Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit reason only. —Blaise Pascal
For me the question is not so much What is reason? as What is language?
—Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788)
In the first four chapters we met the originators of dialogical thinking in the West: Eugen, Franz, and Martin Buber. I’ve seen all three as pioneers in the movement away from theism and toward panentheism. All three of them described, in various ways, how God was in process of enlarging man’s being into the divine.
Then, in Chapters 6 and 7, we’ve just met some of their allies in the movement toward panentheism: the Orthodox—Berdyaev, Bulgakov, and Solovyov; the Anglican—Robinson and Spong; and the Catholic—Baum and Dewart.
Now I’ll wrap up Part I by providing a brief history of dialogical thinking, one which will show certain fascinating links between the forerunners of the Protestant and Jewish dialogical thinkers and their Eastern Orthodox allies. All of them, of course, were reacting to the Enlightenment’s enthronement of rationalism—and its related dismissal of religion. All of them, like Pascal and Hamann, wanted to reconceive the relationship between reason and faith.
Just who, then, did Eugen, Franz, and Buber have as forerunners? Three of the most important were fellow Germans: Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829), and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872).
I’ll begin with Feuerbach, who started out as a Hegelian idealist but then turned on his master.
Buber acknowledges the origins of his I and Thou in Feuerbach when he writes: “I myself in my youth was given a decisive impetus by Feuerbach....Never before has a philosophical anthropology been so emphatically demanded.”
Rosenzweig writes of his speech-thinking that “Ludwig Feuerbach was the first to discover it.”
And Eugen begins Speech and Reality with the statement: “Ludwig Feuerbach, one hundred years ago, was the first to state a grammatical philosophy of man. He was misunderstood by his contemporaries, especially by Karl Marx.”
One statement by Feuerbach that was critical for all three dialogical thinkers is found in his 1843 Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Listed as principle No. 59, it reads:
The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.”
Here, and in similar statements, Feuerbach began thinking in terms of how language, through grammar, molds us into different persons. He elaborates on speech itself when he writes:
A divine impulse this—a divine power, the power of words....The word guides to all truth, unfolds all mysteries, reveals the unseen, makes present the past and the future, defines the infinite, perpetuates the transient....The Word of God is supposed to be distinguished from the human word in that it is no transient breath, but an imparted being. But does not the word of man also contain the being of man, his imparted self,—at least when it is a true word?
Before he published his Principles, Feuerbach had created a sensation, in Germany and beyond, with his 1841 book titled The Essence of Christianity. In it he called for a “higher anthropology,” a science of man based on Christianity—but on Christianity in a non-supernaturalist sense. He described his goal as leading philosophy and religion “from the realm of departed souls back into the realm of embodied and living souls,” that is, pulling them “down from the divine self-sufficient bliss in the realm of ideas into human misery.”
It seems clear that Feuerbach and the dialogical thinkers who succeeded him were seeking a higher humanism, one based on our greatest gifts of the word and the spirit, not the reductionist humanism and materialism with which Feuerbach’s name is usually associated.
Moving back now to Feuerbach’s own predecessors, we come to Friedrich von Schlegel and Hamann. Here I can turn to Isaiah Berlin to help with what I want to say. In 1994 Berlin published his The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism. While Eugen’s interpretation of language was as different from Hamann’s as a car is from a horse and buggy, his eccentric 18th century ancestor certainly played a key role in showing that language is a more central category than reason. Berlin’s book deals with just that issue.
First, Berlin establishes the 18th century Hamann as the spiritual father of the 18th and 19th century German romantics—from his student Johann Gottfried Herder (1774-1803), to Herder’s friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), to Goethe’s friend Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) and to Goethe’s admirer Friedrich von Schlegel. While Berlin does not get into it, since Schelling and Schlegel were critical inspirers of Ivan Kireevsky and the flourishing of Russian philosophy that grew from his work, Hamann becomes a spiritual father of these Eastern thinkers as well. Kireevsky went to Germany in the 1830s—and made it a point to hear Schelling’s lectures.
Following in Kireevsky’s trail, Solovyov, Florensky, Bulgakov, and Berdyaev—all of them—found vital inspiration in the German romantics, those rebels against the arid rationalism of the French Enlightenment.
Second, the title of Berlin’s book provides just the challenge I need to make my “brief history” more than a recital of names. Of course, it’s the word “irrationalism” in the title that alarms me. I’ve been trying to present my mentors as perfectly reasonable. Kireevsky and Eugen, in particular, I’ve described as “supra-rational,” since they quite deliberately said that reason (logical and objective language) was essential—but not exclusive—in understanding anything. Thus, I’ve got to question at least one word from Berlin, an author who’s every other word I’ve treasured.
I’ll begin my questioning by noting that, in 1959, the University of Münster gave Eugen an honorary degree, hailing him as “the Hamann of the twentieth century.” Unfortunately, being recognized as the “new Hamann” is not entirely a blessing. The old Hamann, as I’ve said, was decidedly eccentric. He liked to call himself an “ignoramus,” with “a mind like blotting paper,” and a style of “fragments, leaps, and hints.” Still, as a critical inspirer of thinkers from Goethe to Schelling and beyond, he has an undeniable status, one that Berlin fully accords him.
That brings us to just what Berlin says of Hamann. He calls him, “The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and, in particular, all forms of rationalism of his time.” He notes that, “Goethe saw Hamann as a great awakener, the first champion of the unity of man—the union of all his faculties, mental, emotional, physical, in his greatest creations.” And he concludes that, “It is doubtful whether without Hamann’s revolt…the worlds of Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, Schiller, and indeed of Goethe too, would have come into being.”
While Eugen and Franz, like Berdyaev, drew on Schelling for the idea that we were now about to embark on a third period in history, the age of the spirit, and while they saw Goethe as the first citizen of this new age, Eugen cites Friedrich Schlegel as a more specific source of inspiration. Schlegel provided Eugen with certain key ideas—seeds you might say—that blossomed into Out of Revolution as well as his writings on language. First, in Out Eugen says that his “history of the inspirations of mankind” was “first conceived by Friedrich Schlegel,” a thinker who “foresaw our own attempt to deal with the continuous process of creation in mankind itself.” Second, in his 1935 essay “The Uni-versity of Logic, Language and Literature,” Eugen points to Schlegel as a “predecessor” in disclosing that “language, logic, and literature are various forms of crystallization in one process.”
After reading that in Eugen’s essay, I looked up Schlegel’s writings and found what, indeed, seemed the seeds of Eugen’s understandings of speech and the Cross of Reality. That cross seems prefigured in Schlegel’s 1847 book on language. There he writes:
The first truth then that psychology arrives at is the internal discord within our fourfold and divided consciousness....It is only in the highest creations of artistic genius, manifesting itself either in poetry or some other form of language...that we meet with the perfect harmony of a complete and united consciousness, in which all its faculties work together in combined and living action.
Now Schlegel’s perception that we have a “fourfold consciousness” not only seems to prefigure the Cross of Reality; it also anticipates what Kireevsky said about integral knowledge in his “New Principles for Philosophy.”
Earlier I reported a conversation with Emmanuel Mounier in which I said that Eugen’s cross seems to have been anticipated by Kireevsky. Now it appears that we know why. It seems quite likely that both men derived their approach to integral knowledge from a single source: Friedrich von Schlegel.
That Kireevsky was probably influenced by Schlegel is confirmed by Andrzej Walicki, the noted historian of Russian philosophy. In his biography of Kireevsky, Abbot Gleason writes:
Walicki regards Kireevsky’s ‘integralism’ as part and parcel of a sweeping critique of revolutionary rationalism, almost all the elements of which were taken from German romantic and counterrevolutionary thought….Walicki…stressed the similarities between Kireevsky’s ‘integralism’...and that of Friedrich Schlegel. What Kireevsky called the ‘union of all the forces of the soul’ seems to have been essentially what Schlegel meant by ‘die Einheit des Bewustseins.’ (the unity of consciousness).
Returning now to Berlin’s book, when excerpts from it were printed in the October 21, 1993 New York Review of Books, Hamann scholar James O’Flaherty wrote a letter to the Review (November 18. 1993) in which he pointed out that there was now a consensus among Hamann scholars that he was not irrational but should be thought of as introducing “intuitive reason.” Berlin replied that this term seemed meaningless to him. Of course, what I do in this present book is attempt to make something resembling “intuitive reason” seem rational rather than irrational. That’s why, in Chapter 6, I reported how I decided to create the term “supra-rational.” That’s also why I’ve introduced this chapter with that epigraph from Pascal—on recognizing the limits of reason. I like to think that our French friend would have welcomed Hamann and his German successors.
To link what’s been said in this short chapter to the next three chapters, all based in Russia, I might return to Eugen’s enigmatic statement about Feuerbach: “he was misunderstood by his contemporaries, especially by Karl Marx.” What Eugen meant, I think, is that Marx derived much of his materialist philosophy from Feuerbach, never realizing that Feuerbach, in his The Essence of Christianity and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, was exploring a way beyond both materialism and idealism. Marx, Lenin, and the communist thinkers who followed in their wake, all marching under the banner of materialism, helped prepare the way for that brutal dictatorship which still gripped the USSR in December 1983, when I and a group of friends went there to launch US-USSR Bridges for Peace.
To continue, click: Chapter 9 Bridges for Peace