Absolute Idealism
Absolute Idealism: General Introduction
The Meaning of Absolute Idealism
Similar to Spinoza, the term “absolute” usually meant nothing more than the universe as a whole. Hence its cognates were sometimes ‘the universe’, ‘the one and all’ or ‘being’.
One distinctive trait of absolute idealism is its monism, its thesis that there is one and only one being that has an independent existence and essence. It opposes not only pluralism but also dualism, the doctrine that there are two kinds of substances, the mental and the physical, the ideal and the real. Absolute idealism emphasizes that the opposition between the real and the ideal, the mental and the physical, disappears in the absolute, which is a single reality.
The idealism refers to the rational, archetypical or intelligible, not to mental, subjective or conscious. To claim everything is ideal means that it is a manifestation of embodiment of the rational, archetypical or intelligible. The ideal can have manifestation in either the mental or the physical.
Absolute versus Critical Idealism
There are two major differences between absolute and critical idealism.
The first is that absolute idealism involves a much greater degree of naturalism than critical idealism. It maintains that we can explain not only empirical consciousness, but transcendental self-consciousness according to its place within nature.
The second major difference is that absolute idealism involves a much greater degree of realism than critical idealism. Its stronger realism derives from the very idea of the absolute, which is nothing less than the whole of nature.
The absolute idealists insist that subjectivity is a necessary manifestation of the absolute, and indeed its highest manifestation, apart from which it cannot fully exist or completely realize its nature.
Schelling and Hegel argued that since the absolute is an organic whole, it is both inside and outside consciousness: inside it, because the identity of the whole depends on each of its parts; and outside it, because the very identity of the part depends on the whole.
The Break with Critical Idealism
The essence of Fichte’s deduction is that the external world must exist because all moral activity requires some obstacle to stimulate and restrain it. But this is to reason from our moral needs to the existence of the conditions for their fulfillment. For the romantics, such an inference is patently invalid: just because something ought to be the case does not mean that it is the case; just because we have a legitimate demand does not mean that we can fulfill it.
Intellectual Sources
There were three sources for absolute idealism: Spinozism, Platonism and vital materialism.
Spinozism
Spinoza’s vision of the universe was both religious and scientific, combining an account of the infinite with a complete naturalism. This seemed to provide a solution to that persistent and notorious conflict between science and religion, reason and faith.
Spinoza’s critique of the Bible, his defense of democracy and his separation of church and state seemed to provide the realization of such classical Protestant ideals as the priesthood of all believers and the liberty of the Christian. Spinoza seemed to liberate the Protestant spirit from its two self-imposed shackles: adherence to the letter of the Bible and allegiance to the state.
Spinoza’s monism seemed to provide a solution to the dualisms that had plagued philosophy since Descartes, and continued to do so after Kant, who, it seemed, had overcome Descartes’ mental–physical dualism only to reestablish some dualisms all his own. The sharp distinctions between noumena and phenomena, understanding and sensibility, were just as bad as that between Descartes’ mind and body. Spinoza’s doctrine that the mental and the physical are simply two different attributes of one and the same thing seemed to provide a path out of the dualistic impasse.
Platonism
A second source of the worldview of absolute idealism was Platonism. The unity of universal and particular in the Platonic form provided the perfect model for the unity of the one and many in the absolute itself.
Vital Materialism
Another crucial source of the worldview of absolute idealism was the rise of vital materialism around the close of the eighteenth century. According to vital materialism, the essence of matter does not consist in extension, as in Cartesian physics, but in motion.
This vitalist concept of nature had profound epistemological implications, one important implication is that it provided a completely new paradigm for understanding the relationship between the mental and the physical. They are no longer distinct kinds of substances, which stand in some mysterious causal connection with one another; rather they are only different degrees of organization and development of a single living force. As Schelling summarized: Nature should be visible spirit, spirit should be invisible nature. Another important implication of vitalism is that the mental and the physical are no longer in a purely causal relation with one another, they are in an expressive relation where one becomes what it is, or develops its determinate character only through the other.
The Rehabilitation of Metaphysics
Absolute idealism appears to be “metaphysical” in the very sense condemned by Kant and Fichte: it involves speculation about the unconditioned, about entities that cannot be given in any possible experience, whether that is Plato’s ideas, Spinoza’s substance, or Herder’s vital forces. So absolute idealism appears to be “transcendent”, going beyond the limits of possible experience, the borderline separating knowledge from fantasy and mysticism. So how did the absolute idealists defend their worldview against Kant’s critique of metaphysics?
The absolute idealists were well aware of Kant’s challenge, and they were eager to meet it on his terms. Their first response to Kant’s challenge is a paradox: only absolute idealism realizes the true spirit of the Kantian philosophy.
Behind this paradox lies their belief that only absolute idealism can remain true to the basic principle of Kant’s philosophy - the principle of subject–object identity - and solve its fundamental problem—the explanation of the possibility of objective knowledge.
To explain the paradox, we need to consider a criticism of Kant, “How do a priori concepts apply to the given empirical manifold of sensibility?” The diagnosis of the failure put the blame on Kant’s unbridgeable dualism between understanding and sensibility. Kant attempted to address the dualism by postulating the idea of an organism, “a technic of nature”, as a principle of reflective judgment. According to this principle, the understanding should proceed in its investigation of nature as if nature is the product of an intelligent design, since this alone explains how the manifold of empirical laws form a systematic unity. It bridges the gap by considering nature as an organic whole. The intellectual or noumenal world is now the design or purpose behind the sensible or phenomenal world. However Kant restricted the principle of judgment to be reflective. But the demand from explaining the interaction of understanding and sensibility is that the principle must be constitutive.
Absolute idealism solves the problem of the deduction by its reinterpretation of the Kantian-Fichtean principle of subject-object identity. All absolute idealists agree that we can explain the possibility of knowledge only if there is some point of identity between the subject and object. The starting point of absolute idealism is a rejection of all forms of dualism, because these make it impossible to explain the correspondence between the subject and object involved in knowledge. This principle must be reformulated in two respects. First, it is necessary to universalize or objectify it, so that all its restrictions to the subject are removed; in other words, subject–object identity does not refer simply to the self-consciousness of the subject but to the single infinite substance of which the subjective and objective are only appearances or attributes. Second, it is necessary to vitalize it, so that it refers to a single living force, of which the subjective and objective are only its different degrees of organization and development.
Seen from another angle, the absolute idealist interpretation of the principle of subject–object identity means that the act of knowledge must be placed within the context of nature as a whole. Both the subject and object are now parts of a single universal force.
The absolute idealists believe that they are true to the spirit of the critical philosophy because they develop its principle of subject–object identity to resolve the outstanding problem of the transcendental deduction. Although their reinterpretation of this principle involves absolutizing it, and so transcending the Kantian–Fichtean limits on knowledge, they insist that it is by this means alone that we resolve the metaphysical problem that the deduction poses but cannot answer.
The Aesthetics of Absolute Idealism
Granted that the metaphysics of absolute idealism resolves the problem of the transcendental deduction, this still does not give us the right to assume its truth. We are left with the question: How do we know that there is an absolute? How do we know that anything exists beyond our own representations? Until we have an answer to this question, we cannot claim to solve the problem of nihilism, still less to remove the suspicion of dogmatism.
Yet the romantics’ skepticism and critique of reason was only the negative side of a much more positive and imaginative program: their attempt to establish the sovereignty of the aesthetic, the primacy of art over the realms of reason and action. While they insist that we cannot know the existence of the absolute through reason, they also stress that we can know it, if only vaguely and obscurely, through immediate aesthetic intuition. We know that there is an infinite universe outside us, that there is something much greater than us on which we depend, through aesthetic experience. The feeling of the sublime, the longing to reunite ourselves with all things, and the experience of love, in which I see myself in others as others see themselves in me, show us that we know an other that transcends our own circle of consciousness.
This faith in the sovereignty of art went hand-in-hand with the absolute idealists’ organic concept of the universe: to regard nature as an organism and as a work of art are one and the same. The universe is nothing less than a natural work of art, and a work of art is nothing less an artificial organism. Hence the realms of truth and beauty, the natural and the aesthetic, coincide.
Hölderlin and Absolute Idealism
Philosophy versus Poetry
For absolute idealism to be born, it had to go four steps beyond Fichte’s critical idealism. First, it had to deny that subject–object identity consists in the self-consciousness of the ego alone, and it had to affirm instead that it exists only in the single universal substance, of which the subjective and objective are only appearances. Second, it had to dispute the purely regulative status of the absolute and to stress its constitutive role; in other words, it had to contend that the absolute is not only an ethical ideal but an existing reality. Third, it had to transcend the Kantian–Fichtean limits on knowledge and to claim cognition of the absolute. Fourth, it had to hold that nature is not a projection of consciousness, still less an obstacle to the will, but an autonomous organism having independent reality and inherent rationality.
As early as the spring of 1795, Hölderlin had argued against the subjective status of the principle of subject–object identity; he had postulated an aesthetic intuition of the absolute; he had criticized Fichte’s concept of nature; and he had given nature a standing independent of the ego. For all these reasons, Hölderlin has been considered the father of absolute idealism.
Hölderlin’s twin devotion to poetry and philosophy was the crux and cru- cible of his intellectual development, creating both its agenda and problems. His loyalty to poetry made it necessary for him to justify the realm of art; and his involvement with both disciplines made it imperative that he provide some account of the proper relationship between them. His main goals were to defend poetry and to explain its connection with philosophy. Hölderlin’s struggle with these issues eventually led to a controversial conclusion, which became the guiding theme of his intellectual career: the sovereignty of poetry over philosophy, the supremacy of aesthetic sense over reason.
The strengths and weaknesses of a philosophy, Hölderlin believed, could only be lived through and experienced, and not determined through pure reason. Since personal character and spiritual development are the proper subject of drama and the novel, they prove to be the only proper medium to explore and resolve philosophical problems.
Sources of Absolute Idealism
Holderlin is influenced by Spinoza’s pantheism and Platonism. To go beyond Kant and Fichte means refusing to see aesthetic ideas merely as regulative principles that we should read into appearances, and granting them instead a constitutive status to refer to the structure of reality itself. Holderlin got this from Plato’s Phaedrus. His argument here ultimately goes back to Socrates in the Meno: that we can search for unity, a pattern in particulars, only if we have already had some experience of that unity or pattern itself.
Holderlin is also influenced by Jacobi. There are several strands of Jacobi’s thinking that aided him in making the break with Fichte.
The first strand was Jacobi’s insistence that the concept of existence is something simple, immediate, and fundamental: In my judgment, the greatest merit of the investigator is to disclose existence, to reveal it . . . Explanation is only a means, a path toward the goal— never the final end. His final goal is that which cannot be explained: the irresolvable, immediate and simple. (IV/1, 72)
A second strand was Jacobi’s realism, his belief that we have an immediate knowledge of the existence of things outside ourselves.
The third and final strand was Jacobi’s interpretation of Spinoza. He interpreted Spinoza’s immanent ensoph in terms of the concept of being. Spinoza’s single universal ‘substance’ is nothing less than being itself, which is “the pure principle of actuality in everything actual, of being in all existence.”
Hölderlin combined Fichte’s transcendental concept of the absolute with Jacobi’s interpretation of Spinoza to produce a surprising result: that the fundamental transcendental basis of all consciousness is not the ego but being itself.
The Critique of Fichte
In 1795 Hölderlin took his most important step beyond the idealism of the Wissenschaftslehre, objecting against the purely subjective status of the principle of subject-object identity. He insists that this principle cannot be equated with self-consciousness but must be identified with pure being itself. The paradigm of subject–object identity is not self-consciousness, he implies, but the single universal substance of which thought and extension, the subjective and objective, are only manifestations or appearances.
Aesthetic Sense
Hölderlin anticipated absolute idealism not only by postulating the existence of the absolute, and not only by denying its merely subjective status, but also by affirming the possibility of actual knowledge of the absolute. For Hölderlin, the absolute is not only an ideal for action, as in Fichte, neither is it merely an object of faith, as in Kant. Rather, the absolute is the object of a special kind of experience, the intuition or feeling that arises from aesthetic sense. Following Fichte’s terminology, though not his meaning, Hölderlin called such an experience “intellectual intuition”.
Hölderlin does not hesitate to express his general thesis: “Hence all religion is in its essence poetic” (IV, 281). This is indeed Hölderlin’s main difference with the later Hegel, who will later attempt to express the intuitions and feelings of religion into systematic form.
The Concept of Nature
Criticizing the subjective status of the absolute, postulating its existence, and then affirming knowledge of it were three fundamental steps toward absolute idealism. It is also necessary to consider Hölderlin’s role in formulating the romantic concept of nature. Before Hegel and around the same time as Schelling, Hölderlin developed the vitalist conception of nature that later became so crucial for the philosophy of identity.
He identifies the unity of the subjective and objective with “pure life” rather than with “pure being”. He also makes it clear that pure life is more than unity alone, because life involves the process of growth, organization or differentiation, the development from the unified, inchoate and indeterminate into the manifold, organized and determinate. Indeed, far from the serenity of pure being, Hölderlin now insists that life consists in struggle, a conflict between extremes where each realizes itself only by becoming its opposite, so that the moment of greatest conflict is also that of greatest reconciliation. The life that manifests itself in time does not consist in being but in a process of becoming that is “between being and non-being”.
Hölderlin stresses how both the subjective and objective become what they are only through the other, or how each realizes its nature only through the other. The objective realizes itself as the subjective because nature reaches its perfection in art and human consciousness, which is its highest degree of organization and development. Conversely, the subjective realizes itself as the objective because art attains its perfection in becoming nature, and because human activity realizes its final end only in becoming one again with all of nature.
It is a distinctive feature of Hölderlin’s organic vision of the universe that it consists in a cyclical process of continual formation and dissolution. The universe does not develop only progressively by infinite growth, as if were constantly becoming more differentiated and organized, but it also develops regressively through decay and death, where the organized and determinate returns to its primal mass and unity. Hölderlin did not deny that human self-consciousness can be seen as the culmination of nature, the highest organization of its powers. But for him it was also important to see that human self-consciousness is only one part of the universe, which greatly transcends it, and that it is to the great ocean of the one and all that everyone eventually returns. Thus death was an essential part of the cosmos.
Philosophy in Literature
Fichte’s concept of striving had raised a general question for Hölderlin: How should the self relate to nature? Should the self become everything and nature nothing? Or should nature become everything and the self nothing? Fichte wanted the ego to be everything, because the aim of infinite striving is for nature to disappear; but Spinoza demanded that nature be everything, because he saw the self as a mode of the single infinite substance.
What is so striking about Hölderlin’s solution to this problem is that he rejects both Fichte and Spinoza. He thinks that they represent two extreme attitudes, and that to find the truth it is necessary to find some middle path between them. The proper attitude towards nature, Hölderlin suggests, must be a synthesis of Fichte and Spinoza that preserves their truths and cancels their errors. What he attempts to show throughout the novel of Hyperion is that each attitude towards nature evolves from and depends on a person’s life and stage of development. Since both attitudes are united only through the complete story of a person’s life, their synthesis is the proper subject of literature rather than philosophy.
Hölderlin had no trouble incorporating Fichte’s concept of striving into his worldview. He simply Platonized it, interpreting striving in terms of eros, the longing of the soul to return to the eternal. The greatest danger for Hölderlin posed by Fichte’s concept of striving is nihilism. Since the self sees the purpose of life as its struggle against nature, it lapses into despair as soon as it recognizes—as it eventually must—that its foe is ultimately insurmountable. The striving self then sees the futility of its efforts and so peers into the abyss. After realizing that all his labors to restore the glory of Greece have been in vain, Hyperion grows despondent and gives vent to the darkest brooding: “we are born for nothing, we love nothing, believe in nothing, work for nothing, and gradually convince ourselves of nothing”. It is just at this point, Hölderlin thinks, that the opposing Spinozist view of our relation to nature has its value. For the only cure for such nihilism is to turn to nature. If we cannot achieve unity with nature through our own efforts, we must attain it by surrendering ourselves to the whole of nature. This is how Hyperion saves himself when all his hopes and plans have come to naught. Whenever his struggle fails, he surrenders himself to the arms of nature.
To synthesize Fichte’s and Spinoza’s views, Hölderlin places each attitude toward nature in a broader historical framework: the innocence—fall—redemption scenario of the Christian tradition. Following the Genesis myth, Kant and Schiller had seen history as the story of mankind’s struggle to regain paradise, which consists in its original unity with nature. While Kant and Schiller realize that their ideal of unity is unattainable, the struggle has led to the development of reason and freedom. Spinoza’s unity with nature represents the lost ideal, Fichte’s concept of striving expresses the struggle to regain paradise.
Hence the standpoints of Fichte and Spinoza have equal legitimacy because they represent the two poles of the orbit. Which standpoint is valid, Hölderlin implies, simply depends on the phase of personal development. He makes the validity of the philosophy depend on the individual’s own choice. If the truth of a philosophy depends on choice, stage of development, or experience, then the conditions of its validity are ultimately better represented in literature than in philosophy, given that it is only in literature that it is possible to portray such personal factors.
If the idealist phase mirrors nature’s movement from the universal and inchoate to the individual and organized, where all the energies of the universe seem to concentrate themselves in self-consciousness, their highest organization and development, the realist phase corresponds to nature’s movement from the individual and organized back to the universal and inchoate, where the individual disappears and is swallowed up again in the infinite. It is the task of the poet, Hölderlin insists, to represent both these movements as a unity (IV, 251, 259). To achieve this task would be to show how one’s personal development mirrors the movement of the uni- verse itself. Back to German Idealism