Introduction

Over the past five or six years, Americans have heard an increasing number of calls, as Derrida put it, ‘to save the honor of reason.’1 After decades of nervous warnings that the hyperrationality of Western managerial capitalism was stamping out the freedom and vitality of human life, there has emerged a kind of nostalgia for reason. Particularly in the wake of the global economic crisis, thinkers are no longer embarrassed to suggest that our institutions are and ought to be grounded in universal rational standards open to public debate. In philosophy, cultural studies,2 jurisprudence,3 religion,4 and especially politics,5 luminaries from Al Gore to Pope Benedict XVI have presented faith in reason as a necessary bulwark against a battery of brute expressions of will whose only justification is a relativistic indifference to providing reasons. It is all well and good to question our most deeply shared assumptions, the defense of reason typically runs, but this does not justify abandoning the carefully wrought standards by which we have learned over the millennia to distinguish compelling from specious arguments. While this defense has a provenance at least as old as Socrates’s answer to Callicles in the Gorgias, the alternatingly plaintive and apocalyptic tone in which Gore et al. make it suggests that more is at stake than a weariness of rational defeatism. After seeing so many political and legal institutions crumble at the hands of both malicious neglect and active dismantling, the defenders of reason’s honor have grown increasingly frantic in their efforts to reconstruct the reasons behind these institutions.

These defenses typically (and wisely) decline their opponents’ disingenuous entreaties to provide a definition of reason or to specify with finality how one can distinguish reason from unreason. Instead, they assume that reason carries with it the whole of human experience and cannot be analyzed into any series of rules. If it could, it would be a product of what the German idealists called the intellect or understanding (Verstand), which is defined precisely by its ability to draw connections based upon concrete rules. Such assurances will surely be unsatisfying to those who believe that each person’s reason is nothing but an idiosyncratic collection of prejudices and habits of thought, but the paralyzing force of this skepticism is for some a greater evil than any entrenchment of values. For many continentally trained philosophers of my generation raised on a heavily Nietzschean diet, the reflexive response to these appeals is to question their right to such a universalizing narrative, or at minimum to paraphrase Alisdair MacIntyre in asking ‘Whose reason? Which rationality?’. Yet if frustration with the undue audibility and influence of sophists is insufficient cause for positing the existence of a universal human reason, then the motives behind this hermeneutics of suspicion deserve equal attention. Far too often there is a triumphant, even exultant tone in proclamations that the twenty-first century has moved past assumptions of a universal reason. Like Augustine’s drunkard who feasts on salty foods to magnify the pleasure of drink,6 the misologist can feel an exquisite pleasure in coupling reminders of the modern world’s loss of reason with the bare hint of the operation of a transpersonal reason.

But such suspicions can also come from reason itself. As Immanuel Kant so eloquently observes in the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, the impulse to retrace the reason(s) behind decaying institutions is nothing but the impulse of self-criticism, which inevitably turns back on itself (A xii). To the extent that such calls to and for reason demand that everything submit to critique, they cannot assume that reason is simply given, but must continually question their own justification. For Johann Gottlieb Fichte, this called for reason’s endless striving for self-justification and self-grounding, the very sound of which was already too exhausting for some readers to absorb. Two of the most impassioned of these readers were G. W. F. Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling, one-time seminary roommates and later professional collaborators who came of age intellectually during the waning years of Kant’s productive life and grew to appreciate both the achievements of human reason and the need for its suspension (Aufhebung). Frustrated by what Hegel would later dismiss as the age’s near-universal idle, indeterminate chatter about reason (H 20: 192, §181), both devoted substantial quantities of time and ink to working out exactly what it would mean to distinguish a general faculty of reason from a rule-bound understanding and then to showing how even this more general sort of intelligence is capable of steering us wrong. In a generation raised on both the promise of perennial Foucauldian critique and the disillusion of the American right’s appropriation of philosophical relativism, I suspect that many will find their nuanced approach at least attractive, and perhaps even timely, and it is the thesis of this book that despite the variations of its formulations, there is also truth to be found in Schelling and Hegel’s conception of a suspension of reason.

Suspension

To frame my discussion of reason (Vernunft) in the early writings of Schelling and Hegel in terms of its suspension (Aufheben)7 is already to risk a mistranslation. Such a reading not only risks reading their later realization of reason’s limitations back into their earlier texts, but even rests on a literal mistranslation. While the difficulty of translating the idealists’ term aufheben has been widely noted and has spawned such lexical disfigurements as Derrida’s relever8 and the English sublation, it is perhaps excessively irresponsible to render it with an English word usually used to translate another German term, aufschieben. And to magnify the violence, the distinction between the two words is clear even in German proverbial wisdom with the saying Aufgeschoben ist nicht aufgehoben—roughly, ‘Just because something has been suspended does not mean that it has been cancelled.’ But a fully adequate translation of aufheben is asking too much, as even the German word fails to capture everything Hegel and Schelling mean by it. As Hegel famously notes (H 11: 107), the word can mean both to discard and to raise to a higher level (both of which meanings can also be found in its root’s English cognate heave). But as the following chapters will show, Hegel means far more by aufheben than to discard and raise to a higher level, and a great deal of this added meaning is achieved through the dialectic of reason. And although Schelling does not explicitly highlight the two antithetical meanings of aufheben (and occasionally even deliberately ignores its connotations of preservation in his less than charitable reading of Hegel [S 10: 137]), he, too, gives it a vital role in his discussion of reason’s limitations, assigning it a spatial dimension beyond canceling and preserving.9

As such, despite its dubiousness, my translation of aufheben at least strives to be a virtuous one. On the other hand, to suspend is to put off, to take out of action in such a way that what is suspended maintains its force but is not permitted to put this force into effect. Thus the aforementioned proverb intends to say that what has been suspended has not necessarily been annihilated or canceled, but has merely been taken out of action. Undoubtedly, the temporal sense of postponement (Verschieben in German) predominates in such uses of suspension, but in Chapters 7 through 9 I will show how Hegel and Schelling rethink the Aufhebung of reason in spatial terms. By describing reason’s self-overthrowing spatially, they suspend the temporal sense of postponement and raise the spatial sense of preservation to a higher level.

In working through these arguments, it is useful to remember that ‘suspend’ also has a spatial meaning in English. While suspend is rarely used in English to refer to an act of lifting, it does signify allowing and encouraging something to persist in its already raised state and thus highlights Hegel and Schelling’s methodological charge to present distinctions as they first arise in reason and preserve their meaning even as philosophy grows increasingly complex (S 3: 331). What Hegel would come to call the dialectic, I will show in Chapter 4’s discussion of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, is not so much the active production of distinctions as the process of recalling and organizing distinctions already implicitly known. Since both philosophers explore the manifold ways that reason proves to be inadequate for the task it gives itself, this sense of suspension is vital in combating the aesthetic appeal of collapse.10 While skepticism has long been justified as a corrective to excessive philosophical ambition and as a test for solid systematic grounding, there is something compelling in systematic failure in its own right and consequently a tendency in contemporary philosophy to treat the exploration of these failures as an end in itself.11 As avid students of historical and biological decay, Schelling and Hegel were certainly no strangers to this allure of destruction, but perhaps precisely for this reason they were acutely attuned to how blandly stultifying its extension across all forms of thought could be. Thus they work to show that the suspension of reason entails not its obliteration, but its unwieldy hovering.

As such, their conception of suspension is useful not only for fighting off the post-Marxian conclusion that all dialectics are negative, but for complicating the post-Heideggerian conception of an abyss of reason. In the wake of Heidegger’s conclusion that Western metaphysics first became aware that it rests on an abyss (Abgrund) in the writings of Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel,12 a number of contemporary continental philosophers have gone to work exploring this claim. But while much has been made of Schelling’s ‘discovery’ of the abyssal character of thought13 and some commentators have even grudgingly attributed the same insight to Hegel,14 far too little attention has been paid to the location of the abyssal in Hegel and Schelling. When Schelling’s early works show that our understanding of nature is groundless so long as we seek to analyze it in terms of conditioned conditions (e.g., S 3: 101n), they are (as I show in Chapters 1 and 2) merely giving new emphasis to a point Kant and Fichte had already made. And when Hegel’s Phenomenology shows that desire is abyssal, that there is no basic drive (be it for survival, recognition, or externalization) underlying the infinity of perversions (Verkehrtheiten) that human behavior can assume, he is simply restating Schelling’s observations on the irreducibility of nature to a single force in the practical sphere—which both he and Schelling saw as fundamentally united with the theoretical. But Hegel and Schelling’s insight that reason can suspend these abysses, can suspend us over them, is one that is at best inchoate in Kant and Fichte. As Hegel and Schelling worked from 1795 to 1809 on clarifying how reason suspends the abysses in willing and understanding nature, they came to see this urge for suspension as itself something that needed to be suspended. But the fact that reason’s project is unfinishable does not imply that it is abyssal. Because talk of abysses always implies the lack of an external ground, descriptions of reason as abyssal miss the point. Hegel and Schelling’s central insight is not that reason lacks an adequate ground, but that its striving for unity and postulation of identity must be suspended by something that is both reason and its other. Reason is not only the freedom to suspend drives that have grown perverse, but is itself a structural precondition of perversion and thus must be open to suspension as a whole.

Hegel and Schelling?15

Given the recent flowering of slow and careful English-language readings of both Hegel and Schelling, a monograph that aims to treat both of them systematically, even if only on their development of a single concept, will likely seem quixotic to many. Since the concept of reason is so finely interwoven into nearly all of their texts, it seems impossible to follow its thread in both authors at once without compromising the integrity of the reading. While it is tempting to justify this merger by appealing to their common intellectual progenitors at the Tübingen Stift and close collaboration in the first few years of the nineteenth century on the Critical Journal of Philosophy, this would obscure the fact that their projects never became one (even during the period when Hegel took himself merely to be spelling out Schelling’s project) and that their readings of each other were often in fact violent misinterpretations. In Hegel’s case, this should come as no surprise to specialists who routinely turn to his Lectures on the History of Philosophy for examples of how even the most historically minded of philosophers reduces their favorite philosopher to a facile caricature, but it is equally true of Schelling’s willful misreading of Hegel’s system. Given the startling inability of these two friends to understand each other’s philosophical aims, it would be more than a stretch to assert that Hegel and Schelling were working to develop a single philosophical viewpoint.

And yet an account of the suspension of reason that ignored either of their contributions would not only be incomplete (which is probably inevitable in any case), but in many respects unintelligible. Their respective insights on the structure of this suspension are so tied up with insights that only the other made explicit, that a minimally coherent narrative entails discussing both of their contributions. In contrast, while the narrative I give doubtlessly could have been made richer by including still more contributions from Jacobi, Hölderlin, Herder, Reinhold, Kierkegaard, Fichte after 1799, and so on, I do not think their absence causes my argument to collapse in the same way that Schelling or Hegel’s absence would.

And lest I disappoint anyone hoping to discover who ultimately comes out ahead, I will say at the outset that I declare neither Schelling nor Hegel the victor. While the preternaturally precocious Schelling beat Hegel to many of the insights I discuss regarding both reason’s uniqueness and its limits, Hegel offers unique insights on the systematic implications of a suspension of reason and maintains the ambiguity of this need for suspension even as Schelling shies away from it in his later years. It would have been possible, simply by twisting my project a quarter turn, to show that Hegel bested Schelling in their mutual aim of conceiving a presuppositionless philosophy or that only Schelling succeeded in resuscitating a pre-Enlightenment sense of the tragedy of human existence, but my interest here lies with their accounts of the place and limitations of reason, and on this matter I have found no winner, but only what Schelling would call the indifference of their positions. My focus is not on how Hegel and Schelling encounter one another’s works, incorporating certain thoughts and defining themselves negatively against others, but on the common ground of their inquiries in a network of concerns they associate with reason.

This attention to their common ground in reason rather than the (often spurious) ways the two try to distinguish their respective systems from each other—such as Hegel’s rejection of the absolute in Schelling’s philosophy as ‘the night in which all cows are black’ (H 9: 17, §16) and Schelling’s condemnation of Hegel’s system for being a merely negative philosophy unconcerned with reality (S 10: 127)—allows us to go beyond some of the more calcified caricatures that have emerged to mark the distinction between them. In particular, it allows us to avoid labeling Schelling a loopy irrationalist or pseudoscientific charlatan and to refrain from challenging Hegel’s right to a throne atop philosophy that he never really claimed. Granted, both of these tendencies have been largely discredited in the last half century. In Germany Schelling has long been recognized as a forerunner of modern existentialism, while in English commentary Schelling’s willingness to question the primacy of reason has inspired some provocative work in post-Heideggerian thinkers.16 The English-language Hegel reception, on the other hand, has done an excellent job of recognizing and exploring Hegel’s claims regarding the inherent incompleteness of the project of the Phenomenology of Spirit.17

Yet despite all this progress, the importance of reason in guiding Schelling and Hegel’s various attempts at systems has not yet been fully explored. In their effort to distance him from Hegel, some contemporary readers of Schelling, for instance, mistake Schelling’s suspension of reason for its abandonment.18 And while it is natural for such readers to be somewhat defensive when confronting criticisms of Schelling, given the frequent wholesale rejection of his thinking based on the unsympathetic readings of Hegel and others, this does not justify ignoring the totalizing impulses of his Identity Philosophy or some of the truly misguided tangents in his Nature Philosophy. Equally unjustified is the inference from Hegel’s misleading statements on the ‘cunning’ of reason to the conclusion that Hegel presents a totalizing closure of philosophy. The question Schelling and Hegel put before us, I will show, is not whether philosophy should or should not be guided by reason, but when and how reason should be suspended.

Outline of the Whole

To this end, Chapters 1 and 2 will explore how reason emerges as a distinct power of thought in Kant, Fichte, and the earliest Schelling. Kant, Schelling, and (more ambivalently) Fichte all identify reason with the free activity of thought in general and thus assign it the power to actively distinguish itself from other, less free elements of cognition—especially the capacity to analyze and apply concepts that they call the understanding. By beginning philosophy with reason’s reflection on itself, all three decide in advance that reason is to be both the subject and the object of suspension, which occasionally leads in their writings (as in Hegel’s) to equivocations not only in grammatical structure, but even regarding the nature and function of reason. In certain contexts, for instance, they speak of reason as one of several human capacities, while in others the human subject drops out entirely and their thought can only be followed by placing reason itself in the subject position. Despite the difficulties these equivocations present, it would be a mistake to close off our discussion of reason by assuming a fixed functional definition and comparing how the German idealists fit this faculty into their systems at various stages in their development. Indeed, we will see in Chapter 1 that (for good reason) even the fastidiously categorical Kant did not maintain a fixed definition of reason. To define reason by its role in any faculty epistemology is not to suspend it, but to fail to allow it to distinguish itself as a unique form of striving. The suspension of reason only becomes meaningful when we grant it the freedom to define and redefine itself.

Accordingly, I make no hard distinctions between reason as it is in itself and reason as Hegel and Schelling delimit it. The texts I discuss each explore the range of possibilities for reason’s relationship to the whole of philosophy, and to this extent none is more correct than the others. After Chapter 1 and 2’s discussion of reason’s emergence as a distinct form of thinking, Chapter 3 traces how the three major works of Schelling’s Nature Philosophy develop an interpretation of reason as a form of organism and the ‘universal organism’ of nature as a manifestation of reason. Like an organism, reason for Schelling grows by incorporating external objects into itself and metabolizing them, but this also makes it vulnerable to disease and even poison. On the other hand, the later works of the Nature Philosophy also take nature to be governed by reason and thus attempt to show that its development has from its very beginning been directed toward something like human reason.

Chapter 4 studies Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, which aims to complement the Nature Philosophy by showing how reason develops from the pure immediacy of the ego to a structure complex enough to know its identity with the contingency and externality of nature. But in both this work and in Hegel’s essay on The Difference between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy, which I discuss in Chapter 5, doubts begin to emerge over whether reason can ground a unified system of philosophy. Even as Schelling and Hegel are first working out the methodical way that reason incorporates difference into itself, they are beginning to realize that this condemns reason to the despair of endless striving.

In Chapter 6, I recount how three major works of Schelling’s Identity Philosophy attempt to salvage the promise of a system of philosophy grounded in reason but can only do so by denying that there is anything external to reason. Ultimately, this route proved unsatisfying, and the completeness of its submersion of philosophy in reason convinced both Schelling and Hegel that any philosophy centered on reason was bound to prove false, limited, or even perverse.

Accordingly, one of the prevailing themes of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is the inability of various forms of reason to know or incorporate the world without remainder. Hegel’s immanent exploration of the assumption that the natural world and human communities develop in accord with an underlying reason shows not only that both of these realms are necessarily rife with contingencies, but that reason will never be able to identify itself fully with these contingencies. In Chapter 7 I discuss this theme in general terms as Hegel treats it in the Preface and final chapter of the Phenomenology, and in Chapter 8 I retrace more specifically the path of reason that Hegel discusses in his long chapter on ‘The Certainty and Truth of Reason,’ where he shows that reason’s theoretical activity will never grasp its own ground and its practical attempts to become this ground will inevitably result in perverse forms of disunity.

By the time he wrote his Philosophical Investigations of the Essence of Human Freedom, Schelling had arrived at many of the same conclusions, but he presents them in a radically different form. Rather than show that reason’s striving for self-grounding forces it to abandon its claim to constitute reality, Schelling begins with practical reason’s imperative of freedom and shows how the self-grounding instinct of reason falls by the wayside. In Chapter 9 I retrace his steps and show that Schelling is asking us to place reason on the periphery of philosophy, thus radically reconceiving his earlier projects. I take this arc from reason’s ascendance in the early texts of German idealism through its increasing complexity in the Nature Philosophy and System of Transcendental Idealism to the utterly simple absolute indifference of the Identity Philosophy not as an indication that Hegel and Schelling are growing nearer to the essence of reason, which they finally discover in Hegel’s Phenomenology and Schelling’s Freedom essay, but as a reminder of the various imperatives that reason carries with it as well as the need to suspend these imperatives. To do any less, to treat the moments of reason described before 1807 as ‘things of the past’19 or as meaningful only in light of their subsequent completion would dissolve the distinction between suspending and canceling preserved in our German proverb.

I conclude the book with two chapters on the place of reason in Hegel and Schelling’s later works. After their nearly simultaneous discoveries of the need for a suspension of reason, the two moved in opposite directions, with Hegel building his system around the continual renewal of this suspension and Schelling moving reason to the periphery of his project before coming back to it in the last decade of his life. While Hegel’s later work continued the labor of reason while still reminding himself and his readers of its insufficiency, Schelling came to wonder how we had become ensnared in reason in the first place. In the end, it is the simultaneous opposition and complementarity of these positions that I would like to keep alive. To attempt to get a purchase on the current debates over the place of reason by forcing a decision between them would be to allow the self-seeking instinct of reason to run unchecked and thus to ignore the insight that they share.