Faith and Knowledge

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Walter Cerf (Translator), H. S. Harris (Translator)

English translation of Hegel's essay "Faith and Knowledge" (1802-3). Translator's Preface; Speculative Philosophy and Intellectual An Introduction to Hegel's Essays by Walter Cerf; Introduction to Faith and Knowledge by H. S. Harris; Note on the Text and on Conventions; Faith and Knowledge by G. W. F. Introduction; A. Kantian Philosophy; B. Jacobian Philosophy; C. Fichtean Philosophy; Conclusion; Bibliographic Index; Analytic Index.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Nonfiction

206 pages, hardback

First published January 1, 1802

About the author

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher and one of the founding figures of German Idealism. Influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism and Rousseau's politics, Hegel formulated an elaborate system of historical development of ethics, government, and religion through the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute. Hegel was one of the most well-known historicist philosopher, and his thought presaged continental philosophy, including postmodernism. His system was inverted into a materialist ideology by Karl Marx, originally a member of the Young Hegelian faction.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

New Review:

After spending around 6-7 months reading and re-reading this book by Hegel I have been led to some more nuanced views of it. Firstly, I think the work suffers from a certain programmatic character: in parts it reads more like a manifesto than something of substance. Hegel has a tendency, at least in these early works, to make some sweeping claims and very broad comments that leave one wondering what the actual justification for the views presented are. There is a lack of technical rigour in parts. 'Kant did x, he should've done y' - it leads to the questions of: what precise passages are you referring to? How would doing y be possible on the Kantian view? Even outside of the Kantian view, what does doing y mean in practical or realistic terms? These sorts of considerations aren't really addressed by Hegel.

The best part of the book is the section on Kant himself, which does manage to go into considerable depth. Here Hegel does cite and quote Kant at length and so one is able to directly identify what Hegel is referring to in Kant, but there are still moments where it seems Hegel is motivated by wishful thinking. By this I mean that, for all of his talk of the archetypal intuitive intellect holding the key to resolving Kantian dualisms (which, actually, it is in my opinion), he fails to really argue why we should believe in its existence. It was a necessary thought, for Kant, to be sure, but to actually declare its existence requires a rigorous supporting argument beyond 'it would solve some problems' and Hegel fails to make this argument. I think this, along with the Differenzschrift, does contain interesting comments and insights but a lot of the time I get the feeling that its arguments come from a position of already accepting certain fundamental Hegelian views, goals, and considerations. In other words, no Kantian would read this and become convinced that Kant got something wrong. In that sense it is more an analysis of Kant from a Hegelian point of view, not an argument for why we should side with Hegel over Kant.

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One of Hegel's earliest works. I am particularly struck by the insightfulness of his comments on Kant. Kant and Fichte represent the 'complete idealisation of empirical psychology' because of their dichotomy of form and content, something Hegel compares them to Locke for. Some Kantians think these sort of comments show that Hegel's reading of Kant is mistaken, but I disagree. Hegel is absolutely correct that, like Locke, Fichte and Kant created a dichotomy with thought forms on one side and the sensuous particular on the other. These thought forms remain isolated and unaffected by anything, as immutable categories of the understanding. Hegel points to Kant's notion of the intuitive intellect as a solution to the problems of discursivity, and hints at Kant's concept of organic unity as the model upon which to understand such an intellect. To seek an original identity of the heterogeneity of concept and sensuous particular, of the understanding and sensibility. Hegel's commentary can be cryptic, to be sure, but it seems to me he is spot on when properly explicated.

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really nice entry-point to arguments you will see fleshed out more in the Phenomenology, it grounds on who exactly he is responding to you in these arguments to(his critique of Jacobian common-sense sentimentalism, his critique yet also conditioned praise of Fichte's formalization of practical striving as bearing the positive result/moment of "negativity", of thought's discontent with the givenness of common-sensical reality as in toto meaningless in-itself). It also details , before the Phenomenology, the role he places these thinkers hes critiquing in as embodiments of a process of Bildung(Culture) that results in the historical result of the social feeling of the "Death of God"(all this said before Nietzsche!). A Death of God having more to do with the "practical secularism" of social life in modernity and the isolation of faith and longing for the Beyond as a more and more privatized affair than with any empirical claim about the prevalence of "atheism" or "literal unbelief" in Modernity.

From here you will see explicitly stated what Hegel inherits from Kant(and what Kant failed to live up to as the kernel of his thought) , the transcendental apperception(the living/dynamic unity of thought creating its grounds within the chain of inferences it projects temporally in it's experience of the world through judgment) and the "figurative synthesis" of the imagination being the main thing of his interest, coupled with an interesting claim that what must be emphasized in Kant is the reflective judgment(the creation of universal conceptualities out of the experience of particularity) if we want to avoid the dead and lifeless formalist reading of Transcendental Apperception in Fichte's Self-Positing-I that results from the "dead-ening" of particularity as a mere external/contingent instance of a pre-set/given universal concept as "container"(Determinative Judgment in the First Critique)

Its a good text because you see rather clearly stated Hegel's desire to mediate the formalism that kills nature's manifold "rationality" without at the same time falling back into a romantic conception of nature as "exceeding" Rationality itself. The peculiar case of Hegel seeking this while also explicitly stating that philosophies of finitude don't actually conceive of the "Absolute Nothingness" which he thinks befits True Philosophy, and Hegel's claim that Philosophy has to(and can be) a third way between the positing of God as a mere arbitrary anthropomorphically-grounded projection of human subjectivity and positing God as an ineffable Beyond of which nothing determinate can be said.

All in all great book if you are invested in actually finding the context for Hegel's later reflections(reflections which are usually not as "polemically" adressed to other people as these early texts are)

[Edmundo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know... I don't see Hegel's arguments. I almost see what he is getting at, but it's not in clear view. Painful stuff, again. I wish I could see the arguments. I understand what he wants to do, but now why we should think that he can accomplish it or why we should want to accomplish it. Maybe I am stuck in the Kantian anti-speculative philosophy... but I have no been given a reason to not be in it. Why would the infinite lie in the negation? In the +1 -1, or in the middle. Why? What is the middle? Is it nothing? Is the conclusion really nothingness? How is this not greater pessimism and atheism than we saw before? The more Hegel is uncovered the more terrifying he seems to get. There are good comments on Fichte and Kant and Jacobi, in any case, and it is worth reading. Hegel is clearly a competent philosopher and commentator, but what is he building? It is very strange, very deeply speculation and confusing and not exactly argued. I am once again drawn into the horrible mess of Hegel studies, hoping there is a way beyond Kant. Why could it not have been simpler? Why could the arguments not be open to view? I hope I can learn more.

[blank · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great exposition on finding the “speculative kernel” (intellectual intuition) in the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi and Fichte, ultimately arriving at Hegel’s Idea.

[saml · Rating 3 out of 5]

enjoyed the sections on kant and fichte, especially for hegel as stylist and wit. the section on jacobi i found hard, though this probably in large part owes to my ignorance of him

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hegel starts with “der alte Gegensatz der Vernunft und des Glaubens (the old contradiction of reason and faith).” For what is indeed the price of reason’s triumph? With Kant, the suprasensible can no longer be acknowledged by reason, and the highest possible idea is thereby deprived of reality. With Jacobi, there is simply no reason left, since reason has been boiled down to its non-science (Unwissenheit) of the truth. And with Fichte at last, God is the incomprehensible, and knowledge doesn’t know anything except that (=that it doesn’t know anything=Socrates). “Nach allen kann das Absolute, nach der alten Distinktion, nicht gegen, so wenig als für die Vernunft sein, sondern es ist über die Vernunft (According to all, the Absolute, following the old distinction, can neither be against, nor for reason, but it is over reason),” Hegel writes in conclusion of the introduction. What Hegel holds against all these three philosophers, to each of which one part of the text corresponds, is that they maintain an absolute opposition (das absolute Entgegengesetztsein) of the finite and the infinite, through which the ideal can only be conceptualized as the concept itself, so to speak (das Idealische ist nur begriffen als der Begriff). In other words, all that is left, beyond the absolutely finite and the absolutely infinite, is a void, a void of reason actually, and therefore a lack of understanding (an unintelligibility, according to (Hegel’s reading of) Fichte) much favorable to faith. And then, what happens is the concept is merely negatively posed (gesetzt), and not purely posed (nicht rein gesetzt). In yet other words, it first means that the extent to which the empirical exerts a negative pull towards the concept and vice-versa is not objective, or that the concept is only posed as the Negative in itself (das an sich Negative), i.e. as negativity, and second that the infinite is not thought, insofar as it is always already finitized through the very opposition to the finite that (precisely) de-fines it.

In the section on Kant, Hegel is going to show how this unacknowledgement of the positivity of the concept (ie its rationality) is at work in judgement, and more specifically in the copula. What comes to the fore there, and in consciousness as well (the judgement merely expresses), is only the product (of thought), but its being-one (Einssein) *as* product-of-thought, the consciousness of the product of being a product (self-consciousness in short), that is beyond position. Better: it is the unconscious in the judgement (das Bewußtlose im Urteil). Hegel will later identify Fichte’s self and its self-position as the production of difference (Meiner ed., p. 60) which reflective thought only knows as product (by definition, as we saw).
In a long sentence of the Kant section, Hegel tries to work with Kantian metaphysics to construct a more positive configuration of the Absolute, and he finds it on the level of imagination. No one will ever understand anything to Transcendental deduction of the forms of intuition, or of the categories, Hegel says, if, on the one hand, one doesn’t differentiate between the I and imagination, and on the other hand, if we understand this faculty (imagination) as a middle ground between subject and world, and not as (what it is) the origin (das Erste und Urspüngliche) starting from which subject and world split in the necessary separation of product and apparition that we saw unconsciously at work, and constitutively so, in judgement/consciousness. In this way, imagination is the In-Itself (das Ansich), and the originary two-faced identity (urspüngliche zweiseitige Identität) of subject and object. It is, in short, reason itself. With one restriction though: it is reason itself *as* it appears to consciousness.

In the section on Jacobi, Hegel asks us to consider two circles, and the section of their intersection. I’ll call one circle A, the other B, and alpha will be the name of the surface where they intersect. Ok now alpha, Hegel says, is the infinite in actuality. What does that mean? Alpha is the zone of identity of the difference between A and B and it makes absolute opposition between them possible through substraction (A - alpha, B - alpha). For Hegel, this means that “the true character of thought” is infinity, by which is meant: the absolute affirmation of the identity between the finite (alpha) and the two opposed terms (A and B, which “finitize” (=determine) the finite). Automatically though, this “absolute affirmation” reverts into “absolute negation,” posed effectively qua being, and in which, indeed, the position of the opposed (das Setzen Entgegengesetzter: A and B) consists. In +A – A = 0, the Nothing/Non-Being (das Nichts) *exists* (als Realität) as +A – A, and it is, according to its essence, infinite. Quite simply indeed, the identity between objects we *posed* as incommensurable can only be a Nothing.
Here, I stop for a moment to remark upon a similarity between Hegel’s line of thought here and Fichte’s in the Grundlage der gesammten WL: if the position of the Not-I de-poses (=cancels the position of) the I, it also, and simultaneously, sup-poses it, for, without the I, and therefore (its) position, the Not-I would be posed, but not op-posed, because there would be Nothing to op-pose it to. So you need position to get op-position. So opposition is not just -A, but, as Hegel says, +A – A. Back to Glauben und Wissen.
Hegel returns to Jacobi more closely, and focuses on his views of imagination in an essay of his with one of these super long titles (Über das Unternehmen des Kritizismus, die Vernunft zu Verstande zu bringen, und der Philosophie überhaupt eine neue Absicht zu geben (1802), which translates into: Of the Enterprise of Criticism to bring Reason back to Understanding, and to Give Philosophy in General a New Goal). Jacobi’s caricature of Kant goes like this: Reason relies on Understanding, Understanding on Imagination, Imagination on Sensibility, and Sensibility, again, back on Imagination (qua the faculty of a priori intuitions, so transcendental imagination); “diese Einbildungskraft endlich–worauf? Offenbar auf Nichts!” (And this imagination at last, what [does it relie] upon? Obviously nothing!) Imagination therefore comes to assume the rôle of absolute ground (der absolute Grund), the actual tortoise (Jacobi makes fun of Kant by comparing his system to the Hindus’ (not a compliment in Jacobi’s mind), who were “stupid” enough (told you) to think the Earth rested on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise and the tortoise on nothing), produced through itself, by itself etc. And so the condition, not only of what is possible, but also, perhaps (and this is indeed trivially true of the workings of empirical imagination at least) of the impossible! In sharp contrast to Kant’s, Jacobi’s notion of imagination will therefore have to be one of a productive faculty, indeed an inventive one altogether. What Jacobi specifically attacks in Kant’s philosophy is the genesis of understanding from imagination (the second step of the caricature-like regress outlined above), because according to him, it works like a passage from blindness to sight, which only the understanding itself can accomplish, but it’s not clear to Jacobi how the understanding can self-move itself on its way to imagination: it would be a going before the seeing (roughly translating ein Gehen vor dem Sehen).
More generally now, Jacobi wonders how Kant can finitize, as we saw he does, the Absolute, so how we can go from pure time/space to (relative) times/spaces. So that’s the question of the genesis (Geburt) of finitude as such, and multiplicity. But it’s always the same dilemma:
- Either there is a passage (Übergang) from the eternal to the temporal, but only at the expense of a paradoxical temporalization of the eternal (as “before” the temporal),
- Or there is no such stupid passage, but then the system is incomplete (mangelhaft), because the determinateness of the totality is not explained.
Alright, Jacobi concedes, there is, in a priori synthesis, the position of an abstract unity of the difference which the second horn of the dilemma above, meant to represent the Kantian way, didn’t thematize, but this synthesis, precisely because it is abstract, doesn’t explain, and only presuppose (empirically), the multiplicity of which it is the synthesis (its “matter”): so we’re still very much stuck with the dilemma (and its second horn). At the end of the day, Hegel notes, an originary synthesis to Jacobi’s liking would have to stop nowhere short of a creation ex nihilo (ein Erschaffen aus Nichts). That, however, sounds like an unwarranted leap beyond what Jacobi says: there could indeed be matter, understood as determinability in becoming, before creation/determination in being. This is indeed the kind of primordial determinable soup Fichte and Schelling will elaborate.
But not Hegel. Moving back to originary synthesis with Jacobi, we only find a void. And to Jacobi, Hegel opposes a conception of transcendental imagination that is creative and constructive, because it produces the *idea of* totality as the identity of the universal and the particular, instead of analyzing, ie dividing, nature: on the contrary, Hegel’s “production” will be a living and organic one.
So there must be some extratemporal element in the system: consciousness enters time alright, but is not born in time like your garden type variety of temporal being. The understanding belongs to the temporal being, but reason, the standing ground of infinity, belongs to this extratemporal realm. The identity of the two, to conclude, is the simultaneity of the negation of God and of its own self-making/construction (ein Zugleich des Leugnens Gottes und des sich selbst zum Gott-machens) (maybe the simultaneity that is characteristic of contradiction?) And this is the definition of faith.

I didn’t take notes on the section on Fichte, I didn’t find it interesting.