The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and Schelling

Christopher Lauer

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441115881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

In this rigorous historical analysis, Lauer challenges traditional readings that have reduced two of German idealism's most important thinkers to opposing caricatures: Hegel the uncompromising systematist blind to the novelty and contingency of human life and Schelling the protean thinker drawn to all manner of pseudoscientific charlatanry. Bringing together recent scholarship that is just beginning to realise Schelling's centrality in the overthrow of metaphysics and Hegel's openness to diversity and innovation, this book shows that both thinkers can be read as contributing to the Kantian project of showing both the utter necessity and the limitations of reason. In readings of texts spanning each thinker's career, Lauer shows that animating much of Hegel and Schellings' most passionate work is their recognition of the need neither for a canonization of reason nor for its overthrow, but for its 'suspension'. Their lifelong willingness to revisit both their definitions of reason and their accounts of its role in philosophy give these discussions a vitality and depth that few in the history of philosophy can match.

Chapter 1
The Surge of Reason: Faculty Epistemology in Kant and Fichte

Since Schelling and Hegel each carried a schoolboy’s fondness for myth into old age, it is no great surprise that each couched the origins of his most treasured insights in mythical terms. For each, pre-Kantian conceptions of reason disclosed only a primordial chaos, whose grandchildren were responsible for finally bringing daylight to the world.¹ While the following chapters will examine the extent to which Hegel and Schelling succeeded in bringing this daylight, in this chapter I will show that there was indeed much that was chaotic in Kant and Fichte’s accounts of reason. Though I will not be able to explore all the permutations of these pre-Schellingian, protocosmic accounts of reason’s nature and function, many of which, specialists are sure to point out, predicted or even surpassed some of the insights of Schelling and Hegel,² I intend at least to show that there was no single Kantian or Fichtean conception of reason, that reason’s fate was not already settled in its infancy.

Yet if Schelling and Hegel’s myth of reason led from the chaos of Wolffian rationalism to the daylight of Transcendental Idealism, its intermediaries were not darkness and night, but the dawning of Kant’s first efforts to delineate reason’s possibilities. In Kant’s critical philosophy, Schelling and Fichte saw an answer to the fanatics or Schwärmer who looked everywhere but in themselves for freedom. Instead of relying on quasi-mechanical Humean laws of association to explain humankind’s cognition of nature, Kant analyzed the mind’s functioning in terms of faculties, theoretical abstractions that explain how the mind in its freedom operates. Yet even these abstractions could not be reconciled with a robust account of human freedom, and thus in the 1790s Kant, Fichte and Schelling began to replace the society of faculties hinted at in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with an account of reason that identified reason with freedom itself. In Kant’s three Critiques, we see reason emerge from a field of cognitive competitors to gain supremacy among the faculties of the mind. In Fichte’s early presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre, though reason’s centrality as a critical tool is denied, it nevertheless takes its place at the center of all philosophical striving, beginning to determine what it means to think at all.

The First Critique’s Basic Distinction

A crucial first step in Kantian critique is distinguishing between two sorts of philosophical objects: those of reason (Vernunft) and the understanding (Verstand). Whereas Verstand seeks to relate objects to their conditions, Vernunft seeks only what is unconditioned (A307/B364). Thus while the understanding takes isolated portions of nature as its objects, the object most proper to reason is the will (Wille), which gives laws unconditionally and whose operation can be cognized without the mediation of anything external. Since the aim of Kantian critique is to clear away everything uncertain in our knowledge so a firm foundation for metaphysics can be established (A xv), all critique must begin with a critique of reason. This genitive is meant both objectively and subjectively: to show that we know with certainty any nontrivial truth, we must investigate the source of all unconditioned knowledge from this very source. Otherwise, our access to the structure of cognition would be conditioned by something outside of cognition, which would itself require a critique.

Yet in carrying out its own critique, reason is placed in the problematic position of having to assign itself its own limits. The history of metaphysics, according to Kant, is filled with dogmatists who posited beings beyond all the limits of experience (A296/B352). In order to avoid their excesses, reason must judiciously eschew all of these transcendent principles and limit itself to what can be given to it within experience. This, however, as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all would note,³ implies the troublesome proposition that knowledge begins with reason assuming that it is not the beginning of knowledge. Whereas Fichte would respond to this difficulty by introducing an intellectual intuition that could apprehend that reason is not the beginning of knowledge, Schelling (after 1797) and Hegel would accept reason as the beginning of knowledge and strive to understand how at the same time there must also be something external to reason at the origin of knowledge. Kant, however, never treats this problem explicitly in the first Critique and instead offers the division of cognition into sensation, imagination, understanding, and reason as his explanation for the origin of thought. Instead of investigating how thought can move from the unconditioned to the conditioned, he describes a collection of mutually conditioning faculties.

Given this focus on the interrelations of the faculties, it was natural for Kant to use the term Vermögen (faculty) interchangeably with Kraft (force), a term reserved for objects of the understanding, and then to ask whether we can isolate (isolieren) reason as an independent source of concepts or whether it is a ‘merely subordinate faculty’ that gives form to the products of the understanding (A305/B362). Yet in the ‘Regulative Employment of the Ideas,’ Kant suggests that jurisdiction over the faculties be turned over to reason. As the faculty of unification, reason is compelled to seek the greatest unity possible of the mind’s various Kräfte. For instance, Kant claims it is the task of reason to determine whether the imagination might be reducible to a combination of other mental forces or ‘even identical with understanding and reason’ (A648–9/B676–7). He does not, however, follow through with unifying the faculties in the first Critique. Although the B edition of the Transcendental Deduction could be seen as Kant’s attempt to incorporate the imagination into the understanding,⁴ Kant undertakes no major efforts to show the unity of the faculties in his revision. Then, in the Preface to the second Critique, Kant argues that while an account of human cognition must begin with the individual analysis of the faculties, it is incomplete so long as the faculty of reason has not united them into an idea of the whole (K 5: 10). Nevertheless, Kant again defers a unified account of the faculties to another time.

The Third Critique

Finally, in the Critique of Judgment, we see reason’s efforts to unify the faculties. Kant’s fanciful Introduction describes what we might summarize as a sort of treaty of Westphalia, with reason acknowledging the rights of understanding to its own territory. Kant reiterates his claim from the first two Critiques that the understanding is responsible for the production of all natural or conditioned concepts and reason for the unconditioned concept of freedom (K 5: 176). Yet between these two faculties lies another, the power of judgment, which legislates over no objects and yet nevertheless can be said to have its proper territory (Boden), and not just a residence (Aufenthalt) (K 5: 177). As the feudal king of the realm of philosophy, the cognitive faculty in general has parceled out territory to both reason and the understanding and yet for some reason is compelled to grant the unoccupied territory between them to the power of judgment. Judgment is clearly not given this territory to halt its nomadic wandering, for Kant insists that this territory is not a residence. Yet judgment also has no dominion over either nature or freedom, for these belong entirely within the realms of the understanding and reason. Moreover, there is no need for a buffer between the two faculty-lords, for both are able to legislate over the territory of sensible nature in harmony; the concept of freedom does not disturb natural legislation any more than natural concepts disturb free legislation (K 5: 175). And yet, the only field (Feld) outside of this territory of two realms (Gebiete) is the supersensible, which, while bestowing authority on the cognitive faculties, allows neither of them to govern it. Though reason can populate the frontier of the supersensible with regulative ideas, none of the cognitive faculties can ever settle it.

Still, in an echo of the second Critique’s postulates of practical reason, Kant goes on to argue that reason must think of the territory of sensible nature as within the supersensible’s sphere of influence. And in order for this influence to be intelligible, there must be a region of thought that contains neither theoretical nor practical content, which nevertheless can ground the unity of the sensible and supersensible. To show how this unity is possible, Kant places the realms of nature and freedom within a larger political community, arguing that the faculty of desire stands opposed to the cognitive faculties of reason, the understanding, and judgment (K 5: 197).⁵ The envoy between these faculty kingdoms is pleasure, which can be either a cause or an effect of their unity. In the lower pleasures, the search for pleasure forces desire into consultation with cognition. In contrast, the higher pleasures, such as the quickening (Belebung) that accompanies the apprehension of a beautiful object, are produced by a prior unity of desire and cognition. Just as pleasure serves as a mediator between the cognitive and desiring faculties, Kant supposes that judgment contains a ground for the unity of the sensible and supersensible (K 5: 178–9). Or more specifically, judgment must somehow allow for the transition from understanding to reason.

In the realm of natural science, this is to take place as follows: the understanding hands down a few basic laws for the apprehension of nature, such as the nature of forces, that determine all subsequent judgments about nature (K 5: 167). Based upon these transcendental laws of the understanding, determinate judgments subsume particulars under universals in a rigid, mechanical fashion. But since nature’s forms vastly outnumber the forms produced by the pure understanding, in order for science to be possible there must also be judgments that subsume particulars under universals accessible to, but not necessitated by, the human understanding (K 5: 168). Although such reflective judgments appear contingent to our understanding, if they correspond to natural laws they must be necessary ‘in virtue of a principle, unknown to us, of the unity of the manifold’ (K 5: 180). Thus the task of a critique of reflective judgment is to show how we can perceive the unity of the sensible manifold as if it were legislated by an understanding to which we have no a priori access. (We cannot have access to this understanding, for otherwise the judgment would be determinate.) The cognition of the sensible manifold is thus fragmented at the level of the human understanding and requires us to postulate a superhuman understanding to make this unity intelligible. But what faculty is qualified to postulate the purposiveness of nature assumed in this superhuman understanding? In the first Critique, only reason is capable of producing regulative ideas that, while not telling us anything positive about the world, govern its intelligibility. But here in the third Critique, Kant claims that the purposiveness of nature is a concept produced by judgment. Like the concepts of the understanding, the judgment of nature’s purposiveness requires no reflection and arises as if mechanically in the course of experience (and not by the free positing of a supersensible reason). But Kant emphasizes that this concept does not determine how we actually judge, but how we ought to judge (K 5: 182). In order to make our statements about the empirical world sensible, we ought to judge nature purposive.

Yet this is a strange sort of ought, as it lacks the freedom associated with laws of practical reason. The power of judgment is compelled to suppose a harmony of nature with the human understanding, but the extent of this harmony is left open-ended (K 5: 188). Kant does not see this as a flaw, because his goal is not to show when the faculty of judgment should and should not be employed, but how this faculty is so constituted as to allow reason to incorporate the understanding into itself. Reason’s proposed treaty at the beginning of the Introduction is thus disingenuous. What appears to be a cession of territory and demarcation of its own boundaries actually blurs its boundaries, suggesting the potential need for abandoning or suspending what Kant in the first Critique called the discipline of reason (A707/B735). It seems that from 1781 to 1790 Kant has shifted from opposing a tyranny of reason so far as possible to sufficiently fearing a power vacuum among the faculties to promise reason indeterminate power.

Providing perhaps the strongest evidence of this new conservatism are Kant’s efforts to bring the imagination under the shadow of criticism. Just as we saw with the understanding, the Introduction to the third Critique initially suggests an autonomy of the imagination. Although the table of cognitive faculties at the end of the Introduction lists only the understanding, reason, and judgment, at other points Kant clearly designates the imagination as a cognitive faculty in its own right (e.g., K 5: 191; K 5: 314). The grounds for this ambivalence can be traced back to the first Critique, where Kant strives both to understand the imagination as one force among others and to reduce it to a unified cognitive faculty. Using Kant’s earlier terminology, we can say that the territory of the imagination is in doubt; but when reflected on by the understanding, this is the same as saying that the force of imagination, the Einbildungskraft, die Kraft der Einbildung, is in doubt. Of Gasché and Sallis’s claims that Kant’s power of imagination twists free of a conscious subjectivity there can be no doubt.⁶ Since the imagination underlies the very possibility of a transcendental unity of apperception, it must not only absolutely precede subjectivity, but escape it, disrupting any attempts by the will to gain complete dominion over consciousness. But there must be doubt over whether imagination also twists free of reason. True, the imagination solicits a kind of free play antithetical to the determinate autonomy that Kant envisions practical reason to be. But if it is reason’s task to come to terms with all the powers of mind (as Kant claims in the ‘Regulative Employment of the Ideas’), then the imagination as such belongs in reason’s jurisdiction despite reason’s lack of executive power over it. If, then, the structure of practical reason traced out especially in the first two Critiques proves inadequate to pronouncing and enforcing judgments over the imagination, reason’s response in the third Critique is not to accept this inadequacy, but to expand itself to meet the challenges of effective criticism.

The locus in which reason attempts this reincorporation is the figure of the genius. In the most sustained investigation of the interrelation of the faculties of any of the three Critiques, Kant seeks to show how even something as seemingly irrational as artistic genius is indeed accessible, if not reproducible, by reason. In order to explain the production of free works of art by an individual whose actions must be entirely empirically explicable, Kant suggests that the genius is able to tap into the purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit) of nature without imposing her own purposes (Zwecke) on the artwork. That is, although the production of the artwork can be explained by the artist’s empirical psychology, nevertheless the formal purposiveness of the artwork shows that genius can only actualize itself through nature’s free purposiveness working through the artist. Genius thus serves as a model for how apparently prerational sensibility can be drawn into the imagination and subsequently into reason. Just as judgment supposes nature to follow a purposiveness compatible with the understanding and hence with reason, genius gives imagination the power of ‘creating another nature, as it were, out of the material that nature actually gives it’ (K 5: 314). Instead of meeting the gift of nature with reflective gratitude, reason returns it to the retailer in exchange for a more rational version.

Unlike with the first nature, we need not postulate a possible accord between this second nature and reason, for the existence of such an accord accompanies the very possibility of genius. In the Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment’s section ‘On the Faculties of the Mind Which Constitute Genius’ (§49), Kant considers those cases in which ‘certain products that are expected to reveal themselves at least in part as fine art (schöneKunst)’ and are completely in accord with good taste nevertheless are completely without spirit (ohne Geist) (K 5: 313). Poems, orations, and even women can have everything requisite to be a beautiful object and yet lack spirit. ‘Spirit in an aesthetic sense,’ Kant explains, ‘is the animating principle in the mind [das belebende Prinzip im Gemüt]’ (K 5: 313). The word translated here as ‘animating’ is belebende, the same word Kant uses in describing the way a beautiful object stimulates the imagination and understanding into an active and free play (K 5: 219). Thus spirit is the principle that makes an art object animated and ultimately what allows the observer to judge it as beautiful. This principle, Kant maintains, ‘is nothing but the power [Vermägen] of exhibiting aesthetic ideas’ (K 5: 313–14). By ‘aesthetic idea,’ Kant means ‘a representation (Vorstellung) of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e. no concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it’ (K 5: 314). Thus an aesthetic idea is the converse of a rational one: whereas a rational idea is a concept to which no intuition can be adequate, an aesthetic idea is a representation to which no concept can be adequate. An object’s spirit (in the aesthetic sense) is thus its ability to evoke representations which playfully resist conceptualization and stimulate the cognitive faculties.

This stimulation, Kant elaborates, is more complex than the free play of imagination and understanding that he had alluded to earlier. The imagination has the ability to restructure (umbilden) experience when it finds it too tedious, and it does so through more than the laws of analogy introduced in the first Critique (B218). When the imagination reworks experience, it is no longer bound to the determined laws of cognitive functioning, but freely employs reason to produce representations that surpass (übertreffen) nature (K 5: 314). These representations surpass nature in the dual sense that they are underdetermined by the cognitive laws of the mind, but also produce an intuition of freedom working in and through nature. When an object produces a representation that belongs to a concept in such a way that it infinitely exceeds it, the representation sets the power of reason into motion, stimulating it to freely explore its freedom (K 5: 414–15). The very idea of the supersensible can give rise to such a quickening, provided that it is attached to a sensible expression. One finds in poetry, for instance, the invocation of the infinite in certain finite representations which could not possibly capture the infinite (K 5: 316). While all human beings are capable of appreciating the incomprehensibility of aesthetic spirit, the genius holds the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Surge of Reason: Faculty Epistemology in Kant and Fichte
• Chapter 2: Ascendant Reason: The Early Schelling
• Chapter 3: Metastatic Reason: Schelling’s Nature Philosophy
• Chapter 4: Synthetic Reason: The System of Transcendental Idealism
• Chapter 5: Reason as Reflection and Speculation: Hegel’s Collaboration with Schelling
• Chapter 6: ‘The Sacred Abyss’: Schelling’s Identity Philosophy
• Chapter 7: Space, Time, and Suspension: Hegel’s ‘Absolute Knowing’
• Chapter 8: Suspended Reason: Hegel on ‘The Certainty and Truth of Reason’
• Chapter 9: Reason on the Periphery: Schelling’s Freedom Essay
• Chapter 10: Reason’s Systematic Excess I: Hegel’s System
• Chapter 11: Reason’s Systematic Excess II: The Transition to Schelling’s Positive Philosophy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index