The Edinburgh Critical History of

The Edinburgh Critical The Edinburgh

Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
History of Philosophy
General Editors: Howard Caygill and David Webb
Critical History of
The Edinburgh Critical History of Philosophy is a seven-volume series of reference Nineteenth-Century
works which presents the history of philosophy in an innovative way. Critical essays
address the emergence and development of the themes and problematics that characterise
each period. Particular attention is given to the diffusion of themes across disciplinary,
Philosophy
geographical and historical boundaries, and to the changing practice of philosophy.
Edited by Alison Stone

‘This is a stimulating and highly informative collection of articles,

giving us a very clear view of the philosophical significance of the
nineteenth century, and its central issues and disputes. Anyone with
interests in this field should find it worthwhile, and I recommend
it highly.’ Professor Robert Stern, The University of Sheffield

This volume begins with the rise of German Idealism and Romanticism,
and traces the developments of naturalism, positivism and materialism and
of later-century attempts to combine idealist and naturalist modes of thought.

Written by a team of leading international scholars, this crucial period of

philosophy is examined from the novel perspective of themes and lines
of thought which cut across authors, disciplines and national boundaries.
This fresh approach will open up new ways for specialists and students to
conceptualise the history of nineteenth-century thought within philosophy,
politics, religious studies and literature.

Alison Stone is Reader in European Philosophy at Lancaster University.

Edited by Alison Stone

ISBN 978 0 7486 3566 5
Edinburgh University Press
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Edinburgh, EH8 9LF

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 The
Edinburgh Critical History
of
Nineteenth-Century
Philosophy
 The Edinburgh Critical History of Philosophy
General Editors: Howard Caygill and David Webb

Titles available
The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
Edited by Alison Stone

Forthcoming volumes in the series

The Edinburgh Critical History of Greek and Roman Philosophy
Edited by Giuseppe Cambiano and Alexandra Lianeri

The Edinburgh Critical History of Islamic Philosophy

Edited by Ilham Ibnouzahir and Nigel Tubbs

The Edinburgh Critical History of Middle Ages and Renaissance Philosophy

Edited by Richard A. Lee and Andrew LaZella

The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy

Edited by Gary Banham

The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy

Edited by Andrew Benjamin

The Edinburgh Critical History of Contemporary Philosophy

Edited by Alberto Toscano

Visit the Edinburgh Critical History of Philosophy website at

www.euppublishing.com/series/echp
 The
Edinburgh Critical History
of
Nineteenth-Century
Philosophy

Edited by Alison Stone

Edinburgh University Press

# in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2011
# in the individual contributions is retained by the authors

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in 11 on 13 Ehrhardt
by Iolaire Typesetting, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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ISBN 978 0 7486 3566 5 (hardback)

The right of the contributors

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me a Philip Leverhulme Prize in
2008. This funded a period of research leave that expedited my editorial work on this
volume. I also thank Judith Menzel for help with German, and John Varty for the many
kinds of help that he has provided during the editing process.
 Contents

General Editors’ Preface vii

Introduction: Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

Alison Stone 1
1. The New Spinozism 13
George di Giovanni
2. The Absolute in German Romanticism and Idealism 29
Dalia T. Nassar
3. The Question of Romanticism 47
Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman
4. The Hermeneutic Turn in Philosophy of Nature in the
Nineteenth Century 69
Philippe Huneman
5. Idealism and Naturalism in the Nineteenth Century 89
Sebastian Gardner
6. Darwinism and Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century:
The ‘Whole of Metaphysics’? 111
Gregory Moore
7. Faith and Knowledge 128
George Pattison
8. Philosophising History: Distinguishing History as a Discipline 145
James Connelly
9. Genealogy as Immanent Critique: Working from the Inside 168
Robert Guay
10. Embodiment: Conceptions of the Lived Body from
Maine de Biran to Bergson 187
Mark Sinclair
vi contents
11. The Unconscious in the German Philosophy and Psychology of the
Nineteenth Century 204
Günter Gödde (translated from the German by Ciaran Cronin)
12. Individuality, Radical Politics and the Metaphor of the Machine 223
Alex Zakaras
13. The Rise of the Social 242
William Outhwaite
14. Theory and Practice of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century 259
Paul Blackledge
15. Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century: From Absolute
Subjectivity to Superhumanity 278
Michael Gillespie
16. Repetition and Recurrence: Putting Metaphysics in Motion 294
Clare Carlisle
17. Nineteenth-Century Philosophy in the Twentieth Century and Beyond 314
Andrew Bowie

Notes on contributors 330

Index 333
 General Editors’ Preface

All forms of inquiry are enriched by an appreciation of their own history, and this seems
especially true in the case of philosophy. The study of past thinkers and their works
continues to sustain and to renew philosophical thought, shaping the way that even the
most concrete of contemporary problems are seen, and how they are tackled. If one of the
hallmarks of philosophy is a reflection on the limits of what it is possible to think at any
time, then the history of philosophy is at once an indispensable resource, a testing ground,
and a reminder that we are never really done with thinking.
The Edinburgh Critical History of Philosophy places itself in the European tradition of
philosophy, without being bound to any single vision of what philosophy should be. It
treats the history of philosophy from its beginnings in Ancient Greece to the present day as
composed of many threads, breaks, borrowings and intrigues that cannot be unified in a
single narrative. Often, the orthodox classification of philosophy into themes and sub-
disciplines has been set aside, since it does not always reflect the way problems and themes
first emerged. In turn, consideration of this emergence has sometimes allowed for the
inclusion of figures who may not be well known outside specialist circles, but whose work
was significant in shaping later developments.
Although the idea of critical philosophy properly speaking has passed through many
reformulations since originating with Kant, the idea of philosophy as an ongoing reflection
on its limits has become almost commonplace, and goes beyond any adherence to this or
that methodology, school or tradition. The aim of the series is to present a historical
perspective on philosophy that matches this broad critical outlook. As such, it recognises
that ‘Western Philosophy’ has developed through exchanges across its geographical
borders; that historically speaking, not only are limits hard to define, but periods are
sometimes linked in multiple and unexpected ways; and that what is taken to define a
given period, movement, or sub-discipline within philosophy is often not indigenous to it.
In the same way, philosophy has often taken up problems from other disciplines,
transforming them, and sometimes being transformed by them, in the process. Ignoring
these movements across and along borders can obscure the multifaceted development of
problems and themes as they feed into, and off, one another. It can also tempt one to regard
the subject matter of philosophy as simply given, as though its history were merely a record
of increasing clarification. Similarly, although there are essays in this series dedicated to
individual philosophers, this is not the default choice. Instead, the critical perspective
adopted in this series tries to keep in view how the problems and themes of a given period
took shape, and in turn gave shape to the philosophical work around them. Wherever
possible, we have encouraged volume editors and authors to consider that links may exist
between different essays within volumes, and across volumes. However, for good reasons,
viii general editors’ preface
this could not become their central preoccupation, and so many of these links remain
implicit, and even unintended. It is our hope that this may add to the richness of the work
as a whole and that the reader will take pleasure in their discovery.
As general editors of the series, we have enjoyed working with volume editors who are
outstanding subject specialists, and who have brought great imagination and dedication to
the task. The series as a whole owes a great deal to all of them. Special thanks goes to Carol
Macdonald at Edinburgh University Press, whose patience, care and determination has
made all the difference.
Howard Caygill
David Webb
 Introduction
Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

Alison Stone

Nineteenth-century philosophy can be broadly characterised by several themes: the

conflict between metaphysics and religious faith on the one hand and the empirical
sciences on the other; a new focus on history, progress and evolution; new ideas of
individuality, society and revolution; and ever-increasing concerns about nihilism.1 This
volume provides a re-examination of nineteenth-century philosophy in terms of these and
other themes distinctive of the period.
It is worth remembering that this was the period in which much of the fundamental
structure of modern society took shape in Europe, North America and beyond. At the
beginning of this development, the French Revolution of 1789 sparked political and social
modernisation across Europe and spread ideals of freedom and equality, inspiring a gen-
eration with hopes for a new moral, social and spiritual world. Market economies were
established and the industrial revolution took off. In their wake came rapid urbanisation, the
industrial proletariat, urban poverty and the so-called ‘social question’. Enlightenment and
French Revolutionary ideals spurred waves of revolutionary activity and insurrection,
followed by waves of reaction and restoration. The empirical sciences advanced dramatically
and their success was visibly linked to practical applications in technology and industry. This
advance threw traditional religious beliefs and attitudes into crisis. (It is revealing that the
word ‘secularism’ entered the English language in 1846.) In the wake of this religious crisis
and of the rise of bureaucracy and mass society, concerns grew about modern life’s supposed
conformism and mediocrity and its lack of any guiding moral or religious framework.
Nineteenth-century philosophy is marked by and feeds into this broader social context,
even when philosophers do not directly address it. Earlier in the century, philosophical and
intellectual life was dominated by the German idealism of J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling,
G. W. F. Hegel and others. German idealism has its starting point in Kant. For this reason,
the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1st edn 1781, 2nd edn 1787) marks one of
the two key events after which we may take nineteenth-century philosophy to begin. The
other event is the French Revolution, of which many people saw Kant’s philosophy, with
its emphasis on autonomy, as the theoretical correlate (see Pinkard 2002). ‘Nineteenth-
century’ philosophy as an intellectual rather than strictly chronological phenomenon thus
actually begins in the later 1780s and the 1790s, in response to Kant’s Critical philosophy
and the French Revolution.
Kant sought to defend Enlightenment values of freedom, reason and science against the
threat that he thought they faced from the Enlightenment’s own metaphysics (sometimes
materialism, sometimes ideas of a rational and divinely grounded cosmos) and epistemol-
ogy (sometimes empiricism, sometimes rationalism). For Kant this metaphysics and
2 alison stone
epistemology led inexorably to insoluble sceptical problems (see Stern 2004). F. H. Jacobi
added urgency to these worries by suggesting that Enlightenment reason, which for him was
embodied in Spinoza’s philosophy above all, led straight to nihilism – an attitude of
corrosive rationalism, atheism, determinism and scepticism. In response to concerns of this
kind, the German idealists continued and radicalised Kant’s line of thought. They sought
not only to preserve his emphasis on autonomy and the moral and political values of the
Enlightenment but also to overcome what they saw as unacceptable dualisms in his
thinking – dualisms between things-in-themselves and appearances, freedom and nature,
sensibility and understanding. In different ways, this project led the idealists back to pre-
Kantian metaphysics – Platonism, Spinozism. But this was no naı̈ve return to positions that
Kant had discredited. The German idealists tried to rethink these traditions to defend them
against scepticism, to make them compatible with modern values of freedom, equality and
reason and to integrate them with new discoveries in empirical science (this was the project
of Naturphilosophie, ‘philosophy of nature’). Thus we can see them as trying to produce a
new kind of metaphysics appropriate to the modern world. How successful they were
remains open to question.
Another dominant current in the earlier nineteenth century and beyond was Romanticism.
In fact Romanticism and idealism were intertwined. This was especially so in Germany: the
Early German Romantics were heavily involved in the philosophical debates of the time. In
the US, too, idealism and Romanticism merged in the ‘transcendentalism’ of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and others and in England S. T. Coleridge popularised
German idealist ideas in his Biographia Literaria of 1817. Despite – or perhaps in resistance to –
the industrialisation, urbanisation and class divisions of the time, nineteenth-century thought
became decisively shaped by Romantic ideas about the value and uniqueness of individual and
cultural self-expression. The intellectual climate was likewise shaped by Romantic re-
evaluations of nature, sentiment and art and by Romantic preferences for the organic over
the mechanical, the concrete over the abstract, unique individuality over uniformity.
A key issue on which Romanticism and idealism converged was the all-pervasiveness of
history. In Hegel’s version of this view, everything in human life is historical – morality,
culture, society, modes of thought and belief, religious doctrines and practices and even
nature insofar as it is the object of human thought and practice. All these are historical in
that they are fully shaped by human activity, which for Hegel is rational, self-critical and
self-reflexive and so continually transforms and redefines its own guiding norms. This
means that the practices, institutions and forms of life which human activity produces are
also subject to continual transformation. These Hegelian ideas were perhaps the most
important expression of the broader ‘historical turn’ that took place in the philosophy and
intellectual life of the time.
Nineteenth-century insights into the all-pervasiveness of history and culture have
become premises for much if not all subsequent thought. But the idealist metaphysical
framework in which these insights were often embedded has survived less well. Twentieth-
century philosophers have often disparaged German idealism as outmoded metaphysical
and religious speculation. This attitude has roots in the reaction against idealism by
Bertrand Russell and his co-workers in the early twentieth century. However, the
complaint that German idealism is misguided metaphysics was already heard in the
nineteenth century. In this as in other ways, twentieth-century thought has often
continued nineteenth-century discussions even when professing to reject the nineteenth
century.
After Hegel’s sudden death in 1831, German idealism rapidly unravelled and a variety of
 introduction 3
anti-idealist lines of thought came to dominate. One of these was positivism. In its decisive
formulation by Auguste Comte, positivism relegated theology and metaphysics to the status
of pre-modern modes of thought and took science as the paradigm of knowledge,
advocating its extension to society and history. Scientific advance and its application
were expected to produce not only progress in understanding but also improvements in
social conditions and wellbeing. In a similar vein in the UK, John Stuart Mill developed
Bentham’s utilitarianism, again taking science as the model of knowledge, while under-
standing science to be specifically empirical and inductive. In Germany, Russia and
elsewhere, many scientists and scientifically informed philosophers championed materi-
alism, which centred on a mechanistic and deterministic view of nature. The materialists
inveighed against the hangovers of theology and teleology which they thought had held
back earlier nineteenth-century science, especially due to the malign influence of
Naturphilosophie. Elements of these diverse anti-idealist currents coalesced in Karl Marx,
who, in explicit opposition to Hegel, developed his theory of history which he saw as both
empirically based and materialist.
These various anti-idealist developments coincided with and drew support from the
rapid theoretical and practical advances in the sciences at this time. These advances led to
such achievements as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, expressed in The Origin of
Species of 1859. The developments in science lent new weight to a naturalistic view of the
world: a view that denies the existence of any supernatural forces or beings and that treats
human beings as completely natural creatures, including in their capacities for reason,
creativity and moral and practical agency. These capacities, it now seemed, could in
principle be completely understood by the empirical sciences. Increasingly, naturalism was
supplanting Christianity as the reigning outlook, at least amongst intellectual elites.
There was of course resistance to this trend, but it did not always take the form of a
return to idealism. A very different non-naturalist and anti-idealist line of thought of the
1830s and 1840s was Søren Kierkegaard’s proto-existentialism. He sought to recover
individual subjectivity and the individual’s subjective relation to God from (what he saw
as) their obliteration within idealist philosophical systems that subordinated individuals to
the whole. From Kierkegaard’s perspective, naturalism and idealism are in fact alike – and
at fault – in adopting a purely objective, third-person stance, overlooking or denying
subjectivity and the first-person viewpoint.
Nevertheless, naturalism became the dominant outlook in the mid-to-later century. In a
sense, its proponents sought to keep alive eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas of
progress through scientific knowledge. As Robert Stern has remarked, ‘the ‘‘fight between
the nineteenth century and the eighteenth’’ runs like a thread through the philosophical
debates in the period’ (Stern 2004; this image goes back to John Stuart Mill’s autobio-
graphy). Indeed, the fight went on as much within the thought of individual philosophers as
between different individuals or schools. Many thinkers combined elements of idealism and
naturalism. For instance, Arthur Schopenhauer construed Kant’s thing-in-itself as a
boundlessly creative will – but a purposeless, godless, ultimately meaningless will. In this
way he gave a distinctly naturalistic slant to a view that otherwise might have seemed idealist
and Romantic. Figures who today are largely forgotten, such as Hermann Lotze and Gustav
Fechner, devised new idealist metaphysical systems with which they intended to ‘do justice
to the mechanical view of nature’ (Mandelbaum 1971: 7). Others who eagerly embraced new
developments such as Darwinism in effect reinterpreted them within the terms of older styles
of religious and metaphysical thought. We see this in Herbert Spencer, for instance, but also
– in more sophisticated form – in others such as Charles Sanders Peirce.
4 alison stone
Such compromises reflect the fact that many would-be naturalists still struggled to
extricate themselves from idealism, or devised naturalistic theories that remained indebted
to idealism – or both, as in Marx’s case, whose theory of history owes so much to Hegel’s.
Indeed, the very orientation to history that typified the whole century – and which, with
Darwinism, entered into science itself – reflected the legacies of idealism and Romanticism.
However, from a naturalist perspective the all-pervasiveness of history takes on a different
character. Chains of social, psychological, biological determination run everywhere and
the human agency that feeds into these chains is itself a natural phenomenon. On one
reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals of 1887, this work represents
the ultimate extension of this line of thinking to morality. Moral ideals and standards have
no absolute validity; they are merely contingent products of human affects and desires that
have been shaped by power relations over the centuries.
The fact that moral ideals and standards could become subject to naturalistic critique
and deflation exposes one reason why so many thinkers of this time sought to combine
idealism and naturalism – or in some cases, such as the British idealists of the late
nineteenth century, returned to idealism. These thinkers doubted that naturalism in itself
could do justice to value. This doubt was part of a wider, not exclusively philosophical, set
of concerns about the spiritual emptiness of modern life. More specifically, as Sebastian
Gardner (2007) has argued, naturalist approaches seemed either – pessimistically – to
explain value away by accounting for it in psychological, social, biological, etc., terms (as,
perhaps, in Nietzsche’s Genealogy) or – in the spirit of Enlightenment optimism – to
account for values, in terms of sensations, desires or pleasures, in an unpalatably crude and
shallow way. Nietzsche raised a further worry: that naturalism is incoherent, because any
attempt to give a true account of the causal genesis of morality, religion, etc., presupposes
acceptance of at least one absolute value – truth. And this, Nietzsche suggested,
presupposes a deeper-rooted but unacknowledged debt not only to idealism but also,
through it, to the whole Platonic-cum-Christian metaphysical tradition.
Many thinkers of the time thus believed that values could only be accommodated by a
return to more idealist or Romantic ideas. Mill’s synthesis of utilitarianism with Romantic
ideas of individuality and culture can be seen as indicative of this, as can the spread of
British idealism. Others, such as Kierkegaard, sought alternative ways to address religious
and moral concerns. Others again, notably Nietzsche, seemed only to conclude that the
European intellectual inheritance was hopelessly conflicted and debased. But whatever
route was adopted, as the century went on it seemed more and more that wholesale
naturalism could not but collapse into nihilism. Nietzsche distilled this thought when he
redefined nihilism as the event that the ‘highest values devalue themselves’ (Nietzsche
[1887] 1968: 9). In part, he means that because of the ‘death of God’, the decline of
religious faith and authority and the rise of naturalism in their place, we have been left
without any normative horizon. But moreover, having destroyed all other normative
foundations, naturalism is proceeding to self-destruct as well, producing a dangerously total
void of grounds for belief and action. At the century’s end as at its beginning, nihilism still
appeared to be the great danger, now in the sense of an all-encompassing cultural and
spiritual crisis – yet one that appeared inescapable.
These nineteenth-century preoccupations remain to varying degrees our own – whether
and how science and religion can be reconciled; whether and how value can be
accommodated in a naturalistic world-view; what scope the modern world allows for
individuality and individual self-realisation; what form, if any, metaphysics can appro-
priately take in modernity; how, if at all, to ward off the danger of nihilism, supposing that
 introduction 5
it remains real. To understand how such issues arise for us today – and how some of them
have ceased to arise or come to look very different – we need to understand the nineteenth-
century background that has shaped subsequent thought.
The aim of this volume is to re-examine nineteenth-century philosophy in terms of
concepts, issues and themes which are distinctive of the time or which take on new
prominence and significance at this time. These include history, nihilism, individuality,
society, nature (in the philosophy of nature) and embodiment (in the French ‘spiritualist’
tradition). This volume, then, is organised around neither current philosophical sub-
disciplines nor individual thinkers. Rather, the focus is on themes, or on broader lines of
thought within which continuities and discontinuities of theme emerge, such as Romanti-
cism, naturalism and Darwinism. The volume also has a particular but not exclusive focus
on themes that will become important in relation to later Continental European
philosophy. Evidently, not all the chapter topics are specifically philosophical – some
address general preoccupations in the intellectual life of the time. This reflects another aim
of this volume, which is to look at the relations between philosophical and non-
philosophical thinkers and between canonical and lesser-known figures. After all, this
was a time when specialisation was much less advanced than it is today and when many
disciplinary boundaries were still quite fluid. (It was only during this period that many
current disciplines formed: for example, psychology and sociology became separated from
philosophy over the century; the separation was essentially completed by the 1890s.)
The volume begins in the 1780s and 1790s, with the heated climate of discussion in
which German idealism and Early German Romanticism took shape. The volume extends,
through the decline of idealism in the 1830s and 1840s, into themes from late in the
century. However, many of these later developments continue well into the twentieth
century – for example, debates about the nature of history and historical method and
concepts of the unconscious mind as they feed into Freudian psychoanalysis. This volume
therefore cannot cover these developments fully, but instead will primarily address how
these late-century issues arise out of and transform earlier nineteenth-century thinking.
The chapters are arranged around a combination of chronological and thematic links.
Broadly, we move from themes in epistemology and metaphysics, to scientific and religious
issues, to history, to philosophy of mind, to society and politics and finally back to the
intersection of metaphysical, religious, cultural and moral questions in the nihilism issue.
This organisation is not meant to suggest that epistemology and metaphysics are ‘first
philosophy’. After all, much nineteenth-century thinking in metaphysics and epistemology
is already informed by normative and practical concerns – with warding off nihilism,
carrying forward the liberatory heritage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution,
or improving society through the application of science.
In Chapter 1, George di Giovanni traces German idealism’s roots in the crisis of the
Enlightenment in 1780s and 1790s Germany. He distinguishes this from an earlier crisis
(from 1650 onwards) that traditional religious authority had undergone at the hands of the
Enlightenment. The new crisis affected the Enlightenment itself, as it became threatened
by the very currents – faith and emotion – which Enlightenment thinkers had cast as
irrational and against which they had defined themselves. This crisis crystallised in Jacobi’s
warnings about nihilism. Specifically, Jacobi argued, Spinoza’s view of the world as a
rationally intelligible chain of causal determinations denies human freedom and neglects
the sheer immediate givenness of things which precedes any conceptual understanding.
However, as di Giovanni shows, Jacobi’s emphases on immediate existence and human
freedom suggested the need for an expanded reconception of reason that could do them
6 alison stone
justice. Fichte and Schelling sought to provide this reconception. Thus, these first German
idealist systems arose not out of an absurd inflation of the powers of reason but out of an
effort to rethink and expand Enlightenment reason so as to defend it against the threat of
irrationalism.
Arguably, the concept most central to these idealist systems is that of the Absolute, often
ridiculed as the height of metaphysical obscurity. Challenging this judgement, Dalia T.
Nassar in Chapter 2 shows how this concept arose to resolve difficulties in Kant’s philosophy.
For Kant, reason must seek completeness and therefore a unity of nature and freedom, subject
and object. But, for Kant, this unity can only ever be regulative: a methodological postulate
that does not refer to any ontological reality. Ultimately, however, to ground knowledge and
overcome scepticism, this unity must be assumed to be real – or so Kant occasionally
conceded and the German idealists generally concluded (according to Nassar). For the
idealists and Romantics, this subject–object unity – the Absolute – is known in intuition
(Anschauung). This raises several questions. What is the relation between intuition and
reason? How can reason retain the insights of intuition? And does the Absolute really
differentiate itself into the plurality of empirical things, or do these manifold things only
appear to exist under a narrowly reflective form of understanding?
Nassar’s chapter reflects an important trend in recent scholarship, the trend to recognise
the Early German Romantics – Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and others – as having been to a
significant extent philosophical thinkers and not only poets. Judith Norman and Alistair
Welchman also adopt this view in Chapter 3, in which they consider Romanticism –
which, as they note, is notoriously hard to define. They re-examine its meaning by looking
at how the Romantics themselves, both English and German, took up this initially
pejorative label and ‘transformed it into a self-conscious movement’. To be romantic, they
thought, was to be self-consciously nostalgic for the lost unity, social solidarity and lack of
alienation attributed to the pre-modern world – sometimes classical, sometimes medieval.
Paradoxically, though, this nostalgia was fuelled by the progressive ideals of the French
Revolution, which the Romantics supported. Progressively, they sought to create a new
reconciled world; but, conservatively, they construed this in terms of returning to a former
unity that modernity had lost. Norman and Welchman argue that this idea of a return was
related to an idea of returning to the subject as the ground of experience, thought and
creative imagination. Yet since this subject could be present only in its productions and
writings, language after all took priority over the author and the subject proved to be empty
or missing – hence the widespread romantic interest in meaninglessness, nonsense,
musicality and irony, all of which prefigures modernism.
Philosophy of nature has been another often-reviled aspect of German idealism. As we
have seen, objections to it had already become commonplace in the later nineteenth
century. As Philippe Huneman shows in Chapter 4, these dismissive objections misunder-
stand what kind of project philosophy of nature was. It was not anti-scientific but arose in
the same epistemological space as the modern sciences. This space resulted from the
breakdown of the pre-modern unity of theology, metaphysics and inquiry into nature’s
divinely grounded economy. Philosophy of nature was thus a specifically modern project,
Huneman argues: the project of interpreting the meaning of nature as a whole – an
immanent, not a divinely grounded, meaning. This was different from the scientific project
of explaining natural phenomena with reference to laws. Philosophy of nature was a
distinctly hermeneutic project, whose proponents sought not to challenge or replace
scientific theories but to reinterpret them. Huneman argues this with respect to Schelling,
Hegel, Schopenhauer and, in the US, Thoreau.
 introduction 7
The decline of philosophy of nature may be seen as forming part of idealism’s longer-
term retreat before the advance of naturalism, as Sebastian Gardner suggests in Chapter 5.
He takes this retreat as a guiding thread for re-examining nineteenth-century philosophy as
a whole. He traces the conflict between idealism and naturalism back to Kant’s dualism of
nature and freedom. One way of overcoming this dualism was to return to nature, the other
– the way taken by the German idealists – was to put freedom first and re-interpret nature
in its light, as pure productive activity and as approximating and leading up to free
subjectivity. Within the breakdown of German idealism, Gardner looks at (inter alia)
Schopenhauer’s important intervention and specifically the pessimistic direction in which
he took naturalism. Against classical Enlightenment optimism that science would end
superstition, drive social improvements and maximise happiness, Schopenhauer stressed
the will’s endless, goal-less, futile striving and the consequent omnipresence of suffering –
effectively pushing naturalism’s theoretical against its practical side. Thus Gardner suggests
that the various attempts made in the period to combine naturalism with idealism had an
overwhelmingly practical and value-related motivation: ‘idealism’, he writes, ‘conceive[d]
itself . . . in the terms supplied by classical German philosophy, that is, as practically . . .
motivated and as giving metaphysical expression to what must at all costs be preserved . . .
from our theological and humanistic heritage’. Idealist optimism lined up against naturalist
pessimism. Yet many late-century thinkers – the neo-Kantians, Nietzsche – sought to avoid
this opposition and in doing so they ultimately contributed to the broader process by which
idealism ceased to be compelling.
Another major factor in the rise of naturalism from the mid-century onwards was
Darwin’s theory of evolution. Yet Darwin had less impact on nineteenth-century philo-
sophy and thought than one might have expected, Gregory Moore argues in Chapter 6.
Prima facie, Darwin’s theory should have decisively discredited old views of nature as a
harmonious, divinely grounded order and of reason and morality as divine or supernatural
faculties. But actually Darwin’s theory displaced neither traditional systematic, speculative
philosophising nor traditional Christian beliefs and moral teachings. Instead most later
nineteenth-century philosophers – Moore concentrates on English and US figures –
reinterpreted Darwin’s theory within those pre-existing frameworks. In England, Spencer
spearheaded this trend, weaving elements of Darwin’s theory into his essentially pre-
Darwinian theory of ‘Evolution’ as the universe’s progression to ever more complex levels
of organisation – an Evolution that he saw as manifesting God. If developments such as
Darwinism dealt potentially fatal blows to traditional Christianity, then, those blows
tended to be softened by filtration through Christianity’s pre-existing moral and meta-
physical fabric.
Even so, the tensions between new challenges and old assumptions reanimated questions
about the epistemic status of Christian religious claims. As George Pattison discusses in
Chapter 7, these questions were framed in 1830s and 1840s Germany in terms of whether
or not faith was knowledge. This framing of the issues derived from Kant and Hegel.
Whereas Kant spoke of delimiting knowledge to make room for faith, for Hegel, faith
seemingly was knowledge, since he saw philosophical knowledge as the conceptual
articulation of religious belief and experience – although this left a major ambiguity as
to whether conceptually articulated knowledge itself retained any distinctively religious
content or character. Hence Hegel created the conceptual space for successive, increasingly
atheistic, forms of ‘Left Hegelianism’ in David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach and Marx. These
Left Hegelian developments are relatively well known. But Pattison aims to restore to their
place in history the often neglected theological (or ‘Right’) Hegelians. He focuses on J. E.
8 alison stone
Erdmann, who held that lived Christian faith and theological knowledge ultimately
converge in speculative knowing, which is God’s becoming in thought. It is against just
such views, Pattison argues, that Kierkegaard stresses the finitude, temporality and
incompleteness of human existence and the partial, incomplete, character of human
thinking. For Kierkegaard, human beings can reach unity with God only through God’s
gift, not through their own intellectual efforts. Thus out of theological Hegelianism arises
Kierkegaard’s reaction against it and thence, ultimately, the existentialist currents that
have exerted such influence in twentieth-century philosophy and theology.
In Chapter 8 James Connelly looks at the historical turn in the nineteenth century and
the attendant debates amongst philosophers and historians about historical method. The
historical turn crystallised in Hegel’s conception of history as the progressive, rational and
dialectical process through which the principle of human freedom gradually works itself out
in thought and practice. Hegel’s treatment of history in connection with freedom, reason
and spirit (Geist), as opposed to nature, fed into the emerging distinction between the
historical and natural sciences. For some, historical study was necessarily of unique
individuals (persons or cultures) and contexts of meaning and hence required methods
distinct from those of the natural sciences, which subsume particulars under general laws.
Such views conflicted with the positivist approach to history espoused by Comte, J. S. Mill
and Henry Thomas Buckle amongst others. This conflict motivated a range of attempts to
distinguish the natural sciences, purportedly centred on explanation (erklären), from the
human sciences, purportedly centred on interpretative understanding (verstehen). Connelly
also looks at the British idealists, who in the nineteenth century paid surprisingly little
attention to issues of historical method, with the exception of an important essay by F. H.
Bradley which Connelly discusses. Bernard Bosanquet, in particular, disparaged history as
the ‘doubtful story of successive events’ – but in a way, Connelly argued, that compromised
Bosanquet’s own theory of ‘concrete universals’, which he ultimately needed to identify
with historical individuals (such as the Renaissance, the Catholic Church or the Athenian
marketplace).
An important form of historical inquiry that arose in this period was ‘genealogy’. This
was the method that Nietzsche professed to use for his critical inquiry into morality. Today,
as Robert Guay notes in his account of genealogy in Chapter 9, many scholars in the
humanities and social sciences also claim to practise genealogy, but they understand this
method in very varied ways. Moreover, Guay argues, Nietzsche was not the unique
originator of this method. He was only building on a long-running nineteenth-century
tradition, within which (even if the word was not always used) genealogy was an approach
to human cultural and moral phenomena with four key features: (1) it was cosmopolitan
and (2) it rooted these phenomena in collective human agency; (3) it was critical, typically
tracing how normative ideals and practices have failed by their own standards, under-
mining themselves from within; and (4) it was historical and hermeneutic, identifying
these ideals and practices as being entirely constituted by and in their history. Guay sees
this approach emerging in Rousseau and Kant, coming to full fruition in Hegel and
entering into more materialist and more Humean variations in Marx and J. S. Mill,
respectively. Nietzsche’s version of genealogy, Guay argues, was distinctive chiefly in its
pessimism: Nietzsche saw no exit from the history of ascetic ideals, in which we remain
entangled even (or especially) when we try to escape it.
In the next two chapters we turn to philosophy of mind. In Chapter 10 Mark Sinclair
examines ideas of embodiment in the often neglected French ‘spiritualist’ tradition, which
runs from Maine de Biran through to Henri Bergson. Challenging mind–body dualism,
 introduction 9
Maine de Biran and his successor Félix Ravaisson developed the idea of the lived body as an
intelligent corporeality which is identical to the self. This idea notably anticipates
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. Sinclair argues that, of the French
spiritualists, it was Ravaisson who most consistently advanced beyond mind–body dualism.
This is because Bergson reintroduced a form of dualism and, although Maine de Biran
argued that our immediate first-person apprehension of our bodies in the exercise of the
will precedes any third-person conception of the body as an object, nonetheless Biran also
suggested that prior to volition bodies really exist as physiological objects. Ravaisson, in
contrast, focused on the significance of habit and he argued that the habituated body has
become animated from within by tendencies and ideals and therefore no longer exists as a
purely physiological system. Thus, Sinclair concludes that Ravaisson’s work ‘represents the
summit of nineteenth-century philosophical reflection on embodiment’.
In Chapter 11 Günter Gödde looks at nineteenth-century ideas of the unconscious
mind. Freud is often credited with the discovery of the unconscious. But in fact he brought
together (and transformed) various strands of a large and highly diverse body of pre-
existing, especially German, nineteenth-century philosophising about the unconscious.
Re-examining this body of work, Gödde identifies three main ‘lines of tradition’ within it.
The first, that of the ‘cognitive’ unconscious, he links to Johann Friedrich Herbart.
Herbart’s approach to the mind was empirical and mechanistic. Yet his work opened up a
path to study of the unconscious because it highlighted the causal effects of mental
representations that fall below the ‘threshold’ of consciousness. The second tradition is that
of the ‘Romantic-vital’ unconscious, which emerges from ideas in Romantic medicine
about a ‘vital power’ regulating organic life and distinct from both mind and body. The
third and most developed tradition is that of the ‘compulsive-irrational’ unconscious,
which emerges in Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann and Nietzsche and which – in
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche especially – focuses on instinctual drives and their internal
power struggles. Gödde shows how Freud took up various elements of these traditions and
how this fed into his successive models or topographies of the mind.
The next chapters address political and social questions. In Chapter 12 Alex Zakaras
examines the ideals of individuality and individual self-realisation which originated with
the Romantics, especially Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt’s ideal was for individuals to
cultivate their unique natures, fostering social bonds based on active association and
solidarity with others. Individuality so understood was often contrasted, at least in Europe,
to individualism – which was equated with narrow egoism and atomism. However, as
Zakaras explores, Humboldt thought that individuality would be best promoted by (what
we now call) a minimal state, whereas liberal socialists such as Pierre Leroux in France
favoured an active state. For them, the state was to promote equality of individual self-
realisation through redistributive and interventionist strategies. John Stuart Mill tried to
synthesise these conflicting approaches to individuality. Yet as the century advanced,
support for individuality increasingly tended to combine (as it did in Mill himself) with
pessimism about the conformism imposed by modern society and the tyranny of the
majority. Zakaras explores this tendency, suggesting that it eventually led some, such as
Nietzsche, to pit individuality (for the select few) against equality altogether.
Alongside these developments in thinking about individuality went increasing theore-
tical and practical attention to ‘society’, the many strands of which are explored by William
Outhwaite in Chapter 13. By the early nineteenth century, he notes, some had already
conceptualised society as an association of separate and in principle equal individuals,
moving away from prevailing earlier ‘images of hierarchical complementarity’; and the new
10 alison stone
conception gathered force as the century went on. The impact of the French Revolution
spurred this development on, as did the rise of the Hegelian and more broadly historicist
view that political and legal structures are aspects of broader social and economic processes
and hence are subject to historical change. Further consequences of the new view of society
were the rise of movements for social reform, which reflected growing concerns about
poverty and class inequality, and the associated rise of the social sciences, which had
become largely separate from philosophy by 1900. However, Outhwaite suggests, this
separation meant that many major questions at the intersection of philosophy and society
remained unanswered.
In Chapter 14 Paul Blackledge examines the decisive role that the contested concept of
revolution played in nineteenth-century political thought. He focuses on three main
currents of thought and activity. The first is anarchist rejection of the state as an external
imposition upon society, a current represented especially by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and
Mikhail Bakunin (in France and Russia respectively). The second current consists of
socialist projects for reform of the state, represented inter alia by Louis Blanc and Eduard
Bernstein. The third current consists principally of Marx’s attempt to steer a middle course
between the first two, an approach that Blackledge broadly defends. Marx, he argues,
rejected the bourgeois state – which Marx saw as characterised, amongst other things, by a
split between universal laws and everyday egoism. In its place Marx advocated a proletarian
state. This, however, was to be a wholly different kind of state, not imposed upon social life
from the outside. Rather, Marx saw its lineaments emerging directly from and within the
everyday social life of the working class insofar as this increasingly embodied a practical,
anti-egoistic, spirit of community and of individuality-in-society. It did so, Marx thought,
insofar as the working class engaged in political struggle, for instance, over the length of the
working day. Being rooted in everyday life, this kind of state would after a period of
transition dissolve away as a distinct formation. In this way, Blackledge argues, Marx sought
to understand how revolution could emerge from below, against the model of revolution
imposed from above which had been made so familiar by Robespierre.
Reminding us that these political issues were inextricable from metaphysical and
religious debates, Michael Gillespie in Chapter 15 traces the roots of these conceptions
and practices of revolution back to debates about nihilism within Early German Romanti-
cism and German idealism. Jacobi detected nihilism not only in Spinoza but also, more
importantly in this connection, in Fichte. Jacobi found Fichte’s conception of the subject
egoistic and Promethean in its exaltation of human freedom and he found it nihilistic in
that it seemed to dissolve the reality of the outer world and of God into that of the solitary
subject. Hegel, in response, sought to convert negativity into a moment within the overall
positive process of the realisation of reason and freedom in history. Gillespie shows that
Hegel’s approach was taken in a socially critical direction by the Left Hegelians and others,
who reclaimed nihilism by linking it to practical, non-egoistic, reformism. In Russia,
however, nihilism took a more radical – and destructive – turn, culminating in the
revolutionary nihilism of Bakunin and Nechaev. Meanwhile, Gillespie argues, the tradi-
tion of opposition to nihilism was continued in Russia by Dostoevsky, who famously
denounced nihilism as entailing that everything is permitted.
Nietzsche too, as we have seen, grappled with the question of nihilism, to which his
doctrine of ‘eternal recurrence’ was in part a response. In Chapter 16, Clare Carlisle re-
examines this doctrine in conjunction with Kierkegaard’s related idea of repetition. One
feature that these ideas share, she argues, is that they are not simply theoretical but are
intended to be practically thought through, appropriated and incorporated in ways that are
 introduction 11
transformative of those who think these ideas – and where the nature of this transformation
cannot be predicted or known in advance. Repetition is transformative above all because it
involves the movement of opening oneself to receive God’s gift, which comes to the self
from the outside. For its part, the doctrine of eternal recurrence brings to a head the
conflict in modern thought between freedom and determinism. The doctrine thereby
throws reason into outright crisis and this creates a potential opening to a radically new
future. In their emphases on personal transformation, then, the ‘ideas’ of repetition and
eternal recurrence both foreground lived subjectivity in opposition to the prevailing
historicism of the nineteenth century. As such, both ideas resonate beyond their immediate
contexts, heralding existentialism and more recent continental thinking concerning the
gift and event.
This returns us to the question of the relations between nineteenth- and twentieth-
century philosophy, on which Andrew Bowie reflects in Chapter 17 in connection with
debates about the history of philosophy. Challenging the idea of looking for ways in which
nineteenth-century anticipates twentieth-century philosophy, he reminds us that philo-
sophy is not a discipline in which progress straightforwardly occurs. On the contrary, Bowie
suggests, many philosophers – particularly in the analytical tradition – rejected or ignored
nineteenth-century philosophy for much of the twentieth century and yet have recently
returned to certain of its key elements. Notable examples are John McDowell’s recovery of
Hegel’s critique of empiricism and Quine’s questioning of the analytic/synthetic distinc-
tion, which effectively recovers themes that were already present in Friedrich Schleier-
macher’s hermeneutics. Bowie concludes that the history of philosophy might be most
helpfully studied not in terms of progressive resolution of problems but rather of problems
that come and go in response to broader tensions in their intellectual and social contexts –
tensions to which philosophical problems give ‘unresolved expression’. For example, Bowie
suggests, philosophy of nature may no longer seem a viable project, but we can recognise –
perhaps now more than ever – the validity of the concerns that motivated it: concerns
about the moral appropriateness and the harmful consequences of treating nature as a mere
set of objects or limitless resources.
To read and re-examine the texts and contexts of nineteenth-century philosophy and
thought, then, is not to engage in a narrowly historical exercise. In rediscovering the past
that has shaped our current intellectual horizons, we rediscover ourselves. When we engage
with nineteenth-century ideas and theories that initially seem strange and unfamiliar, we
often discover profound challenges to contemporary ways of conceiving of and addressing
philosophical problems. Nineteenth-century ideas can then become the source of new
questions and ways of philosophising in the present.

Note
1. I thank Graham Smith, John Varty and Garrath Williams for responses to earlier drafts.

References
Gardner, Sebastian (2007), ‘The limits of naturalism and the metaphysics of German idealism’, in
Espen Hammer (ed.), German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 19–49.
Mandelbaum, Maurice (1971), History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968), The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New
York: Vintage.
12 alison stone
Pinkard, Terry (2002), German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Stern, Robert (2004), ‘Nineteenth-century philosophy’, in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclo-
paedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge (retrieved 17 November 2009, from <http://www.re-
p.routledge.com/article/DC100>).
 1
The New Spinozism

George di Giovanni

Our world is the material of our duty made sensible. (Fichte, On the Basis of Our Belief in
a Divine Governance of the World)

The objective world is simply the original, as yet unconscious, poetry of the spirit; the
universal organon of philosophy . . . is the philosophy of art. (Schelling, System of
Transcendental Idealism)

1. Introduction: Crises of Reason

In 1935 Paul Hazard famously spoke of a ‘crisis of the European mind’ to describe the
transition from the earlier confessional era – when reason was still taken to be subservient to
faith and political power to the rule of God and the Church – to the Enlightenment, when
reason reversed that relation by asserting its autonomy with respect to religious belief and
philosophers began to look to reason’s rule for the authentication of political power. Hazard
himself dated that transition to around 1680 (Hazard [1935] 1953: xv–xvi). Recent
scholarship has pushed this date back to 1650 and has also refined the layout of the crisis.
The tendency now is to consider it as a global European phenomenon rather than to break it
down into the various lands and linguistic groups that made up seventeenth-century Europe
(see Israel 2001: 20, 22). There is also a greater sensitivity now to the variety of the strands of
thought that caused it. Some of these strands were especially reluctant to forge compromises
with the tradition of the past and, among these, the one of which Spinoza was both the
spiritual father and the continuing inspirational force – the so called ‘radical Enlightenment’
– was especially uncompromising (Israel 2001: 11–13; Jacob 1981: 20–3, 93).
But, although greatly refined, Hazard’s thesis remains essentially unchallenged. It is
tempting indeed, if we consider the course that philosophy took in Germany in the final
decades of the eighteenth century during the so-called High Enlightenment, to take the
year 1800 as the signal date for another crisis – a crisis this time of the very reason that had
originally made the Enlightenment.
Evidence of such a crisis is abundant, especially within the limits of the German
Aufklärung. In general, a new awareness of the limits of reason had taken hold of
philosophers and poets alike – a new willingness to grant to the irrational an irreducible
place in experience. But did this new awareness, this new willingness, mark a retrenchment
on the part of the hitherto triumphant reason – was reason’s crisis one of self-confidence?
Or, on the contrary, was this crisis the effect of a new prise de conscience, of reason’s
recognition that the faith and the irrationality that it had been fighting all the while had
14 george di giovanni
been in fact an inevitable product of its own rationality – that its past struggle had been in
fact a struggle with itself and that the forces that it had demonised were the indirect effect
of its own power? If taken in this sense, then the crisis was one more episode in the
radicalisation of the Enlightenment: the final episode that brought it to an end as a
recognisable cultural phenomenon. The prima facie evidence that this was indeed the case
is twofold. On the one hand, there is the fact that Spinoza, the father of the Radical
Enlightenment, was the one who presided in spirit over the chain of events that finally
precipitated the crisis. On the other hand, it is also a fact that Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi,1
the most perceptive critic of the Aufklärung, saw the new interest of the philosophers in
faith and the irrational precisely in this light – namely, as reason’s final attempt to pre-empt
whatever grounds were still left for the faith of old. Reason did this by recreating that faith
from within after its own image, a creature of its needs as reason.

2. Jacobi and Spinozism

I have just mentioned Jacobi. Although Spinoza was already everywhere present in the
intellectual Germany of the second half of the eighteenth century, Jacobi was to be the one
responsible for giving to this presence the peculiar significance that it assumed in the
concluding years of the Aufklärung and also for implicating it in the reception of Kant’s
Critique of Reason (as Kant’s critical project was at the time referred to as a whole). As we
shall soon explain, that presence was to be, paradoxically enough, curiously non-Spino-
zistic in character. But then, from the beginning Spinoza had worked his magic in Germany
in unique ways. Moses Mendelssohn had tried to domesticate him, so to speak, as early as
1761, by interpreting all that he had said about the relation of substance to attributes and
modes as directly applying only to the internal life of God – to God’s knowledge of himself,
in other words. It did not in any way preclude the possibility of a created and finite world
that would be distinct from the divine life itself. On this reading of Spinoza, his otherwise
offending monism could be brought well in line with more common and more orthodox
ways of thinking (Mendelssohn 1761). This was indeed Mendelssohn’s intention, pre-
occupied as he was with the prospect that the charge of impiety normally brought against
Spinoza would be automatically extended to the Jewish community at large with which
Spinoza was associated in everybody’s mind.
But for a younger generation of intellectuals the charge posed no threat. Goethe was a
notable case in point. To him the same monism of Spinoza that had brought the charge of
impiety provided instead the required philosophical language for expressing the divinisa-
tion of nature that fuelled his Sturm und Drang art. The young Goethe considered himself a
Spinozist and Spinoza had been the subject of the emotionally charged discussion that took
place between him and Jacobi (his senior contemporary) on the occasion of his visit at the
latter’s Pempelfort country house in 1774.
For the events that were to follow, that visit was fateful. For we can safely surmise that it
was during that visit that Goethe had handed over to Jacobi the manuscript of his poem
Prometheus. This is the same poem with which Jacobi was then to confront Lessing during
his own visit at the latter’s Wolfenbüttel house in the summer of 1780, allegedly exposing
his host’s Spinozism. And it was still the same poem, unnamed and without attribution to
Goethe (see di Giovanni 1994: 70–1), which Jacobi included in 1785 in his famous little
book, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn, published in
that year (a much enlarged second edition was published in 1789: for an English translation
of the first edition and excerpts from the second, see Jacobi 1994). Concerning the Doctrine
 the new spinozism 15
of Spinoza is the book that brought to public attention the controversy that had been
brewing in private between Jacobi and Mendelssohn, after the death of Lessing in 1781, on
the subject of Spinozism. Jacobi claimed to have evidence that Lessing had been a
Spinozist; Mendelssohn denied that he had ever been such. In the still deeply religious
culture of the day, Jacobi’s allegation was especially serious because, since Lessing was the
acknowledged foremost representative of the Aufklärung, his supposed Spinozism would
have reflected on what Jacobi claimed to be the Spinozism implicit in the whole of the
Aufklärung. ‘Spinozism’, ‘pantheism’ and ‘atheism’ were widely accepted at the time to be
synonymous terms.
Now in 1785, when Jacobi’s book was published, Kant’s Critique of Reason had already
made inroads into the German intellectual landscape. Karl Leonhard Reinhold – a
sometime Viennese priest who had sought refuge in Protestant Germany and was eager
to forge a philosophical career for himself – had the idea of using it as the basis of a possible
reconciliation between what was taken to be Jacobi’s fideism and Mendelssohn’s ration-
alism – a way of granting the logical force of Spinozism while metaphysically and morally
disarming it at the same time.2 Reinhold’s idea, as developed in a series of letters published
in the Teutscher Merkur, proved to be highly successful in attracting public attention. And
so Spinoza became implicated in the new idealism that followed upon Kant’s transcen-
dental form of it.
This is, of course, only a one-sided way of telling the story. Spinoza had been part of the
German intellectual landscape long before Kant. As we have just said, the young Goethe
had already made of his pantheism the intellectual manifesto for the new and more tragic
sense of the human situation to which his art gave expression. This sense was directly
opposed to the florid, but stylised and psychologically well-ordered, cult of feeling which
was still fashionable at the time, itself only the sensuous counterpart of the rationalism of
the age. In the Germany of the time, this cult had centred around figures such as C. M.
Wieland and W. L. Gleim. Jacobi and his brother Georg belonged to the circle of those
gravitating around them. Indeed, especially remarkable about the friendship that suddenly
sprang into being in 1774 between Jacobi and Goethe (soon cooling off and having a
thorny history of ups and downs) is that Goethe had recently lampooned this Wieland
circle, taking explicit aim at the Jacobi brothers in his 1773 satires Das Unglück der Jacobis
and Götter, Helden, und Wieland. To what extent, therefore, in raising the issue of Lessing’s
alleged Spinozism, Jacobi was also aiming his attack at Goethe and Goethe’s vision of
humanity is a possibility well worth pondering.
Be that as it may, the point now is that one can think of Kant as being implicated and
interfering with the reception of Spinoza just as much as one can think of Spinoza as being
implicated and interfering with the reception of Kant and that in either case, whether one
takes Kant or Spinoza as the main point of reference, Spinozism was being reinterpreted in
line with interests that would have been totally foreign to Spinoza himself. These interests
reshaped Spinozism in ways that to him would have made it unrecognisable. What these
new interests were and what difference they made to Spinozism can be seen in two works
that were both published in 1800 and which, viewed retrospectively, were to set up the
intellectual tone in Germany for the century to come. One was by Fichte and the other by
Schelling – both self-professed disciples of Kant, both claiming to have brought his
idealism (and, in the case of Schelling, Spinoza’s monism as well) to a logical conclusion.
But even more important is the historical and conceptual context that made these works
possible in the first place. The problem that motivated them had already been set up for
them by Goethe’s Prometheus and Jacobi’s reaction to it.
16 george di giovanni
Just how Goethe’s poem could possibly have been taken as a statement of Spinozism was
a question that at least one reviewer of Jacobi’s book raised immediately upon its
publication (see di Giovanni 1994: 68). But the public did not know at the time that
the poem was Goethe’s, nor did it yet know of the new sense in which the name of Spinoza
had become a shibboleth for both Goethe and Jacobi. The poem itself was a cri de coeur –
the heroic testimony of a man who, as a child, used to revere the immortal gods on high,
but now, whetted by the experiences of life, felt nothing but contempt for them. They too,
like him, are subjected to Fate, to the anonymous course of Time. But they, feeding as they
do on the fat sacrifices that foolish men offer to them, lack one advantage that he enjoys –
namely, that he, though seeing the ‘budding dreams’ of his youth shattered, can none-
theless go on striving, suffering and weeping and yet, in these travails, still rejoice and
boldly shape a race of Men in his likeness. ‘Here sit I, shaping Men/ In my likeness:/ A race
that is to be as I am,/ To suffer and weep./ To relish and delight in things’ (see Jacobi 1994:
186).
The mention of Fate, which evokes the idea of determinism, was the note in the poem
that brought Spinozism into play. Of course, the belief that all that happens in the universe
is preordained and works for the perfection of the whole – in other words, that everything is
as it must be – was typical of the German Enlightenment. It was shared by such contrasting
personalities as the theologian J. J. Spalding, the first to raise the issue of the vocation of
humankind (in his Die Bestimmung des Menschen of 1748) and Adam Weishaupt, the
founder of the Illuminati.3 But in the minds of most, this determinism was still taken to be
personal in nature, simply the metaphysical counterpart of the Christian belief in
Providence. What made it specifically Spinozistic in Goethe’s poem was the impersonalism
that attached to it precisely by being associated with Fate and Time. Spinoza had clearly
severed whatever ties still held between metaphysics and Christian religious beliefs. It was
in the shared recognition of this fact that Goethe and Jacobi could have found in their
1774 meeting not only a true meeting of minds but also, because of their differing reactions
to it, a profound emotional discord. At least, this is what we can surmise from the way in
which Jacobi was to use Goethe’s poem to challenge Lessing in 1780.
Jacobi’s Spinoza differed in two ways from how Spinoza was normally received at the
time (apart from the fact that Jacobi had a truly scholarly acquaintance with the texts). For
one thing, when Spinoza was not simply dismissed as a perfidious Jew, the tendency was to
show that his pantheism was in fact a conceptually unnecessary variant of the accepted
metaphysics that respected God’s transcendence. Mendelssohn’s already noted attempt in
this vein was especially imaginative. Jacobi took instead a directly contrary view.
According to him, Spinoza’s pantheism was rather the logical conclusion of the assumption
that underlay classical metaphysics. This assumption – as stated in the classical formula,
gigni de nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil potest reverti (nothing can arise from nothing, nothing can
revert to nothing) – in fact pre-empted the possibility that anything genuinely new would
ever occur in reality (Jacobi 1994: 204–5). In one way or another, classical metaphysics had
either denied the reality of becoming or had reduced it, at best, to a phenomenon bene
fundatum. Spinoza deserved admiration, according to Jacobi, precisely because he had had
the mental clarity and the courage to recognise this consequence. The classical assumption,
according to Jacobi, was itself the product of reason’s natural desire to attain perfect
explanation. But to explain means to reduce particular representations to more universal
ones that contain them. And since this reduction can be performed only by abstracting
from the determinations that otherwise individuate the more particular representations, it
inevitably entails a loss of representative content. The process of explanation, if allowed to
 the new spinozism 17
follow its inner logic, thus necessarily culminates in a perfect abstraction (such as Spinoza’s
‘substance’) that explains everything in toto but by the same token nothing in particular.
That there are particular determinations is itself reduced to an irrational surd. Each
determination is only explainable by being externally referred ad hoc to another in a series
that, since it proceeds ad infinitum, must ultimately fail to secure the being of any of them. It
must fail precisely because it lacks an ultimate term, both a quo and ad quem. Each
individual determination is thus reduced to a disappearing event. This, according to Jacobi,
was the general outline of Spinoza’s system. The system had brought to a logical conclusion
the tendency already at work in all metaphysics to subordinate the requirements of
existence to those of explanation, thus forcing upon reality a structure that in truth belongs
only to the realm of representation.
The other way in which Jacobi’s criticism of Spinoza differed from commonly accepted
views logically followed from the first. Existence, according to Jacobi, requires irreducible
individuation. Spinoza’s system, according to Jacobi, undermined the possibility of human
agency because it compromised the individuation of any presumed subject of action. Since
it reduced the identity of any such subject to a mere semblance, it made impossible the
attribution of action – at least, in a way that would make the subject truly responsible for it.
As Jacobi was to say to Lessing, when confronting the latter with the implications of what
he took to be his sympathies for Spinoza, in a Spinozistic universe one cannot say that
anyone in particular painted the ‘School of Athens’ but must say, rather, that a sequence of
anonymous events resulted in an appearance which we call ‘the School of Athens’ and
which we choose to attribute to someone called ‘Raphael’ as its author (Jacobi 1994: 189).
In other words, it was not primarily the fear of denying God’s transcendence vis-à-vis
nature that motivated Jacobi’s criticism of Spinoza, as it had motivated the criticisms of
many before him, but rather the fear of denying Man’s transcendence vis-à-vis nature.
Actually God’s and Man’s transcendence vis-à-vis nature went hand in hand in Jacobi’s
mind. For significant individuation requires opposition. There is no ‘I’ without a ‘Thou’
confronting it, according to the formula which Jacobi was the first to articulate in his Letters
to Herr Moses Mendelssohn (1994: 230–1). It is, therefore, only to the extent that finite Man
is confronted by the utter otherness of God, and defines himself precisely with reference to
this otherness, that he stands as an irreducible individual and hence also as a responsible
agent, both before God and in contrast with mere nature.
Jacobi was a deeply pious man. Nothing could have been further removed from Goethe’s
paganism than Jacobi’s religiosity – nothing more dissonant than their respective emo-
tional reactions to Spinoza. Yet one can see how in 1774 the two men would not only have
had a meeting of minds but also, at an emotional level, would have felt, if not sympathy for
each other, at least a certain affinity – an affinity at a distance, so to speak. Intellectually,
they both understood that the Spinoza type of determinism had nothing to do with the
determinism which was part and parcel of the Enlightenment’s vision of the universe. This
universe was pervaded by rational intentions that assured that all things would work to the
perfection of the whole and the appropriate good of each of its parts. It was on the supposed
efficacy of these intentions that those such as Spalding and Weishaupt, to whom we have
already referred, rested their hopes for happiness. In the universe of Spinoza there were, on
the contrary, no such intentions at work. Events happened just because they happened, all
equally driven by an infinite power that worked its efficacy without the encumbrance of
either preordained plan or preordained limits – all equally caught up in a concatenation of
other events and all only externally linked together. Spinoza’s determinism was truly a form
of Fatalism. Both Goethe and Jacobi understood this much. But the young Goethe had
18 george di giovanni
accepted this Fatalism enthusiastically, for it suited his at the time heroic view of Man. The
amor fati that his poem expressed, the rebellious pride with which the protagonist accepted
his situation and even took joy in it – this was his way of rescuing Man from the
impersonalism of Spinoza’s universe. Jacobi’s religious piety did not allow him this solution.
And since Jacobi could not fall back upon the sophisms of classical metaphysics, which he
believed to be a self-deceiving form of Spinozism, his reaction was rather to reject the false
reason which he took to lie behind both that metaphysics and Spinoza’s Fatalism – a reason
that subordinated existence to explanation.
Accordingly, in 1780, when Jacobi met Lessing, what he proposed to him as an antidote
to his perceived Spinozistic inclinations was an act of faith that would reverse precisely that
order.4 Whereas explanation requires the rule of the universal, Jacobi was to declare
himself the champion of the exception. Now, in 1774, no two attitudes could have been
more opposed than Goethe’s and Jacobi’s. The affinity lay nonetheless in the fact that both
men made the dignity of the human individual the centrepiece of their humanism and that
both based it, not on any vocation presumably preappointed for humankind in general
within the greater scheme of nature’s mechanism, but on the existential attitude that the
individual himself assumed with respect to the latter – on his capacity to disentangle
himself from it, whether in pride (as for Goethe) or faith in a personal God (as for Jacobi)
and however much (at least in the case of Goethe) nature itself was divinised or Man
himself seen to be in fact inextricably bound to it. In this, both Goethe and Jacobi set the
tone of much that was to come. Spinoza himself would not have recognised himself in the
persona he was made to assume in this new set of historical circumstances. Spinozism was
donning a new mask. But then, there were aspects of his thought that logically lent him to
this persona. As we shall see, these same aspects were responsible for an element of affinity
even between Spinoza and Jacobi.

3. The Primacy of Existence

To see the nature of this affinity and how it facilitated the transition to the idealism of
Fichte and Schelling, one must recognise how Reinhold’s intervention in the Jacobi–
Mendelssohn dispute, despite its wide public acceptance, was strangely anachronistic. Kant
had used his professed ‘critical ignorance’ about the ‘thing in itself’ to make available to
reason an ideal space where the latter could introduce conceptual constructs for which no
objective truth could be claimed. These constructs could nonetheless be subjectively
justified on the basis of moral or other interests of reason. It must be said that to justify truth
claims pragmatically was in line with the generally practical bend of mind of the
Enlightenment. But Reinhold was now using Kant’s strategy of critical ignorance in effect
to reintroduce beliefs about the order and rationality of things which were still typical of
the Enlightenment, except that they now came indexed as subjectively required for moral
praxis. As Schelling bitterly wrote to Hegel in a letter of 1795: ‘Here there are Kantians in
droves . . . All imaginable dogmas have been stamped as postulates of practical reason’
(Schelling 1961: 1: 13).
Reinhold was to extend this practice of reintroducing Enlightenment beliefs as practical
requirements to the point where he reintroduced issues and disquisitions which only a faint
obeisance to critical ignorance saved from old dogmatic modes of thought. A case in point
was the bitter dispute regarding the nature of human freedom in which he became involved
with his Jena colleague, C. C. Schmid, around 1790. The dispute became all the more
bitter as others joined it, until a halt was put to it by the intervention of public authority.
 the new spinozism 19
At issue was whether freedom of choice requires that the will has the capacity, first to
remain indifferent to two possible alternatives of choice and then to determine itself on its
own for either one or the other. Reinhold argued for this capacity, accordingly rejecting
Kant’s identification of will and reason. Schmid argued instead for a strict determinism. He
made freedom rest instead on the spontaneity with which the will makes its choices on the
strength of tendencies naturally inherent in it, according to a preappointed order of things.
There was no question of an original indeterminacy, the presence of which would have
disturbed, in his opinion, precisely the assumption of such an order. This position, which
went under the title of ‘comparative freedom’, was the common one at the time.
This debate was nothing new. It had a long metaphysical pedigree. What made it strangely
anachronistic is that, whether one took Reinhold’s position or Schmid’s, it still raised the
issue of human freedom in physical terms, as if the human will were one more cause among
many others and its effects part and parcel of the general order of the cosmos. It still entangled
human freedom with the causality of nature – this at a time when Goethe and Jacobi had
instead transposed the whole issue of freedom to an altogether different order of reflection by
raising it in existential terms. This term might sound anachronistic when used in connection
with the late eighteenth century, but Jacobi had explicitly raised the issue in terms of what
comes first – requirements of existence or requirements of explanation (Jacobi 1994: 194–5).
Goethe and Jacobi, then, had raised the issue of freedom as one concerning the attitude
that the human individual should personally assume before nature – whatever the material
constitution of the latter – precisely in order to assert his transcendence before it. This was
a new tone that was being injected into philosophical debate (but one, it must be added,
that had abundant precedents in the religious culture of which Jacobi himself was a
product). Reinhold and Schmid might have been forgiven for missing it in the 1785
controversy. Mendelssohn himself had missed it. But they had no excuse for not having
noticed how Kant himself, of whom they both professed to be disciples, had also recently
redefined the issue of freedom in ways which, albeit in more scholastic modes of expression,
made the human individual’s stance towards nature the centrepiece of moral doctrine.
We can forget Schmid. He is only a marginal figure. We can also leave Reinhold aside,
even though his philosophical influence was immense. The fact is that from beginning to
end – from his early days in Vienna, where he led the double life of cleric and member of
the Illuminati, to his activities in Kiel where his professorial career was to extend well into
the nineteenth century – Reinhold remained committed to the rational programme of the
Aufklärung. He eventually repudiated idealism, joining a group that gravitated around the
now ageing Jacobi and included such figures as Jakob Friedrich Fries and Friedrich
Schleiermacher. As for Goethe, he would make an improbable figure in any philosophical
debate, however much Jacobi had tried to drag him into one. The point of interest is the
intricate conceptual connection that bound Spinoza, Jacobi and Kant. Jacobi is again the
one to give us the clue to where the point of connection lay – even though, as we shall see,
he was soon to become aware of the threat that this connection posed to his own
personalism.
In 1787, in an autobiographical digression in his David Hume on Faith or Idealism and
Realism, Jacobi recounted how excited he had been by two early essays of Kant. We now
call such essays ‘pre-critical’. In both, the point that Kant made, to quote his words verbatim
as Jacobi also did, is that

existence is not a predicate or a determination of a thing, but is rather the absolute

positing of the thing . . . Inner possibility always presupposes existence . . . If all
20 george di giovanni
existence were removed, nothing would be posited absolutely and nothing would
therefore be given either. (Jacobi 1994: 284–5)

Jacobi also reminisced (281) that in two parallel essays published at the same time by Kant
and Mendelssohn the latter had instead privileged ‘possibility’ over ‘existence’,5 thus
following Leibniz in taking the concept of a perfect possibility as the starting point of
his proof for the existence of God. Kant had reversed that order, taking the thought of an
absolute existence as his starting point. But that is exactly what Spinoza, to whom Jacobi also
referred in the same context, had done in his Cartesian Meditations. From the beginning
Jacobi admired and respected Spinoza for that. Even at the time of his controversy with
Mendelssohn, he had praised Spinoza, no less than he had criticised him, precisely because
from Spinoza he had learned that truth is ultimately to be grasped, not through any
ratiocinative process, but intuitively. The conceptual reflection of reason is secondary to and
dependent upon the immediate apprehension of existence in intuition. Spinoza’s mistake
was to express the content of that intuition in the medium of the concept of ‘substance’,
which was in fact the product of an abstraction of reason. The consequent fall into what
Jacobi believed to be the ‘nihilism’ of classical metaphysics was therefore inevitable.
The critical Kant, whom Jacobi was openly criticising in 1787, denied that we, human
beings, are capable of intellectual intuition. Yet he had this much in common with Spinoza,
that the possibility of such an intuition, as available to a being other than the human, had to
be conceded at least in principle. It had to be conceded precisely as the conceptual
counterpiece of his professed critical ignorance that made the claim to this ignorance
meaningful. But whether it was conceded realiter or hypothetically, the possibility of an
intuition that transcends the limits of the discursive determinations of reason had the same
effect of reducing the latter to a secondary and even relative order of cognition – for Spinoza,
to attributes or modes of substance that have validity only from a finite point of view; in
Kant’s critical system, to merely subjective intentions. But that, according to Jacobi, was all
that philosophical reflection had in fact ever been able to achieve. In other words, despite the
different interests and the differing speculative commitments that divided them, the link
connecting the three – Spinoza, Jacobi and Kant – was the very belief on which Jacobi had
made his stand in philosophy, namely, that existence precedes essence and that, conse-
quently, any conceptual determination of reality has to have only relative status.
Therein lay the threat for Jacobi. For one cannot consistently privilege existence over
essence without also privileging efficient over final causality. But, as the pre-critical Kant
had already pointed out, ‘surely, without knowledge and purpose [God] would be only a
blind necessary ground of other things and even of other minds, distinguished not at all
from the eternal fate of some of the ancients’ (cited by Jacobi in the 1789 edition of his
Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn; see Jacobi 1994: 366, n. 10). In 1789, citing this same
passage, Jacobi was to gloss:

I deny that there can be an in-between system (such as conceived by us men) between
the system of final causes and the system of purely efficient ones. If intellect and will are
not the first and highest powers . . . they are not original springs of movement but a
clockwork. (1994: 366)

Under threat was the possibility of the same freedom and personalism which Jacobi had
championed when confronting Lessing’s alleged Spinozism. The critical Kant was to try to
preserve some room for it transcendentally – with, however, more than a measure of
 the new spinozism 21
dissemblance. He openly admitted in the Critique of Judgement (Kant [1790] 1987: 284–6,
§76) that, if one could just see things as they are in themselves, the modal categories would
lose all meaning, since all that is would simply be there. But it is the modal categories,
notably the distinction between the possible and the de facto actual, that are at the basis of
the moral ought. In other words, Kant was indirectly admitting that, if we could see things
as they really are (but fortunately we cannot), we would discover that the whole moral
order is in fact, from an absolute standpoint, only a subjective phenomenon – exactly what
Spinoza would say. One can understand, therefore, Jacobi’s incapacity, after his dispute
with Mendelssohn and in response to the charges of irrationalism that were being laid
against him, to come up with a positive yet conclusive philosophical position of his own.
Conceptually, he was conflicted – just as he had been emotionally conflicted in his first
encounter with Goethe. He felt intellectual affinity for the existentialism of both Spinoza
and Goethe but was conceptually unable to see himself clear of the fatalism, which he
attributed to the abstractions of reason, that motivated it. Short of rejecting reason
altogether and thus making good the charges of irrationalism levelled against him, could he
come up with an idea of rationality which, while still playing an explanatory function,
would allow the individual to count within the world and before his God as an exception?
This was precisely the problem.
By the end of the eighteenth century, Jacobi was to restate altogether his position on a
new conception of reason. But he had unwittingly defined the problem that was to
motivate Fichte’s redoing of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Fichte, by far Kant’s most
perceptive interpreter, was repeatedly and ardently to declare himself a disciple of Jacobi –
despite the latter’s just as often repeated and ardent rebuff of him. Could one establish
precisely what Jacobi had said was impossible, namely, an in-between system of final causes
and purely efficient ones – in effect, a system that would respect the primacy of existence
over essence while at the same time validating the objective status of reason? And could
one accomplish this feat while also respecting Jacobi’s deeply personalist religious faith?
This was still the problem of reconciling Spinoza and Mendelssohn (which Reinhold had
thought Kant had already resolved). But the issue was whether and how faith would come
into the picture in the very emergence of reason and rationality and not, as was the case for
Kant, only when human happiness is at issue. Or again, the issue was also how to conceive
freedom as an event emerging at the intersection of existence and rational discursiveness
and not – as in the Reinhold–Schmid dispute – as some sort of extra-phenomenal, yet still
physical, cause.

4. Fichte’s Vocation of Man

This is the conceptual and historical context in which Fichte and Schelling composed
their two works in 1800. Fichte’s work came at a time when he had taken refuge in Berlin
after fleeing Jena, accused of atheism and politically suspected of Jacobinism. The work’s
title – The Vocation of Humankind, where ‘Vocation’ (Bestimmung) in German means both
‘determination’ and ‘vocation’ – reprised the title of Spalding’s book, mentioned above,
which over fifty years earlier had been a statement of Aufklärung rational faith. This
circumstance was significant, for although Fichte hoped that his spokesman in the book
would stand for Mensch in general, there was no doubt that the experience that he related
was his own in the first place and for him such an experience had begun as that of an
Aufklärer. In both books, the protagonist is engaged in a reflection on who he is and why; in
Fichte’s, the conclusion at which he arrives at the end of the first part is exactly the same
22 george di giovanni
that the protagonist of Spalding’s reaches at the end – namely, that the universe where he
finds himself is an ordered whole, of which every part has its well-appointed determination.
The special vocation within it that defines his identity is precisely to reflect this order
through his conceptual representations. It is by fulfilling this vocation that he can hope to
attain the perfection, and the consequent happiness, that gives meaning to his many
present travails.
This was indeed the belief on which the rational optimism of the Aufklärung was based
and it had apparently also been Fichte’s original belief. But much had happened since the
days of Spalding’s original manifesto to disturb this optimism; this is now also reflected in
Fichte’s book. First, there was the recognition that Spalding’s naturalistic vision of the
universe brought with it the fatalism of Spinoza in train. The posthumous intervention of
Spinoza had caused this disturbance. Criticism, itself a product of the Enlightenment,
intervened second, raising the doubt whether Spalding’s vision might not after all be but a
subjective projection of reason with no foundation in reality. This doubt could have saved
Spalding’s Mensch from the fatalism of Spinoza, but only at the price of undermining the
conceptual framework within which the question itself of a ‘who’ and a ‘why’ could be
objectively raised – in effect replacing one form of what Jacobi had called nihilism with
another. In other words, whether at the hand of rational dogma or rational criticism, the
Aufklärung’s quest for personal identity and meaning was being frustrated.
Therefore we see Fichte’s protagonist fall into deep despair, the very antithesis of
Enlightenment optimism, twice in the book – at the end of the first part, where he fears
that his feeling of being free is only a delusion (Fichte [1800] 1956: 30–4), then again at the
end of the second part, where his fear is that the very ‘I’ to whom he attributes that feeling
is itself a delusion (79). But redemption is fortunately at hand. It comes in a hint dropped
with the parting words of an ethereal figure who has been in dialogue with him in the
second part of the book. This figure, vaguely reminiscent of Descartes’s evil spirit, has
personified in the book the voice of criticism and he now reminds Fichte’s protagonist that
his quest so far was for knowledge and that he (the spirit) had simply guided him to where
this quest would finally lead him. Indeed, Fichte’s protagonist, not unlike the Enlight-
enment Mensch of Spalding, had sought knowledge of reality in an effort to justify the
belief, which inescapably accompanied all his actions, that there was a meaningful place
within it for both him and his actions. In other words, he had sought knowledge in order to
validate belief. The suggestion now is that this order is wrong and that it is the cause of the
despair into which Fichte’s protagonist has fallen: ‘You wanted to know and you took a
wrong road’ (81). Existentially, it is belief – or the immediate feeling of being an effective
agent – that motivates the quest for knowledge and validation in the first instance.
The suggestion, in other words, is that, rather than validating belief in ‘who’ we are and
‘why’ in terms of ‘what is’, we should instead take this belief as the norm of what counts as
effectively being there. It is not ‘what is’ but ‘what ought to be’ that is the measure of reality.
Should it happen that ‘what is the case’ does not measure up to ‘what ought to be’, it is then
incumbent on the one who acts to reshape the former in order to make it conform to the
latter. The ultimate norm that defines the ‘ought’ in question is precisely that the purely
existential requirement ‘that there be action’ is both respected and promoted. To create a
world where one can be a free agent is indeed the vocation of the human being, the answer
to the question of ‘who’ and ‘why’ we are.
This is the suggestion that Fichte’s protagonist follows in the third part of the book. And,
behold, all that he thought he possessed in the first and second part, but which had then
been lost, the ordered universe of the first and the subjectivity of the second – all this is
 the new spinozism 23
now given back to him, a hundredfold, as it were, because now invested with a new
meaning. It is not just that all things, the putative subject of experience included, turn out
to be mere appearances. They must be interpreted as mere appearances precisely in order that
they can be remade – intentionally first and physically eventually – into the manifestation
of a transcendent freedom at work in the universe. Or again, it is not that this universe
simply happens to be mechanically organised. It must be so organised, because the self-
given lawfulness that freedom generates requires that it be so. The third part of the book is
thus like a manifesto of homo faber, a visionary account of an earth, the product of human
work, where there shall be no more diseases, no more putrid swamps, but where ‘the wolf
also shall dwell with the lamb’ (Isaiah 11: 6). Fichte writes:

There is but one world possible – a thoroughly good world. All that happens in this
world is subservient to the improvement and culture of man and, by means of this, to the
promotion of the purpose of this earthly existence. It is this higher Worldplan which we
call Nature when we say: Nature leads men through want to industry; through the evils
of general disorder to a just constitution; through the miseries of continual wars to
endless peace on earth. (Fichte [1800] 1956: 142–3)

Of course this is only an ideal which, ex hypothesi, will never be realised in real time. For,
however expansive and detailed the work achieved at any time, it never exhausts all that
‘might be the case’: it is, in other words, a determinate and, therefore, only limited
manifestation of freedom, never the thing itself. Nonetheless, a system of ends is thereby
introduced within the domain of human actions – one, however, which is not physically
preappointed but is generated instead by the requirements of action itself. It is the kind of
system that Goethe’s Mensch would have to set up for himself, in defiance of the gods and
in full responsibility for his Fate.
There was nothing that Fichte said in popular style in 1800 that he had not already said
in more technical language in the various shapes of his Wissenschaftslehre, his new Science
of Knowledge, which he had presented up to that point and which had brought upon him
the suspicion of atheism.6 Fichte had begun his system by interpreting the otherwise
undefined feeling of self-awareness that accompanies all experience and which Kant had
straightaway conceptualised as a reflective ‘I’, as the intimation of an action which is
intended as pure act of freedom – a thought thinking itself simply for the sake of thinking
itself – but results instead in the thought of something determined, namely, an objective
‘other’. The presence of the latter in experience is at once an unintended result, which in fact
frustrates the original attempt at infinite freedom, and a necessary result. For without the
determination that it brings to the intended freedom, neither would the latter acquire a
name (that of a subjective ‘I’) nor would this ‘I’ be conscious of itself. Accordingly, Fichte
proceeds to interpret the whole of experience as an attempt on the part of this ‘I’ to
transform the ‘other’, which it otherwise feels as an obstacle to its intended freedom, into an
objective presence of itself – to manifest ‘nature’, in other words, as in fact a work of
freedom. The Wissenschaftslehre did this work of transformation intellectually. The 1800
book was to make explicit its pragmatic consequences in the form of a manifesto for moral
and social action. Fichte could have believed indeed that he had thereby achieved the ‘in-
between system’ that Jacobi had declared impossible – a system where ‘efficacy’ stood on
the one side in the form of a freedom understood as causa sui and ‘nature’ stood on the
other, subjectively invested with determinate purposes, all intended to demonstrate
the effectiveness of the other side. And the connection between the two lay precisely
24 george di giovanni
in the need on the part of freedom to let itself go – to loose itself into the finitude of nature,
so to speak – in order to realise itself consciously.
All this was well and good. But there was a problem and a sign of it was that Fichte’s
system ultimately held together on the strength of a metaphor – that of a fall of freedom
into the finitude of nature. The presence of the metaphor was a clear indication that the
system’s closure could be achieved only on the strength of extra-conceptual means. There
was no conceptual ground on which ultimately to defend it. Competing positions drawing
inspiration from alternative metaphors were possible. And to prove the point, thus
rendering the problem all the more pressing, there was Schelling’s system of 1800.
To Fichte’s credit, he both saw and confronted the problem. He openly recognised that
it takes an act of faith, indeed a deliberate choice, to place the origin of experience in an act
of freedom and, accordingly, to interpret the whole of experience as a protracted moral
commitment (see his first Einleitung in der Wissenschaftslehre of 1797; Fichte 1994: 12–20).
As Fichte openly acknowledged, one may just as well take the origin of experience as an
event of mere nature. For since such an origin is ex hypothesi preconscious, it is resistant to
reflective comprehension and univocal reflective determination. Fichte made the appre-
hension of this origin the object of an intuition, but, as he also acknowledged, even the fact
that we have such an intuition must itself be accepted on faith.7 For intuition escapes
conceptualisation. It is at best a feeling and, therefore, its dominance at the opening of the
Wissenschaftslehre injected into the latter a moment of irrationality that could only be
contained (though never dissolved) through extra-logical means. It was temperament –
personal interest in freedom, as Fichte declared (1994: 18–20) – that gave the system its
convincing force. But for others of different temperament the system’s moralism was
singularly distasteful. Such were the early Romantics, notably Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis
and the Schlegel brothers – and Schelling was there to meet their special interests.

5. Schelling and the Unity of Self and Nature in Art

Despite overlap of language, Schelling’s System of Transcendental Philosophy of 1800 was
radically different both in spirit and construction from anything that Fichte had attempted
in his Science. The difference was clearly visible at three levels. First, at the very beginning.
Schelling assumes an original perfect equipoise of subject and object in the immediate self-
awareness that precedes (as he also assumes) reflective consciousness ([1800] 1978: 49–50).
The net result is that the ‘other’ which is the object of consciousness is not straightaway
construed, as it is in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, as a fall from an act that would have been, if
it had just been possible, an expression of pure subjectivity. The second difference is in the
unfolding of the System itself. As the assumed original equipoise is disturbed, two series of
ever-more complex configurations of existence are made to arise according as the one or
the other of its sides predominate: one series is of natural configurations, the other of
conscious ones. In Schelling’s System these two series are continuous and – even more
significant – the series of conscious configurations simply repeats the natural configuration
in conscious mode, that is, ever more reflectively and deliberately (at a higher power, to use
Schelling’s own language). Natural existence is thus granted an independent status as the
prehistory of spiritual existence.8 This is the third difference.
With the emergence of reflection there occurs a falling apart of nature and spirit that
gives rise, on the part of spirit, to a sense of loss of innocence and also a longing to recover a
once natural past. But this ‘falling apart’ is not a fall of nature from spirit or, for that matter,
of spirit into nature – as it is for Fichte. To use a later image of Hegel, it is rather an ‘upward
 the new spinozism 25
fall’ of spirit from nature – a ‘rise’ above the latter that brings unique evils with it and also
the need to recover the original immediate unity with nature. The problem is that
immediacy cannot be retrieved reflectively. Here Schelling, like Fichte, turns to intellec-
tual intuition. Is there a way of retrieving this union with nature consciously, yet in a
medium which is non-reflective – at once expressive (like the concept) yet blindly
spontaneous (like nature)? Now there is, according to Schelling, a type of human
individual who manages precisely this feat. This is the Genius, the artist whose works
are the product at once of blind nature and conscious Besinnung. In his intuition and in his
artistic witness to it, the original unity of self and nature is both retrieved and expressed in
works of beauty (Schelling [1800] 1978: 312–16).
Schelling’s Genius was clearly a philosophical reprise of the young Goethe’s Mensch. The
Spinozistic inspiration motivating this aesthetic vision of humanity was just as obvious. One
need only replace Schelling’s two series of constructs with Spinoza’s res cogitans and res
extensa to see the Spinozistic template that Schelling was retracing in his System. The
difference is that Schelling was post-Kantian and that he therefore took his starting point,
not dogmatically from the concept of substance but from the problem of a finite mind aware
of, yet incapable of expressing, the unity underlying all experiences. Of course, this type of
ascensus intellectus ad Deum that the System provided could itself be taken as a form of
Spinozistic mental discipline, a kind of medicina mentis. But this is all the more reason to
believe that Schelling’s Romanticism was indeed a kind of Spinozism – an aesthetic version
of Spinoza’s monism that better accorded with the temperament of the time.
But was Fichte’s system any different? Of course, Fichte could not accept Schelling’s
System because he rightly thought that it was a kind of naturalism. Indeed, Fichte had
made the choice of rejecting this possible interpretation of the presence of the ‘other’ in
experience the condition for entering into his own Science. But the fact is that the choice
had to be made because he, just like Schelling, had made the validity of his Science – which
like Schelling’s was the product of reflective reason – dependent on an intuition that
escaped logical means of comprehension; because, like Schelling, he had made essential
determination secondary to existence; like him, therefore, he found himself caught up in
that indeterminate zone between Spinoza’s causa sui and the presence of infinitely finite
modes that could only be traversed through extra-logical commitments. His commitment
happened to be different from Schelling’s; his way of providing a face for the causa sui
accordingly different. But none of this detracted from the fact that, whether Fichte wanted
it or not, his Wissenschaftslehre was itself the attempt of a mind, itself a finite mode, to find
its way back to the source of its existence.
Jacobi saw the Spinozism of both Fichte and Schelling and condemned both.9 What he
apparently did not see was the embarrassing position in which he had landed himself. He
had insisted on the primacy of existence over essence, of intuition over conceptual
determination. The problem was that, to the extent that one granted that primacy, one
also forced conceptualisation into the very formalism that he had decried in classical
metaphysics. One forced it to an endless play of thought determinations which could only
intend, but never achieve, the individuality of experience of which Jacobi had declared
himself to be the champion. Of course, when Jacobi spoke of existence, he had primarily in
mind the religious experience of a subject who stands alone before his God, an ‘exception’
before God that transcends any universal order of being. Philosophical reflection matters
little, if at all, to this experience. But Jacobi had raised the issue of existence philoso-
phically and he could not now blame those such as Fichte, or the early Romantics, for
having wanted also to resolve it conceptually. In the process, they had demonstrated that
26 george di giovanni
an element of irrationality, and the need to contain it through extra-logical means,
necessarily arises within experience precisely in the effort at constituting an ‘I’ reflectively
out of what would otherwise simply be blind efficacy. They had also given an object lesson
that it is possible to contain that irrationality by means that were other than Jacobi’s
religiosity. As of 1799, in his reaction to Fichte and to the charges of atheism that were
being brought against him, Jacobi chose to fall back upon religious rhetoric, limiting
himself simply to attacking the play of empty conceptual determinations that he now
declared all science – but Fichte’s in particular – to be. He was soon to have occasion to
level the same charge against Schelling. But, I repeat, Jacobi had originally raised the issue
of existence philosophically, expecting philosophers to deal with it to his satisfaction. As of
1800, the issue still remained unsolved.

6. Aftermaths
Much was to happen after 1800. Jacobi restated his position regarding reason. He now
opposed to it another faculty which he called (following Kant) the ‘understanding’ and
reserved for the latter the work of comprehending reality which is typical of the sciences of
nature. As for reason itself, he now identified it with a type of ‘feeling’ which, he now
claimed, provides immediate access to such eternal moral/religious values as motivate
specifically human action.10 Together with Fries and Schleiermacher, Jacobi was thus to
initiate the tradition of moral/religious positivism, the counterpart of the scientific
positivism based on the understanding, which had its history in the new century. But
the earlier Jacobi, the champion of the ‘exception’, still had his influence. He was to find an
artistically much more articulate and powerful voice in that of Kierkegaard.
As for Fichte, in Berlin he presented new versions of the Wissenschaftslehre in a more
religious mode, but only orally. The young Schopenhauer attended his lectures. One can
easily recognise, in his World as Will and Representation, the same interplay of transcendent
freedom and mechanistic manifestation of it in particularised experience that we find in
the Wissenschaftslehre (for the Fichte/Schopenhauer connection, see Zöller 2006). The
essential difference is that Fichte’s dissembling religious language now gives place to open
myth-making. Schelling, for his part, continued to pursue his Romantic agenda but, like
Fichte, in a different and more religious mode. In late life he switched from the earlier
reflective reconstructions of experience to a more positive examination of it, delving into
the history of myths in order to find evidence there of the presence of the Absolute.
It was Hegel who clearly recognised the problems that positing the primacy of intuition
over conceptualisation posed for any theory of experience. He deliberately broke with both
Fichte and Schelling on this score. He did away with the infinite and atemporal distance
that in both Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems ex hypothesi separates the assumed original act
of sheer efficiency and the presumed first conscious representation of it. Hegel replaced it
with a historical process through which reason gradually emerges out of an only inchoately
intelligent natural existence in order to take explicit possession of itself. This process does
not culminate in any immediate intuition of the Absolute – be this intuition either moral
or aesthetic – but, on the contrary, in a totally discursive Idea which is absolute only in the
sense that through it reason fully comprehends, although reflectively and therefore
necessarily abstractly, the structure of the universe of meaning which it has itself generated
and which constitutes the matrix of all experience. Hegel also restated the problem of
individuality in social terms, as the problem of creating the kind of society that allows an
individual truly to come into his own precisely as an irreducible individual. On both
 the new spinozism 27
counts, his was an interesting conceptual project, but his legacy was quickly dispersed into
the various attempts at pressing this project either in the service of naturalism in the shape
of anthropology or in the service of orthodox Protestant theology.
Many, then, were the ways in which the intellectual situation in Germany as of 1800, as
reflected by Fichte and Schelling, was to work itself out in the century to come. But it must
be remembered that it had been Spinoza who had finally carried the assumptions on which
classical metaphysics was based to their logical conclusion; Jacobi who had given fair
warning to his contemporaries that they could not have it both ways – subscribe to those
assumptions but also hold on to the ethos of Christian personalism that still inspired their
humanism. Their universe of reason was based on fragile premises and it did indeed shatter.
The early post-Kantians, we have argued, were the first to face up to this fragmentation.
Their various efforts were motivated by different interests and were pursued along radically
different conceptual patterns. But they were all directed at re-establishing, albeit on new
premises, the organic unity of reason which for the Enlightenment had been axiomatic.
Those who followed them were to pursue a different course altogether. Theirs was rather an
effort at capitalising on individual fragments of that unity of reason which once was. Yet,
presiding over all these thinkers, whether the early post-Kantians or their nineteenth-
century successors, there still stood the figure of Spinoza, the father of the radical
Enlightenment.

Notes
1. For a study of Jacobi in English, see di Giovanni 1994.
2. Reinhold’s letters were originally published in Der Teutscher Merkur from 1786–87. A much
augmented version was later published as a two-volume book, Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie,
in 1790 and 1792. For an English translation of the first eight letters and additions from the 1790
version, see Reinhold 2005.
3. On Spalding and his place in the German Late Enlightenment, see di Giovanni 2005: ch. 1. On
Weishaupt, see di Giovanni 2005: 104–5.
4. Jacobi did not think himself an irrationalist – and with good reasons. As far as he was concerned,
the philosophers were the ones who generated irrationality because of their formal rationalism.
They walked on their heads. Only a salto mortale would have allowed them to walk again with
their feet on the solid ground of common sense. For the image of the salto mortale (a kind of
somersault), see Jacobi 1994: 189.
5. The relevant essays are Kant’s The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God’s
Existence of 1763; Kant’s Untersuchungen über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen
Theologie und Moral (Enquiries Concerning the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality) of
1764; and Mendelssohn’s Über die Evidenz in metaphysischen Wissenschaften (Concerning Evidence
in Metaphysical Sciences) of 1764.
6. Fichte gave several versions of this Science, starting in 1794/5, some never published in his
lifetime. The most accessible texts are two early ‘Introductions’, the first intended for the general
philosophical public, the second for his critics, both from 1797. See Fichte 1994: 7–35 and 36–
105.
7. ‘We have here presupposed the fact of this intellectual intuition so that we could then proceed to
explain its possibility . . . It is, however, an entirely different undertaking to confirm, on the basis
of something even higher, the belief in the reality of this intellectual intuition’ (Fichte 1994: 49).
As Fichte goes on to say, the ‘something even higher’ is the ‘ethical law within us’. The intuition
must be comprehended in concepts.
8. The first series had already been developed by Schelling in previous works, notably in Ideen zu
einer Philosophie der Natur (see Schelling [1797] 1994). The System of Transcendental Idealism – see
Schelling [1800] (1978) – documents a second series of configurations that reflectively retrieve
 28 george di giovanni
and consciously repeat the natural ones – at first as forms of subjective experiences and eventually
in the reflectively more complex forms of social existence. The System is itself the highest
expression of this reflective retrieval of otherwise unconscious configurations – the point at which
the emergence of consciousness from its preconscious past becomes itself an object of reflective
reconstruction. To borrow an expression of Hegel’s dating from when he was still Schelling’s
follower, at this point ‘the absolute substance first gives a sketch of itself in the idea’ (Hegel 1998:
262, line 7). Exactly how this is possible, or what it might mean, is a problem of all Romantic
idealism of Schelling’s type.
9. Jacobi attacked Fichte in his open letter to him of 1799 and attacked Schelling a decade later
when both were members of the Royal Academy in Munich. This was the third of the three public
disputes in which Jacobi was involved in his lifetime. His position was stridently declared in Von
den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung (see Jacobi 1811) (Of Divine Things and Their
Revelation). At this time, in the outcry that ensued, Goethe definitely broke with Jacobi.
10. This development was documented in the Preface to the 1815 second edition of the dialogue
David Hume which served also as Preface to the author’s Collected Works. See Jacobi 1994: 539–
45, 556.

References
di Giovanni, George (1994), ‘The unfinished philosophy of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’, in Friedrich
Heinrich Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel ‘Allwill’, trans. and ed. George di
Giovanni, Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 1–167.
di Giovanni, George (2005), Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors: The Vocation
of Humankind, 1774–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb [1800] (1956), The Vocation of Man, trans. and ed. Roderick M. Chisholm,
New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1994), J. G. Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings
(1797–1800), trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale, Indianapolis: Hackett.
Hazard, Paul [1935] (1953), The European Mind, trans. J. Lewis May, London: Hollis & Carter.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1998), Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5: Schriften und Entwürfe (1799–
1808), ed. Theodor Ebert, Manfred Baum and Kurt Rainer Meist, Hamburg: Meiner.
Israel, Jonathan I. (2001), Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jacob, Margaret (1981), The Radical Enlightenment, London: Temple Publishers.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1811), Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung, Leipzig: Fleischer.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1994), The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel ‘Allwill’, trans. and
ed. George di Giovanni, Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Kant, Immanuel [1790] (1987), Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett.
Mendelssohn, Moses (1761), Philosophische Gespräche, Berlin: Voß.
Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (2005), Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, trans. James Hebbeler, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1961), Briefe Von und An Hegel, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister,
Hamburg: Meiner.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von [1800] (1978), System of Transcendental Idealism, trans.
Peter L. Heath, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von [1797] (1994), Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Werke.
Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe vol. 5, ed. Manfred Durner with the assistance of Walter Schieche,
Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog.
Zöller, Günther (2006), ‘Kichtenhauer: Der Ursprung von Schopenhauers Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung in Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre 1812 und System der Sittenlehre’, in Lore Hühn and
Philipp Schwab (eds), Die Ethik Arthur Schopenhauers im Ausgang vom Deutschen Idealismus (Fichte/
Schelling), Würzburg: Ergon, pp. 365–86.
 2
The Absolute in German Idealism and
Romanticism

Dalia T. Nassar

1. Introduction
One of the most obscure, yet significant, concepts in early nineteenth-century philosophy
is that of the Absolute. As a word, the Absolute came into philosophical discourse with
Schelling to mean the ontological ground of and point of identity between subject and
object. In this sense Hegel adopted the term in his early works, while in his later writings he
came to identify the Absolute with the process and final conclusion of reason. Although it
is these figures who employed the words ‘the Absolute’ (das Absolute), the idea of the
Absolute as the ontological ground in which subject and object are identical, and out of
which they arise, was central in much philosophy of the early nineteenth century.
While the notion of the Absolute has been criticised and even dismissed as metaphysical
nonsense, its significance in nineteenth-century philosophy cannot be underestimated.
Following the publication of the first and second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason in
1781 and 1787 and the critiques levelled against the Kantian project, it became apparent to
philosophers of the time that a system which rests on fundamental dualisms – between self
and nature, sensibility and understanding, noumena and phenomena – cannot provide an
adequate response to scepticism. Only a philosophical monism, based on an original
identity and harmony between subject and object, thing and its presentation, could
overcome scepticism. Such a monism, however, was neither naı̈ve nor dogmatic. Rather,
the philosophers of the early nineteenth century attempted to establish the phenomen-
ological reality of this principle of identity and to develop it on a sound epistemological
ground. As the principle which underlies and thus precedes all difference and dualism, the
Absolute, they reasoned, could not be given through discursive reflection. Rather, the
Absolute can be gleaned only through an immediate insight which does not divide or
separate in order to present. They termed this insight ‘intuition’ (Anschauung).
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant introduces the idea of an unconditioned ground,
identifying it with reason’s goal. In the Critique of Judgement (1st edn 1790; 2nd edn 1793)
he speaks of a supersensible basis underlying nature and unifying mechanism and teleology.
However, following the restrictions he had placed on reason, Kant could not provide a
positive conception of this ground and concluded that it is ‘a matter that does not admit of
explanation . . .’ (Kant 1900–: 5: 413).1
‘Reason’, Kant writes, ‘is a faculty of principles and the unconditioned is the ultimate
goal at which it aims’ (Kant 1900–: 5: 401). The unconditioned, as unconditioned, must lie
beyond or outside of all determination (Kant identifies the unconditioned with the ‘things
30 dalia t. nassar
in themselves’ in the second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason) and therefore cannot be
sensibly intuited (Kant 1900–: 3: B xx). According to Kant, because the human intellect is
discursive, it can gain knowledge only through the cooperation of sensible intuition and
understanding.2 For this reason, the unconditioned, being outside of all determination, can
never be cognised by the human intellect. Yet, while the unconditioned remains unknown,
the idea of the unconditioned is necessary – for it makes our experience coherent, as well as
reconciles our moral experience with our experience of nature.
Kant thus grants the unconditioned a regulative status. However, as ultimately un-
knowable and unprovable, the tenability and philosophical coherence of his understanding
of the unconditioned came under heavy criticism. The notion that we must assume but can
never know the unconditioned became perhaps the most significant question of the time.
Thus Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) remarked of his time, ‘We search everywhere for
the unconditioned [das Unbedingte], but we always only find things [Dinge]’ (Novalis 1960–
88: 2: 413). Without a fundamental principle or ground that could be proven (not simply
posited and assumed, as Kant had done), the coherence and truth of knowledge could not
be guaranteed. It therefore became necessary for any systematic attempt to ground
knowledge to consider the nature of this unconditioned ground and to prove its reality.
In fact, it is precisely the epistemological concern with knowing the unconditioned and the
attempt to explicate the unconditioned systematically that distinguish the nineteenth-
century formulations of the Absolute from its various predecessors and influences –
whether Platonic, Christian, mystical or Spinozistic.3
In this essay, I provide a brief account of Kant’s understanding of the unconditioned and
his restrictions on reason, establishing the origins of the nineteenth century conception of
the Absolute. I then briefly reconstruct the move from Kant’s critical system to an
ontological understanding of the Absolute, by way of Fichte. This is followed by a
consideration of the meaning of the Absolute in the works of Schelling and Hegel. I
will also draw on the ideas of the Early German Romantics, Novalis, Friedrich Schleier-
macher and Friedrich Schlegel, whose conception of the Absolute played a significant role
in the development of Schelling’s thinking, especially in his works on nature and art.4 My
analysis of Schelling begins with his understanding of the Absolute in his philosophy of
nature and System of Transcendental Idealism, published in 1800. I will then consider the
shift in Schelling’s thinking which took place in 1801, initiating the period of his thinking
known as ‘identity philosophy’. The writings from this period serve as the foundation for
Hegel’s critique of Schelling in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, a critique that I then
examine. I explicate Hegel’s understanding of the Absolute as formulated in the Phenom-
enology and in his later writings on logic. I conclude with an account of the roles of
intuition and reflection in knowing the Absolute, arguing that Hegel’s and Schelling’s
diverging conceptions of knowledge were inherently connected to their opposing views on
the nature of the Absolute.

2. Dualism and Monism in Kant

Although dualism in modernity begins with Descartes, it is equally at home in Kant. In the
first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that the transcendental idealist is a
dualist, since he admits that there is an unbridgeable divide between our consciousness and
things-in-themselves, a divide which permits no knowledge of anything other than
representations or appearances (Kant 1900–: 4: A370).
Kant’s dualism is a fundamental aspect of his system, dating back to his letter of 21
absolute in german idealism and romanticism 31
February 1772 to Marcus Herz. In this letter, Kant distinguishes between intuitive and
discursive thinking. Whereas intuitive thinking is the source of its own objects, discursive
thinking receives objects from an external source. ‘Our understanding’, he writes, ‘through
its representations is neither the cause of the object (save in the case of moral ends), nor is
the object the cause of our intellectual representation in the real sense’ (Kant 1900–: 10:
130). The knowledge given to the discursive intellect is never of the objects themselves,
but of representations. In contrast, intuitive thinking is the productive ground (in the
ontological sense) of its objects and therefore has a direct grasp of them as things-in-
themselves. In this way, Kant acknowledges a difference between our understanding, on
the one hand, and the object of our understanding, on the other.
Alongside the dualism between the thing-in-itself and the representation or appearance
is the dualism between sensibility and reason, the finite and the infinite, or, in Kantian
terms, between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. While sensibility receives
data from within the finitely intelligible forms of time and space, reason demands the
infinite intelligibility of the principle of sufficient reason. There are therefore two worlds,
the world that can be known by finite intelligence through discursive thinking – sensible
intuition and concepts – and the world which can only be known by the infinite
intelligence, intuitive thinking, but can only be presupposed by us.
In the Critique of Judgement Kant acknowledges that his ‘two world’ theory runs into
difficulty and sets out to overcome the ‘gap’ between the two domains, the sensible and the
supersensible. Kant introduces the dilemma at hand: the objects of nature present
themselves to us in intuition as appearances and not as things-in-themselves; the objects
of freedom present themselves as things-in-themselves, but not in sensible intuition.
‘Hence’, he writes,

an immense gulf is fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, the sensible, and
the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible, so that no transition from the
sensible to the supersensible is possible, just as if they were two different worlds, the first
of which cannot have any influence on the second; and yet, the second is to have an
influence on the first, i.e., the concept of freedom is to actualise in the world of sense the
purpose enjoined by its laws. (Kant 1900–: 5: 175)

For this reason, he concludes, ‘there must be a basis uniting the sensible that underlies
nature and the supersensible that the concept of freedom contains practically’. The
question is whether this basis refers to an ontological reality, which in turn constitutes
nature and our experience of it, or to a regulative idea, a methodological principle that we
assume in order to make our experience coherent.
Throughout the work, Kant is clear that this unity is regulative and cannot refer to an
ontological reality in nature or in reason. Therefore he writes, ‘this transcendental
principle must be one that reflective judgement gives as a law, but only to itself: it cannot
take it from somewhere else . . . nor can it prescribe it to nature . . .’ (Kant 1900–: 5: 180).
This principle, he goes on, ‘can be given by an understanding (even though not ours)’, that
is to say, by an intuitive intellect.
In the ‘Critique of Teleological Judgement’, Kant argues for reason’s regulative role in
the same way that he did in his letter to Herz (Kant 1900–: 5: 401). Understanding restricts
the validity of the ideas of reason to the subject because of ‘the nature of our (human)
cognitive ability, or . . . any concept we can form of the ability of a finite rational being as
such’. For human cognition requires ‘two quite heterogeneous components’, namely,
32 dalia t. nassar
‘understanding to provide concepts and sensible intuition to provide objects corresponding
to these’ and if this were not the case, he goes on, ‘our understanding would be intuitive
rather than discursive, i.e., conceptual’.
The necessary basis that unites the sensible and supersensible, the representation and the
thing-in-itself, is – for our understanding – a regulative idea. This is because of the nature of
our thinking. Because it is discursive, it cannot have an intuition of the unifying ground of
the two worlds. We cannot have any experience of this unity and can therefore never know
whether a uniting basis exists, but can only presuppose that it does and act accordingly.
According to Kant, human nature itself – the finitude of human thinking – necessarily
leads to a dualism in knowing.
With the separation of the thing-in-itself from its representation, the supersensible from
the sensible and the mere assumption of a unity between the two that can never actually be
known, the question of true knowledge becomes critical and the road to scepticism seems
inevitable. Kant appears to have recognised this himself when he states in the ‘Appendix to
the Transcendental Dialectic’ that a regulative systematic unity of reason is simply not
enough. He asserts that we must assume that there is a systematic unity in reason and in
nature in order to arrive at a ‘sufficient criterion of empirical truth’ (Kant 1900–: 4: A651;
3: B679).
Kant explains that it is necessary to assume a transcendental principle of rational unity.
Lacking such a principle, he argues, reason has no claim ‘to treat the manifoldness of the
powers which nature gives to our cognition as merely a concealed unity and to derive them
as far as it is able from some fundamental power’, that is, reason has no right to assume
coherence in nature. If this were the case, however, then reason ‘would proceed directly
contrary to its vocation, since it would set as its goal an idea that entirely contradicts the
arrangement of nature’. Reason seeks unity and lacking unity there would be no reason. In
turn, without reason, there would be no ‘coherent employment of the understanding’ and,
lacking that, no ‘secure empirical criterion of truth’. Therefore, Kant concludes, ‘we have
no option save to suppose the systematic unity of nature as objectively valid and necessary’.
In other words, the very fact of reason and the understanding necessarily leads us to assume
a systematic unity in nature.
The claim that there is an objectively valid and necessary unity in nature appears to run
counter to Kant’s teachings. In this case, Kant is not claiming that we must remain agnostic
about the unity’s ontological status. Rather, we must presuppose that such a unity actually
exists. Further, in speaking of the systematic unity of nature in these terms – that is, in
terms of the unity of reason – he is drawing a significant parallel between reason and nature,
suggesting even a conformity between reason and nature. Throughout the third Critique, in
contrast, Kant is clear about the regulative status of any claims made about the natural
organism. Accordingly, we are justified in treating an organism as if it were spontaneous
and reflective – as if it were like reason. In the ‘Appendix’ to the first Critique, however, the
‘as if’ aspect is eliminated, replaced by the assertion that there is a systematic unity in nature
and therefore a conformity between reason and nature. Finally, insofar as this unity
precedes the subject–object distinction and is the necessary condition for the coherent use
of the understanding, it is a point of identity of the subjective and objective that lies
outside of or prior to the dualism engendered by discursive thinking. What Kant takes as
the starting point of his investigation – the discursive intellect – presupposes a unity which
enables it to function, a unity, moreover, that cannot merely be assumed, for it is on the
basis of this unity that the entire operation of knowing, as outlined by Kant, is possible.
Although Kant tacitly assumes a monism, a point of unity prior to the subject–object
absolute in german idealism and romanticism 33
distinction and prior to the duality that arises out of the difference between concept and
intuition, reason and nature, he does not explicitly state this monism, nor does he pursue it
any further. In fact, just a few pages after suggesting this unity as a necessary conformity
between reason and nature, Kant returns to the claim that any such unity is only regulative
(Kant 1900–: 4: A671; 3: B699). The tension in Kant’s thinking thus remained unresolved.
Kant’s first critics noticed this tension, accusing Kant of scepticism. If things-in-
themselves could not be known, then how could we be sure that our knowledge actually
reflects truth and is not merely illusory? (The first review of the Critique of Pure Reason, co-
authored by Johann Georg Heinrich Feder and Christian Garve, published in 1782 and
now known as the ‘Feder/Garve Review’, levelled precisely this critique against Kant,
arguing that his philosophy was a full-blown idealism.) Or, how can a priori forms agree
with or correspond to a posteriori matter? (This was the principal critique made by
Salomon Maimon in his Versuch über die Transcendentalphilosophie of 1789.) Or, given
Kant’s basic premises, how can we know that sensibility is indeed receptive and that things-
in-themselves exist at all? (This was the essence of Jacobi’s argument, in which he claimed
that Kant inconsistently argued that objects are the causes of our representations. For, on
the one hand, empirical objects cannot be the causes of our representations since they are
mere appearances or representations. And, on the other, transcendental objects cannot be
the causes of our representations, since they are beyond our grasp. The question then is,
what exactly is causing our representations? Thus Jacobi famously stated that: ‘I need the
assumption of things-in-themselves to enter the Kantian system; but with this assumption
it is not possible for me to remain inside it’; Jacobi 1846: 2: 304.)
The challenge of scepticism was great. How was the gap between the understanding and
sensibility, between noumena and phenomena, to be bridged? If such a gap could not be
bridged, Kant’s critics argued, then scepticism could not be overcome.

3. Fichte and the Ontological Absolute

These early critiques led Kant’s first interpreters – Fichte and Reinhold – to reconsider the
dualism in the Kantian system. Reinhold maintained that it was only on the basis of an
original unity, a first principle of consciousness from which sensibility, understanding and
reason are derived, that the necessary correspondence between sensibility and under-
standing (cognitive matter and form) could be achieved and knowledge made possible.
Similarly, Fichte claimed that an unconditioned ground of knowledge which was abso-
lutely certain was necessary in order to save Kantian philosophy from the infinite regress of
scepticism. Fichte’s most important contribution, however, came in his reinvigoration of
the concept of intellectual intuition.
Fichte saw that the only way to save Kantian philosophy was not simply by unifying the
various cognitive faculties but by eliminating the duality between self and world – that is,
eliminating the unknown thing-in-itself. This did not mean a denial of the existence of the
thing-in-itself but rather the critical claim that the existence of the thing-in-itself is not
only uncognisable but also unthinkable (see Beiser 2002: 269). The concern of critical
philosophy can only be that which is radically immanent: what is ‘for the self’, as opposed
to ‘in itself’. There is therefore no need to presuppose or assume a reality outside of the self,
for all that is – all that concerns philosophy – is what is given to the self. The duality
between self and world, between knowledge and thing-in-itself, is in this way overcome.
For Kant, however, the reality of the noumenal realm establishes the possibility of
freedom; therefore, its elimination may appear to be the elimination of freedom (Kant
34 dalia t. nassar
1900–: 3: B xxvii). By subjugating all reality – including the self – to the realm of
determination (to the ‘for the self’), Fichte, it seems, made freedom impossible. But this was
certainly not Fichte’s goal, nor was it his conclusion.5
As noted above, Kant differentiates the human and divine intellects on the basis of
intellectual intuition. Only the divine intellect can have immediate (that is, non-
conceptual, non-sensible) insight into the object of knowledge because only the divine
intellect does not receive its object of knowledge but produces it. Fichte agreed with Kant’s
definition of intellectual intuition. However, he regarded Kant’s denial of intellectual
intuition to the human intellect as wrong, especially in the case of self-knowledge.
Upon close inspection of the self, specifically of self-consciousness, it becomes evident
that the act of self-consciousness is immediate and intuitive in the sense outlined by Kant.
The experience of self-consciousness is indemonstrable – each individual must undergo this
experience for her- or himself – and is therefore immediate. Furthermore, in this
experience, the I is absolutely active and spontaneous (as opposed to passive) and cannot
therefore be determined or subsumed under any concept or principle. It is its own principle.
Finally, the act of self-consciousness not only involves self-knowledge but also self-
production, or, as Fichte terms it, the self posits itself in self-consciousness. So self-
consciousness is not solely an epistemological act but also an ontological one.
Fichte explains this as follows. The self is necessarily self-conscious, that is, only a self-
conscious being is a self. Therefore, the self is a self only through the act of self-
consciousness. Prior to this act, there is no self. The self, then, is only insofar as it knows
itself. In other words, in knowing itself, the self brings itself forth. To put it in Kant’s terms,
the knower produces the object of knowledge. Self-consciousness, therefore, is an act
which involves not only the knowledge of the self but also the creation of the self and, in
this way, fulfils Kant’s definition of intellectual intuition.
As Fichte continued to develop his theory of self-consciousness, he came to realise that
the self as subject, as the infinite act, was dependent on a finite, opposing object, an object
that is necessarily not the product of the self (what he calls ‘check’). It is only through an
opposing principle that is independent of the self’s activity, Fichte came to argue, that the
self becomes active. In other words, activity (in contrast to non-activity) emerges only out
of opposition or restriction. Lacking opposition, there is no activity.
The Romantics and idealists were familiar with the Reinholdian-Fichtean line of
defence and agreed that an absolute first principle or ground was necessary. They also
agreed with Fichte that such a first principle is not simply a regulative ideal but an
ontological, productive reality. They were not convinced, however, by Fichte’s claim that
this reality is limited to the activity of self-consciousness, nor were they convinced by what
they took to be Fichte’s reintroduction of Kant’s thing-in-itself. By asserting the need for an
opposing principle, a check, Fichte appeared to be reinstating the Kantian dualism of self
and world. Therefore, instead of establishing the necessary correspondence between the
subject and the object, Fichte returns to an absolute dichotomy between subject and
object. What needed to be demonstrated, therefore, was not the principle or ground of the
self, in opposition to the not-self, but the unity which precedes the division between self
and not-self. This original unity is the Absolute.6

4. The Absolute
The Absolute could not be merely regulative, as Kant argued, because as the Absolute it
cannot be anything other than the ontological ground of reality. In turn, as the ground of
absolute in german idealism and romanticism 35
reality, the Absolute is necessarily active and productive. Furthermore, as Absolute, it
cannot be opposed to anything – there can be nothing outside of or other than the
Absolute. Therefore, the Absolute is the underlying productive ground of the world as well
as its totality. The Absolute is all that is.
Previous philosophies ran into difficulties (hence were criticised by Kant) because they
misunderstood the nature of the Absolute. Kant is right, the Romantics and idealists
maintained, to claim that the Absolute cannot be given as an object in experience (Kant
1900–: 4: A308; 3: B364). However, this is not because the Absolute is an unknown
unconditioned that is beyond determinate experience. Rather, it is because the Absolute is
not an object, a substance, a thing that can be given or predicated or, as Schelling puts it, the
Absolute cannot be ‘said to be’ (Schelling 1976: 7: 77).
As the ground of all beings, the Absolute necessarily precedes all beings – and, in turn,
precedes all difference and determination. Yet the Absolute is not a first cause, in the sense
of a substance that brings both itself and other substances forth. Rather, as Novalis puts it,
it is a ground characterised by a ‘relation with the whole’ (Novalis 1960–88: 2: 269). He
explains what he means with an illuminating metaphor: the Absolute is that whole which
‘rests more or less like persons playing without a chair, merely sitting one on the knee of
another and forming a circle’ (2: 242). The Absolute is not a substance that precedes the
circle that is formed; it is in fact not there, in any traditional meaning of the term ‘there’.
Yet, it is there, as the principle which underlies and informs the circle, without which the
circle would not have formed and would have remained – as Schlegel often reminds his
readers – nothing.7 In essence, the Absolute is the constituting principle of the whole; it is
or can be said to be only in its parts, which, as part of the whole, mutually support and bear
one another. Therefore, the Absolute is neither inaccessible nor fundamentally distinct
from that which it grounds. Rather, the Absolute presents itself both in the whole and in its
various parts.
The question remains, however, regarding the exact relation between the Absolute and
the world that it brings forth. What does it mean to say that the Absolute ‘presents’ itself in
the whole and in its parts? On this particular point – the exact relation between the
Absolute as the ground that informs and sustains the world and the Absolute as the totality,
as the world in its various manifestations – disagreement arose.
Some Romantic and idealist thinkers conceived the relation as one of mediation, wherein
the Absolute ‘goes out of itself’ and thus brings forth the world, as Schlegel put it. Others –
most notably Schelling during his ‘identity philosophy’ period – argued that the notion of
mediation necessarily implies opposition but that the Absolute, as all that is, cannot be
opposed to anything, not even itself. Based on this fundamental difference Hegel famously
wrote in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit that a certain perspective conceives of
the Absolute ‘as the night in which all cows are black’ (Hegel 1968–: 9: 17). Hegel
denounced this contemporary ‘formalism’, which, with its ‘single insight, that in the
Absolute everything is the same’, overlooks ‘the full body of articulated cognition’.
Hegel’s remark has led to a misunderstanding of Schelling’s philosophy as a whole and of
the direction of philosophy at that time, as well as to an avoidance of the inherently
difficult task of conceiving the Absolute. For one, it was only during the period between
1801 and 1809 (his ‘identity philosophy’ period) that Schelling’s conception of the
Absolute could be interpreted as simple and immediate. In his earlier works Schelling
developed a conception of the Absolute much closer to the one Hegel put forth in the
Phenomenology. Moreover, Schelling’s move toward a philosophy of identity was occa-
sioned by a continued struggle with his earlier conception of the Absolute. If the Absolute
36 dalia t. nassar
is all that is, then all that is must exist within the Absolute and must be absolutely identical
with it. Therefore, to speak of the Absolute as an entity that ‘goes out of itself’, in the sense
that the Absolute brings itself forth through an act of self-negation and thus develops itself,
seems unjustified. If the Absolute is, then why must the Absolute become?
Before examining Schelling’s identity philosophy and Hegel’s critique of it, then, we
must consider Schelling’s earlier philosophy, wherein his views are much more in concert
with those of Hegel and the Romantics.

5. Schelling
In his works on the philosophy of nature (especially his 1799 First Outline of a System of the
Philosophy of Nature) and in the 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling attempts to
develop what he sees as nothing other than two sides of the Absolute: nature (objective) and
self (subjective). In the philosophy of nature, he shows how the Absolute develops un-
consciously, from inanimate matter to complex organisation, while in the System he traces the
conscious development of the Absolute. In both cases, Schelling understands the Absolute in
terms of development or becoming, that is, the Absolute is not a stationary substance but the
principle of formation that underlies the growth of nature as well as the development of self-
consciousness. His goal is to illustrate that in both instances one and the same Absolute
underlies and informs the objective and the subjective developments and that consciousness is
nothing other than a more developed manifestation of unconscious nature.
The relation between the Absolute and its parts is understood as a relation of
presentation, or self-presentation. The Absolute (like Fichte’s self) is only in its various
self-presentations (self-consciousness). Each presentation is a moment or a stage in the
development of the Absolute. There are therefore ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ (more complete and
less complete) manifestations of the Absolute. Whatever the case, however, the mani-
festations are not other than the Absolute nor is the Absolute in any way outside of the
manifestations. Rather, each manifestation is a manifestation of the Absolute – only in a
different stage of its development.
In turn, the development of the Absolute, whether in nature or in consciousness, is
dependent upon opposition. Therefore in the same way that the self must first intuit itself
as an object, must oppose itself to itself in order to become itself, so an original opposition,
in both nature and consciousness, is necessary to drive the Absolute toward becoming
itself. That the Absolute must become itself implies that the Absolute involves difference,
opposition and finitude.
The Absolute attains to its highest manifestation only when it comes to see itself as the
ground of both itself (subject, conscious) and the world (object, unconscious), that is, as
the original identity of self and world. In essence, the Absolute must arrive at the point at
which it sees itself as the Absolute. This, according to the 1800 System, can be achieved
only in the work of art, in which the opposition between the conscious intuiting subject
and unconscious intuited object is overcome (Schelling 1856–61: 3: 617).
In these earlier works Schelling’s understanding of the Absolute stands very close to that
of Schlegel, Schleiermacher and Novalis, who agreed that the Absolute is inherently
mediated and, as such, essentially constituted by opposition. Because the Absolute is
constituted, that is, because it is the result or the outcome of opposition, it is neither simple
and immediate nor complete in its beginning. Rather, it necessarily arises out of various
stages of opposition and either attains fulfilment (as in Hegel) or does not (as in Schlegel’s
understanding of a universal progressive poetry).
absolute in german idealism and romanticism 37
In this way these various thinkers – including Hegel – clearly align themselves with the
general direction of Fichte’s notion of the self-positing I. Hegel’s claim in the ‘Preface’ to
the Phenomenology that the Absolute is not merely substance but also subject harkens back
to the Fichtean structure of the subject’s self-opposition. Similarly, though with a less
subjective tone, Schlegel conceives of the Absolute as having ‘gone out of itself and made
itself finite’ (aus sich herausgegangen und hat sich endlich gemacht) (Schlegel 1958–: 12: 39).
Schleiermacher, in turn, conceives of the universe as an ‘uninterrupted activity’, which has
come about through the infinite opposition of two forces – attraction and repulsion
(Schleiermacher 1984: 2: 191). Novalis elaborates that being is not an unmediated, self-
identical reality, but ‘an absolute relation . . . being does not express identity [Seyn . . . ist
eine absolute Relation . . . Seyn drückt nicht Identität aus]’ (Novalis 1960–88: 2: 247).
Schelling’s contrasting view was first introduced in the 1801 essay ‘Presentation of My
System’. The goal of this essay, as the title betrays, is to distinguish his system from
Fichte’s.8 To do this, Schelling does not believe that he needs to make any changes to his
previously outlined systems but that he simply needs to explicate what he had, up to that
point, left unsaid (Schelling 1856–61: 4: 107). Despite this self-presentation, there are
important differences between the ‘Presentation’ and Schelling’s earlier works. For one, he
adopts the geometrical method used by Spinoza, where he begins by postulating definitions.
Second, he puts forth a Platonic view of the Absolute as an eternal unchanging reality,
which does not enter into the temporal sequence of the world and thus cannot be said to
develop. This leads him to adopt his third and most controversial claim (which Hegel
criticises in the ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology), namely, that difference can only exist
outside of the Absolute and that, insofar as the Absolute is all that is, difference cannot be
real but is merely ideal. Difference, he explains, arises out of the perspective of reflection, a
perspective that is inadequate for conceiving the Absolute. Finally and most significantly
with regard to Hegel’s critique, Schelling explains that the Absolute is not something that
is ‘constructed’ or ‘produced’ but is the point of indifference prior to any division and
construction.
Up to 1801, Schelling had presented his philosophy from two different angles: the
philosophy of nature, on the one hand, and, on the other, transcendental philosophy. The
goal of the 1801 essay, in contrast, is to present the ‘point of indifference’ of the two angles –
the point prior to the division between the philosophy of nature and transcendental
philosophy. It is neither to ‘realism’ nor to ‘idealism’ that Schelling turns – nor even to
‘some third combination of them’ – but to ‘a system of identity’ of the two. This system
cannot be grasped from the standpoint of reflection, which ‘works only from oppositions and
rests on oppositions’, but only from the standpoint of reason (Schelling 1856–61: 4: 113).
By reason Schelling means ‘the absolute reason, or reason insofar as it is thought as the
total indifference of subjective and objective’ (4: 114). Usually reason is understood
subjectively, that is, as inherently tied to a thinking subject. This is a mistake because
‘reason’s thought is foreign to everyone’ and thus, to arrive at reason as the absolute, ‘one
must abstract from what does the thinking’. In abstracting reason from a thinking subject,
one is also freed from the objective, ‘since something objective or a thought item is only
possible in contrast to a thinking something, from which we have completely abstracted’
(4: 115). In this way, reason ‘becomes the true in-itself’, the point of absolute identity
between the subjective and objective.
As the Absolute, reason is neither subjective nor objective but their identity. As such,
the law of identity is the ‘highest law for the being of reason’ (4: 116). Reason, then, ‘is
simply one and simply self-identical’. Schelling then elaborates on the relation between the
38 dalia t. nassar
essence and existence of reason. The essence of absolute identity, he writes, is its existence:
as the absolutely true, it necessarily exists. In other words, its essence implies its existence.
This holds for reason as well, insofar as it is identical with absolute identity. Thus,
Schelling concludes, ‘the being of reason is just as unconditioned as that of absolute identity,
or: Being belongs equally to the essence of reason and to that of absolute identity’ (4: 118).
Essence, however, should be distinguished from form. While the essence of absolute
identity is simply that it is, its form is A = A. The difference is decisive because the form of
A = A implies difference, that is, it implies A as subject and A as object, whereas the
essence of absolute identity does not imply difference but only the existence of one absolute
identity. Therefore, the essence of absolute identity remains indifferent while its form contains
difference. What this means, significantly, is that absolute identity is not constituted by A as
subject and A as object (that is, by the difference or opposition between the two) but rather
is the indifference of the two.
Difference therefore does not lie in the essence of absolute identity but in its form. While
the form A = A implies a distinction between A as subject and A as object, it does not
imply that there are (in essence) two distinct As – rather, the same A is posited. The
difference, therefore, is entirely formal. Schelling surmises that this difference cannot be
qualitative, since it is one and the same A – the same essence. Rather it is a quantitative
difference. In other words, the difference has to do with a predominance of one A (whether
the subjective or the objective) over the other. Schelling explains:

since the same A is posited in the predicate and in the subject position in the proposition
A = A, without doubt there is posited between the two utterly no difference at all, but an
indifference. In this situation, difference . . . would become possible only if either
predominant subjectivity or predominant objectivity were posited, in which case A = A
would have changed into A = B. (4: 124)

Quantitative difference, therefore, says nothing about the essence or being of A (the
essence of A remains absolutely indifferent), but refers to the amount of being in A as
subject as different from the amount of being in A as object. It is therefore not a difference
in kind (A is absolutely) but in degree (in quantity).
As the indifference of subject and object, absolute identity is not a synthesis of the two.
This is because absolute identity is outside of the realm of distinction and synthesis implies
an original difference. This means that quantitative difference ‘is only possible outside
absolute identity’, that is, it is outside the Absolute. The Absolute, however, is in
everything, is everything, is totality and the universe (4: 125). Where, then, is quantitative
difference?
Quantitative difference is in the individual, because individuals are not ‘in themselves’
(their essence does not imply their existence) and therefore are not absolute. Insofar as they
are not in themselves, individuals, however, are also not real. Therefore, in asking the
question: where is quantitative difference?, we are led to a second significant question
regarding the status of individuals. If everything that is is in absolute identity and if
quantitative difference must exist outside of absolute identity, then what are individuals,
which are the outcome of quantitative difference? To make the case that his claims are not
contradictory, Schelling returns to an earlier distinction between that which is in itself and
that which is not in itself. Thus, he writes that ‘there is no individual being or individual
thing in itself’ and in fact only the absolute totality is in itself (4: 125). This can only mean,
therefore, that ‘there is nothing in itself outside of totality and if something is viewed
absolute in german idealism and romanticism 39
outside of totality, this happens only by an arbitrary separation of the individual from the whole
effected by reflection’ (4: 126; emphasis added).
Thus, difference is the outcome of perspective, namely, reflection and individuals are
not real entities, but born out of the perspective of one ‘who finds himself outside
indifference, who fails to view absolute identity itself as primary and original’ (4: 128).
Rather than recognising the Absolute as the point of original indifference, such a person
views the Absolute as something ‘produced’ (producirt). This viewpoint is false, Schelling
concludes, because it relies on a separation that is ‘intrinsically impossible’ – namely, a
separation between absolute totality and its parts.
It is in Schelling’s writings of this period that the struggle to understand the relation
between the Absolute and its parts is most intense. For, as just noted, if the Absolute is all
that is, then there can in fact be no separation between the Absolute and its parts, for
nothing other than the Absolute exists. Furthermore, if the Absolute is all that is, then the
Absolute is not an outcome of oppositions born out of separation. Or: if the Absolute is
absolutely, then why must it become?
In the ‘Presentation’, Schelling is neither concerned with the process of the Absolute’s
development nor with its appearances, but with the Absolute as such – as reason. Reason is
the Absolute thinking itself immediately – neither as subject nor as object, neither as
thought nor as being, but as original indifference. In turn, there is no movement of reason
in which it develops and manifests itself but rather things are to be conceived of as they are
‘in themselves’, that is, as ‘they are in reason’ (4: 128). In the earlier writings, in contrast,
the Absolute is considered to be somewhat lacking in its first appearance and thus needing
to go out of itself and develop itself; in the ‘Presentation’, reason as the Absolute is
conceived of as absolutely self-sufficient and, ultimately, unmoving and unchanging.
Schelling thus writes, ‘The basic mistake of all philosophy is the presupposition that
absolute identity actually goes out of itself and the attempt to conceptualise in which way
this going out of itself takes place’ (4: 119–20).

6. Hegel
In the 1801 essay ‘The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy’,
Hegel’s sympathies are clearly with Schelling. Nevertheless, Hegel’s later critiques are not
far from some of the poignant remarks he makes at this earlier stage. First, Hegel maintains
that difference is real, writing that:

because both subject and object are Subject–Object, the opposition of subject and object
is real; for both are posited in the Absolute and through it they have reality. The reality
of opposites and real opposition only happen because of the identity of the opposites . . .
(Hegel 1968–: 4: 35)

For Hegel the opposition between the subject and object is essential and inherent to the
Absolute.
This leads to the second way in which Hegel distinguishes himself from Schelling, in
that he sees the principle of becoming as inherent to the Absolute. Thus Hegel describes
the Absolute as ‘an infinite self-begetting’ (Hegel 1968–: 4: 40). Such self-begetting, he
emphasises, arises out of real opposition. Hegel contrasts this with what he considers to be a
merely formal philosophy. A formal philosophy recognises opposition as merely ideal (that
is, an opposition that arises out of a perspective). In such a system, the overcoming of the
40 dalia t. nassar
opposition is also merely ideal, that is, formal. The only way by which a real (as opposed to
ideal) identity is attained is through the overcoming of a real opposition, that is, an
opposition in being (35). He thus concludes that ‘it is only in real opposition that the
principle of identity is a real principle’.
In the light of these early differences, Hegel’s critique of Schelling in the Phenomenology
gains substance. The differences within the Absolute are real – the Absolute is not absolute
indifference, but ‘the identity of identity and difference’ (34). In the same way that the
Romantics and the early Schelling conceived of the Absolute as inherently active and
developing, so Hegel writes in the Preface to the Phenomenology that the Absolute ‘is in
truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its
self-othering with itself’ (Hegel 1968–: 9: 20, §18).9 Because the Absolute is ‘subject’, it
negates itself and thus creates a bifurcation in the simple substance. The subject, Hegel
continues, ‘is the doubling which sets up opposition and then again the negation of this
indifferent diversity and of its antithesis [that is, immediate simplicity]’. This process of self-
restoration, ‘this reflection in otherness within itself’, is what Hegel calls ‘the true’. The
Absolute, therefore, is not a simple, immediate or original identity but ‘the process of its
own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its
beginning; and only by being worked out to its end is it actual’ (Hegel 1968–: 9: 20, §18).
The Absolute is in this sense clearly purposive – its result is already implied in its
beginning; however, it is only in its end that its purpose is actualised. It is therefore self-
moving and in this motion it unfolds and becomes itself. The motion of the Absolute arises
out of the original opposition between subject and object. In this opposition, consciousness
(as subject) is negated (by the object of consciousness). Consciousness then comes to
realise that the disparity between itself and its object is only a seeming disparity and that in
fact the object (the negation) does not arise externally to itself but from within itself – that
is, it is its ‘own doing’. Thus, Hegel concludes,

When it has shown this completely, Spirit has made its existence identical with its
essence; it has itself for its object just as it is and the abstract element of immediacy and of
the separation of knowing and truth is overcome. Being is then absolutely mediated; it is a
substantial content which is just as immediately the property of the I, it is the self-like or
the concept (Begriff). (9: 29)

Such a self-moving subject can only be thought, Hegel realises, by reconfiguring the
meaning of the subject-predicate relation in judgement. Rather than conceiving the
subject as a ‘fixed’ entity, a passive substance that ‘inertly supports the accidents’, which,
despite its relation to the predicate through the copula, remains opposed to the predicate,
Hegel conceives of the subject and predicate as fundamentally transformed through the
copula. This means, first, that the movement of the proposition is not something external
to the subject and predicate but rather expresses their internal relation. The copula,
therefore, is not an empty form imposed upon them but is the expression of their inherent
unity. In turn, while the subject is transformed such that it dissolves in the predicate, the
predicate is transformed such that it is no longer an empty universal but a concrete
universal which contains within itself the subject. This does not imply, however, a
dissolution of the difference between subject and predicate, but a transformation of both
such that what emerges out of their relation is a harmonious unity (9: 43–5).
In this way the Absolute transforms itself in its appearances throughout the Phenom-
enology, beginning with simple self-identity, a ‘pure abstraction’, which necessarily negates
absolute in german idealism and romanticism 41
itself and thus transforms itself, concluding in absolute knowing. Absolute knowing is not
simply self-consciousness but the point at which the object of self-consciousness is no
longer external to itself, indeed no longer an object, but is incorporated into it and thus
transformed into a unity higher than either subject or object alone.
The Phenomenology was conceived by Hegel as the ‘introduction’ to his logic, in that
it traces the Absolute in its appearance, and it is the conclusion to the Phenomenology –
wherein appearance (objectification) ceases and absolute knowing arises – that forms the
first step in pure knowing (reines Wissen) or pure science (reine Wissenschaft). In the Logic,
the first part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, of which successive
editions appeared in 1817, 1827 and 1830, the goal is to identify and work through the
three categories of pure knowing – being, essence and the concept. For Hegel the concept
(Begriff) is the culmination of logic, as of thought. He writes,

since thought seeks to form a concept of things, this concept (along with judgment and
syllogism as its most immediate forms) cannot consist in determinations and relation-
ships that are alien and external to things . . . thinking things leads over to what is
universal in them; but the universal is itself one of the moments of the concept. (Hegel
1968–: 20: 67, §24A)

The concept therefore has ontological implications – it is the ‘objective thought’ that
constitutes the purpose of objects (by ‘objective thought’, Hegel means the concept of the
object, the determining ground of the object). Thus in the same way that he describes the
spirit at the end of the Phenomenology as having attained to its concept (‘the self-knowing
spirit, just because it grasps its concept, is the immediate identity with itself’ (1968–: 9:
432)), so in the Logic he understands the concept to be the truth and the living reality of its
object, such that every object that attains to its concept (its inner purpose) has become a
true object (1968–: 20: 67, §24A).
The concept first develops its subjective side, which concerns the usual logical data such
as judgement and syllogism, then its objective side, the reality or being of an object and
finally attains to the idea, which is nothing other than the concept coming to grasp itself as
concept. In grasping itself as a concept, the concept sees itself as identical with itself. For
this reason, the structure of the idea, Hegel concludes, is that of ‘subjectivity, thinking,
infinity’ (1968–: 20: 218, §215A). What takes place at this final stage in the development
of the concept is not only an objectification of the concept but also a recognition of this
objectification as objectification of the concept. It is for this reason that only subjectivity
(the I) is an adequate representation of Hegel’s understanding of the concept. Or, as Hegel
puts it, the idea is ‘the course in which the concept . . . determines itself . . . into
subjectivity’ (20: 218, §215).
The idea is absolute because it is the purpose of the world thinking itself. The reason that
the idea is the purpose of the world is that it is the concept conscious of itself – in other
words, it is the concept that has attained to its own concept. While the concept is the
constitutive ground of beings in the world, the concept of the concept – the idea – is the
self-aware constitutive ground of the world. It is thus the Absolute – the ground of all that
is raised to self-consciousness.
While for Hegel the construction of the Absolute out of opposition led to his conclusion
that the Absolute is ultimately subjective – formed in accordance with the structures of
self-consciousness – for Schelling in the identity philosophy the Absolute is indifferent,
neither subjective nor objective. However, Schelling’s attempt to provide a non-objective,
42 dalia t. nassar
non-subjective Absolute, an Absolute that is not determined in accordance with the
structures of self-consciousness, led him to the conclusion that the Absolute must exclude
opposition and difference, as well as particularity and finitude. The disagreement in their
conceptions of the Absolute reveals the complexity of the matter at hand: the Absolute
cannot be designated either subjective or objective, for as Absolute it furnishes the very
possibility of such an opposition. Yet, the Absolute must in some significant way account
for the existence of the non-Absolute, such that the relation between the Absolute and the
relative is a real, not solely ideal, relation. Ultimately, the question of the Absolute in its
relation to the non-Absolute is the question of the one and the many, intimately tied to the
question of being and becoming. How can the one be many, how can that which is
absolutely become something other than itself?

7. Knowing the Absolute

Despite the differences in their conceptions of the Absolute, Schelling and Hegel, as well
as the Romantics, agreed in one fundamental way: intellectual intuition was central to
knowing the Absolute. They viewed Kant’s elimination of intellectual intuition based on
his conception of the discursive intellect as unjustified. As Novalis put it, ‘The most
arbitrary prejudice of them all is that man is denied the capacity to get outside himself and
to have consciousness beyond the realm of the senses’ (Novalis 1960–88: 2: 421, #22).
Although not entirely in agreement with Fichte, Novalis and his fellow Romantics and
idealists were influenced by Fichte’s insight into the mind and his implicit critique of the
Kantian understanding of the human discursive intellect.
With some modifications, the Romantics and idealists more or less agreed with Fichte’s
understanding of intuition. The most significant modification they undertook was to
extend the scope of the intuiting mind, such that in the same way that the I is able to
perceive itself as a non-sensible reality so it is also able to perceive the underlying and non-
sensible laws which unify, structure and constitute the universe. Even Hegel, who was
critical of the notion of an ‘immediate intuition’ agreed that the human mind was intuitive,
stating in 1830 that ‘the notion of an intuitive understanding, of inner purposiveness, etc., is
the universal concurrently thought of as concrete in itself’ (1968–: 20: 94, §55A). Only
through an intuitive insight, according to Hegel, can the particular be determined through
the universal and the universal made concrete.
Having established the necessity of an intuiting mind, all that was needed was to show
how this mind intuited or perceived non-sensible realities other than the I. From within a
natural-scientific, Kantian framework, it makes no sense to speak of a non-material reality
that underlies and constitutes the world. However, it was precisely this point that the
Romantics and idealists contested, claiming, in contrast, that there was no distinction
between inward and outward intuition. Thus, for them, what can be given to the mind
when it reflects upon itself (the intelligible reality of the I) can also be given to the mind as
it considers nature (the intelligible reality of the world).
Underlying this conception of an intelligible outer reality is the notion – discussed above
– of an objective concept or idea. In other words, what determines and forms beings in the
world is a concept that underlies their development and grants them existence. In his
philosophy of nature, Schelling explains the meaning of an objective idea. Nature, he begins,
is an organic whole, in that in it ‘all things mutually bear and support each other’
(Schelling 1856–61: 3: 278–9). This implies that nature as a whole, as an idea, must
precede and inform its parts. For only as such is nature not the outcome of its parts, but that
absolute in german idealism and romanticism 43
which forms its parts and thus informs their relations. The idea, therefore, is not a concept
or category imposed upon nature but is nature itself – the constitutive ground of the parts
and their relations.
The goal of intellectual intuition is to grasp this ground and the relations among the
parts, that is, the whole. It is only through intuition, however, that the whole can be given.
Discursively, only the parts are known and the whole is patched together out of the parts.
This, however, culminates in a mechanistic vision of reality – a reality assembled out of
parts – which violates nature as an organic, living reality which informs its parts.
The question arises as to what is involved in intuiting the whole. The idealists and the
Romantics agree with the Kantian (and Fichtean) premise that we know only what we
make or construct (see, for example, Novalis 1960–88: 2: 589, #267).10 The meaning of
construction, however, must be clarified. Following Fichte, construction is what is
involved in intuition: the self constructs itself in intuiting itself. Schelling develops
construction further, such that it extends beyond the self-construction of the I in intuition
to the construction of nature. This, however, seems contradictory – how can the self
construct nature? Here Schelling introduces experimentation – for in experimentation we
create phenomena (Schelling 1856–61: 3: 275–6).
Schelling is cautious about experimentation, however, noting that it does not produce
phenomena absolutely but only within specific circumstances. Therefore, although
experimentation grants insight into nature’s inner workings, it does so to a limited degree.
For this reason, it must be supplemented by an ‘absolute hypothesis’ that directs one’s gaze
toward nature, thus revealing nature’s laws as they are given in experiment and experience.
The ‘absolute hypothesis’, Schelling explains, is the principle from which the entire
system of nature can be deduced. However, such a hypothesis must conform to the
phenomena of nature; otherwise it is invalid. Given that nature is an organic whole, whose
parts mutually support and bear one another, the absolute hypothesis is the notion that
nature is an inherently and interdependently connected whole. With this hypothesis in
mind, the experimenter is aware of and looking out for the connections, the mutual support
and, ultimately, the ways in which each part is a transformation and manifestation of the
other parts (and of the whole) of nature. What the experimenter seeks is the original and
underlying organising idea of nature as it is given in its various parts.
Although this principle of organisation underlies and constitutes the material reality of
nature, it is itself not material. It is the concept or idea, which, in spite of its ideality, is
nevertheless a real and formative element that develops and sustains the material reality
and which cannot be divorced from it. In essence, the material being cannot exist without
this formative principle. And it is this objective idea or organising principle that only the
intuiting mind can grasp.
While among the Romantics and idealists Hegel appeared to be critical of intuition, he
was also keenly aware of the necessity of intuitive knowledge, arguing that mere reflection
is incapable of attaining to the unity of all opposites for it ‘stubbornly holds fast to being
against non-being’ (Hegel 1968–: 4: 95). Reflection, according to Hegel, undertakes the
significant task of differentiating. Intuition, however, grants insight into the whole without
which knowledge would be impossible (4: 28). Reflection on its own, or intuition on its
own, concludes in formalism, ‘for thing as well as concept is, each taken by itself, just a form
of the Absolute’. In this sense, Hegel’s understanding of the task of knowledge echoes
Schelling’s as construed in the latter’s philosophy of nature – wherein experimentation and
comparative reflection are supplemented by intuitive insight. Yet Hegel is critical of
Schelling’s understanding of intuition as it was developed in the identity philosophy.
44 dalia t. nassar
In the ‘Presentation of My System’, Schelling explains that ‘truly absolute knowledge’ is
possible only ‘where thought and being come together absolutely, where there is no longer
the question of a connection between concept and object, where the concept itself is at the
same time the object and the object the concept’ (Schelling 1856–61: 4: 345–6). This is
the case when there is a coincidence of the two, such that the concept need not go out of
itself in order to attain the object and the object need not strive for a concept external to
itself.
On account of this immediacy in knowledge, Schelling emphasises intuition – for it is
only through intuition that such immediacy is attainable. He begins his explication by
likening philosophy’s method to that of geometry and arithmetic. Demonstration in
geometry is not based on causal derivation but on ‘proof’. In the same manner that a
geometer does not explain a triangle by explaining its parts, so a philosopher does not
derive one thing by subordinating it to another – that is, by deriving it from the other and
hence seeing it as caused by the other. Rather, the philosopher comes to see that
‘everything in the universe is unconditioned in its own way . . . nothing is to the other
a true cause, rather everything is grounded in the unconditioned in the same way’
(Schelling 1856–61: 4: 344). To seek the cause of one thing from that of another is to
fall into an endless ‘chain’, which, he continues, is nonsense that concludes with a
‘complete nothing [Unding]’ for a science (343).
Reflection is precisely that method which, because it continues to rely on subordination
and causal derivation, concludes in an Unding. Intuition, in contrast, grasps the original
and immediate identity. The insight given through intuition escapes the chains of causality
and arrives at the unmediated identity of reality. Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s emphasis on
intuition goes hand in hand with what he sees as a formalism in Schelling’s conception of
the Absolute. According to Hegel, intuition which does not work alongside reflection is
inarticulate and, ultimately, incapable of presenting the Absolute to consciousness. The
Absolute cannot be grasped through intellectual intuition alone, which may simply ‘fall
back into inert simplicity and does not depict actuality itself in a non-actual [that is, merely
formal] manner’ (Hegel 1968–: 9: 20, §18). The Absolute is not an immediate original
unity or identity, but the process and the result of its becoming itself. Simple intuition
cannot grasp the development of the Absolute as it negates itself and then becomes itself
again. Reflection is also necessary. However, reflection is not to be viewed as a mere
necessary step toward grasping the Absolute but as an essential characteristic of reason,
which enables the development of the Absolute. It is reflection, in fact, which brings the
Absolute forth. Thus, Hegel writes,

Reason is therefore misunderstood when reflection is excluded from the True and is not
grasped as a positive moment of the Absolute. It is reflection that makes the True a
result, but it is equally reflection that overcomes the antithesis between the process of its
becoming and the result, for this becoming is also simple and therefore not different from
the form of the True which shows itself as simple in its result; the process of becoming is
rather just this return into simplicity. (9: 19–20, §21)

Schelling, in contrast, concludes that the Absolute, as all that is, does not ‘go out of itself’,
does not bring forth a world distinct from its absolute infinitude. In fact, he considers this
perspective of the Absolute to be inherently flawed and based on a misunderstanding of the
relation between the infinite and the finite as a causal relation. Thus, he states in the
‘Further Presentation of My System’ that the fact:
absolute in german idealism and romanticism 45
that the going out of itself of the absolute . . . is absolutely unthinkable, is, in the same
way as the unity and the inner relatedness of all things among themselves and with the
god-like essence, a further axiom of the true philosophy. (Schelling [1802] 1856–61: 4:
390)

What is needed, then, to grasp the Absolute is immediate, non-discursive insight into this
original, undifferentiated identity. Reflection, in contrast, distracts from the true imme-
diacy of the Absolute.

8. Conclusion
Although the Absolute as a term fell out of philosophical parlance in the second half of the
nineteenth century, its historical and systematic significance cannot be overlooked. As I
have tried to show, the notion of the Absolute was developed as an attempt to overcome
scepticism and nihilism and to affirm the possibility of philosophical knowledge. Further-
more, the Absolute was neither dogmatically asserted nor naı̈vely assumed. Rather, the
philosophers of the early nineteenth century attempted to establish the phenomenological
reality of the Absolute. Insight into the Absolute cannot be given through discursive
thinking, which can only grant knowledge of the parts and not of the whole that underlies
and precedes the parts. Only intuition can offer insight into the whole and adequately
explain its relation to its parts. Lacking such insight, the relation of the Absolute and its
parts can only be conceived mechanistically and hence incompletely.
The difficulties of conceiving and formulating a philosophy around the notion of the
Absolute should by no means be viewed as reason to criticise or dismiss the attempt to
philosophically draw out the Absolute. Rather, these difficulties should serve as insights
into the complexity of the questions at hand. The notion of the Absolute was developed
out of sound philosophical judgement, as a response to fundamental philosophical
problems – of dualism, scepticism, nihilism and the possibility of knowledge – that cannot
be ignored.

Notes
1. All translations are the author’s own unless otherwise indicated.
2. Kant famously distinguishes between the human discursive intellect and the divine intuitive
intellect in his letter to Marcus Herz of 21 February 1772. While the discursive intellect cannot
create its object of knowledge but must be given it by external means, the intuitive intellect does
create its object of knowledge and therefore has direct insight into its object, that is, the insight is
not mediated by either the forms of sensibility or the concepts of the understanding. In other
words, the intuitive intellect knows the object as it is ‘in itself’.
3. Schelling, for example, although sympathetic to Spinoza, repeatedly criticised him on this
ground: Spinoza does not explain how the self is to know the Absolute. He writes, ‘Spinoza was
unable to make it intelligible how I myself in turn become aware of [the] succession [of my
presentations]’ (Schelling 1976–: 5: 90).
4. My account of the German Romantic tradition and its relation to the Kantian legacy differs from
Judith Norman’s and Alistair Welchman’s in Chapter 3 of this volume. Although I would not
want to eliminate all differences between the individual thinkers, I do not think that one of these
differences rests in their varying responses to Kantianism. Rather, as I see it, the Romantics were
just as dissatisfied with the Kantian dualisms and the sceptical outcomes of the Kantian system as
the idealists. Thus, although one can perhaps trace a kind of Kantian scepticism in some of the
earliest writings of the Romantics, this scepticism is soon discarded in favour of an idealist
 46 dalia t. nassar
monism, on the basis of which the knower can have insight into the known – whether immediate
or mediated. See Nassar 2006.
5. Fichte’s defence of idealism is based on his belief that only idealism (as opposed to dogmatism)
can grant human freedom. See for example his 1797 ‘Second Introduction’ to the Wissenschaft-
slehre (Fichte 1964–: 4 (2): 23).
6. The Romantics and idealists saw themselves as combining Fichte’s emphasis on the productive
self with Spinoza’s emphasis on the Absolute, or the Infinite. While the former too narrowly
focused on the self, the latter could not adequately respond to the epistemological question.
7. The question underlying much of Schlegel’s thinking, as he puts it in his Jena Lectures on
Transcendental Idealism of 1800–1, is: ‘why has the infinite gone out of itself and made itself finite
[aus sich herausgegangen und hat sich endlich gemacht]? In other words: why are there individuals? Or,
why doesn’t the game of nature run out in an instant, so that nothing would exist at all?’ (Schlegel
1958–: 12: 39; see also 12: 221 and 17: 281, #1033). (When applicable, references to Novalis and
Schlegel include fragment or note number (indicated #) after page number.)
8. This essay was followed by the ‘Further Presentation of My System’, which was written directly
after the first but published in 1802.
9. When applicable, references to Hegel’s works include paragraph number (§) after page number.
‘A’ (for example §55A) indicates a reference to Hegel’s ‘addition’ to the paragraph.
10. Thus Novalis writes, ‘We know [wissen] something only insofar as we can express [ausdrücken] it,
i.e., make [machen] it. The more readily and manifold we are able to produce [produciren] it, to
execute it, the better do we know it – we know it completely when we are to mediate [mitteilen] it,
to cause it everywhere and in all manner – to effect an individual expression of it in every organ’
(Novalis 1960–88: 2: 589, #267).

References
Beiser, Frederick (2002), German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism 1781–1801, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1964–), Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, ed.
Reinhard Lauth, Hans Jacob and Hans Gliwitsky, 40 vols, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Fromann.
Frank, Manfred (1997), Unendliche Annäherung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1968–), Gesammelte Werke, Hamburg: Meiner.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1846), Werke, ed. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Friedrich Köppen, 6
vols, Leipzig: Weidmann.
Kant, Immanuel (1900–), Kants gesammelte Schriften, Akademie Ausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey et al.,
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Nassar, Dalia (2006), ‘Reality through illusion: presenting the Absolute in Novalis’, Idealistic Studies,
36 (1): 27–46.
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1960–88), Novalis Schriften, ed. Richard Samuel et al., 6 vols,
Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1856–61), Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August
Schelling, 14 vols, Stuttgart: Cotta.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1976–), Werke. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Hans
Michael Baumgartner, Wilhelm G. Jacobs and Hermann Krings, Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog.
Schlegel, Friedrich (1958–), Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, Jean Jacques Anstett
and Hans Eichner, 35 vols, Munich: Schöningh.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst (1984), Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Günter Meckenstock,
Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
 3
The Question of Romanticism

Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman

1. What is Romanticism?
1.1 Beginning
‘Romanticism’ is one of the more hotly contested terms in the history of ideas. There is a
singular lack of consensus as to its meaning, unity and historical extension and many
attempts to fix the category of Romanticism very quickly become blurry. In his Conversa-
tions with Eckermann, Goethe says that the concept of Romanticism ‘is now spread over the
whole world and occasions so many quarrels and divisions’ (Goethe [1836] 1984: 297) and
this situation has not rectified itself in the 180 years since then. But the term was poorly
defined from the start. Friedrich Schlegel, frequently claimed as the progenitor of European
Romanticism, wrote to his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel, widely acknowledged as its
most important populariser: ‘I can hardly send you my explication of the word Romantic
because it would take – 125 pages!’ (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988: 6). In 1866 Alfred
de Musset writes of the search for the meaning of Romanticism: ‘No, my dear sir . . . you
may try in vain to seize the butterfly’s wing; the dust that colours it will be all you can hold
in your fingers’ (De Musset [1866] 1908: 209).
As a result, the great historian of ideas, Arthur Lovejoy, famously concludes that: ‘the
word ‘‘romantic’’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has
ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign’ (Lovejoy 1948: 232).1 But his pessimistic
advice has not stopped scholars from trying to define Romanticism. If anything, it has
brought renewed vigour to the determination with which critics try to pinpoint the term.
There are several approaches to take, for those who attempt to do so. One class of critics
tries to enumerate the features shared by the authors and texts generally considered
romantic. According to René Wellek’s classic rebuttal of Lovejoy:

They [scholars of Romanticism] all see the implication of imagination, symbol, myth and
organic nature and see it as part of the great endeavour to overcome the split between
subject and object, the self and the world, the conscious and the unconscious. This is the
central creed of the great romantic poets in England, Germany and France. It is a closely
coherent body of thought and feeling. (Wellek 1963: 220)2

This description certainly includes a number of elements that many of the writers generally
thought to be romantic have in common. But there is something unsatisfying about this
48 judith norman and alistair welchman
approach, which presupposes a sort of pre-theoretical grasp of Romanticism which it then
tries to formulate. The theory rarely completely conforms to the pre-theoretical grasp.
(Wellek admits that Byron fits poorly into his description.) Do these lists of empirical
commonalities really indicate some underlying profound and essential identity and if so
what? An alternative approach would try to identify the fundamental unity that informs
Romanticism and gives rise to the empirical commonalities. But what would this essential
feature be? The French Revolution? Manic depression? Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre? At-
tempts like this are sometimes problematically reductive and also fail to capture figures
whom we might want to include: A.W. Schlegel was no depressive, Wordsworth was
unmoved by Fichte and so on.
Both of these approaches take an external perspective on Romanticism, seeing it as the
object of inquiry. An alternative approach, which we will pursue, looks at romantic subjects
and Romanticism as a self-constituting category, rather than merely as an externally
imposed one. In other words, we will take as basic neither an (empirical) array of candidate
properties constituting Romanticism nor a supposed underlying (rationalist) essence from
which properties can be derived, but rather we will focus on how the romantics themselves
took up the idea of Romanticism and transformed it into a self-conscious movement. We
will treat the question of Romanticism with respect to England but above all Germany.
Although romantic movements arose and flourished elsewhere in Europe (and in France in
particular), German and English Romanticism were uniquely theoretically sophisticated
and philosophically nuanced.
The transformation of the idea of Romanticism into a movement is by no means easy to
account for. When Friedrich Schlegel, in his essay On the Study of Greek Poetry, written in
1795 and published in 1797, made his own contribution to the long-standing quarrel
between the ancients and the moderns, he described much of what would come to be
associated with the romantic sensibility without either using the term or even liking
modernity very much. His category of modernity was broad, including Dante and
Shakespeare. He called their art ‘interesting’ and described it as subjective, opposing it
to the objectivity of the ancients. He went on to characterise it as a fusion (or confusion) of
genres, a tendency to combine philosophy with aesthetics, a valorisation of the striking and
novel over the traditional and a desire to depict what is characteristic and individual rather
than what is universal. Modern art rejects the aesthetic ideal of self-contained, harmonious
beauty in favour of different ideals, such as the sublime, the interesting and even the ugly. It
valorises striving over achievement, the imagination over reason. As Schlegel writes: ‘if a
faint hint of perfect beauty is found [in modern art], it is experienced not so much in serene
enjoyment as in unsatisfied longing’ (Schlegel [1797] 2001: 18).
This characterisation was not novel, nor was Schlegel’s dislike of this modern tendency.
It took an additional manoeuvre (which he had accomplished by 1797) for him to begin
positively valorising the art of the moderns: a historicist recognition of the definitive end to
classicism and of the fact that his nostalgia was no longer just nostalgia but was itself
something distinctively modern. According to Arthur Lovejoy’s classic study, it was
Schiller who converted Schlegel to the modern ideal, which Schlegel only now christened
‘romantic’, making Schiller a sort of ‘spiritual grandfather of German Romanticism’
(Lovejoy 1948: 220).
The term ‘romantic’ had been used before; it was associated with the courtly romances of
medieval literature, the legend of Roland and the Arthurian myths (as well as the tales they
inspired) and thus denoted a tradition separate from that of classical antiquity, with
particular affinities to the Middle Ages. The word gradually came to signify certain more
 the question of romanticism 49
specific features of this literature such as its exoticism, its valorisation of amorous passions
and excessive states of emotion and its stylistic departures from neo-classical form. What
Schlegel does is to start using it as a broad characterisation of a distinctively modern
sensibility.
The structure of this event deserves closer scrutiny: Schlegel was initially repelled by the
restless dissatisfaction and incompleteness of modern art – its failure to emulate the naı̈ve
harmony of the ancients. But we could say that he came to a self-awareness of his own
Romanticism by virtue of his very nostalgia, of his feeling of distance from the classical
ideal. He later berated his own, earlier work on antiquity as lacking sufficient irony, which
is to say (minimally) a lack of critical distance from his own nostalgic affect (Schlegel
[1797] 1970: 144, #7).3 In other words, his ‘Romanticism’ was not constituted by nostalgia
but by the realisation that his nostalgia is both itself distinctively modern and hence that it
is not about the past but about the present. Incompleteness became emblematic of
modernity and a certain ironic nostalgia became its sensibility. Both are brought together
in the paradoxical notion of an intentional ruin or fragment, since this embodies the
notion of a self-conscious nostalgia. Schlegel would later write ‘Many of the works of the
ancients have become fragments. Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are
written’ (Schlegel [1798] 1970: 164, #24). And indeed this remark was published in one of
the Schlegel brothers’ collections of fragments, a literary form that they cultivated and that
would become something of a signature style for the group that was beginning to gather
around them in Jena in the late 1790s.
It was this group that would come to be retrospectively designated as the Jena
Frühromantiker, the Early German Romantics. It included the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich
Schlegel’s wife, Dorothea (daughter of the Enlightenment philosopher, Moses Mendels-
sohn, and aunt of the composer Felix Mendelssohn), and A. W. Schlegel’s wife, Caroline,
who would soon divorce him – amicably, it seems – for the philosopher Schelling, who was
also associated with the group. Friedrich von Hardenberg was an active participant (writing
under the assumed name of Novalis), as was the playwright Ludwig Tieck, the writer
Wilhelm Wackenroder and the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. They were all young
– when the group broke up around 1800 (and stopped publishing their journal, Athenäum),
they were all under 40, mostly under 30 and Novalis and Wackenroder were already dead.
A. W. Schlegel then went on to publicise the group’s ideas in a series of lectures, first in
Berlin (1801–4) and then in Vienna (1808–9, published in 1809–11). The Vienna lectures
were translated almost immediately into several languages and proved to be the primary
mechanism for the dissemination of the German romantic theories to the rest of Europe,
both on their own as well as through the works of intermediary expositors such as Madame
de Staël (whose children he tutored), Simon de Sismondi and Friedrich Bouterwek.
In 1805, a second and similar group began to form, this time in Heidelberg, around
Clemens Brentano (who had been in Jena and was familiar with the group there), Achim
von Arnim, Josef Görres and Friedrich Creuzer. They were authors, classicists, orientalists
and philosophers of mythology. Brentano and Arnim produced the significant anthology of
German folksongs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–8) and their friends, Jacob and Wilhelm
Grimm, also collected stories. This group incurred the personal and professional enmity of a
group of more conservative thinkers and principally the classicist J. J. Voß, who attacked
and parodied them in 1808, referring to both the Heidelberg and Jena groups as Romantiker.
This was the first systematic use of the term in reference to contemporary writers (see:
Eichner 1972; Wellek 1963) – the Jena group had used the term to refer to post-classical art
in general and particularly literary models such as Cervantes and Shakespeare. It was in this
50 judith norman and alistair welchman
vituperative context that the group first acquired a label and a historical destiny as a unified
movement.
Romanticism, then, had something like a double origin. As we saw, Schlegel achieved
an implicit self-recognition of himself as romantic at the moment that he both named and
valorised the concept and soon after that he was tagged with the label by those who still
regarded it as a negative term. His own positive understanding of Romanticism extended
back at least as far as Giovanni Boccaccio, while the critics’ hostile but ultimately
victorious category limited the scope of the term to the Jena and Heidelberg groups –
in other words, those in whom the nostalgia had become self-conscious. Hegel famously
preserves this duality: in his Lectures on Fine Art he labels the entirety of the post-classical,
Christian world ‘romantic’ (retaining the resonance between Romanticism and Rome as
the site of the disintegration of the classical form and the beginning of the Christian world)
and sees the Romanticism of his contemporaries as only the end and logical (and shameful)
conclusion of this broader movement.

1.2 Returning
Hegel was not the only one to see the contemporary romantic movement as a degraded
repetition of specifically post-classical themes. In his frankly hostile account of the
(German) romantic school, intended as a dampening corrective to Madame de Staël’s
more enthusiastic assessment, Heine writes that Romanticism:

was nothing other than the revival of the poetry of the Middle Ages as manifested in
the songs, sculpture and architecture, in the art and life of that time. This poetry,
however, had had its origin in Christianity; it was a passion flower rising from the blood
of Christ . . . (Heine [1833] 1985: 3)

The romantic school, for Heine, was a secularised form of medieval Christianity, a return to
both its themes and its styles. This notion of Romanticism as a secularisation of Christian
themes was the subject of a highly acclaimed study by M. H. Abrams, Natural Super-
naturalism. Although he certainly did not view Romanticism as a degradation, Abrams
joins Heine in claiming that the ‘characteristic concepts and patterns of Romantic
philosophy and literature are a displaced and reconstituted theology’ (Abrams 1973b:
65), the theology of Christianity. The specific theological element taken up and secularised
by Romanticism is the narrative of a circuitous journey, a Bildungsreise (paradise lost and
regained, the prodigal son) that attempts to recapture a lost unity or sense of identity. The
distinctive contribution of Romanticism is to secularise this notion and make the journey a
search for personal – or even social – fulfilment rather than a quest for God. ‘Wo gehen wir
denn hin?’ Novalis asks in Heinrich von Ofterdingen (written in 1799–1800) – ‘Where are we
going?’ ‘Immer nach Hause’ – we are always going home, trying to work our way out of our
present alienation and return to the comfort and harmony we have lost.
Although Abrams’s thesis takes in German Romanticism, its primary object is English
Romanticism and so we must briefly consider the historical relationship between the two.
There were some channels of influence from Germany to England, particularly in the figure
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been to Germany and studied with Schelling, whom
he plagiarised shamelessly in his 1817 Biographia Literaria. But Coleridge did not have much
success in transmitting his enthusiasm for these ideas: Wordsworth was certainly restrained
and once announced, ‘[I have] never read a word of German metaphysics, thank Heaven!’
 the question of romanticism 51
(quoted in Abrams 1973b: 278). Byron, for his part, was famously dismissive of the
distinction between Romanticism and classicism. Indeed, although there was an early
recognition of the novel and distinctive character of the English poets we now know as
romantic, it was only much later, in literary histories from the 1860s and 1870s, that the
term Romanticism gradually came to be applied to English authors (see Whalley 1972). On
the whole, English Romanticism seems to have developed out of largely autonomous, or
autochthonous, factors (see Butler 1981).
Why then have we come to classify the Jena and Heidelberg groups under the same
heading as the English Lake Poets?4 Without using the term romantic, Percy Bysshe
Shelley wrote that all the major poets derive:

from the new springs of thought and feeling, which the great events of our age have
exposed to view, a similar tone of sentiment, imagery and expression. A certain
similarity all the best writers of any particular age inevitably are marked with, from
the spirit of that age acting on all. (Shelley [1819] 1964: 2: 127)

Looking beyond the mystification of the notion of a Zeitgeist, Shelley cites as a common
cause ‘the great events of our age’. By this he means, primarily, the French Revolution,
which he had called ‘the master theme of the epoch in which we live’ (Shelley 1964: 1:
504). We will return to the master theme of the Revolution in Section 3, but here we will
look more closely at his claim as to its effect, the ‘similar tone of sentiment, imagery and
expression’.
We have already indicated a candidate notion for a distinctively romantic sentiment,
that of a sort of self-conscious nostalgia. Although lacking the element of self-conscious-
ness (a problem we will return to shortly), Abrams’s notion of a circular journey is in line
with the notion of nostalgia, the expression of a desire to return to our point of origin (in
terms of the historical past as well as childhood), tinged heavily with melancholy
(Wordsworth writes: ‘it is not now as it hath been of yore’ in the poem ‘Ode: Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, line 6). It accounts for many of the
sentiments indicated by Friedrich Schlegel and now frequently seen as emblematic of
Romanticism: a longing for wholeness, a craze for fragments and ruins, the theme of the
wanderer, a penchant for millenarian fantasies of founding a ‘new Jerusalem’ or, in Shelley’s
case, ‘another Athens’ (in the poem Hellas). A range of romantic literature from Novalis’s
Heinrich to Wordsworth’s Prelude retraces the clearly and often explicitly lapsarian idea that
a prior age, generally identified as classical Greece, had enjoyed a sort of naı̈ve, unreflective
unity, a sense of wholeness or belonging that has since been lost. The present age,
according to this scheme, is characterised by an overriding sense of alienation, expressed in
various dichotomies, between freedom and necessity, subject and object, duty and
inclination, mind and nature and so on. A. W. Schlegel announces in his Vienna lectures:

The Grecian ideal of human nature was perfect unison and proportion between all the
powers, – a natural harmony. The moderns, on the contrary, have arrived at the con-
sciousness of an internal discord which renders such an ideal impossible; and hence the
endeavour of their poetry is to reconcile these two worlds between which we find ourselves
divided and to blend them indissolubly together. (A. W. Schlegel [1808] 1879: 27)

As Schlegel articulates it, the romantic project is to overcome these dichotomies and
recover a unity, although hopefully on a higher plane (the fall was a fortunate one). This
52 judith norman and alistair welchman
desire informs a scientific programme as well, as the passage from Schlegel immediately
above suggests. German romantic science and Naturphilosophie are strongly motivated by a
rejection of Enlightenment mechanistic models of nature in favour of organic ones and a
wish to re-enchant nature. Hence the interest in alchemy, medieval science and the
esoteric doctrines of Jacob Boehme that the universe is driven by opposed forces, polarities
of a quasi-sexual nature, which Schelling takes up and systematises in his philosophy of
nature. Politically and with respect to the ‘great events of the age’, this conception of the
problem and project of Romanticism can be associated with attitudes towards the French
Revolution, which were in general characterised at first by a sense of hope for the
establishment of genuinely liberatory social institutions. This then often evolved into a
restitutionist longing to refound the institutions (of the Middle Ages, for instance) which
made possible certain types of human solidarity (Novalis’s 1799 Christentum oder Europa is a
model of this): for instance, a paternalistic monarchy, chivalric social code and a shared
religion. The dream of liberation represents the progressive side of Romanticism and the
restitutionist fantasy its reactionary side, but both shared a diagnosis of the present as
somehow broken or deficient and a desire or even plan to recreate a sense of past unity that
has been lost. This structure is not absent from Marx himself, who for this reason has been
considered, in this one aspect at least, romantic.5
These romantic themes can be seen throughout the philosophy and literature of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact, the danger might lie in casting our net a bit
too wide: Hegel and Marx both fall into this generic, circular model of alienation/reconcilia-
tion. In his English Fragments of 1828, Heine himself looks for a New Jerusalem in post-
revolutionary Paris. Even Nietzsche has his share of classicist nostalgias and futural longings, as
well as a theory of return. These are figures, it must be said, who revile Romanticism and yet
Abrams has no trouble absorbing them into his conception of Romanticism which, in fact, he
happily extends into the present day. In addition to the question of when Romanticism starts,
we have the question of when – or even whether – it ends.
In their seminal text on the Jena romantics, the French philosophers Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy write:

[W]hat interests us in Romanticism is that we still belong to the era it opened up. The
present period continues to deny precisely this belonging, which defines us (despite the
inevitable divergence introduced by repetition). A veritable romantic unconscious is
discernable today, in most of the central motifs of our ‘modernity’. Not the least result of
Romanticism’s indefinable character is the way it has allowed this so-called modernity to
use Romanticism as a foil, without ever recognising – or in order not to recognise – that
it has done little more than rehash Romanticism’s discoveries. (Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy 1988: 15)

We cannot recognise Romanticism and cannot have done with it; modernism is an
(unconscious) return of Romanticism, which, according to Abrams at least, was already a
return of Christian themes and specifically the theme of return. We seem to be in the grip
of a genuine repetition compulsion. Abrams is pleased with what he sees as the ubiquity of
romantic concerns in modernism – he embraces the romantic project and believes that it
represents the best in us. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy also see romantic themes in the
present, but unlike Abrams they see this as a ‘genuine degeneration’ – not the best but
rather the worst of us. Romanticism is a ‘fascination and a temptation’ (Lacoue-Labarthe
and Nancy 1988: 16) that we have to understand in order to resist.
 the question of romanticism 53
We have quite a few questions on the table, about the scope, content and even
desirability of Romanticism. To begin to address them, we need to look much more
critically at the theme of return; specifically, we need to return to the notion of critical self-
consciousness that Abrams omitted. We will see that what begins (conceptually) as an
already complicatedly self-conscious but clearly empirical conception of nostalgia for a lost
past quickly assumes the Kantian character of a return to a transcendental rather than
empirical ground. On this account, which will occupy us in Section 2, the past is a cipher
for a return to the subject as the locus of logical rather than chronological priority in
transcendental constitution. This moment of romantic thought elaborates an underlying
Kantian framework centred in particular on the concepts of the transcendental imagina-
tion and the genius. But as we will see, the Kantianism of the romantics extends further
than to an account of the (romantic) subject. The romantics are also critical of the
epistemic optimism of the classical idealists (Fichte and Hegel) and emphasise instead the
extent to which the lost subject to which Romanticism returns is impossible to recover.
Finally, we will also consider the extent to which the romantics begin to break apart the
notion of the subject of return entirely by exploring other potential transcendental
operators that bypass the subject, most notably language.
But however compelling and critical the romantic notions of return might be, it is
perhaps odd that this compulsion to return to origins should arise at a historical moment of
unprecedented interest in the future, the time of the French Revolution. We will end by
suggesting, in Section 3, some points of connection between Romanticism and this master
theme.

2. Backwards or Forwards?
2.1 Kant
The concept of return does not necessarily involve going backwards and wanting to
retrieve what was past; it can be conservative and melancholic, but it can also be radical
and self-critical, an affirmation of distance from the point of departure, or even the
discovery of uncanny origins. One cannot simply return to the primitive harmony, as
Hölderlin’s Hyperion testifies. Accordingly, Romanticism is at times radical and at times
conservative; it generated (and celebrated) a considerable amount of reactionary nostalgia,
but it was also the site for crafting some of the more perceptive tools for taking this
nostalgia apart.
In Section 1, we saw that Friedrich Schlegel discovered the nature of Romanticism by
looking critically at his own nostalgia for classical antiquity. More strongly, he began to
claim that the idea of Greece was patently fantasy construction: ‘To believe in the Greeks
is only another fashion of the age’ he writes in one of his fragments (Schlegel 1970: 201,
#277). A.W. Schlegel writes that ‘up to now everyone has managed to find in the ancients
what he needed or wished for: especially himself’ (Schlegel 1970: 181, #151). Romantic
nostalgia is not so concerned with the past, its putative object, as it is with itself: the
longing for the past becomes a mirror for discovering one’s self. We see this in the probable
ending of Novalis’s unfinished Novices at Sais of 1798–9 – a young initiate into the
mysteries of Isis tears the veil from the statue of the goddess to achieve enlightenment – and
sees only himself. This is the romantic Weg nach Innen, the path inward, and the romantics’
own consensus as to the essential nature of their own literary ideal, that it was subjective as
opposed to classical objectivity. The past (or, in another tendency of Romanticism, the
54 judith norman and alistair welchman
exotic) functions as a self-conscious projection by which the subject comes to understand
primarily itself.
But we must take this further and conceive the idea of projection transcendentally rather
than in terms of empirical psychology. Indeed, the theme of the return to the subject brings
Romanticism into close proximity with problems current in the philosophy of the time and
specifically with Kant. The first Critique is an investigation of how experience is condi-
tioned by structures of subjectivity and how the nature of the subject of experience can
only be found through an investigation into the nature of the experience it conditions.
‘The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions
of the possibility of the objects of experience’, Kant writes (Kant [1781/1787] 1998: A158/
B197) and the nature of subjectivity is essentially bound up with (and discoverable
through) the objects it conditions. But Kant famously goes further and finds that the self
that is discovered is a peculiarly empty one – a formal category, the condition for unified
experience and nothing more. And as we shall see, German Romanticism follows his lead.
We see a related movement in English Romanticism, which has its own thematic of
projection and pursues its own Weg nach Innen. For instance, Coleridge argues for the
essential ‘subjectivity’ of Shakespeare’s works – that the figure of the artist himself is
indelibly present in all his language and descriptions. It is not a personal subjectivity that
Shakespeare expresses, Coleridge argues, it is an impersonal, quasi-divine subjectivity – but
a subjectivity none the less. But more essentially, we see in the texts of English
Romanticism nostalgia reaching the point where the object becomes merely a cipher
for understanding the subject. There are passages where, as Paul De Man writes, the
romantic ‘vision almost seems to become a real landscape’ (De Man 1984: 7). On the one
hand, this pathetic ‘fallacy’ can be referred to the familiar, reassuring blending of
psychology and landscape, or imagination and perception, and can thus be read as a
typically romantic attempt to overcome the dichotomy between subjective and objective.
But as with German Romanticism, this apparently unsophisticated projective structure is
actually self-consciously critical. Poetic language is taking over the landscape, contesting,
as De Man puts it, the ontological primacy of the sensible object. Perhaps (as critics have
argued with respect to Wordsworth) poetic language even wins this contest and dispenses
with the object entirely.6
Affinities with Kant are palpable here (we speak of affinities to avoid the difficult
question of influence). In the third Critique, Kant discusses aesthetic experience as a site for
the reconciliation of subject (the faculty of understanding) and object (or at least the
intuition of the object). But he conceives of this reconciliation as merely subjective, a
feeling rather than an experience. He is particularly insistent that the feeling of the sublime
is merely subjective – we cannot discuss sublimity in nature, but only our feelings of
sublimity in response to experiences of nature. This theory was of great interest and
importance to Coleridge (and, through him, to Wordsworth; see Modiano 1983), who used
it to emphasise the subjective character of the distinctively romantic affect.
The romantic tendency to emphasise the subject of creative production is popularly
associated with the idea of genius and it is certainly true that romanticism brings in a
distinctive conception of the artistic consciousness in particular and the mind in general, a
conception that stresses creativity and activity over passivity and receptivity. Romanticism
takes seriously the poesis of the poem. Wordsworth famously stated in the Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads (1800) that ‘All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings’ (19). This emphasis on the subject of artistic production weakens and even
displaces a mimetic conception of art: the work is essentially an expression of artistic
 the question of romanticism 55
powers rather than an image of nature. The mind, accordingly comes to be seen as a lamp –
or even fountain, wind-harp or plant – rather than a mirror (see Abrams [1953] 1973a). As
we pointed out before, the romantic conception of subjectivity tended to be based on
transcendental philosophy rather than empirical psychology and one issue that makes
Romanticism the adversary of the Enlightenment is their quite divergent theories of mind.
The romantics reject the Lockean notion of a passive mind that receives impressions in
favour of a Kantian notion that stresses the spontaneity and creative powers of the
understanding and, above all, the imagination.
Kant’s notion of the imagination was of inestimable significance for the development of
romantic theories of creativity. Of particular importance was the distinction between
transcendental and empirical imagination, which Coleridge recast as the distinction
between imagination and fancy. Imagination for Coleridge is organic (vital), while fancy
is mechanical (a conception derived from eighteenth-century empiricist theories of
imagination). Coleridge developed this theory in the context of a critical analysis of
Wordsworth, as a way of accounting for Wordsworth’s distinctive poetic achievement.
Fancy merely reproduces the contents of memory in a variety of different arrangements; the
imagination, in contrast, is productive of genuine novelties. As such, it is modelled on
divine production: ‘The primary imagination I hold . . . as a repetition in the finite mind of
the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ (Coleridge [1817] 1975: 167). John Keats
even stated (with reference to Paradise Lost) that: ‘The Imagination may be compared to
Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth’ (Keats [1817] 2009: 102).

2.2 Hegel
Kant’s conception of the transcendental imagination can be and has been pushed in the
direction of intellectual intuition, the notion of a creative intelligence whose thoughts are
productive of reality. Kant strictly denied that such a faculty was possible for humans: for
Kant, our intuition is receptive and not spontaneous. But the idealists found enough
encouragement in the critical corpus to resuscitate the (essentially pre-critical, theological)
idea. Fichte and the early (romantic) Schelling revised Kant’s notion of the transcendental
unity of apperception into the transcendental ego, no longer the highest condition of
knowledge but in fact its author, wielding intellectual intuitions to generate (in Fichte’s
case at least) not only the form but also the substance of experience.
The theme of the artist as second creator is expressed here in the idea of the artist as
transcendental ego, creating its own little reality through intellectual or (as Schelling often
glosses it in his System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800) aesthetic intuitions. The
operation of this faculty is certainly well described by Keats in the quote above: the
contents of Adam’s dream becoming reality. As such, the prominence of the figure of the
author in Romanticism bears a clear relation to the development of idealist theories of the
role of the transcendental ego. This is the basis of Hegel’s critique of the Jena romantics in
his Lectures on Fine Art (delivered in 1820–1). He claims that they elided the figure of the
genius/author with that of the transcendental ego, conceiving of the genius as an over-
inflated ego, a monster of self-will capable of creating reality as he wishes it to be. This,
Hegel believes, accounts for the bizarre dreamscapes of some of the romantic novels and
fairytales, the liberties with form and chronology. Most significantly, in Hegel’s mind, this
explains the romantics’ signature device of irony, the effect of mockery and self-distance
from a reality that the author knows to be a figment of his caprice.
Hegel’s distinctive interpretation of the nature of genius and irony was well suited to the
56 judith norman and alistair welchman
dialectical position that German Romanticism was assigned within his system, as the limit
case of the modern emphasis on subjectivity in art, the empowerment of the subject and its
divorce from the rapidly atrophying object. But his reading of the romantics was highly
misleading. He overemphasised Fichte’s influence on the movement, a piece of mischief
that it has taken scholars generations to undo. The fact is that the Jena romantics did not
share the post-Kantian German idealists’ confidence about the attainment of absolute
knowledge.7 Rather, they remained with Kant on what Hegel would call the perspective of
reflection and most specifically with respect to what Kant considered limitations to self-
knowledge. Their interest in subjectivity did not entail a commitment to the possibility of
transparent (or even dialectically mediated) self-cognition. Rather, part of what we might
consider the pathos of Romanticism was bound up with the impossibility of just such
knowledge, with the rejection of the Cartesian cogito (see Norman 2000; 2007) and hence
with the thought that ‘the self is no longer the master in its own house’, as Manfred Frank
puts it (Frank 2004: 173).
Frank has documented how the romantics were in contact with former students of
Reinhold, who shared an anti-foundationalist critique of Fichte’s system. They were
sceptical not only about the epistemic availability of first principles but also about their
reality. In place of something like an idealist intellectual intuition or direct positing of the
self-identical subject (or subject/object) as an absolute ground, the Jena romantics affirmed
the infinite approximation of the ground. Nor was the ground considered real, if elusive.
Rather, they considered it something like a Kantian Idea, playing a heuristic or merely
regulative role in systematising knowledge. Frank shows that in the absence of philoso-
phical demonstration, Novalis, at least, thought that we needed to assume an inventive
attitude towards the ground, treating it as not merely heuristic but down-right fictional
(Frank 2004: 51 and 174). Indeed, as Novalis writes: ‘if the character of the given problem
is irresolution, then we resolve it when portraying its irresolution [as such]’ (Novalis 1960–
88: 3: 376). It is no wonder that we find Hamlet put forward by the Schlegels as emblematic
of modernity.
This marks a subtle but significant distinction between English and German Romanti-
cism – German Romanticism develops its own philosophical path in contrast to post-
Kantian idealism. The philosophical basis of German Romanticism is distinct from that of
idealism and the two represent competing programmes in the landscape of post-Kantian
German philosophy. English Romanticism, in contrast, did not define itself in relation to
this idealism and more readily absorbed (or resembled, since questions of influence are
difficult here) trends in idealist thought. Accordingly, we do see shades of German idealism
in English Romanticism – Byron’s narcissism has been rightly considered Fichtean and the
idea of the imagination in Coleridge (and, as we saw, Keats) can take on overtones of a
Schellingean intellectual intuition. But we should not over-emphasise the philosophical
influences on English Romanticism. Its poetic achievements stand on their own and the
elements of philosophical scaffolding can be disregarded by readers uninterested in this
issue.
German Romanticism is quite different in this regard. It takes a subtle, complicated and
significant set of philosophical positions and these are the inspiriting force behind its
productions. The theory matters and it matters that their conception of subjectivity is in
greater proximity to Kant’s notion of the transcendental unity of apperception than it is
to Fichte’s transcendental ego. Kant’s apperceptive unity was hollow, a mere form of
subjectivity. So, while Romanticism does involve a return to the subject, this is neither
triumphal nor reassuring, not the proper object for a tidy nostalgic fantasy of a comfortable
 the question of romanticism 57
homecoming. Rather, in German Romanticism at least, the subject is often missing, dead,
or deeply depressed. Tieck’s plays explore what he calls ‘the vast emptiness, the terrible
chaos’ at the heart of the subject (quoted in Lokke 2005: 146). Far from an affirmation of
the self-present cogito, his Weg nach Innen resembles the path of Freudian psychoanalysis,
to a fractured, displaced subject. (Nor was this conception absent from English Romanti-
cism: introspection often reveals demons, as in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Keats too writes
that the poet ‘has no Identity . . . he has no self’: Keats [1818] 2009: 295. We even see this
in French romantic poetry, where, as one commentator writes, ‘the subject of these works is
obsessed by its incompleteness, which takes the specific form of loss’: Strauss 2005: 193.)
It is instructive, in this context, to look at how the Jena romantics criticised and
appropriated Fichte. We noted earlier that, for Kant, subjectivity is only apparent in the
object it conditions: the unity of the subject is only evident in the unity of the object. But
the same can be said of literature when the subject of a text (that is, the author) is
conceived as being merely an object in a text. With obvious and explicit reference to the
method of Kantian critique, Schlegel sees this as the task of literary criticism. ‘The true task
and inner essence of criticism’, Schlegel wrote in ‘On the Essence of Criticism’, ‘is to
characterize’ (Schlegel [1804] 1958–: 3: 60) – which means to provide a character sketch of
the author, to make the author into a character. But this is a project not only for literature
but also for philosophy: criticism of philosophy consists of characterising the philosopher.
Indeed, Schlegel has designs on Fichte, as he makes clear:

[T]o use the jargon that is most usual and appropriate to this kind of conception, [I will]
place myself on Fichte’s shoulders, just as he placed himself on Reinhold’s shoulders,
Reinhold on Kant’s shoulders, Kant on Leibniz’s and so on infinitely back to the prime
shoulder. (Schlegel [1797] 1970: 264)

Schlegel intends to criticise Fichte as Fichte criticises Kant and by effecting a similarly
transcendental move. Kant showed that experience is in fact conditioned by a set of
subjective structures; Fichte showed that the structures were conditioned by a transcen-
dental subject and Schlegel will show that the transcendental subject is conditioned – by
Fichte. The Wissenschaftslehre is ‘as rhetorical as Fichte himself . . . with regard to
individuality, it is a Fichtean presentation of the Fichtean spirit in Fichtean letters’
(Schlegel 1958–: 18: 33). A double fictionalisation is in effect. The transcendental ego is
exposed as a character of Fichte’s (an invention, as Novalis had pointed out) and Fichte
himself is exposed as ‘rhetorical’ – becoming, perhaps, a character of Schlegel’s.8 The
author is indelibly inscribed within the text.

2.3 Linguistic Turns

The notion of unintended textual consequences is of great importance here. Indeed, if the
author is inside the text rather than behind it, we might pose the question of who is in
control. One characteristically romantic answer points to the role of the unconscious in
textual production. Again the locus for this conception is Kant, who writes:

[T]he author of a product for which he is indebted to his genius does not know himself
how he has come by his ideas; and he has not the power to devise the like at pleasure or
in accordance with a plan. (Kant [1790] 1987: 174–6, §46)
58 judith norman and alistair welchman
In line with this conception, Friedrich Schlegel writes that ‘a poem is only a product of
nature which wants to become a work of art’ (Schlegel [1797] 1970: 145, #21). But the
notion of unconscious creation was not a consensus view within Romanticism. A. W.
Schlegel, Coleridge and Schelling all emphasise the cooperation of conscious and
unconscious productive forces in the creative process. And A. W. Schlegel criticises
Kant for not giving more scope to conscious processes in creativity.
However, this notion of conscious control was not necessarily in the service of a theory
of the individual artist. In fact, we see in German Romanticism an interesting and subtle set
of theories of collective authorship, in which it is not nature but a social collectivity that is
the ultimate locus of creativity. Schlegel describes ‘antiquity’ as a ‘genius’, the collective
author of ancient texts (Schlegel [1797] 1970: 197, #248). Or the productive social
collective could be a small community – The Athenaeum explored the concept of
‘symphilosophy’ as a mutual endeavour among a small group of friends, the plan of
constituting a secret alliance. Authorship is, on this model, quite strictly a collective act,
not an individual one. The idea of the productive social collective could also be used in the
service of nationalism, as with the romantic fixation on folk arts, folksong, or even fairy
tales, as the collective expression of a people, a Volk. (We must note at once that this is not
nationalism in a chauvinistic sense – the romantics supported a resurgence of all regional
traditions without claiming the superiority of their own – a point on which Herder, for one,
sharply criticised the Enlightenment. In this sense, the romantics might be considered the
first multiculturalists; see Blechman 1999: 9.)
Schlegel suggests, however, a distinctive response to the question of who is in control of
his texts:

[In my writings] I wanted to demonstrate that words often understand themselves better
than do those who use them . . . there must be a connection or some sort of secret
brotherhood among philosophical words that, like a host of spirits too soon aroused,
bring everything into confusion in their writings and exert the invisible power of the
World Spirit on even those who try to deny it . . . (Schlegel 1970: 260)

Language has a mind of its own and will lead the supposed author along lines he or she
hardly intended to follow. For instance, Schlegel wrote of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister that:
‘surprised by the tendency of its genre, the work became suddenly much greater than its first
intention’ (Schlegel 1958–: 2: 346–7). Here it is the structure of the genre that is doing the
work: in this case, it is not the unconscious that is in control, but language itself.
Novalis thematised this in an essay called Monologue: ‘One can only marvel at the
ridiculous mistake that people make when they think that they speak for the sake of things.
The particular quality of language, the fact that it is concerned only with itself, is known to
no one . . .’ As the monologue progresses, it becomes progressively self-reflective (or
progressively conscious of its inherent self-reflexivity): ‘What if I were compelled to speak?
What if this urge to speak were the mark of the inspiration of language, the working of
language within me? . . . Could this in the end, without my knowing or believing, be
poetry?’ (Novalis 1997: 83).
This introduces a conception of language as an autonomous and self-expressive rather
than representational or communicative structure. We have already seen what De Man
describes as the tendency of poetic language to displace the primacy of the object in English
Romanticism. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault pinpoints the early nineteenth
century as the moment when ‘words ceased to intersect with representations and to provide
 the question of romanticism 59
a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things . . . language may sometimes arise for its
own sake in an act of writing that designates nothing other than itself’ (Foucault 1970:
304). Wilhelm von Humboldt would write that language is a world of its own, distinct from
reality or subjective intention. This conception is a significant factor in the development of
modern hermeneutics: if the author is not the ultimate (or even proximate) locus for the
intelligibility of the work of art (and neither is nature, as we saw earlier), then a new
interpretative science is necessary to tell us what it means. As Friedrich Schlegel writes:
‘the question of what the author intends can be settled; not, however, the question of what
the work is’ (Schlegel 1958–: 18: 318).
It is interesting but somewhat counter-intuitive to regard language as a formal system
without reference to anything extrinsic – but it is hardly unusual or startling to say the same
thing about music. Music accordingly came to be seen not only as the basis for language (a
return to Vico’s idea that we sang before we spoke) but also as a model for thought and
reason. Schlegel speaks of ‘a certain tendency of pure instrumental music toward
philosophy’ (Schlegel [1797] 1970: 239, #444). And we frequently find in romantic texts
language being referred to in musical terms. Music’s (previously problematically) non-
mimetic character now became its mark of superiority and elevated it to a supreme position
in the system of the arts.
In fact romantic music theory typically held that music was the dominant element in
song and opera, with the lyrics of songs relegated to the role of merely repeating and
embellishing the music. In Schumann’s Lieder for instance, the piano has an autonomous
and in many ways more musically interesting role than the voice (see Rosen 1995: 68).
And the idea continues into late Romanticism as well. Nietzsche notes that Schopen-
hauer’s arguments in favour of the priority of music eventually convinced Wagner to put
aside his conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk, an ideal synthesis of the arts, to give music
the lead role. Accordingly, in the (post-Schopenhauerian) Wagnerian music drama, the
music speaks an independent and primary language that is only echoed by the speech and
action on stage. Wagner’s attitude towards this shift in thinking was characteristically
romantic too. As he describes it, it was (Nietzsche notwithstanding) factors intrinsic to the
music drama itself that brought music to the fore – Schopenhauer’s theory was just the
outward stimulus forcing him to recognise this ineluctable fact. Thus, Wagner wrote of his
earlier theory: ‘I didn’t dare to say that it was music which produced drama, although inside
myself I knew it’ (quoted in Magee 1983: 351). We can say of Wagner’s Tristan what
Schlegel said of Goethe’s Meister, that it was ‘surprised by the tendency of its genre’.
It is perhaps surprising for music to be held up as a model for thought precisely because it
is devoid of extrinsic meaning. But, to the extent that the romantics embraced the non-
referential nature of language, they called for literature to be meaningless. Or rather, as
philosophers such as Maurice Blanchot, Foucault, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy claim, this
conception of the meaninglessness of language – the notion that language is concerned
only with itself – marks the beginning of what we know of as literature. We can refer this
again to the transcendental function of language.9 According to an argument familiar to all
transcendental philosophers, we cannot describe a transcendental condition in terms of
what it conditions (the category of causation cannot itself be involved in a causal sequence,
etc.). Consequently, language as a condition for meaning is itself devoid of meaning: the
ground for sense must itself be nonsensical. As the philosopher Winfried Menninghaus
writes in his study of the romantic fairytale: ‘Nonsense is a way in which ‘‘the non-
hermeneutical’’ . . . still appears within the horizon of the hermeneutical field’ (Mennin-
ghaus 1999: 8). The appearance of nonsense in a text, then, fulfils Schlegel’s criterion for
60 judith norman and alistair welchman
proper critical philosophy as the intimate unity of a determining structure, in this case
language, together with the sense it determines (see Norman 2009).
Accordingly, Novalis calls for

tales, without logic, nevertheless with associations, like dreams. Poems – simply
sounding well and filled with beautiful words – but also without any sense or logic –
at most single stanzas intelligible – they must be like mere broken pieces of the most
varied things. At best, true poetry can have . . . an indirect effect like music, etc.
(Novalis 1960–88: 3: 572)

The romantics were particularly attracted to the genre of the fairy tale, considering it to
be a model of meaninglessness in this sense (see Novalis 1960–88: 3: 438, 449; Schlegel
1958–: 16: 475; Menninghaus 1999). They praised its disconnected dream logic, its ability
to explore the confusion of liminal states of consciousness. But beyond the fairy tale we see
in German romantic literature a persistent valorisation of chaos, confusion, chance and
caprice, on the level of language, style and plot. The art of meaninglessness extended to the
visual arts, with Constable’s landscapes criticised for ‘meaning nothing’ – having a paucity
of reference (quoted in Rosen 1995: 75). The landscape is supposed to speak for itself.
Indeed, the romantic playwright Ludwig Tieck formulates his literary ideal in painterly
terms, praising paintings that ‘delight’ solely by their ‘dazzling colours without coherence’
(quoted in Menninghaus 1999: 37).

2.4 Irony
This is already a form of proto-modernism: we are in the neighbourhood of Archibald
MacLeish’s modernist dictum from his Ars Poetica that ‘A poem should not mean / but be’
(lines 23–4) – and the transition from narrative painting to pure landscapes to painterly
abstraction is a fairly clear one. We will take up the question of the proximity of romantic
theory to modernism (and even post-modernism) shortly, but we need to look first at the
stylistic device on which the romantics might most reasonably stake their claims to modernity
(should they wish to do so): their emblematic trope of irony. While (also characteristically)
never defining just what irony is, Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his Dialogue on Poetry:

Every poem should be genuinely romantic and every [poem] should be didactic in that
broader sense of the word that designates the tendency toward a deep, infinite meaning.
Additionally, we make this demand everywhere, without necessarily using this name.
Even in very popular genres – the theater, for example – we demand irony; we demand
that the events, the people, in short, the whole game of life actually be taken up and
presented as a game as well. (Schlegel 1958–: 2: 323)

Irony persistently blocks the referential function of language (or perhaps demonstrates
language at work blocking our attempts to make it referential) – it undermines whatever
serious (meaning-bearing) work language is supposed to be doing and turns everything into
a game. We see this in many of the literary works of Jena Romanticism: an insistent irony
that does not let you forget that the text is fiction. For instance, a character in Brentano’s
Godwi of 1801 tells the narrator: ‘there is the pond into which I fall on page 266’ (Brentano
1995). In a scene from Tieck’s The World Turned Upside Down (Die verkehrte Welt) of 1798,
the character of the innkeeper says:
 the question of romanticism 61
Few guests stay with me now and, if this keeps up, in the end, I’ll just have to take down
my sign. – Ah, yes, once things were good: there was scarcely a play then without an inn
and its innkeeper. I still can recall the hundreds of plays in which the greatest intrigues
were prepared right in this very room . . . (Tieck 1996: I, iv)

The play is taken up and presented as a play and, as with language, refusing to countenance
the illusion that it refers to anything beyond itself. Of course this sort of self-referential
device is hardly distinctive of the period that we call Romanticism, but one of the ways that
the Jena authors are distinguished from earlier models is that, as the critic Peter Szondi
notes about Tieck, the actor is not ‘stepping out of his role’ (a standard comic device at least
since Aristophanes) – rather, the character is asserting its self-consciousness as a character
(Szondi 1986: 72). The character knows itself as such – it becomes self-conscious of its
fictional status.
This in fact brings us to the heart of the German romantic philosophy of literature: the idea
of a literature that contains a moment of critical self-consciousness. Schlegel famously writes,
the ‘theory of the novel would itself have to be a novel’ (Schlegel 1958–: 2: 337). Like Tieck’s
innkeeper, the novel will know itself as such and reflect on what it can and should be as a work
of art. The fairy tale reveals its own meaning as nonsense, the naked presence of language
working its perverse arabesque. Moreover, this points back to the romantic ‘death of the
author’ as discussed earlier – the work is spawning its own intrinsic level of theory (this is
precisely the ‘tendency’ of the novelistic genre that took Goethe by surprise). In this sense, the
work even can do without the author – although the properly ‘characterised’ author could
always join the fun within the text itself (as in the romantic’s beloved Tristram Shandy).

2.5 Some Recent Appropriations

Needless to say, twentieth-century philosophers have found the romantic conceptions of
language and literature both prescient and congenial to their own ideas. De Man writes:

There is a machine there, a text machine, an implacable determination and a total

arbitrariness, unbedingter Willkür . . . which inhabits words on the level of the play of the
signifier, which undoes any narrative consistency of lines and which undoes the reflexive
and the dialectical model, both of which are, as you know, the basis of any narration . . .
(De Man 1996: 181)

According to De Man, romantic wordplay (and in particular irony) play a deconstructive

role, undermining any consistent narrative. Deconstructive critics like to cite Friedrich
Schlegel’s famous adage: ‘it is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none.
It will simply have to combine the two’ (Schlegel 1970: 167, #53). Although decon-
structive readings usefully foreground the notion of language as a transcendental operator,
it would be misleading to push Romanticism too far in this direction: Romanticism had an
expansive tendency and a creative optimism foreign to deconstruction. The romantics
were concerned not with what they were tearing down but with what they were building
up, their projects and poetry. The romantics refer texts to the conditions of their possibility
by characterising the author, letting language come to the fore and so on, but this is no
deflationary technique. They did not dwell on the simultaneous inevitability and im-
possibility of the traditional narrative form. They wanted to explore alternatives: to write
fairy tales and poetry and play with their ‘dazzling colours’.
62 judith norman and alistair welchman
It remains the case, however, as the deconstructive critic will be quick to point out, that
the Jena romantics generally failed to do so, often quite spectacularly. Most of their works
remained fragmentary. Intentionally or not, their projects were never completed and many
of them even died young; all in all, they left an infamous legacy of the partial and
incomplete. Maurice Blanchot takes up this theme and suggests that perhaps Romanticism
isn’t simply unfulfilled, but rather introduces a new mode of fulfilment: ‘the works’ power to
be and no longer to represent . . .’ (Blanchot 1993: 353). The project of Romanticism, for
Blanchot, is pure self-assertion, a pure act of self-conscious declaration of independence of
literature, the ‘theoretical wing of the French Revolution’. Blanchot writes:

[T]o write is to make (of) speech a work, but that this work is an unworking . . . to speak
poetically is to make possible a non-transitive speech whose task is not to say things (not
to disappear in what it signifies), but to say (itself) in letting (itself) say . . . (Blanchot
1993: 357)

In other words and strictly in keeping with themes that we have discussed above, language
is the subject and language is in control. It does not speak for the sake of anything but itself.
Blanchot considers this ‘the work of the absence of (the) work; a poetry affirmed in the
purity of the poetic act . . . ’ (Blanchot 1993: 353) The presentation of language itself and
by itself is the revelation of the now rather impersonal act of poesis and all this abstracted
from content or meaning. Again, we return to the theme: Romanticism is the presentation
of transcendental subjectivity and nothing other than this presentation, according to
Blanchot, but the subject is simply language itself.

3. Revolutions
The notion of the literary text which the romantics developed appears remarkably self-
absorbed and does not seem to leave much room or role for an audience or readership. And
in fact we see in many romantic pronouncements a mixture of indifference and contempt
for the audience, or at least a sense that it is superfluous, as J. S. Mill wrote: ‘All poetry is of
the nature of soliloquy’ (Mill [1833] 1897: 205). And Keats declared his independence too:
‘I never wrote one single Line of Poetry with the least Shadow of public thought’ (Keats
[1818] 2009: 138).
In fact, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century are marked by a dramatic
change in the nature and significance of the audience for the arts. This is perhaps most
striking in the case of music, where the system of patronage (by the Church or court) was
coming to an end; musicians were left to compose for a much more impersonal public. But
the same transition was taking place in all the arts, where the growing importance of the
marketplace was helping to create a new social role for artists and intellectuals as salesmen
for their manuscripts, paintings and compositions (see Löwy and Sayre 2001: 48). This
change in social function was registered in the art itself, as the artist became much more
lonely and isolated a figure. One historian writes of British Romanticism that

the new conditions, an art marketed rather than an art commissioned, also imposed
upon the artist-intellectual the symptoms of disorientation. The necessity to commu-
nicate with a large public to which no individual could relate created large problems, of
form and tone, and also imposed peculiar strains such as alienation and ‘modern literary
Angst’. (Butler 1981: 71)
 the question of romanticism 63
But the situation in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century was even more
problematic, because the reading public barely existed. The narrow size of even the
potential pool of readers was further reduced because the German aristocracy still preferred
to read French writers – the market for German books was perhaps a twelfth the size of that
for books in French (Brunschwig 1974: 140). Whether or not the romantic authors desired
an audience, they did not have one.
But the romantic malaise went deeper than this. As one historian writes about the
situation in late eighteenth-century Prussia:

Thus, wherever he turns, the middle-class young man graduating from the university
cannot find what he is seeking. He cannot always make a career in the civil service; and
the state of society is not such as to enable him to earn a living purely as an intellectual.
The consequence is that the ranks of the dissatisfied swell; petty officials, theological
candidates, tutors, briefless barristers, doctors with no practice and writers with no
readers come to the bitter conclusion that society has not furnished them with a place
worthy of their deserts. (Brunschwig 1974: 146)

So the romantics had no effective outlet for their ambitions. This suggests a new angle on
Romanticism, as a sort of ressentiment (or, minimally, frustration) in the face of an
unpropitious social situation. No less an expert than the French romantic Chateaubriand
claims that the ideas characteristic of Romanticism derive from the ‘irritation of the stifled
passions fermenting all together’. As he writes: ‘our imagination is rich, abundant and full
of wonders; but our existence is poor, insipid and destitute of charms’ (Chateaubriand
[1802] 1856: 296–7). Nor have critics hesitated to link these stifled passions to feelings
about the French Revolution. Political conditions in England and Germany were simply
not favourable to revolution; for instance, there was no unified polity in Germany.
Reinhold, accordingly, commented that: ‘Germany, of all European countries, is most
inclined to revolutions of the spirit, least inclined to political revolutions’ (quoted in
Abrams 1973: 349). Henri Brunschwig reconstructs Reinhold’s observation according to
the logic of ressentiment: ‘Excluded from active life much against their will, [the romantics]
take refuge in literature’ (Brunschwig 1974: 163) – and even there they are denied a means
of effective expression. Romanticism on this reading is the privatisation of revolution, an
involuntary retreat into a dream of illusory self-realisation after the possibility of real
transformation has been rendered impossible.
The diagnosis of Romanticism as ressentiment was taken up, perhaps most famously, by
Nietzsche. He echoed Goethe in declaring that Romanticism was ‘sick’, in contrast with
‘healthy’ classicism (although Goethe was thinking about French Romanticism). What
Nietzsche had in mind was that the lack of rigour and resolution in Romanticism – the
sentimentality and appeal to affect – had an attraction for and affinity with bodies in a state
of decline or decadence. Not being capable of acts of genuine strength and intellectual
rigour, romantics valorise inaction and fuzzy-headed sentiment.
The romantics make no secret of their interest in and (at least initially) sympathy for the
French Revolution, ‘the master theme of the epoch in which we live’, as we have seen
Shelley say. Wordsworth had wanted to lead the Girondin faction in Paris in 1792 and
harboured explicitly revolutionary goals for poetry (Hindle 1999: 69); and, although only
Caroline Schlegel among the Germans was directly involved in revolutionary political
activities, the Early German Romantics embraced a republican ideal and wanted to
radically rethink literary conventions and social norms – the role of the author and
64 judith norman and alistair welchman
the status of women. Nor did the romantics hesitate to connect and compare their ideas
with the great events in Paris. Hazlitt writes of the Lake Poets:

[T]his school of poetry had its origin in the French Revolution, or rather in those
sentiments and opinions which produced that revolution; and which sentiments and
opinions were indirectly imported into this country in translations from the German
about that period. (Hazlitt [1818] 1970: 215)10

For his part, Friedrich Schlegel famously declares that the three ‘tendencies’ of the age are
Fichte, the French Revolution and Goethe and continues:

Whoever is offended by this juxtaposition, whoever cannot take any revolution seriously
that isn’t noisy and materialistic, hasn’t yet achieved a lofty, broad perspective on the
history of mankind. Even in our shabby histories of civilization . . . many a little book,
almost unnoticed by the noisy rabble at the time, plays a greater role than anything they
did. (Schlegel [1797] 1970: 190, #216)

So books, even if they are unnoticed when written, can be more important than
revolutionary deeds. German idealism took this notion as central, as we clearly see from
the elevated historical role Hegel gives to philosophy, in addition to Schelling’s pro-
nouncements on the subject in 1804:

The golden age . . . is to be sought, not by an endless and restless progress and external
activity, but rather by a return to that point from which each of us has set out – to the
inner identity with the Absolute . . . This will not be a gradual progress, it will be the
true revolution, the idea of which is utterly different from that which has been called by
that name. (Schelling 1856–61: 6: 564)

Again, the true revolution will be in ideas and not deeds.

This certainly elevates the role of intellectuals – or perhaps radically overestimates it,
according to Marx, now very distant from Romanticism when he insists in the German
Ideology that ‘liberation is a historical and not a mental act’ (Marx and Engels 1976: 44).
There is, of course, no reason (even on Marx’s terms) why it cannot be both, but there is
still a question of priority and the passages above establish pretty clearly where the
romantics stand. Jerome McGann comments critically on this notion in his seminal study
The Romantic Ideology:

The idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and
culture is the grand illusion of every Romantic poet. This idea continues as one of the
most important shibboleths of our culture, especially – and naturally – at its higher
levels. (McGann 1983: 91)

We are back to the theme of Romanticism as a spectre haunting our modern consciousness.
According to McGann, we are still in Romanticism’s trap, to the extent that we believe in
the transformative power of consciousness and locate solutions to human problems in a
realm of ideas.
McGann’s position is a helpful corrective to a tendency in some of the scholarship to
accept the romantics’ own insistent self-mythologising. But at the same time it is too facile
to dismiss Romanticism as ideological. Culture might be ideology, but it is not merely
 the question of romanticism 65
ideology.11 So what are we to do? One approach is to understand the material factors as
such as distinct from Romanticism proper; they have an impact, but only insofar as they are
taken up by the movement (and this taking up can be in the manner of repression). The
French Revolution can and did occasion a wildly disparate set of responses and so cannot
be considered to play any decisive role in determining the specific and interesting nexus of
ideas and impulses that we know as Romanticism. Moreover, the changing social relations
of patronage and the lack of an audience cannot be said to determine the existence or
nature of Romanticism. Rather, these factors are occasions – they open up the space – for a
new intellectual and artistic relationship between the writer and the public. So there are
more nuanced ways of viewing the relation between romantic culture and its material base
than simply one of ideology. Nor do we need to accept McGann’s contention about the
ideological function of romantic thought. Rather than viewing the dominant impulse of
Romanticism as an impotent retreat from active life into the narcissism of interiority, we
might, perhaps, view it rather as a productive and inventive set of protests against the
depredations of an increasingly alienating society. The nostalgia for homecoming and
wholeness, the project of re-enchantment, imply (at the very least) a criticism of a reality
that is alienating. The romantic resistance was not necessarily of an exclusively progressive
nature – Romanticism has reactionary impulses as well, looking to the Middle Ages as
much as (if not more than) to the future for signs of how to solve the problems of the
present, the increasingly apparent horrors of capitalist modernity.12 But much more
radically, as we have been arguing throughout this paper, romantic nostalgia is no simple
escapism, but is in fact highly complicated and self-critical. It is a call to self-examination
and the self that is discovered – when one is discovered – is hardly reassuring. More likely it
is ironic, decentred, impersonal, transcendentally inaccessible, a conclusion that under-
mines any reassuring ideology of the well-centred individual as a subjective locus of
control. Romanticism often refuses to portray a fantastic solution to alienation because it
refuses to portray any solution at all. Marx, at times, seems more utopian than Schlegel.
Whether or not our modernity is recognisably romantic, we undeniably are still working
through a set of problems that Romanticism was the first to raise – not least the identity of
Romanticism itself. Perhaps Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy were right to say: ‘[L]iterature, as
its own infinite questioning and as the perpetual positing of its own question, dates from
Romanticism and as Romanticism. And therefore . . . the romantic question, the question
of Romanticism, does not and cannot have an answer’ (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988:
83). But Schlegel, characteristically, merely deferred the moment of truth: designating his
age not the Age of Romanticism but rather the ‘Age of Tendencies’, he wrote:

As to whether or not I am of the opinion that all these tendencies are going to be
corrected and resolved by me, or maybe by my brother or by Tieck, or by someone else
from our group, or only some son of ours, or grandson, great-grandson, grandson twenty-
seven times removed, or only at the last judgment, or never: that I leave to the wisdom of
the reader, to whom this question really belongs. (Schlegel 1970: 264)

And it still does.

Notes
1. Lovejoy doesn’t reject the term completely; he pluralises it and urges us to recognise the existence
of multiple romantic movements.
 66 judith norman and alistair welchman
2. Michael Ferber (2005: 6) usefully summarises the history of lists of characteristics proposed for a
definition of Romanticism.
3. When applicable, references to Schlegel include fragment number (indicated #) after page
number.
4. The Lake Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey) were first identified as a group in a
vituperative context as well, by a contemporary critic, Francis Jeffrey, who branded them
revolutionary dissidents (for discussion, see Hindle 1999: 66).
5. Marx relies theoretically both on a contrast with the medieval era (in which exploitation is
present but directly visible) and with a notional era of primitive communism. See Löwy and Sayre
2001: 95; Welchman 1995.
6. See, for instance, Michael Riffaterre’s analysis of Wordsworth’s Yew-trees (Riffaterre 1981).
7. However, see Dalia Nassar’s contribution in Chapter 2, for an alternative reading of the
relationship which emphasises the continuity between Romanticism and idealism.
8. O’Brien sees the Fichte-Studien as the ‘decisive point . . . in the history of German Romanticism:
the point at which Romanticism turns away from idealistic philosophy, or more precisely, turns
back upon it in order to analyze it as language and ultimately, as a fiction’ (O’Brien 1995: 78).
9. This is in line with the ideas of the Sturm und Drang philosopher Johann Georg Hamann
(considered by Isaiah Berlin to be the progenitor of German Romanticism: Berlin 2000). Hamann
had already attempted a linguistic interpretation of Kant, considering the categories of the
understanding from Kant’s first Critique to be essentially categories of language.
10. Indeed, this is a leading and perhaps one of the more plausible theories of the unity of
Romanticism: it is not the case the Germany spread its theories abroad (a theory that has little
empirical support) but rather that comparable social conditions in different countries (and
specifically comparable responses to the French Revolution) produced a similar sort of literature.
See Butler 1981: 74.
11. Recent scholarship has challenged McGann’s thesis; see Malpas 2000.
12. Löwy and Sayre (2001) argue that Romanticism is essentially a critique of capitalism.

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Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Schlegel, Friedrich [1797] (2001), On the Study of Greek Poetry, trans. Stuart Barnett, Albany, NY:
SUNY Press.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1964), The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols, ed. Frederick L. Jones, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Strauss, Jonathan (2005), ‘The poetry of loss: Lamartine, Musset, and Nerval’, in Michael Ferber
(ed.), A Companion to European Romanticism, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 192–207.
Szondi, Peter (1986), On Textual Understanding and Other Essays, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Tieck, Ludwig (1996), Die verkehrte Welt: Ein historisches Schauspiel in fünf Aufzügen, Stuttgart:
Reclam.
Welchman, Alistair (1995), ‘‘‘Wild above rule or art’’: Creation and critique’, PhD Dissertation,
University of Warwick.
Wellek, René (1963), Concepts of Criticism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Whalley, George (1972), ‘England/romantic–Romanticism’, in Hans Eichner (ed.), ‘Romantic’ and Its
Cognates, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 157–262.
 4
The Hermeneutic Turn in Philosophy of Nature in
the Nineteenth Century

Philippe Huneman

1. Introduction
In the nineteenth century the natural sciences underwent a radical transformation. The
paradigms of many of the disciplines that we know today, such as geology, chemistry,
thermodynamics, cell biology or evolutionary biology, were established in this period. Prior
to this period, knowledge of nature was a part of philosophy, as the examples of Leibniz or
Descartes show. Moreover, the Kantian critique of metaphysics from the Critique of Pure
Reason onwards had a profound impact on philosophers, especially in Germany. Kant
dismissed the traditional objects of philosophical inquiry such as God, the world and the
soul, which for Kant were to be replaced by reason’s investigation of our faculty of
knowledge and its limits. Philosophical discourse about nature therefore had to take a
different form to the classical and Enlightenment ‘natural philosophy’ of which figures such
as Galileo were practitioners.
Amongst post-Kantian philosophers, Schelling, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, developed a theory of nature called Naturphilosophie which had an important
influence upon his contemporaries. At the same time Schelling systematised inspirations
from thinkers and scientists like Goethe and Herder, who had already called for a novel
philosophical reappraisal of nature shaped by artistic values. Followers of Naturphilosophie
such as Lorenz Oken and Henrik Steffens and critics such as Hegel agreed on the necessity
of rethinking the philosophy of nature. These developments and debates were harshly
criticised by the scientific materialists whose approach became dominant in the second part
of the century. Nonetheless, the whole movement of philosophy of nature proved
important for the emergence of radically new ways of philosophising about nature.
After 1830, many scientists came to think that Naturphilosophie and philosophy of nature
in general were irrelevant programmes compared to the sciences. However, the very idea of
a philosophy of nature is, as I will argue, clearly related to the new status that the natural
sciences gained in this period. The present chapter will show how a particular philoso-
phical project was embedded in the approaches to nature adopted by otherwise disparate
authors such as Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Henry David Thoreau. Section 2
traces the conceptual conditions of this project by pointing out how it became possible
within the new epistemological structure within which modern science was produced and
which was reflected by Kant’s critique. Section 3 characterises the aim and method of the
project as a hermeneutic one. Section 4 describes the relationship of this project to the
natural sciences. Section 5 considers some of the main themes that this project introduced
70 philippe huneman
into the modern philosophical agenda. Section 6 sketches how the project impinged upon
later philosophical views of nature.

2. From Natural Philosophy to the Natural Sciences

For Leibniz, there was a continuum between logic, the sciences and theology. He stated
that metaphysics, logic and theology were the same thing. Metaphysics uncovers the
elementary essences of which everything in the possible worlds is constituted; logic studies
the connections between these essences; and theology understands the connections
between the divine understanding and the divine will that, by computing the optimal
quantity of reality in the range of possible worlds, chose which possible world came into
existence (Leibniz [1696] 1978: 86). God’s existence itself is proven through logic by an
analysis of the elementary essences and the requirements for their combination. The actual
world can be known though empirical investigation, although an infinite understanding
would see how the empirical determinations of things instantiate a priori determinations.
The truth of scientific investigation rests on metaphysical a priori truths, which in the last
instance are grounded in the existence of God – since his calculus is the ultimate reason
why this world exists rather than another one and hence why there are the laws of nature
proper to our world. Theology, investigation of nature and logic as the grammar of essences
instantiated in nature are therefore continuously related; and mathematics, as grounded in
logic (for Leibniz) is the natural language for these investigations of nature. Philosophy
is one single discourse: theology when applied to God; metaphysics or logic when applied
to the possible worlds or the very general determinations of the actual world and the
reasons for them; and natural philosophy, or natural history, when inquiring into the
laws and details of this world. In the general economy of classical knowledge about nature
as it is reflected in Leibniz’s major philosophical synthesis, natural philosophy tries to
explain by seeking general laws, while natural history classifies the species to be found in
nature.1
Leibnizian doctrine is an easy way to describe the continuity between natural history,
natural philosophy and natural theology. The notion of mathesis, clearly dominant in how
philosophers from the seventeenth and early eighteenth century talked about science,
embodies this structure of continuity: mathesis is a way of organising knowledge that
pervades all regions of nature and uses mathematics, or at least elementary logic. The main
assumption of the project of a mathesis universalis is that the same logic underlies all sectors
of knowledge. And this is ultimately grounded on metaphysical assumptions about the
foundation of all laws of nature resting in God’s divine understanding, this understanding
being ruled by logic (Rescher 1981). Leibniz was the most prolific contributor to the idea of
mathesis universalis (Belaval 1978). Interestingly, this idea disappears in nineteenth-century
philosophy: this disappearance signals a change in the regime of science. Natural philosophy
(singular) is replaced by natural sciences (plural) and the plurality of the latter makes it
problematic to assume a mathesis.
This is not to say that all pre-nineteenth-century natural philosophers were Leibnizian –
clearly not, but Leibniz gives the clearest expression of a structure of knowledge pervasive
until the 1800s. Natural philosophy was the quest for laws and natural history was the
description of essences instantiated by the species and genera of natural things (biological
and mineral alike). Both could ultimately prove the existence of God because they displayed
perfection in nature. Both assumed that fundamental connections – between substances and
properties or between causes and effects – were grounded in the system of essences in some
the hermeneutic turn in philosophy of nature 71
transcendent existence. When Hume elaborated his devastating critique of natural religion
in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, posthumously published in 1779, he assumed
that this view of nature and investigation was taken for granted by his contemporaries. What
is crucial is the connection between mathesis as a structure of knowledge, metaphysics as
investigation of its foundations and theology as the place of the ultimate a priori warrants of
knowledge. This connection organises the solidarity between natural philosophy, natural
history and natural theology, in the context of which controversies about the natural
sciences during the classical age and the Enlightenment took place.
Kant’s work does not share this structure and was decisive in changing it. In particular,
the meaning of the ‘a priori’ changed in his philosophy (Strawson [1966] 1995; Allison
2003). For Kant this refers no longer to God but rather to the very possibility of experience,
which is called the ‘transcendental’ domain. Kantian criticism was decisive at two levels.
First, the Critique of Pure Reason disconnected knowledge of nature from knowledge of
theology, since the a priori warrants of knowledge were no longer to be found in an infinite
understanding. No infinite understanding can contain essences, because any thought of
essence, as far as it is thought by us, is related to our finite thinking. In our cognitive faculty
concepts and intuition are separated and this constitution of ours is a contingent fact (since
another kind of cognitive faculty is conceivable; see Lebrun 1970). Moreover, in the
Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant’s three critiques of the three proofs of God’s
existence broke the continuity between natural philosophy and natural theology. Nature
does not lead to God. On a second level, a pervasive distinction runs through Kant’s work
between nature, as the set of objects ruled by the transcendental principles of possible
experience (see Kant [1783] 1997: 47) and the order of nature, a system of (mostly)
empirical laws that regulate nature and which is not given by the transcendental principles.
The third Critique, the Critique of Judgement of 1790, is devoted to the idea of order, in
general in the whole of nature and in particular within those ordered entities that are
organisms. Kant argued that the knowledge of order in nature does not lead to any
transcendent warrant and is not grounded on one.
More precisely, the traditional architecture of discourses was defeated by a major
criticism, the rejection of an economy of nature. The Linnaean school plainly expressed
the conviction, pervasive throughout the whole of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
natural history, that in nature any organism and any species has a role and contributes to
the wellbeing of the whole (see Linnaeus [1748] 1972). Criticising the idea of relative
purposiveness, Kant destroyed the metaphysical basis of this conviction. From Kant
onwards, purposiveness came to mean only and principally internal purposiveness; it
concerned wholes and parts within an organism (Kant [1790] 1987: 244–7, §63). No one
can say that plants are there to serve herbivores: organic creatures serve no function in
relation to one another. Function and adaptation, as teleological concepts, are an internal
matter and do not allow us to deduce any divinely grounded economy of nature. Defining
natural purposes, Kant shifts from the vocabulary of means/ends to the lexicon of wholes/
parts. This shift indicates his essential departure from the traditional metaphysics of
purposiveness. It does so because he no longer assumes that utility is the primary meaning of
purposiveness and that human technological practice (adjusting means and ends) provides
its principal measure (Huneman 2007b).2
Kant thus neutralises the ontological use that was made of the concept of economy of
nature by traditional natural historians such as Linnaeus. In the structure sketched above
linking natural history and natural philosophy with theology, organisms were the nodal
point because their manifest design (which proved God’s existence) was such because it
72 philippe huneman
fulfilled its role in the economy of nature (which also proved God’s existence). Physiology,
natural history and theology were thus tightly linked through this idea of purposiveness as
utility and design, which the third Critique deconstructed.
This Kantian breakthrough was not universally accepted, but it coheres with the change
from the triad natural philosophy/natural history/natural theology to the modern frame-
work of the natural sciences. This change had many causes, of course, and Kant’s
philosophy both reflected and contributed to the change. Arguably, a major factor in
this emergence of the plurality of natural sciences was the rise of biology as an autonomous
science in the second half of the eighteenth century, on the basis of advances in physiology
(for example, Albrecht von Haller, the Montpellier vitalists: see Rey 1987; Wolfe 2008),
embryology (for example, Wolff’s treatises: see Wolff [1764] 1966) and comparative
anatomy (see: Coleman 1979; Barsanti 1995; McLaughlin 2002; Huneman 2008). Kant’s
assessment of biology in the third Critique intrinsically concerned this epistemological
transformation. Accordingly, we notice that within science the refutation of relative
purposiveness took place simultaneously. In his comparative anatomy, Cuvier (1801)
expressed the idea that adaptation is a matter of internal relationships between parts of an
organism allowing the entity to survive in its environment. But this organism does not
accomplish any role defined previously by God in the whole of nature. In his morphology,
Goethe too expresses the same idea, saying that no one could tell that the fish is made for
water (Goethe [1790] 1995: 54–5).
In his Preface to his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, published in 1786, Kant
claims that nothing can count as science unless it is grounded on a priori principles and
stated in mathematical language. Few sciences correspond to Kant’s requirements and in
the nineteenth century most scientific breakthroughs – cell theory, evolutionary theory or
thermodynamics, for example – were not scientific in his sense. But, plausibly, we cannot
understand Kant’s own interest in the life sciences unless we assume that ‘science’ had
several meanings for Kant, which are not wholly exhausted by the Metaphysical Founda-
tions. These meanings reveal a conception of science which Kant inherited from earlier
Leibnizian metaphysics, even if his own transcendental philosophy challenged it. Sloan
(2006) convincingly distinguishes between Naturwissenschaften and Naturlehre in Kant’s
discourse; only the former is encompassed by the Metaphysical Foundations’s narrow
definition. But the latter is knowledge of nature too and sometimes Kant seems to see
chemistry and biology in this latter way.
Later philosophers would go further than Kant in rejecting the classical a priori view of
science and they would put Lehre and Wissenschaft on a par in order to assess the specificity
of the emerging natural sciences. In this new framework, within which the natural sciences
acquired a novel status which was at the same time reflected and reinforced by the critical
philosophy, a new kind of philosophical discourse on nature appeared, of which the
Naturphilosophie of Schelling and his disciples is the best illustration. It was to be a discourse
distinct from the natural sciences (since it would not be mathematically expressed), but it
was to interpret nature in an immanent way, without tracing its order back to a transcendent
foundation.

3. The Hermeneutics of Nature and its Genealogy

In its radical formulation by Schelling, philosophy of nature is intended to construct nature:
‘To know an object is to determine the principles of its possibility and to determine these is
to be able to construct it, to reproduce its activity in thought’ (Schelling [1799] 2004:
the hermeneutic turn in philosophy of nature 73
196).3 Its method consists in interpreting in a systematic manner the contents and findings
of the natural sciences. Although less radical, Hegel’s project is characterised in a related
way by Westphal:

One of Hegel’s aims in his Philosophy of Nature is to systematically order our most basic
ontological and natural-scientific concepts and principles . . . beginning with the most
abstract, undifferentiated and universal . . . and working through a finely-grained series
of steps . . . towards the most complex, the organic life of animal species. (Westphal
2008: 306)

As a philosophical discourse, philosophy of nature aims to conceive of nature in an

immanent but non-mathematical way. That is, it aims to grasp a meaning immanent in
nature, a meaning that the sciences of nature cannot capture because they express laws –
but a meaning which does not lead to or presuppose a creative God. This project parallels
that of the critical philosophy, which considers thoughts and meanings as immanent to
finite thinking, without relating them to a divine understanding that would circumscribe
the thinkable a priori. Yet this new programme was not Kantian, because, as defined in the
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, the natural sciences for Kant were self-
sufficient and had no immanent meaning left for philosophers. The new programme
can be called a hermeneutics of nature, since its aim is to unveil a specific meaning immanent
to nature and to be deciphered in the discourse of the natural sciences.
Kant’s metaphysics of nature was decisive for the Naturphilosophen: Schelling defined his
first programme of philosophy of nature with reference to Kant’s deduction of the two
forces of nature. In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant had argued that all
matter was constituted from the two forces of attraction and repulsion. In the Einleitung zu
dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (Introduction to the First Outline of a
System of the Philosophy of Nature, of 1799), Schelling sought to reconcile these forces in
a third one. The quest for a pair of original forces was a crucial part of Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie program, which was perpetuated in various successive forms. One of these
forms was that of the Von der Weltseele (On the World-Soul), in which we find at the very
beginning the partition between two absolute forces (Schelling [1801] 1911: 3–4).
Goethe’s ideas of a unity of plans in nature and of a unity between poetry and science
(Richards 2002), as well as Herder’s views of the history of nature and of organisms in
particular as realising a progressive plan (see Herder [1784] 1967), were also decisive for the
elaboration of a philosophy of nature.
Yet we must also emphasise the role of the third Critique, in which Kant’s project was to
understand that which overwhelms the universal a priori laws of nature, transcendentally
understood in the Critique of Pure Reason as conditions of possibility of experience. The
lawfulness of nature was warranted by such transcendental principles, but not the
systematicity of empirical laws, the laws that rule particulars and allow naturalists to
classify them into species and genera. In this sense, Kant in the Critique of Judgement
recognises that the lawfulness of nature, which makes natural science possible, does not
exhaust the whole of nature. The whole topic of the work is what is in excess of laws of
nature – on the one hand, this includes the excess of the empirical laws themselves insofar
as they cannot be deduced from the general laws of nature; on the other hand, it includes
the excess of the norms of organisation since they cannot be derived from the mechanical
laws of nature. Life is – epistemologically speaking – in excess of nature pure and simple and
therefore life must be made intelligible in a different way.
74 philippe huneman
Embryology is a case in point: knowledge of embryological processes cannot be inferred
from the physical laws that condition these processes. These inferences, indeed, could not
allow us to make the distinction we make between normal and abnormal development (i.e.
development leading to a monster) since both happen according to the same laws. So here
we presuppose that development aims at a goal, namely, the type of the animal. This
presupposition is peculiar to the knowledge of life and since it is justified not by objective
reasons but by the requirement to make our knowledge of embryology possible, it is
‘reflective’. Beauty and life are two forms of this excess with respect to the rules of the
understanding which Kant tried to analyse in the third Critique.4 The acknowledgement
that the laws that are the subject-matter of the natural sciences do not encompass the
whole of nature defines the territory of a discourse on nature that will not involve the
mathematical unveiling of laws but rather the deciphering of meaning: hence, a herme-
neutics of nature.

4. The Relationship Between Philosophy of Nature and the

Natural Sciences
Kant elucidated the possibility of the concepts of the natural sciences by confronting them
with the requirements of human thought as such. In contrast the hermeneutics of nature, as
practised by Schelling, Hegel or Schopenhauer, has to interpret these concepts to decipher
what they reveal about the meaning of nature. From this perspective, the science of nature
is a discourse the meaning of which is to be recovered by philosophy. These three authors,
however, accomplish the hermeneutic stance towards nature in different ways.
For Schelling, philosophy does not aim to produce a theory, but deduces the object of
the scientific theory. He states in his Philosophy of Revelation of 1841 that:

the great revolution brought about by the period (following classical metaphysics)
consists in no longer dealing with the search for predicates (therefore creating a true
theory about some objects) but in getting an insurance about the objects themselves.
Still now, lots of people come to philosophy thinking that there are some statements or
propositions that one can take home as a reward. But it is no more the case. The current
philosophy consists in a deduction of the objects themselves, those objects that the
old metaphysics presupposed simply in experience or ordinary conscience. (Schelling
1856–61: 13: 102)

That is why Schelling speaks of the ‘construction’ of objects – but this term, which Kant
used to denote mathematical activity in sensible intuition, for Schelling refers to the
activity of a kind of thought that is no longer finite: a kind of thought for which
understanding and sensibility are no longer separated.5 Through this activity, philosophers
can grasp nature as the infinite and structured productive power from which nature arises as
the sum of objects investigated by the natural sciences. This production – often expressed
by Schelling through an appeal to the Spinozist difference between natura naturans and
natura naturata – is the immanent meaning of nature which science cannot reach and
which is the object of hermeneutics. Thus, Peter Hanss Reill describes how Schelling and
the Naturphilosophen used science as follows: they ‘populated the phenomenal world with
bipolar oppositions, supposedly recapitulating the Ur-polarity, drastically revising the
content of the ‘‘normal’’ sciences from which they borrowed some of their individual
concepts’ (Reill 2005: 211). This ‘construction’ of science by philosophy is reflected in
the hermeneutic turn in philosophy of nature 75
Schelling’s recurring phrase ‘philosophical X’, where X might be chemistry, mathematics or
physiology. Here, Naturphilosophie is thought to duplicate science with the meaning of
science, which can only be delivered from the viewpoint of the philosopher. As such, this
project has been caricatured and criticised, by Jakob Friedrich Fries, for example, as ‘a
duplicating narration of the experiences themselves in a modified language’ (Fries [1803]
1978: 24: 188). But, in principle, this transformation of science through philosophy is made
possible by the gap between lawful regularity and meaning – chemistry pertaining to the
former, ‘universal chemistry’ to the latter – a gap that already opened up within Kant’s third
Critique, as we have seen.
The concept of ‘finite science’ yields Hegel’s own position. Science as such presupposes
the object as given, therefore it is finite. So Hegel shares Schelling’s idea that philosophy
proceeds to the point where the object of science is no longer presupposed as given. Only
philosophy can confer on science its real status and bearings, since philosophy exposes the
meaning of the object, which is constituted as a result. To be sure, Kant also deduced
meanings and their limits – for example, the meaning of ‘natural purpose’ – but for Kant,
philosophy halts before the content of science, whereas for Hegel, this scientific content too
is thought by philosophy. To this extent, Hegel’s philosophy of science could be seen as a
hyper-Kantianism, a Kantianism that gives up the major Kantian distinctions (form/
matter, regulative/constitutive, etc.) and therefore reaches conclusions very different from
those of Kantianism.
However, because of nature’s own status as the entfremdet (self-alienated) Idea, nature
cannot exactly match the rational determinations of the Concept: nature has an essential
lack of power, an Ohnmacht (impotence). This term indicates that because nature is the
immediate realisation of the Idea, the Idea in exteriority (time and space), it is therefore
somehow external to itself (Hegel [1831] 1970: 3: 211–13, §376A).6 But this finitude of
nature is, ultimately, the exteriority of the particular vis à vis the universal. The kind is not
the individual – think of a zoological species – hence the concept lies always outside its
object. Hence for Hegel the impossibility of bringing the facts of nature, the facts
established by natural science, back to the Idea, does not indicate a weakness of science
or a finitude of our understanding, but rather this Ohnmacht of nature itself.
On this basis, the philosopher can interpret the finite sciences – and this interpretation is
the hermeneutics of nature. She makes the inverse gesture to the scientist’s; she begins with
the concept – exactly as Hegel’s Encyclopädie begins with the science of logic. While the
naturalist claims to proceed from the empirical animal forms to the concept, the
philosopher reconceives science by beginning from the concept – which is the truth of
the scientist’s knowledge. Thus Hegel writes:

The infinity of the animal forms is not to be taken so that the necessity of the orders in
nature should be constant. This is the reason why one, on the contrary, must take as a
rule the universal determinations of the Concept and then compare the natural
formations to those determinations. (Hegel [1831] 1970: 3: 180, §368A)7

In Chapter VI of the Phenomenology of Spirit, when Hegel shows how reason looks for
itself within organic nature, he explains that the organic forms are contingent: they cannot
be ordered in a rational progressive series, since every time a species is realised in a given
environment this milieu causes some singular traits to occur in the individuals that
instantiate the species. What Hegel calls ‘Earth as an individual’ alters the individuals
attempting to realise a universal type. So philosophers cannot demand too much of the
76 philippe huneman
natural sciences. This marks the difference between Hegel’s philosophy of nature and
Naturphilosophie, especially that of Schelling. Schelling is more committed to the contents
of the natural sciences because he has greater confidence in the possibility of a rational
interpretation of nature.
For this reason, Schelling speaks in terms of real forces and natural moments (see
Steigerwald 2002), whereas Hegel has in his own way already de-naturalised these contents
of the natural sciences. This is because, for him, their intelligibility refers to logical
moments (chemism, mechanism) of the Science of Logic. That is why Schelling is compelled
to find real correspondences between natural moments, such as light and life, or chemism
and digestion, whereas for Hegel these correspondences are mere arbitrary abstractions
(mere formalism, as he objects in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit). What for
Schelling would be universal chemistry, as the proper concept of philosophy of nature,
indeed pertains for Hegel to logic in the first place rather than to philosophy of nature – and
that is why, for Hegel, chemism is a concept that concerns both natural and spiritual
phenomena. Finally, the anteriority of logic to philosophy of nature in the Encyclopedia
indicates the finite status of nature for Hegel and distinguishes his project of a philosophy of
nature from Schelling’s.
For Schopenhauer, the correspondence between matters of fact investigated by science
and philosophical concepts is necessarily required. He thinks that science by itself
converges towards Schopenhauerian philosophy, so that when one approaches scientific
content in light of our philosophical intuition (given primarily in our experience of the
lived-body) that the In-sich of the world is the will, then one finds that the scientist is
saying the same thing as the philosopher, whether he knows it or not. Science thus
corroborates philosophy: while science and philosophy proceed in an independent manner,
they also meet up and the results of the empirical sciences can be translated into the
Schopenhauerian metaphysics of the will:

My metaphysics proves itself as being the only one that possesses a genuine common
boundary with the physical sciences in the sense that these come to meet it by their own
means, so that they really encounter it, and that establishes their juncture. (Schopen-
hauer [1836] 1901: 215–16)

Schopenhauer’s position on natural science is close to Schelling’s, because for Scho-

penhauer philosophy has to reinterpret natural science without any logical prerequisites. It
was with this intention that he wrote On the Will in Nature, published in 1836. But since
science should confirm philosophical conclusions, so that philosophy works by itself
towards these conclusions, there are no guarantees that the whole of natural science can
provide such a confirmation. Schopenhauer’s On the Will in Nature is therefore less
confident than Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, although close to it in intention; while, like
Hegel, Schopenhauer seeks to find, through the natural sciences, traces within nature of its
core of truth: the Will (rather than the Concept).
The kind of relationship entertained by hermeneutics to natural science is exemplified
in the case of the categories of mechanism and organism. In the third Critique, Kant argues
that besides mechanism, which is the principle of causation specified as explanation of
behaviour of wholes on the basis of explanations of the behaviour of parts,8 some entities
require another principle, ‘teleology’, to be understood. This specific intelligibility of life is
defined by the principle of purposiveness, which every researcher must assume in addition
to the general principle of mechanism, in order to be able to ask the philosophical
the hermeneutic turn in philosophy of nature 77
questions which are required if organisms are to be explained. These entities are organised
beings qua self-organising and they cannot be understood unless we appeal to an
explanatory principle which explains the parts from the wholes.
The interpretation of the status of these two kinds of explanation is highly controversial.
A particularly controversial issue is whether mechanism is a regulative principle or whether
it is constitutive, since it is certainly based on the principle of causality which is a
requirement for any kind of knowledge (see Huneman 2007a: 9–11). Teleology, at least, is
clearly a regulative principle for the ‘reflective faculty of judgement’: ‘regulative’ means for
Kant that teleology only gets its meaning in relation to our project of understanding
organisms – whereas constitutive principles are required for any kind of knowledge and for
experience as such. To this extent, the model of a mathesis can no longer be assumed to be
valid for the whole of nature and this represents a departure from the traditional model of
natural philosophy.
The philosophers who followed Kant, as well as the life scientists (although for different
reasons), overcame this distinction between the statuses of teleology and mechanism.
Scientists such as Karl Ernst von Baer, Christian Heinrich Pander (see Larson 1979), or
even the earlier Blumenbach (see Richards 2001) may have simply had no interest in
Kant’s main concern in stating these distinctions. This concern was metaphysical, in that
Kant tried to understand the meaning of order and purposiveness within the structure of
knowledge established by transcendental philosophy. Philosophers of nature were dis-
satisfied that Kant simply opposed these principles. Admittedly, in the Dialectic of the
Critique of Judgement, Kant assumed that the two principles may be identical in the
supersensible substrate of nature (since both are related to the necessities of our finite
thought). His Methodology, too, stated that in practice both principles could be articulated
together in the study of organisms, basically by the teleological principle leading us to ask
about the functions of certain parts and by the mechanistic principle grounding our
investigation of the mechanisms through which such functions are carried. But this
conjunction seemed too extrinsic to Hegel or Schelling, because it did not relate the
principles themselves in terms of their meaning. Philosophy of nature had to show how the
principle of mechanism itself gives rise to that of teleology, otherwise there was an arbitrary
gap in our science of nature.
For Schelling, then, there is only a difference of degree between inorganic and organic
entities and the intellectual operations for understanding mechanisms are entrenched in
organismic schemes. He states in Von der Weltseele: ‘The organism is so little to be
explained from the mechanism that mechanism is to be explained from organism . . . a
world, an organisation and a general organism are the condition (and as such the positive) of the
mechanism’ (Schelling [1801] 1911: 349). He contends that ‘as soon as our conceptions rise
to an idea of nature as a whole, the opposition between mechanism and organism vanishes,
this opposition which delayed for too long the progress of natural science’ and that ‘the
succession of all the organic beings happened by the progressive development of a unique
organisation’.
For Hegel, considering the category of mechanism itself leads dialectically to the
category of teleology, which appears as mechanism’s truth – according to a scheme of
process that pervades all of Hegel’s logic and encyclopaedia of philosophical science.
Mechanism does indeed construe the behaviour and structure of wholes on the basis of the
parts, but in order to be singled out as parts, it must already be presupposed that these parts
are included in a whole and hence they inherit their meaning as parts from the whole. This
prior assumption of the whole means that we are already adopting a teleological stance.
78 philippe huneman
The general conception of explanation, as it is drawn from the practices of the empirical
sciences, is therefore inverted in hermeneutics. On the received view, mechanism is the
easiest and clearest kind of explanation and this makes organisms difficult to understand – a
motivation for Kant’s concern with organisms in the third Critique. On the alternative
hermeneutic view, the organism provides the complete explanatory scheme, so it becomes
clearer and easier to understand than mechanism. This is clear when we consider the
Hegelian theory that life is the Concept existing for-itself for the first time (which means:
life is the Idea but in its immediate state, opaque to itself). The same view is expressed no
less clearly by Schelling. Notwithstanding all their differences, Hegel, Schelling and
Schopenhauer all agree on the priority of organism to mechanism. The reason for this shift
is that we have switched from the viewpoint of lawful regularity to the viewpoint of
meaning, which is proper to the hermeneutics of nature.
The philosophy of nature, then, effected a general synthesis of the natural sciences of the
time, aiming to give a philosophical interpretation of a meaning that was immanent to
nature and was likely to be decipherable in the concepts necessary to the natural sciences.
Two things are worth mentioning about this synthesising project.
In the eighteenth century, some naturalistic philosophies had emerged which viewed
nature as a whole realising the same property to various degrees in a succession of stages: for
example, the theory that sensibility is latent in atoms of matter and expressed in its highest
form in the human mind. Diderot, for instance, in the Rêve de d’Alembert, written in 1769,
articulated such views. Even if these philosophers’ insistence on continuity in nature and
their focus on life and organisms may remind us of Naturphilosophie, however, they are
structurally different syntheses of the natural sciences. Naturalistic philosophies mostly rest
on vitalism, in the form of the claim that all vital phenomena are based on an irreducible
property of sensibility present in the elementary bases of life (Rey 1987; Wolfe 2008).
These philosophies extrapolated a continuous gradation of this property up to psychology
(in the form of sensations and sentiments) and down to matter (in the form of gravity).
Ultimately, they favoured a kind of materialism of ‘feeling matter’ (Huneman 2008). The
Naturphilosophen did not start with ontological assertions about elementary entities and
their properties but with the structure of natural science, namely, the categories of organism
and mechanism. Although they often sounded vitalist, it was not the same vitalism as the
Enlightenment vitalism of Diderot or others (see Reill 2005).
The fact that Naturphilosophie often sounded idealistic, in contrast to the materialist-
sounding views of Enlightenment naturalist philosophers, results from this difference in
structure, which ultimately stems from the difference in the space of knowledge about
nature that occurred at the time of Kant. However, the relationship between the
hermeneutics of nature and the natural sciences, especially in Schellingian Naturphiloso-
phie, is complex. While the main project of philosophers like Schelling or Hegel was to
unveil immanent meaning in nature, they saw themselves as likely to do useful research in
the empirical sciences, especially in those fields that were new and that were appealing to
Newtonian-style forces (Darnton 1968) such as animal magnetism, galvanism, etc. Indeed,
Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is full of experiments in magnetism, chemistry and other topics.
In fact, in the 1800s, Naturphilosophie could be seen as ‘normal science’ in the Kuhnian
sense. Technologies such as microscopes and concepts such as galvanism as the energy
proper to nerve transmission were recent and controversies were raging about their proper
scope and Naturphilosophen such as Johann Wilhelm Ritter or Steffens made important
contributions to these discussions, often by experimenting themselves. L. S. Jacyna (1990)
argued that one of the main achievements of the biological sciences in the nineteenth
the hermeneutic turn in philosophy of nature 79
century, namely, cell theory, owed a great debt to Naturphilosophie. This is because the
general aim of uncovering universal primitive elements of life relied on the idea, supported
by the Naturphilosophen, that something general should unify all aspects of life so that a
single form underlies all living phenomena.
At another level, Naturphilosophie was strongly entangled with morphology, since the
notion of a unity of plan across animal taxa, put forth by Goethe and then developed in the
context of comparative anatomy by Geoffroy Saint Hilaire (Rehbock 1983; Huneman
2006), was foundational for the very project of a philosophy of nature. The so-called
‘transcendental morphology’ school, represented by Johann Friedrich Meckel, Étienne
Serres and Joseph Henry Green, aimed at understanding the few major plans of organisa-
tion under which all organisms were thought to fall. These scholars were influenced by Carl
Friedrich Kielmeyer’s teaching and unpublished discourse (Bach 2001), which in 1800
initiated the project of understanding the scale of living species according to the types of
forces which these species instantiated, a hierarchy of forces which was in turn grounded in
a metaphysical hierarchy of concepts (Schmitt 2007; Pross 1994). This project, although
explicitly using Kant’s notion of purposiveness, clearly resonated with Naturphilosophie’s
idea of generating the major concepts of the special sciences. It is noteworthy that Richard
Owen, author of a major achievement in comparative anatomy by theorising the vertebrate
archetype, confessed to having been deeply influenced by Oken, one of the most
speculative Naturphilosophen (Owen [1837] 1992; see Sloan 2003).
These close relations between Naturphilosophie and the sciences undermine the still-
widespread view that Naturphilosophie was metaphysical delirium which was clearly
detrimental to science. It can even be argued (see Rueger forthcoming) that, beyond
the case of cell theory, the systematic views of Naturphilosophen such as Oken were
translated into a materialist framework even by those who were its most virulent
adversaries, such as Emil du Bois Reymond or Justus von Liebig, while physiologist
Johannes Müller was inspired by Naturphilosophie to forge his theory of the proper energy
of the senses. However, Timothy Lenoir (1982) argued that a line can be drawn between
(1) biologists who undertook the Kantian project of a life science (‘teleomechanism’), of
articulating functional-teleological questions with mechanistic explanations of teleolo-
gical features and who therefore were serious scientists and (2) philosophers of nature,
especially Schelling, who conferred dogmatic metaphysical status on Kantian regulative
principles. Yet pace Lenoir, transcendental morphology, whose main works (such as those
of Owen or Meckel) were important achievements within the life sciences, cannot simply
be subsumed under the ‘Kantian tradition’, because it involves ideas such as that of a
unity of plan across organisms, ideas that are alien to teleomechanism. The morphologist
Joseph Henry Green extensively drew on ideas from Schellingian Naturphilosophie to
construct his hierarchy of types and their relationships, although he presented it in a
rather Kantian way (Sloan 2007). This calls into question a clear-cut boundary between
Naturphilosophie and ‘teleomechanism’; rather, the theoreticians in these fields belong to a
continuum.
Through their unravelling of the formal relationships between the plans of organisa-
tions, transcendental morphologists as well as some embryologists like Von Baer conceived
of a temporality proper to the biological reign, since they thought that the various plans of
organisation emerged one after the other, according to relationships of logical presupposi-
tion and conditioning. The scholium of Von Baer (1828) explicitly considers this
successive appearance of ideal major types of animals. This peculiar kind of evolutionism
influenced Darwin, as Richards (1992; 2002) has convincingly argued – even if Darwinian
80 philippe huneman
history is conceptually distinct from this kind of temporal succession which merely
instantiates formal logical relationships. The subtle relationships between Naturphilosophie
and Darwinism – through transcendental morphology and descriptive embryology –
illustrate the rather complex scientific status of the philosophy of nature.

5. The Content of a Hermeneutics of Nature

Although there are many different philosophical positions within the project of a
hermeneutics of nature, their common descent from Kantian themes in the Critique of
Judgement and the situation of these projects within the same epistemological space mean
that the work of Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer (and others) shares some common
themes.
One is an emphasis on the notion of the organism. Previously, in the classical
configuration of natural philosophy, the concept of order provided the link between
natural history, theology and metaphysics: organisms exhibited an internal order and were
part of a general order which was evidence of divine design. After Kant, however, life as a
self-organising process, grounded on the biological teleology implemented by organic parts
(Ginsborg 2004; Zumbach 1984; Huneman 2007b), replaces the concept of order as a clue
to the articulations and transitions within the general structure of knowledge, especially
between metaphysics and natural history. The organism becomes a general scheme for
conceiving nature. Schelling refers to Kant’s concept of the organism to sketch out the
consequences for our general understanding of nature of this reversal in the explanatory
roles of organism and mechanism:

Since, in any organism everything reciprocally holds and supports everything else, this
organisation must as a whole pre-exist its parts and the whole cannot stem from the
parts, but the parts have to stem from the whole. It is not that we know nature a priori,
but nature is a priori, namely all that is singular within it is determined from the whole or
from the idea of a nature in general. (Schelling [1799] 2004: 198–9)

Through the notion of the organism, Schelling tries to overcome the opposition between
dualism and materialism: we can be naturalists (that is, we are never to explain things in
nature by referring to anything outside nature) and not dualists, yet we must not embrace
materialism (since mechanism is not the real scheme of explanation).
On the basis of this scheme, Schelling was able – contrary to Kant – to claim that nature
itself is an organism, and Oken will equate life and being. In Schelling’s 1802 work Bruno,
we read: ‘The universe embraces itself and . . . constitutes a living being organised in such a
way that it cannot perish’ (Schelling 1907: 2: 482). In Von der Weltseele too, nature is an
evolving organism, constituted by higher and higher degrees of a general organisation –
whose highest point is consciousness. This crucial status of life in the philosophy of nature
partly comes from the Kantian claim that purposiveness is a concept that we human beings,
with our finite power of thought, necessarily have; as a consequence, the concepts used to
conceive life express what is essential to human thinking. Therefore, for Kant, life is
distinctive within nature because it relates to the finitude of the human thought that
apprehends living creatures. Organisms, which we conceive as purposive, are that in which
the very structure of our finite thinking is reflected.9 In this way Kant demonstrated a close
and immanent relationship between finite thought and life. The hermeneutics of nature
inherited this claim, so that the main concepts used to decipher immanent meaning in nature
the hermeneutic turn in philosophy of nature 81
referred to the phenomenon of life. Therefore, when Schelling writes that for Naturphilosophie
‘nature is nothing else than the organ of self-consciousness’ (Schelling 2004: 194), or when
Hegel conceives of nature as the mind opaque to itself, they both rely on this interpretation
of life as a reflexive concept, proper to the necessities of finite thought, elaborated in the
third Critique (Kant [1790] 1987: 283–94, §§76–7).
In this context the boundary between the organic and the inorganic in nature, which
was fundamental for Kant, disappears (Zammito 1992: 215–22). For example, Schelling
writes:

There is a productivity with no consciousness, but which is conscious productivity

originally transformed, the simple reflection of which is seen in nature and which, from
the viewpoint of the natural perspective, must appear as one and the same blind instinct
that acts at various levels from crystallisation to the heights of organic formations (from
which it returns again to crystallisation through the formative drive [Kunsttrieb]) . . .
(2004: 194)

This completely reverses Kant’s argument in the Critique of Judgement that crystallisation
must not be conceived on the same lines as the organic Bildungstrieb (see Huneman 2006;
Sloan 2006).
A second leitmotif of the hermeneutics of nature is conflict, absurdity and tragedy. Given
Kant’s criticisms of physical theology and of the economy of nature, the hermeneutic
approach to nature cannot regard it as an area in which order and harmony are guaranteed
by a transcendent reference point. Rather, conflict and disharmony are pervasive features
of the meaning of nature. Schelling writes in Von der Weltseele:

The negative condition of the vital process is an antagonism of negative principles,

which is entertained by the continuous influence of the positive principle (the first cause
of life). If this antagonism is to be permanent in the living being, the equilibrium of
principles has to be continuously disturbed inside it. (Schelling [1801] 1911: 202; see
also Bowie 1993)

The privileged status of life within nature means that there is a constant possibility of
conflict between life and non-living nature. This reactivates a conceptual motif to which
vitalist physicians continuously referred up until Xavier Bichat famously stated that ‘life is
the set of the forces which resist death’ (Bichat 1800).10 It is therefore not surprising that
Bichat’s work is a major reference point for Schopenhauer and for Hegel (Schopenhauer
[1818/1844] 1966: 2: 261–8; Hegel [1831] 1970: 3: 126–7, §355; 3: 150, §362A).
Schopenhauer describes the process by which the inorganic gives rise to the organic as
follows:

There is no victory without fight: the highest idea, or objectification of the will, cannot
arise without overcoming the lower ones and it has to triumph over the resistance of
those forces which, while reduced to slaves, still aspire to manifest their essence in an
independent and complete manner. ([1818/1844] 1966: 1: 146)

In Hegel’s philosophy of nature, life, as the immediate form of the Idea, realised in nature, is
in itself negativity; hence, it carries in its essence its own conflictual opposition to brute
matter. Hegel draws the consequences of this: ‘the elementary powers of objectivity . . . are
82 philippe huneman
. . . continuously ready to jump to begin their process within the organic body and life is
the constant fight against this possibility’ (Hegel [1831] 1991: 293, §218). So:

[T]he living body is always on the edge of falling into a chemical process: acid stuff,
water, salt, are always about to rise up, but are always suppressed and it is only in death,
or in illness, that this chemical process can appear for itself. (Hegel [1831] 1970: 3: 10,
§337A)

Schopenhauer and Hegel conceive of this conflict in the same terms: subordination of
non-living stuff to living things, together with living creatures undergoing continuous
harassment by chemical processes through which they eventually perish. And for both
authors, the living and the non-living are moments of the same process: for Schopenhauer,
both are stages of the objectification of the will, whereas, for Hegel, both are stages of the
logical process of the Concept realised within nature. Both agree that this process is not a
temporal one and both contend that life has an intelligibility different to that of the non-
living realm. However, for Hegel, physical phenomena pass into organic phenomena
because in a way the former are the same as the latter and therefore the former are defeated
by the latter. As we saw earlier, life is the truth of nature pure and simple and that is why
life can destroy and appropriate brute nature. Schopenhauer says something different: life
has an intrinsically higher force than non-living nature because life is a higher degree of the
objectification of the will (Schopenhauer [1818/1844] 1966: 1: 139–52).
The leitmotif of conflict goes beyond this vitalistic conflict. Hermeneutics inherits the
radical critique of natural economy in the third Critique, a critique that fitted in perfectly
with the trends in comparative anatomy at this time. ‘Everywhere in nature’, says
Schopenhauer, ‘we see fight, war and alternative victories and therefore we better
understand the divorce of the will with itself’ ([1818/1844] 1966: 1: 146). Conflict in
nature is pervasive and does not lead to any stable order. Schopenhauer acknowledges that
species are stable and co-exist (1: 153–61), although individuals fight eternally. But this is
no longer the Linnaean idea of an order through conflict. What is emphasised now, if we
read Schopenhauer, is not the resulting order, but the infinity and absurdity of the eternal
fight which divides the will from itself:

It is an unending, never satisfied, effort that is the essence of the plant, a continuous
effort through more and more noble forms, until the seed which is, then, a new
beginning and this is repeated infinitely. Never a true goal, never a final satisfaction,
nowhere a place to rest. (1: 309)

This picture of nature is very close to the Hegelian idea of the bad infinite, which for Hegel
is pervasively present within nature – for example, in the genera of living creatures which
exist as successive infinite series.
A third and final leitmotif of the hermeneutics of nature is that of gender (Geschlecht) as a
major sign of nature’s finitude – as nature’s attempt and failure to overcome such a finitude.
For Hegel, reproduction is the highest moment of the living being’s process. Here the living
being relates to another living being and so it recognises itself in an Other; and the
Universal – that is, its species – exists for it through the mediation of this Other. However,
because a species exists as the bad infinite of the sequence of generations, the universal and
the particular can never accord: the living being dies (Hegel [1831] 1970: 3: 175–6, §369).
This death, nevertheless, means that life – and therefore nature itself, whose final end
the hermeneutic turn in philosophy of nature 83
consists in life – leaves room for the moment of Spirit (3: 210–11, §376). This relationship
between nature and spirit which comes about through the failure of the gender process is
properly Hegelian (see Beiser 2002; Westphal 2008). However, the special status of
sexuality is a general feature of the hermeneutics of nature at this time.
For Schelling, the genders are nature’s attempt to overcome its own separation, as well as
its inability to overcome it insofar as these genders are themselves this very separation that
they perpetuate. ‘Nature hates gender and, where it arises, it arises against nature’s will. The
separation into genders is an unavoidable fate, with which nature has to cope and which
nature cannot overcome insofar as it is organic’ (Schelling [1799] 2004: 231). Peter Hanss
Reill (2005: 229) has recently made a convincing case that for the Naturphilosophen, unlike
the Enlightenment vitalist thinkers, gender differences were a crucial intellectual focus
because they could be interpreted in terms of polarities, oppositions and meaningful
schemas. Thus, Schopenhauer gave a long analysis of these matters in the Supplement
XLIV to the World as Will and Representation, entitled ‘The metaphysics of sexual love’.
This is surely the best example of a system placing the theme of sexual lust at the heart of its
conception of nature.

6. The Fate of the Hermeneutics of Nature

Philosophical reflection about nature in the nineteenth century was deeply influenced by
the hermeneutic project. However, from the 1830s onwards with the rise of critiques of
idealism in general and of Hegelianism and Naturphilosophie especially, the kind of post-
Kantian philosophy of nature which I have described here was progressively dismissed. We
can distinguish two sources of criticism: philosophical, coming from thinkers such as
Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche; and scientific. The former source of attacks on philosophy
of nature was the side-effect of a general rejection of Hegel and of post-Kantian idealism.
Within this, philosophy of nature was sometimes understood – by Marx, for example – as
paradigmatic of the idealist privileging of ideas over reality.
The other line of criticism came from scientists themselves, especially chemists. The
synthesis of urea by Friedrich Wöhler in 1828 provided materialists with a strong argument
that vital properties were reducible to plain matter. The rise of Darwinism, especially in
Germany, involved a materialist interpretation of the succession of species which had
interested the Naturphilosophen and the transcendental morphologists. The prospect of
unifying physics and biology within a general science of evolving matter, a synthesis later
advocated by Ernst Haeckel, was far removed from the kind of universal organicism
endorsed by the hermeneuticists of nature. The conjunction of Darwinism and chemical
materialism in the second half of the nineteenth century may explain why almost all
philosophers gave up programmes in the philosophy of nature of the same ambition as
Schelling’s.
Yet the hermeneutics of nature remained alive in several philosophical works about
nature. Distinct from the natural sciences which developed within Darwinian and/or
materialist frameworks and also distinct from the kind of scientifically oriented philosophy
which understood philosophical discourse on science to be mainly methodological or
epistemological – for example John Stuart Mill and William Whewell (see Whewell 1840)
– there was a philosophical trend which took up many elements of the hermeneutic stance.
Since Schopenhauer shared this post-Kantian hermeneutic stance, the Nietzschean project
of interpreting nature as the antagonism of various irreducible wills – a project directly
stemming from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will – belonged to this trend. The later idea
84 philippe huneman
of Lebensphilosophie, developed by Wilhelm Dilthey amongst others at the end of the
century, rested on an insistence that the very fact of being alive provided human beings
with hermeneutic capacities through which they could understand themselves and the
world in which they live, in a way different to that of the explanatory natural sciences (see
Dilthey [1883] 1959). This project reactivates important dimensions of the hermeneutic
stance.
The general idea of uncovering a meaning in nature that is immanent to it and yet is not
exhausted by the natural sciences constitutes the point of connection between the
philosophy of nature (as I have described it here) and important philosophical views
of nature which developed outside the German area. Thoreau and Emerson, authors of two
major philosophical works on nature, were aware of some of the mostly German devel-
opments sketched here. Coleridge introduced Schelling’s thought into English-speaking
countries (Modiano 1985; Wellek 1931) and Emerson and Thoreau, as well as the group
who called themselves ‘transcendentalists’, were exposed to this teaching. So it is
unsurprising that Thoreau’s views on nature, famously presented in his 1854 work Walden,
resonate with aspects of the hermeneutics of nature. Nature according to him has intrinsic
value and significance; rightly approached, it is spiritual as much as physical, not the
symbol of spirituality, but deity and spirituality itself, ‘without metaphor’, which we can
experience. Science can help to foster this experience, as in the case of entomology, as
Thoreau writes in his Natural History of Massachusetts: ‘Entomology extends the limits of
being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom’
(Thoreau [1842] 1906: 5: 107).
In particular, the philosopher of nature is supposed to take the natural sciences into
account while producing a discourse on nature of a different kind. Stanley Cavell regarded
Thoreau as a Kantian transcendentalist because he highlighted the role of the form of our
knowledge in our acquisition of science. But the view of nature and science which Thoreau
developed stems much more from the hermeneutics of nature that Coleridge had made
familiar to the American transcendentalists. While Thoreau relies on science to know
nature, since the ‘true man of science . . . [will have] a deeper and finer experience than other
men’ (Thoreau 1906: 5: 131), he insists that science by itself does not carry the meaning of
nature: the scientist ‘studies nature as a dead language’, he writes in his Journal entry for 10
May 1853 (11: 135). So philosophy integrates the natural sciences – but, contrary to the
philosophers of nature, it does not bring about systematic knowledge, since it proceeds from a
‘a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of what we called knowledge before’ (5: 241). This is
in the sense that the very meaning of what we knew according to the sciences now appears in
an experience where it displays an essential aspect different from the previous content of our
knowledge. The truth about nature is not genuinely accessible through scientific meth-
odologies: ‘We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics
to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy’ (5: 131) – although scientific facts
and recollections are necessary to fuel this learning, as is exemplified by Thoreau’s reading of
botanists and naturalists in order to write about his excursions.
Thoreau is not committed to any form of idealism. Yet his general position on nature and
the natural sciences to some extent replicates the hermeneutic stance that had developed
at the beginning of the century. Thoreau affirms that there is an immediate relationship of
meaning between nature and humanity – an immediate relationship that the scientific
knowledge of nature could not exhaust, although some scientific knowledge is needed for
any grasp of nature. Thoreau’s position contrasts with the German materialism that was
increasingly shaping the whole of physical and chemical scientific theory.
the hermeneutic turn in philosophy of nature 85
As a theory, Naturphilosophie, as well as Hegel’s philosophy of nature, became outdated
after the middle of the nineteenth century. But the theoretical matrix elaborated through
the critical reappraisal of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, and defined here as a hermeneutic
stance towards nature, continued to produce philosophical theories and views of nature in
the writings of Thoreau or Nietzsche. A genealogy could trace important philosophical
interpretations of nature in the twentieth century back to this theoretical matrix –
interpretations such as those of Alfred North Whitehead or Henri Bergson.

7. Conclusion
Kant’s analysis of purposiveness opened up a space for philosophical interpretations of
nature because it created a gap between nature’s lawful regularity and nature’s meaning.
Within German idealism, philosophy of nature was the research programme of this
hermeneutics of nature; Naturphilosophie, Schopenhauer’s theory of the will in nature
and Hegel’s philosophy of nature were three divergent realisations of this programme. Due
to its Kantian genealogy, the hermeneutics of nature gave special status to life, stressed the
overwhelming character of conflict and disorder and the importance of gender and was
sensitive to a kind of tragic meaning in nature.
These elaborations of course do not exhaust all the various conceptions of nature in
nineteenth-century philosophy – interpretations of Darwinism, Anglo-Saxon theories of
science such as those of Whewell or Mill and large-scale syntheses such as Comte’s
positivism, Antoine Cournot’s (1875) rational analysis of the natural sciences and Herbert
Spencer’s general doctrine of evolution were important and influential throughout the
century and sometimes these thinkers were not aware of the developments underlined in
this chapter. My intention has been to delineate an important alternative philosophical
stance regarding nature, a stance that continued to be pursued by various philosophers later
in the century. This hermeneutic stance marks an alternative to the epistemological or
positivist views which emerged later in the century and which, several decades later, gave
rise to what is now known and practised as philosophy of science. To this extent, the
historical importance of this hermeneutic stance goes beyond its main achievements such
as Naturphilosophie and bears on the genealogy of contemporary ways of philosophising
about nature.

Notes
1. Foucault (1966) famously understood knowledge of nature in the classical age as natural history.
However, what metaphysicians such as Leibniz made clear is the fundamental connection
between natural history and natural philosophy.
2. In the third Critique (Kant [1790] 1987: 257–61, §67), Kant reintroduces relative purposiveness
and therefore a hierarchy of organisms serving one another, but this reintroduction is conditional.
Only on the basis of assessing internal purposiveness can one make use – mainly as a heuristic tool
– of the idea that one organism fulfils a role for another. Hence, the system of nature that can be
drawn up on this basis is, so to speak, more regulative than is the use of internal purposiveness. We
can conceive of organisms without conceiving a purposive system of nature, whereas we cannot
conceive of the latter without presupposing the former.
3. All translations from Schelling 2004 are modified in light of Schelling 2001.
4. Schelling recognises that the project of a philosophy of nature is motivated by the need to give a
philosophical account of these two excesses. In the Entwurf, he identifies two ways in which
philosophy overcomes the opposition between conscious and unconscious intelligence: imme-
 86 philippe huneman
diately in the activity of genius, mediately in ‘some products of nature, to the extent that within
them the co-penetration [Verschmelzung] of the ideal and the real is perceived’ (Schelling 2004:
193).
5. See Schelling 2004: 196. Since this paper is not a study of Schelling, I will be quoting from various
stages of his thought. However, although his several versions of Naturphilosophie are quite different
(see Richards 2002; Beiser 2002; Bowie 1993), his general position on philosophy’s relation to
science remains constant.
6. Translations from Hegel and Schopenhauer are sometimes modified by the author without special
notice. References to Hegel’s works include paragraph number (§) after page number. ‘A’ (e.g.
§55A) indicates a reference to Hegel’s ‘addition’ to the paragraph.
7. In Petry’s translation, which on this point is based on the first and second editions, this passage
appears as §370A.
8. On the interpretation of mechanism in Kant see McLaughlin 1990, Ginsborg 2004.
9. Kant does not identify organisms and life and the Critique of Judgement deals only with the science
of organisms as objects of biological judgement, whereas life is identified by self motion (rather
than by a kind of organisation) and the concept occurs mostly in psychological contexts, as the
lowest level of the faculty of desire. Yet the philosophers of nature will conflate life and organisms,
precisely because they will no longer take purposiveness to be a merely regulative concept and will
confer on organisms the same metaphysical status as any other natural being, so that organism
becomes just as metaphysical a concept as life.
10. On Bichat’s work in the history of physiology see Huneman 1998.

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 5
Idealism and Naturalism in the Nineteenth
Century

Sebastian Gardner

1. Introduction
The nineteenth century may be regarded as comprising the first chapter in the story, as it
must appear to us now, of idealism’s long-term decline and of the eventual ascent within
the analytic tradition of a confident and sophisticated naturalism.1 The chief landmarks of
both developments are fairly clear. The former begins with Kant’s Critical Philosophy and
the great systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, a rich legacy which is re-explored
continuously over the course of the century and provides the basis for myriad novel
positions, leading in the final quarter of the nineteenth century to a renaissance of absolute
idealism in Anglo-American philosophy. The story of the growth of naturalism may be
taken to begin with Auguste Comte and to develop through John Stuart Mill and Herbert
Spencer to Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach, receiving an important impetus from the
mid-century German materialism of Karl Vogt, Ludwig Büchner, Jacob Moleschott and
Heinrich Czolbe (see Gregory 1977), as well as of course, after the publication of The Origin
of Species in 1859, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which found forceful
advocates in figures such as Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Haeckel. The neo-Kantian
development which established itself in Germany from the 1860s and 1870s onwards has a
place in the trajectories of both idealism and naturalism.
Both of these narratives, sketched here in the briefest outline, require elaboration not
merely through the addition of numerous other and less salient figures and movements but
also through an account of their context: namely, the exponential growth of scientific
knowledge witnessed in the nineteenth century, especially in physics, physiology and
experimental psychology, together with the profound cultural shift accompanying the
achievements and industrial applications of modern science, to which belongs the erosion
of the institutional bases of Christian theism and demise of its intellectual authority.
Closely bound up with these developments is the cultural dissemination of what might be
called ‘practical naturalism’ – the view, reborn with the Enlightenment, that the true Good
is of an exclusively worldly nature and its realisation fostered by scientific modernity.
What I propose to do in this chapter, in place of attempting to fill out the historical
detail of each of the developments independently, is to concentrate on instances where
they interact or come into significant contact. More exactly, my focus will be on
philosophers of the period who did not simply and straightforwardly pursue either of
the two tendencies but instead regarded the relation of natural scientific knowledge to
metaphysical speculation as posing a problem not to be solved by coming down simply on
90 sebastian gardner
one side rather than the other and so advanced positions which responded in a creative
fashion to the competing claims of idealism and naturalism, in some cases offering a kind of
fusion. This approach, I will suggest, allows us to identify what it was that formed for
nineteenth-century philosophy, to the extent that one can generalise over such a period,
the crux of the opposition of idealism and naturalism. Because the main locus of
developments at the intersection of idealism and naturalism was Germany, the figures I
shall discuss belong chiefly to German philosophy. The order of discussion is loosely
chronological but I shall depart from the strict historical sequence where doing so helps to
give the historical territory a clearer systematic shape.

2. Nature versus Freedom: Classical German Philosophy

Although anticipations can be located in early modern and even ancient philosophy, the
opposition of idealism and naturalism, as it was understood in the nineteenth century, had
its origin in classical German philosophy. Kant famously asserts in the Introduction to the
Critique of Judgement of 1790 that ‘there is an incalculable gulf fixed between the domain of
the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the
supersensible’ (Kant [1790] 2000: 63). While conceding that something must be done by
way of constructing a connecting link from the one domain to the other – the overarching
aim of the third Critique, Kant says, is to show that ‘nature must be conceived in such a way
that the lawfulness of its form is at least in agreement with the possibility of ends that are to
be realised in it in accordance with the laws of freedom’ – Kant regards it as inconceivable,
for human as opposed to divine reason, that Nature and Freedom should be cognised as
comprising two parts of a single unified reality.
This opposition of ontological realms – or, to the extent that our concern is with
representations rather than their objects, of two domains of concepts and judgement –
corresponds to and underpins the opposition of idealism and naturalism as philosophical or
metaphilosophical positions. In so far as Nature and Freedom are considered to be not
contiguous, mutually cohering realities but rather – by virtue of the principles and forms of
explanation which they mandate – in metaphysical competition, they provide the basis for
an exclusive disjunction: either we take the side of Nature, yielding the thesis that all
existents are subject to natural law and that all true explanation is natural scientific in
form; or we take that of Freedom, yielding the denial that Nature, as conceived in the terms
of empirical natural science, is ontologically or explanatorily comprehensive and the
affirmation that human subjectivity is non-natural yet irreducibly real. A more ambitious
form of idealism will add that subjectivity itself supplies the grounds, if not ontological then
at least conceptual, of Nature. On each alternative, the competition of Nature and
Freedom is resolved by taking one of the pair to encompass the other.
Kant himself does not draw up the philosophical geography in exactly these terms. The
highest opposition of (meta)philosophical positions recognised by Kant is that of transcen-
dental idealism, his own standpoint, to transcendental realism, whose forms are legion and of
which naturalism is only one. Nor is naturalism, in the sense that the term has for us now,
regarded by Kant as of special interest and importance. Kant concerns himself variously with
materialism, scepticism, empiricism and other standpoints which deny validity to pure reason
and so annul the reality of Freedom and he in addition recognises an entrenched tendency in
human reason (at the level of natural consciousness as much as that of philosophical reflection)
to assimilate all objects of thought to empirical objects, but he does not envisage a position
which seeks to appropriate philosophically the epistemological prestige of the natural sciences
 idealism and naturalism 91
in the manner characteristic of naturalism as we now know it. In large part this is because Kant
took his own position to accommodate as fully as can reasonably be demanded the distinctive
epistemic authority of natural science: subsequent to the Critique, in the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science of 1786 and in the notes published as Opus Postumum, Kant
attempted to show that his transcendental analysis of the conditions of experience could be
extended to provide natural science with its basic concepts and principles.
Kant’s organisation of the field of philosophical debate makes sense to the extent that
one keeps in view and wishes to take issue with the huge number of ‘dogmatic’ but non-
naturalistic pre-Kantian metaphysical positions, from Plato to Leibniz, in order to be able
to present transcendental idealism as a novel, comprehensive and final solution to the
problems of philosophy. But once the lesson of Kant’s critique of supersensible metaphysics
has been absorbed – once it has been accepted that metaphysics as an enterprise of
theoretical reason is a vain endeavour, which can survive only in the attenuated form of
transcendental idealism’s system of principles of possible experience – and when in
addition it is recognised that Kantian idealism is open to challenge from proto-naturalistic,
Humean and Spinozistic quarters, as had been demonstrated in the early reception of
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason, the philosophical landscape
changes. We then arrive at a view according to which the philosophical options divide
cleanly and exhaustively between idealism and naturalism.
This is the picture presented by Fichte, whom we find maintaining in 1797 that at the
ultimate limit of philosophical reflection an opposition is confronted between ‘idealism’ –
which, according to Fichte, is necessarily transcendental in character and treats the free
non-empirical subject as the universal philosophical explanans – and ‘dogmatism’, defined
by its commitment to explaining subjectivity in terms of ‘things’, Sachen, these being either
empirically real natural objects or modelled closely on them (see Fichte [1797] 1994: 12–
25; and Martin 1997: 36–42). Fichte argues that the choice between these two standpoints,
which comprise the only ones possible, is all-decisive, that is, it determines the results that
we will reach in all other contexts of philosophical reflection. And it cannot, according to
Fichte, be made on grounds of theoretical reason, for it is entirely possible to construe the
world on the basis of mere Sachen – doing so will fail to reconstruct the self-positing Ich
affirmed by idealism, but the significance of this failure cannot, by means of purely
theoretical reflection, be communicated to the dogmatic standpoint, which must conse-
quently be granted internal consistency.
In the course of German idealism’s further development, which interweaves with
German Romanticism, Fichte’s disjunction is held to have been overcome. Schelling’s
more comprehensive idealism or Real-Idealismus obviates the need for an original choice of
standpoints by refusing to grant in the first place the coherence of the naturalist’s
conception of natural phenomena as Sachen. Within Schelling’s idealism, nature is treated
in terms of idealist categories, and the a priori reflection which, he holds, establishes that
Nature in the sense of natura naturans is infinite pure activity joins seamlessly with
scientific enquiry, which reveals natural phenomena, from the most basic forces of light,
electricity and magnetism up to the complex functions of natural organisms, to be stages
belonging to a single unified process which culminates in – for it is directed towards – the
coming-into-existence of self-consciousness. The Naturphilosophie of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia,
although proceeding in terms of a different set of philosophical categories from Schelling –
Hegel’s emphasis is on the immanent rationality, in the sense defined by his Logic, of
Nature – borrows its pattern from Schelling.
Clearly, such philosophy had gone strikingly far beyond Kant. The ‘system of natural
92 sebastian gardner
causes’ affirmed in the third Critique permitted judgements about nature to be regulated by
teleological ideas, but by no means did Kant allow the very existence of Nature to be
‘deduced’ from Freedom: Kant’s aim had been merely and modestly to coordinate Nature
and Freedom, without implying their knowable ontological unity, let alone that Freedom is
constitutive of Nature and that it is possible for us to explain the existence of mechanism in
teleological terms.
At the time of Hegel’s death in 1831 – when his system, though subject to much dispute,
had no rival of equal strength – the most original, progressive and widely endorsed
philosophical developments in Germany embraced, therefore, an idealistic resolution of
the antinomy of Nature and Freedom. The Naturphilosophie of absolute idealism thus joined
with the tradition of romantic science, indebted to Johann Gottfried Herder and enjoying
the prestigious sanction of Goethe, pursued by such creative figures as Lorenz Oken, Franz
von Baader, Karl August Eschenmayer and Gotthilf von Schubert. Had natural science in
the nineteenth century followed the course projected for it by Naturphilosophie, the
idealism/naturalism opposition would have disappeared from view and the notion that
natural science threatens the reality of autonomous subjectivity would have come to be
regarded as an error belonging to a more limited stage of philosophical understanding.
This was not, of course, how things turned out; the union of idealist philosophy and a
posteriori enquiry into nature did not endure. It is important, however, to get this fact into
focus. Romantic ideas about nature did not disappear or lose currency abruptly or at any
clearly determinable point. They remained strongly influential, to such an extent that from
the point of view of many nineteenth-century figures – Alexander von Humboldt, Gustav
Theodor Fechner and Haeckel provide examples – the elements of their thought that
we would consider genuinely ‘scientific’ join inseparably with those that we would call
‘romantic’. This was not because the notion of a line of demarcation between science and
pseudo-science was alien to the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century thought about
nature, even in the early decades, was not credulous or undisciplined and thinkers for
whom the schemas and speculations of Naturphilosophie had intellectual appeal were not
ignoring the evidence of their senses. The question of what counts as genuine empirical
explanation had been a preoccupation of early modern philosophy ever since the over-
throw of Aristotelianism, and Kant had affirmed the epistemological priority (for human
minds) of mechanical over teleological explanation, and even laid down mathematisation
as a stringent condition of natural scientific status. The extensive debates about vitalism
and galvanism showed how fiercely the empirical credentials of theoretical entities could
be contested. The crucial point, rather, is that even for those thinkers to whom it was as
clear as it is to us now that science does not consist in grasping divine ideation and for
whom the systems of German idealism represented so much verbal fabrication, the
accumulated body of scientific knowledge did not determine sharply, in the way that it
presumably does for us now, the scientificity of a given theoretical proposal.
That said, it remains the case that, for a variety of reasons, the notion that philosophical
reflection can reach all the way down to empirical particularity and contribute to the
content of natural science fell by the wayside: Hegel’s system failed to retain its power of
conviction for the following generation, naturphilosophisch forms of explanation came to
seem fruitless and over the course of the century nature increasingly shook itself free of
romantic attributes. In so far as nineteenth-century thinkers rejected the programme of
uniting romantic speculation about nature with a theory of the Absolute and thereby
abandoned the German idealist integration of Nature and Freedom, the opposition of
idealism and naturalism re-presented itself.
 idealism and naturalism 93

3. After Hegel
If we ask where the earliest instance of a confrontation between idealism and naturalism
is to be found, an obvious candidate is Ludwig Feuerbach, who provides an important
bridging element in the transition from Hegel’s idealism to Marx’s materialism. In
his first book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality of 1830, Feuerbach attacked the
Christian doctrine of personal immortality, insisting on the bodily existence of the
self, and naturalistic elements became increasingly prominent in the course of his
critical appropriation of Hegel’s thought for emancipatory humanist purposes, in
particular in his introduction of the foundational concept of man’s ‘species-being’,
Gattungswesen.
Feuerbach’s writings gave powerful encouragement to the German materialists, with
whom Feuerbach later associated himself. It should be emphasised, however, that the
naturalism of Feuerbach and that of the Young Hegelians more generally was of a
tempered sort. It involved of course repudiation of the supernatural entities of Christian
theology, but, once those had been expelled, there was little more to be gained for the
purposes of radical social theory by emphasising man’s embeddedness in the natural
order; on the contrary, if human self-realisation constitutes the ideal for our endeavours,
then man needs to be well distinguished from the rest of nature. Thus Feuerbach
declared, in terms that a thorough-going naturalist would scarcely be able to accept,
that: ‘Man is not a particular being, like the animals, but a universal being . . . an
unlimited and free being . . . this freedom and universality extend themselves over
man’s total being’ ([1843] 1986: 69).
In addition, although foundational issues of epistemology and metaphysics were im-
plicated in its attempt to provide an account of the conditions for human self-realisation –
Feuerbach himself was committed to an unrefined empiricist identification of the real with
the ‘sensuous’ ([1843] 1986: 49–51) – Young Hegelianism fought its battles chiefly not on
the terrain of general metaphysics but rather of theology, Biblical criticism, philosophy of
history and political thought. The materialist theory of history advanced by Marx, which
locates man’s original distinction from animals in his production of his means of
subsistence and implies a strong continuity of human development with natural history,
is not typical of Young Hegelianism but rather signalled his break from it (see Marx and
Engels [1845–46] 1970: 37–52).
It is notable more generally that a number of the positions which pitted themselves
explicitly against idealism in the first half of the nineteenth century were neither motivated
by, nor pointed in the direction of, a naturalistic world-view. To take two central instances
which have had lasting influence, Schelling’s critique in his late ‘positive’ philosophy of
Hegel’s rationalism and Søren Kierkegaard’s repudiation of the Hegelian System were both
directed, on the contrary, to religious ends. Schelling and Kierkegaard both maintained the
irreducibility of being to conceptuality and so affirmed that reality outstrips idealist
comprehension, but for neither was being in the relevant sense a possible object of natural
scientific investigation. Schelling’s dark reflections on Seyn, inspired by Jacob Boehme,
were intended to explain how the existence of Nature is related to that of God and to
reconcile the unity of a necessary being with the multiplicity of the contingent phenom-
enal world. For Kierkegaard the value of the thought that Being eludes conceptualisation
lay in the opening that it gave to recognition of the individual’s ‘existing subjectivity’ as
philosophically ultimate. The possibility of undertaking a critique of idealism without
endorsing naturalism was facilitated by an identification of idealism with Hegel’s system,
94 sebastian gardner
rejection of which was compatible with embracing other forms of (idealistically inclined)
anti-naturalism. Thus Schelling may be described, it has been suggested, as providing a
‘self-critique of idealism’, while Kierkegaard is standardly regarded as heralding twentieth-
century existentialism.

4. Schopenhauer
To locate a more pointed expression of the naturalistic vision – untrammelled by
emancipatory social concerns and free from any taint of Hegelian idealism – we should
look before Feuerbach to Schopenhauer.
When the term German idealism is employed in its broadest sense, Schopenhauer is
himself included within that movement. This has a plain justification, for the very title of
his main work informs us that the world is to be regarded, in one of its two aspects, as mere
‘representation’, and Kant’s theories are drawn on liberally by Schopenhauer in his account
of phenomenal reality. But of deeper importance for the purpose of tracking long-term,
underlying tendencies of philosophical development is the fact that the thought which
stands at the centre of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system is profoundly in accord with
the outlook of modern naturalism.
The thesis that the world in its second, ontologically basic aspect is Wille contradicts
Kant’s conception of the order of things no less than it does those of Fichte, Schelling and
Hegel. Kant had defined ‘will’ as the faculty of practical reason and the final architecture of
Kant’s Critical system locates man, on account of his capacity for pure practical reason, that
is, morality, at the very pinnacle of creation. Kant tells us in the third Critique that the
whole of nature may be regarded as having a telos, as constituting ‘a system in accordance
with the rule of ends, to which idea all of the mechanism of nature in accordance with
principles of reason must now be subordinated’ (Kant [1790] 2000: 250). Schopenhauer,
while agreeing that man occupies a distinctive and privileged position in the order of
things, departs from Kant on two key points.
First, Schopenhauer holds that there is fundamental metaphysical continuity between
human beings and other organisms, indeed, empirical entities in general. Kant had
reasoned in such a way that only rational subjects come to be regarded as possessing,
in addition to their ‘empirical character’, an ‘intelligible character’ falling outside the
bounds of empirical causality. Schopenhauer, in contrast, asserts that all empirical entities
are to be regarded as manifestations of an intelligible character (Schopenhauer [1818/1844]
1966: 1: 156): persons and stones are equally objectifications of Wille, differing merely in
the ‘adequacy’ of the ‘grade’ of objectivity possessed by the ‘Idea’ which defines the natural
kind to which they belong; the ‘deliberate conduct of man’ differs from ‘blindly acting
forces of nature’ only in ‘degree’ (1: 110).
Second, although Schopenhauer accepts the teleological description of natural phe-
nomena and even agrees with Romantic-idealist Naturphilosophie that the natural world in
its entirety must be considered a teleological whole (1: 153–61), there can be no sense in
which the existence of man or anything else instantiates genuine purposiveness for
Schopenhauer, for the very nature of Wille is inconsistent with the ultimate reality of
any Zweck. That nature exhibits teleological order merely reflects the fact that nature
expresses ‘the identity of the one and indivisible will in all its very varied phenomena’
(1: 119) and this One Will is ‘a striving without aim’, ein Streben ohne Ziel (1: 321), the
inner nature of which is not characterised by purposiveness, which presupposes determina-
tion and so is internal to the sphere of representation: ‘willing as a whole has no end in
 idealism and naturalism 95
view’ (1: 165). It is true therefore, as Kant says, that nature must be considered a system, but
it is subordinated to no ‘principle of reason’.
In accordance with this schema, Schopenhauer, recalling Hume, treats reason as a mere
capacity for abstraction and man’s intellect as a tool of the will, regarding human
motivation in general as strictly subservient to natural drives and human action as strictly
necessitated: knowledge ‘enters as an expedient required at this stage of the will’s
objectification for the preservation of the individual and the propagation of the species’
(1: 150). Schopenhauer’s anticipations of Freud, with respect to the general tenor of his
anthropological view as well as particular psychological hypotheses, have received frequent
comment (and see Chapter 11 in this volume).
Although the final basis of the metaphysics of will is a priori, in so far as it derives from a
necessary component of inner self-awareness, Schopenhauer maintains that, once we are in
possession of this essential cognitive key, knowledge of the non-purposive character of
Wille becomes available also a posteriori, through examination of the ‘physiognomy’ of
natural phenomena (see Schopenhauer [1836] 1992), not least the quality of human
experience – the predominantly painful, conflictual and pointless character of what
proceeds in the phenomenal world is merely our apprehension a posteriori of the fact
that purposiveness is a priori categorially alien to Wille.
In so far as idealism is defined less by a thesis of objects’ mind-dependence than by the
assertion that reality is ultimately akin to man’s rational mind and therefore congenial to
his exercise of capacities of freedom and reason which transcend his merely animal nature,
Schopenhauer’s philosophy is aggressively anti-idealistic: his system amounts to an
assertion of the truth of naturalism in the language and terms of modern idealism. This
becomes clear when it is reflected that all that is required in order to give Schopenhauer’s
metaphysics a bona fide naturalistic character is the naturalisation of Wille: if this
ontological substrate is brought within the scope of natural science and thus the line
between science and metaphysics pushed back, then the ‘world as will’ becomes the
scientific image of a fully naturalised world and the ‘world as representation’ its manifest
image.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy did not draw attention or exert its influence until the middle
of the nineteenth century and, when it did so, this consisted not in the direct fostering of
naturalistic philosophical doctrine – the metaphysical idealistic character of his system
ruled that out – but rather in making it an urgent topic of philosophical debate whether the
nature of reality warrants optimism or pessimism. The connection with idealism and
naturalism was, however, close to the surface. The genius of Schopenhauer’s position lay in
its suggestion that when Kantian idealism is properly thought through it agrees on
fundamental points with naturalism, pace Hegel and rationalistic German idealism, just
as naturalism, pushed to the limit, must acknowledge that empirical explanation needs to
be completed with a metaphysical thesis; and that the upshot of this union is a practical
and axiological outlook which merits the title of pessimism or, as Nietzsche later termed it,
nihilism.
The challenge set by Schopenhauer was, therefore, to discover a way of sustaining
optimism or at least avoiding pessimism without returning to Christianity or its Hegelian
variant or subscribing to the programme of Comtean positivism, the naı̈vety of which
Schopenhauer had exposed. Ever since the Enlightenment, the promise of naturalism,
trumpeted by materialist philosophes such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Baron
d’Holbach, had been to deliver unprecedented quantities of human happiness through
the elimination of false supernaturalisms and the effective instrumentalisation of natural
96 sebastian gardner
causes. This practical dimension was regarded not as an incidental gain but as integral to
the rationality of the naturalistic world-view: it is no less pronounced in nineteenth-
century British figures such as Mill and Spencer and naturalists with intentions of radical
social and political reform such as Marx, Mikhail Bakunin and Eugen Dühring. But if, as
Schopenhauer maintains, analysis reveals the very structure of Nature in man to be
counter-hedonic, then naturalism is undermined on its own axiological territory and must
accordingly restrict its claims of justification to the theoretical sphere. In this respect
Schopenhauer, just as he turned idealism upside down, did the same with naturalism,
pitting its own metaphysical implications against its self-association with practical fulfil-
ment.

5. Hartmann
I now turn to consider a set of thinkers from the second half of the nineteenth century who
engaged with the dichotomy of idealism and naturalism.
The first of these is Eduard von Hartmann, whose reception in academic quarters was
generally unfavourable, but who enjoyed extraordinary popularity with the general public
after the appearance in 1868 of his Philosophy of the Unconscious, a work which passed
through eleven editions in its author’s lifetime and continued to generate commentary well
into the early twentieth century.
Hartmann’s overarching description of his philosophy is that of a synthesis of the
philosophies of Hegel and Schopenhauer (Hartmann [1868] 1931: 1: 4–5, 27–32, 117–25).
The aim of uniting the optimistic arch-rationalist Hegel with the irrationalist arch-
pessimist Schopenhauer may appear an extreme case of the nineteenth century’s tendency
to syncretistic eclecticism, but we can begin to appreciate why Hartmann’s project is not
arbitrary by considering the points at which Schopenhauer’s differentiation of his position
from that of Hegel betrays weaknesses.
Schopenhauer’s basic dualism of, on the one hand, undifferentiated, impredicable, pre-
empirical Wille and, on the other, a realm of spatio-temporal objects individuated and
locked into mechanical causal relations with one another according to principles em-
bedded in transcendental subjectivity is insufficient for metaphysical purposes. In order to
account for the actual form of organised nature, Schopenhauer needs in addition, as noted,
his theory of Ideas, which determine the essence or natural kind of individual phenomena.
These Ideas may be thought of, Schopenhauer tells us, as distinct ‘acts’ by which Wille
becomes objectual. But how is this objectification to be thought of and why does it occur at
all? It cannot be merely the result of the subject’s imposition of representational form, but if
its explanation does not derive from the subject then it seems that it must lie in Wille – in
which case there must be more to Wille than the bare blank dynamic of striving allowed by
Schopenhauer. If Wille’s expression in the form of a world of objects is a metaphysically real
event, not merely a matter of subjective representation, then this must have its explana-
tion, which cannot appeal to mechanical causality, since this is confined to the world as
representation, and neither, if Wille exhausts trans-empirical reality, can it be due to some
external action upon it. By elimination, then, Wille must contain within itself the ground of
its disposition to self-expression and if the concept of ‘will’ is to retain any meaning in this
context it would seem that this ground can only be an end which Wille seeks to realise
through expression.
This is exactly Hartmann’s inference – a purpose must be attributed to Wille. And with
purpose comes the attribution of conceptual content, forcing the union, Hartmann claims,
 idealism and naturalism 97
of Schopenhauer with Hegel: it is precisely the Hegelian Idee, Hartmann suggests, that
furnishes the ideational material which informs Wille. Idee gives the world its form and
content, Wille its existence. The telos of the world – the ultimate realisation of which it is
left as the task of humanity to complete, through collective abnegation of the will to life –
is to undo the primordial metaphysical confounding of Will and Idea, restoring reality to a
state of pre-lapsarian innocence. The world itself, having run its teleological course, will
then disappear from existence. To that extent, Hartmann favours Schopenhauer’s vision
over Hegel’s – salvation does not lie in rational social life – but at the same time he shows
Schopenhauer’s anti-teleological, anti-Hegelian conclusion to be the result of a failure to
push philosophical explanation to its proper limit.
Thus far, Hartmann appears to have devised a new, baroque form of absolute idealism,
one which resolves the antinomies of Hegel and Schopenhauer, optimism and pessimism,
reason and will and which in that sense has to its credit a greater comprehensiveness than
Hegel’s system and may perhaps claim some advantage over Schelling’s late philosophy,
from which Hartmann borrows heavily. The associated and deeper sense in which
Hartmann unites idealism with naturalism emerges when we consider his methodology.
I presented Hartmann as proceeding from the Schopenhauerian premise that the
ontological substrate of the phenomenal world is Wille. Hartmann rejects, however,
Schopenhauer’s account of its epistemology and indeed all claims to a priori knowledge.
The basis on which we can know the world to be Wille, Hartmann holds, is strictly
inductive and his Philosophy of the Unconscious bears the sub-title: ‘Speculative Results
According to the Inductive Method of Physical Science’. Hartmann describes his philosophy as
one that ‘takes full account of all the results of the natural sciences’ ([1868] 1931: 2: 63).2 In
direct contradiction to Kantian doctrine – and to the whole trajectory of modern scientific
reflection – Hartmann defends the view that empirical inference warrants the positing of
acts of will, which remain unconscious until the stage of animal existence is reached, as the
explanatory ground of all natural events and kinds, organic and inorganic. The first two
volumes of Philosophy of the Unconscious encompass a painstaking journey through the
natural world, thick with references to contemporary scientific publications, in which
Hartmann argues, with respect to everything from ganglions to gravity, that the hypothesis
of an immanent will having as its content the representation of an end to be achieved
enjoys the highest degree of probability. Finally, the overall unity and coherence of nature
is argued to warrant a further inference, to a ground of unity of the plurality of acts of
volition displayed in nature: the world, Hartmann concludes, consists of a single, cosmic
Unbewußte.3

6. Lotze
The fact that Hartmann’s reduction of mechanical causality to the teleology of volition
contradicts the accepted modern view of mechanistic explanation as primary and self-
sufficient is itself, arguably, no argument against his view. That said, one cannot fail to be
struck by the poverty of Hartmann’s case for a teleological explanation of natural
phenomena and in consequence thereof the great under-motivation of the speculative
by the a posteriori elements in his system.
The view that natural scientific explanation is exhaustively mechanistic was upheld –
and indeed applied, in major contributions to medical science – by Rudolph Hermann
Lotze, who was nonetheless one of the great late absolute idealists. The challenge for one
who grants mechanism full sway over natural processes – and who also agrees that
98 sebastian gardner
reflection on human knowledge must start with the facts of experience, as Lotze does,
rejecting German idealism’s attempt to ‘deduce’ Nature – and yet wants to uphold the truth
of idealism is to explain why anything more than mechanism is needed.
Lotze has an essentially simple argument for the necessary incompleteness of the
mechanical view (see Lotze [1856–64] 1888: Bk. IX, Ch. I; [1883] 1884: §§38–49; and
[1883] 1892: Ch. I, Sects. XIV–XXI). Ordinary experience presents a world of Things,
which have properties, stand in relations with one another and effect changes in one
another’s states. Naturalism affirms the adequacy of this schema, which natural science fills
out and elaborates. Supposing that the basic conception of a propertied thing is granted,
the question arises as to how it is possible for Things to act on one another (Lotze [1883]
1884: 56; [1883] 1892: 28). The answer, Lotze argues, requires us to reject the assumption
of the independence of Things: in place of ‘a multiplicity of self-subsisting Things’ which
become ‘combined subsequently’ – a conception which, Lotze argues, involves the
incoherent conception of relations as entities located ‘between’ Things – we must suppose
‘the self-subsisting existence of some background, or some medium [. . .] in which the
relations of one real thing to another pursue their course’ ([1883] 1884: 77; see also Lotze
[1856–64] 1888: Bk. IV, 443–5, Bk. IX, 602–3). Instances of efficient causality between
Things must be conceived, Lotze argues, as events internal to a self-subsisting One,
‘modifications of a single whole’ ([1883] 1884: 116).
This holistic view provides Lotze with the basis for further regressive inferences. Because,
Lotze argues, the only identifiable source of the conceptual forms applied in ordinary
apprehension of the world lies in the experience that we have of ourselves – specifically,
the relation of our selves to our mental states is the only thing that can provide the basis for
our conception of the unity of a Thing with its properties ([1883] 1884: 138–42; [1883]
1892: 47) – and because in addition there is no other way of giving content to the thought
that individual Things enjoy real independent existence ([1856–64] 1888: Bk. IX, 644–7;
and [1883] 1884: 137–8), we must suppose the underlying character of the world to be
‘spiritual’, geistig. This thesis in turn allows a careful reintroduction of teleology: although
final causes can have no place within the world of natural science, teleology may be
postulated, Lotze contends, in order to complete natural scientific explanation, on the basis
that nature conceived scientifically fails to account for itself in the strongest sense and on
the condition that purposiveness is taken to be wholly realised in lawful efficient causation,
not an alternative or supplement to it. Moreover, Lotze supposes, we can postulate the final
ground of the world to be the highest Good – meaning that, although necessarily fact and
value remain distinct in our apprehension of the world, the distinction can be regarded as
overcome at the point where reality achieves, as Lotze argues that it must, total unity
([1856–64] 1888: Bk. III, Ch. V and Conclusion and Bk. IV, Chs I–III; [1883] 1884: 151–2;
[1883] 1892: 120–31).4 In this way we are led to a conception which counts, in the terms of
Schopenhauer and Hartmann, as unequivocally ‘optimistic’ and with which, Lotze argues,
the central doctrines of Christian theism are consistent ([1856–64] 1888: Bk. IX, Chs IV–
V; [1883] 1892: 70–1 and Chs III–VIII).5 That his metaphysics establishes the possibility of
ethics and agrees with our extra-theoretical interests – our ‘yearnings’ – constitutes, Lotze
maintains, a point in its favour (see Moore 1901).
Lotze’s basic argument may be regarded as a novel application of the traditional
objection to an atomistic metaphysics. If all existents necessarily take atomic form,
exhausting the content of the world, then there must nevertheless be something – at
the level of the world, a ‘world-principle’ – that determines this to be so. A non-
aggregative, ‘atomising’ One must precede the atomic Many.
 idealism and naturalism 99
Lotze’s major difference from the German idealists is that, while the architecture of his
metaphysics is that of absolute idealism, his evaluation of the epistemic achievement of his
system – the degree to which we can claim by its means to have comprehended reality – is
tentative and closer to Kant. Though we can explain why certain metaphysical theses are
forced on us – why they are at least consistent and are all that remain once the alternatives
have been eliminated – we cannot regard them as establishing the Hegelian identity of
Thought and Being: ‘all our ‘‘thinking’’ by no means altogether comprehends, or in the
least degree exhausts, what we could regard as the ‘‘actual constitution’’ and ‘‘inner Being’’
of Things’ (Lotze [1883] 1884: 149). Because the principles to which we are ultimately led
‘never admit of being ‘‘explained’’, ‘‘constructed’’, or ‘‘deduced’’, they cannot be ‘converted
into a major premise from which to deduce the sum of metaphysical truth’ (Lotze [1883]
1884: 159, 153–4).
Lotze affirms, therefore, that while the Many must be traced back to the One, the reverse
route cannot be followed by finite human minds ([1883] 1892: 40–1). Whether or not this
asymmetry is consistent with the final stability of Lotze’s system, it is clear at least that
Lotze, unlike Hartmann, offers a defence of idealism which begins where naturalism begins,
that is, with nature mechanistically conceived and that, if Lotze succeeds, then a non-
negligible portion of the content of German idealism will have been retrieved without
reliance on its famously questionable methodological apparatus (‘intellectual intuition’,
‘the Concept’, ‘determinate negation’ and so on).

7. Anglo-American Idealism
Lotze did not induce further attempts at absolute idealist system-building in German
philosophy, which instead returned to Kant, but the idealistic movement which took hold
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Britain and America stands under Lotze’s
influence and in important respects counts as his successor.
The first full study in English of Hegel’s philosophy, James Hutchison Stirling’s The
Secret of Hegel, appeared in 1865 and in the 1870s Benjamin Jowett, influential at Oxford
as a teacher and translator of Plato, urged that an interest be taken in German idealism.
William Wallace and Edward Caird pursued this path and, along with Thomas Hill Green,
who made clear the ethical and political fruitfulness of idealist ideas, completed the first,
delayed wave of Anglophone assimilation of classical German philosophy, which had
existed previously only on the edges of cultural life.
In 1893 Francis Herbert Bradley published Appearance and Reality, arguably the most
deeply elaborated of the Anglophone absolute idealist systems. In Book I of the work
Bradley unfolds a series of arguments claiming to show that any conception which involves
the attribution of relational structure – of any sort, including that of a thing with qualities –
reveals itself on analysis to be incoherent, for the reason that all attempts to explain how
relations and their terms ‘stand to’ one another generate contradictions, absurdities or an
infinite regress (Bradley [1893] 1897: 32; and see chs II–III). In light of this negative result,
naturalism falls to the ground immediately: natural phenomena, being relational, cannot
have absolute reality. Giving application to his thesis that the mode in which a relation is
‘together’ with its terms resists comprehension, Bradley underlines the metaphysical limits
of natural scientific explanation:

The principles taken up are not merely in themselves not rational, but, being limited,
they remain external to the facts to be explained. The diversities therefore will only fall,
100 sebastian gardner
or rather must be brought, under the principle. They do not come out of it, nor of
themselves do they bring themselves under it. The explanation therefore in the end does
but conjoin aliens inexplicably. The obvious instance is the mechanical interpretation
of the world. (563; see also 353–4)

Intelligibility is not restored, Bradley argues, by declaring that certain ultimate complexes –
for example, the inherence of a quality in a thing – are simply ‘given to us as facts’ (563),
since these putative facts amount to mere conjunctions of elements and

no such bare conjunction is or possibly can be given. For the background is present and
the background and the conjunction are, I submit, alike integral aspects of the fact. The
background therefore must be taken as a condition of the conjunction’s existence and
the intellect must assert the conjunction subject in this way to a condition. The
conjunction is hence not bare but dependent and it is really a connection mediated by
something falling outside it. (564)

The role of ‘background’ – the ‘something’ presupposed by, but ‘falling outside’, the
allegedly given fact – is played ultimately by ‘the Absolute’, which enjoys unity without
relationality.
Whereas Lotze had begun with the manifold of interacting natural objects, Bradley
proceeds at a higher level of generality: Bradley’s argument for holism pertains to the
absolutely basic structure of (discursive, predicative) thought and the stronger conclusion
which Bradley reaches allows Lotze’s holism to be converted into a monism, the content of
which is explained in Book II of Appearance and Reality. What keeps Bradley’s monism on
the side of idealism – that is, distinct from Spinozism – is his claim that the only thing
which exhibits the undifferentiated unified reality which, he has argued, must characterise
the One, is ‘experience’ or ‘sentience in its widest meaning’ (555): the Absolute is ‘an all-
inclusive and supra-relational experience’ (556).
Bradley evinces less concern than Lotze to accommodate the naturalistic wisdom of
modernity. The rationale for Bradley’s attitude becomes clear when it is recalled that his
position requires him to oppose, or at any rate to step far beyond, the naı̈ve position of
ordinary consciousness. For Bradley it is ‘out of the question’ that metaphysics should
‘approve itself to common sense’ (547) and equally, he holds, it would be a mistake to think
that metaphysics could be informed by – or could inform – the results of natural science:
metaphysics rightfully challenges the naturalistic presumption inspired by science, namely,
the claim that science possesses absolute truth, but thereafter it disengages from all questions
concerning the content and proper form of empirical explanation, the aim of which is
essentially different from – more limited than – that of metaphysics (283–6). Metaphysics
does not, therefore, urge the reintroduction of ends into natural science, even though its own
conception of the order of nature is that of an order of degrees of perfection (496–9).
Like Lotze and many late idealists, Bradley may be regarded as having articulated in
greatly clarified terms certain lines of argument which were present but obscurely
formulated in German idealist writing, and many of the same issues as had occupied
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were reworked in Anglo-American idealism.
The confidence of the British and American idealist hegemony at the turn of the century
can hardly be exaggerated. Taking itself to have survived the challenge of Darwinism (see,
for example, Royce 1892: Lecture IX) and equipped with a large bank of metaphysical
argumentation, the view arose that idealism had established itself in perpetuity and with
 idealism and naturalism 101
complete security. The Anglophone philosophical journals – Mind and the Philosophical
Review in Britain and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in the US – were altogether
dominated in the last decade of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth by
discussion of topics in idealist philosophy, directed to the question not of whether idealism
is correct but of precisely which form of idealism is correct.6 When, on occasion, a
confrontation is staged between the idealist and the naturalist, the naturalistic challenge
seems to be entertained only so that idealism should have the opportunity of flexing its
muscles. By way of illustration, consider the following, from the opening of a paper called
‘The present meaning of idealism’ delivered by Ernest Albee to the American Philoso-
phical Association in 1909. Albee asks: ‘What, then, may we all fairly take for granted in
discussing the present situation in philosophy, no matter how divergent our final con-
clusions may seem, or may in fact be?’ Albee answers: ‘In the first place, it seems fair to
assume that, for the technical student of philosophy, materialism [used interchangeably at
this period with naturalism] proper is a thing of the past.’ What defines and suffices for
idealism, Albee says, is ‘the teleological standpoint, that of inner meaning or significance,
which is the standpoint of philosophy itself’ (Albee 1909: 308; for further discussion, see
Gardner 2007: 21–3). This makes it clear that idealism continued to conceive itself right
up until the end in the terms supplied by classical German philosophy, that is, as practically
and axiologically motivated and as giving metaphysical expression to what must at all costs
be preserved – against modernity’s naturalistic tendency – from our theological and
humanistic heritage.

8. Scientifically Orientated Neo-Kantianism

Having followed the absolute idealist tradition to its nineteenth-century conclusion – its
self-proclaimed victory over naturalism – attention should now be given to a late
development in the idealist tradition more receptive to naturalistic insights.
Neo-Kantianism as such was emphatically not a species of naturalism, but it constituted
a broad church and one of the most important tendencies within it – represented by
Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer at Marburg and by Alois Riehl –
exhibited an orientation towards scientific knowledge which had much in common with
the outlook of naturalism and which could plausibly be claimed, for reasons noted earlier,
to mirror Kant’s own intentions for transcendental philosophy.
Riehl shows how it is possible to go far in the direction of positivism while yet remaining
within a doctrinal context of Kantian derivation. Riehl’s chief work, The Principles of the
Critical Philosophy ([1887] 1894), argued that philosophy aims at a ‘general theory of the
world’ – which is also the common goal of the sciences as a whole – and that ‘its method
consists in the generalization of the generalizations of the sciences’ (14). The relevant
theory can be derived only from the growth of scientific knowledge: a ‘theory of the world’
in the sense of metaphysics ‘is nothing more than a universal anthropomorphism’ (14–15).
Nor can philosophy concern itself with the strife between optimism and pessimism, which
is merely a question of ‘temperament and mood’ (15).
What establishes Riehl as a Kantian is his denial that the conditions of knowledge are
objects of psychological enquiry or of a nature that would permit a Darwinian grounding in
substitution for transcendental proof (77–84). Riehl insists, however, that this does not
render the principles which ground knowledge merely subjective: they should be ‘thought
as existing on the side both of the object and of the subject’ (80). Transcendental
philosophy is thus allied by Riehl to realism.
102 sebastian gardner
Riehl’s late nineteenth-century Kantian repudiation of metaphysics belonged to a
tradition – going back to Jakob Friedrich Fries,7 a contemporary and vocal critic of
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – which aimed to affirm the epistemic supremacy of modern
science while holding fast to Kant’s insight concerning the inadequacies of classical
empiricism and also without commitment to materialism. In this last regard Friedrich
Albert Lange played a crucial role. Lange’s influential History of Materialism ([1866:
expanded 2nd edn 1873–5] 1950) offered a clear and powerful message, supported by
critical examination of the history of materialist doctrines. Scientific materialism is led by a
genuine insight concerning the empirical character of genuine knowledge, but it surrenders
to the temptation to enter a metaphysical claim regarding the essence of reality which it
itself cannot warrant, for the teaching of scientific enquiry – also, on Lange’s naturalistic
construal, that of Kant – is that all our knowledge is conditioned at base by the physiology
of the human senses, creating an epistemic circle out of which we cannot hope to step.
From the neo-Kantians’ standpoint, the later nineteenth-century absolute idealists, by
detaching themselves from the Kantian starting point of a concern with the conditions of
possible experience, saved themselves the task of overcoming subjectivism only at the cost
of regressing to dogmatic pre-Critical metaphysics. Instead, it was urged, we must start with
the fact of experience and since experience is necessarily conceptualised and the highest
(most systematic and rational) conceptualisation of experience lies in science, this means
taking our bearings from the Fact of Science. Theoretical philosophy is thus in the first
instance reflection on the conditions of scientific cognition and metaphysics merely the
correlate of epistemology.
A standard part of this position was a further demotion of teleology. The concept of
purpose, Riehl declares, is – pace Kant – ‘not a logical principle for the unification of
thought, but rather a practical principle, a principle of the will’, which does not belong to
theoretical philosophy ([1887] 1894: 314, 342, 346).8 Lotze’s teleological metaphysics,
which interprets the connection of things according to a supersensible plan, gives
according to Riehl the appearance of all-inclusive knowledge and appeals to our aesthetic
sense, but is in truth merely an artefact of thought based on a personification of reason (89,
345). Relevantly similar views of teleology appear in Fries, who consigns it to the spheres of
faith and aesthetic feeling (Fries [1822] 1982: 166–7, 172–3, 188–93) and in Lange, who
regards teleological thinking as explanatorily idle and symptomatic of a primitive mentality
(Lange [1866] 1950: Bk. II, Sect. 2, Ch. IV, 69–71).
Even further along the neo-Kantian spectrum than Riehl stands Hans Vaihinger, whose
Philosophy of ‘As If’ – published in 1911, though the main part of the work was composed in
1877 – proposed a radical merger of Kantianism with naturalism. Thought, according to
Vaihinger, rests on biological bedrock – it evolves as a means of negotiating physiologically
grounded impulses and sensational contents. Intellectual constructions are analysed by
Vaihinger, however, along the lines of Kant’s notion of ‘regulative’ ideas: concepts in
general, including those of metaphysics, natural science, teleology, ethics and religion, are
one and all ‘fictions’, of various distinguishable types, each with their own degree and
species of internal justification. Jointly they compose an ‘‘‘As if’’ world’, which lacks reality
in the ordinary sense ([1911] 1949: xlvi–xlvii). On this account, thought is an ‘organic
function’, as naturalists maintain, yet it manufactures for itself a kind of Kantian autonomy.
Signalling recognition of his proximity to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Vaihinger allowed
that his ‘positivist idealism’ might be classified as ‘anti-rationalism or even irrationalism’
(xlvii, xlvi), since it repudiates the orthodox Kantian assumption of a fixed eternal human
reason without natural origin. Though not a typical neo-Kantian, Vaihinger is indicative of
 idealism and naturalism 103
how thin neo-Kantianism in its more scientistic form had allowed the division between
idealism and naturalism to become.
Neo-Kantians rejected the naturalisation of value as much as that of cognition. One
question which therefore arose, and which Fries and others did address squarely, is that of
how judgements which aspire to validity but do not satisfy the conditions of natural
scientific knowledge, such as those of morality and religion, are to be regarded. The answer
is that, by and large, the scientifically orientated neo-Kantians applied Kant’s strategy of
epistemological dualism, that is, of partitioning robust cognition from belief which has a
merely subjective, albeit non-arbitrary, warrant. The particular forms of epistemological
dualism vary, but the approach is exemplified in Fries’s appeal to Ahnung, indefinite
intuitive awareness, as a discrete basis for morality and religious belief (Fries [1822] 1982:
esp. Dialogues VIII–X) and in Lange’s conception of the ‘Standpoint of the Ideal’ (which
Lange finds expressed in the works of Friedrich Schiller) as compensating for the limits
imposed on cognition by natural science (Lange 1950: Bk. 2, Sect. 4, Ch. 4).
The net contribution of neo-Kantianism – above all the Marburg school – to the
maturation of naturalism was substantial (see Friedman and Nordmann 2006). The
naturalistic spirit had received in the latter half of the nineteenth century formidable
encouragement. The fact that scientific practice could yield increasingly impressive results,
in seeming independence from any metaphysical grounding, appeared to testify to the
gratuitousness of other modes of knowledge-seeking; Darwin’s success in reaching a
conclusion with undeniable importance for the traditional philosophical question of
the nature of man further underlined the self-sufficiency and unboundedness of scientific
enquiry; empirical psychology, in particular the experimental psychology of Wilhelm
Wundt, put down institutional roots in German universities and invaded the citadel of
subjectivity which classical German philosophy had taken to provide a secure ground for
idealism. The practical trappings of naturalism, which in the previous century had stood in
the foreground, allowing campaigners like d’Holbach to represent their outlook as
genuinely humanistic, now seemed inessential to the naturalistic world-view and were,
to an increasing degree, left aside: the self-sufficiency on purely theoretical grounds which
can be claimed for scientific knowledge transmits itself, it came to be supposed, to the
philosophical standpoint which identifies with natural science.
Though neo-Kantianism insisted on qualifying this claim to self-sufficiency, its quarrel
with naı̈ve naturalism was, in the larger scheme of things, a relatively minor matter. In
positive terms, what neo-Kantianism helped to add to the self-certainty of science was an
improved self-understanding. Science is independent of any particular set of axioms
(contra Kant, who had mistakenly supposed it to be committed to Euclidean geometry
and Newtonian physics), just as it is from materialism. Nor does it involve the phenom-
enalist reductionism or neutral monism of Mach. It is defined by methodological commit-
ments and so exists as a task, not a set of doctrines. This task presupposes, furthermore,
constructive conceptual input, in a sense that the inductivist conception of science
elaborated earlier in the century by Mill failed to appreciate. These lessons were absorbed
thoroughly by twentieth-century philosophy of science.

9. Nietzsche
Earlier we noted the challenge, posed by Schopenhauer, to discover a means of avoiding
pessimism that is not philosophically retrograde. This can hardly be said to have been met
by late nineteenth-century absolute idealism, the conservative tendency of which has been
104 sebastian gardner
noted, nor indeed by scientifically orientated neo-Kantianism, which consigns the issue of
‘life-orientations’ to the domain of faith or some other second-class epistemic category.
Another feature of the full-bloodedly idealistic positions represented by Hartmann,
Lotze and the Anglophone idealists meriting comment is their elimination of any properly
transcendental component, which is to say that they do not regard the necessity a priori of
our having to think such and such as itself – independently of any ontological claim –
possessing final philosophical authority, as sufficient for any epistemic purpose or as
normatively self-standing.
One nineteenth-century thinker with deep investments in both of the traditions we are
concerned with, who does take Schopenhauer’s challenge seriously and who reinstates the
transcendental dimension of Kant’s philosophy in at least the practical domain, is Friedrich
Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s absorption of Kantian idealism – originally from Schopenhauer, but
later through direct reading of Kant (see Hill 2003) – shows itself markedly in his earlier
writings, where the notion recurs repeatedly that the arrow of cognition necessarily fails to
hit its target and that the objects of experience are mere illusion, but it also survives in the
‘perspectivist’ doctrine of his mature writings, which (whatever its exact content as a
theory of truth, a matter of dispute) has at its core the idea that the subject’s conditioning
of its objects is not accidental but essential to the process of cognition.
The naturalistic dimension of Nietzsche’s thought, to which much recent commentary
has been devoted (for example, Geuss 1997; and Leiter 2002), reveals itself first in the
writings of his so-called ‘positivist’ phase from 1878 to 1881, where it is claimed that
science (in place of art, the previous occupant of this role) furnishes a model meriting
emulation in all contexts, on account of the virtues which it fosters and the ethos in the
face of reality which it exemplifies; and it then appears in a different form, as an integral
component in the great critiques of morality of the late 1880s, Beyond Good and Evil and
On the Genealogy of Morals, above all in the latter’s proto-psychoanalytic exposure of the
concealed motivational roots and affective dimensions of moral belief.
The mix of idealistic and naturalistic elements in Nietzsche’s writings poses an
interpretative problem,9 to which various solutions have been proposed, one of which
is to classify Nietzsche as a naturalised Kantian on the pattern of Lange and Hermann von
Helmholtz. On that account, Nietzsche’s position is that the facilitating conditions of
cognition which Kant deems ‘transcendental’ are identical with and owe their special status
to physiological structures which are open to empirical investigation. In support of this
interpretation, it may be pointed out that Nietzsche does in fact entertain quasi-mechan-
istic explanations of even the most basic logical and metaphysical concepts. But this also
shows what is puzzling about the naturalistic interpretation. Nietzsche saw clearly that
naturalising Kantian conditions of cognition opens a wide door to the very scepticism
which transcendental philosophy was designed to afford protection against; it leads not to
realism but to its destruction. This leaves it obscure what position Nietzsche could have
intended to occupy by arguing that the concepts of identity and being, for example, are
mere side-effects of physiological processes – an epistemologically nihilistic thesis that, if it
does not refute itself, undermines the sorts of positive claims that Nietzsche himself
apparently wishes to make regarding, among other things, morality and human psychology.
Other candidate solutions to the problem of Nietzsche’s combination of aggressive and
deflationary naturalism with an idealistic epistemology have been proposed and the scale of
the problem can always be reduced, either by devaluing Nietzsche’s attachment to science
or by arguing that the idealistic elements represent residues of his philosophical pre-
maturity, or merely signal an attitude of fallibilist caution towards empirical truth, or
 idealism and naturalism 105
belong only to Nietzsche’s rhetoric. But the question arises eventually whether the
endeavour to assign Nietzsche a consistent position at the ground level of epistemology
and metaphysics is well conceived.10 The alternative, which allows a different view of
Nietzsche to emerge, is to accept that Nietzsche’s engagement with the themes of idealism
and naturalism, along with his experiments in radical scepticism, have a far-reaching non-
traditional orientation.
What is beyond dispute is that Nietzsche’s philosophical project has ultimately a
practical end, the nature of which is hard to state without tending to the nebulous,
but which pertains to the conditions of individual and collective cultural flourishing. Also
clear is that Nietzsche does not regard modern science, whatever its limitations, as in any
sense epistemically arbitrary, whereas the notion that an idealistic system of even Kant’s
relatively modest sort could either possess genuine truth or further the critically appraised
ends of human beings is not on the cards for Nietzsche. If it is then observed that
Nietzsche’s reflections return repeatedly to the theme of a fundamental conflict between
‘truth’ and the conditions of life and that he affirms (explicitly in the Third Essay of the
Genealogy) that in this respect modernity has, through its commitment to science, reached
a point of acute contradiction, then we are drawn to the view that there lies at the heart of
Nietzsche’s philosophy a perception of the impossibility – if not universally, then at least
for us now, in our actual philosophical habitat – of reconciling idealism and naturalism, to
both of which we are nonetheless wedded: what is incontrovertibly correct in naturalism is
its alignment of (modern) truth with modern science, while what we should not and
cannot do (if we understand ourselves correctly, that is, contra Schopenhauer) is deny
authority to our will to life and to the demand for value which it incorporates. This last
constraint has, therefore, transcendental status: it corresponds, in a demoralised form, to
what Kant called the primacy of practical reason and Fichte adopted as a foundational
metaphilosophical principle and it provides Nietzsche with the justification he requires for
rejecting the staple naturalistic reduction of value to states of happiness.
This interpretation promises to make sense of additional aspects of Nietzsche’s philo-
sophical outlook, including his high valuation of the aesthetic and the interest which he
displays in developing metaphysical doctrines (eternal recurrence, will to power) for which
it is hard to suppose he wishes to claim literal truth. The intended vector of Nietzsche’s
thought, on this account, falls between Hume’s naturalism and idealism: Nietzsche does
not suppose, with Hume, that practical consciousness, guided by Nature’s providential
hand, is self-stabilising and insulated from theoretical reason; but equally he rejects the
Kantian-Fichtean grounding of the practical in pure Reason. What is left is a difficult
balancing act, in which practical consciousness has to forge a new kind of relation with
theoretical reason, which has no precedent since the tragic age of the Greeks. Hence the
special value of the aesthetic, which includes for Nietzsche the aesthetic force of
philosophical quasi-fictions such as eternal recurrence and will to power.
This view of the present philosophical situation as having arrived at an impasse, of
inherited intellectual resources as exhausted and calling for drastic action – to be taken in a
spirit oscillating between crisis, despair and fierce hope for future transformation – is
witnessed elsewhere in nineteenth-century philosophy and stands in sharp contrast to the
self-assured standpoints of thinkers such as Lotze and Bradley. Kierkegaard, Max Stirner
and Marx in so far as he is construed as attempting to ‘leave philosophy’ (Brudney 1998) –
all, like Nietzsche, situated by choice or necessity outside university life – exemplify a will
to break radically with existing modes of philosophy. Nietzsche has, therefore, no
monopoly on deep dissatisfaction with modernity, nor on the notion that philosophy
106 sebastian gardner
must begin to play a new kind of game in which praxis takes precedence over theoria and in
which, consequently, the traditional questions which give rise to doctrines like idealism
and naturalism are either relegated or abandoned altogether. What distinguishes Nietzsche,
in terms of his systematic place in nineteenth-century philosophy and the specific narrative
we are following, is his understanding of the modern problem as reflecting the collision of
the naturalistic contraction of theoretical truth in modernity with the non-naturalistic
standpoint of practical reason and thus as traceable back to the original Kantian duality of
Nature and Freedom.

10. Lebensphilosophie
In so far as a single conception of Nietzsche’s significance prevailed in the closing years of
the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century, it consisted in an identification
of the central message of Nietzsche’s philosophy with an assertion of the ultimacy of the
concept of Life. Nietzsche was taken to have demonstrated the fruitfulness of taking the
conception of man as a living being as foundational for the traditional philosophical
purpose of making visible the true nature of things and directing human action accordingly.
In this Lebensphilosophie, Life was understood not in mechanistic or biologically reduced
terms, but as comprehending the full range of distinctively human capacities displayed in
man’s freely developing cultural and historical being, just as the environment in which
man is embedded was conceived non-materialistically and corresponded more closely to
what Husserl would later call the Lebenswelt. Applying this conception, Wilhelm Dilthey
offered a philosophical foundation for the human sciences circumventing empiricism and
metaphysics, designed to secure the autonomy of the Geisteswissenschaften (see Dilthey
[1883] 1989; and Chapter 8 in this volume). In the early twentieth century, a similar
approach returns in the philosophische Anthropologie of Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and
Arnold Gehlen.
The outlook of Lebensphilosophie is of major importance for tracking the history of the
relations of idealism and naturalism and it manifests itself in thinkers whose ideas were
influenced not at all or very little by Nietzsche, including Henri Bergson and John Dewey.
In the latter’s case, Hegel takes the place of Nietzsche as a source of influence and it is not
hard to understand how the Phenomenology of Spirit might be read as providing a
justification for taking the totality of consciousness in its social, cultural and historical
setting as marking the outermost circumference of philosophical reflection.
It is difficult for us, given our acquaintance with austere forms of naturalism and sharp
awareness of the need for naturalism to stay lean if it is to merit the name, to avoid
classifying the approach of Lebensphilosophie as covertly idealistic, but it is important to
appreciate that the appeal of its strategy for those persuaded by it lay in its transcendence at
a stroke of the irksome and fruitless dichotomy of idealism and naturalism: if ‘Life’ is
conceptually primary, then the categories on which idealism and naturalism are fixated
may be regarded as conceptually derivative latecomers, fit only to describe parts abstracted
from a prior whole. A rigorous account of what it means to treat metaphysical categories in
such terms – taken to the extreme conclusion that knowledge of reality is the prerogative of
sheer intuition, counterposed to discursivity – is given in Bergson, whose most influential
work, Creative Evolution, was not published until 1907, but whose thought can be regarded
as a late chapter in the nineteenth-century development.
The positing of Life as a primitive conceptual unity would serve, therefore, the same
unifying purpose as the systems of classical German philosophy, but this result would be
 idealism and naturalism 107
achieved without taking a step out of the concrete natural and historical world into
metaphysics or transcendental subjectivity. The critical question which arises – from the
perspective of those disposed to think along more traditional Kantian lines – is whether
Lebensphilosophie, by simply asserting the unity of Nature and Freedom, rather than
labouring to construct or demonstrate it, has not availed itself of a pseudo-concept which
merely conceals their antinomy.

11. Conclusion
The application of loosely defined terms to whole centuries of philosophical activity carries
obvious dangers, but there can be little doubt that idealism and naturalism provide
categories with genuine historical purchase which are no less essential for an understanding
of nineteenth-century thought than the concept of the historical turn. It is true that
nineteenth-century philosophers did not one and all line themselves up under one of the
two headings like opposing football teams and that, for some, the important issues lay
elsewhere. But a substantial number, including some of the century’s greatest philosophers,
did conceive themselves as belonging to one of the two traditions or programmes and a
shared set of reference points – drawn from classical German philosophy and constructed
around the original Kantian template of Nature versus Freedom, though also reaching back
to figures and debates in the earlier modern period – gave each of the two tendencies a
definite and coherent identity. Idealists and naturalists conceived themselves moreover –
increasingly so over the course of the century, as the German idealist-romantic union of
Nature and Freedom receded further into historical memory – as standing in a relation of
opposition and the fact that the two traditions existed in close proximity while standing in
logical conflict bound each to justify itself by engaging in critique of the other. It also raised
the question of whether the opposition could be aufgehoben or in any sense mediated and
the philosophers we have looked at show what different views of this matter could be
taken.
Arguments between idealism and naturalism converged characteristically on the subject
of teleology, the question of its scope and reality, attitudes to which served as a reliable
indicator of idealistic or naturalistic orientation. This is not hard to understand, in so far as
application of the concept of teleology beyond the purely human sphere provides an entry
point to the broader idealist thought that reality is mind-like and not in its essence alien or
indifferent to human existence.
Kant’s account of the topic, shared by the German idealists, allows the tendency for
arguments between idealists and naturalists to gravitate towards teleology to be explained
in a more systematic way. Teleological judgement is connected conceptually by Kant with
the non-naturalistic concepts of, first, wholes which determine their parts and, second,
what Kant calls the ‘unconditioned’ or ‘supersensible’. To judge that a natural object
exhibits a purpose is to represent it as (as if) caused by a concept – a type of cause which
must be rational, hence non-natural – and so to represent its parts as determined by (the
concept of) its whole; in so far as human reason conceives and seeks to cognise nature as a
whole prior to its parts, it anticipates and refers itself implicitly to ‘intellectual intuition’,
the trans-human mode of cognition necessary and sufficient for knowledge of things in
themselves and unconditioned totality. To vindicate teleology at the level of general
metaphysics would be, therefore, to subordinate Nature to a supersensible reality standing
in relation to it as an unconditioned One to its conditioned Many. If, at the same time, the
empirical manifold, the basic fact that there exists a plurality of natural phenomena, can be
108 sebastian gardner
taken simply as given – if it as such presents no philosophical explanandum – then this
central nineteenth-century argument against naturalism fails and teleological judgement, if
it has any validity at all outside the context of human action, may be confined to the sphere
of natural organisms and subordinated to the conditions of mechanistic explanation.
This construal of the options contrasts with our present philosophical outlook –
wherever one stands – on several fronts.
In terms of the Anglophone or analytic mainstream, as remarked at the outset, not
merely has the default switched from idealism to naturalism but the very notion of idealism
as a deep, continuous tradition going back to Plato, which incorporates an ontological
thesis concerning the grounds and underlying nature of the phenomenal world, has
evaporated; to the extent that there is any unitary conception of an alternative to
naturalism, it is neither identified with idealism nor thought to involve a commitment
to a teleological metaphysics. The issues which now occupy those testing the limits of
naturalism, such as mental content and the reducibility of normativity, although con-
tinuous with nineteenth-century debates about the analysis of cognition and psychologism,
had no elevated place in nineteenth-century arguments about idealism and naturalism,
which were of broader scope and in which a loud echo of the earlier modern conflict of
science with religion can still be heard. This reflects the fact – which belongs, as observed
previously, to the legacy of the nineteenth century – that naturalism, while refining itself as
a set of finely differentiated and technically elaborated positions in theoretical philosophy,
has ceased to advertise itself as a practical or cultural programme.
From the standpoint of the central currents of twentieth-century European philosophy,
the gap is less marked, in so far as traditions such as phenomenology, hermeneutics and
post-structuralism have retained connections with Kant and German idealism, repudiated
naturalism and conceived the task of philosophy in terms which, if not always humanistic,
at any rate preclude its contraction to questions of theoretical reason. In the case of
phenomenology, in which transcendental concerns remain very much alive and the
critique of naturalism has been developed further, the continuity with nineteenth-century
concerns is clear. With regard to other Continental movements, particularly in the latter
half of the twentieth century, the acute sense of the antinomy of Freedom and Nature,
crucial for nineteenth-century developments, does not play a determining role, making it
harder to appreciate the motivation of teleological idealism. Underlying this divergence is
the fact that idealism and naturalism and the problem of their dichotomy belong to the
project of the Enlightenment and earlier modern philosophy and inevitably lose signifi-
cance in contexts where the philosophical agenda has taken a counter-Enlightenment
turn.
These differences help to account for the strangeness of many of the figures populating
the landscape of nineteenth-century philosophy, study of which throws into relief, whether
or not it prompts us to reconsider, our present orientations.

Notes
1. Maurice Mandelbaum, in his outstanding study of the nineteenth century (1971), identifies
‘positivism’ as one of its two great tendencies. Positivism and naturalism are terms by no means
always employed as equivalents, but in the present context we need not choose between them, since
both must be understood broadly in order to serve the relevant historical purpose and Mandel-
baum’s definition of positivism (1971: 11) coincides with naturalism as I here understand it.
2. Translations from this (and other untranslated German texts) are the author’s own.
3. For more detailed discussion, see Gardner 2010.
 idealism and naturalism 109
4. On Lotze’s reasoning, see Moore 1901: ch. 2; Thomas 1921: ch. 12.
5. Note, however, Lotze’s admission that the problem of evil is insoluble ([1883] 1892: 145).
6. It should be pointed out that, for reasons of space and because it does not interact in distinctive
ways with naturalism, I have not discussed the important ‘personalistic’ strand of late idealism
represented in Germany by Immanuel Hermann Fichte and Christian Hermann Weiße and in
Britain and the US respectively by Andrew Seth (a.k.a. A. S. Pringle-Pattison) and George Holmes
Howison. Such (‘pluralistic’) idealism countered Hegel with claims for the reality of both divine
and individual human personality. Lotze too differentiates himself from the German idealists on
this point. This theme is of particular importance for understanding Anglo-American idealist
developments after Bradley. Personalism or ‘spiritualism’ – with its roots in Maine de Biran and
Victor Cousin and a strong relation to Catholicism – comprised also the dominant force in later
nineteenth-century French philosophy. The principal figures include Charles Renouvier, Félix
Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier and Émile Boutroux. Renouvier, Lachelier and Boutroux may also be
classified – alongside Léon Brunschvicg – as French neo-Kantians. On Maine de Biran and
Ravaisson, see inter alia Mark Sinclair’s discussion in Chapter 10 of this volume.
7. See Franks 2007, an illuminating account of the post-Kantian development in its relation to the
challenge of naturalism; Fries is discussed at 253–6.
8. For Riehl’s full account see Riehl [1887] 1894: Part II, Ch. 5, §§3–10.
9. To give a concrete idea of the difficulty, compare the following from Nietzsche’s Nachlaß: (1)
‘When I think of my philosophical genealogy, I feel connected to the anti-teleological, i.e.
Spinozistic movement of our age . . . [and] to the mechanistic movement (all moral and aesthetic
questions traced back to physiological ones, all physiological ones to chemical ones, all chemical
ones to mechanical ones)’ (1967–: VII (2): 264; from summer to autumn 1884). (2) ‘‘‘Mechanical
necessity’’ is not a fact: it is we who first interpreted it into events . . . We only invented thinghood
on the model of the subject . . . If we no longer believe in the effective subject, then there also
disappears belief in effective things, in reciprocity, cause and effect . . . The world of effective atoms
disappears as well of course’ (1967–: VIII (2): 47–8; from spring 1887).
10. Green 2002, concentrating on the tension of naturalistic and non-naturalistic elements in
Nietzsche’s epistemology, denies that Nietzsche had one considered epistemological position.

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 6
Darwinism and Philosophy in the Nineteenth
Century: The ‘Whole of Metaphysics’?

Gregory Moore

1. Introduction
More than twenty years before the publication of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin was
already certain that his embryonic hypothesis would have far-reaching consequences and
not just in biology. ‘My theory’, he wrote in 1837, ‘would give zest to recent and fossil
comparative anatomy; it would lead to the study of instinct, heredity and mind-heredity,
[the] whole [of] metaphysics’ (Darwin 1887: 1: 370). By emphasising mutability and
struggle instead of stability and harmony, by banishing the last intellectually respectable
vestiges of supernaturalism, by asserting a genealogical continuity between humanity and
the rest of the animal kingdom that shone light on the provenance of our proudest
endowments – reason, morality, language – Darwin would surely turn the world upside
down. Small wonder, then, that Josiah Royce, at the close of the nineteenth century, could
conclude: ‘With the one exception of Newton’s Principia, no single book of empirical
science has ever been of more importance to philosophy than this work of Darwin’s’ (Royce
1892: 286).
But what kind of influence did Darwin have on philosophy, exactly? The answer to this
question, or at least part of the answer, was provided by John Dewey in a 1909 lecture
celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the appearance of The Origin of Species. Dewey, who
was born in that auspicious year, 1859, argues that Darwinism ‘introduced a mode of
thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge and hence the
treatment of morals, politics and religion’. It challenges us to throw off our stale intellectual
habits and prejudices, to recognise grand, all-encompassing systems – the ‘wholesale type of
philosophy’– as futile. Philosophy must therefore become narrower in its focus, more
honest in its aims and procedures; it must forswear ‘inquiry after absolute origins and
absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the specific conditions that
generate them’. But, as Dewey himself conceded, this novel practice had yet to be
established. While there were many ‘sincere and vital efforts’ to revise our conceptions
in accordance with the demands of the here and now – and Dewey had in mind his own
instrumentalism, rooted in the pragmatic tradition – a ‘recrudescence of absolutistic
philosophies’ was also discernible (Dewey 1910: 2, 16, 13, 18). These ‘absolutistic
philosophies’, however, had never gone away. If some philosophers not only embraced
Darwinism as a personal conviction but also weighed the problems thrown up by a
consistently naturalistic understanding of the world, there were plenty of others who,
though they readily adopted a pseudo-Darwinian vocabulary of evolutionary change, were
112 gregory moore
either unable or unwilling to face up to the new reality, instead remaining loyal to obsolete
patterns of thought. As we shall see from the following survey of contemporary philo-
sophical discussions of nature, epistemology and ethics, Darwin’s impact on the discipline
before 1900 was more modest and superficial than either he or Dewey anticipated, failing to
touch, in Darwin’s youthful words, the ‘whole of metaphysics’.

2. God and Cosmic Evolution

One of the enduring myths surrounding the so-called ‘Darwinian Revolution’ is that the
author of The Origin of Species took an axe to the rotting timbers of the theological
universe, fatally weakened since Copernicus first put the earth and the sun out of joint. Yet
the old verities were not suddenly swept away to begin an era of dizzying contingency.
Admittedly, the boldest thinkers of the time grasped the implications of what Daniel C.
Dennett has called Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’ (Dennett 1995). Marx, who once offered to
dedicate the English translation of Das Kapital to Darwin, recognised that the latter’s
achievement had been not only to abolish teleology and metaphysics but also (rather less
plausibly) to deliver ‘a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history’ (Adoratsky
1934: 125). And Nietzsche spoke of the ‘terrible consequence of Darwinism, which
incidentally I hold to be true’ (Nietzsche 1999: 7: 461).
At the other extreme was the founding father of British idealism, James Hutchison
Stirling, who had nothing but sneering contempt for the philosophical cogency of what he
alone dubbed ‘Darwinianism’. As a devout Christian and an equally devout Hegelian, he
recoiled from a restless, turbulent planet ruled by ‘Mr Darwin’s sinuosities of accident’ and
took solace in ‘the eternal presence of all-pervading purpose’ (Stirling 1894: 301).1 Many
thinkers, even if they were not overtly or conventionally religious, shared Stirling’s
palpable anxiety. John Stuart Mill, for example, worried that the ‘principle of ‘‘the
survival of the fittest’’’ would, if proven, vitiate the Argument from Design and thus
the only ‘scientific’ case for the existence of God – an outcome he thought unlikely,
though, since ‘in the present state of our knowledge’ there was ‘a large balance of
probability in favour of creation by intelligence’ (Mill 1874: 172, 174). Others accepted
the fact of evolution – of that much Darwin had persuaded them – but refused to accept a
vision of life as unceasing struggle (Bowler 1983). Beyond the blood and butchery, they
reassured themselves, there was an underlying order and meaning in nature. Evolution led
to moral, social and intellectual improvement, a future ‘golden age’, in the words of one
Berlin professor (Gizycki 1876: 93); it was no longer merely a means of accounting for
species change, but also the basis of a modern theodicy. Even the zoologist Ernst Haeckel,
Darwin’s paladin in Germany, moved ever closer towards a pantheistic natural religion that
found expression in a best-selling and much-translated 1899 work of speculative philo-
sophy entitled Die Welträtsel (The Riddle of the Universe). Haeckel now insisted that
evolution was a cosmic event, a manifestation of the creative, vital energy with which
every atom was imbued. His ‘monism’, his affirmation of the unity of mind and matter,
turned out to be little more than romantic nature-worship.
Perhaps the most influential example of this desire to soft-pedal the theory of evolution
is also, not coincidentally, the very figure celebrated by his peers as the pre-eminent
‘philosopher of the doctrine of Development’ (Alexander Bain, quoted in Richards 1987:
244): Herbert Spencer. Though scarcely regarded today as a serious thinker, if he is
remembered at all, Spencer was, in Darwin’s estimation, ‘by far the greatest philosopher in
England; perhaps equal to any that have lived’ (Darwin 1887: 2: 301) and his books sold
 darwinism and philosophy 113
tens of thousands of copies. Yet his commercial success owed less to the validity of his
conclusions than to the felt need that his writings met. His major work, the multi-volume
Synthetic Philosophy, which appeared from 1862 to 1893, was an ambitious attempt not only
to unify the increasingly specialised domains of human knowledge – biology, psychology,
sociology and ethics – on the basis of his own variety of evolutionism but also to bring the
theory of evolution into harmony with more traditional beliefs. Spencer’s bid to broker
peace between science and religion in his 1862 work First Principles is a Victorian fudge.
Both, he is confident, are easy allies, finding common cause in their recognition that there
is an ‘Ultimate Reality’, an inscrutable and incomprehensible power that works through
myriad agencies in shaping the universe. Like the divine, the biologist, despite finding an
exhaustive catalogue of the substances complicit in the production of life, must stop short,
for the essence of vitality ‘cannot be conceived in physico-chemical terms’ (Spencer 1898:
120). As an agnostic, a category of faith invented by his friend Thomas Henry Huxley,
Spencer hastened to reject as fruitless investigations into this noumenal realm, of whose
being we are intuitively convinced, but of whose nature we must remain ignorant; it was
instead ‘our highest wisdom and our highest duty to regard that through which all things
exist as the Unknowable’ – a pallid substitute for God and the proper sphere to which
nebulous religious sentiments were consigned (Spencer 1862: 113). But for all its supposed
mysteriousness, Spencer knew plenty about the Unknowable: it was infinite, impersonal,
unfathomable, unconditional and indestructible and by the time he was finished many of
his readers felt perfectly at home with it.
As he never tired of reminding a forgetful public, Spencer was an evolutionist before
Darwin. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who popularised the term ‘evolution’ (which does not
occur in the earliest editions of The Origin of Species) and who coined the fatal phrase
‘survival of the fittest’. But in truth Spencer’s concept of Evolution with a capital ‘E’ –
adumbrated in his first major work, Social Statics of 1851 and elaborated throughout the
1850s (for example in the essays ‘The Development Hypothesis’ of 1852 and ‘Progress: Its
Law and Cause’ of 1857) – bears little resemblance to the one with which Darwin would
later operate. Spencer declared that biological evolution was just one instance of a
developmental process unfolding on a cosmic scale, which he derived from the laws of
the indestructibility of matter and the conservation of energy. Evolutionary transformation
consisted in the redistribution of matter and the dissipation of motion, leading to the
progress of all phenomena, whether plant, animal, human society or the solar system, from
simple states to conditions of structural complexity through the determination and
combination of their constituent parts. Or, in Spencer’s oft-repeated formula: ‘Evolution
is a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent hetero-
geneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations’ (Spencer 1862: 216). Some
were impressed by Spencer’s effort to explain the entire universe by this unitary evolu-
tionary principle. ‘The fluctuations of the Exchange’, gushed one admirer, ‘are thus subject
to the same law as the passage of a comet; while the victories of Alexander and the works of
Shakespeare are reducible to the same factors as the Falls of Niagara and the spots on the
sun’ (d’Alviella 1885: 41). Others, like the mathematician Thomas P. Kirkman, were
struck only by the vagueness of Spencer’s proposition: ‘Evolution’, he mocked, ‘is a change
from a nohowish, untalkaboutable, all-alikeness, to a somehowish and in-general-talk-
aboutable not-all-alikeness, by continuous something-elseifications and sticktogethera-
tions’ (quoted in Spencer 1900: 519).
Spencer held that the emergence of life was an inevitable corollary of the tendency for
matter to organise itself, as was the increasing diversity and sophistication of biological
114 gregory moore
forms evident in the gulf that separates amoebae from human beings. Organic modification
takes place through an adaptive mechanism which Spencer calls the principle of
equilibriation: each organism exists in a delicate balance which it struggles to maintain
between itself and its environment. Because the latter is in flux, however, internal systems
of adjustments by which life preserves itself have also to be continuously rearranged,
producing shifting equilibria until either the organism fails to adapt to its new circum-
stances or eventually succumbs to the processes of dissolution. Successful adaptations,
though, are transmitted to offspring over many generations through the Lamarckian device
of the inheritance of functionally acquired characters. When the Origin of Species was
published and its terminology quickly gained currency, Spencer simply refined and updated
his deductions: he granted that he was wrong on the details, on the mechanism by which
evolution occurs, but saw in Darwin’s work a vindication of his leading idea: ‘to have the
theory of organic evolution justified was of course to get further support for that theory of
evolution at large with which . . . all my conceptions were bound up’ (Spencer 1904: 2:
50). But if Darwin’s views had very little effect upon the general structure of Spencer’s
philosophy, they had a notable effect upon its public reception. Spencer was indignant that
he should be regarded as a mere mouthpiece of Darwin; yet his enormous popularity was
due, at least in part, to the widespread presumption that his metaphysics had a sound
scientific basis: the Darwinian theory of natural selection.
John Fiske was one of Spencer’s most indefatigable champions in America; indeed, he
was so besotted with the British philosopher that he read aloud from the First Principles
when courting the woman who nevertheless agreed to marry him. Like his master, Fiske,
whose heterodoxy barred his appointment to a permanent post at Harvard, was concerned
to mitigate the repercussions of the evolutionary world-view, effecting a reconciliation
between Darwinism and religion that was thoroughly in accord with American optimism.
In his major work, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy of 1874, and elsewhere, Fiske framed an
evolutionary philosophy (called ‘Cosmism’) based on a notion of God as immanent in the
world and ‘disclosed in every throb of its mighty rhythmical life’ (Fiske 1885: xxviii).
Fiske’s God was infinite power, stripped of anthropomorphic attributes, and, though he
could be known only by his manifestations in nature, this deity was, for Fiske, a fitting
object of reverence. The doctrine of evolution:

brings before us with vividness the conception of an ever present God – not an absentee
God who once manufactured a cosmic machine capable of running itself . . . The
doctrine of evolution destroys the conception of the world as a machine. It makes God
our constant refuge and support and Nature his true revelation; and when all its religious
implications shall have been set forth, it will be seen to be the most potent ally that
Christianity has ever had in elevating mankind. (Fiske 1891: 599)

Fiske thought that the perfection of humanity was the climax of this divinely orchestrated
process and that we could look forward to the day when strife and sorrow would give way to
peace and love, when the spirit of Christ would reign supreme.
Fiske’s evolutionary theism has something in common with the cosmology advanced by
the logician and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce. Although best known today for
his theory of sign relations and espousal of the pragmatic maxim, Peirce also worked out an
idiosyncratic metaphysics rooted in an idea of evolution that, as he frankly disclosed, owed
less to Darwin than it did to Schelling. In fact, Peirce was deeply ambivalent towards
Darwinism. Peirce’s admiration for Darwin was limited to the naturalist’s methodology and
 darwinism and philosophy 115
meticulous observations and did not always stretch to the substance of his claims, ‘which in
themselves would barely command scientific respect’ (Peirce 1931–55: 1: 33). Like many of
his contemporaries, Peirce had misgivings, never quieted, about the adequacy of natural
selection as an explanatory model, which in his view ‘extends politico-economical views of
progress to the entire realm of animal and vegetable life’ and ought to carry the motto ‘the
Devil take the hindmost’ (6: 293). Yet Peirce praised Darwin for having introduced into
natural history similar mathematical innovations to those pioneered by James Clerk
Maxwell in physics. ‘The Darwinian controversy is, in large part, a question of logic’,
he wrote in 1877. ‘Mr Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology. The
same thing has been done in a widely different branch of science, the theory of gases’ (5:
364). Peirce was sure that this probabilistic understanding of the laws of nature, along with
Darwin’s emphasis on random variation, signalled the end of the determinist and
mechanist biases of classical science.
The real legacy of Darwinism, in Peirce’s eyes, was the room it left to chance and
creativity in the world. This, then, would be the point of departure for his own cosmology,
which he duly described as ‘only Darwinism analyzed, generalized and brought into the
realm of Ontology’ (Peirce 1982–: 4: 552). For Peirce, the universe moves not from
homogeneity to heterogeneity, as with Spencer, but from a primordial chaos to greater
order, uniformity and ‘concrete reasonableness’, to the growth of what he called ‘habit’ and
what we customarily label the ‘laws of nature’. These laws, then, are the results of
evolution, just like geological formations and biological species. Indeed, all things, from
molecules to metaphysicians, manifest a tendency ‘to take habits’, whereby they come into
being as discrete, self-identical entities. Since habit is the ‘one sole fundamental’ canon
that governs the mind, though, ‘it follows that physical evolution works towards ends in
the same way that mental action works towards ends’. In fact, matter is simply ‘mind whose
habits have become fixed so as to lose the powers of forming them and losing them’ (Peirce
1931–55: 6: 101).
Although the universe may display statistical regularity and predictability to a greater or
lesser extent, it does not by any means run like clockwork. There lingers – particularly in
the human realms of imagination and thought – an irreducible element of pure chance: the
fallibilism of scientific measurement demonstrates that nature is a dynamic and dicey realm
exhibiting considerable spontaneity. These departures from law:

are perpetually acting to increase the variety of the world and are checked by a sort of
natural selection and otherwise (for the writer does not think the selective principle
sufficient), so that the general result may be called ‘organized heterogeneity’, or better
rationalized variety. (Peirce 1931–55: 6: 101)

Of course, the road to rationality passes not only through the cosmos at large but also
through the mind of man, inasmuch as intellectual inquiry is slowly improving its fit with
the ever-sharper contours of nature. For Peirce, the emergent harmony between the
reasonableness of things and that of human inquiry is evidence of God’s effective and
providential presence: he was unable to entertain a universe devoid of ulterior meaning.
(Peirce’s progressivism is of a subtler kind than that of Spencer, say; it does not impose a
preordained structure on the final goal. Progress is possible, but it need not proceed
inevitably in a single direction, because life has the freedom to create its own future.)
There are three modes by which Peircean evolution takes place: random variation (or
‘tychasm’, in Peirce’s terms, exemplified by Darwinism), mechanical necessity (‘anancasm’,
116 gregory moore
of which Hegelianism is an instance) or creative love (‘agapasm’). Darwinism as such could
not by itself explain change; rather, God’s love must a play a greater role:

[A] genuine evolutionary philosophy, that is, one that makes the principle of growth
a primordial element of the universe, is so far from being antagonistic to the idea
of a personal creator that it is really inseparable from that idea . . . But a pseudo-
evolutionism which enthrones mechanical law above the principle of growth is at once
scientifically unsatisfactory, as giving no possible hint of how the universe has come
about and hostile to all hopes of personal relations to God. (Peirce 1931–55: 6: 157)

According to Peirce, the motor of the evolutionary process is not struggle, greed or
competition, but rather nurturing love (agape), in which an entity is prepared to sacrifice its
own perfection for the sake of the wellbeing of its neighbour. This doctrine had both a
social significance for Peirce, who apparently had the intention of arguing against the
vulgar social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century, and a cosmic significance, which
Peirce derived partly from the Gospel of St John (a text that, Peirce once remarked, is ‘the
formula of an evolutionary philosophy’ (6: 289)) and partly from the Swedenborgian
writings of Henry James, Sr.
For all its many eccentricities, however, Peirce’s evolutionary philosophy was indubi-
tably of its time: like the systems of Spencer and Fiske, it was a metaphysical creed that
dressed older Christian and Romantic ideas in more fashionable, Darwinian clothes.

3. Mind and Evolutionary Epistemology

3.1 Chauncey Wright
Chauncey Wright, philosopher of science and friend of Peirce, was a rare beast among
nineteenth-century evolutionists. Not only was he a champion of the efficacy of natural
selection, he insisted on the ‘metaphysical neutrality’ of science, which ought, in good
Baconian fashion, to concentrate on advancing knowledge by means of careful empirical
observations and experiments. He saw no warrant for applying Darwin’s theory beyond the
biological phenomena it was originally intended to describe and strenuously opposed those
– like Spencer and other exponents of what he termed ‘German Darwinism’ – who
indulged in unprovable speculation about the evolution of culture and the universe. To
introduce design, destiny and deity into the evolutionary process was to make flagrant
misuse of a scientific concept.
For a thinker given to short articles and reviews, Wright’s most sustained and substantive
work is his 1873 essay ‘Evolution of Self-Consciousness’. Written at the instigation of
Darwin himself, Wright’s ‘psychozoölogy’ undertakes to solve a problem raised by a
reviewer of the Origin of Species: explaining the gap between animal instinct and human
intelligence. Wright argued that evolution was opportunistic. It need not imply ‘continuity
in the kinds of powers and functions in living beings, that is, by suggesting transition by
insensible steps from one kind to another, as well as in the degrees of their importance and
exercise at different stages of development’. On the contrary, Wright explained,

new uses of old powers arise discontinuously both in the bodily and mental natures of the
animal and in its individual developments, as well as in the development of its race,
although, at their rise, these uses are small and of the smallest importance to life. (Wright
1878: 199–200)
 darwinism and philosophy 117
Human self-consciousness was not a supernatural endowment, but had evolved quite
naturally and accidentally out of faculties such as memory and imagination already
present in other species. Where these are able to form representative images of the world
and, based on some instinctive mnemonic function, act in accordance with ‘enthyme-
matic reasoning’, by which the images or ‘internal signs’ are merely harbingers of events
without recognition of the relation between the sign and the thing signified, human
beings, through the acquisition of novel habits and dispositions, have learned by stages to
treat the sign itself as the object of reflective attention and to recognise its semantic
capacity, its relations to past, present and future significations. The difference between
animals and their human kin is that the former merely have thoughts, whereas the latter
are able to think about those thoughts and communicate them via a series of ‘external
signs’ (language).
Wright was scarcely alone in seeking an evolutionary account of the mind. In his 1855
Principles of Psychology, Spencer had already tried to trace the emergence of consciousness
from the incremental growth of nerve fibres, reflex arcs and ganglia prompted by waves of
outward stimuli. In Germany, Wilhelm Wundt, the founding father of experimental
psychology and, less memorably, the author of a systematic philosophy, was the first to meet
the challenge of explaining animal behaviour and human mind with an evolutionary
theory of instinct as early as 1863 in his Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele
(Lectures on the Soul of Men and Animals). Under the influence of Hegel, Fichte and
Fechner, Wundt was prepared to discover the glimmerings of consciousness even among
infusoria and to pursue its development into the transcendent brilliance of human reason.
Although he invoked the principle of natural selection to ‘illuminate puzzles of psychic
development’, he remained wedded to the idealistic assumption that mind guided all
natural processes and never shed his belief that individual intention and habit were the
principal moulding tools of evolution (Wundt 1863: 355). Finally, Haeckel’s conviction
that psychology was merely a branch of physiology – indeed, of cytology – rested on the
claim, supposedly confirmed by ‘every scientific man’, that each living cell has a ‘soul’ that
consists of ‘a sum of sensations, perceptions and volitions’ (the so-called ‘cell-soul’); that,
consequently, the thinking, feeling and willing of complex organisms is the aggregate of the
psychic functions of their constituent cells. Human consciousness has evolved from the
‘souls’ of lower creatures and, ultimately, from the simple cell-soul of protozoa (‘there is
present in the egg-cell’, Haeckel conjectured, ‘a hereditary cell-soul, out of which man, like
every other animal, is developed’) (Haeckel 1894: 15).

3.2 William James

Like that of Wright, a fellow member of the Cambridge-based Metaphysical Club, the
thought of William James, both as a psychologist and later as a philosopher, was irreversibly
affected by his early encounter with Darwin’s views. (And, like his older associate, he never
declined an opportunity to attack Spencer.) In 1865 James witnessed at first hand the
scientific battles fought over Darwinism, having joined an expedition to the Amazon led by
Louis Agassiz, one of Darwin’s most prominent critics, the purpose of which was to collect
evidence consistent with the Harvard botanist’s competing hypothesis of divine creation.
Already persuaded by the explanatory fecundity of The Origin of Species, James disagreed
with Agassiz’s theory on methodological grounds, holding that it had no material
implications and was hence unverifiable. It made no difference whether it was true or
not and, for this reason, it had no influence on the way we interpret the world around us.
118 gregory moore
This insight – that the worth of a belief depends on the concrete difference that it makes –
is one of the central planks of what would become pragmatism.
When is a belief true? From the outset, James thought that it was mistaken to assume, as
Spencer did, that a belief is true or justified only if it corresponds with reality. The human
mind, he argued, ‘is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere’, passively
reflecting an external order of things; rather, the mind is creative and ‘co-efficient of the
truth’. Our postulates and suppositions,

so far as they are bases for human action – action which to a great extent transforms the
world – help to make the truth which they declare. In other words, there belongs to
mind, from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game. (James 1975–88: 5:
21)

But how do we acquire our ideas about the world? James’s answer, in the final chapter of his
pioneering Principles of Psychology of 1890, is a Kantian one, albeit with a Darwinian twist.
Beyond the instinctive and pre-rational responses to colour, taste, sound, pleasure and pain
with which the mind comes equipped, we have at our disposal a number of innate ideas –
‘intuitively necessary truths’, ranging from logical relations to metaphysical axioms, that do
not appear to derive from sense impressions. These, too, are the result of our brain structure:
fortuitous variations that have passed through the winnowing fan of natural selection.
Minds that possessed them were preferred over those that did not; but it need not follow
that these ideas coincided with a reality extra mentem meam – here James parts company
with his many contemporaries (among them Spencer, Helmholtz and Wundt) who
presented a form of biologised Kantianism. Now, all traits are selected because they have
adaptive value. The reason human beings came to possess the idea of causation, for
example, is not because causation positively exists and would exist whether we were around
to believe in it or not. We have no way of knowing whether this is so, nor should we care:
we believe in causation because experience shows that it pays to believe in causation. Both
instinct and a repertoire of innate ideas therefore constitute our evolutionary legacy. But
Darwinian, too, is the generation of new ideas, the learning of new facts, in addition to
those supposedly knowable a priori, through this inherited cognitive framework; hypoth-
eses, guesses and cognitions erupt both in our quotidian and scientific interaction with the
world; those that withstand the brunt of the actual live for another day. As James put it
later in Pragmatism of 1907:

The whole notion of truth, which naturally and without reflexion we assume to mean
the simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given reality, proves hard to
understand clearly . . . [A]ll our thoughts are instrumental and mental modes of adaptation
to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-
enigma. (James 1975–88: 1: 93–4)

So James’s epistemology rests on Darwinian foundations. But this Darwinian epistemol-

ogy implies a peculiar sort of metaphysics, a vision of the universe as provisional and in the
making – an ‘open universe’. The world, too, for James, was in a sense evolving, continually
changing, growing, developing. Nothing was absolutely fixed and certain; there was a place
for novelty and chance, without which the world would be little more than a machine,
freedom an illusion and life bereft of meaning. It is chance that gives us the opportunity to
exert choice and control over the direction of human affairs.
 darwinism and philosophy 119

3.3 Ernst Mach

Like James, Ernst Mach also devised an evolutionary theory of knowledge. ‘We are prepared’,
he wrote in his essay ‘On Transformation and Adaptation in Scientific Thought’, ‘to regard
ourselves and every one of our ideas as a product and a subject of universal evolution’ (Mach
1895: 235). According to the scheme sketched out in his 1905 work Knowledge and Error, the
multifaceted human undertaking that is science represents the culmination of countless
adaptive interactions with the environment stretching back over the course of the history of
life on earth and, for that very reason, exists on a continuum with earlier, simpler organic
activity. From instinctive responses to an organism’s immediate circumstances evolved ever
more sophisticated mental capacities – chief among them imagination and memory – that
brought into view a wider field of spatial-temporal relations than those present to the
senses. Finally, the individual human being’s memory was augmented by the retention and
transmission of knowledge through culture. ‘Indeed, the formation of scientific hypotheses’,
Mach averred, ‘is merely a further degree of development of instinctive and primitive
thought and all the transitions between them can be demonstrated’. But if science is a result
of the evolutionary process, it is also an engine driving that same process, having ‘taken over
the task of replacing tentative and unconscious adaptation by a faster variety that is fully
conscious and methodical’ (Mach [1905] 1976: 171, 361). Its end, though, is the same as all
adaptive strategies: survival and nothing else. As Mach put it in his celebrated Analysis of the
Sensations: ‘The biological task of science is to provide the fully developed human with as
perfect a means of orientating himself as possible. No other scientific ideal can be realized
and any other must be meaningless’ (Mach [1886] 1959: 36–7).
How do ideas arise and how does scientific change come about? Mach suggests that ideas
are brought forth in a thoroughly Darwinian manner: by random variation. Ideation, then,
is not intentional, but relies instead on accident and luck, on flashes of inspiration.
Selection is subsequently brought to bear when scientists choose those theories, out of the
pool of available variations, which best fit the data and other pre-existing ideas. In other
words, reason, both ‘syllogism and induction’, cannot by itself engender knowledge; it can
‘merely make sure that there is no contradiction between our various insights and show
clearly how these are connected and lead our attention to different sides of some particular
insight, teaching us to recognize it in different forms’ (Mach [1905] 1976: 231). The true
source of knowledge, in other words, is as mysterious as the source of those mutations that
furnish the raw material of evolution had recently been before the rediscovery of Mendel’s
work on genetics.
It was in psychology and epistemology that a Darwinian or at least quasi-Darwinian
stance produced the most philosophically promising results. The different paths laid out
here – Wright’s and James’s focus on the pedigree of cognitive mechanisms in animals and
humans, for example, or Mach’s description of the rise of concepts and hypotheses using
models borrowed from biology – were continued in the twin programme of evolutionary
epistemology set out in the latter half of the twentieth century: in the work of Konrad
Lorenz and Donald T. Campbell in the former case and in that of Karl Popper and Stephen
Toulmin in the latter case (see Lorenz 1977; Popper 1972; Toulmin 1972).

4. Ethics and Evolution

If Darwinism should prevail, wondered the historian Goldwin Smith gloomily, ‘What will
become of the brotherhood of man and of the very idea of humanity?’ To which the
120 gregory moore
Reverend Minot J. Savage replied: ‘As if ‘‘the brotherhood of man’’ were not one of the
products of evolution!’ (Savage 1890: 5). His response is typical of the many thinkers who
addressed themselves to what seemed the most urgent task of all in the post-Darwinian age:
rethinking the philosophical basis of morality. There was a belief that it would now be
possible not only to give a satisfactory explanation of the genesis and development of moral
sentiments, customs and judgements – one that was truly scientific – but also to provide a
sanction for morality independent of the dogmas of religion (and, often enough, at least in
Britain, corrective of the competing tenets of utilitarianism). Humanity might be just one
species of animal amongst others, caught up in the same perpetual struggle for existence in
an indifferent universe, but evolution need not entail, in Haeckel’s words, ‘a subversion of
all accepted moral law and a destructive emancipation of Egoism’ (quoted in Williams
1893: 27).
Darwin’s own narrative of the growth of morality is outlined in The Descent of Man of
1871. Although he is certain that a moral sense originated through the natural selection of
those tribes in whom the social instinct was strongest, he recognises that this primitive
ethic was transformed into a ‘higher morality’ by the effects of habit, rational reflection and
religious instruction. Not ‘the survival of the fittest’ but ‘as ye would that men should do to
you, do ye to them likewise’ has come to be regarded as the true maxim of human conduct.
Nor is moral improvement at an end. ‘Looking to future generations’, Darwin prophesies,

there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker and we may expect that
virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. In this case
the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe and virtue will be
triumphant. (Darwin [1871] 1877: 1: 124–5)

As so often it was Spencer who, in his Data of Ethics of 1879, led the way. Indeed,
Spencer admitted that he had conceived his entire ‘Doctrine of Evolution’ first and
foremost as a means of finding, ‘for the principles of right and wrong in conduct at large, a
scientific basis’ (Spencer 1879: v). This quest rests on the assumption that nature,
especially human nature, is intrinsically moral. What he terms ‘morality’ is nothing but
a particular instance of the incessant adaptation of internal relations to external relations
which characterises the universal process of Evolution: the adjustment of acts to particular
ends. This alignment becomes more complex and elaborate as organisms evolve. The
ultimate end of all conduct is the preservation of the individual organism and the species to
which it belongs. Actions are thus ‘good’ or ‘bad’ according as to whether they are relatively
more or less adapted to this end. Organisms are led to perform these acts because ‘there
exists a primordial connexion between pleasure-giving acts and continuance or increase of
life and, by implication, between pain-giving acts and decrease or loss of life’ (Spencer
1879: iii, 82). Self-preservation is therefore necessarily bound up with the striving for
pleasure, for those organisms in whom life-sustaining activity generally and consistently
produced misery would perish in the struggle for existence. But the organism strives not
only for the increase of its own pleasure but also for the greatest possible aggregate
happiness; self-sacrifice for the good of the species is no less primordial than self-
preservation. Once again, the organism is led to acts of renunciation because these acts
are innately pleasurable and when pleasure is associated with repetitive actions it
introduces principles of reinforcement and habit that justify increasingly complex social
behaviours.
Moral evolution thus involves the greater refinement of these primitive altruistic
 darwinism and philosophy 121
impulses and ultimately leads to the reconciliation of egoism and altruism: acts through
which the individual seeks its own pleasure in fact maximise the collective happiness and
all altruistic acts also benefit the individual members of society. This development
necessarily runs parallel to biological evolution and culminates in what Spencer calls
the ‘ideally moral man’. The members of this future race will subsist in a state of perfect
equilibrium, of complete internal adaptation to both their physical and social environ-
ment; the ‘moral man is one whose functions . . . are all discharged in degrees duly adjusted
to the conditions of existence’ (Spencer 1879: 76). These beings will have achieved the
greatest general good, equal freedom and eternal peace, upheld by harmonious cooperation
of all members of a society. Here, the feeling of moral obligation, present in lower stages of
evolution, is lost; moral actions become, under the guidance of evolved ‘moral sentiments’,
self-evident and natural, so that organic and moral behaviour are one and the same thing.
Following in Spencer’s footsteps was Leslie Stephen with his 1882 treatise The Science of
Ethics. Stephen’s book is ‘an attempt to lay down an ethical doctrine in harmony with the
doctrine of evolution so widely accepted by modern men of science’ and thereby to remedy
what he saw as the shortcomings of Spencer’s programme (Stephen [1882] 1907: vi).
Stephen argued that it was imperative to look beyond the individual to the community in
which we may discover the ethical process at work. This process works through the ‘race’
and the race forms a ‘social tissue’ through which moral qualities are passed on. This tissue
is composed of individuals, just as the anatomical tissue which physiologists study is
composed of cells. The reproductive organ in society is the family and the family is also the
seat of morality because it inculcates in children those qualities that give life to the race.
Since the law of natural selection compels humanity to become efficient in all walks of life,
including that of conduct, moral qualities evolve to preserve the individual, the com-
munity and the race; the social tissue is constantly modified by evolution so that its various
components may be better adapted to promote the health of the social organism. Morality
is generated by social pressure and keeps the social tissue alive: if it grows faint, the tissue
perishes and the race is threatened with extinction. In other words, a moral rule states a
condition of ‘social welfare’ – the conceptual innovation of which Stephen was proudest –
and this social welfare is the final motive for good conduct and a vital principle in the
survival of the race.
Stephen was not alone in offering variations on Spencer. Some, like F. C. S. Schiller in
Riddles of the Sphinx of 1891 or J. T. Bixby in The Ethics of Evolution of 1900, for all their
criticisms of Spencer, merely offered a more explicitly theistic version of the Data of Ethics,
according to which the ‘ultimate aim of the world-process . . . is a harmonious society of
perfect individuals, a kingdom of Heaven of perfected spirits, in which all friction will have
disappeared from their interaction with God and with one another’ (Schiller 1891: 432).
Jean-Marie Guyau, in his 1885 Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, argues that a
propensity to expansion, to growth beyond the limits of the single organism, is the
physiological basis of altruism. Morality is not, therefore, a repressive external authority, as
(allegedly) with Kant, but a natural, internal power for good that translates itself into
action by means of the accumulation and explosive release of an individual’s vital forces.
One of the ways in which this current discharges itself is in generation: when two cells
unite to form an individual there begins ‘a new moral phase for the world’. Paul Rée lacked
Spencer’s and Stephen’s roseate optimism, although he was, as his erstwhile friend
Nietzsche later grumbled, persistently influenced by the ‘English’ mode of historical
explanation. In his 1877 book Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (The Origin
of Moral Sensations), Rée explained the eventual victory of altruism over egoism by
122 gregory moore
pointing to the role played by habit in reinforcing ethical conduct. The human animal has
not, during the millennia of social evolution, become less selfish; it has merely become
more domesticated, learning to restrain its bestial urges. This process is explicable in terms
of the same Lamarckian physiology on which Spencer’s theory also relies. Self-control –
imposed as a moral demand by state and society – requires the exertion of certain nerves
and muscles; the more frequently these are exercised in order to suppress a particular
passion, the greater the individual’s success in achieving this end because the flow of
‘nervous fluid’ to those parts increases. These internal adaptations to the reigning moral
circumstances are heritable. For Rée, then, morality not only emerges out of our evolu-
tionary history, it can also have a retroactive effect on present and future biological
evolution.
Another approach was taken by Bartholomäus von Carneri, an Austrian philosopher
and liberal politician, in his Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus (and later in Grundlegung der
Ethik), a typically Teutonic stew of Darwinism and Hegelianism, seasoned with a generous
dash of Goethe and a pinch of Haeckel. Carneri understands evolution as the inevitable
march of nature from insentience to self-reflexivity through the human spirit, as the
distillation of matter into mind, a movement propelled by the dialectical rhythm of
the struggle for existence. He begins by distinguishing between ethics and morality;
where the latter is prescriptive, particular and time-bound, varying across history and
cultures, the former is descriptive, universal and bodied forth by the course of evolution
itself. When the triadic progression from instinct to consciousness to self-consciousness is
completed and we have raised ourselves from our individual perspective and recognised our
complex interrelationship with the world, the ideas of the Good and of Truth and Beauty
are revealed to us. To do good means to act in accordance with a beneficent nature, as well
as to work towards the fulfilment of the evolutionary process, the terminus of which is the
perfection of humanity and the attainment of absolute good. To do good means to act
without coercion, not out of momentary caprice, but out of knowledge and conviction.
There is no oughtness; the moral man simply is as he does. He is free, since freedom lies in
the absence of mental discord. And this overcoming of conflict is the direction of
evolution: in time, the more clearly the laws of Geist are perceived, the struggle for
existence becomes less painful yet more rapid, as the cruder, more bloody battles waged in
the animal kingdom, in which brute strength and egoistical utility prevail, are sublated;
then ‘humanity will fully earn its name only when it knows no other struggle than work, no
other shield than right, no other weapon than intelligence, no other banner than civilisation’
(Carneri 1871: 362).
Lastly, in his 1889 Moral Order and Progress, the Oxford philosopher Samuel Alexander
set out to show how morality is, inescapably, subject to the same laws of evolutionary
progress that hold sway over the rest of the physical and cultural world. Evolution is
essential to morality, which is dynamical, shifting, becoming ever more refined: for every
ideal is merely provisional, a station in the passage to a higher value. (Although Alexander
allows for the possibility of degeneration, this is merely a temporary setback on an
otherwise upward trajectory.) An ideal, Alexander claims, is akin to a ‘species’ and the
mechanism of species change, of moral evolution, is analogous to that operative in nature.
Ideals must adapt, for there are always new conditions or situations for morality to resolve
(or, to use Alexander’s Spencerian term, ‘equilibriate’) and they are hence apt to vary,
leading to a struggle between the emergent varieties, in which the good ideal, the most
suitable and effective in a given socio-historical context, carries the day and evil is rejected.
This is not some example of crass social Darwinism: Alexander is at pains to stress that the
 darwinism and philosophy 123
clash is between objects of the mind or will rather than persons and, although his mentor
was A. C. Bradley, his ethics is rather reminiscent of James’s pragmatic epistemology. He
believes his analysis is able to account, among other things, for: the birth of moral
distinctions; the multiplicity of different moral ideals at different stages of development in
different parts of the globe at any one time; and the creeping but no less inexorable
movement of morality towards comprehending all humanity in a universal system of duties.
In fact, as with so many other ethical thinkers of the age, Alexander supposes that, in the
future, the sense of obligation attached to virtuous conduct will be dispelled by the very
highest conception of morality. This consummate morality is a ‘spontaneous outflow of the
sentiments’: a man does good not because he is compelled to do so, but because he is
entranced by the ‘spell of affection’ he has for his community willingly to render service to
an order of life higher than himself, ‘a continuously progressive society of free individuals’
(Alexander 1889: 408, 412–13).

5. Critics of Evolutionary Ethics

There were many, and not merely among the religious orthodox, who found the project of an
evolutionary ethics – especially Spencer’s version of it – both superficial and arbitrary.
Perhaps the most famous and the most devastating criticism came from G. E. Moore in his
Principia Ethica of 1903. To describe the course of evolution, he remarks there, is to say
something about how the world is and how it came to be as it is; but that tells us nothing
about how the world ought to be. To think otherwise, to try to elicit from such facts a
criterion for moral judgement and behaviour, is to commit the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Spencer’s
evolutionary ethics is built on the assumption that ‘to be more evolved’ is synonymous with
‘better’, but there is no logical connection between those terms. Therefore, Moore decided,
‘Evolution has very little indeed to say to Ethics’ (Moore 1903: 58).
There were others who worried that Spencer’s programme failed to do justice to the
normative character of morality; rules of conduct did not automatically follow from the
premise that the moral sense was an ancestral legacy. That point was made by Henry Sidgwick
in his 1876 essay ‘The Theory of Evolution in its Application to Practice’ (Sidgwick 1876). T.
H. Green, in his posthumous Prolegomena to Ethics, concluded that anyone who undertook to
‘reconstruct our ethical systems in conformity with the doctrines of evolution and descent’
would, after ‘having reduced the speculative part of them to a natural science’ be compelled,
were he consistent, ‘to abolish the practical or preceptive part altogether’ (Green 1883: 7).
Certainly the most thorough critique of evolutionary ethics along these lines was mounted by
the idealist William Ritchie Sorley, a disciple of Green and Bradley, in On the Ethics of
Naturalism. Sorley argued that evolutionary theory was unable either to set up a comprehensive
ideal for life or to yield any principle for distinguishing between good and evil, right and wrong.
Spencer’s attempt to show how moral conduct has arisen out of ‘purely physical or reflex
action’ is misguided; he and his ilk ignore the element of self-consciousness in moral behaviour,
for it is through self-consciousness that mere facts are translated into ends of action. And the
ultimate end of all human action, of our conscious willing, is self-realisation; only when we can
conceive of something as necessary for completing our idea of self, both individual and social,
does it become a motive. ‘Evolution’, he opined,

is thus not the foundation of morality, but the manifestation of the principle on which it
depends. Morality cannot be explained by means of its own development, without
reference to the self-consciousness which makes that development possible. However
124 gregory moore
valuable may be the information we get from experience as to the gradual evolution of
conduct, its nature and end can only be explained by a principle that transcends
experience. (Sorley 1885: 283, 291–2)

But not all detractors of nineteenth-century evolutionary ethics levelled their criticism
against the method or logic of the enterprise. Nietzsche, perhaps the most radical, believed
that values could be derived from the evolutionary process (at least as emanations of what
he termed ‘ascending’ and ‘descending’ life) and their genealogical history laid bare, but he
questioned those values which his contemporaries claimed to find there. T. H. Huxley, too,
disputed the moral character of evolution: in the gladiatorial struggle for existence he
witnessed self-assertion rather than self-restraint, only the enormous waste and pain
suffered by those creatures thrust aside as unfit for their surroundings. Though morality
is natural – and not God-given – it is not present in nature. Ethical progress ‘depends, not
on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it’
(Huxley 1894: 83). Nietzsche agreed with Huxley that nature was not moral, but
contended that that was all the more reason to imitate it.
Throughout his career Nietzsche demonstrates a clear sense of the significance of
evolution for human affairs. In On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, he describes
as ‘true but deadly’ the ‘doctrines of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts,
types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal’ and
suggests that, should these teachings find a wider audience, the fabric of society would
disintegrate as moral and legal statutes lost their binding force (Nietzsche [1873–6] 1997:
112). But as his earlier diatribe against David Friedrich Strauss shows, he was already
acutely aware that the lethal repercussions of evolutionism were being ignored by the very
men who were its most vociferous champions. Strauss strove to reconcile the moral
teachings of Christianity with the new evolutionary world-view instead of daring to draft a
‘genuine Darwinian ethic, seriously and consistently carried through’. Having passed up the
opportunity to derive ‘a moral code for life out of the bellum omnium contra omnes and the
privileges of the strong’, Strauss perversely praises Darwin as one of the ‘greatest benefactors
of mankind’ for having established a non-transcendental groundwork for ethical comport-
ment (Nietzsche [1873–6] 1997: 29–30). But Strauss, Nietzsche would soon discover, was
not the only thinker to shrink from making the clean break with traditional systems of
morality which the theory of evolution would seem to demand.
Although Nietzsche quarrelled with Darwin on more than one occasion, casting doubt
on natural selection and dismissing its author as an intellectual mediocrity, it was Spencer
whom he more frequently (and more justifiably) charged with pusillanimity in the face of a
nature red in tooth and claw. Nietzsche’s own conception of evolution is more anti-
Spencerian than it is anti-Darwinian. Indeed, in some respects Nietzsche simply turns
Spencer’s system on its head. Whereas Spencer posits a graduation from egoism to altruism,
Nietzsche argues the opposite: organic change tends towards progressive individuation.
Both moral and biological evolution lie in the refinement of egoism, which, in phylo-
genetic terms, represents ‘something recent and still unusual’ (Nietzsche 1999: 9: 513).
Altruism, in contrast, as a rudimentary form of egoism, the egoism of what he calls the
‘herd’, must eventually become extinct. Like Spencer, Nietzsche sees evolution as
delivering enhanced complexity and heterogeneity, but he suspects that the path which
Spencer has marked out leads only to an evolutionary cul-de-sac of physiological uni-
formity. Spencer is reading the wrong values into the process.
What is a value? Values, according to Nietzsche, are the goals of an organism’s drives. As
 darwinism and philosophy 125
dispositions to act in certain ways, they determine how we – indeed, all creatures – relate to
the world around us. But the values of an individual and those of the group to which it
belongs (humans, after all, are gregarious animals) must inevitably come into conflict. Both
individual and herd, as vessels of the will to power, the very essence of life, want the same
thing. They want to assert themselves and subdue others in the great struggle of existence
(rather than the struggle for existence: strife is for Nietzsche, as it was for Schopenhauer, an
ontological feature of the universe). Exploitation, Nietzsche says, is the ‘fundamental
organic function’ (Nietzsche [1886] 1998: §259). The herd asserts itself and its values at the
expense of the individual: entirely healthy, predatory and creative instincts must be
suppressed in the interests of the collective. Instead, a range of behaviours and attitudes
that promote social cohesion is favoured, bred into the members of the herd and labelled
‘virtuous’, such as selflessness, humility, gentleness, sympathy, abstinence and obedience.
These values are injurious to the individual: they stunt and warp his growth. Nietzschean
evolution, however, by no means predictable or regular, results in the ‘sovereign in-
dividual’, the antithesis of Spencer’s ‘ideally moral man’. Where the ‘ideally moral man’ is
the embodiment of herd consciousness, Nietzsche’s human being of the future can master
the diverse perspectives and impulses that constitute his existence; he has emancipated
himself from the alienating experience of serving ends that are not his own and, in the
name of self-realisation, is thus free to posit his own goals and values, values that do not
traduce life, values that ennoble humanity and contribute to our flourishing, values that are
like the evolutionary process itself: provisional, natural, amoral.

6. Conclusion
‘The Darwinian theory’, Wittgenstein declared in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ‘has
no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis of natural science’ (Wittgenstein
1922: 4: 1122). He was wrong. With its epochal significance, Darwinism issued and
continues to issue a challenge to philosophy. Few thinkers rose to that challenge in the
nineteenth century, even if many rushed to accommodate themselves to the changed
intellectual climate. By invoking the concept of evolution they sought either to reframe
the old, theistic picture of the world or to solve traditional philosophical questions. The
extent to which they succeeded in that endeavour is perhaps indicated by Herbert Spencer,
who, having devoted his life to this very task of placing political, social and moral problems
in the new evolutionary perspective, finally confessed: ‘The Doctrine of Evolution has not
furnished guidance to the extent I had hoped. Most of the conclusions, drawn empirically,
are such as right feelings, enlightened by cultural intelligence, have already sufficed to
establish’ (Spencer 1893: 2: v).

Note
1. Another philosophical critic of Darwin was the widely read Eduard von Hartmann, whose 1869
metaphysical system, Die Philosophie des Unbewussten, aimed to square Hegel with Schopenhauer
(see Hartmann 1875). On Hartmann, see also the discussion by Gunther Gödde in Chapter 11 of
this volume.

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 7
Faith and Knowledge

George Pattison

1. Introduction: Why Faith and Knowledge?

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, religion once more became a prominent topic
of public discourse and the language of religion, and of atheism, became the lingua franca in
which key issues of the day were formulated. Whatever might be thought of the general
level on which it has been taken up in our contemporary debates, this resurgence of
religion facilitates the leap of historical imagination required to take us back to the
intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, especially its first half. Then, as now,
religion offered a crucial focus for debating fundamental issues of human identity as these
were reflected in questions of political order, ethical value, the meaning of cultural life and
the scope and competence of reason itself. Although this last offered the most abstract form
in which the question of religion was then posed, it condensed everything that was at stake
in all those other areas where questions of religion were debated. In this way, the
philosophy of religion came into the very centre of intellectual life and seemed to offer
the ground on which the decisive battles of the day had to be fought. In 1841 the matter
was put in these terms by Friedrich Engels, commenting somewhat sarcastically on
Schelling’s much-heralded lectures on the philosophy of revelation – lectures that were
expected to refute the fundamental basis of Hegelianism:

Ask anybody in Berlin today on what field the battle for dominion over German public
opinion in politics and religion, that is, over Germany itself, is being fought, and if he
has any idea of the power of the mind over the world he will reply that the battlefield is
the University, in public Lecture-hall number 6, where Schelling is giving his lectures on
the philosophy of revelation. (Engels [1841] 1975: 2: 181)

Both the importance and the novelty of the question of faith and knowledge had been
similarly noted several years previously by the Hegelian historian of philosophy, Johann
Eduard Erdmann. In the introduction to his lectures on Faith and Knowledge which were
published in 1837, Erdmann stated that the question of faith and knowledge was essentially
a modern question, unknown to antiquity and to the early Church since these lacked the
modern idea of faith. Although adumbrated in scholasticism, this question came into its
own only in the era – he means the Reformation – that saw a rebirth of both religion and
science. Since then the question has featured prominently in the works of those whom
Erdmann calls the ‘heroes’ of modern philosophy: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Wolff,
Jacobi, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In modern theology, too, a similar reformulation
 faith and knowledge 129
of the question has occurred. Gone are discussions of the lumen supernaturale (supernatural
illumination) versus the lumen naturale (natural illumination), to be replaced by debates on
the relationship between natural and positive religion or between religion and knowledge.
In the last couple of decades, Erdmann notes, this relationship itself has been the focus of
many particular studies and

[E]very trade catalogue brings us new writings about philosophy and religion, faith and
knowledge, faith and reason, reason and revelation, philosophy and Christianity, not to
mention the daily appearance of works on rationalism and supernaturalism that come
out in such manifold forms that one can almost be sure that whenever two ‘isms’ are
compared with one another one will encounter these two much-discussed subjects.
(Erdmann 1837: 3)1

Despite this intense interest, within ten years of Erdmann’s lectures being published Karl
Marx was satisfied that, the critique of heaven being accomplished, it was time to move on
to the critique of earth and leave behind the airy vacuities of philosophy of religion (Marx
[1844] 1975: 244–5).
Not accidentally, Erdmann formulates the question to which his lectures are dedicated as
that of faith and knowledge (Glauben and Wissen). Underlying this choice of words is a
specific intellectual inheritance that Erdmann traces back to Kant’s assertion that in
conducting a critique of the ideas of pure reason, including especially such metaphysical
ideas as God, freedom and immorality, he ‘found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order
to make room for faith’ (Erdmann 1837: 218; see Kant [1781/1787] 1933). But if Kant was
the starting point for the new phase of this discussion, it was Hegel whom both religious
and anti-religious participants regarded as having established the paradigm that enabled
the issues to be articulated in a decisive way. We shall return to Erdmann, who offers one of
the more accessible versions of Hegelian philosophy of religion. But first we must turn back
to Hegel and see how he gave a new shape to an old question.

2. Hegel and his Reception

In July 1802 the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, a journal largely by Hegel and Schelling,
published an article by Hegel entitled ‘Faith and Knowledge’. It begins with the striking
statement that:

The culture of recent times has raised itself above the old opposition between reason and
faith, between philosophy and positive religion to such a degree that this opposing of
faith and knowledge has gained a quite other meaning and has now been relocated into
philosophy itself. (Hegel [1802] 1970: 287)

Hegel sees this as a product of the impasse to which the Enlightenment critique of religion
had led. For the struggle against religion carried out by the Enlightenment was mostly
directed only against the external forms of religion, not its ideal. A striking example of this
is the prominence given in that period to the debate about miracles.
Christian apologetics had laid especially heavy weight on miracles as evidence for
Christ’s divinity, but as the view spread that the laws of nature were uniform and without
exception the possibility of miracles inevitably became a hotly contested topic. In Hegel’s
view this whole debate left the true essence of religion untouched, however, because it did
130 george pattison
not stop to consider the ideal or essence of religion. This failure meant that philosophy
found itself once more having to confess itself incompetent in relation to knowledge of
God. This (Hegel says) is precisely what we see happening in three very different ways in
Kant, Jacobi and Fichte. When Kant argues that what is supersensuous cannot be known by
reason, or Jacobi insists that God is knowable only through feeling or intimations
(Ahnung), or Fichte speaks of God as inconceivable, they all assume that the world of
finite things has no intrinsic connection to what is infinite. God is represented as somehow
‘beyond’ human capacities of knowing and therefore not a proper object of reason. This
means that these philosophies can only ever deliver knowledge of humanity, not of God.
Hegel therefore likens their efforts to a certain kind of portraiture,

that would attain its ideal by putting a longing into the eyes of an ordinary face or
[placing] a sorrowful smile on its lips, but which was utterly forbidden to portray the gods
elevated above all longing and sorrow. Thus philosophy finds itself having to portray,
not the idea of the human but an abstract version of empirical humanity burdened with
limitations and with the arrow of an absolute contradiction immovably lodged within it.
It is immaterial whether it analyses this abstraction or lets it express itself in the touching
manner of a beautiful soul, whilst adorning itself with the superficial colouring of
something supersensuous by invoking faith to suggest something ‘higher’. (Hegel [1802]
1970: 299)

It is immaterial, because truth can only be established when this dualism is abolished and,
as Hegel says, the attitude of those who assume the utter separation of finite and infinite is
like that of a person who, looking at a painting, looks only at the feet and doesn’t raise their
eyes to look at the picture as a whole. The whole, the idea in Hegel’s pregnant sense, is
precisely composed of the finite and the infinite so that the finite itself cannot be known for
what it is without being seen in relation to the infinite. But if this idea of the whole is the
proper object of reason – and if reasoning means knowing the idea – then the true absolute
is itself a matter not of faith but of knowledge. Our relation to it is not that of ‘reasonable
belief’ (which would still suggest that it is somehow external to human experience) but
knowledge.
However, the transition from the dualism of Kant, Jacobi and Fichte to a genuinely
philosophical knowledge of the absolute is not simple or instantaneous. The point to which
they bring us is not merely a kind of cognitive hesitancy, but ‘the abyss of nothingness into
which all Being sinks down’. As such, it elicits ‘the infinite pain . . . on which the religion
of the modern world rests: the feeling that ‘‘God himself is dead’’’ (Hegel [1802] 1970: 432)
– although, Hegel adds, this feeling will be experienced only as ‘a moment of the highest
idea’ and not as something final.
‘Faith and Knowledge’ is, of course, an early work and Hegel has not yet fully articulated
his most distinctive terms and arguments. Nevertheless, it anticipates several themes that
will become characteristic of his later treatments of religion. First, if we once assume an
ontological separation between the finite and the infinite, between human beings and
God, then we will never be able to reconcile the two. Second, it is therefore only on the
basis of the actual experience of unity that genuine knowledge of God can be developed.
Third, it follows that the history of religion and the history of philosophy will, to a
considerable extent, coincide with regard to the question of God. In other words, the
knowledge that philosophy is able to have of God presupposes a certain experience of God,
whilst, conversely, there is no simple experience of God that is not at the same time a
 faith and knowledge 131
thinking experience of God possessed of a certain determinate thought content. What
philosophy is to do, then, is simply to articulate and to develop in a systematic way the
thought that is already implicit in the lived God-relationship. As regards content, faith and
philosophy are therefore one and the same thing – only this one content is given under
different forms. In faith it is given in the form that Hegel will call ‘representation’
(Vorstellung – also translated sometimes as ‘picture-thinking’), whilst philosophy thinks
this same content as ‘concept’ (Begriff).
Hegel generally seems to suggest that this latter is the truer and more adequate form of
the idea. This has led to the long-running divide in the reception of his work: whether it is
essentially theological, that is, preserves the essential content of Christian experience and
teaching, or whether it is fundamentally a philosophical transformation of Christian faith
which eliminates what is most distinctive of and proper to that faith – what, with reference
to the Hegelian theologian Philip Marheineke, Kierkegaard calls a ‘volatilisation’ of
Christian concepts. Why? Because it seems that the basic premise of the whole Hegelian
undertaking is the elimination of a God who might transcend the capacities of human
experience and knowledge, a God who would be ‘Other’ and intrinsically greater than
anything the heart of man might conceive – that is, precisely the God Hegel saw mooted in
various forms in Kant, Jacobi and Fichte. Instead, for Hegel, knowledge of God must be
based on the relationship with God found in humanity itself and especially in what was
most distinctive of humanity: reason. By making the God-relationship given in faith the
object of ‘scientific’ enquiry and exposition, that is, by interpreting it as the self-explication
of reason, Hegel could thus seem to prepare the way for those so-called Left Hegelians who
enthusiastically transformed the theological legacy into the intoxicating new wine of a
radical and thorough-going humanism.
Both some opponents of this Left Hegelianism (including Kierkegaard) and the Left
Hegelians themselves could see the issue in these terms, but this was not the only way of
reading Hegel. If subsequent history of ideas has tended to give privileged place to the
passage of Hegelianism through the Hegelian Left and on to its ‘progressive’ transformation
in Marx, a truer picture would need also to take account of the Hegelian theologians who
sought to emphasise the positive opportunities that Hegelian method offered to theology
and to a philosophy of religion essentially sympathetic to Christianity. In returning now to
J. E. Erdmann and to his lectures on Faith and Knowledge, I shall take a small step towards
rectifying this omission from the history of ideas of what, in their time, was an important
group of thinkers. Erdmann was not the sole representative of this tendency. Perhaps the
best-known in his time was Philip Marheineke, a colleague of both Hegel and Schleier-
macher at Berlin. Karl Rosenkranz, Karl Daub, Christian Hermann Weisse and Julius
Schaller were other figures of some significance. In connection with Kierkegaard, the
Danish Hegelians Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Hans Lassen Martensen have also received
some attention in recent literature (see, for example, Horn 2007; Stewart 2003, 2007;
Thompson 2008). Although Heiberg was not essentially interested in theological ques-
tions, Martensen is an important representative of Hegelian-influenced ‘speculative
theology’.
The more exact definition of this speculative theology, its history and an evaluation of
its significance is singularly lacking in the current history of ideas. These thinkers do pose
some central issues for Christian theology and for the philosophy of religion. In addition to
questions as to the possibility and scope of a ‘knowledge’ or even a ‘science’ (in the specific
nineteenth-century sense of Wissenschaft) of God, they highlighted an issue that has ever
since been a strong undercurrent in many theological and philosophical versions of
132 george pattison
idealism, namely, the issue as to the personality of God. I will not extensively address this
particular issue, but it is important to note that, whether or not Hegel’s own system allows
for an adequate concept of personality, the Hegelian theologians unanimously demanded
that a Christian Hegelianism would need also to be a personalism.

3. Erdmann on Faith and Knowledge

Erdmann is largely forgotten today, but he was a not insignificant figure in his own time.
His History of Philosophy was translated into English in 1890 and passed through several
English editions. Via its re-edition in the Muirhead Library of Philosophy it may be
assumed to have played an important role in disseminating a certain version of Hegelianism
in the English-speaking world. Erdmann is also interesting in relation to the particular
question of faith and knowledge because, although he was undoubtedly ‘Hegelian’ in
several of his key assumptions and intellectual ambitions, he was by no means narrowly or
crudely so. Thus, although he regarded a fully speculative approach as going beyond
Schleiermacher, Erdmann retained a considerable veneration for the ‘father of modern
theology’ and was always willing to acknowledge the debt that the study of religion owed to
him. In contrast to what caricatures of Hegelianism sometimes suggest, Erdmann made
clear that he intended to be careful in doing justice to his sources and several times draws
attention to the fact that particular individual thinkers can never be totally identified with
particular ideological positions, since, in the actuality of individual life and historical
development, ideas never or rarely appear unmixed or unqualified by what went before or
came after. However, a more particular reason why Erdmann is of interest is that his Faith
and Knowledge played a key role in the developing relation to Hegel and Hegelianism of the
young Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s reading of Erdmann is evidenced by extensive notes,
including several pages of discussion. From these we see that some decisive features of
Kierkegaard’s later attack on speculation were formed concretely in the course of studying
Erdmann. It would be wrong to ignore the role of other Hegelian sources both in this early
Auseinandersetzung and in Kierkegaard’s later attacks, but Erdmann’s role is undeniably
important.
Erdmann was struck by how much the question of faith and knowledge dominated the
contemporary intellectual landscape. But, he asks, where does this question properly belong
– in philosophy or theology? He answers: neither. This is a particular case of a general rule:
the definition of the boundaries between intellectual disciplines cannot be decided from
within one or other of those disciplines alone. As such, the question can properly belong only
to the ‘introduction’ to a given science – in this case to what Erdmann calls Religionswis-
senschaft überhaupt. If we translate this as ‘the science of religion in general’ we must
understand it as referring not to the late nineteenth century positivist idea of a ‘science of
religions’ but to any disciplined and scholarly engagement with religion, including both
philosophy and theology. Thus the sub-title of ‘Faith and Knowledge’ reads: ‘Introduction to
Dogmatics and to the Philosophy of Religion’. When this placing of the relationship
between faith and knowledge is ignored, the consequences are dire. Once ‘faith and
knowledge’ becomes a topic within philosophy, then it has the tendency – as, Erdmann
believes, recent decades have shown – to turn philosophy as a whole into philosophy of
religion. All other questions become incorporated into just this one and the equally
important relation of philosophy to, for example, natural science or psychology is neglected.
But how is one to begin and how is the subject to be approached? Here Erdmann
explicitly aligns himself with Hegel. But, he insists, Hegelian method is not a question of
 faith and knowledge 133
applying an abstract triadic schema of thesis-antithesis-synthesis to the data of religion but
of approaching religion with the simple, single postulate that we do so thinkingly. Thought
is distinctive of humanity and it is universally human, ‘the true attribute of being human’
(Erdmann 1837: 15). What the philosopher must do is think ‘the matter at hand’
(Erdmann uses the formulation associated with Husserl: Die Sache selbst) as it shows itself
in its actual development. To follow science, Erdmann tells his students, is to board a ship
bound for an unknown destination. Not in the ‘introduction’ but only at the end can one
know where one has landed. However, as the contents page of the published version of the
lectures invites us to do, we might note that Erdmann’s procedure from here on is (1) to set
out some basic issues around the idea of faith itself before proceeding to examine a
sequence of dialectically unfolding forms of faith comprising (2) reflective faith, (3) doubt
and (4) mysticism. Then, in the second part of the book, he turns to knowledge, looking in
turn at (5) empirical, (6) critical and (7) speculative forms of knowledge. In this last the
antithesis of faith and knowledge is resolved into a unity that reflects not only the interests
of religion but also those of knowledge. The distinction between the two main parts, faith
and knowledge, is that in the former Erdmann claims to be studying the actual forms of the
religious life, in the latter the development of knowledge about that life, that is, theology.
But what, in this case, is the matter at hand? What is religion? Erdmann acknowledges
that for himself and his auditors Christianity is the main form in which religion is known
and that whether they are believers, doubters or unbelievers they will be familiar with the
central teachings of Christianity. He proposes that the central idea of religion is the
relationship between God and human beings, a relationship that Christian teaching figures
as love and philosophy as identity – but, in each case, it is a matter of the ‘unity of God and
the human being’ (Erdmann 1837: 23). He immediately adds, however, the religious
believer also knows this to be a unity ‘subsequent to a separation’: it is the result of an
atonement or reconciliation.
In the immediate forms of the religious life this sense of unity appears as a subjective
attitude (Gemüthszustand) of unconditional certainty, as in Paul’s declaration that he is
certain that nothing can separate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:38–9).
Such ‘naı̈ve’ faith has an almost child-like quality. Whilst all religious people may have
intimations of it at some moments, it is rarely found without qualification in any
individual. Nevertheless, it is characteristic of the faith of the Church as a whole: it is
faith, absolutely and as such, in its subjective aspect. But faith has a no less fundamental
objective aspect which is found in doctrine. In the immediate life of faith, doctrine will be
delivered in the form of facts, as the narration of what has happened and is to be believed as
such. Such teaching does not involve suppressing the subjective side. Both say the same
thing in different ways. The subjective believer says: I am blind; the objective faith of the
Church teaches him: You are blind. This unity is expressed also in how the Creed, the faith
of the Church, is, from another side, the Credo, what I (or any individual believer) believe.
Here ‘what’ is believed is not distinguished from the act of believing – we can scarcely
imagine Christ responding to the sick man who appeals to him with the words ‘I believe!’,
by asking ‘What do you believe?’ (Erdmann 1837: 43).
Yet just as the subjective believer is aware that his union with God is a unity regained
after sin, that is, the result of his being reconciled, so too the question as to ‘what’ is
believed implies the possibility of doubt, which invites us to move from purely immediate
or naı̈ve faith to reflective faith. ‘Reflective faith’ is the focus of the second section of
Erdmann’s lectures. As such it generally presupposes the realisation of a possible distinction
between subjective and objective forms of faith, the fides qua creditur (the faith that
134 george pattison
believes) and the fides quae creditur (the faith that is believed). This reflection is only
‘higher’ than naı̈ve faith if it in turn progresses on to higher forms. Before this can happen,
however, reflective faith must pass through a sequence of forms in which now the
objective, now the subjective, side is one-sidedly emphasised.
The first one-sided form is what Erdmann calls ‘dogmatism’ or, as he somewhat
apologetically calls it, dogmaticism. The point of this distinction is that religion is
naturally dogmatic: the Church tells the believer what to believe, it can do no other;
this, in its own way, is entirely in order. When this teaching is spontaneously accepted by
the subjective believer, there is no problem. However, dogmaticism goes a step further and
insists on the submission of the subject, often self-consciously opposing itself to reason.
Faith is what is to be believed and no longer faith as such: it is ‘holding something to be true
but without having grounds for doing so’ (Erdmann 1837: 56). Somewhat characteristic of
the Protestant Scholasticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this tendency is
exacerbated in what he calls ‘Dogmatic Superstition’ where the teaching is not only set
over against the subject for his acceptance or rejection but is also declared to be in total
opposition to anything the subject could understand. This is the religion of those Erdmann
calls ‘head-hangers’ and false Pietists, a religion in which God is declared incomprehensible
(he cites Tertullian and Jacobi as examples) – a statement, he says, that tells us nothing
about God but much about the minds of those who would believe it.
At this point we are faced with the slightly peculiar situation that although dogmaticism
insists on the opposition between supernatural truth and the ‘I’ (comprising also the
rationality to which the ‘I’ spontaneously subscribes), the fact that dogmatic assertions are
formulated with a view to their antithesis to the ‘I’ means that, actually, the ‘I’ is making
the running. This unacknowledged role of the ‘I’ comes to the fore in religious doubt. But
this is also the moment in which the ‘I’ becomes capable of awakening to philosophy. Yet if
the ‘I’ is not content with questioning the validity of its objects, but comes to reject
anything that disrupts its sense of self-identity and makes itself the sole arbiter of truth,
then this ‘I’ has become nihilistic, whether this appears as indifference to religious truth,
tolerance of all truths, irony, or the reduction of morality to the requirement to be true
solely to oneself. This is something that Erdmann sees widely attested in contemporary
culture, especially amongst the educated. Nevertheless, even nihilism still allows for a
certain relation to the object, although this is done away with in thorough-going unbelief,
the most vivid (and alarming) example of which is the culmination of the French
Enlightenment in the Terror and the annihilation of everything holy (Erdmann 1837: 93).
Once all relations between the ‘I’ and its objects have been broken in this way, there
seems to be nothing to prevent a constant and merely random oscillation between the
polarities of superstition and unbelief. Yet this oscillation itself can be understood as
testifying to an inner contradiction in the self, an unrest, an impulse that, Erdmann
suggests, is an essentially religious impulse towards unity. This impulse finds expression in
mysticism (Erdmann seems chiefly to have in mind those forms of mysticism associated
with Protestant Pietism). But the mystic’s claim to unity with God is not organic. On the
one hand, mysticism seems to resemble naı̈ve faith in its immediate sense of the presence of
God; on the other hand, mysticism seems to resemble speculative knowledge. But these are
only analogies and the insufficiency of the mystical approach is seen in the tendency of
mystical groups to separate themselves from the world: the self becomes one with God only
by surrendering much of its own identity. A sense of this loss therefore drives the ‘I’ to seek
a more organic unity with its object, a unity founded in what is truly universal in the ‘I’, its
‘genuine substance or inner essence’ (Erdmann 1837: 135). Once the ‘I’ discovers this, it is
 faith and knowledge 135
no longer merely an arbitrary ‘I’, since it has identified itself with the standpoint of reason,
from which thinking and the pursuit of knowledge are the natural outcomes. With this
transition (which he links historically with German Pietism rather than the French
Enlightenment) Erdmann advances to the second part of the lecture series, devoted to
knowledge.
What is the relationship between these two parts? Is everything in Part I superseded and
therefore worthless? Not at all, Erdmann says. The relationship is akin to that between the
Aristotelian dynamis and energeia. The former has the possibility of the latter an sich (in
itself): when the bud becomes the flower it becomes what an sich it already was (Erdmann
1837: 146). The forms of faith examined in the first part ‘were already reason, already forms
of thought but not [experienced] as reason or as thought’. Popular prejudice might lead us
to think that reasons and thoughts are merely subjective but, Erdmann says, being
reasonable means seeing the reason of things and the relation of reason to the world is
precisely that of knowing: knowledge is cognition based on reason. Thus, whereas the first
part of the lecture series dealt with living forms of religious existence, the second deals with
theologies. To an extent, as Erdmann acknowledges, this means repeating the same journey
made in the first part, as we follow reason through the various one-sided and limited
developments that precede its achievement of a definitive and infinitely satisfying form.
In three main sections – ‘Empirical Knowledge’, ‘Critical Knowledge’ and ‘Speculative
Knowledge’ – Erdmann expounds and shows the internal logic of the main forms of post-
Reformation theology, each with its further sub-divisions. Thus ‘Empirical Knowledge’ is
first manifested as the ‘practical Christianity’ of early Pietism which, as he emphasises, was
not just about the cultivation of religious emotions but was also directed toward moral
conduct (thereby demonstrating its intrinsic rationality). This is the subjective pole –
immediately followed by a swing to the objective pole that Erdmann calls ‘experimental’,
focused on vindicating the factual basis of faith. This occurs either in attempts to prove the
miracles as attestations of the Christ or to extract a core of ‘essential’ beliefs from the whole
range of biblical and doctrinal sources. A further form of this ‘empirical’ moment in
theology is the turn to history and to historical testimony as the basis of faith. In
Catholicism this is seen in the role given to tradition, in Protestantism in the rise of
the historical-exegetical school of biblical study – but these still do not give what is needed,
namely, an understanding of the inner grounds for the truth of the witness. The interests of
reason therefore drive it to seek these grounds not just in external testimony but in itself
and with the recognition of this desire Erdmann makes the transition to the next section,
‘Critical Knowledge’.
The first form of this critical knowledge is what Erdmann calls natural theology or
naturalism. The second of these terms is the better guide to his meaning, since this is not
‘natural theology’ in the sense of Catholic or Anglican natural theologies from the Middle
Ages or seventeenth century. Rather, it is the limitation of theology to what is universally
and objectively demonstrable which leads to the specific Enlightenment period theology
known as naturalism, a ‘theology’ that excluded anything supernatural. However, Erdmann
sees its insistence on nature as theologically self-defeating, since to regard human beings in
terms of nature is to see them in light of what they have in common with animals – but
religion is precisely that in which human beings distinguish themselves from animals, from
nature. Similarly, the requirement of universality found in the idea of a natural religion is
inherently limiting, since the Christian concept of God is not identical with all the ‘gods’
of the various religions. The God who is love is not the fetish-worshipper’s god. This kind
of theology therefore leads to what Erdmann calls the theology of ‘healthy common-sense’,
136 george pattison
but this ‘healthy common-sense’ thinks and speaks only in abstract generalities. It is limited
to the level that Hegel called that of the ‘understanding’ (Verstand) and, in religion, it leads
to Unitarianism and the denial of the Incarnation.
Erdmann now arrives at what, for him, is a major watershed in the whole history of
relations between faith and knowledge, namely, Kant’s critical philosophy. Kant’s decisive
contribution was to turn reason back from external facts and empty generalities to its own
inner laws. However, as Kant himself developed this self-examination of pure reason, it was
unable to deliver any positive outcome. Whilst philosophy uncovered the transcendental
forms of all possible knowledge, it could establish no knowledge of transcendent entities
themselves, that is, of entities transcending human reason. This outcome could, however,
be developed in a number of different directions. Negatively, it could issue in a theology of
not-knowing, which in turn could take either a frankly nihilistic or a supernaturalistic
form, in which the metaphysical space that Kant had excluded from knowledge was filled
by dogmatic claims. Erdmann sees this as disingenuous, however, since dogmas are
themselves essentially theoretical and it was precisely the possibility of theoretical knowl-
edge of transcendent realities that Kant had sought to eliminate – whether this took
dogmatic or philosophical forms. But supernaturalism contradicts not only the Kantian
premises to which it appeals but also the Bible, where faith is both often used inter-
changeably with knowing and conceived of as a spiritual possession of truth. Both faith and
knowledge in the Bible are only ever ‘in part’, but knowledge that is ‘in part’ is nevertheless
knowledge. The not-knowing in which the Kantian critique culminates cannot satisfy the
impulse (Trieb) or instinct of reason, to know the truth as not only subjective but also
objective. Coinciding with the religious impulse, reason too seeks and will only be satisfied
with the unity of subject and object.
This marks the transition to Speculative Knowledge (the third and final section of the
treatment of ‘Knowledge’). The first form of this is also a fruit of the Kantian revolution in
philosophy, this time in its practical aspect. For where Kant had denied the possibility of a
theoretical knowledge of God, he opened the way to a new approach to religious truth, as a
matter ‘not of knowing but of willing’ (Erdmann 1837: 237). Now it was not a matter of
God’s existence, conceived as the existence of some external or alien being, since ‘Not
Being but only an Ought is to be attributed to God’ (242). Yet this contains a paradox. If
God is not, but ought to be, then that ‘ought’ itself is a requirement that God should be, that
God’s kingdom might come on earth as in heaven. The tension between these contra-
dictory requirements generates what Erdmann sees as an infinite process, variously reflected
in the theologies of Fichte and Schleiermacher. However, it finds its more satisfactory
expression in dialectical reason:

If the actual unification of Non-being and Being is Becoming (Werden), then truth is to be
apprehended neither as Non-being nor as Being but as Becoming. Reason will thus reflect
both requirements if it knows truth as becoming. Now something is known in its becoming
when one knows the law or rule governing its becoming. But the law or rule of becoming is
what we call its determination (Bestimmung) or concept (Begriff). This is the being of the
object that is at one and the same time an Ought and an Ought that at one and the same
time is a Being. Truth must therefore be known by knowing the concept. (255)

That speculative knowing – knowing in accordance with the concept – thus knows God as
‘becoming’ does justice to the religious conviction that God is a living God and not a ‘dead
something’ (todtes Daseyn) (257). But this is not to be understood in terms of temporal
 faith and knowledge 137
succession but as an eternal, timeless becoming or process (Erdmann uses the Latinate term
to emphasise the distinction of divine from merely historical becoming). The concept,
whether of God or more generally, is neither a priori nor a posteriori: rather, it is simply
thinking the genesis of the object as it reveals itself. Although it requires the activity of the
thinking mind, it is not a matter of inventing ‘merely’ conceptual forms under which to
catalogue real phenomena but it ‘produces’ only that which is itself coming into being.
Conceptual thinking of this kind is therefore essentially maieutic and thinking about God
is essentially ‘letting His own thinking hold sway in us’ (262). For what we think in
thinking about God is itself an unqualifiedly thinking Being, a Being in whom thinking,
willing and Being coincide absolutely. Speculative knowledge of God is thus also knowl-
edge of God as subject or personality (263). Such knowledge can itself take two forms,
speculative dogmatics (when it is determined by the specific content of Christian teaching)
or philosophy of religion. This latter opens the way to a history of religion in which the
world’s religions are understood not (as Schleiermacher understood them) merely as a
system of types of religion but as a progressive sequence of stages leading back to speculative
knowledge of God itself as the highest point of religious development.
I have offered this summary of Erdmann’s lectures largely without comment. From a
contemporary standpoint, many of their shortcomings are by now long familiar tropes of
debate amongst philosophers of religion – not least because we are heirs both of the Left
Hegelian and Kierkegaardian critiques of Hegelianism. Yet even this somewhat sketchy
summary allows us to see that, in at least some of its representatives, Hegelian theology and
philosophy of religion was driven by and expressed a genuine religious interest as well as a
concern to work out the development and implications of religious ideas in the detail of the
concrete historical forms of religious life and theology. The inevitable selectiveness of such
an approach to thinking about God marks it out for criticism (the Catholic world makes
only an intermittent and marginal appearance in Erdmann’s history, for example). Yet its
historical grounding is nevertheless a challenge that has remained normative for most
versions of philosophy of religion in the continental approach and that is similarly (if also
differently) found in Erdmann’s Left Hegelian and radical Christian critics. Only in
relation to the actual, lived forms of religious life and consciousness can the truth (or
otherwise) of religion be decided. The neglect of this challenge is, moreover, a feature of
much contemporary atheism which renders the latter singularly ineffective in its account of
how and why religion actually comes to exercise the power it does in human hearts and
minds.

4. Hegelianism Rejected: Strauss, Feuerbach and Kierkegaard

Erdmann’s lectures were, as he insisted, merely ‘introductory’ and could not guarantee the
conclusion to a journey of which they merely offered the first stage. But his kind of
Hegelianism nevertheless gave the impression of marking a point of arrival. Even if Hegel is
misconstrued when he is seen as declaring an ‘end of history’, there seems to be a certain
and inevitable finality implicit in the claim that we now have an absolute, speculative
knowledge of God and of what is essential to human beings’ God-relationship. Yet even by
1837 the so-called Hegelian synthesis of Christianity and philosophy was starting to
unravel. Erdmann himself took note of one of the first critical voices from within
Hegelianism itself, David Friedrich Strauss.
Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined, published in 1835, was one of the few books of
modern theology that can, without hyperbole, be called epochal. The subsequent devel-
138 george pattison
opment of Left Hegelianism would reach radical applications and conclusions with which
Strauss could not go along. Biblical criticism too would move far beyond what Strauss
achieved in this work. Nonetheless the work was experienced by its contemporaries as
throwing wide open the whole issue of historical Christianity and its relation to knowledge.
Strauss’s ‘mythical’ approach to the New Testament was, in its way, founded on
naturalist principles, in that he allowed no exceptions to the universal laws of nature.
Yet naturalist hermeneutics still largely understood the biblical texts as a kind of reportage
– that is, that reports of miracles were indeed accounts of events that had happened, albeit
highly erroneous and misleading accounts. Strauss, however, argued that once we have
detected a mythical element in a given narrative we have no reason to suppose that there
was any historical basis to it – or, even if there is, it has no decisive significance for the
interpretation of the passage. For the meaning of the passage hinges precisely on the
specific meaning of its mythical element which, in the specific context of the Gospels, is
primarily determined by the belief that Jesus is the Messiah, ergo all the attributes associated
with the Messiah must be ascribed to him. But speculative theology allows us to go a step
further and add that the messianic idea itself is merely a mythical form of a more
fundamental ideal truth, namely, the idea of the unity of the divine and human (the
central element in Erdmann’s definitions of faith and speculative knowledge). What is
important in the Gospels is thus not a string of merely historical or factual occurrences but
the speculative idea of divine-human unity. Thus, Strauss claims that whatever is lost to
Christianity by a mythical approach to the Bible is returned with interest in his speculative
Christology. The individual historical facts of Christ’s life are stripped of the importance
they previously enjoyed. But this is compensated for by the greater clarity with which the
idea of divine-human unity can now be presented. Christ’s physical presence on earth
disappears or is absorbed into the ongoing spiritual life of the Christian community:

The God-man, who during his life stood before his contemporaries as an individual
distinct from themselves and perceptible by the senses, is by death taken out of their
sight; he enters into their imagination and memory: the unity of the divine and human
in him becomes a part of the general consciousness; and the church must repeat
spiritually, in the souls of its members, those events of his life which he experienced
externally. (Strauss [1835] 1972: 778)

Or, as he puts it still more succinctly: ‘This is the key to the whole of Christology, that, as
subject of the predicate which the church assigns to Christ, we place, instead of an
individual, an idea’ (780) – and this ‘idea’, he adds, finds its reality in the race, that is, in
the common life of humanity as a whole. Where Christ qua individual healed ‘some sick
people in Galilee’ we are now able to realise the Christ-idea:

in the miracles of intellectual and moral life belonging to the history of the world – in
the increasing, the almost incredible dominion of man over nature – in the irresistible
force of ideas, to which no unintelligent matter, whatever its magnitude, can oppose any
enduring resistance. (Strauss 1972: 781)

Yet although Strauss’s approach thus issues in a celebration of the material applications
of contemporary science, it is still couched in essentially idealistic terms. This laid it open
to criticism both from more theologically conservative positions (including more con-
servative Hegelians, as well as supernaturalists) and from more consistently materialist
 faith and knowledge 139
developments of Hegelianism. An example of the response of the more conservative (or,
we might say, the more theological) Hegelians is provided by Erdmann himself. Dealing
with how religion necessarily represents its doctrines as fact, he objects to Strauss’s
separation of the ideal truth of doctrine from its factual representation. For religion,
the fact is not merely the form of the idea, but that whereby the idea is the idea. Thus (as
arguably for Hegel himself) the historical appearance of the ‘idea’ of divine-human unity is
inseparable from its appearance in one single historical individual (Jesus Christ) who
cannot therefore be construed merely as a transient ‘form’ for a trans-historical ‘idea’.
The idealism inherent in Hegelianism is the subject of particular attention and particular
criticism in the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, perhaps especially his 1843 Principles of the
Philosophy of the Future. As he had argued at length in The Essence of Christianity, published
in 1841, the distinctive contribution of modern philosophy (that is, Hegelianism) was ‘the
transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology’ (Feuerbach [1843] 1986: 5).
The religious form of this achievement is found in the history of Protestantism, whilst
‘speculative philosophy is the rational or theoretical elaboration and dissolution of God
. . . [its] essence . . . is nothing but the rationalized, realized, presented essence of God.
Speculative philosophy is the true consistent and rational theology’ (5–6). However,
although the transformation of theology into anthropology is a considerable achievement,
both the theology and the anthropology of speculative philosophy are essentially idealistic.
God is understood solely as a ‘thinking being’ who ‘thinks only himself’ in such a way that
‘this unity of thought and the objects of thought is . . . the secret of speculative thought’
(15) (which seems a reasonable summary of, for instance, Erdmann’s version of speculative
thought, where this unity of thinking subject and thinking object was both the theological
premise and the theological conclusion of Faith and Knowledge). Moreover, since God is
also understood as ‘a purely immaterial being’ and since ‘only what is valid in and through
God has being’ this ‘means nothing else than to determine matter as a thing of nothingness,
as a non-being’ (21). Even in Hegel ‘the essence of God is actually nothing other than the
absence of thought, or thought abstracted from the ego, that is from the one who thinks’
(36). But real existence is not just something that is thought. What has real existence has
existence not only in thought but also in the world, not only for the ‘I’ who thinks but also
for others. ‘A being that only thinks, and thinks abstractly, has no conception at all of
being, of existence, or of reality’ (40). Similarly, ‘Thought that ‘‘overleaps its otherness’’
. . . [that is, reality] . . . is thought that oversteps its natural boundaries’ and is comparable
to suicide in that it negates bodily existence, surrendering itself to ‘fantastic and
transcendental practice’ in which ‘the difference between imagination and perception’
is lost (46).
Against this, Feuerbach declares that the new philosophy must begin with what is real,
which, for him, means what exists sensuously: ‘Things must not be thought of otherwise than
as they appear in reality,’ he warns (Feuerbach [1848] 1986: 62). Or, more enthusiastically,
the modern thinker must take to heart what Feuerbach calls categorical imperatives:

Desire not to be a philosopher, as distinct from a man; be nothing else than a thinking
man. Do not think as a thinker, that is, with a faculty torn from the totality of the real
human being and isolated for itself; think as a living and real being, as one exposed to the
vivifying and refreshing waves of the world’s oceans. Think in existence, in the world as
a member of it, not in the vacuum of abstraction as a solitary monad, as an absolute
monarch, as an indifferent, superworldly God; then you can be sure that your ideas are
unities of being and thought. (67)
140 george pattison
Feuerbach’s ‘world’ is the human world: the real world of concretely existing human beings,
encountering each other as an I and a Thou, of which he writes that ‘man with man – the
unity of I and thou – is God’ (71). His materialist humanism thus ‘takes the place of
religion and has the essence of religion within itself. In truth, it is itself religion’ (73).
Feuerbach’s materialism would, famously, be criticised in turn by Marx as lacking
historical specificity and, as has already been noted, Marx had from the early 1840s
regarded the critique of religion – which remained such an abiding focus of Feuerbach’s
thinking – as essentially finished. It might also be questioned whether the seemingly naı̈ve
account of material existence to which Feuerbach so consistently appeals does justice to
how human beings actually experience their own existence in the world. To pursue the
question as to how ‘existence’ itself might be interpreted, we turn to Kierkegaard: it would
be specifically from Kierkegaard – although without his religious presuppositions – and not
from Feuerbach that twentieth-century philosophies of existence took their defining
concept of existence.
Like Feuerbach, Kierkegaard developed the concept of existence with one eye on what
he saw as the confusion of thinking and being in Hegelian or speculative thought. It was
previously noted that Kierkegaard read Erdmann’s lectures in the year they were published,
making extensive notes and comments on them. These notes constitute one of the defining
documents of his relation to Hegelianism. Even as a student he was developing the take on
Hegelianism that would find fuller expression in such works as the Concluding Unscientific
Postscript of 1846. He disputes some of Erdmann’s (Hegelianism’s) fundamental assump-
tions, such as the view that the human ‘I’ is constituted as the subjective pole of a subject–
object relation that is properly describable as universal and reasonable. The analysis of
human self-consciousness cannot yield a definitive account of reason, since we cannot
presuppose that reason is limited to whatever human self-consciousness knows of it. (This
is a point that would reappear in the Postscript when Kierkegaard cites Hamlet’s comment
to Horatio that ‘there’s more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy’
(Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v, 166).)
Furthermore, Erdmann does not adequately take account of Christianity’s historical
aspect. In this connection Kierkegaard accuses Erdmann of caricaturing the various
historical positions that he takes as exemplifying the abstract positions he has deduced
from the inner development of the idea. Nor can the individual abstract himself from the
testimony of the Church’s sacred texts and traditions, since there is always a quite specific
interest in play in his relation to them, namely, the interest of faith itself. Moreover,
Kierkegaard does not accept that post-Kant we have to choose between supernaturalism
and agnosticism, since, as he says, supernaturalism is not just a matter of dogma but of the
‘total transformation of consciousness’ or a ‘new consciousness’ that is the basis for
believing the dogma (Kierkegaard 2001: 167). Kierkegaard simply rejects the basic
assumption, which is both Erdmann’s and Hegel’s, that what the believer experiences
as union with God in faith and love is the same as what the philosopher experiences as
identity.
The refusal to understand human existence in terms of a rationally constituted subject–
object, or to allow the limits of reason to determine either what might be known (or, at
least, believed) of God or even of the self’s own possibilities on the far side of its rebirth into
a new consciousness are all key features of Kierkegaard’s later mature critique of Hegelian-
ism. Somewhat like Feuerbach, he sees the Hegelian subject–object as a case of thinking
thinking itself and, in so doing, cutting itself off from the larger reality of existence. As did
Feuerbach, Kierkegaard depicts the philosopher who presumes to occupy such a standpoint
 faith and knowledge 141
of pure thought as a ‘fantastic’ being – and such a fantastic being ‘that the most extravagant
fancy has scarcely invented anything so fabulous’ (Kierkegaard [1846] 1992: 117). Such a
thinker has forgotten that he exists and, in identifying himself with humanity (that is, what
is universally human), abolishes humanity ([1846] 1992: 124). Whilst, as a matter of fact,
Hegelianism does not realise its own claim to operate without empirical observation
(which it ‘smuggles’ into the system by a philosophical sleight of hand), its posture of
having achieved a position of pure thought (conceived as identical with pure Being) and of
absolute knowledge is simply ridiculous. An important part of Kierkegaard’s strategy is to
expose such claims to a sustained campaign of mockery which, whilst scarcely constituting
a philosophical argument, makes for enjoyable reading and effectively undermines the
whole tenor of Hegelianism’s self-representation.
A crucial element in Kierkegaard’s distinctive concept of existence is the relationship
between subjectivity and time. The speculative thinker contemplates the world sub specie
aeternitatis and forgets that he himself is living in time. Whilst existence may indeed
constitute a system from God’s eternal standpoint, that is not a standpoint any human
being could ever actually occupy (Kierkegaard [1846] 1992: 118–25). To exist in time is to
exist in a state of unfinishedness; as long as we are alive we are capable of only a partial view
of life and of ourselves. Of course, we all know that we must die, but we cannot anticipate
that death just by thinking about it and no knowledge of death would absolve us from the
unthinkable confrontation with our own end (165–7). The existing person is always under
way, always seeking to realise his or her possibilities, passionately seeking to give shape and
coherence to existence through acts of choice and decision so that, as Kierkegaard
repeatedly says, ‘subjectivity is truth’ – whereas ‘for an existing person, objective truth
is like the eternity of abstraction’ (313). What is eternally true about me, who I really am, is
therefore something I can only ever relate to uncertainly, although, at the same time,
‘objective uncertainty, held fast in the most passionate act of inward appropriation is truth,
the highest truth there is for an existing person’ (41). Existence involves separating reality
from the idea, therefore it is always in motion, necessarily temporal and open, and yet for
the existing person precisely this ‘unfinished business’ is a matter of ‘the highest interest’ –
as opposed to the supposed ‘disinterested’ stance of speculative thought (314).
By such manoeuvres Kierkegaard marks out the profound differences he believes there to
be between his own position and that of speculative thought. Yet there is a point at which
he does seem in essential agreement with at least the theological representatives of
speculative thought. Although Kierkegaard denies that the union of the divine and
human is essentially definable in terms of reason (and therefore cannot be understood by
means of the self-interpretation of human consciousness), he does believe that, never-
theless, the divine and the human can be and in faith are united. Human beings were made
in the image and likeness of God and that likeness is restored in the ‘new consciousness’,
the ‘rebirth’ that is Christian faith. However, this new consciousness cannot be developed
out of human consciousness as we know it, but becomes possible only on the basis of the
Incarnation, the descent of God into human form, taking the ‘likeness’ of human flesh. But
the Incarnation is a paradox and an offence to reason, since it involves identifying God
with just this singular individual human being (and, moreover, a human being marked out
by poverty, suffering, misunderstanding and a scandalous death). Indeed it is not just a
paradox but the ‘absolute paradox’ (Kierkegaard [1844] 1985: 37–48). As such no human
being could ever imagine it nor can a human being believe it, except by the regenerating
action of God himself.
142 george pattison

5. Conclusion
In these last points there is nothing especially unconventional from the point of view of
Protestant theology (except for the humour, freshness and vivacity of Kierkegaard’s
presentation). Yet Kierkegaard’s point is precisely to block the kind of move he saw
being made by those contemporary Protestant theologians who associated themselves with
speculative philosophy, and to render impossible any fusion of horizons between reason and
faith, faith and knowledge. Kierkegaard himself never used the expression ‘leap of faith’, yet
the overall thrust of his account of faith is that it is indeed possible only by leaping away
from the standpoint of immanent reason towards a God who is knowable only as absolute
paradox. From the point of view of an account of faith and knowledge such as that of
Erdmann, Kierkegaard might seem to be reverting to the position of dogmatic superstition
(that is, to be a ‘head-hanger’), whilst from a Feuerbachian position he might seem to take
all too little account of the immediate and enlivening possibilities of finding oneself in and
through working for the material improvement of humanity. Yet the Kierkegaardian
analysis of existence, in all its anguish and absurdity, was not simply a reactionary retreat
from the ‘breakthrough’ supposedly achieved in Hegelian philosophy. Precisely this
analysis, once reinterpreted in the philosophy of existence, would then be reappropriated
by theology itself. Its resonances can be detected in several of the existentialist theologies of
the mid-twentieth century (for example, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Rahner)
but also in the ‘post-metaphysical’ theologies of more recent years (Mark C. Taylor, Don
Cupitt, John D. Caputo and others).
The point of these comments is not to initiate a historical argument for the ‘superiority’
of the Kierkegaardian separation of faith and knowledge over the way of Hegelian
synthesis. Rather, it is simply to flag the unresolved status of the question. Since the
Hegelian position seems to rest on the assumption that the question has been resolved, this
might seem to require an outright rejection of Hegelianism. If the very possibility of a
resolution is denied outright, however, then it is hard to see how the question could ever
arise. If it is in the interests of faith to avoid being confused with one or other form of
knowledge, the question as to the more exact relationship between faith and knowledge is
one that it is in the interests of both faith and knowledge to address. It is perhaps striking in
this connection that precisely this way of putting the question was reflected in the title
Jacques Derrida chose for his contribution to a conference on religion, namely, ‘Faith and
Knowledge’ – a lecture that addresses contemporary issues of religious pluralism and the
relationship between religion and politics in a perspective significantly shaped by both
Kant and Hegel (Derrida 1998).
However, perhaps the most striking contemporary presence of the basic terms of the
faith and knowledge debates of the first half of the nineteenth century is in our own debates
about the respective places of theology and religious studies in higher education, especially
in contexts where religious studies is conceived as a ‘science of religions’ (Religionswis-
senschaft). This is scarcely surprising, since the nineteenth-century debate itself reflected
the new institutional challenges posed by the founding of the University of Berlin and the
consequent propagation of a new ideal of ‘science’ as a model for all university work,
including the humanities (see Howard 2006). If some contemporary theologians have
attempted to revivify the medieval notion of theology as Queen of the Sciences (for
example, Milbank 2000; D’Costa 2005), this has by no means dampened the eagerness of
some to banish theology from the academy, on the grounds that faith-based positions are
incompatible with academic (‘scientific’ in the nineteenth-century sense) objectivity and
 faith and knowledge 143
rigour (Gill 1994). Such causes célèbres as the withdrawal of Hans Küng’s license as a
teacher of Catholic theology at Tübingen University or the dismissal of Gerd Lüdemann
from Göttingen University also reflect these tensions. Today, both theology and the study
of religions are also having to respond to the new technological environment of university
life (Pattison 2005: 194–217), which may seem to have moved the parameters of the
debate beyond recognition, but which can also be seen as bringing to a head what was
already implicit in the Berlin reforms (Heidegger [1938] 2002). Abstract as it may seem, the
question of faith and knowledge is once more focusing on central issues about the nature of
university study and teaching, both reflecting and affecting the complex and ever-shifting
self-understanding of scholarly life.
Our way of putting the question may have changed, but the question retains its urgency
and its force. If, somewhere in the sound and fury of contemporary debates, a final and
satisfying resolution has been found, it is clearly still far from finding universal acceptance,
and until that has happened we have every reason to revisit the debates of the 1830s and
1840s. If our ways cannot quite be their ways, their ways may nevertheless help form and
articulate ours – and, as with all historical study, help us both to resist claiming credit for re-
inventing the wheel and to avoid falling into positions whose limitations have long since
been exposed.

Note
1. All translations from German texts are the author’s own.

References
D’Costa, Gavin (2005), Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Derrida, Jacques (1998), ‘Faith and knowledge’, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (ed.),
Religion, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–78.
Engels, Frederick [1841] (1975), ‘Schelling on Hegel’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected
Works vol. 2, Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 181–8.
Erdmann, Johann Eduard (1837), Glauben und Wissen, Berlin: Duncker and Humblot.
Feuerbach, Ludwig [1843] (1986), Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred H. Vogel,
Indianapolis: Hackett.
Gill, Sam (1994), ‘The academic study of religion’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LXII
(4): 965–76.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich [1802] (1970), ‘Glauben und Wissen’, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden
vol. 2, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 287–433.
Heidegger, Martin [1938] (2002), ‘The age of the world picture’, in Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed.
and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57–72.
Horn, Robert Leslie (2007), Positivity and Dialectic: A Study of the Theological Method of Hans Lassen
Martensen, Copenhagen: Reitzel.
Howard, Thomas Albert (2006), Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kant, Immanuel [1781/1787] (1933), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London:
Macmillan.
Kierkegaard, Søren [1844] (1985), Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kierkegaard, Søren [1846] (1992), Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Howard V. and Edna H.
Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
144 george pattison
Kierkegaard, Søren (2001), Søren Kierkegaard Skrifter, ed. N.-J. Cappelørn et al., vol. 19, Notesbø-
gerne 1–15, Copenhagen: Gad.
Marx, Karl (1975), Early Writings, ed. Lucio Colletti, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Milbank, John (2000), ‘The conflict of the faculties: Theology and the economy of the sciences’, in
Mark Thiessen Nation and Samuel Wells (eds), Faith and Fortitude: In Conversation with the
Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, pp. 39–58.
Pattison, George (2005), Thinking about God in an Age of Technology, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Stewart, Jon (2003), Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Stewart, Jon (ed.) (2007), Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries. Tome II: Theology, Aldershot:
Ashgate.
Strauss, David Friedrich (1972), The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. from 4th edn of 1840 by
Marian Evans (George Eliot) (1846), Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Thompson, Curtis L. (2008), Following the Cultured Public’s Chosen One: Why Martensen Mattered to
Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.
 8
Philosophising History: Distinguishing History as a
Discipline

James Connelly

1. Introduction
This chapter focuses on key themes, problems and concepts in the thinking of historians
and philosophers about the nature and status of historical thought, practice and self
understanding in the nineteenth century. It covers the concept of history in relation to
Hegel and German idealism, the British idealists, the development of historicism and the
issues surrounding the Methodenstreit. This story is also that of the other disciplines, such as
psychology, sociology, economics and theology, with which history stands in relation.
Until the twentieth century, the term ‘philosophy of history’ usually denoted not an
epistemological inquiry but systematic claims concerning the direction and meaning of the
historical process as a whole. It does not follow that no epistemology was going on, for it
was. But it went on under different names and frequently as part of a wider debate about the
nature and methods of other disciplines. There are thus two important distinctions to note.
The first is between philosophy of history as an epistemological inquiry or as the search for
laws and patterns in history; this distinction was later characterised as that between
analytical and speculative philosophy of history. The second distinction (not unrelated to
the first) is between history as past events and history as historiography, as the study of the
past. These distinctions are frequently – perhaps even typically – blurred. We should not
expect to find ‘pure’ philosophy of history in any sense, but rather a hybrid and loosely
related set of inquiries.1
An underlying concern in historical thought is (and always has been) the nature of the
object studied and the implications for historical method of construing it in one way rather
than another. Following a discussion of how this is conceived in Hegel and the idealist
tradition, in historicism, and in the positivist and empiricist responses to these, the attempt
to reconsider history as a discipline and to undertake serious inquiry into the differentiae
of inquiry in the historical and related sciences in the work of Wilhelm Windelband,
Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber will be considered. These debates
primarily concern whether historical and natural processes are or should be the same or
different. Central to this is the cluster of concepts around Verstehen, or understanding, and
Erklärung, or explanation.
Parallel to these debates in Germany, other debates were being conducted in Britain
within the prevailing idealist school of the latter part of the nineteenth century. These
debates were not merely internal to British idealism but also represent an engagement with
another nineteenth-century worry – biblical criticism and the historicity of Jesus. The
146 james connelly
latter debate led to philosophical questions concerning historians’ sources, the nature of
historical evidence and the validity and worth of eye-witness or contemporary testimony.
These debates, issuing from David Strauss ([1835] 1846) and Ferdinand Christian Baur
([1853–63] 1878), led directly to works such as Francis Herbert Bradley’s The Presupposi-
tions of Critical History of 1874 (1935) (hereafter Presuppositions), which, in a secular
fashion, took over the debate that they initiated and asked what the historian necessarily
presupposes in thinking about the past. Bradley does not present himself as contributing to
that debate so much as offering an account of historical knowledge as such. In contrast to
his fellow idealist, Bernard Bosanquet, Bradley took history seriously as a form of knowl-
edge. Bosanquet was rather more sceptical. This indicates that the British idealists never
constituted a monolithic school on this (or indeed any other) philosophical matter.

2. Hegel, the Philosophy of History and Historicism

For Hegel, history is a rational process. Hence his famous dictum that ‘what is actual is
rational and what is rational is actual’ (Hegel [1821] 1942: 10), by which he neither meant
to defend the status quo, by asserting that whatever is is perfect, nor to deny it, by requiring
it to abide by the standard of abstract reason. His point was that we have to look for the
rationality in the historical process and that to achieve historical understanding we have to
adopt methods appropriate to it as a rational object. In this sense Hegel was an idealist; and
in this sense Marx is in many ways, despite his huge indebtedness to Hegel, his antithesis.
Both regarded the historical process as a dialectical process, but for Hegel this is a rational
process of mind or spirit, while for Marx it is a material process driven by economics. For
Hegel historical facts are understood as expressions of thought rather than as the outcome
of material causes (for discussion see Norman and Sayers 1980). Marx’s thought belongs to
a later period than Hegel’s, both temporally and in the sense that he sought to combine
Hegel’s dialectic with the claim (more akin to that of the positivists) that laws of historical
development could be discovered and harnessed for political action.
In the cases of Hegel or Benedetto Croce, although they utter distinctive first-order
claims about the historical process (writing, for example, of History as the Story of Liberty –
the title of a 1941 book by Croce), they do not claim that this is a necessary law-driven
process. On the contrary, that would be self-contradictory and obviously so in the case of
freedom. What they are asserting is that one unique set of circumstances changes into
another through a dialectical process in which a shape of life transcends itself whilst both
negating its previous stage of development and simultaneously preserving its truth. In their
language, each form is an instance of a universal but not an instance of an abstract universal
in the way in which a particular explained by a scientific law is indifferently an example
and could be replaced by any other example. It is a concrete universal in which the universal
and particular are fused into a unique individual.2
For Hegel, history is ‘the development of Spirit in time’. What is ‘spirit’? It ‘may be
defined as that which has its centre in itself’; whereas ‘matter has its essence outside itself,
Spirit is self-contained existence’ (Hegel [1837] 1991: 17). Spirit is both immanent and
transcendent; it is both universal and particular; it is both individual and collective:

It is the concrete spirit of a people which we have distinctly to recognise and since it is
Spirit it can only be comprehended spiritually, that is, by thought. It is this alone which
takes the lead in all the deeds and tendencies of that people and which is occupied in
realising itself, in satisfying its ideal and becoming self-conscious, for its great business is
 philosophising history 147
self-production. But for spirit, the highest attainment is self-knowledge; an advance not
only to the intuition, but to the thought – the clear conception of itself. This it must and
is also destined to accomplish; but the accomplishment is at the same time its dissolution
and the rise of another spirit, another world-historical people, another epoch of
Universal History. ([1837] 1991: 71)

Although at first glance it might appear that Hegel conceives of the historical process as
a form of necessary development according to fixed stages, this is not so. For Hegel, there is
a crucial distinction between the world of mind or spirit and the world of nature. The
natural world is spirit estranged from itself; it is spirit’s other. Hence its processes are not
spiritual processes; they are not processes of mind. History, as dealing with spirit, is a process
that proceeds dialectically, not according to necessary or even probabilistic scientific laws.
It is a realm of unfolding human self-understanding and this understanding in turn leads to
historical development. This is not so for nature. For Hegel, understanding is a historical
activity and includes not only whence something came but also whither it is going; in this
sense it is proleptic, anticipating although not determining future states of itself. Hegel’s
approach to history has a distinctive flavour in which he marries the idea that the historian
rethinks the thoughts of historical agents, a view of the historical subject as a collective
agent instantiated in individuals as concrete universals, and the claim that, although there
is no predictable course of history, the historical process is the dialectical working out of the
principle of liberty. Progress is not automatic or predictable but there is progress and
considered in retrospect it has a determinate shape. Considered in prospect it also has a
shape whose achievement depends on will:

Since the substance of the individual, the World-Spirit itself, has had the patience to pass
through these shapes over the long passage of time and to take upon itself the enormous
labour of world-history, in which it embodied in each shape as much of its entire content
as that shape was capable of holding, and since it could not have attained consciousness
of itself by any lesser effort, the individual certainly cannot by the nature of the case
comprehend his own substance more easily. Yet, at the same time, he does have less
trouble, since all this has already been implicitly accomplished. (Hegel [1807] 1977: 17)

Also central to Hegel’s thought is that the philosopher can no more transcend his own
time than he can leap over Rhodes; thus ‘philosophy is its own time apprehended in
thoughts’ (Hegel [1821] 1942: 11). The consequence of this line of thought is the belief
that each era or epoch, although constantly unfolding into its successor, is constructed so
that all parts are interrelated and to fully understand any part one must understand the
whole. This, it might be said, is the historicising of the Absolute: absolute knowing is a
process in time; it is the ‘development of Spirit in time’ (Hegel [1837] 1991: 65).
This is historicism. The term was not used at the time but by later commentators such as
Friedrich Meinecke in characterising nineteenth-century thought (see Meinecke [1936]
1972). Although there have been different (not always congruent) senses of the term
‘historicism’ employed over the past century or so, Meinecke’s characterisation attracts
general agreement. For him, the essence of historicism lay in replacing generalising views of
human forces in history with a process of individualising observation. This was not
necessarily to the exclusion of attempts to find general laws and types in human life.
Historicism did not deny the existence of a permanent foundation of basic human qualities,
although it was certainly sceptical of the stability of human nature and argued that it
148 james connelly
constantly took on new and individual forms. Thus individuality is revealed in a process of
development. The key point is that historicism denies the claims of positivism and asserts
the individuality and uniqueness of each historical set of circumstances. To understand
historically, therefore, is to understand an agent as acting within a determinate background
context (see Burns and Rayment-Pickard 2000: 57–8). For Georg Iggers, historicism
involved a philosophy of value, a theory of knowledge and a conception of politics and
central to these was the rejection of natural law. In ethics this meant denial of universal
norms; history consisted of individuals, each unique in character.

Individual persons as well as collective bodies – states, churches, epochs – possessed the
characteristics of individuality. Values did not exist in the abstract but only within
concrete historical contexts. Each individual was to be judged in terms of its own laws of
development and the unique values it represented. (Iggers 1967: 383)

Historicism was closely related to the Verstehen approach to social reality: historical
individuals and institutions could never be reduced to abstract concepts but could only
be understood from within in terms of their unique character. Looking to make general-
isations in history or to find general laws of social development was a violation of the reality
and variety of history.
Whatever its merits, the term ‘historicism’ rapidly acquired negative connotations,
because it was thought to be an endorsement of relativism and hence a threat to
fundamental ethical, intellectual and religious values. And because it was intimately
connected to the questions of whether historical knowledge is subjective or objective and
of whether it can be scientific and of whether social science is possible, historicism is a
crucial part of what came to be known at the end of the nineteenth century as the
Methodenstreit or war of methods. At that time the discussion spread far beyond its origin in
German academia and embraced, for example, Croce in Italy, who took historicism further,
firmly rejecting the claims of social science. For Croce, social science, whatever its
pretensions to universality, could at most provide contingent historical knowledge of a
society at a given time.
Before leaving Hegel and historicism, the role of Leopold von Ranke should be
considered. The image of Ranke in the English-speaking world is largely that of someone
devoted to ‘the facts’ and to knowing the past ‘as it really was’. He has a reputation as an
unphilosophical empiricist. He was rightly seen as dedicated to the sources and to
scrupulous attention to the documentary evidence. On that basis his attitude was embraced
by American historians who wanted to constitute history as a (natural) science and by
English historians and writers on history who applauded him for his empiricism and anti-
philosophical stance. These were seriously wrong assessments, for Ranke was no positivist.
He was on the contrary a philosophical idealist and far more Hegelian than Comtean. It is a
rich irony that his popular image is the opposite. Much hinges on the interpretation of a
key phrase of his which repeatedly appears in his writings: the idea that the historian should
capture the past wie es eigentlich gewesen. This is typically translated as ‘as it really was’ or ‘as
it actually was’, whereas at the time of his using the phrase it was ambiguous in that it could
also mean ‘essentially’ – and that was the sense in which Ranke used it. Thus he was
seeking to find the essence of past events, to present them as they were and to avoid judging
them. In Germany, at the same time as he was being embraced by the empiricists in the
Anglo-Saxon world, Ranke was being attacked by positivists such as Karl Lamprecht for his
idealism and defended by those who, like Meinecke, wished to defend the tradition of
 philosophising history 149
philosophical idealism. In Peter Novick’s words, ‘All German historians saw Ranke as the
antithesis of a non-philosophical empiricism, while American historians venerated him for
being precisely what he was not’ (Novick 1988: 28).
Ranke should be considered as belonging in the company of those for whom die
Wissenschaft primarily means scholarship or learning and for whom eine Wissenschaft
primarily means a discipline. As Fritz Ringer remarks,

In English it is possible to argue about whether sociology or history is ‘a science’. In

German, history is eine Wissenschaft by definition and to ask whether sociology is eine
Wissenschaft is to wonder about its status as a distinct and clearly circumscribed
discipline, not about its more or less ‘scientific’ methods. (Ringer 1969: 102–3)

As a term, Wissenschaft implied more than knowledge – it was also self-fulfilment, not
merely practical knowledge but knowledge of ultimate meanings. In that sense, Wis-
senschaft was closely allied with philosophical idealism, as was the term Geisteswissenschaft
(science of mind or spirit), which covers disciplines such as history, philosophy, theology
and literature. It is accordingly not surprising that German historians reacted vehemently
to the positivistic suggestion that the methods of the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences)
should be applied to their discipline (Novick 1988: 24).

3. Historical Empiricism and Positivism

A strong reaction to this Hegelian or idealistic lineage emerged in the forms of empiricism
and positivism. Here it is claimed that historical events (particulars) can be subsumed as
instances of general laws (universals). This form of explanation is typical of the natural
sciences, where the occurrence of an event is explained not by focusing on its individuality
but by considering it as an example of the operation of a general law of nature. Empiricism
consists in a denial of central idealist claims; positivism consists in asserting that the forms
of explanation typical of the natural sciences should be employed in all sciences. Some
claim not only that particular events can be explained in this way but also that general laws
of historical development can be discovered. What positivism signifies for Auguste Comte
and for those who argue similarly, such as John Stuart Mill and Henry Thomas Buckle, is
the belief that there is only one method appropriate in all disciplines and that the
appropriate method is that of natural science. Historical and natural processes are taken as
both subject to natural laws and the study of history, no less than that of the natural world,
is conducted nomologically, by seeking underlying explanatory laws. Hence Comte
claimed to have discovered laws of historical development:

[T]he first characteristic of the Positive Philosophy is that it regards all phenomena as
subjected to invariable natural laws. Our business is . . . to pursue an accurate discovery
of these laws, with a view to reducing them to the smallest possible number. (Comte
[1830] 1896: 31)

Comte characterised history as passing through several determinate stages, in which

religious thought is superseded by metaphysical thought, which is in turn replaced by
positive science. Thus positivism is both the correct account of thought and itself the
necessary outcome of earlier phases. Buckle sharply rebukes history for its absence of settled
scientific method:
150 james connelly
[F]or all the higher purposes of human thought history is still miserably deficient and
presents that confused and anarchical appearance natural to a subject of which the laws
are unknown and even the foundation unsettled. (Burger 1977: 168)

Buckle’s rebuke had the unintended effect of provoking Johann Gustav Droysen to respond
and thereby usher in the search for a critique of historical reason (which it was Dilthey’s
explicit ambition to produce, along the lines of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason).

4. The Response to Positivism: Understanding and Explanation

The earliest post-Hegelian responses came with Droysen responding to Mill and Buckle.
Thomas Burger claims that, with this, the age of methodological innocence came to an end
for historians (Burger 1977: 168). Before that time there had been no well-worked out
positivist method on offer as an alternative to the humanistic methods of Hegel and others.
Now the situation was different, for Buckle’s indictment

was derived from a relatively well-developed and systematic theory of science within
whose framework historical accounts appeared as devoid of any serious significance. Its
logical conclusion was the demand to replace history by sociology. Traditional historians
had little by the way of a worked-out theory of history to put forward against the
positivists’ charge. The closing of this gap and the provision of a secure methodological
‘foundation’ thus became the central preoccupation of the theorists of history in the last
part of the nineteenth century. (Burger 1977: 168)

In responding to positivism, Droysen in 1858 referred to things which demand not to be

explained but understood and hence drew the now standard distinction between explana-
tion (erklären) and understanding (verstehen). In a reminder that historical method has
wider connections, however, other factors were involved. Droysen’s attack on positivism
went beyond the historicist complaint that it introduces an inappropriate teleology into
history, based on laws that violate the unique nature of historical individuality. His
hostility centred

not on its [positivism’s] cognizable progressivism per se, but rather on what he regards as
the political consequences of the particular kind of progressivism it espouses. By rooting
the logic of historical development in inexorable laws rather than in human will,
positivism for Droysen obscures the genuine normative significance of historical study
and thereby threatens the moderate liberal practice which is its proper political expres-
sion. Knowledge of putative historical laws satisfies men’s intelligence but, by masking
history’s ethical imperatives, starves their will. The result is an historical disorientation
that reduces men from autonomous actors consciously exerting their wills in history in
pursuit of the liberal millennium, to an undifferentiated mass of passive automatons eager
to accept despotic political direction from above. (Maclean 1982: 349)3

As background to this debate, it is worth recalling the verum-factum principle enunciated

by Giambattista Vico, in his New Science of 1744:

in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity . . . there shines the
eternal and never-failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil
 philosophising history 151
society has certainly been made by man and that its principles are therefore to be found
within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but
marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world
of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have
neglected the study of the world of nations or civil world, which, since men had made it,
men could hope to know. (Vico [1744] 1948: 85, §331)

For Vico, we can know only what we have made; we make history, therefore we can know
it. And, further, this claim implies a distinct way of viewing historical knowledge, a way
developed by neo-Kantians such as Dilthey, Rickert, Windelband and Weber and later by
neo-Hegelians such as Croce.
Wilhelm Dilthey popularised the distinction between the Geisteswissenschaften and the
Naturwissenschaften. He did not, however, regard either the distinction or its terms as
absolute. He argues that the range of concepts of human studies is

identical with that of understanding and understanding consistently has the objectifica-
tion of life as its subject-matter . . . Mind can only understand what it has created.
Nature, the subject-matter of the physical sciences, embraces the reality which has arisen
independently of the activity of mind. Everything on which man has actively impressed
his stamp forms the subject-matter of the human studies . . . Every fact is man-made and,
therefore, historical; it is understood and, therefore, contains common features; it is
known because understood. (Dilthey [1883] 1976: 192)

This shows Dilthey’s acceptance of Vico’s verum-factum principle, although Dilthey allows
that knowledge of nature is possible by arguing that it is not that we cannot have natural
scientific knowledge: it is merely that knowledge of nature and knowledge of history are
different: ‘we explain nature but we understand mental life’ ([1883] 1976: 69).
The distinction between the human sciences and the natural sciences needs to be
considered carefully. Although it is tempting to suggest, following Hegel’s distinction
between mind and nature, that the sciences map directly onto that distinction, the
distinction can never be merely twofold. Although we should study the human world
through the methods appropriate to mind, does that mean that any and every attempt to
generalise and make law-like explanations is illegitimate? Conversely, although the natural
history of the world presumably cannot be understood as mind, natural processes and their
unique history cannot easily be subsumed under a simple set of laws. They are unique, with
a unique history. The reason for this observation is that one characteristic of the historical
is frequently taken to be that it is in search of the unique, the unrepeatable, that this is a
characteristic of the activities of mind where repetition is never sheer repetition but always
repetition with a difference. But this can be a feature of the natural as well as of the human
world. Conversely, it is often thought that the world of mind can never be captured
through general laws, but at some level this might not be true. There are emergent patterns
in human activity; are we to be forbidden to look for law-like generalisations?
For Dilthey, verstehen is appropriate to the human studies and erklären to the natural
sciences because of the difference in their respective subject-matters. The difference in
method is the consequence of this difference in subject-matter. Dilthey rejected the
positivist claim that all sciences can and should follow the methods of natural science. On
the contrary, he suggested that the human world could only be made intelligible through
understanding (verstehen). When studying nature we do not consider its inner side. We do
152 james connelly
not consider feelings, intentions, consciousness, volitions or desires to be involved in the
study of nature. In the study of the human world we do consider these things. Through
what Dilthey calls the re-experiencing or Nacherleben of an actor’s behaviour, we under-
stand the inner reason for that behaviour. This is verstehen. This can be construed in
different ways: one would be psychologically, which in turn could be regarded as a way to
discern regularities in human behaviour through the assumption that what holds for the
person seeking to understand holds also for the understood. However, it is generally
accepted that, in the words of one eminent commentator, ‘Dilthey was not committed to a
purely psychological approach, he did not advocate understanding at the expense of other
cognitive approaches and he did not accept complete historical relativity’ (Rickman 1979:
164). Further, understanding is not a method, but rather ‘one ingredient of a method and,
as an achievement, it may be the result of using a method’.

5. Patrolling the Boundaries: Rickert and Windelband

In The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science of 1902, Heinrich Rickert ignores
the ontological question of what nature or culture or spirit are in themselves and focuses
instead on the issue of values. The very existence of culture or spirit, he says, depends on
human values, whereas nature is independent of human values. By linking this together
with Windelband’s distinction between the nomothetic and the idiographic, he gives us a
different account of how the sciences might be subdivided. Rickert combines the
positions of Dilthey and Windelband in arguing that there are two sorts of division
possible between the various sciences. One is a formal distinction between the methods of
concept formation, represented by the extremes of generalisation and individualisation,
which does not correspond to the distinction between natural and social science. The
other is a substantive division between the subject-matters of the sciences where the
division lies between natural and socio-cultural objects. So the difference between nature
and history lies not in the object but in our approach to the object. ‘Empirical reality
becomes nature when we conceive it with reference to the general. It becomes history
when we conceive it with reference to the distinctive and the individual’ (Rickert [1902]
1986: 54).
The two kinds of objects originate differently: natural objects come about by themselves;
cultural objects are brought about specifically because of their value to mankind, therefore
relevance to value can serve as the distinguishing methodological feature of the cultural
sciences. Putting formal and substantive distinctions together, we can display the result as
in Table 8.1.

Table 8.1 Formal and substantive distinctions

FORMAL
Nomothetic Idiographic

Natural (unrelated Physics Cosmology

to values)

MATERIAL Socio-cultural (related to

mind and values) Social Science History
 philosophising history 153
This typology is as much indebted to Wilhelm Windelband as it is to Rickert. In 1894
Windelband delivered a rectorial address in Strasbourg on ‘History and Natural Science’.
Like Rickert, he wanted to get away from the idea that the difference between the sciences
was grounded simply in the nature/mind dichotomy:

At present, a certain classification of the disciplines which attempt to establish

knowledge of reality is regularly employed. They are distinguished into natural sciences
and sciences of the mind. Stated in this particular form, I regard the dichotomy as
unfortunate. Nature and mind is a substantive dichotomy . . . this dichotomy, which has
become fixed in our general modes of thinking and speaking, can no longer be
acknowledged as so certain and self-evident that it may serve – just as it stands and
without any inquiry into its grounds – as the foundation for a classification of the
sciences. (Windelband [1894] 1980: 173)

For Windelband, the difference between different types of science lies not so much in their
respective subject-matters as in what type of interest we have in the subject-matter. In
particular, we can have an interest in deriving and elucidating laws and generalisation or,
on the contrary, in the unique and the individual. This leads to two types of approach: the
nomothetic and the idiographic. The nomothetic approach is concerned to establish
general laws and general phenomena and the idiographic approach is concerned with
unique and unrepeatable configurations of events (Gestalten). Windelband then pointed
out that, despite our conventional reservation of the idiographic approach for history and
our reservation of the nomothetic approach for natural science, we could, in fact, apply
either to the other.

This methodological dichotomy classifies only modes of investigation, not the contents
of knowledge itself. It is possible – and it is in fact the case – that the same subjects can be
the object of both a nomothetic and an idiographic investigation. (Windelband [1894]
1980: 175)4

In seeking to understand the notion of verstehen in any of its senses, it is also important to
maintain a distinction between understanding actions through the inner motives of
individuals and the idea that its purpose is to understand the ‘meaning’ of action rather
than the motives of acting individuals. In reflecting on the foregoing debates, Max Weber
sought to establish the foundations of empirical social science. He took there to be an
essential difference between meaningful human conduct and nature because the subject-
matter of a socio-cultural investigation (human action and its artefacts) is already
understood by the actor him- or herself: the contents of any culture are defined or
identified as such by the natives who participate in it. As to how we should know human
conduct, his answer was through verstehen. For Weber, verstehen was part of an empirical
social scientific approach to the understanding of action, but not the whole. And, even in
that part where it was appropriate for the understanding of action, he argued that it should
not be construed as a matter of rethinking inner motives or feelings. This is both because
that approach can take a psychologistic direction and because it is plagued with the
problem (unless strict transhistorical psychological laws are postulated) of being beyond
the scope of verification: how can we know that our process of re-thinking coincides with
the original thinking or experience we seek to understand? To avoid this, Weber proposed
that verstehen be concerned with the social meaning of actions. This is why he once
154 james connelly
memorably remarked that ‘one need not have been Caesar in order to understand Caesar’
(Weber [1921] 1947: 90). Caesar is understood through the meaning of his actions, not his
inner mental states. And this was why Weber was sharply critical of Georg Simmel and
Dilthey in so far as they employed a psychological approach to verstehen.
For Weber, the task of sociology is to achieve an interpretive understanding of social
action, that is, of human behaviour to which the acting individual attaches a subjective
meaning. In this sense, to identify socio-cultural phenomena is to identify its meaning as
this meaning is understood by the actors or natives. Weber refers here to subjective
meaning by which he means both the meaning of a situation as understood by the agent
and the relevance of that meaning in respect of that agent’s intentions; and he is also
talking about social or objective meaning, that is, shared social constructs. Meaning in this
latter sense is something which is not private to an individual. The meaning of an act
should not be identified with the intention with which it is performed – action should be
understood from within, but action takes place within a framework of shared meanings.
This framework does not dictate individual actions, but individual actions are only
intelligible within that framework. It is therefore important to be clear that the meaning
assigned to an action might be prior to the determination of what the action was intended
to do or why it was performed here and now in this given situation. Actions have a socially
shared and understood meaning and we need to identify and recover this meaning in order
to locate what is being done. As Weber remarks:

we owe to Simmel the elucidation of the most extensive range of cases which fall under
the concept of ‘understanding’ – ‘understanding’, that is, in contrast to ‘discursive
knowledge’ of reality which is not given in ‘inner’ experience. He has clearly distin-
guished the objective ‘understanding’ of the meaning of an expression from the
subjective ‘interpretation’ of the motive of a (speaking or acting) person. In the first
case, speech is the object of ‘understanding’, in the second case, the speaker (or agent).
(Weber [1903–6] 1975: 152)

However, instead of following the verstehen debate into modern sociology and the
phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, let us at this point revert to the idealist tradition, this
time in Britain, and consider the British idealists’ attitude to history.5
The British idealists are often taken to be followers of Hegel, who domesticated his
thought to make it presentable for the English-speaking world. In so far as Hegel had a
historicist approach to philosophy, a teleological view of world history and an organic
theory of the state, it is often assumed that they followed this also. The truth is much more
interesting. Their relation to Hegel and the German idealists was much more subtle, much
more critical and much more oblique. The influences on the thought of Bradley and
Bosanquet, for example, were as likely to be Lotze (whom Bosanquet translated) or Kant or
Fichte. Also, it should always be remembered that they were arguing against a native
background of empiricism, positivism and utilitarianism, as exemplified by the thought of
Mill, Comte, Spencer, Henry Longueville Mansel, William Hamilton and others now
largely forgotten, but the lines of whose thought can still be traced by the careful reader in
the shape and concerns of the British idealists’ writing.
However, it is certainly the case that the philosophy of history did not feature greatly in
the work of the first wave of British idealists in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Although the volume Essays in Philosophical Criticism (Seth and Haldane 1883), largely a
posthumous Festschrift for Thomas Hill Green who died in 1882, contained two essays on
 philosophising history 155
history, neither can be said to constitute a major contribution to debates in the philosophy
of history. The first, by William Ritchie Sorley, on ‘The Historical Method’ (Sorley 1883),
is largely devoted to considering the merits of the ‘historical method’, conceived as the
study of the aetiology and development of the various sciences. It is thus not a discussion of
either the methods or the principles of history as a form of inquiry and was written without
mention of F. H. Bradley, whose groundbreaking contribution to the subject we will
consider shortly. The paper by David George Ritchie, on ‘The Rationality of History’
(Ritchie 1883), is Hegelian in spirit, taking the term ‘philosophy of history’ to refer to a
teleology of world history. It is epistemological in so far as it addresses the question of how
we can know the ‘plot of history’. But it does not address (although it occasionally alludes
to) the central epistemological questions concerning historical knowledge per se identified
above. Like Sorley’s piece, it also is innocent of reference to Bradley.
Given these dispiriting facts, why should we be concerned with the attitude of the
British idealists to history? For three reasons: (1) because Bradley produced a vitally
important positive contribution to the debate; (2) because the very lack of consideration of
historical knowledge as a form of inquiry narrowed their angle of vision and thereby
stultified (in some cases) the idealists’ own attempt to construct their philosophical system;
(3) because the generation of idealists who emerged in the first part of the twentieth
century – in particular Oakeshott and Collingwood – were instrumental in the develop-
ment of modern philosophy of history. Modern philosophy of history is thus rooted in a
resurgence of idealistic thought as applied fruitfully to the question of historical knowledge.
Given this movement of thought, it is clearly important to investigate the trials and
tribulations of the philosophy of history in the thought of the idealists on its path towards
its emergence as the foundation of later work in the subject. We will examine the positive
contribution of Bradley, who sought to establish the presuppositions of historical inquiry,
and the more negative contribution of Bosanquet, who found himself unable to rely on
history as a form of knowledge and experience.6

6. Bradley and The Presuppositions of Critical History

For Hegel, history was not the whole, but part of the whole, the whole being absolute
knowledge. For the British idealists, similarly, history was not typically dealt with in and for
itself – Bradley’s essay is a rare exception. Rather, it was taken as part of an examination of
what we might call (in Bradley’s phrase, converted into the title of a book by Michael
Oakeshott) ‘modes of experience’ or (in R. G. Collingwood’s terms) ‘forms of experience’
(see Oakeshott 1933; Collingwood 1924). As in Hegel, the forms or modes are taken to be
rival ways (overlapping for Collingwood, non-overlapping for Oakeshott) of understanding
or experiencing the world. The task of the philosopher is to examine these modes and place
them in the ‘map of knowledge’. Hegel did this in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (as distinct from the speculative history of some of
his other works). Bradley and Bosanquet – whom I have chosen as my representatives of
the British idealists – are doing much the same in their own way.
Following Green, the most important and influential of the British idealists was Bradley,
who was a Fellow of Merton College from 1870 until his death in 1924. Bradley’s major
works were Ethical Studies ([1876] 1927), The Principles of Logic ([1883] 1922) and
Appearance and Reality ([1893] 1930). Generally speaking, as we have seen, the British
idealists were not over-concerned with the philosophy of history (in either sense of the
term). The major exceptions in the twentieth century are Collingwood and Oakeshott.
156 james connelly
The latter’s Experience and Its Modes contains a chapter on ‘Historical experience’ of which
Collingwood in The Idea of History claims that it

not only represents the high-water mark of English thought upon history, but shows a
complete transcendence of the positivism in which that thought has been involved, and
from which it has tried in vain to free itself, for at least half a century. (Collingwood
[1946] 1993: 158–9)

For Collingwood, then, the way to a proper conception of historical knowledge is through
idealism, but this path was not properly taken until the mid-1930s and it was certainly not
taken by the great British idealists such as Green and Bosanquet. However, it was embarked
upon by Bradley (see Walsh 1984; Rubinoff 1996).
Collingwood claims that Bradley’s metaphysics was a profoundly historical one.
Although Collingwood considered Bradley’s Presuppositions infected by ‘positivism’, this
was remedied in later works. First, the Principles of Logic constructed ‘a logic orientated . . .
towards the epistemology of history’ and Appearance and Reality presented ‘a metaphysic in
which reality was conceived from a radically historical point of view’ (Collingwood [1946]
1993: 140). The precise meaning and validity of this claim need not concern us here. What
is indisputably the case is that Bradley wrote a very important essay on the philosophy of
history, which was, according to Collingwood, so important that it should be regarded as
nothing less than a Copernican revolution in the philosophy of history.7 Collingwood
regarded the Presuppositions as a work of major significance, not simply for what it
accomplished in itself but for what it promised:

in it the Copernican revolution in the theory of historical knowledge has been in

principle accomplished . . . Bradley has seen that the historian brings with him to the
study of his authorities a criterion of his own by reference to which his authorities are
judged. (Collingwood [1946] 1993: 240)

What was Bradley seeking to do in the Presuppositions? His work here followed on
directly from the thunderous debates in the nineteenth century on the historicity of Jesus,
the value of the Bible as a historical source, the debates about miracle and so on – debates
which in Germany were associated with Baur and Strauss. In response Bradley sought to ask
by what criterion the historian should judge claims made about the past, in particular
claims contemporary with the events they purport to describe or report. Although written
in a rather obscure manner (especially the preface) Bradley’s essay seeks to answer the
question as to the possibility of historical knowledge. Bradley argues that history requires
judgement, both in the testimony of witnesses and in the evaluation of that testimony by
the historian, and judgement in turn rests on certain presuppositions. ‘History is necessarily
based upon prejudication; and experience testifies that, as a matter of fact, there is no single
history which is not so based, which does not derive its individual character from the
particular standpoint of the author’ (Bradley [1874] 1935: 15).
Each judgement rests on an inference and ‘an inference, it will be admitted, is justified
solely on the assumption of the essential uniformity of nature and the course of events’
([1874] 1935: 16). This is a necessary presupposition: ‘the universality of law and what
loosely may be termed causal connection is the condition which makes history possible’
(17). This, however, is a very general presupposition and hence Bradley goes on to assert
that, on the basis of historical testimony, we cannot accept ‘the existence of any causes or
 philosophising history 157
effects except on the conviction that there is now for us something analogous to them’
(19). The critical historian is the judge – there can be no other: ‘the historian, as he is, is
the real criterion; the ideal criterion . . . is the historian as he ought to be. And the
historian who is true to the present is the historian as he ought to be’ (2).
So one of the particular presuppositions of historical knowledge is the uniformity of
nature and this rules out, for example, the possibility of the historian taking seriously
reports of the miraculous. In other words, the historian in the present is constrained in
believing the testimony of eye witnesses by the presupposition that whatever they saw, or
thought they saw or interpreted in what they thought they saw, cannot be contrary to
natural law. Here are Bradley’s own words:

[W]hat then . . . is the presupposition of criticism? . . . the ground of criticism is that

which is the justification of inference; and an inference, it will be admitted, is justified
solely on the assumption of the essential uniformity of nature and the course of events
. . . the universality of law . . . is the condition which makes history possible and which,
though not for her to prove, she must nonetheless presuppose as a principle and
demonstrate as a result worked out in the whole field of her activity. To this extent the
characteristics of history are the characteristics of (natural) science, for both carry into
the particulars an anticipation which the particulars have already realized in implication:
and the reason of this is that for both the fact can exist so far only as already possessed of
attributes conferred on it by virtue of the principle and can oppose the principle by no
means but its own self-annihilation. ‘Science’, we may be told in answer, ‘is founded on
experiment and not on a presupposition.’ ‘The fact of the existence of scientific
experiment proves’, we must return, ‘the existence of an absolute presupposition, which
it can be said to found, only because upon that itself is already founded.’ We base our
action on that which our action itself supports and testifies to. (21–2)

Surely Bradley is right to consider the role that our conception of what is possible or
impossible in the natural world plays in historical inquiry. Granted, it is a merely negative
criterion, a criterion ‘not of what did happen but of what could happen’ (239), but it is
nonetheless a criterion, even if it can hardly be the sole one. Further, there is nothing in
Bradley’s argument which precludes the addition of other criteria: all he is arguing, it might
be said, is that critical history requires at least this one.
In The Idea of History, Collingwood gave an appreciative but critical account of Bradley’s
essay. In discussing the role of the critical historian, Collingwood remarks that:

On the positive side of the account, Bradley is absolutely right in holding that historical
knowledge is no mere passive acceptance of testimony, but a critical interpretation of it;
that this criticism implies a criterion; and that the criterion is something the historian
brings with him to the work of interpretation. (Collingwood [1946] 1993: 138)

But he then convicts Bradley of still being in the grip of an empiricist philosophy from
which he was later to break free:

Where he goes wrong . . . is in his conception of the relation between the historian’s
criterion and that to which he applies it. His view is that the historian brings to his work
a ready-made body of experience by which he judges the statements contained in his
authorities. Because this . . . is conceived as ready-made, it cannot be modified by the
158 james connelly
historian’s own work as an historian: it has to be there, complete, before he begins his
historical work. Consequently this experience is regarded not as consisting of historical
knowledge but as knowledge of some other kind and Bradley in fact conceives it as
scientific knowledge, knowledge of the laws of nature. This is where the positivism of his
age begins to infect his thought. He regards the historian’s scientific knowledge as giving
him the means of distinguishing between what can and cannot happen; and this
scientific knowledge he conceives in the positivistic manner, as based on induction from
observed facts on the principle that the future will resemble the past and the unknown
the known. The inductive logic of John Stuart Mill is the shadow which broods over all
this part of Bradley’s essay. But there is an inner inconsistency in this logic itself. On the
one side, it claims that scientific thought reveals to us laws of nature to which there
cannot be exceptions; on the other, it holds that this revelation is based on induction
from experience and therefore cannot ever give us universal knowledge that is more than
probable. ([1946] 1993: 138–9)

Whatever the truth of Collingwood’s claim that Bradley, at the time of writing the
Presuppositions, was still infected by the positivism of the age, it is plain for us and for
Collingwood too that the Presuppositions was an opening salvo in the development of
analytic philosophy of history in the twentieth century (for recent discussions, see Bradley
Studies 3 (1)).
The other British idealists wrote little on the philosophy of history – but there is one
exception: Robert Flint, who was not a full-blooded idealist but was sympathetic in many
ways to the idealist project. Flint was the author of a book on Vico (Flint 1884) and of two
works on the history of the philosophy of history (Flint 1874, 1893). His dissemination of
Vico’s thought was important in energising interest in the epistemology of historical
thought in the early twentieth century. Vico became popular in Edwardian Oxford and
Croce’s book The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico was translated into English in 1913 by
Collingwood, who mentioned Flint’s books on the history of the philosophy of history,
while denying that Flint had any positive doctrines of his own (Collingwood [1946] 1993:
142; see also O’Sullivan 2009).
Other idealists were less interested in historical thought and on occasion positively
hostile. A case in point would seem to be Bernard Bosanquet. With the phrase ‘The
doubtful story of successive events’, Bosanquet is often taken to have damned historical
knowledge to oblivion (Bosanquet 1912: 78–9). However, although he wrote these words,
it is less clear what their import is and whether he intended to damn history as a form of
knowledge as such. In fact, Bosanquet’s animosity to history derived not from a desire to
condemn but from a desire to draw more from history than the historiography of his time
would allow. He was not, in other words, rejecting history outright but, as I will explain, he
needed a better account of historical experience to flesh out his account of the concrete
universal.
It is worth remembering that ‘Green, Bradley and Bosanquet wrote in an intellectual
environment saturated with evolutionary and historical perspectives and historians
themselves had begun the process of establishing their subject as a professional university
activity’ (Parker 1988: 213). The Literae Humaniores degree at Oxford included a
considerable amount of history as an integral part. Fellows of Oxford colleges in the
latter part of the nineteenth century were multi-disciplinary and those whom we now
remember as primarily philosophers taught a lot of history and not necessarily ancient
history. Green, for example, gave lecture courses on the English Civil War and Bosanquet
 philosophising history 159
taught history throughout the first ten years of his academic life and often returned to
historical themes in his writings. This does not mean that they paid any great attention to
the claims of history as a form of knowledge, however, or, indeed, that they necessarily
regarded history as a reliable form of knowledge at all. Looking back to this time,
Collingwood wrote that Bosanquet was typical of his idealist colleagues in his lack of
interest in history as a form of knowledge:

[T]he 19th century idealists in England were not, in general, historically minded: there
are traces of the historical point of view in Bradley and Green and Caird – but they are
not very strong and in Bosanquet they vanish entirely and the relics of that school in
Oxford are quite out of touch with history. (Collingwood 1931)

Despite this judgement, history was not something the idealists could lightly discount,
for ‘the holistic presumptions of idealist philosophers made a consideration of the
relationship between past and present almost essential and their idealism made an
examination of the relationships between ideas and the social world important’ (Parker
1988: 214). And Bosanquet’s social and political thought is strongly historical in tone and
presupposition. He might have been less enthusiastic about history than some of his idealist
contemporaries, but ‘nevertheless, his social theory constitutes a strong incitement to
understand everything in terms of the context to which it is inextricably related’ (Boucher
1984: 194). However, Bosanquet failed to integrate historical knowledge and history in his
account of the concrete universal.
The notion of the concrete universal is central to the thought of the British idealists and it
is integral to all of Bosanquet’s writing, whether on logic, metaphysics, ethics, or social or
political philosophy. The concrete universal is both a logical and a metaphysical doctrine. It
is logical in that it consists in a rejection of the idea of a particular being a mere instance of an
abstract universal. A concrete universal is one in which an individual both exemplifies and
contributes to the universal, hence it is a universal which is not merely transcendent and
indifferent to its particulars but both immanent and transcendent. This is a metaphysical
view in its claim that the world (and our experience of the world) is structured on this
principle. It is also a social, political and ethical doctrine in the sense that our being is
construed as inherently social, both our absolute responsibility and also as contributory to a
whole greater than ourselves, a whole which is not a mere aggregate of individual actions but
both their ground and result. This is an organic whole in which each part functions only as
part of the whole and the whole is more than the sum of its parts. This leads to a strongly
communitarian tendency in idealist thought but one in which individual responsibility is a
necessary moment in the life of the concrete universal. Bosanquet developed his theory of
the concrete universal most fully in his Gifford Lectures delivered in 1911 and 1912 and
published as The Principle of Individuality and Value and the Value and Destiny of the Individual
(Bosanquet 1912, 1913; for a recent account of the concrete universal, see Stern 2007).
For later idealists such as Collingwood, the concrete universal was a historical universal.
Bosanquet was rather less confident in history as a foundation and he looked elsewhere in
developing his account of the concrete universal. The irony for Bosanquet, as I shall show,
is that he implicitly relied on historical experience in his account of the social whole and
the formation of institutions and individual souls but provided no satisfactory account of
how historical knowledge was possible. For him, it appears, the historical process was
doomed to be an unknowable thing in itself because he could see no satisfactory account of
how we could come to know it. Lived historical experience was a necessary presupposition
160 james connelly
of his doctrine of the concrete universal, while knowledge of that experience was
impossible. It seems that he wanted more from history than historians could provide
and that he relapsed into a scepticism which he could not overcome.
Much of Bosanquet’s work was indebted to Bradley and often consisted in responding to
the positions that Bradley had developed. But one piece that he did not respond to or
develop was the Presuppositions. Despite this, when he referred to work in historiography or
the philosophy of history it was usually Bradley that he cited. For example, he wrote that
the Presuppositions ‘gives the best account known to me of the process by which all parts of a
whole can be criticised and adjusted on the basis of each other’ (Bosanquet 1885: 332).8
Despite this, he thought it inadequate and this seems to be because he failed to grasp its full
significance.
Picking up the threads of Bradley’s discussion, let us note that Bradley did not doubt
the existence of history apart from the historian, nor that it is possible for the historian to
know it:

contrariwise we must take it for granted that there is no such thing as history which is
merely ‘subjective’, or, in other words, that whatever is ‘created’ by the historian is not in
a proper sense history at all. For that history as a whole has been so ‘made’, that in it we
have nothing but a series of projections of present consciousness in the form of a story of
past events, from time to time gathered up or abolished in a larger and more inclusive
projection – this has, so far as I know, been upheld by no sober-minded man, nor could
be. (Bradley [1874] 1935: 8)

Bosanquet, it seems, constantly reverts to something near to the scepticism which Bradley
denies. For Bradley, however, critical history is able to progress beyond this doubt: ‘It is
when history becomes aware of its presupposition that it first becomes truly critical and
protects itself . . . from the caprices of fiction’ (Bradley [1874] 1935: 21).
Bradley is not claiming that historical knowledge is certain and indubitable. On the
contrary, he asserts, it is inferential and incomplete. Relying on the uniformity of law and
the principle of analogy, however, the historian can generate criteria governing what it is
reasonable to accept as evidence for events in history. This, taken together with the overall
web of historical inference and reconstruction, enables the historian to construct an
account which is more than ‘a story of past events’. Our puzzle is this: although Bosanquet
thought highly of the Presuppositions, he implicitly denied its worth in his critical
comments on history as a form of experience. What is the source of his scepticism?
To answer this, let us return to the context of his utterance of the phrase ‘the doubtful
story of successive events’. The remark was made in the course of Bosanquet developing his
view of the concrete universal in his The Principle of Individuality and Value of 1912. It was
in part a response to comments made by the Cambridge philosopher James Ward. The
whole issue turns on Bosanquet’s understanding of what history (as process) is conceived to
be and therefore on whether or not it can be understood or intelligibly captured by the
historian. There is no doubt that, given the way Bosanquet characterises history, it is
unintelligible to the historian and that his conclusion follows. But is he committed to this
view of history? Or is he implicitly committed to a different view integral to his theory of
the concrete universal and to his account of self-realisation?
For Collingwood, Bosanquet ‘treated history with open contempt as a false form of
thought’. In his Logic (1911), Bosanquet pays great attention to the methods of scientific
research and says nothing of history. History is ignored because ‘he assumed as correct the
 philosophising history 161
positivistic view of its subject-matter as consisting of isolated facts separated from one
another in time and he saw that if this was their nature historical knowledge was
impossible’; and he describes history as ‘a hybrid form of experience, incapable of any
considerable degree of ‘‘being or trueness,’’ in which reality is misconceived by being
treated as contingent’ (Collingwood [1946] 1993: 143). Here Collingwood is right to
suggest that Bosanquet is working out the logical implication of a certain conception of
historical method, but it is the method rejected and superseded by Bradley. Bosanquet was
too unfamiliar with the work of critical historians to realise that Bradley had already made
the Copernican revolution in historical studies.
Bosanquet begins by stating that for Ward ‘the actual is wholly historical . . . it alone is
concrete experience . . . it is contingent, admitting contingency into the heart of things as
against the necessity of thought-connections’ (Bosanquet 1912: 78–80). This, for Bosan-
quet, is ‘little better than natural realism’ because

we are to accept as richer than thought a reality consisting in the fragmentary diorama of
finite life-processes unrolling themselves in time, seen from the outside, not strictly
knowable because a tissue of mere conjunctions; and yet not given, because a mere
construction on the basis of the present; and contingent through and through.

This is why he concluded that ‘history is a hybrid form of experience, incapable of any
considerable degree of ‘‘being or trueness’’’ and that the ‘doubtful story of successive events’
could not ‘amalgamate with the complete interpretation of the social mind, of art, or of
religion’. Bosanquet is attempting to develop a conception of the concrete universal and
Ward’s conception of history is antithetical to that:

[T]he reason for taking this hybrid form of experience for the type of reality lies in
ignoring the concrete universal. This is the defect which leads us to suppose that
concreteness and contingency are inseparable and makes us confound the apparent
contingency of details within a cosmos, whose main members are necessary to the whole,
with the contingency at the heart of a spatio-temporal world of incident, which has
never been recreated by experience of the fullest type. (Bosanquet 1912: 79)

For Bosanquet, life at its best cannot be contingent and freedom is ‘the logic of
individuality and as remote as possible from contingency’; and, finally, ‘Social morality,
Art, Philosophy and Religion take us far beyond the spatio-temporal externality of history’
(Bosanquet 1912: 80).
The enemy here is contingency and this is linked with Bosanquet’s claim that we cannot
enter into the inward aspect of things in history (Bosanquet 1912: 74–7). History is an
inferior form of experience because it cannot be a true concrete universal, unlike art and
religion. Bosanquet’s strictures on history are, then, directed negatively against Ward’s
enthusiasm for contingency as a mark of the concrete. Bosanquet characterises history
naturalistically and he takes the view that no satisfactory explanation or understanding of
what is important in human experience can be gained in this way. Bosanquet is interested
in the richness of human experience and given that Ward and Bradley have provided no
account of how mind can understand mind in history, of how the historian can provide a
full picture of the historical process, Bosanquet is left with the view that the reconstructive
work of the historian is a poor thing, which necessarily fails to do justice to the concrete
experience of historical individuals. His is a critique born of frustration, a scepticism
162 james connelly
derived from what he saw as the absence of an account showing how a fuller knowledge of
history was possible. Bradley, his one acknowledged authority, provided only the sketch of
such an account. Equally Bosanquet was aware that the ‘scissors-and-paste’ methods
advocated by others were inadequate. In the absence of a richer conception of history
he relapsed into scepticism about the claims and value of history as a form of experience.
Bosanquet wants something more than history: he wants the concrete universal because
‘it is impossible for life at its best to be contingent’ (1912: 79). But is he concerned with
historiography as a form of experience or with history as the lived experience of people in
time? It is perfectly possible that lived experience is beyond our capacity to grasp it
historically, but Bosanquet does not give us enough to convince us and equally it might be
that history, as a form of inquiry, is both a valid form of knowledge and also a valuable form
of experience. What exactly is Bosanquet denying? It is easy to allow that history and
historical experience are not ultimately satisfactory – but that does not show that historical
knowledge is impossible; and, against the Absolute, finite historical experience of either
type will be found wanting, but that does not mean that it is non-existent.
Despite the above, a positive account can be drawn from Bosanquet’s thought on
historical knowledge. In a paper on ‘Atomism in history’ he asks what the narrative
historian can offer and suggests that

[H]e brings to your notice in an orderly way a number of documents and achievements of
intense human interest, the connection and interpretation of which must always be in
some degree doubtful, but in each of which, as a whole, the spirit of humanity speaks to
your spirit. (Bosanquet 1917: 22)

In discussing ‘Time and the Absolute’ he indicates that we can transcend some of the
difficulties attendant upon history conceived as the contingent succession of spatio-
temporal events:

The more that history and science bring before us a unified past, the more closely do we
weld it to the content on which we base our construction of the future and the less do we
actually live in a world of temporal succession. (Bosanquet 1927: 116)

This points to a view in which history can provide self-knowledge, a key part of any
doctrine of self-realisation. For this to be possible,

[I]t would not be that the absolute had come into being after time, but that in the
temporal succession it had more or less completely manifested itself and something as to
a deeper reality might be inferred from this manifestation. But for this we require, not the
annihilation of temporal experience, but the power of seeing through it. (119)

We can rescue history for Bosanquet if (within his philosophy) it is possible to conceive of
a way in which we can transcend temporality. On this Bradley had provided a clue:

[T]he facts which exist for critical history are events and recorded events . . . although
the work of the mind, they now at any rate are no mere feelings, nor generally the private
contents of this or that man’s consciousness, but are fixed and made outward, permanent
and accessible to the minds of all men. Failing to be thus they have failed to be for history
and history can never be for them. (Bradley [1874] 1935: 13)
 philosophising history 163
This leads us to the notion of re-enactment, which is verstehen in its English and Italian
form, primarily associated with the writings of Croce and Collingwood. In re-enactment we
see through temporality by fastening on the outward expressions of thought which are in
principle accessible to all. Inwardness is achieved because it can be reached through the
outward expression of thought. Towards the end of his life Bosanquet engaged with the
work of the Italian idealists who had developed a philosophy which radically historicised
all acts of knowing (Bosanquet 1920; Harris 1960a, 1960b). Bosanquet did not accept the
full implications of Croce’s and Giovanni Gentile’s philosophies. But he moved some way
towards a more historical view, one in which the answer to his riddle is to recover the sense
that the world of history is a world of mind – a world in principle accessible to the mind of
the historian. In such a world the inwardness of the spiritual world is captured and made
the principle of the possibility of historical knowledge. And, as shown above, this view was
already implicit in Bosanquet’s own thought, but never developed (and indeed, over-
looked) by him. In re-enactment, as adumbrated by Bradley and developed by Croce,
Gentile and Collingwood, time is transcended in history because

[T]he historian, in discovering the thoughts of a past agent, re-thinks that thought for
himself. It is known, therefore, not as a past thought . . . but as a present thought living
now in the historian’s mind. Thus, by being historically known, it . . . triumphs over
time and survives in the present. (Collingwood 1937: 143)

This is Collingwood’s summary of Gentile’s view, which he concludes by conjuring and

exorcising Bosanquet’s ghost and remarking that ‘so conceived, history is no longer a ‘‘story
of successive events’’: it is the actual possession by the historian, here and now, of the
thought whose history he studies’. This approach provides what Bosanquet was looking for
when he stated that we require ‘not the annihilation of temporal experience, but the power
of seeing through it’ (Bosanquet 1927: 119). Finally, on Bosanquet’s behalf, we can bring
history and the concrete universal into harmony and thereby rescue history from the charge
that it is a ‘hybrid form of experience’.
Michael Foster suggests that Bosanquet’s account of the concrete universal should be
construed in an historical fashion. He defines the concrete universal as ‘the universal which
determines its own particularisation’ (Foster 1931: 1). He then argues that Bosanquet’s
characterisation of the concrete universal and his insistence that it cannot be historical
derive in part, from the limitations of his Logic, which he regarded as ‘derived almost
exclusively from reflection upon the comparative sciences . . . and its conclusions then
applied uncritically to the whole of knowledge’. However, below these sciences – the
sciences of life – are the sciences of matter, working with the conception of causal law, and
above them are ‘the sciences of spirit (the historical sciences) which work with the notion
of the individual’. It was the illegitimate extension of what was appropriate to the middle
sphere to the sciences of spirit which led to Bosanquet’s confusion (Foster 1931: 13–14).
If, having ‘transcended time in history’, we can now similarly transcend biological
metaphor in logic, we can achieve a conception of the concrete universal unimpeded by a
residual naturalism. We can, according to Foster, see that the concrete universal that
Bosanquet is striving for is historical:

[T]he conception which supplies the deficiencies of the ‘individual system’ is the
historical individual – not primarily the individual person, but such individuals as
‘the Athenian [empire], ‘the Roman Catholic Church’, ‘the Renaissance’. These do
164 james connelly
indeed penetrate the very being of their constituent particulars and obliterate for the first
time the hard and fast distinction within them of essential from accidental qualities; and
they determine not merely the spatial boundaries and temporal limits within which their
members shall exist, but the precise time and place of their existence. They are the
objects par excellence of intellectual intuition; they are the true concrete universals,
because they are concrete qua universal and universal qua concrete; they do not, like all
other universals, leave a residuum of ‘the accidental’ unpenetrated and therefore
inaccessible to thought. (19)

What prevented Bosanquet from taking this final step? According to Foster it was his
failure to comprehend the nature of the historical universal. Yet he was driven to seek a
more adequate realisation of the concrete universal than the ‘individual system’ which had
satisfied him in his Logic. He saw that what was required was something ‘individual’ and
that the individual person was inadequate as a solution. He was ‘precluded from recognising
the true historical individual’ and ‘condemned therefore in his later work to conduct a
fruitless search for adequate examples of the concrete universal, which can none of them in
reality supply more than a plausible analogy’ (Foster 1931: 20). For example, Bosanquet
claimed that ‘the best way to think of a finite individual is to bear in mind the nature of a
work of art, or of the moral temper as analysed by Aristotle, or of an organic being’
(Bosanquet 1912: 120–1). For Foster, the use of these analogies prevented Bosanquet from
grasping the relation of thought, history and the concrete universal, with the result that

[H]e is driven finally to the paradoxical conclusion that that concrete universal, which
was shown to be the culmination of the proper development of thought, is yet realised
never as thought, but as Art, Religion or Love. If we once claim any degree of
concreteness for the universal, there is no stopping along that path short of the
historical individual. (Foster 1931: 19–20)

Despite himself, this is what Bosanquet is committed to by the logic of his own arguments.
If he had continued to develop his thinking on history in line with his thinking on the
concrete universal, then plausibly Foster is right that Bosanquet would not have stopped
short of the historical individual (see Connelly 2000).

7. Conclusion
This survey has tracked some of the key concepts and themes typical of debates over the
nature of historical method and knowledge in the nineteenth century and has placed them in
the historical context of developments in the disciplines not only of history but also of
sociology and the social sciences in general. The key themes in the debate can also be located
in debates concerning the status of psychology, the ethical and social import of evolutionary
thought and Darwinism in particular, theology, biblical criticism and textual interpretation
(hermeneutics). Space precludes following these fascinating paths here. But the foregoing
shows how active these debates were in intellectual circles in the nineteenth century.

Notes
1. Whether analytic and speculative philosophy of history can be entirely separated is a matter of
contention. See: Burns and Rayment-Pickard 2000; and Connelly 2004a and 2004b. For good
 philosophising history 165
general accounts of the topics under discussion in this chapter, see: Burns and Rayment-Pickard
2000; Antoni 1959; Burrow 2009; Hughes 1979; Parker 2000; and Iggers 1983.
2. In the hands of some late nineteenth-century British idealists, the role of the historical individual
is downplayed, as a consequence of the view that history is an inferior mode of knowing by
comparison with philosophy, which alone can understand and generate the concrete universal:
see below.
3. This view has an exact counterpart in Walter Benjamin’s objections that a certain type of Marxist
conception of laws of inevitable progress in history leads to passivity in (and ultimately defeat for)
the working class. See Connelly 2004b.
4. For criticism of Rickert and Windelband, accusing them of disastrously confusing the formal
methods and the material content of scholarly disciplines, see Muller 1967.
5. On Weber and his thought in relation to history, see Whimster 1980.
6. I do not mean to imply that the work of Collingwood and Oakeshott is an undisputed foundation
of later work in the subject, merely that it provided the subject with much-needed impetus and
rigour.
7. On this essay and Collingwood’s commentary on it, see Burns 2006. On some of the debates
surrounding idealism and sociology in this period, see Collini 1978.
8. For his other references to the Presuppositions see Bosanquet 1912: 331; 1917: 22.

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Journal for the History of Philosophy, 15: 115–53.
Strauss, David Friedrich (1846), The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. Marian Evans (George
Eliot) from 4th edn of 1840, London: Chapman.
Vico, Giambattista [1744] (1948), The New Science, trans. Thomas Bergin and Max Fisch, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Walsh, W. H. (1984), ‘Bradley and critical history’, in Anthony Manser and Guy Stock (eds), The
Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 33–52.
Weber, Max ([1921] 1947), The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson
and Talcott Parsons, New York: Free Press.
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Guy Oakes, New York: Free Press.
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Windelband, Wilhelm [1894] (1980), ‘Rectorial address’, History and Theory, 19: 169–85.
 9
Genealogy as Immanent Critique: Working from
the Inside

Robert Guay

– only as persons of this conscience do we still feel ourselves related to the German
rectitude and piety of millennia, even if as its most questionable and final descendants,
we immoralists, we godless ones of today, indeed even in a certain sense as its heirs, as the
executors of its innermost will . . .
(Nietzsche, Daybreak)

1. Introduction
Of the distinctive terminology of nineteenth-century thought, perhaps no word has been
more widely adopted than ‘genealogy’.1 ‘Genealogy’, of course, had a long history before
Nietzsche put it in the title of a book, but the original sense of pedigree or family tree is not
the one that has become so prominent in contemporary academic discourse.2 Nietzsche
initiated a new sense of ‘genealogy’ which, oddly, has become popular despite a lack of
clarity about what it is.3 My aim here is to clarify this sense of genealogy by situating it in
the context of nineteenth-century narrative argument and identifying its general features. I
contend that the famous Nietzschean genealogy is actually the least distinctive narrative
form. Its features are to be found, usually together, in others’ argumentation. This is by no
means to disparage Nietzsche, but the contemporary prominence of genealogy comes not
from Nietzsche offering the most extreme or radical account, but from his offering the
one that most neatly represents the critical, historical, consciousness of the nineteenth
century.4
Genealogy, as with other prominent philosophical-historical accounts, involves narra-
tives that, by relating the functioning of a process, explain some feature of the present. The
presence of the past is thus implicit in such accounts: with certain phenomena, under-
standing them requires seeing not only their immediate condition but also their extension
backward through time. There are, I contend, four features that both distinguish genealogy
as such and establish its common ground with other prominent accounts. First, genealogy
involves what I call historical agency. The events narrated in a genealogy are considered as, if
only in an inchoate or unconscious way, actions. Genealogy thus explains human events by
appeal to terms familiar from the domain of human agency: purposes, reasons and above all
freedom. Second, genealogy involves a form of cosmopolitanism. There are many forms of
cosmopolitanism and that of genealogy is not a typical one, such as one in which ethnic or
 genealogy as immanent critique 169
national differences are ethically insignificant. The cosmopolitanism of genealogy, rather,
is that human identity is collective and in particular historical: being oneself involves
relations to a broader community. Indeed, genealogy typically characterises identity, in its
increasingly particularised form in the modern world, as coordinate with membership in
increasingly broad groups, such that some identities are only possible as the legacy of
enormous historical projects. Third, genealogy is typically critical. Genealogy, that is, takes
normative (or, for that matter, social) authority to be problematic and responds to this
by showing that certain claims to authority are in some way defective. As Nietzsche
characterised it, genealogy is a ‘no-saying’ enterprise, whose purpose is to exhibit the
failure of ideals (Nietzsche 1967–77: 6: 350).5 Fourth, genealogy is historical-hermeneutic.
Genealogy does not merely provide accounts of a sequence of events or of the changing
circumstances of stable entities. Genealogy provides accounts of things that are themselves
historical: because they are so fluid or indefinable, they can only be accounted for within
the temporal scope of the narrative.
Together these features render genealogy into what might be called ‘immanent
critique’.6 By this I mean that it offers a kind of critique that does not involve the
adoption of a privileged position with respect to the object of critique. One might conceive
of a typical critique in terms of a superior standpoint: the critic or the criticism has some
kind of epistemic privilege or better reasons or more information and is thus well-placed to
pass judgement on something. In an immanent critique, by contrast, no such privileged
standpoint is available, either because there are reasons to doubt any such claim of privilege
or because the legitimacy of one’s standpoint is itself part of what the critique addresses.
Immanent critique thus proceeds by taking up the very position or standpoint to be
criticised and identifying ‘internal’ flaws: ones that count as such from within the
standpoint under consideration. In accordance with the basic features of genealogy,
particular claims are inseparable from the more general commitments that shape an
outlook. Advancing these commitments turns out to be self-undermining in a way that
produces a transformative result. This provides the critical conclusion: the transformation
is explicable as an immanent failure of the old position. The critical conclusion is thus
always at least potentially vindicating: the result is a claim of relative superiority, if only
that almost anything would be better than the old position.
Here my procedure will be to examine genealogy as a general approach by considering
the main exemplars of philosophical-historical argumentation of the nineteenth century,
along with some precursors and heirs. Unfortunately I have to neglect some worthy
possibilities, but I hope to cover a full range of variations on genealogy. I shall not be
concerned with presenting the content of the particular stories that these philosophers tell:
the particular personae, events and dynamics are less important for present purposes than
the ways in which their narratives function as arguments. Indeed, one thing I hope to show
is that, apart from the distraction of differences on particular substantive issues, there is a
commonality in the way these philosophers regard the relationship between historical self-
understanding and normative critique.

2. Nietzsche’s Example: Genealogy

I will not try here to present an uncontroversial view of Nietzsche’s genealogy: since there is
no such thing, the attempt would be in vain. In this section, my aim is instead to bring out
some main features of Nietzsche’s approach, in order to show how genealogy operates
as immanent critique. I hope that showing how these features function together does
170 robert guay
illuminate Nietzsche’s philosophical position in general: the elements of my reading should
be mutually reinforcing. But resolving interpretative issues is less important for present
purposes than locating, in Nietzsche’s work, a critical, historical, cosmopolitan account of
normative and in particular, ethical authority.
One might think that there is a relatively clear path for ascertaining in what Nietzschean
genealogy consists.7 One should simply turn to Nietzsche himself for a statement of
method, or at least a definition of the term ‘genealogy’, or failing that to identify the key
elements or commonalities among the paradigm cases. But apart from referring to the title
of his own 1887 work, On the Genealogy of Morals (Zur Genealogie der Moral), Nietzsche
hardly ever uses the word ‘genealogy’, let alone identifies a method that is supposed to be
distinct from historical method in general. Even locating the titular ‘genealogy of morals’ is
a challenge. The promise of a single, complete account of morals is undercut by the
preposition that begins the title, ‘on’ or possibly ‘to’ (zu) and by the three narratives with a
chronologically and otherwise indeterminate relationship to one another which comprise
the book.
We can nevertheless identify enough of Nietzsche’s genealogical account to be able to
isolate its main features. In the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche declares
that his true concern in offering genealogical hypotheses has been to provide a ‘critique of
moral values’ (Nietzsche [1887] 1967–77: 5: 253, P6). He suggests that we lack self-
knowledge in part because ‘our moral prejudices’ (5: 248, P2) have gone unexamined: what
we are is so thoroughly bound up with moral values that narratives of self-understanding
must take the form of critique. Three sets of narratives that manage to be both polemical
and ambiguous then follow: they offer unflattering reports of successes that have turned out
to be destructive. In the first Treatise, the main subject is the invention of the good/evil
dichotomy. Nietzsche claims that the spontaneous self-affirmation of nobles was replaced
by the ‘slave revolt in morality’ (5: 270, I.10), wherein the weak exacted ‘imaginary
revenge’ (5: 271, I.10) against the nobles by inverting their value system. The weak refer to
the noble and powerful as ‘evil’ and themselves, by contrast, as ‘good’, and meekness and
humility comprise this new form of goodness. Nietzsche later refers to slave morality – or
simply ‘morality’ – as undoubtedly victorious, but at the same time as a form of ‘anti-nature’
that succeeds at the cost of health. The second Treatise primarily concerns what Nietzsche
calls ‘the fundamental moral concept’ (5: 297, II.4), namely, guilt. According to Nietzsche,
the notion of guilt has its origin in the non-moral notions of debt and indebtedness. The
creditor–debtor relationship was the forum in which human beings first measured
themselves against one another and, when creditors suffered losses, they made the debtors
suffer as compensation. This gave rise to pre-moral notions of guilt and duty which, when
‘turned backwards’ (5: 331, II.21) into the ‘bad conscience’, made a final discharge of the
creditor–debtor relationship impossible. This, claims Nietzsche, has produced memory, the
inwardisation of humankind and also ‘the self-crucifixion and self-violation of the human’
(5: 333, II.23). The third and final Treatise explains how the priest, in teaching the
sufferers that they are to blame for their suffering, ‘changes the direction of ressentiment’
(5: 375, III.15) and invents ‘the ascetic ideal’. The ascetic ideal functions as an expedient
that comforts the sick by providing an explanation for suffering, but at the same time
exacerbates their sickness. Nietzsche suggests in concluding the narrative that ‘all will to
truth’ (5: 410, III.27) has put itself forward as a candidate to replace the ascetic ideal but
turns out to be the ideal’s especially pure form.
Even this skeletal account of Nietzsche’s approach in one text evinces the four main
features of genealogy. Historical agency makes its appearance above all in the form of the
 genealogy as immanent critique 171
ascetic ideal. Nietzsche characterises human history as the working out of an ideal in
particular manifestations: Christian morality and the will to truth, for example, thereby
take on causal roles. By way of the specific appeal to asceticism, moreover, Nietzsche insists
that we cannot understand our historical condition except as something we have done to
ourselves. Nietzsche’s account involves appeals to a common agency that extends across
millennia: ‘We moderns, we are the heirs of the conscience-vivisection and animal-self-
cruelty of millennia: this is our longest practice, our artistry perhaps, or in any case our
refinement, our discriminating palate’ (5: 335, II.24; cf. 5: 410, III.27). This very feature
also shows the cosmopolitanism of Nietzsche’s account. Nietzsche characterises human
history as one slowly developing action – indeed, as a kind of meta-action, that of
furnishing a meaningful end for the will through an intensifying asceticism. The result of
this project is that a common human identity outweighs all the particular forms that
contributed to it. The critical element of genealogy is obvious: in addition to the declared
intention to offer a critique of moral values, there is the conclusion that modernity
represents a self-enervating will to nothingness.
The historical-hermeneutic aspect of genealogy comes out more strongly in Nietzsche’s
statements on ‘historical methodology’ than in the above summary: for example, in his
famous claim that ‘only that which has no history is definable’ (5: 317, II.13). Nietzsche
connects this methodological claim both to the features of the narrative and to the other
features of genealogy, however. The context of the claim about history is a claim about the
primacy of the ‘fundamental concept’ of activity over ‘the mechanistic senselessness of all
happening’ (5: 315, II.12). Undefinability, that is, comes from understanding events as
actions; this is what also generates the availability of critique. Nietzsche declares this to be
the most important proposition of historical method:

The cause of the origin of a thing and its final utility, actual employment and place in a
system of purposes lie worlds apart; that something existing, having somehow come-into-
being, is always again and again appropriated by a power superior to it and interpreted
from new viewpoints, reorganised and redirected toward a new use; that everything
that happens in the organic is an overcoming, a becoming master and on the other hand
that all overcoming and becoming master is a new-interpreting, a preparation in which
the prior ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be obscured or entirely obliterated.
(5: 313f., II.12)

This continual reappropriation of purposes is what allows Nietzsche to claim that our
modern commitments to institutions have a meaning fundamentally different from the one
that they are supposed to have. And history as self-subverting activity not only brings light
to failures in human agency; it also connects the opacity of the ‘continuous sign-chain of
new interpretations’ (5: 314, II.12) with the cosmopolitan nature of the ‘actual problem of
the human’ (5: 291, II.1). A genealogical approach is necessary, Nietzsche suggests, because
we lack privileged access to our own meanings and must therefore locate them in the
history of the human more generally.
These features of genealogy suffice to distinguish it from a Humean account, or what
Nietzsche referred to as that of the ‘English psychologists’.8 Such an account is primarily
explanatory. It attempts to identify the basic psychological features of human nature, along
with the principles of association or causal regularities that are sufficient to explain the
emergence of familiar ethical dispositions. The aim is to show that and how complex
systems of value could develop out of simple elements of our psychology. This kind of
172 robert guay
account shares with Nietzsche’s enterprise the view that morality itself has a causal
explanation and thus requires an account of historical change in order to understand it.
Even the meaning of this narrow commonality would be in dispute, however. For
Nietzsche, as we have seen, purposive activity plays a distinctive explanatory role. Such
activity in a Humean account, by contrast, is indistinguishable from other events
determined by antecedent causes. The meaning of historical change is different, too.
For Hume, this can only mean that the ‘original constitution’ of human nature manifests
itself in different ways, depending on causal history: everything, furthermore, is either
definable in empirical terms or meaningless. But for Nietzsche’s genealogy there are no
stable entities that endure through history as the subject of change. Historical change,
rather, is so pervasive that the basic elements of the narrative are fluid and indeterminate –
‘punishment’ is Nietzsche’s most famous example (5: 316, II.13). This makes Nietzsche’s
form of cosmopolitanism different, too. Rather than being rooted in a common human
nature, Nietzsche’s version only enters at the end of his story, as a shared ascetic patrimony.
The principal aim of genealogy, moreover, is critical rather than explanatory.
Critique is indeed the very point of Nietzsche’s genealogical enterprise. The Humean
approach can provide a causal history of moral belief and thereby perhaps an account of its
meaning, but genealogy aims to assess moral beliefs. And such a critique cannot presume
epistemic superiority – ‘the value of truth must be experimentally called into question’ (5:
401, III.24), writes Nietzsche – because such a presumption is potentially implicated in the
outlook under scrutiny. So genealogy functions as ‘immanent critique’: it provides a critical
assessment without appealing to the independent authority of its critical stance. Genealogy
criticises moral values – or, more generally, ‘ideals’ – by taking them as not merely
furnishing a measure or standard but also functioning to structure the conduct and
understanding of life. And because ideals are purposive in this way, they can be assessed,
on their own terms, by their success or failure.
The dynamic of this is complex, at least on Nietzsche’s account, since living in light of
an ideal transforms not just one’s life but also the ideal and oneself. As Nietzsche sees the
process, having ideals affects the life that one leads, sometimes in line with the ideals and
sometimes perversely. In either case, the resulting transformation of life also changes the
self: a new human type is cultivated or ‘bred’, as Nietzsche would have it. This
transformation of the self alters the meaning of ideals, which in turn changes the way
in which lives are led and so on. Genealogy’s critical point is that this whole process has
conclusively failed: morality represents a purposiveness that cannot possibly be redeemed.
There are three different ways in which Nietzsche makes the case for the failed teleology of
morality. One, it turns out to have achieved defective purposes: it reduces humanity to ‘the
botched, diminished, atrophied and poisoned’ (5: 277, I.11). Two, morality generates
purposes that are opposite from what had been intended: here Nietzsche’s main example is
the ‘priestly medication’ of the interpretation of suffering ‘that makes people sicker’ (5: 391,
III.21). Three, and most importantly, the purposiveness of morality has come to a dead end,
in which all other purposes have been co-opted or measured ‘only according to the
meaning of its interpretation’ (5: 396, III.23) and yet the possibility of any further
purposiveness has been foreclosed. In the concluding section of On the Genealogy of
Morals, the ascetic ideal has moved from the ‘faute de mieux par excellence’ to ‘will to
nothingness’ (5: 412f., III.28). Nietzsche’s argument qualifies as immanent critique because
of his claim that it is precisely from adopting a moral standpoint that we are led to conclude
that it has failed: in Nietzsche’s simplest formulation, it is the Christian cultivation of
responsibility and ‘will to truth’ that finally turns against itself. What is more, Nietzsche
 genealogy as immanent critique 173
insists that there is no alternative to the ‘One Goal’ (5: 396, III.23) of the ascetic ideal, so
we cannot help but draw the conclusion against the moral standpoint.
There remains more to be said about Nietzsche’s genealogical enterprise and the way it
functions as immanent critique. The range of possibilities for immanent critique is better
exhibited, however, in others’ critical narrative forms. After a consideration of these I shall
return to Nietzsche.

3. The Prehistory of Genealogy

One element of the understanding of genealogy would have to be the reflexive one: a
genealogy of genealogy. Such a project would be limitless in its complexity. Places of
honour could be given to Greek tragic irony, the Judeo-Christian hope for messianic
intervention in temporal history, the self-image of the ‘Renaissance’, Vico, the higher
criticism, teleology in biology and chemistry, Darwin and much more. Here, however, I
wish to merely point out two significant contributions to the flurry of productivity
following the Enlightenment’s invention of the term ‘philosophy of history’ (this is
attributed to Voltaire in Lemon 2003: 7). Rousseau and Kant offered philosophies of
history that, together, laid much of the groundwork for the development of genealogy.
In the opening words of The Social Contract, Rousseau introduces most of the basic
preconditions of genealogy: ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains’ (Rousseau
[1762] 1966: 41). Here there is the cosmopolitanism of the human condition, the
consideration of human beings as freely active, the perverse operation of that activity
to self-enslavement and the iron necessity of historical processes. In the philosophy of
history, with Rousseau’s famous claim that we have become corrupt and sick precisely by
our own freedom and ‘perfectibility’ (Rousseau [1755] 1992: 184), even deeper affinities
with genealogy can be found.
In Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment, modern forms of social organisation, in
seeking to legitimate themselves, have mistaken what unjust institutions have made of
‘men’ for human nature itself. As a result, putatively rational institutions only serve to
legitimate and intensify existing forms of domination. Our social order has thereby reached
a dead end, in which we have reached the ‘extreme state of corruption’ (Rousseau [1755]
1992: 252) and old processes of legitimation no longer function at all. This pattern of
argument, despite all of Rousseau’s differences from Nietzsche (on which see Ansell-
Pearson 1996), represents a crucial formative step towards genealogy: ironic historical
agency. Rousseau’s argument is not that Enlightenment efforts to vindicate a modern social
order have failed because of implementation problems, or because the institutions were
somehow too good for the world. Rousseau’s argument was that precisely because such
institutions succeeded, in proportion to their immense effectiveness, they generated human
misery and thus their own delegitimation. Rousseau takes the Enlightenment narrative of
progress and provides a counter-narrative in which all the same events occur but every
single change has been for the worse. To put this point in its simplest form, ‘The majority of
our ills are our own doing’ (Rousseau [1755] 1992: 179). An appropriate critical narrative
will therefore tell the story of how we, by our own agency, continuously made things worse
and made things especially bad when we were most successful.
Rousseau’s other main contribution to the development of genealogy was that he was the
first to theorise the speculative enterprise of cosmopolitan self-knowledge in which
Nietzsche also engaged. Just as Nietzsche opened his Preface to On the Genealogy of
Morals, Rousseau begins the Preface to the Second Discourse, On the Origin of Inequality, by
174 robert guay
invoking missing self-knowledge: ‘the most useful and least advanced of all the fields of
human knowledge seems to me to be that of man’ (Rousseau [1755] 1992: 157). In his
Introduction, Rousseau further emphasises the cosmopolitan import of his account. He
writes, ‘O man, from whatever land you come, whatever your opinions, listen. Here is your
history that I have thought to read, not in the books of your compatriots, who are liars, but
in nature, which never lies’ (169). What is most distinctive about Rousseau’s account is
how he conceives of his method, however. This conception of method emerges in two
passages:

Let us begin therefore by setting aside all the facts, because they do not touch upon the
question. One must not take the investigations that can be carried out on this subject for
historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings, more appropriate
for clearing up the nature of things than for showing their true origin . . . (169)

Because it is no easy enterprise to separate what is original from what is artificial in the
present nature of man and to know well a state that does not exist, that perhaps did not
exist and probably never will exist and about which it is nevertheless necessary to have
correct notions in order to judge our present state. (158)

In Rousseau’s historical enterprise, the factual is not merely absent, say because of epistemic
difficulties with respect to the past. The factual is irrelevant. Because Rousseau’s aim is to
identify ‘the nature of things’ rather than the ‘true origin’, ‘hypothetical and conditional
reasonings’ are appropriate. And this is so in spite of Rousseau’s concession in the second
passage that there never was nor ever will be a state of nature. Rousseau is not indifferent to
the realism of the story and the causal effectiveness of its elements: at the very least,
arriving at the ‘correct notions’ is critical. But whereas empirical evidence can only support
causal inferences, one can from speculation ‘draw the nature of things’ (221). In this way,
Rousseau moves historical narrative away from contingent happenings toward the nor-
mative analysis of the internal character of human agency. As in genealogy, narrative
elements function to show something about who we are and what we are doing.
Kant builds on Rousseau’s contributions, in particular Rousseau’s story of cosmopolitan
freedom. What Rousseau formulates in terms of the incommensurable value of human
liberty, Kant explains, most famously, in terms of a universal legislative capacity. Rational
beings are thus ‘ends-in-themselves’ (Kant [1785] 1994: 51) and a source of unconditional
worth. In conceiving of persons in this way, Kant decisively marks a shift in cosmopolitan-
ism, from imagining that there is some significant quality that all human beings possess in
common, to granting everyone the same normative status. Kant’s insistence, that is, that all
should be entitled to ‘rational esteem for individual value’ (Kant [1784] 1999: 21)
contributed to genealogy’s interest in the sustainability of ideal commitments.
Kant is worth mentioning in this context because of two additional contributions. The
most important is critique. Of course, there was a notion of critique before Kant and
Rousseau was certainly, in some sense, critical of his culture. But Kant makes clear that
critique is not simply an epistemological notion but also a historical-cultural one. In
declaring an ‘age of critique’ (Kant [1781/1787] 1956: A xii), he placed critique within the
historical dynamic, so that critical adequacy became part of the explanation of events. And
just as important was Kant’s specific conception of critique in terms of self-scrutiny and real
possibility. Critique proceeds immanently: a ‘critique of pure reason’ is reason’s critique of
itself. In particular, critique proceeds by identifying possibility conditions. For example,
 genealogy as immanent critique 175
Kant claims that the pure concepts of the understanding are necessary for the possibility of
experience. His argument does not concern logical possibility: experience without such
concepts is not self-contradictory. His argument, rather, is that judgement involving the
pure concepts constitutes the possibility of experience and that the concepts are therefore
objectively valid. By thus connecting legitimacy with real possibility, Kant makes way for
the critical practice of the nineteenth century: that supposed value commitments are
somehow unsustainable or unliveable in practice and must therefore be rejected.
The other main contribution of Kant’s to the development of genealogy was his
invocation of the question of hope. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant offered ‘What
may I hope?’ (Kant [1781/1787] 1956: B832) as one of three questions that express the
complete interest of reason. Indeed, this is the most important of the questions, since it
promises a unified resolution of the other two. What is important about this is not Kant’s
specific answer, in terms of the ‘development of humanity’s original capacities’ (Kant
[1784] 1999: 3), nor even the appeal to hope in general (although this reappears, for
example, in Adorno [1951] 2006: 121; see also Bernstein 2001: 338ff.). What is important
about the appeal to hope is that it signifies that we make sense of ourselves in narrative
terms. Kant posed a question that would eventually be answered in his philosophy of
history. By locating our deepest interest in hope and insisting that it would sustain
philosophical scrutiny, Kant suggested that we should see ourselves in terms of a narrative
that extends indefinitely into the future, so that our commitments and even what we are
transcend the present moment.
With Rousseau’s and Kant’s contributions, then, most of the theoretical underpinning of
genealogy is already present at the end of the eighteenth century. History is a field of
purposive, if ironically self-subverting agency; cosmopolitan commitment to the distinctive
standing of persons is in place; and the immanent critique of our own human powers has
ascended to cultural supremacy. But the distinctively historical form of genealogy is still
lacking. Even though he thinks it has been completely effaced, Rousseau still makes appeal
to a Humean ‘original constitution’, if only as a benchmark. Rousseau thinks that there is
an independently specifiable content to what sort of creatures we naturally are and that this
content, even if irretrievably lost, can help us make sense of ourselves now. Kant more fully
abandons the normative significance of nature, except insofar as its cunning leads us
to develop our moral capacities. But for him reason, even if merely formal, is fully
determinate: through a consideration of the form of legislative capacities, one can derive
the content of the moral law and the human vocation. Original constitution is thus
replaced by the ‘original capacities’ of humanity. History, then, can reveal or conceal what
already in some sense is, but shows no discontinuities in its underlying actors. To arrive at
genealogy, then, what so far remains stable must still be historicised: being must be
considered as ‘absolutely mediated’ (Hegel [1807] 1988a: 29) through human activity and
reason and nature thereby reunited with transformed content. This is Hegel’s task.

4. Hegel: Phenomenology on the Via Dolorosa

Hegel offers his Jena Phenomenology as, at first encounter, an account of adequately
‘scientific’ cognition: ‘The goal is Spirit’s insight into what knowing is’ (Hegel [1807]
1988a: 23). The initial presentation of this topic is indeed what one might expect. Hegel
sets forth ways of conceiving of the relationship between consciousness and the world, with
a view to assessing whether the objects of consciousness might count as knowledge. Even
the initial formulation, however, suggests that Hegel’s account will depart from the familiar
176 robert guay
framework: the goal is Spirit’s insight. The story that Hegel tells turns out not to be one of
increasing accuracy in specifying the relationship between two stable things but one of
each side being transformed in a developmental process until Spirit’s ‘certainty of being all
reality is raised to truth’ (288). In the ‘science of the experience that consciousness goes
through’ (28), meeting the demands of knowing turns out to require reconceptualisations
in the self-understanding of the subject of experience and thus turns out to require both
self-transformations of the subject and objective experience in the world.
Hegel characterises the path that consciousness follows as the ‘way of despair’ (61). The
achievement of every new perspective, or ‘shape of consciousness’, that is, comes at the cost
of increasingly deeper, more self-alienating, more conclusive failures. The process does not
involve a stable subject who succeeds in making incremental progress toward the
realisation of some theoretical insight. Instead, movement comes from adopting forms
of self-understanding that turn out to collapse completely. The relevant failures generate
‘despair’ and not just abdication: they must be personal in two ways. One is that they
provoke a loss of identity. Since some form of self-understanding is always at stake in the
relationship to the world, failure on the path to science always appears as the loss of any
familiar way of going forward. The other way in which the relevant failures are personal is
that they are self-provoked. In a phrase that could have come from Nietzsche, Hegel writes,
‘consciousness suffers this violence . . . from its own hands’ (63). The dissatisfaction that
leads to collapse is generated internally.
Hegel’s claims about ‘absolute mediation’ and reason ‘knowing itself to be all reality’ are
indeed his way of setting out his conclusion that there is nothing outside our own
conceptual activity that sets authoritative standards for us. As he characterises his
phenomenological approach, ‘Consciousness gives its standard to itself and the investiga-
tion will thereby be a comparison of itself with itself’ (64). Hegel in this way offers a form of
immanent critique.9 The dialectic does not proceed by measuring the stages against some
external standard; it proceeds by each shape of consciousness being occupied, as it were,
and contradictions arising amid the attempts to carry it out, until the contradictions come
to seem unresolvable from within the current standpoint. As Hegel puts this, ‘reason is
purposive activity’ (16). Failures emerge from trying to live out normative self-under-
standings; as a matter of practice, they generate scepticism about themselves and under-
mine their own authority. In this way Hegel is the heir of Kant: real possibility takes on a
negative form, as the impossibility of avoiding contradiction within the dialectical
movement.
The dynamic by which consciousness generates its own scepticism involves the
determinacy of conceptual content. Any form of self-understanding will be, as such,
conceptually mediated. But the specific mediations that constitute self-understanding only
gain determinate content in the context of lived experience. Within lived experience,
however, the more determinate meanings turn out to be self-subverting and require
replacement. There is a particularly clear explanation of this point in the Philosophy of
History. Hegel writes, ‘The logical nature and moreover the dialectical nature of the
concept in general is that it is self-determining: it posits determinations in itself, then
negates them and thereby gains in this negation an affirmative, richer and more concrete
determination’ (Hegel [1840] 1988b: 67; cf. Hegel [1807] 1988a: 39). In Hegel’s picture,
this dynamic is completely general: even Spirit’s recognition of itself in its freedom requires
making its own content available through a long, historical process of failed self-definition.
That the dynamic proceeds in this way conveys a hermeneutic import. Since, on Hegel’s
picture, content emerges out of negating activity and there is nothing extra-conceptual
 genealogy as immanent critique 177
that can function as a ground, all meanings are unstable, at the very least until scepticism
‘completes itself’ (Hegel [1807] 1988a: 61). Meanings depend on their historical location,
relative both to past determination and to the future negations that they will resist. The
very shape that Spirit can take depends on historical externalisations of content in this
way. As a result, meaning is never available ready-to-hand. It must be traced out across
temporal contexts with degrees of complexity that depend on how closely it is involved
with Spirit’s self-understanding.
Hegel moves beyond the Enlightenment form of philosophy of history by historicising all
the way down. He recounts a story in which there are discontinuities in the dramatis
personae (or persona) and in the processes of change; interpreting these elements thus
becomes a matter of locating the context of self-activity rather than re-identifying stable
objects. With Hegel, then, all the elements of genealogy are already together: historical
agency, cosmopolitanism, critique and historical hermeneutics. What might make Hegel
seem far removed from genealogy is that he thinks not only that this process has a point of
completion, as does Marx, but also that his time has reached this end point. But the
substantive details of the narrative do not have much of an effect at the level of
genealogical practice. Immanent critique is always potentially, in a qualified way, vindi-
catory. That Hegel deemed the historical process to be largely successful does not change
this approach. For Hegel, too, absolutely everything needs to be submitted to justificatory
scrutiny, even the demand for justificatory scrutiny itself. And nothing, it turns out, could
possibly count as an answer that lies outside what I have been calling historical agency.
The main difference in approach lies in Hegel’s attempt to circumvent what might be
called the ‘starting point problem’ in immanent critique. Since immanent critique proceeds
by showing that flaws are internal to the standpoint under criticism, its critical reach only
extends as far as the standpoint within which it works. It can show, that is, that particular
positions fail and lead to comparatively better results; but it cannot show that an entirely
different trajectory, with an entirely different starting point, might not have led to an even
more satisfactory position. Hegel addresses this potential shortcoming with a category
theory, or ‘logic’, the burden of which is to show that his narrative is perfectly general: no
other starting point could be available. No one else has thought to make such a claim as a
matter of logic; but, as we shall see with Marx, the strategy of denying that there is any
alternative starting point worthy of consideration has endured.

5. Marx: Materialist Dialectics

By illuminating the pervasive effects of economic institutions and the distinctive character
of capitalism, Marx has become the most influential genealogist outside philosophy. At the
same time, however, Marx is the most eccentric, in ways that often pass unrecognised.
Marx, uniquely among genealogists, claims to offers the genuine causal account of actual
historical events and indeed depends on the accuracy of his account for his argument to
succeed. With Marx, any gap between real possibility and justification is closed off: the
only issue to be addressed is the sustainability of institutionalised practices and any question
of justification is deferred until some social practice is realised that does not generate its
own contradiction. Marx’s version of immanentism, his view of thought as operating
internal to its context, accordingly leads him away from taking evaluative questions
seriously until the causal structure of human practices is resolved.
In the German Ideology, written in 1845–6, Marx introduces his historical approach with
an account of ‘science’ that was to endure throughout his career: ‘Where speculation ends,
178 robert guay
where real life starts, there consequently begins positive science, the exhibition of practical
activity, of the practical process of development of men’ (Marx and Engels 1976a: 37,
modified). Science, which for Hegel was distinguished by the absolute reach of critical
scrutiny, is for Marx distinguished by its deferral. ‘Communists’, furthermore, ‘do not
preach morality at all’ (247). Justificatory and evaluative claims reflect material conditions,
so those matters, insofar as they are relevant, must wait for a post-revolutionary con-
sciousness. Accordingly Marx, by appeal to the material, the real, the empirically verifiable,
resolved to exhibit the actual historical process and the contradictions that it generates. In
the German Ideology, Marx thus identifies ‘real individuals, their activity and the material
conditions of their lives’ as his ‘premises’ (31): his narrative is meant simply to be a
chronicle, once the correct ontology and the genuine causal factors are identified.
The conception of history that Marx then offers involves the basic elements needed to
explain productive activity, the formation of social relations and the creation of new needs.
With these basic elements in place, the historical process takes on its own dynamic. New
generations continually transform their material inheritance to increase productive
capacity; this necessitates a change in social institutions to accommodate the new
economic relations; this in turn changes the goods that a society requires for itself, which
in turn changes the organisation of production and so on. Above all, this process is
characterised by greater and greater ‘division of labour’. As productive tasks become more
and more narrowly circumscribed, economic activity takes on its own logic, separate from
the purposes of any and all participants: ‘This consolidation of what we ourselves produce
into a material power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations,
bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in our historical development
up till now’ (47f.). This consolidation, as a chief causal factor, at the same time generates
the critical conclusion.
The division of labour is effective not only at increasing material power but also at
consolidating it apart from human agency. This is what, on Marx’s account, generates the
contradictions that bring about revolution. Human productive activity alienates its own
causal efficacy from itself more and more until it can do so no further; a dynamic internal to
the process compels it finally to break down once its self-alienating character is complete.
Marx thus is not primarily concerned to offer theoretical claims about reality or an account
of the reasons that we might currently have to revolt. Marx is, rather, arguing that we can
anticipate the resolution of a general practical problem: social contradictions will bring
about their own demise. Although no evaluative standpoint is presently available, we shall
be able to gain some purchase on the defects of current institutions after their conclusive
failure. We can thus see how, although Marx’s account is causal, it differs from a Humean
one. In appealing to the ‘actual relations springing from an existing class struggle’ (498),
Marx invokes the distinctive character of human activity, even when that activity is
ironically subverted. For Marx, as with Hegel, the causal process is one of agency that finds
itself in self-externalisation; the developmental account belongs to the Geisteswissenschaf-
ten rather than the Naturwissenschaften. And, as with genealogical accounts in general, the
aim is critical: to show that current social conditions are indefensible.
The similarities with Hegel at the level of historical approach are noted, in a different
respect, in Marx’s 1872 Preface to Capital. There Marx, although insisting that Hegel’s
approach ‘must be turned right side up again’, nevertheless gives him credit for working out
the dialectical method in a full and comprehensive manner (Marx 2000: 458). Indeed, in
defending his own dialectical approach against a mixed review, Marx argues that it is
inherently ‘critical and revolutionary’:
 genealogy as immanent critique 179
[Dialectic] includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state
of things at the same time also the recognition of the negation of the state, of its inevitable
breaking up . . . it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement
and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence
. . . it lets nothing impose upon it and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

The reason to adopt a dialectical approach is, of course, that doing so serves the
revolutionary ends of critique. Marx’s explanation for how it does so, however, appeals
to historical-hermeneutic grounds. One cannot employ the appropriate social categories,
take note of the shifts in categories, account for the dynamics of change, or recognise the
‘fluid movement’ of all social forms without a dialectical approach.
We can now see that Marx’s way of identifying his differences with Hegel, that Hegel offers
a ‘mystical’ rather than ‘rational’ form of dialectic that needs to be inverted, is unfair. They
share an approach to history that criticises institutions on the basis of a dialectical logic that
exhibits their real possibility. Hegel’s famous formulation of this point, that the rational is the
wirklich (Hegel [1821] 1995: 24), the actual or effective, could just as well apply to Marx’s
analysis of the contradictions of capitalism.10 Of course, the details of the narratives differ
completely, but it is not fair to claim that, for Hegel, ‘the real world is only the external,
phenomenal form of ‘‘the Idea’’’ (Marx 2000: 457) – as if Hegel were not, like Marx,
criticising the picture in which the ideal and the material were ‘self-standingly’ independent
of one another (Marx and Engels 1976a: 35, modified). Marx radicalises, amongst other
things, the philosophical tradition of hyperbolic assertion of a break with the past.
In any case, there are significant divergences from Hegel and the others. Although Marx
could fairly be called a genealogist of capitalism, his is the most eccentric account. Almost
uniquely, he stakes out an anti-speculative account. Whereas Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and
Nietzsche want to identify causally significant features of the world to support their
normative claims, Marx wants to identify particular causal interactions in the world.
Unlike the others, he attempts to explain historically identifiable events – indeed, the
historical process as a whole. There are then three main implications of this anti-
speculative approach. One, already mentioned, is that Marx claims to have no evaluative
purchase on the world; under present conditions, such judgements must be ideological.
Two, Marx insists that historical narrative must follow ‘order in time’ rather than ‘order in
the idea’ (Marx and Engels 1986: 44). Narrative elements must follow a chronological
sequence rather than ‘their logical sequence and their serial relation in the understanding’
(Marx and Engels 1976b: 62). Three, Marx has a different response to the ‘starting point
problem’ that Hegel addressed by his logic. For Marx, worrying about whether the actual
historical process neglects some better, alternative possibility for human existence is simply
a waste of time. Marx writes, ‘The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not
dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination’
(Marx and Engels 1976a: 31). A better possibility is purely imaginary and thus does not
merit serious consideration. Marx promises that the real will eventually provide herme-
neutic closure to the real possibilities of human social life.

6. Mill: The Commitments of Modernity

John Stuart Mill is not especially known for his philosophy of history. However, in The
Subjection of Women, published in 1869, he offers an account of the distinctive character of
modernity as a necessary supplement to his better-known account of the moral develop-
180 robert guay
ment of the individual. His specific end in that work is critical: to show that the legal
principle of the subordination of women is wrong and needs to be replaced. Mill makes his
case by explaining the emergence of a distinctively modern outlook and arguing that it calls
for equality as a condition of human development. In making his case, he offers something
close to a genealogy of gender difference, but ultimately retreats to perfectionist commit-
ments and an empiricist mode of explanation.
Mill’s famous notion of ‘experiments in living’ implies a great deal of plasticity in human
nature (Mill [1859] 1998: 89). One can and indeed should shape oneself into many
different forms, as a response to the basic open-endedness of human existence. This process
of individual self-development, furthermore, functions best when it proceeds without
external constraint. In The Subjection of Women, Mill offers an account of the historical
character of the normative commitments involved in this picture of the self. Although his
argument focuses on the legal status of women, he draws his critical conclusion from a more
general claim about the character of modernity. Modernity represents both the ‘fruit of a
thousand years of experience’ (Mill [1869] 1988: 18) and that by which old customs are
‘undermined and loosened’ (2). And it offers, above all else, this distinctive conviction:
‘human beings are no longer born to their place in life . . . but are free to employ their
faculties and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them
the most desirable’ (17). This is deployed in order to criticise laws and institutions, but Mill
is fully aware that this is not merely a legal doctrine. He offers it more fundamentally as a
social doctrine and one concerning the formation of the self.
In defending this social and personal ideal, he argues against the belief that it must be
conditioned by natural, morally significant differences between the sexes. This is where his
argument takes the shape of a genealogy of gender difference:

Women have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in
so unnatural a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly disguised and
disfigured . . . I shall presently show, that even the least contestable of the differences
which may now exist, are such as may very well have been produced merely by
circumstances, without any difference of natural capacity. (61)

He claims to provide a genetic narrative of entrenched gender differences to show that they
could be contingent or arbitrary. From this speculative narrative, together with an analysis
of our present epistemic condition with regard to gender differences, he concludes that they
are in fact arbitrary and contingent rather than revelatory of natural capacity and thus
should ideally play no role in our practical deliberation. Here, then, we see most of the
basic features of genealogy.
Historical agency is present, as gender difference is the product of social institutions
ruled by ‘the law of superior strength’ (7). The critical aspect is certainly present. Indeed, it
even appears in its continental form, involving the causality of reason and the necessity of
contradiction: customs and social forms that ‘have owed their existence to other causes
than their soundness’ (4) are ‘discordant with the future and must necessarily disappear’
(17). And Mill’s outlook is cosmopolitan: he aims to show that present social conditions do
not represent the human condition in general.
Mill’s departure from the genealogical framework comes with respect to the historical-
hermeneutic. Mill seems to view the self as fluid or variable in its manifestations, but not in
a way that requires historical interpretation. The variability, instead, simply provokes an
epistemic problem, of recognising the underlying nature that has been ‘distorted and
 genealogy as immanent critique 181
disfigured’ (61). The correct approach is thus the regrettably speculative one of identifying
the causal influences that have disfigured nature.

I have said that it cannot now be known how much of the existing mental differences
between men and women is natural and how much artificial . . . but doubt does not
forbid conjecture and where certainty is unattainable, there may yet be the means of
arriving at some degree of probability . . . I shall attempt to approach it by tracing the
mental consequences of external influences. (72f.)

History, for Mill, is not the field of possibility for self-relating agency, but that of evidence
for an unchanging nature that should ultimately regulate our thoughts and ends, if only we
had access to it.
Mill views his contemporary circumstances as the contingent outcome of a historical
process whose preconditions are now forgotten and thus decides to engage with the sphere
of social meaning with a view to changing it. But he retreats from a genealogical approach
to a more Humean approach to the explanation of change. This departure from the
continental approach is, of course, unsurprising on Mill’s part and not necessarily a flaw,
but it does seem to stem from a pair of ambivalences. One, the plasticity of the human that
Mill invokes in his defence of liberty either manifests an underlying nature or is somehow
more deeply indeterminate. Two, Mill embraces both a Humean causal view of human
mentality and an Aristotelian view of nature’s purposes providing the measure of social
progress and individual perfection. The rest of the genealogical tradition takes more care to
address the plasticity in human nature and the relation between efficient and final causes.
Without having resolved these tensions in his position, Mill does little to justify his starting
commitments or the value of liberal culture.

7. Nietzsche’s Distinctiveness
Although it was Nietzsche who appropriated the term ‘genealogy’, his philosophical
approach to history was not especially distinctive. If we bracket off the substantive details
of his narrative and focus on the basic features of their accounts – admittedly, a big
qualification – then Hegel, Marx and Mill share a broadly similar historical outlook. They
each offer a historicised view of human freedom in a narrative that connects legitimacy
with social practices and historical actuality. Nietzsche, without a category theory,
materialism or Mill’s mixture of commitments, arguably offers the least distinctive form
of genealogy. There is one significant respect in which Nietzsche’s approach is distinctive,
however: he forestalls and inverts his narrative’s vindicatory element. That vindicatory
element, as with the others, is present; but it appears with such thoroughgoing irony that
there is little hope of it ever being redeemed.
There are more and less innocuous-seeming versions of this feature of Nietzsche’s
approach. The more innocuous-seeming version appears in The Antichrist, written in 1888.
In that work, the single overarching objection to Christianity concerns historical under-
standing. Nietzsche characterises healthy cultures as having undertaken centuries of
learning from experience and having then incorporated that learning in customs and
habits until it becomes unconsciously authoritative. ‘There’, writes Nietzsche, ‘the yields of
reason from long ages of experiment and uncertainty should be laid out for the most distant
uses and the greatest, richest, most complete harvest possible be brought home’ (Nietzsche
1967–77: 6: 245, §58). But Christianity’s typical feature, according to Nietzsche, is that it
182 robert guay
seeks out such historical wisdom and destroys it in the name of a new era and a beyond.
This is his greatest complaint:

The entire labour of the ancient world in vain: I have no words to express my feelings
over something so monstrous. – And considering that its labour was preparatory, that it
was just the foundation laid with granite self-consciousness for a labour of millennia, the
entire meaning of the ancient world in vain! (6: 247, §59)

Christianity has been productive: by destroying tradition, or whole ways of life, it opened
up the possibility of a modern historical sense. But it did so at the cost of destroying healthy
relationships with the past – indeed, with any past. And this problem is irremediable.
No triumph is possible here; the loss is permanent. The only response is to recuperate
some of the historical experience by reinterpreting our historical self-understanding. But no
conclusive measure of success could be even potentially available and learning proceeds by
way of painful failures. Above all, no triumph is possible because genealogy itself belongs to
the Christian sense of the historical. Nietzsche writes, discussing the Book of Manu: ‘A law
book never recounts the use, the reasons, the casuistry in the prehistory of a law: then it
would forfeit its imperative tone . . . The problem is precisely here’ (6: 241, §57).
Genealogy is this problem: in looking to the past with an eye to the open-ended future,
it represents knowledge as ‘a form of asceticism’ (6: 243, §57) that undermines the higher
values. Turning this against the Christian sense of history combats ‘decadence’ (6: 172,
§6), but it also represents a decadence that has always been going on. Even the very hope to
get beyond the Christian inheritance is part of the Christian inheritance, suggests
Nietzsche. And yet there is no alternative.
The less innocuous-seeming form of this distinctive feature of Nietzsche’s approach
appears in his claim that there is no alternative to the ascetic ideal. In the concluding
sections of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche identifies the ascetic ideal with the ‘One
Goal’ of human history and then asks, ‘Why is the counterpart lacking? Where is the other
‘‘One Goal’’?’ (Nietzsche 1967–77: 5: 396, III.23) Nietzsche considers the modern scientific
conscience as a possible alternative, but then immediately argues, ‘it is not the contrary of the
ascetic ideal, but rather its most recent and distinguished form’. So Nietzsche offers no
helpful suggestion in concluding his genealogy, in part because of the unavailability of any
good suggestion, but in part also because the very project of trying to overcome the ascetic
ideal is an exacerbation of the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche’s genealogy, unlike those of the others,
promises no ultimate vindication, no constructive result, no future culmination; indeed, it
subverts the very idea of vindication by suggesting that it would be another ascetic gesture.
Seeking justification is both part of who we are in our projects of getting beyond the present
and also hopelessly entangled with the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche does concede that the modern
person ‘at least turned out relatively well, at least is still capable of living, at least still says
‘‘Yes’’ to life’ (5: 277, I.11). And he very unhelpfully suggests, ‘the ascetic ideal has at present
only one kind of enemy who truly harms it: the comedian of this ideal’ (5: 409, III.27). But in
general, Nietzsche’s genealogy points to irony: any success in vanquishing the ascetic ideal
leads deeper into its inescapability.

8. The Post-history of Genealogy

Many of the contemporary invocations of ‘genealogy’ are perhaps arbitrary: they make a
body of work seem better theorised by the name alone. Many contemporary invocations
 genealogy as immanent critique 183
are connected to Nietzsche’s practice, but in a much looser sense than the one that I have
suggested here. For example, Bernard Williams writes that: ‘A genealogy is a narrative
that tries to explain a cultural phenomenon by describing a way in which it came about,
or could have come about, or might be imagined to have come about’ (Williams 2002:
20). Nietzsche arguably fits here – if we do not press too hard on ‘explain’ or the
counterfactual options – but so does Hume, state of nature theory and myth, according to
Williams.11 Beyond such an appropriation of ‘genealogy’, however, there remain others
with a more direct lineage to Nietzsche and the nineteenth-century historical forms. The
popularity of these appropriations is owed to Adorno’s formulation of ‘immanent critique’
and Foucault’s practice of genealogy. Here I cannot begin to offer accounts of their
approaches, or even their divergences. Instead I merely wish to suggest how these
approaches are continuous with the past in ways that lead into the present. In particular,
these approaches can be seen as taking up versions of what Hegel called ‘absolute
mediation’ that lead away from the distinctively philosophical to more wide-ranging
accounts of self, desire and society.
When Hegel referred to ‘absolute mediation’ he was referring to mediation by con-
ceptual activity. So, for example, our experience of the world is not directly received from
‘outside’. Rather, it is mediated by the conceptual repertoire that we have available and
employ to structure our experience. ‘Absolute’ mediation suggests that everything is
mediated and that everything is fully mediated: there is no element that even provisionally
escapes the human production of determinations. That which does the mediating changes
from Marx to Nietzsche and beyond, but the basic point endures. There is no moment of
anything outside of our social or cultural conditions within the entire human world; the
merely artificial does not come into contact with the purely natural; mediation is
everywhere and must itself be illuminated if we are to understand even the most familiar
phenomena. Adorno’s version of this point is called, simply, ‘infinite mediation’ (Adorno
1967: 7) and entails that nothing is ever ‘to be taken simply at face value’. Foucault
expresses a similar point in terms of the ‘rule of immanence’ (Foucault [1976] 1978: 98) and
his analytics of power: ‘Where there is power, there is resistance and yet, or rather
consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power’ (95). On
Foucault’s conception, nothing is outside of power because power produces, constitutes or
conditions everything.
Contemporary genealogy, following Adorno and Foucault, has drawn two consequences
from absolute mediation that owe more to Nietzsche than to anyone else in the
genealogical tradition. The first is to find something sinister in it. For Hegel the explicit
recognition of absolute mediation was a mark of success; even for Marx it suggested that, as
the product of human activity, everything was liable to be changed. But for Adorno and
Foucault it suggests that there is no possibility of human self-liberation: nothing that we
could try to accomplish could possibly count as a departure from our subjection. Adorno
writes, for example, ‘Of course, even the immanent method is eventually overtaken by this.
It is dragged into the abyss by its object’ (Adorno 1967: 34). Foucault is slightly more
sanguine about the possibility of genuine resistance. In an early essay, genealogy effects this
by introducing ‘discontinuity into our very being’ (Foucault [1971] 1977: 154). Later, the
genealogical enterprise is meant to help to ‘counter the grips of power with the claims of
bodies, pleasure and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance’
(Foucault [1976] 1978: 157). Even here, however, the relationship to power seems
permanently ambiguous and thus at best there is a ‘perpetual danger of relapse’ (Foucault
[1971] 1977: 160).
 184 robert guay
The second consequence of absolute mediation is that everything has become the subject
of genealogy. Given absolute mediation, no longer are only Nietzsche’s ‘highest values’ the
subject of genealogy. Chains of determination lead back everywhere: from the self and
social institutions and desires into all the constituting activities that have shaped what we
are. With absolute mediation, then, every element of the human world becomes a subject
for genealogy. And thus genealogy is no longer a distinctively philosophical enterprise.
Instead it looks critically everywhere, to interpret everything that shapes the human.12

Notes
1. Any list of examples must be radically incomplete. For some examples within philosophy, see:
Agamben 2000; Nichols 2002; and Williams 2002. For examples from other disciplines, see: Benn
Michaels 1992; Der Derian 1987; Liu 2002; Miller 1998; Saldivar 1991; and Turner 2000. See
also David Owen’s (2005) valuable review essay. I discuss Foucault’s important appropriation of
genealogy below; most of these examples (and many besides) refer to Foucault.
2. For an early usage, see Herodotus (1920: 448), where he writes of ‘genealogizing oneself’.
Nietzsche’s book is of course On the Genealogy of Morals; he had not used the word ‘genealogy’ in
any previously published work. On the difference between genealogy as pedigree and genealogy
in Nietzsche’s sense, see Geuss 1994.
3. This perhaps explains why, despite its popularity, the new sense of genealogy is absent from
dictionaries, except for this bland attempt from Merriam-Webster: ‘an account of the origin and
historical development of something’ (2003: 520).
4. I discuss some additional reasons below. The popularity of ‘genealogy’ no doubt also benefits from
it being a common term (unlike, say, ‘historical materialism’) that nevertheless does not suffer
from competition with common meaning, since, outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints and the US Senate, no one cares about family pedigree anymore.
5. Translations from French and German texts are the author’s own. Emphasis is original unless
otherwise noted. In references to Nietzsche’s Genealogy, page number is followed by essay number
(in Roman numerals) then section number (for example, III.25), or, in references to the Preface,
‘P’ followed by section number, for instance, P4). In references to other works of Nietzsche’s, page
number is followed by paragraph number (§) when applicable.
6. ‘Immanent’ and ‘critique’ had currency long beforehand – see Benhabib 1986. But to the best of
my knowledge the phrase ‘immanent critique’ stems from Adorno 1967 and Adorno [1966] 1973.
Here, however, I am more interested in a general idea of immanent critique, not specifically in
Adorno’s notion of it. In particular, immanent critique as I characterise it does not represent a
distinctive ‘method’, as it does in Adorno (1967: 31) or Jay (1986: 266).
7. On some textual difficulties in identifying Nietzsche’s view of genealogy see Guay (2005: 355).
8. On the identification of Hume, somewhat oddly, as an English psychologist, see Clark and
Swensen (1998: 129). For an attempt to read genealogy as a Humean enterprise, see Leiter 2002.
9. Stern (2002: 41) refers to Hegel as carrying out ‘immanent critique’. Pinkard (1996: 6) offers the
similar idea of an ‘internal test’.
10. By claiming that the rational is the wirklich and the wirklich rational, Hegel shows his willingness
to attribute rationality to the movements prior to the ultimate resolution of contradiction. Marx,
despite occasional encomia for the bourgeoisie, is less sanguine about resolutions that generate
new contradictions.
11. Williams explicitly refers to state of nature theories and Hume as presenting genealogies. Myth
implicitly qualifies as genealogy, I believe, in Williams (2002: 161).
12. I thank my research assistants during the writing of this paper, Joshua Wretzel and Jack Marsh;
Amy Wendling, for her discussion of Marx; Sean Johnston, for his discussions of Mill and
Foucault; Anna Gebbie and my students at Binghamton for their discussions of everything. My
benefactors are, as usual, not responsible for my errors and in this case especially so.
 genealogy as immanent critique 185

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Morality, Indianapolis: Hackett.
Der Derian, James (1987), On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement, Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell.
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Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 139–64.
Foucault, Michel [1976] (1978), The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley, New York: Vintage.
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Companion to Nietzsche, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 353–71.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich [1807] (1988a), Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hamburg: Meiner.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich [1840] (1988b), Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo
Rauch, Indianapolis: Hackett.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich [1821] (1995), Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
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Kant, Immanuel [1781/1787] (1956), Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Hamburg: Meiner.
Kant, Immanuel [1785] (1994), Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Hamburg: Meiner.
Kant, Immanuel [1784] (1999), Was ist Aufklärung?: Ausgewählte kleine Schriften, Hamburg: Meiner.
Leiter, Brian (2002), Nietzsche on Morality, New York: Routledge.
Lemon, Michael C. (2003), Philosophy of History: A Guide for Students, New York: Routledge.
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University of Michigan Press.
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186 robert guay
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 10
Embodiment: Conceptions of the Lived Body from
Maine de Biran to Bergson

Mark Sinclair

1. Introduction
In contemporary philosophy the phenomenological movement has offered a compelling
challenge to the mind–body dualism that was instituted by Descartes amongst others in the
seventeenth century. This challenge, perhaps most notably in the work of the French
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, does not consist in the reduction of one of the
opposed terms to the other in the manner of a thoroughgoing or ‘eliminative’ materialism but
rather rests on a broader critique of both terms. The self, it is argued, is not originally an isolated
thinking subject, certain of its own thoughts and separable from the body, whilst the body is
originally not an object partes extra partes, divisible like any other (see Merleau-Ponty [1945]
1962). Of course, I can seek the certainty of the cogito just as I can objectify my body in the
manner of the physiologist studying it from the outside. But prior to this, experience shows us
that the self or subject is the body and that the body as a lived body, a cognitive corporeality, a
capacity for intelligent action, is the subject or self. We exist as embodied beings in a manner
that both escapes and precedes the objectifying approach to the body in the modern sciences.
These arguments are fundamental to contemporary philosophy and the present essay aims
to situate them historically by elucidating how they first emerge in the French philosophy of
the nineteenth century. The essay focuses on three thinkers who are often characterised as
the principal representatives of the French ‘spiritualist’ tradition in this period: Pierre Maine
de Biran, Félix Ravaisson and Henri Bergson. The term ‘spiritualism’, like any ‘-ism’, is vague
but, in a broad philosophical sense, one applicable to the work of Descartes, it can be taken to
denominate philosophical doctrines asserting the primacy of an intellectual principle – mind
or spirit – in relation to matter. In a narrower sense that relates more particularly to
nineteenth-century French philosophy, ‘spiritualism’ denominates doctrines holding that an
intellectual principle is not only primary but also the ontologically grounding principle of
matter. (See the entry on spiritualism in Lalande 1993.)
To demonstrate the enduring significance of the nineteenth-century French spiritualist
tradition for reflection on embodiment, the essay advances in three stages. In Section II I
show how, early in the century, Maine de Biran articulates an idea of le corps propre – ‘one’s
own body’ – within his philosophical psychology of the will, an idea which Merleau-Ponty
will make famous.1 In Section 3, I show how Ravaisson, by means of philosophical
reflection on the nature of habit, offers a viable response to the problems and limitations of
his predecessor’s approach. In Section 4, I argue that Bergson’s conception of the body, for
all that it offers an interesting challenge to Cartesian conceptions of embodiment, in fact
188 mark sinclair
retreats from the originality of the insights of both Biran and Ravaisson. I thus contend that
Ravaisson’s thinking, insofar as it responds to the problems of Biran’s approach, represents
the summit of nineteenth-century philosophical reflection on embodiment.

2. Le corps propre in Maine de Biran

Maine de Biran published little in his lifetime. He was known by his contemporaries more
as a politician than as a philosopher, but he left a body of work which proved extremely
influential (see Copleston [1975] 1999: 21–2, for a brief but reliable summary of Biran’s
political life). Ravaisson borrowed much from his thinking and Bergson later claimed that
‘from the beginning of the century, France had a great metaphysician, the greatest that she
had produced since Descartes and Malebranche: Maine de Biran’ (Bergson [1915] 1972:
1157).2 Biran’s reluctance to publish seems to be because of a constant dissatisfaction with
his attempts to present his ideas in a complete and definitive form. He more than once
began work on a new synthesis of his ideas before completing the last one, so that it has
been claimed that ‘Maine de Biran is the man of a single book and this book he never
wrote’ (Gouhier 1947: 22).3
The first text he did publish, however, and the only one to have been translated into
English (see Maine de Biran 1970), was his 1802 dissertation entitled Influence of Habit on
the Faculty of Thinking. This was presented as the winning entry in a competition organised
by the Académie de sciences morales et politiques in which candidates were to determine the
effect that frequent repetition of the same operations produces on our intellectual faculties.
Biran addresses this specific issue of habit from the perspective of a psychology of the will
whose most immediate source was the work of Antoine Destutt de Tracy, a member of the
jury assessing the entries to the competition and principal representative of the Ideological
school in France. Ideology, in the most general terms, aimed to offer a form of descriptive
psychological analysis independent of metaphysical speculations concerning the causes or
ultimate nature of the soul. Its approach was influenced by the arguments of the eight-
eenth-century French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, according to which
higher psychological faculties can be explained on the basis of a primary capacity of
receptivity. In the work of Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, Ideology took the particular form
of reductive physiological explanations of the operations of thought. Destutt de Tracy,
however, had begun to underline the importance and irreducibility of our motor activity.
Biran develops this idea of voluntary action or ‘motility’ as the basic principle of a
philosophical psychology that will lead him to break from the Ideologists and, by 1807 at
least, to an explicit discovery of the subjective body.4
In the introduction to the 1802 dissertation (see Maine de Biran 1987) Biran advances his
psychology according to a distinction between ‘active and passive impressions’. Each of the
five senses, to varying degrees, admits of a distinction between passively receiving an
impression and actively apprehending that now only partially passive impression. Whereas
passive impressions occur ‘in me without me’, without any agency on the part of the subject,
perception or active impressions, on the contrary, involve the voluntary movement of the
sense organs. Active movements of the eye, for example, although they might pass unnoticed
by us, allow us to perceive visual objects, just as active movement of hand and body allows us
to trace the contours of things. Biran argues, however, that this voluntary movement
constitutive of active impressions necessarily involves an awareness of oneself as a voluntary
agent or ‘acting self [moi agissant]’, an awareness that is given through an ‘impression of effort’
which admits of degrees. Effort involves not only awareness that it is ‘I who move, or who
 embodiment 189
wants to move’ (Maine de Biran 1987: 131),5 but also, and at the same time, an experience of
the resistance to the will offered by the body and, through the latter, by other objects. Effort is
hence understood as the unity of will and resistance and although Biran describes it here as an
‘impression’ it is given to what he terms le sens intime, an intimate or inner sense that
necessarily accompanies external perception.
For Biran, effort comprises the ‘two terms of the necessary relation to ground the first
simple judgment of personality: I am’ (134). This is the keystone of his thinking: perception
and, at the same time, my sense of self is originally given through my voluntary relation to
the resistance of my body and the things of the world and thus consciousness is originally as
much a matter of an ‘I will’ as it is of an ‘I think’. This is not to say that Biran opposes a
practical conception of self-awareness to a theoretical one, as we might be tempted to
think. It is simply the case that the volo and cogito are here co-extensive: there is an identity
of the thinking and motor principle in man (see Maine de Biran 1995: 94–6; Henry 1965:
75). Biran is not, of course, the first philosopher of the tradition to argue that consciousness
is grounded in the will. In this connection it should be noted that in his 1805 Mémoire sur
la décomposition de la pensée (Dissertation Concerning the Decomposition of Thought), his
second prize-winning entry to an Académie competition, he cites the German idealist
philosophers Fichte and Schelling (Maine de Biran 1988: 108–10).6 Yet Biran cites them
critically, for they have not understood that free, voluntary activity can be the origin of
consciousness only insofar as it meets a resistant term. In pure activity without resistance,
he argues, as much as in pure passivity, consciousness would be absent. Consciousness is
thus conceived as an irreducible relation or duality; but this is not the ‘union’ of two
separable substances, since the will can exist only in an active relation to a resistant term.
Already in 1802, this emphasis on the relational nature of consciousness has important
consequences for the status of the body. The latter cannot be considered as something
secondary and accidental, given that it is one of two necessary terms for the advent of
consciousness. The Cartesian claim that the existence of the body, as opposed to that of the
mind, can be subject to sceptical doubt is contrary to the basic structure of experience. The
reality of the body, as Biran will later state, ‘is just as certain as that of our own existence
from which it is inseparable’ (Maine de Biran 2001: 142). The best way to comprehend
how the idea of consciousness as a voluntary relation is developed in Biran’s later work and
leads to a conception of le corps propre, however, is to examine his critique of David Hume’s
sceptical arguments concerning our experience of causality or force.
This critique first appears in Biran’s 1807 De l’aperception immédiate (On Immediate
Apperception), the winning entry to a competition organised by the Berlin Academy.
Hume had argued that in the external world we experience a mere succession of events and
not causal relations between them. Biran accepts this, but he refuses the further claim that
we have no experience of force or causal power internally, in our own actions. In Section
VII of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume focuses on the relation of
volitions to the physical movements following from them. Biran takes up three points of
the argument in order to unveil and attack the presuppositions that underlie it.7
First, Hume sets up the problem by arguing that the fact that the ‘motion follows the
command of the will is a matter of common experience, like other natural events’ (Hume,
[1748] 1975: 67). He therefore considers inner experience, that is, the relation of the will to
the body, on the model of outer experience and the relations between objects. This is
tantamount to a reification and objectification of the human being. Our volitions, even if
they are recognised not to be spatial objects, are considered by Hume as things in the
particular region of the world that we call ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ and as related to the body in the
190 mark sinclair
manner that other external objects are related to it. Such an approach, for Biran, is a
‘naturalistic’ prejudice that deforms the entirety of Hume’s analysis.8 Biran argues that the
difference between inner and outer, spatial, experience is more radical than has heretofore
been understood and that conscious experience must be considered from a genuinely first-
person perspective. The ‘primitive fact [fait primitif]’ of consciousness is the relational unity
of will and resistance, but this ‘fact’ is not proper to the world of objects and it is known not
by means of perception, by ‘common experience’ in Hume’s terms, but rather by a sens
intime now understood as an ‘immediate apperception’ rather than as an ‘impression’ of
effort.
Second, concerning the ‘influence of volitions over the organs of the body’ Hume writes
that ‘this influence . . . can never be foreseen from any apparent energy or power in the
cause, which connects it with the effect, and renders the one an infallible consequence of
the other’ (Hume [1748] 1975: 65). The argument, in separating volition from movement
according to a traditional, Cartesian distinction of soul and body, is that we have no
experience of a causal relation or necessary connexion underlying the temporal succession
of the two terms. Yet, for Biran, ‘the relation of causality is completely different to that of
succession’ (Maine de Biran 1995: 117). The presupposition that causality, if it exists, must
be a matter of succession is another motivation for the scepticism Hume professes. The
causal force or power in our action is not prior to the effect but is rather present in it: ‘the
internal energy of the cause is directly felt in the effect or the movement produced’ (119).
This is to say that the volitions preceding action of which Hume writes are mere ideas or
wishes and it is therefore no surprise that we find no energy or causal power within them.
Genuine volition, force and power are given nowhere but in the act itself. Concerning the
status of the body in its relation to the will, we learn here that the ‘relation’ is neither the
simple relation of two separable entities nor a temporal relation of succession. It becomes
difficult, it might be thought (and I shall return to this point), to conceive of the unity of
will and resistance as a relation at all.
Third, Hume argues in Cartesian fashion that ‘we are so far from being immediately
conscious’ of how the mind affects the body ‘that it must forever escape our most diligent
enquiry’ (Hume [1748] 1975: 65). We know neither why only some of our bodily organs
can be directed by the ‘soul’, nor how the soul affects the parts that it can direct,
particularly when we consider what ‘we learn from anatomy’, namely, ‘that the immediate
object of power in voluntary motion is not the member itself which is moved, but certain
muscles and nerves and animal spirits and, perhaps, something still more minute and
unknown’ (66). We might think that we feel an immediate power to move our limbs, but in
reality our will does not have to act on the limb as a whole, but rather on a host of
physiological intermediaries, and we have no knowledge of this in our experience. Biran
responds first by attacking the claim that we have to know how the will moves the body in
order for us to know that it moves the body. The claim is spurious insofar as there is nothing
to distinguish it from the more evidently erroneous claim that we can see only if we know
the physiological processes according to which we see, and it presupposes the possibility of
taking simultaneously a first-person and a third-person perspective on our experience:

[J]ust as, in order to have an immediate direct perception, both of the luminous fluid of
the eye in itself, and of its effect on the fibres of the retina, we would have to have two
eyes seeing at once inside and outside of themselves, so too, in order to know the
efficacious means of the will or the muscles at the same time as we feel this efficacy we
would have to be ourselves and other than ourselves. (Maine de Biran 1995: 121)
 embodiment 191
It is, however, precisely such a third-person and anatomical perspective on the body that
Biran seeks to displace within philosophical reflection on the nature of voluntary action.
Hume’s argument, for Biran, makes obvious the necessity of a certain distinction:

[T]he knowledge acquired by the representation of things or images outside of us is not at

all the same as that which is bound to the facts of le sens intime . . . What relation is
there, for example, between the images that the anatomist or philosopher make of the
position of the different organs, or of their play in a phenomenon such as that of
muscular contraction, and the feeling that the individual has of these contractions
produced, or of the power that effects them in a freely determined effort? Is there any
relation between the secondary objective knowledge that the individual acquires
successively from the external parts of his body in studying them with his hands and
eyes and the internal knowledge of the parts obeying the same will, acquired in the first
deployment of effort, a knowledge without which the self does not begin to exist for itself?

Biran couches in interrogative form a revolutionary insight: a distinction between a

primary and a secondary knowledge and thus between a primary and secondary existence of
the body. The secondary knowledge of the body I gain by objectifying it by means of the
senses of touch and sight, in the manner of the physiologist studying it from the outside. In
contrast, the primary knowledge of the body, the body experienced as le corps propre,
belongs to le sens intime or immediate apperception.9
Biran develops these remarks in the most deliberate manner in his Essai sur les fondements
de la psychologie (Essay on the Foundations of Psychology). He began this in 1811 and appears
to have intended it to be a masterwork developing his earlier dissertations, but again, even
after reworking it in 1822, he left it unpublished. In the section ‘Origin of the Knowledge
that we have of our own Body’, he recognises the radical nature of his own thinking in
proposing ‘a completely new point of view according to which I consider the primary
knowledge of le corps propre’ (Maine de Biran 2001: 141). To understand the primitive fact of
consciousness, he argues, we must recognise that there are ‘two sorts of outsides, or two
objects, two elementary terms, the one relative to internal immediate apperception, the
other relative to intuition or external perception’. The body not only possesses its own kind
of resistance or inertia, distinct from that of worldly objects, but it also possesses its own kind
of spatiality that is irreducible to the spatiality of other things. This internal spatiality is ‘a sort
of vague extension without limits or figures . . . a mode of purely internal space that is . . . the
inherent form of the proper object of internal apperception’. In my actions, I do not usually
have a precise knowledge of the locations of my members, but rather have a vague, pre-
thematic understanding of their position and possibilities. Psychologists in the twentieth
century will come to talk of this bodily awareness in terms of a ‘body schema’ or ‘body image’
but, for Biran, it can in no way ‘be represented in the form of an image’, nor does it have an
explicit distinction of parts. This vague, non-imagistic understanding of space is not a
derivative and less precise mode of external spatial representation. On the contrary, it is
primary and only on its basis can I isolate the particular form and position of what I already
understand to be my body when I view it objectively via external perception.10
In this way Biran offers at least the framework of an original phenomenology of bodily
awareness and bodily being, which seeks to demonstrate the inadequacy of traditional
conceptions of embodiment. As he writes:

When philosophy has raised the question: ‘How does a motor and sensitive being first of
all learn to know its own body’, it has in mind only an objective and external mode of
192 mark sinclair
knowledge; it has taken a secondary phenomenon to be a primary fact . . . In posing the
origin of the representative knowledge of the body as a problem, one considers the
problem of existence to be resolved, or else one does not believe that there is a problem
at all. (Maine de Biran 2001: 287–8)

It is therefore no exaggeration to claim, following Michel Henry, that ‘Maine de Biran is

the first philosopher to have understood . . . the derivative and secondary character of any
objective conception of the body’ (Henry 1965: 182). It is in recognising this derivative
character and in remembering that anatomy always presupposes a corpse that we can
overturn Hume’s appeal to objective anatomical studies in order to advance his scepticism.
In, say, moving an arm, the will does not have to act on objective parts of the body such as
nerves or even ‘animal sprits’, but can rather immediately move the arm insofar as it
belongs to the pre-objective primary and lived body.11
Biran argues, then, that the primary fact of consciousness consists in the relation of the
will to a resistant term and this resistant term is le corps propre as the object of immediate
apperception. Notwithstanding the originality of this conception of the body, Biran always
maintains his conception of consciousness as a relation and always maintains concomi-
tantly that ‘the self [le moi] is distinguished’ from the body ‘without ever being able to
separate itself from it’ (Maine de Biran 2001: 142). Certainly, Biran’s descriptions of this
relation, as we have seen, challenge ordinary conceptions of the nature of a relation. Yet we
go beyond at least the letter of the texts if we claim, as does Michel Henry, that what is
described as a relation ‘is ultimately not a relation’ and that, for Biran, ‘there is an identity
of the being of the body and the ego’ (Henry 1965: 166). Such a claim is certainly one way
to deal with the difficulty and, perhaps, the equivocations of Biran’s thinking. Yet from the
perspective of the twentieth-century phenomenological philosophy to which Henry’s
reading is indebted, we might also wonder whether Biran has sufficiently uprooted the
Cartesian paradigm. It might be asked whether Biran, espousing a conception of con-
sciousness as a relation to the lived body as a resistant term, offers an all too intellectualist
and spectatorial conception of action which is unable to apprehend that the body is the self
and the intentional subject of action.
In Biran’s defence against this charge of intellectualism, it must be noted that he
recognises, already in 1802, that some actions are more voluntary and thus conscious than
others, that there is a ‘multitude of degrees’ between passive impressions and fully conscious
action.12 Yet this defence brings us to another more telling problem in Biran’s thinking, a
problem that, as commentators such as Henry and Merleau-Ponty have noted, limits the
originality of his conception of le corps propre (Moore 1970: 105ff.; Henry 1965: ch. 5).
Biran never renounces the supposition that he adopts from Condillac and the Ideologists
and which he first presents in the 1802 dissertation, of impressions occurring without any
measure of consciousness or voluntary activity. Although he claims that activity is always a
matter of degree and although he seeks to demonstrate that ‘passive impressions’ are not, in
fact, wholly passive since they are accompanied by a form of vital, unconscious and non-
voluntary activity, he always radically distinguishes non-voluntary from voluntary activity.
As he writes in the Essai:

[I]t is not impossible to trace, so to speak, in human organisation, the terminating circle
of the light of consciousness, or the line of demarcation that separates the proper and
individual sense of effort or of will and this other sense, a general and common organ,
that can be called a vital sense. (Maine de Biran 2001: 140)
 embodiment 193
Biran acknowledges here and elsewhere the difficulty of isolating such a line of demarca-
tion within our own experience, but he claims that prior to voluntary perception and
apperception, there is a vital sense and physiological ‘system’ wholly independent of the
will and consciousness. Biran cites approvingly the dictum of Herman Boerhaave: homo
simplex in vitalite, duplex in humanitate (133). Man is simple, for Biran, as a biological being
governed by a vital principle, but dual in his humanity insofar as the latter comprises, in
addition, the will as the principle of perception and apperception. The consequences of
such claims, though perhaps confusing, are evident. What Biran describes as the ‘primitive
fact’ of consciousness turns out, in fact, not to be the most primary or primitive truth of
existence as such. It now emerges that before being le corps propre the body is a physiological
object independent of consciousness. Biran’s thinking thus always operates on two levels.
His phenomenology of le corps propre as distinct from the body objectified in experience is
always counter-posed to a physiological account of the body considered as both ontolo-
gically and chronologically prior to our actual experience. What is secondary in our actual
experience is held ultimately to be primary and, from the position of philosophical
reflection in the first person, Biran thus posits the primacy of the body apprehended in
third-person terms. It should be noted that in maintaining this position, which he inherits
from the Ideologists, Biran does not attain a thoroughgoing or consistent spiritualist
philosophy asserting the primacy of an intellectual principle. It is therefore not simply
because of his reluctance to offer his work to the public that Biran can be characterised as a
‘philosophe de bonnes intentions’ (Merleau-Ponty 1997: 66), a philosopher whose intentions
and insights are never adequately or consistently realised.13
In Section 3, however, I aim to show how Félix Ravaisson offers a viable response not
only to this problem in Biran’s work but also to the problematic issue of the ‘relation’ of will
to the body. If, as Jacques Derrida has remarked, Ravaisson ‘derives his axioms’ from Biran’s
thinking (Derrida 2005: 155), he nevertheless develops these axioms in a manner which
brings nineteenth-century thought into the closest proximity to contemporary phenom-
enological conceptions of the body.

3. Ravaisson and the Habituated Body

In 1834, at the age of 21, Ravaisson was the remarkably young winner of another
competition organised by the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, this time con-
cerning the meaning and historical reception of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Four years later, in
1838 and after having gained first place in the agrégation – the state examination – in
philosophy, he was awarded a doctorate on the basis of a principal thesis entitled De
l’habitude, recently translated as Of Habit (Ravaisson 2008). In this essay and thus in
returning to the question that had animated Biran’s dissertation of 1802, Ravaisson
presents an original conception of embodiment together with a philosophy of nature that
develops his predecessor’s insights. It seems unlikely, however, that Ravaisson had actually
read any of the later Biran’s explicit discussions of le corps propre given the limited number
of his texts available at the time.14
It was remarked above that Biran had responded in 1802 to the question posed by the
Académie about the influence or effects of habit on the ‘faculties of thinking’. For
Ravaisson, in contrast, the explicit task of philosophical reflection on habit is to ‘aspire,
beyond noting its apparent law, to learn its how and its why, to illuminate its genesis and
finally to understand its cause’ (Ravaisson 2008: 20). Ravaisson’s philosophical ambitions
in reflecting on habit, then, are further reaching than those of the younger Maine de Biran.
194 mark sinclair
Ravaisson’s account of the force or cause constituting motor habits constitutes the kernel of
his text and leads to his particular conception of embodiment.
Ravaisson offers this account in attempting to show the inadequacy of both intellectualist
and physiological – or ‘idealist’ and ‘realist’ – accounts of motor habit. On the one hand, the
hypothesis that habitual action is guided by a succession of judgments or acts of will that occurs
unbeknownst to ourselves neither explains nor corresponds to our experience, given that
habitual acts appear to occur independently of conscious thought and the will.15 On the other
hand, Ravaisson refuses any solely physiological explanations of motor habit. Here it should
be noted that the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet, whose work Biran had cited in the
introduction to his 1802 text as a pivotal influence, had offered neurological hypotheses
concerning acquired habitual dispositions as consisting in the changed state of the molecular
state of nerve fibres (Bonnet 1760; Whitaker and Turgeon 2007). Ravaisson certainly admits
that ‘the increasing ease of the movements could perhaps by explained hypothetically by some
change (which anatomy has not yet discovered) in the physical constitution of the organs’
(Ravaisson 2008: 53). Thus he does not deny the possibility of organic changes accompanying
motor habits. Although Bonnet’s ideas were largely speculative, contemporary neurobiology
has offered more concrete accounts of such changes (see: Hawkins and Kandel 1984; Squire
and Kandel 1999). Yet habit properly so called consists not simply in a developed capacity to
carry out an action, or in an increasing ease in carrying out that action, but rather in an active
tendency or inclination to carry it out. It is this tendency, Ravaisson argues, that cannot be
accounted for physiologically: ‘no organic modification can explain the tendency, the
inclination whose progress coincides with the decline of . . . effort’ (Ravaisson 2008: 53).
The claim is that habitual tendencies or inclinations are no mere third-person or mechanical
phenomenon but are rather intrinsically related to the freedom of the will and to intelligence.
Habitual movements do not, he argues, become the ‘mechanical effect of an external impulse
but rather the effect of an inclination that follows from the will’ (Ravaisson 2008: 55). Even if a
habitual action leaves the ‘sphere of will and reflection, it does not leave that of intelligence’
(Ravaisson 2008: 55), given that it still inclines toward a goal. In other words, habitual
tendencies present themselves as a spontaneous force that is ‘at once active and passive, equally
opposed to mechanical Fatality and to reflective Freedom’ (55).
Materialist explanations of habit, Ravaisson argues, do not take into account the specific
nature of habitual tendencies. Yet there is another problem that such explanations face.
Unless they adopt a form of ‘eliminative’ materialism, the problem of how the mind affects
the body at all remains unaddressed. Yet the ontological presuppositions of this traditional
mind–body problem are brought into question by Ravaisson’s reflection on habit. Con-
sideration of the specific nature of motor tendencies leads us to think beyond the
conception of a mechanical, material body that stands partes extra partes opposed to a
sphere of thought and freedom. For if movements are originally determined by a
theoretically posited goal as an idea in the mind, then in their continuity or repetition

[t]he idea becomes being, the very being of the movement and of the tendency that it
determines. Habit becomes more and more a substantial idea. The obscure intelligence
that through habit comes to replace reflection, this immediate intelligence where subject
and object are confounded, is a real intuition, in which the real and the ideal, being and
thought, are fused together. (Ravaisson 2008: 55)

This conception of a fusion of the ideal and the real is certainly influenced by Schelling’s
philosophy of nature and Identitätsphilosophie, for, even though Of Habit does not contain a
 embodiment 195
direct reference to the German thinker, Ravaisson had previously translated some of his
work.16 Yet Ravaisson thinks this fusion according to an original conception of bodily
being. In the acquisition of motive habits, ideal goals come to constitute the very nature,
‘the very being’, of the organs of the body. The progress of motive habits consists in a
descent of thought and will into bodily being. The habituated body is not simply an
extended, mechanical thing, since ideas and then habitual inclinations ‘become more and
more the form, the way of being, even the very being of these organs’ (Ravaisson 2008: 55).
What the body is, or, better, the manner in which the body exists comes to be transformed
through the duration or repetition of a change.
It is in this way, then, that Ravaisson might seem to develop – without naming it as
such – Biran’s conception of le corps propre as distinct from the objective body. The habits
incorporated in the body cannot be located in it from the outside in the way that a physiologist
can isolate a tear in a muscle or a calcium growth in a joint. Thus the habituated body must be
conceived as irreducible to the body objectified and viewed from the outside. Ravaisson’s
thinking, however, offers a particular response to the problem of the ‘relation’ of will to the
lived body that we encountered in Biran’s work. This relation is to be thought according to a
conception of being and, in fact, according to an ‘ontological difference’. There is a difference
between being and beings, between that which exists and its existence, but this difference is
not the difference between two separable entities and neither can it be accounted for as the
successive relation of a cause and an effect.17 For Ravaisson, the habituated body, rather than
being caused to move by its tendencies, is those tendencies that animate it. But the verb ‘being’
here must be understood, precisely, in a verbal and active sense as an inclination that will tend
to realise itself in action. This means that although the conscious self, as Biran had argued,
might be able to distinguish itself from the lived body in voluntary action, that voluntary
action will always contain habitual aspects. In these habitual aspects the self, in the more
profound guise of habitual tendencies, does not distinguish itself from the body but rather
‘relates’ to it as being ‘relates’ to beings. With Ravaisson’s thinking, then, it becomes more
legitimate to argue, following Michel Henry, that there is an ‘identity’ of ‘the being of the body
and the ego’. But identity here must be understood as the identity in difference of being in
beings, whilst the ego has to be understood first of all in terms of the unthematic and pre-
conscious tendencies that animate the body.
Ravaisson’s ontological approach, then, provides a means of conceiving what Biran had
discussed as the relation of will to body. Yet Of Habit also presents a response to the second
problem noted above in Biran’s work, that concerning ‘passive impressions’. Although
Ravaisson also considers the consciousness in perception and action to be a matter of degree,
the continuum he describes is not subtended by a primary stratum of sensations and
affections independent of the will. For Ravaisson, nothing like pure passivity is given in
experience because activity and passivity always work together as ‘proportionately and
inversely related’ (Ravaisson 2008: 43). The more an experience is passive, the less it is
active and vice versa. Just as there is no pure activity of movement or perception that would
exist without a measure of passivity, there is no such thing as a purely passive impression: ‘in
every sensation . . . motility and perception have a role’ (Ravaisson 2008: 43). It takes a very
peculiar frame of mind to attempt to apprehend something like a pure sensation. Far from
coming first, what is alleged to be mere passive sensation, it can be argued, is rather ‘the last
effect of consciousness’ (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1962: 37). Concomitantly, Ravaisson never
adopts Biran’s claim that a ‘vital sense’ and physiological system exist prior to and
independently of the will and consciousness. He finds, again, a continuum in the place
of his predecessor’s dualism: although there is a difference between habit and instinct,
196 mark sinclair
between habit and the natural and vital operations of the body, the progress or development
of habits – which we might take to be natural instincts if we did not know that we once
acquired them – shows us that the ‘difference is merely one of degree’ and ‘can always be
lessened and reduced’ (Ravaisson 2008: 43). If habit is a second nature, then this second
nature cannot be clearly demarcated from our primary nature and is in fact grounded in the
latter. On Ravaisson’s account, the principle of biological life is intrinsically ‘related’ to
consciousness, but this is not to say, in the manner of the eighteenth-century ‘animism’
traditionally ascribed to Georg Ernst Stahl, that all physiological functions are controlled by
consciousness. Rather it is to say that there can be no absolute lines of demarcation between
the will, habitual inclinations and natural, vital tendencies.18
I have contended that Ravaisson offers a viable response to both of the key problems
with Biran’s conception of embodiment. To be sure, it might be argued that Ravaisson’s
thinking is still the less developed and the less radical insofar as he does not clearly
distinguish the lived, primary body from the secondary or objective body. Ravaisson’s
concern to synthesise eighteenth-century animist and vitalist philosophies by arguing that
the force of habit is continuous with, on the one hand, a vital, non-mechanical principle of
biological life and, on the other hand, the principle of conscious will leads him to integrate
the embodied self into a general philosophy of nature instead of immediately distinguishing
it from other things. Yet recognition of the distinction between the primary and secondary
body is at least implicit in his thinking. This is particularly so when he acknowledges that
the sciences may be able to discover material changes having occurred in the body as a
result of the acquisition of habits. To use the fact of such changes to explain the habituated
body in third-person, material and ultimately mechanical terms is to approach the body
and human experience from the outside. In contrast the metaphysical force or principle of
habit as constituting the veritable being and the original existence of the body can be
known, as he claims, only through a mode of subjective experience or reflection – after
Biran we might say ‘apperception’, but Ravaisson in Of Habit does not. In this ‘the same
being at once acts and see[s] the act’, a being in which ‘the author, the drama, the actor, the
spectator are all one’ (Ravaisson 2008: 39). Ravaisson offers, then, a solution to the two
key problems of Biran’s thinking, but the fact that a distinction between a primary and
secondary body is only implied in Of Habit suggests that in 1838 he had not actually read
his predecessor’s explicit remarks concerning le corps propre.

4. Bergson’s Dualism
Ravaisson’s ideas were influential in the nineteenth century in France, particularly as a result
of his becoming in 1863 the chairman of the committee charged with adjudicating and
determining the programme of the agrégation. Generations of candidates to the examination,
as Henri Bergson would later remark, learnt by heart the final pages of his 1867 Rapport sur la
philosophie en France au XIXème siècle (Report on Philosophy in France in the nineteenth
century), which outlined a spiritualist philosophy that would overcome the more materialist
philosophies of the age. In Bergson’s Matter and Memory of 1896, however, a text in which we
find its author’s most developed conception of embodiment, Bergson seems, at least at first
glance, to be little influenced by Ravaisson’s work.

This book affirms the reality of spirit, the reality of matter, and tries to determine the
relation of the one to the other with a precise example, that of memory. It is therefore
clearly dualistic. But, on the other hand, it envisages body and mind in such a manner
 embodiment 197
that it hopes to attenuate, if not to suppress, the theoretical difficulties that the dualism
has always caused. (Bergson [1896] 1991: 9)19

In opposition to the continuist ontological monism that Ravaisson proposes, Bergson

professes to be a philosophical dualist and he will indeed discover ‘differences of nature’
between the mind and the body where his predecessor had found only differences of degree.
The dualism articulated in Matter and Memory, for all that, differs markedly from
traditional Cartesian dualisms of mind and body. In the opening pages of the text’s first
chapter, Bergson presents a biological account of the ‘role’ of the body within what can be
described as a realist and pragmatist theory of perception. The body, in opposition to things
governed by constant physical laws, is conceived as a centre of action in the world, which,
as a function of its capacity to introduce a delay in its reaction to stimuli and affections, can
bring forth events that are unforeseeable, unpredictable and, that is to say, undetermined.
Moreover, this body is not the producer or container of internal representations of the
external world. In claiming that representational theories of perception are contradictory
and mythical, Bergson urges us to recognise that the body is a centre of action which
responds to the movements it receives from things with other movements (see Bergson
[1896] 1991: 17–30; also Lawlor 2003: 11f.). Perception, on this account, is not a
theoretical or intellectual inspection of representations of things but is instead conceived
as a bodily response to the things themselves: ‘the objects which surround my body reflect
its possible action upon them’ (Bergson [1896] 1991: 21).
The upshot of these arguments is that it is originally the body in itself, and not simply the
body as the instrument of memory and mind, which acts and perceives the world. The
limitations of this quite particular conception of the body become evident, however, when
Bergson presents his distinction of two forms of memory in the second chapter of the text.
On this account, the past ‘survives under two distinct forms: first, in motor mechanisms;
secondly, in independent recollections’ and these two forms are at least ‘theoretically
independent’ of each other (Bergson [1896] 1991: 78). The past can either be recollected as
individual events that occurred at a particular moment in time and are therefore
unrepeatable, or it can be taken up and repeated by means of the habitual actions of
the body. In the process of learning a poem by heart, to use Bergson’s celebrated example, it
is possible to recollect any particular reading of the poem, whereas the result of the process
is not a recollection in this sense at all; it is rather an acquired aptitude or motor habit.
Bergson delineates, in fact, three essential moments or aspects of habit.20 The acquisition
of a habit requires not only the repetition of an act but also, in the beginning, an
intellectual act of analysis or decomposition. I originally separate the words and syllables, so
as to be able to learn them, before they are recomposed as a whole once I have developed
the habit to pronounce them without hesitation, that is, once I have learnt the poem by
heart. Yet the learning or acquisition of the habit through decomposition and repetition
consists in the development of a motor mechanism, which is described as follows.

These movements, as they recur, contrive a mechanism for themselves, grow into a habit
and determine in us attitudes which automatically follow our perception of things. This
. . . is the main office of our nervous system. The afferent nerves bring to the brain a
disturbance, which, after having intelligently chosen its path, transmits itself to motor
mechanisms created by repetition. Thus is ensured the appropriate reaction, the
correspondence to environment – adaptation, in a word – which is the general aim
of life. (Bergson [1896] 1991: 84)
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Although habits require a principle of intellect and freedom in their acquisition, it is argued
that once acquired they can simply be explained in third-person and mechanistic terms.
Whilst Ravaisson challenges the philosophical dualism underlying the classically
modern determination of habit as a ‘mechanical’ principle of action, Bergson reverts to
it. This means that the idea of the living or biological body presented in the first chapter of
Matter and Memory is not conceived as a personalised, ‘lived’, body, as a fulcrum of
intelligent agency with its own relation to time and history. Ultimately, the body as
Bergson conceives it has no relation to time beyond the present at all. The idea of a
‘survival’ of the past in the neurological changes of which habit consists is a ‘verbal artifice’
– as Merleau-Ponty argues when reading Matter and Memory in a lecture course given in
1948/49 (Merleau-Ponty 1997: 87). This artifice serves only to bind, after the fact and
when Bergson addresses dualism as a problem in the final sections of his text, the two terms
that he initially separates as different in nature: habit and memory, the body and the mind.
Certainly, Bergson seems to be well aware of the problem insofar as he repeatedly wonders
whether it is legitimate to describe habit as a form of memory at all. Yet if an acquired habit
is purely a question of material and mechanical changes, one wonders why we could not
also say that the past persists in things independent of the body; that other things – such as
the piece of paper I have folded – have their own memory.21 The fact that the changes in
the body were originally occasioned as a result of effort and conscious decision in no way
distinguishes, of course, my body from the folded piece of paper.22
The body-subject is still very much a body-object in Bergson’s text, then, precisely
because he accepts wholeheartedly objectifying and scientific explanations of the habi-
tuated body. On this basis we can understand the argument of Merleau-Ponty concerning
the status of the body in Matter and Memory: ‘The body never manages to be a subject –
although Bergson tends to accord this status to it – for if the body was subject, the subject
would be the body and this is what Bergson wants to avoid at all costs’ (Merleau-Ponty
1997: 87). As we have seen, Bergson tends to accord the status of subject to the body
insofar as it is originally the body, he argues, that acts and perceives the world. Yet, in the
end, Bergson wants to avoid any assertion of the body as a genuine subject because of his
basic dualist position. His biological, pragmatist and realist conception of the living body is
accompanied by an idealism of the mind or spirit, according to which memory constitutes
the very essence of the self and its character and thus of ‘subjectivity’.
To be sure, in the third chapter of Matter and Memory Bergson will attempt to show how
the body and mind work together in experience by arguing that the difference between the
‘two forms of memory’, although a difference in kind or nature, is merely a functional
difference.

Since they are not two separated things, since the first is only, as we have said, the
pointed end, ever moving, inserted by the second in the shifting plane of experience, it is
natural that the two functions should lend each other a mutual support. So, on the one
hand, memory offers to the sensori-motor mechanism all the recollections capable of
guiding them in their task and of giving to the motor reaction the direction suggested by
the lessons of experience . . . But, on the other hand, the sensori-motor apparatus
furnish to ineffective, that is unconscious, memories, the means of taking on body, of
materialising themselves, in short of becoming present. (Bergson [1896] 1991: 152)

In perception not only does memory guide the motor mechanisms or ‘motor schema’ of
recognition but also these mechanisms, from the opposite perspective, allow for memory to
 embodiment 199
be incorporated into experience. This incorporation is held to occur, in a manner clearly
influenced by Ravaisson’s thinking, according to a continuous scale that descends from the
absolute, ultimately unconscious singularity of pure memory to the increasing generality of
the memory image and then to concrete perception.
This argument concerning the functional unity of matter and memory in experience
leads to Bergson’s infamously difficult attempt, in the final sections of the text, to posit a
monistic principle underlying and uniting the two principles that he has separated.23 This
principle is a conception of time as duration. Because the briefest slice of perceptual
experience that we might designate with the word ‘now’ is always and already a stretch of
time and thus always and already implies a temporal synthesis, there is, in the end, no such
thing as pure perception. Bergson argues, in fact, that there is a temporal principle of
synthesis uniting both perception and memory. It is not possible to discuss here the
viability and full significance of this attempt to attenuate, in Bergson’s own words, the
‘theoretical difficulties’ that dualism in general has caused. Suffice it here to say that this
response to the problem of dualism in no way distinguishes the human body from other
worldly objects occupying a minimal slice of duration. Once again, and although the first
chapter of Matter and Memory might seem to accord a subjective status to the body as a
living body, the specific ontological status of the lived body remains undisclosed.

5. Conclusion
As has become clear, the history of conceptions of embodiment in the nineteenth-century
French ‘spiritualist’ tradition amounts to something quite different from a linear or
progressive development. Ravaisson does not explicitly discuss Biran’s idea of le corps
propre and Bergson, towards the end of the century, seems unconcerned with either of his
predecessors’ conceptions of the body. However, I hope to have clarified a point that
twentieth-century thinkers such as Michel Henry and Merleau-Ponty seem not to have
acknowledged: Ravaisson offers compelling responses to the two fundamental problems of
his predecessor’s conception of the body. Thus his work can be understood to represent the
pinnacle of nineteenth-century reflection on embodiment and the problem of mind–body
dualism.
To reinforce this claim, I want to conclude by addressing an outstanding issue that was
initially raised concerning Biran, namely, the problem of intellectualism. It might be asked:
is there not an underlying intellectualism and idealism that unites the conceptions of
embodiment offered by Biran, Ravaisson and Bergson? For do not all three thinkers
conceive the acquisition of bodily, motor habits as necessarily guided in the first instance
by reflective thought? It is on this point that Merleau-Ponty explicitly criticises Bergson’s
account of the acquisition of habit (see Merleau-Ponty [1942] 1963: 65 and [1945] 1962:
142; see also Marin 2004). The progress of habit does not – or at least does not necessarily –
consist of acts learnt by intellectual decomposition and analysis coming by means of
repetition to occur without any operation of the understanding. For ‘it is the body which
‘‘catches’’ and ‘‘comprehends’’ movement: the acquisition of a habit is indeed the grasping
of a significance, but it is the motor grasping of a motor significance’ (Merleau-Ponty [1945]
1962: 143). The organist accustoming herself to an unfamiliar instrument, for example,
does not necessarily proceed by means of intellectual analysis, by means of the intellectual
decomposition and re-composition that Bergson describes. Rather she adjusts her body and
lets her body adjust itself to the new arrangement of stops and pedals. The acquisition of
habit is thus a ‘rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal schema’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962:
200 mark sinclair
143) which can occur without the mediation of reflective thought. There is certainly
intelligence in the acquisition of habit, but this is neither necessarily nor primarily the
intelligence of a reflective consciousness.
If it is supposed, as we have seen Ravaisson and Bergson explicitly affirm, that the
progress of habit begins from ideas in the mind, then we risk failing to recognise the primary
and cognitive corporeality that Merleau-Ponty attempts to reveal. Ravaisson may appear to
offer the sort of intellectualist account in question here when he describes the acquisition
of habit as the incorporation of ideas. Yet it is precisely because he offers something other
than the mechanistic physiology involved in Bergson’s thinking that the essay of 1838 does
not preclude the idea that habits can be acquired prior to the intervention of reflective
thought. Ravaisson does not state that the acquisition of habit must proceed from reflective
thought, just as Merleau-Ponty does not state that it cannot do so. Crucially, Ravaisson will
argue that voluntary action and effort is always preceded by an ‘effortless antecedent
tendency’ (Ravaisson 2008: 37).24 The progress of habit can be pictured as descending a
continuous scale underlying the opposition of mind and matter, but this descent shows us
that prior to the advent of explicit consciousness, and all the way from the most elementary
instinctive movements, an intelligent but not yet reflective tendency or desire was at work.
Hence the intelligent but not reflective or explicitly conscious desire that is manifest in
habit is not only post-reflective, as it might seem to be on the basis of certain passages of
Ravaisson’s text, but also pre-reflective. The idea of a pre-reflective consciousness, then, is
not foreign to Ravaisson’s thought, even if it will be developed much more deliberately
according to ideas of an ‘operative intentionality’ or ‘cognitive corporeality’ within the
twentieth-century phenomenological movement.25

Notes
1. Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Biran’s idea of le corps propre is seldom acknowledged, but see
Engel 2008.
2. All translations are the author’s own unless otherwise stated.
3. See Moore 1970: 188–90, Appendix 1, on the extent and fate of Biran’s manuscripts.
4. On the Ideological school and its influence on Maine de Biran see Copleston [1975] 1999: 19–21;
Truman 1904.
5. I refer directly only to the most recent French edition of the text, not to the incomplete English
translation.
6. Biran cites Fichte and Schelling from the French translations in Dégérando 1804.
7. This critique of Hume deserves increased attention and I develop here F. C. T. Moore’s brief
presentation of it: Moore 1970: 85–6.
8. Biran responds to Hume’s claim concerning action as a ‘matter’ of experience thus: ‘That this is a
fact is enough for us: but is it a fact of experience of the same nature as the other operations of an
external nature? I deny the equivalence. It is precisely this that seems to me to be the source of the
illusions that give such heart to the sceptics’ (Maine de Biran 1995: 119).
9. On the basis of responding to these three points of Hume’s argument, Biran argues that when
Hume concludes that ‘our idea of power is not copied from any sentiment or consciousness of
power within ourselves, when we give rise to animal motion, or apply our limbs to their proper use
and office’ (Maine de Biran 1995: 67) he is simply denying an evident fact. Ultimately, such a
denial cannot be met with an argument, as Biran will write in the Essai sur les fondements de la
psychologie: ‘What should we say to someone who denies a visible or tangible fact? Perhaps
nothing. We should only make him see or touch what he denies and if he persists in saying that his
senses lead him into error, all discussion will end there’ (Maine de Biran 2001: 165). Descartes, it
should be noted, had at least recognised that we do have the feeling of such causal power, even
 embodiment 201
though he claims that we are unable to understand how the mind can affect the body. Hume’s
refusal to acknowledge this feeling means, from Biran’s perspective, that his scepticism is simply
extravagant and that the philosophical presuppositions that underlie it are insufficiently
empirical, insufficiently attentive to the modality of our own experience.
10. In his 1823 Considérations sur les principes d’une division des faits psychologiques et physiologiques
(Considerations on the Principles of a Division of Psychological and Physiolological Facts), Biran
discusses the theses of the German physiologist Johann Christian Reil concerning ‘coenaesthesis’,
understood as a form of internal sensory awareness of the body that is proper to living beings. Yet
according to Biran’s concern for a correct division between the physiological and the psycho-
logical, what Reil characterises as coenaesthesis is to be distinguished from voluntary awareness
and thus from awareness of le corps propre. Biran’s conception of the spatiality of the lived body, in
other words, is not simply a doctrine of coenaesthesis even though it is related to the latter. See,
on this point, Maine de Biran 1990: 129–35.
11. Moore highlights the importance of Biran’s distinction between the experience of bodily
movement and the ‘symbolic’ interpretation of that movement by the physiologist. But –
without reference either to Biran’s explicit discussions of le corps propre or their interpretation
by Michel Henry in 1965 – Moore makes remarkably little of this distinction, considering it
‘lamentably obscure’ (Moore 1970: 94–8).
12. If intellectualism is defined as a position according to which ‘consciousness does not admit of
degree’ (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1962: 121–2), then Biran is not an intellectualist.
13. After the Essai Biran will resort to the hypothesis of a non-phenomenal substantial self in response
to difficulties about the continued existence of the soul when it is not actively willing. This allows
us to understand Merleau-Ponty’s further claim concerning the final form of Biran’s thinking: that
he ‘poses once again, and in terms that are just as difficult, the traditional problem of the soul and
body; he re-establishes the absolute soul in the face of the absolute body: we find ourselves back at
the starting point’ (Merleau-Ponty 1997: 78).
14. Of Habit is unhelpful in relation to what exactly Ravaisson had read, since in it he refers only to
Biran’s 1802 dissertation by name and otherwise uses ‘passim’ to refer to the basic themes of Biran’s
thinking as a whole. The only readily available works by Biran in 1838 were the 1802 habit
dissertation, the 1817 Examen des leçons de philosophie de M. Laromiguière, the 1819 Exposition de la
doctrine de Leibniz, and the 1821/22 Nouvelles considérations sur les rapports du physique et du moral
chez l’homme (New Considerations on the Relations of the Physical and Psychological in Man)
edited by Victor Cousin, the most prominent French philosopher of the time, in 1834. In none of
these texts is there an explicit discussion of le corps propre. It is nevertheless not impossible that
Ravaisson read Biran’s work on this question within the manuscripts that Cousin, to whom
Ravaisson in the mid-1830s was close, had in his possession and published in four volumes in
1841. On this point see Blondel 1999.
15. Biran had already offered this critique of intellectualist conceptions of habit in a footnote added to the
section of his text entitled ‘The Influence of Habit on Perception’ (a footnote not contained in the
English translation); see Maine de Biran 1987: 179. This footnote also suggests Biran was not wholly
convinced by the neurological explanation of habit articulated by Charles Bonnet (see below).
16. On Ravaisson’s relation to Schelling see the Editors’ Introduction to Ravaisson 2008: 1–21.
17. For Martin Heidegger’s reflections on the idea of an ‘ontological difference’ see, for example,
Heidegger 1999: §266, 327–8.
18. Ravaisson disagrees with this traditional reading of Stahl’s animism and claims that ‘the letter and
the spirit’ (Ravaisson 2008: 122, n. 53) of his doctrine is rather that there is a graduated principle
of consciousness which in its different modalities underlies all bodily functions. In arguing,
therefore, that the principle of habit is continuous with the principle of biological life and that of
conscious will, Ravaisson claims to present a position close to that of Stahl.
19. These are the first lines of the 1911 preface to the text’s seventh edition, a preface originally
written for its first English translation.
20. See Bergson ([1896] 1991: 80) on the learning of a poem: ‘Like a habit it is acquired by
the repetition of the same effort. Like a habit, it demands first a decomposition and then a
 202 mark sinclair
re-composition of the whole action. Lastly, like every habitual bodily exercise, it is stored up in a
mechanism.’
21. Our treatment of habit sheds light on Merleau-Ponty’s argument that Bergson makes of
subjectivity a simple function of representation: he conserves the dichotomy of movement ‘in
the third person and the subject’ (Merleau-Ponty 1997: 87). It also allows us to see the limitations
of claims (see Mullarkey 1994: 346) that Matter and Memory offers us a veritable ‘phenomenology
of the body’ and that the ‘Bergsonian body is a true body-subject with its own desires’.
22. If habit is a form of memory, if the body has a relation to time beyond the present, a principle of
the acquisition of habit, then a power synthesising the past, present and future must be rooted
within the body itself. Ravaisson offers a hint of such a temporal conception of active and
intelligent habitual dispositions when he writes that ‘habit remains for a change which either is no
longer or is not yet; it remains for a possible change’ (Ravaisson 2008: 25) and that habit comes to
‘anticipate [prévient]’ (51), but not simply in the sense of a mechanical precedence, the conscious
activity of the will. So it is no surprise that when Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition
(Deleuze 1994: 70–2) presents habituation as a ‘first synthesis of time’ there is no direct reference
to Bergson’s own conception of habit. The lack of reference to Ravaisson is more surprising.
23. As Vladimir Jankélévitch – perhaps the greatest of Bergson commentators – notes, the pages of
Matter and Memory in which Bergson aims to overcome the dualism that the text has previously
established are ‘among the most obscure and embarrassing of his entire work’ (Jankélévitch [1930]
1999: 116).
24. This is, in fact, Ravaisson’s response to a problem with which Biran often and already in 1802
grapples: resistance and will both presuppose each other, a fact which presents a vicious circle
when attempting to account for how voluntary perception arises on the basis of sensation. As a
way out of this circle, Biran argued that sensation already possesses a form of ‘instinct’, which,
although non-voluntary, encounters resistance and that it is out of this instinctive effort that the
will arises. This hypothesis is problematic, as Dominique Janicaud notes, in that it ‘undermines
the specificity of effort’ within Biran’s analysis (Janicaud [1969] 1997: 26). In contrast, Ravaisson
argues that there is neither will nor resistance in pre-reflective desire, but that the will arises when
this effortless tendency meets resistance. On the problem in Biran’s texts, see Moore 1970: 90–4.
25. Merleau-Ponty does not discuss Of Habit in any of his published texts or lectures, not even in his
course on Maine de Biran and Bergson – both authors were on the programme of the agrégation in
philosophy – in 1948–9. Janicaud (1997: 11) relates that Merleau-Ponty had claimed at his thesis
defence that Ravaisson was of interest only as a precursor of Bergson. But Ravaisson’s importance
was recorded soon afterwards by another French philosopher concerned with habit and the body,
Paul Ricoeur. He writes in his Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and Involuntary that the
‘intuitions of that great philosopher are the source of many of the reflections in this book’
(Ricoeur [1950] 1966: 286).

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Bergson, Henri [1915] (1972), Mélanges, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Bergson, Henri [1896] (1991), Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, New York:
Zone.
Blondel, E. (1999), ‘Ravaisson lecteur de Maine de Biran’, in Jean-Michel Le Lannou (ed.),
Ravaisson, Paris: Kimé, pp. 15–32.
Bonnet, Charles (1760), Essai analytique sur les facultés de l’âme, Copenhagen: Philibert.
Copleston, Frederick [1975] (1999), A History of Philosophy, Vol. 9: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
French Philosophy, London: Continuum.
Dégérando, Joseph Marie (1804), Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, Paris.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: Athlone.
Derrida, Jacques (2005), On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
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Engel, Pascal (2008), ‘Psychology and metaphysics from Maine de Biran to Bergson’, in Sara
Heinämaa and Martina Reuters (eds), Psychology and Philosophy: Inquiries into the Soul from Late
Scholasticism to Contemporary Thought, Amsterdam: Springer, pp. 235–46.
Gouhier, Henri (1947), Les conversions de Maine de Biran, Paris: Vrin.
Hawkins, Robert D., and Eric R. Kandel (1984), ‘Steps toward a cell-biological alphabet for
elementary forms of learning’, in Gary Lynch et al. (eds), Neurobiology of Learning and Memory,
New York: Guilford Press, pp. 65–77.
Heidegger, Martin (1999), Contributions to Philosophy, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Henry, Michel (1965), Philosophie et phenomenology du corps: Essai sur l’ontologie biranienne, Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Hume, David [1748] (1975), Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P.
H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Janicaud, Dominique (1997), Ravaisson et la métaphysique: Une généalogie du spiritualisme français,
Paris: Vrin.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir [1930] (1999), Henri Bergson, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Lalande, André (1993), Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, 3rd edn, Paris: Quadrige.
Lawlor, Leonard (2003), The Challenge of Bergsonism, London: Continuum.
Maine de Biran, Pierre (1970), The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, trans. Margaret D.
Boehm, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Maine de Biran, Pierre (1987), Oeuvres vol. II, Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser, ed.
François Azouvi, Paris: Vrin.
Maine de Biran, Pierre (1988), Oeuvres vol. III, Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, ed. François
Azouvi, Paris: Vrin.
Maine de Biran, Pierre (1990), Oeuvres vol. IX, Nouvelles considérations sur les rapports du physique et
du moral de l’homme, ed. Bernard Baertschi, Paris: Vrin.
Maine de Biran, Pierre (1995), Oeuvres vol. IV, De l’aperception immédiate, ed. Ives Radrizzani, Paris:
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Maine de Biran, Pierre (2001), Oeuvres vol. VII, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, ed. F. C. T.
Moore, Paris: Vrin.
Marin, C. (2004), ‘L’être et l’habitude dans la philosophie française contemporaine’, Alter 12: 149–
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Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice [1942] (1963), The Structure of Behaviour, trans. A. L. Fisher, Boston:
Beacon Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1997), L’union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson, Paris:
Vrin.
Moore, F. C. T. (1970), The Psychology of Maine de Biran, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mullarkey, John (1994), ‘Duplicity of the flesh: Bergson and current philosophy of the body’,
Philosophy Today 38 (3): 339–55.
Ravaisson, Félix (2008), Of Habit, ed. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair, London: Continuum.
Ricoeur, Paul [1950] (1966), Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and Involuntary, Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
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Truman, Nathan (1904), Maine de Biran’s Psychology of the Will, London: Macmillan.
Whitaker, Harry A. and Yves Turgeon (2007), ‘Charles Bonnet’s neurophilosophy’, in Harry
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Springer, pp. 191–200.
 11
The Unconscious in the German Philosophy and
Psychology of the Nineteenth Century

Günter Gödde
Translated from the German by Ciaran Cronin

1. Introduction
The adjective ‘unconscious’ designates a quality that can be found in psychical processes
such as imagining, remembering, thinking, feeling, desiring, wishing and acting. The
processes which exhibit this quality differ from those with the quality ‘conscious’ in that the
former are not present in the current field of consciousness but nevertheless remain
psychologically effective, indeed, often far more so than the processes which have the
quality of being conscious. The substantive, the ‘unconscious’, expresses the fact that
psychological phenomena are not confined in principle to conscious experiences but are
profoundly shaped by unconscious forces. In psychoanalysis, this concept also designates a
region of mental life (in contrast to the preconscious and the conscious) or a system with
specific functions and regularities (primary process, pleasure principle).
For many years Sigmund Freud was acclaimed as the discoverer of the unconscious,
without acknowledgement that his doctrine is rooted in a philosophical tradition which
can be described as the ‘philosophy of the unconscious’. Freud studied a range of clinical
conceptions concerning the effects of unconscious psychological processes (those of Jean-
Martin Charcot, Hippolyte Bernheim, Pierre Janet and Josef Breuer) before presenting a
first systematic exposition of his discoveries concerning the unconscious dynamics of
‘defence’, ‘repression’ and ‘resistance’ in Studies in Hysteria of 1895, which he co-authored
with Breuer (Freud and Breuer [1895] 2004). In The Interpretation of Dreams of 1900 he
went on to introduce the concept of the unconscious as a central concept in psychoanalysis
and later modified it in ‘The Ego and the Id’ of 1923.
A paradigm shift in the dominant view of the history of the idea of the unconscious was
precipitated only by Henry Ellenberger’s 1970 book The Discovery of the Unconscious
(Ellenberger [1970] 1985). Ellenberger’s achievement consisted in resituating Freud’s
notion of the unconscious ‘within its historical context, in identifying precursors and
offering a wide-ranging, well-documented description of the intellectual space within
which psychoanalysis arose’ (Schröter 2006: 218). Following Ellenberger, a whole series of
important works have appeared which forge links between psychoanalysis and the
philosophical tradition of the unconscious. Two postdoctoral theses merit special mention
in this connection, namely, Odo Marquard’s Transzendentaler Idealismus, Romantische
Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse (1987) and Reinhard Gasser’s Nietzsche und Freud
(1997). Also highly recommended are the survey article by Mai Wegener (2005a) and
 the unconscious in german philosophy 205
the volumes edited by Michael Buchholz and Günter Gödde (2005a) and by Angus
Nicholls and Martin Liebscher (2010). In my own book, Traditionslinien des ‘Unbewußten’:
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud (Gödde [1999] 2009), I distinguish three lines of devel-
opment in the philosophy of the unconscious in the opening three chapters, before going
on to establish connections to Freud and post-Freudian psychoanalysis, including the most
recent developments.

2. The Origins of the Conception of the Unconscious in the

Enlightenment
The opposed conceptions of consciousness and the unconscious originated in the eight-
eenth-century Enlightenment era. Descartes, who subordinated all mental processes to
consciousness in his Discours de la méthode of 1637, is regarded as the founder of the
philosophy of consciousness. To body or material substance he ascribed just the two
properties of spatial extension and movement (res extensa). ‘It is nature that acts’ in the
operations of these machines ‘according to the dispositions of their organs – just as we see
that a clock composed exclusively of wheels and springs can count the hours and measure
the time more accurately than we can with all our carefulness’ (Descartes [1637] 1998: 33).
Thus it was only consistent that he made thought the defining criterion of the mind and
described the latter as res cogitans. Descartes is the source of the statement ‘Anima semper
cogitans’ (‘the mind is always thinking’). The mind is always in a thinking and hence a
conscious state. This rational model of the mind left no room for an unconscious activity
of feeling, imagining and thinking. It is hardly surprising that Descartes’s mind–body
dualism led to mechanistic and ‘soulless’ anthropologies such as La Mettrie’s famous
L’homme machine (Machine Man) of 1747.
Only as a result of this separation of mind from body did the problem arise of how to classify
mental processes which exist without our being immediately aware of them. Leibniz, who
developed his famous doctrine of the ‘pétites perceptions’ in his New Essays on Human
Understanding of 1704 and 1765, became Descartes’s most prominent opponent. Leibniz’s
doctrine in the Monadology of 1720 (Leibniz 1965) can be regarded as his starting point.
With this doctrine he postulates that the whole of the universe is animate and that there is a
hierarchy of simple monads extending from animal souls and human psychological monads
up to God as the absolute monad. For Leibniz the basic mental capacities of the monads are
the ‘small inconspicuous perceptions’ which are located at the margins of consciousness, as it
were, or do not enter consciousness at all. At any moment there are a countless number of
such ‘inconspicuous perceptions’ of which we are unaware because they are ‘either too
minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying . . . But when they are combined with
others they do nevertheless have their effect and make themselves felt, at least confusedly,
within the whole’ (Leibniz [1704/1765] 1996: 53). Every cognition, however unclear and
obscure it may be, has a multiplicity of effects on perception, thought, taste and habits and
constitutes a component of every clear conscious perception. This can be illustrated, for
instance, by the roaring of the sea and the murmuring of crowds. Inconspicuous perceptions
can also leave residues of past mental states in memory or can find expression in diffuse states
of indecision and doubt or can spur the will to counteract mental irritations. With his
doctrine of the ‘pétites perceptions’, Leibniz paved the way for a tradition which can be
described as that of the cognitive unconscious (see Pongratz 1984: 188–96).
Johann Friedrich Herbart’s philosophy and psychology is situated within this tradition.
In express opposition to idealist philosophy and psychology, Herbart pursued the project of
206 g ü n t e r g ö d d e
grounding a psychology on ‘realist metaphysics’. Although he remained beholden to
metaphysics, he founded an ‘explanatory psychology’ which tried to comprehend the
regularities of mental life with the methods of natural science. His psychology of
representation and association has a mechanistic and dynamic character and is devoted
to investigating the facts which are given in consciousness. However, it already points in a
rudimentary way towards a theory of the unconscious.
Herbart employs ‘representation’ (or ‘idea’: Vorstellung) as a central concept to define the
contents of experience which are given in consciousness. Representations are understood as
particular elements of mental life which can have varying destinies. This raises in particular
the question of the regularities exhibited by the processes through which representations
become associations and undergo change. For Herbart, representations are in constant
motion. They can attract and repel each other, sink below the ‘threshold of consciousness’ or
re-enter consciousness. Only because they ‘resist’ each other – that is, become caught up in a
relation of pressure and counterpressure – do they become forces in the dynamic sense with
specific, and in principle measurable, magnitudes. Herbart distinguishes in connection with
Leibniz and Kant between clear representations – that is, those which are located above the
threshold of consciousness – and obscure representations whose ‘level of clarity’ is partially
reduced (‘inhibited’) or diminishes to nothing (‘obscured’). He explicitly states that weaker
representations can be ‘suppressed’ (verdrängt) below the threshold of consciousness by
stronger representations (see Herbart [1816/34] 2008: 9–14).
The concept of the threshold of consciousness, which at first sight seems to be meant
only as a spatial metaphor, is for Herbart a mathematically measurable factor within his
realistic psychology. In this connection he distinguishes between a ‘static’ threshold, in
which a representation, even though it is no longer in consciousness, can nevertheless re-
enter consciousness without encountering major resistance, as it were, and a ‘mechanical’
threshold, in which a representation is completely suppressed from consciousness for a
certain time, but nevertheless strives with all its force to return to consciousness, or at least
to exercise an indirect influence on consciousness (14). In this way Herbart developed a
doctrine of the ‘statics and mechanics of representations’ which studies changes in degrees
of clarity and intensity as representations unfold.
The representations which are suppressed below the mechanical threshold raise the
more far-reaching question of the psychological reality of what is hidden but nevertheless
continues to exercise psychical effects. This question is often addressed by Herbart and
his successors. Since the clear representations are only islands in the ocean of obscure
representations, they regarded it as worthwhile to explain the dynamics of the obscure
representations and their reproducibility (Herbart [1824] 1886: 340–1; Lindner [1873]
1889: 81). However, they thought that the connection between what is perceptible and
what is imperceptible could only be inferred.
Among Herbart’s successors, Gustav Theodor Fechner more than anyone else took up
Herbart’s constructions and gave them an empirical grounding within the framework of his
psychophysics (see Heidelberger 2004; Wegener 2005b). This extremely creative research-
er operated at the intersection of Romantic philosophy of nature and exact science.
Whereas Herbart’s attention remained focused on the more-or-less conscious representa-
tions, Fechner turned to the ‘unconscious sensations’ which lie beyond the ‘psychophysical
threshold’. According to Fechner, as long as stimuli remain below the psychophysical
threshold, the corresponding sensations are unconscious, yet nevertheless effective. Thus
the concept of the psychophysical threshold already acquires central importance, as
Fechner writes in his major work Elemente der Psychophysik, because it
 the unconscious in german philosophy 207
provides a secure foundation for the concept of the unconscious as such. Psychology
cannot abstract from unconscious sensations and ideas [Vorstellungen] . . . Sensations,
ideas, have, of course, ceased actually to exist in the state of unconsciousness, insofar as we
consider them apart from their substructure. Nevertheless, something persists within us,
i.e. the psychophysical activity of which they are a function and which makes possible
the re-appearance of sensation. (Fechner [1868] 1966; quoted from Brentano [1874]
1995: 104n.)

In this context we should also mention the theory of ‘unconscious inferences’ which has a
long prehistory in philosophy. Hermann von Helmholtz placed it at the centre of his theory
of perception. Wilhelm Wundt, too, defended this theory in his Beiträgen zur Theorie der
Sinneswahrnehmung (Contributions to the Theory of Perception) of 1862, although he later
abandoned it.
From the assumption of unconscious cognitive states, in the sense of unconscious ideas,
perceptions, thoughts, inferences and the like, it was then but a short step to anthro-
pological and psychological concepts dealing with unconscious strivings, drives, inten-
tions, actions, as well as with unconscious memories, motives, feelings, emotions, conflicts
and so forth. The basic assumption that unconscious psychical processes exist and are
capable of exercising profound effects played a key role in this theoretical development.
From here one can forge a link to contemporary cognitive psychology (see Mertens 2005).

3. From the ‘Vital Power’ to the Vital Unconscious in

Romanticism
Whereas the tradition of the cognitive unconscious developed within the Enlightenment, a
second tradition evolved out of a reaction against the Enlightenment. Underlying this
second tradition was the fear that the Enlightenment would ossify into a shallow
rationalism unless more attention was paid to the emotional, the natural, the corporeal,
the imaginative and the irrational. This alternative tradition had its origins in the Sturm
und Drang or pre-Romantic era. Amongst its first representatives were J. G. Hamann,
Herder and the younger Goethe.
Two quotations can serve to illustrate Goethe’s statements concerning the unconscious:
‘Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the
Unconscious, for his roots live there’ (quoted from Eysenck 1995: 108). Here the
unconscious features as a refuge, as a place of inner peace and of self-recollection. Another
passage deals, as so often with Goethe, with the creative forces of the unconscious:

no great thought which bears fruit and has results, is in the power of any one . . . Man
must consider them as an unexpected gift from above . . . They are akin to the demonic,
which overwhelms him and does what it pleases and to which he unconsciously resigns
himself, whilst he believes he is acting from his own impulse. (Goethe [1848] 2005:
309–10; translation amended)

This second tradition of thinking about the unconscious had its heyday in the Romantic
philosophy of nature and in Romantic medicine. The concept of ‘vital power’ or ‘life force’
(Lebenskraft) can be regarded as an essential precursor of the Romantic idea of the
unconscious (see Goldmann 2005). Within two decades of its introduction by Friedrich
Casimir Medicus (1774), the concept of vital power became a central topos of the medical
208 g ü n t e r g ö d d e
anthropology of the era. As the German physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland writes in
his posthumously published autobiography, at the time he and a whole range of other
doctors were striving ‘to bring the whole of medicine under a single principle of life or of
the vital power and thereby to establish unity in the various parts of the same’ (Hufeland
1937: 83). Vital power was understood – in contrast to Descartes and to all attempts to
explain the internal, for the most part unconscious, movements of life in mechanistic terms
– as a third substance in addition to the thinking mind and matter. It was regarded as the
‘source of all of the movements’ in the organic domain – for example, metabolic processes,
digestion, secretion, blood formation, pulse and circulation – which take place without the
influence of the mind. Hufeland explicitly stated that ‘vital power’ exists ‘without the
power of thought [Denkkraft] (mind)’. The thinking mind is connected with the vital
power only by the fact that

it [the thinking mind] can influence, guide, direct and determine it [that is, the vital
power], though only in accordance with certain laws and limits, for there exist organs
whose vital power is not subject to its influence. Thus mind is not vital power itself, but
should be viewed as one of the most powerful and most direct stimuli acting upon it.
(Hufeland 1795: 36–7)

For Hufeland, the vital power is

one of the most general, the most incomprehensible and the most powerful of all the
powers of nature. It fills and gives motion to everything; and, in all probability, is the
grand source from which all the other powers of the physical, or at least the organized,
world proceed. It is that which produces, supports and renews everything . . . In short, it
is this which, purified and exalted by a more perfect organization, kindles up the powers
of thought and of the soul; and which gives to rational beings, together with life, the
sensation and enjoyment of it. (Hufeland [1797] 2003: 35)

The concept of the unconscious itself first appears in 1800 in Schelling’s System of
Transcendental Idealism (Schelling 1978). In the Schelling school, the concept of the
unconscious was employed primarily in connection with the dark side of nature and of the
mind – mental illnesses, madness, dreams, genius and parapsychological phenomena.
In his work Psyche of 1846, the late Romantic Carl Gustav Carus developed a first
psychology of the unconscious. He distinguished three regions of mental life: the ‘absolute’
unconscious, understood as a delimited domain which is intimately related to the body,
constituted for him the central region; he viewed the ‘relative’ unconscious as the region of
what has temporarily become unconscious but can at any time return to consciousness; and
consciousness for him was synonymous with feeling, cognition and action.
Carus remained beholden to the notion of the vital power, but he subordinated it to his
postulated unity of the ‘psyche’. Amongst the essential characteristics of the unconscious
he counted ‘tirelessness’: in the unconscious there is no pausing, interrupting, or stopping.
A second feature can be termed ‘immediacy’: what takes place in the unconscious has no
need of ‘tedious study, [needs] no practice to achieve dexterity’: ‘all is done and achieved
easily and immediately as required by the nature of a particular being’ (Carus [1846] 1989:
57). A further feature is the ‘inexhaustible health’ of the unconscious (70). Carus speaks of
the ‘healing power of nature’. One can speak in connection with Carus of an essential
polarity between the conscious and the unconscious, but one that contrasts sharply with
 the unconscious in german philosophy 209
the stark dualism to be encountered in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud – although it
should be noted that, in his definition of the unconscious, Carus anticipated some of the
features of the Freudian unconscious. Since the term ‘the unconscious’ was henceforth
accorded central importance in psychological life, one can speak of a replacement or
appropriation of the vital power by the unconscious (see Goldmann 2005). This second
line of tradition can be termed that of the Romantic-vital unconscious.

4. The Turn Towards the Primacy of the ‘Unconscious Will’ in the

Post-idealist Period
A third tradition is represented by Schopenhauer with his major work The World As Will
and Representation (Schopenhauer [1818/1844] 1966), by Eduard von Hartmann with his
Philosophy of the Unconscious (Hartmann [1868] 2001) and by Nietzsche with his Thus
Spoke Zarathustra ([1883–5] 1961) and other works. These works lead to the breakthrough
of the idea of human beings’ dangerous instinctual nature (Triebnatur) and thus also of that
of ‘evil’, which was largely tabooed in Romanticism. The – philosophical – problem which
these works shared concerned the dialectics of the power/powerlessness relation between
the ego (in the sense of reason, intellect, consciousness) and the unconscious (in the sense
of instinctual nature, will, id).
Schelling, amongst others, had already paved the way for greater attention to be devoted
to the compulsive and irrational sides of human nature. In his work on freedom of 1809
(Schelling 2006), he developed a fundamentally new conception of nature – as compul-
sion, drive, desire and addiction – and he called this irrational power ‘will’, in stark
contradiction to the traditional understanding of the will as a rational faculty. Schelling’s
successors, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, took his redefinition of the will as their starting
point. They no longer accepted the enchanted conception of nature of Romanticism, but
treated it instead as a dangerous instinctual nature. Thus at the beginning of the
nineteenth century there was, in Odo Marquard’s words, a new ‘turn towards reality’.
Nature lost ‘the attributes of harmony, egohood and purposiveness, its rational-historical
and intact, organic character; it is stripped of its aesthetic properties. This process can be
called the ‘‘disenchantment of Romantic nature’’’ (Marquard 1987: 199). Egoism, aggres-
sion and the striving for power – and thus also the long-tabooed ‘evil’ – were henceforth
numbered among the natural human drives.
Schopenhauer’s philosophical system turned the traditional hierarchy of mind and
instinctual nature completely on its head (see Gödde 2005; Baum et al. 2005): human
beings are the slaves of their egoistic cravings, of the ‘will to live’, against which their
intellect can offer little by way of resistance. The will, which is depicted as blind and devoid
of cognition and intention, is, for Schopenhauer, always the primary and fundamental
reality. By comparison, for him, the intellect is in every respect ‘secondary, subordinate and
conditioned’. To demonstrate this is all the more necessary for Schopenhauer because all
philosophers before him

place the true or real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness.
Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them
. . . [the] soul, as primarily and essentially knowing and only in consequence of this,
secondarily and derivatively, as willing. This extremely old, universal and fundamental
error . . . must first of all be set aside. (Schopenhauer [1844] 1966: 2: 198)
210 g ü n t e r g ö d d e
The world of the will ‘is not essentially united with consciousness’, but is related to
consciousness ‘as something illuminated to light, as the string to the sounding-board’
(199). In another passage, from his manuscript remains, he writes:

Everything original, all genuine being is unconscious; that which has passed through
consciousness has become representation and its expression is the communication of a
representation. All genuine qualities in the character or mind of man are therefore un-
conscious and only as such do they make a deep impression. All awareness of the manner
of acting is at any rate half affectation, i.e. deception. (Schopenhauer 1988–90: 3: 480)

At the psychical level the main expressions of the unconscious will are the somatic
emotions, feelings and passions. The will’s symbol is the ‘heart’, whereas only the cognitive
and rational are ascribed to the ‘head’:

Accordingly, we say: he has a bad heart; his heart is in this business; it comes from his
heart; it cut him to the heart; it breaks his heart; his heart bleeds; the heart leaps for joy;
who can read a man’s heart? . . . Quite especially, however, love affairs are called affairs
of the heart, affaires du coeur, because the sexual impulse is the focus of the will and the
selection with reference thereto constitutes the principal concern of the natural, human
willing . . . (Schopenhauer [1844] 1966: 2: 237)

In an astonishingly radical move, Schopenhauer proceeded in his metaphysics of sexual love

to anticipate Freud’s notion that sexual desire is the strongest and most active of all of the
natural human being’s drives and passions. ‘This, however, is the piquant element and jest of
the world, that the principal concern of all men is pursued secretly and ostensibly ignored as
much as possible’ (513). From the perspective of the history of philosophy, Schopenhauer
made a turn both from the mind to the body and the drives and from the rational to the
irrational. That his metaphysics of the compulsive-irrational will contains a new kind of
psychology of the unconscious is largely a function of his doctrine of the primacy of the will
and of the subordinate status of the intellect. He expressed the underlying point in the
formula: ‘What opposes the heart is not admitted by the head’ (218).
In his Philosophy of the Unconscious, Eduard von Hartmann appealed to Schopenhauer’s
conception of the unconscious ‘will’ but also to Hegel’s ‘idea’ and he tried to reconcile the
two opposed currents in his philosophical system. The twofold nature of the unconscious as
powerful will and as purposive cognition (zweckrationale Erkenntnis) finds expression in the
following descriptions:

1. The unconscious does not become ill.

2. The unconscious does not succumb to fatigue.
3. All conscious representation assumes the form of sensuousness; unconscious thinking
is exclusively non-sensuous.
4. The unconscious does not vacillate and doubt, it does not need time to reflect but
grasps the result instantaneously.
5. The unconscious does not err.
6. The unconscious acquires its value through memory.
7. In the unconscious, will and representation are inextricably bound up with one
another – nothing can be willed which is not represented and nothing represented
which is not willed (see Hartmann [1868] 2001: 2: 47–8).
 the unconscious in german philosophy 211
The characterisation of the unconscious as a tireless source of energy, as a workshop of
desires and as the adversary of the conscious coheres for the most part with Carus’s earlier
conception and with Freud’s later conception.
From an epistemological point of view, unconscious willing and unconscious represent-
ing lie outside experience and hence can be discovered only indirectly. The will can be
inferred from its motives, from its accompanying and ensuing feelings, from its effects and
from the conscious representation which constitutes the goal or the content of the will.
Representing falls under the generic concept of representation only as an ‘essential ideal
anticipation of a performance of the will to be realised’. Since willing and representing are
inextricably bound up with one another in the unconscious, reverse inferences can be
made from either side:

Where unconscious representation can be discovered, one must also infer back to a will
whose content it is and which represents its tendency towards realisation; where an
unconscious will can be discovered, one must also infer back to an unconscious
representation which lends this willing determinateness, direction, aim and content.
(Hartmann 1901: 79–80)

With his hypothesis that psychology is primarily concerned with unconscious psycho-
logical activity, Hartmann occupies a middle ground between the materialists and the
idealists, although this did not prevent his opponents from attacking him vigorously from
both sides. Hartmann agreed with the materialists that conscious processes are physiolo-
gically determined. However, he rejected the view that all psychological and mental
phenomena can be explained in terms of the dispositions of physical molecules. This
objection suggests that Hartmann understood the unconscious in anti-materialistic and anti-
mechanistic terms. In fact, he conceived of the unconscious in terms of a ‘a teleological
activity alongside and above the molecular processes of the unconscious’ (116). All processes
in the human organism, as well as those in animal and plant organisms, are marked by
purposiveness. This shows that Hartmann was opposed not only to physiological materialism
but also to Darwin’s anti-teleological principle of selection. Hartmann was a staunch anti-
Darwinist and a founder of neo-vitalism (on this, see also Chapter 6 in this volume).
Against the idealists, who postulated the supremacy of the intellect and consciousness
over the body, Hartmann argued that consciousness is purely passive and unproductive.
This objection to idealism reveals that Hartmann, with his proof of unconscious psycho-
logical activity, rejected the ideas of God’s absolute consciousness and of the immortality of
the soul and that, like Schopenhauer before him, he attempted to dethrone consciousness.
For Hartmann, consciousness is ‘merely an intermittent epiphenomenon’ in the stream of
the unconscious and arises only at intersections where the unhindered activity of the
unconscious is blocked and reflected back upon itself (81).
When Hartmann describes his philosophy as ‘inductive metaphysics’ he is trying to
reconcile the inductive procedure of the natural sciences with the deductive procedure of
metaphysics by, on the one hand, explaining conscious phenomena in terms of the
physiological and psychical unconscious and, on the other, tracing them back deductively
to a psychical activity in the form of unconscious willing and representing. As laudable as
Hartmann’s approach was, it proved to be problematic to draw inferences from the inductively
ascertained material to an ‘absolute’ unconscious and to proceed to make deductions which
could be productive for theory-guided induction. An empirically grounded psychology, such as
that realised by Freud, remained beyond Hartmann’s purview.
212 g ü n t e r g ö d d e
It is a well-known fact that the young Nietzsche was a passionate follower of Scho-
penhauer. After his ‘Schopenhauerean conversion’ at the age of twenty-one, his philo-
sophical thought was inspired for the most part by the metaphysical idea of the will to life.
Schopenhauer’s idea of redemption through art offered Nietzsche an escape from this
pessimistic outlook. Through Richard Wagner’s musical drama, he sought to gain access to
and a foothold in a deeper – ‘Dionysiac’ – stratum of life. If Nietzsche’s early work remains
influenced by Romantic notions of the unconscious as more original, higher and more
authentic by comparison with consciousness, in his second – pro-enlightenment –
developmental phase he distances himself increasingly from Schopenhauer, Wagner
and the Romantic philosophy of nature. He ultimately rejects the metaphysics of the
will to life as still Romantic – in the sense of being not sufficiently enlightened and
scientific. During this period he takes his orientation from the idea of science, which is
supposed to take the place of the old metaphysics, and he looks for connections to the then
highly topical findings of physiology and of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Nietzsche views the drives, accordingly, as the decisive forces of life which set the whole
psychophysical organism in motion and force their way out from inside in order to
discharge their physiological energy. In this way he arrives at the conception of a drive-
unconscious. Thus in Daybreak he writes:

However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete
than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name
even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and
counterplay among one another and above all the laws of their nutriment remain wholly
unknown to him. (Nietzsche [1881] 1997: 74)

The underlying activity of the drives is explained on the following hypothesis:

there come into play motives in part unknown to us, in part known very ill, which we
can never take account of beforehand. Probably a struggle takes place between these as
well, a battling to and fro, a rising and falling of the scales – and this would be the actual
‘conflict of motives’: – something quite invisible to us of which we would be quite
unconscious . . . the struggle itself is hidden from me and likewise the victory as victory;
for, though I certainly learned what I finally do, I do not learn which motive has
therewith actually proved victorious. But we are accustomed to exclude all these
unconscious processes from the accounting and to reflect on the preparation for an
act only to the extent that it is conscious. (79–80)

In this context Nietzsche poses a radical challenge to the pre-eminence of consciousness

in mental life: ‘One thinks that it constitutes the kernel of man; what is abiding, eternal,
ultimate, most original in him! One takes consciousness to be a given determinate
magnitude! . . . Sees it as the ‘‘unity of the organism’’!’ But this is a ‘ridiculous over-
estimation and misapprehension of consciousness’ (Nietzsche [1887] 2001: 37). Nietzsche
regards the view of consciousness as ‘the highest achievable form, as the supreme kind of
being’ (1968: 286) as an egregious error. The genuine dynamics of life play out below the
level of consciousness. More important than ‘all our beautiful moods and heights of
consciousness’ are the ‘animal functions’. ‘What one used to call ‘‘body’’ and ‘‘flesh’’ is of
such unspeakably greater importance’ (355).
From the realisation that ‘the superficiality of psychological observation has laid the
 the unconscious in german philosophy 213
most dangerous traps for human judgement and conclusions and continues to lay them
anew’ ([1878] 1996: 41) Nietzsche derives the motivation to develop a new kind of
‘unmasking psychology’ in the field of tensions between instinct and reason, the rational and
the irrational, appearance and reality, falsehood and truth. Since psychoanalysis grew out
of a similar dialectic of veiling and unveiling, masking and unmasking, hiding and
revealing, deceiving and disenchanting, one can speak of a shared basic structure in
the psychologies of Nietzsche and Freud. To this common basic structure belong:

1. the guiding anthropological conception of a drive-related unconscious,

2. a model of motivation in terms of the psychology of drives,
3. the idea of self-delusion,
4. the closely related conflict-defence model (Konflikt-Abwehr-Modell),
5. the illness-triggering dynamics of the suppression of emotions,
6. ‘internalisation’ as the origin of exaggerated guilt feelings and
7. the assumption that ‘ascetic ideals’ have pathogenic effects (see Gödde 2010: 528–9).

Given the wealth and variety of his unmasking psychology, Nietzsche is rightly regarded
as an influential precursor of the later psychologies of the unconscious (see Gödde 2002).
In his later work he again falls back upon Schopenhauer’s conception of the will, but lends
it a new interpretation: the restlessly longing will to life which craves redemption is
replaced by a dynamic, expansive and life-affirming will to power. For Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer’s basic misconception consisted in viewing desire as the ‘essence’ of the
will, thereby ‘lowering the value of the will to the point of making a real mistake’ and
regarding ceasing to will as ‘something higher, indeed the higher as such’ (Nietzsche 1968:
52, translation amended). Nietzsche, on the contrary, sees in the will to power a tendency
of all living beings to go beyond mere self-preservation and the preservation of the species
and to extend their own sphere of power in every direction. For him the will to power is not
an ultimate metaphysical unity but can be conceived only as ‘organization and cooperation’
or as ‘a pattern of domination’ (303) designed to coordinate and integrate the multiplicity
of one’s drives and, once unity has been achieved, to defend it both within oneself and
towards the outside.
Summing up, one can speak with reference to Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s philo-
sophy of the tradition of a compulsive-irrational unconscious.

5. The Unconscious in Freud

In the nineteenth century the unconscious underwent a major transfer from the philo-
sophical disciplines of metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics to psychology, medicine (above
all neurology and psychiatry) and psychotherapy. The most influential contributor to this
development was Sigmund Freud (see Gödde 2010).
When the ‘discovery of the unconscious’ is attributed to Freud, what first springs to mind
is his clinical experiences and findings in the treatment of neuroses and the interpretation
of dreams. His guiding assumption was that, when conflicts arise within the psyche,
especially embarrassing ideas which are marked by aversion are repressed without losing
their efficacy. Freud identified the deeper reason for the repression in a more or less
systematic dishonesty towards oneself. He recognised that revealing repressions, and thus
the means by which truth is discovered, has liberating and healing effects. As he later
remarked, it was primarily through ‘the study of pathogenic repressions’ (Verdrängungen)
214 g ü n t e r g ö d d e
that psychoanalysis was compelled ‘to take the concept of the ‘‘unconscious’’ seriously’
(Freud [1925] 1954–73f: 20: 31).
Parallel to his clinical theory, from 1895 onwards Freud envisaged a farther-reaching
general theory – the so-called metapsychology – intended to ground the scientific character
of his new direction in psychology. In developing this project, he proceeded at first in the
manner of a neurological psychologist. He found himself faced with the question of ‘how
the theory of mental functioning takes shape if quantitative considerations, a sort of
economics of nerve-force, are introduced into it’ (Freud 1985: 129). Following a period of
serious self-doubt, he informed his Berlin friend Wilhelm Fliess, clearly in an ecstatic frame
of mind, that:

In one energetic night . . . the barriers suddenly lifted, the blinders fell away and one’s
gaze encompassed everything from details on neurosis to the conditions of consciousness.
Everything seemed to fit everything else, the gear-wheels meshed, one got the impression
that the thing was now actually a machine, that it would soon be running on its own
steam. The three systems of neurons, the free and the bound states of quantity, the
primary and secondary processes . . . the two biological rules of attention and defence,
the quality signs, real[ity] signs and thought signs . . . the sexual conditions of repression,
ultimately the conditions of consciousness in its perceptual function – it all passed
muster and it still does today! Of course, I can hardly contain my delight . . . (149)

The result of these theoretical efforts was the Entwurf einer Psychologie (the ‘Project for a
Scientific Psychology’, as it was titled in English) of 1895, a manuscript published only after
Freud’s death, which reveals his materialistic orientation at the time. One can draw a line
here from Descartes, through the mechanistic materialism of the nineteenth century, up to
the group of physiologists around Hermann von Helmholtz, to which Freud’s teacher Ernst
Brücke also belonged. The thinkers within this tradition consistently sought a material
support for psychological processes and thus adopted an opposing programme to the
Romantic philosophy of nature and its central principle of vital power, which they rejected
as deductive and speculative.
Although Freud distanced himself from his neurologically oriented apparatus model of
the psyche soon after writing the Entwurf, in The Interpretation of Dreams he continued to
speak of a ‘psychical apparatus’, of psychological instead of physiological energies, of a
psychological instead of a physiological principle of constancy and of a psychological
instead of an anatomical topography. The concepts, analogies and metaphors employed in
The Interpretation of Dreams were henceforth to be understood in purely psychological
terms, even though they were still beholden to the general conceptions of the materialist
tradition.
The central question for the constitution of psychoanalysis was whether an unconscious
psychological domain exists alongside the conscious at all. Answering this question called
for a critical engagement with the then-dominant philosophy of consciousness. Among
those who, towards the end of the nineteenth century, identified psychical with conscious
phenomena were, in particular, the two dominant schools of philosophy in Austria,
namely, those of Johann Friedrich Herbart and Franz Brentano.
Herbartianism represented the mainstream psychology in Austria at the time. Compar-
isons between Herbart’s and Freud’s basic conceptions of the ‘psychological mechanism’,
the ‘machine’ or ‘apparatus’ constructed in the manner of a physical structure, have
revealed profound similarities (see Dorer 1932; Hemecker 1991). Yet even if one can
 the unconscious in german philosophy 215
already speak of a repression-resistance theorem in Herbart, this must be seen within the
framework of a rationalist and metaphysical philosophy of a traditional kind. Freud did not
merely adopt these abstractions but filled them with life in the context of his clinical theory
and practice, in the process subjecting them to crucial transformations (see Gödde 2010:
272–5).
Freud also kept his distance from the epistemology of his former philosophy teacher
Brentano, the founder of a second major direction in psychology in Austria. In his work of
1874 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano took an uncompromising stance
against the hypothesis of an unconscious and claimed that, in addition to the consciousness
of facts, there is a second consciousness directed to one’s own person which is accessible to
‘inner perception’. Indeed, the judgements of inner perception possess that ‘immediate
infallible evidence’ which no other cognition possesses (Brentano [1874] 1995: 126). Such
an optimistic assessment stood in stark contrast with Freud’s clinical results in the
treatment of neuroses and self-analysis.
Freud instead began to take his orientation from philosophers who defended the
hypothesis of the unconscious. In his letters to Fliess we find explicit references to the
philosopher Wilhelm Jerusalem who taught in Vienna, to Hippolyte Taine, to ‘old
Fechner’ and above all to Theodor Lipps, a philosophy professor who taught in Munich.
In the letter of 31 August 1898, Freud writes:

I found the substance of my insights stated quite clearly in Lipps . . . Consciousness is

only a sense organ; all psychic content is only a representation; all psychic processes are
unconscious. The correspondence [of our ideas] is close in details as well; perhaps the
bifurcation from which my own ideas can branch off will come later. (Freud 1985: 325)

Lipps had already taken a firm stance in favour of the hypothesis of the unconscious in his
1883 work Die Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (The Basic Facts of Mental Life; Lipps
1883). At the Third International Congress of Psychology in Munich, he delivered a
programmatic lecture on ‘Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der Psychologie’ (The Concept of
the Unconscious in Psychology) in which he defended the thesis that the question of the
unconscious in psychology ‘is less a psychological question than the question of psychology’
(Lipps 1897: 146). For Freud, he became the chief witness in defence of the scientific
character of the basic assumption of the unconscious in psychology.
In Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud introduced a topographical model
which distinguished between the systems of the ‘conscious’, of the ‘preconscious’ and of the
‘unconscious’ in the strict sense. The idea of the unconscious was at first informed by the
theory of repression. One can speak of a repression-unconscious associated exclusively with
the psychological domain; the somatic – in the sense of the later theory of drives – remained
excluded for the present. What was decisive for the distinction between the (merely)
preconscious and the unconscious (proper) in the first topography was the hypothesis that
there is a threshold between the two where a ‘censorship’ resists wishes as they try to force
their way out of the unconscious. The unconscious proper, as a region of repressed wishes,
passions and fantasies, exhibits certain features and functions which do not appear in the
preconscious domain: the processes of condensation and displacement, the characteristics of
indestructibility and non-contradictoriness, regulation in accordance with the pleasure
principle and the mode of operation of the primary process. These features stem in part from
the tradition of the Romantic-vital unconscious, in part from the models of the modern
natural sciences. Freud describes the unconscious proper as the ‘dynamic’ unconscious.
216 g ü n t e r g ö d d e
Thus Freud’s original conception of the unconscious emerged at the intersection of two
philosophical traditions: on the one hand, a tradition which assigned the unconscious to
the psychological domain and accorded it primacy in mental life and, on the other, the
materialist tradition which sought to integrate the unconscious into an apparatus model of
the psyche. Since Freud’s attention in this early phase was focused on the effectiveness and
the knowability of the psychical unconscious, he was influenced by the tradition of the
cognitive unconscious, although his conception of the dynamic unconscious envisaged
more deep-lying motivational substrates than his predecessors. On a merely cognitive
conception, according to Freud, illumination and enlightenment would end at the level of
the preconscious and would remain too much beholden to the rational model of
consciousness.
In his work between 1900 and 1915, Freud made a turn to a foundation based on the
theory of drives. With the help of two drive theories – the dualism of the sexual and ego
drives and later the additional dualism of narcissistic and object libido – he tried to place
his conception of the unconscious on a new foundation. In the 1915 essay ‘The
Unconscious’, he relativised the previous equation of the unconscious with the repressed;
he now states that the repressed is not coextensive with the unconscious but is merely a
part of the latter. From this perspective there is also an original unconscious, which Freud
compared with an ‘aboriginal population of the mind’ (Freud [1915] 1954–73a: 14: 195).
He spoke in this context of ‘inherited mental formations’ which formed the core of the
unconscious; to this later accrues ‘what is discarded during childhood development as
unserviceable’. With this step from a point of view centred on repression to a genetic one
geared to drives, the previous orientation to a pure psychology was changed in favour of a
biologically grounded developmental theory.
In Freud’s later work, psychosexuality, the life instincts and Eros are no longer the sole
centre. The dynamics of the unconscious which spring from the instinctual nature of
human beings seemed to Freud to be even more shaped by irrational forces which are
hostile to life than he had assumed until then. With the dualism of Eros and Thanatos (or
the death drive) in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ of 1920, Freud developed a third theory
of drives. He assigned Eros the task of connecting the natural with the psychical: in
relations between the sexes, in the family, in the formation of groups and masses and, above
all, in the highest forms of cultural activity. The death drive, by contrast, counteracted the
progressive tendencies of tension, change and advancement.
In the 1923 essay ‘The Ego and the Id’, Freud presented a new structural model. He
divided the psychological apparatus into the three agencies of the ‘id’, the ‘ego’ and the
‘super-ego’ and stressed that ‘we land in endless obscurities and difficulties if we keep to our
habitual forms of expression and try, for instance, to derive neuroses from a conflict
between the conscious and the unconscious’ ([1923] 1954–73d: 19: 17). Among the
difficulties discussed here are, most importantly, the problem of localising the forces of
repression; the problem of moral values, conscience and ideals; that of internalisation,
narcissism and the self; that of anxiety and that of aggression and the instincts of self-
preservation (see Sandler et al. 1997: 141–52).
Freud postulates the ‘id’ as the original location both of the libidinous and of the
aggressive and destructive drives. As a dark, inaccessible and scarcely controllable part of
our personality, the id has ‘no organization, produces no collective will, but only the
striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of
the pleasure principle’ (Freud [1933] 1954–73g: 22: 65). In this context, Freud’s affinity
with the idea of the compulsive-irrational will, as prefigured in Schopenhauer’s and
 the unconscious in german philosophy 217
Nietzsche’s philosophy of life, becomes increasingly apparent. If Freud had already declared
that Schopenhauer’s ‘unconscious ‘‘Will’’ is equivalent to the mental instincts [Trieben] of
psycho-analysis’ (Freud [1917] 1954–73b: 17: 143–4), the Frankfurt School social theorist
Max Horkheimer re-emphasised this when he wrote that:

The unconscious in Schopenhauer is in fact ‘the main reality: the will’; the will, which
human beings in fact generally did not know how to describe. However, both are
identical insofar as one can also interpret Schopenhauer’s philosophy . . . in psycho-
logical terms and, conversely, one can also interpret the concept of the unconscious in
Freud in a philosophical sense. (Horkheimer [1972] 1987: 454–6; see also Schmidt 1988:
393–5)

The characterisation of Schopenhauer’s will agrees literally with the Freudian id and a
corresponding comparison can be drawn between Freud’s ego and Schopenhauer’s intellect
(see Zentner 1995: 87–8).
According to Freud, the ego must not be identified with consciousness, because the ego
cannot become conscious of the acts of repression and resistance which originate in it, for
otherwise the success of the repression would be jeopardised. Instead of speaking of a
conflict between the conscious and the unconscious, therefore, one must speak of a conflict
between ‘the coherent ego and the repressed which is split off from it’. Consistently
thought through, this leads to the conclusion that: ‘A part of the ego, too, and Heaven
knows how important a part, may be Ucs., undoubtedly is Ucs’ (Freud [1923] 1954–73d:
19: 9). With this Freud paved the way for an ego-psychological research programme in
psychoanalysis in which the ego was liberated from its previous odium of rationality and
superficiality by comparison with the profundity of the unconscious.
The key innovation made in ‘The Ego and the Id’ resides in the fact that the superego is
introduced as a so-called ‘step’ or ‘differentiation’ (Stufe) within the ego and thus as a third
agency. Although the concepts ‘ego ideal’, ‘ideal ego’ and ‘super-ego’ had already cropped
up in earlier works, from now on Freud uses the term ‘superego’ as a terminus technicus and
distinguishes between its functions as ideal and as prohibition. (Subsequently he divided
the superego into the three functions of self-observation, ideal formation and conscience.)
In the context of the structural model, the importance of the substantive concept of the
unconscious gradually declined in favour of the concept of the id. The word ‘unconscious’
was now used in the adjectival form to designate a psychical quality of the three agencies.
The essential point was that the former region of the unconscious psychological processes
was augmented by particular ego and superego components. Following the introduction of
the structural theory, Freud understood psychoanalysis as ‘a psychology of the id (and of its
effects upon the ego)’ ([1924] 1954–73e: 19: 209). In the subsequent development marked
by ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’ of 1926, through the 1933 lecture ‘The Dissection
of the Psychical Personality’ and up to ‘An Outline of Psycho-analysis’ of 1940, he
continued to refine his structural theory, but without making any further essential changes.
A fundamental difficulty was and remains the conceptual ambiguity of the unconscious.
A prominent representative of the orientation which leans towards the Enlightenment
pole was Alfred Adler, the founder of individual psychology, with his major 1912 work The
Neurotic Character (Adler 2002). Adler attached much less importance than Freud to the
opposition between the spheres of the rational-conscious and the irrational-unconscious.
His sought to demythologise the understanding of the unconscious as a dark, fateful power
in the life of the mind. Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, took the
218 g ü n t e r g ö d d e
opposite route. In his 1954 work The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Jung 1980),
he introduced the idea of a ‘collective’ unconscious which is determined by ‘archetypes’,
that is, primordial images or templates (Urbilder) of structural possibilities of the mind. In
psychoanalysis, authors such as Sándor Ferenczi, Georg Groddeck, Michael Balint, Donald
W. Winnicott and Heinz Kohut also belong to the tradition of Romantic thought.

6. The Unconscious in Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis

During the 1960s and 1970s, Freud’s successors undertook a critical re-examination of
psychoanalytical metapsychology and of the associated concepts derived from the mechan-
istic tradition. The American psychoanalyst Roy Schafer (1976: 104) objected that the
talk of psychical systems, structures or agencies, of primary and secondary processes, of
drives and energies, depict these as ‘purposive, meaning-creating, choice-making, action-
oriented entities’, ‘as if they were minds within the mind, or homunculi’.
The three agencies have experienced shifting careers in psychoanalysis. In the late
1920s, there began a trend away from the psychology of the id to the psychology of the ego
(Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Rudolph Loewenstein), which remained
dominant for decades. In so-called object relations theories, from the 1950s and 1960s
onwards the primary emphasis shifted from the drives and the ego to the influence of
internalised object relations (Melanie Klein, W. R. D. Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, Wilfred
Bion). Then John Bowlby and later Joseph D. Lichtenberg underlined the independence
of the needs for attachment, contact, security, exploration and coping from the sexual and
aggressive drives. In the 1970s, the emerging self psychology and the psychology of
narcissism (Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg) appeared on the scene as a further challenge
to the dominant ego psychology. Whereas psychoanalysis at the time still operated within
an individual-centred frame of reference in which the id-, ego-, superego-, self- and object-
related perspectives could be distinguished, family therapy developed interaction-related
and systemic perspectives which shifted the focus from the childhood self to parental
influence and the family system as a whole and which took the reciprocity of relationships
as its main concern. In recent years, an ‘intersubjective turn’ in psychoanalysis has been
postulated (Altmeyer and Thomä 2006). The primary determining factor in this paradigm
shift was the impressive findings of early childhood research concerning the intersubjective
exchanges between mother and child (following Daniel Stern), after a large number of
interpersonal approaches (drawing on Harry Stack Sullivan) and, above all, Stephen
Mitchell’s relational psychoanalysis had already pointed in this direction (see Buchholz
2005).
Freud already provided a few, sparse, conceptual points of orientation for an inter-
subjective perspective. Thus, he wrote in the introduction to ‘Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego’ of 1921 that: ‘In the individual’s psychic life, other people ordinarily
must be considered as either models, objects, helpers or opponents. Thus, from the
beginning, individual psychology is simultaneously social psychology’ (Freud [1921]
1954–73c: 18: 71). Freud elaborates on this in ‘The Ego and the Id’ when he writes that
‘the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes’ and contains within itself ‘the
history of those object-choices’ (19: 29). The psychical processes which play a role here
were dealt with under the headings of identification, introjection and internalisation,
among others. In addition to the focus on the ‘internal’ as opposed to the ‘external’, in both
his topographical and his structural models, Freud worked with the metaphors of the
‘depth’ of the unconscious in contrast to the ‘surface’ of the conscious. The intersubjective
 the unconscious in german philosophy 219
turn, by comparison, involves a displacement in both directions, both upwards from below
and outwards from within, although not in the sense of a mere antithesis, but rather in that
of a new synthesis of the psychical and the social, of self and other: ‘The self needs the
object – reflection in the other, recognition by the other, resistance from the other and so
forth – if it is to develop something like an identity’. Accordingly, as regards the dialogue
with the other, the self ‘must not break it off or let it be imposed from without; the self
possesses a dialogical internal structure into which the other is admitted and in which it
already occupies a ‘‘virtual’’ place’ (Altmeyer 2005: 655, 657). The individual self evolves
in an interactive intermediate space which has been conceived as a ‘psychic matrix’ (Hans
Loewald), as a ‘relational matrix’ (Stephen Mitchell), as ‘mutual recognition’ (Jessica
Benjamin) or as an ‘analytic third’ (Thomas Ogden) (see Altmeyer and Thomä 2006).
If the division into the systems of the unconscious, the preconscious and the conscious
can be described as the first topography and the distinction between the agencies of the id,
the ego and the superego as the second topography, then the present-day discourse can be
thought of as offering a third topography of the internal, the external and the intermediate,
or, alternatively, of self, other and interaction. To this effect, the concepts which have
been understood until now in intrapsychic terms must be reconceptualised and elaborated
from intersubjective perspectives. For the present it is difficult to predict whether the
intersubjectivists’ hope for an integration of psychoanalysis under a unifying paradigm will
be fulfilled; but they have certainly contributed to a reassessment and re-examination of
the assumptions underlying Freud’s structural model.

7. Concluding Remarks
Although the polarity between consciousness and the unconscious was prefigured by the
dialectic of Enlightenment and Romanticism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
it exercised its full effects only in nineteenth-century philosophy, psychology and
medicine. Several currents played a role in this upsurge of the unconscious, in particular
the cognitive psychologies of Herbart, Fechner and Lipps, the Romantic tradition of the
Schelling school and the late Romantic Carus, the philosophy of the compulsive-irrational
will in Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann and Nietzsche and, not to be forgotten, the
medical-psychological research of Charcot, Bernheim and Pierre Janet. The idea of the
unconscious acquired central importance in Freud and Jung and subsequently in psycho-
analysis and depth psychology in general up to the present day, although here an
unmistakable multiplicity of perspectives was already apparent from an early date (see
Buchholz and Gödde 2005a; 2005b).
The fact that Freud consistently upheld the demarcation of psychoanalysis from the
philosophy of the unconscious was presumably primarily a consequence of his positivistic
theory of science, which seems to be marked by unresolved contradictions. The notion of a
purely clinical theory of psychoanalysis which is free from any residue of metaphysics
appears to be illusory. There is no science without philosophical presuppositions and
background assumptions. The philosophical tradition of the unconscious was integrated
from the beginning into Freud’s metapsychology as an important component and lives on
in it in a latent fashion.
Today there is a broad agreement that unconscious processes also exhibit a logic and an
intentionality. Even the more recent cognitive psychology and findings in neuroscience
assume that cognitive processes occur for the most part unconsciously. Unconscious
perception, unconscious thought and unconscious influences on mental processes are
220 g ü n t e r g ö d d e
among the accepted topics of research in modern psychology. Bringing the unconscious
into consciousness – not just in the sense of rational clarification, but as the integration of
undeveloped and fragmented personality components – remains a general principle of
analytic and depth-psychological therapies.

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 12
Individuality, Radical Politics and the Metaphor of
the Machine

Alex Zakaras

1. Introduction
The concept of individuality expresses an ideal of personal emancipation and self-
realisation. For many philosophers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
individuality was the highest end, the telos, not only of human life but also of social
and political organisation. Its attainment, however, often seemed a distant goal: virtually
all of the philosophers who defended individuality believed that it was endangered, if not
entirely stifled, in their own societies. Individuality was, for them, a way of imagining a
modern world worth living in. It gave ethical content to their imagined utopias; it also
served as the normative foundation of their social and political criticism.
What sort of emancipation did individuality promise? What were its social and political
implications? And what would it emancipate us from, exactly? These are the questions I
set out to address in this chapter. The impressions I sketch here are designed to be not so
much representative as illustrative and to reveal some, at least, of individuality’s varied
moral, social and political significance. Three philosophers – Wilhelm von Humboldt,
Pierre Leroux and John Stuart Mill – are central to the essay. Two others – Friedrich
Schleiermacher and Ralph Waldo Emerson – appear more peripherally. Each of them
treated individuality as a centrepiece of his ethical and political theory; none of them used
it in precisely the same way. Together, their writings form a rudimentary conceptual map
that connects individuality to many of the reformist moral and political ideas – liberal,
democratic and socialist – of the period.
Individuality is often defined with reference to the contrasting term ‘individualism’. The
French individualisme was first used by conservatives in the 1820s. Steven Lukes locates its
origins in the work of Joseph de Maistre, the reactionary Catholic critic of the French
Revolution. He used the term to describe a condition of epistemic anarchy, in which the
infallibility of Church teachings had given way to an ‘infinite fragmentation of all
doctrines’ (see his ‘Extrait d’une conversation’: Maistre [1820] 1884–93: 14: 286). Maistre
believed that such fragmentation gave rise to civil anarchy, since church doctrine formed
the very foundation of human association. For him, individualisme described the anti-
nomian and anti-social legacy of both Reformation and Enlightenment rationalism
(culminating as it did in the French Revolution).
But it was another group of French critics of the Revolution, the utopian socialists who
identified with the teachings of Claude Henri de St Simon, who began to use the term
‘individualism’ more regularly (Lukes 1973: 6). For St Simon, individualism was an
ideology that sanctified private egoism and celebrated individual conscience above shared
224 alex zakaras
moral standards. It was a stubborn refusal to countenance ‘any attempt at organization from
a centre of direction for the moral interests of mankind’ (Moulin 1955: 185). For St Simon
too, individualism was part of the ideology of the eighteenth-century philosophers which
had precipitated the Revolution and its ensuing horrors. Individualism would need to be
overcome before humanity could enter the final, ‘organic’ period of its progress toward
perfection. While Maistre looked to the Catholic Church and the absolutist state as sources
of social cohesion, St Simon worked to subject modern society to the authority of an
entirely new religious hierarchy and to a caste of modern technocrats. The pejorative
connotations of the French term remained for many nineteenth-century English writers,
including John Stuart Mill, who used it in his Chapters on Socialism to describe a state of
‘competition, each one for himself and against all the rest’ (Mill [1879] 1963–91: 5: 715). It
was in America that the term was transformed into a liberal ideal.1
The concept of individuality has different, Romantic origins, which can be traced to
Germany in the closing decade of the eighteenth century (and before that, to the writings
of Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder). Early Romantic writers, including Novalis,
Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt,2 celebrated what Georg Simmel has called
an ‘individualism of uniqueness’ (Simmel 1971: 224). Theirs was an ideal of individual self-
realisation and self-expression. It is best illustrated in the figure of the artist, so ubiquitous
in early Romantic thought, who boldly rejects the strictures of bourgeois respectability and
asserts his subjectivity and freedom; who remains fiercely faithful to his own idiosyncratic
creative vision; whose highest aim is the fullest possible development and expression of his
particular talents and capacities; whose life has itself become a work of art.
Unlike individualism, individuality was, in the writings of its inventors, an ideal to
which to aspire. It was an aesthetic ideal, to be sure: the life that attained to some measure
of individuality was, as Mill would put it in On Liberty, ‘a noble and beautiful object of
contemplation’ (Mill 1963–91: 18: 269). But it was also an ethical ideal: the Romantics
believed that self-realisation and expression were matters of personal obligation. As
Charles Taylor argues, describing the rise of expressivism in the eighteenth century,

The differences [between individuals] define the unique form that each of us is called on to
realize. The differences take on moral import; so that the question could arise for the first
time whether a given form of life was an authentic expression of certain individuals or
people. This is the new dimension added by a theory of self-realization. (Taylor 1975: 17)

As in Aristotelian ethics, the perfection and realisation of one’s own humanity became
an ethical, not strictly an aesthetic, matter. But in the Romantic age, self-realisation comes
unhinged from its Aristotelian telos: each individual now has his or her own way, in
Taylor’s words, of ‘being human’ (Taylor 1975: 15). There was no shared, objective ideal of
human excellence to give form to human lives.
By the 1830s, French socialists not only recognised a distinction between individualism
and individuality but also treated them as antitheses. The Saint-Simonian Alexandre de
Saint-Cheron, for instance, warns against ‘confounding individuality with individualism,
with that mean egoism, lonely and disunited, which chokes all dignity . . . while the
sentiment of individuality is the holy exaltation of man, conscious of the life in himself and
all others, in God and nature’ (Saint-Cheron 1831: 600). Indeed, as Sacvan Bercovitch has
argued, the ideal of individuality became a ‘rallying point against liberal ideology’ which
animated critics of the left and right alike (Bercovitch 1993: 315). It was, of course, also
appropriated by a number of prominent liberal philosophers, including Humboldt and Mill.
 individuality, radical politics 225
Though it is first of all an ideal of personal self-realisation, individuality was never a strictly
private concept. For the poets and philosophers who celebrated it, it was invariably bound up
with an ideal of the good society and the just polity. Indeed, for virtually every thinker who
espoused it, the ideal of individuality is best understood as part of a complex of ethical, social
and political ideas: it describes an aspiration to individual self-development which presup-
poses, on the one hand, certain enabling relations between individuals and, on the other, a
certain buttressing framework of political institutions. This complex relationship helps to
explain why many nineteenth-century philosophers used individuality as the normative basis
of their social and political criticism. They condemned existing regimes for stifling human
individuality; in its name, they proposed radical political reforms.
At the same time, the idea of individuality casts light on some fears that troubled many
social and political critics of the period. Individuality was, in their eyes, an ideal under
threat of extinction. Each of the philosophers I consider could imagine a modern world,
not so far removed from their own, in which individuality was entirely suppressed. All of
them used mechanical metaphors to describe these darker modern possibilities. Barred from
individuality, individuals, and sometimes also communities and states, would become like
machines. The machine functions, for many writers of the time, as individuality’s
antithesis: the machine has no distinctive character; its movements are calculated to
serve ends that are not its own; it is incapable of growth or development; and efficiency is
the sole measure of its worth. If individuality casts some light on the utopian imagination of
the time, the metaphor of the machine gives us glimpses of the imagined dystopias that
lurked in the background.

2. Beginnings: Humboldt and Schleiermacher

The end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of
reason and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most
harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. (J. S. Mill,
On Liberty)

These lines of Humboldt’s, quoted by John Stuart Mill, account for a great deal of the
scholarly interest in Humboldt in the English-speaking world.3 They are drawn from
Humboldt’s most important work of political theory, The Limits of State Action, penned
in 1791–2 when he was twenty-four years old. The book appeared in print only in the 1850s
after his death (although excerpts from the book were published by Friedrich Schiller in the
1790s). By the 1850s the intellectual climate was receptive to the ideas expressed there, not
only in Humboldt’s native Prussia but also in France and England (see Sweet 1973: 469–70).
Humboldt was one of the earliest champions of the idea of individuality (Eigentüm-
lichkeit). For him it balanced two competing aspirations: diversity and variety, on the one
hand, and harmony or coherence, on the other. As J. W. Burrow puts it, Humboldt wanted
to achieve ‘unity in diversity’, to retain ‘coherence without sacrificing variety, richness,
diversity’ (1969: xxiv). What can this mean? First, Humboldt believed that the human
individual possessed a very broad variety of intellectual, aesthetic and emotional capacities
or potentials. Like Herder before him, Humboldt’s study of history led him to believe in the
malleability and variety of human character and personality. There were many different
goods – sensual as well as rational – and many forms of human mastery and excellence to
which individuals might aspire, and these could be known both through the study of
history and, more importantly, through the accumulation of varied personal experience.
226 alex zakaras
Humboldt therefore lists ‘variety of situations’ as one of the essential preconditions of
individuality: the greater the variety of our personal experience, the more different
capacities we can tap and develop. ‘Even the most free and self-reliant of men is hindered
in his development, when set in a monotonous situation’ (Humboldt [1851] 1969: 10).
Monotony can be avoided in several ways. In less developed societies, he suggests that the
sheer variety of physical struggles and the diversity of the untamed natural world were
enough to stimulate a varied and active human character (14). In more developed
societies, where the natural world has been mastered and reduced to a less recalcitrant
uniformity, variety comes from association with diverse people, but also through receptive
engagement with the subtler ‘intellectual and moral variety’ of modern life (14–15). In
modern life, more than in earlier stages of human history, diverse experiences must be
deliberately and openly courted.
Diversity alone is not enough, however, to constitute individuality. Individuals must
then labour to bring this diversity into coherent expression, much as the painter subsumes
the myriad elements of a landscape under a single, coherent vision or idea. Out of
experiential variety, individuals must fashion a coherent self and life. Humboldt divides
human nature into ‘form’ and ‘substance’ or ‘idea’ and ‘sensuous perception’. Individuality
requires that sense experience be expressed as idea and ‘the richer and more various the
substance that is combined, the more sublime is the resulting form’ (12). Such combination
and expression allow the individual to avoid the serial ‘one-sidedness’ of one who is
buffeted by successive and various experiences but fails to refine them cumulatively into a
unified character (11). The idea of Bildung, so important to Humboldt and other German
writers of his generation, describes this process of deliberate self-formation through
exposure to difference.
Just as every work of art was unique, both in its constituent details and in the quality of
its idea or vision, so too would every well-developed individual be without precedent in the
world. The fully developed individual, the person who had attained to individuality, would
thus himself contribute to the diversity of the world and also help create the conditions of
variety within which others could flourish. The ideal human community, for Humboldt, is
an association of independent individuals, each of whom might inspire the others to grow
and learn. The ‘true art of social intercourse consists in a ceaseless endeavour to grasp the
innermost individuality of another, to avail oneself of it and, with deepest respect for it as
the individuality of another, to act upon it’ (27–8). Each individuality is at once an end in
itself and a catalyst for the strivings of others.
Humboldt’s use of a mechanical metaphor helps brings his idea of individuality into
clearer focus. He bridled against the political forces that reduced the human individual to a
functional part in some larger, efficient whole; this reduction spelled the death of
individuality. Like other young Romantics of the period, Humboldt reaches time and
again for organic metaphors – ‘flowering’, ‘blossoming’ – when describing individual self-
development.
What, exactly, threatened to make machines out of men? For Humboldt, it was above all
the paternalist state. He vehemently rejected the theory of enlightened absolutism that had
prevailed in Prussia since the seventeenth century. According to this theory, as Frederick
Beiser summarises it, ‘the purpose of the state is to ensure the happiness, morality and piety
of its subjects through wise legislation and administration’ (Beiser 1996: xxiii). Citizens
were not themselves thought competent judges of their own interests. Such states were a
moral and aesthetic travesty, in Humboldt’s view, because they imposed cultural and
intellectual uniformity, crowded out voluntary association and reduced their subjects to
 individuality, radical politics 227
dependents who ‘look for instruction, guidance and assistance from without’ rather than
relying on their own energies and initiative (Humboldt [1851] 1969: 19). The growth of
paternal state bureaucracy crushed the individuality both of the bureaucrats themselves
and of the subjects who came to rely habitually on the state’s initiative and largesse.
Such bureaucracies transformed not just individual character but the whole tenor of social
or communal life. In The Limits of State Action, Humboldt contrasts two visions of human
community. The community organised and governed by the paternalist state, he says,
‘resembles an agglomerated mass of living but lifeless instruments of action and enjoyment’
(31). Though Humboldt is here criticising the Prussian monarchy, these lines anticipate later
Romantic criticisms of mass, commercial society; their target is, in any case, recognisably
modern: bureaucratised government presiding over a passive mass of pleasure-seeking subjects.
‘Under such a system’, he continues, ‘we have not so much the individual members of a nation
living united in the bonds of a civil compact; but isolated subjects living in a relation to the
State’ (18). To this dystopian image, Humboldt juxtaposes a contrasting ideal of a civil society
constituted by voluntary association – a ‘multitude of active and enjoying energies’ taking
responsibility for their own lives and their collective affairs, affiliating on their own terms (31).
This latter form of community induces self-reliance and active character.
Humboldt thought that such community could thrive only under certain political
conditions. He defended what we would now call the ‘minimal state’: a government
dedicated strictly to preserving the security of its subjects, nothing more. He condemned all
government initiatives to advance the ‘positive welfare’ of its subjects, including poor laws,
‘the encouragement of agriculture, industry and commerce’, ‘all regulations relative to
finance and currency, imports and exports’, all provision of national education and even
‘all measures employed to remedy or prevent natural devastations’ (17). All such measures,
says Humboldt, are bound to have ‘harmful consequences’, to produce passive, dependent
individuals. They are also bound to weaken human sympathy: where government provides
for the poor and vulnerable, private subjects are less likely to help each other voluntarily
and even to feel for the suffering of others. Voluntary community, grounded either in shared
responsibility or mutual sympathy, would atrophy.
To specify the limits of state action, Humboldt defends a version of the ‘one very simple
principle’ that Mill would later articulate in On Liberty: ‘any State interference in private
affairs, where there is no immediate reference to violence done to individual rights, should
be absolutely condemned’ (1969: 16). Government is necessary, Humboldt thought,
because human beings are naturally inclined both to take more than their share and to
encroach on the rights of others. Left to redress these harms on their own, people only
initiate a cycle of revenge and counter-revenge that has no foreseeable end. The state,
however, can impose a ‘species of revenge which does not admit of any further revenge’
(Humboldt 1969: 16); herein lies its necessity and genius. Anything it does beyond this,
however (and beyond defence against foreign aggressors), is illegitimate: kings should be
leaders in war and merely judges in times of peace (39).
Like Mill’s, Humboldt’s justification of his principle is consequentialist: government
interference in private affairs has harmful effects. But Humboldt’s defence of limited
government is more clearly perfectionist than Mill’s: the purpose of politics, in Humboldt’s
view, is to encourage human flourishing and the state should be designed with this end in
view. But since the form of human flourishing he admires cannot be created by any power
external to the individual, since state action is inherently homogenising, the scope and
powers of government must be severely limited. The best it can do is help create the two
conditions – freedom and variety – in which individuality is likely to flourish. It creates
228 alex zakaras
freedom by protecting individuals from harm so that they can live, speak, worship and
associate freely, without interference from would-be assailants, either public or private. It
promotes variety by constraining its actions to these minimal guarantees, so as not to create
uniformity among its subjects.
As many commentators have observed, the young Humboldt held strikingly optimistic
conceptions of both human nature and civil society. Freed from the suffocating intrusions of
the paternalist state, individuals could be expected to pursue virtue and self-development.

There can be no one, surely, so degraded as to prefer, for himself personally, comfort and
enjoyment to greatness; and he who draws conclusions for such a preference in the case
of others may justly be suspected of misunderstanding human nature and of wishing to
make men into machines. (18)

Strip away their restraints and men would strive for perfection, would make their lives
works of art. To deny this was to treat men like machines, governed by a single, simple (in
this case hedonic) goal. Humboldt gives no sign of the profound anxiety, felt by later
theorists of individuality, that human beings may not ultimately want greatness or
uniqueness or perpetual exposure to new and unfamiliar experience; that they may be
perfectly satisfied with a complacent, hedonistic conformity. Humboldt has no concern
that both heteronomy and uniformity might themselves be objects of individual desire, or
that (mass) civil society, unaided by the coercive agency of the state, might itself give rise
to a rigid uniformity of belief, desire and character.
One particular manifestation of Humboldt’s optimism is worth emphasising here,
because it contrasts to the attitudes of many other Romantics, including Leroux and
Schleiermacher, to whom I turn next. Humboldt held the view, very radical for his time,
that the Church and state should be entirely separated. The state should make no attempt
to promote religion of any kind. He adamantly rejected the conservative view that morality
itself depended on religion:

The citizen who is wholly left to himself in matters of religion will mingle religious
feelings with his inner life, or not, according to his own individual character; but, in
either case, his system of ideas will be more consistent and his sensations more profound;
his nature will be more coherent and he will distinguish more clearly between morality
and submission to the laws. (69)

Strip away state-sanctioned religious uniformity and we are left with a rich variety of moral
vocabularies, secular and religious, from which individuals can draw freely in fashioning
their own characters. The main current of European Romanticism would soon run directly
against this view: Romantics would turn to the state and especially to religion as a way of
elevating the human person from a condition of degradation from which individuals could
or would not escape without help.
If Humboldt was an optimist about human nature, he considered himself a sober realist
in politics. Though he approved of the French Revolution for its bold assertion of
individual rights and liberties, he doubted that modern French citizens could attain
the virtue required to sustain republican institutions (Beiser 1992: 118). He was deeply
sceptical, moreover, of democracy: ‘properly speaking’, he wrote to Schiller in 1792, ‘free
constitutions do not seem to me so important and salutary. A moderate monarchy on the
whole puts far less straitening fetters on the education of the individual’ (Aris 1965: 157).
 individuality, radical politics 229
He also thought that political reform must come gradually and should be initiated by
political elites themselves. Humbolt, therefore, ends The Limits of State Action not with a
rousing call to action, but rather with a plea for patience. Political reforms too hastily
pursued, he says, before the people are ‘ripe’ for them, can only undermine their own goals
(Humboldt [1851] 1969: 141–4). In this sense, although he bristled at Burke’s assessment of
the French Revolution, Humboldt held decidedly Burkean attitudes about the likely
consequences of abrupt social and political change.
Frederick Beiser has argued that the young Romantics defined themselves in self-
conscious opposition to both absolutist and liberal political ideas. Against the absolutists,
they asserted the personal and political freedom of the individual; against the liberals, who
seemed to them to celebrate hedonism and egoism, they asserted an ideal of community
that often hearkened back to an imagined, rural medieval idyll (Beiser 1992: 223). If their
political ideals were forward looking, inspired by the ambitions of the French Revolu-
tionaries, their social and communal ideals were nostalgic. There is much less of this
nostalgia in Humboldt than in other young Romantics of his generation. Unlike other
young Romantics, such as Novalis and Schleiermacher, Humboldt did not perceive liberal
civil society itself as a danger to individuality, nor indeed as a threat to community. As I
have emphasised, Humboldt shared the Romantics’ acute sense of the importance of close
community, bound together by sympathy and love, and this allowed him to share also an
idealised vision of rural, pre-modern life (‘Their participation in that beneficent toil and
the common enjoyment of its fruits, entwine each family with bonds of love, from which
even the ox, the partner of their work, is not wholly excluded’ (Humboldt [1861] 1969:
22)). But unlike his Romantic contemporaries, Humboldt believed that this vision was
fully consistent with liberal politics, which would provide a minimal framework of
protections within which (voluntary) communities would flourish.
To sharpen the contrast between Humboldt and other contemporary Romantics, it is
worth comparing him to Schleiermacher, whose Monologues of 1800 offer a more
paradigmatic statement of the early Romantic ethical and political perspective. Like
Humboldt, Schleiermacher treats individuality (Eigentümlichkeit) as the highest human
goal. Like Humboldt, he understands individuality to mean the full development of the
individual’s unique capacities and the reflective unification of varied personal experience
into a single harmonious character. ‘It has become clear to me’, he writes, ‘that every
person presents humanity in his own unique way, by his own mixture of its elements, so
that humanity reveals itself in every possible manner and so that everything diverse realized
itself in the fullness of infinitude’ (Schleiermacher [1800] 1996: 174–5). Like Humboldt,
Schleiermacher placed the aspiration to individuality higher even than the will to conform
to the dictates of reason, which imposed uniform obligations on everyone alike. And like
Humboldt, Schleiermacher was a vehement critic of political absolutism, which he
thought stifled individual self-development.
But Schleiermacher saw more dangers to individuality than Humboldt did. In his
Monologues, he finds humanity – European civilisation in particular – squandering its
talents on what he calls its ‘profane task’: the mastery of nature and the provision of
material goods for human welfare. The cultivation of individual character is everywhere
subordinated to this collective enterprise:

the ingenious machine of the community conducts the slightest movement of each
individual along a chain of a thousand links to achieve a single goal, as if they were all
members of a whole and everything they did were its work. (187)
230 alex zakaras
The modern economy and with it the division of labour threaten to reduce humans to
machine parts, to destroy their spontaneity, creativity and spiritual depth. ‘From such a
world’, he laments, ‘you can hope for nothing for your strivings, nothing for your inner
development’ (188).
Schleiermacher saw Humboldt’s ideal of the liberal state as an accomplice in this
degradation of the human person. Here again, the mechanical metaphor returns: Schleier-
macher dismisses the notion that the state should be ‘a merely necessary evil, a mechanism
to prevent and control crime’ (192).4 Instead, he describes the state as humanity’s ‘most
splendid work of art’, through which individual citizens can realise their own higher
aspirations. ‘Where is the power’, he asks, surveying the barren landscape of European
politics, ‘that this highest form of existence gives to a person, the consciousness that
everyone should have of being part of its reason, fantasy and strength?’ (191). He is talking
about the state here and presenting a view of its relationship to individuality at odds with
Humboldt’s. In Schleiermacher’s ideal, the free citizen participates lovingly in the
collective creation and perpetuation of a republican state and this activity motivates
and expresses his individuality. Citizens become artists, each of whom contributes some-
thing distinctive to a shared political design.
Schleiermacher’s several uses of the machine metaphor reveal the depth of his
differences with Humboldt. For Schleiermacher, as we have seen, the modern economy
could itself be described as an ungodly machine that used and disciplined human beings to
suit its own ends. What was needed, in its place, was a spiritual community of free and
equal people, dedicated to the realisation of individuality. But Schleiermacher goes further
in condemning mechanical descriptions of the state itself and insisting it be regarded as a
work of art or an organic entity. One can see the beginning, here, of a shift in the locus of
moral concern within the Romantic tradition, from the individual to the state and,
eventually, the nation. This was a move Humboldt resisted: he was content to describe the
state as ‘a complex and intricate machine’ designed to serve human ends (Humboldt [1851]
1969: 63). ‘The State is not in itself an end’, he reminds us, ‘but is only a means towards
human development’.

3. Pierre Leroux: Between Individualism and Socialism

By the 1830s, the Romantic ideal of individuality was being used, in France too, to
underwrite a politics substantially more collectivist than Humboldt’s. It was used by leftist
philosophers such as Leroux to distance themselves from the authoritarian statism of St
Simon and to articulate a form of socialism that was more hospitable to individual freedom
and more consistent with the ideals of the revolution. For Leroux and other socialists (and
communists) after him, individuality became an animating goal of political and economic
reform; Leroux would have agreed with Edouard Bernstein who at the end of the
nineteenth century wrote that ‘the aim of all socialist measures . . . is the development
and the protection of the free personality’ (Bernstein [1899] 1993: 147).
Pierre Leroux was arguably the first democratic socialist. He was widely admired in his
day as one of the leading French philosophers and political theorists and earned high praise
from such motley figures as Heinrich Heine, Alexander Herzen and Guiseppe Mazzini
(Bakunin 1976a: 14–17). He rose to prominence first as a literary critic; along with Jean
Reynaud, he edited the Encyclopédie Nouvelle; he edited a number of influential journals
and also wrote a number of philosophical treatises – including Of Equality of 1838 and Of
Humanity of 1840. He was a pacifist and held himself aloof from reformist politics for much
 individuality, radical politics 231
of his life, though he was involved as a deputy in the Assemblies of the Second Republic.
He rejected calls to violent revolution and preached gradual reform through the peaceful
propagation of socialist and democratic ideas (Bakunin 1976b: 473).
Leroux’s criticisms of his society (in this case, France in the 1830s and 1840s, under the
July Monarchy) are more varied than Humboldt’s and his outrage more palpable. Yet like
Humboldt, who was infuriated by newly aggressive state censorship in Prussia in the late
1780s, Leroux was first moved to outrage by political repression. In a brilliant 1834 entry in
the Revue Encyclopédique (titled ‘Of Individualism and Socialism’), Leroux draws attention
to the violent repression of the silk workers in Lyon, which he likens to a civil war.
Workers, he says, are being brutalised simply for associating to protect their livelihoods
(Leroux [1834] 1948: 225). Leroux was especially appalled by the government’s apparent
motives in the conflict. ‘In the Sixteenth Century’, he writes, ‘when we assassinated each
other in our civil wars, it was in the name of God, crucifix in hand; it was about the holiest
matters, matters which, while they held our conviction and faith, so rightly dominated our
nature’ (224).5 Now, he says, we are killing each other over strictly material interests. In
the striking paragraphs that open the essay, Leroux is almost nostalgic for the days of
religious violence, when there remained at least some measure of nobility, ‘which took
for its maxim the neglect of lucre’, which shed human blood only for spiritual ends (225).
Now that the Catholic, clerical hierarchy has been replaced by class hierarchy, now that
the priest has given way to the bourgeois, people are killed simply over disruptions in
business (226).
The principles that Leroux finds ascendant in France of the 1830s are materialism and
individualism. Individualism, for him as for St Simon, was the ideology of the English
political economists – the ideology that licenses the unyielding pursuit of personal, material
gain. It was the ideology that ‘makes men, amongst themselves, ravenous wolves and
reduces society to atoms, letting everything arrange itself at random’ (231). It was corrosive
of all moral bonds among humans, it was the negation of all moral and social order. He
compares France in his day to pagan Rome – a society founded on individualism and
slavery – which was overtaken at last by the Christian ideal of communal life and property
(227). Such passages contain strong traces of the St Simonian doctrine of the transitional
or critical age, ushered in by the rupture of an existing moral and social order. St Simon
had taught that history moved through such critical stages on the way to more settled and
progressively more perfect periods of social cohesion.
Leroux was no St Simonian, however. He flirted with St Simonian doctrine briefly, for a
few years in the early 1830s. By 1834, he was sharply critical of its authoritarian political
tendencies. Leroux was one of the first writers to use the term ‘socialism’ (if not the very
first) and in his early writings he uses it to criticise the St Simonian social and political
ideal.6 Socialism, Leroux argues, has emerged as a leading response to the individualism of
the age, but it is no less misguided (231). St Simon and his followers had argued that society
should be reorganised hierarchically under the supervision of a caste of scientists and
captains of industry, who would preside over a planned economy, as well as a new
theocratic elite who would raise the masses from their moral and spiritual torpor. Leroux
denounced such ideas as regressive betrayals of the egalitarian spirit of the Revolution.
Leroux traces an intellectual trajectory from Pope Gregory VII and the Spanish
Inquisition through Robespierre to the St Simonian creed itself, which he describes as
the latest atavistic manifestation of the Catholic impulse to dominate and control (232).
The Revolution had brought temporary chaos, but it was not, as St Simon and other
conservative critics had held, a strictly negative assault on the clerical and aristocratic
232 alex zakaras
order. Rather, it expressed the positive commitments – liberty, equality and fraternity –
upon which a new, democratic order would soon be founded. Leroux saw himself as one of
the prophets of this new order, which would ultimately be dedicated to the ideal of
individuality.
To better understand this ideal of individuality, it is worth clarifying why exactly Leroux
found both individualism and its antithesis, socialism, so objectionable. Leroux associated
individualism with unfettered egoism. He thought it inconsistent with the ideal of human
equality, which required that we each recognise our own beholdenness to the human
species itself. In perhaps his most ambitious work, Of Humanity, he would argue that
egoism was self-contradictory, for it involved neglecting the interests of humanity as
expressed in the lives of other human beings. Since individuals were themselves mani-
festations of this common humanity and since they depended on human community and
society for their flourishing, egoism was a form of self-destruction. Self-interest rightly
understood should lead us to embrace human solidarity and charity for our fellows (Leroux
[1840] 1985: 147, 154).
Equality and solidarity are values Leroux often champions for their own sake. At the
same time, he maintains that the very goal of egalitarian societies is to realise the ideal of
individuality. And he objects to individualism precisely because it inhibits this goal. First,
in transforming humans into ‘wolves’ and unrepentant materialists, it obscures the higher
forms of flourishing to which they might attain. Second, in virtually ensuring the desperate
poverty of the proletariat, it prevents the working classes from attaining the material
preconditions of individuality. ‘It is his dignity, his humanity, his liberty, his independence,
that the proletarian demands, when he aspires to possess material goods’ (Leroux [1834]
1948: 229). Though Leroux decries materialism, he warns also against the naı̈ve, monastic
view that material goods are of no consequence whatever.
There is, finally, a third kind of harm that Leroux associates with individualism and with
the broader liberal ideology that justifies it. Liberal individualism defends the separation of
Church and state and with it the privatisation of religious belief. It encourages the anarchic
proliferation of religious sects. Leroux, like St Simon and other critics of the Revolution,
including Joseph de Maistre, rejected this tendency. Leroux held that the privatisation of
religion leads to a form of human alienation or incompleteness. Civic perfection and
spiritual perfection are consigned to two different areas of life, are artificially separated one
from the other, so that civic man must hold his religious beliefs at a distance and religious
man must confine himself to the private domain.
If individuality was threatened by individualism, so too was it threatened by ‘socialism’.
Socialism was objectionable to Leroux mainly because, in subjecting adult human beings to
yet another authoritarian hierarchy, it infantilised them and stunted their development as
free beings. Leroux’s rejection of state paternalism recalls Humboldt’s: anyone attached to
the ideals of freedom and individuality should, he writes, reject ‘this new papacy, crushing,
absorbing, which would transform humanity into a machine, in which the true living
beings, individuals, would be but useful matter instead of arbiters of their own destiny’
(Leroux [1834] 1948: 233). The metaphor of the machine returns here; Leroux uses it
deliberately in place of the organic metaphors favoured by many conservatives.
Individuality, for Leroux as for Humboldt, meant individual self-development, meant
the full realisation of each individual’s distinctive talents and capacities. Among these were
physical, intellectual and emotional capacities which should be brought into mutual
harmony (Bakunin 1976a: 163). Such harmonious self-development required the freedom
to direct one’s own life:
 individuality, radical politics 233
We must organize for the free development of man’s individuality and not against this
development; in such a way that everyone seeks, according to his affinities, the beings
with whom he should form alliances and the different objects that his personality feels a
need for – and not in such a manner that everyone thinks, loves, works, according to a
guidance that is imposed and impressed upon him as if he were a slave or a machine.
(Leroux 1846: 109)

Like Humboldt, Leroux believed that individuality could flourish only in a free society in
which individuals enjoyed basic rights and liberties. The draft constitution that he
proposed to the National Assembly in 1848 articulates rights to free expression, association
and conscience (among the ‘nine general rights of the man and the citizen’) (Leroux 1848:
26–9). Unlike Humboldt, however, Leroux envisioned a very active role for the state in
creating economic opportunities for the working class. He was sharply critical of the
‘policeman’ state of the individualists, who in the name of private property abandoned the
poor to abject poverty and economic slavery (Leroux [1834] 1948: 232). He never outlined
systematic prescriptions for economic reform, though he favoured the socialisation of the
means of industrial production, as well as a system of regulations designed to safeguard the
health and salary of workers and guarantee them a pension (Evans 1948: 80–4; Bakunin
1976a: 99).
Leroux was also a democrat – in fact, he was more deeply committed to democracy than
to individual rights. Democracy was, in his view, the only form of government suited to
develop human individuality. In making each individual a legislator, in giving each
individual the power to shape society itself, democratic politics demanded that individuals
develop their own voice and capacity for judgement (Leroux 1846: 125). Democracy
refused to subject the ordinary citizen’s judgement and personality to the authority of some
higher power. Like Mill after him, however, Leroux worried that democratic politics might
subject individuals to an invasive tyranny of the majority and he was adamant that the
individual could never surrender to the state control of ‘his thoughts, his loves, his
friendships, the direction of his work or its fruits, in brief the multitude of acts which
together constitute his personality’ (1846: 102).
A striking feature of Leroux’s political ideal was a national religion, the content of which
would be determined democratically. Though all citizens must retain absolute freedom of
conscience and with it the right to dissent vocally against the state religion and the right to
try to change it through democratic suasion, he believed that the state should nonetheless
establish a single religion, prevent the emergence of rival sects and educate children in its
doctrines. He imagined that its basic tenets would be the equality and solidarity of all
humans, as well as a commitment to their individuality. Jack Bakunin writes, of this
religion, ‘human freedom would be furthered by the dogmas of this new religion, which
would be designed to keep an ideal of autonomous individual self-realisation in the minds
and hearts of its adherents’ (Bakunin 1976a: 162). Official positions within the church
would be open to all and Church decisions taken through egalitarian, democratic
procedures.
It is important to notice why Leroux thought this religion necessary to the flourishing
of human individuality. The alienation or incompleteness that afflicted liberal societies
would strip individuals of the motivation to strive for their own development and
perfection (Leroux 1846: 88). Society and culture were sources from which individuals
must draw, and draw freely, in developing themselves. And if the source should fail to
encourage self-development in the first place, should fail also to provide a moral and ethical
234 alex zakaras
foundation upon which individual personality should be layered, it would yield only
egoists, materialists or immoralists (109–11). Here the contrast with Humboldt could
hardly be sharper. Leroux’s views on religion are much closer to Schleiermacher’s, who, like
other young German Romantics, had called for the creation of a new church, founded on
an ideal of human brotherhood, which would help cultivate the spirit and inspire pursuits
of perfection. Neither man, however, held a merely instrumental view of religion: Leroux
believed that the democratic religion would at last realise the true, egalitarian moral
teachings of God, which had been straining to make themselves manifest (with progres-
sively great success) throughout human history.
Leroux believed that people needed help in achieving individuality. Unlike Humboldt,
who believed that government should simply clear a space for individual freedom and let
individuals do the rest, Leroux maintained that the state would be instrumental in the
cultivation not only of individuality itself but also of the communities in which it could
flourish. The state would first redistribute wealth massively and empower workers to
manage their own economic affairs. It would oversee the founding of a new, democratic
religion, which would itself inculcate the values of democratic culture. Without the
government’s agency, individuals would be at the mercy of brutal economic forces and an
egoistic, philistine culture. Individuality’s enemies had multiplied and they would not be
subdued without the agency of the state.

4. John Stuart Mill’s Synthesis

Mill was deeply influenced both by Humboldt’s libertarianism and by French socialism.
Since his philosophy is more familiar to Anglophone readers than either Humboldt’s or
Leroux’s, it needs less exegesis here. I focus mainly on how his treatment of individuality
compares (and contrasts) with the others’.
Mill absorbed the idea of individuality largely from Humboldt and did not stray far from
Humboldt’s use of the term, except in shearing it of some of its metaphysical accompani-
ments. Individuality, for Mill in On Liberty, means the development of the individual’s own
distinctive talents and capacities – including, notably, not just his rational and moral
faculties, but also his ‘desires and impulses’ (Mill 1963–91: 18: 267).7 Like Humboldt, Mill
emphasised the importance of inner harmony or balance: ‘strong impulses’, he says, ‘are
only perilous when not properly balanced; when one set of aims and inclinations is
developed into strength, while others, which ought to co-exist with them, remain weak
and inactive’. And like Humboldt, he thought that our diverse capacities could be realised
only through varied personal experience and self-conscious experiments in living.
Perhaps even more than Humboldt, Mill emphasised the educative effects of choice
itself; that is, the act of choosing. ‘The human faculties of perception, judgment,
discriminative feeling, mental activity and even moral preference’, he argues, ‘are exercised
only in making a choice’ (18: 266–7). Mill argued that beliefs and desires that were simply
absorbed from others unreflectively, or dictated by them, tended to compromise our very
humanity: ‘one whose desires and impulses are not his’, Mill writes, ‘has no character, no
more than a steam-engine has character’ (18: 268). For Mill, as for Humboldt, this notion
of owning one’s own mental states is ambiguous. On the one hand, we own our attitudes by
choosing them; on the other, we own them insofar as they accord with our authentic,
individual ‘nature’ – a nature that becomes apparent to us only through lived experiments,
but that is itself unchosen. The cultivation of individuality is part self-creation and part
self-discovery.
 individuality, radical politics 235
Andrew Valls has argued that Humboldt’s ideal of individuality was more indeterminate
than Mill’s. ‘There is no pursuit whatever’, writes Humboldt, ‘that may not be ennobling
and give to human nature some worthy and determinate form. The manner of its
performance is the only thing to be considered’ (Humboldt [1851] 1969: 23). Mill
disagreed; for him, individuality required the development of ‘higher’ human faculties,
including the moral, aesthetic and intellectual faculties. Not all ways of life, not all kinds of
human activity – no matter the style in which they are conducted – would conduce to such
development. Humboldt would not, I think, have demurred from Mill’s account of the
higher faculties; rather, he was more optimistic than Mill that such faculties could be
realised across a very broad range of human activities. Consider, for instance, his
description of the peasant life:

It seems as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists; that is, men who
love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive
skill and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character and exalt and refine
their pleasures. (Humboldt [1851] 1969: 22)

Where did Mill locate the principal threats to individuality? Like both Humboldt and
Leroux, Mill thought that it was threatened by the paternal state.8 In his 1861 Considera-
tions on Representative Government, Mill invites his readers to imagine a perfectly virtuous,
benign and omniscient despot who acts always in the best interest of his subjects. On what
grounds, he asks, could anyone conceivably object to such a despot’s rule? The answer, he
argues, lies in this regime’s effect on individual character: even the most benevolent
despotism renders its subjects passive and dependent, strips them of a sense of responsibility
for their own lives and for their common affairs. It crushes their individuality. ‘Nor is it only
in their intelligence that they suffer’, says Mill. ‘Their moral capacities are equally stunted’
and their sentiments ‘narrowed’ (Mill [1861] 1963–91: 19: 73). He reproduces Humboldt’s
argument here that the human capacity for sympathy atrophies when people no longer feel
responsible for one another, when they rely on the state as a caregiver.
Like Leroux, he argued that participatory democracy would give citizens the incentive to
assume responsibility for their collective affairs and might hence encourage not only
mutual sympathy but also active characters – that is to say, characters who strove to
improve themselves and their circumstances. Indeed, democracy was his response not only
to paternal government but also to paternal capitalists and factory bosses, whose pacifying
effects on the worker’s mind and character were no less objectionable. Mill argued that
participatory democratic politics, both in the public sphere and in the management of
worker-owned, private cooperatives, could lend some ‘largeness’ to the ideas and senti-
ments of modern citizens (19: 81). Such largeness had been stamped out not only by
infantilising subjection to factory bosses but also by the repetitive drudgery of modern
industrial labour. Self-government could educate citizens and contribute to the develop-
ment of the higher faculties, which were indispensable to the pursuit of individuality.
Democracy was not enough, however, to protect and encourage the cultivation of
individuality. Mill mistrusted democratic governments almost as much as any other; he
worried that paternal despotism would simply be re-created in democratic form. He worried
that democratic governments, supported as they were by a majority of the population,
would impose their will on dissenters more efficiently than any other. He famously
designed the harm principle to constrain the power of democratic majorities and preserve
space for individual autonomy and eccentricity. Individuality became, in this way, one of
236 alex zakaras
the ethical centrepieces of his liberal political philosophy. Unlike Humboldt, however,
whose justification of limited government rests exclusively on the value of individuality,
Mill gave it a utilitarian justification: limited government would maximise human
happiness. The pursuit of individuality was, granted, an integral part of happiness – for
many people, anyway. But Mill’s political theory is less unambiguously perfectionist than
Humboldt’s: he would not have said, as Humboldt did, that the purpose of government is to
realise a certain ideal of human character.
Mill differed most from Humboldt in his insistence that civil society, not government,
posed the most serious threat to individuality. Mill believed that the yoke of conformity,
enforced for the most part not by the state but by ‘society’, most threatened to render
humans uniform and machine-like. He describes this pressure to conform throughout On
Liberty:

The mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is
the first thing thought of; they live in crowds; they exercise choice only among things
commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with
crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow:
their human capacities are withered and starved. (18: 268)

Mill was responding here to a mass, proto-democratic culture that Humboldt never knew.
In describing the origins of this culture, he admitted to a much darker view of human
nature than either Humboldt or Leroux would have accepted. Mill doubted that many
people wanted either individuality or freedom. Many of us, Mill thought, want little more
than the reassuring embrace of the group and aspire to nothing more than ‘collective
mediocrity’ (18: 272). What is more, because the aspiration to individuality is easily
understood as an implicit condemnation of the group, we take a certain pleasure in
stamping it out; we then sanctify our intolerance, and the pleasure we derive from it, as a
form of communal virtue. Mill worried that moderns were making themselves into machines
and then sanctimoniously intimidating anyone who refused to fit the mould (see Zakaras
2007).
The metaphor of the machine had special significance for Mill. It recurs throughout
Chapter 3 of On Liberty, and also surfaces in a crucial passage of his Autobiography:

I conceive that the description so often given of a Benthamite, as a mere reasoning

machine, though extremely inapplicable to most of those who have been designated by
that title, was during two or three years of my life not altogether untrue of me. (Mill
[1873] 1963–91: 1: 172)

He means that his intellect was, at this early stage in his life, a creation of his father’s,
designed to pursue certain goals which had as yet no firm grounding in John’s own
emotions. His philosophical zeal ‘had not its root in genuine benevolence, or sympathy
with mankind’ (1: 172). Mill believed that this deficit was responsible for his ensuing crisis
and depression. And throughout his adult writings, Mill would locate human authenticity
in the emotions: if the personae we fashion through experiments in living are to be
expressions of ourselves, not just false roles, they must reflect and develop our passions. This
helps explain why emotional development was such an important piece, for him, of
individuality. It helps also explain Mill’s enthusiasm for a ‘religion of humanity’, to which I
turn shortly.
 individuality, radical politics 237
The libertarian currents of Mill’s philosophy are somewhat weakened by two other
currents, both of which run closer to Leroux (and to Auguste Comte, whom Mill admired)
than to Humboldt. The first is Mill’s (liberal) socialism. Like Leroux, Mill believed that in
the absence of certain economic preconditions, individuality would remain the exclusive
privilege of the few and that such conditions entailed a substantial, structural overhaul of
the modern economy. The deep divide between capitalist and worker would have to be
overcome by reorganising industrial production around a system of worker-owned (rather
than state-run) cooperatives, which would emancipate workers from dependence on their
capitalist bosses and help ensure a fairer distribution of the fruits of modern productivity
(see Ten 1998; Baum 2007). Also like Leroux, Mill was concerned about the moral effects
of competition in the absence of a strong, egalitarian public spirit, without which ‘man
never thinks of any collective interest, of any objects to be pursued jointly with others, but
only in competition with them and in some measure at their expense’ (Mill [1861] 1963–
91: 19: 82). He acknowledged the familiar socialist concern that competition might
promote a form of ‘individualism’ that would erode human sympathy (5: 249).
Second, Mill turned not only to democracy but also to religion for the cultivation of
moral feeling. This religion, which Mill called a ‘religion of humanity’, would above all
help cultivate a feeling of deep sympathy with all humankind, ‘a desire to be in unity with
our fellow creatures’ (10: 276). Like Leroux, Mill imagined that such a religion would
socialise children and help motivate utilitarian moral behaviour – it would serve as the
‘ultimate sanction for the happiness morality’ (10: 280). The relationship between
individuality and the ideal of universal sympathy cultivated by the religion of humanity
is under-theorised in Mill’s work. Daniel Brudney (2008) has suggested that these form two
separate ideals of human perfection in Mill’s philosophy and are, if not logically
incompatible, very difficult to reconcile practically.
Mill did not think so. He hoped that the pursuit of individuality would be balanced and
directed by sympathy for others. If we took pleasure in the happiness of others, and if this
pleasure was more edified and durable than sensual pleasure, then the sort of life and
personality we would want to cultivate and express would be devoted, in part, to moral
ends – to the wellbeing of others. Sympathy would give shape to our individualities. In
another sense, too, Mill thought the religion of humanity could complement individuality.
In ‘Theism’, he writes,

To me it seems that human life, small and confined as it is, and as, considered merely
in the present, it is likely to remain even when the progress of material and moral
improvement may have freed it from the greater part of its present calamities, stands
greatly in need of any wider range and greater height of aspiration for itself and its
destination, which the exercise of imagination can yield to it without running counter to
the evidence of fact. (Mill [1874] 1963–91: 10: 475)

Mill thought that religion could inspire the pursuit of excellence itself and that the very
idea of the divine, understood as a projection of human perfection, could draw us out of our
collective mediocrity. Here Mill and Leroux agreed: unlike Humboldt, neither trusted that
human beings would strive for transcendence or beauty or moral perfection without
collectively organised social inducements; both thought that religion could serve this
purpose.
One final point of similarity between Mill and both Humboldt and Leroux is worth
mentioning. Classical antiquity figured prominently in each of their accounts of indivi-
238 alex zakaras
duality: when they reached for an example of a time when individualities flourished, they
reached invariably for ancient Greece or Rome. In an early essay titled ‘On Genius’ (1832),
Mill worried that his own age could not possibly measure up to Greek antiquity, especially
in the quality of its individuals. Humboldt and Leroux shared his belief that classical
individuals had been more complete and in some ways more brilliant than their modern
counterparts. None of them, however, used such comparisons as ways of condemning
modernity. Individuality was not, for any of them, part of a nostalgic vision of either
politics or society; rather, it justified social and political reforms that each author under-
stood to be progressive.

5. The Idea of Individuality and its Tensions

The idea of individuality is part of the broader notion of self-development. Like other
ideals of self-development, it suggests that human lives are best lived in pursuit of a higher
self, a self as yet unattained. It is distinctive, though, in celebrating the uniqueness of each
individual, in prioritising openness or receptivity to new and diverse experiences and in
encouraging us to fashion (and refashion) ourselves out of the raw material of such
experience, to create ourselves expressively. Individuality urges one, as George Kateb puts
it, ‘to become the architect of one’s soul’ rather than passively accepting the imprint of
society or circumstance (Kateb 1992: 90). There was, of course, over the course of the
nineteenth century, much disagreement about the precise content and scope of the ideal. I
will conclude by drawing attention to two areas of dispute in particular, both of which
concern individuality’s relationship to the egalitarian moral and political ideals that
animated much political radicalism of the age.
Humboldt, Leroux and Mill believed that individuality was an ideal to which everyone
could in principle aspire. It was not restricted to the genteel class, nor even to the middle
classes (as Humboldt’s description of the farmer illustrates), nor strictly to men. In this
assertion of inclusiveness, all these thinkers were rejecting the common view, decried by
the American William Ellery Channing in his 1838 oration ‘Self-Culture’, ‘that the mass of
the people need no other culture than is necessary to fit them for their various trades’
(Channing 1838: 21).9 The ideal of individuality rested, for these three thinkers, on the
view that all human persons had something valuable and distinctive to bring into the
world. This inclusive, egalitarian conception of individuality resonated throughout nine-
teenth-century political thought, not least in Marx’s writings.
Inclusive individuality also found powerful expression in the works of several American
Transcendentalists, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt
Whitman. For them, individuality was part of the promise of constitutional democracy,
which destroyed both the cultural boundaries and the material inequalities that confined
individuals to certain classes or social stations. Democracy was an invitation to cease being
merely a serf or a proletarian or a petty bourgeois and to be simply oneself. ‘No law can be
sacred to me’, writes Emerson in ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘but that of my nature. . . . The only right
is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it’ (Emerson [1841] 1983:
262). In these lines (and many others like them), the celebration of individual idiosyncrasy
and the radical rejection of authority reach a higher pitch than even Mill could tolerate.
Still, Emerson’s self-reliance, in its celebration of uniqueness, receptivity and expressive
self-creation, is a recognisable iteration of the ideal of individuality.
The very inclusiveness that individuality attained through its association with democ-
racy gave rise, however, to new anxieties. What if most people want no part of such a
 individuality, radical politics 239
demanding ideal? What if they not only prefer conformity and mediocrity for themselves
but also demand it of others? Mill’s concerns about mass conformity arose partly out of his
reading of Alexis de Tocqueville, who famously criticised the tremendous homogenising
power that the American majority exercised over the minds of all citizens. ‘I know of no
country where there is in general less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion
than in America’ (Tocqueville [1835] 2004: 293). Such observations led Tocqueville to
conclude that democracies, where power resided in the mass, would contain fewer brilliant
and distinctive individuals than aristocratic societies. Though they ultimately rejected this
conclusion, the American Transcendentalists, too, were urgently aware of the dangers of
mass conformity, which they denounced as the most important remaining obstacle to
individuality. Thus mass conformity, rather than political oppression at the hands of either
absolutist or socialist government, became the focal antipode of individuality.
Other philosophers rejected the more inclusive conception of individuality outright.
Friedrich Nietzsche, who was greatly influenced by Emerson, also inveighs against the
conformity of modern individuals and also espouses an ideal of self-creation that has its
origins in Romantic individuality. Unlike Emerson, he concluded that most people were
either incapable or constitutionally averse to the creative self-fashioning and honest self-
scrutiny that individuality required. Whereas Emerson always held out hope that the
conformist could be awakened, if only momentarily, to the allure of a higher self, Nietzsche
suggests that a deep and insuperable divide separates the overman from the ‘last man’ – a
phrase he used to describe the passive, weak-willed, comfort-seeker who eschews truth for
pleasing illusion. For Nietzsche, as for Schopenhauer before him, self-creation was the
domain of the gifted few. Traces of such pessimism – momentary lapses of faith – can be
found in the works of Emerson and Mill both; in Nietzsche it is unequivocal.
A second tension also emerged between individuality and egalitarianism. For some
defenders of individuality, morality itself came to seem like yet another impediment to
individual self-creation. Such aesthetic amoralism can be found in Max Stirner’s 1844
work The Ego and Its Own, which urges its readers to reject not only social norms and
customs but also moral restraints that fetter the free play of the individual will. Traces of it
can also be found in Emerson, whose essays sometimes elevate self-reliance above the
imperatives of any moral code: ‘If I am the Devil’s child’, he writes whimsically, ‘I will live
then from the Devil’ (‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), in Emerson 1983: 262). And of course this
amoralism finds fullest expression in Nietzsche, who treats moral egalitarianism as an
atavism of the slave morality, which draws its strength from the majority’s resentment of
individual distinction. In these later iterations of individuality – certainly in Stirner and
Nietzsche – the moral and the aesthetic come unhinged from one another in ways that
Humboldt and the Romantics of his generation would have found appalling (although
their own elevation of self-reliance above reason itself surely foreshadowed these later
developments).
There remained, finally, an enduring tension between the ideal of individuality and the
practice of politics. Whereas Schleiermacher could understand political participation as an
act of creative self-expression, later writers tended to be more sceptical. For Emerson, for
instance, most forms of political participation threatened to subsume the individual into
partisan rancour or party ideology, both of which were simply manifestations of conformity.
Emerson’s politics, like those of Thoreau, Marx and Stirner, had a strong anarchist streak:
‘we shall one day learn to supersede politics by education’ (‘Culture’ (1860), in Emerson
1983: 1020). All of these thinkers sometimes entertained the fantasy of a society regulated
only by the voluntary commitments of well-formed individuals. At other times, they – Mill,
 240 alex zakaras
Emerson and Thoreau especially – worked hard to reconcile the demands of individuality
with the claims of politics and in so doing articulated a distinctive conception of
democratic citizenship.10

Notes
1. Yehoshua Arieli writes: ‘Although individualism as a historical and sociological concept was
elaborated in Europe, its value-content changed completely with its transplantation to America.
The term, which in the Old World was almost synonymous with selfishness, social anarchy and
individual laissez-faire, connoted in America self-determination, moral freedom, the rule of
liberty and the dignity of man’ (Arieli 1964: 193).
2. Humboldt is often described as a liberal rather than a Romantic. But these distinctions are highly
artificial: his early writings express many of the themes and concerns that are usually thought to
define the Romantic point of view. See Beiser 1992: 111–14.
3. Discussing On Liberty in his autobiography, Mill describes Humboldt as ‘the only author who has
preceded me . . . of whom I thought it appropriate to say anything’ (Mill [1873] 1963–91: 1: 227).
4. Schleiermacher’s German word is Maschinenwerk, which could be translated as ‘machine shop’.
5. All translations from this text are the author’s own.
6. Leroux is usually credited with the invention of the term ‘socialism’. It was ‘a neologism
necessary’, he wrote, ‘to set against individualism’ (see Evans 1948: 223–4). Later in his life,
Leroux began to accept the term as a description of his own philosophy. ‘When I invented the
term socialism’, he writes, ‘to oppose it to the term individualism, I did not expect that twenty years
later this term would be used to describe, in a general sense, the democratic religion. I wanted to
capture, with this word, the doctrine or the diverse doctrines which, under one pretext or another,
sacrificed the individual to society and, in the name of fraternity or under the pretext of equality,
destroyed liberty. To see in my work a criticism of socialism, in the new meaning given to this
word, would be to misunderstand me’ (Leroux 1850: 161 n).
7. In this sense, Mill followed Humboldt’s emphasis on the balance of reason and sensuality or
sensual passion. On sensuality in Humboldt, see Sweet 1973: 477–9.
8. Mill was aware of Leroux and had by 1833 both met Leroux and read parts at least of the Revue
Encyclopédique, according to a letter that Mill wrote to Thomas Carlyle on 25 November 1833.
See Mill 1963–91: 12: 194.
9. The full passage reads: ‘I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by
a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work
and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being of free spiritual powers . . . [but] I am aware, that
this view is far from being universal. The common notion has been, that the mass of the people
need no other culture than is necessary to fit them for their various trades’ (Channing 1838: 21).
10. On this conception of citizenship in Emerson and Mill, see Zakaras 2009.

References
Arieli, Yehoshua (1964), Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Aris, Reinhold (1965), History of Political Thought in Germany from 1789 to 1815, New York: Russel &
Russel.
Bakunin, Jack (1976a), Pierre Leroux and the Birth of Democratic Socialism, 1797–1848, New York:
Revisionist Press.
Bakunin, Jack (1976b), ‘Pierre Leroux on democracy, socialism and the Enlightenment’, Journal of the
History of Ideas 37 (3): 455–74.
Baum, Bruce (2007), ‘J. S. Mill and Liberal Socialism’, in Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras (eds), J.
S. Mill’s Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
98–123.
 individuality, radical politics 241
Beiser, Frederick (1992), Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German
Political Thought, 1790–1800, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Beiser, Frederick (1996), ‘Introduction’, in Frederick Beiser (ed.), The Early Political Writings of the
German Romantics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bercovitch, Sacvan (1993), Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America,
New York: Routledge.
Bernstein, Eduard [1899] (1993), The Preconditions of Socialism, ed. and trans. Henry Tudor,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brudney, Daniel (2008), ‘Grand ideals: Mill’s two perfectionisms’, History of Political Thought 29 (3):
485–515.
Burrow, John W. (1969), ‘Editor’s introduction’, in Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State
Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xvii–lviii.
Channing, William Ellery (1838), Self-Culture, Boston: James Monroe & Co.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1983), Emerson: Essays & Lectures, New York: Library of America.
Evans, David Owen (1948), Le socialisme romantique: Pierre Leroux et ses contemporains, Paris: Rivière.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von [1791–2/1851] (1969), The Limits of State Action, trans. John W. Burrow,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kateb, George (1992), The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Leroux, Pierre (1846), D’une religion nationale, ou du culte, Paris: Boussac.
Leroux, Pierre (1848), Projet d’une constitution democratique et sociale, Paris: Sandre.
Leroux, Pierre (1850), Oeuvres de Pierre Leroux: 1825–1850, Paris: Imprimerie du Gerdès.
Leroux, Pierre [1834] (1948), ‘De l’individualisme et du socialisme’, in David Owen Evans, Le
socialisme romantique: Pierre Leroux et ses contemporains, Paris: Rivière, pp. 223–38.
Leroux, Pierre [1840] (1985), De l’humanité, Paris: Fayard.
Lukes, Steven (1973), Individualism, Oxford: Blackwell.
Maistre, Joseph de (1884–93), Oeuvres Complètes vol. 14, Lyon: Vitte.
Mill, John Stuart (1963–91), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Moulin, Léo (1955), ‘On the evolution of the meaning of the word ‘‘individualism’’’, International
Social Science Bulletin 7 (1): 181–5.
Saint-Cheron, Alexandre de (1831), ‘Philosophie du Droit’, Revue Encyclopédique LII: 593–606.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst [1800] (1996), Monologues II and III, in Frederick Beiser
(ed.), The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 169–97.
Simmel, Georg (1971), ‘Freedom and the individual’, in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social
Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 217–26.
Sweet, Paul (1973), ‘Young Wilhelm von Humboldt’s writings (1789–93) reconsidered’, Journal of the
History of Ideas 34 (3): 469–82.
Taylor, Charles (1975), Hegel, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ten, C.L. (1998), ‘Democracy, socialism and the working class’, in John Skorupski (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Mill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 372–95.
Tocqueville, Alexis de [1835] (2004), Democracy in America, vol. 1, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, New
York: Library of America.
Valls, Andrew (1999), ‘Self-development and the liberal state: The cases of John Stuart Mill and
Wilhelm von Humboldt’, The Review of Politics 61 (2): 251–74.
Zakaras, Alex (2007), ‘J. S. Mill, individuality and participatory democracy’, in Nadia Urbinati and
Alex Zakaras (eds), J. S. Mill’s Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, pp. 200–20.
Zakaras, Alex (2009), Individuality and Mass Democracy: Mill, Emerson, and the Burdens of Citizenship,
New York: Oxford University Press.
 13
The Rise of the Social

William Outhwaite

1. Introduction
This chapter will examine social philosophy in the nineteenth century in terms of three
interrelated processes: the consolidation of a conception of society or the social; the
reformulation of issues of poverty and inequality in the form of ‘the social question’ and
related attempts at social regulation; and the emergence of the social sciences ‘between
literature and science’ (see Lepenies [1985] 1988). Although the term ‘rise’ may seem to
suggest an inevitable or desirable process, we shall see that the status of the social sciences
and the relation between the social and the political were no less contentious at the end
than at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and they remain so in the twenty-first.
How was the social conceptualised at the beginning of the nineteenth century? By 1790,
there was already, in many parts of Europe, a concern with issues of poverty and inequality
and a developed concept of society in the modern sense of an encompassing structure
(Baker 1994; Sewell 2005: 324–8). Herder described Hume to Kant in 1767 as ‘in the most
literal sense a philosopher of human society’ (see Masaryk 1994: 139). This sense of
‘society’ can be distinguished from earlier usage, where it tends to refer either to a small-
scale association such as a secret society or the Society of Friends, or to the fact of
association with one’s ‘fellows’. In contrast, the modern conception was of what Norbert
Elias [1939] (1991) called a ‘society of individuals’, not just in the crude sense of economic
individualism (though this was a substantial part of the story) but one where the relations
between individuals and society were being reconfigured in thought and practice. For
Elias, the emergent conception and practice of personal privacy in early modern Europe
‘causes the individual to feel that ‘‘inside’’ himself he is something that exists quite alone,
without relation to other people and that only becomes related ‘‘afterwards’’ to others
‘‘outside’’’ (Elias 1991: 28). What Elias called the ‘I–We relation’ is reconfigured; the
(problematic) idea of an opposition between individual and society becomes a topic.
It becomes increasingly possible to find people saying that their society is credulous about
gods, monarchs, etc., but that they and their friends are not. As Charles Taylor wrote in a
classic article on the ‘Modern Social Imaginary’, ‘we start with individuals’ (Taylor 2002:
96). He contrasts this conception with an earlier one of natural hierarchies and their
harmony or disharmony. ‘[T]he inevitable flip side of the new understanding of the
individual is a new understanding of sociality: the society of mutual benefit, whose
functional differentiations are ultimately contingent and whose members are fundamen-
tally equal’ (2002: 99).
But, as Taylor readily conceded, this conception took time to bed down and replace
 the rise of the social 243
earlier ideas of essential hierarchical difference. For example, he says, ‘it is really only in our
own time that the older images of hierarchical complementarity between men and women
are being comprehensively challenged’ (2002: 98). The secular understanding of society is
another example: organised religion, far from having been seen off by the philosophes,
continues to pervade the social conceptions of many citizens and politicians in the twenty-
first century. In the nineteenth century, ideas of natural theology, which are hard to place
on a continuum between credulity and secularism, played a notoriously important part.
The concept of society itself remained suspect in the nineteenth century, as noted below,
in politically backward parts of Europe (including Germany) and Russian serfdom, like US
slavery, was not abolished until 1861.
The two themes of a society of individuals and of equality came together, before the
nineteenth century began, in Rousseau’s 1755 Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. And
just before the end of the eighteenth century, Nicolas de Condorcet drew a distinction
between domestic and international inequality in a way which has recently preoccupied
Amartya Sen and many others. ‘Our hopes for the future condition of the human race can
be subsumed under three important heads: the abolition of inequality between nations, the
progress of equality within each nation and the true perfection of mankind’ (Condorcet
[1793] 1796: 251).1
We also see, well before the beginning of the nineteenth century, the emergence of a
distinction between political phenomena and underlying social processes. Charles-Louis
Montesquieu (despite his obsession with climate which tends to embarrass modern readers
in their centrally heated and/or air-conditioned rooms)2 had already in 1748 clearly
expressed the basic idea that political and legal arrangements depend on broader social
processes.3 In a more polemical vein, Thomas Paine in 1792 contrasted the necessity of
society with the undesirable contingency of government. ‘Government’, he wrote,

is no farther necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and civilisation are
not conveniently competent; and instances are not wanting to show, that everything
which government can usefully add thereto, has been performed by the common
consent of society, without government [he cited the case of North America]. (Paine
[1792] 1995: 215)4

However, what we do not find until well into the nineteenth century is the fixation on
the proletariat rather than merely the poor, the masses, the peuple or the Pöbel.5 The shift in
value associations marked by the German term is unmistakable: what had been mostly a
positive term in France became in Germany a negative expression of class fear. Towards the
end of the century, Nietzsche extended the term Pöbel to the upper classes as well: ‘Pöbel
oben, Pöbel unten’ ([1883–5] 2009: 215). ‘Gesellschaft’, too, was a problematic concept for
many on the political Right in what we now call Germany, where their counterparts in
Britain and France had long learned to live with society and société. Blüntschli’s influential
dictionary of 1857–70 described Gesellschaft as a concept of the third estate (Adorno
1973b: 17) and Treitschke polemicised against it in 1859 (see Wagner 2001).
The German-French divide was symbolically bridged at mid-century by a German
aristocratic conservative, Lorenz von Stein, writing about French socialists and commu-
nists in terms of the concept of society, and by German radicals like Marx and Engels,
driven west by German reaction. At the beginning of the century, the French Revolution
shaped the political imaginary of Europe and much of the world for another two centuries
with its imagery of liberty and barricades. At mid-century, the 1848 revolutions pointed,
244 william outhwaite
depending on your political preferences, towards a ‘proper’ proletarian revolution, to a
reinforced conservative desire for order, or to the third way, as we would now say, of the
securitisation of social order through social policy. The last of these was combined with
the first in reformist and gradualist socialism which was intended, in theory at least, to
lead more gently to the same goal as that of the revolutionaries. Alternatively, as in
Bismarckian Germany, conservatism was allied with social policy: the development of the
welfare state went along with a ban on the socialist party, the Sozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands.
Philosophy, Hegel pronounced in 1821 in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, is its
time apprehended in thought and this simplification will suffice for the purposes of this
chapter. In the nineteenth century, the conceptualisation of the social as an object of
knowledge went hand in hand with a political concern for what was coming to be called
the social question and with a more academic concern for something like a social science.
Some philosophers turned into militants or were rebadged as sociologists or – like Marx –
both. The philosopher Leszek Kolakowski’s opening line in his massive account of
Marxism, ‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher’ (Kolakowski 1978: 1), can be read
either as a truism or as an error, as it was by the British Marxist sociologist Tom Bottomore
(1984). Yet Marx would probably have been even more annoyed at his posthumous
designation as a sociologist and as part of a now entrenched holy trinity, along with Max
Weber and Emile Durkheim from the following generation. As Herbert Schnädelbach
writes,

[I]t was more or less immediately after Hegel that sociology emerged as an independent
discipline which from the beginning reserved the theme of ‘society’ for itself alone.
Social scientists of all tendencies at that time placed no value on being regarded as
philosophers; rather, philosophers presented themselves as sociologists . . . (Schnädel-
bach [1982] 1984: x)

Auguste Comte is a good example. He was clearly a philosopher, but he invented the term
sociology in 1831 and can therefore hardly be deprived of the label sociologist, although
some would prefer to assign him, along with Marx, to a category of proto-sociologists.6
What came to be called sociology claimed a kind of special right to talk about the social,
sweeping up elements of the philosophy of history,7 ethics and related fields. At the end of
the nineteenth century, Georg Simmel wrote about both and his 1900 work the Philosophy
of Money could as easily have been called the Sociology of Money. (One of his earlier essays
on the topic calls it a psychology of money; see Simmel [1889] 1997.)
In this context, the following brief remarks on the philosophy of history may be worth
making. The term ‘philosophie de l’histoire’ was used by Voltaire in a pseudonymous text
of 1765, but, as Bertrand Binoche (1994) stresses, it was in an idiosyncratic sense.
Binoche focuses on Condorcet’s 1793 Tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain,
Dugald Stewart’s natural history in his introduction to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral
Sentiments, and Kant’s discussion of historical theodicy in his 1798 Streit der Fakultäten
(The Conflict of the Faculties). Binoche suggests that these three genres define the
project of the philosophy of history at the end of the eighteenth century (Binoche 1994:
11). This comparative approach, in addition to its other merits, brings out the inter-
relations between these and other writers. Comte, for example, learning of J. S. Mill’s
Scottish connection, wrote in 1843 of his enthusiasm for the Scottish enlightenment and
his disinclination to look more closely at German contemporaries. This judgement
 the rise of the social 245
contrasts with that of Victor Cousin, who had met Hegel in 1817 (and was later freed
from prison in Berlin partly through his intervention). Cousin admired the German
tradition and thought Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society to be feeble
and moralising (Binoche 1994: 80–1).

2. Kant, Hegel and the Social

The transition from Kant to Hegel, so fundamental for modern philosophy as a whole, is
also central to conceptions of the social. Kant’s massive influence on objective idealist and
neo-Kantian philosophy continues right through the nineteenth century and up to the
present. Habermas’s philosophy, for example, is essentially strung on a set of tightropes
between Kant and Hegel and he makes a more general and plausible claim for the
continuing influence of themes which preoccupied the Young Hegelians, who remain, as
he often puts it, our contemporaries. Gillian Rose, in a hunt of McCarthyite intensity
(though of course infinitely greater intelligence) for neo-Kantians, upheld the claims of
Hegel Contra Sociology (Rose 1981), although in a way which demonstrated Hegel’s
importance as a social thinker in a broader sense. For Rose, ‘The very idea of a scientific
sociology, whether non-Marxist or Marxist, is only possible as a form of neo-Kantianism’
(Rose 1981: 1–2). This is of course an exaggeration, but the importance of neo-Kantian
thought for social theory, including Marxism, at the end of the nineteenth century and well
into the twentieth is not in doubt.
Hegel’s place in European social theory has still not been fully recognised, however,
partly no doubt because so much twentieth-century philosophy was either analytic or
Marxist or (occasionally) both.8 The Hegelian critique of Kant was in part a sociological
one (Wagner 2008: 183–5). As Frederick Copleston wrote,

When at Berlin Hegel lectured on political theory and described the State in highfalutin
terms, he was concerned with making his hearers socially and politically conscious and
with overcoming what he regarded as an unfortunate one-sided emphasis on the
inwardness of morality . . . (1962: 29)9

More fundamentally, although the idealism which was dominant throughout the century,
in successive waves in different parts of Europe and North America, might be thought to be
inimical to social theory, in fact this is far from the case. As Randall Collins suggests, there
is both an intellectual and a practical reason for this. ‘The [dialectical] method of showing
the one-sidedness of concepts and their dependence on others, when applied to the ideals
of morality and politics, leads to the recognition that such ideas are always social’ (Collins
1998: 660). In practice, ‘Hegel opened up the social sciences as disciplines and made
dialectical philosophy available as an instrument of social criticism’ (Collins 1998: 660).
According to Collins’s sociology of philosophy, which stresses competition within net-
works, Hegel was impelled towards this historical and social focus because Fichte and
Schelling had already appropriated other areas of philosophy.

Located at the center of action in a crowded and highly competitive space, he got
virtually the last attention slot available . . . He found the slot by focussing on history,
both of the intellectual community itself and of its links to the surrounding social world
in general. (657)
246 william outhwaite
Whatever one thinks of this slightly reductive account (see Baehr 2002: 43–55), Hegel
remains at the centre of action in any account of nineteenth-century philosophy and social
theory. Even if Marx and Engels had not existed, he would no doubt have been recognised
in the following century as a major figure. In the event, as Paul Vogel wrote, ‘with Lorenz
von Stein and the Marxists . . . Hegel’s concept of society . . . shook the world. A single
movement of thought leads from Hegel via Stein to Lassalle’ (Vogel 1925: 122). What was
so revolutionary about Hegel’s conception of the social? One can point to the notion of
dialectical contradiction, as orthodox Marxism does, or to the role of labour, which is of
course crucial also for less orthodox Marxists such as the young Habermas. Most funda-
mental, though, is Hegel’s historicisation both of philosophy and of what we would now
call social and political structures and what Hegel terms civil society and the state. As
Manfred Riedel writes, commenting on paragraphs 259 and 340 of the Philosophy of Right,
this is no longer the traditional concept of the state, the static and ahistorical model of
classical politics and modern natural law, but a radically historical conception (Riedel
1970: 24). And this is of course what Marx stressed as Hegel’s principal contribution.
Against this background, the oppositions between ‘young’ and ‘old’ Hegelians and
conflicts of Hegel-interpretation pale into insignificance. Even the famous contrast in
which Marx set himself to Hegel with the metaphor of putting him back the right way up
appears more like a continuum between a Hegel who was solidly rooted, despite his flowery
language, in the contradictions of his own times and a Marx who was offering a clearer
alternative to those contradictions. It is, however, useful to note how Hegel’s model of
society was developed through the conception of class and in particular the proletariat in
Stein and Marx and Engels, through the Marxist emphasis on the primacy of society – and
hence its contradictions – over the state and into the idea that there was one further step
before anything like Hegelian reconciliation could be expected.
The Marxist use of Hegel has of course been historically the most important, but there
has also been a conservative development of his thought, particularly in Germany and to
some extent in Britain. In between these was a liberal perspective which probably owes
more to Wilhelm von Humboldt (and others elsewhere in Europe) than to Hegel, but
which Hegel might himself in the end have found most congenial and which predominated
in the social theory of the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Liberal
thought was strongly influenced by the belated publication of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s
book The Limits of State Action, written in 1791–2 (on which see Alex Zakaras’s chapter in
this volume), as well as by J. S. Mill’s On Liberty and the work of Alexis de Tocqueville.
Tocqueville, although he might not have sought the title, must be acknowledged, as he
increasingly is, as an important political philosopher and incipient sociologist. In the
Introduction to his Democracy in America, published in 1835, he also explicitly invokes the
notion of political science: ‘Il faut une science politique nouvelle à un monde tout
nouveau’ (‘there must be a new political science for a completely new world’) (Tocqueville
[1835] 1888: 9). Via the neo-Kantian philosopher Charles Renouvier, this liberal tradition
fed into the sociology of Emile Durkheim which dominated French social thought in the
early twentieth century (see Logue 1983: 1993).
Finally, it is useful to set Hegel in counterpoint to Comte, as Marcuse ([1941] 1955) did.
Comtean positivism was highly influential in France and, in a more muted form, in Britain,
via the mediation of J. S. Mill.10 Again, Durkheim assured the survival of essential
elements of Comtean positivism and of the idea of a sharp break between social science and
common sense, which persisted in the later twentieth century in the work of Louis
Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu.
 the rise of the social 247

3. The Beginning of the Nineteenth Century: One Revolution or

Two?
The beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe was fundamentally shaped by the
French Revolution. Reactions to it fell into three broad classes. First, it could be seen as a
successful, if flawed, attempt to create a rational polity which embodied the universal
values of liberty, equality, fraternity and human rights. Fichte risked his youthful reputation
with a bold attempt in 1793 to ‘correct the Judgement of the Public on the French
Revolution’ and Dugald Stewart in Edinburgh was criticised for his praise of Condorcet
(Collini, Winch and Burrow 1983: 32–3). In France itself, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights includes a social theory as well as legal prescriptions. As Georges Gusdorf
wrote in his massive history of the human sciences, ‘La Déclaration manifeste solennelle-
ment les premiers principes métaphysiques de la science sociale’ (‘the Declaration solemnly
expresses the first metaphysical principles of social science’ (Gusdorf 1978: 207)). The
idéologues, as we shall see, fought an uphill battle to preserve some of these principles of the
Revolution (and, by extension, of the Enlightenment) against opposition from Napoleon
and more conservative forces. In a more muted way, liberals like Tocqueville argued that
one had to learn to live with the consequences of the Revolution and to try to mitigate its
disadvantages. The United States, having come to this ‘democratic’ state without a
cataclysmic revolution of the French kind, could show the way forward.
The conservative reaction was the second main line of response to the Revolution,
marked in 1790 by Edmund Burke’s very influential Reflections on the Revolution in France
and, in a less nuanced way, by more explicitly conservative thinkers in France and Germany,
notably Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald. Karl Mannheim’s classic study of Con-
servatism ([1925] 1986) remains a fundamental analysis of how responses to the Revolution
shaped European conservative politics. The US sociologist Robert Nisbet (1966) brilliantly
made the case for the conservative origins of sociology and although this claim cannot be
sustained, as Anthony Giddens (1972) and others have pointed out, it remains the case that
many of what Nisbet called the ‘unit-ideas’ of the emergent ‘discipline’ of sociology – such as
those of community and the sacred – are shared with the conservative tradition. And as
Mannheim stressed in his better-known Ideology and Utopia ([1929] 1960), the conservative
critique of liberal rationalist politics – namely, the critique that it neglects more fundamental
social forces – is shared by socialist and, in particular, by Marxist critics of liberalism.
This, then, was the third line of response to the Revolution: that it needs to be
completed by a social revolution which really would deliver social justice and equality,
rather than just a looser Tocquevillean equality of condition. Lorenz von Stein posed the
issue in neutral terms:

The basic tenet of the new Constitution of 1793 was absolute personal equality. Public
law, the right to vote, public representation and legislation were established according to
this principle. The state did not want to recognize, still less create, any differences. This
state form, according to the law which determines the relationship between state and
society, is based on the assumption that society too is not differentiated. But did social
equality really exist side by side with political equality? (Stein [1850] 1964: 145)

In this third line of response, some of the more radical strands of Revolutionary thought,
notably that of Gracchus Babeuf, which themselves echoed the most radical wing of the
Enlightenment, were picked up in the 1830s by Marx and others.
248 william outhwaite
The Revolution, then, was a fundamental caesura in social thought no less than in
practical politics.11 In France, the Revolution’s after-effects under Napoleon produced a
lengthy latency period until the 1820s. Napoleon’s critique of the idéologues (to which we
owe the modern, originally Marxist, use of the term ideology) succeeded in marginalising
what was in fact a quite innovative approach to knowledge, which continued the themes of
the pre-Revolutionary Enlightenment and which eventually came to fruition in positivism.
The idéologues popularised the term science sociale, taking up Condorcet’s theme of social
mathematics, and they linked moral and political science to political economy and to what
they called the science of legislation. Gusdorf, who gave them a prominent place in his
history of the human sciences, called them ‘a lost generation’ (Gusdorf 1978: 549). Fredric
Jameson elegantly summarises accounts of this thirty-year gap, before arguing that it is in
fact substantially filled by Charles Fourier (Jameson 2005: 238–9). There were of course
other continuities across this gap. The idéologues represented one line, but there were also
longer-term continuities between thinkers such as Montesquieu and Tocqueville, widely
separated by history but sharing many concerns and habits of thought.
The French Revolution was a massive fact.12 The second revolution at the beginning of
the nineteenth century was more conceptual and conjectural. Its most explicit advocate is
perhaps Michel Foucault, in Les mots et les choses. As he wrote in the forward to the English
translation of this work,

Within a few years (around 1800), the tradition of general grammar was replaced by an
essentially historical philology; natural classifications were ordered according to the
analyses of comparative anatomy; and a political economy was founded whose main
themes were labour and production. (Foucault [1966] 1970: xii)

These are of course the three foci of Foucault’s book, but as he claims in the main text, they
are symptomatic of a much broader shift.

Whereas in Classical thought [that is, the thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries] the sequence of chronologies merely scanned the prior and more fundamental
space of a table which presented all the possibilities in advance, from now on, the
contemporaneous and simultaneously observable resemblances in space will be simply
the fixed forms of a succession which proceeds from analogy to analogy. ([1966] 1970:
218)

European culture is inventing for itself a depth in which what matters is no longer
identities, distinctive characters, permanent tables with all their possible paths and
routes, but great hidden forces developed on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible
nucleus, origin, causality and history. (251)

This is in essence the same historicising shift which Hegel performed in philosophy.
As Robert Wokler points out in a sympathetic discussion of Foucault’s argument, this
picture needs to be filled out with a discussion of the emergent institutions that were
concerned with developing the human sciences in the period of the Revolution and with
developing the concept of social science itself (Wokler 1987: 326–7). The term ‘science
sociale’ seems to have been first used in a classic pre-Revolutionary text, the Abbé Sieyès’s
Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (What Is the Third Estate?) and the term was subsequently used
by Condorcet and others.
 the rise of the social 249
It appears from these early, almost casual, invocations of la science sociale . . . that the
term was at first ill-defined . . . More important, however, is the fact that each author
assimilated his conception of a social science with other human sciences, including . . .
la morale and la politique, whose integration it was the task of la science sociale to achieve.
(Wokler 1987: 329)

The next section addresses this issue of the emergence of what we now call the social and
political sciences.

4. The Social and the Political

What emerged in the nineteenth century was the notion, in both Marxist and non-Marxist
social theory, that states were secondary to broader social processes. Collini, Winch and
Burrow make this point negatively in relation to the philosophy of history and they would
undoubtedly say the same of much sociology: ‘the category of the political is deprived of all
significant autonomy by incorporation in some larger story of the unfolding and mutation
of social and economic forms’ (1983: 7).13 William Sewell Jr. characterises the social in a
related sense: ‘The social . . . is best understood as, first, an articulated, evolving, web of
semiotic practices . . . that, second, builds up and transforms a range of physical frame-
works’ (Sewell 2005: 369).
Putting the same issue in historical terms, Peter Wagner (2001) has traced the rise and
fall of the concept of society and has shown how sociology can be seen as offering a certain
set of answers to questions of political philosophy, rather than transcending or relativising
them, as it had once claimed to do. In other words, the social and the political are more like
two sides of the same coin than two separate, if intersecting, spheres. As Pierre Manent
wrote in 1982 of Tocqueville,

To distinguish between democracy as a social state and democracy as a political

institution is not to apply to democracy a general ‘sociological’ distinction. Nor does
the heavier weight attached to the social state derive from a causal primacy attributed in
general to the social over the political instance. Nor, finally, are the social and the
political two ‘aspects’ of democracy, distinguished arbitrarily in the face of the massive
opacity of the fact, or two ‘conceptual levels’ deliberately constructed for expository
convenience by the observer of democracy. It is democracy as the thing itself which is
given in this real duality. (Manent [1982] 1993: 48)

At the same time, however, there was a clear tension between the social and the political
in much early use of the term social science or sociology. Both positivists and Marxists
tended to present themselves as undercutting or transcending what was conventionally
seen as political. Even someone such as Saint-Simon, who was closely attuned to political
issues (including the issue of what we now call European integration), saw himself as
undercutting the political.14
This theme of undercutting the political is evident in one of Marx’s earliest and richest
texts, his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ of 1844 (see Marx 1975). This includes a critique of
the political illusion (which was later taken up by Régis Debray and others). The political
illusion parallels and mimics the religious illusion, both expressions of distorted social
relations. The diremption (Entzweiung) of heaven and earth, god and human, state and civil
society expresses in a transfigured or distorted form that between exploiters and exploited.15
250 william outhwaite
There is, however, a further aspect of both positivist and Marxist thought in the
nineteenth century which demands attention: the idea that something like a social science
would also supersede philosophy. In Comte’s religion of humanity, philosopher kings were
to be replaced by sociologists, while Marx and Engels anticipated a realisation of
philosophy which would also be its Aufhebung (Labica 1976). Adorno wrote one of many
epitaphs of this conception: ‘Philosophy lives on because the moment to realize it was
missed’ (Adorno [1966] 1973a: 3). While this deeply ambiguous remark seems to let Marx
off the hook, Stefan Collini is more thoroughly negative about positivism and, by
implication, Marxism as well.

[I]f the positivist project of much of nineteenth-century social science now seems to have
been a deeply flawed one . . . this must shift our attention to the philosophical
anthropology, the metaphysical sympathies and the scale of values which actually
animated these theories. And this points to the final irony of the matter, for it means
that in writing the history of those nineteenth-century attempts to supersede philosophy
by social science we cannot help engaging in philosophical criticism of them. (Collini
1980: 231)

I shall suggest in the conclusion that there is a little more to be said in defence of the social,
but first we should look at the third main theme of this chapter, that of the ‘social’ question
– a theme that is far from exhausted, even if the terms of it have changed from the early
nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. We may argue about whether we have a
Marxist or Lukácsian proletariat, or a Fanonist third world one, or a post-Marxist global
Lumpenproletariat – but the poor are always with us.

5. The ‘Social’ Question

There was a substantial convergence of analysis among nineteenth-century thinkers
concerned with poverty and related issues. However much their prognoses and prescrip-
tions may have differed, Hegel (and even Fichte [1806] 1847: 236–9), Lorenz von Stein,
Marx and Engels and Tocqueville all characterise the situation of the growing working
classes in very similar terms. At the most descriptive level, Tocqueville and Engels
converged on Manchester (Tocqueville in 1833 and 1835, Engels in 1842) and said
much the same about it.

From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole
world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete
development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles and civilised man
is turned back almost into a savage. (Tocqueville [1835] 1958: 107–8)

This is Tocqueville, but even the antithesis in the last phrase sounds like Engels; the
difference lies only in the prognosis. For Engels, ‘It is too late for a peaceful solution’
(Engels [1844] 1987: 292). For Tocqueville, in contrast,

England seems to me in a critical state in that certain events, which it is possible to

predict, can from one moment to another throw her into a state of violent revolution.
But if things follow their natural course, I do not think that this revolution will come . . .
(Tocqueville [1835] 1958: 73)
 the rise of the social 251
Somewhat later, Tocqueville, Stein, Marx and Engels converged again on the 1848
revolutions. For Marx and Engels, of course, they embodied the spectre of communism
haunting Europe in The Communist Manifesto. For Tocqueville, speaking in 1835 just
before the revolutions, ‘we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano . . . the earth is
quaking once again in Europe’ ([1835] 1958: 12–13).
As for Stein, as Kaethe Mengelberg notes, ‘Stein never identifies himself with any class
position; he takes rather a detached point of view’ (see Stein 1964: 29). Stein’s social
reformist approach won out in most of Western Europe. In Britain, the term ‘social science’
essentially meant a cluster of social reformist concerns with the working classes and the
poor, prefiguring what in disciplinary terms we would now call social policy. This ‘social
science’ had links to eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophy, to philosophical
radicalism and, more antagonistically, to utilitarianism and political economy and to
Comtean positivism (Yeo 1996: x, 34–5, 110–12). But its principal concerns were more
practical. Thus, social reformist concerns invoked and even colonised the term ‘social
science’. The Statistical Societies of Manchester, London and a number of other British
and US cities were founded in the 1830s, the Social Science Association in 1857, followed
in 1862 by the Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales and in
1865 by the American Association for the Promotion of Social Science. The Verein für
Sozialpolitik, best known today for Max Weber’s later involvement in it, was founded in
Germany in 1872. The semantic associations between the social question, socialism and
social science persisted into the late twentieth century (for example, into the attack made
on social science in the UK by the Thatcher government, which led to the renaming in
1983 of the Social Science Research Council as the Economic and Social Research
Council).

6. The Later Nineteenth Century

If philosophy took a significant turn toward the social in the middle of the nineteenth
century, a second impetus, which both preceded it and continued well into the twentieth
century, was what came retrospectively to be called historicism.16 Schnädelbach writes of a
‘historicist Enlightenment’ and stresses that the critique of Enlightenment was only one of
the three strands that he identifies in historicism.

The first sense of ‘historicism’ (historicism1) is positivism in relation to the human

sciences: the value-free accumulation of material and facts without distinction between
what is and what is not important, which nevertheless makes a claim to scientific
objectivity . . .

In another use, ‘historicism’ refers to what can be regarded as the theoretical justification
of historicism1: historicism in the sense of historical relativism (historicism2) . . .

[Historicism3] . . . is the view that all cultural phenomena are to be regarded, to be

understood and explained as historical. (Schnädelbach [1982] 1984: 37–8)

I shall focus here on the epistemological and methodological issues raised in relation to the
human sciences as a whole, notably by the German historian Droysen and by Dilthey
and by the ‘historical schools’ of law and economics. Droysen launched in the 1850s an
anti-positivist programme, based around the idea of ‘understanding’ (Verstehen), the
252 william outhwaite
implications of which went well beyond history and shaped the anti-naturalist or
‘methodological dualist’ approach to the social sciences, especially, but not only, in
Germany, for the following century and a half up to the present. The notion of under-
standing historical materials had been developed in early nineteenth-century classical
philology and theological hermeneutics (notably by Schleiermacher), but it acquired its
polemical point in the reaction against Kantian rationalism, Hegelian speculative philo-
sophy of history and scientific and historiographical positivism. For Droysen, as later for
Dilthey, we are to understand historical expressions from the inside, as psychic expressions
located in a broader intellectual context. Dilthey later took Hegel’s concept of objective
spirit but removed it from its developmental sequence in the Hegelian architectonic. The
emphasis was now more on the diversity of human personality and culture, against a
background of an underlying unity of human nature which underwrites the process of
understanding. In the classic phrase, you don’t need to be Caesar to understand him, but
you do need to be a human being (and not, as we might now add, just a smart system
observing regularities and applying algorithms to them as in predictive texting).
These principles were extended from the study of history and culture to the social
sciences (although this development lies largely outside the time-frame of this volume).
Throughout the nineteenth century, however, there were complementary developments in
law and economics which stressed the importance of understanding legal and economic
principles and structures in a broader social and historical context. Friedrich Carl von
Savigny, who had argued in 1814 against the over-hasty codification of German law, co-
founded in 1815 a journal, the Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft (Journal for the
Historical Science of Law), representing the historical approach to law inaugurated by
Gustav von Hugo. Savigny’s History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages (1815–31) was one of
the emblematic texts of the historical school of law.17
As for the historical school of economics, this is conventionally divided into three
phases. The first is represented by Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Knies and Bruno Hildebrand.18
The second phase is dominated by Gustav von Schmoller, whose response to Carl Menger
initiated the controversy known as the Methodenstreit. The third phase is dominated by
Werner Sombart and Max Weber. Roscher explicitly announced his intention to do
‘something akin to what the method of Savigny and Eichhorn has achieved for jurispru-
dence’ (Roscher 1843: 2). And Knies gives a clear statement of the basic principles:

The economic life of a people is so closely interwoven with other areas of its life that any
particular observation can only be made if one keeps in view its relation with the whole
. . . political economy is therefore enjoined to take its place with the moral and political
sciences. Only then does it effect a proper connection with real life . . . (Knies 1883:
436–7)19

The ‘historical schools’ of law and economics formed the basis of much twentieth-century
social science, not least that of Max Weber (who, however, increasingly distanced himself
from them).20
Philosophical theories of the social, then, were very substantially shaped by issues in
historiography and the philosophy of history. The early part of the century was heavily
influenced by the speculative philosophy of history of Hegel and the Young Hegelians –
what Karl Popper (1945) misleadingly called historicism. For Marx, the end of history, or of
pre-history as an antagonistic process of class conflict, was also the end or Aufhebung of
philosophy as an intellectual reflection on and of human history and its conflicts. The later
 the rise of the social 253
part of the century was dominated, at least in Germany, by historicism properly so called, a
more scientific and, as Hans-Georg Gadamer was later to complain, even scientistic or
objectivistic methodology. But in the early twentieth century social theory cut itself off
from philosophy of history and from historicism (Antoni 1959), as it had from natural law
(Löwith [1941] 1965; Chernilo forthcoming). The leading midwife of this process was Max
Weber, who emerged from the Historical Schools of law and economics and came to call
himself a sociologist in the last decade of his life.
Yet this separation left a good deal of unfinished business, in the form of neo-Kantian
methodologies, an unclear relation to law – which has opened up again in the late
twentieth century with the rise of universalistic and globalised notions of human rights –
and a continuing tension between unitary and dualistic conceptions of science and
between scientific and more speculative approaches to the social world.

7. Conclusion
Historians of ideas from Stuart Hughes (1958) to John Burrow (2000) have pointed to the
pessimistic tone of much of the thought of the later nineteenth century compared to that of
the period before 1848. Georg Lukács ([1937] 1962) echoes Marx’s account according to
which there was a degeneration of political economy after the 1848 revolutions, as the
bourgeoisie went on the defensive against the working class and its economic thinkers.
Lukács also argues against a similar shift that he saw in literature away from grand historical
themes and towards ‘bourgeois interiority’. Burrow, while critical of Lukács for exaggerating
this, points to the reaction against ‘the tedium of contemporary life’ which was particularly
strong in France in the 1850s and 1860s (Burrow 2000: 28).21 Something like a retreat to a
more cautious or realistic position can also be found in the philosophical scene of the
period, with the rejection of Hegelian idealism in Germany in favour of a more relativistic
historicism in history and in what came to be called the social sciences, and a greater
engagement with natural science. In France, the latter was sustained throughout the
century by the strength of positivism. In Germany, the philosophy of life, which had its
origins in Dilthey’s work in the 1880s and onwards, took an increasingly irrationalist turn
in the late nineteenth century, forming a lethal mix with anti-Semitism (which, as well as
having been called ‘the socialism of fools’, in a remark often attributed to Bebel, should also
be seen as the sociology of fools; Stoetzler 2009). In a less dramatic turn, as we saw in the
previous section, German historicism, as well as British caution, curbed the enthusiasm
earlier in the century for holistic evolutionary sociology, which was also much more muted
in the form in which Durkheim, following Comte, introduced it in France. By 1890, the
golden age of classical social theory, represented by Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel,
Durkheim and eventually Max Weber, was well established.

Notes
1. In his 1782 acceptance speech to the Paris Academy of Sciences, Condorcet was similarly optimistic
about the emergent social sciences: ‘Those sciences, created almost in our own days, the object of
which is man himself, the direct goal of which is the happiness of man, will enjoy a progress no less sure
than that of the physical sciences . . .’ (Condorcet, cited in Hankins 1985: 183).
2. As Melvin Richter (1976) pointed out, however, climate does not in fact play such a large part in
Montesquieu’s explanations and he sees its influence as diminishing over historical time.
3. As well as The Spirit of the Laws, see Montesquieu’s ‘Essay on the Causes That May Affect Men’s
Minds and Characters’ ([1736] 1976) and Richter’s introduction to it (Richter 1976). David
 254 william outhwaite
Carrithers writes: ‘Hindsight suggests that Montesquieu was the single most important figure in
the Enlightenment for the science of society. No other theorist inspired so much ‘‘sociological’’
investigation and speculation, sometimes to corroborate and sometimes to rebut the diverse
materials and contentions within L’esprit des lois’ (Carrithers 1995: 264, n. 39).
4. This is a familiar theme, echoed for example by the Russian Ivan Aksakov: ‘Society . . . is that
medium in which is shaped the conscious mental activity of a people . . . society alone can save
the people and stop the diseased overgrowth of the state’ (cited in Hare 1951: 150). In the
conservative version of Louis de Bonald (1796), nature creates necessary relations between
members of society and laws based on human opinions can only cause damage.
5. As John Burrow notes, ‘The French idea of the people – though one finds it also in Carlyle – was
not quite the German Volk, the nation as autonomous creator and poet, though it could come
very close to it. It was more like the Marxist proletariat, seen as the essence of humanity itself,
though more sentimentally conceived’ (Burrow 2000: 12).
6. See, for example, Ritzer and Stepnisky 2010. Robert Brown writes: ‘Comte did not, and could not
correctly, claim to be practising empirical sociology, for that discipline remained to be invented.
He believed that the task of the sociologist of the future would be to discover social laws that . . .
would take account of two facts: the cumulative effect on people’s behaviour of social factors over
time and the way in which social institutions and customs are always parts of a social system and
operate as an ‘‘ensemble’’ of interrelated factors . . .’ (Brown 1994: 160).
7. Masaryk runs these together: ‘After Kant and Hume philosophy . . . became more collectivistic,
especially sociological philosophy (in Germany, philosophy of history)’ (Masaryk 1994: 225; see
Flint 1893 for a discussion of Comte and others in these terms; also Barth 1897; Schnädelbach
[1982] 1984: ch. 2). As Collini, Winch and Burrow write of Britain: ‘devotees of the science of
politics in the second half of the nineteenth century increasingly had to come to terms with the
cultural hegemony of ‘‘the philosophy of history’’ and ‘‘the science of society’’’ (Collini, Winch
and Burrow 1983: 11). Later they write more impatiently of ‘the nineteenth-century tendency to
reduce politics to a residual appendage of ‘‘civilisation’’ (more usually ‘‘society’’) and to tell it,
essentially, to keep out of the way’ (193).
8. Marcuse ([1941] 1955) remains an excellent overview of the development of social thought and
philosophy, focusing on the conceptual opposition between Hegel and Comtean positivism and
giving substantial attention to Lorenz von Stein.
9. Axel Honneth has, however, argued that Kant’s philosophy of history is closer to Hegel’s than is
often realised and takes a more ‘sociologically realistic’ form (Honneth 2007: 26–7; see also
Kleingeld 1999).
10. As well as Mill’s work, notably Book VI of his System of Logic, works such as Buckle’s History of
Civilisation in England (1857–61) were extremely influential. Buckle’s positivism attracted the
hostility of the German historicist Droysen, who wrote in 1852 that ‘crass positivism is
unfortunately finding great support even in the development of the German sciences’ (Spieler
1970: 20 n; cf. Outhwaite [1975] 1986).
11. It also, as Koselleck (2008) notes, shaped attitudes to the Enlightenment – a term which had
recently come into use.
12. Randall Collins, however, downplays the Revolution’s intellectual influence on the idealist
philosophical community in favour of more internal processes. He writes that: ‘The effects of the
Revolution on the content of philosophy were not so much ideological as structural. It coincided
with quite different activity in various nations because the material means of intellectual
organization were different in these places’ (Collins 1998: 661–2). More generally, the ‘long’
nineteenth century is strung between two world-historical revolutions, the French and the
Russian. The latter, of course, failed in 1905 and succeeded only in 1917, but is prefigured in
much of the political activity in the late nineteenth century.
13. Stefan Collini writes, for example, of Herbert Spencer that ‘His was one of the most extreme of
those nineteenth-century theories which claimed to detect a progressive trend in social devel-
opment which would lead to the ultimate disappearance of the traditional problems of politics’
(Collini 1980: 209). In more recent social and political theory, however, there has been a
 the rise of the social 255
reaffirmation of the importance of political processes in the creation or ‘institution’ of societies,
marked in one way by the work of Hannah Arendt.
14. Comte, however, stresses the interdependence of society and government: ‘Although it may be
useful and, in certain cases, even necessary to consider the idea of society, abstracted from that of
government, it is universally recognized that these ideas are in fact inseparable’ (Comte [1826]
1974: 227).
15. Anthony Polan (1984), in his very suggestive book on Lenin, traces this anti-political theme into
twentieth-century Marxism.
16. See also James Connelly’s discussion of historicism in Chapter 8 of this volume.
17. For a brilliant discussion of later neo-Kantian theories of law and their implications for twentieth-
century philosophy and social theory, see Rose 1984. Britain had the equivalent of a historical
school of law in the work of Henry Maine and others.
18. Roscher and Knies are best known now for Max Weber’s critiques of 1903–6 (Weber 1975).
Roscher also published a short book on democracy.
19. This is a new edition of a book published under a marginally different title in 1833. See Jun
Kobayashi (2001: 56), where these passages are translated. I am indebted to Pearson and
Kobayashi respectively for these quotations and their translations.
20. See, for example, Eucken 1940; Koslowski 2005. For a more sceptical account of the ‘historical
school’, see Pearson 1999. Pearson, arguing that the ‘German historical school’ was neither
German nor historical nor a school, shows at least that these terms have to be taken with a grain
of salt. Hirschman (1982) is a brilliant discussion of the interrelations between theories of the
economy from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.
21. There were also, he suggests, three principal areas of anxiety for the middle classes: the rise of
democracy, the growth of cities and the urban proletariat and the decline of religion (Burrow
2000: xi).

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 14
Theory and Practice of Revolution in the
Nineteenth Century

Paul Blackledge

1. Introduction
The word ‘revolution’ was first used in an unmistakably modern sense in the eighteenth
century to describe the American and French Revolutions. And although it had begun to
gravitate towards something like this modern meaning in England in the wake of her
seventeenth-century revolutions (Williams 1976; Hill 1991; Hobsbawm 1962: 74–5), John
Dunn is right that ‘in a few short months, in the year of 1789, the people of France set their
stamp ineffaceably on a political idea which has loomed over the history of the world ever
since’ (Dunn 2008: 17). In fact, as Krishan Kumar points out, the French Revolution
inspired ‘practically every important statement about revolution in the subsequent century
and a half’ (Kumar 1971: 2).
Maximilien Robespierre’s name is pivotal to this contested legacy. His linkage of virtue
and terror through revolutionary government proved not only to be a fundamental point of
reference for all subsequent analyses of the Revolution itself but it also provided the
backdrop to all ensuing debates on the nature of revolution more broadly. The most
important contribution to these debates was made by Karl Marx, who, alongside Frederick
Engels, engaged with this issue from a position that was deeply influenced not only by his
reading of Hegel but also by engagements with other critics of capitalism. To make sense of
the meaning of the word revolution in the nineteenth century, therefore, necessarily means
engaging with the ideas of Marx, through the lens of his relationships both to Jacobinism
and classical German philosophy and to other socialist and anarchist intellectuals.

2. The Jacobin Legacy

In his classic critique of Marxism, The Preconditions of Socialism of 1899, Eduard Bernstein
insisted that Marx had failed to transcend the Jacobin perspective, that is, the perspective
of the followers of Robespierre who supported his programme of revolutionary Terror.
Bernstein claimed that Hegelian philosophy was ‘a reflex of the great French Revolution’
and that insofar as Marxism failed to disentangle itself from this framework it too remained
politically tied to the far-left tendencies which carried forth the Jacobin tradition into the
nineteenth century (Bernstein [1899] 1993: 36–46). For Bernstein these tendencies were
represented classically by two revolutionary communists: François-Noël ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf
who was guillotined after a failed insurrection in 1796 and Louis-Auguste Blanqui who
attempted many similar insurrections throughout the nineteenth century and consequently
spent most of his adult life in prison.
260 paul blackledge
Bernstein did not believe that Marx and Engels were uncritical of Babeuf and Blanqui.
Rather, he thought that their attempt to synthesise the ‘destructive’ politics of these early
socialists with more modern and more ‘constructive’ tendencies was a failure that
bequeathed an unstable compromise to their followers. Concretely, Bernstein argued that
whereas Babeuf and Blanqui had followed the Jacobins in demanding the violent over-
throw of the old order, modern socialism – Bernstein was writing specifically about the
German Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the turn of the twentieth century – emerged in
a radically different context. Once the political rights of voting, association and a free press
had been established, the old methods of ‘political expropriation’ were no longer relevant.
Emancipation was now to come through ‘economic organisation’. Bernstein claimed that
Marx, in trying ‘to combine the essentials of both [of these] streams’ in his political theory,
bequeathed to his followers an incoherent compromise from which Bernstein intended to
extricate them (Bernstein [1899] 1993: 40–1).
Bernstein’s claim that there is a direct lineage from Robespierre to Marx has often been
repeated (Birchall 1997: 126, 155). Indeed, even Mikhail Bakunin, who challenged Marx
from a diametrically opposed perspective, agreed with Bernstein that the faults with
Marxism could be traced back to its Jacobin heritage. Admittedly, Bakunin claimed that
the lineage from Robespierre to Marx passed not through Babeuf and Blanqui but via a
more reformist route, arguing that ‘in respect to politics [Marx] is a direct disciple of Louis
Blanc’ (Bakunin [1873] 1990: 142). Nonetheless, he would have agreed with Bernstein
that the faults with Marxism traced back to his inheritance from Robespierre, for – Bakunin
claimed – Marx, like Robespierre and Blanc, believed that radical reforms could come
through the state.
A problem with both Bernstein’s and Bakunin’s claims is that while Marx obviously
admired Robespierre’s ‘historical greatness and revolutionary energy’, he explicitly rejected
Jacobinism ‘as a model or source of inspiration for socialist revolutionary praxis’ (Löwy
1989: 119). From his earliest writings, Marx drew on Hegel’s analysis of Jacobinism to
criticise the one-sidedly political character of Robespierre’s practice (Marx [1844] 1975c:
413). Moreover, as Michael Löwy suggests, Babeuf was the only actor from the Great
French Revolution whom Marx saw as a ‘really important . . . precursor’ (Löwy 1989: 119).
To untangle Marxism from Jacobinism thus requires first making sense of Babeuf’s
relationship with Robespierre.
One aspect of the difference between these two revolutionaries is uncontentious.
Whereas Robespierre followed Rousseau in believing that the ‘general will’ could be
represented in a modern society, Babeuf began to move towards a class analysis of the
Revolution which, by placing conflicts between the rich and the poor at the centre of the
struggle for ‘common happiness’, pointed beyond Rousseau’s politics (Birchall 1997: 147).
This is not to suggest that Robespierre was an uncritical follower of Rousseau. He was well
aware that, although Rousseau had suggested that tyrannies could be overthrown by
revolutionary movements, he had had no developed theory of revolution (O’Hagan 1999:
56). Robespierre thus recognised that his own revolutionary politics was ‘as new as the
revolution which brought it into being’ (Robespierre [1793] 2007: 98).
Andrew Levine highlights one aspect of this difference between Robespierre and
Rousseau. He points out that in the Social Contract of 1762 Rousseau had suggested that
a ‘suspension of sovereignty’ was permissible only in exceptional circumstances when the
republic was threatened from ‘without’. However, in contrast to this model, divisions
within the French community between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries were
rooted in conflicting class interests and these divisions meant that ‘what threatened the
 theory and practice of revolution 261
French Revolution in the autumn of 1793 was, in very large measure, internally generated’
(Levine 1987: 54–5). Levine claims that Robespierre responded to this problem by
extending the idea of the suspension of sovereignty in a way that revealed both his
own inability to articulate the ‘general will’ and perhaps also a more general problem of
articulating any kind of general will in a class-divided society. The Jacobins discovered
‘that in revolutionary times the general will cannot be exercised if, indeed, it makes sense
to speak of a general will at all’ (Levine 1987: 56).
The Terror was therefore evidence that far from articulating the ‘general will’, the
Jacobins represented the interests of a particular social group. In fact, George Rudé argues
that they represented the so-called sans-culottes of urban ‘small shopkeepers and craftsmen
(both masters and journeymen), servants and day-labourers’ (Rudé 1988: 94–5). Because
Robespierre de facto recognised the limited nature of his social base, even if he was unable
to provide an adequate theoretical account of this, he came to believe that the common
good would have to be imposed on society as a correction against ‘the shortcomings and
defects of individual men’ (Israel 2001: 717). So, despite his fervent advocacy of
democracy, he held to a more-or-less implicit belief not only that ‘democracy had to
be directed from above’ but also that ‘no reliance could be placed on the spontaneous
revolutionary ardour of the people’ (Soboul [1965] 1977: 107).
In contrast to this perspective, Babeuf pointed towards a very different form of
revolutionary organisation. Unfortunately, this difference was obscured by Filippo Buo-
narroti, who had been a member of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals in the 1790s and
subsequently authored the first serious analysis of this group’s politics: Conspiration pour
l’égalité dite de Babeuf of 1828. In this book, Buonarroti underplayed the divergences
between Babouvism and Jacobinism by both glossing over Babeuf’s criticisms of the
Jacobins and overstating the conspiratorial and clandestine nature of the Conspiracy of
Equals (Birchall 1997: 90). He thus distorted Babeuf’s belief that his ‘organisation was an
instrument of the people, not something [like the Jacobins] that substituted itself for it’
(Birchall 1997: 158). Ian Birchall argues that it was this democratic characteristic of
Babouvism which allowed Marx to trace a lineage through it from earlier to more modern
forms of socialism in a way that bypassed Jacobinism (Birchall 1997: 96; cf. Marx and
Engels [1844] 1975: 119). More generally, Marx’s delineation between bourgeois and
proletarian revolutions was formulated in part to explain the historical specificity of
modern socialism and thus to differentiate it from Jacobinism (Marx [1852] 1973b).
According to Marx, bourgeois revolutions emerged out of developing contradictions
between emergent capitalist relations of production and existing pre-capitalist states and
where they were successful resulted in the removal of fetters to further capitalist develop-
ment. Although these revolutions were generally marked by a progressive break with pre-
capitalist hierarchies, because they were characterised by the transference of power from one
ruling class to another, they involved at best a contradictory relationship between their
leadership and the mass of the population. For instance, bourgeois revolutions ‘from above’
such as Bismarck’s unification of Germany involved no mass action at all, whereas England’s,
America’s and France’s bourgeois revolutions ‘from below’ were won through the involve-
ment of the lower classes but ended similarly with the exclusion of the poor from power.
Proletarian revolutions, by contrast, because they are made for and by the working class – ‘the
emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’
(Marx [1864] 1974a: 82) – were necessarily qualitatively more democratic in both their
execution and outcome. Their triumph required the workers to be organised as a political
force and, because the workers exploit no social group below them, once the bourgeois
262 paul blackledge
counter-revolution was suppressed the workers’ state would itself ‘wither away’ (Callinicos
1989; Draper 1978: 28–32; Hobsbawm 1986: 26; Lukács [1923] 1971: 282).
Despite this divergence, Marx did recognise a degree of continuity between bourgeois and
proletarian revolutions, for it was at the radical extremes of the more democratic examples of
the former that the germ of the latter emerged. For instance, socialism was not only hinted at
in the French constitution of 1793, especially in excluded clauses that had been suggested for
this constitution by Robespierre (Rudé 1975: 108–9), but was more properly prefigured in
the writings and actions of Babeuf in the 1790s and also of Gerrard Winstanley a century and
a half earlier in England. Following their lead, Marx argued that the aim of German socialists
should be to make their ‘bourgeois’ revolution ‘permanent’: that is, to fight within it for the
realisation of its most democratic, that is, socialist, implications (Marx [1850] 1973a: 330).
So while Marx expected proletarian revolutions, at least sometimes, to grow out of bourgeois
revolutions, his differentiation between these two types of revolution points to fundamental
problems with Bernstein’s claim that there was an unbroken trajectory from Robespierre
to Marx via Babeuf and Blanqui: Marx’s revolutionary strategy was based upon a total
reorganisation of society based upon the prior emergence of new social forces, not a one-
sidedly political change of leadership within the state.
Nevertheless, it is true that Blanqui was deeply influenced by the Jacobins and his model of
revolution as the act of a small elite of revolutionaries did build upon their substitutionalist
politics. For instance, in the oath of membership to his organisation he suggested that the
malicious consequences of existing inegalitarian social structures included the ideological
contamination of the people which left them unable to liberate themselves. From this
premise, he surmised that the revolution should be led by a ‘revolutionary power’ (Blanqui
[1830] 1983: 34). Hal Draper comments that Blanqui believed that socialism could only be
inaugurated through the ‘revolutionary dictatorship’ of a small conspiratorial band, who
would take power in the name of the workers before leading them forward to socialism
through a benign educational tyranny (Draper 1986: 37–8).
Discussing the arguments put forward by the Blanquists in the wake of the Paris
Commune of 1871, Engels argued that they were ‘socialists only in sentiment’, because
their model of socialism was not underpinned by anything like an adequate account of
either the class struggle or of the historical basis for socialism itself. He thus dismissed
Blanqui’s proposal that the revolution be a ‘coup de main by a small revolutionary
minority’ and claimed that Blanquist politics was an ‘obsolete’ model of revolution as
‘dictatorship’ (Engels [1874] 1989a: 13).
This argument is interesting not only for the light it sheds on Marx and Engels’s
relationship to Blanquism and through it to Jacobinism but also for its illumination of their
criticisms of both anarchist and reformist tendencies within the European socialist
movement. At the centre of all of these debates was Marx’s deployment of the concept
of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. This concept is often confused with Blanqui’s
concept of ‘revolutionary dictatorship’ and many commentators have assumed the truth of
the unfounded myth that Marx borrowed his concept from Blanqui. In fact the phrase
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ ‘cannot be found anywhere in Blanqui either as a term or as
an idea’ (Draper 1986: 35).
It is important to register the distinction between Marx’s concept of ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’ and Blanqui’s idea of ‘revolutionary dictatorship’ because it provides a basis
from which to explain Engels’s justification both of the criticisms of Blanqui noted above
and his argument against Bakunin’s anarchism, made for instance in his essay On Authority
written just a year earlier, that ‘a revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there
 theory and practice of revolution 263
is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by
means of rifles, bayonets and cannon’ (Engels [1873] 1988: 425). If this claim appears to
suggest that Engels favoured a Blanquist model of revolution, this interpretation of his ideas
is reinforced by his later critique of the SPD’s Erfurt Programme. In this essay he insisted
that ‘our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a
democratic republic. This is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat’
(Engels [1891] 1990c: 227). To make sense of these seemingly contradictory statements –
in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat and yet against the (Blanquist) idea of a
revolutionary dictatorship – it is necessary to examine Marx and Engels’s relationship to
other forms of anti-capitalism.

3. Marxism, Hegelianism and the Historical Model of Human

Nature
In his important study of Marx’s relationship to anarchism, Paul Thomas argues that
although Marx and his anarchist counterparts desired the overthrow of the state it would be
a misconception to claim that the differences between them were of a merely tactical kind
(Thomas 1980: 13). On the contrary, because the anarchists did not have a historical
conception of human nature as Marx did, they did not understand, as he did, the overthrow
of the state to mean that ‘socialised man . . . man freely associated with his fellows, could
control the totality of his social existence and become master of his own environment and
activity’ (Thomas 1980: 106). The historical conception of human nature was not merely
the basis from which Marx criticised anarchism. It was also first formulated, in no small
part, as a response to Max Stirner’s extreme egoistic anarchism.
Stirner developed this perspective against what he saw as the limitations of Feuerbach’s
materialism. Both Feuerbach and Stirner were prominent members of Berlin’s radical
Young Hegelian circle in the 1830s and 1840s. This milieu was characterised in part by its
interrogation of what Engels later described as tensions between Hegel’s (conservative)
system and his (revolutionary) dialectical method (Engels [1886] 1990a: 363). Indeed,
many of Hegel’s followers believed that he had resisted the revolutionary implications of
his analysis of the contradictory character of bourgeois society. This is apparent in Hegel’s
analysis of the Jacobins. Like Kant (Kersting 1992: 360; Kant [1798] 1991: 182, 188),
Hegel welcomed the ideals of the French Revolution, but he rejected the revolutionary
means by which they were realised, and he detested Robespierre.
This is not to say that Hegel simply counterposed 1789 to 1793. Rather, he believed that
although the Terror was the inevitable excess which accompanied the progressive
realisation of the freedoms of civil society, the idea that the Jacobins pointed beyond
the limits of the Revolution towards a freer society was unfounded. This was because, for
Hegel, Robespierre’s Terror was the culmination of the abstract political will’s attempt to
impose its vision on society from the top down without transforming the nation’s
‘dispositions and religion’ (Hegel [1837] 1956: 446, 449, 450). More specifically, because
Hegel believed that personal freedoms were realised in civil society, he saw this type of
social organisation as the historical limit on human progress. So, although he recognised
that the modern contradiction identified by Rousseau between homme and citoyen had its
roots in civil society, he believed that this contradiction was a necessary manifestation of
personal freedom. Against the chaotic implications of this perspective, he argued that the
universal class of state bureaucrats would subordinate the fragmenting interests of civil
society to the broader interests of the community as a whole (Hunt 1974: 53–4; Taylor
264 paul blackledge
1975: 437). So while he rejected Jacobinism, he at least believed that Robespierre had been
part of an excessive but necessary evil through which progress had been realised. Never-
theless, he dismissed the idea that the proletarian ‘rabble’ (Hegel [1821] 1952: 150), who
had taken up the struggle against the bourgeoisie in the wake of the Revolution, could forge
an ethical alternative able to overcome the contradictions of bourgeois society.
After Hegel’s death, one issue faced by the Young Hegelians was, as Marx suggested in
1843, that the state bureaucracy, far from operating in the universal interest of the
community, seemed to be alienated from the people’s will and in fact to have its own
particular interests (Marx [1843] 1975a). The Young Hegelians explored this problem, and
the tensions between the conservative and revolutionary aspects of Hegel’s thought
generally, through a debate on the issue of religion. Because this debate was effectively
about the nature of authority, its political implications were apparent from the outset. This
was nowhere truer than in the work of Feuerbach, who challenged Hegel’s claim that
human history was a product of the Absolute, arguing instead that the idea of God was a
property of human consciousness. Feuerbach also rejected the egoistic freedom of civil
society. He argued that ‘man is conscious of himself not only as an individual, but also as a
member of the human species’ and that ‘God is really the perfected idea of the species
viewed as an individual’ (McLellan 1969: 92). This concept of species-being both
challenged the liberal naturalisation of the egoism of civil society and informed a turn
towards socialism amongst a layer of the Young Hegelians.
The concept of species-being also influenced the young Marx. But from a very early stage
he was aware that the naturalistic morality which Feuerbach extrapolated from it was
inadequate to the needs of modern politics (McLellan 1969: 113). Interestingly, it was
partly to the same weakness with Feuerbach’s moralism that Stirner addressed The Ego and
His Own (1844) (McLellan 1969: 131; Hook [1950] 1962: 174). And it was through
answering Stirner’s criticisms of Feuerbach that Marx moved beyond the limitations of the
latter’s perspective.
Stirner argued that all political systems – conservative, liberal, socialist or whatever – led
in practice to authoritarian suppression of the individual ego. Even revolutions, by claiming
to be in the common interest, involved the suppression of individual egoism. Consequently,
Stirner conceived ‘self-liberation’ to be possible through an act of rebellion rather than
revolution (Martin [1963] 2005: xiii; see also Thomas 1980: 130). Drawing on Hobbes, but
in a way that prefigured Nietzsche (Hook [1950] 1962: 165), Stirner insisted that

because each thing cares for itself and at the same time comes into constant collision with
other things, the combat of self-assertion is unavoidable . . . The victor becomes the lord,
the vanquished one the subject . . . But both remain enemies. (Stirner [1844] 2005: 9)

Nevertheless, in contrast not only to Hobbes but also to his liberal critics, Stirner did not
extend this argument into a justification of some form of political state. Quite the reverse,
he suggested that ‘political liberty’ amounts to nothing less than the ‘individual’s
subjugation in the state’ (Stirner [1844] 2005: 106, 196, 255). In a comment on the
French Revolution which he believed to have general salience, he suggested that this
upheaval was not directed against ‘the establishment, but against the establishment in question,
against a particular establishment. It did away with this ruler, not with the ruler’. That the
French Revolution ended in reaction should therefore come as no surprise: for it is in the
nature of revolutions that one authority is merely exchanged for another (110). The
embrace of the post-revolutionary state by ‘political liberalism’ revealed its authoritarian
 theory and practice of revolution 265
implications, implications that were also inherent in socialism and communism (ideologies
that Stirner subsumed under the heading ‘social liberalism’), for these too would merely
repeat the transference of power from one authority to another (122, 130). Even the
‘humane liberalism’ of the best of the Young Hegelians was suspect, because it too saw the
egoism of others as a weakness while denying it in itself.
In contrast to Hegel’s socio-historical understanding of the conception of freedom,
Stirner argued that ‘freedom can only be the whole of freedom, a piece of freedom is not
freedom’ (160). From this perspective, he concluded that all moral approaches, including
Feuerbach’s, were the enemies of freedom because they preached self-sacrifice in the name
of some metaphysical notion – god, man, the state, class, nation and so on. If ‘the road to
ruin is paved with good intentions’, the correct egoistic response was not revolution in the
name of some ‘good’ but a more simple rebellion of the ego against authority (54, 75).
Moreover, communism was not so much a radical alternative to the status quo as its latest
moralistic variant (18, 164, 258).
The vast bulk of the almost universally unread sections of Marx and Engels’s The German
Ideology ([1845–6] 1976) is a critique of Stirner’s book. Against Stirner’s claim that
socialists had embraced a static model of human essence which provided them with a moral
basis for criticising existing society, Marx outlined a Hegelian historicised transformation of
his earlier Feuerbachian materialism. On this basis he insisted that people made and
remade themselves through history. As he argued in Capital, by working purposefully
together on nature to meet our needs, people not only change the world around them, they
also change themselves (Marx [1867] 1976: 283). In the modern world this process
underpinned the emergence of both egoistic and more social forms of individualism.
Morality, as it was understood by Stirner, was an essential authoritarian characteristic only
of communities made up of the former. By assuming the universality of egoism, Stirner was
unable to comprehend the concept of workers’ solidarity. By contrast, Marx argued,
solidarity had become a real need for workers, such that it was wrong to contrast individual
and social emancipation. So, whereas Feuerbach’s abstract humanism tended to dissolve
the individual into the species, whilst Stirner saw only the conflict between these two
elements, Marx countered both of these models. He did so by claiming that socialism would
be a working-class-based movement whose goal was an ‘association, in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Marx and Engels
[1848] 1973: 87; see also Thomas 1980: 154). From this perspective there would be no need
to impose the idea of community on the working class from without. This is why, Marx
claimed, ‘communists do not preach morality’ (Marx and Engels [1845–6] 1976: 247).
Embedded in this argument is a general historical model of human nature. This model
built upon Hegel’s attempt to point towards an ethically (that is, socially and materially)
grounded theory of social transformation. But Marx did so while simultaneously rejecting
Hegel’s dismissal of the proletariat as a ‘rabble’. Marx claimed that while the division of
labour separated and fragmented its members, the ‘new fangled’ working class (Marx [1856]
1980: 656) could be characterised also by a rebellion against this fragmentation, which was
manifest as a growing desire for community. He first drew these conclusions in the 1840s on
the basis of his engagement both in the Silesian weavers’ revolt and in socialist circles in
Paris (Perkins 1993: 33). Generalising from these experiences, Marx commented that in
struggling against the power of capital workers begin to create modes of existence which
offer a virtuous alternative to egoism. This is an alternative both to the egoism of capitalist
society generally and, more specifically, to the enforced egoism of working-class life within
that society.
266 paul blackledge
When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction,
propaganda, etc. But at the same time, they acquire a new need – the need for society
– and what appears as a means had become an end. This practical development can be
most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating
and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company,
association, conversation, which in turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The
brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines
forth upon us from their work-worn figures. (Marx [1844] 1975b: 365)

This class analysis differentiated Marx’s model of liberation from both Robespierre’s
abstract conception of the ‘general will’ and the moralistic approach embraced by
Feuerbach’s ‘true socialist’ followers. Because Marx’s politics were based upon a socio-
historical analysis of the emergence of a new social class it escaped the abstract character of
Robespierre’s practice. From this perspective Marx also criticised the ‘true socialists’ for
aiming to liberate not real men and women but rather some disembodied ‘Man’ (Marx and
Engels [1845–6] 1976: 468). He insisted that because ‘true socialism’ abstracted the human
essence from its real manifestation in history it acted as a barrier to the real diffusion of
socialist consciousness, which could only arise through the recognition of the class-divided
nature of society (469). The true socialists forget

that the ‘inward nature’ of men, as well as their ‘consciousness’ of it, i.e., their ‘reason’,
has at all times been an historical product and that even when . . . the society of men
was based ‘upon external compulsion’, their ‘inward nature’ corresponded to this
‘external compulsion’. (Marx and Engels [1845–6] 1976: 468)

This historical model of human nature is central not only to Marx’s theory of history but
also to his theory of revolution. In The German Ideology he suggested two reasons why
socialism could only come through revolution. First, in common with revolutionaries such
as Robespierre and Blanqui, he argued that the ruling class could not be overthrown by any
other means. Second, and much more profoundly, he differentiated his conception of
revolution from those of these earlier revolutionaries by insisting that ‘the class over-
throwing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and
become fitted to found society anew’ (Marx and Engels [1845–6] 1976: 53). Revolutionary
activity was therefore not merely system-changing, it was also individually transformative:
it was the necessary means through which workers could come to realise in consciousness
the power of their situation at the centre of the new socialised mode of production.
Moreover, Marx suggested that workers, in tending to rebel against the process of their
dehumanisation, begin to act as potential agents for not only their own liberation but also
the universal liberation of humanity, because they exploit no groups below them (Marx
and Engels [1844] 1975: 36–7).
This model of revolutionary practice is of the first importance to an understanding of
Marx’s theory of revolution, because it is the basis on which he and Engels criticised
Blanqui’s Jacobinism. While Marx agreed with Blanqui, and for that matter Robert Owen,
that capitalism had made workers unfit to rule, he departed from their respective solutions
to this problem – Blanqui’s revolutionary elitism and Owen’s philanthropic elitism (Owen
[1817] 1991: 188). Instead Marx insisted that workers could become fit to rule through the
revolutionary process itself: ‘the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of
human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as
 theory and practice of revolution 267
revolutionary practice’ (Marx [1845] 1975d: 422). Indeed it was the collective struggles in
the revolutionary process that did away with the need for Blanqui’s elitist model of
‘revolutionary dictatorship’.
Marx also rejected Blanqui’s political voluntarism. He believed that while individuals
would play pivotal roles within them, revolutionary situations developed, fundamentally,
out of objective historical circumstances over which individuals had little control (Marx
[1852] 1973b: 145). He was adamant that capitalism was subject to systemic contradictions
which could not be reformed away and that these were a specific instance of a pattern of
structural crises recurring throughout history. Consequently, whereas Alexis de Tocque-
ville famously pointed to a political explanation of the genesis of the French Revolution as
a specific instance of a more general pattern, Marx attempted to analyse the underlying
causes of the political shifts themselves. According to Tocqueville’s classic formulation,
revolutions tend to occur when bad regimes move to reform themselves:

[I]t oftener happens that when a people which has put up with an oppressive rule over a
long period without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes
up arms against it, and experience teaches us that, generally speaking, the most perilous
moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways. (Tocqueville [1856]
1966: 196)

While Marx had read Tocqueville’s study of the French Revolution (Marx 1981: 939), I am
unaware of any substantive comments he made on it. Nonetheless, we can probably assume
that while he would have accepted the limited power of Tocqueville’s suggestion, he was
himself interested in uncovering not only the political dynamics of revolutions but also the
seismic shifts that underpinned their emergence. As Rudé has argued, for all Tocqueville’s
‘brilliance’, he leaves unanswered the general problem of why Louis XVI’s ministers and
why other reforming governments before and since ‘have to stop short’ their reforms. More
specifically, Tocqueville does not explain the actual circumstances of the outbreak and the
process through which a revolt of the elites was transformed into a revolution from below
(Rudé 1988: 15). For Marx, by contrast, revolutions emerged at specific historical
junctures: when the mode of production entered a structural crisis.

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into
conflict with the existing relations of production . . . From forms of development of the
productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social
revolution. (Marx [1859] 1970: 20)

Under capitalism, Marx argued, the contradiction between forces and relations of
production is expressed through the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. Because
it is rooted in the capital accumulation process, this tendency cannot ultimately be resolved
without a revolutionary transformation of social relations. Moreover, capitalism is also
characterised by the growth in size and strength of the working class, such that when
workers join together to resist the consequences of crisis they begin to offer a potential
political alternative to capitalism (Marx [1867] 1976: 929; Marx and Engels [1848] 1973:
68; see also Callinicos 1995: 151–65).
This process is obscured so long as it is viewed from the point of view of the atomised
individual within capitalist society and it becomes fully apparent only when examined from
the point of view of the totality of the capitalist system (Marx [1867] 1976: 732).
268 paul blackledge
Moreover, it is from the standpoint of workers’ struggles that the nature of the social
totality itself becomes clear (Lukács [1923] 1971: 28, 129). This perspective provides the
point of contact between Marx’s scientific, explanatory account of the dynamics of the
capitalist mode of production and his normative critique of capitalism. Far from being
mutually exclusive, these two aspects of his social theory are two sides of the same coin:
capitalism as a system for the exploitation of wage labour becomes apparent from the point
of view of class struggles over the length of the working day. These struggles simultaneously
point beyond what Alasdair MacIntyre suggests is the structure of incommensurable moral
preferences which characterises modern, bourgeois, moral theory (MacIntyre 1985: 8). It is
therefore from the perspective of workers’ struggles that we can begin to make sense of
Marx’s condemnation of morality. He dismisses those moral attitudes that pretend to offer
some mechanism through which a universal good can be promoted in a world in which
social divisions undermine such a project. But he does this from the point of view of a class-
based morality which, through the emergence of a need for solidarity, not only points
beyond liberal naturalisations of egoism, but also, he believes, has become universal in the
modern context. Marxism therefore presupposes and reaffirms the sort of social practice –
collective working-class struggles – which simultaneously reveal and point beyond the facts
of exploitation (Blackledge 2008).
It is because Marx’s perspective is rooted in a historical materialist analysis of the emergence
of a new social class with novel needs and capacities (that is, a new nature), that he points
beyond the one-sidedly political character of both Jacobinism and Blanquism, while none-
theless remaining a revolutionary. It is this dual character of Marx’s revolutionary theory that
underpins Engels’s criticisms of Bakunin’s anarchism, Blanquism and statist reformism noted
above. Despite appearing to be opposites, both Blanquism and state socialism are united as
examples of what Hal Draper called ‘socialism from above’, to which Engels opposed Marx’s
‘socialism from below’ (Draper 1992). Moreover, whilst anarchism and Marxism are both
rooted in movements from below, Marx differs from Bakunin in recognising, on the one hand,
the historical novelty and social specificity of the modern socialist movement and, on the other
hand, the need for a revolution which not only ‘smashes’ the old state machine but also
simultaneously builds new forms of workers’ power (see Blackledge 2010b).

4. Marxism, Anarchism and Social Democracy

This historicised conception of human nature also underpinned Marx’s criticisms of Pierre-
Joseph Proudhon’s anarchism. Proudhon’s anarchism was of a very different stripe to
Stirner’s. Whereas Stirner dismissed Proudhon as a moralist (Stirner [1844] 2005: 47),
Proudhon could not have accepted Stirner’s claim that ‘labouring does not make you a
man, because it is something formal and is . . . accidental’ (130). For Proudhon, labouring
and the morality attendant upon it were at the centre of his critique of capitalism; and,
according to Thomas, he believed that while ‘power corrupts, labour ennobles’ (Thomas
1980: 148). Indeed, against Lockean attempts to derive the rights of private property from a
basic labour theory of value, he insisted not only that the transformation from ‘possession
into property’ necessarily involved something ‘besides labour’ but also that even in a
situation of wage labour the labourer retains ‘a natural right of property in the thing which
he has produced’ (Proudhon [1840] 1994: 85, 88).
Proudhon’s famous claim that ‘property is theft’ (Proudhon 1994: 13) therefore rested on
the distinction he drew between possession and property. Whereas he believed that the act
of labouring entitled the labourer to the possession of the product of his labour (and for
 theory and practice of revolution 269
Proudhon it most certainly was his rather than her labour), he believed that such possessions
did not underpin entitlements either to the ownership of the means of production
(primarily land) or to the appropriation of the product of the labour of others (McNally
1993: 140). It was these latter forms of property which he believed were artificial and
immoral. Consequently, as Peter Marshall has argued, Proudhon ‘did not attack private
property as such’, since he believed that freedom was threatened both by communist plans
to collectivise and by the way that large property owners ate into the property of the petty
bourgeoisie (Marshall 2008: 239). And although his critique of property might appear to be
a rehash of the attacks on individual rights associated with Robespierre’s rule, nothing
could be further from his thoughts (Proudhon 1994: 13). The error of the revolutionaries of
the 1790s, from Proudhon’s point of view, was that their attack on the ancien régime had
been hamstrung by an inability to think beyond the old monarchical system. Rather than
overthrowing the property system, they generalised it downwards: ‘the people finally
legalised property. God forgive them, for they knew not what they did’ (30). Because
Proudhon saw in the bourgeoisie’s defence of property not the ideological reflection of class
interest but an intellectual error, he aimed to correct it through a ‘revolution’ that was
primarily ‘a movement of the mind’ (27; see also Proudhon [1851] 1989: 8). In fact, when a
decade later he published a monograph on the concept of revolution, he dedicated it to the
‘bourgeoisie’, because he believed that its members were, not only in 1789 but also in the
1840s and 1850s, ‘the boldest and most skilful revolutionaries’ ([1851] 1989: 7).
Proudhon insisted that ‘revolution was necessary’ because the aims of 1789 had yet to be
realised (45). Far from being a ‘natural order’, France had become a ‘fractitious order’ with
‘parasite interests, abnormal morals, monstrous ambitions, [and] prejudices at variance with
common sense’. Interestingly, despite his claim that he alone represented ‘the revolu-
tionary point of view’ (Proudhon [1851] 1989: 125), like Stirner he explained the injustices
of the status quo in a way that tended to naturalise particular modern capitalist social
relations. As David McNally has argued, Proudhon’s critique of modern capitalism
involved an actual accommodation with bourgeois ideology in a number of important
ways. First, he defined justice by ‘equal market exchange’; second, he used commodity
exchange as ‘the model for the social contract’; third, he depicted exploitation not as a
product of commodity production but as its violation through monopoly; fourth, he aimed
to foster equal exchange of commodities by opening a ‘People’s Bank’ which would use
paper money to overturn ‘the royalty of gold’; fifth, he equated socialism with the ‘abolition
of monopoly and the realisation of free trade’; and, sixth, he argued within the workers’
movement against strikes and political struggles against the state and in their place for
‘mutualism and equal exchange’ (McNally 1993: 141–3). This ‘absolute pure morality’
emerged, or so Marx argued, out of Proudhon’s critique of the classical political economists
‘from the standpoint of political economy’ (Marx and Engels [1844] 1975: 31).
The political consequences of this perspective are apparent in Proudhon’s critique of
socialism. The dominant voice of socialism in France at the time was that of the reformist
state-socialist Louis Blanc. According to Proudhon, Blanc was heir both to Robespierre’s
statism and, through him, to the dictatorial methods of ‘the scoundrel’ Rousseau (Proud-
hon [1851] 1989: 188, 152–3). What these figures shared was a common focus on reform
through the state. This approach, Proudhon believed, confused legitimate with illegitimate
forms of authority: the state transferred patriarchal authority from the family, which was its
proper abode, to an unnatural situation (171). Practically, this meant that whereas
anarchists focused upon demands for jobs and a ‘living wage’, socialists followed the
Jacobins in their focus on politics (166). This was just as true of revolutionary socialists
270 paul blackledge
such as Blanqui (and before him Babeuf) as it was of Blanc’s reformism: Proudhon claimed
that both were counter-revolutionary because they failed to see that power and liberty were
absolutely ‘incompatible’ (Thomas 1980: 180, 212). Against these socialists, the key issue
of the day was not which kind of government but rather ‘Government or No-Government’,
or absolutism versus anarchy, and the aim of the revolution was ‘to do away with . . . the
state’ (Proudhon [1851] 1989: 153; see also 105, 128, 286).
In place of the state, Proudhon envisioned a social contract which was the opposite
of Rousseau’s statism because it was to be freely entered into by independent producers
(113–27; see also 130, 206). While Proudhon accepted the need for workers’ trade unions
as a buffer against the power of capital, at a deeper level he insisted that these organisations
were antithetical to his idea of anarchy. Commenting on Blanc’s advocacy of the needs
principle – ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ – Proudhon
responded that such a principle could operate only through a ‘binding’ union that would
infringe individual liberty. Given this situation, he asked, who is to decide what my needs
and capacities are? Noting the tyrannical consequences of this perspective, he suggested
that the only beneficiaries of such an agreement would be ‘weak or lazy workers’ (84–5, 96).
More generally, while he agreed that unions were important to workers, the role of workers
in the coming revolution was not to fight for their ‘petty union interests’, but rather to deny
‘the rule of capitalists, money lenders and governments, which the first revolution left
undisturbed’ (99).
The second half of this sentence allows us to make sense of how Proudhonists and Marxists
were able to work together within the International Working Men’s Association or First
International (1864–72). However, the first half of the sentence and Proudhon’s anti-
political perspectives more generally point to the tensions embedded in this relationship
from the start. From Marx’s standpoint, Proudhon’s mutualism – the idea that capitalism
could be transformed ‘by means of producer cooperatives financed by a ‘‘people’s bank’’’ –
was the most extreme muddle, which reflected his inability to look beneath capitalism’s
surface appearance as a system of equal exchange to the underlying appropriation of value
from workers. ‘We may well’, wrote Marx, ‘feel astonished at the cleverness of Proudhon who
would abolish capitalist property – by enforcing the eternal laws of property which are
themselves based on commodity production!’ (Marx [1867] 1976: 734)
Within the International, debate became focused on the issue of working-class demands
made on the state. On one side, the Proudhonists opposed this approach, while Marx,
supported by English trade unionists, stressed the necessity of fighting for reforms.
According to Collins and Abramsky, whereas Marx believed that ‘trade union struggle
represented a necessary phase through which the workers must pass on the road to full
emancipation’, ‘for the French they were a barbaric expedient, necessary perhaps, as a last
resort in particular circumstances, but contributing nothing of value to the movement’
(Collins and Abramsky 1964: 101, 117; see also Gilbert 1981: 90). Thus, whilst Proudhon’s
mutualism meant that his followers tended to reject both strikes and ‘political’ struggles,
Marx insisted that when workers won reforms and then acted to enforce these laws they did
not ‘fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used
against them, into their own agency’ (Marx quoted in Fernbach 1974: 17).
Marx was generally successful in his struggles against the Proudhonists. But from 1867–8
onwards the torch of anarchism was taken up within the International by Bakunin. He
described his version of anarchism as ‘Proudhonism greatly developed and pushed to its
furthest conclusion’ (Guerin [1965] 1970: 4). Concretely, this meant that Bakunin agreed
with Proudhon’s general argument that natural social harmony was possible only through the
 theory and practice of revolution 271
eradication of government and the state. But he went further than Proudhon in a collectivist
direction (12). If anarcho-syndicalism or libertarian-communism was the logical culmina-
tion of this intellectual movement, Bakunin himself was keen to stress his ‘detestation’ of
communism’s top-down, state-led approach, which he compared unfavourably to the
bottom-up democratic processes that gave rise to collectivism (22). Nevertheless, in the
first instance the gap between Marx and Bakunin was less than it had been between Marx
and Proudhon and at the 1869 conference of the International Bakunin supported Marx’s
motion in favour of ‘public ownership of land and industry’ against the Proudhonists (Collins
and Abramsky 1964: 228; see also Thomas 1980: 268).
This convergence was soon overshadowed by renewed debates on the question of
reformist political demands. On this issue, Bakunin’s position ‘was of a piece with
Proudhon’s’ (Thomas 1980: 294). Draper comments on their differing approaches to this
issue. He suggests that whereas both Marx and Bakunin aimed at ‘abolishing’ the state, this
for Marx – unlike Bakunin – did not mean an end to authority but rather its ‘democratisa-
tion’. This, in turn, Marx thought would be possible only after ‘a sufficient period of
socialist reconstruction of society’ (Draper 1990: 174; Blackledge 2010a).
Rather ironically, given the animosity of the debate between them and their followers,
both Marx and Bakunin embraced the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of real living
socialism. Nevertheless, Bakunin insisted that whereas ‘the communists [that is, Marxists]
believe it necessary to organize the workers’ forces in order to seize the political power of
the State’, ‘the revolutionary socialists organize for the purpose of destroying – or, to put it
more politely – liquidating the State’. Concretely, Bakunin proclaimed his support for the
Commune not only because it was made by ‘the spontaneous and continued action of the
masses’ but also because it was the ‘negation of the state’ (Bakunin [1872] 1973: 263, 264,
268). Marx had already written, in a document published under the auspices of the
International, that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state
machinery and wield it for its own purposes’. Nevertheless, Marx insisted that although the
Commune was the ‘direct antithesis to the Empire’, it was still ‘a working-class government’
(Marx [1871] 1974c: 206, 208, 212). This last point is important, because despite
Bakunin’s attempt to paint Marx’s model of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Jacobin,
Blanquist or Lassallean colours, Marx did not mean by this term the dictatorship of an elite.
Rather, for him it meant more simply the rule of the working class (Draper 1987: 29). Thus,
two decades later Engels could write that

of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome
terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you
want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was
the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. (Engels [1891] 1990b: 191)

The difference between Marx and Bakunin was, however, about more than mere
semantics. Bakunin argued that Marx’s approach was mistaken because ‘every state power,
every government, by its nature and by its position stands outside the people and above
them and must invariably try to subject them to rules and objectives which are alien to
them’ (Bakunin [1873] 1990: 136). Therefore, whereas Marx predicated his political
practice on a historical model of human nature which underpinned his differentiation
between more and less democratic states, between better and worse laws and indeed
between workers’ and capitalist states, Bakunin believed that the desire for freedom was a
universal human characteristic and declared himself the enemy ‘of every government and
272 paul blackledge
every state power’. This informed his refusal of reformist political demands (Bakunin [1869]
1992: 109). It is not clear, however, how this position cohered with his embrace of the Paris
Commune as an example of his model of revolution. For, as Peter Kropotkin argued a few
years later from a perspective very close to Bakunin’s, the Commune’s key failing was its
embrace of a representative structure which meant that it reproduced the typical vices of
parliamentary governments. The weaknesses of the Commune were due not to the men
who led it but to the ‘system’ it embraced (Kropotkin [1880] 2002a: 237–42). Kropotkin
went on to reject the Blanquist idea of a ‘revolutionary government’ as the dream of
‘budding Robespierres’ and like Bakunin he conflated Marx’s conception of revolutionary
leadership with Blanqui’s elitism. Consequently, like Bakunin’s claim that Marx was a
Jacobin, Kropotkin’s critique of Marxism tended to miss its mark (Kropotkin [1880] 2002a:
242–50; [1887] 2002b: 61; see also Bakunin [1873] 1990: 182).
To this conceptual problem was added a more substantive issue. Bakunin’s approach
immunised his followers against the malign appeal of reformism. But by rejecting a whole
series of ‘political’ struggles for reform he found that he had little to say to those workers in
the advanced capitalist states who were engaged not only in struggles to extend the laws
that protected them but also to defend existing laws from the encroachment of individual
capitalists. More generally, by tarring all states with the same brush, Bakunin was unable to
formulate an adequate model of the revolutionary transformation to socialism. So,
although he had no trouble conceiving of a violent struggle between classes, he avoided
the problem of how workers might win victory without violently replacing the old order
with one of their own. As Marx pointed out in his notes on Statism and Anarchy, it was
precisely the need for violent revolution which implied that the working class must be
organised as an armed force, that is, as a form of state (Marx [1874–5] 1974b: 517).
The trouble with Marx’s approach, by contrast, was that, in focusing on the necessity for
socialist revolutionaries to engage in struggles for reform, he left himself open to
misrepresentation as a reformist (Fernbach 1974: 17). To counter this problem, he wrote
his ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’. This programme was agreed to by the German
Social Democratic Party (SPD) under the influence of the followers of the state-socialist
Ferdinand Lassalle (see Draper 1990: 41–71, 241–69) at the Gotha unity congress in 1875.
The programme was an odd amalgam which brought together some ultra-radical verbiage
with a series of practically moderate political demands. Both aspects of this ‘synthesis’ were
evident in the programme’s central demand for a ‘free state’.
Marx famously subjected a draft of the programme to a brutal interrogation. Beyond
pointing to the authoritarian implications of the aim of fighting for such a goal, he insisted
that in the transitional period from capitalism to communism the state could only exist as
‘the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’. He suggested that in avoiding this issue
the SPD had opened itself up to a possible evolution towards liberalism (Marx [1875]
1974d, 355). Contrary to Bakunin’s attempt to paint him as a statist, Marx was careful to
differentiate between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the modern capitalist state.
Indeed, he criticised the statism of the draft programme, claiming that beneath its
‘democratic clang’ could be discerned ‘the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state’ (357).
Engels similarly criticised the draft programme, commenting that ‘all the palaver about
the state ought to be dropped, especially after the commune, which has ceased to be a state
in the true sense of the term’ (Engels [1875] 1989b: 71). Nevertheless, Marx and Engels did
not carry out their threatened break with the SPD after the programme was ratified. In a
context in which both the bourgeois press and the workers read into the Gotha Programme
their views (Engels [1875] 1991: 97–8), they wagered that, despite the shortcomings of the
 theory and practice of revolution 273
party’s programme, the general superiority of the perspectives of the Party’s Marxist
tendency would lead to its eventual hegemony within the organisation. In the medium
term this was precisely the turn taken by events, a process which culminated with the
revision of the party’s programme at the Erfurt congress of 1891 (Schorske [1955] 1983: 3).
While Engels welcomed the Erfurt Programme as an improvement on that of Gotha,
however, he once again criticised the failure to address the question of state power
scientifically: ‘The political demands of the draft have one great fault. It lacks precisely
what should have been said’ (Engels [1891] 1990c: 225). Noting that reformism was
‘gaining ground in large sections of the Social-Democratic press’, Engels argued that it was
incumbent upon the framers of the programme to spell out clearly to the German workers
that the transition to socialism could only come ‘by force’, insisting that if the SPD did not
make this clear then, in the long run, the party would go ‘astray’ (226–7).

5. Conclusion
Despite Engels’s prescient warnings, reformist tendencies grew in strength across the
European socialist movement towards the end of the nineteenth century. Partly as a
reaction to this tendency, a syndicalist current emerged within the workers’ movement
which combined a rejection of reformism with a focus on independent working-class
action. Syndicalism was rooted in a renewal of class struggle from below and drew on
Proudhon’s and Bakunin’s rejections of bourgeois politics, alongside Marx’s conception of
socialism as working-class self-emancipation (Darlington 2008: 74–5). Expressed in the
writings of intellectuals such as Georges Sorel, the syndicalists had ‘nothing but contempt
for ‘politics’ in the form of compromise and opportunism which characterised parliamen-
tary affairs’ (Portis 1980: 44–5; Sorel [1908] 1999). A parallel reaction against the growing
reformism of the Second International developed within the Marxist movement itself.
Associated with the writings of Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin in The State
and Revolution ([1917] 1968) traced the intellectual basis of reformism in the Marxist
movement to a wilful misrepresentation of Marx’s critique of the state within the Second
International (1889–1914).
The trajectory taken by Antonio Gramsci highlights both the differences and similarities
between this renewed Marxism and anarcho-syndicalism in the early twentieth century. In
response to the accusation that he and the L’Ordine Nuovo group around him in Turin in 1919
and 1920 had acted in a syndicalist fashion, he replied that, yes, like the syndicalists and against
the mechanical interpretation of Marxism which had been dominant with the Second
International, his grouping had attempted to root their socialism in the real spontaneous
movement of workers from below instead of offering an ‘abstract’ model of leadership.
However, the weakness with this approach, and for Gramsci the weakness with syndicalism
more generally, was that L’Ordine Nuovo did not articulate a strategy for replacing the
capitalist state with a workers’ state, a lacuna which informed their failure to build an all-Italian
revolutionary socialist party (Gramsci 1971: 197–8; Williams 1975: 145–68).
Over the next few years Gramsci sought to overcome these weaknesses while building on
the strengths of the L’Ordine Nuovo period. Like the anarcho-syndicalists, he rooted his
practice in the day-to-day struggles of ordinary workers, but unlike them he extended this
approach into a strategy that included fighting for ‘immediate’ reforms within capitalism as
part of the broader struggle against capitalism (Gramsci 1978: 369). In so doing he moved
towards a Leninist position which had little in common with caricatures of Lenin as a
latter-day Jacobin, but which did cohere with Marx’s broader historical analysis of the
274 paul blackledge
emergence of new class relations and thus of new forms of class struggle. It was these
historically novel class relations which pointed towards a revolutionary political project
that aimed to escape the abstract character of Jacobinism.
This strategy was both ‘political’ and ‘statist’ in the limited senses criticised by Bakunin
and Proudhon, because it was based upon the distinctions Marx made between proletarian
and bourgeois revolutions and between bourgeois and workers’ states, including the claim
that the latter would wither away in a post-revolutionary context. The strategy was,
however, anti-statist and thus anti-political in the sense in which Marx and Engels had
described the Commune as the antithesis of the capitalist state. Unfortunately, the anti-
statist character of Marxism was subsequently and wilfully obscured by Stalin who
reinterpreted the success of his counter-revolution as the victorious culmination of the
Russian Revolution itself (Blackledge 2006: 126–30). While academic discussions of
Marxism in the twentieth century tended to be distorted by the Stalinist lens through
which Marx’s ideas were interpreted, the divisions between Marx, Proudhon and Bakunin
were rehearsed on the libertarian left throughout this period. These debates relate, on the
one hand, to the coherence of Marx’s claim that his model of the ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’ is distinct from Blanqui’s Jacobin-influenced model of ‘revolutionary dictator-
ship’ and to whether Marx’s vision of the ‘withering away’ of such a state is a utopia and, on
the other hand, to whether anarchist models of revolution can adequately confront not
only capitalist society but also the system of capitalist states. These divisions, in turn, relate
to the coherence of Marx’s historical model of human nature and, what is the corollary of
this, his distinction between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions and thus to the
coherence of the distinction between his politics and Jacobinism.
It is perhaps ironic that although the libertarian left welcomed the collapse of Russian
state communism, this event, in a context overdetermined by defeats suffered by the
workers’ movement over the last three decades of the twentieth century, ensured that the
voices of the left became even more marginalised within the academy in the 1990s.
Nevertheless, since the emergence of a global anti-capitalist movement at Seattle in 1999,
revolutionary voices have once again found a hearing. If these voices include, most
prominently, thinkers such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, perhaps the pre-eminent
amongst them are Michael Hardt and Tony Negri, who in Empire (2000) and Multitude
(2004) attempted to synthesise Marxist with post-modernist themes to reach recognisably
anarchistic conclusions. Each of these thinkers has been criticised from a more classical
Marxist perspective by Alex Callinicos (2006). Whatever one thinks of the relative merits
of these arguments, it is undoubtedly true that their power has helped to push the concept
of revolution back into the academic mainstream over the last decade, opening the door to
a welcome revival of engagements with this issue both as a philosophical problem and as a
political necessity.1

Note
1. For an instance of this re-engagement, see Foran et al., eds, 2008.

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 15
Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century: From
Absolute Subjectivity to Superhumanity

Michael Gillespie

1. The Varieties of Nihilism

The term ‘nihilism’ has been used to denote a philosophical concept or position, a
psychological or sociological state or mood, a doctrine or agenda for political action and a
cultural condition or movement. Moreover, the connotations of the term within each of
these areas are multiple, complicated and contested. It is thus not easy to define the term or
to determine the nature of the phenomenon that the term describes. This difficulty is
exacerbated by the fact that the term has been principally used as a pejorative by opponents
to characterise a condition, doctrine, or movement that they fear, disagree with or detest.
The term itself presents peculiar difficulties. In all of its modern variations ‘nihilism’
derives from the Latin nihil, ‘nothing’. Nihilism is thus literally ‘nothingism’ and nihilists
are ‘nothingists’. Typically, ‘ism’ terms such as nationalism refer to something substantive.
‘Nihilism’, by contrast, is a pure negation. It thus has no specific content. This has led some
to conclude that, in contrast to all other ‘isms’, nihilism is not directed to any specific end
(Thielicke 1961: 27). Even if this claim is exaggerated, the lack of a clear referent has
allowed the term to be used in multiple and conflicting ways.
The term is generally thought to describe a phenomenon that began in the second half of
the nineteenth century and which was during that time given its guiding definition by Ivan
Turgenev and by Nietzsche. It is generally thought, too, that the phenomenon became
acute in the first half of the twentieth century, driving and informing not merely German
thought during the inter-war years but also German and French existentialism in the period
after World War II. At the same time, the two leading theorists of nihilism, Friedrich
Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, argue that the explicit nihilism of the nineteenth century
and after is only the revelation of an implicit nihilism that has characterised European
civilisation since its Greek beginnings. Similarly, the leading French writer on the subject,
Albert Camus, used Sisyphus and Caligula as his examples of nihilists. Nietzsche and Keiji
Nishitani, a leading Japanese theorist of nihilism, were not even convinced that nihilism
was a merely Western phenomenon and they thought that it had explicit affinities to
Buddhism (Nishitani 1990). Moreover, the basic character of nihilism is in dispute. While
nihilism is generally considered atheistic, many scholars have argued that it has a Christian
or proto-Christian origin, connecting it to Plotinus’s notion of the One, Dun Scotus’s
notion of the univocity of being, or Ockham’s notion of divine omnipotence (Zamir 2000;
Cunningham 2002; Gillespie 1995). Others see nihilism as the result of a shift from other-
worldly to this-worldly concerns which began with medieval realism and nominalism
 nihilism in the nineteenth century 279
(Manschreck 1976). From this perspective, Christianity is neither the victim of nor the
antidote to nihilism but its driving cause – so that again nihilism would significantly
predate the nineteenth century.
Even those who associate nihilism with the decline in belief in the Christian God and
the rise of atheism and materialism do not agree about the nature or origin of the
phenomenon (Thielicke 1961; Rosen 1969). Many believe that it was humanism that
turned the West away from orthodox Christianity. Others attribute the origins of modern
atheism to Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza or to the critique of religion by
Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire. Still others focus on Hume’s scepticism or Kant’s
transcendental idealism. From this point of view nihilism is the result of a frustrated
foundationalism. Others lay greater weight on the deification of man that pushes God and
religion to the side. Still others, such as Max Weber, see nihilism as a symptom of the
disenchantment of the world produced by late capitalism or, like Heidegger or Jacques
Ellul, of the homelessness produced by the ceaseless operation of global technology. Others
see nihilism as a profound world-weariness and/or hatred of the present that leads to the
radical rejection of all existing modes and orders. Existence from this point of view is
meaningless and absurd and the only appropriate human response is murder and/or suicide.
Given the variety of conceptions of nihilism, it is difficult to determine how to make
sense of the term. To come to terms with nihilism we need to examine its genealogy, that is,
to trace the development of the concept in specific contexts and determine how the
meaning and use of the term have changed. In this way it may be possible to obtain some
idea not of the specific meaning of nihilism but of a constellation or range of meanings of
nihilism and the relationships between them.

2. The Critique of Post-Kantian Idealism as Nihilism

The term nihilism was apparently first used by F. L. Goetzius in his De nonismo et nihilismo in
theologia of 1733, but this work was little known and probably did not influence the later
development of the term. The concept of nihilism, as it has come down to us, was first used
by the critics of German idealism, who attacked the thought of radical Kantians and
particularly of Fichte as nihilism. They did so because they believed that such radical
egoism was a form of atheism.
Jacob Hermann Obereit, a theosophist, used the term in 1792, complaining that the
inaccessibility of the thing-in-itself which was proclaimed by the Kantians put a bare
nothing in the place of God (Timm 1971: 80–1). Daniel Jenisch, a Lutheran theologian,
similarly characterised transcendental idealism as nihilism in his On the Ground and Value
of the Discoveries of Herr Professor Kant in Metaphysics, Morals, and Aesthetics (Pöggeler
1970: 180, 186–9). His title notwithstanding, he applies the term not to Kant or even to
Fichte but to the radical Kantians who denied the existence of the thing-in-itself.1
While Obereit and Jenisch were the first to use the term, it was Jacobi who first
popularised the term in his open letter to Fichte in 1799: ‘Truly, my dear Fichte, it should
not grieve me, if you, or whoever it might be, want to call chimerism what I oppose to
idealism, which I reproach as nihilism’ (Jacobi [1799] 1959: 2: 268–71).2 Raised as a Pietist,
Jacobi became a critic of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, arguing that we
must ultimately rely on feeling and belief.3 In the 1780s he had been the principal
antagonist in the Pantheism Controversy, when he characterised the Spinozism of thinkers
such as Lessing and Mendelssohn as atheism.
Jacobi’s letter to Fichte was written during the similar Atheism Controversy at the
280 michael gillespie
University of Jena, a controversy which eventually cost Fichte his professorship. Jacobi used
his letter to distance himself from Fichte, whom he had begun to suspect of defending an
inverted Spinozism and whom he knew to be a supporter of the French Revolution. Jacobi
was convinced that Fichte recognised no truths beyond those of consciousness or reason and
thus fell into an absolute subjectivism which attributed everything to man and left no room
for God – indeed, which made God into a product of the human imagination. This, for
Jacobi, was the ‘most horrible of horrors’ (Jacobi 1959: 3: 29). Jacobi was convinced that

[M]an has this choice and this alone: nothing or God. Choosing nothing he makes
himself God; that means he makes God an apparition, for it is impossible, if there is no
God, for man and all that is around him to be more than an apparition. I repeat: God is
and is outside me, a living essence that subsists for itself, or I am God. There is no third
possibility. (3: 49)

There are several possible explanations for how Jacobi and other critics of German
idealism came to this German use of the term ‘nihilism’. First, it may have been adopted
from the French term rienniste, which was used to describe the extreme Jacobins. In
discussing new French coinages, Louis-Sébastien Mercier defined a Rienniste, a nihilist or a
nothingist, as ‘one who believes in nothing, who interests himself in nothing. A beautiful
result of the bad philosophy which brought itself into the world in the great Dictionnaire
encyclopédique!’ (Mercier 1801: 2: 143). While there is no evidence that the German term
was borrowed from the French, the connection of a philosophical/theological and a
revolutionary element within the concept over the course of its development is unmistak-
able.
A second possibility is that the theological connotations of the term reflect a connection
to an earlier analogous term. The term nichilianist(a)e – nothingist(s) – was used in the
second half of the twelfth century by Gauthier of St-Victor to describe a heretical strain of
Christianity which argued that the divine logos is eternal and thus cannot become man.
According to this heresy, Christ was merely accidental rather than necessary and thus was
‘nothing’ real. While there is no direct evidence that any of the early Germans who used
the term knew of Gauthier’s work, the term Nihilianimus did appear in Heinrich Matthais
August Cramer’s Dictionary (1775–86), and we know that Jacobi used this work. A third
possibility is that Jacobi settled on this term by adapting the term ‘annihilation’ which was
used by two other critics of Fichte in the Atheism Controversy (Süss 1951; Pöggeler 1970).
The term was adopted by Jacobi’s student Friedrich Köppen in 1803 to critique the
thought of Schelling. In 1803 Kajetan von Weiller suggested that Schelling’s thought
would be better called absolute nihilism than absolute idealism (Weiller 1803: 1: 195).
What Jacobi and his followers found so ‘nihilistic’ in the thought of Fichte and Schelling
was their attempt to resolve the diremption in Kant’s thought between the phenomenal
and noumenal without reference to God. Fichte, in their view, sought to derive everything
from the activity of an absolute I that posits itself as an empirical I and the rest of the world
as the not-I. This seemed to Jacobi to remove any possibility of transcendence and to
attribute to man the freedom and power to create all existence, thus turning man into God
and rendering God superfluous. Fichte’s thought was thus essentially atheistic. Schelling
avoided such an absolute subjectivism, but only by a return to a pantheistic – and thus, in
their view, atheistic – philosophy of nature akin to that of Spinoza. Nihilism, then, for
Jacobi, is not merely atheistic in denying the existence or importance of God; it is also
hubristic in attributing to man superhuman or, indeed, divine powers.
 nihilism in the nineteenth century 281

3. Romantic Nihilism
In this early period the term ‘nihilism’ was also used to describe and critique the Jena
Romantics, Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck et al. –
almost all of whom were students of Fichte. In 1804 Jean Paul (Richter), a follower of
Jacobi, called them ‘aesthetic nihilists’ because they attempted to portray Fichte’s absolute I
as an actual human possibility that would allow finite human beings to challenge or replace
God. The thought of the Jena Romantics, in Jean Paul’s view, was an expression of ‘the
lawless, capricious spirit of the present age, which would egoistically annihilate the world
and the universe in order to clear a space merely for free play in the void’ (Richter 1973:
15). Jean Paul had already captured this wild spirit and its consequences in the ‘Speech of
the Dead Christ from the Celestial Sphere that There Is No God’ in his novel Siebenkäs of
1796–7, but he adopted Jacobi’s formulation to encapsulate and dramatise his critique
(Richter 1959: 2: 268–71).
While Jean Paul’s description was pejorative and critical, it was not unjustified
terminologically. As Dieter Arendt has argued, the Jena Romantics’ conception of poetry
and poetic creation grew out of a fascination with the ‘nothingness’ of the world, which was
reflected in their emphasis on the night and night wisdom (Arendt 1970: 9–62). The world
as these Romantics saw it was quite different from the rational cosmos of the Enlight-
enment. In works such as Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann’s The Night Watches of
Bonaventura of 1804 and Novalis’s Hymns to the Night of 1800, this darker element takes
centre stage. As in William Blake’s 1794 poem ‘Tyger’ and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798
‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, the world appears to be a dark and chaotic place where very
little makes sense to human reason. This view of the world leads to reflection on the dark,
mysteriously hidden side of the human soul. Within Jena Romanticism this was sometimes
connected with an interest in Eastern religion. Friedrich Schlegel, for example, saw
nihilism as connected to mysticism, especially as it was practised in Indian Buddhism,
where God is an endless nothing (a view shared by Schopenhauer, himself a Fichte student
and reader of the Jena Romantics) (see Schlegel [1823] 1958–: 15/1: 95–7).
This notion of a hidden noumenal power or will that guides our feelings was not unique
to the Jena Romantics. It was broadly shared by Romantics in Germany, Europe and the
United States who saw themselves at odds with Enlightenment notions of rationality and
order. From the Romantic perspective, rational laws and mores are merely forms of
oppression that prevent individuals from discovering their own affective roots in the
natural and spiritual world. The heroic man is thus not good and reasonable but bold and
powerful, acting against prevailing rules, shattering all of the boundaries that are imposed
upon him. The pre-eminent example of such a person in their minds was Napoleon, but
artists such as Beethoven and Byron came to play a similar role for later Romantics. Such
transgressive individuals who challenged authority and generally followed a meteoric path
of ascent and descent were a favourite subject of Romantic fiction not merely in Germany
but across Europe. Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Brentano’s Godwi, Tieck’s William Lovell,
Byron’s Don Juan and Manfred, Shelley’s Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein,
Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin are only the
most famous examples of these titanic beings (Hildebrand 1984).
These bold individuals may not ascend to the level of God but they are great and
independent powers who can and do challenge his hegemony. They typically suffer from
Weltschmerz, from a sense of alienation, wanderlust, isolation and misanthropy. They feel
themselves to be above all laws and look down with aristocratic disdain on lesser men,
282 michael gillespie
often violating the most fundamental prohibitions through seduction, incest and murder,
thus irrevocably detaching themselves from the community. Surprisingly, while they are
libertines and sensualists, rapists and murderers, they are not villains in the context of
Romantic fiction. Indeed, their libertinism and criminality are often portrayed as paths to
liberation. These characters are expressions of what Goethe called the demonic, which:

comes forward in overpowering fashion among men . . . a monstrous power goes out
from them, and they exercise an unbelievable power over all creatures, indeed even over
the elements, and who can say how far their influence reaches? All of the unified powers
of the community cannot resist them . . . they can be overcome by nothing except the
universe itself with which they have entered into competition; such observations may
have led to the strange but monstrous maxim: Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse [None
against God save God himself]. (Goethe, Faust [1832], ll. 11,934–7, 1950–60: 10: 177)

Goethe included Napoleon, Karl August, Byron, Frederick II of Prussia, Paganini and Peter
the Great as demonic natures and he was clearly attracted to them. He also recognised the
dangers they posed. However, while they may try to do evil, Goethe believed that, like
Mephistopheles, they end up doing good – and thus that, like Faust, they can because of
their striving be saved (Dichtung und Wahrheit [1811–25] 1950–60: 12: 299).
Goethe’s attempt to constrain these demonic characters within a broader Christian
perspective, however, was rejected by the Romantics themselves. Their hero was not Faust
but Byron’s Manfred, who, in the poetic drama of 1817, asserted his independence of
Christianity:

The Mind which is immortal makes itself/ Requital for its good or evil thoughts,–/
Is its own origin of ill and end–/ And its own place and time: its innate sense/ . . . [I] was
my own destroyer and will be / My own hereafter. (Byron 2009: Act 3, Scene 4, lines
132–40)

Striving to become a god, the demonic hero of Romanticism becomes a beast or, more
correctly, a beast god, represented most clearly by Frankenstein’s monster. Jean Paul
summarises what he sees as the essential nihilism of these characters: ‘in an age when God
has set like the sun, soon afterwards the world too passes into darkness. He who scorns the
universe respects nothing more than himself and at night fears only his own creations’
(Richter 1973: 15).

4. Hegel: Nihilism and Absolute Knowledge

Like Goethe, Hegel was concerned about the dangers of Romantic nihilism, but he
recognised that the problem that gave rise to it was real and compelling. In his view, the
diremption in Kantian idealism had disastrous consequences, undermining faith, severing
subject from substance, making consciousness itself contradictory, and thus, contrary to
Kant’s intentions saving neither science nor religion nor morality. Hegel was also
convinced that neither Fichte’s absolute egoism nor Schelling’s philosophy of nature
offered a solution to this problem. In contrast to Jacobi, however, Hegel did not simply
condemn or reject idealism. In his 1802 essay, Faith and Knowledge, Hegel argued rather
that it was out of this
 nihilism in the nineteenth century 283
abyss of nothing [Abgrund des Nichts] . . . the feeling: God is dead . . . [that] the highest
totality, in its complete seriousness and out of its deepest ground, at once all-encom-
passing and in the most joyful freedom of its form, can and must arise. (Hegel [1802]
1970: 2: 432–3)

The nihilistic diremption at the heart of idealism had to be reconciled on idealist grounds
without reliance on a transcendent God.
In Hegel’s view, Kant in his antinomies had demonstrated that reason necessarily came
into contradiction with itself when it attempted to grasp the infinite. This demonstration
led Kant to conclude that humans could not understand the divine and thus that the
understanding had to limit itself to an investigation of the finite world, to what Kant called
the island of truth. Hegel tried to show that it was precisely the necessity of the contra-
diction that was the answer to the contradiction, since it pointed to a reason and necessity
that transcended the contradiction itself. Hegel thus attempted to demonstrate that the
principle of freedom or negation that had been conceived by Jacobi and Jean Paul as the
source of nihilism did not lead to meaninglessness but to absolute knowledge and to a
rational ethics and politics.
Hegel understood why Jacobi and Jean Paul characterised Fichte and the Jena Romantics
as nihilists and in many respects he agreed with them. However, he believed that Jacobi’s
notion that knowledge could only be grounded in the affective experience of an
unknowable God was an even more profound form of nihilism. This was because it
eternally separated us from the truth and, as Hegel put it in his Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘the
true alone is absolute and the absolute alone is the truth’ (Hegel [1807] 1970: 3: 70). Hegel
was thus convinced that the path of Fichte and the Romantics pointed to a solution, a true
‘nihilism’ through which humans could come to participate in the absolute. This is possible
because in Hegel’s view the absolute is not an I or nature but absolute spirit, the unity not
merely of being and knowing but of the individual, society and the divine. Hegel’s thought
is an attempt to demonstrate that all of these disparate moments are reconciled with one
another in a speculative synthesis.
This demonstration rests upon a kind of nihilism, which Hegel refers to as absolute
negativity, the ‘motion from nothing to nothing and thereby back to itself . . . the nothing
of a nothing, and this being the negation of a nothing, constitutes being. – Being only is the
motion of nothing to nothing’ (Hegel [1812–16] 1970: 6: 24–5). Hegel’s solution to
the problem of nihilism is thus the demonstration that nothing turned back on itself,
as the negation of negation, is being. Concretely, for Hegel, this means that the ‘power of
the negative’ – that is, the freedom of self-consciousness that liberates itself repeatedly from
its content – is the driving force in world history. In contrast to Fichte, Schelling and the
Romantics, Hegel thus argues that there is no nothingness, but only an active nothing that
negates something, and that this negated something is again not nothing but something
else. Negation for Hegel is thus always determinate and not absolute negation and brings
about change and new forms of meaning, rather than absolute annihilation and mean-
inglessness.
The principal agents of the negative in history are those men whom Hegel calls ‘world-
historical individuals’. On the surface, these individuals seem to be the same titanic or
demonic characters that had entranced the Romantics, men who live beyond the standards
of good and evil and who, like Napoleon, repeatedly lay down new codes of laws and new
ways of life. Hegel argues, however, that they are merely agents of spirit, successful because
they will what everyone else already (unknowingly) wants. Each may believe he is a titan
284 michael gillespie
and that he works his will on others, but in fact he is himself directed by the ‘cunning of
reason’ and, like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, he unwittingly but inevitably serves the
progressive movement of spirit. Moreover, at the end of history, when spirit has become
completely self-conscious of itself as being all reality, such individuals are no longer needed.
In the rational state that Hegel saw coming into being in his own time, the world-historical
individuals are thus replaced by a universal class of bureaucrats who maintain the liberal
order that is the final outcome of history.
Hegel thus recognised the problem of nothingness that leads to nihilism and he sought to
provide a solution to it. This solution, however, rests on his notion of absolute negativity,
that is, on the speculative unity that is the culmination of his thought. Hegel himself
admitted that this unity was only a spiritual unity, that is, a unity in thought and not a unity
in the objective realm of political and social life. Within civil society poverty, inequality
and human misery were ineliminable.
But, already in Hegel’s lifetime, his system was called into question. Few understood his
speculative claim and many were unwilling to believe that nothing could be done to
ameliorate human misery. The collapse of Hegelianism (and the speculative synthesis at its
core) after 1840 and the failure of the Revolutions of 1848 to institutionalise the rational
states that Hegel had predicted led to the recognition of the continuing importance of
heroic human action to effect fundamental historical change. The demonic heroes of
Romanticism, whom Hegel had sought to harness to the chariot of spirit, thus reappeared,
although not as asocial or antisocial individuals but as the charismatic leaders of social
movements aiming at revolutionary change. The Left Hegelians play an important role
here. Unlike the Right Hegelians who interpreted Hegel’s synthesis in a more Christian
manner as the basis of the unity of throne and altar and who were drawn toward Romantic
nationalism, the Left Hegelians rejected Hegel’s synthesis as merely spiritual and they
sought to bring about the actual transformation of social reality.

5. Left Hegelianism and Nihilism

The rejection of Hegel’s speculative synthesis led to a re-evaluation of the nature of the
Absolute and of the rationality of existing social and political institutions. In this context, a
new form of nihilism arose. The attack on orthodox Christianity was at the centre of this
effort. David Friedrich Strauss, who was influenced by Hegel, called into question Christ’s
divinity in his Life of Jesus of 1835; Bruno Bauer declared that Jesus was merely mythical; and
Ludwig Feuerbach took the matter to its logical conclusion, declaring God to be only the
outward expression of man’s inward nature. His atheism had a wide and powerful influence
on the young and especially on those who were active in the Revolutions of 1848.
We also see this nihilistic impulse in its extremity in the thought of Max Stirner (Johann
Caspar Schmidt) who sought to free the individual not only from God but also from society
and indeed from humanity as such. The nihilistic dimension of this project was particularly
evident in Stirner’s magnum opus, The Ego and his Own of 1844, in which he claimed that,
‘I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out
of which I myself as creator create everything’ (Stirner [1844] 1907: 6). Here the
connection to the earlier Fichtean and Romantic nihilists and to later nihilism is especially
apparent. This is equally true of Stirner’s moral stance, for he was willing to countenance
incest, infanticide and murder (Stirner 1907: 58, 65, 124, 247, 424).
The impact of Left Hegelianism on politics and theology was particularly evident in the
Young Germany movement of the 1830s which included Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner
 nihilism in the nineteenth century 285
and Karl Gutzkow, among others. Büchner, for example, explicitly abandons Hegel’s
speculative synthesis in Danton’s Death: ‘The nothing killed itself, creation is its wound and
we are its drops of blood and the world is the grave into which they fall’ (Büchner 1980:
55). Negation, for Büchner and his fellows, does not negate itself as Hegel suggested,
producing a new and higher form of life; instead it is an open wound that leads only to our
annihilation. Heine is less explicit in his rejection of Hegel, but he clearly believes that the
death of God is not the well-spring of a higher form of life but the source of mean-
inglessness. However, he treats this fact ironically rather than tragically, in part because he
views the world not absolutely but perspectivally. He and other members of this group sided
with the Left Hegelians and were unequivocal opponents of Romanticism and of the union
of church and state, instead advocating more liberal social and political institutions. Many
of these thinkers were ardent supporters of the Revolution of 1848 and thought of
themselves as nihilists. However, they distinguished their nihilism from that of the
Romantics, pursuing methodical and continuous reforms, rather than a single apocalyptic
and revolutionary transformation.
The character of this new nihilism and its differences from Romantic nihilism are
evident in Gutzkow’s novella The Nihilists of 1853. The story is set in the period before and
during the Revolution of 1848. It depicts two nihilists. The first is Konstantine Ulrichs, a
charismatic and egoistical nihilist, reminiscent of Romanticism. He wants all or nothing,
America or Russia, and wants above all to be admired. With the failure of the Revolution,
he gives up his nihilism and marries into the ruling class. The second nihilist, Eberhart Ott,
is quiet and practical, a dedicated reader of Feuerbach, someone who favours effective
reform over radical revolution. In contrast to Konstantin, Eberhart does not wants to
impose his subjective will upon events but to bring about reforms that are in the public
good. The failure of the Revolution does not daunt him and he continues to work for
whatever reforms can be achieved.
Gutzkow sees Romantic nihilism as radical egoism, the Mephistophelean spirit of criticism
and negation. Like Hegel, he believes that this egoistic nihilism must be replaced by a
practical nihilism that is concerned not with the individual but with society as a whole. Like
the Left Hegelians, however, he is convinced that much still needs to be done to bring about
a truly rational state. His hero Eberhart is a nihilist in the sense that he aims at the negation of
the existing order. He does not think of himself as a world-historical individual but as a part
of a new universal class, not of Hegelian bureaucrats but of Left Hegelian reformers. The
novella ends with the Feuerbachian claim that while such negation may not yet have
achieved its goals, the path it follows spirals continually upward. In this way the egoistic
nihilism of Romanticism was replaced by a self-sacrificing, reformist nihilism. This new
nihilism continued to play a role in Germany in the succeeding decades, particularly within
the socialist movement, but it played an even more important role in Russia.

6. Russian Nihilism
Russian nihilism was part of the movement to reform the autocratic Czarist régime. Russian
reformers drew heavily on Left Hegelian thinkers such as Feuerbach because they believed
that a more atheistic stance was necessary to break the connection of throne and altar
which they saw as essential to the Russian régime. The connection to German thought was
longstanding. Czar Nicholas I’s attempts to Prussianise Russian society under the rubric of
‘autocracy, orthodoxy and nationality’ led to the introduction of Schelling’s Romantic
idealism and his millenarianism. The movement from Romanticism to Right Hegelianism,
286 michael gillespie
then to Left Hegelianism and finally to anarchism/nihilism was typical of many Russian
radicals and the enduring connection to a millenarian element helps to illuminate the
apocalyptic hopes that they placed in human will. It was, however, just such an apotheosis
of man that led the orthodox to characterise Russian Left Hegelians as nihilists, employing
arguments similar to those of Jacobi and Jean Paul.
While they were initially enraged to be called nihilists, many radicals came to accept and
deploy the term as a self-description (Kravchinskii 1883). Alexander Herzen, for example,
asserted that

Nihilism is logic without structure, it is science without dogmas, it is unconditional

submission to experience and the resigned acceptance of all consequences, whatever
they may be, if they follow from observation, or are required by reason. Nihilism does not
transform something into nothing, but shows that nothing which has been taken for
something is an optical illusion and that every truth, however it contradicts our fantastic
ideas, is more wholesome than they are and is in any case what we are duty bound to
accept. (Herzen [1868] 1973: 642)

These radicals were convinced that the elimination of repression would produce freedom,
but were uncertain where this freedom would lead. Indeed, they thought a positive goal
could only be formulated once the old order had been destroyed. Their purpose in the
moment was sheer negation and they felt that anything that delayed progress ‘is immoral,
unjust, harmful, irrational’ (Moser 1964: 37). Dmitri Pisarev proclaimed:

Here is the ultimatum of our camp: what can be smashed should be smashed; what will
stand the blow is good; what will fly into smithereens is rubbish; at any rate, hit out right
and left – there will and can be no harm from it. (Yarmolinsky 1956: 120)

While Russian nihilists drew heavily on Feuerbach, they did not feel themselves bound
by the notion of dialectical development that characterised German thought. History in
their view was determined by the free actions of individuals. In this respect they were closer
to Fichte, whom Bakunin declared ‘the true hero of our times’, than to the Left Hegelians
(Mendel 1981: 56–83, 134–6, 145). The apocalyptical character of the power that they
attributed to freedom was awe-inspiring. Nikolai Dobrolyubov, for example, thought that
they would have to wait only a single night for the social transformation they expected
(Volski 1969: 209–10).
The main organs of this movement were two journals, the populist The Contemporary,
edited by Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, and the positivist the Russian Word,
edited by Dmitry Pisarev. The former was dedicated to mobilising the peasantry; the latter
aimed to create a managerial elite. Both believed in the decisive importance of the
intelligentsia, whom they imagined would be organised like a Jesuitical order. Many of their
members were drawn from the seminary and even their opponents recognised that they
acted more like a religious order than a political party or social movement. Chernyshevsky
was the son of an orthodox priest but was attracted to Hegel and the Left Hegelians in his
student days, and especially to Feuerbach. Human beings, in his view, were complex
chemical compounds, driven entirely by rational egoism. His theory of rational self-
interest, however, was underpinned by the optimistic assumption that the interests of
society and those of the individual naturally coincide.
It was Turgenev’s portrayal of these men in Fathers and Sons of 1862 that first brought the
term ‘nihilism’ into broader circulation. Turgenev modelled his nihilist hero, Eugene
 nihilism in the nineteenth century 287
Bazarov, on Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Pisarev. Bazarov is a doctor by training, a
thorough positivist, unwilling to accept anything on faith. However, at his core he is a
nihilist and a revolutionary (although because of the censorship this could not be explicitly
stated). He has a very high opinion of himself, likening himself to a god, and is, as the
author indicates, a bottomless pit of self-conceit. He has rejected all Romanticism and
idealism and studies natural science not for its own sake but in order to understand men.
Bazarov wants to be useful and he believes that at the present time negation is the most
useful of all. Everything, in his view, is corrupt and only absolute negation can bring
substantive change. The important thing, he proclaims, is hate and negation. Unfortu-
nately, he meets and falls in love with a beautiful, rich, young widow, Odnitsova, and thus
finds it impossible to live up to his own principles. Heedless of his own safety and in
contradiction with himself, he fails to cauterise a wound during the dissection of a cholera
victim and dies. Bazarov believes he is a self-creating being, a Prometheus, but Turgenev
adopts a more Romantic attitude, suggesting that Bazarov is only an expression of mother
earth and in the end is reunited with her. While Turgenev had misgivings about nihilism,
he considered Bazarov a ‘hero for our times’ – although he admitted that that said more
about the times than the hero.
The nihilists themselves believed that Turgenev’s book was an attack upon their
movement. In response Chernyshevsky published his 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?,
which presents a more attractive picture of the new men, most of whom bear a striking
resemblance to Gutzkow’s practical nihilists. They are all disciples of Feuerbach, self-
sacrificing reformers, living and working together in a socialist commune. Their goal is the
production of a socialist society in which everyone has enough to eat, lives comfortably and
dies quickly at a great age.
There is one character in the novel, Rakhmetov, who is radically different from the
others. He is a nihilist revolutionary who rivals Bazarov, a titanic being in Chernyshevsky’s
view. He steels himself for the rigours of revolutionary action, even sleeping on a bed of
nails to prepare for torture. In describing him and his like Chernyshevsky remarks that

there are few of them, but through them flourishes the life of all; without them life would
become dead and putrid; there are few of them but they will help all people to breathe;
without them people would suffocate . . . they are the salt of the earth. (Chernyshevsky
[1863] 1986: 291)

The populist nihilists clearly hoped that a path of reform that engaged the peasantry could
eventually bring about needed political reform, but when the peasantry showed no interest
in such changes it became clear that any real reform within Russian itself could only be
achieved through conspiratorial politics.
The best known of these conspiratorial nihilists were Bakunin and Sergei Nechaev.
Bakunin was a Left Hegelian, an anarchist, an atheist and a revolutionary (on Bakunin,
especially in respect of his relation to Marxism, see also Chapter 14). Bakunin’s turn against
religion was decisive. He wrote in 1871: ‘If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be
free; then God does not exist . . . [Therefore] it will be necessary to eliminate, first of all, this
fiction of God, the eternal and absolute enslaver’ (Bakunin [1871] 1895: 15, 25). And yet
there was a revolutionary ardour in him that took the form of religiosity, even if it was more
Satanic than angelic. He suggested to his fellow revolutionaries: ‘Let us put our trust in the
eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally
creative source of all life – the passion for destruction is also a creative passion!’ (Bakunin
288 michael gillespie
[1942] 1973: 58). He had no doubt where this was leading and was entranced by his own
apocalyptic visions: ‘The star of revolution will rise high and independent above Moscow
from a sea of blood and fire, and will turn into a lodestar to lead a liberated humanity’,
Bakunin wrote in his ‘Appeal to the Slavs’ of 1848 (quoted in Woodcock 1962: 154).
This vision of the nihilist revolutionary is even more fully embodied in Nechaev, who,
along with Bakunin, composed the infamous Catechism of a Revolutionary of 1869, which
authorised and promoted the use of what most nihilists themselves considered immoral
techniques to organise a conspiratorial organisation. For Nechaev,

The Revolutionary is a man set apart. He has no personal interests, no emotions, not
attachments; he has no personal property, not even a name. Everything in him is
absorbed by the one exclusive interest, the one thought, one single passion – the
revolution. In his innermost being he has, not only in words but in deeds, broken every
bond with the present-day society and with the whole civilized world including its laws,
customs, conventions and morality. If he continues to live in it, he does so as the
implacable enemy for the sole purpose of destroying it. (Prawdin 1961: 63)

The public trial of the Nechaevists, who, following Nechaev’s lead, had murdered one of
their own members, propagated nihilist doctrines to a broad audience, inspiring many who
had previously been unaware of the movement. Not all intellectuals, however, sided with
the nihilists. In fact, many saw nihilism as a social disease. Fyodor Dostoevsky has
Raskolnikov dream of a plague that makes people go mad in Crime and Punishment of
1866. In his 1872 novel Demons, the nihilists appear to be filled with evil spirits and in
Aleksey Pisemsky’s In the Whirlpool, they are portrayed as men driven by uncontrollable
passions (Moser 1964: 154).
Dostoevsky played an important role in shaping the larger European conception of
nihilism. While he was originally attracted to the revolutionary movement, he became an
ardent critic of it later in life. With a few exceptions, he portrays the nihilist revolutionaries
as men who do not understand themselves, are taken in by foreign ideas, driven by dark
motives, capricious, pathological, embittered and/or in search of revenge. They may claim
they have ideals, but Dostoevsky reveals them at best to be confused and mistaken.
The nihilists in Dostoevsky’s Demons reflect his views. Kirilov has decided that his own
will is the ultimate reality and he intends to commit suicide as a way of rejecting God and
proving his own divinity. Shigalyov is an anarchist socialist who is driven by a kind of
hatred of everything Christ-like. Pyotr Verkhovensky is a duplicitous manipulator, who
believes in little more than negation and is and willing, like Nechaev, to kill or abandon
his fellows at a moment’s notice. Nikolai Stavrogin is a charismatic sociopath, a paedophile
who refuses to repent and who ultimately commits suicide.
The characterisation of the nihilists in The Brothers Karamazov of 1881 is equally grim.
Even Ivan Karamazov, the most coherent of Dostoevsky’s nihilists, is ambiguous. He takes
the suffering of the innocent as a demonstration either that God does not exist or that he
does exist and that no right-thinking person would want to live in the world he has created.
Moreover, if God is dead, then in Ivan’s view everything is permitted. This doctrine
inspires his half-brother Smerdyakov to kill their father. In the end Ivan goes mad and
Smerdyakov commits suicide.
Dostoevsky thus does not develop a univocal image of the nihilist. All are atheists of one
kind or another and recognise no moral bounds, acting as if everything were permitted. Some
have been influenced by earlier European thought; some are cynical Machiavellian
 nihilism in the nineteenth century 289
manipulators; some are debauched sensualists; and their number includes seducers, paedo-
philes, parricides, murderers and thieves. Even the best of them self-destruct in one way or
another, killing themselves or falling into madness. In Dostoevsky’s view the denial of God
produces a radical freedom, but it is only the freedom to err, to injure and to destroy. Far from
being revolutionary heroes, these nihilists are sinners who construct their own inferno.
While Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the Russian nihilists had a broad and lasting impact on
the European imagination, it did not impede the nihilist movement in Russian itself. The
members of conspiratorial groups modelled themselves on Bazarov and on Chernyshevsky’s
character Rakhmetov and they adopted the methods of Bakunin and Nechaev. Though
they were small in number, they succeeded in assassinating the liberalising Czar Alexander
II in 1881. The régime, however, did not collapse and in fact became more repressive,
quickly eliminating the nihilist movement within Russia. Nihilist thought, however,
helped to shape Russian Marxism and was important for the later development of
Bolshevism. Vladimir Lenin, for example, was deeply influenced by Chernyshevsky, whose
Rakhmetov became his great hero. And while Lenin and many others became Marxists,
they employed a Bakuninist strategy. They also continued to believe that human will and
freedom could overcome everything and bring about an apocalyptic transformation of
society. Leon Trotsky perhaps best expressed the nihilists’ belief in the superhuman, which
they had inherited from their idealist and Romantic progenitors: through permanent
revolution, he writes, man will be able

to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biological type, stronger, wiser,
subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice
more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human
type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge
new peaks will rise. (Trotsky [1924] 1957: 256)

7. Nietzsche’s Conception of Nihilism

The idea of the superhuman also played an important role in the development of nihilism
in Germany during the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially in the hands of
Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is generally regarded as the philosopher most responsible for
developing and propagating the concept of nihilism, but this is a misperception. He
actually only began using the term in his notes in 1880 and in his published work in 1886,
two years before slipping into madness (Kuhn 1992). It was one of a series of terms that he
used to describe what he perceived as the spiritual and cultural crisis of European
civilisation and he used it only briefly, replacing it with ‘decadence’.
The notion that nihilism was central to his thought was the result of a deception
perpetrated by his sister who constructed a work from his notes and pawned it off as his
magnum opus, the Will to Power. This book presents nihilism as the focus of Nietzsche’s
thought. As a result, the early twentieth century came to think of Nietzsche as the arch-
priest of nihilism. Nietzsche struggled for his entire life to come to terms with the cultural
crisis that he saw engulfing Europe. He was by no means convinced that the term ‘nihilism’,
with all of its connotations and connections, was the appropriate way to describe this crisis.
However, as a result of the impact of the Will to Power, the connection to nihilism became
indelible and exercised an enormous influence on almost everyone who came after him.
Nihilism, as Nietzsche understood it, is connected to the death of God. God, as
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra argues, died out of pity for man, that is, because man was no
290 michael gillespie
longer powerful enough to sustain him. Extending Feuerbach’s argument, Nietzsche thus
suggests that God is a projection of human spirituality and that the death of God is a
reflection of the degeneration of humanity. Man is no longer capable of creating or
sustaining gods. Or, to use Nietzsche’s later language, the highest values devalue them-
selves. The immediate consequences of the death of God in Nietzsche’s view would be
cataclysmic: the collapse of European morality, a monstrous logic of terror and wars the like
of which the world had never seen.
The long-term consequences, however, are more ambiguous. Freed from the shackles of
Christian morality, European humanity could become more than it has been or less, rising
to glorious new, superhuman heights or sliding into the lowest of human possibilities,
becoming what Nietzsche calls the last man. The advent of nihilism confronts humanity
with a decision between these two possibilities. The contrast could not be starker –
choosing the superhuman, or as Nietzsche also calls it the ‘Dionysian’, path means saying
Yes to life in all of its terrifying chaos and complexity; choosing the path of the last man
means choosing banality. It is within his formulation of these two possibilities that
Nietzsche deploys the concept of nihilism.
Nietzsche’s use of the term ‘nihilism’ almost certainly derives from his reading of
Turgenev, but Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, Bakunin, Alexander Herzen and Peter
Kropotkin also had an impact on his understanding of the phenomenon (Nietzsche
1967–: III (4): 26; V (2): 264; VI (2): 424; VIII (1): 2; see Kuhn 1992: 21; Janz 1978: 1:
677). Nihilism, for Nietzsche, thus initially meant Russian nihilism. However, Nietzsche
was misled about the character of Russian nihilism by his reading of Prosper Mérimée and
Paul Bourget who wrongly portrayed Russian nihilism as Schopenhauerian and thus a form
of resignation and despair (Bourget 1885: 2: 225, 239; Mérimée 1927–33, 9: cviii–cix; 11:
548; see Kuhn 1984: 266, 269, 271).
In his development of the concept of nihilism in his late notes (and as it was presented in
the Will to Power), Nietzsche distinguishes between incomplete and complete nihilism. He
identifies incomplete nihilism with positivism, materialism and utilitarianism, all of which
attempt to escape from nihilism without facing the consequences of the death of God.
Complete nihilism confronts this problem and the devaluation of the highest values that it
entails. Complete nihilism takes one of two forms. It is either passive nihilism, which in
Buddhist or Schopenhauerian fashion leads to resignation, or it is active nihilism, which as
in the case of Russian nihilism seeks to destroy the existing order. Both of these Nietzsche
saw as fundamentally negative and standing in contrast to the affirmative and creative,
‘Dionysian’ nihilism that he himself favours.
The solution to the problem of nihilism in Nietzsche’s view lies in nihilism itself. For
some, the death of God and the collapse of all Christian values mean that they can simply
follow their momentary passions. These are incomplete nihilists, the banal last men. They
do not seek discipline and order of rank but a democracy of the passions in which each is
satisfied in turn without repression or sublimation. The passive nihilist, by contrast, can no
longer believe in God but still needs an absolute. He is driven to despair and resignation in
the face of nothingness. The active nihilist is also distraught by the death of God, but he
does not fall into despair, nor does he resign himself to the world as he finds it. Rather, he is
thrown into a destructive rage and seeks to destroy the existing order, to have done with all
moral commands. This active nihilist is free but is filled, like Turgenev’s nihilist hero
Bazarov, with hatred of the existing world. These active nihilists, however, are necessary in
Nietzsche’s view to wipe away all of the vestiges of Christianity and its morality of pity. He
believes that their impulse to destruction will produce two hundred years of warfare, at the
 nihilism in the nineteenth century 291
end of which a new group of harder, stronger, more disciplined, more nihilistic human
beings will arise (Nietzsche 1967–: VI (3): 364; VII (2): 25, 261). Out of these hardened
men will grow the superman, the Dionysian nihilist who will establish a thousand-year
Dionysian empire (Kuhn 1992: 237).
The reception of Nietzsche’s Will to Power convinced his readers that for him nihilism was
a social or cultural malaise that was characterised by the death of God and the devaluation of
the highest values. These led to a sense of the meaninglessness of life that undermined all
goals, unity, truth, reason and purpose. In their reading of Nietzsche, to overcome nihilism it
was necessary to create a new order based on the will to power that cultivates a super-
humanity, whose members are stronger, more violent, less pitying than their human
predecessors. While the effect of the Will to Power was blunted by the reception of Nietzsche’s
other works, there is little doubt that it exercised an inordinate and misleading influence on
the conception of nihilism that developed after Nietzsche plunged into insanity.

8. Nihilism After Nietzsche

The end of the nineteenth century was a period of peace and stability, but under the
influence of Nietzsche many intellectuals perceived it as an era of decadence and decline.
In the literature of the period a sense of world-weariness is palpable and many identified
this as the consequence of a creeping nihilism (Ascheim 1992: 52). Like Nietzsche, they
looked for the antidote to the meaninglessness and purposelessness of their lives in a
variety of sources, including an exploration of the primitive, the mythical, the wild, the
unconscious and the irrational.
One manifestation of Nietzsche’s impact was the elegant nihilism of the 1890s,
exemplified in the works of Oscar Wilde and his circle, who were preoccupied with
aestheticism, decadence, Hellenism and homoeroticism. But in others, many of whom were
also inspired by Nietzsche, there was a growing fascination with nihilistic and primitive
violence. This was evident in the literary works of Joseph Conrad and Jack London and the
political tracts of Georges Sorel and F. T. Marinetti, amongst many others. The impact of
this nihilistic notion of the positive value of destructive violence also fuelled actual
political movements, such as the socialist God-building movement of Maxim Gorky and
Anatoly Lunacharsky in Russia and the Young Bosnia movement which assassinated
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.
The story of nihilism in the twentieth century is marked by the shattering impact of the
two world wars and the holocaust on the Western psyche. Nihilism played an important
role in the cultural pessimism of post-World War I Europe, the sense of meaninglessness
and despair that characterised the literature of the lost generation, the apocalyptic
spirituality of the interwar years, the rise of Fascism and Nazism and, later, many
philosophical movements, including existentialism. The reception of Nietzsche’s thought
and his notion of nihilism had a decisive impact on this development at almost every point.
However, the concept of nihilism had its origins in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century. As I have argued, it arose as part of the effort of European intellectuals
such as Jacobi and Jean Paul to come to terms with the deep problems that they saw
growing out of the new notion of human freedom which found its first articulations in
radical Jacobinism and in the absolute egoism of Fichte and the Jena Romantics, and which
was at the heart of the broader Romantic notion of the demonic hero. It was this
Promethean notion of human freedom and power, which seemed to render God irrelevant,
that intellectuals such as Jacobi characterised as nihilism. Hegel, too, recognised the
292 michael gillespie
dangers of such a radical egoism, but he was not willing to dismiss it as nihilism, since he
believed that it was essential as a moment of the realisation of freedom within the rational
state. Moreover, he was convinced that the negative element could be transformed into
something positive within the speculative synthesis at the heart of his philosophy.
Hegel’s Left Hegelian followers, however, rejected this synthesis, as they rejected his
assertion that freedom could not actually be attained within the existing social and
political order. In this way they revived the idea of radical freedom that had characterised
Fichtean and Romantic nihilism, but they transformed it into a realist plan for collective
reform. This Left Hegelian nihilism was further developed in Russia into first a movement
of political reform, then a notion of radical critique and agitation and finally a conspir-
atorial organisation employing terror and assassination which aimed at the immediate and
total transformation of society. While focusing as well on the superhuman possibilities of
the human will, Nietzsche vastly expanded the meaning of nihilism, which in his thought
became a name not for a doctrine or a political movement but for a cultural and
psychological condition of meaninglessness, aimlessness, despair and destruction. It was
this more extensive notion of nihilism that became definitive in the last decade of the
nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. Since its beginnings, then, the
term has been connected to atheism, the death of God, the collapse of absolute values, the
assertion of human freedom – and the collapse of European civilisation.

Notes
1. The Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie entry on ‘Nihilismus’ claims that Friedrich Schlegel
and Novalis used the term as early as 1787. This is clearly an error, since at the time they were
both only fifteen. This may be a typo that should read 1797. The entry has a number of such errors
and should not be relied on without confirmation.
2. All translations from non-English language texts are the author’s own.
3. For a different account of Jacobi, see George di Giovanni’s account in Chapter 1 of this volume.

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 16
Repetition and Recurrence: Putting Metaphysics in
Motion

Clare Carlisle

1. Introduction
In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze writes that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche ‘are
among those who bring to philosophy new means of expression’:

They want to put metaphysics in motion, in action. They want to make it act and make
it carry out immediate acts. It is not enough, therefore, for them to propose a new
representation of movement; representation is already mediation. Rather, it is a question
of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all
representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work . . . (Deleuze [1968]
1994: 8)

In identifying this common ground between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Deleuze focuses on
their ideas of repetition and eternal recurrence and his remarks offer a point of departure for
our discussion of these two themes. Neither repetition nor recurrence can be adequately
expressed through concepts; both are movements that are ‘produced’ rather than represented
within the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. For Deleuze, at least, this production
responds to the consummation of idealism that is attained in Hegelian philosophy.
This is not to say that we should never speak of the ‘concepts’ or ‘ideas’ of repetition and
recurrence and indeed it would be inconvenient to dispense with these designations
altogether. But we must at the same time recognise that for both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
the content of their thought is inseparable from its communication: ‘what’ is inseparable
from ‘how’. Repetition, if it is possible, is something that happens within the individual –
within the fictional individuals that populate Kierkegaard’s texts, but also, the author hopes,
within the individual reader of these texts. Repetition is therefore linked to Kierkegaard’s
themes of subjectivity, inwardness and lived truth. In Nietzsche’s philosophy, the eternal
recurrence or return of the same is not a proposition or a hypothesis but a doctrine, a
teaching, a thought to be incorporated and it is linked essentially to the idea of transition.
Another key issue that unites the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is the
importance of interpretation. In both cases, interpretation is not merely subsequent to and
separate from the writer’s presentation of certain claims but is rather essential to the work. This
aspect of Kierkegaard’s authorship is continuous with a religious tradition of scriptural exegesis,
while in Nietzsche’s thought the concept of interpretation, understood as a creative
act, undermines belief in objective truths and meanings. Even in relation to the rest of
 repetition and recurrence 295
Kierkegaard’s or Nietzsche’s work, however, repetition and recurrence are especially enigmatic
and as soon as we attempt to make sense of repetition and recurrence we find ourselves in an
open domain of interpretation that may never yield certainty or satisfaction. We also find
ourselves – particularly in Nietzsche’s case – confronted with an extensive scholarly literature
that includes many different ways of making sense of repetition and recurrence.
Repetition and eternal recurrence have so much and perhaps more in common with one
another. In fact, the following interpretations of the themes will point to the conclusion
that they both signify a concern for human freedom, in a way that attempts to challenge
and even to break with the philosophical tradition from Plato to Hegel. Repetition and
recurrence signal a rethinking of temporality and futurity that is decisive for twentieth-
century and contemporary philosophy. However, none of this undermines the fact that
they are distinct concepts and that they originate from very different philosophical
perspectives. They do not represent a point of convergence for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
This essay will attempt to clarify the differences between them, as well as situating both
themes within the history of European thought.

2. Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition

Kierkegaard’s first discussion of repetition (Gentagelse)1 occurs in the final pages of his
unpublished work Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est (Kierkegaard 1985b:
171–2). But the idea comes to occupy centre stage in Repetition, which was published under
the pseudonym Constantin Constantius in October 1843, on the same day as Fear and
Trembling. Both books had been written, in an astonishing burst of productivity, during
Kierkegaard’s second visit to Berlin in May 1843. At the end of that year the influential
Danish Hegelian J. L. Heiberg published a review of Repetition which provoked Kierkegaard
to write, in the name of his pseudonym and with characteristic sarcasm, a lengthy response
that defended Repetition against Heiberg’s misunderstandings – which were perhaps
excusable, given the elusive nature of the text.2 Kierkegaard decided not to publish his
polemical ‘Open Letter to Professor Heiberg’, but it now stands as an indispensable
supplement to Repetition, since it explains in greater detail points that are only hinted at in
the book and clarifies the significance of repetition.3
Kierkegaard’s next pseudonymous work, The Concept of Anxiety, contains a long
footnote concerning repetition (Kierkegaard [1844] 1980a: 17–19), but in subsequent
texts the term is hardly mentioned. This may seem surprising, given Constantin Con-
stantius’s claims that ‘repetition is the new category that will be discovered’ (Kierkegaard
[1843] 1983: 148) and that ‘the question of repetition . . . will play a very important role in
modern philosophy’ (131). However, if the question of repetition is the question of human
freedom; if repetition signifies the movement of becoming that characterises existence and
constitutes an existential, spiritual version of the Aristotelian concept of kinesis – then this
remains essential to Kierkegaard’s thinking throughout his authorship. Ideas expressed in
the 1843 writings relating to Repetition anticipate the account of despair presented in The
Sickness Unto Death of 1849, perhaps Kierkegaard’s finest work and certainly a text in
which philosophical, theological and psychological themes from earlier books are brought
together in a penetrating analysis of the human condition. When in 1853 – two years
before his death – Kierkegaard reflected on his ‘productivity’ as a whole, he remarked that
‘repetition is the category about which it will revolve’ (Kierkegaard 1983: 329).
Before we turn to Repetition, it will be helpful to consider certain passages from
Kierkegaard’s journals and papers that illuminate the indirect and enigmatic presentation
296 clare carlisle
of repetition in the published text. In his response to Heiberg, who was most interested in
repetition in the natural world, Kierkegaard makes explicit what we might call the domain
of his concept of repetition: this is ‘the domain of the spirit’, which cannot, as in Hegel’s
philosophy, be conflated with ‘the world-historical process’, but which rather denotes a
distinct ‘spiritual existence that belongs to individuals’ (1983: 287). It is this domain –
which is sometimes labelled simply ‘inwardness’ or ‘the existing individual’ – that
Kierkegaard endeavours throughout his authorship to preserve and protect in the face
of the totalising, all-encompassing force of the Hegelian system. What is at stake here is
human freedom, ‘all the tasks of freedom’ (288) that constitute the substance of an
individual’s inner life. The words ‘individual’ and ‘freedom’, hardly mentioned in Repetition
itself, and no doubt for this very reason, recur to excess in the letter to Heiberg:

As soon as one considers individuals in their freedom . . . – then [the question arises of]
what meaning repetition has in the domain of the spirit, for indeed, every individual, just
in being an individual, is qualified as spirit and this spirit has a history . . . More
particularly, the question concerns the relation of freedom to the phenomena of the
spirit, in the context of which the individual lives, inasmuch as his history advances in
continuity with his own past and with the little world surrounding him. Here the
question becomes that of repetition within the boundaries of his life . . . The issue will
arise at this point again and again, insofar as the same individual in his history makes a
beginning many times, or the question will again be whether each individual is capable
of it, or whether he is lost through his initial beginning, or whether what is lost through
his initial beginning is not recoverable. Here the individual does not relate contempla-
tively to the repetition, for the phenomena in which it appears are phenomena of the
spirit, but he relates to them in freedom. (288–9)

The question of ‘whether there is repetition’ is, Kierkegaard insists, ‘the first issue of
freedom’. This passage emphasises the link between freedom and the ‘spiritual’ being of the
individual and a couple of Kierkegaard’s journal entries discussing repetition accentuate its
religious significance – which is certainly alluded to in Repetition, although not in an
explicitly Christian context. In 1844 Kierkegaard wrote in his journal that ‘‘‘Repetition’’ is
and remains a religious category’ (Kierkegaard 1967–78: 3: 3794). This suggests that
Repetition is oriented towards Christianity; that it must be read, like all of Kierkegaard’s
texts, in the context of his concern to communicate to his contemporaries – whose spiritual
authenticity he doubted and whose complacency he sought to unsettle – the nature of the
task of becoming a Christian.
Although it is not easy to ascertain exactly what Kierkegaard means by repetition, we
can go some way towards clarifying the concept – having acknowledged that it is not
merely a concept – by considering how it is connected to other philosophical ideas. In
Repetition the pseudonym Constantin Constantius contrasts his ‘new category’ to Platonic
recollection, compares it to Aristotle’s concept of kinesis and opposes it to Hegelian
mediation. We shall now examine each of these connections in turn.
The opening paragraph of Repetition states that

the question of repetition – whether or not it is possible, what importance it has – . . .

will play a very important role in modern philosophy, for repetition is a crucial expression
for what ‘recollection’ was for the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is a
recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition. (1983: 131)
 repetition and recurrence 297
For Plato, recollection is a process through which the individual attains truth: with the
help of a teacher and prompted by her own experience of the world, she recollects the
eternal Ideas which her immortal soul has already encountered before her birth. In the
passage just cited, Constantin Constantius links the contrast between recollection and
repetition to the contrast between knowledge and life: if recollection seeks the truth as
knowledge, repetition concerns a different kind of truth that belongs to life – a truth that is
lived. This subjective, existential truth will not take the form of idea or a concept, for it
signifies a way of living sincerely, authentically, faithfully; it is a question of being true to
oneself, to another person or to God.
Constantin’s remark that ‘repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in
opposite directions’ gives more precise content to this conception of truth. Both recollection
and repetition are movements between two modes of being: between the ideal and the
actual. In the case of Platonic recollection (as interpreted by Kierkegaard), truth is reached
by a movement from the individual’s particular, situated, temporal existence to a realm of
eternal, unchanging Ideas, or Forms, which are the only real objects of knowledge. In his
doctoral dissertation On the Concept of Irony of 1841, Kierkegaard writes that ‘Socrates
ferried the individual from reality over to ideality’ (1989: 255) and here ‘reality’ must signify
temporal existence. The movement of repetition, on the other hand, is a transition in the
opposite direction, from ideality to temporal existence – but in this case ideality signifies not
a realm of eternal Forms, but the sphere of possibility.4 For Kierkegaard, possibilities are not
abstract ideas to be accessed through reason but vivid and dynamic projections of the self
imbued with anxiety, hope, desire, expectancy and so on. They are what one might become:
at each moment the future takes the form of various possibilities and as that future becomes
the present particular possibilities are chosen, brought into being, actualised.
At the end of Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, Kierkegaard writes that
‘when ideality and reality touch each other, then repetition occurs’ (Kierkegaard 1985b:
171) and a key theme of this text is an existential form of truth conceived in terms of
fidelity to certain ideals: as one commentator puts it, Johannes Climacus

is ‘faithful’ in the sense that his conduct displays his fidelity to a philosophical ideal of
integrity or inner harmony – a harmony of thought and existence, or, in Kierkegaardian
terms, of ‘ideality’ and ‘actuality,’ that is apparently no longer to be found among
philosophers. (Howland 2006: 14)

The discussion of repetition in Johannes Climacus is too brief and too obscure for us to
establish whether Kierkegaard had at this stage developed the temporal, dynamic under-
standing of the concept that is expressed in Repetition, but the thought that repetition
constitutes a new form of truth can already be detected in the earlier text.

If speculative philosophy is ‘untrue’ it is . . . because its practitioners act ‘falsely’ in that

their deeds do not accord with their words. Conversely, it would seem that a philosophy
is true only if one is true to it. To be a true philosopher is not merely to espouse
philosophical doctrines, but to live a philosophical life. (Howland 2006: 15)

In Repetition, however, the concern is not only with the truth of a philosophy or a
philosopher, but also, more broadly, with the subjective, ‘lived’ truth of any individual.
The invocation of repetition as a ‘new category’, a new form of truth to take the place of
the idealising movement of recollection, undertakes a radical ontological reorientation.
298 clare carlisle
According to the Platonic view, recollection moves from the sphere of becoming to the
sphere of being, which is the locus of reality and truth. The movement of repetition,
however, takes place within becoming; it is the movement of becoming – of becoming a self
– and the being of what becomes, the truth of what becomes, is nothing other than this
movement. For Kierkegaard, this being and this truth are essentially relational: in relating
to herself, to another person or to God, the individual is this dynamic relation – but only
insofar as the relation is actualised again and again, repeatedly brought into being.
This philosophical emphasis on becoming is linked to a theological understanding of the
human condition as characterised by sin. Kierkegaard understands sin ontologically, as
non-being and as untruth: as a failure to actualise the relation to God, a failure to be true to
God, which is also the failure to become oneself insofar as the self is so fully dependent on
God that it is its relation to God. This Lutheran anthropology is expressed most clearly in
The Sickness Unto Death, where Kierkegaard emphasises that the self is continually ‘in a
process of becoming’ ([1849] 1980b: 30). Thus, although in essence – or, as he puts it, ‘kata
dunamin’ – the self is ‘a relation which relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself
relates itself to another [that is, to God]’ (13), from an existential point of view it ‘has the
task of becoming itself’ (35), the task of actualising its constitutive relations.
According to Constantin Constantius, ‘the Greek view of the concept of kinesis
corresponds to the modern category ‘‘transition’’ and should be given close attention’
(1983: 149).5 Repetition is like kinesis – defined by Aristotle in the Physics as the transition
from potentiality (dunamis) to actuality (energeia) – insofar as it involves the actualisation
of a possibility, the bringing into existence of an idea.6 In borrowing and adapting the
ancient concept of kinesis, Kierkegaard transfers it from physics and metaphysics to the
existential sphere, where, as repetition, it becomes central to his account of human
freedom: when a person makes a choice, she actualises the chosen possibility at the expense
of various alternative possibilities. (We can do no more than note here that Kierkegaard’s
interpretation of kinesis involves a highly questionable slide between the concepts of
potentiality and possibility.) In The Concept of Anxiety the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis
suggests that ‘when Aristotle says that the transition from possibility to actuality is a
jimgris, this is not to be understood logically but with reference to historical freedom’
(Kierkegaard [1844] 1980a: 82).
Constantin’s claim that Leibniz is the only modern philosopher who had ‘an intimation’
of the significance of repetition supports this interpretation. In the early 1840s Kierkegaard
read and took notes on Leibniz’s works, especially the Theodicy, and was struck by the idea
that God chose from all the possible worlds and in this choice created, or actualised, the
best one. In 1843 Kierkegaard wrote in his journal that ‘when I am going to act, my action
has existed in my consciousness in conception and thought’ (1967–78: 3: 3793), which
suggests – together with the further discussion of possibility and actuality in the Philoso-
phical Fragments of 1844 – that Kierkegaard’s understanding of human agency draws on
Leibniz’s account of divine creation.
In Repetition, as in many of his other texts, Kierkegaard presents an indirect but
polemical critique of the Hegelian philosophy and theology that was being promoted
in Copenhagen by prominent intellectuals such as Heiberg and H. L. Martensen.7
Constantin Constantius opposes repetition to the Hegelian movement of mediation –
and it is in this opposition that the question of human freedom is at stake. The pseudonym
writes that ‘there is no explanation in our age as to how mediation takes place’ (1983: 148)
and emphasises the significance of kinesis ‘in this connection’. This point is clarified in the
letter to Heiberg, where freedom is understood in terms of ‘movement’ and ‘transcendence’:
 repetition and recurrence 299
Movement is a concept that logic simply cannot support. Mediation, therefore, must be
understood in relation to immanence. Thus understood, mediation may not again be
used at all in the sphere of freedom, where the subsequent always emerges – by virtue not
of an immanence but of a transcendence . . . In the sphere of freedom, the word
‘mediation’ has again done damage, because, coming from logic, it helped to make the
transcendence of movement illusory. In order to prevent this error or this dubious
compromise between the logical and freedom, I have thought that ‘repetition’ could be
used in the sphere of freedom. (1983: 308)

Here Constantin Constantius echoes an earlier Kierkegaardian pseudonym, Either/Or’s

Judge William, who insists that the ‘sphere of thought’ and the ‘sphere of freedom’ – the
sphere of logic and the sphere of existence – must be clearly distinguished in order to avoid
confusion. To the sphere of thought belong mediation, reflection and logical necessity; this
is the sphere of immanent movement, of the dialectic. The sphere of freedom is the sphere
of power, of becoming, of transcendent movement. But the distinction between these two
spheres is not a new version of Platonic or Kantian dualism: although Kierkegaard insists
that they are separated by a rift, by a qualitative difference, he also describes a leap from one
to the other, a ‘qualitative transition’ that cannot be mediated – that thus leaves the sphere
of thought and in doing so institutes the sphere of freedom. On the one hand, then, there is a
gap between the two spheres; on the other hand, the leap across this gap is itself an
expression of the sphere of freedom and at the same time the difference between the two
spheres. Returning to Constantin’s response to Heiberg, we find that repetition is to be
understood in terms of freedom and of the transition that constitutes it:

When movement is allowed in relation to repetition in the sphere of freedom, then the
development becomes different from the logical development in that the transition
becomes. In logic, transition is movement’s silence, whereas in the sphere of freedom it
becomes. Thus, in logic, when possibility, by means of the immanence of thought, has
determined itself as actuality, one only disturbs the silent self-inclosure of the logical
process by talking about movement and transition. In the sphere of freedom, however,
possibility remains and actuality emerges as a transcendence. Therefore, when Aristotle
long ago said that the transition from possibility to actuality is a kinesis, he was not
speaking of logical possibility and actuality but of freedom’s, and therefore he rightly
posits movement. In all of Schelling’s philosophy, movement likewise plays a major role,
not only in the philosophy of nature, but also in the philosophy of spirit, in his whole
conception of freedom. What gives him the greatest trouble is precisely this, to include
movement. (1983: 309–10)

From an historical point of view, it is quite natural that Kierkegaard appeals to Aristotle
and to Schelling in his critique of Hegelian thought. During the 1830s, debates between
the Danish Hegelians and their opponents, notably Bishop Mynster, often focused on
whether or not the principles of Aristotelian logic really were overcome by Hegel’s
dialectical logic. Mynster, for example, invoked Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction
and law of the excluded middle in his attack on Martensen’s attempt to relativise the
differences between opposing theological positions – and both of these theologians used
the phrase ‘either/or’ to denote the Aristotelian laws of logic.8 Either/Or of 1843 represents
Kierkegaard’s contribution to this debate, for here ‘either/or’ becomes a kind of existential
version of the law of the excluded middle, signifying that each individual is faced with a
300 clare carlisle
choice between mutually exclusive alternatives (for example, to marry or not to marry) –
just as repetition would become an existential version of Aristotle’s kinesis. In the case of
Schelling, whose lectures Kierkegaard attended during his first visit to Berlin in 1841–2, it
seems that the influence of the German philosopher helped to focus Kierkegaard’s
attention on the issue of movement and to make this central to his polemic against
Hegelian thought.9
Repetition signifies freedom as the actualisation of a possibility. In this movement there
is at once repetition and newness, insofar as something that is in one way is again in another
way: a possibility, an essence, becomes an actuality, an existence. But there is another level
of repetition: the repetition of repetition, of the kinesis, of the moment of freedom. A
possibility must be actualised repeatedly if it is to persist in existence, for whatever is
actualised is immediately past, immediately lost. This second repetition – or rather,
repetition raised to the second power – is the restoration of freedom, of the self, and it
is only through this renewal that there can be self-constancy through time. Kierkegaard
finds in this repetition the possibility of subjective truth: the possibility of being true or
faithful to oneself, to another person, to God. It is as if an individual, once she makes a
decision, loses herself – loses her freedom – in the result, unless the moment of freedom
recurs and the choice is taken again. This point is clarified in response to Heiberg:

If it were the case that freedom in the individuality related to the surrounding world
could become so immersed, so to speak, in the result that it cannot take itself back again
(repeat itself), then everything is lost. (1983: 302)

The double nature of repetition can be illustrated by means of an example from

Philosophical Fragments, where the pseudonym Johannes Climacus suggests that belief
involves the actualisation of a possibility – indeed, that ‘belief and coming into existence
correspond to each other’ (Kierkegaard [1844] 1985a: 86–7). Here he is discussing belief in
the Incarnation and is arguing that the past is no more necessary than the future:

The possibility from which emerged the possible that became the actual always
accompanies that which came into existence and remains with the past, even though
centuries lie between. As soon as one who comes later repeats that it has come into
existence (which he does by believing it), he repeats its possibility. (Kierkegaard 1985a:
86–7)

Kierkegaard’s purpose here is to argue that the individual’s relationship to Christian

doctrine is not a matter of knowledge, belonging to the ‘sphere of thought’, but a task within
the ‘sphere of freedom’. On this view, believing is an instance of repetition – but if an
individual is to hold fast to her belief, to attain constancy as a believer, then this repetition
must itself be repeated. How else could freedom endure, other than by repeating itself?
The philosophical contribution of Repetition consists not in a claim or a thesis, but in a
question: ‘is repetition possible?’ Any assertions about repetition have to be understood
in relation to this question, because the answer to it depends on how the question is asked
and thus on who asks it. The book’s three main characters – Constantin Constantius; a
nameless young poet going through an engagement crisis; and the biblical character of Job,
whose story the fiancé reads in his despair – personify different existential perspectives and
exhibit different relationships to repetition. While Constantin exemplifies the perspective
of a theorist, a disinterested observer, the young poet undergoes an existential transition
 repetition and recurrence 301
when he finds himself in an ethical situation, facing a choice that concerns not only his
own happiness but also that of his fiancée. Job, meanwhile, also finds himself in a crisis, but
his situation unfolds before God and in relation to God. He loses his family, his home, his
possessions; he questions God; he expresses his faith: ‘the Lord gave, the Lord taketh away;
blessed be the name of the Lord!’ According to the existential schema presented more
explicitly in some of Kierkegaard’s other pseudonymous texts, Constantin belongs to the
aesthetic sphere, the fiancé to the ethical sphere and Job to the religious sphere.
Kierkegaard’s response to Heiberg clarifies some of the peculiar literary aspects of
Repetition, for he here has his pseudonym explain his role within the text. As a reader
familiar with Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works might guess, Constantin Constantius
presents a reflection on repetition from a limited and self-effacing perspective: this involves
a misunderstanding that works, indirectly, to push repetition out of the theoretical sphere.
Because Constantin’s own relation to repetition is confined to this theoretical sphere, he
fails to attain repetition and eventually abandons his investigation into its possibility: ‘I in
despair have relinquished my theory of repetition, because my position also lies within
immanence’ (1983: 317–18). He claims that his own discussion of repetition ‘is always
either a jest or only relatively true, adequately illustrated by the fact that I who said it
despair of (its) possibility’ (305) and suggests that his own efforts to realise repetition are
just a ‘parody’ and a ‘pun’ on the true repetition. His aim in writing Repetition was

to depict and make visible psychologically and aesthetically; to let the concept come
into being in the individuality and the situation, working itself forward through all sorts
of misunderstandings . . . I myself play the stoic in order to . . . suggest in abstracto what
cannot be realised in abstracto . . . (302–3)

Constantin confesses to misleading the reader by treating ‘the most interior problem of the
possibility of repetition’ in an external way, by seeking repetition outside himself ‘when in
fact it must be found within the individual’ (304). Nevertheless, we may allow ourselves to
take many of his remarks seriously – while acknowledging that his theoretical account does
not exhaust the significance of repetition – because these remarks clearly cohere with
aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought presented in earlier and later texts.
Although the notion of repetition as the actualisation of a possibility provides an
account of freedom that is articulated in relation to certain figures within the history of
philosophy – Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Schelling, Hegel – for Kierkegaard the question of
freedom unfolds within the context of a theological problem. Christian theology posits two
absolute limitations of human freedom: sin, a condition that is not itself chosen but which
rather conditions the will itself and which constitutes a form of bondage from which the
sinner is unable to release herself; and God’s power, on which all beings are completely
dependent. These two limitations go together, of course: integral to sin is the failure to
acknowledge one’s dependence on God and yet the very condition of sin intensifies the
individual’s lack of freedom.10
As we have seen, Kierkegaard understands sin as loss of the self and defines the self as
spirit, that is to say as freedom. He also conceives sin philosophically as non-being and
untruth, while faith, as the opposite of sin, is the transition from non-being to being, from
untruth to truth. Kierkegaard emphasises that the condition of the possibility of faith has to
be given to the individual who lacks it. To put the point in more conventional theological
terms, faith, which signifies release from sin, is possible only through grace. Grace and sin,
gift and loss, are reciprocal movements – what Kierkegaard calls a ‘double movement’ – and
302 clare carlisle
human existence oscillates between the two. Human freedom must therefore be thought in
this oscillation between the double limitation of grace and sin. Only when the self is lost
can it be given again; only once given can it be lost again. The influence of Martin Luther
on Kierkegaard’s category of repetition should not be underestimated, for we can trace this
religious anthropology back to the German reformer:

Progress is nothing other than constantly beginning . . . For we who are justified are
always in movement, always being justified, for so it comes about that all righteousness in
the present instant is sin with respect to what will be added at the next instant. (Luther
1883: 4: 350, 364)11

This is the Christian significance of repetition, which in Kierkegaard’s 1843 texts is

indicated only indirectly, by the stories of the poet and of figures from the Hebrew bible.
When he falls in love the young fiancé of Repetition discovers his wish to be a poet, but this
self he discovers is already lost because he cannot devote himself both to marriage and to
his poetic vocation and he feels bound by the ethical commitment; he seeks ‘to make
[himself] into a suitable husband, to take away everything that is incommensurable in order
to become commensurable’ (1983: 214). His self and his freedom are finally and
unexpectedly returned to him when his fiancée marries someone else. ‘I am myself again’,
he writes to Constantin, ‘Is there not, then, a repetition? Did I not get everything double?
Did I not get myself again and precisely in such a way that I might have a double sense of its
meaning?’ (220–1). He also writes of ‘the movement . . . in one’s interior being, there
where every moment one is staking one’s life, each moment losing it and finding it again’
(221). Job gives expression to the double movement of gift and loss by his words, ‘The Lord
gave and the Lord took away: blessed be the name of the Lord’.
Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling also
indicates a religious repetition. The birth of Isaac to Sarah, who was ageing and barren, was
a gift from God; this gift seems to be taken back when God commands Abraham to sacrifice
his son; the last-minute reprieve means that Abraham, ‘contrary to expectation, got a son a
second time’ (1983: 9). In this instance, God gives, takes away and gives again. But there is
also a corresponding subjective movement, which Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de
silentio describes as the ‘double movement’ of resignation and faith: in resignation
Abraham gives up both his claim on Isaac and his claim to happiness and justice in
return for obedience to God, and thus reconciles himself to God at the expense of his
worldly life; in faith he opens himself to God’s love, receiving this life itself as a blessing, a
gift.
Kierkegaard emphasises the paradoxical quality of the movement of faith – for how can
Abraham continue to experience his existence as a gift from God, as an expression of
divine love, when God has commanded him to kill his beloved son?

It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to gain
eternity . . . but it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal
realm now by virtue of the absurd and this is the courage of faith. By faith Abraham did
not renounce Isaac, but by faith Abraham received Isaac. (1983: 49)

The double movement of resignation and faith is symbolised by Abraham’s journey up

to Mount Moriah, where the sacrifice is to take place, and then home again, with Isaac
restored to him. But in fact the double movement is performed in every step in both
 repetition and recurrence 303
directions, for Abraham walks to Mount Moriah in faith. Abraham exemplifies the way in
which the double movement of religious faith must be repeated at every moment. Through
repetition Abraham ‘remained true to his love’ (120) and it is this that the pseudonym
Johannes de silentio marvels at and professes himself unable to understand.
In Fear and Trembling the question of whether repetition is possible receives a
complicated answer, for according to Kierkegaard Abraham’s faith, his remaining ‘true
to his love’, is in a sense impossible and cannot be understood – and yet Abraham achieves
the impossible. The point seems to be – and this highlights the Christian significance of the
text – that humanly speaking faith is impossible. This takes us back to the transcendent
aspect of repetition, according to which it is God’s grace that provides the condition for
faith and which needs to be given repeatedly if faith is to be sustained.

3. Nietzsche’s Thought of Eternal Recurrence

Kierkegaard draws on Aristotle’s concept of kinesis to articulate a new conception of truth
in opposition to the idealism that characterises the philosophical tradition from Plato to
Hegel. Likewise, Nietzsche takes from Greek thought the doctrine of eternal recurrence
(ewige Wiederkunft) or eternal return (ewige Wiederkehr)12 – which was discussed by the
Stoics and perhaps also by Heraclitus – and resituates it in a specifically modern context:
the confrontation with European nihilism. However, Nietzsche’s challenge to the philo-
sophical tradition is more radical than Kierkegaard’s, whose Christian interpretation of
human existence as grounded in the eternal being of God is still Platonic, despite his focus
on the existential, subjective aspect of Christianity and thus on the movements of
becoming that constitute the medium of the religious life. The idea that the world and
everything within it recurs eternally presents an image of eternity very different from both
the Platonic doctrine of unchanging Ideas and the Christian doctrine of an eternal life to
come following bodily death. To these two forms of eternity – equally essential to Western
thought and alike in transcending the transient world of human life – Nietzsche opposes an
eternity of this world, precisely in its fleeting character: not as eternally enduring but as
arising and passing away and arising again, again to pass away and to return and so on,
endlessly. The doctrine of eternal recurrence provides, like Platonic metaphysics or
Christian theology, a kind of context or a bigger picture within which the world and
life within it can appear as meaningful – for Nietzsche seems to suggest that mere
immersion in the matters of this life can never produce meaning – but rather than
invoking a transcendent perspective, the eternal return never steps outside the world and
recognises nothing beyond it. Indeed, the absolute inescapability of this world is one of the
terrifying aspects of the thought.
In Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, written in 1873 and based on his lectures at
Basel University in the early 1870s, Nietzsche emphasises the importance of Heraclitus’
belief ‘in a periodically repeated end of the world and in an ever renewed rise of another
world out of the all-destroying cosmic fire’ (Nietzsche 1962: 60, §6).13 He also emphasises
the ‘innocence’ of this process: ‘In this world only play, play as artists and children engage
in it, exhibits coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any
moral additive, in forever equal innocence’ (62, §7). Nietzsche suggests that Heraclitus’
doctrine of everlasting becoming and the impermanence of everything is ‘a terrible,
paralyzing thought’ and that it ‘takes astonishing strength to transform this reaction into its
opposite, into sublimity and the feeling of blessed astonishment. Heraclitus achieved this’.
On this point Nietzsche compares Heraclitus to Schopenhauer, citing several passages from
304 clare carlisle
The World as Will and Representation and, while noting similarities between the two
philosophers, he argues that ‘the basic tone’ of their reflections is very different: in contrast
to Heraclitan affirmation, Schopenhauer regards continual becoming, in the form of ‘will
to life’, as a ‘menacing and gloomy drive, a thoroughly frightful and by no means blessed
phenomenon’ (56, §5). In a passage from The World as Will and Representation which
Nietzsche does not mention, but with which he was no doubt familiar, Schopenhauer
envisages a kind of person

whose love of life was so great that he willingly and gladly accepted all the hardships to
which it is exposed for the sake of its pleasures . . . (he) could calmly and deliberately
desire that his life, as he had hitherto known it, should endure forever or repeat itself
ever anew. (Schopenhauer [1818/1844] 1966: 1: 283–4)

However, in a later section he writes that, in view of the suffering inherent in existence,
this person ‘will much prefer absolute annihilation’ (324).
In August 1881 the thought of the eternal return of the same apparently came to
Nietzsche with renewed force, indeed as a sort of revelation, while he was out walking in
Sils-Maria. Eighteen months later – after what he subsequently described as an elephantine
‘pregnancy’ – he published Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in 1883–5, a work whose ‘fundamental
conception’ is ‘the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is
at all attainable’ (Nietzsche 1967b: 295). This idea had in fact already been discussed in
The Gay Science of 1882 and it appears again in Nietzsche’s later works Beyond Good and
Evil ([1886] 1966: 68, §56) and Twilight of the Idols ([1888] 1968b: 108–11, §§4 and 5). It
also appears in the collection of notes from the 1880s that were published posthumously
under the title The Will to Power. In his influential lecture courses on Nietzsche, delivered
in Freiberg between 1936 and 1940, Martin Heidegger identifies the doctrine of eternal
return – together with the will to power, since the two are for Heidegger inseparable – as
Nietzsche’s most essential thought.
The fact that in Ecce Homo (written in 1888, but first published posthumously in 1908)
Nietzsche very definitely identifies the time of ‘conception’ of the eternal return as August
1881 suggests that from this point onwards the thought had a significance that exceeds the
discussion of Heraclitus’ and Schopenhauer’s versions of recurrence in Philosophy in the
Tragic Age of the Greeks. There was something more in the ‘revelation’ of the thought in the
Swiss mountains than the ideas of affirmation and innocence and fear at the prospect of
endless recurrence. Nietzsche’s notebook from the autumn and winter of 1881 contains
several passages on the eternal recurrence (in this notebook Nietzsche always uses the term
Wiederkunft, recurrence, rather than Wiederkehr, return) and these indicate the various
aspects of the new significance of the thought. Subsequent discussions through the rest of
the 1880s seem merely to echo and at times to elucidate the ideas in this notebook, where
Nietzsche describes eternal recurrence as ‘the new heavy weight’; ‘the weightiest knowledge,
one which prompts the terrible reconsideration of all forms of life’; ‘the greatest weight’; the
‘most powerful thought’ that ‘has a transforming effect’. The fullest and clearest exposition
of the doctrine is provided in the following passage:

The world of forces does not suffer diminution: otherwise in infinite time it would have
grown weak and perished. The world of forces suffers no cessation: otherwise this would
have been reached and the clock of existence would have stopped. So the world of forces
never reaches equilibrium; it never has a moment of rest; its force and its movement are
 repetition and recurrence 305
equally great for all time. Whatever state this world can attain, it must have attained it
and not once but countless times. Take this moment: it has already been once and many
times and it will return as it is with all its forces distributed as now: and so it stands with
the moment that gave birth to it and with the moment that is its child. Man! Your whole
life will be turned over like an hourglass time and again and time and again it will run out
– one vast minute of time in between, until all the conditions that produced you, in the
world’s circular course, come together again. Then you will find again every pain and
every pleasure and every friend and enemy and every hope and every error and every leaf
of grass and every shade of sunlight, the whole nexus of all things . . . And in every ring
of human existence altogether there is always an hour when – first for one, then for
many, then for all – the most powerful thought surfaces, the thought of the eternal
recurrence of all things: each time it is for humanity the hour of midday. (Ansell Pearson
and Large 2006: 240)

Here Nietzsche presents eternal recurrence as a sort of scientific hypothesis, based on the
idea of a ‘world of forces’, and then addresses directly to ‘Man!’ this thought, which will, as
we have seen, have a transforming effect. This idea of transformation dominates another
entry in the notebook:

‘But if everything is necessary, how can I determine my actions?’ This thought and belief
are a heavy weight pressing down on you alongside every other weight and more than
them. You say that food, location, air, company transform and condition you? Well, your
opinions do so even more, since it is they that determine your choice of food, location,
air, company. If you incorporate the thought of thoughts within yourself, it will
transform you. The question in everything that you want to do: ‘is it the case that I
want to do it countless times?’ is the greatest weight.

In the very first entry concerning the eternal return, which is dated August 1881 and takes
the form of an ‘outline’, apparently for a book entitled ‘The Recurrence of the Same’,
Nietzsche follows the introduction of the thought with the question, ‘What shall we do
with the rest of our lives – we who have spent the majority of our lives in the most profound
ignorance?’ (Ansell Pearson and Large 2006: 238). Following the thought of eternal
recurrence, ‘the question is whether we still want to live: and how!’ (239)
These questions about how to live, which imply freedom, seem to be in conflict with the
deterministic thesis that this life as a whole has already been lived thus innumerable times.
Nietzsche’s presentation of the eternal return is also marked by a contrast between the
‘infinite importance’ (Ansell-Pearson and Large 2006: 238) of our actions and our utter
insignificance: ‘The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again
and you with it, speck of dust!’ (Nietzsche [1882] 1974: 273–4, §341). Another contrast is
between the immense weight of a ‘new burden’ and a new-found lightness, symbolised by
Zarathustra’s liberation from the ‘Spirit of Gravity’ (Nietzsche [1883–5] 1961: 178–80, §2).14
These contradictions have prompted several commentators to prioritise one aspect of
the thought – either its ‘cosmological’ face or its ‘ethical’ face – over the other and even in
some cases to dismiss altogether the aspect of the thought deemed less acceptable. On this
view, we must choose whether to regard the doctrine of eternal recurrence as either a theory
about the nature of reality or a sort of thought-experiment that tests one’s capacity to say
yes to life.15 This is problematic, however, since both aspects are undeniably present in
notes written within quite a short period of time, when Nietzsche was first struck by the
306 clare carlisle
significance of eternal recurrence. In more than one of these notes Nietzsche deliberately
accentuates its contradictory implications. He himself raises the question, ‘But if every-
thing is necessary, how can I determine my actions?’ and in another passage he writes that
‘My doctrine says: the task is to live your life in such a way that you have to want to live it
again – you will in any case!’ (241). This suggests that the contradiction between freedom
and necessity is itself an important element of the doctrine of eternal return. Moreover, we
should bear in mind that a ‘doctrine’ is not a set of propositions referring to objective facts
but a way of teaching something that eludes our grasp. This applies to the doctrine of
eternal return just as it applies to religious doctrines.
How the ethical and the cosmological or scientific faces of the eternal return belong
together in their contradiction can be grasped in a preliminary way only in light of the
historical character of Nietzsche’s thinking and in light of his critique of the notion of bare,
objective facts that precede interpretations. For Nietzsche, science itself is an interpretation
of being and a way of looking at the world which has developed through history, which
rests on faith in certain metaphysical ideas and which derives its force from a ‘will to truth’
rooted in the moral imperative ‘I will not deceive’ (Nietzsche 1974: 280–3, §344).16 He
argues that science is nihilistic – that is to say, it devalues this world – insofar as it denies
perspective, the condition of all life. The scientist ‘thereby affirms another world than that of
life, nature and history; and insofar as he affirms this other world, does this not mean that
he has to deny its antithesis, this world, our world?’ Science ‘rests on a certain impover-
ishment of life’ ([1887] 1967a: 154, III.25). In notes from 1887 Nietzsche writes that
‘mechanical necessity is not a fact but an interpretation’ (1968a: 297–300, §552).
If we take the risk of supposing that he is consistent on this point, then it appears
unlikely that he would propose an eternally-valid scientific theory concerning the
objective nature of the universe; rather, the very possibility of science would be a
phenomenon within the world which, according to the doctrine, recurs eternally. And
just as he attacks science, Nietzsche challenges the ‘error’ or ‘superstition’ of free will
(Nietzsche 1974: 279–80, §345; see also 1966: 25–7, §19; 1968b: 53–4, §§7–8) and related
metaphysical ‘fictions’ such as that of an agent distinct from his acts, a doer prior to his
deeds. For Nietzsche, belief in free will is as nihilistic as belief in science. The contradiction
between freedom and necessity is a specific historical event that finds expression in
Platonic idealism, in Christian theology and in Kantian thought, which makes explicit the
antinomy between the mechanistic world of knowledge, conceived scientifically in terms
of causality, and the sphere of free action, of disembodied willing. (Today we might point
to the contradiction inherent in the popular secularism that on the one hand teaches
biological determinism and on the other insists on ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘freedom of
choice’.)
Of course, Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return of the same is also an historical
phenomenon, an interpretation of being that emerges from the nihilistic contradiction of
European thought, makes it manifest and calls on us to think it through. According to
Heidegger,

[T]he thinking of the thought of eternal recurrence, as a questioning that perpetually

calls for decision, is the fulfilment of nihilism. Such thinking brings to an end the veiling
and painting over of this event, in such a way that it becomes at the same time the
transition to the new determination of the greatest burden. The doctrine of eternal
return is therefore the ‘critical point’, the watershed of an epoch become weightless and
searching for a new centre of gravity. It is the crisis proper. (Heidegger 1979–87: 2: 159)
 repetition and recurrence 307
Thinking the thought of eternal recurrence will be transformative insofar as it demands a
new understanding of both freedom and necessity that challenges the idealism of western
metaphysics. The first of Nietzsche’s 1881 notes on the doctrine emphasises the importance
of ‘incorporation’, which denotes precisely a non-idealistic form of thought, according to
which the mind is a ‘little intelligence’, a mere part of the body, which is a ‘great
intelligence’ (Nietzsche 1961: 61–3). One possibility that emerges from the thinking
through, or incorporation, of the eternal return is amor fati, which unites the necessity of
fatalism with the freedom of love.
The contradiction between the so-called ethical and cosmological aspects of eternal
recurrence is at once a contradiction between freedom and necessity and between the
‘what’ and the ‘how’ of the thought – that is to say, the content of the thought and the way
in which it is thought. As Heidegger argues, both of these contradictions are integral to the
eternal return:

In thinking the most burdensome thought what is thought cannot be detached from the
way in which it is thought. The what is itself defined by the how and, reciprocally, the how by
the what . . . The distinction between a ‘theoretical’ doctrinal content of the thought and
its ‘practical’ effects is impossible from the very start. (Heidegger 1979–87: 2: 119–20)17

He also states that

[T]he question of freedom, and hence of necessity too and of the relation between these
two, is posed anew by the teaching of the eternal return of the same. For that reason we
go astray when we reverse matters and try to cram the doctrine of return into some long-
ossified schema of the question of freedom. (2: 138)

Heidegger, for whom Nietzsche is not, as the latter claims, the first anti-metaphysician, but
rather ‘the last metaphysician of the West’ (3: 8) who failed to ‘recognise the truth of the
thought of return in terms of the history of metaphysics’ (3: 164), adds that ‘Nietzsche
never pursued these interconnections’ between freedom and necessity.
However, a recent interpretation develops Heidegger’s analysis but contends that
Nietzsche recognised that the eternal return bears within itself the contradiction between
freedom and necessity:

That is why Nietzsche says that this thought brings together ‘the two most extreme ways
of thinking – the mechanistic and the platonic’ (see The Will to Power, §1061) . . .
Nietzsche’s task was precisely to bring out the essence of the world we live in, in order to
demonstrate that it is, inescapably, nihilistic . . . We are halfway-houses between
heaven and earth and, having arrived at the end of the Platonic age, these two sides
of our being have come unstuck. One interpretation sees the world as pure necessity; the
other tries to grasp our freedom. The task then is to bring these together and this task has
already been approached in that it is here the same thought, the same teaching, which
gives expression to both freedom and necessity. (Haase 2008: 129, 138, 144)

This ‘task’ is linked to another aspect of the doctrine that is indicated in one of the 1881
notes: ‘Only those who consider their existence capable of eternal repetition will remain:
with such ones, though, a state is possible which no utopian has yet reached!’ (Ansell
Pearson and Large 2006: 241). This is echoed in notes from 1884, where Nietzsche
308 clare carlisle
describes eternal recurrence as ‘the great cultivating idea’ (1968a: 544, §§1053, 1056). This
is because it functions to discriminate between ‘the weak’ and ‘the strong’: between those
who suffer nihilism passively and reactively and those who actively and affirmatively grasp
the nature of the illness and thus make possible a convalescence. The weak will recoil at
the doctrine, while the active are able to think it through and to be transformed in the
process; ‘this is how the thought of the Eternal Return of the Same is supposed to become a
historical crisis for humankind’ (Haase 2008: 144). It is important to add to this
interpretation that until we ourselves have fully incorporated the teaching of eternal
recurrence we do not know what such a transformation – sometimes described by Nietzsche
as a transition to the Übermensch – would be like, or even how it could occur.
The 1881 notes also bring out the way in which the doctrine of eternal return emphasises
this life rather than invoking a transcendent realm in relation to which the world could be
given meaning. ‘Let us impress the image of eternity on our life!’, writes Nietzsche; ‘This
thought contains more than all the religions that have taught us to despise this life as
something fleeting and to look towards an indeterminate other life’ (Ansell Pearson and
Large 2006: 240). The idea of eternal recurrence provides Nietzsche with a way to explore
the meaning of the world and of life – understood historically – from the inside. The
doctrine has an extraordinary quality of outsidelessness: the whole of nature and history,
everything we can experience, know and imagine is within the circle of becoming and yet
the thought of eternal return itself is inside this world, indeed inside this moment and a
singular product of it. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra the image of the gateway named ‘Moment’
captures this – and it is here that Zarathustra teaches the eternal return:

And if all things have been here before: what do you think of this moment . . . ? Must
not this gateway, too, have been here – before? And are not all things bound together in
such a way that this moment draws after it all future things? Therefore – draws itself too?
. . . And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight and this moonlight itself
and I and you in this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must
we not all have been here before? (Nietzsche 1961: 178–80, §2)18

To be in the moment is to be inside life, inside time. It is significant that the dwarf or ‘Spirit
of Gravity’ who has accompanied Zarathustra thus far, upon his shoulders, refuses to enter
the gateway and then vanishes. Perhaps this stunted ‘Spirit’ (Geist) represents, in its
nihilistic rejection of becoming, the rational mind, which Nietzsche calls the ‘little
intelligence’; perhaps at this point in the text the reader is being invited into the moment
and thus presented with a choice between Zarathustra and the dwarf.
An important aspect of Nietzsche’s commitment to immanence that is not mentioned in
his 1881 notebook is the refusal of teleology. In The Will to Power Nietzsche writes that
‘becoming is not merely an apparent state (and) does not aim at a final state . . . I seek a
conception of the world that takes this fact into account’;

If the world could in any way become rigid, dead, dry, nothing, or if it could reach a state
of equilibrium, or if it had any kind of goal (that were a once-and-for-all telos) then this
state must have been reached. But it has not been reached. (1968a: 377–8, §708; 548–9,
§1066)

Teleology is a form of transcendence because in positing a purpose for life as a whole it

invokes a perspective outside life – perhaps a creative God who designs the world for a
 repetition and recurrence 309
reason; perhaps an Aristotelian ‘unmoved mover’ or final cause. There are two ways of
interpreting the immanence of the eternal return. One way sees this as an attempt to
overcome nihilism by offering an alternative to metaphysical and Christian appeals to
transcendence (see Löwith 1945: 278). The other way would see the denial of transcen-
dence as itself nihilistic – as a negation of a negation, so to speak – so that the thought of
eternal recurrence would be making this nihilism explicit and thus forcing human beings to
a crisis-point where they are faced with the possibility of incorporating it actively. This
brings us back to the idea that the doctrine has a selective, cultivating power.
One question that may arise here is why Nietzsche needs to invoke the doctrine of
eternal return in order to insist on immanence. Why not just affirm the transience of all
things and deny any notions of transcendence and purposiveness? Why ‘impress the image
of eternity’ onto this life? It might be objected that this is just another denial of temporality
and finitude, another instance of metaphysical thinking. Nietzsche offers some kind of
response to this question in one of the 1881 notes, where he criticises the ‘political
delusion’ of ‘secularization’, which focuses on the world and deliberately ignores the
possibility of ‘the beyond’. The goal of this secular world-view

is the wellbeing of the fleeting individual, which is why its fruit is socialism, i.e. fleeting
individuals who want to conquer their happiness through socialisation – they have no
reason to wait, as do human beings with eternal souls and eternal becoming and future
improvement. (Ansell Pearson and Large 2006: 240–1)

Nietzsche wants to provoke a transition to a new form of human life, to a new form of
human being – the Übermensch – and he regards modern secularism as the culmination of
passive nihilism that neglects the human being in favour of social ‘progress’. In his later
writing he discusses the ‘future improvement’ mentioned here in terms of processes of
‘discipline and breeding’ (Zucht und Züchtung), which is the title of the fourth book of The
Will to Power.

Breeding, as I understand it, is a means of storing up the tremendous forces of mankind so

that the generations can build upon the work of their forefathers – not only outwardly,
but inwardly, organically growing out of them and becoming something stronger.
(1968a: 215, §398)

Nietzsche announces his intention to replace metaphysics and religion with ‘the theory of
eternal recurrence (this as a means of breeding and selection)’ (255, §462). He shares with
Kierkegaard the view that a spiritual illness – whether despair or nihilism – can be
overcome only by going through it; only from the inside, as it were. It would not be possible
to avoid or put an end to nihilism from the outside, by proposing some kind of alternative
(see Heidegger 1979–87: 2: 179). Nietzsche illustrates this symbolically in Zarathustra’s
vision of a shepherd with a black snake in his mouth: when Zarathustra fails to pull out the
snake, he tells the shepherd to bite off its head and spit it out, thus expelling it from the
inside.

4. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were precisely a generation apart. Nietzsche’s father was born in
the same year as Kierkegaard, in 1813, and Nietzsche himself was born thirty-one years
310 clare carlisle
later, exactly twelve months after the publication of Repetition. Both men came from
Lutheran backgrounds; both were drawn to Greek philosophy and wrote works on Socrates
while in their late twenties; both spent most of their adult lives writing furiously and were
enormously prolific; both produced philosophies that bear the mark of Hegel’s legacy – a
preoccupation with history and with questions of movement and becoming. Both thinkers
seek, in different ways, to challenge idealism; both are concerned above all with questions
of spiritual health. If there had been just a few more years between them Nietzsche would
probably have read Kierkegaard’s works and the affinities and differences between their
ideas would no doubt have been clarified by a Nietzschean polemic against the Danish
‘poet of the religious’.
One striking point of affinity between Kierkegaard’s repetition and Nietzsche’s recur-
rence is the production of a thoroughgoing movement that encompasses both the ‘what’
and the ‘how’ of the task of philosophy. It is this that Deleuze describes so aptly as ‘putting
metaphysics in motion’ (Deleuze [1968] 1994: 8). Repetition is a concept of movement –
the transition from ideality to actuality – that Kierkegaard dramatises in several texts and
that he hopes as an author to bring into being within the reader. Just as repetition is an
actualising movement, so the literary technique of dramatisation signifies the bringing into
being, within a fictional world, of philosophical concepts and arguments. Finding herself
addressed and reminded that she is an existing individual, the ideal reader of these texts
makes her own movements of self-discovery and self-actualisation, although of course in
going through these motions she will realise her inability fully to accomplish them by
herself, without God. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is a thought of movement that must be
thought through – that is to say, ‘incorporated’ – and this process is supposed to bring about a
transformation. For both philosophers, the inseparability of ‘what’ and ‘how’ in these
thoughts of transition indicates also the coming-together of being and becoming.
However, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche seek to produce movement within different milieux.
This becomes clear when we compare their attitudes to the historicism that characterises
nineteenth-century thought. Kierkegaard is determined to resist Hegelian historicism and
constantly ridicules speculative philosophy’s preoccupation with ‘world history’. He con-
cedes that human beings are part of nature, of history and of society, but he also wants to keep
separate from these a ‘sphere of freedom’: the milieu of subjectivity or inwardness. The
movements within Kierkegaard’s texts both represent this inner being indirectly and attempt
to touch it directly. His resistance to historicism comes not from a reactionary individualism
but from a conviction that faith, love and passion are the most important tasks of a human
life and that these cannot be accomplished by the progress of history:

Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially
human from a previous one. In this respect, each generation begins primitively, has no
task other than what each previous generation had, nor does it advance further . . . For
example, no generation has learned to love from another. (Kierkegaard 1983: 121)

It is this position that constitutes the heart of Kierkegaard’s ‘existentialism’.

In contrast to Kierkegaard – whose commitment to an interiority somehow apart from
the body he would surely disparage – Nietzsche’s movements take place on the stage of
European history. Nietzsche’s thought is even more radically historicist than Hegel’s,
because what the latter regards as the end of history is for Nietzsche the brink of a transition
to new forms of life. He understood his own life and philosophy in terms of the fate of
Europe: he described himself as ‘a destiny’ and as ‘dynamite’ (1967b: 326–7) because he
 repetition and recurrence 311
found himself unable to evade the task of bringing Europe to a point of crisis where the
essence of nihilism comes into the open. It was this task, which involved the intense
suffering of loneliness, poor physical health and eventual madness, that Nietzsche urged
himself to love when he wrote of amor fati.
To be sure, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is supposed to lead to an overcoming of
nihilism by making explicit the contradiction between freedom and necessity inherent in
modern thought; and this is indebted to the Hegelian idea that contradiction leads not to
an impasse, but to movement. However, the contradiction present in eternal recurrence is
not resolved or reconciled in the kind of rational movement at work in the Hegelian
dialectic. Rather, the crisis encountered in thinking the thought will be a crisis of reason,
among other aspects of human life that have dominated hitherto. The ‘transition’ effected
by the thought is foreseen by Nietzsche not as reconciliation but as decision. In a way, this
echoes Kierkegaard’s argument, against the principle of mediation, that contradiction
(‘either/or’) compels a choice between alternative possibilities. But this Kierkegaardian
moment of decision is individual and existential, while for Nietzsche it must be fateful and
historical. The thought of eternal return calls into question the very meaning of decision
and the very being of the individual.19
Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are transitional thinkers in relation to the history of
European thought, although Nietzsche is more self-conscious about his own transitional
status. Commentators wonder whether Nietzsche succeeds in going ‘beyond metaphy-
sics’,20 and the same question might meaningfully be asked of Kierkegaard, insofar as he
insists that truth is inseparable from life and from becoming. But instead of focusing on an
‘overcoming’ or ‘ending’ of metaphysics, it perhaps makes more sense to assess the
contributions of these two extraordinary thinkers in terms of how and to what extent
they ‘put metaphysics in motion’. We do not know where the movements of repetition and
recurrence lead, for they exceed knowledge, calculation, expectation – and precisely
because of this they shake the foundations of secular humanism. By making questionable
the form and motion of time itself, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche call into being a radically
open future that may transform the past, that may disrupt the boundary between the
possible and the impossible. They are transitional thinkers in precisely this sense.
Philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who set themselves the task of
thinking thoughts such as singularity, gift and event (Ereignis, événement) are following and
continuing movements instituted by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

Notes
1. Some scholars have argued that the term Gentagelse as used by Kierkegaard should be translated as
‘resumption’ rather than as ‘repetition’, since the former better conveys the idea of ‘taking again’
or ‘taking anew’ that is implied by the Danish term. See Croxall 1956: 128–9; Fulford 1911: 8.
2. Heiberg’s discussion of Repetition occurs in ‘Det astronomiske Aar’ (The Astrological Year), in his
yearbook Urania Aarbog for 1844. For a translation of the relevant passages, see Kierkegaard 1983:
379–83.
3. See Kierkegaard 1983: 283–323, for an English translation of Kierkegaard’s response to Heiberg.
4. On possibility in Kierkegaard’s thought, see Carlisle 2006: 63–89; Walsh 1992: 11–15.
5. Note the following journal entries concerning kinesis: ‘Hegel has never done justice to the
category of transition. It would be significant to compare it with the Aristotelian teaching about
kinesis’ (Kierkegaard 1967–78: 2: 260); ‘The category to which I intend to trace everything, and
which is also the category lying dormant in Greek Sophistry if one views it world-historically, is
motion (kinesis), which is perhaps one of the most difficult problems in philosophy. In modern
 312 clare carlisle
philosophy it has been given another expression – namely, transition and mediation’ (Kierke-
gaard 1967–78: 5: 5601).
6. On Kierkegaard’s debt to Aristotle, see Stack 1974; Løkke and Waaler 2010; Come 1991.
7. On Repetition as a response to Hegelian thought, see Stewart 2003: 292–304.
8. On these Danish debates of the 1830s, see Stewart 2003: 50–89; Carlisle 2005: 39–45.
9. An English translation of Kierkegaard’s notes on Schelling’s lectures of 1841–2 is in Kierkegaard
1989. On Kierkegaard’s relation to Schelling, see Olesen 2007.
10. A journal entry from 1843 lists three forms of repetition, the second of which involves ‘the
problem of sin’: ‘Repetition comes again everywhere. (1) When I am going to act, my action has
existed in my consciousness in conception and thought – otherwise I act thoughtlessly – that is, I
do not act. (2) Inasmuch as I am going to act, I presuppose that I am in an original integral state.
Now comes the problem of sin, which is the second repetition, for now I must return to myself
again. (3) The real paradox by which I become the single individual, for if I remain in sin,
understood as the universal, there is only repetition no. 2’ (Kierkegaard 1967–78: 3: 3793).
11. On Kierkegaard’s thought in light of Luther’s influence, see Hampson 2001: 249–84.
12. On the translation of these two terms, see Ansell Pearson 2005: 19–20, note 1.
13. In references to works of Nietzsche’s, page number is followed by paragraph number (§) when
applicable. In references to Nietzsche’s Genealogy, page number is followed by essay number (in
Roman numerals) then section number (for example, III.25).
14. Eugen Fink has commented on this contradiction between futility and significance: ‘All doing, all
risk is senseless and futile since everything is already determined. But one could equally say this:
all is still to be done, whatever we decide now, we will need to decide over and over again. Every
moment has an importance that extends beyond any individual life . . . The importance of
eternity rests on the moment’ (Fink 2003: 78).
15. On the various interpretations of the eternal recurrence that follow this pattern, see Dudley 2002:
202–7.
16. For his critique of science, see Nietzsche [1887] 1967a: 145–61, III.23–7; Nietzsche 1968a: 324–
31, §594–617.
17. Nietzsche criticises the distinction between theory and practice in 1968a: 227–9, §423; 251–2, §458.
18. On this section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, see Heidegger 1979–87: 2: 43–4, 56–7.
19. Pierre Klossowski accentuates how the eternal recurrence brings into question the nature of
selfhood and identity; see Klossowski 1995: 108–14. On the Nietzschean idea of decision, see
Heidegger’s lecture ‘Nietzsche as the thinker of the consummation of metaphysics’, in Heidegger
1979–87: 3: 3–9.
20. See, for example, Heidegger 1968: 88–110; Fink 2003: 6, 8, 80–1, 164–73.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich [1886] (1966), Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York:
Random House.
Nietzsche, Friedrich [1887] (1967a), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale, New York: Random House.
Nietzsche, Friedrich [1908] (1967b), Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968a), The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New
York: Random House.
Nietzsche, Friedrich [1888] (1968b), Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Nietzsche, Friedrich [1882] (1974), The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random
House.
Olesen, Tonny Aagaard (2007), ‘Schelling: A historical introduction to Kierkegaard’s Schelling’, in
Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries – Tome I: Philosophy, Aldershot:
Ashgate, pp. 229–76.
Schopenhauer, Arthur [1818/1844] (1966), The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols, trans. E. F. J.
Payne, New York: Dover.
Stack, George (1974), ‘Aristotle and Kierkegaard’s existential ethics’, Journal of the History of
Philosophy 12 (1): 1–19.
Stewart, Jon (2003), Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Walsh, Sylvia (1992), ‘Kierkegaard: Poet of the religious’, in George Pattison (ed.), Kierkegaard on Art
and Communication, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
 17
Nineteenth-Century Philosophy in the
Twentieth Century and Beyond

Andrew Bowie

1. Methodological Reflections
Reflections on the relationships between one period of philosophy and another raise
important methodological issues which first emerge in their modern form in the wake of
Kant, Herder and other thinkers in the second half of the eighteenth century. This is the
period in which the ramifications of the idea that philosophy is bound up with the
historical circumstances of its production begin to be apparent. In the light of these
ramifications, the apparently obvious aim of identifying anticipations or echoes of
twentieth-century forms of philosophy in the nineteenth century is by no means as
straightforward as it might at first seem.1
Is what is anticipated necessarily superior to what preceded it, or is it merely a response to a
different historical situation? For it to be superior, philosophy would have to progress in
something like the manner in which a science can be said to progress, namely by expanding
its explanatory and predictive capacity and by enabling new technological solutions. This
sort of progress already looks unlikely in a discipline notorious for its lack both of consensus
and of uncontested direct application to real-world problems. Moreover, a key aspect of
nineteenth-century philosophy, perhaps most apparent in the work of Nietzsche, is the idea
that progress in any sphere can be questioned, on the basis that what is progress from one
perspective may well not be progress from another. This latter approach makes philosophy
more analogous to art than to the sciences, because on this view philosophical value does not
necessarily lie in making the next move in a cumulative or progressively bigger story, but
rather in illumination of some particular aspect of life and the world. The nature of this
illumination, as Hans-Georg Gadamer suggests, changes in differing social and historical
contexts, rather than being something that can be established in objective terms for all time.
Marx famously wrestled with the fact that Greek art could still give pleasure, even though the
means of production of Greek society had long been superseded and nineteenth-century
science had taken over from mythology. Does the same apply to Plato’s philosophy – or, for
that matter, any philosophy from the past where the means of production and the state of
reliable scientific knowledge are not as developed in the present? The very fact that there are
analytical reinterpretations of ‘Platonic’ arguments which are intended to contribute to
contemporary debates, as well as readings, like those of Heidegger and Gadamer, which
interpret Plato via what has happened in philosophy since Plato, suggests that the assign-
ment of philosophy to a status akin to science or art is itself a philosophical problem, any
answer to which will itself depend on contested philosophical assumptions.
 p h i l o s o p h y b e y o n d t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y 315
In twentieth-century academic philosophy in the Western world a split develops
between ‘European’ and ‘analytical’ philosophy, investigation of which has become an
issue in contemporary philosophy (see, for example, Glock 2008). The nature of the split
tells us a great deal about the reception of nineteenth-century philosophy in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. The split also echoes that between the idea that philosophy is
more like art, in which progress is not a dominant criterion of evaluation, and the idea that
philosophy is more like a science, because it is supposed to produce rigorously argued
theories that account for the nature of reality. The issue is complicated by the fact that
some ‘European’ forms of philosophy have effects on the production of art – Schopenhauer
influenced Wagner, Mahler, Thomas Mann and many others, for example – and some
analytical forms of philosophy play a role in the development of scientific theories – the
Vienna Circle, for instance, had an impact on quantum mechanics. In these cases the
boundary between philosophy and other disciplines and cultural practices ceases to be as
definite as it is sometimes assumed to be. What these issues imply for the presence of
nineteenth-century philosophy in the twentieth century and beyond is complex, as the
following can suggest.
Is one looking for those ideas in nineteenth-century philosophy which have proved to be
durable because they are repeated or echoed by later thinkers or movements? Given the
massive divergences of approach to key philosophical issues which characterise twentieth-
century philosophy, the danger here is that one will end up with a series of arbitrary echoes
that do not add up to anything philosophically significant. One can always find ways in
which an idea can be said to be echoed by another idea. A more radical alternative is to
look for those aspects of nineteenth-century philosophy which are in some way superior to
what happens in key areas of twentieth-century philosophy: if there are such aspects, they
will necessarily put into question assumptions about philosophical progress. As we shall see,
parts of twentieth-century analytical philosophy were dominated by empiricist assumptions
and a now widely accepted argument against these assumptions was central to Hegel’s
philosophy. Does this mean that philosophy has had to ‘go backwards’? Or is the use of
Hegel really an advance that has only been made possible by the thorough working out of
the contradictions in empiricism by analytical philosophers?
These questions involve an issue which has considerable effects on the nature of
institutionalised philosophy in the Anglo-American world and which sheds important
light on how nineteenth-century philosophy relates to twentieth- and twenty-first-century
philosophy. This is the notional division between ‘philosophy’ and the ‘history of ideas’. In
the former one supposedly seeks to build theories in order to answer philosophical
problems, in the latter one is supposedly looking at attempts to do this in the past which
are interesting for historical reasons, but which no longer play a role in the debates of real
philosophers. How, though, does one know whether one is doing the former or the latter,
especially in the light of issues like that concerning Hegel and empiricism? What are the
criteria for knowing that one is dealing with a real philosophical problem? The criteria
presumably have themselves to be philosophically legitimated, but how does one avoid
what Hans Albert terms the ‘Münchhausen Trilemma’, the danger of circularity, regress or
dogmatism with respect to the adoption of such criteria – a danger already identified by
Jacobi at the end of the eighteenth century? Often philosophers simply assume that they are
already in touch with the true problem, even though they are actually merely joining a
debate on an issue as it has been constituted by those who contingently happen to be their
philosophical peers. Were there a universally agreed stock of such issues and how to
formulate them (and were there objectively accredited peers), the problem might be
316 andrew bowie
soluble, but the history of philosophy is littered with approaches that have turned out to be
dead-ends. The meta-philosophical difficulty remains: how does one prove that something
is a real philosophical problem rather than part of the ‘history of ideas’?
A key nineteenth-century idea, which appears in various versions in Hegel, Marx,
Nietzsche and others, is that philosophical positions can only be fully understood by
understanding their origins, philosophy being, in Hegel’s phrase, ‘its age written in
thought’. Why, then, did people make a philosophy/history of ideas separation, who
did so and how did they make the distinction? The term ‘history of ideas’ seems to stem
from Arthur Lovejoy, who saw it in positive terms, as a discipline with its own justification,
which was to trace the historical development of key concepts. However, the vital point
here is that the term’s actual employment in philosophy goes along, in ways which deeply
influence the discipline, with the rejection of a historical approach to philosophy on the
part of many (analytical) philosophers. This rejection is usually justified by the argument
that the genesis of a philosophical issue is separate from the validity of the claims made
about that issue. This rejection constitutes a crucial interpretative divide between key
aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy.
The most frequent analytical response to genesis/validation issues tells us something
important about aspects of that approach to philosophising in the present context. For the
difference to be a logical necessity, the object of the philosophical problem has to be, in
some senses at least, clearly definable. The so-called ‘mind/body’ and ‘mind/world’
problems can illustrate the difficulty here. Historically these emerge as a central concern
with Descartes, when the issue of how to connect thinking substance and extended
substance appears to be quite clear, insofar as thinking substance can be defined as that
which constitutes the limit of epistemological doubt and extended substance is defined
precisely by its contrast with the certainty of the ‘I think’. The issue is then analysed on the
assumption that the key problem is a scepticism-threatening dualism that makes mind’s
connection to the world incomprehensible. The genesis of this problem might seem to be
separate from the issues to which it gives rise and so to belong to the ‘history of ideas’.
However, it is far from clear either that this approach to these issues is self-justifying, or
that it is the approach which has necessary philosophical priority. An equally valid
question would be why, with sporadic exceptions, the ‘mind/body’ and ‘mind/world’
problems did not turn on the issue of self-consciousness until the seventeenth century
in Europe, before becoming absolutely central in German idealism via Fichte’s responses to
Kant. Does this mean that the phenomenon of self-consciousness did not ‘exist’ until then
(whatever that might mean), at least in the form of ‘self-reflection’ which it takes from
Descartes to Kant, in German idealism, phenomenology and beyond? In the Cartesian
version of the two substances, each term is dependent for its definition on the scope of the
other term. The idea that what is being analysed has a clear sense is therefore open to
question, because the object of analysis changes its status as it is redescribed via different
contrasting terms at different periods.2
The last point is precisely why ideas from Hegel and others in the nineteenth century,
which are regarded as part of the very substance of philosophy by Heidegger, Adorno and
others in the twentieth, can be used to question whether there are clearly identifiable
essential mind/body or mind/world problems which can be solved by a definitive
explanatory theory. The basis of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is the idea that we cannot
understand ‘mind’ if we separate it from ‘world’. That is why the book is about the ways in
which mind ‘appears’ as forms of consciousness which develop via interactions with the
world. Now this might seem just to take us back into the domain of ‘real philosophy’, on
 p h i l o s o p h y b e y o n d t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y 317
the grounds that Hegel is proposing an argument for a version of monism, which can be
compared with other arguments about monism and either found wanting or found superior
to those arguments. The alternative here would seem, then, either to be that one should
pursue the true theory of monism, ‘neutral’, ‘anomalous’ or whatever, because that is the
aim of philosophy, or that one should trace the history of differing versions of monism as
responses to the idea that mind and world cannot be wholly separate. Both stances involve
instructive problems.
The former stance is best seen from the vantage point of successful scientific theories.
These will, in the main, definitively refute what preceded them, provided that they enable
better prediction or account for the phenomena in ways which better cohere with other
theories in the same area. A return to a previous theory will only be possible via the kind of
alteration to the theory which effectively means that it is a different theory anyway. One
can worry about whether successful theories ‘correspond to reality’, but it is not clear that
this notion can be made intelligible at all, as many leading philosophers in both the
analytical and European camps suspect. Moreover, the real-world test of theories tends to
be whether it is rational to act in terms of them, by, for example, getting on a plane built
according to proven aerodynamic principles, or taking a drug which kills a specific
bacterium. None of this applies to philosophical theories of monism, which may pre-
dominate at some times and not at others.
This is not an argument against detailed philosophical theorising on an issue. The point
is to see how such theorising is embedded in contexts which can affect the content of the
theory. Here the very notion of ‘philosophical analysis’ comes into question, because it may
not be possible strictly to separate the elements of what is being analysed. Once this is
admitted, one has to ask fundamental questions about the relationship between argument
and interpretation. Such questions are a major reason why aspects of nineteenth-century
philosophy have enjoyed a revival in recent years.
On the other hand, the latter historically oriented stance is open to the threat of what
Herbert Schnädelbach has termed ‘morbus hermeneuticus’, in which ‘the philologisation of
philosophy turns means into ends and the medium into the content of philosophy’.
Schnädelbach asserts that ‘one should ask the historical hermeneuticists why one
should also have the hermeneutic problems which they have with the philosopher X’
(Schnädelbach 1987: 283–4).3 By dint of making the issue of context the primary focus of
philosophy, one can lose sight of why an issue matters beyond the context in question. One
can, however, turn this argument around and ask why one should be bothering about
‘problem X’, the ‘content’ of philosophy, if, for example, it becomes apparent that putative
solutions to it have no bearing on anything that matters in other contexts. The history of
philosophy, as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty suggest, can sometimes be
written not as the history of successful argument and counter-argument but rather as the
waning of interest in issues that may dominate one period before coming to appear
irrelevant in a subsequent period. The tension between the conflicting stances just outlined
is itself a historical issue which seems unlikely to be definitively resolved. It is for this reason
that certain approaches to history and philosophy, particularly those influenced by Hegel
and Marx, can legitimately concentrate more on what contradictions between theories can
tell us about the world that produces the contradictions than on striving to decide between
the conflicting theories. The tension between the desire to resolve a philosophical issue
and the sense that the issue may be a historical expression of perhaps irresolvable conflicts
can be as ‘philosophically’ productive as either putatively resolving the issue or reducing it
to its historical context.
318 andrew bowie

2. Back to the Future

Any attempt to give a general account of twentieth-century Western philosophy faces a
huge number of disparate positions, all of which have some roots in the nineteenth century.
A taxonomy of the differences between the positions would become hopelessly complex,
especially if one tried to detail the local differences within, say, phenomenology or the
Vienna Circle. There is, however, a notional aspect of both European and analytical
philosophy which would seem to connect the traditions, even as in other respects they
begin to become distinct. This is criticism of ‘metaphysics’, usually in conjunction with a
new evaluation of the effect of considerations of language on dealing with traditional
philosophical problems. The problem is, though, that the very meaning of the term
‘metaphysics’ points to further fundamental philosophical divisions.
The most familiar analytical criticism of metaphysics during the 1920s consists in the
attempt to demonstrate that metaphysical propositions are ‘meaningless’. This requires the
establishment of a criterion for meaning and leads to the notorious limitation of mean-
ingful propositions to those of logic and observation statements. The objection to this
project is that claims that these are the only meaningful statements do not themselves
belong to the class of meaningful statements. As the early Wittgenstein realised (in a
probably unconscious echo of a theme in Novalis),4 this meant that philosophical
propositions about what was meaningful, of which his own Tractatus was itself composed,
were in some sense ‘metaphysical’, although they were at the same time ‘nonsense’. Given
the result of such a critique, it has to be asked why it was advanced with such emphasis by
the Vienna Circle in particular. The answer has to do with their aim of establishing a
‘scientific philosophy’ and the crucial point is that the attempt to do so comes up against a
defining issue in modern philosophy.
To see what is at stake here, it is important to remember that, while the Vienna Circle
sought to get rid of metaphysics by prioritising a certain conception of reliable scientific
method, Heidegger, in his work from the mid-1930s onwards, came to contend that
metaphysics had itself become modern science, metaphysics being the subject’s way of
gaining mastery over being. Heidegger’s stance involves a questioning of all the ways in
which modern philosophy had sought to ground its relationship to being, from Descartes’s
cogito to Kant’s transcendental subjectivity to Hegel’s movement of absolute spirit, to the
forces of production in Marx to Nietzsche’s will to power. The attempt to overcome
‘Western metaphysics’ is a key aim of certain kinds of European philosophy at the latest
from Marx onwards. The attempt at such overcoming can take a rather apocalyptic form, as
it sometimes does in the work of Jacques Derrida, or can be more compatible with some
analytical approaches, as it is in Jürgen Habermas’s (1988) notion of ‘post-metaphysical
thinking’, which seeks a way out of philosophy based on the attempt to ground subjectivity,
as Heidegger thinks the metaphysical tradition to be. Both Derrida and Habermas see the
critique of metaphysics as dependent on the primacy of intersubjective language before
subjectivity and this suggests a possible bridge between the analytic and European
traditions, especially in the light of how nineteenth-century concerns become part of
debates about language in the ways we shall see in a moment. However, at this point a
crucial difference between these traditions becomes clear.
The basis of one version of the analytical project in the strict sense (it is increasingly
clear that there is no consensus on how to define analytical philosophy) is summed up in
Michael Dummett’s claim that ‘words have meanings in themselves, independently of
speakers’ (Dummett 1986: 473) and was established by the nineteenth-century Czech
 p h i l o s o p h y b e y o n d t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y 319
logician Bernard Bolzano. The essential analytical goal is suggested by Bolzano’s assertion
that the ‘objective representation designated by any word is, as long as this word is not
ambiguous, single’ (Bolzano 1963: 66). Bolzano’s idea is to come up with a theory of
meaning in which psychology plays no role and so to put the objective knowledge
provided by the sciences on a firm philosophical footing. Doing this depends on finding a
way of making clear what ‘objective representations’ are. This might seem straightfor-
ward, as the ability to make true assertions seems to depend on them, given that truths
about things in the world cannot be wholly dependent on psychological states of
speakers, if they depend on these at all. How, then, does one give an account of an
‘objective representation’, which equates to something like an account of a Fregean
‘sense’ or, more broadly, to the idea that there are such things as ‘meanings’ in Dummett’s
sense?
Making a representation objective can be seen in terms of formulating the correct rule
for the use of a word, so rendering the word non-ambiguous. Alternatively, one can seek to
identify a class of words whose meaning is given in a way which is free of the contingent
associations attached to words by individual language users. In both cases the aim is to find
a location from which the objectivity of meaning can be grounded. The problem with the
first option was already apparent (in a non-linguistic form) to Kant and the consequences
of the problem are part of what gave rise in the nineteenth century to the development of
modern hermeneutics. In his account of judgement Kant realises that if one wishes, in order
to make a judgement about it, to ‘distinguish whether something belongs under the rule or
not, this could only happen via a further rule’ (Kant [1781/1787] 1968: A133/B172). This
leads to a regress of rules for rules, which means that judgement cannot be made wholly
objective by subjecting it to rules: there has to be a moment in judgement which involves
some kind of non rule-governed interpretation.
A version of this point about rules and their application is developed by the later
Wittgenstein, but it has too rarely been appreciated just how presciently Schleiermacher
dealt with this issue. His prescience becomes apparent when he describes the task of his
Dialectic:

[I]nstead of setting up a science of knowledge in the hope that one can thereby put an
end to disagreement it is now a question of setting up a doctrine of the art [Kunstlehre] of
disagreement in the hope that one can thereby arrive at common bases for knowledge.
(Schleiermacher 1942: 43)

For Schleiermacher ‘art’ is ‘that for which there admittedly are rules, but the combinatory
application of these rules cannot in turn be rule-bound’, on pain of the regress of rules for
rules suggested by Kant, which would render the activity impossible (Schleiermacher 1998:
229). Schleiermacher asks how children could ever begin to learn a language if under-
standing were essentially based on rules, because they would have no basis for learning the
first rule. The contrast between science and art suggested in Schleiermacher’s conception
gets beyond the clichéd view of what ‘art’ signifies in Romantic philosophy, because ‘art’,
with its sense of judgement that has to transcend rules, is essential to human commu-
nication. He therefore makes a connection between what is generally dealt with in terms of
epistemology and the pragmatics of human communication in all spheres, at the same time
as opening up ways in which aesthetics has to be seen as germane to more than the
consideration of works of art or natural beauty.
The second option, that of identifying a special class of words, also has a connection to
320 andrew bowie
Kant, via his distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements. The former involve a
notional class of concepts whose predicate is ‘contained’ in the subject concept (although
exactly what this means is much disputed), as in ‘a bachelor is an unmarried man’, whereas
in synthetic judgements the predicate is not ‘contained’ in the subject and so depends on
information from the world. The notion of analytic judgements presupposes that there are
truths which are purely conceptual (although exactly what this means is still much
disputed) and do not rely on empirical data, which was part of the reason why the Vienna
Circle saw logical statements as being a reliable basis for a criterion of meaning. Famously,
Quine put this idea into question in the 1950s, on the grounds that whether or not a
statement is analytic depends on its relation to other statements in the wider ‘web’ of
language. Changes in one part of the web result in changes in other parts, so that the idea of
stable conceptual truths is highly questionable.5 Schleiermacher makes precisely this point
(although his example of an analytical proposition is probably not a good one) in his
Dialectic:

The difference between analytic and synthetic judgments is a fluid one, of which we take
no account. The same judgment (ice melts) can be an analytic one if the coming into
being and disappearance via certain conditions of temperature are already taken up into
the concept of ice and a synthetic one, if they are not yet taken up . . . This difference
therefore just expresses a different state of the formation of concepts. (Schleiermacher
1839: 563)

If all concepts gain determinacy by their relations to other concepts, then there can be
no concepts that have a privileged logical status by dint of their possessing invariable
meanings: all there can be is a ‘state of the formation of concepts’, not a definitive end to
that formation. Samuel Wheeler, who associates this idea with Quine, Davidson and
Derrida, has put this point in terms of there being no ‘magic language’: ‘A magic language is
a system of representation such that the senses and referents of that language’s terms are
determined by the intrinsic nature of those terms’ (Wheeler 2000: 217). The basic point
had already been adumbrated in the eighteenth century by Hamann, when he questioned
the rationalist assumption of a ‘general philosophical language’ which would obviate all the
kinds of meaning which can only be understood by full engagement with the culture in
which a language occurs. Versions of the rationalist assumption reappeared in the now
generally rejected notion, from the early days of analytical philosophy, of a logically
purified language that would serve as the touchstone for whether utterances are mean-
ingful.
There is ongoing debate about the status of analytic propositions and purely conceptual
truths, but the reasons for the widespread questioning of these notions involve more than
the specific arguments of Quine, being part of a more general sense that attempts at such
grounding of purely conceptual meaning misrecognise what actually happens in human
communication. What is at issue is thus one aspect of the suspicion of metaphysics as a way
of thinking supposedly capable of transcending the contingencies of human existence. If
these points are accepted, the idea of a strictly ‘analytical’ philosophy has to dissolve and a
way would seem open to bridging any European/analytical divide. However, there are a
number of important questions here. In relation to the role of nineteenth-century
philosophy in twentieth-century analytical philosophy, the question arises of why the
conception that I have exemplified by core ideas that informed Schleiermacher’s dialectic
and hermeneutics – which are developments of aspects of widely held ideas in German
 p h i l o s o p h y b e y o n d t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y 321
idealist and Romantic philosophy – gained no real purchase in the Anglo-American world
until others came up with much the same ideas independently of these nineteenth-century
sources. One simple answer is that too many of the relevant German texts remained
untranslated. But there are obviously a whole range of other contingent historical factors in
play here and, while one should not reduce the issue to these, it is remarkable how rarely
philosophers reflect on the fact that the ways philosophy develops can depend on often
quite arbitrary factors.
Significant new approaches were established in philosophy in the analytical tradition
stemming from Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein. At the same time, it is clear that
isolating problems and analysing them in great detail is an inappropriate method for
dealing with many aspects of human life, because aspects of life are interconnected in ways
which can be obscured by this method. It is this realisation which, for example, makes
Wittgenstein think so differently about language in his later work. The inappropriateness
of a strictly analytical approach is particularly obvious in questions involving ethical and
aesthetic matters, where establishing boundaries between, for example, deontological and
consequentialist ethical positions, or expressivist and non-expressivist theories of art, fails
to see that it is often the contradictions between the positions which bring us closest to real
ethical and aesthetic life, rather than the resolution of the conflict in favour of one or other
of its sides.6
One of the few things that still seems to unify analytical philosophers is the idea that
analytical philosophy brings a new standard of rigour and clarity into the practice of
philosophy. The problem with this stance, which is obviously justified in some respects, is
twofold. First, the rigour and clarity is often assumed to be of the same order as that to be
found in theories in the natural sciences. The problem here is that the internal rigour in the
presentation of philosophical positions is not necessarily matched by any gain in warran-
table insight. Given that modern philosophy can be said to begin at the point when
dogmatic founding certainties dissolve, internal consistency of argument is anything but a
guarantee of a position’s veridical nature. The case of Nietzsche offers a useful reminder
here: his wilful self-contradiction and inconsistency (which can sometimes be a serious
failing) can be a source of some of his most important insights. A glance at history also has
to make one wonder just where the insistence upon rigour and clarity actually leads. For a
long time the Vienna Circle defined the project of analytical philosophy as the philosophy
of science, but this project has become a relatively insignificant aspect of analytical
philosophy in recent years and not because definitive philosophical answers were given to
the kind of questions of epistemology and semantics which concerned the Circle. It may be
that the sciences work too well for most people to want to spend their time failing to
explain in philosophical terms why this is the case. The desire to give science firm
foundations in the 1920s and 1930s, a desire common to thinkers in the analytical camp
and in phenomenology, is these days probably more significant as another example of why
consideration of the history of philosophy should be inseparable from its content than as a
durable philosophical issue.
Second, the assumption that clarity is the ultimate virtue in all philosophy easily leads to
an ideological refusal to take seriously forms of philosophy which are not clearly expressed,
but which may turn out to be more durable than forms which are. Russell initiated one
strand of analytical philosophy with his rejection of Hegel and his move from holism to
logical atomism and this helped to lead to the ignoring of Hegel for most of the twentieth
century by those schooled in the analytical tradition (see Hylton 1992). If one does not
regard Russell’s move against holism merely as an internal issue based on philosophical
322 andrew bowie
argument alone, but rather as an expression of wider cultural changes, then the return of
Hegel and German idealism in recent philosophy can be used to suggest how certain kinds
of nineteenth-century perspective on philosophy now offer crucial cultural and political
resources (see Hammer 2007).

3. The Return of German Idealism

Perhaps the most influential book in recent philosophy has been John McDowell’s Mind
and World of 1994. The book is an explicit espousal of a version of Hegelianism: McDowell
commits himself to a kind of holism which, as his detractors argue and as he is happy to
concede, means that he may no longer be doing analytical philosophy. But how would as
subtle and forensic a thinker as McDowell, who was probably best known for work on Frege
and proper names, arrive at the judgement that Hegel is the best source of therapy for some
of the concerns of modern epistemology? Hegel, as he was understood in the Anglo-
American tradition for much of the twentieth century, is the philosopher who inflated
Mind into some kind of demiurge, rejected inconvenient facts in the name of the
completion of a philosophical system and was an enemy of the ‘open society’ with
quasi-totalitarian views on the relation between state and individual. How does one
move from this Hegel to one whom McDowell actually uses to salvage aspects of
empiricism? The initial answer has to do with the fact that Hegel’s specific engagements
with forms of philosophy like empiricism are formulated in terms which can still be used
directly to address contemporary versions of such philosophy. The answer to the wider
question of why Hegel has become a major focus of contemporary philosophy is, however,
again not to be sought solely in the realm of philosophical argument.
Research into Hegel and nineteenth-century philosophy both in the US and Germany
in the last thirty years (at the time of writing) has uncovered more and more of the
‘constellations’ of issues that Hegel, German idealist and Romantic philosophers were
addressing. (The term ‘constellation’ is associated with Dieter Henrich’s research into the
contexts of German idealism, though it also has roots in Walter Benjamin and Adorno.) By
establishing the richness of the contexts of Hegel’s work, it becomes less possible to use his
potentially unfortunate formulations (such as ‘the real is the rational’) to reduce his
concerns to the caricature familiar in the Anglo-American philosophical world. For
McDowell, Hegel sees through what Wilfrid Sellars terms the ‘myth of the given’, the
idea that there is a source of self-authenticating epistemic certainty in ‘sense data’, which
function as the foundation of knowledge in empiricism. This supposed source is a myth
because nothing intelligible can be said about it which does not already involve notions
that cannot be derived from sense data, understood as the brute causal impacts of the world
on the human organism. The basic point is made by Hegel in his critique of the immediacy
of ‘sense certainty’ in the Phenomenology. Anything we say about the apparently most
immediate data, such as what is in front of me now, requires indexical and other forms of
thought which take us beyond the supposed immediacy of the data.
McDowell’s focus on this issue might seem rather narrow, but what he is questioning is the
kind of scientistic naturalism that reduces issues of mind and world to causal explanatory
theories and this has major consequences. Exclusively causal theories eliminate serious
consideration of the ‘space of reasons’, the dimension of spontaneous judgement that allows
us to take a stance on epistemic and moral issues, which cannot be explained in terms of natural
causality. McDowell’s aim is, he claims, nothing less than a reconciliation of reason and nature,
by seeing how spontaneity and receptivity relate in our apprehension of the world.
 p h i l o s o p h y b e y o n d t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y 323
As I have shown elsewhere (Bowie 1996), the problematic taken up by McDowell is a
version of the one opened up by Jacobi in his ‘On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr
Moses Mendelssohn’ of 1785, the ramifications of which echo right through the history of
modern philosophy, appearing, for example, in Nietzsche’s reflections on how the attempt
to ground cognition leads to the ‘abyss’ (see Bowie 1997). Jacobi’s concern with Spinoza
prefigures contemporary objections to scientism, because Jacobi refuses to accept that
restricting our account of reality to what science tells us is self-legitimating (a restriction
that he sees as being implicit in Spinoza’s monistic system of determination by negation).
Rather, science depends on a prior non-scientific ‘revelation’ of the world as something
meaningful. (This theme later forms the core of Heidegger’s thinking about science and
philosophy.) McDowell makes the same point as follows: ‘When we ask the metaphysical
question whether reality is what science can find out about, we cannot, without begging
the question, restrict the materials for an answer to those that science can countenance’
(McDowell 1998: 72).
McDowell’s key concern in Mind and World is with a ‘coherentism that threatens to
disconnect thought from reality’ (McDowell 1994: 24). Jacobi sees the coherentist problem
of grounding cognition as follows:

[I]f everything which is supposed to arise and be present in a manner which we can
comprehend has to arise and be present in a conditioned manner; then we remain, as
long as we comprehend, in a chain of conditioned conditions [this is the way he talks about
Spinoza’s closed system, in which cognition is based on defining things by their relation
to other things that ‘condition’ them]. Where this chain ceases [that is, where we require
the ‘unconditioned’] we cease to comprehend and the context which we call nature itself
also ceases. (Jacobi in Scholz 1916: 276)

German idealism revolves around attempts to explicate the ‘unconditioned’ which

connects thought and reality, mind and nature, and so hopefully to resolve the dilemma
Jacobi sees in any systematic philosophy which tries to ground human reason.
Hegel’s solution is to give up the idea of an initial, ‘immediate’ founding ‘uncondi-
tioned’, of the kind that Fichte suggests is manifest in thought’s capacity freely to reflect on
its own nature. Instead, one is to arrive at ‘absolute knowledge’ by working through what is
lacking in the conceptions of objectivity in Kant, Jacobi, Fichte and others. The aim is to
show that there is ultimately no split between subject and object, because what appears to
lie outside the conceptual realm, like Kant’s thing-in-itself, is in fact within it, the thing-in-
itself being a notion generated in the space of reasons by abstraction from everything we
concretely know about a thing. In McDowell’s version: ‘the deliverances of receptivity [via
which we grasp the objective world] already draw on capacities that belong to spontaneity
[that is, the subject’s thinking]’ (McDowell 1994: 41), so that the very notion of objectivity
already depends on subjectivity. There are numerous versions of this point in Early German
Romantic philosophy. Friedrich Schlegel puts it thus:

The grasping of what is given demands spontaneity, one’s own exertion, own activity.
The smaller is the quantity of spontaneity which the grasping of the appearance
demands, the more the appearance appears. There are no absolute maxima on either
side; without any spontaneity there is no receptivity: and if all receptivity stopped, then
the appearance would cease to be appearance and become a concept, for pure
spontaneity. (Schlegel 1988: 170)
324 andrew bowie
The Hegelian solution has considerable strengths because, in line with Friedrich
Schlegel and Schleiermacher, it sees the issue of cognition as always in some sense
involving ‘beginning in the middle’. As Hegel suggests, you can’t learn to swim without
being in the water, so building reliable cognition can only come about by overcoming
unreliable cognition, the pure starting point which would ensure that everything is built on
solid ground being part of the ‘myth of the given’. The full Hegelian route, however, as
Habermas puts it, lays claim to a philosophical account of the ‘context of all contexts’
(Habermas 1988: 219), which, in some much-disputed sense, supposedly obviates the
contingency inherent in real knowledge acquisition. Contemporary pragmatist alternatives
to wholesale Hegelianism draw on the aspects of Nietzsche in which knowledge is
essentially just one form of social practice whose value depends on its contribution to
one’s aims rather than its true representation of the world. The main question in the
present context, though, is why McDowell needs to offer his therapeutic version of Hegel at
all so long after essentially the same moves took place in German idealism.
The problem is that one needs a convincing account both of the demise of Hegelianism,
which meant that there had to be a revival of Hegel, and of what the demise and the
revival mean. This is once again not something that can simply be described in terms of
competing philosophical arguments. Habermas has contended that ‘There is nothing for it:
we are philosophically still contemporaries of the Young Hegelians’ (Habermas 1988: 277),
because their ‘arguments reclaim the finitude of spirit against the self-related-totalising
thinking of the [Hegelian] dialectic’ (47). Suspicion of Hegelian claims to a total system is,
then, part of the wider move against ‘metaphysics’ discussed above.
One of Hegel’s most insightful twentieth-century critics, Habermas’s mentor, Adorno,
suggests the complexity of the mediation between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
here. He sees Hegel’s system as a reflection of how the modern world becomes a systematic
totality via the expansion of the commodity system, which renders everything potentially
equivalent by turning all things into exchange values. Adorno’s concern is closely related
to Jacobi’s fear that Spinoza’s system led to ‘nihilism’, because in it things only had value
by their relations to other things. Read in this way, Hegel ceases to be essentially the
philosopher who overcomes traditional epistemological concerns about sceptical doubt
and instead his thought becomes a symptomatic expression of modernity, and Adorno links
this aspect of Hegel’s thought to Weber’s views of rationalisation and bureaucracy. Adorno
uses this link not least to understand how the Holocaust was in part a function of what he
terms ‘identity thinking’, which can take the form of the reduction of people (and things)
to their function in a system. The idea is that identification based on systematic relations
between things represses the awareness of the particularity of the things, to the point where
people can cease to matter as suffering individuals and can be reduced to material to be
processed.7 The same kind of identification, as Adorno is fully aware, is what enables
modern societies to function in often advantageous ways. It is precisely the fact that the
same kind of rationalising processes produce effective transport, communication and
health systems, as well as mass murder, that is the crux of Adorno’s approach to philosophy.
At the same time as adverting to the danger of which Hegel’s systematic approach can be
interpreted as an expression, then, Adorno also adopts and adapts key aspects of Hegel in
most of his significant philosophical work.
Whereas McDowell aims for a Wittgensteinian ‘quietism’ that tries therapeutically to
dissolve philosophical contradictions, Adorno reads philosophical contradictions, of the
kind which Hegel seeks to reconcile in his account of the role of philosophy in modernity,
as expressions of historical tensions. Adorno sometimes does this in a questionable manner,
 p h i l o s o p h y b e y o n d t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y 325
but his dialectical account of, for example, the free-will/determinism issue offers a model of
philosophy which confronts the simple fact that this issue, like many of the central
problems of modernity, seems constitutively to resist philosophical resolution (see Adorno
2001). Rather than seeking to transcend the contradiction, Adorno interprets it as one
expression of the modern dilemma of how to relate to nature within us and outside us, a
dilemma made urgent by the success of the sciences in transforming external nature. As he
points out, the idea of the third antinomy is a product of the modern period, not a
perennial concern of philosophy. Rather than resolve the Kantian antinomy, therefore,
Adorno uses it to explore how the concept of freedom can be interpreted in different
contexts and how it has differing historical effects in those contexts.
Despite their considerable differences, Adorno and McDowell share a sense that the
ways of conceiving of nature in much twentieth-century philosophy are inadequate. This
again turns out to involve a revival of a strand of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century thinking which was rejected both in the analytical tradition and in many parts of
the European tradition, namely, the idea of Naturphilosophie, as it appears in Schelling in
particular (see Bowie 1993). Because Naturphilosophie could easily become a hindrance to
empirically warrantable science and contained much that is now beyond any kind of
retrieval, the fact that it was at its best an expression of a key aspect of modernity was easily
ignored. As the world faces an ecological crisis of unforeseeable proportions, a crucial
challenge to the very legitimacy of philosophy lies in the lack of ways of thinking which
respond to the fact that for most of the history of philosophy ‘nature’ was seen as an
essentially limitless resource, whereas now it has become something finite and fragile.
Schelling already warned against regarding nature merely as an object for realising
human purposes when he criticised Fichte for giving total primacy to practical reason:

I am thoroughly aware of how small an area of consciousness nature must fall into,
according to your conception of it. For you nature has no speculative significance, only a
teleological one. But are you really of the opinion, for example, that light is only there so
that rational beings can also see each other when they talk to each other and that air is
there so that when they hear each other they can talk to each other? (Schelling in Schulz
1968: 140)

Schelling later became even more critical of Fichte:

[I]n the last analysis what is the essence of [Fichte’s] whole opinion of nature? It is this:
that nature should be used . . . and that it is there for nothing more than to be used; his
principle, according to which he looks at nature, is the economic-teleological principle.
(Schelling 1856–61: 7: 17)

One would search in vain in most twentieth-century analytical philosophy for any sense
that there might be a whole dimension of human responses to nature which was not
addressed by such philosophy. A philosophical method which takes as its model the
analytical procedures of the sciences is ill-suited to grasping the kind of radical questions
posed by the cumulative effects of the sciences. Heidegger is often criticised for his
observation that ‘science does not think’, but what he meant is clear: while each element of
a successful science can legitimate itself in its own terms, how each of those elements in
conjunction with all the others changes the very nature of the world we inhabit (and our
relationships to ourselves and other people) is not itself a scientific question.
326 andrew bowie
It is not that a revival of a substantive Naturphilosophie is now a realistic proposition, but
rather that a new examination of how nature has been understood in modern philosophy
seems inevitable. Adorno suggests what is needed here with his idea that nature necessarily
has a history, because what ‘nature’ means for humankind changes radically as societies
change. Rather than the contemporary view of nature in terms of the ‘final physics’,
Adorno aims to find a way out of the objectifying assumption that there is nothing more to
nature than will be explained by the final physics. His aim is not to produce a positive
metaphysics of nature, but he realises that the need which leads to the attempt to produce
such a metaphysics is not simply destroyed by philosophical arguments which demonstrate
its impossibility. The kind of thing Adorno means is suggested when he claims, in
reflections from lectures of 1961 on Kant’s Critique of Judgement, that: ‘There is no other
determination of the beauty of nature . . . than as the appearance of something as speaking
. . . as expression which is not made by human beings’, that is, which is not a result of
instrumental manipulation of nature for human purposes (Adorno 1961: 6851). This
comes close to an indefensible attempt to ‘re-enchant’ nature and Adorno is more careful
in his reflections on natural beauty in his published work. However, the fact that his
reflections are now echoed in many areas in relation to the ecological crisis is a sign that
what they advert to is highly significant. The revival of interest in German idealism is
closely connected to a growing suspicion that scientism is a sign of a wider malaise in the
dominant goals of contemporary capitalist societies.
A related constellation is apparent in the growing interest in the hermeneutic ques-
tioning of the idea of science as the solution to the problems of modernity. Although the
natural sciences are indispensable to human survival, as Gadamer contends,

this does not mean that people would be able to solve the problems that face us, peaceful
coexistence of peoples and the preservation of the balance of nature, with science as
such. It is obvious that not mathematics but the linguistic nature of people is the basis of
human civilisation. (Gadamer 1993: 342)

Despite Gadamer’s apparent inability to see his proximity to Schleiermacher, Schleier-

macher is one of the first to insist on this point: ‘Language never begins to form itself
through science, but via general communication/exchange [Verkehr]; science comes to this
only later and only brings an expansion, not a new creation, in language’ (Schleiermacher
1942: 511). What these echoes of nineteenth-century modes of philosophical reflection
share is the sense that the role of philosophy is to mediate between conflicting ways of
addressing the issues of modernity, rather than to adopt a stance which gives primacy to the
natural sciences, seeks a theory that will definitively tell us how language connects to the
world or wishes ‘to discover what fundamental kinds of things there are and what properties
and relations they have’ (Williamson 2007: 19).
Rorty’s contention that contemporary philosophy should take the form of ‘cultural
politics’ brings into focus perhaps the other main constellation between the nineteenth
century and developments in contemporary philosophy (see Rorty 2007). Strange as it
may seem, Rorty wishes to establish an approach which uses both Hegel and Nietzsche
and the reasons for this apparently impossible combination tell us much about how
philosophy from the past is mediated by the present. Hegel and Nietzsche are routinely
regarded as essentially opposed, the former offering a narrative of the progress of Reason
in history, the latter regarding such a narrative as just another ‘shadow of God’ that is
meant to hide the contingency of human existence. Recent readers of Hegel, notably
 p h i l o s o p h y b e y o n d t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y 327
Terry Pinkard (1996) and Robert Pippin (1989, 1997, 2005), however, argue that
Hegel’s is a philosophy of socially developed norms, there being no extra-social, extra-
mundane perspective from which norms can be legitimated. Rather than Geist (‘mind’/
‘spirit’) somehow driving the empirical world from the outside, Geist is just the
immanent development of the ‘sociality of reason’, for which a practice can only be
justified in terms of an account of why it has come to be the socially accepted norm.
Seen in this light, Nietzsche’s desire to get rid of forms of legitimation which claim any
kind of transcendent authority is not necessarily so far from what Hegel seeks to do. For
Rorty, the key element in Nietzsche is his questioning of the correspondence theory of
truth and his related insistence on considering how philosophical convictions relate
to practical dealings with the world, which are summarised in his questions about the
value of truth.
The real division here is, then, between the ways in which philosophy regards the status
of norms: are they, as they are for Hegel, the rationally justifiable result of understanding
what informs the dominant social practices of a culture, or are they, as they are for
Nietzsche (and those most influenced by him), the form which power takes in a particular
historical situation? Are these positions necessarily opposed? Rorty’s work can be seen as a
negotiation between them.
An alternative which still dominates much work in the analytical tradition lies in the
pursuit of some way of transcending such debates, by, for example, making the corre-
spondence theory of truth work and so gaining a firm philosophical grasp on how language
can truly represent the world. Part of the value of a historical perspective on such an
enterprise is to remind us of the fate of previous enterprises of this nature and of the fact
that alternatives to such enterprises have often been neglected. Perhaps the key herme-
neutic reminder that nineteenth-century philosophy now offers us, then, is of the need to
consider why the questions which dominate the analytical agenda should still form the
focus of philosophy. This approach involves accepting the perennial tension between
arguing towards resolutions of philosophical problems and the reminder that history can
show us that such argument always involves more than we could be aware of when we are
engaged in it. In retrospect, many positions, even in the more technical reaches of
philosophy, such as Kant’s antinomy between determinism and free will, or the aim for a
logically purified language, can come to be seen as unresolved expressions of social and
cultural tensions. Although we cannot say now what the current revival and development
of nineteenth-century conceptions will mean for the future of philosophy, we can be aware
of the limitations of perspective that resulted from the idea that those conceptions were no
longer philosophically significant.

Notes
1. I shall not approach the nineteenth century in a purely chronological sense. Like those who argue
that the twentieth century really begins in 1914, I think that the philosophical nineteenth
century begins with Kant’s 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, which sets the agenda for what is
chronologically in the nineteenth century.
2. This issue relates to that discussed below, concerning the distinction between analytic and
synthetic judgements, which is one form in which the doubts that I am considering made their
way into analytical philosophy.
3. Translations from German language texts are the author’s own.
4. ‘The essence of identity can only be established in a pseudo-proposition [Scheinsatz]. We leave the
identical in order to represent it’ (Novalis 1978: 8).
328 andrew bowie
5. It is worth remembering that Otto Neurath came to hold related views (see Bowie 2000). The
caricature of nineteenth-century philosophy often presented in the analytical tradition should not
be repeated for the twentieth century. As Friedman (1999) has shown, the Vienna Circle held
very diverse, often incompatible, views.
6. See also Richard Bronk’s (2009) plaidoyer for Romantic ideas as a way out of the patent
inadequacies of the sort of economic theorising that seeks to analyse human agency as based
on the rational optimisation of preferences, missing out the role of fantasy, projection and other
kinds of motivation in real actor’s lives.
7. See Bauman (1989), who explicates ideas that are sometimes only implicit in Adorno in relation
to detailed historical research on the Holocaust.

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 Notes on contributors

Paul Blackledge is Reader in Political Theory at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is the

author of Marxism and Ethics (SUNY Press, 2011), Reflections on the Marxist Theory of
History (Manchester University Press, 2006) and Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left
(Merlin Press, 2004). He has co-edited Virtue and Politics (University of Notre Dame Press),
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism (Brill, 2008), Revolutionary Aristotelianism
(Lucius & Lucius, 2008) and Historical Materialism and Social Evolution (Palgrave, 2002).

Andrew Bowie is Professor of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of

London. He has published very widely on modern philosophy, music and literature, and is a
jazz saxophonist. His books include Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche
(Routledge, 1990; 2nd edn 2003); Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (Routledge,
1993); From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory
(Routledge, 1996); Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas (Polity,
2003); Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and German
Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010). He has translated
works by Schelling and Schleiermacher.

Clare Carlisle is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. She is the author of
Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming (SUNY Press, 2005), Kierkegaard: A Guide for the
Perplexed (Continuum, 2006) and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: A Reader’s Guide
(Continuum, 2010).

James Connelly is Professor of Politics at the University of Hull. He is the author of

Metaphysics, Method and Politics: The Political Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Imprint
Academic, 2003). He has published extensively on the philosophy of Collingwood, the
British idealists and the philosophy of history. He also writes and researches in environ-
mental politics and applied ethics.

Sebastian Gardner is Professor of Philosophy at University College London. His research

interests lie in Kant and post-Kantian philosophy, especially German idealism. His
publications include the Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and the Critique of Pure
Reason (Routledge, 1999) and Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge
University Press, 1993).

Michael Allen Gillespie is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Duke

University. He works in political philosophy, with particular emphasis on modern
continental theory. He is the author of Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History
 notes on contributors 331
(University of Chicago Press, 1984), Nihilism before Nietzsche (University of Chicago Press,
1995) and The Theological Origins of Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2008). He is
also co-editor of Nietzsche’s New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics
(University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Ratifying the Constitution (University Press of
Kansas, 1992).

George di Giovanni is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Montréal, specializing

in late Enlightenment studies and German idealism. His previous publications include
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill (McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1994; pbk edn, 2009), Freedom and Religion in Kant and His
Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774–1800 (Cambridge University
Press, 2005) and Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism
(rev. edn, Hackett, 2000).

Günter Gödde is a practising psychotherapist, a lecturer at the Berliner Akademie für

Psychotherapie and a scholar who works on the history and theory of psychoanalysis. He is
the author of numerous publications on the history and theory of psychoanalysis, including
Traditionslinien des Unbewußten: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud (2nd edn, Psychosozial,
2010) and Mathilde Freud (2nd edn, Aufbau, 2005). He is also co-editor of a three-volume
history of the concept of the unconscious and related discourses, Das Unbewusste vols I–III
(Psychosozial, 2005–6).

Robert Guay is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University, State

University of New York. He is currently working on contributions to Key Concepts:
Nietzsche (Acumen, forthcoming) and on a book on Nietzsche’s ethical thought.

Philippe Huneman is a philosopher of science at the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie

des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS/Université Paris I Sorbonne). Trained in mathe-
matics and philosophy, he has published on Kantian metaphysics and modern biology. He
is author of Métaphysique et biologie: Kant et la constitution du concept d’organisme (Kimé,
2008) and edited Understanding Purpose: Essays on Kant and the Philosophy of Biology
(University of Rochester Press, 2007). He also works on philosophical issues in evolu-
tionary biology.

Gregory Moore is Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages at the University of St

Andrews. He is the author of Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge University Press,
2002) and has translated works by Herder and Fichte.

Dalia T. Nassar is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. She has

written articles on Romanticism and idealism, most recently ‘Interpreting Novalis’ Fichte-
Studien’, in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, and ‘From a philosophy of self to a philosophy of
nature: Goethe and the development of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie’, in Archiv für
Geschichte der Philosophie. She is presently completing a manuscript on the metaphysics
of German Romantic philosophy.

Judith Norman is Professor of Philosophy at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

She has published numerous articles on Schelling, Nietzsche and early German Romanti-
cism and co-edited The New Schelling, a collection of contemporary readings of Schelling
332 notes on contributors
(Continuum, 2004). In addition, she has translated books by Nietzsche and Schelling and
is currently co-translating Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (Cambridge
University Press, forthcoming).

William Outhwaite is Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University. His recent publica-

tions include The Future of Society (Blackwell, 2006), European Society (Polity, 2008),
Habermas (2nd expanded edn, Polity, 2009) and (with Larry Ray) Social Theory and
Postcommunism (Blackwell, 2005). He is currently working on social and political change
in Europe since 1989, supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

George Pattison is Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and a
Canon of Christ Church Cathedral. He has written extensively on modern theology and
philosophy of religion, with particular emphasis on nineteenth- and twentieth-century
existentialism. His books include Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis
of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2002), The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Acumen,
2005), the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heidegger (Routledge, 2000),
Thinking about God in an Age of Technology (Oxford University Press, 2005) and, most
recently, God and Being: An Enquiry (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Mark Sinclair is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University.

He has published Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art (Palgrave, 2006) and, with Clare
Carlisle, a critical edition of Félix Ravaisson’s Of Habit (Continuum, 2009). He is currently
working on a book-length study of the French spiritualist tradition, entitled Before Bergson:
Phenomenology and Ontology in Nineteenth-Century French Thought.

Alison Stone is Reader in European Philosophy at Lancaster University. Her research

interests lie in Early German Romanticism, German idealism including Hegel, the
Frankfurt School and feminist philosophy. Her publications include An Introduction to
Feminist Philosophy (Polity, 2007), Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference
(Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy
(SUNY Press, 2004).

Alistair Welchman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Texas at San

Antonio. He has published numerous articles on Kant, Schelling and Deleuze and co-
edited The New Schelling, a collection of contemporary readings of Schelling (Continuum,
2004). In addition, he has co-translated Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy
(Continuum, 2010) and is currently co-translating Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and
Representation (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Alex Zakaras is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont. His
first book was Individuality and Mass Democracy: Mill, Emerson, and the Burdens of Citizenship
(Oxford University Press, 2009). He is co-editor of J. S. Mill’s Political Thought: A
Bicentennial Reassessment (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
 Index

a priori, 70, 71, 72, 97 animals, and human intelligence gap, Babeuf, François-Noël ‘Gracchus’,
Abrams, M. H., Natural 116–17 247, 259–60, 261, 262, 270
Supernaturalism, 50, 51, 52, 53 animism, 196 Conspiracy of Equals, 261
Abramsky, Chimon, 270 Anschauung see intuition Bacon, Francis, 279
Absolute, the, 6, 26, 34–6, 92, 100, anthropology, 27, 95, 106, 139, 205 Badiou, Alain, 274
130 medical, 207–8 Bakunin, Jack, 233
and difference or indifference, philosophical, 250, 298, 302 Bakunin, Mikhail, 10, 96, 260, 262,
37–9, 41–2 anti-capitalist movement, 274 268, 270–2, 273, 274, 286,
Fichte’s, 30, 33–4 anti-Semitism, 253 287–8, 289, 290
in German idealism and apperception ‘Appeal to the Slavs’, 288
Romanticism, 29–46 immediate, in Biran, 189–93 Balint, Michael, 218
Hegel and, 29, 30, 39–42, 264 transcendental unity of, 55–6 Bauer, Bruno, 284
Kant on, 34–5 archetypes, 218 Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 146, 156
knowing the, 30, 31–4, 42–5, 147 Arendt, Dieter, 281 becoming, 16, 36, 39–42, 44, 124,
relation with the world, 35–42 argument, and interpretation, 317, 136–7, 295–6, 299, 303–9
in Schelling, 29, 30, 36–9, 64 319–20 Begriff see concept
time and, 162 Argument from Design, 112 Being, 93, 137, 194–5, 298, 318
use of term, 29, 45 Aristotelianism, 92, 135, 181, 224, Beiser, Frederick, 226, 229
absolutism, 224, 226, 229, 270 295 Benjamin, Jessica, 219
abstraction, and explanation, 16–17 Aristotle, 301 Benjamin, Walter, 322
adaptation, 72, 114, 118, 119, 120, on kinesis, 295, 296–7, 298, Bentham, Jeremy, 3, 236
197–8 299–300, 303 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 224
Adler, Alfred, The Neurotic Character, Metaphysics, 193 Bergson, Henri, 8–9, 85, 106, 187–8,
217 Arnim, Achim von, 49 196–9, 200
Adorno, Theodor, 175, 183, 250, 316, art Creative Evolution, 106
322, 324–6 and philosophy, 60, 314–15, 321 Matter and Memory, 196–9
aestheticism, 25, 291 redemption through, 212–13 Rapport sur la philosophie en France
aesthetics, 105, 224, 239, 281, 319 and science, 319–20 au XIXième siècle, 196
and language, 321 unity of self and nature in, 24–6, Bernheim, Hippolyte, 204, 219
Agassiz, Louis, 117 36–9 Bernstein, Edouard, 10, 230, 262
agnosticism, 113, 140 artist The Preconditions of Socialism,
Albee, Ernest, 101 as individual, 224, 235 259–60
Albert, Hans, 315 social role for, 62, 64 Bestimmung see vocation
Alexander II, Czar, 289 as transcendental ego, 55–7 biblical criticism, 145, 156
Alexander, Samuel, Moral Order and asceticism, 170–1, 172, 182, 213 Bichat, Xavier, 81
Progress, 122–3 atheism, 2, 15, 23, 26, 128, 137, 279, Bildung, 226
alienation, 51, 52, 62, 65, 178–9, 280, 284–5, 292 Binoche, Bertrand, 244
232–4, 281–2 Atheism Controversy, 279–80 biology, 69, 72, 78–9, 83, 111, 115, 119
Althusser, Louis, 246 Athenäum, 49, 58 Bion, Wilfred, 218
altruism, 121–2, 124–5 atomism, 162, 321–2 Birchall, Ian, 261
American Revolution, 259, 261 audience, 62, 65 Bismarck, Otto von, 244, 261
analytic/synthetic division, 11, 320 Aufklärung see Enlightenment, Bixby, J. T., The Ethics of Evolution,
analytical philosophy, 11, 108, 318, German 121
320–2 author Blackledge, Paul, 10, 259–77, 331
and European philosophy, 315–27 death of the, 57–8, 61 Blake, William, ‘Tyger’, 281
as philosophy of science, 321–2 role of the, 63–4 Blanc, Louis, 10, 260, 269
rationalist assumption, 320 authority Blanchot, Maurice, 59, 62
analytical psychology, 217–18, 220 challenges to, 269–70, 281–2, 327 Blanqui, Louis-Auguste, 259–60, 262,
anarchism, 10, 223, 239, 259, 262, of criticism, 169 266–7, 268, 270, 272, 274
263, 268, 268–72, 286 democratisation of, 271–2 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 77
and social democracy, 268–73 the nature of, 264–5 Blüntschli, Johann Kaspar, 243
anarcho-syndicalism, 271 authorship, 57–60 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 50
anatomy, 192 theories of collective, 58 body
comparative, 72, 79, 82, 111 autonomy, 1; see also freedom the habituated, 9, 193–6, 198
ancients and moderns, 48–9, 51–2 Avenarius, Richard, 89 as le corps propre, 187–93, 195
334 index
the lived, 9, 187–203 Cassirer, Ernst, 101 Hartmann on, 210–11
and mind, 307 categorical imperatives, 139 socialist, 266
and the will, 9, 190–3, 193–6 Catholicism, 135, 224, 231–2 threshold of, 206
see also mind-body dualism causality, 77, 97, 118, 181, 306, 322–3 and the unconscious, 205, 208–9,
body schema/image, 191 chain of, 44, 59 212–13, 214–18, 219
Boehme, Jacob, 52, 93 efficient before final, 20–1, 23 and the will, 189–91
Boerhaave, Herman, 193 in history, 177–9, 180 consequentialism, 321
Bolshevism, 289 Hume on, 189–93 conservatism, 228, 244, 246, 247
Bolzano, Bernard, 319 and succession, 190 Conspiracy of Equals, 261
Bonald, Louis de, 247 Cavell, Stanley, 84 Constable, John, 60
Bonnet, Charles, 194 cell theory, 79 ‘constellations’ of issues, 322
Bosanquet, Bernard, 8, 146, 154, 155, ‘cell-soul’, 117 Contemporary, the, 286
156, 158–64 Cervantes, Miguel de, 49 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 112
‘Atomism in History’, 162 Channing, William Ellery, ‘Self- Copleston, Frederick, 245
Logic, 160–4 Culture’, 238 corporeality, cognitive, 200
The Principle of Individuality . . ., Charcot, Jean-Martin, 204, 219 corps propre, le see body
159–60 Chateaubriand, René, 63 ‘Cosmism’, 114
‘Time and the Absolute’, 162 chemistry, 78, 83 cosmology, and Darwinism, 112–16
Bottomore, Tom, 244 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 286, 287, cosmopolitanism, 168–9, 171–2,
Bourdieu, Pierre, 246 289, 290 173–5, 177, 180
bourgeois state, 10, 274 What is to be done?, 287 Cournot, Antoine, 85
bourgeoisie, 231, 253, 264, 269 Christianity, 3, 98, 172 Cousin, Victor, 245
Bourget, Paul, 290 and Darwinism, 7, 114, 124 Cramer, Heinrich Matthias August,
Bouterwek, Friedrich, 49 epistemic status of claims, 7–8 Dictionary, 280
Bowie, Andrew, 11, 314–29, 331 erosion of authority, 89, 93 creativity, 55, 58, 61, 115, 207, 290–1
Bowlby, John, 218 Kierkegaard and, 296, 298, 300–3 Creuzer, Friedrich, 49
Bradley, A. C., 123 and knowledge, 128–44 criticism, 22, 169; see also literary
Bradley, Francis Herbert, 8, 105, 154, limits on freedom, 301–2 criticism
155 and metaphysics, 16 critique, 172, 174–5, 177
Appearance and Reality, 99–100, Nietzsche on, 181–2, 290–1, 303 genealogy as immanent, 168–86
155, 156 and nihilism, 279, 280, 284–5 revolutionary ends of, 179
Ethical Studies, 155 and Romanticism, 50 Croce, Benedetto, 146, 148, 151,
The Presuppositions of Critical Christology, 138, 145, 156 163
History, 146, 155–64 civil society, 227–8, 236, 246, 263–6 The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico,
The Principles of Logic, 155, 156 class inequality, 10, 231, 265–8, 158
Brentano, Clemens, 49, 60, 281 273–4 cultural politics, philosophy as, 326–7
Brentano, Franz, Psychology from an cognition, 104, 108, 210, 323–4 culture, 2, 4, 64–5, 119, 152, 216, 236,
Empirical Standpoint, 214–15 coherentist problem, 323 238, 248
Breuer, Josef, 204 scientific, 175 crisis of European, 289–92, 311
Brücke, Ernst, 214 cognitive psychology, 207, 219–20 Cupitt, Don, 142
Brudney, Daniel, 237 Cohen, Hermann, 101 Cuvier, Baron Georges, 72
Brunschwig, Henri, 63 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 54, 55, 56, cytology, 117
Buchholz, Michael, 205 57, 58, 84 Czolbe, Heinrich, 89
Büchner, Georg, 284 Biographia Literaria, 2, 50
Danton’s Death, 285 ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’, Dante Alighieri, 48
Büchner, Ludwig, 89 281 Darwin, Charles, 103
Buckle, Henry Thomas, 8, 149–50 collectivism, 271 The Descent of Man, 120
Buddhism, 278, 281, 290 Collingwood, R.G., 155, 160–1, 163 The Origin of Species, 3, 89, 111–12,
Bultmann, Rudolf, 142 The Idea of History, 156, 157–8, 159 113, 114, 117
Buonarroti, Filippo, Conspiration pour Collini, Stefan, 249, 250 theory of evolution, 3, 7, 79, 211,
l’égalité dite de Babeuf, 261 Collins, Henry, 270 212
bureaucracy, 1, 226–7, 264, 284, 324 Collins, Randall, 245 Darwinism, 3, 7, 79–80, 83, 85, 100,
Burger, Thomas, 150 communication, 320–1 173
Burke, Edmund, 229 communism, 251, 259, 265, 269, 271, and 19th-century philosophy,
Reflections on the Revolution in 274 111–27
France, 247 community, ideal, 226–9, 265–6 and ethics, 119–24
Burrow, John W., 225, 249, 253 Comte, Auguste, 3, 8, 85, 89, 95, 149, Daub, Karl, 131
Byron, Lord, 48, 51, 56, 281, 282 154, 237, 244, 246, 250, 253 Davidson, Donald Herbert, 320
concept (Begriff), 41, 42–3, 71, 75–6, de la Mettrie, Julien Offray, 95
Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-George, 188 78, 131, 136, 176 De Man, Paul, 54, 58, 61
Caird, Edward, 99 concept formation, 320 Debray, Régis, 249
Callinicos, Alex, 274 concrete universals theory deconstruction, 61–2
Campbell, Donald T., 119 (Bosanquet), 8, 159–64 Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and
Camus, Albert, 278 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 188, Repetition, 294, 310
capitalism, 177, 179, 235, 237, 259, 192 democracy, 228–9, 232–3, 238, 249
261–2, 265–8, 268–72, 273–4, Condorcet, Nicolas de, 243, 247, 248 constitutional, 238
326 Tableau historique des progrès de from above, 261
Caputo, John D., 142 l’esprit humain, 244 participatory, 235–6, 239–40
Carlisle, Clare, 10–11, 294–313, 331 conformity, 9, 236, 239 social, 268–73
Carneri, Bartholomäus von, Sittlichkeit Connelly, James, 8, 145–67, 331 Dennett, Daniel C., 112
und Darwinismus, 122 Conrad, Joseph, 291 deontology, 321
Carus, Carl Gustav, 219 consciousness depth psychology, 219–20
Psyche, 208–9, 211 continuum of, 195–6, 199 Derrida, Jacques, 142, 193, 318, 320
 index 335
Descartes, René, 22, 30, 69, 128, 188, Elias, Norbert, 242 and explanation, 18, 19
208, 214, 279 elitism, 266, 272 and individuation, 17
cogito, 56, 316, 318 Ellenberger, Henry, The Discovery of Kant on, 19–20
Discours de la méthode, 205 the Unconscious, 204 as meaningless, 279
mind-body dualism, 187, 189, 197, Ellul, Jacques, 279 natural and spiritual, 24
205, 316–17 embodiment, 5, 8–9, 187–203, 199 the primacy of, 18–21, 25–6
despair, 295, 309 embryology, 72, 74, 79 existentialism, 3, 8, 11, 21, 94, 140–1,
despotism, 235 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 84, 223, 142, 278, 291, 295–303, 310
Destutt de Tracy, Antoine, 188 238, 239, 240 experimental psychology, 103, 117
determinism, 2, 3, 4, 16, 17 ‘Self-Reliance’, 238 experimentation, 43
free will issue, 11, 325, 327 empirical sciences, 1, 2, 3, 78, 153–4 explanation, 77–8
and freedom, 11, 19, 305–8, 311 empiricism, 1, 70, 90, 102, 145, 148, and abstraction, 16–17
Spinoza’s type of, 17–18, 323 154, 322 empirical, 92, 149, 322–3
Dewey, John, 106, 111 assumptions, 315 ‘English’ mode of historical, 121–2
d’Holbach, Baron, 95, 103 Hegel’s critique of, 11, 315, 322 as Erklärung, 8, 145, 150–2
di Giovanni, George, 5–6, 13–28, 332 historical, 149–50 and existence, 17, 19
dialectics, 245, 263, 299 Encyclopédie Nouvelle, 230 mechanistic, 97–8
Marx’s materialist, 177–9, 246 Engels, Friedrich, 128, 243, 246, 250, metaphysical limits of scientific,
Schleiermacher’s, 319, 320 259, 263, 265, 266, 268, 271, 99–100
dictatorship 272–3, 274 expressivism, 224, 321
of the proletariat, 262–3, 271–2, On Authority, 262–3
274 The Communist Manifesto, 251 Fairbairn, W. R. D., 218
‘revolutionary’, 262, 267, 274 England, 225, 250 fairy tales, 60, 61
Diderot, Denis, Rêve d’Alembert, 78 political economy, 231 faith
difference revolution, 259, 261 and doctrine, 133–4
and identity, 40–1 Romantics, 6, 48, 50–1, 54, 56, 62 and knowledge, 7–8, 128–44
or indifference and the Absolute, Enlightenment, 1, 2, 3, 5, 71, 78, 89, leap of, 299–303
37–9, 41–2 108, 129, 135, 173, 177, 223, and metaphysics, 1
quantitative, 38 247, 251, 279, 281 and political power, 13
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 84, 106, 145, 150, German, 13–27 reflective, 133–4
151–2, 154, 251, 252, 253 ‘radical’, 13–14, 27 Fascism, 291
disciplinary boundaries, 5, 132, 149, and Romanticism, 52, 55, 58 fatalism, 16, 17–18, 21, 22, 307
152–5, 315 Scottish, 244 Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 3, 92, 117,
division of labour, 178–9, 230 and the unconscious, 205–7, 219 206–7, 215, 219
Dobrolyubov, Nikolai, 286 entomology, 84 Elemente der Psychophysik, 206–7
dogmatism, 91, 136, 137, 315 epistemology, 2, 5, 30, 69, 93, 102, Feder, Georg Heinrich, 33
or dogmaticism, 134 103, 104–5, 211, 319, 321, 322 feeling, cult of, 15, 51, 54–5, 78
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 10, 288–9, 290 evolutionary and mind, 116–19 Ferenczi, Sándor, 218
Crime and Punishment, 288 equality, 1, 2, 9, 180, 232, 242–3, 247; Ferguson, Adam, Essay on the History
Demons, 288 see also inequality of Civil Society, 245
The Brothers Karamazov, 288 Erdmann, Johann Eduard, 8, 128–9, Feuerbach, Ludwig, 7, 83, 139–40,
doubt, 133, 134 137, 139, 140, 142 142, 263, 264, 265, 266, 284,
Draper, Hal, 268, 271, 272 Faith and Knowledge, 128–9, 131, 285, 286, 287, 290
dreams, Freudian intepretation, 204, 132–7 Principles of the Philosophy of the
213–14 History of Philosophy, 132 Future, 139
drives, instinctual, 9, 210, 212, Erklärung see explanation The Essence of Christianity, 139
216–18, 218 Eros, 216 Thoughts on Death and Immortality, 93
Droysen, Johann Gustav, 150, 251–2 Eschenmayer, Karl August, 92 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 1, 6, 10, 13,
dualisms essence, 38, 40–1, 71 15, 18, 27, 56, 64, 89, 105, 117,
Bergson, 196–9 eternal return see recurrence, eternal 128, 130, 154, 189, 245, 247,
Cartesian, 187, 189, 205, 316–17 ethics, 98 250, 279–80, 281, 286
Kantian, 2, 29, 30–3, 34, 103 Aristotelian, 224 compared with Schelling, 25, 37,
Dühring, Eugen, 96 critics of evolutionary, 123–5 39, 325
Dummett, Michael, 318–19 and evolution, 119–23 on idealism and dogmatism, 91,
Dunn, John, 259 and historicism, 148 136, 279, 316
Duns Scotus, John, 278 and individuality, 224, 301 on intellectual intuition, 33–4, 42,
Durkheim, Emile, 244, 246, 253 and language, 321 43, 55, 57
and morality, 122 and the ontological Absolute, 30,
ecological crisis, 325, 326 European philosophy, and analytical 33–4, 282, 291, 323
economics, 145, 177–9, 230, 237, 252 philosophy, 315–27 theory of self-consciousness, 34, 42
education event, 11, 17, 162–3, 179 Vocation of Man, 21–4
and politics, 239–40 evil, 209, 282 Wissenschaftslehre, 23–4, 25, 26, 48
religious studies in higher, 142–3 evolution, 1, 112 First International, 270, 271
egalitarianism, 232, 238, 239 Darwinian theory of, 3, 7, 79–80, first person, 3, 190–3, 196
ego psychology, 218 83, 111–27, 212 Fiske, John, 114
ego, the, 216–17, 218–19 and ethics, 119–23 Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, 114
relations with the unconscious, 209 God and cosmic, 112–16 Fliess, Wilhelm, 214, 215
egoism, 209, 223–4, 224, 232, 279, moral, 120–1, 122–3 Flint, Robert, 158
285 Spencer on, 7, 85, 112–14, 120 folksongs, German, 49, 58
and altruism, 121–2, 124–5 use of term, 113 Foster, Michael, 163–4
of civil society, 264–5 existence Foucault, Michel, 183
Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 252 the concept of, 140–1 Les mots et les choses (The Order of
Eigentümlichkeit see individuality and essence, 38, 40–1 Things), 58–9, 248
336 index
Fourier, Charles, 248 galvanism, 78, 92 revolutionary, 259–61
France, 225, 243, 253 Gardner, Sebastian, 4, 7, 89–110, 331 and society, 243
Constitution (1793), 262 Garve, Christian, 33 Gramsci, Antonio, 273–4
Ideological school, 188, 192, 193, Gasser, Reinhard, Nietzsche und Freud, Green, Joseph Henry, 79
247, 248 204 Green, Thomas Hill, 99, 154–5, 156,
July Monarchy, 231 Gauthier of St-Victor, 280 158
National Assembly draft Gehlen, Arnold, 106 Prolegomena to Ethics, 123
constitution (1848), 233 Geist see spirit Gregory VII, Pope, 231
philosophy, 187–203 Geisteswissenschaften, 149, 151, 178 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 49
Revolution (1848), 284, 285 gender, 82–3, 85 Groddeck, Georg, 218
Romanticism, 48, 57, 230 difference, 180 Guay, Robert, 8, 168–86, 332
spiritualist tradition, 5, 8, 187–203 genealogy, 8, 168–86 guilt, 170, 213
Universal Declaration of Human key features of method, 8, 168–9 Gusdorf, Georges, 247, 248
Rights, 247 Nietzschean, 169–73 Gutzkow, Karl, 287
see also French Revolution (1789) post-history of, 182–4 The Nihilists, 285
Frank, Manfred, 56 prehistory of, 173–5 Guyau, Jean-Marie, Esquisse d’une
Frankfurt School, 217 genetics, 119 morale sans obligation ni sanction,
Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Archduke, Genius, the, 25, 54, 55, 57 121
291 Gentile, Giovanni, 163
freedom, 1, 2, 5, 8, 22, 271–2 geometrical method, Spinoza’s, 37, 44 Habermas, Jürgen, 245, 246, 318, 324
of choice, 234–5, 298–303 Germany, 63–4, 243, 251, 253 habit, 9, 115, 120, 122, 187, 188–93
in civil society, 263–6 Bismarckian, 244, 261 acquisition of, 197, 199–200
and communism, 269 Early Romanticism, 5, 6, 10, 24, and the body, 193–6, 197
‘comparative’, 19 323 neurological hypotheses, 194
of conscience, 233 Enlightenment, 13–27 Haeckel, Ernst, 83, 89, 92, 112, 117,
cosmopolitan, 174–5 idealism, 1–2, 5–6, 7, 10, 15, 18, 120
and determinism, 11, 325, 327 29–46, 145, 316, 320–1, 322 Die Welträtsel, 112
historicised, 181 idealism and naturalism in, 90–2 Hamann, J.G., 207, 320
and individuality, 223, 224, 230, materialism, 3 Hamilton, William, 154
297, 300 modern philosophy, 322 happiness, 21, 22, 95, 120, 236, 237,
Kant on, 19, 23, 31, 327 neo-Kantianism, 89, 101–3 260, 301
and morality, 122 nihilism in, 284–5, 289–91 Hardenberg, Friedrich von see Novalis
and nature, 23–4, 31, 90–2, 107, Romanticism, 2, 6, 29–46, 48, Hardt, Michael, 274
325 56–7, 281, 322 harm principle, 227–8, 235–6
and necessity, 305–8, 311 Social Democratic Party (SPD), Hartmann, Eduard von, 9, 96–7, 99,
or negation, 283–4 260: Erfurt Programme, 263, 273; 104, 219
possibility of, 33–4 Gotha Programme, 272–3 Philosophy of the Unconscious, 96–7,
power of radical, 286–7, 289–92, the unconscious in philosophy and 209, 210–11
299 psychology, 204–22 Hartmann, Heinz, 218
Reinhold-Schmid debate, 18–19, Geschlecht see gender Hazard, Paul, 13
21 Gesellschaft, 243 Hazlitt, William, 64
and repetition, 295–303 Giddens, Anthony, 247 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1,
and the subject, 10 Gillespie, Michael, 10, 278–93, 331–2 8, 18, 24, 52, 245, 250, 301,
of the will, 194, 306, 325, 327 Gleim, W.L., 15 316
Frege, Gottlob, 319, 321, 322 God and the Absolute, 29, 30, 39–42,
French Revolution (1789), 1, 5, 6, 10, and cosmic evolution, 112–16 264, 323
134, 223–4, 228–9, 231–2, 243–4, death of, 4, 130–1, 285, 289–91, critique of empiricism, 11, 315,
259, 261–2, 264, 267, 279 291, 292 322
reactions to, 247–8 as endless nothing, 281 critique of Schelling, 30, 35, 40–1,
and Romanticism, 48, 51, 52, 53, existence of, 70, 71, 93, 112, 130–1, 43–4
62, 63–5, 230 136–7, 139, 264, 280, 287–8 on dangers of nihilism, 10, 282–4
Freud, Anna, 218 gift of, 11 Elements of the Philosophy of Right,
Freud, Sigmund, 5, 9, 57, 95, 209 love of, 116, 133 244, 246
‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 216 personality of, 132 Faith and Knowledge, 7, 128,
clinical theory, 215, 219 Gödde, Günter, 9, 204–22, 332 129–30, 282–3
comparison with Nietzsche, 213 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 14, on history, 2, 8, 10, 26–7, 64, 145,
Entwurf einer Psychologie, 214 23, 25, 63, 64, 69, 92, 224, 282 146–9, 154, 155, 179, 181, 252,
‘Group Psychology and the Analysis Götter, Helden und Wieland, 15 264, 291–2, 310, 317
of the Ego’, 218 Conversations with Eckermann, 47 on Jacobinism, 260, 263–4, 265
philosophy of the unconscious, 204, Das Unglück der Jacobis, 15 Lectures on Fine Art, 50, 55–6
210, 211, 213–18 Faust, 284 legacy of, 89, 93–4, 96–7, 99, 117,
structural theory, 216–19 and Jacobi, 14, 15, 17–18, 19, 21 210, 310
Studies in Hysteria, 204 morphology, 72, 73, 79 Logic, 41, 91
‘The Ego and the Id’, 204, 216–17, Prometheus, 14, 15–16 Phenomenology of Spirit, 30, 35, 37,
218–19 on the unconscious, 207 40–1, 75–6, 106, 155, 175–7,
The Interpretation of Dreams, 204, Wilhelm Meister, 58, 59 252, 283, 316–17, 322
214–15 Goetzius, F. L., De nonismo et nihilismo Philosophy of History, 176
‘The Unconscious’, 216 in theologia, 279 and philosophy of nature, 69, 73,
Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 19, 26, 75, 102, Gorky, Maxim, 291 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81–3, 85, 91
103 Görres, Josef, 49 philosophy of science, 75–6
government and Romanticism, 55–7
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 253, 314, 316 limited, 227–8, 236 Science of Logic, 76
Galileo Galilei, 69, 279 representative, 235–6 on the social, 245–6
 index 337
‘The Difference Between Fichte’s homoeroticism, 291 identity philosophy
and Schelling’s System of hope, 175 (Identitätsphilosophie of
Philosophy’, 39 Horkheimer, Max, 217 Schelling), 30, 35–6, 37–44,
Hegelianism, 83, 128, 132–3, 140, Hufeland, Christoph Wilhelm, 208 194–5
141, 259, 294, 311 Hughes, Stuart, 253 Idéologues, the, 188, 192, 193, 247,
Danish, 131, 295, 299–300 Hugo, Gustav von, 252 248
and the historical model of human human agency, and responsibility, ideology, 64–5, 179, 188, 223–4, 231,
nature, 263–8 17 232, 248, 269
rejection of, 137–41, 142, 284, 298, human nature idiographic, and nomothetic, 152–3
321, 324 aesthetic vision of, 25 Iggers, Georg, 148
revival of, 322–4, 326–7 dangerous instinctual, 209 Illuminati, 16, 19
see also Left Hegelianism; neo- heroic/demonic, 18, 281–2, 283–4, imagination, transcendental, 53,
Hegelianism; Right Hegelianism; 291–2 55–7
Young Hegelians the historical model of, 263–8, immanence, 72–4, 78, 80–1, 177, 183,
Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, 131, 295, 298 271–2, 274 299, 301, 308–9
Heidegger, Martin, 278, 279, 304, linguistic, 326 immanent critique, genealogy as,
306–7, 314, 316, 318, 323, 325 optimistic view of, 228–9 168–86
Heine, Heinrich, 50, 284, 285 pessimistic view of, 236–8, 239 impressions, active and passive,
English Fragments, 52 superhuman, 289–91 188–9, 192–3, 195
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 104, 118, theory of rational self-interest, incorporation, 307, 310
207, 214 286–7 individual psychology, 217
Henrich, Dieter, 322 unity of, 252 individualism, 9, 223–4
Henry, Michel, 192, 195, 199 human rights, 247, 253 economic, 242
Heraclitus, 303 humanism, 18, 27, 131, 140, 265, 279, liberal, 232
Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 9, 205–6, 311 and socialism, 230–4, 265–6
214–15, 219 Humboldt, Alexander von, 92 individuality, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 25, 124–5,
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 58, 69, 73, Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 9, 59, 223, 148, 159–60
92, 207, 224, 225, 242 234, 236, 237–8 the concept of, 223–5, 238–40
hermeneutics, 6, 11, 59, 108, 138, and individuality, 224, 225–9, 232, freedom and, 223, 224, 230, 297,
319, 320 235 300
in philosophy of nature, 69–88 The Limits of State Action, 225–9, the ideal of, 232–4, 238–9
problems of, 317, 326 246 Mill on, 234–8
theological, 252 Hume, David, 8, 91, 95, 105, 171–2, and morality, 239
heroic/demonic man, 18, 281–2, 175, 181, 183, 242, 279 and radical politics, 223–41
283–4, 291–2 Dialogues Concerning Natural Romantic idea, 230
Herz, Marcus, 31 Religion, 71 Schelling on, 38–9
Herzen, Alexander, 230, 286, 290 Enquiry Concerning Human and society, 26, 225, 226, 236,
Hildebrand, Bruno, 252 Understanding, 189–93 242–4
historical agency, 168, 170–1, 173–5, Huneman, Philippe, 6, 69–88, 332 and the state, 230, 233–4, 322
177, 180 Husserl, Edmund, 106, 133 individuation, 17, 124–5
historical method, 5, 8, 171 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 89, 113, 124 industrial revolution, 1
historical turn, 2, 4, 8, 135 inequality, 242, 284
historical-hermeneutic, 169, 176–7, ‘I’, and ‘Thou’, 17, 134–5, 140 domestic and international, 243
179 id, the, 216–17 inferences, theory of unconscious, 207
historicism, 11, 145, 147–8, 246, 248, Idea, the, 26–7, 41, 42–3, 81–2, 94, Inquisition, Spanish, 231
251–3, 252–3, 310 96–7, 130, 139, 179, 194–5, 210 instinct, evolutionary theory of, 117
history, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 327 ideal, and the actual, 297 institutions, 171, 173, 177–9, 225,
critical, 155–64 idealism, 132, 139, 149, 245, 294 248
as a dialectical process, 146–7 absolute, 97–9, 280 instrumentalism, 111
as a discipline, 145–67 British, 2, 4, 8, 99–101, 112, 145–6, intellect, subordinate to the will,
empiricism and positivism, 149–50 154–5, 159 210–11
evidence or testimony, 146, 148, critique of, 83, 303, 307, 310 intellectualism, 192–3, 199
156–7 critique of post-Kantian as nihilism, intelligence, 194
as free actions of individuals, 286–7 279–80 intentionality, operative, 200
Hegel on, 2, 8, 10, 26–7, 64, 137, German, 1–2, 5–6, 7, 10, 15, 18, International Working Men’s
145, 146–9, 154, 155, 179, 181, 29–46, 64, 85, 94, 145, 316, Association see First
252, 264, 291–2, 310 320–1, 322 International
Marxist theory of, 3, 93, 177–9, 252 Italian, 163 interpretation, 294–5, 306
Nietzsche on, 171, 179, 306, and naturalism, 3, 4, 7, 89–110 and argument, 317, 319–20
310–11 Platonic, 297, 303, 306 non-rule governed, 319
philosophising, 145–67 ‘positivist’, 102–3 intersubjectivity, 218–19
sources, 146, 148 reaction v., 2–3, 253 in language, 318–19
transitional/critical age, 231 and Romanticism, 2, 53, 55, 56, intuition, 30–1, 71, 106
see also Methodenstreit; philosophy of 91–2, 285 (Anschauung), 6, 20, 24, 25–6, 29
history transcendental (Kant), 21, 30–1, indefinite awareness (Ahnung), 103
history of ideas, and philosophy, 90–1, 279, 282 intellectual, 33–4, 42–4, 45, 55–7,
315–16 transcendental (Schelling), 24–6, 107–8
history of philosophy, 11, 210, 314–29 30, 36–9 or reflection, 43–5
history of religion, 137 ideas, history of, 315–16 sensible, 74
Hobbes, Thomas, 264, 279 identity, 22, 140, 176 irony, 6, 49, 55–6, 60–1, 65, 173,
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 24 and genealogy, 169, 171 181–2
Hyperion, 53, 281 the principle of, 29, 40 irrationality, 13, 21, 26, 102, 209–10,
holism, 98, 100, 159, 321–2 thinking (Adorno), 324–6 212–13, 216–18, 253
338 index
Italy on the Unconditioned, 34–5 language, 6, 53, 62, 117, 327
idealism, 163 will and reason, 19 intersubjective, 318–19
socialism, 273–4 Kantianism, 53, 252 magic, 320
biological, 118 mathematical, 72
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 2, 5, 10, and naturalism, 102–3 non-referential nature of, 59–61
20–1, 23, 27, 128, 130, 134, 281, see also neo-Kantianism in philosophy, 57–60, 318–22,
282, 283, 291, 315, 323 Kateb, George, 238 326–7
Concerning the Doctrine of Keats, John, 55, 56, 57, 62 poetic, 54, 58–9
Spinoza . . ., 14–15, 17, 18, 20 Kernberg, Otto, 218 of religion, 128
David Hume on Faith or Idealism and Kielmeyer, Carl Friedrich, 79 in Romanticism, 57–60
Realism, 19–20 Kierkegaard, Søren, 3, 4, 8, 26, 93, 94, the ‘web’ of, 320
and Goethe, 14–15, 16, 17–18, 19, 105, 131, 140–1, 142, 294–5 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 246, 272
21 compared with Nietzsche, 309–11 law, German, 252
on Kant, 33 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, law and economics, Historical Schools
letter to Fichte, 279–80 140 of, 251–2, 253
and Spinozism, 14–18, 25–6, 323, Either/Or, 299–300 Lebenskraft see vital power
324 on Erdmann, 132 Lebensphilosophie, 84, 106–7, 253
Jacobi, Johann Georg, 15 Fear and Trembling, 295, 302–3 Lebenswelt, 106
Jacobinism, 259–63, 268, 274, 280, Johannes Climacus, 295, 297 Left Hegelianism, 7, 10, 131, 137, 138
291 The Concept of Irony, 297 and nihilism, 284–5, 286, 292
Jacyna, L. S., 78 ‘Open Letter to Professor Heiberg’, legislation, the science of, 248
James Sr., Henry, 116 295–6, 298–9, 300 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 20, 57,
James, William, 117–18, 119, 123 Philosophical Fragments, 298, 300 69, 70, 91, 128, 206, 298, 301
Pragmatism, 118 pseudonyms, 295–9, 300–1 Monadology, 205
Principles of Psychology, 118 on repetition, 10–11, 295–303 New Essays on Human
Jameson, Fredric, 248 Repetition, 295–7, 298–9, 300–2, Understanding, 205
Janet, Pierre, 204, 219 310 Lenin, Vladimir, 289
Jean Paul see Richter, Jean Paul The Concept of Anxiety, 295, 298 The State and Revolution, 273
Jena Frühromantiker, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56, The Sickness Unto Death, 295, 298 Lenoir, Timothy, 79
57, 60, 62, 280, 281–2, 291 kinesis, 295, 296–7, 298, 299–300, 303 Lermontov, Mikhail Yuriyevich, 281
Jenisch, Daniel, On the Ground and Kirkman, Thomas P., 113 Leroux, Pierre, 9, 223, 228, 230–4,
Value of the Discoveries . . ., 279 Klein, Melanie, 218 235, 237, 238
Jerusalem, Wilhelm, 215 Klingemann, Ernst August Friedrich, Of Equality, 230
Jewish community, 14, 16 The Night Watches of Of Humanity, 230, 232
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 101 Bonaventura, 281 ‘Of Individualism and Socialism’,
Jowett, Benjamin, 99 Knaben Wunderhorn, Des (Brentano 231
Jung, Carl Gustav, 219 and Arnim), 49 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 14, 15,
The Archetypes and the Collective Knies, Karl, 252 16, 17, 18, 20, 279
Unconscious, 217–18 knowledge Levine, Andrew, 260–1
and the Absolute, 30, 31–4, 40–1, liberalism, 224, 229, 232, 233, 236,
Kant, Immanuel, 1–2, 6, 7, 8, 107–8, 42–5, 56, 282–4, 323 246, 247, 264–5, 272
128, 154, 173, 179, 206, 242, and belief, 22 social, 265
316, 319 as cognition based on reason, 135 libertarianism, 234, 237, 271, 274
Adorno on, 326 critical, 133, 135–6 liberty, 64, 282
on analytic/synthetic judgements, and dialectics, 319–20 equality and fraternity, 232, 247
320 empirical, 133, 135, 322 and power, 270
on authorship, 57 evolutionary theory of, 119 libido, 216
on critical ignorance, 18, 20–1 faith and, 128–44, 282–3 Lichtenberg, Joseph D., 218
Critique of Judgement, 21, 29, 31–2, the possibility of, 45, 56 Liebig, Justus von, 79
71–2, 73–4, 76–7, 80, 81, 85, 90, primary and secondary, 191–2 Liebscher, Martin, 205
92, 94, 326 scientific, 84, 89, 95, 314 life, 73–4, 78–9, 80–3, 85, 113–14
Critique of Practical Reason, 91 speculative, 133, 136–7 and consciousness, 195–6
Critique of Pure Reason, 1, 14, 15, as Spirit’s goal, 175–7 see also Lebensphilosophie; vital
29–30, 54, 69, 71, 91, 175 structures of, 70–1 power
dualism and monism in, 29–30, 30– as Wissenschaft, 149 linguistic turns, 57–60
3, 34, 103 Kohut, Heinz, 218 Linnaean school, 71, 82
on existence, 19–20 Kolakowski, Leszek, 244 Lipps, Theodor, 219
on faith and knowledge, 7, 34, 129, Köppen, Friedrich, 280 Die Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens,
130, 136 Kris, Ernst, 218 215
on freedom, 19, 23 Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, 129 literary criticism, 57
letter to Herz (1772), 31 Kropotkin, Peter, 272, 290 literature
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Kumar, Krishan, 259 meaninglessness in, 59–60
Science, 69, 72, 73, 91 Küng, Hans, 143 Romantic, 48–9, 60–1, 65
Opus Postumum, 91 Locke, John, 55, 268
and philosophy of nature, 71–2, 73– La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, L’Homme Loewald, Hans, 219
4, 80, 85, 175 Machine, 205 Loewenstein, Rudolph, 218
and Romanticism, 53–5, 56, 57 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 52, 59, 65 logic, 76, 91, 115, 160–4, 177,
on the social, 245–6 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, physiology, 299–300, 318, 320
Streit der Fakultäten, 244 122 metaphysics and theology, 70
and the thing-in-itself, 2, 3, 18, 21, Lamprecht, Karl, 148 London, Jack, 291
29–30, 31–3, 279, 323 Lange, Albert, 104 Lorenz, Konrad, 119
transcendental idealism, 21, 30–1, History of Materialism, 102 Lotze, Rudolph Hermann, 3, 97–9,
89, 90–1, 279, 318, 323 ‘Standpoint of the Ideal’, 103 100, 102, 104, 105, 154
 index 339
Louis XVI, 267 ‘Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism methods
love and Anarchy’, 272 historical, 149–52, 174, 177–9
as agape, 116, 307 The Communist Manifesto, 251 philosophical, 314–17
metaphysics of sexual, 210 The German Ideology, 64, 177–8, verum-factum principle, 150–1
Lovejoy, Arthur, 47, 48, 316 265, 266–8 war of (Methodenstreit), 145, 148,
Löwy, Michael, 260 theory of history, 3, 93, 140, 146, 252
Lüdemann, Gerd, 143 177–9, 181, 252, 265–8, 317, 318 microscope, 78
Lukács, Georg, 253 on trade unions, 270 Middle Ages, 48–9, 50, 52, 65
Lukes, Steven, 223 Marxism, 245, 246, 247, 249–50 Mill, John Stuart, 3, 4, 8, 9, 62, 83, 85,
Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 291 anarchism and social democracy, 89, 96, 103, 112, 149, 150, 154,
Lutheranism, 298, 302, 310 268–73, 273 158, 244
Luxemburg, Rosa, 273 critique of, 259–60 Chapters on Socialism, 224
Hegelianism and the historical and the commitments of modernity,
McDowell, John, 11, 322–4, 325 model of human nature, 263–8 179–81
Mind and World, 322–3 Russian, 289 Considerations on Representative
McGann, Jerome, The Romantic materialism, 1, 3, 69, 78, 79, 80, 83, Government, 235
Ideology, 64, 65 84, 89, 90, 93, 95–6, 101, 102, and individuality, 223, 233, 234–8,
Mach, Ernst, 89, 103, 119 140, 211, 214, 216, 231, 232, 239
Analysis of the Sensations, 119 263, 279, 290 ‘On Genius’, 238
Knowledge and Error, 119 eliminative, 194 On Liberty, 224, 225, 227, 234, 236,
‘On Transformation and Marx’s dialectics, 177–9, 268 246
Adaptation in Scientific mathematics, 70, 92 The Subjection of Women, 179–81
Thought’, 119 mathesis universalis, 70–1, 77 ‘Theism’, 237
machine, metaphor of the, 223–41 Maxwell, James Clerk, 115 millenarianism, 285–6
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 268 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 230 mind, 55, 78, 81, 95, 118
MacLeish, Archibald, Ars Poetica, 60 meaning and the body, 307
McNally, David, 269 of action, 153–4 and evolutionary epistemology,
magnetism, 78 objectivity of, 319–20 116–19
Maimon, Salomon, 33 shared social, 154 and nature, 150–1
Maine de Biran, Pierre, 8–9, 187, theory of, 319 rational model of the, 205
188–93, 196, 199 meaninglessness, 6, 59–60, 279, 285, the thinking, 137
Essai sur les fondements de la 292, 318 and vital power, 208
psychologie, 191–3 mechanism, 3, 76–8, 97–8, 205, 214, and world problem, 316–17, 321–4
Influence of Habit on the Faculty of 223–41 see also consciousness; philosophy of
Thinking, 188 ‘psychological’, 214–15, 218 mind; unconscious, the
Mémoire sur la décomposition de la Meckel, Johann Friedrich, 79 Mind (journal), 101
pensée, 189 mediation, 33, 36, 296, 298–9, 311 mind-body dualism, 8–9, 187, 189,
Maistre, Joseph de, 223, 224, 232, 247 ‘absolute’, 176, 183–4 194, 196–9, 205, 316–17
majority, tyranny of the, 9, 233 by philosophy, 326–7 miracles, 129–30, 135, 138, 156, 157
Malebranche, Nicolas, 188 ‘infinite’, 183 Mitchell, Stephen, 218, 219
Manchester, 250 medical science, 97 modernism, 6
Manent, Pierre, 249 medicine, Romantic, 9, 207–8 and Romanticism, 52
Mannheim, Karl Medicus, Friedrich Casimir, 207–8 modernity, 324–6
Conservatism, 247 Meinecke, Friedrich, 147, 148 Mill and the commitments of, 179–
Ideology and Utopia, 247 memory, 170, 196–9, 205 81
Mansel, Henry Longueville, 154 Mendel, Gregor Johann, 119 Moleschott, Jacob, 89
Marburg school, 101, 103 Mendelssohn, Moses, 14, 15, 16, 19, monads, 205
Marcuse, Herbert, 246 20, 21, 49, 279, 323 monarchy, 228–9
Marheineke, Philip, 131 Mengelberg, Kaethe, 251 monism, 14, 29, 30–3, 100, 112,
Marinetti, F.T., 291 Menger, Carl, 252 317
Marquard, Odo, Transzendentaler Menninghaus, Winfried, 59 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, 243, 248
Idealismus, 204, 209 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 280 Moore, George Edward, Principia
Marshall, Peter, 269 Mérimée, Prosper, 290 Ethica, 123
Martensen, Hans Lassen, 131, 298, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 9, 187, 192, Moore, Gregory, 7, 111–27, 332
299 198, 199, 200 moral philosophy, Scottish, 251
Marx, Karl, 7, 8, 52, 65, 83, 93, 96, metaphysics, 1, 2, 4, 5, 71, 93, 105 morality, 103
105, 129, 131, 183, 238, 239, and Christianity, 16 and competition, 237
243, 244, 247, 250, 253, 259, criticism by analytic philosophers, and Darwinism, 119–23
273, 316 318, 320–1, 324 and ethics, 122
class analysis, 265–8 and Darwinism, 111–27 and evolution, 122–3
‘Critique of the Gotha Program’, French, 188–93 happiness, 237
272 ‘inductive’, 210–11 and individuality, 239
Das Kapital, 112, 178–9, 265 Kantian critique of, 69, 91 Kantian, 19, 21, 94
dictatorship of the proletariat, logic and theology, 70 Marxian, 268
262–3, 274 in motion, 294–313 and nature, 11, 124
on Greek art, 314 and natural history, 80 Nietzschean, 4, 8, 104, 170, 172,
on human nature, 263–8, 271–2, realist, 206 290–1
274 and scientific knowledge, 89–90, and politics, 264–6
materialist dialectics, 177–9, 268 100, 102 of property, 268–9
on morality, 268 tradition/classical, 4, 16, 20, 27 and religion, 120, 228
‘On the Jewish Question’, 249 of the will, 76, 81, 82, 83–4, 85, slave, 170, 239
on revolution, 260, 261–3, 266–8 94–6, 209–10, 212, 213, 216, 219 morphology, 72, 73, 79
on the state, 10, 246, 271–2, 274 metapsychology, 214–18, 219 transcendental, 79
340 index
Müller, Johannes, 79 Nechaev, Sergei, 10, 287, 289 nomothetic, and idiographic, 152–3
‘Münchhausen Trilemma’, 315 Catechism of a Revolutionary, 288 nonsense, 6, 59–60, 61, 318
music, 6, 59, 62 needs principle, 218, 270 Norman, Judith, 6, 47–68, 332–3
Musset, Alfred de, 47 Negri, Antonio, 274 norms, 4, 179, 327
Mynster, Bishop, 299 neo-Hegelianism, 151 nostalgia, 6, 48–9, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54,
mysticism, 133, 134–5, 281 neo-Kantianism, 7, 89, 101–3, 104, 65, 229
‘myth of the given’, 322, 324 151, 245, 253 noumenal world, 31, 33, 113, 280, 281
neo-vitalism, 211 Novalis, 6, 24, 30, 35, 36, 37, 42, 49,
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 52, 59, 65 neurobiology, 194 52, 56, 57, 60, 224, 229, 318
Napoleon Bonaparte, 247, 248, 281, neuroscience, 219–20 Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 50, 51
283 Newton, Isaac, Principia, 111 Hymns to the Night, 281
narcissism, 216, 218 Nicholas I, Czar, 285 Monologue, 58
Nassar, Dalia T., 6, 29–46, 332 Nicholls, Angus, 205 Novices at Saı̈s, 53
nation, 230, 243 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 9, 52, 59, 63, Novick, Peter, 149
nationalism, 58, 284 69, 83, 121, 209, 239, 243, 264,
Natorp, Paul, 101 294–5, 316, 321, 326 Oakeshott, Michael, 155
natural history, 70, 71–2, 80, 84 Beyond Good and Evil, 104, 304 Experience and Its Modes, 155–6
natural philosophy, 69, 70–2 compared with Kierkegaard, Obereit, Jacob, 279
natural religion, 71, 129, 135 309–11 object relations theory, 218
natural sciences, 8, 69, 70–2, 90–2, comparison with Freud, 213 objectivity, 323, 326
152–5, 253 on Darwinism, 112 of meaning, 319–20
and human sciences, 151–2 Daybreak, 212 Ockham, William of, 278
and metaphysics, 100 ‘death of God’, 4, 130–1, 285, Ogden, Thomas, 219
and philosophy, 321–2, 326 289–91, 291, 292 Oken, Lorenz, 69, 79, 80, 92
relationship with philosophy of doctrine of ‘eternal recurrence’, ontology, 30, 33–4, 108, 115
nature, 74–80 10–11, 52, 303–9 Ordine Nuovo, L’, 273–4
see also Naturwissenschaften Ecce Homo, 304 organic, v. mechanical, 2, 76–8
natural selection, 115, 116, 117, 118, genealogy, 168, 169–73, 181–2, 183 organisms, 71–2, 75–6, 80–1, 94
120, 121, 124, 211 on history, 171, 179, 306, 310–11, evolution of, 114, 120
natural theology, 135–6, 243 314, 317 ought, 22, 136
naturalism, 3, 25, 27, 138 idealism and naturalism in, 95, Outhwaite, William, 9–10, 242–58,
criticism of, 4, 322–3 103–6 333
growth of, 89, 103 on knowledge, 324, 327 Owen, Richard, 79
and idealism, 3, 4, 7, 89–110 on nature, 83–4, 85 Owen, Robert, 266
and Kantianism, 102–3 on nihilism, 4, 10–11, 95, 278,
‘practical’, 89 289–91, 292, 306–9, 311, 323–4 Paine, Thomas, 243
naturalistic fallacy, 123 On the Genealogy of Morals, 4, 8, painting, 60
nature, 5 104, 105, 168, 170, 173, 182 Pander, Christian Heinrich, 77
causal influences, 181 On the Uses and Disadvantages of pantheism, 15, 16, 112, 280
conflict in, 81–2, 85 History for Life, 124 Pantheism Controversy, 279
and Darwinism, 7 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the paradox, 141
disenchantment of Romantic, 209, Greeks, 303, 304 Paris Commune (1871), 262, 271–2,
326 ‘positivist phase’ (1878–1881), 104 274
divinisation of, 14 The Antichrist, 181–2 pathetic fallacy, 54
economic-teleological principle, The Gay Science, 304 patronage, 62, 65
325 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 209, 304, Pattison, George, 7–8, 128–44, 333
economy of, 71–2 305, 308–9 Paul, Saint, 133
as the entfremdet (self-alienated) Twilight of the Idols, 304 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 3, 114–16
Idea, 75–6 on the unconscious, 212–13, 217, on evolution, 115–16
and freedom, 7, 8, 23–4, 31, 325 219 perception
and gender (Geschlecht), 82–3 on values, 124–5 ‘inner’, 215
healing power of, 208–9 Will to Power, 289–91, 304, 308–9, and memory, 197–9
hermeneutics of, 72–4, 80–5 318 pétites perceptions, in Leibniz, 205
independent of human values, nihilism, 134, 278–93 theory of unconscious inferences,
152–3 and absolute knowledge, 282–4 207
Kant on, 31–2, 175 after Nietzsche, 291–2 phenomenal world, and noumenal
mechanistic and deterministic view as critique of post-Kantian idealism, world, 31, 94, 280
of, 3, 52 279–80 phenomenology, 108, 154, 316, 318,
and mind, 150–1 dangers of, 1, 2, 4–5, 10, 20, 22, 45, 321
and morality, 11, 124 324 of embodiment, 9, 187–203
order of, 71, 80, 82 European, 303 Hegelian, 175–7
and reason, 32, 322–3 in Germany, 284–5, 289–91 philology, 252
Romantic view of, 2 and Left Hegelianism, 284–5 Philosophical Review, 101
and transcendence, 17, 19 Nietzsche on, 4, 10–11, 95, 278, philosophy
unity of self with in art, 24–6 289–91, 292, 306–9, 311, 323–4 analytical and European, 315–27
versus freedom, 90–2, 107 Romantic, 281–2 Anglo-American, 3, 89, 99–101,
see also philosophy of nature Russian, 10, 285–9, 290, 291, 292 321, 322
Naturphilosophie see philosophy of use of term, 278–9, 280, 281, 286, contextual approach, 317, 324, 327
nature 289, 290 as cultural politics, 326–7
Naturwissenschaften, 149, 151 varieties of, 278–9 and Darwinism, 111–27
and Naturlehre, 72 Nisbet, Robert, 247 dialectical, 245
Nazism, 291 Nishitani, Keiji, 278 French, 187–203
necessity, and freedom, 305–8, 311 nominalism, 278 genesis/validation issue, 316
 index 341
German, 204–22 demonic, 282 Reformation, 128, 223
Greek, 291, 303, 310 Foucault on, 183 reformism, 10, 262, 269–70, 272–3,
mediating role, 326–7 and liberty, 270 285
methods, 314–17 political, 13 regress, 315, 319
nineteenth-century, 1–12 relations between ego and the Reill, Peter Hanss, 74, 83
nineteenth-century relations with unconscious, 209 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard, 15, 33, 56,
twentieth, 11, 314–29 pragmatism, 111, 114–16, 118, 319, 57, 63
real-world test of theories, 317 324 debate with Schmid, 18–19, 21
and the sciences, 101–2, 314–17, privacy, 242 relativism, 148, 251, 253
318, 321–2, 325–6 progress, 1, 3, 302, 309, 314 religion, 103
themes, 1, 5 proletarian state, 10, 274 and conception of society, 243
and theology, 132–3 proletariat, 1, 232, 243–4, 246, 250, crisis in, 1, 4, 5
transformation of science through, 264, 265–6; see also dictatorship critiques of, 279
74–80 of the proletariat and Darwinism, 114–15, 124
twentieth century and property, morality of, 268–9, 270 Eastern, 281
Romanticism, 61–2 Protestantism, 128, 134, 135, 139, 142 of humanity, 236–7, 250
twentieth century, idealism and Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 10, 268–71, and knowledge, 128–44
naturalism, 101, 108 273, 274 and morality, 120, 228
see also history of philosophy Prussia, 63, 225, 226, 231 national, 233–4
philosophy of history, 145, 146–9, psyche natural, 71, 129, 135
154–6, 173, 177, 244, 249, 252–3 apparatus model of the, 216 and nature of authority, 264–5
philosophy of mind, 5, 8–9 conflicts within the, 213–14 positive, 129
philosophy of nature unity of the, 208–9 privatisation of, 232
(Naturphilosophie), 2, 3, 6–7, 11, psychoanalysis, 204, 213, 219 and science, 4, 5, 93, 108, 113
36–9, 42–3, 52, 91–2, 193, Freudian, 5, 57, 213–18 see also faith; philosophy of religion
194–6, 280 intersubjective turn, 218–19 religious studies, in higher education,
hermeneutic turn in, 69–88 relational, 218 142–3
modern, 325–6 the unconscious in post-Freudian, Renaissance, 173
relationship with natural sciences, 218–19 Renouvier, Charles, 246
74–80, 94–5 psychology, 5, 78, 103, 104, 108, 116– repetition, 10–11, 52, 294–313
Romantic, 207–8, 214 17, 119, 145, 171–2 Kierkegaard on, 10–11, 295–303
philosophy of religion, 128–9, 137 explanatory, 206 representation(s), 16–17, 31–3, 131
Hegelian, 129–32 philosophical, 188–93 and association, 206
philosophy of science, 75–6, 85, 91, the unconscious in German, 204– by association-free class of words,
321–2 22 319–20
physics, 83 psychophysics, 206–7 by rule, 319
physiology, 72, 102, 104, 117, 121–2, psychosexuality, 216 objective, 319
212 ‘psychozoölogy’, 116 unconscious, 210, 211
Pietism, 134, 135, 279 purposiveness see teleology repression, 213–14, 215–16
Pinkard, Terry, 327 Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich, 281 political, 231, 286
Pippin, Robert, 327 republicanism, 63, 228–9, 230
Pisarev, Dmitri, 286, 287 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 11, 320 responsibility, and human agency, 17
Pisemsky, Aleksey, In the Whirlpool, ressentiment, 63–4
288 Rahner, Karl, 142 revelation, 128, 304, 323
Plato, 108, 301, 303, 314 random variation, 115, 119 revolution, 1, 62–5, 259–77
recollection, 296–7, 298 Ranke, Leopold von, 148–9 anarchist models, 268–73, 274
Platonism, 2, 37, 91, 306, 314 rationalism, 1, 2, 223, 252, 281, 320, bourgeois, 261–2, 274
play, 303 324 contested concept of, 10, 259
Plessner, Helmuth, 106 Ravaisson, Félix, 9, 187, 188, 193–6, contradictions and, 178–9
Plotinus, 278 198, 199, 200 as dictatorship, 262–3
Pöbel, 243–4 De l’Habitude, 193–6 from above, 10, 261, 263–4, 268
poetry, 48–9, 57, 60, 62, 63–4, 281 realism, 179 from below, 10, 261–2, 267, 268,
political economy, 231, 248, 251, 252, medieval, 278 273–4
253, 269 transcendental, 90–1, 101 of the mind, 269
political science, 246, 249 reason, 1, 2, 5–6, 8, 94–5, 135 nihilism and, 287–8
political, the, and the social, 249–50 as the Absolute, 37–8 permanent, 289
politics crises of, 11, 13–14, 21, 27, 311 proletarian, 244, 261–2, 274
influence of nihilism on, 291–2 dialectical, 136 social, 247–9, 267–8
radical and individuality, 223–41 and faith, 140–1, 142 use of term, 259
and revolution, 10, 63–5 and intuition, 6 Revue Encyclopédique, 231
and society, 5, 96, 243–4 Kantian, 6, 18, 29–30, 32, 69, 174– Reymond, Emil du Bois, 79
Popper, Karl, 119, 252 5, 283 Reynaud, Jean, 230
positivism, 3, 8, 85, 95, 101, 145, 148, and nature, 32, 322–3 Richards, Robert J., 79–80
158, 219, 246, 248, 249–50, 251, the sociality of, 327 Richter, Jean Paul, 281, 283, 291
253, 290 and understanding, 26 Siebenkäs, 281
in history, 149–52, 154, 252 will as practical, 94, 105 Rickert, Heinrich, 145, 151
moral/religious, 26 receptivity, 322, 323 The Limits of Concept Formation in
possibility, 20–1, 174–5, 176, 179, recurrence, eternal, 10–11, 105, 294– Natural Science, 152
297, 298, 300–3 313 Riedel, Manfred, 246
post-structuralism, 108 Rée, Paul Der Ursprung der moralischen Riehl, Alois, 101–2
poverty, 1 Empfindungen, 121–2 The Principles of the Critical
and inequality, 10, 242, 250, 284 reflection, 24–5, 30, 37, 56 Philosophy, 101
power, 4, 213, 327 or intuition, 43–5 Right Hegelianism, 7–8, 284, 285–6
342 index
Ringer, Fritz, 149 compared with Fichte, 25, 39, 43, philosophy as, 314–17, 321–2,
Ritchie, David George, ‘The 325 325–6
Rationality of History’, 155 Hegel’s critique of, 30, 35, 40–1, 43–4 and religion, 4, 5, 108, 113
Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 78 identity philosophy, 30, 35–6, of religion, 132
Robespierre, Maximilien, 10, 231, 37–9, 41–2, 194–5 Romantic, 52
259–61, 262, 263–4, 266, 269 late ‘positivist’ philosophy, 93, 97 see also philosophy of science
Romanticism, 2, 4, 9, 47–68, 228 letter to Hegel (1795), 18 scientism, 323, 325–6
as a Bildungsreise, 50, 51 Naturphilosophie, 69, 72–3, 74–5, Scotland
critical self-consciousness of, 50, 76, 79, 80, 81, 83, 325 Enlightenment, 244
53–5, 61, 65 Philosophy of Revelation, 74–5 moral philosophy, 251
defining, 6, 47–53 ‘Presentation of My System’, 37–9, Seattle, anti-capitalist movement
Early German, 5, 6, 10, 24, 30, 49, 44–5 (1999), 274
234, 323 Real-Idealismus, 91 Second International, 273
English/British, 6, 48, 50–1, 54, on revelation, 128 secularisation, 1, 50, 309
56–7, 62, 64 ‘self-critique of idealism’, 93–4 ‘secularism’, 1
French, 48, 57, 63 System of Transcendental Idealism, self
German, 2, 6, 29–46, 48, 50–1, 54, 24–6, 30, 36, 208 Freudian theory, 216–17
56, 56–7, 63–4, 322 Von der Weltseele, 73, 77, 80, 81 and the lived body, 9, 187, 192,
Heidelberg group, 49, 50 Schiller, F.C.S., Riddles of the Sphinx, 195–6
and idealism, 2, 53, 55, 56, 91–2 121 loss of the, 301–2
Jena group, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56, 57, Schiller, Friedrich, 24, 48, 103, 225, production of the, 34, 180, 238–40,
60, 62, 280, 281–2, 291 228 298–303
linguistic turns, 57–60 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 24, 47, 48, unity with nature in art, 24–6, 36–9
nihilism, 281–2 49, 53, 56, 58 self psychology, 218–19
as ressentiment, 63–4 Vienna lectures, 49, 51–2 self-consciousness, 23, 24, 34, 41–2,
the unconscious in, 207–9, 218, Schlegel, Caroline, 49, 63 91, 140, 283, 316
219 Schlegel, Dorothea, 49 evolution of, 116–17, 122, 123–4
use of term, 47, 48–9, 50 Schlegel, Friedrich, 6, 24, 30, 35, 36, Romantic, 50, 53–4, 61, 65
Rorty, Richard, 317, 326–7 37, 49, 56, 58, 61, 64, 65, 281 see also subjectivity
Roscher, Wilhelm, 252 on authorship, 57, 58, 59 self-knowledge, 33–4, 173–4
Rose, Gillian, Hegel Contra Sociology, Dialogue on Poetry, 60 self-realisation, 9, 123–5, 223, 224,
245 ‘On the Essence of Criticism’, 57 226, 233, 234, 238
Rosenkranz, Karl, 131 On the Study of Greek Poetry, 48–9 Sellars, Wilfrid, 322
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8, 173–4, 175, and Romanticism, 47, 51, 53, 57, semantics, 321
179, 263, 269 281 Sen, Amartya, 243
general will, 260–1 on spontaneity and receptivity, sensibility, 74, 78
On the Origins of Inequality, 173–4, 323–4 Serres, Etienne, 79
243 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 11, 19, 26, Sewell Jr., William, 249
The Social Contract, 173–4, 260, 30, 36, 37, 49, 132, 136, 234, sexuality, 83, 210
270 252, 324, 326 Shakespeare, William, 48, 49, 54
Royce, Josiah, 111 Dialectic, 319, 320 Shelley, Mary, 281
Rudé, George, 261, 267 and individuality, 223, 224, 228, Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 51, 63, 281
Russell, Bertrand, 2, 321 228–30, 239–40 Sidgwick, Henry, ‘The Theory of
Russia Monologues, 229–30 Evolution in its Application to
materialism, 3 Schmid, C. C., 18–19, 21 Practice’, 123
nihilism in, 10, 285–9, 290, 291, Schmoller, Gustav von, 252 Sièyes, Abbé, Qu’est-ce que le tiers
292 Schnädelbach, Herbert, 244, 251 état?, 248
serfdom, 243 Morbus Hermeneuticus, 317 Simmel, Georg, 154, 224, 244, 253
Russian Revolution, 274 scholasticism, 128, 134 sin, 298, 301–3
Russian Word, 286 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3, 6, 7, 9, 26, Sinclair, Mark, 8–9, 187–203, 333
59, 69, 74, 78, 80, 81, 103, 125, Sismondi, Simon de, 49
Saint-Cheron, Alexandre de, 224 239, 281, 290, 315 Sloan, Phillip, 72
Saint-Hilaire, Geoffroy, 79 metaphysics of the will, 76, 81, 82, Smith, Adam, Theory of Moral
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de, 83–4, 85, 94–7, 209–10, 212, Sentiments, 244
223–4, 230, 231, 232, 249 213, 216, 219 Smith, Goldwin, 119
transitional/critical age, 231 naturalism, 94–6 social contract
sans-culottes, 261 On the Will in Nature, 76 Proudhon’s, 269, 270
Savage, Rev. Minot J., 120 The World as Will and Rousseau’s, 173–4, 260, 270
Savigny, Friedrich Carl von, History of Representation, 26, 83, 209, social philosophy, 242–58
Roman Law in the Middle Ages, 303–4 social policy, 244, 251
252 Schubert, Gotthilf von, 92 social psychology, 218
scepticism, 2, 29, 33, 45, 90, 104–5, Schutz, Alfred, 154 ‘social question’, 1, 242, 244, 250–1
160, 190, 192, 279 science, 1, 5 social reform, 10, 96, 251
Schafer, Roy, 218 as adaptation, 119 social science, 10, 148, 153–4, 242,
Schaller, Julius, 131 and art, 319–20 244, 245–6, 248–9
Scheler, Max, 106 construction by philosophy, 74–80 ‘methodological dualist/anti-
Schelling, F.W.J., 1, 6, 13, 15, 18, 21, disciplinary boundaries, 152–3 naturalist’ approach, 252
27, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 58, 89, ‘finite’, 75 use of term, 248, 249, 251, 253
114, 128, 129, 189, 209, 219, Kant on, 72, 103 social, the
245, 280, 282, 285, 299–300, 301 Marx on, 177–8 Kant and Hegel and, 245–6
and the Absolute, 26, 29, 30, 35, metaphysical neutrality of, 116–17 and the political, 249–50
36–9, 42–3, 44–5, 64 Nietzsche on, 306 rise of, 242–58
Bruno, 80 as paradigm of knowledge, 3 social theory, 217, 245, 253
 index 343
social welfare, morality and, 121 standpoint, 169, 172, 177; see also first Teutscher Merkur, 15
socialism, 10, 244, 259, 265–6, 273–4, person text, literary, 62
309 state unintended consequences, 57–60
democratic, 230–4 and anarchism, 10, 269–72 Thanatos, 216
French, 224–5, 234, 243, 271–2 bourgeois, 10, 274 Thatcher, Margaret, 251
from above or from below, 268 and civil society, 246 theology, 3, 50, 71, 72, 93, 128–9,
German, 262, 285 freedom of the, 272–3 131, 145, 303
and individualism, 230–4, 264 and individuality, 230, 233–4, 322 metaphysics and logic, 70
liberal, 9, 237–8 limits to action, 225–9 and nihilism, 279, 280, 284–5
modern, 261–2 negation of the, 179 and philosophy, 132–3, 139
Proudhon’s critique of, 269–70 paternalist, 226–8, 232, 235 Protestant, 27, 128
and social science, 251 proletarian, 10, 274 speculative, 131–2
state, 268 rational, 284 status in higher education, 142–3
through revolution, 266–8 redistributive, 9 thinking
use of term, 231 reform through the, 269–70 intuitive and discursive, 31–2, 42,
utopian, 223–4 separate from Church, 228–9, 232 45
as working-class emancipation, and society, 246, 247, 249 post-metaphysical, 318–19
273 subjugation in the, 264–5 Thomas, Paul, 263, 268
sociality, 242–3 ‘withering away’, 262, 274 Thoreau, Henry David, 2, 6, 69, 84,
society, 1, 5, 9–10 see also absolutism 85, 238, 239, 240
conception of, 242–4, 249 Steffens, Henrik, 69, 78 Natural History of Massachusetts, 84
and individuality, 26, 225, 226, Stein, Lorenz von, 243, 246, 247, 250, Walden, 84
236, 242–4 251 Tieck, Ludwig, 49, 57, 60–1, 281
and politics, 5 Stendhal, 281 Tillich, Paul, 142
and the state, 246, 247, 249 Stephen, Leslie, The Science of Ethics, time
sociology, 5, 145, 150, 153–4, 244–5, 121 and the Absolute, 162
247, 249 Stern, Robert, 3 as duration, 199
evolutionary, 253 Stewart, Dugald, 244, 247 existential, 311
sociology of philosophy, 245 Stirling, James Hutchison, 112 in history, 163
solidarity, 265, 268 The Secret of Hegel, 99 subjectivity and, 141
Sombart, Werner, 252 Stirner, Max, 105, 263, 268, 269 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 239, 246, 247,
Sorel, Georges, 273, 291 The Ego and Its Own, 239, 264–5, 248, 249, 250–1, 267
Sorley, William Ritchie 284 Democracy in America, 246
On the Ethics of Naturalism, 123–4 Stoics, 303 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 253
‘The Historical Method’, 155 Stone, Alison, 1–12, 333 Toulmin, Stephen, 119
Spalding, J. J., 16, 17, 21–2 Strauss, David Friedrich, 7, 124, trade unions, 270
‘species-being’ (Gattungswesen), 93, 137–9, 146, 156 transcendence
264 Life of Jesus Critically Examined, denial of, 280, 298–9, 308–9, 327
speculative theology/philosophy, 131– 137–8, 284 and nature, 17, 19
2, 136–7, 138, 139, 141, 142 Sturm und Drang, 14, 207 ‘transcendental morphology’ school,
Spencer, Herbert, 3, 7, 85, 89, 96, 115, subject, the, 10, 53–7 79
116, 118, 154, 279 subjectivity, 3, 7, 41–2, 53–4, 62, 90, transcendental philosophy, 2, 24–6,
criticism of his evolutionary ethics, 93, 96, 198, 294, 310, 323 37, 55, 59–60, 71, 72, 77, 101,
123–5 absolute, 278–93 104, 108, 136; see also
Data of Ethics, 120, 121 in art, 55–7, 224 idealism, transcendental
evolutionary theory, 7, 85, 112–14, grounding, 318–19 transcendentalism, American, 2, 84,
120–1, 125 lived, 11, 196 238–9
First Principles, 113, 114 and time, 141 transformation, 2, 11, 23, 40–1, 169,
and morality, 120–1 transcendental, 24–5, 54–6, 64, 90, 172, 304–9, 310–11
Principles of Psychology, 117 107, 318 social, 265–7, 270–1, 284–7, 292
Social Statics, 113 sublime, the, 54–5 transition, 298–303, 310–11
Synthetic Philosophy, 113 substance, 20 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 243
Spinoza, Baruch, 2, 5, 10, 20, 21, 22, suffering, 7, 172, 304 Trotsky, Leon, 273, 289
25, 27, 74, 91, 128, 280 super-ego, the, 216–17 truth, 4, 18, 20, 32, 40–1, 44, 105,
Cartesian Meditations, 20 superhumanity, 289–92, 308–9 118, 136–7, 141, 213, 283, 303
geometrical method, 37 supernaturalism, 134, 136, 140 correspondence theory of, 327
and radical Enlightenment, 13–14 ‘survival of the fittest’, 112, 113 subjective existential, 297–303
Spinozism, 2, 100 ‘symphilosophy’, 58 will to, 170–1, 172
Jacobi and, 14–18, 25–6, 279–80, syndicalism, 271, 273 Turgenev, Ivan, 278, 290
323, 324 Szondi, Peter, 61 Fathers and Sons, 286–7
the new, 13–28
spirit Taine, Hippolyte, 215 Übermensch see superhumanity
as Geist, 8, 40–1, 83, 146–7, 175–7, Taylor, Charles, 224 Unbewusste see unconscious, the
252, 283–4, 318, 324, 327 ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, 242–3 unconditioned, the, 29–30, 323
Kierkegaard’s domain of the, 296 Taylor, Mark C., 142 role in textual production, 57–60
and nature, 24–5 teleology, 3, 71–2, 76–7, 79, 80–1, 85, unconscious inferences, theory of, 207
‘spiritualism’, 187 92, 94, 97–8, 101, 102, 107–8, unconscious, the, 5, 9, 96–7, 204–22
spiritualist tradition, French, 5, 8, 112, 150, 173, 211, 223 cognitive, 9, 205, 207, 216
187–203 in history, 154–5 collective, 218
spontaneity, 322, 323 Nietzsche’s refusal of, 308–9 compulsive-irrational, 9, 212–13
Staël, Madame de, 49, 50 ‘teleomechanism’, 79 in Freud, 204, 213–18
Stahl, Georg Ernst, 196 Terror, the, 259–60, 261, 263 origins of conception, 205–7,
Stalin, Joseph, 274 Tertullian, 134 208–9, 215
344 index
in post-Freudian psychoanalysis, Vogt, Karl, 89 to power, 105, 125, 213, 289–91,
218–19 Volk, 58 292, 304, 318
relations between the ego and, 209 Voltaire, 173, 244, 279 to truth, 170–1, 172, 306
Romantic-vital, 9, 207–9 von Baader, Franz, 92 the unconscious, 209–13, 216–17
use of term, 204, 209, 217 von Baer, Karl Ernst, 77, 79 Williams, Bernard, 183
unconscious will, 209–11 Vorstellung see representation Winch, Donald, 249
understanding (Verstehen), 8, 145, Windelband, Wilhelm, 145, 151, 152,
148, 150–2, 153–4, 163, 251–2 Wackenroder, Wilhelm, 49 153
Unitarianism, 136 Wagner, Peter, 249 ‘History and Natural Science’,
universal, concrete, 159–64 Wagner, Richard, 212, 315 153
urbanisation, 1 Gesamtkunstwerk, 59 Winnicott, Donald W., 218
urea, synthesis of, 83 Wallace, William, 99 Winstanley, Gerrard, 262
United States of America Ward, James, 160, 161 Wissenschaft, 149; see also knowledge;
democracy, 247 Weber, Max, 145, 151, 153–4, 244, science
evolutionary philosophy, 114 251, 252, 253, 279, 324 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 317, 318, 319,
historians, 148 Wegener, Mai, 204–5 321
idealism, 99–101 Weiller, Kajetan von, 280 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 125,
individualism, 224 Weishaupt, Adam, 16, 17 318
modern philosophy, 322 Weisse, Christian Hermann, 131 Wöhler, Friedrich, 83
Romantics, 281 Welchman, Alistair, 6, 47–68, 333 Wokler, Robert, 248–9
slavery, 243 welfare, 121, 227 Wolff, Christian, 128
transcendentalism, 2, 84, 238–9 welfare state, 244 women
utilitarianism, 3, 4, 120, 154, 236, Wellek, René, 47, 48 Mill on subjection of, 179–81
251, 290 Weltschmerz, 281–2, 291 status of, 64
Westphal, Kenneth, 73 Wordsworth, William, 48, 50, 51, 54,
Vaihinger, Hans, Philosophy of ‘As If’, Wheeler, Samuel, 320 55, 63
102–3 Whewell, William, 83, 85 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 54
Valls, Andrew, 235 Whitehead, Alfred North, 85 working class, 10, 233, 250, 261–2,
value(s) Whitman, Walt, 238 265–8, 270, 271, 272, 274; see
exchange, 324 Wieland, C.M., 15 also proletariat
labour theory of, 268 Wilde, Oscar, 291 Wright, Chauncey, 116–17, 119
modern, 2 will, 3, 7, 286 ‘Evolution of Self-Consciousness’,
in natural science, 152 and the body, 9, 190–3, 193–6 116–17
and naturalism, 4, 103 compulsive-irrational, 216–17 Wundt, Wilhelm, 103, 117, 118
Nietzschean critique of moral, 124– consciousness and the, 189 Beiträgen zur Theorie der
5, 170, 290–1, 292 and freedom, 19, 289, 306, 325 Sinneswahrnehmung, 207
Verstehen see understanding general, 260–1, 266 Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und
verum-factum principle, 150–1 and habit, 194 Thierseele, 117
Vico, Giambattista, 59, 158, 173 Hartmann on the, 96–7
New Science, 150–1 Kant on the, 94 Young Bosnia movement, 291
Vienna Circle, 315, 318, 320, 321 metaphysics of the, 76, 81, 82, 83– Young Germany movement, 284–5
violence, nihilistic, 291–2 4, 85, 213 Young Hegelians, 93, 245, 252,
vital power, 207–9, 214 psychology of the, 187, 188–93 263–5, 324
vitalism, 78, 81, 92, 196; see also neo- Schelling on, 209
vitalism Schopenhauer’s, 76, 81, 82, 83–4, Zakaras, Alex, 9, 223–41, 333
Voß, J.J., 49 85, 94–6, 209–10, 212, 213, 216, Zeitschrift für geschichtliche
vocation, 16, 21–4, 175 304 Rechtswissenschaft, 252
Vogel, Paul, 246 to life, 105, 209–10, 212–13, 304 Žižek, Slavoj, 274