On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 2:14 AM 'Alan Ponikvar' ponikvaraj@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

Your comments recall how most anyone begins as a reader of the work. The allusions are unending making interpretation difficult. If one is fortunate, one finds a way to focus the discourse.

 

• Alan

 

From: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2018 3:25 PM
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [hegel] Some thoughts on Jean Wahl

 

 

Paul, I am pretty clear that Wahl’s justification for seeing Christianity in the Unhappy Consciousness would be in terms of what is known of Hegel’s prior interests and reading, i.e. the theological manuscripts and also perhaps the Critical Journal essays. What else does the empty tomb signify?

 

Paul and Everyone else, I would like to say a little more about the chapter as a whole that concludes with the Unhappy Consciousness sub-section. This has two titles, the titles “B. Self-consciousness” and “4. The Truth of Self-certitude”. In other words, Part B. of the book has only one Chapter. The first Part “A. Consciousness” has three chapters. Strangely, Part C. of the book has no name, but includes all the rest of the book. “Truth” is to be taken in a wide sense (“the truth of the matter”, i.e. the end result, or upshot). The other part of the title (Gewissheit seiner selbst) has the sense of “Self-certitude”, “self-assurance” or Miller’s “Self-certainty”. All the metaphorical uses of Gewissheit in my dictionary retain the core meaning of certainty. The expression is unusual, but the core meaning seems to be being sure of one’s ground in whatever setting. Contrary to any expectation of a tripartite structure, there are only two sub-sections, “Independence... of Self-consciousness” and “Freedom of Self-consciousness”, though the introduction is quite long and so might be considered an untitled sub-section. The first titled sub-section starts with “desire” and “life” and includes the famous “struggle to the death” by which order is imposed by the sword. This is common ground to any society with a class structure and not specifically German or European, though the language is that of German feudalism. It basically discusses the economy.

 

The part on the Unhappy Consciousness is the concluding part of the second section on Freedom. One might argue that the second section on Freedom is an outcome of the first on the Economy, as only economic production permits freedom. However, it seems to me that the two sections can be seen simply as rivals. In the reception of Hegelian ideas for example, it is sometimes pointed out that Wahl’s religious stress on the Unhappy Consciousness is a rival to Kojève’s political reliance on the Struggle for Recognition as the key to the book. It puzzles me that Desire and Work should reappear in the Unhappy Consciousness section. Perhaps intellectual work is meant? I guess I should re-read the chapter. Perhaps there are some clues in the less well known paragraphs.

 

All the best

Stephen Cowley

 

 

From: Paul Trejo petrejo@... [hegel]

Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2018 7:04 PM

To: hegel@yahoogroups.com ; hegel@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [hegel] Some thoughts on Jean Wahl

 

 

Again, Wahl is entirely mistaken to project Christ and Christianity into Hegel's narrative in the Unhappy Consciousness.   Hegel's never mentions Christ even one time, so no matter how many dozens of times Wahl repeats hus error, it remains an error.

 

All best,

--Paul

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

 

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 4:07 PM, 'Stephen Cowley' stephen.cowley@... [hegel]

<hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

[Continued. I have looked again at the chapter on Self-consciousness of which the passage on the Unhappy consciousness is the concluding part. There is a parallel with the first section on Consciousness, which begins with the observation of a tree and a house (a natural object and a human artefact), but in which there is a certain incursion of scientific material by the end of the chapter on Force and the Understanding. The equivalent to science in dealing with self-consciousness is history and hence we might anticipate similar incursions of historical material into the concluding portions of the self-consciousness chapter. Whilst the imposition of order by the sword could happen anywhere, the terms Stoicism and Skepticism have an ambiguity: they are both names, behind which lie historical individuals (Seneca, Sextus Empiricus), but also general modes of thought. Montaigne was a skeptic and Schulze was a skeptical contemporary of Hegel, for example; while the the French revolutionaries were often stoical in outlook. Both chapters then, function as transcendental deductions concerned with the possibility of experience in general, but as experience is always particular, they include scientific and historical material in their latter sections, as we move from the generality of immediate experience to more mediated and conceptual material. – SC]

 

The Unhappy Consciousness in Christianity (Miller, 213-18)

 

Again, I share my own notes before turning to Wahl’s interpretation. 213. The unhappy consciousness changes its focus from the Unchangeable, accompanied by its own self-abnegation, to the embodiment of the Unchangeable. We wish to identify ourselves with (the cause of) Christ. Hegel introduces an equivalent term here: das entzweite Bewußtsein. In Miller, this is “divided consciousness”, but entzweite also has the sense of broken (in two, like a twig). This sheds some light on the nature of the unhappiness, or misfortune, of the unhappy consciousness. 214. This movement towards embodiment is itself threefold, corresponding to:

• Pure consciousness
• Desire and Work
• Self-awareness.

215. Christ may be present to pure consciousness, but his presence is not realised. 216. Even here, there is an advance of sorts on Stoicism and Skepticism (though Hegel is not clear on what it is). However, he adds, the unhappy consciousness does not know that its own object is its own self, i.e. that its idea of Christ is its own self. [Because it is not, one might reply. The objects of a mind are not necessarily themselves within the mind. ] 217... This first attitude then, is devotion (Andacht). Hegel famously says: “Its thinking as such remains the formless chiming of bells, or a warm fog of incense, a musical thinking...” Hegel finds a reason for the failure of the Crusades in the fact that the physical grave of Christ is something inessential. 218. The world of desire and work (the economy, in other words) impinges on consciousness by its own thinking of itself. It approaches with a kind of self-certainty, but is still lacking due knowledge of its own significance.

 

[It seems odd to me to contrast two pagan philosophies with early Christian religious observance. Admittedly, both are shapes of consciousness that aim to project a unitary character on experience. However, Stoicism was primarily an ethical stance, skepticism a method of intellectual inquiry, and Christianity a form of piety. For the Greeks and Romans, Christianity also involved turning to an independent and (initially) foreign literature for inspiration. Seen more broadly though, both the former were responses to the breakdown of an earlier civic religion, while the latter is a seeking for a new religion, that only later (through desire and work, as Hegel puts it) colors the rest of life. The thread of the narrative, in other words, ranges through quite different fields: political conflict, science, economic life, personal and public forms of piety. It is possible though, that they may become in turn the central concern of a social development (the Schwerpunkt, in Herder’s terminology).

 

The main points that Wahl draws from the text are as follows: 213. We move from the Jewish law to the God of Christianity. We have our expectation of Christ. [But these are extended, altered and corrected by Scripture – SC] 214. Hegel emphasises the distance, even of the incarnate Christ. 215. We look first at pure consciousness. Wahl says: “It will be only later that one ill see that the attention lent to the Unchangeable by consciousness is at the same time an attention paid to consciousness by the Unchangeable.” (180) Wahl calls this “theological relativism” and “mystical monism”. [The relativist interpretation was that of Feuerbach and David Strauss. – SC] 216.. Christ is a different figure from the gods of Olympus. Both can be thought of as amalgams of universal and particular, but Christ is a figure of a different order. 217. Piety at fist has the form of feeling. Wahl invokes Schleiermacher as an example. He writes: “Schleiermacher’s thought represents well both the thought of the disciples at the moment of Christ’s death and the thought of the Germanic world.” (184) Jacobi too feels such a longing (Sehnsucht). Wahl attributes a “painful consciousness” to the disciples. [This is overcome in the New Testament, e.g. Acts. – SC] The incarnate Christ is a This, subject to the dialectic of the world of sense (as expounded in Chapter 1 of the Phenomenology). Hence we find a tomb in place of the divine life we seek. Wahl attributes to Hegel the idea that (naive) piety is something to be surpassed. The disciple, the crusader, the romantic are cases in point. 218. The world of desire and work is to be sanctified. Wahl suggests that religion is to be subverted by the union of subjective and objective in absolute knowledge. The unhappy consciousness will reappear in the Phenomenology on the path to the spiritual daylight of the present.

 

Christianity renders the abstract oppositions of the previous world views concretely. Wahl summarises:

 

“Judaism [...] becomes the Christian unhappy consciousness and gives birth to the idea of the incarnation; and the succession of Kings gives birth to the son of God. [...] But Christianity, although it can, in contrast to Judaism the religion of the indeterminate beyond, be called the religion of the incarnate beyond, remains a religion of the beyond. It concludes a sensuous element that gives rise to a new opposition.” (189)

 

Thus we arrive, not at a synthesis, but at a point of contact that can become a synthesis only through enlargement. This realises itself through:

• Contact (the death of Christ, Crusades, romantic longing)
• Work and communion (Candide, Faust, the blessing of bread and wine)
• Asceticism (Cloisters, priesthood and laity).

Thereafter comes the Renaissance and Reformation.

 

Conclusion

 

One conclusion would be that Chapter 4 – Self-consciousness is essentially a transcendental deduction, with illustrations. Such a deduction is concerned with the limits of possible experience, with the presupposition of particular forms of experience. It proceeds from:

• Life (including primitive economic life), to
• Independence (and dependence), to
• Freedom (at first that of withdrawal, then that of a religious shaping of society).

Hence, a certain amount of actual experiential matter is appropriate, but only to guide the reader through an otherwise abstract presentation. There is an ambiguity as to whether Christianity is to be realised or transcended in the latter stage.

 

Wahl’s book made an impression in France. Subsequently, according to Jacques D’Hondt, Hegel’s name became better known through the surrealists. The curiosity this awakened was met first by Alexandre Kojève’s lectures in Paris in the 1930s, later published. Politics and the struggle for recognition was the primary theme in these. Then came the famous translation and commentary of Jean Hyppolite on the Phenomenology, completed in 1946. As a result, the Phenomenology for long remained the central text in the French – and French influenced - reception of Hegel. This was considerable in the heyday of existentialism, on which Wahl later wrote.

 

Wahl thought that the model of division and reunion of the unhappy consciousness was applicable more generally to experience, as perhaps to the theology of sin and redemption. This remains an alternative view to the common emphasis on social recognition, initiated by Kojève, as a key to Hegel...

 

(This concludes my remarks on Wahl.)

Stephen Cowley

 

 

From: 'Stephen Cowley' stephen.cowley@... [hegel]

Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2018 2:21 PM

To: hegel@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [hegel] Some thoughts on Jean Wahl

 

 

[Continued. In addition to pa previous comment of mine.. There is indeed no passing reference in the first section to Judaism – a burning bush or something to match the bells and incense in the third section. Hence, one might doubt if Judaism is at stake at all. However, Judaism is adapted to the role in that there always was a universal aspect to its opposition to local idols and after the destruction of Solomon’s temple it was already alienated from its original homeland, as in a way was Abraham who left Ur of the Chaldees (Genesis 11). It is not a perfect match though, so the idea that the European reception of Judaism may be involved remains plausible to me. There was a messianic hope within Judaism, but the primary issue was t the receptivity of the Graeco-Roman world to Christ, which its meeting with the Jewish world allowed it to express and conceive. Hegel did discuss Judaism in his manuscripts, but not very successfully, so he left the material unpublished. Kojève sees reference to Judaism in his commentary. Judaism however, was not a unitary phenomenon in Christ’s time (nor since). ]

 

Christianity

 

On my reading of paras 210-12, we move from

• God as judge, to
• Relationship, to
• Reconciliation.

These moves are experiences of self-consciousness in its misfortune. It involves relationship of the Immoveable to the individual, of individuals to each other and on their part to be one with him. The Immoveable must take on the form of something that happens, or has happened, to enter into relationship.... However, such presence brings with it contingency and chance. Hence the presence necessarily becomes conceived as having disappeared (in time) or as distant (in place). We are united to the Immoveable through Christ. [Hegel thus assimilates the Creator God of the Bible to the unmoved mover of Aristotle.]

 

Wahl sees in these passages something akin to the movement from being and nothing to becoming in the Logic. The unhappy consciousness sees itself as nothing faced with being. The Wisdom of Solomon must become embodied in a Son of David. He says: “Christianity is only the awakening [in] consciousness of this contact of the Immoveable and particular.” (170) He cites Abraham and Moses, David’s kingdom and the advent of Christ and continues:

 

“The fact is that Judaism could be defined as a Stoicism in reverse, or a Skepticism turned into theology, and that in any case it it opens the way definitively to the higher ideas of religion, while remaining all the while itself at a lower level.” (171)

 

It is the unhappy consciousness that produces the idea of the unity of universal and particular. The preconditions of this need to be rehearsed to generate piety and understanding. In history, a middle point between the blinding sun and the blinding cloud of dust is sought. The living Christ would be subject to the dialectic of the here and the now – so he is placed at a distance. The heavenly Jerusalem seems just as distant as the earthly one to the believer.

 

More to follow

Stephen Cowley

 

From: 'Stephen Cowley' stephen.cowley@... [hegel]

Sent: Friday, November 16, 2018 2:05 PM

To: hegel@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Fw: [hegel] Some thoughts on Jean Wahl

 

 

[This post concerns the commentary section of Wahl’s book. In answer to a previous question, Franz Baader wrote Revision der Philosopheme der Hegel’schen Schule bezüglich auf das Christentum (1839) – SC]

 

The Commentary on the Unhappy Consciousness

 

Wahl’s commentary covers only the first two thirds of the section on the Unhappy Consciousness. The paragraphs are 208-218 in Miller’s translation. The last section that is not covered uses the imagery of medieval monasticism..

 

There is an apparent conflict in that Wahl takes them to be a commentary on Judaism and early Christianity. Hegel however, says at the outset of the section: “In skepticism, consciousness truly experiences itself as internally contradictory. From this experience emerges a new form of consciousness which brings together the two thoughts which skepticism holds apart.” (para 208). The difficulty here is that Stoicism and Skepticism were not historical precursors of Judaism, which dates back to the time of Abraham.. Hence the historical continuity of the chapter seems to break down. The historical imagery that later accrues to stoicism is that of the Roman temples, its Pantheon and public square. The solution to this seems to me to be that what Hegel is discussing is in part or principally the reception of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman world. There are distant analogies to stoicism in the Bible, but no positive vision of skepticism in it. Another potential solution would be to say that the chapter is a pure development of ideas. There is some truth in this, as the material is deliberately couched in abstract terms and the names “Stoicism” and “Skepticism” are universal dispositions as well as historical designations. However, this would be to eliminate the historical side of the book altogether, which Hegel himself affirms. Wahl himself comments that “It is no longer a matter of a purely logical dialectic, but of a historical dialectic of emotion and practice.” (158)

 

Wahl comments that Hegel employs imagery of polarity and duality. Division and duality are retained, being interwoven with the structure of consciousness. There is also a striving for unity. There is an unhappiness (dissatisfaction, misfortune, restlessness) already in Skepticism as the flux of thought never attains the unity of action and decision.

 

Judaism (Miller paras 208-12)

 

In this section, I male some points on my own account and then summarise Wahl. The skeptical suspense of judgement has left us with a beyond that is a blank canvas. On my reading, there is at first an opposition of a manifold, shifting, changing consciousness and a simple, unchangeable nature or essence [Wesen]. We take ourselves to stand on the inessential side, but wish to liberate ourselves from its superfluity. The very constancy of the divided consciousness’s relationship to the unchangeable itself brings stability to it. We raise our eyes to the eternal [as in the Psalms], but this raising makes us aware of our own individuality. The eternal in consciousness itself takes on individuality. The very path back and forth becomes familiar to us, but the moment of difference remains predominant. At first, God is an alien judge and we feel outcast; but secondly, there emerges a relationship; and thirdly, at last, a kind of joyful reconciliation and individual and universal. 

 

Wahl’s commentary takes in some wider points.. He argues that the unity of consciousness is the cause of its affliction. He echoes Hegel in speaking of “this unfortunate consciousness that is born of skepticism” (164) The synagogue announces the church. The progression of the book is from:

• Material hostility (master and servant)
• Spiritual struggle (unhappy consciousness)
• Unity of Spirit.

This he describes as the movement form Montaigne to Pascal, a move from skepticism to piety.  He finds many veiled references to Christianity. The ground of Christianity was prepared by skepticism and Judaism, which proclaim duality and immediate unity respectively. Consciousness has sought a new starting point in the East. He speaks of the Psalms turning to Lamentations and mentions Job and Ecclesiastes. He says: “Pascal at Port-Royal is an image, more than an image, of Christ in the Garden of Olives.” (167) Pascal was a famous French convert to an intense Christian faith. His use of French examples highlights the universal scope of Hegel’s analysis. [The use of the ancient world as a palimpsest of modernity is a feature of the Phenomenology. – SC]

 

Christianity

 

More to follow

Stephen Cowley

 

 

From: 'Stephen Cowley' stephen.cowley@... [hegel]

Sent: Monday, October 8, 2018 12:04 PM

To: hegel@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [hegel] Some thoughts on Jean Wahl

 

 

Romanticism and Irrationalism

 

One of the most striking features of Wahl’s interpretation is his assimilation of Christianity to Romanticism. He speaks for example of a “religious emotion of love” in Hegel’s idea of spirit, which he later rationalised, without eliminating. This he calls “this romantic basis and this Christian blueprint of his thought” (248). In Hegel’s later thought, he says: “We can always find however, still living, these primitive elements of his thought, which for us make up the greatest part of the value, even if they risk bursting the framework of the system.” (250) This is an echo of the view that Hegel’s early sense of movement and life was later frozen into the rigid categories of his logic.. To some extent this is simply of reflection of ideas taken over from Wilhelm Dilthey. Wahl writes for example:

 

“The young man who had dismissed Christianity in the name of Kant, who had then thought to reconcile the thought of Christ and that of Kant, at almost the same time as Friedrich Schlegel wished to hellenize the Fichtean philosophy, had been led, at least momentarily, to dismiss Kant in the name of Christ. However, he retained something very precious from Kant: this idea of an a priori synthesis, which perhaps, in a sense, is embodied in the union of two natures.” (241)

 

However, Dilthey is not Wahl’s only source. He points out for example, that Hegel borrowed thoughts from Meister Eckhart which he found in Mosheim’s Church History. The source of this is Nohl’s edition of Hegel’s Early Theological Writings (1907). At the same time, there is a recognition of the distance that exists between Hegel and Christianity. This comes out in the treatment of Helmut Groos’s book Der deutsche Idealismus und das Christentum [German Idealism and Christianity] (1927). This is one of a number of now forgotten German works in his bibliography. Wahl writes:

 

“Mr Groos brought to light in a forceful and ingenious way the oppositions [between Hegelianism and Christianity] in his work German Idealism and Christianity. Hegel replaces the idea of creation unacceptable in his monism by the idea of a fall of the divine, the creation becomes bad. And on the other hand, sin becomes creation and principle of redemption. According to Mr Groos, one would be an accomplice here to a “complete reversal of Christian dogma”. The relationships though, appear more complex between Hegelianism and the Christian religion. However, one must signal that the creation of the Son and the creation of the world are identified by Hegel, that he adapts from the Gnostics the concept of the Adam Kadmon (Philosophy of Religion, ed. Lasson, I, 200) and that his theory appeared at times as a gnosis for which there was no more mystery.” (142n)

 

Wahl is seeking to rescue Hegel from the interpretation of his thought as a kind of panlogicism in earlier French scholarship, such as Georges Noël. He criticises interpretations focused on the Logic in a note on J..M.E. McTaggart: “McTaggart’s interpretation gives us an intellectualised and “flattened” Hegel. He has diminished as much as possible the specific character of the moment of negativity. He recognised though that it is when it is a matter of crime, punishment and reconciliation, or of the death necessary for life, that one feels the real Hegel.” (129n) Wahl goes so far as to say of Hegel at one point that: “We are in the presence of a deep irrationalism.” (220) This is in the tradition of writers including Richard Kroner and Baillie, the first translator of the Phenomenology into English. Wahl writes of Hegel’s intentions:

 

“It will be necessary to do for philosophy what Schleiermacher did for religion, ; to rediscover it starting from romanticism, but to rediscover philosophy with all its objectivity and as a fact of reason, and by that very act distinguish itself deeply from romanticism conceived as a simple aspiration. [...] Hegel opposes to the pietists as to the rationalists the enthusiasm of the artist, of the religious man, of the romantic philosopher.. His work appears as a vast generalisation and a transposition of what is also expressed in Hölderlin and Schleiermacher.” (195-96)

 

This is a reference to Schleiermacher’s Discourses on Religion to its Cultured Despisers. Wahl argues that Hegel’s alleged romanticism was only transitory, though it left its mark. Wahl says: “Hegel, arrived at the extreme point of romantic irrationalism, concluded that this irrationalism, as deep as it might appear, yet remained superficial in a certain degree. Being, life, love, cannot end with irreflection, but must be completed by reflection.” (195, 221) My view is that there is indeed an openness to experience in Hegel, but that it is unwarranted to describe this as irrational. It is more a matter of the work of reason not yet (never yet) being accomplished.. This openness continues into and is even strengthened in the late editions of the Encyclopaedia,; the objection is more that Hegel is by then overly careless or presumptuous in fitting new material into his ready-to hand categories.

 

More to follow

Stephen Cowley

 

 

From: 'Stephen Cowley' stephen.cowley@... [hegel]

Sent: Sunday, September 16, 2018 3:40 PM

To: hegel@yahoogroups..com

Subject: Re: [hegel] Some thoughts on Jean Wahl

 

 

[I pressed send by mistake. More to follow.

Stephen Cowley]

 

From: Stephen Cowley

Sent: Sunday, September 16, 2018 2:28 PM

To: Stephen Cowley

Subject: Re: [hegel] Some thoughts on Jean Wahl

 

I have now finished Wahl’s book and would like to share some of the highlights. Much of the book is a recapitulation of the Diltheyan interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology as growing from the intuitions/views of his youth as found in the early manuscripts on Christianity. The book also contains a translation and interpretation of the first two thirds of the Unhappy Consciousness section. This covers the first two parts on the reception of Judaism and Christianity (i.e. Miller, paras 206-18), but ends before the third part on Christian asceticism and its limits. The book tends to circle around its subjects, so I will organise the material thematically.

 

Logic and the Death of God

 

Hegel said: “The task of philosophy consists in uniting oppositions, in placing being in non-being as becoming, separation in the absolute as appearance of the absolute, finite in the infinite as life.” (Differenzschrift, 127; 97) The movement of the finite shows us that the truth is infinite. Hegel rejects Lessing’s idea that “sleep is the brother of death.” Hegel, according to Wahl, interprets the Incarnation and Atonement in terms of the logical distinction of particular and universal. Thus Jesus is particular, God the Father is universal.

 

Wahl endorses this account of Hegel’s heretical views when he concludes: “What the author of the Logic had, primitively, at the bottom of his soul, was a Christian vision of the cross and a Boehmean vision of the wrath of God.. [.......] there is in Hegel’s soul, united closely with these two ways of seeing, a third vision, that which, at the same time under a very different form, was expressed in certain poems of Blake, that which Hegel found in passages cited by Mosheim [in his Church History] which he copied out. “The good man is the only son of God whom the Father begets eternally. There is in souls something that is not created, and that is reason [....] What the Holy Spirit says of Christ, is all true of every divine man. All that is proper to the divine nature is proper to the divine man.” (Nohl, 387)” These heterodox citations, which deny the historical uniqueness of Christ, come from Meister Eckardt.

 

The Unhappy Consciousness

 

Wahl rehearses Hegel’s account of Greek religion. The unhappy consciousness is the bitter undertone to the destructiveness of comedy – of all great comedy, Wahl says. The unhappy consciousness does not just succeed Stoicism and Skepticism, it is present in them.

 

 

 

 

From: 'Stephen Cowley' stephen.cowley@... [hegel]

Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2018 12:28 PM

To: hegel@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [hegel] Some thoughts on Jean Wahl

 

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.

 

Romanticism

 

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 rom

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