Foreword
“Yet if the prospects for reason looked bleak at the end of the eighteenth century, they were not hopeless. While the beginning of the 1790s witnessed a formidable challenge to the authority of reason, at its shakiest point since its assertion by Descartes nearly two centuries before, there were also forces working silently toward its resurrection. These forces were indeed so strong that by the end of the 1790s there was a revival of metaphysics, comparable to the vigorous and widespread metaphysical speculation of the mid-seventeenth century.”
Beiser, Fate of Reason
“Therefore the complete antithesis is that of idealism and materialism, represented in its extremes by Berkeley and the French materialists (Holbach). Fichte is not to be mentioned here; he deserves no place among real philosophers, those elect of mankind who with deep earnestness seek not their own affairs, but the truth. They must therefore not be confused with those who under this pretext have only their personal advancement in view. Fichte is the father of sham philosophy, of the underhand method that by ambiguity in the use of words, incomprehensible talk, and sophisms, tries to deceive, to impress by an air of importance, and thus to befool those eager to learn. After this method had been applied by Schelling, it reached its height, as is well known, in Hegel, with whom it ripened into real charlatanism.”
Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation Part II
I must apologize for my extended period of inactivity. A combination of personal obligations and the difficulty of writing this entry conspired to mire me in continual procrastination for much of the last year. Seeing that some of you have maintained a continued interest in my writing despite this failing has left me feeling ashamed for my inactivity. I intend to be more active in the future. For any who have not read the prior posts, I highly recommend them to fully appreciate what follows here.
I initially planned to cover all three of the principal German Idealists—Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—in a single post. The shared characteristics and concerns that bind these three, such that it makes sense to speak of a German Idealist tradition in the first place, convinced me they could be dealt with as a group. But in my many attempts to write this entry I realized I could not adequately address each of their philosophical systems in such a condensed format. As a result, I have instead decided to dedicate this introductory post to discussing the general features and spirit of German Idealism, and to follow it with three posts treating the philosophers individually. Each of these profiles will connect the individual’s character and system to a broader theme of the tradition as a whole. This revised approach allows me to focus on several smaller topics I wished to discuss that would have been difficult to include in a cumulative discussion of the Idealists. My goal is to shed light on these characters, whose historical significance is generally acknowledged but whose actual philosophies—especially regarding Fichte and Schelling in the English-speaking world—are poorly understood.
The history of German Idealism is one of grasping for the infinite. Undeterred by the limits Kant had imposed upon philosophy they would restore reason to its pre-critical position of unlimited authority. They raised speculative metaphysics from the Tartarus into which Kant had cast it, and sought once more to know the fundamental nature of reality guided by reason alone. Following in the footsteps of Spinoza, they would posit an original infinite unity from which all distinctions and differentiation emerged. Like all monists before them, their great philosophical challenge became the task of explaining the transition from the infinite to the finite, from the One to the many. They would each propose a distinct philosophical system, but Hegel clearly articulated the inner kernel which bound the idealists together—something possesses reality only insofar as it participates in the infinite. Put differently: only the infinite truly exists, and the cosmos is but its shadow.
The Twin Inheritance
“(…) this philosophy is in complete accord with Kant’s and is nothing other than the Kantian philosophy properly understood.”
Fichte, Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre
“In the Wissenschaftslehre we will rediscover Spinoza’s highest unity,
not as something that exists, but rather as something that ought to be but cannot
be produced by us. (…) there are
only two fully consistent systems: the Critical system, which recognizes this limit,
and the system of Spinoza, which oversteps it.”
Fichte, Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre
“(…) until now realism in its most sublime and perfect form (in Spinozism, I mean) has been thoroughly misconstrued and misunderstood in all the slanted opinions of it that have become public knowledge.”
“I have taken Spinoza as a model here, since I thought there was a good reason to choose as a paradigm the philosopher whom I believed came nearest my system in terms of content or material and in form,”
Schelling, Presentation of my System
“What differentiates and forms the particular is said to be just a modification of the absolute substance and nothing actual in its own self. The operation upon it is just the stripping away of its determination or particularity, so that it can be thrown back into the one absolute substance. This is what is unsatisfying in Spinoza. (…) The great merit of the Spinozist way of thinking in philosophy is its renunciation of everything determinate and particular, and its orientation solely to the One—heeding and honoring only the One, acknowledging it alone. This view must be the foundation of every authentic view.”
Hegel, Lectures on the history of Philosophy
The best starting point for understanding the spirit of German Idealism is an appreciation for the philosophical environment from which it emerged. The explosion of philosophy in the late 18th and early 19th century Germany is inconceivable without the pantheism controversy. The idealists came of age during the controversy and each of their philosophical systems ought to be viewed as a response to the challenge Jacobi raised (Spinoza), and the allegedly inadequate response Kant provided.
All three major idealists read Spinoza once he was raised to the attention of the German public by Jacobi, and all three were at some point during the Pantheism controversy essentially committed Spinozists. Spinoza’s radical commitment to the spirit of philosophy and his unparalleled ambition commended himself to the increasingly radical youth of the Romantic era. The lesson which the idealists took from the Pantheism controversy was not, as Jacobi hoped, to reject the enlightenment rationalists as being too near Spinoza, but to scorn them for being half-hearted compared to Spinoza's philosophical purity.
They did not however remain committed Spinozists. Despite their admiration they still found his conception of the human subject deeply depressing. The charge of fatalism which Jacobi laid upon Spinoza was legitimate, and while Spinoza’s radicalism and naturalism meshed well with Romanticism, his denial of human agency did not. It was here that Kant’s greatness would impress itself upon the Idealists. The Critique persuaded them that all prior philosophy, including Spinoza’s, had been founded on error. The horrible deterministic conclusions that Spinoza was led to could now be dismissed as a product of his transcendental realism. Kant’s transcendental idealism had opened a path where recognition of earthly determinism, commitment to reason (albeit in a limited form), and a defense of human freedom and morality could all coexist.
Yet just as they had found Spinoza inadequate, so too did their enthusiasm for Kant quickly wear off. His defense of freedom and morality came at a price: the abandonment of metaphysics and the philosophical ambition that Spinoza had sanctioned. The Critique of Pure Reason was just as the title suggests critical of the ambitions of rationalism. The true world was unknowable according to Kant, making any philosophy that grasped the inner essence of existence impossible. Worse still, it seemed as if Kant might not have been as successful in constructing a secure philosophical foundation as he had been in destroying all prior philosophies through his novel form of skepticism. Kant’s account of cognition depended on a number of presuppositions and seemingly arbitrary divisions, and consequently it never began from an indubitable first principle. The German Idealists believed that the Kantian system, for all its merits and achievements, was incomplete.
For these reasons, the Idealists would present themselves as successors to both Kant and Spinoza, while accepting neither of their full doctrines. Each of their philosophical systems would inhabit the subjective standpoint of Kant, while stripping out the sensible and skeptical component of his philosophy through the rejection of passive sensibility. With the division between the sensible and the conceptual dissolved, Kantianism could be transformed into a sort of Idealist Spinozism. It became a monistic system wherein the world of experience was merely the product of the activity of the subject, and the subject was itself merely an individuated aspect of an infinite intellect. In the early Pantheism Controversy, Kant was seen as the antidote to Spinoza; the Idealists saw him as more of an aperitif for the true Spinozist doctrine. They would attempt complete the project initiated by Kant’s Critique through the incorporation of Spinoza.
Idealism and its Meaning
“‘The world is my representation’ (…) This truth is by no means new. It was to be found in the sceptical reflections from which Descartes started. But Berkeley was the first to enunciate it positively, and has thus rendered an immortal service to philosophy, although the remainder of his doctrines cannot endure.”
“‘No object without a subject’ (…) Berkeley, to whose merit Kant does not do justice, had already made the important proposition the foundation-stone of his philosophy, and had thus created an immortal reputation for himself.”
“Although coming later and already familiar with Locke, Berkeley consistently went farther on this path of the Cartesians and thus became the creator of the proper and true idealism, that is, the recognition that what is extended in space and fills it, thus the intuitive world in general, by all means can exist as such only in our representation, and that it is absurd, even contradictory, to attribute to it as such an existence outside of all representation and independent of the cognitive subject, and hence to assume a matter existing in itself.”
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
“Few men think; yet all will have opinions”
Berkeley
To grasp what is distinctive about German Idealism, we must first clarify the much abused title of ‘Idealist’, and distinguish the tradition of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel from earlier forms of Idealism. In everyday language, the term ‘idealist’ is usually associated with those who maintain an optimistic attitude towards reality, favoring abstract principles or hypotheticals. In philosophical discourse proper, idealism is often used equivocally with spiritualism—the view opposed to materialism which asserts that the substance of the world is essentially immaterial. And if you read Leibniz and his followers you will often encounter the term being instead associated with the thought of Plato and his descendants, referring to the Platonic attribution of substantial reality to the forms or ideas. Schopenhauer would deride the continued misuse of this ambiguous label:
“One should take away the term ‘idealism’ from the laypeople in philosophy, which include many doctors of philosophy, since they do not know what it means and do all kinds of nonsense with it; they imagine idealism to be now spiritualism, now roughly the opposite of philistinism, and are supported and confirmed in this view by the vulgar literati.”
Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena
To seek the origin of Idealism as it was understood in Germany, we must briefly acquaint ourselves with the first early-modern philosopher to whom the label was applied.
George Berkeley was a bishop born in the late 17th century to a family of Anglo-Irish nobles. His original and underappreciated thought warrants its own post, but we already have ample material to deal with. Berkeley is more nuanced than he is often portrayed, and many, including Kant, are guilty of having misrepresented his work. Nonetheless, I shall restrict myself to the superficial reading shared by Kant and his contemporaries. Berkeley developed a metaphysics in reaction to Locke which asserted that objects only exist insofar as they are objects of perception.
Berkeley can be seen as Locke’s successor in a way that is roughly analogous to Spinoza’s relationship with Descartes. Locke and his followers examined the human faculties of perception and the extent to which objects correspond to our impression of them. In doing so they claimed to have identified several secondary qualities, such as smell, taste, and color, which belonged only to our perception of objects and not to objects themselves. Berkeley essentially considered their work half finished, and believed they had not extended their skepticism consistently. Rather than denying that color, taste, and smell represented objects-in-themselves, they ought to have denied that objects independent of our perception even existed. Objective existence belonged only to the content of perception.
Berkeley’s doctrine is best summarized by his famous dictum esse est percipi: ‘to be is to be perceived’. The being of objects, which are mental and not physical in nature, lies in their perception by a spirit. The things we interact with are not material entities independent of us, but collections of ideas within our mind whose nature is fundamentally mental. We are ‘spirits’, finite mental substances, who experience certain mental states aided by the infinite spirit God. Berkeley influenced Kant, who would adopt the title which had been applied to Berkeley, Idealist. Kant would nonetheless exasperatingly attempt to distinguish his thought from that of Berkeley, as one of the first charges laid against him after the publication of the Critique was that he merely covertly introduced the philosophy of Berkeley to Germany. And he was right to do so, as his Idealism was of a fundamentally different sort than that of Berkeley. Here Schopenhauer compares the Transcendental Idealism of Kant with the Empirical Idealism of Berkeley.
“True idealism, on the other hand, is not the empirical, but the transcendental. It leaves the empirical reality of the world untouched but adheres to the fact that all object, and hence the empirically real in general, is conditioned by the subject in a twofold manner. In the first place it is conditioned materially, or as object in general, since an objective existence is conceivable only in face of a subject and as representation of this subject. In the second place, it is conditioned formally, since the mode and manner of the object’s existence, in other words, its being represented (space, time, causality), proceed from the subject, and are predisposed in the subject. Therefore immediately connected with simple or Berkeleian idealism, which concerns the object in general, is Kantian idealism, which concerns the specifically given mode and manner of objective existence.
Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation
Berkeley’s idealism claims that objects themselves are ideal; they possess no reality independent of the subject which represents them, existing only as ideas of said subject. Kant instead argued that only the form in which objects are presented to us is determined by the subject. His idealism therefore only extends to the universal conditions of representation, and not to the existence of the objects themselves.
German Idealism
“(…) perhaps something like God in Berkeley’s system (which is a dogmatist system and by no means an idealistic one.)”
“Idealism explains the determinations of consciousness by referring them to the acting of the intellect, which it considers to be something absolute and active, not something passive.”
Fichte, First Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre
“Or—since objective validity is designated by the term “being”—how do we come to assume the existence of any being? Since this last question is one that arises as a result of introspection, i.e., from noticing that the immediate object of consciousness is nothing but consciousness itself, it follows that the type of “being” that is here in question can only be a being for us. It would be completely absurd to consider this question to be the same as the question concerning the existence of a being that has no relation to any consciousness. Yet it is precisely what is most absurd that is most commonly encountered among the philosophers of our own philosophical era.”
Fichte, Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre
“Hamann and Jacobi had suggested that there was a higher intuitive form of knowledge that was not subject to all the restrictions which Kant had imposed upon discursive knowledge in the first Kritik, All the critical results of the Kritik could then be recognized — and circumvented — simply by appealing to this new form of knowledge. Later, Schelling and Hegel elevate this knowledge into the new organon of metaphysics, baptizing it ‘intellectual intuition’.”
Beiser, Fate of Reason
For Berkeley, idealism is about what kinds of beings there are and the relations among them. It extends skepticism of perception-independent objects into a full ontology. To be a Berkeleyan subject is to be a being (spirit) among beings (other spirits) affected by an infinite being (God). Kant’s contribution was to develop the original idealist insight—no object without a subject—into an articulate account of how the subject conditions its objects. Yet he still maintained that we are some kind of being, and that metaphysical beings beyond us cause our representations. With the German Idealists, idealism becomes more of a meta-ontological claim about the nature of being itself.
They differ in their answers, and there is significant development between what Fichte proposed in the 1790s and what Hegel popularized in the 1810s, yet nonetheless some shared premises and attitudes bind them together. They rejected Kant’s claim that the true world is unknowable and consists of beings independent of the subject which provide the material of cognition. They would instead make the subject the ground of its objects’ existence, and appeal to an ability to immediately intuit what Kant had declared unknowable. They rejected the idea that metaphysics ought to be a sort of categorization of the beings which compose the world. Descartes, Berkeley, Locke, and many others all share this fundamental view that world is composed of some kind or kinds of matter, be they physical or mental, and that understanding the world is just understanding what kind of ‘stuff’ there is and how the subject perceives it.
German Idealism would instead argue for the ‘inseparability of being and thought’. They would deny that there is a fundamental divide between ‘beings’ and our ideas or impressions of them: intellect is not a passive observer of reality, but constitutive of it. As a result of this claim, they would blur the distinction between epistemology and metaphysics such that the quest to know the limits and conditions of human knowledge was the quest to know the ultimate nature of reality. Reality isn’t some static state of existence that can be imagined independent of a subject. It is not being(s) as conceived by prior philosophers, but rather an active state of being-for the subject. The world is fundamentally the product of a kind of intellect, and intellect is fundamentally active. To know the world isn’t to know ‘what it’s made of’, but to understand the necessary processes and activities of this intellect which are themselves the true object of metaphysics.
“For idealism the intellect is an acting and absolutely nothing else; one should not even call it something active because by this expression one points to something substantial which is the subject of this activity”
Fichte, First Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre
In the above quote Fichte makes this importance of activity for the idealists quite clear. We can’t even call the intellect (mind) something active because it is not a thing. It is pure activity itself. Again, I must bring up Spinoza here. His conatus doctrine from which I take my handle states that all being is in a state of striving where the reality of an entity is commensurate to its activity. A distinctive feature of all the German Idealists systems is this sort of dynamism and obsession with activity.
While the idealists did indeed make the subjective the foundation of all experience, it is important to distinguish this view from solipsism (the view that you, dear reader, are the upholder and creator of all reality). The German Idealists would not, like Berkeley, view individual subjects as discrete beings, but rather as finite aspects of one infinite ur-consciousness. In this they once more took Spinoza as their model, who saw individuals as only finite modifications of one infinite substance. The difference with the Idealists would be that their infinite unity was not an object, a substance, but rather pure subjectivity itself, and so they would still claim that they affirmed freedom against fatalism.
In summary, the principle claim of German Idealism is that all reality is the product of the pure activity of infinite intellect; the absolute. All the idealists would develop monistic metaphysics which attempted to reduce the entire world to a singular, infinite, and active principle associated with reason. This would place them much closer to philosophers like Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides than Berkeley, Descartes, or other early moderns. And so if we are to understand the German Idealists on their own terms, we should be much more concerned with abstract concepts such as infinity, limitation, negation, intellect, and etc, rather than with any debates over whether the world is matter-stuff or mind-stuff. The German Idealists are a conscious attempt inspired by the work of Kant and Spinoza to step past that entire philosophical framework.
The Binding Qualities
If we were to turn a glance backwards, and look at the three ancient qualities which I identified in Spinoza at the start of this series, we will find that by the end of the Pantheism Controversy they had succeeded in infecting all of the greatest philosophers of Germany. Those three qualities were: (1) hen kai pan - All is one, (2) Deus sive Natura - God = Nature, and (3) ex nihilo nihil fit - Nothing comes from nothing. Taken together these principles commit a philosopher to some form of pantheist monism. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all consciously attempted to imitate Spinoza in their metaphysics, tempered by the criticism of Jacobi and Kant, and as a result these three properties emerge in all of their systems. In the next three parts, I will discuss in detail the lives and thought of each of these figures, and relate their story to one of these three principles.
I. Fichte and Nothing
“It is just as impossible for anything to break out of it as to break into it; with Parmenides as with Spinoza, there is no advance from being or from absolute substance to the negative, the finite.”
Hegel, The Science of Logic
“I feel a terrible horror before the nothing, the absolutely indeterminate, the
utterly void (these three are one: the Platonic infinite!), especially as the
object of philosophy or aim of wisdom; yet, as I explore the mechanism of the
nature of [Fichte’s Neo-Spinozist philosophy], I attain only to the nothing-in-itself; (…)
therefore do not see why I, as a matter of taste, should not be allowed to prefer
my philosophy of non-knowledge to the philosophical knowledge of the nothing, at
least in fugam vacui [“flight from the void”]. I have nothing confronting me, after all, except
nothingness; and even chimeras are a good match for that. Truly, my dear Fichte,
I would not be vexed if you, or anyone else, were to call Chimerism the view I
oppose to the Idealism that I chide for Nihilism.”
Jacobi, Letter to Fichte
“Fichte rid Kant’s philosophy of the thing-in-itself; but in doing so he revealed its true tendency and inner spirit: nihilism.”
Beiser, Fate of Reason
Hen Kai Pan. All is One! This is the phrase which Jacobi claimed Lessing uttered to him upon his confession of Spinozism. It is the slogan of all monism, the philosophical view that all existence is in some sense reducible to a fundamental unity. The persistent and obvious challenge to monism is the explanation of how the evident diversity of the apparent world could be produced from an original unity. Parmenides, who is perhaps the most thorough going monist in human history, was mocked by many of his contemporaries for the paradoxical nature of his views. Spinoza is no exception, and a great challenge of his system was to explain how a many could also be a one.
As I discussed in my posts on Spinoza and Jacobi, Spinoza fails to meet this challenge and his system is beset by acosmism; the denial of the finite cosmos. Because he defines determination (i.e. being this and not that) as negation, and asserts that no negation pertains to God’s essence, the logical outcome of Spinoza’s metaphysics is a God which is everything all at once and hence no thing. There is no mechanism by which determined, finite objects could emerge from the bosom of a God that fails to be any one thing, and hence is nothingness itself. When the Idealists took Spinoza as their model and all constructed monist systems, they inherited this problem of acosmism.
Fichte is the first of the idealists, and as a result in many ways the least prepared for the trial of acosmism. When he sought to transform Kantianism into a sort of idealist Spinozism, he ended up creating a philosophy which not only denies the existence of anything entirely independent from the I, but as a consequence condemns even the I itself to nothingness. This philosophy of nothingness would occasion the first significant use of the term Nihilism when Jacobi publically condemned Fichte’s thought. The post discussing Fichte and his philosophy will therefore also double as a larger discussion of the issue of acosmism within German Idealism, and of the origins and meaning of nihilism. It was this term generated by the Pantheism Controversy which Nietzsche decided best described the ailment affecting western civilization, and the connection is not accidental.
II. Schelling and Nature
Deus sive Natura is how Spinoza refers to the first principle of his philosophy. It translates literally to “God or Nature”, with or implying that the two can be used equivocally. Spinoza does not just argue that all is one in God, but that God is fundamentally identical with nature. In doing so he makes a major break with Christianity, which maintains that the divine creator is separate and prior to creation, and places himself much closer to ancient pagan cosmologies. He also further argues that the mental and the physical, the conscious and the unconscious, are just two attributes of this same God/Nature substance, and hence there is nothing which is devoid of thought.
These equivocations partially explain the radically different interpretations Spinoza has inspired, ranging from cutthroat atheist to God-drunk theologian. But these one-sided interpretations merely lapse back into the same dualism which Spinoza laudably abandoned, and fail to grasp a valuable insight present in his thought. In our era the dominant metaphysical view is a materialism of a quite different nature than that which can be ascribed to Spinoza. Matter is seen as something dead and inert from which life emerges as an entirely secondary and meaningless phenomena. There is no fundamental distinction between the inanimate and the animate, and so modern materialists opt to understand the animate through the inanimate. We are all just star-stuff (read: as dead and mechanical as any other matter). But if there is no fundamental distinction between the animate and inanimate, why not conceive of the inanimate through the animate? Spinoza sees the entire world as one great dynamic being defined by constant activity. The conscious and the unconscious are inseparable and universal, and all is teeming with a kind of life.
This feature of Spinoza would emerge prominently in Schelling and Hegel, who would both assert that being and thought were one under a form of pantheism. Schelling is distinctive in particular for his appreciation of the natural world, and his attempts to explain natural phenomena such as gravity, crystals, or mass through a priori philosophical reasoning. He took as his starting point a rejection of Fichte’s reduction of the natural world to the mere thought of the subject, and tried to instead present nature and spirit as complementary aspects of the same unity. Nature was unconscious mind, and mind was merely nature become conscious, and both were to be united by reason. And so in my presentation of Schelling and his philosophy, it will be this idea of nature and what it meant to the German Idealists that shall be my guiding star. I shall also use this opportunity to fulfill my original promise from the start of this series to discuss the relationship between the Idealists and Platonism, and compare the thought of Schelling with that of Plotinus.
III. Hegel and Reason
“God alone is the true agreement of concept and reality; all finite things involve some untruth, they have a concept and an existence which are incommensurable.”
Hegel, Encyclopedia
“This bare and simple infinity, or the absolute notion, may be called the ultimate nature of life, the soul of the world, the universal life-blood, which courses everywhere, and whose flow is neither disturbed nor checked by any obstruction that arises, as well as that into which all distinctions are dissolved; pulsating with itself, but ever motionless, shaken to its depths, but still at rest.”
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
“If Hegel had written the whole of his logic and then said, in the preface or some other place, that it was merely an experiment in thought in which he had even begged the question in many places, then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.”
Kierkegaard
Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit. Nothing is from nothing made. This is nothing less than the principle of sufficient reason and the spirit of causality. The principle that whatever exists must have a reason for its existence is the beating heart of any pure rationalism. But if we accept this principle, we are left with only two paths to explain the existence of the cosmos. An indefinite chain of reasons to which there is no end, or one which terminates in an original ground which is entirely self-sufficient. And if we agree with Spinoza that true substance (i.e. real being) is only that which attains to this kind of original self-sufficiency and is consequently infinite (without limitation), then we are left with a startling conclusion: only the infinite truly exists. All that is finite pertains only to a secondary existence, entirely derivative of the infinite. It is for this reason that Spinoza would break with Descartes, and claim that finite substance is a logical impossibility.
This is the insight of Spinoza’s which Hegel clung to more than any other. He would go so far as to define Idealism, and indeed all philosophy, as the acceptance of this principle.
“The claim that the finite is an idealization defines idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in the recognition that the finite is not truly an existent. Every philosophy is essentially idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is carried out. This applies to philosophy just as much as to religion, for religion also, no less than philosophy, will not admit finitude as a true being, an ultimate, an absolute, or as something non-posited, uncreated, eternal. (…) A philosophy that attributes to finite existence, as such, true, ultimate, absolute being, does not deserve the name of philosophy.”
Hegel, The Science of Logic
Hegel's only departure from Spinoza on this subject would be in his own conception of Infinity. Spinoza understands infinity as a sort of static property. Something is infinite because no finitude pertains to it; it does not lack. But Hegel would argue that it is this bad conception of infinity which commits Spinoza to acosmism. He would instead define true infinity as an active process in which the finite transcends itself through a historical development. Finite being is in a state of development towards infinite being, and it only exists insofar as it is becoming infinite.
The entire cosmos and its history is merely the shadow of God’s self-actualization. All that we see, smell, taste, hear, or feel; in short, all of the phenomena which confronts us in experience, all this is derivative of abstract concepts colliding in the fires of contradiction as Spirit develops according to its logic. Hegel surpassed both Fichte and Schelling in their excesses, and outdid even Spinoza in his relentless reason-worship. And so it is in this final post that I will transition from my more expository presentation of the Idealists to an expressly critical engagement.
There is no philosopher’s whose writings and thought I have instinctively reacted to with greater repulsion than Hegel’s. Even when he is lucid and insightful, such as in his commentary on other philosophers, his words retain a sort of grime upon them. Nowhere does he retire from his relentlessly clumsy and obtuse style, and he is ever ready to invoke terminology without the precise definition and explanation which makes Kant so legible. Yet even if we are to stomach the presentation of his thought, its actual content somehow manages to be more nauseating in its charlatanism.
“Concepts as such do in fact exist nowhere but in consciousness, they are, therefore, taken objectively, after nature, not before it: Hegel took them from their natural position by putting them at the beginning of philosophy. There he places the most abstract concepts first, becoming, existence, etc; but abstractions cannot be there, be taken for realities, before that from which they are abstracted; becoming cannot be there before something becomes, existence not before something exists. When Hegel says philosophy begins by withdrawing completely into pure thinking, he has splendidly expressed the essence of the truly negative or purely rational philosophy”
Schelling, Criticism of Hegel in On the history of Modern Philosophy
Hegel’s philosophy flips the world on its head. No other philosopher has strayed further from common sense and experience. He casually dismisses the evidence of the senses as the “empty abstraction of pure being”, and even goes so far as to label the individual object of experience “abstract” while the absolute is “concrete”. He elevates reason—the most novel and poorly developed cognitive faculty— into the supreme and original blueprint of all reality. And as if this was not already enough, he makes contradiction the foundation of both metaphysics and logic, which he no longer bothers to truly distinguish. Though I must acknowledge the originality and cunning of this sophistry, I hold Hegel guilty of inaugurating an entire movement of philistinism and obfuscatory thought which still holds strong in Western intellectual culture. He is the father of all modern wordcels, and it this pervading logocentrism which shall be the theme of his entry, and provide a nice transition to Schopenhauer, whose thought is nothing less than the complete rejection of this spirit.
The Abolition of Kant
“In consequence of Kant’s criticism of all speculative theology, almost all the philosophizers in Germany cast themselves back on to Spinoza, so that the whole series of unsuccessful attempts known by the name of post-Kantian philosophy is simply Spinozism tastelessly got up, veiled in all kinds of unintelligible language, and otherwise twisted and distorted.”
Schopenhauer, Parerga
Hegel represents the culmination of a process begun with Fichte—the corruption and eventual abolition of Kant’s core insights. Kant began his project expressly with the purpose of curtailing the excesses of philosophers who ascribed to reason an unlimited speculative capacity. Yet only a generation after his death, the dominant German philosophy was one which declared human reason constitutive of the very structure of reality. Hegel not only believed he could speculate wildly on the nature of existence in the abstract, but that even such ridiculously specific features of the cosmos such as the number of planets in the solar system could be predicted through a priori reasoning alone. I can think of few greater reversals and regressions in human intellectual history than those 20 years separating the final edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and the publication of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. If were to return to the analogy which Kant offers in the first Critique of pre-critical metaphysics as a tower of babel, it was as if the tower of babel had been toppled, only to sprout once more out of the earth like some irrepressible weed.
But to properly appreciate this a more in-depth look into each of the Idealists is necessary. Until next time.
Thank you for your work