Hello Hegel-list,

 

Since I last wrote, I have made some further progress into Wahl’s The Unhappy Consciousness in Hegel’s Philosophy (1929). Much of what he says rehearses material we already know from general biographies. Wilhelm Dilthey is a particular influence. For example, he says “His [Hegel’s] mysticism and his system of concepts both come, as Dilthey saw, from one will, from one intuition. [...] One must then place Hegel again within his era, as Dilthey did, in order precisely to see what there is of the universal in him.” (29-30) Sometimes he cites Richard Kroner’s From Kant to Hegel (1921-24), an important book which we have yet to discuss on this list, and a number of now forgotten German historical essays.

 

One inconvenience is that Wahl wrote just before the Glockner edition of Hegel’s Werke appeared. Hence he cites the first (1832-) edition. However, I gather that this differs from Glockner’s edition. The first edition included an essay on The Relation of Philosophy to Philosophy of Nature in Volume 1 that is now attributed to Schelling. Wahl cites this, though he also expresses doubt as to the authorship (77n). Glockner omitted this and hence there was a repagination of the first volume and some moving of material between volumes. In addition, Wahl often cites whole pages of the Glockner and other editions, so it is hard to see just what his supporting evidence is.

 

As to the content of the book, Wahl seems to extend the concept of the “unhappy consciousness” to cover Judaism, the life of Christ, early Christianity, Stoicism, medieval Christianity and aspects of the 18th century, including romanticism, the Enlightenment and Pietism and the oppositions between them. He says that Judaism viewed nature as something dead. This seems to be a mistake, as plants and animals are a separate order of creation in Genesis. Presumably he is speaking of the period after Abraham and the view of a transcendent God as the source of life. I find this too undifferentiated to be persuasive and it impacts his analysis of early Christianity. His view of Christ seems perverse. He says for example: “Jesus is the unhappy consciousness, the first unhappy consciousness, the most essential.” (54) It is as if Christ were some kind of 18th century “man of feeling”, similar to Rousseau. Wahl thinks that Hegel wished to overcome Rousseau’s pessimism: “But he can do it only by rising towards a religious conception that surpasses the social problem properly speaking.” (29) This was the view of social reform that Lukács took issue with. It is related to the saying “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18.36) The influence of Rousseau on Hegel seems to have been an issue in French Hegel scholarship at the time. To judge from a talk I listened to last year, it may still be so.

 

 

Wahl’s approximation of Hegel to romanticism is also clearly at odds with Hegel’s own views and is also contested by Lukács. The distinction of romantic and classic is significant for German literature of this time and indicates the distinction of feeling from its institutional expression. The following passages shed some light on Wahl’s views of romanticism:

 

“Only romanticism will allow us to make Christianity live again in its essentials – where the essential form of the unhappy consciousness presents itself. [...] no moment of history appeared to Hegel as close both to the deepest despair and to the revelation of the eternal Gospel as that in which he wrote.” (30-31) “A hope crosses the world, and Christianity is really, above all, a religion of hope.” (53)

 

“And if it be true that romanticism is at the same time a renaissance of religious feeling, would we not be led to say that it is the religious feeling itself that makes us feel the necessity of suffering? The religious soul, be it that of Pascal or Hamann, is a soul divided. Romanticism, Christianity, these two essential forms, though not the only ones, of suffering consciousness, are thus the necessary mediations for the emergence of Hegelianism, which will be a classical romanticism, a rational Christianity.” (34)

 

“It is a matter, for Hegel, of reworking the pragmatist history of Gibbon that had so much influence on him, but with the developed intuition that romanticism had given him.” (59) [This is a reference to the once-famous passage in Gibbon’s work on the Roman Empire about the rise of Christianity..]

 

“We will see at the end of this study that the mystery of Christianity, the incarnation of the absolute, the holy trinity, negativity in God, is at the same time the central mystery, the transparent and sombre mystery, in Hegel’s eyes, of philosophy.” (37-38)

 

 

Wahl says: “Despite his best efforts, Hegel could not bend Christianity to the requirements of a vision, as had Schleiermacher; he could grasp the happiness in it only after a detour, a detour that was precisely the study of the unhappy consciousness.” (73)

 

Like Dilthey, Wahl takes the rejection of the form of master and servant as decisive for Hegel’s understanding of Christianity. The theorist of duty simply moves the external commands of God into his own consciousness. Wahl says: “Like religious consciousness, moral consciousness is thus misfortune. [...] The romantic, Fichtean exaltation of the self is thus still the Christian and Jewish consciousness.” (86-88) The main objection to this to my mind is not so much psychological or philosophical as a matter of theology, specifically a misinterpretation of view of the law in the Old Testament and the Sermon on the Mount.

 

Frankly, it strikes me that the idea of unhappy consciousness is stretched so far by Wahl that it loses explanatory power. There are contrasts that are historical in origin and others that are simply part of the human condition.. The idea of overcoming unchangeable oppositions is a utopian strain in Hegel that he only slowly modified by the time of his professorship in Berlin.

 

 

Wahl goes on later in the book to discuss the emergence of the core concepts of the system. The following passage expresses his intentions: “The first books of the Logic will be, beyond the description of the categories, an effort to show that the reality is not indeterminate, as Schelling’s idealism would have it, nor is it unknowable, as Fichte’s idealism would have it, but is a determinate knowledge.” (94)

 

It will be interesting to see what he makes of this.

 

All the best

Stephen Cowley