Mysticism and Materialism in the Wake of German Idealism

W. Ezekiel Goggin, Sean Hannan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000555820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Mysticism

This book argues that the rediscovery of mystical theology in nineteenth-century Germany not only helped inspire idealism and romanticism, but also planted the seeds of their overcoming by way of critical materialism. Thanks in part to the Neoplatonic turn in the works of J. G. Fichte, as well as the enthusiasm of mining engineer Franz X. von Baader, mystical themes gained a critical currency, and mystical texts returned to circulation. This reawakening of the mystical tradition influenced romantic and idealist thinkers such as Novalis and Hegel, and also shaped later critical interventions by Marx, Benjamin, and Bataille. Rather than rehearsing well-known connections to Swedenborg or Böhme, this study goes back further to the works of Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Catherine of Siena, and Angela of Foligno. The book offers a new perspective on the reception of mystical self-interrogation in nineteenth-century German thought and will appeal to scholars of philosophy, history, theology, and religious studies.

1 The Spark and the Counterfeit

Kant, Fichte, and the Transcendental Critique of Mysticism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090250-2

Immanuel Kant had no patience for mysticism. From his withering attack on Swedenborgian spiritualism in Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766) to his denunciations of mysticism as counterfeit philosophy (Afterphilosophie) toward the end of his life (1800), he was remarkably consistent in this. Whether unitive, affective, esoteric, or otherwise, mysticisms amounted to peculiar forms of metaphysical dogmatism with a popular and potentially dangerous appeal. In addition to encouraging intellectual laziness and obfuscation, mysticism was not compatible with the public role of religious life, Kant believed. Kant’s early remarks on mysticism serve as prolegomenon to the transcendental circumscription of metaphysics undertaken in the critical trilogy. Much like the “spirit-seer” who mistakes figments of the imagination as independently subsisting, spiritual beings, the dogmatic metaphysician is a “waking dreamer” who mistakes the products of thought as establishing the character of “things in themselves.”

Kant’s so-called critical works carried this momentum forward. By restricting the reach of pure reason from such dogmatic claims, Kant claimed to have saved human knowledge from scepticism and fruitless metaphysical debate. Such a restriction did not spell the end of “religious” claims about a supersensible world, however. Quite the opposite. According to Kant, restricting theoretical access to “things in themselves” opened a space for a narrow conception of moral faith constituted through a priori determination of the will. Kant thus offers a normative redescription of religion as an expression of humanity’s aspiration to rational freedom, rather than accession to heteronomy. While the systems of theoretical and practical reason could never be fully synthesised, they could be held together in a tentative way through the heuristic or “regulative” use of rational principles. The ideas of a purely rational religion—the highest Good, God, the immortal soul—are among these. These ideas are postulated to reconcile freedom and nature. They cannot be known through theoretical speculation. Nor are they experienced through rapturous visions, unitive intuitions, profound feelings, or ecstasy. At best, claims to such experiences amount to a mystification of transcendental philosophy, in Kant’s view. At worst, they are mere delusion.

It is something of a truism that for the tradition of classical German philosophy—the reveries of the romantics, the audacious systems of the idealists, and the radical programmes of the materialists who followed them—all roads lead to and, perhaps, through Kant. In the case of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, this was both figuratively and literally the case. In 1791, his professional prospects waning, Fichte travelled the long road from Warsaw to Königsberg to visit the man himself. Fichte expressed gratitude to Kant for the transformative effect transcendental philosophy had had upon his life, saving the young thinker from an abyss of despairing fatalism. He also asked Kant for a loan. Kant refused the loan but agreed to help secure publication for a manuscript which Fichte had hastily written in hopes of impressing the older philosopher. Due to a printing error, the first edition of An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1791)—the earliest to apply the results of Kant’s critical thought to the subject of religion—was for a time mistakenly attributed to Kant (Fichte, 1964, p. 2010). But when the sage of Königsberg publicly corrected the error, revealing that a young and unknown philosopher was responsible for the work, a career in the academy became all but assured for Fichte.

While Fichte began his career as Kant’s most celebrated disciple, significant differences between the thinkers regarding the nature of cognition and the limits of systematicity would eventually alienate them. According to Fichte, critical philosophy’s account of the synthetic origins of the empirical world assumed a pre-reflexive mental activity that Kant could not explain given the limits he had imposed upon cognition. A revision of the Kantian limits on knowledge would facilitate a reconstruction of this pre-reflexive ground through a special form of cognitive activity that Fichte, in his early days, called “intellectual intuition” (intellektuelle Anschauung) or later, in his Berlin period, “pure knowing” (reines Wissen). Through a sui generis cognitive act, Fichte purported to trace all finite, empirical determinations and their transcendental principles to a single, self-constituting ground (Grund). None of this invites us to interpret the visionary experiences of spiritualist and theosophical mystics in any epistemically or metaphysically relevant sense. Still, the fact that many of Fichte’s contemporaries understood his positions as conveying transcendental philosophy toward “mysticism” is not entirely surprising. After all, Fichte’s original breakthrough is, contra Kant, his insistence on the necessity of an intuitive form of cognition and the development of that intuition into a systematic comprehension of the transcendental ground of the empirical world. The resonance with Platonic mysticism, which we will explore in this chapter, is unmistakable. Despite his unmitigated antipathy for the mystics, it seemed that Kant was not off the hook either. His practical philosophy, in particular, appeared reminiscent of affective pietist mysticism, which valued inner transformation and the “feeling” of a divine power guiding and sustaining moral life. Kant rejected such readings. Fichte was similarly impatient with readers who suggested parallels between his work and mysticism—but with some important qualifications, as we shall see.

In what follows we will offer a broad sketch of the critiques of mysticism appearing in the works of Kant and Fichte while also drawing attention to crucial differences between them. Kant interprets all mysticisms as expressions of a “dogmatic” attitude that mistakenly reifies certain products of our mental activities by identifying them as self-subsisting beyond reason’s self-determining activity. Rational religion, by contrast, recognises that items of faith like an immortal soul and God are postulated on the basis of our own practical reason. In the end, mysticism produces only “counterfeit goods,” thus circumventing philosophical labour and stymying the realisation of rational freedom. Fichte’s view of mysticism accords with Kant’s critiques of spiritualism, theosophy, and religious appeals to “feeling.” At the same time, Fichte comes to believe that Kant’s dogmatic attitudes about transcendental subjectivity had not only rendered his system less defensible but had cut him off from a mystical philosophia perennis present in the Gospel of John as well as the works of Plato. Properly conceived, transcendental philosophy is the heir of this tradition, per Fichte. He thus deploys the topoi of this Platonic-Christian mysticism to present the system of transcendental idealism in “a new light” after 1800. But this quasi-mystical turn is not Fichte kowtowing to religious critics. In fact, Fichte associated a Platonic variety of mysticism with the constitutive use of reason as it figures in Kant’s works, even prior to the debut of the Wissenschaftslehre in 1794. While many forms of so-called mysticism remained suspect, the heritage of Platonic and Neoplatonic mysticism appeared to be essential to philosophy as such. Indeed, these had stumbled upon the same “divine spark” that could now be transcendentally deduced, Fichte believed.

By reading the mystical tradition forward from Plato and backward through Kant, Fichte establishes enduring parameters for its historical reception. As we situate his and Kant’s accounts of mysticism vis-à-vis their views on systematicity and the limits of cognition, we will also note the role played by materiality in their critiques. Both titans of transcendental idealism appeal to the language of materiality—affectivity, labour, commodity, and “blind, natural power”—to understand the intellectual and social stakes of contemporary and historical mysticisms.

Spirit-Seers, Fanatics, and Alchemists: Kant’s Critique of Mysticism

As noted, we should not be surprised to learn that Kant had little patience for “mysticism,” if by that term we mean efforts to express an intuition of divine presence and induce some transformative effect upon our self-regard, relationships, and forms of life.¹ Surely this kind of mysticism would transgress the limits of possible experience as Kant understood them. Theoretically, the idea of the Absolute or “infinite” (as described in Kant’s account of the ens realissimum) can only be employed in a “regulative” or heuristic sense (Kant, 1911a, 1911b, 2007, A180/B222).² It cannot be “experienced” since, by definition, it cannot be subsumed by the transcendental conditions of objectivity. Nor can reflection on the transcendental conditions of objective experience yield some form of intuitive or mystical self-knowledge. While we can and must infer a form of unified mental activity as the condition of any possible experience—what Kant calls the “transcendental unity of apperception”—we cannot have an “intellectual intuition” of this unity. “The consciousness of self (apperception) is the simple representation of the ‘I’,” writes Kant, “and if that manifold in the subject were given by the activity of the self, the inner intuition would be intellectual [die innere Anschauung intellektuell sein]” (KrV B68).

Unlike the infinite intellectual faculty we might ascribe to a divine mind, we can know nothing of “things in themselves” and cannot constitute objects of non-empirical, metaphysical knowledge from acts of pure thought (KrV B72). To grasp the transcendental unity of apperception would mean a cognition which refers to itself and produces an intuition of the mind’s own activity. However, Kant claims, no act of reflection can do so without modifying the pre-reflexive activity of thinking which it seeks to know. It can produce only a representation of its own self-affecting activity and thus cannot intuit itself as it is in itself (Kant, KrV B68). Attempts at a fully transparent account of transcendental self-consciousness are always “blocked” by an unavoidable act of self-reification. Lacking a legitimate constitutive employment, theoretical reason can only direct the pure concepts of the understanding which organise the sensory manifold of experience. We thus have no knowledge of things “in themselves” but only as they appear to us. The same is evidently true of the transcendental unity of our own mental activity (KrV A41/B59).

While theoretical reason is barred from “constitutive” employment, as in Kant’s treatments of speculative theology and rational psychology, practical reason must be used constitutively. Rather than determining the will through a merely hypothetical imperative to pursue some course of action depending on its fitness for attaining goals such as happiness or satisfaction, Kant insists that the constitutive use of practical reason determines the will through the strict necessity of moral law: we are commanded to act in terms binding for all rational agents (Kant, 1913, pp. 135–136; 2015, p. 109). “The moral law is,” he argues, “a law of causality through freedom and hence a law of the possibility of a supersensible nature” (Kant, 1913, p. 48; 2015, p. 42). Causality through freedom is constituted by our capacity to determine our will independently of any empirically determined goal we might adopt. However, Kant does not believe that one should be indifferent to the consequences of action:

In order to extend a pure cognition practically there must be purpose given a priori, that is, an end as object (of the will) that, independently of all theoretical principles, is represented as practically necessary by an imperative determining the will immediately (a categorical imperative), and in this case that is the highest good.

(Kant, 1913, p. 134; 2015, p. 108)

The rational character of practical reason would be vitiated if we were to disregard the results of action entirely: it is a manifest contradiction, for instance, to will that those who deserve happiness in virtue of their moral disposition should not receive it. Practical reason thus demands not only rectitude of the individual will, but also the possibility of the “highest good” wherein happiness is apportioned in accordance with moral worthiness.

The systematic root of Kant’s critical philosophy of religion must be traced to this point. As noted above, speculative theology is undercut by Kant’s insistence that while all knowledge arises through pure concepts, it only pertains to the content of possible experience. The theoretical path to God is blocked. But the practical demand to reconcile nature and freedom provides Kant with another path toward a qualified justification of theism: “By the practical law that commands the existence of the highest good possible in a world, the possibility of those objects of pure speculative reason, the objective reality which the latter could not assure them, is postulated” (Kant, 1913, p. 134; 2015, p. 108). In other words, practical reason is justified in assuming the conditions under which the “highest good” becomes possible as an object of rationally justified hope. Among these conditions are “freedom, immortality, and God” (Kant, 1913, p. 134; 2015, p. 108). Nature offers no guarantees that those who deserve happiness in proportion to the moral rectitude of their dispositions will receive it. But belief in a coordination of disposition and deserts is essential to the consistency of practical reason as such, and it is on this basis that Kant postulates immortality and the existence of God. This constitutes a radical revision of God’s place within the system of our concepts. For Kant, the idea of God does not form the basis of moral reasoning. It is, rather, the expression of practical reason and thus of humanity’s highest, rationally necessary aspiration.

Fichte, we should note, turns to the idea of externalisation or “kenosis” to make sense of Kant’s postulates. Since the idea of kenosis looms large throughout this project, it is worth pausing to consider its history and point of entry into classical German thought. The Greek kenosis signifies “emptying,” as a cup or a jug voided of its content. Its Christian locus classicus is Paul’s letter t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Spark and the Counterfeit: Kant, Fichte, and the Transcendental Critique of Mysticism
• 2. In the Vein of Eckhart: Franz Xaver von Baader’s Mining of Medieval Mysticism
• 3. Now the Bridge Stands Glittering: Apophasis, Kenosis, and Temporality in Novalis’ Mystical Politics
• 4. The Eye With Which I See: All-Seeing Eyes in Hegel, Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa
• 5. Social Grace: Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, and Marx on Appropriation
• 6. A Dramatic Loss of Self: Bataille’s Mystical Praxis
• Conclusion
• Index