The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Needless to say, there were very opposing views of how successful Schelling’s program was. For many it attracted a great deal of interest, and it spawned several generations of people who sought to construct their own Naturphilosophie, since—no surprise here—different people claimed to be intellectually intuiting different things at different times.22 Some scientists of the first order were even inspired by it. Other scientists were completely baffled by the whole project and by Schelling’s execution of it. Other scientists still simply ignored it. By around 1809, Schelling himself seems to have abandoned the program and moved on to other equally ambitious (or some would say grandiose) projects, none of which he published in his lifetime. Schelling constructed several different systems of philosophy and gave lectures on them, only to find himself dissatisfied with each of them and then moving on to work on newer things. His literary executors published his various systems in his collected works after his death. Schelling never really stopped experimenting with his philosophy.

  12.6 HEGELIAN IDEALISM

  Schelling’s fame in German philosophical circles was soon eclipsed by the rise of his friend from the days at Tübingen, Hegel. In perhaps the most famous university friendship of all time, Hegel, Schelling, and Friedrich Hölderlin had lived together as students in the Seminary at Tübingen and had worked intensely on issues in philosophy, poetry, politics, and religion. Schelling’s rise to fame in Jena put him in the position of being able to extend to Hegel an offer to join him in Jena and to co-edit a journal together which was to spearhead the new Schellingian direction in philosophy. After leaving Tübingen, Hegel had exercised a great sympathy for Kantianism, which was further honed in Switzerland where he worked unhappily as a private tutor. After his departure from Switzerland, Hegel went to Frankfurt where he was once again in the company of Hölderlin. The two worked together on Fichte’s system and on ideas about how to go beyond Fichte; although by the time Hegel arrived in Jena as a Schellingian, he had already by 1803 or 1804 moved away from Schelling’s position. (Schelling had left Jena in 1803.) After the publication of his Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807, it was apparent to just about everybody (and especially to Schelling) that Hegel was now a Hegelian and not a Schellingian. The preface to that work had even sarcastically referred (although not by name) to Schelling’s philosophy of the “absolute” as the “night in which all cows are black.” Schelling himself was offended by the reference. Ever since that point, one of the most basic questions about Hegel’s own idealism has been how Schellingian it really was.23

  In his later lectures on the history of philosophy in Berlin in the 1820s, Hegel notes that although Schelling’s system of this period runs on two tracks—one starting with nature and ending up with self-consciousness and the intellectual intuition of the “absolute,” the other starting with self-conscious subjects and ending up with nature and the intellectual intuition of the “absolute”—what Schelling lacked was any logic for this enterprise.24 Like Schelling, Hegel too saw his philosophy as an articulation of the “absolute.” However, unlike Schelling (at least after 1804), Hegel rejected all reference to intellectual intuition. The development, he argues, must come from “the concept,” and the unity to which this aspires, he says, is that of the “absolute Idea.”

  Some of the earliest reviews of Hegel’s works and some of the latest work on him nowadays basically take the line that Hegel simply took over the monistic Schellingian system, added a “logic” of sorts to it, and made it his own.25 On that view, both Hegel and Schelling are spiritual-Spinozists with the major difference between the two being that whereas Schelling was content to show how the original unities of the “one and all” were disrupted and come to temporary rest in the developing “indifference points,” Hegel thought he had shown how the later structures emerge out of a logic of sorts involving “negative” relations among the different articulations of the “absolute.”

  That certainly downplays Hegel’s own distinction of his system from that of Schelling, and it downplays Schelling’s own views on the differences. But what is the difference? In his day, Schelling was known as the “German Plato.” After K. F. Bachmann’s review of Hegel’s Phenomenology in 1810, Hegel became known as the “German Aristotle.” As Schelling intimated in his lectures in Berlin in 1841 (where he was criticizing Hegel), both he and Hegel had understood themselves to be completing the project that Kant had begun.

  How much of a Schellingian Hegel remained remains perhaps the most contentious issue in contemporary Hegel scholarship.26 (The likely runner-up is the status of Hegel’s putative Christianity. Resolving either of those problems here is both impossible and out of place.) It is clear, however, that both Schelling and Hegel, following Fichte’s lead, rejected the hard and fast Kantian dualism of concepts and intuitions, while nonetheless maintaining the validity of the distinction between them.27 Both of them rejected the Kantian doctrine of things in themselves for many of the same reasons that Fichte did.28

  One of the clues that Hegel’s own conception of idealism differs from more ordinary conceptions of idealism is that one of his favorite metaphors (which he was fond of repeating) has to do with how animals are idealists and not realists.29 They do not take food to be appearances of any underlying reality. They take it to be nutrition, and they are right. Now, on its face such a passage makes it hard to attribute any traditional idealism to Hegel’s thought. If anything, it sounds as if it might at best be a version of Fichte’s idealism, that there is a crucial element to a subject’s (and even an organism’s) “taking” something to be something or another. Put back into the Kantian-Fichtean terms from which Hegel’s idealism derives, the agent’s spontaneity includes within itself receptivity to the world. Rather than seeing concept and intuition as lying outside each other, as one version of Kantian orthodoxy would have it, receptivity lies within spontaneity. Although this might sound as if it were stating that our mental capacities (spontaneity, as it were) create the objects of perception (receptivity, as it were), such a view would conflate the active–passive distinction with the spontaneity–receptivity distinction, which Hegel does not do. Animals are idealists not because they actively constitute the objects of their world. Rather, to use a different metaphor, things “show up” in an animal’s sensory field as food because of the purposes the animal brings to bear on itself and its environment. Lettuce is not food for rabbits because rabbits create lettuce. Rather, lettuce shows up for rabbits as food because of the kind of creatures rabbits are, just as rabbits show up as food for foxes because of the kinds of creatures foxes are.30 The purposiveness of agents, since it involves self-consciousness, is even more complex. If one conflates spontaneity with activity and receptivity with passivity, then one is pushed to a view of the mind as “actively” imposing something like a “conceptual scheme” on more or less neutral content, and then one has the problem, itself generated by that very picture, of whether the things of experience are different from things in themselves. If one does not make that conflation, that problem does not automatically appear.

  On the Hegelian (and Fichtean) picture, things in the world show up in our experience depending on the spontaneity at work in that experience. Food can show up to an animal but not to a boulder. Likewise, animals can experience illness, a way in which their proper functioning is thwarted, whereas non-purposive entities, like a rock, cannot.31 Only for creatures with the proper nervous systems can things “show up” as food, and only for self-conscious creatures can things “show up” in experience as states, constitutions, divinities, artworks, and ethical requirements.32 Crucially for Hegel, this is not because the “I” does anything like “positing” these kinds of things. That individualistic language leads directly to images of imposing form on matter or conceptual meaning on distinct and neutral sensible content.

  Instead, the very elements of conscious experience—of singular things, of singular things as possessing general properties, or of things with properties exerting force on other things
—themselves are realized (or, to use a different word for the same thing, actualized) only in self-conscious experience. Singular things show up in patterns of unseen forces and powers for a creature who has the conceptual capacity to render judgments on those things—judgments which, for example, can be true or false—and that capacity is that of self-consciousness itself: knowing where one stands in a larger space of reasons (to use not Hegel’s but Wilfrid Sellars’s terms), knowing the matters to which one is obliged, what is required, and to what one is pledged.

  That is Hegel’s idealism, and it is far more Kantian and Fichtean than it is Schellingian. The world “shows up” for creatures with a capacity for self-consciousness in a way that it cannot for non-self-conscious creatures. This is “idealism,” since it holds that there is nothing that is not available to conceptual thought—but not that conceptual thought imposes itself on anything. Since receptivity to the world is “within” spontaneity (the conceptual) such that the world can show up in determinate ways to self-conscious creatures, there is nothing “outside” spontaneity, and this means that spontaneity is boundless, unendlich (or “infinite” as it is usually translated). Put in this way, it is not the idea that the world is inherently spiritual but that there is nothing in principle in the world that cannot show up for conceptual thought. Even things that cannot be directly experienced, such as the infinitely small and the infinitely large can show up for conceptual thought when and only when the appropriate conceptual apparatus has been constructed (such as the differential and integral calculus). Hegel’s idealism is therefore not Schelling’s metaphysical idealism. It is indeed a metaphysics but one of a very different sort.33

  Hegel’s indebtedness to both Fichte and Schelling shows up in the way he would treat the series that goes from the ideal to the real. For Fichte, that involved the way in which the “I” posited the “Not-I” and the transformations in the “I’s” idealities as they became progressively embodied in the “Not-I.” In turn, that involved bringing the “Not-I,” taken as lying outside of the conceptual sphere, into the conceptual sphere, and for Schelling, it involved seeing the “I” and “Not-I” as already contained within the boundlessness of the “absolute.” Hegel argued for a third alternative. The effort to grasp singular items of consciousness—by pointing to things that are here and now—reveals that the attempt to carry out that kind of grasping activity cannot make itself real—cannot in Hegel’s terms, “actualize” itself—without pushing itself further to note that it is pointing out particular things as exemplifying general properties. However, that stance itself cannot actualize itself, become a real pointing out, without noting how those things fit into a larger context (of forces, of interactions, of regularities, etc.). In turn, that larger context itself only shows up to self-conscious agents already moving about in a more abstract space of reasons. This is a transformation, in effect, of Kant’s point that our intellects require both concepts and intuitions for singular things to show up in our experience as having general features.

  For Kant, this is the argument for the rules for what Kant calls a “universal self-consciousness.”34 Hegel took Kant to have moved a few steps too fast to reach that conclusion, and the difference of his idealism from that of Kant and Fichte depended in large part on that criticism. A self-conscious agent claims a certain authority for her judgments, an authority, among other things, to judge that this is how things look and this is how things really are. However, self-conscious agents confronting each other may challenge each other in ways the world does not. From the practical point of view, the individual things of the world can serve as means for the satisfaction of desires—as food in the most obvious case. Those things may resist being so taken—the deer may do its best to run away, and other animals may fight back—but being outside the space of reasons, they cannot challenge the agent’s authority to take them to serve neatly as means of nutrition. On the other hand, other self-conscious agents can indeed raise those kinds of rational challenges—they can not only fight back, they can dispute, for example, whether they should be taken as means, as servants or slaves, to the other’s desires. If we imagine such a confrontation in the distant pre-historical past, we see that such agents can be confronted with what could most abstractly be called, in the language of Hegelian idealism, that of coming up with a finite solution to an infinite problem. The space of reasons is boundless, but where agents are disputing about who really has authority over whom, they must appeal to that space of reasons, and as finite agents, they must appeal to competing views of what actualizing those reasons means. Where each is willing to stake his life on demanding that his own claim to authority be decisive, there is a fight to the death over who is to wield that authority. Had finite agents world enough and time, they could reason this out. However, finite agents need a finite answer to what otherwise could well take an infinite time. Sometime back in pre-history, one of them, as it were, opted for life when challenged to a “life or death” confrontation—he or she submitted to the other who then became authoritative for him. The authoritative agent became the master to the other, and the other now became some sort of vassal or subordinate (or even a slave) to the master.

  Hegel’s dialectic of mastery and servitude intimates the way Hegel’s idealism departed from both Fichte’s and Schelling’s. The largest context in which things show up for experience becomes revealed as the “space of reasons,” what Hegel also calls in his post-1807 discussions of the topic “universal self-consciousness,” the appeal to reason itself.35 However, there is no unmediated access to the space of reasons. Although “reason” always outstrips all of its embodiments—there is always a normative surplus to reason—it nonetheless always appears in a determinate shape, as a set of established social norms. For others to show up as self-conscious agents is for them to show up as having a standing in the space of reasons, and that standing is itself a matter of what shape the space of reasons has come to take. Kant thought that reason itself required us to regard all agents (by virtue of their freedom) as ends in themselves, and Fichte thought that the other agent showed up in experience as demanding equal recognition and thereby as rationally requiring it. Hegel thought that the kind of standing that both Kant and Fichte thought belonged to rational agents in general was in fact an expression of a certain determinate shape that the space of reasons had assumed in early modern European life, which was itself the result of a long historical struggle. Our status as free and equal was an achieved status whose achievement itself depended on the failure and breakdown of earlier and entire systems of domination and servitude.

  Hegel’s idealism thus claims that it is not the absolute in its own self-identity that is embodying itself in matter and in us (Schelling), nor that the “I” posits itself and the “Not-I” (Fichte), but that the larger context in which anything (things in the world or other agents) shows up in our experience depends on “spirit” (Geist, human mindedness) taking a determinate shape. Although “reason” is “infinite”—reason admits nothing except what follows a plan of its own, as Kant puts it36—reasoners (agents) are finite. They also move within a space of reasons that calls for judgment about that for which there is a reason for belief, action, feeling, etc.

  Hegel calls this unity of concept and objectivity, or concept and reality, the Idea (Idee), harking back to Kant’s use of the term to express a concept of the whole that, for Kant, can never have a corresponding intuition.37 For Hegel, the Idea is the background against which things can show up in an intuition. Put very generally, the Idea is our conception of our ultimate commitments, a kind of picture of what the world is ultimately like and how that normatively requires certain beliefs, actions, emotions, and the like. (For example, something like the “Christian Idea” is that of a material world created by a beneficent, omnipotent, omniscient God, in which the possibility and reality of evil is always present and in which people are called to a kind of final judgment on their lives.) How that Idea is specified more concretely depends on
how it is embodied in concrete practices and institutions. Whereas for Schelling, the Idea is an ideality that pushed itself into embodiment in seeking to restore the original unity of nature, for Hegel, the Idea is the conceptual background (as taken up in habits and practices by agents who live within it) in terms of which certain things show up and others do not. Those ways in which it is specified more concretely in institutions and practices are the actualizations of the Idea. Only in terms of such an Idea do things show up for us as having, for example, artistic or religious significance and do other people show up, for example, as possessing infinite dignity.

  In his Science of Logic, Hegel gave what he took to be his definitive account of this “Idea.” There his basic claim was that explanatory adequacy requires us to differentiate among three different types of judgments that are made about the world and the unity of mind and world. Each of these types of judgments has to do with the way in which tensions that arise in linking those judgments inferentially to other judgments come to a head in figuring out how to stop various types of infinite regress. The ways such regresses threaten is the following (when put in their classical Pyrrhonian formulation): if to know one thing, one has to know another thing, and to know that other thing, one also has to know yet another thing, then either that series goes on infinitely (in which case in order to know one thing, one has to know an infinite number of things), or the series stops in one thing (that one knows without having to know anything else), or it circles back on itself (in which case there might be many mutually exclusive but non-overlapping series).38 This affects all accounts that deal with things as having their determinateness set by something “external” to them.