Russian Journal of

Philosophy & Humanities

Volume 1 · #2 · 2017
Establisher—Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy

Editor-in-chief Valery Anashvili

Guest editor Kirill Chepurin
Editorial B oard: Alexander Bikbov, Vyacheslav Danilov, Dmitriy Kralechkin,
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Rouslan Khestanov, Igor Chubarov
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Abu-Dhabi), Boris Groys (New York), Gasan Guseynov (Basel), Klaus Held (Wuppertal),
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Victor Molchanov (Moscow), Frithjof Rodi (Bochum), Blair Ruble (Washington, D. C . ),
Sergey Sinelnikov-Murylev (Moscow), Maxim Viktorov (Moscow),
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 Contents

1 German Idealism after Finitude

3 Daniel Whistler. Abstraction and Utopia in Early German Idealism
23 Adrian Johnston. Contingency, Pure Contingency —​Without Any
Further Determination: Modal Categories in Hegelian Logic
49 Alex D ubilet. Speculation and Infinite Life: Hegel and Meister Eckhart
on the Critique of Finitude
71 Kirill Chepurin. Beginning with Kant: Utopia, Immanence, and the
Origin of German Idealism
91 Frank Ruda. The Beginning of Spirit As We Know It: Hegel’s Mother
115 Oxana Timofeeva. The Owl and the Angel
135 Michael O’Neill Burns. Kierkegaard, Fichte and the Subject of
Idealism
155 Dave Mesing. Debordian Strategists: Agamben and Virno on the
Coming Politics

ii
German Idealism after Finitude

I N the landscape of contemporary thought, German Idealism has

again become a central —​and contested —​territory. As borders are
being re-drawn, new alliances formed, and large-scale theoretical
battles fought, major lines of conflict and division pass again through Kant,
Hegel and Schelling. This has to do not only with the fact that German
Idealism was a foundational epoch of thought whose influences resonate
across the past two centuries and into today —​although that is, of course,
a prominent factor in its contemporary uses, employed, for instance, po-
lemically by Quentin Meillassoux in his influential (and divisive) diagno-
sis of the “correlationism” inhering in the dominant idealist-phenomeno-
logical tradition. The new prominence enjoyed today by German Idealism
is also informed by the realization that, far from being ‘merely’ historically
or genealogically important, it re-emerges today as an important resource
for working through the current theoretical predicament, given not least the
striking similarity of the philosophical situation. After all, just as German
Idealism itself constituted a reaction against skepticism, irrationalism or
linguistic metacritique —​so, too, the new philosophical interest, critical or
constructive, in German Idealism is defined in no small part by contempo-
rary thinking’s attempt to move beyond postmodernism, philosophy of lan-
guage or phenomenology and towards a post-deconstructive “speculative”
stage, revisiting and revising such concepts as the absolute, infinity, nature,
divinity or speculation and re-defining what it means to talk about or prac-
tice materialism, realism, speculative ontology or even Naturphilosophie.
Those are just two factors that may help explain the current interest
in new interpretations of German Idealism, attuned to novel theoretical
frameworks; the reader will surely be able to adduce more. In this short
introduction, my aim is not to go into detail, and I will not dwell here on
the myriad of books, published or forthcoming, academic or more specu-
lative, that take it upon themselves to rethink many pivotal aspects of the
German idealist project(s). I will just note that, generally, the fact that we
again find ourselves in a battle for the speculative, the infinite and even
the transcendental does not equal going back to the philosophical map
of Europe in the 1790s or 1800s. The current speculative and ontological
turn is essentially constructive in character: the task today is not to decon-
struct but, after the deconstruction has already taken place, to construct
something new by experimenting on and with philosophical (as well as
theological and other) material. When it comes to German Idealism in
particular, what is at stake is reconstructing the speculative gesture itself

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 1
and its conditions of possibility in a new phase of thinking —t​ he stakes
that coincide crucially with those of the entire turn beyond the postmod-
ern. The question of why German Idealism has gained new relevance to-
day or why it is genealogically important implies thus also a working with
German Idealism —​as both an allegiance and an experimentation.
That kind of working-with is precisely the goal of this collection of pa-
pers under the heading “New Life of German Idealism,” written by some
of the best established and upcoming scholars belonging to what may be
broadly called the new generation in continental German Idealism stud-
ies —​the generation through which German Idealism acquires new life.
What these papers share is the contemporary speculative context from
which they approach German Idealism, and the sense of its philosophi-
cal relevance for the present and future. The main intention behind them
as I see it is not so much to provide an analysis of existing approaches
to and debates around German Idealism as to offer new interpretations
and open up new conceptual pathways. The papers are arranged so as to
move broadly from the more “abstract” topics and conceptualities (con-
tingency, totality, utopia, immanence, or the concept of abstraction itself)
to the more “human” or “concrete” (anthropology, history or subjectiv-
ity). My hope is that the reader will notice not just the shared theoreti-
cal backgrounds, but also all the ways, big and small, in which these texts
conceptually echo each other. There is, for example, a certain configura-
tion of immanence, groundlessness and impersonality to be found in all
of them: an immanent objective generation of possibilities (Johnson); an
immanent, impersonal and non-subjective inheritance of spirit (Ruda); an
inhuman community (Timofeeva); impersonal immanence as such (Du-
bilet); the inhuman totality of utopian space (Whistler); a groundless and
immanently expanding utopian origin (Chepurin); or an impersonal on-
tological reading of the Kierkegaardian subject (Burns). Another point of
resonance is e.g. the conceptualization of ohne Warum, “without a why,” in
Johnson’s and Dubilet’s papers. Furthermore, in all the papers, even when
it comes to concepts such as the human, subjectivity or, say, methodology,
these are always ontologically grounded or inflected —b ​ e it as an ontolo-
gy of subjectivity (Burns), anthropological inheritance (Ruda), immanent
life (Dubilet) or contingency (Johnson), an abyss between reality and free-
dom (Timofeeva), or ontologies of the utopian origin (Chepurin) and uto-
pian space (Whistler). Ultimately, no matter the specific aspects of Ger-
man Idealism they focus on, what these papers show is what can be done
with German Idealism today and how it can be re-worked in contem-
porary, systematic and constructive, and not just de(con)structive ways.

Kirill Chepurin

2 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
Abstraction and Utopia in Early
German Idealism

Daniel Whistler
Senior Lecturer, Philosophy Department, Liverpool University.
Address: Mulberry Court, Mulberry Str., L69 7ZY Liverpool, UK.
E-mail: [email protected].
Keywords: Friedrich Schelling; Louis Marin; abstraction; utopia; early
German idealism.
Abstract: This paper is based on a close reading of the first five proposi-
tions of Schelling’s Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie
(1801). The author argues that what is distinctive and significant
about these propositions is that they both describe and create an
ideal space determined by an athetic logic. The first five proposi-
tions of the 1801 Darstellung are intended to transport the reader
outside of time and space, outside of affirmation and negation, to
a neutralised utopia defined by three functions alone: abstraction,
entailment and definition.
The author considers this intention in the context of German
Idealist discussions of abstraction: Hegel’s critique of the abstract
particular and abstractive methodology, as well as Fichte’s and
early Schelling’s attempt to theorise abstraction as the starting
point for the philosophical enterprise. This leads the author to
consider what a philosophical text that practices abstraction and
construction (rather than deduction, inference, or explanation)
looks like, and he draws upon the early work of Louis Marin to
characterise such a text as utopic. In so doing, he attempts to
demonstrate the significance and cogency of a nondialectical,
a-Hegelian tradition in early German Idealism that culminates in
the opening pages of Schelling’s 1801 Darstellung.

3
 Vous utopisez à perte de vue.
Diderot to the Abbé Morellet1

§1. Definition. I call reason absolute reason, or reason insofar as it is

conceived as the total indifference of the subjective and objective...
Reason’s thought is foreign to everyone: to conceive it as absolute,
and thus to come to the standpoint I require, one must abstract
from what does the thinking. For the one who performs this ab-
straction reason immediately ceases to be something subjective, as
most people imagine it. It can of course no longer be conceived as
something objective either…
§2. Outside reason is nothing, and in it is everything. If reason is con-
ceived as we have asked in §1, one immediately becomes aware that
nothing could be outside it…
Remark. There is no philosophy except from the standpoint of
the absolute…
§3. Reason is simply one and simply self-identical…
§4. The ultimate law for the being of reason, and, since there is noth-
ing outside reason, for all being (because it is comprehended with-
in reason) is the law of identity, which with respect to all being is
expressed as A=A. The proof follows immediately from §3 and the
propositions that precede it…
§5. Definition. I call the A of the first position the subject, to differen-
tiate it from that of the second, the predicate. 2

1. Denis Diderot, Apologie de l’Abbé Galiani in Oeuvres politiques, ed. Paul

Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1963), 91.
2. F.W.J. Schelling, Werke, ed. K.F.A. Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856-61), 4:114-7;
Presentation of My System of Philosophy, trans. Michael Vater, in Philosophical
Forum 32.4 (2001), 349-51.

4 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
S UCH are the first five propositions of Schelling’s Darstellung
meines Systems der Philosophy, published in May 1801. What fol-
lows attends to what is distinctive and significant about these
lines; that is, I argue that not only do they describe a kind of ideal space
for philosophising outside of existence, subjectivity, objectivity, action
and reaction —​a space determined by an a-thetic logic —​these open-
ing lines also perform this logic themselves. The first five propositions
of the 1801 Darstellung are intended to transport the reader outside of
time and space, outside of affirmation and negation, to a neutralised
utopia defined by three functions alone: abstraction, entailment and
definition. What is conspicuously missing from these propositions is
any form of positing, whether thetic, antithetic or synthetic. For Fichte,
Hegel and even Kant, some form of Setzen makes experience possible,
gives rise to being and existence or motors the dialectical movement
of reality. Schelling’s text, however, is indifferent to all positing. From
a Hegelian or even Fichtean perspective, such a philosophical space
is impossible and can only be attained by means of an illegitimate act
of transcendence, i.e. ‘abstraction’. The task of this paper is to get to
grips with this Schellingian performance of abstraction, thereby mak-
ing sense of the impossible space which opens the 1801 Darstellung.
What is more, the chronological significance of these proposi-
tions should not be lost from view. Crudely put, in May 1801 Schelling
stuck his neck out and began philosophising for himself. The Darstel-
lung meines Systems der Philosophy has the emphasis placed firmly
on ‘meines’; here Schelling becomes a Schellingian. However, the 1801
Darstellung, is a tricky character, one which resists our standard catego-
ries for interpreting German Idealism: there is no dialectic, no move-
ment, no time or history, nor even —​despite Schelling’s reputation —​
any mystical intuition. In fact, at this time Schelling falls foul of many
of the accusations that Hegel will surreptitiously make of him in the
Phänomenologie: just as Hegel complains of him, he does proceed to
the absolute ‘like a shot from a pistol’, he does construct schema af-
ter schema ‘monochromatically’, he does mix philosophy up with nat-
ural science, mathematics and many other disciplines, he does indeed
put forward a rigorously Eleatic monism that does away with finite in-
dividuals (at least as one normally understands them). The task fac-
ing any post-Hegelian reconstruction of Schelling’s 1801 Darstellung is,
therefore, to defend it against the widespread intuition that the above
somehow leads directly to the invalidation of Schelling’s thought, that
merely to subscribe to these tenets is prima facie to practise bad phi-
losophy. This task involves making explicit the cogency of Schelling’s
thinking precisely as monochromatic and Eleatic, etc. What follows is

DANIEL WHISTLER 5
a very small contribution to this task: an attempt to demonstrate the
significance and cogency of a non-dialectical, a-Hegelian tradition in
early German Idealism that culminates in the opening pages of Schell-
ing’s Darstellung, a tradition knotted around the concept of abstraction.

1. Impossible Transcendence
The poverty of the abstract is supposedly a decisive moral to be drawn
from German Idealism; hence, the Hegelian dictum, ‘Think abstract-
ly? Sauve qui peut!’3 Or, more fully, ‘the abstract universal… is an iso-
lated, imperfect moment of the Notion and has no truth.’4 What I want
to suggest, however, is that prior to and in opposition to Hegel’s dia-
lectical suspicion of the abstract, there is a generative conception of
abstraction to be found elsewhere in German Idealism —i​ n, what one
might call, the utopic strand of German Idealism.
One way-in to this other strand is through Hegel’s own critique
of transcendental methodology, particularly the limit argument he re-
peatedly deploys against it. The point here is to take seriously Hegel’s
implicit contention that there is in fact a distinctive and very different
way of doing philosophy at play within German Idealism here being
attacked and refuted, a utopic alternative. The Enzyklopädie Logik ver-
sion of the limit argument runs,

It is the supreme inconsistency to admit, on the one hand, that the

understanding is cognizant only of appearances and to assert, on the
other,… cognition cannot go any further, this is the natural, absolute
restriction of human knowing… Something is only known, or even
felt, to be a restriction, or a defect, if one is at the same time beyond
it… There can be no knowledge of limit unless the Unlimited is on
this side within consciousness.5

Or, as Hegel summarises it in the Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der

Philosophie, ‘Kant says that we must remain at what is one-sided, at the
very moment when he is passing out beyond it.’6 Hegel criticises Kant

3. G.W.F. Hegel, ‘Who Thinks Abstractly?’ in Hegel: Texts and Commentary, ed.
and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor, 1966), 113.
4. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Prometheus, 1969),
604.
5. G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T.F. Geraets et al (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1992), §60.
6. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane and
Frances H. Simson (London: Routledge, 1896), 3:472. An early version of this
argument is also to be found in G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Wal-

6 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 for transcending the limits of human cognition at the same time as
deeming such transcendence impossible, i.e. in order to limit knowl-
edge, he must himself have already gone beyond such limitations to
recognise them as limits. By Kant’s own lights, therefore, philosophy
seems to be methodologically constituted by an impossible transcend-
ence. The transcendental philosopher illegitimately takes up an impos-
sible position outside of the limits of experience from which to conduct
a critique of the given. This is a methodological standpoint that ex-
ists under erasure or, to put it slightly differently, the philosopher here
generates an impossible space, a no-place —w ​ hich is simultaneously a
good-place from which to do critical philosophy. The transcendental
philosopher creates a methodological utopia for herself, and it is the
utopianism of this transcendental methodology that bears the brunt of
Hegel’s criticism here.
Hegel closely ties two further criticisms to the limit argument. First,
the poverty of immediacy: as he writes of Kant, ‘This standpoint lacks
mediation, and thus remains at the immediate,’7 echoing the ‘like a shot
from a pistol’ line from the Phänomenologie8. Transcendental methodol-
ogy immediately posits itself in a place in which its cognition is already
secure. It knows prematurely. Hegel articulates this more fully as follows,
‘There soon creeps in the mistaken project of wanting to have cognition
before we have any cognition, or of wanting to go into the water before
we have learned to swim.’9 The Kantian’s impossible transcendence is also
to be understood as an illegitimate way of claiming knowledge too soon.
The philosopher immediately posits herself outside of the limits of cog-
nition in order to determine such limits. This moment of transcendence
always occurs too early: not only is it impossible, it is also premature.
Moreover, and appropriately enough, Hegel goes on to identify this
methodology with the production of the abstract. He writes, transcen-
dental philosophy gives rise to ‘the empty abstractions of an under-

ter Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), 89. For a recent recon-
struction of the limit argument that places it at the centre of Hegel’s philoso-
phy, see A.W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of
Things (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), 164-6. Moore earlier writes of Hegel’s critique
of Kant in this regard, ‘Can Kant, when he draws a limit to our thick sense-mak-
ing, do so from anywhere inside that limit, or must he do so from somewhere
outside it?... Must we not therefore already have taken a step back from the hu-
man standpoint?’ (138-9) The inhumanity of abstraction will soon become ap-
parent in regard to Schelling’s programme for a philosophy of nature; see fn. 38.
7. Hegel, History of Philosophy, 3:475.
8. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1977), §27.
9. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, §41.

DANIEL WHISTLER 7
standing which keeps itself in the abstract universal’.10 This is ‘a rad-
ically abstract thinking’.11 And its abstract character is a direct con-
sequence of the above: the philosopher who immediately transcends
limits to determine them prematurely from outside can know them
merely externally. She imposes properties onto phenomena from above,
rather than making them explicit from within. Cognition is forever ab-
sehen von, set apart from what is known. It is against such a paradigm
of abstract and impossible transcendence that Hegel puts forward the
model of dialectic, which ‘is not brought to bear on the thought-de-
terminations from outside; on the contrary, it must be considered as
dwelling within them.’12 Dialectic is immersive.13

2. Generative Abstraction
It is Fichte who had first fully articulated the utopic methodology that
Hegel later criticised14; indeed, Fichte is very explicit about the utopic

10. Hegel, History of Philosophy, 3:472.

11. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, §52.
12. Ibid., §41.
13. This is not to say that Hegel himself merely employs ‘abstract’ and its cognates
in a negative sense; the word retains some ambivalence in his mature thought.
As Osborne puts it, ‘In its adjectival form “abstract” (abstrakt) thus remained a
predominantly derogatory term in Hegel’s lexicon. It denotes the one-sidedness
and finitude of the concepts of the understanding… For Hegel, “bad” abstrac-
tions are the one-sided, oppositional abstractions of the understanding, consid-
ered as if they are true forms of knowledge. “Good” abstraction is the concrete
abstraction of the absolute idea, containing within itself the systematic relations
between the abstractions of the understanding.’ Peter Osborne, ‘The Reproach
of Abstraction’ in Radical Philosophy 127 (2004), 25. Such ambivalence is even
more marked in Hegel’s early thought (during his ‘Schelling-discipleship’ in
1801, in particular); for example, G.W.F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s
and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Alba-
ny: SUNY, 1977), 97, 113. It is also the case that Hegel’s philosophy can be said
to only incompletely ward off the ‘reproach of abstraction’ itself: for accounts
of Hegel’s unacknowledged commitment to methodological ‘bad’ abstractions,
see Lisabeth During, ‘Hegel’s Critique of Transcendence’ in Man and World 21
(1988), 287-305 and Andrew Buchwalter, ‘Hegel, Marx and the Concept of Im-
manent Critique’ in Journal of the History of Philosophy 29.9 (1991), 260-7.
14. While it is explicitly Kant’s name that is deployed by Hegel in the above, the
method of abstraction is still obscured in his work. The clearest commitment
to abstraction in the critical philosophy occurs in a methodological coda to
the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’: ‘In the transcendental aesthetic we shall, there-
fore, first isolate sensibility, by taking away from it everything which the un-
derstanding thinks through its concepts, so that nothing may be left save em-
pirical intuition. Secondly, we shall also separate off from it everything which
belongs to sensation, so that nothing may remain save pure intuition and the

8 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
act of impossible transcendence that orients his philosophy. In the Er-
ste Einleitung he writes,

A finite rational being possesses nothing whatsoever beyond experi-

ence. The entire contents of his thinking are comprised within experi-
ence. These same conditions necessarily apply to the philosopher, and
thus it appears incomprehensible how he could ever succeed in ele-
vating himself above experience. The philosopher, however, is able to
engage in abstraction. That is to say, by means of a free act of thinking
he is able to separate things that are connected with each other within
experience… and when he does so he has abstracted from experience
and has thereby succeeded in elevating himself above experience.15

For Fichte, abstraction designates precisely that act by which the philos-
opher incomprehensibly rises above experience. The human is defined
as what is limited to experience and this limitation ‘necessarily applies
to the philosopher’ —a​ nd yet, nonetheless and almost miraculously, by
means of abstraction the philosopher generates an impossible space be-
yond experience from which genuine philosophy can be conducted. The
philosopher manages to achieve what no human can: utopia.
Hence, the impossible but successful experiment of abstraction
founds philosophy, according to Fichte, and to this extent he adheres
to the Hegelian caricature of transcendental methodology rehearsed
above. However, Fichte counters that the type of knowledge that arises
from this initial act of abstraction is not one-sided, empty or poor, but
richer than it otherwise would have been. This is a form of abstraction
that is generative: it makes appear to the philosopher aspects of reality
not evident before. This is how Breazeale puts it,

We are no more conscious of our immediate ‘feelings’ than we are

of the immediate unity of subject and object that is expressed in the
Tathandlung… [They] become objects of thetic consciousness only
within philosophical reflection, where they are abstracted from the
full, rich context of lived experience.16

mere form of appearances.’ (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans.

Norman Kemp-Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1929), A22/B36) See also Im-
manuel Kant, ‘The Jäsche Logic’ in Lectures on Logic, ed. and trans. J. Michael
Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), §6.
15. J.G. Fichte, ‘An Attempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre’ in In-
troductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Indian-
apolis: Hackett, 1994), 10-1.
16. Daniel Breazeale, ‘Fichte’s Abstract Realism’ in Daniel O. Dahlstrom and Mi-
chael Baur (eds), The Emergence of German Idealism (Washington: CUA Press,
1999), 112; my emphasis.

DANIEL WHISTLER 9
Only by neutralising ‘lived experience’ in abstraction does properly
philosophical content come to consciousness.
Moreover, Fichte is very clear, and this is central to what follows,
abstraction is not negation. One does not actively cancel that from
which one abstracts, one becomes indifferent to it. Abstraction is the
proper operation of indifference. In Fichte’s words, ‘The concept… is
here not thought of at all —​either positively or negatively.’17 The ab-
stracted element is not posited in any form; there is a suspension of
judgment (an epochē), rather than an antithetic judgment. Fichte’s in-
sistence on the fundamental difference between abstraction and nega-
tion needs to be contrasted with Hegel’s collapsing of abstraction into
another modality of negation. Here, for example, is Hegel’s definition
of abstraction in ‘Who Thinks Abstractly?’, ‘This is abstract thinking:
to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a
murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this sim-
ple quality.’18 For Hegel, abstraction ‘annuls’, and in so doing, the he-
gemony of the dialectic, motored by negation, is preserved. Neverthe-
less, there is a line of thought in early German Idealism that insists
forcefully on the fundamental distinction between abstraction and ne-
gation, as evidenced in Fichte and, as we shall see, in the Schelling of
1801.
To emphasise: since abstraction is not negation for Fichte, a philos-
ophy premised on it possesses (at least) one non-dialectical moment.
Abstraction cannot be subsumed into a dialectical play of negation and
negation of negation, for it obeys a different logic. The early philoso-
phies of Fichte and Schelling, premised as they are on this initial act of
abstraction, offer therefore something different to the hegemony of di-
alectic, concreteness and immanent critique bequeathed by Hegelian
thought, a utopic alternative within early German Idealism resistant to
the pull of the concrete universal.

3. Fichte’s Problem —v​ ia Manet

Nevertheless, Fichte’s account of abstraction is limited in one regard
at least and I wish to name the limitation manifest here the problem
of ‘the immune transcendental’. That is, Fichte proposes that one be-
gin philosophising by abstracting from the object of intuition to isolate
the self or the intuiting activity: ‘One should continue to abstract from
everything possible, until something remains from which it is total-

17. Fichte, ‘New Presentation’, 39.

18. Hegel, ‘Who Thinks Abstractly?’, 117; my emphasis.

10 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
ly impossible to abstract. What remains is the pure I.’19 For Fichte, the
abstracting I remains a limit; it is what is left over after the most thor-
oughgoing procedure of abstraction has removed every object of con-
sciousness. Moreover, this I is unabstractable precisely, it seems, be-
cause it is what makes the activity possible in the first place. The tran-
scendental condition of abstraction cannot itself be abstracted; it is
itself immune from the process. The self remains untouched by its own
operation of abstraction.
This logic can be further illustrated by means of a very different ex-
ample: Georges Bataille’s Manet. For Bataille, Manet’s painting can be
characterised by the process of indifferentiation or abstraction:

Stripped to its essentials, Manet’s sober elegance almost immediate-

ly struck a note of utter integrity by virtue not simply of its indiffer-
ence to the subject, but of the active self-assurance with which it ex-
pressed that indifference. Manet’s was supreme indifference, effortless
and stinging… His sobriety was the more complete and efficacious
in moving from a passive to an active state. This active, resolute so-
briety was the source of Manet’s supreme elegance.20

Bataille picks Manet’s Execution of Maximillian as an example of such

abstraction: it refuses to empathise or to take sides, or even to engen-
der affects in the spectator. The representation of murder is achieved
as an affectless still-life:

Manet deliberately rendered the condemned man’s death with the

same indifference as if he had chosen a fish or a flower for his sub-
ject… On the face of it, death, coldly, methodically dealt out by a fir-
ing-squad, precludes an indifferent treatment; such a subject is noth-
ing if not charged with meaning for each one of us. But Manet ap-
proached it with an almost callous indifference that the spectator,
surprisingly enough, shares to the full.21

Whether the painting depicts murder or fruit is a matter of indiffer-

ence to Manet: he ‘put the image of man on the same footing as that of
roses or buns’.22 Indifferentiation is actively pursued in the name of the

19. J.G. Fichte, ‘Concerning the Difference between the Spirit and the Letter with-
in Philosophy’ in Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 204.
20. Georges Bataille, Manet, trans. Austyn Wainhouse and James Emmons (New
York: Skira, 1983), 73.
21. Ibid., 46.
22. Ibid., 97.

DANIEL WHISTLER 11
 neutral; as Bataille puts it of the Masked Ball at the Opera, ‘every figure
seems quite neutral.’23
However, it is precisely here, when we begin to consider the pro-
cess of abstraction in Manet’s painting, that the very same problem that
haunted Fichte recurs. According to Bataille, Manet’s ‘subversion’ takes
the form of an aestheticism that repudiates life, vitality and significance
for the sake of reaffirming an insular sovereign subject who basks in his
own creative powers. Manet subtracts from the world in the name of
the self, finding in his paintings a mere reflection of his own mastery. In
other words, the affect by which Manet indifferentiates the world is one
of condescension: the construction of a master-subject over and above
the material from which he is abstracting. Condescension names the
affect that results when everything becomes indifferent except the self.
This non-totalising operation of indifferentiation, moreover, reaffirms
the problematic transcendental structure identified in Fichte’s account.
In both cases, the operation of neutralisation or abstraction is shown
up as incomplete; in both cases, there is a limit beyond which it cannot
pass, and this limit corresponds to the necessary condition that makes
the operation itself possible.
A final way of articulating this problem is in terms of utopia:
Bataille’s Manet and Fichte both replicate the logic of a ‘bad utopia’, cre-
ating a transcendent, otherworldly space (the space of the painting or
the thetic space, respectively) that puts into question all worldly values
apart from those the utopia is itself affirming. In Louis Marin’s words,
‘The utopian critique is ideological because it is not itself the object of
a critique.’24 In other words, the critique is here incomplete, resulting
in the construction of a secure domain in which all values are scruti-
nised apart from its own. Such, once more, is the problem of the im-
mune transcendental.
My question for the second half of this paper is, therefore, wheth-
er Schelling’s account of abstraction in 1801 necessarily suffers from
this problem too, or whether other forms of abstraction and indiffer-
ence are possible. At stake, then, are a notion of totalising abstraction
and the identification of a good utopia. This would provide the basis
for a procedure of abstraction that put its own transcendental condi-
tions into question while still rejecting the dialectical valorisation of
the concrete universal.

23. Ibid., 86.

24. Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, trans. Robert A.
Vollrath (New York: Humanity Books, 1984), 195.

12 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
4. Immersive Abstraction
In January 1801, Schelling found himself trying to articulate what dis-
tinguished his methodology for a philosophy of nature from Fichte’s.25
He writes, ‘The reason that those who have grasped idealism well have
not understood philosophy of nature is because it is difficult or impos-
sible for them to detach themselves from [the methodology of Fichtean
idealism].’26 The shortcomings of the latter are clear to Schelling, and
once more revolve around the centrality of the self. Fichte remains
bound by the concerns and structures of the self, never transcending
them to intuit anything more: ‘During the entire [Fichtean] investiga-
tion I never get out of myself.’27 The Fichtean idealist remains trapped
in ‘the circle of consciousness’ which is ‘inescapable’28. Here the philos-
opher is both the subject and object of her philosophical interest: she
is the one philosophising and she is also the one being philosophised
about; philosophical narcissism at its most extreme.
What, then, is Schelling’s alternative to the Fichtean model? It is,
surprisingly enough, abstraction. Even though Fichte had so often spo-
ken of abstraction, Schelling still uses the very same concept to name
that methodological practice that distinguishes them, and so enables
an escape from the circle of consciousness:

To see the objective in its first coming-into-being is only possible by

depotentiating… This is only possible through abstraction.29

So, Schelling’s assertion is odd: both Schelling and Fichte make re-
course to abstraction as a central methodological operation, as we
have seen, but yet it is precisely here that Schelling considers his
methodological differences from Fichte to be most evident. And
this must be because he has somehow transformed this concept to
mean something contrary to its Fichtean use, which turns out to be
the case. For Schelling, unlike Fichte, abstraction takes one towards
the world, not away from it. While the Fichtean idealist raises him-
self above the adulterated objects of ordinary experience through

25. For a detailed reconstruction of Schelling’s doctrine of abstraction in 1801, par-

ticularly in contrast to Fichte’s account, see Daniel Whistler, ‘Schelling’s Doc-
trine of Abstraction’ in Pli 26 (2014), 58-81.
26. Schelling, Werke, 4:87; F.W.J. Schelling, ‘On the True Concept of Philosophy of
Nature and the Correct Way of Solving its Problems’, trans. Judith Kahl and
Daniel Whistler in Pli 26 (2014), 14.
27. Ibid., 4:89; 11.
28. Ibid., 4:90; 12.
29. Ibid., 4:89; 12.

DANIEL WHISTLER 13
 an act of abstraction (potentiation), in a subversion of the idealist
the Schellingian philosopher transcends ‘beneath’ the limits of con-
sciousness into the depths of nature (depotentiation).30
Thus, in Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie, Schell-
ing differentiates his own methodology from Fichte’s as follows. The
Fichtean alters (or potentiates) the object (i.e. nature) until it becomes
identical to the subject: to bring nature into the mind and make it
into a sensation or perception. Yet, there is a major problem here, ac-
cording to Schelling: that which is not raised to the potency of con-
sciousness still remains hidden from the philosopher. That is, reali-
ty exists at non-conscious as well as conscious potencies, and the for-
mer are not accessible to the Fichtean. Here is how Schelling puts it,
‘[The Fichtean] can behold nothing objective other than in the mo-
ment of its entry into consciousness… and no longer in its original
coming-into-being at the moment of its first emergence (in non-con-
scious activity).’31 To limit the philosophical task merely to the rais-
ing of reality into consciousness is therefore to foreclose on the study
and description of the non-conscious potencies. Schelling contends
that through Fichte’s method, ‘I assume myself already in the highest
potency, and therefore the question is likewise only answered for this
potency.’32
The Schellingian proceeds in the opposite direction: to alter con-
sciousness so that it becomes identical to (and can therefore know)
non-conscious reality. That is, instead of altering nature and bringing it
into identity with consciousness, what requires changing is conscious-
ness in order to bring it into equality with nature. The philosopher must
reduce her intuiting down to the lower potencies, so as to become one
with the unperceived, hidden natural world: she must become like na-
ture, immerse herself in it.33 So, for Schelling the crucial methodologi-
cal question in fact runs: what need the philosopher do to herself in or-
der to become nature? And the answer is to be found in abstraction. In
Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie, abstraction is the prac-

30. Hence, ‘abstraction’ names one of the ways by which the Schellingian philoso-
pher refuses the German Idealist arms-race of ‘going-meta’. Abstraction in its
Schellingian subversion ends up reinstating the priority of the immanent and
the worldly. Schelling ‘abstracts’ in order to philosophise about stones.
31. Ibid., 4:89; 12.
32. Ibid., 4:90; 11; my emphasis.
33. Hence, the ‘of ’ in philosophy of nature not only functions as an objective geni-
tive (philosophy about nature), but also and primarily as a subjective genitive
(philosophy from the viewpoint of nature); hence, the inhumanity of the ab-
stractive standpoint.

14 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
tice that immerses the philosopher in the world. To repeat the crucial
passage in full,

To see the objective in its first coming-into-being is only possible

by depotentiating the object of all philosophising, which in the high-
est potency is = I, and then constructing, from the beginning, with
this object reduced to the first potency. This is only possible through
abstraction.34

Nature at all of its levels of productivity, not merely the conscious, only
becomes visible through a process of abstractive depotentiation by
which philosophy shifts away from the high potencies in which Fichte
philosophised and scours the low potencies for how nature comes to
be. This form of abstraction differentiates Schelling from Fichte: ‘With
this abstraction one moves from the realm of the Wissenschaftslehre
into pure-theoretical philosophy.’35 According to the true concept of
philosophy of nature, philosophy must be taken to the potency 0, to its
very depths, through abstraction, before gradually reconstructing real-
ity through all its potencies, mimicking the productive force of nature.
The opposition between Schellingian and Fichtean abstraction can thus
be schematised according to the following figure:

Highest potency (freedom/pure thetic positing of the I)

↑ Practical abstraction (the beginning of the Wissenschaftslehre)
Ordinary/pre-philosophical consciousness
↓ Theoretical abstraction (the beginning of Naturphilosophie)
Potency 0 (non-conscious emergence of nature/pure productivity)

5. Abstraction without Limit

Moreover, this change in orientation takes place because Schelling
conceives of abstraction without limit, a totalising process of abstract-
ing that not only indifferentiates all objects of experience, but the sub-
ject (and so the very act of abstracting) as well. For Fichte, abstraction
reaches a limit with the subject; for Schelling it occurs without limits.
The Schellingian process of abstraction neutralises both the subjective
and the objective, so as to bring about pure indifference.

34. Ibid., 4:90; 12.

35. Ibid.

DANIEL WHISTLER 15
 Hence, the Identitätssystem itself begins in Schelling’s 1801 Darstel-
lung meines Systems der Philosophie with an initial methodological mo-
ment of abstraction from both what is subjective and what is objec-
tive.36 The first of the five propositions with which this essay started
begins thus,

I call reason absolute reason or reason as it is conceived as the total

indifference of the subjective and the objective… Reason’s thought is
foreign to everyone: to conceive it as absolute, and thus to come to
the standpoint I require, one must abstract from what does the think-
ing. For the one who performs this abstraction reason immediately
ceases to be something subjective.… [Reason] can of course no longer
be conceived as something objective either, since an objective some-
thing… only becomes possible in contrast to a thinking something,
from which there is complete abstraction here. 37

Both the subject and the object are neutralised so as to isolate what
Schelling here calls ‘the total indifference of the subjective and the ob-
jective’. Insofar as one abstracts from what is subjective for conscious-
ness, one abstracts from what is objective for consciousness too. This is
for the simple reason that one is inhumanly abstracting from conscious-
ness as such, and so from the structural opposition of subjectivity and
objectivity that it establishes. It is not the case that Fichtean abstraction
merely removes what is objective, while Schellingian abstraction neu-
tralises the subjective; rather, Schelling shows that the ‘true’ process of
abstraction —​and the only one that is coherent —i​ s one which is shown
to neutralise both the subjective and the objective insofar as they are
qualitatively distinct in the name of a ‘pure’ subject-object.
Therefore, complete abstraction generates absolute indifference. This
totalising gesture of abstraction presupposes the value —​and even ter-
ror —​of the abstract against the concrete (thereby refusing dialectics)
and also the neutralisation of even its own transcendental conditions.
What we begin to glimpse in the opening of Schelling’s Identitätssystem,
then, is the structure of a ‘good utopia’. Indifferentiation is absolute for
Schelling: nothing is posited whatsoever. The philosophical realm is

36. The 1801 Darstellung does, nevertheless, still limit abstraction in one way: to the
philosophisable. Thus, nonbeing, which Schelling identifies with the non-ration-
al and non-philosophisable in §2 of the work, remains external to its operation,
and with it those aspects of reality which the Schelling of 1801 consigns to non-
being, e.g. time, force, history and qualitative difference. In many ways, the sub-
sequent attempts at the Identitätssystem over the next few years constitute Schell-
ing’s repeated attempts to recuperate such aspects for the abstracting philosopher.
37. Schelling, Werke, 4:114-5; Presentation, 349.

16 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
constituted for him by a complete suspension of all judgment (absolute
epochē). To abstract is to create a space for philosophising indifferent
to positing, indifferent to self-consciousness, indeed indifferent to an-
ything subjective or objective whatsoever. Such a philosophical space
performs absolute indifference.38

***
This textual operation of abstraction also provides a crucial clue to a re-
current question for readers of Schelling’s output: what precisely does
a philosophical text do? That is, during this period, Schelling is keen
to expel many typical modes of argumentation, explanation and de-
scription from the genuine philosophical enterprise. For example, he
rejects all forms of description based on the category of representation,
for they presuppose a dualism in which ‘on the one side [stands] think-
ing and on the other side matter or the empirical in general’39, and thus
contravene the demands of identity. Schelling’s task is thus to philoso-
phise without recourse to the category of representation (or any of its
correlates, such as reflection, correspondence or even adequacy): since
representation is an inadequate category for understanding the activi-
ty of philosophising, there is a metaphilosophical need to think philo-
sophical activity without representation.
In the first of his Fernere Darstellungen, Schelling insists, moreo-
ver, that deduction, derivation, inference, explanation, even analysis
and synthesis, are inadequate modes of cognition.40 Insofar as they
presuppose the principle of causality or separate and conditioned fi-
nite entities, such methods are productive of ‘non-knowledge’ that ‘dis-
solves into complete nothingness.’41 In general, ‘All these modes of cog-

38. One should also stress the radicality of Schelling’s position here: it is through
becoming indifferent to consciousness that one gains knowledge. To philoso-
phise, Schelling states, I had ‘to posit [the I] as non-conscious… not = I.’ (Schell-
ing, Werke, 4:92; ‘On the True Concept’, 14) As one depotentiates one’s conscious
attention, one intensifies one’s knowledge. More is known through less —​less
freedom, less personality, less thinking. This is partly why one ought to desig-
nate the perspective made possible by abstraction as an impossible or utopic
one; for how is it possible to know without consciousness? How philosophise
thoughtlessly? The contemporary significance of these questions can be brought
out in reference to questions which haunt Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: ‘How does
thought think the death of thought?’ i.e. how does ‘the subject of philosophy…
recognise that he or she is already dead’? Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlight-
enment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 223, 239.
39. Schelling, Werke, 4:341. On the critique of representation, see further ibid.,
6:137-40.
40. Schelling, Werke, 4:343-6.
41. Ibid., 4:343-4.

DANIEL WHISTLER 17
nition are false per se, according to their principle. They are an eter-
nal and flowing source of error. —​It is not only these specific forms
which must change, but the whole outlook must be fully reversed and
reconfigured.’42
Hence, there remains the question of precisely what Schellingian
philosophy does, if description, explanation and all modes of argu-
mentation are unavailable to it. If it does not argue, explain or describe,
what then? The answer is, in short, that Schelling’s writings are made
up of Darstellungen: his philosophical texts exhibit. The very fact that
Schelling entitles so many of his works ‘Darstellung’ is itself evidence
of this: the task of his texts is to exhibit reality linguistically, or, as he
puts it more grandiosely himself, ‘Philosophy is the immediate or di-
rect Darstellung of the divine.’43 In this way, the first five propositions of
the 1801 Darstellung consist in, what Schelling elsewhere calls, ‘Darstel-
lung with complete indifference’44 —​a perfect textual symbol of a-thet-
ic space, or (quite literally) ‘a figure of the absolute’.45 Here, reality in-
stantiates itself a-thetically.
There are two components to this procedure of exhibition: abstrac-
tion and construction. This is not the place to discuss Schellingian
construction at length46, but it is worth noting that these two com-
plementary operations are both non-dialectical, insofar as they pro-
duce abstract particulars, rather than concrete universals. Following
Kant, Schelling conceives construction as a procedure of exhibiting ide-
as in intuition, and since intuitions are particulars, constructions are
to be understood as particular instantiations of abstract entities.47 The
abstracted impossible space, which I have been outlining in this es-
say, is similarly both particular and abstract. The Schellingian text as a
whole is an abstract particular: in place of argumentation, explanation
or description, the first five propositions of the 1801 Darstellung gen-
erate abstract particulars in language that are intended to exhibit real-
ity indifferently.

42. Ibid., 4:342. Schelling also attacks modes of critical and sceptical argument in a
later section of the work (ibid., 4:350-52).
43. Ibid., 5:381; F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minne-
apolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989), 29.
44. Ibid., 5:411; 49.
45. Alberto Toscano, ‘Philosophy and the Experience of Construction’ in Jane Nor-
man and Alistair Welchman (eds), The New Schelling (London: Continuum,
2004), 117.
46. See Whistler, Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language, Chapter Six.
47. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A713/B741, and Schelling’s endorsement of
this definition in Werke, 5:128; F.W.J. Schelling, ‘On Construction in Philoso-
phy’, trans. Andrew A. Davis and Alexi Kukeljevic in Epoché 12.2 (2008), 273.

18 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
6. The Utopic Space of the 1801 Darstellung
The above Schellingian procedure can, I wish to conclude, be precisely
denoted as the production of a utopic space. For Schelling’s conception
of abstraction reinforces the contemporary link between utopia and the
neutral, first invoked by Louis Marin in the early ‘70s and subsequent-
ly informing Barthes’ 1978 Collège de France lectures (indeed, the fig-
ure of the neutral was itself to provide a kind of utopic asylum from the
structuralist hegemony of the signifier for Blanchot and those follow-
ing him).48 Even Derrida, whose anti-utopianism often prevents him
from properly appropriating the Blanchotian neutral, echoes Fichte in
asserting the resistance to dialectics within the operation of neutrali-
sation: ‘The movement of the neuter is evidently neither negative nor
dialectical.’49
It is Marin, however, in his identification of utopia with the neu-
ter, who approaches the a-thetic logic of Schellingian abstraction most
closely. For him, the utopic space is ‘the place of the neutral’50, or more
fully, ‘the place where mutual neutralisation occurs between contrary
properties’.51 Schelling’s performance of immersive abstraction converg-
es with such a definition of utopia, i.e. as ‘the discursive expression of
the neutral (defined as “neither one nor the other” of contraries).’52 Here,
the contraries of subject and object are reciprocally neutralised, such
that this no-place ultimately forms an impossible space. Marin writes,

[Utopia] has no negative function because it comes before judgment

or even a position one might take… neither before nor after affirma-
tion or negation but between them… Neither yes nor no, true nor
false, one nor the other: this is the neutral… This neutral is the span
between true and false, opening within discourse a space discourse
cannot receive. It is a third term, but a supplementary third term, not
synthetic.53

The utopic space is an a-thetic space resistant to the dialectical ruses

of contradiction and negation; indeed, it is a-Hegelian, or, in Marin’s
words, ‘the zero degree of the Hegelian synthesis’.54 Marin expresses this

48. On the above, see R. Teeuwen, ‘An Epoch of Rest: Barthes’ “Neutral” and the
Utopia of Weariness’ in Cultural Critique 80 (2012), 1-26.
49. Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 70.
50. Marin, Utopics, 11.
51. Ibid., 13.
52. Ibid., xiii.
53. Ibid., 7.
54. Ibid., 7.

DANIEL WHISTLER 19
resistance to the dialectic through the figure of the zero55, indifferent
to the instable play of number, prior to judgment, ‘what remains after
the crossing out of… negation’.56
Such a space is nowhere better exemplified in Schelling’s output
than in the first five propositions of the 1801 Darstellung, which per-
form, as well as describe, the generation of indifference through ab-
straction. It is only in proposition six57 that identity is posited, and so
the initial (and sole) thesis of the Identitätssystem occurs. Propositions
one to five, on the contrary, must describe and perform an a-thetic
state of affairs, consisting of abstract particulars. These propositions
operate according to processes of abstraction, definition and analyt-
ic entailment alone. Here, as Schelling repeatedly points out and as we
have seen, both the subject and the object are thoroughly neutralised
in an act of total abstraction; here emerges a non-dialectical language
of indifference. In other words, in the first five propositions of the 1801
Darstellung, Schelling abstracts absolutely so as to make manifest an a-
thetic, utopic space:

§1. Definition. I call reason absolute reason, or reason insofar as it is

conceived as the total indifference of the subjective and objective...
Reason’s thought is foreign to everyone: to conceive it as absolute,
and thus to come to the standpoint I require, one must abstract
from what does the thinking. For the one who performs this ab-
straction reason immediately ceases to be something subjective, as
most people imagine it. It can of course no longer be conceived as
something objective either…
§2. Outside reason is nothing, and in it is everything. If reason is con-
ceived as we have asked in §1, one immediately becomes aware that
nothing could be outside it…
Remark. There is no philosophy except from the standpoint of
the absolute…
§3. Reason is simply one and simply self-identical…
§4. The ultimate law for the being of reason, and, since there is noth-
ing outside reason, for all being (because it is comprehended with-
in reason) is the law of identity, which with respect to all being is
expressed as A=A. The proof follows immediately from §3 and the
propositions that precede it…

55. Ibid., xvii-xix, 7.

56. Ibid., 13.
57. Schelling, Werke, 4:117; Presentation, 351.

20 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 §5. Definition. I call the A of the first position the subject, to differen-
tiate it from that of the second, the predicate.
§6. … The unique being posited through this proposition is that of iden-
tity itself…58

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Contingency, Pure Contingency —​
Without Any Further
Determination: Modal Categories
in Hegelian Logic

Adrian Johnston
Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico.
Address: 1 University of New Mexico, 87131 Albuquerque, NM,
USA. E-mail: [email protected].
Keywords: Hegel’s logic; contingency; possibility; necessity; modalities.
Abstract: Beginning during G.W. F. Hegel’s own lifetime, two interlinked
unsympathetic portraits of Hegel take shape and become endur-
ing refrains in his critics’ complaints. According to the first of
these, the Hegelian philosophical system posits a foundational
teleological necessity that rigidly determines the constitution of
both natural and human realities. The second critical portrayal of
Hegel charges him with an ideologically pernicious Panglossian-
ism dressing up a miserably conservative/reactionary status quo
as the highest possible sociohistorical realization of Reason itself.
Taken together, these two connected criticisms amount to treat-
ing Hegelian Wissenschaft as a post-Kantian version of Leibniz’s
theosophy, with the former, purportedly like the latter, appealing
to a necessary teleology supposedly guaranteeing the actualiza-
tion of “the best of all possible worlds.”
From the late-period F. W. J. Schelling and Rudolf Haym
through today, countless voices past and present have repeated
these anti-Hegelian allegations. The goal of the paper, simply
stated, is to discredit thoroughly both of these pictures of Hegel’s
philosophy. These two entwined lines of criticism ultimately rest
upon the imputation to Hegel of a certain arrangement of modal
categories in which possibility has priority over actuality, and
necessity dictates the transition from the possible to the actual.
Through a close reading of Hegel’s core doctrine of modal catego-
ries as definitively delineated in his mature Logic, the author
shows that the depiction of Hegel as a neo-Leibnizian is an intel-
lectually bankrupt, one-hundred-eighty-degree inversion of the
truth.

23
O NE of several stock stories about G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy is that
it privileges the modality of necessity to such an excessive extent
as to engage in what would be tantamount to a lamentable and/or
laughable post-Kantian regression, within the traditions of German phi-
losophy, to pre-Kantian Leibnizianism. That is to say, from this kind of
all-too-common perspective, Hegel, like G.W. Leibniz before him, elabo-
rates a theodicy (however secularly disguised or not) according to which
reality, in its categorial and conceptual determinations via the metaphysi-
cally real God-like mega-Mind of “the Absolute Idea,” necessarily is exact-
ly as it is and cannot be otherwise. Purportedly like Leibniz’s divinity, the
Hegelian Absolute’s sufficient reason(s) make it such that there is no space
whatsoever left open for anomaly, arbitrariness, caprice, contingency, dif-
ference, facticity, irrationality, meaninglessness, randomness, and the like.
Of course, near the start of his philosophical career in the early 1800s,
Hegel (in his Jena period prior and leading up to the Phenomenology of
Spirit) already encountered objections along these very lines to German
idealism overall from the pen of W.T. Krug, an otherwise trifling writ-
ing instrument made (in)famous thanks exclusively to Hegel’s stinging
responses to Krug’s critical challenges.1 And, before Hegel’s corpse was

1. G.W.F. Hegel, “How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (as
Displayed in the Works of Mr. Krug)”, Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. He-
gel, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 229, 231,
233. G.W.F. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy, Exposi-
tion of its Different Modifications and Comparison of the Latest Form with the
Ancient One”, Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kan-
tian Idealism, ed. and trans. George Di Giovanni and H.S. Harris (Indianap-
olis: Hackett, 2000), 330. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1977), 27-28. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: Part
Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1970), §250, 23. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy,
Volume Three (New York: The Humanities Press, 1955), 511-512.

24 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 even cold, the later F.W.J. Schelling, faithfully executing his state-or-
dained duty by his Prussian summoners to “stamp out the dragon seed
of Hegelianism” while occupying the philosophical chair at the Univer-
sity of Berlin vacated by his former friend’s death, initiates what sub-
sequently become commonplace refrains amongst subsequent critics
of Hegelian philosophy: Hegel’s System is centered on the Logic alone;
The machinery of this absolute idealist apparatus dissolves the real into
the logical; Hegelian “negative philosophy” (to be opposed by a Chris-
tian “positive philosophy”) entirely excludes and is powerless to account
for the extra-logical real, especially in terms of an undeducible factical
“thatness” evading the grasp of any deducible categorial “whatness,” a
contingent givenness unassimilable by mediated necessity.2
I will show below, among other things, that this Schellingian dance
on Hegel’s grave, the first of many such performances, does not have
a leg or even terra firma upon which to stand (let alone move grace-
fully). Hegel’s modal doctrine in the Logic combined with his more-
than-logical Philosophy of the Real — Schelling and all those who re-
duce Hegel’s philosophy to the Logic on its own fail to recognize that
the System is the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in its entire-
ty (within which Logik is only one part, along with Naturphilosophie
and Geistesphilosophie)3 —i​ s a rebuttal in advance (a refutation from the
crypt, as it were) of Schelling’s opportunistic attacks upon him. Addi-
tionally, as Klaus Düsing perspicaciously observes, the late Schelling
presupposes without supporting arguments a modal doctrine in his pos-
itive-philosophical critique (with its notion of factical thatness) of He-
gel’s allegedly Logic-centric negative philosophy.4
Hegelian Logik, by contrast, posits with supporting arguments pre-
cisely such a doctrine. I want now to elaborate an extended, detailed ex-
egesis of Hegel’s handling of the contingent, especially in the variants of
his mature Logik. I will deviate from chronology in what follows, focus-
ing first on the Encyclopedia Logic and then turning to the Science of Logic.
The modalities of actuality, possibility, necessity, and contingency are
addressed by Hegel at the close of “The Doctrine of Essence,” itself bring-

2. F.W.J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1994), 134-163. F.W.J. Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Phi-
losophy: The Berlin Lectures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007),
118, 128-135, 137, 139, 145-147, 149-151, 155, 159-161, 202-205, 211.
3. Adrian Johnston, “Where to Start?: Robert Pippin, Slavoj Žižek, and the True
Beginning(s) of Hegel’s System,” Crisis and Critique, special issue: “Critique
Today”, ed. Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda, vol. 1, no. 3, 2014, 371-418.
4. Klaus Düsing, Das Problem der Subjektivität in Hegels Logik, Hegel-Studien, Bei-
heft 15 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1976), 341-342.

Adrian Johnston 25
 ing the entirety of the “Objective Logic” (i.e., “The Doctrine of Being”
[Die Lehre vom Sein] plus “The Doctrine of Essence” [Die Lehre vom
Wesen]) to an end in transitioning into the “Subjective Logic” formed by
the third book of the Logic, namely, “The Doctrine of the Concept” (Die
Lehre vom Begriff). To understand Hegel’s modal doctrine requires be-
ginning where Hegel himself begins in this doctrine, namely, with the
logical-categorial determination/moment of “Wirklichkeit.” Of course,
Wirklichkeit (actuality) is a particularly (in)famous Hegelian term spe-
cifically because of the appearance it makes in the renowned/notorious
preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Therein, as is all too well
known, Hegel declares, in the form of what has come to be known as the
“Doppelsatz,” that, “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational”
(Was vernüftig ist, das ist wirlich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig).5
Countless critics past and present (starting with Rudolf Haym6) indict-
ing this Hegel for being an apologetic mouthpiece for the conservative
Prussia of Friedrich Wilhelm III latch onto this one-liner as “Exhibit A”
for their indictment. But, in so doing, they ignore the precise technical
sense of “wirklich” and thereby carelessly trample over Hegel’s strict dis-
tinction between, on the one hand, Wirklichkeit and, on the other hand,
Dasein/Existenz (being-there/existence). In §6 of the Encyclopedia Log-
ic, Hegel directly refutes those accusing him of pronouncing a Leibnizi-
an/Panglossian-style benediction over everything that happens to be the
case in his given status quo as necessitated and justified by a theodicy of
an omniscient and omnipotent Weltgeist. For this Hegel, much of what
happens to be the case in his given status quo merely is there or exists, but
is not fully real qua actual als wirklich. Such mere beings-there/existenc-
es would include, for the Berlin-era Hegel, what he construes as the futile,
doomed Germanic reaction against the ultimately irresistible progressive
currents represented by the French Revolution and Napoleon, the Em-
peror embodying and epitomizing Hegel’s notion of history überhaupt as
inexorably surging toward ever-greater realizations of human freedom.
In this instance, actuality als Wirklichkeit and, hence, rationality (Vernün-
ftigkeit) resides on the side of revolution rather than reaction —​revolu-

5. G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und
Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse: Mit Hegels eigenhändigen Notizen und den
mündlichen Zusätzen, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, 7, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and
Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 24. G.W.F. Hegel,
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 20.
6. Rudolf Haym, “Preußen und die Rechtsphilosophie (1857): Hegel und seine
Zeit,” Materialien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Manfred Riedel (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 365-394.

26 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 tionary rationality is “the rose in the cross of the present”7 of a reaction-
ary Dasein/Existenz —​with reaction straining in vain against “the inner
pulse” (inneren Puls) incarnated in and by revolution.8 Hegel’s 1820s dic-
tum “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational” is anything
but an older, comfortably established man’s cynical or craven repudiation
of the progressive/revolutionary passions of his restless, volatile young-
er years. This one-liner’s author remains the same person who faithfully
toasted Bastille Day year after year, including publicly, and with audacity,
in mixed company during the height of Prussian conservative repression.
But, as Hegel’s own defense of himself in the Encyclopedia Logic
against the criticisms triggered by his proclamation regarding the ration-
al and the actual in the preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right indi-
cates, his definitive determinations of the category of Wirklichkeit are to
be found within the framework of the Logik (rather than within branch-
es of Realphilosophie, such as Rechtsphilosophie or Geschichtsphilosophie).
In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel opens the section on “Actuality” by stat-
ing, with its very first sentence, that, “Actuality is the unity (Einheit), be-
come immediate, of essence (Wesens) and existence (Existenz), or of what
is inner and what is outer.”9 The entire prior two thirds of “The Doctrine
of Essence” is structured around what fundamentally amounts to a two-
worlds metaphysics. This Doctrine’s first two sections on, one, “Essence
as Reflection Within Itself ” (“Das Wesen als Reflexion in ihm selbst,” Sci-
ence of Logic) or “Essence as Ground of Existence” (“Das Wesen als Gr-
und der Existenz,” Encyclopedia Logic) and, two, “Appearance” (Die Er-
scheinung) both unfold variations on the basic theme of the distinction
between, on one side, supersensible essential ground and, on another
side, sensible apparent existence. To cut the long story of the entirety of
“The Doctrine of Essence” very short, this second of the three divisions
of the Logic culminates with Wirklichkeit as the sublation of the close-
ly interrelated families of dichotomies structuring the prior moments

7. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 22.

8. G.W.F. Hegel, “Hegel to Niethammer: Jena, October 13, 1806,” Hegel: The Letters
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 114. G.W.F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie
der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Erster Teil: Die Wissenschaft der Logik mit
den mündlichen Zusätzen, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, 8, ed. Eva Moldenhau-
er and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), §6, 47-49.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of the Philo-
sophical Sciences with the Zusätze (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), §9, 33; §6, 29-
30. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 24-28. Hegel, Elements of the
Philosophy of Right, 20-23. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History (New York: Do-
ver, 1956), 17-19, 63-64, 446-447.
9. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Erster Teil, §142, 279;
Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §142, 213.

Adrian Johnston 27
of the Wesenslehre.10 That is to say, the “unity” (Einheit) Hegel speaks of
in the just-quoted opening sentence of §142 of the Encyclopedia Logic is
specifically a dialectical-speculative Aufhebung of the “two worlds” (as
ground-versus-existence, essence-versus-appearance, inner-versus-out-
er, and similar variations on this theme) at stake in the first two-thirds
of “The Doctrine of Essence.”11
One of many consequences of actuality’s sublation of the opposi-
tions making possible any and every two-worlds metaphysics is the di-
alectical going under of what Hegel sees as perhaps the most sophisti-
cated and formidable version of such a metaphysics, namely, Immanuel
Kant’s critical-transcendental framework as subjectively idealist in He-
gel’s precise sense of “subjective idealism” (as distinct from “objective”
and “absolute” idealisms). The “Addition” (Zusatz) to §142 of the Ency-
clopedia Logic emphatically links Wirklichkeit to absolute idealism in
terms of this idealism’s anti-subjectivist realism, namely, its non/post-
Kantian insistence that objective (qua extra/more-than-subjective) re-
ality an sich is, prior to and independently of knowing subjectivity, al-
ways-already formed, structured, etc. in and of itself.12 Given Kant’s
omnipresent shadow looming over an ambivalently post-Kantian He-
gel, this point is crucial. Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, treats the
topic of modalities (i.e., as per Kant’s “Table of Categories,” the pairs
possibility/impossibility, existence/non-existence, and necessity/con-
tingency) under the heading of his subjectively idealist “Transcenden-
tal Analytic.”13 By contrast, Hegel, in his mature Logik, narrates the mo-
dalities as emerging out of an actuality that itself involves, among other
things, an absolute idealist sublation of anti-realist transcendental ide-
alism (and all other two-worlds metaphysics along with it). This means
that, for Hegel, modalities are not just subjectively ideal categories, as
they are for Kant, but also objectively real ones. In other words, contra
Kant and inverting a famous line from the preface to the Phenomenolo-
gy of Spirit, subject (here, the categories of modality as subjectively ide-
al) must be thought, through a thinking responding to the compelling
force of the movement of Hegelian Logic up through the culmination
of the Wesenslehre in Wirklichkeit, also as substance (here, the catego-
ries of modality as objectively real in addition to subjectively ideal).14

10. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §141, 213.

11. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §143, 215. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Logic: Ber-
lin, 1831 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 155-156.
12. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §142, 214.
13. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), A80/B106, 212.
14. Hegel, Lectures on Logic, 172-173.

28 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 In the “Addition” to §143 of the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel stipulates
that, “of course, it is not just what is immediately there (unmittelbar Da-
seiende) that should be understood as actual (das Wirkliche)”15 (inci-
dentally, this clarification regarding a strict distinction between Dasein
and Wirklichkeit buttresses the above-mentioned non/anti-conserva-
tive interpretation of “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is
rational”). Earlier, in Hegel’s Nuremberg lectures on the “Philosophical
Encyclopedia” for advanced Gymnasium students, the category of de-
terminate being-there (i.e., Dasein as immediate existence [Existenz])
already is deployed in connection with actuality —“​ The Actual itself is
the unity of its possibility and its existence (Daseins).”16 In this quota-
tion from Hegel’s Nuremberg texts, the pairing of the category of be-
ing-there/existence (Dasein/Existenz) with the category of possibility
arguably suggests that the former, like the latter, also is a modal catego-
ry (or, at least, has a modal valence) in this precise context. Put differ-
ently, Dasein, in being an ingredient in Wirklichkeit distinct from that
of possibility, is or represents a modality distinct from that of possibil-
ity itself. In yet other words, if being-there/existence is distinguished
from possibility-as-a-modality, then this seems to suggest that being-
there/existence is or instantiates a modal category.
Before proceeding further, a radically anti-Leibnizian upshot to He-
gel’s Logic at this specific stage of its unfolding must be appreciated.
Only after the logical genesis of actuality towards the end of “The Doc-
trine of Essence” does the particular category of the modality of possi-
bility explicitly arise —​and, with it, the general (meta-)category of mo-
dality overall (i.e., any and every modality). That is to say, for Hegel,
actuality precedes any and every possibility. By sharp contrast, in Leib-
niz’s theosophical metaphysics with its Christian theodicy —​this aspect
of Leibnizianism resurfaces in multiple secular (dis)guises within the
twentieth-century Anglo-American Analytic philosophical tradition —​
possibility precedes actuality (with a benevolent, omniscient, omnipo-
tent, and perfect God selecting amongst an infinitude of possible worlds
before actualizing, through the act of creation, the one-and-only, opti-

15. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Erster Teil, §143, 283.
Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §143, 216-217.
16. G.W.F. Hegel, “Texte zur Philosophischen Propädeutik: Philosophische En-
zyklopädie für die Oberklasse,” Nürnberger Schriften, Werke in zwanzig Bänden,
4: Nürnberger und Heidelberger Schriften, 1808-1817, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and
Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), §48, 20. G.W.F. He-
gel, “The Philosophical Encyclopedia [For the Higher Class],” The Philosophi-
cal Propaedeutic, ed. Michael George and Andrew Vincent (Oxford: Blackwell,
1986), §48, 133.

Adrian Johnston 29
mally-good “best of all possible worlds”). Hence, Hegel, already from
within the pure conceptual abstractness of his logical apparatus, an-
nounces a principled, categorical opposition to the spiritualist idealism
of Leibniz’s ontologically prioritized metaphysical/virtual reality of pos-
sibilities purportedly pre-existing anything and everything actual.
Hegel’s anti-Leibnizian prioritizing of actuality over possibility noted,
the identification of Wirklichkeit as a dialectical-speculative, sublation-
al (als Aufhebung) synthesis (“unity” [Einheit]) of “immediate thereness”
or “existence” and possibility still requires further exegetical unpacking
here. Something being actual automatically entails it also already be-
ing possible too. In this sense, were this something impossible, it sim-
ply would not be. However, the peculiarity of this sort of possibility as
invoked by Hegel at this stage of the Logic is that it is not a possibility
preceding and preexisting the being-there/existence of the actuality for
which it is the very possibility. Instead, the given actuality generates si-
multaneously both its own possibility as well as its being-there/existence.
In other words, Möglichkeit and Dasein/Existenz are contemporaneous-
ly co-emergent from Wirklichkeit as their shared ground. The first main
paragraph of §147 of the Encyclopedia Logic corroborates this reading.17
At this point, two things are to be appreciated. First, as just explained,
actuality logically (i.e., dialectically-speculatively) gives rise out of itself
to the jointly-arising pair of possibility and being-there/existence —a​ nd,
in so doing, initially introduces modality tout court into the movement
of Hegelian Logik (modality here begins with the being-there of an actu-
ality that, as really existing, is at the same time really possible). Second,
if the determination/moment that introduces modality into the Logic
is being-there/existence qua possible, then the modality of contingen-
cy surfaces before that of necessity. Therefore, the contingent definitely
appears to enjoy a certain priority over the necessary in Hegelian think-
ing (with the Science of Logic furnishing confirmation of my interpretive
reasoning here18).
Indeed, Hegel discusses contingency before necessity, emphasizing
the former in §145 and the latter in §147 of the Encyclopedia Logic. The
Zusatz to §145 states that:

…contingency… does deserve its due in the world of objects (gegen-

ständlichen Welt). This holds first for nature, on the surface of which
contingency has free rein, so to speak. This free play should be rec-
ognised as such, without the pretension (sometimes erroneously as-
cribed to philosophy) of finding something in it that could only be

17. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §147, 220-221.

18. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), 545.

30 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 so and not otherwise (nicht anders sein Können). Similarly… the con-
tingent also asserts itself in the world of spirit, since will contains the
contingent within itself in the shape of freedom of choice, though
only as a sublated moment. In regard to the spirit and its activity, we
also have to be careful that we are not misled by the well-meant striv-
ing of rational cognition into trying to show that phenomena that
have the character of contingency are necessary, or, as people tend to
say, into ‘constructing them a priori.’ For example, although language
is the body of thinking, as it were, still chance indisputably plays a de-
cisive role in it, and the same is true with regard to the configurations
of law, art, etc. It is quite correct to say that the task of science and,
more precisely, of philosophy, consists generally in coming to know
the necessity that is hidden under the semblance of contingency; but
this must not be understood to mean that contingency pertains only
to our subjective views and that it must therefore be set aside totally
if we wish to attain the truth. Scientific endeavors which one-sidedly
push in this direction will not escape the justified reproach of being
an empty game and a strained pedantry.19

Throughout this quotation, starting with its very first sentence, Hegel
thrusts to the fore the objectively real status of the modality of contin-
gency in his logical framework —​and this by sharp implicit contrast with
its subjectively ideal status in Kantian critical transcendentalism. One of
Hegel’s central assertions here, at least as much against Baruch Spino-
za and Leibniz as contra Kant, is that the contingent is far from always
symptomatic merely of epistemological ignorance (i.e., the knowing sub-
ject’s failure to grasp a concealed underlying necessity in objective being
an sich). Sometimes, this seeming ignorance is, in fact, direct ontological
insight (i.e., the knowing subject’s success, whether appreciated by this
subject or not, at grasping the actual absence of necessity within objective
being an sich). Relatedly, Hegel warns that the far-from-unproductive,
not-always-unjustified rationalist tendency/drive to search for real ne-
cessity hidden behind or beneath apparent contingency, if left lop-sidedly
unchecked by not giving to the contingent its countervailing metaphys-
ical due, inevitably results in “an empty game and a strained pedantry.”
To begin with, I again would suggest that Leibniz exemplifies such
a teller of these risible rationalist just-so stories (indeed famously lam-
pooned by Voltaire). Within Leibniz’s theodicy of the purported “best
of all possible worlds,” each and every seeming contingency is nothing
more than an index of finite human knowers’ lack of full understand-

19. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Erster Teil, §145, 286-
287. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §145, 219.

Adrian Johnston 31
 ing of God-the-creator’s sufficient reasons for things being exactly so
and not otherwise. In Leibnizian Christian-theosophical philosophy,
the combination of the laws of classical, bivalent logic with the prin-
ciple of sufficient reason guarantees that everything in creation neces-
sarily and with certainty is precisely as it is, with no “illogical” or “irra-
tional” breathing room for any really existent contingencies whatsoever.
Additionally, and still apropos the passage from §145 quoted above, I
also would maintain that there is a secular, as well as theistic (i.e., Leib-
nizian), epitomization of the contingency-denying rationalism derided
by Hegel as predictably eventuating in absurd rationalizations: a mod-
ern, natural scientific Weltanschauung in which nature and all things
natural/naturalizable (including living beings generally and even hu-
man beings specifically) can and should be reduced to structures and
dynamics governed by laws qua deterministic causal rules imposing an
iron-clad, inviolable necessity on all entities and events. Hegel, in the
preceding quotation from §145 remaining under discussion here, sees
fit to mention nature first when insisting upon certain contingencies
as in fact being objectively real, with his motif of “the weakness of na-
ture” (die Ohnmacht der Natur) palpably in the background. The ne-
cessitarian worldview of the natural sciences and scientists of the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries (this worldview lingers on in the
early-twenty-first century too) is parodied as bringing about its own
ridiculous self-wrought ruin in the section on “Observing Reason” in
the Phenomenology of Spirit, culminating as this section does with the
preposterous, comical pseudo-explanations of Franz Josef Gall’s phre-
nology (with its attempts to eliminate such phenomena as “will” qua
“freedom of choice” [§145] in favor of dumb bumps on lifeless bones).
These phrenological pseudo-explanations are this naturalistic world-
view’s immanently generated reductio ad absurdum. According to He-
gel’s 1807 narrative, the scientific Weltanschauung taking form in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries begins to run into troubles with
contingency particularly when it shifts its attention to the organic and
human realms over and above physics and chemistry20 (incidentally, I
have addressed both Hegel’s Ohnmacht der Natur and phenomenolog-
ical figure/shape of “Observing Reason” at length in other contexts21).

20. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 145-210.

21. Adrian Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Nega-
tivity Materialized,” Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, ed.
Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2011), 159-179. Adrian Johnston, “Second Natures in Dappled
Worlds: John McDowell, Nancy Cartwright, and Hegelian-Lacanian Material-
ism,” Umbr(a): The Worst, ed. Matthew Rigilano and Kyle Fetter (Buffalo: State

32 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 Furthermore, Hegel, particularly in the 1831 “Preface to the Second
Edition” of the Science of Logic,22 insists that thinking, including that
of the most purely logical sort, is inextricably intertwined with natu-
ral language(s) (as he also elaborates in the accounts of the linguisti-
cally mediated and facilitated emergence of distinctively human intel-
ligence in various versions of his Philosophie des Geistes, itself a part
of Realphilosophie rather than Logik alone).23 As seen from the previ-
ous block quotation, Hegel, in §145 of the Encyclopedia Logic, makes
reference to this language-bound character of cognition. His point
in this passage is that thinking, in thinking either itself (as in Logic)
or anything else (as in the Philosophy of the Real), cannot avoid the
contingent insofar as all natural languages without exception are shot
through with myriad contingencies (as, one, the more-than-linguis-
tic histories impacting etymologies, as, two, what Saussurian struc-
tural linguistics later designates under the heading “the arbitrariness
of the signifier,” and so on). A simple syllogism is enough to encap-
sulate Hegel’s argument here: First, human sapience is made possible
by and always operates within natural language(s); Second, all natural
languages are riddled with contingencies; Therefore, cognitive intelli-
gence cannot avoid entanglement with and working through incarna-
tions of the modality of contingency.

University of New York at Buffalo, 2011), 71-91. Adrian Johnston, “The Voiding
of Weak Nature: The Transcendental Materialist Kernels of Hegel’s Naturphilos-
ophie,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, Spring 2012, 103-157.
Adrian Johnston, “An Interview with Adrian Johnston on Transcendental Ma-
terialism [with Peter Gratton],” Society and Space, October 2013, http://society-
andspace.com/2013/10/07/interview-with-adrian-johnston-on-transcendental-
materialism/. Adrian Johnston, “Transcendentalism in Hegel’s Wake: A Reply to
Timothy M. Hackett and Benjamin Berger,” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philoso-
phy, no. 26, Fall 2014, 204-237. Adrian Johnston, “Confession of a Weak Reduc-
tionist: Responses to Some Recent Criticisms of My Materialism,” Neuroscience
and Critique, ed. Jan De Vos and Ed Pluth (New York: Routledge, 2015), 141-170.
Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two: A Weak
Nature Alone (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017), forthcoming.
22. Hegel, Science of Logic, 31-33.
23. G.W.F. Hegel, “First Philosophy of Spirit (being Part III of the ‘System of Specu-
lative Philosophy’ of 1803/4)”, System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy
of Spirit (Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/4), ed. and trans.
H.S. Harris and T.M. Knox (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979),
221-223. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie des Geistes, Jenaer Systementwürfe III: Natur-
philosophie und Philosophie des Geistes, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner, 1987), 176-178. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of
the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1971), §459, 214, 218; §461, 219; §462, 220-221. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 62.

Adrian Johnston 33
 Before turning attention to §147 of the Encyclopedia Logic, I want to
highlight that, in §145 as quoted above, Hegel renders the modality of
necessity as “could only be so and not otherwise (nicht anders sein Kön-
nen).” Although this is a quite conventional way of defining the nec-
essary, Hegel’s recourse to it soon will prove to be important with the
benefit of subsequent hindsight below. For now, suffice it to note that
Hegelian necessity, as introduced at this exact moment in the Logic, is
determined as no more and no less than the impossibility of any addi-
tional “otherwise” (anders sein).
The time has come to parse a portion of §147 of the Encyclopedia
Logic. While the main body of §147 portrays actuality as simultaneous-
ly realizing in and through itself the co-emergent pair of possibility and
being-there/existence —I​ explained Wirklichkeit along these very lines
a short while ago —​its “Addition” goes into more detail as regards ne-
cessity. Therein, Hegel declares:

The process of necessity (Der Prozeß der Notwendigkeit) begins with

the existence of dispersed circumstances (der Existenz zerstreuter
Umstände) that seem to have no concern with one another and no
inward coherence. These circumstances are an immediate actuality
(eine unmittelbare Wirklichkeit) that collapses inwardly; and from this
negation a new actuality (eine neue Wirklichkeit) emerges. We have
here a content that has a dual character within it in respect to its
form: first, as the content of the matter (Inhalt der Sache) that is at is-
sue, and secondly, as the content of the dispersed circumstances (In-
halt der zerstreuter Umstände) that appear to be something positive,
and initially assert themselves as such. Because of its inward nulli-
ty, this content is inverted into its negative, and so becomes the con-
tent of the matter. As conditions, the immediate circumstances go un-
der, but at the same time they are also preserved as the content of the
matter (Die unmittelbaren Umstände gehen als Bedingungen zugrunde,
werden aber auch zugleich als Inhalt der Sache erhalten).24

To cut to the chase and go directly to the crucial upshot of this passage
without further ado, this quotation contains the thesis that necessity it-
self (i.e., the “process of necessity”) originally arises out of contingency.
In other words, there is an Ur-contingency preceding and at the root of
the necessary. Conversely but correlatively (and contrary to so many
ridiculous, flagrant bastardizations of Hegel), there is no transcendent,
metaphysically real Ur-necessity, a divinely supernatural cosmic Idea

24. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Erster Teil, §147, 289.
Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §147, 221.

34 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 or world Spirit, imposing in a top-down fashion the Platonic-style teloi
of a preordained theodicy upon the being-there of really existing actu-
ality. Instead, any and every necessity and/or teleology is a delayed ef-
fect and belated outcome of a primordially neither necessary nor teleo-
logical Wirklichkeit qua just-happening-to-exist possibility. Alternately,
the only Ur-necessity recognized by Hegelian Logic is the necessity of
Ur-contingency as a modal category with logical priority vis-à-vis the
modal category of necessity. As Stanley Rosen expresses this sense of
the necessity of contingency, “contingency itself, namely, as a category,
is not itself contingent.”25 To this should be added Georg Lukács’s ob-
servation that, “in Hegel the annulment of contingency takes place on
the assumption that it cannot be annulled.”26
What logically comes first and, hence, has a certain categorial prec-
edence in Hegel’s philosophy is the being-there (Dasein) of (an) actu-
ality (Wirklichkeit) which, as existing, is also at the same time possible
(möglich). And, a merely possible existence would amount to a contin-
gency. Thus, a given actuality qua contingent is the factical ground, the
baseless base, of an always-after-the-fact necessity (the Science of Logic
directly ties existence to facticity as itself groundless [Grundlose],27 to
an anti-Leibnizian, post-Kantian ohne Warum). That is to say, for He-
gel, necessity is, in its very logical essence as a metaphysical category,
invariably the result of a movement of becoming, with this kinetic tra-
jectory (i.e., “the content of the matter”) within which necessity takes
shape pushing off from an initially contingent set of conditions —n ​ ame-
ly, “the existence of dispersed circumstances that seem to have no con-
cern with one another and no inward coherence,” “circumstances” that
“are an immediate actuality that collapses inwardly.”
Some of the exact wording in the above quotation from §147 should
be highlighted. Arguably, the word “Existenz” in “the existence of dis-
persed circumstances” is used here by Hegel in its precise technical sense
(i.e., as equivalent to determinate being-there [Dasein]). Likewise, when
he depicts these same circumstances as “an immediate actuality,” this
resonates with the phrase “immediately there (unmittelbar Daseiende)”
as employed in §143 to designate one of the two co-emergent modal

25. Stanley Rosen, The Idea of Hegel’s Science of Logic (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2014), 375.
26. Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and
Economics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), 394.
27. G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II: Erster Teil, Die objektive Logik, Zweites
Buch; Zweiter Teil, Die subjektive Logik, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, 6, ed. Eva
Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969),
123. Hegel, Science of Logic, 478.

Adrian Johnston 35
dimensions of actuality (along with the modality of possibility). Both
of these terminological details further reinforce the interpretive thesis
(one advanced by Slavoj Žižek, among others28) regarding the prima-
cy of contingency over necessity within Hegelian Logic itself. Finally, at
the end of the previously-quoted passage from §147, Hegel indicates that
(Ur-)contingency gets sublated, but never negated altogether, by the sub-
sequent resultant necessity to which it gives rise (such contingencies “go
under, but at the same time they are also preserved”).29 Put differently,
everything necessary bears upon itself a navel-like mark of its contin-
gent origin, of its origin as contingent (i.e., as a prior actuality [Wirkli-
chkeit] qua both existent and possible). Consistent with the immediately
preceding, Žižek, in Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dia-
lectical Materialism, remarks, “The key problem is… that of the umbili-
cal cord connecting a formal-transcendental structure to its contingent
historical content: how is the Real of history inscribed into a structure?”30
In connection with Žižek’s mention of the topic of history, per-
haps the best corroborative instantiation of the just-summarized He-
gelian logic of modality in the more-than-logical Realphilosophie is to
be found in the Philosophy of History. Specifically, the last stretch of this
text’s introduction, a section entitled “Geographical Basis of History,”31
indicates that, for Hegel, the grand arc of human history in its com-
plex, extended entirety arises out of the grounds of actual, factual/fac-
tical contingencies, such as the geographical dispersal of different pop-
ulations and, relatedly, the variations of climate, resources, etc. available
to these scattered groups. Prior to everyone from Marx to Jared Dia-
mond —G ​ eorgi Plekhanov, among others, holds up the “Geographical
Basis of History” as evidence of Hegel’s historical materialist leanings
avant la lettre32 —H
​ egel already argues that whatever necessities eventu-
ally come to hold sway and be retroactively discernible across sequenc-
es of human history, these necessities ultimately, when all is said and
done, are secondary results, products of a becoming-necessary, emerg-
ing out of primary contingencies qua “the existence of dispersed cir-
cumstances” as “immediate actuality” (§147) (in this case, dispersed ge-

28. Adrian Johnston, “Absolutely Contingent: Slavoj Žižek and the Hegelian Con-
tingency of Necessity,” Rethinking German Idealism, ed. Joseph Carew and Sean
McGrath (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 215-245.
29. Hegel, Science of Logic, 603.
30. Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materi-
alism (London: Verso, 2014), 101.
31. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 79-102.
32. Georgi V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism, ed. James S. Allen
(New York: International, 1969), 49.

36 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 ographical circumstances and the variables these circumstances bring
with them). Moreover, anachronously invoking the Ernst Haeckel of
“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” the becoming-necessary of the con-
tingent in phylogenetic collective history is mirrored, in Hegel’s phi-
losophy, by the same dynamic in ontogenetic individual history, as il-
lustrated by the Faust-inspired figure of “Pleasure and Necessity” in
the Phenomenology of Spirit (a Gestalt springing phoenix-like from the
phrenological skull of “Observing Reason”).33
At this juncture, I want to put forward an argument gathering to-
gether what I have traced thus far in terms of the intertwined threads
from the Encyclopedia Logic (an argument I will further substanti-
ate subsequently in connection with the Science of Logic). This line of
thought might best be introduced through reference to another set of
moments in the “Addition” to §143. This Zusatz opens with Hegel force-
fully inverting the common misperception according to which possi-
bility is greater than and enjoys priority over actuality:

The notion of possibility appears initially to be the richer and more

comprehensive determination, and actuality, in contrast, as the poor-
er and more restricted one. So we say, ‘Everything is possible, but not
everything that is possible is on that account actual too.’ But, in fact, i.e.,
in thought, actuality is what is more comprehensive, because, being the
concrete thought (konkrete Gedanke), it contains possibility within it-
self as an abstract moment (abstraktes Moment). We find this accepted
in our ordinary consciousness, too: for when we speak of the possible,
as distinct from the actual, we call it ‘merely’ possible (nur Mögliches).34

He continues with the following paragraph:

It is usually said that possibility consists generally in thinkability

(Denkbarkeit). But thinking is here understood to mean just the ap-
prehending of a content in the form of abstract identity (abstrakten
Identität). Now, since any content can be brought into this form, pro-
viding only that it is separated from the relations in which it stands,
even the most absurd and nonsensical suppositions can be considered
possible. It is possible that the moon will fall on the earth this evening,
for the moon is a body separate from the earth and therefore can fall
downward just as easily as a stone that has been flung into the air; it
is possible that the Sultan may become Pope, for he is a human being,
and as such he can become a convert to Christianity, and then a priest,

33. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 217-221.

34. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Erster Teil, §143, 282-
283. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §143, 216.

Adrian Johnston 37
 and so on. Now in all this talk of possibilities it is especially the prin-
ciple of a ‘grounding’ (das Denkgesetz vom Grunde) that is applied…
according to this principle, anything for which a ground (or reason)
(Grund) can be specified is possible. The more uneducated (ungebil-
deter) a person is, the less he knows about the determinate relations
in which the objects that he is considering stand and the more in-
clined he tends to be to indulge in all manner of empty possibilities
(leeren Möglichkeiten); we see this, for example, with so-called pub
politicians (Kannengißern) in the political domain.35

There is much to be unpacked in these two quoted paragraphs. To be-

gin with, Hegel herein deploys a distinction between, on the one hand,
the “concrete thought” of actuality and, on the other hand, “empty pos-
sibilities.” Wirklichkeit and the concrete thinking of it contain within
themselves non-empty possibilities, namely, those possibilities that are
made concretely possible by an already-there (as Dasein) actuality en-
dowed with the ontological weight of Existenz. Such Wirklichkeit in-
ternally harbors these non-empty possibilities as its own possibilities,
as the multiple potential future actualities with real chances (i.e., non-
null probabilities) to be actualized in the à venir out of the previously
actualized. This actuality therefore is a presence embodying not only
the/its past and present, but also the/its future specifically in the form
of this actual present’s own immanently self-generated possibilities as
its corresponding not-yets. Actuality’s presence shelters within itself its
own future as its auto-produced “abstract moment.” To go even further,
what makes a given actuality the very actuality that it indeed is in the
present is, in no small part, what it has the potential to become in the
future. All of this is buttressed with a characteristically Hegelian ap-
peal to the (contingent) conventions of “ordinary language” (“We find
this accepted in our ordinary consciousness, too: for when we speak of
the possible, as distinct from the actual, we call it ‘merely’ possible”).
However, with Hegel’s mention of “abstract identity” —​he here
means nothing other than the law of identity (A = A), the recto whose
verso is the law of non-contradiction (A ≠ ¬A), as the load-bearing pil-
lar of classical, bivalent logic —​it is clear that he associates the empti-
ly possible with mere logical possibility alone. Once again, through his
references both to the law of identity as well as to the principle of suffi-
cient reason (“the principle of a ‘grounding’”), Hegel evidently is taking
yet more swipes at Leibniz. But, as was seen above in connection with
the Zusatz to §145 of the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel’s handling of mo-

35. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Erster Teil, §143, 283.
Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §143, 216.

38 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
dalities has critical consequences for certain secular scientific targets in
addition to monotheistic religious ones. To be precise, I suspect, given
Hegel’s chosen examples, that some of his mockery of the bare think-
ability of logical-but-empty possibilities is scorn being heaped upon
the empiricist David Hume and the latter’s confronting of the scienc-
es with the problem of induction. Hegel, for a number of reasons, has
a somewhat low estimation of Hume’s philosophy,36 a philosophy in-
spiring such Hegel-disliked developments in the late-eighteenth/ear-
ly-nineteenth-century German-speaking intellectual milieu as Kantian
critical-epistemological anti-realism and the neo-Humean skepticism
of such contemporaries as Salomon Maimon and G.E. Schulze.
Whether as the immeasurable vastness of the metaphysical reality
of countless possible worlds à la the Leibnizian theodicy, the indefinite
number of unpredictable future patterns of observed entities and events
à la the Humean problem of induction, the wild, free-wheeling socio-
political hypotheses and predictions of drunk and uninformed barflies
(i.e., “so-called pub politicians”), or whatever other imaginative play-
ing upon the basic skeletal structure of logical possibility in its untem-
pered purity (i.e., unconstrained by any considerations regarding prob-
ability) —​all instantiations of the merely logically possible count, from
Hegel’s perspective, as just so many empty possibilities. Their emptiness
is due to an emptying from the possible, whether through inadvertent
ignorance or intentional neglect, of the possible’s determinate contents
endowed to it exclusively by virtue of it arising from the concreteness of
established actuality. This Wirklichkeit, as the extant ground of its cor-
responding non-empty possibilities, renders a certain number of possi-
bilities, a quantity far short of the incalculably large number of logical
possibilities, actually possible (with the latter being those “abstract mo-
ments” “contained within” [§143] the concreteness of the actual as the
latter’s “ownmost” possibilities, to resort to a bit of Heideggerian jargon).
In other words, the limited number of possibilities projected from and
tethered to a given actuality are non-empty thanks to their anchoring in
and expression of the actual potentials and probabilities of a really exist-
ent, already-there Wirklichkeit. The excessive surplus of the greater num-
ber of formal-logical possibilities over and above the significantly lesser
number of these concretely real possibilities amounts to the arid, boring

36. G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1977), 69, 154. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy, Expo-
sition of its Different Modifications and Comparison of the Latest Form with
the Ancient One,” 311-362. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §38, 77-79; §39, 80.
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume Three, 369-375. Hegel, Lec-
tures on Logic, 26-30.

Adrian Johnston 39
expanse of empty, fantastical possibilities never-to-pass. Like the undis-
ciplined, untrained mind of the inebriated “pub politician” —t​ his is the
pathetic, pitiable figure to which all intoxicated speculators foolishly bet-
ting upon the unreal prospects of formal-logical possibility alone reduce
(whether they be Leibnizians, Humeans, Meillassouxians, or whoever
else) —​the boundless, sprawling space of the logically possible beyond
the confines of the really possible is vacuous and unformed (ungebilde-
ter). Both are equally worthy of disregard and dismissal in Hegel’s eyes.
Earlier, and in connection specifically with the “Addition” to §145 of
the Encyclopedia Logic, I placed a spotlight on Hegel’s rendition of ne-
cessity as “could only be so and not otherwise (nicht anders sein Kön-
nen).” Now, with me having just spent some time on the actuality-pos-
sibility link as elaborated in the Zusatz to §143, the significance of the
modality of necessity as per §145 can be properly explained and appre-
ciated. Given the ground I already have covered here apropos the He-
gelian logical doctrine of the modalities, it can be said that Wirklichkeit
embodies the modality of contingency. It also can be said that such log-
ically-modally primary contingency is the concrete being-there (Da-
sein) out of which grow all real, actual possibilities (as opposed to the
superfluous, frivolous limitlessness of empty formal-logical possibil-
ities by themselves). On this basis, Hegelian necessity, as a modality
qua logical category, can and should be comprehended as nothing oth-
er than the internally differentiated unity formed by the modal ensem-
ble of the actual-qua-contingent and this actuality’s correlative actual
possibilities. Beyond this pairing of existent (als Existenz) contingen-
cy and the concretely possible corresponding to and sheltering within
it, nothing else or more is possible. That is to say, although there is the
wiggle room of the “otherwise” (anders sein) within concrete actuali-
ty for its multiple accompanying possibilities as non-empty/real —​and,
for Hegel, each and every present actuality is itself the actualization of
one among several possibilities generated by a past actuality —​the pro-
liferation of mere logical possibilities in excess of actuality’s own pos-
sibilities cannot really (come to) be. Put differently, outside the mod-
al pair of contingent actuality and its correlative actual possibilities, “it
cannot be otherwise,” namely, no other, additional possibilities are re-
ally possible. Therefore, if the necessary is the modality of “cannot be
otherwise,” then, as is done in Hegel’s Logic, necessity can be equat-
ed with the set constituted by the combination of Wirklichkeit with its
own possibilities. In terms of modal categories, Notwendigkeit is the
produced logical outcome resulting from the prior dialectical-specula-
tive synthesis of Zufälligkeit (as incarnated by Wirklichkeit) and an ac-
companying Möglichkeit.

40 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 The moment finally has arrived for examining the modal categories
as they feature in Hegel’s Science of Logic. My focus in what follows will
be on “The Doctrine of Essence,” “Section Three: Actuality,” “Chapter
2: Actuality.” This specific chapter is divided into three main sub-sec-
tions: “A. Contingency, or Formal Actuality, Possibility, and Necessity”
(Zufälligkeit oder formelle Wirklichkeit, Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit);
“B. Relative Necessity, or Real Actuality, Possibility, and Necessity” (Rel-
ative Notwendigkeit oder reale Wirklichkeit, Möglichkeit und Notwendig-
keit); and, “C. Absolute Necessity” (Absolute Notwendigkeit). On the
basis of the table of contents alone, one readily can see that, for Hegel,
contingency precedes necessity, with the “absolute” version of the lat-
ter being a late outcome/result (rather than eternally preexistent Alpha,
Beginning, Origin, etc.) of the dialectical-speculative dynamics of reale
Wirklichkeit, itself arising out of Zufälligkeit.
In “A. Contingency, or Formal Actuality, Possibility, and Necessity,”
Hegel directly links the dialectical-speculative relations between actu-
ality and possibility with those between contingency and necessity. Re-
ferring specifically to the “two determinations” of actuality and possi-
bility (in which the latter is co-emergent with the being-there/exist-
ence of the former in its contingent, immediate givenness), Hegel states:

This absolute unrest of the becoming (Diese absolute Unruhe des

Werdens) of these two determinations is contingency (Zufälligkeit).
But just because each immediately turns into its opposite (jede un-
mittelbar in die entgegengesetzte umschlägt), equally in this other it
simply unites with itself (mit sich selbst zusammen), and this identity
(Identität) of both, of one in the other, is necessity (Notwendigkeit).37

One could say that the determinations of Wirklichkeit and Möglichkeit

are doubly contingent. First, as already observed here in connection
with the Encyclopedia Logic, the actual itself fundamentally is a contin-
gency as a merely possible being-there that also happens to exist. Sec-
ond, no single one of the multiple real possibilities generated and con-
tained within a given actuality is itself necessary qua destined or fat-
ed to be the one-and-only next actuality produced out of the current
actuality as the latter’s successor moment. Any one of the plurality of
non-empty possibilities, as possible future actualities bound up with
a present actuality, contingently could become the subsequently real-
ized actuality.
As Hegel has it, Wirklichkeit and Möglichkeit are “opposites” qua
complimentary pair of mutually entangled dialectical determinations.

37. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, 206. Hegel, Science of Logic, 545.

Adrian Johnston 41
 Additionally, they are enrichments of the logical category of Becoming
(Werden). Of course, Becoming famously surfaces near the very begin-
ning of the main body of the Logic, doing so precisely as the Aufhe-
bung of the first two moments of “The Doctrine of Being,” namely, Be-
ing (Sein) and Nothing (Nichts).38 The much later logical moment of
“Actuality” near the conclusion of “The Doctrine of Essence” retroac-
tively adds to Becoming modal determinations. In the quotation above,
Werden acquires as characteristics the modalities of possibility, con-
tingency, and necessity. What is more, this modally enriched Becom-
ing (i.e., the “absolute unrest of the becoming” in the passage just quot-
ed) is one involving the two determinations/moments of actuality and
possibility. Therein, “each immediately turns into its opposite” insofar
as, one, a current actuality becomes a subsequent actuality by transi-
tioning into one of the actual possibilities it already harbors within it-
self and, two, possibilities ceaselessly transition into being actualities in
and through the perpetual movement (i.e., “absolute unrest”) wherein
posterior actualities continually take shape out of prior ones. In short,
actuality passes over into possibility (with this possibility thereby be-
coming the new, next actuality) and possibility passes over into actu-
ality (with this actuality producing in and through itself further pos-
sibilities). More succinctly stated still, the actual becomes the possible
and vice versa. Even putting aside temporal connotations that always
risk being problematic in relation to Hegel’s Logic in its strict logical
abstractness, the categorial determinations of actuality and possibili-
ty structurally imply each other within the Hegelian framework. Any
and every actuality is itself an actualization of a possibility; and, any
and every possibility in Hegel’s precise sense (i.e., as real/non-empty
qua more than simply a formal issue of mere, sheer logical possibility
alone) is tethered to an extant actuality making this possibility an ac-
tual possibility. With Hegelian actuality and possibility conceptualized
thusly, the one essentially and necessarily entails the other.
Lastly, as Hegel stipulates at the close of the preceding quotation, ne-
cessity is the “identity” (specifically as a dialectical-speculative unity via
sublation) of actuality and possibility. That is to say, the necessary is the
Aufhebung-attained identity-of-identity-and-difference between the ac-
tual and the possible. Necessity preserves the distinction between actu-
ality and possibility while, at the same time, being nothing other than
what results from the interminable restlessness of the passage of Wirkli-
chkeit and Möglichkeit into each other (this passage being the imma-
nent dialectics of the actual and the possible, their self-subversion as au-

38. Hegel, Science of Logic, 82-108. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §86-88, 136-145.

42 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 to-sublation). But, as I already stressed apropos the Encyclopedia Log-
ic, Hegelian Notwendigkeit is nothing more or other than this, namely,
the contingency-ridden relations between actualities and their accom-
panying limited-but-open plethoras of possibilities. Along these precise
lines, it bears repeating that necessity à la Hegel is, contrary to count-
less caricatures, anything but a metaphysically real predestination flaw-
lessly manifesting itself as a unique, contingency-free fate or theodicy.
The title of the second sub-section of “Chapter 2: Actuality” of “Sec-
tion Three: Actuality” of “The Doctrine of Essence” in the Science of Log-
ic clearly contrasts with that of the preceding sub-section of this same
chapter. Whereas sub-section “A” deals with “Contingency, or Formal
Actuality, Possibility, and Necessity,” sub-section “B” deals instead with
“Relative Necessity, or Real Actuality, Possibility, and Necessity.” Obvi-
ously, the “formally actual” as contingent now has become the “really
actual” as “relatively necessary,” with the three logical categories of ac-
tuality, possibility, and necessity shifting from being “formal” to being
“real.” As formal, the three dimensions of contingent actuality, possibility,
and necessity are not really distinguished from each other. Sub-section
“A,” as explained by me above, makes clear that contingent actuality and
possibility ultimately are identical, with this identity being necessity it-
self. Minus the reality of any content, there is nothing to realize the for-
mal differences between these modalities in sub-section “A.” But, now in
sub-section “B,” the addition of the reality of content enables the implicit
formal differences between modalities to become explicit real differenc-
es. With a really existent content, the actuality of this content as present
can be seen to be distinct from any of its not-(yet-)present possibilities.39
With an eye already to the third and final sub-section (“C. Absolute
Necessity”) of “Chapter 2: Actuality,” a focus on necessity in sub-section
“B” is an appropriate reflection of the dialectical-speculative transition,
the very movement of Wirklichkeit itself, from contingency to absolute
necessity. As regards real necessity, Hegel specifies that, “this necessity
is… relative. For it has a presupposition from which it begins, it has its
starting point in the contingent” (Diese Notwendigkeit… ist… relative.
Sie hat nämlich eine Voraussetzung, von der sie anfängt, sie hat an dem
Zufälligen ihren Ausgangspunkt).40 Insofar as necessity is the result of
the relationship between contingent actuality and the latter’s accompa-
nying possibilities —​the necessary presupposes the combination of the
contingently actual and the actually possible —​it is “relative” to Wirkli-
chkeit as itself, at least initially, contingent.

39. Hegel, Science of Logic, 546-547.

40. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, 211. Hegel, Science of Logic, 549.

Adrian Johnston 43
 Hegel proceeds to posit that, “in point of fact real necessity is in it-
self also contingency… Real necessity… contains contingency” (In der
Tat ist… die reale Notwendigkeit an sich auch Zufälligkeit… Die reale
Notwendigkeit enthält… die Zufälligkeit).41 He soon adds that, “Here,
therefore, the unity of necessity and contingency is present in itself
or in principle; this unity is to be called absolute actuality” (An sich
ist also hier die Einheit der Notwendigkeit und Zufälligkeit vorhanden;
diese Einheit ist die absolute Wirklichkeit zu nennen).42 As I elucidat-
ed much earlier here apropos both §147 of the Encyclopedia Logic as
well as the section on the “Geographical Basis of History” in the in-
troduction to the Philosophy of History, contingency, as the Ur-mo-
dality of modalities, sets in motion the “absolute unrest of the becom-
ing” in which actuality and possibility constantly pass over into each
other. The contingent thereby self-sublates by immanently generating
out of itself “absolute actuality” as necessary insofar as nothing oth-
er than this absolute Wirklichkeit is possible. Put differently, no pos-
sibilities for things being “otherwise” than this actuality beyond the
non-empty, more-than-formal/logical possibilities already contained
within Wirklichkeit are truly possible. This particular “cannot be oth-
erwise” is Hegelian real necessity which, as an outcome/product of the
interrelations between actuality and possibility primordially activated
and launched by contingency, “contains contingency” as this necessi-
ty’s sublated but impossible-to-expunge-altogether basis, the ground-
less ground of its originary factical givenness ineliminably preserved
in whatever Aufhebung it undergoes.
Hegel succinctly reiterates the immediately preceding at the very
start of “C. Absolute Necessity,”43 the sub-section bringing “Chapter
2: Actuality” to a close. He goes on to characterize absolute necessi-
ty thusly —“​ it is, because it is… it has only itself for ground and condi-
tion. It is the in-itself, but its in-itself is its immediacy, its possibility is
its actuality. It is, therefore, because it is” (es ist, weil es ist… es hat nur
sich zum Grunde und Bedingung. Es ist Ansichsein, aber sein Ansichsein
ist seine Unmittelbarkeit, seine Möglichkeit ist seine Wirklichkeit.  — Es
ist also, weil es ist).44 Hegel’s depiction of absolute Notwendigkeit here
already suggests what is emphatically emphasized two paragraphs lat-
er, in the penultimate paragraph of sub-section “C”: With the absolute
of necessity (or also the necessity of the Absolute), a dialectical-spec-

41. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, 213. Hegel, Science of Logic, 550.
42. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, 213. Hegel, Science of Logic, 550.
43. Hegel, Science of Logic, 550.
44. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, 215. Hegel, Science of Logic, 552.

44 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
ulative “convergence of opposites” transpires in which Ur-contingen-
cy is Ur-necessity and vice versa. As that penultimate paragraph states:

……this contingency is… absolute necessity; it is the essence (Wesen) of

those free, inherently necessary actualities (freien, an sich notwendi-
gen Wirklichkeiten). This essence is light-shy (Lichtscheue), because
there is in these actualities no reflective movement (Scheinen), no re-
flex, because they are grounded purely in themselves alone (nur rein
in sich gegründet), are shaped for themselves (für sich gestaltet sind),
and manifest themselves only to themselves, because they are only be-
ing (Sein)… contingency is absolute necessity, it is itself the presup-
posing of that first, absolute actuality (sie selbst ist das Voraussetzen
jener ersten absoluten Wirklichkeiten).45

So, not only is contingency the first of the modalities to be introduced

in Hegel’s Logic —i​ t returns as (part of) the last of the modalities (i.e.
absolute necessity) therein too. Thus, contingency is, in a certain sense,
genuinely both the Alpha and the Omega of the modal categories of
Hegelian Logik.
Any necessity (whether formal, real, and/or absolute) is a subsequent
result arising from or supervening upon a prior contingency —​specifi-
cally, a merely possible actuality just so happening also to enjoy being-
there/existence. Such necessity sublates but, as is the well-known nature
of Hegel’s Aufhebung, does not negate entirely and without remainder
this always-already-there contingency to which necessity remains teth-
ered (as Hegel puts it in the previous quotation here, “absolute necessi-
ty… is itself the presupposing of that first, absolute actuality,” with this
always-prior absolute Wirklichkeit incarnating ineliminable Ur-contin-
gency). Furthermore, each and every necessity, even when “absolute” —​
this absoluteness can be construed as referring to primordial origins,
unsurpassable horizons, absence of an otherwise, and/or lack of any
Beyond/Outside —​confronts thinking, when all is said and done, with a
spade-turning “it is, because it is.” This tautology expresses the conver-
gence of opposites in which this convergence, rather than being an equal,
balanced synthesis between the opposed modalities of contingency and
necessity, lop-sidedly favors contingency. “It is, because it is” articulates
the ultimate contingency of necessity. Likewise, the Hegelian Absolute
überhaupt (obviously invoked as part of the phrase “absolute necessity”),
whatever else it might be, also is just such a coincidence of the appar-
ently contradictory modal determinations of contingency and necessity.

45. Hegel, Science of Logic, 553.

Adrian Johnston 45
 Finally, Hegel cautions that this dialectical-speculative identifica-
tion of the absolutely necessary with the contingent is “light-shy.” He
indicates that this has to do with the fact that absolute necessity, as ab-
solute, is self-grounding (“necessary actualities… are grounded pure-
ly in themselves alone, are shaped for themselves, and manifest them-
selves only to themselves”). The notion of self-grounding is shrouded
in obscurity precisely because of its dialectical ambiguity: on the one
hand, the self-grounded is grounded insofar as it supplies itself with a
ground; on the other hand, the self-grounded is groundless insofar as
it rests on nothing beyond, behind, or beneath itself. In the Hegelian
System, absolute necessity specifically and the Absolute generally, in
their shared lack, given their absoluteness, of any Other or Externality,
involve this ambiguous combination of being simultaneously with and
without ground qua reason: “with why” (mit Warum) as auto-justifying
and self-supporting (i.e., with a base of grounded necessity); but, at the
same time, also “without why” (ohne Warum) as unjustified and unsup-
ported (i.e., with a baselessness of groundless contingency).
Hopefully, my preceding reconstruction of Hegel’s logical doctrine of
the modal categories has succeeded at making the privileging of contin-
gency in Hegelian philosophy highly plausible and readily defensible. If
nothing else, this reconstruction shifts the burden of proof squarely onto
the shoulders of all those who would stubbornly cling to doubts about
the centrality of the contingent in Hegel’s System, namely, those who
would persist in portraying Hegel as a pre-Kantian wolf (or “Wolff ” à
la the Leibnizianism of Christian Wolff) in post-Kantian clothing (i.e., a
theosopher of divine necessitation, a metaphysical realist about a trans-
cendent destiny, and so on). For the black-and-white vision of the un-
derstanding (Verstand), with its congenital blindness to the colors of
reason (Vernunft), the ambiguities of absoluteness are difficult, if not
impossible, to discern (i.e., they are “light-shy”).46 They really are there
nonetheless. Here, the Hegelian circle closes, with the Absolute rejoining
the “Being, pure Being, without any further determination” (Sein, reines
Sein,  — ohne alle weiterer Bestimmung)47 of the very start of the System
at the (apparent) beginning of the Logic. The Absolute of Being and/or
the Being of the Absolute resultantly has turned out to be, in truth, Con-
tingency, pure Contingency  —without any further determination.

46. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 2. Hegel, Science of Logic, 48. Hegel, The Ency-
clopedia Logic, 5, 7-8; §81, 130-131; §82, 132-133.
47. G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I: Erster Teil, Die objektive Logik, Erstes
Buch, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, 5, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus
Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 82. Hegel, Science of Logic, 82.

46 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
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Haym R. Preußen und die Rechtsphilosophie (1857): Hegel und seine Zeit.
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am Main, Suhrkamp, 1975, pp. 365–394.
Hegel G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1991.
Hegel G. W. F. Faith and Knowledge, Albany, State University of New York
Press, 1977.
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Hegel G. W. F. Jenaer Systementwürfe III: Naturphilosophie und Philosophie
des Geistes, Hamburg, Felix Meiner, 1987.
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versity Press, 2008.
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Development of Post-Kantian Idealism (eds G. Di Giovanni,
H. S. Harris), Indianapolis, Hackett, 2000, pp. 311–362.
Hegel G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
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Hegel G. W. F. Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the
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Hegel G. W. F. Science of Logic, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1969.
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(Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/4), Albany,
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Johnston A. Confession of a Weak Reductionist: Responses to Some
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48 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
Speculation and Infinite Life:
Hegel and Meister Eckhart on the
Critique of Finitude

Alex D ubilet
Lecturer, Departments of English and Political Science, Vander-
bilt University. Address: 323 Commons Center, 230 Appleton Pl,
Nashville, TN 37203, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Keywords: Hegel; speculation; finitude; life; immanence; negative theol-
ogy.
Abstract: The paper turns to the thought of G.W. F. Hegel and its conver-
gence with Meister Eckhart’s thought in order to explore the pos-
sibility of a speculative and affirmative relationship between
philosophy and religion. It argues that these thinkers, taken
together, offer a possible way of rejecting one of the binary struc-
tures prevalent in recent continental philosophy, namely the divi-
sion between an atheistic defense of philosophy and its (secular)
egological subjects on one hand, and the affirmation of the pri-
macy of transcendence and alterity (in a quasitheological vein)
on the other hand. Hegel’s and Eckhart’s works suggest that such
binaries foreclose a third possibility of annihilating the subject as
a way to affirm a speculative and infinite immanence.
Utilizing different discursive spaces and theoretical vocabular-
ies, Hegel and Eckhart propose to annihilate the subject as the
site from which transcendence could be affirmed in the first
place. Moreover, here, God no longer functions as a name against
which to struggle in the name of atheism, or one to uphold for a
theological critique of the secular. Rather, it becomes the name
for the possibility of absolute desubjectivation, of self-emptying
and annihilating the subject— processes that are no longer open
to transcendence, but reveal the ungrounded immanence of life.
In tracing these logics, this paper questions the dominant distri-
bution of concepts structuring the recent turn to religion in con-
tinental philosophy, and suggests one possibility for the
democratization of thought that would dislocate the imperialism
of secular and atheistic discourses without elevating theology to a
renewed position of power.

49
I. Rethinking the Polemics around the Religious Turn

T H E turn to religion in continental thought is no longer a radi-

cally new phenomenon. Over the course of the last several dec-
ades the penetration of religious problematics into philosophy,
a process that had already become visible in the second half of the
twentieth century, has only intensified. Undermining the modern as-
sumptions about the strict separation of philosophy and theology, there
has been a powerful rearticulation of the boundary of and the rela-
tion between these discourses. The strictures demarcating the prop-
er and legitimate place of philosophy in relation to theology that had
guided modern philosophy —​at the very minimum from Kant’s cri-
tique of speculative theology to Heidegger’s outlining of the ontological
function of philosophy in “Phenomenology and Theology” —​no long-
er holds sway with quite the same unquestioned force.1 What, howev-
er, does remain up for debate is the precise significance of the transfor-
mation enacted by the religious turn. What exactly is the nature of the
interpenetration and to what end is it performed? If religious and phil-
osophical discourses are no longer strictly separated, how exactly do
they become reconfigured?
One answer to these questions has been offered by Hent de Vries,
who suggests that the religious turn allows for the illumination of “the
unthought, unsaid and unseen of a philosophical logos that, not only
in the guise of modern reason, but from its earliest deployment, tends
to forget, repress or sublate the very religio (relegere, religare, or relation
without relation, as Levinas, and, following him, Derrida would have

1. One useful attempt to articulate a typology of possible relations between philos-

ophy and theology is found in Daniel Colucciello Barber, On Diaspora: Chris-
tianity, Religion, and Secularity (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2011), 1-29.

50 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
it) to which these motifs testify.”2 The motifs being referred to are all
those figures of thought, operations, non-dogmatic theologemes that
have recently returned to theoretical significance, which include ques-
tions of prayer, apocalyptics, messianicity, sacrifice, specters, apopha-
sis, and revelation, among others.3 On this account, the religious turn
allows us to return to the religious and theological archives in order to
uncover and reactivate the operations disavowed in the self-narration
of philosophical reason.
Within this broad theoretical intervention, a more restricted trajec-
tory is traceable. The religious turn took up the critique of the philo-
sophical subject, variously its autonomy and consistency, its self-pos-
session and mastery, its egological self-enclosure and self-identity, and
did so in order to re-affirm the primacy of transcendence. The link be-
tween the breakdown of the subject, the affirmation of transcendence
and the critique of secular philosophical reason is nowhere enacted
as starkly as in the corpus of Levinas. His thought at once sought to
displace the subject towards an ethical relation to the transcendence
and, complementarily, to liberate the name of God. For Levinas, the
two tasks were convergent precisely because they challenged the sta-
tus of philosophy, which rendered the subject and God the two nodes
through which the dominance of the Same was enforced at the expense
of the relation, both theoretical and ethical, to the Other. The gener-
al tendency to recuperate transcendence is succinctly recapitulated by
de Vries around the deconstructive figure of the adieu. “All this is im-
plied from the outset in the phrase à Dieu or adieu, in all its ambigu-
ity of a movement toward God, toward the word or the name of God,
and a no less dramatic farewell to almost all the canonical, dogmatic,
or onto-theological interpretations of this very same ‘God’.”4 In other
words, God becomes the name for a non-dogmatic relationality, nam-
ing an exteriority and a transcendence that constitutively cannot be ex-
hausted by operations of knowledge or mastery. But the critique of on-
to-theology yielded different and even divergent paths. In Derrida, for
example, it ultimately entailed a reactivation of negative theology not
as an affirmation of a hyperessentiality, but as an enactment of a re-
lentless negativity.5 Apophasis, or negative theology, was reappraised

2. Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999), 5-6.
3. Ibid, 23 and passim.
4. Ibid., 24.
5. Derrida’s appraisal of negative theology changed over the course of his life, from
its rejection to a positive reappraisal in later writings. For an example of the lat-
ter, see: “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” trans. Ken Frieden, in Derrida and

Alex Dubilet 51
in part because of the ways it put into question the pretensions of phil-
osophical discourse: it suggested that determination is never as pow-
erful as it claims, revealing it as the projection of a masterful subject
attempting to possess and exhaust what is transcendent to it.6 At the
same time, the critique of modern philosophy in its onto-theological
dimensions has yielded more explicitly religious-oriented paths. One
can think of the Catholic phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion, who fol-
lowed Heidegger in dislodging onto-theology, but did so in order to af-
firm a God beyond being.7
Recently, however, questions have been raised as to whether the re-
sult of the religious turn has not simply been a failure for philosophy
itself. Through his diagnosis of the ‘correlationism’ in modern philos-
ophy, Quentin Meillassoux has argued that the finitization of thought
has led to a reemergence of fideism in various forms: once thought is
restricted to the domain of the human, it generates an undetermined
beyond that can be filled with God knows what. An even more explic-
it push back against the religious turn and its appropriation of decon-
struction has recently been offered by Martin Hägglund, who has pro-
posed an interpretation of Derrida as a “radical atheist.” The gener-
al contours of this position —​the assertion of a stark divide between
an atheist discourse (however much it might borrow from theological
and religious archives) and a properly (dogmatically, orthodox) reli-
gious discourse —​is one that has had more general purchase. For exam-
ple, Christopher Watkin has recently offered a reading of Meillassoux,
Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy as proposing a “difficult atheism” in
polemical contrast to any so-called religious turn.8 Attempts to reas-
sert the proper domains of philosophy in opposition to its contamina-
tion by the theological are not exactly new: more than two decades ago,
Dominique Janicaud diagnosed and sought to restore the proper lim-
its and scientific merit of phenomenology in contrast to its cooption
by the theological, which he saw as dominant in post-Levinasian phe-

Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 1982)). On the transformation see: John D. Caputo, The
Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997).
6. For a classic account along these lines see: Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign:
Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
7. Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1991).
8. Christopher Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badi-
ou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press, 2011).

52 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
nomenology. Each of these retorts can be said to exhibit a certain kind
of secularism of thought insofar as they seek to reassert the purity of a
philosophical or atheist position in polemical opposition to religious
discourse, which is relegated to being the hostile enemy of philosophy.
Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, editors of the recent vol-
ume After the Postsecular and the Postmodern, appraise this situation in
a particularly perspicacious way: “The deconstruction of the philoso-
phy/theology binary has resulted, not in a true democracy of thought
between philosophy and theology, but in the humiliation and debase-
ment of philosophy before the Queen of the sciences, theology.”9 In oth-
er words, the religious turn did not yield a democratization of thought,
one that would dislocate the imperialism of secular and atheistic prac-
tices to allow religious discourse to be treated seriously. Rather, what
has happened is a reversal, a “theologisation of philosophy.” In con-
trast, Smith and Whistler call for a “liberation of philosophy of religion,”
which would mean undertaking “the task of experimenting on and with
theological and religious material.”10 Significantly, they don’t call for a
mere re-inversion, for a militant atheism standing again in opposition to
religion. Instead, they ask whether there is a way of making speculation
and experimentalism lie at the heart of religion and philosophy alike.
Perhaps, one can avoid choosing sides in this false polemic: between
a militant atheistic defense of philosophy, which becomes, intentionally
or not, another weapon in the intellectual arsenal of secularism, and a
religious turn as it has been understood in the Levinasian and Derrid-
ian register. Perhaps, there is a way to think outside of these relentless-
ly persistent binaries that seem to reappear as soon as we undo them:
either a masterful subject of ontology in contrast to a finitude aporeti-
cally relating to an (ethical or divine) alterity, or (from the other side)
a supposedly religious orthodoxy as opposed to a nuanced atheism. As
though, we never learn from old polemics, but can only restage them
anew in ever more complex theoretical ways.
Perhaps, there is another possibility, one that becomes visible when
we read Hegel and Meister Eckhart together, one that that imbricates
the philosophical and the theological in a different, immanent, and
speculative way. Something of such a third option is provocatively
suggested by the editors of After the Postsecular when they rearticu-
late the nature of philosophy of religion as a speculative rather than a

9. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (eds.), After the Postsecular and the
Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 3.
10. Ibid, 4

Alex Dubilet 53
critical enterprise. Rather than a critical genealogy that took philos-
ophy of religion as a battleground for political interests that sought
to deflate religious orthodoxy (a tradition they see spanning from
Locke and Hume to Nietzsche and Derrida), they propose “an alter-
native genealogy of speculative or affirmatory philosophy of religion
leading from Spinoza through Schelling to Bergson and Deleuze.”11
These resulting speculative productions are not simply apolitical or
private exercises in cosmographia. Rather, they are affirmative pre-
cisely because they avoid being primarily structured by a polemical
antagonism, but are driven instead by a speculative and experimental
impulse: they indeed have political ramifications, but ones no long-
er fundamentally structured by a divide between secular atheism and
religious orthodoxy.
By looking at Hegel and his convergence with Eckhart, I want to in-
sist on such a speculative and affirmative relation of philosophy and re-
ligion, but I want to do so along a particular axis. I want to suggest that
the two thinkers engage with theological materials without enforcing
the primacy of subjective finitude. They indeed follow speculative line
by “ignoring the pathos of finitude so central to phenomenology, her-
meneutics and deconstruction and, instead, prioritising the infinite.”12
What I find in them are two interrelated thinkers who propose to re-
ject the very binary between a masterful egological subject that under-
girds onto-theology and the affirmation of alterity. For them, this bina-
ry forecloses a third possibility, the possibility of annihilating the sub-
ject as a way to affirm a speculative and infinite immanence. Utilizing
different discursive spaces and theoretical vocabularies, Hegel and Eck-
hart both propose to annihilate the subject as the site from which any
kind of transcendence could be affirmed. Moreover, for them, God is
not a name against which to struggle in the name of atheism, nor one
to uphold within a theological critique of secularism. Rather it becomes
the name for the possibility of absolute desubjectivation, of self-empty-
ing and annihilating the subject, processes that no longer affirm tran-
scendence, but open onto an infinite, immanent life.

II. Annihilating Finitude and Subverting Transcendence

Near the end of the introduction to the 1802 essay Faith and Knowledge,
Hegel writes the following lines: “Truth, however, cannot be deceived
by this sort of hallowing of a finitude that remains what it was. A true

11. Ibid., 7-8.

12. Ibid., 19.

54 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
hallowing should annihilate [vernichten] the finite.”13 In this statement,
Hegel articulates a position on the status of finitude, which persists in
various forms continuously from his works in Jena through to his Ber-
lin lectures. Within the context of Faith and Knowledge, the affirmation
of the necessity of annihilating finitude delineates the specifically He-
gelian perspective in contrast to the reigning post-Kantian philosophy
of his time. The insistence on not absolutizing finitude as such, of not
making it primary in our theoretical and ethical thought, is not a mar-
ginal component, but rather presents one of the definitive axes of He-
gelian thought. The specificity of the position is located in the particu-
larly unremitting formulation that finitude must be annihilated, abso-
lutely taken as nihil. It is not to be exalted as such, or merely be given
a proper place within an ordered totality, or even partially negated in
order to exalt something above it.
This insistence on annihilation —​and the conceptual logic that un-
dergirds it —f​ orms a categorical divide between Hegelian thought and
the dominant contours of the philosophy of his contemporaries.14 Ul-
timately, for Hegel, theoretically there are two mutually-exclusive pos-
sibilities: either naturalizing finitude as self-standing, as the unsurpass-
able limit out of which one thinks and lives, or, alternatively, annihi-
lating finitude as the primary theoretical nexus, and instead situating
it as a moment in a movement that precedes and exceeds it. He diag-
noses the situation as follows: “The fundamental principle common to
the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi and Fichte is, then, the absoluteness of
finitude and resulting from it, the absolute antithesis of finitude and in-
finity, reality and ideality, the sensuous and the supersensuous, and the
beyondness of what is truly real and absolute.”15 What is valorized is a
dual and bifurcated reality, a finite subjectivity, separate, singular and
enclosed, and a transcendence to which it remains related, and which,
in turn, in being rendered constitutively unreachable, maintains the
subjectivity in its finitude. Hegel analyzes the variations and permuta-
tions that this principle takes, including the ideality of the moral law as
the ultimate objective reality (in Kant), the prioritization and elevation

13. G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany:
State University of New York, 1977), 65, translation modified and G.W.F. He-
gel, “Glauben und Wissen” in G.W.F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 4: Jenaer
Kritische Schriften, eds. Hartmut Buchner and Otto Pöggeler (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner Verlag, 1968), 323.
14. For a powerful interpretation of the significance of Faith and Knowledge in He-
gel’s overall project, see: Gillian Rose, Hegel contra Sociology (London: Athlone,
1995), esp. 92-102.
15. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 62.

Alex Dubilet 55
of the singular subject in its feeling and longing (in Jacobi), and the at-
tempted enactment of this opposition in a synthesis and the drive for
mastery and suffering thus produced (in Fichte). But what is notable is
precisely the way that for Hegel these differences matter much less than
the common conceptual matrix that underlies these variations. Each of
these philosophical systems legitimates an injunction: “never to forget
the absoluteness of the subject.”16
What Faith and Knowledge seeks is to reconfigure theoretical con-
ceptuality so that one could precisely forget that absoluteness, and it
does so through the insistence on the process of its Vernichtung. Anni-
hilation is not a violent process of immolation or sacrifice, nor a simple
absorption of particularity into a totality or individuality into the ab-
solute. Annihilation appears as a violent operation only to the position
that takes empirical subjectivity as the sine qua non, the baseline begin-
ning and unsurpassable site, for thought and life. It is a loss only if one
begins with life and thought as already possessed and appropriated, as
my life and my thought —a​ s possessions or quasi-faculties, rather than
from a position that affirms that I partake in thought and life that pre-
cedes and exceeds me. By contrast, for Hegel, annihilation is first and
foremost an operation that rearticulates the very status of finitude. He-
gel offers the following image to describe this dynamic:

It is as if someone who sees only the feet of a work of art were to com-
plain, when the whole work is revealed to his sight, that he was be-
ing deprived of his deprivation and that the incomplete had been in-
completed…. In the Idea, however, finite and infinite are one, and
hence finitude as such, i.e., as something that was supposed to have
truth and reality in and for itself, has vanished. Yet what was negat-
ed was only the negative in finitude; and thus the true affirmation
was posited.17

What is at stake in this conception of annihilation is the annihilation of

finitude as finitude, as something self-standing and severed from the
infinite it posits and holds as a transcendent truth. For Hegel, finitude
as such must not be affirmed as primary, but taken as only an abstract-
ed form, the result of a secondary operation, which breaks apart the im-
personal, immanent process that exceeds any given finite appropriation.
To begin with an empirical perspective, as Hegel repeatedly diagnoses
in his immanent critiques of dominant philosophical and theological
paradigms, is to improperly essentialize and naturalize finitude, allow-

16. Ibid., 64.

17. Ibid., 66.

56 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
ing life and thought to at most strive to elevate themselves towards a
transcendence that can definitionally never be reached; but it is always
to fail to inhabit speculative infinity immanently, which precisely re-
quires annihilation of finitude “in and for itself,” that is, as something
self-standing and independent.
The convergent point that Hegel never ceases to impart is that infini-
ty cannot be posited merely as the other of finitude without being there-
by rendered finite itself. Infinity articulated in opposition to finitude re-
mains itself merely finite because it is defined and limited by this oppo-
sition. Precisely insofar as it is other to the finite, it is determined as its
other, and thus reveals itself not to be genuine infinity, but merely an ab-
stract projection of finitude itself. “They understood the sphere of this
antithesis, a finite and an infinite, to be absolute; but if infinity is thus set
up against finitude, each is as finite as the other.”18 Though the explicit
target of Hegel’s critique is the philosophy of his contemporaries, it also
contains the kernel of a proleptic critique of Levinasian and post-Levina-
sian thought. This becomes visible when we realize that Hegel’s decisive
theoretical move is to insist that transcendence, the positing of a beyond
for which one strives or by which one is affected (whatever the form one
gives it, whether the moral law, eternal life, the intelligible world, or the
Other) is an abstraction, an effect of self-negation or self-limitation that
does nothing but enact a gesture of prostration towards alterity —​and,
moreover, that this formation can be formalized within religious dis-
courses no less than philosophical ones. The assertion of transcendence,
then, no longer functions, as it frequently does even in contemporary
discourse, as an act of valorization, one that upholds the purity of what
is posited as radically other —​but rather as a ruse of abstraction whose
central effects are the delimitation and enforcement of finitude.
For Hegel, to critique the subject in order to exalt some form of tran-
scendence surreptitiously reinforces the very perspective of finitude that
it means to be subvert. What is at stake is not the opening up of finitude
to transcendence, however conceived, but the diagnosis of the correla-
tion between finitude and transcendence, and in turn the subversion of
that entire correlation. To annihilate finitude for Hegel is to remove the
very negative constraint of transcendence that structures its entire the-
oretical and affective matrix, and in this way to hallow life, to release it
from the determination as essentially finite. In other words, one must
resist merely choosing between the affirmation of a self-possessed sub-
ject and its self-negation as a way of valorizing transcendence; instead,
the task of the speculative enterprise becomes the collapse of the entire

18. Ibid., 63.

Alex Dubilet 57
conceptual field governed by finitude, in order to articulate finitude it-
self as a moment of infinite generation of immanence.
This is why Hegel can write: “Infinity is the pure annihilation [Ver-
nichtung] of antithesis or of finitude; but it is at the same time also the
spring of eternal movement, the spring of that finitude which is infinite,
because it eternally annihilates itself.”19 For Hegel, in contrast to Levinas,
the infinite names not a transcendence that ruptures the self-sufficiency
of the subject, but an immanent and impersonal process that precedes
and exceeds the very difference between self and other. This is why He-
gel insists that annihilation is an “eternal” process, one that continuously
subverts the primacy of the subject and affirms its absolute (rather than
partial or analogical) participation in processual infinity. And yet, what
is thus annihilated is only the negative determination, only the theoret-
ical and existential decision on the primacy of finitude itself. According
to this reading, Hegel’s thought is less one of closure and totality than
one of externalization and productivity, one that speculatively affirms
an immanence that is not merely a possession or a property of the sub-
ject, but is an impersonal process in excess of all subjectivity.

III. Divine Speculation: Immanence against Negative

Theology
At the outset of Faith and Knowledge, Hegel points out one of the cen-
tral problems with all philosophy that commences from the perspec-
tive of finitude: “In this situation philosophy cannot aim at the cogni-
tion of God, but only at what is called the cognition of man.”20 For He-
gel, such restriction of thought to the human subject presents as the
successful realization what used to —a​ nd, for Hegel, still must —m​ ark
the very “death of philosophy.”21 Hegel’s articulation of thought as di-
vine must not, however, be mistaken for its attribution to a transcend-
ence entity, to a God beyond the human. At stake is not the displace-
ment of thought to a different subject —​a divine instead of a human
one —​rather it is the reconfiguration of the very parameters of thought.
For Hegel, speculative reason can be said to be the cognition of the di-
vine only if one takes divine as something absolutely immanent to itself,
and not simply that which is external and transcendent to the human.
To say immanent only to itself is to say that it has nothing outside of it.
Hegel is adamant that nothing has standing outside of God: “Philoso-

19. Ibid, 190 (trans. mod.).

20. Ibid., 65.
21. Ibid., 56.

58 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
phy recognizes that there is no outside of God, and hence that God is
not an entity that subsists apart, one that is determined by something
outside of it, or in other words, not something apart from which oth-
er have standing. Outside of God nothing has standing at all, there is
nothing.”22 In other words, for Hegel, the divine ceases to name tran-
scendence and becomes speculative precisely once finitude is annihi-
lated as the site from which thought and life takes place. Taken spec-
ulatively, God names the possibility of immanence itself, the articu-
lation of a thought and plane of immanence no longer bound to the
strictures of the perspective of the finite subject and its correlation to
transcendence. What this crucially means is that, for Hegel, there is no
longer any essential connection between God and transcendence, on
the one hand, or immanence and humanism or secularism, on the oth-
er. In fact, not only is there no essential connection, there is no connec-
tion at all: God speculatively names immanence that challenges tradi-
tional theologies oriented around transcendence, no less than the hu-
manisms and secularisms that appropriate immanence and restrict it
to a wordily condition.
It is the decoupling of God from transcendence that makes Hegel
a radical critic of the logic of negative theology, of any position that
proclaims the indetermination of God as a beyond. For Hegel, nega-
tive theology is, in the end, nothing but the proclamation of the failure
of thought, one that underwrites the finitude of the subject. It is noth-
ing but the prostration of finitude pointing in exaltation beyond itself,
without declaring anything but its own prostrated frustration. Already
present in Faith and Knowledge, this position persists into his late Lec-
tures on the Philosophy of Religion:

This
is especially the attitude and the way of viewing [religion] in our
time; religion is an orientation toward God, a feeling, speaking, and
praying directed toward God above —​but [only] toward God … we
know nothing of God, have no acquaintance with the divine con-
tent, essence, and nature; [we are oriented] toward a place that for
us is empty.23

By associating the name of God with a pure beyond, with a transcend-

ence in excess of all possible determination, what is in reality accom-
plished is less the valorization of the divine beyond all conceptual idol-

22. Ibid., 169.

23. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: Introduction and The Con-
cept of Religion, trans. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984), 191.

Alex Dubilet 59
atry, than the determination of life as oriented towards a transcendent
goal, which it, by definition, fails to ever reach.24 It becomes a way of
defining life as dirempt, because it is essentially related to transcend-
ence. As Hegel polemically judges this Enlightenment position: “From
such a God, in Him, there is nothing to be had for He has already been
emptied of all content. He is the unknowable… the void lacks content,
is indeterminate and possesses no immanent life and action.”25 Being
emptied of all content, but retaining its form as transcendence, God be-
comes the name for the beyond whose main accomplishment is the en-
forcement of the human in its finitude. For Hegel, the negative theology,
philosophically most explicitly articulated by Kant, bars the relation of
the intellect to the divine: it situates intellect not as one of the names of
the divine (perhaps the name for Hegel) but always as something situ-
ated on the outside. Nor should it be overlooked that what is eradicat-
ed in such a conception is not only speculative thought, but precisely
divine, “immanent life,” that is, a life that is immanent because it has
nothing beyond it, a common life not split into my life and the life of
the other. What the retention of an apophatic beyond accomplishes is
less the proper actualization of the beyond than the enshrinement and
essentialization of the finitude of the human.
Does the attribution of thought to God render Hegel a megalomani-
acal philosopher, the kind of onto-theological metaphysician that Hei-
degger charged him with being?26 Nothing is less certain, unless one
is committed to the theoretical unsurpassibility of the correlation be-
tween finitude and transcendence. I would suggest, by contrast, that for
Hegel, God becomes a speculative name that allows for the theoreti-
cal articulation of immanence, and thus also for thought and life to be
seen as exceeding their subjective appropriation.
But what does it mean that thought is not reducible to an appropria-
tion of the human subject? The transition from the perspective of con-
sciousness, of the subjective perspective, is not simply an affirmation
of the perspective of the divine. Rather than a view from nowhere, He-
gel proposes a non-anthropomorphic and non-anthropocentric artic-

24. For a contemporary concern about conceptual idolatry, see: Jean-Luc Mari-
on, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas. A. Carlson (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2001).
25. G.W.F. Hegel, “Foreword to Hinrichs’ Religion in Its Inner Relation to Science,”
trans. A.V. Miller, in Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, ed. Jon Stewart
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 341.
26. Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in
Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chica-
go Press, 2002).

60 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
ulation of immanence, for which any empirical subjectivity becomes a
moment rather than a ground. What Hegel reintroduces into philoso-
phy, against its dominant tendencies then and now, is the appreciation
that we are not just finite. Hegel’s gesture is to denude the pretensions
of the subject, and expose its pretense to being self-grounding in or-
der to make it acknowledge the immanence in which it partakes with-
out reserve or mastery. At stake is an immanent movement of infini-
ty, one no longer possessed by the subject, nor simply appropriated by
God as a (divine) subject to which creatures and the world then would
stand opposed. Hegel’s thought is a thought of immanence because it
disrupts the conceptual topography that separates and keeps separate
the self, the world and God.
Such a reading suggests that Hegelian speculative thought should be
inserted back within the genealogy of immanence that Deleuze artic-
ulates in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza and What is Philosophy?
Although Deleuze has often been interpreted, in accordance with his
explicit position, as offering a radical anti-Hegelianism, this has led to a
failure to note their theoretical convergence on the primacy of genera-
tive immanence. Certainly, as is most powerfully visible in his Nietzsche
and Philosophy, Deleuze places his philosophy against the humanistic
Hegel dominant in 20th century post-Kojèvian philosophy. Yet this is
not the only Hegel that there exists, even for Deleuze himself, since Jean
Hyppolite had already articulated Hegelian thought as a non-human-
istic ontology of immanence in his Logic and Existence.27 Years before
his articulation of the genealogy of immanence in relation to Spinoza,
Deleuze read and appreciated Hyppolite’s intervention.28 The differenc-
es between Deleuze and Hegel are certainly great, especially on the sta-
tus of difference and contradiction and Deleuze’s conception of a tran-
scendental empiricism. But these differences have led to the forgetting
of the strong theory of immanence in Hegel’s thought, which deserves
to be reinserted in the genealogy of immanence from medieval mystics
to Giordano Bruno through to Spinoza and to Deleuze himself.
Moreover, when Hegel describes thought as divine, such an ascrip-
tion should be read within the tradition of philosophy that takes God
as a site for speculation in excess of the fields of representation estab-
lished between subjects and objects. In other words, as part of the tra-
dition that takes the name of God as liberating thought’s speculative ca-

27. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
28. Deleuze’s appreciative review is published as an appendix of the English trans-
lation: Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, 191-196.

Alex Dubilet 61
pacities. With God, everything is permitted, because through thinking
God, concepts become disarticulated from the bounds of representa-
tion, and a new kind of freedom of thought is made possible. God does
not name the origin of moral restrictions or condemnations, but names
instead the site for the liberation of thought. As Deleuze explained in
his late lectures on Spinoza:

With God, everything is permitted… God and the theme of God of-
fered the irreplaceable opportunity for philosophy to free the object
of creation in philosophy —​that is to say concepts —​from the con-
straints that had been imposed on them... the simple representation
of things…. The concept is freed at the level of God because it no
longer has the task of representing something. 29

For Deleuze, such an approach is emblematic of early modern philos-

ophy. I have argued elsewhere that medieval mystical theologians like
Eckhart likewise used God as the name for immanence in excess of
subjectivity, decoupling it from any remnants of transcendence or op-
erations of creation —a​ fact that Deleuze failed to see due to his overly
rigid distinction between the tasks and domains of theology and phi-
losophy.30 For Deleuze, philosophy consists of constructing concepts,
articulating immanence, and upholding univocal relations while the-
ology is relegated to the conservative defense of an ineffable God, cos-
mological hierarchies and analogical predication.31 Here I would like to
insist complementarily that Hegel reactivated precisely a philosophical
use of God in the wake the Kantian moment in which God again be-
came the name for a pious and moral restriction on thought. Hegel re-
discovers this impulse insofar as for him God no longer names the lim-
it of the human —a​ s though being something beyond the human —​but
the name for the force of processual immanence, which leaves nothing
external to itself. God becomes the name for the process of speculation
that renders thought and life as absolutely immanent, no longer essen-
tially severed into a finite subject and a transcendent beyond. It names
the site not of the ultimate (self-)possession, but of all subjective dispos-

29. Gilles Deleuze, Lectures on Spinoza, <http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.

com/2007/02/on-spinoza.html> (accessed June 04, 2013).
30. Alex Dubilet, “Freeing Immanence from the Grip of Philosophy: On Univoci-
ty and Experimentalism in Meister Eckhart” in Speculation, Heresy, and Gno-
sis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute, eds. Joshua
Ramey and Matthew Haar Farris (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
31. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin
(New York: Zone Books, 1990), 169-199 and passim; and Dubilet, “Freeing
Immanence.”

62 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
session, precisely because immanence is no longer a possession or prop-
erty either of the subject or the secular world. Hegelian speculative im-
manence allows one to abrogate choosing between a secular subject and
a theological transcendence, and instead upholds the task of thinking
and living out of that processual infinite that can be called divine pre-
cisely and only insofar as it is nothing but immanence itself.

IV. Immanence, or a Life without a Why: Hegel as an

Inheritor of Eckhart
At the very moment in the Lectures when Hegel articulates the nature
of the speculative perspective that stands in contrast to the perspec-
tive of the finite subjectivity, he evokes “earlier theologians who saw to
the very bottom of this depth, especially Catholic theologians.”32 And
yet, despite conjuring a plurality of predecessors, he names only one:

Meister Eckhart, a Dominican monk of the fourteenth century, says

in the course of one of his sermons on this innermost [dies Innerste],
‘The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him;
my eye and his are one and the same. In justice [Gerechtigkeit] I am
weighed in God and he in me. If God did not exist nor would I; if I
did not exist nor would he...’ ”33

What Hegel finds in Eckhart is a predecessor in the rejection of the the-

oretical primacy of external relations between the human and the divine,
in order to affirm their identity and immanence.34 Hegel finds, within
the terrain of medieval theology, the assertion of the dependence not
merely of the subject on God, but much more radically, of God on the
subject: “If I did not exist nor would he.” What makes Eckhart a Hegelian
precursor is the fact that he diagnosed and sought to subvert the prima-

32. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 347.

33. Ibid., 347-348, trans. mod. As the editors of the Lectures point out, the quota-
tion is an amalgamation of several of Eckhart’s sermons.
34. The connection between Eckhart and Hegel (and between German Medieval
Mysticism and German Idealism more generally) is helpfully explored by Ernst
Benz, Les Sources Mystiques de la Philosophie Romantique Allemande (Paris: J.
Vrin, 1981). Hegel’s response to reading Eckhart is canonically captured in the
comment he is purported to have made to Franz von Baader in 1824: “Da haben
wir es ja, was wir wollen.” (Les Sources Mystiques, 12). On this also see the brief
discussion in Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2008), 224-227. H.S. Harris makes the claim that He-
gel encounters the medieval mystics much earlier, in 1795, while working on his
essay on the positivity of Christianity, cf. H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: To-
wards the Sunlight 1770-1801 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 230-231.

Alex Dubilet 63
cy of asymmetrical relations of externality, and moreover, one that did
so by insisting that thought is not something external to its object: tak-
en speculatively, my eye is the divine eye, and not merely a human eye
looking at the divine as something external or transcendent. For Hegel,
as for Eckhart, there is not a severed duality between the (human) self
and the (divine) other, but only the immanence of the One as process.
There are several interrelated vectors of convergence between Hegel
and Eckhart, which put them at odds with the dominant logics operat-
ing both in medieval theology and modern philosophy. The first is the
insistence of the necessity to annihilate finitude as the site from which
thought and life are articulated. Eckhart’s sermons repeatedly thematize
questions of self-annihilation, detachment, and self-dispossession; in-
deed, they generate a veritable kenotic lexicon.35 For Eckhart, just as for
Hegel, this process of undoing the delimitation of the subject entails pre-
cisely not the affirmation of transcendence, but rather the collapse of the
entire correlation between finitude of the subject and divine transcend-
ence. In other words, in contrast to what might be expected of medie-
val mystical and spiritual writings, in Eckhart’s discourse, the annihila-
tion of the self does not yield experiences of God or foretastes of beatif-
ic afterlife. Eckhart repeatedly makes this point, but perhaps nowhere
more acutely than in his famous Sermon 52, where he delineates the po-
sition that true poverty requires not only giving up the self, but also to
become free of God as God, that is, God as a transcendent externality.
Eckhart and Hegel, in different discursive frames, both problema-
tize the link of God with transcendence, and do so not in order to foist
on the beyond a set of concepts that would produce an idolatrous re-
lationship, but because such a link forecloses the possibility of an ab-
solute immanence that would not be a priori severed between the (fi-
nite) self and the (divine) other. This is performed, at least in part,
through the subversion of negative theology, which is understood not
as a pious operation that exalts God (as it is in the Christian tradition
from Pseudo-Dionysius onwards) as much as an exaltation of a tran-
scendence, which is nothing but the inverse of the affirmation of hu-
man finitude. For Hegel and Eckhart both, the true opposite of nega-
tive theology is neither simply kataphatic or positive theology nor an
idolatrous relation (which Christian theologians never cease warning
us of), but the infinitizing of thought and life. It is the affirmation of

35. For a useful enumeration of relevant terms, see: Alois M. Haas, “‘... das Persön-
liche und Eigene verleugnen’: Mystische vernichtigkeit und verworffenheit sein
selbs im Geiste Meister Eckharts,” in Mystik als Aussage: Erfahrungs-, Denk- und
Redeformen christlicher Mystik (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2007), 370 and passim.

64 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
the possibility of the cognition of God, not from the position of the
finite subject, but as the condition for the articulation of the divine
as absolute immanence itself. They suggest that the rejection of nega-
tive theology in order to affirm speculative immanence is not simple
idolatry: it does not give an improper name that exhausts God. Rath-
er it shows how the traditional concerns of negative theology them-
selves can be said to disavow their enactment of a negative idolatry, in
which God remains defined as the negative beyond of the perspective
of human finitude. Instead of affirming transcendence, the annihila-
tion of finitude is an operation that opens onto a speculative concep-
tion of God as absolute self-immanence, one from and not towards
which one thinks and lives.
For Hegel and Eckhart, thought and life are not severed or opposed.
On this point, one can recall Deleuze: “Actually there is only one term,
Life, that encompasses thought, but conversely this term is encompassed
only by thought.”36 They are no longer possessed, they are no longer ap-
propriated, but name what is common, what precedes and exceeds the
subject. But they do so not as a hyper-excessive transcendence, but an
immanence that subverts at once the subject and any transcendence to
which it can be attached. Annihilation of finitude enacts not a violence
of abstraction or the self-mutilation of subjective life, but quite the op-
posite —t​ he recognition that subjective life itself is always already a de-
formation, a life made to suffer by being forced into itself. Annihila-
tion is thus not a simple negation, but a radical affirmation of life and
thought in which one partakes in excess of one’s own subjectivity.
If there is an ethics of self-annihilation that affirms the speculative
immanence of life, one could say, turning directly to the vocabulary of
Eckhart and the medieval mystics, that it is a question of a life “without
a why.” This is life out of the absolute univocal identity that precedes the
very differentiation between the human and the divine, between crea-
ture and creator, between self and other. Life without a why is neither
creaturely nor divine (or, when ascribed to the divine, it is thereby ren-
dered absolutely immanent, as lacking all externality and alterity), but
is immanent generation that precedes and undoes all operations of ap-
propriation and transcendence, all difference between humans and di-
vinities. Indeed, one can say that for Eckhart life and immanence are
precisely what is revealed in the wake of the breakdown of the concep-
tual grammar structured by the hierarchical relationality of the delim-
ited self, the created world, and the transcendent God. No longer im-

36. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Fran-
cisco: City Light Books, 1988), 14.

Alex Dubilet 65
manent to something, in the sense of being a property of something,
life is articulated only as immanent to itself.

It is out of this inner ground that you should perform all your works
without asking, “Why?” I say truly: So long as you perform your works
for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, or for God’s sake, or for the sake
of your eternal blessedness, and you work them from without, you are
going completely astray…. If anyone went on for a thousand years ask-
ing of life: “Why are you living?” life, if it could answer, would only
say: “I live so that I may live.” That is because life lives out of its own
ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without ask-
ing why it is itself living.37

This passage suggests that life cannot follow the instrumental logics of
‘in order to’ or ‘for the sake of ’ or ‘so that’ without being maimed and
losing its quality as life. It is not that life should not be instrumental-
ized for things that are somehow unworthy of it, but that life cannot
be made to serve any ground or reason whatsoever —w ​ hether it be the
kingdom of heaven, God, or eternal blessedness. It would be difficult
to find a more exalted religious triad, and yet Eckhart’s insistence on
absoluteness of the mistake suggests precisely a qualitative difference,
a conceptual rupture between a life lived according to the logic of in-
strumentality that arises out of the severance of means and ends, be-
tween finitude and transcendence, and, on the other hand, the logic of
immanent life without a why.
In recognizing that life is not something possessed or appropriated
by the subject, but an immanence revealed through annihilation and
self-emptying, both Eckhart and Hegel are harbingers of the connec-
tion identified by Deleuze in his last essay: “We will say of pure imma-
nence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else.”38 If for Eckhart, life without a
why is a recurring topos, which insists on life’s irreducible immanence,39
it is perhaps less obviously the case for Hegel. Nevertheless, Hegel re-
peatedly bemoans the maiming of life under the configurations of con-
cepts, the suffering and longing that is produced under the philoso-
phies of his contemporaries. The problem with absolutizing the subject

37. Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatis-
es and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Mahwah: Pau-
list Press, 1981), Sermon 5b, 183-4, emphasis added.
38. Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans.
Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 27.
39. For this dimension of Eckhart’s thought, see: Reiner Schürmann, Wandering
Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy, trans. David Appelbaum (Great Bar-
rington: Lindisfarne Books, 2001).

66 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
and tethering it to transcendence is not only the failure of theoretically
articulating a consistent conception of infinity, but also its foreclosure
of a shared immanence of life. Moreover, it should be remembered that
the effect of philosophies of subjective reflection is not a generation of
an actual beyond, but the deformation of the speculative capacities of
thought and the existential capacities of life: both reason and life be-
come essentially subjective, appropriated, privatized. This is why He-
gel imbricates the two sides so closely: “the task of philosophy consists
in uniting these presuppositions… to posit the finite in the infinite, as
life.”40 For Hegel too, then, life is precisely not simply an attribute of the
subject, but that which is opened onto, once the finite subject is seen as
partaking in the infinite immanence that exceeds it. But what does this
entail? As Hegel writes in immediately preceding passage: “It is the goal
that is being sought; but it is already present, or how otherwise could
it be sought?”41 Rather than a transcendent goal or a telos, posited as
something to be achieved, the speculative perspective ungrounds life
and thought, leaving them without transcendent moorings and desti-
nations. Hegel’s thought proposes a movement from the diremption
constitutive of a finitude severed from a transcendence to a speculative
conception of life which is fundamentally immanent and infinite inso-
far as it is no longer a property of the subject. The result is an ethics of
ungroundedness and an abolition of teleological work. Speculative life
is immanent life, generic common life, one no longer appropriated by
the subject nor tethered to a transcendent telos.
Such an interpretation is further confirmed by the fact that Hegel
differentiates himself from both Kant and Fichte through the way the
latter conceive of striving and accomplishment. In the Jena writings,
Hegel’s critique of Fichte stems precisely from the teleological frame-
work in which Fichte seeks to unify opposites through subordination
and mastery: of nature to self, of necessity to freedom, of drive to re-
flection. For Hegel, this is the direct result of Fichte’s prioritization of
the subjective appropriation of speculation, of articulating the specu-
lative identity as ultimately the possession of the subject. Here identi-
ty is merely ideal insofar as it is posited as an ought, something to be
achieved, leading to a relation of a violent imposition, a teleological
making real of the ideal that cannot but be violent. In contrast, for He-
gel, the task cannot be to overcome separation and difference into iden-

40. G.W.F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philoso-
phy, trans. H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1977), 94.
41. Ibid., 93.

Alex Dubilet 67
tity, but one that affirms speculative immanence as preceding the very
division between subject and object, self and other, finitude and tran-
scendence. Identity and immanence are not then merely the property
of the subject, but must be read speculatively as undermining the status
of the subject and any moral mission it might claim. Not coincidental-
ly, right after evoking Eckhart in the Lectures, Hegel differentiates the
implications of this position from the position most closely associated
with Kant and Fichte, one that gives priority to the morality: “as though
there were a world, forsaken by God, outside of me, waiting for me to
introduce the goal (or goodness) for the first time.”42 But for Hegel, as
for Eckhart, the task is not to realize a goal, as though the subject is be-
holden to a necessity (of the norm, of the law, of the free will) to trans-
form the world, which is separate from a transcendent God. Rather, the
question is of conceptually subverting the very production of such illu-
sions of necessity, along with the triadic division between the subject,
the world and God that underwrites them.
Indeed, to read Hegel in this way is to resist the pieties of schol-
arship and the powers of historicist common sense that insist on the
privileged position of the Kantian framework for interpreting Hegel’s
thought. But it is also to propose a different mode of organizing tra-
ditions, no longer structured by the disjuncture between religious and
philosophical domains, but instead by the difference between modes
of thought that give voice to immanence and those that enshrine the
primacy of transcendence. Such an organization, moreover, compels us
to acknowledge that problematizing frameworks that prioritize tran-
scendence and arrest the process of immanence does not necessari-
ly have to be anti-religious, whatever the united voices of theologians,
philosophers and common sense might tell us: philosophical and re-
ligious discourse each have the capacity to be articulated immanently
and speculatively. In such an organization, Hegel must indeed be seen
as an inheritor of a medieval theologian like Eckhart, and to stand in
opposition to any theoretical articulation that enshrines transcendence,
even when it is articulated philosophically, as it is by Kant.43

42. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 350.

43. Though the importance of Kantian categories for Hegel is undeniable (e.g. Rob-
ert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1989)), one risks missing something essential if one
traces the persistence of Kantianism in Hegel: the very way that Hegel radically
traverses and subverts the Kantian framework to open up his speculative per-
spective, and in so doing recuperates traditions of thought that preceded Kant
and which Kant sought to disqualify as illegitimate. So, although it might be
true that Hegel is not a metaphysician in a pre-Kantian sense, as Pippin insists,

68 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
References

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losophy of Religion (eds A. P. Smith, D. Whistler), Newcastle upon
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Barber D. C. On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity, Eugene,
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Benz E. Les Sources Mystiques de la Philosophie Romantique Allemande,
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Caputo J. D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without
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de Vries H. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
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Deleuze G. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, New York, Zone Books,
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Deleuze G. Immanence: A Life. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, New
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Deleuze G. Lectures on Spinoza. Available at: http://deleuzelectures.blogs-
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ern University Press, 2002, pp. 332–353.

it must be noted that the very dichotomy between pre-Critical thinkers like
Spinoza and Critical thinkers following Kant is itself a product of the Kantian
genealogical self-narration.

Alex Dubilet 69
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burg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1968.
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Magee G. A. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Ithaca, Cornell University
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Meister Eckhart. Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries,
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Pippin R. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Chicago,
Chicago University Press, 1989.
Rose G. Hegel contra Sociology, London, Athlone, 1995.
Schürmann R. Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy, Great
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70 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
Beginning with Kant: Utopia,
Immanence, and the Origin of
German Idealism

Kirill Chepurin
Senior Lecturer, School of Philosophy, Faculty of Humani-
ties, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
Address: 21/4 Staraya Basmannaya Str., 105066 Moscow, Russia.
E-mail: [email protected]
Keywords: Immanuel Kant; German Idealism; utopia; immanence;
temporality.
Abstract: This paper outlines a utopic reading of the Kantian origin of
German Idealism, which in turn implies and necessitates a re-
articulation of the concept of utopia. In this optic, utopia ceases
to be a mere idealistic vision of the future and becomes, first and
foremost, a utopian method and standpoint from which Kantian
idealism begins. Utopia, in this sense, originates as if at a dis-
tance from the real, but in such a way that it remains impossible
to reach it from within reality; any such transition would have to
remain, at best, an infinite approximation. It is therefore point-
less to expect utopia —one can only begin from it. This implies a
different, non-Spinozan immanence, which this paper character-
izes as utopian and discovers in Kant. On this reading, transcen-
dental idealism, as non-realism, suspends the real and starts
from a “non-place,” refusing to think the emergence of the ideal
from any environment or the in-itself. This non-place is redupli-
cated as an immanent, non-dualist facticity from which the sub-
ject of idealism proceeds to think and act. Idealism thus implies
a utopian structure (non-relation), operation (suspension), and
temporality (futurity-as-facticity), which, taken together, suggest
a different way of looking at the continuity between Kant and
post-Kantian idealism, as well as a way to think immanence as
non-Spinozistic —and even as deconstructing Spinozism —while
also avoiding any dualism, including that of the religious-secular
binary.

71
 With Kant came the dawn.
Schelling to Hegel1

Why a beginning at all? … The beginning is already a later concept.

Novalis2

T HIS paper outlines a reading of Kant’s thought —​and thus the

Kantian origin of German Idealism —​as utopian. This kind of
reading, however, requires a rearticulation of both Kant’s Criti-
cal project and the theoretical concept of utopia. Continental philoso-
phy’s new-found engagement with German Idealism, in which the lat-
ter has emerged as an important resource for new forms of thinking,
rarely approaches Kant in a constructive manner —​instead, more often
than not, he continues to be pitted negatively against Hegel and Schell-
ing, the two leading characters in the current German idealist reviv-
al. Here, I would like to provide a more speculative angle from which
to consider Kantian thought itself, in order to see what is, theoretically
and politically-theologically, “idealist” about Kantian (and, potential-
ly, post-Kantian German) Idealism. To that end, I will revisit Kantian
thought as a thought of immanence —a​ n immanence which, while born
out of a Spinozistic context, is not Spinozan; an immanence which,
furthermore, is idealist or non-realist. The “refusal of transcendence”
(and its flip side, the affirmation of immanence) has lately grown to
be a central motif in contemporary Continental philosophy, not least

1. Schelling an Hegel, Tübingen, den 4ten Febr. [17]95 // Briefe von und an Hegel.
Bd. I: 1785–1812 / J. Hoffmeister (Hg.). Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952. S. 21.
2. Novalis. Das Allgemeine Brouillon. Nr. 634 & 76 // Werke, Tagebücher und
Briefe. Bd. 2: Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk / H.-J. Mähl (Hg.). München:
Carl Hanser, 2005. S. 622, 485.

72 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 in philosophy of religion, where immanence names an alternative to
the traditional binary division between “religious” and “secular” (in
this division’s religious and secularist forms alike).3 However, following
Deleuze, immanence has predominantly been considered as equivalent
to, or genealogically aligned with, its Spinozistic articulation. Here, I
aim to conceptualize a different, non-Spinozan —i​ dealist and utopian —​
immanence, which I discover in Kantian idealism and which likewise
escapes any binary confines, including the procrustean bed of the reli-
gious-secular opposition. On this reading, we can discern within tran-
scendental idealism a certain theoretical core —a​ structure, temporality,
and method of what I would like to call “utopian immanence.”
Importantly, this structure of immanence in Kant is not dualistic in
essence, which allows, at least on one count, to escape or render more
theoretically complex the commonplace distinction between Kant as a
dualist and post-Kantian thought as striving towards unity. In an im-
portant section in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals enti-
tled “Of the Uttermost Boundary of All Practical Philosophy,” Kant
himself complicates what is often taken to be his dualism between “na-
ture” and “freedom” —a​ longside other divisions or parallelisms he men-
tions there (and elsewhere in that work), such as those between theo-
retical and practical reason, Verstand and Vernunft, Sinnenwelt and Ver-
standeswelt, as well as, for instance, “the world” vs. rational agency. In
different ways, each of these conceptual pairs represents for Kant two
aspects or “senses” into which a unity is bifurcated but which remain
within this unity —K ​ ant calls this a Wegescheidung (AA 4:455)4, which
I am translating here as “bifurcation.” The subject is the name or site of
this bifurcation, but it is not itself the origin of or that which produces
it, and not where it begins. Moreover, Kant insists on the original uni-
ty —​of the subject, and of reason. Since both nature and freedom are
“ideal” in Kant (what he calls “nature” is for him based on the ideality of

3. See e.g. Barber D.C. Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the
Future of Immanence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. See also
Alex Dubilet’s paper in this issue. The phrase “refusal of transcendence” is tak-
en from the title of an important recent book on Kierkegaard: Shakespeare S.
Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2015.
4. With the exception of the first Critique, references to Kant in this paper are to
the “Akademie-Ausgabe” (abbreviated AA, followed by volume and page num-
ber): Kant I. Gesammelte Schriften. Hg. von der Königlich Preußischen Aka-
demie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Georg Reimer / Berlin-Leipzig: de Gruyter,
1900–. References to the Critique of Pure Reason adhere to the standard ci-
tation style: “A” for the first edition, “B” for the second, followed by page
number.

K i r i ll C hepur i n 73
space and time), to ask about the origin of this Wegescheidung in Kant
means to inquire into the origin of ideality, or the ideal, as such —i​ nto
the origin and structure of the ideal in “transcencendental idealism.”

***
In this paper, I will argue that this origin is utopian. It cannot be a part
of, or derived from, any pre- or extra-ideal reality, which we may (provi-
sionally for now) call the “in-itself ”. If that were the case, that would, for
Kant, result in “dogmatism” —a​ dogmatism that, at once metaphysical-
ly and politically, serves to justify the world as it is, the realist status quo,
while leaving no room for freedom and critique. The ideal must there-
fore, for Kant, begin only from itself and its own here and now, not from
the world or the past —b ​ egin from that which the dogmatic real cannot
account for, a non-place, a nowhere which is the immanent now-here, a
“fact of reason.” Such is, provisionally, the first, basic sense in which ide-
alist immanence is “utopian”. Generally, the focus on the utopian should
not come as too much of a surprise given that, if you look at Kant him-
self or German Idealism in the wake of Kant —a​ t Fichte, Schelling, He-
gel or the Romantics —y​ ou can see a lot of explicitly utopian projects of
a perfect society, new religion, new mythology, new revelation, absolute
identity, the perfect reconciliation of morality and happiness or moral-
ity and right, the idea of a complete system, or the idea of completion —​
and sometimes even incompletion —​itself. These projects may be po-
litical, political-theological, or theoretical, but they are also, seemingly,
all of that at once —a​ lways rooted in or following from theoretical con-
siderations. Additionally, none of them is strictly secular or strictly re-
ligious. In order to get at the root of this, utopia needs to be grasped as
something other, and more interesting, than merely a utopian vision of
another world or an impossible future. I will argue that it is in and with
Kantian idealism that we can begin to conceive of utopia in this way.
To put it briefly and provisionally: whereas Spinozan immanence
is devoid of distance and transition,5 utopian immanence is a distance
without transition and a suspension without dualism. Originating by
definition as a “non-place,” utopia must involve a rearticulation of the
problem of beginning itself. Utopia suspends the real and starts at a
distance from it (albeit in a non-relative way —a​ distance as non-place),
making it impossible to transition to the utopian from within reality,
history or the world; any transition of this sort would have to remain,

5. See Barber D.C. Nonrelation and Metarelation // Serial Killing: A Philo-

sophical Anthology / E. Connole, G. J. Shipley (eds). Schism Press, 2015.
P. 39-52.

74 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
at best, an infinite approximation. It is therefore pointless to expect uto-
pia —o ​ ne can only begin from it. Utopia must therefore be rearticulated
as a structure, method and temporality that is immanent, not transcend-
ent. This implies a different kind of temporality compared to those tradi-
tionally ascribed to German Idealism and Romanticism, irreducible to a
divine cyclical time, an approximation of the future modeled upon the
present, a transcendent Christian eschaton or a mere incessant delay of
the apocalypse without beginning or end. Utopia is, here, the idealist or
non-realist origin and structure, as well as the idealist strategy (or meth-
od), which are immanently constitutive of and operating in ideality (be
it reason, history, freedom, community, Geist, cognition, the human, the
I, the subject, sometimes nature, or any other name for the ideal familiar
from German Idealism). It is also a fundamentally political-theological
concept that in an important sense precedes both the secular-religious
binary and “ideal” things like knowledge, law, religion, and community,
setting up a stage of critique, a “critical” plane of immanence on which
the ideal as such operates and which Friedrich Schlegel calls a realism
or Spinozism “of an ideal origin” (“idealischer Ursprung”)6.
As François Laruelle has put it, “utopia must first be the means before
being the ends.”7 As such, utopia, for me, is not, at least not first and fore-
most, a utopian vision of the future, although it can operate at this level,
too, —a​ nd as mentioned, German Idealism does include some explicitly
utopian visions. Instead, I want to revisit the concept of the utopian as the
minimal theoretical condition inscribed within Kantian idealism as such
(which, furthermore, makes it a philosophy of immanence before mak-
ing it a philosophy of the subject). The point here is not to “defend” ide-
alism or to defend the term “idealism”, but to make it explicit. What is at
stake in saying “the ideal” and not “the real”? What is the logic of ideal-
ism as “non-”realism? In what follows, I aim to consider these questions
by turning to Kant’s Critical corpus from the Critique of Pure Reason to
the Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. In my future work, I also
hope to trace this logic in post-Kantian German idealist thought.

1.
As delineated by the first Critique, the architectonic of pure reason ex-
tends from sensibility to the understanding to reason in the narrow

6. Schlegel F. Rede über die Mythologie // Schriften zur Kritischen Philosophie,

1795-1805. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2007. S. 99.
7. Laruelle F. Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy. Minneapolis:
Univocal Publishing, 2012. P. 146.

K i r i ll C hepur i n 75
 sense. I will also call this structure that of “ideality” or “the ideal,” fol-
lowing the fundamental distinction Kant draws between “transcenden-
tal realism” and his own “transcendental idealism,” as well as his use
of the terms “ideality of space and time” and “ideas” of reason. On the
one side, this transcendentally ideal structure begins with sensibility,
affected by the objects (A19/B33) that, as appearances, are grounded in
the “thing in itself ” as their correlate (“the true correlate of sensibility,”
A30/B45), as well as the “transcendental object” as “appearance in gen-
eral” of which “I know nothing of what it is in itself ” (A253). On the
other, pure reason is delimited by, and culminates in, “transcendental
ideas,” or “ideas of reason” (such as the idea of God). These, too, are
unknowable in itself, nor can they be taken to correspond to any actual
objects, instead governing the “systematic unity” of empirical cognition
(B595-6) and given to us as ideal “tasks” (e.g. B380) to be followed and
“problems” to be pursued (e.g. B397, A647/B675). Thus, ideality is here
suspended, as it were, between the two “in itself,” both unknowable yet
thinkable —​precisely as the limits or boundaries of ideality.
The issue of the ideal’s origin or starting point as introduced in the
first Critique has been particularly problematic for Kant interpreters
starting already from Jacobi’s famous criticism of the thing in itself as
that without which one cannot enter the Kantian system and with which
one cannot remain inside it. Other aspects of his argument aside, Jaco-
bi correctly identified the change of perspective from the in-itself to ap-
pearance and the accompanying “forgetting” of the thing in itself (which
cannot, as such, have any place within Kant’s system) as the starting
point of transcendental idealism. It is, after all, around this change of
perspective —f​ rom the (transcendentally) real to the (transcendentally)
ideal —​that Kant’s Copernican revolution itself revolves. The “idealist”
point here, however, is not that our knowledge is somehow “unreal,” but
that ideality does not need to be traced back to or derived from the in-it-
self, beginning instead with its own facticity and functioning as autono-
mous or indifferent to however the in-itself may be independently of us.8
To better understand this change from realism to idealism, it would
do well to recall what Kant considers “transcendental realism” to be —a​
philosophy that, for him, culminates in Spinozism and against which,
among other things, he positions his “transcendental idealism” during
(but also, as Omri Boehm has recently argued,9 even before) the so-
called Pantheism Controversy of the 1780s. Transcendental realism is de-

8. On this point cf. Chepurin K. Spirit and Utopia: (German) Idealism as Political
Theology // Crisis and Critique, 2/2015. P. 329.
9. Boehm O. Kant’s Critique of Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

76 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
fined by, first, the conflation of the in-itself and appearance and, second-
ly, the contention that the “ordained order of nature” as it is in itself, na-
ture as such, the infinite series taken as a whole or totality or substance,
is absolutely or objectively necessary10 —​that it is itself the absolute or
God (given that Spinozism rejects any substance pluralism). “Therefore,”
says Kant in the second Critique, “if one does not adopt this kind of ide-
ality of time and space [i.e., the realm of appearance as ideal], nothing
else remains except Spinozism, in which space and time are essential
determinations of the first being [Urwesen, i.e. God] itself ” (AA 5:100).
We should take note of the real ontological continuity at work in
transcendental realism according to Kant —​a logic of continuity be-
tween the real and the ideal, which precludes any autonomy of ideality.
By contrast, for Kant against Spinozism, if the ideal and the real coin-
cide, or the former is somehow derived from or in relation to the latter,
immanent critique becomes impossible, which results in “dogmatism.”
Dogmatism, in its turn, refers to the conception that regards the ideal
as emerging from a pre- or extra-ideal stratum,11 and thus, relatedly, to
the attempt to explain ideality (knowledge, morality, history, religion,
etc.) from within the real, to trace the emergence of the former from
the latter and therefore close the gap by going back to, or proceeding
from, the in-itself. Idealism, however, maintains this gap. If the latter
were to be closed by going back to the emergence of the ideal from the
real and re-instituting the continuity, critique would become impossi-
ble. As Kant puts it, “if appearances are things in themselves, freedom
cannot be upheld” (A536/B564).
In other words, in order for there to be ideality and freedom, the
structural starting point for reason’s critique must be ideality itself —​
ideality as distance without emergence or transition. The foundation-
al move of Kant’s transcendental idealism involves a suspension of or
a disinvestment from the real in order to set up an autonomous crit-
ical stage of reason. Kant’s short essay “What Does It Mean to Orient
Oneself in Thinking?” (1786), his explicit intervention in the Spinoza
Controversy, is programmatic in this regard. Ideality, says Kant, “ori-
ents” itself solely by its own facticity in abstraction from everything pre-
or extra-ideal, by the fact that it exists —​and, as it were, does its own
thing. That is also why, in the Critique of Pure Reason, reason for Kant
begins not with the real or any sort of correspondence between the real

10. Cf. Grier M. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001. P. 225.
11. Per Markus Gabriel’s formulation in Gabriel M. Aarhus Lectures: Schelling and
Contemporary Philosophy // sats № 14(1), 2013. P. 72.

K i r i ll C hepur i n 77
 and the ideal, but with itself: “reason has insight only into that which
it produces after a plan of its own” (Bxiii) or “what reason brings forth
entirely out of itself ” (Axx). As Markus Gabriel notes, Kant “is not in-
terested in grounding the dualism of appearance and thing in itself in
some futher fact.”12 Importantly, however, for Kant, there is no need
to ground ideality further (and arguably no dualism within the sys-
tem either), since that would disrupt the immanence of reason. This is
why, even though he infamously calls the in-itself the “ground” (A380)
and “cause” (B567) of appearances, Kant is indifferent to theorizing this
“ground” and “cause” any further. From the hypothetical realist stand-
point (the standpoint of ontological continuity), one might well regard
the ideal as emerging from within the real, because otherwise it would
be phantasmic and absurd (“absurd” being Kant’s own word —h ​ e says
that to think appearances without the in-itself would be absurd; Bxx-
vi-xvii). For idealism, however, it is from its own facticity that the ide-
al begins or originates. Idealism does not conceptualize its origin in the
in-itself, because only by keeping its distance from the latter and keep-
ing it suspended can it remain what it is.
The in-itself is, for ideality, the “empty” distance that makes freedom
and critique possible. There is no place for the in-itself as such within
the system of the ideal, and the latter remains non-dualistic. Thus, al-
ready at the beginning of the architectonic of reason, the ideal’s facticity,
indifferent towards the non-place of the real, and therefore Kantian cri-
tique, for which this facticity is constitutive, show their utopian charac-
ter (here, literally, as ou-topos). The utopian in this “technical” sense is
at the same time aligned with a number of characterstic traits of utopia
as commonly understood: utopia as not derivable from the real histor-
ical process and not emerging from it, and therefore as suspending the
real and beginning with its own facticity, to which there is no transition.

2.
In the 1783 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant claims that
“metaphysics is utterly impossible, or at best a disorderly and bungling
endeavor” if we do not separate “ideas of reason” from “concepts of the
understanding” (AA 4:329). In an important section of the first Critique
entitled “On the Regulative Use of the Ideas of Pure Reason,” he points
out, relatedly, that “transcendental ideas are just as natural to reason as
the categories are to the understanding” (A642/B670). When it comes to
our knowledge, Kant analyzes three classes of such ideas, whose objects

12. Ibid. P. 84.

78 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
can never be given empirically: the absolute unity of the thinking sub-
ject, or the totality of the subjective conditions of all representations; the
unconditioned unity of the “series of conditions of appearance,” or put
simply, the world as a whole; and the absolute unity of the “conditions of
all objects of thought in general,” or the being of all beings (A334/B391).
Reason, for Kant, “unites the manifold of concepts through ideas by pos-
iting a certain collective unity as the goal of the understanding’s actions”
(A644/B672). It provides a “unity a priori through concepts to the un-
derstanding’s manifold cognitions” (A302/B359). Furthermore, there is
a coherence and unity among these ideas of reason themselves, so that,
says Kant, they form a system (e.g. A333-8/B390-6, A645/B673).
The in-itself as “limit-concept” thus works both ways: limiting our
sensibility at the origin of idealist knowledge, it also limits how far this
knowledge can go —i​ mportantly, however, this limit is what conditions
knowledge and thought alike, so that without it ideality cannot oper-
ate. In a sort of reduplication, the unknown that affects our sensibility
re-appears as the unattainable closure of knowledge (the full unity or
system of knowledge as, per Kant, an intrinsic goal of reason), marking
a fundamental gap that “leaves open a space which we can fill neither
through possible experience nor through pure understanding” (A289/
B345). Hence, it is reason that attempts to fill this gap with the help of
transcendental ideas as ideas of complete syntheses (A322-3/B379-80).
If the thing in itself as affecting sensibility is the lower limit of the ide-
al, this may be said to be its upper limit, with reason arriving at tran-
scendental ideas as it “ascends” from given objects to their conditions
(A330-2/B386-9).
What must be taken care of, then, in order not to fall into dogma-
tism, is making sure that reason does not overstep its bounds as it ar-
rives at this limit. That is not, however, an easy thing to do. Transcen-
dental ideas are supersensible so that, as the “Transcendental Dialec-
tic” shows, reason falls into contradiction if it attempts to conclude
from these ideas to the actual reality of their respective objects —w ​ hich
amounts, onto- and epistemologically, precisely to a conservative re-
turn or transition from the ideal to the real. Obviously, for Kant, our
reason is by nature errant and enjoys nothing more than to deal in il-
lusion (Schein); hence the popularity of dogmatic rational metaphys-
ics as well as attempts to ontologically prove God’s existence. Ration-
al theology of this kind is, however, nothing more than itself a species
of illusion. In the famously “destructive” section of the first Critique
called “Critique of All Theology from Speculative Principles of Reason,”
Kant declares that “reason, in its merely speculative use, is far from ad-
equate for such a great aim as this, namely, attaining to the existence of

K i r i ll C hepur i n 79
a supreme being” (A639/B667) and asserts that “all attempts of a mere-
ly speculative use of reason in regard to theology are entirely fruitless
and intrinsically null and void” (A636/B664).
Contrary to many negative readings of Kant’s dialectic, howev-
er, reason for him is not merely the faculty of producing illusion, and
transcendental ideas are not there solely to point beyond the limit at
an unreachable object. In order to retain its ideal and critical charac-
ter, and not generate contradiction, reason must handle this limit prop-
erly by making proper use of its ideas; what is at stake here, like earli-
er in reason’s self-orientation, is not just the structure of ideality, but
also the proper method of idealism. Kant notes that reason has “a natu-
ral inclination to transcend [its] limits” (A642/B670). If reason indulg-
es this Hang and concludes from ideas to “actual things,” it falls into
transcendence (A643/B671) —​and we fall back into dogmatism. Rea-
son must therefore, for Kant, stay immanently within ideality, which in-
volves what he calls the “immanent” or “regulative use” of ideas (A643-
4/B669-70). Here, Kant arguably has in mind the definition of imma-
nence he gives earlier in the Critique: “We shall entitle the principles
whose application is confined entirely within the limits of possible ex-
perience, immanent; and those, on the other hand, which profess to
pass beyond these limits, transcendent” (A295-6/B352). The structure
and method of the ideal we have traced so far remains strictly imma-
nent as long as reason employs —​and critiques —​transcendental ide-
as properly.
Furthermore, in their immanence, transcendental ideas gather the
experience, as ideal, into a single focal point:

[Alongside their transcendent use,] ideas [also] have an excellent and

indispensably necessary regulative use, namely that of directing the un-
derstanding to a certain goal respecting which the lines of direction of
all its rules converge at once point, which, although it is only an idea
(focus imaginarius) —i​ .e., a point from which the concepts of the under-
standing do not really proceed [i.e., in the realist or empiricist sense],
since it lies outside the bounds of possible experience —​nonetheless
still serves to obtain for these concepts the greatest unity alongside the
greatest extention (Ausbreitung). (A644/B672)

This focus imaginarius may lie, in a utopian manner, “outside” the

boundaries of experience, but it is regulative, immanently and repeat-
edly performed at and as this boundary, or non-place. The “unity” of
the ideal as immanent, the closure of the utopian circle, is the full “sys-
tem” of ideas —​a point which the later post-Kantian idealism, culmi-
nating in Hegel, will develop further. Importantly, transcendental ide-

80 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
as are not derived or borrowed from experience, and thus their im-
manent use is not governed by but governs empirical cognition: “Such
concepts of reason are not created from nature, rather we question na-
ture according to these ideas, and we take our cognition to be defective
as long as it is not adequate to them” (A645-6/B673-4) —a​ revolutionary
reversal of the correspondence theory of truth, and an important con-
structive or positive aspect of Kant’s transcendental dialectic. The ide-
al suspends the real in order to treat it, critically, as material. This is, I
believe, a crucial aspect of the logic of the “non-” inherent in idealism
as non-realism, or idealism as criticism.
For Kant, in other words, we employ a transcendental idea imma-
nently not by attempting to derive it from experience or sensibility,
but by proceeding from it as an “as if ” focal point located at the lim-
it of cognizability, which gives unity to concepts of the understand-
ing, guides them in a certain direction, and arranges them into a sys-
tem. The transcendent God or the (no less transcendent) immortal soul
as really existing objects are thereby transformed into the immanent-
ly employed transcendental ideas of reason. The regulative use means
that reason performs its own limit in an immanent manner. Method-
ically and methodologically, in the course of the first Critique, it as-
cends to the limit and then orders everything as leading up to it, as if
proceeding from the ideas themselves– which is, for Kant, necessary
for knowledge.13 “As if ” in Kant thus indexes immanence. What looks,
pragmatically, as cautiousness on Kant’s part —t​ he stipulation of the “as
if ” —​serves to mark nothing other than the suspension of the dogmat-
ically real and the absolute immanence (and, in a sense, groundless-
ness) of critique, as if to downplay its revolutionary character. At this
point, we can discern the logic of utopia not only as a non-place (ou-to-
pos), but also the good place (eu-topos) of the full system of knowledge,
from which reason proceeds. Utopianism and idealism here coincide.

3.
Reason for Kant has a “speculative interest” (e.g. A466/B49414) in the
immanent completeness that transcendental ideas provide. By having
an interest, however, reason proves its de facto practical character. As

13. We ascend to transcendental ideas as conditions, which is, for Kant, required to
make fuller sense of what is given in appearance: “…for the complete compre-
hensibility of what is given in appeareance, we need its grounds, not its conse-
quences” (A411/B438). Cf. A702/B730.
14. Cf. ibid. on “practical interest.”

K i r i ll C hepur i n 81
Kant puts it in the second Critique, elaborating on the relationship be-
tween the speculative and the practical, “all interest is ultimately prac-
tical and even that of speculative reason is only conditional and is com-
plete in practical use alone” (AA 5:121). In the “Canon of Pure Reason”
in the first Critique, Kant mentions three ideas to which “the final in-
tent” (Endabsicht) of reason is directed: the freedom of the will, the im-
mortality of the soul, and the existence of God (A798/B826).15 These
ideas have great importance not merely for the theoretical immanent
use, but also “for the practical” (A800/B828). Indeed, in the first Cri-
tique Kant notes that the transition from theoretical to practical rea-
son may be regarded as going precisely through transcendental ide-
as, which “perhaps make possible a transition from concepts of nature
to the practical, and themselves generate support for the moral ideas
and connection with the speculative cognitions of reason” (A329/B386).
This transition has, moreover, an important additional aspect, aside
from the practical character of theoretical reason’s interest in these
ideas. Namely, the ideas that marked the immanent limits of theoret-
ical reason are in Kant’s practical philosophy turned into the “postu-
lates” of practical reason, which are “theoretical propositions,” too (AA
5:122), but ones that we perform “as rules” and as “the original condi-
tion” (A328/B385).
In other words, transcendental ideas point for Kant to the unity of
reason. Even though he distinguishes between theoretical and practical
reason and asserts that reason is above all practical, “it is still only one
and the same reason which, whether from a theoretical or a practical
perspective, judges according to a priori principles; it is then clear that,
even if from the [theoretical] perspective its capacity does not extend
to establishing certain propositions [e.g., the existence of God] affirm-
atively, although they do not contradict it, as soon as these same propo-
sitions belong inseparably to the practical interest of pure reason it must
accept them” (AA 5:121). Theoretical reason has, in the first Critique,
established the immanent character of the ideal’s utopian plane, and
this facticity is where practical reason begins. Ideas are performative in
that reason acts by them, and it does so as a matter of fact —K ​ ants calls
this the “Faktum der Vernunft,” the fact as well as immediate deed of
reason. Morality is for Kant instantaneous. The moral agent is “certain
on the spot what he has to do” (AA 8: 287), a facticity also reflected in
Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act so the maxim of

15. Cf. “These postulates are those of immortality, of freedom considered positively
(as the causality of a being insofar as it belongs to the intelligible world), and
of the existence of God” (AA 5:132).

82 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 your will could hold every time at the same time [jederzeit zugleich] as
a principle of universal legislation” (AA 5:30).16
The principle of morality, just like the ultimate principle of cogni-
tion, is, for Kant, necessary yet uncognizable; what we, however, can
cognize is precisely its “uncognizability” (AA 4:463) —a​ “non” that is, in
fact, a starting point, a facticity from which reason begins, the unique,
single point where, as Kant puts it, “the negative” and “the positive” co-
incide —a​ nd which must be thought of as preceding the division into
positive and negative. There is nowhere to begin within the dogmatic
status quo of the real, which is why we must begin, positively, necessari-
ly and immanently, from a utopian point of the ideal’s own facticity, out
of which it then immanently unfolds —​via two causalities, that of expe-
rience (ideas of reason) and that of morality (the same ideas as postu-
lates). The theoretical origin-as-if and the practical origin thus coincide,
or are reduplicated.17 Just like theoretical reason proceeds as-if, or im-
manently, from the unconditioned, practical reason begins with tran-
scendental ideas as postulates. Thus, it takes its beginning immanent-
ly from within the field of (theoretical) reason, expanding the scope of
ideality from the theoretical to the practical. However, in contrast to
theoretical reason, practical reason does not proceed from e.g. the idea
of God in order to give unity to empirical experience. Instead, it im-
manently constitutes its own, moral field of experience. In the realm of
“that which pertains to principles of morality, legislation and religion …
the ideas first make the experience (of the good) itself possible, even if
they can never be fully expressed in experience” (A318/B375).
In theoretical reason, ideas immanently govern or regulate the utopi-
an structure of ideality; in practical reason, they immanently constitute
it. As such, the transition from the theoretical to the practical is an im-
manent expansion of reason towards morality, which preserves the plane
of immanence insofar as reason produces it out of itself —o ​ ut of the tran-
scendental ideas to which it immanently ascended in the first Critique.

16. Translation taken from Comay R. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Rev-
olution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. P. 162.
17. “The doubling of the ideas’ constitution and function in Kant” is mentioned,
among others, by Dieter Henrich, who notes that “these two aspects of Kant’s
doctrine of ideas —​ideas ‘as-if ’ and ideas expressed in terms of [immedi-
ate] certainty —​are very hard to reconcile into a single concept.” Henrich D.
Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus.
Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2004. Bd. 2. S. 1527. Importantly, however, the “as if ”
is for Henrich a wholly “fictitious” and not an immanently constitutive princi-
ple. Furthermore, on my reading, this kind of structural reduplication of a uto-
pian origin is fundamental for German Idealism as such in its various (Kantian
and post-Kantian) mutations.

K i r i ll C hepur i n 83
As a consequence, according to Kant’s definition of immanence (“we
shall entitle the principles whose application is confined entirely with-
in the limits of possible experience, immanent”) as applied to moral ex-
perience, morality is immanent, too, since it constitutes its own expe-
rience by proceeding from the ideas as postulates. Kant only reinstates
the same ideas that the first Critique argues to lie beyond knowledge as
principles of morality because they were already there as the limit-con-
cept which reason performed. This expansion is not the final one, either.
In fact, it may be said that Kant’s account of reason in his critical cor-
pus —​up to and including the rational religious standpoint in the Reli-
gion within the Limits of Reason Alone —​proceeds by way of several such
immanent expansions of ideality.

4.
At the basis of all moral judgment and agency lies for Kant the idea of the
good (A315/B372). At the end of the first Critique, Kant introduces “the
ideal of the highest good,” or the idea of God considered practically as
reconciling Sittlichkeit (ethics or morality) and Glückseligkeit (happiness).
“Consequently,” Kant concludes, “God and a future life are two presup-
positions that are not to be separated from the obligation that pure rea-
son imposes on us in accordance with principles of that very same rea-
son” —a​ reconciliation that, however, is “possible only in the intelligible
world, under a wise author and regent,” so that “reason sees itself com-
pelled ... to assume such a thing, together with life in such a world, which
we must regard as a future one” (A809-11/B837-9). Here in the first Cri-
tique, unlike later in Religion, Kant seems to limit the religious principle
to that of “a future life.” At the same time, however, already here such a
life amounts for Kant to “the condition that everyone do what he should”
(A810/B838) —a​ standpoint according to which morality contains with-
in itself a transformative principle: the “idea of the moral world” is one
that “really (wirklich) can and ought to have its influence on the sensible
world, in order to make it agree as far as possible with this idea” (A808/
B836). Reason is for Kant transformative in the sensible world as trans-
forming it from the standpoint at which reason already immediately is
in its facticity. This facticity is thus that of an immanent future, or the fu-
ture as the moral now, from which we begin in a utopian way.
As Kant claims, this transformative principle is theoretical reason’s
ground for hope: “…just as the moral principles are necessary in ac-
cordance with reason in its practical use, it is equally necessary to as-
sume in accordance with reason in its theoretical use that everyone has
cause to hope for happiness in the same measure as he has made him-

84 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
self worthy of it” (A809/B837). In this, we do not overstep the bounda-
ries of reason’s immanence —p ​ recisely because moral experience is im-
manentaly constituted by reason, and the interest in seeing morality re-
alized in the world is inherent to it:

Pure reason thus contains… principles of the possibility of [moral] ex-

perience, namely of those actions in conformity with moral precepts
which could be encountered in the history of humankind. For since
they command that these actions ought to happen, they must also be
able to happen. (A807/B835)

We can, however, only encounter these actions “in history” by proceed-

ing from the moral “ought.” The same move in repeated in Kant’s Con-
jectural Beginning of History. Here, Kant starts from the ideal —​reason,
freedom, and morality —​as a fact, as if man produced it “completely
from within himself ” (AA 8:19). The “beginning” of history can only be
“presumable” or “conjectural,” because Kant can only speak about rea-
son and morality in history by beginning from the standpoint of reason
and morality. This standpoint is not based on the model of our moral
behaviour and our historical efforts to act morally, but on the contra-
ry already implied in and by these efforts —i​ t is a utopian futurity-qua-
facticity, a normativity that is not transcendent but immanently oper-
ative and transformative. This means that the future is not constituted
by the past, that it does not “project images drawn from the world” or
from history. It is also in this sense that Kant introduces, in Religion, a
distinction between “revolution” and “infinite approximation” in the
creation of the “new man”. From the standpoint of actual historical de-
velopment, the “revolutionary” limit of full moral reform may be seen
as the unreachable limit. However, for reason, this utopian limit is the
facticity from which it begins. Importantly, the “new man” may or may
not be regarded as “new” in the usual sense; there is no dualism or tran-
sition from old to new here —i​ t is, immanently, what and where we al-
ready are within our morality. “Infinite approximation” indexes not a
transition, but an absensce thereof. (And generally, as we have seen in
thought and morality, it is not newness but utopia which is structural-
ly important —​utopia may imply newness, but it may also imply intem-
porality or a repetition of the here and now.)
Similarly, in Kant’s practical philosophy, reason compels us to rec-
ognize the highest good “as possible since it commands us to contrib-
ute everything possible to its production” (AA 5:119), and so, as Kant
puts it in Religion, the human being “is driven to believe in the cooper-
ation or the management of a moral ruler of the world, through which
alone this end is possible” (AA 6:139). Morality therefore, for Kant, “in-

K i r i ll C hepur i n 85
escapably” or “inevitably leads to religion” (AA 6:6, 6:7n.). At the same
time, the rational religious standpoint to which it leads is irreducible
to morality:

The proposition, ‘There is a God, hence there is a highest good in the

world,’ if it is to proceed (as proposition of faith) simply from morality,
is a synthetic a priori proposition; for although accepted only in a prac-
tical context, it yet exceeds the concept of duty that morality contains
… and hence cannot be analytically evolved out of morality (AA 6:6n.).

In the same passage, Kant calls religion an “expansion” of morality:

“morality, therefore, leads inescapably to religion, through which it ex-
pands to the idea of a powerful moral legislator outside the human be-
ing” (AA 6:6).18 This expansion is, for Kant, carried out with necessi-
ty by reason alone only to become, in an already familiar fashion, that
which immanently determines reason (“among its determining bases”;
AA 6:7n.). Since religion is not merely a part of morality, it cannot be
a direct moral duty to adopt the religious standpoint. What the latter
contributes is a new transformative horizon that unites “all our duties”
and recognizes them “as divine commands” (AA 6:154) aimed at the
collective realization of the highest good in the world. Thereby moral
duties are collectively performed as actually transformative.
Religion is thus an expansion of morality also in the sense that it in-
troduces a unified perspective on all duty, turning into what Kant goes
on to call “a universal religion” (AA 6:154). As he notes in the Meta-
physics of Morals, “in this (practical) sense it can therefore be said that
to have religion is a duty of the human being to himself ” (AA 6:444).
Similarly, in Religion, Kant speaks of “a duty sui generis, not of human
beings toward human beings but of the human race toward itself ” (AA
6:97).19 In conceiving of this duty, reason finds itself at the utopian
standpoint of full moral reform, which it cannot but think and from
which it cannot but proceed in accordance with the necessity of its own
nature —​a total transformation of humanity towards a universal mor-
al condition. Neither a strictly political community nor individual mo-

18. Cf. AA 6:7n.: “…the [moral] law … expands to the point of admitting the mor-
al final purpose of reason among its determining bases. That is, the proposi-
tion, ‘Make the highest good that is possible in the world your final purpose!’
is a synthetic a priori proposition which is introduced through the moral law
and through which practical reason nonetheless expands beyond this law.”
19. The fact that this is not a new particular duty, but rather a standpoint that gath-
ers or “collects” all our duties into a single point and provides their ultimate
condition, allows Kant to claim that “there are no particular duties toward God
in a universal religion” (AA 6:154).

86 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
rality can, for Kant, suffice to fulfill that kind of utopian task, leading
him to introduce the idea of the “ethical community,” or the “invisible
church.” At the same time, the utopian political-theological standpoint
of the ethical community also involves for him, politically, “an eternal
peace” (e.g. AA 6:124). The political-theological focal point thus points
in Kant to the limits of the political —​with utopian politics going be-
yond any Realpolitik and beginning from this limit.20
“An ethical community,” Kant concludes, “is conceivable only as a
people under divine commands, i.e. as a people of God” (AA 6:99). If
such a community were to be realized, we would enter the “kingdom
of God on earth” (AA 6:101). But if the religious principle is predicat-
ed, it would seem, on a God beyond, then does this not imply a trans-
cendent rupture of reason’s immanence? How can we act within our
autonomous rationality if our ethical-religious striving as humankind
is dependent on a God who is seemingly “outside the human being”
and therefore transcendent? Kant is aware of this problem, and so, in
a move similar to the one we saw vis-à-vis transcendental ideas in the
first Critique, he transforms the standpoint of an ethical community
into a regulative principle whose very realization already presuppos-
es, for reason, its immanent facticity. The utopian structure of reason
compels us to conceive of a universal ethical horizon and to act, says
Kant,“as if ” the coming about of the kingdom of God were a regulative
principle for us and dependent on our efforts: “Each must… so con-
duct himself as if everything depended on him. Only on this condition
may he hope that a higher wisdom will provide the fulfillment of his
well-intentioned efforts” (AA 6:101) —a​ hope that indexes the utopian
here and now. We perform God’s alleged transcendence, but it is we
who do so “as-if.” It is this curious immanent/as-if-transcendent struc-
ture that has historically provided religion with its real transformative
force21 —w​ hich we can only appreciate from the moral-religious stand-

20. Kant speaks of the historical church as a “sensible vehicle” for the invisible one
(AA 7:37), required “for the sake of praxis” (AA 6:192). Cf. AA 6:101: “The true
(visible) church is one that displays the (moral) kingdom of God on earth in-
asmuch as the latter can be realized through human beings.”
21. I would argue that Kant’s above-mentioned concept of “revolution” in the Re-
ligionsschrift, far from being purely moral or religious in the private sense,
is similarly located at the limits of the political. The ethical revolution, Kant
explicitly notes, “is not brought about through the endeavor of the individ-
ual person for his moral perfection alone, but requires that rational beings
unite for this same purpose” (AA 6:97). It is, thus, a utopian coincidence of
political, moral and religious which must be thought as preceding their di-
vision and from which, again, reason must proceed —​so that this revolution
turns out to be not a transcendent future, but the immanent now. What may

K i r i ll C hepur i n 87
 point. Theology is thus, in Kant, transformed into a transcendental-
performative political theology of immanence.
Furthermore, when speaking of “hope” in this way, Kant may be
regarded as making an anti-messianic point. We may approach this
by drawing a distinction in Kant’s text between “hope” (Hoffnung)
and “expectation” (Erwartung), the latter having the connotations of
warten, “to wait.” It has become habitual in Kant scholarship to refer to
Kant’s three questions —“​ What can I know?”, “What ought I to do?” and
“What can I hope for?” —​where hope is often taken to mean waiting for
something good to happen and change the way things are, for a trans-
cendent future event. It is, however, important to distinguish Kant’s use
of “hope” from that kind of use. The conclusion at which he arrives in
the Religionsschrift states that “to found a moral people of God is, there-
fore, a work whose execution cannot be expected (erwartet) from hu-
man beings but only from God himself ” (AA 6:100). Hope as Erwar-
tung is for him transcendent. There is no point in waiting, since ide-
alism takes utopian facticity as its starting point. Only in this way, if
“each … conducts himself as if everything depended on him … may he
hope (darf er hoffen) that a higher wisdom will provide fulfillment of
his efforts” (AA 6:101). Reason can only hope by doing its own thing.
Which is why Kant also explicitly criticizes messianism in the Religion-
sschrift, since for him any covenant (Bund) is transcendent —​based, in
this sense, on expectation, not hope —a​ nd the Kingdom of God must
be thought of immanently. In order to conceive of a (moral-political)
revolution, one must begin from it. The “new man” is what we proceed
from, “as if ” transformed into it “through a single immutable decision”
(AA 6:47). The utopian starting point of humankind’s collective exist-
ence (the kingdom of God, the answer to “What can I hope for?”) thus
structurally coincides with that of individual morality (“What ought
I to do?”) as well as that of idealist knowledge as conditioned and fo-
cused by the immanent ideas of reason (“What can I know?”).

Conclusion
Kantian idealism is thus a non-realism insofar as it suspends —​i.e., be-
gins from a non-place that does not relate to —t​ he real, refusing to think
the ideal in terms of its emergence from, or trace it back to, any sort of
environment or the “in-itself ”. Accordingly, utopian origin in idealism

look like reason and history dualistically striving towards a future, is actu-
ally immanently constituted by the revolutionary standpoint at the limit of
the ideal.

88 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
is one to which no return is possible. Instead, the non-place of the origin
gets reduplicated as the immanent facticity of the ideal, starting from
which the subject of idealism begins to think and act, so that the non-
place and the all-place structurally coincide. This immanence may bi-
furcate into different configurations and binaries (nature-freedom, the-
ory-practice, morality-religion, etc.), but must be thought as preceding
them all. The critical, non-dogmatic character of idealist immanence is
also supposed to prevent utopia from turning into ideology;22 critique
is here fundamentally auto-critique. It may be said that Kantian ideal-
ism literally de-constructs Spinozism. The ideal is the utopian distance
that suspends both “nature” and “God” but does not relate or transi-
tion to either. In Spinoza’s deus sive natura, idealism is the “sive” —t​ he
repetition or re-enactment, as well as an affirmation, of the “or.” It is on
this ideal stage that Kantian critique operates, so that its “autonomous”
character —​the fact that it is a critique-qua-suspension rather than just
a critique of something —​this kind of autonomy is itself utopian, and is
also a constant re-enactment of a certain non-Spinozistic immanence.
In this paper, I have limited myself to a reading of Kant, but to con-
clude, I would like to put forward the hypothesis that this idealist struc-
ture is also one that gets inherited by, and further mutates in, post-Kan-
tian German Idealism. One could, I believe, argue that Fichte’s self-pos-
iting of the I and the way it (non-)relates to the uncognizable Wechsel
between the I and the non-I, Fichte’s and Hegel’s philosophies of his-
tory, Hegel’s concept of Geist and his statement that “Geist begins only
from Geist”, the idea of the system in Hegel or post-Kantian idealism
more broadly, Schlegel’s articulations of idealism, revolution, and the
new mythology, the utopian standpoint of reconciled free agency and
predestination in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism or the
standpoint of his system of identity, may all be regarded as sharing, in
many important respects, a similar utopian structure (the reduplica-
tion of the non-place), method (suspension or non-relation), and tem-
porality (futurity as facticity).23 This would allow us not only to reas-
sess what is “idealist” about German Idealism, similarly to how it has
been done in this paper with relation to Kant’s transcendental idealism,
but also to provide a novel and potentially productive way of looking
at its continuity in the wake of Kant, as well as its unity with its Kan-
tian beginning. The point, then, would be not to present this structure

22. Contra Louis Marin’s verdict. See Marin L. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Tex-
tual Spaces. New York: Humanity Books, 1984. P. 195.
23. I have briefly considered some of these examples elsewhere. See Chepurin K.
Spirit and Utopia. P. 336-345.

K i r i ll C hepur i n 89
as exhaustive of German Idealism but to discern it within the latter as,
among other things, a structure of inheritance and continuity. But this
has to remain, for now, a story for another time.

References

Adorno T. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben,
Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1951.
Barber D. C. Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the
Future of Immanence, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Barber D. C. Nonrelation and Metarelation. Serial Killing: A Philosophi-
cal Anthology (eds E. Connole, G. J. Shipley), London, Schism Press,
2015, pp. 39–52.
Boehm O. Kant’s Critique of Spinoza, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014.
Chepurin K. Spirit and Utopia: (German) Idealism as Political Theology.
Crisis and Critique, 2015, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 326–348.
Comay R. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, Stanford,
CA, Stanford University Press, 2010.
Fichte J. G. Werke. Bd. 7: Zur Politik, Moral und Philosophie der Geschichte,
Berlin, de Gruyter, 1971.
Gabriel M. Aarhus Lectures: Schelling and Contemporary Philosophy. sats,
2013, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 70–101.
Grier M. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, Cambridge, Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001.
Hegel G. W. F. Briefe von und an Hegel. Bd. I: 1785–1812, Hamburg, Felix
Meiner, 1952.
Henrich D. Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte
des Idealismus. Bd. 2, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2004.
Kant I. Gesammelte Schriften: Akademie-Ausgabe, Berlin, Leipzig, Georg
Reimer, de Gruyter, 1900–.
Kuzniar A. Delayed Endings: Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin, Athens,
GA, University of Georgia Press, 1987.
Laruelle F. Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy, Minneapo-
lis, Univocal Publishing, 2012.
Marin L. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, New York,
Humanity Books, 1984.
Novalis. Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe. Bd. 2: Das philosophisch-theore-
tische Werk, München, Carl Hanser, 2005.
Ruda F. For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism, Evanston, IL, Northwestern
University Press, 2015.
Schlegel F. Kritische Ausgabe, Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 1979.
Schlegel F. Schriften zur Kritischen Philosophie, 1795–1805, Hamburg, Felix
Meiner, 2007.

90 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
The Beginning of Spirit As We
Know It: Hegel’s Mother

Frank Ruda
Senior Fellow, International Center for Research into Cultural
Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM), Bauhaus University
Weimar. Address: Cranachstr. 47, 99423 Weimar, Germany. E-mail:
[email protected]
Keywords: Hegel’s anthropology; philosophical anthropology; habit;
inheritance.
Abstract: Contemporary anthropological discourses are struggling and
striving more than ever before. This may come as a surprise,
given the longtime intimate connection anthropology has had
with metaphysics. This article investigates how and why Hegel’s
anthropology, the first part of his philosophy of subjective spirit
and his philosophy of spirit as a whole, is a means of overcoming
a substantialist characterization of the human.
To that end, the article turns to Hegel’s conception of habit in
order to raise the problem of the human spirit’s beginning in
Hegel’s anthropology and the relationship between habit as “sec-
ond” nature and the “first” nature that habit transforms. In doing
this, we come across the issue of inheritance in Hegel: if there is
nothing that is a given, then how can we conceive that which
spirit somehow inherits? Hegel refers to this presence of spirit in
the mode of absence as “nature.” Spirit presupposes nature, i. e.
its own absence. There are, furthermore, two important aspects
to the natural disposition of spirit in Hegel, analyzed here: the
concept of “genius” and the role of another subject. The author
defends the idea that Hegel’s anthropology may be regarded as
overcoming substantialism, because for Hegel the human being
cannot but be confronted with the fact that there is no (m)other.

91
1. Human Life Discourses

O NC E upon a time, philosophical anthropology was a wasteland.

Nearly all endeavors within its terrain were subjected to harsh
and fundamental criticisms, far-reaching de(con)structions of
different kinds, or even worse, blunt repudiations. How did this pecu-
liar situation come about? In expounding the internal structure, log-
ic and / or (of the) natural constitution of human beings as such, phil-
osophical anthropology did not only seem to constitutively rely on an
objective and objectifying conception of the human, but produced and
postulated a concept of the human being and human life that had high-
ly problematic implications. In part, this was because it provided the
ground for the (first widely ignored and then, after a transitory and af-
firmative period, widely rejected and allegedly idealist) Weltanschau-
ung of humanism. Humanism politically, and at least supposedly, en-
abled criticism of existing social conditions by emphasizing their op-
position to, or contradiction with, the true end(s) of human nature.
Humanism thereby was always a closet Aristotelianism. The humanist
perspective may have encouraged criticism of social and political cir-
cumstances, but only by paying the high price of returning to a meta-
physical conception of human nature. Because of humanism, i.e. Ar-
istotelianism, philosophical anthropology was led into a proper Scylla
or Charybdis situation. If human nature is the basis for changing or at
least critically evaluating the existing worldly conditions, then we rely
on a stable basis for performing the very act of criticism. And even if
this basis allows us to change or criticize the world, we thereby implic-
itly acknowledge that we will never be able to change what allows us to
change the world, namely our own nature. Philosophical anthropology
tending towards humanism aristotelianized itself and thus immediately
became a substantialist human-nature-and-life-metaphysics.

92 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 A slightly different phrasing of the same conceptual concatenation,
which is often identified or associated with the work of early Marx1,
emphasizes that human beings are the only ones that constantly trans-
form their own nature, so that any society that is fixated has to rely on
a fiction / fixion of what human beings are.2 Such a fiction / fixion may
allow for the constitution of a certain —​say, capitalist —​form of socie-
ty, but as human life constitutively and constantly re-determines itself,
any fixion of human nature turns out to be nothing but an inhuman fic-
tion alienating society from its own subjective life-impulse and there-
fore from its natural basis. Human nature, in this depiction, is different
from that of all other beings because it can only properly realize itself
within a self-transforming and self-transformative practice. With this
conceptual move —​the definition of human nature as essentially unfix-
able —​history or historical transformation is turned into the proper na-
ture of mankind. It implies that “history is human nature.”3 As a con-
sequence, as long as society is alienated from its substantial subjective
ground, we are still living in “the prehistory of human society.”4 Even
if one seeks to claim that humans do not have any pre-given nature but
only are what they are through a historical process of self-transforma-
tion, i.e. through their own practice, one thereby cannot but again nat-
uralize history. Saying that history is human nature, and therefore the
human being has no other nature than a self-transforming one, im-
plies not just a normative, but also a fundamentally substantialist as-
sumption. The essential instability of human nature turns out, as a re-
sult, to be a surprisingly stable condition. Critical or (self-proclaimed)
emancipatory anthropology inferred from this, inter alia, that the pre-
sent state of (capitalist) affairs must be criticized because it fixates, and
thereby oppresses, the true realization of human nature, hindering ac-
tual human life and practice.
Both of these ‘left-wing’ anthropologies of human nature turned
out, however, to be highly problematic with regard to their concepts

1. Erich Fromm was one of the most prominent proponents of a humanist Marx.
See, Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (London/New York: Continuum,
2004). For a cognitive map of different reactions to humanism, see Frank Ruda,
“Humanism Reconsidered, or: Life living Life”, in: Filozosfki Vestnik, Ljubljana,
Vol. XXX, No. 2, 2009, 175-197.
2. The term fixion with an ‚x’ was introduced by Jacques Lacan. See, Jacques La-
can, “L’etourdit”, in: Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 483.
3. Robert B. Brandom, A Spirit of Trust: A Semantic Reading of Hegel’s Phe-
nomenology of Spirit (unpublished typescript, available at: http://www.pitt.
edu/~brandom/spirit_of_trust_2014.html).
4. Karl Marx, “Preface to a Critique of Political Economy”, in: Selected Works, Vol.
I (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1955), 364.

FRANK RUDA 93
of history and historicity. Either one ended up with an ahistorical and
invariable human nature grounding all social or political change and
thus history (nature as turned into the basis of history, and history as
thereby essentially naturalized); —​or one ended up with a supposed-
ly historical and transformative nature of the agent of history (the hu-
man being), claimed to be so fundamentally historical that it implied
the abolishment of any substantial kind of human nature.5 However —​
in an apparently paradoxical way —t​ his very abolishment proved to be
a renewed re-inscription of a substantialist kind of nature. Why? Be-
cause the only thing that could not or was not supposed to change, ac-
cording to the normative consequence of this doctrine’s principal idea,
was the constantly changing human nature itself.
Anthropology in these two versions ended up conceptually elimi-
nating history, which means it ended up in nature. From this one can
see why it may not be too surprising, after all, that both of these anthro-
pological visions could be easily converted and incorporated into the
opposite, namely into conservative political orientation. The first ver-
sion —t​ he invariantly unchanging human nature —​became quite prom-
inent with the (still) repeated claims about human nature as essentially
self-seeking and egotist (one may here think of Hobbes and many oth-
ers), and therefore only fit for a competitive surrounding best repre-
sented by the capitalist mode of social organization.6 If human nature
has substantial characteristic traits, one could argue that it is precisely
these traits, determining as they are for all human conduct and interac-
tion, that counteract any demand to transform society in a fundamen-
tal way. Human nature, in this conservative anthropological articula-
tion, serves not as the unchangeable foundation allowing for transfor-
mation, but as the unchanging natural ground preventing any change
from happening.7 The given state of society is what it is because of hu-

5. One version of this kind of anthropological claim is that there is no pre-given

nature of mankind, since human nature is essentially indeterminate. Yet con-
tending the indeterminateness of human nature ultimately means either that
human nature is what humans make of it or that it will always be essentially
indeterminate. The former leads to the consequences depicted above, the lat-
ter substantializes indeterminacy (one may here think of Sartre).
6. On this, see the by now classical study: C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory
of Possessive Individualism. Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1990), 9-159.
7. This is why, for example, Max Horkheimer remarked, opposing such claims, that
„the discourse raised since eternity that opposes necessary historical transfor-
mation because of human nature should finally hush.” Max Horkheimer, “Be-
merkungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie,” in Kritische Theorie, ed. by
Alfred Schmidt, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 227. One should

94 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
man nature, and those who dream of another state of the world either
dream unnatural (and often violent) dreams or have the wrong idea of
human nature and need to be reminded of the correct one.
The second version, that of the constantly changing nature of the
human being, reappeared in two different conservative stances. The
first contends that any kind of social construction that is not as dy-
namic as human nature necessarily hinders productive transforma-
tive potential at the heart of human life and activity. Therefore, for the
social and political organization to function properly, it must adopt
the internal transformative dynamics of human nature as its norma-
tive standard. This normative standard is then presented as the ne-
cessity for a society and its members to be constantly dynamic, mov-
ing, and flexible. Societies can only survive if they admit of self-trans-
formation and are constantly self-transforming. At the same time, the
laws of this self-transformation are not freely decided upon by those
subjected to them, but are rather regarded as themselves natural (one
such ‘natural environment’ is, for example, the market and its specif-
ic laws).8 The second possible option of integrating the self-transform-
ing human nature into an often (although not necessarily) conservative
framework, is to emphasize that human beings are deficient by nature.
Human nature is weak and malfunctioning, and therefore we have to
rely on strong social institutions that operate in the compensatory way,
allowing the human society to function.9 Human nature is so weak that
it cannot help relying on a constant socio-cultural process of prosthe-
tization, which in its turn constantly transforms human nature —​pre-
cisely because there was no functional human nature before its institu-
tional transformation, education, and formation in the first place. Hu-
man nature has thus been unable to determine the society humans live
in, because it needed the society it was formed by to function. In this
way society and culture present themselves as the natural destiny of the
weak human nature, which enables the latter to overcome its weakness.
In these conservative articulations, the end result is either human na-
ture which naturally determines the given form of society, or the kind
of human nature that is unable to decide upon its own laws of trans-
formation, whereby these laws are naturalized.

also mention that Stalin’s idea of creating the new man is, in a way, a deter-
minately negative conceptual consequence of this definition of human nature.
8. For an analysis of flexibility against what is called “plasticity”, see Catherine Ma-
labou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2008).
9. One may here think e.g. of Arnold Gehlen.

FRANK RUDA 95
 Philosophical anthropology became a conceptual wasteland because
all these —c​ onservative as well as emancipatory —v​ ersions remained, in
one way or another, imprisoned in a metaphysical, substantializing ac-
count of (human) nature. The discourse of the human being and hu-
man nature became an uninhabitable terrain due to its own naturaliz-
ing tendency, which ultimately elided any historicity proper. Anthro-
pology became a wasteland because in its kingdom nature ruled and
history withered away. The struggles that were fought between the con-
servatives and the emancipators on this deserted battleground turned
out, more often than not, to be struggles about (the) ahistorical nature
(of human beings). Among other things, the aftermath of these battles
did a lot of collateral damage to any further attempts at any discourse
with even the slightest anthropological timbre —​which is one of the
reasons why, for example, psychoanalysis in general and Freud’s theo-
ry of the drives in particular were criticized for turning “historical ac-
cidents into biological necessities”10 (some of Freud’s critics also con-
tended that one could infer from his theory the general mechanism of
naturalization, and hence ideology11). Once upon a time, philosoph-
ical anthropology was a wasteland because it stank of substantialism
and metaphysics, or more precisely: of a metaphysics of (human) na-
ture. It naturalized human nature, and history became its anathema —​
an anathema it nonetheless constantly talked about and referred to. At
the same time, the naturalizing tendency led to issues that exceeded
even the conflict between the emancipatory and the conservative po-
sition. The reason for that is conceptual, since substantialism cannot
but turn into an exclusivism —t​ he inheritance of a certain underlying
Aristotelianism12 —​and to exclude some people not only from the so-
cial and political sphere, but also from the sphere of humanity as such
proved politically (and historically) more than disastrous. As a result,
any discourse that sought to substantially define the human (being) be-
came a highly forbidden and justifiably avoided territory. The dangers
were too many: substantializing nature, naturalizing substance, both at
the same time, both at the same time by way of trying to avoid them
both at the same time, political and ontological exclusivism, etc.

10. Herbert Marcuse, Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

1955), 17.
11. “The unhistorical character of Freud’s concepts … entails…its opposite.” Ibid,
34.
12. For some implications of this see Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and
Philosophy (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), and for a com-
plication of this reading see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power
and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

96 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
2. Habit
Then suddenly, not so long ago, a resurgence of interest in philosophi-
cal anthropology took place. Neo- or non-neo-biologisms are in vogue;
many forms of philosophical vitalisms encourage a return to anthro-
pological speculations; Naturphilosophie came back together with new
materialisms that not only re-define matter but, with the same stroke,
also revivify the definitions of human nature; finally, theories of second
nature have become predominant in many philosophical camps. Given
how bad the situation had been for anthropology, how did this happen?
The question is easier to answer than may seem at first glance, since the
resurgence of anthropology was, in a certain sense, already inscribed
into what brought about its very decline. What was needed was a non-
substantialist discourse on human nature, and this was brought about
precisely by taking seriously the substantialist anthropological claims.13
Left with the options of an unchangeable human nature that grounds
or prohibits change or a constantly changing nature that allows for or
prohibits the same, one can infer that the conflict between these two
versions is determinative not only for human nature, but also for an-
thropology itself. Human nature in anthropology is split between stat-
ic and dynamic, unchanging and unchangeably changing determina-
tions, so that this split also splits the discourse itself. In this sense, an-
thropology lost substance because of its substantialism, which in turn
made the return to anthropology possible. To make this more compre-
hensible, here is a highly reductive schema (see next page).
Where does the real struggle reside? Where does the lack of sub-
stance occur? Obviously, between the first two and the second two col-
umns: an antagonism running through the definition of human nature
and thus through anthropology as its defining discourse, too. The uni-
ty of this difference is the structure of anthropology itself, which lost
its substantialist character precisely by understanding its own structure
(seeing it as a wasteland or battlefield). That is to say, by taking the over-
determined (overdetermined, because it is ultimately determined by an
unchangeable factor) contradiction at its heart seriously, anthropolo-
gy was led to the insight that there is no stable definition of the human

13. It is worth noting that already in 1969 Adorno (a critic of any substantialist an-
thropology) praised Ulrich Sonnemann’s book Negative Anthropology. The re-
turn to anthropological questions is thus neither overly new nor a proper re-
turn, simply because the very historical moment of overcoming anthropolo-
gy coincided with a return to it (a very Adornian motif). Or, in other words,
the moment when the substantialist discourse lost all substance (and became
a wasteland) was the moment when this discourse could be taken up again.

FRANK RUDA 97
 Constantly Constantly
Changing (de- Changing (de-
terminate or terminate or
Unchangeable indeterminate) Unchangeable indeterminate)
Human Nature Human Nature Human Nature Human Nature
Pro Change Pro Change Against Change Against Change

being and life, neither as simply transformative nor simply as resisting

transformation. It is, rather, constitutively both, as well as at the same
time changing and unchanging. Taking this seriously meant that an-
thropology lost its inherent substantialist character and had to address
its immanent contradiction. And since, as a famous saying goes, it is
not enough to address a contradiction only in terms of substance, but
also in terms of the subject, it is no wonder that most, if not all, of the
current renewals of anthropology start from or at some point turn to
Hegel. This goes for both the so-called ‘continental’ and for the more
analytic or pragmatist approaches.
For is not Hegel the thinker of contradictions that are at the same
time strangely or peculiarly bound together into a unity? That is why
it is not a great surprise that the resurgent interest in anthropology co-
emerged with the resurgent interest in the Hegelian system —a​ nd more
specifically in a part of it that had for a long time been neglected, or
even considered a wasteland of its own: his philosophy of nature (as
well as human nature, or the philosophy of subjective spirit). Hegel’s
anthropology is, of course, not a part of his philosophy of nature, ex-
cept in a certain sense: it is the transition out of nature, which both is
itself a part of nature and is not anymore. Hegel’s anthropology is thus
in and outside of nature; in other words, it deals with the specificity of
human nature.14
But what can one learn from Hegel’s anthropology that exceeds an-
thropology’s previous substantialism? It was the achievement of, inter
alia, Catherine Malabou15 and Slavoj Žižek16 to have brought attention

14. One of the first volumes dealing with Hegel’s philosophy of nature is Hegel and
the Philosophy of Nature, ed. by Stephen Houlgate (New York: State Universi-
ty of New York Press, 1998). Subjective spirit does not play any significant role
in it at all.
15. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic,
London/New York: Routledge, 2004.
16. Slavoj Žižek, “Discipline Between Two Freedoms —​Madness and Habit in Ger-
man Idealism,” in: Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek, Mythology, Madness, and
Laughter. Subjectivity in German Idealism (London/New York: Continuum,
2009), 95-121.

98 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
to the centrality of the concept of habit in Hegel’s philosophy —a​ con-
cept that provides the answer to the above question. Habit is a concept
that is supposed to conceptually circumvent all unchanging substan-
tialist traits of human nature, as well as to be crucial for any kind of
human practice. It therefore stands at the heart of the properly human
life. Habit is relevant not only for Hegel’s account of the formation of
subjectivity, or subjective spirit, but also for his treatment of socio-po-
litical phenomena (objective spirit). In fact, one may go as far as to as-
sume that it plays a crucial role for the constitution of absolute spirit,
too —t​ hat is, the spheres of art, religion, and philosophy. It is, further-
more, this concept which occurs in the transition from Hegel’s philos-
ophy of nature to his philosophy of mind, in the first part (the “philos-
ophy of subjective spirit”) of the third volume of his Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Sciences —t​ he part in which he deals with the (natural and
spiritual) formation of the subject and which begins with the “Anthro-
pology” before moving on to the “Phenomenology” and “Psychology,”
and then to objective17 and absolute spirit.
Habit is an element of what Hegel calls the “feeling soul,”18 and as
has been argued many times before, habit is for him a formational cate-
gory. By means of habit one is able to transform one’s nature into anoth-
er kind of nature —t​ he second nature. Habit is formational and trans-
formative, because it is through habit that one is not only able to get
used to things and activities (from breathing to walking to talking, etc.),
but also to make these activities a part of one’s own self-feeling (that
is to say: one cannot imagine oneself without these capacities). This is
why the concept of habit belongs in Hegel to the “feeling soul.” Habit-
ualized things are felt as if they were inscribed into our very nature —​
precisely because they have been habitualized, becoming our second
nature. Yet they are acquired and hence cultural, because this nature is
second nature. Everything we are is, in an abstract sense, habitualized
and hence not naturally inherited. By means of habit one is capable of
doing several complex things at once (speaking while walking, smok-
ing and thinking, etc.), too.
It is not my aim here to present a rather poor overview of the Hege-
lian concept of habit; neither do I seek to explicate the conceptual intri-

17. I also contributed to the long list of Hegelian habit-studies by investigating the
role habit plays in objective spirit in: Frank Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble: An Investiga-
tion into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (London: Continuum, 2011), 75-99.
18. The concept of habit occurs in § 409, after Hegel has given an account of “self-
feeling” and the “feeling soul in its immediacy.” See: Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind.
Translated from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1984), 39ff.

FRANK RUDA 99
 cacies inscribed into it. Rather, the present return to anthropology (and
more specifically to Hegel’s anthropology) raises one simple question,
thereby raising the stakes as well: if there is always only a transformed,
second nature, determined as it is by the very practice that habitualizes
the subject, then what is the nature that is transformed? This question
becomes even more pertinent if one takes into account that Hegel’s an-
thropology does not start with habit, but with something else to which
I will return in an instant. So, what is the nature that is transformed
through the practice of spirit? Differently put: does spirit inherit any-
thing from nature? Is there anything that naturally determines spirit?
Or again in different terms: is there any first nature? Is there —​and can
there be —​a theory of inheritance in Hegel, or does his theory of habit
systematically preclude such a theory?19
The immediate answer seems to be a straightforward “no”: there is
no inheritance whatsoever that would not be fundamentally an inher-
itance of spirit to spirit. Of course, habit contributes to the formation
of culture and the inheritance of cultural practices, but there seems
to be no natural element of inheritance involved in that (even though
some claim that second nature is simply another kind of nature, and
therefore spirit never leaves behind that from which it tries to liberate
itself).20 If, in the philosophy of subjective spirit, spirit begins to form
itself by forming a second nature, one can see why Hegel can explicitly
state that “spirit does not naturally emerge from nature.”21 If spirit does
not naturally emerge from nature, this is simply because it always is
“its own result.” Thus, nature cannot be “the absolutely immediate, first,
originary positing,” but merely a precondition that spirit “makes for
itself.”22 Since spirit in the beginning cannot but (among other things)

19. Obviously, Hegel has a legal theory of inheritance that he develops in his Phi-
losophy of Right, concerning family relations. I am here focusing solely on the
‘biological’ or ‘natural’ meaning of inheritance. For the legal theory see: G.W.F.
Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 176ff.
20. One may here think of the work of Hubert L. Dreyfus. One may also recall that
for Hegel even breathing is something that a human child first has to learn
when it is born, and then becomes immediately habitualized to it. Yet the fact
that human bodies need to breathe and that there is air and an atmosphere
cannot be said to be merely an effect of culture (although the atmosphere is, of
course, a cultural concept).
21. Here and in the following I cite the German edition, since it includes a critical
edition of the additions (Zusätze) to the paragraphs, compiled by Hegel’s pu-
pils, that are often Hegelian in spirit and highly instructive: G.W.F. Hegel, En-
zyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Dritter Teil, in:
Werke, Vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 25.
22. Ibid., 24.

100 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
naturalize itself, the emergence of spirit is fundamentally spiritual. This
is the seemingly paradoxical move: spirit naturalizes itself —i​ t takes na-
ture for its precondition —​yet this naturalization is an act of spirit.
Could one therefore not simply assume that the only thing that spir-
it inherits is the product of spirit, determined by spirit to be inherited
by itself? One could, but what precisely does this mean? Given Hegel’s
claim that “as it is by nature or immediately, humanity is what it ought
not to be, and that, as spirit, humanity has instead the vocation to be-
come for itself what in its natural state it still is only in itself,”23 it seems
that the only thing making humanity into humanity, spirit into spir-
it, is the very act of transforming that which seems to have the status
of an immediate natural givenness. One of the means to do so —​per-
haps the most crucial one —​is habit, i.e. the formation of a second na-
ture. Furthermore, everything that appears to be an immediate natu-
ral given is in truth posited by spirit in an act of naturalization. Does
it therefore not simply seem useless to inquire into a Hegelian concep-
tion of inheritance? One can, however, complicate the matter by ask-
ing the following question: what does spirit inherit as that which it
needs to transform, so that it is that which spirit posited as that which
it needs to transform? If there is nothing given in Hegel, not even noth-
ing, how does one conceive of that which is less than nothing that we
somehow inherit?
Before introducing the concept of habit in his anthropology, Hegel
unfolds a concept that, at least at first sight, seems to provide a possible
ground for a Hegelian conception of inheritance. This concept is what
he calls “Naturell,”24 which can be translated as disposition. In German
the reference to nature is obvious. Moreover, it is an aspect of this con-
cept that can provide the answer to the question I raised —n ​ amely, the
notion of genius, on which I will elaborate in what follows. To approach
the concept of “Naturell”, one should take note, first, of Hegel’s meth-
odology when he says that “one… cannot begin with spirit as such, but
must begin with its inadequate reality. Spirit is already spirit in the be-
ginning, but it does not know that it is spirit.”25 Spirit thus begins in-
adequately. Its beginning is a failed beginning. This inadequate reality
of spirit is what Hegel refers to as nature.26 Thus, nature is spirit in an

23. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. III (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1990), 25.
24. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, Dritter Teil, 71.
25. Ibid., 33.
26. Obviously, this is a very reductive way of elaborating the concept of nature in
Hegel, which is far more complex. Yet, here it is only important to note that
nature is what is there if there is an inadequacy of spirit.

FRANK RUDA 101

inadequate form —t​ hat is to say, in the beginning spirit is natural sim-
ply because it is not (yet) spirit. It is spirit that is not spirit, because it
does not know what it is and therefore is not what it is. This inadequa-
cy is measured and articulated by Hegel in terms of knowledge. Spir-
it is there in the beginning, but it does not know that it is there and
therefore it is not-there in the beginning.27 It is a spirit that does not
know where, what, or even that it is. In its beginning spirit is disori-
ented. And it will only slowly start to sense that it is and what it is (i.e.
the feeling soul). Spirit arises from its own inadequacy, which is why it
will ultimately be its own result. And it arises from its own inadequa-
cy because spirit cannot simply begin with itself as such, emerging in-
stead from its own failure to grasp itself. In this sense, one may say that
spirit begins even before its beginning; it is there before it is properly
there. Given that “spirit is essentially only what it knows about itself ”28
and that spirit does not know it is spirit, spirit is not spirit at the begin-
ning of spirit. Spirit begins before it begins, yet this beginning is not the
beginning, because the spirit that begins before spirit begins is not yet
spirit. Spirit is there before being there, but only as the absence of spir-
it and therefore as its own failed anticipation. The name for this pres-
ence of spirit in the mode of absence is nature. Why nature? Because
nature is for Hegel the other of spirit, the positive (in both the trivial
and the Hegelian sense of the term) notion of the absence of spirit. But
how does spirit emerge from its own absence?

3. Finally: The Life of Spirit

Hegel states that “spirit, for us, has its presupposition in nature…”29 Does
spirit thus inherit anything from and by nature? Nature is the other of
spirit, i.e. its absence, or more precisely: spirit not (yet) being spirit, so
is there anything that the presence of the absence of spirit hands over
to spirit? What is the status of this peculiar presupposition? To elabo-
rate on this, one should recall that Hegel classifies three forms of spirit:
spirit immanently relating to itself, spirit relating to something outside
of itself, and spirit relating to something outside of itself as (posited by)
itself. Subjective, objective, and absolute spirit. It is important to note
that spirit from the beginning is part of (absolute) spirit, which is why
it is only “for us” (from the perspective of absolute spirit, i.e. philoso-
phy) that it has its presupposition in nature (i.e. in the absence of spir-

27. With an emphasis on both the „not“ and the „there“.

28. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, Dritter Teil, 33.
29. Ibid., 17.

102 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
it). But it is also important to note that, ‘as such’, spirit does not presup-
pose nature, since there is simply no given and objective nature that is
simply there before spirit, which could serve as the latter’s pre-spiritu-
al precondition. Spirit presupposes nature, that is, its own absence, and
the name of this presupposition is nature. Yet it does not merely pre-
suppose itself negatively as absent —​it presupposes its own absence by
determining this absence and assigning (natural) qualities to it. If it is
absent, then there is an other that fills this lack —i​ .e., nature —a​ nd na-
ture can be determined.
Spirit assigns to its absence qualities that are marked by the ab-
sence of spirit in such a way as to bear the traits of this absence. If spir-
it is that which is able to determine itself, then the absence of spirit (as
spirit’s precondition) is marked by unchangeable laws, natural cycles,
and heteronomous determinations. Spirit thereby determines its own
absence (we are dealing with the positive aspect of determinate nega-
tion). To reiterate, however: spirit at its own beginning, i.e. at the be-
ginning of subjective spirit, does not know that it is spirit; as a result, it
appears to itself in the form of (given) natural determinations that de-
termine its absence.30 Spirit appears to itself in the form of something
other than itself.31 In fact, however, spirit is “not the mere result of na-
ture, but rather truly its own result; it brings itself forth from the pre-
suppositions that it lays itself.”32 This is why nature is not simply a giv-
en presupposition, it is posited by spirit as the absence of spirit, so that
this very absence —​which spirit does not know it posited —​starts to de-
termine spirit. Thus, one may say that nature emerges as soon as spirit
starts to believe that there are given presuppositions (which it does not
acknowledge as having been posited by itself).
As soon as one starts believing in the givenness of the objective pre-
suppositions that one posited, forgetting or ignoring the act of positing
itself, these presuppositions begin to externally determine oneself. It is
precisely this kind of determination that is at stake at the beginning of

30. Hegel also calls this move “the shift (Umschlagen) of the idea into the immedi-
acy of the external and individualized being-there. This shift is the becoming
of nature.” Ibid., 30.
31. However, it is important to note that this is only an appearance, since “the emer-
gence of spirit from nature should not be taken as if nature is the absolute-
ly immediate, primary, originally positing, and as if spirit is in contrast only
something posited; rather, nature is posited by spirit and the latter is the abso-
lute primary.” Ibid., 24. Spirit is here determined by its own appearance (even
though it posited the latter unknowingly in the first place), and the fact that it
does not know that it is ultimately determined by itself forces it to take a nat-
ural form.
32. Ibid.

FRANK RUDA 103

spirit. Nature turns out then to be the name for the idea that there is
something, anything at all, before it has been posited. It is the assump-
tion that there is a ‘there is’ before any positing. However, this assump-
tion is itself posited, and forgetting that means being determined by
something posited as if it were not posited. Nature appears here as a
posited myth of the given, whose act of positing has been forgotten. In
a certain abstract sense, one may contend here that if there is a natural
inheritance at work here, it is ‘natural’ in precisely the sense delineated
above. What one inherits from nature, is inherited because one does
not know that one posited that which determines oneself, instead tak-
ing it as a given. In other words, it seems that inheritance is only there
at the beginning of spirit because spirit has failed to grasp that there is
nothing to inherit. In the beginning, spirit cannot help failing to know
that there is nothing to inherit —​hence, there is natural inheritance.
Natural inheritance thus has its origin in spirit positing a precondi-
tion and ignoring the positedness of this precondition. This leads spir-
it to believe that there is a (natural and objective) ground for its own
being. As the positing agent, spirit should have known that the presup-
position was posited by spirit, but somehow it does not know what it
knows. Such is the way spirit emerges from nature, i.e. from spirit not
knowing that it knows something it does not know. Because it does not
know what it knows, spirit inherits something from and by nature. To
simplify the matter, this means that conceptually there is for Hegel no
natural path from nature to spirit (since there is no nature without spir-
it misconceiving itself33). The only way of getting from nature to spir-
it is via spirit, simply because nature is spirit that failed. At the same
time, this failure makes the move from nature to spirit look as if there
were also natural determination involved.
How can we more precisely account for the move from spirit that
does not know what it is, thus appearing as natural determination, to
spirit proper? As has been stated, Hegel situates this beginning in sub-
jective spirit, divided into three distinct domains: anthropology, phe-
nomenology, and psychology. Anthropology deals with spirit in itself,
which Hegel calls “soul” as well as “natural spirit,” or (literally) spirit
in nature (Naturgeist). Spirit in the beginning is in nature (it is there
only by virtue of being not-there). Phenomenology (in the Encyclope-
dia) deals with consciousness, and psychology with spirit as such. Spir-

33. Hegel’s point here is highly relevant (e.g. for today’s ecological debates): not
even nature should be naturalized. Of course, the same holds for spirit, al-
though spirit in the beginning cannot but find itself in nature (thereby consti-
tutively missing itself).

104 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
it can therefore be differentiated into three forms: abstract universality
(soul), particularity (consciousness), and singularity (spirit for itself).
And it is the anthropology that deals with the “groundwork of man.”34
As Catherine Malabou succinctly formulated:

The course of the Anthropology as a whole explicates the process

whereby originary substance, leaving behind the natural world, pro-
gressively differentiates itself until it becomes an individual subject.
This movement unfolds in three moments which structure the expo-
sition: self-identity, rupture, return to unity. The meaning of this divi-
sion organizes itself in the process of the soul’s singularization which,
from its beginning in the ‘universal’ (understood as ‘the immaterial-
ism of nature’ or ‘simple ideal life’), moves progressively towards self-
individuation until it becomes ‘singular self ’. From the ‘sleep of spir-
it’ to the ‘soul as work of art’ the genesis of the individual is accom-
plished, that individual which, configured as the ‘Man’, finally stands
forth in the guise of a statue. If the anthropological development ap-
pears to be a progressive illumination, it does produce some abrupt
returns to obscurity, some moments of trial and error, some aberra-
tions. … The unfurling of the process of individuation is the consti-
tution of the ‘Self ’ (Selbst), the founding instance of subjectivity.35
The course of the anthropology begins with “spirit that is still based
in nature, and still related to its embodiment.”36 This is why the pri-
mary object of the anthropology is “the soul bound to natural
determinations”37 that determine that which appears to be determined
by the absence of spirit. These natural determinations of spirit appear
to spirit, for example, in the form of racial differences (such as the as-
sumption that the French think differently from the Japanese simply
because of different natural —s​ ay, geographical —d​ etermining factors).
As Malabou again states:

The soul’s determinations are in the first instance the ‘natural quali-
ties’ which make up its initial ‘being-there (Dasein).’… But what, for
the Anthropology, are these ‘qualities’? … [The] first [group of] natu-
ral qualities can be classified under the generic term of ‘influences’, in
the original sense of that physical and fluid force believed by ancient
physics to proceed from the heavens and the stars and act upon men,
animals and things. These ‘physical qualities’ determine the soul’s
correspondence to ‘cosmic, sidereal, and telluric life’… The second

34. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, Dritter Teil, 40.

35. Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 28.
36. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, Dritter Teil, 40.
37. Ibid.

FRANK RUDA 105

 group of ‘natural qualities’ contains those of the specialized ‘nature-
governed spirits’ (Naturgeister) which constitute the ‘diversity of rac-
es’. The third set of ‘qualities’ consists of those which can be called ‘lo-
cal spirits’ (Lokalgeister). These are ‘shown in the outward modes of
life (Lebensart) and occupation (Beschäftigung), bodily structure and
disposition (körperlicher Bildung und Disposition), but still more in
the inner tendency and capacity (Befähigung) of the intellectual and
moral character of the peoples’.38

The first and therefore most inadequate natural form in which spirit
presupposes itself (as being absent, or not yet spirit) is that of the soul.
Spirit knows itself as the soul and not yet as spirit. The soul appears as
something given, besides the givenness of the absence of spirit. This is
an important point, since the soul is natural in the sense that it appears
to spirit as a given and not as posited, yet it appears to spirit as its own
given presence, whereby the complete (but nonetheless posited) ab-
sence of spirit is overcome. Yet since the givenness of the soul still con-
ceptually implies the absence of spirit (since it is not conceived as hav-
ing been posited), the soul ends up being conceptually determined by
physical, natural, and local determinations. The soul is thus spirit tak-
ing an always already naturally determined form of itself to be a giv-
en. Spirit assumes that it is naturally given to itself in the form of the
soul. It is, however, important to note that, starting with the soul, an
important differentiation occurs. For the soul is not simply nature, but
the immaterial beginning of spirit; Hegel calls it the “immateriality of
nature” and “simple universality.”39 Spirit posits a determinate presup-
position of itself that is separate from nature as such (the pure absence
of spirit), and this determination is as general and simple as it can be:
there is a givenness of spirit. Spirit assumes itself to be given, not rec-
ognizing that there is always an act of positing involved, the positing
of itself as its own presupposition. If the unacknowledged positing of a
given presupposition leads spirit into nature, the unacknowledged pos-
iting of itself as the given presupposition, i.e. of its own givenness, leads
spirit to the assumption of a (naturally given) soul that differs from na-
ture due to its immaterial (and yet natural) qualities. That is why He-
gel can contend that the soul names “the universal immateriality of na-

38. Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 30.

39. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, Dritter Teil, 43. One trivialized way of reading this would
be to observe that we are usually not inclined to regard ourselves as merely
natural beings (such as plants); we believe ourselves to be endowed with some-
thing else, too, which is not as material as the rest of our natural constitution.
This something —​a surplus exceeding the mere bodily constitution —​is that
which is here named “soul.”

106 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
ture… the sleep of spirit… that is potentially everything.”40 The soul is
spirit sleeping, but whoever sleeps also dreams (of oneself).
Spirit posits itself as its own presupposition, and hence as differ-
ent from nature. At the same time, this difference from nature still ap-
pears to be a difference that is given, and therefore natural, not posit-
ed. Spirit posits itself as the soul that is different from nature, yet it re-
mains Naturgeist (spirit as given and not as its own result). Here one
can see how the (seemingly unavoidable) failure of spirit to take its
own act of positing into account leads to the assumption that spirit is
not only given, but also —​due to this very givenness —​determined by
factors that exceed spirit’s grasp. Spirit sleeps and dreams of itself, but
what and how it dreams does not appear to spirit to be its own fabri-
cation (although it is, as later Freud will also clearly expound). Spir-
it’s dreams seemingly come from a source outside of spirit; as a con-
sequence, spirit seems to inherit its being (or existence) from nature.
Spirit inherits its dreams as well as itself. But where from? This ques-
tion is what awakens spirit.
The soul thus grounds the process of the awakening of spirit (to it-
self), because it does not appear merely as simple universality, but also
as “singularity”41. That is to say, in the ensuing steps of his anthropol-
ogy, Hegel will start to differentiate and individualize the assumption
of the givenness of determinations by differentiating these determina-
tions of givenness themselves. Spirit assumes that it has a given deter-
mined nature (the nature of spirit, different from nature as such), which
it slowly begins to grasp. This makes a difference, because spirit thereby
unknowingly acknowledges that there are different forms of positing a
presupposition, so that positing the soul as the form of spirit’s given-
ness determinately specifies the act (of positing a presupposition) itself.
Spirit slowly begins to make a real difference.

4. Soul-Mates
The soul is for Hegel divided in three forms: the natural soul, the feel-
ing soul, and the actual soul. Thus far I have referred to the natural soul
(the assumption of the natural givenness of spirit). The natural soul is
not yet individualized in any specific manner. Conceptually, it embod-
ies the assumption that there are general qualitative determinations,
“the physical as well as psychical racial differences in humanity”42 —​dif-

40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 51.
42. Ibid., 50.

FRANK RUDA 107

ferences that enable the individualization and differentiation of the one
simple universal natural soul (a process in which one differentiates and
individualizes the presupposition that there is a presupposition).43 This
process of differentiation does not only produce external natural differ-
ences (of races), but also facilitates the inner differentiation and indi-
vidualization of human beings. For instance, it generates the assump-
tion that there are unchangeable natural ages, be it of an individual, a
race or a state (childhood, youth, adulthood, etc.) —​the soul is deter-
mined by the natural form of change and so spirit assumes that it, too,
cannot but be subjected to these natural determinations. The latter take
at first the guise of the (universal) natural soul living a “universal plane-
tary life” determined by “the differences of climates, the changes of the
seasons, and the periods of the day.”44 The life of spirit in the form of
the natural soul is a natural life determined by natural changes. Spir-
it presupposes itself as given in the form of the soul as something dif-
ferent from nature (the absence of spirit), only to re-introduce nature
as the determining instance of its own givenness. However, this deter-
mining instance is thereby particularized and individualized so that, in
this process of differentiation, we advance from races to the more “local
spirits”45 (local cultures, ethical communities, etc.). We proceed here
from racial to national differences, and this process is the re-assertion
of spirit. It is determined by nature, and yet this determination leads
spirit to re-determine that which determines it —​the process in which
spirit is, again and again, led back to naturalizing that which it assumes
to be the determining instance.
It should be obvious that this continuous differentiation of differ-
ent determinations leads to an increasing degree of particularization of
what spirit assumes to be a given precondition for itself (such as assum-
ing that being born into the Italian state and thus into certain given cus-
toms makes for a different spirit than one born, for example, in Turkey).
One moves from the effects of climatic conditions to races to national
communities to, ultimately, intrafamilial relations, i.e. the naturally de-
termining impact of mothers on their children. Hegel claims that this
particularization appears in the form of the “special temperament, tal-
ent, character, physiognomy, or other dispositions and idiosyncrasies of
families or singular individuals.”46 We thus proceed to individual fam-

43. One can see here that Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit is also a fundamen-
tal critique of ideology, since ideology always relies on naturalization.
44. Ibid., 52.
45. Ibid., 63.
46. Ibid., 70.

108 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
ily life, the life of an individual in a family, and the life of an individu-
al as an individual. This brings us closer to the concept of inheritance.
Hegel states that “the peculiarity of an individual has different sides to
it. One distinguishes it by means of the determination of the disposi-
tion (Naturell), temperament, and character.”47 What is a “Naturell”?

5. Naturell
Hegel defines “Naturell” in §395 of the Encyclopedia as “natural dispo-
sitions in contrast to that which a human being has acquired by means
of its own activity.”48 A natural disposition is thus not a habit (although
it is posited, if unknowingly, in the sense elaborated above). This is why
this disposition can be characterized as “innate.”49 An astonishing claim
for (any Hegelian) spirit. Spirit unknowingly presupposes itself as given,
i.e. as the soul, yet some part of the determinate character of this given-
ness (the natural disposition) is, or at least appears to be, innate. This
implies two things: 1. Spirit unknowingly presupposes itself in such a
way that it is given as different to nature while still possessing the fun-
damental quality of nature, namely the unchangeability of its constitu-
tion (even though the natural disposition is highly individualized here).
Spirit presupposes itself as given and takes this to be an unalterable fact.
In the beginning of spirit, and for spirit, spirit has no beginning; con-
sequently, its beginning is conceptually and necessary a failed begin-
ning. 2. That also makes clear why spirit cannot but presuppose a nat-
ural disposition of itself (which is the sense in which this disposition is
“innate”). Spirit —a​ t least subjective spirit, spirit in the beginning, spir-
it that ignores its beginning —i​ s stuck with the assumption that it has
a given ground it cannot alter. Spirit cannot alter the assumption that
there is something it cannot alter. That which spirit cannot alter is the
assumption of its own givenness, which makes spirit assume an innate
ground, or itself in the form of a natural disposition.
What Hegel calls the “talent” and the “genius” are part of spirit’s
unalterable, natural disposition. Both terms express a “determined di-

47. Ibid., 71. I will in the following leave aside what Hegel says about the temper-
ament, because it is “the most general form in which an individual is active”
(Ibid., 72), and also what he states about the character, determined by “formal
energy” and “a universal content of the will” (Ibid., 73). Both are already situat-
ed at a point where “natural determination loses the guise of being fixed” (Ibid.,
74), and here I am only interested in investigating Hegel’s theory of natural dis-
position and the question about a theory of natural inheritance in Hegel.
48. Ibid., 71.
49. Ibid., 74.

FRANK RUDA 109

rection that the individual spirit has received by nature.”50 But where-
as talent produces something new within a specific given field (one
can, for example, be talented in painting), the genius is able to “cre-
ate a new species (Gattung).”51 Talent is a given, but one that remains
within the domain of the given. Genius is a given that alters the given,
creating something new. In the unalterable given natural condition of
spirit, there is a part that is repetitive and another that is transforma-
tive. Spirit differentiates its own presupposition in two different innate
parts. At the same time, both talent and genius “have to be cultivated in
a universally valid way.”52 This cultivation follows a natural logic (since
one assumes to simply cultivate, not posit the given), and thus the logic
of the ages of life (childhood, youth, adulthood, etc.) as well as educa-
tional institutions (kindergarten, school, etc.), which play a crucial role.
In all that, spirit never ceases to sense that it is not simply given, and
yet it takes itself to be given, thereby ending up in natural determina-
tions. That allows Hegel to claim that this very oscillation of spirit rep-
resents the natural cycle of spirit’s sleeping and waking. Here, we are
still caught up in the domain of natural determination, and so the un-
derlying rhythm of waking and sleeping —​the law of when spirit sleeps
or is awake —​is determined not by spirit, but by nature. It appears to
be natural to spirit that it is spirit, but also that it is given without hav-
ing posited itself. However, only one of the two states (Zustände) gen-
erates a form of feeling (Empfindung) proper to waking life. Only in its
waking life does spirit sense that it is spirit, and hence not simply a nat-
ural given. This feeling —​which turns the natural into the feeling soul —​
is not natural, but a form of self-relation of spirit.53 It is a “judgment,”54
namely the judgment that spirit is there and given. Ignoring the self-
positing act of spirit, this judgment posits a relation to that which does
not appear to have been posited. But it is an erroneous judgment, a
judgment that “is the form of the dull weaving of spirit,”55 in which a
particular content appears. Spirit feels itself, and it feels itself as being
something particular (it does not feel the whole nature, nor its innate
disposition, but only something specific). However, feeling is the “worst
form of spirit,”56 relying as it is on the assumption that the foundation
of that feeling is something that is simply given (the soul).

50. Ibid., 71.

51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 96.
54. Ibid., 97.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 100.

110 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 Hegel distinguishes two types of feeling —t​ hose produced by exterior
impulses and those expressing internal ones. This distinction immedi-
ately collapses, however, since the soul is something internally external,
i.e. assumed to be given, to spirit. In this, we can also see more clearly
what the concept of feeling implies for Hegel. 1. The determinations that
appear in feeling are transient and singular, although as such they also
imply a sense of self.57 They do not last, but they are always feelings be-
longing to the soul. 2. Feeling implies a passivity of the soul. Hegel here
toys around with the etymology of “Empfindung”, tracing it back to “fin-
den”, “to find something” (that is given). The soul finds a feeling, thereby
relating to something that did not originate in itself. The soul itself does
the same thing as spirit does when it assumes there is a soul —i​ t takes
something to be simply given and not posited. The soul feels something,
and whatever it feels also actualizes the feeling of the soul’s own given-
ness. This is why feeling is a determining as well as individualizing factor
of the soul’s givenness. 3. A feeling can occur even when something is
not immediately present at hand (e.g. to the senses). Feeling thus differ-
entiates the concept of givenness: a feeling can emerge from something
that is given in a form different from any objective, apparent givenness.
At the same time, this helps to explain why feeling always implies self-
feeling, since the self, or the soul, is also given in a non-objective way.
Hegel derives from this the concept of the individual soul. And it is
here, in §405 of his Encyclopedia, that he further specifies the notion
of the genius. The soul that feels has a sense of individuality, since it
always feels itself. However, it does not have a true sense of self, since
what it feels comes to it from something that is as much a given as
the soul itself. This is why Hegel can state that “the feeling soul in its
immediacy”58 is not as itself. The soul feels itself, but it does not feel
itself as itself —​in the same way that spirit does not recognize itself in
the soul. But as what does the soul feel itself when it feels itself in such
a passive way? Hegel’s answer is: as “another subject.”59

6. Imagine There Is No Mother

Hegel’s paradigm for this other subject is the mother. The mother “is
the genius of the child.”60 Here, Hegel defines “genius” as the “intensive

57. These feelings I have now are always my feelings. Hegel claims: „What I feel... is
me, and what I am, I feel.” Ibid., 119.
58. Ibid., 124.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., 125.

FRANK RUDA 111

form of individuality.”61 First of all, this implies that the mother-child
relation is in some way similar to the spirit-soul relation. The child can-
not avoid taking the mother as a given, simply because it takes itself to
be a given (it is given to itself by the mother, which must have been giv-
en in order to be able to give a child). But what does the mother give
to a child? Hegel’s answer is fourfold: 1. The mother gives to the child
the child itself. 2. The mother gives to the child its (the child’s as well
as the mother’s) individuality. Thereby, the mother gives itself to the
child, and this is the paradigm of givenness for the child (as well as the
source of all its feelings —​at least before it has been born). 3. It gives to
the child the individuality in the form of the genius —​as “concentrat-
ed individuality,”62 condensing the individuality of the child and the
mother. Inside the mother’s womb, the child feels what the mother feels.
In this way the mother becomes the paradigm of the other subject to
which spirit constitutively relates. 4. The mother gives to the child the
concept of givenness as such (of the mother, of the genius, and most
importantly: of the child itself).
Here, it is important to recall that genius, for Hegel, also defines
that which allows for the creation of a new species. The mother thus
gives to the child that which she herself is, namely that which makes
her into a mother: the act of creating something new.63 What the child
thus inherits from the mother is nothing but the possibility —t​ o be dis-
tinguished from a capacity —t​ o generate something that exceeds the
given coordinates, a possibility that exceeds all capacities, that is not
a given, a possibility beyond the possible, an im-possibility. At the
same time, Hegel clearly states that the mother is the genius of the
child. Does the mother therefore possess genius, in the sense of a ca-
pacity transmitted to the child? One can unfold here a simple argu-
ment, namely that the mother used to be a child herself and, thus, ge-
nius is also something that has been passed on to her. Genius names
a possibility that is not — although it is by necessity mistakenly per-
ceived as if it were — a natural disposition. Genius is that which names
the quality to posit new presuppositions. And if the mother gives this
possibility to the child, can one not conclude that there is no mother
of this possibility (not simply because every mother used to be a child
but, additionally, because one can never assume this possibility to be

61. Ibid., 126.

62. Ibid., 126.
63. Here one can see how Marx’s infamous saying about a society being pregnant
with something new implies, in a specific way, a Hegelian theory of inherit-
ance. See Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans.
Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 916.

112 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
a given)? Because of that, any mother has a mother, but there is no
Mother of all mothers. Hegel’s theory of inheritance leads to the sur-
prising conclusion that there is no Mother, not only in the sense that
there is ultimately no mother of that which is inherited —n ​ o sujet sup-
posé de l’avoir — ​but also that the only thing spirit, reason, and all of
us can inherit is genius, an im-possibility, eine Un-Möglichkeit, to pos-
it new presuppositions.

References
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ford University Press, 1998.
Brandom R. B. A Spirit of Trust: A Semantic Reading of Hegel’s Phenom-
enology of Spirit. Unpublished typescript. Available at: http://pitt.
edu/~brandom/spirit_of_trust_2014.html.
Fromm E. Marx’s Concept of Man, London, New York, Continuum,
2004.
Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature (ed. S. Houlgate), New York, State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1998.
Hegel G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Translated from the Encyclopedia
of the Philosophical Sciences, Oxford, Clarendon, 1984.
Hegel G. W. F. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Vol. 3, Berkeley, Uni-
versity of California Press, 1990.
Hegel G. W. F. Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Oxford, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2008.
Hegel G. W. F. Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp,
1983.
Horkheimer M. Bemerkungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie.
Kritische Theorie. Bd. 2 (Hg. A. Schmidt), Frankfurt am Main,
Suhrkamp, 1968, S. 200–227.
Lacan J. Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001.
Macpherson C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Hobbes
to Locke, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990.
Malabou C. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, Lon-
don, New York, Routledge, 2004.
Malabou C. What Should We Do With Our Brain?, New York, Fordham
University Press, 2008.
Marcuse H. Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp,
1955.
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Books, 1990.
Marx K. Selected Works. Vol. I, Moscow, Foreign Language Publishing
House, 1955.
Ranciѐre J. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minnesota, University of
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Ruda F. Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,
London, Continuum, 2011.
Ruda F. Humanism Reconsidered, or: Life living Life. Filozosfki Vestnik,
Ljubljana, vol. XXX, no. 2, 2009, pp. 175–197.
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tinuum, 2009, pp. 95–121.

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The Owl and the Angel

Oxana Timofeeva
Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Sociology, Euro-
pean University at St. Petersburg. Address: 3 Gagarinskaya str., 191187
St. Petersburg, Russia.
Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sci-
ences. Address: 12/1 Goncharnaya str., 109240 Moscow, Russia.
E-mail: [email protected].
Keywords: Hegel; Walter Benjamin; Owl of Minerva; Angel of History; happi-
ness; revolution; dialectics.
Abstract: In Hegel’s philosophical system, the owl of Minerva is not just a meta-
phor, but a significant symbol. In the symbolism of Hegel’s time, it stood
for ideas of enlightenment and political emancipation, including radical,
revolutionary, cosmopolitan, anti-monarchical, and even anarchistic
ideas. Hegel, however, places the owl in a context that appears utterly
un-revolutionary. “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the
falling of dusk,” he writes in the preface to the Philosophy of Right, thus
summing up his argument that philosophy’s task is not to teach the
world how it ought to be, nor to issue instructions to the state, but rather
to comprehend the world as reasonable.
Not only does Hegel’s owl seem to defend the reactionary present
state (a state against which she previously fought in the name of reason
and freedom), but she also seems to teach us to accept the present with
joy. The point is not merely to reconcile oneself with reality, but also to
enjoy it. This paper traces a number of explanatory trajectories —​philo-
sophical, psychological, and anthropological —​in order to elucidate the
paradoxical nature of this enjoyment, and compares the figure of Miner-
va’s owl with another flying creature, Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History.
Such a comparison aims to pave the way towards a new interpretation of
Hegel’s philosophy of history and time.

115
 Like cabbage-heads in some seedbed of hell
They lay, looking up at us,
The heads of our comrades
Kirill Medvedev

T H E owl of Minerva in the Hegelian system is not just a meta-

phor, but what one might call a heraldic symbol. Existing in a
separate category from really existing owls, it presents a simpli-
fied image, like other heraldic animals (lions, griffins, falcons, dragons,
and so on) whose purpose is to reveal an idea or the essence of a thing.
Once it appears in the philosophical bestiary, the owl becomes an irre-
placeable, indispensable element in it, and the reader of Hegel is faced
again and again with the temptation to lose himself in tracing the tra-
jectory of its twilight flight. Since, in Oscar Wilde’s words, the only way
to get rid of temptation is to yield to it, the ideas inspired by this image
have lost none of their immediacy.
Even before Hegel introduced the owl of Minerva into his philos-
ophy in the position of housekeeper, this symbol was in circulation in
the culture of Hegel’s time and was well-known to his contemporar-
ies. Minerva was the name of a renowned historico-political journal
edited by Johann Wilhelm Archenholz,1 appearing at the turn of the
nineteenth century, from whose pages Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling and
many other educated, progressively inclined Germans learned about
the most recent world events (D’Hondt 1968: 7-43) —​for example, rev-

Translated from Russian by Timothy Dwight Williams

1. All issues of the journal from 1792 to 1815 are archived online: http://www.
ub.uni-bielefeld.de/diglib/aufkl/minerva/minerva.htm (last accessed Septem-
ber 8, 2015).

116 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
olution, not only in France but in Haiti (Buck-Morss 2009: 42-47). The
owl perched on an open book served as the emblem of the Bavari-
an Illuminati —​a secret society of the Masonic type, founded in 1776
in Ingolstadt (D’Hondt 1998) by the “first citizen of freedom,”2 Adam
Weishaupt. According to Jacques D’Hondt, author of a “secret biogra-
phy” of Hegel, the philosopher was loosely involved in the society’s ac-
tivities, though still quite a young man in 1784, when the Bavarian gov-
ernment placed an official ban on the group.
Secret esoteric societies such as the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and
the Rosicrucians at that time faced the crucial task of fighting igno-
rance and disseminating the ideas of the Enlightenment, but there
were, of course, other reasons for the authorities to fear them. Broth-
erhood had already materialized as a reality in these closed associa-
tions —f​ reedom and equality were yet to come. In the wake of enlight-
enment understood as general intellectual and spiritual emancipation
there followed ideas for political emancipation, including radical, rev-
olutionary, cosmopolitan, anti-monarchical and even anarchistic ide-
as. Amongst other accusations leveled at them, the Illuminati were
charged with conspiracy, with the abolition of nation-states as one of
its goals.
As a significative symbol, the owl of Minerva reflects the ambigu-
ity of the situation where the ideals of universal knowledge, open-
ness, equality and freedom demand from their chief adherents, con-
versely, a certain amount of secrecy, the observance of occult rituals,
a strict hierarchy, and so on. The necessarily conspiratorial nature of
their subversive activity in conditions of pervasive obscurantism has
correspondingly given birth to conspiracy theories that explain the
lack of transparency in organizations of the Masonic type (cf. Piatig-
orsky 1997) as resulting primarily from their evil intentions (whether
involving the blood sacrifice of children or a global cabal). In the im-
age of the owl of Minerva sitting on a book is embodied the paradox
of knowledge itself, necessarily universal and simultaneously necessar-
ily occult: where there is knowledge, there must be a secret supposed
to be known. On the one hand, the owl is the bird of reason and light;
on the other hand, the “ominous and fearful owl of death,” in Shake-
speare’s words, is the ruler of night and darkness, in which murders
and sorcery take place.

2. The tombstone of the order’s founder bore the inscription: “Here lies
Weishaupt—a respected man of scholarly mind, the first citizen of freedom!” Cf.
(last accessed September 12, 2015): http://www.illuminaten.org/seminararbeit/
adam-weishaupt.

Oxana Timofeeva 117

 In short, Hegel’s owl does not appear from nowhere. In the sym-
bolism of the age, it represents not only reason, but also revolution,
around which reason circles dangerously and with increasing inten-
sity. The utterly un-revolutionary context into which Hegel sudden-
ly places the owl is thus all the more bewildering. “When philosophy
paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philoso-
phy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only understood. The
owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk,” he
writes in the penultimate paragraph of the preface to the Philosophy
of Right (Hegel 1967: 13), thus summing up his argument that philos-
ophy’s task is not to teach the world how it ought to be, and give in-
structions to the state, but to “comprehend what is […] for what is, is
reason” (Hegel 1967: 11).
Hegel’s owl, it seems, is no anarchist or revolutionary, no conspira-
tor seeking to change the world, but an old defender of the same state
against which she once stood in the name of reason and freedom. Phi-
losophy finds its proper place within God and the state as the “mor-
al universum.” More rational than ideals is the grey old reality, with
which one must become reconciled. This reconciliation is furthermore
not renunciation or simply acceptance of the inevitable. Reason “is
just as little content with the cold despair which submits to the view
that in this earthly life things are truly bad or at best only tolerable,
thought here they cannot be improved and that this is the only reflec-
tion which can keep us at peace with the world: There is less chill in
the peace with the world which knowledge supplies” (Hegel 1967: 12).
This peace is by no means coerced; on the contrary, it brings joy: “To
recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to
enjoy the present (Gegenwart … sich zu erfreuen), this is the rational
insight which reconciles us to the actual, the reconciliation which phi-
losophy affords to those in whom there has once arisen an inner voice
bidding them to comprehend, not only to dwell in what is substantive
while still retaining subjective freedom, but also to possess subjective
freedom while standing not in anything particular, but in what exists
absolutely” (Ibid.).
A number of passages in this quotation attract our attention and
merit some closer thought. First of all, the rose on the cross is, like the
owl of Minerva and in equal measure, an ambiguous symbol: if the
owl evokes the Illuminati, the rose on the cross is the emblem of the
Rosicrucians. Hegel’s works are full of deliberate allusions to the se-
cret societies of his time. In their philosophical interpretation, these
images take on new and unexpected meaning. Moreover, Hegel is not
the sort of author who piles on metaphors gratuitously: the rose on

118 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 the cross in the preface to the Philosophy of Right is freighted with
rich significance.
On the one hand, this powerful image hints to us that the present
is a kind of cross, possibly a heavy one, to which reason then becomes
attached, or perhaps out of which reason grows, as something extra-
neous, but beautiful and alive (like a rose). The contrast here is im-
portant: the cognition that reconciles us with reality, would not per-
mit us to enjoy the present if it were not at the same time a heavy cross
we must bear.
In an earlier passage in the preface, Hegel paraphrases the moral of
Aesop’s fable of the Boasting Traveler and, acting as if the sense of such
a play on words were self-evident, transforms “Hiс Rhodus, hiс saltus”
(Here is Rhodes, jump here) into “Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze” (Here
is the rose, dance here) (Hegel 1967: 11). Philosophy invites us to dance,
expressing the joy of sympathetic reason and reconciliation with reality,
not somewhere, sometime, but precisely here and now. The dance with
the roses on the cross of the present is the culmination of the celebra-
tion of universal understanding. “Here is the rose, dance here” could be
Hegel’s answer to the anarchistic motto attributed to Emma Goldman,
“If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” It is not in some distant, ideal
revolution, but in the reality of the actually existing state that sympa-
thetic reason begins joyfully whirling in its ritual dance.
On the other hand, the cross symbolizes death in Christian cul-
ture. Crosses adorn and designate graves. The cross as a sign thus tes-
tifies to the dead’s status as truly dead; we should remember, however,
that in Christianity, the finality of death in fact represents immortality
and eternal life for the dead: the deceased rest in peace, and only those
dead who are not dead, the undead, the living dead continue wander-
ing about, restlessly. In an analogous manner, the Hegelian “cross of the
present” represents the end of time itself. “[P]hilosophy is its own time
apprehended in thoughts,” Hegel says, meaning the present: it is impos-
sible to “overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes” (Ibid.), impossible
to leap over death. For philosophy, any time which is not present (and
that means any time, because the present is not a time, but a ceaseless
transition into nonbeing) is always already dead in some sense. He-
gel’s cross of the present on the grave of time is crowned with the roses
of knowledge. Philosophy spins around this grave in a macabre dance.
Reason, the funeral wreath, is given over to mourning, and reconcilia-
tion is indistinguishable from the peace of the graveyard.
The owl of Minerva flying at twilight arrives at just such a picture
of completed, and therefore comprehensible and accessible, time. In-
stead of resolving how to take action and creating projects for the or-

Oxana Timofeeva 119

 ganization of the future, philosophy takes a look backward, acting like
a monochrome painting: grey on grey nicely captures the graveyard
atmosphere. As if the dust of ashes drew not a rose but the owl sitting
on a graveyard cross in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting “Owl on a
Grave Marker.” In fact Friedrich’s whole series of sepia depictions of
owls, completed in the period between 1836 and 1839, after the artist
was devastated by paralysis and could no longer work in oil painting —​
“Owl Flying Against a Moonlit Sky,” “Owl in a Gothic Window,” “Land-
scape with Grave, Coffin, and Owl,” could serve as great illustrations
for this passage in Hegel.
Incidentally, the last of the illustrations mentioned, “Landscape with
Grave, Coffin, and Owl” (1839), appears on the cover of Rebecca Co-
may’s book Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (2011),
which undertakes an interesting effort to rethink the relationship be-
tween Hegelian philosophy and its historico-philosophical context. Co-
may’s analysis starts with the concepts of trauma, mourning and mel-
ancholy.3 The author expands upon these concepts, taken from Freud,
by applying them to German culture more broadly and German phi-
losophy in particular. The diagnosis, declared in the title, of mourning
sickness, originates in contemporary mass culture: it is the name for
the lamentations and collective affect that the media provokes in con-
nection with certain world or national events, such as the death of a
celebrity.
In Comay’s view, the common mournful and melancholic tone of
German classical thought is determined by references to a traumatic
event which had not in fact taken place in Germany. It is mourning the
loss of something that was never there. Revolution —t​ he embodiment
of the ideas of the enlightenment in reality, transforming the political
life of society in its entirety —h​ ad occurred nearby, in France, and the
Germans, active readers of magazines and newspapers, had merely ob-
served it at a safe distance, as people look, in Herder’s words, “from a
secure shore at a shipwreck far off in the open sea” (Herder 1971: 336),
drawing lessons from the mistakes of someone else’s history.4

3. Hegel’s relationship to the French Revolution in terms of melancholy are also

examined by Artemy Magun, though he places greater emphasis on the idea
of negativity (Magun 2013: 187-192).
4. In the drafts of the Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, Herder writes: “And if
Providence itself put this spectacle before our eyes, if it, after a long prepara-
tion, allowed it to happen in our time, that we might see it and learn from it —​
who does not want to learn from it and will not thank God for the fact that it
is happening abroad and that we are involved in it only as a newspaper report,
unless, as already mentioned, some evil genius is not going to plunge us reck-

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 Comay calls this type of situation, when revolution appears not as
a really lived experience, but as a sublime spectacle of catastrophe, si-
multaneously splendid and appalling, a “Kantian theater,” noting the
duality or even duplicity of Kant’s position: on the one hand, sympa-
thy with the ideals of Enlightenment and republicanism (which Kant,
introducing the distinction between spirit and letter, proposes to sup-
port as regulative ideas within monarchical government) (Comay 2011:
166-167), and on the other, rejection of revolution as such, inasmuch
as it goes against the law — ​not only against a particular juridical or
moral law, but against the principle of law in general, against univer-
sal formal law. The execution of the sovereign, who was the guaran-
tor of law, exposes the pure arbitrariness that underlies its very form
(Comay 2011: 36-37).
German culture knows revolution only in translation, Comay un-
derscores, following Marx, who, in the Communist Manifesto, for ex-
ample, ridicules German philosophers and “literati” for their uncon-
vincing attempts to “bring … the new French ideas into harmony with
their ancient philosophical conscience,” implemented “in the same
way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by transla-
tion” (Marx, Engels 1848). According to Marx, the most important el-
ement is lost in translation, namely the class struggle; political revolu-
tion is emasculated by being transformed into a revolution of the spir-
it, of ideas, of morals —a​ conceptual, theoretical revolution. “Not true
requirements, but the requirements of Truth” are raised up as goals;
“not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature,
of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists
only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy” (Ibid). Such “foul
and enervating literature” represents the product of so-called “true”
German socialism, which, being a “silly echo” of French criticism, lets
its real historical chance pass it by and remains faithful to its calling —​
to serve as the “bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Phil-
istine” (Ibid).
In her discussion of the temporality of translating the French Revo-
lution into the language of German culture and philosophy, Comay fre-
quently notes its paradoxical nature: the past had not yet occurred here,
but the future is already precluded —​having failed to appear, never hav-
ing materialized, it nevertheless got left behind. In response to Marx’s

lessly headlong into what is happening? Here we are allowed to gather all of
our German common sense, to look it over with empirical scrutiny, to reason-
ably use everything good, and throw out, according to justice and prudence,
everything reprehensible” (Herder 1971: 337).

Oxana Timofeeva 121

witty remark, in the introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right, that the Germans “have shared the restorations of modern na-
tions without ever having shared their revolutions” and that “we only
once kept company with freedom, on the day of its interment” (Marx
1843), Comay, however, observes that Hegel himself anticipates such a
criticism —​and not so much in the Phenomenology of Spirit as in the
Philosophy of Right. The “strange temporality” in which the future is
left in the past but the past has not taken place (the revolution has not
yet come to pass, and now will never do so), finds its adequate expres-
sion in Hegelian philosophy which places before it the task of signi-
fying the present—and in particular the actually existing state—as an
anachronism (Comay 2011: 144). This form of life, beneath which is
buried the freedom that never materialized, has already become old in
the here and now.
Readers of the Philosophy of Right fall into two groups —​those who
consider it an eloquent testimony to Hegel’s rejection of his youthful
ideals of revolution and an apologia for the Prussian state, and those
who see in the work a continuation of the emancipatory project under
conditions of external reaction and censorship by that same Prussian
state. Comay unequivocally belongs to the second group: in her inter-
pretation, Hegel remains unconditionally true to the event of the revo-
lution —​the event that did not take place and was allowed to slip away.
Comay is convinced that the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philoso-
phy of Right are two sides of the same intellectual scenario regarding the
Spirit, and that the often-bewildering conservative pathos of the Phi-
losophy of Right and, probably, many other works in the history of po-
litical philosophy, represents the result of “an endless negotiation with
the censors” (Comay 2011: 144).
In defending Hegel the revolutionary against Hegel the reactionary,
it is possible to base the argument on the fact that the rational reality
Hegel refers to in the controversial passage on reconciliation is not ex-
actly reality as we generally understand it. Thus, in the Science of Logic,
Hegel makes a distinction between reality and existence and defines re-
ality as the unity of essence and existence. As Engels underscores, “ac-
cording to Hegel certainly not everything that exists is also real, with-
out further qualification. For Hegel the attribute of reality belongs only
to that which at the same time is necessary” (Engels 1946). As concerns
the Prussian state of which the Philosophy of Right is commonly be-
lieved to be a vindication, according to Engels, Hegel’s stance with re-
gard to it rather signifies that “this state is rational, corresponds to rea-
son, insofar as it is necessary; and if it nevertheless appears to us to be
evil, but still, in spite of its evil character, continues to exist, then the

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 evil character of the government is justified and explained by the cor-
responding evil character of its subjects. The Prussians of that day had
the government that they deserved” (Ibid.).
By strongly accenting the “strange temporality” of Hegelian philos-
ophy, Comay, for her part, gives this classical Marxist reading an inno-
vative Benjaminian twist: “‘Actualization’ (Verwirklichung) in this sense
can mean nothing other than the deactivation of the existent and the
reactivation and reenactment (in every sense) of the thwarted futures
of the past. Actuality thus expresses precisely the pressure of the vir-
tual: it opens history to the ‘no longer’ of a blocked possibility and the
persistence of an unachieved ‘not yet’” (Comay 2011: 144-145). In this
“temporal convolution” the author discerns “something resembling the
messianic structure of ‘hope in the past’” (Ibid.). The Prussian state in
this reading is presented as perhaps a real, but not an essential form of
life. It is the cross of the present, upon which grows the rose of knowl-
edge, on which there perches at twilight the owl of philosophy, and un-
derneath which is buried the future itself. In the grave of time lies that
which has not yet had a chance to be born. The present as anachronism
both blocks and at the same time marks a whole series of missed op-
portunities. If we extend this thought further, then any moment in the
present could be a revolution.
This interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy undoubtedly draws pro-
found inspiration from reading Benjamin. It would seem that we have
no grounds whatever for juxtaposing the two authors: if Hegel’s thesis
on the rationality of reality is treated as an apologia for the status quo,
(“for what is, is reason”), what can be further from the thought, per-
sistently developed by Benjamin, that what is, is a catastrophe? None-
theless, Comay manages to make a persuasive case for this parallel. In
Benjamin’s view, the main threat to humanity is represented not by the
coming apocalypse, but the stability and preservation of what is: “That
things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe” (Benjamin 2002: 184). The
critical moment does not cease presenting itself as long as things main-
tain their position or follow their course (Benjamin 2002: 185). Every
minute of the present in which the status quo is preserved, buries the
future in the past and transforms history into ruins. “Catastrophe —t​ o
have missed the opportunity,” writes Benjamin (Benjamin 1999: 474).
It is this territory of missed opportunities and hope buried in the past
where his meeting with Hegel takes place.
The owl of Minerva completes her flight at precisely the moment
when everything has already happened, and what has occurred cannot
be changed, or (what amounts to the same thing) when nothing has al-
ready happened, when the opportunity has been missed, that is, now.

Oxana Timofeeva 123

In an essential way, the owl of Minerva is a witness to the catastrophe.
As Mladen Dolar suggests,5 a condition for the existence of philosophy
and its activity of drawing grey on grey is, in Hegel, a devastating, cat-
astrophic event—the end of the world or apocalypse—only after which
event can thought arise, as if from ashes. In fact, being, in order to be,
requires this primeval catastrophic event: the end of the world precedes
its beginning. To begin from the very beginning, it is necessary at the
beginning to reach the end. Of decisive importance is the point of tran-
sition (an empty point) from being (pure being) to nothingness (and
vice versa). Hegel describes this transition in various ways, everywhere,
it may be said, in all of his works, but particularly precisely and terse-
ly at the beginning of the first chapter of the first book of the Science of
Logic, where he declares that pure being and pure nothingness are one
and the same thing (Hegel 2010: 59). It is crucial to note that here, “one
and the same” signifies not indifference but absolute engagement, the
truth of which —b ​ ecoming —​contains a delicate temporal nuance: “be-
ing has passed over into nothing and nothing into being—‘has passed
over,’ not passes over” (Hegel 2010: 59-60). Becoming unfolds in the
post-apocalyptic modality of “always already,” and thought, which in
this process ceases to identify itself with being, carries from the outset
a mark of the irremediability of (non-)happening.
Comay also sees Hegel as a philosopher of catastrophe, but in addi-
tion, she radically reads him as already expressing Benjaminian aware-
ness of the unpostponable urgency of revolutionary interference in the
course of history and the need for a break with the catastrophic con-
tinuum of the present (Comay 2013: 251-259). Reconciliation with re-
ality, read this way, dialectically crosses over into its opposite, into ir-
reconcilability, which emerges, however, not as a romantic rejection
of reality, but as its deactivation, its abolition through completion,
through the “always already” of the transition from being into noth-
ingness. This transition becomes double and in its natural, immedi-
ate form is cast off or overcome; the negation of negation takes place.
That which buries the future in the past is itself old, grey, and dead. As
if we could do away with it and start over, find what was lost, let the
un-happened to happen.
Like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, Benjamin’s Angel of History —​the
Angelus Novus from Klee’s painting —​is a witness to the world ca-

5. I am borrowing the idea of catastrophe, of apocalypse as the founding event of

being and thought in Hegel’s philosophy from Mladen Dolar, who has been
kind enough to share with me an unpublished passage in which the Hegelian
subject is described as a catastrophe survivor.

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tastrophe. With his eyes wide open and his lips rounded, he looks
into the past, from whence none return. A storm wind blows back in
his face from heaven. “The storm drives him irresistibly into the fu-
ture, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him
grows sky-high” (Benjamin 2015): the precipitate movement of the
angel into the future looks more than anything like falling down. In-
stead of a series of events succeeding each other, he observes “one sin-
gle catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and
hurls it before his feet” (Ibid.). He would like to stay, “to awaken the
dead and to piece together what has been smashed,” but the storm is
so strong that he cannot even fold his wings. Benjamin’s reader al-
most feels the pain of the fallen angel experiencing his clumsy, brut-
ish, birdlike body.
The owl of Minerva and the angel of history, two images whose me-
diation is vital to our understanding of modern historical subjectivi-
ty, have much in common. Both the angel and the owl have feathered
wings. They are both flying creatures. Both turn their gaze backward,
into the past, at what has already been (un)consummated. Both see
in front of them something grey: the angel of history ruins and rub-
ble, the owl of Minerva dust and ashes. Both are unable to change or
fix anything. They are united by the irreversibility of real or imagined
loss, inability to interfere in the catastrophic march of events or influ-
ence it, to replay history. They are birds of grief, mourning and melan-
choly. And yet, such a description does not exhaust their shared psy-
choemotional content. Behind the obvious background of desolation,
something else is hidden.
As we find our way toward this something else, we should once
again remember the dance with roses and the fact that Hegelian re-
ality at the moment of our reconciliation with it not only makes it-
self understandable, but gives cause for enjoyment. The end of the
world watched over by the owl of Minerva, the end of history, the end
of time, represents a sorrowful picture of the withering of life, but in
point of fact, the philosophizing animal’s passion is not for life but
for truth. That animal’s main organ of feeling is reason. As transla-
tor T.M. Knox writes in the notes to the English edition of the Philos-
ophy of Right: “If the actual is rational, then however tragic the actu-
al may seem to be, reason will be able to find joy in it, because it will
find itself in it as its essence.”6 The thesis on the rationality of reality
thus contains a certain kind of “imperative to enjoy.” In making this
reconciliation, we are not renouncing the pleasure principle in favour

6. Hegel 1967: 303, note by T.M. Knox.

Oxana Timofeeva 125

of the reality principle, in order to receive some safe and happy grey
life in return. On the contrary, at the world’s twilight, when the He-
gelian spirit embodied in the nocturnal bird abandons the dead body
of history, some primary, unconscious desire of ours suddenly uncov-
ers its element.
The angel of history, in turn, is revealed to be an unambiguous-
ly melancholic figure. As Jonathan Flatley writes, it is not only “that
Benjamin himself —​born, as he noted, ‘under the sign of Saturn’ —​
tended toward depression is well known, and the problem of melan-
choly recurs regularly in his work” (Flatley 2008: 64), but material-
ist method is itself melancholic, inextricably linked as it is with loss.
A prominent tradition of Benjamin interpretation is focused on mel-
ancholy and depression; its most important voice is that of Gershom
Scholem. Scholem analyzes in particular an enigmatic short fragment
written by Benjamin on Ibiza in August 1933, entitled “Agesilaus San-
tander” (Scholem 1976: 198-237). This fictional name, supposedly be-
stowed on the author by his Jewish parents to supplement his real
name, belongs not so much to Benjamin himself as to his “personal
angel.” In the Jewish tradition, each person possesses such an angel:
he represents the person’s hidden or celestial self. No less important,
according to Scholem, is the fact that this combination of the name
of the king of Sparta, Agesilaus, and the name of the north Spanish
city Santander conceals the anagram “Der Angelus Satanas,” signi-
fying a union of “angelic and demonic forces” (Scholem 1976: 217).
Scholem traces the dynamics of how the demonic motifs, inspired
not only by mysticism and theology, but also the poetry of Baude-
laire, develop in Benjamin’s angelology, and claims that the Angelus
Novus from Thesis IX in On the Concept of History is the same Satan
who figures elsewhere in Benjamin’s work, though concealed under
a different name. The word “Novus” (new)—given that the real, “old”
name of the angel is already designated and known—indicates an un-
canny repetition and the return of the same. It is truly a fallen angel, a
dark bearer of evil rather than good. His Satanic nature, in Scholem’s
view, is underscored by his “claws and knife-sharp wings”: “No angel,
but only Satan, possesses claws and talons” (Scholem 1976: 222). For
Benjamin, the encounter with this demonic angel is a secular epiph-
any, but, Scholem concludes, its secular nature does not prevent the
image from playing a deeply mystical role, as it expresses the “occult
reality” of Benjamin himself, a melancholy accumulation of various
irreparable losses.
It is difficult to disagree with Scholem’s version, and yet there is a
philosopher who takes it upon himself to face that challenge, painstak-

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ingly refuting the most self-evident and convincing arguments in his
interpretation —G ​ iorgio Agamben.7 In his reading, the angel of histo-
ry is not a melancholic figure, but a messianic one. Agamben directs
our attention to the following passage from Benjamin’s fragment: “He
[Agesilaus Santander] wants happiness: the conflict in which lies the
ecstasy of the unique, new, as yet unlived with that bliss of the ‘once
more,’ the having again, the lived” (Scholem 1976: 208). Scholem, of
course, did not neglect to discuss this passage, but for him the happi-
ness that the angel wants consists of a mystical connection with lost
objects, where for Agamben happiness lies in salvation and redemp-
tion. If Benjamin’s “personal angel” is a demon, then it is by no means
the demon stigmatized by Judeo-Christian religious tradition, it is
not Lucifer, whose fierce claws are kissed by witches at their Sabbaths.
Agamben proposes to examine the other meaning of the word “de-
monic,” originating in classical Greek ethics, which Agamben reads as
the doctrine of happiness: “For the Greeks, the link between the de-
monic (daimonion) and happiness was evident in the very term with
which they designated happiness, eudaimonia” (Agamben 1999: 138).
Agamben agrees that the old and the new angel are the same charac-
ter, but he rejects its depressive-melancholic, occult, and Luciferian
qualities. Instead, in Agamben’s reading, the angel is “a bright figure
who, in the strict solidarity of happiness and historical redemption, es-
tablishes the very relation of the profane order to the messianic […]”
(Agamben 1999: 145).
These counter-intuitive conclusions may, of course, seem bewilder-
ing to some who, following Scholem, could point to the angel’s feral
claws as endowing him with a diabolical nature, but for them Agam-
ben also has an answer: Satan is not the only angel with claws. In the
European iconographic tradition it is Eros, more than Satan, who joins
together angelic and demonic features —a​ nd he, too, incidentally, is of-
ten depicted with feral claws. It is no accident that Benjamin himself,
in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, refers to a painting by Giotto,
in which Cupid is shown “as a demon of wantonness with a bat’s wings
and claws” (Benjamin 2009: 226). As Agamben remarks, the new angel
in Klee’s painting has arms and claws that make him resemble a preda-
tory bird. The claws reveal not the demonic, but the “destructive—and
simultaneously liberating—power of the angel” (Agamben 1999: 142).
Thus we are dealing with no depressive melancholic, but a real exter-

7. I owe this reference to Sami Khatib, from whom I learned that the Angel of his-
tory is happy when brushed again the grain.

Oxana Timofeeva 127

minating angel.8 Agamben references yet another text, in which Ben-
jamin cites Klee’s angel and speaks of “a humanity that proves itself by
destruction”: “where origin and destruction come together, [the de-
mon’s] rule is over” (Agamben 1999: 150, quoting Benjamin 1986: 273),
he writes in the essay “Karl Kraus,” as if disputing in advance the in-
terpretation placed on his work by his friend Scholem. The theme of
destruction, emphasized by Agamben, plays a crucial role here.9 De-
struction does not contradict happiness and love, quite the contrary:
the place where destruction and origin meet is the moment of redemp-
tion. It must be admitted that understood in this way, the desire of
Benjamin’s angel is close to the drive to reach the end in order to begin
again, with which Hegel’s owl flies at twilight toward death —​another
creature with long, sharp claws, naturally. The owl and the angel are
birds of the apocalypse. They do not simply observe catastrophe, but
find in it their own element and the beginning of a new life. Beyond
mourning, sorrow and melancholy, they share a strange enjoyment.
We could try to explain this enjoyment in a number of ways. The
first would be a philosophical explanation. The owl and the angel en-
joy as they find themselves drawn into a vertiginous vortex of double
negation. In the owl’s case this is expressed in the fact that reality, or
the present as the simple negativity of time, annulling everything that
is not itself, in turn also becomes obsolete and annuls itself in each of
its constitutive moments. The owl rejoiced at the catastrophic nature
of the transition point from being into nothingness, as the owl coin-
cided with this point on the path to the beginning that can be followed
through to the end only by slipping through the needle’s eye of death.
In the angel’s case, it is the joy of victory over the demon, the happy
possibility of the destruction of destruction itself, thereby becoming
joined together with origination, that is, again finding the beginning
of the path through its end. For the owl and the angel, the end of his-
tory is connected with the redemptive destruction of the destructive
force that operates in history. It is a purely dialectical, difficult enjoy-
ment, accessible only to a select few.
The second kind of explanation would be psychoanalytical: the se-
cret of the owl and the angel is that their principal drive, the death drive,
finds itself actualized in history’s most catastrophic development. As

8. El ángel exterminador (Sp.) is the title of a well-known Surrealist film by Luis

Buñuell, which refers to some Biblical stories, particularly the apocalypse, as
well as the Old Testament story of the Angel of Death.
9. Sami Khatib develops this theme in his extensive study of Benjamin’s messian-
ism and nihilism as a revolutionary philosophical method (Khatib 2013).

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Comay writes, elucidating the link established by Freud between the
repetition compulsion (for example, daily rituals through which a trau-
matic event is unconsciously reenacted) and the death drive: “ … the
compulsion to repeat expresses a desire for inanimate existence and ul-
timately for nonexistence: it is a desire to return to a time before the be-
ginning —t​ o go back not for the sake of regressing but in order to take
it over again, to do it otherwise. The desire for repetition is essentially
the desire for difference. This is why Lacan will underline the link be-
tween the death drive and sublimation. It is only the encounter with
death that clears the slate for a new beginning: every creation is an ex
nihilo creation” (Comay 2011: 148). Death is needed and desired, then,
in order to return, to repeat (but also remake) history. Moreover, exam-
ined from the point of view of psychology, happiness and melancholy
are not, strictly speaking, mutually exclusive. In keeping with Freud’s
theory, as Artemy Magun underscores, “there is, in both mourning
and melancholy, a manic, joyous phase, in which the individual cel-
ebrates his sovereign solitude, liberation from the object, both exter-
nal and internal” (Magun 2011: 51). What if the owl and angel have al-
ready moved into this manic phase, and take sovereign joy in their sol-
itude and freedom?
Finally, an anthropological explanation can also be found for the
enjoyment of the owl and the angel. They are not only simultaneous-
ly witnesses to and participants in the catastrophe (of the end of the
world and of missed opportunities), but are also those who survived
the catastrophe. They are the last birds. They fly over when all the oth-
er animals have already died. They are survivors, and survival, in the
words of Elias Canetti, “is a kind of pleasure” (Kanetti 1984: 230). A
central chapter of his book Crowds and Power is concerned with the
nature of this pleasure, compared to which “all grief is insignificant”
(Kanetti 1984: 227); Canetti describes survival as the “moment of pow-
er”: “Horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction that it is some-
one else who is dead. The dead man lies on the ground while the sur-
vivor stands” (Ibid.). The feeling of absolute power arises from this
exaltation over the dead, who can no longer stand in your path. It is
important that “whether the survivor is confronted by one dead man
or by many, the essence of the situation is that he feels unique. He sees
himself standing there alone and exults in it; and when we speak of
the power which this moment gives him, we should never forget that
it derives from his sense of uniqueness and from nothing else” (Ibid.).
The survivor “knows of many deaths”—he has seen his comrades and
his enemies, whom he risked his life with, fall. There is a pile of dead
men around the survivor. He, however, has managed to avoid death,

Oxana Timofeeva 129

and is therefore the “victor,” “favoured of the gods,” and a “hero” (Ka-
netti 1984: 227-8). From this perspective, grief and mourning for the
fallen appear to be rather a mask, a screen for that same manic hap-
piness of “sovereign solitude” and liberation to which the owl and the
angel are subject.
Enjoyment, happiness, and pleasure are not so much affects as a cer-
tain kind of ontological modes, not unlike Heideggerian horror. They
in fact immediately border on horror in certain conditions, or rath-
er, since the words “immediately border on” make no sense in the He-
gelian context (since any border is already a form of mediation), they
pass over into each other. If for Canetti horror at the feeling of immi-
nent death precedes the survivor’s triumphant joy, then for Hegel it ac-
companies the consciousness of absolute freedom. That is the politi-
cal condition discussed in the concluding part of the sixth chapter in
the Phenomenology of Spirit’s second section, “Absolute Freedom and
Terror.” In it, Hegel discusses the Enlightenment, which “will taste the
fruits of its deeds” (Hegel 1977: 354). The Enlightenment is followed by
revolution, which in turn is followed by terror. When there is no god,
and the previous form of rule and social stratum have been done away
with, the “undivided Substance of absolute freedom ascends the throne
of the world without any power being able to resist It” (Hegel 1977: 357).
In the experience of revolution, the “common sense” and “utility” with
which the Enlightenment linked itself suddenly devolve into the mad-
ness and potlach of terror.
The fruits of the Enlightenment that allow the spirit to open up for
itself the space of absolute freedom look like vegetables —​self-con-
sciousness suddenly sees before itself the guillotine and decapitated
heads piled up like cabbages: “The sole work and deed of universal free-
dom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or
filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self.
It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more signifi-
cance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of
water” (Hegel 1977: 360). As Comay writes in her commentary on this
passage, “Absolute freedom is terror. It is the infinite melancholia of a
self that knows no other” (Comay 2011: 68). The world of objects, de-
tached from self-consciousness and opposed to it, has lost the certain-
ty of its reality; the “independence of real being” has been transformed
into a “corpse” (Hegel 1977: 358). Spirit thus finds itself entrusted to its
own self, to its “sovereign solitude,” and now death as a free, but choice-
less reality frightens it: “the terror of death is the vision of this negative
nature of itself ” (Hegel 1977: 361). Such terror would appear to have
nothing in common with the philosophical owl’s enjoyment in recon-

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 ciliation as it flies at the end of time, and yet it gives birth to pleasure:
“so does absolute freedom leave its self-destroying reality and pass over
into another land of self-conscious Spirit where, in this unreal world,
freedom has the value of truth. In the thought of this truth spirit re-
freshes itself, in so far as it is and remains thought” (Hegel 1977: 363).
The “fury of destruction” that embodies negative freedom (359), like
the night owl, also has wings.10 Between terror and pleasure (the latter
attributed by Hegel to the birth of a new form of “moral spirit”) runs
this boundary, or rather transition. Sovereign freedom brings this tran-
sition into being, thereby revealing itself in its new, euphoric, manic
mode. To rejoice in the new, it was necessary to pass through its dev-
astating and catastrophic trial, encountering solitude and death them-
selves under the name of freedom. Freedom is necessity, that is, reali-
ty, that is, reason.
The encounter that takes place at this juncture between the “revo-
lutionary” Phenomenology of Spirit and the “reactionary” Philosophy
of Right, closing —​or opening (it amounts to the same) —t​ he Hegelian
system, once more convinces us of its irreproachable consistency. The
owl of Minerva pierces its way through from the end to the beginning
like the Benjaminian Angel who wishes to destroy destruction itself.
So what if this path is not accessible to people at all, but only to clawed,
winged creatures, since it goes through the abyss between reality and
freedom —t​ he abyss into which historical humanity irreversibly disap-
pears? Hovering or hanging over this abyss, revealing from a bird’s eye
view the picture of the apocalypse that has just occurred, is accompa-
nied by oscillations between depression and euphoria, terror and joy,
melancholy and happiness.
The problem, as I see it, lies in the fact that the amplitude of these os-
cillations develops, if anything, according to a psychotic scenario. The
situation of losing not simply the other, but the whole world, without
any hope of reassembling it, is a typical one for psychotics. As has al-
ready been noted, the survivor, the Spirit of revolution, the owl and the
angel find themselves in complete solitude at the critical moment. It is
precisely solitude, that is, the incommunicability of the experience of
knowledge, which gives that experience a psychotic quality. Solitude is
a crooked mirror, looking into whose reflection leads the viewer to mis-
take power for freedom (it is no accident than Canetti’s book ends with
a chapter on the paranoia of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber). Should not
the survival of a witness to the world catastrophe itself be witnessed by

10. The goddesses of vengeance, the Furies or Erinyes of Greco-Roman mythology,

are often depicted with snakes for hair, black canine snouts, or batwings.

Oxana Timofeeva 131

someone else, by others? Only then, when in the gap between thought
and the disappearing world there appears community, does the Hege-
lian “terror of death” transform into what Georges Bataille called “joy
in the face of death” (Bataille 1979).
According to Bataille, the practice of joy in the face of death can
only take place in a collective, shared fashion. The isolated individu-
al ceases to exist when it happens, as the boundaries of individuali-
ty break down: “Having got into the game with death, he has already
gone outside the limits of himself, into the glorious community who
laugh at the misery of their fellows and, with each moment driving
out and destroying his predecessor, he triumphs over time as it con-
tinues to reign over his neighbors … community is necessary to him
in order to feel the glory of that moment that tears him from existence.
The feeling of connection with those who have been chosen to unite
their great intoxication, is only a means of noticing that loss is glory
and victory, that the dead man’s end signifies renewed life, a flash of
light, an alleluia” (Bataille 1979). The triumph of the participant over
time “that reigns over his neighbors” resembles the negation of nega-
tion, rejoiced in by the owl, and the destruction of destruction where-
in the angel finds happiness. But to make the “fury of destruction” it-
self disappear, it seems an entire flock of owls and host of angels would
be required. Hegel is, in his own way, conscious of this problem and
designates the way out of it dialectically, through the formation of the
moral Spirit, or the State: thus that is how we arrive in the end at the
Philosophy of Right. Community, however, does not appear as a cen-
tral theme for philosophy until the twentieth century, in the wake of a
series of catastrophes that bring down entire States. What kind of in-
human community can take up the challenge of our still post-apoca-
lytic world? Let this difficult question lie at the foundation of further
investigations and communities, in which Hegel and his wise owl will
no doubt emerge once again as participants.

References
Agamben G. Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical
Redemption. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford,
Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 138–159.
Bataille G. La joie devant la mort. Le Collège de Sociologie (ed. D. Collier),
Paris, Gallimard, 1979, pp. 302–326.
Benjamin W. On the Concept of History. Marxists Internet Archive. Avail-
able at: http:// marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/his-
tory.htm.

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Benjamin W. Reflections, New York, Schocken Books, 1986.
Benjamin W. Selected Writings: 1938–1940, Cambridge, Harvard University
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Benjamin W. The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Harvard University Press,
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Benjamin W. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, New York, Verso,
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Buck-Morss S. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Pittsburgh, University
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Canetti E. Crowds and Power, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.
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Comay R. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, Stanford,
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D’Hondt J. Hegel: Biographie, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1998.
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marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm.
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Cambridge, MA, London, Harvard University Press, 2008.
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cho-Analysis, 1957.
Hegel G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
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Press, 2010.
Herder J. G. Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität. Bd. 2, Berlin, Aufbau-
Verlag, 1971.
Khatib S. R. Teleologie ohne Endzweck: Walter Benjamins Ent-stellung des
Messianischen, Marburg, Tectum Verlag, 2013.
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Press, 1980.
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meni [Unity and Solitude: A Course in Modern Political Philoso-
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Magun A. Negative Revolution: Modern Political Subject and its Fate After
the Cold War, New York, Bloomsbury, 2013.
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Marx K., Engels F. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marxists Internet
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Piatigorsky A. Who’s Afraid of Freemasons?: The Phenomenon of Freema-
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Kierkegaard, Fichte and the Subject
of Idealism

Michael O’Neill Burns

Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University of the
West of England. Address: Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane,
BS16 1QY Bristol, UK. E-mail: [email protected].
Keywords: Søren Kierkegaard; Johann Gottlieb Fichte; subjectivity;
German Idealism.
Abstract: While the philosophical and religious authorship of Søren
Kierkegaard is often said to be absolutely anti-systematic, and in
particular anti-idealist in its orientation, this essay argues that
Kierkegaar’s philosophical project can in fact be best interpreted
as offering a critical appropriation of the philosophy of German
Idealism. Through a reading of his text, Johannes Climacus, the
author shows that Kierkegaard is interested in exploring the exis-
tential stakes of the philosophy of German Idealism from the
perspective of the dynamic development of consciousness. Along
with this, he uses the work of J. G. Fichte to further show the
manner in which this concern with the life of the individual sub-
ject places Kierkegaard in continuity with one of the key figures
of German Idealism.
Along with a systematic reading which places Kierkegaard in
clear historical continuity with German Idealism, the paper con-
cludes by arguing that this idealist interpretation of Kierkegaard
not only places his thought more clearly in a nineteenth century
philosophical context, but equally that this reading can offer con-
ceptual support to contemporary theories of subjectivity. In par-
ticular, the author argues that only by rereading the work of
Kierkegaard via the conceptual framework of German Idealism
can we bring his thought to life in a way that makes it absolutely
crucial to contemporary philosophical debates on the nature of
subjectivity and the political.

135
I

W H E N we ask the question of what the legacy of the philosophy

of German Idealism will be in the twenty-first century, and in
particular when we inquire into what sort of ‘new life’ can be in-
jected into this nineteenth century tradition, one does not immediately
think of the religious authorship of nineteenth century Danish author
Søren Kierkegaard as a crucial resource for this task. To begin with, Ki-
erkegaard was not German or an idealist, and in many senses his lega-
cy is most strongly connected to his religious and existential rejection
of the totalizating metaphysical aims of the absolute idealism of Hegel.
This then leads to his being considered as a proto-existentialist critical
thinker with little concern for systematic accounts of the structure of
consciousness or formal ontology. Along with this, Kierkegaard is of-
ten thought to be necessarily theological in his orientation and subse-
quently outside the realm of those proposing to think the real of both
subject and reality in the terms of a systematic idealism.
This reading is problematic on (at least) two counts; first, a read-
ing that places Kierkegaard as in any way contra the systematic aims
of German Idealism (Fichte-Schelling-Hegel) misses the philosophi-
cal spirit of his authorship completely. Kierkegaard was not only deep-
ly indebted to the thought of the German idealists, but his own work
touches on many of the same systematic aims, only from a different
perspective. As Lore Hühn and Philipp Schwab have recently argued,
“it is precisely by means of his critical reaction against idealism that Ki-
erkegaard outlines the shape of his own philosophy.”1 While Kierkeg-

1. Lore Hühn and Philipp Schwab, “Kierkegaard and German Idealism,” in The Ox-
ford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 55.

136 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
aard is critical of many of the philosophical tendencies of German Ide-
alism, it is only through this critical appropriation that Kierkegaard de-
velops his own post-idealist systematic philosophy.
Some of this confusion regarding Kierkegaard’s relation to idealism
can be attributed to a difference in style. While Hegel aimed at a rigor-
ously systematic and logical exposition of his philosophical idealism as
it pertained to consciousness, logic, nature and the state, Kierkegaard
flirted with a number of different literary styles to outline his system-
atic thought. Rather than provide an objective (or, external) account of
an ideal ontological framework, he provides an account of ontological
structure via the perspective of the individual subject itself (or, an inter-
nal account). However, instead of putting him at odds with the literary
style of the German idealist, this emphasis on considering the stakes
of idealism through the eyes of the particular subject places Kierkeg-
aard in a tradition utilized by Fichte himself in his Vocation of Man, a
text that Kierkegaard was familiar with.2
In this sense, the divergence between Kierkegaard and German Ide-
alism is not a matter of great ontological or systematic difference, but
rather, a matter of perspective and literary style. Hegel (and to various
extents Schelling and Fichte) aimed to articulate the dynamics of the
absolute through an objective, or external, account (through an elab-
oration of either spirit or nature); Kierkegaard’s style shows the rela-
tionship between the individual subject and systematic thought from
the perspective of the becoming of the consciousness of the individu-
al philosophical subject. Whereas the conceptual structures at play re-
main largely the same, in Kierkegaard’s case we see the becoming of
the concept develop via the movements internal to the reflective ac-
tivity of the subject. In particular, as I will argue in this essay, Kierkeg-
aard preforms this sort of idealism in Johannes Climacus, an unfinished
text published posthumously.3 While stylistically this is one of Kierkeg-
aard’s most literary texts, when read in a similar fashion to texts such
as Fichte’s The Vocation of Man we can see it as an existential account
of the stakes of idealist philosophy from the perspective of the dynam-
ic development of subjective consciousness.
It should now be clear why a reading that attempts to place Kierkeg-
aard in opposition to the systematic aims of German idealist philoso-

2. For a detailed account of Kierkegaard’s relations to Fichte, and in particular his

reading of The Vocation of Man, see David Kangas, “J.G. Fichte: From Tran-
scendental Ego to Existence,” in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries,
ed. Jon Stewart (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009).
3. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, trans. How-
ard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

MICHAEL O'NEILL BURNS 137

phy holds little weight; however, the question of the theological basis
and aims of his thought still remains. Although I have argued for the
possibility of a non-theological interpretation of Kierkegaard at length
in another work,4 I will provide a concise summary of that argument
to set up the main argument of the present essay.
The first step of this is to note that many of the theological aspects
of Kierkegaard’s philosophical thought are merely posited as existen-
tial (or ethical) solutions to fundamental ontological (or philosophical)
problems. For example, even though faith can be considered in an ex-
plicitly theological fashion, it can equally be seen as an existential con-
cept showing the possibility of the individual subject to commit to ex-
istential projects without any underlying ontological certainty. Follow-
ing this reading one can still give weight to these theological solutions,
but they do not prove any sort of retroactive theological necessity in
terms of the philosophical problems outlined by Kierkegaard (contin-
gency, uncertainty, despair, anxiety, etc.).
Along with this, it is worth noting that Kierkegaard never provides
any clearly theological content in his pseudonymous authorship.5 The
religious is a general existential structure without any particular sys-
tematic content. This has led to readings in which traditional Lutherans,
contemporary Catholics, and fanatic evangelicals can all claim Kierkeg-
aard’s thought as their own. While this tendency can lead to a varie-
ty of theological readings of the existential-religious solutions provid-
ed by Kierkegaard, it is clear that these are merely religious solutions
to many of the problems left in the wake of the systematic ontology of
German idealist philosophy.
To counter this tendency to read Kierkegaard as either necessarily
theological and/or absolutely opposed to the philosophical project of
German Idealism, this essay will argue that Kierkegaard’s thought de-
velops via a critical repetition of the key philosophical ideas of Ger-
man Idealism. However, Kierkegaard differs from traditional idealism
by placing a focus on the ontology of the actuality of lived human life,
rather than a strictly conceptual account of life in a more formal sense.
Reading Kierkegaard alongside the idealist anthropology of Fichte will
highlight this emphasis on the ontology of lived activity. This histori-
cal reading of Kierkegaard against the backdrop of German Idealism

4. Michael O’Neill Burns, Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured

Dialectic (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
5. For more on this see Jon Stewart, Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nine-
teenth and Twentieth Century European Philosophy (London: Continuum,
2010).

138 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
also bears relevance to contemporary debates in continental philoso-
phy, specifically those aiming to utilize the theoretical resources of Ger-
man Idealism to contribute to contemporary political philosophy and
theory. Following this, the essay will conclude by arguing that this ide-
alist informed reading of Kierkegaard opens up the path to consider the
life of the subject in a materialist and political context.

II
Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus (hereafter JC) is an unfinished work
not published during his lifetime that manages to be both one of his
most literary texts while conceptually being one of his most purely phil-
osophical. In JC Kierkegaard offers a narrative account of a young man,
Johannes, who has an encounter of sorts with philosophy and subse-
quently falls in love with thought, and in particular, the process (or act)
of thinking. This amorous relationship with thought leads him to an
obsession with the foundational moment, or beginning, of the process
of philosophical thinking. For Johannes this creates a tension between
ideality and actuality, as this obsession with fully comprehending the
absolute leads him to abandon any concern with the seeming incon-
sistencies of nature and actuality. In the terms of German Idealism, Jo-
hannes becomes completely enamored with the possibility of absolute-
ly knowing the ideal structure that exists beyond the mere appearances
of actuality, and thus “ideality became his actuality.”6 While Johannes
is certain that the end of philosophical speculation is this form of ab-
solute knowing (which in many ways is a parody of the Danish Hegeli-
ans) in which ‘the rational is the actual’, he struggles to fully account for
the originary grounds of this form of speculation. To attempt to think
in a retroactive fashion towards these grounds, he begins an investiga-
tion of the foundations of modern philosophy, which for him can be
captured in the statement: philosophy begins in doubt.7
It is worth mentioning at this point that much of Kierkegaard’s cri-
tique of German idealist philosophy has to do with what he consid-
ers to be an ironic use of the concept of actuality, and in JC we see
him exemplify this issue through the particular anxieties of the indi-
vidual philosophical subject, Johannes. For Kierkegaard, the issue be-
comes apparent when the idealist philosopher conflates conceptual ac-
tuality with existential actuality, and subsequently thinks that concep-
tual thought is capable of consistently comprehending pre-conceptual

6. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, 124.

7. Ibid., 132.

MICHAEL O'NEILL BURNS 139

existential reality. In this model there is a consistent relation between
thought and being, or ideality and actuality. For Kierkegaard this mis-
use (which he identifies in the Danish Hegelians) leads the individual
philosopher to believe that conceptual thought (which has to do with
the internal consistency of concepts) can allow a person to comprehend
the whole of reality (and their own existential activity).
This leads to a consideration of the role of doubt as the founda-
tional moment of the act of philosophical speculation, and in particu-
lar, a consideration of what makes the act of doubt possible in the first
place. Johannes begins by considering what ‘the philosophers’ have said
about the possibility of beginnings, stating that there are three possi-
bilities: absolute beginning, objective beginning, and subjective begin-
ning.8 The absolute beginning is equated with absolute spirit (the ab-
solute concept), objective beginning is absolutely indeterminate being
(nature), and subjective beginning is consciousness (reflection).
After a consideration of each of these options, which each equate to
a particular concept of German idealist philosophy, Johannes remains
in despair as he concludes that none of these accounts of philosophi-
cal beginnings can offer the space for doubt. For an absolute beginning,
doubt is impossible since absolute spirit is wholly consistent with abso-
lute structure, and there is no space or tension from which any form of
doubt could emerge. An objective beginning, which is ‘absolutely in-
determinate being’, can be thought of as pre-reflective nature, before
the emergence of mind, i.e., before there can be any contradiction be-
tween the process of nature and the act of mind by which doubt could
occur. Finally, Johannes equates subjective beginning with the sort of
self-positing account of consciousness by which the subject is self-pro-
duced, and once again, there is no space (or difference) within which
the subject would have room for doubt.
Once he works through the inadequate accounts of the philosophers
regarding the possibility of doubt, Johannes asks, “by what act can the
individual begin” (to philosophize)?9 Put otherwise, he wants to know
what needs to occur to make doubt possible, as the philosophers have
convinced Johannes that philosophy begins in doubt, and if doubt is
not possible for the individual, than philosophy becomes impossible.
In particular, Johannes asks whether doubt is something that individ-
uals are capable of producing on their own, or must something exter-
nal take place to make this possible?

8. Ibid.,149.
9. Ibid., 150-151.

140 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 This line of inquiry leads Johannes to the realization of the inade-
quacy of his attempts to begin the act of philosophy (doubt) as his own
grounds, i.e., as a completely consistent and self-identical subject. Rath-
er than the act of philosophy being something immediately possible to
consciousness as such, he realizes that for philosophy to be possible for
the individual, an ordeal is required, something which exists absolute-
ly outside of the consistent activity of self-consciousness. This ordeal
is what creates the conditions that make doubt, and thus philosophy,
possible. In systematic terms, this ordeal is a moment of contradiction
by which a space of rupture emerges between the seeming consistency
of the self and reality, and in this space doubt comes to be possible. In
more properly ontological terms we could say that this ordeal is a mo-
ment in which there is an abyss between the self and its grounds, and
this disjunction creates the conditions for doubt.
One could here think of the ordeal as that which breaks the seem-
ing consistency of a dialectical process by which thought and being
are neatly synthesized into a consistent conceptual structure with-
out remainder, a reading often ascribed to the systematic aims of Ger-
man idealist philosophy. While in this version of the project of ideal-
ism, thought (and being) begin and end with a moment of consistency,
through this emphasis on subjective experience Kierkegaard is outlin-
ing a model by which philosophy begins and ends (or more precisely,
fails to ever properly end) with ordeal, and inconsistency. Consistency
in the purely conceptual realm is not problematic for Kierkegaard, it
is the notion that this consistency bleeds into our conception of reality
as such which is the enemy; and this false notion of consistency leaves
the philosophical subject in a place of ironic conflation.
At this point Johannes is able to push the previously offered account
of the genesis of the philosophical act even further; rather than being
satisfied with ‘philosophy begins in doubt’, he now realizes that before
this is possible, “philosophy requires an ordeal.”10 Whereas the first def-
inition (philosophy begins in doubt) assumes only the autonomous act
of the singular philosophical subject in her own act of doubt, this up-
dated understanding (philosophy requires an ordeal) now presuppos-
es that something external to the act of the thinking subject must oc-
cur to create the very conditions by which actual philosophical specu-
lation, and doubt, is possible in the first place.
While this will be discussed in more detail in the present essay, we
can already begin to see how Kierkegaard’s internal critique of the sub-
ject of idealism shares an affinity with that of J.G. Fichte. As Fichte

10. Ibid., 158.

MICHAEL O'NEILL BURNS 141

himself wrote in 1804, “life has become merely historical and symbol-
ic while real living is scarcely ever found.”11 For Fichte, a certain strand
of idealism has mistakenly turned life (and in particular, the life of the
individual subject) into an historical and symbolic concept at the ex-
pense of accounting for the actual life (and living) of the individual
philosophical subject. In both cases, it is clear that this critique is not
against the structure of idealist philosophy as such, but rather, against
the conflation of the conceptual consistency of idealist thought with
the inconsistent experience of actual existence. I will return to a fur-
ther discussion of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Fichte lat-
er in this essay.
Kierkegaard’s analysis (via the narrative account of Johannes) has
remained largely existential up until this point, but he makes a transi-
tion to considering the ontological conditions that make this existen-
tial situation possible, and this is where we can most clearly see Ki-
erkegaard’s critical re-articulation of the German idealist project. Jo-
hannes asks, “What must the nature of existence be in order for doubt
to be possible?”12 Put otherwise, he is inquiring into the ontological
conditions for the existential possibility of doubt, or, the difference be-
tween the possibility of and the production of doubt.13 As Johannes con-
siders it, this possibility must be essential for human consciousness to
emerge. Through this line of questioning, Kierkegaard is implicitly cri-
tiquing German Idealism insomuch as these philosophies run the risk
of skipping ahead to assuming that human consciousness is immedi-
ately able to do philosophy in terms of conceptually comprehending
the absolute in thought. Johannes is here realizing that this moment of
doubt must precede the constitution of speculative consciousness. He
then outlines this through an exposition of Johannes’ own journey to/
through consciousness.
Johannes begins by considering the first state of consciousness,
which he refers to as ‘immediate consciousness’, which is indetermi-

11. J.G. Fichte, The Science of Knowing, trans. Walter E. Wright (Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 2005), 21.
12. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, 166.
13. It is worth noting that this distinction, between the ontological and the existen-
tial, is one of the key issues that has kept Kierkegaard’s work from being con-
sidered as a resource in the contemporary revival of interest in German ide-
alist philosophy. When one simply stops at the existential, Kierkegaard con-
tinues to be considered in an anti-idealist (and even an anti-philosophical)
fashion. However, once we aim at uncovering the ontological conditions that
make these existential concepts possible, we see that Kierkegaard is always-al-
ready engaged in the process of critically building upon the systematic ontol-
ogy of German idealist philosophy.

142 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
nate and has no relation.14 Here we can think of consciousness as some-
thing like an immediate comprehension of its nature with nothing ex-
ternal that would constitute the possibility of relation. This form of con-
sciousness simply is what it is, with no gaps between subject and object,
or, internal and external reality.
The emergence of the possibility of relation is what leads to the
cancelation of this immediacy, and a relation is made possible when
consciousness is brought into relationship with something wholly ex-
ternal to itself. At this point, according to Kierkegaard, untruth be-
comes possible, as the possibility of relation has cancelled immedia-
cy, or, subject and object are no longer in a consistent relation to one
another.
As he goes on to explain, immediacy is reality itself, and mediacy
is the word which is able to cancel immediacy by presupposing it. We
can think here of the difference between immediate existence and the
space created when this immediate nature is conceptualized via lan-
guage, since language creates a difference between the thing and its
conceptualization. (We here see the difference between the conceptu-
al and the existential-actual.) So, when immediacy moves to a state of
conceptualization (in language), there is no longer any immediate re-
lationship to reality by the self, as everything is now mediated through
conceptual language, and relation is made possible by this space. When
immediacy moves to the act of conceptualization, there is no longer
any immediate relation to reality, given that everything is now known
through the mediation of conceptual language.
Immediacy thus equates to reality-in-itself, and language to ideali-
ty. Consciousness is subsequently neither reality nor ideality, but rather,
the possibility of the contradiction, and subsequent relation, between
the two. Consciousness is only made possible through a contradiction
between reality and ideality, as consciousness is the very possibility of
a relation between ideality and reality, since in reality itself there is no
space for doubt. Using this discussion of Johannes’ journey to con-
sciousness, Kierkegaard places emphasis on the fact that it is always a
particular subject that brings ideality into relation with reality for her-
self. Without mutual contact, consciousness exists only according to
its possibility.
It is therefore precisely the act of the individual subject which both
splits reality and ideality through the conceptual abstraction of lan-
guage, and then subsequently is able to bring these two aspects (real-
ity-ideality) into relation with one another through the dialectical ac-

14. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, 167.

MICHAEL O'NEILL BURNS 143

tivity of consciousness. For Kierkegaard, then, the condition of actu-
al existence (and not merely conceptual actuality) is collision, and in
particular, the collision between ideality and reality that takes place in
consciousness. Because Kierkegaard’s concern here is with placing em-
phasis on the particular subject of idealism, he notes that this collision
must necessarily involve an ‘I’, and does not merely take place by itself.
This then leads to a discussion of the crucial difference between con-
sciousness and reflection, a difference that further makes sense of Ki-
erkegaard’s critique of certain aspects of German idealist philosophy.15
For Kierkegaard, many idealist philosophies mistake reflection, which
is an act of abstract thought, for consciousness, which has to do with
appropriation and activity. In other words, the split between reflection
and consciousness could be seen as the difference between abstraction
and activity, with Kierkegaard falling on the side of the later and ideal-
ism too often stopping at the former.
Kierkegaard outlines this distinction by placing emphasis on the di-
alectical nature of his own conceptual structure. According to Johannes,
reflection’s categories are dichotomous, i.e., ideality-reality. In reflection
these categories touch each other in such a way that relation becomes
possible, but as long as one stays in reflection these relations are only
possible and not actual. In this manner reflection creates the conditions
for a relation, but does not actively force the relation, since there is al-
ways a gap between these dichotomous categories, i.e., there is no third
which could offer the possibility of an indirect relation between them.
Rather than the dichotomous categories of reflection, consciousness’
categories are trichotomous, and are demonstrated by language. As Ki-
erkegaard states, “consciousness is mind,”16 and when one is divided in
the world of mind there are three, never two. He is here arguing that
mind is what separates the two categories (ideality-reality) via language.
Instead of serving as an alternative to reflection, consciousness presup-
poses it, which is what can allow us to adequately understand both the
ontological conditions and the existential activity of doubt, given that
doubt is possible because of the possibility of relation offered by this
third category (mind) which is able to facilitate a collision between ide-
ality and reality. Doubt is then the sign that consciousness is in fact pos-
sible, since the act of doubt presupposes the possibility of conscious-
ness created through reflection.
Another way to understand the distinction between reflection and
consciousness is through an emphasis on the importance of the inter-

15. Ibid., 160.

16. Ibid., 169.

144 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
est of the subject. Reflection, while providing the possibility of a re-
lation between reality and ideality, remains disinterested. Conscious-
ness, as a relation, is interested. This interest (interesse) is equivalent
to a “being between.”17 While a pure reflection can be observed pos-
itively as a form of purely objective thinking, Kierkegaard considers
doubt to be of a higher form, as it prepossess objective thought but
also has a third, which is the interest of consciousness. To relate back
to the previously quoted passage from Fichte, reflection may under-
stand life in a symbolic and historical sense, but only the interest of
consciousness is concerned with the actual living of individual sub-
jects. Accordingly, consciousness (as interest) creates the conditions
for an actual (and active) subject, and with this breaks the myth that
the subject can be wholly reflective and objective in its activity. Inter-
est is necessary to move from the passivity of reflection to the activi-
ty of consciousness.
According to Kierkegaard, the subject must have a genuine inter-
est in reality if she is going to move beyond a simply objective and sys-
tematic knowledge and towards an active and interested existence. Sys-
tematic knowledge fails to relate to life insomuch as it is disinterested,
whereas doubt is based on interest. Because doubt is based on an actu-
al interest, it is the beginning of the highest form of existence, and not
merely the beginning of systematic thinking.18
In the terms of systematic ontology, while reflection presupposes a
sort of objectivity and stability on both sides of its activity, conscious-
ness emerges through and presupposes collision and contradiction.
Kierkegaard can here be read as inverting the traditional notion that
idealism begins and ends with completion (or, totality), as for him, a
contradiction and collision reside on both sides of a seemingly imme-
diate, or complete, form of consciousness. This construction of con-
sciousness is in opposition to an idealist form of reflection and leads
to a particular set of implications for the lived existence of the philo-
sophical subject, and one of the keys to understanding these implica-
tions is Kierkegaard’s well-known category of repetition.19 In particu-
lar, following this line of thought we can see how this understanding
of consciousness provides the ontological conditions for repetition as
existential activity.

17. Ibid., 170.

18. Ibid., 170.
19. For his most famous employment of this concept see Søren Kierkegaard, Repe-
tition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1983).

MICHAEL O'NEILL BURNS 145

 To begin with, Kierkegaard notes that whenever the question of rep-
etition arises, there must be a collision present, as in reality as such
there is no repetition —​reality only is in the moment.20 There is no
repetition in ideality either, but when ideality and reality touch, rep-
etition is made possible. At the level of consciousness, repetition can
be understood through the concept of redoubling, by which the mo-
ment of actuality emerging through the collision of reality-ideality re-
doubles within consciousness.21 Rather than being an external act di-
vorced from the activity of consciousness, this collision between real-
ity and ideality takes place within consciousness itself, and in this way
consciousness has a disjunctive role more so than it does a synthetic
one, and in fact, this disjunction is the necessary pre-condition for any
attempt at a synthetic act. The only possible synthesis is the synthet-
ic act by which ideality and reality are momentarily held together —​a
purely subjective act, which never has the reflective effect of bringing
thinking and reality into a completely consistent relationship. Consist-
ency is only in this brief moment which facilitates the necessary act of
repetition that follows.
Because consciousness has the structure of a fractured dialectic, rep-
etition is the manner by which this fracture is momentarily bridged
only to return back to a state of fracture. Through repetition conscious-
ness is paradoxically involved in recuperative acts which are marked by
a further disjunction, as the dialectical interaction between the real and
language, neither of which is a necessarily consistent category, means
that the dialectic is always moving both ways, and it is not the case that
it is only the work of language, and the language of logic in particular,
to fully conceptually comprehend reality. The conceptual importance
of this repetition has recently been explained as such:
The form and manner of this repetition can consequently be charac-
terized as an operation that both maintains and renews the tension of
the relation to this originary event, a tension generated by the unsub-
latable and ultimately unfathomable difference between what brings
the repetition and what is repeated.22

This passage highlights the manner by which repetition serves as a

category explaining the possibility of the philosophical subject’s ex-
istence against the backdrop of an inconsistent and disjointed reality.
While Kierkegaard’s antagonism to the philosophy of Hegel is much

20. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, 170.

21. Ibid., 171.
22. Hühn and Schwab, “Kierkegaard and German Idealism,” 79.

146 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
more nuanced than it is often presented, and much of Kierkegaard’s
systematic style is completely Hegelian in form, we can here see one
of the biggest points of distinction between Kierkegaard and Hegel.
For Kierkegaard, any emphasis on a conceptual completion that exists
in the realm of pure thought serves the purpose of undermining the
particular activity of lived subjectivity, and this activity is only possi-
ble through the primacy of an originary incompletion and subsequent
collision, rather than a final sublation. This is what leads to an empha-
sis on the practical dimensions of human existence, and as Hühn and
Schwab have argued:
In making this objection to Hegel’s system, however, Kierkegaard
comes into proximity to the late philosophy of Fichte, who, in pre-
cisely the opposite way, makes the pratical-ethical dimension of hu-
man self-affirmation the center of his thought.23

As we see, this reading of Kierkegaard as in opposition to a tradition-

al reading of Hegel does not place him at absolute odds with idealism,
but rather, allows us to consider his relevance to idealism through the
emphasis on self-affirmation his shares with Fichte.24 To once again
quote Hüln and Schwab:
Kierkegaard may have sought critically to portray the aesthetic life as
a perverted form of a life that should be otherwise constituted, but
Fichte should rightfully be acknowledged as having decisively antic-
ipated this basic motif of Kierkegaard’s thought.25

III
While Kierkegaard is most often considered in historical relation to
(and his reaction against) the work of Hegel and to a lesser extent
Schelling, for the purpose of the present argument I find it most useful
to (briefly) consider this project in relation to the work of Fichte. The
intellectual continuity between Kierkegaard and Fichte has received
little attention in the recent literature (likely due to Kierkegaard’s own
brief, and dismissive, interaction with his work), and while at first the
systematic aims of Fichte’s philosophy can seem at odds with Kierkeg-

23. Ibid., 80.

24. It must be noted, however, that the reading that places Kierkegaard in oppo-
sition to Hegel rests upon a traditional reading of Hegel’s dialectic, in which
there is a moment of final synthesis in absolute knowing.
25. Hühn and Schwab, “Kierkegaard and German Idealism,” 80.

MICHAEL O'NEILL BURNS 147

aard’s seeming assault on the scientific aspirations of German Ideal-
ism, when we set these characterizations aside we see that Kierkegaard
and Fichte were engaged in extremely similar projects, and in particu-
lar shared extremely similar practical aims.
I have previously shown that Kierkegaard’s critique of idealism was
not a critique of systematic philosophy as such, but rather, a critique of
the lack of subjective appropriation on the part of the individual sub-
ject engaged in the activity of philosophical speculation. Rather than
offering a full-scale critique, Kierkegaard is instead critiquing the idea
that the individual subject is ever capable of occupying the perspective
of the absolute idea. This equates to a serious consideration of the how
of idealist speculation and not just the what which is the absolute ob-
ject of this speculation. Kierkegaard’s concern is with giving both an
existential and systematic account of the subject of idealism, which is
capable of supplementing a non-subjective account of the object of ide-
alist speculation.
Fichte is crucial on this point since he levels the same critique of the
tendencies of idealist philosophy in a work that bears much stylistic re-
semblance to Kierkegaard’s own authorship, The Vocation of Man. In
this work Fichte provides a narrative analysis of three forms of philo-
sophical (and existential) activity: Doubt (associated with a sort of Spi-
nozist determinism), Knowledge (associated with Kantian transcen-
dentalism), and finally Faith (associated with Fichte’s own brand of ide-
alism). While the very mention of the place of faith as an alternative
to either absolute doubt or absolute knowledge (which each produce
their own form of despair), can bring to mind a clear connection with
Kierkegaard’s own emphasis on faith as a response to the despair in-
duced by idealist speculation,26 the English translator of The Vocation
of Man is quick to dismiss this comparison:
The use of the word “faith” should not suggest a kind of Kierkeg-
aardian collapse into orthodox religion. Rather, faith indicates a free
(i.e., theoretically unjustifiable) act of mind by which the condi-
tions within which we can act and use our intellects first come to
be for us.27

Fortunately for the present argument, this dismissal of the connection

between Kierkegaard and Fichte rests upon deeply shaky, if not com-

26. On this point see Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
27. J.G. Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1987), “Editor’s Introduction,” xi.

148 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
pletely non-existent, grounds. First, it completely misses the systematic
role of faith within Kierkegaard’s account of the constitution of human
subjectivity, which is never a collapse into orthodox religion. Second,
this wildly reductive reading of Kierkegaard derails any possible pro-
ductive encounter between Fichte and Kierkegaard. Most important-
ly for the purposes of this essay, in The Vocation of Man we see Fichte
place emphasis on the distinction between knowledge and activity, a
problem that both he and Kierkegaard see in idealist philosophy. As
Fichte states, “your vocation is not merely to know, but to act accord-
ing to your knowledge”28 —a​ similar distinction to the one Kierkegaard
noted between reflection (which is concerned with knowing) and con-
sciousness (by which one acts in response to knowledge). For Fichte,
this emphasis on action is not to be read as some sort of supplement
to the primary purpose of human subjectivity in knowing, as he states
clearly, “you exist for activity.”29
We can here see a structural similarity to the role of repetition in Ki-
erkegaard, a concept signifying an existential response to the truth of
various forms of knowledge, when Fichte states that, “faith is no knowl-
edge, but a decision of the will to recognize the validity of knowledge.”30
We could equally say that for Kierkegaard repetition is the act by which
the subject recognizes the validity of various forms of knowledge and
subsequently repeats this form and its set of implications in an exis-
tential fashion.
While this brief discussion of Fichte’s Vocation of Man provides a
sort of existential insight into the role of faith in practical philosophy,
and in particular, the manner by which faith is a way out of the dead
end of the subjective despair produced by determinism and skepticism,
we can glean a more conceptual picture of this form of idealist subjec-
tivity through Fichte’s 1804 presentation of his systematic project, The
Science of Knowing. One of the main arguments of Fichte in that work
is that idealism cannot merely be presented in an objective fashion, but
rather, must be appropriated by the individual who hopes to under-
stand the conceptual structure of the idea. Among other things, Fichte
is concerned with drawing a distinction between life as an intellectu-
al concept, and living as the activity of the particular subject, as he ar-
gues, “life has become merely historical and symbolic, while real living
is scarcely found.”31 The point is to not confuse understanding a sys-

28. Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 67.

29. Ibid., 68.
30. Ibid., 71.
31. Fichte, The Science of Knowing, 21.

MICHAEL O'NEILL BURNS 149

 tem of philosophy with actual living, and thus not merely to grasp the
system of philosophy, but instead to “undertake this thought process
again for oneself.”32
For Fichte, each individual has to “fulfill these terms [of the true] in
himself, applying his living spirit to it with all his might, and then the
insight will happen of itself without any further ado.”33 There is a sub-
jective element, and active involvement, that plays a part in any sort of
actual philosophical knowing. Here we can see a similar point to the
one expressed so forcefully in JC, namely, that any idealism that forgets
the importance of appropriation of the truth by the individual subject
necessarily becomes ironic and fails to account for the importance of
individual subjective activity. Of course it is crucial to note that this in
no way implies that each of us has our own version of the absolute, but
rather that we each necessitate an individual experience of this abso-
lute, and that there must be an inward appropriation if we are to move
beyond a merely symbolic and historical existence and towards real
life. In more conceptual terms Fichte states that there must be a “uni-
versally applicable distinction between the mere concept and the real.”34
For Fichte this is a distinction between apprehending and appropria-
tion, according to which merely apprehending is history, and appro-
priation is living.35
Here we once again find the emphasis placed on the gap between
an abstract concept and its real. It is important to note, however, that
I am not attempting to fully align the systematic aims of Fichte and
Kierkegaard, as there still remains a crucial difference at the level of
the ontological, or put differently, while they both argue for a similar
conception of the relationship between the individual subject and the
absolute, they do not conceive of the absolute in the same way. For
Fichte the absolute still caries a largely monistic character, as he states,
“…absolute oneness is what is true and in itself unchangeable, its op-
posite purely contained within itself.”36 For Kierkegaard, on the oth-
er hand, there is no absolute oneness, and the absolute itself is charac-
terized by a primordial fracture, or as a lack of access to primary on-
tological grounds. To stay within the realm of German Idealism, we
could say that while Kierkegaard and Fichte are aligned in the em-
phasis they each place on the act of subjective appropriation, Kierkeg-

32. Ibid., 21.

33. Ibid., 22.
34. Ibid., 23.
35. Ibid., 24.
36. Ibid., 24.

150 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
aard’s conception of the absolute is significantly more aligned with the
work of Schelling.37

IV
At this point we could rightly pose the question of whether or not this
Kierkegaardian conception of the relationship between idealism and
subjectivity has anything to offer either the relevance of German Ide-
alism or the relevance of Søren Kierkegaard’s thought for contempo-
rary philosophical debates.
The first thing this reading offers is a sort of idealism with what we
could call an open, or even broken, structure. Rather than positing an
initial and final moment of absolute synthesis, this structure grounds
the emergence of thought in an ordeal that must first take place. This
open sort of idealist dialectic does not, then, reject Hegelian philoso-
phy, but rather re-figures it in such a way as to account for the necessi-
ty of each particular philosophical subject engaging in the act of doubt,
and thought, for themselves. As a result, Kierkegaard’s post-idealism
provides an account that maps out the conditions for subjective activi-
ty, and not merely the structural conditions of thought. In this way ide-
alism is less about ideal systematic structures as such, and more about
the manner by which this ideal structure creates the conditions for the
thought and activity of the individual philosophical subject. Finally,
this emphasis on activity leads to certain socio-political consequences,
and in other words, lets us see a Kierkegaard of action, and not just the
Kierkegaard of isolated religious despair. This is especially relevant as
much contemporary European philosophy, and in particular those at-
tempting to build upon the legacy of German Idealism, has been deep-
ly concerned with the relationship between subjectivity and the polit-
ical.38 Through this reading we see how a political philosophy which
falls into the traps of a wholly internal idealism (i.e., one in which all
that matters is intellectually understanding objective political concepts)
lacks the ability to ground political activity and subjectivity.
One could here think of the work of contemporary figures like Alain
Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, who rely on readings of both Kierkegaard and
German Idealism in their major theoretical works, and who build upon

37. For one of the most detailed accounts of Kierkegaard’s ontological relation to
the work of Schelling see Alison Assiter, Kierkegaard, Eve and Metaphors of
Birth (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
38. We can here mention the work of Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Catherine Mala-
bou, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

MICHAEL O'NEILL BURNS 151

these figures to theorize the manner in which contemporary political
thought depends on a form of subjectivity grounded in the necessity of
activity. In this way, we could even venture to say that figures such as
Badiou and Žižek are involved in furthering the project of a post-ide-
alist philosophy of the subject already outlined by Kierkegaard in nine-
teenth century Denmark.
Along with the political ontologies and theories of subjectivity at
play in figures such as Badiou and Žižek, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on
consciousness as the result of contradiction has recently been artic-
ulated (or even, redoubled) in the materialist philosophy of Cathe-
rine Malabou, for whom, “a reasonable materialism … would posit
that the natural contradicts itself and that thought is the fruit of this
contradiction.”39 As we have already seen, Kierkegaard grounds the ca-
pacity for human thought in a collision, or contradiction, between re-
ality and ideality, and argues that the possibility of philosophical spec-
ulation (and activity) in the individual subject is the product of this
contradiction. Following this, we can note that contemporary Europe-
an materialist philosophy does not render Kierkegaard’s theory of ide-
alist subjectivity antiquated, but rather, shows that we can now pro-
vide a material basis for this internal contradiction which produces a
more-than-material form of subjectivity. This also helps solve some of
the lingering theological problems of Kierkegaard’s authorship, as the
primordial contradiction that Kierkegaard could only think in spiritu-
al or romantic terms40 can be accounted for in material, and even neu-
robiological, terms. This contemporary re-consideration of Kierkeg-
aard’s creative repetition of German Idealism can further reinforce the
bridge between nineteenth century idealist philosophy and the concep-
tions of subjectivity and ontology at play in twenty-first century mate-
rialist philosophy.
To approach a conclusion I would like to offer a quotation from
Lars Iyer’s recent novel, Exodus, a story involving two British philoso-
phy lecturers attempting to reckon with the consequences of thought
for a country being ravaged by the effects of contemporary capitalism.
One of the themes of this novel is the two main characters’ attempt to
write on Kierkegaard and the political, and much of the stakes aimed
at by these characters are similar to those of the present essay, mainly,
what does an idealist such as Kierkegaard have to offer to contempo-

39. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 82.
40. See Søren Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

152 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
rary philosophical debates? The character W. puts this in terms so sim-
ilar to the ethos of the present essay that it is worth quoting at length:
W. snaps shut the copy of Josiah Thompson’s Kierkegaard that he
found on the library shelves. We should shun Kierkegaard schol-
arship, he says, Kierkegaard scholarship can only make us afraid to
do what we must do: remake Kierkegaard in our image. We must be
free to dream, as he has dreamt, of a Kierkegaard who was happily
married to Regine, W. says. Of a Kierkegaard who understood that
the religious sphere is no higher than the ethical one, and that love
for God is really love for the other person. Hasn’t W. dreamt of a Ki-
erkegaard who never believed that Jesus was really the Messiah, or
that messianism could never be understood in terms of the coming
of a particular person? Of a Kierkegaard who had faith only in the
messianic epoch?
His Kierkegaard is turned to the world, W. says. To politics! His is
a Kierkegaard of the barricades, whose despair has caught fire, whose
inwardness has become outwardness, whose religious faith has be-
come ethical faith, has become political faith.41

It is my contention that this Kierkegaard, the one of ethical and po-

litical faith, must become our Kierkegaard. And that to get to this Ki-
erkegaard, we must risk what many Kierkegaard scholars would find
utterly paradoxical, and first reconsider Kierkegaard as an idealist fig-
ure concerned with a repetition of the structure of German idealist
philosophy from a perspective of the individual subject. This ideal-
ist interpretation of Kierkegaard helps us circumvent the reading by
which Kierkegaard’s authorship is one of the crucial moments of anti-
idealist philosophy that paved the way for existentialism, phenome-
nology, and quasi-mystical philosophies of religion. Rather, I am offer-
ing an interpretation that places Kierkegaard in the line of the creative
post-idealist thinkers dealing with the implications of German ideal-
ist philosophy for issues of politics, human praxis, and materialism.
Rather than being considered as a nineteenth century ally to twentieth
century French existentialism (of both the Catholic and atheist varie-
ties), this makes Kierkegaard a fellow traveler of Marx and the young
Hegelians. While this is obviously important for reasons of histori-
cal context, this reading also bears direct consequences on contempo-
rary philosophy as this circumvention also makes it possible to draw
a logical line of connection between Kierkegaard’s critical appropri-
ation of German idealist philosophy and contemporary post-idealist
philosophical tendencies, such as dialectical materialism, materialist

41. Lars Iyer, Exodus (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2013), 157.

MICHAEL O'NEILL BURNS 153

dialectics, and transcendental materialism. In this way, Kierkegaard’s
critical appropriation still has much to offer to the continuing life of
German Idealism.

References
Assiter A. Kierkegaard, Eve and Metaphors of Birth, Lanham, MD, Rowman
& Littlefield, 2015.
Burns M. O. Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured Dialec-
tic, London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Fichte J. G. The Science of Knowing, Albany, NY, State University of New
York Press, 2005.
Fichte J. G. The Vocation of Man, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1987.
Hühn L., Schwab P. Kierkegaard and German Idealism. The Oxford Hand-
book of Kierkegaard (eds J. Lippitt, G. Pattison), Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2013, pp. 54–85.
Iyer L. Exodus, Brooklyn, NY, Melville House, 2013.
Kangas D. J. G. Fichte: From Transcendental Ego to Existence. Kierkegaard
and His German Contemporaries. Tome I: Philosophy (ed. J. Stewart),
Aldershot, Ashgate, 2009, pp. 49–66.
Kierkegaard S. Concept of Anxiety, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University
Press, 1980.
Kierkegaard S. Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, Princeton,
NJ, Princeton University Press, 1985.
Kierkegaard S. Repetition, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983.
Kierkegaard S. The Sickness Unto Death, Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1980.
Malabou C. What Should We Do with Our Brain?, New York, Fordham
University Press, 2008.
Preuss P. Editor’s Introduction. In: Fichte J. G. The Vocation of Man, Indi-
anapolis, Hackett, 1987, pp. vii–xiii.
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Debordian Strategists: Agamben
and Virno on the Coming Politics

Dave Mesing
PhD Candidate, Philosophy Department, Villanova Univer-
sity. Address: 800 E. Lancaster Ave., 19085 Villanova, PA, USA.
E-mail: [email protected].
Keywords: Guy Debord; Giorgio Agamben; Paolo Virno; language; politics;
life; post-operaismo.
Abstract: This paper considers Agamben’s political project as it develops
in response to Guy Debord. By tracing the historical context of
Agamben’s initial engagement with Debord during the summer of
1968, I argue for a reading of The Coming Community as at one
and the same time the opening of Agamben’s explicit political
project and as part of a specific theoretical horizon, namely a
divergent or heretical Marxism.
The importance of Debord for Agamben’s political project
allows for a helpful comparison between Agamben and post-
operaismo, especially the work of Paolo Virno, alongside whom
Agamben published an essay recapitulating the conclusion of The
Coming Community in a 1991 book on the Situationists. I situate
Agamben’s inheritance from Debord against the work of Virno in
order to carry out an immanent critique of Agamben’s conceptu-
alization of language, life, and the common in relation to politics.
Situating Virno’s development within a similar, if fleeting,
Debordian heritage, I argue that it is especially the problem of
the common that remains under-conceptualized in Agamben’s
political project.

155
Introduction

I N the prologue to The Use of Bodies, the last volume of his

Homo Sacer series, Agamben calls attention to the fact that Guy
Debord’s Society of the Spectacle opens with the word “life” and
never ceases to interrogate the historical weave of life up to and in-
cluding its “concrete inversion” in the spectacular conditions of mod-
ern society.1 On the one hand, Agamben’s focus on the problem of
life is not surprising, given his account of bios and zoe at the heart of
the Homo Sacer project. However, the concise but thorough discus-
sion of Debord’s works that suffuses the prologue of The Use of Bod-
ies also allows us to consider Agamben’s conceptual deployment as
an inflection on his relationship with this master of strategic philos-
ophy.2 More specifically, instead of enumerating life in spectacular so-

1. Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2015), xix. For Debord’s remarks on the spectacle as the “con-
crete inversion of life,” cf. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy
Perlman et al. (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), 2. All references to Society of the
Spectacle are to the numbered theses, not page numbers.
2. For a more thorough account of Debord, strategy, and philosophy, particularly
in relationship to Hegel, cf. Jason E. Smith, “Strategy and the Passions: Guy De-
bord’s Ruses,” in Mark Potocnik, Frank Ruda, and Jan Völker, eds. Beyond Po-
tentialities?: Politics Between the Possible and the Impossible (Zurich: diaphanes,
2011), 169-182. Smith notes Agamben’s recounting of a story in a lecture given a
year after Debord’s death in which Agamben tells of his rebuke, given Agamben’s
recurring temptation to call him a philosopher, that he is not a philosopher but a
strategist. My attempt to read both Agamben and Virno as Debordian strategists
is situated within the ambivalent relationship between philosophy and strategy
present in Debord’s writings. A fuller reckoning of this relationship might begin
also with Althusser, who along with Debord best understood the Kampfplatz of
philosophy in the twentieth century. Such a reckoning would, in turn, also need
to consider our inheritance of an old alternative, that of Hegel or Spinoza.

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ciety as an addendum to the Homo Sacer series, we might do well to
work through the implications of the Debordian context at the root
of Agamben’s constructive political project. Agamben’s engagement
with Debord, although clandestine and scattered, dates from an ini-
tial encounter in the breaks of Heidegger’s 1968 Le Thor seminar, and
I will argue that the genesis of Agamben’s constructive political pro-
ject with the publication of The Coming Community in 1990 is marked
by the theoretical horizon of Debord’s divergent or heretical Marx-
ism.3 Agamben shares this horizon with Paolo Virno, to whom I will
return in conclusion for a slight, but importantly different articulation
of the strategic relation between language and life such that it allows
him to reflect on a problem that remains under-theorized in Agam-
ben’s work: the common.
Before entering this analysis, it is useful to linger briefly with the De-
bordian horizon shared by Agamben and Virno. Both thinkers share a
concern for the interaction between language and life, using the con-
ditions of spectacular society diagnosed by Debord as points of depar-
ture. Neither Agamben nor Virno has produced an extended study on
Debord, and the analysis of their similar, but not shared constructive
projects is thus less a problem of identifying relations of indebtedness
than demonstrating the Debordian insights that are operative in their
deployment of concepts. In line with Debord’s Hegelian Marxism, this
shared horizon might be most succinctly encapsulated as two political
reflections on Hegel’s claim in the Sense-Certainty chapter of the Phe-
nomenology of Spirit that in trying to speak about a “this,” we speak the

3. Agamben describes this encounter in a 2010 interview with Hanna Leitgeb and
Cornelia Vismann. Cf. “Das unheilige Leben: Ein Gespräch mit dem italienis-
chen Philosophen Giorgio Agamben.” Interview with Hanna Leitgeb and Cor-
nelia Vismann. Literaturen (Berlin), 2010, 2 (1), 16-21. Further analysis of the
genesis of Agamben’s political project might take into account his remark in
the same interview regarding a coterminous interest in the work of Hannah
Arendt, coupled with his lament that most of his friends engaged in the 1968
movements considered Arendt a reactionary thinker. My argument that the
genesis of Agamben’s constructive politics are marked by a Debordian ho-
rizon is not intended to downplay the influence of other thinkers, such as
Arendt, Foucault, Heidegger, and Benjamin, on his work, but rather to trace a
thread that makes a significant contribution to his understanding of politics.
My characterization of Debord as a divergent or heretical Marxist is not meant
as a polemic, but rather more generally a critical engagement from within the
inheritance of Marx and Marxism, similar to what André Tosel identifies as
the blooming of a thousand Marxisms. Cf. André Tosel, “The Development
of Marxism: From the End of Marxism-Leninism to a Thousand Marxisms —​
France-Italy, 1975-2005,” in Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis, eds. Critical
Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 39-78.

Dave Mesing 157

universal even though we mean to say a particular: “We do not envisage
the universal This or Being in general, but we utter the universal.”4 Here
again, while neither thinker has dedicated an entire study to Hegel, this
Hegelian insight about language is fundamental for both.5 In an early
seminar on language and death in Hegel and Heidegger, Agamben uses
precisely this account of Hegelian indication to argue for a conception
of speech that always speaks the ineffable, showing it to be each time the
nothingness that it is. The experience of nothingness, among other for-
mulations about language in this early work, becomes integral to the ex-
plicit political project Agamben embarks on in The Coming Community.6
Virno’s variation on uttering of the universal has less to do with
the repeated experience of nothingness than with the repeated re-en-
actment of anthropogenesis. Virno thus perhaps reads this Hegelian
insight even more literally than Agamben, who traces out the way in
which the utterance of the universal implicitly shows how the con-
cept is always at work such that ineffability is precisely manifested as
nothingness. By contrast, Virno attempts to simultaneously account
for the physical reality produced by speaking—the physiognomic ex-
pression of logic7—and the way in which the fact of speaking dem-
onstrates the potential synchronicity of anthropogenesis to any par-
ticular, contingent moment.8 I will return to the conceptual inter-

4. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1977), 60.
5. I have concentrated the reference to Hegel to this brief element from Sense-
Certainty because it nicely goes to a point of both similarity and difference in
Agamben and Virno’s work. Future work involving the relationship of these
two thinkers to Hegel and language would certainly benefit from Hegel’s dis-
cussion of language in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Phi-
losophy of Subjective Spirit, Volume 3: Phenomenology and Psychology, ed. and
trans. M.J. Petry (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1978), 156-179.
6. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Ka-
ren E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), 6-15. My reference to this work as early (the Italian publication date is
1982, and the seminar on which it is based was held in 1979) is not meant to
suggest a heavy periodization of Agamben’s works, but simply to register that
the five books which precede The Coming Community are primarily concerned
with aesthetics and language; neither of these concerns disappear in his later
work, but the political valence becomes much stronger in 1990’s The Coming
Community, which of course then carries over into the Homo Sacer project and
Means Without End (1996), definitely his most “concrete” political analysis.
7. Paolo Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, trans.
Guiseppina Mecchia (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015), 122-132
8. Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh, 51-61; 100. We will return to this point in
the final section of the paper, but the fact of speaking to which Virno refers is
specifically delineated by having the logical form “to say: I say.”

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play between language and life in both thinkers below, but here it is
worth noting that although the text in which Virno gives this substan-
tial treatment of language, When the Word Becomes Flesh, was pub-
lished in 2003, several years after the opening of Agamben’s political
project, the two thinkers published essays on Debord alongside one
other in 1991, and Agamben contributed to some of the early issues of
the Italian journal Forme di vita with which Virno is heavily involved.9
While we should not force too many comparisons between the two,
given the substantial differences and the more overtly political na-
ture of Virno’s writing,10 we can at least situate the shared Debordian
horizon to the early 1990s, summarized by Agamben’s claim in The
Coming Community that the spectacle is “the politics we live in.”11 I
will begin by reconstructing Agamben’s scattered responses to De-
bord before turning to the development of language and life through-
out his political project. Agamben’s deepening account of language
and life in the Homo Sacer project arises from Debordian concerns
in the concluding chapters of The Coming Community, but the related
problem of the common has not yet been given significant treatment
by Agamben. Thus, by way of conclusion, I argue that this problem
is under-conceptualized in Agamben’s political project, and there-
by needs to be addressed in order to lay claim to the “fuller Marxi-
an analysis” he gestures towards in The Coming Community. In order
to carry out this immanent critique, I return to the Debordian con-
text of Agamben’s political project, and introduce Virno’s work in or-
der to provide the resources to think the production of the common
in a way that addresses the shortcomings of Agamben’s approach to
the coming politics.

9. The first issue of Forme di vita, entitled “La natura umana,” was also published
much later, in 2004. This presents us with a roughly fifteen year span during
which there were some shared publishing ventures, but neither thinker has
to my knowledge engaged at any length with the other’s work on language or
otherwise.
10. Here we should not pass over in silence the fact that Virno dedicates When the
Word Became Flesh to the protestors in Genoa during 2001’s demonstrations, or
the fact that Virno was arrested and jailed under the false accusation of being
involved with the Red Brigades in the 1970s. As he notes in the interview cit-
ed above, Agamben was not involved in the movements that emerged around
and after 1968, but Agamben’s work has been influential for groups in the ex-
tra-parliamentary French left such as Tiqqun, and Agamben wrote an editori-
al for the French newspaper Libération in defense of the so-called Tarnac 9 af-
ter the arrest of Julien Coupat and others in 2008.
11. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 80

Dave Mesing 159

1. Agamben’s Debord
Negotiating Agamben’s texts as a response to Debord is no simple task,
and not only because of the enigmatic style of The Coming Commu-
nity. Besides the prologue to The Use of Bodies cited above, if we lim-
it ourselves to direct and substantial references, we seem to have three
very good candidates. First, an essay in Means Without End—Agam-
ben’s most focused political book, dedicated to the memory of De-
bord—simply entitled “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the So-
ciety of the Spectacle,” which Agamben intends literally, claiming that
Debord’s works need perhaps little more than “a few glosses in the
margins.”12 Second is The Coming Community, especially the final two
chapters Shekinah and Tiananmen. And third is a book mentioned
above on the Situationists from 1991, in which Agamben published an
essay alongside Virno.13 However, a closer look reveals that certain pas-
sages are contained in all three of the texts. This is not due to redundan-
cy or a marketing ploy, especially because these various passages, which
make up large parts of the final two chapters of The Coming Communi-
ty, are not identical in any of the three works. Instead, these texts reveal
the key points of reference to Debord animating Agamben’s politics.
Because I will return to Virno in the conclusion, and because Agam-
ben does not provide anything substantially different in his 1991 text,14
I will restrict my analysis to the first two texts in order to introduce the
problematic of language, life, and the common for the coming politics.
In the Marginal Notes text, Agamben helpfully identifies three ways
in which he wants to marshal Debord’s work as “the pure power of the
intellect.”15 First, Agamben adopts the centrality of commodity fetish-
ism to Debord’s account of the spectacle. Although Agamben brief-
ly repeats this point in The Coming Community, he spells out the con-

12. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare
Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 73.
13. Agamben also references Debord in passing in the final chapter of The Kingdom
and the Glory, and I want to note two excellent papers which I only encoun-
tered after completing this paper, listed in the bibliography under the entries
Abbott and McLoughlin. McLoughlin’s paper treats aspects of Agamben’s De-
bordian context with respect to the conceptual arsenal of The Kingdom and the
Glory especially, and Abbott’s paper situates Debordian aspects of The Kingdom
and the Glory within Agamben’s Aristotelianism.
14. Agamben’s contribution to this volume adds some reflections on Italian politics
that were originally written for the newspaper il manifesto. See Giorgio Agam-
ben, “Violenza e speranza nell’ultimo spettacolo,” in I Situazionisti (Rome:
Manifestolibri, 2001), 11-17.
15. Agamben, Means Without End, 74.

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text of his reading more fully in the Marginal Notes text. Through his
understanding of commodity fetishism, Agamben affirms the compre-
hensiveness of the obstacle course facing any attempt at constructing
community within the spectacular society: “The ‘becoming-image’ of
capital is nothing more than the commodity’s last metamorphosis, in
which exchange value has completely eclipsed use value and can now
achieve the status of absolute and irresponsible sovereignty over life in
its entirety, after having falsified the entire social production.”16 Debord
identifies such an obstacle course most clearly when he writes of the
spectacle as “the epic poem of [the struggle between commodities], an
epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy. The spectacle
does not sing the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodi-
ties and their passions. In this blind struggle every commodity, pursu-
ing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becom-
ing-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity
of the world.”17 The extreme element in spectacular society thereby re-
mains linked to the simultaneously transparent and phantasmagoric
present in the fetishism of the commodity form itself.
Second, Agamben strongly emphasizes the centrality of language.
Comparing Debord to Karl Kraus, Agamben claims “language pre-
sents itself as the image and place of justice.”18 Throughout The Com-
ing Community, Agamben holds that the alienation of linguistic being
is the common experience driving contemporary politics and making
possible a community of whatever singularities who have appropriat-
ed their being-in-language.19 Agamben sketches a response to this ac-
complished nihilism in a third key point from the Marginal Notes text,
which is that the gesture is an expression of liberation “after the passage
of life through the trial of nihilism.” Gesture is “the other side of the
commodity,”20 neither use value nor exchange value, but rather what al-
lows the fully realized commodity fetishism and concomitant linguis-
tic experience of nihilism to sink in.
Taken together, these elements demonstrate the centrality of lan-
guage and life to the task of any future community or politics according
to Agamben. As “the politics in which we live,” Debord’s spectacle pro-
vides a specific historical jumping point for Agamben. Although Agam-
ben’s comments, as well as Debord’s remarks throughout Society of the

16. Agamben, Means Without End, 76.

17. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 66.
18. Agamben, Means Without End, 77.
19. Agamben, The Coming Community, 60; 65; 83.
20. Agamben, Means Without End, 80.

Dave Mesing 161

 Spectacle, remain attentive to the representative and reified nature of
the spectacle, it is crucial to note that in Debord’s account, the specta-
cle is neither an image, nor a supplement to reality, but rather a social
relation.21 Agamben takes this point up directly in the Shekinah chap-
ter of The Coming Community, dissociating the spectacle from what is
ubiquitously referred to today as the media.22 For Debord, this social
relation is not the natural development of an alienating technology, but
rather is chosen by society—the spectacle is the process whereby soci-
ety chooses its own alienation. As Debord puts it in a crucial passage,
“the spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of
the existing system’s conditions and goals.”23
The genesis of Agamben’s political project can thus be considered as
departing from a Debordian context. Agamben enigmatically outlines
his constructive response to the spectacular society at the conclusion
of the Shekinah chapter in The Coming Community:

Only those who succeed in carrying [the society of the spectacle] to

completion—without allowing what reveals to remain veiled in the
nothingness that reveals, but bringing language itself to language—
will be the first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions
nor a State, where the nullifying and determining power of what is
common will be pacified and where the Shekinah will have stopped
sucking the evil milk of its own separation.24

The interaction between life, language, and the common in this passage
rests on Agamben’s assertion that “it is clear that the spectacle is lan-
guage, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans.”25 In
order to provide a more straightforward account of these concepts, it
is helpful to turn away from Agamben’s messianic prose in The Coming
Community and towards his remarks on language and life in The Sac-
rament of Language and The Highest Poverty.

2. The Interplay of Language and Life in Agamben

The task and stakes of such a constructive response to the spectacular
society through language and life are perhaps most clearly evident in
the following two questions, posed by Agamben in the final threshold

21. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 4-6.

22. Agamben, The Coming Community, 79.
23. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 6.
24. Agamben, The Coming Community, 83.
25. Agamben, The Coming Community, 80.

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 of The Highest Poverty: “How can use—that is, a relation to the world
insofar as it is inappropriable—be translated into an ethos and a form
of life? And what ontology and ethics would correspond to a life that,
in use, is constituted as inseparable from its form?”26 In other words,
Agamben sets himself the task of articulating a form of life that is indif-
ferent towards and unable to be absorbed by the machinations justify-
ing the existing conditions of the society of the spectacle and contem-
porary capitalism, as well as a theoretical justification of such a use of
linguistic life. Both of these problems are addressed through Agamben’s
analysis of Franciscanism in The Highest Poverty, but before turning to
the coincidence between language and life in this text, it is first helpful
to pause over Agamben’s understanding of language itself.
The relevance of Agamben’s The Sacrament of Language to his po-
litical project lies chiefly in the interaction between gesture and lan-
guage he identifies in the oath. As we indicated in Agamben’s “Mar-
ginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle,” Agamben
understands gesture as the other side of the commodity, or that which
is able to communicate the traversal of human existence through the
trial of nihilism. In The Sacrament of Language, however, he considers
the origins of the oath as “a gesture symmetrically opposed to that of
blasphemy.”27 In the linguistic event of naming, Agamben claims, we
can understand the oath as a gesture whereby the speaker swears “on
the correspondence between words and things that is realized in [the
oath].”28 This use of language is an experience wherein “it is not possi-
ble to doubt” such correspondence.29 Agamben situates the spheres of
religion and law as responses to the oath: “they were invented to guar-
antee the truth and trustworthiness of the logos through a series of ap-
paratuses, among which the technicalization of the oath into a specific
“sacrament”—the “sacrament of power”—occupies a central place.”30 As
a gesture pre-dating law and religion, the oath can be understood as a
subversive element capable of redeployment against both these spheres;
since Agamben connects the oath to every act of naming,31 this means
that the event of naming occupies a central place in the coming politics.

26. Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans.
Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 144.
27. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath,
trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 42.
28. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 46.
29. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 54.
30. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 59.
31. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 46,

Dave Mesing 163

 Agamben is not entirely sanguine about the oath, since there is a
concomitant risk of curse alongside it.

Every naming is, in fact, double: it is a blessing or a curse. A blessing, if

the word is full, if there is a correspondence between the signifier and
the signified, between words and things; a curse if the word is empty; if
there remains, between the semiotic and the semantic, a void and a gap.
Oath and perjury, benediction and male-diction correspond to this
double possibility inscribed in the logos, in the experience by means
of which the living being has been constituted as speaking being.32

Agamben considers the ambivalence of this experience in linguistic life

to be full of potential, but not simply in the form of a nostalgic long-
ing for the experience of language available prior to the emergence of
law and religion. Instead, he concludes that philosophy begins when
the speaker puts into question the correspondence between word and
thing.33 In a variation on his understanding of the accomplished nihil-
ism revealed by language in The Coming Community,34 he argues here
that politics is the “governance of empty speech over bare life.”35 Agam-
ben’s reconstruction of the linguistic experience in the oath is thus to
clarify lines of “resistance and change,” rather than to articulate an on-
tological guarantee available through some purification of language.
If the critique of the oath forms an essential element of Agamben’s
account of the co-implication of language and life, his analysis of the
monastic rules within Franciscanism goes much further towards an on-
tological situating of the coming politics. Agamben takes up the “most
precious legacy of Franciscanism” in order to think a form of life in
which form is irrevocably linked with life, such that the form of life
could never be substantialized or appropriated by an outside, but is
rather only given as common use.36 According to Agamben, this is be-
cause the Fransciscan monastic rules coincide to such an extent with
the lives of the monks that the form of the rule is not easily identifiable
as a law in the same way that the life under the rule is no longer truly
life; “the rule enters in this way into a zone of undecidability with re-

32. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 69-70.

33. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 72.
34. “In this extreme nullifying unveiling, however, language (the linguistic nature
of humans) remains once again hidden and separated, and thus, one last time,
in its unspoken power, it dooms humans to a historical era and a State: the era
of the spectacle, or of accomplished nihilism.” See Agamben, The Coming Com-
munity, 82.
35. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 72.
36. Agamben, The Highest Poverty, xiii.

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 spect to life.”37 Such an understanding of monastic rules causes Agam-
ben to succinctly define Franciscanism as “the attempt to realize a hu-
man life and practice absolutely outside the determinations of the law.”38
Just like in his account of the oath, Agamben’s purpose in resuscitat-
ing such a legacy from Franciscanism is not a form of nostalgic longing.
Instead, this understanding of life as common use provides a foothold for
Agamben to introduce an understanding of ontology he thinks is capa-
ble of undergirding a life characteristic of those who would carry the so-
ciety of the spectacle to its completion. In his theory of use developed at
the conclusion of The Highest Poverty, Agamben clarifies that such an on-
tology is existentialist rather than essentialist.39 In this sense, Agamben’s
ontological account of form of life is not systematic, but rather gestural.
As he puts it, “the ontology that is in question here is thus purely opera-
tive and effectual.”40 The conflict that takes place in the common use of
form of life against all other appropriable conceptions of life and law is a
“purely existential reality” waiting to be liberated from the clutches of law
and religion, the same two spheres that arise in response to the oath. As
a gestural and active operation, such an existentialist ontology is rightly
characterized as purely evental.41 The ontology Agamben sketches in The
Highest Poverty helps explain his remark in the postface to the 2001 Ital-
ian edition of The Coming Community that inoperativity rather than work
is the paradigm of the coming politics. “Inoperativity does not mean idle-
ness, but katargesis—that is to say an operation in which the how integral-
ly replaces the what, in which the life without form and the form with-
out life coincide in a form of life.”42 As the coming politics, such an act
that renders law and religion inoperative is not deferred into the future,
but rather takes place in each instance of the linguistic event form of life.

3. On Not Foreclosing Ambivalence: Form-of-Life and

the Common
The interaction between language and life clearly frames a crucial aspect
of Agamben’s political project as it has developed through the Homo Sac-

37. Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 26.

38. Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 110.
39. Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 136.
40. Ibid.
41. This is Lorenzo Chiesa and Frank Ruda’s instructive argument in their “The
Event of Language as Force of Life: Agamben’s Linguistic Vitalism.” Angelaki
vol. 16 no. 3 (September 2011): 163-180.
42. Giorgio Agamben, La comunità che viene (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001),
92-93.

Dave Mesing 165

er series in accordance with the Debordian concerns we outlined in The
Coming Community. I have treated the common as a kind of shadow con-
cept throughout the paper, and with the operative ontology of form of life
in place, it is time to bring this concept onto center stage in order to press
Agamben’s under-theorization of it. Agamben does consistently refer to
the common as a crucial concept of the coming politics. In the passage
I referenced earlier as paradigmatic of Agamben’s constructive response
to spectacular society, for example, Agamben alludes to the disappear-
ance of “the nullifying and determining power of what is common” in
the coming community.43 In the same chapter, just prior to claiming that
the spectacle is “the politics we live in,” Agamben identifies the appropri-
ation of the Common logos as the most extreme form of capitalist expro-
priation.44 As such, capitalism’s affront on the common is precisely what
is at stake in the alienation of linguistic being and experience of nihil-
ism that render Agamben’s existentialist ontology of form of life possible.
However, the common remains only a negative and limit-concept
in Agamben’s work, restricted to the linguistic sphere. This is a further
reason why Agamben remains stuck in a form of linguistic vitalism: his
ontology is unable to explain how such a form of life that resists spec-
tacular society is able to be produced and defended in common, oth-
er than through the repetition of a meta-historical event.45 If the form
of life offered by Agamben as constitutive for the coming politics is in-
deed a common use of life, we require a more detailed account of its
production as common. In this under-conceptualization of the com-
mon, Agamben in fact follows a similar logic as his account the oath as
gesture of naming that is double, capable of both benediction and mal-
ediction.46 However, instead of the ambivalence he maintains with re-
spect to this double potential, the linguistic vitalism in his conception
of form of life forecloses the risk involved in constructing a communi-
ty at odds with spectacular society.
Such an ambivalence was identified with perspicuity by Paolo Vir-
no in a 1991 essay on Debord he published alongside Agamben, which
we referenced earlier. Before turning to the concepts of language, life,
and the common in Virno, it is important to clarify the sense in which

43. Agamben, The Coming Community, 83.

44. Agamben, The Coming Community, 80.
45. Again, Chiesa and Ruda are perceptive, arguing that Agamben “aims at estab-
lishing a theory of the event in and of language according to which being as
such is meta-metaphysically a sort of arche-event,” or more simply that lan-
guage itself functions as a kind of transcendental without emergence. See Chie-
sa and Ruda, “The Event of Language as Force of Life,” 163 and 165.
46. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 69-70.

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Virno’s constructive project might also be said to depart from Debord-
ian concerns. We have worked through Agamben’s claim in The Com-
ing Community that the spectacle “is the politics we live in,” and a quick
glance at Virno’s essay on Debord reveals a similar appreciation for
the strategic philosopher. Virno situates Debord’s Society of the Spec-
tacle alongside a series of texts, comprising “an unusual family album”
which also consists of Raniero Panzieri’s Plus-valore e pianificazione, Al-
fred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor, Mario Tronti’s Oper-
ai e capitale, Antonio Negri’s La crisis di Stato-piano, and Hans-Jurgen
Krahl’s Konstitution und Klassenkampf. Together, Virno suggests, these
works form “useful picklocks to unhinge the society of mature capi-
talism and its State.”47 Virno specifically picks up on what he refers to
as the double nature of the spectacle: it is one product or commodity
among others as well as an index for the quintessence of the contempo-
rary mode of production. Virno shares with Agamben the distance from
falsely conflating the spectacle with the media: “the situationist critique
has nothing to do with the jeremiads of consumerism and the alienation
of free time, and does not let itself be confused with the exquisite disgust
for the mass media and advertising.”48 Instead, a critique of the spectacle
remains tethered to putting the mode of production itself into question.
For Virno, the contemporary mode of production is linked to lan-
guage, as well as, eventually, life. In the spectacular society, language
is put to work by becoming the principle recourse for social reproduc-
tion. We are meant to read this putting to work of language quite lit-
erally: Virno claims that the linguistic faculty needs to be thought to-
gether with wage labor, and not that language or immaterial labor sim-
ply replaces older forms of labor under capitalism, as some hasty and
broad-sweeping assessments of post-operaismo thinkers occasionally
suggest. In fact, Virno argues that contrary to what is suggested by a
“little postmodern song,” the appropriation of linguistic communica-
tion in the spectacular society radicalizes the antinomies of capital-
ism rather than allows them to languish or become inoperative.49 Vir-
no’s account of language differs from Agamben, although their shared
emphasis on the linguistic faculty also shares a genesis in an analysis
of Debord. For Virno, “the spectacle is the reified form through which
that amount of communication, intelligence, and knowledge is present-
ed, which although always in the name of capitalist productivity, cannot
come to be deposited in machines, but must manifest itself in the co-

47. Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh, 20.

48. Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh, 21.
49. Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh, 26.

Dave Mesing 167

operation of living subjects.”50 Virno subjects this broad understanding
of the linguistic faculty to a different development than Agamben, but
maintains language as “the terrain of conflict and the odds at stake,”51
a phrase that successfully reiterates the angle of Agamben’s construc-
tive political project we have been pursuing from another vantage point.
Virno’s advance on this battlefield involves a shifted conceptual con-
stellation that brings the production of the common into sharper fo-
cus. Rather than forcing a schematic point-by-point comparison with
Agamben, now that we have underscored the shared Debordian po-
litical horizon for both thinkers, it is useful to return to Virno’s dif-
fering take on Hegelian indication we observed at the outset of the
paper in order to help stage this transmuted conceptual constellation.
For Agamben, uttering the universal opens up the possibility of expe-
riencing and traversing the nothingness present in every act of locu-
tion, whereas for Virno each time the universal is spoken, the moment
of anthropogenesis is re-staged in the present. These differing perspec-
tives cannot be reduced to a prioritization of negation on Agamben’s
part versus an elision of the work of the concept in order to trace the
positive contours of universal indication on Virno’s part.52
Virno places less emphasis on the operation of use, which is so cen-
tral to Agamben’s articulation of the relationship between language and
life, comprising a substantial part of The Use of Bodies, and as a result the
alternation between the two concepts remains pervasively ambivalent
throughout his project.53 We can locate in Virno’s account of language

50. Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh, 24.

51. Paolo Virno, “Cultura e produzione sul paloscenico,” in I Situazionisti (Rome:
Manifestolibri, 2001), 26.
52. In fact, Virno’s most recent book is a study of negation, and the function of
negativity in both thinkers would make for a productive study, as would oth-
er angles such as their accounts of potentiality and time, two topics which are
widely debated in English literature on Agamben, but would benefit from be-
ing read alongside Virno, especially now that his work is becoming more ac-
cessible in English. Both thinkers also share a common reference to Aristote-
lian theoretical and practical philosophy, in addition to am ambivalent appre-
ciation of Arendt, especially in the case of Virno. Perhaps also of note in terms
of these potential skirmishes is the fact that Virno’s doctoral work was done on
Adorno, a thinker almost wholly absent from Agamben’s field of reference. For
more on Virno’s interesting reconfiguration of Arendt, cf. Paolo Virno, “Vir-
tuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,” trans. Ed Emory in
Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds. Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Pol-
itics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 189-212.
53. Agamben briefly elaborates on the concept of use in The Highest Poverty, but his
most sustained treatment to date comes in the first section of The Use of Bod-
ies, comprising eight chapters.

168 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
 and life a displacement of Agamben’s conceptual arrangement in three
movements. First, Virno argues through a reading of the later Wittgen-
stein that language and life are co-extensive concepts; they share an in-
determinacy of lacking extrinsic purpose and obeying arbitrary rules.54
Language and life are not identical concepts, but are rather coterminous
to the extent that the fact of speaking opens up the potential space for
alteration. Virno refers to this as the “naturalistic virtuosity” of speech.
“Linguistic practice rests in the hiatus between the mind and the world,
a gap that cannot be filled by a predetermined conduct but needs to be
mastered with virtuoso performances and arbitrary rules.”55 This car-
ries with it the important consequence that this potential space is pub-
lic in a very precise sense. Neither mirroring an exterior state of things
nor residing in a secret interior, this potential space is the common pre-
condition for the strict separation of an interior and exterior out of this
transindividual, and intrinsically political, potential of language.56
Virno develops his description of naturalistic virtuosity from out
of the fundamental locutionary act wherein this potential is spoken.
The logical form “to say: I say” functions for Virno as a translation
of the universal uttered through Hegelian indication, and it is there-
by accurate to refer to “the event of language” in Virno’s work. We fol-
lowed Chiesa and Ruda’s argument that Agamben’s linguistic arche-
event lapses into vitalism,57 but this figure functions in a much more
mundane sense for Virno: “the event of language is contained in the
work of the epiglottis: its insertion in the world flashes through an air
movement.”58 Such a formulation is not merely an ironic turn of phrase
for Virno, but rather signals the naturalistic dimension of his work. Ac-
cordingly, Virno’s second major deployment on the linguistic battlefield
consists in the fact that life is not characterized by the meta-historical
repetition of negation, but rather that life is characterized by the task of
historicizing metahistory. Virno’s exhibits this task through both of the
coextensive terms. “Every statement of facts and of the state of things is
simultaneously a statement on the use of words: what we witness, thus,

54. Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh, 29.

55. Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh, 30.
56. Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh, 41.
57. In the prologue to The Use of Bodies, Agamben does signal his attention on the
problem of vitalism, suggesting that the task of thought and politics today is
to identify the intimate connection between being and living outside of every
vitalism. Chiesa and Ruda’s essay was published prior to the publication of The
Use of Bodies, and Agamben’s relationship to vitalism remains an open ques-
tion, especially now that the final volume of the Homo Sacer series has been
completed. Cf. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, xix.
58. Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh, 55.

Dave Mesing 169

is a complete fusion of language-object and metalanguage.”59 Enunciat-
ing the event of language gives an exaggerated visibility to the language
faculty, which Virno argues is a “biological invariant.”60 Although mun-
dane, the event of language presents the possibility of historicizing me-
tahistory as a perennial challenge; the challenge opened up is to both
reconstruct the biological invariant while also analyzing the operative
field of social practice, which shares the potential for variation indicat-
ed by the naturalistic virtuosity of the speaking animal.61
Finally, then, Virno’s dislocation of the conceptual constellation con-
sists in a persistent commitment to ambivalence. Virno provides a com-
pact account of this commitment in the conclusion to an essay on jokes
and logic. For Virno, ambivalence can be characterized in two closely re-
lated ways: the space between the rule and regularity of species-specific
action, or the treatment of meta-history as historical or historical contin-
gency as metahistory.62 In either case, with respect to life, ambivalence is
linked to a theory of crisis. For the former example, following Wittgen-
stein, “a form of life withers and declines when the same norm is realized
in multiple dissimilar ways that contrast with one another.”63 The poten-
tial space in which these forms are articulated is and remains ambivalent
because facts within life can “thicken” into norms—and empirical reg-
ularity can take on a grammatical rule, but for precisely this reason, the
relationship between rule and regularity is not given in advance or ab-
solute. In the second example, whereby the meta-historical and histor-
ical come to be confused, such a particular crisis for a form of life rein-
troduces a persistent potential problem, that of “shaping life in general.”64
This element in the theory of crisis is rightly recognized as a state of ex-
ception, and to link this analysis with our development of language and
life, we would do well again to take another brief pass at Virno’s account
of Hegelian indication, and the occasional and ambivalent synchronicity
of anthropogenesis involved in the locutory event of language.
The ambivalence inherent in this paradoxical restaging of anthro-
pogenesis is transitional, involving each time the actual production of

59. Virno, “Jokes and Innovative Action: For a Logic of Change,” in Multitude: Be-
tween Innovation and Negation, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and
Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 143.
60. Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh, 202.
61. Virno thus notes that “biopolitics is a particular derivative aspect of the inscrip-
tion of meta-history within the field of empirical phenomena; an inscription
[…] that distinguishes capitalism historically.” Cf. Paolo Virno, Déjà Vu and
the End of History, trans. David Broder (London: Verso, 2015), 166.
62. Virno, “Jokes and Innovative Action: For a Logic of Change,” 166.
63. Virno, “Jokes and Innovative Action: For a Logic of Change,” 151.
64. Ibid.

170 R J P H   ·   V O L U M E    1   ·   # 2   ·   2017
a content from within a coextensive and coterminous potential. Al-
though the linguistic event is mundane, as we have noted, its precise
instantiation in the event of language, or as Virno also refers to the log-
ical form “to say: I say,” the absolute performative, occurs very rare-
ly.65 The rarity of the absolute performative or pure expression of an-
thropogenesis in the linguistic faculty as such does not imply that the
politics of such a form of life ought to be heroic. In fact, as we noted
above, Virno argues that politics “is inherent to the very fact of hav-
ing language.”66 Politics does not characterize one among many possi-
ble interactions between life and language, but the political character of
speech itself forms part of the presupposition for any form of life. Al-
though the pure logico-linguistic form of ambivalence is rare, each in-
stance of speaking constitutes a production in the present that extends,
challenges, and/or constructs some form of life. “An act of speech es-
tablishes the present and makes it dovetail with its own unrepeata-
ble execution, precisely because it leaves behind the perennial laten-
cy of the language faculty.”67 Any collection of beings that would resist
the contemporary mode of production manifested by capitalism in the
spectacular society subject their coincidence of life and language to the
field of praxis. The citizens of a coming community do not simply vow
to take up arms against capitalist appropriation, but rather actively de-
velop means of resistance and alternatives in common. The effectuali-
ty, status, and longevity of these powers of intellect and activity are not
guaranteed — such is the common and ambivalent ordeal marking the
terrain of the battle against capitalism.

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