing mind from body. He was surely right to do so, but the result in his case was all but indistin- guishable from a reduction of the one to the other. The human subject became just as much a biological automaton as Descartes supposed other animals to be.

Kant’s profound investigation of the nature and scope of theoretical reason was set off, in significant part, by his confrontation with Hume’s thought. It was just as deeply affected— perhaps even more deeply, in fact—by his reading of Rousseau. It was said that Kant knew Rousseau’s published works by heart and that the one image that hung in his study was that of the French philosopher.¹ This appears at first to be a strange pairing. Not only were Rousseau and Kant two very different personalities, Rousseau’s own thinking hardly demonstrates the logical rigor that we associate with the author of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Logical rigor, in fact, was no shibboleth of Rousseau’s. For him rationality itself was a kind of Mephistophelean gift, marked as much by its ill effects as by its advantages, and his philosophy sketches the progress of this ambiguous gift both historically and socially. His philosophical history argues for the destructive effects of rationality on humanity as a whole. His political writings show the same process at work in the generation and maintenance of inequality and in the way through which a popular and spontaneous recognition of the truths of natural religion was undermined by the guardians of a purportedly higher rationality.

It is the latter aspect of Rousseau’s thought that spoke most deeply to Kant:

I am myself by inclination a seeker after truth [Kant wrote]. I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless passion to advance in it, as well as satisfaction in every forward step. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This blind prejudice vanished; I learned to respect human nature, and I should consider myself far more useless than the ordinary working-man if I did not believe that this view could give worth to all others to establish the rights of man.²

It seems hardly sensible to think of Kant as a radical democrat, but we shall see just how directly his critical philosophy opened the door to that position.

“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” This is the opening of Rousseau’s Social Contract, the one line of Rousseau’s that every educated reader will know by heart, and it lends itself to a kind of superficial reading of his philosophy as a form of primi- tivism. (The common error of identifying him with the illusion of the “noble savage” is of a piece with this; Rousseau never uses the term.) Rousseau is a much more sophisticated and difficult thinker than the stereotype suggests, and one thread contributing to the depth and the challenge of his thought is the suggestion that at some level these chains are inevitable and perhaps even necessary.

Rousseau’s, in fact, is a genuinely tragic view of humanity. The arts and sciences have corrupted the innocence of the primitive state, but the primitive state could not last and its innocence had to perish. Human perfectibility is an inevitable urge that cuts both ways:

It would be sad for us to be forced to agree that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all men’s miseries; that it is the faculty which, by dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would spend calm and innocent days; that it is the faculty which, over the centuries, causes his enlightenment and his errors, vices and his virtues to arise, and eventually makes him his own and Nature’s tyrant. It would be frightful to be obliged to praise as a beneficent being him who first suggested to the inhabitants of the Banks of the Orinoco the use of the Slats he ties to his Children’s temples, and which insure at least a measure of their imbecility and of their original happiness.³

Progress, then, is an unfortunate necessity. Rousseau was hardly a conventional Christian, but his is a philosophy of fallen humanity. It is a different kind of fall, however, because it is not ascribed to Adam and Eve’s free choice. It is a foreordained fall. We are haunted by the perfection of a natural state in which we could never have remained.⁴

As Richard Velkley writes of Rousseau, “Reason’s very essence is the perpetual flight and deviation from the only truly natural order, that of the prerational condition.”⁵ As a result,

Rousseau thinks that true happiness, as a sustained condition, is simply unavailable to rational and socialized humanity. Reason cannot establish a secure correspondence between human willing and natural order because all rational efforts bring about disequilibrium. Whereas our natural contentment consists in being wholly contained within the present moment, reason, even when it seeks only to recreate that contentment and nothing else, inevitably places the present moment within a context of recollections and anticipations that remove the mind from the present moment.⁶

Such a position connects with the Indian tradition on the one hand and with Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents on the other. But Rousseau is much more Freudian than he is a believer in the Indian version of enlightenment. He offers, at best, the hope of ordinary unhappiness as preferable to the deeper misery and unnecessary cruelty of what passed in his age for civilization. As Velkey notes,

The idea of the best life derives from our original nature, but we discover that our original nature must contain at least the seeds, or the earliest forms, of rationality. The earliest man is incon- ceivable without some reflection, and therewith some “bondage” to reason. Rousseau’s various plans for the reform of politics, education, the family, and the philosophical life are ways of making the most of that bondage, and nothing more.⁷

Hume had accepted the epistemological conclusion that thought and reality were radically disconnected. Rousseau had little if any interest in the theory of knowledge, but he argues for a similar and even more drastic disjunction. Where human nature is concerned our thinking actively moves us away from our true nature.

For Hume everything vanishes in the seamless flow of perception. Rousseau’s, on the other hand, is a philosophy of disjunction, of inherent antagonisms between nature and culture and between self and society. His educational treatise-in-the-form-of-a- novel Emile grapples throughout its length with these irreconcilable oppositions, between individual fulfillment and social duty and between the wholeness of the natural state that must be left behind and the alienation and sterility of the intellectual life in which we must live.

Tremendously influential in Rousseau’s lifetime, Emile is a testimony to the difficulty of achieving even ordinary unhappiness. It outlines a form of education available only to the immensely wealthy, one that must be carried out by a dedicated teacher who has sole charge of the child’s welfare for decades. (Those who tried to this in practice seriously harmed their unhappy offspring.) And in Emile the outcome of these years of education is the production not of a philosopher prince but of a carpenter. Rousseau might hope that a future society, endowed with better laws, would provide the conditions whereby all citizens grew up to be maximally healthy (or minimally unhappy) young adults like Emile. How difficult that would be is obvious, because the effort to create a natural humanity has always to contend with humanity’s natural urge to move beyond the natural.

At the heart of Emile is the famous “Creed of a Savoyard Vicar,” which explores this tragic dilemma in the context of religion, a subject which concerned Rousseau far more than it did the majority of the Francophone philosophes. Here the dilemma becomes inter- nalized, experienced as an inner struggle rather than a political one or an historical process. It remains the same problem, however. Just as the progress of the arts and sciences and the human urge to perfectibility ruin the natural goodness that all humanity originally shared, so too does an intoxication with rational discourse lead humanity away from the religion of the heart through which all can apprehend eternal truth:

Thank heaven we have now got rid of all that alarming show of philosophy; we may be men without being scholars; now that we need not spend our life in the study of morality, we have found a less costly and surer guide through this vast labyrinth of human thought.⁸

Rousseau repeatedly pulls away from any simplistic association of the good with feelings and evil with rational thought, but the opposition remains. The vicar laments:

Ever at strife between my natural feelings, which spoke of the common weal, and my reason, which spoke of self, I should have drifted through life in perpetual uncertainty, hating evil, loving good, and always at war with myself, if my heart had not received further light, if that truth which determined my opinions had not also settled my conduct, and set me at peace with myself. Reason alone is not a sufficient foundation for virtue; what solid ground can be found?

His advice to the young Emile is thus to follow the path of intel- lectual humility:

My good youth, be honest and humble; learn how to be ignorant, then you will never deceive yourself or others …. The abuse of knowledge causes incredulity. The learned always despise the opinions of the crowd; each of them must have his own opinion. A haughty philosophy leads to atheism just as blind devotion leads to fanaticism.¹⁰

And in a long footnote—frequently the location of his most personal musings—Rousseau identifies philosophy not only with arrogance but with sterility:

Fanaticism, though cruel and bloodthirsty, is still a great and powerful passion, which stirs the heart of man, teaching him to despise death, and giving him an enormous motive power, which only needs to be guided rightly to produce the noblest virtues; while irreligion, and the argumentative philosophic spirit generally, on the other hand, assaults the life and enfeebles it, degrades the soul, concentrates all the passions in the basest self- interest, in the meanness of the human self; thus it saps unnoticed the very foundations of all society, for what is common to all these private interests is so small that it will never outweigh their opposing interests.¹¹

This type of philosopher despises the common people, forgetting that they are actually capable of apprehending the truths of religion and can be guided towards moral improvement. Worse yet, this arrogance is self-fulfilling. The diffusion of the philosophical spirit turns the populace away from the deeper truths uncovered through their feelings and eats away at the foundations of common life. The masses no longer hearken to their original virtuous sentiments. They become the incapable and dangerous mob of the philosophers’ prejudiced imaginings.

Rousseau, who always styled himself “Citizen of Geneva,” draws much from the tradition of civic republicanism; his ideal is a commonwealth of supremely self-disciplined individuals who act out of conscience and duty, always bearing in mind the good of the whole and living in fear of God:

[T]he good man orders his life with regard to all men; the wicked orders it for self alone. The latter centers all things round himself; the other measures his radius and remains on the circumference. Thus his place depends on the common center, which is God, and on all the concentric circles which are His creatures. If there is no God, the wicked is right and the good man is nothing but a fool.¹²

The need for God is both surprising and important to note. Rousseau’s stress on the unique and unfathomable experience of the individual, which led to his pioneering works of self-scrutiny (and self-mythologization), led him away from the assumptions that had made the Enlightenment project so plausible and back to something like the providentialist problematic. The individual was at war with the world, and there was no earthly guarantee that virtue would coincide with happiness. The belief in God was an essential element in moral order once more, because morality stood opposed to self- interest and only a morally ordered universe could make sense of the sacrifices of the virtuous.

This is not so far from Kant’s religion within the bounds of reason alone, and it is hardly the only point of contact between the two philosophers. Kant’s change in attitude towards the “common man” went along with a rejection of philosophical pretensions. The preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason contains an attack on the arrogance and elitism of “the schools” that, style aside, could almost have come from Rousseau’s pen. Kant makes it clear that the truths of (Christian) religion owe nothing to “argumentative philosophy.” What is most important in human life is within the grasp of all, and philosophers have violated their duty and betrayed both their calling and the people among whom they live by pretending to define and control the truths that in reality are a common possession:

When the schools have been brought to recognise that they can lay no claim to higher and fuller insight in a matter of universal human concern than that which is equally within the reach of the great mass of men (ever to be held by us in the highest esteem), and that, as Schools of philosophy, they should limit themselves to the study of those universally comprehensible, and, for moral purposes, sufficient grounds of proof, then not only do these latter possessions remain undisturbed, but through this very fact they acquire yet greater authority.¹³

Kant’s parenthetical remark that “the great mass of men” is “ever to be held by us in the highest esteem” is especially telling.

Even more of an echo of Rousseau appears in a famous passage in the second edition’s preface, where Kant wrote, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”¹⁴ He has not always been taken at his word. His religious concerns are rarely reflected in the writings of contemporary Kantians like Christine Korsgaard, for example. But the canard that the Kantian philosophy was atheistic is an old one, dating at least as far back as Heine’s scurrilous, insightful, brilliant and often wildly inaccurate Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, which paints Kant’s religious concerns as concessions to the feelings of his loyal manservant Lampe:

Up to this point Immanuel Kant presents the picture of the relentless philosopher; he stormed heaven, put the whole garrison to the sword, the sovereign of the world swam unproven in his own blood; there was now no all-mercifulness, no paternal kindness, no reward in the other world for renunciation in this, the immortality of the soul lay in its last throes—you could hear its moans and death rattle; and old Lampe stood there, a mournful spectator, his umbrella under his arm, cold sweat and tears pouring from his face. Then Immanuel Kant relented and showed that he was not simply a great philosopher but also a good man, and he deliberated and said, half good-naturedly and half-ironically, “Old Lampe must have a God, otherwise the poor fellow can’t be happy. But man ought to be happy in this world—practical reason says so—that’s certainly all right with me—then let practical reason also guarantee the existence of God.” As a result of that argument Kant distinguished between theoretical reason and practical reason, and by means of the latter, as with a magician’s wand, he revived the corpse of Deism, which theoretical reason had killed.¹⁵

As charming as this is, almost everything Heine says here is wrong.

Kant’s religious concerns were real, not feigned, and he shared much with Rousseau in this regard. His approach, though, was different. He did not reject reason itself, but he was to argue that what Rousseau and others, Hume included, had called reason was only one form of rationality. This theoretical or discursive reason had to be limited in the way Rousseau wanted reason itself constrained, but the space that Rousseau gave over to the promptings of the innocent heart was for Kant occupied by another form of reason— one that established the truths that had been discerned in less rigorous form by the heart.

This was Kant’s solution to a problem that had agitated virtually the entire German-speaking philosophical community. The progress of reason seemed to many to lead inexorably towards atheism or Spinozism—at this date the two were identified; the “God-intoxi- cated Spinoza” was a later discovery. There were endless debates over whether reason and faith were at odds and equally interminable arguments over which one was to be preferred.

These debates were not notably influenced by Rousseau, but Rousseau’s argument that reason destroyed both natural goodness and spontaneous faith raised many of the same issues, and in Germany the need to reconcile reason and faith was felt with special intensity, for reasons which were political and social as well as intel- lectual. The comfortable rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff, which presumed an ultimate harmony of the two, was still taught at the universities; Kant himself had done this before the intellectual crisis that led to the critical philosophy. It was the common underpinning for the moderately rationalized “neologism” of figures like Johann Joachim Spaulding, author of the immensely popular devotional tract Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The Vocation of Man), and the mildly theistic popular philosophy of Moses Mendelssohn, the composer’s grandfather, whose works were read by a wide public. The self-educated and deeply pious Haydn, for example, owned a copy of Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunde oder Vorlesungen über das Daseyn Gottes (Morning Hours or Lectures on the Existence of God.)¹⁶

Outside the bastions of orthodoxy and the anodyne confidence of the likes of Spaulding and Mendelssohn, however, cracks were appearing between reason and emotion and between logic and belief. Pietism, a uniquely German tradition of inwardness and self-scrutiny, had a continuing appeal to a surprising range of thinkers and writers. It strongly influenced the interest in passionate states and their deliberate invocation in artistic form that seems to emerge without warning in the second half of the eighteenth century, a tendency known even then as Sturm und Drang, or “Storm and Stress.” In The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe’s breakthrough novel of 1774, Werther’s ultimately self-destructive obsession with his own emotional states reads like a secularized form of Pietism gone wrong, yet Goethe himself understood and surely felt the appeal of the religious movement; it pervades the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, written after Sturm und Drang had run its course. And Pietism itself was hardly a uniform tradition. Heterodox speculations like those of Jakob Böhme had their place within it, as did strong tendencies towards of egalitarianism and communalism.

In another corner was the protean figure of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Germany’s preeminent Enlightenment figure during his lifetime, whose writings on religion both invoked and cast doubt on traditional theism. An ironist and a chameleon, exactly what Lessing truly believed is still debated. Almost as ironic, though defiantly orthodox in the essentials of his thought, was the complicated and difficult writer Johann Georg Hamann, the “Magus of the North,” whose gnomic and macaronic texts on the provisionality of knowledge and the mediating role of language are still pertinent today. For Hamann, at least, reason and faith did not coincide, and where they differed it was to faith that one must turn.

This search for a fusion of reason and religion, the ferment of mixed philosophical and religious ideas which can be no more than suggested here, had an intense relevance that is hard for us to recapture today. Germany in the eighteenth century was, of course, “only a geographical expression,” as Metternich was to say a century later of Italy. The political authority of the Holy Roman Empire did not extend to the largest and most powerful of German states, Prussia, a non-imperial domain of the Imperial Elector of Brandenburg, and in any event it was frequently no more than nominal within its borders. Political fragmentation had certain intel- lectual advantages; it was generally easier for heterodox publications to find a press and for heterodox thinkers to find a safe haven in a splintered Germany than it was in a unified France. At the same time, however, that fragmentation made it hard to speak of a public or to contemplate, let alone bring into being, a broad social movement. It was only in cultural unity that Germany could exist, and the need to create a German public through periodicals, books and theater was increasingly felt during the eighteenth century.¹⁷ These tendencies towards fragmentation thus played into the German focus on Kultur, an ideal that involved emotional maturity and matters of religion even more than it did matters of “cultural literacy” (to speak anachronistically) and social finesse.

Adding impetus to the development of a literary and cultural community and further foregrounding religion was an overall weakness of social institutions. No part of Europe had suffered more from the religious wars than Germany. The traditional estimate is that rural population declined by some forty percent and urban population by a third.¹⁸ Although population rebounded rapidly, in part because of immigration from Protestant communities elsewhere in Europe, the devastation of the wars compounded a long-term economic decline as the focus of trade and growth in Europe turned towards the Atlantic. Germany was more of a backwater in the eighteenth century than it had been in Luther’s day. At the same time, the mediating institutions of medieval Germany had largely vanished and the princes had more power over a more atomized populace.

This put exceptional weight on matters of the spirit. Religion had been an integral part of the sixteenth-century Peace of Augsberg which had ended the first round of religious wars. Cujus regio, ejus religio was the solution, which left princes in charge of the religious life of their states. This was an unstable system and the threat of religious strife had never been entirely dispelled. In the 1730s, for example, Karl Alexander, the Catholic Duke of Württemberg, solicited the aid of the Jewish banker Josef Süss Oppenheimer to finance his government without the restraining influence of its Protestant diet. Rumors were constant that the Duke was planning to forcibly reconvert his subjects with Oppenheimer’s financing, and after Karl Alexander’s death his successor and the Protestant notables secured the judicial murder of Oppenheimer, whose corpse was left to hang as a warning for six years.

Such violence was rare. Within most every state, however, religion was deeply bound up with social and political concerns, and as Heine, Feuerbach, Marx and Engels were all to understand in different ways, in Germany “the criticism of religion [was] the prerequisite of all criticism.”¹⁹ In this atmosphere questions about reason and religion were intensely public ones, not just matters of individual conscience. If the Enlightenment as a whole was an attempt at providing a rational unity to replace the lost unity of Christendom, the Aufklärer continued to hope that such a unity would also heal religious divisions. This was a political as well as a philosophical imperative.

That so much was at stake accounts for the furor provoked not once but several times by one of Kant’s younger contemporaries, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Propagandist, novelist, gadfly, philosopher, Jacobi is either a neglected major figure or a talent of second rank who nonetheless played an important role in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Although Jacobi’s interventions begin a few years after the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, their nature and the intensity of the response among the educated German public is a good sign of the concerns that surrounded the emergence of Kant’s critical philosophy.²⁰

Jacobi’s first major work appeared in 1783. It presented itself as a brief reminiscence of a few conversations with Lessing, who had died two years before, and it bore the seemingly unrelated title Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza, in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn. The title was not deceptive, however, and Jacobi’s aim was not to memorialize the revered Enlightenment figure but to tar the rationalizing program of Mendelssohn and the other leading figures of the German Enlightenment with the accusation of Spinozism.

There was nothing particularly subtle in Jacobi’s tactics. Mendelssohn and Lessing had been friends and Mendelssohn had served as the model for the Jewish central character in Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise. Mendelssohn had let it be known that he was planning a book on Lessing. Jacobi’s intervention derailed those plans, and Mendelssohn’s sudden death at the height of the controversy seemed to many, including Jacobi himself, to have been caused by the uproar.

There could hardly have been a more potent slur on Lessing than to accuse him of Spinozism, since the great Dutch philosopher was still thought of at the time as an atheist. But Jacobi’s attack was both more nuanced and more devastating. He was a better and more attentive reader of Spinoza than were most of his contemporaries, and he professed great admiration for his thought in his reported conversations with Lessing. There was a sting concealed in this sympathy, however. Jacobi’s Spinoza was no atheist, but he was something worse: an absolute determinist whose logically airtight philosophy left no room for human individuality or freedom. The point Jacobi was making was that Spinoza was not an exceptional case. His genius was nothing more than his consistency. All rational philosophy inevitably led towards determinism and the extinction of the individual. Mendelssohn’s was no exception.

Jacobi’s book relates a visit to Lessing that took place a year before the author’s death. As Jacobi tells it, he let Lessing see a copy of Goethe’s poem Prometheus, at that point still unpublished, to pass the time while he finished his morning’s letter-writing. (This part of the account is dubious; the scholarly consensus is that Jacobi had planned to spark the conversation with just this text.)

Lessing handed the poem back to Jacobi and said, “The point of view from which the poem is treated is my own point of view…. The orthodox concepts of the Divinity are no longer for me; I cannot stomach them. Hen kai pan [One in all]! I know of nothing else.” Jacobi then replied, “Then you must be pretty well in agreement with Spinoza. Lessing:²¹ If I have to name myself after anyone, I know of nobody else. I: Spinoza is good enough for me; yet, what a wretched salvation we find in his name! Lessing: Yes indeed! If you like…! And yet…. Do you know of a better one?”²²

No more is heard about Goethe; Spinoza is Jacobi’s real interest, and the text goes on to explore the dilemma already hinted at—that Spinozism offers only “a wretched salvation” but none other exists within the realm of reason. The next day, Jacobi writes, Lessing came to him again, concerned that his confession might have frightened his houseguest. Jacobi owned only to bewilderment; he had hoped to enlist Lessing against Spinoza’s influence:

Lessing: Oh, so you do know him? I: I think I know him as only very few can ever have known him. Lessing: Then there is no help for you. Become his friend all the way instead. There is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza. I: That might be true. For the determinist, if he wants to be consistent, must become a fatalist: the rest then follows by itself. I: It is certainly nothing other than the ancient a nihilo nihil fit that Spinoza made an issue of…²³

“Nothing can come from nothing,” which is one form of the principle of sufficient reason, is what Jacobi takes to be Spinoza’s starting point. Because of that, there can be nothing at all except an infinite series of causes and effects, and the immanent divinity of Spinoza’s one substance must be devoid of will, consciousness and personality:

This immanent infinite cause has … neither understanding nor will. For because of its transcendental unity and thoroughgoing absolute infinity, it can have no object of thought and will; and a faculty to produce a concept before the concept, or a concept that would be prior to its object and the complete cause of itself, or so too a will causing the willing and thus determining itself entirely, are nothing but absurdities….²⁴

Both a personal God and the individual person vanish in what Jacobi sees as a process as endless as it is blind.²⁵

Jacobi tells Lessing that he can extricate himself only by means of a salto mortale, a somersault, but adds, “I take it that you are not given to any special pleasure in leaping with your head down.”²⁶ As Jacobi paints him, Lessing is not so unsympathetic personally, but he shares none of Jacobi’s commitment to “an intelligent personal cause of the world” or the freedom of the will:

Lessing: I note that you would like to have a free will. For my part, I don’t crave one. On the whole I am not in the least frightened by what you have just said.²⁷

Jacobi thinks differently, of course. If a consistent philosophy leaves no room for free will, then so much the worse for philosophy:

I: I draw back from a philosophy that makes perfect skepticism a necessity. Lessing: And where do you turn to then? I: Towards the light, of which Spinoza says that it illuminates itself and the darkness as well—I love Spinoza, because he, more than any other philosopher, has led me to the perfect conviction that certain things admit of no explication: one must not therefore keep one’s eyes shut to them, but must take them as one finds them. I have no concept more intimate than that of the final cause; no conviction more vital than that I do what I think, and not, that I should think what I do. Truly therefore, I must assume a source of thought and action that remains completely inexplicable to me.²⁸

Lessing responded that he himself held to the “bestial” error of holding that there was no free will, but concluded,

On the whole I don’t dislike your salto mortale, and I see how a man can turn his head up-side-down in this way, to move from it…. But that too takes a leap that I can no longer ask of my old age and heavy head.²⁹

The image of philosophy’s having turned men upside-down and of the resolution of self-induced philosophical aporias as a tumble to a right-side-up position was to have a long posterity.

As the very sympathetic Jacobi scholar George di Giovanni admits, however, the crisis that Jacobi insists that Spinoza has created comes from Jacobi’s own presuppositions. Jacobi remained tied to the expectations of classical metaphysics; he, like virtually everyone else in the eighteenth-century intellectual world, expected a rational account of the world and of history. Put more bluntly, he wanted facts about ultimate reality, and the impossible dilemma in which he found himself came about because any system of facts led to a thoroughgoing determinism.

Jacobi’s solution was to insist that a tolerable philosophy had to begin with the brute facts of human individuality and the person- ality of God. These postulates could not be justified, of course, and Jacobi could not argue for them either. His position, like Hume’s— the subject of his next book—rested on a kind of reductio ad absurdum, except that with Jacobi the ultimate position he found in theoretical philosophy was merely unpalatable instead of being logically unsound. The problem with this approach was that one’s choice of postulates became little more than a matter of taste. Spinoza arguably did not fall into this trap, but even if one concludes that he did so, and that his philosophy does no more than elaborate with great clarity a specific vision of things, it is no more and no less justifiable than Jacobi’s. We are very close here to Fichte’s concession that the kind of philosophy one embraces depends on the kind of person one is.

All the same, Jacobi was fingering a genuinely sore spot in the philosophical project as a whole, one which Hume had already explored. There is always a gap between event and explanation, between the squirming facts and the squamous mind, and between the inescapable experience of being a free subject and the rational analysis in which we are mere products of our circumstances. Lessing himself, in one of his late pamphlets on religion, had spoken of “a ‘broad ugly ditch’ separating the contingent truths of history from the necessary ones of reason.”³⁰ Jacobi’s salto mortale was his attempt at jumping over that ditch, so that concrete lived experience could be seen to be grounded in rational truth.

To anticipate a little, Jacobi’s failure was inevitable, because the ditch is dug by the activity of knowledge itself and in the subjec- tivity/objectivity division, the separation between self and world, that this activity presupposes. As Kant was to argue, we appear to be determined moments in a world of sufficient reason, but this is because all we know of ourselves through theoretical reason is an appearance; subjectivity as it is in itself cannot be an object of knowledge. As the idealists were to argue, all knowledge requires us to imagine ourselves standing apart from that which we seek and claim to comprehend, and this falsifies any claim to self-knowledge by splitting self from self. Jacobi’s demand for a rational philosophy that united subject and object could never be satisfied.

Yet that failure was not merely Jacobi’s and the concern with religion and reason was not a specifically German problem. Economically backwards, Germans found themselves debating issues which the rest of the European world would come to see only generations later. Jacobi’s aporia comes out of the inherent instability of philosophy in the European tradition, which frames all experience in terms of knowledge, the activity of isolated observer-actors whose orientation to reality is through word, symbol and theory. The ditch that Lessing spoke of and that Jacobi tried to leap over, like the disjuncture that that Rousseau lamented, depends on the conviction that we live outside the truth of things and must recover that truth through rational activity. This is an element in our starting point rather than a conclusion, and it is a theologically-based one at that; it is the problem that Christianity both creates and purports to solve. The impassability of Lessing’s ditch lies most fundamentally in the demand that we find a secular, non-religious solution to a religious, specifically Christian, problem.

Without the guarantee of ultimate coherence which the Christian God provides, all rational activity on this basis will only reinforce the separation from the truth that it purports to annihilate. This is not an insoluble dilemma, but the paths away from it demand a transformation in the ideas of reason and the human subject, a different problematic. Philosophy could aim at transforming our orientation to the world, dispelling the illusions which give rise to the need for theoretical or metaphysical solutions—the illusion of a separate rational order chief among them. Alternatively, it could rest on “historical reason,” as di Giovanni calls it, instead of objective reason, wherein rationality is revealed

within relations between human individuals and (as Jacobi would insist) between human individuals and God, which relations establish meanings and values that are absolute yet never to be abstracted from the historical contexts within which they arise.³¹

Both of these paths were to emerge in the development of post- Kantian philosophy; Fichte tends towards the first and Hegel to the second. But they do so only within the context of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. It is to this that we must now turn.

5

The limits of knowledge

Kant, and even more than Kant the generation of philosophers who followed him, would attempt to avoid Lessing’s “broad, ugly ditch” and resolve the oppositions that Rousseau had thought were irrecon- cilable, to reconcile reason and reality. They did not attempt to effect this reconciliation through language or discourse, however, and the pursuit of it led them to far more radical conclusions than Rousseau ever dreamed of. Yet the project that Kant set in motion seemed a modest one at its start. It aimed at limiting the pretensions of metaphysics and keeping theoretical reason within its area of competence.¹ Kant wrote in the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason:

In this enquiry … I venture to assert that there is not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved, or for the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied…. While I am saying this I can fancy that I detect in the face of the reader an expression of indignation, mingled with contempt, at pretensions seemingly so arrogant and vain-glorious. Yet they are incomparably more moderate than the claims of all those writers who on the lines of the usual programme profess to prove the simple nature of the soul or the necessity of a first beginning of the world.²

As we have already seen, Kant also wanted to keep the natterings of the philosophers from destroying the robust natural faith of the great mass of people. But this was not a matter of political utility, as it might seem with Rousseau, or a shying away from the unpleasant results of theoretical inquiry, as it was with Jacobi. Kant limited reason for sound philosophical, even scientific reasons: because it had shown itself to be useless outside the realm of possible experience.

In other words, Kant, like Wittgenstein a century and a quarter later, sought to trace out the inherent limits of thought. He was confident that in so doing he was carrying on the Enlightenment project. So, too, were his successors. This remains a contentious subject, however, and those interpreters of the period who identify the Enlightenment with the proclamation of universal values or a positivistic attempt at a rational ordering of all human activities will likely disagree. From that perspective, any questioning of reason is an attack on the Enlightenment.

On the other hand, if the Enlightenment project also demanded that our knowledge and all existing institutions be subject to the test of reason, it would be hard to argue that Kant’s questioning of reason itself falls outside of its scope. He himself portrayed it that way; if reason was to be given free rein to critique and to recon- struct, it must first achieve self-knowledge. It has no right to inter- rogate the other facts of the human world if it shies away from inter- rogating itself. This is what Kant means by the critique of pure reason: if reason is to be the judge, it must first judge itself.³

The legal metaphor is a significant one. It relates to one of Kant’s key terms, “deduction.” The first critique revolves around the “transcendental deduction of the categories,” and the later Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment both contain their own deductions. These portions of the three critiques are among the most difficult passages of these difficult works and their method- ological presuppositions are not obvious. Part of the problem is that Kant suggested the nature of those presuppositions through termi- nology that would soon be outdated. He did not mean by “deduction” a logical demonstration of the entailments of a particular concept. He was using the word in its legal sense, as a term of art (as lawyers call it) from the jurisprudence of the Holy Roman Empire, and this sense of the word disappeared along with the Empire and its law courts in 1806. It has been easy ever since to overlook the legal implications of the term.

Before Napoleon abolished the Empire the relations among its hundreds of states and statelets had been governed by thousands of treaties, agreements, laws, alliances and understandings. Because of this multiplicity of authorities the imperial lawyer needed to show what law applied to the facts that he was about to present and argue, and the name for this preliminary task was deduction:

JURISTS, when speaking of rights and claims, distinguish in a legal action the question of right (quid juris) from the question of fact (quid facti); and they demand that both be proved. Proof of the former … they entitle the deduction. Many empirical concepts are employed without question from anyone. Since experience is always available for the proof of their objective reality, we believe ourselves, even without a deduction, to be justified in appropriating to them a meaning, an ascribed significance. But there are also usurpatory concepts, such as fortune, fate, which, though allowed to circulate by almost universal indulgence, are yet from time to time challenged by the question: quid juris. This demand for a deduction involves us in considerable perplexity, no clear legal title, sufficient to justify their employment, being obtainable either from experience or from reason.⁴

Kant’s use of the term for his method is carefully considered. He is trying to show that the aporias of metaphysics develop because theoretical reason has overstepped its proper limits. To do this he has to define the territory within which that form of reason operates lawfully and reliably and the boundaries over which it should not be permitted to stray. The legal process of deduction is a very apt metaphor for this process.⁵

This implies a really extraordinary change, however. Hume, Rousseau and all their contemporaries thought of one thing when they thought of reason: the logical development of concepts expressed through language. This is still how most people think of it today, most philosophers included. For Kant, however, theoretical reason was only one of several different ways of comprehending and orienting oneself within experience, each one of which was entitled to be treated with the same respect. There is practical reason, which determines and guides action; this has strong connections with the Aristotelian phronesis. There is also a kind of evaluative reason. This is what Kant treats in his Critique of Judgment, which yokes together in surprising and interesting ways aesthetics (a field in which he was a pioneer) and biology.

Kant built his critiques on the notion that each of these types of reason has its proper functions and its built-in limits. All of them are entitled to be considered reason, just as all of the laws that the Imperial lawyer had to sort through were laws. Each one of them applies in some cases to some activities. One of the central tasks of the critical philosophy was to find out which type of reason applies to which activities, so that we do not employ theoretical reason, for example, in situations for which it is not suited.

It is important to stress that Kant’s philosophy is not in any way psychological or empirical. Hume’s was, as was that of the other Scottish moralists who had a sizable impact on Kant and his contemporaries; all of these rested their theories on generalizations from experience and all of them argued that human beings are so fashioned or evolved that they respond in certain ways to certain situations. This was not Kant’s procedure. He was trying to descry and delineate the necessary forms of necessary activities, and his results were meant to apply to all rational beings however compounded. All rational beings—those capable of reflection—would seek to understand experience through conscious analysis and synthesis, the exercise of theoretical reason. All of them would act with deliberation and purpose, and that is the exercise of practical reason. More controversially, Kant presumed that all of them would create and take pleasure in works of art and would try to comprehend the living world as an implicitly ordered whole.

What Kant tried to do was show that each of these activities had a logic of its own that limited its effective use, but that each one of them also had in-built tendencies that led it to be employed outside its limits. They were not to be replaced or made subservient one to another, however. They merely had to be confined to their proper spheres.

One other point needs to be made, though it really should not need to be stressed. Kant was forced to develop an immanent or internal critique. The boundaries of the realm of theoretical reason could not be drawn in theory, certainly not by placing theoretical reason within a discourse that purported to embrace it. As the tradi- tional Indian saw puts it, this would be like someone jumping over his own shadow. We cannot think discursively outside discourse; theoretical reason cannot surpass itself. Its limits must be mapped out from within.

Kant thus has to surrender the rationalist practice of beginning with facts or with axioms that all must grant are true. His starting points cannot be established as truths of theoretical reason. Instead, they are properly put forth as experiments, as hypotheses, and whether or not they are valid emerges from the answers that they give to the problems to which they are applied.

There is a kind of built-in circularity to this procedure. The proof of the starting point can be established only after its implications are fully explored. This will become a key aspect of the work of Kant’s successors, and it is one reason that they all push towards the achievement of comprehensive systems. Fichte, Schelling and most of their contemporaries would agree with Hegel that “the truth is the whole.” The reason for this is internal to their projects. There are no verifiable facts from which they can begin, no axioms that cannot be interrogated. Philosophy cannot begin with a truth that stands outside of itself. It must validate its own claim to truth in the course of its working out, and thus its end is the sole proof of its beginning.⁶

It must be admitted that Kant is not always consistent. Throughout the critical philosophy he finds himself appealing to common experience and opinion, and after his dedication and prefaces he launches the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason with the statement, “There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience”⁷ —interestingly, a less pregnant claim than the corresponding passage in the first edition, which opens with “Experience is, beyond all doubt, the first product to which our understanding gives rise, in working up the raw material of sensible impressions.”⁸

Still, the experimental basis of Kant’s methodology is clear enough, and Kant explains it in the preface to the second edition when he claims that his approach attempts in philosophy exactly what Copernicus did in astronomy:

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.⁹

For Kant there are clear signs that theoretical reason had passed over its inherent limits. These are the antimonies of reason, those philosophical dilemmas such as the endless tussle between free will and determinism where perfectly coherent rational arguments can be made on both sides. These suggest, not that we have not yet come up with the right answers, but that we have either been asking the wrong questions or expecting answers from the wrong form of reason.

Kant’s critical philosophy is generally referred to as transcen- dental idealism, and to begin with the thought that “objects much conform to our knowledge” is definitely to embrace a form of idealism. The term is apt to lead to misunderstanding, however, and it deserves some explanation. Materialism, its apparent opposite, is obviously the doctrine that everything can ultimately be explained as the interaction of material entities. On the materialist view our mental life is a product of physical activity in the brain, and we should be able to elucidate the entire experience of mental life in terms of neuron firings responding to other neuron firings responding to external stimuli.

If materialism holds that everything is reducible to matter, it might follow that idealism holds that everything is reducible to thought. Experience would thus be the product of mental activity, either our own or that of some supraindividual mind (or Mind). Everything looks and feels real and is real, but the reality is that what seems solid and material is only a particular configuration of experience that stems from mental rather than physical activity.

This view is hard or impossible to refute. (Samuel Johnson claimed to do so by kicking a stone, but he clearly missed the point.) For most people today, though, it hardly seems like a reasonable possibility or even a modestly tenable argument. It sounds like a Matrix-style nightmare or a particularly fanatical kind of mysticism, the kind of idea that Westerners often ascribe to people considered inscrutable Others, like the philosophers of India. But it is not what Kant meant at all, nor is it what the post-Kantian idealists were to mean.¹⁰

Kant was so concerned about the confusion between his position and the denial of physical reality associated with Berkeley that he added an extensive refutation of idealism to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. His own philosophy did not make any claims about ultimate reality; in fact, it largely eliminates traditional ontology. At the same time, though, Kant does not seem to have entertained any doubts about the existence of a world of material objects or of individual subjects who perceive and act within that world.

In his mature philosophy Kant was interested in something else: the character of our experience of our selves and of the external world. Experience seems like the uncomplicated transcription of a structured extramental reality by a passive thinking faculty, but Kant argued persuasively that the perceived structure of objects in space and events in time results from our own activity. So does the connection of one perception to another according to the laws of nature. The “idealist” aspect of Kant’s mature philosophy does not involve any assertion that thinking is primary. Instead it marks the insight that experience is the product of our own activity as it interacts with a physical world. Perception and thought are inextri- cable.

In a famous passage Kant wrote:

Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.¹¹

The union of sensibility and understanding goes on all the time without our having any idea that we are fusing these two distinct activities. Kant is supposing something that cannot ever be observed, but he justifies this supposition by showing that experience could not exist as experience without it. This is the transcendental aspect of Kant’s transcendental idealism: the argument that some unobserved activity is required for experience to have the character that it does.¹²

Kant sees the understanding at work in two different ways, and his discussion contains both a “transcendental aesthetic” and a “transcendental logic” which is divided, in turn, into a “transcen- dental analytic” and a “transcendental dialectic.” The transcendental aesthetic concerns “the rules of sensibility in general,”¹³ what one might loosely call the stage on which the drama of experience plays out. The transcendental analytic then develops the categories which make possible the plot of that drama, “the absolutely necessary rules of thought without which there can be no employment whatsoever of the understanding”¹⁴ and through the transcendental deduction Kant establishes the validity of these rules.

The transcendental aesthetic argues, with a fair degree of clarity, that space and time are necessary elements of any experience. We could not derive the notion of space from experience, because space is presupposed in all experience; we always already place ourselves in space and objects outside of ourselves.¹⁵ If we think that we have an experience of space as such with no objects in it, we are only taking our ordinary experience of objects in space and removing the objects. Similarly, we always already place one experience after another, and thus the experience of time logically precedes and constitutes inner experience. We could no more encounter time as an event in a timeless universe than we could stumble across space in a universe without dimension.

Space and time give us no more than the possibility of experience. They are empty. We frequently talk about “empty space,” and Kant’s thinking shows us that emptiness is the very nature of space; space by itself is only an abstraction from the activity that produces objects. The nature of those objects is given in other ways. How objects emerge within that space, how they stand, what they are like and how they relate to one another are aspects of experience which are generated as pure concepts of understanding are applied to sensibility and then rendered into experience as such by the imagi- nation.

The concepts themselves are a kind of vocabulary of experience. Kant comes up with a list of twelve, divided neatly into four groups: Quantity, Quality, Relation and Modality.¹⁶ Quantity consists of unity, plurality and totality. That is, the object of our thoughts can be one, more than one, or everything. Quality includes reality, negation and limitation. Modality includes alternatives: possibility versus impossibility, existence versus non-existence and necessity versus contingency. Relation encompasses inherence and subsistence, reciprocity and cause and effect.

It is in the last issue that we find Kant engaging most clearly with his predecessors. He agrees with Hume that cause and effect cannot be derived from experience itself.¹⁷ This relationship, however, is not a mere habit. We must apply the category of cause and effect to every sequence of events in which one event regularly succeeds another, and if we did not do this we would not have anything which we could recognize as experience. The same is true of the other categories. They are the forms through which we bring experience before ourselves. And they are purely formal; by themselves they have no content at all. We cannot encounter them in the abstract and they do not qualify as innate ideas in the Cartesian sense. They deploy themselves within empirical, real-life experience and are completely merged into the experience, just as space and time are completely merged into experience.

In this way Kant believes that he has secured the lawfulness of natural phenomena. All rational beings will apply the category of cause and effect to the striking of a match and its lighting, for example. It is therefore legitimate to say that one caused the other, because we cannot experience this sequence in any other way; no thinking being could survive as such while presuming that the sequence of events is wholly fortuitous. Hume’s doubts can be dispensed with, and the natural sciences can proceed with confidence.

The difficult part of Kant’s discussion is yet to come, however. He wants to show how these categories come into play, and by understanding this he hopes to show when they can be properly used and when they cannot. It is obviously the case that we apply the categories to all kinds of objects, real and imaginary. Unicorns, for example, are plural, and they are caused to be calm by the presence of a female virgin. God is a unity—unless you are a strict pantheist, in which case he is the totality—and he causes objects to come into being. Whether he is existent or non-existent, however, is something that theoretical reason has been unable to resolve.

This is where theoretical reason is hauled before the tribunal of reason and asked to justify its application. In other words, this is the deduction phase of a trial in the Imperial law courts. Is theoretical reason trying to apply itself in the wrong jurisdiction? To what realm do the categories apply? The transcendental deduction of the categories aims at answering the second of these questions, and the answer to the second will give us the answer to the first.

The deduction cost Kant a great deal of difficulty and it has done the same for generations of students after him. He was so dissatisfied with the first edition’s account that he rewrote it extensively for the second. The broad outlines of the deduction in the second edition are fairly simple to tease out, however, and they define the shape of Kant’s solution to the problems of metaphysics so well that it is useful to set them out here.

Kant’s specific term for the flow of unmediated sensation, both inner and outer, is “manifold,” and although what we receive through our senses is a manifold, “the combination of a manifold in … is an act of spontaneity of the faculty of representation; and since this faculty, to distinguish it from sensibility, must be entitled under- standing, all combination … is an act of the understanding.”¹⁸

The understanding takes the many and organizes it. Its basic operation is to gather aspects of the manifold together into unities. It constitutes as unities the objects which we synthesize out of a multi- plicity of sensations, the apple which is present to us through its appearance from many angles, its feel in the hand, its weight and coolness or warmth, its smell, its taste and its texture in the mouth. Even more importantly, it constitutes the manifold as the coherent experience of a single world.

But where does the “representation of unity” come from that accounts for the oneness of things? It cannot come from the category of unity. That comes into play only as experience is being made available to us through the activity of the understanding, as we are unifying the manifold, and it has no priority over multiplicity. The representation of unity must precedes the act of unification, or combination as Kant calls it; it must be present before the represen- tation of the manifold to make it possible for anything to be combined at all.

Where that unity comes from, says Kant, is “the original synthetic unity of apperception:”

It must be possible for the “I think” to accompany all my representation; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all…. All the manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the “I think” in the same subject in which this manifold is found. But this representation is an act of spontaneity, that is, it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility. I call it pure apperception, to distinguish it from empirical apperception, or, again, original apperception, because it is that self-consciousness which, while generating the representation “I think” (a representation which must be capable of accompanying all other representations, and which in all consciousness is one and the same), cannot itself be accompanied by any further representation.¹⁹

For there to be representations, and for the manifold to be trans- formed into objects, we first need a point of combination, and a unitary point at that. This is given to us by the original or pure apperception. The unity that we need so we can bring order out of the chaos of the manifold is found in the subject itself, in the unity of the “I think” that can accompany all representations. This is meaningless unless the same I is doing the thinking in all represen- tations. Self-consciousness thus makes the unification of multiplicity possible.

In other words, we have to have the logical capacity to have experience that is ours before we have any experience at all, and that means that we have to be an “I” in a sense that Hume would not have accepted. The concept of the unity of the self is a necessary one and it is rooted prior to the application of the concepts applied to experience. At the same time, however, our ability to bring that unity of experience into being is the basis for our experience of ourselves as unitary agents.²⁰ That is why the synthetic unity of the apperception is “the highest principle in the whole sphere of human knowledge.”²¹ We cannot know anything without it and we cannot be selves without its engagement in experience. In a move with tremendous historical importance, Kant argues that our experience of our self and our experience of the world cannot be separated. There is no disembodied knowledge in the abstract. All knowledge is the knowledge of a knower, of one who takes part in the activity of producing experience and thus knowledge. It is thus a process which implicates and defines both subject and object.

Kant then turns to the specific forms through which the manifold is combined; after all, merely lumping sensation together into an undifferentiated unity would accomplish nothing. “All the manifold,” he writes, “so far as it is given in a single empirical intuition, is determined in respect of one of the logical functions of judgment, and is thereby brought into one consciousness.”²² The categories, which structure those logical forms of judgment, are thus the scaffolding of experience. These are the patterns through which the understanding unites with sensibility to produce experience out of the manifold. But their use depends on a creative function, not merely an analytical one. We bring experience into being for ourselves through yet another faculty, the faculty of imagination.

The exact nature and scope of Kant’s doctrine of imagination is a very difficult issue, but even in the first Critique it clearly plays an important role. It effects a “figurative synthesis,” which transforms our inner sense:

Since there lies in us a certain form of a priori sensible intuition, which depends on the receptivity of the faculty of representation (sensibility), the understanding, as spontaneity, is able to determine inner sense through the manifold of given representations…. In this way the categories, in themselves mere forms of thought, obtain objective reality, that is, application to objects which can be given us in intuition.²³

As Wallace Stevens put it in the title of one of his great late poems, “Reality is an activity of the most august imagination.” It is the imagination that makes knowledge into something that concerns us. It is the bridge between self and world, and in fact is the artificer of the experience of both. It does indeed make what is real, and Kant insists that what it makes is objective reality.

There is a sting in Kant’s use of the term “objective,” however. What he means is objective (that is, predictable and lawlike) knowledge of appearances.²⁴ And “appearances are only representa- tions of things which are unknown as regards what they may be in themselves.”²⁵ Theoretical reason applies only to that which it is possible to experience, and these are all appearances. The “thing in itself,” the notorious Kantian “Ding an sich,” is unknowable.

These boundaries are both like and unlike the limitations of the transcendental aesthetic. It is obviously meaningless to ask what lies outside space or what came before time, though this has never stopped people from asking those questions. These questions are meaningless because they demand experience outside the condi- tions of experience. But the difference with the application of the concepts is that they do seem to be meaningful when applied beyond the realm of experience, to things in themselves as well as to things that we could never encounter:

The pure concepts of understanding are free from this limitation, and extend to objects of intuition in general, be the intuition like or unlike ours, if only it be sensible and not intellectual. But this extension of concepts beyond our sensible intuition is of no advantage to us…. Only our sensible and empirical intuition can give to them body and meaning.²⁶

Here is where the temptations of classical metaphysics lead us astray. Only the unity of empirical sensibility and understanding can yield theoretical knowledge, and any attempt at overstepping their sphere and transcending experience itself is invalid. The categories do not care where we apply them, and the imagination will create all kinds of dream worlds that have the lawlike structure which the categories make possible. But these are nothing but logical castles in the sky.

We are back at the starting point, in a way, at the source of all knowledge in experience itself. As Kant puts it, more broadly, “there can be no a priori knowledge, except of objects of possible experience.”²⁷ But we also understand now that what we experience is not the brute impression of events on a receptive and passive sensibility but an active accomplishment, the fruit of an engagement with the world that presents a world to us and gives us selves that experiences the world. (Note Kant’s emphasis on the word our in the passage cited above.)

This is a severely restricted view of theoretical reason nonetheless, and these limits apply, crucially, to self-knowledge as well. We do not know ourselves. We are and can only ever be aware of our selves as they appear to be. “I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself,” Kant wrote. “The consciousness of self is thus very far from being a knowledge of the self.”²⁸

Hume was both right and wrong, then. He was right to observe that he could not locate the self no matter how hard he tried. He could see no more than the appearances of the self, its inner seemings. This is the only way our inner activity can be the object of experience, and the self as it is itself is always missing from those experiences. But Kant can argue that Hume was wrong to conclude that the self did not exist. In Kant’s view all he had encountered were the limits of theoretical reason. There is another kind of reason, practical reason, and it is there that we come to terms with the nature of the self that theoretical reason cannot reach. What for Hume was an occasion for skepticism becomes for Kant a tool of liberation— liberation from the perplexities of theoretical reason and from Humean determinism as well.

6

The moral law

The Critique of Pure Reason made its way slowly. The first reviews did not appear for some years after its 1781 publication, and these were not universally favorable. Even those readers who were able to make it through a work that Kant himself admitted was anything but lucid seemed to ignore the larger enterprise in which Kant was engaged. The tendency to view him as primarily concerned with the possibility and limits of knowledge was present from the beginning, and from this narrow perspective Kant’s difficult and novel approach seemed unnecessary or even self-contradictory.

Among these early critics was Jacobi. In a supplement to his 1787 dialogue David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism¹ he set out his objections to what he saw as Kant’s incoherent half-way house between two extremes. He was especially exercised by the notion of the thing in itself, and in a frequently-cited passage complained, “I had to start from the beginning over and over again with the Critique of Pure Reason, because I was incessantly going astray on this point, viz. that without that presupposition [the thing in itself] I could not enter into the system, but with it I could not stay within it.”²

Jacobi’s main argument was that Kant allowed for the existence of things in themselves and admitted that our representations are representations of those things in themselves, but that Kant then insisted that we could say nothing about how those things affect our senses so as to create these representations. He asks, “How is it possible to reconcile the presupposition of objects that produce impressions on our senses, and in this way arouse representations, with an hypothesis intent on abolishing all the grounds by which the presupposition could be supported?”³ Since causation is a product of our own activity, and applies to appearances only, how can things in themselves cause impressions?

This only sounds like a telling argument. What it reveals is a failure to understand Kant’s point. Jacobi misconstrued Kant when he claimed that things in themselves are “objects that produce impressions on our senses.” Kant does not make this claim. He could not do so and be consistent. We are not causally connected with things in themselves. They are not objects, because objects are produced by the imagination. They are not even things, if by that word we mean objects of thought. Kant was mapping out knowledge from within, and he established to his satisfaction that it can deal with appearances only. He granted that these were appearances of a real world that existed without the intervention of consciousness, but what that world was and how it functioned were questions that lay outside theoretical knowledge altogether. Jacobi was right in one sense, though it was not a sense with which he would have been comfortable. One cannot truly stay in the Kantian system with the thing in itself qua thing, because the thing in itself is always outside the system. It is indeed no more than an entrance ticket.

To ask how things in themselves give rise to representations is to demand knowledge that extends outside the proper sphere of knowledge. Jacobi’s question is once again like asking what is outside the universe or what took place before time began. It presupposes a realm of transcendent objects that interact with the world of human sensibility and understanding. This would be a transcendent realm in name only, in exactly the same way that there is nothing transcendent (in the religious sense) in the Mormon doctrine that God the Father and God the Mother live on a planet orbiting the star Kolob. In both examples a difference in kind is replaced by a difference in location and/or efficacy. The God of traditional monotheism is genuinely transcendent and like peace he passeth understanding; the Mormon God is simply a talented and immortal human. Similarly, Kant’s noumenal realm, the realm of things in themselves, is unknowable by the theoretical reason that applies to the world of objects, which is the phenomenal realm of appearances. It is not merely a realm of special objects, which is what Jacobi assumes that it is.

Jacobi’s criticism, then, suffers from the same defect as his attack on Spinoza. He fails to see that he is demanding a rational account of something that reason by its very nature cannot provide. In the pantheism dispute he had argued that the principle of sufficient reason turned every rational system into determinism and elimi- nated individual agency, yet he still held on to factual claims about the existence of a personal deity and the uniqueness and freedom of the individual subject. His misunderstanding of Kant had the same root. He made Kant into another Jacobi, demanding of him that he provide a comprehensive rational account of all of existence and attacking him because his system could not be extended beyond appearances without becoming incoherent. The problem did not lie in Kant’s thinking, of course. It lay in Jacobi’s rationalist demands.

In the same year that Jacobi published David Hume on Faith Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Letters on the Kantian Philosophy appeared in book form.⁴ (They had first been published in the Teutsche Merkur starting in 1786.) With Reinhold’s essays the educated public’s view of Kant’s new work begin to change; in a few years there were popular journals devoted to explaining it. Significantly, Reinhold, a former Jesuit, emphasized the ethical and theological implications of the critical philosophy, taking seriously Kant’s point that he had to limit knowledge to make room for faith. There is very little in Reinhold’s text that grapples with Kant’s theory of knowledge, in fact. It is almost entirely devoted to Kant’s “proof” of a rational religion and the security he was said to have given to belief.⁵

Kant’s own philosophical development helped this process along. He did not set out to write a series of critiques, and the Critique of Pure Reason is written from the perspective that the task of criticism had been accomplished and the ground had been suffi- ciently prepared for positive philosophy. The text explicitly looks forward to new, properly-delineated metaphysics of both natural science and morals, and after the publication of the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783, an attempt at a short summary of the first Critique which is probably more impenetrable than the original, Kant set to work on these projects. The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, perhaps his most-read book on ethics, appeared in 1785. The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science followed in 1787.

But Kant grew dissatisfied with the theoretical underpinnings of his ethics, and soon found himself writing a second critique, this time a Critique of Practical Reason. That work appeared in 1788, and with the ground prepared for it by works like Reinhold’s it was immediately taken up by the philosophical community and the educated public as well. Kant’s time had come, but it was as a moral philosopher instead of as an epistemologist. It was only after the first Critique was seen in this light that it was recognized as the epoch in philosophy that it is still considered today. Works on religion and anthropology followed, including Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone and the actual Metaphysics of Morals in 1793 and 1797 respectively.

In the last two decades of the century, then, both Kant and his audience turned increasingly to ethical and even theological questions, questions not merely of doctrine but of right action and the nature of humanity itself. All of this was implicit in the first Critique, but it takes clear eyes to discern it there, and even today the unity of Kant’s project is often ignored. In forgetting this, however, we forget what made Kant so important to his contemporaries. We forget what issues were in the forefront of their concerns and what their hopes and expectations were, not just for philosophy but for the future of the European world.

Once Kant’s larger enterprise is obscured the critical philosophy also loses its critical edge. Kant has been reimagined as a defender of individual human rights and his ethical theory has been re-erected on a foundation of respect for individual human dignity. These values—a word that Kant himself would not have accepted—are given the status of ontological universals, and duties are derived from them. Ethics and political thinking, then, are carried out in theoretical form, and they reaffirm the construction of a social world composed of discrete individuals.

This is precisely the reverse of Kant’s procedure. Other humans do indeed have immeasurable value for Kant, but this is a conse- quence of the moral law and is not its foundation. Kant starts with the incomprehensible but inescapable sense of moral obligation, a fact which we struggle to comprehend in language and which operates outside of theoretical reason altogether. This starting point leads to much deeper analyses and much richer results than any theory constructed on the basis of values could provide. Although Kant himself did not take it so far, it was this that ultimately led the idealists out of the individualist presuppositions with which the Enlightenment started.

The failure to notice the inextricable bonds between Kant’s critical epistemology and his theory of human nature and action is a key element in the forgetting of the Enlightenment. Seen as a whole, Kant’s thought suggests a way out of the separations with which the Enlightenment grappled and which Western thought as a whole had depended on. The inextricability of the experiences of self and world that the first Critique implies is one of the most radical ideas in the history of Western thought. Its inner logic propelled Kant from the first to the second Critique and beyond; in 1790, two years after the second Critique, he published the third and last of the critiques, the Critique of Judgment, and he continued to explore these issues until his death in 1804.⁶ The same logic led to Fichte’s idealism and arguably to Hegel.

Although the implications of this underlying unity are potent and complex, the immediate connections between the first and second Critiques are straightforward enough. They lie in the very puzzlement that Jacobi professed when confronted with the thing in itself; “Neither the principle of sufficient reason, nor even the propo- sition that nothing can come of nothing, apply to things in themselves,” he complained.⁷ Here he very obviously missed Kant’s point entirely, because this ignorance is the most potent aspect of our relationship with the noumenal. We cannot say that cause and effect apply to things in themselves, and that means that we cannot say that cause and effect apply to our own actions, since what we are in ourselves is also unknowable by theoretical reason. We, too, are inhabitants of the noumenal sphere, and considered as such we cannot say that we are subject to the principle of sufficient reason or the rule that nothing can come from nothing.

The separation of noumenal from phenomenal realms secures the space within which we can at least think of ourselves as free, taking this in the strong sense that a free act is not one that is subject to the principle of sufficient reason. (Indeed, the absence of such a space is exactly Jacobi’s problem with Spinoza; the infinite elaboration of causal relations left no room for freedom.) Kant refuses to define freedom down as the mere absence of external constraint, as Hobbes and Hume had done. For him, freedom is the ability to initiate a chain of causation, the power to act without antecedent causes—to make something come from nothing. For some interpreters, from Kant’s time through contemporary writers such as Ermanno Bencivenga, this is all that he meant. Their argument is that Kant was content to license our belief that we are free and responsible individuals in that strong sense. Theoretical reason cannot disprove our claim to be free, so it is not logically inconsistent to think of ourselves as such.

This would make sense in the context of Kant’s sympathies with Rousseau and his concern with the fundamental good sense of everyday experience. We do obviously think of ourselves as free and we do spontaneously hold ourselves and others responsible for decisions. Utter determinism appears to be self-defeating. Not even determinists adhere to it consistently; as the joke has it, the determinist doesn’t sit down at a coffee shop and tell the waitress that they’ll have whatever it is that circumstances dictate they’ll eat. The separation of the noumenal and phenomenal gives us permission to see ourselves as common sense paints us. But this interpretation of Kant both claims too little and authorizes too much. Virtually any ethical or anti-ethical theory would be equally acceptable in this view, as would virtually any theology no matter how baroque, because none of these could ever be disproved.

Kant does not want to license theological fantasies or theories of personal reality. At the same time, though, he wants to show that human freedom is not just thinkable but is actually real. This is consistent with his quasi-judicial division of the different activities of reason. To define the root of the experience of freedom should allow us to map out the realm of practical reason from within, just as a clear grasp of the role of the categories allows us to define where theoretical reason provides knowledge and where it produces monsters. Kant is to argue that the sense of freedom implicit in the moral law is just as grounded as anything in the theoretical realm.

But there is a genuine problem with Kant’s strong version of freedom. A free act is not arbitrary, a Gidean acte gratuit; it requires a motive or a goal, and motives and goals are themselves phenomena that appear to have causes. If these follow from biological urges or the expectations of others we cannot say that the acts that they motivate are genuinely free. Yet how can we be motivated by anything else? More precisely, how can we justify our claim to be free without lapsing into a Cartesian dualism or some mystification?

This is another of the issues that propel both Kant and his successors beyond their starting points, and many times in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant concedes the difficulty of the problem. In a key section of that work he goes so far as to admit that “how a law can be of itself and immediately a determining ground of the will (though this is what is essential to all morality) is for human reason an insoluble problem and identical with that of how a free will is possible.”⁸

Kant believes that he can show that we are free and responsible even though he can never explain how this comes about. In doing so, however, he adopts a decidedly difficult notion of freedom.

It is well known that Kant’s ideal of freedom is that of autonomy; one originates a chain of causation by giving oneself the law which determines one’s acts. (This is another point of contact between Kant and Rousseau.) Anything else would place the starting point of one’s actions outside oneself. It is self-legislation that is the key, not self- will, and Kant takes the legal metaphor literally. To be worthy of the title a law must be something that is valid for every actor, just as natural laws must be valid for all appearances.

This is emphasized in the first definition of the “analytic of pure practical reason,” the opening section of the second Critique:

Practical principles are propositions that contain a general determination of the will, having under it several practical rules. They are subjective, or maxims, when the condition is regarded by the subject as holding only for his will, but they are objective, or practical laws, when the condition is cognized as objective, that is, as holding for the will of every rational being.⁹

Kant’s consistent habit of resolving practical reason into language is evident here and is worth noting at the outset.

Kant’s next step is to argue that anything motivated by desire is necessarily empirical “and can furnish no practical laws.”¹⁰ He thus rejects all hedonistic ethics and all ethical theories that aim at individual happiness. This condemnation is sweeping, and it takes in all forms of “refined” hedonism, too. Kant is clearly sympathetic to the call to the “higher pleasures,” which “do not wear out but rather strengthen feeling for further enjoyment of them, and while they delight they at the same time cultivate.”¹¹ But these are no more in the nature of genuine practical laws than is the grossest self-indul- gence. To think that one has acquired an ethical standpoint by this kind of refinement “is just as when ignorant people who would like to dabble in metaphysics think of matter so refined, so superrefined, that they make themselves giddy with it and then believe that in this way they have devised a spiritual and yet extended being.”¹²

Kant notes one objection to a hedonistic ethics that echoes Hobbes: “the determining ground of the faculty of desire is based on the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, which can never be assumed to be universally directed to the same objects.”¹³ In this he also finds himself aligned with Rousseau, whose starting point in pre-social humanity made it impossible for him to embrace his contempo- raries’ comfortable assumptions about the uniformity of the human species and thus the ultimate compatibility of individual ends. But hedonism would have the same problems even if everyone happened to want the same things, because “this unanimity would itself still be contingent.”¹⁴ A law must be necessary and it must be valid for all rational beings, whatever they might find pleasurable or useful. It cannot be founded on pleasure or happiness.

The problem is that we are nonetheless biological organisms and every goal we set for ourselves is a function of desire. What, then, could be the nature of a law of practical reason? What rule for action could there be that does not depend on desire?

Kant’s answer is simple but difficult. Practical laws are “principles that contain the determining grounds of the will not by their matter but only by their form.”¹⁵ If we strip away every material concern from the operation of a practical law, abstracting from the concept of a practical law every possible consideration of an empirical nature, all we have left is the bare form of lawgiving itself. Since laws are universal by their very nature, what we end up with “is the mere form of giving universal law.”¹⁶ Perhaps unexpectedly, we have arrived at one formulation of the familiar categorical imperative. Practical laws are maxims (that is, directions for concrete, empirical actions) that can be considered universal law. They stand apart from every inclination and, indeed, can be said to oppose them all. Whatever is capable of being willed as a universal law of nature is a practical law, and acts pursuant to these practical laws are ethical acts.

To be free is to make not just maxims but laws for oneself, and since the only practical laws are forms of the moral law, to submit oneself to the moral law and act ethically is thus the only way to be truly free. This has often been read as a paradox, and a good deal of rhetoric has been employed to tar Kant with the sins of Prussian militarism and worse. He is said to elevate duty above all other virtues, and this was the interpretation of Kant given by none other than Adolf Eichmann in his trial in Jerusalem: his autonomy was impaired by the conditions of authority in which he found himself, he explained, so his primary ethical obligation was to do his duty.¹⁷

This is an outrageously false interpretation of Kant, contradicted by the very example that Kant adduces to show that we recognize the existence of the moral law: and of ethical freedom:

Ask [someone] whether, if his prince demanded, on pain of… immediate execution, that he give false testimony against an honorable man whom the prince would like to destroy under a plausible pretext, he would consider it possible to overcome his love of life, however great it might be. He would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would do it or not, but he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him.¹⁸

Yet it seems utterly self-contradictory to insist that freedom is to be found in adherence to a law, even one that one gives to oneself. What is more, the notion of freedom arising out of the rejection of all of our inclinations can appear repulsive as well as absurd.

The paradox vanishes, however, when Kant’s ethical theory is read in the context of the critical philosophy as a whole. Inclinations are appearances, after all. They are empirical conditions, which means that they are aspects of the phenomenal world and are subject to the law of sufficient reason. Everything we do as phenomenal beings is done for a purpose, and the purpose comes down to the interests of the body, either for survival, reproduction, or the maintenance of a sense of well-being. Our biological needs are negotiated and fulfilled within the causal order, and that same causal order determines our desires and thoughts, no matter how abstract or disinterested.

Kant did not set ethics against all inclination because he was a puritan or because he despised the body, although both of these complaints have some legitimacy. In a theoretical sense, at least, Kant has nothing against inclination. It is simply that inclination cannot play any role in the realm of ethics, because all inclination is phenomenal. As soon as one lets inclination into the sacred halls of ethics the structure collapses. We find ourselves back in the phenomenal world and freedom evaporates. That is why they all have to be cut away or abstracted before the moral law itself can appear.

But where does the moral law come from? Kant cannot derive it from human freedom, even though freedom and the moral law are inseparable:

It cannot start from freedom, for we can neither be immediately conscious of this, … nor can we conclude it from experience, since experience lets us cognize only the appearance of freedom. It is therefore the moral law, of which we become immediately conscious … and, inasmuch as reason presents it as a determining ground not to be outweighed by any sensible conditions and indeed quite independent of them, leads directly to the concept of freedom. But how is consciousness of the moral law possible?¹⁹

Kant’s answer is simple but not wholly satisfactory. The moral law simply is. The moral law, he tells us, is “the sole fact of pure reason.”²⁰

Kant protests that this is not an empirical fact, although it may be hard to see it in any other light. His argument marks something of an improvement over the position in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which rests on the even-more-empirical- sounding assertion that a good will is the only unqualified good that one could imagine.²¹ In both cases, however, the charge of empiricism is slightly misleading. In the Groundwork Kant’s argument is not that people generally think of a good will as the highest of goods. Instead, it is that the concept of a good will is the only concept of a good that does not contain any qualifications. (Whether or not this is tautological is another objection.)

The moral law is similarly free from actual empirical determination. It is, in fact, the call to free oneself from empirical determinations altogether, the power to say no, and as two-year-olds discover that power is also the key to self-consciousness.. We cannot be rational selves unless we can extricate our actions from purely biological responses. If a being was not able to choose its actions, and was thus a slave to inclination, it could not be said to exist as a rational creature. The moral law as the obligation to deny inclination is a fact of reason because it is the foundation stone of rational life, not because one inevitably stumbles upon it when considering one’s future actions.

The problematic factuality of the moral law is likely inevitable, given the relationship that practical and theoretical reason have within the critical philosophy. The first Critique had established that theoretical reason could not legislate in this realm. But demanding of practical reason that it integrate itself with and justify itself by the standards of theoretical reason would turn authority back to theoretical reason, which is exactly what the critical philosophy forbids. (It would also be fruitless, of course.) The moral law is an irruption of one form of reason into another, the grounding of the supersensible world made manifest in the sensible, discursive world of appearances and theories. It cannot but appear as a brute fact, just as our experience of it is that of an unqualified demand, an imperious “ought.” It can only come from nowhere.

If the moral law exists only in the form of lawgiving, is it therefore also devoid of content? This has been a criticism of Kant’s ethics from the beginning, and Alasdair MacIntyre put the case succinctly in an introductory text:

The doctrine of the categorical imperative provides me with a test for rejecting proposed maxims; it does not tell me whence I am to derive the maxims which first provide the need for a test. Thus the Kantian doctrine is parasitic on some already existing morality.²²

MacIntyre goes on to indict Kant for presenting a strictly individu- alistic ethics in which sufficient ingenuity can convert any wish of the actor’s into a universalizable formulation. It thus offers endless opportunities for self-justification This, too, however, is a criticism that misses the point. The moral law is in some ways like the pure concepts of the understanding; it is never met with by itself. It is pure form. It commands that one act as a legislator for the world, but it gives no concrete directions. These can only be provided by the empirical condition of the actor and thus by the actor’s inclinations; as Kant admits, “all cases of possible action that can occur can only be empirical, that is, belong to experience and nature.”²³ Thus, “the human being is not thereby required to renounce his natural end, happiness, when it is a matter of complying with his duty; for that he cannot do, just as no finite rational being whatever can.”²⁴ Instead, the ethical act is a coinci- dence or fusion of contingent and necessary considerations; it is an empirical end chosen because its accomplishment is consistent with universal law.²⁵

The empirical conditions cannot be the motivating factor in the act, however. Kant writes:

Freedom, and the consciousness of freedom as an ability to follow the moral law with an unyielding disposition, is independence from the inclinations, at least as motives determining (even if not as affecting) our desire.²⁶

In other words, one can act freely while still engaged in one’s phenomenal life and satisfying one’s inclinations, but the ruling force in action must be the moral law.

Seen in this light the moral law as is not actually devoid of content. The standard of universalizability directs our attention to the entirety of the rational world, if not beyond. (Kant’s formula is that a moral maxim must be suitable as a universal natural law.) To act as a legislator for the world means that one’s stance has to be wholly impersonal. The ethics of Kant thus points towards a practice of radical and absolute selflessness. The ethical act fulfills an incli- nation, but it is the inclination that serves everyone’s interest. To act as a universal legislator is to be what Frederick the Great claimed to be, the first servant of—in this case—the whole of humanity.

Kant is unwilling to surrender the notion of individual, personal happiness, however, and this is the root of his controversial recon- struction of religion. He argues that the consciousness of our acting in accord with the moral law is a source of contentment, but that this alone is inadequate. More like Heine’s caricatured Lampe than Heine’s Kant, he finds the absence of reward for morality to be untenable and the absence of this incentive to be destructive of morality. It is obvious that virtue does not always lead to happiness in the present world, so Kant insists that practical reason demands and authorizes belief in the immortality of the soul and an afterlife of rewards and punishments. In that way justice will be done and individual happiness will be squared with individual desert.

Here his own cultural presuppositions run riot. There is no rational basis for preferring Kant’s rebuilt Protestantism to other theologies—for example, the traditional Indian moralized notions of karma and rebirth.²⁷ Indeed, the Indian theories would appear to present a significantly more naturalized solution to this particular problem than Kant’s does, and they require fewer hypothetical entities.

As Kant becomes entangled in questions of incentives and rewards he runs the risk of turning his ethics into something merely prudential. In theory this should not be a danger. It is the consciousness of the moral law that gives us the afterlife of rewards and punishment; to be motivated by a desire for heavenly treasure is to mistake the logical consequence for the logical antecedent. Were the moral law to lose its noumenal character and become merely the cornerstone for a theology, a fact like other facts, though, the danger would be hard to avoid.

The retreat to a standard of personal happiness is not even logically necessary. Ethical self-cultivation is a social process, a practical negotiation in which individual intentions move towards harmony and indeed fusion, and this could well be as potent a motivating force as the promise of an afterlife of bliss:

The moral law in fact transfers us, in idea, into a nature in which pure reason, if it were accompanied with suitable physical power, would produce the highest good, and it determines our will to confer on the sensible world the form of a whole of rational beings.²⁸

The “highest good possible in the world” is “the union and harmony” of human morality and human happiness; we must not only obey the moral law, we have “the duty to bring it about as far as we can that such a relation (a world in keeping with the moral highest ends) exists” through our cooperation, that is, our willing submission to the moral law.²⁹ This is Kant’s “kingdom of ends” and it promises an earthly rather than a heavenly reward. If everyone were to discipline empirical inclinations by the overriding demands of the universal, what would emerge would be the truly necessary inclinations of all rational beings and thus universal happiness or at least satisfaction.

In the Groundwork the kingdom of ends takes a prominent place; it is one of the three alternative forms of the categorical imperative. In the second Critique it barely appears, although Kant makes a clear reference to it in the chapter on the incentives of pure practical reason:

We are indeed lawgiving members of a kingdom of morals possible through freedom and represented to us by practical reason for our respect; but we are at the same time subjects in it, not its sovereign.³⁰

This distinction is the essential one and it is carried over from the earlier work.³¹ We are simultaneously lawgivers and subjects, again in a very Rousseauean sense, which means that we give laws to each other. In doing so, however, we engage each other in the task of making a genuinely common world. Kant’s political writings look forward to this progress, but as far as individual motivations go he seems to have overlooked its appeal.

The first Critique is Kant’s response to Hume’s challenge while the second responds to Rousseau as well, and in both cases his solutions are arrived at by granting the problems they revealed but then reframing the question. Kant could agree with Hume that our thoughts cannot reach out and contact a reality outside their orbit, but he avoids Hume’s skeptical conclusions by showing that those thoughts have their own lawlike consistency in their engagement with that unknowable realm. Kant’s reframing of Rousseau’s problem is more complex, however, and it goes a considerable distance towards decentering the individual subject entirely.

For Rousseau human perfectibility is inimical to human happiness, and the social life into which it leads is ethically dubious and at odds with both human nature and with virtue itself. For Kant, too, human perfectibility is at war with the inclinations. But the command to seek perfection comes from the moral law, which is itself the only opening to our true nature as free beings. The happiness to which it is opposed is well set aside, because ultimately it is not human happiness—that is, it is not the happiness appro- priate to a rational being.

Kant’s opposition to inclination looks like a return to what morality has been through most of the history of Western philosophy and theology, a form of self-discipline through which the second nature of reason (however defined) becomes the governor of the individual’s actions. Yet this is not what he is about at all. Kant’s position in no simple denial of Rousseau’s. He accepts the conflict between reason and inclination, but reason means something different for him than it did for Rousseau and, indeed, for virtually all of his predecessors. Practical reason is the movement of human life itself in its unknowable noumenal reality. Inclination, in contrast, is not the vehicle of our deepest needs but the promptings of our phenomenal, causally-bound existence, and it is opposed not to the deadening hand of society but to that which we are in ourselves.

It therefore misconstrues Kant’s ethics to think of the moral law as a code which is assimilated from outside, something put on like a restrictive garment. The moral law is a tool of liberation. It frees us from the immediate demands of our biological lives so we can become what we truly are. It is not a second nature but our first, authentic nature. As rational as its expression may be, it arises within, and obedience to the moral law is thus obedience to one’s true being. (In this way Kant can also affirm the relatively unreflective piety of the multitude.) Both Rousseau and Kant see humanity as radically split, but Rousseau’s is a narrative of an inevitable fall into an eternal disjunction between individual and social demands. Kant’s vision is that of humanity striving towards a state of inner perfection within a kingdom of ends in which individual and social interests are ultimately seen to be identical.

Kant’s ethical theory does not derive from a thought experiment, as in Rawls’s Theory of Justice, where the objection can be raised that the entire edifice could be erected by a single suitably ethical mind. It sets up the standards proper to a common process. Inclinations will always play into the decisions of finite rational beings, so the empirical conditions and desires of the entire human community will find expression within the kingdom of ends. They do so, however, only insofar as each person acts on behalf of the whole. This is far from being a libertarian utopia, merely a theater in which each actor is maximally free to pursue private interests. It has a specific positive content which arises out of the activity of all of its members. Yet none of that content can be given beforehand; Kant’s ethics is not so much empty as it is open-ended.

This is its essential novelty and radicalism. The first Critique had introduced the idea that we as individual percipient-actors are parties in the creation of experience. Its argument implies that each of us makes the experience of the world and at the same time makes the experience of the self. The second Critique opens up the possi- bility of a common process of world-making in which a truly human world results from an ongoing meshing of individual intentions, a kind of social/ethical Bildung. The kingdom of ends is the true expression of the general will, enunciated and expressed by its lawgiver-subjects as they discipline themselves to act in accord with their own true nature. It is a community of Emiles, even a community akin to Periclean Athens as Jaeger would later idealize it, where paiedia aimed simultaneously at individual perfection and social coherence.³²

For Kant this was a regulative idea, although his famous line about the “crooked timber of humanity” does not necessarily meant that he was averse to a form of utopianism.³³ But this aspect of Kant’s thought was to prove extraordinarily fertile, especially in the hands of Fichte and Hegel. Already, in the second Critique, we can see emerge what Dieter Henrich called “the concept of reason in Classical German philosophy:” “a rationality that, without a funda- mental orientation toward the contents of the world, or toward eternally fixed, given rules, spontaneously generates way of organizing thought and the dynamics of rational life.”³⁴ This is one reason that it was Kant’s ethics, and not Kant’s epistemology, that was the focus of interest as the critical philosophy made its way.

7

The elusive point of unity

Although his intentions were surely otherwise, Kant’s critical philosophy takes a crucial step towards decentering language, discourse and theoretical knowledge. In the cosmology of the Classical era, still influential as late as the Elizabethan era, we dwell in the sublunary sphere of mutability and partial truth. Kant’s theoretical realm is similarly cut off from the fullness of the real. Only at one point does supersensible reality break through, in the fact of reason that is the moral law. But that break is of the greatest importance. The very notion of a gap through which reality manifests itself links Kant not only with the idealists who followed him but with Heidegger’s assertion that philosophy is ultimately about the self-disclosure of Being, an irruption into the givenness of ordinary existence. David Walsh, writing from a Catholic perspective, has argued that Kant is the first philosopher of the modern age to recognize that being is disclosed in existence in a way that cannot be held within theory:

The mystery of who we are remains impenetrable, although it is never a complete blank. Awareness of mystery is in part a disclosure of it. The temptation is to mistake the part for the whole and turn the self into an object again. Kant refused any such attempts by insisting that knowing about the supersensible is not the same as knowing the supersensible. We cannot make what makes objects of experience experiencable an object of experience again without undermining the entire investigation. All that we have is the possibility of a sideways glance at the movement of experience itself.¹

But Kant himself does not take this too far. His argument has none of the late Heidegger’s tendency towards the passive, for one thing—hardly anything could be less Kantian than the image of humanity as shepherds of being—and he would surely have been wary of the anti-intellectual and anti-humanist tendencies of Being and Time. More significantly, Kant’s supersensible immediately finds itself embraced in discourse. Whatever the implications of his thought, Kant has difficulty divorcing cognition from language. Even though practical reason is grounded in something beyond theory and words, it manifests itself in maxims rather than, say, habitus or Aristotelian phronesis.

There is room for the supersensible nonetheless, and therefore something in which one could have at least a reasoned faith, and for this Kant’s contemporaries were grateful. As Reinhold’s Letters suggests, his early partisans largely saw Kant’s contribution as affirming the validity and rationality of positions that they were likely to have held beforehand. The Kantian position gained adherents because it allowed one to retain both a pre-existing commitment to reason and an equally pre-existing belief in the truths of Christianity. Taken this way, Kant’s philosophy could be read to leave everything as it was.

The more immediately radical and even dangerous aspects of the critical philosophy lay elsewhere. It lay in Kant’s novel stress on the role of human activity. It is one thing to establish the limits of theoretical reason. There was little or nothing that was truly new in the notion that reason had its limits. This had been conceded by philosophers for millennia, and it was something of a Greek and Roman cliché. Similarly, although few if any of Kant’s predecessors undertook to define those limits internally and none defined them with such precision and logical rigor, there is nothing in the idea of an internal critique of reason that would demand a departure from previous thought.

Where Kant truly broke new ground was the notion that experience was an affair in which subject and object both participated. His “Copernican revolution” was explicitly a reversal of polarities; instead of assuming that our thoughts must conform to objects, we must start from the premise that objects must conform to our thoughts. But this reversal introduces an affirmative role for thinking to which nothing in the previous position corresponds. Kant rejects the myth of the given, the common sense picture of experience as the record of a passive spectator in receipt of sensation from an objective world that stands at one remove from the percipient. (He would similarly reject the idea, still common today, that there is “information” present in the world which we take up through our senses and then record, manipulate and process.) But he also rejects the dogmatic idealism in which the apparently objective world is merely the projection of the activity of a subject who creates it ex nihilo—an extreme form of the “myth of the giving.”² Instead, subjective and objective experience both arise out of a mutual engagement of elements which may not correspond precisely to the division between subjectivity and objectivity.

Something similar appears in the practical philosophy, where Kant’s position is at least open to the idea that the human world is not simply a product of various individuals’ intentions and drives but is a shared, common human project. He does not break from eighteenth-century commonplaces such as the essential role of the founding legislator and the shaping of individual mores and character by the laws. The idea of the kingdom of ends, however, suggests a different grounding for social order and a different relationship between actors and norms. One can trace a path from the idea of a community of autonomous individuals who knowingly legislate for each other to the coming-into-consciousness of the Absolute’s world-making in Hegel, and from there it is an even shorter leap to Marx. Although Marx did not share Kant’s individu- alist presuppositions, the transition from prehistory to history that is the focus of his early writings looks very much like the dawning of the Kantian kingdom of ends. It is the revolutionary emergence of social self-knowledge, the creation of a conscious community within which human life can develop in full awareness of its collectively self-made nature and where each person is both a legislator and a citizen.

No doubt Kant would be horrified to learn of his progeny. The cautious liberalism of the essay “What is Enlightenment” is typical; although he was not unsympathetic to the ideals of the French Revolution, he generally drew conservative or moderately conserv- ative implications from his own arguments. This was a consistent pattern, by no means limited to the overtly political aspects of his work, and it was evident from the start.

To his more progressive contemporaries especially Kant often appeared to draw back from the more radical implications of his philosophy. He seemed to be gesturing over and over in the direction of a unity that he could not or would not define or explore. He argues persuasively that the experience we have of both self and world derives from their interaction, that the activity of the self is written in all experience, and that what we know of ourselves is produced in the same way as our experience of the outside world. He argues that we cannot know ourselves as we are in ourselves. Yet regardless of the implications of his thought, he remained content to accept the common sense picture of humans as isolated individuals who set goals and pursue them in an objective and fundamentally alien world, a position which hardly seems compatible with the direction in which the critical philosophy was moving.

Somebody or something must be the agent in the activity that throws up both self-experience and world-experience. It is that agent who would be carrying out those transcendental acts, and in Kant’s case it would seem to be connected with the “I think” that the transcendental deduction argues can accompany all experience. Moreover, since the process of every transcendental activity is the unification of different faculties—sensation and understanding, practical reason and volition and so on³ —the transcendental actor would appear to be single or at least should stand at a higher level of unification than is accessible to experience and theoretical reason. Yet Kant does not take the discussion any further.

This unitary transcendental actor would be the obvious candidate for the Kantian self, and it would seem that Kant’s philosophy discloses something about it by tracing its necessary activities. But Kant will not go there. The self is acknowledged and even made into the foundation of both epistemology and ethics, but the limits of discourse keep us from saying anything about it. Dieter Henrich argues persuasively that Kant’s silence about a possible common root of sensibility and understanding is a matter of logical necessity, not a reluctance to carry the argument any farther:

The logical analysis of knowledge leads to attainments that have to be presupposed but that remain essentially inaccessible in their own being. The analysis points back to the origin of knowledge without, however, being able to ascertain any original foundation for it. The provisional and fragmentary form of the subjective deduction is due not, as Heidegger thinks, to the fact that its development was not Kant’s immediate intent, but rather to Kant’s insight that it is impossible to carry it out in the manner endeavored by Heidegger. It is not the missed development but the analysis of the conditions under which such a development could possibly occur that keeps Kant in the conceptual framework of traditional psychology.⁴

As Henrich points out, the “methodologically peculiar position” of the deduction “provokes revisionary attempts” because “Kant gets into the peculiar difficulty of not being able to determine … this supreme principle of all thought and knowledge.”⁵

To many of Kant’s sympathetic readers, as well as to Heidegger, whose Kant interpretation is the launching point for Henrich’s study, this appeared as a defect. Kant’s theories colorably pointed to the existence of a transcendental actor behind the experience of the self, but that actor never appeared on the stage. As a result, human nature as we could grasp it was in danger of collapsing into a conglomeration of different and irreconcilable activities, leaving us with the faculty psychology that Kant claimed to have gone beyond. Or so it seemed.

A similar but even more obvious problem arose in the concept of reason. Here Kant started off by shattering a unity that prior philoso- phers had taken for granted. Instead of reason pure and simple there were now several different kinds of reason, theoretical and practical reason most prominently. The obvious question for both Kant and his contemporaries was whether or not these different activities could be understood as facets of a single, more broadly conceived rationality.

There was at least one obvious point of connection, the fact of reason that is the moral law. Yet for all the importance of the moral law and human freedom in grounding practical reason, these have no authority in the realm of the phenomenal. The moral law is a fact of reason, but as far as appearances go it is an unilluminating fact. It cannot generate or even substantiate other facts.

Kant himself recognized this as a problem, and he continued to investigate the possibility that some higher perspective could be attained through which theoretical and practical reason could be joined. In the introduction to the third and last critique, the Critique of Judgment, he asked, “Why do these two domains not form one domain?”⁶ He answered:

This is because the concept of nature does indeed allow us to present its objects in intuition, but as mere appearances rather than as things in themselves, whereas the concept of freedom does indeed allow us to present its object as a thing in itself, but not in intuition; and so neither concept can provide us with theoretical cognition of its object (or even of the thinking subject) as things in themselves, which would be the supersensible. We do need the idea of the supersensible in order to base on it the possibility of all those objects of experience, but the idea itself can never be raised up and expanded into a cognition.⁷

It is striking here that Kant frames the split as one between nature and freedom. Seen this way, the problem becomes how we can think the combination of our free acts and the causal order of the natural world. It is Lessing’s ditch once more, almost in the same words; wrote Kant, there is an “immense gulf” between the two, “just as if they were two different worlds … and yet … the concept of freedom is to actualize in the world of sense the purpose enjoined by its laws.”⁸ The problem of unity, then, is essentially a practical problem, yet it also demands a resolution in thought.

The Critique of Judgment suggests Kant’s way out:

It must be possible to think of nature as being such that the lawfulness of its form will harmonize with at least the possibility of [achieving] the purposes that we are to achieve in nature according to the laws of freedom. So there must after all be a basis uniting the supersensible that underlies nature and the supersensible that the concept of freedom contains practically, even though the concept of this basis does not reach cognition of it either theoretically or practically and hence does not have a domain of its own.⁹

The teleology of nature in the third Critique fulfills this goal. We are compelled to consider the world as subject to a moral order. In that way the rationalization of the world in the moral kingdom of ends would also be the realization of its phenomenal nature. This is an impossible goal, and in reality it is simply a regulative idea, but it is a necessary one. The concept of freedom is meaningless unless free acts can bear fruit in the movement of nature.

This passage also implies that, pace MacIntyre, freedom has a determinate content. A teleological concept of nature can harmonize only with a teleological concept of freedom. This is an inescapable conclusion if the noumenal and phenomenal realms are interpreted as different types of explanation that are applied to the same world, and as George di Giovanni notes, Kant sometimes suggests that the free acts of rational beings would be understood as necessary from the perspective of the divine.¹⁰ If freedom has inherent purposes which are to be realized in a specific shape of the world, however, they must move towards something other than the greatest possible liberty for the greatest number of individuals. Kant’s freedom is not to be confused with negative liberty, which merely leaves the world safe for inclinations. It is the affirmative command that we create the kingdom of ends. The world itself must be in some sense ratio- nalized.

Kant’s solution, if indeed it is a solution, won few followers in a literal sense. (It is a strong influence on Fichte, but he arrives at his reconciliation in other ways.) The problem of unity, however, was very much an issue for debate, all the more so because the prestige of the geometric method in philosophy remained strong. There were few philosophers among Kant’s contemporaries who could shake the conviction that a proper philosophy had to begin with universally- accepted axioms and deduce conclusions therefrom. Kant himself had attempted such a demonstration in the first part of the Critique of Practical Reason.

What seemed needful, then, was to go beyond Kant, to complete or ground the critical philosophy by making its unity explicit and by deriving the various activities of reason from a single point of origin. It is an open question whether this can be done without violence to Kant’s real intentions and to the structure of the critical philosophy itself. The essential modesty of Kant’s project lay in his willingness to define the limits of reason and live within them. A systematic and grounded account of the whole of reality would seem to stray beyond the territorial limits that Kant has so carefully mapped out. But this was unsatisfactory to those who demanded of thought that it comprehend the whole of things, the ambition of most previous philosophy. The drive to convert the critical philosophy into a rational metaphysics was a strong one, and though the impetus for this could be said to arise from a failure to see what was truly forward-looking in Kant’s thought and from an attachment to the very style of philosophizing that Kant had rejected, it appeared at the time to be a step forward instead of a retreat. Nor was this entirely an error, as the career of idealism was to show.

It may also be that the desire to convert Kantian theories into a coherent discursive order came out of a sense that the critical philosophy left too much open. Kant’s appeal to the noumenal as an unknowable realm of freedom was at least potentially destabilizing. It put in question the entire project of a rational framework through which people could coordinate the pursuit of their individual goals. By the same token, it put in question the conventional understanding of self-knowledge as theoretical insight into one’s fundamental nature. In a sense Kant was too true to Rousseau, for all of his instinctive conservatism. His philosophy could be read in a way that blurred distinctions between personal and social life and made both into an infinite process of collective self-education and self-legislation.

Fichte was to grasp these implications and develop them systematically into a quasi-revolutionary politics and a negative theology, but they do not seem to have been immediately apparent to him or to Kant’s other early readers. Yet the first attempt at surpassing Kant had the effect of heightening these destabilizing forces even as the project was meant to produce something more secure and settled.

The proponent of this first candidate for a post-Kantian system was none other than Reinhold. His Letters on the Kantian Philosophy had done as much for his career as they had for Kant’s popular standing. In the same year that they were published in book form Reinhold was appointed Extraordinary Professor at the University of Jena, where he lectured on Kant. Jena was relatively small as German universities of the period were concerned, but it was prestigious beyond all of its competitors. It was within the Duchy of Weimar and in the last quarter of the eighteenth century it was effectively under the supervision of Goethe himself, who worked as a privy councilor and advisor to the grand duke. Goethe himself held no position at the university, but his friend Schiller was named professor of history and philosophy there in 1789.

As Franz Rosenzweig quipped, the course of philosophy runs from Ionia to Jena. It is no exaggeration to say that both Idealism and the Romantic movement in Germany came out of Jena and the circle around Goethe, and Reinhold moved in both; he had married the sister of the noted writer Wieland, part of the Weimar group. The move changed the character of philosophy. Kant spent his entire life in the East Prussian backwater of Königsberg, and all of his wide reading and careful attention to European issues could not keep him from a degree of remove. Jena was far more cosmopolitan, more progressive, more in touch with the wider world. From Reinhold’s day through the composition of Hegel’s Phenomenology, which famously coincided with Napoleon’s victory outside the city, the history of idealism was intertwined with politics.

This was not Reinhold’s intention, of course. He merely set out to remedy what he saw as a defect in Kant’s project. From Reinhold’s perspective Kant had started in media res, producing a metaphysics that lacked a proper foundation. This is a misreading of Kant and of his philosophical intentions, but it was to prove an extremely influ- ential misreading and a fertile one as well.

As Reinhold saw it,

The Critique of Reason found that the only tenable metaphysics is the science of the objects of possible experience, and for this it did establish a first principle in the proposition: “Every object stands under the necessary conditions of synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in a possible experience,” or what amounts to the same: “To every real object, insofar as it be knowable as such, belong the formal and material conditions of experience” (i.e., the forms of intuition and of the concept that are determined in the faculty of cognition; and the material that is given through impression) This principle expresses nothing but the concept of an object of experience (of a knowable, authentic object).¹¹

The second quoted phrase is not found in Kant, however. It is Reinhold’s paraphrase, and as the parenthetical gloss makes clear it is asserting something different from what Kant says.

Kant is concerned with the nature of reason as such. The real natures of the perceiving subject and the object being perceived remain uninterrogated because they cannot be known. Reinhold, on the other hand, tends to reify these unknowable things in themselves, at least to the extent of assuming a faculty of cognition as well as “knowable, authentic” objects, and he traces the formal elements in perception to one and the material elements to the other.

Reinhold argued that Kant had merely revealed the workings of a particular faculty of the human subject, “the science of the empirical faculty of cognition, which is made up of sensibility and understanding.” He went on, “the science of sensibility and under- standing, taken together with the science of reason, would be the science of the entire faculty of cognition.”¹²

The science of the faculty of cognition, though, is incomplete. It does not stand by itself. It needs to be grounded by a “science of the a priori form of REPRESENTING through sensibility, understanding, and reason; on this form depends the forms of knowledge as well as that of desire. In a word, it would be the science of the entire faculty of representation as such.”¹³ Reinhold claimed to have uncovered the basic structure of representation, which in his theory furnished the material on which both sensibility and understanding worked; it was the missing element in Kant’s thought, the “explication of how experience is made possible in the mind, i.e., of how the faculty of cognition is originally constituted.”¹⁴

He therefore named his procedure elemental or elementary philosophy, Elemenarphilosophie.¹⁵ His first principle was the axiom “in consciousness representation is distinguished through the subject from both object and subject and is referred to both.”¹⁶ This proposition expresses a concept which, to Reinhold, was immedi- ately drawn from consciousness. It was a fact, a Tatsache. It was simple, self-explanatory and incapable of analysis or definition—essentially, then, self-evident. From this point Reinhold intended a philosophy that would surpass the critical philosophy and indeed all partial systems, a “philosophy WITHOUT SURNAMES.”¹⁷ It would “reduce systematically to one what the other [i.e., the Critique of Reason] abstracts rhapsodically from many, and will exhibit dogmatically what the other prepares for critically.”¹⁸

Yet Reinhold fails to see the most significant difference between his approach and Kant’s. It did not merely establish the conditions under which sensibility and understanding operated. As di Giovanni notes, “Reinhold’s new science will have to be a sort of ‘transcendental psychology,’ a phenomenology of the mind.”¹⁹ This was an inevitable result of the theory of representation, because representa- tions are obviously mental events. To build a philosophy around the characteristics of representation is to center it on the subject. Indeed, it is to leave nothing outside the subject. Dieter Henrich has argued persuasively that the modern theory of the subject has its inception with Reinhold.²⁰ So, too, do the egoism and subjectivity that Frederick Beiser sees as the threats which German idealism attempted to allay.²¹

Reinhold had high hopes for his elementary philosophy. In one of the 1790 additions to his Letters on the Kantian Philosophy he wrote that a proper grounding of Kant’s theory, which developed its “universally accepted ground” into a “universally accepted principle” (that is, which would achieve a discursive starting point for a system) would:

stand firm in a very simple and readily understandable system that could be surveyed in a single glance…. on this view one could derive the highest viewpoint of history, the most fundamental rule of taste, the principle of all philosophy of religion, the first principle of natural right, and the fundamental law of morality. And, consequently, at precisely the point in time when the need for a complete reformation of philosophy had risen to the most extreme on account of a universal shaking in all fields of the philosophical sciences, we would also have obtained the only possible and fully sufficient means for such a reformation; and we might look forward with joyful expectation to one of the most universal remarkable, and beneficent revolutions that has ever occurred in the human spirit.²²

Such euphoric hopes would be echoed in Fichte and the early Hegel, and it was surely hard for readers in 1790 to avoid thinking of the events in France as they read Reinhold’s words.

It was all but universally agreed, however, that Reinhold’s own system was not going to satisfy those widely-held hopes. The principle of representation was utterly inadequate to ground a philosophical system. For one thing, it was something less than a comprehensive statement of the contents of consciousness, which is what Reinhold claimed that it was. It reduced cognition to represen- tations, and representations were assumed to be referable to the subject that entertains them and the object to which the subject relates itself through the representation. It is a mediator, standing between subject and object and manifesting their relationship. But is it plausible to argue that cognition consists solely of representa- tions? What about intuitions? These are distinguished from the subject, but they do not appear to have an object to which they refer. What about bodily states, such as pain? These do not seem to stand at one remove from the subject. It is an accomplishment of some difficulty to move from “I hurt” to “I am aware of a pain.”

These objections are not the only ones that can be brought against Reinhold’s principle. It suffers from an internal defect that is far more crippling than the essentially empirical complaints about the adequacy of representation as a description of mental events. Reinhold’s “fact” involves a representation, a subject, an object and the activity of the subject in distinguishing and relating these elements, and Reinhold fails to account for these elements. They are simply assumed.

If a subject is to have a representation in Reinhold’s sense, as subjects actually do, it has to be able to tell itself apart from the repre- sentation and it has to have a concept of an objective world from which the representation is distinguished and to which it is related. Less intuitively but just as obviously, it has to have a concept of a self from which it can distinguish the representation, for otherwise it would be like the presumed consciousness of other animals, who do not appear to be able to stand apart from their intentional states, and it needs a concept of a self for an additional reason: in order to claim the representations as its own. Reinhold’s first principle, then, could never be a satisfactory first principle. It begged far too many questions and was unable to justify its own pretensions.

The defects in Reinhold’s own theories were clear enough to his contemporaries. What was less clear was the degree to which they moved away from Kant’s own methodology. Attacks on the two philosophers proceeded in tandem, in a way that adds little to our understanding of either man but a good deal to a picture of the philosophical concerns of educated late eighteenth-century Germans. Of all this literature the most prominent was a book in the form of letters that appeared anonymously in 1792 under the title Aenesidemus, or Concerning the Foundations of the Elements Issued by Prof. Reinhold in Jena Together with a Defense of Skepticism Against the Pretensions of the Critique of Reason.²³

As the subtitle indicates, Aenesidemus is a skeptical attack on both Reinhold and Kant. Its thrust is that neither philosopher had truly succeeded in refuting Hume’s skepticism. It fixes clearly on some of the weaknesses in Reinhold’s position. “The Philosophy of the Elements, by deriving actual representations from a faculty which it takes to be something objectively actual, contradicts its own principles as well as the results of the Critique of Reason,” the author writes.²⁴ This should have been obvious to Reinhold, too; any claim to know anything about a “faculty of representation” that was not itself a representation—and thus, in Reinhold’s theory, a product of that faculty—would be knowledge of something outside the realm of possible experience. As Aenesidemus continues,

The definition of the faculty of representation in the Philosophy of the Elements is in fact nothing more than a definition of the characteristics of the very representation which is supposed to be the effect of the defined faculty, adorned however with the entirely empty title of power or faculty.²⁵

Reinhold does appear to have violated the fundamental principle of transcendental philosophy. He claimed to establish a fact outside the realm to which theoretical reason was confined, and his attempts at deriving the fact from its supposed consequences ran afoul of the Kantian discovery that claims of causation must themselves be limited to that realm.

Reinhold was not the main target of Aenesidemus, however. The book was widely and properly perceived as an attack on Kant, and here the author stumbles. He had no trouble demonstrating that Reinhold illegitimately introduced a purported real entity into what was claimed to be a Kantian system. Aenesidemus, however, inter- prets Kant to have made the same mistake. Kant has not refuted Hume, he argues; all he has done is assume the very propositions that Hume had shown to be groundless:

For the Critique claims that the original determinations of the human mind are the real ground or source of the necessary synthetic judgements found in our knowledge; but it does this by inferring from the fact that we can only think of the faculty of representation of the ground of those judgements, that the minds must be their ground in actual fact too.²⁶

Not only that, Kant presupposes the existence of a real world which supplies the content of experience as the mind produces its form, “therefore, that each segment of human knowledge has a real ground that causes it.”²⁷

This is a gross mischaracterization of Kant’s thought. Kant does not base his transcendental arguments on the “fact that we can only think of the faculty of representation of the ground” of the concepts. He would not have accepted that claim as factual. Instead, he accepted Hume’s proof that these concepts could not be derived from experience itself. Then, in the step that eluded Aenesidemus, he tried to establish that the concepts (along with space and time) were logically necessary if there was to be any experience at all. This was what makes the critical philosophy valid for all rational beings, and what removes it from philosophical psychology and Schopenhauer’s notion that the concepts arise because of the nature of the human brain.

Since the concepts are inherent elements of the experience of any rational being, and since sensation itself cannot account for them, the only possibility left is to conclude that they are products of the subject and that any rational subject would construct experience in the same way. There is a strong element of necessity here, but it is a logical necessity, not an empirical or psychological one. Aenesidemus is thus wrong to assert that Kant assumes “that the consciousness of necessity that accompanies certain synthetic propositions constitutes an infallible sign of its having originated a priori and in the mind.”²⁸ Kant rests nothing on any consciousness of necessity.

Yet even this wrong-headed attack found its way to real problems. It is not inaccurate to say that Kant simply assumed the existence of a world of objects and of thinking subjects that perceive them, comprehend them as objects and act on them. Hume had shown that there was no possibility of verifying these elements of common experience, and Kant did not attempt to refute him. Instead, he took Hume’s skepticism as a sign that these questions were outside the terrain of theoretical philosophy.

In a strict sense there was nothing inconsistent or improper about Kant’s almost casual acceptance of the presuppositions of everyday experience. His concern lay elsewhere. Aenesidemus, however, suggested at least one philosophical problem that could be legitimately raised in a Kantian context. We are indeed conscious of a feeling of necessity in our perceptions of the objects of the world and of ourselves. If one assumes that the subject merely records impressions from objects this feeling of necessity does not need to be accounted for. It is proved by experience itself, like Samuel Johnson’s stone refuted Berkeley. If, however, one agrees with Kant, and with Hume for that matter, that everything of which we are aware is an event within our bodies, then we are faced with a diffi- culty. From where do we derive the incorrigible conviction that there really is an objective world? From where do we derive the even more secure conviction that we are actors within such a world?

Hume and Kant have ruled out experience as a source of these beliefs, but they must originate from somewhere, and they are utterly unshakable and lawlike. Kant relies on them but he does not account for them. This was one area in which it appeared that the critical philosophy might profitably be developed.

Nor was the turn towards subjectivism entirely a misreading of Kant. We can know nothing of things in themselves, after all, and though we can know as little about ourselves as we are in ourselves, except through practical reason, we can discern the necessary structure of our own activity in rendering the manifold into knowable experience. The original unity of apperception, upon which so much rests in the transcendental deduction, also appears as a given, yet it, too, would seem to demand further inquiry. Aenesidemus asks for something that Kant cannot and does not attempt to supply, a real ground for the concepts and representa- tions in general; but it stands as a valid critique insofar as it points to the undeveloped understanding of the “‘I think’ that must accompany all experience.”²⁹

For all its faults, then, Aenesidemus appeared to be a telling critique, and it suggested some genuine difficulties in the course of Kantian philosophy as it had developed to that date. Just how seriously it could be taken can be shown by the delays that plagued one young philosopher as he struggled to produce the review he had agreed to write. Johann Gottlieb Fichte had assumed that he could evaluate the book in a month or two. It took him more than a year, and he could answer it only by fashioning a new kind of philosophy altogether.

8

The self posits itself

In the English-speaking world an interest in Fichte is not always viewed with sympathy. I was once introduced to the chair of the philosophy department of a major Midwestern university. When I told him that I wrote on Fichte he rolled his eyes, moaned “oh, no!” in a theatrical tone and turned to a younger colleague explaining, solemnly, “Fichte said that A equals A,” as if that settled the matter.¹

Fichte did, in fact, write that “A equals A.” In context it is nowhere near the inane tautology that my interlocutor seemed to think that it was. Fichte was making a point about Kant’s original unity of apperception, that central presupposition that Kant himself had more or less left unexplored. We hold ourselves capable of making a judgment of identity, Fichte pointed out; we all agree that A=A. What generally escapes our notice in such a judgment is that we are talking about two moments and two separate experiences which are then compared. The first “A” has to be evaluated from the same reference point as the second. This is true of all of our judgments. Unless there is some element of experience that subsists unchanged we would be unable to make judgments at all. It is thus a precondition of experience that it be the experience of an agent which remains identical with itself.² But where and what is that agent? What makes it come into being? These are among the questions that Fichte spent his life trying to answer. “A equals A” is not an assertion, then. It is a problem.

Fichte suffers from many of his interpreters, too. It is generally accepted that he was concerned with the self. This is true in a general sense, but the nature of his concern and his central philo- sophical arguments were misunderstood in his day and are misun- derstood today. The most common stereotype of Fichte, that he was committed to solipsism, is old enough to have been caricatured by Heine in his Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany:

The great mass of people really thought that the Fichtean Ego was the Ego of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and that this individual ego denied all other existences. “What impudence!” exclaimed the good people, “this fellow doesn’t believe that we exist, we who are far more corpulent than he is and, as mayors and magistrates, are actually his superiors!” The ladies asked, “Doesn’t he at least believe in the existence of his wife? No? And Madame Fichte doesn’t mind?”³

We like to think of ourselves as more astute than the plump mayors and magistrates of Heine’s lampoon, but we are still apt to encounter summaries that imagine Fichte’s idealism to be some assertion about the supremacy of spirit over matter. But the position that everything is mental is what Fichte called dogmatic idealism. He rejected it as decisively as he rejected materialism.

Fichte would grant that the world exists only in our experience; he goes so far as to write in a work written for a popular audience that “Only in our minds has [God] created a world; at least that from which we unfold it, and that by which we unfold it.”⁴ But he means little or nothing more by this than what Kant did: the experience we call “world” is an accomplishment, a product of human activity which renders the manifold into both self and world. The concept of a world is meaningless if it is divorced from the concept of a self which unfolds that world, and both concepts depend on human activity. This is not a metaphysical statement, although Fichte would draw metaphysical conclusions from it of a novel and far-reaching sort, but almost a matter of definition.

This is not the only misunderstanding that has been passed off as an interpretation of Fichte’s thought. A recent biography of Fichte’s earlier years takes him to have been concerned most of all with the maintenance of a stable ego in a changing world. In this interpretation Fichte’s distinctive contribution was to theorize “how the self, as a moral person, asserted itself in a relentless struggle against the resistance of things; and by making the very existence of the empirical self a function of the intersubjective relations with other selves.”⁵ Writing in a similar vein, a recent work on Fichte’s political thinking states that “Fichte held that to be a human being was to engage in ‘an ongoing reciprocal interaction, dependent only on the person’s own will, between the person and the sensible world outside of him.’”⁶ This is indeed a quote from Fichte, but it is misleadingly out of context. Fichte was not there describing what it is to be human. He was defining the condition of original right, which one acquires by entering the social contract.⁷

Both misreadings share the same starting points. Both are essen- tially dualist. If one must be either an idealist or a materialist then Fichte is said to be the former; if one’s primary concern is the self or the world then Fichte is said to build his philosophy on the first of these. Both fail to see what is distinctive and radical in Fichte’s position. He is in fact a consistent non-dualist, determined to trace all oppositions back beyond a primal act of division. In pursuing this project he began to undo the separation on which the Enlightenment and the mainstream of Christian and post-Christian thought depend. He is not interested in making statements about what exists or what does not exist, at least not in a scientific, objective sense. And he is not interested in validating or defending the self, either. His concern is how the self can appear in the first place, which is not apart from the question of how the world can appear before us, and through the working out of these interrelated questions he ends up with a radical denial of the ego itself.

Fichte’s own itinerary is both conventional and unique. Few if any major philosophers came from such humble beginnings. He was born into a family of ribbon-weavers in 1762, their social rank below that of the peasantry. Plucked from home at an early age when a local nobleman discovered his intelligence and exceptional memory—he is said to have repeated a sermon verbatim that the noble had arrived too late to hear in church—Fichte was educated for the clergy. This was common enough in late eighteenth-century Germany; such generosity to talented children of low rank was a way for the nobility to ensure a compliant clergy and thus to influence if not control the spiritual life of their subjects. Equally common was Fichte’s fate upon graduation from the seminary. His patron had died, no positions were available, and so like many other young men of low status and high education he was forced to seek work as a private tutor.

The particular hell of the tutor’s lot in eighteenth-century Germany is brilliantly illustrated in Jakob Lenz’s play Der Hofmeister (The Tutor), whose hero castrates himself after falling in love with his unattainably high-ranking student. Fichte’s early career offered no such melodrama, but it was frustrating enough. His inflexibility and sense of his own genius made it hard for him to keep a job, and he wandered from post to post. In Zurich, however, where he worked for a time, he found a sympathetic circle in the group around clergyman and author Johann Kasper Lavater. A particularly unctuous and argumentative partisan of Christian orthodoxy, Lavater is perhaps best known today for his challenge to the Jewish Mendelssohn to refute the truths of Christianity or convert. In 1793 Fichte was to marry his niece Johanna Rahn, and though his own religious views were far more heterodox he and Lavater corre- sponded until the latter’s death in 1801.⁸

Fichte was deeply concerned with the questions of free will and determinism and the conflict between faith and reason that came to a head in the pantheism controversy, but his attention was not specif- ically focused on philosophy until 1791, when a student he was tutoring asked him about Kant. The second Critique was a revelation to him, resolving all of his doubts about human liberty. From that moment on Fichte counted himself a Kantian, and he was to paint his own theories as a continuation or clarification of Kant’s critical philosophy.

In 1792 he decided to pay homage to Kant himself, traveling to Königsberg on foot after an unsuccessful job interview in Poland. He presented himself and was disappointed in his reception, although Kant would have had no reason to pay much attention to an impoverished and unemployed tutor with no introduction, no publications and no philosophical training. Undeterred, Fichte decided to show Kant what he was capable of doing. He took a room in the town and spent the next six weeks writing a book. He had never done serious philosophical writing before and he had been studying Kant’s theories for a year at most.

The result of this piece of foolhardy conceit was An Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation, Fichte’s first book. It is a work of considerable interest, very much in the Kantian vein but developing in directions where Kant himself had not ventured. Fichte presented it to Kant, who read at least part of it, and the great man was sufficiently impressed by its quality and audacity to recommend it to his own publisher.

The publisher, in turn, either ignored or misplaced Fichte’s preface and put the book out without any indication of its author. This oversight has never been explained, but could well have been clever marketing. Kant’s writings on religion had led to several run-ins with Prussian censorship, and the odds were good that an anonymous book on a religious subject in the Kantian manner would be taken for a new work by Kant himself. This was exactly what happened. Once Kant corrected the error Fichte found himself famous—so famous that within two years he had been named to succeed Reinhold at the University of Jena.

In the midst of this sudden reversal of fortune Fichte was asked to review Aenesidemus. The book deeply troubled him. He had briefly been a follower of Reinhold’s, but the criticisms in Aenesidemus showed Fichte how inadequate the Elementary Philosophy really was. He was determined to refute its skepticism, but it appeared to him that he could do this only by succeeding where Reinhold had failed.

In mid-December 1793 he wrote to a friend:

Have you read Aenesidemus? It has perplexed me for some time now. It has overthrown Reinhold in my eyes, has made me suspicious of Kant, and has overturned my whole system from the ground up. One cannot live under the open sky. It cannot be helped; the system must be rebuilt. And this is what I have been faithfully doing for the past six weeks or so. Come celebrate the harvest with me! I have discovered a new foundation, on the basis of which it will be easy to develop the whole of philosophy. Kant’s philosophy, as such, is correct—but only in its results and not in its reasons. This singular thinker looks more marvelous to me every day. I believe that he possesses a genius which reveals the truth to him without showing him why it is true. In short, I believe that in a few more years we shall have a philosophy which will be just as self-evident as geometry. What consequences do you think this will have for mankind?⁹

But what was this new foundation? As Dieter Henrich relates, Fichte had found himself at an impasse: both self and non-self were absolutely conditioned. This is a problem familiar to all post- modernists, but Fichte was no post-modernist; he could not develop his system without an unconditioned ground. Henrich continues, “several anecdotes tell of how Fichte, pausing from his long medita- tions and crossing the room from his desk to warm himself before the winter stove, was seized by the thought that only the ‘I’ can serve as the highest principle of philosophy…. He returned to his desk and wrote: ‘Yes—the Self! Pursue the Self’s being-absolute [Unbedingtheit].’”¹⁰

This can be read too easily as a claim that it is the ego of our experience that is absolute. Fichte’s “Self” is not the same as the empirical self, however, which he understands as absolutely condi- tioned, and it is an unfortunate choice of his to refer to it as a “Self” or as an “I.” His intentions and his original insight (the phrase is Henrich’s) may be clarified by a memoir by the Danish scientist Henrik Steffens, who visited Jena at the height of Fichte’s fame:

I remember well how in a narrow circle of intimate friends Fichte related to us how his philosophy arose, and how that first conception of it entered his mind. It had long seemed to him that truth lies in the union and unity of thought and object of thought; he had learned that this unity can never be found within the domain of the senses, and that where it does appear, as in the mathematics, it is only a dull, dead formalism, and wholly divorced from life. At that point the thought suddenly struck him that the act in which the self-consciousness conceives of itself is yet a subject of our knowledge. The ego recognizes itself through its own manifestation of itself; the ego thinking and the ego thought, the knowing and the object of the knowledge, are one, and from this point of unity, and not from scattered elements, time and space and the postulates of all thought proceed.¹¹

As Steffens understood, Fichte’s discovery was that he could build his system on the act through which the self of experience was constituted. The “absolute” nature of the self lay in its Unbedingtheit, its not-being-made-a-thing-ness.¹² He would not begin from a Tatsache, a fact, as Reinhold had done and as all previous philoso- phers had done as well. Instead, Fichte’s philosophy would begin with an act which was at the same time a fact—in his coinage, a Tathandlung. To grasp this act required an alteration of perspective, to which Fichte gave the name “intellectual intuition.”

Although Reinhold had used the same term, he had used it to characterize a special form of theoretical insight. This created the problem that Aenesidemus, among others, had pointed out: it illegit- imately attempted to ground a Kantian philosophy on privileged knowledge of a real entity, in Reinhold’s case the faculty of represen- tation. This kind of “intellectual intuition” was a point of inconsis- tency and thus a sign of failure.

Fichte did not fall into this mistake. His intellectual intuition was the recognition of an act, not the agreement that a particular entity existed. It was the ability to catch oneself in the moment of self-making and to intuit that the experience of being a self was born in that act. Steffens records one of his classroom attempts at inducing that very insight. Fichte, whose speech was “cutting as a knife,” had directed his students to enter into their own minds—“we are not now dealing with anything outward:”

The hearers, thus bidden, really seemed to withdraw into their own minds. Some changed their position and straightened themselves up; others bowed themselves over and closed their eyes. All waited with great eagerness to see what should come next. “Gentlemen,” continued Fichte, “let your thought be that wall.” I could see that the hearers set their minds most intently upon the wall, and everything seemed favorable thus far. “Have you thought—the wall?” asked Fichte. “Now then, gentlemen, let your thought be that which thought the wall.” It was curious to see what confusion and perplexity now seemed to arise.¹³

The intellectual intuition was the key to Fichte’s thinking and he later claimed that anyone who was capable of it could easily construct his own version of the same philosophy without any further assistance. Its novelty and centrality lay in the fact that it shifted attention from a world of objects and facts, in which the self was just one item among many, to a world of actions. The self was the fulcrum for this shift, because it was the unique point at which experience and action met. It was an action in which acting and knowledge were identical.

In an essay from 1796, “A Comparison between Professor Schmid’s System and the Wissenschaftslehre”—Wissenschaftslehre being Fichte’s name for his thought—Fichte claims that his thinking

does not propose to justify any system of things, but rather to describe a series of acts. It allows the I to act before its eyes, while it observes this acting. The I which it observes is not what might be called the “philosophizing I,” which, as always happens when one contemplates anything, is lost in contemplation; instead, it is the common, ordinary I.¹⁴

This is why Fichte prefers his own, basically untranslatable term over the time-honored term “philosophy.” Wissenschaftslehre has been variously translated as “The Science of Knowledge,” “The Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge,” or “The Science of Knowing,” among others, but in a note written in 1804 Fichte identified reason with the Greek logos, and he cited the beginning of the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the logos.” The Wissenschaftslehre, he added, could be called “logologia,” reason about reason.¹⁵

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the reflexive nature of Fichte’s term indicates that the self with which he was so concerned was a product of reflection. This was the conventional view of self-experience, shared by philosophers and non-philoso- phers alike, not Fichte’s. When we turn our attention to the outside, they had assumed, our perceptions reflect an objective world. Similarly, when we turn our attention to our inner experience we seem to reflect on the sensations, thoughts and emotions of the self.

As Fichte realized, however, the self we recognize in this experience had to be prior to any act of reflection, because reflection alone could not give us the knowledge that what we reflected on was in fact the self. We could not encounter our selves in reflection unless we already knew that we existed as selves. The cognitions that we interpret as knowledge of the self would be no more than a congeries of perceptual moments along with all other perceptual moments, and even if they could be distinguished by criteria such as invisibility and difficulty of communication, those reasons alone would not make them present themselves as experiences of a self. One can easily imagine a being with such experiences who does not assign them to a self, instead merging what to us are subjective and objective worlds so that the analogue of emotional states are not the sensations of a self in a stable world but implicit elements which color other aspects of experience, the way that sunlight or sound may seem painful to us when we are sick. As was suggested above, this may very well be what happens among other animals.¹⁶

The self is not a thing which we encounter in our thoughts, therefore. It demands a particular mode of experience, and thus the self appears in the act of constituting that mode. One makes one’s self by establishing a position within experience, and Fichte was to argue that the self is simply that act of positioning. There is no self before the act, any more than there was a universe before the Big Bang, and no self that exists outside of that act. In Fichte’s terms, the self posits itself, and it is nothing other than that act of self-positing. And without a self there is no experience as such, only inchoate awareness at best, so positioning oneself in experience as a self is also making conscious experience itself come into being.¹⁷

In the act of positing the self of experience appears. But since it has no existence or experience prior to that act, what is it that acts in the first place? Is the self that posits the same as the self that is posited? Fichte makes this claim. Yet he also distinguished the absolute I, which is the self that does the positing, from the empirical I, which is the ordinary, everyday self with which we are all familiar.

In February of 1794, when he finally set down his review of Aenesdemus, Fichte closed with a skeletal sketch of the project he would follow for the rest of his career. It sharply distinguishes between the absolute I and the empirical I:

If, in intellectual intuition, the I is because it is and is what it is, then it is, to that extent, self-positing, absolutely independent and autonomous. The I in empirical consciousness, however, the I as intellect, is only in relation to something intelligible, and is, to that extent, dependent. But the I which is thereby opposed to itself is supposed to be not two, but one—which is impossible, since “dependence” contradicts “independence.” Since, however, the I cannot relinquish its absolute independence, a striving is engendered: the I strives to make what is intelligible dependent upon itself, in order thereby to bring that I which entertains representations into unity with the self-positing I. This is what it means to say that reason is practical.¹⁸

The circular pattern that Abrams discerned in Romantic writing in general is clear here. The act of self-positing is a kind of fall, from absolute unity to individual unity amid a sea of others and of things, and the activity of each individual I is to strive for reunion with each other and everything else. Theoretical reason reflects upon the struc- tures of experience which this striving engenders, and practical reason structures the striving itself, which points back to the totality and in this sense can be identified with Kant’s moral law.

What is less clear from this passage is that the same act through which the self makes the self also posits the world, the “something intelligible” to which the passage refers. For Fichte there is no consciousness that is also not self-consciousness. (This was evidently Kant’s position, too, because all thoughts and thus all consciousness can be accompanied by the “I think.”) Self- consciousness, though, can exist only in separation, by being contrasted with something else. There has to be a not-self so the self can appear. Paradoxically, one act (albeit a complex one) posits both.

This is a position with radical implications, at least as Fichte frames it. Self-consciousness inevitably takes place within the experience of subject and object; its paradoxical nature as well as its centrality for Fichte comes about because it is both subject and object and is known as such and because it brings about the division which engenders both self and world. It is therefore the primal point of unity and the primal point of separation, and by developing the Wissenschaftslehre from this point Fichte problematizes the most fundamental presupposition of both common sense experience and the empiricist theorizing of the Enlightenment. In a world built on the separation of self and world the argument that both express a unitary underlying act is the most dangerous position imaginable.

The act of self-positing is an act of world-positing at the same time. But these two acts are not enough. Fichte claims to be describing a series of acts and he consistently defended the Wissenschaftslehre as the one philosophy that comprehends human activity. The self and the not-self do not exist as static entities, therefore; they are not reified objects of contemplation. Simply as posited objects they would be unknowable. To be known they must be in motion and act, and to act means to change the conditions of something’s real existence. It is to make the self or the world different. Yet the self and the not-self are all there are at this point in the process of self-positing. They are each uniform and together they occupy the entire space of possibility. Fichte would seem to raise the specter of a kind of Parmenidean plenum in which no change is possible.

Fichte’s solution, in his early philosophy at least, is to argue that the self must posit both the self and the not-self as divisible and as limiting each other. Activity is posited in both, the self striving to recover the not-self and the not-self pressing back against the self. This continuous negotiation of boundaries makes both self and word knowable. It is the self’s striving to incorporate the not-self, to return to the unity of subject and object out of which self and world had appeared, that gives us the world of objects. “No striving, no object,” as Fichte writes.¹⁹

He therefore breaks down the single act of self-positing into three moments. The self posits the self, the self posits a not-self and the self and not-self are posited as divisible and capable of limiting each other. This threefold act establishes the framework for Kant’s categories and for all self-consciousness and action.

The shifting boundary between self and not-self cannot be reified either. It, too, is a matter of action; it is made up of the points at which the activity of the self and that of the not-self meet head-on. Fichte calls such a point an Anstoss, or “check.” When the self finds its activity checked its activity recoils and is reflected back within the self, and from this the productive imagination generates the experience of a world of objects.

An analogy may be helpful at this point. One might imagine a blind woman who inherits a farm property, a cottage surrounded by an irregular patch of meadow with stone walls separating it from the neighbors’ properties. Each morning she leaves her house and walks out in a different direction, tapping a cane in front of her and counting her steps until she reaches the wall. Then she returns home. Given enough time, she will acquire a detailed understanding of the size and shape of her land.

In a very similar way the Anstossen we encounter define the shape of our world. The experience of action in the world and the knowledge we have of the world are aspects of the same process, and since the self of self-consciousness is defined by its interface with the not-self, our actions give us both objective and subjective experience.

This breakthrough—for it was nothing less than that—accom- plished a great deal. It grounded and clarified the original unity of apperception and it gave an internal warrant to Kant’s notion that the end of human activity is to rationalize the world. But it went beyond Kant and answered a question the older philosopher had shied away from, the source of the feeling of necessity that accom- panies sense perceptions.

This was the problem that the Wissenschaftslehre was meant to answer: “How do we come to attribute objective validity to what in fact is only subjective? Or, since objective validity is described as existence: How do we come to believe in an existent?”²⁰ It was also one of the weak points in the critical philosophy, and Aenesidemus was not alone in thinking that it could be accounted for only by way of some special quality of perception or some additional content that came to consciousness along with the perception itself.

Neither of these approaches is satisfactory, but Fichte showed that neither of them was necessary. Instead, the feeling of necessity arises because the existence of an objective world is a logical concomitant of the experience of self-consciousness. To be a self—to have a range of experience that one ascribes to one’s own being—is to be placed in an objective world (the not-self) which is potentially subject to one’s control or at least influence. We must be able to act efficaciously on the not-self. This is not because such a power is in inherent component of selfhood. It is because the experiential existence of the self depends on its perceived ability to bring about change in the world, to renegotiate the boundary between self and not-self. No striving, no self.

There can be no striving without a “real” world, though, without a not-self which is posited opposite the self. So there can be no subjective self without an objective world. It is clearly possible to imagine oneself a king of infinite space, the sole occupant of a world that is merely a projection or extension of one’s own being. But such a thought experiment proves nothing. It merely imports the self of everyday experience into an imaginary situation, giving no insight into the possibility of experience if one were truly residing in such a solipsistic world instead of visiting it. To be a self is to be a limited agent in a physical world, and we can no more doubt the existence of the world in which and on which we act than we can doubt our own existence. We cannot eliminate the objective world without annihilating ourselves in the process.

Fichte believed that he had thus done away with Kant’s thing in itself; in his own understanding of the Wissenschaftslehre this was one of its chief advantages. Yet this was not as clear-cut an issue as he thought at first. The Anstoss was an intellectual stumbling block as well as a posited one. If it had any form of real existence outside the circle of positing and self-positing, then it was nothing more than the thing in itself brought back in under another name. If it were something that the self generates internally to the process of positing, however, it would be hard to tell the Wissenschaftslehre apart from an absolute idealism.

It is also difficult to see who or what is doing the positing. Fichte was emphatic in denying that the I that posits itself was the “empirical I,” the I of our ordinary self-experience. But he also claimed to be operating in a strictly Kantian context. If that is the case, the Wissenschaftslehre does nothing more than explore the necessary operations that underlie conscious experience and the absolute I would be nothing more than a regulative idea with no real existence. This has the advantage of ontological modesty, but it once again returns us to the choice that the question about the Anstoss presented, with slight but meaningful variations. If Fichte is merely accounting for our experience of a real physical world, he would seem to be developing a complicated way of explaining something that simple common sense explains just as well. If the individual self constructs its own experience, on the other hand, we run the risk of finding ourselves in a multiplicity of private worlds, with little or no possibility of unification or even coordination.

Fichte was well aware of these problems, and they were not insoluble within his approach. His solution, however, depends on the primacy of the practical not simply in a logical sense but in an epistemological sense, and this is yet another move with disruptive and yet liberatory consequences. It leads to a rejection of the contemplative stance that typified previous philosophy. Fichte argued that human knowledge, of whatever kind, is never taken in passively. It is created by action. The Wissenschaftslehre not only began with an act, it concerned a consciousness which is always already that of activity and which, in fact, can exist only through activity. We understand the world only insofar as we explore it. Although these seem to be separate activities, they are one and the same; it is only because of the necessary structure of conscious experience that they look different. The Anstossen are moments within a reciprocal pattern of real activity, not external experiences upon which we reflect.

Fichte’s “pragmatic history of the human mind” thus had to be written in two parallel streams, that of knowledge and that of action. It is no coincidence that these two line up exactly with Kant’s first two critiques, of theoretical and of practical reason. But Fichte could not separate them out the way Kant did, so the Wissenschaftslehre resembled a double helix, with the two streams perpetually twining around each other like the holly and the ivy. Both thinking and doing are equiprimordial, since both emerge in the act of self- positing, the sole act which is also something known. They are ultimately one single movement, although that movement cannot be experienced as such.

It is easy to see that Fichte had presented himself with a problem of presentation, and he struggled all his life with the difficulty of presenting the two streams in a way that avoided giving undue prominence to theory or practice. The danger was always that one would slip out of the reader’s thoughts while she dealt with the many difficulties of the other.

Fichte maintained that practical reason came first, but he made the fateful choice in his first presentation of his thought, the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre of 1794-1795, of beginning with the theoretical. This book, which is still referred to as the canonical source for an understanding of Fichte’s thought, is actually a poor and often misleading beginning and was never intended to be read as a standalone text.

Fichte had wanted to write such a book. He had discovered that developing the implications of his breakthrough would take more than a few weeks or months and tried unsuccessfully to postpone the start of his appointment at Jena until he could work those out.²¹ Pressed for time, he decided instead to compose a set of notes for his students to spare them the need to take notes during his lectures and ensure they were in possession of a correct outline. This was what appeared as the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre.²² Meant for the classroom and setting out only the foundational steps of Fichte’s system, this text was unfortunately taken to be a definitive statement of the whole of the Wissenschaftslehre. This misconception has been carried on up to the present; the one English translation of the text misleadingly labels it the Wissenschaftslehre; the title page calls it “Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre),” and that is how the translators refer to it in their sometimes patronizing intro- duction.

Fichte complained all his life that he was being misunderstood, but he is certainly not responsible for this particular mistake. What he did come to regret was the way he developed his ideas in that text, which for most of his contemporaries gave the first and lasting impression of his approach. As a first attempt the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre is not a disaster, but it starts so defini- tively with the theoretical and spends so much time deriving the Kantian categories from the initial acts of self-positing that few readers seemed to notice when Fichte took up the practical side of his thought. It was all too easy for them to imagine that he was proposing a form of individualistic idealism, an argument that each individual brought the world into being through the power of his or her imagination.

This was not Fichte’s aim. He made no secret of the fact that the Wissenschaftslehre undermined our sense of individual self-suffi- ciency, just as he continually reminded his readers that the I which posits itself is not the empirical I of the individual.²³ The entire movement of his thought was away from individuality towards absolute oneness. The inherent logic of the Wissenschaftslehre moves towards the unification of individual experience through reciprocal human activity. The entire tendency of the striving inherent in self- conscious life, in both its real and ideal aspects, is to return to the unity out of which it emerged. This unity, however, is prior to all of our empirical interests, and thus the implicit goal of all human striving is to realize universal and impersonal ends. The unity behind the multiplicity of individual selves is thus much more than a Kantian idea, it is an underlying reality made actual through social process, in the progressive unification of the human world. This is as much a political program as it is an ethical or spiritual one, but in either context it is anti-individualistic.

The apparent solipsism of Fichte’s starting point thus emerges from and leads back to its opposite, the unity of all rational beings. “Reason alone is eternal,” wrote Fichte in his second introduction to the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, “while individuality must continually decay.”²⁴ As we shall see, the selflessness commanded by the categorical imperative ends up, with Fichte, as a denial of the substantial self, though not in a way that eliminated agency altogether, as it did with Hume. Fichte’s attempts at explaining this most controversial position did not seem to do him much good. The anti-individualist elements of his thinking were neglected. They were the very ones that pushed beyond the separation of self and world of common sense and Christian and post-Christian philosophy, and to have them properly understood was always going to be difficult. (It is difficult even today to get readers to take such arguments seriously, let alone agree with them; they run too much against the grain.) Most of his contemporaries concluded instead that Fichte was proposing a reinvention of the world by imaginative power alone. Like the cabal of idealist encyclopedia-writers in Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbit Tertius,” we had only to dream a world. This by itself would bring that new world into being. After all, didn’t the self create the self?

This was a huge error, but like many such errors it spoke to a specific historical moment. For Fichte came on the scene just at the most radical moment of the French Revolution, when it did seem tantalizingly possible for the whole of life to be reinvented out of the resources of the imagination and built anew.

9

Bliss it was

In Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage, written in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848, the commitment-averse antihero Claude explains his apolitical disposition in these words:

I, who nor meddle nor make in politics, —I who sincerely

Put not my trust in leagues nor any suffrage by ballot,

Never predicted Parisian millenniums, never beheld a

New Jerusalem coming down dressed like a bride out of heaven

Right on the Place de la Concorde….¹

We have all but forgotten what Claude (and Clough) knew. Before the word and the idea were routinized and cheapened revolutions were understood to aim at something far more serious than a new way to clean dishes and far more profound than a change of government, universal suffrage, or a stronger guarantee of the rights of man. They were supposed to usher in a new world, and the quarter century of turmoil that started in 1789 seemed at first to be the birth pangs of a new Europe that would be unlike anything ever seen.

It is not often that the millennial aspects of the French revolution have been taken with the seriousness that they deserve. Entire schools of mainstream historiography are devoted to minimizing them. One interpretation, going back to de Tocqueville’s classic The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, emphasizes continuity above all; whatever its surface manifestations and the excesses of popular sentiment and Jacobin fantasy, the real process of the Revolution was a continuation of the centralizing and rationalizing tendencies that began under the Bourbons. Another view, heavily criticized but still commonly held, sees the Revolution in historical materialist terms as the triumph of the bourgeoisie, that class which every Western history undergraduate knows is always rising.² Then there is the more-or-less official liberal version of the Revolution, painting it as the messy but ultimately happy moment when the ideals of individual freedom, equality before the law and human rights were first introduced into European political life, the same claim to conti- nuity between Enlightenment values and capitalist modernity exemplified by the EU anthem.

These accounts are not fundamentally incompatible, and all of them separate the “real” movement of the Revolution from its peculiarities and its excesses. (This is almost inevitably the case even if an interpreter wishes to justify the Terror, because the Jacobin interlude is generally seen as a temporary expedient to secure the real gains of the Revolution, which lie elsewhere.) The tendency is to see the events of 1789-1815 not as a break from the past but as the culmination of a long process, its violent character merely a sign of the social and/or intellectual contradictions that had built up over time.

This may be the product of the historiographical preference for the longue durée over the shallow and evanescent world of événement. It may even be accurate as well as useful if one thinks of historical events as Chou En-Lai is alleged to have done.³ But it does little to illuminate the self-understanding of its participants, who end up as victims of the cunning of history, and it obliterates those events and movements that had no long term consequences. Perhaps all history is Whig history, but this one more Whiggish than most.

Here it is Clough and not the mainstream historians who get it right. To a degree that we may find hard to credit, the participants in the Revolutionary process saw themselves as breaking from the past and starting afresh. The Revolutionary calendar, for example, looks from most contemporary perspectives like an amusing rationalist fantasy, somewhere between the sensible rationalization of weights and measures of the metric system (another contribution of the Revolution, of course) and the lunacy of the Saturday Night Live sketch of the “Metric Decabet,” in which all letters from R through Z were to be represented by the symbol Я. The new names for the month have some poetic charm⁴ and the interests of the ever-rising bourgeoisie can be detected in the replacement of one day of rest in every seven by one day of rest in every ten, but the entire project appears wrong-headed.

Yet these perfectly valid observations are beside the point. The calendar’s very existence was its most important message. It restarted the clock of history, substituting an event in the history of France for the birth of the putative savior of humanity. What was happening in France was comparable to what had happened in Bethlehem eighteen hundred years before, and it was a similar moment of liberation. Jesus was to have led humanity from sin to blessedness. The Revolution was to lead it from oppression to freedom and from arbitrary rule to rational self-government, and nothing was to be untouched by that transformation.

The calendar was a failure, of course, and there must have been few who regretted its loss when Napoleon went back to the old one. Its very existence, though, suggests some of the hopes and expecta- tions that attended the early progress of the Revolution. There is much more in the same vein: the festivals whose messages and inadequacies have been exhaustively set out by Mona Ozouf, the rationalization of dress, the informal cult of virtue and Robespierre’s cult of the Supreme Being, the appearance, for the first time, of the hortatory relationship between an educative state and the people, the lévée en masse, the veneration of the nation and so on. The Revolution meant to change things utterly, humanity itself not excluded. France in the 1790s did not see the wildness of the early years of Communism, where there was serious talk in various circles of public sex and of the resurrection of the dead, but the sans culotte is certainly the progenitor of the New Soviet Man.

This was fundamentally a millenarian project, and the liveliness, pervasiveness and respectability of millenarian hopes in the late eighteenth century cannot be overemphasized.⁵ Its appeal was by no means limited to outsiders like Blake; the scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley, for example, told John Adams soon after his political views had forced him to move to the new United States that the Revolution “was opening a new era in the world and presenting a near view of the millenium [sic].”⁶ Three years earlier he had written that it was “unparalleled in all history … a change from darkness to light, from superstition to sound knowledge, and from a most debasing servitude to a state of the most exalted freedom” which would bring about “an end to national prejudice and a reign of universal peace, end to Empires and civil war.”⁷

Literal, biblical millenarianism like Priestley’s was not widespread, but chiliastic hopes of a more secular sort were common. When note has been taken of this strain, however, there has often been a tendency to treat it and all other forms of millenari- anism as a disease that recurs periodically and runs a predictable course. Events in France are reduced to yet another case study.

More concrete, sympathetic and historically persuasive is Robert Darnton’s conclusion that

The Revolution defies belief. It seems incredible that a whole people could rise up and transform the conditions of everyday existence. To do so is to contradict the common working assumption that life must be fixed in the patterns of the common workaday world…. [T]he French Revolution was a succession of … events so terrible that they shook mankind to its core. Out of the destruction, they created a new sense of possibility—not just of writing constitutions or of legislating liberty and equality, but of living by the most difficult of revolutionary values, the brotherhood of man…. Possibilism against the givenness of things—those were the forces pitted against one another in France from 1789 to 1799.⁸

The Revolution really was different, and after it things were changed for good.

Darnton, for his part, cites the violence of the Revolutionary events, shocks which shattered the sense of the everyday and left participants with a sudden sense of openness and possibility. But this alone is not a full explanation. There is always a strong element of contingency in great events as in small ones, but there is also a prehistory and a context to them, an implied narrative or problematic that provides a vocabulary of expectations and inter- pretations. Otherwise violence is simply violence, a breakdown of law and order rather than the birth pangs of a new world. The extra- ordinary hopes that attended the Revolution, roused not just in France but in Germany and even France’s traditional enemy England, are testimony to a widely-held sense that the old order had run its course and that something new was demanded.

Along with this belief came a search for new cultural resources and an openness to other traditions. It is always easy to find elements of conservatism, ethnocentrism and racism in the writing of any period, and European thought in the late eighteenth century was no exception. At the same time, however, there were important voices in the last quarter of that century who called not just for tolerance but for real receptivity to different cultural possibilities. This was the great theme in the many writings of Kant’s former pupil and later critic Herder, whose interest in the varying cultural qualities of different nations was joined with an appreciation of their common validity. It appears as well in the brief but powerful fasci- nation with Indian culture on the part of many thinkers, especially in Germany. Similarities between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin had been noted by others, but it was not until Sir William Jones’s famous 1786 discourse before the Asiatic Society of Calcutta that the common descent of these languages was generally known in Europe, and that light suddenly illuminated the intimate ties between the India of the Upanishads and classical antiquity.⁹ For a few decades India was received as a sister culture and a still-living connection with the roots of the European world.¹⁰ Jones’s translation of Kalidasa’s The Recognition of Shakuntala was a sensation in Germany. It was a clear influence on Goethe’s Faust and Schubert contemplated an opera on the subject. There was also an increasing interest in alter- native rationalities and even the apparently irrational on the part of the intelligentsia; the widespread fascination with Mesmerism, which Fichte shared, is probably the best-known example.

Over and above this receptivity, though, was the background of the Enlightenment project itself and the expectations that accom- panied it. The Enlightenment had emerged from a sense that the generally accepted foundations of a common life had all failed, and for decades discussion on every subject had presupposed that a rational social order was possible. The unexpected collapse of monarchical power in France seemed to clear the way for its accom- plishment and made it a pressing need. The European world was ready for a rebirth, and the generally-accepted model of the legis- lator crafting a social world which shapes the citizens proper to that order lent plausibility to the project. In that light the experimentation and incessant constitution-writing of the early Revolutionary years seemed reasonable and all but inevitable.

It was in the midst of this ferment that Fichte took up his highly visible position at Jena. His reputation as a radical had preceded him, often in exaggerated form; rumors circulated that he had had told audiences that “in ten or twenty years there will be no more kings or princes.”¹¹ He had almost certainly not said this; as we shall see, Fichte’s actual political stance was both more opaque and less revolutionary than was generally supposed. But he was definitely in favor of the ideals of the early years of the French Revolution, he did not contest the right of the French people to overthrow the monarchy and craft their own government and he expected the Wissenschaftslehre to have a social and political impact as well as an intellectual one. His first public lectures at Jena, soon published as Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation, were naturally read as endorsements of revolutionary ideals, most prominently those of equality and fraternity.

Fichte’s language certainly suggests such an interpretation. No amount of hedging could contain the explosive force of passages such as this:

The state is … only a means for establishing a perfect society, a means which exists only under specific circumstances. Like all those human institutions which are mere means, the state aims at abolishing itself. The goal of all government is to make government superfluous.¹²

Upon the withering away of the state—the Marxian parallel is inevitable—all errors will be rectified through the use of reason, as all will have “the goodwill to allow themselves to be convinced that they have erred.”¹³

Fichte’s lectures assumed a division of labor and a division of society into classes. All the same, each person’s social obligation was to contribute his talents (or, less likely, her talents—Fichte was no feminist) to benefit the whole, and all were to be accorded equal respect and equal support. As he told his listeners, “the final aim of all society is the complete equality of all of its members:”¹⁴

If someone were to ask about the relative perfection of a society … we would first have to investigate the following question: Are all needs cared for in the society in question. Are they all developed and satisfied, and are they all developed and satisfied equally? If they are, then the society in question is perfect qua society.¹⁵

This is an unattainable goal, but it is nonetheless the goal to which all striving leads; and because all are united in that striving, to take up this great task is to share in immortality. Fichte closes his third lecture in the series with these words:

That which is called “death” cannot interrupt my work; for my work must be completed, and it can never be completed in any amount of time. Consequently, my existence has no temporal limits: I am eternal…. I lift my head boldly to the threatening stony heights, to the roaring cataract, and to the crashing clouds in their fire-red sea. “I am eternal,” I shout to them. “I defy your power! Rain everything down upon me! You earth, and you, heaven, mingle all of your elements in wild tumult. Foam and roar, and in savage combat pulverize the last dust mote of that body which I call my own. My will alone with its unyielding project shall hover boldly and indifferently above the wreckage of the universe, for I have seized my vocation, and it is more permanent than you; it is eternal, and I am eternal, as it is.”¹⁶

Such language is more Promethean than Goethe’s Prometheus had used, in the poem that Jacobi claimed to show to Lessing, and it is testimony to the intensity with which Fichte and his audience threw themselves into the questions of philosophy.

The educated class, the scholars of the lectures’ overall title, are charged with the progressive unification of all humanity and the collective rationalization of natural and social worlds. This must be done through openness, conversation and persuasion, however; all are free, so “the scholar must employ none but moral means to influence society. He will not be tempted to use compulsory means or physical force to get men to accept his convictions.”¹⁷ But the scholar’s role as an educator is vital, for he “sees the direction in which the human race must proceed if it is to continue on the path toward its final goal.” Barred by the inherent process of reason from historical leaps—“No step along this path can be skipped”—the scholar does not need to shape the future, but he does have “to see to it that we do not remain standing in one place or turn back.”¹⁸

No matter how perfected one’s philosophical understanding, one will inevitably face pain and disappointment, for “men are quite different from what is prescribed by your ethics.” This is but a spur to the scholar’s vocation, though, part of the plan. It is the Anstoss that defines the task:

Act! Act! That is what we are here for. Should we complain that

others are not as perfect as we are, as long as we ourselves are only more perfect than they are? Isn’t our greater perfection precisely this calling we have received to work for the improvement of others?¹⁹

The call to action rather than passive contemplation was one of Fichte’s most electrifying messages, and it did indeed electrify. Even for the first lecture “the largest auditorium in Jena was too small,” Fichte wrote to his wife. “The entire entrance hall and courtyard were filled; people were standing on tables, benches, and each other’s heads.”²⁰ Like Heidegger a century and a quarter later, Fichte was taken for the “uncrowned king of the empire of thought.”

A few years later, writing in the short-lived journal Athenaeum, Friedrich Schlegel wrote, “The French Revolution, Fichte’s philosophy, and Goethe’s Meister are the greatest tendencies of the age.”²¹ At the time Schlegel was a Privatdozent in Jena, and the circle around him and his brother August Wilhelm included Friedrich von Hardenberg, whose published work bore the name “Novalis,” the brilliant young philosopher Friedrich Schelling, Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter Dorothea Veit, who was to marry August Schlegel and Caroline Michaelis, who married Friedrich Schlegel but eventually left him for Schelling. This small and rather incestuous group gave birth to the Romantic movement in Germany.²²

Manfred Frank has argued at length that the early Romantics were not Fichtean Idealists, and that their philosophical positions, which were generally quite astute and worth study, are better seen as anti-foundationalist, skeptical critiques of Fichte.²³ The validity of this interpretation rests on the assumption that the Wissenschaftslehre is itself foundationalist, and this is debatable; as we shall see, to the extent that Fichte’s thinking points towards a ground it points to an unknowable one. Fichte was right to complain about misunder- standings of his thought.

What Frank cannot deny is the constellation of interests and metaphors that both Fichte and the Jena Romantics shared. Both were committed to freedom as identified with autonomy, both were drawn to the notion of infinite progress towards an ungraspable goal, both saw conversation and cooperation as essential to the nurturing of a renewed and genuinely humane world. Both were obsessed with unity, with an original state from which thoughts and interests had been dispersed and which it is the aim of human creative activity to recover. Both gave (or in Fichte’s case seemed to give) a high role to the productive imagination of every individual. Fichte was thus unavoidable. Few in the Jena circle thought they agreed with him, but there was none who did not work out a philosophy by wrestling with his ideas.

And the realm of ideas is where they remained. Fichte urged his listeners to act, but the Jena Romantics largely acted as young intellectuals have most often done to this day. They wrote poetry, essays and the opening section of novels, they had endless conversations, and they edited journals that failed after a few issues. Their activities echoed the stereotype of the dreamy, poetic Germans as opposed to the active, politically conscious French, a nineteenth-century commonplace that owes much to Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne of 1810 and which did not survive the Second and Third Reichs. But their devotion to ideas also owed much to the inseparability of theory and practice that Fichte had announced in asserting that knowledge and activity are aspects of an ungraspable unity. If our experience is bound up with the work of the productive imagination it should be subject to change by alterations in the imagination itself. A quarter of a century later Shelley was to write that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” To the Jena Romantics, though, it must have seemed as if Fichte had indeed acknowledged them in that role.

Novalis is today seen as the most gifted philosopher among the early Romantics, although he published virtually nothing in the field. His notebooks on Fichte have generated so much interest that they have been translated into English in the “Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy,” a rare honor for a set of cryptic jottings written with no thought for publication.²⁴ Such attention and some recent scholarship have dispelled the long-standing stereotype of Novalis as a death-haunted medievalist with an uncomfortable passion for an underage girl. He now appears as a political radical, a systematic ironist and a pioneering theorist of language.²⁵

Novalis’s Fichte Studies and his other philosophical writings circle around the paradoxes of the idealist project, paradoxes of which Fichte was well aware but which his methodology and his aggressive style of presentation tended to conceal. As Novalis put it in perhaps his best-known aphorism, “We seek the absolute every- where and only ever find things.”²⁶ Everything we encounter emerges from our pursuit of the absolute and unconditioned, but the very condition of being found removes the experience from the unconditioned and renders it a mere thing among things. This is as true of self-consciousness as it is of everything else:

Consciousness is a being outside of being that is within being.

But what is that?

What is outside being must not be a proper being.

An improper being outside being is an image—So what is outside being must be an image of being within being. Consciousness is consequently an image of being within being.²⁷

For Novalis the image of being within being is a matter of signs and thus of language. In a remarkable short text from 1798 he suggests that the denotative function of language leads away from reality but that its free play mysteriously reflects it more accurately than direct address could. Like mathematical formulas, words “play only with themselves, express nothing but their own wondrous nature,” and “for that very reason … the peculiar relational play of things reflects itself in them.”²⁸

The idea is no less original for its echoes of Kant’s aesthetics. To focus on the image itself, or the specific import of a text, is to be taken in by language and to overlook the improper nature of the sign. To understand the play of signs as the way in which being is “there for itself,” however, allows the real to present itself, at least “in a certain respect.” To be driven to speak is thus to be “enthused by language,” and as every intellectual of the time knew, an “enthu- siast” is one who is filled with the divine. The spirit drives one to reveal what one cannot name.

Novalis’s politics, similarly, stresses the central role of fantasy and illusion. His late, apparently reactionary texts that appear to praise the king and queen of Prussia (Faith and Love) and the excesses of Medieval Catholicism (Christendom or Europe) can be read as deeply ironic attacks on the very institutions they pretend to extol; the first of these hints at this intention in its opening paragraphs, which address the question of how one is to “speak about something secret” in a large mixed company.

Since all thinking is based on signs, which is to say on illusions, politics and social change must also be founded on illusion. The task that Novalis saw was the creation of what we could call true illusions—those that connect a community with the unfathomable reality of their nature, the same reality which has manifested itself in the ordinary life of the community:

The world must be made Romantic. In that way one can find the original meaning again. To make Romantic is nothing but a qualitative raising to a higher power. In this operation the lower self will become one with a better self. Just as we ourselves are such a qualitative exponential series. This operation is as yet quite unknown. By endowing the commonplace with a higher meaning, the ordinary with mysterious respect, the known with the dignity of the unknown, the finite with the appearance of the infinite, I am making it Romantic. The operation for the higher, unknown, mystical, infinite is the converse—this undergoes a logarithmic change through this connection—it takes on an ordinary form of expression. Romantic philosophy. Lingua romana. Raising and lowering by turns.²⁹

What saves this position from willfulness and obscurantism is Novalis’s conviction that the raising and lowering are operations of the absolute, which both presents itself in images and is approachable through the play of those images. The signs are true intermediaries, not as pointers but as vehicles of an activity that runs in two directions at once; the way up and the way down are the same.

The reality lay in the process and not in any result. For Novalis, one can philosophize but never attain the ground at which philosophy aims; “Philosophy, the result of philosophizing, arises … through interruption of the drive toward knowledge of the ground— through standing still at the point where one is.”³⁰ The system—and from Novalis’s perspective the Wissenschaftslehre is one—is the corpse of philosophizing. What is needed is a discourse that questions itself and leads the reader beyond the words. Philosophizing is thus best done in fragments. These suggest but do not tell, point but do not describe, and in parallel to the drawing- towards the unattainable and unknowable absolute they resist closure and completion. Their import is manifest not in the utterance but in the silence that follows.³¹ Each fragment thus calls forth another fragment; to think in fragments is to think dialogically. It is to invite conversation and collaboration.

Among the Jena Romantics this preference for collaborative thinking was most strongly held by Friedrich Schlegel, who dubbed it “symphilosophy.” The fragments he published in Atheneum were largely his own, but he mingled in with them aphorisms by his brother August, by Novalis and by the philosopher and theologian Schleiermacher, all anonymously. For Schlegel this was one way to overcome the inevitable limitations of one’s existence as an empirical individual; “one person’s poesy must be limited precisely because it is his own…. The spirit cannot bear this, because it knows, without knowing it, that no human being is merely a human being, but rather can and should be, really and in truth, all of humanity as well. Therefore a person keeps going outside of himself, ever certain of finding himself again, in order to seek and find the completion of his innermost being in the depths of a stranger.”³²

To find one’s innermost being in the depths of a stranger is, of course, to move towards the harmony and ultimate unification of all people. For Schlegel, this drive towards collaboration and collective activity gives thought and imagination their goal: the creation of a new mythology, not by an inspired prophet or a Nietzschean Übermensch but out of the dialogue of all poetic spirits:

The highest beauty, indeed the highest order, is only that of chaos, namely, a chaos that waits but for love’s touch in order to unfold into a harmonious world, a chaos such as ancient mythology and poesy were…. Poems of antiquity are all joined one to the other until the whole is formed from their evergrowing masses and members. Everything interlocks, and one and the same spirit is expressed everywhere, merely differently … Why should it not become again as it once was? Obviously, in a different way. And why not in a more beautiful, greater way?³³

This new mythology “can only create itself out of the innermost depths of the spirit as if out of itself,” just as idealism emerged, giving “a fixed point in the spirit world … from which the strength of humankind can spread out in all directions, ever increasing, sure of never losing itself or its way out.”³⁴

It is not a matter of mere human experience that emerges in poesy; it is “the gentle reflection of the deity in man” which is “the actual soul.” Here Schlegel invokes Spinoza, where “you find the beginning and end of all fantasy, the universal ground on which your particularity rests.”³⁵ And yet particularity must be treasured and incorporated into the great work whatever its source:

What new source of poesy could flow to us from India if a few German artists with universality and depth of mind, with their genius of translation, were given the opportunity…. It is in the Orient that we must seek what is most romantic, and when we are finally able to draw from the source, the impression of southern ardor, which we currently find so charming in Spanish poesy, will perhaps appear to us again, occidental and austere.³⁶

What Novalis looked for in the romanticization of the world is also the aim of Schlegel’s new mythology. Both were meant to draw together the universal and the particular, to unite humans with each other and humanity with the divine which is their source and goal. In Schlegel’s early writings—he later became increasingly conserv- ative and eventually was received into the Roman Catholic church, along with his wife Dorothea—this drawing-together was explicitly a collective project, albeit one largely limited to poetic spirits. The very process of forging the new mythology, then, was a fulfillment in itself.

The Jena circle was not alone in this hope. In his student days at the Tübingen seminary, before moving to Jena, Schelling had roomed with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and his future collabo- rator and later rival G. W. F. Hegel. They, too, were deeply affected by events in France and by the emergence of idealism in the first versions of the Wissenschaftslehre.³⁷ In the winter of 1796-1797 one or more of the three produced a document known today as the “Oldest systematic program of German idealism.” (The copy that survives is in Hegel’s handwriting, but Hegel’s authorship has been disputed.) This brief text, just two pages long, is not exactly systematic, at least not in the Hegelian sense, but it is definitely programmatic.

It starts with ethics, which in Fichtean fashion “will be nothing more than a complete system of all ideas,” its first idea “the repre- sentation of myself as an absolute free being.”³⁸ It them moves in rapid steps through physics, to which the author wants “to give wings again,” the abolition and/or transcendence of the mechanistic state, the writing of a universal history that would “expose down to the bone the whole miserable apparatus of state, constitution, government, and legislation,” and the overthrow of all superstition accompanied by “the persecution of the priesthood, which recently pretends to reason.”³⁹ Philosophy will then embrace beauty, the point where truth and goodness are united, and thus will return poetry to its rightful role as teacher of humanity.

The teaching, though, will be done through a “religion of the senses,” a “monotheism of reason and the heart, polytheism of imagination and art,” hence a new mythology—which the author or authors say is an idea that “has still not occurred to anyone else.” This mythology will be in the service of ideas and of reason:

Mythology must become philosophical to make people rational and philosophy must become mythological to make philosophers sensuous. Then eternal unity will reign among us…. No longer will any power be repressed, and then will rule the universal freedom and equality of the spirits! A higher spirit sent from heaven must establish this new religion among us. It will be the last and greatest work of humanity.⁴⁰

The term “reason” needs to be taken in the sense suggested by Henrich, as the inherent logic of the unfolding process of the human world rather than as the logical elaboration of concepts. Even so, one can already see in this very early text some of the differences between Tübingen and Jena; Novalis and the Schlegels emphasize collaborative work and the unknowability of the absolute, while the “Oldest systematic program” sounds more traditionally metaphysical; the word “beauty” is to be taken “in a higher Platonic sense,” and “the last and greatest work of humanity” is to be accom- plished by “a higher spirit sent from heaven.” (These ideas suggest the influence if not the authorship of Hölderlin.)

What the two groups share, though, is more than the bare idea of a new mythology. It is a group of related ideas and insights that can all be traced back to Fichte and to Kant as seen through Fichte’s influence. These include freedom as the foundation and capstone of philosophy, the inseparability of action and understanding, the recognition of the human role in the creation of human experience and the need to embrace all of humanity in a new social and experi- ential world.

There is also the sense of vast possibilities and of a new beginning. The millenarian hopes of the French Revolution found more than an echo in Jena and Tübingen, and what these circles lacked in political realism they made up for in philosophical and psychological acuity. They both complemented and critiqued the revolutionaries, recognizing that the new world could not be ushered in by the fiat of a legislator, as many in France had thought or hoped. That fantasy rested on the separation of self and other, on the belief in a tabula rasa individual on whom social ideas could be inscribed. Instead, the future was to be made by human activity and human interaction, to which Fichte had given the highest impor- tance:

Everyone can say, “Whoever you may be, because you bear a human face, you are still a member of this great community [and] it is … certain that there will come a time (it may take millions or trillions of years—what is time!) when I will draw you into my sphere of influence, a time when I will benefit you too and receive benefit from you, a time when my heart will be joined with yours in the loveliest bond of all—the bond of free, mutual give and take.⁴¹

The chiliastic excitement in this passage and in the writings of the Jena and Tübingen circles does not come from a sense that the new world has been achieved. Everyone accepted that this was an infinite task. It came, instead, from the belief that the way in which worlds are made had finally been uncovered and from the new-found confi- dence that self and world were ours to make. The appearance of these ideas, through which the process of world-making seemed to become self-conscious for the first time, was so liberating a moment that it would thenceforth animate the entire course of idealism, just as it animates the early, visionary writings of Marx and of those later writers who rediscovered Marx’s philosophical roots. It can be said without exaggeration to be a revolution in philosophy.

Fichte, never given to false modesty, claimed as much. In 1795 he drafted a letter seeking a state pension from the revolutionary government in France. (It is not known if he ever sent the letter.) “My system is the first system of freedom,” he wrote. “Just as France has freed man from external shackles, so my system frees him from the fetters of things in themselves, which is to say, from all those external influences which all previous systems—including the Kantian—have more or less fettered man.”⁴² He goes on to say that “the first principle of my system presents man as an independent being.” The consequences of that principle are not what one might expect, however, and as Fichte works them out in the applied portions of the Wissenschaftslehre, those which address politics and ethics, the collab- orative, communal and even anti-individualist tendencies of his thought emerge clearly. Yet this does not in any way diminish Fichte’s commitment to human freedom. It is simply that freedom and agency turn out to be pervasive and distributed rather than being powers of separate and self-sufficient individuals.

10

The politics and ethics of freedom

Fichte was to take his ideas farther than any of his followers or even his critics. He soon came to see the problems posed by the structure and method of the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre. By 1796 he had developed a new way of presenting his ideas in the classroom, and a few years later he announced the imminent publi- cation of a new version of the Wissenschaftslehre. Only one chapter of that book ever appeared, however, and the most complete presen- tation of Fichte’s post-1796 approach comes from students’ notes from Fichte’s lectures, usually referred to as the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo.¹ Fichte was never to publish another foundational text, through he struggled to write one for many years.

The problem, in part, was that his own understanding of the Wissenschaftslehre continued to evolve. He himself maintained that he had never moved away from his original insights, and the Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation are remarkable for their many anticipations of his later writings, but in the years 1796-1801 especially Fichte’s rethinking of the nature and origin of self- consciousness led him into increasingly radical positions.

The nova methodo notes give some indication of these changes, but valuable as they are, they share one defect with the 1794-1795 Foundations. They describe the fundamentals of Fichte’s project without developing its implications for ethics, politics, natural science and religion. Fichte’s starting points and methodology are clear enough, but the lectures remain preliminary in nature, and from them alone it is easy to overlook just how individual Fichte’s position really is. The full implications of the Wissenschaftslehre appear only in its application.

These implications and the internal development of Fichte’s thinking are most apparent in the two major academic books that Fichte wrote at Jena, the Foundations of Natural Right of 1795-1796 and The System of Ethics of 1798, and in a text written for a wider audience, The Vocation of Man, published in 1800. Of these three it is the Foundations of Natural Right and its 1800 pendant The Closed Commercial State that have attracted the most criticism. Fichte’s notion of an applied philosophy was to deduce the basic principles of a given field, politics, economics, ethics and the like, from the logic of the Wissenschaftslehre, just as he had deduced the framework of experience from the intellectual intuition of the Tathandlung. In an all-too-human fashion, however, the prescriptive portions of the applied Wissenschaftslehre frequently reproduced the cultural predilections of the age in philosophical dress.

This would be bad enough in itself, but where Fichte diverges from commonplaces he seems to add a degree of state control and intrusiveness that inevitably remind today’s readers of totalitari- anism. George di Giovanni saw Fichte’s political order as one “in which the behavior of all its members, whether individual or collective, can be predicted with the same accuracy as the workings of a machine.”² Jerrold Siegel, relying on an out-of-context quotation in a book by the very unsympathetic George Armstrong Kelly, sums up the message of The Closed Commercial State as “the formula that ‘justice demands that morality should be imposed on individuals [remembering the special sense that Fichte gave the word] by force.’”³

Both of these criticisms miss the mark. Siegel’s quotation derives ultimately from the classic work by Xavier Léon, Fichte et son Temps, and Léon was not claiming that Fichte wanted to impose “morality” in the ethical sense. As the passage which immediately follows the quoted words shows, he was talking about economic and social legislation meant to ensure an egalitarian social order:

Liberty and equality … are only words so long as they have no material to which they can be applied; they need a realm wherein they can live. Fichte’s ambition was to create that realm by the transformation of an economic and social state to which these principles were almost completely foreign. He grasped the powerlessness of economic liberalism to realize them within a society so far removed from morality, and the consequent need to adapt principles to the given facts, which is to say the need to impose liberty and equality by the plenary power of the state. He thus, by a stroke of genius, defined the profound essence of socialism.⁴

There can be no question of imposing ideas of morality on individuals here, unless one thinks of the unrestrained pursuit of wealth as a moral right. Instead, there is a far-sighted recognition of the way in which unrestrained economic activity produces inequality.

In a larger sense there should be nothing in the Foundations of Natural Right or The Closed Commercial State that dictates morals. Fichte carefully and deliberately separates ethics from Recht (the term is usually translated as “right,” but it refers in German to law as well as to rights and correctness). Ethics works out the implica- tions of our knowledge of and submission to the moral law, and given the primacy of the practical in Fichte’s thought this puts ethics at the center of philosophy. Right is of secondary interest and impor- tance. It concerns the structuring of a human community so that it will be most conducive to ethical growth, within which fallible human beings can best pursue the task of self-education in morality:

For a species of perfected moral beings, there is no law of right. It is already clear that humankind cannot be such a species, from the fact that the human being must be educated and must educate himself to the status of morality; for he is not moral by nature, but must make himself so through his own labor.⁵

In his earlier writings Fichte refers to the state as a Nothstaat.⁶ This is generally translated as “makeshift state,” but Not also means need, as it does in the name of Siegfried’s sword, Nothung, and the power and organization of a state is a necessity because human perfection is “millions or trillions of years” away:

Reason is one, and it is exhibited in the sensible world also as one; humanity is a single organized and organizing whole of reason. Humanity was divided into several independent members; the natural institution of the state already cancels this independence provisionally and molds individual groups into a whole, until morality re-creates the entire species as one.⁷

All states are provisional. Their withering away is infinitely deferred, but this remains a regulative idea at the very least, and thus the ethically neutral sphere of right is ultimately subordinated to the demands of the ethical.

This division between right and ethics (better, Staatsrecht and Sittenlehre) reproduces the division between inner and outer freedom that we saw in Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” and which can be traced back to Luther. Outer freedom is the domain of the state, and it concerns the proper relations of human beings considered as empirical individuals. As we shall see more clearly in considering The System of Ethics, morality is a matter of inner freedom, and it unfolds from the universal and anti-individualistic moral law. From the point of view of morality the empirical individual, the subject of right, has no ultimate reality. This is a distinction that was hard for Fichte’s audience to make and remains hard today, because of our strong cultural and psychological identification with the experience of a substantial self, but for Fichte the insubstantiality of the self was not an ethical goal but a fundamental aspect of the entire Wissenschaftslehre. He stresses this point even in the earlier text:

As soon as we hear of the I as active, we do not hesitate to imagine a substratum that is supposed to contain this activity as a bare capacity. This is not the I, but rather a product of our own imagination, which we construct in response to the demand to think the I. 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.⁸

Fichte’s anticipation of important strains in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science is especially striking in this passage.

The provisional character of right thus has two aspects, diachronic and synchronic; it addresses a stage in human devel- opment which in the idea, at least, is to be surpassed, and it considers people as empirical individuals, a condition which the moral law reveals is not their true nature. Its apparent inconsis- tencies should be seen in that light.

But how is the state to be organized to best foster ethical growth? It is not meant to determine the good and cajole or prod people towards the light. Fichte was so far from wanting to impose morality by force that he rested his entire political theory on a series of contracts, each one establishing a group of reciprocal rights and duties. The state originates in an act of agreement, and its powers are defined by the implicit terms of the bargain which any reasonable being would necessarily enter into.

The chief aim of Fichte’s rational state is to secure the peace and to ensure that all citizens have the means to support themselves and the opportunity to participate in the moral self-education of the community, the give-and-take extolled in the Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation. One of Fichte’s fundamental social rights, then, is the right to work. Everyone must be able to support himor herself by labor, and any degree of inequality that deprives a citizen of that right must be corrected:

As soon as someone suffers from need, that portion of others’ property that would be required to spare him from such need no longer belongs to those others; rather, it rightfully belongs to the one in need. The civil contract must provide for such a repartitioning of property.⁹

On the other hand, along with the right to work citizens are under an obligation to work, and each must declare a career. Their choice is not entirely their own; it must be approved by the state, which regulates economic life so that basic needs are met and all labor contributes to the public benefit. There are to be neither paupers nor idlers in the rational state, and nobody will be allowed to pursue a career producing useless objects or providing unnecessary services.¹⁰ In The Closed Commercial State Fichte goes on to argue that the ideal state should virtually shut off from all others, like Japan under the shoguns, so that nothing impedes its power to regulate the economy.

It should already be apparent that Fichte’s state possesses a degree of power that would make most of us uncomfortable. He cannot be easily fit into any contemporary political categories, however. He insists that “Everyone must always carry an identity card with him … containing a precise description of his person…. Since merely verbal descriptions of a person always remain ambiguous, it might be good if important persons (who therefore can afford it as well) were to carry accurate portraits in their identity cards, rather than descriptions.”¹¹ (Fichte would have welcomed the invention of photography for at least one reason.) “But in order not to prevent citizens from enjoying even the innocent pleasures of remaining anonymous,” he continues, “police officers must be prohibited—on pain of punishment—from demanding to see identity cards out of mere whim or curiosity, but may do so only when it is necessary to verify the person’s identity; in which case— should it become an issue—they must be required to justify why it was necessary.”¹² There can be few states today with identity card regimes where the police power is so limited.

As this example suggests, Fichte’s guiding principle in the Foundations of Natural Right is reciprocity. He understands better than most that rights are no more than demands to which a community normally accedes and thus that there can be no rights outside of a community. There is no community, however, without a surrender of a portion of one’s own power; this is what happens when one admits the rights of others and agrees to accede to certain of their demands. Fichte is both honest and consistent in underlining the degree of obligation that any rule of right entails, and one aspect of the rationality of his rational state is that the obligations do indeed fall on all parties.

It would be a mistake, then, to think of Fichte’s political philosophy as a dialectic of authoritarianism and individualism. The powers that he assigns to the state are vast, but they are largely restricted to the administration of things. His ideal state is little more than a technocratic executive with untrammeled powers, watched over by a small group of inviolable and incorruptible “ephors.”

The function of the ephorate is to block the executive when it oversteps its proper authority. Once that happens the matter is referred to the people as a whole, who must decide if the executive has violated the social contract, in which case it is guilty of treason and its members banished, or if it is the ephorate that has betrayed their trust by unfairly accusing the executive. If that is the case it is the ephors who must go into exile. In a similar fashion, Fichte accepts the rightfulness of a successful rebellion, because the broad public support which secures the rebels’ success is proof that the contract keeping the government in power had been breached by the government.

We may be uncomfortable with Fichte’s specific solutions, but his political thinking is stimulating because he consistently asks questions which we tend to overlook. This is especially the case when it comes to Fichte’s economic thinking. We may be disturbed by the high level of control that his state exercises over the economy, but for Fichte this was the least intrusive way to maintain a reasonable subsistence for all. In light of today’s inexorable rise of inequality, the destruction of public amenities and the public sphere as a whole, and considering the environmental costs of an economy based on the infinite expansion of production and consumption, Fichte’s egalitarian steady-state economics has something to offer, at least as a thought experiment. The economic autarchy proposed in The Closed Commercial State sounds not just unpalatable but almost absurd, yet as Isaac Nakhimovsky has argued, Fichte’s insights into the destabilizing and immiserating effects of uncontrolled capital flows have a very contemporary pertinence in an age of globalization and global economic turbulence.

Fichte’s insistence that right had to be separated from ethics has also made interpreters uneasy, but it too needs to be viewed from Fichte’s own perspective. It is far from being the charter of an amoral state; instead, Fichte’s principle severely limits the sphere of government. It eliminates all partiality. Insofar as one is a citizen one is exactly equal to all others, and no philosophy has the authority to categorize, classify, or rank citizens in order of importance. Moreover, no preconceived ethical rules can be allowed to dictate the structure or goals of the state. These have to come from the mutual give-and-take of citizens’ ethical growth.

For Fichte, to live and to exist as a self-conscious being is to act. As a result, the equality in a rational state must be an equality of action, not merely a juridical equality of rights. Otherwise it is no equality at all. Kant could accept Frederician absolutism as the hard shell in which the capacity for free thought was nurtured, but Fichte saw—rightly—that there could be no free thought without freedom of action; the hard shell was the tomb of liberty, not its cradle. Political liberty thus entails a positive obligation to foster the widest possible participation in the life of the community. This suggests a way out of Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated distinction between negative and positive liberty, giving some affirmative content to the role of the state without stepping onto the slippery slope towards despotism. Berlin’s lack of sympathy with Fichte, whom he named as an enemy of freedom, likely led him to overlook this possibility.

The one aspect of the Foundations of Natural Right that has attracted the most attention is Fichte’s notion of the “summons” and the implied theory of intersubjectivity that appears in the theoretical sections at its start. From a strictly historical perspective this interest scarcely seems justified; Fichte never returned to the theory in his later work. It is not even a real theory of intersubjectivity, in fact; as Fichte presents it, it is more of a solution to the “zombie problem,” the question of how we recognize other humans as rational beings like ourselves and not merely automatons whose behavior perfectly mimics those of rational beings. As useful as this is for a political theory which rests on the recognition that all humans are entitled to the same consideration, it is far from being a truly intersubjective position.

The notion of the summons, however, has a certain present-day appeal. It fits well with a common if mistaken view that the Wissenschaftslehre was primarily concerned with the creation and maintenance of a stable self in a changing world. A focus on this portion of the Foundations of Natural Right tends to go along with a fundamentally individualistic interpretation of Fichte’s thought.

Such an individualistic interpretation is difficult to maintain without ignoring Fichte’s development towards theology from 1798 onwards, his own statements about the anti-individualistic thrust of his philosophy found as early as 1795 and his insistence that the “early” and “late” versions of the Wissenschaftslehre are consistent with one another. Moreover, most discussions of the summons treat the notion in isolation. This is unfortunate, because in context it is apparent that the summons in the Foundations of Natural Right is not a doctrine as such. It is a solution to a problem that Fichte had himself created, and it disappears along with the problem as his philosophy developed. That is almost certainly why he abandoned it.

Fichte starts off in both the Foundations of Natural Right and The System of Ethics with compressed versions of the Wissenschaftslehre’s foundational steps, and the differences between these accounts are extremely important. In the earlier text Fichte derives self-consciousness from a reflection on the experience of efficacious action posited with respect to an object. This lands him in an infinite regress. To see ourselves acting with respect to an object means that we must already have concepts of both the self and the object, which is exactly what Fichte is trying to ground.¹³ Self-consciousness keeps being pushed back behind its putative moment of origin. In Fichte’s words, there is no “possible moment in which we might attach the thread of self-consciousness.”¹⁴

Fichte’s way out of this problem in the Foundations of Natural Right is the notion that we can discover our own self-conscious agency by a summons from outside. Through this summons the subject finds itself “being determined as its being-determined to be self-determining, i.e., as a summons to the subject, calling upon it to resolve to exercise its efficacy.”¹⁵ Our own self-consciousness, then, is something that is shown to us by another, who calls us to recognize ourselves as objective beings who must act out of our subjectivity. Fichte then tries to demonstrate that this experience necessarily brings with it the understanding that the one who gives the summons is also a self- conscious rational being.

In other words, this is a theory of education, not of intersubjec- tivity, and Fichte refers to the summons as an act of upbringing. It resonates well with the task that every parent faces, but it solves few if any problems that Fichte himself had not put in his way by his insistence that self-consciousness must be based on the experience of efficacious action, and it creates difficulties of its own. If humans must be taught by another rational being to discover their own self- determining nature, the problem of origins is simply shifted from individual history to the history of the species.

Fichte is well aware of this problem, and his only way out is to refer to the Bible:

A human being could not have brought them [the first humans] up…. Therefore, another rational being (one that was not human) must have brought them up—obviously, only to the point where humans could start bringing up each other. A spirit took them into its care, exactly as is portrayed in an old, venerable document that generally contains the deepest and most sublime wisdom and presents results to which all philosophy must return in the end.¹⁶

Here he has only exchanged one infinite regress for another.

More crucially, perhaps, his argument is circular. To be called upon to act in a certain way presupposes not only a summoner but a self to whom the summons is addressed. In no other way could the summons be heard and perceived as such. This necessitates a two- stage process: the self posits itself but it does not see itself as endowed with free agency until it receives and responds to the summons to free self-activity. The self as it is before the summons is thus passive and object-like. As such this theory seems to be a departure from the fundamental insight of the Wissenschaftslehre, that the self is itself nothing other than the activity of its own self- constitution.

By the time he wrote The System of Ethics two years later, however, Fichte no longer derives self-consciousness from the experience of efficacious action. Instead, he theorizes that it emerges through the intervention of an active intellect within a complex movement of drives and that it rests on a bare tendency to action, not on the analysis of a concrete act. There does not need to be an originary moment of efficacious action, because the activity to which the intellect turns and lays claim is not that of the self and is always already in process. Self-positing is a moment of diremption, not of reflection.

In the System of Ethics Fiche argues that we find ourselves only as willing, as initiating and making changes in an objective world.¹⁷ This is what we encounter in every reflective moment. But the act of reflection objectifies, and we thus become aware of our activity as an objective property independent of the subject. If we abstract from every empirical aspect of this activity, we discover this to be a pure tendency to determine oneself absolutely, without reference to anything else.¹⁸ This is the moral law in the formulation of univer- salizability, it must be stressed, not an embrace of the acte gratuit.

Thus far Fichte follows the outlines of the Foundations of Natural Right,¹⁹ and he would seem to be stuck in the same difficulties. If the pure tendency is an abstraction from cognized acts, those acts themselves would have to be grasped as the action of a subject on an external object, the very construction of experience which has to be established. In the System of Ethics, though, Fichte takes a different course. The tendency to self-determination takes the form of “an original consciousness … even if we may not be precisely conscious of it as a singular object at the same level of abstraction with which we have [just] established it.”²⁰ It is a primitive awareness that is not yet self-awareness, an inchoate experience that exists even before it is brought to full, defined knowledge, and it exists within an imper- sonal activity that is always already in process.

There is no doubt that the I “possesses the power of intuition;” otherwise we would not be capable of self-consciousness at all. Furthermore, the I must be able to intuit itself. These powers are necessary for self-positing and Fichte no longer tries to justify them, but they do not in themselves constitute self-consciousness. They must be logically prior to any separation of experience into subjective and objective realms.

So how does the I intuit itself, and what does it find when it does so? Fichte writes:

The intuiting subject (the intellect), which becomes an intellect precisely by means of the postulated act, posits the tendency to absolute activity described above …as—itself; that is, as identical with itself, the intellect. The previously mentioned absoluteness of real acting thereby becomes the essence of an intellect and is brought under the sway of the concept, and this is how the absoluteness of real acting first becomes freedom proper; the absoluteness of absoluteness, the absolute power to make itself absolutely. —Through the consciousness of its own absoluteness the I tears itself away—from itself—and puts itself forward as something self-sufficient.²¹ This unthinkable unity out of which the self posits itself is activity, too, and is both subject and object. It “contains within itself a tendency to absolute self-activity which, when it is thought of apart from the substance and as the ground of the latter’s activity, is a drive that drives the substance.”²² The I, then, does not posit itself in a vacuum. It posits itself within a stream of activity which is itself intentional, and in the act of positing it both separates itself from that activity and claims it as its own.

There follows a complex and subtle development of the contents of original consciousness. Through it Fichte obtains the result that he had earlier reached through the notion of the summons:

We are required to think that we are supposed to determine ourselves consciously, purely and simply though concepts, indeed in accordance with the concept of absolute self-activity.²³

This process clearly commences with action, not with perception, and with the bare consciousness of activity which one then takes for empirical self-activity. This is the key: self-consciousness and the self itself are claims to an activity that is itself not the activity of the self.

The genesis of self-consciousness is thus a split within a larger movement and a claim to agency instead of a recollection of activity, the constitution of an individual perspective within a primordial activity that encompasses, grounds and gives rise to the act of diremption through which the self brings itself into being. This is a new understanding of the act of self-positing, and it marks a genuine deepening of Fichte’s original insight. He is no longer trying to locate the emergence of self-consciousness in our reflection on an act which itself contains all the preconditions for self-consciousness (active subject and mutable object) and thus presupposes what it is supposed to account for. Instead, he finds it in an act of self-consti- tution as self-assertion, in the tearing away of the self from the self, the forcible separation of agent from object and consciousness from being, the subjection of the latter to the former and the “finding” of the drive to self-activity which itself produces the tearing-away as the defining property of the self.

Fichte had always argued that his was a “philosophy of seeing,” not a “philosophy of being,” but it is only with the System of Ethics that it fully deserves the title. It becomes a philosophy of seeing in a double sense. It still embraces the methodology of watching the self as it goes about its business, but the self that it uncovers is an act incorporating the vision/interpretation through which self- consciousness becomes possible. In a handwritten note of great importance, Fichte added to the printed text, “Eyes are inserted in the unified one.”²⁴

The self still posits itself, but Fichte no longer suggests that this is the posit of a perceptual subject that stands apart from the not-self. It is the posit of individual agency in play with other agents. Experience emerges from an assertion of a perspective point within the activity of the whole. Agency thus precedes the self which claims it, and this, in turn, presupposes that the activity of the whole is itself a manifestation of agency. This helps move Fichte’s “Spinozism of freedom” towards theology. Just as the articulation of the unity of experience in terms of percipient and object of perception demands and presumes the existence of a physical world, so its articulation in terms of agency and resistance demands and presumes the existence of a world imbued with intentionality.

The oppositions of subject/object and agency/resistance are never really distinct, of course; they are the poles of the same process viewed, respectively, in theory and in action. The notion of the summons had tended to separate these two aspects chronologically, not just logically, unless one makes the assumption that the summons itself is a moment within self-positing. If that were the case, however, it would be meaningless to talk about a summons or a response as if they arose among distinct individual agents or to talk about self-positing as if it were an activity of the individual self. These would fall into place as moments of a global process that only manifests itself as the play of individual wills, and this is the direction that Fichte takes.

One advantage of this new approach is that it eliminates the infinite regress problem. At the same time, this transformation shifts the focus from the individual and the mental to the collective and the embodied.²⁵ For internal reasons the Foundations of Natural Right was concerned with the external relations among rational beings. The System of Ethics, by contrast, deals with the totality as it is manifest within the self-consciousness of rational beings, and this manifestation is corporeal as well as cognitive. It takes place through the play of drives. It is a drive that gives rise to the willing which we find in the initial act (and indeed every act) of intro- spection; through drives the world makes itself and makes itself known to itself.

Drives are central to the System of Ethics and, indeed, to the entire Wissenschaftslehre; as Alexis Philonenko wrote, the theory of drives is both the foundation on which Fichte constructs his system of ethics and the point at which he brings his entire system to completion.²⁶ Several consequences flow from this shift. First, the drives are impersonal, and in developing a theory of ethics and action from their movement Fichte displaces the individual from its traditional role as the center of philosophy. Man is no longer the measure of all things. The Wissenschaftslehre is now revealed as anti-individualist in structure as well as in aim. Second, the acquaintance we have with the totality is through our awareness of the movement of the drives, and this means that knowledge must now be conceived of as an embodied process.

Fichte’s concern with drives is not unusual. There was consid- erable interest in the eighteenth century in biological or quasi- biological accounts of human activity, and in Fichte’s work drives make an appearance as early as The Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre. But they have a greatly expanded role in The System of Ethics, as becomes apparent first in the short passage dealing with the natural world.²⁷ In these few pages, which owe a great deal to Kant’s discussion of the teleology of nature in The Critique of Judgment, Fichte argues that a universal law of organi- zation governs nature as a whole:

[E]very part of nature strives to unite its being and its efficacious action with the being and efficacious action of another determinate part of nature…. This drive is called the formative drive [Bildungstreib].²⁸

This drive must be taken “in both the active and the passive sense: both as a drive to form or to shape or to cultivate and as a drive to allow oneself to be formed, shaped, or cultivated.”²⁹

The formative drive of nature thus links all organisms in recip- rocal action—its essence can be reduced to a reciprocity which stipu- lates its expression at every point—and by defining the internal determinants of each organism’s activity by its links with all others it transforms a view of nature as a multiplicity of self-acting units into one that envisions a single process which is manifest in the inter- linked self-activity of all beings. This implies a theory of distributed activity. Intentional activity is a matter of mutual self-determination instead of being the independent behavior of individual actors.

This movement from apparently solipsistic premises to the understanding of each agent as site of free activity in an all-encom- passing collaborative process is the key to Fichte’s development, and it is reproduced in the deduction of morality itself, where the supposedly egocentric starting point of the Wissenschaftslehre leads to an ontological monism and a theory of distributed agency. Humans are also products of nature. We thus find the formative drive in ourselves as well, but we cannot be aware of it or of any other drive as a mere drive. Reflection demands determinacy. The longing that results from the drive must be distinguished from other possible longings, and “the only way it can be distinguished from another longing is by means of its object.” In reflection, then, we know this “natural drive” as the “lower power of desire,” which is given along with its sensually satisfying objects.³⁰

Unlike other animals, however, we have torn ourselves away from ourselves, and in so doing we bring to awareness the conscious aspect of the primordial unity of matter and intentionality and being and consciousness. This aspect is a window on the activity of the whole, so in our self-construction as active subjects we find within ourselves a “higher power of desire” as well. Like the lower power this moves us towards an object. Unlike the natural ends picked out by lower power, though, the object of the higher power is nothing in nature. It is the pure self-sufficiency enjoined by the moral law, the realization of the fundamental tendency in original consciousness.³¹

Fichte could easily pause at this point and assert that, since we have an interest in the object of any drive, we have in interest in the self-activity and autonomy towards which this drive leads us. But the “pure spiritual drive” which appears in reflection as the higher power of desire is nothing which can exist on its own. Both drives are interdependent and both arise in their knowable form through the original act of diremption. They are simply aspects of an Urtrieb, or original drive, and their division is a product of the tearing away of oneself from oneself; “These two drives,” Fichte writes, “constitute only one and the same I.”³²

Spiritual nature and bodily nature are the necessary forms through which we experience the undivided real. They are the subject-object grasped through its subjective and objective aspects respectively. But since these two drives are inseparable we cannot act out of the higher power of desire alone. We are ever and always moving towards the objects of the natural drive, following the lower power, and our inclinations seem irreconcilable with our awareness of the pure, ethical drive. No reconciliation is possible in theory, but we can manifest their identity in practice. The reciprocal interaction of these two drives produces an ethical drive which hovers above the empirical interests of the natural drive and leads us towards whichever immediate end will take us further along the infinite path to absolute self-activity.

What we do in response to the lower power of desire is necessary and determined activity, like that of other animals, but in the ethical act “the I is not being driven but drives itself.”³³ We are not pushed along by something which we have posited as separate from the Self. Here the Self itself does the pushing. In the ethical act we bring together both higher and lower powers of desire and thus the objective and subjective aspects of the Urtrieb that self-consciousness divides.

This harmonizes the self which drives itself with the self that is driven and harmonizes our subjective being with our objective being. This harmony of the self with itself “is a determinate state and is felt” in much the same way as the indefinable rightness of a work of art is felt.³⁴ We feel pleasure as well as approval. “But this kind of pleasure has nothing to do with enjoyment,” Fichte cautions; it “does not lead me outside of myself but rather back into myself. It is contentment, and this is something that is never associated with sensory pleasure; it is less arousing than the latter, but more heartfelt, while at the same time it supplies us with new courage and strength.”³⁵

Because the drives provide us the only contact we can have with the real, Fichte has nothing but feeling to mark off the ethical from the unethical. There are no true formulations.³⁶ Explanations of the real are approximations at best, flawed by the implicit dualism of both consciousness and language. Although Fichte constructs a daunting metaphysics of morals at the end of The System of Ethics, morality ultimately cannot be elaborated discursively either; indeed, the determination of action by discursive reasoning pertains to the I as object, not the I as subject.³⁷ Ethical action must therefore depend on our attunement to the specific affective states which register harmonies among actions and drives. It is a matter of conscience.

The Wissenschaftslehre thus resolves Kant’s problem of the incentive of the moral law. It has real power over human activity because it is really present in us as the drive to pure self-activity. As Kant understood by the time he wrote The Critique of Judgment, if not earlier, the specific ends to which the moral law leads could not be marked out for us unless the moral law dictated or at least shaped the sensible world itself. Kant’s solution was to argue that we were compelled to think that this was the case; the command of the moral law would be meaningless if the world were not so ordered as to be conducive to its own rationalization, so we are compelled to see it in teleological terms. Fichte’s solution is at once more elegant and more totalizing. For Fichte the sensible world—indeed, all that there is and could be—is the product of the primordial drive to self-activity, manifest in nature as the formative drive and in rational beings as the complex of drives which find their point of unity in the ethical act. As if it were individual striving writ large, the inherent logic of that primordial drive is a return to the absolute unity from which it emerged.

For Kant we must act on behalf of the totality and we must assume that the totality moves in ways favorable to our acts. For Fichte we act as empirical manifestations of the totality, and thus we realize its inner movement towards harmony and unification in acts of moral worth. The sensible world and the moral law are given together, just as subject and object are, and the moral law, in its manifestation as a drive, unlocks both right action and the real inner logic of all things.

The ontological implications of this view are unavoidable, whatever Fichte’s intentions, but what it implies is a negative ontology. Since his is a philosophy of seeing, not one of being, the real can never be an object of thought. Fichte is still a Kantian of a sort. All we know through theoretical reason are appearances, even introspection yields nothing that makes contact with the real. The very shape and character of self-experience is an activity, a construct, and its manifest content thus provides no direct insight into that activity. Idealism’s ability to say “no” to experience, that element which Marcuse was to identify as its revolutionary core, is grounded here.

At the same time, however, Fichte avoids the dangers of solipsism by grounding the self in the actual reciprocal interaction of all life. He is no proto-post-modernist; there is a unitary reality, but it is not available to us within self-conscious awareness or thought. We can only participate in its activity, through attunement to the drives which are its traces in the empirical world. This elevation of bodily knowledge over discursive knowledge is one of Fichte’s most original contributions. It is also deeply subversive of any attempt to order the social world through discursive reason.

This vision, it must be stressed, is as little authoritarian as it is individualist. Fichte’s “Spinozism of freedom” shows agency and thus freedom to be a property distributed throughout the system. The movement of the Urtrieb is unconstrained and spontaneous, it is activity for activity’s sake, and its tendency towards absolute self- activity is present within each of us as a drive. The moral law emerges in our reflection on that drive. This freedom comes at a price, however. Exactly as in Kant, the only free acts are those done in submission to the moral law. We are free, then, if and only if we act as the pure I.

The pure I, however, is both subject and object, consciousness and being, pure drive and natural drive. These are separated only in empirical existence, the realm of the self-conscious subject. The pure I thus is not the individual at all and to act as the pure I is to let slip not just one’s inclinations but one’s existence as an individual. As Fichte writes, “It is precisely by means of …[the] disappearance and annihilation of one’s entire individuality that everyone becomes a pure presentation of the moral law in the world of sense and thus becomes a ‘pure I,’ in the proper sense of the term.”³⁸

In Fichte’s radicalization of Kant’s principle of universalizability, to be free is to be selfless. Yet each free act is also the fulfillment of natural ends, because the drive to self-activity is manifest in the sensible world and our moral acts also satisfy natural impulses. Real physical gratification is as essential to an ethical action as it is to any other act. We cannot act out of the higher power of desire alone; we are ever and always moving towards the objects of the natural drive, following the lower power. The aim is not asceticism but harmony, inner and outer at once. It is pleasure within reason—better yet, the unity of pleasure and reason—under the guidance of a perfected conscience.

It is also the unity of self and world, not in the subjection of one to the other but in the realization of their inseparability. The true rational community which reconciles individual and society, then, could not be one where individuals negotiate their affairs through rational discourse. It would be a community where the drive to pure self-activity runs without interference from one person to another, in which each person manifests the play of reason from moment to moment, and thus one in which the unity of self and world is continually enacted. For all of his anticipations of socialism in his economic thinking, Fichte has more accurately been termed an anarchist. The Nothstaat is indeed a makeshift as well as a necessity. It can never capture the developing patterns of human interaction. It should govern absolutely but govern as little as possible: just enough to secure the peace, to guarantee everyone the right to work and thus to contribute to the whole, to solve the “freeloader” problem and to protect the majority from those few who would destroy the equality needed for the deeper development of a shared way of life.

The real movement of life is outside the realm of the state. It is the progressive harmonization of human interests, effected by each person’s opening heror himself to the flow of reciprocal influences through which the drive to self-activity finds expression. Beyond the realm of the state is not civil society, with its voluntary organizations and its private individuals secure in their bourgeois freedoms. It is the self-expression and actualization of the totality, which is always in the process of being made and remade from within.

This seems very far from Kant and from the Enlightenment mainstream, yet Fichte is definitely working along Kantian lines, continuing the investigation of the processes whereby we constitute experience and apprehend the world. The difficulty and the sheer strangeness of the Wissenschaftslehre come from the insight that self-experience is not transparent. Accounting for it turned out to be more unsettling than even Fichte had anticipated, and one of the chief consequences of his investigation was the dissolution of the separation between self and world from which the philosophes and Aufklärer had proceeded so confidently. This was a more thoroughgoing revolution than anything in France, and it remains at best dimly understood. More than two centuries have passed and we have yet to come to terms with it.

11

Dualism in search of its undoing

For those who were following developments in German philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century there appeared to be two standard bearers for idealism, both of them in Jena: Fichte and his younger colleague Schelling. For a time the two worked as partners, defending and developing each other’s ideas and making common cause for transcendental idealism. But in a few years their partnership had ruptured. Schelling had quarreled with Fichte, as he would with just about everyone else, and Fichte had written him off as someone incapable of understanding what the Wissenschaftslehre was all about, as he habitually did with those who disagreed with him.

In retrospect it is surprising only that the partnership lasted as long as it did. Personal issues aside, their philosophical interests and intentions were strikingly and almost systematically different. Indeed, the first book publication of Schelling’s seminary roommate Hegel was to be an essay on the difference between the two. It is a text of some interest, but Hegel’s interpretation is not impartial. He had taken Fichte’s place as Schelling’s companion in arms and the two were now publishing a journal with their own work, usually uncredited. Hegel, habitually uncharitable towards Fichte, largely advances Schelling’s own claims in his book. It was Schelling’s system that pointed towards the future, although in Hegel’s view it had not yet been developed with sufficient clarity.

The apparent need to develop his ideas further remained a problem throughout Schelling’s long life. He was something of a moving target, and Hegel, who burned his own bridges with Schelling in the preface to his Phenomenology of Mind, later remarked that Schelling had conducted his philosophical education in public. From the mid-1790s through 1809 Schelling seemed to run through any number of different philosophies: transcendental idealism, speculative idealism, philosophies of nature, aesthetics, identity and “indifference,” a positive philosophy to set against a negative one and so on. After 1809 he published nothing, though he outlived all of his important contemporaries and died in 1854. He continued to lecture, however, and his public pronouncements were reported in journals and widely known; in 1841, when he was called to the chair of philosophy in Berlin that had once been Hegel’s, his first lectures were attended by Kierkegaard, Engels, Bakunin, Ranke, Burkhardt and Alexander von Humboldt, among others. These outlined yet more positions and were strongly influenced by Schelling’s increasing religiosity, the source of the positive element in his positive philosophy. Attendance at the lectures fell off rapidly, and by the end of the nineteenth century Schelling was all but forgotten.

There is a real consistency in this maze of systems, false starts and failures, however, and figures as different as Andrew Bowie and Slavoj Žižek have helped revive an interest in Schelling’s work. The underlying logic behind Schelling’s constant shifting of focus is not easy to discern in his own writing, however, and it may be helpful instead to start with a text by his other Tübingen roommate, Friedrich Hölderlin. One of the greatest of German poets, Hölderlin had the gifts of a major philosopher, but he made the conscious decision to present his ideas in the form of poetry instead of philosophical discourse. (He was also a political radical through most of his active life.)

Hölderlin’s text dates from 1795, the year that Fichte published The Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre. It is titled “Über Urtheil und Seyn,” “Of Judgment and Being,” but the text glosses “Urtheil,” or judgment, to mean “Ur-Theilung,” a primordial division. A perceptive, almost visionary critique of the early form of the Wissenschaftslehre, it anticipated Fichte’s development through 1798 and went on to suggest a real speculative idealism. It had a decisive effect on both Schelling and Hegel.

Hölderlin’s immediate focus was Fichte’s intellectual intuition and the notion of the Self as the identity of subject and object. Where Fichte started from the analysis of self-consciousness, however, Hölderlin began with a definition of absolute Being:

Being [Seyn]—expresses the joining of Subject and Object. Where Subject and Object are absolutely, not just partially united, and hence so united that no division can be undertaken, without destroying the essence of the thing that is to be sundered, there and not otherwise can we talk of Being as such, as is the case in intellectual intuition.¹

Mere identity falls short of real Being. Fichte’s act of self-positing does not constitute an intuition of Being itself, because its subject and object, though identical, “are not so united that absolutely no sundering can be undertaken, without destroying the essence of the thing that is to be sundered; on the contrary the Ego is only possible through this sundering of Ego from Ego.” It cannot claim the status of absolute unity proper to Being. It is made possible by judgment, the original act of division (Ur-Theilung), which is the condition of possibility for subject and object and which pre-exists their possible division.

That self-consciousness rests on division, on the sundering of self from self, not merely the act of self-posting or self-assertion, is consistent with the tendencies in Fichte’s thought that came to the fore by the time he wrote The System of Ethics. To have seen this far into the logic of the Wissenschaftslehre in 1795 would be impressive enough. Hölderlin, though, goes well beyond this. The assertion “I am I,” he argues, does not denote the unity of Being. Instead, it is a claim that can be made only within the realm of subject and object that has already been brought into existence with an act of judgment that must precede the self.

Hölderlin’s point is that both Being and Judgment, unity and division, are events within the philosophical history of the Absolute. The initial diremption for Fichte is the act through which the self makes itself. For Hölderlin, in contrast, it becomes a cosmic catastrophe, albeit a necessary one.

This is a significant break from Fichte and launches Hölderlin and Schelling on a distinct path of their own. Whatever Hölderlin’s intentions, Schelling will consistently place the primordial act of diremption outside of the human actor. Fichte never did this. For him, the real is absolutely one and appears as subject and object only within the experience of empirical individuals. While he gradually lets go of the idea that individual self-consciousness can be accounted for internally, by reference to the individual agent alone, the larger, impersonal structure which is manifest in individual acts of self-positing is not itself a realm of subject and object. This remains true even in Fichte’s late and overtly theological writings.

Connected with this shift on the part of Hölderlim and Schelling is a move towards traditional metaphysics and a philosophy of being. On the whole, Fichte asserts a transcendental form of ontology, as defined by Markus Gabriel:

Transcendental ontology investigates the ontological conditions of our conditions of access to what there is: … The subject with its conceptual capacities actually exists; it is part of the world. Therefore, the question arises: what conditions have to be fulfilled by being (the world) in order for it to appear to finite thinkers who in turn change the structure of what there is by referring to it?²

Fichte arrives at a position which definitively points to a supersen- sible realm and a global complex of activity from which both being and consciousness emerge. The nature of that realm is unknowable and it must remain so; preceding subject and object, it cannot be made the object of thought. What can be addressed in philosophy are the necessary conditions which must be presupposed if self- consciousness itself is to exist. These are the limits within which Fichte’s ontological concerns are consistent with his more or less Kantian premises, and Fichte observes them (most of the time, at least) by confining his attention to activities. His is thus also a kind of adjectival ontology. The real cannot be known, but its modes of operation can be deduced from their consequences in knowable experience, from the drives which are its expression and its traces.

Hölderlin and Schelling are both hunting different game. “Urtheil und Seyn” suggests the possibility of an “intellectual intuition” of absolute Being itself, and the notion of a primordial division within Being and outside of or prior to the emergence of the self opens up the possibility of something knowable—that is, something capable of being the object of knowledge—about the ground of sensible existence. Fichte’s intellectual intuition is nothing more than the immediate awareness of being a self-determining intellect, the being-determined-to-be-self-determining to which one is summoned in the Foundations of Natural Right but which The System of Ethics argues we discover from a reflection on original consciousness; he wrote in the later book, “no material substance is intuited by means of a feeling, but instead the intellect is intuited immediately as such, and nothing but the intellect is intuited.”³

For Schelling especially, the object of the intellectual intuition is quite different. It is absolute Being. Its form is identical with Fichte’s intellectual intuition, because in it the thought and the object of thought are the same. With Fichte, however, what is intuited is an act, and in that intuition we recognize how we bring self-conscious experience into being. Schelling’s intellectual intuition, by contrast, “is an immediate cognition of the absolute.” It is a “point of coincidence between formal absolute cognition and the absolute itself.”⁴

The differences between the two are well illustrated by Schelling’s use of A=A, the tautology with which Fichte had opened the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre. In Fichte’s text, it will be recalled, this universally-accepted equation is used to direct readers (and students) to the underlying act of self-positing that makes such judgments possible. “A=A” means “if A, then A,” and this cannot be said without positing an I or self which subsists and which judges. As George Seidel rephrases it in his useful commentary on the Foundations, “the ‘I am I’ is the condition for the possibility of asserting A=A.”⁵ The actual content of A=A is unimportant; what Fichte wants us to see is that we ourselves must be doing something behind the scenes that permits us to say A=A. As he did with the wall in the lecture Steffens attended, Fichte uses his investigation of A=A to shift our attention from the thought to the thinker and to the activity of constituting the thinker which is implicit in all of its thoughts.

In a text from 1801, “Presentation of my System of Philosophy,” Schelling also makes use of A=A. But even though he cites Fichte’s text and claims to be developing its logic, Schelling employs the tautology for entirely different ends. It is a statement of fact in itself, “the ultimate law for the being of reason, and, since there is nothing outside reason … for all being.”⁶ This law of identity, A=A, “is the sole truth posited in itself, without any reference to time…. [It is] an eternal truth, not in an empirical but in an absolute sense.”⁷

Fichte’s A=A launches the philosopher on a way of seeing; it directs attention to the acts which make it possible for there to be judgments and for there to be experience itself. Schelling’s A=A is a claim about ultimate reality. There is a “unique being posited through this proposition” which is “that of identity itself, which accordingly is posited in complete independence from A as subject and from A as predicate.”⁸

The echoes of Hölderlin are strong here. Schelling’s unique being is not a unification of subject and object. It is neither subjective nor objective. In a misleading borrowing from English, Schelling locates reason (and thus absolute being) “in the indifference-point of the subjective and objective.”⁹ What he means by “indifference” is more along the lines of un-difference or non-difference. The Absolute is not different from the subjective and it is not different from the objective. It is neither of these and it is not their identity either. It is completely and entirely its identity with itself.

Before considering what this standpoint can mean it is useful to see where it fits within Schelling’s work as a whole. When he published this text he was already well known in philosophical circles. His first important essay had appeared seven years earlier, when he was only nineteen, and he had published steadily ever since then and had assumed a professorship at Jena in 1798. Yet only now did he offer an account of his system “in its fully characteristic shape.”¹⁰

He did this, in part, because he had come to see that the public had misunderstood his philosophical project. Schelling first came to be known as an advocate of transcendental idealism. One of his early and most important essays, for example, was titled “Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy, or, On the Unconditional in Human Knowledge,” a subject which sounds as Fichtean as anything that Fichte wrote. Yet at the same time Schelling developed something that seemed entirely different and separate: a philosophy of nature, in which the sensible world was presented as the product of the activity of the Absolute as it reached towards consciousness.

There were formal similarities between these two bodies of thought. Both proceeded through oppositions, for example; transcendental idealism started with the opposition of self and not- self, which was elaborated through secondary and consequent oppositions until all of the operations of the intellect were deduced, and the philosophy of nature saw the sensible world as the product of opposed natural forces, dualities which issued in syntheses which themselves produced other dualities. But the realism implicit in the philosophy of nature seemed completely at odds with transcen- dental idealism.

The truth was that Schelling always interpreted the Wissenschaftslehre as a subjectivist philosophy and thought of it as one-sided and incomplete. He admitted that his own idealist works were similarly incomplete, but so was the philosophy of nature:

I never concealed from myself or from others the fact that I take neither what I term “transcendental philosophy” nor what I term “philosophy of nature,” each in isolation, to be the system of philosophy itself. Instead I announced in the clearest terms … that I regard each of them as nothing more than a one-sided presentation of that system…. I have always represented what I call philosophy of nature and transcendental philosophy as the opposite poles of philosophical activity. With the present exposition [the “Presentation of my System of Philosophy] I situate myself at the indifference-point; only if one has previously constructed [philosophy] from completely antithetical directions can one correctly and confidently place oneself there.¹¹

Both branches of philosophy move towards the same vanishing- point. Idealism starts from the subjective and philosophy of nature from the objective, and both lead towards the indifference point of absolute identity which is neither subject nor object.

Fichte strongly disagreed with this characterization, of course. For him Schelling had created yet another philosophy of being, an attempt at knowledge of a real ground, and “one cannot start out from being (everything toward which mere thinking is directed and, consequently, to which the real ground can be applied is being, even if one were to call it reason); rather, one must start out from seeing.”¹² Such a philosophy of seeing was not devoid of ontology, but the object of ontology could not be grasped in either science (to which any philosophy of nature can be assimilated) or in the Wissenschaftslehre itself. These inquiries are confined to the objective and subjective aspects of “the ideal-real and the real-ideal.”

Fichte’s position is made clear writes in another letter, one which is worth close attention:

Science, which, through a skillful abstraction, makes nature alone its object, must certainly posit nature as absolute … and must have nature construct itself by means of a fiction; similarly, transcendental philosophy has consciousness construct itself through the same kind of fiction.¹³

The parallelism should be taken literally. Science depends on the fiction that the sensible world is absolute in itself, internally self-determined and independent.¹⁴ This is a fiction because the sensible world is merely the presentation as objective nature of one aspect of the ungraspable unity of being and consciousness. Transcendental philosophy, the Wissenschaftslehre included, rests on an identical fiction, that the world of the thinking subject is also absolute in itself, internally self-determined and independent.

Fichte, then, was well aware that the Wissenschaftslehre was not a presentation of the unity of being and consciousness which was its real subject-matter. For obvious reasons it had to be limited to an analysis of consciousness and its transcendental conditions. Yet it was not one-sided and it did not need to be complemented by another form of philosophy. As he had tried to show through his working out of the conditions of self-consciousness, his analysis could establish at least three points: that certain forms of transcen- dental activity were necessary for self-experience to manifest itself, that this insight pointed towards an unknowable identity of being and consciousness which manifests itself as and within the world, and that the moral law identified those acts wherein our activity was identical with the activity of the absolute. It is because the Wissenschaftslehre can elucidate the partiality of both philosophy and science and thus create the opening for our non-discursive orien- tation towards the absolute that no other line of inquiry is needed.

For Fichte, Schelling’s methodology failed because the younger philosopher would not recognize that both science and philosophy rested on fictions, a fact which had been firmly established through the Wissenschaftslehre. Schelling had accepted their separation as fact instead and then tried to surpass that division. But those spheres were never actually divided; they were separate only under the conditions of self-consciousness. Any attempt to unite them, to fuse a philosophy of nature developing the inner logic of an objective world with a transcendental philosophy elucidating the inner logic of a subjective one, was a sign of an initial error.

Schelling remained adamant. For him, Fichte’s position could never escape subjectivity.¹⁵ In a later text his criticism of Fichte is clear:

Idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is the body; only both together can constitute a living whole. The latter can never provide the principle but must be the ground and medium in which the former makes itself real and takes on flesh and blood. If a philosophy is lacking this living foundation, which is commonly a sign that the ideal principle was originally only weakly at work within it, then it loses itself in those systems whose abstract concepts of aseity, modifications, and so forth, stand in the sharpest contrast with the living force and richness of reality.¹⁶

For Schelling there must be a real intuition of a real ground, the indifference point or Absolute, which manifests itself in nature, which in turn raises itself to consciousness, from which point consciousness then reaches back to unify the entire process by an elucidation of its operations and an intuition of its source. The circular movement that propels Fichte’s striving and the infinite rationalization and harmonization of all humanity is present in Schelling, too, but it is completed within the philosopher’s intellect instead of through human striving and human history.

Schelling, then, aspires to a grasp of the ground of existence, the aim of all traditional metaphysics. He was hardly a traditional dogmatist and he was far too intelligent and far too aware of Kant’s work to be satisfied with an arbitrary ground provided by revelation or by the longings of the heart. Jacobi’s faith was not a solution for him. He was thus very careful to avoid objectifying the Absolute. His use of the term “indifference” resembles the language of Indian non- dualism, where the very term “non-dualism” avoids the objectifying implications of “monism.” Schelling’s Absolute is not apart from the subjective and it is not apart from the objective. Its identity is mere self-identity; it possesses the intimate and indissoluble unity of Hölderlin’s Being.

The problem is that this tells us nothing, and Schelling is after knowledge. He needs to move from the perfect self-contained self-identity of the Absolute to the universe, which is exhibited in its objective aspect through the philosophy of nature and in its subjective aspect through idealism. Viewed from the other direction, these two streams of inquiry must meet at something other than a blank wall. Their fusion must exhibit the inherent nature of the Absolute. It is not the Absolute itself; this claim would run counter to Hölderlin’s warning that a unity that can be put together from parts is not the real unity of Being. Somehow, however, the real nature of Being would be apparent to us once we reached the conjunction of those two paths.

At the heart of Schelling’s project, then, is the difficulty of transcending the division between the two branches of his philosophy. In a larger context this is the difficulty of joining self and world. For Schelling these were indeed not separate, but their unity existed only in the Absolute, and the problem of holding them together in a single vision crops up whenever one moves out from that unity or looks back into it. The problem of creation and the problem of knowledge are thus the two sides of the same coin.

The mainstream Enlightenment project of developing a discursive framework in which self and world are reconciled had no appeal to Schelling, of course, but he was also unconvinced by Fichte’s argument that the separation of self and world was an artifact of self-positing. Instead, like Hölderlin, Schelling saw it as part of a primordial division within Being itself, and like most other philosophers in the Western tradition he wanted to know what lay behind that division.

He and Fichte are virtually inverted reflections of one another. For Fichte there was an unknowable unity that manifested itself within self-consciousness as the duality of subject and object, and the way back behind that apparent duality lay in the embodied knowledge that produces ethical action. For Schelling, on the other hand, subject and object were real manifestations of Being itself that emerged prior to human self-consciousness, and the way back to the unity of Being was through philosophical contemplation. Paradoxically, this shift towards individual and interior activity was demanded by Schelling’s placement of the initial separation in history, in the moment of creation. The world itself was broken, and only the individual could make it whole. For Fichte, by contrast, the world was not broken and ethical activity progressively dispelled the illusion that it was. What compounded these differences is that Fichte, for whom the intentionality of the absolute was embodied in ethical action, was willing to relinquish discursive knowledge of its nature. Schelling was not.

Schelling’s inevitable focus is the passage from the self-identical Absolute to the universe which is nominally contained within it. The rupture within human experience was merely a reflection of that primordial division.¹⁷ For a few years he suggested that this rupture could be healed only in the perfection of a work of art. Aesthetics thus stood at the pinnacle of his thinking as the sole point of unity available to human knowledge. But this shift from the philosophical to the aesthetic did not satisfy Schelling for long. He was drawn back, over and over, to the moment of creation and to the questions, ultimately theological ones, of why there is something rather than nothing and where evil originates.

These issues come to a climax of sorts in Schelling’s 1809 essay on human freedom. Professional reversals and personal tragedies may have given an edge to such concerns, but they are also implicit in his philosophical project as a whole. If everything is within the pure identity of the Absolute, which Schelling no longer hesitates to label God, where is there room for human freedom? And why is there evil?

Schelling’s answer is a difficult one and it was not entirely satis- factory even to the author. The Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom was announced as the first in a series of essays. None of the others ever appeared, and Schelling then turned to the composition of The Ages of the World, a text that was to be part philosophical treatise and part visionary poem. After three attempts he gave that up as well.

Yet these failures are always interesting in themselves. The crux of the essay on human freedom is the distinction between God himself and his ground. This ground is “nature—in God, a being indeed inseparable, yet still distinct, from him.”¹⁸ This difficult concept is not significantly clarified by Schelling’s analogy to gravity and light, in which gravity is the ever-dark ground of light; but what this obscure comparison does bring out is Schelling’s intuition that darkness is itself an intrinsic aspect of that which is at once God and that out of which God produces himself.

Before there is anything there is the circular movement of God and ground:

In the circle out of which everything becomes, it is no contradiction that that through which the One is generated may itself be in turn begotten by it…. God has in himself an inner ground of his existence that in this respect precedes him in existence; but, precisely in this way, God is again the prius [what is before] of the ground in so far as the ground, even as such, could not exist if God did not exist actu.¹⁹

This is “the yearning the eternal One feels to give birth to itself. The yearning is not the One itself but is after all co-eternal with it. The yearning wants to give birth to God, that is, unfathomable unity, but in this respect there is not yet unity in the yearning itself.”²⁰ We are at a stage even before Hölderlin’s Being.

The darkness of the ground is not merely analogical but real. The self-generation of God manifests that absolute unity, but it also brings forth nature, the manifestation of the ground in the world of becoming that is our own world, and which is blighted by loss, yearning and imperfection as a result:

After the eternal act of self-revelation, everything in the world is, as we see it now, rule, order and form; but anarchy still lies in the ground, as if it could break through once again, and nowhere does it appear as if order and form were what is original but rather as if initial anarchy had been brought to order. This is the incomprehensible base of reality in things, the indivisible remainder, that which with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in understanding but rather remains eternally in the ground…. Without this preceding darkness creatures have no reality; darkness is their necessary inheritance.²¹

This extraordinary vision of the pre-existence of chaos reads like a gloss on the opening of Genesis, when the spirit of God broods over the face of the waters.

Žižek paints the state of existence before existence in characteris- tically flamboyant but not inaccurate terms: “Prior to the Word there is the chaotic-psychotic universe of blind drives, of their rotary motion, of their undifferentiated pulsing, and the Beginning occurs when the Word is pronounced that ‘represses,’ rejects into the eternal Past, the self-enclosed circuit of drives.”²² God alone is in the light, and creation, though entirely contained within God—who creates the ground out of which he creates himself, it must be remem- bered—inherits the disunity of the ground, its yearning for God and its deep and destructive darkness.

The identity of God and ground is not so distant from the anodyne identity of subjective and objective in the Presentation of My System of Philosophy, but it is incomparably richer. It, too, is a form of indifference, as the divine is not different from that which is not divine and yet not different from its own all-perfect nature. The essay on human freedom has been described as a theodicy, and as such it perhaps stands as the only possible or at least tolerable theodicy. It is one which accepts the perfection of the most intolerable darkness, as is otherwise found only in images like that of the terrifying Indian goddess Kali or the antinomian creator/destroyer Shiva.

The gods of Hinduism, though, are objects of devotion. They are not explanations. Schelling wants more than they can offer and he does not find it. His brilliant raids on the incomprehensible are endlessly suggestive, but they never return with the discursive knowledge of the Absolute that they sought. Schelling sometimes seems like a man who repeatedly throws himself against a brick wall.

It is worth following him there, though, because that brick wall is more than a product of his methodology. It really exists. Schelling’s insistence on the darkness and chaos at the root of the manifest world keeps him focused on the tragic aspects of existence that Fichte refuses to see. The movement of the Wissenschaftslehre can easily be seen as ironic or even tragic; we strive to eliminate the not-Self, but if we were to succeed in that task we would unravel the basis for our own existence. Self-consciousness, then, always strives for its own undoing; all individual life yearns to vanish into the undifferentiated unity of the Absolute. Fichte’s overheated rhetoric and his air of strenuous uplift generally conceal this truth. Schelling admits it.

The consistency in Schelling’s work is the persistence with which he returns to “the original divorce” (as he calls it in the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature) and the perspicuity with which he develops its consequences. His work is not more profound than Fichte’s and it does indeed seem like a wrong-headed enterprise if one grants Fichte’s presupposition that being and consciousness are ultimately one and that their divorce is not an event of ontological significance but a matter of epistemology. But it addresses itself much more than Fichte’s does to the inner experience of a life where separation—of self from world, consciousness from being, experience from reality—is not merely incidental but foundational. He is more convincing as a philosopher of loss than he is when he tries to present a positive philosophy to set alongside his negative one.

In much of his greatest work Schelling’s old roommate Hölderlin also appears as a philosopher of loss. “Bread and Wine,” for example, written at about the same time as Schelling’s Presentation of my System of Philosophy, continually poses oppositions and then reverses their polarities, evoking through its movement as much as by its explicit statements a sense of separation and loss that betokens our estrangement from our own inmost being.

Hölderlin builds up his theme slowly. The poem begins at nightfall in a small town. It is “visionary night.” (Hölderlin calls night “Schwärmerische,” a term associated at the time with the dangers of religious enthusiasm.) Night is incomprehensible and intoxicating, and humanity shies away from it. But “something at least endures for us in the dark,”²³ something that leads to a more vital and daring life; this is what the poet and the madman seek. The poem then bursts into a hymn to the idealized Greece that so haunted German thought, only to lament the vanishing of temples, oracles, rituals and the gods themselves, whose day comes to humanity only through the shadows—those named “Eines und Alles,” one and all—Hen kai pan, an obvious echo of Lessing in Jacobi’s text.

Where are they, too, the old holy theaters?

Why is the sacred, holy dance no longer celebrated?

Why, as never before, is the brow of man unmarked by a god?

It is because humankind cannot bear very much reality, as T. S. Eliot was to say. The gods live still, over our heads, but they keep their distance out of their love, for we are weak and frail and we cannot bear the light of their truth. The few who catch glimpses of that light are the poets. But theirs is a hard fate. In lines wrenchingly evocative of his own life and destiny Hölderlin writes

…Meanwhile, I often

Think it’s better to sleep than to be without friends,

Always waiting, and what to say or do in the meantime,

I don’t know, and of what use are poets in such meager times?²⁴

The poet’s fate, though, is only a more extreme version of our own. We, too, are cut off from the fullness of life and from the unity of humanity and the gods. We are left with one consolation, the rituals of Christianity, which are here reimagined in pagan terms; bread and wine remind us of the gods who will one day come again, and wine especially, the gift of the poet’s wine-god Dionysus. But for all that, there is only the promise of reunion and the overwhelming sense of loss. The day of the gods is only fitfully seen in our night, and our daylight turns the emblems of the wine-god into merchandise and accepts reasoning and account-keeping in place of ecstatic dance and ritual.

Hölderlin is universally and deservedly recognized as one of the greatest of German poets, but in this context what is most worthy of note is how “Bread and Wine” places the reader in the same dilemma in which Schelling perpetually finds himself. Hölderlin departs from Schelling by sketching a kind of philosophical history, but both see the world as ultimately one and both see separation as an inevitable fall from primordial unity. In both “Bread and Wine” and Schelling’s Essay on Human Freedom the gulf between divinity and the sensible realm is unreal and yet unbridgeable. Only the seer can hold them together, and that takes place only in moments of inspiration, intuition, or madness. We are condemned to solitude. It is no wonder that part of Schelling’s appeal today is as a forerunner of existentialism.

12

Separation, unity, differentiation

Schelling’s and Hölderlin’s turn towards a philosophy of being and being’s self-diremption implied if it did not require an all but impassable gulf between the objective and the subjective, between the world and the self. In theory this gulf was an illusion; for Schelling, at least in 1801, the only reality was reason, and reason was absolute self-identity. Everything existent had its empirical being only through a differing proportion of subjective and objective aspects.¹ But everything existent could be understood only through the objective logic of the philosophy of nature or the subjective logic of transcendental idealism. The identity which was the real ground and real nature of all things, humanity included, was nowhere realized. It could be divined through Schelling’s special kind of intel- lectual intuition or made palpable in the inspired work of art, but in itself it was never actual. Schelling criticized Fichte for the subjec- tivism he saw in the Wissenschaftslehre, but his own philosophy made individual experience the focus of a fundamentally contemplative philosophy and it left the thinking subject in its traditional role, as the agent who could pierce through illusion to reality. In the absence of the intellectual intuition, however, the subject was cut off from the activity of the objective realm, isolated in an apparently alien world. Paradoxically, a philosophical trajectory that began with a move towards dissolving the opposition between self and world had led to a focus on interiority and alienation that was far more intense than anything implied by the conventional sensationalism that Kant had critiqued.

Yet at least one of the seeds of the new interiority had been planted by Kant himself, if it does not hearken back to Leibniz and the problem he had attempted to resolve with the doctrine of preex- isting harmony. As Jan Goldstein has pointed out, eighteenth-century sensationalist psychology distinguished between reason and imagination, faculties which had been considered as one since Aristotle. Both operated through representations of experience and associations of ideas, but reason was disciplined and public where imagination was private, unrooted in actual experience and therefore psychologically dangerous as well as anti-social. Much attention was paid to disciplining and restricting imagination and the tendency to solitary thinking that it was said to foster.²

Kant, however, had valorized imagination, placed it back in the ordinary activities of the mind and given it a central role in the production of experience. Without the productive imagination experience itself could not occur; what we take for direct perception is in fact the imaginative presentation of the manifold as shaped by the schemata of the understanding. Our experience is our own collaboration with the sensual environment and it is impossible without the continuous operation of the imagination.

Problems crop up once imagination comes back in from the cold, however. The tie between experience and external reality begins to loosen. Sensationalism had linked these by treating rational subjec- tivity as the disciplined combination of immediate and therefore reliable impressions made on the mind by external objects. So long as Hume’s criticisms were ignored this was a satisfactory connection between interior and exterior realms. But no such direct connection existed with Kant. His reason remained public and lawlike and its schemata presumably dictated a single configuration of experience for each given manifold. Yet merging reason and imagination made it more difficult to separate reality from illusion.³ There is a fine line between the imaginative presentation of the manifold and a halluci- nation, and Kant’s role for imagination is not too far from the view of contemporary neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, who wrote, “It’s as if each of us is hallucinating all the time and what we call perception involves merely selecting the one hallucination that best matches the current input.”⁴

Fichte was easily able to avoid this danger. For him subjective experience and action were intertwined, two aspects of a unity, and this grounded the operations of the imagination. Activity provides the foundation for veridical representations and ideas and the standard by which we can distinguish between reality and dream. Schelling, on the other hand, does not connect action and thought, and like the early Romantics he leaves open the possibility that these two can drift apart, sometimes fruitfully but also sometimes disas- trously.

What is more, Schelling’s variety of idealism could not but have political consequences. Few are capable of the intellectual intuition that gives access to knowledge of the absolute and those few would thus have a privileged insight into the nature of reality. It is a short step from this to the conclusion that those who are gifted with the knowledge of the nature of things are especially qualified to order the lives of those who have no such gift. Schelling’s weakness for the oracular thus seems symptomatic of an underlying distrust of the masses. Hölderlin, more of a democrat by nature, understood the problem better than Schelling did. His three attempts at a verse drama on the death of Empedocles struggle with the dilemmas facing an inspired seer within an unenlightened community, but in none of them did he find a solution.

Fichte took a completely different course, in keeping with the different implications of his philosophical position. He himself was always willing to act as the inspired lawgiver, but his pronounce- ments were generally in the realm of meta-ethics and meta-politics, just as his ontology was adjectival rather than denotative.⁵ They were not commandments for ethical conduct or outlines of the one proper political order. Instead, they were meant to outline the frame- works within which ordinary humans could negotiate their social relations and engage in their collaborative ethical self-perfection. Fichte’s concerns were consistently more egalitarian than those of his younger rivals and this was apparent not just explicitly but in his strategies as a writer and as what we would call today a public intel- lectual. After 1798 his books no longer addressed the scholarly elite. Instead, he tried with some success to reach the larger literate public.

There were several interrelated reasons for this shift. Fichte ultimately stopped trying to present a comprehensive written account of the Wissenschaftslehre, coming to believe that the self- investigation needed to attain the perspective of philosophy could be taught only face-to-face. His texts for numerous lecture courses on the Wissenschaftslehre survive and have been published (it is a great pity that nobody transcribed the discussion sessions that followed each lecture) but none of them appeared in print during his life.⁶

Fichte had also suffered a major reversal of his professional fortunes. In 1798 he had been accused of atheism on the strength of an essay, “On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World- Governance.” For anyone familiar with Fichte’s writings, especially The System of Ethics, this accusation was absurd; Fichte was as “God- intoxicated” as Spinoza. Like Spinoza’s, however, Fichte’s religion could look like atheism to the unsympathetic or the philosophically simple because he rejected the notion of a personal divinity. The accusation was at least plausible, then, and at the end of the eighteenth century in Germany it was as serious as an allegation of Islamist sympathies would be in today’s United States or even worse.

Fichte had the overall support of his superiors, but with charac- teristic self-righteousness and political insensitivity he played his hand badly and alienated those who had started out on his side. He was unable to appreciate the political pressures faced by the author- ities in Weimar and was unwilling to accept even a pro forma reprimand. Turning the dispute into a life-and-death struggle, Fichte left his superiors no face-saving way out except to remove him from his professorship. In 1800 he moved to Berlin, where he remained for most of the rest of his life. In 1809 he was named professor of philosophy and rector of the newly-founded University of Berlin, but by 1812 his principles and poor political skills had once again led to his resignation. (Among other things, he had insisted on disciplining students for an anti-Semitic outrage.)

Much of Fichte’s work during his later years was directed not at university students but at the intelligentsia and political elite of Prussia. While in Berlin he gave courses on the Wissenschaftslehre in his home and offered lectures on subjects of more general interest. His first publication after the atheism controversy, however, the last of his Jena works, was a popular presentation of his thinking with an explicitly religious conclusion. For it Fichte borrowed the tile of Spaulding’s popular devotional tract, The Vocation of Man.

It is often supposed that the religiosity in The Vocation of Man was Fichte’s response to the charge of atheism and a deliberate change of course. Such an interpretation generally goes along with a division of Fichte’s work into an initial period of egoism and a later theological period, where the absolute Self is replaced by the Absolute pure and simple. As The System of Ethics shows, however, the tendency towards an immanent theology developed in Fichte’s thought by an inner logic, not by the need to meet objections from outside.

That logic has best been analyzed by Dieter Henrich, who sees it as Fichte’s responses to the three “paradoxes of self-reference,” the problems that arise once one realizes that the simple reflection model of self-consciousness is inadequate.⁷ Fichte only gradually came to recognize these paradoxes. He seems to have started with the belief that the grounding and the structure of self-knowledge could be fully accounted for within the activity of each individual. Such a “complete” theory of self-consciousness eluded him, however; Fichte found that could not explain self-consciousness through the operations of the individual whose self-consciousness it was. He thus began to explore the possibility that the phenomenon of self-knowledge arose within a larger, more all-embracing process. The theory of the summons in the Foundations of Natural Right was Fichte’s first published attempt at deriving self-consciousness from such a process, and while it had the advantage of hewing close to his apparently egoistic starting point it turned out to be no solution at all. It was only with The System of Ethics, where the self is a claim asserted within the ongoing play of drives, that his mature position emerges. With that discovery the focus of the Wissenschaftslehre shifts from the structure of self-positing to the transcendental reason from which self-positing withdraws but which the internal structure of self-consciousness also reveals.

Fichte himself did not think that his position had changed at all. In 1806, in the preface to a set of lectures on religion, he wrote of “that philosophy in which I have been a partaker for thirteen years, and which, although, I hope, it has changed many things in me, has nevertheless itself suffered no change whatever during that period.”⁸ Even the reinterpretation of self-positing as an act which is also a claim remains within the strict meaning of the term; as Henrich points out, along with placing and affirming Setzen can indicate the posing of an hypothesis or the putting-forth of a defensible thesis.⁹ The tearing away of the self from the self, which enacts the thesis that the self exists and is independent, is just such a positing.

In a letter to Schelling, too, Fichte described The Vocation of Man as setting out “the clearest indications” of his “transcendental system of intelligible world.”¹⁰ There is no reason not to take him at his word. The Vocation of Man can thus be taken as the most compre- hensive, though hardly the most rigorous, presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre as a whole, bridging and consistent with both his early and later work.

It is an unusual text, however, unlike anything else Fichte was to write. A dialogue with an unseen spirit flanked by two meditations, it is written in the persona of a seeker, someone in search of his calling, the titular vocation of all humanity. Its first-person narrator is obviously fictional, but the structure of the argument enacts the same kind of existential crisis that Fichte might have experienced before his discovery of Kant. What it leads to, however, is not the assertion of an independent and self-created ego. Fichte’s conclusion is anti-individualist and unabashedly mystical.

Fichte was writing for the ordinary reader, and instead of theoretical questions he roots the foundations of the Wissenschaftslehre in broad concerns about human freedom and the possibility of knowledge. The first meditation, entitled “Doubt,” presents a materialistic picture in which the principle of sufficient reason and the apparent reality of external objects lead to a vision of soulless mechanism and absolute determinism. The universe appears as a single process—for Fichte this is the sine qua non of any successful explanation—but that process leaves no room at all for human freedom and agency. Freedom is the deepest wish of the heart, but it seems a mere supposition, an unsupported claim that is at best merely conceivable. Yet our protagonist has apparently read his Kant, because he concludes that the system of determinism is equally unfounded; in adopting it he would “extend a principle, which is perfectly true in its own place, beyond its proper and natural application.”¹¹ He is left in a state of indecision.

This darkness is interrupted by the appearance of a “wondrous spirit” who promises to set the protagonist on the right road. This section is titled “Knowledge,” and the spirit guarantees that the results of the inquiry will be irrefutable. In Socratic fashion it will do no more than draw out from the seeker that which he already knows. A dialogue ensues in which the spirit develops a wholly subjectivist theory of knowledge, very much what the Wissenschaftslehre was popularly presumed to be. Yet this leaves the narrator in even more doubt than he was before. What knowledge grasps are mere images, and the realm of knowledge is nothing more than fantasy:

Pictures are: - they are the only things which exist, and they know of themselves after the fashion of pictures: - pictures which float past without there being anything past which they float; which, by means of like pictures, are connected with each other: - pictures without anything which is pictured in them, without significance and without aim. I myself am one of these pictures; - nay, I am not even this, but merely a confused picture of the pictures. All reality is transformed into a strange dream, without a life which is dreamed of, and without a mind which dreams it; into a dream which is woven together in a dream of itself. Intuition is the dream; thought, - the source of all the being and all the reality which I imagine, of my own being, my own powers, and my own purposes, - is the dream of that dream.¹²

Precisely, says the spirit, to which the protagonist responds with fury. But the spirit explains that its one aim was to annihilate error, to point up the absurdity of trying through knowledge to grasp that which lies behind the representations with which knowledge must work. What lies behind the mere image cannot be found through knowledge. But there is another way of grasping that reality, adds the spirit—and with that the mysterious being vanishes.

There may be a criticism of Schelling behind the assertion that intuition is a mere dream. In the larger context, though, the first two sections of The Vocation of Man present the underlying problematic out of which Fichte’s philosophy grew, framed more sharply by the opposition between objective and subjective paths of inquiry. The deterministic cosmos of “Doubt” calls Jacobi to mind; it outlines the dire consequences of taking the reality of the sensible world as the whole of things and reducing existence to the play of cause and effect. What may be a little more surprising is the Humean conclusion of the second section, where Fichte adopts the subjective path generally associated with idealism to demonstrate that knowledge can never show us reality. As long as we count on knowledge, “the battle to establish reliable links between thought and reality” would always be a losing one.

Schelling laid out objective and subjective systems of knowledge in the philosophy of nature and his transcendental idealism respec- tively, striving against the limits of knowledge itself to uncover their point of unity. Fichte, by contrast, outlined these paths in order to demonstrate their deceptiveness. He asks his readers not to unify them but to unlearn them. As Henrich points out, the Wissenschaftslehre is a docta ignorantia, a learned unknowing.¹³ The first two sections of The Vocation of Man carry out that process of unlearning, and they do so with such thoroughness that the reader is left in the deepest of perplexities.

Unlearning in and of itself would hardly qualify as a form of philosophizing, of course, and Fichte has no intention of leaving the reader in the dark. His affirmative doctrines appear in the third section of the text, which is controversially titled “Faith.” The faith of which it speaks, however, is not that of a conventional believer. It should be recalled that the German word “Glaube” has the meanings of two English words, belief and faith, and is broader than both. It need not mean assent to an article of faith; “Glaube” can just as easily mean a justified confidence in an element of one’s experience. Fichte’s faith is not a salto mortale like Jacobi’s, and unlike Jacobi’s it does not led him to a personal God. In a real sense it is the confi- dence that the agency which we claim through the tearing-away of the self from itself is real agency and embodies real freedom. There are theological consequences to this confidence, at least as Fichte develops them, but as with Kant’s religion within the bounds of reason Fichte’s theology is derived from the moral law instead of the moral law following from the revelation of a realm of spirit.

There is nothing explicitly religious about the breakthrough that ushers in the third part of the text, however. In it the narrator realizes that he does more than think. He acts, and it is activity alone that determines his worth. And at once he understands that action, which must be deliberate and conscious, is itself “greater and higher than all knowledge, and … contains within itself the end and object of all knowledge. When I act, I doubtless know that I act, and how I act; nevertheless this knowledge is not the act itself, but only the obser- vation of it. This voice thus announces to me precisely that which I sought; a something lying beyond mere knowledge, and, in its nature, wholly independent of knowledge.”¹⁴ Just as immediately he embraces the theory of drives set out in The System of Ethics:

There is within me an impulse to absolute, independent self-activity. Nothing is more insupportable to me than to be merely by another, for another, and through another; I must be something for myself and by myself alone. This impulse I feel along with the perception of my own existence, it is inseparably united to my consciousness of myself.

I explain this feeling to myself by reflection; and, as it were, endow this blind impulse with the gift of insight by the power of thought. According to this impulse I must act as an absolutely independent being: - thus I understand and translate the impulse. I must be independent. Who am I? Subject and object in one, - the conscious being and that of which I am conscious, gifted with intuitive knowledge and myself revealed in that intuition, the thinking mind and myself the object of the thought inseparable and ever present to each other. As both, must I be what I am, absolutely by myself alone; - by myself originate conceptions, - by myself produce a condition of things lying beyond these conceptions.¹⁵

This sounds as egoistic as any philosophy could be. The separation of self and world is fully present, and all weight is placed on the self- sufficient, indeed imperial self. Such language supports the argument that Fichte is primarily concerned with the creation and maintenance of a stable ego in a mutable world

These interpretations, though, fail to place passages like this one in the context of the work as a whole. It is only Fichte’s starting point, and through the third section of The Vocation of Man the protagonist is repeatedly brought back to that starting point until he surrenders his initial egoism and discovers that the only reality—the fullness of that reality which he encounters in that drive—is the self-expression of the divine will.¹⁶ The text is a moral education which by stages takes the narrator from the self-assertion of the initial discovery of the drive to self-activity to an ecstatic conclusion in which he announces, “I regard myself merely as one of the instruments for carrying out the purpose of reason; I respect, love, or feel an interest in myself only as such an instrument, and desire the successful issue of my deed only in so far as it promotes this purpose.”¹⁷

This line of development links together both the individual and social concerns expressed in The Vocation of Man. These include notorious passages on the rationalization of nature, which attracted Schelling’s ire for their apparently instrumental approach to the natural world and which continue to darken Fichte’s reputation. They are hardly the most convincing portions of the text. Some of Fichte’s arguments, however, such as the claim that cultivation of the soil would moderate the climate, was simply the science of the day; that “rain follows the plow” was widely believed throughout the nineteenth century and following its logic was one of the causes of the Dust Bowl. Other portions are perhaps forgivable when one recalls that Fichte himself grew up in rural poverty. Yet others are simply odd, such as his belief that earthquakes and volcanoes would grow less intense in a fully humanized world.

More likely to please today’s readers are Fichte’s political views, which even in 1800 remained strikingly cosmopolitan and egali- tarian. Fichte is admittedly willing to consider the inhabitants of much of the non-European world as savages, but he allows even savages the full humanity exhibited by more civilized folk, and the unification of all peoples to which the moral law directs us is to be accomplished by the rise of the less developed races to the civilized state instead of a self-imposed mission civilatrice on the part of the more advanced:

[U]ntil the existing culture of every age shall have been diffused over the whole inhabited globe, and our race become capable of the most unlimited inter-communication with itself, one nation or one continent must pause on the great common path of progress, and wait for the advance of the others; and each must bring as an offering to the universal commonwealth, for the sake of which alone it exists, its ages of apparent immobility or retrogression.¹⁸

And Fichte is even more withering in his criticism of war and of “those singular associations, thrown together by unreasoning accident, which we call States.”¹⁹ These last are fated to be plagued by class division and oppression,

until at last oppression shall reach its limit, and become wholly insupportable, and despair give back to the oppressed that power which their courage, extinguished by centuries of tyranny, could not procure for them. They will then no longer endure any among them who cannot be satisfied to stand and to abide on an equality with others.²⁰

There could be no contemporary reader who would not take this for a defense of the revolution in France. Fichte makes it into a paradigm for necessary historical change.

Neither the rationalization of the natural world nor the unifi- cation of humanity are ends in themselves, however. They come about because the moral law makes their accomplishment necessary. This law demands that we act impartially and that our aims be universalizable; the entire sensible world must be unified. Not surprisingly, it thus demands that we strive for a world in which universalizable motives have universal effects. The moral law drives us to make a morally ordered world, but that hardly seems to be something within our power.

Fichte then turns this notion on its head. The results of moral actions are often hard to see or even to count on, and by contrast the progress of humanity is often fostered by actions which are less than honorable. Yet the moral law still commands, and we would not observe its commands unless we thought that they directed us to efficacious actions. Those effects are self-evidently not to be found in the world of sense, however, no matter how it is unified and ratio- nalized; time and chance will always stand between the deed and its desired end. For our ethical acts to bear fruit, Fichte argues, they must affect something else. There must be a supersensible world which is transformed by moral activity. Since freedom is following the moral law, this also means that the reality of freedom depends on the existence of a morally-ordered supersensible world which has real effects on the world of the senses.²¹

Here, of course, Fichte enters the realm of theology. As we have already seen, the obligatory character of the moral law demands that we assume a moral order to the world. Kant recognized this, but what for Kant was a necessary idea of reason is here an ontological assertion. Henrich, among others, has considered this to be a step outside Fichte’s self-imposed methodological limits and even self- inflicted theoretical damage. Yet Fichte does not throw all of his starting points overboard. He does indeed move to a speculative theology, but it is a theology of seeing, not a theology of being. All that we know of the divine is its activity of self-manifesting, its self- revelation in the world and as the world. It is the supraindividual will that manifests as and takes back into itself the wills of all rational beings. It is ultimately the inherent liberatory movement of reality itself.

In this light nature finally appears as something other than an inert mass that functions only as the terrain for our moral devel- opment. It, too, is the self-manifestation of the divine. Everything, both spirit and matter, is the expression of one life which “forms, flows forth through me, and throughout the immeasurable universe of Nature:”

Here it streams as self-creating and self-forming matter through my veins and muscles, and pours out its abundance into the tree, the plant, the grass. Creative life flows forth in one continuous stream, drop on drop, through all forms and into all places where my eye can follow it; it reveals itself to me, in a different shape in each various corner of the universe, as the same power by which in secret darkness my own frame was formed. There, in free play, it leaps and dances as spontaneous activity in the animal, and manifests itself in each new form as a new, peculiar, self-subsisting world: - the same power which, invisibly to me, moves and animates my own frame. Everything that lives and moves follows this universal impulse, this one principle of all motion, which, from one end of the universe to the other, guides the harmonious movement; - in the animal without freedom; in me, from whom in the visible world the motion proceeds although it has not its source in me, with freedom.²²

The difficult point that Fichte tries to convey, here, though, is more than the essential divinity of all things. It is a point about agency, and in particular the claim to independent self-activity with which the third part of the text had begun.

Fichte’s theology, like his ethics, implies a kind of distributed agency. In the passage above he seems to deprive us of the very freedom he claims to be installing as the highest principle of action. If our activity is not our own in its source how could we be said to be free? The answer lies in Fichte’s understanding of individuality. He consistently denies that individuals have any real existence and his position in both The System of Ethics and The Vocation of Man is that each of us is merely an instantiation of the global process which in the latter text he calls God. Yet the pure immanence of that global process means that every individual will is an aspect of the divine will.

The integration of human and divine is not carried out through anything like a providential order or the cunning of reason. Fichte’s stress on immanence and his concentration on seeing rather than being would rule these out. Instead, it arises through the same kind of reciprocal activity that structures and stipulates the activity of organisms in general:

This is the great mystery of the invisible world, and its fundamental law, in so far as it is a world or system of many individual wills: - the union and direct reciprocal action of many separate and independent wills; a mystery which already lies clearly before every eye in the present life, without attracting the notice of anyone or being regarded as in any way wonderful…. [T]his mutual recognition and reciprocal action of free beings in this world, is perfectly inexplicable by the laws of nature or of thought.²³

Fichte was absolutely right to point this out. Our mutual recognition and understanding are indeed difficult to account for through conscious and rational grounds. The “zombie problem” in contem- porary philosophy reflects this difficulty, as do the many contro- versies over the nature and even the existence of a theory of mind. Only recently have naturalistic explanations for these phenomena begun to appear, and these lead to anti-individualistic conclusions not unlike Fichte’s.²⁴ Simply recognizing this problem was one of Fichte’s most notable accomplishments, one which is all the more important today because its real depth is still often unappreciated.

Fichte, of course, did not propose a naturalistic solution.²⁵ For him the vehicle was spirit. He writes, “Through this mysterious union does each individual perceive, understand, and love himself only in another; each soul unfolds itself only through its fellows, and there are no longer individual men, but only one humanity; no individual thought or love or hate, but only thought, love and hate, in and through each other.”²⁶

Yet such language gives one pause. We seem to be back at the beginning of our protagonist’s search, once again in the presence of a totalizing process to whose logic all must yield. The only difference seems to be that the process was deemed mechanical in part one of The Vocation of Man and was then rebranded as spiritual in part three of the text. If both human and natural activity are manifestations of the same divine life, what makes human action a product of freedom and the action of cats and cockroaches something else? If we do not actually will, but God wills in and through us, how can we be said to exercise freedom in any meaningful way?

The answer is not perfectly clear from Fichte’s text but it can be reconstructed in his terms. It begins with the anti-individualistic tendencies of the moral law in Kant. Since the moral law sets itself against all inclination, it therefore negates as a motivating force any of the specific needs that we have as embodied human agents. To act with freedom is to transcend our individual needs and desires and act as if we were legislating for the whole world—to assume the perspective of the divine, as it were.

Kant’s refusal to thematize the human subject proper left this as an obligation and its fulfillment is only a regulative idea. The individual does not disappear, primarily because its existence is taken for granted. Moral development consists in a constant struggle to shape individual actions in accordance with rational demands, and the unification of wills in the kingdom of ends is merely an ideal and cannot be fully realized.

Fichte habitually radicalizes Kant, and in this instance his radicalization turns on the embodied nature of the moral law and the manifestation of the divine as a drive—indeed, as the fons et origo of all drives. Kant considered the moral law to be a fact of reason, the sole such fact, but its nature remains obscure, though he also speaks of it as a command to which we respond emotionally, for example by humiliation or respect.²⁷ This goes along with Kant’s tendency to assimilate action to the working out of discursive maxims. Fichte, on the other hand, removes the moral law from the discursive realm entirely, seeing it a drive which both issues in all the specific drives of empirical life and which shapes our inclina- tions and satisfactions with enough force so as to become a causal factor in intentional acts.

This makes the identity of the divine and its manifestation more than an ideal. It is always already present, at work the content of each empirical life. The actual realization of the divine on earth, the rationalization of nature and the perfection of society, may be infinitely deferred, but the reality of this and every moment, past and future, is that of the full presence of the divine. As the historian Leopold von Ranke was to say, all ages are immediate to God. For Fichte, so too are all individuals, but in far more intimate manner than Ranke’s dictum suggests.

To be a vehicle of the divine self-manifestation is to identify ourselves with the supra-individual will which is the truth of our own individual being. We fulfill ourselves by becoming nothing but an incarnation of the moral law. This is what we really are, since we are not apart from the drive to self-activity that manifests as every- thing. Our self-identity with the movement of all things offers us the only real freedom, which is the freedom of the totality, the divine.

The divine has no way of acting, though, except through the beings through which it manifests itself. As a result, our ethical acts are the acts of God. Paradoxically, this submission is the only autonomy as well as the only genuinely efficacious mode of action. Since the divine will is none other than our own deepest will, following it is the only law that we can freely give ourselves; but so intimately is it our own nature that we are not so much bound by duty but released into the spontaneity idealized within the Chinese and Indian traditions.

The same totalizing process operates at the level of unreflective beings, but these merely attend to the necessary activities of their specific location within the whole. As rational, which is to say self- conscious beings, we have the ability to restrain our empirical drives, survey the entirety of the process and act on a broader scale. Our lower drives prompt us to act within the narrow compass of our empirical biological lives, but ethical acts have lasting and larger consequences. We do not play out our assigned roles with the unthinking grace of other animals, but through the promptings of conscience in each moment we can align ourselves with the larger movement of the totality of things, which leads always toward universal freedom.²⁸ We are therefore in a position to advance that movement.

What self-consciousness grants us, in this interpretation of Fichte’s theology, is the ability to participate in the realization of the unity of creation, and this is the only way we can go about our Heavenly Father’s business. But the divine is process, not fulfillment, and thus it is fully present in every moment. To surrender everything but one’s inmost nature as a manifestation of freedom allows one to recognize the actual divinity of the process, which fills the flawed present just as much as it would fill a perfected world:

I am related to Thee, and all that I behold around me is related to me; all is life and soul, and regards me with bright spirit-eyes, and speaks with spirit-voices to my heart. In all the forms that surround me, I behold the reflection of my own being broken up into countless diversified shapes, as the morning sun, broken in a thousand dew-drops, throws back its splendors to itself.²⁹

What is required is the turn from seeing through our inclinations to seeing purely and simply. In a striking phrase, Fichte says that the “eye itself is purified by freedom.”³⁰ It is by acting in the liberty of utter egolessness that we can experience rather than merely give assent to the hen kai pan. And experience is primary. Fichte’s “Spinozism of freedom” concerns a single process with which one aligns oneself through ethical activity, not a single substance which is grasped through contemplation and the amor dei intellectualis. Action itself is the knowledge we seek.

The theological monism of Fichte’s later work is the most consistent alternative possible to the separation of self and world with which the Enlightenment project began. It establishes intimate and illuminating connections between spiritual life and political action, grounding a strong commitment to egalitarianism in the ultimate identity of all rational beings and on the structural inacces- sibility of privileged insight into the real. His theology remains of great interest even if one is unwilling to follow Fichte all the way to the realm of religion. As is evidenced by his ever-deepening investi- gation into the paradoxes of self-reference and his still-challenging insight into the puzzles posed by the “mutual recognition and reciprocal action of free beings,” Fichte had a keen eye for problems unrecognized by his contemporaries and largely overlooked even today.

Yet the idea of the world as the self-manifestation of the divine creates problems of its own even in secularized form. If we are nothing more than specific, empirical manifestations of a single process, what is the source of dissension and cultural differenti- ation? In The System of Ethics Fichte had framed evil as a form of spiritual inertia or laziness, a failure to heed the inner call to raise oneself above the merely sensual.³¹ However satisfactory this my be as an explanation for individual failings, and it does not appear to be all that successful, it cannot account for the social evils that Fichte so persuasively attacks in The Vocation of Man or for the significant differences in the character of different communities and different historical epochs. It would explain, at most, a kind of random variability, individual deviance but not the differences between, say, South India and North Germany.

By the early 1800s the need for some such explanation was surely obvious. The utopian hopes of the early days of the Revolution had long been dashed. Not even the most sympathetic observer could expect a return of the inspired unanimity of 1789. Party politics and constitutional experimentation had led to sham democracy and finally a military dictatorship, equality dwindled into the career open to talents, and on the international scale fraternity was unmasked as an excuse for imperial Realpolitik.

Fichte’s response in the last years of his life was to develop two different theories of cultural differentiation. In a lecture course published in 1806 as The Characteristics of the Present Age he sketched a philosophical history of humanity in five defined stages. Interestingly, these incorporate social and political factors as well as strictly philosophical ones. In the first epoch, he wrote, reason manifests without self-awareness, simply as instinct. This is “the State of Innocence of the Human Race.”³² Instinct is blind, though, and within it there is no possibility of self-knowledge.

The step out of instinctual life into the self-consciousness of reason is effected in a way that prefigures Hegel. The most powerful among the community make use of instinctual reason as a basis for authoritarian rule. The second age is thus “The Age of positive systems of life and doctrine,” and here reason is objectified in the forms of system and of rulers. It becomes visible and it thus becomes possible to critique and oppose it.

In opposition to this arbitrary authority, though, reason also appears as the impulse towards personal freedom. This impulse drives humanity into the third age, when the systems of the second are challenged and overthrown. Yet this epoch overreaches itself. Instead of universalizing reason it refuses to hear the voice of reason in any of its forms. The third and present age is thus “the Age of absolute indifference towards all truth, and of entire and unrestrained licentiousness:—the State of completed Sinfulness.”³³

In the last two stages reason finally receives its due. In the fourth stage the truth of reason (and of the Wissenschaftslehre, presumably) is finally acknowledged and humanity begins the task of structuring its relations on rational lines. Doing so by means of the law is not enough, however. In the fifth and final stage life by reason becomes an art, or art and life merge, “until the Race become[s] a perfect image of its everlasting archetype in Reason;—and then shall the purpose of this Earthly Life be attained, its end become apparent, and Mankind enter upon the higher spheres of Eternity.”³⁴

It is worth noting that Fichte’s reason neither develops nor makes itself through these events. It is always what it is, and what varies is the way in which it is apprehended and realized in human activity. Fichte’s history thus gives more room for contingency and concrete human agency than Hegel’s does; like so much of the rest of his thought, its implications are open-ended and collective. But it remains only a sketch. The above account is very little compressed from the original, and it is hard to see how it could be elaborated so as to present a useful explanation for historical variability and change.

Fichte’s other theory of cultural difference is found in his notorious lectures of 1808, the Addresses to the German Nation. Technically a sequel to The Characteristics of the Present Age, the Addresses have been the key evidence for those who see Fichte as a forerunner of German nationalism. They do not support the charge, however. Fichte was certainly claimed as an ancestor by the nationalists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, but he was also and with more justification claimed by the socialists. The Addresses are not his most pleasant or most persuasive work, but they do not advocate any kind of racial or ethnic nationalism. Fichte thought that Germans were unusually favored by history but not that they were radically different from others by nature. He was adamantly opposed to imperialism and he could not have hoped that Germany would replace France as an imperial power. Instead, he urged Germans to build a state and an educational system that would make them a light unto the nations.

Fichte’s concrete proposals in the Addresses are for a form of schooling that would create selfless, moral, spiritually aware citizens. This part of his argument owes much to Rousseau and even more to the Swiss educational theorist Pestalozzi, like Fichte a friend and associate of Lavater’s. In Fichte’s view Germany was especially suited for such educational reforms, because its defeat at the hands of Napoleon had made the need for national regeneration obvious. (It also jump-started the transition from the third age of humanity to the fourth.) But Germany had an additional advantage over the rest of Europe, and it is this aspect of the text that presents Fichte’s other explanation for cultural differentiation.

This theory comes out of Fichte’s thoughts on language. Although it is easy to overvalue the importance of language in Fichte’s philosophy and in that of the idealists in general, Fichte gives it a significant role in shaping the approach to and the understanding of that which cannot actually be grasped in language—namely, the supersensible. The System of Ethics had argued that every community had to maintain a unified conversation about the supersensible and that such a conversation had to proceed from a symbol or creed.³⁵ (The words are the same in German.) The symbol is only a starting point and is not to be taken literally.³⁶ It is a Notsymbol, which like the Notstaat is both a necessity and a makeshift. But the language employed in discussing the supersensible is decisively important precisely because in this sphere language has no objective referent. This is the realm wherein language is most creative, most powerful and most treacherous.

This is a promising insight, even a kind of generalization from Kant, but in the Addresses to the German Nation Fichte elaborates it through a dangerously fallacious notion of linguistic authenticity. The German language, he claimed, had developed without inter- ruption since before the days of the Roman empire. It had been shaped by a continuous discourse about the supersensible, and the very construction of key terms reflected the thought that had given rise to them. It was a living language, and “among the people of the living language spiritual culture intervenes in life; among the opposites spiritual culture and life both go their separate ways.”³⁷

The speakers of Romance languages were the “opposites,” those who did not possess a living language. They had traded their native tongue for Latin, the language of their roman conquerors. This was the difference between them and Fichte’s audience:

In the former case [i.e., among Germans] something peculiar to them has been retained and in the latter [i.e., the French and other Europeans] something foreign adopted; nor is the issue the prior ancestry of those who continue to speak the language, but only the fact that this language continues to be spoken without interruption, for men are formed by language far more than language is by men.³⁸

Only the Germans have a true mother tongue in which life and reason are genuinely connected.³⁹ Only they could take the lead in ushering in the final ages of humanity.

Fichte’s claims for the historic unity of German language and culture are unsustainable, though, and his division between living and dead languages rests, in large part, on assertions about the communicative power of etymology that simply cannot be maintained. The presence of concrete roots in words like “Menschenfreundlichkeit” does not make the concept of humanitar- ianism more palpable and pure among Germans than does the presence of the word brother in “brotherhood” induce English speakers to see others as blood relatives. Like Wagner, who unlike him was a real racist and nationalist, Fichte imagined that German life had always remained “German and true.”⁴⁰ Also like Wagner, he too easily thought of these as synonyms.

It is the same throughout the Addresses. They continually offer up stimulating insights. The idea of language forming men is not so unusual in itself, but it gains additional force and depth in light of Fichte’s underlying presupposition that humanity is, in a sense, reason speaking itself to itself. But they just as continually descend into nonsense. As Gregory Moore writes, the Addresses are “at once hard headed and utopian, sublime and ridiculous, brilliant and obscure, nationalist and cosmopolitan.”⁴¹ What they do not do is provide a theory of cultural difference with real explanatory power.

Without engagement with the concrete matter of history it is unlikely that Fichte could have developed such a theory, but he did not make significant further attempts in that direction. He continued to lecture in Berlin on both popular and philosophical topics, and as Prussia returned to war against the French he joined the militia and might have been fatally wounded had not the musket-ball that struck him lodged in the pages of his own copy of his Way to the Blessed Life. In 1814 his wife Johanna volunteered to nurse wounded soldiers in Berlin. She fell sick, and in nursing her back to health Fichte himself took ill. He died on January 27, 1814, aged fifty-two. By then Hegel had already published his Phenomenology of Mind and the first half of his Logic. Twice offered Fichte’s chair at the university of Berlin, Hegel finally accepted the offer and took up the position in 1818. From that point on idealism and Hegelianism were virtually synonymous.

13

The dance of self-othering

Hegel is inescapable, not least because he made himself so. He may have felt that he needed to look after his place in history, because he was even more of a late bloomer than Fichte. Of the “Tübingen three” he seemed the least talented, and initially he did not intend to do his own philosophical work. Instead he planned on supporting the work of his brilliant younger friend Schelling with journalism in a more popular vein, and with that purpose in mind he went to Jena in 1801. It was there that he wrote The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy and collaborated with Schelling in the essays for their own publication, The Critical Journal of Philosophy. None of these was in any way popular however; Hegel was beginning to discover his own vocation, and it was not to be that of a popularizer of others’ work.

These were difficult years for him. He struggled to survive as a Privatdozent, a position with no salary. (The teacher was expected to live off students’ lecture fees.) Through his lecture courses, however, Hegel began to find his way to a distinctive intellectual position. The result was his first significant publication as an original philosopher, The Phenomenology of Mind, which appeared in 1807. Hegel was then 37, already close to middle age.

His fortunes slowly improved, however. In 1816 he began teaching at the University of Heidelberg and two years later he went to Berlin, where he taught for the rest of his life. His major publications after the Phenomenology were limited to the immense Science of Logic, the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, which, like Fichte’s Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, was an outline of his system intended for the use of students, and The Philosophy of Right. His lectures ranged widely, though. Published after his death, his analyses of the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy had tremendous influence throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.

If Hegel did not invent the history of philosophy as a discipline he did much to shape it, and his account of the transformations of philosophy made his own system into the culmination of a long historical development. He portrayed himself as Kant’s one true successor, with Fichte and Schelling as transitional figures of historical interest only. This remains the conventional wisdom, in which Hegel is idealism and idealism is Hegel. The very sweep and complexity of his mature system, which seems to have a place for everything, reinforces the impression that everything of value arrived at by Fichte or Schelling is also present within the Hegelian synthesis.

This is untrue; in spite of their close connections at certain key junctures both Fichte and Schelling present very different solutions from Hegel’s and in fact grapple often with different problems. In many respects Fichte’s later philosophy offers a genuine alternative to Hegel which better preserves the open-ended humanism of early idealism while better resisting the tendency of all philosophy to collapse into mere theorizing.¹ Yet it cannot be denied that Hegel rose to meet some of the unmet challenges in the other idealists’ work. His imperial claims are not altogether unjustified.

Hegel cannot be ignored, then. But which Hegel? Ever since his students broke into left and right factions around the time of his death in 1831 there have raged debates about the real meaning and direction of Hegelian idealism. These continue to the present day. Hegel has largely been absolved of the charges that he was an apologist for Prussian militarism, a glorifier of war and of the state and a harbinger of Nazism. His metaphysical claims, though, continue to give trouble, and there is a clear difference between those who take those claims literally and seriously (as this text does) and those who would rather develop a version of the Hegelian dialectic which can be “put in dialogue” with contemporary analytical philosophy and provide useful insights for the resolution of contemporary problems.

Out of this latter tendency has come an overtly anti-metaphysical interpretation of Hegel and the other idealists. Scholars such as H. S. Harris, Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard have taken their starting points from Hegel’s thoughts about mutual recognition and from his understanding of social institutions as vehicles though which free individuals might fulfill their nature as rational beings. They see Hegel as concerned most of all with the inherent demands of a rational community made up of responsible individuals. His philosophy of history charted its emergence out of more limited, primitive forms of organization. His ethics and philosophy of right showed how social structures, institutions of civil society and systems of government could foster standards and procedures for creating a reasoned consensus. His theories of mutual recognition suggested new insights into the social genesis of subjective experience. These ideas are then frequently discussed with little reference to Hegel’s system as a whole or to anything that could be called the Absolute.

Even more influential has been a different but identically anti- metaphysical interpretation presented by Alexandre Kojève. Kojève’s lectures, delivered in Paris in the late 1930s, were attended by Sartre, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, among others, and their publi- cation in abridged form under the editorship of the novelist and belles-lettrist Raymond Queneau as Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel in 1947 has carried their influence into the present.² Kojève’s interpretation focuses almost entirely on the Phenomenology, and it is nothing if not idiosyncratic. He takes that text’s famous passage on the struggle between Master and Slave as the key to Hegel’s entire philosophy. Hegelian idealism, for Kojève, is ultimately a worldly drama of recognition and of the transformation of warfare into labor, a transformation through which the masters ultimately become powerless and irrelevant and the slaves create a rationalized world state through productive activity. (Kojève spent the post-war years working as a planner for the forerunner of the EU, thus promoting exactly such a rationalized supranational state which was meant to succeed the war-riven Europe of the masters.)

Not only does Kojève’s Hegel envision the end of history, a theme taken up and popularized in North America through the work of Francis Fukuyama, but this Hegel recognizes himself as the self- consciousness of the man who himself had brought history to a close: Napoleon. Hegel had written about seeing Napoleon at Jena— “the World-spirit on horseback,” he called him—but Kojève takes this much farther. He links the completion of the Phenomenology with the French victory at Jena:

Absolute Knowledge became—objectively—possible because in and by Napoleon the real process of historical evolution, in the course of which man created new Worlds and transformed himself by creating them, came to an end…. And—subjectively—absolute Knowledge became possible because a man named Hegel was able to understand the World in which he lived and to under- stand himself as living in and understanding this World…. By understanding himself through the understanding of the totality of the anthropogenetic historical process, which ends with Napoleon and his contemporaries, and by understanding this process through his understanding of himself, Hegel caused the complete whole of the universal real process to penetrate into his individual consciousness, and then he penetrated this consciousness. Thus this consciousness became just as total, as universal, as the process that it revealed by understanding itself; and this fully self-conscious consciousness is absolute Knowledge, which, by being developed in discourse, will form the content of absolute philosophy or Science, of that Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences that contains the sum of all possible knowledge.³

This is a brilliant improvisation on Hegelian themes, but it hardly stands as an actual interpretation of his thought. Hegel is not outlining a process of anthropogenesis. He does argue that humanity has developed, materially, intellectually and spiritually, but this development is an integral part of the self-manifestation of the Absolute and is a unification not merely of humanity with itself but of humanity with the Absolute which is the source and real content of everything. It is only in that unity that being and consciousness are one. By removing human history from its ground in the Absolute, therefore, Kojève’s account tends to divide objective world-activity from its subjective comprehension, the Napoleons from the Hegels. It thus comes dangerously close to sundering the unity of subject and object that Hegel, like all the other idealists, took as the touchstone of knowledge.

But Kojève’s interpretation does point to something important about Hegel’s work as a whole. He is right to stress that the Phenomenology has a different purpose from that of the Encyclopedia (or, for that matter, from the Logic).⁴ Readers of Hegel tend to choose one over the other; there are those who find the “real” Hegel in the novelistic depths of the Phenomenology and those who prefer the intricately-structured reasoning of the Logic. The truth, as always with Hegel, is in the whole—in the both/and. The Phenomenology is a kind of psychodrama through which the reader is led to the stand- point of philosophy. Everything that Hegel published thereafter is an elaboration of the knowledge that it is possible to grasp from that standpoint. To favor one over the other almost inevitably privileges either the subjective or the objective and reinforces the very separation between self and world that Hegel strove to overcome.

The Phenomenology itself starts with a very strong version of the identity of being and consciousness, which is not just the starting point but the motor of the process it outlines. Knowledge aims at a state of identity with its object, but prior to that consummation knowledge is always aware of its own inadequacy. There is an inherent development in human understanding, then, as each partial grasp of reality generates its own critique and overcomes itself to arrive at a more comprehensive and adequate view. In the body of the work Hegel presents a pragmatic history of that development, the stages whereby humanity finds ever more satisfactory ways of apprehending the real until at last it reaches the stance where absolute knowing becomes possible.

One might think, after Fichte, that the separation of subject and object is an essential aspect of there being any knowledge at all, and thus that absolute knowing is infinitely deferred. Hegel, however, has his own solution to this problem. Absolute knowing cannot be knowing as we conventionally conceive of it, because it does not depend on our placing ourselves outside the object of knowledge. It is nothing like a secret doctrine or the revelation of some superrefined version of ordinary knowledge. Instead, it is a stance, a specific way of positioning oneself within experience, which can be approached only through a process of inner transformation.

The Phenomenology outlines that process, but it is probably best known for its preface, written like most prefaces after the completion of the main work. This substantial essay fully deserves its fame. It can stand as a manifesto for the whole of Hegel’s project and not just the first part of his system of knowledge (as the Phenomenology was originally titled). His distinctive approach appears at the very outset. He is writing a preface to a work of philosophy, but he opens with the argument that he cannot write such a thing. A philosophical preface, which is to say a preface to a genuine, scientific philosophy, would always be misleading or useless when the philosopher’s aim is to bring us to a different way of apprehending the world, not just a different set of theories about it. For Hegel, genuine philosophy is not expressed in any set of conclusions. How one arrives at those conclusions is an integral part of the truth of a system, and without comprehending the entirety of the structure one cannot really grasp the meaning of any of its parts.

In the most famous passage of the preface Hegel writes:

The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is only what it ultimately is through its development. It can be said of the Absolute that it is essentially result, that in its end it is for the first time what it is in truth, and herein lies its nature: actuality, subject, or that-which-becomes itself.⁵

There can be no potted summary of the “meaning” of a philosophy, then, certainly not of a real philosophy. “For the matter is not exhausted in its goal, but in its development; and the actual whole is not the result, but the result together with its becoming. The goal for itself is the nonliving universal, just as the tendency is the mere drive which lacks actuality, and the naked result is the corpse which the tendency has left behind.”⁶

Hegel goes on to argue that what is true about any particular system is similarly true about the relationship that various philo- sophical systems have with each other. Each system must be grasped as a whole, and to do this it is necessary to place each one in the context of the progress of philosophy itself. Prefaces are often used for settling scores. Hegel is not above doing so in his own preface, but he also argues that the division between truth and error misses the point. All systems must be comprehended as part of a continuous development:

The bud disappears in the eruption of the flower, so one could say that the flower contradicts the bud. In a similar way, the fruit declares the flower to be the plant’s false existence … their fluid nature makes them into moments of an organic unity, in which they not only do not struggle with each other, but one is as necessary as the other; and only this equal necessity constitutes the life of the whole.⁷

Yet once one grasps this succession of stages as equally necessary one has also transcended any and all of them.

This is exactly where Hegel places himself, claiming to offer the most comprehensive of philosophical visions. His philosophy presents the truth about the truth, its full self-realization as actuality and as thought, which contains within itself the truth of all previous systems. Claims to novelty are very much in the philosophical tradition, of course, but it was Hegel who thematized such claims, cast the history of philosophy as a succession of ways of seeing rather than of theories about what was seen, and gave that history a teleological spin that cast himself as the culmination of the story.

This truth about the truth had to be scientific, and although it could not be grasped without a revolution in one’s own self-under- standing Hegel still insisted that it be expressible in language; his aspiration was “to help [philosophy] renounce its name as love of Knowing, and become actual Knowing.”⁸ He was often closer to Fichte than he cared to admit, but he could not share Fichte’s willingness to orient himself to reality through drives and the shape of specific experiences such as the manifestation of the moral law within conscience. For similar reasons he rejected the intuitionism of Schelling and Jacobi’s leaps of faith on structural grounds. Neither of those approaches could lead to a scientific, i.e. systematic philosophy. Schelling, in particular, erred in his obsession with the impassable gulf between God and world which opposed the empty infinite of an Absolute in which everything is equal to “a knowledge that is differentiated and fulfilled, or that seeks and requires fulfillment.” Cut off from its manifestation in the world, Schelling’s Absolute was “the night in which all cows are black.”⁹

In reality, wrote Hegel, “Spirit’s force is only as great as its exter- nalization.”¹⁰ Its real nature consists of its self-annihilation as the mere empty and abstract infinite and the trajectory of its life as the finite and concrete. It has to become other than itself in order to become what it really is. It has to fall into the condition of knowledge, with its split between subject and object, in order to overcome that split and grasp both poles as aspects of something at once known and yet unknowable in ordinary terms.

Hegel’s Absolute is thus both subject and substance, and this is one reason that he also often refers to it as the Concept or Spirit. It is the identity of its own self-manifestation and its self-comprehension as that productive activity. There can be no abstract intuition of such a truth, no claim to stand in the immediacy of being, because when it has achieved its fullest expression “Being is … absolutely mediated,” and only through its absolute mediation is it “immedi- ately the property of the I.” As Yovel elaborates:

In the state of universal mediation, reality (the substantive contents) has a subject-like property, and the subject has a substantive dimension; this is Hegel’s so-called “objective idealism.” Neither side overcomes or overwhelms the other; a unity of opposites is rather obtained within them, which endows each side with distinct character and status.¹¹

Only in absolute mediation is the true “in the form of the true.”

As everyone with an interest in philosophy knows, this histori- cizes the Absolute. Its truth lies in the successive stages through which it becomes what it is, in which it realizes itself and achieves its true form and comes into its full self-awareness. What may be less appreciated is that Hegel is also arguing for a new form of philoso- phizing and a new mode of apprehending reality. As he insists in the Phenomenology’s preface, the ascent to the standpoint of philosophy is a difficult one and it demands of us that we make war against our own misleading familiarity with the subject matter.¹² Even the analysis of familiar concepts, “the subject, the object, God, nature, the intellect, sensibility, and so forth” can get us only so far. The familiar must be destroyed, but this is only a beginning; ultimately, everything in the way of fixed ideas and grounded structures must go, those of philosophy included.

Yet such analyses are a start, because they manifest the “activity of dissolution[, which] is the force and work of the understanding, which is the greatest and most wondrous power—indeed it is the absolute power.”¹³ It is the negative which is “the absolute power … the energy of thinking, the pure I.”¹⁴ Paradoxically, the closest thing we have to a definition of the Hegelian Absolute is that it is the power of negation.

Hegel’s philosophy is rooted in the concept of negativity in a way that is both old and new. The other idealists had accepted that philosophy could not start from ordinary experience and the facts which experience seemed to disclose. These had been the foundations of sensationalism, which started from an isolated thinking subject confronting its physical and social environment and which sought to define the subject’s activity in terms of the impressions of sensation from without and the combination of ideas within.

The post-Kantian idealists accepted instead that the structure of ordinary experience itself had to be accounted for. This demanded a standpoint from which experience could be understood as the product of some other activity. That activity could be that of a transcendental ego, a supraindividual self, or a self-manifesting Concept, but in whatever form it was taken it had logical and explanatory primacy over the evidence of the senses and of introspection. In this sense, then, all of idealism rested on the power to say no to the appearances of ordinary experience.

This did not turn idealism into mysticism, however. The justification for transcendental philosophy was that it provided the one adequate account of the experience of self-consciousness and thus of the apparent facts from which sensationalism took its start. The explanations were justified because they led back down to the world of the senses. Fichte’s often-stated ambition, for example, was to give a complete account of ordinary life and thought. His most obvious success in that direction was his demonstration that the assumption that we live within an objective world that can be transformed by concept-guided action is necessary for self-consciousness to exist at all.

As we have seen, however, Fichte was generally less successful in relating the deductions of the Wissenschaftslehre to the concrete structures of real societies and the concrete contents of various bodies of thought. Like Kant, moreover, he placed the Absolute and the manner of its activity entirely outside the reach of theoretical reason. Only the manner of its activity was knowable, and this could be apprehended only through action and emotion, through the embodied reason that was Fichte’s version of Kant’s practical reason.

In demanding that we move beyond the givenness of everyday experience and the fixity of its contents the Phenomenology is as much an unlearning as Fichte’s Vocation of Man. But Hegel was after absolute knowing, which is simultaneously the knowledge of the Absolute and the Absolute’s own knowledge of itself, and the Wissenschaftslehre denied that we had access to either of these. Like Schelling, Hegel hoped to define and describe the nature and operation of ultimate reality, yet he had to do this in a way that avoided objectification. What is more, he wanted to proceed from that understanding to an account of the differentiated structures which were the manifestations of the Absolute in and as the sensible world.

Hegel attempts to resolve this problem by making negativity the fundamental nature of being. Instead of its featuring as an aspect of the ground of being, as it does in Schelling’s essay on freedom, it is the source and activity of being itself. Hegel’s absolute or objective idealism thus posits at the outset a primordial negativity. This can do nothing but negate itself, because in the primitive state there is no other possible object for its activity. And this negation objectifies, because negation implies a relationship with that which is negated. It is the act of creation.

But to negate negation is to manifest something that is merely not negation, so this nascent objectivity, too, is ultimately negative. It has no qualities except for that which it is not. It thus brings us back to the original negation. In that cycle, however, negation relates to itself. It constitutes a separation from itself that it also annihilates. By its own power it objectifies itself, becomes what it is not and thus recovers itself back into itself. The difference is that its essence is now in determinate form.¹⁵

This idea, the circular or spiral path in which negation negates itself and thus manifests and defines itself, points to what Hegel claimed was the fundamental logic of reality. Fichte had come to argue that the sensible world is the self-manifestation of the divine. He took this for a kind of empirical fact, however; the divine simply manifests itself for incomprehensible reasons, and as manifestation it cannot be apprehended except in terms of subject and object. Hegel goes a step farther. His Absolute manifests itself by its own inner nature, and the sensible world is not its appearance under the conditions of self-conscious experience but the necessary stages of definitiveness in a cycle that moves from bare abstract identity through differentiated and defined existence to the return of the Absolute to itself in its differentiated form. For Fichte the sensible world is ultimately only how an eternal Absolute must be seen. In Hegel it is how the evolving Absolute makes itself into what it is and comes to see itself in the form of absolute knowing. As negativity it is always making itself into what it is not. As that which is negative, the very same movement thereby makes itself into what it is. As a process of knowing—because for Hegel as for the other idealists being and consciousness are one—the Absolute makes its own conditions for self-knowledge and then, through the work of philosophy, returns that knowledge to itself and as itself.

Absolute knowing is, of course, the identity of knowledge with its object. Its accomplishment makes manifest the inverse: that it is the identity of the object with knowledge. Our knowledge reveals itself to be the formative self-knowledge of the Absolute, which comes into the fullness of its being by the very process of losing itself in its finite manifestations and its progressive self-reintegration in knowledge. To achieve absolute knowing, then, means to eliminate the space between knowledge and its object, to quit the imaginary stance outside of being from which we conventionally expect to see it as it really is. It is to also see that we and the Absolute are one, because the self-separation from reality that we create by the stance of “objective” knowledge is just what projects a transcendent illusion behind what we think are appearances. From the philosophic standpoint, which is the standpoint of absolute knowing, the appearances are the full manifestations of the Absolute as it makes itself what it is and there is no separation between humanity and the divine.

Achieving the standpoint of absolute knowing means the utter disappearance of self and world as static entities. It is a state as egoless as Fichte’s ideal. It is the light that emerges in the darkest night, available only to those who have entered into the negativity at the heart of everything, which is the door through which the Phenomenology leads one to the heights. In his response to The Vocation of Man, the 1802 essay Faith and Knowledge, Hegel had called for

the absolute Passion, the speculative Good Friday in place of the historic Good Friday. Good Friday must be speculatively re-established in the whole truth and harshness of its God-forsakenness…. The highest totality can and must achieve its resurrection solely from this harsh consciousness of loss, encompassing everything, and ascending in all its earnestness and out of its deepest ground to the most serene freedom of its shape.¹⁶

Hegel thus ends the Phenomenology with the image of Calvary; the world is the fruit of the Absolute’s self-sacrifice and its only way of knowing itself. But the speculative Good Friday demands the specu- lative Easter Sunday. In broadest terms this is the whole structure of Hegel’s work; the Phenomenology is the Passion and the Logic and Encyclopedia are the Resurrection.

Socrates taught that philosophy was a preparation for death. Hegel has us confront and even imaginatively undergo death over and over.

The life of the spirit is … a life that bears death and maintains itself in it…. Spirit is that power … only in so far as it looks the negative in the face and dwells in it. This dwelling is the magic force that converts the negative into being.¹⁷

But this is also a kind of giving-birth, as we begin to give up “both the fixity of the purely concrete, namely, the I in opposition to the differentiated content, and the fixity of the differences which are set in the element of pure thinking and participate in the same uncon- ditionality of the I.”¹⁸ What we begin to recognize is the inherent identity of the incessant activity of all things with absolute stillness and peace:

Appearance is coming-to-be and vanishing, that itself neither comes to be nor vanishes, but is in itself, and constitutes the actuality and movement of the life of truth. The truth is thus the Bacchanalian whirl in which no member is not drunk; and because each one vanishes immediately upon its separation it is also transparent and simple rest.¹⁹

This is all but impossible to grasp theoretically, and indeed the Phenomenology resembles a set of spiritual exercises in which each stage in the self-development of the Absolute must be entered into and absorbed into one’s own being before it is possible to move on to the next.

This, at least, is one way of reading the Phenomenology—as a history of humanity whose stages and forms of life must be incorpo- rated by every individual through imaginative and emotionally committed participation. Hegel refers to the process as Bildung, that common German ideal which is more a matter of maturation and increased authenticity and inwardness than it is the acquisition of knowledge. Discursive thinking is only its first stage, which must give way to “the earnestness of life in its fullness, which leads into experiencing the matter itself.” Then, with luck “it also comes about that the concept’s earnestness rises in its depth.”²⁰

What the true science of knowledge amounts to is the elucidation of the logic of reality as reality lays it out for itself. The philosopher must therefore allow reality to take shape before his eyes, as it were, and to reveal the rules of own activity.²¹ Hegel’s philosophy, then, is in many ways as much a philosophy of seeing as Fichte’s is, although its ontological commitments are quite different.²² Like the Wissenschaftslehre as well, its commitment to seeing is also a course of self-exploration; it is not a phenomenology in the Husserlian sense, where the subject is bracketed out of the inquiry along with the objective reality of perceptions. An idealist phenomenology can proceed only from the identity of subject and object, and Hegel’s thought cannot be properly grasped so long as it is seen as the description of a process that stands separate and apart from the percipient.

The very presentation of a philosophy in the form of a text makes it difficult to avoid this error, though. Readers are apt to take it as yet another body of thought, to be accepted or rejected depending on how well it appears to explain observable phenomena. (This may be one reason that Fichte eventually abandoned the idea of a compre- hensive written presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre.) Hegel thus argues for not just a different form of philosophy but a different form of presentation. As Yovel glosses the text, philosophical “thinking disrupts intellectual habits and opposes the structure of ordinary language, so it must be illustrated by new literary means that break the atomic appearance of singular propositions and set them ‘in movement.’”²³

Achieving the standpoint of philosophy is thus a difficult task. But Hegel ascribes much of this difficulty to the state of the age and reassures himself that the very ability to think his philosophy means that it is ready to be understood:

The nature of truth is to break out when its time comes, and to appear only when its time comes. Therefore it never appears prematurely, nor does it find the public unprepared for it.²⁴

What is more, the appearance of his philosophy is a sign of a new dawn:

Our time is a time of birth and transition into a new era. Spirit had broken away from its former world of existence and its former imaginary; it is about to sink all that into the past, and is busy shaping itself anew…. This gradual crumbling, which does not change the physiognomy of the whole, is broken by the rising day which, in a flash, outlines the features of a new world.²⁵

The appearance of the Phenomenology is, of course, that new dawn.

Hegel, then, saw himself as part of a process ushering in and indeed creating a transformed world. At this early stage in the unfolding of the new order, though, his ideas could be the property of no more than a few “singular individuals.” This, too, was a philo- sophical and historical necessity. Science is no more fulfilled in its beginnings than an oak is fulfilled in the acorn. It begins with the announcement of a newly appearing shape of experience and under- standing. In their abstraction and simplicity these are difficult to grasp and in this stage philosophical science is esoteric. In time, however, the content of the new form of spirit becomes fully deter- minate, enfleshed in the shape of the world itself, and then science becomes exoteric, the property of everyone and open and compre- hensible to all.²⁶

Hegel was more conservative than Fichte, though he was by no means a reactionary, and a philosophy built upon the self-activity of the Absolute will tend to a less activist ethics than one which is built on the self-overcoming logic of self-consciousness. Yet at this early point in his career Hegel saw his philosophical work as both an indication that the world was at the dawn of a new day and as part of the morning light itself. But there is more to day than dawn, as Thoreau said. The preface to the Phenomenology looked confidently to a future in which its fundamental insights would be common coin and in which the ultimate identity of particular and universal, abstract and concrete, and self and world would become the building-blocks of a new civilization. In its preface, at least, Hegel’s was a very hopeful text.

14

The owl of Minerva

Few of Hegel’s generation were equally hopeful in the year 1807, but what looked like reaction to some was consolidation to others. Hegel did not identify himself as Napoleon’s self-consciousness, but he sympathized with the project of transforming unstructured revolutionary ferment into rational, universalizable public institutions and codes of law; this much is implied by the Phenomenology’s section on “Absolute Freedom and Terror.” He would not have seen anything necessarily wrong in the Napoleonic claim to have established the revolution on the basis of its founding principles and thus to have brought it to a close. Others, however—Beethoven, though neither an idealist nor a Romantic, may serve as an example—saw the developments through Napoleon’s rule as a progressive betrayal of those principles.

Among the latter number was Hölderlin, whose novel Hyperion shows its titular hero’s intentions betrayed by the revolutionaries whose cause he had joined. Hölderlin’s own fate was particularly cruel. His political commitments had been shaken by the authoritarian turn in France but German authorities still suspected him of Jacobin tendencies, the love of his life (immortalized as “Diotima” in his poems and Hyperion) had died, his substantial inheritance was being kept from him by his mother, who claimed falsely that it had been dissipated, and his poetry, now recognized as among the greatest in German literature, found no audience. In 1805 he was found too unstable to face trial on charges of treason (the charges were false), and in 1806 he was committed to an insane asylum. He came under the care of a thoughtful and sensitive carpenter, with whose family he found a home until his death in 1843. It seemed to some of his friends to be an almost willed self-annihilation, a relief from the terrible strain of his life. He wrote occasional poems, generally of almost stupefying banality, and referred to himself as “Scardinelli, or something like that.”

Hölderlin’s is an extreme case, but it is not so extreme as to be without significance. The last decade of the revolutionary years were increasingly disillusioning, and the decades of reaction that followed saw the systematic suppression of anything that suggested discontent with the way things were. Along with these external factors, however, was a deep instability within the idealist project as it was generally understood, especially in the form that it took among the first generation of Romantics. It could hardly have survived as it had started out.

Fichte’s and Hegel’s thought both moved towards a dissolution of the separation of self and world in the very activity and objectivity of daily life. As we have seen, however, idealism in its pre-Hegelian forms was often understood to rest instead on the creative power of the self, and this made the self into a battleground. Fichte’s later work, which clarified his thought and placed the egoistic appearance of the early presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre in context, was little known and even less understood. What dominated were the Romantic vision of the imaginative transformation of reality and Schelling’s essentially dualistic version of idealism.

Both of these tendencies, though, made huge demands on the solitary enquirer, who was commanded to penetrate through to the hidden point where self and world could be fused. The intuition of that unity was an individual accomplishment of daunting difficulty, and in the context of Schelling’s idealism and Romantic ideals a failure to achieve or sustain it could be nothing but an individual failure, not a social or structural one.

Here, too, we may take an extreme case, that of the playwright and short story writer Heinrich von Kleist. Kleist was the archetypal soul out of joint; both his life and his work present the separation of self and world as an unbridgeable chasm. His famous essay on the puppet theater argues that puppets can move and convey emotion with a purity and a grace that no human being can match, for they are unburdened by self-consciousness. The title character in his play The Prince of Homburg is continually adrift in his own thoughts and feelings, a sleepwalker through life. (In the opening scenes he is literally sleepwalking.) A premature cavalry charge under his command wins a victory but violates explicit orders; he is condemned to death, surrenders all dignity as he begs for clemency and ultimately accepts his own execution as the inevitable and just command of the Elector, his sovereign. At that point everything is reversed. He is spared and restored to favor and instead of death he receives a laurel wreath from the hand of the Elector’s niece. Almost the last lines are his question, “Say, is this a dream?” and the answer, “A dream; what else?”

The incomprehensible nature of external reality and its utter disconnection with the inner world could hardly be more forcefully dramatized. Between the two there is no unity or even reconciliation possible. Certainly none was possible for Kleist himself. Meeting up with a young woman with a fatal illness, the two decided on suicide and on November 21, 1811, Kleist shot her and then himself. In his letters of the day before he declared himself to be blissfully happy.

Few had such melodramatic ends. Fichte died in 1814, before the post-revolutionary repression, having remained largely true to his early beliefs. Novalis had died even earlier, of tuberculosis. Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling and their wives all found their way into the Catholic Church, that traditional refuge of disillusioned radicals.

In the darkness of reaction and failed hopes those whose lives and careers continued could only rarely escape the need for some sort of accommodation or at least a scaling-down of expectations. Hegel did not. About his diminished hopes there can be no doubt. The preface to his last published work, the Elements of the Philosophy of Right of 1821, rules out any role for philosophy in bringing about social change. Hegel forswears the attempt “to construct a state as it ought to be.” (The italics are his own.) Philosophy is “its own time comprehended in thoughts”¹ and it cannot transcend its own world. Philosophers might build themselves an ideal world, but such a world exists only within their opinions, “a pliant medium in which the imagination can construct anything it pleases.”² Real philosophy is an act of reconciliation, a discovery (and proof) of the reality of the Absolute’s presence in actuality. It does not furnish blueprints for the future.

This point is so important to Hegel that he returns to it at the very end of the preface, in one of the most often-quoted and most eloquent passages in his entire oeuvre:

A further word on the subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state. This lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.³

Only fourteen years separate this preface from the preface to the Phenomenology, but the reversal in Hegel’s expectations could not be more striking. Even the metaphors are inverted. In 1807 Hegel had seen his philosophy as a new dawn, part of a change that would ultimately light the world, no doubt hand in hand with practical and political advances, and which would lose its esoteric character as it was reflected more and more in the shape of that transformed life. By 1821, however, sunrise and youth have given way to dusk and old age. Philosophy is retrospective only, confined to uncovering the hidden rationality that had given rise to the shape of life that gave rise in turn to the philosophy of the age. Like Benjamin’s angel of history, Hegel’s philosopher now walks backwards into the future.

Whether or not Hegel’s philosophy was inherently conservative is a different question. The split between left and right Hegelians can be read as a disagreement over just this issue, and it remains a matter for debate. Never as radical or politically outspoken as Fichte, Hegel was nonetheless sympathetic to the ideals of the revolution in France and to the reform movement in Prussia, and it appears that he maintained those sympathies to the end. Though the “liberty tree” story about his student days is a myth, it is well-attested that during his years in Berlin Hegel celebrated every July 14 as the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. His appointment to the University of Berlin was a victory for the reforming party in Prussia⁴ and the institution itself, modeled on the university at Jena, was meant to provide a genuinely liberal education to its students and serve as an intel- lectual focus for national regeneration. His writings show him continually trying to cope with the increasingly autocratic restric- tions on thought and publication that followed the failure of the Prussian reformers.

Hegel’s personal sympathies, though, are less important than the inherent direction of his philosophy itself. This is a harder area of inquiry, made even harder by Hegel’s ability to stand on both sides of the fence at the same time. In his Logic he developed a kind of genealogy of thought forms, a system of differing ways of appre- hending the nature of reality which was, at the same time, the system of reality’s evolving manner of being. Hegel’s logic is the grammar of existence; it is the way things work and thus it is the way things are. It is a formative process and thus would seem to lead towards the future. But it is also a comprehensive logic that culminates in the return to the beginning, where the Absolute discovers itself through the completion of its own objectification in actuality and its self- comprehension within the philosophical intellect. In that sense it closes in on itself, and its movement is not progressive but circular, yet another example of Abrams’s circular pattern. Hegel finds this pattern in every area of study: the infinite Absolute manifests as finitude, in concrete institutions, practices and forms of knowledge, and those manifestations mutate though the immanent logic of the Absolute until their source returns to itself in the form of a conscious grasp of its identity with its expressive development.

Once history had reached the point of self-understanding, of absolute knowing, it appears to stop, however. Hegel unashamedly identifies the modern European state as the highest form of the state and Christianity as the highest form of religion, and because in both cases the accolade is connected with the purported achievement of complete self-awareness the term “highest” must be taken literally. It suggests finality, not just the best to date.

The significance that Hegel gives to Christianity is especially illuminating in this regard. It can be reasonably argued that Christianity offers solutions only to problems of its own creation. Hegel might not have disagreed with this characterization. Indeed, that or an insight like it was the basis for his argument that Christianity was the highest form of religious life. The paradigmatic structure of Hegelian theory, after all, is that the Absolute is both the problem and the solution. The separation of humanity from the divine and its ultimate reconciliation through Jesus’ self-sacrifice echo the movement of the dialectic, and in light of Hegel’s lifelong theological concerns these may well have been the ultimate source for his structural model. Moreover, the propulsive force of that movement is negativity: the Fall, its burden of sin, and the suffering of the crucifixion which is the negativity that resolves and preserves the negativity of Adam’s separation from God. This closed circle of estrangement and reconciliation constitutes one of Hegel’s “good” infinities, a finite-but-unbounded whole wherein the finite is grasped as the necessary expression of the infinite and the infinite is fully expressed in the fusion of that which comes to being as the finite and the generative process wherein all of those finite forms are linked.

Hegel, who was himself deeply religious, claimed that his idealism was the rational truth of Christianity, which had pictured the unity of the divine and the worldly in representations and narrative. This was the same absolute knowing that he had set out in scientific form. It encompassed the negative as well as the positive; the medieval view of Adam’s fall as “a happy sin”—felix culpa—bears the Hegelian gloss extremely well. Other religions, such as Hinduism, were less “advanced” because they asserted a “bad” infinity, a mere endlessness that had no possible connection with the finite. In such defective religions only the infinite was real. The finite was consequently denigrated as an illusion.⁵

In one sense Hegel intended no value judgments. The Absolute is fully present in all religions and all forms of life, at least in their ideal forms. (There is an uncomfortable amount of wiggle room in his concession that the actual manifestation of the Absolute is clouded by contingency.) The Absolute as it is present in Indian life, however, is the Absolute which has not yet achieved full expression in the concrete and finite. For that reason its emergence into conscious possession of itself is not yet possible. For Hegel the religions of India are therefore not false, they are merely prior and partial forms of the truth. But this means that they stand in an historical continuum with Christianity, and the specifically Hegelian character of that progression makes Christianity into Hinduism’s and Buddhism’s legatee as well as their successor. This is a classical example of intellectual imperialism, practiced first by the early Christians in their relationship with Hebrew religion especially and alive and well in comparative religious studies even today.

Hegel’s progressivism is thus a specific, even a peculiar kind of progressivism, because, as we have already noted, there is a strong counter-tendency towards closure in the accomplishment of the Absolute’s self-awareness within thought. Kojève’s claim that Hegel proclaimed the end of history speaks to a continuing tension in Hegel’s thought.

The tension is not inherent in the concept of absolute knowing as such or of the world as the progressive self-manifestation of the Absolute, and it does not arise from the unique event proclaimed in the Phenomenology. The dawn of absolute knowing need not mark the end of historical change. Its achievement could just as easily bring about the replacement of one kind of temporal movement by another. The Absolute would continue to manifest itself in history, but it would do so in a conscious manner rather than working through the cunning of history. The divine government would thus be present on earth and the future would be the product of the conscious collective activity which would be the Absolute’s fully- realized self-knowledge.

Marx’s theory of revolution draws out these implications. The proletariat is the universal class by virtue of its being negativity incarnate. This is not in a metaphysical sense but a real one; it has nothing and being universally deprived it thus experienced univer- sality as absolute negation. Its triumph, the negation of its own negativity, is therefore qualitatively different from the victories of other classes. It is the recovery of the totality of human life by the negation of a universal negativity, the grasp of total power by the class which had previously had no power at all. Humanity had always made its own history and its own social structures and insti- tutions, but this reality had been concealed in class societies thanks to the nature of class warfare, the ideological character of thought and public discourse and (under capitalism) the fetishism of commodities, whereby social relations subject to human control assume the “fantastic form of relationships among things.”⁶ The working class, however, embodied the reality of humanity’s collective construction of its personal and social life in its very depri- vation, and through its revolutionary victory this unconscious knowledge would become conscious. What would follow the triumph of the proletariat would be not the end of history but the end of prehistory.⁷

All this sounds reasonably consistent with Hegel, or at least of a naturalized form of one aspect of Hegelian thought. It seems to be anticipated in the lines with which the Phenomenology ends, where “from the chalice of this realm of spirits / foams forth for Him his own infinitude.”⁸ Even the strictures of the preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right would not rule it out, because the conscious direction of humanity’s progress would take place conjoined with practice rather than being the product of the philosopher’s imagi- nation. But it makes for a kind of secular pantheism, which Hegel had rejected on the grounds that in pantheism God was no longer a subject and indeed was lost in the world. It brings the Absolute down to earth and subjects history to the will of the human community. The internal necessity of its self-development is replaced by collective freedom and the external necessities imposed through time by its transitory forms are cast off.

Hegelian idealism cannot be reduced to the formula that the Absolute is identical with its finitization as the world. The Absolute cannot be naturalized à la Feuerbach, Hegel’s heretical pupil and Marx’s early inspiration. It is logically if not temporally prior to its manifestations and its manifestations must take specific forms in accordance with its immanent logic; to an uncomfortable extent to be is to be determined, and no recognition of contingency can change this. The liberatory vision behind the left-Hegelian and early Marxian interpretation would sever the connection between the Absolute and the lawful specificity of its self-manifestations. It would change the relation between infinite and finite from one of identity within a structure of difference to one of undifferentiated identity.⁹

The Marxian vision also ignores the actual teleological aspects of Hegel’s idealism. It is the Absolute’s own infinitude that foams forth to the Absolute, its own nature that returns to its source. There is an end point to this movement. Hegel is clear that Christianity is the final form of religion, just as he claims that the modern state (which he unfortunately identifies as “Germanic”) is the highest possible form of the state. Quotations can be assembled to show that Hegel was confident that the future remained open and that history was far from over, but these statements are of secondary importance compared to the inherent logic of his fundamental vision.

This is evident in Hegel’s theory of the state, a theory which has seen more than its share of misunderstandings and polemics. It is often said that Hegel deified the state, and he did indeed once refer to it as God on earth. But Hegel’s god is not the deity of the bible, the omnipotent and omniscient creator and director of all things. It is the unity of subject and substance, the reconciliation of the concrete with the universal. And that is precisely what Hegel’s state is supposed to effect.

“The state is the actuality of the ethical idea,” Hegel wrote in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right.¹⁰ In other words, the ethical idea is concretely present in the state itself, and political life is the realization of the moral law. The starting points for this claim lie within Kant’s ethics, in the arguments that only autonomous actions are ethical and that ethical maxims are those which are capable of being given as universal laws. The difference is that Hegel, unlike Kant, demanded a concrete institutional structure which could generate those self-imposed and universal laws. Citizens make themselves into moral beings by participation in such a state and by their willing submission to its laws. For Hegel, in fact, the existence of a state authority was a precondition for ethical life; not only is it meaningless to speak of law or right outside a state, there could be no ethical existence outside one either. Nor could there be genuine religion or artistic life outside of one.

The theater of Kant’s practical philosophy was the individual, who was moved to ethical life through the awareness of the moral law. Political life was subject to ethical control but in itself it was not central to Kant’s practical philosophy; morality was a matter of individual motivation and self-fashioning.¹¹ But Hegel departs from Kant in his insistence that ethics go out from its subjective origins and find itself in the world. Unlike Fichte, he refuses to separate law and politics from ethics. The moral law, which is necessarily an aspect of the self-activity of the Absolute, could not remain subjective. It had to rise above being a mere “ought” and become objectified. That is the function of the state.

The complex structure of the modern state is the matrix through which individual wills can rise to universality. It is universality itself made manifest, present as an institution in concrete, finite lives. At the same time, however, it is the realization of individual, subjective willing made consistent with the moral law, and thus the fulfillment of the authentic needs of the individual:

The state is the actuality of concrete Freedom. But concrete freedom requires that personal individuality and its particular interests would reach their full development and gain recognition of their right for itself (within the system of the family and of civil society), and also that they should, on the one hand, pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal, and on the other, knowingly and willingly acknowledge this universal interest even as their own substantial spirit, and actively pursue it as their ultimate end. The effect of this is that the universal does not attain validity or fulfillment without the interest, knowledge, and volition of the particular, and that individuals do not live as private persons merely for these particular interests without at the same time directing their will to a universal end and acting in conscious awareness of this end.¹²

The idea of the ethical as the identity of individual and universal ends echoes Fichte’s claim that conscience identifies the identity of a specific individual drive with the drive to absolute self-activity, but for Hegel this reconciliation had to be effected through political process rather than individual transformation.

Hegel thus embroils himself in factual questions. His ideal is tenable only so long as a state exists or can exist which can truly bring about the condition wherein individual and universal ends are both fully expressed and fully reconciled. The actualities of the state are thus much more important for Hegel than they were for any of his predecessors and his discussion is thus much more specific and concrete than Fichte’s was.

This is not the most satisfactory part of Hegel’s system, unfortu- nately. His rational polity was not identified with the specific struc- tures of any actually existing state, and he claimed to be discussing the modern state taken in its essentials, as an ideal. But however much he attempted to see matters sub specie aeternitatis he was unable to free himself from the givens of his time. His rational state had to be a constitutional monarchy, because it needed a figure of absolute unity and universality. It required a class of disinterested agricultural landlords whose consistency of income and status freed them from immediate concerns and allowed them to carry forward the interests of the nation as a whole. (Hegel insisted that property for this estate pass through primogeniture, in order to guarantee its independence.) The “changing and variable” interests of civil society were separate, and these were presented through an elected chamber of deputies, set apart from the house wherein the landed proprietors sat and deliberated. In other words, it looked something like a reformed Prussia, or an England with the Prussian agrarian aristocracy sitting in the House of Lords.

Like Aristotle in his less persuasive moments, Hegel tended to identify what was with what had to be. Uncovering the rationality behind and within contemporary institutions is a valid undertaking, but coupled with a conviction that human institutions exhibited reason itself at work leads too easily to a canonization of the present, and Hegel’s belief that history had advanced to the point where absolute knowing was possible only compounded this tendency. Like evolutionary psychology, a field which it resembles, Hegel’s philosophy is too prone to the just-so story. In the preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right he wrote, famously, “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.”¹³ He kept tripping up on the second of these formulations, and given his stress on the concrete it is hard to see how he could have avoided that problem.

Whether he was successful or not, Hegel was nonetheless trying to resolve some of the difficulties that had faced Fichte and Schelling. Fichte’s deeply monistic approach had left him unable to give a sensible account of differentiation and concrete distinctions. Schelling was similarly unable to develop a robust theory that led from the unity of being to the sensible world, and the activity of the Absolute after its primordial self-sundering was akin to that of a centrifugal force, unlike the Wissenschaftslehre’s ceaseless and endless movement towards the unity of the Absolute. Being had been shattered, and its lost unity could be found only in thought.

Hegel avoids Schelling’s problem by conceiving the movement of the Absolute as closed in on itself, as a circular movement out into the sensible world and back to itself. He thus makes the realization of the Absolute into a public, common process, as it was for Fichte, and he eliminates Schelling’s tendencies to elitism and intuitionism. The implicit rationality of Hegel’s modern state was therefore grounded in the implicit rationality of the historical process that gave rise to it.

In other words, the progress of the Absolute in its self-realization would itself generate the rational state and bring about the fulfillment of the Enlightenment project. Would and in fact already had; the Absolute had solved the problem of the proper form of the state. Crucially, however, it had done so through praxis, not theory. The Absolute had realized itself through the construction and transformation of concrete human lives as much as it had in the development of increasingly adequate theoretical insights.

Hegel thus vindicates concrete life and grants it priority over its reflection in thought. Indeed, for Hegel a philosophy of reflection was inadequate to grasp reality; it merely concocted explanations for experience, which it left uninterrogated. The true philosophy was speculative philosophy, the demonstration of the real movement that gives rise to the realm of experience. That movement is what propels social and historical change, which therefore consists of a collective human struggle which proceeds through negativity and strife towards complete rationality, though in nowhere near as one-sided a way as Kojève claimed. In this movement all human activity had a part to play. It thus takes place in the open air, as it were.

Fichte had ultimately come to identify all of the sensible world with the “one life” of the divine. Hegel’s vision was not so far from Fichte’s. As he told his classes, “The consummation of the infinite End … consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished.”¹⁴ But this lands him in some of the same aporias that Fichte encountered, and his insistence on the rationality of concrete individuals and social structures made these notably more damaging. Unlike Fichte, who denied that individuals had any substantial existence, Hegel was committed to the reality of individual needs and ends as moments in the overall movement of the Absolute. They could not be surrendered in the egolessness of ethical life, as Fichte had proposed. Instead, their content had to be preserved within the universal end of the state, and this could hardly come about unless there were common elements that united each individual with all others.

Hegel faced a problem much like the one which had confronted Hobbes and Rousseau. Without the eighteenth-century belief in a uniform and plastic human nature, how can one move from the individual to the communal without doing violence to individual needs? How can one come out of many? Hegel’s solution is to assume that the rational state was grounded in a community which was prior to and outside the political sphere and was more compre- hensive than the subgroupings of civil society. It was unified not only by a political system but by religion and culture as well. The Rechtstaat was also a Kulturstaat.

Hegel’s cultural nationalism, like Fichte’s linguistic nationalism, emerged as a way to mediate between the individual and the collective. Its significantly stronger form and importance in Hegel’s philosophy was paradoxically due to the greater weight he gave to the reality of individual existence; he created a larger and more pressing problem and thus needed a more complex and effective solution. There is thus nothing accidental about Hegel’s commitment to the idea of the culturally and linguistically coherent nation state, a nineteenth-century idea of dubious relevance even to Europe, where after World War Two at least 13 million of Hegel’s countrymen were among those killed or exiled to create a continent of relatively homogeneous states. Without it he would have had to abandon the notion of the state as an organically unified actor or be forced to theorize the resolution of innumerable unique individual wills by political means alone.

But what of those actors on the world stage, the states themselves? Had he not concluded that the contemporary state was, in broad outlines at least, the perfection of rationality, Hegel would not have confronted the question of what succeeds that achievement. But that is where he finds himself. History may not come to an end with Hegel, but it becomes a different kind of history, and one not at all like Marx’s. Once absolute knowing is achieved and rational institutions develop which manifest the identity of subjective and objective and the infinite with the finite, the Absolute shifts its activity from the life of those institutions into another sphere.

The final section of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right is given over to international law and world history. In these the rational states become actors in their own right. Each one faces the same struggle for recognition among the community of nations that the individual faced in the dialectic of master and servant in the Phenomenology. In a sense each state is a collective individual. In the international realm, however, there is no ethical life, because nations confront one another in what is effectively the state of nature. They are composed of mediating institutions, but there are no mediating institutions above them into which they may be integrated. They universalize the wills of their citizens, but nothing universalizes them.

The Absolute, finished with the state in its internal workings, now concerns itself with the competition and mutual influence of the various states. Their struggle carries forward the self-development of the world-spirit itself, advanced in every age by the one world-historical nation that the Absolute has taken to itself. But it does not seem to hold out the prospect of the reconciliation and return to oneself that is the fundamental movement of the Absolute, at least not any time in the future as Hegel could foresee it. As a result, the separation between self and world that Hegel resolves over and over again is unresolvable here. It is simply moves further and further upstream until it reaches the lawless sphere of international relations.

An irreducible tension between freedom and rationality lies at the heart of all idealism and even in Kant, who as we have seen had suggested that apparently free human activity might appear fully determined from the perspective of the divine. Fichte attempted to resolve this tension by envisioning the process of the totality as spontaneous and unconstrained, but in doing this he reconfigured individual agency so that it no longer resembles any of our conven- tional ideas of the subject.¹⁵ With Hegel the tension seems at times to have been deployed structurally, with the arbitrary, self-willed element of the experience of free activity sublimated within the rational life of the community but discharged and anarchically in play at the level of international relations.

Here the traditional criticisms of Hegel hit their mark. He appears all too clearly as a man of his time, resorting to a measure of geographical determinism, indulging in the Eurocentrism and racism that few of his predecessors or contemporaries escaped, and assuming that nations possessed a fixed essence, which is why each has only a single moment in the world-historical sun as it makes its unique contribution to the unfolding of the Absolute. There is also a troubling resonance between the suggestion that warfare is the ultimate expression of freedom and the enthusiasm with which so many young men went to war in 1914, seeing it as a release into the realm of real life.

But we ask too much of Hegel to demand of him the absolute knowledge that he claimed to provide, and there is much that is living in his philosophy along with that which is dead. His problems, along with his successes, arose from his commitment to the same ideas that he shared with Fichte and Schelling. Self and world were not to be separated and individual existence was comprehensible only within a single process whose inner movement was true rationality, a movement which works its way to full expression through the concrete interactions of individuals with each other. This vision cuts both ways, and the apparent conser- vatism of his later work concealed tendencies that were politically as well as theoretically progressive; the anarchy of international relations opens up the very process of history that Hegel’s theory of the state appeared to close. As Heine, who claimed to have been a student of Hegel’s, relates:

I sometimes saw how he gazed around anxiously out of fear that he was understood…. Once when I was annoyed with the phrase, “Everything that is, is reasonable,” he laughed strangely and remarked, “It could just as well read, “Everything that is reasonable, must be.” He glanced around hastily, but soon calmed himself, for only Heinrich Beer had heard what he said.¹⁶

Philosophy could not lay out the path to the future, but it could assure us that our common activity was in fact a movement towards the good in which every act had meaning and every person had dignity and worth. Perhaps there was nothing more than could be expected of a philosopher in what were increasingly dark times.

15

Things fall apart

Idealism’s affinities with the revolutionary process in France lay in their shared sense of possibility and their conviction that self and world could be and in fact needed to be refashioned together. By the beginning of the nineteenth century this intoxicating but treacherous sense of openness had been lost; with the emergence of the Napoleonic state revolutionary possibilities were reduced to a juridical equality and a commitment, often only nominal, to the career open to talents. Liberty because an individual matter, the right to pursue one’s ambitions within an essentially fixed public order. The revolution was recast as a demand for a regime of rights and duties, which had never been its real aim, and what was needed to institutionalize it and to paint it as a triumph was the act which killed it off.

Idealism lasted longer, although it too was slowly drained of its unsettling content. Into the 1840s various factions quarreled over the proper interpretation of Hegel’s ideas, some of them attracting wide support. Fichte’s son Immanuel Hermann brought out a collected (and over-edited) edition of his father’s published and unpublished writings in 1844-1845, which contributed to a brief revival of interest in Fichtean idealism just before the revolutionary year of 1848. Coleridge and Carlyle popularized idealist themes in Great Britain, William Smith’s still-valuable English translations of Fichte’s Popular Works went through four editions between 1845 and 1889, and full-fledged idealists like F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green were the dominant philosophers in English universities into the early years of the twentieth century. There are clear tracings of idealism in the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson (himself an unlikely but powerful influence on the young Nietzsche) and on Margaret Fuller, and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the earliest scholarly journal of philosophy in the United States, was the product of the “St. Louis Hegelians” in and around that city’s Washington University. While never as dominant in the United States as it was in late Victorian and Edwardian England, American idealism flourished in the same decades in the teaching of Harvard’s Josiah Royce and his students.

Yet it is not misleading to say that idealism vanished even while its banner was being held aloft by so many followers. What faded at a varying but inexorable pace was the very insight that gave rise to its most creative and radical movement, which was also its tie to the Enlightenment project from which it emerged—the inseparability of self and world. Its critical edge was lost, and so too were its political implications. The idealists of the later nineteenth century were polit- ically liberal for the most part, but they rarely if ever problematized the separation of self and world in a political sense and thus did not call the emerging individualist order of nineteenth-century capitalism into question. Idealism became the theory of an Absolute that could be grasped as an object of contemplation, separate and apart from the observer in everything but a nominal sense, an ultimate unity that was the only true reality but which had little concrete connection with everyday life. This was what was passed off as “the ‘idealist system’ scorned by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, misunderstood by Feuerbach, Marx, and countless others, and presented as ‘Hegelian’ by the British and American Idealists.”¹

Hegel himself was partially to blame for this loss, because he was determined to present absolute knowing in the form of discourse. To set out a detailed theory in writing always tends to fossilize a specific view of things and render it fixed and authoritative, a danger noted by philosophers since Plato if not before. Read in context, from the philosophical standpoint to which one had to raise oneself through the Phenomenology or some similar discipline, Hegel’s theoretical claims remained within the classical project of idealism. They could not be mistaken for the description of an activity outside the thinking subject; instead, they were meant to orient that subject to the universal process which makes and reveals itself within the subject and object at the same time. But the very breadth and detail of Hegel’s expositions made it look dangerously like conventional philosophy or even theology, a description of the manner of operation of a discrete and powerful entity that generated the world of phenomena. This was never his intention; as Duncan Forbes writes, “It is one of Hegel’s most consistent themes from his earliest writings onwards, that all varieties of reality-behind-appearance metaphysic and religion are pathological, a symptom of alienation in man and society which must be aufgehoben [overcome].”² But it is what idealism became in the years after his death. It became a theory of an invisible reality that gave rise to the appearances of the sensible world.

Viewed this way, idealism appeared to be the rival to the Enlightenment, not its completion. It could no longer be seen as the self-critique of reason which both embraced the method and yet undermined the expectations and assumptions of the Enlightenment project. It was no longer a critique of reason at all or a philosophy which sought to interrogate the subject-object division which was duplicated in the self-world or self-society split. It became nothing more than another philosophy, and its invocation of themes generally associated with theology and its critique of individualism made it seem like an irrationalist conservative reaction to Enlightenment rationality rather than its internal and revolutionary self-awareness.

The difficult and delicate task of comprehending agency as something shared or distributed was also abandoned or watered down into appeals to community and selfless love. Yet no alternative theory of agency was able to preserve the essential openness of idealism. All others were developed out of a conventional self-other dichotomy, within which only two major forms of thought are available. In one form the individual is the sole source of agency and will, and the commonality is nothing but the ground in which individual wills collide and sometimes coincide, more or less by accident; this leads to Randian egoism, the liberal embrace of the “level playing field,” the ethical demand that we overcome our selfishness out of love for others, or some mix of these elements. In the second it is the commonality which is reified, often presented as an organic unity, and its internal movement constitutes individuals who are essentially sites of social power rather than agents in their own right. This tends towards an anti-humanist collectivism or an equally anti-humanist critique à la Foucault.

What vanishes is the essential insight of idealism, that both individual and commonality are constituted together and are so constituted by the reciprocal interaction of all rational beings or even all things. Put more simply, what disappeared was the thought that we human beings make each other and that this activity gives us both our selves and the shape of the world that seems to stand over and against us. Without that insight the freedom of the individual is eroded to the point of vanishing. If there is nothing in the world but discrete individual wills, then every other person is at least a potential barrier to my own satisfaction, and we either live in isolation from one another or return to the Hobbesian war of each against all. If collective activity is presented as a separate agent, the individual will always be overmastered by the force of the collectivity. One is equally impaled by either horn of the dilemma

Philosophy and popular thought after idealism nonetheless ran along one or the other of those alternatives. The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer does so, for all of its supposed roots in Kant’s philosophy. Schopenhauer was a younger contemporary of the idealists, all of whom he loathed, and his one major work, The World as Will and Idea, appeared in 1818, the same year that Hegel began teaching in Berlin. But it and its author were ignored until the 1850s. It was then that Schopenhauer came into his own, and for the rest of the nineteenth century The World as Will and Idea was the most widely-read German philosophical text, with an extraordinary influence on artists like Wagner as well as scholars and philosophers. It captured both the mood and the intellectual presuppositions of the post-idealist generations with clarity and force.

Schopenhauer claimed to present the true meaning of Kant’s insights, and he begins with a dual-aspect ontology that has clear Kantian resonances. His distinction between the world as will and the world as idea, or representation, is supposed to do no more than restate in clearer terms the Kantian division between the noumenal and the phenomenal. Other elements in The World as Will and Idea echo Fichte: Schopenhauer, for example, argues that self-conscious action is the site where the unity of the noumenal and the phenomenal is revealed. The resemblances, though, are only superficial. His vision offers none of the liberatory or even reconciliatory possibilities of idealism.

Schopenhauer’s thing-in-itself, the will, is blind and all-powerful. It is a drive, and this suggests parallels with Fichte. Fichte’s drives are the manifestations of the activity of the Absolute, however, they are not the Absolute itself. Schopenhauer’s will, on the other hand, exists by itself and in a purposeless way it exists for itself. It is a kind of cosmic vitalism that assumes innumerable forms of ever-increasing differentiation and individuality. (He eventually identified it with the life force of nineteenth-century science.) The details of this differentiation are not so much developed philosophically as suggested by repeated references to biology, but it ends in the will’s self-contradiction and in the incessant and terrible fight for life among its manifestations—a fight for life that has none of the epistemological or ethical consequences that similar struggles have for Hegel and Fichte.

Like Fichte, Schopenhauer sees life as an endless striving. Unlike Fichte’s striving, however, which emanates from the necessary separation of self and not-self, gives objects to the active subject and moves towards the overcoming of that separation, Schopenhauer’s striving is meaningless and pathological. It is a pointless grasping after illusory happiness and a degrading struggle for the means of preserving a life that no rational being would want to suffer through. The only solution for Schopenhauer is to remove oneself from the activity of the will altogether.

His is a gnostic philosophy of salvation, then, which puts Schopenhauer very far indeed from Kantian and post-Kantian thought. For both Fichte and Hegel the philosophical standpoint shows the reality of agency, albeit in distributed form, and the reality of freedom in the Kantian sense of autonomy. Activity in the world is an integral aspect of the life of reason. Their essential optimism is not based on the factual judgment that the world is good or is getting better. It arises from the internal logic of reason itself, which in its very nature is a movement towards ever-deeper reciprocal interaction, the harmonization of individual wills and mutual recognition and openness. The unity of being and consciousness is both the source of the activity of the universe and its goal, and because the course of consciousness is defined by its original unity with being it its movement is always teleological. The individual has no substantial existence as a separate being, but individuality is a necessary moment in the circular movement through which the Absolute either endlessly strives to realize itself (in Fichte) or makes and comes to grasp itself in its history of concrete manifestations, as in Hegel. From either perspective there is no essential disharmony between individual and world or among individuals.

Schopenhauer has a similarly monistic ontology, but for him consciousness and knowledge are secondary and play no part in the unfolding logic of the will. As a result, his salvation is limited to the release from the world’s processes. It is a renunciation of agency altogether. Similarly, Schopenhauer’s notion of freedom is not the Kantian one of agency under self-willed law but the ancient ideal of ataraxia, of the absence of desire and the disappearance of suffering.

This release is possible because human beings are capable of acknowledging their subservience to the will and can understand its true nature. Individuals have a kind of real existence for Schopenhauer even though they, like everything else in the universe, are nothing more than moments within the movement of the will. The will operates according to a principle of individuation, and according to Schopenhauer’s rather ad hoc logic the most highly individualized of creatures, human beings, are composed from a variety of fixed intelligible characters which effectively dictate every one of his or her actions. Human beings, then, are concretions of the life force, each with an immovable nature, unique in a rather seven- teenth-century way. They are essentially closed off from one another, which makes their conflicts even more horrible than those among animals.

This is not the end of the argument, though. In an odd antici- pation of evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, Schopenhauer theorized that the will had found it necessary to develop a faculty of knowledge among its manifestations as human beings, whose complexity requires something more than mere instinctual operation. This faculty is purely instrumental in most people, but in the occasional genius (Schopenhauer among them, of course) it is capable of taking a more all-encompassing view, one that recognizes the ultimate unity of all existence as the mindless play of the will. Embodied in works of art, especially music, such a vision opens a space in which the suffering of the will-driven life is temporarily alleviated. As a revelation of shared suffering it leads to an ethic of compassion. Understood most deeply, however, it leads to the renunciation of the will to live altogether.

To renounce the will to live is different from suicide. It is to forswear agency altogether, to remove oneself entirely from common process, an act which is logically possible for Schopenhauer because he saw human beings as closed systems with given natures which could thus operate on their own, at least to a limited degree.³ This is yet another point on which he diverged from the idealists. Neither Fichte nor Hegel would have found anything sensible in the idea of an individual activity divorced from the activity of the whole.

Fichte had started from the self-positing Ego and from there the Wissenschaftslehre had led to a vision of cosmic unity. By contrast, Schopenhauer began with absolute unity—the will is the single source and force of everything—and ended with atomic individuals adrift in a savage sea whose only hope is to detach themselves from the universe altogether. His late nineteenth-century success likely owes much to the fact that this is the phenomenal appearance that modernity always assumes: the opposition between an implacable force and an irreducible but powerless individual. Schopenhauer’s long wait for the fame he craved may well be explained by his clear presentation of a form of experience that in 1818 was far in the future. History caught up with him, and he was lucky enough to live to see this.

This separation and opposition between two poles is the underlying structure of most if not all post-idealist thought. It shows up in Nietzsche in a form strongly reminiscent of Schopenhauer; on the one hand there is the Übermensch and on the other there is the relentless perpetual cycling of the Eternal Return, repeating the same events over and over.

The death of God that Nietzsche announces is a declaration that this split is irresolvable. It does not free Nietzsche from the Christian world view, however, because the split is a cultural artifact, a foundational move that he, like the rest of us, happened to have inherited from Christianity. Like virtually every other atheist and secularist in the modern world, Nietzsche works with a model of the human person as an isolated and self-directed percipient/actor that derives from Christianity and then seeks to resolve the model’s inherent problems in ways that owe nothing to religion. It is not surprising that his solution is the creation of a new mythology and it is equally unsurprising that his new mythology has none of the open-endedness or participatory quality of similar projects among the Jena romantics.

The nineteenth century thus saw a return to the fundamental problematic of Christian theology, the separation of humanity from God and a search for the proper way to conduct an individual life that had been detached from an external source that remained active as the ultimate source of order. Interest returned to the interiority of the apparently pre-social individual and thus to the gulf between self and other. What dominated was a decisive and unbridgeable division between the inner and outer worlds and an increasing tendency to reify both.

The reification of the outer world borrowed idealist notions of collective agency, but these lost a great deal in the translation. In the post-revolutionary era agency was no longer seen as reciprocal interaction or the dialectical movement of an absolute. Once it was severed from the agency of the individual all that remained of collective agency was the imagined will of the community itself, now depicted as an actor in its own right—once again, an opaque and implacable will that stood over and against that of the individual.

This was a strongly conservative position. Once the Volk was personified and treated in isolation from its constituent members there could be no role for conscious individual agency. Social change proceeded, but at the glacial pace of unconscious, organic development, something on the model of the unconscious linguistic changes that Jakob Grimm had documented in 1822. This was largely the position of Savigny and others of the German historical school, predominantly reactionary thinkers with whom Hegel was often at odds. The differences between the two had less to do with political attitudes, though, and more to do with the essentially subject-less agency of the personified Volk to which the individual was expected to submit.

The most common form of that reification was nationalism. Nationalism was not an invention of the nineteenth century, of course, and nationalistic elements are arguably present in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation and play a more obvious part in Hegel’s philosophy of right. But Fichte’s and Hegel’s concern with national character differs from the nationalism that developed later in the century. They were cosmopolitans at heart, and for Fichte especially national identity was a mere moment in the ongoing history of reason. A shared history, culture, language and religion shaped and made more likely a harmonization and unification of wills, but those ends could be effected only through social and political processes. Even in the Addresses, Fichte’s most nationalistic book, national character was neither the source of social unity nor an end in itself. Unity could come only from a shared engagement with the supersensible and a shared openness to its activity. These, in turn, grew out of interactions and conversations about the supersensible, and a common culture was helpful because it supplied a vocabulary for those conversations. Like the symbols of religion, however, these were starting points and not a goal.

For Fichte and the early Jena romantics the problem of social cohesion was a transitory one. Self-discovery and the production of social order were aspects of a single process, so the ultimate compatibility of self and world was guaranteed. Different thinkers took different views on the social norms and political forms that could promote this unity, and some—Hölderlin, for one—were not confident that any were. Kant, too, remained skeptical of any totalizing reconciliation of self and world, though he had hoped to move beyond Rousseau’s argument that social life demanded the loss of individual freedom and morality. All the same, confidence in the ultimate consistency of self and world was general enough that the problem of social order could be seen as solvable through the rationality of its own implicit movement, at least in the very long term.

Without the idealists’ confidence in social process, however, the problem of social order and thus of legitimate authority returned. If the true nature of individual life was not grasped in egoless ethical acts or by participating in the universalizing system of the modern state, where did self and world meet? What claim did the commonality have on the individual?

The solutions provided by later nineteenth-century nationalism were significantly different from those of Hegel or Fichte. The nation became seen as an end in itself. It was posited as an external, pre-existing unity which formed individuals and which demanded their loyalty. On the world stage these acted much as Hegel’s nations did, but internally they were nothing like his rational state, because they were not animated by the unity of individual and universal wills. National character no longer merely facilitated the social and political processes that effected the universalization of individual wills. It was now the actuality of that universalization, given a much more decisive and far-reaching role than it ever had for the idealists. The result was a denigration of both social and political process and individual agency.

Nationalism excludes cosmopolitanism, and the moment of openness to non-European cultures that seemed to emerge in the late 1780s was soon at an end. Interest in India, for example, faded rapidly, and from India’s being seen as a source for cultural renewal and as the sister civilization to that of Ancient Greece it became a paradigm for an effeminate, primitive yet degraded world, and other racist attitudes soon accumulated around that image. Hegel’s dismissal of Indian philosophy was typical of this new attitude and was in fact more temperate than most.⁴

This shift was not confined to the world of scholarship. The period after 1815 saw a major change in the policies of the East India Company. The era of the “white Moguls” ended; Company officials increasingly separated themselves from native Indians and the Company no longer acted as a partner within the Mogul Empire (albeit a rising if not the dominant one) but as a colonizing force, insistent on the superiority of its culture as well as of its arms.⁵ The aim was now the exportation of British civilization to the East, the production of “a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” who would communicate the will of the conquerors to the Indian masses.⁶ At the same time, the British government was pressured into reversing its stand on Christian proselytism, which had long been barred within India. The missionary activity of English Evangelicals in the years before the Great Mutiny of 1857 led Indians to believe that the colonial power wanted more than just political power; it was out to destroy Indian religion and civilization. In this they were not so far wrong.

The increasing influence of this new Eurocentrism and of an ultimately much more dangerous nationalism was part of a general hardening of positions and a narrowing of the European world view, perhaps betraying a loss of confidence in the viability of the European order. After the trauma of the revolutionary years that order was enforced by overt violence, through the widespread use of a secret police and by imprisonment, exile and massacre. The insur- rectionist traditions of the Parisian working class were ended by two outbreaks of large-scale slaughter, in 1848 and 1871. More effective in the long run, however, was the fashioning and disciplining of the self, which was made more easily feasible by the renewed separation between self and world and more tolerable by the wealth which showered Europe and its settler colonies as that once-backwards part of the globe suddenly rose to world domination.

This focus on the self had little or nothing to do with Romanticism. It was, instead, the production of a restricted, regimented ego that fulfilled its function by internalizing and maintaining principles of order and whose interactions with others increasingly took the forms of production, exchange and consumption. In France especially, however, a reinterpretation of Kantian and idealist philosophy was often called upon to give this new self-image both weight and authority. To effect this, though, these philosophies were shoehorned into the very self-other dichotomy that they had struggled to transcend.

This is clear in Madame de Staël’s influential De L’Allemagne, published in 1813 outside of France to evade Napoleonic censorship. Her widely-read text interpreted Kant’s critical philosophy as a dualism which “separated with a firm hand the empire of the soul from the world of sensations” and affirmed the common under- standing “that there is a soul and an external nature, and they affect each other by various laws.”⁷ Fichte, in turn, was seen as an absolute idealist and egoist, in which the moi (a recent addition to the French philosophical vocabulary used to mean “self”) was the productive agent for the entire universe, a thought that de Staël could view only with incredulity.

De Staël did find something of value in what seemed to her to be an obsessive and unpoetic theory. By her understanding, Fichte argued for the existence of an immortal and unchangeable soul within the self. The self as a whole was always variable. Like the self of sensationalist psychology, it was always subject to the influence of the environment. One’s identity lay somewhere else:

What is there then that accounts for that identity, if it is not the MOI which is always the same, which sees passing before its tribunal the MOI modified by external impressions?⁸

De Staël’s account of Fichte’s teaching is that this indestructible soul, the witness to the variable soul, is what creates “or, to translate more exactly, radiates within itself the image of the universe.”⁹

These can hardly stand as valid interpretations of either Kant or Fichte. The eternal moi that De Staël thought she found in Fichte points the way, however, to the most consistent and conscious attempt at fashioning a theory fit for the post-revolutionary years, the eclectic philosophy of Victor Cousin which Jan Goldstein has described and placed in historical context in The Post-Revolutionary Self. Cousin has no real claim on our attention by virtue of his philo- sophical gifts, but his historical importance is undeniable; for close to a century his ideas were the core of the upper-level philosophy course in the curriculum of the lycée. This was due as much to his political skill and success as to any intellectual merit. Along with his associate, the parliamentarian and historian Guizot, Cousin insti- tuted the centralized control of education that ensured that on every day every student in France would be learning the same lesson as every other, and he and Guizot devised the curriculum for this system. Cousin’s philosophy thus became the official teaching of the French educational system.

Cousin paid respect to Kant and there are superficial similarities between his introspective method and Fichte’s concern with the self; his frequent use of the terms moi and non-moi is an obvious echoing of Fichte. He even sought Hegel’s approval for his ideas, though unsuccessfully. But where Fichte uses introspection as a way of opening questions and ultimately of undermining the appearance of self and other that is given to consciousness, Cousin treats both the self and the contents of introspection as facts. Instead of dissolving the apparent separation of self and world Cousin solidifies it.

At the heart of Cousin’s philosophy is the introspective “discovery” of a unitary, rational self which is seen to be the source and controller of all of our thoughts and actions. Exactly what one would encounter in the course of Cousinian introspection is not easily gleaned from Cousin’s less-than-systematic writing, but as Goldstein suggests, the contents of the “post-revolutionary self” are defined in various textbooks and lecture courses that helped spread Cousin’s ideas through the male bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century France. One such text is a set of lectures delivered at Toulouse between 1830 and 1834, in which the minor Cousinian Adolphe-Fêlix Gatien-Arnoult conveniently lays out its elements.

The moi, taught Gatien-Arnoult, is a being created by an uncreated being. It is simple, has its living being in multiple organs, and is free, having been created in the image of its creator. This freedom is threefold. It is the union of force, intelligence and love, all of these being finite, corruptible and perfectible. The process of perfecting human freedom brings the human character more and more in line with the infinite freedom of God, a being of infinite force, intelligence and love, and this process leads to a human soul characterized by virtue, beauty and happiness.¹⁰

Because humanity is called upon to perfect its freedom, each person has the right to pursue that blessed state. The obligation to perfect his force¹¹ gives him the right to seek sustenance, to preserve health and find treatments for any sickness and to prolong life and put off death.¹² These, in turn, give rise to the right of legitimate self- defense, the right of individual liberty or habeas corpus, the right to work, the right to property and freedom of commerce.¹³

The perfection of intelligence imposes on man the duty to observe, to reason inductively and to verify conclusions.¹⁴ These are protected by the rights to freedom of thought, freedom of speech and of the press and freedom of education.¹⁵

Gatien-Arnoult’s concept of love is closely allied to the sympathy of the Scottish moralists. In the pursuit of the perfection of love everyone has three duties (Gatien-Arnoult tended to think in triads): to be sympathetic, which was the same as being just, to practice benevolence and thus be good, and to be loyal and devoted, and thus to act heroically.¹⁶ Freedom of association, equality or universal fraternity and the right to sovereignty—and thus the right to bring about social change—are consequences of these obligations, which like all of Gatien-Arnoult’s others rights and duties, he tells his readers, are recognized even by the vulgar.¹⁷

We are thus back in the realm of the social contract, but in the conservative liberal vein of de Tocqueville and the mainstream of American political thought. The individual is primary and exists apart from social process. Social life is merely the theater of individual self-perfection, its real validity lying in its potential for personal growth. At the same time, however, personal growth is narrowly defined as the perfection of one’s being as a rational observer and agent. As Goldstein writes:

[T]he grandiose moi was destined to be thoroughly unoriginal, to rediscover and take as its guide the banal verities about “the true, the beautiful, and the good” to which Cousin’s ubiquitous textbook would so famously lend his name. In short, the Cousinian combination of “personal will” and “impersonal reason” flattered the possessor of the moi that he enjoyed a thrilling degree of individuality and efficacy yet at the same time guaranteed that he would not rock the boat.¹⁸

Advertised as a technique of self-discovery, Cousin’s real teaching was internal self-monitoring and self-discipline. It is an early example the individuation of social issues which is a hallmark of present-day life, the transformation of structural problems into individual tasks so that each citizen is made absolutely responsible for social ills and rendered utterly powerless at the same time.

In an intriguing and obviously Foucauldian analysis, Goldstein sees the official promotion of Cousinian philosophy as a political response to the violence and turbulence of the revolutionary years. These were blamed on the pernicious effects of sensationalist psychology, as typified by Condillac and, secondarily, by Locke. The permeability of the sensationalist psyche and its variability under the impressions of a constantly-changing environment left individuals with no self and no self-control. Once the firm hand of the ancien régime’s institutions was removed, imagination and wayward influences took command, tossing individuals and the body politic around in aimless, pointless violence.

After this turmoil, however, there was no possibility of returning to the guilds and to the royal and ecclesiastical discipline that had contained and tempered the excesses of imagination. Instead, each individual had to be trained to control himself from within, in the name of a unitary self-structure and a universal Cartesian reason.

Self-discipline is hard and unpleasant. It cannot be argued that communal forms of life are free of their own difficulties; they can be equally harsh and the omnipresence of social scrutiny and the judgment of others can be deeply oppressive. Yet the severing of individual from community is painful in a very deep way, because it cuts off the newly-minted individuals from the common process in which alone their agency has its roots and its efficacy. Genuine social action vanishes, replaced by pressure-group politics in the name of private interests which simply happen to be shared by a statistically significant number of individuals. The meaningfulness of an individual life comes to rest either on the treacherous ground of self-confidence or self-assertion or on the illusions of a transcendent realm which is no longer manifest as the fabric of a morally ordered world. When Christianity extirpated the religions of the Classical era a world full of gods was suddenly emptied out, replaced by a city of man and a city of God which were separated from each other by endless empty space. In somewhat analogous ways the post-revolutionary world became one without social agency, with individuals were separated from an autonomous social realm by an equally impassible chasm.

The rise to dominance of the post-revolutionary self was thus part of a larger movement which cannot be understood in terms of a self-model taken in isolation. A new self does not emerge without a new world, and any history of the self which does not address itself to the worlds implied by the changing forms of the self and the conceptualization of their relationship is likely to be partial at best. The movement to which Cousinian psychology and philosophy attest is best seen as one that goes from a partial rapprochement between self and world within sensationalism through the thoroughgoing deconstruction of that separation by the idealists and back to an intensified separation.

Within the prevalent models of personal experience this reaction to the anti-individualism of Fichte and Hegel led to a merely nominal individualism. In the stand-off between self and other the other always holds the winning cards, because the other, after all, is the reciprocal activity of all, only rendered opaque and uncontrollable through its reification as an alien force. Even more disturbingly, if no implicit order emerges from reciprocal human interaction or the self-manifestation of the Absolute then it follows that order has to be imposed from without. In social and political terms, then, the alternative to idealism is technocratic domination as with Comte, the inhuman and often violent force of the state, the race or some other fictitious entity, or the rule of the market. The rejection of idealism and the return of the self-world dichotomy, in other words, set the terms for the history, ideologies and forms of experience of the age of liberal capitalism. From this perspective, however, the rejection of idealism is also the rejection of the Enlightenment. Modernity was born from reaction.

16

Enlightenment as a critique of modernity

Although Cousin set out to replace the disruptive theories and insights of the late eighteenth century, what really happened to idealism was perhaps more of a forgetting than a suppression. It certainly appears to be such in the case of Marx. Marx was well read in idealist philosophy and there are reasons to believe that he was influenced by Fichte as well as by Hegel,¹ and he would certainly have sympathized with any sign of political radicalism in their writing. The progressive tendencies in idealism do seem to be recog- nized in the first of his Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845, which concedes that idealism had developed the “active side” of human existence.² But that is as far as Marx goes in acknowledging the revolutionary tradition in idealist thought. He casts himself as breaking with all of previously existing philosophy by the very fact that he sees his thinking as a tool for change, and this implies a claim about philosophy as a whole and an argument that idealism was just as contemplative and theoretical as its rivals.

The last and best-known of Marx’s theses runs:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.³

Nothing could better illustrate the historical amnesia that has buried the story outlined here. For more than a decade, from Fichte’s lectures to packed houses in Jena, when he exhorted his listeners to act and transform the world, through the early Romantic projects for a new mythology and a collective politics, philosophy and poetry, Fichte’s detailed proposals for economic and educational reform and Hegel’s claim that the Phenomenology was to play a part in the dawn of a new era, philosophy had seen itself not just as the thought of a European revolution but as an active contributor to social change. The passive, contemplative philosophy that Marx rejects was the idealists’ target as well.

Yet Marx could write as if none of this had ever happened, as if the idealists had been content to devise theories about a world which they took for granted and a social order that they assumed was essentially unproblematic. What is more, Marx’s formulation seems even today to be a simple statement of fact. Of course the philosophers had only interpreted the world in their various ways. That is generally what we expect of philosophy.

It is not what we had been offered at the end of the eighteenth century, however, and our difficulty in seeing this difference leads to a difficulty in seeing just what happened in the formative years of the modern world. When the idealist self-critique of the Enlightenment project vanishes from historical memory and its claims about the mutual dependence of self and world are ignored it becomes close to impossible to recognize that the opposition between self and world in the post-revolutionary era is far stronger than it had ever been before. It is also harder to see how thoroughly the root problematics of the modern age were given to us out of Christianity and how close European culture had come to finding a way out of the Christian and post-Christian frame. The origins of the modern world are hidden behind an anodyne and self-justifying myth of constant progress with its triumphal conclusion in the best of all possible modern worlds.

In addition, we find it hard how arbitrary the split at the heart of our world is and how it continues to dominate our thinking and our actions, how it underlies activities that we have great difficulty seeing as ideological or culturally specific. The separation of self and world, along with the corollary that all individuals exist in isolation from each other, is not simply a psychological problem or a philosophical postulate. It structures our personal lives regardless of our theoretical or spiritual commitments.

The split is publicly enacted in spatial terms, in the central political ritual of voting. We rarely recall that elections and the secret ballot are different and that one preceded the other by a considerable margin. In both Great Britain and the United States voting was origi- nally performed in public, and the secret or Australian ballot was not universally adopted in the United States until the 1890s. Before that time, as historian Jill LePore has written, “Our forebears considered casting a ‘secret ballot’ cowardly, underhanded, and despicable; as one South Carolinian put it, voting secretly would ‘destroy that noble generous openness that is characteristick of an Englishman.’”⁴ Voters carried a ticket provided by the party of their choice, often colored so as to be easily recognizable, to a window where it could be passed in to the election officials. Voting was thus a public decla- ration, part of an ongoing discussion of political views, often a noisy and contentious one, and in the early United States frequently a dangerous one as well.

Today, of course, the secrecy and inviolability of one’s ballot are considered essential, so much so that there are couples whose members do not divulge their votes to one another. Voting is still a ritual, but it is now a ritual of symbolic social disintegration and private choice, a periodic reenactment of the entry into a social contract. What serves as an authorization for the government of the public sphere, which is clearly marked off from the realm of personal activities, is that its citizens are claimed to stand apart from the community and are thought to determine in their inmost hearts who should govern the state and how.

The old voting rituals seem counter-intuitive to us, not simply because of the obvious dangers for abuse but because they suggest too great a fluidity, too much intermingling of private and social; the social obviously controls the personal and merely expresses itself in the results. The point of contemporary voting ritual is to demon- strate the opposite and show that the social has been subordinated to the personal. The results are supposed to be determined by the private concerns of those who by choice or happenstance live within the jurisdiction of a given state. That is why we vote in small, curtained-off booths and these days not only carry our ballots to the scanner upside-down but are encouraged to place them in cardboard privacy sleeves.

The secret ballot can easily be justified on other grounds, of course. It is easier for employees to vote against their employer’s interest or for tenants to vote against their landlords’ if voting is carried out in private. Yet the same validation of decisions by reference to ostensibly private decisions recurs in a more unequivocal and much more dangerous form in the primacy of the market, the other fundamental institution of the modern era.

It is not that markets are new. Exchanges of goods have long been negotiated through them, though not as universally as economists generally suppose. The surrender of control over major social decisions to the market is novel, however, as is the practice of subjecting individual policymakers and workers to market-like incentives and penalties on the assumption that this is the best or perhaps even the only way to ensure that they will perform their jobs with skill and efficiency.

The ideology of the market is that it is not a social institution at all, merely a device through which individuals match up desires and resources. As the passionate marketeer Mrs. Thatcher famously said, “There is no such thing as society.” Within the terms of that ideology, any flaws in the market’s outputs must be due to insufficient information flow or irrational conduct on the part of the actors. “Reforming” markets, then, appears as a matter of policing them for obvious manipulation and providing adequate information to potential buyers, hence the huge mass of unreadable data which is supposed to be digested before choosing a mortgage bank, a utility supplier, or an American health-care plan. Once the information is made available the buyer is on her own, and if she makes a mistake it is her own damn fault.

There are a growing number of critiques of the supremacy of the market, like Michael Sandel’s What Money Cannot Buy. What they miss, however, is the inevitability of what they generally see as incidental problems. Mrs. Thatcher was not wrong. In a real sense there is no longer any such thing as society. The market reigns supreme and wipes out all other forms of social life because it rests on the very ideological foundation of the modern world, the division between self and other and the atomization of the human subject that follows on this. These give rise to the claim that the market is superior to all other forms of social organization and the most democratic of institutions, because it does nothing more than add up and give effect to the desires of individuals—and individuals are all that there are, each one existing in her or his little bubble of wants and accomplishments.

Market ideology has come to dominate the thinking of even nominally left-wing and social democratic parties. But the market can be justified as a social institution only on the assumption that the decisions which it allegedly coordinates have been made outside the sphere of the social, that there exist genuinely independent individuals who merely make use of the social world for their own private purposes. And this is just what the idealists tried to show was false.

The purported separation of the actors who participate in the market is the foundation for the claim that the market merely responds to their wishes. If there are no genuinely private decisions, however, the demands made on the market cannot be considered in isolation from the market itself. The totality obviously controls and merely expresses itself in the form of individual choices.

In truth the market is no more grounded outside of itself than is the men’s society in a New Guinea tribe or the National Football League. It is a social institution like any other, a way in which people talk with each other and are transformed in the process, only within its peculiar structure the conversation is recast as the negotiation of the buyer and seller and is carried out in such an alienated and mediated way that the reality of the activity is entirely mystified and its movement savagely constrained. Marx was perfectly right; this is a human relationship which is disguised as individual relationships with the movement of things.

We end up with a kind of half-hearted echo of Rousseau. The incompatibility of individual interests is taken for granted; Enlightenment assumptions about human uniformity are no longer fashionable. Social life is thus disconnected from the fulfillment of authentic human needs and desires. Yet Rousseau’s sense of loss and his tragic tone are gone, as is his self-disciplined civic republicanism. The market is idealized as if it were Rousseau’s primeval forest, where independent actors meet when necessary to secure their independent ends. For Rousseau, of course, the state of nature was a myth, an explanatory device. For the partisans of the market, on the other hand, it is an ideal, and a living one at that. Unprincipled entrepreneurs like libertarian capitalists of Silicon Valley are today’s noble savages: direct, brutal, and free.

The insistence that personal and social worlds remain separate has other equally far-reaching consequences. Within its strictures social life cannot be shaped by any shared commitments to any specific ends; that would be an impermissible limitation on the individual’s right to formulate and pursue her own ideas of the good. Factors like social justice, compassion, and the well-being of future generations can be entertained, but these play a part only to the extent that they are accepted as individual ethical choices which lead to the setting of personal goals, and there is no standard by which it is possible to criticize another’s value choices. As a result, no questions as to the constitution or goals of the community can ever be at stake in political life. The inherent logic of this system reduces political life to the clash of private interests, and under conditions of inequality the inevitable result is the domination of political life by the wealthy and powerful.

In addition, it restricts community life as a whole to the exchange of goods and labor power. Only buying and selling are universal. Everything else is the activity of a social sub-group. Capitalism’s spiral of consumption and the endless production of needs which can never be satisfied is not accidental. These draw their power from the unavailability of any other means of affirming one’s existence and social worth. Since it is only economic activity which links each of us with the community as a whole, it is only in buying and selling that we exist as real human beings among all others. Economic life and purchasing power acquire real emotional weight. It is a mistake, then, to castigate the modern world for its obsession with material values. It is precisely because material goods have been invested with spiritual values that people have come to crave them so much. Vast populations are exploited and the planet is being gutted to feed our insatiable need for goods which produce, temporarily, the illusions of individual self-worth and connection with others.

Closely connected with this is another myth of the modern world, that it embodies the rights of man, that we live today in the secular, liberal, rational world envisioned by the Enlightenment. The many inconsistencies and aporias of contemporary discussions of human rights show something more troubling. Rights talk is meant to preserve the greatest liberty possible for the perfection of each individual’s self-nature. But there is no recognized human right to collective activity, to participate in setting social goals or defining the particular forms of the good to which members of the community ought to aspire. These are taboo; they mark the intrusion of the social into the inviolable space of the private and personal. Our human rights boil down to a single right, the right to be confirmed in the delusion that we stand apart from common human life. A right to exercise genuine social power is not recognized.

As Fichte knew, and as any lawyer would acknowledge, a right is only the ability to enforce a particular interest. One cannot claim rights without demanding a specific order of social life in which those rights are respected. Only today, when “human rights” have been reduced to a bare minimum which corresponds to the bare individuality of the nominal self, is it possible to maintain the delusion that there can be meaningful human rights without a shared command of the shape of social power.

More than three decades ago Alasdair MacIntyre argued in After Virtue that the abandonment of the Aristotelian and Thomist moral tradition (outside of Catholicism, that is) led to a plurality of incompatible claims of rationality, truth and value. This is a theme taken up by Brad Gregory in his recent The Unintended Reformation. But the problem is not that modernity has turned away from one or another criterion for the determination of rival claims. It is that it has accepted as a foundational principle that such claims cannot be adjudicated and, indeed, must not be adjudicated. They have been removed from social life. There are publicly accepted facts, but there is only one social value inherent to modernity, and that is that there can be no social values.

The same split appears the still-fashionable post-modernism which rhetorically reduces individuals to the status of the objects of social inscription. If the popular image of life in the contemporary world is a tepid and uncritical echo of Rousseau, post-modernism often sounds like a species of Humean philosophy that loses its nerve part way through. For all the talk of epistemic shifting and social inscriptions, the post-modern self fails to vanish as Hume knew it must. Instead, it is said to retain an independent if socially-deformed subjectivity which can accommodate, transgress, subvert, or ironize the social, though the source of this subjectivity is just as much a mystery as the source of social power. This theory is thus little different from the mainstream, everyday understanding, though it is put to the service of a well-intentioned attempt at challenging the universalist claims of the modern world. Both folk psychology and post-modernist scholarship assert the reality of an individual agency for which there is no logical room. As a result, in both of them the power of the subject is exercised only in private.

This is ultimately a crisis of agency. The modern self is trapped in an illusionary struggle with an all-powerful other, called upon to be free but experienced as isolated from and set in opposition to the world within which it must act. It is not surprising, then, that there is presently a lively public debate on the ancient question of free will, one that Jacobi would have felt at home in, because it repeats the same opposition between lawlike rationality on the one hand, with the sense of individual powerlessness which it engenders, and the ineradicable experience of agency on the other.

Part of the problem of free will lies in its inherent intractability. We do indeed experience ourselves as free agents, yet we have to concede that in any objective sense we have no basis for our claim. As Fichte demonstrated, however, the sense of agency is integral to the achievement of self-consciousness and it is an illusion only as we present it to ourselves as individual agency. The self is real insofar as it is a moment in the life of a process that is itself both freely active and self-aware through its individual instantiations. Where Hume saw a universal machine in which true agency and freedom were nowhere, Fichte and most of the other idealists saw agency and freedom everywhere. Like Wagner’s music dramas, life is all melody and no recitative.

Such a solution smacks of the mystical and it scarcely seems viable today even in naturalized form. Its explicit anti-individualism suggests the regimentation and terror of twentieth-century Bolshevism and Fascism and its denial of a substantial self is personally threatening to boot. Yet there are few alternatives. Kant’s solutions, if they are indeed solutions, might seem more plausible, but he has as few genuine followers as the idealists do; contem- porary Kantianism is so bound up in individualism and rests on such fragmentary appropriations of the critical philosophy that it generally ignores the problem of agency altogether.

Critics of the Enlightenment have often accused its thinkers of preferring an abstract rationality over the lived reality of tradition and the emotions of the individual life.⁵ What has dominated European social thinking since the restoration, however, is far more abstract and inhuman than anything that emerged from the real mainstream of the Enlightenment. Modernity reinforces and gives secular garb to the foundational structure of the Christian world and its opposition between the isolated soul and the omnipotent creator and it has abolished any and all mediating institutions through which we might recognize, comprehend and further human freedom, which is the real power of human communities to build their own forms of life and experience. In that light the movement of thought has not been forward but backward. More fundamentally, the process we think of as secularization is only the reinforcement of a metaphysical stance that is no less metaphysical for the fact that it rests itself on the appearances of human life; the problem lies not in the appearances but the proclamation that these appearances are the truly real.⁶ This too is a step backwards, a retreat from a critique that did not shy away from examining itself and its own presupposi- tions.

The plausibility of the Enlightenment project grew from its assumption that harmony between self and world was possible. As Hume and Rousseau had shown in different ways, however, this assumption could not support the desired conclusion. The self either dissolved in a welter of sensations or it existed as a substantial entity whose integration into any larger group could only be oppressive. The post-revolutionary world retained the division of self and world but remains trapped by this now-unacknowledged dilemma. The goal of social harmony has been eliminated by the proclamation that it has finally been achieved. Disharmony remains, of course, but this is no longer seen as a social problem. Instead, it is left to the individual to craft that harmony herself. Social failures have been converted into individual pathologies, to be transcended in the semi-private sphere of religion, subsumed in fundamentalist ideologies or jingoism, or treated by one of the new therapies which aimed at reconciling the beleaguered individual with her unsatis- fying role within a mechanical and alien state.

Not even “normal” life survives. Each of us is assured that she is unique and precious: she must only be true to her inmost being. Yet this inmost being is as much a cipher as the subject of human rights, for at root we are all biological organisms with a limited range of drives and needs. The individualism of contemporary life, like the universality of its rights, embraces a subject devoid of genuine individuality. In reality individuality is not something interior, given outside of the social. It develops only in the real practice of real human action, the way an author’s style does not exist aside from the texts and emerges only in their writing.

More pernicious yet is that way in which the opposition of self and world turns all human contact into a threat. If one’s authentic being is some primordial internal essence outside of and apart from the social, every interaction with another creates the risk of compromise or defeat. We have nothing to gain but power, and what we stand to lose is our very self. The contemporary decline of intimacy, the widespread dread of experience, the desiccation of emotional and social life so often ascribed to technological change— all of these are better explained as the logical consequences of a construction of experience in which our own being is at stake every time we encounter the alien and uncaring world or even another human being.

The vapidity and the obvious shams of contemporary public life, the emptiness of personal life, the nominal freedom and actual powerlessness of individuals—all of these result from the removal of the real activity of human self-constitution from our common control and our field of view. That such an inhuman form of life and thought has survived for nearly two centuries, and grown more extreme with time, is not so much evidence of its underlying truthfulness as it is of the emollient properties of wealth. For Europe suddenly became rich in the nineteenth century, so rich that even the working class could see its standards of living rise. No longer a stinking backwater in a planet dominated by the fabulous wealth of India and China, Europe found itself ruling the world. How tolerable that loss could have been in the absence of the burgeoning prosperity of an industrial- izing West is an unanswerable question, but it is hard to discount the effects of that wealth and of the colonial projects that made it possible.⁷ Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral, said Brecht, but a full belly can easily be a drug for ethical deficiencies instead of a precondition for ethical growth.

Innumerable studies from Weber to the present have claimed that the rise of Europe and its and settler colonies to world dominance was a product of individual freedom, Calvinist world- liness and self-reliance or some other internal factor that made European civilization more conducive to economic growth than were the commercial societies of the Pearl River basin, Gujarat or the other proto-industrial regions of Asia. Yet this growth would never have come about without the easy availability of coal in Britain and northern Europe,⁸ and it would not have led to world domination and been maintained for so long without the rape of the rest of the world and the pillage of the future. The economic foundations of modernity are just as shaky as its intellectual ones, and with the inevitable dwindling of the power and wealth of the West has come a new harshness of tone and a further destruction of what remains of social life in an industrialized world seemingly locked into a permanent state of war, austerity and hyperinequality. What a future of runaway global warming and scarcity of resources will look like is unclear, but it is bound to make the problems of the present seem negligible and the predicament of the individual more intolerable.

To be sure, the world of the early twenty-first century is in many ways an advance over the world of the lumières. It can be gentler in its daily manners, more solicitous of individual differences, more open to talent, more sexually egalitarian and generally more tolerant and friendly. But these virtues are not necessarily specific to its underlying structures; they could come into being in many different worlds. It is those structures which are the issue, and these constrain and direct the larger movement of social and economic life. These exact their own price, and it may well be that when the bill comes due there will not be wealth enough to settle up.

Modernity in its economic operations is a gamble, something of a sucker’s bet. The irrationality of its intellectual project is harder to see. Here, especially, the idealist critique is of value. If it is taken as the culminating moment of the Enlightenment the movement of eighteenth-century thought was indeed profoundly liberatory. Inconsistent and internally contradictory as it was (and as every body of thought is), its tendency all the same was towards a release from the assumptions that had dominated European thought since the Christianization of the Roman Empire. This self-critique was part of a moment of genuine openness, an historical juncture when revolutionary and millenarian possibilities seemed on the verge of realization, when nourishment and renewal could be sought as far afield as in India and when it seemed reasonable and even necessary to hope that the life of the community would once again become the fulfillment of the deepest needs of the individual. Among the idealists this movement flowered in radical new ideas about agency and the sources of the self and the world and in a vision of reciprocal interconnection and mutual creative activity that united deep religious longings with the rigor of philosophy. They pointed behind the foundations of Christianity, back to the life of the polis, the “common city of gods and men” in which the pursuit of individual flourishing and the making of the community were identical tasks.

The modern world has nothing to do with this vision. Idealism now appears foolish and delusional, even though an increasing body of biological research is consistent with both the anti-individualism of the idealists and the notion of distributed agency.⁹ Modernity originated instead in the rejection of the doors which idealism opened, the denial of collective agency, the separation of self and other and “the West from the rest.” Most of all, it rooted itself in the rejection of any hope that social life could be the sphere of self- perfection. A wedge was once again driven between the two, gods and men were forced apart, and the reciprocal activity of all rational beings was replaced as an image of reality with the confrontation of an isolated essential self with the blind force of the world.

All this was carried out, ironically, in the name of Enlightenment values, while the movement of thought and life moved steadily away from the vision which the Enlightenment sought to realize. Proud of its secularism, modernity is nothing more than the bare framework of Christianity with the possibility of a Christian reconciliation banished. It is no break with the past, no emergence into a transformed condition of humanity. Instead, it is a holding action, made effective by the accidental availability of a supply of wealth which it is rapidly and uselessly squandering. It is simply another, and progressively more destructive, stage in the long disintegration of the Medieval Christian world.

This does not mean that the problems of modernity were brought into being because of the intellectual rejection of idealism and, generally, of the Enlightenment. The relationships among theory, experience, institutions and structures of human interaction are complex and run in multiple directions. Even Montesquieu’s notion that men make laws which thereafter make men, the conventional wisdom of his day, suggests that particular patterns of conduct produce particular characters. Though such an argument was usually accompanied in the eighteenth century with a tabula rasa theory of the subject, the two are not logically related. It reappears in more nuanced form in Marx’s theory of ideology, which suggests that specific sets of productive relationships will give rise to theories and modes of experience that reflect, express and rationalize the status quo. The only universal form of experience is that of the universally deprived proletariat, which has no ideology, and out of that universality would come the end of ideology and the free self-constitution of all people in their now-self-conscious interactions. The proletarian revolution would therefore usher in an open-ended kingdom of ends not at all unlike the society which some idealists had projected as the culmination of human development.

In actuality the proletariat turned out not to be the universal class, and Marx consented to the diminution of his revolutionary vision until it became just another theory of history. What followed, however, was even more damaging for the Marxian future than this lost opportunity. It was the coincidence of an atomized structure of social and productive life with an ideology that seemed to assert nothing more than the apparently self-evident fact that self and other stood opposed to each other. The working class became a mere congeries of private interests. There existed nothing but private interests in any event. The peculiar transparency and self-evidence of modernity arises from that coincidence, which eliminates the contest of ideologies by depriving all of them of traction—all of them, of course, except the ideology that ideas should play no part in the composition of the social world.¹⁰

History thus appears to come to an end. But nothing, not even modern capitalism, can truly stop history in its tracks. Human self- constitution continues though the deformed structures of the market, the spectacles of a banal and delusional public life and the hopeless dreams of a purely personal freedom. This activity is deeply concealed, however, and the distorted form through which it is exercised most often leads to social oppression and environmental destruction even when the actors’ intentions are otherwise. Thanks to today’s technologies, moreover, those unintended consequences are so far-reaching that they are of global significance and danger. Modernity offers the illusion of rational agency to its members, but to live within it today is to feel like a helpless passenger in a bus that is careening out of control. Yet we are the ones driving that bus; who else could there be?

We are not what we appear to be and our relationship with each other is not what it seems; this is why the forgetting of idealism was an historical disaster and why its recovery is essential if a way is to open once again towards a more humane life in a more humane world. If social change were a matter of adopting the right ideas we could go back and pick up where the idealists left off. But we cannot do that; the world is far too complicated and our ideas are only a part of the story. We can at best produce new starting points out of an engagement with the past and move forward from there, knowing that there is no external perspective from which we can chart out our path. For the future cannot be philosophized, it cannot be planned and it cannot be known. It can only be made.

Notes

1. Something happened

1. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 3.

2. http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/anthem/index_en.htm. That Von Karajan had once been a member of the Nazi party did not, apparently, bar his participation in such a project. Whether Beethoven’s music actually expresses these ideals without Schiller’s words is another matter.

3. Mozart’s ability to structure dramatic action in musical terms can best be seen in middle-act finales like that of the second act of The Marriage of Figaro. Here it is the music which unifies the diverse elements of the libretto, a reversal of the procedure in the baroque.

4. The contrapuntal finales of some of Haydn’s early quartets and Mozart’s Jupiter symphony are not exceptions, as fugal textures are almost invariably more static harmonically than the classical norm.

5. This is often cited as the first use of trombones in a symphony, but was preceded by eighteen months by a Symphony in E flat by the Swede Joachim Nicolas Eggert.

6. There are still complaints that the finale of the ninth is formless, but as Rosen shows it is a brilliant fusion of variations with concerto first-movement form, together structured so as to constitute a four-movement work in itself.

7. Stephen Hinton, “Not Which Tones? The Crux of Beethoven’s Ninth,” 19th-Century Music, XXII/1 (Summer 1998): p. 68.

8. Examples include Tieck’s play which runs backwards, the constant self-referentiality of Byron’s Don Juan and the purportedly random interweaving of stories from different genres and milieu in Hoffman’s Kater Murr.

9. Charles Rosen writes, “there is a well-established theory that the Freude, or joy, of the final ode was intended to be understood as an obvious substitute for the overly inflammatory word Freiheit. [freedom]”, “Freedom and Art,” New York Review of Books, May 10, 2012. There is no evidence for this theory before 1849, however, and it is more likely a legend; see Alexander Rehding, “‘Ode to Freedom’: Bernstein’s Ninth at the Berlin Wall,” Beethoven Forum, 12:1 (Spring 2006): 36-49. If it is true, however, the impossibility of moving from the first three movements to the substance of the finale without divine intervention is even more poignant.

2. A task for philosophers

1. James Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 2.

2. Immanuel Kant, “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Schmidt, What is Enlightenment?, 58.

3. Ibid., 58-59.

4. Ibid., 63.

5. Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press:1965), 25.

6. A similar position is the theme of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man.

7. Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 63.

8. See, for example, Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), and What is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. 2002).

9. This subject is discussed at length in two earlier books of mine, The Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning, and the Culture of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005) and A New Biology of Religion: Spiritual Practice and the Life of the Body (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012).

10. The failure to recognize the specific and unusual meanings given to “reason” by the idealists is one of the major stumblingblocks to understanding their aims and arguments.

11. David Ulansey has argued that the appeal of the cult of Mithra came from its claim that he stood outside the cosmos and links this claim of faith to the discovery of the precession of the equinoxes—proof that the cosmos as a whole was moving; see Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

12. The term “pagan” is etymologically related to “peasant” and suggests what Marx and Engels later called “the idiocy of rural life.”

13. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

14. These generalizations are substantially less applicable in the case of the Greek church.

15. I owe this insight to R. A. Markus’ work, especially “Word and Text II: Gregory,” in Signs and Meanings: Word and Text in Ancient Christianity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), pp. 45-70. This entire book is extremely valuable, as is his earlier The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

16. The key work on this subject is, of course, Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Similar tendencies appear in Renaissance magic and in developments such as the method of Ramus; see Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).

17. Indeed, these factors are still are work today, and for that reason accounts of history in terms of explicit ideologies may be more likely to be valid of European and Western history than they are of events in Asian cultures, where individuals are less likely to orient themselves to their contexts through discourse and assertions of fact.

18. This is obviously a large topic, one that deserves one if not several large volumes, but the clearest line of descent is easily traced.

3. The science of the soul

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith (London: Macmillan 1933), 9, fn. A, A xi (Preface to the First Edition).

2. John Aubrey, Brief Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 349. Aubrey also wrote, “He had very few bookes. I never sawe (nor Sir William Petty) above halfe a dozen about him in his chamber. Homer and Virgil were commonly on his table; sometimes Xenophon, or some probable historie, and Greek Testament, or so.”

3. Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, trans. D. Gobetti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 29.

4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13.

5. Ibid., 47.

6. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic: Part I, Human Nature, Part II, De Corpore Politico, with Three Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 44.

7. See Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

8. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998 [2nd edition]), 314.

9. This is not to say that these changes are not aspects of a general cultural preference for explanations that assume regularity and order; it is merely that the logic of science by itself does not compel the conclusion that regularity, order and uniformity are characteristics of its subject matter. “[I]t was neither rationality nor science nor even secularization that buried the wondrous for European elites …. Leading Enlightenment intellectuals did not so much debunk marvels as ignore them.” Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 361.

10. Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. R. Schwab (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 6.

11. Ibid., 12.

12. D’Alembert is very far from a quasi-Nietzschean notion that some ethics is merely personal resentment writ large.

13. Ibid., 13-14.

14. Ibid., 25-26.

15. Ibid., 26.

16. Ibid., 84.

17. David Fate Norton, “An Introduction to Hume’s Thought,” in Norton, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5, 7, his emphasis.

18. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, Introduction.

19. Hume, Treatise, § 1.1.1.

20. Norton, “An Introduction to Hume’s Thought.”

21. Hume, Treatise, § 1.4.6.

22. David Hume, An Abstract of a Book Lately Published, Entituled, A Treatise of Human Nature, etc., in Hume, Treatise, ed. Selby-Bigge, 647. The attribution of this work to Hume is generally though not universally accepted.

23. Hume, Abstract, 651.

24. Hume, Abstract, 652.

25. Hume, Abstract, 654.

26. Hume, Treatise, § 2.3.3.

27. Hume, Treatise, § 2.3.3. Kant was to struggle, without real success, to establish how reason alone could be a motive to any action of the will.

28. There is an apparent inconsistency in Hume’s thought between his denial of the lawlike nature of causality and his determinism, which is founded on the universal sway of causal laws. This was to be the space Kant opens up in his critical philosophy.

29. Hume was taking part in an extensive debate in which poets, novelist and philosophers all participated; see Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

30. Terence Penelhum, “Hume’s moral psychology,” in Norton, The Cambridge Companion to Hume, 144.

4. The dangers inherent in thinking

1. Ernst Cassirer. Rousseau, Kant and Goethe (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 1; see also Dieter Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant. (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1992), 10.

2. Quoted in Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe, 1-2.

3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”, § I, 17, in Gourevich, ed. and trans., The First and Second Discourses, Together with Replies to Critic and Essay on the Origin of Languages (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 142.

4. Surprisingly, Rousseau is not mentioned in Stephen Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

5. Richard Velkley, Being After Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 54.

6. Ibid., 55.

7. Ibid., 33.

8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. B. Foxley (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 304.

9. Ibid., 305.

10. Ibid., 331-332.

11. Ibid., 331, fn.

12. Ibid., 305.

13. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 31, B xxxii-xxxiii.

14. Ibid., 29, B xxx. Kant’s emphasis.

15. Heinrich Heine, “Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” trans. Mustard, in Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, Jost Hermand and Robert Holub, eds. (New York: Continuum, 1985 [The German Library, vol. 13]), 211-212.

16. Maria Höhrwathner, “Joseph Haydn’s Library,” in Elaine Rochelle Sisman, ed., Haydn and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 445. Haydn also owned a copy (in English) of Adam Smith’s Theory of Mortal Sentiments as well as books by Shaftsbury and Burke.

17. See, for instance, Benjamin W. Redekop, Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder and the Quest for a German Public (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).

18. Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: 1648-1840 (New York: Knopf, 1964), 22.

19. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” trans. Benton, in Marx, Early Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 243.

20. The most thorough treatment in English of the subsequent “Pantheismusstreit” (Pantheism controversy) is found in Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

21. Jacobi writes in the form of a drama.

22. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza, in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn,” in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. G. di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 187. This is by far the most comprehensive anthology of Jacobi’s writings in English and di Giovanni’s book-length introductory study makes the best possible case for Jacobi’s importance.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 188.

25. Hume might just as easily be cited in this connection, but Jacobi was to make different use of Hume in his later work.

26. Ibid., 189.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 193-194.

29. Ibid., 195.

30. Ibid., 83 (di Giovanni’s “Introduction: The Unfinished Philosophy of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi”).

31. Ibid., p. 84. What di Giovanni is here describing is very much the interpretation of Hegel that he shared with the late H. S. Harris.

5. The limits of knowledge

1. It is common to focus instead on Kant’s epistemological question “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” I do not think this question is central to Kant’s larger undertaking and it largely removes the discussion from the broader historical context. Those are the concerns which motivate my treatment here.

2. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 10, A xiii-xiv. There is a later echo of this in Wittgenstein’s preface to the Tractatus, “I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problem are solved.”

3. Ibid., 9, A xi-xii.

4. Ibid., 120, A 84-85, B 116-117.

5. For the legal origin of Kant’s term and its implications see Dieter Henrich, “Kant’s Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of the First Critique” in Eckart Förster, Kant’s Transcendental Deductions: The Three “Critiques” and the “Opus Postumum” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 29-46.

6. Decades ago the great literary critic M. H. Abrams analyzed the circular structures in idealist philosophy as mythic journeys of exploration and return in his still-valuable Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973).

7. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 41, B 1.

8. Ibid., 41, A 1. The difference may be an attempt at easing the reader into Kant’s central claim instead of confronting her with it immediately.

9. Ibid., 22, B xvi.

10. It is not what Indians mean either. The most common view in classical Indian philosophy is that mind is itself material, though it is an extremely subtle form of matter, and the reality of the physical world is rarely doubted. The illusionary character of the world of experience lies not in its non-existence but in the way we misinterpret it; the archetypal Indian metaphor is the rope which we mistake for a snake.

11. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 93, A 51-52, B 75-76.

12. The specific nature of Kantian transcendental arguments is that they account for the combination of two or more separate faculties; see Robert J. Benton, Kant’s Second Critique and the Problem of Transcendental Arguments (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977).

13. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason., 93, A 52, B 76.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 68, A 23, B 38.

16. Ibid., 113, A 80, B 106.

17. Ibid., 127-128, B 127-128.

18. Ibid., 151, B 129-130.

19. Ibid., 152-153, B 131-132.

20. Ibid., 154, B 134.

21. Ibid., 154, B 135.

22. Ibid., 160, B 143.

23. Ibid., 164, B 150.

24. Ibid., 164, B 150-51.

25. Ibid., 173, B 164.

26. Ibid., 163, B 148. Emphasis in original.

27. Ibid., 173-174, B 166. He hastens to add in a footnote, “The use of reason is not always directed to the determination of an object, that is, to knowledge, but also to the determination of the subject and of its volition – a use which cannot be here dealt with.” This is practical reason.

28. Ibid., 168-169, B 157-158.

6. The moral law

1. The odd title derives at least in part from the fact that the German word “Glaube” can mean both “faith” and “belief.” Jacobi could thus present Hume’s reliance on belief (the pragmatic acceptance of the limits of knowledge) as an affirmative expression of faith.

2. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “David Hume on Faith,” in Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, 336.

3. Ibid., 337.

4. There is a comprehensive translation available, including both the 1787 original and the major passages from Reinhold’s expanded 1790 edition, in Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, ed. Ameriks, trans. Hebbler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

5. According to George di Giovanni, “Reinhold’s first reaction to the Critique of Pure Reason had been quite negative” and his adherence was always to the ethical implications of Kant’s thought, not to its epistemological aspects; George di Giovanni, “The Facts of Consciousness,” in di Giovanni and Harris, Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of German Idealism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000 [2nd ed]), 9.

6. Kant’s unpublished notes were eventually published as the Opus Postuum.

7. Jacobi, “David Hume on Faith,” 337.

8. Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 198, AK 5:72. This is an echo of Hume, whether deliberate or not.

9. Ibid., 153, AK 5:19.

10. Ibid., 155, AK 5:21.

11. Ibid., 157-158, AK 5:24.

12. Ibid., 158, AK 5:24.

13. Ibid., 159, AK 5:26.

14. Ibid., 160, AK 5:26.

15. Ibid., 160, AK 5:27.

16. Ibid.

17. http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/ Sessions/Session-105-04.html

18. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason” 163, AK 5:30.

19. Ibid., 163, AK 5:29-30.

20. Ibid., 165, AK 5:31.

21. Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Practical Philosophy, 49, AK 4:393.

22. Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 197.

23. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” 195, AK 5:68.

24. Kant, “On the Common Saying: That may be Correct in Theory, but it is of no Use in Practice, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, 282, AK 8:278.

25. This, at least, was how Kant was to be interpreted by Fichte, whose own ethical theory builds a semi-Kantian edifice on very different grounds.

26. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” 234, AK 5: 117.

27. These doctrines were hardly unknown in the European tradition, either, having been prominently held by the Pythagoreans and Empedocles and acknowledged and perhaps taught by Plato; see Thomas McEvilly, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York: Allworth Press, 2002), pp. 98-156.

28. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” 175 AK 5:43. The charge that Fichte wished to turn the entire world into a rational whole could be made just as easily against Kant.

29. Kant, “Of the Common Saying,” 282-3, fn. AK 8:280.

30. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” 206, AK 5:82.

31. See, e.g., Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” 83-84, AK 433-434.

32. This is in the realm of morals only, it should be added, and must be distinguished from political systems. Kant was opposed to absolute democracy, in which the whole of the people acted both as legislators and executives; this led to the denial of the rights of minorities and “a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom,” Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” in Kant, Practical Philosophy, 324, AK 8:352.

33. See, e. g., Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso Books, 1992), 233-234.

34. Dieter Henrich, “The French Revolution and German Philosophy: Toward a Determination of their Relation,” in Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 91.

7. The elusive point of unity

1. David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 37.

2. The phrase is from S. L. Hurley, Consciousness in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 240 ff.

3. See, on this point, Benton, Kant’s Second Critique and the problem of Transcendental Arguments, 7-19.

4. Dieter Henrich, The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 37.

5. Ibid.

6. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgment, trans. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 14, AK 5:176.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., 14-15, AK 5:175-176.

9. Ibid. Interpolation by the translator.

10. George di Giovanni, Freedom and Religion in Kant and his Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 20-24.

11. Karl Ludwig Reinhold, “The Foundations of Philosophical Knowledge,” excerpts translated in di Giovanni and Harris, Between Kant and Hegel, 66.

12. Ibid., 67.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. di Giovanni translates that as “Philosophy of the Elements” to parallel the standard English rendering of Kant’s “Doctrine of the Elements.”

16. Reinhold, “Foundations of Philosophical Knowledge,” 70.

17. Ibid., 93.

18. Ibid.

19. di Giovanni and Harris, Between Kant and Hegel, 99, fn 27.

20. Dieter Henrich, “The Origins of the Theory of the Subject,” in Honneth, McCarthy, Offe and Wellmer, ed., Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

21. Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Beiser makes this argument succinctly: “Reinhold reinterpreted the critical philosophy in a subjectivist manner,” 227.

22. Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, 176.

23. The author of Aenesidemus was Gottlob Ernst Schulze. There are many other critiques of Kant and developments of the critical philosophy in this period that would merit attention if this book were longer; the contribution of Solomon Maimon may be mentioned in that regard.

24. [Schulze], Aenesidemus, in di Giovanni & Harris, Between Kant and Hegel, 109.

25. Ibid., 111.

26. Ibid., 113.

27. Ibid., 115.

28. Ibid., 117.

29. I am paraphrasing.

8. The self posits itself

1. Even those whom one might expect to be sympathetic to Fichte’s enterprise are sometimes ambivalent; the translators of the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre call it “the brilliant labor of abortive genius,” which hardly seems like a brief for the defense; see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) with First and Second Introductions, trans. Heath & Lachs (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), xviii.

2. Ibid., 94-96, I, 92-95.

3. Heine, “Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” 216.

4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “The Vocation of Man” in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, trans. Smith (London: Trübner & Co, 1889 [4th ed.]), 462, I, 303.

5. Anthony La Vopa, Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8. As I argue below, Fichte’s theory of intersubjectivity is developed only in the Foundations of Natural Right and he seems to have found it unsatisfactory. It has become a major focus of contemporary Fichte scholarship nonetheless, perhaps because it seems less extreme than his more consistently-held ideas.

6. Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 154.

7. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Foundation of Natural Right According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 183, III, 210.

8. One of Lavater’s closest friends at university was Johann Heinrich Füssli, who fled to England and renamed himself Henry Fuseli after he and Lavater drew the ire of a local magistrate whose misdeeds they had publicized. Fuseli’s visionary art and his translation of Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man influenced Blake to a significant degree.

9. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, trans. Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 371.

10. Dieter Henrich. Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 197-198.

11. Henrik Steffens, The Story of my Career as a Student at Freiberg and Jena, and as Professor at Halle, Breslau and Berlin, trans. Gage (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1863), 64. The desire for a unitary starting point is well expressed in this passage.

12. The term really does mean “unconditioned” but Fichte’s fondness for interpreting from Germanic roots suggests this interpretation, which is borne out by Fichte’s thought as a whole.

13. Ibid., 39.

14. “A Comparison between Professor Schmid’s System and the Wissenschaftslehre,” in Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, 325, II, 445. This is an apt reflection on the invisibility of the self in Hume.

15. “Aphorisms on the Essence of Philosophy as a Science,” in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Science of Knowing: J. G. Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 205.

16. This is my analogy, not Fichte’s.

17. In other words, it would be a mistake to think that there is a preexisting stream of experience within which we interpose selfhood.

18. “Review of Aenesidemus,” in Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings,” 75, I, 22.

19. Fichte, Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, in Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) with First and Second Introductions, 231, I, 262.

20. Fichte, “Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,” in Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) with First and Second Introductions, 31, I, 455-456.

21. Daniel Breazeale, “Editor’s Introduction” in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, 15.

22. “I at first wrote for my students in the classroom, where I had it in my power to continue with verbal explanations until I was understood,” Fichte, “First Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,” in Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) with First and Second Introductions, 3, I, 419.

23. Significant parts of the important “Second introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre” are devoted to these subjects.

24. Fichte, “Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,” in Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) with First and Second Introductions, 75, I, 505.

9. Bliss it was

1. Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage, Canto II, ll. 17-20.

2. The classic attack on this interpretation is Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [2nd ed]); the first edition is from 1970. A similar critique of this historiography from an unimpeachably leftist perspective is George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London: Verso Books, 1987).

3. Asked in the early 1970s if he thought the French Revolution had been successful, Chou supposedly answered, “It’s too soon to tell.” It appears, alas, that he was thinking in terms of the May 1968 uprising, not 1789; see http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/74916db6-938d-11e0-922e-00144feab49a.html#axzz1vW1GOusM.

4. Not so George Ellis’s satirical English translations; “‘Snowy, Flowy, Blowy, Showery, Flowery, Bowery, Hoppy, Croppy, Droppy, Breezy, Sneezy and Freezy.”

5. See Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).

6. Ibid., 133.

7. Ibid., 134.

8. Robert Darnton, What Was Revolutionary about the French Revolution? (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 1990), 18.

9. Jones himself had strong radical sympathies and risked prosecution for some of his pre-India publications. His Indian career was more conventional, at least politically.

10. It demonstrably is that, but outside of tourist guidebooks the parallels between the temple cultures of South India and that of classical antiquity is often overlooked.

11. Quoted in Breazeale, “Editor’s Preface” to “Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation,” in Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, 139.

12. “Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation,” in Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings,” 156, VI, 306.

13. Ibid., 157, VI, 306.

14. Ibid., 163, VI, 315.

15. Ibid., 170, VI, 325.

16. Ibid., 168-169, VI, 322-323, translation modified. The echoes of Kant are clear, though Fichte’s is more akin to revolutionary immortality than to the Christian kind.

17. Ibid., 175, VI, 332. Fichte adds, in words which ring sadly untrue today, that “In our own era one should not have to waste any further words on such folly.”

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 184, VI, 345-346.

20. Quoted in “Editor’s Introduction,” in Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, 19.

21. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Firchow, 46, no. 216.

22. A thorough if somewhat indulgent account of the Jena romantics can be found in Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

23. Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Millan-Zaibert (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004).

24. Novalis, Fichte Studies, trans. Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

25. Wm. Alexander O’Brien, Novalis: Signs of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). O’Brien argues against the use of the pen name “Novalis,” and refers to his subject throughout as “Hardenberg,” the name by which he was known to friends. The usage seems too well-accepted by now to change it, however.

26. Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. Stoljar (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 23 (originally published in the collection Pollen).

27. Novalis, Fichte Studies, 5.

28. Novalis, “Soliloquy,” in Jochen Schulte-Sasse, et al., eds., Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 145-146.

29. Novalis, Philosophical Writings, 60.

30. Novalis, Fichte Studies, 168.

31. There may be a parallel here to the late eighteenth-century preference for landscape designs that open on the sublime and unbounded, as in Jefferson’s plan for the University of Virginia and the once open-sided mall in Washington, D. C., now closed off in Beaux Arts style by the Lincoln Memorial.

32. Friedrich Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy,” in Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice, 181.

33. Ibid., 183.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 185.

36. Ibid., 187. The Schlegel family had strong connections with India; an older brother died in Madras in 1789 and August Wilhelm eventually took a professorship in Sanskrit. Friedrich wrote a short book on Indian language and thought in 1806, but by then his idealized picture of Indian culture had faded.

37. There is a much-repeated legend that the three planted a Liberty Tree near the seminary and ceremonially honored the anniversaries of the fall of the Bastille, but there is no historical support for this lovely story.

38. I am quoting the translation in Frederick Beiser, ed., The Early Political writings of the German Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3.

39. Ibid., 4.

40. Ibid., 5.

41. “Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation,” in Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, 160-161, VI, 311.

42. In Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, 385.

10. The politics and ethics of freedom

1. These have been published and have been translated into English in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1796/99), trans. Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

2. di Giovanni, Freedom And Religion In Kant And His Immediate Successors, 162.

3. Jerrold Siegel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 374.

4. Xavier Léon, Fichte et son Temps, Vol. II, 1ère Partie (Paris: Armand Colin: 1924), 99. Translation my own.

5. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, trans. Baur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 132, III, 148. It is worth noting Fichte’s stress on labor as the source of ethical self-cultivation.

6. The term is used only once in the Foundations of Natural Right.

7. Ibid., 176, III, 203.

8. Ibid., 23, III, 22.

9. Ibid., 186, III, 213.

10. Ibid., 186-187, III, 213-215.

11. Ibid., 257, III, 295.

12. Ibid., 257-258, III, 295-296. The glint of playfulness is “the innocent pleasures of remaining anonymous” is a rare but not unique glimpse of Fichte’s humor.

13. Ibid., 30, III, 31.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 31, III, 33.

16. Ibid., 38, III, 39-40.

17. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The System of Ethics According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, trans. Breazeale and Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 24, IV, 18.

18. Ibid., 33, IV, 28.

19. There is a statement to this effect at 27, IV, 21.

20. Ibid., 36-37, IV, 30-31.

21. Ibid., 37, IV, 32.

22. Ibid., 46, IV, 42-43.

23. Ibid., 52, IV, 49.

24. Ibid., 52, IV, 49. Emphasis in the original.

25. As Henrich states, what Fichte has rejected by this point is the idea that self-reference is “complete;” Henrich, Between Kant and Fichte, 260-261; “Fichte’s Original Insight,” in Darryl E. Christensen, Contemporary German Philosophy, Vol. 1 (University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1982), 30-31.

26. Alexis Philonenko, L’Oeuvre de Fichte (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1984), 54.

27. This discussion is the ultimate foundation for contemporary autopoietic biology and cognitive science, although the chain of transmission is so complex that Fichte’s contribution generally goes unrecognized.

28. Fichte, The System of Ethics, 116, IV, 121.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 120, IV, 126-127.

31. Ibid., 124, IV, 130.

32. Ibid., 125, IV, 131.

33. Ibid., 137, IV, 144.

34. Ibid., 138, IV, 145.

35. Ibid., 139, IV, 146. Fichte’s discussion has been drastically simplified here; the unification is also the empirical self with the pure I, which by this point in Fichte’s development is hard to distinguish from the divine.

36. See, e.g., his discussion of Protestantism, Ibid., 232-233, IV, 244-245.

37. Fichte does not segregate the physical from the mental or the instinctive from the rational. He draws lines elsewhere. In the dualism of folk psychology thinking is opposed to body as brainstuff is opposed to muscle, bone and sex. For Fichte, however, conscious linguistic thinking falls outside the subjective; as he writes, our objective being is “completely determined by the laws of sensible intuition and discursive thinking.” (Ibid., 125, IV, 130, my italics) Fichte’s nature is not devoid of mind. What it lacks is freedom, which results only from reflection and the independence it affords from both the physical and the discursive.

38. Ibid., 245, IV, 256.

11. Dualism in search of its undoing

1. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Über Urtheil und Seyn,” in H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770 –1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 515 –516, translation slightly altered.

2. Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (New York: Continuum, 2011), ix. Emphasis in original.

3. Fichte, The System of Ethics, 50, IV, 47.

4. F. W. J. Schelling,“Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy,” trans. Vater, The Philosophical Forum, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter 2001), 381-382, 4:368.

5. George J. Seidel, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre of 1794: A Commentary on Part 1 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993), 29.

6. F. W. J. Schelling, “Presentation of my System of Philosophy,” trans. Vater, The Philosophical Forum, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter 2001), 350, 4:116.

7. Ibid., 351, 4:117.

8. Ibid. This entire sentence is emphasized in the original text.

9. Ibid., 349, 4:115.

10. Ibid., 344, 4:108.

11. Ibid., 344-345, 4:108.

12. Fichte, letter to Schelling dated May 31, 1801, in Schulte-Sasse, ed., Theory as Practice, 82. A new translation of the whole of this extremely revealing correspondence, along with the Schelling texts cited above, has been published in Michael Vater and David Wood, The Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800-1802) (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012).

13. Fichte to Schelling, November 15, 1800, Theory as Practice, 74. Emphasis in original.

14. There is an interesting anticipation here of Wittgenstein’s point that “The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.” Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, 6.371.

15. Schelling to Fichte, October 3, 1801, Ibid., 86.

16. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Love & Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 26.

17. For Fichte, of course, the rupture is the form and product of self-positing.

18. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 27.

19. Ibid., 28.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., 29. Žižek took the phrase “the indivisible remainder” for the title of a book on Schelling.

22. Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom, with F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World (2d Draft, 1813, trans. Norman) (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 14.

23. “Bread and Wine,” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Chernoff and Hoover (Omnidawn Press, 2007).

24. Ibid.

12. Separation, unity, differentiation

1. As Hegel immediately realized, this was far too flimsy a form of differentiation to serve Schelling’s purposes.

2. Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), esp. Ch. 1, and see also Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 339-343. What follows is my development, not theirs.

3. Of course, the “faculties” are merely explanatory devices. What Kant did was reconfigure a form of explanation, and in so doing he made certain distinctions easier and others harder.

4. V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 57.

5. I am using the term “meta-ethics’ in a Humpty-Dumptian way and do not mean that Fichte is engaging in meta-ethics in the analytical philosophy sense.

6. The later developments of the Wissenschaftslehre proper, however, do not concern us here, especially as they were unknown to most of Fichte’s contemporaries and had little or no historical influence.

7. Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, esp. 235-272. Henrich first makes this point in “Fichte’s Original Insight,” but the discussion in the later work is more detailed.

8. Preface, “The Way to the Blessed Life,” in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, trans. Smith (London: John Chapman, 1859), Vol. II, 277, V, 399.

9. Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, 232-235.

10. Fichte to Schelling, December 27, 1800, in Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice, 79-80.

11. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “The Vocation of Man,” in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, trans. Smith (London: Trübner & Co, 1889 [4th ed.]), 35, I, 195.

12. Ibid., 402, I, 245, emphasis in original German.

13. Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, 273-274.

14. Fichte, “The Vocation of Man,” 405, I, 249.

15. Ibid., 406-407, I, 249-250.

16. On the rhetorical structure of The Vocation of Man see my essay “Knowledge Teaches us Nothing: The Vocation of Man as Textual Initiation,” in Daniel Breazeale, ed., Fichte’s Vocation of Man: New Interpretative and Critical Essays (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013).

17. Fichte, “The Vocation of Man,” 471, I, 312.

18. Ibid., 430, I, 272.

19. Ibid., 431, I, 273.

20. Ibid.

21. Ultimately, of course, the supersensible world is identical to the sensible one; this is yet another division that emerges within the act of self-positing.

22. Ibid., 475, I, 316.

23. Ibid., 458, 460. I, 299, 301. Fichte’s emphasis is worth noting. It should also be noted that the admission that mutual recognition “is perfectly inexplicable by the laws of … thought” suggests that Fichte has definitively abandoned the notion of the summons, which was an attempt at establishing just such a law of thought.

24. See, generally, my A New Biology of Religion: Spiritual Practice and the Life of the Body (New York: Praeger, 2012), esp. ch. 5.

25. However, the Foundations of Natural Right suggests that the summons is carried out through the interaction of “subtle matter,” and both this and Fichte’s late-life interest in Mesmerism suggest that he was not opposed in principle to naturalistic explanations.

26. Fichte, “The Vocation of Man,” 476, I, 316.

27. See the chapter “On the Incentives of Pure Practical Reason” in Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” esp. 203-204, 5:78-79.

28. Fichte, unlike Kant, did not hold that there were mortally neutral actions.

29. Fichte, “The Vocation of Man,” 475, I, 315.

30. Ibid., 470, I, 311; Fichte’s verb is “verklären,” which at the time could mean both “made clear” and “transfigured.”

31. Fichte, The System of Ethics, § 16, esp. 191, IV, 202.

32. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “The Characteristics of the Present Age,” in Fichte, Popular Works, trans. Smith (London: John Chapman, 1859), Vol. II, 9, VII, 11.

33. Ibid., VII, 12.

34. Ibid.

35. Fichte, The System of Ethics, 230-233, IV: 241-245.

36. Fichte defines the Catholic attitude as that which leads to the symbol and stops there and the Protestant one as that which begins with the symbol and moves outward. This is nothing more than prejudice, of course, but it places Fichte at the start of the demythologizing movement in modern (and especially German) Protestant theology.

37. Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Addresses to the German Nation, trans. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 126, VII, 329.

38. Ibid., 113, VII, 314.

39. Ibid., 122, VII, 324.

40. Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Act II, scene 5: “blieb sie doch deutsch und wahr.”

41. Gregory Moore, “Introduction,” in Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 44. This is a very fair-minded assessment of the Addresses and their historical context.

13. The dance of self-othering

1. In Novalis’s terms it tends more towards philosophizing, while Hegel’s is more philosophy.

2. An English translation appeared in 1969 as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969).

3. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 35.

4. There is a compressed version of the Phenomenology in part three of the Encyclopedia, but overall this distinction holds up.

5. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, par. 20, translation and with running commentary by Yirmiyahu Yovel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 102, translation considerably modified.

6. Ibid., par. 3, 69.

7. Ibid., par. 2, 66-67.

8. Ibid., par., 72.

9. Ibid., par. 17, 94. That Schelling was the target of this jibe is clear from Hegel’s citation, immediately before this passage, of A=A as Schelling understood it. Schelling was deeply hurt by this remark and the two never restored friendly relations.

10. Ibid., par. 10, 80.

11. Ibid., 136.

12. Ibid., par. 31, 125.

13. Ibid., par. 32, 127.

14. Ibid., par. 32, 128.

15. This explanation is largely based on Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, 317-319.

16. G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and knowledge, trans W. Cerf & H. S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), 191; GW IV, 414. Hegel uses “speculative” in almost exactly the opposite sense from the conventional one; it is thinking that proceeds from the real unity of subject and object. Reflection is thinking that accepts their separation.

17. Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, par. 32, 129-130.

18. Ibid., par. 33, 132.

19. Par. 47. Translation mine; the German “Erscheinung” suggests a somewhat richer and divinized experience than the English “appearance.”

20. Ibid., par. 4, 71, translation substantially altered. The original is, “Dieser Anfang der Bildung wird aber zunächst dem Ernste des erfüllten Lebens Platz machen, der in die Erfahrung der Sache selbst hineinführt, und wenn auch dies noch hinzukommt, daß der Ernst des Begriffs in ihre Tiefe steigt, so wird eine solche Kenntnis und Beurteilung in der Konversation ihre schickliche Stelle behalten.” Every translation reads “steigt” as if it meant “descend,” where its normal meaning is “rise.” I take the conjunction of “depth” and “rise” as a typically Hegelian conjunction of opposites and an indication that the process is not that of the inquiring mind but that of the Concept in which the knower and the known are one.

21. Ibid., par. 56, 174.

22. Fichte understood the Wissenschaftslehre as the description of a process that was observed under the fiction that it was self-contained; the unity of reality itself was implicit but beyond comprehension. Hegel, on the other hand, claimed to occupy a stance where the logic of the process was the logic of absolute reality. In both cases, however, the philosophical undertaking is one of describing an activity and uncovering its inherent logic.

23. Ibid., 189.

24. Ibid., par. 71, 195.

25. Ibid., par. 11, 83-84, translation slightly altered.

26. Ibid., par. 13, 85-88.

14. The owl of Minerva

1. Both in G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1991), 21.

2. Ibid., 22.

3. Ibid., 23.

4. He took the chair that had previously been Fichte’s, the faculty having left it open for want of a suitable successor until Hegel accepted the offer.

5. This is a narrow and misleading interpretation of Indian religious and philosophical thought, but it was as sophisticated and scholarly as the state of European knowledge permitted in Hegel’s time. His acquaintance with the source material (in translation, of course) was unusually broad.

6. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 165.

7. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Preface, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 182.

8. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), par. 808, 493.

9. Later Marxists rejected the subjectivist Hegelianism of Marx’s early writing, which was largely unknown anyway, and approached Hegel through the Logic, favoring the necessary succession of social forms within an historical continuity over notions of a liberatory break from prehistory. In such Marxisms it was the discovery of historical materialism which was the decisive shift.

10. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 275, § 257.

11. Fichte’s ethics, while recognizably Kantian, diverge from Kant as he moves towards a vision of a supersensible and suprapersonal drive towards unification.

12. Ibid., 282, § 260.

13. Ibid., 20.

14. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. W. Wallace (1873; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 274, § 212.

15. That this reconfiguration is consistent with much recent neurobiology does not lessen its incompatibility with everyday experience.

16. Heinrich Heine, “Letters on Germany,” in Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, 289. Heine’s veracity has been challenged, but it now appears that even if he himself did not hear Hegel say this at least one of his students did, and Hegel’s early lectures on the philosophy of right confirm this interpretation; see, e.g., Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 22-23.

15. Things fall apart

1. Duncan Forbes, “Introduction” to G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), xii.

2. Ibid.

3. Schopenhauer denied the reality of free will, and theoretically the acts of individuals are those of the will alone. However, because the will is essentially concreted in each person’s intelligible character, its agency is all but indistinguishable from individual agency.

4. Schopenhauer had a strong interest in Indian philosophy, which he saw in almost obsessively pessimistic terms. His understanding of his beloved Vedas and Upanishads is unreliable, however. He shared the common nineteenth century error that Hinduism and Buddhism were life-negating religions devoted to self-extinction and the embrace of nothingness, and for all of his reading he misconstrued or at least misrepresented the sources. For example, he often cites the tag tat tvam asi—that is what you are—as if it accompanied an exercise in the denigration of the world. The saying, however, has a completely different meaning in the Chandogya Upanishad, where it originated, and that meaning is the one still taught among Hindus: tat tvam asi refers to the identity of the individual self with the impersonal absolute reality of Brahman, which is frequently described as the unity of being, awareness and bliss—an un-Schopenhauerean claim to be sure.

5. This process began as early as the final Mysore War of 1799, with the much-publicized killing of its modernizing ruler Tipu Saltan, who was allied with revolutionary France; see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (New York: Knopf, 2005), 149-196.

6. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education,” 1835.

7. Germaine De Staël, De L’Allemagne (Paris: Didot, 1853), 435, my translation.

8. Ibid., 436, emphasis in original.

9. Ibid.

10. Adolphe-Félix Gatien-Arnoult, Doctrine Philosophique (Paris: Hachette, and Toulouse: Martegoute & Cie., 1834), 114-115, my translation.

11. The single-sex language here is deliberate, as Cousinian teachings were almost always limited to a male audience.

12. Ibid., 130.

13. Ibid., 135.

14. Ibid., 132.

15. Ibid., 136.

16. Ibid., 133.

17. Ibid., 136.

18. Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 180.

16. Enlightenment as a critique of modernity

1. See generally, Tom Rockmore, Fichte, Marx and the German Philosophical Tradition (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980). Rockmore’s argument has attracted far less interest than it deserves.

2. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx & Engels, Selected Works, 28.

3. Ibid., 30.

4. Jill LePore, “How We Used to Vote,” in The New Yorker, October 13, 2008, at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/13/081013fa_fact_lepore#ixzz20zBq8VsF, accessed on July 19, 2012.

5. Romanticism is thereupon characterized as an individualist protest against “the Age of Reason” and its pretensions, as the cry of the soul whose essence is threatened by the regimentation of reason. Such an interpretation obscures the real political and social content of Romanticism, especially in its formative years. Blake was eloquent in his denunciation of rationalism, but he looked to a new order of society and a new integration of self and world no less than did the members of the Jena circle, the young Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Shelley.

6. Cf. Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.372: “Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both are right and both wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.”

7. The connection was made explicitly in the liberal imperialism of people like Joseph Chamberlain.

8. See, for example, Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), and more generally the work of the late André Gunder Frank.

9. See generally my own A New Biology of Religion: Spiritual Practice and the Life of the Body.

10. This idea is treated in detail in my Fiction of a Thinkable World.

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