10

In this new edition, the reader (if he is motivated to look for such things) will find several parts reworked and developed into more precise determinations. I was concerned in this edition with moderating and lessening the formal character of the presentation by, among other things, using more expansive, exoteric remarks to bring the abstract concepts closer to ordinary understanding and a more concrete representation of them. Yet the condensed brevity made necessary by an outline, in matters that are abstruse anyway, leaves this second edition in the same role as the first, to serve as a text for the lectures [Vorlesebuch] in need of the requisite elucidation by the oral presentation. To be sure, the title of an encyclopedia ought to leave room for a less rigorous scientific method and for assembling items based upon external considerations. However, the nature of the matter entails that the logical connection had to remain the foundation.

There are, it would seem, more than enough promptings and incentives on hand that seem to make it compulsory for me to explain the position of my philosophizing towards what lies beyond it, namely, the bustling concerns of contemporary culture, some of which are full of spirit, some devoid of it. This is the sort of thing that can only happen in an exoteric manner, as in a preface. For, although these concerns link themselves to philosophy, they do not engage with it scientifically and thus bar themselves from philosophy altogether, conducting their palaver outside of philosophy and remaining external to it. It is unpleasant and even awkward to enter ground so alien to science, for this sort of explaining and discussing does not advance the very understanding that can alone be the concern of genuine knowledge. Yet it may be useful, even necessary, to discuss some of these phenomena.

In general, in my philosophical endeavours, what I have worked towards and continue to work towards is the scientific knowledge of the truth. It is the most difficult path but the only path that can be of interest and value for the spirit, once the latter has entered upon the path of thought and, once it is on that path, has not fallen prey to vanity but instead has preserved the will and the courage for the truth. That spirit soon finds that the method alone can tame thought, bring it to the basic matter at hand, and keep it there. Inasmuch as the spirit initially strove to venture beyond this absolute content and placed itself above it, such a procedure proves to be nothing other than the restoration of that content – but a restoration in the most distinctive, freest element of the spirit.

It is not yet very long ago that the innocent and, by all appearances, fortunate condition obtained when philosophy proceeded hand in hand with the sciences and with culture, when enlightenment of the understanding was moderate and satisfied at once with the need for insight [Einsicht] and with religion, when a natural law was likewise in accord with the state and politics, and empirical physics bore the name of 'natural philosophy'. The peace, however, was rather superficial and, in particular, that insight stood in internal contradiction to religion just as that natural law stood in fact in contradiction to the state. The split then ensued, the contradiction developed itself. In philosophy, however, the spirit celebrated its reconciliation with itself, so that this science is in contradiction only with that contradiction itself and the effort to whitewash it. It is a pernicious prejudice that philosophy finds itself in opposition to knowledge gained from sensory experience, to the rational actuality of what is right as well as to an innocent religion and piety. These figures are recognized, indeed even justified, by philosophy. Far from opposing them, the thoughtful mind enters deeply into their content, and learns and strengthens itself in their midst as in the midst of the great discernments of nature, history, and art. For this solid content, insofar as it is thought, is the speculative idea itself. The collision with philosophy enters only insofar as this ground takes leave of its own distinctive character and its content is supposed to be grasped in categories and made dependent upon them, without leading the categories to the concept and completing them in the idea.

The understanding of the universal, scientific culture finds itself with an important negative result, namely, that no mediation with the truth is possible on the path of the finite concept. This result tends to have a consequence that is the very opposite of what lies immediately in it. That conviction has nullified [aufgehoben] the interest in the investigation of the categories and superseded, too, attentiveness and caution in the application of them, instead of working to eliminate finite connections from knowing. The use of categories has only become all the more unabashed, devoid of consciousness, and uncritical, as in a state of despair. The notion that the insufficiency of finite categories for truth entails the impossibility of objective knowledge is based upon a misunderstanding, from which the legitimacy of addressing and rejecting [matters] on the basis of feeling and subjective opinion is inferred. Replacing proofs are assurances and narratives of facts found in the consciousness that is held to be all the purer, the more uncritical it is. On so barren a category as immediacy – and without investigating it further – the highest needs of the spirit are to be based and to be decided by means of it. Particularly where religious objects are treated, one can find that philosophizing has been explicitly put aside, as if by this means one had banned every evil and attained assurance against error and deception. The investigation of truth is then staged on the basis of presuppositions drawn from anywhere and through rationalization [Räsonnement], i.e. through the use of the usual determinations of thought such as essence and appearance, ground and consequence, cause and effect, and so forth, and through the usual ways of inferring according to these and the other finite connections. 'Free of the evil one though they are, the evils remain',¹ and the evil is nine times worse than before because trust is placed in it without any suspicion and critique, as if that evil held at bay, namely, philosophy, were something other than the investigation of the truth – conscious of the nature and the value of the relationships in thinking that link and determine all content.

Philosophy itself, meanwhile, experiences its worst fate at the hands of those same individuals when they make it their business to meddle in philosophy, construing it and judging it [on their own terms]. The fact [Faktum] of physical or spiritual, in particular also religious vitality, is distorted by a reflection incapable of grasping it. Yet, as far as it is concerned, this way of construing the fact has the sense of initially elevating it to the level of something known [Gewußte] and the difficulty lies in this transition from the basic matter to knowledge, a transition that is the work of deliberating on the matter. In the science itself, this difficulty is no longer on hand. For the fact of philosophy is knowledge that has already been prepared and, with this, the process of construing the matter would be a thinking over [Nachdenken] only in the sense of thinking that follows after the fact [nachfolgendes Denken]. It is only [the act of] evaluating that would demand a thinking over in the usual meaning of the term. But that uncritical understanding demonstrates itself to be equally unfaithful in the naked construal of the idea that has been articulated in a determinate manner; it has so little suspicion or doubt of the fixed presuppositions contained within it that it is even incapable of repeating the bare fact of the philosophical idea. Miraculously, this understanding combines the following double-barrelled approach [das Gedoppelte] within itself. It is evident to this understanding that in the idea there is a complete departure from and even explicit contradiction of its use of categories – and at the same time no suspicion dawns on it that another way of thinking than its own is present and employed and that its thinking would have to behave differently here than usual. In this manner it happens that the idea of speculative philosophy is fixed upon immediately in terms of its abstract definition, on the supposition that a definition would of itself necessarily appear clear and settled and that it would have its regulating mechanism and criterion in presupposed representations alone, at least without knowing [in der Unwissenheit] that the sense of the definition like its necessary proof lies solely in its development and in the way the definition proceeds from the latter as a result. More precisely, since the idea in general is the concrete, spiritual unity but the understanding consists in construing conceptual determinations only in abstraction and thus in their one-sidedness and finitude, that unity is made into an abstract identity, devoid of spirit, an identity in which difference is not on hand but instead everything is one; even good and evil, among other things, are one and the same. Hence, the name 'system of identity', 'philosophy of identity' has already come to be a received name for speculative philosophy. If someone were to make his profession of faith as follows: 'I believe in God the Father, the Creator of heaven and earth', it would be surprising if someone else were to conclude from this first part that the person professing his faith believed in God, the creator of heaven, and therefore considered the earth to be uncreated and matter to be eternal. The fact is correct that in his profession of faith that person has declared that he believes in God, the creator of heaven, and yet the fact, as others have construed it, is completely false; so much so that this example must be regarded as incredible and trivial. And yet this violent bifurcation takes place in the way the philosophical idea is construed, such that, in order to make it impossible to misunderstand how the identity (which is, we are assured, the principle of speculative philosophy) is constituted, the explicit instruction and respective refutation ensue to the effect that, for instance, the subject is different [verschieden] from the object [Objekt], likewise the finite from the infinite, and so forth, as if the concrete, spiritual unity were in itself devoid of any determinateness and did not in itself contain the difference, as if someone did not know [nicht wüßte] that subject and object [Objekt] or the infinite and the finite were different from one another, or as if philosophy, immersing itself in book-learning [Schulweisheit], needed to be reminded that, outside school, there is wisdom for which that difference is something familiar.

More specifically, in relation to this difference that is not supposed to be familiar to it, philosophy is decried for the fact that in it, because of this, even the distinction between good and evil falls away. As a result, some would happily exercise a certain fairness and magnanimity by acknowledging 'that philosophers, in their presentations, do not always develop the disastrous consequences that are bound up with what they assert (though perhaps they also do not do so because these consequences are not inherent in their presentations after all)'.² Philosophy must spurn this mercifulness that some would extend to it, for it needs that mercifulness for its moral justification just as little as it can lack insight into the actual consequences of its principles and fail to make explicit their implications. I want to shed light briefly on that alleged implication, according to which the difference between good and evil is supposedly made into a mere semblance of a difference. I want to do so more to give an example of the hollowness of such a manner of construing philosophy than to justify it. For this purpose, let us simply take up Spinozism, the philosophy in which God is determined only as substance and not as subject and spirit. This distinction concerns the determination of the unity; this alone is what matters and yet those who tend to call the philosophy a system of identity, know [wissen] nothing of this determination, although it is a fact. They are even willing to say that, for this philosophy, everything is one and the same, even good and evil are alike – all of which are the worst sorts of unity. In speculative philosophy, there can be no talk of these sorts of unity; only a thinking that is still barbaric can make use of them with respect to ideas. As far as the claim is concerned that in that philosophy the difference between good and evil is not in itself or genuinely valid, it must be asked 'what does “genuinely” mean here?' If it means the nature of God, it will not seriously be demanded that evil be placed in that nature. That substantial unity is the good itself; evil is only division; in that unity, then, there is anything but the sameness of good and evil; to the contrary, the latter is excluded. Accordingly, the distinction of good and evil is just as little in God as such. For this distinction is only in what is divided into two, in which there is evil itself. Furthermore, in Spinozism one also finds the distinction: that the human being is different from God. Theoretically, the system may not be satisfying from this side. For human beings and the finite in general, even though reduced later to a mode, find themselves and are considered only alongside the substance. Here it is, then, in human beings, that the distinction exists, existing essentially as the distinction of good and evil as well, and it is here alone that the distinction genuinely is, for only here is the determination peculiar to it present. If, with respect to Spinozism, one is looking only at the substance, then, to be sure, there is no distinction of good and evil in it, but because evil, like the finite and the world generally (see the Remark § 50 on pp. 98–9), does not exist at all from this standpoint. If, however, one has one's eyes on the standpoint from which, even in this system, human beings and the relation of human beings to the substance surface and where evil alone can have its place in contrast to the good, then one must have examined the parts of the Ethics [of Spinoza] which treat of it (of emotions, human servitude and human freedom), in order to be able to speak of the moral implications of the system. One will undoubtedly be convinced as much of the exalted purity of this moral dimension, the principle of which is the sheer love of God, as of the fact that this purity of the moral dimension is a consequence of the system. Lessing said in his day that people treat Spinoza the way they treat a dead dog; one cannot say that in more recent times Spinozism, and speculative philosophy in general, are treated any better, particularly if one sees that those who report on and judge these matters do not even take the trouble to grasp the facts correctly and cite and portray them correctly. This would be the minimum of fairness and philosophy should in any case be able to demand as much.

The history of philosophy is the history of the discovery of the thoughts about the absolute that is their object. Thus, for example, one can say that Socrates discovered the determination of the purpose that was developed and determined by Plato and, in particular, by Aristotle. Brucker's history of philosophy³ is so uncritical, not only with respect to the external aspect of the historical material but with respect to the report of what was thought, that one finds twenty, thirty, and more sentences quoted as the philosophical sayings of ancient Greek philosophers, not a single one of which belongs to them. They are inferences that Brucker draws based on the bad metaphysics of his time and imputes to those philosophers as their claims. Inferences are of two sorts: some are merely elaborations of a principle in further detail, others trace the principle back to deeper principles. The historical dimension consists precisely in detailing which individuals are responsible for such a further deepening of thought and for unveiling this deepening. But that procedure [of Brucker] is inappropriate not merely because those philosophers did not themselves draw the implications that supposedly lie in their principles and thus merely failed to articulate those implications explicitly. It is even more inappropriate because in the course of inferring in this way it is immediately imputed to them that they let stand and make use of finite relations of thought, relations that are directly counter to the sense of philosophers of a speculative spirit and merely pollute and falsify the philosophical idea instead. In the case of ancient philosophers of whom only a few sentences have been conveyed to us, such falsification might be excused as allegedly a matter of making the correct inference. But that excuse falls by the wayside for a philosophy that has put its idea into determinate thoughts and has explicitly investigated and determined the value of the categories, if, in spite of this, the idea is construed in a distorted way and only one moment (e.g., identity) is picked out of the presentation and put forward as the totality, and if the categories are introduced quite unreflectively in the manner nearest at hand in their one-sidedness and untruthfulness, just as they pervade everyday consciousness. An educated knowledge of the relations of thoughts is the first condition of construing a philosophical fact correctly. But, thanks to the principle of immediate knowing, the rawness of thoughts is not only explicitly authorized but made into a law. Knowledge of thoughts, and with it the education of subjective thinking, is as little a form of immediate knowing as is any sort of science or art and skill.

Religion is the manner of consciousness in which the truth exists for all human beings, for human beings with any education. Scientific knowledge of the truth, however, is a particular sort of consciousness of it, the labour of which not everyone, indeed only a few, undertake. The content is the same, but just as Homer says that some things have two names, one in the language of the gods, the other in the language of the earthlings [übertägige Menschen], so there are two languages for that content, one the language of feeling, representation, and thinking nesting in finite categories and one-sided abstractions of the understanding, the other, the language of the concrete concept. If one also wants to discuss and evaluate philosophy from the vantage point of religion, more is required than merely having the habit of the language of earthlings. The foundation [Fundament] of scientific knowledge is the inner basic content, the indwelling idea and its vitality vibrant in spirit, just as religion is no less a mind that has been worked through, a spirit awake to mindfulness, a well-developed basic content. In most recent times religion has more and more contracted the cultivated extensiveness of its content and retreated into the intensity of piety or feeling, and indeed often a feeling that manifests a very meagre and barren content. As long as it has a Credo, a doctrine, a systematic theology, it has something that philosophy can treat and in which philosophy as such can come to some understanding with religion. This [process of coming to some understanding] is, again, not to be taken in terms of the impoverished understanding that merely dissects things, the sort of understanding that has captivated modern religiosity and in accordance with which both philosophy and religion are represented in such a way that the one excludes the other, or that they are generally separable to such an extent that they can then only be joined together from the outside. It is far more the case, again based on what has been said up to this point, that religion can probably exist without philosophy but philosophy cannot exist without religion, instead encompassing religion within itself. The genuine religion, the religion of the spirit, must have such a Credo, a content; the spirit is essentially consciousness, with a content that has been rendered objective [gegenständlich]. As a feeling, it is the non-objective content itself (merely qualia-like [qualiert], to use an expression from Jakob Böhme) and only the lowest level of consciousness, indeed, in that form of the soul that we have in common with animals. Only thinking makes the soul (with which animals are also endowed) a spirit, and philosophy is only a consciousness of that content, the spirit and its truth, in the shape and manner of its essential character that distinguishes it [the spirit] from the animal and makes it capable of religion. The intense [kontrakte] religiosity concentrating itself in the heart must make its gnashing and contrition [Zermürbung] the essential factor of its rebirth. At the same time, however, it would have to remember that it is dealing with the heart of a spirit, that the spirit is ordained with the power of the heart, and that this power can only exist insofar as spirit is itself reborn. This rebirth of the spirit from natural ignorance as well as from natural error takes place through instruction and the belief in the objective truth, the content, achieved by the testimony of the spirit. This rebirth of the spirit is, among other things, also immediately a rebirth of the heart from the vanity of the one-sided understanding, a rebirth on which it insists and through which it claims to know [wissen] things such as that the finite is different from the infinite, that philosophy must be either polytheism or, in discriminating spirits, pantheism, and so forth – the rebirth from such pitiful views on the basis of which pious humility rides high against philosophy as much as against theological knowledge. If religiosity persists in this intensity that is devoid of spirit because it lacks any expansion, then it knows [weiß], of course, only of the contrast of its narrow-minded and narrowing form with the spiritual expansiveness of religious as well as philosophical doctrine.⁴ But the spirit that thinks does not restrict itself merely to being satisfied with the purer, innocent religiosity. By contrast, the former standpoint [the one that lacks such expansiveness] is in itself the result of reflection and rationalization [Räsonnement]. With the help of a superficial understanding, it has fashioned for itself this polite [vornehme] liberation from practically every doctrine and, by zealously employing the thinking (with which it is infected) against philosophy, it maintains itself forcibly on the thin peak of an abstract condition of feeling, devoid of content. I cannot refrain from citing excerpts from Franz von Baader's exhortation [Paränesis] over such a patterning of piety, from Fermenta Cognitionis, Volume 5 (1823), Preface, p. ixf:

'As long,' he says, 'as a respect grounded on free investigation and thereby on genuine conviction has not been procured for religion and its doctrines, from the side of science…you pious and impious souls alike, with all your commandments and prohibitions, with all your palaver and action, will have no remedy for this bad situation [Übel] and, as long as this is the case, religion that is not respected will also not be loved. For one can only love heartily and sincerely what one sees sincerely respected and what one knows, beyond a doubt, to be worthy of respect, just as religion can only be served by this sort of amor generosus [generous love]…In other words, if you want the practice of religion to thrive once again, then take care that we attain once more a rational theory of it. Do not entirely leave the field to your opponents (the atheists) with the irrational and blasphemous claim that such a theory of religion is something impossible, something utterly unthinkable, and that religion is merely an affair of the heart in regard to which one justifiably can, indeed must, lose one's head.'⁵

As for the scantiness of the content, it can also be noted that one can talk of this only as the way religion appears in its external circumstances at a particular time. Such a time would be lamentable, when there is such a need simply to bring forth the mere belief in God (what was so pressing to the noble Jacobi) and, beyond that, simply to awaken a concentrated Christian feeling. At the same time, the higher principles that make themselves known in that feeling cannot be overlooked (see the Introduction to the Logic, the Remark to § 64). But before the science lies the rich content produced by centuries and millennia of the activity of knowing for itself. Moreover, it lies before science, not as though it were something historical that only others possessed and for us is in the past, something we concern ourselves with merely to become acquainted with it and to remember it and to develop acuity in criticizing narratives – in short, something irrelevant to knowledge of the spirit and interest in the truth. Religions, philosophies, and works of art have brought to the light of day the most sublime, the most profound and the innermost dimensions of things and done so in pure and impure, clear and clouded, often rather repugnant form. Mr Franz von Baader deserves our esteem for continuing, not only to recall such forms but also, with a profoundly speculative spirit, to honour their content explicitly in a scientific way by expounding and corroborating the philosophical idea as it emerges from them. The profundity of Jakob Böhme in particular affords opportunity and forms for this. The title philosophus teutonicus [Teutonic philosopher] has been rightly accorded this powerful spirit. On the one hand, he has expanded the content of religion for itself to the universal idea, and in terms of that very content he conceived the highest problems of reason and sought to grasp spirit and nature in their more definite spheres and formations. He did so by taking as the foundation that the spirit of the human being and all things have been created according to the image of God – none other, of course, than the triune God – and that their life is only this, after the loss of that original image, to be reintegrated into it. On the other hand, moving in the opposite direction, he has violently employed the forms of natural things (sulphur, saltpetre, and so forth, the tart, the bitter, and so forth) as spiritual forms and forms of thought. The gnosis of Mr Baader, which latches on to the same sorts of formations, is a distinctive way of igniting and advancing philosophical interest. His approach forcefully opposes the tranquil resignation accompanying the empty and barren pronouncements of so-called Enlightenment as much as a piety that wants only to remain in an intensive emotional state. In all his writings Mr Baader demonstrates, along the way, that he is far from taking this gnosis for an exclusive manner of knowing. There is more than one awkward side to it: its metaphysics does not push itself to consider the categories themselves and to develop the content methodically; it suffers from the concept's inadequacy for such wild or ingenious forms and formations; in a similar way, it suffers generally from having the absolute contents as a presupposition and then explaining, reasoning, and refuting on the basis of it.⁶

We have enough and even too many, one can say, of more rarefied and cloudier configurations of the truth – in religions and mythologies, in Gnostic and mystical philosophies of ancient and modern times. One can enjoy discovering the idea in these configurations and derive a certain satisfaction from the fact that the philosophical truth is not something merely solitary but that its activity has at least been present as a stirring ferment within them. But something else happens when the arrogance of someone immature, as was the case of an imitator of Mr Baader, tries to 'reheat' such productions of the fermenting process. In his laziness and inability to think scientifically, this imitator easily elevates that gnosis into the exclusive manner of knowing. For it takes less effort to indulge in such fictions and attach assertoric philosophical arguments to them than to take on the development of the concept and to submit one's thinking as well as one's mind to its logical necessity. Someone with this arrogance is also likely to attribute to himself the discovery of what he has learned from others, and he believes this all the more easily if he fights them or puts them down or, rather, is annoyed by them because he has drawn his insights from them.

Just as the urge to think announces itself, albeit distortedly, in the phenomena of the present time – phenomena that we have taken into consideration in this Preface – so, too, there exists in and for itself the need (this being the only reason worthy of our science) for the thought that has elevated itself to the heights of the spirit, as well as for its time, for what had been earlier revealed as a mystery – but in its revelation's more rarefied configurations and even more so in its cloudier ones remains something utterly opaque to formal thought – to be revealed for thinking itself. With the absolute right of the freedom proper to it, this thinking stubbornly insists on reconciling itself with the sound content, but only insofar as this content has been able to give itself the form [Gestalt] most worthy of it: that of the concept and of necessity, which binds everything, content as well as thought, and precisely therein makes it free. If the old is to be renewed (i.e., an old shape since the content itself is eternally young), then perhaps the shape of the idea given it by Plato and, much more profoundly, by Aristotle is infinitely more worth remembering. Moreover, it is so not least because to unveil it [i.e. that shape] by means of appropriating it to the formation of our thought is, without further ado, not only to understand it but also to advance science itself. But understanding such forms of the idea does not lie on the surface as does grasping Gnostic and cabbalistic phantasmagorias, and developing such forms is something that happens much less automatically than pointing to or indicating these echoes of the idea.

It has been rightly said of the true that it is index sui et falsi [the sign of itself and the false], but that the true is not known [gewußt] on the basis of the false. So, too, the concept is the understanding of itself and of the form lacking a concept, but the latter does not, on the basis of its inner truth, understand the concept. Science understands feeling and faith, but science can only be judged on the basis of the concept on which it rests. Moreover, since science is that concept's self-development, then appraisal [Beurteilung] of it on the basis of the concept is not so much passing judgment [Urteilen] on it as progressing along with it. That kind of appraising judgment is, necessarily, what I also wish for the present venture, as the only kind that I can respect and heed.

2 The words of Mr Tholuck in the Collection of Blossoms from Western Mysticism (Blütensammlung aus der morgenländischen Mystik) (Berlin, 1825), p. 13. Even Tholuck, for all his profound sensibility, allows himself to be misled into following the popular manner of construing philosophy. The understanding, he says, can make inferences only in the following two ways: either there is a primal ground [Urgrund] conditioning everything, so that even the ultimate ground of my self [meines Selbst] lies in it and my being and free acting are only an illusion, or I am actually a being [ein Wesen] differentiated from the primal ground, and my acting is not conditioned and produced by the primal ground, and consequently the primal ground is not the absolute being, conditioning everything; hence, there is no infinite God but instead a multitude of gods, and so forth. All philosophers who think more deeply and more incisively are supposed to accept the first proposition (I would not know exactly why the first one-sidedness should be deeper and more incisive than the second); the consequences, however, which, as mentioned above, they do not always develop, are 'that even the ethical standard of the human being is not an absolutely true standard; instead good and evil are actually (emphasis by the author himself) alike and only diverse in terms of the appearance [Schein].' It would always be better for someone not to speak of philosophy at all as long as, for all the depths of one's feeling, one is still so much caught up in the one-sidedness of understanding that one knows only the either–or of, on one side, a primal ground, in which the individual being and its freedom [is] only an illusion and, on the other, the absolute self-sufficiency of individuals, and one has no experience of the neither–nor of these two sorts of one-sidedness of what Mr Tholuck calls the 'dangerous dilemma'. On page 14 he speaks, to be sure, of such spirits – and these are, he claims, the genuine philosophers – who assume the second proposition (though one would think that this is exactly what is meant by the first proposition above) and cancel [aufheben] the opposition between unconditioned and conditioned being, doing so by virtue of the indifferent primal being in which all the respective oppositions pervade one another. But did Mr Tholuck not notice, in speaking this way, that the indifferent primal being in which the opposition is supposed to be suffused is entirely the same as that unconditioned being, the one-sidedness of which was supposed to be cancelled [aufgehoben]? Did he not see that in the same breath, as he cancels [das Aufheben] that one-sided thought [Einseitiges], he is thus cancelling [des Aufhebens] it in favour of something that has precisely this same one-sidedness and that, as a result, what he says allows that one-sidedness to persist instead of cancelling it. If one wants to say what spirits do, then one has to be able to comprehend the fact of the matter and do so with spirit. Otherwise, the fact has become falsified in one's own hands. – Allow me to note, moreover, somewhat tediously, that what is said here and subsequently about Mr Tholuck's notion of philosophy cannot and should not be said, so to speak, individually about him. One reads the same thing in hundreds of books, in the prefaces of theologians especially, among others. I have cited Mr Tholuck's presentation, in part because it happens to be closest at hand, in part because the profound feeling (that seems to place his writings on a side completely different from the theology of the understanding) stands closest to something profound. For the basic determination of that profundity, the reconciliation – which is not the unconditioned primal being and something abstract of this sort – is the basic content itself that the speculative idea is and expresses in thinking – a basic content that that profound sensibility should be least prone to fail to appreciate in the idea.
But even there it happens as it does everywhere else in Mr Tholuck's writings that he allows himself to indulge in the usual palaver about pantheism, about which I have spoken at length in one of the final Remarks [§ 573] of the Encyclopedia. I note here merely the peculiar clumsiness and about-face [Verkehrung] into which Mr Tholuck falls. For while, on the one side of his alleged philosophical dilemma, he places the primal ground, and afterwards (pp. 33, 38) characterizes this as pantheistic, he characterizes the other side as that of the Socinians, Pelagianists, and the so-called Popular Philosophers in such a way that on that side there is 'no infinite God but instead a large number of gods, namely, the number of all the beings that are different from the so-called primal ground and have their own being and acting, alongside that so-called primal ground'. On this side there is thus in fact not merely a large number of gods, but instead all things (everything finite counts here as having its own being) are gods. By this means, Mr Tholuck in fact explicitly has his omnitheism [Allesgötterei], his pantheism on this side, not on the first side, whose God he explicitly makes the one primal ground, such that, on that side, there is only monotheism.

4 To come back once more to Mr Tholuck who can be regarded as the enthusiastic representative of the pietistic orientation, the lack of such a doctrine is quite marked in his work The Doctrine of Sin, second edition (Hamburg, 1825), which has just come to my attention. What caught my eye was his treatment of the doctrine of the trinity in his work The Speculative Doctrine of the Trinity of the Late Orient (Berlin, 1826), for whose assiduously assembled historical notes I am sincerely grateful. He calls this doctrine a scholastic doctrine. But in any case it is much older than what one calls 'scholastic'. He considers it solely from the external side as supposedly a merely historical emergence, proceeding from speculation on biblical passages and under the influence of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy (p. 41). But in the writing about sin, he treats this dogma quite cavalierly, one might say, by declaring it to be only capable of being a framework [Fachwerk] within which the doctrines of faith (but which?) might be classified (p. 220); indeed, one must also employ the expression fata morgana to refer to this dogma (p. 219), for so it appears to those standing on the shore (in the sands of the spirit?). But the doctrine of trinity is 'under no circumstances a foundation on which the faith can be grounded' (hence, Mr Tholuck speaks of it as a three-legged stool; see p. 221). Has not this doctrine, as the most holy of doctrines, from time immemorial – or at least for how long? – been the chief content of the faith itself as its Credo and has this Credo not been the foundation of subjective faith? Without this doctrine, how can the doctrine of reconciliation (that Mr Tholuck in the work cited tries with so much energy to make his readers feel) have more than a moral or, if one will, heathen sense? How can it have a Christian sense? In this text one also finds nothing of other, more particular dogmas; Mr Tholuck always leads his readers, for example, only up to Christ's life and death but neither to his resurrection and elevation to the right hand of the Father nor to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. A major determination in the doctrine of reconciliation is the punishment of sins; for Mr Tholuck (pp. 119ff.) this is the burdensome self-consciousness and the unblessed condition bound up with it, the condition of everyone who lives outside God, the sole source of the blessedness as well as holiness. As a result, sin, consciousness of guilt, and the unblessed condition cannot be thought without one another (here then thinking, too, comes into play, just as on p. 120 the determinations are also shown to flow from God's nature). This determination of the punishment of sins is what some have called the natural punishment of sins and (like the indifference towards the doctrine of trinity) it is the result and the teaching of reason and the Enlightenment, otherwise so severely decried by Mr Tholuck. – Some time ago, in the upper house of the English Parliament, a bill fell through that concerned the Unitarian sect. On this occasion an English newspaper, after reporting the large number of Unitarians in Europe and America, added: 'For the most part, on the European continent, Protestantism and Unitarianism are presently synonymous.' Theologians may decide for themselves whether Mr Tholuck's systematic (or dogmatic?) theology differs from the usual theory of the Enlightenment on more than one or at most two points and whether, on closer inspection, it even differs on these points.

6 It is obviously quite pleasant for me to see, in the content of several more recent writings of Mr Baader, as well as in the explicit mentioning of many statements from me, his agreement with the latter. Regarding most or easily all of what he contests, it would not be difficult for me to come to terms with him, to show in other words that it in fact does not diverge from his views. I only want to touch on one reproach that comes up in the Remarks on Some Anti-religious Philosophical Arguments of our Age (1824), p. 5, cf. pp. 56ff. He speaks of a philosophical argument which is the product of the 'philosophy of nature' school and sets up a false concept of matter, 'because it maintains of the transient essence of this world, containing ruination in itself, that this essence, having emerged from God and being emergent from him both immediately and eternally, as the eternal exit (externalization) of God, conditions God's eternal re-entry (as spirit)'. As far as the first part of this representation is concerned, on matter's emerging from God, I see no way around the fact that this proposition is contained in the determination that God is the creator of the world (though it bears noting that 'emerging' is in general a category that I do not use since it is only a picturesque image, not a category). As for the other part, namely, that the eternal exit conditions God's re-entry, Mr Baader places conditioning in this position, a category that is, in and for itself, inappropriate and one that I use just as little for this relation. I recall what I noted above about uncritically swapping determinations of thought. But to discuss matter's emergence, be it in an immediate or mediated way, would lead merely to utterly formal determinations. What Mr Baader himself (pp. 54ff.) declares about the concept of matter does not, as far as I see, depart from my own determinations with respect to it. Similarly, for the absolute task of grasping the creation of the world as a concept, I do not understand what help might lie in Mr Baader's declaration (p. 58) that matter 'is not the immediate product of unity, but the product of the principles of it (those empowered, the Elohim) which the unity summoned for this purpose'. From the grammatical structure, the sense of this claim is not completely clear. Is the sense that matter is the product of the principles or is it that matter has summoned these Elohim to itself and has let itself be produced by them? In either case, those Elohim or rather this entire circle must be put together into a relation to God, a relation that the insertion of Elohim does not illumine.

Preface to the second edition