Nineteenth-Century Philosophy

Revolutionary Responses to the Existing Order

Alan D. Schrift, Daniel Conway

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844652129
• eBook ISBN: 9781317546955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The second half of the 19th Century saw a revolution in both European politics and philosophy. Philosophical fervour reflected political fervour. Five great critics dominated the European intellectual scene: Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche. "Nineteenth-Century Philosophy" assesses the response of each of these leading figures to Hegelian philosophy - the dominant paradigm of the time - to the shifting political landscape of Europe and the United States, and also to the emerging critique of modernity itself. Both individually and collectively, these thinkers succeeded in revolutionizing theology, philosophy, psychology, and politics. The period also saw the emergence of new schools of thought and new disciplinary thinking. The volume covers the birth of sociology and the social sciences, the development of French spiritualism, the beginning of American pragmatism, the rise of science and mathematics, and the maturation of hermeneutics and phenomenology.

1

FEUERBACH AND THE LEFT AND RIGHT HEGELIANS

William Clare Roberts

To those left cold by the bombast, internecine polemics, and melodrama of post-Hegelian German philosophy, it might seem either that Hegel’s students failed to attain the height of their master, and so fell into obscure partisan squabbles, or else that the entire project of German idealism contained the germs of this debacle from the beginning, and that it serves as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole tradition. Both of these views were common among the post-Hegelians themselves. The first reaction is characteristic of those who came to be known as Right Hegelians. These set themselves the task of conserving the truth of Hegel’s philosophy, and defending it against misapplications, misappropriations, and misinterpretations. The second reaction is the developed response of the more radical among the Left Hegelians, Feuerbach¹ and Marx especially. Thus an air of dissatisfaction and restlessness permeates the entire post-Hegelian scene. To the extent that this dissatisfaction continues to characterize philosophical and political discourses, we remain within that scene.²

This essay will investigate this scene of restlessness with special attention on the role of Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach is generally treated as the joint between Hegel and Marx, and this essay will to some extent reinforce that tendency by beginning with Hegel and ending with Marx. Nonetheless, Feuerbach is certainly much more than a mere transitional figure, in that he articulates a response to the post-Hegelian ferment that endures as a recurrent, live option.³ Marx is certainly not the necessary consequence of Feuerbach’s premises; one can start down the path with Feuerbach and travel as far as one wishes without arriving at Marxism. One of the objects of this essay is to identify the point of rupture that separates Feuerbach’s position from that of Marx. Whether Feuerbach’s position is satisfactory, as opposed to unique and viable, is a separate question, and one that this essay will not seek to answer. Instead, it will identify the problem to which Feuerbach responds, trace in some detail the critique of theology and philosophy by which he responds to that problem, and highlight the distinctive features of his response, by which Feuerbach can be differentiated from Right Hegelians, other Left Hegelians, and Marx.

I. PERSONALITY, SPIRIT, AND THE PROBLEM OF INCARNATION

In order to appreciate Feuerbach’s problem, it is helpful to be cognizant of certain aspects of the historical and cultural context of his writings, aspects that are not explicitly acknowledged within those writings, but that function nonetheless as the backdrop against which Feuerbach wrote.⁴ Feuerbach was seduced into philosophy by Hegel himself, and left behind his studies in theology to devote himself to Wissenschaft (philosophical science). He was never to secure the academic post he desired, however, for he was blacklisted after failing sufficiently to guard his authorship of the anonymous Thoughts on Death and Immortality, which argued against the immortality of the personal soul. The ensuing death of his academic career was not due merely to his book’s offen-siveness to religious orthodoxy. The personality of the soul – its individual and irreducible selfhood – was one leg of the three-legged stool of German order, together with the personality of God and the personality of the king. Warren Breckman has demonstrated that this discourse of personality colored all of the controversy surrounding Hegel and the Young Hegelians. This is because German personalism sustained an elaborate homology between the uniqueness of a personal God, the indivisible and quasifamilial sovereignty of the king, and the singularity of each subject. As Breckman reminds us, “the works of the Young Hegelians unified theological, political, and social themes in large measure because they were written within a context in which this unity was taken for granted.”⁵ Therefore it is necessary to examine in more detail both the personalism of German politics and theology and the aspects of Hegelian and post-Hegelian thought that elicited such a powerful defensive reaction. It is crucial to understand, in other words, how German idealism came to be seen as a threat to the German order.⁶

During and after the Pantheismusstreit (pantheism controversy) – the debate between F. H. Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn about whether Enlightenment rationalism necessarily entails pantheism and fatalism – the line of demarcation between enlightenment and reaction was Spinoza’s definition of God as substance, or the totality of nature. It was Jacobi’s exchange with Mendelssohn that cemented the identification of Spinozism with what Jacobi called “nihilism,” and counterpoised to it the intuitive and emotional certainty in “a transcendent personal intelligence” (MYH 26).⁷ Already in Jacobi, the transcendent personality of God is also keyed to the transcendent personality of the human individual. After Napoleon’s defeat, Restoration political thinkers such as Carl Ludwig von Haller decisively asserted the personality of the sovereign to be the third leg of the stool, and Pietist reactionaries and the later Schelling unified all three into the Christian personalism that functioned as the de facto state ideology of Prussia right up to 1848.⁸

Without delving too deeply into Hegel, it is a fairly straightforward matter to show that his philosophy of spirit is deeply – although not simply – opposed to each branch of orthodox personalism. In his early essay “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” he had argued for the incompatibility of Christianity and personalism. According to Hegel, Christ himself was explicitly “against personality, against the view that his essence possessed an individuality opposed to those who had attained the culmination of friendship with him.”⁹ This view did not change, and is reiterated in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Although his endorsement of monarchy in The Philosophy of Right dramatically separates him from the Left Hegelians, Hegel’s monarch was not the personal monarch the conservatives wanted, but a mere functionary of the state, a “decider” whose decisions carried not personal authority but only the impersonal authority of the constitution and its laws. On theological and political grounds, then, the conservatives had good reason to count Hegel as an opponent.

It is in relation to the third aspect of personalism, however – the transcendent personality of the individual – that the complexity and depth of Hegel’s opposition to personalism comes to the fore. The personality defended by the conservatives was a willful personality, self-contained and sovereign within its own domain.¹⁰ This personality has a place in Hegel’s thought, to be sure. Yet it is not the truth of personality, but only an abstract, legalistic moment to be overcome. Just as God the Father is not the truth of God, so, too, the self-contained, sovereign person is not the true person; only Geist (spirit) is fully and actually a self-conscious subject. When Hegel introduces spirit in the Phenomenology, he writes:

A self-consciousness, in being an object, is just as much “I” as “object.” With this we already have before us the Notion of Spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is – this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: “I” that is “We” and “We” that is “I.”¹¹

As opposed to the abstract, legal person, spirit is the concrete person, the person constituted as a subject by a consciousness of its intersubjective reality. This person is not sovereign or willful, for it comes to know itself only through the ethical and rational life it shares with others. Spirit does not transcend and rule over its own private domain, but is always outside itself. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s apt phrase, spirit “trembles in desire.”¹² Or, as Judith Butler puts it, “if we are to follow The Phenomenology of Spirit, I am invariably transformed by the encounters I undergo; recognition becomes the process by which I become other than what I was and so cease to be able to return to what I was.”¹³

Hegel’s identification of spirit as the truth of personality could not have pleased any of the parties in the theological-political disputes roiling Germany, for all camps relied, at one point or another, on abstract personality. The political reactionaries stressed the sovereign personality of the king, and the religious reactionaries stressed the same in God. But political liberals were equally invested in the personality of the individual political subject. Attachment to and rejection of the spiritualization of God, of the state, and of the subject, therefore, became the shibboleths of Hegelianism and anti-Hegelianism, respectively. Left and Right Hegelians were as one in their adherence to spirit. What divided them was the question of how to interpret spirit, a question that came unmistakably on the scene with the 1835 publication of David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined.¹⁴

In the denouement of his argument, Strauss presents the standard Hegelian Christology – every element of the “evangelical history” is “deduced” dialectically from “the concept of God and man in their reciprocal relation”¹⁵ – only to diagnose it with a fatal contradiction:

If reality is ascribed to the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures, is this equivalent to the admission that this unity must actually have been once manifested, as it never has been, and never more will be, in one individual? This is indeed not the mode in which Idea realizes itself; it is not wont to lavish all its fullness on one exemplar, and be niggardly towards all others: it rather loves to distribute its riches among a multiplicity of exemplars which reciprocally complete each other – in the alternate positing and sublating of individuals. (LJ 48)

With this text, the division between Left and Right Hegelians sprang into existence fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Whereas Right Hegelians (such as Philip Conrad Marheineke and Karl Rosenkranz) emphasized the differentiation within spirit, and valorized certain historical instantiations of spirit as the actual manifestations of the idea, Left Hegelians followed Strauss in denying equally to all particular historical shapes of spirit the privilege of actualizing the idea. It is the play of history as an infinite totality that alone incarnates the “infinite spirit” of God, and no incident or moment of that play can, to the exclusion of other moments, condense and hold the infinite within itself.

That this Left Hegelian interpretation amounts to an absolute humanism was made obvious by Strauss from the beginning:

Humanity is the union of the two natures – the incarnate God, the infinite Spirit alienated in the finite and the finite Spirit recollecting its infinitude; it is the worker of miracles, insofar as in the course of human history the spirit more and more completely subjugates nature, both within and around man, until it lies before him as the inert matter on which he exercises his active power. Humanity is the sinless one because the course of its development is blameless. … It is Humanity that dies, rises, and ascends to heaven, for from the negation of its natural state there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life; from the sublation of its finitude as a personal, national, and terrestrial spirit, arises its union with the infinite spirit of the heavens.

(LJ 48–9)

There are two dilemmas constitutive of Strauss’s spiritual humanism, dilemmas that will in turn frame Feuerbach’s own con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Feuerbach and the Left and Right Hegelians
• 2. Marx and Marxism
• 3. Søren Kierkegaard
• 4. Dostoevsky and Russian philosophy
• 5. Life after the death of God: thus spoke Nietzsche
• 6. Hermeneutics: Schleiermacher and Dilthey
• 7. French spiritualist philosophy
• 8. The emergence of sociology and its theories: from Comte to Weber
• 9. Developments in philosophy of science and mathematics
• 10. Peirce: pragmatism and nature after Hegel
• 11. Aesthetics and the philosophy of art, 1840–1900
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index