Peter Trawny
German Idealism is for Heidegger a certain constellation and context of certain philosophers and poets in the history of metaphysics, that is, of being. The constellation and context of German Idealism are not always the same, but they are ultimately stable. It is remarkable that Heidegger, with the exception of the lecture course “German Idealism” of summer semester 1929, ignores the canonical accentuation in the study of German Idealism on the names of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.1 German Idealism for Heidegger is primarily the thinking of Hegel and Schelling, its being-historical location is the “Absolute” in its relation to “subjectivity.” On the one hand, it is set up by the philosophy of Kant, which is at the same time decidedly notable (GA 42, 62, 72; GA 86, 193). On the other hand, Hölderlin’s poetry, insofar as it in a certain respect belongs to German Idealism, is dehistoricized (yet not understood as unhistorical), and its specific significance for the history of being beyond German Idealism is emphasized (GA 65, 421–2).
We will accordingly consider German Idealism in the following order:
(1) Hegel and German Idealism
(2) Schelling and German Idealism
(3) German Idealism in the history of metaphysics, that is, of being
In a later text Heidegger speaks of the “superficial talk of the breakdown of Hegelian philosophy” (GA 7, 74).2 This opinion is rejected, because “in the 19th Century only this philosophy has determined reality,” and indeed it has as “metaphysics.” And then he claims: “Since Hegel’s death (1831) everything is only a countermovement, not only in Germany, but also in Europe.”
Heidegger’s engagement with Hegel begins early and ends late. Heidegger dealt with no other philosopher perhaps as continuously as Hegel.3 When later he introduces certain notations simply with “Hegel | Heidegger” (GA 11, 105–7), the proximity and distance is clearly marked. Heidegger’s philosophy is also the attempt, by “overcoming metaphysics,” to overcome that “counter movement.”
Already in his habilitation treatise, Duns Scotus’s Doctrine of Categories and Meaning (1916), Heidegger speaks of the “great task” of bringing about a “thorough confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with the abundance and depth, richness of experience and conceptualization of the most powerful system,” that is “with Hegel” (GA 1, 410–11). This task, formulated under the influence of Dilthey, was realized in the coming decades of Heidegger’s thinking.
This begins in summer 1923, in the lecture course Ontology (Hermeneutics of Facticity), where Heidegger separates phenomenology and dialectics in the Hegelian sense for the first time (GA 63, 43–7). If “today it is attempted to connect the authentic underlying tendency of phenomenology with dialectics,” then this is as if “someone would like to connect fire and water” (42). Fire and water build an antagonism resulting in the annihilation of each other. This demonstrates that phenomenology is not indifferent to dialectics.
In Being and Time, Heidegger appears to distance himself from German Idealism. While Plato and Aristotle challenged him at the beginning of the 1920s to further his philosophical development, Hegel still remains present. In the famous passage, where Heidegger reminds us of the γιγαντομαχία περὶ τῆς οὐσίας, the “question for the meaning of being,” “which provided a stimulus for his researches of Plato and Aristotle,” Heidegger also speaks of Hegel. For what was “achieved” in this research, “was to persist through many alterations and ‘retouchings’ down to the ‘logic’ of Hegel” (GA 2, 3). Hegel’s understanding of time then becomes so important that Heidegger announces a comparative lecture of Hegel’s Jena Logic and Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics (570). In the summer semester of 1927, he ventured such an interpretation (in fact not on the Jena Logic, but on the Science of Logic (see GA 86)).
In the summer of 1929, Heidegger interprets Hegel further in a lecture course on German Idealism (GA 28, 195–232). In this lecture course, he returns to the “confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with Hegel” (214). Initial expressions of this confrontation are crystallized, which remain in place. A “confrontation with Hegel” is one with “absolute idealism and therefore with western metaphysics.” It pushes “in totally concealed dimensions, which we primarily have to obtain in a deep elaboration of the problem of metaphysics.” But still something different emerges. Heidegger in his readings of Hegel will notably refer to the “central work” of the “Phenomenology of Spirit,” but also to the “Science of Logic.” He attempts his first extended readings of Hegel’s “Phenomenology” in the winter-semester 1930/31. It is “abandoned” in the interpretation of “self-consciousness” (GA 32, 215). “Everything” should “remain unsettled.”
Heidegger taught a seminar four years later (1934/35) about Hegel’s Philosophy of Right with the well-known theorist of jurisprudence Erik Wolf at the university of Freiburg. This seminar testifies to how the philosopher seeks to unfold a political philosophy in recourse to Hegel’s thought. A concept of National-Socialism, and its coherence with political realities is questionable, serves as a pathmark. This attempt to answer National-Socialism with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is not resumed. Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right remained the only classical work of political philosophy that Heidegger publically interpreted.
At the end of the 1930s we see Heidegger addressing Hegel’s understanding of “negativity,” renewing the appeal for a “philosophical confrontation” with Hegel (GA 68, 3). For Hegel’s philosophy “stands definitively in the history of thinking,” that is, “of Beyng” as a “unique and still not conceived demand.” “Every thinking” that comes “after” Hegel, “or also only primarily wants to arrange the presuppositions of philosophy,” cannot avoid this “demand.” The “uniqueness of Hegel’s philosophy” consists “primarily in the fact that a higher standpoint of the self-consciousness of spirit beyond this philosophy is no longer possible.” Therefore, there is no philosophy that “still could be superordinated on a higher level than Hegel’s systematics.” But the “standpoint of a necessary confrontation” with Hegel’s philosophy has “nonetheless to cope with it, and thus to be superior in an essential aspect.” This “standpoint” cannot be “brought and convinced from outside,” but must be found “in Hegel’s philosophy” as an “essentially inaccessible and indifferent ground for it.” A true critique of a philosophy has to confront its main ideas. An external interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy remains shallow.
The second presupposition of a “philosophical confrontation” with Hegel challenges the systematic standard of his thinking. As the “principle of his philosophy” (4–5) conceives the “whole of beings,” thus that philosophy has to dispose of the “principle” that shows itself in the “whole of beings” because it is “the actual.” A “basic confrontation with Hegel” can only succeed if it fulfills “at the same time and consistently both demands” (6). In the introduction of the notes of 1938/39, Heidegger begins to deal with Hegel’s “fundamental determination” of “negativity.”
The 1942 summer term seminar represents a further intense interpretation of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit.” This turned out to be a very fertile exploration. The outcome of this seminar was the essay Hegel’s Concept of Experience (GA 5, 115–208) and Elucidation of the “ Introduction ” of the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (GA 68). Hegel’s Concept of Experience, published in Off the Beaten Track (1950), belongs to the context of examining the problem of “experience” in general. For Hegel, “experience concerns the present in its presence” (GA 5, 186). Insofar as “consciousness” exists by exposing itself to its own “inquiry” (Prüfung), it “moves out of its presence to arrive in this presence.” “Experience” is the “representation” of the “appearance of the appearing knowledge.” During this period, Hegel’s philosophy found its place in the context of the history of metaphysics. The “desertification of the earth” (GA 7, 97) begins “as a process which is willed, but unknown in its essence, and also not knowable at the time,” where “the essence of truth is projected as certainty.” It is Hegel who conceives “this moment of the history of metaphysics as the moment in which absolute self-consciousness becomes the principle of thinking.”
Heidegger confirmed this idea immediately after the war. In his Letter on Humanism (1946) Hegel’s thinking appears in the history of beyng (GA 9, 335, 360), the key to Heidegger’s later philosophy. Those who wish to understand the accomplishment of modernity with its far-reaching consequences in the twentieth century cannot avoid a “confrontation” with Hegel’s philosophy.
Hegel’s thinking is furthermore the starting point for the interpretation of the “onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics” (1957). The “philosophical confrontation” has become a “thinking dialogue” about the “matter of thinking” (GA 11, 55). If we want to enter into such a dialogue “with Hegel,” we not only have “to talk with him about the same matter, but to talk with him about the same matter in the same way.” Hegel thinks the “being of beings in a speculative-historical way” (spekulative-geschichtlich). Heidegger responds to this “way” of thinking by “being-historical” thinking.
The outcome of this correspondence is differences that Heidegger roughly contrasts: “For Hegel” (56) “the matter of thinking is being in reference of the being-thought in absolute thinking and as absolute thinking.” In contrast “for us the matter of thinking is the same, thus being, but being in reference to its difference to beings.” Heidegger then adds: “For Hegel, the matter of thinking is the idea as the absolute concept. For us, formulated in a preliminary fashion, the matter of thinking is difference as difference.”
Heidegger’s exhortation to speak with Hegel “about the same matter in the same way” continues in a lecture given in 1958 in Heidelberg and Aix-en-Provence with the title “Hegel and the Greeks.” In this text Heidegger interrogates the originality of Hegel’s philosophy of history insofar as he is also concerned with “philosophy in the totality of its historical destiny” (GA 9, 429). The question is whether Hegel is able to recognize the “enigma of ᾽Αλήθεια” in his consideration of “truth” (442). For with ᾽Αλήθεια “our thinking is addressed by something”; “what before the beginning of ‘philosophy’ and through the whole course of its history has already drawn thought to itself” (444).
The relation “Hegel | Heidegger” was so precarious that Heidegger, at the instigation of Jean Beaufret in 1962, accepted the necessity of distinguishing his thinking from Hegel with even more emphasis. It is stated in the Protocol of a Seminar about “Time and Being”: “Thus in France the impression was widely predominant that Heidegger’s thinking was a recapitulation—as a deepening and an expansion—of Hegel’s philosophy” (GA 14, 57). “From Hegel’s point of view” (59), one could say that “Being and Time” gets caught in being, because it is not developed “to the ‘concept.’” On the other hand, one could ask from the perspective of Being and Time , why Hegel considers “being as indeterminate immediacy,” just “to place it from the very beginning in relation to determination and mediation.” For Hegel, the “identity of being and thinking” is “really an equivalence” (59). Therefore, it does not come to a “question of being.” Furthermore, the human being is interpreted as a “coming-to-itself of the Absolute,” what “leads to a sublation of the finitude of the human being.” In the thinking of Heidegger the “finitude” of the human being is what “comes to view.”
In the Le Thor seminars (1968/69), Heidegger attempts to formulate the “great task” of a “philosophical confrontation” with Hegel. Heidegger thinks the “finitude of being” (GA 15, 370–1). Being can “not be absolutely for itself.” Even if Hegel says that the “Absolute is not ‘without us,’” he says this in reference to the Christian God, who in a certain sense is reliant on the human being. But for Heidegger “being is not without its relation to Dasein” and “Nothing is further away from Hegel and all idealism.”
Heidegger became acquainted with Schelling at the same time as Hegel (GA 1, 56), in the years before the First World War. This might not be a coincidence. Heidegger always read Schelling with Hegel and Hegel with Schelling; Hegel and Schelling build the essential constellation and core of German Idealism.
Heidegger offered a seminar about Hegel’s logic in the summer semester of 1927. He taught Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom for the first time in the winter of 1927/28. The notations as they are handed down to us do not reveal a special interest, but the discussion of “love” of “evil” reveal a change in Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel.
In the lecture course German Idealism from the summer of 1929, Heidegger discussed Schelling rather briefly. He is interpreted as a critic of Fichte, and Heidegger refers more or less superficially to Schelling’s philosophy of nature. Heidegger claims that Schelling “primarily in a countermovement [Gegenspiel] to Hegel’s phenomenology came to himself” (GA 28, 197). Nonetheless, somebody different “has brought him to himself, i.e., has freed the whole of philosophizing in him,” namely “Caroline”4 (193). She has “by the impact [Wucht] of her existence,” which took place “beyond convention, moralism, and prevailing taste and the dwarfishness of everyday life, accomplished her great life.” This was undoubtedly an opportunity for Heidegger to identify himself with Schelling.
A half-dozen years later Heidegger returns to Schelling. In the context of the being-historical lecture courses Heidegger now allows Schelling a special meaning. In the Schelling-lecture course (summer 1936), Schelling has freed himself of his dependency on Hegel. He is now the “real creative and farthest reaching thinker of this whole era of German philosophy,” that is, of German Idealism. He is this thinker “to such an extent that he drives German Idealism from within right past its own fundamental position” (GA 42, 6). It is difficult to say what this means.
Heidegger offers an initial clue when he emphasizes that the “innermost center” of Schelling’s thinking is the “essence of human freedom,” that is, “the question for freedom” (ibid.). Hegel did not see “that just this single thing, freedom, was not isolated for Schelling, but was thought and developed as the essential foundation of the whole, as a new foundation for a whole philosophy” (21). Heidegger becomes even more definite in Mindfulness. Schelling has projected “the deepest form of the spirit within the history of German metaphysics.” Indeed, the “spirit and the Absolute” remain “‘Subjectum’; but if it [spirit] has its essence in freedom, thus in this freedom a determination of the capability of good and evil is present, which says something more essential than Hegel’s ‘absolute concept’” (GA 66, 264).
It is plain that Schelling transcends German Idealism, because he is able to confront Hegel with an own understanding of spirit and the Absolute. Heidegger elucidates this event in the history of being in an explanation entitled The Difference of Hegel’s and Schelling’s System. The philosopher emphasizes immediately that this difference builds an aspect of the history of being. The difference between Hegel and Schelling lies in the “determination of ‘being’” (GA 86, 212). It is only possible to speak of a difference, when “in advance unanimity in the essential” is given. This is the case insofar as for Hegel and Schelling being is “subjectivity—reason—spirit.”
For Schelling and Hegel, “spirit” is “absolute— that is it unifies everything in himself.” If this is true, then the “non-spiritual” or “<ι>the sensuous” belongs to it. Here, in the determination of the relation between the “sensuous” and “reason,” lies the difference. For Hegel, the “sensuous” is the “one-sided—abstract.” It is not “negated,” but considered irrational. Schelling in contrast understands the “sensuous emerging from will and appetite.” This is also recognized by Hegel, but the “unity” as “unity of ground (base) and existence is nevertheless different”; Schelling’s “idea of identity and un-ground as in -difference” is “more original within the absolute metaphysics of subjectivity,” but “only within.” Schelling consequently does not project a thinking that crosses German Idealism’s historical borders.
This is articulated again in another context. The “fundamental movement to the positive” (GA 88, 149) is decisive for Schelling. Heidegger calls this “Schelling’s ἔρως.” The “positive” consists: (1) in the fact that “it is not able to be content with the negative of the Fichtian non-I, but that it has to conceive nature out of itself as the visible spirit”; (2) that it does not integrate “the identity of intelligence and nature” in a “mutual dialectics of both,” but that it goes back in a “ground of both,” their “absolute indifference”; and (3) the “fundamental movement into existence as first” testifies that “the freedom and the will as such” is “the first, what comes forward from itself ” and “thus becomes beings.” With this Schelling reaches “the highest stage of his philosophy and perhaps of western metaphysics in general” (141). Of course, the “fundamental movement to the existing” unfolds “in a final, highly Christian-theological restorative way.” The “growing antagonism to Hegel” renders Schelling “more and more dependent on him, and makes the positive more and more rude and backwards oriented.” Therefore, “the real exciting moment of Schelling’s thinking” lies “not in his late philosophy.” Especially in this philosophy, Schelling reveals less of “what is necessary for the overcoming of real ‘rationalism.’”
The status of Schelling’s late philosophy is consequently evident. The “difference between the negative and positive philosophy” is “the reflection of the onto-theological essence of metaphysics—within absolute idealism” (GA 86, 520). But the “onto-theological essence of metaphysics” has its basis in the “ontological difference” (517). Whereas Hegel has “dissolved” the “ontological difference” in “speculative idealism,” Schelling has “reconstructed” it in the “difference of negative and positive philosophy.” In the identity of identity and difference, “ontological difference” has disappeared yet is not overcome, as it returns again in the difference of negative and positive philosophy.
Heidegger considered German Idealism to be an era in the history of being. In Contributions of Philosophy, he allocated it its own place in the third “joining” of “Playing-Forth.” Localizing an era in the history of being requires that its descent from the “first beginning” be made visible.
This descent consists in the fact that idealism interprets the ὄν as ἰδέα, and that ἰδέα is understood as “being-seen, re-presentedness—and of course re-presented[ness of] κοινόν and ἀεί” (GA 65, 202). Hence idealism goes back to its Platonic genesis, where the idea is thought as the general and the eternal. The idea is “re-presented” already in Plato. Thus Plato’s idealism became “an anticipation of the interpretation of beings as ob-jects for representation.”
This place in the history of being is the beginning of the modern age. Here the “representation is ego percipio, the representedness as such for the I think.” This representation is at the same time an “I think myself,” which means that the I gains “certainty.” But this certainty is apparently not a consequence of representation, but the “origin of the priority of the ego” that lies “in the will to certainty” to be “certain of itself.”
But this place in the history of being is still not the place of German Idealism. For this first “ self-representation” still remains in the “particularity of precisely each particular I.” In this sense, this version of idealism does not even reach Platonic idealism for “what is thus represented” “is not yet κοινόν and ἀεί.” Therefore, the “self-representation” has to become a “ self -knowing in the absolute sense.” This “absolute” “ self-knowing knows the necessity of the relation of the object to the I and of the I to the object.” It has freed itself from the “one-sidedness” of Cartesian philosophy.
This “absolute knowledge” in German Idealism is connected “with divine knowing of the Christian God.” It can look back on a tradition in which St. Augustine has already determined “what is represented in the representation of God,” that is, as “ideas.” Nevertheless, Heidegger insists that such idealism, which can invoke the whole history of metaphysics since Plato, was “developed” “only since Descartes.”
“German Idealism” (202) is this idealism, which was “delineated in advance in Leibniz,” and “attempts to conceive the ego cogito on the basis of Kant’s transcendental step beyond Descartes at the same time as it moves in direction of Christian dogma.” The “aberrance” (203) of German Idealism therefore lies in the combination of “modern Dasein and Christianity,” which finally hindered its thinking of the “question of being.” In this sense, German Idealism was “‘too true’-to-life” and produced countermovements like “positivism, which now celebrates its biologistic triumphs.”
In the context of German Idealism’s allocation in the history of metaphysics, the following can be understood: Truth as being is thought differently in metaphysics and becomes “the certainty that unfolds into an unconditioned trust in spirit and thus unfolds first as spirit in its absoluteness.” Now “beings” are “completely displaced into objectness.” What Heidegger has in mind with this unusual interpretation becomes more evident in his reference to “machination.” For “machination” as the “basic character of beingness” becomes a “subject-object-dialectics, which, as absolute, plays out and arranges together all possibilities of all familiar domains of beings [in the system].”
From this position “there is no bridge to the other beginning.” Nevertheless it is important “to know particularly this thinking of German Idealism”; for here “the machinational power of beingness” comes into its “utmost, unconditioned unfolding.” Hence the “end is prepared.”
The end of metaphysics is prepared in this way that the “self-evidence of being,” that is, the neglect of the question of being, “is now systematically extended to the richness of the historicity of spirit and its forms” (203–4). It is Hegel’s system appearing as one end of philosophy or metaphysics. Schelling’s “treatise on freedom” attested to “individual thrusts,” but it “nevertheless does not lead to any decision” (204). Hegel and Schelling are nearly codified, as German Idealism remains in its “richness” a location of the history of metaphysics.
1 Daniel O. Dahlstrom places more emphasis on Heidegger’s reading of Fichte in Dahlstrom, Heidegger and German Idealism. In: A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2005), 65–79.
2 The quotations are related to the Gesamtausgabe (GA), but, if possible, oriented to existing English translations
3 Rockmore writes about Heidegger’s reading of Hegel: “Although he prepared a number of texts on aspects of Hegel’s thought, he seems finally not to have made much progress toward understanding Hegel’s position as a whole” (Heidegger, German Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism, ed. by Tom Rockmore (Amherst: New York, 2000), 13). This judgment is based on many hermeneutic presuppositions. Perhaps the most problematic one lies in this question: what does it mean to “understand Hegel’s position as a whole”?
4 Caroline Michaelis (1763–1809), since 1803 married to Schelling, formerly married to August Wilhelm Schlegel, was a woman with a very unusual biography in the early nineteenth century.
Peter Trawny - Heidegger and German Idealism.
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