On Sat, Jun 22, 2019 at 7:45 AM 'Stephen Cowley' stephen.cowley@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

I would like to continue this summary of some reading on Hegel and skepticism with a discussion of F.H. Jacobi’s Letters on Spinoza (1785) and dialogue David Hume on Faith (1787). In addition, I have come across the following as worthy of consideration:

• H.S. Harris’s commentary
• A few recent books and collections of essays published by Wilhelm Fink on the subject
• Stäudlin’s History of Skepticism (1794)
• Benedetto Croce’s theory of error.

I feel that Hegel is seeking a way forward from a rich philosophical tradition and recovering some of this material may shed light on the course of his presentation. Skepticism and Christianity have long co-existed so the progression of the five paragraphs needs to be justified as argument rather than historical narrative.

 

F.H. Jacobi

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) was a major intellectual conversation partner for Hegel, who wrote a chapter on him in the essay Faith and Knowledge (1802), reviewed his Collected Works (1815) and discussed his theory of “immediate knowledge” in the Encyclopaedia (1827, 1830). We find in Jacobi discussions of the unchangeableness of God and skepticism in close proximity. These shed some light on Hegel’s vocabulary though the necessary connection that Hegel suggests between the basic ideas is missing.

 

Jacobi was from near Düsseldorf and worked in the family merchant business in Frankfurt and Geneva in his early years. He became a Privy Counsellor and worked on the reform of economic and taxation policy in a small German principality and then in Bavaria. In the 1770s, Jacobi published two novels, Eduard Allwill and Woldemar, as well as essays on French literature and political and economic subjects. In 1779, he became financially independent through an inheritance and returned to live near Düsseldorf where he developed his literary and scientific interests. These are known to have included works of the Swiss-French Enlightenment – as is apparent from the dialogue on Hume - and Spinoza’s philosophy. At one point, he considered moving to Glasgow to study medicine (di Giovanni, 281). He knew personally and corresponded with figures known to Hegel, including Goethe, Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hamann, Lavater, Diderot and Hemsterhuis.

 

Letters on Spinoza

Jacobi’s fame grew when he published Letters to Moses Mendelssohn on the Theory of Spinoza (1785), which elaborated Jacobi’s claim that Gottfried Lessing had been a Spinozist at the end of his life. Mendelssohn (1729-86) died the following year and his Morgenstunden (Morning Hours, 1785) contains his response. This and the resulting literature became known as the Pantheismusstreit and dates to Hegel’s early years at Tübingen. Spinoza at the time was widely seen as a pantheist and fatalist. The Spinoza Letters analysed the relations of reason to revelation, the concept of a personal God and Spinoza’s rationalist view of religion. Lessing followed Spinoza, according to Jacobi, in deducing from the principle that nothing comes from nothing (ex nihil, nihil fit), that “The first cause cannot act in accordance with intentions or final causes.” (di Giovanni, 188) It must thus be eternal, necessary and, if thought in relation to time, unchanging. Jacobi writes:

 

“Lessing could not accept the idea of a personal, absolutely infinite being in unfailing enjoyment [in dem unveränderliche Genuße] of his supreme perfection. He associated an image of such infinite boredom with it, that he was troubled and pained by it. [...] Several people can testify that Lessing often and emphatically referred to the hen kai pan [one and all] as the sum-concept of his theology and philosophy. He spoke it and wrote it whenever the occasion presented itself, as his definitive motto.” (di Giovanni, 197-99)

 

Jacobi work employs the impersonal terminology for God in his exposition of Spinoza that we find in Hegel’s transition from skepticism to the divided consciousness, namely “the unchangeable” (das Unwandelbar). There are two such terms used interchangeably, unwandelbar (unchangeable) and unveränderlich (unalterable). Thus Jacobi, in expounding Spinoza, refers to “an indwelling cause of the world, eternally unalterable within itself” (eine inwohnende, ewig in sich unveränderliche Ursache der Welt). We find several instances in the exposition of his understanding of Spinoza sent to Hemsterhuis then forwarded to Mendelssohn. I will give the German to make this clear:

 

III. From all eternity therefore, the changeable has been with the unchangeable, the finite with the infinite, and whoever supposes a beginning of the finite, also assumes an origination from nothingness.

X The first [...] the primal being, the ever-present unchangeable real [...] this unique and infinite being of all beings Spinoza calls “God”, or substance. (di Giovanni, 217-19)

III. Von Ewigkeit her ist also den Wandelbaren bei dem Unwandelbaren, das Endliche bei dem Unendlichen gewesen, und wer ein Beginnen des Endlichen annimmt, der nimmt ein Entstehen aus dem Nichts an.

X. Das Erste [...] das Ur-sein, das allgegenwärtige unwandelbare Wirkliche [...] dieses einzige unendliche Wesen aller Wesen nennt Spinoza Gott, oder die Substanz. 

(Hauptschriften, 144-49; see also I, V, XVI).

This is not so clear in di Giovanni’s translation, which uses “permanent”, “unalterable” or “unfailing” for unwandelbar, as opposed to the “Unchangeable” of Miller’s translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology. The fame of the Pantheismusstreit in Germany would have assured the currency of this vocabulary among Hegel’s audience.

 

It is worth noting in passing that the reference to Spinoza as a “dead dog” and to Spinozism as a “spectre haunting Germany” (di Giovanni, 232) suggest that the fame of the Pantheismusstreit lasted into the era of Marx, as witness the start of the Communist Manifesto (1848) and Afterword to Capital (1873). There have been some murmurings of late (possibly more) about the Spinoza-Marx connection.

 

The second edition of the Spinoza Letters (1789) was twice as long and contained seven essays appended to the main text. In the first of these (1.IV) we read of the world as a whole: “in der Tat das Ganze und jener Teil, der Substanz nach, nur Eins ist. Diese nannte daher Parmenides mit recht das Eine, Unendliche, Unwandelbare.” (in fact, the whole and each part, according to substance, is only one. This Parmenides rightly named the One, Infinite, Unchangeable.” (Hauptschriften, 221) Here we see a precedent for Hegel’s idea of the Unchangeable in the Phenomenology. It is part of a heterodox tradition of natural theology dating back to Parmenides, but whose main modern representative was Spinoza. The idea of not unknown in the Bible (e.g. Malachi 3.6), but this appears not to be central. The question between Jacobi and Mendelssohn was whether the theology of Spinoza’s Ethics could be reworked as a rational underpinning of the biblical theology of Spinoza’s broadly rationalist Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Mendelssohn argued in two chapters of Morning Hours that this was feasible. Jacobi objected to the idea. The Spinoza Letters finishes in an impassioned polemical sermon the tone of which can probably be explained partly by personal factors, but also because Christianity is less easily reconcilable to a purely rationalist reading of scripture than the version of Judaism espoused by Mendelssohn. 

 

Jacobi cites Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: “I want now to call this pure, original unchangeable consciousness transcendental apperception.” (A107) One feature of Hegel’s treatment of the unchangeable in the emergence of the divided consciousness is its status in part as metaphysical substrate, but also in an ambiguously subjective mode. The relation of these is a key to Chapter Four of the Phenomenology. Both are present in Jacobi, but mere juxtaposition does not shed light on the logical relations between the two themes.

 

David Hume on Belief

The Pantheismusstreit was the literary-philosophical background for Jacobi’s next work David Hume on Faith, or Realism and Idealism (1787). This is a compression of three intended dialogues on Hume’s concept of belief, the realist theory of perception, and the rationalism of Leibniz respectively. It is particularly the first of these that sheds light on the debates on skepticism in Hegel’s day.

 

In both the Spinoza Letters and David Hume, Jacobi cites Pascal’s epigram that “Nature confounds the Pyrrhonians, and reason the dogmatists.” (di Giovanni, 204, 254) We live only through belief, but these beliefs are not immune to inquiry (skepsis). We can see in this the same desire to incorporate skepticism within a philosophy that is found in Hegel’s essay on Schulze, though the resources brought to the task are different.

 

Jacobi cites Hume’s Enquiries (1748-51), particularly the closing essay “On the Academic or sceptical philosophy”. There was a German translation of these in 1754. As happened in British 18th century philosophy (Thomas Reid, Richard Price, John Taylor), Jacobi seeks to correct Hume’s description of belief as a species of “sentiment or feeling” no subject to the will. In place of the idea of it as “a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object” (271), Jacobi recovers the idea of logical judgement about an object external to the mind. He falls short of Condillac (and James Mylne in Glasgow) by asserting that belief in external objects is immediate, rather than inferred from the sense of touch.

 

In passing, we find reference to “the concept” in the sense of the concept( s) by which God creates the world. This matches the idealised use of the term in Hegel.

 

The second part of the dialogue, on the realist theory of perception, draws us further into the worlds of Thomas Reid and the Swiss thinker Charles Bonnet amongst others. Jacobi refers earlier to Bonnet “whose Collected Works I had just about learned by heart”. (di Giovanni, 197) He cites Bonnet:

“collect your being at the point of a simple perception, so that you become once and for all aware [...] that the I and the Thou, the internal consciousness and the external object, must be present both at once in the soul, even in the most primordial and simple of perception.” (di Giovanni, 277)

This evokes the omnipresence of selfhood in perception, on lines familiar to readers of Condillac and James Mylne. Jacobi then discusses temporality in relation to the nature of causality.

 

In the third part, the idea of existence outside the mind leads on to a discussion of the ontological argument and whether existence is a predicate.. He argues, citing an early essay by Kant, that existence is not a relation to a thing, but the thing itself. 

 

History and Society

In the Leibniz section of the Hume dialogue, Jacobi writes in the person of his conversation partner:

 

“My opinion is that the hereditary flaw of mankind, its primordial cancer, is that it ignores the kernel for the husk, the real thing for the mere show, the essence fro the form. Religion has everywhere degenerated into ceremonies and superstition; civil union into political machinery; philosophy into prattle; art into industry. And why should not reason too degenerate into the mere use of its forms and methods.” (di Giovanni, 319)

 

This dates from 1787, i.e. before the start of the French Revolution and indicates a source of Christian social criticism independent of the Deism/Atheism of the revolutionaries. It is remarkable that Hegel gives little direct attention to the Christian Enlightenment in Francophone Europe, i.e. Condillac and Bonnet. It may thus be that Jacobi is a stand-in for them. Hegel’s own enthusiasm for the French Revolution as an event was later qualified by similar reservations to Jacobi’s about the nature and implications of its underlying ideology.

 

On history, Jacobi writes: “Surely the keen and serious observer cannot fail to notice that all our knowledge is based on positivity, and the moment we abandon the latter, we end up in dreams and empty fictions. [...] we must accept that at any given time the composition of human reason is determined by the way of the world, – and never by reason on its own.” (di Giovanni, 320-324) Here we find not only Hegelian vocabulary, but thoughts reworked by Hegel in the light of his own historically-informed rationalism. Jacobi also wrote of two patriotic Spartans mentioned by Plutarch:

 

“They had no philosophy, or rather, their philosophy was just history. And can living philosophy ever be anything but history? As are the objects, so too are the ideas; as the ideas, so the desires and passions; as the desires and passions, so too the actions; as the actions so the principles and the whole of knowledge. What caused the swift and universal reception of the doctrine of a Helvetius or a Diderot? Nothing but the fact that the doctrine really captured within itself the truth of the century.” (di Giovanni, 239)

 

This truth was disputed, albeit in different ways, by Jacobi and Hegel.. It led Jacobi to reject Spinoza (“Spinozism is atheism.” di Giovanni, 233) and Hegel to rework him through the idea that substance was also subject. However, from the similarities it is easy to see why Hegel would have chosen Jacobi’s ideas as a literary conversation partner.

 

Conclusions

There are instances more generally in literary history when skeptical doubt gives way to faith: the book of Ecclesiastes, the Meditations of Descartes and, in a different key, the writings of Pascal. However, there are other occasions where doubt succeeds religious certainty: Pierre Bayle and David Hume for example travel in the opposite direction, towards resignation and doubt. The ancient thinkers Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus bear no apparent relation to the emergence of Christianity: the philosophers St Paul met in Athens are called Epicureans and Stoics, not skeptics (Acts 17). Hence the progression of ideas in Hegel towards the divided consciousness cannot be explained as a mere recounting of history. So we are entitled to look to more recent writers to understand the relations of ideas at work. In this regard the Pantheismusstreit is clearly a significant part of the German intellectual inheritance that Hegel absorbed in his early years. It rivals Kant as an influence on Hegel and in some areas overshadows the Leibniz-Wolff tradition of metaphysical rationalism. The fundamental ideas of skepticism, the unchangeable nature of God and the omnipresence of self-consciousness were clearly known to this literary inheritance, but Hegel’s use of it is either original to him or stems from another source.

 

References

Altmann, Alexander. Moses Mendelssohn: a biographical Study. London: Littman, 1998.

Buée, Jean-Michel. Savoir immédiat et savoir absolu: la lecture de Jacobi par Hegel. Paris: Garnier, 2011.

Hume, David. Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals. 1748-51.

Hume, David. Vermischte Schriften. Hamburg, 1754.

Jacobi, F.H. The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill. Ed. di Giovanni. Montreal: McGill UP, 2009.

Jacobi, F.H. and Mendelssohn, M. Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit. Hrsg. Scholz. Mauthner, 1912.

[There are also Meiner editions of Jacobi’s German texts.]

Mendelssohn, Moses. Last Works. Illinois: UP, 2012. [This contains the Morning Hours. There is another translation.]

 

 

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

Sent: Monday, May 27, 2019 3:28 PM

To: hegel@yahoogroups.com

Subject: [hegel] Notes on the skeptical self-consciousness

 

 

Hi there,

 

I’d like to devote a bit of energy to the problem of the origin of the unchangeable wing of the unhappy or divided consciousness out of the skeptical standpoint in Chapter Four of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (paras 205-08). This follows from the discussion of the unhappy consciousness in a previous thread.

 

The Skeptical Origin of the Divided Consciousness

There are several lines of inquiry I’d like to pursue. These include:

• The Berlin Phenomenology
• Hegel’s Essay on Skepticism
• Jacobi’s book on Hume
• Labarrière and Jarzyk’s commentary
• Michael Forster and Bertrand Quentin’s books on Hegel and Skepticism
• Essays by Claus Düsing and Klaus Vieweg
• Anything else I’ve forgotten or that anyone else can suggest.

I don’t expect these all to be fruitful for my purposes, but negative answers are still progress of a sort.

 

The Berlin Phenomenology

Hegel gave five sets of lectures on self-consciousness in Berlins on the basis of the Encyclopedia (1817, 1827, 1830). However, the structure of this treatment is different from that in the Phenomenology. In Berlin, we proceed directly from the economic (in a broad sense) concepts of desire and work, master and servant to their institutional embodiment in the structures of the family, civil society and the state. There is no historical diversion through Graeco-Roman philosophy and the unhappy consciousness, as in the Phenomenology (Chapter 4b). Instead, similar material is displaced into discussions of education or given in popular lectures on history.

 

The reason seems to be that the Berlin lectures are a systematic presentation of the content of philosophy, rather than the historical presentation of the emergence of the systematic viewpoint in the Phenomenology.

 

There are English versions of the Berlin material in the translations and commentaries of Wallace/Miller (Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind) and Petry (Subjective Spirit, Berlin Phenomenology).

 

Hegel’s Essay on Skepticism

This essay on The Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy first appeared in the Critical Journal of Philosophy (1801-03) and there is an English translation in Between Kant and Hegel (Eds. Giovanni & Harris. Hacker, 1985). It elaborates several arguments about the project of thinking in the absence of knowledge claims. Here I wish to focus solely on matters that affect the interpretation of the arising of the unchangeable from skepticism in Chapter Four of the Phenomenology. The main argument of the article is an engagement with Schulze, the author of Aenesidemus (1794) and Critique of Theoretical Philosophy (2 vols, 1801). Hegel points out that Schulze confines the field of doubt to theoretical reason. Unlike the ancient skeptics, Schulze excludes the facts of consciousness, analytic statements, and physics which “sets all doubt all defiance” from the scope of skeptical doubt. In the remaining range of “theoretical philosophy”, he opposes dogmatism and skepticism and takes the part of the latter. Hegel argues:

 

“Without the determination of the true relationship of skepticism to philosophy, and without the insight that skepticism itself in its inmost heart is at one with every true philosophy, and hence that there is a philosophy which is neither skepticism nor dogmatism, and is thus both at once, without this, all the histories, and reports, and new editions of skepticism lead to a dead end.” (322-23)

 

In this sense, Hegel identifies Plato’s Parmenides as a skeptical work: “it is itself the negative side of the cognition of the absolute, and directly presupposes reason as the positive side. [...] This skepticism that comes on the scene in its pure explicit shape in the Parmenides can, however, be found implicit in every genuine philosophical system.” (323-24) Hegel illustrates his concept of reason by Spinoza’s definition of a cause of itself. He observes that Zweifel (doubt) is an inadequate translation for the skeptical epoche (suspension of judgement).

 

Hegel offers a rewriting of the history of skepticism  in line with this classification, adverting to Stäudlin’s History of Skepticism (2 vols, 1794). Pyrrho was the founder of skepticism. His “singular personality became increasingly blurred by time, and the philosophical interest emerged in its purity.” This was found in the “10 tropes” (turnings) of early skepticism, which were directed against knowledge from the senses. It appears to be this that is referred to in the Preface to the Phenomenology when Hegel says:

 

“The skepticism that is directed against the whole range of phenomenal consciousness, on the other hand, renders the spirit for the first time competent to examine what truth is.” (para 78)

 

Only in its later developments did a further five tropes appear (and then a further two) directed against reason itself. Hegel gives an account of the five tropes, along with his answers to them. To the first, diversity of opinions among philosophers, he points out that disagreement presupposes a minimal prior level of agreement and that one can thus search out identity behind apparent conflicts. For the other four, reason is at home with considerations of infinite regress, relationship, assumption and circular argument – and not disabled by them. This is evident in the paradox that appears when it is noticed that statements of universal skeptical doubt are included in their own scope.

 

Hegel extends his argument by questioning the separation of thought and being that he sees as an assumption of modern skepticism. This is a version of Thomas Reid’s critique of the skeptical assumptions of Hume and the “way of ideas” in Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764). This British debate was familiar in Germany through the translations of Garve. Hegel observes of the skeptic:

 

“This sundering of the rational, in which thinking and being are one, and the absolute insistence on this opposition, in other words the intellect made absolute, constitutes the endlessly repeated and universally applied ground of this dogmatic skepticism.” (339)

 

The significance of this for interpretation of the skeptical self-consciousness in Chapter 4b of the Phenomenology is we ought not to assume that the “unchangeable” counterpart to the wavering skeptic is a finite dogmatism that might be aligned with an earthly authority. For Schulze’s dogmatism and skepticism alike “the truth resides in temporality.” (330) Instead, Hegel’s idea of the skeptic ought to evoke in us the idea of reason, which in Hegel’s reading of Spinoza and others, is akin to the idea of God.

 

I omit consideration of Hegel’s discussion of Schulze’s analysis of Locke, Leibniz and Kant, as the key point relates to the discussion of ancient skepticism. It is worth noting that he cites Jacobi’s remark on modern skepticism, that “we get sick of it, once all the moves and turns are known.” (Werke III, 29-30). We now turn to consider Jacobi’s essay on Hume.

 

More to follow

Stephen Cowley