BEISER'S IDEALISM (2): Infinite Selves

Beiser carries on trying to clear away a picture of German idealism that has become almost mythical. He has already argued that it is a mistake to see the history of these thinkers as a slow swelling of the human subject, a story where the modest Kantian self gradually inflates into a vast cosmic mind that creates everything. Now he turns to the special role played in that myth by the idea of an infinite self or absolute ego. For a long time, readers have treated phrases like “absolute ego”, “infinite self” or “universal spirit” as a secret key to the whole movement. If only one can decode what this mysterious self is, it seems, one will understand everything the post Kantian philosophers were trying to say. This has encouraged people to read the story of German idealism as if it were mainly the story of this self slowly discovering itself. The model is almost autobiographical. Just as, in the writings of Fichte or Hegel, self consciousness slowly progresses from vague awareness to full clarity, so the history of philosophy itself is told as a path from confused notions of mind to a final revelation of an absolute spirit that knows itself completely.

Beiser wants to show that this story is too neat and too narrow. He is not denying that the language of an absolute self appears in the writings of Fichte, Schelling or Hegel. Nor is he denying that they sometimes see history as the development of spirit’s own awareness. His point is rather that if we focus only on this motif and treat it as the whole meaning of idealism, we lose sight of other things that mattered just as much to these thinkers, and in some cases mattered even more. Above all, we lose sight of their concern with the reality of the external world and with nature as an independent power.

In the subjectivist picture, the absolute self is simply the successor to the Cartesian subject. Descartes had made the thinking self the starting point of philosophy. The idealists then seem to take over that starting point and pump it up. The transcendental subject in Kant, which had originally been introduced to explain the conditions for having a unified experience, is gradually turned into a metaphysical creator. First, all its ordinary, human features are taken away, since it cannot itself be one object among others if it is supposed to underlie any possible experience. Then, despite Kant’s own warnings, it is treated as if it were a kind of thing or substance, a hidden activity standing behind appearances and producing them. Finally, once the “thing in itself” has been removed from the picture, this pure self is said to generate not only the general framework of space, time and categories, but even the detailed contents of experience. Nature and history start to look like the self’s own products.

Seen in this way, German idealism begins to resemble a rationalised theology. Where Christian doctrine once spoke of an infinite divine mind creating the world, philosophers now speak of an absolute ego or spirit doing much the same job in abstract terms. The language changes, but the basic imagination remains religious. Spirit becomes a kind of secular God, whose life story is told in the language of logic, history or self consciousness rather than in the imagery of scripture. Beiser thinks that if we take this religious picture too seriously, we miss the most interesting and radical features of the movement. He argues that the idealists did indeed experiment with talk of infinity and absolute spirit, but they also struggled to keep their thinking faithful to a robust sense of the natural world. Far from making nature a mere shadow of the subject, many of them tried to understand the subject as arising within nature, as one particularly complex and reflective part of a larger reality that does not depend on us.

Here it is important to recall what he said earlier about realism and naturalism. For Kant and Fichte, there is already a strong insistence that objects in space are genuinely real for us, not dreams or illusions. The critical idealism of these authors holds that the mind contributes the form of experience, but that something independent provides its matter, whether we call this the thing in itself or some resisting obstacle that our activity encounters. For the later, absolute idealists, this compromise does not go far enough. They think that if we are really serious about avoiding subjectivism, we must go beyond any picture in which the subject stands over against a mysterious outside source of impressions. Instead we should think of both mind and world as manifestations of a more basic reality, which can be called the absolute, or nature, or spirit, but which is not simply identified with any individual or even with humanity as a whole.

This is one reason why Beiser takes the early Romantics so seriously. In their writings, nature is not reduced to a set of appearances for a subject, but is treated as a living whole with its own inner powers. Human self consciousness is not the starting point, but a late and fragile achievement of this natural process. Rationality is no longer a magical gift that falls from nowhere, it is an emergent form of life, the highest flowering of forces that have been at work long before there were human beings to think about them. If we read them with this in mind, talk of the infinite or of the absolute need not imply a ghostly super mind hovering over the world, it can instead point to the idea of a world that is more than the sum of our experiences, a world whose depth we only ever partly grasp. Beiser therefore advises us to “exorcise the spirit”, by which he means that we should stop treating the idea of an infinite self as a literal, metaphysical being which can be described in personal terms. Instead, we should take it as a symbol or a way of thinking that the idealists used to express several different insights. One of these insights is that there must be a unity to reality, a coherence that makes scientific and moral knowledge possible. Another is that the structures of thought and the structures of the world are not simply alien to one another, but must meet somewhere if knowledge is to be more than a lucky guess. A third is that the standpoint of the individual is limited and partial, so that philosophy must learn to think beyond the narrow perspective of a single human life.

Once we remove the temptation to imagine a giant cosmic person brooding over everything, the remaining task is to reconstruct these insights in a form that is intelligible and, as far as possible, sober. The absolute can then be understood as the idea of a complete system of truth, not as a supernatural being. Spirit can be taken to mean the network of practices, institutions and forms of understanding that bind human beings together, rather than a mysterious substance drifting through history. The infinite self becomes a way of gesturing to the fact that our thoughts inevitably reach beyond what any one of us can verify, that the standards by which we judge our beliefs cannot be confined to the viewpoint of a single critic at a single moment.

From this angle, the opposition between subject and object begins to look less sharp. The mind is not outside the world, peering in at it, but is one of its expressions. In knowing nature, we are also, indirectly, knowing something about ourselves, since we are part of nature. Yet in reflecting on our own thinking, we are also coming to terms with the powers that make the world what it is, since our capacity to know is one development of those very powers. This mutual implication is what later philosophers sometimes call the identity of identity and difference, the idea that subject and object, mind and world, are both distinct and yet share a deeper unity. Beiser’s reinterpretation invites us to see the history of German idealism as a series of experiments in articulating this unity without falling back into a simple collapse where one side swallows the other. Kant worries that if we identify the structures of knowledge too closely with the structure of things in themselves, we will slide back into dogmatic metaphysics, pretending to know more about ultimate reality than our experience can justify. Fichte worries that if we keep things in themselves as a separate factor, we will never escape the old dualism and will always be tempted by the thought that the mind is helpless before an alien outside. Schelling and the Romantics worry that if the ego is treated as primary, we forget that it is not self made, that it depends on nature and on history in ways it cannot fully control. Hegel worries that if we rest content with any fragmented picture, we will misdescribe the rational structure that allows us to move from one limited viewpoint to another. Each of these moves is, on Beiser’s account, driven by a desire to do justice both to the independence of the world and to the active role of thought.

Seen in this light, the idealists’ fascination with self consciousness looks different as well. They do not study self consciousness just because they are obsessed with the subject, but because they think that in understanding how a finite self can become aware of itself as limited, as dependent, and as answerable to standards it did not invent, we get a clue to the nature of reason itself. Self consciousness reveals that there is a dimension of normativity, that is, of rules and standards, which cannot be reduced either to brute facts about how things are or to mere personal preference. When I grasp that I might be wrong, or that I ought to act in a certain way, I am already situated within a space of reasons, a world of “oughts” and “shoulds” that goes beyond my private sensations. It is this space that the idealists often try to capture with terms like spirit.

The religious sounding vocabulary here can be misleading, but Beiser suggests that it had a historical function. In a culture where theology had long been the serious language for talking about the ultimate conditions of our life, it was almost inevitable that early attempts to think in more secular terms would borrow that vocabulary and bend it to new uses. The difficulty for later readers is to sort out when these thinkers are still speaking as traditional believers, when they are transforming religious ideas into philosophical ones, and when they are perhaps doing both at once. By insisting that we do not simply read the absolute ego as a God substitute, Beiser is trying to keep this complexity in play. 

There is also a political and cultural side to this. If one sees German idealism as the story of an absolute subject, one is tempted to draw a straight line from its philosophical doctrines to certain later political forms, such as authoritarian states that claim to embody a higher spirit of the nation. Beiser does not deny that there are questions to be asked about these connections, and he acknowledges that others have explored them. However, he insists that one should not rush to such conclusions before one has done the basic work of understanding the philosophical arguments on their own terms. Only when we are clear about what “absolute ego” or “spirit” meant inside the conceptual framework of the time can we responsibly discuss how such notions may have influenced, or failed to influence, later social and political developments.

What emerges from all this is a more modest and at the same time more demanding picture of German idealism. Modest, because it no longer pretends to have a single magic formula, such as “everything is the self”, that solves all problems at once. Demanding, because it requires us to follow a number of intricate attempts to balance different insights without letting any one of them dominate. The reality of the external world must be affirmed, yet we must also account for the ways in which our own conceptual schemes shape what we find there. The dependence of thought on nature must be recognised, yet we must also give a place to freedom, to norms, to responsibilities that cannot simply be read off from the facts. The finitude of the human perspective must be kept in view, yet we must also try to think about the wider patterns into which that perspective fits.

In this sense, Beiser’s reading rescues German idealism from two opposite caricatures. On one side is the picture of an arrogant metaphysics that dismisses common sense and replaces it with a closed system in which a world spirit plays with itself. On the other side is the picture of an irrelevant scholasticism, concerned only with dusty logical puzzles that have nothing to do with real life. By showing how the idealists wrestled with problems that are still with us, such as how to relate mind and world, freedom and nature, individual and community, he makes it possible to approach them without either pious reverence or contempt. For a contemporary reader, this can be both unsettling and liberating. It is unsettling because it means there is no easy way to classify these thinkers. They are neither simple allies nor simple enemies of modern positions like scientific naturalism, religious faith, political liberalism or critical theory. They cut across our categories. At the same time, it is liberating because it allows us to treat them as serious partners in conversation rather than as monuments to be worshipped or toppled. We can agree with them in some respects, disagree in others, and above all we can learn from the ways they tried to hold together aspects of human experience that we often keep separate.

By the time Beiser reaches the end of this part of his discussion he has told us what his main theme will be, the struggle against subjectivism and the defence of realism, and he has warned us against the misleading tale of the absolute ego as a simple, world creating subject. He has urged us to see German idealism as a field of competing attempts to make sense of knowledge, nature and self consciousness, rather than as a single doctrine marching toward a predetermined end. With that preparation in place, he can then turn to Kant, Fichte, Schelling and the Romantics in turn, tracing in each case how they took up the problem of how a finite self can know and live in a world that is not its own creation, yet which somehow reflects its own rational structure.