The Theological Project of Modernism: Faith and the Conditions of Mineness (Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology) 9780198722649, 0198722648

Table of contents :
Cover
Series
The Theological Project of Modernism
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
1. Mineness and Faith
1.1 Intending a Life
1.2 Narrative
1.3 Narrating Self and Circumstance
1.4 Potentially Disintegrating Circumstances
1.5 Faith and Modern Theology
1.6 Historical Constraints
1.7 The Goodness of “Mineness”
2. Giving Oneself the Law
2.1 Deterministic Beginnings
2.2 A New Approach to Space and Time
2.3 Disunity between Subject and Object?
2.4 “One and All Mine”: The Unity of Consciousness
2.5 Freedom and the Moral Law
2.6 Reasonable Hope in Happiness
2.7 Reasonable Hope in Worthiness to be Happy
2.8 Objections
3. Harmonizing Dependence
3.1 Freedom and Character
3.2 Harmonizing Circumstances
3.3 Infinitude of Humanity
3.4 The Limits of Human Infinitude
3.5 Infinitude as Unity of Oppositions
3.6 God-Consciousness and God-Forgetfulness
3.7 Redeeming God-Consciousness
3.8 Objections
4. Reconciling Spirit
4.1 From Civil Religion to Reconciling Oppositions
4.2 Self-Unity in Relation to Otherness
4.3 Unity with World-Spirit
4.4 Consummate Reconciliation
4.5 Objections
5. Personalizing Faith
5.1 Historical Method
5.2 Spirit and Religion
5.3 Mistrust toward God
5.4 The Vocation of Jesus
5.5 Trust in God
5.6 Synthesizing History
5.7 Objection
6. Integrating In-Spite-Of
6.1 Critical Theology
6.2 The Possibility of Integrated Selfhood
6.3 Estrangement
6.4 New Being
6.5 Reintegrated Selfhood
6.6 Method of Correlation
6.7 Synthesizing the Mineness Project
6.8 Theology after Modernism?
Index

Citation preview

OX FOR D S T U DI E S I N   A NA LY T IC T H E OL O GY Series Editors Michael C. Rea    Oliver D. Crisp

OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY Analytic Theology utilizes the tools and methods of contemporary analytic philosophy for the purposes of constructive Christian theology, paying attention to the Christian tradition and development of doctrine. This innovative series of studies showcases high quality, cutting edge research in this area, in monographs and symposia. Titles in the series include: Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God William Hasker The End of the Timeless God R. T. Mullins

The Theological Project of Modernism Faith and the Conditions of Mineness

K E V I N W.   H E C TOR

1

1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Kevin W. Hector 2015 The moral rights of the author‌have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015931638 ISBN 978–0–19–872264–9 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For Bruce McCormack and Jeffrey Stout

Preface Modern theology is not very popular among contemporary theologians; given the prevailing understanding, it is not hard to see why. The customary account goes something like this:  modern theology arose as a response to increasingly severe challenges posed to traditional beliefs by natural science, historical criticism, conflicts among and within traditions, and so on. Faced with such challenges, modern thinkers tried to establish a new, secure basis for belief, namely “reason.” Reason seemed like a good candidate for such a basis, insofar as it provides us with universal, lawlike principles, by contrast with the particular, accidental principles handed down by custom and tradition; these universal principles could thus stand as a criterion with which to test other candidate beliefs, and if the latter passed the test, they could be recognized as non-accidental, too. In that way, the story goes, modern thinkers thought they could rise above the sheer givenness of historical particularity.1 So understood, modern theology has seemed liable to serious objections, three of which have become especially prominent. First, many have worried that insofar as it subordinates God, Jesus, faith, etc. to human reason, modern theology commits idolatry; this is what Karl Barth had in mind, for instance, when he urged, against modern theology, that the First Commandment should serve as a theological axiom.2 A  second objection

1   Examples of this account are not hard to come by. So David Bentley Hart, for instance, asserts that “all the magisterial projects of modernity . . . are recognizably modern insofar as they attempt to ground their discourse in some stable, transhistorical process, method, set of principles, or canon of rationality” (The Beauty of the Infinite [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003], 6). Likewise, Stanley Hauerwas claims that “Kant sought to secure knowledge and morality from the skepticism that the Enlightenment, by its attempt to free all thought from the past, had produced . . . Accordingly, Kant sought to ground ethics in reason itself.” Hauerwas then suggests that Kant’s approach is characteristic of modern theology more generally: “Protestant liberal theology after Kant,” he writes, “is but a series of footnotes to his work” (“How ‘Christian Ethics’ Came to Be,” in John Berkman and Michael G. Cartwright (eds.), The Hauerwas Reader [Durham: Duke University Press, 2001], 44–5). Relevantly similar, influential treatments of modernism include Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); and, more recently, J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). My own understanding of modernism is much closer in spirit to that of Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and closer in constructive impulse to that of Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 2   Barth, “Das erste Gebot als theologisches Axiom,” Zwischen den Zeiten 11 (1933); cf. Barth’s assessment of modern theology in Evangelische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert, Theologische Studien 49 (Zollikon-Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1957). We will return to Barth’s criticisms in Chapters 5 and 6.

viii Preface is that that which modern theology takes to be universal is actually just a particular historical-cultural perspective, namely that of white European intellectuals; what these intellectuals saw as Universal Reason, on this objection, was just what was taken for granted as reasonable by those who belonged to their particular context—hence modern “reason” was a kind of optical illusion. This is related to a third objection, that modern thinkers so emphasized reason that it distorted their view of humanity, particularly insofar as reason was contrasted with bodily life and the vulnerabilities to which persons are exposed. The second and third objections have recently been joined together by J. Kameron Carter, though he was not the first to raise them. As Carter sees it, modern theology’s would-be universalization of a particular perspective, along with its disembodied conception of humanity, is characteristic of what he terms its “whiteness.” Carter thus objects, on the one hand, to theology’s role in “the ongoing ‘project’ of modernity,” which Carter identifies as “the political and pseudotheological significance ascribed to whiteness as the basis of Western civilization,” and, on the other, to modern theology’s “forgetting of the everyday practices of people in their real worlds of pain, suffering, poverty, and death.”3 According to Carter, then, modern theology’s “reason” is simply a universalization of a particular “white” perspective, and this perspective can be treated as universal only to the extent that modern theologians are forgetful of particularity, of everyday life and struggle, and of everything else that does not fit into that perspective. If modern theology is unfashionable, accordingly, this is due, in part, to its alleged idolatrousness, its forgetfulness of particularity, and its disregard for bodily vulnerability. There is some truth to the prevailing understanding, but in the chapters that follow I will argue that it overlooks several of modern theology’s principal features, and that many of the usual objections therefore miss the mark. So, for instance, critics often portray modern theology as a series of footnotes to Kant, but if so, it is important to recognize that Kant’s lasting contribution to theology was not only, and perhaps not primarily, a method for universalizing reason, but a problem, namely, how persons could identify with their lives or experience them as “mine,” especially given their vulnerability to tragedy, injustice, luck, guilt, and other “oppositions.” 4 For Kant as well as his successors, faith—specifically faith in a God in and by whom all oppositions are reconciled—played an essential role in addressing this problem. Faith in such a God was supposed to enable one to identify with one’s life, but this does not mean, and should not be thought to mean, that God was treated as a mere instrument for solving humanity’s problems, since, for most modern  Carter, Race, 42, 373.   For claims to the effect that modern theology is a series of footnotes to Kant, see the Hauerwas passage quoted in note 1; Carter seems likewise to suggest that “the ongoing ‘project’ of modernity” is an extension of “the Kantian vision” (Race, 42). 3

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theologians, the human predicament and the divine solution were both understood in theological terms, as a mark of our fallenness and of justification by grace, respectively. Naturally, this solution raised the question of how faith could itself be one’s own; a key component of the answer that emerged was that persons can identify with faith insofar as each puts his or her own stamp on the faith that was mediated to him or her by others, so that the faith of each continually opens up new self-expressive possibilities for others, and faith would thus bear an ever-enriched and ever-enriching texture of particularity. As I see it, then, something crucial has been left out of the prevailing account, since modern theologians were in fact chiefly concerned with that which they supposedly overlook, namely the vulnerability and particularity of humanity, as well as our dependence upon justification by grace. Once modern theology has been brought into proper focus, it becomes apparent that contemporary theologians may stand in a closer relationship to it than they realize. In light of these claims, it should be plain why a book on modern theology would focus on the conditions under which one’s life could have a shape such that one could identify with it or, for short, on “mineness.” There is also good reason for a book on “mineness” to focus on modern theology, not least because modern theologians have some light to shed on this issue. One of their key arguments, interestingly, is that historical reconstruction of the sort undertaken here can itself contribute to “mineness,” insofar as the synthesis and appropriation of historical phenomena opens up possibilities for the subsequent syntheses and appropriations of others; if so, then tracing a history of modern theology might not only shed light on the conditions of “mineness,” but contribute to their being met. By now, it should be evident that I  think theology has something to say to, and something to learn from, a wider public. I  recognize that this is a controversial position, and will address objections to it in due course. For now, I want to point out a key aspect of my learning from others, and, so, this book’s place in Oxford’s Analytic Theology series. As I  understand it, “analytic theology” is an approach characterized, above all, by a commitment to the precision, clarity, and rigor prized by analytic philosophers, and by a creative deployment of these philosophers’ best insights. I  intend for this book to exemplify both of these characteristics. With respect to the former, I  have tried throughout to explain key concepts by relating them to well-understood examples and other concepts, to make the steps of my arguments explicit (usually by putting them in the form of conditionals), to anticipate and respond to objections to which my claims are liable, and, in short, to submit my claims to the sort of discipline practiced among analytic philosophers. With respect to the latter, I simply could not have written this book without drawing significantly on the resources of analytic philosophy,

x Preface as is evident in the way Chapter 1 frames the project. That is to say, it was only after I had sufficiently digested work by Elizabeth Anscombe, Michael Bratman, Donald Davidson, John Martin Fisher, Harry Frankfurt, Peter van Inwagen, Robert Kane, Albert Mele, Martha Nussbaum, Amelie Rorty, Galen Strawson, Michael Thompson, David Velleman, Bernard Williams, Susan Wolf, and many other analytic philosophers, that I could get the right sort of grip on the historical and theological issues that I was trying to understand. By drawing their work into this project, I hope not only to clarify and lend precision to my treatment of these issues, but to introduce them to a wider theological audience. I also hope this book will extend the range of issues to which an analytictheological approach is taken. Thus far, analytic theology has focused mostly on issues involving metaphysics and epistemology, and, given the explosion of groundbreaking work done in metaphysics and epistemology over the past fifty years, there is good reason for this. Analytic philosophy has also made significant strides in other areas, however, including some that are relevant to this project: the philosophy of action, of freedom, of selfhood, and of narrative, not to mention the recent upsurge of analytically minded work in the history of philosophy. In this book, then, I  hope not only to contribute to analytic theology but to extend analytic theology into new areas. In so doing, I hope also to answer the two concerns I most commonly hear about analytic theology, namely, that it is a-historical (or insufficiently sensitive to history), and that it has nothing to say about matters of deep human concern. To be sure, analytic theology does not need my book in order to address these concerns, since they are pretty obviously mistaken, but I do think that this book represents a fairly decisive refutation of them.5 In any case, I hope not only to learn from analytic philosophers, but to shed theological light on some of the issues they treat. As I will argue, one’s life can be recognizably one’s own even if it is not entirely due to one. This is important for several reasons, one of which is that this book can be recognizably mine even though I could not have written it without significant contributions from others. Here I want to express warm appreciation for some of those contributors, beginning with my colleagues and students at the University of Chicago, especially Daniel Arnold, Dwight Hopkins, Margaret Mitchell, Richard Rosengarten, Susan Schreiner, William Schweiker, Olivia Bustion, Jason Cather, Julius Crump, Mary Emily Duba, Tarick Elgendy, Jeffrey Fowler, Brian Herlocker, Timothy Hiller, Aaron Hollander, Russell Johnson, Evan Kuehn, Lisa Landoe Hedrick, Willa Lengyel, Herbert Lin, Elsa Marty, Andrew Packman, and Bryce Rich. I am 5   Michael Rea addresses these same concerns in his “Introduction” to Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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also grateful to colleagues elsewhere who offered helpful comments: Neil Arner, David DeCosimo, Jennifer Herdt, Keith Johnson, Terrence Johnson, Tamsin Jones, Tal Lewis, Fred Simmons, Jonathan Tran, Andrea White, and the anonymous readers for Oxford University Press. I am grateful, too, for the unfailing help and support of my editors, Tom Perridge, Michael C. Rea, and Oliver D. Crisp. Special thanks, of a different sort, are due to my family:  my children, Simeon and Anastasia, and my wife Krista. I have learned quite a bit of theology and philosophy from them, but I am most thankful simply for their presence in my life. Every day is brightened by their being part of it. A final word of gratitude is due to Bruce McCormack and Jeffrey Stout. I am blessed to have had not one but two mentors who believe in me and who have pushed me, lovingly and firmly, to live up to that belief. They also taught me how to think carefully and constructively about modern thought. In large measure, then, I owe this book to them, so it seems fitting that it be dedicated to them.

Contents 1. Mineness and Faith  1.1 Intending a Life  1.2 Narrative  1.3 Narrating Self and Circumstance  1.4 Potentially Disintegrating Circumstances  1.5 Faith and Modern Theology  1.6 Historical Constraints  1.7 The Goodness of “Mineness” 

1 3 6 11 17 23 26 28

2. Giving Oneself the Law  2.1 Deterministic Beginnings  2.2 A New Approach to Space and Time  2.3 Disunity between Subject and Object?  2.4 “One and All Mine”: The Unity of Consciousness  2.5 Freedom and the Moral Law  2.6 Reasonable Hope in Happiness  2.7 Reasonable Hope in Worthiness to be Happy  2.8 Objections 

30 32 36 43 45 54 59 63 71

3. Harmonizing Dependence  3.1 Freedom and Character  3.2 Harmonizing Circumstances  3.3 Infinitude of Humanity  3.4 The Limits of Human Infinitude  3.5 Infinitude as Unity of Oppositions  3.6 God-Consciousness and God-Forgetfulness  3.7 Redeeming God-Consciousness  3.8 Objections 

75 76 80 84 90 96 102 112 122

4. Reconciling Spirit  4.1 From Civil Religion to Reconciling Oppositions  4.2 Self-Unity in Relation to Otherness  4.3 Unity with World-Spirit  4.4 Consummate Reconciliation  4.5 Objections 

126 127 138 156 164 176

xiv Contents 5. Personalizing Faith  5.1 Historical Method  5.2 Spirit and Religion  5.3 Mistrust toward God  5.4 The Vocation of Jesus  5.5 Trust in God  5.6 Synthesizing History  5.7 Objection 

179 180 184 192 196 202 210 219

6. Integrating In-Spite-Of  6.1 Critical Theology  6.2 The Possibility of Integrated Selfhood  6.3 Estrangement  6.4 New Being  6.5 Reintegrated Selfhood  6.6 Method of Correlation  6.7 Synthesizing the Mineness Project  6.8 Theology after Modernism? 

221 222 228 234 238 244 252 255 263

Index 

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1 Mineness and Faith There are at least three senses in which a person’s life could be said to be meaningful. A  life can be meaningful, first, simply insofar as it makes a certain amount of sense, as opposed to its being either absurd or a series of apparently disconnected events. A  life can be meaningful, second, insofar as it has a certain value or worth; a life devoted to a worthwhile cause may thus be said to have meant something, as when a sainted individual has spent his or her entire life caring for the poor. And third, a life can be meaningful insofar as it has the shape that one means or intends for it to have, such that one can identify with one’s life or experience it as “mine,” rather than as something imposed upon or merely happening to one. The second and third senses are sometimes run together, but this is a mistake, since there may be cases in which someone can identify with his or her life even if it has no objective worth (as when someone organizes his or her life around an ignoble cause such as white supremacy), just as someone’s life may contribute significantly to the achievement of an objective good, even if he or she does not identify with that life (as when someone who did not want to have children, for instance, nevertheless devotes him or herself to their nurture and care).1 We will return to these distinctions below; for now, the point is that a life can be meaningful insofar as it makes sense, insofar as it has worth, or insofar as it is “mine.” This book investigates the conditions under which a life can be meaningful in the third of these senses, that is, the conditions of a life having a shape such

1   There is at least one sort of case in which the two may run together, namely, when one identifies with one’s life precisely on the grounds that it contributes to something objectively valuable. In that case, the mineness of a person’s life is susceptible to objective assessment, since, if it turned out that the supposedly objective value to which one had committed oneself was not in fact valuable, one would look back at one’s life not only as wasted but as something with which one no longer identifies, not least because it is in an important sense not the life one thought one was living. My view is thus to be distinguished from that of Susan Wolf, for instance, for which see her Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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that one can identify with it, paradigmatically by its conforming to a life-plan with which one identifies; to count as “mine,” in other words, one’s life must not only hang together, but do so in such a way that one can experience it as self-expressive. The investigation will proceed, in subsequent chapters, by considering the views of a series of modern theologians, each of whom can be understood as defending a set of claims about the conditions of mineness. Consideration of these figures will provide us with a better understanding of these conditions, and, by integrating them into a narrative focused on “mineness,” will meet one of them. That is my hope, at any rate. Before proceeding, two clarifications. First, by “modern theology” and its variants, I have in mind a theological trajectory that includes, but is obviously not limited to, figures such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, G.W.F. Hegel, F.C. Baur, Albrecht Ritschl, Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Barth, and Paul Tillich. In approaching modern theology, then, my strategy has been first to read and think about several figures almost universally recognized as belonging to the class “modern theologians,” and only then to determine what project—if any—these figures have in common, by contrast with a strategy that begins with a substantive notion of “modernism” or “modern theology” and then interprets specific figures in light of that notion. We will have more to say about this procedure in Chapter 5. Second, it is important to distinguish “mineness,” in the sense that I will be using the term, from another relevant sense. As I am using it, “mineness” is a particular sort of relationship in which one can stand toward one’s life, characterized especially by an ability to identify with one’s life, to intend oneself in it, or to experience it as self-expressive. This is obviously distinct from “mineness” in a more minimalistic sense, according to which one’s life is one’s own if each of its events happens to or otherwise involves one, quite irrespective of whether one can see oneself in the life that results. (Suppose person A’s and person B’s lives unfold according to the very same life-plan, that this plan was devised by person A, and that person A would see a life lived according to this plan as self-expressive. In that case, persons A and B will both be able to experience their lives as “mine” in the minimal sense that it is not the life of anyone else, but only person A will be able to experience it as “mine” in the sense I am using that term.) To help us maintain this distinction, I will regularly supplement my use of the term “mineness” with equivalents like “identifying with one’s life” and “experiencing one’s life as self-expressive.” These are complicated issues, to say the least. Prior to considering modern theologians’ claims about them, therefore, this chapter will try to shed some light on these issues by drawing together recent literature on intention, narrative, and the like, in order to sketch a preliminary account of “mineness.” (Naturally, sufficient elaboration and defense of several points will have to wait until subsequent chapters.) The account’s key claims are these: first, that a life is recognizable as one’s own—as “mine”—insofar as it hangs together



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in such a way that one can identify with it, typically by its conforming to a life-plan with which one can identify; second, that a life’s “hanging together” can be understood in terms of its having a sort of narrative structure; third, that a significant number of significant life-circumstances may be indifferent or hostile to one’s plans, in consequence of which one’s life may either not hang together, or hang together in such a way that one cannot identify with it; and fourth, that faith—which, for now, can be understood as a stance about that which is ultimate—can relativize such circumstances and thus enable one to identify with one’s life even in the face of them. This last claim raises a serious worry, though, namely that faith is also something with which one may or may not identify—indeed, faith, too, may be indifferent or hostile to one’s intentions—which means that faith may enable a person to reclaim his or her life at one level, as it were, only by requiring him or her to give it back at another. This worry, along with the preceding claims, will eventually bring us back to modern theology, which can be understood (among other things) as a series of arguments about what it would mean for one’s life to be self-expressive, and what role faith can play in making this possible. (To be sure, faith may have played such a role long before modern theologians started talking about it, but faith’s relationship to “mineness” seems to have become a much more prominent theme in modern theology than it had been in earlier theologies; there are intellectual as well as sociological reasons why this would have been the case, some of which we will consider in Chapter 2.)

1.1. I N TENDI NG A LIFE I have suggested that a life is “mine” insofar as it hangs together in such a way that one can identify with it, paradigmatically by conforming to a life-plan or -intention with which one can identify. So what would it mean to intend such a thing? Suppose, to begin with, that an action counts as intentional just in case it is done for a reason (in the sense of being first-personally explicable in terms of, rather than explicitly justified by, that reason). Tying one’s shoes, for instance, can be considered intentional if and only if one did so for some reason; one might thus explain one’s behavior by saying, “I am tying my shoes because I want them to stay on,” or “I am tying my shoes because I am going running,” or even “I am tying my shoes because I follow the rules.”2 In each 2   Here I am following Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957, 2000), Donald Davidson’s Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), Michael Thompson’s Life and Action:  Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2008), Harry Frankfurt’s The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press,

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case, one is doing something for some reason, in consequence of which one’s so doing counts as intentional. (Contrast this with a case in which one is tying one’s shoes while under hypnosis or in one’s sleep.) These reasons are not all of the same sort, however: the first is of the form “I am doing A because I want B,” where one does something because it is instrumental in bringing about some desired state of affairs; further examples of such reasoning would include “I am eating vegetables because I want to be healthy,” “I am studying because I want a good grade,” and “I am leaving now because I want to see my children before bedtime.” The second, by contrast, is of the form “I am doing A because I am doing B,” where one does something because it contributes to a larger or ongoing action; further examples would include “I am eating vegetables because I am doing an experiment,” “I am studying because I am preparing for a career,” and “I am leaving now because I am keeping a promise.” Finally, the third is of the form “I am doing A because I am the sort of person who would do A,” where one does something because it would be “in character” for one to do so; other examples include “I am eating vegetables because I am a vegetarian,” “I am studying because I am a responsible student,” and “I am leaving now because I am not a night person.” (There are other forms, of course—for instance, “I am doing A because it is conventional to do A in this context”—but these three are the most important for present purposes.) One can intend an action, accordingly, because it is instrumental to bringing about some desired state of affairs, or because it contributes to a larger-scale action in which one is engaged, or because it is the sort of thing one would do. This raises an obvious question: are one’s desires, large-scale actions, and character themselves intended by one? Given our interest in “mineness,” the importance of this question should be evident.3 Prior to addressing it, though, we can already make some headway on the issue of intending a life: thus far, to intend for one’s life to have a certain shape would be for one to do certain things because one wants to bring about a certain state of affairs, or because one is doing something else (namely, giving shape to one’s life), or because doing so reflects who one is. If so, then one’s going to school, for example, may be intentional if one does so because one wants to get a job, or because one is going to be a teacher, or because one is a good student. Other actions could then be intended either as part of or for the sake of this one: so one’s going to school can be the reason for one’s doing things like reading books, saving 1999), David Velleman’s How We Get Along (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000), and Self to Self (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Michael Bratman’s Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), Structures of Agency (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), and Faces of Intention (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999). 3   I am not claiming, note well, that intention theorists who are not also interested in “mineness” are obligated to address this question.



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money, and waking up early; one’s doing the latter things can be the reason for doing still others, like getting a summer job, limiting the amount of time one spends on the Internet, and going to a tutor; doing these things can be the reason for doing yet others, and so on. A single intention can thus serve as the reason for a ramified network of intentional actions, in which case the latter actions can cohere with one another and, if there are enough of them, give a sort of intentional structure to one’s life. To see what this might mean, consider an idealized, but nevertheless plausible, example of a person who devotes her life to animal welfare. This devotion may be the reason that she studies veterinary medicine, volunteers in a shelter, hands out leaflets, joins an advocacy group, and eats only certain foods, and these actions may give her reason, in turn, to work hard in school, adopt certain time management techniques, learn the basics of graphic design, live in a particular location, and plant a garden, and the latter actions may give her reason to do still other things. Her devotion to animal welfare can thus filter down into, by giving her reason for, all sorts of intentional actions, in consequence of which more and more of her life can become organized around this devotion. An overall intention can thereby string together a significant number of intentional actions, and, in virtue of relating these actions to a single, guiding intention, provide them with a rational structure. We might say of a person so devoted, accordingly, that her life has a purpose, that this purpose lends purposiveness to a significant number of her actions, that it thus permeates and so gives shape to her life, and, in sum, that she intends for her life to be shaped by this purpose. (It is worth pointing out that overall intentions or purposes need not be as high-minded as devotion to animal welfare, since a life could just as well be structured by one’s commitment to a favorite sports team, to one’s work, hobbies, family, or any number of other things.) This intentional structure can also influence one’s perceptions, not only of oneself, but of one’s circumstances; so a person who is devoted to animal welfare may become disposed to see her circumstances in light of this purpose, and so perceive some circumstances as, for instance, a threat to animals (rock salt spread across an icy sidewalk, say), as good for animals (a newly fallen tree of a certain sort), or as cruel to animals (fitting a dog with a particular kind of choke collar), whereas those not so devoted may not perceive them as such—indeed, the latter may not perceive them at all, since these circumstances may not become salient for such persons. We will return to this point in Section 1.2. For now, the suggestion is simply that an intention can shape not only one’s actions but one’s perceptions as well. As a first approximation, then, it seems plausible to suggest that if a significant number of one’s actions are undertaken due to an overall intention, then that intention can structure one’s life, and one can thereby count as intending for one’s life to have a certain shape. Even as a first approximation, this formulation runs into two serious problems: first, until something further is said

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about the mineness of an overall intention, it is not clear why actions done for the sake of such an intention would thereby count as one’s own; and second, such an intention would count as shaping one’s life only if it structured not only one’s other intentions, but a host of circumstances beyond those intentions. In order to address the second of these problems, it will be helpful to say something further about what it means to intend for one’s life to have a certain shape; we can do so by considering the oft-invoked category of narrative. (Narrative is not among the categories used by the theologians treated in subsequent chapters, but it bears enough resemblance to their own categories, and captures many of the salient features of a wide range of such categories, that its use here should neither beg the question nor be beside the point.)

1.2 .  NA R R ATI V E As I  understand it, a narrative is a particular sort of structure in terms of which temporally (or spatially) disparate phenomena can be held together and thus made sense of.4 So, famously, “the king died and then the queen died” is not a narrative, whereas “the king died and then the queen died of grief” is, since the latter connects the two phenomena in a way that makes them part of a single, sense-making whole.5 This explains the common association of narratives with arcs or threads, since narrative enables one to see disparate phenomena as hanging together in a followable or traceable—as opposed to a chaotic or merely sequential—manner. By putting phenomena into a framework that explains how they are related to one another, that is, narrative differs not only from the mere identification of an object (“lo, a rabbit!” is not a narrative) but also from the mere chronicling of a series of events (“George Bush was elected president, then the White Sox won the World Series, then my daughter was born”). The difference is that narrative relates events to one another in such a way that they can be seen to hang together—in such a way, that is, that one can see a sense-making connection between them. This point is nicely exemplified by the intuitive suggestion—itself relevant to the present argument—that the goodness of a life is not an “additive” 4  Here I  am following David Velleman (“Narrative Explanation,” The Philosophical Review 112:1 [January 2003], and How We Get Along), E.M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel [New York: Harcourt, 1927]), Paul Ricoeur (Time and Narrative, 3 vols. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–8]), Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966, 2000]), Adriana Cavarero (Relating Narratives [Routledge, 2000]), Gregory Currie (Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010]), and Bernard Williams (“Making Sense,” in Truth and Truthfulness [Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2002]). 5   Cf. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 86.



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property, as if one could tell how good a life was by assigning a point value to the goodness of each day, or each hour, and then simply adding up the points.6 To see why not, consider two nearly identical lives, the first of which is that of a politician who devotes her career to, say, ecological justice. After a period of learning the ropes and climbing her way into office, she then spends 25 years struggling unsuccessfully against those who oppose environmental reforms; finally, during the last year of her career, she cobbles together enough votes to pass several meaningful reforms. The second life is that of a politician who is likewise devoted to ecological justice, but who, after a period of learning the ropes and climbing her way into office, meets immediate success: during her first year of office, she cobbles together enough votes to pass several meaningful environmental reforms. Her hardwon coalition does not stick together for long, though, and she spends the remaining 25 years of her career struggling unsuccessfully against those who oppose environmental reform. By hypothesis, then, both politicians enjoyed precisely the same amount of success and difficulty in their careers, but it is at least plausible to think that their careers were not equally good or satisfying, or, less controversially, it seems obviously to matter not just how much good each achieved, but when she achieved it; this is the case, I think, because the timing of these good-achieving events influences which narrative we would use to hold those events together—for instance, a narrative of commitment to a cause earning an eventual reward (“she never gave up . . .”), or a narrative of meteoric, perhaps unearned success, followed by a lifelong inability to replicate that success (“it seemed like the sky was the limit, but . . .”). We will return to these issues in a moment. Before doing so, we need to say more about narrative itself, since it is not yet clear what sort of “structure” or “framework” is here being invoked. As a preliminary analysis, suppose that for two phenomena x and y, x-then-y counts as a narrative if and only if the “then” identifies a non-accidental relationship between x and y, and, following much of the literature on this subject, that it identifies such a relationship precisely by perceiving there to be some causal connection between the two.7 X-then-y would count as a narrative, accordingly, when and only when one understood x as the—or a—cause of y; so, again, 6   This is a point I  borrow from Michael Slote, “Goods and Lives,” in Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), David Velleman, “Well-Being and Time,” in The Possibility of Practical Reason, and John Martin Fischer, “Free Will, Death, and Immortality: The Role of Narrative,” in Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 7  I  am here siding with Noël Carrol, “On the Narrative Connection,” in Beyond Aesthetics:  Philosophical Essays (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Mieke Bal, Narratology (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 1997), over against Velleman, “Narrative Explanation.”

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The Theological Project of Modernism

the king died and then the queen died because of grief, where grief renders the latter event intelligible in terms of its relationship to the former. (On my understanding, a narrative need not explicitly connect a single event to other events; so long as it is seen in terms of causal relationships of the sort characteristic of narrative, one’s interpretation of a lone event would still count as a narrative interpretation.) Narrative thus enables one to see discrete events as hanging together with one another, and it does so by identifying a causal connection between them. It is important to note, however, that there are several ways in which a y can be seen as caused by an x (or as part of a causally related series that includes x and y), depending on what sort of broader causal framework one invokes to understand their relationship. Candidate causal frameworks would include the following: those which explain an event in terms of scientific laws (explaining the spread of disease, say, in terms of a particular virus’s mutation); historical forces (explaining the emergence of American Pragmatism as a response to the Civil War, Darwinism, and probabilism); convention (as that which explains the relationship between waiting in line, paying for a ticket, and then presenting that ticket to a ticket-taker); character (explaining a basketball player’s late-game shot selection in terms of his or her being “clutch” or not); justice (explaining someone’s getting an “A” in terms of his or her deserving it, due to the excellence with which he or she completed all of his or her work); and, last but certainly not least, intention or planning (explaining the path I walked through the woods in terms of my wanting to find a particular rock formation). There are undoubtedly other sorts of causal frameworks with which one might understand the relationship between various phenomena—think here, for instance, of “magical” frameworks, according to which an event is explained, by way of superstition, as due to its connection with, say, one’s wearing lucky socks—but these should suffice to make the relevant point, which is that narrative is a way of making an intelligible connection between two or more phenomena precisely by seeing the two as causally connected. Causality is here construed very broadly, however, since there need not be any real connection between the two phenomena, and therefore no real causal connection.8 (Some readers will want to reserve the term “causality” for cases in which there is a real connection between events, and others will want to reserve it for cases in which that connection can be boiled down to the sort of causality appealed to within natural sciences. There is good reason for such regimentation in certain specialized contexts, though I  would argue that the causal frameworks with which persons make sense

8   By “real” here, I mean that an antecedent event has actually exerted causal influence on a subsequent event, where such actuality should be explicable in terms of worldly causal processes of the sort cataloged by scientists and historians.



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of their everyday lives are not so constricted. In any case, if it makes them feel better, scrupulous readers can simply add “quasi-” to my use of the term “causal.”9) The fact that narratives can call upon a wide range of causal frameworks in order to make sense of an event helps explain Aristotle’s interesting suggestion that there can be narrative connections even among matters of chance, so long, he claims, as “there is an appearance of design as it were among them.” As an example, Aristotle relates a story in which “the statue of Mitys at Argos killed the author of Mitys’s death by falling down on him when a looker-on at a public spectacle,” about which Aristotle comments, wryly, that “incidents like that we take not to be without a meaning.”10 Aristotle’s point here is that even if it is simply by chance that a murderer was killed by a statue of the one he murdered, we are inclined to understand the latter as happening “as if by design,” since it happens according to the designs of, and so as if caused by, justice. Likewise, when something bad happens to a horrible person, one is inclined to see it as him or her getting what he or she deserves, and so as if caused by his or her horribleness, even if that is not strictly the case (as when the bad event happens simply by chance). Examples aside, the first point about narrative is that it is a matter of understanding two phenomena as standing in a causal relationship to one another, though causality here is not limited to what we might think of as real causal connections. Crucially for our purposes, phenomena can also be narrated in terms of what Aristotle famously termed final causality, where one sees them as hanging together in connection with an end or plan, not only insofar as the plan actually causes them to hang together, but insofar as they can be seen as contributing to its accomplishment. A second point is that we perceive the world around us, and our place within it, largely in narrative terms, to such an extent that the world itself, and our place within it, seems to be narratively structured.11 This is the case not only because we generally perceive phenomena in narrative terms, but because we do so irrespective of our deciding so to perceive them; unless something goes wrong, that is to say, we just see some event as someone getting what he or she deserves, or as physically caused by some prior phenomenon, or as manifesting someone’s character. We seldom notice that we are seeing things this 9   This should suffice to handle Velleman’s objection to such a claim, for which see “Narrative Explanation,” 2ff. 10  Aristotle, Poetics ix, 1452a (ET:  The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984]). 11   For arguments on behalf of this claim, see Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, pp. 44f., and Katherine Nelson, “Finding One’s Self in Time,” in Joan Gay Snodgrass and Robert L. Thompson (eds.), The Self Across Psychology (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1997).

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way, of course, any more than we notice the way we divide a speaker’s stream of noises into words and sentences. But we do notice it when an expected consequence fails to materialize, as when an illusionist makes playing cards do things that apparently defy the laws of physics, or when a highly qualified employee is passed over for a promotion that everyone expected him or her to get.12 The second point, then, is that narratives not only help us make sense of phenomena, but do so to such an extent (pervasively), and in such a way (non-inferentially), that we perceive much of the world itself, and our place in it, as being narratively shaped. If that is the case, and if it is also the case that narrativity is a matter of seeing phenomena as causally connected, then it follows that causality, broadly construed, is one of the elementary principles of our experience. This brings us to a third point, which is that narrative is something that we bring to phenomena, rather than something strictly derived from them. This is the case, on the one hand, because phenomena themselves do not decide for us which narrative to understand them in terms of—phenomena underdetermine narrative, in other words—and, on the other, because narrative plays a key role in determining which phenomena ought to be understood—which are salient—by contrast with those that do not show up or stand out to us. With respect to the former, recall the narrative applied above to a politician who achieved immediate success which she spent the rest of her career failing to replicate. One might make sense of her career by seeing the fleetingness of her early success as evidence that it was a fluke—that it was somehow unearned, or not strictly due to her—and seeing the remainder of her career as confirming this fact. The facts themselves neither dictate nor require this interpretation, however, since one could equally interpret them in terms of a narrative about the power and character of corporate interests, and the swiftness with which they act to squelch any meaningful opposition. The point, then, is that events or phenomena themselves underdetermine which narrative one will use to interpret them, from which it follows that those phenomena should not be thought to decide for us which narrative to apply (even if they do exert some constraint over the range of narratives one may reasonably deploy).13 This point is reinforced by the fact that narrative plays a role in determining which among literally countless phenomena ought to figure in a 12   Note well that one can perceive something in narrative terms precisely by responding with the relevant emotions or other reactive attitudes:  feeling shame can thus be a way of perceiving one’s behavior as manifesting some dishonorable aspect of one’s character; feeling disrespected can be a way of perceiving another’s behavior as failing to give one the recognition that one deserves, etc. 13   The relevant parallel here is to theory choice in science, for discussion of which see Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), and, more recently, P. Kyle Stanford, Exceeding Our Grasp:  Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).



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narrative interpretation. At any given moment, that is to say, there are innumerable phenomena occurring, but one does not attend to, much less try to account for, all of them; rather, the vast majority of such phenomena remain in the background, so to speak, while a handful show up either as meaningful or as calling for meaning-making, and while a phenomenon may show up irrespective of its fitting into our narratives, phenomena that do fit into those narratives—or are supposed to fit into them—are far more likely to do so. Narrative is not a necessary condition of salience, in other words, but in many cases it is sufficient. If so, then narrative plays a role not only in enabling one to make sense of the events that stand out to one, but also in the (usually unconscious) selection of which events stand out. For both of these reasons, although narratives may answer to phenomena, they should not be thought to be dictated by or straightforwardly derived from those phenomena. A fourth point is that narratives can thus provide one’s life with a sense of meaning and coherence, alike in daily life (as when conventions and routines give structure to what one does), in one’s life as a whole (as when one’s character provides one with a sense of who one is and how one should respond to various circumstances), and in the world one inhabits (as when one trusts the connection between certain phenomena and their consequences, whether in the realm of physics or morals). In a minimal sense, then, narratives can provide one’s life with a sense of meaning insofar as they render explicable the world and one’s place in it; one then experiences one’s life not as a mere succession of one thing after another, but as structured, and so as the sort of thing that could count as a “life” in the first place. For one’s life to make sense at all, that is to say, it must be characterized by a certain amount of reliability—reliability in one’s surroundings, in oneself, and in the relationship between the two—and it is precisely through narrating the phenomena of one’s life that one can perceive such reliability. Insofar as one experiences the world in narrative terms, one can see it as exhibiting reliable patterns of just this sort, and one can accordingly see one’s life as making a certain amount of sense. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, this is one of the three senses in which a life can count as meaningful, and a necessary condition of its counting as “mine.”

1. 3.  NA R R ATI NG SELF A ND CIRCUMSTA NCE Narrative can also help us understand how a life can have a shape that one can identify with or experience as “mine,” rather than as something imposed upon or merely happening to one. Here we return to a claim discussed earlier, to the effect that an overall intention can guide one’s actions and perceptions, as a result of which these can be seen as contributing to the achievement of

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that intention and, just so, as hanging together in that sort of narrative arc. As mentioned, however, what one intends is not only that one’s perceptions and intentional actions would fit into such an arc, but that certain of one’s environing circumstances would too. Consider someone who devotes himself to taking care of his family: he may do various things, like plant crops, for this reason, yet he intends not only to let this intention guide his actions, but that his family would actually be taken care of; hence, if the crops fail and his family goes hungry, his life will not have the shape he intends for it to have. The point is suitably general: for one’s life to be recognizable as one’s own, in the present sense, is not only for one’s own actions to have the shape that one intends, but for certain circumstances to have that shape, too, irrespective of whether their having this shape is even plausibly a result of one’s intentions. We will return to this point in a moment. Before doing so—and to have some conceptual resources on hand when we do—it is important to say something further about what it would mean not only to intend for one’s life to have a certain narrative shape, but to identify with that shape or experience it as self-expressive. Toward that end, consider the steps through which a person might proceed in order to arrive at such an identification:  (a)  one first learns, presumably as a child, how to narrate one’s circumstances and one’s place among them; (b) one eventually comes to intend for one’s life and circumstances to conform to certain of these narratives; (c) one may come to identify oneself with certain of these narratives, in which case one intends oneself in intending them; and (d) these narratives render certain phenomena important to one, such that one’s life has the shape one intends—and with which one can identify—only if these phenomena have that shape, too. If this is roughly correct, then one could stand in a “mineness” relationship to one’s life just insofar as one can integrate one’s intentions and perceptions, as well as important phenomena, into a narrative with which one identifies. Each of these steps requires elaboration. Backing up, then, to the first step, which is usually taken in early childhood when one learns to understand phenomena in narrative terms: so a child is taught to see a particular phenomenon as a consequence of an antecedent phenomenon, where seeing it as such may mean seeing it as a matter of justice (“that’s what happens when one is mean to one’s brother”), of natural causality (“that’s what happens when one tries to run on ice”), of convention (“that’s what happens when one asks nicely”), or the like. The child learns to understand his or her own involvement in such phenomena in these terms, too: “I was punished because I was mean to my brother,” “I slipped because I tried to run on the ice,” “I got a treat because I asked nicely,” and so on. In most cases, children will soon learn to see phenomena in narrative terms without having to be told how to do so, at which point he or she has become a narrator in his or her own right. This brings us to a second step: in the course of trying to understand various phenomena, certain narratives can become important, even essential, to one’s



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self-understanding. To see how this could come to be the case, consider that among the phenomena one may try to make sense of are those involving the one trying to make sense of them, in which case the sense-maker will likely try to make sense of him or herself as a phenomenon, so to speak.14 In order to make sense of phenomena like misspelled words, for instance, one may appeal to a narrative according to which one is a bad speller; to make sense of one’s response to medical injections, one may appeal to a narrative according to which one is afraid of needles; to make sense of one’s saying things that elicit laughter from others, one may appeal to a narrative according to which one is funny. The point, simply stated, is that one makes sense of various phenomena not only by telling narratives about them, but by telling narratives about oneself, and while some of these narratives might matter very little to one, others may come to figure more centrally in one’s self-understanding. Let a narrative that one uses to understand oneself be termed a self-narrative. A narrative may become central to one’s self-understanding for a variety of reasons:  it may be central because that is how those who are important to one think of one, for example, or because one has become habituated into thinking of oneself in this way, or because one cares about being that kind of person. However they achieve this status, these narratives’ centrality to one’s self-understanding may entail: (a) only that one intends to understand oneself in their terms, and therefore to perceive phenomena as conforming to these narratives and act in conformity with them; or (b) that one so identifies with these narratives that in intending them, one intends oneself.15 Both of these points require comment. With respect to (a): to understand oneself in terms of certain narratives is to perceive oneself and one’s circumstances in terms of those narratives, and, in many cases, to intend for one’s

14   Note well that “selfhood” is here simply a reflexive affair, which strikes me as a promisingly unspooky building block upon which to build an account of selfhood’s more robust dimensions; Velleman sketches such an account in his Self to Self. 15   Here I am drawing on a range of literature on the connection between selfhood and narrative; see, for instance, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) and Philosophical Papers, vol. 1: Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), David Velleman, Self to Self, The Possibility of Practical Reason, and How We Get Along, Paul Ricoeur, Oneself As Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Problems of the Self (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1973), Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution:  Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009), and Anthony Rudd, Self, Value, and Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Some worries about this connection are raised by Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio 16:4 (2004), Dan Zahavi, “Self and Other:  Some Limits of Narrative Understanding,” in Daniel D. Hutto (ed.), Narrative and Understanding Persons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Peter Lamarque, “On Not Expecting Too Much from Narrative,” Mind and Language 19:4 (2004); for a response to these worries, see Rudd, “In Defence of Narrative,” European Journal of Philosophy 17:1 (2009).

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circumstances to conform with them. This is one of the reasons that students who think of themselves as bad at something—say, spelling—not only see misspelled words as confirming their self-understanding, but often end up acting so as to make that self-understanding come true.16 (As this example suggests, a self-narrative need neither be positive nor taken by one to be such.) One’s self-narratives can thus frame one’s understanding of various phenomena and give shape to one’s intentional agency. Naturally, this opens the door to, and may even encourage, various forms of self-deception, but for now the point is that when a particular narrative is an ingredient in one’s self-understanding, one tries to see phenomena as conformed to it, and one may therefore act so as to bring about such conformity. One thus intends for one’s life to conform to this narrative, but one need not identify with it, since one who sees him or herself as a bad speller, for instance, need not see bad spelling as central to who he or she is. That brings us to (b): one may not only understand oneself in terms of certain narratives, but also identify with oneself as so understood, to such an extent that one’s selfhood comes to be bound up with that narrative. This is an admittedly dark claim, the clarification of which will occupy much of this book. For now, consider the potential difference between understanding oneself as a bad speller and as devoted to animal welfare: in the latter case, unlike the former, one intends for one’s life to conform to a particular narrative and, crucially, one intends oneself in so intending, inasmuch as one sees this narrative as an expression of who one fundamentally is, and would thus experience its loss or failure as an at least partial loss of self. Someone whose sense of self is bound up with his or her devotion to a particular cause may thus worry about, and so be on guard against, the waning of that devotion or its becoming an ingredient in another, more basic narrative (of, say, self-promotion). He or she would experience each of the latter as a betrayal or loss of his or her self, by contrast with the case of someone who gave up a self-narrative according to which he or she is a bad speller. By the same token, someone whose youth was dedicated to collecting baseball cards, or to militant anarchism, or to the ruthless pursuit of self-interest may look back upon that time and think to him or herself, “That’s not who I am anymore. I’m a different person now.” Here, too, there is a loss of something central to one’s self, but one may mourn, celebrate, or be indifferent to that loss, depending upon how it fits into one’s current self-narratives. (As these examples should indicate, self-narratives can change over time, and it is possible for a person to identify with more than one self-narrative at any given time.) The point is that one can come to understand oneself in terms of

16  For a summary of, and philosophical interaction with, the research on self-fulfilling prophecy, see David Velleman, “From Self Psychology to Moral Philosophy,” Philosophical Perspectives 14 (2000).



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certain narratives, that some of these may come to seem like an expression of who one fundamentally is, and that one may therefore become invested in phenomena—and one’s very self—being brought into conformity with those narratives.17 So far so good, but a decisive issue remains unaddressed: under what conditions would one’s identification with such narratives itself count as one’s own? The mere fact that one identifies with a self-narrative would not by itself entail that one’s life has thereby been rendered one’s own, not only because one’s life-circumstances must actually fit into this narrative—a condition to which we shall return shortly—but because this narrative, too, must be recognizably one’s own. The question, then, is how one can stand in a mineness-relationship to such narratives, and here there are several possible answers, each of which will be considered in subsequent chapters: a self-narrative is in the relevant sense one’s own, on one account, if and only if one can “give the law” to it; on another account, if and only if it enables full expression of one’s individuality; on yet another, if and only if one can behold oneself in it and thus be reconciled in it with one’s particularity. These are complicated claims, to say the least, and we cannot begin to do them justice in the present chapter. For now, then, we will have to let them stand as promissory notes, and as indicating at least that there have been serious attempts to address this issue—indeed, the need to address it is one of the great engines driving modern thought. This brings us to a final step, namely, the actual integration of various phenomena into these narratives. Elaboration of this claim will involve dealing with several complicated issues—in this and subsequent chapters—but simply stated, the idea is that one’s self-narratives render certain phenomena important to one, that is, as needing to be integrated into them in a particular way, as contributing to the achievement of one’s plans, such that if one were not able to integrate these phenomena successfully one’s self-narratives could be strained or called fundamentally into question. To see why this would be the case, consider, first, which phenomena must be so integrated: if (a) certain narratives are essential—or at least important—to one, (b) certain phenomena are rendered salient by these narratives, and (c) inability to integrate these phenomena into those narratives could call the latter into question, it would follow (d) that such integration is itself essential, or at least important, to one. That which must be integrated into one’s self-narratives, accordingly, is that which is rendered salient by those narratives, and salience here necessarily means that a phenomenon is important to one. Hence, if one of a person’s self-narratives is something like “I am rational,” and if this entails that he   This point could be elaborated in terms of, and thus draw into the present account, the recent wave of work on “the care of the self,” paradigmatically that of Michel Foucault (especially vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality) and Pierre Hadot (especially his Philosophy as a Way of Life). 17

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or she must maintain a certain logical order among his or her beliefs by, say, reconsidering them in light of contrary evidence or tailoring one’s confidence in them to the degree of warrant they currently enjoy, then it is easy to see why certain phenomena, such as the realization that two of his or her beliefs are incompatible with one another, would press for integration into his or her narrative, whereas other phenomena, such as the content of his or her dreams, may not. More generally, this explains why, for example, the exact shade of paint on a wall may not matter to me, and so need not be integrated into my narratives, but may matter to, and so have to be integrated into the narrative of, an interior decorator; likewise, one person may not care how many cups of cereal he or she ate for breakfast, so long as he or she had something to eat, whereas someone on a strict diet may care very much about this, and would accordingly have to integrate that number into an overall dietary plan. The point, then, is that a phenomenon must be integrated into one’s selfnarratives if it is the sort of phenomenon rendered salient by those narratives, and since one identifies with these narratives, it follows that the integration of these phenomena must be important to one. Two additional features of “importance” bear mentioning: first, importance is in many cases a transitive property. On the one hand, as already noted, insofar as one identifies with certain self-narratives, phenomena rendered salient by those narratives are necessarily important to one. On the other hand, a phenomenon that is not directly important to one may become important if it is important to someone or something that is. I may not care about soccer, for instance, but if soccer is important to my children, and my children are important to me, then soccer will likely become important to me too. There are exceptions, of course, but the point is that one’s self-narratives render certain things important to one, and their importance to one can render still other things important, in consequence of which a ramified network of importance can stretch further and further beyond oneself. Second, a phenomenon’s salience or importance to one should not be equated with or thought to require one’s becoming overtly conscious of it, nor should one’s integration of important phenomena be thought to require explicitly self-conscious activity on one’s part. In many, perhaps most, cases, phenomena will be immediately, non-inferentially perceived as important, and they will be integrated into the relevant narratives without one’s so much as noticing it. Eating is important to me, for instance, but since I have plenty of food and usually eat the same thing each day, I seldom have to think either about eating’s importance or about how to integrate it into my self-narratives. Or again, fitting into a group of friends or colleagues—belonging among them—is important to me, but if it is a group of old friends or trusted colleagues, then I may not give a second thought to whether or how I fit in. In such cases, I may not become self-consciously aware that these things are important to me, nor that they must be integrated into my self-narrative, since I have no trouble perceiving their importance, nor any trouble integrating them into my narrative. There is a



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difference, accordingly, between a phenomenon’s not being important to me and my not noticing its importance.

1.4.  POTEN TI A LLY DISI N TEGR ATI NG CIRCUMSTA NCES That brings us to a crucial point, which is that if such an account is even roughly correct, it would explain some of the characteristic vulnerabilities to which persons seem liable—some of the difficulties, that is to say, of identifying with one’s life or experiencing it as self-expressive, even if “mineness” is not an all-or-nothing affair. Again, one’s self-narratives render certain phenomena important to one, but one may not be able to integrate these phenomena into those narratives, whether because one cannot bring them under any narrative (that is, they are absurd), or because the narrative into which they fit does not itself fit into one’s narrative. With respect to the latter, think of phenomena that are important to one, but which fit into a laws-of-nature narrative that seems indifferent to one’s own narratives: a hurricane or tsunami may thus destroy that which is important to one, just as drought and disease may cause suffering for those one cares about. In such cases, one may be able to narrate these phenomena, but that narrative is at odds with one’s own. Then again, if one comes to see all phenomena as fitting without remainder into a laws-of-nature narrative, then one may find it difficult to fit them into one’s own narrative even if they are not directly opposed to it, inasmuch, that is, as one’s own narrative is structured by values and intentions that are not to be found in such a narrative. In cases like these, one can integrate the phenomena into a narrative and so make sense of them, but this narrative is itself at odds with—or at best indifferent to—one’s self-narratives. There are also cases in which phenomena cannot be fitted into one’s narrative because they are a result of wrongdoing: a person one cares about may be treated unjustly, or one may do something (or have done something) immoral, such that the narrative into which these phenomena fit may once again be at odds with one’s narratives, according to which persons get what they deserve, or according to which one is a good person. Again, though, there may also be cases in which a phenomenon is at odds with one’s narrative, but there seems to be no reason why; such phenomena may therefore strike one as absurd or, more commonly, as bad luck.18 One may have devoted years and financial resources   There is an extensive literature on this subject, the highlights of which include Bernard Williams, Moral Luck, Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Daniel Statman (ed.), Moral Luck (Albany, NY:  State University of New  York 18

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to preparing oneself for a particular career, only to discover, when finished, that the market for one so prepared has dried up, or that there are positions available, but one is inexplicably passed over for them. (This turn of events may be due, of course, to some wrongdoing, but it would be a mistake to assume that all such turns are explicable as such.) Likewise, a belief to which one is committed may turn out to be false, even though one came to hold it on the basis of a highly reliable belief-forming process; in that case, one may have done everything right, epistemically speaking, yet end up with a false belief, in which case one’s holding such a belief is a matter of bad epistemic luck.19 Examples aside, the point is that one may have a hard time integrating certain important phenomena into one’s self-narrative, whether because one is unable to see them as part of any meaningful narrative (as in cases of absurdity and luck), or because the narrative into which they figure is indifferent to or at odds with one’s own narrative. In the face of such phenomena, one may attempt to maintain one’s self-narrative by trying to pretend that these phenomena are not actually important to one, or by engaging in wishful thinking or coercive acts in order to force them into one’s narrative, or by changing one’s narrative in order to accommodate them.20 Some of these approaches are obviously sounder than others—a point to which we will return—but there may also be instances where one simply cannot integrate an important phenomenon into one’s self-narrative, in which case one will be able neither to ignore it nor to identify with its place in one’s life. Some such phenomena may not pose too much of a problem for one, in which case one may acknowledge them, shrug one’s shoulders, and leave it at that. If a pattern of non-integratability emerges, however, or if the non-integratable phenomenon’s importance to one is critical, then one may not be able to shrug it off, and one may therefore be in danger of no longer being able to identify with one’s life. Clear examples of this are not hard to come by, unfortunately. One should suffice to illustrate the danger I have in mind, namely that of Plenty Coups, who was a chief of the Crow Nation from 1876 until his death in 1932, and who thus led the Crow both before and after they had been moved to a reservation, before and after the bison herds had disappeared. Plenty Coups experienced these phenomena as making it impossible to lead the life that he and his people intended and with which they identified; toward the end of his life, accordingly, he told a biographer that “when the buffalo went away, the hearts Press, 1993), Alfred R. Mele, Free Will and Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Neil Levy, Hard Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 19  On this point, see Duncan Pritchard, Epistemic Luck (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005). 20   With respect to the last of these, see Michael Bratman’s discussion, especially in his Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason, of the way plans are adjusted in light of phenomena.



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of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”21 Plenty Coups had understood his life in terms of hunting and fighting—indeed, this is reflected in his name itself—but once there were no more bison to hunt and the US government had forbidden the Crow from fighting their Sioux and Cheyenne enemies, such a life was no longer possible. Plenty Coups lived for many years after this, of course, but his life could no longer conform to the self-narrative with which he identified and in which he intended himself. In these circumstances, as Jonathan Lear puts it: insofar as I am a Crow subject there is nothing left for me to do; and there is nothing left for me to deliberate about, intend, or plan for. Insofar as I  am a Crow subject, I have ceased to be. All that’s left is a ghostlike existence that stands witness to the death of the subject. Such a witness might well say something enigmatic like “After this, nothing happened.”22

Examples aside, the point is this: if (a) the mineness of one’s life is a matter of one’s life having a narrative shape with which one identifies, (b) its having that shape depends upon certain phenomena actually fitting into that narrative, and (c) some of these phenomena are at odds with that narrative, it follows (d) that one may not be able to integrate these phenomena into one’s narratives, and (e) that, if this occurs too many times, or in too important an instance, one may not be able to identify with one’s life or experience it as one’s own. In such a situation, that is to say, one may surmise that phenomena which figure importantly into one’s life are subject to a narrative other than, and perhaps at odds with, one’s own, and one may therefore be unable to identify with one’s life. Then again, one need not actually face such dire circumstances in order to feel that one’s life is subject to narratives other than one’s own, for if one came to see that many significant phenomena fit into a narrative that was hostile or indifferent to one’s intentions—because, say, they were governed by the laws of nature—then one might arrive at a similar conclusion. 23 As we shall see, much of modern theology has been animated by worries about the implications of such indifference. The point, then, is that important phenomena may not fit into one’s self-narratives, in consequence of which one’s life may not have a shape such that one can identify with it. This helps to explain both the possibility and 21   Frank B. Linderman, Plenty-Coups: Chief of the Crows (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962, 2002), 311. Jonathan Lear offers a perceptive, affecting philosophical analysis of this episode in Radical Hope:  Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 22  Lear, Radical Hope, 49–50. 23   Though not, perhaps, if one were a compatibilist. We will return to this issue in subsequent chapters.

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the attraction of self-deception. As I am using the term, “self-deception” occurs when one bends one’s understanding of phenomena so as to make them fit into one’s self-narratives, whether by ignoring phenomena that might not fit into those narratives, or by interpreting them in a distorted sense so as to treat them as if they did. 24 Self-deception thus includes much of what we would characterize as wishful thinking, denial, selective memory, hypocrisy, and so on. However characterized, self-deception is attractive insofar as one wants to preserve one’s self-narratives in the face of phenomena that are at odds with those narratives, and self-deception is possible due to certain characteristic features of narrative, especially (a)  the role narrative plays in rendering certain phenomena salient, and (b)  narrative’s underdetermination by phenomena. The former explains how one could ignore phenomena that would otherwise cause trouble for one’s self-narrative, since one can class these phenomena, instead, with the innumerable other phenomena that need not be integrated into a narrative, while the latter explains how one could forcibly integrate otherwise troublesome phenomena into one’s narratives, since as a rule narrativity is something that one brings to phenomena. There may be a fine line, accordingly, between valid and invalid narrations: a student who gets a few bad grades, or an athlete who fails to make the team, or an author whose book is rejected by several publishers, may try to see these failures as due to bad luck or unfairness rather than as casting doubt upon their self-narratives, and in some cases one’s seeing things as such is a legitimate way of maintaining one’s self-narratives in the face of various obstacles, whereas in others it is a matter of maintaining them in the face of dispositive evidence to the contrary. This explains why one often looks to others to help one discern whether one is interpreting phenomena correctly—which is one of the reasons that mentors can play such a crucial role in one’s life—though looking to others may render one vulnerable in certain other respects, to which we will turn shortly. The present point is that one’s desire to maintain one’s self-narrative may lead one into self-deception, in consequence of which one may enable oneself to experience one’s life as conforming to one’s intentions, but only by ignoring or distorting important phenomena. In such a case, the mineness of one’s life is merely a subjective affair, at odds not only with what is objectively the case, but with what one would oneself recognize—self-deceptions aside—as such. Such a life does not actually have the shape one intends.

  Here I am following recent work on the subject by Alfred Mele, Self Deception Unmasked (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Annette Barnes, Seeing Through Self Deception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and the essays collected in McLaughlin and Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self Deception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 24



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One may also be self-deceived in another, deeper sense, if one’s self-narratives are at odds not with external phenomena, so to speak, but with oneself.25 This may sound paradoxical, but the situation is familiar enough: someone may try to see herself as someone she is not, whether this is because she is trying to conform herself to her family’s or society’s expectations, or because this is who she used to be, or because there is some incentive—prestige, belongingness, financial gain, not getting picked on, etc.—involved in seeing oneself this way, or for any number of other reasons. That there are such cases seems uncontroversial; more controversial, perhaps, is any explanation of how one could come to recognize them as such. Here is one suggestion: suppose a person has long understood his or her life in terms of a particular narrative; he or she then comes to understand his or her life in terms of another narrative, perhaps because the latter better integrates important aspects of him or herself; he or she comes to feel that the latter narrative captures who he or she really is, by contrast to the former; he or she is thus at odds with him or herself at the level of self-narrative, and has to deal with this either by experiencing dividedness, or by trying to suppress one of the narratives, or by changing self-narrative. However one accounts for such cases, the point is that one’s self-narratives may not adequately integrate important elements of one’s self, in which case, again, it is hard to see how that self-narrative could enable one to identify with one’s life. That brings us, finally, to a special class of phenomena that must be integrated into one’s self-narratives, namely other persons (along with their narratives). First, if one recognizes other persons as narrators, for instance, then it may be important to integrate their narratives into one’s own, for otherwise—if there were too great a disparity between their narratives and one’s own—one may have to give up one’s recognition of them (or of oneself) as fellow narrators. Consider a case in which one’s memory of a particular event clashes with the memories of those one trusts, or in which one’s memory of many events clashes with theirs; especially in the latter case, one may begin to lose confidence in one’s reliability as a narrator. Not only that, but, second, those whom one recognizes as narrators may also integrate one into their narratives, in which case one may have to integrate that integration into one’s narrative, which can further complicate one’s ability to experience one’s life as one’s own. So, for example, one may not feel like oneself around those whose understanding of one diverges from one’s self-understanding; think here of family members who continue to think of one in terms of a narrative from one’s past, or of coworkers who perceive one in terms of

25   Important examples abound in recent work on gender; see, for instance, c­ hapter  3 of Ellen K.  Feder, Family Bonds:  Genealogies of Race and Gender (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007).

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certain stereotypes. One may also find it difficult to identify with a particular self-narrative if it is at odds with others’ narratives of one, especially when that self-narrative is new to one; so graduate students, for instance, may (try to) think of themselves as having something to contribute to scholarly discussion, but if those whom they recognize as participants in that discussion do not in turn recognize those contributions, the students may find it hard to perceive themselves as such. (Imagine teaching a game to young children in which one continually treats the children as if they did not know what they were doing; in such a case, the children would not be able to see themselves as competent players of the game, even if they were.) Third, one’s relation to others may matter in a further respect, in that it may be important to one that one have a certain importance for them; if so, then if one does not perceive oneself to be important to them, one may experience a kind of disconnect in one’s relationship to oneself. Someone who perceives him or herself not to be important to those who are important to him or her may thus perceive him or herself as “invisible,” as not mattering, as not salient, and may therefore find it difficult either to identify with his or her place in their narratives, or with his or her own self-narrative.26 In such cases, others figure importantly into one’s self-narratives, but one may find it difficult to integrate them into those narratives, and may therefore find it difficult to maintain the right sort of relationship to oneself. So then: if a life is “mine” just in case it has a narrative shape with which one can identify or in which one can intend oneself, and if it can have such a shape only if important phenomena actually fit into that narrative, then it is not hard to understand some of the characteristic vulnerabilities to which human life is exposed: if one cannot integrate these phenomena because they are absurd or at odds with one’s self-narratives, or if one’s self-narratives are at odds with oneself, then one’s life may not have a narrative shape such that one can identify with it. There are a few ways that one might respond to such a situation. First, one might simply resign oneself to the fact that one’s life will not have the shape one intended—one may give up, in other words, or try to give up, on leading a life with which one can identify. A second response might be to revise one’s intended narrative: someone who cannot get a job in his or her field, for instance, might decide to do something else with his or her life. If a person can identify with the revised intention, rather than experience it as having been imposed upon him or her by his or her circumstances, and if his or her circumstances now conform with that intention, then the person may be able to experience his or her life as “mine.” If not, one may opt for a

26   Reactive attachment disorder seems to be an extreme—and heartbreaking—example of this; see C.H. Zeenah et  al., “Reactive Attachment Disorder in Maltreated Toddlers,” Child Abuse and Neglect 28:8 (2004).



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third response, namely, to intend for one’s life to have a shape that is invulnerable to the whim of circumstance; one might thus intend only that one’s will would have a certain shape—say, that of willing what is right irrespective of circumstance. This intention may be harder to fulfill than one would think, however, since (a) it is difficult to bring even one’s will into conformity with such an intention, and (b) insofar as one’s life is supposed to be governed by this will, one apparently intends, yet again, that certain circumstances would conform to it, in which case one is back where one started. We will discuss these problems at length in Chapter 2. A fourth response, to be considered in Section 1.5 and, indeed, the rest of this book, would be for one to have faith that there is something more ultimate than these phenomena, and for this faith itself to be recognizably self-expressive. Before turning to this response, we should say something about how—or whether—these considerations apply to cases where important circumstances go the way a person wants, such that his or her life has the shape he or she intends. Such cases do seem to exist, and may even be fairly common, but insofar as a particular life’s turning out this way is a matter of luck—insofar, that is, as important circumstances could have turned out differently—one cannot know in advance whether one’s own life will turn out this way. Hence, while mineness may certainly be achieved apart from faith, the theologians we will be considering turn to faith because it is sufficient to establish mineness in a maximally wide range of cases, and so irrespective of how one’s circumstances turn out. The claim, in other words, is that faith may not be a necessary condition of mineness, but it is a sufficient condition for a wide range of cases. (Here as elsewhere, it is important to note that faith is not being reduced to the role it can play in establishing “mineness”; the claim, rather, is that it can play such a role, even if it can also play other, possibly more basic, roles, with other, more basic, contents.)

1.5.  FA ITH A ND MODER N TH EOLOGY That brings us, finally, to faith, reliance on which has often been motivated by the experience of such vulnerability. For present purposes, let “faith” indicate a sort of stance one takes toward that which one takes to be ultimate. To characterize faith as a stance is to suggest that it involves the taking of a stand or the placing of a bet on what really matters, and so to distinguish faith from the mere affirmation of certain propositions or engagement in certain practices. Of course, simply affirming a proposition’s truth or engaging in a practice also involves taking a stand on it, not least because the evidence is seldom such as strictly to dictate what one ought to think or do, but unless it is a stance toward what finally matters it does not count as faith (as I am using

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that term). Faith is thus a stance one takes toward that which one takes to be ultimate, that is, what one takes as the standard in terms of which to understand or respond to a suitably wide range of phenomena, and therefore as that which may or must be counted on amid such phenomena. This formulation will be filled in considerably in the following chapters, but it should already seem plausible enough, since it follows a thread common to many understandings of faith: think here of Schleiermacher’s famous claim about feeling oneself to be absolutely dependent upon the Whence of that dependence, or Tillich’s claim about “ultimate concern,” or even Luther’s claim that to have a god is to trust in one with one’s whole heart. The present formulation—that faith is a particular sort of stance one takes toward that which one takes to be ultimate—means to say something relevantly similar. Again, we will have much more to say about faith as the argument proceeds, but we can already see why faith might be important to one whose life has been rendered vulnerable by absurdity, injustice, tragedy, and the like, for if one takes something other than these circumstances to be ultimate, one can then stand in a different relation to them: such circumstances may indeed threaten one, but if one trusts that something other than them has the final word on one’s life, then the threat can be relativized and one can continue to hope that one’s life will turn out as intended. To take just one example, faith played precisely this role for many during (as well as prior to and after) the American Civil Rights movement, when it enabled persons to see themselves in light of a God who created and loved all persons equally, and so to resist the manifold ways in which racism threatened to impose its narrative upon them; they were able to see justice in light of this same God, and so see discriminatory laws and practices, along with the authority with which these had been invested, as unjust and so lacking true authority.27 The point is that by taking a stand about that which is ultimate, one can see one’s life in its light, and can therefore stand in a different relationship to phenomena by which one’s life may be compromised or threatened. Faith can thus play an important role in enabling one to see one’s life as hanging together, but appealing to it raises an obvious problem: faith, too, may be merely given to one rather than truly one’s own, or it may appear to be a form of wishful thinking, or to be at odds with one’s true self, and so on, in consequence of which faith seems to be one of the phenomena that must be integrated into one’s self-narratives, rather than something suited to maintain those narratives. The questions, then, are these: how might faith enable one to identify with one’s life and so experience it as self-expressive, and what would enable one to identify with faith and experience it as self-expressive?

27   These points are nicely captured in Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).



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Modern theology can be read as a series of responses to these questions, and as helping us see what an adequate response might look like. Each of the figures treated in subsequent chapters offers an account (a) of how one’s life would have to hang together such that one could identify with it; (b) of the oppositions which stand in the way of such hanging together; (c) of God as the one by whom oppositions are overcome, such that one can have faith that one’s life will ultimately hang together; and (d) of what such faith would have to be like in order for one to identify with it, too. Immanuel Kant argues, accordingly, (a) that one can identify with one’s life if one intends the moral law and one’s life conforms to that law; (b) that one’s inclusion in the realm of nature, as well as the corruption of one’s will, seems opposed to such conformity; (c) that one can reasonably hope that such opposition is not ultimate only if there is a moral God who is the Supreme Cause of nature, and who would regard one as righteous in spite of one’s corruption; and (d) because faith in this God is consonant with one’s intending the moral law, that one can identify with it, too. We see something similar in Friedrich Schleiermacher, who claims (a) that one can identify with one’s life insofar as one can establish a self-expressive harmony between one’s freedom and that upon which one depends; (b) that freedom and dependence stand in antithesis insofar as one treats the finite world as if it were ultimate; (c) that such antitheses can be overcome only insofar as one has faith in the One upon whom both freedom and dependence depend absolutely and by whom they are harmonized; and (d)  that one can identify with such faith, too, insofar as one’s faith is itself an instance of self-expressive harmonization. Likewise, G.W.F. Hegel contends (a) that one can identify with one’s life insofar as one can maintain one’s self-unity in relationship to otherness, such that one would be fully at home with oneself in all of one’s circumstances; (b) that such unity is threatened by that which stands over against one, including worldly objects, others who do not recognize one, and authoritarian moral codes; (c) that God overcomes all such over-against-ness by “negating its negation,” that is, by taking over-against-ness upon Godself so as to overcome its character as over-against; and (d) that one can identify with faith in God insofar as one can “return to oneself” in relationship to God, just as God returns to Godself in relationship to humanity. Similarly, Albrecht Ritschl and Ernst Troeltsch claim (a)  that one can identify with one’s life insofar as it hangs together as a person-forming and personally formed whole; (b) that such wholeness is opposed by the dominion of nature and of social evils; (c)  that faith in God’s providence enables one to trust that such would-be dominion is not ultimate, and so to organize one’s life instead around one’s particular vocation; and (d) that one can identify with such faith insofar as one’s particular expression of it gathers up and contributes to a series of precedent expressions. And finally, Paul Tillich asserts (a) that one can identify with one’s life insofar as one can integrate one’s circumstances, as well as oneself, into a

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self-determined “center”; (b) that insofar as one centers oneself on a ground other than God, one becomes estranged from God, self, and world, such that one no longer stands in a “self-returning” relationship to them; (c) that God overcomes this estrangement by taking it into unity with the divine life; and (d)  that one can identify with one’s faith in this overcoming because one’s inclusion in the divine life simultaneously reunites one with one’s center. This sketch of modern theology is overly schematic, not least because it omits the material connections among these figures, but it should suffice to indicate some of the central issues by which modern theologians were animated, as well as some general themes in their treatment of these issues. On their account, faith in a God who overcomes oppositions enables one to experience one’s life as hanging together, and one can identify with this faith, in turn, if (a) it enables one to experience one’s life as such, (b) one’s relationship to God is simultaneously a self-relationship, in that one can see oneself, as it were, in God’s own relationship to one, and (c) one’s appropriation of it can be seen as gathering up and putting one’s stamp on the faith that has been mediated to one, thereby opening up possibilities for others to appropriate it as such. If that is correct, then a mineness-relationship to faith could be established, in part, by identifying the role that faith can play in enabling one to experience one’s life as one’s own, and by synthesizing precedent faith-expressions in such a way that others can appropriate them. That is one of the things this book aims to do—not only to identify the conditions of mineness, but to contribute to their being met.

1.6.  HISTOR ICA L CONSTR A I N TS There is internal warrant, accordingly, for the historical approach I am taking to these issues, for if I am right, the tracing of a historical narrative can play an important role in establishing the mineness of one’s relationship to that which is narrated. I hope that my approach is also warranted—or at least warrantable—by strictly historical standards, though I cannot fully elaborate (much less defend) these standards here, not least because such standards are controversial even among scholars of history.28 I should at least mention two historical-methodological constraints that I have tried to observe throughout. First, although this book means to contribute to contemporary discussions, it attempts to do so by reading historical figures in their own historical   For an overview of some of the relevant issues, see Geoffrey Roberts (ed.), The History and Narrative Reader (London:  Routledge, 2001); for a helpful philosophical approach to them, see Michael Kremer, “What Is the Good of Philosophical History?” in Erich Reck (ed.), The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 28



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context. One of the chief dangers I have sought to avoid, accordingly, is anachronism, and so I have worked hard to resist interpreting these figures in terms of questions and ideas that I have imposed upon them. It is worth noting, then, that the questions by which my interpretations are animated, and the answers at which I have arrived, have all emerged from years spent reading (and letting myself be challenged by) these texts. Despite my commitment to reading these figures in their historical context, however, readers will soon realize that I have focused almost exclusively on their intellectual context, to the relative exclusion of social, cultural, economic, and other factors. I have benefited considerably from work that understands these figures in terms of such factors, and there are certainly points at which I will have to address them. I do think, though, that focusing primarily on their intellectual context is warranted, since one’s reasons for advancing a particular argument or holding a particular belief are seldom dictated by external circumstances, and even if they were so dictated, one’s stated reasons would still be meant to make sense in terms of one’s intellectual context. For better or worse, then, in trying to understand these figures in their historical contexts, I have focused primarily on their specifically intellectual context. Second, my argument is constrained by the recognition that a historical approach warrants modest conclusions at best. This is the case, first, because although my selection of figures is not entirely arbitrary, neither is it necessary, in consequence of which the argument’s conclusions are contingent upon the relative goodness of this selection. Second, even given the choice of these figures, any reading of any of their texts will be probable at best, and since my interpretation of each figure involves the reading of many texts, it follows that the establishment even of a probable interpretation will be difficult. Surely, then, nothing more than probable conclusions are to be expected. And third, the movement from one figure to the next is motivated by objections to that figure’s views, but since there are in each case rejoinders available to someone who would continue to defend these views, it follows that these movements proceed with something far short of logical necessity. For reasons like these, accordingly, the conclusions to be drawn here must necessarily be modest. One further word with respect to my choice of figures. Some might wonder why we need another book about Great European Figures, and might think it especially odd that a book about mineness would be about these figures, since their canonical status has often seemed like a formidable obstacle to those who are trying to establish their own theological and philosophical voices. I share this concern. As I see it, though, these figures can help us think about what it would mean to establish one’s voice, and I  would argue that those who are trying to do so can gain a new sort of freedom in relationship to these figures precisely insofar as they are integrated into a narrative about how one can experience one’s life as self-expressive. One can stand in this new

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relationship, however, only by actually integrating them into such a narrative, which is one of the reasons why this book spends so much time on these figures. It seems to me, then, that one’s commitment to the flourishing of a wider array of theological perspectives is not necessarily incompatible with one’s determination to understand long-canonical figures of the sort treated here.

1.7.  TH E GOODNE SS OF “M I N EN E SS” Before turning to these figures, one additional question must be addressed: is identification with one’s life good, as the preceding pages seem to assume? To deal with this question, consider two cases in which mineness would not be good, the first of which is straightforwardly based upon, and so meant to illustrate, our earlier distinction between a life’s worth and its recognizability as one’s own. So think, for instance, of an aristocrat whose unwarrantedly privileged way of life has begun to crumble, and who can therefore no longer lead the life he or she intends and with which he or she identifies; in such a case, I am inclined to say that his or her inability so to identify is a good thing, or that its badness is far outweighed by the goodness of achieving more egalitarian circumstances for all. More generally, then, it seems to me that there are some cases in which it would not be good, all things considered, for one’s life to have the narrative shape that one intends, since that narrative may itself promote or otherwise depend upon circumstances whose badness outweighs whatever goodness is involved in identifying with one’s life. If so, the implication is not that “mineness” is not a good, only that if it is a good, it is a good that can be outweighed by others. There are other cases, however, in which “mineness” is not a good. Suppose, by hypothesis, that there are certain persons who in principle cannot identify with their lives; these may include some persons who experience severe deprivation, and some persons with a severe mental illness or disability (though it would be a mistake to assume that persons with, say, moderate intellectual disabilities are unable to form intentions with respect to their lives). Are such persons missing something? That is to say, are their lives less good than those whose lives are recognizably their own? The key to handling such cases, I  think, is to consider whether a person is able to experience a disconnect between him or herself and his or her life. If a person who has endured severe deprivation can experience this deprivation as at odds with the way he or she would want his or her life to go, then his or her life would in that case be bad not only in virtue of his or her being treated inhumanely, but also in virtue of its utter indifference to his or her intentions. If a person cannot experience such a disconnect, by contrast, then he or she could not experience a lack of “mineness” as a lack, and “mineness” would therefore not be a good that his



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or her life could either have or be missing. This suggests that if “mineness” is a good, it is so only for those who can experience its lack as if something were missing from their lives, though, again, even in such cases it can be outweighed by other goods. So then:  insofar as the absence of “mineness” can be experienced as a lack, there seems to be prima facie warrant for thinking that the presence of “mineness” is a good. Such a claim is hardly conclusive, however, since it is liable to all sorts of serious objections, the strongest of which can be put in characteristically Buddhist terms: if (a) “mineness” is a matter of intending for one’s life to have a particular narrative shape, and (b) one’s so intending renders one vulnerable to experiences of lack, then (c) “mineness” is one of the roots of human suffering, and, therefore, (d) “mineness” is not a good to be pursued, but precisely the sort of self-relationship from which one must be freed. One could thus argue that, in the case of “mineness,” the bad necessarily outweighs the good, such that there are no actual cases in which “mineness” is a good. I cannot here elaborate a decisive response to this argument, but happily I need not do so, since I actually agree with (and have already discussed versions of) points (a) through (c), and would thus argue only that (d) does not necessarily follow from these points—that is to say, even if one were to grant that “mineness” is a root of suffering, this would not necessarily mean that one should give up on it; it could just as well mean that an adequate account of “mineness” must include an element of what Tillich will characterize as an “in-spite-of” relationship to one’s life. This too is a point to which we shall return.

2 Giving Oneself the Law Chapter  1 argued, first, that “mineness” is a matter of one’s life hanging together in such a way that one can identify with it; second, that the need for such hanging together renders one vulnerable insofar as important phenomena may not actually conform with one’s life-intentions, since such phenomena may instead be governed by forces that are hostile or indifferent to these intentions; and third, that modern theology can be read as a series of responses to the question of how one can identify with one’s life even in the face of such vulnerability, and, in particular, as claiming that faith plays a key role in enabling one to do so. This chapter considers the response of one modern theologian: Immanuel Kant. Some readers will be surprised to hear Kant described as a “modern theologian”; others, to hear that Kant was concerned with “mineness” and vulnerability. That such descriptions are nevertheless apt should become clear soon enough, for I  will argue, first, that Kant was deeply concerned with two sources of vulnerability: (a) the apparent powerlessness of would-be free persons in the face of a world governed by the strict laws of natural, mechanistic necessity, and (b)  one’s apparent powerlessness to prevent important beliefs—including even those formed on the basis of scientific investigation—from turning out to be wrong, or at the very least as indistinguishable from merely customary beliefs. To address these vulnerabilities, Kant argued (a) that the principles upon which scientifically grounded beliefs are based are not merely customary, for these principles are in fact universal laws; (b)  that human persons are free from natural necessity because and insofar as they are governed by a different sort of law, namely moral law, and that government by this law enables one to identify with one’s life; (c) that moral and natural law are alike the product of human reason, such that beliefs and intentions governed by them are simultaneously self-governed; and (d)  that the laws governing nature apply only to sensible phenomena, whereas the laws governing morality apply to a supersensible realm, such that one and the same event can be described as naturally necessary and as



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a free action, and, therefore, that the former need not be seen as a threat to the latter. Kant thus takes himself to have addressed two sources of vulnerability, but his ingenious way of doing so seems not only liable to, but severely to have exacerbated, another sort of vulnerability, namely one’s apparent powerlessness to bring phenomena into conformity with one’s intentions. As Kant himself realizes, it is not clear how a supersensible realm governed by the moral law could have any effect in a sensible realm governed by natural law, which raises an obvious problem: if a will governed by the moral law necessarily intends to have such an effect in the sensible realm, as Kant contends, then unless it can be known, or at least reasonably thought, to have such an effect, in willing the moral law one would will what one knew to be impossible. This problem is related to another: if morality were not known, or at least reasonably thought, to have a reliable effect in the world, then there would be no reason to think that there is a reliable connection in the world between happiness and worthiness to be happy, and thus no way of addressing the tragic fact that wicked persons often prosper while decent ones suffer. In response to these problems, Kant admits that one cannot be certain that the moral law will be effective in the sensible realm, but claims that one can nevertheless reasonably hope that it will, and that such hope is sufficient to enable one to persist in willing the moral law. The reasonableness of this hope, he claims, turns out to depend upon, and thus warrant faith in, the existence of a God who governs both realms according to the moral law. The reasonableness of such faith also addresses a further problem, namely, that one may be unable to bring one’s will itself into conformity with the moral law, despite one’s best intentions, since the human will is never entirely “holy,” and is in fact “radically evil.” Once again, then, it would appear that in willing the moral law one wills that which is impossible. In response to this problem, Kant again appeals to faith, in this case, faith that one who commits him or herself to the moral law may reasonably hope to be regarded by God as righteous in spite of his or her unholiness. In sum, then, Kant can be understood as responding to certain kinds of vulnerability by appealing, first, to laws that govern the realms of nature and of morality, which one can nevertheless recognize as self-legislated and, especially in the case of the moral law, as “mine”; and, second, to faith as the reasonable hope that the moral law can also govern the natural realm as well as one’s own will, such that the difficulties one experiences in trying to integrate the latter into the former need not mean it is impossible for one’s life to have the moral shape that one intends.

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2 .1.  DETER M I N ISTIC BEGI N N I NGS To understand why Kant became concerned with these issues, and how he responded to them, it will be helpful to consider a few key moments in his philosophical development. As we shall see, Kant eventually invented the notion of “mineness,” in our sense, in order to address problems that arose during the course of this development. Tracing his development will also allow us to bring some of the broader intellectual context into the picture, since Kant started off as a sort of Leibnizian rationalist, turned for a time to Humean empiricism, before eventually settling on the views for which he is best known. As such, Sections 2.1 to 2.3 depart from the procedure followed in the rest of the book, in that they recount historical developments that are not immediately or directly related to the problem of “mineness.” I think there is good reason for this, but readers who think otherwise can skip ahead to their culmination in the Critique of Pure Reason. We begin, then, with one of Kant’s first theoretical writings, namely his New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (publicly defended in 17551), in which he elaborates and defends an account according to which natural processes and human rationality are governed by one and the same principle, such that a person should be able to see his or her rationality as conforming more or less unproblematically with natural phenomena. This establishes an important baseline for understanding Kant’s later work, for once Kant lost faith in the principle upon which this account is based, he became increasingly concerned with the difficulties involved in such integration, and was thus propelled toward the claims discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The aim of the Elucidation, Kant tells us, is to shed light on the first principles of cognition, that is, on the grounds on which such cognition rests.2

1  The Elucidation was in fact the second of two dissertations that Kant had to defend in order to qualify for the post of Privatdozent at the University of Königsberg; the first was a natural-scientific work entitled On Fire, also defended in 1755. For the relevant biographical context, see Manfred Kuehn, Kant:  A  Biography (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001); helpful accounts of Kant’s philosophical background and development can be found in Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy:  Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1969), Alison Laywine, Kant’s Early Metaphysics and the Origins of the Critical Philosophy (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1993), and Martin Schönfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 2  Kant, Principium Primorum Cognitionis Metaphysicae Nova Dilucidatio, 1:387. References to Kant are to the volume and page numbers of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, commonly referred to as the Akademie edition (Berlin: Georg Reimer, then Walter de Gruyter, 1900–), with one exception: references to the Critique of Pure Reason will be to the page numbers of the 1781 edition (cited as “A”) and/or the second edition of 1787 (“B”). A note on translations: I have tried to stay close enough to existing English translations that English-speaking readers, especially students, will not have too much trouble finding and following the passages I am quoting; toward that end, references to non-English texts will include parenthetical references to English translations, except in cases where the translations already include reference to the



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To establish these grounds, Kant argues for what he calls the principle of determining ground—a variation on the traditional principle of sufficient reason—where a ground is that which “establishes a connection and a conjunction between the subject and some predicate or other,” specifically by rendering this connection intelligible, and a determining ground is one that identifies the reason why this predicate is conjoined with this subject, as well as why its opposite is excluded, thereby making the connection maximally intelligible.3 With respect to any phenomenon, that is to say, if one can adduce an explanation that suffices not only to explain why it is as it is, but why it could not have been otherwise, then one will have identified its determining ground and understood the phenomenon as far as is possible. From this principle, Kant draws the interesting conclusion that the determining grounds of reason are isomorphic with the determining grounds of things themselves. He writes, accordingly, that “a ground, therefore, converts things which are indeterminate into things which are determinate. And since all truth is generated by the determination of a predicate in a subject, it follows that the determining ground is not only the criterion of truth, it is also its source.”4 Think here of explaining an object’s falling in terms of gravity: one thinks of the laws of gravity not only as providing sufficient explanation of the object’s fall, but also as identifying a real cause of that fall.5 Kant’s idea is that if a determining ground is sufficient not merely to explain a given phenomenon, but to explain why it could not have been otherwise, then that ground would count as necessitating that phenomenon. Taken by itself, however, this would not warrant Kant’s claim that rational grounds, when determining, are identical with real grounds, since he has thus far argued only that these grounds are sufficient and necessitating, not that they are also necessary, which leaves open the possibility that another sufficient and necessitating ground is in fact the real ground. That brings us to the final step of Kant’s argument, to the effect that every contingent phenomenon requires an antecedently determining ground—a ground, that is, sufficient to necessitate the phenomenon—and that each of these grounds likewise requires such sufficient and necessitating grounds,

original pagination. I have nevertheless modified the existing translations, sometimes drastically, wherever necessary. In this chapter, I favor the translations from the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, with the exception, again, of the Critique of Pure Reason, where I favor that of Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1929). 3  Kant, Nova Dilucidatio, 1:392, cf. 1:393, where Kant claims that “the term ‘determinate’ designates that which is certainly sufficient to conceive the thing in such and such a way, and in no other.” 4  Kant, Nova Dilucidatio, 1:392. 5   Kant’s own, somewhat infelicitous example concerns a globular explanation of the fact that light does not travel instantaneously (cf. 1:392–3).

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and so on, in a chain that stretches back to a sole, absolutely necessary being.6 Hence, given that everything in this chain is necessitated by an antecedent ground, it follows that none of the links in the chain could have been otherwise, and that each is therefore a necessary condition of that which is grounded upon it, not because there could not have been other sufficient grounds, but because the actual world is the only possible world. Kant thus claims that if it is the case that whatever happens can happen only if it has an antecedently determining ground, it follows that whatever does not happen could not happen either, for obviously no ground is present, and without a ground it could not happen at all. And this is something which has to be admitted in the case of all grounds of grounds taken in retrogressive order. It follows, therefore, that all things happen in virtue of a natural conjunction, and in such a connected and continuous fashion that, if someone were to wish the opposite of some event or even of a free action, his wish would involve the conception of something impossible, for the ground necessary to produce the opposite of what happened or was done is simply not present.7

It now follows, accordingly, that if one knows the rational determining ground of some phenomenon, one also knows the real determining ground, for phenomena themselves are governed by precisely the sort of necessary and sufficient conditions that reason identifies. The principle of determining ground thus provides Kant with a robust defense against the charge that our beliefs are mere accidents of history, and it also leads him (by way of some interesting claims about the necessary being upon which contingent beings are ultimately grounded) to the comforting belief that the world, thus necessitated, is the best possible world; in his “Optimism” essay, accordingly, he writes that “I am also happy to find myself a citizen of a world which could not possibly have been better than it is,” and that he will therefore “gaze around me as far as my eye can reach, ever more learning to understand that the whole is the best, and everything is good for the sake of the whole.”8 His principle of determining ground thus seems to inoculate Kant against worries about absurdity, tragedy, and so forth, but it would appear to leave him open to another worry, namely that his theory entails that humans are not actually free. Kant registers a version of this charge, which he attributes to Crusius, in the New Elucidation: “The determining ground

6   So Kant claims, on the one hand, that “nothing which exists contingently can be without a ground which determined its existence antecedently” (Nova Dilucidatio, Proposition VIII, 1:396), and, on the other, that “there is a being, the existence of which is prior to the very possibility both of itself and of all things. This being is, therefore, said to exist absolutely necessarily. This being is called God” (Proposition VII, 1:395). 7  Kant, Nova Dilucidatio, 1:399. 8  Kant, Versuch einiger Betrachtungen über den Optimismus (1759), 2:34–5.



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not only brings it about that this action in particular should take place; it also brings it about that no other actions could happen instead of it. Therefore,” his imagined objector continues, “whatever happens within us has been foreseen by God in its orderly sequence in such a way that nothing else at all could happen. Thus, the charging to our account of the things we have done is charging us with what does not belong to us.”9 The objection is familiar enough: if a person’s conduct is necessitated by forces over which he or she has no control, then it would appear that he or she is not free with respect to his or her conduct, and cannot rightly be held responsible for it. In response, Kant appeals to a more or less Leibnizian account of compatibilism:  in the case of the free actions of human beings, insofar as they are regarded as determinate, their opposites are indeed excluded; they are not, however, excluded by grounds which are posited as existing outside the desires and spontaneous inclinations of the subject, as if the agent were compelled to perform actions against his will, so to speak, and as a result of a certain ineluctable necessity. On the contrary, it is in the very inclination of his volitions and desires, insofar as that inclination readily yields to the blandishments of his representations, that his actions are determined by a fixed law and in a connection which is most certain but also free.10

Given the moral psychology with which Kant was working at the time, the claim seems to be (a) that a person’s conduct is free if and only if it issues from his or her own desires, (b) that he or she necessarily desires that which he or she finds most pleasing, and (c) that his or her conduct is thus necessitated by determining grounds, yet (d) it is simultaneously free insofar as it also accords with his or her own desires. As Kant summarizes the point, “to act freely is to act in conformity with one’s desire and to do so, indeed, with consciousness,” even if this means that one’s acts are therefore “bound to happen, given the inclination of your desire relative to the situation as it was constituted.”11 Kant will later repudiate this view—referring to it, derisively, as “the freedom of a turnspit”—but it is important to note that in one of his earliest theoretical works, Kant is already dealing not only with problems related to rational belief, but also with those related to freedom and necessity.

 Kant, Nova Dilucidatio, 1:399.  Kant, Nova Dilucidatio, 1:400; cf. Optimismus, 2:34. The understanding of desire here at issue is one that Kant takes himself to have learned—and at first accepted—from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, but which he vehemently rejects in his mature ethical works. In their correspondence, Moses Mendelssohn pointed out to Kant that it was unfair to equate these thinkers with Epicurus (letter of December 25, 1770, 10:114), and Kant registers the point in his Metaphysik der Sitten, but it seems to have made little material difference to his settled understanding of moral feeling. 11  Kant, Nova Dilucidatio, 1:402. 9

10

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2 .2 .  A NEW A PPROACH TO SPACE A N D TI M E The New Elucidation represents Kant’s first attempt to deal with these issues, but it would not be his last. Indeed, within a few years Kant had already lost confidence in the principle of determining ground; this first becomes apparent in his “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy,” in which he tries to account for phenomena wherein, say, two bodies in motion bump into one another and thereby come to rest, about which he observes, crucially, that the actual opposition between the two bodies is importantly different from the sort of opposition captured by logic (formulated in the latter’s notion of contradiction). From this observation, Kant draws two more general conclusions:  first, if logical relationships are thus distinct from real relationships, it follows that rational explanation cannot be assumed to stand in an isomorphic relationship with reality, as he had earlier thought. Kant argues, that is, that logical contradiction differs from real opposition, in consequence of which the latter cannot be explained as a case of the former; likewise that logical consequence differs from real causation, since the former sees consequences as contained within, and so identical with, that from which they are being drawn (think here of “therefore, Socrates is mortal”), whereas in the latter, that which is caused is by no means identical with or contained within the cause itself. As evidence, Kant points out that the will of God is presumably the cause of the world, but that the world is not (analytically) contained in God’s will in the same way that a conclusion is contained within the premises by which it is logically entailed; or again, that the motion of one object—say, a billiard ball—can cause another object to be set in motion, but that the latter’s motion is not contained in the former.12 Kant thus takes it that real relationships differ from logical relationships, which leads him to a second, more radical conclusion, namely, that we do not in fact understand things like real opposition and causation:  I fully understand, how a consequence is posited by a ground in accordance with the rule of identity: analysis of concepts shows that the consequence is contained in the ground . . . But what I should dearly like to have distinctly explained to me is how one thing issues from another thing, though not by means of the law of identity . . . How am I to understand the fact that, because something is, something else is?13 12   Kant discusses these examples on 2:202–3 of Versuch den Begriff der negativen Grössen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen. I borrow the term “analytic” here from Kant’s later discussion in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B6–7; cf. B10. 13  Kant, Negativen Grössen, 2:202. In the background here, I  take it, is the influence of Hume, though this is a controversial point; for arguments that support this interpretation, see Laywine, Kant’s Early Metaphysics, over against those of Lewis White Beck, “A Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant,” in Essays on Kant on Hume (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1978).



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Kant is here claiming that if (a) an effect’s relationship to its cause differs from a conclusion’s logical relationship to its premises, especially in that the latter relationship is analytic and so necessary, whereas the former is synthetic and so, apparently, not necessary, and (b) we clearly understand only that which can be put into logical form, then (c) we do not clearly understand an effect’s relationship to its cause. He concludes, therefore, that “all our cognitions of this relation reduce to simple unanalyzable concepts of real grounds, the relation of which to their consequences cannot be rendered distinct at all.”14 Kant will spend much of his career trying to address this issue, but what is crucial for his immediate philosophical development was that he had lost faith in the principle of determining ground, and thus in the apparently solid foundations laid in the New Elucidation. This loss of faith had decisive consequences for Kant’s development, since it obviously meant that he could no longer appeal to the principle of determining ground to establish the ultimate non-arbitrariness of our beliefs, and would therefore either have to accept such arbitrariness, or work out an alternative means of establishing that it does not have the final word. In writings immediately subsequent to “Negative Magnitudes,” therefore, Kant’s agenda is clear:  he will establish the ultimate non-arbitrariness of our beliefs by working out “the fundamental principles of our cognition,” the philosophy of which he terms “metaphysics.”15 The goal, as he puts it in his so-called Prize Essay of 1764, is as follows: “If the method for attaining the highest possible degree of certainty in this type of cognition has been established,” he argues, “and if the nature of this kind of conviction has been properly understood, then the following effect will be produced: the endless instability of opinions and scholarly sects will be replaced by an immutable rule which will govern didactic method and unite reflective minds in a single effort.”16 Kant’s central insight here is that such instability results when reason oversteps its proper bounds, and that stability can therefore be restored by identifying those boundaries and staying within them. In other words, Kant thinks that he can distinguish reasoning that leads to secure beliefs from reasoning that does not, and can accordingly keep the former from being tainted by the latter. Kant first attempts to draw the relevant distinction, and so achieve the relevant security, by adopting what he calls a “Newtonian” approach to metaphysics.17 In the Prize Essay, accordingly, he argues that the endless disputes among metaphysicians about first principles is due to their trying to derive

 Kant, Negativen Grössen, 2:204.  Kant, Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral (1764), 2:283. 16  Kant, Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze, 2:275; cf. the similar agenda proposed in Kant’s 1765 Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik, 2:342. 17   For characterizations to this effect, see Kant, Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze, 2:275, 286. 14 15

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such principles from abstract definitions.18 Metaphysicians have attempted in this way to follow the example of mathematics, he claims, while failing to realize that the method responsible for the latter’s astonishing progress causes nothing but confusion and hindrance when applied to the former.19 The cure for what ails metaphysics, therefore, is simple: instead of drawing endless inferences from abstract definitions, metaphysicians should derive their principles strictly from empirical data. Kant thus argues that if one wants to attain “the highest possible degree of metaphysical certainty,” one must adhere to two rules:  The first and most important rule is this: one ought not to start with definitions . . . One ought, rather, to begin by carefully searching out what is immediately certain in one’s object, even before one has its definition. Having established what is immediately certain in the object of one’s inquiry, one then proceeds to draw conclusions about it. One’s chief concern will be to arrive only at judgments about the object which are true and completely certain . . . The second rule is this: one ought particularly to distinguish those judgments which have been immediately made about the object and relate to what one initially encountered in that object with certainty . . . These judgments are to be placed at the beginning of one’s inquiry, as the foundation of all one’s inferences, like the axioms of geometry.20

The claim, then, is that if (a) the endless conflicts among metaphysicians are endless in principle, and (b) these conflicts are due to their procedure of drawing inferences from definitions that are not themselves anchored in empirical experience, then it seems to follow (c) that one can avoid such conflicts—and so, apparently, the arbitrariness of which they are a sign—by basing metaphysical claims solely on empirical experience, and carefully distinguishing that which is inferred from that from which it is inferred, since the latter alone is secure. If metaphysicians were to follow such a procedure, Kant promises, they could finally guarantee the soundness of their principles, as well as the soundness of beliefs which rest upon them.21 Kant defends a similar procedure in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1765), claiming that metaphysics’ contribution to human knowledge “consists in knowing whether a given task has been determined by reference to what one can know, and in knowing what relation the question has to the empirical concepts upon which all our judgments must be based. To that extent metaphysics is a science of the limits of human reason.”22 With its limits thus fixed, Kant promises

  On this point, cf. Kant, Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze, 2:289, cf. 283–4.  Kant, Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze, 2:283. 20  Kant, Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze, 2:285. 21  Kant, Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze, 2:289. 22  Kant, Träume, 2:367–8. Here Kant advances his theory in at least one important respect, arguing for an account of empirical experience in terms of those experiences whose objects are publicly available and about which almost everyone would agree; cf. 2:334–5, 342, and 344–5. 18

19



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that reason’s “frontiers will contract in size and its boundary-stones will be securely fixed.”23 There is a problem looming just outside these borders, however, as Kant himself recognizes: once reason has been hemmed in by empirical experience, it is no longer clear with what right one can speak of lawlike relations—paradigmatically relationships of cause and effect—within experience.24 Kant here argues, accordingly, that reason cannot explain notions like causality—and, indeed, that causality is inexplicable in principle—since (a) the relationship in question is a matter of some effect following necessarily from a cause, (b) reason has reliable insight only into that which has been derived from empirical experience, and (c) empirical experience never suffices to demonstrate that something necessarily follows from something else. With an eye to subsequent developments, it is important to observe that there is a questionable assumption underlying this argument, namely, that in cases like these necessity could be only an analytic affair—as in, “such-and-such necessarily follows from so-and-so, because such-and-such is antecedently contained in the concept of so-and-so, which is to say that so-and-so would contradict itself if such-and-such did not follow from it.” Be that as it may, if (a) it is never contradictory to say of an empirical phenomenon that it could obtain without a particular consequence following from it—here Kant agrees with Hume—and (b)  such consequences could count as necessary only if they were “analytic,” then (c) it follows that we know nothing of causation, strictly speaking, within the empirical realm. At this point, then, Kant has little choice but to accept Hume’s conclusion, that what we term causation is a matter not of objective necessity but only of subjective necessity, which is to say that when we speak of so-and-so causing such-and-such, we mean only that we have become accustomed to so-and-so causing such-and-such. The customariness of a way of thinking hardly seems to prove that the beliefs it produces are not arbitrary, however, which would explain why Kant was not long satisfied with this approach—for “in the absence of reason,” he writes, “everything seems to be accident or blind necessity.”25 Thus dissatisfied, Kant continues to work on these problems until, in 1769, a revolutionary idea occurs to him, such that he will later exclaim that “the

 Kant, Träume, 2:368.   Kant lays this out at 2:370; for a precisely parallel formulation from 1769—as Kant is beginning to arrive at his mature positions on these matters—cf. Reflexionen 3972, 17:370. 25  Kant, Reflexionen 4439 (1771), 17:547 (note that “or blind necessity” is a later addition). In appealing to such Reflexionen—and, in particular, in dating their appearance in Kant’s philosophical development—I am indebted to Erich Adickes, for which see especially his introduction to vol. 14 of the Akademie edition. Independent confirmation of Adickes periodization is presently impossible, however, for reasons detailed by Werner Stark, Nachforschungen zu Briefen un Handschriften Immanuel Kants (Berlin:  Akademie Verlag, 1993). In view of this problem, I have appealed to the Reflexionen only when I could triangulate their claims with sources to which we have direct access. 23

24

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year ’69 gave me great light.”26 During this year, he tells us, “I tried quite earnestly to prove propositions and their opposite, not in order to establish a skeptical doctrine, but rather because I suspected I could discover in what an illusion of understanding was hiding.”27 Still troubled by the fact that the application of rational principles can yield equally warranted, yet contradictory, metaphysical conclusions, Kant set to work trying to identify what these “antinomies” have in common and, in particular, to discover their root cause; this investigation eventually convinced Kant that such antinomies arise when spatial and temporal categories are applied beyond their proper bounds, that philosophy could thus be freed from such antinomies if these boundaries were strictly observed, and that, if so observed, human knowledge would thereby be set on a demonstrably solid foundation. The key, then, was to delimit the realm within which spatial and temporal categories properly applied, which is what led Kant to the revolutionary idea that space and time are subjective conditions of our perceiving an object rather than properties of objects themselves—space and time, that is to say, are not part of reality “out there,” so to speak, but are something that we necessarily impose on reality in order to perceive it as such. In handwritten notes from that year, accordingly, Kant remarks that “the form of appearances rests solely on space and time, and these concepts do not arise through the senses or sensation, but rather rest on the nature of the mind, in accordance with which the various sensations can be represented under such relations”; from this, it follows that space and time are “mere phenomena and something subjective, not a representation of the things.”28 Space and time are thus construed as subjective conditions of perception rather than as objective matters of fact. Kant elaborated these claims in his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, which he defended in order to qualify for a long-coveted position as Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. There Kant argues, first, that space and time are the subjective conditions of human perception rather than objective perceptions of what is “out there”; so he claims, for instance, that the categories of space and time are “only a certain law, which is inherent in the mind and by means of which it coordinates for itself that which is sensed from the presence of the object.” This is the case, he argues, for objects do not strike the senses in virtue of their form or aspect. Hence, if the various factors in an object which affect the sense are to coalesce into some  Kant, Reflexionen 5037 (18:69).  Kant, Reflexionen 5037 (18:69). This characterization of his breakthrough is illuminatingly similar to one that Kant mentions to sometime-critic Christian Garve; cf. his Letter to Christian Garve, September 21, 1798 (12:257–8). 28  Kant, Reflexionen 3957 (17:365) and 4077 (17:405–6), both from 1769. 26 27



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representational whole, there is needed an internal principle of the mind, in virtue of which those various factors may be clothed with a certain aspect, in accordance with stable and innate laws.29

Kant thus maintains that the laws of space and time are applied to sensations by the mind so as to impose order upon them, and, in consequence, that space and time are not themselves perceived, but are that through which one perceives. This means, among other things, that spatial and temporal categories cannot be thought to correspond with anything in the objects thus perceived; objects necessarily appear to have spatial and temporal properties, of course, but this is due solely to the fact that these are the subjective conditions of our perception. 30 (One who wears rose-colored glasses would be mistaken if he or she thought the world was in fact rose colored.) This understanding of spatial and temporal categories enables Kant to diagnose the root cause of the antinomies, on the one hand, and to keep these categories within their proper bounds, on the other. Kant claims, accordingly, that “great care must be taken lest the principles which are native to sensitive cognition transgress their limits, and affect what belongs to the understanding,” since “the illusions of the understanding [are] produced by the covert misuse of a sensitive concept, which is employed as if it were a characteristic mark derived from the understanding.”31 We see such illusions, he suggests, when philosophers argue about the seat of the soul, for instance, or about whether the world had a beginning, or whether bodies consist of simples; in each case, he contends, the arguments are endless in principle so long as we do not recognize the confusion lying at their root, namely the mistaken application of spatial and temporal categories to that which transcends sensible experience.32 These confusions can be avoided, accordingly, and metaphysics pursued on a secure basis, by adhering to a simple principle:  “If of any concept of the understanding whatsoever there is predicated generally anything which belongs to the relations of SPACE AND TIME , it must not be asserted objectively; it denotes only the condition, in the absence of which a given concept would not be sensitively cognizable.”33 Adherence to this principle, Kant claims, will finally free metaphysicians from their interminable disputes, that is, from “the endless rolling of their Sisyphean stones.”34 Kant thus thinks that the antinomies can be resolved once we realize that space and time are that through which objects are perceived, rather than

 Kant, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, 2:393; cf. 2:391, 398. 31   Kant elaborates these claims at 2:400 and 403.  Kant, De mundi, 2:411. 32 33   For these examples, see Kant, De mundi, 2:413–17.  Kant, De mundi, 2:412. 34  Kant, De mundi, 2:411. 29

30

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that which is perceived about (or as) objects. This realization also plays a key role in the Dissertation’s argument for the objectivity of rational principles, though this argument is not altogether clear (as Kant himself realized), and is in any case soon left behind.35 The rudiments of the argument, at least, seem to be these: if (a) space and time are subjective conditions of perception rather than perceptions of what is objectively the case, then (b) space and time cannot explain why the world hangs together as it does, in consequence of which (c) this hanging together must be explained in terms of the world’s dependence upon a Necessary Being.36 Kant seems to think, that is to say, that the unreality of space and time end up requiring an extra-sensible explanation for the world’s unity and orderliness, and that this explanation is to be found in the postulation of a necessary being.37 This brings us, finally, to the objectivity of rational principles, for Kant now claims that when we understand the world around us in terms of, say, causal laws, we are in fact cognizing them not only according to the subjective principles of our understanding (as he had claimed through much of the 1760s), but according to the very principles by which everything hangs together.38 Rational principles pertaining to possibility, necessity, substance, and causality are thus thought to correspond to the world as it is in itself—they represent things “as they are”39—because, through them, we cognize the world according its (and our) dependence upon a necessary being. Hence the proximity, noted by Kant, between his position and that defended by Malebranche: “His view,” Kant writes, “the view namely that we intuit all things in God, is very close indeed to the one which is expounded here.”40 In the Inaugural Dissertation, then, Kant once again arrived at a position according to which human cognition rests upon a demonstrably secure foundation, such that our understanding of the world could no longer be suspected of arbitrariness. As already indicated, Kant will soon abandon many elements of this position, though it also contains several elements upon which his mature views will be built; among these are his claims to the effect that space and time are subjective conditions of perception, that rational principles are objective, and that metaphysical confusion results from the admixture of these.

35   Indeed, he seems to have recognized this even at the time, as is evident in his advising Lambert to skip the section in which the argument is contained; cf. Kant’s letter of September 2, 1770 (10:98). 36   With respect to (b), cf. De mundi, 2:406–7; with respect to (c), cf. 2:408–9. 37   Note that Kant is here returning to an argument he earlier defended as “The Only Possible Proof of the Existence of God” (1763), which might explain its otherwise incongruous appearance in the Dissertation. 38   Kant argues this point at De mundi, 2:409–10. 39 40  Kant, De mundi, 2:392; cf. 2:395.  Kant, De mundi, 2:410.



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2 . 3.  DISU N IT Y BET W EEN SU BJECT A N D OBJECT? Kant’s dissatisfaction with the Inaugural Dissertation, his consequent movement toward the Critique of Pure Reason and, in particular, the latter’s appeal to “mineness,” can be traced to at least two sources.41 The first can be seen in a letter from the philosopher J.H. Lambert, to whom Kant had sent a copy of the dissertation; in it, Lambert informs Kant that he is concerned that in the dissertation, “these two ways of knowing”—the sensible and intellectual— “are so completely separated that they never come together.” 42 As an example, Lambert points to Kant’s treatment of time: “All changes are bound to time,” he writes, “and are inconceivable without time. If changes are real, then time is real, whatever it may be. If time is unreal, then no change can be real. I think, though, that even an idealist must grant at least that changes really exist and occur in his representations, for example, their beginning and ending. Thus, time cannot be regarded as something unreal.”43 Lambert concludes, accordingly, that “since I  cannot deny reality to changes, unless someone teaches me otherwise, I also cannot say that time (and this is true of space as well) is only a helpful device for human representations.”44 The objection, then, is this:  if spatial and temporal categories are merely subjective conditions of our perceiving the world, then it follows that the spatial and temporal aspects of perception correspond to nothing real, and, therefore, that temporally inflected perceptions of change, succession, and so forth correspond to nothing real. This strikes Lambert as highly implausible, and leads him to suspect that Kant has gone too far in his separation of sensibility from intellect. This is obviously a serious concern, and one that Kant had to take seriously, for as he wrote to his friend Marcus Herz, this is “an objection that has made me reflect considerably, because it seems to be the most serious objection that can be raised against the system, and an objection that seems to occur naturally to everybody.”45 Kant’s concern with this objection had to have been deepened, in turn, by his repudiation of one of the Dissertation’s key claims, namely, that the correspondence between human rationality and objects themselves is guaranteed by the dependence of both upon a necessary being. Within two years

41  On this period of Kant’s development—his so-called “Silent Decade”—see W.H. Werkmeister, Kant’s Silent Decade:  A  Decade of Philosophical Development (Tallahassee, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1979), Wolfgang Carl, Der schweigende Kant (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1989), and Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 42   Letter from J.H. Lambert, October 13, 1770 (10:105); a similar objection is raised by Mendelssohn (Letter of December 25, 1770 [10:115]). 43   Letter from Lambert, October 13, 1770 (10:107). 44   Letter from Lambert, October 13, 1770 (10:107). 45   Letter to Marcus Herz, February 21, 1772 (10:134).

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of the Inaugural Dissertation, Kant writes the following: “that we can, from within ourselves, validly connect properties and predicates with the represented objects, although no experience has shown them to us as so connected, is difficult to understand. To say that a higher being has already wisely put such concepts and principles in us is to run all philosophy into the ground.”46 Even more tellingly, in the aforementioned letter to Herz, Kant specifically criticizes Malebranche’s explanation of the agreement between intellect and reality: “the deus ex machina is the greatest absurdity one could hit upon,” he writes, “in the determination of the origin and validity of our knowledge. It has—besides its deceptive circle in the conclusion concerning our cognitions—also this additional disadvantage—it encourages all sorts of wild notions and every pious and speculative brainstorm.”47 Kant thus feels compelled to address the objection that he draws too sharp a separation between the realms of intellect and sense, and he can no longer countenance the Dissertation’s primary argument for their connection, namely its appeal to a necessary being. Kant spends the next decade, therefore, puzzling over the question, “What is the ground of the relation of that in us which we call ‘representation’ to the object?”48 His answer to this question will require a further revolution, parallel to that undertaken in regard to space and time, in the conception of objecthood itself. The possibility of such a revolution had already occurred to Kant by 1772: in contrast to the usual approach, wherein one tries to understand representations’ conformity to objects in terms of the latter’s effect on the former, he suggests that “if that in us which we call ‘representation’ were active with regard to the object, that is, if the object itself were created by the representation (as when the divine cognitions are conceived as the archetypes of all things), the conformity of these representations to objects could be understood.”49 The idea here, simply stated, is that if the conditions of objecthood are themselves products of our capacities, then objects will necessarily correspond to our representations, and the Inaugural Dissertation’s appeal to a necessary being could be set aside in favor of an appeal to our own representational capacities. This would also provide Kant with a new way of securing the necessity, and so non-arbitrariness, of such representations, for as he writes, “experiences never yield truly universal cognitions, because they lack necessity,” but they could be yielded by “universal judgments [that] lie in reason prior to experience.”50 To address the objection raised by Lambert, however, Kant would also have to argue that our representations correspond not only with objects, but with sensible experience, too. As Kant himself later 47  Kant, Reflexionen 4473 (17:565), dated to 1772.   Letter to Herz (10:131).   Letter to Herz (10:130). 49   Letter to Herz (10:130); cf. Reflexionen 4473 (1772), 17:564. 50  Kant, Reflexionen 4473, 17:565. 46 48



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put the point, “what is decisive here is that we can give them [i.e. rational principles rooted in our representational capacities] corresponding intuitions. If this cannot be done, then they are not possible.”51 The agenda for the Critique of Pure Reason is now largely set: Kant would there demonstrate that objecthood is rooted in our representational capacities, that these capacities are likewise the ground of representations’ necessity, and that representations thus grounded necessarily correspond with sensible intuitions.

2 .4.  “ONE A ND A LL MINE ”: TH E U N IT Y OF CONSCIOUSN ESS In spite of his initial optimism—Kant told his friend Herz, in 1772, that he expected to publish a “Critique of Pure Reason” within three months’ time52—it would be nearly a decade before the Critique finally appeared. Once it did, the book wasted no time—or modesty—in announcing its ambition, namely, “to institute a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims, and dismiss all groundless pretensions, not by despotic decrees, but in accordance with its own eternal and unalterable laws.”53 The goal of the first Critique, that is to say, is nothing less than (a) to establish laws by which human knowledge is to be governed (and so freed from arbitrariness), and (b) to demonstrate that these are in the relevant sense our laws. Toward this end, Kant will explain our knowledge of objects in terms of objects’ conformity to our understanding, by contrast with the usual explanation in terms of our understanding’s conformity with objects; such an explanation would provide him with a ready response, he hoped, to objections of the sort raised by Lambert.54 He will then claim, on the basis of this same explanation, that our understanding, and so experience itself, must be governed by rational laws; if successful, this claim would provide him with a response to Humean skepticism about causality and other supposed laws of nature.55 And finally, he will argue that these laws apply only to objects of possible experience, and that they do not warrant inferences, therefore, to putative knowledge about 51   Die philosophischen Hauptvorlesungen Immanuel Kants, ed. Arnold Kowalewski (Hildersheim: Olms, 1965), p.  505 (Ak 24.2 [Logic Dohna-Wundlacken], pp.  783f.; Kant, Lectures on Logic, pp. 515f.). 52   Letter to Herz (10:132). 53  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A xi–xii (hereafter KrV). 54   For claims to this effect, cf. KrV, B xvi–xvii. 55   Kant argues, accordingly, that explaining knowledge in terms of objects’ conformity to the understanding “enables us to explain how there can be knowledge a priori; and, in addition, to furnish satisfactory proofs of the laws which form the a priori basis of nature, regarded as the sum of the objects of experience” (KrV, B xviii–xix).

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supersensible entities that lie beyond the sensible world; this argument would thus enable him to delimit the proper scope of reason, over against rationalist metaphysics of the sort developed by Leibniz and Wolff (and, earlier, by Kant himself).56 This is a complicated set of arguments, to say the least, but their principal steps are not hard to discern. The first step should seem familiar, since it reiterates the central insight of Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation, namely, that space and time are subjective conditions of perception. Kant here claims, accordingly, that space is “nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense,” and “the subjective condition of sensibility, under which alone outer intuition is possible for us.”57 He likewise claims that time is “a necessary representation that underlies all intuitions,” that “in it alone is actuality of appearances possible at all,” and that it is “therefore a purely subjective condition of our (human) intuition (which is always sensible, that is, so far as we are affected by objects), and in itself, apart from the subject, is nothing.”58 Here again, then, Kant argues that space and time are not “out there,” in the world, but rather are the subjective conditions that we necessarily apply to sensible impressions of what is out there. From this, Kant draws a decisive conclusion about the limits of human perception, namely, that if we have no perceptual access to objects apart from these conditions, it follows that we have no access to objects as they may be considered apart from them—as they are “in themselves,” as it were—and, as a result, that it would be impossible for us to perceive that which transcends space and time as transcending space and time, for we could perceive any such object only in spatial and temporal terms. Kant concludes, accordingly, that time and space, taken together, are the pure forms of all sensible intuition, and so are what make a priori synthetic propositions possible. But these a priori sources of knowledge, being merely conditions of our sensibility, just by this very fact determine their own limits, namely, that they apply to objects only insofar as objects are viewed as appearances, and do not present things as they are in themselves. This is the sole field of their validity; should we pass beyond it, no objective use can be made of them.59

56   Thus Kant: “we are brought to the conclusion that we can never transcend the limits of possible experience, though that is precisely what this science [viz. metaphysics] is concerned, above all else, to achieve” (KrV, B xix). 57  Kant, KrV, A  26/B 42. Representative discussions of these arguments—which Kant terms a “Transcendental Aesthetic”—include Arthur Melnick, Space, Time, and Thought in Kant (Dordrecht:  Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989) and Lorne Falkenstein, Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 58  Kant, KrV, A 31/B 46; A 34–5/B 51–2. 59  Kant, KrV, A 38–9/B 55–6; cf. A 30/B 45, A 41–2/B 59.



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The first step of Kant’s argument, then, is to claim (a) that space and time are the subjective conditions of human perception, and, in consequence, (b) that we have no warrant for ascribing spatiality and temporality to objects thus perceived, from which it follows (c) that we cannot perceive (i) objects as they may be “in themselves,” apart from our mode of perception, nor (ii) objects that might transcend space and time. The second step is to claim that such perceptions, taken by themselves, do not add up to knowledge; for this, a further condition is necessary, namely understanding or conceptualization. This is what Kant has in mind when he argues, famously, that “without sensibility no object could be given to us, but without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind . . . Only through their union can knowledge arise.”60 Taken by themselves, perceptions could not amount to knowledge, for the simple reason that we could know something on their basis only if we could keep them in mind even after the perceptions themselves had passed, and hold them together with other perceptions. To that which is immediately given to us in perception, therefore, must be added an act of the imagination by means of which such perceptions are kept in mind even after they have passed, and an act of understanding by means of which they are set in an orderly relation to other perceptions. With respect to the former, Kant writes that “space and time contain a manifold of pure a priori intuition  .  .  . but if this manifold is to be known, the spontaneity of our thought requires that it be gone through in a certain way, taken up, and connected.”61 This going through and taking up is performed, in the first instance, by the imagination, since it is only by keeping in mind an image of that which we have perceived that we can string perceptions together and so (possibly) recognize them as, say, several perceptions of a single object. Kant thus argues that “experience as such necessarily presupposes the reproducibility of appearances,” for the following reason:  when I seek to draw a line in thought, or to think of the time from one noon to another, or even to represent to myself some particular number, obviously the various manifold representations that are involved must be apprehended by me in thought one after another. But if I were always to drop out of thought the preceding representations (the first parts of the line, the antecedent parts of the time period, or the units in the order represented), and did not reproduce them while advancing to those that follow, a complete representation would never be obtained.62

Without imagination, therefore, we would not be able to hold perceptions in mind long enough to think or form beliefs about them, for they would vanish just as quickly as they had appeared.

60

 Kant, KrV, A 51/B 75.

61

 Kant, KrV, A 77/B 102.

62

 Kant, KrV, A 101–2.

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Such keeping in mind would not yet count as knowledge, however; for that, a further element must be introduced, namely concepts, which unite strung-together perceptions with one another by making judgments about them. Conceptualization, that is to say, is not just a further stringing-together of that which has been strung together, but a stringing-together by means of judgments about how these should be related to other perceptions and judgments. Concepts are therefore a kind of “rule” by means of which we order, and so unite, all that has been given to us through perception as well as through other conceptions.63 Indeed, Kant argues that it is only by applying concepts that one can unite various perceptions into perceptions of a single object; application of a concept can thus unite perceptions of, say, (a) green and brown color-patches, (b) largeness, and (c) tree-shapedness, into the perception of a unitary object, “a tree.” Concepts likewise enable one to unite perceptions of this object into a single fabric with one’s other perceptions; so if one perceives that this tree is losing its leaves, that the days are getting shorter, and that other leafy trees are losing their leaves, then one may organize these perceptions by means of a causal concept, according to which the shortening of the days causes trees to lose their leaves. Naturally, one might also try to organize one’s perceptions in the opposite direction, to the effect that days get shorter because the trees lose their leaves, but this would-be organization will be hard to square with other candidate perceptions of, say, the earth’s tilt, or a massive leaf-loss that did not result in day-shortening. The point is that we string together perceptions and conceptions not simply by piling one on top of another, but by making judgments about how they should relate to one another. (Think here of a film editor who continually receives raw footage: to make it into a film, it won’t do simply to add the new footage to the end of the old; rather, he or she will have to make decisions about how the new hangs together with the old, and he or she will presumably do so in terms of narrative arc, character development, and so on.) Kant claims, accordingly, that concepts are necessary not only to unite various perceptions into perceptions of a single object, but to unite all of our perceptions into a single fabric. As a rough illustration of these claims, imagine a flip-book on each page of which there is a single image of a stick figure, where the series of such images portrays the figure running along and then slipping on a banana peel. On the model Kant has been defending, one can make sense of the flip-book only by (a) perceiving that which appears on each page; (b) stringing these perceptions together into perceptions of a continuous motion; and (c)  applying concepts like “running” and “banana peel” to these perceptions, as well as more general   Kant writes, accordingly, that “a concept is always, as regards its form, something universal which serves as a rule” (KrV, A  106), and that concepts “rest on functions,” that is, “the unitive acts of bringing various representations under one common representation” (A 67–8/B 92–3). 63



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categories like cause and effect. Kant’s point, thus far, is that these steps are each necessary to human cognition, which would explain why he claims that intuition and thought need one another. Kant then extends this model by advancing a much more ambitious claim, to the effect that certain concepts necessarily govern all thought; included among such concepts, which Kant calls “categories,” are those of substance and accident, cause and effect, necessity and contingency, reality, unity, and so on.64 Kant has already argued, recall, that our combination of various perceptions and conceptions must be a matter of making judgments about how they ought to be combined; he now claims that because all such judgments must be subject to certain logical rules, it follows that these same rules must govern our combination of those perceptual and conceptual representations.65 The categories are thus derived from logic (rather than, say, from empirical experience), and are supposed to be the universal and necessary rules that govern our combination of manifold representations. Kant claims, accordingly, that that act of understanding by which the manifold of given representations (be they intuitions or concepts) is brought under one apperception, is the logical function of judgment. All the manifold, therefore, so far as it is given in a single empirical intuition, is determined in respect of one of the logical functions of judgment, and is thereby brought into one consciousness. Now the categories are just these functions of judgment, insofar as they are employed in determination of the manifold of a given intuition. Consequently, the manifold in a given intuition is necessarily subject to the categories.66

Perceptual and conceptual representations must be combined according to the categories’ rules, therefore, for such combination depends upon the making of judgments, and judgments are necessarily governed by the universal and necessary rules of logic. So then: if intuitions can add up to knowledge only if they are combined in thought, and they can be so combined only according to the universal and necessary rules prescribed by the categories, then it seems to follow that knowledge is governed by universal and necessary rules, and that intuitions and thoughts necessarily hang together.67 The latter conclusion raises  Kant, KrV, A 80/B 106.   Kant argues this point in the “Metaphysical Deduction,” KrV, A 67–80/B 92–106. 66  Kant, KrV, B 143; cf. B 128, where Kant claims that the categories “are concepts of an object in general, by means of which the intuition of an object is regarded as determined in respect of one of the logical functions of judgment.” 67   With respect to the latter, Kant writes that, according to the model just defended, “the same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition” (KrV, A  79/B 104–5); with respect to the former, Kant argues that the categories are “pure concepts of the understanding which apply a priori to objects of intuition in general” (A 79/B 105), where “apriority” is more or less equated with universality and necessity. 64 65

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a crucial question, however, namely whether intuitions and thoughts necessarily hang together simply because we cannot help but think as we do, or whether intuitions themselves are necessarily governed by the very rules that govern our thinking. That is to say: even if thought and intuition necessarily hang together, is their hanging together objectively necessary, or merely subjectively so?68 (In Kant’s idiom: are the principles of their synthesis a priori?) This brings us to Kant’s celebrated—and vexing—Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, the aim of which is to consider “whether a priori concepts do not also serve as antecedent conditions under which alone anything can be, if not intuited, yet thought as object in general. If that were the case,” Kant continues, then “all empirical knowledge of objects would necessarily conform to such concepts, because only as thus presupposing them is anything possible as object of experience.”69 The aim, that is to say, is to demonstrate that it is only by means of the categories that one can experience any object whatsoever, from which it would follow that the categories necessarily apply not only to our thoughts about objects, but to the very possibility of experiencing them. Kant’s argument to this effect is notoriously difficult to interpret, much less summarize, but in each of its versions the overall strategy is plain enough:  Kant claims (a)  that one’s thoughts and experiences must all be recognizable as one’s own thoughts and experiences—they must be recognizable as “one and all mine,” as he puts it; (b)  that they are recognizable as the thoughts and experiences of a single, unitary self only if they hang together with one another; (c) that they so hang together only if they stand in a logical, rational relationship to one another; (d)  that experience does not come to us pre-packaged, so to speak, in these relationships; and (e) that the logical hanging together of experience and thought must therefore be supplied by the self whose experiences and thoughts they are.70 Kant argues, accordingly, that the empirical consciousness, which accompanies different representations, is itself diverse and without relation to the identity of the subject. Hence that   Kant explicitly raises this issue at KrV, A 89/B 122.  Kant, KrV, A 93/B 125–6. 70   The literature on the Transcendental Deduction is vast; especially important contributions would include Dieter Henrich, “The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” The Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969), Karl Ameriks, “Kant’s Transcendental Deduction As a Regressive Argument,” Kant-Studien 69 (1978), Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983, 2004), Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, Hubert Schwyzer, The Unity of Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), Wolfgang Carl, Die Transzendentale Deduktion der Kategorien in der ersten Auflage der KrV (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), Béatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), and Patricia Kitcher, Kant’s Thinker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 68 69



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relation [that is, of rational synthesis between thought and experience] comes about, not simply through my accompanying each representation with consciousness, but only insofar as I conjoin one representation with another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them. Only insofar, therefore, as I can unify a manifold of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the consciousness in [i.e. throughout] these representations.71

From this, he draws the following conclusion:  The thought that the representations given in intuition one and all belong to me, is therefore equivalent to the thought that I unite them in one self-consciousness, or at least can so unite them; and although this thought is not itself the consciousness of the synthesis of the representations, it at least presupposes the possibility of that synthesis. In other words, only insofar as I can grasp the manifold of the representations in one consciousness, do I call them one and all mine. For otherwise I should have as many-colored and diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious to myself.72

Kant claims, in other words, that if our thoughts and experiences did not hang together with one another, then they would not be recognizable as the thoughts and experiences of a single, integrated self. To be recognizable as the thoughts and experiences of such a self, therefore, these must be combined with one another in an orderly fashion; otherwise, they would not make sense to me, and I would not make sense to myself. But since the manifold of experience does not itself dictate how thought and experience should be integrated, it follows that we must integrate them, and do so in an orderly fashion. (Even the judgment, “I do not know how these apparently incompatible representations hang together,” or “This representation seems to be at odds with that one,” would suffice for maintaining the unity of the self. On the other hand, if one held two incompatible representations that were not so related or relatable, they would as well belong to two different consciousnesses.) From this, Kant infers that thought and experience must both be combined in terms of, and so governed by, the logical categories of the understanding, and thus claims that the manifold given in a sensible intuition is necessarily subject to the original synthetic unity of apperception, because in no other way is the unity of intuition possible. But that act of understanding by which the manifold of given representations (be they intuitions or concepts) is brought under one apperception, is the logical function of judgment. All the manifold, therefore, so far as it is given in a

 Kant, KrV, B 133.  Kant, KrV, B 133–4. Cf. similar claims in the “A” Deduction, at A  108–9, 111–12, 116, and especially A  123, 129–30. Relevantly similar claims can be found throughout the “B” Deduction; cf. B 131–2, 132–3, 135–6, and 138. 71

72

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single empirical intuition, is determined in respect of one of the logical functions of judgment, and is thereby brought into one consciousness. Now the categories are these functions of judgment, insofar as they are employed in determination of the manifold of a given intuition. Consequently, the manifold in a given intuition is necessarily subject to the categories.73

Experience and thought are necessarily combined according to the categories, therefore, and because experience can be recognizable as one’s own only if combinable as such, it follows that experience as well as thought must conform to those categories.74 Kant thus takes himself to have answered one of the crucial charges raised, by Lambert among others, against his Inaugural Dissertation, for he has now argued that thought and experience necessarily hang together. Kant also thinks that this argument, taken a step further, provides him with a satisfactory response to Humean skepticism about laws of nature. The further step is roughly this: if experience necessarily conforms to the categories of our understanding, and if these categories are lawlike rules having to do with causality, substance, existence, and so on, then it follows that experience necessarily conforms to laws, and, indeed, that the categories of the understanding are themselves the source of nature’s laws. Kant claims, therefore, that all possible perception is thus dependent upon synthesis of apprehension, and this empirical synthesis in turn upon transcendental synthesis, and therefore upon the categories. Consequently, all possible perceptions, and therefore everything that can come to empirical consciousness, that is, all appearances of nature, must, so far as their connection is concerned, be subject to the categories. Nature, considered merely as nature in general, is dependent upon these categories as the original ground of its conformity to law.75

This would mean, among other things, that the cause and effect relationships we observe in nature are indeed governed by an objectively necessary law, since whatever we observe necessarily conforms to the lawlike category of cause and effect.76 This being the case, it apparently follows (contra Hume) that these laws  Kant, KrV, B 143.   That this is how Kant understands the Transcendental Deduction seems clear; so he writes, in conclusion to the “A” Deduction, that “Pure understanding is thus in the categories the law of the synthetic unity of all appearances, and thereby first and originally makes experience, as regards its form, possible. This is all that we were called upon to establish in the transcendental deduction of the categories, namely, to render comprehensible this relation of understanding to sensibility, and, by means of sensibility, to all objects of experience” (KrV, A 128). 75  Kant, KrV, B 164–5; cf. similar claims at B 159–60, 163, and in the “A” Deduction, at A 113–14, 127–8. 76   By lawlike, Kant means, roughly, that a rule is valid, and so produces necessary consequences, in every relevant possible world—in every world, that is to say, where the faculty of human understanding is constituted as it is in the actual world; on this, cf. KrV, A 126. For a discussion of lawhood that disputes such a view, see Marc Lange, “Laws, Counterfactuals, Stability, and Degrees of Lawhood,” Philosophy of Science 66:2 (1999). 73 74



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are not merely customs that influence our thought, since they are the very laws by which experience, and objecthood itself, are necessarily governed.77 Our understanding of nature is neither arbitrary nor merely customary, therefore, since it necessarily conforms to laws which are themselves universal (i.e. they apply to every possible experience) and necessary (i.e. they must be applied to every case to which they are applicable). Nature and human understanding thus necessarily conform to one another, and both conform to laws, which entails that neither are ultimately subject to arbitrariness. Crucially for Kant, though, the laws to which nature and the understanding answer are our laws, the product of understanding’s own legislation: the understanding understands only by applying certain categories, and these categories necessarily impose lawlike patterns upon that which is understood; this being the case, it follows that the only laws we find in nature are laws that we, through our understanding, have put there. With respect to such laws, accordingly, Kant contends that “they are not borrowed from experience; on the contrary, they have to confer upon appearances their conformity to law, and so to make experience possible. Thus the understanding is something more than a power of formulating rules through comparison of appearances; it is itself the lawgiver of nature.”78 That one’s understanding is governed by laws means that it is not ultimately arbitrary, yet because these laws are posited by the understanding itself, they are recognizable as products of one’s autonomy (as self-legislated) rather than of heteronomy (laws given to one from without). With this position, then, Kant has finally arrived at a satisfying solution (to him, at least) to the problem of how beliefs could be necessary (and so demonstrably non-arbitrary) yet self-legislated (and so recognizably “mine”). With a view to the argument that follows, one additional feature of Kant’s position deserves to be mentioned, namely, that his defense of the lawlikeness of causality and other rational principles does not entail that these principles can be applied beyond the sensible realm, for the simple reason that they are predicates of possible experiences, and human experience is necessarily sensible. Kant claims, in this regard, that “the most the understanding can achieve a priori is to anticipate the form of a possible experience in general. And since that which is not appearance cannot be an object of experience, the understanding can never transcend those limits of sensibility within which alone objects can be given to us. Its principles are merely rules for the exposition of appearances.”79 If Kant has correctly identified the very principles by 77   For evidence that Kant sees it as such, see §§27–30 of the Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (1783), 4:310–13, and KrV, B 5, 127–8, and 163–8. 78  Kant, KrV, A 126. 79  Kant, KrV, A 246–7/B 303; cf. A 235–6/B 294–5, A 296–7/B 253–4.

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which human understanding must judge, and if these principles apply only to that which is sensible, then it follows (contra Leibnizian metaphysics) that humans have no capacity to judge that which allegedly transcends the sensible. With respect to such supersensibles, theoretical reason must remain agnostic. There is another dimension of reason, however, which has much more to say about the realm of the supersensible.

2 .5.  FR EEDOM A ND TH E MOR A L L AW This other dimension is what Kant calls practical reason—reason, that is, as applied not to knowledge but to moral agency. Here too, Kant asks about the conditions under which one could recognize one’s concepts and intuitions as “one and all mine,” but in this case, such one-and-all-mineness is established by bringing both into conformity with the moral law—and since, for Kant, conformity with the moral law is that which frees one from natural necessity and in which distinctively personal life consists, it follows that a life so conformed would achieve mineness of a more fundamental sort.80 Kant’s account of practical reason thus picks up precisely where his theoretical account left off, arguing in particular that theoretical reason’s limits are good news, at least potentially, for practical reason, since those limits mean that theoretical reason cannot pretend to hold all of reality within its grasp. This is crucial, Kant claims, since everything so grasped is necessarily governed by exceptionless laws of nature, laws having to do especially with more or less mechanical relations of cause and effect; hence, if there were no limit to theoretical reason, then we could not possibly transcend those laws, and would accordingly be wholly subject to causal mechanisms. The good news, accordingly, is that theoretical reason, suitably critiqued, recognizes that its principles apply only to objects as they appear to us, rather than to objects as they may be “in themselves,” which means that it is at least possible that objects themselves are not subject to causal laws, and so at least possibly free from them. Kant’s argument to this effect proceeds through roughly the following steps. He argues, first, that the realm of nature is governed by exceptionless laws of natural/mechanical causality—so he claims, characteristically, that “nature in the most general sense is the existence of things under laws”81—and that human beings are necessarily included in this causal nexus. This must be the case, he contends, for otherwise—if our lives were not governed by

  For a claim along these lines, see Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 5:86–7 (hereafter KpV).  Kant, KpV, 5:43.

80 81



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natural laws of causality—we would be given over to an unpredictable chaos; Kant thus rules out one tempting solution to the problem of natural necessity, observing that “if one wants to attribute freedom to a being whose existence is determined in time, one cannot, so far at least, except this being from the law of natural necessity as to all events in its existence and consequently to its actions as well; for, that would be tantamount to handing it over to blind chance.”82 Nature is a realm of exceptionless, mechanical laws of cause and effect, therefore, and human beings are included in this realm. The second step of Kant’s argument is to claim that the laws governing this realm are incompatible with freedom. Over against his earlier defense of compatibilism, Kant now argues that the necessity in the causal relation can in no way be united with freedom; instead they are opposed to each other as contradictory. For, from the former it follows that every event, and consequently every action that takes place at a point in time, is necessary under the condition of what was in the preceding time. Now, since time past is no longer within my control, every action that I perform must be necessary by determining grounds that are not within my control, that is, I am never free at the point of time in which I act.83

Thus far, then, Kant takes himself to have demonstrated that human beings are included in the realm of natural necessity, and that such necessity is incompatible with freedom, since he here equates freedom with exerting control over the determining grounds of one’s actions.84 He infers, therefore, that if there were nothing beyond the realm of necessity—and, in particular, nothing of humans beyond it—then we would not be free. This brings us to Kant’s third point, which is that his critique of theoretical reason opens up the possibility that there may be something beyond this realm, since it has demonstrated that the mechanistic causality characteristic of nature is a product of human understanding and, crucially, applies only to appearances rather than to objects as they may be in themselves. For Kant, recall, we cannot help but perceive the world in spatial and temporal terms, and we cannot help but understand the world thus perceived in terms of certain categories, yet this does not entail that space, time, or the categories are 82  Kant, KpV, 5:95. This is a version of the so-called “Indeterminism Argument,” for recent discussions of which see Timothy O’Connor (ed.), Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Randolphe Clark, Libertarian Accounts of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and Robert Kane, “Agency, Responsibility, and Indeterminism:  Reflections on Libertarian Theories of Free Will,” in Joseph Klein Campbell et al. (eds.), Freedom and Determinism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 83  Kant, KpV, 5:94. This is an obvious precursor to the so-called Consequence Argument of Peter van Inwagen, for which see especially his Essay on Free Will (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1983). 84   For Kant’s most explicit argument against compatibilism, see KpV, 5:96–7.

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“out there,” so to speak, in the world itself; again, it would be a mistake if the person wearing rose-colored glasses thought that the world was itself rose colored. Kant claims, accordingly, that “the concept of causality as natural necessity . . . concerns only the existence of things insofar as they are determinable in time and hence as appearances, as opposed to their causality as things in themselves.”85 This being the case, it follows that it is at least possible that causal necessity does not have the final word about reality, since it is possible that that which is true of objects as they appear to us differs from that which is true of them in themselves, or, as Kant puts it, “that a thing in appearance (belonging to the world of sense) is subject to certain laws from which as a thing or a being in itself it is independent, contains not the least contradiction.”86 It could be, then, that human beings are constrained by natural necessity only as objects of appearance, but not as we are in ourselves, which means that we might be free after all. The mere fact that freedom does not necessarily stand in contradiction to natural necessity would give us no grounds for thinking that we actually are free, however; for that, we would need an additional argument to the effect that our will, say, is indeed free from natural causality, and here, surveying then-prevalent options in moral theory, Kant thinks our prospects look rather bleak. The basic problem with such theories, he argues, is that they explain the will in terms of its being moved by all-too-natural desires or feelings, in consequence of which it cannot be thought to rise above the natural realm. This is most evident, Kant thinks, in the case of theories that root morality in feeling or inclination, for if one’s willing to do such-and-such is simply a matter of one’s being moved, immediately, to do such-and-such because one’s circumstances have triggered certain feelings or inclinations, then one’s doing such-and-such is straightforwardly an effect of an external cause, and one’s will remains within the realm of natural law.87 Yet the situation is hardly improved, Kant claims, if theorists try to explain morality in terms of the will’s relationship either to a moral principle (such as a divine command) or a good object (such as happiness), at least insofar as these are not posited by the will itself, for if they are not so posited, then the will must be moved toward something that is external to itself, and unless this movingtoward is prompted by the will quite apart from that which is external to it (in which case morality cannot finally be explained in terms of such principles and objects), it must be moved by that which is outside itself, and such movement belongs to the realm of natural causality.88 As Kant sees it, then, there  Kant, KpV, 5:94.  Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 4:457; cf. KpV, 5:97–8. 87   Kant here has in mind British moralists like Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, but also, and perhaps especially, his own earlier views. 88   For an argument to this effect, see KpV, 5:21–2; cf. 5:59–61. Kant defends similar claims in the Grundlegung (see, for instance, 4:398) and the Metaphysik der Sitten (see 6:211–21, 6:378). 85

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is little difference between a morality grounded upon immediate inclinations and one grounded upon external principles or objects, for insofar as the will is moved by anything other than its own principles, it necessarily remains in the realm of natural causality, in consequence of which the theoretical possibility of freedom would remain unrealized. Kant claims, therefore, that according to all such theories, it would, strictly speaking, be nature that gives the law; and this, as a law of nature, must not only be cognized and proved by experience—and this is therefore in itself contingent and hence unfit for an apodictic practical rule, such as moral rules must be—but it is always only heteronomy of the will; the will would not give itself the law but a foreign impulse would give the law to it by means of the subject’s nature, which is attuned to be receptive to it.89

The theoretical possibility of freedom cannot be realized, then, if the will is moved only by immediate inclinations or that which is external to it. The failure of such theories does provide us with a clue, however, as to what would allow for the realization of freedom: the will must be moved by a self-posited, lawlike principle, and it must be so moved quite apart from external conditions. That such a principle would have to be posited by the will itself, and be sufficient to move the will apart from (and even contrary to) natural causation, obviously follows from the preceding analysis. Such a principle must also be lawlike, Kant thinks—where lawlikeness is a matter of the principle’s being necessary or, roughly, valid in every possible circumstance—for two reasons. First, if the will is to be effective, it must function as a cause, but something is a cause, for Kant, only if it brings about certain effects with lawlike regularity; Kant thus claims that since the concept of causality brings with it that of laws in accordance with which, by something that we call a cause, something else, namely an effect, must be posited, so freedom, although it is not a property of the will in accordance with natural laws, is not for that reason lawless but must instead be a causality in accordance with immutable laws but of a special kind; for otherwise a free will would be an absurdity.90

If the will is even possibly to count as a cause, then, it must be governed by a lawlike principle. The will must also be governed by a lawlike principle for a second reason, namely, that only a law could free one from external forces and thus raise one above the realm of nature. To be freed from external forces, that is to say, one’s will must be governed by “an objective principle on which we would be directed to act even though every propensity, inclination, and natural tendency of ours were against it,” and Kant claims that only a law can serve as such a principle, “for only law brings with it the concept of an  Kant, Grundlegung, 4:444.

89

90

 Kant, Grundlegung, 4:446; cf. KpV, 5:55.

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unconditional and objective and hence universally valid necessity, and commands are laws that must be obeyed, that is, must be followed even against inclination.”91 If our will were governed by such a principle, accordingly, it would enable us to rise above natural laws. We find such a principle, Kant argues, in the moral law, which commands one’s obedience even in the face of all natural incentives to the contrary and so frees one from the influence of natural causation.92 Kant thus claims that because “the moral law  .  .  . is a determining ground not to be outweighed by any sensible conditions and indeed quite independent of them,” it “leads directly to the concept of freedom.”93 The idea here is simple enough: if one feels oneself compelled to do one’s duty even when doing so is contrary to one’s interests, then duty—so long as it is self-legislated—would enable one’s will to be determined by a causality other than natural causality. Kant offers a helpful example:  Suppose someone asserts of his lustful inclination that, when the desired object and the opportunity are present, it is quite irresistible to him; ask him whether, if a gallows were erected in front of the house where he finds this opportunity and he would be hanged on it immediately after gratifying his lust, he would not then control his inclination. One need not conjecture very long what he would reply. But ask him whether, if his prince demanded, on pain of the same immediate execution, that he give false testimony against an honorable man whom the prince would like to destroy under a plausible pretext, he would consider it possible to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would do it or not, but he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him. He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him.94

A person whose behavior is determined by lust can thus rise above such determination if he or she fears a serious punishment, yet a person whose behavior is determined by fear of punishment can rise above such fear if his or her duty commands it, to such an extent that he or she could choose to obey this duty even if it meant sacrificing his or her life. One’s duty to obey the moral law

 Kant, Grundlegung, 4:425, 416; cf. KpV, 5:105.   On these issues, see Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Carol Voeller, The Metaphysics of the Moral Law:  Kant’s Deduction of Freedom (New  York:  Routledge, 2001), Jens Timmerman, Sittengesetz und Freiheit:  Untersuchungen zu Immanuel Kants Theorie des freien Willens (Berlin:  Walter de Gruyter, 2003), Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 93  Kant, KpV, 5:30. 94  Kant, KpV, 5:30; Kant offers similar examples in “Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis” (1793), 8:286–7, Grundlegung, 4:398–9, 4:455, and KpV, 5:92–3. 91

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can thus free one from being moved or governed by any natural incentives, which Kant takes as demonstrating that there is in fact a law-governed realm independent of nature. Kant concludes, therefore, that “in the moral principle we have presented a law of causality which puts the determining ground of the latter above all conditions of the sensible world,” and, because such determination is “absolutely inexplicable from any data of the sensible world,” that it points to “a pure world of the understanding and, indeed, even determines it positively and lets us cognize something of it, namely a law.”95 Kant discusses the content of this law in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and, especially, in his Metaphysics of Morals, but for our purposes the material content of the moral law is less important than what we might call its formal content, namely, that a will governed by the moral law necessarily intends to be an effective cause, which means that one so governed necessarily wills (a) that one’s will would itself be governed by that law, and (b) that this law would be effective in the realm in which one acts, that is, the realm of nature. That is to say, one so governed necessarily seeks a sort of perfection in one’s will, which Kant terms virtue, and a particular sort of conformity between the world and a will so governed, which Kant terms happiness; Kant thus claims that “virtue and happiness distributed in exact proportion to morality (as the worth of a person and his worthiness to be happy) constitutes the highest good of a possible world,” and, accordingly, that “the production of the highest good in the world is the necessary object of a will determinable by the moral law.”96 With respect to happiness, the argument seems to be that the human will necessarily seeks to be a cause—that is part of what it means to be a will—and that a will governed by the moral law thus necessarily seeks to bring about effects that conform to that law; hence, insofar as one wills to act in the realm of nature, one necessarily wills to bring about effects in that realm that conform not (only) to the natural but to the moral law. To will the moral law is thus necessarily to will its effectiveness, not only in one’s will itself, but in the realm of nature.

2 .6.  R EASONA BLE HOPE I N H A PPI N E SS By Kant’s own lights, however, it is not clear how the moral law could have such effects, since it is not clear whether one could reasonably expect that which belongs to the moral realm to have any effect within the realm of nature. Kant is well aware, for instance, that the latter realm seems often to

95

 Kant, KpV, 5:50, 43; cf. 5:28–9, as well as KrV, B xxxii–xxxiii.  Kant, KpV, 5:110–11, 122, cf. 5:113, 115, 124.

96

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be at odds with, or at least indifferent to, morality; in a particularly bleak passage, he observes that one whose will is governed by the moral law will seek only to establish the good to which that holy law directs all his powers. But his effort is limited; and from nature he can, to be sure, expect some contingent assistance here and there, but never a lawlike agreement in accordance with constant rules (like his internal maxims are and must be) with the ends to act in behalf of which he still feels himself bound and impelled. Deceit, violence, and envy will always surround him, even though he is himself honest, peaceable, and benevolent; and the righteous ones besides himself that he will still encounter will, in spite of all their worthiness to be happy, nevertheless be subject by nature, which pays no attention to that, to all the evils of poverty, illnesses, and untimely death, just like all the other animals on earth, and will always remain thus until one wide grave engulfs them all together (whether honest or dishonest, it makes no difference here) and flings them, who were capable of having believed themselves to be the final end of creation, back into the abyss of the purposeless chaos of matter from which they were drawn.97

So far, then, from its seeming that morality is effective in the world, there seems to be quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, since those who live by the moral law are so often subjected to immoral treatment and to the indiscriminate processes of nature. This being the case, one may conclude that happiness will never be proportioned to virtue, and, therefore, that the highest good can never be achieved. One’s life will not conform to the shape one intends for it to have. One could resist this conclusion, of course, by arguing that there is a reliable, rather than necessary, connection between morality and the way of the world, in view of which one could reasonably expect to achieve the highest good even in the face of such counterevidence. Whether Kant could accept such an argument would depend upon his willingness to adopt an alternative conception of lawhood, but even then an apparently insurmountable problem would remain, namely, that on the basis of Kant’s own theoretical commitments, it appears that the moral law cannot have any influence in the realm of nature. Kant has claimed, recall, that the sensible realm of nature is governed by mechanistic laws, whereas the supersensible realm of freedom is governed by the moral law; the problem, then, is that the domain of the concept of nature under the one legislation and that of the concept of freedom under the other are entirely barred from any mutual influence that they could have on each other by themselves (each in accordance with its fundamental laws) by the great chasm that separates the supersensible from

97  Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft §87, 5:452–3 (hereafter KU); cf. similar claims in Kant’s moral catechism, Metaphysik der Sitten, 6:482.



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the appearances. The concept of freedom determines nothing in regard to the theoretical cognition of nature; the concept of nature likewise determines nothing in regard to the practical laws of freedom: and it is to this extent not possible to throw a bridge from one domain to the other.98

The problem is this:  (a)  the sensible realm is governed by natural laws; (b) the supersensible realm is governed by moral law; (c) a will governed by the moral law necessarily intends to have an effect in the sensible realm; yet (d)  given the sensible realm’s government by natural laws, it seems impossible for the moral law to have such effects; from which it would follow (e) that, contrary to one’s intention, one cannot bring phenomena into conformity with the moral law, and one’s life cannot have the shape one intends. Hence, given the apparently “immeasurable gulf ” between these two realms, it seems impossible to bring about such conformity, but if that were the case, then intending the highest good would be roughly equivalent to intending to turn scrap metal into gold, or intending to invent a perpetual motion machine. Kant thus reasons that “if the highest good is impossible in accordance with practical rules, then the moral law, which commands us to promote it, must be fantastic and directed to empty imaginary ends and must therefore in itself be false.”99 To be free, then, one’s will must be governed by the moral law, but one cannot reasonably will to be so governed if that which the moral law prescribes cannot actually be brought about. Freedom is possible, therefore, and the moral life a plausible thing to intend, only if one can reasonably hope that the moral law can be effective not only in the supersensible realm, but in the sensible realm as well. Kant insists that the moral life must be a plausible thing to intend, and so argues that one can reasonably postulate whatever conditions are necessary for this to be the case. This leads him, famously, to postulate the existence of God, for he asserts that this alone renders morality plausible.100 (The fact that a belief is reasonable only if some state of affairs obtains would not usually warrant one in postulating that it actually obtains, as Kant himself acknowledges; Kant claims that it does so in this case, however, since he thinks that morality must be reasonable, and that this entails that the conditions of its being  Kant, KU, 5:195–6, cf. similar claims in KU, 5:175–6, and KpV, 5:68, 113, and 124–5.  Kant, KpV, 5:114; cf. 5:143. 100   Relevant literature on this argument includes Paul Guyer, “From a Practical Point of View: Kant’s Conception of a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason,” in Kant on Freedom, Law and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 333–71; Norbert Fischer (ed.), Kants Metaphysik und Religionsphilosophie (Hamburg:  Felix Meiner Verlag, 2004); Gordon E. Michalson, Kant and the Problem of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); Onora O’Neill, Kant on Reason and Religion (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 1997), Grethe B. Patterson (ed.) (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997), 269–308; and Allen Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1970) and Kant’s Rational Theology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). 98

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so must obtain.101) Kant thus argues that it is necessary, and so reasonable, to have faith in the existence of a God, since the acting rational being in the world is not also the cause of the world and of nature itself. Consequently, there is not the least ground in the moral law for a necessary connection between the morality and the proportionate happiness of a being belonging to the world as part of it and hence dependent upon it, who for that reason cannot by his will be a cause of this nature and, as far as his happiness is concerned, cannot by his own powers make it harmonize thoroughly with his practical principles. Nevertheless, in the practical task of pure reason, that is, in the necessary pursuit of the highest good, such a connection is postulated as necessary: we ought to strive to promote the highest good (which must therefore be possible). Accordingly, the existence of a cause of all nature, distinct from nature, which contains the ground of this connection, namely the exact correspondence of happiness with morality, is also postulated.102

Kant’s idea here is that if (a) one can reasonably will the moral law only if one can reasonably hope that it will be effective, (b) one can so hope only if occurrences governed by laws of nature can be brought into conformity with the moral law, and (c) occurrences can be brought into such conformity only if they are governed by a supreme cause which is itself moral in nature, then (d) if it must be reasonable to will the moral law, one must assume the existence of such a supreme cause. Kant thus claims that the moral law necessitates the assumption of a God, and, to this extent, necessitates faith. Such faith does not amount to knowledge, as Kant understands it, since the supersensible object of such faith could not possibly be perceived by us.103 Neither, however, does such faith amount to mere superstition or the acceptance of merely customary beliefs, for if morality necessitates the assumption of a supreme moral cause of the world, it follows that such an assumption is a product of reason’s legislation and is thus in the relevant sense one’s own. Faith can thus be integrated into what Chapter 1 termed one’s self-narratives (which Kant understands in terms of one’s would-be conformity with the moral law), but it is important to note that faith can be integrated as such precisely because of the role it plays in maintaining that integrity, for apart from such faith, Kant thinks that one could not count—even to oneself—as a self-legislator, since one would have no reason to think that one’s laws could actually govern anything. That is to say, if one were to face phenomena (a) that one necessarily intends to bring into conformity with the moral law, but (b) which obey a law seemingly indifferent, and sometimes opposed, to morality, then

  Kant addresses this concern explicitly; cf. KpV, 5:143n.  Kant, KpV, 5:124–5; cf. 5:129, as well as the KU, §§87–8 (5:450–8). 103   For claims to this effect, see KpV, 5:4, 125, and 135, along with KU, §88, 5:456. 101

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(c) one would intend what one cannot effect, that is, one would not be able to integrate important phenomena into the lawlike framework that one intends would govern one’s life. Kant argues, accordingly, that in the face of phenomena that are beyond one’s (moral) control, one can maintain one’s self-narrative only if their apparent being-beyond-moral-control is not the final word about them, such that one’s willing the moral law is not condemned to futility. Thus the importance of faith, since faith, for Kant, is the reasonable hope that the realm of nature can be brought into conformity with the moral law.

2 .7.  R EASONA BLE HOPE I N WORTHI N E SS TO BE H A PPY Kant thus appeals to faith in order to address a serious problem facing his philosophy, namely, the apparent disconnect between that which is willed by one who wills the moral law, and the natural realm in which that will is to be effective. That brings us to a second problem, related to the fact that the moral law is to be effective not only in the natural realm, but over one’s will itself. The highest good, recall, consists in virtue as well as happiness proportioned to virtue; Kant thus reiterates that “the highest good in the world is the necessary object of a will determinable by the moral law,” and that “in such a will the complete conformity of dispositions with the moral law is the supreme condition of the highest good.”104 This raises a problem similar to the one Kant just addressed: one who wills the moral law necessarily intends that his or her will would be wholly conformed to that law, which conformity Kant terms holiness, yet the achievement of such holiness seems impossible, for two reasons: on the one hand, humans are imperfect and always fall short of perfect conformity to the law, and on the other, humans are radically evil by nature and thus apparently cannot bring our will into such conformity. Here again, then, one who wills the moral law necessarily wills that which it seems impossible to effect, such that one’s life could not possibly have the shape one intends. Kant’s response to this problem precisely parallels his response to the problem of happiness, particularly in its move from the requirements of morality to the reasonableness of faith. Of the two reasons why one seemingly cannot bring one’s will into conformity with the moral law, Kant addresses the first more straightforwardly. He argues, again, that one who wills the moral law necessarily intends that his or her will would be brought into complete conformity with that law, but notes that such conformity is “holiness, a perfection of which no rational

104

 Kant, KpV, 5:122.

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being of the sensible world is capable at any moment of his existence.”105 It would appear, then, that if one who wills the moral law necessarily wills such complete conformity, then he or she wills that which is impossible—but since one cannot reasonably will that which one knows to be impossible, this would entail that one cannot will the moral law. Kant insists that it must be reasonable to will the moral law, however, and so insists that such conformity must be at least possible; “this conformity,” accordingly, “must be just as possible as its object [viz. happiness] is, since it is contained in the same command to promote the object.”106 Hence, if such conformity must be possible, then the conditions of its possibility must be possible, too; this being the case, Kant postulates the reasonableness of hoping that one will endlessly progress toward complete holiness: “since [holiness] is nevertheless required as practically necessary,” he writes, “it can only be found in an endless progress toward that complete conformity, and in accordance with principles of pure practical reason it is necessary to assume such a practical progress as the real object of our will.”107 And since human beings cannot hope to make endless progress within the span of our lives—each of which comes to an end, after all—Kant likewise claims that it is reasonable to assume that our souls are immortal.108 Again, Kant insists that such assumptions are reasonable precisely because they are necessitated by morality itself, for without them, one would face an intractable dilemma: “one either quite degrades the moral law from its holiness by making it out to be lenient (indulgent) and thus conformed to our convenience, or else strains one’s calling as well as one’s expectations to an unattainable vocation.”109 Kant’s position faces a serious objection at this point, however: even if one were to grant the reasonableness of these assumptions, it is not clear why endless progress toward conformity with the moral law would be equivalent to complete conformity with it, such that it remains unclear how that which one wills in willing the moral law is actually possible. (A golfer who gets closer and closer to hitting a hole-in-one does not thereby count as having hit a hole-in-one.) Kant’s answer to this objection sheds important light on his position, since it turns out that his claim is not that endless progress per se counts as holiness, but that one who is making such progress can reasonably hope that God would regard it as such. He argues, accordingly, that for a rational but finite being only endless progress from lower to higher stages of moral perfection is possible. The eternal being, to whom the temporal condition is nothing, sees in what is to us an endless series the whole of conformity

106  Kant, KpV, 5:122.  Kant, KpV, 5:122.  Kant, KpV, 5:122.   108 Kant, KpV, 5:122.   109 Kant, KpV, 5:122.

105

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with the moral law, and the holiness that his command inflexibly requires in order to be commensurable with his justice in the share he determines for each in the highest good is to be found in a single intellectual intuition of the existence of rational beings.110

It turns out, then, that one’s commitment to the moral law is fulfilled not in endless progress per se, but in one’s being regarded as righteous by a being who sees into one’s heart, so to speak, and who counts one as holy on this basis. To put the point in traditional theological terms, what ultimately matters here is justification. (This is crucial to understanding why—and, for those who may be skeptical, that—theology ends up playing a decisive role in Kant’s philosophy.) Kant claims, in turn, that one can reasonably hope to be counted righteous by God only if (a) one has been regenerated—that is, become a new moral being—and (b) one’s guilt has been atoned for. Each of these is necessary, Kant insists, because human beings are radically evil by nature, such that one can reasonably hope to be counted righteous only if one’s nature has changed and one’s guilt has been paid for. Kant’s claim about radical evil has often been misunderstood, so it is important that we clarify just what he means by it. First, by “human nature” Kant means “the subjective ground . . . of the exercise of the human being’s freedom in general . . . antecedent to every deed that falls within the scope of the senses,” where this ground must itself be “a deed of freedom,” since it is the ground on which we hold him or her responsible.111 Human nature is thus that which lies at the basis of all one’s deeds—it is one’s nature qua subject, in other words—yet this nature must itself be understood as deedlike, and so as freely undertaken. It cannot be something that is decided for one, in other words, for then it would make no sense to take one’s subsequent actions as blameworthy.112 So then: when Kant claims that a human’s nature is “evil,” he says this “not because he performs actions that are evil (contrary to law), but because these are so constituted that they allow the inference of evil maxims in him.”113 The upshot is that if one’s subjective ground is evil, then each of one’s deeds is evil, even if outwardly those deeds conform with one’s duty; their outward conformity would be accidental in such a case, since one would be doing them for a reason other than duty itself. Kant thus echoes Augustine and Luther, among others, arguing that “whenever incentives other than the law itself . . . are necessary to determine the power of choice to lawful actions, it is purely accidental that these actions agree with the law, for the incentives might equally well incite its violation.”114  Kant, KpV, 5:123.  Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (1793), 6:21. 112 113   Cf. Kant, Religion, 6:48–9.  Kant, Religion, 6:20. 114  Kant, Religion, 6:30–1. 110 111

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That is what it would mean, then, if human nature were in fact evil. But on what grounds would one argue that this is the case? As it turns out, it is not easy to arrive at any claim about the character of one’s ground-maxim, since maxims are strictly unobservable; we can observe only actions, and there is no necessary connection between actions and maxims, since apparently good actions can be done on the basis of an evil maxim, such as self-seeking.115 To arrive at a judgment about the character of one’s subjective ground, accordingly, Kant argues the following points: (a) that one’s free actions must be undertaken on the basis of a subjective ground, for that is what renders them free;116 (b) that there must be a single ground at the basis of all one’s actions, for one’s decision among candidate grounds must itself be free and so undertaken on the basis of a ground;117 (c) that this ground must be either good or evil, since good and evil are incompatible with one another;118 (d) that the moral law is itself an incentive, such that if one acts otherwise than in conformity to it, one must have done so due to the influence of an immoral influence such as self-love;119 (e)  that human beings are in fact moved by immoral influences like self-love; from which it follows (f) that our subjective ground must be evil.120 Kant claims, that is, that we can explain good and evil actions on the basis of an evil maxim, since one can certainly perform moral actions for immoral reasons, whereas we cannot explain both kinds of action on the basis of a good maxim. Hence, given the empirical fact of immoral actions, Kant infers that our ground-maxim must be evil: “We can spare ourselves the formal proof,” he writes, “that there must be such a corrupt propensity rooted in the human being, in view of the multitude of woeful examples that the experience of human deeds parades before us.” He concludes, accordingly, that “the human being is evil,” by which Kant means “that he is conscious of the moral law and yet has incorporated into his maxim the (occasional) deviation from it.”121 If this is the case, however, it raises a serious question:  if one’s groundmaxim is evil, then it would appear that one can never be otherwise than evil, for even if one now decided to follow the moral law, one’s so deciding would itself be based upon an evil ground-maxim. Kant thus claims, in this

  For Kant’s argument to this effect, see Religion, 6:20.   This must be the case, Kant claims, since “freedom of the power of choice has the characteristic . . . that it cannot be determined to action through any incentive except so far as the human being has incorporated it into his maxim . . . ” (Religion, 6:24–5) 117   Kant here employs a kind of regress argument, for which see Religion, 6:21n; cf. 6:25. 118   Cf. Kant, Religion, 6:24. 119   For an argument to this effect, see Religion, 6:24, cf. 6:36. 120  Given the actuality of immorality Kant claims that human nature must be evil; cf. Religion, 6:30–1, 36–7. 121  Kant, Religion, 6:32–3. 115

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regard, that our evil nature “cannot be eradicated, for the supreme maxim for that would have to be the maxim of the good, whereas in this propensity the maxim has been assumed to be evil.”122 If we are evil by nature, that is to say, then even our best deeds are done for the sake of something other than duty itself; from this, it follows that the deed of changing from an evil ground to a good one would itself be done on the basis of the evil ground, and so would not displace it. It is not clear, then, how it is so much as possible to be anything other than evil, since evil, “as [our] natural propensity, . . . is also not to be extirpated through human forces, for this could only happen through good maxims—something that cannot take place if the subjective supreme ground of all maxims is presupposed to be corrupted.”123 It thus seems impossible for a person who is evil by nature ever to be anything other than evil, yet Kant insists that it must be possible, for otherwise one could not reasonably will the moral law: “For, in spite of that fall,” he writes, “the command that we ought to become better human beings still resounds unabated in our souls; consequently, we must also be capable of it, even if what we can do is of itself insufficient and, by virtue of it, we only make ourselves receptive to a higher assistance inscrutable to us.”124 What one needs, accordingly, and what must therefore be possible, is a regeneration or revolution in one’s ground-maxim. Regeneration is necessary, Kant insists, for “so long as the foundation of the maxims of the human being remains impure,” one’s transformation from evil to good “cannot be effected through gradual reform but must rather be effected through a revolution in the disposition of the human being (a transition to the maxim of holiness of disposition). And so a ‘new man’ can come about only through a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation . . . and a change of heart.”125 By Kant’s own lights, such regeneration must be the product of one’s own free decision, that is, of “a single and unalterable decision [in which] a human being reverses the supreme ground of his maxims by which he was an evil human being.”126 But this brings us back to the problem just mentioned, for if free decisions are based upon ground-maxims, and one’s ground-maxim is evil, then it is not clear how one could freely decide to change one’s ground-maxim—it would appear, that is, that here one must will that which is impossible.

123 124  Kant, Religion, 6:31.  Kant, Religion, 6:37.  Kant, Religion, 6:45.  Kant, Religion, 6:47. For recent discussions of these problems, and Kant’s solution, see Gordon E.  Michaelson, Fallen Freedom:  Kant on Evil and Moral Regeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Philip L. Quinn, “Christian Atonement and Kantian Justification,” Faith and Philosophy, 3 (1986), 440–62, and Philip Rossi and Michael Wreen (eds.), Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991). 126  Kant, Religion, 6:47–8. This does not entail that all of his or her actions will now be good, however, for the apparent reason that even after one has adopted a good maxim, one’s old habits continue to influence one’s behavior; on this, see Religion, 6:48. 122 125

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In this light, Kant’s assertion that regeneration must nevertheless be possible seems insufficient to warrant hope in such possibility, since the latter now looks to be impossible in principle. Kant does offer some help with this problem, though his solution is not as plainly stated as one might hope. The key move seems to involve an appeal to a Christ, but how this is supposed to help is unclear. (I say a Christ, since it would appear that, within the constraints of Kant’s theology, there could be any number of suitably Christic figures.) A plausible reconstruction of his solution might go something like this: (a) a Christ is one who sacrifices his or her welfare for the sake of following the moral law; (b) in the face of such a Christ, one thus beholds the moral law in its purity; (c) this purity elicits one’s respect for the moral law, unmixed with any natural incentive; (d)  this enables one to commit oneself to the moral law on the basis of such respect alone; and so (e) freely decide to change one’s will on the basis of something other than one’s evil ground-maxim, since all natural incentives are here set aside. Again, Kant never clearly elaborates such an argument, but it seems plausible based on his understanding of Christ, of moral exemplars, and of the problem that needs to be addressed. He comes close to saying as much, in fact, when he claims that exemplars can play a key role in one’s moral development, especially when the former are portrayed as suffering for the sake of morality; he thus suggests that a moral teacher should represent him [the example] at a moment when he wishes that he had never lived to see the day that exposed him to such unutterable pain and yet remains firm in his resolution to be truthful, without wavering or even doubting; then my young listener will be raised step by step from mere approval to admiration, from that to amazement, and finally to the greatest veneration and a lively wish that he himself could be such a man (though certainly not in such circumstances); and yet virtue is here worth so much only because it costs so much, not because it brings any profit. All the admiration, and even the endeavor to resemble this character, here rests wholly on the purity of the moral principle, which can be clearly represented only if one removes from the incentive to action everything that people reckon only to happiness. Thus morality must have more power over the human heart the more purely it is presented. From this it follows that if the law of morals and the image of holiness and virtue are to exercise any influence at all on our soul, they can do so only insofar as they are laid to heart in their purity as incentives, unmixed with any view to one’s welfare, for it is in suffering that they show themselves most excellently.127

If we have this passage in mind when we read Kant’s suggestion that Christ is significant precisely as “an example to be emulated,” and especially his characterization of Christ as “a human being willing not only to execute in person all human duties . . . but also, though tempted by the greatest temptation, to

127

 Kant, KpV, 5:156; cf. a similar example on 5:77.



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take upon himself all sufferings, up to the most ignominious death, for the good of the world,” it seems plausible that what one is here supposed to emulate is Christ’s pure commitment to the moral law (even when such commitment runs contrary to all natural incentives), and that the emulation of this commitment can itself embody such purity, since his example elicits in one a respect for the moral law that is likewise contrary to natural incentives.128 In such a case, one whose ground-maxim had been evil could freely commit him or herself to the moral law on a basis other than that maxim, and could therefore become a new person, morally speaking.129 However one accounts for it, Kant claims that a person thus regenerated could reasonably hope to be regarded as righteous by God, since the moral law is now his or her ground-maxim and new nature. By itself, however, regeneration is a necessary but not sufficient condition of such hope, for a serious impediment remains, namely, the guilt one accrued in one’s former life. Even though a person has become a new creature, that is to say, he nevertheless started from evil, and this is a debt which is impossible for him to wipe out. He cannot regard the fact that, after his change of heart, he has not incurred new debts, as equivalent to his having paid off the old ones. Nor can he produce, in the future conduct of a good life, a surplus over and above what he is under obligation to perform each time; for his duty is to do all the good in his power.130

Kant’s point, obviously indebted to Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, is that one cannot do something more than one is morally obliged to do, and so accrue a moral surplus with which to repay one’s moral debts, since one is at every moment obligated to do one’s duty, and one cannot do more than one’s duty. No one can pay these debts on one’s behalf, moreover, since guilt is “the most personal of all liabilities, namely a debt of sins which only the culprit, not the innocent, can bear.”131 Given one’s guilt for sin, accordingly, and the apparent impossibility of one’s doing anything to discharge that guilt, it seems impossible yet again that one could reasonably hope to be counted righteous by God, and so impossible to will the moral law. Kant’s resolution of this issue is complicated, but it goes something like this:  he argues, first, that the old person deserves infinite punishment, but that this punishment was not visited upon him or her, yet given that the new person “now leads a new life and has become a ‘new man,’ the punishment cannot be considered appropriate to [him or her].”132 So: the old person owes a debt that he or she did not pay, but the new person, qua new, owes nothing, since he or she is a different person, morally speaking, from the one who

 Kant, Religion, 6:64, 62.  Kant, Religion, 6:72.

128 130

129   On this point, see Kant, Religion, 6:66–7, 48. 132  Kant, Religion, 6:72.  Kant, Religion, 6:72–3.

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incurred the debt. This provides us with a possible solution to our problem, namely, that “the punishment must be thought as adequately executed in the situation of conversion itself.”133 So then: if “conversion” is “an exit from evil and an entry into goodness,” how does this count as the taking on of punishment? Kant’s answer is that “the emergence from the corrupted disposition into the good is in itself already sacrifice . . . and entrance into a long train of life’s ills which the new human being undertakes . . . simply for the sake of the good, yet are still fitting punishment for someone else, namely, the old human being (who, morally, is another human being).”134 To be converted, accordingly, is to enter into a life characterized by pain and suffering, namely, the pain consequent upon one’s putting off of one’s old self and experiencing this as a sacrifice of self. This counts as payment for the debts one has previously incurred, since, “considered in his empirical character as a sensible being, he is still the same human being liable to punishment, and he must be judged as such before a moral tribunal of justice and hence by himself as well.”135 Because the new person is numerically identical with the old person, in other words, there is a sense in which the new person can be thought liable for the old person’s debts. But because the new person is morally a different being, he or she does not owe these debts, from which it follows that qua new being he or she can “bear as vicarious substitute the debt of sin for [the old person],” which is precisely “that surplus over the merit from works for which we felt the need earlier.”136 One’s guilt is thereby atoned for, Kant claims, in consequence of which one can reasonably hope, once again, to be regarded by God as righteous.137 (This is still a matter of faith in justification, for even after conversion one falls short of complete holiness, to such an extent that “the accuser within us would still be more likely to render a verdict of guilty—which means that one must hope that a God would see in one a pure heart and therefore take one’s debt as discharged.”138) 134 135  Kant, Religion, 6:73.  Kant, Religion, 6:74.  Kant, Religion, 6:74.  Kant, Religion, 6:74–5. 137   It is not directly relevant to my argument, but it turns out that these conditions, too, are insufficient by themselves to warrant such hope, since one’s hope for duty’s happiness depends in crucial respects upon one’s joining a moral community. This is the case, first, because one would otherwise be tempted to an almost irresistible extent; on this, cf. Religion, 6:93–4. Participation in a moral community is also necessary for a second reason: because it is the only means by which to fulfill—or so much as hope to fulfill—our duty toward humanity as a whole (cf. 6:151). In order for such a moral community to work, however, it is necessary to think of the laws binding its members as themselves capable of being regarded as the commands of a single lawgiver who knows the heart of each, for (a) such laws must be aimed at the promotion of moral action; (b) morality is something internal, related to the maxim for the sake of which such action is undertaken, rather than external; (c) laws promulgated by other persons can regulate only external behavior; hence, (d) “there must therefore be someone other than the people whom we can declare the public lawgiver of an ethical community,” a moral ruler who knows one’s heart and commands only that which is one’s moral duty (6:99). 138  Kant, Religion, 6:75. 133

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Once again, then, one can give oneself the moral law, and so be free, only if one can bring certain circumstances into conformity with that law, but in light of serious reasons for doubting one’s ability to do so, Kant claims that the reasonableness of the moral life depends upon faith rather than sight—faith, that is, that one’s commitment to morality is not finally futile, and so faith that one would be regarded as righteous by God. One can reasonably hope to be so regarded (or justified), in turn, only if one has been regenerated and one’s guilt has been atoned for. For Kant, then, one’s life is “mine” just to the extent that it is governed by the moral law, but because one cannot necessarily bring it about that one’s life and life-circumstances are so governed, one must have faith in that which enables one to persist in intending the moral life, rather than to give it up as impossible.

2 .8. OBJECTIONS In sum, then, Kant argues (a) that the realm of nature is governed by natural laws, and that these are in fact the laws of one’s own understanding; (b) that the realm of morality is governed by the moral law, conformity with which frees one from natural necessity and is that in which distinctively personal life consists; (c) that one governed by the moral law necessarily intends to bring one’s life into conformity with it; (d) that there are two formidable obstacles to such bringing-into-conformity, namely one’s own unholiness and the natural realm’s apparent indifference to one’s intentions; and, finally, (e) that the maintenance of this intention (and so of one’s life having a shape that one can identify with as a moral being) depends upon the reasonableness of hoping that a God governs the natural world according to moral law, and that this God would regard one as righteous. For Kant, therefore, faith plays a crucial role in enabling one to hope that one’s life will have the shape one intends. Kant thus addresses the problems with which we began, and does so in strikingly original—and ambitious—fashion. Not everyone was satisfied with his solutions, however. Then as now, the criticisms most commonly directed against him involve a claim to the effect that Kant’s system leaves one “cut off” from something of vital importance. One common criticism, accordingly, is that Kant’s claims about the unknowability of things in themselves entail that we are disconnected, in principle, from the objects that our knowledge purports to be about. So F.H. Jacobi, for one, argued that the Kantian philosopher goes right against the spirit of his system whenever he says that objects produce impressions on the senses through which they arouse sensations, and that in this way they bring about representations. For according to the Kantian hypothesis, the empirical object, which is always only appearance, cannot

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exist outside us and be something more than a mere representation. On the contrary, according to this same hypothesis we know not the least of the transcendental object.

With respect to Kant’s claims about things in themselves, therefore, Jacobi famously quipped that “without that presupposition I could not enter into the system, but with it I could not stay within it.”139 Jacobi was not alone in raising this objection, nor was he the first to raise it; that honor probably belongs to Lambert, who raised a version of it, recall, in response to Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation. Kant was not left empty-handed in response to this objection, of course; he responded, most notably, with the “Refutation of Idealism” that he added to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.140 Kant himself did not regard such criticisms as devastating, therefore, and in light of all the subsequent philosophical discussion devoted to the relevant arguments and counter-arguments, I am inclined to agree with him.141 Even if they were not devastating criticisms, however, they caused (or exhibited) sufficient unease with his system that many of his contemporaries set to work trying to create accounts that would avoid them. A similar criticism was directed against Kant’s account of morality, to the effect that his philosophy requires moral agents to cut themselves off from an important element of human nature, namely, their inclinations. Bernard Williams has leveled an influential critique along these lines in our own day, but the red flag had already been raised by several of Kant’s contemporaries. One of the best known was due to Friedrich Schiller, who asked of Kant, “how shall sentiments of beauty and freedom be compatible with the austere spirit of a law which guides a person more through fear than confidence, which, although nature had made him one, yet always seeks to dismember him, and assures itself dominance over part of his essence only for the reason that it awakens in him distrust of another?”142 Schiller contends, therefore, that Kant so opposes the moral 139   F.H. Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus (Breslau, 1787), 220 and 223 (ET:  Main Philosophical Writings, trans. George di Giovanni [McGill-Queens University Press, 1994]). Similar criticisms were leveled by many others, including G.E. Schulze’s Aenesidemus, oder über die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Prof. Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementar-Philosophie, nebst einer Verteidigung gegen die Anmassungen der Vernunftkritik (1792, reprinted in Aetas Kantiana [Brussels, 1969]), 100, 132–3, 138–40, 172, and the Feder-Garve review, Zugabe zu den Göttingischen Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen 3 (1782). 140  Kant, KrV, B 274. 141   For a nice summary of these discussions, see Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge and Georges Dicker, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and “Kant’s Refutation of Idealism,” Noûs 42 (2008). 142  Schiller, Über Anmut und Würde (1793), in Nationalausgabe (Weimar:  Hermann Böhlhaus Nachfolger, 1943–), vol. 20, 283–4 (ET:  Schiller’s “On Grace and Dignity” in its Cultural Context, ed. Jane V. Curran [New York: Camden House, 2005]); similar criticisms were leveled by Christian Garve, Versuche über verschiedene Gegenstände aus der Moral, der Litteratur, und dem gesellschaftlichen Leben (Breslau, 1792), part 1, 111–16.



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law to sensible inclinations that the former must be sharply separated from the latter. Schiller sees this as a would-be distortion of human nature, and therefore as doomed to failure, since “nature announces to him the obligation not to divide asunder what she brought together, not even in the purest expression of his divine part to leave the sensuous part behind, and not to found the triumph of the one on the repression of the other.” He continues: “Only when it flows forth from his entire humanity as the united effect of both principles, when it has become nature for him, is his moral way of thinking secure from danger.”143 Over against Kant’s alleged austerity, accordingly, Schiller proposed a moral philosophy in which one’s inclinations and one’s duties are brought into harmony with one another—not, note well, by subordinating one to the other, but by achieving what Schiller would term a “beautiful,” almost musical, accord between the two. For his part, Kant thought his views were defensible against these criticisms, too, and his Metaphysics of Morals, in particular, elaborates such a defense.144 Even if they do not constitute knock-down arguments against Kant’s moral philosophy, however, these criticisms once again point to a basic discomfort with certain aspects of that philosophy, which discomfort, in turn, stimulated a number of Kant’s successors to attempt novel approaches to these issues. Chapters  3 and 4 consider two such successors, namely Friedrich Schleiermacher and G.W.F. Hegel, each of whom not only responds to Kant, but seeks to develop a more adequate approach to the problem of “mineness.” Hegel saw critiques like Jacobi’s and Schiller’s as symptomatic of a more general problem, which he traced to Kant’s failure to reconcile lawlike universals with the particulars of nature and history; that is to say, Hegel thought that Kant’s universals were merely imposed, from without, on particulars (including those who would govern and be governed by them), such that particulars remained external to one’s autonomous legislation, and one’s legislation was grounded in universals that remained external to oneself. To deal with these problems, Hegel went to work on an astonishingly ambitious project, the aim of which was to achieve precisely that which he thought Kant failed to achieve: the complete reconciliation of universals and particulars, and, in consequence of this, persons’ being completely at home with themselves in relationship to that which is external to them.145 Before turning to Hegel, however, we will consider the views of one of his main rivals, Friedrich  Schiller, Über Anmut und Würde, 284.   See especially his Metaphysik der Sitten, along with the Religion (see especially 6:23–4n), along with his response to Garve in “Theorie und Praxis.” For subsequent discussion of these issues, see Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993), Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, Marcia Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), and Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom. 145   As before, it is worth mentioning that Kant addressed this criticism, too, especially in his KU. 143

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Schleiermacher. Like Schiller and, to some extent, like Hegel, Schleiermacher criticized Kant for two principal reasons: first, that Kant’s philosophy did not do justice to the whole of human nature, including especially our sensible inclinations, and second, that Kant’s emphasis on universal laws could not account for, and perhaps even discouraged, the development of one’s individuality. In order to address these perceived inadequacies, Schleiermacher developed a view according to which persons strive to harmonize, in themselves, all that is merely given to them, including moral norms, social structures, and natural necessities, and in so doing to put their characteristic stamp upon these givens and, thus, to experience their entire lives as self-expressive. To the elaboration of this view we now turn.

3 Harmonizing Dependence Chapter 2 sketched an account of Immanuel Kant’s intellectual development, paying particular attention to his claims about what I am calling “mineness.” Kant’s key claims are that one’s life is one’s own, rather than a consequence of natural causation, only if one subjects it to the moral law; that one who subjects one’s life to the moral law necessarily intends to bring his or her life into conformity with that law; and that one can reasonably maintain this intention, despite circumstances that would appear to confound it, only if one has faith of a certain sort. Kant thus provides an answer to the questions with which this book is centrally concerned, namely, under what conditions one can identify with one’s life or experience it as self-expressive, especially when important circumstances are governed by forces that are either hostile or indifferent to one’s intentions. For a variety of reasons, however, few were satisfied with Kant’s answer, which led several of Kant’s contemporaries to propose answers of their own. This chapter considers one such answer, that of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher’s answer involves the following claims:  (a)  that one can identify with one’s life only if one can establish a self-expressive harmony between one’s freedom and that upon which one depends; (b)  that freedom and dependence appear to stand in antithetical relation insofar as one fails to see that both are utterly dependent upon an antecedent factor, which Schleiermacher terms the Whence of such dependence; (c) that this Whence is a wise and loving God, such that one who lives in absolute dependence upon God would experience freedom and dependence as finally harmonious; (d)  that the antithesis between freedom and dependence is first overcome in Jesus’s life of absolute dependence; and (e) that Jesus founds a community in order to convey his absolute dependence to others, who will in turn be able to experience freedom and dependence as harmonious, and, indeed, as bearing their characteristic stamp. A person whose life embodies such harmony can thus integrate all of his or her circumstances, including those over which he or she exerts no control, into a life with which he or she can identify.

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3.1.  FR EEDOM A ND CH A R ACTER Schleiermacher was concerned with these issues throughout his life, and while it took him several decades to work out a consistent, settled response to them, key elements of his mature views begin to emerge already in his earliest writings.1 One such element, developed in critical conversation with Kant, is that one is free if and only if one’s acts are recognizable as one’s own, and that one’s acts are recognizable as such if and only if one acts “in character,” that is, in such a way that a candidate action would hang together with one’s other actions. Schleiermacher’s consideration of these issues, beginning in his early essay “On Freedom” (1790–2), was explicitly motivated by dissatisfaction with Kant’s own treatment of them. Schleiermacher was unconvinced, for instance, by Kant’s notion of freedom as “a power of causality having no necessary connection with what precedes,” not only because Kant thus winds up portraying us as “miracle workers” or “otherworldly subjects,” but because this notion fails to meet one of the standards upon which Kant’s entire philosophy was built, namely the “mineness” or “unity-of-consciousness” criterion that he deployed in the Transcendental Deduction.2 Kant there argued, recall, that all of one’s intuitions and representations must be united in a

1   On Schleiermacher’s early writings, see Günter Meckenstock, Deterministische Ethik und kritische Theologie: Die Auseinandersetzung des frühen Schleiermacher mit Kant und Spinoza 1789–1794 (Berlin:  Walter de Gruyter, 1988); Albert L.  Blackwell, Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life:  Determinism, Freedom, and Phantasy (Chico, CA:  Scholars Press, 1982); Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher und die Frühromantik (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986); Eilert Herms, Herkunft, Entfaltung und erste Gestalt des Systems der Wissenschaften bei Schleiermacher (Gütersloh:  Gütersloher Verlangshaus, Gerd Mohn, 1974); Julia Lamm, The Living God:  Schleiermacher’s Theological Appropriation of Spinoza (University Park, PA:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). On Schleiermacher himself:  Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher:  Leben, Werk, und Wirkung (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), Martin Redeker, Schleiermacher:  Life and Thought (Philadelphia:  Fortress Press, 1973), Richard Crouter, Friedrich Schleiermacher:  Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005); Andrew Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010); Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1870); Brian A. Gerrish, “Friedrich Schleiermacher,” in Continuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 2   Quotations from Schleiermacher’s “Notizen zu Kant: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,” and Über die Freiheit, p. 295, both in Kritische Gesamtausgabe I/1: Jugendschriften 1787–1796, ed. Günter Meckenstock (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983 [hereafter KGA, ET: “Notes on Kant,” trans. Jacqueline Mariña, in Schleiermacher on the Workings of the Knowing Mind (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1998), and On Freedom, trans. Albert Blackwell (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1992)]; as in Chapter 2, I have tried to stick closely to existing English translations in order to make this book useful for a wider Anglophone readership, but I have also used my own translations wherever necessary). I am not claiming that Schleiermacher borrowed this criterion directly from Kant, since it seems to have become common practice to generalize the TD’s criterion (we see clear examples of this in Jacobi and Hegel, for instance).



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single consciousness, for otherwise they would not be recognizable as one and all my intuitions and representations; he writes, accordingly, that the thought that the representations given in intuition one and all belong to me, is therefore equivalent to the thought that I unite them in one self-consciousness, or at least can so unite them . . . In other words, only insofar as I can grasp the manifold of the representations in one consciousness, do I call them one and all mine. For otherwise I should have as many-colored and diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious to myself.3

Kant claims, that is, that “all my representations in any given intuition must be subject to that condition under which alone I can ascribe them to the identical self as my representations, and so can comprehend them as synthetically combined in one apperception through the general expression, ‘I think’.”4 At a crucial moment, then, the Transcendental Deduction depends upon an argument to the effect that all of one’s representations must be recognizable as the unified representations of a single self-consciousness or, more simply, as “mine.” Schleiermacher accepts this argument, and contends that it manifests the fundamental inadequacy of Kant’s understanding of freedom, since an action undertaken ex nihilo, as it were, could not be united in a single consciousness with the rest of one’s life. Hence, against the idea that freedom means that one can act ex nihilo, Schleiermacher insists that it must be possible, everywhere and in all cases, to conceive and sense the sentiments arising from the true portion of this feeling [of freedom], together with their related senses, in a unity of consciousness. It must be possible because these sentiments rest upon nothing except consciousness of those characteristics of our soul in which the possibility of these states is grounded . . . In contrast, those sentiments resting on the incorrect portion of feeling [of freedom] . . . can be recognized as false precisely by the fact that they exist only as momentary sentiments and can never occur as feelings of our interconnected existence.5

Schleiermacher claims, accordingly, (a) that, on Kant’s account, one’s actions are free only if they are neither conditioned by nor grounded in one’s past actions, such that a free act bears no material connection to those actions, and (b)  that this account fails Kant’s own unity-of-consciousness test, since an act that is not materially related to one’s previous and subsequent acts cannot be united in a single consciousness with those acts in such a way that they can be recognized as “mine.” More generally, then, Schleiermacher claims that insofar as an account of freedom “disrupts the interconnection of life,” it must be inadequate.6 4  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 133–4.  Kant, KrV, B 138.  Schleiermacher, Freiheit, 291; cf. 294–5 and Spinozismus, in KGA I/1, 540, 545. 6  Schleiermacher, Freiheit, 296. For Kant’s opposition to accounts of the sort defended here by Schleiermacher, see especially Metaphysik der Sitten, 6:407. 3

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This means, in turn, that an adequate account of freedom must explain how a free action could be united with one’s other actions in a single consciousness and, in consequence, how such an action could be recognizable as one’s own. That brings us to Schleiermacher’s own account, according to which one’s actions are free only if they are grounded in dispositions that are themselves a product of one’s previous actions and valuations. Schleiermacher thus argues that an action “must in every case be grounded in the totality of present representations and in the state and interrelations of all the soul’s faculties that have been produced in the progression of representations in our soul,” such that “nothing will occur except what is grounded in our state and thus in the whole succession of all previous states.”7 The idea here, simply stated, is that one’s prior actions and judgments give shape to one’s will, so that one acts according to one’s will, and thus freely, just insofar as a candidate action stands in a series with one’s prior actions. So, for example, if I repeatedly put my own interests before those of others, then I will become more and more disposed to do so; hence, if I  now decide, say, to write a critical review of someone’s book because I think doing so may advance my career, then I have acted in accordance with my will or “in character,” so to speak. This is what it would mean, Schleiermacher claims, for one’s actions to be due to one’s will and thus, in his sense, free; he argues, in this regard, that “the more particularly the actions that occur through us interconnect with our previous actions and with the whole modification of our capacity for action, the more we call them our own.”8 On Schleiermacher’s account, therefore, an act is recognizable as one’s own only if it is connected with what one has willed in the past. Or, to put the point in Kant’s idiom, only insofar as I can grasp a manifold of actions in one consciousness do I call them one and all mine, for otherwise I should have as many-colored and diverse a will as I have actions. Schleiermacher then argues that apart from some such account, it would make little sense to hold persons accountable for their actions, since there would be no connection, strictly speaking, between their actions and themselves—there would be no reason, that is to say, to see an action as a person’s own. Schleiermacher thus claims, first, that in order to hold someone accountable for his or her actions, one must be able “to separate that in the action which was merely a consequence from that which was act.”9 To hold a person accountable for his or her behavior, Schleiermacher is claiming, one must differentiate between that which he or she has done and that which

 Schleiermacher, Freiheit, 237–8, 292–3; cf. 241–2.  Schleiermacher, Freiheit, 298; emphasis added. 9  Schleiermacher, Freiheit, 248. Note well that Schleiermacher’s compatibilism differs in important respects from some contemporary varieties, since he thinks, for instance, that ideas can be causes, and that ideas are not themselves caused by anything external to one (including especially “forces of motion”); cf. 345–9, 264–5. 7

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merely happens to or through him or her—one must differentiate, that is, between behaviors that a person has performed intentionally and those which are due to factors other than one’s intentions, since the latter are connected to a person only accidentally. Schleiermacher then claims that this condition can be met only if actions can be seen as the end result of a series of previous movements, so to speak, in the person’s will; he thus argues that “from the way an action is composed of certain constituents we cannot conclude anything concerning certain characteristics of the soul . . . unless actions are regarded as consequences of certain grounds in the soul which, so long as they are present, must bring forth the same effects.”10 Suppose I observe someone tripping and falling in the aisle of a grocery store. I would usually perceive this as an accident, but there may be cases in which I  would perceive it as something the person did on purpose. If so, then I am perceiving the person’s tripping as due to his or her intentions, as if he or she said to him or herself, “I am going to trip now” just before doing so. In that case, the person would be responsible for his or her tripping in a way that he or she would not be if it were simply an accident (due, say, to a wet floor). The intention ascribed to the person, moreover, can itself be perceived as more or less rooted in the person’s will, depending upon whether it is understood as a whim or as evidence of the person’s settled intentions. If the person’s behavior is rooted in such intentions—if he or she has a history of scheming—then I am more likely to perceive it as non-accidentally related to his or her will, and so as something for which he or she is responsible. This is what Schleiermacher has in mind when he claims that in seeing an action as the product of a person’s will, one can see it as “an expression of the soul, from which the soul is able to disclose its state.”11 An action’s connection with the antecedent workings of a person’s will thus establishes it as his or her own action, and therefore as that for which he or she is responsible.12 On Schleiermacher’s account, then, an action counts as free only if it is a product of one’s willing, and it counts as a product of one’s willing only if it is grounded in one’s previous willings. The series of such willings imbue one’s will with a certain character, such that when one’s acts carry on this series and so express this character, they are recognizable as “one’s own.” Schleiermacher thus claims that an action “is more our own the more we know that and how it has occurred in us,” and, therefore, that “our feeling of self-activity and personality is greater the more we are able to see into the mutual interconnection of the various individual workings of the soul in relation to an action, 11  Schleiermacher, Freiheit, 254–5.  Schleiermacher, Freiheit, 259; cf. 260.   Schleiermacher thus argues that his account, by contrast with Kant’s, does justice to important moral sentiments of regret and aspiration, since these sentiments make sense only if the current state of one’s will is grounded in preceding states; on this point, see Freiheit, 240, 293–5. 10

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and into the interconnection of an entire state with preceding states.”13 In this early essay, then, Schleiermacher identifies a component of “mineness” that will remain important throughout his career, namely, that an act (or, by parity of reasoning, belief or emotion) is one’s own if it reflects one’s character, since acts that do so can be taken as expressions of who one is. This claim raises some obvious questions, however:  even if particular acts are expressive of one’s character and so recognizably one’s own, what makes one’s character itself one’s own? Think here of someone who acts in character but whose character was dictated by narrow, oppressive social constraints, or of someone who acts in character but hates him or herself for it. Are such persons connected to their characters, and so to their acts, in such a way that their characters and actions are recognizable as their own? A second question concerns the effectiveness of one’s will: even if a person’s acts express his or her character, and his or her character (somehow) expresses him or herself, does this entail that he or she can identify with his or her life, especially insofar as one faces circumstances beyond one’s control? Think here of someone who devotes him or herself to the welfare of his or her children, and whose acts reflect this devotion, yet who is powerless to prevent his or her children from enduring significant pain or injustice. Can such a person identify with his or her life or experience it as self-expressive?

3.2 .  H A R MON IZI NG CIRCUMSTA NCE S Schleiermacher was concerned with the latter question from the very beginning until the very end of his career. As one might expect, his answer changed considerably during this time, and following these developments will shed important light on his understanding of these issues. In this section, then, we begin with his earliest written attempts to deal with the issue of one’s relationship to one’s circumstances, in which he tries to argue, roughly, that one can identify with one’s life if and only if one is sufficiently guided by reason. In one of his earliest essays—“On the Highest Good” (1789)—accordingly, Schleiermacher takes issue with Kant’s claims about the relationship between virtue and happiness. Kant had claimed, recall, that one who wills the moral law necessarily intends to bring one’s circumstances into conformity with that law—but that, since one’s circumstances are governed by the laws of nature, one who would will the moral law must therefore hope that a Supreme Cause  Schleiermacher, Freiheit, 296–7.

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will bring the realm of nature into conformity with morality. The young Schleiermacher rejects this claim, for he thinks that it represents a betrayal of the Reason that Kant otherwise held so dear, and that this is evidenced by “contradictions” into which Kant was thereby led: “For what else but contradiction,” Schleiermacher asks, is it for us to admit into the object of pure practical reason something [namely, happiness] that can never be attained through a procedure that thoroughly conforms to its demands, or to squander the name of a concept of pure reason on an idea by which, through an alien addition about which reason knows absolutely nothing and which it cannot construct with any of its tools, it is distorted and polluted in the most repulsive way? What else is it but contradiction for us to allow reason, here at the point at which it should show its self-sufficiency most of all, to prescribe for itself something that would be absolutely impossible for it to set in motion?14

Small wonder, then, that Kant ends up appealing to a Supreme Cause in order to underwrite the hoped-for connection between morality and happiness, for, Schleiermacher scoffs, “the land of happiness can lie only in those wonderful regions where imagination alone governs without restriction and with a single magical stroke unites everything that must seem eternally irreconcilable to the rest of us.”15 By contrast with Kant, therefore, Schleiermacher here insists that the highest good for human beings is determined solely by reason, and that happiness must be strictly subordinated to reason:  “The concept of the highest good, then, presents to us the condition of a will all individual actions and maxims of which agree with each other and are determined as much as possible in conformity with the laws of reason.”16 Schleiermacher thus argues that if one’s expectation of happiness is itself brought into conformity with reason, then circumstances will no longer be able to dictate one’s happiness, and, in turn, that one will no longer need to postulate a Supreme Cause in order to rationalize one’s hope for happiness.17 Schleiermacher tells us more about what this means in a subsequent essay, “On the Value of Life,” in which he argues that true happiness occurs when knowing and desiring are both subordinated to reason and, so, brought into harmony with one another. His argument here proceeds through the following steps. He claims, first, that “the good life,” for humans, consists in harmony between knowing and desiring; knowing and desiring are thus “to be one, not two, things in me.” Hence, a good life would be characterized by “complete, constant harmony of the two to the fullest degree to which they  Schleiermacher, Über das höchste Gut, in KGA I/1, 95 (hereafter HG; ET: On the Highest Good, trans. Victor Froese [Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1992]). 15 16  Schleiermacher, HG, 87.  Schleiermacher, HG, 93. 17   Cf. Schleiermacher, HG, 124–5. 14

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are possible within me, unity of both in purpose and object.”18 A life is good, therefore, insofar as one’s desires are fulfilled, one’s beliefs are true, and the fulfillment of one’s desires hangs together with the truth of one’s beliefs. This brings us to the second step of his argument, where he claims that reason is that by means of which desire and knowledge can hang together; he thus argues that “pleasure in rules is the driving wheel of my knowledge,” just as “pleasure in rules for action is the tendency of my faculty of desire.” One’s faculty of knowing and of desiring thus seeks to be brought into conformity with rules, and since reason is the faculty of rules, it follows that a good life is one in which knowing and desiring are (individually and jointly) brought into conformity with reason. Schleiermacher claims, accordingly, that reason “is the more splendid, distant goal of my destiny,” for “that is the highest, most intimate, essential unity of my powers!”19 The third step is to claim that one whose knowing and desiring conform to reason will experience his or her life as good only insofar as life-circumstances themselves conform to reason. Schleiermacher argues, then, that it is “to rationality, the crown of my existence, that I strive to appropriate everything within me and to make it conform,” and, therefore, that “if I am to praise life, then by all means it must give me material with which to be happy; it must give me the occasion to exercise and develop moral good, but without forcing me.”20 This raises an obvious question, however, namely, “how can life provide me with objects in which I can perceive a chance harmony among my powers? How can it still my longing for happiness and well being?”21 Schleiermacher addresses this question by cataloging a variety of circumstances, including those in which one’s senses delight, those that can be bent to one’s purposes, and those that connect one with others, in order to argue that the world affords one with plenty of opportunities for such harmonization.22 Yet he realizes that many circumstances are more difficult to bring into harmony with one’s desires, and that such circumstances thus pose a serious threat to the possibility of one’s life having the rational shape one would want it to have.23 As an example, Schleiermacher asks us to consider the suffering of loved ones:  Suppose that those whom I love should suffer and that I should extend a helping hand in vain, that helplessness should consume every good intention, yielding no fruit, and that every attempt at alleviation should fail to take effect, that any good I would contrive for them should go up in smoke, thence making life

18  Schleiermacher, Über den Wert des Lebens, in KGA I/1, 410 (ET: On What Gives Value to Life, trans. Edwina Lawler and Terrence Tice [Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1995]). 19 20  Schleiermacher, Wert, 412.  Schleiermacher, Wert, 412–13. 21 22  Schleiermacher, Wert, 414.   For this, see Schleiermacher, Wert, 422. 23   Crucial here, for Schleiermacher, is the fact that ours is necessarily a bodily existence, which means that our happiness is necessarily subjected to external forces; cf. Wert, 439.



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possible mainly for suffering! Where then would be the harbor of happiness into which life would have seemed to lead me so gladly and effortlessly?24

In circumstances such as these, in which one beholds the suffering of a loved one without being able to do anything about it, it is hard to see how one could take pleasure in, or feel in harmony with, one’s life. The moral of such stories is that our lives are subject to forces beyond their control—which forces, taken together, Schleiermacher terms “fate”—and that these forces can affect our happiness; “neither I nor any other individual,” Schleiermacher observes, “is so sovereign over this twofold, unending supply of joys and sorrows as to be able to select therefrom according to fancy. Each of us is restricted by our circumstances in what we can grasp and avoid and is so in our own way.”25 Schleiermacher notes that fate can seem like a threat to one’s happiness for two principal reasons: on the one hand, insofar as it distributes goods unequally (where such inequities are not deserved), and on the other, insofar as it supplies insufficient goods in any case. With respect to the former, Schleiermacher argues that the appearance of inequity is due to a misperception on our part, and that everyone is in fact equally fortunate with respect to the opportunities and resources that fate has provided them, since each has been given certain challenges as well as certain privileges. In support of this claim, Schleiermacher considers several examples of apparent inequity— unequal distributions of wealth, power, education, ability, health, and so on—and argues that, in each case, those with less of these goods are no worse off than those with more, for the simple reason that having more and having less present equal, if different, opportunities for happiness.26 However, even if Schleiermacher were successful in arguing that fate distributes its goods equally, this would not by itself entail that fate poses no obstacle to the leading of good lives, for the simple reason that it could distribute goods equally yet parsimoniously. This brings Schleiermacher to the other worry: “if we grant that fate is just, everything will then depend on the answers to the following questions. How generous is it? In what does it let each person partake? Is there a surplus of possible happiness beyond necessary evil, and how great is that?”27 The question, then, is whether one’s circumstances are indeed such that one could lead a good life amid them. In response, Schleiermacher first argues that the question cannot be meaningfully addressed for one’s life as a whole, but only for individual moments of life; so he claims that “each moment, considered as a work of fate, is an aggregate of the state of all my relationships at that time, and I cannot know what their variability and their connection in each single moment will bring forth.”28 Granted this,

25  Schleiermacher, Wert, 426.  Schleiermacher, Wert, 427.   For claims to this effect, see Schleiermacher, Wert, 428–9, 440, 458. 27 28  Schleiermacher, Wert, 460.  Schleiermacher, Wert, 466. 24

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Schleiermacher then argues that every such moment is pregnant with endless possibilities, and, in consequence, that fate offers generous opportunities for happiness in each; he thus claims that “I cannot determine for any part of my life, either before or after the moment when it was actual, the limits of attainable pleasure and avoidable unpleasure. Throughout and for every conceivable relationship I see before me an indefinite ‘infinity,’ as it were, of happiness, within which I grope about with my judgment and find everywhere the limits of what has really come into being only in the actions and omissions of my free ingenuity and skill, and I do this without seeing any one of those so-called unavoidable conclusions of fate being effective in the process.”29 Hence, “in each moment I feel free on a limitless, infinite field of happiness. This is a consciousness that includes the greatest gratitude toward just, yet infinitely benevolent, fate, and the strongest proof of my good opinion of it.”30 The argument here, then, is that every moment presents an unbounded array of possibilities, including possibilities for happiness, such that fate can be perceived as generously providing one with such possibilities, and, indeed, as infinitely so. At this early stage of his development, therefore, Schleiermacher argues that one can stand in harmony with one’s circumstances only if one brings them into conformity with reason, and that circumstances can indeed be brought into such conformity, since they neither subject one unduly to chance, nor are they unduly parsimonious in providing one with opportunities for happiness. This argument may seem unconvincing—one may wonder, for instance, whether a person who suffers a great injustice right before dying can be said to have infinite possibilities for happiness, or whether someone who was born into cruel or oppressive circumstances is really no worse off, happiness-wise, than someone born into relative privilege—but for our purposes, the important points are these:  (a)  that Schleiermacher is already wrestling with the question of how one could be in harmony with one’s circumstances, especially when those circumstances seem to be at odds with one’s desires; and (b) that in so wrestling, Schleiermacher ended up introducing a notion that plays a crucial role in his development, namely, that of infinity.

3.3.  I NFI N ITU DE OF HUM A N IT Y The next step in Schleiermacher’s development, accordingly, is to work out this notion of infinity or “the Infinite,” as he sometimes calls it. Schleiermacher took a first step in this direction when trying to think through the views

29

 Schleiermacher, Wert, 466–7.

 Schleiermacher, Wert, 468–9.

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of Spinoza, then elaborated his own understanding in his Speeches. As we shall see, this new understanding offered Schleiermacher new possibilities for explaining the “mineness” of one’s character and circumstances, though it took several years for these explanations to develop fully. Schleiermacher’s essays on Spinoza are concerned primarily with coming to grips with Spinoza’s views rather than with advancing Schleiermacher’s own, yet looking back at them from the perspective of his subsequent development, we can see some rudiments of Schleiermacher’s understanding of the Infinite.31 Two points are especially significant in this regard, the first of which concerns the Infinite’s relationship to finite phenomena. Following Spinoza, Schleiermacher reasons that the Infinite cannot be understood as one such phenomenon, obviously, but neither can it be understood as standing over against them, for in that case the Infinite would not be infinite, since there would be something outside the Infinite; in order to perceive the Infinite as infinite, accordingly, its relationship to the finite must be construed differently. This brings Schleiermacher to Spinoza’s so-called pantheism, according to which the Infinite is understood as “the unconditioned, which cannot be found outside the series [of phenomena], but only as the complete totality itself.”32 If the series of phenomena is understood to include all causal relationships—A causes B causes C and so on—then the Infinite cannot be thought of as a member of this series or as strictly separate from it, but, somehow, as identical with the entire series itself. This “somehow” is explained, for Spinoza, by the fact that the Infinite must be infinitely expressed in infinitely many ways, that the series of phenomena is thus the necessary outworking of this infinite expression, and, therefore, that the Infinite can be identified with the (infinite) series as a whole. An explanation along these lines will eventually play an important role in Schleiermacher’s own understanding of the Infinite. A second key point, concerning the way one could become aware of the Infinite, plays a similarly important role. In trying to understand how one could become aware of the Infinite without thereby treating it as if it were yet another finite object, Schleiermacher proposes that the Infinite can be understood not as something perceived, but as that by means and in terms of which anything might be perceived. He thus suggests, following some clues from Spinoza, that the genuinely true and real in the mind is the feeling of being, the immediate idea, as Spinoza calls it. This idea, however, is never itself perceived, but rather

  The best treatment of these issues is Lamm, The Living God.  Schleiermacher, Kurze Darstellung des Spinozistischen Systems, in KGA I/1, 567 (ET: Facing-Page Translation of Kurze Darstellung des Spinozistischen Systems and Spinozismus, trans. Patrick Dinsmore [Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2013], 23). 31

32

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only particular ideas and experiences of will are perceived, and except for these nothing exists in the mind in any moment of time. But can one say that particular ideas had their independent, individual existence? No, nothing actually exists other than the feeling of being—the immediate idea. Particular ideas are only its manifestations.33

The idea, then, is that the Infinite is not a discrete object, which means that it cannot be perceived or conceptualized as if it were, and, therefore, that one cannot become aware of it through the mediation of one’s usual perceptual and conceptual capacities; hence, if one is to become aware of the Infinite, one must do so (a) without such mediation, and (b) in such a way that one is oneself included in the Infinite. Insofar as it meets these conditions, “the feeling for being” seems like a good candidate for explaining the possibility of one’s becoming aware of the Infinite. Schleiermacher may not have realized it at the time, but this idea was to play a crucial role in the development of his thought. We see this already in Schleiermacher’s 1799 Speeches, in which these ideas become the cornerstone of his claims about religion. Here he claims, famously, that “religion is the sensibility and taste for the Infinite,” or again, that religion “accept[s]‌everything individual as a part of the whole, and everything limited as a representation of the Infinite,” just as it “see[s] the Infinite, its imprint and its manifestation, in humanity no less than in all other individual and finite forms.”34 These claims obviously echo those earlier ascribed to Spinoza, specifically those concerning (a)  the immediacy of one’s awareness of the Infinite (reflected here in Schleiermacher’s appeal to “sense and taste”), and (b) the Infinite’s relationship to the finite (here expressed in the suggestion that every moment should be seen as an activity of the Universe—another of Schleiermacher’s names for the Infinite—and the Infinite expressed in every finite form). Schleiermacher thus equates religion with an immediate awareness of the Infinite, and of everything finite as included in, and an expression of, the Infinite. Schleiermacher then elaborates not one but two models for understanding the Infinite—or, more precisely, two components of a model, either of which

 Schleiermacher, Spinozismus, 155.  Schleiermacher, Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, 1st ed., in Kritische Gesamtausgabe I/2, Schriften aus der Berliner Zeit, ed. Günter Meckenstock (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), 53 (here cited by original pagination) (ET: On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter [Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996], 23, 25). Schleiermacher here connects his ideas with those of Spinoza; cf. 213/54. On the Reden, see Günter Meckenstock’s “Historische Einführung,” in the “de Gruyter Texte” edition of Über die Religion, ed. Günter Meckenstock (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001); Peter Grove, Deutungen des Subjekts: Schleiermachers Philosophie der Religion (Berin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004); and Ulrich Barth, “De Religionstheorie der ‘Reden’:  Schleiermachers theologisches Modernisierungsprogramm,” in Aufgeklärter Protestantismus (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 2004). 33

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could be taken as explanatorily basic to it. This is worth noting, since one component seems basic to the model developed in the Speeches themselves, whereas the other component becomes basic to Schleiermacher’s mature understanding of the Infinite. The first component is a claim to the effect that the Infinite is that in which the oppositions characteristic of finitude are united and so relativized. Schleiermacher thus asserts that “the deity, by an immutable law, has compelled itself to divide its great work endlessly, to fuse together each definite thing only out of two opposing forces, and to realize each of its eternal thoughts in twin forms that are hostile to each other and yet exist inseparably only through each other.” As an example of such forces, Schleiermacher observes that “every life is only the result of a continuous appropriation and repulsion; everything has its determinate being only by virtue of the way in which it uniquely combines and retains the two primal forces of nature: the thirsty attraction and the expansion of the active and living self.”35 Schleiermacher then suggests that insofar as one experiences life as if it were bounded by such oppositions, or as if such oppositions were absolute, one experiences the finite as if it were everything; to see these oppositions as if they were ultimately united in an Infinite, on the other hand, and so as merely relative oppositions, is to experience the finite as if it were included in the Infinite. We see the latter unity most clearly, Schleiermacher suggests, in persons whom he terms “mediators”: “At all times,” he writes, “the deity sends people here and there in whom both tendencies [viz. attraction and expansion] are combined in a more fruitful manner, equips them with wondrous gifts, prepares their way with an all-powerful word, and employs them as translators of its will and its works as mediators of what would otherwise remain eternally separated.”36 Such persons are thus “mediators between limited man and infinite humanity . . . for they bring deity closer to those who normally grasp only the finite and the trivial; they place the heavenly and the eternal before them as an object of enjoyment and unification, as the sole inexhaustible source of that toward which their creative endeavors are directed.”37 The idea here, then, is that everything in the universe is composed of, and continually affected by, opposing forces, and that the Infinite is that in which such forces are united. On this picture, accordingly, one would become aware of the Infinite insofar as one perceives and contributes to the unity of creaturely oppositions. This is only one component of the Speeches’ model of the Infinite; the other, more fully developed component is a claim about the Infinite’s appearance in humanity. Schleiermacher elaborates this claim in the second Speech’s phenomenology of infinitude, in which he argues that one begins to glimpse the

 Schleiermacher, Religion, 59 (5).  Schleiermacher, Religion, 61–2 (7).

35

37

 Schleiermacher, Religion, 60–1 (6).

36

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Infinite not by surveying the universe’s endless expanse, but by coming to see each person as a microcosm of the universe.38 He thus claims that one can become aware of the Infinite by proceeding through roughly the following steps. A first step is taken when one loves a person whose character differs significantly from one’s own, and—because one loves him or her—one sees this character as a necessary expression of human nature, as if something would be missing from the world without it. This is what Schleiermacher has in mind when he claims that, “in order to have religion, one must first have found humanity, and one finds it only in love and through love,” for “each person embraces most ardently the one in whom the world is reflected most clearly and purely; each loves most tenderly the person in whom one believes one finds everything brought together that one lacks for the completion of humanity.”39 The second step is to use this insight as a clue to understanding the particular character of other persons: once one has recognized the particular character of a loved one, and so perceived it as a necessary expression of human nature, this should lead one to see others in a similar light. Schleiermacher suggests, therefore, that once one has seen a loved one’s character as a necessary expression of humanity, one should proceed to survey other such expressions throughout time (history) and space (the world), in order to see how, “according to their inner essence, all individuals are necessary supplements to the perfect intuition of humanity.”40 The third step is to return to oneself and perceive one’s own character as a necessary expression of humanity: “From these wanderings through the whole realm of humanity,” Schleiermacher writes, “religion then returns to one’s own self with sharpened meaning and better-formed judgment, and at last finds everything in itself that otherwise was gathered from distant regions . . . You have really passed through all these different forms within your own order; you yourself are a compendium of humanity; in a certain sense your personality embraces the whole of human nature, and in all its versions this is nothing but your own self that is reproduced, clearly delineated, and immortalized in all its alterations.” Schleiermacher concludes, then, that “in whomever religion has thus worked back again inwardly and has discovered there the infinite, it is complete in that person in this respect: he no longer needs a mediator for some intuition of humanity, and he himself can be a mediator for many.”41 After surveying various expressions of human nature and seeing each such expression as necessary to the full manifestation of humanity—for humanity

38   Schleiermacher argues that one can see glimmers of the Infinite in certain finite objects and their interrelationships, yet that this does not explain the Infinite’s appearance, since one’s ability to see them as glimmers of the Infinite depends upon one’s already having found the Infinite elsewhere (cf. Religion, 88). 39 40  Schleiermacher, Religion, 89 (38).  Schleiermacher, Religion, 94 (40). 41  Schleiermacher, Religion, 98–9 (41).



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would be missing something without it—one can see one’s own expression of human nature as necessary, too. What is more, one can see every such expression, including one’s own, as a microcosm of the whole, since persons contribute such expressions precisely by gathering up all that is common to humanity and putting their own stamp on it. The idea here, simply stated, is that each person gathers up others’ expressions of human nature and uses these as raw material, as it were, for one’s own expression, and one’s own expression is gathered up and used in the expressions of still others. In the fourth Speech, accordingly, Schleiermacher claims that Religion . . . grants each person his own lot out of its infinite richness. As befits artists, each person joins the endeavor to complete himself in some particular aspect with the general sense for all that belongs in its holy realm. A noble rivalry prevails, and the longing to produce something worthy of such an assembly permits each person to absorb faithfully and diligently everything that belongs to his particular realm.42

On this account, then, humanity can be fully expressed only in an endless array of particular persons’ expressions, and each expression is itself a microcosm of the whole. Schleiermacher thus portrays humanity as infinite, in more or less Spinozistic terms, since each person is included in, and an expression of, a whole that can itself be fully expressed only in the series of all such expressions. Schleiermacher thus portrays humanity as infinite, but he hastens to emphasize that it is not the Infinite; just as each person is an expression of humanity’s infinitude, he argues, so humanity is itself an expression of an Infinite that includes, but infinitely transcends, humanity. He notes, therefore, that the picture he has sketched so far is “the end of religion for those to whom humanity and the universe are of equal worth,” but maintains that it would be a mistake to think that “this is at the same time the limit of religion. Rather,” he insists, it cannot properly stop here, and only on the other side of this point does it gaze directly upon the infinite . . . . Humanity itself is to the universe as individual persons are to humanity; it is only an individual form of the universe, a depiction of a single modification of its elements; there must be other such forms by which humanity is circumscribed and to which it is thus opposed. Humanity is only a middle term between the individual and the One, a resting place on the way to the infinite.43

Schleiermacher here maintains, therefore, that the Infinite is not identical with its expression in humanity, but that it would be futile to try to lead the

 Schleiermacher, Religion, 233 (94); cf. 184.  Schleiermacher, Religion, 104–5 (43–4).

42 43

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Infinite’s cultured despisers beyond this expression. Irrespective of his readership’s limitations, at this stage in his development Schleiermacher may have been unable to say much more about the Infinite, for he seems not yet to have hit upon an insight that would become fundamental in his later work, namely, that the Infinite is best understood in terms of the Speeches’ other component, as that in which opposites are united. This is an issue to which we shall return shortly. The point, for now, is that in the Speeches the Infinite can be understood in either of two ways (or a combination thereof): as that in which apparent oppositions are united, or as that which comes to expression in an endless variety of particular human characters. The latter understanding is more thoroughly developed at this point, as is evident in Schleiermacher’s tendency to see the uniting of oppositions as an element of humanity’s infinitude, but not vice versa. We see this tendency clearly, along with its consequences for Schleiermacher’s understanding of one’s ability to identify with one’s life, in his Monologen of 1800.

3.4.  TH E LIM ITS OF HUM A N I N FI N ITU DE The Monologen apply the Speeches’ claims about the Infinite to Schleiermacher’s earlier claims about individual character and putting one’s stamp on life, and so clarify what these claims mean and where they get us. Three points are especially relevant to Schleiermacher’s development: (a) he here elaborates his claims about humanity’s infinitude in order to say more about how one’s character could itself be one’s own; (b) he brings the uniting-of-opposites motif into his account as part of his claims about humanity’s infinitude, rather than the other way around; and (c) he tries to explain one’s relationship to circumstances solely in terms of his claims about individuality, thereby (unwittingly) showing us the limits of that approach. Schleiermacher begins by explaining what motivated his concern with individuality, namely, a growing dissatisfaction with putatively universal—and so, he thinks, flattened—views of humanity; he thus tells us that for a long time I too was content with the discovery of a universal reason; I worshipped the one essential being as the highest, and so believed that there is but a single right way of acting in every situation, that the conduct of all men should be alike, each differing from the other only by reason of his place and station in the world. I thought humanity revealed itself as varied only in the manifold diversity of outward acts, that the person him- or herself, the individual, was not a being uniquely fashioned, but of one substance and everywhere the same.44 44  Schleiermacher, Monologen:  Eine Neujahrsgabe, 1st ed., KGA I/3, Schriften aus der Berliner Zeit 1800–1802, ed. Günter Meckenstock (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), 38 (here cited



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Schleiermacher was initially attracted to an account along these lines, but was eventually frustrated by its failure to do justice to individuality; he explains that “such freedom alone did not content me, for it gave no meaning to my personality, nor to the particular unity of the transient stream of consciousness flowing within me.” 45 Dissatisfaction with such universalizing accounts thus leads Schleiermacher to what he terms his “highest intuition,” namely, that “each person is meant to represent humanity in his or her own way, combining its elements uniquely, so that it may reveal itself in every mode, and all that can issue from its womb be made actual in the fullness of unending space and time.”46 Schleiermacher thus echoes his position from the Speeches, claiming that human nature is instantiated not in lawlike regularity but in an infinite array of individual expressions.47 He likewise echoes the Speeches’ claims about how one comes to see humanity as such, and so see oneself as contributing something essential to its expression; Schleiermacher thus claims that “only if one is conscious of one’s individuality in one’s present conduct can one be sure of not violating it in one’s next act, and only if one requires oneself constantly to survey the whole of humanity, opposing one’s own expression of it to every other possible one, can one maintain the consciousness of one’s unique selfhood.”48 Here too, then, Schleiermacher claims that one arrives at a sense of one’s individuality—and of that individuality’s indispensability as an expression of humanity—by appreciating the individuality of others. It is only by doing so, he suggests, that one can be sure that one is being true to oneself. To see what he is getting at, consider, as a rough analogy, the process of discerning one’s vocation. If persons can picture only one vocation as open to them—in a situation where, say, everyone in their town works in the local factory—then they may see their vocation as interchangeable with that of everyone else, irrespective of their particular talents, interests, and so on. By contrast, if persons can picture a wide array of vocations as open to them—because they see others pursuing these vocations and perceive each of them to be significant—then they may have more freedom to consider which vocation best expresses their talents, interests, and so on, or what they can see themselves doing, as one says. Analogies aside, Schleiermacher’s point is that one must survey humanity in order to appreciate the range of ways that humanity is expressed, and to determine one’s own way of expressing it. by original pagination) (ET: Soliloquies, trans. Horace Leland Friess [New York: Open Court, 1926], 30–1). Schleiermacher’s attitude toward universality is not wholly negative; rather, he sees it as enabling one to take an important step on the road to individuality (cf. pp. 30–1). For an excellent discussion of the Monologen, see Brent Sockness, “Schleiermacher and the Ethics of Authenticity,” Journal of Religious Ethics 32:3. 45 46  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 39 (31).  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 40 (31). 47   For claims to this effect, see Schleiermacher, Religion, 24, 39. 48  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 50–1 (38).

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By thus determining one’s own expression of humanity, one can observe the first half of Schleiermacher’s dictum, to “bring out what is individual in you, and place the impress of your spirit on all that is about you.”49 To observe the dictum’s second half, one must not only have discovered one’s individuality, but one must put its stamp on one’s entire life. Using his own experience as an example, Schleiermacher explains how one would go about doing so:  I must first store up every new acquisition in my mind, and then let the characteristic forces of my life play upon it and about it, so that the new shall be mingled with the old, and come into touch with everything that I already harbor within me . . . Therefore my progress is slow, and I shall have to live long before I have embraced all things equally, but whatever I do embrace will bear my impress. Whatever part of humanity’s infinite realm I have apprehended will be in equal measure uniquely transformed and taken up into my being.50

The idea here is that one puts one’s individual stamp on life by relating more and more of that which one encounters to one’s character, such that one’s perceptions, actions, and reactions are more and more “in character.” To understand what this means, consider the example of a dedicated Thomist; to put her characteristic stamp on life, this Thomist would need, first, to arrive at her own understanding of and way of expressing Thomism (perhaps she is a transcendental Thomist with an eco-feminist twist), and second, for her perceptions, actions, and reactions themselves to express such Thomism (she may thus come to see all that is as desiring the good, cultivate virtues which better align her with that good, and so on). Meeting the first condition will provide this Thomist with a sense of individuality, while meeting the second will ensure that more and more of her life is brought into conformity with that individuality; as she brings more of her life into such conformity, her Thomism will bear more and more of her own stamp, enabling more of her life to bear this stamp, and so on. She would thus be able to say, with Schleiermacher, that “whatever the active community of humanity can produce shall pass before me, shall stir and affect me in order to be affected by me in turn, and in the manner I receive and treat it, I intend always to find my freedom and to develop my individuality through its outward expression.”51 Her expression of Thomism, moreover, can open up possibilities for others’ individual expressions, just as Karl Rahner’s, say, opened up possibilities for hers. Community and individuality, along with tradition and novel self-expression, can thus be reconciled, insofar as one finds oneself in and puts one’s stamp on that which has been handed down to one, and others,

 Schleiermacher, Monologen, 27 (24).  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 57–8 (42–3). 51  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 106 (72–3). 49 50



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in turn, find themselves in and put their stamp on what one hands down to them. Schleiermacher sees evidence of this, too, in his own experience:  As soon as I have genuinely appropriated anything new in respect to culture and individuality, from whatever source, do I not run to my friend in word and deed to let him know of it, that he may share my joy, and himself profit as he perceives understandingly my inner growth? My friend I cherish as my own self; whatever I come to recognize as my own, I place straightaway at his disposal.52

On this account, then, one surveys others’ expressions of humanity in order to determine one’s own way of doing so, and one then strives to bring one’s perceptions, actions, and reactions into conformity with this individuality, so that one’s entire life would bear its stamp and be increasingly recognizable as self-expressive. With a view to the developments that follow, it is worth noting that Schleiermacher’s unity-of-opposites motif also shows up here, but only as an element of his larger understanding of humanity. So he remarks, for instance, that “in the realm of outward behavior particulars are often contradictory; action destroys passivity, thought supplants sensation, and contemplation forces the will to be at rest.” Such oppositions are resolved, he claims, through being held together in the human mind: “But within the spirit all is one, each action is but supplementary to another, in each the other also is preserved. Thus self-contemplation lifts me far above the finite.”53 Or again, he suggests that humanity is characterized by a polarity between those who exhibit their individuality in works of art and those who exhibit it in their actions, and that this polarity can be united only in those who perfect their humanity.54 Or, to take just one more example, Schleiermacher asserts that human life is composed of two opposing forces—loving activity and sensitive receptivity—but that fullness of life depends upon their being united; he thus writes that one’s spirit must “move continually in both directions, and each person has his or her own way of combining both [loving activity and sensitive receptivity] in order to make up the whole.”55 As these examples show, the unity-ofopposites theme continues to play a role in Schleiermacher’s thought, but at this point its role is simply to elaborate the more basic themes of individuality and self-expression. These themes are also basic to Schleiermacher’s explanation of how one can be reconciled to one’s circumstances, including those that seem to be at odds with one’s desire for self-expression. The explanation, simply stated, is that neither good nor bad circumstances are actually at odds with one’s  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 60 (44).  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 23–4 (21). (The context makes it clear that Schleiermacher is referring to human spirit.) 54 55   On this point, see Monologen, 44.  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 56 (41–2). 52 53

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self-expression, since a person’s aim should not be happiness, per se, but to become a microcosm in which one’s individuality is brought into combination with all circumstances, good and bad alike.56 Schleiermacher thus asks, tellingly, am I so complete as not to welcome joy and sorrow alike, indeed whatever the world calls weal or woe, seeing that everything in its own way serves the purpose of further revealing my being’s relationships? . . . I know what I have not yet made my own . . . and some day I shall compass what is lacking, by my activity and my meditations, harmonizing it inwardly with everything already mine.57

Again, Schleiermacher contends that the aim of one’s life is not to be happy nor to bend the world to one’s will, but simply to express one’s individuality; given that one’s individuality is more fully expressed the more one encounters new circumstances, it follows that both good and bad circumstances are necessary to one’s self-expression, and so consonant with the aim of one’s life. In response to the question, therefore, of whether the goodness of a life can be endangered by adverse circumstances, Schleiermacher claims that this would undoubtedly be the case if even in matters of morality and self-formation I harbored the desire for some specific result at each moment; if the performance of some particular action should at any time become in itself the object of my will, then, to be sure, this object might escape me just when I wanted it. In such a case I should indeed find myself under alien control, but were I to blame fate, I should only be mistaking the real thing at fault, namely myself. But such a fate can never befall me! For I always live in the light of my entire being. My only purpose is ever to become more fully what I am; each of my acts is but a special phase in the unfolding of this single will; and no less certain than my power to act at all is my ability always to act in this spirit; in the sequence of my actions there will be nothing unconformable to this principle. Come then what may! . . . Such a will can never be cheated of its object, and in its very conception the idea of fate vanishes.58

One can express oneself in the face of difficult circumstances no less than in the face of felicitous ones, which means that the former are not an obstacle to but a necessary condition of the full expression of one’s individuality. That being the case, it follows that a person who wants only to express his or her individuality is “no longer a creature of fate or fortune.”59 This account faces a fairly obvious objection, however, namely that there do seem to be circumstances that can obstruct one’s self-expression, just as

56   Thus Schleiermacher: “What I aspire to know and make my own is infinite, and only in an infinite series of attempts can I completely fashion my own being” (Monologen, 144 [96–7]). 57  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 110–11 (76). 58  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 104–5 (71–2). 59  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 19 (19).



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circumstances necessary to one’s full self-expression may not come to pass. To his credit, Schleiermacher addresses this objection directly, and does so by considering an example from his own life, namely, his desire to be married. This was not merely a hypothetical example, for at the time he wrote the Monologen, Schleiermacher was deeply in love with a woman, Eleonore Grünow, who was already married, but whom he hoped would leave her husband to marry him. Schleiermacher admits, accordingly, that I long for another world. I still have many new ties to form; my heart must beat to the law of new loves as yet unknown to me, so that the relation of these to the rest of my being may be revealed. I have experienced every kind of friendship . . . but the most sacred of all ties has yet to lift my life to a new level; some beloved soul and I must melt into one being, so that my humanity may touch another humanity in the finest of all relationships.60

He thus claims that marriage would bring his life to “a new level,” since it would bring him into a unity more intimate and complete than would otherwise be possible. It would appear, then, that apart from this union, Schleiermacher will not be able to achieve a sort of self-expression that he values deeply and, indeed, which he sees as its preeminent form. Yet he also realizes his powerlessness to bring this union about, not least because his beloved was already married to another. He concedes, then, that here I stand at the boundary where my will is limited by another freedom, and by the course of life, a mystery of nature. I have hope; man can do much; by strength of will and serious effort he surmounts many difficulties. But should hope and effort both prove vain, if all is denied me, am I then conquered at this point by my fate? Has it then really prevented my inner life from reaching a higher level, and succeeded by its caprice in limiting my development?61

Here, therefore, is a case where Schleiermacher’s earlier argument seems to crumble, for in this case (a) the full expression of his individuality depends upon certain circumstances coming to pass, yet (b) he is powerless to bring these about. Schleiermacher realizes that this is a problem, but tries to address it by claiming that one can bring these circumstances to pass—in one’s imagination; he thus notes that “the impossibility of outward accomplishment does not prevent an inner process,” and, therefore, that “as long as we belong to one another, she and I, imagination will transport us, though we have not actually met, into our lovely paradise.”62 Given that he is already united with her in his imagination, Schleiermacher argues that “even in my solitude, I have already tied the knot with my beloved; our union is a fact, and indeed is the better

 Schleiermacher, Monologen, 114–15 (78).  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 116 (79–80). 62  Schleiermacher, Monologen, 117 (80). 60 61

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part of my life”; this being the case, it hardly matters whether he is actually married to her:  if we should suddenly be brought together by a stroke of magic, nothing would be strange to us; we should walk easily and gracefully into our new life as if we had been engaged through fond acquaintance of long standing. And thus, even without that stroke of magic, we are not deprived inwardly of our higher life together. It is for this life and by it that we are fashioned, and only its external manifestation is lost to the world.63

Schleiermacher thus tries to salvage his earlier argument by claiming that one can achieve full self-expression even when outward circumstances do not allow it, for in that case “the higher life” can be reached through the power of one’s imagination. It is not clear whether Schleiermacher continued to find these claims persuasive after Eleonore Grünow had decided, once and for all, not to leave her husband; in subsequent correspondence, at least, he seems so thoroughly shattered by the decision that he could hardly have believed that nothing of consequence was missing from his life.64 Nor is it clear whether Schleiermacher should have found such claims persuasive, since, by his own lights, it would appear that a life in which one’s circumstances enable one to express oneself fully is fuller, and more recognizable as self-expressive, than one in which one can merely imagine such possibilities. Schleiermacher would, in any case, soon develop a model of the Infinite that would provide him with more adequate resources with which to address such issues.

3.5.  I N FI N ITU DE AS U N IT Y OF OPPOSITIONS Schleiermacher’s thought undergoes a decisive shift in the decade after he wrote the Monologen: whereas his earlier works tended to focus on the infinitude of humanity in its particular self-expressions and thus to deploy the unity-of-opposites model only insofar as it shed light on humanity, by 1811 there has been an unmistakable reversal in the direction of his thought, for he now takes the unity-of-opposites model as the key to understanding everything, including humanity. The reasons for this shift are not entirely clear:  it might have been prompted by Eleonore Grünow’s decision not to leave her husband, or by

 Schleiermacher, Monologen, 118, 122–3 (81, 83).  See especially his heartbreaking letter of June, 1803, to Henriette Herz (Aus Schleiermachers Leben: In Briefen [Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1860]); cf. his letter of October, 1805 to Ehrenfried and Henriette von Willich. 63

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Schleiermacher’s encounter with Schelling, or by his newfound commitment to thinking systematically, or by the need to lecture on various subjects once he became a professor, or by a combination of these and other factors.65 What is indisputably clear is that by 1811, the unity-of-opposites model has become basic to Schleiermacher’s thinking. We see this, first of all, in his lectures on the foundation of knowledge, which he entitled Dialektik. Here Schleiermacher argues, first, that knowledge depends upon the unity of thought and being; he writes, accordingly, that “knowing is the congruence of thinking with being as what is thought,” and that “knowing is the pure coinciding of reason with being.”66 Second, although knowledge depends upon a unity between thought and being, this unity can be found neither in the realm of thought nor in that of being; knowledge must therefore depend, Schleiermacher thinks, upon a ground that transcends both; he here terms this ground of unity “the Absolute.”67 (As we shall see, this exemplifies one of Schleiermacher’s favorite argumentative strategies, wherein he argues (a) that two sorts of phenomena must hang together, (b) that their hanging together cannot be explained in terms of either phenomenon, and, therefore, (c) that they hang together in virtue of that which transcends both.) Third, Schleiermacher asserts that the Absolute cannot itself be known, since it is rather the transcendent ground of all knowing.68 The Absolute is thus known only as the ground of knowledge, and, therefore, not as one might know a particular fact. However, Schleiermacher then argues, fourth, that we are not completely ignorant of the Absolute, for we do know that it is that in which thought and being (along with other apparent opposites) are united. This is one of Schleiermacher’s most fundamental points. He claims, accordingly,

  On these developments, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Ursprüngliches Gefühl unmittelbarer Koinzidenz des Differenten: Zur Modifikation des Religionsbegriffs in den vershiedenen Auflagen von Scheiermachers ‘Reden über die Religion’,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 75 (1978); Herman Süskind, Der Einfluß Schellings auf die Entwicklung von Schleiermachers System (Tübingen:  J.C.B. Mohr, 1909); Eilert Herms, Herkunft, Entfaltung und erste Gestalt des Systems der Wissenschaften bei Schleiermacher (Gütersloh:  Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1974). 66  Schleiermacher, Dialektik (1811), in Ludwig Jonas (ed.), Sämmtliche Werke (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1839) Lectures 8 and 10 (ET: Dialectic, trans. Terrence Tice [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996]). On the Dialektik, including a discussion of later editions, see especially Falk Wagner, Schleiermachers Dialektik: Eine Kritische Interpretation (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1974). 67   Schleiermacher claims, accordingly, that “we derive the correspondence between thinking and being in real knowing only from the original identity of the two in the absolute” (Dialektik, Lecture 24; cf. Lecture 26). As evidence that this unity cannot be grounded either in thought or in being alone, Schleiermacher points to the failures of empiricism and idealism; cf. Dialektik, Lecture 13. 68   This explains Schleiermacher’s claim, for instance, that “we perceive the deity only in and with the collective system of perception. The deity is just as surely incomprehensible as the knowledge of it is the basis of all knowledge” (Lecture 17). 65

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that “the idea of the Absolute is the fullness of identity with the consciousness of the contrasts that are contained therein,” and that “what is absolute and the total being-in-common of individual things are one and the same.”69 That brings us to the final step of his argument, which is to use this understanding of the Absolute, as that in which finite oppositions are united, as the cornerstone of an entire metaphysics. Armed with this understanding of the Absolute, that is, Schleiermacher now understands the finite world precisely in terms of such oppositions, and sees these oppositions as becoming either one-sided or dualistically at odds with one another just insofar as they are not set in relation to their transcendent ground. Schleiermacher thus explains the process by which the finite world is related to the Absolute:  The idea of the Absolute is the first member of this process: in it we find the basis of division: being and doing, ideal and real. The relative union of these basic contrasts, or the world, is the second member. The idea of the Absolute is unity, what is necessary, what is not directly given, whereas the world is plurality, what is conditioned, what is to be given directly.70

Schleiermacher concludes, therefore, that the oppositions characteristic of finitude should not be taken to be ultimate, and that they are so taken just insofar as one does not relate them to the Absolute; he thus claims that “no contrast is absolute; rather all contrasts are only relative. An instance of thinking that isolates a supposedly absolute contrast represents nothing actual.”71 By 1811, then, Schleiermacher has provided himself with the foundation for a consistent metaphysics, and has done so by taking his earlier claims about the Infinite as a unity-of-opposites as fundamental to understanding all that is. Commitment to such a metaphysics obviously entails that Schleiermacher’s earlier claims about humanity’s infinitude should be understood in its terms, too. We find clear evidence of this in his lectures on ethics, beginning in 1812, for here his views on humanity are consistently situated within, and framed in terms of, his unity-of-opposites metaphysics. He lays all of this out, plainly, in a series of theses:  [1]‌The totality of being as a finite entity must be expressed by means of a highest opposition, because otherwise it would not be a totality but an aggregate, and knowledge of it would have no unity, but would be chaotic. [2] All finite being in the narrowest sense, i.e. every finite life, is an image of the Absolute and thus an interaction of oppositions. [3] Real knowledge in its totality is therefore the development of this interrelatedness of all oppositions under the power of both terms of the highest opposition . . . [4] The sense of opposition is inborn in the form of soul and body, the ideal and the real, reason and nature. [5] Ethics is

 Schleiermacher, Dialektik, Lectures 20, 44; cf. Lecture 21.  Schleiermacher, Dialektik, Lecture 44; cf. Lecture 28. 71  Schleiermacher, Dialektik, Lecture 28. 69 70



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thus the depiction of finite being under the power of reason, i.e. viewed from that aspect where, in the interrelatedness of oppositions, reason is the active principle and reality that which is acted upon; physics is the depiction of finite being under the power of nature, i.e. where reality is the active principle and the ideal is what is acted upon. [6] In finite existence, just as in finite knowledge as a depiction of the Absolute, opposition is only relative. In their perfected state ethics is physics and physics ethics.72

Schleiermacher thus argues (a) that finitude is a realm of oppositions, (b) that the highest of these oppositions is that between reason and nature, and (c) that such oppositions are only relative—they are only relative, he contends, since they coincide in that which transcends finitude, namely, the Absolute. With respect to the latter contention, accordingly, Schleiermacher asserts that “absolute knowledge is the expression of no opposition whatsoever, but only of absolute being, which is identical with it.”73 As in the Dialektik, therefore, Schleiermacher here understands the Absolute as that in which finite oppositions coincide, and thus understands finite oppositions as ultimately reconcilable. These claims provide him, in turn, with a framework for understanding ethics: “The depiction of the ethical process,” he maintains, “in which it is posited that reason and nature are ultimately at one, thus posits the totality of everything which is in the process of an ethical becoming as ultimately at one, i.e., the various functions of nature and the various orientations of reason becoming one with those functions as an organic whole.”74 Hence if finite oppositions ultimately coincide in the Absolute, then ethics should try to explain how this could be the case. Schleiermacher sees two such oppositions as especially calling for explanation, namely, the opposition between freedom and physical necessity, on the one hand, and that between freedom and moral necessity, on the other.75 Thus far, then, Schleiermacher has argued that finitude is characterized by a fundamental opposition between reason and nature, that these apparent opposites coincide in the Absolute, and that ethics (and, by parity of reasoning, physics) should thus strive to see how they could (and must) be reconciled, not least because such reconciliation is for Schleiermacher a necessary condition of one’s life hanging together as a selfexpressive whole.

72  Schleiermacher, Ethik (1812), ed. Hans-Joachim Birkner (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1981), 6–8 (here cited by original pagination) (ET:  Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, trans. Louise Houish [Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002], 7–8); cf. parallel argument in 1816, 13–20. For an especially perceptive treatment of Schleiermacher’s ethics, see Brent Sockness, “The Forgotten Moralist:  Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Science of Spirit,” Harvard Theological Review 96:3 (2003). 73  Schleiermacher, Ethik (1812), 7 (7); cf. (1816), 13. 74 75  Schleiermacher, Ethik (1812), 17 (11).  Schleiermacher, Ethik (1812), 11 (7–8).

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These same oppositions—and this same strategy for dealing with them—will frame the argument of Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre, to which we shall turn in a moment. Before doing so, it will be helpful to consider an example of how Schleiermacher approaches such oppositions in his Ethik, not least because this will shed light on what he is trying to do in the Glaubenslehre. Consider, then, the apparent opposition between individual freedom and the objective norms imposed upon one by one’s community; moral action depends upon both, Schleiermacher argues, for if one were constrained by objective norms that left no room for one’s individual freedom, one would merely be a “channel” for those norms, yet if one were to express one’s individual freedom without such constraint, one’s acts would be mere self-expression, since one would in that case be responding to whim or instinct rather than to moral norms.76 Imposed norms and individual freedom can nevertheless appear to contradict one another, since being constrained by norms can seem to suffocate one’s individuality and freedom, just as the expression of individual freedom can seem to undermine such norms. From this, Schleiermacher concludes that moral action depends upon establishing a harmonious relationship between communal norms and individual freedom, such that “internal stimulus” would coincide with “external demand.” 77 Schleiermacher thus tries to identify the conditions under which such coincidence would be possible, which leads him to elaborate and defend a model according to which objective norms stand in reciprocal relation with individual freedom. On this model, individual expressions are constrained by norms which facilitate such expression and to which one’s expressions in turn contribute; this is possible, Schleiermacher argues, precisely because communal norms precipitate out of, and are continually being shaped by, individual expressions. Schleiermacher claims, accordingly, that the apparent contradiction between individual self-expression and communal norms is superseded (gehoben) only to the extent that the particular formative activity of each person, together with its results, is seen not as existing in its own right but as an integrating part of the whole formative activity of reason, mediated through the diversity of each person’s nature  .  .  . All particular formative activity, then, must include the endeavor to have it acknowledged (Anerkenntniß) as such by others, and to acknowledge their formative sphere

76   Schleiermacher thus argues that “the will to appropriation would be without value if what has been appropriated were to pass into community without the community becoming a source of new appropriation. Then the subject would be merely a channel without any part of the purpose being posited within him. There can only be a coincidence of the two if the general will proceeds from the individual, and the individual will from the general” ([1814/1817], 19 [233]). 77  Schleiermacher, Ethik (1814/1817), 22 (236).



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oneself; and in its unity this perfects the essence of sociability, which consists in the acknowledgement of alien property, in order to allow it to be opened up by oneself, and the opening up of one’s own, in order to have it acknowledged.78

On Schleiermacher’s account, therefore, moral action must harmonize communal norms and individual self-expression, and this sort of harmonization is made possible when expressions are constrained by norms which are themselves ongoingly constituted, and so expanded, by such expressions. There is an obvious connection here with the issue of “mineness,” as Schleiermacher himself makes plain. Schleiermacher here uses a technical term, “appropriation” (Aneignung), for making a community’s norm one’s own, and writes that “the will to appropriation would be without value if what has been appropriated were to pass into community without the community becoming a source of new appropriation . . . There can be a coincidence of the two only if the general will proceeds from the individual, and the individual will from the general.”79 As he sees it, then, a community’s norms should be such that one can make them one’s own (and so express oneself precisely through being constrained by them), and they can be such only if they are continually enriched by individual expressions; constraint by norms would then enable one to express oneself (and thus see oneself in one’s actions), one’s expressions would contribute to norms by which others’ self-expressions are enabled, and so on. (Think here of a jazz trio in which each “does his or her thing” with a common melody: each contributes to the melody by which they are constrained, but in such a way that this melody is continually opened up by the novel riffs and improvisations contributed by each, which begets opportunities for further improvisation, and so on. In such a case, one’s being constrained by a common norm is not antithetical to, but is rather a condition of, individual self-expression.) In broad outline, this is one of the positions to which Schleiermacher will remain committed until the end of his career, which raises a significant question:  from Schleiermacher’s perspective, at least, it would appear that the Ethik has already largely solved the problem of “mineness,” and done so quite apart from any appeal to faith; if so, one might reasonably wonder what role, if any, is left for faith to play once Schleiermacher returns to these issues in his Glaubenslehre. Schleiermacher’s response to this question makes sense only if one appreciates why it is so difficult, indeed all but impossible, to achieve such harmonization. To understand this, we must turn, finally, to the Glaubenslehre itself.

 Schleiermacher, Ethik (1816/1817), 41 (195–6). This is a crucial, recurrent theme in Schleiermacher’s ethics; cf. similar claims on (1812/1813), 58, 74–5, 80, 34; (1816/1817), 20; and (1814/1817), 9–10. 79  Schleiermacher, Ethik (1814/1817), 19 (233). 78

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3.6.  GOD-CONSCIOUSN E SS A N D GOD-FORGETFU LNESS In the Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher defends each of the following claims: (a) that creaturely life is characterized by relative freedom and relative dependence; (b)  that relative freedom and dependence hang together only insofar as both are absolutely dependent upon a transcendent Whence; (c) that freedom and dependence are at odds with one another, for humans, insofar as we do not integrate them into our consciousness of absolute dependence, since we then treat relative freedom and dependence as if they were absolute; and (d) that if a person were wholly to integrate freedom and dependence into his or her consciousness of absolute dependence, then he or she would no longer experience freedom and dependence as if they were at odds. Taken together, these points have an important bearing on Schleiermacher’s approach to “mineness,” but in order to see what this is, we need first to get a better grip on each of them. In light of the developments traced above, it is hardly surprising that Schleiermacher frames his argument in terms of a finite opposition that is overcome only in relation to an absolute in which opposites coincide. Here, the fundamental opposition is that between freedom and dependence; Schleiermacher builds up to this opposition by claiming, first, that “in every moment of self-consciousness there are two elements, which we might call respectively a self-posited element (ein Sichselbstsetzen) and a non-self-posited element (ein Sichselbstnichtsogesetzthaben),” and that “the latter presupposes for every moment of self-consciousness another factor besides the I, a factor which is the source of the particular determination, and without which the self-consciousness would not be precisely what it is.”80 The idea is straightforward enough: every moment of one’s life, Schleiermacher argues, is determined partly by oneself and partly by that which is other than one; hence my perception of a tree, for instance, depends upon that which I bring to the perception (concepts, reliably formed dispositions, etc.) and upon that which

 Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der Evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt, 2nd ed. (1830/1831), ed. Martin Redeker (Berlin:  Walter de Gruyter, 1960), §4.1, 24 (hereafter CG; ET: The Christian Faith, trans. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1928]). I am here focusing on the second edition of the Glaubenslehre, but the trains of thought I am following are equally characteristic of the first edition. On the Glaubenslehre’s opening arguments, see Hans-Joachim Birkner, “Natürliche Theologie und Offenbarungstheologie,” in Schleiermacher-Studien (Berlin:  Walter de Gruyter,1996); Theodore Jørgensen, Das religionsphilosophie Offenbarungsverständnis des späteren Schleiermacher (Tübingen:  Mohr Siebeck, 1977); and my “Attunement and Explicitation:  A  Pragmatist Reading of Schleiermacher’s ‘Theology of Feeling’,” in Brent Sockness and Wilhelm Gräb (ed.), Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010). 80



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is given to me (the tree itself, the light in which to see it, etc.). Schleiermacher terms these, respectively, the spontaneous (selbsttätig) and receptive (empfänglich) elements of one’s experience, which correspond, in self-consciousness, with a feeling of freedom and a feeling of dependence.81 Schleiermacher then argues that receptivity and spontaneity characterize not only one’s own experience of the world, but the world itself. To substantiate this point, he begins by considering an idealized example in which one’s spontaneity and receptivity are related to a single object; in such a case, he claims, one’s spontaneity would correspond precisely with the object’s receptivity, and one’s receptivity would correspond with its spontaneity. If I  am pruning a tree, for instance, then each of my acts of cutting corresponds to a being-cut on the tree’s side, while the tree’s spontaneous acts of existing, being green, growing, and so on correspond to certain effects on my side, not least my perceiving these acts. Schleiermacher characterizes such relationships as “reciprocal,” and claims that all worldly relationships exemplify such reciprocity, since every spontaneous action affects something else, and every being-affected is due to some spontaneous act, in an organic network of mutual interrelationship. The entire realm of such reciprocity just is the “world,” which Schleiermacher thus understands as a sort of organism or as a hanging together of all finite entities, in which each is receptive to the spontaneity of all, and all receptive to the spontaneity of each.82 From these claims about the world and one’s place in it, Schleiermacher draws two decisive conclusions. The first, more obvious conclusion is that nothing in the world is absolutely free. Schleiermacher offers two reasons for this conclusion. The first is that an action is free, on Schleiermacher’s account, only if something is affected by it, yet the very presence of such a thing implies receptivity on the side of the actor, not least inasmuch as the thing’s existence is not itself due to one’s freedom.83 The second reason is that one’s own existence, including one’s freedom, is not itself due to one’s freedom—even if I could presently act altogether freely, my very being could not itself be a product of that freedom, because my birth, for instance, was not something I  brought about freely, nor was my being supplied with the

 Schleiermacher, CG, §4.1, 24; cf. §4.2, 25.   With respect to the former characterization, Schleiermacher writes that “this is true not only when we particularize this Other and ascribe to each of its elements a different degree of relation to the twofold consciousness within us, but also when we think of the total ‘outside’ as one, and moreover (since it contains other receptivities and activities to which we have a relation) as one together with ourselves, that is, as a World” (CG, §4.2, 26). With respect to the latter, he claims that “being conscious of oneself as part of the world is one and the same as finding oneself posited in a universal hanging-together of nature (Das Sich-seiner-als-eines-Teils-derWelt-bewußt-Sein und Sich-in-einen-allgemeinen-Naturzusammenhang-gestellt-Finden, ist eines und dasselbe)” (CG, §34.1, 180–1). 83   On this point, cf. Schleiermacher CG, §4.3, 27–8. 81

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physical and educational resources necessary to my eventual “coming of age” as a free person. Schleiermacher argues, therefore, that not only is every distinct movement bound up with the state of our stimulated receptivity at the moment, but, further, the totality of our free inward movements, considered as a unity, cannot be represented as a feeling of absolute freedom, because our whole existence does not present itself to our consciousness as having proceeded from our own spontaneous activity.84

On the strength of these arguments, Schleiermacher concludes that “in any temporal existence, a feeling of absolute freedom can have no place.”85 This brings us to Schleiermacher’s second conclusion, namely, that we, along with everything else in the world, are absolutely dependent, and that our relative freedom makes us immediately conscious of this fact. Schleiermacher argues, toward this end, that the self-consciousness which accompanies all our activity  .  .  . and negatives absolute freedom, is itself precisely a consciousness of absolute dependence, for it is the consciousness that the whole of our spontaneous activity comes from a source outside of us in just the same sense in which anything towards which we should have a feeling of absolute freedom must have proceeded entirely from ourselves.86

On its face, this argument might seem to entail that one is “absolutely dependent” upon the world, since one’s birth, sustenance, etc. are apparently due to worldly factors, just as the objects to which one’s freedom is directed are altogether worldly. Schleiermacher counters, however, that one’s consciousness of absolute dependence finds its terminus neither in any worldly entity nor in the world itself, since (a) everything in the world is likewise caught up in a reciprocal relationship of spontaneity and reciprocity, and so is not the spontaneous source of its own spontaneity, and (b) the world itself is constituted by the entire network of such reciprocal relationships, and is therefore partly dependent upon one’s freedom; as such, it cannot be the terminus of one’s absolute dependence. Schleiermacher thus argues that we recognize in our self-consciousness a co-positedness with (Mitgesetztsein) the world, but it is different from the co-positedness of God in the same self-consciousness. For the world, if we assume it to be a unity, is nevertheless in itself a divided and disjointed unity which is at the same time the totality of all antitheses and differences and of all the resulting manifold determinations, of which every man is one, partaking in all the antitheses. To be one with the world in self-consciousness is nothing else than being conscious that we are a living part of this whole; and this cannot possibly be a consciousness of absolute

 Schleiermacher, CG, §4.3, 28.     Schleiermacher, CG, §4.3, 28.

84 86

 Schleiermacher, CG, §4.3, 28.

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dependence; the more so that all living parts stand in reciprocal interaction with each other.87

Schleiermacher argues, therefore, that everything in the world is absolutely dependent, and that humans are immediately conscious of this fact. By “immediate consciousness,” Schleiermacher means that one is tacitly aware of one’s absolute dependence—that this is the condition in which one always finds oneself—precisely inasmuch as one’s freedom always depends upon factors that are not themselves due to one. This consciousness must be immediate, Schleiermacher thinks, for otherwise, if one became aware of one’s absolute dependence only by dint of one’s representational capacities, then that upon which one is absolutely dependent would be treated as if it were something with respect to which one could be spontaneous. That is not to suggest, however, that one cannot become conscious of this consciousness; on the contrary, the concept “God” exists, for Schleiermacher, precisely so as to name the Whence of this consciousness. The point, rather, is that one is absolutely dependent prior to one’s becoming explicitly conscious of this fact, and that one’s pre-reflective attunement to the world and oneself already reflects this fact, since one only ever acts freely amid other entities upon which one depends to some degree. The claim, then, is that we necessarily stand in reciprocal relationships with our surroundings, and that our so standing involves an implicit acknowledgment that we ourselves, along with our freedom, are utterly dependent upon that which necessarily transcends our freedom. These concepts should become clearer as we proceed; for now, the crucial point is that Schleiermacher understands the world, and our place in it, in terms of the relative opposition between freedom and dependence, and claims that this opposition is transcended, and so recognizable as relative, in light of that which absolutely transcends both. In order to elaborate this point, we must first register a terminological shift:  given his view of the world and one’s place in it, Schleiermacher gathers the entire realm of relative freedom and dependence into the category of “sensible life,” and terms one’s awareness of this realm “sensible self-consciousness.”88 Likewise, given his claims about the entire world’s absolute dependence on that which transcends it, Schleiermacher contends that one’s awareness of such dependence lies at the root of the concept “God,” such that one’s consciousness of absolute dependence can equally be termed one’s “God-consciousness.”89 Hence, when Schleiermacher hereafter discusses “God-consciousness,” he is referring to one’s consciousness of absolute dependence, and when he discusses “sensible

 Schleiermacher, CG, §32.2, 172–3.   On “sensible life,” cf. Schleiermacher, CG, §§4.2, 5.1. 89   Cf. Schleiermacher, CG, §4.4, 28–9. 87

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self-consciousness,” he is referring to one’s consciousness of relative freedom and dependence—that is, one’s consciousness of the reciprocal relationships by which the world, and one’s place in it, is constituted. With that terminology on board, we can now say more about how Schleiermacher understands their relationship. There are in fact two ways in which the God-consciousness and the sensible-consciousness can relate, depending upon the extent to which the latter is integrated into the former: if the sensible-consciousness is integrated into the God-consciousness, then one will experience one’s life as a unified whole; if not, then one will experience freedom and dependence as at odds with one another, and one’s life, therefore, as pervaded with oppositions. Schleiermacher argues, accordingly, that the freedom and dependence characteristic of sensible life need not stand in opposition to one another, and that they will not so stand insofar as one unites each in one’s consciousness of absolute dependence. Schleiermacher thus contrasts “the sensible self-consciousness, which rests entirely upon the antithesis [between freedom and dependence],” with “the feeling of absolute dependence, in which the antithesis again disappears and the subject unites and identifies itself with everything which was set over against it.”90 The more one is conscious of one’s absolute dependence, therefore, the less one’s freedom will seem to be at odds with one’s dependence—or so Schleiermacher claims. As he sees it, then, once the higher grade of feeling [i.e. the feeling of absolute dependence] comes to preponderate over the lower [the sensible], so that in the immediate self-consciousness the sensible determination asserts itself rather as an opportunity for the appearance of absolute dependence than as containing the antithesis, which is therefore transferred to the realm of mere perception, then this fact, that the antithesis has almost disappeared again from the higher grade of life, indisputably means that the latter has attained its richest content of feeling.91

Every moment of one’s sensible-consciousness can thereby be taken up into one’s God-consciousness, and can in this way be experienced as hanging together. We will say more about what such hanging together looks like in a moment; before doing so, we need to consider one of the conclusions Schleiermacher draws from these claims, namely, that everything in the world, without exception, can be included in one’s God-consciousness. This must be the case, he argues, for the demand that the God-consciousness should be able to unite itself with every sensuous determination of the self-consciousness would be in vain unless all the world-impressions (and this is only another way of saying the relation of all

90

 Schleiermacher, CG, §5.1, 31, 33.   

 Schleiermacher, CG, §5.4, 39; cf. §66.2.

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other finite being to the being of men) concurred in making the direction of the spirit to God-consciousness compossible with them.92

From this it follows that every moment in which we confront externally given existence involves the implication that the world offers to the human spirit an abundance of stimuli to develop those conditions in which the God-consciousness can realize itself, and at the same time that in manifold degrees the world lends itself to being used by the human spirit as an instrument and means of expression.

It follows, in other words, that one can be fully conscious of one’s absolute dependence in moments of receptivity and of spontaneity, and since the world is constituted by the interrelationship of such moments, this means that there is nothing in the world that cannot be taken up into one’s God-consciousness.93 This explains Schleiermacher’s well-known claim that “the religious self-consciousness, by means of which we place all that affects or influences us in absolute dependence on God, coincides entirely with the view that all things are conditioned and determined by the interdependence of nature.”94 Schleiermacher then argues that if everything in the realm of freedom and dependence can be taken up into the God-consciousness and so experienced as hanging together, then even that which seems to oppose one’s freedom can be so experienced. This brings us to Schleiermacher’s treatment of life’s obstacles and, at their extreme, of what are usually termed “evils.” Evils function as a sort of limit-case for his claims about the scope and integrative capacities of the God-consciousness, but Schleiermacher insists that evils, too, can be taken up into the God-consciousness, precisely insofar as one can perceive them, too, as part of the world’s interconnectedness, rather than as discrete moments. He thus argues that “we wrongly represent these influences which produce permanent life-repressions as if they were a separate self-contained province and thus could be isolated and eliminated—in short, that the world could exist apart from evil.”95 The argument here is that if everything in the world is mutually interrelated and absolutely dependent, as Schleiermacher has already maintained, then insofar as one understands evils as included in these interrelationships, one should see them, too, as absolutely dependent. This is not yet to suggest, of course, that a world in which such evils are included is a good world, much less that the Whence of absolute dependence

92  Schleiermacher, CG, §57.1, 307. Cf. here Brian A. Gerrish, “Nature and the Theater of Redemption: Schleiermacher on Christian Dogmatics and the Creation Story,” in Continuing the Reformation. 93  Schleiermacher, CG, §59 Thesis; cf. §57.1. 94  Schleiermacher, CG, §46 Thesis; cf. §§49.1, §51.1, and §53.1. 95  Schleiermacher, CG, §48.2, 246.

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is good; Schleiermacher will defend such claims only after he has discussed redemption. Here, the argument is simply that evils should not be understood in isolation from, but rather in connection with all other circumstances, and that they can therefore be perceived as absolutely dependent.96 Schleiermacher likewise argues that one’s dependence upon other persons can be taken up into one’s God-consciousness. In the background here is the idea that there are two realms in which one’s God-consciousness can be stimulated and expressed, the natural and the social or moral; Schleiermacher aims to show that there is nothing, in either realm, that cannot be integrated into the God-consciousness. With respect to the latter, accordingly, Schleiermacher claims that one’s social-consciousness—one’s consciousness of being included in a “we”—can be integrated into one’s God-consciousness, such that one can experience others’ influence upon one, as well as one’s influence upon them, as equally included in this consciousness. One’s ability to integrate one’s relationships with others into the God-consciousness differs in an important respect, however, from one’s ability to integrate one’s relationship to nature, since the former is something that one cannot do on one’s own; rather, these relationships can be so integrated, Schleiermacher claims, only insofar as members of one’s community likewise integrate them into their God-consciousness. Schleiermacher thus maintains that “the inclusion of the kind-consciousness in the personal self-consciousness, and the communicability of the ‘inner’ through the ‘outer’ which is connected with it, is the fundamental condition or basis of social life, for all human fellowship rests upon it”; this being the case, it follows that a person’s acts, because accompanied by a sensible excitation of self-consciousness, may contain at the same time a communication of his or her God-consciousness. Nay more, the free and mobile outward life of a person must be able in its whole range to serve the external expression and communication of the God-consciousness (though not in the case of each individual taken singly, but only in combination with others), for otherwise there would be a sensibly stimulated self-consciousness with which the God-consciousness could unite inwardly, but in conjunction with which it could not express itself outwardly.97

Schleiermacher claims, accordingly, that all of one’s interpersonal transactions can be taken up into the God-consciousness, especially if one is part of a community whose members assimilate individual expressions into their God-consciousness, and whose outward acts, gestures, words, and so forth are expressions of that God-consciousness. The integration of freedom and

  On this point, see CG, §48.2, 245–6.   

96

97

 Schleiermacher, CG, §60.2, 323–4.



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dependence within social life depends, therefore, upon the God-consciousness being “supreme in all.”98 Thus far, then, Schleiermacher has claimed that the entire realm of sensible life, including one’s relationship to nature and other persons, can be included in one’s God-consciousness, and that the God-consciousness can therefore integrate all of one’s freedom and dependence. Schleiermacher also thinks that God-consciousness is a necessary condition of such integration, which becomes clear when he considers what happens when persons become insufficiently attuned to the God-consciousness and, therefore, “lack the facility (Leichtigkeit) for introducing the God-consciousness into the course of our actual lives and retaining it there.”99 In that case, one experiences an obstruction or arrest of the vitality of the higher self-consciousness, so that there comes to be little or no union of it with the various determinations of the sensible self-consciousness, and thus little or no religious life. We may give to this condition, in its most extreme form, the name of Godlessness or, better, God-forgetfulness (Gottvergessenheit).100

As Schleiermacher sees it, then, persons may relate to the world as if it—including, but not limited to, their place in it—were absolute or ultimate, and thus forget that the world is absolutely dependent, whether they mean to or not; as a result, they invariably relate to finite oppositions as if they, too, were absolute. Schleiermacher then claims that persons not only may stifle their sense of absolute dependence, but that all persons in fact do stifle that sense. This is the case, he argues, for two reasons. First, because humans develop as they do, the sensible-consciousness emerges before the God-consciousness; when the latter finally materializes, therefore, it is no match for the sensible-consciousness, which persons have already become accustomed to treating as if it were absolute.101 The idea here is that persons become aware of their own and the entire world’s finitude only after they have grown up a bit, since one’s becoming so aware presupposes some capacity for thematizing one’s experiences; prior to developing such capacities, however, the person took the world itself, along with his or her place in it, as the ultimate horizon within which to act, make meaning, and so on. By the time the God-consciousness could so much as appear, therefore, persons’ dispositions have already been thoroughly formed by their sensible-consciousness, and so they perceive and  Schleiermacher, CG, §75.1, 413 (my italics).    99 Schleiermacher, CG, §11.2, 77.  Schleiermacher, CG, §11.2, 77. For further treatment of Schleiermacher’s understanding of sin, see Günter Bader, “Sünde und Bewußtsein der Sünde: Zu Schleiermachers Lehre von der Sünde,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 79 (1982); and Walter Wyman, “Rethinking the Christian Doctrine of Sin: Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hick’s ‘Irenaean Type’,” in Journal of Religion 74 (1994). 101   Cf. Schleiermacher, CG, §67.2. 98

100

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act upon their surroundings as if they were absolute. In such a situation, the emerging God-consciousness, too, will be perceived and acted upon as if it were yet another item in one’s surroundings, rather than as integrating those surroundings—and oneself—into it. By itself, this would already be sufficient to ensure the God-forgetfulness of all humans. Matters are worsened, however, by the fact that we are social animals, since the forgetfulness of each exacerbates the forgetfulness of all. Recall Schleiermacher’s earlier claim about the relationship between the God-consciousness and the “we”-consciousness: the latter can be included in the former, he claimed, since the God-consciousness can circulate through a community’s expressions and thus be perceived as “our” consciousness. God-forgetfulness circulates through this same mechanism, which means that those who perceive and act upon the world as if it were ultimate communicate their consciousness to others in their community, and these others will be formed by that consciousness and communicate it to still others. Schleiermacher thus argues that, “in virtue of this dependence of the specific constitution of the individual life upon a larger common life, as also of the later generations upon the earlier, the sin of the individual has its source in something beyond and prior to his own existence.”102 Schleiermacher thus claims that God-forgetfulness is a universal human condition, since (a) the later emergence of the God-consciousness ensures its subordination to the sensible-consciousness, and (b)  one is socialized into a community of the forgetful, such that one’s self-consciousness is inescapably infused with a God-forgetting “we”-consciousness. Schleiermacher thus argues that we are universally God-forgetful, and that this has exactly the consequence we have been led to expect: because we fail to integrate freedom and dependence into our God-consciousness, we experience them as contradicting one another, and our lives as marked by dissonance. We thereby reap what we have sown, for if the finite world is treated as if it were absolute, then the oppositions by which that world is constituted will likewise be treated as absolute, and we will experience the world as frozen into intractable contradictions. As a result, our freedom and our dependence will seem to be at odds with one another, both in our relationship to nature and our relationship to other persons. With respect to the former, Schleiermacher argues that “if the predominant factor is not the God-consciousness but the flesh, then every impression made by the world upon us and involving an obstruction of our bodily and temporal life must be reckoned as an evil, and the more so, the more definitely the moment of experience terminates solely in the flesh apart from the higher consciousness; the reason being that there is then a repression of the only principle which could in such a case restore  Schleiermacher, CG, §69.1, 366.

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the harmony.”103 As Schleiermacher sees it, then, once a person has become God-forgetful, he or she will experience the world’s relative oppositions as if they were ultimate, for the simple reason that they can be regarded as relative only insofar as one acknowledges their absolute dependence; apart from such acknowledgment, these oppositions will appear to one as finally opposing or at odds with one, and so as what Schleiermacher terms “natural evils.”104 Schleiermacher offers a parallel account of “social evils,” arguing, first, that freedom and dependence within human community need not be at odds with one another, and indeed would not be so if all persons were directed by their God-consciousness. He claims, accordingly, that it is obvious that an activity that was purely and simply an expression of humanity’s original perfection could never turn out to be a hindrance to the spiritual life. For, even if such activity, through the error and against the intention of the agent, were to turn out a hindrance, though only to the life of sense, then, since along with this would necessarily go an incentive to correct the error, it would not be regarded as an evil. Just as little again could the action of one person prove a hindrance to another’s life, since, in virtue of the God-consciousness that was supreme in all, each could not but acquiesce in the other’s every action.105

Given the universality of God-forgetfulness, however, communal life takes on a very different character, and is now typified by antagonism, competitiveness, and opposition; Schleiermacher thus argues that “if that supremacy is done away with, there emerges opposition between the individual beings, and what is a furtherance to one will often for that very reason become a hindrance to another.”106 In the social world as well as the natural, then, God-forgetfulness has the consequence of turning relative oppositions into absolute ones, since these oppositions can be harmonized only by being integrated into that which transcends them, namely the God-consciousness. The world, and one’s dependence on it, may thus seem to oppose one, even when one can bend it to one’s will. On Schleiermacher’s account, therefore, God-consciousness is a necessary as well as a sufficient condition of integrating freedom and dependence, for without it one cannot integrate them. Unfortunately, once the God-consciousness has been subordinated to the sensible-consciousness, one can do nothing to reorient oneself, for the apparent reason that any such

 Schleiermacher, CG, §75.1, 412 (my italics).   So Schleiermacher: “Once sin is present in man, he finds also in the world, as his sphere, persistent causes of hindrance to his life, i.e., evils” (CG, §75 Thesis). 105  Schleiermacher, CG, §75.1, 413. 106  Schleiermacher, CG, §75.1, 413. Evil, in Schleiermacher’s sense, cannot precede sin, “for to see an obstruction of life in any moment of experience in which there was a disturbance merely of the sensuous consciousness would of itself argue an impotence in the Godconsciousness and therefore sin” (CG, §76.1, 415). 103

104

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reordering would itself necessarily be brought within one’s worldly horizon; Schleiermacher thus claims, in this connection, that if the disposition to the God-consciousness is obscured and vitiated, then humanity, just because our God-consciousness, though the best thing in us, is thus polluted and untrustworthy, must be wholly incapable not only of developing, but even of consciously aspiring to, such inner states as would harmonize with the proper aim and object of that disposition.107

One can reintegrate one’s freedom and dependence only if one’s God-consciousness and sensible-consciousness have been reordered, yet one cannot bring about this reordering for oneself:  “Under these conditions,” Schleiermacher writes, “no satisfaction (Befriedigung) of the impulse towards the God-consciousness will be possible; and so, if such a satisfaction is to be attained, a redemption is necessary, since this condition is nothing but a kind of imprisonment or constraint of the feeling of absolute dependence.”108 In this situation, one cannot achieve the sort of harmony that would enable one to identify with one’s life, and there is nothing one can do to change this situation.

3.7.  R EDEEMI NG GOD-CONSCIOUSN E SS This brings us to the heart of Schleiermacher’s theology, namely, humanity’s redemption in Christ. We should now be well positioned to understand the best-known feature of Schleiermacher’s Christology, viz. the centrality he accords to Jesus’s perfect God-consciousness, since this is precisely what must be restored in us if we are to be redeemed. Schleiermacher thus contends that “the capacity of the God-consciousness to give the impulse to all of life’s experiences and to determine them” is the ideal which humanity was meant to instantiate, and that this ideal was perfectly realized in Jesus, inasmuch as he himself “was the ideal (i.e. the ideal became completely historical in him), and each historical moment of his experience at the same time bore the ideal within it.”109 Schleiermacher’s fundamental Christological claim, then, is that

108  Schleiermacher, CG, §70.1, 370.  Schleiermacher, CG, §11.2, 78.  Schleiermacher, CG, §93 Thesis, and §93.2, 35; cf. §89.2. The literature on Schleiermacher’s Christology is vast; I  summarize some of it in my “Actualism and Incarnation:  The High Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8:3 (2006); see also Hayo Gerdes, “Anmerkungen zur Christologie der Glaubenslehre Schleiermachers,” in Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 25 (1983); Maureen Junker, Das Urbild des Gottesbewußtseins (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990); as well as the classic treatment of Horst Stephan, Die Lehre Schleiermachers von der Erlösung (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1901). 107

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Jesus, unlike all others, had a perfectly potent God-consciousness, and that every moment of his life was perfectly harmonized with this consciousness. We need to say more about what such harmonization actually looked like. First, though, an objection:  in light of Schleiermacher’s earlier claims, one might reasonably wonder how anyone’s God-consciousness, including Jesus’s, could harmonize each of their experiences, since we have already been told that normal human development, along with the God-forgetfulness of our communities, renders this impossible. Schleiermacher’s response to this objection is twofold. He argues, first, that the perfection of Jesus’s God-consciousness must have been due to a miraculous act of God, since he grants that such a consciousness could not possibly have arisen in the natural course of human history and development. Schleiermacher argues, accordingly, that Jesus’s God-consciousness “cannot be explained by the content of the human environment to which he belonged,” but must be “newly implanted” by God; he argues, that is, that “since the whole human race is included in this sinful corporate life, we must believe that this God-consciousness has a supernatural origin.”110 Schleiermacher hastens to add, however, that this supernatural act need not be thought to disrupt the hanging together of nature, and thus the consciousness of absolute dependence, since the act that produces this God-consciousness is one and the same as the act by which the world is created and preserved. The idea here, in rough outline, is (a) that the consciousness of absolute dependence implies that the Whence of this dependence is purely active vis-à-vis the world;111 (b)  that pure activity must be singular, for otherwise there would necessarily be passive elements mixed into it;112 (c) that the implanting in Jesus of a perfectly potent God-consciousness is a supernatural act of God, as just claimed; and, therefore, (d) that this implanting must be part of the same singular activity upon which the entire world absolutely depends. Schleiermacher concludes, accordingly, that “both events go back to one undivided eternal decree and form, in a higher sense, only one and the same natural system,” and, indeed, that “the first stage of creation,” namely the act to which creation owes its very existence, “is ordained by God only in view of the second,” namely the act of recreating humanity in Jesus.113 The importance of this point will become clearer in a moment. The first component of Schleiermacher’s response, then, is his claim that Jesus’s God-consciousness was due to a supernatural act of God, such that that God-consciousness was not subjected to the sinful forces of normal human history. A second component is his argument that, again unlike everyone else, Jesus’s development was such that his God-consciousness was at every moment

 Schleiermacher, CG, §93.3, 38, §88.4, 22; cf. §94.3.  Schleiermacher, CG, §94.2, 45; cf. §40.3.    112  Cf. Schleiermacher, CG, §40.3. 113  Schleiermacher, CG, §94.3, 48; §89.3, 26; cf. §89 Thesis. 110 111

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sufficiently powerful to determine his sensible-consciousness—though not, for that reason, all-powerful. He claims, accordingly, that Jesus developed in the same way as all the others, so that from birth on his powers gradually unfolded, and, from the zero point onward, were developed to completeness in the order natural to the human race. This applies also to his God-consciousness . . . which in him, too, had to develop gradually in human fashion into a really manifest consciousness, and antecedently was present only as a germ, although in a certain sense always present as an active power.114

Jesus was born not with an absolutely powerful God-consciousness, therefore, but with a sufficiently powerful one—sufficiently powerful, that is, to outpace the development of his sensible-consciousness. Schleiermacher thus claims that Jesus could have grown up more or less the way everyone else does, with the crucial exception that his God-consciousness was always stronger than his sensible-consciousness. With this argument on board, Schleiermacher concludes that two things are quite well possible together: first, that all powers, both the lower ones which were to be mastered and the controlling higher ones, emerged only in gradual development, so that the latter were able to dominate the former only in the measure of their development; and, secondly, that the domination itself was nevertheless at each moment complete in the sense that nothing was ever able to find a place in the sense-nature which did not instantly take its place as an instrument of the spirit, so that no impression was taken up merely sensuously into the innermost consciousness and elaborated apart from the God-consciousness into an element of life, nor did any action, that can really be regarded as such, and as a whole, ever proceed solely from the sense-nature and not from the God-consciousness.115

Hence, whereas human development and corporate sinfulness ensure that everyone else’s sensible-consciousness dominates their God-consciousness, Schleiermacher argues that Jesus’s God-consciousness was supernaturally implanted by God, in consequence of which his development and participation in society were unable to curb the power of that consciousness. Schleiermacher thus claims that Jesus’s God-consciousness was sufficiently powerful to determine every moment of sensible-consciousness; from this, he draws the striking conclusion that Jesus incarnates the pure activity in which God eternally subsists. The argument here is straightforward enough: if (a) the Whence of absolute dependence is pure activity; and (b)  Jesus’s perfect receptivity to this Whence governs his reception of and activity toward the world; then (c) the latter receptivity and activity are pure activity vis-à-vis the world, since they are determined not by the world but

 Schleiermacher, CG, §93.3, 38–9.   

114

 Schleiermacher, CG, §93.4, 40–1.

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only by an absolute receptivity toward God; from which it follows (d)  that Jesus’s receptivity and activity reproduce, within the world, God’s own activity. This explains Schleiermacher’s assertion that Jesus is the only creature “in which there is an existence of God in the proper sense, so far, that is, as we posit the God-consciousness in his self-consciousness as continually and exclusively determining every moment,” or again, that “every moment of his existence, so far as it can be isolated, presents just such a new incarnation and incarnatedness of God, because always and everywhere all that is human in him springs from the divine.”116 It likewise explains what Schleiermacher has in mind when he claims that “to ascribe to Christ an absolutely powerful God-consciousness, and to attribute to him an existence of God in him, are exactly the same thing,” since his perfectly receptive God-consciousness ensures that every moment of Jesus’s life reproduces, as his own, the pure activity in which God subsists. The fact that Jesus incarnates this activity demonstrates, moreover, that the one upon whom we depend absolutely is not just any pure activity, but the act of love; to be absolutely dependent, therefore, is to depend wholly upon God’s love, and to let that love govern one’s reception of and activity toward the world. That love is the pure activity to which Jesus is perfectly receptive, and which his life therefore reproduces as his own pure activity vis-à-vis the world, becomes clear in Jesus’s most apparently passive moments, most notably in his suffering. Schleiermacher remarks that we find one passive condition posited as necessary, almost as constant, in Christ, so that in a sense all his actions depend upon it—namely, sympathy with the condition of humanity; yet at the same time in everything which proceeded from this we shall most distinctly recognize the impulse of the reconciling being of God in Christ . . . Now this “divine” is the divine love in Christ which, once and for all or in every moment—whichever expression be chosen—gave direction to his feelings for the spiritual conditions of humanity.117

Here, then, Jesus’s passivity is precisely a reproduction of God’s activity, and thus shows us that that activity is reconciling love. Nowhere is this clearer than in Jesus’s crucifixion, for “in his suffering unto death, occasioned by his steadfastness, there is manifested to us an absolutely self-denying love; and in this there is represented to us with perfect vividness the way in which God was in him to reconcile the world to himself.”118 Hence, if Jesus perfectly reproduces the pure activity in which God subsists, then it turns out that God subsists in the singular activity of reconciling love. In light of Jesus, therefore, we can see why “love alone is made the equivalent of the being or essence of God.”119  Schleiermacher, CG, §94.2, 46; §96.3, 58.    117 Schleiermacher, CG, §97.3, 70.  Schleiermacher, CG, §104.4, 127–8.    119 Schleiermacher, CG, §167.1, 449.

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To be absolutely dependent, therefore, is to depend absolutely upon God’s reconciling love, which has decisive implications for one’s ability to harmonize freedom and dependence and, so, to identify with one’s life. To understand what these are, we have to consider, first, how Christ’s God-consciousness could be communicated to others in order thereby to become their own. Jesus accomplishes this, Schleiermacher argues, by drawing us into the activity of his life—he acts not only upon every circumstance of his own life, but he also acts upon other persons, in such a way that his activity becomes theirs. Schleiermacher thus asserts that “the activity by which he assumes us into fellowship with him is a creative production in us of the will to assume him into ourselves, or rather—since it is only receptiveness for his activity as involved in the impartation—only our assent to the influence of his activity.”120 More specifically, Schleiermacher argues that “whatever in human nature is assumed into vital fellowship with Christ is assumed into the fellowship of an activity solely determined by the power of the God-consciousness, which God-consciousness is adequate to every new experience and extracts from it all it has to yield,” and, therefore, “that each assumption of this sort is simply a continuation of the same creative act which first manifested itself in time by the formation of Christ’s person.”121 On this account, then, Jesus is perfectly receptive to God’s pure act and perfectly reproduces it as his own action; in redeeming us, Christ makes us receptive to his receptivity so that it becomes ours. Schleiermacher argues, accordingly, that in him the passivity of his human nature was nothing but a lively susceptibility to an absolutely powerful consciousness of God, accompanied by a desire to be thus seized and determined, which became changed through the creative act into a spontaneous activity constituting a personality. In the same way our desire is heightened in conversion by the self-communication of Christ till it becomes a spontaneous activity of the self that constitutes a coherent new life.122

For Schleiermacher, then, Jesus is perfectly receptive to God’s reconciling love and perfectly reproduces it as his own, and in redeeming us, Jesus makes us receptive to his receptivity so that we, too, can receive and reproduce God’s love. There is, then, a sort of transitive property at work here, which Schleiermacher understands as (and, in turn, uses to explain) the work of Christ’s Spirit. To explain how this works, Schleiermacher takes as his model Christ’s disciples, since he sees in them exactly the transformation he is trying to explain, namely one where they were initially merely receptive to Christ, but were eventually transformed so that Christ’s receptivity (and

 Schleiermacher, CG, §100.2, 91–2.     Schleiermacher, CG, §108.6, 171.

120 122

121

 Schleiermacher, CG, §101.4, 103.



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activity) became their own. Schleiermacher claims, accordingly, that the disciples first had to become susceptible to Christ’s activity: “in spending time together with Christ,” he writes, “the disciples’ receptivity developed, and by perceiving what he held before them, a foundation was laid for their future effectiveness for the kingdom of God.” During their time with Christ, then, the disciples watched what Jesus said and did, and from this they began to learn what it meant to follow him. Through such training, the disciples grew in their susceptibility to Christ’s influence, but his receptivity had not yet become their own, for they had not yet internalized this influence. A crucial step in their development occurred, therefore, when Jesus recognized them as competent to assess others’ receptivity, since, Schleiermacher notes, “the right binding and loosing of sin is essentially just an expression of a fully cultivated receptivity for what pertains to the kingdom of God.”123 Jesus’s recognition of the disciples’ authority to bind and loose thus meant that the disciples had learned what it meant to follow him, which meant, in turn, that Jesus’s influence on them was no longer merely external.124 This recognition also meant that the disciples were now in a position to confer this same recognition upon others, such that Jesus’s influence was now fully transitive: the disciples had internalized Jesus’s influence through becoming receptive to him, and once they had become sufficiently receptive, he recognized them as competent recognizers of such receptivity; once others had become sufficiently receptive, they too would be recognized as such, and so on. From this, Schleiermacher extrapolates a more general model according to which a “multifarious community of attunement” is carried on: first, those whose God-consciousness has been attuned to Christ express that consciousness through their gestures, words, actions, and recognition-laden responses to such expressions; if others recognize this person’s expressions as properly receptive of Christ’s influence, they may imitate them in similar circumstances until they have become reliably disposed to do so, at which point these expressions become part of their own God-consciousness; still others may then recognize the latter’s expressions as attuned to Christ, imitate those expressions, become reliably disposed to repeat them, and so on. In this way, the Spirit of Christ’s own receptivity can be carried forward through a chain

123  Schleiermacher, CG, §122.1, 255. Note well that Schleiermacher is here alluding to the socalled Johannine Pentecost (cf. John 20:22–3), especially the connection there made between the sending of the Spirit and the binding and loosing of sins, rather than to the bindingand-loosing passages in the Synoptic Gospels; cf. §122.1, 254n2. On Schleiermacher’s pneumatology, see my “The Mediation of Christ’s Normative Spirit: A Constructive Reading of Schleiermacher’s Pneumatology,” in Modern Theology 24:1 (2008); cf. the treatment in Wilfried Brandt, Der Heilige Geist und die Kirche bei Schleiermacher (Zürich: Zwingli Verlag, 1968). 124   So Schleiermacher: at this point, “there is more in the individual than [mere] receptivity, and his or her own activity is not only the activity of Christ simply passing through him or her” (CG, §122.3, 257).

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of intersubjective recognition, and persons’ lives can thereby be reordered to God.125 Those who have been sufficiently formed by, and who thus contribute to, the community founded by Jesus, are therefore new persons, for, as Schleiermacher writes, the pervasive activity of Christ cannot establish itself in an individual without becoming person-forming in him or her, too, for now all his or her activities are differently determined through the working of Christ in him or her, and even all impressions are differently received—which means that the personal self-consciousness too becomes altogether different.126

The community founded by Jesus is the means, therefore, by which his God-consciousness is communicated to others; their reception of his God-consciousness would obviously liberate them from their God-forgetfulness, which is why Schleiermacher terms this the redemptive activity of Jesus.127 This is the basis, in turn, of Jesus’s reconciliatory activity, since having a renewed God-consciousness enables one to reintegrate relative freedom and dependence, and so restores one to harmony with the world. That is to say, one is redeemed when Jesus’s God-consciousness becomes one’s own, just as one is reconciled when his “unclouded blessedness” becomes so.128 Such reconciliation is brought about, as Schleiermacher has led us to expect, in our relationship to nature as well as in our community with others. With respect to the former, Schleiermacher argues that, for Jesus, the hindrances to his activity never determined any moment of his life until the perception of them had been taken up into his inmost self-consciousness, which was so completely one with his powerful God-consciousness that they could appear in it only as belonging to the temporal form of the perfect effectiveness of his being . . . It was still less possible that hindrances arising out of his own natural or social life could be taken up in this innermost consciousness as hindrances; they could be no more than indications of the direction set for his activity.129

Because every moment of his life was determined by a perfect receptivity toward God’s reconciling love, Jesus could be reconciled even to circumstances that seem opposed to this love, for reconciling love is precisely that which relativizes and overcomes such opposition. God-forgetfulness treats worldly oppositions as absolute and so experiences them as contradictions; God-consciousness, by contrast, is conscious of the ultimacy of reconciling

125  So Schleiermacher: “Thus our proposition depends upon the assumption that in the Christian fellowship, outwardly so constituted, there is still that communication of the absolutely potent God-consciousness in Christ as a thing which is inward, and yet, since faith can rest upon nothing except an impression received, capable of being experienced” (CG, §88.3, 21). 126  Schleiermacher, CG, §100.2, 92.    127  Cf. Schleiermacher, CG, §100 Thesis. 128   Cf. Schleiermacher, CG, §101 Thesis.    129 Schleiermacher, CG, §101.2, 98.



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love, and so treats these same oppositions as that which is to be united with that which is truly absolute. Once one’s God-consciousness has been restored, accordingly, one likewise participates in Jesus’s reconciliation to his circumstances: Schleiermacher thus claims that the redeemed person, too, since he or she has been assumed into the vital fellowship of Christ, is never filled with the consciousness of any evil, for it cannot touch or hinder the life which he or she shares with Christ. All hindrances to life, natural and social, come to him or her even in this region only as indications. They are not taken away, as if he or she were to be, or could be, without pain and free from suffering, for Christ also knew pain and suffered in the same way. Only the pains and sufferings do not mean simple misery, for they do not as such penetrate into the inmost life . . . The assumption into vital fellowship with Christ, therefore, dissolves the connection between sin and evil.130

Jesus’s redemptive work thus plays a key role in his reconciling work, since, by restoring persons’ God-consciousness and, so, their receptivity to God’s reconciling love, he enables them to experience worldly oppositions as overcome—or to-be-overcome—by that love. Those who are redeemed can therefore integrate all of their circumstances, and they themselves, into their God-consciousness, because they trust that these circumstances are one and all absolutely dependent upon a wise, loving God. Jesus’s redemptive work also plays a key role in reconciling oppositions in relation to other persons, not just by enabling one to see others’ opposition as to-be-overcome and, so, forgiven, but by establishing a new community in which one’s freedom and individuality are reconciled with that of others. We have already seen glimpses of this in Schleiermacher’s earlier claims about the intersubjective mediation of Jesus’s Spirit, but he elaborates this theme most clearly in his Christliche Sitte (the companion volume, as it were, to his Christliche Glaube). There Schleiermacher aims simply to “describe those ways of acting that arise from the dominion of Christianly determined religious self-consciousness”—to describe, that is, the way of life shared by those whose God-consciousness has been redeemed.131 Here, too, a new state of reconciliation is achieved, since those who are receptive to God’s reconciling love can be fully reconciled to one another and thereby overcome the antagonism and opposition characteristic of relationships among the

 Schleiermacher, CG, §101.2, 98; cf. §101.4, 103.  Schleiermacher, Die christliche Sitte nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im zusammenhänge dargestellt, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Ludwig Jonas (Berlin:  Georg Reimer, 1843), 32–3 (hereafter CS; ET:  Christian Ethics, trans. James Brandt [Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 2011], 36). On the Sittenlehre, see Hans-Joachim Birkner, Schleiermachers christliche Sittenlehre im Zusammenhang seiner Philosophisch-Theologischen Systems (Berlin: Töpelmann Verlag, 1964). 130 131

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God-forgetful. The community founded by Jesus is thus supposed to instantiate, and be included in, the reconciliation he accomplished. Schleiermacher claims, accordingly, that in the Christian realm, community rests purely on the fact that the divine Spirit is one and the same in all and for all and on the fact that all individuals are only its instruments, and therefore that each individual would also bear the divine Spirit completely in him or herself only insofar as the consciousness that all others are likewise instruments of the divine Spirit has come into self-consciousness in him or her. This happens, however, only insofar as a person takes the self-consciousness of others into his or her own, which in turn can happen only insofar as the self-consciousness of each one passes over into appearance. And this inner necessity for the continual joining of self-consciousnesses separated by personal existence is the essence of brotherly love and conditions both presentational activity and the continuity of community.132

In the redeemed community, therefore, persons’ receptivity and spontaneity are equally determined by a more basic receptivity toward God’s love, from which it follows that they can receive one another, and act toward one another, with brotherly and sisterly love. They form a community, then, characterized by reciprocity and mutual regard, and in which the spontaneity and receptivity of each can therefore be integrated; hence, “a twofoldness is established—a communication of oneself to others, and a taking up for oneself of the Christian life and existence of others, in their relationship to the divine Spirit—a twofoldness, accordingly, between spontaneity and receptivity.”133 To understand these claims, it is important to recall Schleiermacher’s account of the Spirit, according to which Jesus taught his would-be followers what it meant to follow him by showing them how to do so, correcting their mistakes, and so on, until they became competent judges of what counted as doing so; at that point, Jesus recognized them as such, thereby conferring normative authority upon their judgments; other would-be followers could then learn from them how to follow Jesus, and once these followers had become competent judges of what counted as doing so, still others could learn how to do so. On this account, then, the normative Spirit of Jesus’s own assessments is carried on by a chain of mutual recognition. Jesus’s Spirit is carried on not only by assessments, however, but also by that which is to be assessed, including words, actions, gestures, and other would-be Jesus-following behaviors. These behaviors likewise teach one what it means to follow Jesus, 132  Schleiermacher, CS, 517–18 (148); “ . . . the Spirit wants the consciousness of the Spirit’s being the possession of all others to be in every other individual at the same time, and the Spirit wants consciousness that each individual is an organ of the Spirit to be passed on from each individual to all others. This is so, for the entire task of presentational action rests upon this mutual ‘taking up of this consciousness into oneself’ . . .” (CS, 519 [149]). 133  Schleiermacher, CS, 521 (150).



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yet they usually do so apart from conscious assessment: insofar as a person who intends to follow Jesus perceives certain behaviors as “Jesus-following,” he or she may repeat these behaviors; others may then perceive such behavior as “Jesus-following,” reproduce that behavior, and so on. Schleiermacher emphasizes, though, that such reproduction need not, and indeed must not, be mere reproduction, since the chain by which the Spirit is carried on is to be characterized not only by mutuality, but by individuality: the chain of recognizers and recognized behaviors should be richly textured enough that one can express oneself in it as oneself, and it comes to have such a texture precisely through recognizing novel contributions and contributors as carrying it on. (Think here, again, of a jazz trio each of whose members carry on a common melody while improvising on it, and whose improvisations open up new improvisatory possibilities for the others.) Schleiermacher claims, accordingly, that “insofar as each Christian as a new creation is also a distinctively determined, particular being, we must also imagine that surely one and the same result follows for all, and yet that each person takes in the same distinctiveness and by means of this becomes again something particular.”134 On Schleiermacher’s account, therefore, persons become receptive to God’s reconciling love through the Spirit of Jesus, and this Spirit is carried on through the community Jesus founded; to become receptive to God’s love, accordingly, is to become receptive to this community. In turn, those who have become sufficiently receptive become contributors to the community, such that others will become receptive to them, too. Their receptivity to the community thus facilitates their spontaneity, just as their spontaneity is received by the community and facilitates further spontaneity. In the redeemed community, therefore, one can achieve harmony between individuality and community, precisely insofar as one’s membership in this community opens up possibilities for individual expression, just as one’s individual expression opens up possibilities for the expression of others. With these claims on board, we can now see that Schleiermacher offers a theological diagnosis of, and prescription for, what we have called the problems of “mineness.” From his vantage point, the seeming antithesis between one’s freedom and that upon which one is dependent—manifest in natural as well as social antagonisms—is due to “God-forgetfulness,” for the relativity of such antitheses, along with their possible coincidence, can be realized only when they are set in relationship to one upon whom both are absolutely dependent, and for whom both coincide. To overcome these antitheses, 134  Schleiermacher, CS, 297 (101). “All the actions of Christ were to result in persons’ sin being overcome in them and thus in unifying flesh with spirit. This result was to be the same in all persons; however, each person was to become a mentally alive single being—only in a higher grade and out of higher material—thus again a unique individual, each one different from all the others” (CS, 296–7 [101]).

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therefore, reconciliation is necessary, which is what Schleiermacher claims has been accomplished in Christ and mediated through his Spirit: Christ is perfectly God-conscious, Schleiermacher argues, and is thus able to bring every moment of his sensible-consciousness, including his relative freedom and dependence, into unity with that God-consciousness; by founding a community and conveying the Spirit of his God-consciousness to others, Jesus enables them to share in that God-consciousness and, so, to experience harmony between themselves and their circumstances, including their relationship to other persons, and to put their stamp on those circumstances. On Schleiermacher’s account, accordingly, faith plays a crucial role in enabling one to harmonize one’s life-circumstances, and to do so in such a way that one can identify with that harmony.

3.8. OBJECTIONS Schleiermacher’s theology has been criticized, sometimes ruthlessly, by two of modernity’s other giants, G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Barth. One criticism, now standard, is that “feeling” or “immediate consciousness,” upon which Schleiermacher bases his theology, is hopelessly subjective, that it lacks objective purport, and that his theology is finally uninterested, therefore, in truth.135 This is what Barth has in mind, for instance, when he characterizes such consciousness as a sort of “timeless inwardness” that has “a complete lack of particularity or quality,” and what Hegel has in mind when he claims that Schleiermacher’s theology has “escaped from development and objectivity into feeling,” and that it thus represents theology’s “general renunciation of the cognition of truth.”136 Based on the preceding, it should be fairly obvious that Schleiermacher is not liable to this sort of objection, since “feeling” and “immediate consciousness” are not, for him, merely inward, subjective states; this is evident in his claim that such consciousness circulates through communities in a “public” way, and that would-be expressions of such consciousness are assessed in terms of communal norms. Religion’s “immediate consciousness” is “inward,” accordingly, in the same way that any other internalized norm would be—like knowing how to tie one’s shoes, for instance, or

135   See here the hugely influential interpretations offered by Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience, and George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine. 136  Barth, Die Theologie Schleiermachers, in Gesamtausgabe II/11, ed. Dietrich Ritschl (Zürich:  Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1978), 293–4; Hegel, “Vorrede zu Hinrichs’ Religionsphilosophie” (1822), in Johannes Hoffmeister (ed.), Berliner Schriften 1818–1831, (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1956), 58.



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knowing one’s multiplication tables—but this does not entail that such consciousness is unduly subjective.137 An objector could rejoin, of course, that this response simply moves the problem back a step, from the subjectivity of immediate consciousness to that of one’s community—for unless one can judge the rightness of one’s communal norms, the fact that one’s consciousness can be judged in terms of those norms will not enable one to escape the charge of subjectivism.138 Hegel brings this objection, too, against Schleiermacher, claiming that the latter offers, and can offer, no community-transcending standard by which to judge among various communities. Such communities are thus said to lack a “claim to objectivity,” in consequence of which the little congregations and peculiarities assert themselves and multiply ad infinitum; they float apart and gather together by happenstance; every moment the groupings alter like the patterns in a sea of sand given over to the play of the winds. Yet at the same time—as is only fair—each group regards the private and distinctive peculiarity of its view as something so otiose and even unremarkable that it does not mind whether it is acknowledged or not, and gives up all claims to objectivity.139

Interestingly, this is an objection that Schleiermacher explicitly addressed, and his response turns out to be fairly close to Hegel’s own. The key passage is in Schleiermacher’s Brief Outline of Theology As a Field of Study, in which he asserts that “unless religious communities are to be regarded as mere aberrations, it must be possible to show that the existence of such associations is a necessary development for the development of the human spirit.”140 The published version of the Brief Outline offers little explanation of this remark, but we can fill in the blanks by turning to David Friedrich Strauss’s notes from Schleiermacher’s lectures on this material. According to these notes, Schleiermacher argues that the moral legitimacy of a community differs from that of an individual actor or action, in that the former is either necessary or a “mere aberration,” whereas the non-necessity of an individual action does not entail that the action is an aberration. The argument here goes something like

 I  defend an argument along these lines, at greater length, in my “Attunement and Explicitation.” 138  A  similar criticism is leveled by F.C. Baur, Vorlesungen über die christliche Dogmengeschichte (Leipzig:  Fues’s Verlag, 1865), 3:351–3. For a contemporary rendition of this accusation, on Hegel’s behalf, see Robert Pippin, “Brandom’s Hegel,” European Journal of Philosophy 13:3 (2005), 381–408. Here I am following Dole, Schleiermacher. 139  Hegel, Glauben und Wissen (1802), in Hartmut Buchner and Otto Pöggeler (ed.) Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, (Hamburg:  Felix Meiner, 1968), 386 (ET:  Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977]). 140  Schleiermacher, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (1811, 1830), ed. Heinrich Scholz (Leipzig: Deichert, 1910), §22 (1820) (ET: Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study, trans. Terrence Tice [Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1990]). 137

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this: (a) a norm is “aberrant,” in the relevant sense, if it is merely given, merely an accident of history, rather than proposed by reason and so legitimated as something more than a mere given or accident; (b) the norms governing individual actions are such that acts consequent upon them can be legitimate even if they are not consequent upon necessary norms, since (i) individual action must leave room for novelty and individual self-expression—Schleiermacher here cites the example of fine art—and in any case (ii) the relevant norms here underdetermine what would count as acting in conformity to them; whereas (c) norm-circulating communities, of the sort Schleiermacher has in mind, are “all encompassing” in a way that the norms governing individual actions are not, such that being governed by such a community is relevantly different from being governed by an individual norm, since the former comes at greater cost to individual freedom. This cost is justified, Schleiermacher thinks, only if entrance into such a community enables one to flourish in ways one could not flourish apart from that community. We can now see, then, that a community is “necessary,” in Schleiermacher’s sense, just insofar as it is a necessary condition of some aspect of human flourishing—a community is necessary, that is, insofar as one cannot flourish in some important respect apart from entrance into it. Schleiermacher elaborates this point by drawing an instructive analogy to social-contract theories of the state, but for our purposes it should suffice to note his conclusion: “What is not necessary to spiritual life,” Schleiermacher contends, is “arbitrary,” “an aberration,” and “ephemeral.”141 This explains, in turn, why Schleiermacher claims that “in ethics it must be possible to show that the founding and existence of such associations comprise a necessary element in the development of humanity.”142 First, note well that when Schleiermacher writes of “a necessary element in the development of humanity,” he has in mind that which is necessary to any person’s development, given the nature of humans and their flourishing, rather than, say, that which is necessary to humanity’s development over the course of history. Second, Schleiermacher turns here to “ethics” as the discipline that identifies the dimensions and conditions of human flourishing; on his account, there are four such dimensions, each of which emerges only in certain kinds of community. One of these dimensions of flourishing—Schleiermacher calls it the “the symbolizing/particular dimension”—emerges only in a community of fellow-feeling and expressivity, which is the sort of community Schleiermacher identifies as a “church.”143 So then: if one cannot flourish in a given dimension without entering into and binding oneself to a particular   Friedrich Schleiermacher Theologische Enzyklopädie (1831–1832):  Nachschrift David Friedrich Strauss, ed. Walter Sachs (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987), 21–2. 142  Schleiermacher, Kurze Darstellung (1811), I§23. 143   Schleiermacher elaborates these dimensions in the Introduction to his 1812–13 Ethik. 141



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sort of community, then that sort of community is necessary to human flourishing, from which it follows that the existence of such communities is not a mere aberration. This means, among other things, that Christian communities, too, are legitimate only if they are necessary to one’s flourishing, which implies that there is indeed a community-transcending standard by which to judge such communities. Based on the foregoing, that Schleiermacher sees the Christian community as meeting this standard, and how it does so, should be obvious. This brings us to one final objection, implicit in Hegel’s infamous remark that “if religion grounds itself in a person only on the basis of feeling, then such a feeling would have no other determination than that of a feeling of his dependence, and so a dog would be the best Christian.”144 The worry here, apparently, is that Schleiermacher portrays humans as wholly and ultimately dependent upon God, such that reciprocity at one level—in relationship to nature and others—is forfeit at another—in relationship to God. To Hegel’s ears, this hardly sounds like an affirmation of humanity’s freedom. By contrast with Schleiermacher, Hegel claims that one can stand in a “mineness” relation to one’s life insofar as one enjoys consummate reciprocity in all of one’s relationships, including one’s relationship to God. This is obviously a significant departure from Schleiermacher’s emphasis on absolute dependence; to understand what Hegel means by it, we will have to turn to a consideration of the latter’s own thought.

  Hegel, “Vorrede zu Hinrichs Religionsphilosophie.”

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4 Reconciling Spirit Chapters 2 and 3 considered Immanuel Kant’s and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s proposals for dealing with the problem of “mineness,” that is, of one’s life hanging together in such a way that one can identify with it or experience it as self-expressive. For all of their differences, these proposals converge at several key points. Both perceive the problem as, fundamentally, a matter of determining how certain oppositions can be overcome: so Kant wonders how the realm of nature might be brought into conformity with the realm of morality—that is, how “the highest good” might possibly be brought into being—while Schleiermacher considers how freedom and dependence might be harmonized so as to overcome their apparent contradiction. Faith plays a key role, moreover, in each of their approaches to this problem: Kant thus claims that one can reasonably hope that nature will conform with morality only if both realms are governed by a Supreme Moral Cause, whereas Schleiermacher contends that freedom and dependence seem ultimately antithetical only because we have become forgetful of the One upon whom both depend absolutely, such that they can be harmonized only through one’s becoming reattuned to this One. Hegel’s project has much in common with that of Kant and Schleiermacher—more, surely, than Hegel himself seemed to realize—though his project also differs from theirs in important respects. Like them, Hegel attempts to explain how certain fundamental oppositions could be overcome, and faith likewise plays a key role in Hegel’s account of such overcoming. Hegel departs from Kant and Schleiermacher, however, insofar as they fail, he thinks, finally to overcome these oppositions: Kant because the laws governing morality and intellect are construed, on Hegel’s view, in such a way that sensible life remains outside their jurisdiction; Schleiermacher because although absolute dependence on a Whence may enable one to harmonize relative freedom and dependence, this Whence itself remains absolutely over-against one. Hegel’s own account is notoriously difficult to summarize, but a very rough approximation would go something like this: for Hegel, one can reconcile that which is opposed to one only by self-consciously mediating

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one’s relationship to it, in such a way that in relating to it, one simultaneously relates to oneself; in that case, one would be “united with oneself in otherness,” as Hegel puts it. Hegel’s project, accordingly, is to explain how one could stand in that sort of relationship to all of one’s circumstances, such that one could experience one’s entire life as self-expressive. As we shall see, faith plays a key part in this project, though Hegel insists that even as God enables one to remain united with oneself in certain circumstances, it is crucial that one remain united with oneself in relationship to God, too. Before proceeding, it might be helpful to clarify some Hegelian terminology, beginning with his notion of “unity with self in otherness.” Again, one is so united, on Hegel’s account, if and only if one relates to that which is other than oneself in such a way that one simultaneously relates to oneself. This might seem like a fairly esoteric, even occult, notion, but what Hegel has in mind is familiar enough. Such unity-in-otherness would occur, to take one simple example, if one’s concepts corresponded to the fundamental reality of an object, such that contemplating the object’s reality, and contemplating one’s concept of it, would come to the same thing. If so, then one would achieve a kind of unity between one’s concepts and an object external to them. Something similar occurs if one can see oneself in others’ perceptions of one—if, say, their understanding of what one does for a living lines up with one’s own understanding. In that case, one achieves unity between one’s self-conception and others’ conception of one. When Hegel talks about “unity with self in otherness,” then, this is the sort of thing he has in mind, though the achievement of such unity is far more complicated than these examples might suggest. “Unity with self in otherness” is related to a second key term, “spirit” (Geist), which is Hegel’s word for the sort of being that can maintain such unity, or for that which enables it to do so. As such, what Hegel means by “spirit” is much closer to “mind,” as English speakers use that word, than to the singular of “spirits.” This should become clear enough in due course.

4.1.  FROM CI V IL R ELIGION TO R ECONCILI NG OPPOSITIONS The preceding paragraphs should indicate the ambition, as well as the complexity, of Hegel’s undertaking. Thankfully, that undertaking comes into much clearer focus if we take a few steps back in order to see how Hegel arrived at it.1 By the time he graduated from the Tübingen Stift, Hegel had 1  On Hegel’s development, see especially H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development:  Toward the Sunlight, 1770–1801 (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1972) and Hegel’s Development:  Night Thoughts (Jena 1801–1806) (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1983). On Hegel’s biography, Terry

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already committed himself to a grand project, though not yet that of enabling persons to be at home with themselves in all of their circumstances. Rather, Hegel initially set out to “complete the Enlightenment”: as he then understood it, the Enlightenment’s effectiveness had been limited due to the fact that its subjection of every dimension of life to cold-blooded rationality left little that might move the wills and imaginations of ordinary persons, in consequence of which its impact had been confined to relatively small (usually elite) pockets of society.2 On Hegel’s view, accordingly, the Enlightenment would not succeed in transforming society until it began to engage its less elite members, and it could effect such engagement primarily by means of religion, since religion conveys morality in an accessible, heart-engaging manner.3 Not just any religion will do, however, for Hegel shares many then-common worries about religion’s authority structures, doctrines, practices, etc. Hegel thinks, therefore, that the Enlightenment can be “completed” only if a religion that moves persons’ hearts can also remain true to the Enlightenment’s commitments to freedom and reasonableness; such a religion’s “primary task,” accordingly, “is to weave these fine strands of morality into a noble union suitable to human nature;” hence “the teachings of such a religion, even if resting on the authority of some divine revelation, must of necessity be constituted so that they are actually authorized by the universal reason of humanity, whereby one is no sooner made aware of them than one perceives and recognizes their binding force.”4 Hegel’s technical term for a religion that meets these conditions is “Volksreligion,” which might be translated as “folk religion” or, since that phrase usually carries descriptive rather than normative connotations, as “civil religion.”5 Given its predominance in his cultural context, Hegel could hardly avoid the question of whether Christianity could function as such a civil religion. His first extended response to this question took shape in a 1795 essay entitled “The Positivity of the Christian Religion.” Two elements of this essay are Pinkard, Hegel (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000); Frederick Beiser, Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2005). 2   So Hegel: the Enlightenment’s principles “could never influence anyhow, since they are fit only for an order of things antithetic to sense. Little wonder, then, that they do not readily qualify for wholehearted acceptance on the part of the people” (“Tübingen Fragment,” in Hegels theologische Jugendschriften, ed. H. Nohl [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1907], 13–14 [hereafter “TF”]; ET: “The Tübingen Essay,” in Three Essays, trans. Peter Fuss and John Dobbins [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984]. Here as elsewhere, I have tried to stick closely to existing English translations in order to make this book useful for a wider Anglophone readership, but I have also used my own translations wherever necessary). 3 4   For claims to this effect, see “TF,” 5, 18.   Hegel, “TF,” 19, 21. 5   For a defense of the preference for “civil religion” as a translation of Volksreligion, see Thomas A. Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2011), ­chapter 1.

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significant for our understanding Hegel’s development. First, Hegel here uses a plainly Kantian standard to determine whether a religion could serve as a civil religion, for a religion can serve as such, he argues, only insofar as it is reasonable, and Kant’s claims about morality supply the criterion by which such reasonableness is judged.6 At this stage of his development, then, Hegel takes for granted the correctness of Kant’s views (in this regard, at least). Second, Hegel argues that Jesus’s own teachings nicely conform to the Kantian criterion, and that the authoritarianism or “positivism” of Jesus’s devotees is to be explained in terms of the wider culture in which those teachings were promulgated. (A belief or practice is “positive,” on Hegel’s understanding, if one believes or practices it on the basis of authority, so that it has the character of being “merely posited” or simply given to one.7 Such beliefs and practices are not in the relevant sense one’s own.) With respect to the former, Hegel asserts that Jesus “undertook to raise religion and virtue to morality and to restore to morality the freedom which is its essence,” and, in keeping with this, that “he urged not a virtue grounded on authority (which is either meaningless or a direct contradiction in terms) but a free virtue springing from one’s own being.”8 Hegel claims, accordingly, that Jesus himself cannot be charged with founding a “positive” religion, yet he nevertheless thinks that Christianity is such a religion. How is it, then, that the anti-positivistic teachings of Jesus could have spawned a decidedly positivistic religion? Hegel’s answer to this question, and its place in his overall argument, are fairly conventional: the problem with Christianity is not Jesus but his followers, since the latter have distorted or corrupted the pure teachings of the former. Less conventional is the “spirit-of-the-age” analysis with which Hegel aims to render this answer plausible. The argument here, simply stated, is that people had been so brutalized by first-century Roman rule that their spirit had been crushed, and they could therefore seek happiness only in a supernatural realm. In this situation, “God’s objectivity is a counterweight to the corruption and slavery of humanity, and it is strictly only a revelation”; as such, God is “put into another world in whose confines we had no part, to which we contributed nothing by our activity, but into which, at best, we could beg or conjure our way.”9 Given this, it was inevitable that Jesus’s followers would receive, and so pass along, his teachings as if they were “positive,” since the spirit of the age had been thoroughly debased through its domination by Roman emperors. Religion mirrors this broken spirit, manifesting itself in Gods that reflect the low esteem in which humanity holds itself—Gods, therefore, who are wholly 6  For Hegel’s claim to this effect, see “Die Positivität der christlichen Religion,” in Jugendschriften, 153 (ET:  “The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” in Early theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948]). 7   For Hegel’s characterization of “positivism,” see “Positivität,” 157. 8 9   Hegel, “Positivität,” 154–5.   Hegel, “Positivität,” 227–8.

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other than humanity, and to which humans can relate only in utter subjection. The spirit of such an age is obviously antithetical to the dignified, free, moral religion proclaimed by Jesus, such that it is no surprise that his proclamation was rejected—by those who accepted that proclamation no less than by those who crucified him for it. On this sort of analysis, then, religion tells us something about the way a culture pictures itself, and so manifests the spirit of that culture. The importance of these developments becomes clear in Hegel’s second major attempt to address these issues, an essay entitled “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” (written 1798–9). First, Hegel here begins to generalize his “spirit-of-the-age” analysis, applying it to Christianity as well as to Judaism (with predictably regrettable results). Hegel thus asserts of Judaism, for instance, that “mastery was the only possible relationship in which Abraham could stand to the infinite world opposed to him, but because he was unable himself to make this mastery actual, it therefore remained ceded to his ideal”; as a result, Abraham and his people pictured God as Master, “an infinite power which they set over against themselves and could never conquer,” in keeping with their picture of themselves as mastered.10 We will return to the exceptionableness of this interpretation in Section 4.5. For the moment, the crucial thing to see is that Hegel now aligns the spirit of another age—his own—with that of Judaism, and that Hegel’s attitude toward Kant has thus changed drastically. This becomes clear when Hegel contrasts Jesus’s teaching, on the one hand, with Judaism and Kantianism, on the other, in order thereby to exhibit the structural similarities he sees in the latter pair. Hegel remarks, accordingly, that we might have expected Jesus to work along these [Kantian] lines against the positivity of moral commands, against sheer legality, and to show that, although the legal is a universal whose entire obligatoriness lies in its universality, still, even if every ought, every command, declares itself as something alien, nevertheless as concept (universality) it is something subjective, and, as subjective, as a product of human power (i.e. of reason as the capacity for universality), it loses its objectivity, its positivity, its heteronomy, and the thing commanded is revealed as grounded in the autonomy of the human will.11

If Jesus were a Kantian, that is to say, he would have reacted to Judaism’s (alleged) positivism precisely by emphasizing the lawlikeness of its moral commands, since these are supposed to accord with human reason and just so to be recognizably self-legislated. But Jesus is not a Kantian, and Hegel sees

10   Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,” in Jugenschriften, 247, 256 (hereafter “GC”; ET: “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” in Early Theological Writings). 11   Hegel, “GC,” 265.

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Jesus’s response to positivism as highlighting Kant’s own shortcomings; so Hegel argues that by this [Kantian] line of argument, positivity is only partially removed, and between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules the church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and persons who listen to their own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter are free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carry their lord in themselves, yet at the same time are their own slaves.12

Whereas for Kant the relevant contrast is between laws imposed upon one from without and those imposed by one’s own reason, for Hegel it is between abstract laws, externally or internally imposed, and what he terms “particularity”; Hegel claims, accordingly, that “for the particular—impulses, inclinations, pathological love, sensuous experience, or whatever else it is called—the universal is necessarily and always something alien and objective.”13 Hegel’s point, then, is that Kantian morality is positive, a merely given authority, just insofar as it calls persons to obey abstract laws whose alleged universality does not include persons’ particularity. The standard by which Hegel had earlier assessed the positivity of religious teachings, he now perceives as itself positive. Several implications follow from this development in Hegel’s thought. First, Hegel now sees the mark of positivity not as a lack of conformity with reason or the moral law, but as a kind of one-sidedness or over-against-ness. Just as the problem with Judaism, on Hegel’s understanding, is that it “sets an infinite power over against it,” so the problem with Kantian law is that “laws are unifications of opposites in a concept, which leaves them as opposites while it exists itself in opposition to reality.”14 The fundamental problem, then, is with authorities or norms or powers that stand over against the particularities of human life. This brings us to a second implication, which is that what humanity needs, and what Hegel now intends to provide, is not a religion that enables the moral law to engage our imagination and sentiments, but a way of overcoming the opposition between us and that which seems to stand over against—and so over—us. Hegel thus hits upon an issue that he will spend the rest of his career trying to address. The remainder of the “Spirit of Christianity” essay interprets Jesus as offering a three-step program, so to speak, for solving this problem; two of these steps turn out to be significant for Hegel’s own eventual solution. The first step in Jesus’s solution, Hegel claims, is for one’s inclinations to be reformed, so that the moral law expresses the desire of one’s own heart rather   Hegel, “GC,” 265–6. (Note that Hegel here cites Kant, Religion, 6:176.) 14   Hegel, “GC,” 266.   Hegel, “GC,” 264.

12 13

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than the demands of an external authority.15 As Hegel sees it, this first step addresses the form of law—as external—but not its content. The second step is to overcome the content of the law, and if what the law characteristically says, on Hegel’s account, is that one deserves punishment, then it can be overcome only through forgiveness. Lawhood is here construed as a kind of pure universality; hence, given that particular actors and actions necessarily fall short of such pure universality, such laws would necessarily pronounce everyone guilty.16 From this it follows that law’s content—its pronunciation of guilt—can be overcome only if abstract lawhood is not supreme, which is precisely why Jesus ascribes such importance to forgiveness, where “forgiveness” means that “the heart no longer stands on the right acquired in opposition to the offender.”17 Insofar as one maintains that kind of right, one treats law as if it were supreme, and just so remains subjected to a universal by which one is oneself pronounced guilty; this is what Jesus has in mind, Hegel takes it, when he warns his followers that they ought not to judge, lest they be judged, for by whatever measure they judge others, they too will be measured—and found wanting. As such, Hegel concludes that “if you ignore this warning, you are recognizing over you a lord before whom you are impotent, who is stronger than you, who is not yourself. You are then setting up for yourself and for others an alien power over your deed.”18 In forgiveness, on the other hand, one gives up one’s right to insist upon the offender’s punishment, and one thereby overcomes the would-be ultimacy of a purely universal law. Hegel thus claims that in forgiveness, “the heart reconciles itself with the offender, and thereby has won just so much for itself in the field of life, has made friendly just so much life as was hostile to it,” and then instructively, if cryptically, characterizes such reconciliation as a process in which “Life has severed itself from itself and united itself again.”19 The idea, very roughly, is (a)  that life includes offenses that negate one’s rights, the immediate effect of which is that one’s life now includes that which negates one; (b) that one cannot overcome this negation by insisting upon one’s right to punish the offender, since (i) one will thus render oneself liable to punishment for one’s own offenses, and (ii) such punishment may restore the integrity of the law, but not of one’s life;20 Hegel contends, therefore, (c) that one can reintegrate one’s life only by forgiving the offense and so standing above its would-be negation, in order thereby to negate the negation and to reestablish the unity   On this point, cf. Hegel, “GC,” 268.   For a characterization of the law’s content in these terms, see “GC,” 278; for Hegel’s claim about form vs. content, cf. 277. 17 18 19   Hegel, “GC,” 287.   Hegel, “GC,” 288.   Hegel, “GC,” 287, 289. 20   So Hegel claims that, “If there is no way to make an action undone, if its reality is eternal, then no reconciliation is possible, not even through suffering punishment. To be sure, the law is satisfied when the trespasser is punished, since thus the contradiction between its declared fiat and the reality of the trespasser is annulled” (“GC,” 278–9). 15

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of one’s life. This idea becomes important later in Hegel’s development, as we shall see. On Hegel’s interpretation, then, Jesus has now claimed that the form of law is overcome through transformed inclinations, just as its pronunciation of guilt is overcome through forgiveness. So far, so good, but Hegel contends that a third step must still be taken, for since inclination and forgiveness are both subjective, a unity based upon them alone would exclude an essential aspect of human nature, namely thought. Hegel claims, accordingly, that “in the moments of happy love there is no room for objectivity; yet every reflection annuls love, restores objectivity again, and with objectivity we are once more on the territory of restrictions. What is religious, then, is the pleroma of love; it is reflection and love united, bound together in thought.”21 The claim, then, is that even if love overcomes the opposition one experiences vis-à-vis the law, it remains opposed to objectivity and thought; in order fully to overcome opposition, therefore, subjectivity must become objective or representable to thought. Hegel here equates such becoming-objective with religiosity, insofar as religion consists in the worship of that in which subjective and objective are united; this is what he means when he asserts that “the need to unite subject with object, to unite feeling, and feeling’s demand for objects, with the intellect, to unite them in something beautiful, in a god, by means of fancy, is the supreme need of human spirit and the urge to religion.”22 At this stage in his development, Hegel is not entirely clear about how such unity could be achieved, as is evident in his reliance here on mere assertion—“The hill and the eye which sees it are object and subject,” he writes, “but between humanity and God, between spirit and spirit, there is no such cleft of objectivity and subjectivity; one is to the other an other only in that one recognizes the other; both are one”23—and appeal to unexplicated metaphors: “A person wholly immersed in seeing the sun,” he suggests, “would be only a feeling of light, would be light-feeling become an entity,” so that “the opposition of seer and seen, i.e. of subject and object, disappears in the seeing itself.”24 It is clear to Hegel, however, that Jesus’s conception of God fails to provide the necessary subject–object unity, since “Jesus  .  .  . needed only the opposite of the world, an opposite in whom his opposition was itself grounded.”25 Small wonder, then, that Christianity is pervaded by a sense of standing over against the world, and, in turn, that its God cannot overcome the opposition between subject and object. Christianity is therefore unable to reconcile itself with the world, and so abandons itself to its fate, namely “that church and state, worship and life, piety and virtue, spiritual and worldly action, can never dissolve themselves into one.”26

21

22 23   Hegel, “GC,” 302; cf. 332.   Hegel, “GC,” 332.   Hegel, “GC,” 312.  Hegel, “GC,” 316.   25 Hegel, “GC,” 332–3.   26  Hegel, “GC,” 342.

24

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From this third step, Hegel draws an important conclusion: a crucial element of religion is to overcome the opposition between subject and object by representing a God in and by whom they are overcome. At this point, Hegel takes it that Christianity’s representation fails to achieve this overcoming, which leads him to search for more adequate representations. In the 1800  “Fragment of a System,” Hegel flirts with a view according to which subject and object are instances of, and are thus united in, an animating “Spirit.” As “Spirit,” God is here represented as “infinite life,” as “the living unity of the manifold,” and as “an animating law in union with the manifold which is then animated infinite life.”27 The idea here, which seems to have its roots in Spinozism, is that God is infinite life, that God’s livingness animates all things, and that the opposition we experience between ourselves and objects can be overcome insofar as we see them from the perspective of, or self-consciously include ourselves in, that by which they (and we) are animated. Hegel claims, accordingly, that when one takes this animated manifold as a multiplicity of many individuals, yet as connected with the animating spirit, then these single lives become organs, and the infinite whole becomes an infinite totality of life; when one takes the infinite life as the spirit of the whole, moreover, and at the same time as a living [being] outside oneself (since one is oneself restricted), and when one puts oneself at the same time outside one’s restricted self in rising toward the living being and intimately uniting oneself with it, then one worships God.28

Hence, by uniting oneself with the God by whom all things are animated, one experiences oneself and the world as included in this unity, and the experience of opposition is thereby overcome.29 The “Fragment of a System” is important, therefore, since it is one of Hegel’s first attempts to come up with a representation of God adequate to overcome the opposition between subject and object. Even more importantly, Hegel now begins to generalize the problem of subject–object opposition, seeing it as affecting not only religion and its representations of God, but all candidate relationships between ourselves and objects. Once again, regrettably, Hegel draws this generalization by equating an element of contemporaneous philosophy with a counterpart in Judaism— in this case, he equates Judaism’s relationship to God with the Fichtean Ego’s relationship to the world: “The greater and more isolated the inner sphere,” Hegel writes, “the greater and more isolated the outer sphere also, and if the latter is regarded as self-subsistent, the more subjugated must humanity

  Hegel, “Systemfragment,” 347 (ET: “Fragment of a System,” in Early Theological Writings).   Hegel, “Systemfragment,” 347. 29   As Hegel puts it, “this partial character of the living being is transcended in religion; finite life rises to infinite life” (“Systemfragment,” 348). 27

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appear.” Hegel then sets up the equation, claiming that “it is precisely this being mastered by the immeasurably great object which is steadily retained as humanity’s relation to the object,” and that it does not matter what mode of consciousness humanity prefers, whether that of fearing a God who, being infinite and beyond the heaven of heavens, exalted above all connection and all relationship, hovers all-powerful above all connection and all relationship, hovers all-powerful above nature; or that of placing oneself as pure Ego above the ruins of the body and the shining suns, above the countless myriads of heavenly spheres, above the ever new solar systems as numerous as ye all are, ye shining suns.30

Anti-Judaism aside, Hegel’s point is that God is not the only thing that can be represented as if it remained over against the world, and in light of modern philosophy’s prevailing antipathy toward God, not the most dangerous. Humans can represent ourselves, too, as if we remained over against the world, which is what Hegel sees in Fichte’s philosophy. The moral of Hegel’s story is that an absolutized subject is just as bad as an absolutized object, precisely insofar as each remains fixed in its opposition to the world: “when the separation is infinite,” Hegel protests, “it does not matter which remains fixed, the subject or the object; but in either case the opposition persists, the opposition of the absolutely finite to the absolutely infinite.”31 Given this generalization of the problem, we might expect Hegel to try to generalize his quasi-Spinozan solution to it. This is exactly what we see Hegel doing in his first philosophical publication, “The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy” (1801), though naturally the solution is itself affected by the attempted generalization. Several elements of the earlier essays have now become central to, and settled within, Hegel’s thought, beginning with his commitment to overcoming certain oppositions:  Hegel thus observes that antitheses such as spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and intellect, freedom and necessity, etc., used to be important, and in more limited spheres they appeared in a variety of other guises. The whole weight of human interests hung upon them. With the progress of culture they have passed over into such forms as the antithesis of reason and sensibility, intelligence and nature, and, with respect to the universal concept, of absolute subjectivity and absolute objectivity.

As Hegel sees it, such oppositions are the fundamental problem for which philosophy must try to provide an answer—indeed, he claims that “the sole

30  Hegel, “Systemfragment,” 351 (emphasis mine). Note that Hegel here quotes Fichte, Appellation an das Publikum. 31   Hegel, “Systemfragment,” 351.

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interest of reason is to supersede (aufzuheben) such rigid antitheses.”32 The rest of the essay then interprets and defends Hegel’s then-friend Schelling’s solution to this problem over against that proposed by Fichte.33 The fundamental claim, simply stated, is that subjectivity and objectivity are united in the Absolute, in consequence of which the apparent opposition between them is surmounted. This is what Hegel has in mind when he asserts, for instance, that “the need of philosophy can satisfy itself solely by penetrating to the principle of nullifying all fixed opposition and connecting the limited to the absolute,” or, more explicitly, that “these two opposites, whether they are called Ego and nature, or pure and empirical self-consciousness, or cognition and being, or self-positing and oppositing, or finitude and infinity, are together posited in the absolute.”34 The reason that subject and object coincide in the Absolute, Hegel maintains, is that the Absolute is the Reason by which all things are animated; Reason thus animates subjects and objects, in consequence of which subjects and objects are both really subject-objects— that is, both are objects inasmuch as the Absolute object-ifies itself in them, yet because the Absolute is Reason, both are equally subjects, since they are thus animated by and expressions of Reason. Hegel claims, accordingly, that reason “posits the opposites, identity and non-identity, as identical, not just in the form of cognition, but in the form of being as well. And the only real opposition of this kind is the one in which subject and object are both posited as Subject-Object, both subsisting in the Absolute, and the Absolute in both, and hence reality in both.”35 Here, then, Hegel not only generalizes the problem of subject–object opposition, he addresses this problem by revising his earlier Spinozistic account, now claiming that “it is reason itself that produces itself as nature and as intelligence, and cognizes itself in them,” which should enable the subject/object dichotomy to be overcome.36

32  Hegel, Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, ed. Hartmut Buchner and Otto Pöggeler (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968), 13 (ET: The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977]). Throughout this chapter, I translate Aufhebung and its variants as “superseding.” 33   Given that the rudiments of Schelling’s position are already independently defended in Hegel’s own earlier works, it might be fairer to say that Hegel here defends their shared viewpoint, or even that he here defends his own views precisely by defending Schelling’s. 34 35  Hegel, Differenz, 30, 77.  Hegel, Differenz, 66. 36  Hegel, Differenz, 67. I  am here siding with those who read this essay as defending a Spinozistic position, over against those who read it as defending a Kantian one, though it clearly includes elements of both. Briefly, I understand Hegel as using Spinoza to make Kant’s Transcendental Unity work, rather than using Kant to naturalize Spinoza—that is to say, I read Hegel’s initial expressions of allegiance to Kant’s Transcendental Unity of Apperception (5–6) as pointing toward or motivating his appeal to Spinozism, since the latter provides the principle by which Kant’s Unity might actually be realized. (Here it is worth noting that, soon after the quotation just cited, Hegel clearly equates his view with one of Spinoza’s key claims; cf. 71.) Importantly, though, I do not think that Hegel maintains this position for much longer,

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The “Difference” essay thus consolidated several of Hegel’s earlier ideas, but did little to advance beyond them. That would change in his next essay, “Faith and Knowledge” (1802), in which he finally hit upon an insight that became a cornerstone of his mature thought. The problem remains the same, namely, “the absolute antithesis of finitude and infinity, reality and ideality, the sensuous and the supersensuous, and the beyondness of what is truly real and absolute.”37 What is new here, in contrast not only to Hegel’s earlier views but to Kant’s and Schleiermacher’s as well, is the idea that oppositions can be overcome not by appeal to an Absolute in which they coincide or by which they are simply united, but by a process of double-negation. (Those familiar with the Lutheran tradition should hear echoes of Luther’s “theology of the cross.”) Whereas the “Difference” essay negates oppositions by uniting them, “Faith and Knowledge” unites oppositions by negating their negation. The idea is not entirely new, of course; we encountered something similar in the “Spirit of Christianity” essay’s discussion of forgiveness. Now, however, it has the makings of a metaphysical first-principle. We catch a glimpse of this principle in the following sentences: “In the Idea,” Hegel writes, “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 negated was only the negative in finitude; and thus the true affirmation was posited.”38 The first sentence sounds like a near-repetition of Hegel’s longstanding view, according to which oppositions—in this case, between finitude and infinitude—are overcome in an Absolute, in this case, “the Idea.” In the second sentence, however, Hegel offers a different account of this overcoming, now generalizing the double-negation principle he had earlier found in forgiveness. So generalized, the principle can now serve as the basis of a metaphysics in which oppositions are finally negated, though within this essay Hegel can only point in the direction of such a metaphysics. This is what Hegel seems to be doing in the well-known flourish with which the essay ends:  the pure concept or infinity as the abyss of nothingness in which all being is engulfed must signify the infinite grief [of the finite] purely as a moment of the supreme Idea, and no more than a moment. Formerly, this infinite grief existed only historically, in the formative process of culture. It existed in the feeling that “God himself is dead” . . . By marking this feeling as a moment of the supreme Idea, the pure concept must . . . reestablish for philosophy the idea of absolute freedom and along with it the absolute passion, the speculative Good

in consequence of which I  do not take this essay as providing evidence for the traditional “Spirit-monism” interpretation of Hegel. 37  Hegel, Glauben und Wissen (1802), in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, ed. Hartmut Buchner and Otto Pöggeler (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968), 321 (hereafter GW; ET: Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977]). 38  Hegel, GW, 324.

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Friday in place of the historic Good Friday. Good Friday must be speculatively re-established in the whole truth and harshness of its God-forsakenness.39

This is an admittedly cryptic passage, but the point seems to be that negations are overcome precisely through being included, as a “moment,” in the supreme Idea, and that the Idea must be construed, therefore, as capable of negating such negations. Hegel sees Good Friday as a model, as it were, or picture of what such inclusion would involve, for Good Friday represents the moment when God took human flesh and condemnation upon Godself so as to overcome them. The idea here, then, is that Good Friday provides a generalizable model for thinking about how negation can be overcome, and that the Idea, and rationality more generally, should therefore be rethought along these lines. Faith and Knowledge thus ends by announcing what amounts to a research program, the outworking of which would occupy Hegel for the rest of his life. In his Jena lectures on logic and metaphysics we see some of Hegel’s first attempts to develop this program, but his settled views first emerge while writing The Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s development thus proceeds through the following steps. Hegel was initially motivated by the problem of “completing the Enlightenment,” since he was concerned by the Enlightenment’s seeming unpopularity among the masses. Given religion’s influence on these same people, Hegel sees it as a means of addressing this problem—but only if religion is itself conformed to Enlightened reason. The standard by which Hegel judged such conformity, at this point, was lifted straight from Kant, but Hegel soon began to worry about Kantian “law,” and thus to focus on the more general problem of the opposition between, and possible integration of, subject and object. As a possible solution to this problem, Hegel considered various construals of “the Absolute,” understood as that in which subject and object are ultimately united. This leads Hegel, finally, to the idea of using Good Friday as a model for understanding how such unity could be accomplished; the elaboration and defense of this model is a key element in the research program that eventually produces The Phenomenology of Spirit and, with it, Hegel’s account of how one could experience one’s life as self-expressive.

4.2 .  SELF-U N IT Y I N R EL ATION TO OTH ER N E SS The Phenomenology of Spirit is probably Hegel’s most famous work; it is also among the most famously difficult books ever written. Hegel scholars

 Hegel, GW, 414.

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disagree about the most basic features of the text, arguing, for instance, over whether it should be considered a single work or two loosely connected ones, and over what Hegel even means to be talking about.40 I happen to think that most of the book’s difficulties lie on the surface, as it were, of Hegel’s prose, rather than in the fundamental structure of its argument and ideas; I  will therefore try to make the latter plain in this section, but given the extensive divisions among Hegel scholars, I can claim here only to have warranted my interpretation, rather than to have demonstrated the alternatives’ incorrectness.41 I mean, then, to get Hegel right, as well as to suggest his contribution to the problem of “mineness.” If I am right about Hegel, it turns out that these goals hang together, for “mineness” is what the Phenomenology is centrally about, though Hegel does not use the term; to put the point in Hegel’s own idiom, the key issue is how one can achieve a kind of unity with oneself even in apparently alienating circumstances, or encounter such circumstances in such a way that one can return to oneself.42 As I read it, the Phenomenology is Hegel’s account of what such unity would look like, and of the conditions under which it could be realized. The goal of the Phenomenology, Hegel tells us, is “spirit’s insight into what knowing is”—not only to understand the nature of knowing, but for “spirit” 40   On the apparent disunity of the work, see Theodor Häring, “Entstehungsgeschichte der Phänomenologie des Geistes,” in Verhandlungen des III. Internationalen Hegel Kongresses 1933, ed. B. Wigersma (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1934); and Otto Pöggeler, “Die Komposition der Phänomenologie des Geistes,” in Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Hans-Georg Gadamer (Bonn: Bouvier, 1966); for a persuasive response to these claims, see Jon Stewart, The Unity of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000). 41   The literature on the Phänomenologie is vast; important recent treatments include Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism:  The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Hegel on Self-Consciousness:  Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2011); Michael Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Gerd Kimmerle, Sein und Selbst:  Untersuchung zur Kategorialen Einheit von Vernunft und Geist in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (Bonn:  Bouvier, 1978); Otto Pöggeler, Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geistes (Freiburg:  Alber, 1973); Kenneth Westphal, Hegel’s Epistemological Realism: A Study of the Aim and Method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Dordrecht:  Kluwer:  1989); Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology:  The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Briefly, my own interpretation sides with the so-called “post-Kantian” reading of Hegel (against the so-called “Spirit-monism” reading), but draws conclusions importantly different from those usually associated with that reading. (My conclusions are thus closer to the post-Kantian interpretation offered by James Kreines, Reason in the World: The Philosophical Appeal of Hegel’s Metaphysics [Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming], than to those of Pippin, Pinkard, and others.) 42   To take just a couple of relevant formulations:  “the self is pure being-for-self,” Hegel writes, “which in its opposite communes with itself” (Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister [Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952], 492/§755 [ET: Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), cited by paragraph number]; “spirit is the knowledge of oneself in the externalization of oneself; the being that is the movement of retaining self-identity in otherness” (494/§759).

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to achieve such understanding.43 As we shall see, by “spirit,” Hegel refers to a minded self that is fully united with itself in otherness, but as we shall also see, Hegel thinks that “spirit” cannot understand what knowing is until it understands itself, and cannot understand itself until it “experiences” itself and is reconciled with these experiences. The idea here is not as spooky as it may sound: given (a) that a mind stands over against objects that it means to know, and (b) that it achieves a sort of satisfaction when objects correspond with its conception of them, it follows (c) that if mind is itself taken as the object to be known, the mind will be satisfied only when it corresponds with its self-conception, and, in light of (a)  and (b), when its correspondence to other objects is included in this self-conception.44 From this, Hegel draws support for the Phenomenology’s unusual methodology, for, he claims, “in what consciousness affirms from within itself as being-in-itself or the true, we have the standard which consciousness itself sets up by which to measure what it knows”; that is to say, “if we designate knowledge as the concept to be examined, and the essence or the true as what exists or the object, then the examination consists in seeing whether the concept corresponds to the object.”45 Roughly, then, the point is that the mind supplies concepts in terms of which one tries to understand objects, and it counts these concepts as true if and only if they correspond to those objects. Likewise, the mind supplies concepts in terms of which to understand itself, and these count as true if and only if mind corresponds to them—if and only if, that is, the mind’s self-concept does justice to its reality. Interestingly, this ends up pushing the inquiry in two different directions: on the one hand, Hegel investigates whether various understandings of mindedness do justice to the relevant phenomena, much as a scientist would test and refine a hypothesis; on the other hand, because he eventually arrives at a view according to which the mind is implicitly that which unites self and otherness, he turns to an investigation of the conditions under which this unity could become explicit, in the sense that mind’s self-concept would be fully actual—an investigation more akin to a dog-show

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 23/§29.   With respect to (a) and (b), Hegel claims that “Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it, or, as it is said, this something exists for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating, or of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing. But we distinguish this being-for-another from being-initself; whatever is related to knowledge or knowing is also distinguished from it, and posited as existing outside of this relationship; this being-in-itself is called truth” (Phänomenologie, 64/§82). With respect to (c), he claims that “if we inquire into the truth of knowledge, it seems that we are asking what knowledge is in itself. Yet in this inquiry knowledge is our object, something that exists for us; and the in-itself that would supposedly result from it would rather be the being of knowledge for us” (Phänomenologie, 64/§83). 45  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 65/§84. 43

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judge’s consideration of whether particular dogs embody their breed’s standards of excellence. It might be useful to consider an example. Suppose a precocious preschooler wants to determine what the concept “circle” means, and does so by looking at the would-be circles drawn by her friends. Based on this investigation, she arrives at a definition of “circle” as a rounded, unbroken line, any given point on which is equidistant from a single center-point—this, she takes it, is what everyone means to draw when they draw a circle, and thus what they mean by this concept. If she is right about this, it follows that her definition is true in the sense of getting the concept itself right. She is not long satisfied by this outcome, however, since it occurs to her that her friends’ would-be circles do not actually correspond to this definition, such that the latter is true only conceptually. This budding philosopher then sets out to find “true circles,” as she calls them, and is delighted whenever she happens upon one (in a soap-bubble, say, or a book about shapes), for in such cases her definition is true not only in itself, but in its actual correspondence to a concrete object. What this preschooler does for circles, Hegel means to do for minded selves, considering not only how such mindedness should be conceptualized, but where one might find instances that actually correspond to that concept. Hegel tells us, accordingly, that the Phenomenology aims to bring us to “the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where concept corresponds to object and object to concept.”46 And since this concept—mind as that which unites subject and object, or maintains the self’s unity in relation to otherness—can be instantiated only in circumstances in which minded selves have actually achieved such unity, it follows that insofar as such circumstances can be found (or produced), these selves really are at one with themselves in their circumstances. When minded selves have reached this point, “what seems to happen outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and substance shows itself to be essentially subject . . . Being is then absolutely mediated; it is a substantial content which is just as immediately the property of the ‘I’, it is self-like or the concept.”47 Mind corresponds to itself in such circumstances, and has thus achieved what Hegel will term “absoluteness” or “infinitude,” since there is no longer anything finally over against it. These are difficult claims, to say the least. The best way to understand them—and to see how Hegel tries to warrant them—is to retrace the steps of Hegel’s argument, for in each step Hegel assesses candidate interpretations and instantiations of mindedness.48 To be sure, Hegel does not first secure a  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 62/§80.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 28–9/§37. Tellingly, Hegel immediately adds that, “with this, the Phenomenology of Spirit is concluded.” 48   In support of this interpretation, see Hegel’s summaries in §§438 and 440. 46 47

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correct interpretation and then search for corresponding instantiations—the Phenomenology is not so neatly divided—but at a very general level, the argument does move in roughly that direction. For our purposes, the steps of this argument are especially worth following, since, given Hegel’s understanding of “spirit,” they are equally interpretations of the conditions under which one could identify with or “be at home with oneself in” one’s life. The first step of Hegel’s argument is to assess a candidate interpretation according to which mindedness is understood in terms of cognition, and cognition is understood strictly in terms of the mind’s reception of an object’s independent truth. Here, in other words, a mind’s relationship to otherness—in the form of objects—is supposed to be established by otherness, apart from any contribution from the mind’s side; on such interpretations, “what is true for consciousness is something other than itself.”49 Hegel thus considers views that portray knowledge as a matter of the mind’s being brought into correspondence with objects by mirroring them; on such views, the mind’s unity with otherness is due to its being brought into conformity with something external to it, whether by receiving sensations, perceiving properties, or understanding the forces by which the world is governed. Like Kant, Hegel argues that any such view fails to do justice to the relevant phenomenon—knowledge—precisely insofar as it pictures the mind as passively registering that which is true independent of its own activity, since that which is sensed, perceived, or understood can count as knowledge only if the mind applies universals to it. Apart from the mind’s application of such universals, sensible appearances break up into a series of disconnected This-Here-Nows, properties are not united with one another as properties of a single object, and forces become divided into the unified field of forces in which matter subsists, on the one hand, and matter itself, on the other.50 The moral to be drawn from such failures, Hegel contends, is that a knowing relationship to objects depends upon the mind’s act of applying universals to them; as he puts it, “what the object immediately was in itself—mere being in sense-certainty, the concrete thing in perception, and for the understanding, a force—proves to be in truth, not this at all; instead, this in-itself turns out to be a mode in which the object is only for an other,” that is, for a minded self.51 Hegel claims, accordingly, that the failure of these views teaches us something about how the mind is related to otherness, namely, that the mind’s conformity to objects depends upon the former’s application of universals to the latter, for one cannot grasp an object’s “in-self” apart from the mind’s grasping it “for-self.” (For readability’s sake, I will translate Hegel’s “in-self”

50  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 120/§166.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 95-9/§§136–40.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 120/§166; cf. 117–18/§164.

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and “for-self” as “object” and “subject,” “objective” and “subjective,” “objecthood” and “subjecthood,” and the like.) The fact that the mind must stand in a subjective or “for-self”-relationship to objects leads Hegel to consider a second interpretation of mindedness, according to which the minded self is united with itself immediately, insofar as it treats objects as if they were nothing but what they are for one; it is thus an interpretation, he tells us, which pictures the self as, simply, “the unity of self-consciousness with itself.”52 At issue here are views according to which the minded self’s relationship with otherness is indeed characterized by subjectivity or for-self-ness, but only because the self is supposedly either insulated from, or unconditionally sovereign over, that which is other than it. Hegel considers a series of such views, beginning with a suitably primitive one in which objects are nothing but would-be satisfiers of a self’s desires, such that the self is nothing but a subject, that which objects are for.53 Given, however, that one’s subjecthood or for-me-ness is here established by, and so depends upon, its satisfaction by something other than itself, it follows that this interpretation fails even on its own terms, since a self which depends upon something other than itself is obviously not a pure subject or being-for-self apart from otherness; the problem, as Hegel remarks, is that “desire and the self-certainty obtained in its gratification, are conditioned by the object, for self-certainty comes from superseding this other: in order that this supersession can take place, there must be this other.”54 He thus considers a second such view, which hopes to improve upon the first by establishing one’s subjectivity or for-self-ness not in relationship to objects but in relationship to other selves. The idea here is that if there were an object that could deny its independence from one, by subjecting itself to one’s subjectivity, then one’s dependence on this object would not be at odds with one’s being wholly for-self. One would thus be related to an other, in Hegel’s well-known characterization, as lord to a slave.55 To do the trick, the slave must itself be a subject, for otherwise, if the slave could not cancel its own independence, we would remain stuck with the problem raised against the desire–satisfaction model. In truth, Hegel thinks that we do remain stuck, because if the slave were recognized as a subject, the lord could not simply impose its will upon it as if the slave existed only for the lord’s self, but if it were not so recognized, then

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 121/§167.  Thus Hegel:  “Self-consciousness which is simply for itself and directly characterizes its object as a negative element, or is primarily desire, will therefore, on the contrary, learn through experience that the object is independent” (Phänomenologie, 122/§168). 54  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 126/§175. 55   As Hegel explains, “the lord achieves his recognition through another consciousness . . . Here, therefore, is present this moment of recognition, viz. that the other consciousness sets aside its own being-for-self, and in so doing itself does what the first does to it” (133/§191). 52 53

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the slave’s subjection to the lord’s subjectivity would not count for the lord as anything other than would a desire-satisfying object. It turns out, then, that the object in which the lord has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness. What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality the inessential consciousness and its inessential action.56

In light of these failures, Hegel turns to models on which pure subjectivity is explained not in terms of sovereignty over objects, but in terms of insulation from them. Hegel thus considers Stoicism, in which, on his telling, one attempts to maintain one’s subjectivity by withdrawing into, and so being affected only by, one’s thoughts. Hegel thus claims of Stoicism that “whether on the throne or in chains, in the utter dependence of its individual existence, its aim is to be free, and to maintain that lifeless indifference which steadfastly withdraws from the bustle of existence, alike from being active as passive, into the simple self-essentiality of thought.”57 The trouble with Stoicism, however, is that even if one can sufficiently insulate oneself from the outside world, one ends up with an attenuated selfhood, the scope of which is dictated by circumstances that remain beyond the control of one’s subjectivity. Hegel concludes that such “abstract freedom is thus only the incomplete negation of otherness.”58 This is all made plain by skepticism, since in skepticism the external world is cancelled by thought, yet this cancellation does not suffice to achieve pure subjectivity or being-for-self.59 Skepticism cannot achieve this goal, Hegel argues, because it must continually act so as to cancel the world, such that it is continually conditioned by, and so changing in light of, objects; so Hegel claims that “this consciousness, instead of being self-identical, is in fact nothing but a purely accidental disarray, the dizziness of a perpetually self-engendered disorder.”60 Contrary to its aspirations, therefore, the mind becomes divided within itself, between the would-be purity of its thought and the inescapable intrusions of otherness; Hegel characterizes such a mind as an “unhappy consciousness,” for here mind is unhappy just because it includes such divisions.61 This marks a step forward, however, for in the unhappy consciousness thought and otherness are contained within the same mind, even though they are not yet united by that mind. To alleviate the unhappiness resulting from its self-division, the unhappy consciousness may turn to a minister, that is, to

57  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 133–4/§192.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 138/§199.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 140/§201. 59   On this point, cf. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 140/§202. 60 61  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 142/§205.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 144/§206. 56 58

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one who can supposedly mediate between the two sides and thus reconcile these divisions. “This mediated relation,” Hegel writes, “is thus a syllogism in which the individuality, initially fixed in its antithesis to the in-itself, is united with this other extreme only through a third term.” Crucially, though, “this middle term is itself a conscious being.”62 The fact that the mediator is a conscious being is decisive, because the minded self can now first behold its own nature, as that which unites itself and objects, although it does not yet recognize that this is its nature. In the minister, that is to say, the minded self sees that its truth is that which appears in the syllogism whose extremes appeared as held completely asunder, as the middle term which proclaims to the unchangeable consciousness that the single individual has renounced itself, and, to the individual, that the unchangeable is for it no longer an extreme, but is reconciled with it. This middle term is the unity directly aware of both and connecting them, and is the consciousness of their unity, which it proclaims to consciousness and thereby to itself, the consciousness of the certainty of being all truth.63

Hence the truth of mindedness, as that which unites these two extremes, has finally come on the scene, yet the minded self has not yet recognized this to be the case. To bring this truth to light—and to explain how these extremes could be united—Hegel turns to a third candidate interpretation, which he calls “reason.” This interpretation marks a qualitative advance beyond previous candidates, for here we begin to understand what mindedness really is, namely, that which unites one with that which is other than one, or, more precisely, that which maintains one’s unified self-relationship even in one’s relationship to objects. As in the first candidate interpretation, mind is here united with objects insofar as the two correspond to one another, but, by sharp contrast with that interpretation, mind is now portrayed as corresponding with itself when it corresponds with objects. This is what Hegel means when he claims, astonishingly, that once mind has become aware of its nature as reason, it “is certain that it is itself reality, or that everything actual is nothing other than itself.”64 The best way of understanding what Hegel has in mind here is to begin with his account of objects.65 This account can be summarized in terms of five claims. The first claim is that existence is self-identity over time: Hegel thus argues that “the subsistence or substance of anything that exists is its self-identity, for a failure of self-identity would be its dissolution”; insofar as

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 154/§227.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 157/§231 (my italics). 64  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 157/§232. 65   For a fuller treatment of this account—including its relation to Hegel’s important discussion of laws—see Kreines, Reason in the World. 62

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anything exists, therefore, “it is for itself, or it subsists through this simple oneness with itself.”66 The idea here is that if an object did not endure over time—as itself—it would cease to exist; existence is thus self-identity over time. Self-identity is not a static affair, however, but an object’s ongoing act of self-preservation or self-integration in the face of external circumstances; so Hegel asserts that an object is not a passive subject inertly supporting accidents; it is, on the contrary, the self-moving concept which takes its determinations back into itself. In this movement the passive subject itself perishes; it enters into the differences and the content, and constitutes the determinateness, i.e. the differentiated content and its movement, instead of remaining inertly over against it.67

On this account, then, an object exists only by maintaining its self-identity over time, and it maintains its self-identity through an ongoing movement in which it enters into relationship with otherness and reproduces, in those circumstances, whatever it is that makes it what it is. (Think here of the way cellular organisms remain what they are only through an ongoing process of respiration, alimentation, excretion, and so on.) This brings us to Hegel’s second claim:  if an object maintains its self-identity over time by continually reproducing whatever it is that makes it what it is, it follows that this self-identical element is the object’s essential “quality” or “kind.” This explains Hegel’s contention that “existence is quality (Qualität), self-identical determinateness, or determinate simplicity,” or again, that “it is by quality that one existence is distinguished from another, or is an existence.”68 (A piece of iron may be distinguished from other substances by the fact that it has a particular elemental constitution; if so, this is what it must maintain throughout its circumstances if it is to remain what it is.) Hegel’s third claim is that these essential “qualities” or “kinds” correspond to ideas, and, therefore, at least potentially correspond to our ideas: “Precisely because existence is defined as species,” he writes, “it is a simple thought; Noûs, simplicity, is substance”; from this, it follows that “self-consciousness and being are the same essence—the same, not through comparison, but in and for themselves.”69 That is to say, if (a) an object’s existence is its self-identity over time, (b) that which remains self-identical is an object’s essential “quality” or “kind,” and (c) these qualities (potentially) correspond with the mind’s ideas or categories, then (d) insofar as the mind’s ideas actually correspond to these qualities—as a result of investigation into the object’s self-identity over time70 —they likewise correspond 67  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 40–1/§54.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 45/§60.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 41/§55; 41/§54. 69  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 42/§55; cf. 160/§235. 70   That they result from investigation is important to understanding Hegel’s acceptance of Kant’s Kritik; on this, see James Kreines, “Between the Bounds of Experience and Divine Intuition: Kant’s Epistemic Limits and Hegel’s Ambitions,” in Inquiry 50:3 (2007). 66 68

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with the object’s essence or substance. Hegel thus claims, fourth, that when mind achieves such correspondence, its contemplation of objects is simultaneously a communion with itself: “Because this is the nature of what is,” he argues, and insofar as what is has this nature for knowing, this knowing is not an activity that deals with the content as something alien, is not a reflection away from the content . . . [S]‌ince knowing sees the content return into its own inwardness, its activity is totally absorbed in the content, for it is the immanent self of the content, yet it has at the same time returned into itself, for it is pure self-identity in otherness.71

So if, in observing an object, one perceives its essential qualities, then one’s idea of the object matches up with the object itself, and in beholding the latter one is simultaneously beholding the mind’s own handiwork. In that case, the mind can relate itself to itself even in relating to an object, and can therefore remain at home with itself in this relationship. Interestingly, Hegel suggests that this is why we find it so satisfying when we can explain something: “The reason why ‘explaining’ affords so much self-satisfaction,” he writes, “is just because in it consciousness is, so to speak, communing directly with itself, enjoying only itself; although it seems to be busy with something else, it is in fact occupied only with itself.”72 Insofar as its ideas correspond to an object’s essential qualities, mind is at home with itself in contemplating the object’s content, so to speak; it is also at home with itself because objects have the same form or structure as mind; so Hegel claims, fifth, that objects, in maintaining their self-identity in relationship to otherness, implicitly bear the structure of self-consciousness. This explains some of Hegel’s more curious assertions—for instance, that “the object, to which [mind] is positively related, is therefore a self-consciousness,” or, a bit less enigmatically, that substance is in itself or implicitly subject, [since] all content is its own reflection into itself. The subsistence or substance of anything that exists is its self-identity . . . Self-identity, however, is pure abstraction; but this is thinking. When I say “quality,” I am saying simple determinateness; it is by quality that one existence is distinguished from another, or is an existence; it is for itself, or it subsists through this simple oneness with itself. But it is essentially a thought.73

Hegel’s contention here is (a)  that objects exist just insofar as they maintain their self-identity in relationship to otherness, (b) that, as we have just seen, mind maintains its self-unity in relationship to otherness, from which Hegel infers (c) that mind and object correspond at the level of fundamental

72  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 41/§54.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 117§163.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 233/§347, 41/§54. Hegel also claims that the failures of previous interpretations provide some warrant for this view; on this point, cf. 158–9/§233. 71

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structure. With this, we are now in position to understand the claim with which we began, namely that, as reason, mind becomes certain that it is all reality. “Now that self-consciousness is reason,” Hegel writes, its hitherto negative relation to otherness turns round into a positive relation. Up till now it has been concerned only with its independence and freedom, concerned to save and maintain itself for itself at the expense of the world, or of its own actuality, both of which appeared to it as the negative of its essence. But as reason, assured of itself, it is at peace with them, and can endure them; for it is certain that it is itself reality, or that everything actual is nothing other than itself.74

Mind can now see itself as at home with objects, since the latter correspond not only to the mind’s ideas, but to the mind’s very structure; in contemplating that which is other, accordingly, mind communes with itself, and just so glimpses its own reality as that which unites self with otherness. In coming to understand itself as reason, then, mind begins to see what it really is, namely, that which is united with itself in otherness, and which brings about this unity. This is obviously an important step, for here, mind first beholds its nature and, in consequence, its unity in and with otherness. Minded selfhood has not yet fully realized its truth, however, since its unity-in-otherness is still only internal to the mind; mind has not yet concretely instantiated or actualized itself in otherness, and has not, therefore, united itself with its own self-externalization. At this point, Hegel tells us, “self-consciousness found the thing to be like itself, and itself to be like a thing; i.e., it is aware that it is in itself the objectively real world”; hence, mind “is spirit which, in the duplication of its self-consciousness and in the independence of both, has the certainty of its unity with itself.” Mind now knows the truth about itself, yet this truth has yet to be fully actualized: “This certainty now has to be raised to the level of truth; what holds good for it in principle, and in its inner certainty, has to enter into its consciousness and become explicit for it.”75 We turn, then, to a fourth interpretation—not, now, an interpretation of what minded selfhood is, but of the conditions under which it could achieve self-actualization. The idea here is that minded selfhood can be fully united with itself in otherness only if it can enter into or instantiate itself as itself in otherness, that is, in outward appearance, and so unite itself with this instantiation. To get a rough grip on the issue, think of cases in which one cannot

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 157/§232; cf. similar claims in 162/§237, 260–1/§396, 277/§420.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 233/§347. This is the primary, but not only, means by which Hegel motivates the transition from Reason to Spirit; the other is a claim to the effect that reason’s correspondence to objects depends upon the universality of reason’s ideas, which universality cannot be guaranteed by the reason of an individual mind. For the latter, see 288/§438. 74

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identify with the one whom others see—because, for instance, they cannot see beyond their preconceptions of one, or because one is not acting like oneself; in such cases, one’s outward behavior may not correspond to one’s actual self, or others may fail to perceive one’s self (or even a self) in such behavior. If so, then even though one’s nature, as a minded self, is to unite self with otherness, one will not be united or at home with one’s outward instantiation, since one will not be able to identify with that instantiation itself or with others’ perception of it. In beholding one’s outward appearance, then, one will not be in communion with oneself, or—to borrow another of Hegel’s phrases—one will fail to return to oneself. One’s true nature as a minded self will thus remain over against, or external to, the phenomenal world, in which case one will experience one’s self-unity as existing in a “beyond,” as Hegel puts it; as such, one’s life will “fall apart into one realm in which self-consciousness as well as its object is actual, and into another, the realm of pure consciousness which, lying beyond the first, is not a present actuality but exists only as faith.”76 On the resulting picture, minded selfhood exists only in a transcendent realm, exterior to the actual world, and so cannot experience its acts in the latter as expressions of its own nature. Indeed, given that such acts must then appear to fall short of mind’s pure existence in the “beyond,” these acts must appear impure and, so, to render one guilty; Hegel explains, accordingly, that, “by this act, it gives up the specific quality of the ethical life, of being the simple certainty of immediate truth, and initiates the division of itself into itself as the active principle, and into the reality over against it, a reality which, for it, is negative. By the deed, therefore, it becomes guilty.”77 The idea here is that if one’s actions fail to express or live up to one’s true nature, then one’s acts stand in antithesis to one, and one is in this sense “guilty.” To overcome this antithesis, it is necessary to identify the conditions under which one could be united with one’s acts, or one’s acts could be self-expressive. What it would take, apparently, is an ethical community or way of life that corresponds with minded selfhood—a way of life, that is, in which (a) a minded self can express itself as itself and be recognized as such by other minded selves, which requires (b) that this way of life be characterized by universals that facilitate such expression and recognition. One’s own self-expressions could then be recognized as embodying the universal, and so recognized by others who embody it, such that each could recognize the other as a minded self, and their “inward” nature could thus become “outward” in such a way that they could be at home with themselves in this outwardness. In a difficult but crucial passage, accordingly, Hegel contends that

76

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 322/§486.

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 307–8/§468.

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if we look on this still inner spirit as substance that has already advanced to the stage of having an outer existence, then in this concept there is disclosed the realm of ethical life. For this is nothing else than the absolute spiritual unity of the essence of individuals in their independent actual existence; it is an intrinsically universal self-consciousness that takes itself to be actual in another consciousness, in such a way that this has complete independence, or is looked on as a thing, and it is precisely therein that the universal self-consciousness is aware of its unity with it, and only in this unity with this objective being is it self-consciousness . . . The single individual consciousness, conversely, is only this existent unity insofar as it is aware of the universal consciousness in its individuality as its own being, since what it does and is, is the universal ethic [Sitte].78

This is a complicated claim, to say the least, but the idea is (a) that minded selves can be fully actual only if they participate in a way of life that facilitates such actualization, and (b)  that such actualization is possible only if each individual self is an expression of the universal, and the universal is an expression of each. Consider an example: I am a teacher, and I present myself to others as a teacher—one might say, instructively, that this is one of the ways that I “put myself out there.” Others may then see me as a would-be instance of the general category “teacher.” In such a case, the category “teacher” obviously plays a key role in shaping both what I mean to present myself as to others, and what others perceive me to be. So, for instance, if “teacher” meant something like, “an enormously learned person who shares some of this learning with others,” then in presenting myself as a teacher, I would be putting myself forward as something that I am not, and would therefore have a hard time identifying with my self-presentation or with that as which others would see me. On the other hand, if “teacher” meant something more like “someone who tries to help others become independent contributors to a shared inquiry, and who does so primarily by facilitating their acquisition of knowledge and intellectual discipline,” then I  would feel much more at home with my self-presentation as a teacher and with others’ perceptions of me as one. In that case, what I am for others or outwardly would match up with what I am for myself or inwardly; my self-presentation would then truly be a self-presentation, and others’ perceptions of me would correspond with who I really am. I would be fully united, therefore, with my appearance, and in beholding others’ beholdings of me, I would return to or be in communion with myself. Very roughly, then, that is what it would look like if one were to present oneself to others as oneself, in such a way that they can perceive one’s true self and one can be fully at home or united with one’s outward appearance. The key here, obviously, is to determine what sort of universals would have

78

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 234/§349; cf. a similar claim on 288–9/§439.

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to circulate within a community in order for that community to support such self-presentation and perception. Hegel elaborates a fairly comprehensive answer to this question in §§483–552 of his Encyclopedia and, especially, in his Philosophy of Right.79 In these more comprehensive treatments, Hegel defends a fine-grained account of the universals and institutions that would allow minded selves to be at home with themselves in a wide range of particular circumstances. Within the Phenomenology, Hegel’s more modest goal is to outline a set of conditions sufficient—but not, I think, necessary—for a minded self to be recognized as such by other minded selves, and vice versa, such that they can be at home with themselves in their outward appearance.80 To arrive at this goal, and to provide some warrant for the claims he will eventually make, Hegel’s strategy is to begin with a “one-sided” approach to these issues, identify problems internal to that approach, and suggest that these problems end up pushing it to overcome its one-sidedness. We see this strategy in Hegel’s portrayal of a process that finally culminates in mutual recognition, to which I will limit our attention. The process unfolds through several steps. First, Hegel introduces us to a character guided by its conscience alone, and who is therefore immediately certain that whatever it does is right. This character, he explains, is a “concrete moral spirit which, in the consciousness of pure duty, does not give itself an empty criterion to be used against actual consciousness; on the contrary, pure duty, as also the nature opposed to it, are superseded moments. Here spirit is, in an immediate unity, a self-actualizing being, and the action is immediately something concretely moral.”81 The “conscientious self” would thus seem to be at home with his or her actions, since these are taken to be necessarily coincident with duty. This brings us to a second step: although the conscientious self assumes that its acts accord with duty, it still intends that they actually do so accord, which means that it presents them to others as the doing of duty or as instances of a universal that transcends his or her own conscience; as a result, there may arise a discrepancy between that as which the conscientious self presents his

79   To understand the latter’s connection with these themes from the Phänomenologie, see especially §§142–57. 80   Before turning to these conditions, Hegel first considers two others that are supposed to do the trick: one in which selves are supposed to show up for others simply in virtue of their enjoying the bare legal status of “person,” and a second in which selves are supposed to show up in virtue of bringing their actions into conformity with the moral law; with respect to the former, cf. 416–17/§633; with respect to the latter, 403/§611. 81  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 417/§634; here, then, “Duty is no longer the universal that stands over against the self; on the contrary, it is known to have no validity when thus separated. It is now the law that exists for the sake of the self, not the self that exists for the sake of the law” (419–20/§639). For an especially perceptive treatment of this material, see Molly Farneth, “Agon and Reconciliation: Ethical Conflict and Religious Practice in Hegel’s Account of Spirit” (PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2014).

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or her acts, and that as which they are perceived by others. Hegel suggests, therefore, that conscience has not given up pure duty or the abstract in-itself; duty is the essential moment of relating itself, qua universality, to another . . . The action is thus only the translation of its individual content into the objective element, in which it is universal and recognized, and it is just the fact that it is recognized that makes the deed a reality.82

The conscientious self thus renders its actions liable to judgment by the standard of a universal—duty—that is not identical with his or her own conscience. In acting, then, the conscientious self opens itself up to judgment, which brings us to a third step: these acts, simply in virtue of their particularity, fail to instantiate the pure universal, and those to whom they are presented may judge them as such. “Conscience,” Hegel explains, is positively aware that it, as this particular self, makes the content . . . but in the purpose of its action, a purpose with an actual content, it is aware of itself as this particular individual, and is conscious of the antithesis between what it is for itself and what it is for others, of the antithesis of universality or duty and its reflection out of universality into itself.83

The conscientious self thus becomes aware of a discrepancy between its deed and the would-be universality of that deed, and others are in any case quick to point out such discrepancies. Others thereby play the role of judges, since they realize that “what conscience places before them . . . is something expressing only the self of another, not their own self; not only do they know themselves to be free from it, but they must dispose of it in their own self-consciousness, nullify it by judging and explaining it in order to preserve their own self.”84 So then: the conscientious self, once so sure that its acts expressed the universal, now experiences the universal as standing in judgment over them, and experiences its true self as standing in antithesis to the realm in which it acts. In consequence, what was meant to have been an occasion for others to recognize the conscientious self in his or her self-presentation, has become instead an occasion for division, because the language of “duty,” the language in which all reciprocally acknowledge each other as acting conscientiously, this universal identity, falls apart into the non-identity of individual being-for-self: each consciousness is just as much simply reflected out of its universality into itself. As a result, the antithesis of individuality to other individuals, and to the universal, inevitably comes on the scene.85

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 420/§640.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 433–4/§659; cf. 426–7/§648. 84 85  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 427/§649.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 433/§659. 82 83

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Hence, the conscientious self is at home neither with its acts nor with others’ perceptions of him or her, and, therefore, cannot commune with him or herself in his or her being-for-others. He or she thus experiences him or herself as an individual subject over against other such individuals, but this ends up providing him or her with a new possibility for overcoming such over-againstness. A  fourth step, then, is taken when the conscientious self comes to the realization that he or she and the judge are the same in this fundamental respect, that each is a particular subject or “being-for-self.” That is to say, the conscientious self realizes that the judge’s judgment, too, is not purely universal but is likewise a particular expression, such that he or she recognizes the judge as being the same, in this respect, as him or herself. (Indeed, at this point the conscientious self implicitly proposes a new universal, according to which each is a self capable of reconciliation with other selves and so of maintaining its unity-in-otherness, in which each could see itself.) In response to the judge’s verdict, accordingly, the conscientious self can now confess his or her guilt, but he or she can equally expect the judge to recognize his or her liability to this same verdict. The conscientious self thus recognizes the judge as in this respect identical to him or herself, and expects the judge to recognize this, too: “By putting itself, then, in this way on a level with the doer on whom it passes judgment,” Hegel explains, the judge is recognized by the latter as the same as himself. This latter does not merely find himself apprehended by the other as something alien and disparate from it, but rather finds that other, according to its own nature and disposition, identical with himself [as a particular subject]. Perceiving this identity and giving utterance to it, he confesses this to the other, and equally expects that the other, having in fact put himself on the same level, will also respond in words in which he will give utterance to this identity with him, and expects that this mutual recognition will now exist in fact. His confession is not an abasement, a humiliation, a throwing-away of himself in relation to the other; for this utterance is not a one-sided affair, which would establish his disparity with the other; on the contrary, he gives himself utterance solely on account of his having seen his identity with the other; he, on his side, gives expression to their common identity in his confession . . . He therefore expects that the other will contribute his part to this existence.86

At this point, then, the conscientious self has confessed that it is what the judge perceives it to be, namely, a particular subject (rather than one whose subjectivity is itself universal, as the conscientious self had initially assumed). It has also seen through the putative universality of the judge’s subjectivity, and so expects that the judge, too, will confess its particularity. This expectation is initially disappointed, however, which is a fifth step in the process.

86

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 438/§666.

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The judging self takes itself simply to be representing the universal, and so has a hard time seeing that its judgment doubles back on itself. Hence, when the conscientious self expects the judge to echo its confession—“I am so,” that is, I am what you charge me with being, namely a particular rather than straightforwardly universal self—the judge bridles:  “This was not what the judging consciousness meant,” Hegel explains, quite the contrary. It repels this community of nature, and is the hard heart that is for itself, and which rejects any continuity with the other. As a result, the situation is reversed. The one who made the confession sees himself repulsed, and sees the other to be in the wrong when he refuses to let his own inner being come forth into the outer existence of speech . . . [The judge] refuses to put itself into communication with the other which, in its confession, had ipso facto renounced its separate being-for-self, and thereby expressly superseded its particularity, and in so doing posited itself in continuity with the other as a universal. The other, however, retains within itself and for itself its uncommunicative being-for-self; and it retains, in face of the individual who did confess, just the same uncommunicative being-for-self.87

The judge readily perceives that the would-be universality of its counterpart’s subjectivity is not in fact universal, and thus insists that the latter confess its particularity. It is not yet ready to confess the particularity of its own subjectivity, however, and so refuses to recognize its essential continuity with the conscientious self. In consequence, neither the conscientious self nor the judge can see itself in the other’s perception of it, and, therefore, neither can return to themselves in this perception; Hegel thus claims that “it is its [i.e. the judge’s] own self which hinders that other’s return from the deed into the spiritual existence of speech and into the identity of spirit, and by this hardness of heart produces the disparity which still exists.”88 If the judging consciousness were to recognize that it is liable to the same judgment it levels against the conscientious self, however, then we could proceed to a sixth step, in which the judge would recognize itself in the conscientious self’s perception of it, just as the conscientious self recognized itself in the judge’s perception. In that case, the judge would “renounce the divisive thought,” Hegel tells us, “and the hard-heartedness of the being-for-self which clings to it, because it has in fact seen itself in the first.”89 Hence, just as the conscientious self has seen itself in the judge’s perception and confessed “It is so,” so the judge would now see itself in the conscientious self’s perception of the continuity between them. Each would thus identify with the other’s perception of it, and  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 438–9/§667.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 439/§667; likewise, “it cannot attain to an identity with the consciousness it has repulsed, nor therefore to a vision of the unity of itself in the other, cannot attain to an objective existence” (439–40/§668). 89  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 440/§670. 87

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so recognize the other as a subject or being-for-self; at the same time, each would return to itself as a subject in its own right, and so, finally, achieve unity between what it is for itself, inwardly, and what it is, outwardly, for others. We thus arrive at the climactic step of this process, namely, the point at which a new kind of universal—spirit as that which unites otherness—has emerged, such that minded selves can return to or commune with themselves in their outward activity and in their perception by others. At this point, then, the minded self maintains its unity with itself precisely by overcoming its antithetical relationship to others, such that this antithesis is itself the indiscrete continuity and identity of “I”  =  “I;” and each, through the very contradiction of its pure universality, which at the same time still strives against its identity with the other, and cuts itself off from it, explicitly supersedes itself within its own self. Through this externalization, this knowledge which in its existence is self-discordant returns into the unity of the self. It is the actual “I,” the universal knowledge of itself in its absolute opposite, in the knowledge which remains internal, and which, on account of the purity of its separated being-within-self, is itself completely universal. The reconciling Yea, in which the two “I”s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the “I” which has expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself.90

In being recognized as a subject by another whom one recognizes as such, accordingly, one can recognize oneself in that as which one is recognized, and can therefore be at home with oneself in this recognition. With that, we have also arrived at a climactic moment in the Phenomenology, for we now have before us a fairly complete—albeit rough—sketch of Hegel’s account of minded selfhood and, in light of this account, of some conditions under which such selfhood could maintain its unity-in-otherness. On the account that has emerged, the nature of minded selfhood is to maintain its unity-in-otherness, and under the right conditions such selfhood can achieve a kind of infinity or absoluteness, insofar as nothing would then be finally over against it: under the right conditions, that is to say, the in-self of objects corresponds to the mind’s idea of them—corresponds, that is, to what they are for the minded self—just as one’s own in-self, as a subject or for-self, corresponds to itself in one’s outward acts and in what one is for others. The more such conditions can be established, the more fully one can commune with oneself in otherness, and the more one can be at home with one’s life.

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 442/§671. I have here omitted the end of the last sentence—in which Hegel remarks that “it is God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge”—not because I mean to avoid this sentiment, but because it is better understood in light of the next section. 90

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4.3.  U N IT Y W ITH WOR LD-SPIR IT At this point, one might reasonably expect the Phenomenology either, mercifully, to end, or to say more about the conditions under which minded selves could achieve complete unity with themselves. It may seem surprising, therefore, that at this point Hegel proceeds instead to a discussion of religion. Does Hegel think that religion contributes something to the preceding account? Or, perhaps, that the preceding account sheds light on religion? There has been no shortage of answers to these questions; indeed, the longest-standing disagreements among Hegel’s interpreters have been over these issues. One prominent answer—think of it as a Feuerbachian answer—suggests that, for Hegel, religion depicts that which is true of minded selves, yet religion fails to realize (or teach) that this is what it is doing. To proponents of this answer, then, Hegel turns to religion not because it contributes anything to his account of minded selfhood, but for precisely the opposite reason, namely, that his account both explains religion and renders it obsolete.91 According to this view, Hegel is trying to undermine and, finally, eliminate religion. A second answer—call it the civil-religion answer—shares a key feature with the first, viz. the idea that religion merely offers a picture of that which is otherwise true of minded selves, but without quite realizing that that is what it is doing. The main difference is that this answer sees Hegel as wanting nevertheless to preserve religion—albeit in improved form—since the pictures offered by religion can play a role in helping common folk to achieve some of the self-unity he has been discussing. Not everyone is a philosopher, after all, but that does not mean that such persons should not enjoy some measure of communion with themselves in otherness.92 Differences aside, there are a few good reasons to ascribe to Hegel a view along one of these lines. First, as already mentioned, there is the apparent completeness of the account Hegel has already elaborated, such that it is not clear how religion could contribute anything to that account. It makes sense, therefore, to think of Hegel as using the preceding account to shed light on, and so help us do without, religion. A second reason, regularly adduced in recent interpretations, is that Hegel was convinced by Kant’s critique of metaphysics, in alleged consequence of which he could not have accepted a “God” other than, say, one that has been projected by human mindedness. If valid,

91   The so-called “non-metaphysical” readers of Hegel, especially Pippin, seem to hold such a view, at least partly as a result of their opposition to traditional “Spirit-monist” readings of the sort offered by Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 92   The best defense of such an interpretation is Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, cf. “Religion and Demythologization in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in Dean Moyar and Michael Quante (eds.), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:  A  Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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these reasons may have the effect of inclining readers toward a Feuerbachian or civil-religion interpretation, but taken by themselves, they would not dictate such an interpretation. That brings us to the strongest reason for interpreting Hegel in these ways, namely, Hegel’s well-known characterization of religion as “representation” (Vorstellung) or, in Wallace’s colorful phrase, “picture-thinking.” In so characterizing religion, Hegel is taken to be suggesting that religion presents us with the truth about ourselves, but presents this not as our truth, but as true of something that transcends us. In that case, religion would be a sort of mythical projection whose true content can be preserved precisely by demythologizing it, that is, by recognizing it as a picture of ourselves. This is what Hegel is taken to have in mind, accordingly, when he complains that religion portrays absolute spirit as “something alien,” such that the minded self “does not recognize itself in this thought of spirit, does not recognize the nature of pure self-consciousness.” 93 There are good reasons, then, for interpreting Hegel along Feuerbachian or civil-religious lines. There are also good reasons for interpreting Hegel along a rather different line, not least because this other interpretation seems better able to do justice to all of the relevant texts94 (including those usually cited by Feuerbachians, as when Hegel claims that we should see religion as presenting us with pictures of our true nature as “spirit,” and that we should therefore not encounter religion’s “spirit” as if it were something alien). On this interpretation, religion’s importance for Hegel is due to the fact that, in it, the world’s own Spirit reveals itself to, and reconciles itself with, minded selves, and since the world-Spirit is itself a unity of self in otherness, it follows that when minded selves are reconciled to it, they are simultaneously at home with themselves and the world itself. Each element of this interpretation requires elaboration. First, Hegel claims that religion can contribute something important to the account sketched thus far, namely, the self-revelation of the world’s own Spirit, which is important because, without it, his account would be one-sidedly subjective:  Insofar as self-consciousness one-sidedly grasps only its own externalization, then even though its object is for it just as much being as self, and it knows

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 502/§771 Cf. the similar claim on 498/§765.   Including, importantly, Hegel’s claims to Lutheranism, for which see, for instance, his letter to Tholuck, July 3, 1826 (Letter 514a in Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister [Hamburg:  Felix Meiner, 1969]), his remarks about the Trinity in his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, third part, ed. Carl Ludwig Michelet (Berlin: 1844), p. 104, as well as Hegel’s endorsement of Friedrich Göschel’s Aphorismen über Nichtwissen und absolutes Wissen (1829), for which see Werke, vol. 20, p. 309. My interpretation of Hegel’s religion thus bears a strong resemblance to Peter Hodgson’s, for which see his Hegel and Christian Theology (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005), and to Robert R.  Williams, Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), though their interpretations focus more on Hegel’s Lectures than on the Phänomenologie. 93

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all existence to be spiritual in nature, nevertheless true spirit has still not yet come to be explicitly for self-consciousness inasmuch as being in general or substance has not equally, on its side, implicitly externalized itself and become self-consciousness. For in that case, all existence is spiritual being only from the standpoint of consciousness, not in its own self. Spirit is in this way only imagined into existence.95

Hegel thus suggests that his account of minded selfhood, and of mind’s relationship to external circumstances, may appear one-sided, inasmuch as the account moves only from mind to its circumstances. If the external world were somehow to present itself to one, however, in such a way that minded selves could unite themselves with this self-presentation, then this one-sidedness would be fully overcome. It may seem a bit odd to think of the world presenting itself to us, especially if this self-presentation is construed as something other than the mere sensible appearance of objects, but odd or not, this is how Hegel seems to understand God’s self-revelation, for if (a) God is the Spirit by which all things are animated, and (b) God reveals Godself to us, then (c) in God’s self-revelation, the Spirit animating all things has presented itself to us. Again, this may seem like a rather fantastic set of claims, but Hegel thinks that they are warranted by his earlier arguments about reason and morality; the idea, apparently, is that he has already demonstrated that the world is spirit-shaped, as it were, in the sense of corresponding to minded selfhood, so that religion can be seen as arriving not out of the blue, nor as a sort of wishful thinking, but as the expression of a truth already implicit in preceding arguments. This is what Hegel has in mind, it seems, when he asserts that “religion presupposes that these [earlier moments] have run their full course and is their simple totality or absolute self,” or again, that “religion is the perfection of spirit into which its individual moments—consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit—return and have returned as into their ground,” such that “the genesis of religion in general is contained in the movement of the universal moments.”96 Hegel thus contends not only that the world is spirit-shaped, but that the world’s own spirit cannot be otherwise than spirit. Supposing, then, that the world is spirit-shaped and that we now know it to be such, Hegel next claims, on the one hand, that if the world were animated by spirit, this spirit would have to reveal itself, and on the other, that it could do so only as and to spirit. With respect to the former, Hegel reiterates that spirit is minded selfhood that is united with itself in outwardness; he writes, accordingly, that “the divine being is known as spirit,” and that “spirit is the knowledge of oneself in the externalization of oneself; the being that is the

95

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 492–3/§756.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 446/§679, 446–7/§680.

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movement of retaining its self-identity in otherness.”97 For the world-Spirit to be revealed, therefore, is for it to know itself and be united with itself in its self-externalization. Given that world-Spirit is spirit, moreover, its very nature compels it to actualize such unity-in-externalization, since spirit that is unity in itself is not satisfied to be this only in itself; rather, it achieves its satisfaction only when it is actually united with itself in otherness. Hegel thus maintains that “Spirit that is expressed in the element of pure thought is itself essentially this, to be not merely in this element, but to be actual spirit, for in its concept lies otherness itself, i.e. the supersession of the pure concept that is only thought.”98 That brings us to the latter claim; to understand what Hegel has in mind here, recall his earlier remarks about the conditions under which minded selves could be united with themselves in outwardness: a minded self can be so united, he argued, only if it is perceived as such by another minded self whom it perceives as such. This same logic applies to the world-Spirit, in that the latter can be fully united with itself in otherness only if it is recognized as spirit by other spirits—that is, by other minded selves. Hence, for the world-Spirit to be revealed is for it to make itself known as itself, “but it is known precisely in its being known as spirit,” Hegel explains, as a being that is essentially a self-conscious being. For there is something hidden from consciousness in its object if the object is for self-consciousness an “other” or something alien, and if it does not know it as its own self. This concealment ceases when the absolute being qua spirit is the object of consciousness; for then the object has the form of self in its relation to consciousness, i.e. consciousness knows itself immediately in the object, or is manifest to itself in the object. Consciousness is manifest to itself only in its own certainty of itself; its object now is the self, but the self is nothing alien; on the contrary, it is the indissoluble unity with itself, the universal that is immediately such. It is the pure concept, pure thought or being-for-self which is immediately returned into itself and in communion with itself; it is, therefore, that which is truly and alone revealed.99

On Hegel’s account, then, the world-Spirit must strive to actualize its unity-inotherness, and it can achieve such actualization only in being recognized as united-in-otherness by others who are so united. The picture that emerges looks something like this: world-Spirit presents itself to others, in the hope of being recognized by them; if it is so recognized, world-Spirit can know itself in their knowing of it, can see itself in their seeing of it, and can therefore be united with itself in its outward appearance. This explains Hegel’s otherwise cryptic claim that, in revelation, “the actual world-Spirit has attained to this knowledge of itself; it is then, too, that this knowledge first enters its consciousness.”100

97

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 494/§759.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 495/§759.

99

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 502/§772.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 494/§757.

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In rough outline, then, Hegel provides himself with a model that he then uses as a criterion for assessing the extent to which candidate revelations could count as actual revelations of world-Spirit. Of these, the most important for our purposes is his treatment of Christianity, since Hegel sees Christianity as a religion in which the content of revelation is accurately depicted, for in it God is represented as a unity of self with otherness and as actually establishing this unity. Christianity is thus an objectively true religion, for Hegel, though he thinks that its content is not yet expressed in a correspondingly true form. This is the case, he argues, insofar as Christianity sees God as otherwise than Spirit, and as finally over-against minded selves. Hegel summarizes what he takes to be the true content of Christianity in terms of a three-step movement, beginning with the fall of humanity. Hegel understands the fall in terms of humanity’s would-be withdrawal into subjectivity or pure being-for-self, and the state of alienation consequent upon this withdrawal; in the doctrine of the fall, then, man is represented in this way:  that it once happened, without any necessity, that he lost the form of being at one with himself through plucking the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and was expelled from the state of innocence, from nature which yielded its fruits without toil, and from paradise, from the garden with its creatures.101

Humanity thus moves from a state of innocence, in which it does not yet perceive the distinction between what it does and what is good, to a state in which it becomes aware of this distinction and, therefore, because it is not identical with this good, of its guilt. Persons thus become withdrawn into their own particular subjectivities, and “since this withdrawal into itself or self-centeredness of the existent consciousness immediately makes it self-discordant, evil appears as the primary existence of the inwardly-turned consciousness.”102 Human existence is characterized, therefore, by an antithesis between individual subjects and the universal good that stands over against them and of which they fall short. The second step in this movement is taken when God, who is reconciliatory by nature, acts so as to cancel this antithesis. Hegel thus explains that, for Christianity, the movement of reconciliation is initiated by that side which is determined as possessing being-in-itself as contrasted with the other. This is represented as a spontaneous act; but the necessity for its externalization lies in the concept that being-in-itself, which is so determined in the antithesis, has just for that reason no genuine subsistence. It is, therefore, that side which has no being-for-self but simple being as its essence that alienates itself from itself, yields to death, and thereby reconciles absolute essence with itself. For, in this movement, it manifests itself as spirit; abstract

101

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 504/§775.

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 504/§776.

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essence is alienated from itself, it has natural existence and self-like actuality; this its otherness, or its sensuous presence, is taken back again by the second othering and posited as superseded, as universal. The essence has thereby come to be its own self in its sensible presence; the immediate existence of actuality has ceased to be something alien and external for the absolute essence, since that existence is superseded, is universal. This death is, therefore, its resurrection as spirit.103

God is here represented as entering into the antithesis, remaining united with Godself in it, and therefore superseding the antithesis. God overcomes the antithesis, that is to say, by negating its negation and so maintaining God’s self-communion even in enduring that negation. To put the point in a more traditional theological idiom, God overcomes sin and condemnation precisely by taking them upon Godself, even unto death on a cross, so that sin and condemnation no longer fall outside of communion with God. This brings us to the third step, in which fallen persons see themselves in, and so identify with, this reconciliation, such that the antitheses by which their lives had been characterized are overcome not only objectively but subjectively. Reconciliation has now become their own reality, in other words, and is thus a “spiritual unity, or the unity in which the differences are present only as moments or as superseded.”104 Just as these antitheses have been overcome by God’s act of maintaining self-unity in enduring them, so individuals who identify with God’s unity with them can trust that these antitheses have been overcome, so that they, too, can maintain their self-unity. The movement of reconciliation, as depicted by Christianity, is thus complete, and Hegel claims, again, that the content of this depiction, according to which the world-Spirit achieves unity-in-otherness, is true. He also claims, interestingly, that the movement so depicted presses beyond mere depiction, since its last step moves us in the direction of an appropriate form, emphasizing as it does that reconciliation must become a person’s own truth. Hegel argues, accordingly, that in Christianity one is to know that one has been reconciled to God, and that “this knowing is the inbreathing of the spirit (Begeistung)”; human spirit is thus to be reconciled to the world-Spirit and know itself to be such, in consequence of which “spirit is self-knowing spirit; it knows itself; that which is object for it is, or its representation (Vorstellung) is the true, absolute content  .  .  . It is at the same time not merely the content of self-consciousness, and not merely object for it, but it is also actual spirit.”105 Christianity’s representation should thereby move beyond mere representation, since that representation’s content—God as world-Spirit that is reconciled to one—is itself supposed to become realized as one’s own

103

104  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 506–7/§779.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 509/§780.  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 512/§785; 513/§786.

105

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content, and therefore no longer pictured as if it were external to one. Insofar as Christianity remains in the realm of representation, then, it fails to fulfill its own picture of itself. Hegel laments that Christianity has indeed failed in this regard, which leads him to make a remarkable claim, namely, that philosophy here contributes to religion’s own fulfillment—and so performs a properly religious task—precisely by providing religion with a form that corresponds with its content.106 The true content, again, is that minded selves have been fully reconciled to world-Spirit; the true form would be for minded selves to realize this reconciliation as their own, that is, a bit more technically, for them to be united with the world-Spirit’s unity with them, and, since both sides unite themselves with the other, to be fully at home with themselves in this unity. Hegel returns, therefore, to his earlier treatment of forgiveness, for in forgiveness, recall, minded selves finally correspond to their nature as that which maintains unity of self in otherness. The idea here, apparently, is that once minded selves realize that they can maintain self-unity even in antithesis to other such selves—i.e. in forgiveness—they can see themselves as maintaining this sort of unity in relation to God, and can therefore unite themselves with God’s self-unity, just as God unites Godself with theirs.107 In that case, reconciliation would no longer be external to them, since they reconcile themselves to the world-Spirit’s reconciliation with them. Hegel thus reiterates his contention that minded selves must be able outwardly to enact, and so remain united with, their nature as maintainers of unity-in-otherness, and that we see such enactment in confession and forgiveness. He writes, accordingly, that in forgiveness, what it [minded selfhood] is in truth, it now also makes explicit, and the negative is, as determinateness of each both for the other and in itself, self-superseding . . . It is only through action that spirit is in such a way that it is really there, that is, when it raises its existence into thought and thereby into an absolute antithesis, and returns out of this antithesis, in and through the antithesis itself.108

Minded selfhood has thus realized itself as able to bear the negation of others, and can thus realize itself in relation to the negation-bearing world-Spirit. That is to say, once minded selves have actualized themselves in otherness and   For a claim to this effect, see 513–14/§787.   So Hegel: “This reconciliation of consciousness with self-consciousness thus shows itself as brought about from two sides: on one side, in the religious spirit, and on the other side, in consciousness itself as such. The difference between them is that in the former this reconciliation is in the form of being-in-itself or implicit being, and in the latter in the explicit form of being-for-self. In our consideration of them they at first fall apart . . . The unification of the two sides has not yet been exhibited; it is this that closes the series of the shapes of spirit, for in it spirit attains to a knowledge of itself not only as it is in itself or as possessing absolute content, nor only as it is for itself as a form devoid of content, or as the aspect of self-consciousness, but as it is both in essence and in actuality, or in and for itself ” (Phänomenologie, 519–20/§794). 108  Hegel, Phänomenologie, 522/§796. 106 107

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returned to themselves therein, they have achieved spirit-hood of a sort that can be fully united with the world-Spirit, and with which the world-Spirit, too, can be fully united. Once they have become so united, there is finally no otherness, in principle, in which minded selves are not at home with themselves, which is what Hegel is referring to when he claims that they have achieved a sort of “absoluteness,” in that minded selves can now see themselves in all that confronts them and so experience such confrontation as a simultaneous communion with themselves. Hegel thus concludes that “this last shape of spirit—the spirit which at the same time gives its complete and true content the form of the self and thereby realizes its concept as remaining in its concept in this realization—this is absolute knowing”; the minded self is “absolute,” then, insofar as it has a content which it differentiates from itself; for it is pure negativity or the dividing of itself, it is consciousness. This content is, in its difference, itself the “I,” for it is the movement of superseding itself, or the same pure negativity that the “I” is. In it, as differentiated, the “I” is reflected into itself; it is only when the “I” communes with itself in its otherness that the content is comprehended. Stated more specifically, this content is nothing else than the very movement just spoken of; for the content is spirit that traverses its own self and does so for itself as spirit by the fact that it has the “shape” of the concept in its objectivity.109

The Hegelian waters are running especially deep here, but his point is not nearly as obscure as the prose in which it is expressed. As we have already seen, Hegel claims (a) that I, as a minded self, can see myself in objects insofar as the latter correspond to my concept of them; (b) that I can see myself in outward appearance—as an object to others—insofar as I can identify with others’ perceptions of me, and these others can identify with my perception of them; and (c) that I can see myself in the Spirit that animates the world insofar as (i) the latter renders itself perceptible to me and identifies with my perception of it, just as I identify with its perception of me, and (ii) this Spirit overcomes all antitheses, including my antithesis to it. Hegel thus attempts to explain how persons could be at home with themselves even when facing various antitheses and oppositions, precisely because they can actually see themselves in everything that they encounter and can therefore experience such encounters as a communion with themselves. In broad outline, then, Hegel has provided us with a response to the problem of mineness, for his account explains how one can be at home with oneself in, and so identify with, one’s life. Religion plays a role in this response, for in religion one sees that the Spirit by which the world is animated is a unity of self in otherness, and one actually becomes united with this spirit, such

109

 Hegel, Phänomenologie, 523/§798; 523/§799.

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that there is finally nothing outside of one’s own unity-in-otherness. This is a fairly abstract understanding of religion, however, in consequence of which it may be hard to see how its contribution to “mineness” is all that important. The specifics of this understanding emerge much more clearly in Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion, and, as a result, so does its significance in enabling one to identify with one’s life.

4.4.  CONSUM M ATE R ECONCILI ATION Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion stand in substantial continuity with the Phenomenology as thus interpreted, while extending the latter’s analysis in a few important directions.110 Consideration of these lectures augments the Phenomenology’s account of mineness, accordingly, while lending additional support to the interpretation just sketched. The lectures’ key claims are as follows: (a) that God is Spirit, that is, a unity of self with otherness; (b) that although humans are implicitly spirit, we are not this explicitly, in consequence of which we are at odds with God, the world, and ourselves; (c) that God overcomes this and all other oppositions by taking them upon or uniting them with Godself; and (d) that insofar as we identify with and realize ourselves in this unity, we are reconciled to God, the world, and ourselves. We should not be surprised to find substantial agreement between the Phenomenology and the lectures on religion, since Hegel claims that the subject matter of philosophy is the same as that of religion, namely, God and all things in relation to God. Hegel thus remarks that “the object of religion, like that of philosophy, is the eternal truth, God and nothing but God and the explication of God”; from this, it follows that “philosophy is only explicating itself when it explicates religion, and when it explicates itself it is explicating religion.”111 The common denominator here is spirit, that is, the sort of minded selfhood that 110  I  lack the space, unfortunately, to trace these themes through their development in Hegel’s Logik and Encyklopädie, but my interpretation is strongly corroborated by evidence in each. Those interested in this evidence might start with §§377–85 of the Encyklopädie. For a helpful—and provocative—recent treatment of the Logik, see Nicholas Adams, Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). 111  Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ed. Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983–5), I:63 (hereafter VPR; ET: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. Peter C. Hodgson [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984–5]). I am here focusing on the 1827 lectures, though these themes are prominent throughout 1821 and 1824 versions. For a defense of this choice of focus, see Walter Jaeschke, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), and Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel. On Hegel’s mature understanding of religion, see, in addition to Jaeschke and Lewis, Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology; Williams, Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God; Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994); Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

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is at home with itself in otherness. As we have just seen, Hegel’s philosophy explicates the nature of spirit and the conditions under which it could actually realize its nature as unity with otherness. Hegel there claims, moreover, that God—which term he now prefers over “world-Spirit”—is spirit, too, which is to say that God is implicitly a unity of self with otherness, and that God, too, can realize this unity only under certain conditions. Hegel argues, therefore, that God can realize God’s nature as spirit only in communion with minded selves, just as minded selves can realize their nature only in communion with God. As he conceives them, then, philosophy and religion necessarily belong together, for “according to the philosophical concept, God is spirit, concrete; and if we inquire more precisely what spirit is, it turns out that the basic concept of spirit is the one whose development constitutes the entire doctrine of religion.” This is the case because, in religion as in philosophy, “spirit is a self-manifesting, a being for spirit. Spirit is for spirit and of course not merely in an external, contingent manner. Instead, it is spirit only insofar as it is for spirit.”112 Given this convergence, Hegel takes it that his philosophical claims about spirit can shed light on the nature of religion, even as these claims turn out to depend upon religion for their fulfillment.113 Four such claims are of central importance. The first claim is that if God is spirit, then God’s nature is to unite Godself with otherness or, as he puts it here, with finitude: “the concept that has determined itself,” Hegel explains, “that has made itself into its own object, has thereby posited finitude in itself, but posited itself as the content of this finitude and in so doing superseded it—that is spirit.”114 The second claim is that if this is God’s nature, then God can be actualized, can enact this nature, only by entering into finitude or outwardness, and returning therefrom, as Godself, for only then has God actually achieved God’s unity-inotherness. Hegel remarks, accordingly, that God “enters into antithesis, into distinction in general, which is thus a finitizing of spirit,” for this is the condition of spirit’s “superseding itself, coming into its own self, becoming and being explicitly the way it is implicitly.”115 God’s nature is to maintain God’s self-unity-in-otherness, which means that God’s nature impels God actually Press, 2001); William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003); David Kolb (ed.), New Perspectives on Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992); Martin Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit bei Hegel (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007); James Yerkes, The Christology of Hegel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1983). 112  Hegel, VPR, I:73–4. Hegel explicitly characterizes religion as “spirit that realizes itself in consciousness,” or, more expansively, as “spirit conscious of its own essence, conscious of its own self,” in the sense that “Spirit is conscious, and that of which it is conscious is the true, essential spirit.” In religion, then, Spirit “realizes itself in the consciousness that is itself spiritual, the consciousness for which alone spirit can be” (I:87). Cf. VPR III:178–9, 189. 113   With respect to the former, Hegel claims that “Our starting point (namely, that what we generally call ‘God,’ or God in an indeterminate sense, is the truth of all things) is the result of the whole of philosophy” (VPR, I:266). 114 115  Hegel, VPR, III:195.  Hegel, VPR, I:85.

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to enter into an outward relationship with finitude. This means, third, that God’s nature likewise impels God to make Godself manifest, for to enter into outwardness just is to manifest oneself. Hegel thus asserts that “God can be known or cognized, for it is God’s nature to reveal Godself, to be manifest,” or again, that “Spirit is an absolute manifesting, and its manifesting is a positing of determination and a being for an other.”116 God’s nature thereby impels God to enter into outwardness, but this nature is fully actualized or in accord with itself only if an additional condition is met, namely, that God be fully united with God’s outward appearance, which turns out to mean that God’s nature can be actualized only if God is manifest to others as God, not only objectively but subjectively. The idea here is that if God appeared to others as Godself but the latter did not perceive God as such, then God would not be fully at home with God’s outward appearance; from this, Hegel infers that God’s nature, as unity of self in otherness, can be fully actualized only if others perceive God as God is. Consider a parallel example: I am sometimes introduced to others as a theologian, often with the predictable result that those to whom I am introduced are not sure what to make of me, either because they have no idea what a theologian is, or because they had assumed the species “theologian” had long ago gone extinct. In such cases, even though I have been introduced to them as myself, there is a disconnect between me and their perception of me, and I cannot see myself in that perception. Likewise, Hegel argues, for God: God must not only manifest Godself, but be manifest to others as God, for otherwise God would experience a disconnect in God’s appearance to others. That brings us to a fourth claim, regarding those to whom God would be manifest. For God to be fully at home with Godself in otherness, those to whom God is manifest must themselves be spirit, since, Hegel argues, only spirit can perceive spirit as such. Hegel claims, accordingly, that “God is as spirit for spirit. Spirit is essentially a being for spirit, and spirit is spirit only insofar as it is for spirit.”117 The idea here—which we have already rehearsed twice—goes something like this: (a) “spirit” can commune with itself in its outwardness only if it is returned to itself by those whom it encounters, (b) it can be so returned only by one who likewise communes with it, and (c) only another spirit can commune with spirit, since the condition in (b) can be met only by one who can commune with itself in otherness, too, which is just what “spirit” means for Hegel. As Hegel understands it, the perception of spirit requires such reciprocity, for only self-consciously minded selves are aware of spirit’s nature, and are therefore the only ones equipped to perceive spirit as such.118 117  Hegel, VPR, I:278.  Hegel, VPR, I:279.   Hegel often compares such mutuality with love, since a certain kind of love, at least, can be fulfilled only when directed toward, and reciprocated by, another lover; anything short of this would be one-sided. For a nice example of such comparison, see VPR, III:201–2. 116 118

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The upshot of these claims is that God can fully realize God’s nature only by actually maintaining unity in the face of otherness, and that such unity can be achieved only under certain conditions. That brings us from Hegel’s theoretical claims to his consideration of actual, “determinate” religions and, he hopes, to a determinate religion in which these conditions are actually met. Hegel’s treatment of “determinate” religions thus follows the approach laid out in the Phenomenology, according to which various would-be instances of a universal (or concept) are assessed by the standard of that universal, with the goal of finding an instance that actually corresponds to it; in that case, one could truly behold the universal in a concrete instance. Likewise here, particular religions are to be evaluated in terms of the concept “religion,” and if a particular religion corresponds to that concept, its particularity is then simultaneously the concept’s very embodiment or manifestation. Hegel thus writes that “the absolute realization is when this determination is adequate to the concept,” or again, that “what results is the concept that posits itself, and has itself as its content.”119 Given the content of this concept, moreover, if a particular religion corresponded to it, that religion would also meet the conditions in which God could commune fully with humans and vice versa, and, so, the latter could commune fully with themselves. Of such a religion, Hegel would claim that “here for the first time, spirit is as such the object, the content of religion, and spirit is only for spirit.”120 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Hegel thinks that every religion save one fails to measure up to this concept. Like many of his contemporaries, including Kant, Hegel was a voracious reader of travel literature and other reports from distant lands and cultures, and also like many, he wanted to explain why his own, now apparently relativized, cultural commitments were neither arbitrary nor merely relative. To accomplish the latter goal, Hegel thought it necessary to demonstrate the necessity of these commitments, and thought such necessity could be demonstrated precisely by means of his “particular that corresponds to its concept”-approach, for if particular cultural commitments and institutions could be shown to correspond to the concept of which other commitments and institutions are would-be instances, then there would be a non-arbitrary reason for adhering to the former rather than the latter. If children around the world draw circles, there is an objective standard by which their drawings might be judged, namely circularity or the equidistance of every point on the circle to a center-point; likewise, Hegel argues, for religion, ethics, art, and so on. This is a controversial claim, to say the least, and one to which we will return below and in Chapter 5. For present purposes, we need not linger

119

 Hegel, VPR, I:84; III:195.

120

 Hegel, VPR, III:179; cf. I:91, 92n.

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over Hegel’s treatment of particular religions, since what is important here is simply (a) the place that this treatment occupies in Hegel’s system—viz. that of providing examples that fail to measure up to their concept—and (b) his claims about a particular religion that supposedly does measure up, namely Christianity. Christianity is the “consummate” religion, Hegel claims, or the religion that corresponds to its concept, insofar as in it the divine spirit is truly reconciled with human spirit, and vice versa. Hegel’s elaboration and defense of this claim includes the following steps. First, he argues that Christianity understands God as implicitly spirit, that is, as spirit immanently or “in Godself.” As evidence of this, Hegel points to the doctrine of the Trinity, according to which the divine life is an eternal movement in which God differentiates Godself from Godself, and unites Godself with this differentiation. Hegel thus maintains that in Christianity, the eternal idea is expressed in terms of the holy Trinity:  it is God himself, eternally triune. Spirit is this process, movement, life. This life is self-differentiation, self-determination, and the first differentiation is that spirit is as this universal idea itself. The universal contains the entire idea, although it only contains it, it is only implicitly the idea. In this primal division is found the other, the particular, what stands over against the universal—that which stands over against God as distinguished from him, but in such a way that this distinguished aspect is God’s entire idea in and for itself, so that these two determinations are also one and the same for each other, an identity, the One. Not only is this distinction implicitly superseded, and not only do we know that, but also it is established that the two distinguished moments are the same, that this distinction is superseded insofar as it is precisely what posits itself as no distinction at all; hence the one remains present to itself in the other. That this is so is the Holy Spirit itself; or, expressed in the mode of sensibility, it is eternal love: The Holy Spirit is eternal love.121

If “spirit” is a kind of selfhood that unites itself with otherness, then Christianity’s doctrine of the Trinity seems to suggest that God is spirit “in Godself ” or implicitly, since God’s very being is here understood as a movement in which God becomes other to Godself and then unites Godself with this otherness. As yet, though, God is spirit only implicitly, in Godself, but not outwardly or explicitly; God has not yet made God’s nature actual.122

 Hegel, VPR, III:201; cf. similar formulations on III:196, 213.   So Hegel: “In accord with the first element, then, we consider God in his eternal idea, as he is in and for himself, prior to or apart from the creation of the world, so to speak. Insofar as he is thus within himself, it is a matter of the eternal idea, which is not yet posited in its reality but is itself still only the abstract idea” (III:199–200). 121

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Hegel claims, secondly, that on Christianity’s account, humanity, too, is spirit, at least implicitly, which is what Christianity means by propositions to the effect that humans are “implicitly good” or “made in the image of God.” Hegel notes, in this connection, that Christianity interprets humanity’s goodness to mean that “human beings are implicitly spirit and rationality, created in and after the image of God,” and just so are “implicitly good.”123 Humans are good by nature, then, and bear the image of God, in that our nature is to be spirit, to maintain our self-unity-in-otherness. This does not entail, however, that humans are actually good, for as we have seen, spirit is fulfilled only when it actually achieves such unity-in-otherness. The fact that humans are implicitly spirit thus means that we are implicitly good, but insofar as we fail to become so explicitly, we fall short of this good; to say that humanity is implicitly good, then, “means that human beings are good only in an inner way, or according to the concept, and not according to their actuality. But insofar as they are spirit, they must be in actuality, i.e., explicitly, what they are in truth.”124 What Hegel has in mind here should be clear from the preceding: as spirit, humans have the potential to be united with themselves in relation to objects, insofar as reason’s grasp of objects corresponds to them; in relation to other persons, insofar as one can recognize oneself in their recognition of one; and in relation to God, insofar as one is united with God’s own unity with finitude. To be human, then, is to be the sort of creature that can and should maintain its self-unity-in-otherness; our nature thus specifies what is good for creatures like us. This second point thus leads to a third, namely, that humans are not what we should be—namely, fully actual spirit—and that we are therefore divided against ourselves, against the world, and against God. We are divided against ourselves, obviously, since what we are by nature or implicitly, viz. spirit, is at odds with what we are explicitly, insofar as we are not actually united with ourselves in otherness.125 Our actual existence thus stands in contradiction with that which we are supposed to be; as we become conscious of such self-contradiction, humans experience “infinite anguish concerning themselves.”126 We are likewise divided against the world insofar as our relationship to it is not simultaneously a self-relationship—insofar, that is, as we cannot establish correspondence between our reason and worldly objects, or between ethical principles and the ways of the world, or between ourselves and our outward actions. Insofar as we are unable to achieve such correspondence, Hegel claims, we are unable to live in accord with our nature as spirit, and are therefore “miserable” or “unhappy”; he thus writes that “insofar as these requirements, which are implicitly justified in the concept of humanity . . .

123

 Hegel, VPR, III:221.   124 Hegel, VPR, III:221. 126   On this point, cf. Hegel, VPR, III, 222.  Hegel, VPR, III:229.

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do not find satisfaction in existence, in the external world, humanity is in a state of unhappiness.”127 We also stand in opposition, finally, to God, for since we are not united with ourselves in relationship to ourselves and the world, we are only finite spirit and are thus cut off from, and at odds with, infinite Spirit. So Hegel claims that, “as finite spirit, [humanity] is placed in a condition of separation; it has fallen away from God, it is apart from God . . . The concrete spirit, the finite spirit defined as finite, is therefore in contradiction to its object or content.”128 In sum, Hegel characterizes human existence as “evil,” since we fail to live up to our nature as spirit, in consequence of which we experience “anguish,” “misery,” and an inability to identify fully with our lives. The solution to this problem, obviously, is for one to be reconciled with oneself, the world, and God, for then one’s nature as spirit would become fully actual. This is easier said than done, however, since it is not in one’s power to make others recognize one, for instance, nor to bring the world into correspondence with ethical principles. This brings us to a fourth point, namely, that God reconciles us to Godself, in consequence of which we can be reconciled to all else. God does this, Hegel claims, by taking finitude and separation into unity with Godself, and God can do this because God is infinite Spirit. With respect to the latter, Hegel reiterates that antecedently in Godself, God eternally maintains unity-in-otherness; within the divine life, that is, “the antithesis arises eternally and just as eternally supersedes itself; there is at the same time eternal reconciliation. That this is the truth,” he continues, “may be seen in the eternal, divine idea: God is the one who as living spirit distinguishes himself from himself, posits an other and in this other remains identical with himself, has in this other his identity with himself. This is the truth.”129 It is the truth, on Hegel’s account, that God eternally posits, and reconciles Godself with, an antithesis within Godself, but it must also become the truth, in the sense that that which is not God must actually be included in this reconciliation—in such a way that reconciliation becomes its truth, too. To bring this about, God enters into humanity’s antithesis to, and separation from, Godself, so that this antithesis, too, is actually included in God’s eternal reconciliation. This actual inclusion takes place, Hegel claims, in Christ, for in his life and death, God takes humanity’s over-against-ness into God’s life, as a result of which such being-against is no longer actually over against God. Hegel maintains, therefore, that God was in Christ reconciling humanity to Godself:  It is their finitude that Christ has taken [upon himself], this finitude in all its forms, which at its furthest extreme is evil. This humanity, which is itself a

127

 Hegel, VPR, III:231; cf. 229.  Hegel, VPR, III:234; cf. III:250.

129

128

 Hegel, VPR, III:197.

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moment in the divine life, is not characterized as something alien, not belonging to God. This finitude, however, on its own account (as against God), is evil, it is something alien to God. But he has taken it [upon himself] in order to put it to death by his death. As the monstrous unification of these absolute extremes, this shameful death is at the same time infinite love.

Hegel continues:  It is out of infinite love that God has made himself identical with what is alien to him in order to put it to death. This is the meaning of the death of Christ. It means that Christ has borne the sins of the world and reconciled God [with the world] . . . This death of the natural has in this way a universal significance: finitude and evil are altogether destroyed. Thus the world has been reconciled: by this death it has been implicitly delivered from its evil.130

There is no separation too extreme, no antithesis too contrary, that it cannot be brought into the unity-in-antithesis characteristic of God’s eternal life, and in Christ, Hegel argues, God has actually brought humanity’s separation and antithesis into that unity; as a result, our separation from God can no longer separate us from God. Objectively speaking, then, or from God’s side, as it were, humanity has been reconciled to God. The fact that humans have been reconciled to God “from God’s side” does not yet complete our reconciliation, however, for God or for humans. For God and for humans, reconciliation would mean that spirit is actually united with itself in relation to otherness—that spirit, in relating to something external to itself, simultaneously relates to itself—which brings us to a fifth step: that which is objectively true of humanity, viz. that our separation from God is itself united with God, must become true for humanity; we must see this unity with God as true of us, and must therefore see ourselves as included in this unity. Hegel argues, accordingly, that this truth must be proclaimed to one, and that one must respond to this truth with faith, which Hegel understands as one’s appropriation of it: “the presentation of the divine history is something that is objective for them,” he writes, “and they must now traverse this history, this process, in themselves. In order to do this, however, they must first presuppose that reconciliation is possible, or more precisely, that this reconciliation has happened in and for itself, that it is the truth in and for itself, and that reconciliation is certain.”131 As Hegel sees it, then, faith is a kind of repetition: God has overcome our separation and included us in the divine unity, and faith is the human response wherein we accept that this is true and so include ourselves in this inclusion. At first, the repetition involved is simply one’s coming to believe that God has overcome one’s separation from God, and so to see this as true of one. This is  Hegel, VPR, III:246n; cf. III:239, 249–50.  Hegel, VPR, III:252; cf. III:255, 259–60.

130 131

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akin to one’s being forgiven by another and accepting that forgiveness, such that one is now reconciled to him or her. For Hegel, though, there is also an important ontological dimension to reconciliation, since one’s separation has been overcome through one’s actually being brought into communion with God. As a rough analogy, think of a college that decides to accept an applicant and so notifies her of this acceptance, and of the applicant hearing of this decision and deciding to accept her acceptance; if so, the applicant has made her admission true for her, and is now actually included in the college. Again, at first this transpires at the level of accepting the truth that God has overcome separation, and so seeing one’s own separation as overcome. Crucially, however, that which is true in itself, and which one has accepted as true for oneself, must become more and more true in actuality—in oneself and in one’s relationship to others. The train of thought here goes something like this:  (a)  God is Spirit—God is united with Godself in relationship to that which is other—and so maintains self-unity in relationship to separated humanity; as such, (b) one can see oneself in God’s relationship to one and so be united with oneself in that relationship, such that in relationship to God, at least, one is actually “spirit”; in this relationship, then, one has become what one was meant to be, or has become explicitly what one is implicitly or by nature; and (c) the reconciliation that one enjoys in one’s relationship with God—unity with oneself in relationship to that which is other than one—should pervade more and more of one’s relationships. (This “should” is rooted, apparently, in Hegel’s earlier claims about human nature.) More and more, that is to say, one should become what one is, namely spirit, which is to say that more and more of one’s relationships to that which is other than one should simultaneously be relationships in which one is united with oneself. To stand in such a relationship, on Hegel’s account, is for one to be fully at home with oneself, and so to fulfill one’s vocation as spirit:  The substantial aspect of the subject is that it is a free person, and as a free person it relates itself to the worldly and the actual as a being that is at home with itself, reconciled with itself, an utterly secure and infinite subjectivity. This vocation of the subject ought to be foundational in its relation with what is worldly . . . What is required, therefore, is that this reconciliation should also be accomplished in the worldly realm.132

One might think of this in terms of the relationship between justification and sanctification: with respect to the former, one accepts the truth that God has overcome humanity’s separation and one is thereby reconciled with God; with respect to the latter, one should bring more and more of one’s life into line with this truth, such that one’s reconciliation with God would become more and more actual.  Hegel, VPR, III:262–3.

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To actualize reconciliation, on this account, would be for one to be united with oneself in one’s relationship to others and the world, so that in relating to others one would simultaneously be relating to and at home with oneself. Hegel claims that there are two realms in which such reconciliation must be established, which he terms the real and the ideal. (These correspond to the Phenomenology’s chapters on Morality and Reason, respectively.) On the side of reality or actuality—the side, that is, of one’s being united with oneself in one’s acts—Hegel argues that reconciliation is to be achieved through the cultivation of an ethical way of life and ethical institutions. Such a life, obviously, and such institutions, must be of the sort that one could act within them as oneself, and be recognized as such by others, so that one would be united with oneself in so acting. Hegel remarks, accordingly, that reconciliation is here achieved when “the principle of freedom has penetrated into the worldly realm itself, and the worldly, because it has been thus conformed to the concept, reason, and eternal truth, is freedom that has become concrete and will that is rational”; when this occurs, he claims, “the institutions of ethical life are divine institutions,” and, therefore, that “it is in the ethical realm that the reconciliation of religion with worldliness and actuality comes about and is accomplished.”133 Hegel spends considerable time discussing such institutions in his Encyclopedia and, especially, his Philosophy of Right. What is interesting, here, is that he characterizes such institutions as “divine,” insofar as the reconciliation of spirit takes place, and can take place, in them. The cultivation of an ethical way of life plays a key role, then, in actualizing reconciliation, enabling one to identify or be at home with one’s life. Something similar must take place on the side of ideality, that is, in the relationship between the mind and its objects. Here, too, what is true of one must become true for one—not only in that one believes it to be true, but in that one’s life is to be increasingly conformed to this truth. The truth, on Hegel’s account, is that one is spirit and so united with oneself in relationship to otherness; in the realm of ideality, one achieves such conformity insofar as the mind relates to itself—to its own ideas—in relating to objects. The danger here, of course, is that such self-relatedness will be brought about by what Hegel terms “one-sidedness,” whether because one simply projects one’s ideas on to objects, or because one takes oneself to be cut off from objects. Hegel characterizes the former as “an inward weaving of spirit within itself,” a consequence of which is that “everything fades away in the subject, without objectivity, without firm determinacy”; the latter as “abstract universality” which “turns against externality in general [and] is opposed to distinction as such,” for it can maintain its self-unity only in an “abstract identity.”134 Either

 Hegel, VPR, III:264–5.  Hegel, VPR, III:266–7; 265–6.

133

134

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way, spirit cannot be united with itself in otherness, and so conform to its truth, for its self-unity here comes at the expense of not relating to that which is external to it. (The misogynist who perceives all women as conforming to his biased ideas about them may remain undisturbedly at home with himself, but not because he has actually related to that which is other than him.) Hegel claims, accordingly, that in order for one to be at home with oneself in contemplating an object, one’s ideas must correspond to the object’s own truth; in that case, he argues, “the concept indeed produces the truth—this is subjective freedom—but it recognizes this truth as at the same time not produced, as the truth that subsists in and for itself.”135 We need not look far to see what Hegel means by this claim, for his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion are supposed to exemplify it. The lectures aim to do this by exhibiting a correspondence between the concept of religion, on the one hand, and a particular religion, on the other, in such a way that one could see the former instantiated in the latter, and, so, contemplate one’s concept precisely in contemplating that religion. Crucially, the lectures also attempt to demonstrate the necessity of that concept by, roughly, suggesting the ways in which particular religions implicitly aim to embody it, such that one’s contemplation of and adherence to a religion in which the concept is actually embodied, would be free from the suspicion that one has simply projected one’s subjectivistic concepts on to it. Hegel explains these points in the following passage: the pinnacle of his philosophy, he tells us, consists in the fact that subjectivity develops the content from itself, to be sure, but in accord with necessity. It knows and acknowledges that a content is necessary, and that this necessary content is objective, having being in and for itself. This is the standpoint of philosophy, according to which the content takes refuge in the concept and obtains its justification by thinking. This thinking is not merely the process of abstraction and definition according to the law of identity; it does not have the concrete “over there,” but rather is itself essentially concrete, and thus it is comprehension, meaning that the concept determines itself in its totality and as idea. It is free reason, which has being on its own account, that develops the content in accord with its necessity, and justifies the content of truth  .  .  . This objective standpoint is alone capable of bearing witness to, and thus of expressing the witness of, spirit in a developed, thoughtful fashion. Therefore, it is the justification of religion, especially of the Christian religion, as the true religion; it knows the content [of religion] in accord with its necessity and reason.136

The Lectures thus aim to demonstrate that our, or at least Hegel’s, concept of religion is (a) necessary and (b) embodied in a particular religion, namely

 Hegel, VPR, III:268.  Hegel, VPR, III:267–8.

135

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Christianity, and, in so demonstrating, to contribute to one’s being actually and explicitly united with oneself in relating to that religion (by, say, believing in it). This argumentative strategy corresponds with Hegel’s more general procedure, which we have already seen in his Phenomenology: the formula, roughly, is first to establish a correspondence between our (his) concepts, on the one hand, and particular phenomena, on the other, so as to claim that the latter embody the former, and that concept and particularity no longer stand over against one another; and, second, to demonstrate that a range of phenomena are would-be instances of this concept, such that the concept is “necessary” and can be used, non-arbitrarily, to assess these phenomena. Hegel contends, moreover, that insofar as philosophy establishes such correspondence and necessity, it plays a role in accomplishing the sort of reconciliation that is already true in relation to God, for in that case, one can see phenomena as reflecting one’s concepts back to one, and one’s relationship to these phenomena as simultaneously a self-relationship. This is what Hegel means, finally, when he maintains that philosophy “is to this extent theology,” for “it presents the reconciliation of God with himself and with nature, showing that nature, otherness, is implicitly divine, and that the raising of itself to reconciliation is on the one hand what finite spirit implicitly is, while on the other hand it arrives at this reconciliation, or brings it forth, in world history.”137 Hegel’s philosophy is thus supposed to contribute to one’s being at home with oneself in relationship to objects, and therefore to the actualization of Spirit’s reconciliation with all that is—to contribute, that is, to the actualization of religion. To understand why he would think this, it is useful to recall some of Hegel’s earlier points: (a) that religion is human spirit’s quest, so to speak, to be at home with itself in relation to divine Spirit; (b) that particular religions aim to achieve this sort of relation, such that the concept of “religion” can be seen as necessary, that is, as a universal and non-arbitrary standard with which to judge religions; (c) that the Christian religion, properly interpreted, embodies this concept, for in Christianity (i)  humanity is included in, and so objectively reconciled with, the divine Spirit (which itself reconciles all that is, including death, “evil,” etc.), and (ii) humanity subjectively includes itself in this reconciliation, and so is at home with itself in relation to the divine Spirit; (d) that, for those so related, more and more of their lives should be brought into this reconciliation, which is to say that in relating to others and the world, they simultaneously relate to themselves and to divine Spirit; and (e) that such reconciliation depends upon the cultivation of ethical institutions, on the one hand, and upon the establishment of our concepts as necessary and as instantiated in particular phenomena, on the other. Hegel’s  Hegel, VPR, III:269.

137

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philosophy of religion aims to do precisely this, namely, establish a concept of religion as necessary and as instantiated in Christianity, which is to say that his philosophy aims not only to describe but to contribute to humanity’s reconciliation with God. Put differently, the content of Christianity (that human spirit is at home with itself in relationship to divine Spirit) demands an appropriate form (that human spirit would be at home with itself in relationship to this content), which is what Hegel’s philosophy of religion aims to provide. From this vantage point, it is not hard to discern the continuity between Hegel’s philosophy of religion and his Phenomenology. In the latter, recall, Hegel argued that human “spirit” or “mind” is such that one can maintain one’s self-unity in relation to that which is external to one—so one can maintain such unity in relation to objects insofar as they correspond to one’s concept of them, in relation to others insofar as one can see oneself in their perception of one, and in relation to the world-Spirit insofar as the latter overcomes one’s separation and one sees oneself as included in this overcoming. The continuity between these claims and those of the philosophy of religion, as well as their development, should be apparent. In the latter, Hegel contends (a) that God is Spirit, that is, a unity of self with otherness; (b) that although humans are implicitly spirit, we are not this explicitly, in consequence of which we are at odds with God, the world, and ourselves; (c) that God overcomes this and all other oppositions by taking them upon or including them in the divine self-unity; and (d)  that insofar as we identify with and realize ourselves in this unity, we are reconciled to God and, increasingly, with the world, others, and ourselves. Equally apparent is the connection between these claims about spirit and religion, on the one hand, and “mineness,” on the other, for Hegel has here sketched an account according to which one can be at fully at home with oneself in relationship to anything one might encounter, and so see oneself in or identify with one’s entire life.

4.5. OBJECTIONS Hegel thus defends a grand account of humanity’s relationship to God, the world, and others, according to which we can be fully at home with ourselves in each of these relationships. Not everyone felt at home with this account, however; indeed, several prominent figures’ careers were launched by their criticisms of Hegel. Among the most prominent, at the time, was Ludwig Feuerbach, who pressed two key objections against Hegel’s system—one against Hegel’s claims about correspondence, the other against his claims about necessity. With respect to the former, Feuerbach insists that historical phenomena, especially phenomena as complicated as religion, do not, and in principle cannot, correspond to or perfectly embody a human ideal. Feuerbach

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asks, in this connection, “is it at all possible that a species realizes itself in one individual?” His answer, obviously, is no, for, he claims, “whatever enters into time and space must also subordinate itself to the laws of time and space. The god of limitation stands guard at the entrance to the world. Self-limitation is the condition of entry. Whatever becomes real becomes so only as something determined.” Hence, “the incarnation of the species with all its plenitude into one individuality would be an absolute miracle, a violent suspension of all the laws and principles of reality,” from which he concludes that “incarnation and history are absolutely incompatible.”138 Feuerbach thus opposes Hegel’s claim that a particular phenomenon corresponds to or instantiates our concept of it, and so, obviously, opposes his claim that Christianity embodies the concept of religion. The problem with such claims, from Feuerbach’s perspective, is that historical phenomena are invariably characterized by particularity, multiplicity, and limitation, whereas ideals are characterized by universality, uniformity, and completeness; if so, then it is simply a mistake to think that the former could ever correspond with the latter. Feuerbach likewise objects to Hegel’s claim that certain historical developments, such as the emergence and development of Christianity, are rationally necessary or absolute. Hegel asserted, recall, that Christianity is the fulfillment of that for which other religions implicitly strive, such that Christianity counts as both a particular religion and as the absolute consummation of religion. In response to this sort of assertion, Feuerbach maintains that Hegel has failed to reckon with the particularity of his own vantage point, and that his absoluteness-claims are really the absolutization of that vantage point:  Anticipating the future with the help of reason, let us therefore undertake to demonstrate that the Hegelian philosophy is really a definite and special kind of philosophy. The proof is not difficult to find, however much this philosophy is distinguished from all previous philosophies by its rigorous scientific character, universality, and incontestable richness of thought. Hegelian philosophy was born at a time when humanity stood, as at any other time, on a definite level of thought, when a definite kind of philosophy was in existence. It drew on this philosophy, linked itself with it, and hence it must itself have a definite, i.e. finite, character. Every philosophy originates, therefore, as a manifestation of its time; its origin presupposes its historical time. Of course, it appears to itself as not resting on any presuppositions; and, in relation to earlier systems, that is certainly true. A later age, nevertheless, is bound to realize that this philosophy was after all based on certain presuppositions; i.e., certain accidental presuppositions

 Feuerbach, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 2, Philosophische Kritiken und Grundsätze (Leipzig:  Otto Wigand, 1846), 188–9 (ET:  “Toward a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy,” in The Young Hegelians, ed. Lawrence S.  Stepelevich [New York: Humanity Books, 1983], 97). 138

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which have to be distinguished from those that are necessary and rational and cannot be negated without involving absolute nonsense.139

Feuerbach argues, then, that Hegel fails to appreciate the extent to which his philosophy is a product of its time, in consequence of which Hegel takes his own historical vantage point to be self-evidently true and, so, as the standard by which to judge all else. As Feuerbach sees it, this is why Hegel thought that Christianity was absolute, but once one has become sufficiently aware of Hegel’s historical context, as often happens to philosophies in a later age, one will be freed from his illusions of absoluteness. It would be a mistake to assume that Hegel could not have responded to these objections—he could respond to the first, for instance, by appeal to traditional arguments on behalf of an incarnation, and to the second by tempering his claim, in order to suggest only that Christianity addresses a problem that is common to many religions and cultures, rather than that Christianity perfectly fulfills that at which all religions aim. Nevertheless, the role of history in Hegel’s thinking, and in relation to absoluteness-claims more generally, continued to be a source of controversy; Feuerbach was hardly alone in raising such objections, nor in considering their implications for theology. In Chapter 5, we will consider the work of three theologians whose work was animated by historical concerns of precisely this sort, namely F.C. Baur, Albrecht Ritschl, and Ernst Troeltsch.

 Feuerbach, Zur Kritik, 191–2 (99).

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5 Personalizing Faith Some important patterns have emerged in our analysis of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel: each of these figures is concerned with the problem of overcoming the various oppositions by which human life is characterized, and of doing so in such a way that one can experience one’s life as self-expressive. Each likewise sees faith as playing a key role in establishing such unity, though they have different ideas about the nature and content of this faith. Some of these ideas can be integrated into a single, more adequate account of “mineness”; others cannot. An example of the latter are competing claims about what it would take for faith itself to be recognizably one’s own; this issue arises in Hegel’s objection to the putative subjectivism of Schleiermacher’s account of faith, and again in Feuerbach’s objection to the putative a-historicism of Hegel’s own account. For our purposes, the relevant worry is this: even if faith enables one to integrate the oppositions by which one’s life is characterized, this does not entail that faith is itself one’s own, for the obvious reason that such faith might be imposed upon one, or an accident of one’s upbringing, or mere wishful thinking, or subject in some other respect to the very oppositions that faith was supposed to overcome. A recurring question, then, is how one could stand in a “mineness”relation to faith, or how the faith that enables one to overcome various oppositions could itself be one’s own. One popular answer is that faith is recognizably one’s own if one can demonstrate its necessity or absoluteness, since this would seem equally to demonstrate that one’s faith is not simply the product of one’s culture or of submission to religious authorities. This sort of answer, in turn, raises some critical questions: Is it possible to demonstrate that a historical faith is necessary or absolute? And is faith one’s own only if it can be so demonstrated? These issues come to a head in the period treated in this chapter. The question of whether a historical faith, usually Christianity, could be deemed somehow necessary or “absolute” loomed large throughout the nineteenth century, as we have already seen. This chapter focuses primarily on Albrecht Ritschl, a figure for whom this issue was of decisive importance in its own right and as part of his claims about “mineness.” To understand Ritschl’s contribution to these issues, however, we will need to see how it emerged from

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the Tübingen School, led by F.C. Baur, and how it was received within Ritschl’s own School, in the works of Julius Kaftan and, especially, Ernst Troeltsch. Context aside, the key elements of Ritschl’s proposal are as follows: (a) against what he sees as an overly naturalized philosophy of history, Ritschl defends an approach that emphasizes the individuality of particular ways of life; (b) this approach to history is connected with Ritschl’s more basic understanding of “spirit’s” (or “personhood’s”) relationship to nature, according to which the former struggles to rise above the dominion of the latter and, so, to establish a kind of life with which persons can identify; (c) religion is a product of this struggle, such that particular religions can be judged in terms of the extent to which they enable humanity to rise above nature; (d) in Christianity, persons can attain complete dominion over nature, since forgiveness leads them to see God as Father, which leads them, in turn, to trust God’s providence in the face of all oppositions; and (e) this dominion comes to expression precisely in one’s individual vocation, such that one’s life can now be organized around an end with which one identifies. Ritschl eventually disowned (c), not least because of its apparent incongruity with (a), but doing so left him without much to say about Christianity’s validity as a particular historical faith. To address this issue, accordingly, we will consider Troeltsch’s account of historical validity, the key thesis of which is that historical phenomena like Christianity are valid insofar they are “person-forming,” that is, insofar as they enable persons to personalize or identify with their lives, and insofar as persons’ appropriation of faith opens up person-forming possibilities for others. Troeltsch thus supplies that which was missing in Ritschl, namely, an approach to history that corresponds with, and contributes to the possible establishment of, their shared commitment to the personal appropriation of and identification with life.

5.1. HISTOR ICA L M ETHOD A strong case could be made that, in the period bookended by Hegel and Ritschl, roughly 1830 to 1870, no German theologian was more influential than F.C. Baur. Baur was an astonishingly prolific, groundbreaking historical theologian whose work focused primarily on the emergence and early development of Christianity, yet at the beginning of his career, at least, this historical work was guided by, and meant to serve, what we might call Baur’s philosophical or constructive-theological views. These views are nicely captured in Baur’s 1835 study of Christian Gnosticism, the instructive subtitle of which is “Christian Philosophy of Religion in its Historical Development.”1 Baur there claims that 1   Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche Religions-Philosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwiklung (Tübingen: Osiander, 1835). The best recent treatment of

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ancient Christian Gnosticism should be understood as a philosophy of religion, and indeed as the original example of what his contemporaries mean by that term. This is the case, Baur argues, inasmuch as the ancient Christian Gnostics tried to explain Christianity’s relationship to other religions—paganism and Judaism—by portraying Christianity as their fulfillment. Baur claims, accordingly, that in all of its major forms the task of Gnostic systems was ever “to determine the relation in which these three forms of religion stand to one another with regard to their character and their inner value, and in this way, through a critical-comparative investigation, to arrive at the true concept of religion.”2 The task undertaken by Gnosticism thus corresponds, Baur argues, with that undertaken by modern philosophers of religion. Nor is this the only such correspondence: Baur claims that the Christian Gnostics, like their modern counterparts, tried to accomplish this task by demonstrating that Christianity satisfies the impulse implicit in other religions, and that it is therefore the true religion. The idea here, on Baur’s telling, is that religion aims to unite immanence and transcendence, but that paganism and Judaism fail to achieve such unity, since paganism one-sidedly emphasizes immanence, and Judaism, transcendence. The true religion, accordingly, would be one in which immanence and transcendence were fully reconciled, which is what Christian Gnostics claim has occurred in Christianity. Thus far, Baur seems to think that the Gnostics were more or less on the right track. Baur contends that they failed at just this point, however, precisely insofar as they held to a docetic understanding of the Incarnation—insofar, that is, as they held that, in Jesus, God merely “seemed” to take on flesh—since this betrayed a fundamental opposition that Gnostics continued to see between spirit and matter.3 Here, too, Baur perceives a parallel between ancient Christian Gnosticism and modern philosophers of religion, which brings us to Baur’s boldest claim, viz. that modern philosophy of religion fails at the same point that Gnosticism did, and for the same reason. He argues, that is, that modern philosophy of religion likewise tries to exhibit Christianity as the true religion, and to do so by appeal to Christianity’s reconciliation of immanence and transcendence, or nature and spirit, yet that these appeals have unwittingly repeated the Gnostics’ docetic misstep. As evidence, he points to Hegel’s philosophy of religion, which Baur regards as the fulfillment or consummation of recent trends in the field, and so as exemplifying these trends.4 For Hegel, Baur claims, “historical religions . . . are only moments of the concept [of religion], and so they do not correspond to the concept, it is not actual [wirklich] in them.”5 This explains why, on Baur’s (probably mistaken) reading, Hegel’s “Spirit” remains finally this material is Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), to which my own treatment is indebted. 2 3 4  Baur, Gnosis, 19.  Baur, Gnosis, 260–1.  Baur, Gnosis, 720. 5  Baur, Gnosis, 690.

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outside of history even in Spirit’s consummate appearance therein, that is, in Christ; hence, what, in the first moment, is something human, is in the second moment something divinely-human, is in the third moment the pure Idea, the Spirit as such, and all that pertains to the appearance and life of Christ, has its truth only in this, that in him the essence and life of the Spirit present themselves. What however the Spirit is and does, is not history.6

Baur maintains, then, that like the Christian Gnostics, contemporary philosophy of religion tries, and fails, to demonstrate that immanence and transcendence are reconciled in Christianity, and that the latter is therefore the true religion. The stumbling block here, according to Baur, is history: modern philosophy of religion either assumes that Spirit cannot enter into history as itself, or, more likely, that properly historical investigation cannot substantiate a claim to that effect, such that belief in this sort of claim represents a leap of faith.7 Baur’s own project, accordingly, at least early in his career, was to overcome this residual docetism by integrating history and philosophy of religion and, in particular, accomplishing the long-desired integration of immanence and transcendence. Albrecht Ritschl was a student of Baur’s and, initially, one of the latter’s most prized pupils.8 Ritschl soon split with Baur and the so-called Tübingen School, however; this was due, in part, to an increasing divergence between the conclusions of Ritschl’s and Baur’s historical investigations, but, crucially for the story we are telling about “mineness,” Ritschl also came to reject what he saw as the Tübingen School’s philosophy of history.9 The problem with that philosophy, on Ritschl’s view, is that it treats history as a continuous, causally connected series, which admits no novelty, no individuality, and so, he concludes, cannot even possibly do justice to “spirit.” (We will say more about this in a moment, but for now it is important to note that by “spirit,” Ritschl means something like “personhood.”) Hence, in an 1861 essay entitled “On Historical Method,” Ritschl claims that Baur’s idealistic conception of Jesus cannot, in principle, be reconciled with Baur’s conception of history, for the latter, Ritschl claims, understands “historical continuity” on analogy with “natural processes,” and therefore decides, in advance, that nothing truly novel or individual can enter into, or stand out from, history.10 Ritschl thus  Baur, Gnosis, 715.   On this, cf. Baur’s interpretation of Hegel’s Christology (Gnosis, 712). 8   For evidence of this, see Baur’s enthusiastic endorsement of Ritschl’s work on Luke and Marcion, in Baur’s Tübingen Jahrbuch essay. 9   With respect to the former divergence, compare the first and second editions of Ritschl’s Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1850, 1857); cf. Otto Ritschl, Albrecht Ritschls Leben, vol. 1 (Freiburg, 1892). 10   Albrecht Ritschl, “Über geschichtliche Methode in der Erforschung des Urchristentums,” Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie (1861), 444–5. This essay is written in response to an article, penned by Eduard Zeller but published anonymously, entitled “Die Tübinger historische 6 7

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argues that Baur’s approach cannot account for the individuality of any subject, much less Christ or the community he founded, since “such individuality must be understood not as the result of a natural process of the species, but rather, under such conditions, as a miraculous creation of God.”11 Within the bounds of this essay, it is not clear why Ritschl thinks that individuality can be explained only as a miracle; the reasons will become clear only after we have considered his understanding of spirit and nature. For now, his point is that Baur construes history by analogy with natural processes, and that, under such a construal, “spirit” or “the Ideal” cannot possibly become historical. Ritschl thus contends that “such naturalism, to which Baur gave currency, is in open conflict with itself,” for here, too, whatever Spirit is and does cannot be history.12 Again, the grounds for these claims will not become clear until we consider Ritschl’s understanding of nature and spirit, but before doing so, it is worth noting an interesting parallel between his worries about Baur’s construal of history and his later, better known worries about “metaphysics.” Ritschl understands “metaphysics,” plausibly enough, as “the investigation of the universal foundations of all being.” He then argues that if “all being” includes nature as well as spirit, then “any investigation of the common foundations of all being must set aside the particular characteristics by which one represents the difference between nature and spirit and the means by which one knows that these groups of things are dissimilar entities.”13 On Ritschl’s account, accordingly, metaphysics seeks the foundations of all that is, and in so doing it ends up seeing all that is as fitting within a single category, “being”; from this, Ritschl concludes that metaphysics relativizes or simply wipes away important differences between, say, nature and spirit, for it treats both as, more fundamentally, mere “things,” or as members of a single class.14 Ritschl thus judges that “metaphysics,”

Schule,” Historische Zeitschrift (1860). Helpfully for our purposes, Ritschl here bases his interpretation of Baur on the latter’s Die christliche Gnosis; cf. 433. Ritschl’s other notable treatment of Baur occurs in the first volume of his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (Bonn:  1870), but Ritschl there focuses more narrowly on Baur’s claims about reconciliation. 11 12   Ritschl, “Methode,” 445.   Ritschl, “Methode,” 448. 13  Ritschl, Theologie und Metaphysik:  Zur Verständigung und Abwehr (Bonn:  Adolph Marcus, 1881), 6 (hereafter TM; ET:  “Theology and Metaphysics,” in Three Essays, trans. Philip Hefner [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972], 154. Here again, I have tried to stick closely to existing English translations in order to make this book useful for a wider Anglophone readership, but I have also used my own translations wherever necessary). Ritschl treats “metaphysics” similarly in Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 3: Die positive Entwicklung der Lehre (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1874, 1883, 1888), §3. (Hereafter, RV; ET: The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine, trans. H.R. Mackintosh and A.B. Macaulay [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1902].) (I will here focus on the third edition of RV, not least because Ritschl saw it as the clearest statement of his mature views.) 14   See Ritschl, TM, 6 (154).

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much like “history” as construed by the Tübingen School, cannot do justice to spirit or religion, since it is of spirit’s essence to differ from, to stand over against nature.15 The implication is not that spirit and nature cannot be reconciled, but that they can be reconciled only if spirit can integrate nature into its own ends, and thereby overcome nature’s would-be dominion over it—not by seeing both as numerators over a common denominator, which is what Ritschl perceives “metaphysics” to be doing. As Ritschl sees it, then, metaphysics and Tübingen-style history fail, in principle, as frameworks within which to understand spirit and nature, and so to relate them in such a way that persons can identify with their lives, precisely insofar as each misjudges the former’s essential difference from the latter. Each of these claims depends, of course, on Ritschl’s understanding of spirit, to which we now turn.

5.2 .  SPIR IT A ND R ELIGION To get a sense of what Ritschl means by “nature” and “spirit,” and so how the latter could stand in a “mineness”-relationship to the former, we can begin with what might be termed his four-realmed ontology. (This could equally be called his metaphysics, but since Ritschl reserves that term for a particular sort of ontology, it seems wise to use the latter term for Ritschl’s own views. The fact that Ritschl elaborates any such ontology should indicate that, in rejecting “metaphysics,” he means to reject only a particular kind of metaphysics.) A first, most inclusive realm is comprised of simple causal reactions, as when snow reacts to heat by melting, or litmus paper reacts to acid by changing color. Ritschl acknowledges that such reactions are rightly understood in terms of mechanical causation:  he writes, accordingly, that “natural science is right and consistent in explaining the mechanical regularity of all sensible things by the manifold movement of simple limited forces or atoms.”16 Mechanical-causal explanations take one only so far, however, for as soon as one tries to understand the interaction of many such reactions within more complex systems, one’s explanations must also account for the organization of these reactions, which means, 15   Ritschl thus claims that, “in all its forms, the religious world view is established on the principle that the human spirit differentiates itself to some degree in value from the phenomena within its environment and from the workings of nature that press in upon it” (TM, 7 [156]). 16   This and the following three quotations are from Ritschl, RV, §28, 199. On the philosophical background of Ritschl’s metaphysics, see Leonhard Stählin, Kant, Lotze, Albrecht Ritschl: Eine kritische Studie (Leipzig: Dürffing & Franke, 1888). For the ethical background of Ritschl’s theology, see his Vorlesung “Theologische Ethik,” ed. Rolf Schäfer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007).

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Ritschl thinks, that one must introduce teleology into one’s account. Ritschl thus claims that “within the whole realm of existence that is interpretable by the category of causality, observation reveals to us the narrower realm of organisms, which cannot be exhaustively explained by the laws of mechanism, but demand, besides, the application of the idea of end.” Think here, for instance, of the relationships among various causal reactions involved in plant life: chlorophyll reacts to light, cellular structures react to water (or lack thereof), and so forth, yet one does not fully understand these reactions until one sees them as exhibiting a certain amount of organization, and thus as working together for the sake of a common end. The second realm of Ritschl’s ontology, then, adds a teleological dimension to the simple causality characteristic of the first. By themselves, though, causal and teleological explanation are still not sufficient to account for all of the phenomena to be explained, since some organic systems exhibit not only the working-together, toward an end, of many causal reactions, but action or self-movement toward bringing about such ends—they are animals, in other words. Ritschl thus remarks that “among organic beings, again, one section, differentiated in manifold ways, is animate, that is, endowed with the capacity of free movement.” Many animal behaviors must be understood, that is to say, not as a mere organized series of causal reactions, but in terms of an animal’s acting so as to achieve such organization, as when, for instance, a wolf reacts to various scents and sounds in order to track its prey, and then uses its teeth and claws to attack and eat it. In such cases, an organism uses complexly organized systems of causal reactions, each working together toward a common end, to put itself in position, so to speak, to achieve the end of eating, say, or procreating. Like denizens of the second realm, animals are comprised of systems of interrelated causal reactions, organized to work together to achieve an end; what sets animals apart is that they are not only so organized, but can play an active role in such organization. (Ritschl seems not to have a theory of how animals might play such a role; he is interested in claiming only that they can do so.) The mere fact that animals can play an active role in organizing the complex systems by which they are composed still fails to account for all of the relevant phenomena, however, since some animals can actively organize their entire lives around an end that they set for themselves, and whose lives as a whole can therefore be understood as a product of their own action. This brings us to the smallest of Ritschl’s concentric circles, namely, the personal or spiritual realm, which he describes in the following terms:  a still smaller section of animate beings is so constituted as to act freely from the conception of ends, to discover the laws of things, to conceive things as a whole, and themselves as in ordered interaction with them, further to identify all these activities with their own ego by means of the manifold affections

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of feeling, and to exchange their spiritual possessions with others through speech and action.17

Persons differ from other animals, accordingly, in that they can (a) act on a conception of an end, rather than on an end simply given to them by nature, such as survival; (b) conceptualize the world around them, and so see how their environing circumstances hang together, and how their actions can affect such circumstances; (c) identify with their actions, insofar as the latter are directed toward an end that one has set for oneself; and (d) share their conceptions with other persons. We will say more about these characteristics presently; for now, Ritschl’s point is that an adequate ontology must distinguish among at least four realms, each of which is a subset of those which precede it: that of mechanical-causal processes; of complex systems of such processes, organized so as to work together toward a common end; of animals who play an active role in organizing such systems; and of persons who can organize their entire lives around an end that they have set for themselves. One of Ritschl’s goals in elaborating such an ontology, obviously, is to draw attention to what he sees as irreducible differences among its realms, and so to argue against the sort of monism that would understand all phenomena as instances of mechanical-causal processes. Another goal is to lay some groundwork for explaining how these realms interact, and, in particular, how personhood might be related to “nature.” (The latter category apparently includes the three subsets outside of personhood, such that Ritschl’s four-realmed ontology can also be boiled down to two.) In his more detailed comments on the subject, Ritschl offers a three-step analysis of how persons can rise above nature and so identify with their lives. First, persons can be freed from immediate causal determination, Ritschl claims, through the counterweight provided by intentions and memory. He thus writes that an independent personality, when acquired, has open to it a range of activity beyond the sway of the above-mentioned [causal] conditions  .  .  . For the self draws a multitude of incentives from the reciprocal action of its own memories and from the principles it has acquired, and is thus able to repel the synchronous stimuli it receives from surrounding persons and things.18

As embodied creatures, persons remain liable to the influence of environmental stimuli, but their behavior is not necessarily determined by them, for the influence of these stimuli may not be as strong as a person’s commitment to certain principles, or even as strong as the patterns implicit in his or her prior behaviors. So a dieter, say, or an athlete in training, may feel hungry but resist the urge to eat, deciding that it is best to wait until dinner. Then again, 17

  Ritschl is plainly alluding to Kant’s Grundlegung; cf. 4:412.  Ritschl, RV, §30, 222.

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someone might decide to eat something even though he or she is not hungry, simply because he or she has gotten in the habit of eating too much. In such cases, a person’s behavior is caused not by his or her environment, but by his or her decisions, intentions, habits, and so forth. Second, these decisions, intentions, and habits can themselves become part of, and so be determined by, an overall intention or plan. Ritschl claims, in this connection, that “developed personal individuality consists in the power to take up the inexorable stimuli of the environment into one’s plan of life, in such a way that they are incorporated in it as means under firm control, and no longer felt as obstacles to the free movement of the self.”19 Plans, in this sense, are diachronically stable intentions which serve as the end toward the achievement of which an array of other intentions is organized. An athlete who plans to make it to the Olympics may thus regiment his or her eating, sleeping, training, and so on; likewise, a person who devotes his or her life to making a difference to the lives of the poor may read books about poverty, spend time getting to know poor persons, stand with these persons as they face mistreatment, etc. As such, more and more of a person’s intentions, decisions, and habits can be oriented toward the achievement of a particular end, in consequence of which a person’s life will exhibit a kind of wholeness and constancy. In one’s ability to organize one’s life around such plans, then, we see “the power of the will actively to pursue a single end throughout the ordered succession of intentions and resolves derived from it.”20 Importantly, these plans can shape not only one’s decisions and conscious intentions, but one’s emotions, too. On Ritschl’s understanding, emotions begin as immediate reactions to certain stimuli; one feels afraid during a violent storm, for instance, or disgust upon smelling rotten food. Such reactions are brought about by one’s circumstances, but these reactions can also become expressions of what one values, such that if one’s values are oriented toward a particular end, one’s emotions can be oriented increasingly toward that end, too. (“Increasingly,” since it can take time for emotional reactions to be reoriented.) “In such a case,” Ritschl writes, “the emotions can no longer be regarded as passive mental experiences, but come rather to involve principally an exercise of power which the independence of one’s character is felt to justify.”21 On Ritschl’s account, then, one can orient oneself toward, and so plan one’s life around, an end, where this orientation includes how one feels as well as what one does. Hence a person who has devoted him or herself to the poor should see this devotion expressed in his or her emotions: he or she will no longer feel disgusted, say, by the scent of a homeless person who has 20  Ritschl, RV, §30, 222–3.  Ritschl, RV, §30, 223.  Ritschl, RV, §30, 223. Ritschl’s understanding of emotion bears an important resemblance to that of many contemporary philosophers; for a review of the recent literature, see Jesse Prinz, Gut Reactions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 19 21

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been unable to bathe, and will feel regret that he or she ever did; he or she will feel worried about harms to which the person is especially vulnerable, and anger in response to those who contribute to such harms; and he or she will feel joy when the person gets back on his or her feet. One’s emotions, too, can thus be oriented toward a particular end, such that they are no longer merely reactions to environing circumstances, but are expressions of one’s will. Ritschl contends that such emotional orientation is a crucial condition of our lives’ actually being ordered toward an end, since only a small fraction of our lives are dictated by conscious thought, and in any case we are moved more by emotion than by thought; he argues, accordingly, that “it is not the clear and exhaustive perceptions which exert the greatest influence on human conduct; it is rather the indefinite ideas, those which insinuate themselves into the feelings and the will, which excite the emotions, and which work in us alongside of our definitely calculated purposes, moving us indeed mightily.”22 One’s intentions, habits, emotions, and so forth can thus be oriented toward a particular end, in consequence of which one’s life can become an increasingly cohesive whole. Only a certain kind of end will enable one to achieve such wholeness, however, which brings us to the third step of Ritschl’s analysis. For one’s life to achieve wholeness through being organized around one’s end, and so be experienceable as fully one’s own, the end to which one orients oneself must be potentially all-encompassing or universal, for only such an end is capable of uniting all one’s impulses into a unified whole. Ritschl defends this claim in the following terms: If the spirit determines itself uninterruptedly by a single end, then, as a power ruling over its individual impulses, it is free . . . However, freedom, as the power of self-determination supreme over our impulses, is not attained when the end which dominates our self-determination is bad, or when it consists in the satisfaction of a single impulse, for in the latter case we have only a partial power over our impulses, while the pursuit of a bad end implies a defect of freedom as against the single dominant impulse.

He continues:  Even though the general ends of our family, or class, or nationality form our personal ends, self-determination exclusively by regard for family-feeling, class-interests, or patriotism, may be bad if it sets itself in opposition to common ends that are higher still. In such cases what binds the will is certainly not a form of personal selfishness; but yet the limitation of our moral interest to these ends of merely relative universality implies a refined or idealized selfishness, and therefore a defect of freedom as against the impulse arising from natural

22  Ritschl, Die christliche Vollkommenheit:  Ein Vortrag (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1874), 17 (ET: “Christian Perfection,” trans. E. Craigmile, Biblioteca Sacra 35:140 [October 1878], 676–7); cf. Ritschl, RV, §3, 22.

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partiality for one’s relatives, for those who pursue the same occupation, or for public law and the state. Freedom, therefore, consists in self-determination by that end which, by possessing the most universal content, makes it possible to subordinate to it all individual impulses and all moral aims which may be particular in their range.23

Ritschl’s reasoning here proceeds roughly as follows: (a) to be free is for one’s life to be determined by an end that one sets for oneself, rather than by external stimuli or by a merely given end such as survival; (b) if one’s end is simply the maximal satisfaction of a natural impulse, such as the acquisition of goods, then it is insufficient to render one free, since one’s life is in that case organized around a merely given end; (c) if one sets an end for oneself that is limited in scope—as when one’s end is to maximize the well-being of one’s family or nation—then one will likewise remain unfree (or not fully free), since such an end may simply be one’s natural, selfish impulse writ large, and in any case cannot free one from all such impulses; hence (d) one can be free only if the end that one sets for oneself is a universal, moral end, for only such an end is (i) sufficient to free one from determination by external stimuli and merely given impulses, and (ii) all-encompassing enough to orient one’s entire life toward it. Ritschl concludes, accordingly, that “freedom is permanent self-determination by the good end, the standard of which is to be found in the law of universal love for humanity.”24 On Ritschl’s account, then, persons who orient themselves toward a particular end can experience their lives as an integrated, self-expressive whole, and therefore as the product not of nature but of “spirit.” Much depends here, of course, on the little word “can,” for as Ritschl is clearly aware, there are reasons to wonder whether such wholeness is possible in the real world. Before turning to these, however, it is important to observe a significant implication of this account: given Ritschl’s claims about persons, ends, and their relation to nature, it is now further apparent why he would reject the Tübingen School’s philosophy of history, insofar as the latter tries to understand the actions of persons on the model of simple causal processes, and thus commits what Ritschl sees as a category error. A more adequate approach, Ritschl thinks, must take into account the ends toward which persons’ lives are directed; Ritschl thus proposes, as an alternative to the Tübingen School, an approach that focuses on the ideal by which persons are oriented—a Lebensideal—and the ways that these ideals shape the conduct of one’s life—the Lebensführung.25 Ritschl’s analysis of medieval Catholicism and Reformation Protestantism exemplifies this approach:  the former, Ritschl claims, was oriented toward

24  Ritschl, RV, §36, 277–8 (my emphasis on “all”).  Ritschl, RV, §36, 278.  For these categories, see, for instance, Ritschl’s Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 1 (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1880), 38. 23

25

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the end of mystical union with God, and this orientation corresponded with a contemplative, “monastic” way of life; Protestantism, by contrast, was oriented toward the ideal of trusting God in all conditions of life, which corresponded to a life of patiently suffering within one’s secular vocation.26 Examples aside, Ritschl’s point is that persons’ lives, and the personal dimensions of history more broadly, can be properly understood only in light of the ends toward which they are oriented and around which they are organized.27 This point is crucial to Ritschl’s understanding of Christianity and its connection with “mineness,” as we shall see. Equally crucial is Ritschl’s understanding of the difficulties involved in orienting one’s entire life toward a universal moral end. As Kant pointed out, there are at least two seemingly insurmountable obstacles to doing so: on the one hand, even when persons set such ends for themselves, they seem incapable of orienting themselves, consistently and wholeheartedly, toward them. Vast stretches of one’s life may be oriented toward some other end, and one may also fail to live up to that orientation even where one intends to. On the other hand, even if all of one’s intentions, habits, emotions, and so on were oriented toward an end, this would not suffice to orient one’s entire life toward that end, precisely insofar as one’s life-circumstances are exposed to forces beyond one’s control. With respect to the latter, Ritschl observes that we are as far removed as possible from independence, if we consider only our natural existence as parts of the world in the midst of the action and reaction of all the parts thereof. For we are exposed to all possible restrictions of our freedom, endangered by all possible evils of nature and human society. These evils are innumerable; and in their pressure against us is seen the pressure of the whole world against us.28

One of Ritschl’s fundamental claims thus appears to be in danger, for it seems that the best a person can do is struggle, ultimately in vain, against the forces of nature. This is the context within which Ritschl understands religion, at least early in his career, for “in every religion,” he claims, what is sought, with the help of the superhuman spiritual power reverenced by persons, is a solution of the contradiction in which one finds oneself, as both a part of the world of nature and a spiritual personality claiming to dominate nature. For in the former role spirit is a part of nature, dependent upon it, subject to and confined by other things; but as spirit one is moved by the impulse

  Ritschl defends these characterizations in Pietismus, vol. 1, 36–61.   Unsurprisingly, Ritschl holds a parallel position toward theology, for “theology has to do,” he claims, “not with natural objects, but with states and movements of man’s spiritual life . . .” (RV, §3, 20). 28  Ritschl, Vollkommenheit, 16 (675). 26 27

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to maintain one’s independence against them. In this juncture, religion springs up as faith in superhuman spiritual powers, by whose help one’s own power is in some way supplemented, and elevated into a unity of its own kind which is a match for the pressure of the natural world.29

On Ritschl’s account, then, persons turn to religion precisely because they experience nature as standing in contradiction to them—i.e. because they cannot orient their life-circumstances toward the end they have set for themselves. In this situation, one seeks help from a spiritual power or powers, in the hope that such a power will somehow enable one to rise above the forces of nature and so, finally, to achieve freedom. To return to our example, it is not hard to imagine someone who devotes his or her life to the poor, yet is acutely aware of how difficult it is to make a difference in their situation, and how difficult it is to bring all of one’s intentions and emotions into line with that devotion, and who may therefore pray that a God will change his or her heart, and will also take the side of the poor. Religions differ, on this account, according to the sort of help one might hope to receive, and under what conditions one might receive it, but from Ritschl’s perspective they are all fundamentally answers to the question of how persons can rise above the opposition of nature. There are several obvious objections facing “religion” so construed, the first of which is that religions then appear rather obviously to be the products of wishful thinking. Encouraged by Ritschl, that is to say, an objector might argue along the following lines: our plans are frustrated by our own failures and by the intransigence of nature, so of course we wish that there were some superhuman, supernatural power that would come to our aid. If Ritschl is right about this, one might infer that such powers are simply the reification of that for which we naturally wish, and that the moral of his story is precisely that one should turn away from religion in order to face the fact that human life is filled with hardships and that one has only this-worldly resources for dealing with them. A  second objection is that Ritschl’s definition makes “religion” sound suspiciously like Christianity, albeit a watered-down version thereof, which raises concerns about how adequate it is as a definition, and, more seriously, about the legitimacy of using this definition to judge non-Christian religions. A  third objection is the inverse of the second:  the problem is not that Ritschl judges non-Christian religions in terms of a watered-down understanding of Christianity, but that he judges Christianity in these terms—the problem, that is, is that Ritschl takes a putatively neutral stance toward Christianity, and that such neutrality is at odds with Christian

29  Ritschl, RV, §27, 189–90; cf. §3, 17; §29, 207–8; §52, 473, and Ritschl, Unterricht in der christlichen Religion (Bonn:  Adolph Marcus, 1875, 1881, 1886), §8 (ET:  “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” in Three Essays).

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faith. The second and third objections were raised against Ritschl by two of his students: Ernst Troeltsch and Julius Kaftan, respectively. We will return to these two objections—and Ritschl’s response to them—toward the end of this chapter, and to the first objection in Chapter 6. The following claims, then, are fundamental to Ritschl’s thought: (a) that “spirit” differs from nature, because and insofar as persons can orient their lives toward an end that they set for themselves; (b) that this means, among other things, that historians can adequately account for persons’ actions only if they understand them in terms of the ideals toward which these persons were oriented; and (c) that persons turn to religion to help them address the problems they face in trying to orient their lives toward a universal moral end. With these claims on board, we are well positioned to understand Ritschl’s account of the Christian religion, and, in particular, of Christianity’s role in enabling persons to organize their lives around an end that they set for themselves—enabling them, that is, to integrate their lives in such a way that they can identify with them or experience them as “mine.”

5.3.  M ISTRUST TOWA R D GOD We turn, then, to Ritschl’s understanding of Christianity, which he sees as providing an especially satisfying solution to the problems just discussed. On Ritschl’s view, these problems are best diagnosed in terms of Christianity’s claims about sin, guilt, and evil, and best remedied by one’s sharing in Jesus’s relationship to God. Ritschl understands sin as, at base, mistrust (Mißtrauen) toward God, though he everywhere insists that such mistrust is necessarily adjoined with immorality. Ritschl thus claims, for instance, that “sin, which alike as a mode of action and as a habitual propensity extends over the whole human race, is, in the Christian view of the world, estimated as the opposite of reverence and trust (Vertrauen) toward God, as also the opposite of the kingdom of God.”30 Ritschl consistently maintains that sin includes both of these components: on the one hand, a lack of trust toward God, and on the other, lack of morality or, what turns out to be the same thing, lack of adherence to God’s kingdom. For 30  Ritschl, RV, §43, 363; cf. §41, 317, and Unterricht, §27. On Ritschl’s theology, see Rolf Schäfer, Ritschl: Grundlinien eines fast verschollenen dogmatischen Systems (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1968); James Richmond, Ritschl: A Reappraisal (London: Collins); J. Ringleben (ed.), Gottes Reich und menschliche Freiheit (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht); B. Malibabo, Reich Gottes und menschliche Selbstätigkeit:  Zum Verhältnis zwischen christlichen Glauben und moralishen Handeln in der Theologie Albrecht Ritschls (Würzburg: Echert, 2003); see also Christophe Chalamet’s thoughtful survey of the relevant literature:  “Reassessing Albrecht Ritschl’s Theology: A Survey of Recent Literature,” in Religion Compass 2:4 (2008).

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Ritschl, then, mistrust toward God and immorality are the two basic forms of sin, and they seem always and necessarily to coexist. Nevertheless, Ritschl, following Luther, sees mistrust as the more basic form of sin:  Ritschl thus contrasts Augustine, who “assumes that the moral law is the original dispensation between God and humanity,” with Luther, who “recognized the kind providence of God and humanity’s trust in it as the basic form of religion, in which humanity lived and moved before the fall”; for the latter, accordingly, “a defect in reverence and in trust in God, or indifference and mistrust of him, was proved to be the basic form of the sin of our first parents, and, if that sin is transmitted to all, as the basic form of original sin, which then has as a special consequence selfish desire directed against the claims of the moral society.”31 For Ritschl, therefore, as apparently for Luther, mistrust toward God is the fundamental form of sin. That Ritschl thinks so is clear; why he thinks this, or how he construes the relationship between mistrust and immorality, is less so. Given its importance to Ritschl’s understanding of Christianity—and of Christianity’s making it possible for one to orient one’s life toward a moral end—it is important that we spend some time trying to clarify this relationship. To get a grip on these issues, it will be helpful to follow Ritschl’s claims about the sources of sin. For a given individual, the most immediate source of sin is the person’s sinful disposition; Ritschl claims, accordingly, that “the ‘law of sin’ in the will is a result of the necessary reaction of every act of the will upon the direction of the will-power. Accordingly, by an unrestrained repetition of selfish resolves, there is generated an ungodly and selfish bias.”32 Sins are the consequence, then, of one’s sinfulness, and one’s sinfulness is understood as a kind of habituation into selfishness and unfaithfulness: every time one acts selfishly, one becomes a more selfish person, and the more selfish one is, the more selfishly one will act. Sin thus becomes engrained in one’s will, serving as a law by which one is governed. Note well, however, that for Ritschl one’s sinful disposition is not simply the product of one’s sinful acts; he seems to think, rather, that one is in each case sinfully disposed prior to one’s undertaking any action, such that sinful acts should be thought to reinforce, but not create, that disposition. The disposition appears, instead, to have been produced, originally, not by one’s own actions but by the actions and attitudes of others, even as one’s own actions and attitudes help produce this disposition in still others. Ritschl thus depicts a “whole web of sinful action and reaction, which presupposes and yet again increases the selfish bias in every person,” in relationship to which “we become accustomed to standing forms of sin . . . and acquiesce in them as the ordinary expression of human nature.”33 Such “standing forms of sin” are all forms of selfishness, but 32  Ritschl, RV, §40, 316.  Ritschl, RV, §41, 331, cf. 319.  Ritschl, RV, §41, 321, 332; cf. Unterricht, §30.

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it would be a mistake to think of these solely, or even primarily, in terms of a person’s pursuing his or her individual self-interest at the expense of others, for, in Ritschl’s usage, “selfishness” is more or less synonymous with “orientation toward a partial end.” To be sure, an individual’s own interest—set over against that of others—is a partial end, but it is not the only such end; Ritschl thus remarks that “the selfish bias can also be associated with the appreciation of particular goods, with family pride, class-spirit, and patriotism, or with loyalty to the church’s creed.”34 It is not clear whether Ritschl thinks that persons pursue these ends for selfish motives, because they perceive the achievement of these ends as contributing to their own flourishing (as when politicians favor more or less restrictive voting laws, depending upon whether lower or higher turnout is likely to help them or their party win election), or that persons so identify with these ends that their achievement is itself experienced as contributing to the person’s flourishing (as when parents experience that which is good for their children as good for them). Either way, the point is that persons become accustomed to pursuing certain partial ends, and that such accustomization is the original source of one’s sinful disposition: one is not only told to pursue these ends, but, more importantly, one consciously or unconsciously imitates those who pursue them, such that one becomes disposed to reproduce their actions and reactions as one’s own. In the course of a normal upbringing, therefore, one becomes oriented toward the partial ends toward which those around one are oriented, in consequence of which one first acquires a sinful disposition. Sinfulness is thus explained in terms of one’s becoming accustomed to the pursuit of a partial end, which helps us understand, in turn, why Ritschl sees mistrust as the fundamental form of sin. The idea here, simply stated, is (a) that orientation toward a partial end is a kind of dependence on, or trust in, the world, and (b) that such trust in the world is equivalent to mistrust toward God. This is what Ritschl has in mind when he claims, for instance, that “whereas the kingdom of God as the supreme end rises above all that falls within the compass of the world, and is destined to regulate and embrace every relationship of life, a bondage and a false dependence on the world are the fruit of that friendship for the world which runs counter to that final end.”35 If I take as my end the selfish pursuit of my own interests—whether immediately, by doing whatever I  can to advance those interests, or mediately, by seeking the good of that partial end with which my interests are identified—I orient myself to the world in such a way that my good depends upon the fortunes of some worldly entity. Suppose, for instance, that I identify my interests with the company for which I work, or with the form of life upon which my livelihood depends, and that I set the furtherance of these interests

34

 Ritschl, RV, §41, 332.

 Ritschl, RV, §41, 320–1.

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as my end; in that case, the good toward which I  am oriented is a worldly good, and its fortunes—the fortunes of something within the world—decide how well my life is going. The partiality of my end thus makes it the case that I depend upon, and indeed trust in, the world. Such trust renders one especially vulnerable, of course, to various misfortunes, for if one’s life is oriented toward an end whose achievement is finally dependent upon the accumulation of certain worldly goods, then the absence of these goods can negate or otherwise stand in the way of that around which one’s life has been organized. (If my life is oriented toward making vast sums of money, and if the goodness of my life therefore comes to depend upon, say, a steady rise in the stock market, then if the stock market crashes, my life will crash with it.) Such vulnerability plays a crucial role in Ritschl’s account, for he argues that persons implicitly realize that the selfish partiality of their ends means that they are not trusting God, that they are thus estranged from God, and that they therefore deserve punishment—and, as a result, they experience misfortune precisely as punishment. That one experiences misfortune as such is apparently a natural consequence of trusting in the world, so that one should experience it as one’s getting what one deserves for not trusting God. Ritschl thus claims, in this connection, that “of the evils which make themselves perceptible as hindrances to human freedom, those have the significance of divine punishments—presupposing the divine government of the world—which each individual, through his or her unrelieved consciousness of guilt, imputes to him or herself as such.”36 On Ritschl’s account, then, one feels guilty for putting one’s trust in the world, and one thus experiences misfortunes as a natural consequence of, and so punishment for, such misplaced trust. This is not the only reason one feels guilty, however; Ritschl claims that one also feels guilty simply insofar as one pursues a selfish, partial end. Ritschl claims, that is, that persons implicitly know that they should pursue a universal end, such that, insofar as they pursue a partial end, they implicitly know that they are guilty—and insofar as they perceive God as the legislator of the universal end, they likewise perceive themselves as guilty before God. Ritschl thus asserts that God is conceived as the author and active representative of the moral law, because the final end which he desires to realize in the world must be realized just through the human race, and because the moral law represents the system of ends which are the means to the common final end. In the Christian sense, therefore, guilt denotes that contradiction of God on which the individual as well as the totality of humankind has entered through the non-fulfillment of the moral law, and which is recognized as present through the consciousness of

 Ritschl, RV, §43, 363; cf. §10, 52, Unterricht, §33.

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guilt in which the individual feels with pain the unworthiness of his or her own sin as well as his or her share in the guilt of all.37

Insofar as one pursues a partial end, therefore, one feels oneself to fall short of the moral law and, so, of God’s own law; one thus perceives oneself as deserving of punishment, and perceives certain misfortunes, particularly those arising in one’s relationship with others, as punishment, since certain kinds of estrangement from others are the natural consequence of, and punishment for, the pursuit of partial ends. As we shall see, moreover, Ritschl also seems to think that the pursuit of partial ends is a form of mistrust, because trust in God is a necessary and sufficient condition of pursuing a universal end—one can pursue such an end only if one trusts in God, and if one trusts in God, one will pursue such an end—which would mean that if one is not pursuing a universal end, one is not trusting God. Or, to get a bit ahead of ourselves: to pursue the universal end of bringing all persons into loving fellowship with God and one another is to set aside one’s own, selfish ends; to set aside one’s own, selfish ends is to renounce various forms of worldly trust; and one can do this, Ritschl claims, only insofar as one trusts in God’s provision. Ritschl thus sees adherence to a universal moral end as requiring, and as a form of, trust in God, and adherence to partial ends as a sort of mistrust in God and as leading one to experience certain misfortunes as consequent upon, and so punishment for, such mistrust. On Ritschl’s account, then, sin is fundamentally mistrust toward God, and this leads us to perceive certain misfortunes as the natural consequence of, and punishment for, that mistrust. Ritschl thus sheds some theological light on the problems discussed in Section 5.2, for if one is mistrustful of God, one experiences misfortune as punishment, and as contradicting the end toward which one’s life is oriented. To overcome such contradiction, therefore, one’s mistrust toward God, as well as one’s consequent sense of guilt, must be overcome. As one might expect, Ritschl’s theological diagnosis of our problem leads him to propose a theological solution, to which we now turn.

5.4.  TH E VOCATION OF JE SUS One can understand this solution, Ritschl maintains, only in light of Jesus, and one can understand Jesus only in light of his end. (Given his earlier claims against the Tübingen School, this is exactly what we should expect Ritschl to say, since he is committed to the view that “every intelligent life  Ritschl, RV, §12, 56.

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moves within the lines of a personal self-end.”38) Ritschl claims, accordingly, that “the human life of Christ must be viewed under the category of his consciously pursued personal end . . . For all such ends become criteria of one’s characteristic and personal conduct, only insofar as they are included in one’s personal self-end.”39 On Ritschl’s account, then, Jesus’s words, deeds, and so forth must be understood in terms of the end he set for himself, or, as Ritschl also puts it, in terms of his “vocation.” This is how Ritschl would understand any person, but especially Jesus, since Ritschl takes it that everything Jesus did was oriented toward this vocation, and can thus be understood only in light of it.40 Indeed, Ritschl will claim that in Jesus’s case, even that which happens to him is oriented toward his vocation, such that his entire life is organized around, and contributes to, its achievement. To understand Jesus, accordingly, it is crucial that we understand the end toward which he devoted himself. Simply stated, Jesus’s vocation is to devote himself wholly to a loving fellowship with God; given who God is, such devotion necessarily entails that Jesus will aim to bring others into this fellowship, who will in turn aim to bring others into that fellowship, and so on, such that in taking this as his end, Jesus also aims at establishing a loving fellowship among persons. Ritschl writes, therefore, that “the end aimed at [is] that Christ should maintain the unique position which, as Son, he has in the love of the Father, and then further by the end that the community of disciples should be effectively taken up into the love of the Father.”41 On this account, then, Jesus’s devotion to God means, by a sort of transitive property, that he is simultaneously devoted to seeing others share that devotion, and, by this same transitive property, that these persons will be devoted not only to God but to seeing others share that devotion, and so on. Given that Jesus and his followers see loving fellowship with God as the highest possible end, moreover, it follows that in wanting to bring others into this fellowship, one is devoting oneself to their good, which is another way of saying, for Ritschl, that one loves them; in devoting himself to loving God, therefore, Jesus likewise aims to bring about a loving communion among persons and their own highest good. This transitivity explains what Ritschl means when he claims, for instance, that, in each moment of his life, Jesus stands to God as Father in a relation of incomparable fellowship, which is realized in his knowledge of God, in the surrender of his will to God’s providential guiding, and in the security of feeling which accompanies the same. When, in

39  Ritschl, RV, §48, 417.  Ritschl, RV, §48, 418.   In the context of his Christology, Ritschl claims that Jesus is actually the source of his views about personhood (RV, §48, 424). This is an important admission, since some of Ritschl’s other claims about the singular orientation of persons toward an end seem applicable only in extraordinary cases. 41  Ritschl, RV, §14, 69. 38

40

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prayer especially, he collects himself for this fellowship, he asserts the nearness of God, and assures himself of the love of God as the ground of his own position as God’s Son (John 15:10–11). At the same time, this function is not exercised outside his consciousness of his vocation and the activity resulting therefrom, but of necessity opens out to include the whole range of this activity, even as it receives stimulus and support in return. For Christ recognizes his vocation, and exercises it, as the direct work of God; the aim of his own efforts is known to him as the very aim of God; his conduct therefore is intelligible to him as a service rendered to God, which in its own way brings him just as near to God as prayer itself.42

Jesus thus orients himself wholly toward fellowship with God, but in drawing near to God, Jesus is simultaneously led to love those whom God loves, or to take God’s end as Jesus’s own; to maintain his fellowship with God, therefore, is also for Jesus to commit himself to God’s end, namely, that others would enjoy this same fellowship. Ritschl’s argument here is fairly dense, but it seems to proceed through the following steps. He claims, first, that Jesus devoted his life to establishing a “kingdom” in which persons are united with one another in love: “the business of [Jesus’s] vocation,” Ritschl contends, “was the establishment of the universal ethical fellowship of humankind, as that aim in the world which rises above all worldly conditions”; this fellowship rises above the world precisely because it is “an association of persons for reciprocal and common action from the motive of love—an association which is determined no longer by the natural conditions of affinity in the narrower sense, but by the unity of humanity’s spiritual constitution.”43 Jesus devoted himself, then, to founding a community in which persons would love one another, irrespective of the selfish, partial ends that may or may not be furthered by such love. Such a community is thus not of this world, which is evident in the fact that, in it, “persons give up their legal rights out of love, or at any rate do not bring the standard of right as such visibly into application. That Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36) can only mean that it is exempt from the standard of legal rights.”44 In this community, one takes others’ ends as one’s own, not for the sake of advancing one’s own selfish interests, but simply because one loves others—yet insofar as one loves others and so takes their end as one’s own, one experiences the advancement of their end as good for one. This is what Ritschl has in mind when he characterizes love as “the abiding disposition to further spiritual personalities in regard to their proper self-end, under the condition that in so doing we recognize and are seeking to attain our own self-end.”45  Ritschl, RV, §50, 448. With respect to the transitivity between fellowship with God and drawing others into that fellowship, cf. Unterricht, §42; cf. RV, §50, 454–5. 43 44  Ritschl, RV, §48, 423, §36, 276.  Ritschl, RV, §46, 409. 45  Ritschl, RV, §49, 427; cf. §34, 263–4. 42

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Jesus devotes himself to the establishment of just such a community, which means, first of all, that he sets aside his rights, his self-interest, for the good of others. This brings us to Ritschl’s second point, namely, that Jesus can do this only in dependence upon God, which sheds light upon God’s own end. Ritschl argues, in this connection, that a vocation of this kind can only be conceived under the guiding idea of a transcendent God. But for this reason Christ not merely recognizes the business of his vocation to be the lordship or kingdom of God, he also recognizes this vocation as the special ordinance of God for himself, and his activity in the fulfillment of it as service rendered to God in God’s own cause.46

Ritschl’s reasoning here is not entirely clear, but it seems to go something like this:  (a)  to give oneself wholly to love for others, and so set one’s own interests entirely aside, is to entrust oneself to something other than oneself or the world, and trust that this something other—God—is looking out for one’s good; (b) if one trusts that God is looking out for one’s good, and one’s good is identified with that of others, then one must trust that God is looking out for their good, too; (c) if one trusts that God is looking out for the good of those whom one loves—in this case, the good of all others—then one must trust that God will arrange for their good to be achieved, which trust will lead one, finally, to a sense that God governs the world with this end in view (which would obviously reinforce the trust that enables one to set aside one’s own self-interest). This last point seems to be what Ritschl has in mind when he claims that “God’s will, permanent and certain of itself, directed toward the realization of the kingdom of God as the ethical and transcendent unity of a multitude of persons [Geister], forms, for the sake of this end, the ground of everything which, as causes or effects, serves as a means to its accomplishment.”47 If the end to which Jesus is devoted is likewise that to which God is devoted, as Ritschl contends—“if the life-work of Christ is the work of God, this involves the assumption that the personal self-end of Christ has the same content as is contained in the self-end of God”48—it follows, third, that Jesus’s life, as oriented toward this end, reveals God’s will:  as the founder of the kingdom of God in the world, in other words, as the bearer of God’s ethical lordship over humanity, Jesus . . . is that being in the world in whose self-end God makes effective and manifest his own eternal self-end in an original manner, whose whole activity, therefore, in discharge of his vocation, forms the material of that complete revelation of God which is present in him, in whom, in short, the Word of God is a human person.49

 Ritschl, RV, §48, 423–4.  Ritschl, RV, §48, 425.

46 48

47  Ritschl, RV, §37, 284; cf. §39, 308–9.  Ritschl, RV, §48, 425–6.

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The idea here is straightforward enough: if person A is wholly devoted to a particular end—teaching children to read, for instance, or the appreciation of music—and person B is wholly devoted to that same end (and means for his or her devotion to correspond to that of person A), it follows that someone who observes person B’s devotion, and takes it to correspond with that of person A, would likewise take it to reveal person A’s devotion. (Think here of a grown child who learns his or her parent’s trade and then takes over the family business.) On Ritschl’s account, Jesus’s commitment to the establishment of a loving communion corresponds to, and means to enact, God’s own commitment, such that Jesus thus reveals God’s will. This brings us to a fourth point: insofar as this will is essential to who God is, as Ritschl claims, 50 it follows that God is fundamentally committed to the establishment of such fellowship or, in sum, that God is love:  “For in the characteristic activity of Christ in the discharge of his vocation,” Ritschl writes, “the essential will of God is revealed as love, since Christ’s supreme aim, namely, the kingdom of God, is identical with the supreme end of his Father.”51 Indeed, Ritschl goes so far as to claim that “when God is conceived as love, through the relation of his will to his Son and the community of the kingdom of God, he is not conceived as being anything apart from and prior to this self-determination as love. He is either conceived as love, or simply not at all.”52 So then:  if (a)  love is a matter of seeking another’s good, (b) humanity’s good is to be in communion with God and one another, and (c) Jesus reveals that God is devoted to the establishment of this good, it follows (d)  that God is devoted to love; if, moreover, this devotion is essential to God—which must be the case, Ritschl argues, if one takes Jesus to reveal God—then it follows that God is love. (Ritschl likewise argues, on this basis, that Jesus is himself God, but unfortunately this is a point that I cannot address here.53) The fact that Jesus was wholly devoted to God’s own cause leads to one final, crucial point: devotion to this vocation not only reveals God, but establishes Jesus’s independence from, and dominion over, the world, insofar as everything that happens to him can be seen as an expression of his vocation, and so as included in his intentions, rather than as simply imposed upon him from without. We see this most clearly, Ritschl suggests, in Jesus’s response to suffering, for he experienced suffering (a)  as a temptation to forsake his vocation, since suffering naturally inclines one to pursue one’s self-interest, 50   Ritschl argues this point at length in TM, in which he contrasts his view, according to which God is understood in terms of God’s loving commitment to us, with that of his critics, who “have subordinated the knowledge of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to an idea, to a general concept which is called the Absolute, Substance, that is, Thing or Object” (38–9 [187]). 51 52  Ritschl, RV, §49, 428.  Ritschl, RV, §34, 268. 53   For claims to this effect, see Ritschl, RV, §44, 376–7; §45, 382–3; §49, 442; Unterricht, §24.

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whereas Jesus’s vocation depended upon his setting aside that pursuit; and (b) as a would-be obstacle to the accomplishment of that vocation, as when those opposed to Jesus threatened him with torture and execution, such that not giving up his vocation in the face of these threats meant that they, too, became instances of his devotion to it. Ritschl claims, accordingly, that had he succumbed to one such temptation, it would have meant that, to preserve the tranquility of his individual existence, he had renounced his vocation. But, on the contrary, all the sufferings that befell him, and especially those he was ready to bring on himself by his appearance in Jerusalem, he steadfastly endured, without once proving untrue to his vocation, or failing to assert it. Therefore, these sufferings, which, by his enduring of them even unto death, he made morally his own, are manifestations of his loyalty to his vocation, and for Christ himself come into account solely from this point of view.54

Through devotion to his vocation, therefore, Jesus’s sufferings became something other than mere subjection to suffering; they became, rather, an occasion for Jesus to remain faithful to his vocation, and in not allowing these sufferings to divert him from it, they became instances of that faithfulness. As such, Jesus’s sufferings become part of the diachronically stable intention by which he governs his life, and are thus included in the life Jesus intends to live; hence Ritschl’s claim that “the suffering of Christ, through the patience with which it was borne, becomes a kind of doing” and that, “by his patience, the suffering inflicted on him is as such made his own.”55 Jesus’s relationship to suffering is a particular instance, moreover, of a more general truth, namely, that Jesus’s relationship to the world is subordinated, in each case, to his vocation, such that Jesus’s life is entirely his own, entirely a sort of doing, and entirely independent of the world’s would-be dominion. Ritschl thus claims, in this connection, that “Jesus subordinates to himself the relation between himself and the world,” and, in consequence, that he “overcomes the world,” “acquires spiritual lordship over the world,” and “realizes in his own experience independence toward the world.”56 In outline, at least, we can now see how Jesus might play a key role in Ritschl’s response to the problem discussed earlier, namely, the problem of spirit overcoming its apparent contradiction by nature. On Ritschl’s account, Jesus is wholly devoted to his vocation, viz. to bringing humanity into loving fellowship with God and one another, in consequence of which he (a) reveals God as devoted to this same end, and (b) takes all of his experiences, including his sufferings, up into his vocation, to such an extent that his entire life is included in and actually organized around that vocation. This last point is obviously crucial for an account of “mineness,” but it is not yet clear how the  Ritschl, RV, §48, 423; cf. §49, 434, 436; §50, 451; §58, 534; Unterricht, §23. 56  Ritschl, RV, §48, 419.  Ritschl, RV, §49, 436; §48, 424; §44, 366.

54 55

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mineness characteristic of Jesus’s life would come to characterize the lives of others, not least because the latter, by contrast with Jesus, are sinful. To address this point, we turn to Ritschl’s further claims about the community founded by Jesus.

5.5. TRUST I N GOD The community founded by Jesus is like any other, on Ritschl’s account, in the sense that it is guided by, and should be understood in terms of, a Lebensideal—but in this case, a Lebensideal as embodied in the life of a person, Jesus, since the end toward which the community is oriented is that toward which Jesus’s life was oriented, namely, that persons would be drawn into loving fellowship with God and one another. For the Christian community, then, to pursue its ideal is simultaneously to pursue conformity with its founder and, in consequence, to attain to the sort of wholeness or “mineness” by which his life was characterized. This raises an obvious problem, however: unlike Jesus, those who would be brought into this community are sinful, such that an apparently insuperable obstacle stands in the way of their becoming conformed to him. To join the community, that is to say, would be to share Jesus’s fellowship with God, but since humans have put their trust in the world and are therefore mistrustful toward God, they cannot enter into such fellowship. A  first step necessary to establishing this fellowship, accordingly, and achieving God’s own end, is taken by God, who remains steadfastly committed to this end even in the face of human sinfulness, and so pardons humans’ sin. “The forgiveness of sins as pardon,” Ritschl explains, “renders inoperative that result of guilt and the consciousness of guilt which would manifest itself in the abolition of moral fellowship between God and humanity, in their separation or mutual alienation. God, in forgiving sins, exercises his will in the direction of not permitting the contradiction—expressed in guilt—in which sinners stand to him to hinder that fellowship of humanity with him which he intends on higher grounds. And so far as this intention works determinatively upon sinners, it does not, indeed, free them altogether from the consciousness of guilt, but from that mistrust which, as an effect of the consciousness of guilt, naturally separates the injured person from the offender.”57 In pardoning those who are mistrustful or sinful, therefore, God does not overlook their sinfulness but refuses to let it determine the state of God’s relationship to them; God will not allow our sinfulness, in other words, to prevent God from achieving God’s end, nor to diminish God’s love for us. Consider an example: suppose 57

 Ritschl, RV, §13, 61–2; cf. §14, 65.

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my young son is frustrated by the difficulties involved in learning to read, and so decides to quit trying. Knowing how important it is that he learn to read, I am unlikely to allow him to quit—on reading or on himself. In light of these “higher grounds,” as Ritschl puts it, I will not let my son’s resistance be the decisive word on the matter. Roughly, this is what Ritschl means by forgiveness or “justification,” and it is an essential condition of anyone’s entering the community founded by Jesus. The mere fact that God pardons one, however, is not by itself a sufficient condition of one’s entering the community, nor of entering into loving fellowship with God; for that, a further condition must be met, namely, that the one who has been pardoned must trust that this is the case, or, as Ritschl puts it, he or she must have faith. On the one hand, then, “the ground of justification, or the forgiveness of sins, is the benevolent, gracious, merciful purpose of God to vouchsafe to sinful humanity the privilege of access to himself”; on the other, the form in which sinners appropriate this gift is faith, that is, the emotional trust in God, accompanied by the conviction of the value of this gift for one’s blessedness, which, called forth by God’s grace, takes the place of the former mistrust which was bound up with the feeling of guilt. Through trust in God’s grace the alienation of sinners from God, which was essentially connected with the unrelieved feeling of guilt, is removed.58

For Ritschl, then, faith just is one’s trust in God’s pardon, and in light of the “higher grounds” on the basis of which God pardons sin, it is likewise one’s trust that God loves one and takes one’s blessedness to be God’s aim. 59 In response to God’s pardon, then, the members of Jesus’s community are led to trust in God, and are thus brought into a new, reconciled relationship with God. Ritschl thus maintains that reconciliation is “the effect ever aimed at in justification or pardon, namely that the person who is pardoned actually enters into the relationship which is to be established”—a relationship, that is, in which “those who formerly were engaged in active contradiction to God have, by pardon, been brought into a harmonious orientation toward God, and first of all into agreement with the intention cherished by him in acting thus.”60 To trust God’s pardon, accordingly, is to recognize God’s love for one, and so not only to accept God’s forgiveness, but to relate to God as a child would to a loving parent, or, in the traditional idiom, to God as one’s heavenly Father.61  Ritschl, RV, §20, 104–5; cf. §19, 96–9; §23, 135, 139–40.   On faith as trust, see Ritschl, RV, §19, 99. 60  Ritschl, RV, §15, 76; cf. §16, 81; §23, 133; §61, 566; Unterricht, §37. 61   So Ritschl: “the forgiveness extended by a father to his child combines in one act the judgment that a fault committed by the child ought to bring about no alienation between father and 58 59

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This brings us to a decisive step in the argument: Ritschl claims that trust in God’s pardon leads one to trust in God’s fatherly love, and that this leads one, in turn, to trust in God’s provision; crucially, then, faith sets one in a different relationship not only to God, but, because of this, to the world. The principle is not hard to understand:  because my daughter trusts that I  love her, she counts upon me to look out for her in certain circumstances—she knows that I will hold on to her as she learns how to swim, for instance, and that I will get her something to drink if she is thirsty. My daughter’s relationship to me thus impacts her relationship to particular circumstances. Likewise, Ritschl argues, for one’s relationship to God:  Faith in the fatherly providence of God is the Christian world view in an abbreviated form. In this faith, although we neither know the future nor perfectly comprehend the past, yet we judge our momentary relation to the world on the basis of our knowledge of the love of God and on the basis of what we derive from this knowledge, namely, that every child of God possesses a significance greater than the world which God directs in accordance with his final purpose, i.e., our salvation. From this faith there springs that confidence which in all its gradations is equally far removed from the gnawing anxiety which might arise from our relation to the superior power of nature, as it is from dull indifference, bold recklessness, or stoic imperturbability, since none of these are an expression of ongoing spiritual freedom.62

If one trusts in God’s pardon, accordingly, one will trust in God’s love, and if one trusts in God’s love, one’s relationship to the world will likewise be characterized by trust—in this case, trust in God’s providence. Ritschl thus claims that faith in providence follows necessarily from faith in God’s pardon, to such an extent that the former serves as one’s only assurance that one actually has the latter: if one does not trust in God’s providence, this means, for Ritschl, that one does not really trust in God’s love; on the other hand, if one does trust in God’s providence, then one must trust in God’s love, for, in consequence of human sinfulness, Ritschl thinks that one can trust God only if one trusts God’s pardon. Ritschl claims, then, that “personal assurance, springing from justification, is experienced in and through trust in God in all the situations of life, and especially in patience, by one who through faith in Christ incorporates oneself into the community of believers.”63 Such faith is not a matter of knowing, in any given circumstance, what God will do on one’s behalf, but of perceiving all of one’s circumstances in light of one’s trust in God, and, especially, of one’s becoming non-inferentially child, and the expression of the purpose to admit the child, as a right and gracious action, to the unfettered intercourse of love” (RV, §18, 91–2); cf. Unterricht, §37. 62  Ritschl, Unterricht, §51. This is a prominent theme throughout Ritschl’s writings; for other instances, see RV, §25, 166–7, and Vollkommenheit, 14–15. 63  Ritschl, RV, §26, 183; cf. §25, 167.

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disposed to respond trustingly in these circumstances.64 Ritschl claims, that is, that trust toward God is exhibited not by one’s affirmation of certain doctrines, nor by one’s knowledge of certain facts, but by one’s responsive dispositions and, especially, one’s emotions; recall that, for Ritschl, it is not the clear and exhaustive perceptions which exert the greatest influence on human conduct; it is rather the indefinite ideas, those which insinuate themselves into the feelings and the will, which excite the emotions, and which work in us alongside of our definitely calculated purposes, moving us indeed mightily . . . The disposition, the temper of mind is thus the home where trust in God may rule.65

To trust in God, therefore, is for one’s dispositions, and particularly one’s emotions, to be formed by such trust; the God-ward and world-ward dimensions of such dispositions correspond, on Ritschl’s account, with the dispositions of humility and patience, respectively. Ritschl defines humility as “the disposition to depend on God,” or as “the resolve to submit ourselves to God.”66 To become humble is thus to become reliably disposed to trust in God, and so to shed one’s previous disposition of trust in the world and of mistrust toward God. (For Ritschl, the paradigmatic means of becoming so transformed is prayer, since prayer both expresses and reinforces one’s trust in God’s providence.67) One’s disposition toward worldly circumstances is likewise transformed, from a disposition to feel oneself dependent upon the world and so as subjected to its caprice, to a feeling of independence from the world and so of being able to bear one’s circumstances in freedom. This disposition, which Ritschl terms patience, emerges as humility’s necessary attendant:  the truth of the fatherly care of God for his children suggests to us not only the inference that no evils arising from the world can overbalance the blessing of fellowship with God, but also this further application, that these evils, as tests of our fidelity to God, are elevated into relative blessings. And this comes about just through the exercise of patience as the peculiar and proper manifestation of Christian freedom.68

On this account, then, patience names the feeling of freedom, consequent upon one’s trust in God, that one experiences in relation to one’s circumstances, particularly difficult or “evil” ones. Indeed, Ritschl suggests that one is not only freed from one’s previous subjection to these evils, but one can now experience them as blessings, precisely insofar as one experiences them

  For claims to this effect, see Ritschl, RV, §63, 584, 587; Vollkommenheit, 15.  Ritschl, Vollkommenheit, 17 (676–7). 66  Ritschl, Vollkommenheit, 17 (677); Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, §65, 600. 67   On this point, see Ritschl, Unterricht, §54; RV, §66, 606–7, 610; Vollkommenheit, 18–19. 68  Ritschl, RV, §64, 594–5; cf. Vollkommenheit, 17–18; Unterricht, §§52–3. 64 65

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as an occasion for one’s trust in God and, so, as integral to the achievement of one’s end. That evils count as blessings may sound like a strange, even perverse, claim. Once we see the logic behind it, however, we will also see why the claim is so important to Ritschl’s overall argument. That logic comes most clearly to light in the following passage: for those who trust God, Ritschl contends, that which in the ordinary view is a restriction of freedom, and proves itself as such by exciting the feeling of pain, is invested, through the joy which springs from peace with God—through this expression of the harmonious feeling of life—with the precisely opposite value of a means which ministers to freedom. For when these experiences of evils do not become the occasions of apostasy from the Christian faith, when, as temptations, they still do not lead to bodily and social self-preservation being preferred to the duties of the Christian vocation, then their utility actually comes to be that of stimuli to endurance in the Christian faith, i.e. means to the assertion of freedom against the world.69

Every time one faces evils and obstructions, one faces that which would tempt one not to trust God; hence, insofar as one trusts God in the face of these temptations, they become occasions for that trust, and, therefore, are incorporated into a life oriented toward that toward which one wants to be oriented. This should sound familiar, since it echoes Ritschl’s earlier claims about Jesus, to the effect that even Jesus’s sufferings counted as his “doings” or “his own,” in that they were occasions for him to remain faithful to his vocation. Jesus’s love for others was a crucial element in his vocation, as it will be for those who would follow him, but we can already see how his followers would share in what Ritschl earlier termed Jesus’s dominion over the world and, in consequence, the wholeness or “mineness” by which his life was marked, for if a person were to experience all of his or her circumstances, including those which seem opposed to one, as occasions to trust God, then he or she could see those circumstances, too, as fitting into the life he or she intends and with which he or she identifies.70 Ritschl is quick to insist, however, that one cannot actually share Jesus’s dominion unless one shares his love for others, not least because trust in God is a sufficient as well as a necessary condition of such love. With respect to the former, Ritschl claims that one is brought into loving fellowship with God only by accepting God’s end as one’s own, and, because God’s end is loving fellowship with others, that one must therefore accept that end as one’s

 Ritschl, RV, §52, 476.   So Ritschl: “In the assurance that all things work together for good to them that love God, because God’s love is manifested to them in reconciliation through Christ, we may exercise the same dominion over the world which Christ exercised by the assertion of his consciousness of God” (RV, §59, 557); cf. §54, 503–4; §52, 474; §68, 634. 69 70

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own; Ritschl thus argues that “love follows from faith in reconciliation only because the God in whom we put our faith has for his final aim the union of persons in the kingdom of God.”71 On Ritschl’s account, then, if one trusts God, one will commit oneself to love for others—trusting God is a sufficient condition of such love. Those who trust God will love others, therefore, as God loves them. Ritschl claims that such trust is likewise a necessary condition of loving others; to see why, consider first Ritschl’s understanding of love. Love, he claims, is distinguished by three characteristics:72 to love others is to seek their good, where (a) this seeking has become a settled part of one’s will— “love implies a will which is constant in its aim,” Ritschl writes, “for if the objects change, we may have fancies, but we cannot love”; (b) one desires and aims to promote a loved one’s flourishing at the level of his or her ultimate end, as opposed to desiring simply that life-circumstances go well for him or her—this is what Ritschl means when he claims that “what love does is rather to estimate everything which concerns the other, by its bearing on the character in which the loved one is precious to the lover; hence, whatever valuable spiritual requirements the other may possess, or whatever is still necessary for his or her perfection, becomes the content of the definite ideal which the lover sets before him- or herself”; and (c) the other’s so flourishing, rather than one’s self-interest, becomes one’s own personal end—“the will of the lover,” Ritschl maintains, “must take up the other’s personal end and make it part of his or her own; that is, love continually strives to develop and to appropriate the individual self-end of the other person, regarding this as a task necessary to the very nature of its own personal end, its own conscious individuality.”73 To love another, then, is to commit oneself to the flourishing of his or her ultimate good, to such an extent that one takes their good as one’s own—to such an extent, that is, that one sets aside the direct pursuit of one’s own flourishing. That is why, for instance, persons bound by love “give up their legal rights, or at any rate do not bring the standard of right as such visibly into application.”74 This explains, in turn, why trust in God would be a necessary condition of loving others, for one can set aside one’s own interests, Ritschl thinks, only on the basis of such trust; so Ritschl claims that devoting oneself to love

 Ritschl, RV, §53, 489.   Ritschl’s account actually includes a fourth—that the object of love must be of the same nature as the one who loves it—but this characteristic is not relevant to the present argument, and in any case it is not clear why this should be considered one of love’s principal characteristics; it is clear that the kingdom of God, on Ritschl’s view, should be characterized by reciprocity of a sort that would require like-natured-ness, but it is equally clear that God’s love is not limited to those who reciprocate, nor, it seems to me, to that which is capable of reciprocating. 73 74  Ritschl, RV, §34, 263–4; cf. §43, 360; §39, 303.  Ritschl, RV, §46, 409. 71

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requires that we should be assured of our position as against the world, so far as this is possible in view of the human weakness which still remains to us, for we cannot with confidence undertake that self-abnegation and patience and longsuffering toward others which form a chief part of moral duty, unless, through religious trust in God’s guidance, we are a match for, or rather superior to, those obstacles, small and great, which nature and human society present.75

On Ritschl’s account, then, one cannot commit oneself fully to the flourishing of others unless one is freed from having to look after one’s own interests, and one can be so freed only if one trusts in God’s provision. As a rough analogy, suppose a wealthy benefactor promised to pay someone’s living expenses so that the latter, freed from having to look after his or her own interests, could devote him or herself wholly to improving the lot of the poor. Assuming that he or she would otherwise have no choice but to look after his or her interests, at least to some extent, it follows that he or she is freed from having to do so only on the basis of his or her trust in the benefactor’s promise. Likewise, Ritschl argues, one cannot be freed from one’s self-interest, and so freed wholly to love others, unless one trusts that God will provide for one; the latter is therefore a necessary condition of the former. Ritschl has also claimed that to trust God is to take God’s end as one’s own, and since God’s end is loving fellowship with humanity, it follows that such trust is a sufficient as well as a necessary condition of such love. To trust God, then, is to love others as God loves them, and to be released from having to care about one’s interest precisely so that one can do so. One’s life is thereby oriented toward a universal end, but Ritschl hastens to add that one is so oriented only in keeping with one’s particular vocation. To love others, that is to say, is to take their end as one’s own, but this does not mean that one takes every single other’s end as such; one pursues the universal, divine end, rather, only within the limited scope of one’s calling. Ritschl thus claims that each individual acts morally when he or she fulfills the universal law in his or her special vocation, or in that combination of vocations which he or she is able to unite in his or her conduct of life [Lebensführung] . . . The fact that good action is conditioned by one’s calling invalidates the apparent obligation we are under at each moment of time to do good action in every possible direction.

Importantly, then, we find in our moral vocation the proximate norm which specifies for each individual the action which the moral law makes necessary. Our special calling, in 75  Ritschl, RV, §54, 496–7; cf. §53, 488. In the background here, obviously, is Luther’s Freedom of a Christian. For Luther’s influence on Ritschl, see F. Hofmann, Albrecht Ritschls Lutherrezeption (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998).

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fact, is seen to be the field of moral action to which we are summoned, because we appropriate it as subordinate to the universal final end of the good, or as an integral part of the kingdom of God.76

Ritschl identifies such callings with the roles one inhabits in one’s family, social group, occupation, and so forth, which delimit the persons with whom one has meaningful relationships and, therefore, those whose ends one should take as one’s own. In my case, then, my vocation would include the roles I play in my family (as a son, a brother, a father, and a husband), in my occupation (as a teacher), and in various social groups (my church, my circle of friends, my neighborhood), as well as the temporary roles I take on from time to time (as a patron of institutions like the YMCA, the library, and grocery stores). In each of these roles, certain persons are put in my path, as it were, and it is these persons that I am called to love. It is precisely in one’s particular vocation, then, that one pursues the universal end of love, which means, among other things, that the various parts of one’s life can now hang together in their orientation toward that end, and that one’s life can achieve a sort of unity or wholeness in consequence. “It is under these conditions,” Ritschl maintains, that the individual’s moral achievement becomes a whole. The realization of the universal good within the special limited domain of our vocation, in such a way that all extraordinary actions are regarded as essential from their analogy to our vocation, is the reason why the multiplicity of good works, in which action manifests itself, forms an inwardly limited unity, in other words, a whole.77

One is thus called to advance the universal end in one’s particular calling, such that one’s commitment to that end unifies one’s various endeavors and, so, enables one to produce “a connected, harmonious life-work” that one can “regard as a whole.”78 On Ritschl’s account, then, (a)  one orients one’s life toward God’s end, (b) God’s end is love for others, and (c) one is called to pursue this end in one’s particular vocation, such that (d) a life oriented toward God becomes organized around one’s vocation, and (e) one’s life attains an integrity or wholeness with which one can identify. Ritschl calls such wholeness “perfection,” since it corresponds with Christianity’s Lebensideal.79 Ritschl recognizes the danger inherent in using this term, for it seems to imply that one is supposed to achieve a sort of sinlessness or flawlessness in one’s commitment to God’s end, but this is not what he means by it; for Ritschl, rather, to be “perfect” is to trust and so orient oneself toward God, which includes trusting in God’s pardon.80 “Perfection”  Ritschl, RV, §68, 630–1; cf. §62, 576–7; Vollkommenheit, 12–14; Unterricht, §56. 78  Ritschl, RV, §68, 631.  Ritschl, Vollkommenheit, 12 (670). 79   On “perfection,” see Ritschl, RV, §68, 632-3; §27, 203; Vollkommenheit, 16ff.; Unterricht, §48. 80   For qualifications to this effect, see RV, §67, 613–15. 76

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therefore includes, rather than excludes, one’s needing and asking for forgiveness. Nor does “perfection” mean that one has integrated one’s entire life, down to the last detail, into a unified life-work; it means only that enough of one’s life is so integrated that it can be experienced as such—which, Ritschl suggests, is what it means to experience “joy.”81 One experiences joy, in Ritschl’s sense, when one’s life has the shape one intends for it to have, when it is actually organized around one’s vocation, and when one can thus identify with it—in short, when one’s life is characterized by “mineness.” On Ritschl’s account, then, those who trust in God’s pardon are brought into loving fellowship with God, in consequence of which they can trust in God’s providence and so become free vis-à-vis the world. To trust God is also to love others according to one’s particular vocation, such that one’s life can be organized around an end with which one identifies. Putting these claims together, Ritschl argues that the life of one who trusts God has the shape one intends for it to have, and that the characteristic mark of such a life is joy.

5.6.  SY N TH E SIZI NG HISTORY Ritschl claims, accordingly, that by participating in the community founded by Jesus, one can achieve a sort of spiritual wholeness or integrity, and can thus experience one’s life as oriented toward an end with which one can identify, as opposed to its being dictated by forces beyond one’s control. Such wholeness, recall, is what Ritschl has claimed religion is meant to provide, such that he can now claim that Christianity succeeds, so to speak, as a religion. During the course of his career, Ritschl asserted stronger and weaker versions of this position; the reasons for, and implications of, his change of mind turn out to be important for our argument. Ritschl’s initial claim was of the stronger variety: if (a) religion is the quest for spiritual wholeness, as Ritschl had argued, (b) entrance into Jesus’s community enables one to attain such wholeness, and (c) the wholeness attained within that community is either qualitatively or quantitatively superior to that made available in other religious communities, then (d) Christianity fulfills the religious quest, as it were, and is thus recognizable as the absolute religion. This is what Ritschl has in mind when he claims, for instance, that Christianity brings the answer to the question which has been put in all previous religions; it lifts from the heart the weight which is felt in all religions, solves the contradiction

81   Ritschl thus claims, for instance, that “joy is the feeling of perfection or completeness (Gefühl der Vollkommenheit)” (Vollkommenheit, 18 [678–9]); cf. Unterricht, §48, RV, §68, 632.

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in which one by nature finds oneself; namely, that one is but a little fragment of the world, and yet is also a spirit and an image of God, that as this latter one has a value quite different from that of all nature—with which nature, however, one shares the fate of belonging to the world . . . thus Christianity is not merely the perfect kind of religion as distinguished from some other things which are imperfect kinds of religion, and yet are really religions; but Christianity is itself the real religion.82

If all religions are fundamentally an answer to one and the same question, and if one of these religions provides an answer demonstrably superior to the rest, then the latter religion can be regarded as the superior religion. Such is Ritschl’s early argument on behalf of Christianity. Ritschl soon tempered such claims, however, and there is some evidence that he did so in response to criticisms raised by a “Ritschlian,” Julius Kaftan. Kaftan’s objection to the strong version of Ritschl’s claim, simply stated, is that Christianity’s uniqueness is undermined if it is portrayed as the fulfillment of religion.83 Implicit in the claim, for instance, that Michael Jordan is the best shooting guard of all time, as indeed he is, is a comparison with other shooting guards, as well as a recognition that Jordan belongs with them in a more general category. Likewise, Kaftan suggests, if one claims that Christianity is the perfect or absolute religion, one implicitly allows that Christianity belongs in a category with other religions. Such comparisons are at odds with the supposition that Christianity is set wholly apart from all other religions, in consequence of which Kaftan urges that these comparisons be avoided. Again, there is some evidence that Ritschl revised his earlier claims in response to this objection.84 However it came about, Ritschl’s later claims are far more muted, specifically due to the care with which Ritschl insists that he is not portraying Christianity as one religion alongside others, nor warranting adherence to Christianity by appeal to the putatively neutral category of “religion.” He echoes Kaftan, for instance, in worrying about appealing to “religion” “in such a way that the influence of the general conception of religion would make one even for a moment neutral toward the Christian religion itself, in order to be able to deduce its meaning from the conditions of the general conception, for the only effect of this is to undermine Christian conviction.”85 Ritschl’s newfound modesty is also due to his detection of difficulties arising not from the side of Christianity, but from the side of “religion” itself. He acknowledges, in this regard, that his usual claim

 Ritschl, Vollkommenheit, 8–9 (666–7); cf. Unterricht, §50.   See Julius Kaftan, Das Wesen der christlichen Religion, 2nd ed. (Basel, 1881), 24. 84   For a review of the evidence—the most persuasive element of which are the parallels between Ritschl’s review of Kaftan and later editions of RV—see Zachhuber, Theology as Science, pp. 267–73. 85  Ritschl, RV, §27, 187. 82 83

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about “religion in general” does not and cannot amount to a proper definition of religion or identification of religion’s essential properties, for “the ideas which it employs—God, world, blessedness—have so directly Christian a stamp, that they apply to other religions only in a comparative degree”; Ritschl thus concludes that “since the historical religions offer, under each of these heads, a rich supply of specific and sub-specific characteristics, which have no place in the general conception of religion, language can furnish no terms sufficiently neutral and indeterminate to express the general conception of religion desired.”86 Hence, it now seems nearly impossible to identify a universal essence of religion, and altogether impossible to identify an essence sufficiently robust to crown a particular religion “absolute” vis-à-vis the others—unless, of course, that essence is just a watered-down version of the religion that was meant to be crowned in the first place. At this point, then, Ritschl claims not that Christianity alone fulfills the essence of all religions and so is the demonstrably “absolute” religion, but that Christianity offers a satisfying response to a problem by which humanity seems long to have been beset, namely, the problem of achieving personal wholeness in the face of impersonal and anti-personal forces. It might be surprising to hear that Ritschl holds such tempered views, and, in particular, to hear the criticisms in response to which he tempered them, since Ritschl is commonly thought to be liable to precisely these criticisms. He was certainly thought liable to them by Ernst Troeltsch, whose justly famous arguments against “absoluteness” targeted Ritschl as well as Hegel.87 Even if Ritschl turns out to be innocent of the offenses with which he is charged—and he should be acquitted of at least one—Troeltsch’s criticisms deserve consideration, since they drive Troeltsch and others to address certain problems

 Ritschl, RV, §27, 185–6.   Troeltsch writes, for instance, of those who try to warrant absoluteness claims on the basis of “religious drives and needs that are found in men universally and that play a part in every religion. It has sunk to the level of a set of questions that find their answer only in the Christian revelation . . . ” (Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1901], 20; ET: The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, trans. David Reid [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1971], 59). For an explicit application of this objection to Ritschl, see Troeltsch, Glaubenslehre, ed. Gertrud von le Fort (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1925), §1V. On Troeltsch’s life, see Hans-Georg Drescher, Ernst Troeltsch: Leben und Werk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991); on his thought, see Sarah Coakley, Christology without Absolutes:  A  Study of the Christology of Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1988); Mark Chapman, Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Brent Sockness, Against False Apologetics:  Wilhelm Herrmann and Ernst Troeltsch in Conflict (Tübingen:  Mohr Siebeck, 1998); John Clayton (ed.), Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Walter Wyman, The Concept of Glaubenslehre: Ernst Troeltsch and the Theological Heritage of Schleiermacher (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983); Lori Pearson, Beyond Essence: Ernst Troeltsch as Historian and Theorist of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 86 87

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facing Ritschl’s “personalism.” Troeltsch presses two key objections against Ritschl and other defenders of Christianity’s absoluteness. (These objections should sound familiar, for they mirror those of Feuerbach, discussed in Chapter 4.) Troeltsch first challenges their apologetic appeals to “religion,” since the various phenomena gathered under that concept are far too diverse to be subsumed under such a simple category, much less neatly ordered in terms of it. Troeltsch thus contends that history is “an immeasurable, incomparable profusion of always-new, unique, and hence individual tendencies, welling up from undiscovered depths, and coming to light in unsuspected places and under different circumstances”; from this, it follows that history provides “no basis which would allow all phenomena to be grasped immanently by means of an all-inclusive principle that would constitute, first, a law regulating the emergence and evolution of everything individual; second, and for this very reason, the essence and fulfillment of all genuine value; and third, the norm of all historical phenomena.”88 On Troeltsch’s account, historical phenomena, including religious phenomena, are akin to a Kantian “manifold,” and conceptualizations of these phenomena are like Kant’s “categories”; the latter are brought to bear on phenomena in order to make sense of them, but it would be a mistake, Troeltsch thinks, to construe these categories as if they were “out there,” in the phenomenal world itself. From this perspective, it is easy to see why “religion” could so readily be thought to warrant claims about the absoluteness of Christianity, and why such claims are ultimately confused, since the “religion” seemingly discovered by an apologist is precisely that which he or she put there. Troeltsch thus objects to certain kinds of “absoluteness” or “necessity” claims, and, by implication, to such claims being used to establish a mineness-relation to faith—as if one’s faith were one’s own, rather than merely given to one, only if one could establish it as absolute or necessary. We will return to this point in a moment. Troeltsch presses a similar objection against Ritschl’s (and others’) understanding of Christianity:  the historical phenomena we might term “Christian,” Troeltsch insists, are a manifold to which we might apply a category like “Christianity,” but it would be a mistake to think that our category is given to us by these phenomena, rather than brought by us to them. Troeltsch maintains, therefore, that Christianity is itself a theoretical abstraction. It presents no historical uniformity, but displays a different character in every age, and is, besides, split up into 88  Troeltsch, “Die Stellung des Christentums unter den Weltreligionen,” in Der Historismus und seine Überwindung:  Funf Vortrage (Berlin:  Rolf Heise, 1924), 69 (ET:  “The Place of Christianity among World Religions,” in Christian Thought, ed. Baron F. von Hugel [London:  University of London Press, 1923], 13–14), Absolutheit, 24–5 (64); cf. “Die Ethik der Kulturwerte,” in Historismus, 37. On Troeltsch’s approach to historicism, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (ed.), Ernst Troeltschs “Historismus” (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2000).

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many different denominations, hence it can in no wise be represented as the finally attained unity and explanation of all that has gone before, such as religious speculation seeks. It is rather a particular, independent, historical principle, containing, similarly to other principles, very diverse possibilities and tendencies.89

This objection applies, Troeltsch thinks, to anyone who would equate his or her understanding of “Christianity” with a historical phenomenon or set of such phenomena, and who therefore fails to see the active role he or she plays in constructing that which answers to this name. Against such equations, Troeltsch points out that in order to understand some set of historical phenomena as “Christian,” one must make all sorts of judgments about which phenomena ought to count as such, what features of these phenomena ought to count, how to interpret these features, etc., and that the phenomena themselves do not dictate how these questions are to be answered; one can identify some set of phenomena as “Christian,” therefore, only on the basis of several such judgments, from which it follows that one’s conception of Christianity is not simply read off of or strictly determined by these phenomena. To be clear, this does not entail that one’s conception is merely projected on to reality, nor that there can be nothing objective about such conceptions; it entails, rather, that one’s conception should not be thought to speak the world’s own language about itself, as it were, and that one should be on guard against simply projecting one’s conceptions—prejudices—on to phenomena. Troeltsch then argues that there is a positive upshot to these objections, for if we recognize the active role we play in making sense of phenomena, then we can play this role more skillfully; so aware, (a) we should be less prone to confuse our conceptions of phenomena with the way things are, and should therefore test our conceptions more carefully (akin to the way scientists hold hypotheses accountable to the phenomena they are meant to explain); and (b) we can open up new possibilities for establishing a “mineness”-relation to faith, for oneself and for others. To understand what such skillfulness looks like, consider Troeltsch’s account of how one should go about constructing “Christianity,” which can be summed up in terms of the following steps. What comes first is not so much a step as a point of departure, namely, one’s intuitive “sense” or “feel” for Christianity, since this sense provides one with a sort of preliminary hypothesis about, and means of discerning among, the various phenomena that might count as such. The nature and source of this sense will become clearer when we reach Troeltsch’s fourth step; for now, his point is simply that, in order to get the ball rolling, “we have to have a sense for what is still Christian.”90 The second step is to test this sense against the   Troeltsch, “Stellung,” 68–9 (12–13).   Troeltsch, “Was heißt ‘Wesen des Christentums’?” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, Zur religiösen Lage, Religionsphilosophie und Ethik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1913), 89

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relevant phenomena and, so, to determine the extent to which it accounts for them, the respects in which it is unduly partial, etc. Troeltsch claims, in this regard, that the purpose and meaning of historical thought is, by pursuing the matter to its roots, by taking a comprehensive view of all the relevant phenomena, and by making comparisons with other historical formations, to remove the onesidedness, prejudices, and superficialities which attend one’s first image of partial or fleeting impressions and effects of the moment.91

One’s initial feel for what counts as Christian is thus to be tested against, and refined in light of, a suitably wide range of historical phenomena. Even the most extensive testing, however, will not suffice to determine, finally, what counts as such, which brings us to Troeltsch’s third step: one’s own creative synthesis and appropriation of these phenomena, in which one brings these phenomena together in such a way that, ideally, this bringing together is simultaneously a recognizably personal, individual act. Troeltsch maintains, accordingly, that one’s take on “Christianity” is, ultimately, an individual, creative act which arises out of the possession and appropriation of previous acts, but which conscientiously shapes the development of what is possessed in such a way that in the new formation of values the acquisition of the past coincides with personal conviction, and the necessity of a driving idea within the development is united with the personal grasp of this idea.92

The idea here is that one should put one’s own stamp on that which has been given to one, so that one’s acceptance of certain historical deliverances would coincide with, and give voice to, one’s individual self-expression. (Naturally, if the historical deliverances were such that one could not experience such coincidence, then Christianity would no longer be “living” for one.93) This appropriation is not merely an individual affair, however, since one’s own appropriation of Christianity itself becomes, or means to become, one of the phenomena that count as “Christian,” such that what others appropriate as “Christianity” can now include one’s own appropriation of it. The fourth step,

419 (ET:  “What Does ‘Essence of Christianity’ Mean?” in Robert Morgan and Michael Pye (eds.), Writings on Theology and Religion [Atlanta: John Knox, 1977], 152). 91   Troeltsch, “Wesen,” 428–9 (160); cf. 419. 92   Troeltsch, “Wesen,” 435 (166); cf.: “The position taken toward Christianity, however, in spite of all the accompanying objective considerations of a historico-philosophical or metaphysical and speculative kind, is in the last analysis a thoroughly personal matter conditioned by personal religious acceptance and appropriation of the Christian idea in the living context of the present” (427 [159]). 93   Troeltsch claims, in this connection, that “we feed on the tradition, but this tradition would be a dead thing were it not for the productivity of the one who receives life from it” (Glaubenslehre, §2 [ET: The Christian Faith, trans. Garrett E. Paul, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991)]).

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then, is that one’s own synthesis may contribute to that which is synthesized by others. At this point, one’s appropriation is “no longer merely a judgment about history but it is itself a piece of history,” and in it “the historical is newly formed and available for the future”; such appropriation, accordingly, “is itself a constituent element of the continuing historical development [of Christianity] and indeed one of the most important and crucial means by which it takes place.”94 Troeltsch’s point here can be illuminated by drawing an analogy with common law jurisprudence.95 In common law, a judge decides a case by considering prior cases which he or she takes to be the precedents relevant to this one; the judge thus intends for his or her decision to go on in the same way as these precedents, and so to stand in a series with them. This means, in turn, that the judge also intends for his or her decision to serve as a precedent for still other decisions, since the series of such precedents would now include his or her decision. Something similar happens, Troeltsch argues, in one’s appropriation of Christianity, for one means not only to synthesize the phenomena one recognizes as such, but to do so in such a way that one’s synthesis is itself one of these phenomena, and is thus recognizable as such by other would-be synthesizers. Insofar as one’s synthesis coincides with one’s individuality, moreover, such that that synthesis bears one’s own characteristic stamp, then the phenomena relevant to other would-be synthesizers now includes one’s individual, novel expression, which, in combination with an ever-expanding array of other individual expressions, provides the synthesizer with new possibilities for his or her own self-expressive appropriation. Troeltsch claims, accordingly, that an individual appropriation “provides the possibility of new combinations with the concrete life of the present,” for “it is itself a living, individual historical formation which joins the series of those which lie in the past.”96 We should now see, Troeltsch thinks, that many of the “Christian” phenomena to be synthesized are in fact the syntheses of others, just as one’s own synthesis may be among the phenomena to be synthesized by others; we should also see that this sort of thing takes place all the time, and not just when a person explicitly goes through these steps, since one’s implicit “sense” for what is Christian is itself a kind of gathering up and internalization of what others, especially one’s teachers, count as such, just as one’s own “sense” may be gathered up and internalized by others. As a result, “in every religious life, something primary is interwoven with something received.”97 Troeltsch thus offers an account of how Christianity is, and should be, constructed:  one (a)  begins with one’s intuitive sense of what is   Troeltsch, “Wesen,” 429 (161).   I discuss this model at greater length in Theology without Metaphysics, ­chapters 2 and 6. 96  Troeltsch, “Wesen,” 431 (162). Troeltsch sums his position up in a nice slogan: “Wesenbestimmung ist Wesengestaltung” (431). 97  Troeltsch, Glaubenslehre, §2. 94 95

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“Christian,” (b) disciplines this sense in light of the relevant historical phenomena, (c) creatively synthesizes and appropriates these phenomena, and, therefore, (d) may contribute to the possible syntheses and appropriations of others. On Troeltsch’s account, then, the “mineness” of faith is established not by demonstrating its rational necessity, but by one’s individual appropriation of it. The enduring validity of faith is thus a matter of its appropriability, that is, of the resources it provides for self-expressive appropriations: if Christian faith continues to provide such resources, then it is valid; likewise if a particular appropriation of that faith provides such resources. Troeltsch claims, accordingly, that the validity of any particular appropriation “could however only really be established from the point of view of a much later stage of development.” He goes on to claim that “our own feeling is completely justified in considering our positions to be Christian and we can leave it to the future to decide whether we are producing a movement which moves away beyond Christianity or one which remains in continuity with it.”98 Insofar as one’s appropriation synthesizes the relevant phenomena, one is “completely justified” in considering it to be Christian; so synthesized, these phenomena, including the syntheses of others, are valid for one. Likewise, if one’s synthesis can be included in the future syntheses of others, then it is valid for them. On Troeltsch’s account, then, the validity of faith is understood not in terms of rational necessity, but in terms of its being appropriable as one’s own. Troeltsch’s account of Christianity’s ongoing construction reinforces, and is reinforced by, his understanding of its content. Much like Ritschl, Troeltsch sees “personalism” as central to Christianity, where the key feature of personhood is a being’s independence from nature and fate on the basis of self-unity. Human personhood is constituted, on this account, when one devotes oneself to the achievement of a particular aim, namely, “of independence from mere fate, and of self-determination from within, through the ideal of an internal unity and clarity of our being.”99 On the picture that emerges, a creature who has been determined by external forces can achieve personhood by committing him or herself to a particular ideal, to such an extent that his or her life is brought into a unity and given shape by this commitment, and is thus recognizable as self-determined. Troeltsch further explains this person-forming process, including the ideals involved, in broadly Kantian terms, but the key point for our purposes is that he understands Christianity, too, in terms of its role in this process. This is evident in Troeltsch’s claims about Christianity’s   Troeltsch, “Wesen,” 439–40 (175).   Troeltsch, “Die Persönlichkeits- und Gewissensmoral,” in Historismus, p. 10 (ET: “The Morality of Personality and of Conscience,” in Christian Thought, 51–2). Troeltsch recognizes that personhood, so construed, is a characteristically European notion; cf. “Die Ethik der Kulturwerte,” 41. 98

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“essence” or “principle”: “we define the Christian principle,” he writes, “in this way: Christianity is the general, decisive breakthrough in principle to a religion of personality”; more specifically, “it is the principle of a religious rebirth or higher birth in a realm of spirits infused with God, so that everything that is merely natural becomes a means to self-development and self-production.”100 Troeltsch never fully elaborates these claims, but the idea seems to be that God is here construed in entirely personalistic terms—Troeltsch is “opposed to all naturalistic and anti-personalistic understandings of God”101—such that those who are united with this God realize their own personhood and are thus raised above impersonal fate. Troeltsch characterizes such unity as “higher birth,” and claims that it “elevat[es] us above our own narrow destiny, above earthly and sensual passions, and draw[s]‌us into the life of God as new creatures, internally pulsing with his power  .  .  . This new creation provides our soul with a home in the midst of an infinite and chilling universe.”102 Again, Troeltsch provided only a rough outline of his theology, but these claims suffice to indicate his striking proximity, in this connection, to Ritschl, which means that we need not look far to see how Troeltsch might have elaborated these aspects of his theology. Not that Troeltsch added nothing of his own to this enterprise, however; on the contrary, he contributed at least two significant ideas. The first is a claim about the way person-forming union with God circulates from person to person, and does so in a suitably personal form:  the possibility of a person-forming unity with God is revealed, on this account, by those in whom this possibility has been actualized, and one’s own person-forming inclusion in this unity reveals this possibility to others. Troeltsch terms this “reproductive revelation,” which he explains, or at least illustrates, by means of metaphor:  “The concept of reproductive revelation,” he writes, “suggests the image of a spark that leaps from heart to heart, igniting a different flame in each, according to what it finds therein  .  .  . The latter too is a creation of spirit, reaching into the depths of the spirit’s own life:  image becomes archetype, intrinsic to the self.”103 The possibility of a person-forming unity with God is revealed, accordingly, by the fact that persons have been and are being so formed; each is formed, moreover, as an individual, and so not only “reproduces” revelation, but does so as oneself. This claim obviously parallels Troeltsch’s earlier claims about historical synthesis, which brings us to his second significant contribution: as we can now see, Troeltsch’s methodology, according to which one receives and contributes to the phenomena of Christianity, is just as personalistic, and in just the same way, as “reproductive

 Troeltsch, Glaubenslehre, §5.3; cf. Absolutheit, 78. 102  Troeltsch, Glaubenslehre, §5.3.  Troeltsch, Glaubenslehre, §5V. 103  Troeltsch, Glaubenslehre, §3V. 100 101

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revelation.” (This explains Troeltsch’s interesting claim that “a Glaubenslehre is therefore a participant in the never-ending process of religious production.”104) On Troeltsch’s account, then, historical synthesis participates in the sort of “reproductive,” person-forming process by which the Christian community is ongoingly constituted, and should thus be seen as a more deliberate, explicit instance of that same process. Troeltsch’s methodology thus matches up with the understanding of Christianity he develops on its basis, just as his understanding of Christianity informs his methodology. From this, an important conclusion can be drawn:  Ritschl and Troeltsch largely agree about the person-forming content of Christianity, but whereas Ritschl tries, early on, to establish the “mineness” of Christianity by appeal to necessity, Troeltsch establishes it on the basis of this same person-forming process. If valid, the latter approach seems obviously better suited for achieving the sort of personalizing faith prized by Ritschl and Troeltsch alike.

5.7. OBJECTION We must consider at least one further objection to Ritschl as well as to Troeltsch, but before doing so we should take stock of their proposals. Ritschl has claimed (a) that Christianity enables persons to rise above the dominion of nature and to experience a new kind of wholeness; (b) that faith in God’s forgiveness is crucial to this rising-above, for one who is forgiven can trust God as Father and, so, trust God’s providence in the face of obstacles; and (c) that faith in God is also expressed in an individual vocation to love others, so that one’s entire life can hang together in such a way that one can identify with it. Troeltsch accepts much of this account, but worries about Ritschl’s early attempt to validate Christianity on the basis of an appeal to “religion”; Troeltsch thus offers an alternative approach to validity, the key steps of which are these: (a) one refines one’s sense of what is Christian by testing it against the relevant historical phenomena; (b) one synthesizes and appropriates—“makes one’s own”—these phenomena, in such a way that they contribute to one’s personal formation; and (c) one offers one’s synthesis to others for their appropriation, so as to contribute to the possibility of their own personal formation. Troeltsch and Ritschl provide an account, therefore, wherein faith is both personalized and personalizing. This brings us to a final objection, famously leveled against this account by Karl Barth: reconciliation with God is here understood, Barth maintains, solely in terms of its contribution to humanity’s aspirations, in consequence

104

 Troeltsch, Glaubenslehre, §1.5.

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of which God is treated as a means to our ends—God is treated, that is, as an idol. Barth thus claims that Ritschl understands Christianity “as that which grandly and inevitably made possible, or realized, a practical ideal of life,” that he therefore “makes the interpretation of Christianity, the Bible, and particularly the Reformation, serve the founding and strengthening of this ideal,” and that his theology is accordingly “the very epitome of the national-liberal bourgeois in the age of Bismarck.”105 In a particularly devastating passage, Barth suggests that Ritschl simply equates justification with the realization of our own purposes: for Ritschl, Barth asserts, “we obtain justification, that is, we obtain admission to the kingdom of God, that is, we obtain the realization of our own purpose of life . . .”106 The worry, then, is that if faith is interpreted in terms of its contribution to our aspirations, even aspirations as lofty as that of integrated personhood, it will become idolatrous. Barth raises this objection specifically against Ritschl, but it could just as well be raised against the entire “mineness” project. Indeed, it is hardly surprising that Barth saw Ritschl’s theology as both the low point and the natural conclusion of modern theology. This is a serious objection, and one that this book, in particular, must address. In order to do so, we need to consider a critical development in the trajectory we have been following, namely, Paul Tillich’s attempt to carry on the mineness project while addressing Barth’s worries about idolatry, which Tillich shared. Tillich’s theology, therefore, is the subject of Chapter 6.

105   Karl Barth, Die Protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert:  Ihre Geschichte und ihre Vorgeschichte (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1947), 599 (ET: Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden [Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2002], 642). 106  Barth, Protestantische Theologie, 604 (647).

6 Integrating In-Spite-Of Chapter 5 ended with a serious objection: Albrecht Ritschl and Ernst Troeltsch were criticized for allegedly having turned theology into a mere instrument for the satisfaction of bourgeois aspirations, and having portrayed God as contributing to or simply crowning such aspiration. The criticism, more generally, was that insofar as theology is framed in terms of human needs and human goods, it is idolatrous. This is obviously a serious objection, and one to which modern theology’s entire “mineness” project might seem liable. In order to address this concern, and to see where the mineness project goes after Ritschl and Troeltsch, we turn to the theology of Paul Tillich. Tillich carries on the project, but does so in a new way: we still see modern theology’s characteristic emphasis on God as the one in and by whom oppositions are overcome, for instance, and faith in this God still plays a key role in enabling one to identify with one’s life, but Tillich diverges from his predecessors in insisting that human existence is fundamentally questionable, and that faith is therefore a matter of accepting God’s acceptance in spite of one’s utter unacceptableness. In outline form, then, Tillich’s approach includes the following claims: (a) that an integrated human self-relationship depends upon one’s standing in a certain world-relationship, a relationship in which certain polarities are held together and certain dimensions of finitude relativized; (b) that, due to our estrangement from God, the latter relationships no longer obtain, such that we no longer stand in an integrated self-relationship; (c) that God overcomes this estrangement by taking our separation upon Godself, and that this overcoming is embodied in Jesus as the Christ, in whom the eternal form of God enters into human existence; (d) that Jesus as the Christ establishes a new possibility for humanity, since he entrusts his entire existence to God as the ground of being and, so, resists the threats implicit in finitude and the consequent temptation to establish an alternative ground; (e) that others can participate in this new possibility insofar as Jesus’s trust becomes their own, first of all when they accept God’s acceptance (in spite of their unacceptableness), and then as they are transformed more and more into the image of Christ; and, finally, (f)  that, on account of such trust, it

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is newly possible for persons to stand in what Tillich calls a self-returning relationship with God, the world, and others, and so to be at home with their lives. Tillich’s theology not only addresses Barth’s critique, then, but shows us where the mineness project goes, and, just as importantly, where it could be headed after Tillich. This is important, for if the preceding account is right, modern theology can now be seen as an antecedent to contemporary theological trends that are concerned with relevantly similar issues. Before proceeding, a word about Tillich’s terminology. Tillich uses terms like “self-integration,” “self-unity,” and “self-relationship” more or less interchangeably, to refer to a state in which one’s life hangs together and one can identify with that life, by contrast with a state in which one’s life either does not hang together or does so by virtue of, say, an alien power. Such unity can be achieved, Tillich claims, only if one stands in what he calls a “self-returning” relationship to certain circumstances, especially one’s relationship to other persons, to the forms in which one can express oneself, and to the prior determinations by which one’s freedom is constrained. One’s relationship to these circumstances is “self-returning,” in Tillich’s sense, if and only if they can be integrated into a life with which one can identify, or if and only if one can experience them as enabling rather opposing one’s self-expression. So, to take just one example, if (a) a person has become habituated to act in certain ways, to such an extent that he or she cannot do otherwise, and (b) he or she wants to act in accord with these habits, then (c) the constraint imposed by a prior determination of his or her will can express rather than oppose his or her freedom, and (d) such constraint is “self-returning,” as Tillich uses that term. For Tillich, then, to identify with one’s life—to stand in a “mineness” relationship to it—is to achieve a sort of self-unity, and one can achieve self-unity only if one stands in a self-returning relationship to certain important circumstances. This should all become clearer in due course.

6.1.  CR ITICA L TH EOLOGY To understand Tillich, it is useful to begin with his early disagreement with Karl Barth, since (a)  this disagreement provides us with a helpful way of understanding Tillich’s overall project, and (b)  it helps us see how Tillich responds to an objection against the very idea of thinking theologically about “mineness.” On Barth’s view, recall, Ritschl’s theology represents a mere reinforcement of, and capitulation to, humanity’s exalted self-understanding, for, Barth thinks, Ritschl portrays justification and reconciliation as nothing more than ways of helping humans achieve their ends. Barth thus claims that Ritschl “thought he could understand Christianity as that which grandly and



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inevitably made possible, or realized, a practical ideal of life,” as a result of which “he makes the interpretation of Christianity, the Bible, and particularly the Reformation, serve the founding and strengthening of this ideal.”1 Barth’s verdict, accordingly, is that Ritschl “stands with incredible clearness and firmness (truly with both feet) upon the ground of his ‘ideal of life,’ ” which is “the very epitome of the national-liberal German bourgeois of the age of Bismarck.”2 For Barth, by stark contrast, God is to be understood not as the affirmation but the crisis of human ideals, not as exalting but crucifying humanity. In his famous Romans commentary, accordingly, Barth insists that there is an infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity, that God is “wholly other” than humanity and whatever humanity would make of God, that God is “pure negation,” and, therefore, that “there is no possibility of stretching or elongating or developing or building up what lies on this side of the line so that it may cross it.”3 At this point in his development, then, Barth opposes Ritschlian and other sorts of “culture-theology” by insisting upon an utter discontinuity between humanity and God, and so upon a discontinuity between humanity’s hopes and achievements, on the one hand, and God’s saving acts, on the other. (“At this point in his development,” since Barth eventually changes his mind about the supposed utter discontinuity between God and humanity.4) Barth worries, then, that Ritschlian theology leaves culture undisturbed or, worse, simply crowns its highest aspirations with a theological halo. Tillich shares this concern, but worries that Barth’s theology of “pure negation” ends up leaving culture undisturbed, too, albeit inadvertently. To understand this worry, consider, first, Tillich’s claim that then-prevailing culture was marked, above all, by “self-sufficiency”; this becomes apparent, Tillich thinks, if one

1   Karl Barth, Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert (Zürich: Theologische Verlag Zürich, 1947), 599 (ET: Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002], 641. Again, to make this book useful for a wider Anglophone readership, I have tried to stick closely to existing English translations and have cited these parenthetically, yet I have also used my own translations wherever necessary). 2  Barth, Die protestantische Theologie, 599 (642). 3  Barth, Der Römerbrief, 2nd ed. (Zollikon-Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1922, 1940), 117 (ET: The Epistle to the Romans, sixth ed., trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933], 141). Barth likewise claims that “God is the pure and absolute boundary and beginning of all that we are and have and do; God is distinguished qualitatively from humanity and from everything human, and must never be identified with anything which we name, or experience, or conceive, or worship, as God” (315 [330–1]); that “No bridge, no continuity, links the potter and the clay, the master and his work. They are incommensurable. The distinction between them is infinite and qualitative . . . ” (341 [356]). 4   I trace these developments in my “Karl Barth,” Routledge Companion to Modern Christian Thought (London:  Routledge, 2013); see also Bruce L.  McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Keith L. Johnson, “A Reappraisal of Karl Barth’s Theological Development and His Dialogue with Catholicism,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 14:1 (2012).

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considers the cultural dominance of natural science, technology, and capitalist economics. As Tillich sees it, “we come out of a time in which existence was directed toward itself, in which the forms of life were self-sufficient and closed against invasions of the eternal . . . We come out of a time which no longer possessed any symbols by which it could point beyond itself. Bourgeois society rested undisturbed in its finite form.”5 A  key reason why society could rest undisturbed, Tillich contends, is that theologians portrayed God as either irrelevant to or the ultimate affirmation of its self-sufficient self-understanding. Tillich claims, accordingly, that for the “liberal” theologians of this culture, “the divine became the principle of a finiteness resting in itself . . . He is the consecrating word for the closed world system, for the completed immanence and its rational structure.”6 It should be clear, then, that Tillich shares Barth’s concern with liberal “culture-theology,” for he, too, faults its purveyors for reinforcing a prevailing sense of self-sufficiency, when it ought to have disrupted that sense by bearing witness to that which transcends culture and, so, calls it into question. Tillich nevertheless disagrees with Barth’s strategy for calling such sensibilities into question, for he thinks that Barth’s unrelenting insistence on God’s otherness to, and sheer negation of, culture, is finally unable to differentiate between a self-sufficient culture and one that rejects self-sufficiency, inasmuch as each falls infinitely, and so equally, short in the face of a wholly other God. Tillich argues, accordingly, that Barth’s theology lets the judgment of the unconditionally transcendent God fall upon every attempt of culture or religion to claim value before him. In its conception the only relation which the world has to God is that the world stands in the divine negation, in the crisis, in the shaking of time by eternity . . . Civilization may go on its own independent way but it must be subjected as a whole to the judgment. The system of finite forms is to remain as it is, but must be broken through as a whole. There can be no doubt that this theology is of the highest importance for the religious situation of the present. But it is also clear that it can turn into an actual reinforcement of the spirit of bourgeois society and of its orthodox correlate as soon as the prophetic disturbance of our days has ceased—as it must

5  Paul Tillich, Die religiöse Lage der Gegenwart (Berlin:  Ullstein, 1926), 19 (hereafter RL; ET:  The Religious Situation, trans. H. Richard Niebuhr [New  York:  Henry Holt and Company, 1932]. 50–1). On Tillich’s theological development, see Günter Wenz, Subjekt und Sein:  Die Entwicklung der Theologie Paul Tillichs (Munich:  Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1979); and Hannelore Jahre, Theologie als Gestaltmetaphysik: Die Vermittlung von Gott und Welt im Frühwerk Paul Tillichs (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989). 6  Tillich, Das Dämonische:  Ein Beitrag zur Sinndeutung der Geschichte (Tübingen:  J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1926), 62 (ET: “The Demonic,” in The Interpretation of History, trans. Elsa Talmey [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936], 108); cf. Tillich, RL, 82, 87.



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cease—and as soon as self-sufficient finitude stands before us once more unassailed and unchanged.7

From Tillich’s perspective, then, Barth is right to criticize the prevailing culture, but his criticism ultimately fails to hit its mark precisely because it is too undiscriminating in its radicality: if the divine negation stands equally opposed to everything in the created order, Tillich thinks, it seems to follow that faithlessness and self-sufficiency are no worse, in principle, than faithfulness and criticisms of self-sufficiency; Tillich thus maintains that, “in practice, this naturally means the support of that which is, in our case the support of the spirit of a time controlled and formed by bourgeois society.”8 As evidence of these claims, Tillich points to the fact that Barth’s criticisms seem to be self-defeating, given that his criticisms are just as liable to the same undiscriminating No that Barth pronounces upon culture-theology; this is what Tillich has in mind when he claims that “the dialectician must perceive that as a dialectician he has one position among others which does not cease through any dialectic self-transcendence to be a position, and he must, as he is prepared to do—despite his conviction of the truth of his position—submit to the No,” or, more simply, when Tillich inquires “whether the theology of crisis still acknowledges an absoluteness that it itself forbids.”9 To avoid such problems, Tillich claims that theology’s negations must be rooted in a more fundamental affirmation, for otherwise these negations are self-negating and, so, easily dismissed by those against whom they are pronounced.10 On Tillich’s view, then, radical theological critique can succeed only if it is possible for something this-worldly to point beyond itself without thereby rendering itself liable to such critique—only if, that is, it can question the culture’s self-sufficiency without entailing that everything in culture is necessarily guilty of, and nothing more than, self-sufficiency. To achieve this, Tillich develops a theology of culture, the key propositions of which are (a) that there can be moments when cultural artifacts and artificers become at least tacitly aware of, or pointers to, the abyss before which they and all things stand, that is, of the radical contingency and questionableness of their existence, and

 Tillich, RL, 92 (217–19); cf. 87. For Barth, “All history is marked by a negative warning sign. But this negative warning remains the only sign” (Tillich, “Kritisches und positives Paradox,” Theologische Blätter [1923], 267; ET:  “Critical and Positive Paradox,” in The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology, ed. James M. Robinson [1968], 139); Tillich is here referring to an infamous passage of Barth’s Römerbrief, 466ff. 8 9  Tillich, RL, 83 (197).   Tillich, “Paradox,” 264 (134). 10   As Tillich puts it, “everything must be done to make the cutting edge of this criticism felt in wide circles inside and outside the church. But just for this reason we must prevent opponents from using incidental weaknesses of this standpoint in order to make what is more than standpoint invisible and harmless . . . With the comment that one ‘cannot always be suspended in negations and paradoxes,’ one eases his conscience for all the things that by rights are brought under the judgment of crisis and paradox” (“Paradox,” 263 [133]). 7

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(b) that they can thus become simultaneously aware of or pointers to the fact that they do not fall into the nothingness by which they are threatened, and, so, that they and all things are grounded upon that which utterly transcends them. This is what Tillich has in mind when he writes, for instance, of “the experience of absolute reality founded on the experience of absolute nothingness,” for here one experiences the nothingness of entities, the nothingness of values, the nothingness of personal life, yet wherever this experience has brought one to the nothingness of an absolute radical No, there it is transformed into an experience, no less absolute, of reality, into a radical Yes. This Yes has nothing to do with a new reality that stands beside or above things; such a reality would only be a thing of a higher order, which in its turn would become subject to the power of the No. Rather, throughout everything, the reality forces itself upon us that is simultaneously a No and a Yes to things. It is not a being, it is not substance, it is not the totality of beings. It is, to use a mystical formulation, what is beyond being, what is simultaneously and absolutely nothing and something.11

To understand Tillich’s point, an analogy might be helpful: during the winter, it is not uncommon for cars, cruising down the highway, suddenly to lose traction and spin out of control. Even when the drivers are not hurt, they are often shaken up by the experience, and may find it difficult to get back on the road, for they may now perceive their grip on the road to be tenuous at best, and may constantly feel as if every car on the road were just about to crash. (I, for one, have felt this way.) Tillich is suggesting that one can undergo a similar experience with respect to existence itself—for many in Tillich’s generation, the just-fought war served as such an experience—and that one may thus come to perceive the radical non-necessity, the not-having-to-be, of all that is, and, in consequence, to perceive the threat of nothingness that hangs over everything.12 Crucially, though, the experience of such a threat opens up the possibility of experiencing oneself and the world as upheld by or grounded in that which transcends both—and, because one perceives the non-necessity of all existence, one can experience this upholding as grace. (Those familiar with the Lutheran tradition should see Tillich’s approach here as a generalization of that tradition’s characteristic claims about Law and Gospel, according to

11   Tillich, “Über die Idee einer Theologie der Kultur,” in Religionsphilosophie der Kultur (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1919), 34–5 (ET: “On the Idea of a Theology of Culture,” trans. Victor Nuovo, in Visionary Science: A Translation of Tillich’s “Idea of a Theology of Culture” with an Interpretive Essay [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987], 24–5); cf. Dämonische, 46; “Paradox,” 266. 12   On Tillich’s experience in the war, see Wilhelm and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich:  His Life and Thought, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976) and Renate Albrecht and Werner Schüßler, Paul Tillich: Sein Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993).



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which the Law is preached so that one can recognize one’s helplessness before God and, therefore, can experience God’s grace as grace.) Tillich claims, accordingly, that in experiencing the threat under which existence stands, one can experience it as grounded in that which overcomes the threat and so grounds existence. Tillich agrees with Barth, then, that any would-be relation to God must “pass through the constant radical No,” but insists that negation is not the last word, precisely because God is the ground who eternally overcomes or negates such negation.13 And, because “we can regard the eternal in this way,” it follows that “we need not, in the face of the world, grant the ultimate victory to the negation, to the abyss, to meaninglessness—that and that alone,” Tillich maintains, “is the salvation in finite time, which again and again becomes reality.”14 Like Barth, then, Tillich worries about theology that is unduly affirming of humanity and its cultural creations, and, like Barth, he therefore thinks it important for theology to proclaim the negation of these creations vis-à-vis God. Tillich differs from Barth, however, in claiming that cultural artifacts—including theology—can point beyond themselves, precisely insofar as they bear witness, even tacitly, to the radical questionableness of their existence, and therefore become open to recognizing the groundedness of their being in that which overcomes such questionableness. Those familiar with Tillich’s Systematic Theology should recognize in this approach a precursor to his famous “method of correlation,” just as those familiar with the Lutheran tradition should recognize it as a version of that tradition’s claims about Law and Gospel. In this respect, Tillich’s approach was remarkably consistent from beginning to end, marked by a steady outworking of some insights he had settled upon at the outset of his career; unlike most theologians, that is to say, the developments in Tillich’s thought are marked not by changes of mind, but by the incorporation of more and more material into his original theological program.15 As Tillich himself liked to put it, all of his theological and philosophical proposals through the years were “screws in the rock” of his Systematic Theology—footholds, in other words, that he used in order to reach its summit. For our purposes, then, we can turn from the earliest statements of Tillich’s theological program to its definitive realization.

14   Tillich, “Paradox,” 263 (133).  Tillich, Dämonische, 71 (122).   I  disagree, therefore, with those who suggest that Tillich’s encounter with Heidegger, for instance, brought about a significant shift in his theology; for a view along these lines, see Robert P. Scharlemann, “The Scope of Systematics: An Analysis of Tillich’s Two Systems” Journal of Religion 48:2 (1968); for a contrary argument, see Russell Re Manning, Theology at the End of Culture (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), and Gerd Hummel, “Der Weg zur ‘Systematischen Theologie’,” editorial introduction to Tillich, Main Works/Hauptwerke, vol. 6, Theological Writings/Theologische Schriften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992). 13

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6.2 .  TH E POSSIBILIT Y OF I N TEGR ATED SELFHOOD It is best to begin not with the method of correlation, to which we shall return later, but with Tillich’s actual use of that method to address the problem of “mineness” or, as he would put it, of achieving “self-unity” or “self-integration.” Tillich’s argument proceeds through the following steps: he claims (a) that under the conditions of finitude, human selfhood is constantly in danger of disintegrating, and that under the conditions of estrangement, such disintegration invariably occurs; (b) that estrangement and disintegration are overcome in the New Being, inaugurated by the Christ, for in it, the finite human being is united with the ground of being and, so, with oneself and one’s world; and (c) that the spiritual presence of the Christ enables others to participate in the New Being and, thus, to achieve more and more self-unity in their God-, self-, and world-relationships, even as such unity remains fragmentary and, so, continues to depend upon God’s prior act of overcoming disunity. On Tillich’s account, to be a self is to maintain a particular sort of self-relationship, which he terms “self-identity,” in relation to that which is other than one—to be a self, in other words, is to remain a self, the same self, in relation to one’s environing circumstances. Tillich calls that which is to be maintained a self’s “center,” and suggests that one can maintain one’s center only by constantly relating one’s circumstances to it; the process of doing so, he terms “life.” Tillich thus characterizes life as a centrally intended movement ahead, a going-out from a center of action. But this going-out takes place in such a way that the center is not lost in the outgoing movement. The self-identity remains in the self-alteration. The other (alterum) in the process of alteration is turned both away from the center and back toward it. So we can distinguish three moments in the process of life:  self-identity, self-alteration, and return to one’s self.16

Tillich claims that this sort of process is common to all things:  so a tree maintains its identity over time, for instance, only by maintaining certain relationships to its environment (including light, water, soil, etc.). Something similar is true of human selves, except that the human kind of selfhood can

16  Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1963), 30 (hereafter ST3). As for the basicness of this life-process, Tillich claims of it that “the structure of self-identity and self-alteration is rooted in the basic ontological self-world correlation” (ST3:32); cf. Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1951), 164, 170 (hereafter ST1). For a helpful treatment of Tillich’s anthropology, see Anjuta Horstmann-Schneider, Sein und menschliche Existenz (Würzburg:  Königshausen & Neumann, 1995); and Christian Danz, Religion als Freiheitsbewußtsein:  Eine Studie zur Theologie als Theorie der Konstitutionsbedingungen individueller Subjektivität bei Paul Tillich (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000).



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be maintained only insofar as one can relate one’s circumstances to what Tillich calls one’s center—in such a way, that is, that one “returns to oneself,” and so maintains one’s self-unity, in one’s relationship to these circumstances. (Again, this is Tillich’s way of talking about what we have been calling “mineness.”) To understand what Tillich means by this, consider his three sets of “polarities,” each of which illustrates the returning-to-self by which selfunity is to be maintained. The first of these is the polarity between one’s own personhood and one’s relationship to other persons: one can maintain one’s own personhood, Tillich asserts, only if one relates to other persons in such a way that one is “returned to oneself ” in these relationships, paradigmatically by being recognized as a person by those whom one recognizes as such. Tillich claims, in other words, that one can be a person only in communion with other persons and, indeed, that personhood is constituted by such communion. Tillich’s argument to this effect proceeds through roughly the following steps. He claims, first, that one is a person only if one has risen above nature, and that one rises above nature only if one relates oneself and one’s circumstances to a self-determined center that is itself universal. Tillich thus claims that “personality is that being which has power of self-determination, or which is free,” and that personhood can also be defined, therefore, as “that individual being which is able to reach universality”; this is the case, he argues, for “freedom is the power of transcending one’s own given nature, but it would not be real freedom if the individual merely exchanged its peculiar nature for another one.”17 The second step of Tillich’s argument is a bit murky, but it seems to go something like this: one acquires such a universal center only when (i) one encounters another whose center one recognizes as inviolable, that is, as not to be treated as a means to the end of one’s own centeredness, and (ii) this other treats one’s own center as such. Tillich seems to have something like this in mind in the following claim: The person as the fully developed individual self is impossible without other fully developed selves. If he did not meet the resistance of other selves, every self would try to make himself absolute. But the resistance of other selves is unconditional. One individual can conquer the entire world of objects, but he cannot conquer another person without destroying him as a person. The individual

17  Tillich, “The Idea and the Ideal of Personality,” The Protestant Era (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1948), 115–16 (quoted from Main Works/Hauptwerke, vol. 3, Writings in Social Philosophy and Ethics/Sozialphilosophische und ethische Schriften, ed. Carl Heinz Ratschow [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998]). Tillich continues: “The freedom of personality is . . . freedom for universality on the basis of individuality. Personality is that being in which the individual is transformed by, and united with, the universal structure of being” (116–17).

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discovers himself through this resistance. If he does not want to destroy the other person, he must enter into communion with him.18

The third step, then, is to claim that one achieves personhood insofar as one centers oneself on, or identifies with, that which other inviolably-centered-selves recognize as inviolable about one, and so relates oneself and one’s circumstances to a personal, self-determining center. In the encounter with another whom one recognizes as a self-determining centered self, that is, one recognizes that one cannot treat this other as a means to one’s ends; in being recognized as such by those whom one recognizes, one can recognize oneself, too, as one who cannot be treated as a mere means to others’ ends, and one can thus conduct one’s life as an end in communion with other ends. In that case, one relates to other persons in such a way that one “returns to oneself”—one’s other-relationship is included in one’s self-relationship and vice versa—since others then relate to one as a self, and thus relate to one as one relates to oneself. To put the point in a slightly different idiom, their perception of one—that one is a fellow self-centerer—mirrors one’s self-perception, such that one can perceive oneself in their perception of one, and so be at home with oneself in it. (The parallel with Hegel should be obvious.) On Tillich’s account, then, one’s own personhood depends upon one’s participation in community with other persons. Tillich claims that one’s vitality or potential stands in a similarly polar relationship with the forms in which that potential can be actualized. The idea here is simple enough:  on the one hand, a person’s “vitality” is his or her potential to actualize or express him or herself in countless new ways; on the other, such vitality can be actualized or expressed only by taking on a shape or “form.” Think here of songwriters who express their creativity in all sorts of novel ways, but can do so only by making use of existing linguistic and musical forms, as when Bob Dylan borrowed from a stock of folk, rock, and English-language resources to craft his own distinctive “sound.” Tillich thus claims, on the one hand, that “the dynamic element in man is open in all directions; it is bound by no a priori limiting structure. Man is able to create a world beyond the given world.” On the other hand, one can express such dynamism or vitality only by “intending” such expression, that is, by using existing forms to express oneself; Tillich remarks, accordingly, that vitality stands in polar relationship with “ ‘intentionality,’ which means being related to meaningful structures, living in universals, grasping and shaping them . . . Man’s dynamics, his creative vitality, is not undirected, chaotic, self-contained activity. It is directed, formed; it transcends itself toward meaningful contents.”19 18

 Tillich, ST1, 176–7; cf. ST3, 38, 40; “Ideal of Personality,” 125.  Tillich, ST1, 180–1; cf. ST3, 50–1.

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Tillich’s point here is nicely illustrated by an experience common among young persons, wherein they contemplate their potential for doing countless things with their lives, yet engage in such contemplation precisely by considering what it would look like if they inhabited a variety of careers, roles, etc., so as to determine whether they can see themselves in those roles. On this account, then, to actualize one’s potential is for one to direct oneself toward, or intend oneself in, one of the forms available to one, and, crucially, to see oneself in that form, or to experience it as self-expressive. The latter is crucial, for unless one can identify with the form in which one intends oneself—unless one can see one’s vocation, say, or one’s social roles, as a faithful expression of who one is—then one cannot be united with oneself or “return to oneself” in these forms. Tillich thus argues that one’s vitality can be fulfilled only when it is united with forms in which that vitality can be expressed. The same pattern emerges in Tillich’s third polarity, between freedom and destiny. One is free, on Tillich’s account, insofar as one is self-determined, and one is self-determined insofar as one organizes one’s life around a self-posited center. This is what Tillich means when he claims, for instance, that to be free is to be “a totally centered self,”20 and that “freedom is experienced as deliberation, decision, and responsibility”21—not, note well, because he equates freedom with decisions and so forth, but because in making decisions, one brings one’s circumstances and possible courses of action into relation to one’s center, and just so is free. Importantly, though, Tillich insists that the exercise of such freedom is constrained by, and indeed depends upon, a variety of conditions, the sum-total of which he refers to as “destiny”: “our destiny,” he writes, “is that out of which our decisions arise; it is the indefinitely broad basis of our centered-selfhood; it is the concreteness of our being which makes all our decisions our decisions. When I make a decision,” therefore, it is the concrete totality of everything that constitutes my being which decides, not an epistemological subject. This refers to body structure, psychic strivings, spiritual character. It includes the communities to which I  belong, the past unremembered and remembered, the environment which has shaped me, the world which has made an impact on me. It refers to all my former decisions. Destiny is not a strange power which determines what shall happen to me. It is myself as given, formed by nature, history, and myself. My destiny is the basis of my freedom; my freedom participates in shaping my destiny.22

From Tillich’s perspective, then, human freedom is invariably conditioned freedom, because the determining center is always already a determined center—a center conditioned by its past, so to speak; yet such conditionedness is a necessary condition of freedom, for apart from it, one’s center would 21  Tillich, ST3, 27.  Tillich, ST1, 184.  Tillich, ST1, 184–5; cf. ST3, 27–8.

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be unable to determine anything. Suppose, for example, that I decide to spend time catching up with a friend: in order to count as an act of self-determination, such catching up must be the sort of thing that I can relate to my center, and it can be such a thing only if my center is already habituated, for instance, to value this friendship more than free time; more basically, I  can decide such a thing only if I  can regulate my behavior in light of certain policies and plans, and can properly perceive situations in light of those policies and plans. As with the other polarities, therefore, Tillich claims that freedom can be achieved only if one’s destiny enables freedom’s exercise—only if, that is, one’s center is conditioned in such a way that one’s determination by this center is simultaneously self-determination, and, in consequence, that freedom “returns to itself” in these conditions. Each of these polarities thus illustrates Tillich’s more basic claim, to the effect that self-unity, and so one’s ability to identify with one’s life, depends upon the self’s ability to return to itself in its relationship to the world. Crucially, though, it is not a given that one will be able to stand in such relationship, for it is entirely possible that one will not be recognized by those whom one recognizes, or that one will not be able to see oneself in any of the forms (vocations, roles) available to one, or that the conditions by which one’s center is determined oppose rather than enable self-determination. Examples of this are not hard to come by, unfortunately: female students are sometimes told, and often treated as if, women cannot contribute to theology or philosophy (the two fields with which I am most familiar); persons regularly feel as if they are performing, rather than expressing themselves in, their social roles—the role of, say, a manly man, or a feminine woman, or a member of their racial group; and most of us experience weakness of will, as when we genuinely want to do something like, say, be patient, but are unable to do so because we have become too habituated to the contrary.23 Innumerable examples could be adduced, but the point is simply that if Tillich is right about selfhood standing in polar relationship to the world, it follows that selfhood is vulnerable, at the most basic level, to all sorts of antagonism, disruption, and other obstacles to self-return. As such, Tillich claims that humans are rightly anxious about “the possibility of losing one’s ontological structure and, with it, one’s self,” about “disintegrating into nonbeing through existential disruption,” and, therefore, about “not being what we essentially are.”24 For Tillich, then, to be human is essentially to be a

  For Tillich’s discussion of such problems, see ST1, 199–201.  Tillich, ST1, 201, 199. The context of the latter quotations is important, for Tillich claims that “finitude is actual not only in the categories but also in the ontological elements. Their polar character opens them to the threat of nonbeing. In every polarity each pole is limited as well as sustained by the other one. A complete balance between them presupposes a balanced whole. But such a whole is not given” (ST1, 198). 23

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centered self capable of relating one’s circumstances to that center, yet it is not a given that one will be able to achieve such centeredness or relatedness, such that one may not be able to become or live as what one essentially is, nor to identify with one’s life. Before proceeding to the next step in his argument, we need to say something about Tillich’s understanding of God, and about how this understanding arises out of humanity’s sense of finitude. On Tillich’s account, humans constantly brush up against reminders of our finitude, particularly of the nonbeing by which our being is threatened; the pervasiveness of such reminders, and so of the experience of finitude, is due in part to the fact that finitude is written into the very categories in terms of which we perceive the world—time, space, causality, and substance.25 So the temporal categories remind us of the transitoriness of all that is, as well as of the passing-away to which everything, including us, is subject; the spatial categories remind us of our need for, and the insecurity of, having a place; causal categories remind us that everything depends upon a chain of prior causes that need not have been; and substantial categories remind us of the constant changingness or ephemerality of everything we encounter.26 Our very experience of the world thus provides us with constant reminders of the threatenedness of our finite existence. Tillich claims that this can lead one, in turn, to experience “a ‘metaphysical shock’—the shock of possible nonbeing,” and that, in the face of such an experience, “everything disappears in the abyss of possible nonbeing.”27 Hence from our side, as it were, there is no reason why everything does not disappear into nonbeing. Nevertheless, everything does not disappear, which is why “the shock of nonbeing” can lead one to experience being not only as fundamentally threatened but as upheld or grounded against such threats—it can lead one, that is, to an awareness of God as “the ground of being,” as “the power of being, resisting and conquering nonbeing,” or as “being-itself.”28 Tillich has a lot more to say about God, much of which we will consider below. The important point, for now, is to note that Tillich understands God as the ground of being; unless we register this point, even briefly, Tillich’s claims about “estrangement” will not make much sense.

25   So Tillich:  “The mind is not able to experience reality except through the categorical forms” (ST1, 192). 26 27   For Tillich’s discussion of these threats, see ST1, 193–8.  Tillich, ST1, 163–4. 28  Tillich, ST1, 235, 272. (Tillich’s claims about theological symbols are obviously relevant to this discussion, but unfortunately I cannot address them here.) On Tillich’s theology in general, see David Kelsey, The Fabric of Paul Tillich’s Theology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967); Charles Kegley and Robert Bretall (eds.), The Theology of Paul Tillich (New York: Macmillan, 1956); Langdon Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich (New York: Crossroad, 1990); Oswald Bayer, “Grundzüge der Theologie Paul Tillichs,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 49:3 (2008).

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6.3. E STR A NGEM EN T So far, Tillich has argued only that one may not stand in the right sort of relationship to one’s circumstances, such that one may not achieve what he calls centered-selfhood or self-unity, or what we have been calling “mineness.” Centered-selfhood may be an element of humanity’s essence, in other words, but it is not a given that persons will be able to live in accord with that essence. Thus far, then, he has claimed that it is possible that humanity would not achieve self-unity. Tillich next argues that this possibility is universally, but not necessarily, actual, since humans are universally, but not necessarily, estranged from God, the world, and themselves. (The importance of adding “not necessarily” will become apparent when we turn to Tillich’s Christology.) Tillich’s argument here begins with a claim about the relationship between human goodness and human fallenness, to the effect that fallenness is the flip side, as it were, of our essential goodness. The idea is that if the essence of humanity, and so its good, is that we are to be self-determining, centered selves, then our essence must be achieved rather than given, for if it were given we would not be self-determining centered selves; if so, however, it follows that the actualization of our essential goodness means falling away from it as given, and, therefore, from the giver or ground of that essence. (Here it is important to emphasize that, for Tillich, humanity’s essence is not simply to be self-determining, but to center ourselves on God as the ground of being.) On the one hand, then, Tillich claims that human nature is a task rather than a given:  “the goodness of man’s created nature,” he remarks, “is that he is given the possibility and necessity of actualizing himself and of becoming independent by his self-actualization.”29 On the other hand, this means that we can realize our essence only by falling away from it as essence, and therefore, on Tillich’s account, from our connection with being-itself or with the ground of being. He claims, accordingly, that “man does exist, and his existence is different from his essence . . . Man is grounded in it, but he is not kept within the ground. Man has left the ground in order to ‘stand upon’ himself, to actualize what he essentially is, in order to be finite freedom. This is the point,” Tillich concludes, “at which the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the fall join,” for “the creature has actualized its freedom insofar as it is outside the creative ground of the divine life.”30 For Tillich, then, human existence is universally, but not necessarily, separated from its essence, and it is so precisely because our essence is to be self-determining centered selves who center themselves on God as the ground of being. To be estranged from one’s essence is therefore to be estranged from the ground of one’s being, which is, from another angle, to be sinful: as Tillich puts it, “Man as he exists is not 29

 Tillich, ST1, 259; cf. 261.

 Tillich, ST1, 255; cf. 256, 261.

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what he essentially is and ought to be. He is estranged from his true being. The profundity of the term ‘estrangement’ lies in the implication that one belongs essentially to that from which one is estranged. Man is estranged from the ground of his being, from other beings, and from himself.”31 Given the way that existence is related to humanity’s essence, therefore, estrangement is universally a fact prior to, and apart from, one’s so much as deciding to be estranged.32 Tillich then offers a tripartite analysis of the nature of estrangement, a clear grasp of which will help us see the difficulties involved in achieving self-unity. To be estranged is, first of all, to have fallen away or removed one’s center from the ground of being. Tillich characterizes this as “unbelief” or, better, “unfaith,” which is “the act or state in which man in the totality of his being turns away from God” and, simultaneously, “turns toward himself and his world.”33 Second, insofar as we are aware of our finitude, human beings need a ground that can bear its weight and can resist the threat of nonbeing, such that when we turn away from the ground of being, we cannot help treating something else as such a ground, something that is thereby elevated to the status of “god.” Tillich calls this elevation “hubris,” since its paradigmatic instance is self-elevation, that is, the attempt to ground oneself on oneself; hence, hubris “is turning toward one’s self as the center of one’s self and one’s world,” and, therefore, “the self-elevation of man into the sphere of the divine.”34 (Here, at least, Tillich seems to suggest that everyone who turns from the ground of being ends up elevating him or herself to the status of ground, but he should not hold such a view, since (a) Tillich’s own reasoning requires only that one elevate something to the status of ground, not that it must be oneself; (b) a broader understanding, according to which elevation includes but is not limited to self-elevation, can better deal with the entire range of relevant phenomena, including instances where persons treat their social group, another person, or even an idea as if it were the ground of their being; and (c) he should know better, since he recognizes contrary examples—as when, for instance, a self “faces the danger of losing its center altogether” due to “the dispersing power of manifoldness.”35 Here as elsewhere, I would argue that Tillich is not as “systematic” or deliberate a theologian as he might appear to

31  Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1957), 44–5 (hereafter ST2). 32   So Tillich: “Sin is a universal fact before it becomes an individual act, or more precisely, sin as an individual act actualizes the universal fact of estrangement” (ST2, 56). 33 34  Tillich, ST2, 47.  Tillich, ST2, 50; cf. the wider discussion on 49–51. 35  Tillich, ST3, 33. See here the criticism raised by Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin, and Grace:  Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (New  York:  University Press of America, 1980); cf. the careful discussion by Rachel Sophia Baard, “Tillich and Feminism,” in Russell Re Manning (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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be, which is why I have interpreted him, at certain points, by following not only what he actually says, but what his ideas might logically entail.) Finally, because whatever one treats as the ground of being is supposed to be that upon which everything is grounded, and so the center of everything, one tries to make it the center of everything. In relation to self-elevation, this center-making takes the form of “concupiscence,” which Tillich characterizes as “the unlimited desire to draw the whole of reality into one’s self.”36 Again, though, that which is elevated need not be oneself, such that the drawing-in here at issue need not take the form of concupiscence. (Someone who treats a fascist dictator as the ground of his or her being will not try to draw everything into his or her own orbit, but into the orbit of that dictator, presumably by insisting upon the ultimacy of this dictator’s will.) On Tillich’s analysis, then, to be estranged is to turn away from the ground of being, to elevate something else to the status of ground, and to attempt to relate everything to that which has been so elevated. This analysis helps us understand, in turn, some of estrangement’s consequences. One consequence is that the threats of finitude become unbearable, since that which one treats as if it were the ground of being cannot bear the weight. Death, suffering, uncertainty, placelessness, transitoriness, and other aspects of human finitude thus come to seem insurmountable, and we are condemned to struggle against, but finally be overcome by, these threats.37 “Estranged from the ultimate power of his being,” Tillich writes, “man is determined by his finitude. He is given over to his natural fate.”38 Faced with the hopelessness of one’s situation, one “tries to make absolute a finite security or a finite certainty. The threat of a breakdown leads to the establishment of defenses, some of which are brutal, some fanatical, some dishonest, and all insufficient and destructive; for there is no security and certainty within finitude.”39 Once one has turned from the ground of being, accordingly, the threat of nonbeing becomes intolerable. Another consequence is that one’s self-relationship and world-relationship fall apart; this is the case, Tillich maintains, because estrangement “contradicts man’s essential being, his potency for goodness. It contradicts the created structure of himself and his world and their interdependence.” As a result, “the elements of essential being which move against each other tend to annihilate each other and the whole to which they belong.”40 The idea here is that 37  Tillich, ST2, 52.   On the threats of finitude, cf. Tillich, ST2, 67–75. 39  Tillich, ST2, 66.  Tillich, ST2, 73. 40  Tillich, ST2, 60. One thus experiences self-loss, which Tillich describes as follows: “Self-loss as the first and basic mark of evil is the loss of one’s determining center; it is the disintegration of the centered self by disruptive drives which cannot be brought into unity. So long as they are centered, these drives constitute the person as a whole. If they move against one another, they split the person” (ST2, 61). One likewise experiences a loss of world: “The attempt of the finite self to be the center of everything gradually has the effect of its ceasing to be the center of anything. Both self and world are threatened. Man becomes a limited self, 36 38



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if one grounds oneself elsewhere than the ground of being, one cannot relate to the world or oneself in such a way that one “returns to oneself.” We see this in each of the polarities. Tillich claims that one cannot commune with other persons, for instance, if one is centered on a ground other than the ground of being (whether that would-be ground is oneself or something else), for in that case one will try to assimilate others to one’s own center—to make it their ground, too—and will therefore not recognize them as self-determining. Nor, for that matter, can one be a self-determining centered self, for if (a)  one’s would-be ground is something other than oneself, then one becomes fundamentally other-determined, whereas if (b) one’s would-be ground is oneself, then one makes it a condition of one’s self-determination that others be determined by one, and this is a condition that cannot be met. The upshot, Tillich claims, is that “in the state of estrangement man is shut within himself and cut off from participation.”41 Something similar happens with the polarity of vitality and form. Under the conditions of estrangement, one’s vitality cannot, in principle, come to expression in any form, for one who is estranged from one’s essential being obviously cannot identify with any expressions of being. In such a situation, “man is driven in all directions without any definite aim and content,” and “his dynamics are distorted into a formless urge for self-transcendence.”42 The forms available to one, moreover, can come to seem like “mere formalities,” like an ill-fitting suit or a straitjacket, for “if a form is abstracted from the dynamics in which it is created and is imposed on the dynamics to which it does not belong, it becomes external law.”43 Freedom and destiny feel the effects of estrangement, too, for one’s destiny is now such that one is no longer free to achieve one’s essential goodness; in consequence, destiny stands opposed to any true exercise of freedom, just as one’s freedom is reduced to the pursuit of inessential goods. With respect to the latter, Tillich claims that under the conditions of estrangement, freedom loses its definiteness. Indefinitely and arbitrarily, freedom turns to objects, persons, and things which are completely contingent upon the choosing subject and which therefore can be replaced by others of equal contingency and ultimate unrelatedness . . . If no essential relation between a free agent and his objects exists, no choice is objectively preferable to any other; no commitment to a cause or a person is meaningful; no dominant purpose can be established.44

in dependence on a limited environment. He has lost his world; he has only his environment” (ST2, 62). 41 42 43  Tillich, ST2, 65.  Tillich, ST2, 64.  Tillich, ST2, 64. 44  Tillich, ST2, 63. At the same time, “destiny is distorted into mechanical necessity. If man’s freedom is not directed by destiny or if it is a series of contingent acts of arbitrariness, it falls under the control of forces which move against one another without a deciding center” (ST2, 63).

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One who is estranged from the ground of being is no longer able to stand in a self-returning relationship to the world, therefore, since such estrangement makes it impossible for persons to be united with one another, for one’s vitality to find expression in form, and for destiny to facilitate one’s exercise of freedom. The situation that Tillich had claimed possible has thus become universally actual: we have turned away from the ground of being, elevated something else to serve as such a ground, and have treated that ground as if it were the center of everything; this has meant, on the one hand, that finitude becomes an unanswerable threat, and, on the other, that one can no longer stand in a self-returning relationship to the world—one can no longer achieve the sort of self-unity in which “mineness” consists. The human situation is bleak, therefore, and since everything one does is subsequent to and springs from one’s fallen, estranged state, it appears hopeless: as Tillich puts it, “no act within the context of existential estrangement can overcome existential estrangement.”45 The only thing that would help, in this situation, is if we could somehow become new beings. This, Tillich claims, is precisely the help we receive.

6.4. NEW BEI NG Tillich claims that “New Being,” of the sort that could help us out of our predicament, would have to meet two criteria: (a) it would have to overcome humanity’s existential separation from God as the ground of being, and (b) would have to do so without betraying humanity’s essence as self-determinedly centered upon God. Thus far, these criteria have seemed impossible to meet, for since humanity’s essence includes self-determination, we end up falling away from God as the ground of being as soon as we try to actualize it. It is at least possible, however, that one could determine one’s existence in such a way that one centered oneself upon God as the ground of being, and what Tillich calls “New Being” is the realization of this possibility; New Being is “essential being under the conditions of existence, conquering the gap between essence and existence.”46 Tillich claims that this New Being is instantiated in Jesus as the Christ, insofar as Jesus remains faithful to, and so centered upon, the ground of being in every moment of his existence, and thereby draws estranged humanity into unity with the ground of being. (Tillich also claims that the drawing-into-unity accomplished by the Christ manifests, and so

 Tillich, ST2, 78.  Tillich, ST2, 118–19; cf.: “The New Being is new insofar as it is the undistorted manifestation of essential being within and under the conditions of existence” (ST2, 119). 45

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depends upon, an eternal uniting from God’s side, so to speak. We will return to this point momentarily.) To call Jesus the Christ, according to Tillich, is to recognize him as the inaugural bearer of the New Being, as the one in whom this Being is first instantiated, and just so as “the one who brings the new eon.”47 On Tillich’s understanding, then, Jesus’s work is inseparable, in principle, from his being, since his work just is to instantiate a certain kind of being; Tillich thus claims that “the being of the Christ is his work and that his work is his being, namely, the New Being which is his being.”48 (In more traditional idiom: Christ’s person is his work, and vice versa.) The Christ inaugurates this kind of being, Tillich argues, by living a life every moment of which is in line with his essence, such that his existence perfectly instantiates that essence—and because his essence is to be freely centered upon the ground of being, it follows that he inaugurates the New Being precisely insofar as he freely centers every moment on that ground. Tillich explains what this means, and how it could come about, in terms of a two-step process instantiated in every moment of the Christ’s life: in every moment, the Christ faces the threat of finitude and the consequent temptation to unfaith, and in every moment, he centers himself on the ground of being and so resists this temptation.49 On the one hand, then, Jesus could not be the Christ unless he actually endured the threat of nonbeing and its attendant anxiety. Tillich emphasizes this point:  As a finite being, he is subject to the contingency of everything that is not by itself but is “thrown” into existence. He has to die, and he experiences the anxiety of having to die . . . Like every man, he experiences the threat of the victory of non-being over being, as, for instance, in the limits of the span of life given to him. As in the case of all finite beings, he experiences the lack of a definite place. From his birth on, he appears strange and homeless in the world. He has bodily, social, and mental insecurity, is subject to want, and is expelled by his nation. In relation to other persons, his finitude is manifest in his loneliness, both in respect to the masses and in respect to his relatives and disciples. He struggles to make them understand, but during his life he never succeeds . . . At the same time, he is deeply affected by the misery of the masses and of everyone who turns to him. He accepts them, even though he will be rejected by them . . . In relation

47  Tillich, ST2, 118; cf. 121, 125; ST3, 144–6. For a solid recent treatment of Tillich’s Christology and soteriology, see Paul Galles, Situation und Botschaft:  Die soteriologische Vermittlung von Anthropologie und Christologie in den Offenen Denkformen von Paul Tillich und Walter Kasper (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012). 48  Tillich, ST2, 168. 49   So Tillich:  “The biblical picture is thoroughly positive in showing a threefold emphasis: first, the complete finitude of the Christ; second, the reality of the temptations growing out of it; third, the victory over these temptations insofar as the defeat in them would have disrupted his relation to God and ruined his messianic vocation” (ST2, 127).

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to reality as such, including things and persons, he is subject to uncertainty in judgment, risks of error, the limits of power, and the vicissitudes of life.50

Throughout his life, accordingly, Jesus faced the threat of nonbeing, and therefore faced the temptation which leads us to turn away from the ground of being and elevate something else to that status. Crucially, though, Jesus faced these threats, and this temptation, by maintaining his faith in, and so centeredness upon, the ground of being, and thus takes these threats into his union with God. Tillich claims, accordingly, that the conquest of existential estrangement in the New Being, which is the being of the Christ, does not remove finitude and anxiety, ambiguity and tragedy, but it does have the character of taking the negativities of existence into unbroken unity with God. The anxiety about having to die is not removed; it is taken into participation in the “will of God,” i.e., in his directing creativity. His homelessness and insecurity with respect to a physical, social, and mental place are not diminished but rather increased to the last moment. Yet they are accepted in the power of a participation in a “transcendent place,” which in actuality is no place but the eternal ground of every place and of every moment in time. His loneliness and his frustrated attempts in trying to be received by those to whom he came do not suddenly end in a final success; they are taken into the divine acceptance of that which rejects God, into the vertical line of the uniting love which is effective where the horizontal line from being to being is barred. Out of his unity with God he has unity with those who are separated from him and from one another by finite self-relatedness and self-seclusion. Both error and doubt equally are not removed but are taken into the participation in the divine life and thus indirectly into the divine omniscience.51

The moral of the story is that Jesus’s entire life is thus “a personal life which is subjected to all the consequences of existential estrangement but wherein estrangement is conquered in himself and a permanent unity is kept with God. Into this unity he accepts the negativities of existence without removing them. This is done by transcending them in the power of this unity.”52 Tillich claims, therefore, that in every moment of his life, and in every way, Jesus faces the threat of nonbeing and the anxiety to which it leads, yet he does not give in to this anxiety; rather, he continues to trust in, and remain united with, the ground of being. To see what Tillich means by this, suppose that Jesus is anxious about the suffering, abuse, and death by which he has been threatened. Faced with these threats, one is tempted, naturally, to find some source of security against them, whether by running away, or by defending oneself, or by trying to think them away, however wishfully. These courses of action are a temptation just

51  Tillich, ST2, 131.  Tillich, ST2, 134.  Tillich, ST2, 134–5; cf. 123, 126.

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insofar as a person puts his or her trust in them or oneself, rather than in the ground of being. (Obviously, the mere fact that one runs away or defends oneself does not indicate that one is not trusting God as the ground of being, just as the mere fact that one lets oneself suffer abuse does not mean that one is trusting God.) Tillich’s contention is that Jesus faced these threats and, thus, the temptation to seek his security elsewhere than the ground of being, but that he resisted this temptation precisely by trusting that the ground of being is indeed his ground, and that nonbeing is finally overcome by that ground. On Tillich’s account, then, Jesus remains centered upon the ground of being even when threatened by nonbeing, and so maintains his essential being under the conditions of finite existence. From this, Tillich infers that essential being or “being-itself” thereby becomes manifest in Jesus’s finite existence, participating in that existence, facing the threat of nonbeing, and just so overcoming that threat. In Jesus, that is to say, being-itself participates in finitude and thus overcomes nonbeing by taking it into unity with itself, which would mean that Jesus’s trust in the ground of being is vindicated. Implicit in Tillich’s Christology, then, is a claim to the effect that the ground of being can and does overcome nonbeing.53 To explain what this means, Tillich argues, first, that the ground of being must be thought of as “living,” that is, that the divine life is “the eternal process in which separation is posited and is overcome by reunion.”54 The idea here is that the ground of being is a sort of living process in which separation is posited and overcome. As such, “an element of non-being must be seen in his being, that is, the establishment of otherness. The Divine Life then would be the reunion of otherness with identity in an eternal ‘process.’ ”55 All this is to say that, on Tillich’s account, the ground of being is triune, as the abyssal, inexhaustible God eternally takes on a particular form and maintains unity with it.56 On the strength of this account, Tillich contends that the God who becomes manifest in the Christ can and does overcome finitude and nonbeing, for “the finite is posited as finite within the process of divine life, but it is reunited with the infinite within the same process. It is distinguished from the infinite, but it is not separated from it.”57 From this, it follows that God can become manifest in finite existence, and can thus participate in finitude, because within the divine life God has eternally been finitizing Godself and maintaining unity with that finitude. It is a short step from here to Tillich’s next claim, that in the Christ it becomes manifest that one’s separation from God as the ground of being

53  Readers who are familiar with the theological tradition might expect me to discuss Tillich’s account of the resurrection at this point, but resurrection seems to be a peripheral matter in Tillich’s theology. 54 55  Tillich, ST1, 242; cf. 188–9, 237–8, 246–7, 252.  Tillich, ST3, 284. 56   For claims to this effect, see Tillich, ST1, 228, 250–1; ST3, 284–6, 293. 57  Tillich, ST1, 251.

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cannot finally separate one from the ground of being, since such separation has been included in the ground of being as a moment, as it were, of the divine life; God overcomes human estrangement, accordingly, by taking it upon Godself. As Tillich puts it, “God’s atoning activity must be understood as his participation in existential estrangement and its self-destructive consequences. He cannot remove these consequences; they are implied in his justice. But he can take them upon himself by participating in them and transforming them for those who participate in his participation.”58 God does this, and can do this, precisely because God is the living God, eternally overcoming nonbeing within the divine life, and is therefore able to conquer nonbeing ad extra by repeating that life within finite existence. It is fitting, then, to speak of “the suffering that God takes upon himself by participating in existential estrangement or the state of unconquered negativity,” for, as Tillich remarks, “here the doctrine of the living God and the doctrine of the atonement coincide.”59 It is also fitting to speak of God as love, because God eternally reunites with that which is separated ad intra, and God repeats this reuniting ad extra, in relation to separated creatures.60 Tillich thus claims, in this regard, that “God works toward  .  .  . the bringing-together into the unity of his life all who are separated and disrupted.”61 The fact that God is love sheds additional light, in turn, on Tillich’s understanding of reconciliation. Suppose one’s love for another—say, a father’s love for his daughter—is such that he would continue loving her even in the face of that which is unlovely about her, including even her rejection of that love; in that case, the father’s love for his daughter is capacious enough to include even her would-be separation from him, such that there is finally no way for her to remove herself from that love. (Lest this sound like an unduly controlling love, I  hasten to add that such love must include, rather than preclude, an element of letting-go.) Tillich’s suggestion is that God’s love is of just this sort: the divine life includes separation and reunion within itself, and God includes humanity’s separation within the divine life, too, from which it follows that we cannot finally separate ourselves from God. On Tillich’s account, then, Jesus trusts the ground of being rather than anything else, even when threatened by nonbeing, such that (a) his existence is self-determinedly aligned with essential being under conditions of existence, (b) being-itself becomes manifest in his existence, and (c) it becomes manifest that the ground of being overcomes nonbeing by including the latter in the divine life. In consequence of his trust in God as the ground of being, therefore, Jesus participates in the ground’s participation in finite existence, the ground’s inclusion of separation within itself, and his trust is

59  Tillich, ST2, 174.  Tillich, ST2, 175.   For Tillich’s claim to this effect, see ST1, 279.

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thereby vindicated. The solution to humanity’s finitude and estrangement, accordingly, is the ground of being’s eternal overcoming of nonbeing and its would-be separation of us from that ground. Tillich thus argues that inclusion in the divine life is the solution to human finitude and estrangement, and he contends that it is likewise the solution to one of estrangement’s key consequences, namely, the falling-apart of self and world. His solution here depends upon a claim to the effect that the polarities characteristic of the self–world relationship are perfectly united in the divine life:  “within the divine life,” Tillich maintains, “every ontological element includes its polar element completely, without tension and without the threat of dissolution, for God is being-itself.”62 The idea, obviously, is that within the divine life, personhood is eternally united in communion, vitality is perfectly expressed in form, and freedom effortlessly coincides with destiny. Tillich claims, accordingly, that God is called a person, but he is a person not in finite separation but in an absolute and unconditional participation in everything. God is called dynamic, but he is dynamic not in tension with form but in an absolute and unconditional unity with form, so that his self-transcendence never is in tension with his self-preservation, so that he always remains God. God is called “free,” but he is free not in arbitrariness but in an absolute and unconditional identity with his destiny, so that he himself is his destiny, so that the essential structures of being are not strange to his freedom but are the actuality of his freedom.63

Within the divine life, then, individuality is continually reunited with individuality, such that individuality is returned to itself through its participation in that life; this is the case, Tillich argues, because the abyssal element in the divine life, the element of unlimited potentia, is ever distinct from, yet united with, the element of form or logos that it has taken on, and vice versa. (Unfortunately, perhaps, the best analogy for Tillich’s view here is probably not that of communion among human persons, but of an individual person whose life has taken on a particular shape, and who continually identifies with that shape. If Tillich’s trinitarianism allowed for fuller personhood among the hypostases, as I think it might, then it would equally allow for a fuller account of divine personhood-in-communion.) The divine life likewise expresses itself in ever-new ways, yet does so always in keeping with God’s eternal form or logos; the form is expansive enough to include such expressions, and in these ever-new expressions God remains faithful to Godself. (Think here of someone who has given her life a certain shape—say, as a teacher—but who continually finds new ways of expressing that shape or is continually reinventing herself as such.) And finally, Tillich contends 62

 Tillich, ST1, 243.

63

 Tillich, ST1, 244.

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that God is always free—otherwise God would be unable, for instance, to act graciously toward estranged humans—but that God acts freely only in keeping with God’s destiny—only in faithfulness, that is, to who God is.64 (The relevant analogy is to someone whose will is formed in the way he or she would want it to be, such that his or her consequent self-determinations are both free and determined by that will—as when someone who wants to be an honest person has no choice but to tell the truth, and therefore experiences truth-telling as expressive of his or her freedom.) On Tillich’s account, then, the divine life is “the unity of the ontological elements and the telos of life.”65 If one participates in the divine life, therefore, one likewise participates in the unity of these polarities, such that one can stand in a self-returning relationship vis-à-vis the divine, even if one does not stand in this relationship vis-àvis the world. This has obvious implications for one’s ability to identify with one’s life, to which we shall return in Section 6.5. So far, then, Tillich has claimed that Jesus wholly trusts in God, that God thereby becomes manifest in Jesus’s existence, and that God overcomes nonbeing by including it in the divine life; if so, it follows that humanity’s separation from God is not itself separate from God, since God has included it, too, in the divine life. Tillich claims, moreover, that the self–world polarities are likewise united in the divine life, such that one who participates in that life could experience a return to self, however much one continued to stand in a non-self-returning relationship to the world. We can see, then, at least in principle, why Tillich asserts that “the divine love is the final answer to all the questions implied in human existence, including finitude, the threat of disruption, and estrangement.”66 So far, though, we have seen only how these questions are answered in principle, or how their answer has become possible; we still need to understand how it would actually become an answer for those who are finite, disrupted, and estranged.

6.5.  R EI N TEGR ATED SELFHOOD The New Being in the Christ is human being that has freely centered itself upon God as the ground of being; such recentering is possible because humanity’s separation from the ground has already been included in that ground and thus overcome, and, because the self–world polarities are perfectly united in the divine life, it follows that in their relationship to God, at least, the disintegration of humanity’s self–world relationship can be overcome. Tillich claims

  For Tillich’s discussion of the polarities’ unity in God, see ST1, 245-9. 66  Tillich, ST1, 249.  Tillich, ST1, 286; cf. ST2, 166.

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that this overcoming is already accomplished in the divine life and, in Jesus as the Christ, has been realized in human existence, yet it must still be made actual throughout the rest of human existence—the objective fact of salvation, so to speak, must become actual as one’s own state of salvation. The process whereby it becomes actual, on Tillich’s account, involves regeneration, justification, and sanctification, or, as he puts it, “participation in the divine participation, accepting it and being transformed by it—that is the threefold character of the state of salvation.”67 Tillich claims that the first step—one’s participation in the divine participation—can be taken only if the New Being has been made present to one, which occurs when one hears the message that God has overcome our separation, and one is “grasped” by that message. With respect to the former, Tillich asserts that “the message of conversion is, first, the message of a new reality to which one is asked to turn; in the light of it, one is to move away from the old reality, the state of existential estrangement in which one has lived.”68 The new reality to which one is asked to turn is the reality made manifest in the Christ, namely, that one’s separation from God cannot finally separate one from God. To turn to this reality is to put one’s faith in it, which is possible insofar as the “Spiritual Presence”—Tillich’s other name for “Divine Spirit”—awakens the Christ’s own faith in one. The Spiritual Presence does this, Tillich claims, by “grasping” one: awakened faith, accordingly, “is the state of being grasped by the Spiritual Presence and opened to the transcendent unity of unambiguous life. In relation to the Christological assertion, one could say that faith is the state of being grasped by the New Being as it is manifest in Jesus as the Christ.”69 To be “grasped,” then, is to hear the message effectively, which means, at a minimum, that one trusts in the truth of that message and thus accepts it as one’s own truth; so one hears that God has overcome one’s estrangement from God, one believes or trusts that this message applies to one, and one therefore comes to trust in what God has done. Tillich does not tell us much about how this works, but the idea is that in being “grasped,” one thereby participates in the Christ’s trust and, as such, in his inclusion in the divine life, from which it follows that one enjoys a new reality. Following the theological tradition, Tillich terms this “regeneration,” which he defines as “the event in which the divine Spirit takes hold of a personal life through the creation of faith,” such that one is “drawn into the new reality manifest in Jesus as the Christ.”70 To be regenerated, therefore, is to trust that God has overcome one’s separation and, so, to put one’s faith in God. To have such faith, in turn, is to accept one’s acceptance by God, in spite of one’s unacceptableness; it is to

68  Tillich, ST2, 176.  Tillich, ST2, 177. 70  Tillich, ST3, 131, cf. 112; ST2, 177.  Tillich, ST3, 222; ST2, 177.

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accept that one is justified by grace alone. On Tillich’s account, then, justification is first an objective event and then a subjective reception; in the objective sense, justification is the eternal act of God by which he accepts as not estranged those who are indeed estranged from him by guilt and the act by which he takes them into the unity with him which is manifest in the New Being in Christ . . . It is an act of God which is in no way dependent on man, an act in which he accepts him who is unacceptable.71

Objectively speaking, one is justified before God only because God accepts one in spite of one’s unacceptableness, and therefore only by grace. To receive such justification as justification by grace is to recognize its “in spite of” character, and so to recognize that one’s acceptance by God is due solely to God’s love. The subjective side of justification, accordingly, is “the acceptance. Indeed, there is nothing in man which enables God to accept him. But man must accept just this. He must accept that he is accepted; he must accept acceptance.”72 One is loved by God, Tillich insists, in spite of one’s unloveableness; one is accepted by God in spite of one’s unacceptableness; and one is not estranged from God in spite of one’s estrangement. Faith in justification, therefore, must always include “the element of ‘in spite of,’ ” which element is “the heart and center of salvation.”73 One trusts that one is accepted by God in spite of one’s unacceptableness, and that one is therefore included in the divine life in spite of one’s would-be exclusion from it; if so, and if one takes God to be ultimate, it follows that one can now stand in a different relationship to oneself, to the world, and to others, for in virtue of one’s being united with the ground of being in spite of one’s disunity, Tillich claims that one can now be united with oneself in spite of one’s disunity, can be united with the world in spite of its opposition, and can be united with others in spite of their unloveableness. We have already seen what this would mean with respect to one’s self-relationship: by trusting that one’s existence has been included in the divine life, one can bring one’s existence into line with one’s essence by trusting that God has so brought it—and since one stands in this relationship solely on the basis of one’s trust in what God has done, irrespective of one’s deserving it, it follows that one’s existence (in the sense of the stance one takes on one’s life) can be aligned with one’s essence (to center oneself on God) in spite of the fact that one’s existence (in the sense of what one has made of one’s life) is not so aligned. Tillich claims, accordingly, that

 Tillich, ST2, 178.  Tillich, ST2, 178.

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73

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in the Spiritual Presence, man’s essential being appears under the conditions of existence, conquering the distortions of existence in the reality of the New Being. This statement is derived from the basic Christological assertion that in the Christ the eternal unity of God and man becomes actual under the conditions of existence without being conquered by them. Those who participate in the New Being are in an analogous way beyond the conflict of essence and existential predicament.74

One thereby stands in a new relationship to oneself, since one is aligned, by grace, with one’s essence, and one can accept that this is the case in spite of one’s misalignment. Tillich claims that one who accepts the divine acceptance likewise stands in a new relationship to others, for one knows that God has overcome their separation, too, by including them in the divine life. One need not take their unacceptableness as the final word about them, accordingly, for precisely the same reason that one need not take one’s own unacceptableness as the final word about oneself, namely, that God’s acceptance is more ultimate than either. One can thus be united with others in spite of their estrangement from one, which is what Tillich terms “the ‘reunion in spite of,’ ” or, in more traditional idiom, “the message and act of forgiveness.”75 One who accepts acceptance can stand in an equally new relationship to the world, which Tillich calls “faith in providence”: insofar as one trusts that God has overcome nonbeing by including it within the divine life, Tillich claims, one also “believes, and asserts with the courage of faith, that no situation whatsoever can frustrate the fulfillment of his ultimate destiny . . . that history in each of its moments, in eras of progress and eras of catastrophe, contributes to the ultimate fulfillment of creaturely existence, although this fulfillment does not lie in an eventual space-time future.”76 Faith in providence thus gives the individual the feeling of transcendent security in the midst of the necessities of nature and history. It is confidence in “the divine condition” within every set of finite conditions . . . it is the paradox of the belief in providence that, just when the conditions of a situation are destroying the believer, the divine condition gives him a certainty which transcends the destruction.77

By trusting that nonbeing has been taken up into the divine life, accordingly, one can trust that the ground of being, rather than suffering and meaninglessness, is ultimate, such that one can trust that life hangs together in spite of these threats. One’s faith that God has overcome separation and estrangement by including them within the divine life thus enables one to stand in a different relationship to oneself, to others, and to the world, in that the

75  Tillich, ST3, 269–70.  Tillich, ST3, 180.  Tillich, ST1, 268; cf. 264, 269–70.

74

77

76

 Tillich, ST1, 267.

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estrangement or opposition one meets there cannot separate one from the ground of being, and therefore cannot finally compromise one’s self-unity. On Tillich’s account, then, God accepts one in spite of one’s unacceptableness, and this acceptance-in-spite-of can set one in a different relationship not only to God but to oneself, to others, and to the world, since, for one who accepts acceptance, estrangement and opposition no longer have the final word. Importantly, though, Tillich claims that this same acceptance-inspite-of paves the way for these relationships to become less and less in-spite-of, and to be characterized more and more by actual self-returning unity with God and others. This is how Tillich understands the traditional category of sanctification, which he describes as “the process in which the power of the New Being transforms personality and community,” a transformation which thus aims at “the reunion of these elements in life processes in which actual being is the true expression of potential being.”78 Such transformation is newly possible, Tillich claims, because one’s unity with the ground of being has now been re-established by that ground; in accepting this, one is freed from trying to establish the ground and unity of being elsewhere than God, and, therefore, from the distortions caused by reliance on such would-be grounds. This means, first, that one who accepts acceptance can bring his or her existence more and more into line with his or her essence, and so achieve a mature, “come of age” self-relationship—a relationship, that is, where such alignment is due to one’s spontaneous, independent determination so to align oneself, rather than to one’s being so aligned by nature or external compulsion. This is the case, Tillich claims, because to accept one’s acceptance just is to trust God as the ground of one’s being, to recognize oneself in God’s recognition of one, and so to identify one’s existence (what one makes of one’s life, or the stand one takes on it) with one’s essence (one’s nature or what one is meant to be). Tillich terms this a “reunion with one’s self,” accordingly, that begins as soon as one accepts God’s acceptance, but that moves toward a state in which one brings one’s existence more and more into line with one’s essence as one who is to be grounded in God; “the process of sanctification runs toward a state,” therefore, “in which the ‘search for identity’ reaches its goal, which is the identity of the essential self shining through the contingencies of the existing self.”79 Through faith, then, as a determination of one’s existence, one trusts God as the ground of one’s being and so begins to exist as one was essentially meant to.

 Tillich, ST2, 179–80; ST3, 129. He adds that “in the reunion of essential and existential being, ambiguous life is raised above itself to a transcendence that it could not achieve by its own power” (ST3, 129). 79  Tillich, ST3, 234–5; cf. 269–70. 78



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Given, moreover, that one’s essence is what one ought to be, and that, through faith in God’s acceptance, one’s existence can now be aligned with one’s essence, it follows that what one has made of one’s life no longer precludes one from recentering oneself on God as the ground of being, and, therefore, that one’s destiny is no longer necessarily at odds with one’s freedom. As evidence that this is the case, Tillich points to the fact that one’s essence no longer stands over against one’s existence, in the form of a hostile, alien law; he thus claims that “growth in Spiritual freedom is first of all growth in freedom from the law. This follows immediately from the interpretation of the law as man’s essential being confronting him in the state of estrangement. The more one is reunited with his true being under the impact of the Spirit, the more one is free from the commandments of the law.”80 More positively, the fact that one’s existence can now be expressive of one’s essence, and increasingly so, means that one’s life can attain a kind of simple, effortless spontaneity, no longer encumbered by external law or marred by willfulness: “as the process of sanctification approaches a more mature self-relatedness,” Tillich remarks, “the individual is more spontaneous, more self-affirming, without self-elevation or self-humiliation.”81 Freedom and destiny had once been at odds, inasmuch as one could no longer exist as one was meant to, but through God’s acceptance of one in spite of one’s unacceptableness, this contradiction has been overcome, and one can grow into this acceptance. Likewise, because one’s unity with one’s essential self is grounded in God’s acceptance of one, one’s self-unity is no longer strictly dependent upon one’s relationship with others or the world, which means, in turn, that one is freed for a new relationship to them:  When taken into the transcendent unity, the personal center is superior to encounters with reality on the temporal plane, because the transcendent unity embraces the content of all possible encounters . . . In the “communion of the Holy Spirit,” the essential being of the person is liberated from the contingencies of freedom and destiny under the conditions of existence. The acceptance of this liberation is the all-inclusive sacrifice which, at the same time, is the all-inclusive fulfillment.82

The idea here, simply stated, is that one’s unity with God as the ground of being means that one can be returned to oneself irrespective of whether one stands in a self-returning relationship to the world or others, and that one is therefore freed from their power over one. As a result, one is free to decide for oneself how one will relate to them; this is what Tillich has in mind when he claims that “insofar as the personal center is established in relation to the universal center, the encountered contents of finite reality are judged for their

 Tillich, ST3, 232.

80

 Tillich, ST3, 234–5.

81

 Tillich, ST3, 269.

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significance in expressing the essential being of the person before they are allowed to enter, or are barred from entering, the unity of the centered self.”83 This claim may seem a bit abstract, but Tillich illustrates it with at least two helpful examples, namely, one’s relationship to “forms” and to other persons. “Forms,” recall, are the recognizable roles, practices, etc. in which one intends one’s life or expresses one’s vitality. One may find it hard to identify with any such form insofar as one feels that one’s vitality cannot be fully expressed by any of them, as if it would be too limiting to identify with any such expression. For one whose self-unity is already secured in relationship to God, however, particular forms no longer have to bear the entire weight of one’s self-expression, such that one is free to identify with those forms in spite of their limitedness. Tillich thus remarks that not all creative possibilities of a person, or all the creative possibilities of the human race, have been or will be actualized. The Spiritual Presence does not change that situation—for although the finite can participate in the infinite, it cannot become infinite—but the Spirit can create an acceptance of man’s and mankind’s finitude, and in so doing can give a new meaning to the sacrifice of potentialities. It can remove the ambiguous and tragic character of the sacrifice of life possibilities and restore the genuine meaning of sacrifice, namely, the acknowledgment of one’s finitude.84

Tillich claims, accordingly, that “in contrast to the humanist idea of man which actualizes what man can be directly and without sacrifice, the Spirit-determined fulfillment of man sacrifices all human potentialities, to the extent that they lie on the horizontal plane, to the vertical direction and receives them back into the limits of man’s finitude from the vertical direction, the direction of the ultimate.”85 One whose self-unity is grounded in God can thus come to terms with the finitude of his or her expressions, since his or her self-relationship does not depend upon his or her potential taking shape in every possible way; he or she can therefore be at home with, or experience as self-returning, the small handful of forms in which he or she expresses him or herself. Then again, such limitation is not the only reason that one may not be able to identify with particular forms; another reason is that there may not be any well-fitting forms available. Even if one comes to terms with one’s limitations, in other words, one may still not be able to stand in a self-returning relationship to the forms in which one can express oneself, for the simple reason that one may not be able to see oneself in these forms—because, say, the prevailing forms are unduly narrow or homogenizing. To address this, Tillich contends that those whose self-unity is grounded in God can actively contribute new

 Tillich, ST3, 269.

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 Tillich, ST3, 271.

 Tillich, ST3, 271.

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forms and do new things with the old ones, not only because they have a sense of self that is secured apart from these forms and so should feel less pressure to fit into them, but because God apparently values multiplicity of expression and, thus, the proliferation of forms. The community of the faithful, accordingly, should be characterized by just such proliferation: “the Spiritual Community contains an indefinite variety of expressions of faith,” Tillich writes, “and does not exclude any of them. It opens in all directions because it is based on the central manifestation of the Spiritual Presence.”86 The very manner in which the New Being is mediated, moreover, may provide insight into the mechanism by which forms can be multiplied and variegated, for each person receives that which has been mediated by others, and, in turn, contributes to that mediation:  “He who receives mediates,” Tillich writes, “and, on the other hand, he has received only because the process of mediation is going on continuously.”87 If we add to this that mediation includes an element of transformation—as Tillich puts it elsewhere, an individual’s “productive power is restricted to the transformation of what is given to it,” yet his or her influence “should not be so small that the result is a repetition instead of a transformation”88—we can see here the outlines of a model for how such proliferation could be brought about, insofar as the experience of each transforms that which they receive from others and, in turn, that which still others will receive, transform, and pass on. The point, at any rate, is that those who are united with God through faith are free from currently available forms and can therefore be creative in and with those forms, and, as such, can create forms that more and more persons can experience as self-returning. Tillich offers a similar account of one’s relationship with other persons. The problem here is straightforward enough: if one’s own personhood somehow depends upon one’s standing in a self-returning relationship with others, one is obviously vulnerable to those who relate non-reciprocally to one, and this vulnerability may make it difficult, in turn, for one to return others to themselves, inasmuch as one may instead try to protect oneself from them, or to force them to recognize one. By contrast, one whose self-unity is grounded in God no longer depends in the same way upon others, and is therefore free to offer a self-returning relationship even to those who may not reciprocate. Such relationships exemplify what Tillich calls “agape,” which has the same receptive, paradoxical, and anticipatory character as the new being: In the case of agape, the first quality is evident in its acceptance of the object of love without restrictions; the second quality is disclosed in agape’s holding fast to this acceptance in spite of the estranged, profanized, and demonized state of

87  Tillich, ST3, 155; cf. 170.  Tillich, ST3, 189.  Tillich, ST1, 46. Tillich is here talking specifically of a particular theologian’s experience, but the point seems suitably general. 86 88

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its objects, and the third quality is seen in agape’s expectation of the reestablishment of the holiness, greatness, and dignity of the object of love through its accepting him. Agape [thus] takes its object into the transcendent unity of unambiguous life.89

One who identifies with God’s acceptance is therefore freed from having to take other persons’ stances toward one as constitutive of one’s personhood, which frees one, in turn, to respect their personhood irrespective of that stance. One thus bears witness to God’s maintenance of unity with humanity in spite of our estrangement, and so opens up the possibility that others, too, will be able to experience such unity and, in turn, to stand in a self-returning relationship to still others. One works to make it the case, in other words, that more and more persons will actually be able to identify with themselves in their relationship to others. On Tillich’s account, then, the fact that one is accepted by God in spite of one’s unacceptableness means that one can stand in a new relationship to God and oneself: one stands in a new relationship to God simply by accepting this acceptance, for in doing so, one trusts God as the ground of one’s being; doing so likewise sets one in a new relationship to oneself, since it means that one’s existence has now been brought into unity with one’s essence. One’s self-unity thus having been established in relationship to God, one is freed from certain kinds of dependence upon the world, which simultaneously frees one to bring more and more of the world into a self-returning relationship and, so, enables one to experience more and more of one’s life as one’s own. Tillich is quick to remind us, however, that no matter how successful the latter endeavor may be, one remains dependent upon grace, for sanctification remains fragmentary at best, and so “stands under the ‘in spite of’ of which the Cross of the Christ is the symbol.”90

6.6.  M ETHOD OF COR R EL ATION Tillich thus defends an account according to which faith, in the form of acceptance-in-spite-of, plays a crucial role in enabling one to integrate and identify with one’s life. This brings us back to Barth’s earlier objection, to the effect that such accounts simply crown humanity’s aspirations and, so, reinforce our sinful, self-centered projects. Indeed, one might reasonably wonder whether the mineness project as a whole, and not just Tillich’s iteration of it, is liable to such an objection.

 Tillich, ST3, 138; cf. 261.

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Tillich’s rejoinder to this objection comes in the form of his famous, but frequently misunderstood, “method of correlation”—the method, that is, of correlating cultural questions with theological answers. To understand this method, it is important to consider one of the basic theological commitments that Tillich shares with much of the Lutheran tradition, to the effect that theology’s would-be content, God, can be approached only on the basis of a corresponding form, for apart from this form, God is inadvertently turned into “God.” Tillich argues the point by claiming that God is one’s ultimate concern, and that one’s relationship to God must therefore express such concern or, as a later generation would say, must be “self-involving.” He maintains, accordingly, that “that which is ultimate gives itself only to the attitude of ultimate concern,” and, as such, that “it is the object of total surrender, demanding also the surrender of our subjectivity while we look at it.”91 On Tillich’s account, then, one can approach God as God only if one does so with a sense that, in this approach, one’s very existence is at stake; “only those statements are theological,” accordingly, “which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us.”92 This brings us to Tillich’s method of correlation, the point of which is not simply to coordinate theological answers with cultural questions, but to exhibit the utter questionableness of humanity—our threatenedness by finitude and sin, along with our inability to resist these threats on our own—in order to ensure that God is approached in an attitude of ultimate concern, and that God’s grace is received as grace. The method of correlation, in other words, is Tillich’s translation of characteristically Lutheran claims about the relationship between Law and Gospel, according to which “Law” is that which manifests one’s unrighteousness and sheer contingency vis-à-vis God, so that “Gospel” can be proclaimed and heard as a message of pure grace. This is what Tillich has in mind when he claims, for instance, that “only those who have experienced the shock of transitoriness, the anxiety in which they are aware of their finitude, the threat of nonbeing, can understand what the notion of God means,” and that “only those who have experienced the tragic ambiguities of our historical existence and have totally questioned the meaning of existence can understand what the Kingdom of God means.”93 For

91  Tillich, ST1, 12. He adds that “Ultimate concern is the abstract translation of the great commandment: ‘The Lord, our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind, and with all your strength’ ” (ST1, 11). It seems equally to be a translation of Luther’s well-known claim, in his Large Catechism, that “to have a God is simply to trust and believe in one with our whole heart . . . Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God.” 92  Tillich, ST1, 14; cf. 11–12. 93   Tillich, ST1, 61–2. For a helpful treatment of these issues, see John Clayton, The Concept of Correlation:  Paul Tillich and the Possibility of a Mediating Theology (Berlin:  Walter de Gruyter, 1980).

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Tillich, then, theological answers are to be correlated not with cultural questions, per se, but with the questionableness implicit in creaturely existence.94 With that, we return to Barth’s objection, which can now be formulated in the following terms: if Christianity is understood as an answer to human questions, then no matter how dire these questions may be, nor how unequipped we are to answer them, it might appear that Christianity has been turned into an instrument for meeting a human need or has been made to play a role in accomplishing a fundamentally human project. We can also put the worry in terms borrowed from contemporary philosophy of language: on one widely accepted view, to understand the meaning of a question is to understand the range of statements that would count as an answer to it, which might seem to entail that questions inherently delimit the range of answers that could be thought to answer them.95 From here, it would be a short step to the conclusion that Tillichian answers are delimited by cultural questions and, therefore, that his theology is indeed liable to Barth’s objection. At least two responses are relevant. First, it is worth pointing out that the range of assertions that would count as an answer to a question is not identical with the range of answers a question-poser might have in mind when posing it, nor indeed with the range of assertions that anyone might foresee as an answer, for assertions are often only retrospectively recognizable as answers to a question. (Many jokes work this way.) More importantly, Tillich insists that in his theology, at least, theological answers have not been made to play a supporting role in achieving humanity’s self-determined aspirations, for the simple reason that his formulation of the questions is just as theological as his formulation of the answers. Tillich claims, that is, that his understanding of the questionableness of human existence is itself derived from the perspective of the Christian message, such that his theology of culture is indeed a theology of culture, a theological analysis of culture. He thus maintains, in this connection, that “theology formulates the questions implied in human existence, and theology formulates the answers implied in divine self-manifestation under the guidance of the questions implied in human existence,” or again, that “God answers man’s questions, and under the impact of God’s answers man asks them.”96 On Tillich’s account, therefore, both sides of the correlation are understood in terms of the Christian message; hence, although he intends for his analysis of human existence to be independently plausible, he does not intend for it to be independently imposed.

94   So Tillich: “Man is the question he asks about himself, before any question has been formulated” (ST1, 62). 95   For an influential argument along these lines, see Lauri Karttunen, “Syntax and Semantics of Questions,” Linguistics and Philosophy 1 (1977). 96  Tillich, ST1, 61.



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Tillich thus insists that his theology neither crowns culture nor reduces the gospel to an instrument for addressing an antecedently established human need, for his understanding of culture and of human need is itself theological, informed from the standpoint of the Christian message. To be sure, Barth may not have been satisfied by this response, but at the very least it should establish that Tillich’s approach is not as obviously liable to Barth’s objection as it might otherwise appear. Likewise for the mineness project as a whole: if a theologian takes Christianity, say, to include an understanding not only of humanity’s redemption but of the ills from which we are redeemed, and if he or she uses the latter understanding to shed light on contemporary iterations of those ills, then he or she is not guilty, at least in principle, of treating Christianity as if it were nothing but an affirmation of, or aid to, humanity’s own aspirations.

6.7.  SY N TH E SIZI NG TH E M I N EN E SS PROJECT The mineness project as a whole is liable to some other serious objections, but before considering these we need to move beyond Tillich and take stock of where the project as a whole stands. To do so, we can usefully begin by returning to Ernst Troeltsch’s claims about historical construction:  on his approach, recall, one (a) surveys the relevant historical phenomena, (b) synthesizes and appropriates these phenomena, and (c) offers one’s own synthesis as one of the phenomena to be synthesized by others. Preceding chapters have surveyed at least some relevant phenomena, so, following Troeltsch, we can take stock by suggesting how they might be synthesized. (To state the obvious: what follows is a brief sketch of how key elements from preceding chapters might be brought together in order to address the problem of mineness; for elaboration and defense of these claims, readers are referred back to the chapters themselves.) The question to which these chapters, and the figures treated therein, has been addressed is, again, the question of “mineness,” of one’s life having a shape such that one can identify with it and experience it as self-expressive. Given that one’s life-circumstances may not actually have this shape, it might appear that whether a life meets these conditions depends finally either upon luck or one’s ability to impose that shape on them. The latter, too, may finally be a matter of luck, but even if it were not, the point is that “mineness” would seem to be experienceable only in a relatively narrow range of cases where a person’s life actually goes the way he or she intends for it to go. The range would be narrowed further insofar as one cares about other persons, not to mention things like “causes,” for one then intends for their circumstances to have a certain shape, too, yet their having this shape is likely to be even less

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responsive to one’s intentions. It may also be the case that if the mineness of one’s life depends upon one’s bringing circumstances into conformity with one’s intentions, then one who pursues mineness will be less able to experience it as a good (i.e. to enjoy it), or one may actually be less likely to achieve one’s intentions because, say, one is so driven to make one’s life turn out a certain way that one alienates those one cares about. Complications could be multiplied, but the point is that if “mineness” is simply a matter of one’s life having the shape one intends, then only a particular, possibly narrow, range of lives may be recognizable as such. The modern theologians we have been considering offer an alternative approach to “mineness,” a key component of which is faith. On this approach, God is understood as having taken various oppositions into unity with Godself and, so, as overcoming the apparent ultimacy of such oppositions; to have faith in God, accordingly, is to trust that the oppositions one encounters are not themselves ultimate. Here it is crucial, these theologians contend, that God has first of all overcome one’s own opposition to God, for apart from this prior act of grace, one would not be able to trust God, nor see one’s entire life as taken up into unity with God, and one would therefore continue to take finite oppositions as ultimate. Justification by grace is a necessary condition, therefore, of one’s being able to see oneself as united with God. This unity, in turn, can enable one to maintain self-unity in relationship to all one’s circumstances—not because they now conform seamlessly with one’s intentions, but because one can remain self-united in the face of them, for one’s self-unity or self-integration no longer finally depends upon one’s standing in a self-returning relationship to these circumstances. Our modern theologians contend, in other words, that apart from one’s unity with God, one’s self-unity is more vulnerable to the potentially disintegrating effects of circumstance, for in that case if important circumstances did not go the way one had hoped, one’s life might not have the shape one had intended; one who intends to be united with God, by contrast, intends that which cannot finally be overcome by circumstances, such that the latter cannot finally threaten the intention in terms of which one integrates one’s life. In the face of hostile circumstances, accordingly, one can exhibit what Ritschl calls “patience.” Among these circumstances, one’s interactions with other persons form a special class. On the one hand, these interactions are similar to all other circumstances, in that one’s prior unity with God entails that one can remain self-united even in the face of others’ opposition, since one’s self-unity does not then depend upon one’s standing in a self-returning relationship to them; one can thus endure their opposition with patience or, more specifically in this case, forgiveness. One need not hold their opposition against them, in other words, insofar as it, too, has been included in the divine unity, and one’s identity is not finally threatened by it. From this, it follows that one is not only freed from those who oppose one, but freed for them: because one’s



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self-unity is no longer threatened, ultimately, by others’ not returning one to oneself, one is free to return others to themselves even if they oppose one. One can love them in spite of their hostility, therefore, and in so doing, one can free them from having to oppose one, from having to protect their own self-unity, and, perhaps, contribute to their becoming free to stand in a mutually self-returning relationship with others. Patience and forgiveness are thus the form that faith takes in relation to circumstances, and which enables one to remain self-united in the face of these. (They are the form of faith, note well, rather than something that faith merely makes possible, for to be patient in the face of obstacles, and to love others in the face of their opposition, is an act of trust.) Faith can thus enable one to maintain an integrated self-relationship irrespective of one’s circumstances, which may enable one, in turn, to identify with one’s life—but only if a further condition were met: if such self-integration were recognizable as self-integration. To understand the importance of this condition, consider the fact that even if faith enabled one to experience one’s life as hanging together or as having a certain shape, it would not necessarily follow that one had achieved a mineness-relationship to one’s life, for it is not yet clear how a life of faith would itself be recognizable as one’s own. Indeed, this may seem more like a recipe for self-loss, insofar as what one intends—inclusion in the divine unity—seems no longer recognizable as a human life, much less as one’s own, individual life. Our theologians have offered two principal responses to this worry. The first response is to insist that God has not only overcome humanity’s opposition, but has done so by taking humanity upon Godself and, thus, uniting humanity with God’s very being. If so, they argue, then in identifying with one’s unity in God, one is not intending to become something other than, nor to be somehow alienated from, what one is, for to unite with God, on this account, would be simultaneously to unite with one’s humanity. Think here of joining a group each of whose members wholly identifies with that with which one most fundamentally identifies—with a particular cause, say, or with love for one’s family members. In uniting oneself with such a group, one would simultaneously be united with oneself. Likewise, on this account, for one who would be united with God. The second response is to insist that faith can and should be self-expressive, bearing one’s own character or “stamp,” such that a life that hangs together by faith can likewise be self-expressive. The idea here is that in integrating one’s life into one’s unity with God, one can simultaneously put one’s stamp on that integration, or do so in one’s own way, such that that integration would be expressive of one’s individuality. To understand what this might mean, and to stay with the metaphor of integration, consider first the center(s) around which one’s life and circumstances are to be organized: the accounts we have been following would insist, of course, that one’s organizing center must itself be integrated into one’s unity with God, but the

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latter requirement seems to leave plenty of room for individual vocation; hence, one person may organize his or her life around devotion to certain loved ones, another around a particular craft, yet another around his or her commitment to a cause, and each of these organizing centers may themselves be integrated into, and so an expression of, his or her unity with God. If so, then the person’s unity with God will not only enable him or her to maintain self-unity in relation to his or her experiences, but to experience or stand behind this unity as his or her own. Assuming, moreover, (a) that persons learn what it means to have faith, at least in part, by considering the faith-integrating lives of others, and (b) that each such life is unique as an individual self-expression and in the unique circumstances each faces, it follows (c) that each faith-integrating life may contribute to the meaning of such integration, and so open up new possibilities for others to do so. We encountered several versions of this claim in preceding chapters, but the basic idea is that persons put their individual stamp on the faith that is mediated to them, and so contribute something of their own to that which is mediated to others; these others then put their stamp on that which is mediated, and so on, as a result of which each contributes to the expressive possibilities available for all. Self-unity should be recognizable as self-unity, accordingly, not only because one can express faith through one’s individual vocation, but because one partakes of, and contributes to, an ever-growing store of expressive resources. On this account, then, faith can be experienced as self-expressive, such that a life integrated by it can be experienced as such, too. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, this claim is liable to at least two serious objections, the first of which is that such faith is just wishful thinking. Sigmund Freud raised an objection to this effect, arguing, famously, that religious ideas “are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind,” and that “the secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes.”97 The idea here is that humans deeply desire, yet are often unable to obtain, goods such as security and justice, and that we cope with this inability by believing in a super-being who will help us to obtain them, or in an alternative reality in which these desires will be fulfilled. On Freud’s account, then, religions and their “gods” are projections that have been designed to do certain jobs: they “must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”98 Religions are here thought  Freud, Die Zukunft einer Illusion (Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1928), 47 (ET: The Future of an Illusion, trans. and ed. James Strachey [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961], 38). 98  Freud, Zukunft, 26 (22); cf. a similar formulation on 31–2. 97



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to emerge, accordingly, because humans wish so desperately for certain goods that we are liable to believe in whatever illusory beings would guarantee their fulfillment. Taken by itself, Freud’s objection may not seem all that worrisome:  as many have pointed out, even if the emergence of religions could be explained in terms of wish-fulfillment, it would not thereby entail that they had been proven false, nor that they were nothing but wish-fulfillment; Freud’s inference to the contrary seems, to put it bluntly, like an example of the genetic fallacy.99 It would appear, moreover, that Freud’s criticism goes too far, for if hopes that go beyond current evidence are “illusions” from which we should be freed, inasmuch as they are “insusceptible of proof,” then persons so freed would be deprived of an important and apparently legitimate resource with which to resist opposition and to sustain themselves during difficult times.100 Hope played precisely this role, for instance, for some of those involved in the American Civil Rights movement; we see this in Martin Luther King’s urging that when our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.101

In the face of oppositions confronting the Civil Rights movement, and African-American persons more generally, King here expresses the hope that there is something more ultimate than these oppositions, and that this something-more stands on the side of justice. This hope may have been an “illusion” in Freud’s sense, since it certainly went beyond and may even have run contrary to then-available evidence, but without such hope, persons may not have been able to endure in their long struggle for justice, and in any case they would have had one less spiritual resource to sustain them in the face of oppression. To my mind, this sort of hope stands as clear evidence against any principle, like Freud’s, that implies that such hope is somehow illegitimate or should be done without. Much better, I think, is the view articulated by Iris Murdoch: “Extreme suffering,” she writes, “from one cause or another, is likely to be the lot of everyone at some time in life; and innumerable lives are hideously darkened throughout by hunger, poverty, and persecution, or 99  For arguments to this effect, see William Alston, “Psychological Explanations of Religion,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New  York:  Macmillan, 1967); and Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ­chapters 5 and 6. 100  Freud, Zukunft, 50 (40). 101  Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?” delivered at the SCLC Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, on August 16, 1967.

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by remorse or guilt or abandoned loneliness and lack of love. Here every individual is ultimately alone, and in relation to actual cases it seems impertinent to consider what use is made of religious consolation.”102 To be sure, even if evidence-outrunning hopes are not necessarily illegitimate, this obviously would not entail that all such hopes are legitimate. Hence, even if Freud were to drop his principled objection against such hopes, related objections would remain. So, on the one hand, Freud objects that religious hopes tempt persons not to face reality as it is, insofar as religion encourages persons to think their situation is not really as bad as it seems. As Freud sees it, religion keeps persons from “going out into ‘hostile life,’ ” which is to say that if persons were freed from the illusory influence of religion, they would “have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe.”103 Religion can thus distort one’s view of reality, Freud thinks, inasmuch as it leads one to see one’s circumstances as if they were less threatening than they really are. This can discourage persons, in turn, from having a sense of urgency about trying to make things better, insofar as they trust that a “god” will do so. Freud has the latter worry in mind when he claims, again, that if persons were freed from religion, then, “by withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they would probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone.”104 Freud worries, accordingly, not only that religion can lead to a distorted view of reality, but that it can weaken one’s determination to make things better, since it encourages one to trust that a super-being will make everything all right. The proposals we have been discussing may seem liable to worries like these; if so, at least four responses are relevant. With respect to the idea that religious faith can lead to a distorted view of reality, consider two responses. First, on the account defended here, to have faith is, among other things, to trust God in the face of life’s oppositions and, so, not to take these oppositions as ultimate. This is importantly different from taking oppositions lightly, or from failing to perceive them, in precisely the same way that forgiving someone need not involve taking their offense lightly. In both cases, one’s view is not (necessarily) that a particular circumstance is not actually bad, but that its being so need not (necessarily) preclude one from seeing it in light of a more ultimate framework or a more fundamental commitment. Second, if dealing with bad circumstances can tempt one to self-deception, as Freud suggests is the case with religion, it seems likely that if one facing such circumstances

  Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics As a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin, 1992), 504. 104  Freud, Zukunft, 80 (62–3).  Freud, Zukunft, 81 (63).

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thought that there were nothing beyond them in which one could trust, or that these circumstances may themselves finally determine the shape of one’s life, one would be tempted even more strongly by self-deception. (If there is a problem around the house that I  know I  cannot fix—a leaky pipe, for instance—I am much more likely to pretend it is not there.) If so, then faith of the sort we have been discussing would not promote, but would enable one to resist, self-deception. At the very least, it is not clear why this sort of faith would encourage one to take a distorted view of reality. That brings us to Freud’s second worry, namely, that faith weakens one’s motivation for action. Here again, at least two responses are relevant. First, if persons trust that various oppositions will be ultimately overcome by God, this entails that such oppositions are not themselves ultimate, which should lead persons to act accordingly. Persons might then be more likely to do something about these oppositions, for whereas a seemingly ultimate opposition may discourage resistance, or at least promote an all-or-nothing mentality about such resistance, an opposition whose non-ultimacy has been exposed would seem to invite more resistance, and to discourage an all-ornothing approach to it. (Many corporations, for instance, seem to promote an appearance of giantness, and of ordinary persons’ consequent powerlessness against them, in order to discourage the latter from thinking that they could even possibly challenge them.) This is hardly an airtight response, however, since persons who trust that God will ultimately overcome oppositions may be equally likely to do nothing about them. Some maintain, for instance, that this is precisely why Christians have failed to address the ecological crisis. That brings us to a second response:  faith, as understood in the preceding chapters, is necessarily expressed in certain kinds of action—or, more precisely, to have faith is to act in certain ways in response to certain circumstances, such that faith, so understood, is decidedly anti-quietistic. Suppose my daughter is wary of eating a new food, but I assure her that she will like it; in that case, for her to eat the food just is for her to trust me. Likewise, to take a biblical example, for Abram to leave his homeland is for him to trust in God. Several modern theologians have made a similar claim about the relationship between faith and action:  to trust God, they argued, is to have patience in the face of obstacles, or to forgive in the face of offense, or to establish self-returning relationships with and for others, and so on. To be sure, none of them explained what it might mean to establish a self-returning relationship with the environment, but the point is that faith, for them, necessarily comes to expression in action, such that faith, so understood, cannot be rightly thought to discourage action. Even if the wishful thinking objection can be adequately addressed, as I think it can, another serious criticism remains. The criticism, which we first encountered in our consideration of Schleiermacher, could be termed the overkill objection: I have already granted that faith, as elaborated by modern

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theologians, is at best a sufficient, but not necessary, condition of mineness; if so, then an objector might argue that if something less metaphysically and existentially demanding would also suffice, it would be foolish not to choose the latter. Consider an analogy: suppose I am going to build a tree house that will be held together by one hundred nails, and that I could drive those nails by using the perfectly good hammer I already have in my garage. In that case, it would be foolish if I were to purchase an expensive, cumbersome nail gun in order to drive the nails, since something handier and less expensive would do the trick just as well. Our objector is suggesting that having faith is similar to buying an expensive, cumbersome nail gun, in that one ends up committing oneself to certain epistemically risky beliefs, to a fairly demanding way of life, etc., when one might have gotten along just fine without them. In response to this objection, it is important to note that lives are different from tree houses in at least this respect:  that whereas one might know in advance how many nails a tree house will require, one generally does not know in advance what circumstances one will face, such that it is much less clear what would count as overkill in the latter case. A  more apt analogy, therefore, might be the decisions involved in building a bridge, particularly with respect to the stresses it should be built to withstand—the stress of a one hundred-year storm, say, or an earthquake. A bridge built to withstand such dangers will surely be costlier than one that is not, and depending on the weather, the cheaper bridge may turn out to be sufficient. If one does not know this in advance, however, it is not irrational to opt for the costlier, stronger bridge. Likewise, if one does not know in advance whether important circumstances will conform to one’s intentions, and if faith, as understood here, is sufficient to withstand a maximally wide range of such circumstances, then it is not irrational to opt for the costlier, stronger alternative. Our objector could rejoin, of course, that it is then rational to have faith only as a sort of back-up plan, but if Ritschl is right, it takes time to foster the relevant dispositions, such that faith will work best as a back-up plan only if one has cultivated it ahead of time. If so, then it is not foolish to have faith before a crisis arises. (To be clear, I am suggesting only that it is not irrational for one to have faith before one needs it, not that one cannot have faith once one does. Note well, moreover, that the issue here is the rationality of appealing to faith as part of what I have been calling a mineness project, not the rationality of faith per se.) If the present account can be acquitted of the charges of idolatry, of wishful thinking, and of overkill, and if the arguments of previous chapters are valid, then there is at least prima facie warrant for a characteristically “modern” understanding of faith and its relationship to “mineness,” the key points of which are as follows: (a) that one’s experience of oppositions is due to humanity’s fallen state; (b) that God is the one who overcomes oppositions, including humanity’s own opposition to God; (c) that faith in God sets one in new



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relation to oppositions, such that the latter are no longer experienced as ultimate, and one’s life can be experienced as hanging together; and (d) that one can see oneself in this faith, or experience this faith as self-expressive, insofar as (i) one can see oneself in God’s own identification with humanity, (ii) one can express faith through one’s individual vocation, and (iii) faith opens up new expressive possibilities for each.

6.8.  TH EOLOGY A F TER MODER N ISM? One final comment: Troeltsch claims, recall, that the validity of such syntheses depends not only on the extent to which they do justice to relevant historical phenomena, but also on their fruitfulness for or contribution to the syntheses of others. It is not up to me, of course, whether others will incorporate this synthesis into their own, but it might be worth considering, at least briefly, one way in which modern theology, as here synthesized, might be taken up in contemporary theology. (This is what the next chapter of modern theology might look like, in other words, but writing that chapter would require—and surely deserve—a book of its own. Here I can only be suggestive.) Unquestionably, one of the most significant developments in the half-century since Tillich wrote his Systematic Theology has been the emergence of contextual theologies. By “contextual theologies,” I mean theologies that are explicitly conscious of their own and others’ social, historical, and cultural contexts, and which are written at least partly for the sake of fitting with or being faithful to a particular context (usually that of the author). Such theologies are sometimes motivated, at least in part, by a sense that putatively context-less theologies, paradigmatically of the sort written by white European males, are decidedly unhelpful in this endeavor, and perhaps even an obstacle to it, insofar as these figures treat a particular context as if it were universal. So feminist theologians, for instance, have objected to the masculine assumptions underlying much traditional theology—classic examples here are Mary Daly’s post-Tillichian Beyond God the Father and Valerie Saiving’s “The Human Situation: A Feminine View”—just as many “global” theologians have argued against the particular philosophical assumptions they see underlying Western theology—see here Kazoh Kitamori’s equally classic Theology of the Pain of God. It might appear, then, that the present synthesis is unlikely to be taken up by contextual theologians, since modern theology is often thought to rest upon the very thing that these theologians are trying to overcome, namely, the taken-for-granted universality of a white, male, European context. We encountered a version of this idea at the beginning of the book, in J. Kameron Carter’s claim that modern theology is bound up with, and means

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to reinforce, “whiteness,” by which he means the taken-for-granted normativity and universality of a particularly white, male perspective, and in his counter-claim that theology can regain its relevance in the twenty-first century only if it recovers the voices that modernism left out. Carter contends, therefore, that as a twenty-first century discourse, Christian theology must take its bearings from the Christian theological languages and practices that arise from the lived Christian worlds of dark peoples in modernity and how such peoples reclaimed (and in their own ways salvaged) the language of Christianity, and thus Christian theology, from being a discourse of death—their death. This is the language and practices by which dark people, insofar as many of them comported themselves as Christian subjects in the world, have imagined and performed a way of being in the world beyond the pseudotheological containment of whiteness.

“To the extent that they have done this,” Carter concludes, “they mark out a different trajectory for theology as a discourse.”105 Carter joins with other contemporary theologians, accordingly, in calling for theologies that arise from, and are sensitive to, particular contexts, paying special attention to the role that theology plays in enabling persons to navigate life and death, joy and sorrow, and other aspects of their real-world contexts. Carter contrasts this “different trajectory for theology” with what he terms “the intellectual-theological habitus of modernity.”106 If the preceding treatment of modern theology is even roughly accurate, however, it should be clear that modern theologians were deeply concerned with just the sort of issues that Carter mentions, including especially the role theology might play in enabling persons to face death, tragedy, guilt, and injustice. Given some of the relevant similarities between modern theologians and what Carter calls the theologies of “dark peoples,” moreover, it should be clear that “mineness,” and faith’s role in maintaining it, are not an exclusively “white” preoccupation. To be sure, Carter is right that modern theologians approached these issues from a particular vantage point, and that some of them, at least, were insufficiently aware of that fact. Yet this was not true of them all, as we saw especially in Troeltsch, which is one reason why a synthesis of modern theology, of the sort sketched above, need not repeat its universalizing pretensions. If so, then the account offered here opens up the possibility of seeing modern theologians as antecedents to the sort of theology that Carter proposes and, so, as potentially fitting into, and perhaps even contributing to, the trajectory that Carter envisions.

105   J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 378; cf. 374. 106  Carter, Race, 374.



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To come at the same point from a different angle: if my account is right, then one of the principal ways that modern theology’s project would have to be carried forward—in light of its own commitment to faith being recognizable as self-expressive, as well as its claims about the conditions under which this could be the case—is through contextual theologies of just this sort. At the very least, I hope to have demonstrated that modern theology is engaged in a different project than is usually assumed, and, in so doing, to have opened up new possibilities for it to be taken up into contemporary syntheses.

Index absurdity, 1, 17–18, 22, 24, 34 Adickes, Erich, 39n. 25 Alston, William, 259n. 99 analytic theology, ix–x Anscombe, G.E.M., 3n. 2 Anselm, 69 Aristotle, 9 Augustine, 65, 193 Baard, Rachel Sophia, 235n. 35 Bal, Mieke, 7n. 7 Barth, Karl, vii, 2, 122, 219–20, 222–5, 227, 252, 254–5 Barthes, Roland, 9n. 11 Baur, F.C., 2, 123n.138, 178, 180–3 Beck, Lewis White, 36n. 13 Bratman, Michael, 4n. 2, 18n.20 Buddhism, 29 Carrol, Noël, 7n. 7 Carter, J. Kameron, vii–viii, 263–5 causality, 7–10, 12 (see also Kant on causation) Cavarero, Adriana, 6n. 4 character, 4, 8 (see also Schleiermacher on character) circumstances, 6, 12, 13–26 (see also Schleiermacher on circumstances) Civil Rights Movement, 24, 259 compatibilism, 19n. 23, 35, 55, 78n.9 consequence argument, 55n. 83 contextual theology, 263–5 Currie, Gregory, 6n. 4 Daly, Mary, 263 Davidson, Donald, 3n. 2 Dorrien, Gary, vii n. 1 Dylan, Bob, 230 emotion, 10n.12 (see also Ritschl on emotion, Schleiermacher on feeling) faith, viii–ix, 3, 23–6, 179, 256–8, 262–3 (see also Hegel on faith, Kant on faith, Ritschl on faith, Schleiermacher on faith, Tillich on faith) Feder, Ellen, 21 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 156–7, 176–9, 213 Fichte, J.G., 134–6

Fischer, John Martin, 7n. 6 Forster, E.M., 6nn. 4–5 Foucault, Michel, 15n. 17 Fraassen, Bas van, 10n. 13 Frankfurt, Harry, 3n. 2 Freud, Sigmund, 258–61 Garve, Christian, 40n. 27, 72n.139, 72n.142, 73n.144 God, viii, 24–6, 256–7 (see also Hegel on God, Kant on God, Ritschl on God, Schleiermacher on God, Tillich on the Ground of Being) Grünow, Eleonore, 95–6 Hadot, Pierre, 15n. 17 Hart, David Bentley, vii n. 1 Hauerwas, Stanley, vii n. 1, viii n.4 Hector, Kevin, 102n. 80, 112n.109, 117n.123, 123n.137, 216n.95, 223n.4 Hegel, G.W.F., 2, 25, 73, 76n.2, 122–5, 126–78, 179, 180–2, 212, 230 criticisms of Schleiermacher, 122–5, 126 The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, 136–7 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 151, 173 Encyclopedia, 151, 164n.110, 173 Faith and Knowledge, 123n.139, 137–8 Foreword to Hinrich’s Religionsphilosophie, 125n.144 “Fragment of a System,” 134–5 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 164–76 on the Absolute, 136–8 on civil religion, 128, 156–7 on correspondence, 140–2, 145–64, 167–76 on the death of God, 137–8, 170–1 on desire-satisfaction, 143 on the Enlightenment, 128, 138 on essential qualities, 146–8 on faith, 25, 126, 149, 171 on Fichte, 134–6 on forgiveness, 132–3, 137, 162, 172 on God, 133–5, 158–61, 164–76 on Good Friday, 137–8 on Jesus, 129–33

268 Index Hegel, G.W.F. (cont.) on justification and sanctification, 172 on Judaism, 130, 134–5 on Kant, 126, 129–31, 136n.36, 142, 146n.70, 156 on knowing, 139–41 on law, 131–2 on the lord-slave dialectic, 143–4 on love, 131–3, 166n.118, 168, 171 on Lutheranism, 137, 157n.94 on morality, 128–32, 148, 173 on negation, 132, 137–8, 161–4 on necessity, 167, 174–6 on objectivity, 133–8, 140–64 on oppositions, 131–8 on positivism, 129 on reason, 135–6, 145–8 on recognition, 132–3, 143, 149–55, 159, 166, 169–70, 173 on religion, 128–33, 156–76 on self-actualization, 148–64, 165–6 on skepticism, 144 on Spinoza, 134, 136n.36 on Spirit, 127, 134, 139–64, 165–76 on Stoicism, 144 on subjectivity, 133–8, 140–64 on the Trinity, 157n. 94, 168, 170 on universals, 149–55 on World-Spirit, 156–65 Phenomenology of Spirit, 138–64, 167, 173, 175–6 “The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” 128–30 Post-Kantian interpretation of, 139n. 41, 156n.91 Science of Logic, 164n.110 “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” 130–4 Spirit-monist interpretation of, 139n. 41, 156n.91 Tübingen Essay, 127–8 Heidegger, Martin, 227n. 15 Herz, Henriette, 96n. 64 Herz, Marcus, 43–4, 45 history, 26–8 (see also Ritschl on history, Troeltsch on historical construction) Hume, David, 32, 36n.13, 39, 45, 52 Hummel, Gerd, 227n. 15 Hutcheson, Francis, 35n. 10, 56n.87 Idealism, 43, 97n.67 idolatry, vii–viii, 220, 221, 262 importance, 15–17, 22 indeterminism argument, 55n. 82

intention, 3–6, 8, 11–13 Inwagen, Peter van, 55n. 83 Jacobi, F.H., 71–3, 76n.2 Jaeschke, Walter, 164n. 111 Jesus, see Hegel on Jesus, Kant on Christ, Ritschl on Jesus, Schleiermacher on Christ, Tillich on Jesus as the Christ justice, viii, 8–9, 12, 17, 24, 258–9, 264 justification, ix, 172, 203–204, 220, 222 (see also Hegel on justification and sanctification, Kant on justification, Ritschl on justification, Tillich on justification) Kaftan, Julius, 180, 192, 211 Kant, Immanuel, vii n. 1, viii, 25, 30–74, 75–7, 79n.12, 80–1, 126, 129–31, 136n.36, 142, 146n70, 156, 167, 179, 186n.17, 190, 213, 217 ‘Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy,’ 36–7 The Critique of the Power of Judgment, 60–1, 73n.145 The Critique of Practical Reason, 54–64 The Critique of Pure Reason, 36n.12, 45–54, 76–7 Dreams of a Spirit-seer, 37n.16, 38–9 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 56–9 Inaugural Dissertation, 40–2, 46, 52 Metaphysical Deduction, 49–50 Metaphysics of Morals, 35n.10, 56n.86, 59, 60n.97, 73 New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition, 32–7 on analyticity, 36–7, 39 on antinomies, 40–2 on atonement, 65, 69–70 on autonomy, 53, 73 on the best possible world, 34 on bringing nature into conformity with morality, 31, 59–63 on bringing one’s will into conformity with morality, 31, 59, 63–71 on categories, 49–52 on causation, 36–7, 39, 42, 49, 52–9 on Christ, 68–9 “On the common saying: That may be right in theory, but it is of no use in practice,” 58n. 94, 73n.144 on concepts, 48–52 on desire, 35, 56 on empiricism, 37–9, 44 on faith, 25, 31, 62–3, 70–1

Index On Fire, 32n.1 on freedom, 34–5, 54–66 on God, 31, 34, 42, 43–4, 61–71 on the highest good, 59, 63 on hope, 31, 61–71 on human nature, 65–6 on imagination, 47 on immortality, 64 on justification, 31, 64–71 on moral community, 70n. 137 on moral law, 30–1, 54–71 on natural law, 30–4, 42, 52–7 on objects’ conformity to reason, 44–5, 49–52 on objects “in themselves,” 47, 54–6, 71–2 On Optimism, 34 on perception, 40–2, 46–7 on the principle of determining ground, 33–5, 37 on radical evil, 31, 65–7 on reason, 30, 32–3, 37–40, 42, 45 on regeneration, 65, 67–9 on space and time, 40–2, 46–7 on the synthetic a priori, 50 on the transcendental unity of apperception, 50–2, 76–80 on understanding, 47 “The Only Possible Proof of the Existence of God,” 42n. 37 “Prize Essay,” 37–8 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 53n.77 Reflexionen, 39nn.24–5, 40nn.26–8, 44n.46, 44nn.49–50 Refutation of Idealism, 72 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 65–71 Silent Decade of, 43n. 41 Transcendental Aesthetic, 46–7 Transcendental Deduction, 50–2 Karttunen, Lauri, 254n. 95 Kermode, Frank, 6n. 4, 9n.11 King, Martin Luther, 24n. 27, 259 Kitamori, Kazoh, 263 Korsgaard, Christine, 13n. 15 Kreines, James, 139n. 40, 146n.70 Kremer, Michael, 26n. 28 Lamarque, Peter, 13n. 15 Lambert, J.H., 42n. 35, 43–5, 52, 72 Lange, Marc, 52n. 76 laws, vii, 8, 17, 30, 52n.76, 57 (see also Kant on moral law, Kant on natural law, Hegel on laws) Laywine, Alison, 36n. 13

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Lear, Jonathan, 19 Leibniz, 32, 35, 46, 54 Lewis, Thomas A., 128n. 5, 156n.92, 164n.111 Lindbeck, George, 122n. 135 love, see Hegel on love, Ritschl on love, Schleiermacher on love luck, viii, 17–18, 23, 30, 255 Luther, Martin, 24, 65, 137, 157n.94, 193, 208n.75, 226–7, 253 MacIntyre, Alasdair, vii n. 1, 13n.15 Malebranche, Nicolas, 42, 44 Manning, Russell Re, 227n. 15 meaning of life, 1, 11, 28 Mendelssohn, Moses, 35n. 10, 43n.42 mineness, viii–ix, 1–23, 28–9, 30, 255–8, 262–3 (see also self-expression) Modern theology, vii, 2, 25–6, 30, 256–8, 262–3 Murdoch, Iris, 259–60 Nagel, Thomas, 17n. 18 narrative, 6–11, 12, 17 (see also self-narratives) nature, 17, 30 (see also Kant on natural law, Ritschl on nature, Schleiermacher on nature) Nelson, Katherine, 9n. 11 Newton, 37–8 non-inferential responses, 9–10, 16, 204–5 (see also Ritschl on dispositions) Nussbaum, Martha, 17n. 18 opposition, viii, 256–7 (see also Hegel on oppositions, Ritschl on evils, Schleiermacher on oppositions others, 21–2 (see also recognition, Tillich on personhood and communion) perception, 5, 9–10, 14, 16 (see also Kant on perception) Pippin, Robert, vii n. 1, 123n.138, 156n.91 planning, 3–4, 8–9, 15–16, 18n.20, 19, 187, 191, 232 Plantinga, Alvin, 259n. 99 Plaskow, Judith, 235n. 35 Plenty Coups, 18–19 Proudfoot, Wayne, 122n. 135 quietism, 260–261 Reactive attachment disorder, 22n. 26 reason, vii–viii (see also Hegel on reason, Kant on reason, Schleiermacher on reason)

270 Index recognition, 10n. 12, 21 (see also Hegel on recognition, Schleiermacher on recognition) reliability, 11, 18, 21, 31, 60 Ricoeur, Paul, 6n. 4, 13n.15 Ritschl, Albrecht, 25, 178, 179–213, 217–20, 221, 256, 262 The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 183n.13, 184–212 Christian Perfection, 188, 190, 204–12 The Emergence of the Ancient Catholic Church, 182n.9 History of Pietism, 189–90 Instruction in the Christian Religion, 191–211 on dispositions, 193–4, 198, 204–5, 262 on emotion, 187–91, 203–5 on ends, 186–92, 194–202, 206–10 on evils, 190, 195, 205–6 on faith, 25, 191–2, 201, 203–10, 219 on freedom, 186–9 on God, 195–6, 197, 203–10 “On Historical Method in Research into Primitive Christianity,” 182–3 on history, 182–4, 189–90 on humility, 205 on individuality, 182–4 on Jesus, 196–202 on joy, 206, 210 on justification, 203–4 on Kant, 186n. 17 on the kingdom of God, 192–6, 198–202 on love, 188–9, 197–8, 206–10 on Luther, 193, 208n.79 on metaphysics, 183–4 on nature, 182–92 on pardon, 202–3, 209 on patience, 205, 256 on personhood, 182 on plans, 187–8 on providence, 197–8, 204–5, 210 on religion, 190–2, 210–12 on Roman Catholicism, 189, 193 on sin, 192–6, 202 on spirit, 182–3, 185–92 on the Tübingen School, 182–4, 189, 196 on vocation, 196–202, 208–10 on wholeness, 187–8, 202, 206, 209–10 ontology of, 184–6 Theology and Metaphysics, 183–4, 200n.50 Vorlesung ‘Theologische Ethik,’ 184n.16 Rudd, Anthony, 13n. 15 Saiving, Valerie, 263 salience, 10–11, 15–16, 20 Scharlemann, Robert, 227n. 15

Schelling, F.W.J., 97, 135–6 Schiller, Friedrich, 72–4, 136 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 24, 25, 75–125, 126, 179, 261 Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study, 123–5 Christian Ethics, 119–21 Christian Faith, 100, 102–19 criticisms of Kant, 73–4, 76–7, 80–1, 90–1 Dialektik, 97–8 Ethik, 99–101, 124 Monologen, 90–6 on the Absolute, 97–9 on absolute dependence, 75, 102, 104–22 on character, 76–80 on Christ, 75, 112–22 on circumstances, 80–4, 93–6 on community, 92, 100–1, 108–12, 117–22, 123–5 on dependence, 75, 102–9, 118–22 on evils, 107–8, 111–19 on faith, 25, 101, 122 on feeling, 86, 122 on freedom, 75, 100–1, 102–9, 118–22 On Freedom, 76–80 on God, 75, 97n.68, 115 on God-consciousness, 102–22 on God-forgetfulness, 109–13, 118–20 on happiness, 80–4 on harmony, 75, 82–4, 112–22 On the Highest Good, 80–1 on the Holy Spirit, 116–22 on humanity, 88–96 on immediate consciousness, 105, 117–18, 122 on incarnation, 114–15 on individuality, 88–93, 100–1, 120–1 on infinitude, 84–90, 96–101 on love, 88, 95, 115–16, 118–21 on moral sentiments, 79n. 12 on nature, 107, 113 on oppositions, 75, 87, 90, 93, 96–101, 102, 106–22 on Pentecost, 117n. 123 on reason, 81–4 on recognition, 117–20 on redemption, 112–22 On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 86–91 on self-expression, 75, 88–96, 99–101 on sensible consciousness, 105–12, 114 on Spinoza, 85–6 on unity of consciousness, 76–80 on the world, 103 On the Value of Life, 81–4 Schulze, G.E., 72n. 139

Index self, 13, 21 (see also Hegel on subjectivity, Tillich on personhood and communion, Troeltsch on personhood) self-deception, 14, 18, 20–1, 258 self-expression, ix, 2, 12, 14–15, 25–6, 257–8 (see also Hegel on Spirit, Kant on freedom, Ritschl on vocation, Schleiermacher on self-expression, Tillich on self-integration, Troeltsch on individual appropriation) self-fulfilling prophecy, 14n. 16 self-narratives, 12–23 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 35n. 10, 56n.87 Slote, Michael, 6n. 6 Spinoza, Baruch, 77n. 5, 85–6, 89, 134–6 Stark, Werner, 39n. 25 Stewart, Jon, 139n. 40 Strauss, David Friedrich, 123 Strawson, Galen, 13n. 15 Taylor, Charles, 13n. 15, 156n.91 Tillich, Paul, 24, 25–6, 29, 220, 221–55, 263 “Critical and Positive Paradox,” 225–7 The Demonic, 224–7 Experience in World War I, 226n. 12 Heidegger’s influence on, 227n. 15 Lutheranism of, 226–7, 253 Method of Correlation of, 227, 252–5 on Barth, 223–7 on estrangement, 234–8, 241–3 on faith, 26, 221, 235, 238–40, 245–8 on finitude, 233–4, 236, 239–43, 253 on freedom and destiny, 231–2, 237–8, 243–4, 249–50 on the Ground of Being, 233–52 “On the Idea and the Ideal of Personality,” 229 “On the Idea of a Theology of Culture,” 226 on Jesus as the Christ, 238–45 on justification, 245–6 on Law and Gospel, 226–7, 253 on New Being, 238–51 on personhood and communion, 229–30, 237, 243, 249–52 on resurrection, 241n. 53 on sanctification, 248–52 on self-integration, 221–2, 228–33, 235–8, 243–4, 246–52

271

on self-returning relationships, 222, 228–33, 235–8, 243–4, 246–52 on theology of culture, 223–7, 254–5 on the Trinity, 241–2 on vitality and form, 230–1, 237, 243, 250–1 The Religious Situation, 224–5 Systematic Theology, 227–55 theory choice, 10n. 13 Thompson, Michael, 3n. 2 Troeltsch, Ernst, 25, 178, 180, 192, 212–19, 221, 255, 263 The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, 213–14 Christian Faith, 215–19 criticism of Hegel, 212–13 criticism of Ritschl, 212–13 “The Ethics of Cultural Values,” 213, 217n.99 “The Morality of Personality and of Conscience,” 217 on Christianity, 213–19 on historical construction, 214–19, 255, 263 on individual appropriation, 215–17 on personhood, 217–19 on religion, 212–13 on reproductive revelation, 218–19 “The Place of Christianity among World Religions,” 213–14 “What does ‘Essence of Christianity’ Mean?,” 214–17 underdetermination, 10 universality, vii–viii (see also Hegel on universals) Velleman, David, 4n. 2, 6n.4, 7nn.6–7, 9n.9, 13nn.14–15, 14n.16 vocation, 25, 91, 180, 190, 197–200, 257–8 (see also Ritschl on vocation) Williams, Bernard, 6n. 4, 13n.15, 17n.18, 72 Willich, Ehrenfried and Henriette von, 96n. 64 Wolf, Susan, 1n. 1 Wolff, Christian, 46 Zachhuber, Johannes, 181n. 1, 211n.84 Zahavi, Dan, 13n. 15 Zeller, Eduard, 182–3n. 10