The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Hegel’s Science of Logic develops in its ‘Logic of Essence’ the insight that any ‘flat’ understanding of empirical statements as merely logical combinations of observational classifications a posteriori misses the crucial point of materially dispositional content: Empirical truth proper would be restricted to historical statements ex post. But statements of this sort never lead to reliable modal predictions and theoretical explanations of events. In other words, without a two-level distinction between empirical actualities and a theoretically formed reality of causally efficacious things (Wirklichkeit) by which we generically explain actual, historical, or expected appearances (Realität), we do not and cannot understand the notions of efficient causality in our explanations. Causal explanations always work with dispositional ‘forces’ or energies that are generically attached as the ‘essence’ to the particular objects of a genus or species of objects. Explaining and predicting possible futures is possible only by our conceptual systems as they are analysed in their general forms in Hegel’s ‘Logic of the Concept’.

  In the sciences we develop theories. Theories are conceptual systems that make dispositional default expectations explicit, conditioned by the fulfilment of certain criteria by which we distinguish classes of things or events generically, for example, in a taxonomy of species. Only on this ground can we know what a thing of a certain type is able to do or might do or will do or what might or will happen after a certain event or action of some type. The corresponding ‘a priori knowledge’ about a deep structure or essence of a genus is explicated by ‘standing sentences’ that function as rules for conceptual default inferences. In theories we ‘develop’ this conceptual framework—by which we ‘causally explain’ changes or movements of real things.

  All this got partially lost in the further debate of German Idealism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, partially even in the British Hegelianism of Francis Herbert Bradley and John McTaggart, and in the Italian Hegelianism of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. One reason lies in the lasting confusion about the diverse meanings of the word ‘metaphysical’ and a wrong, sweeping, transcendent reading of Hegel’s pun about a ‘world spirit’ as the personalized ethos of mankind. On the side of the critics we find far too hasty linguistic critiques of the use of nominalized terms in logical reflection on ‘topics’ and ‘places’ of special forms of discourse. The problem is that philosophical writers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Max Stirner prefer a verbalized style and claim that generic expressions like ‘spirit’ or ‘self-consciousness’ only name an idée fixe, a spooky entity that does not exist at all. Despite his fierce attacks on Stirner,15 Karl Marx also claims that Hegel’s allegedly subjective idealism must be turned from spirit to brain, from merely theoretical belief to materialistic practice, in short: from head to feet. Stirner also influenced Friedrich Nietzsche indirectly via Friedrich Albert Lange. His influence reaches via Fritz Mauthner’s Sprachkritik down to Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, even though Wittgenstein verbally distances himself from the particular forms of Mauthner’s critique of language and of all metaphysics. The result is a wide-spread hearsay about German Idealism and the alleged collapse of Hegel’s alleged System in the early 1840s16 that only recently came under more critical scrutiny.

  The central problem is, of course, a correct understanding of generic expressions, for example, when we talk about a transcendental ‘I’ which is a ‘We’ with capital letters or about the State as a system of all legally sheltered social institutions or about the Idea as the performative form of joint actions governed by the implicit norms of a system of institutions. A secondary problem is the defence of traditional religious language as an early form of talking about the forms and norms of practices that are constitutive for our ability to lead a personal human life with the faculty of taking part in the joint practices of language, knowledge, and science.

  We can see now that there are overly hasty ways of criticizing certain forms of expressions as allegedly metaphysical. An important example is Hegel’s gnomic formula that the real is a matter of reason and reason is real. It means that we declare generic explanations of phenomena (in particular but still general applications) as the real reality (Wirklichkeit)—if they are reasonable. And we say that judgements are reasonable when they are realistic, that is, if they take efficacious reality into account. So we see that it is a question of how intelligently these philosophical texts are understood when we want to assess the insights of German Idealism. In Hegel’s own language at least, the word ‘idealism’ merely expresses that we have to take the ‘idea’ or ‘form’ of our world-related knowledge and beliefs into account when we talk about objectivity (Objektivität) and efficacious reality (Wirklichkeit).

  29.8 ACHIEVEMENTS AND SHORTCOMINGS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY METAPHYSICS

  1. A particular distinction between Kant and Hegel relates to the famous attack on any rational theology by the disproof of the ‘ontological proof’ of the existence of God—and Hegel’s infamous reproach. Kant argues that a definition of any logically complex property is never adequate to prove that in a given domain there is some thing having this property. The reason is that existence is no object-level property at all. The quantification ‘there is some thing with this or that property’ expresses, instead, a meta-level property-property, saying that a property is not empty.

  A first, rather trivial, reaction to this argument, could say that at least basic empirical properties like being red or being blue presuppose that something is red or blue—since the introducing definitions of basic properties which work by showing examples and counter-examples are only possible when they are not empty. But in the case of God and the defining property ‘being that is more or greater than any other being’ we are not dealing with an elementary property. And the ‘proof’ that such a being must exist because, if it did not exist, it would lack a crucial property and would be even less than any real being, may not convince us. It should convince us, however, if we read the formula, as Hegel does, already in a meta-level way, namely, as a definitional explanation of the domain of all existent beings. Then the existence of God is to be read in analogy to the existence of the natural numbers in contrast to the existence of any particular number. Just as the infinite existence (or constitution) of the variable domain of the abstract numbers is presupposed when we prove any finite existence claim in it, the infinite existence of the whole domain of reality is already presupposed when we talk about any real thing. This consideration stands in the tradition of Spinoza’s identification of God with the only real substance there is, namely the whole world, which unfortunately is identified further with nature in the narrow sense of the physical world. In this reconstruction, the speculative sentence that all things are in God is trivially true, just as all our attitudes to God turn out to be attitudes to being in the holistic sense of Heidegger’s Sein. It is trivially true, then, that God does not exist as an element or finite, that is, limited object in the world. In the explained sense, the world or God exists with necessity; for it would be totally unclear what it might mean to say that the world does not exist, even though we certainly should not confuse the world with a finite thing in the world.

  This shows why it would be too hasty to assume that Hegel did not grasp Kant’s formal logical argument and just arbitrarily defended some ideas of metaphysical rational theology from Anselm of Canterbury via René Descartes to Leibniz against Kant’s critique. Rather, Hegel shows us something about the peculiar logical status of the words ‘God’ and ‘god(s)’. Unfortunately, there existed no device yet to clearly separate meta-level reflections in sentences that only mention a word from object-level use of the concept. This had the problematic result that almost all readers concluded that Hegel’s use presupposed the meaning and reference of the words as settled, even though Hegel wanted to bar this conclusion by distinguishing finite things and finite sentences from infinite topics and sentences.

  2. Talking about God is talking
about the whole world. As a result, the accusation of God in a theodicy turns into a sweeping accusation of the world as allegedly not good enough to us humans, because, for example, there are earthquakes in Lisbon.17 Any such accusation is an anthropocentric attitude.

  In some contrast to Kant, Hegel makes clear that we have to distinguish between cognitive relations to the outer world and our ethical or aesthetical attitude to the world. A performative attitude (hexis, habitus) to other persons and the world is, in a way, absolute, and not just a rational inference we draw from some premises by automatically applying allegedly reasonable rules.

  Some generically good attitudes are expressed traditionally by talking about faith in God. This faith is neither grounded in merely singular experiences nor should it be shattered too easily by unfortunate accidents. Moreover, it is up to us whether we have trust in the world and other humans, or whether we are distrustful and sceptical, thankful or full of resentment—perhaps because of some autistic feeling of deserving better. The question is not so much whether there is undeserved unhappiness, but rather whether we ourselves should be the ones to complain and to address the complaint to God, that is, the world.

  3. The problem of Spinozism and pantheism is now exactly the same as that of naturalism or materialism. It is the problem of a wrong identification of the whole world with nature in the too narrow sense of physics or the natural sciences. Here, nature appears as the set of objects we refer to when we scientifically or technically, theoretically or practically refer to the world—which already excludes the transcendental and existential preconditions of our being-in-the-world or Dasein in the sense of Heidegger, which in some ways goes back to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Jacobi obviously already had a presentiment of our attitudes to the world and that they can be limited if we identify the set of objects of physics with the whole world: We then tend to overlook the important structure of self-fulfilling prophecies in our modal attitudes, for example, to the future. The unhappiness of nihilism or the self-fulfilling akrasia of a wrong belief in the power of some pre-determined fate (or our genes) are just two examples of such a self-fulfilling metaphysical attitude. Whoever believes that he will not succeed in an enterprise will not succeed most probably—because he stops trying hard enough.

  Faith, trust, and self-trust become necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for leading a good and active life, as William James later recognizes as well. James also sees the narrow connection to religious faith. But James still tinkers with the possibility of believing in an actual God, whereas Hegel teaches, in ontic18 terms, atheism, as Heinrich Heine testifies clearly enough. This is the case even though the tradition prefers to believe Feuerbach, who, in reformulating Hegel’s philosophy of religion as a reflection on the human condition, spreads the impression that Hegel’s ‘world spirit’ is just another name for the Lutheran god. At the same time, Feuerbach trivializes Hegel’s critical analysis. In his materialist view, which strongly influenced Marx, the essence of Christian theology is, in the end, just wishful thinking: Christians hope for a better life after ‘this bad life’. In his expression ‘opium of the people’, Marx famously condenses this thought.

  4. The topics of religious reflection, though expressed in ‘mantic’ poetry, extend far beyond a materialist world, as Hegel’s critical metaphysics shows on the ground of Schelling’s philosophy of nature. However difficult the texts of these authors are, their intention is to distinguish nature as the ‘physical’ domain that is described post hoc and can in part be causally explained praeter hoc by the diverse natural sciences, from nature as the metaphysical concept of the whole world which includes our own life with its actions and all the different ways of relating to nature in the sciences. It is, for example, not wise to exclude without further thought the expressive power of religious or poetic mythology, especially in view of its possible impact on practical attitudes. The usual critique of Hegel’s philosophy of nature or of Heidegger’s invention of a new language for thinking along the lines of Hölderlin overlooks this very fact.

  As a result, it is not so much nature as the overall ‘object’ of the technical sciences but our attitudes to the world by which we should distinguish the different approaches to nature in the sciences, in instrumental technologies, in our ethical, aesthetical, and ‘religious’ attitudes to nature and in relation to the social and political world of human cooperation and action.

  5. In the wake of Hegel’s rethinking of Kant’s debate about the ontological notion and proof of God, for the leading German philosophical discussions of the young Hegelians (like Arnold Ruge, Edward Bauer, Max Stirner, but also Feuerbach, Moses Hess, and Marx)19 the ontic god is dead long before Nietzsche famously repeats Hegel’s words. It does not make sense at all to believe in a god positively, that is, as an ontic subject that acts in a certain way, if we understand the expressive and reflective function of religious language. In contrast to this development of thought, the (mainly British) common-sense debate about the existence of God focuses on the ‘physico-theological’ or cosmological idea of God as an anthropomorphic creator of the world, earth, life, animals, and men.

  As a result, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary biology does not have much to say on this topic at all. If it were not for dogmatic creationists, it should be no big deal anyway to admit that there is an evolution of species and that the taxonomy of species is disjoint only if we restrict the very notion of species to some limited time or epoch, that is, if we read it in a synchronic and not in an indefinitely diachronic way. Natural evolution is an absolutely important principle for modern biology, but already too weak for a differential anthropology that accounts for the special individual abilities and social forms of human life in their historical development. We have the personal or the ‘spiritual’ competences of sapience only as members of our species homo sapiens—thanks to cultural traditions in which we take part and have to learn to take part, as Hegel had already pointed out long before the later Wittgenstein, in continuing a line of thought that starts with Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder.

  6. Hamann, Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt were the first to stress the importance of culture, language, and history, beyond the limits of Kant’s transcendental reflections on the logical forms of empirical statements. Fichte brings the performing acts into focus and opens the way to Hegel’s insight into the ‘absolute’ form of performative acts: acting so, makes it so. Schelling’s philosophy of nature is not merely a move away from Cartesian and Kantian dualism but also towards the insight that the Cartesian premise ‘I think’ is an empirical premise (as Kant himself says), which means that the thinking I is the embodied person here and now, as Hegel will develop the thought. But the person does not exist before the embodiment of personal skills in education and self-education, such that we must distinguish between the personality as the general possibility of becoming a human person and the already more concrete rational abilities and intelligent capacities with which we can further develop our sapience and competences.

  7. Post-Darwinism returns to the pre-critical metaphysics of modernity with its empiricist or physiological, behaviouristic or materialist, in both cases transcendent, not transcendental, psychologism and a corresponding nihilistic existentialism that ranges from Schopenhauer via Nietzsche and Freud to current French philosophy. Schopenhauer’s sweeping (transcendent) belief-metaphysics of the will, for example, opts in the end for a contemplative life and for some bourgeois aesthetics; Nietzsche shares the premise and praises the heroism of a future overman who can lead an enthusiastic life despite the depressing facts of nihilism which allegedly result as a necessary consequence of scientific enlightenment, the loss of faith in an ontic god and an immortal soul. Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre follow suit.

  Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein as the always present performance of life in a sense leads him, unbeknownst to himself, back to the insights of Hegel into the categorical finitude and absolute subjectivity of personal life. Heidegger’s c
are (Sorge) in a sense replaces Schopenhauer’s metaphysical stories about an inborn egotistic individual will and stands for a partially self-fulfilling attitude to my own future. There are limits of what we can actively do, for example, in cases when a mood like anguish or depression befalls us. In his differentiation of non-directed anguish and the intentional feeling of fear, Heidegger follows Franz Brentano and, for that matter, Søren Kierkegaard, who had also seen the importance of emotional life, in some contrast to Hegel’s allegedly too rationalistic analysis, especially in view of the roles he gives to religious talk and practices. Heidegger’s Gelassenheit pledges for an attitude of acknowledging all possible contingencies of life. But his main goal is to deconstruct the metaphysical premises of the nineteenth century, the existential attitudes of latent ennui and the problematic reaction to it in Nietzsche’s heroism.

  8. The role of logic in the critique of metaphysics is more ambivalent than we might imagine, especially in the nineteenth century. Adolf Trendelenburg, a very influential German philosopher and Aristotelian scholar, rightly recognized that Hegel in a sense misses the point of Aristotle’s three types of syllogisms. Hegel does not read them as different classes of formally valid inferences in mereological taxonomies, but in a metaphorical way, as deductive, inductive, and abductive forms of reasoning.20 However, by focussing on formal deductions, Trendelenburg in turn misses the point of Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ altogether: it surpasses by far any merely formal logic of taxonomy and also goes far beyond mathematical definitions of logically complex predicates on the ground of elementary relations by using logical operators like ‘and’, ‘not’, and the quantifier ‘for all’—where quantification is defined on a purely sortal domain of distinct abstract objects as we know them from arithmetic and pure set theory.