Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, Hegelianism was repeatedly read as the culmination of the onto-theological tradition in which the will to totality issues in the will to power, which, in turn, unleashes “the fury of destruction” in a holocaust that threatens to become all-consuming. In the wake of the Second World War and the shadow of the Cold War, everywhere people looked they detected what they believed to be totalizing systems that reduce differences—be they religious, racial, sexual, or political—to an identity that is inescapably repressive. As the culmination of the Western tradition, Hegelianism, many argued, is both one of the causes and an effect of hegemonic ideologies on the Left as well as the Right sides of the political spectrum. To counter philosophies of identity, critics developed philosophies of difference, which, contrary to expectation, issued in contrasting versions of an identity politics in which conflict is both inevitable and insurmountable. Many of Hegel’s most influential critics drew their inspiration from a misreading of Derridean différance as exclusive difference in which opposites can be neither mediated nor reconciled. As the impending threat shifts from totalitarianism to sectarianism, it is becoming increasingly clear that if oppositions can be neither negotiated nor mediated global catastrophe is all but inevitable.

Unlike his many epigones, Derrida always appreciated the complexity of Hegel’s philosophy and readily admitted that his own work would have been impossible without it. Concluding the opening chapter in Of Grammatology, he writes:

The horizon of absolute knowledge is the effacement of writing in the logos, the retrieval of the trace in parousia, the reappropriation of difference, the accomplishment of what I have elsewhere called the metaphysics of the proper. Yet, all that Hegel thought within this horizon, all, that is, except eschatology, may be reread as a meditation on writing. Hegel is also the thinker of irreducible difference. He rehabilitated thought as the memory productive of signs. And he reintroduced, as I shall try to show elsewhere, the essential necessity of the written trace in a philosophical—that is to say Socratic—discourse that had always believed it possible to do without it; the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing.¹

In an interview four years later, Derrida clarified and elaborated his position on Hegel’s writings. Noting that his own work involves an “infinitesimal and radical displacement” of Hegel’s philosophy, Derrida proceeds to explain:

We will never be finished with the reading or re-reading of Hegel, and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this point. In effect I believe that Hegel’s text is necessarily fissured; that it is something other than the circular closure of its representation. It is not reduced to a content of philosophemes, it also necessarily produces a powerful writing operation, a remainder of writing, whose strange relationship to the philosophical content of Hegel’s text must be reexamined, that is, the movement by means of which his text exceeds its meaning, permits itself to be turned away from, to return to, and to repeat itself outside of its self-identity.²

The fissure “within” Hegel’s text interrupts the circuit of return and thereby exposes an opening that makes possible the “movement by which the text exceeds itself.” By reading the Hegelian text against the grain, Derrida makes it possible to detect the activity of an infinite that is neither good nor bad but is something else, something other, which is virtually indistinguishable from nothing. To reread the Hegelian infinite through Derridean différance and at the same time to reread Derridean différance through the Hegelian differente Beziehung (differentiating relation).³ This double reading creates the possibility of glimpsing an infinite restlessness that is, perhaps, the restlessness of the infinite.

Hegel’s entire systematic enterprise turns on a distinction between understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft). Understanding, which is based upon the principle of noncontradiction, is the analytic activity by which one makes distinctions, establishes antitheses and discerns paradoxes. “Thought, as understanding,” Hegel argues, “sticks to fixed determinations and to the distinction of one thing from another: every such limited abstraction it treats as having a subsistence of its own.”⁴ Reason, by contrast, apprehends the dialectical interplay of differences; when rationally comprehended, differences are not exclusive but are codependent and, therefore, coevolve. In an early and important text, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, Hegel explains that in contrast to understanding,

the sole interest of reason is to transcend such rigid opposites. But this does not mean that reason is altogether opposed to opposition and limitation. For the necessary bifurcation is one factor in life. Life eternally forms itself by setting up oppositions, and totality at the highest vitality of living energy is only possible through its own restoration of the deepest separation. What reason opposes, rather, is just the absolute fixity, which the understanding gives to the dualism; and it does so all the more if the absolute opposites themselves originated in reason.⁵

The contrasting principles of Verstand and Vernunft lead to different interpretations of the infinite. While understanding conceives the finite and the infinite as mutually exclusive, reason comprehends their reciprocal interrelation. If the finite and the infinite are regarded as antithetical, the infinite is, in fact, limited and bounded by the finite. It is, in other words, a “finite” and therefore “bad” or “spurious infinite [Schlecht-Unendliche].” Through a dialectical reversal, the ostensible negativity of the finite and the positivity of the infinite become the positivity of finitude and the negativity of infinitude:

The infinite determined as such has present in it the finitude that is distinct from it; the former is the in-itself in this unity, and the latter is only determinateness, limit in it; but it is a limit, which is the sheer other of the in-itself, is its opposite; the infinite’s determination, which is the in-itself as such, is ruined by the addition of such a quality; it is thus a finitized infinite. Similarly, since the finite as such is only the negation of the in-itself, but by reason of this unity also has its opposite present in it, it is exalted and, so to say, infinitely exalted above its worth; the finite is posited as the infinitized finite.⁶

The finite, in other words, appears to be independent and self-subsistent and the in-finite seems to be dependent on and conditioned by firmly established finitude. According to the dialectical principle of reason, the finitude of Verstand negates itself in its very assertion. “The being of the finite,” Hegel argues, “is not only its being, but is also the being of the infinite.”⁷ Finitude includes within itself its opposite as the indispensable presupposition and essential ground of its own being:

The finite itself in being elevated into the infinite is no sense acted upon by an alien force; on the contrary, it is its nature to be related to itself as limitation, both limitation as such and as an ought, and to transcend such limitation and to be beyond it. It is not in the sublating of finitude as a whole that infinity in general comes to be; the truth is rather that the finite is only this through its own nature to become infinite.⁸

Infinitude, by contrast, necessarily includes finitude within itself. While the finite realizes itself in and through the infinite, infinitude renders itself infinite in relation to finitude. Then finite is not merely other than or opposed to the infinite but is actually an internal dimension of the infinite. The infinite, therefore, “is on its own account just as much finite as infinite”:

Thus both finite and infinite are this movement in which each returns to itself through its negation; they are only as mediation within themselves, and the affirmative of each contains the negative of each and is the negation of the negation. They are thus a result, and hence not what they are in the determination of their beginning; the finite is not a determinate being on its side, and the infinite a determinate being or being-in-itself beyond the determinate being, that is, beyond the being determined as finite…. They occur … only as moments of a whole and … come on the scene only by means of their opposite, but essentially also by means of the sublation of their opposite.⁹

But is this movement truly circuitous and do the finite and infinite actually form moments of an integral whole? If the Hegelian text is fissured as if from within, there might be an alternative infinite, which could be conceived as the inconceivable mean that is neither either/or nor both/and? Might the very infinity of the infinite imply disruptions, which, though somehow “within,” can be neither assimilated nor comprehended by any process designed to contain them? Might this infinite restlessness be Hegel’s Absolute, which, contrary to his own intentions can be itself only by not being itself? And might Derridean deconstruction be nothing other than the ceaseless reinscription of the point Hegel made without fully realizing what he was doing? To answer these questions, it is necessary to trace a genealogical trajectory that leads from différance back to Heidegger, Schelling, Schlegel, Fichte, and finally Kant. Weaving together what Kant and post-Kantians were saying by not saying, Heidegger exposes the nonoriginal “origin” of deconstruction and thereby shows that the infinitesimal displacement that Derrida claims to effect is already in play in Hegel’s system. This play, which “must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence,” is the infinite restlessness of the infinite.¹⁰

In 1784, Kant published a brief but influential essay entitled “What Is Enlightenment?” in which he stresses the interrelation of reason and freedom:

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!” That is the motto of enlightenment.¹¹

This definition of enlightenment turns on his distinction between heteronomy, which derives from the Greek hetero (other) and nomos (law), and autonomy, which derives from auto (self) and nomos. While heteronomy involves determination by another, for example, God, sovereign, parent, or teacher, autonomy is the self-determination or self-legislation through which the subject gives itself the law. Far from arbitrary, free actions are, from this point of view, both rational and normative. Though reason is deployed both theoretically (in thinking) and practically (in acting), Kant insists on the primacy of the practical. Reason and will are inseparable: reason is essentially an activity, and if activity is free, it must be reasonable. In the second critique, Kant underscores the primacy of practical reason by arguing that freedom is the pivotal notion for his entire philosophy: “The concept of freedom, in so far as its reality is proved by an apodictic law of practical reason, is the keystone of the whole architecture of the system and even of speculative reason.”¹² Freedom, however, proves to be a complex keystone because it harbors an irreducible ambiguity. The more closely one examines Kant’s argument, the clearer it becomes that freedom not only involves autonomy but also entails what can best be described as “an-archy.” In this context, the term “an-archy” does not mean the absence of form and thus disorder, confusion, or chaos. Rather, an-archy suggests the absence (an, without) of any beginning (arkhe) and by extension the lack of an originary foundation. That which is anarchic is groundless. While Kant does not always seem to recognize the significant implications of his argument, his critical philosophy demonstrates that autonomy actually presupposes an-archy, which is the nonfoundational foundation or the groundless ground of the law that the self-legislating subject gives to itself. To understand the importance of these two aspects of freedom, it is necessary to consider why autonomy is impossible apart from anarchy.

The notion of autonomy is the structural principle around which all three critiques are organized. The theoretical and practical deployments of reason are isomorphic: a universal principle of reason is brought to bear on particular sense data. While theoretical reason organizes the sensible manifold of intuition through a priori forms of intuition and categories of understanding, practical reason controls idiosyncratic sensible inclinations through universal moral principles. The aim of the Critique of Judgment is to reconcile the oppositions and overcome the contradictions within as well as between theoretical and practical reason. The critical faculty in the architectonic of reason in all of its deployments is the imagination.

Kant’s three critiques are directed at the triple threat of skepticism, determinism, and atheism. His critical philosophy prepares the way for the defense of religion in terms of moral activity rather than theoretical speculation. Every aspect of his argument is organized around a series of binary oppositions, which he both articulates and attempts to reconcile:

Autonomy/Heteronomy

Freedom/Determinism

Reason/Sensibility

A priori/A posteriori

Universality/Particularity

Objectivity/Subjectivity

Obligation/Inclination

Form/Matter

Kant’s immediate successors were divided between those who thought he had not gone far enough and those who thought he had gone too far in formulating a comprehensive philosophical system that could mediate these oppositions. The former argued that his reconciliation of opposites remained incomplete and the latter insisted that his effort to synthesize these opposites was misguided because it obscured the irreducible contradictions and inescapable aporiae inherent in thought and life. The unresolved tensions in Kant’s work set the terms of debate in the nineteenth century and continue to influence critical reflection and practice down to the present day.

It has frequently been observed that Kant’s “Copernican revolution” is the theoretical equivalent of the political revolution in France. Rarely noted but no less important is the fact that one of Kant’s most significant philosophical innovations was his translation of ontology into epistemology. To understand the implications of this development, it is necessary to trace the religio-philosophical genealogy of Kant’s epistemology all the way back to Plato and early Christian apologists. In Plato’s myth of origin, the world is created by a Demiurge who brings together unchanging forms with the undifferentiated flux of matter. Within this framework the activity of creation is a process of formation through which order is brought to chaos. Early Christian apologists, eager to demonstrate that their religion did not involve unsophisticated superstition, which was politically subversive, reinterpreted fundamental theological principles in terms of Platonic philosophy. Instead of an intermediate being situated between eternity and time like the Demiurge, the Christian God, they argued, is the eternal creator of the world. For these apologists, Platonic forms become the mind of God or the Logos, which is understood as the eternal Son of the divine Father. Inasmuch as the Father always creates through the Son, the world is an expression of the divine Logos and is, therefore, logical, reasonable, or, in a more recent idiom, logocentric. Human reason is the reflection of the Logos though which people can comprehend the world God has created. In Kant’s account of theoretical reason, Platonic forms and the divine Logos become the forms of intuition and categories of understanding, and the undifferentiated flux of matter becomes the sensible manifold of intuition. Just as Platonic forms and the divine Logos are universal and unchanging, so the forms of intuition and categories of understanding are a priori rather than a posteriori and are therefore universal.

To understand the far-reaching implications of Kant’s analysis, it is helpful to translate his epistemology into contemporary information theory. From this point of view, the mind is programmed to process data, which are presented through multiple sensory inputs. Knowledge results from the synthesis of the universal forms of intuition and categories of understanding and the particular data of sense experience. This information processing brings order to chaos by unifying the multiplicity of data to form coherent patterns. The agency through which this synthesis occurs is the imagination—die Einbildungskraft. “Now, since every appearance contains a manifold,” Kant argues, “and since different perceptions therefore occur in the mind separately and singly, a combination of them, such as they cannot have in sense itself, is demanded. There must therefore exist in us an active faculty for the synthesis of this manifold. To this faculty I give the title, imagination. Its action, when immediately directed to perceptions, I entitled apprehension. Since imagination has to bring the manifold of intuition into the form of an image, it must previously have taken the impressions up into its activity, that is, have apprehended them.”¹³ Inasmuch as the imagination articulates objects, it is the necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge and as such is transcendental. To fulfill this function, the imagination must operate at the edge or on the border between understanding and sensation. Kant writes: “Obviously there must be some third thing, which is homogeneous on the one hand with the category, and on the other hand with the appearance, and which thus makes the application of the former to the latter possible. This mediating representation must be pure, that is, void of all empirical content, and yet at the same time, while it must be in one respect intellectual, it must in another be sensible. Such a representation is the transcendental schema.”¹⁴ Kant describes the operation of the imagination as the “schematization of the categories.” In a manner reminiscent of the transcendent Demiurge who brings form to chaos and the transcendent God who creates through His Logos, the imagination deploys transcendental schemata to organize experience and thereby create the world in which we dwell.¹⁵

For Kant, all knowledge is synthetic and thus presupposes unification at every level. The data of experience are first processed through the forms of intuition, that is, space and time, and then organized to conform to the categories of understanding through the transcendental imagination. The diverse objects of understanding are, then, unified through what Kant labels the three interrelated Ideas of reason—God, self, and world. Since these Ideas do not arise from and cannot be verified by sense experience, they do not constitute knowledge. Their function is regulative rather than constitutive, that is, they are useful heuristic devices but do not necessarily tell us anything about the world.

Kant was convinced that his analysis of reason provided a response to every version of skepticism and thereby secured the possibility of genuine knowledge. Since the categories of understanding are universal, the knowledge they yield is objective. The data of experience are different but everybody processes them the same way. The principle of causality, for example, is not the result of arbitrary subjective habit but expresses the necessary structure of the human mind. It is clear, however, that such “objectivity” remains subjective because it tells us nothing certain about the way things really are in themselves. Kant’s most incisive critics argued that instead of establishing the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, he actually exposed the conditions of the impossibility of knowledge. Kant responded by insisting that this limitation is really an advantage. By limiting knowledge of the world, he thought he had made room for the rational affirmation of the freedom of the self and the existence of God.

Kant’s argument in Critique of Practical Reason is strictly parallel to his argument in Critique of Pure Reason. Reason is one though its deployment is triune. In moving from theory to practice, the universal categories of understanding become the universal moral law, and the sensible manifold of intuition becomes multiple sensory intuitions and conflicting sensual desires. The “fundamental law of pure practical reason,” Kant argues, is: “To act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle establishing a universal law.” He takes this law to be “a fact of reason,” which is “plain to all.”¹⁶ Just as the first critique is devoted to ascertaining the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, so the second critique seeks to establish the necessary presuppositions of moral activity. In his definitive study, Between Kant and Hegel, Dieter Henrich writes: “Kant had already shown that the concept of mind as the subject of knowledge is not possible without the idea of a world that laws govern. Thus a certain concept of the mind implies a conception, an ‘image’ of the world. We don’t have a concept of mind unless we see that the concept of the world is already implied in the self-understanding of the mind. In sum, to develop a conceptual framework for the interpretation of the mind that is based only on mental activity leads directly to the insight that mental activity always implies a world within which such activity occurs.”¹⁷ The exercise of practical reason entails a moral Weltanschuauung, which, Kant maintains, is impossible apart from three postulates: freedom, God, and immortality. Freedom, I have noted, is “the keystone to the whole architecture of the system of pure reason and even of speculative reason.” While the limitation of the causality and, by extension, determinism, to a law of the mind preserves the possibility of freedom, the fact of the moral law implies its actuality. In Kant’s terms, “freedom is the ratio essendi of the moral law” and the moral law is “the ratio cognoscendi of freedom.”¹⁸ If the subject is not free, moral activity is impossible. In this context, Kant defines freedom as autonomy:

The autonomy of the will is the sole principle of all moral laws and of duties conforming to them; heteronomy of choice, on the other hand, not only does not establish any obligation but is opposed to the principle of duty and to the morality of the will.

The sole principle of morality consists in independence from all material law (i.e., a desired object) and in the accompanying determination of choice by the mere form of giving universal law, which a maxim must be capable of having. That independence, however, is freedom in the negative sense, while this intrinsic legislation of pure and thus practical reason is freedom in the positive sense. Therefore, the moral law expresses nothing else than the autonomy of the pure practical reason, i.e., freedom.¹⁹

In moral activity, the individual agent regulates personal inclinations and desires through the universal moral law. For an action to be moral, the will cannot be influenced by either desired objects or external pressures but must be determined by nothing other than itself.

While moral action cannot be determined by an object, it is nonetheless unavoidably intentional and, therefore, necessarily entails an object or more precisely an objective. The sole legitimate object of moral action is the summum bonum, which Kant defines as happiness proportionate to virtue: “Happiness is the condition of a rational being in the world, in whose whole existence everything goes according to wish and will. It thus rests on the harmony of nature with his entire end and with the essential determining ground of his will.” If happiness is the conformity of will and world, it can only be brought about through a being wise enough to discern moral intention and powerful enough to control the natural world. Only God meets these requirements. Moral activity, therefore, presupposes a moral governor who actualizes “the Kingdom of God in which nature and morality come into harmony.” It is important to note that while Kant’s God is a moral governor, He is not himself a moral being because God’s duty and desire are never in conflict. In terms Nietzsche uses in a different though related context, God is “beyond good and evil.” Human beings, by contrast, are moral because they never are what they ought to be. When not deceiving himself and others, Kant’s moral agent confesses: I am what I am not. The best for which such a divided self can hope is infinite progress in moral development, which is impossible apart from personal immortality. Summarizing the import of the three postulates of practical reason, Kant concludes: “If, therefore, the highest good is impossible according to practical rules, then the moral law, which commands that it be furthered, must be fantastic, directed to empty imaginary ends, and consequently inherently false.”²⁰ Taken together, freedom, God, and immortality provide a schema in which moral action appears to be reasonable, and the world, therefore, makes sense.

Kant realized that his interpretation of reason in both its theoretical and practical deployments deepens the contradictions of subjectivity by inwardizing the conflict between the various binary opposites he articulates. With the movement from heteronomy to autonomy, universality, which had been externally imposed, is inwardly legislated. In the third critique, devoted to aesthetic judgment, Kant attempts to mediate these oppositions through the notion of inner teleology. In contrast to every form of utility and instrumentality in which means and ends are externally related, inner teleology involves what Kant describes as “purposiveness without purpose” in which means and ends are reciprocally related in such a way that each becomes itself in and through the other and neither can be itself apart from the other. Kant illustrates this idea by describing the interplay of whole and part in the work of art:

The parts of the thing combine of themselves into the unity of a whole by being reciprocally cause and effect of their form. For this is the only way in which it is possible that the idea of the whole may conversely, or reciprocally, determine, in its turn the form and combination of all the parts, not as cause—for that would make it an art product—but as the epistemological basis upon which the systematic unity of the form and combination of all the manifold contained in the given matter become cognizable for the person estimating it.²¹

Though not immediately obvious, this formulation of inner teleology marks a tipping point in cultural and social history whose ramifications are still emerging. In hindsight it is clear that the nineteenth century began with the 1790 publication of the Critique of Judgment. The distinction between external and internal teleology is the philosophical articulation of the transition from a mechanical to an organic schema for interpreting the world. What Kant discovered is the principle of constitutive relationality in which identity is differential rather than oppositional. While the immediate implications of this insight were worked out by romantic artists and idealistic philosophers during the closing decade of the eighteenth century and early years of the nineteenth century, the structure Kant identifies not only defines modern and postmodern art but also operates in today’s information networks and financial markets and anticipates current theories of biological organisms as well as the nature of life itself. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that Kant offers two examples of inner teleology—beautiful works of art and living organisms.

The third critique extends the principle of autonomy from theoretical and practical reason to the work of art understood as both the process of production and the product produced. In contrast to art produced for the market, which is utilitarian and as such has an extrinsic purpose, fine art is not produced for any external end but is created for its own sake. Never referring to anything other than itself, high art is art about art and is, therefore, self-referential and thus self-reflexive. But while seeming to be completely autonomous, the structures of self-referentiality and self-reflexivity are considerably more complicated than they initially appear because they presuppose something they cannot assimilate. The interruption of the self-referential circuit of reflexivity exposes aporiae, which are the condition of creativity. The pivot upon which this analysis turns is the interplay of the imagination and representation in the production of self-consciousness.

For the young writers, artists, and philosophers gathered in Jena in the years immediately following the publication of the third critique, Kant’s critical philosophy opened the possibility of completing what began in France by shifting the revolutionary struggle from politics to philosophy and poetry. In a world without adequate social, political, and economic institutions and ravaged by the early stages of industrialization, writers and critics sought to overcome personal alienation and social fragmentation by cultivating new forms of unification and integration. Kant glimpsed the possibility of a unity that nourished rather than repressed differences in his account of the reciprocity of inner teleology but was unable to carry his argument through to its necessary conclusion. Given the limitation of knowledge established in the first critique, he was forced to restrict his notion of beauty to a regulative idea, which might or might not describe the way things really are in the actual world. Since the work of art figures reconciliation as nothing more than an unrealizable idea, it actually deepens the oppositions and fragmentation it is designed to overcome. To accomplish what both the French and the Kantian revolutions leave undone, romantics and idealists argue, it is necessary to realize the Idea by transforming the world into a work of art. As apocalypse by revolution gave way to apocalypse by imagination and cognition, consciousness turned inward and became self-conscious. In pushing itself to its limit, however, autonomous self-consciousness becomes an-archic. That is to say, the subject discovers that it has emerged from a groundless ground that it can never fathom. This fissure creates the opening for the postmodern critique of modernism. Contrary to expectation, the transition from autonomy to an-archy, which is the condition of the possibility of postmodernism, passes through the notion of the infinite elaborated in Hegel’s speculative system.

Kant’s successors realized that the inner teleological or self-referential structure he identified discloses the self-reflexive structure of self-consciousness. In self-consciousness, the subject (S^S) turns back on itself by becoming an object (S^o) to itself. Self-as-subject and self-as-object are reciprocally related in such a way that each becomes itself through the other and neither can be itself apart from the other. The structure of self-relation constitutive of self-conscious subjectivity presupposes the activity of self-representation (figure 1). Though not immediately obvious, precisely at the point where self-consciousness seems to be complete, it approaches its constitutive limit. Henrich identifies the crucial question in commenting on Fichte’s reading of Kant: “We might cast this question another way: Will ontological discourse always make use of the premise that something can be said about the mind that is not of the mind, and that the mind can say something that is of the mind about what is not of the mind, so that the two discourses can never be derived from one another—or even form a third discourse, thereby precluding any fully intelligible linear formulation?”²² Henrich implies that the impossibility of explaining self-consciousness through linear models does not necessarily mean that the self-reflexivity of self-consciousness is circular. To the contrary, when consciousness turns back on itself, it discovers a lacuna without which it is impossible but with which it is incomplete. The pressing question is: where does that which the self-conscious subject represents to itself come from? If self-as-subject and self-as-object are codependent, neither can be the originary cause of the other. The activity of self-representation, therefore, presupposes a more primordial presentation, which must originate elsewhere. This elsewhere is the limit that is impossible to think but without which thinking is impossible. “Thinking,” as Jean-Luc Nancy explains in another context, “is always thinking on the limit. The limit of comprehending defines thinking. Thus thinking is always thinking about the incomprehensible—about this incomprehensible that ‘belongs’ to every comprehending, as its own limit.”²³ This limit is the edge of chaos where order simultaneously dissolves and emerges. To understand what occurs along this border, it is necessary to consider the dynamics of representation in more detail.

The question of representation—Vorstellung—runs through all three critiques. In the first critique, Kant argues: “A concept [Begriff] formed from notions [Notio] and transcending the possibility of experience is an idea [Idee] or concept of reason.”²⁴ In the exercise of practical reason, Ideas that lie beyond experience and hence remain regulative are actualized as they become practically effective in moral activity. But postulates can no more be experienced than ideas and, therefore, yield no knowledge even though they are rational. An Idea or a postulate, Rodolphe Gasché explains, “is a representation by a concept of the concepts that serve to represent representation with consciousness”:

Representation here translates the German Vorstellung, a term Kant uses to designate the operation by which the different faculties that constitute the mind bring their respective objects before themselves. Yet when Kant claims that in spite of the impossibility of intuitively representing (and thus knowing) the ideas, they nonetheless play a decisive role for in the realm of cognition, or that in the moral realm they acquire an at least partial concretization, he broaches the question of the becoming present of the highest, but intuitively unpresentable representation that is the idea. This is the problem of the presentation, or Darstellung of the idea, and it is rigorously distinct from that of representation. The issue is no longer how to depict, articulate, or illustrate something already present yet resisting adequate discursive or figural expression, but of how something acquires presence—reality, actuality, effectiveness—in the first place. The question of Darstellung centers on the coming into presence, or occurring, of the ideas.²⁵

Coming into presence (Darstellung) is the condition of the possibility of representation (Vorstellung). But how does such presencing or presentation occur?

In his analysis of Hegel’s concept of experience, Heidegger suggests a possible answer to this question when commenting on Hegel’s claim that “science, in making its appearance, is an appearance itself”:

The appearance is the authentic presence itself: the parousia of the Absolute. In keeping with its absoluteness, the Absolute is with us of its own accord. In its will to be with us, the Absolute is being present. In itself, thus bringing itself forward, the Absolute is for itself. For the sake of the will of the parousia alone, the presentation of knowledge as phenomenon is necessary. The presentation is bound to remain turned toward the will of the Absolute. The presentation is itself a willing [emphasis added], that is, not just a wishing and striving but the action itself, if it pulls itself together within its nature.²⁶

This remarkable insight complicates Hegelianism in a way that opens it up as if from within. Far from a closed system, which as a stable structure would be the embodiment of the Logos, the Hegelian Absolute here appears to be an infinitely restless will that wills itself in willing everything that emerges in nature and history and wills everything that exists in willing itself. Heidegger explains the implications of this reading of Hegel when he interprets the inconceivability of freedom in Kant’s philosophy in a way that points toward his own account of the groundless ground of Being: “The only thing that we comprehend is its incomprehensibility. Freedom’s incomprehensibility consists in the fact that it resists comprehension since it is freedom that transposes us into the realization of Being, not in the mere representation of it.”²⁷

The interplay of Darstellung (presentation) and Vorstellung (representation) occurs through the activity of Einbildungskraft (imagination). The etymology of Einbildungskraft is important for Kant’s argument as well as its elaboration by his followers. Bild means picture, image, likeness, or representation, and Bildung means formation, forming, generation, and by extension culture as well as education. The verb bilden means to form, fashion, shape, mold, or construct. Finally, Ein means one. Einbildungskraft, then, is the activity of formation or construction by which something is fashioned into a unified image or representation. The multiple nuances of Einbildungskraft are captured in the English word “figure.” “Figure,” which is both a noun and a verb, derives from the Latin figura (form, shape, figure). In addition to form or shape, “figure” means the outline or silhouette of a thing as well as a pictorial or sculptural representation. A figure also refers to a diagram, pattern, design, and number. The verb “to figure” means to shape or form something, to make a likeness of, depict, represent, and to adorn with design or figures. In mathematics, to figure is to calculate or compute. Finally, “to figure” can mean both to take into consideration, to solve, decipher, comprehend, and in a more recent twist, to fail to solve, decipher, comprehend, as in “Go figure!” Figuration, by extension, means the act of forming something into a particular shape. What makes the words “figure,” “figuring,” and “figuration” so interesting and useful is the intersection of the three threads of meaning: form (object), forming (activity), and comprehending or failing to comprehend (thinking or reflecting). Kant’s account of the imagination involves all three of these meanings—the imagination figures in all three senses of the word.

While Kant clearly and consistently distinguishes the theoretical and practical uses of reason, I have noted that he insists on the “primacy of practical reason.” Cognition presupposes volition but willing does not necessarily presuppose thinking. The imbrication of thinking and willing lies at the heart of the imagination. In his analysis of aesthetic judgment in the third critique, Kant offers a definition of the imagination that proved decisive for many later writers, artists, philosophers, and theologians: “If, now, imagination must in the judgment of taste be regarded in its freedom, then, to begin with, it is not taken as reproductive as in subjection to the laws of association, but as productive in exerting an activity of its own (as originator of arbitrary forms of possible intuitions).”²⁸ The imagination, then, involves two interrelated activities, which Kant describes as productive and reproductive. In its productive modality, the imagination figures forms that the reproductive imagination combines and recombines to create the schemata that organize the noisy data of experience into comprehensible patterns. Inasmuch as the imagination (Ein-bildungs-kraft) is the activity of formation (bilden/Bildung), it is, in effect, an in-formation process. Information and noise, as we have already discovered, are not opposites but are codependent: information is noise in-formation and new information disrupts old patterns to create noise (figure 2).

The imagination both fashions schemata that organize experience and disrupts and dislocates stabilizing structures. The figures that the productive imagination forms are arbitrary insofar as they are not determined by other figures but are freely formed and thus original. Freedom, in other words, is the condition of the possibility of the imagination and, therefore, of knowledge as well. Fichte was the first to recognize implications of this interpretation of the imagination that Kant himself did not fully realize. In The Science of Knowledge, he argues:

Our doctrine here is therefore that all reality—for us being understood, as it cannot be otherwise understood in a system of transcendental philosophy—is brought forth solely by the imagination…. Yet if it is now proved, as the present system claims to prove it, that this act of imagination forms the basis for the possibility of our consciousness, our life, our existence for ourselves, that is, our existence as selves, then it cannot be eliminated unless we are to abstract from the self; which is a contradiction, since it is impossible that what does the abstracting should abstract from itself.

I will return to the seemingly outrageous claim that the imagination is the basis of all reality in the next section. At this point, it is important to understand why consciousness presupposes the imagination. The argument once again turns on the relation between Darstellung and Vorstellung. Theoretical and practical reason are impossible apart from representations. Re-presentation, however, is impossible apart from antecedently given data (Latin datum, something given; from do, dare, to give). The question, then, becomes: What gives? How does Darstellung occur? How do representations emerge? How are figures figured? According to Fichte, presentation is an act that “occurs with absolute spontaneity” and, therefore, Darstellung is “grounded” in freedom. Such freedom is not the freedom of subjectivity but the freedom from subjectivity through which both subjectivity and objectivity are posited or given.

While autonomy is self-grounded, an-archy is groundless. It “is not the diffraction of a principle, nor the multiple effect of a cause, but is the an-archy—the origin removed from every logic of origin, from every archaeology.”²⁹ Heidegger describes the an-archy of freedom glimpsed in the presentational activity of the imagination as an abyss. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, he explains: “In the radicalism of his questions, Kant brought the ‘possibility’ of metaphysics to the abyss. He saw the unknown. He had to shrink back. It was not just that the transcendental power of the imagination frightened him, but rather that in between [the two editions of the first critique] pure reason as reason drew him increasingly under its spell.”³⁰ This abyss or Abgrund from which all determination emerges is the groundless ground that is indistinguishable from nothing. Such an unfathomable ground is the no-thing on which every foundation founders. Hegel explains the relationship between nothingness and freedom: “In its highest form of explication nothingness would be freedom. But this highest form is negativity insofar as it inwardly deepens itself to its highest intensity; and in this way it is itself affirmation—indeed absolute affirmation.”³¹ Negativity is affirmative insofar as it is the condition of creative emergence of everything that exists. Just as God creates freely ex nihilo, so the productive imagination creates freely out of nothing.

In Kant’s doctrine of the imagination, theology becomes anthropology in a way that subverts the simple opposition between word and deed or structure and event. As word issues from will, so structure emerges through event. This process is (the) infinite. Spirit, Hegel argues, “is not an inert being but, on the contrary, is absolutely restless being, pure activity, the negating or ideality of every fixed determination of the understanding; not abstractly simple but, in its simplicity, at the same time distinguishes itself from itself; not an essence that is already finished and complete before its manifestation, hiding itself behind its appearances, but an essence that is truly actual only through the determinate forms of its necessary self-manifestation.”³² This interpretation of the will further deepens the contradictions of subjectivity. Since the will “is actual only through the determinate forms of its necessary self-manifestation,” it can be itself only in and through its particular instantiations. While Kant’s analysis brings together universality (i.e., categories and the moral law) and particularity (sense data and sensible inclinations), Hegel demonstrates that inasmuch as the will is inescapably active, the universal (will) is in itself particular (i.e., determinate) and particulars (determinations) are in themselves universal (i.e., instantiations of the will). So understood, the subject can be itself only by not being itself. When interpreted in this way, the will is not a unified self-identical ground but is the play of differences that can be itself only by always being other than itself. The noncoincidence of the self with itself issues in its infinite restlessness. Heidegger brings the argument full circle by not closing the loop of self-reflexivity: “This original, essential constitution of humankind, ‘rooted’ in the transcendental power of the imagination, is the ‘unknown’ into which Kant must have looked if he spoke of the ‘root unknown to us,’ for the unknown is not that of which we simply know nothing. Rather, it is what pushes against us as something disquieting in what is known.”³³ The analysis of the transcendental power of the imagination “reveals” the concealment, which is the origin of the work of art.

Fichte, we have seen, makes the seemingly implausible claim that the imagination is the basis of objective as well as subjective reality. From this point of view, the world is, in effect, a work of art. Such a comprehensive notion of the imagination only makes sense if we have an expanded notion of art. Art, as Heidegger has learned from Kant and Fichte, is inescapably poetic. The word “poetic” derives from the Greek poiesis (poiein), which means a making or creation. So understood, poiesis is not limited to poetry in the traditional sense but involves all productive and creative activity. Inspired by the third critique but convinced that it did not go far enough, romantic philosophers and poets extended Kant’s analysis of the imagination beyond the bounds of the human until it became a creative cosmic principle. Schlegel makes this point concisely in his Athenaeum Fragments: “No poetry, no reality. Just as there is, despite all the senses, no external world without the imagination.”³⁴ Jena Romantics identified three distinct but related aspects of poetry:

1. The restricted literary meaning of poetic literature in verse or prose.

2. A faculty of the mind that mediates sensation, understanding, and reason.

3. A cosmic principle informing the entire universe.³⁵

As the expression of the productive imagination, poiesis is the “putting-into-form of form” or the figuring of figure. In The Philosophy of Art, Schelling turns to the notion of genius to explain poiesis: “The real side of genius, or that unity that constitutes the informing of the infinite into the finite, can be called poesy in the narrower sense; the ideal side, or that unity that constitutes the informing of the finite into the infinite, can be called the art within art.” The work of art is not only the created product but is more importantly the creative process through which any determinate form emerges. If the imagination is the activity of figuring, which delimits figures, then it is, in effect, an in-formation process that occurs wherever figures are articulated. The so-called natural world is a work of art de-signed by an anonymous artist. Wherever forms are figured, the imagination is active. In other words, the imagination is not merely a subjective process but is also the creative origin of the so-called natural world.

Insofar as objectivity and subjectivity emerge in and through the same information process, they are isomorphic. The formal identity-within-difference and difference-within-identity of subject and object make knowledge possible. If knowledge is to be something other than a projection or construction of human schemata, the structure and operation of the mind and the world must be the same. In knowing the world, the subject knows itself, and in the subject’s self-consciousness, the world becomes aware of itself. Through the self-reflexivity of the subject, the figurative process of the world bends back on itself and manifests itself to itself. This is implied in Kant’s account of genius: “Genius is the talent (natural endowment), which gives the rule to art. Since talent, as the innate productive activity of the artists, belongs to nature, we may put it this way: Genius is the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature gives rule to art.”³⁶ Insofar as the activity of the genius is “natural,” nature manifests itself to itself in the work of art. The most important point to stress in this context is that such self-manifestation is always incomplete and, thus, self-reflexivity is inevitably short-circuited. Since the groundless ground of the imagination can never be fathomed, knowledge and self-consciousness are necessarily incomplete and must constantly be revised and reformulated. Far from an insufficiency, the lacuna, which is constitutive of all knowledge and every figure, is infinitely generative. As Blanchot observes when commenting on Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragments: “The poet becomes the future of humankind at the moment when, no longer being anything—anything but one who knows himself to be a poet—he designates in this knowledge for which he is intimately responsible the site wherein poetry will no longer be content to produce the beautiful, determinate works, but rather will produce itself in a movement without term and without determination.”³⁷ When the movement of the imagination is without term, the conversation becomes infinite.

The in-finity of the work of art is the unending process of its own production. The work (verb) of art is the creative activity through which determinate works (noun) of art emerge. As the formation of form or figuring of figure, art is the infinite process of creative emergence. Here production is autoproduction and as such is autotelic; the work of art, in other words, is purposeless or has no purpose other than itself. This infinite process is both complete/closed and incomplete/open—it is complete/closed insofar as it always becomes itself in and through itself and it is incomplete/open insofar as it can become itself only by becoming other than itself and, thus, never secures its own identity. In his book Hegel: The Restlessness of the Infinite, Jean-Luc Nancy explains:

Now, there is no thing—neither being nor thought—that is not determined. But becoming is not a process that leads to another thing, because it is the condition of everything. Its absolute restlessness is itself the determination of the absolute. Becoming is quite exactly absolution: the detachment of each thing from its determination, as well as the detachment of the Whole in its determination. And it is thus that the absolute is what it is: equal to itself and, consequently, in absolute repose—but it is so only thus, quite exactly as non-repose. And the process or progress of the absolute is an infinite process or progress.³⁸

The structure of this infinite process is isomorphic with the structure of the creative imagination. Since creativity is “grounded” in the groundless abyss of nothing, its expression is always new. As Schlegel insists, “creative art is still in the process of becoming, and it is even its essence proper never to obtain perfection, to be always and eternally new; no theory of art can exhaust it, it alone is infinite just as it alone is free.”³⁹ Since the imagination is what it is by becoming other than itself, it constantly “strives,” “hovers,” “oscillates” between opposites it simultaneously brings together and holds apart. “Being free,” according to Novalis, “means to waver between extremes that have to be united and also to be separated necessarily. From the light point of the wavering radiates all reality; object and subject exist through it, not it through them.”⁴⁰ Another name for this oscillation is “altarity.” The neologism “altarity” harbors three implications that are important in this context. First, altarity specifies the endless alternation through which binary and dialectical differences are articulated in such a way that their oppositions are overcome. Second, altarity names the unnameable outside that is inside every system, structure, and schema as its necessary condition. As such, it is the irreducible trace that marks and remarks the openness and incompletion of seemingly closed systems. And third, altarity suggests a dimension of sacrality, which is neither simply transcendent nor immanent but is an immanent transcendence that disrupts and dislocates systems, structures, and schemata that seem to be secure.

The immanent transcendence of altarity transforms human agents into vehicles of an infinite creative process that is more encompassing than any individual activity. The artist, as Nietzsche observes in The Birth of Tragedy, is the medium through which “the True Subject celebrates His redemption in illusion.”⁴¹ This True Subject is the incarnation of the transcendent Creator who dies and is reborn in the creative imagination of the artist. Another name for this creative activity is the infinite. While Nietzsche restricts the genuine work of art to the activity of the genius, Schlegel’s vision is more inclusive: “Everyone is an artist whose central purpose in life is to educate his intellect.” Education (Bildung) is cultivation (Bildung). To educate oneself is, therefore, to cultivate oneself and to cultivate oneself is, in effect, to become God. Schlegel continues: “Every good human being is always progressively becoming God. To become God, to become human, to cultivate oneself are all expressions that mean the same thing.”⁴² Cultivation occurs through the imagination. Coleridge, who heard Fichte’s lectures in Jena and transmitted German philosophical idealism and romanticism to British romantics and American transcendentalists, reformulates Kant’s doctrine of the imagination in a way that translates theology into anthropology and vice versa: “The imagination, then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and the mode of its operation.”⁴³ Whereas the primary imagination is emergent, the secondary imagination is recombinant. In different terms, the imagination involves both the activity of figuring through which schemata emerge and the activity of recombining and reconfiguring schemata to adapt to changing circumstances. Though figuring cannot be represented, there is nonetheless a mimetic dimension to creative emergence. In a gloss on Kant’s notion of art, Derrida describes a mimesis that is not simply a repetition of preformed figures:

Mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the relation of resemblance or identification between two beings, the reproduction of one product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions. And of two freedoms. The artist does not imitate things in nature, or if you will, natura naturata, but the acts of natura naturans, the art of an author-subject, and, one could even say, of an artist-god, mimesis displays the identification of human action with divine action—of one freedom with another.⁴⁴

With this notion of nonrepresentational mimesis, we return to the issue of freedom, which we have been exploring from the outset. Far from restricting freedom, the restlessness of the infinite is its necessary condition, which is not to say its original ground.

Freedom, I have argued, is neither simple nor monolithic but is inwardly divided and, thus, irreducibly complex. Though the modern subject is self-legislating, autonomy presupposes an originary givenness, which is groundless and hence an-archic. In relating itself to itself through the activity of self-representation, the creative subject relates itself to an altarity, which, as a condition of its own possibility, is not simply heteronomous. The “inward” disruption of altarity issues in the infinite restlessness of desire. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, desire that is vital never strives for fulfillment; to the contrary, when it is creative, desire desires desire. Originary lack does not involve loss but is the supplementary excess that keeps everything and everyone in play. The purpose of this play is nothing other than the creative process itself. Far from satisfying desire, the infinite engenders an endless restlessness that is the eternal pulse of life.

1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 26.

2. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 77–78.

3. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 14.

4. G. W. F. Hegel, Lesser Logic, trans. W. Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), para. 80.

5. G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. and ed. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), pp. 90–91.

6. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 145.

7. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. B. Sanderson (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), vol. 3, p. 254.

10. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 292.

11. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in On History, trans. Louis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 3.

12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 3.

13. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 144.

15. I will consider further implications of Kant’s account of the imagination later.

17. Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, ed. David Pacini (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). Henrich proceeds to explain the significance of Kant’s argument: “This insight into the interconnection between concepts of the mind and images of the world is the origin of the modern methods of historical interpretation. Fichte was the first to bring the word Weltanschauung (image of the world) to philosophical prominence; it captured the theoretical correlation he was developing in his own work. Similarly, employed methodologically, this correlation between mind and world image is the foundation of Hegel’s Phenomenology: because all stages of the development of the mind are simultaneously stages of the development of the conception of the world, we cannot talk about either one apart from the other” (20). I was fortunate enough to hear Henrich’s lectures when he first delivered them at Harvard in 1972. I also took a seminar with Henrich on Hegel’s Science of Logic. The lectures and the seminars decisively shaped my interpretation of Hegel and have influenced my thinking for more than three decades.

21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Meredith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), part 2, p. 21.

23. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 54.

25. Rodolphe Gasché, “Ideality in Fragmentation,” foreword to Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1991), pp. xix–xx.

26. Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. Kenley Dove (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 48–49.

27. Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 162.

30. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 118.

31. The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 162.

32. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 3.

35. This is a revised version of Ernst Behler and Roman Struc’s formulation in their introduction to Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), p. 15.

37. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 354.

38. Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Infinite, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 12.

41. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 5.

43. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), vol. 1, p. 202.