The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  This deleterious combination of pseudo-theology, pseudo-science and revolutionary politics comes to a culmination in Richard Wagner’s philosophical writings in the mid-nineteenth century. Radicalizing Fichte, Wagner held the Jews as “oriental” Other responsible for the resistance to a revolutionized and perfected body politic. As is well known, Wagner’s philosophy heavily depends on the writings of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Schopenhauer. In a distorted and highly simplified way Feuerbach reworked Hegel’s historicist account of religions and cultures.

  Whereas in Hegel’s philosophy religions are subjected to historical change, for Feuerbach religions are revelatory of the immutable essence of various peoples. Significantly, Feuerbach’s revolution stopped short of questioning the purported rational essence of Christianity. Feuerbach did not set out to negate religion as such but only what he called “the inhuman” (Feuerbach 1984: 23) aspects of it. He equates the Jews with this inhuman or demonic Other. Feuerbach attempts to pinpoint the essence of inhumanity in the God of the Jews who, according to Feuerbach, precipitated a rift between immanence and transcendence. Here the God of the Jews creates threatening Otherness by producing a divide between the empirical and the spiritual which Hegel attempted to bridge by way of dialectics.

  Moreover, the Jewish God fabricated the divide between anthropology and theology which Feuerbach’s “humanistic” thought claims to overcome. As with Kant, Feuerbach saw reason as originating in a Western Christian setting. The Jews and their God are seen as the oriental Other of this occidental society. We witness in Feuerbach’s anthropology of religion the contrast between Western selfhood and its demonized Other: whereas Christianity’s essence is that of “critique and freedom” (Feuerbach 1984: 79), the Jews “do not dare to do anything, except that commanded by God” (Feuerbach 1984: 79). In keeping with Kant’s ethical denigration of inclinations, the posited Jewish fear of God here serves to reveal the essence of an orientation towards the goods of this world. Feuerbach identifies the Jewish obedience to God’s commandments with Kantian heteronomy, claiming that the Jews are immutably bound to the egoistic inclination towards the goods of this world: “The Jews have kept their peculiarity up to the present day. Their principle, their God is the practical principle of this world—egoism, namely egoism in the form of religion” (Feuerbach 1984: 187). Religion here turns out to be an immutable essence. This obsession with ahistorical, context-independent, essentialist immutability affiliates the pseudo-theological with the pseudo-scientific denigration and, worse still, demonization of the Other. In Kant’s, Feuerbach’s, Schopenhauer’s, and Wagner’s anthropological and religious writings, the Jewish veneration of God amounts to the opposite of both Christianity and Kantian rationality: it constitutes enslavement to the lowly sphere of embodiment and heteronomy. In this way Feuerbach contrasts the “Jewish” “desire for earthly happiness” with Christianity’s “longing for heavenly bliss” (Feuerbach 1984: 192).

  Like Kant’s and Feuerbach’s, Schopenhauer’s homogenous universalism excludes the Jew as demonic Other from rational modern society. Most importantly, Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant’s neglect of the body as well as the will prepared the way for Wagner’s paradigmatic shift, in which art rather than reason holds out the promise of inclusion into a modern cosmopolitan body politic. For Schopenhauer Kant’s thing-in-itself is no longer a limit of rational inquiry: rather the thing-in-itself denotes the truth covered by mere appearances. This truth is the embodied will. This may sound materialistic. However, the point of Schopenhauer’s ethics is to overcome the embodied will. He associates the will with the demonic Other. In what is most significant for Wagner’s aesthetic revision of the Kantian vilification of the Other, Schopenhauer’s ethics sees in art the best way to overcome the Other’s inclination to worldly or willful bliss. Following Kant, Fichte, and Feuerbach, Schopenhauer constructed a notion of Jewish immutability in pseudo-theological terms.

  Muslims and Jews do not fit into the homogeneity of Schopenhauer’s cosmopolitan reason. He partitions the universe into two opposed religious ideologies: the Zend tradition—Judaism and Islam—and the religion of the Vedas of which Christianity partakes. In Kantian terms, Zend revolves around worldly or heteronomous desires, whereas the Vedas recognize the world as a mere appearance and see the root of evil in the will, the redemption from which is the highest aim. Schopenhauer in particular attacks the Jews for having infiltrated Europe (whereas Muslims were an almost absent minority in nineteenth-century Germany) and for having thereby corrupted and subverted Christianity from an idealist to worldly religion. He argues that in Europe transcendental thought has validity only in Kantian philosophy, but is cut off from the life of the general European population at large, precisely because of the influence of “a Jewish realist way of thought” (Schopenhauer 1982: 131) on social life: “In India idealism is—in Brahmanism as well as in Buddhism—part of the teaching of popular religion; idealism is merely paradoxical in Europe, due to the essentially and inevitably realist Jewish position” (Schopenhauer 1982: 131). As we have seen in the case of Fichte, in nineteenth-century German idealist writing and thought, the Jews came to be seen as the enemies of progress, revolution, and the universal and cosmopolitan promise of a homogenous society governed by reason; reason here understood in secularized Christian terms, namely as the indifference to and independence from the merely embodied inclinations (which partake of Schopenhauer’s concept of the will). In Kant’s, Fichte’s, Feuerbach’s, and Schopenhauer’s philosophy reason coincides with secularized religion. Philosophy reaches down to the kernel of the Christian and finds there its essence, in radical opposition to the demonized Other (the Jew or Muslim or non-Western, the Oriental).

  As we have seen in the previous paragraph, Schopenhauer bemoaned the perceived lack of popular idealism in nineteenth-century Europe, which he saw as corrupted by the demonic influence of “Jewish realism” (another word for “worldliness”). As will be briefly analyzed in the closing part of this section, following Kant, Fichte, Feuerbach, and Schopenhauer, Wagner theorized art as capable of popularizing the politics of a Kantian idealist philosophy. In his aesthetic writings Wagner repeatedly contrasts idealism and realism. He blames the Jews for precluding a realization of the ideal. Radicalizing Schopenhauer’s revision of Kant’s rational theology, Wagner tried to reconcile art with the Feuerbachian essence of Christianity. In his essay “Concerning State and Religion” (1864) Wagner let the artist proclaim Christ’s “my realm is not of this world” (Wagner 1920, vol. 14: 11). Crucially he argued for a combination of aestheticism and politics in order to create a body politic in which the body can truly be overcome. The members of this secularized Christian state make themselves “independent from the world” by virtue of their “voluntary renunciation of suffering” (Wagner 1920, vol. 14: 25). As in Fichte, Feuerbach, and Schopenhauer, the Jews play the role of the demonic Other subverting any attempt at revolutionary politics. Following Feuerbach, Wagner posits the demonic essence of the Jews in their religion. In his infamous essay “Judaism in Music,” he pinpoints Jewish immutability in the Jewish God: “But the Jew has stood quite apart from this community [the community of European nations], alone with his Jehovah in a dispersed and barren stock, incapable of real evolution, just as his own Hebraic language has been handed down as something dead” (Wagner 1991: 27–8/Wagner 1920, vol. 14: 102). Strikingly Wagner does not allow for any historical development or change: his demonic image of the Jew remains immutable, stuck beyond any form of growth. What makes for this immutability is the posited pseudo-theological union with the Jewish God, whom Wagner calls “Jehovah.”

  Wagner conceptualizes aesthetics as a revenge on Jehovah: this revenge consists in taking power away from the Jews, thus outdoing their God (who according to this pseudo-theological racism has given it to them in the first place). Anticipating the paranoid fantasy of “Jewish power” which can be found in the infamous and highly influential (from Henry Ford to Hitler’s school curriculum in N
azi Germany) anti-Semitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), Wagner proclaims that thanks to Jehovah the Jews might gain power over the whole world, writing “The tribal God of this small people promised those who belong to him the future domination of the whole world, including everything that is alive and active as long they strictly keep his laws” (Wagner 1920, vol. 40: 150). To counter what he saw as Jewish power, Wagner attempted to found a nationalist popular form of art. Therein he set out to popularize the Kantian opposition between autonomy and heteronomy. Indeed in his Ring cycle he put this Kantian divide onstage and in doing so tried to turn it into a political as well as popular form of life. In this way “art has passed judgment on the Jewish God,” whereas “Jehovah has not much to say to the faithful soul of the people” (Wagner 1920, vol. 14: 135).

  Wagner’s hero Siegfried exemplifies the autonomy in socio-political action. In stark contrast to the Other—embodied in the dwarf Alberich—Siegfried refuses to hand over the ring when he is forced to choose between it and his life. This is Wagner’s political version of Kant’s autonomy: Siegfried refuses to give up the ring, precisely because the ring endangers his position in the embodied, material world. Strikingly, Wagner’s hero emphasizes his independence from any heteronomous or worldly inclinations, as the following important quotation makes clear:

  But with the threat to my life and body

  Even if it were not

  Worth a trifle

  You could not wrest the ring from me. (Wagner 1997: 88)

  By freely disregarding any threat to his life and body, Siegfried enacts the transformation of the heteronomous body into the autonomous body politic. In section 37.3 we will see how Herder critiqued in Kant’s new metaphysics the foundations of excluding or, worse still, demonizing the Other.

  37.3 HERDER’S CRITIQUE OF KANT’S CHAMPIONING OF RACE

  In sharp contrast to Kant’s homogenous universalism, according to Herder the good is not concentrated in one geographical point, or one time, or one nation. Rather it is scattered throughout the universe. He makes it clear that a single absolute conception of human nature does violence to human diversity. As Herder put it in This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity: “Here again too, stupidity to tear a single Egyptian virtue out of the land, the time, and the boyhood of human spirit and to measure it with the criterion of another time!” (Herder 2002: 296). Rather than measuring the human—and thereby labeling which culture, religion, and people should be included in a homogenous conception of humanity and which should be excluded—Herder first theorizes the intellectual and affective validity of Einfühlung (empathy) when it comes to the ethical and anthropological perception of the Other: “in order to share in feeling this, do not answer on the basis of the word but go into the age, into the clime, the whole history, feel yourself into everything” (Herder 2002: 292). Herder sets out to persuade us to abandon homogenous standards of human behavior. Comparisons between different ethnic and religious groups are problematic, because we have no right to extol one over the other. We are diverse and can therefore only find happiness and fulfillment in different social and cultural formations.

  Herder emphasizes, however, that human diversity does not amount to a separation between differing communities. The diverse is interconnected. This is why he speaks out against the conception of societies as independent entities. Rather than being independent, communities are interdependent. From the omniscient perspective of God, diversity is unity. The existence of human diversity does not mean that we are created unequally. Neither does it offer proof positive that we are separated into different races that have little in common with each other.

  It is such a pluralistic and narrative perspective on human society and human diversity that Kant dismissed as unscientific in Herder’s anthropology. Herder clarifies the political and social ramifications of his anthropology in the second part of his Ideas. Here he dismisses the concept of race. Deviating from Kant’s approach, Herder proposes a view of history that is not metaphysical. Avoiding Kantian metaphysics, Herder allows for the contingent and unpredictable. At the same time, however, he does not conceive of contingency as an absolute that we have to embrace wherever and in whatever form we encounter it.

  Herder does not make absolute either the ideational or the contingent, namely temporal. His thought does not oppose fact to idea, nor does it establish an identity between these two distinct, but not necessarily opposed, entities. Instead he argues that we are not fully able to grasp the laws governing the interaction between the normative sphere of ethics and the ontological realm of contingent temporality. Herder was troubled by the anthropocentric tendency in Kant’s attempt to turn philosophy into a master narrative that polices historical and scientific investigations. From Kant’s perspective, philosophy qua philosophy seems to reside in a realm removed from the contingencies of historical events. However, from Herder’s perspective it is important to understand that this enforced separation from the unpredictability of various historical realities sets the stage for the violent imposition of predictable, therefore “rational,” schemata onto the infinite diversity of both individual actors and anthropological communities.

  Strikingly, Kant demotes human diversity to a fiction appropriate for Herder’s merely literary approach, which he contrasts with what he sees as the scientific esteem of race. He faults Herder’s pluralistic understanding of humanity. He does so by assessing Herder’s mode of inquiry as that worthy of a poet but not of a scientist and philosopher. “What can the philosopher now invoke here,” Kant asks in his review of Herder’s first part of the Ideas, “to justify his allegations except simple despair of finding clarification in some kind of knowledge of nature and the attendant necessity to seek it in the fertile field of the poetic imagination?” (Kant 1963: 37–8). “Knowledge of nature” refers to what is, for Kant, Herder’s scandalous avoidance of metaphysics.

  In the first part of the Ideas Herder argues that humanity’s reason is the product of human physiology: namely its upright posture. Herder makes clear that this discussion of human rationality departs from Kantian metaphysics, because it focuses on the phenomenological world rather than on categories or concepts. This grounding of reason in physiology precludes a developmental scheme of history, since humanity has already fully attained its upright posture (it does not still need to fully attain it in some goal of history).

  As his review makes clear, Kant is disturbed by both a) the lack of an opposition between nature and freedom or reason and b) the concomitant absence of a teleology which would transform the merely natural into a second state of rational nature where history brings about the self-extinction of all those peoples and cultures that are perceived to be less talented. In this way Kant contrasts his providential understanding of reason—here rationality only reaches its fruition once undesirable parts of humanity have passed away—with reason as a product of nature: “Upright posture and the rational use of his limbs were not allotted to man because he was destined to be a rational creature; on the contrary, he acquired reason by virtue of his erect stature, as the natural effect of that stature which was necessary merely to make him walk upright” (Kant 1963: 31). History understood in terms of providence realizes Kant’s idea of reason as freedom from natural or pathological deficiencies that hinder the complete implementation of the categorical imperative universally. By grounding reason in physiology—as upright posture—Herder, in contrast, has already completed its instantiation “as natural effect.” There is thus no need for a history understood in purposive terms, namely, as Kant calls it, as “providence.” There is also no need for the historical destruction of parts of humanity that cannot keep pace with reason’s destiny.

  Kant insists on the importance of race (which Herder questions in the second part of his Ideas), because race is the purposive force within nature. As nature’s purpose it assists history’s goal. There is a strong link between Kant’s teleological conception of reason, in nature as well as
history, and his writings on race. Race was crucial for Kant’s moral philosophy and for his philosophy of history, because it “called for a purposive account” (Bernasconi 2001: 29). Race guarantees teleology in nature which runs parallel to and supports Kant’s teleology of reason.

  Against this background it is not particularly startling that in his review of the second part of Herder’s Ideas Kant harshly criticized the abolition of the universal division of humanity into the merely natural and the rational. One result was that Kant, in effect, denied human rights to the inhabitants of Tahiti, asking of Herder:

  Does the author mean that if it were the case that the happy inhabitants of Otaheite, having never been visited by civilized nations, would be destined to live in their quiet indolence for another thousand of centuries, one could then give a satisfactory answer to the question why they exist and whether it would not be as well that these islands were occupied with happy sheep and cattle rather than with humans who are happy with the sheer pleasure of being alive (Genuss)? (Kant 1964: 805)

  On this view, Genuss, that is to say the sheer pleasure of being alive without metaphysical groundings, makes the human mutate to the bodily level of the animal. As a consequence, Kant argues that Tahiti might as well be “cleansed,” its inhabitants replaced by sheep and cattle. The latter would be as happy as the former but more useful for the subsistence of human society.

  Over the discordant path of history human nature turns divisive, separating those who have won in the competition from those who lost out. According to Kant racial differences offer proof positive of such division. This is why Kant reacted vehemently against Herder’s dismissal of racial divisions: “Whereas Kant was among those who advocated a division into only four or five kinds, Herder advocated recognition of the diversity of human peoples; whereas Kant focused on color divisions, Herder saw continuity: ‘colors run into one another’” (Bernasconi 2001: 28). Bernasconi here cites the crucial quote from the second part of the Ideas on which Kant vents his angry response in his second review of 1785. Herder argues for the unity underlying human diversity: “In brief neither four or five races nor exclusive varieties exist on this earth. The colors run into each other; the formation serves the genetic character; and on the whole in the end everything mutates into shades of one and the same picture which is spread throughout all spaces and times of the earth” (Herder 2002: 231). In his review of the second part of the Ideas Kant first duly notes Herder’s abandonment of the notion of race: “The division of the human species into races does not find favor with our author; he is especially hostile to the classification based on hereditary coloration, probably because he does not yet clearly conceive the notion of race” (Kant 1963: 47). According to Kant, such dismissal of racial division not only disqualifies Herder as a scientist but also calls into doubt his philosophical credentials. Kant takes issue with Herder’s pluralistic understanding of humanity: “But what if the true purpose of providence would not be this shadow of happiness that each man forms of himself, but rather the endlessly growing and progressing activity?” (Kant 1963: 50). He questions Herder’s notion of reason (Vernunft) as a different form of listening (Vernehmen). Countering Kant’s conception of reason as pure independence from the merely material world, Herder defines reason as autonomy’s heteronomy—as the self’s cognizance of itself and the other: