CHAPTER ONE

The Symbolic Dimension and the Politics of Young Hegelianism

IS STRUCTURALISM A PRODIGAL CHILD of German Romanticism? If we follow hints from Pierre Bourdieu and François Dosse, the answer would seem to be yes. Thus, in his major work on the history of structuralism, Dosse follows Roland Barthes in suggesting that Saussurean linguistics heralds a democratic model insofar as the conventional nature of the sign establishes a homology between the linguistic contract and the social contract. “An entire lineage here refers to structuralism’s enduring rootedness,” writes Dosse. “Poetry, according to the Schlegel brothers, was supposed to be a Republican discourse, and there is indeed a debt to German Romanticism, which had argued for a notion of art as a structure freed of mimesis.”1 In a similar vein, Pierre Bourdieu writes: “proceeding, in accordance with [Friedrich] Schelling’s wish, to a properly tautegorical (in opposition to allegorical) reading which refers the myth to nothing outside itself, structural analysis aims at laying bare the structure immanent in each symbolic production.”² The attempt to link structuralism to Romanticism hits a snag the moment we recall a distinction made by Kant, whose role in the Romantic theory of the symbol was instrumental. For Kant, a symbol creates visibility—it appeals to sensual intuition. In thus defining the symbol, Kant broke with the conceptual vocabulary of eighteenth-century rationalism, which had defined the symbol as an abstract sign that serves discursive knowledge.³ So, complained Kant, “The use of the word symbolic in contrast to the intuitive kind of representation has, of course, been accepted by recent logicians, but this is a distorted and incorrect use of the word: for the symbolic is merely a species of the intuitive.”⁴

As Bengt Algot Sørenson, the great student of Romantic symbol theory, suggests, the idea of the symbol almost immediately forked off from Kant. Kant, after all, believed that the symbol makes concepts visible by analogy, not by participation in or identity with the conceptual object, which itself remains sensuously unpresentable; the sensual and the intellectual are permanently divided. Ultimately, the role of the Kantian symbol is to lead us toward clarity on our concepts, as when Kant famously declares that “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.”⁵ Goethe, inspired by Kant but not satisfied with the restriction of the symbol to an analogical function, insisted that the symbol touches the object itself.⁶ Romanticism, as we shall see, did not decisively settle on one side or the other of the alternatives posed by Kant and Goethe, but oscillated between the notions that the symbol presents the unpresentable and that it participates in the object it presents. Complicated as the history of this idea immediately becomes, we can agree with Tzvetan Todorov that Kant and the Romantics who followed resubstantialized the idea of the symbol.⁷

One of Saussure’s inaugural gestures, let us not forget, was to separate the symbol from the sign, and what is really meant when mid-twentieth-century structuralism speaks of the Symbolic is the system of signs. So in fact structuralism is not so much Romanticism’s distant heir as its overcoming, achieved, ironically, by resurrecting the eighteenth-century association of the symbol with the conventional sign. When we turn to what is known—somewhat problematically—as postmodern or poststructural thought, the connection to Romanticism looks more promising. There is, for example, the revival of interest in the “sublime” pioneered by Jean-François Lyotard, whereby the attempt to “present the unpresentable” comes to define a general condition of communication in an epoch shadowed by the figure of a radical heterogeneity that disrupts all efforts at closure, totalization, and seamless narrativity.8 Scholars are quick to point out the gulf separating the Romantic from the postmodern sublime. For example, Edward Larrissy describes postmodern sublimity as “ironic, self-conscious, lacking in metaphysical confidence,” and Paul Hamilton asserts that “the Romantic trope of sublimity recasts failures of understanding as the successful symbolic expression of something greater than understanding; Postmodernism rereads this success as indicating only the indeterminacy of meaning.”⁹ Yet, the relationship of postmodernism to Romanticism seems to go beyond this latter-day act of demystification, for the experience of indeterminacy is not at all alien to Romantic thought. While Kant seemed confident that the symbolic could lead us toward an intellectual comprehension of that which cannot be presented, Romanticism did not produce a similar sense of certainty. The Romantic quest to “say the unsayable” ensured that truth is a goal we never reach; Andrew Bowie writes of the Romantic sensibility that “all we can assert is that our experience of truth is of an ongoing insufficiency which yet sustains the continuing demand for a better account.”¹⁰

If we can agree with François Dosse that Romanticism broke with mimetic theories of art, this did not produce a Romantic theory of a self-enclosed and endlessly self-referential discursive system. Rather, the break from mimesis led to a new appreciation for the constitutive role of representation, for the power of language to reveal or disclose a world. Of course, this could and did produce an exalted sense of the imagination’s autopoietic power and of an artistic freedom operating beyond existing rules. Yet it also produced a refined and sometimes dizzying sense of irony. Work by the young Friedrich Schlegel often reads like an uncanny primer for Jacques Derrida; Schlegel’s ironic claim that “it is equally fatal for the mind to have a system, and to have none” anticipates Derrida’s habit of placing words under erasure in order to warn readers that he is using concepts that he can neither fully accept nor do without.¹¹ Further, Derrida did not believe that one could ever neglect the associations that belong to the intuition that underlies the signified meaning: one cannot assume that the signifier communicates an intended meaning without carrying traces of other associations. “In other words,” writes Kathleen Dow Magnus, “by Derrida’s assessment, the transition from the symbolic to the sign-making imagination can never be complete.”¹² The fact that Derrida makes this point about signs and symbols in an essay directed against Hegel suggests the need for a refinement of my description of structuralism.¹³ Perhaps it is more accurate to say that structuralism is the second overcoming of Romanticism.¹⁴ Generations earlier, Hegel had already, after his own fashion, campaigned against the Romantic symbol in favor of the sign.

The status of the symbolic was one of the important divisions between Hegel and his Romantic contemporaries. The symbolic expressed the Romantics’ paradoxical quest for the unity of the perfectly individual with the fully universal, their contradictory combination of yearning for the fullest possible presence of meaning and their fascination for the inexpressible, unapproachable, and inscrutable. The symbol, to cite Friedrich Schelling, creates an “inner bond uniting art and religion,” and, further, the symbol establishes the philosophy of art “as the necessary goal of the philosopher, who in art views the inner essence of his own discipline as if in a magic and symbolic mirror.”15 Hegel, by contrast, judged the symbol to be inadequate for philosophy. How, he asked in the Aesthetic, is the idea supposed to take form in the symbolic?¹⁶ Even stronger is his insistence in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy that “whoever hides thoughts in symbols has no thoughts at all.”¹⁷ The linguistic sign was, in Hegel’s view, the privileged medium of the science of the concept. It is a commonplace among theorists of symbolism that all symbols are signs, but not all signs are symbols.¹⁸ Hegel’s distinction between the symbol and the sign hinges on the sensuous or intuitive dimensions of symbolism. According to him, a symbol conveys its meaning through the presentation of some quality or qualities it has in common with that meaning. By contrast, the specific virtue of the sign is precisely its arbitrariness. Because its capacity to convey meaning depends only on convention and agreement, the sign can be purged of the naturalness and intuitiveness that linger in the symbol. It can shed the symbol’s ambiguity and become the transparent medium of spirit’s self-determination. The tension between the sign and the symbol opens the heart of the conflict between Hegel and the Romantics.

Hegel’s impulse toward desymbolization came to exercise a powerful influence upon the Left Hegelian movement that emerged into public discussion with the publication of David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu in 1835. Strauss’s initial campaign against Christian belief rapidly grew more radical in the writings of figures like Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno and Edgar Bauer, and Karl Marx. From the outset, this attack on religion was not without profound political meaning, particularly within the restorationist Prussian context, where the state staked its legitimacy on its Christian mission; in the hands of Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx, the political dimension became more explicit and ever more insistent. Still, even if Marx declared the critique of religion finished in Germany in the year 1843, the arsenal developed by the Left Hegelians had an enduring effect on social and political criticism, not least that of Marx himself. Compelled by the attempt to free humanity from religion, radical Hegelians like Arnold Ruge, Theodor Echtermeyer, and Friedrich Theodor Vischer sharpened Hegel’s opposition to the Romantic sensibility. Ruge and Echtermeyer’s polemical manifesto Der Protestantismus und die Romantik (1839–1840) is emblematic of this. Claiming that philosophy must now form a party against the dead past in the name of the true present, Ruge and Echtermeyer declare the Romantics to be the “living dead.”19 Against the Romantic taste for the “indeterminate, the ungraspable, the twilight, and the flitting,” they pitted the “self-conscious spirit, that seeks to firmly appropriate the divine.”²⁰ Ruge and Echtermeyer were much blunter than Hegel in linking Romantic aesthetics to the reactionary politics of the post-Napoleonic era and connecting spirit’s struggle to overcome the heteronomy of the divine with the struggle for political emancipation.²¹

The main tendency of Left Hegelianism was opposed to Romanticism and, by extension, Romantic ideas about symbolic form. Nonetheless, as this chapter will show, there were subtleties in the way this critical distance from Romanticism played out. To explore these, this chapter will discuss the divergent tracks taken by Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. Bauer’s philosophy of self-consciousness radicalized Hegel’s emphasis on the potential transparency of language and meaning, thereby tying the emancipatory project to a radical process of desymbolization. Feuerbach’s position was more conflicted. Although he developed a radical hermeneutic that had a tremendous impact on the development of left-wing thought, Feuerbach’s naturalism led him toward a stance in which the Hegelian schema of the subject’s appropriation of meaning contended with a resistant natural kernel that called for the reintroduction of symbolic representation as the only mode of signification appropriate for this unsayable and unmasterable element. This was a position that conflicted with main tendencies in Left Hegelianism, and even in Feuerbach’s thought itself, and it eventually drew criticism from Karl Marx. Yet, in pointing to the irreducibility of the symbolic dimension, Feuerbach anticipated possibilities for conceptualizing the link between philosophical meaning and emancipatory politics that resonate with radical theory in the period of Marxism’s collapse.

The Symbol from Classicism to Romanticism

The symbol held something of an absolute status for the Romantics. Nicholas Halmi has emphasized that Romantic symbolist theory was less concerned with identifying and interpreting particular symbols than with “establishing an ideal of meaningfulness itself.”22 This is an intuitively persuasive claim. The notion of the symbol carried far too much weight in the Romantic mind to be merely a rhetorical figure. Indeed, it seemed to speak directly to an acute sense of need. It was, after all, a time of crisis, when revolutionary upheaval cast existing convictions into doubt. Everyone, wrote the young Friedrich Schlegel, was caught up in this process of fermentation, whether he liked it or not, yielding to it or struggling against it.²³ The experience of the age—its politics, its social transformations, its dominant modes of analytic rationality inherited from the Enlightenment—produced a widespread sense of division and dualism. It is symptomatic of such a time that Novalis should describe philosophy as “homesickness—the desire to be everywhere at home.”²⁴ Such a sensibility placed tremendous strain on existing modes of aesthetic and linguistic representation, which had already become sources of anxiety for Enlightenment thinkers. In the tempestuous climate opened by the French Revolution, eighteenth-century semioticians’ emphasis on natural signs that consist in mimetic representations, or causal relations, but lack metaphysical content seemed both complicitous in the political, artistic, and epistemological ancien régime and of questionable service in the emerging new order.²⁵ Under such circumstances, the symbolic seemed to promise a more adequate mode of representation, one that better addressed this desire to overcome dualism. This is certainly the function that Halmi focuses on when he describes the Romantic symbol in terms of its claim to unify being and meaning through the sign’s participation in the ontological order of the thing it represents.²⁶

Where Halmi dispassionately searches for the genealogical sources of this emphatic ideal of the identity of sign and thing, critics of Romanticism have focused on its fantasmatic or mystifying dimensions. So, for example, Walter Benjamin valued Baroque allegory precisely because its evident reliance on arbitrary conventions accentuated the gap between meaning and being; Romantic symbolism, he argued by contrast, rested on a dream of fusion and identity, whereby the gap between signifier and signified is to be transcended by what Benjamin called “the idea of the unlimited immanence of the moral world in the world of beauty.”27 Paul de Man considered all writing an attempt to come to grips with the insurmountably temporal nature of our condition, and he judged allegory especially suited to revealing this situation. Allegory, writes de Man, “designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference.” The symbol, by contrast, “postulates the possibility of an identity or identification”: within this view, the central feature of Romanticism is “a conflict between a conception of the self seen in its authentically temporal predicament and a defensive strategy that tries to hide from this negative self-knowledge.”²⁸ Indeed, modernity or, more precisely, postmodernity has sometimes been seen as intrinsically allegorical (which would be to say antisymbolic) because it has forever foreclosed on the fantasy of immediacy, presence, identity, and transcendence.²⁹

Insofar as such twentieth-century approaches distinguish strongly between allegory and Romantic symbolism, they are not without some grounding in Romanticism itself. Hence the young Friedrich Schelling articulated a dialectical triad, with the symbol serving to reconcile two opposed terms: Schematismus, which, following Kant’s terminology, signifies the particular through the general, and Allegorie, which signifies the general through the particular. The “synthesis of the two, in which the general does not signify the particular nor does the particular signify the general, but in which the two are absolutely one, is the symbolic.”³⁰ As opposed to allegory, the symbol creates a relationship of identity, not simply of signification, between the general and the particular. The symbol is what it signifies; it presents, rather than represents. Thus Schelling offers as an example Mary Magdalen, who “does not only signify repentance, but is living repentance itself.”³¹

Schelling’s emphasis on presence and participation accentuated a change in German aesthetic discourse already observable in predecessors like Karl Phillip Moritz and Goethe. Moritz articulated a notion of the beautiful object as the in sich vollendet, that which is perfect in itself. “An authentic work of art,” wrote Moritz, “a beautiful poem, is something finished and completed in itself, something that exists for itself, and whose value lies in itself, and in the ordered relationship of its parts.”32 The beautiful cannot be translated into another medium, and it is, as Tzvetan Todorov emphasizes, radically “intransitive”: “The beautiful object does not require an end outside itself, for it is so perfected in itself that the entire purpose of its existence is found in itself.”³³ Goethe formalized this ideal of the beautiful in his concept of the symbol. “True symbolism,” wrote Goethe in 1797, “is where the particular represents the more general, not as a dream or a shadow, but as a living momentary revelation of the Inscrutable.”³⁴ Goethe identified this ideal through a contrast to allegory.³⁵

Where the Baroque period has been called the climactic age of the allegory, by the later eighteenth century, critics were attacking allegory for various reasons, some of them mutually contradictory. So, for Gottsched, allegory’s reliance upon the sensuous embodiment of ideas means that allegory appeals to the senses and thus is not sufficiently rational, whereas Lessing maintained that because allegory relies upon a system of conventional signs—the blindfold signifying impartiality, for example—which is understood cerebrally, it cannot generate an affective response to art.³⁶ A new basis for the critique of allegory emerged with Goethe and Moritz’s Autonomieästhetik. Allegory, in this view, represents a mechanical and self-conscious way of connecting the particular and the general. In creating an allegory, the poet seeks a particularity to typify a generality, thus the particular serves merely to exemplify the general. By contrast, Goethe argued, the very nature of poetry lies in its expression of the particular, without thinking of or referring to a universal. To grasp this particular in a truly lively way, however, is also to come into contact with the general, though without immediate awareness or, at most, with an awareness that emerges only in reflection. “The allegory,” wrote Goethe, “changes the phenomenon into a concept, the concept into an image, in such a way that the concept is always limited and complete in the image and expressed in the image.” The symbolic, by contrast, “changes the phenomenon into an idea, the idea into an image, such that the idea remains always infinitely active and unapproachable in the image, and will remain inexpressible even if expressed in all languages.”³⁷

This formulation points to a tension in the Autonomieästhetik: the work may have a certain kind of autonomy insofar as it can never be reduced to something outside itself. But can a work of art be complete in itself when it opens up a potentially infinite activity of interpretation? Goethe’s definition vacillates between an ideal of the symbol as a form of presence, or, better, presentification, and as a figure that initiates a disruptive, open, and above all inexhaustible dialectic. Hence, Goethe spoke of the double nature of the symbolic artwork, whereby it is what it pretends to be and nonetheless embodies a different, general principle.38 At times this could prompt descriptions that evoke an insurmountable circularity in this play of difference and identity: the symbol is “the thing, without being the thing, but nonetheless the thing.”³⁹ Ultimately, it may be said that Goethe tried to contain the disruptive dimensions by insisting that the aesthetic symbol is a demonstrable perfection achieved in the greatest artworks. An observation from R. H. Stephenson suggests the self-imposed restriction this required: “Aesthetic expressibility, subject like everything else to polarity, evokes its opposite: ineffability. Any aesthetic symbol, marking an ultimate limit of articulation, necessarily evokes what may lie beyond: the transcendental. Aesthetic consciousness cannot, in the nature of things, vouchsafe insight into what lies beyond the little patch of order presented to it. An aesthetic symbol embodies an experience of presence; the absence which hovers about it is a matter for religious symbolism.”⁴⁰

The Romantics were unwilling to follow Goethe’s self-restraint. The aesthetic and the religious mixed much more freely in Romantic thinking about the symbol.41 Here we see the other side of how the idea of the symbol intersected with the sense of political and cultural upheaval around 1800. That is, the belief that the symbolic could overcome the dualisms of the age contended with a sense that the symbolic was actually a key index of unsurpassable dualism. Whereas Goethe and Moritz believed the symbol to be an achievable part of a classical ideal of completed aesthetic form, the Romantics tended to see the symbol as a condition of harmony and reconciliation that eluded the present. The symbol marked a lost past and an ideal future. Even Schelling, who offered perhaps the most emphatic formulation of the symbol as the organic fusion of particular and universal, maintained that whereas the classical Greeks had been able to create symbols of the infinite, Christianity, with its division of the world from the divine, could present only allegories of the infinite. Moreover, the modern commitment to originality and change made the symbol impossible in our age, for the symbol presupposes the constancy of a shared system of thought.⁴² The symbol thus formed a cable in a temporal span suspended between the poles of recollection and imaginative invention, and the Romantics typically saw this bridge expanding infinitely in both directions. Though they strove for the perfect symbol, they were always underway toward it. In Schelling’s opinion, the modern age—which in the broad Romantic usage meant essentially the Christian epoch—“must be allegorical, even if against its will, because it cannot be symbolic.”⁴³

With good reason, Sørenson places Schelling between Goethe’s classicist idea of the symbol and that of the Romantics.44 Some of Schelling’s contemporaries moved more decisively away from the classicist ideal of the in sich vollendet. In the case of Friedrich Schlegel, Goethe’s terminological distinction between symbol and allegory was of little significance; although he emphatically believed that all art is symbolic, he sometimes used allegory and symbol interchangeably, and at various points throughout his long career he privileged one term or another despite the fact that his basic view of the symbolic remained constant.⁴⁵ For Schlegel, the Christian narrative of Fall and Redemption meant that the symbol awaited the end of days, and until then the mediation of God and world could only be achieved indirectly. Allegory thus becomes the appropriate form of representation: “All beauty is allegory. One can only express the highest allegorically, precisely because it is inexpressible.”⁴⁶ By allegory, it must be emphasized, Schlegel did not mean to designate the rhetorical trope or didactic device described by Enlightenment poetics; rather, Schlegel’s “allegory of the infinite” spoke to the ontological situation of human beings and the limits of their systems of meaning.⁴⁷ We find a similar claim for the disruption of symbolic meaning in Novalis, for whom “the world’s meaning has been lost.”⁴⁸ For him, the symbol functions as a hieroglyph, gesturing toward a totality no longer understood in Goethe’s and Moritz’s terms as the perfected work of art, but as the numinous interpenetration of divinity and the world. Novalis thus imagined that the symbolic relationships constituting art paved the royal road to the recovery of lost meaning. However, because the symbol’s ultimate pretext is the numinous, neither Schlegel nor Novalis believed that the symbol could be exhaustively decoded or understood.⁴⁹ Not surprisingly, Goethe never accepted the Romantic emphasis on the allegorical nature of modernity, a claim that would have nullified core values of his own aesthetics; nor was he at all happy with the Romantic tendency to steer the concept of the symbolic away from the clear light of artistic revelation toward the mystical domain of “shadow and dream.” For Goethe, the Romantic tendency to mix the aesthetic with the religious and the allegorical with the symbolic were key symptoms of the immoderation that he believed was a discernible danger in modernity.⁵⁰ Quite by contrast, it was precisely the dynamic exchange between religion and aesthetics, the allegorical and the symbolic, the present and the absent, ultimately the interchange between possibility and impossibility that confirmed the moral grandeur of the Romantics’ striving spirit, what Friedrich Schlegel called the “unformed colossalness of the moderns.”⁵¹

Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man both recognized this tendency toward allegorical polyvalence and fragmentariness within Romanticism, even as they criticized what they considered Romanticism’s main tendency toward fantasies of fusion, identity, and totality. The nuances of Benjamin and de Man’s critique of Romanticism have frequently disappeared in work inspired by them. The tension between symbol and allegory, which of course was a feature of the Romantic era itself, frequently hardens into an opposition. And, by extension, the notion that the postmodern age is allegorical rests inherently on a contrast to a modern age that was symbolic. It should be clear from the present discussion that it is a mistake to elevate one dimension of Romantic symbol theory above the polyvalence that lies at its core: the symbol is simultaneously a figure that concentrates and disperses meaning; it is a powerful figure, not just one sign among all others, but one that has the paradoxical power both to present or body forth and to accentuate the gap between the sign and the signified. It is, in Cordula Grewe’s words, “both insufficient and overfull, insufficient in its inevitable failure to express the divine, overfull in its poetic surplus of meaning.”52 It is with good reason that Umberto Eco asks whether the Romantic symbol is an instance of “an immanence or of a transcendence” and then leaves the question unanswered.⁵³ The polyvalence is further accentuated when we consider that the same Romantics who distinguished between symbol and allegory often used the terms interchangeably and collapsed the two into a general idea that the modern age is itself allegorical. That is, modernity is a state of longing for an impossible unity. This understanding of modernity bridges the divide between the early Romanticism of the Jena group, which recent scholarship has embraced for its politically progressive and conceptually daring attitudes, and later Romanticism, whose Christian and politically conservative impulses continue to make it suspect. Further, this Romantic epochal concept establishes an affinity with the sensibility of much recent theory, even if generations of countervailing philosophical thought erected taboos that continue to hinder our recognition of that affinity.

Hegelian Spirit from Symbol to Sign

Hegel had little sympathy for the Romantic concern for the symbolic intuition of divinity. In his eyes, the Romantics’ “nebulous representation [Vorstellung] of the Ideal” exemplified their flight from the world into the extremes of subjectivity.⁵⁴ Where the symbol and the allegory—whether as opposed terms or as synonyms—preoccupied Romantic theorists, Hegel was far more concerned with the distinction between symbol and sign. Indeed, Hegel presented allegory merely as a type of “conscious symbolism”; he thus turned allegory back from the kind of metaphysical and ontological meaning assigned it by Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel to the place it had held in eighteenth-century poetics, namely a rhetorical form ranked along with riddles, metaphors, images, and similes as modes of comparison. At one level, Hegel’s lack of concern with the contrast between symbol and allegory may reflect the fact that these terms never became fixed in the contemporary debate. The Romantics themselves were not consistent in their usage, a lack of clarity that may be explained not only by the dependence of the concept of the symbolic on the intrinsically murky categories of the intuition but also by the fact that both symbols and allegories ultimately share a common identity as forms of sensuous imagery or as indirect representations of concepts. Yet, at another level, Hegel’s relative indifference to the distinction between allegory and symbol underscores the greater significance he assigned to the distinction between sign and symbol.

As Kathleen Dow Magnus writes, “Hegel defines the act of symbolization as the imagination’s use of sensuous appearances or images to represent by analogy conceptions ‘of another kind’; the symbol conveys a meaning through the presentation of some quality or qualities that it has in common with that meaning. The sign, by contrast, presents its meaning through an ‘arbitrary connection’ with it.” The sign and the symbol each has a meaning that is different than its immediate sensible expression. However, where the symbol is both identical to and different from its meaning, the sign expresses its meaning through an indifference to its expression. The symbols lion and fox, for example, work because they “themselves possess the very qualities whose meaning they are supposed to express.”55 The sensuous form of symbolic expression introduces ambiguity in that the sensible expression does not fully coincide with its meaning. For example, “mountain” could symbolize sublimity or self-transcendence, but it could also mean obstacle or peril. As Hegel wrote, “the symbol, strictly so-called, is inherently enigmatic because the external existent by means of which a universal meaning is to be brought to our contemplation still remains different from the meaning that it has to represent, and it is therefore open to doubt in what sense the shape has to be taken.”⁵⁶ The sign, by contrast, signifies only by convention. Its sensible expression has no value outside the agreement that establishes a link between expression and meaning; hence both the arbitrariness and the efficiency of Fuchs, fox, renard. Precisely by negating the significance of the relationship between meaning and the form of its presentation, the sign is able to mark identities and differences within a system of meaning. Purged of naturalness or intuition, the relationship between its expression and meaning clarified and explicit, the sign sheds the ambiguity of the symbol and exists only in its ability to signify. The sign is thus the privileged medium for philosophy, the science of the concept.

The nature of symbols establishes a connection between art and religion in Hegel’s thought. As he writes, “In the case of art, we cannot consider, in the symbol, the arbitrariness between meaning and signification [which characterizes the sign], since art itself consists precisely in the connection, the affinity and the concrete interpretation of meaning and of form.”57 Likewise, as Magnus notes, religious consciousness tends toward symbolization. It assigns a “general meaning or conception to immediacies” that share something in common with that general meaning without being identical to it. It “communicates its meaning ambiguously because it does not clarify the basis or limitation of the identification it asserts.” And finally, religious consciousness “in one way or another sustains a divergence between its form and its meaning, its activity of representation and the object it seeks to represent.”⁵⁸ In drawing this connection between religion and art as symbolic forms, Hegel shared, in some ways, the impulse of his Romantic contemporaries to carry the idea of the symbol back and forth across the line separating religion and art. Yet Hegel took this to a quite different conclusion. Where the Romantic Schelling believed that art has the permanent task of teaching the philosopher to “recognize symbolically the way sensual things” emerge from the “true archetypes of forms,” Hegelian philosophy was premised on the historical progression from symbols to signs.

Or, more precisely, where his contemporaries were interested in the ongoing viability of the symbol, Hegel created a tripartite history of the symbolic form that fit into his general account of the journey of spirit—humanity as a collective subject—from its immersion in nature to the freedom of self-conscious self-determination. In his aesthetics Hegel maintained that all art is, in a broad sense, symbolic insofar as it cannot express spirit as it is in itself but must rely on presentations in sensuous form.⁵⁹ Yet the only period in art history that Hegel called properly “symbolic” was the art of early civilizations like ancient Egypt.

In that early phase, spirit struggles to liberate itself from nature, but its limited success is reflected in an art that, in Hegel’s view, imperfectly imposes human meaning on the obdurate materiality of its main medium, stone. In this view the hieroglyph provides not a general template for art, as it did for a Romantic like Novalis, but an instance of a phase when consciousness remains indeterminate and unsure of its autonomy. Likewise, the Sphinx serves Hegel as the “symbol of the symbolic itself,” that is, the riddle-laden sign of spirit’s unfree and half-conscious impulse to emerge from the animal domain.60 In the subsequent classical period of ancient Greece, spirit is less bound by its interaction with the material. Classical sculpture transforms stone with less regard for its inherent properties, and spirit seems to penetrate and illuminate the human forms that classical art took as its main subject matter. Indeed, so perfect is the unity of form and content that the artwork no longer signifies in the way a symbol does, but appears to be simply what it is. In a sense, Hegel thus treats the late-eighteenth-century classicist notion of the perfect work of art, the in sich vollendet, not as a timeless ideal but as a historical manifestation. Precisely this perfection proves to be the limit of classical art, because it hinders subjectivity from developing its own interior depths: “For spirit is the infinite subjectivity of the Idea, which as absolute inwardness cannot freely and truly shape itself outwardly if it remains poured into a bodily existence as the one appropriate to it.”⁶¹ It is precisely subjectivity liberated from the corporeality of its artistic presentation that characterizes the Romantic period, which Hegel, in keeping with the Romantics he putatively opposed, equates with nothing less than the emergence of Christianity itself. Painting is Hegel’s essential Romantic art. Where sculpture exists in natural space, painting creates its own unnatural space, an illusion of nature. Far from being a weakness, this creation of illusion exemplifies subjectivity’s growing power of self-reflection and autonomy from the substantial world of nature. Under such circumstances, art once again becomes symbolic in the sense that there is yet again a discrepancy between the form and content of art. Yet symbolic art in Hegel’s strictly technical and historical sense strove to find an adequate expression of a concept it held in an indeterminate way: as Hegel would remind his readers, the secrets of the Egyptians were also secrets for the Egyptians. By contrast, Romantic art expresses in a determinate fashion recognition that artistic form is exceeded by its spiritual content. Aware of a tension between itself and the sensuous, Hegel writes, spirit in its Romantic phase “dissolves that classical unification of inwardness and external manifestation and takes flight out of externality back into itself.”⁶² In the “free room for play” that spirit thus wins for itself, Romantic art reestablishes the typical tension of the symbolic, namely the gap between expression and meaning.⁶³

There is much in this description that accords with Hegel’s Romantic contemporaries: the general equation of the Romantic with the Christian period; the sense that the “modern” (that is, postclassical) period is allegorical, in the metaphysical sense intended by Friedrich Schlegel; even the contrast between sculpture and painting, which resonates with August Wilhelm Schlegel’s contrast between the plastic spirit of classical art and poetry and the picturesque spirit of the moderns. However, Hegel departs sharply from the Romantics when he views this new symbolic phase as itself overcome by the progress of spirit. The end phase of Hegel’s historical account of the aesthetic symbol coincides with his declaration that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past,” by which he never intended to suggest that art ceases to be produced but rather that it ceases to be an adequate medium for spirit’s self-expression.64 Human consciousness’s reliance upon concrete sensual representations of itself weakens, even as spirit’s ability to speak directly of itself grows. The Romantic form, writes Hegel, “passes over from the poetry of imagination [Vorstellung] to the prose of thought.”⁶⁵ Or, more precisely, spirit never fully abandons sensual images, but it learns to distinguish with ever greater clarity between general ideas and attempts to give them visible form. Hence the history of the artistic symbol ends in conscious symbolism, a point where symbols can be known as symbols, that is, as humanly instituted conventions that function as components of human discourse.⁶⁶ The last symbolic stage of art is therefore the “conscious symbolic of the comparative form of art”; here, the artist has various possibilities at his disposal, such as metaphors, allegories, symbols, and parables, by which he may consciously compare and relate meaning and concrete appearance in the work of art. As Peter Szondi wrote, this is a “secularization of symbolic art,” a rather flat matter of artistic choices about representational forms that no longer stands in the center of the historical process.⁶⁷ This attitude became even sharper among Hegel’s liberal and left-wing followers. So, for example, the Young German Theodor Mundt and the Left Hegelian Friedrich Theodor Vischer believed that symbolic art continues to exist only as a relic.⁶⁸ Likewise, Arnold Ruge and Theodor Echtermeyer formulated a sarcastic “Catechism” for the Romantic living dead. Point number 4 reads: “the best will not become clear through words [das Beste wird durch Worte nicht deutlich]!”⁶⁹ Thus they pit the Romantic allegory directly against the ideal of discursive clarity.

A similar logic governs Hegel’s treatment of symbolization in religion. Hegel assumes that “the object of religion, like that of philosophy, is the eternal truth, God and nothing but God and the explication of God.”70 Though philosophy and religion share an identical object, he nonetheless insisted on a distinction between the forms in which they express that content. Religion knows the Absolute naively because it does not recognize its absolute content thinkingly, but rather represents this content pictorially, symbolically. Consequently, religious consciousness knows the truth of religion in an unfree way, bound to the sensuousness of the image rather than liberated as a free self-determination of spirit. As he had done with art, Hegel inserted the history of religion into his account of the unified historical process of the evolution of consciousness, culminating in Christianity. A succession of “finite religions,” such as Hinduism, Judaism, and Greek polytheism created a series of sensuous forms of the divine that allowed human subjectivity to establish identifications with the otherness of the divine, even if the forms of that identification did not yet permit the self-conscious recognition of the unity of the human and the divine. All historical religions prior to Christianity contain “some truth” as the different moments of the gradual yet determinate self-revelation and self-realization of spirit, but they remain fragmentary, representing a dualism in spirit between consciousness and self-consciousness. Only in Christianity, the “absolute religion,” is God “thought of as self-consciousness” and hence it is only in Christianity that the self “beholds itself in the object.”⁷¹

To be sure, in Christianity Hegel does see a continued role for the symbolic. However, because Christian symbols—most notably Christ himself as the incarnate God-Man—correspond to the structure of the Idea, symbols incline the Christian to reflect on the unity in difference of his own subjectivity and the divine as a moment of the self-relation of Spirit.⁷² Absolute religion produces something equivalent to the condition of art in the period when art no longer is the privileged bearer of spirit’s development, namely a conscious symbolism in which the nature and function of symbols becomes an object of self-conscious reflection. Religious consciousness thus moves toward philosophical consciousness, the symbol toward the sign. To be sure, Kathleen Dow Magnus is correct in arguing that Hegel reserved a place for the symbolic even in his conception of absolute spirit. Absolute spirit manifests itself in art, religion, and most fully in philosophy. Though philosophy’s manner of knowing places it in the highest position within this triad, philosophy’s own comprehensive grasp of identity in difference requires the persistence of art and religion in their relative autonomy, and this requires the persistence of the sensual and imagistic element that distinguishes art and religion from philosophy. In other words, the recalcitrant dimension of symbols gives us the opportunity to encounter a limit in our self-knowledge, to experience ourselves not knowing ourselves.

Ultimately, however, the obstacle of the symbolic acts as a catalyst propelling consciousness toward greater depths of self-comprehension and self-determination.73 Magnus’s detailed demonstration of the ongoing importance of the symbolic for Hegel remains tied to an understanding of human history as the dialectical movement of spirit toward absolute self-determination. The gulf between Hegel and the classicist and Romantic champions of the symbol remains unbridged. Where those champions insisted on both the untranslatability and intransivity of the symbol, Hegel’s treatment is based on the claim that the symbol is both translatable and transitive. The highest aim of spirit is thought, and “in thought there is no longer any difference between ideas or pictures and their meaning; thought is its own meaning and in its existence it is what it is implicitly.”⁷⁴ This conviction stamped Hegel’s radical followers.

Left Hegelian Desymbolization

Writing in 1844, Bruno Bauer observed that the radical movement of Left Hegelianism had followed a pattern familiar in Germany, where revolutionary agitation and struggle played out as literary phenomena.⁷⁵ Bauer intended that to be a criticism of the inverted German world, much in the spirit of Marx’s remark from the same year that “in politics, the Germans thought what other nations did.”⁷⁶ However, if we take Bauer’s claim seriously, then the notion that Young Hegelianism was a literary phenomenon ultimately rests on the fact that its radical politics began as a critique of religion. That meant, first and foremost, the criticism of religious texts. Insofar as Left Hegelianism may thus be understood as a practice of textual criticism, it is necessary to explore Bauer and Feuerbach’s governing assumptions about referentiality and representation in the biblical text if we are to open the broader question of the status of the symbol in their thought. From there, finally, we will consider the political significance of their assumptions about the symbolic.

A first remark may be drawn from the preceding discussion of the Romantics and Hegel. For Left Hegelians like David Friedrich Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Ludwig Feuerbach, the Romantic distinction between symbol and allegory seems to have had little significance. Rather, they tended to follow Hegel in treating allegory as a form of symbolic consciousness. Indeed, Left Hegelians used the terms allegory and symbol interchangeably and with less conceptual rigor than either the Romantics or Hegel. These terms functioned as roughly equivalent designations of the activity of symbolic representation; accordingly, in dealing with the Left Hegelians, it makes little sense to insist on the allegory-symbol distinction. While much of the specific conceptual weight of symbol and allegory was lost in the debates of the Left Hegelians, Hegel’s distinction between the sign and the symbol was of far greater significance for them. Here it must quickly be said that the Left Hegelians did not explicitly, let alone rigorously thematize this distinction, nor did any of the Hegelian left significantly deepen Hegel’s approach to this specific question. The distinction between sign and symbol was important more for the bedrock assumptions it entailed than for the conceptual clarity it might have brought to the discussion of religion and art.

What of the question of textual reference and representation in the biblical criticism of the Left Hegelians? Hegel’s opposition between representation and concept authorized the dismantling of conventional schemes of biblical referentiality. Most dramatically, this meant the dissolution of the literal historical referent, reference to the biblical event, which by the later eighteenth century had become the hermeneutical model of biblical interpretation for orthodox defenders of the Bible and skeptical Enlightenment critics alike.77 David Friedrich Strauss’s 1835 Das Leben Jesu launched this critical trajectory by arguing that the Christian gospels were products of the Volksgeist of the ancient Hebrews, that is, mythical fulfillments of earlier messianic expectations. This was a hermeneutical position that absorbed both event and author into a collective mythological consciousness. It dealt a serious blow to supernaturalist theologians who read the Bible as a true and literal historical record of divine participation in human affairs; but it struck as well at rationalist Christian apologists who accepted the historical veracity of the biblical account, yet sought to explain away its more incredible episodes by recourse to natural causes. Further, Strauss’s strategy undermined the long tradition of allegorical reading that discovered multiple levels of meaning in the Bible, for example Cassian’s influential fourth-century account of the fourfold levels of meaning: the literal, the sacred historical or typological, the ethical, and the eschatological. Strauss nevertheless acknowledged that the allegorical mode of interpretation coincides with his own mythical approach “in relinquishing the historical reality of the sacred narratives in order to preserve to them absolute inherent truth.”

Yet, Strauss quickly identified a crucial difference between the two approaches. The allegorical approach attributes the inspiration and truth of the narrative to “immediate divine agency,” whereas the mythical method traces inspiration and truth back to the “spirit of a people or a community.”78 This distinction became blurred in the conclusion of Das Leben Jesu. There Strauss turned from the negative task of criticizing the historical claims of the New Testament to the positive task of discerning the true spiritual meaning of Scripture by reflecting upon the doctrinal significance of his critical life of Jesus. Indeed, Strauss offers what we might call an inverted allegorical reading as his mythical interpretation passes over into an exercise in Hegelian speculative reason. Arguing that God and man, the infinite and the finite, are complete only in each other, Strauss proceeds to deduce the necessity of the historical narrative of the God-Man from the conceptual truth of the union of human and divine natures. Deep meaning yields the surface narrative, an allegory in reverse. Reading Strauss today, it is difficult not to recall Heinrich Heine’s exasperated observation that Kant’s critical defense of belief in God reminded him of a student friend who smashed all the lamps in the city in order to lecture on the need for street lamps.

Under relentless attack from his many orthodox critics, Strauss retreated somewhat in subsequent editions of Das Leben Jesu from his initial assertion that every element of the biblical narrative is mythical. Even as Strauss backtracked, the Left Hegelian critique of religion rapidly moved beyond him. In 1837 Strauss described the Hegelian school as fragmented into a “right,” “center,” and “left,” with himself occupying a lonely position as the sole figure on the left. By 1841 Strauss felt so insulted by the Hegelian left that he withdrew from the Deutsche Jahrbücher, the main organ of the movement.79 Despite the souring of Strauss’s relations with other Hegelian radicals, the rejection of historical referentiality that he articulated remained the bedrock of Left Hegelian biblical criticism. However, once the linguistic sign was detached from its conventional referent, the question of true reference became a matter of sharp debate, with Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach defining the two most radical post-Straussian positions. In 1837 Strauss described Bauer as one of his main adversaries on the Hegelian right, because Bauer’s articles in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik between 1835 and 1837 amounted to the Prussian Hegelian establishment’s official censure of Das Leben Jesu. By 1841 Bauer had entirely abandoned his defense of the accommodation between philosophy and theology. Bauer’s evolution from a staunch defender of the accommodation between Hegelianism and orthodox Christianity to a militant Hegelian atheist may be traced through his unfolding critique of Strauss. The details of that engagement from Bauer’s 1835 reviews of Das Leben Jesu through Die Religion des Alten Testamentes (1838), Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes (1840), and Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (1841) cannot detain us here, except to repeat the frequently made observation that the continuous theme in these works is the role of human self-consciousness in its relationship to the infinite. However, where Bauer’s early position centered on the “process of the subjective spirit which relates to God,” that is, the understanding of God by the subjective spirit,⁸⁰ by 1841 he had arrived at the conclusion that religion is “nothing more than an inward relationship of self-consciousness to itself.”⁸¹ This was the most radical and influential stage of Bauer’s development, which found its fullest expression in his Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker. We will confine ourselves to this period and focus mainly on the extremely interesting preface to that work, which lays out Bauer’s objection to Strauss and his alternative reading strategy.

In Bauer’s view, Strauss’s idea of a collective mythical consciousness is as alienating as the orthodox idea of revelation, for in both cases a transcendent explanation of the Scriptures conceals their true origin in human self-consciousness. In contrast, Bauer argued that the Synoptic Gospels were, in both form and content, the inventions of individual authors responding freely and pragmatically to the needs of their age. Bauer’s insistence that individual authors created both the form and the content of Scripture was a dramatic departure from Strauss, as well as from those critical biblical scholars like Christian Gottlob Wilke, who had been willing to concede that humans had invented the Bible’s literary forms but not the divinely revealed content. It enabled Bauer to claim that the Scriptures are “artistic” compositions through and through, and that both form and content were freely given by self-consciousness in accordance with the principles of authorship, even if self-consciousness did not yet recognize its own creativity at that stage in history.82 The author’s creation of both form and content, Bauer wrote, meant that there was no access to a “given and naked reality” outside the text.⁸³ Reference becomes a circular movement within the text itself, which now contains the signifier and the signified wholly within it. This would seem to link Bauer both backward to Karl Phillip Moritz’s Autonomieästhetik and forward to Jacques Derrida’s claim that there is nothing outside the text. Yet both associations need careful qualification. The relationship between Moritz and Bauer has yet to be explored in any depth, even though the last essay published in his lifetime was devoted to Moritz and Ernst Barnikol reports that Moritz was Bauer’s favorite author.⁸⁴ This connection warrants investigation, but at present it suffices to assert that Bauer, like Hegel, would not have accepted Moritz’s insistence on the radical intransitivity and untranslatability of the work of art. As for Derrida, Bauer would have had no patience for Derrida’s radical skepticism about the capacity of language to serve as a transparent sign for thought. Indeed, far from either the self-contained wholeness of the work of art implied by Moritz or the displacement of referentiality along a chain of signifiers implied by Derrida, Bauer believed that the referent of the biblical text is in fact self-consciousness itself as it moves through history toward final recognition of itself as the “only power of the world and history.”⁸⁵

As religious self-consciousness, writes Bauer, the spirit is entirely gripped by the content of its own productions,

cannot live without it, and without its continuous description and production, for it possesses in this activity the experience of its own determination. But as religious consciousness it perceives itself at the same time in complete differentiation from its own essential content, and as soon as it has developed it, and in the same moment that it develops and describes it, this essential content becomes for it a reality that exists for itself, above and outside religious consciousness, as the absolute and its history.⁸⁶

The contrast here between manifest and essential content might look like a return to the allegorical mode, but it is not. For, as Bauer claims toward the end of the preface to the Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, the process of critique collapses the distinction between the content and the self-consciousness. There is no positivity in the text, no remainder. Or, to use Derrida’s terminology, the materiality of the sign is effaced, because there is no slippage of meaning, no historical association or symbolic ambiguity that cannot be penetrated and mastered. Even with the alienated self-consciousness that composed the biblical text, self-consciousness recognizes something “homogeneous” with itself.87 There is then no process of negotiation between signs and meaning, only the self-relation of a self-consciousness whose essential content is not its products, but its own productivity. Such transparency is the antithesis of the allegorical sensibility, which, if we follow Walter Benjamin, experiences the text, and indeed the world, as fragmentary and enigmatic, an aggregation of signs that adumbrate a truth that resides elsewhere. Allegory is literally “other-discourse,” meaning that truth is, at most, “bodied forth in the dance of represented ideas.”⁸⁸ By contrast, Bauer’s critical assault on the gospels as well as on Strauss’s mythical reading was motivated by his belief that “personality, reality and everything positive can in fact be gobbled up and consumed by the Hegelian idea.”⁸⁹ Against critics who charged that he was animated only by the spirit of destruction, Bauer insisted in 1842 that “we fight for the honor and freedom of the positive, when we recognize and prove that it springs from the noblest thing there is, the historical self-consciousness.”⁹⁰

Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums appeared in the same year as Bauer’s Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker. The two works share an emphasis on the development of human self-consciousness in relationship to religion; yet as both Feuerbach and Bauer recognized, they differed over the meaning of religion. Where Bauer regarded humanity’s subjection to religious illusions as totally debasing, Feuerbach viewed religious feeling as alienated human species-being. Whereas Bauer sought to dissolve religious illusion, Feuerbach sought to return the projections of religion to their proper source in humanity, to restore the predicates of religious consciousness to their proper subject, man, and thereby to transform religious devotion into humanist devotion. Not surprisingly, Bauer denounced Feuerbach as a mystic and argued that the notion of species-being replicates the structure of theism insofar as it subordinates free self-consciousness to a substance that precedes and defines it.⁹¹ As Bauer wrote in “Die Gattung und die Masse,” “The essence which [man] does not make … is rather the expression of his weakness. The truly human in him would thereby be a barrier which is unattainable for him. His perfections, which confront him as hypostases or as dogmas, could at most be only the object of a cult or a faith.”⁹²

Feuerbach, for his part, maintained in the preface to the second edition of Das Wesen des Christentums (1843) that “Bauer takes for the object of his criticism the evangelical history, i.e., biblical Christianity, or rather biblical theology.”93 There are two implicit criticisms embedded in this seemingly neutral comment. First, Feuerbach always drew a sharp line between theology and the essence of faith; whereas faith expresses emotional and psychological needs that in themselves are authentic, even if misplaced, theology is an abstract discourse that distorts the content of faith and distances religion from its emotional core. So, from Feuerbach’s perspective, Bauer’s focus on the intellectual discourse of biblical theology obstructed his access to the essence of religion. Second, Bauer’s exclusive focus on the theological text replicated what Feuerbach had come to regard as Hegel’s greatest fault, namely, his identification of thought and being or, as Feuerbach insisted in his 1839 critique of Hegel, his confusion of the form or rhetoric of philosophy with the thing itself.⁹⁴ In contrast to Bauer, Feuerbach insisted that his own object “is Christianity, is Religion, as it is the immediate object, the immediate nature, of man.” Religion as an object of reflection and intellection only comes afterward. Hence Feuerbach divided Wesen des Christentums into a first section dealing with “The True or Anthropological Essence of Religion” and a second section treating “The False or Theological Essence of Religion.”

To put this another way, in Feuerbach’s view Bauer operated as if there were nothing outside the text, or at least no truth that is not textual, which in Bauer’s view is the privileged site of self-consciousness’s creative self-realization. In contrast, Feuerbach insisted that his position does not “regard the pen as the only fit organ for the revelation of truth, but the eye and the ear, the hand and the foot; it does not identify the idea of the fact with the fact itself, so as to reduce the real existence to an existence on paper, but it separates the two, and precisely by this separation attains to the fact itself.”⁹⁵ The line drawn between representation and the object itself, between thought and being, had been a feature of Feuerbach’s thought ever since he jotted down some doubts about Hegel’s logic in 1828. By the time he wrote his critique of Hegel in 1839, it had become a central motif of his thought. Manfred Frank has argued that Feuerbach formulated this critique under the influence of the later thought of Schelling, whose so-called positive philosophy had exercised such a complex and multivalent influence on the intellectual history of the 1830s.⁹⁶ We will discuss Schelling at greater length in the next chapter, and here it suffices to note that at the basis of positive philosophy was the claim that, instead of acknowledging their nonidentity, dialectical philosophy wrongly collapses being and consciousness into an identity. Rather than see the Unaufhebbarkeit or unassimilability of being as a restriction on human freedom, however, Schelling argued that precisely the gap between being and thought generates an unending open movement that resists closure in self-consciousness.

The Left Hegelian opposition to Schelling was generally unrelenting. Once again, we can point to Ruge and Echtermeyer’s Der Protestantismus und die Romantik. There they complained that Schelling treats the thought process as too positive, too natural. In the absence of unity between thought and being within the “process of the Absolute,” this unity occurs only in the form of an “intuition [Anschauung] of the Absolute, in which thinking is still not thinking, but remains immediate, in the form of thinking phantasy or brilliancy of thinking [Genialität des Denkens].” Failing to recognize the “self-movement of the Absolute, the true mediation of the finite and the concrete Spirit,” Schelling consigns the human spirit to “subjective arbitrariness,” in which an “alien objectivity” can only be mediated through “analogies and symbols.” Schelling, so they argued, envisions no way for thought to “digest raw existence,” because he lacks the “fluid dialectic of the free spirit.” At the tail end of this particular metaphorical passage, Ruge and Echtermeyer diagnose Schelling to be sick from indigestion, though they leave unclear whether the result is constipation or diarrhea.97

Between 1835 and 1840 Feuerbach, too, directed a number of sharply critical essays against Schelling and his followers, yet there were sufficient overlaps with Schelling’s positive philosophy that Schelling himself detected an underlying affinity.98 Manfred Frank has even suggested that the vehemence of Feuerbach’s critique of Schelling was motivated by a desire to distract attention from his reliance upon the anti-Hegelian philosopher. There are good reasons to remain skeptical of Frank’s assertion of a direct reliance upon Schelling, though those cannot occupy us here.⁹⁹ However we judge that relationship, there can be little doubt that Feuerbach’s recognition of the nonidentity of thought and being was a crucial impetus toward his attempt to construct a philosophy based on naturalism and sensuousness. He extended the principle of nonidentity into his attempt to rethink the human subject as an embodied subject. This effort formed the center of gravity in his 1843 Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, where he wrote, “Whereas the old philosophy started by saying, ‘I am an abstract and merely a thinking being to whose essence the body does not belong,’ the new philosophy, on the other hand, begins by saying, ‘I am a real, sensuous being and, indeed, the body in its totality is my ego, my essence itself.””¹⁰⁰ In the 1841 Wesen des Christentums the idea of embodied subjectivity was already present in Feuerbach’s emphasis on the relationship of religious projections to humanity’s sensuous needs, from carnal love to creaturely appetite. Yet here three qualifications are called for. First, what Van Harvey calls the “existentialist-naturalist” strand of Feuerbach’s religious critique coexists uncomfortably with a “three-fold Hegelian schema of self-knowledge: objectification–alienation–reappropriation.”¹⁰¹ Second, embodiment has ambiguous consequences for Feuerbach’s theory of knowledge. For although sensuousness disrupts the closed circuit of a mediation between thought and being that occurs one-sidedly in the dimension of thought, sensuousness opens the pathway toward more immediate, intuitive, and putatively more complete forms of knowledge. Hence, for Feuerbach, the “whole man,” the man of “reason, love, and will” becomes the subject of a putatively deeper, fuller knowledge than the thin conceptual knowledge accessible to the abstract self-consciousness of Hegel or Bauer. If Bauer’s biblical criticism drove the referent of language from history into the text, Feuerbach’s religious criticism is not immune to the dream of bypassing the text in order to reach an anthropological core where language and activity are fused in the immediacy of human life. Indeed, he presented his humanist naturalism as a vital corrective to “the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original.”¹⁰² Third, recognition of sensuous species-being was meant to bring the attributes of a transcendent divinity down into the immanent existence of humanity. However, Feuerbach was unable to balance this drive toward immanence against the return of the transcendent in the form of species-being itself. This was the burden of Bruno Bauer’s charge that Feuerbach’s concept of species acts as a surrogate god. In Derrida’s language, we might say that the species furnishes a new transcendental signified. An observation made by Marcel Gauchet about a general tendency of the modern secularization process seems appropriate to this ambiguous aspect of Feuerbach: “It is as if the principle of collective order could only be returned to humans, to the visible, by setting up the invisible at the heart of the human order. It is as if we had to be dispossessed by collective-being’s terrestrial transcendence if we were to be delivered from heaven’s will. This is a remarkable example of realist fiction or effective symbolism.”¹⁰³

Feuerbach’s Naturalist Symbol

Realist fiction or effective symbolism: the two are, arguably, not the same. Karl Barth, who viewed Feuerbach from a sharply critical if respectful distance, maintained that modernity suffers from the illusion of realism. In Barth’s view realism, in both its literary and philosophical forms, expresses the highest point of confidence in the ability to represent. “Modernity,” writes a student of Barth, “might be understood as an epoch in which the stability of Being and representation, the essential unity of Being and representation, went unquestioned—an epoch of forgetting.”104 Barth consecrated his theology to warning against this forgetting; that is, to recollecting the paradox that humans “need to posit theologically an otherness which cannot be posited within systems of human representation without undermining them.”¹⁰⁵ Certainly, despite Feuerbach’s insistence on the nonidentity of thought and being, he may be judged guilty of a certain blindness about his own procedure. He spoke of a kind of immediate sensuous knowledge beyond and behind philosophical language without problematizing the fact that he was representing this knowledge through philosophical language. Here again there is ambiguity, however. For there is good reason to argue that Feuerbach’s thought rests on a gap between the necessity of textually representing the anthropological secret of religion and the claim that that truth lies beyond representation in a lifeworld constituted by the triangulated interactions of community, the embodied subject, and nature.

Rather than exemplifying Barth’s realist illusion, Feuerbach represents a return to symbolic or allegorical styles of thought within Young Hegelianism. There is, first of all, his recognition that every system of thought or belief is a “presentation.” That is, it is a means or vehicle for ideas that it can at best approximate. Not only the content of the system, but the form as well constitutes the presentation. It is striking that Feuerbach draws metaphorically on a different system of representation in order to accentuate the presentational dimension of philosophy that the Hegelian tradition specifically denied: “the systematizer is an artist—the history of philosophical system is the picture gallery of reason. Hegel is the most accomplished philosophical artist, and his presentations, at least in part, are unsurpassed models of scientific art sense and, due to their rigor, veritable means for the education and discipline of the spirit.”106 Hedged with qualifications, we may evoke Richard Rorty’s contrast between, on the one hand, the image of philosophy as “a chain of arguments and building a single coherent edifice on demonstrable foundations” and, on the other, philosophy as “edifying discourses,” offering exemplary states of reflection, promising to take “us out of our solid selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings.”¹⁰⁷ Despite the fact that Feuerbach was, to say the least, significantly more committed to foundations than Richard Rorty, the notion of presentation entwines philosophy’s task to make abstract arguments with its capacity to produce allegorical emblems of the examined life.

Feuerbach returns to the symbolic in another way. In the preface to Das Wesen des Christentums, Feuerbach performs an interesting move. There, he explicitly repudiates the allegorical mode: “we should not, as is the case in theology and speculative philosophy, make real beings and things into arbitrary signs, vehicles, symbols, or predicates of a distinct, transcendent, absolute, i.e., abstract being.” Instead, Feuerbach urges us to take things for the “significance which they have in themselves, which is identical with their qualities, with those conditions which make them what they are. … I, in fact, put in place of the barren baptismal water, the beneficent effect of real water. How ‘watery’, how trivial!”¹⁰⁸ This is just the kind of thing that Karl Barth judged “extraordinarily, almost nauseatingly, trivial.”¹⁰⁹ However, Feuerbach proceeds to reintroduce the symbol: “But while I thus view water as a real thing, I at the same time intend it as a vehicle, an image, an example, a symbol, of the ‘unholy’ spirit of my work, just as the water of Baptism—the object of my analysis—is at once literal and symbolical water.”¹¹⁰

Feuerbach thus passed from the religious symbolic to the real to a reinvocation of the symbolic as an irreducible dimension of naturalism. In the Romantics, to be sure, there was an impulse toward the naturalization of the symbol. One sees this, for example, in Novalis, for whom all things relate to everything else in such a way that nature and art are both symbolic. Yet, if nature is symbolic, for Novalis this could only be because nature is suffused with divinity. For Feuerbach, symbolism functions in an immanent, humanist context. So, for example, noting that humans are both part of and distinct from nature, he writes, “The symbols of this our difference are bread and wine. Bread and wine are, as to their materials, products of Nature; as to their form, products of man.” Bread and wine, core symbols of Christianity, become the symbols of the transformative powers of human labor:

Bread and wine are supernatural products,—in the only valid and true sense, the sense which is not in contradiction with reason and Nature. If in water we adore the pure force of Nature, in bread and wine we adore the supernatural power of mind, of consciousness, of man. Hence this sacrament is only for man matured into consciousness; while baptism is imparted to infants. But we at the same time celebrate here the true relation of mind to Nature: Nature gives the material, mind gives the form. … Bread and wine typify to us the truth that Man is the true God and Saviour of man.111

Bruno Bauer, by contrast, argued that the movement of self-consciousness absorbs the symbol. We see this, for example, in Die evangelische Landeskirche Preussens und die Wissenschaft. In 1817 Friedrich Wilhelm III had merged the Lutheran and Calvinist confessions into the Prussian “evangelical-Christian church.” As Christopher Clark writes, the project of uniting the two churches reflected an “obsessive concern with uniformity that is recognizably post-Napoleonic: the simplification and homogenization of vestments at the altar as on the field of battle, liturgical conformity in place of the plurality of local practices that had been the norm in the previous century, even modular Normkirchen (standardized churches), designed to be assembled from pre-fabricated parts and available in different sizes to suit villages and towns.”¹¹² Opposition to this effort grew after 1830 among groups who resisted this imposition of conformity. To a Hegelian like Bruno Bauer, who in 1840 had not yet lost his faith in the basic rationality of the Prussian state, such obdurate insistence on particularities must eventually disappear in the development of free self-consciousness:

There is a oneness of the two churches which so strongly and thoroughly unites them that nothing can divide them. It is not symbols as such that form this oneness; if symbols are operative, then they separate, if the churches come together, then the symbols cease to have a binding effect. Wherein then does this unity lie? It lies in inwardness, into which the symbols have collapsed, in self-consciousness, into which the objective dogmatic consciousness has turned, in subjectivity.¹¹³

Even more clearly, in his 1842 book Hegel’s Lehre von der Religion und Kunst, Bauer finds support in Hegel himself, quoting him at length: “The symbolical ceases immediately when the free subjectivity, and no longer merely general abstract conceptions [Vorstellungen] constitutes the contents of the representation [Darstellung]. Then the subject is the significant one for itself and the self-explaining [das Bedeutende für sich selbst und das sich selbst Erklärende].”114 Hegel’s end of art thesis has rarely been presented so succinctly. Bauer does more than faithfully present Hegel’s aesthetics, however. For in fact he reverses the priority that Hegel had assigned to religion over art. For Bauer, the freely created sensuous representations of the individual artist supersede the sensuous representations of the alienated religious consciousness. Yet if Bauer’s Hegels Lehre von der Religion und Kunst argues for the Auflösung of religion in art, the real point of the book is that the end of art marks the definitive end of religion. As Douglas Moggach has argued, Bauer’s reversal of Hegel’s elevation of religion over art was already present in Bauer’s 1829 prize essay on Kant’s doctrine of the beautiful.¹¹⁵ Bauer’s enduring emphasis on art would seem to suggest a place for symbolism in his thought. The 1829 essay opens with an epigraph: “Symbol: ‘The seriousness in art is its joyfulness.’”¹¹⁶ This invocation of joy seems to hover between Schiller’s play impulse and Nietzsche’s gay science, but in fact what is meant is that art is the “demonstrated and represented idea.”¹¹⁷ Art displays the unity of concept and object, thought and being, and thereby awakens “spiritual powers to their unhindered use,” as he wrote in an 1842 essay on Beethoven.¹¹⁸ Hence, when the very young Bauer claimed that “art is a symbol of philosophy,” he immediately added that “no one, not even the artist, because he remains in immediacy, can penetrate [durchschauen] art more deeply than the philosopher, and knowledge of art can be given only through philosophy.”¹¹⁹

Feuerbach did not spell out the differences between himself and Bauer at the level of aesthetics. However, consideration of the Young Hegelian Hermann Hettner underscores the contrast I have drawn. Hettner’s 1845 article “Gegen die spekulative Aesthetik” employs Feuerbachean principles to criticize Hegel’s aesthetics. While Hettner defended the cognitive vocation of art, he insisted that art communicates truth differently than does conceptual reflection. As Ingrid Pepperle writes, for Hettner, the “aesthetic disclosure of truth [Wahrheitsfindung] is ‘aglow with the pulsing blood of concrete form,’ and it is not simply overtaken by formal thought, but is an ‘essential and necessary enlargement of systematic [wissenschaftlichen] thinking.’ The pleasure of art can never be replaced by abstract thought. It is pleasure of the whole human being, ‘which is both sensuous and spiritual.’”120 Feuerbach was less explicit than Hettner about the aesthetic implications of his naturalism; still, as we have seen, he reappropriated the Romantic emphasis on the opacity of the symbol, but defined that opacity not by reference to the divine but to human subjectivity’s embodied presence in the world. Bauer’s position from 1829 onward rested on the assumption that the symbol is translatable without remainder. In this conviction, Bauer was more typical of the Young Hegelians than was Feuerbach, as Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s characterization of Left Hegelian literary criticism would suggest: “In the final analysis it is the task of philosophical-critical argumentation to annihilate art as such and, by conceptualizing art in its historical development, to carry its living remains into philosophical-conceptual discourse; hence, the minimal interest in hermeneutical problems.”¹²¹

Ambiguity and Radical Democracy

In Theology and Social Theory the so-called postsecular philosopher John Milbank makes an observation about Spinoza’s biblical criticism that is relevant to the present discussion. Milbank notes that Spinoza’s effort to create scientific criteria for biblical criticism was meant to free the reader; yet, writes Milbank, “although each free individual confronts the Biblical text without traditional mediation, this confrontation paradoxically irons out all idiosyncrasy, because the Bible, like nature, is [presumed to be] a self-interpreting totality, a world articulated by its own widest and most unambiguous meanings, as is nature by the most general motions.”122 What must be banished from such readings, he insists, is allegory, the uncontrollable proliferation of Christocentric meaning. Milbank sees this “‘capturing of the Biblical text’” as a constitutive dimension of modern politics, a commitment to “the illusion of spatial immediacy and to the exorcism of the metaphorically ambiguous.”¹²³ This leads Milbank to vilify modern secularism and lament the decline of a theistic world. Moreover, it compels him to defend the metaphorical richness of the biblical text against the tradition of secular reading that one might say opens with Spinoza and stretches through the Enlightenment, the Left Hegelians, and into our own time. I have no interest in following Milbank down this path. Indeed, one of the questions that lurks behind our investigation of the post-Marxist adventure of the symbolic is whether a secular politics can recapture a vital sense of complexity and ambiguity without lapsing into the explicit or covert theological view that Milbank believes exercises a monopoly over these qualities. More precisely, I am concerned with the survival of complexity and ambiguity within the modern emancipatory project, not just as obstacles that will be overcome but also as irreducible—and even enabling—conditions for the attempt to create meaning.

The Left Hegelians’ critique of religion presents something of a privileged moment for examining the hinge that connects the struggle for autonomy with the problem of meaning. It is not just that they confronted a deeply rooted system of religious heteronomy with the most radical claims for human self-sufficiency that had yet been uttered; rather, it is the fact that they confronted an age-old system of meaning with a philosophical guarantee of their own historical victory. That guarantee granted both the future and the past to an omnivorous self-consciousness that recognizes itself behind every mask and sees every window as a mirror. Bruno Bauer took this much further than Ludwig Feuerbach. Although Feuerbach also placed religion into the framework of a history of self-consciousness’s self-actualization, he reserved a place of tension between textual representation and the world, subject and object, clarity and obscurity, the visible and the invisible. Having said this, it is equally important to qualify it. This was, after all, just one impulse in his work, and it was generally subordinated to his desire for immediacy and the essential presence of the species. Yet, in preserving a referential gap that leaves open the ambiguity of the symbol, Feuerbach embraced precisely the dimension of positivity that Bauer’s philosophy of self-consciousness sought to “gobble up” and that Ruge and Echtermeyer diagnosed as the source of Schelling’s indigestion. If the Young Hegelians continue to have relevance for philosophical debate, I wager that it rests largely in the lessons to be drawn from the confrontation between the unprecedented assertion of self-consciousness and the positive remainder. The remainder, was, of course, the theme of Schelling’s later “positive philosophy,” and it helps to explain the interest Schelling has held for a number of postmodern thinkers, from Heidegger through Jean-Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo, and, as we will see in chapter 6, Slavoj Žižek. Insofar as Feuerbach’s thought represents the incursion of this positivity into the heart of a philosophical discourse oriented toward the full self-possession of human spirit, it belongs to this contemporary debate, as does the clash among Left Hegelians over this issue.

The next chapter concerns a different variation of the encounter between Hegelianism and the remnants of Romantic symbol theory, the scandal created among Left Hegelians when Pierre Leroux, one of the leading figures of the French left in the 1830s and 1840s, chose to embrace Schelling. Leroux’s decision opens up a quite different perspective on the political valences of the symbolic. Let me conclude the present chapter by linking once again the Left Hegelian critique of Romantic symbol theory to the broad themes of this book. Ambiguity and positivity are of interest to more than the aesthetic theorist who recognizes the need to preserve hermeneutical complexity in approaching the expressive art object. The question is also of paramount concern to democratic political theory. To return to Marcel Gauchet’s observation about the impulse to resurrect the transcendental within the disenchanted heart of the immanent, he raises an important point about the investments we make in transcendent collective bodies: this impulse, Gauchet writes, has given rise “to a new category of sacred beings, abstract individuals, collective apparitions, that we belong to and which crush us, immanent deities which, though never seen, continue to receive our devotion: the invisible State and the everlasting Nation. The personification and subjectivation of transcendent entities is the key to modern political development whose most original contribution, namely the system of impersonal institutions, is incomprehensible if we do not take into account the formation of these entities, as effective as they are fictitious.”124 For over two hundred years, the revolution unleashed by the struggle to replace personal power by impersonal institutions has intertwined and overlapped with the invention of quasi-transcendental entities like State, Nation, and, of course, Class. The historical and conceptual intersections of the democratic project with these new “immanent deities” compel us to recognize the unavoidable symbolic dimension of politics. Radical democracy demands preservation of nonidentity between the symbolic and the real, renunciation of full possession, acknowledgment of the power of symbols, and recognition that the impossibility of fixed and univocal meaning opens the symbolic domain to the possibility of a constant activation of the quest for autonomy.