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| 1783 -1863 |
Günther’s aim is to defend Christianity and to show how the new philosophies fail to understand its basic tenets. At the same time as Günther is criticising them, he is also clearly influenced by some of the ideas of the other German philosophers, in ways that resemble Coleridge’s new reading of the idea of trinity.
Günther’s book is structured as an exchange of letters between a theology student and his uncle, who is afraid that the nephew has fallen to pantheist thinking. The evidence for this suspicion lies in certain theses reminiscent of ideas common to many of the idealist thinkers of the time. In these theses, philosophy is regarded as a single entity, developing throughout history through various relatively true philosophical systems. Furthermore, philosophy is here regarded as having essentially the same mission as religion, and in addition, as bridging two different phases of religion: an undeveloped awareness of divine in feeling would have been supplanted by Greek realistic and polytheistic philosophy and Greek philosophy would have been superseded by Christian idealistic philosophy, which would finally lead to an age of reasoned consciousness of God, where philosophy would not be needed anymore and wise humanity would rule over all nature and create a new heaven.
Nephew then defends himself that despite his conviction that philosophy will lead to a new understanding of God, he does not think that this would necessarily imply supplanting Christianity with pantheism. Indeed, he insists that theism is an equally valid way to do philosophy.
Nephew outlines his position in more detail by dividing all possible philosophical systems into two kinds: critical philosophy begins with the faculty of cognition and takes care of not overstepping its limits, while transcendent philosophy does precisely what critical warns against and starts from what is absolute. He specifies this rather Kantian division by noting that transcendent philosophy describes the relation between absolute and relative being in terms of substance and its accidental modifications. Critical philosophy, on the other hand, tries to - again in Kantian terms - leave room for faith in matters pertaining to things outside cognition.
The student makes an even more intricate division of philosophical systems, although only in a footnote. Uncle is not that impressed with it, noting that all philosophical systems are in a sense critical, because they all must begin with some facts of consciousness, and at the same time also transcendent, because absolute or God is always one of these facts of consciousness.
His own understanding of philosophy is built around several oppositions. One of them is the primary opposition between absolute and relative being, by which uncle means, effectively, God and the world. Another opposition lies within the relative being, that is, opposition of nature and spirit. A third opposition cuts across the second opposition: in both nature and spirit we can differentiate between accidental or phenomenal appearances and their substance or noumenal ground. Furthermore, he finds yet another opposition between the phenomena multiplicity and the noumenal unity: both natural and spiritual appearances can be reduced to two opposed forces. One of these forces is always passive - in case of nature, contraction, in case of spirit, receptivity - while the other is active - respectively, expansion and spontaneity.
All of these opposed concepts are familiar from Kantian and post-Kantian discussions. Uncle - the probable voice of Günther himself - notes that they are also among the facts of consciousness, from which philosophy should begin. For instance, uncle notes that in our self-consciousness we are conscious of ourselves as spirit, but also of something distinct from us and spirit, that is, nature. By studying both spiritual and natural phenomena, uncle suggests, we can find the basic forces behind them. Uncle points out that this already leads us from accidental variability to more stable and substantial level; even more apparent this substance behind phenomena is to us in our experience of ourselves as a stable unity behind individual experiences. Finally, we are aware of ourselves being conditioned, which then requires the assumption of something that can exist just by itself.
Basic question of philosophy, uncle suggests, has always been to explain how these various components of experience are related to one another, and different systems have a different answer. Some of them concentrate on the relation between nature and spirit, like naturalism, which take substance of spirit be just an effect and a product of substance of nature, spiritualism, where the roles are reversed and the substance of nature emanates from the substance of spirit, hylozoism, where the two are identified, and dualism, where the two substances differ, but interact. Some philosophical systems try to settle the relation of natural and spiritual appearances, like sensualism, which takes all spiritual phenomena to be caused by natural phenomena and therefore raises the status of senses, or intellectualism, which takes the opposite stand and states that the world of experience must be a product of our representations.
The more important question in Günther’s schema concerns the question about the relationship between absolute and relative worlds, and it is here especially where the character of uncle finds evidence for his pantheism accusations. Some systems regard nature and spirit as mere accidents of divine substance: following tradition, uncle calls this acosmic pantheism, because this system denies the existence of any world distinct from God. In a sense opposed to this is what the uncle calls cosmic pantheism, where God is just the goal to be actualised through world history, which is then a process of God’s self-revelation. Further forms of pantheism the uncle mentions hold God or absolute to be spatiality (monadistic pantheism, where all becoming is mere illusion), temporality (compared to previous, all stability is here illusion), substantially identical with nature (pantheistic naturalism, where nature is revelation of divinity) or substantially identical with human spirit (here human spirit is just a limited mode of God and nature this limitation, and God is revealed through the system of finite spirits). With all of this evidence before him, uncle concludes that pantheism is a necessary result, when philosophy attempts to describe the relation of God to nature and spirit.
Nephew objects that there is still some room for a non-pantheist philosophy, where God is described as a creator of the world, creation being an external relation between God and nature. He does concede that creation cannot be handled theoretically, because it is based on God’s unconditioned, free causality, which cannot be conceptualised. Creation is still justified on practical grounds, because it is the only possible basis of ethical freedom.
The basic idea of creation, nephew says, presupposes that there is a world distinct from God and God distinct from the world. World can, he admits, be said to be in God, but only in the sense that God thinks even possible worlds. In addition to this, world still needs to receive existence, which is based on a free act of God. At the same time, nephew says, God reveals himself as the most perfect entity through the world to other, less perfect entities outside him, who are capable of knowing and loving God and so taking part in his blessedness. These less perfect entities or spirits God has created as his likeness, but not as equal to him.
Nephew also makes a Kantian distinction between the sense world and the intelligible world. The sense world is only the manner in which the intelligible world appears to finite spirits, thus, God has no real relation to the sense world. Because spatiality is the property of the sense world, God is not in any spatial relation to the real world. Still, nephew insists, God is outside the world in the sense that he is not finite.
Uncle notes that nephew’s model of creation resembles the system presented in Vorschule der Theologie (note the similarity with the name of this book), written by I. H. Fichte, son of the more famous J. G. Fichte. In Fichte’s system, as presented by Günther, absolute realises itself by giving independent existence to a difference implicit in it and forming a sort of body to itself through its self-division. Absolute retains and knows its unity in and through its division and is thus a self-conscious God only because of creation. The divisions are in the fashion of Leibnizian monadology themselves relative absolutes or self-contained universes and therefore also self-conscious personalities.
The concept of relative absolute reminds the nephew of another recent philosophical work, by Georg Friedrich Daumer. Daumer’s starting point, nephew tells, is an idea found in Schelling’s essay on freedom that God himself had a basis or ground in an ultimate, featureless indifference, on top of which divine self-consciousness was built. For Daumer, nephew says, God is always self-conscious and this indifference is more like something divinity rips out of itself - the relative absolute - and makes into a basis of finite world. In effect, this Daumerian relative absolute is a blind generating force that searches for its own self-consciousness and eventual reconciliation with God.
Nephew uses the Daumerian idea to solve a fault he finds in Fichte’s system, where there appears to be no place for nature outside self-conscious subjects. Nephew notes that most post-Kantian philosophers have taken nature as a dynamic whole and thus something real. If Fichte were right, nature would then also form a self-conscious subject and would be on the same level as human spirits, which the nephew cannot accept. His own idea was to take nature as a mere shadow of true reality, but now Daumer has given him a new idea - if nature is just this blind relative absolute, humanity is still on a higher level, because it does not just strive, but can also reach back to God. The only worry nephew now has is that it seems to restrict God’s omnipotence, if he can never create something truly different from himself, but only modifications of divinity - when God creates, he should not be just positing his own essence.
It is time for the uncle to lead the student away from the quagmire he has got himself into. The first target of uncle’s criticism is nephew’s Kantianism, evident especially in latter’s insistence that spatial sense world was nothing real and that God had nothing to do with it. Günther goes into more detail with Kant’s idea of space and time as a priori forms of experience in an appendix, where he balances Kantianism with Aristotle’s objective notion of space and time and both with Augustine’s manner of grounding space and time to God. In the main book, uncle merely notes that while it was right to say that worldly and therefore spatial relations do not concern God, it is wrong to insist that no relation holds between God and the spatial world. He also adds that Kant’s attempt to make room for faith actually managed to just set faith aside somewhere where it could be forgotten.
Uncle also notes that Fichte’s system is essentially another form of pantheism, because - as the nephew had feared - in it God just multiplies itself or posits other absolutes similar to itself. He also notes, making fun of the idea mentioned in the beginning about apparently different philosophies being just phases in the development of one philosophy, that pantheism, as exemplified by Fichte’s system, and Kant-inspired criticism, as exemplified by nephew’s system, are more like eternal rivals, neither of which can be seen as development of the other. Ultimately, the decision between the two systems boils down to the question whether facts of self-consciousness should weigh more than demands of reason. Human self-consciousness is inevitably bound to a consciousness of something else limiting us - nature - and thus to an inevitable dualism between finite or relative and infinite or absolute being. Then again, our reason strives to reduce everything into a unified whole and to envision the relative world as a revelation of absolute. Although not yet spelling it out, uncle hints of a possibility of a third option more satisfying than either criticism or pantheism.
Uncle also makes short shrift of Daumer’s position. At first, he quickly dismisses Schelling’s essay of freedom, which influences Daumer, by noting that Schelling introduces without any justification dualism within absolute, thus, making it into relative being. Daumer himself, uncle continues, makes again the pantheistic assumption that God can only posit something similar to itself (relative absolute) and that God needs the world for its own self-consciousness.
We then get an interlude with nephew’s letter, where he notes the similarity of his time with the time of Neoplatonists and Church Fathers. He suggests that just like Neoplatonism was a syncretist hodgepodge of various mystery religions and mythologies covered with magical superstition, modern idealism is also a similar confusion of oriental pantheism with mysticism of intellectual intuition. Furthermore, nephew insists that whereas Church Fathers appropriated from Neoplatonism all that was worthwhile (especially the notion of supersensuous world above the world of senses) and added solid historical background in the form of Bible, the task now ahead is to take what is useful in modern pantheistic idealism and give it again a solid grounding in Christianity.
Uncle takes up this challenge by picking as the important result of modern idealism the analysis of self-consciousness. Consciousness as such unites two distinct moments: what is represented and what represents. Self-consciousness is a form of consciousness, in which representing subject makes itself its own object. Immediately subject can know only its activities or interactions with some objects, while it can know its substance or essence only through the mediation of these activities: in the words of a common analogy, eye can see or be aware of itself only through the seeing of other things.
God, the uncle continues, should also have self-consciousness, although it is one of a peculiar kind, because it is absolute. Still, even God must have something as its object, before being capable of self-consciousness. Unlike human consciousness, God can simply posit its own essence as its own object. At the same time, it must posit a common substance for God as subject and God as object. In a manner very reminiscent of Coleridge uncle states that this threefold structure of divine self-consciousness is what Christianity has called trinity. In other words, God necessarily emanates three persons from himself in order to know itself.
Self-revelation of absolute, which reason required for completing its demands, happens then already at the level where only God exists, because God posits its own essence as a new object. Question is why God would still create something other beyond himself and his persons. Uncle concludes that God’s goal must have been to reveal himself to someone else who is not God.
Within the created realm, uncle continues, nature and spirit share similarities, but on a more substantial level they differ and oppose one another. Thus, both nature and spirit are based on a pair of opposed forces and their underlying unity, but with nature these two forces are necessarily related (action and reaction), while with spirit spontaneity need not correspond with the receptive side of human mind, and thus, spirit can freely rise above what it senses. Spirit and nature cannot then be reduced to one another and also not to any indifferent substance underlying them. Their opposition is also not based on their combination, which is just as finite and relative as both of them, namely, humanity as a combination of spirit and body. Their existence, uncle concludes, can then be based only on something third above them, which has created them.
God is then something completely different from both nature and spirit, uncle says, and completely incommensurable with them. In a sense, God is even opposed to finite creatures. God has a unified essence and substance, which appears in three essential forms. World, on the other hand, contains three different kinds of substances (nature, spirit and their combination or humanity), but they all share the same form of revealing their substance through a dualism of basic forces. Still, uncle points out, both the world as a whole and individual created beings can be regarded as God’s images - individual creatures are relative absolutes, since they have life principles that work as a foundation of a sum of appearances, while the world as a whole is a trinity of substances.
Nephew’s final letter starts by recounting traditional properties of God, such as his omnipotence, omniscience and love, all of which are essential reasons why God created the world and how he could do it. He notes that some philosophers deem such properties too anthropomorphic, while only accepting spirit as God's characterisation. Nephew points out that it would be actually better to distinguish spirit as a finite entity from God as absolute - although God is not necessary, like nature, he is also not free in the sense of finite spirit.
He then turns to the question, whether human reason can by itself know that God exists. He notes that philosophers have had two positions on the topic. First position insists that reason has in its own self-consciousness also an immediate mystical awareness of divinity. Nephew cannot accept this position, because it is an obvious fallback to the pantheist position, where humans and God are identified. The second position, on the other hand, accepts that we have only mediate knowledge of God, but suggests that this is possible only if God comes and directly interacts with us. Nephew is skeptical, whether knowledge requires such a direct interaction with its object - we can deduce the existence of absolute even from the awareness of ourselves as conditioned entities.
A related problem concerns the role of faith in getting to know absolute. The prominent opinion, as the nephew points out, was that faith had at least something to do with it. One party, endorsing the idea of reason having a immediate connection to God, identified this immediate connection with faith and insisted that only this immediate cognition or faith was required, while understanding as mediate cognition was dependent on immediate cognition and could only be of use in the multiplicity of the sense world. Understanding and its traditional proofs of God’s existence could still enliven faith in us, even if they really couldn’t prove anything. The opposing party insisted that understanding has something to do with cognition of divine: faith was created in us by God’s interaction with us and understanding was required for refining it into cognition through traditional proofs of God’s existence. Nephew points out that both parties have tried to find an immediate connection with God, one through its own self-consciousness, other through God’s interaction with us. Yet, both must admit that understanding and its mediate, conceptual thinking is required for knowing God, since immediately we can know only our own states, but not what produces them.
In the concluding letter of the book, uncle congratulates the nephew for endorsing two controversial ideas. First of these is the idea that God is properly speaking not a spirit. True, God has similarities to spirits: both are non-material and have self-consciousness. Still, they both have widely different essences, just like animals and humans do not share their essence, although both have the capacities to sense and imagine.
The second controversial position is that we can know God even without direct connection to him. The opponents of this idea insist that only similarities between the knower and the known make knowing possible. Uncle points out that this would make it impossible for us to ever know things of nature, which have a different essence from us. He points out the possible objection that humans can know nature through their bodily side, but rejects it instantly by noting that it ignores the unity of human self-consciousness - it is not the eye that sees, but the self-conscious human using the eye.
Uncle notes that the principle of similars knowing similars has a true kernel: we must know something similar to ourselves, that is, we must be conscious of ourselves, before we can know anything else. Still, this does not mean that we have to turn in something else in order to know its existence. Furthermore, the knowledge of God provided by our knowing the conditionedness of ourselves is only theoretical knowledge of absolute. If we truly want to know God as God or his personality, uncle concludes, we must know him also through hearing him speak to us through our conscience.
