Louis Eugène Marie Bautain: Philosophy of Christianity – Second volume

Bautain begins the second volume of his book by continuing with his account of the history of philosophy. He had ended the first volume with the mention of Aristotle, and next he jumps over most of the Hellenistic period to Neoplatonism, which he takes to be nothing but an eclectic conglomeration of Jewish traditions, Greek philosophical doctrines and oriental superstitions and suggests it to be a providential example of what errors human reason is capable by itself. Bautain contrasts Neoplatonism with New Testament and the Church Fathers, who, he claims, founded the true science by investigating especially the trinitarian nature of the divinity.

Bautain’s view of medieval philosophy is highly critical. He understands the aim of the scholastics, who were keen to defend philosophy against heresies invented by human reason. Yet, Bautain thinks that the weapons they used, that is, the syllogistic and the whole Aristotelian philosophy, were incompatible with the living nature of Christian faith. He does admit that philosophers like Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas found great truths by their faith, but regrets that they had to mutilate their ideas by presenting these in the rigid scholastic form.

The most regrettable result of scholastic philosophy, according to Bautain, was that human reason once again thought itself capable of knowing the truth by itself, without the help of faith. This led, Bautain thinks, straight to the idea of Cartesian doubt, which ultimately remained vague in its very principles, since it never could explain what even this thinking thing was in its nature. A similar cry for beginning from tabula rasa regarding the external nature, Bautain suggests, was heralded by the Baconian philosophy, which, in addition to Cartesianism, Bautain sees as a principle of all modern philosophy. The effect of Descartes and Bacon, Bautain insists, was making philosophy again a pagan affair, which he considers to be especially embodied in the contemporary German philosophy or Schellingian pantheism, which he sees as a resurrection of Neoplatonism.

Bautain moves to consider specifically the current French schools of philosophy. He starts with the Enlightenment philosophers, all of whom he deems as mere materialists and as responsible for the anarchy of the French revolution. Bautain especially emphasises the role of Condillac as the instigator of the later ideological school of Destutt de Tracy, which in Bautain’s eyes made humans into mere thinking machines and especially led to a complete indifference to religion.

After the restoration of French monarchy, Bautain continues, the ideological school was replaced by the followers of the Scottish common sense school. He finds the whole premise of this school suspect, since it tries to determine the nature of human mind through self-consciousness, although even Kant had shown this to be a flawed attempt. Furthermore, Bautain continues, the common sense school is interested merely in the worldly side of human experience, ignoring the question of his future fate. Thus, he concludes, common sense philosophers are at best just deists, who do not know the living God.

The final contemporary French school Bautain mentions is that of eclecticism, founded by Victor Cousin. Bautain is reluctant to criticise Cousin, having been his student and still considering him a friend. Still, Bautain cannot really endorse Cousin’s eclecticism. Much of it, he says, is essentially just a repetition of the common sense philosophy, with all the same faults, and what Cousin adds to it is just a view that all historical schools of thought have had some grain of truth in them, which Bautain finds repugnant, as it lowers Christianity on the same level as all the non-Christian philosophies. Bautain is especially distrustful of Cousin’s affinity with the contemporary German philosophy, which pantheistically reduces spirit and matter, God and human, and indeed everything into a featureless absolute.

Bautain turns his critical eye next to contemporary theologians. Apparently his views had aroused some controversy, since he attaches to the letters published in the book an explanation that when criticising scholasticism, he does not criticise Catholicism. In fact, he says, scholasticism is just a method, that is, application of Aristotelian logic and philosophy to Christianity. There’s nothing particularly Christian in Aristotle, Bautain argues, and indeed, his logic is good mostly for disputation. In fact, he emphasises, Church Fathers did not use Aristotle in their works, but tried to positively make sense of the things they had faith in. Bautain admits also that the scholastic method still has its uses, for instance, in making our reason more precise, but the point is that reason by itself cannot reach the essential truths.

In the original correspondence, Bautain does not even pay this lip service to scholasticism, but begins an all out attack against the contemporary scholastics, who tried to base things of faith on reason. Theology, he insists, hasn’t really progressed in the last few centuries, and theologians seem completely unaware of the developments in other sciences. Although Bautain speaks of scholasticism, the theology he investigates is actually based on Cartesianism, even if the methods used are otherwise Aristotelian. 

The current theologians, Bautain starts, begin with a Cartesian doubt, imagining that reason could set up metaphysics without any recourse to faith. Indeed, he adds, they restrict the whole nature of human soul to this one faculty of reason or thinking, ignoring the wealth of richness hidden within the human mind. No wonder they then proceed directly to logic, by which they understand mere study of reasoning and especially syllogisms, without any comprehension of the limits of reasoning shown by Kant, Bautain underlines and emphasises that syllogisms by themselves can merely show that some statements are consistent with one another, but cannot provide their own premisses.

Armed with the methods of logic, Bautain states, the modern theologians continue to apply them to abstract ontological notions like being as such that don’t have any proper content in themselves: we do not feel what this being is like, unlike when the very source of being or God touches us. When they then divide being into material and spiritual beings, he insists, they seem to imply that the two share the same nature, forming one monistic whole with two poles, and when they then further divide the spiritual being into finite and infinite spiritual beings, they seem to add that this whole is even pantheistic, whole of existence forming a mere gradual continuum from matter to God.

Theologians try to prove, in a manner reminiscent of Descartes, the existence of God from their notion of being, but relying on both Kant and Paul, Bautain thinks their attempt is doomed to fail. All demonstrations happen through equation, deduction or induction, he suggests, but none of these work with the topic of God: equation is ruled out, because there is nothing equal to God, if one tried to deduce the existence of God from the existence of being in general, this would essentially make God pantheistically into a mere aspect of the whole existence, and induction fails, because we cannot understand infinity from our merely finite experiences. In fact, Bautain insists, the only way to reach a true faith in God is to accept the divine Logos speaking to our very minds, and if someone refuses to do that, no manner of argument can really persuade them.

Equally fruitless in Bautain’s eyes are the rest of the branches of modern scholasticism. He especially focuses on the study of human nature, which he deems equally entangled with dead abstractions and ignoring the true living unity of individual humans. Thus, Bautain reproaches, these neo-scholastics do not consider such important questions as what the future fate of humanity is like, being satisfied with such dry notions as the simplicity of spiritual substance. This dryness is especially felt, he thinks, in morality, which instead of concrete situations requiring moral consideration investigate mere abstract notions pertaining to morality.

Bautain does not suggest a complete abandonment of a philosophical study of Christianity, but more its reworking: less listing of historical heresies and their refutations, more edification of heart. Instead of ontology of being in general, he suggests founding theology on faith in the divine trinity. This should be supplemented, Bautain continues, with analytical psychology, investigating the facts of consciousness and their genesis in the history of an individual and the whole human species. Only after these fundamental disciplines should follow logic, the main task of which would be to determine the limits of the use of reason, on the basis of its place among all faculties, and to recognise, not truth as such, but only truth in certain contexts and especially faults in reasoning. The final apex of this study would be morality, based on the dual nature of humanity and its relation to the divine.

Bautain introduced a further supplement to the correspondence, concerning what he considers an increasing threat of pantheism, inspired by the German idealism of Fichte, Schelling and now also Hegel. Bautain considers it especially dangerous that French Catholic priests do not have the means to deal with this new enemy, since they are still engaged in age-old heresies not relevant in the current situation. Pantheism in itself, he suggests, is a perennial enemy of Christianity, and indeed, all other philosophies eventually become just pantheism, whether we are dealing with Gnosticism, Platonism or Cartesianism. The current pantheism, Bautain suggests, is a reaction to sensualist philosophy, reverting from the everyday common sense to vaguely idealistic speculations.

The main thrust of this new form of pantheism, Bautain suggests, is to again synthesise all the developments of science into a unity incorporating God as well as nature and humans. All its proponents, he continues, divide it into two parts, first of which provides an insight into this unity in its purity, independently of all appearances, while the second part applies the first into the realms of nature and humanity. Thus, Bautain concludes, the new pantheists see individual disciplines as mere reflections of the whole of science, describing the unity incorporating everything.

What makes this form of pantheism especially dangerous, Bautain thinks, is that for the first time it is a pantheistic doctrine that has found footstep in the society at large. It sees all religions as mere development of our understanding of the all-encompassing unity, he explains, hence degrading the status of Christianity to a mere temporary quirk that will be replaced by a more refined religion. Because of its popularity, this attempted replacement has its effects in the practical affairs, Bautain argues and suggests that young people are already dismissing the notion of Christian charity and speaking instead of philanthropy and harmony, which still are too sterile concepts to actually incite anyone to action. He sees the effects of pantheism also in sciences, where the place of the analysis has been taken by an almost poetic urge to synthesise, and in arts, the task of which is not anymore to imitate the beauty of nature, but to manifest the divine unity in complete independence of anything outside art.

In the realm of politics, Bautain states, principles like justice have been replaced by a fatalistic following of the supposed necessity of events, crushing individual happiness under the banner of common good. Then again, he adds, a pantheistic individual has no reason to consider the good of others, since anything they do will always be a manifestation of the divine, no matter how immoral it may seem.

Bautain returns from this detour back to the original series of letters, where the three converts have a new worry. They wonder about the doctrine of the original sin, which appears to contradict the evident glory of humanity that holds the veritable crown among all the creatures of Earth and has a capacity for infinite perfectibility: how could all this be reconciled with the supposed depravity of human nature? And supposing this depravity of original sin is true, how can it have affected the whole humanity, when it is essentially the fault of one human being?

Bautain insists that despite all their marvelous achievements, humans still are in a state of deprivation: just look at the fact that none of those achievements appears to satisfy us, but we always yearn for more. Furthermore, when we speak of the glory of humans, we refer to humans at the height of their development, but forget that their first state is one of weakness, where the power of reason is still dormant. And when a child grows, they do not automatically become purely good and virtuous, but more of a melange of brightest generosity and deepest egoism. A human is an animal with mere animal desires, one might say as an excuse, but why are they then given a reason that is not satisfied with its animal condition?

For Bautain, God's condemnation of the original sin is just a proof of divine justice. God has set up a law, Bautain explains, in order to make humans happy and thus wants them to follow it, but if they don't, God must act as a judge. How come then has the original sin transferred from one person to the rest of humanity? Bautain suggests that the first sinner being the progenitor of all human race has causally affected the whole humanity, which forms a genetic unity due to its common ancestors.

The Jews admit all that Bautain has taught them, but raise another problem: where has all the evil, such as sin and death, come from? Is it ascribable to God, as Paul seems to imply, when he says that everything is from, by and in God? Does this mean that evil is eternal and what this implies for the accountability of humans? What is the law that humans are supposed to follow and how come the first human could have known it, when even philosophers don't agree on this matter?

Bautain's answer begins with another warning against pantheism: although it may sound so, Paul's statement does not equate everything with God. Instead, Bautain explains, what Paul meant was that all that is, in a primary sense of the word, comes from God. This still leaves the possibility of something not deriving from God, namely, evil, as long as it is not being in the proper sense of the word.

God did not necessarily develop or emanate into the world, Bautain underlines, but freely created it, that is, willed into existence, what they had thought in their wisdom (from God), through their Logos or Word (by God), in an act incomprehensible to mere humans. What God created, he continues, was two substances – heaven and earth – or spiritual and corporeal nature, both sustained by divine life (in God), without which both would return to non-existence. With this life, on the other hand, both are immortal, Bautain assures us, so that not just our soul, but also our body can live forever. In summary, the world in its possibility depends on divine wisdom, but in its reality on divine will.

The world created by God, Bautain insists, cannot be nothing but good. Where do evil, sin and death then come? In an Augustinian manner, Bautain suggests they are mere negations: evil is just the lack of good in our actions or an abuse of our freedom, sin is the effect of this evil, as a breaking of law, and death is just the necessary consequence of sin as a removal of life. This explanation does not fully satisfy his correspondents, who ask Bautain how come even the possibility of choosing wrongly exists, before the appearance of sin, and indeed, what this mysterious freedom or liberty actually is: it is supposed to be the highest glory of human beings, yet, it enables their lowest deprivation. Furthermore, they add, couldn’t God wisely have foreseen that humans will abuse their freedom and why were humans created so weak as to err?

Bautain reaffirms that evil is nothing in itself and especially not derived from God, but a consequence of a free choice by an intelligent creature. This possibility of free choice, he continues, is something inherent in all creatures, even if they are merely physical, since they can react spontaneously and in an individual manner to their environment. With moral creatures or humans, Bautain suggests, this freedom occurs as a possibility to live either a mere natural or a spiritual life, in answer to speech awakening us to this possibility. Finally, he concludes, with metaphysical creatures or pure intelligences, freedom means capacity to receive or refuse divine light.

Whatever the form of freedom in creatures, Bautain analyses, it presupposes objective life giving an impulse to the free subject, capacity of the subject to receive and retain life, and the capacity to react positively or negatively to life. This is completely different from divine freedom, he explains, since God has life in themselves, while the freedom of other beings is spontaneous only on the condition of reacting to something else: creation merely sets out this capacity to react, which then must still be activated by the vivifying power of things around us. In the case of humans, Bautain states, this vivifying power comes from both the physical things sustaining our bodies and the speech sustaining our spirits.

Due to their dependence, Bautain insists, human beings should turn themselves toward the source of their life, in other words, God. Indeed, he underlines, this harmony of the divine and human or love toward God is the very law that humans should follow – you are dependent on the life given by God, thus, you should acknowledge it. Breaking this law, Bautain explains, means simply that the human being pretends to be autonomous and independent of God, breaking the connection to that very source, without which they cannot even exist.

The three Jews are still perplexed, why God provided humans even with the possibility of turning away from God, since this seems a peculiarly cruel trick. Bautain assures them that the only motive God does anything is love, because as completely free God is in need of nothing. The temptation for humans to do evil must then originate from somewhere else, namely, Bautain states, in purely metaphysical, non-corporeal entities (biblical angles), vivified directly by the divine idea and with the capacity to decide their very mode of existence by choice: this differs, he explains, from humans, who are determined by their belonging to their common genus, linked together by their line of ancestry.

All creatures, Bautain affirms, exist indefinitely after their creation, because they are sustained by the unending divine love, and this is true also of angels. Now, he continues, the first act of angels is to instinctively and spontaneously react to the vivifying power of God: they feel the action of life, they are conscious of this feeling and freely act on the basis of this consciousness. Their action may be one of accepting this divine gift, but it can also be the opposite one of rejection. Why would an angel do that? Bautain’s explanation is its very power: an angel feeling itself self-sufficient might well choose to let go of the divine life. While the choice of self-abnegation and surrender to the divine life would make an angel bright and good, he continues, the opposite act would not destroy it – the divine love still sustains its existence that much – but would make it a creature of shadow and chaos, aiming to lure all the other creatures to the same condition of disharmony.

What comes from God, Bautain summarises, are the power of free choice of all creatures and the occasion to use it for harmony with the source of all life, but God does not determine, in which way the creatures will act: that would mean that the choice would not be free. The egoistic choice of the fallen angels, Bautain concludes, is therefore not the responsibility of God, because God has not wanted this choice, but merely out of pure love gave them the opportunity to forge the fate they wanted. God has known the possibility of a bad choice, Bautain admits, but insists that as pure goodness they could not have known in advance that the choice would be bad. God would immediately take the fallen angels back to the harmonious state, if they so wanted, Bautain underlines, but after their first choice, they continue making the same bad choice again and again.

Bautain attaches to this metaphysical tale a familiar sort of reading of the first few chapters of Genesis. After creating the spiritual and the physical world, he begins, God created humankind as mediating the two realms, with supernatural spirits incorporated in terrestrial bodies and thus different from purely spiritual angels. Because of their semi-terrestrial nature, humans were not directly connected to the divine, Bautain explains, but could only hear the divine speech or Logos and believe this to be divine. In addition, he points out, humans were connected to the physical world that threatened to lure them away from the link to the divine. The fallen angels, Bautain notes, encouraged the humans to succumb to this temptation.

Due to the unity of humankind, this original sin of the first human beings, Bautain insists, became a disposition for personal sin in each individual human being. The sin, he explains, consists of a contradiction of two elements: objective will of God manifested to a creature and subjective will of this creature to act against the first. The contradiction, Bautain adds, is proportional to the intelligence of the creature, so that the sin of an angel is greater than the sin of a human being. Still, he states, the result of both of them is the same, namely, the disruption of the rapport between God and the creature, when the creatures turn themselves away from the divine. Yet, Bautain notes, the consequences of the result still differ: the angel has turned away from God with all their will, because of the simplicity of their nature, while for the human being as a combination of animal and spiritual substances, this turning means a disruption of the hierarchy of the two substances, the body being not anymore in full control of the soul.

The human soul is still immortal, Bautain notes, but it is deprived of its full satisfaction, available only from interaction with the divine, and thus feels an ever rekindling desire that gnaws its mind. The soul is also free and susceptible to the power of God, if it just heard the divine speech, but due to the break, it hears only the whispers of the fallen angels and becomes more and more ruled by the animal nature of the body. Finally, Bautain concludes, without properly controlling the body, the soul experiences the natural transformation of this body as its destruction or death.

Couldn’t God just restore the lost connection to humans and other fallen creatures? Yes, Bautain admits, but adds at once that this would go against respecting their liberty: if people want to stay away from the divine, God does not force themselves on them. Humans by themselves do not even recognise that they have distanced themselves from God through their sin, thus, Bautain argues, they must at first have to be told by their conscience that they are living in a sinful state. This consciousness of sin is not enough for restituting the lost harmony, he continues, but a punishment is required to balance the scales of justice. The problem is, Bautain explains, that no human is anymore innocent, so that the only possible solution has been the Christian one: sacrificing an incarnation of the very speech of God.

Why did God wait for so long before committing this salvational act? Because it was necessary to let humans themselves develop into a state where they freely desired redemption, Bautain explains: the evil of the fall had to be diminished to a degree where it was again possible for the souls of humans to search for God and for the bodies become pure enough to serve as a vessel for the divine.

Returning again to his account of the history of philosophy, Bautain states that from the very beginning, humans have had two foundational ideas on which to base knowledge: that of God and that of themselves in their separation from the divine. These ideas and the consequent true monotheism, Bautain adds, were retained in their pure form by the Jews, while with the rest of the world, monotheism degraded into pantheism, and even more, into animalistic polytheism. It is only at the point when the contradiction between the two was grown into its highest prominence, Bautain concludes, that the time for the liberator or redeemer had come.

This liberator, Bautain underlines again, had to be a real human being and not a mere fictional symbol, like Homeric heroes. Furthermore, he adds, he was not just a wise person, like Confucius, Zarathustra or Socrates, but a divine person. Bautain admits that he cannot really explain how the two sides of the saviour are connected, but then again, he retorts, we cannot even explain how natural generation of humans and animals happens and we are not rejecting their actuality. Besides, he notes, humans are similarly a synthesis of two different kinds of substances, which is something equally incomprehensible to us, although we can say that the divine life has something to do with this union, and just like by the word “I” we refer both to our body and to our spirit, so should the liberator act in some ways as human and in other ways as God.

Bautain advertises the Catholic Church as the place where the work of the redeemer continues: the redeemer has established a change in the spiritual nature of human beings, but this change must be affected through sensuous means or sacraments, such as the devouring of the body of redeemer taking the form of bread. This does not mean, he explains, that all the members of the Church or even all its priests are holy, because the affairs of the world might still tempt them. Still, Bautain assures the three friends, as members of the Church and as its priests, they do complete their task of transmitting the redemption to future generations. Thus, Bautain concludes his correspondence by asking the three friends to leave the ways of the world and set their faith in the Church – not just as members in name only, but as true, believing Christians.

Louis Eugène Marie Bautain: Philosophy of Christianity (1835)

(1796–1867)

Bautain is again not one of those names you are likely to hear in a course on 19th century philosophy: Catholic conservatives do not fit well in the tale of progression toward modernity. His Philosophie du Christianisme adds an interesting layer to a typical dialogue between philosophy and Christianity, as it represents also a dialogue between Catholicism and Judaism. The historical context of the book is a surge of Jewish converts in France, a number of which act as characters in the book, structured as a series of letters between these converts and Bautain. In fact, these characters apparently were real historical personages, who begin the book by telling the story of their conversion.

The context raises the inevitable question of the reasons for the conversion. Certainly the conversion must have been a step toward better inclusion in the French society, and indeed, one of the converts makes the remark that Christianity was already familiar to him from his social circles. Yet, since all three of the converts eventually became priests, they in great probability must have felt a genuine change in their hearts. Indeed, the separation from the Jewish community seems to have been one of great personal anguish to some of the converts, leading even to being ostracised by their former friends and relatives.

Despite these strong personal experiences presented in the book, as a reader I shall try to be impartial and not make any judgement about the respective status of the two religions. Still, since I am expounding the dialogue from the viewpoint of Bautain, it is inevitable that the argument of the Catholic side will have a more prominent role in the discussion.

The book begins from a time when the three future converts are still Jewish youth, but already skeptical about their religion, at least in its current state, which they interpret as putting more emphasis on ritualistic traditions than on true moral improvement. They have also been affected by the deistic arguments, but still feel that deism leaves certain of their needs unsatisfied. Furthermore, they are curious about Christianity, but do not understand the reasoning behind some of its mysteries, like the doctrine of the trinitarian nature of God.

Bautain, on his part, commends the three Jews for their spiritual search – indeed, he suggests that this is something brought about by the very hand of God. He at once warns them not to trust deism, because, he thinks, deism misreads God as being a mere force of nature, with no true personality. Indeed, Bautain is certain that Judaism is a much truer belief system than deism, seeing God as a living entity. Bautain is still convinced that Judaism is not the final truth, having been a mere stepping stone toward the true religion or Christianity. Still, it has been a necessary stepping stone, and Christianity without Judaism, he compares, would be like a statue without a pedestal.

What makes Christianity the ultimate truth, Bautain argues, is the simple fact that it is based on divine revelation given to humanity through words of Moses, prophets, Jesus and apostles and retained and fulfilled by the community of the Catholic church: what more justification would it need? Of course, if one sees in the Church nothing more than a human institution, he admits, this justification falls flat. Yet, Bautain is eager to point to moral development of humankind after the founding of the Church as an indirect proof of the truth of Christianity.

Bautain’s correspondents find flaws in this argument. They find it unsettling that they should just believe that the Church knows the right way to interpret the holy writings, suffocating the freedom of their own thought. Furthermore, they point out, the Church seems far from a consistently good organisation, as many of its members and even priests have been corrupt. Finally, it even seems doubtful to them whether one can speak of a unified Church, when it has national factions, often contradicting one another in various issues.

Bautain is ready to defend the Church. He emphasises the essential freedom of human nature and insists that Christianity does not contradict it. Instead, Bautain states, Christianity is something that is freely chosen by humans, and it is not forced upon them, but at most argued for. He admits that this ideal might not have been always fulfilled, but he thinks this is just indicative of the fact that the heavenly ideal of the Church does not always correspond to the human realisation of this ideal. Thus, Bautain admits, there have been immoral Christians and even priests, and they are to be morally condemned even more forcefully than others, since we should expect more of them. Even so, he thinks, something of that heavenly ideal affects even its worldly image: the core doctrine of Christianity has remained intact through the ages, being ready to be taught to any curious soul.

The Jews become even more perplexed, when they hear what other supposed Christians have to say about their religion: they paint the Old Testament at best as an assortment of legends and metaphors, and they regard Jesus as a philosopher or a magician, but certainly not as a son of God. Bautain notes that all such talk is the fruit of putting reason above faith, although reason is just a capacity for drawing consequences from given principles – but incapable of finding principles for itself. Thus, he insists, while reason can help us in mundane affairs, where it can base its deductions on experience, in questions of supernatural matter, by itself it will just end up with situations like Kantian antinomies, where different opinions seems equally probable and the best is can do is to sceptically believe none of them.

Faith, on the contrary, Bautain explains, is not really a doctrine and nothing to do with truth in the common sense of the word, but an act of becoming connected with the divine – trying to argue about it with the tools of reason is beside the point, and for this reason it is often the less educated who understand the faith better. Then again, he adds, this connection with divine – truth in the higher sense of the word – makes a higher sort of knowledge possible, by giving reason a proper basis in metaphysics.

Bautain begins his introduction to this metaphysics from the question of divinity: is Christian God a unity? At first, Bautain’s answer is affirmative – if asked, a Christian would affirm that God is one and would definitely not place their trust in any other divinity. Yet, from a deeper perspective, the question is not so simple, Bautain suggests. God, he says, is something we simply cannot know at all, thus, we cannot really understand the divine unity. This is, Bautain underlines, true of all things in general, since we, for instance, see the images of physical things, but never really understand their essence or what makes them tick. Humans cannot even know themselves, he insists, as we experience ourselves as in a mirror, through the reflection of a light outside us – no wonder we cannot know the divine light, except throught the revelation of the light itself.

Bautain contrasts the authority of revelation with the supposed faculty of common sense that some of his contemporaries suggested as a criterion of truth. Yet, Bautain notes, common sense is characterised not by being a certain criterion of truth but only by being common to all human beings. What lies behind this common sense, he suggests, is the speech of other human beings, awakening us to our capacity of reason. Yet, he at once adds, the first human being had to be awakened by a speech beyond human being, that is, by the divine word or light.

There are then three forms of light, Bautain suggests: the physical light revealing the natural objects, the rational light of speech revealing the human language and thinking, and the metaphysical light revealing religious truths. Concentrating on this third form, inherent in the teachings of the Christian Church, he insists that this is our only possible guarantee for the existence of God. If we instead try to make rational arguments about the existence of God, Bautain suggests, we essentially swap God with an idol: not with a natural being, like a stone, as in what is commonly understood by idolatry, but with a figment of our imagination, that is, with our personal representation of what it means to be God.

The Jews admit that the divine unity is ineffable, but return to the question they had suggested at the beginning of their correspondence – how can we then say that God is trinity and even make any sense of this statement? Instead of answering, Bautain returns to the theory of threefold light he had just discussed. He connects this discussion to a theory of three faculties of human cognition: imagination, dealing with images of physical objects, understanding, dealing with concepts or notions of relations between images, and intelligence, dealing with ideas of metaphysical prototypes. All these faculties require for their activities – formation of images, distinction of notions and generation of ideas – three conditions: the regard of subject toward its object, object distinct from and still in correspondence with the subject, and the light harmonising the subject and the object.

Now, when using these three faculties, the human mind appears passive, Bautain notes: physical light strikes our eyes and connects us to our external environment, or speech strikes our understanding and intelligence, making us form some concepts. Yet, he at once adds, these are mere materials of our thinking, while thinking still does something to them, combining them into various systems of knowledge. Of course, all these systems depend also on the materials that cannot be created by the mind. Still, Bautain underlines, these materials need not be only those seen by the physical eye, but they can be something seen by the intellectual eye, such as ideas of beauty and goodness.

Where do such pure ideas arise? They are ingrained in our very soul, Bautain suggests, and are just awakened by suitable experiences: for instance, we have an idea of a mathematical point or of a force, principles respectively of geometry and physics, which we then just become conscious of, once certain experiences awaken these ideas. Bautain connects this Platonic idea of ingrained ideas with the Augustinian notion that the ideas are awakened by the divine light of truth. In a rather predictable manner, he then identifies this pure light with the Logos of John’s Gospel, which should have then embodied itself in the body of the human being called Jesus.

Although Bautain’s correspondents are not yet enamoured by the biblical overtones of his theory, they do acknowledge that it is far more convincing than Condillac’s idea of a completely passive human soul that develops thinking through mere sensations. They find even Locke more unconvincing than Bautain, since although this philosopher did admit the power of reflection as another source of knowledge beyond sensation, he did not convincingly explain where such pure ideas like that of being came from.

Bautain’s next line of thought is again Augustinian: all the pure ideas we have exhibit a trinitarian structure, for instance, the geometric idea of a circle has the centre as the origin of the circle (being, in the sense of the kernel from which all the else is derived), the circumference as it form (existence, in the sense of what is derived from being) and the radius as the means for determining the circumference from the centre (life, in the sense of a process mediating between being and existence). Bautain goes through various examples, such as a proposition, where subject is connected to its predicate through copula, but the main point is just to argue that analogically the divinity must also have this same trinitarian nature, where the being of God is connected to the divine existence in its speech or Logos (“I am”) through the living activity of spirit.

Bautain states that the idea of trinity lies behind all true metaphysics. In order to justify this statement, he begins by dividing all objects of science into three groups: eternal and all creating God, created, but free and intelligent humans, and unfree and unintelligent physical world. Humans, Bautain contends, are acquainted with all these three objects: God through the idea of being, themselves through their self-conscience and the physical world through the abstract notion of space.

All three objects, Bautain thinks, are in a sense investigated in the same manner, through a loving embrace of the object by the subject, but through different means: God by admission of divine light or word, ourselves and our moral state through self-consciousness, and physical things through physical light and organic vision. Yet, Bautain insists, all three presuppose the activity inherent in the notion of trinity: physical space is constituted by the movement of a single point in a line, we ourselves are constituted by our soul becoming active intelligences and God is constituted by an eternal movement of the absolute source of being into its appearance as Logos.

Bautain compares this Christian philosophy with other philosophies, finding them all insufficient in comparison. Materialists are quickly dismissed as knowing nothing about the divine light or at least as interested in nothing else, but the animal side of life. Empirical scientists try in vain to find truth in the physical world around us, where it cannot be discovered. Deists do admit that the world around us must be based on a divinity beyond it, but this deistic divinity is a lifeless lawgiver, which cannot explain why the world is what it is and which also cannot base morality on nothing more than formal justice and self-preservation. And while Stoics admit the world to be ruled wisely, they cannot explain why this world appears to be a battlefield between life and death, except by endorsing Manichean dualism.

Moving on to more recent philosophers, Bautain considers Kant to be the epitome of protestant Christianity, attacking all the remnants of scholasticism in philosophy and ending up with speculative atheism that denies all knowledge of the divine. On the side of practical philosophy, according to Bautain, Kant emphasises the imperative of moral conscience as the only basis of human behaviour, but since every individual has their own conscience, the result is Fichtean practical atheism, where humans have absolute freedom to make their decisions by spontaneous choices.

To account for the existence of the world around them, Bautain thinks, the idealistic philosophy of nature turns on to internal vision (he does not mention any particular figure, but there are definite Schellingian vibes here). This vision suggests that everything is based on an absolute unity that as living source opens up to itself as an object or as a dualistic existence or universe that tries to return to the original unity: this is essentially pantheism, because all the universe is seen as a mere development of God. What is missing even from this latest philosophical invention, Bautain suggests, is the trinitarian mystery of divine being generating Logos that creates everything else and divine life flowing from both of them as a light revealing everything to humans.

At this point, the Jews feel that they are sufficiently convinced of the truth of the trinity. Yet, they feel that their conviction is still just philosophical and not the faith that a true Christian would have. Bautain assures them that they already have Catholic faith, but they have just been confused by their philosophical learning. To make the matter clearer, Bautain suggests investigating what it means to believe or have faith in something. Belief in the most general sense, he says, is just adhering to a truth, and in order to be able to believe in the existence of something real, this real thing must have acted upon us in some manner and we must have observed this action in some manner. This action could have been by natural things, leading to natural belief, by human speech, leading to moral belief, or by divine intervention, leading to supernatural faith.

In each of the three cases, Bautain thinks, the belief or faith is generated through three steps: firstly, we feel the action of the object on us, secondly, we attend to and reflect on this experience, and finally, we have reflected consciousness of the effect of the object on us. Taking the belief or faith as this whole process, he argues, we see that knowledge arises from belief or faith, not the other way around. Indeed, Bautain insists, the certainty of all our knowledge can ultimately be based only on belief and faith, which is based on the innermost interaction with the object of belief of faith. Of course, he admits, we often feel hesitant about the things we have beliefs of or faith in, but this is just due to our reason hesitating, because we have wandered away from the light that originally generated the belief or faith in us.

Just like there are three kinds of belief, Bautain argues, there are three kinds of certainty. Physical certainty, he begins, is based on sensation, through which we are convinced that fire burns etc., but it tells at most what things are for us, not what they are in themselves. Moral certainty, Bautain continues, is based on reason, acquired through interaction with other people, but it is far from infallible, because of the possibility of human error. This leaves as the profoundest kind the metaphysical certainty, Bautain says, based on the most intimate interaction with the divine.

The converts-to-become are also perplexed how people who have not even heard the biblical tales would be able to become part of this faith. Bautain suggests that God has still inscribed some essential truths, like moral law, to the minds of all human beings. Thus, he insists, all human beings have the possibility of feeling the connection to the divine through their own conscience. This means, firstly, that all humans know in their innermost self what is the right way to act and they need just to be reminded about it by external instruction about the moral law. Similarly, Bautain suggests, the metaphysical truths about the nature of the divine have already been inscribed in our mind and the revelation merely awakens us to recognise them, if we are just ready to hear what it has to say.

The three youth raise another question: if all the examples of philosophy presented thus far have veered off from the Catholic doctrine, are philosophy and religion, and especially theology, necessarily in contradiction with one another? Bautain denies this and insists that philosophy or science in general need not be antagonistic toward Christianity, and although they often seem endeavours fairly independent of one another, science can be used to confirm religion. True philosophy, he says, should not be just a description of natural phenomena, but a science of human condition and its relation to the divine, thus, it already presupposes faith in the existence of God, just like true theology should not ignore nature and humanity.

Science in general, Bautain explains, especially in its most exact form in mathematics, is based, firstly, on the analytically precise use of language, and secondly, on the necessity of the laws governing its objects: a line must have a beginning and an end, a figure must be enclosed by angles, number presupposes a unit etc. If the same exactness should be extended to philosophy as the study of human beings, he continues, we should remember that humans are not just physical, but also moral creatures. Thus, Bautain concludes, philosophy cannot be as precise as mathematics, if it has not revealed, in addition to Kantian forms of space and time, also an architectonic of its own spiritual nature. This means, firstly, knowing the genetic development of the various faculties of the human mind – how is e.g. memory related to imagination – but also knowing the source of the whole human mind or God.

Bautain notes that while a true philosopher or lover of wisdom is inevitably led to search for this wisdom beyond human beings, in the divine, a sophist instead searches for the wisdom within humanity, confusing it with mere universal reason. Thus, he suggests, sophists are lured by rationalistic pantheism, which is nothing but an aggrandised form of human self-love.

Bautain proceeds to recount the phases of true philosophy and sophism – an account which is from the perspective of current times sorely lacking in historical accuracy, especially when it comes the early eras of humankind, since at Bautain's time historical research hadn’t yet developed much further beyond using Bible as a source for everything. Thus, Bautain begins from Adam and his third son Seth, Noah and his first son Sem, Abraham and especially Moses as the founders of the true philosophy, inscribed in the Pentateuch and the other books of the Old Testament. The more mundane part of philosophy, he continues, began with the descendants of Noah’s second son, Ham, that is, the Egyptians, who also retained some knowledge of the more divine affairs.

The Egyptian tradition of philosophy, Bautain believes, was brought to Greece by Pythagoras, who was still also a religious figure, teaching rituals in addition to the more speculative philosophy. The work of Pythagoras was continued by Socrates, Bautain states, but on a more superficial level, since Socrates was not interested in the ritualistic side of Pythagoreanism, and indeed, was more of a destroyer of beliefs than an upholder of positive doctrines, questioning youth and encouraging them to speak their opinions, when Pythagoras had commanded them just to listen silently what was taught to them. Still, Bautain concedes, Socrates was ultimately aiming to make divine truths accessible to humankind, and this trend continued with Plato, who was enamoured by the spiritual teachings of Pythagoras, but unfortunately lacked the necessary practical component and succumbed eventually to pantheism. On the other hand, Bautain contrasts, Aristotle upheld the more rationalistic side of Socrates, taking Platonic ideas as mere abstractions of thought and reducing philosophy into a lifeless system of axioms and syllogisms, the content of which amounted to nothing but pantheism, with universal reason replacing the part of true divinity.

The discussion of the history of philosophy is stopped for now, with the first volume of Bautain’s work ending. We shall see where the second volume will take us in the next post.

Carl Friedrich Göschel: Hegel and his time: with regard to Goethe (1832)

The last time we met Göschel, he was busy defending Hegelian philosophy against the reinterpretation of a single philosopher, but now we see him arguing for Hegel against all his contemporaries in the work Hegel und seine Zeit, mit Rücksicht auf Goethe. The look toward Goethe mentioned in the title refers to Göschel’s belief that Goethe and Hegel were essentially on the same side in this battle, Indeed, at various points of the work, Göschel quotes Goethe’s poems, to indicate correspondences with Hegelian and Goethean ideas. Even more, Göschel begins with a description of Goethe’s take on Leibnizian monadology – we are a collection of monads, soul being a central monad, ruling over a body made out of other monads, and after our death, the monads disperse, only to come together during resurrection, only with more heightened awareness – just to make the fancy remark that the two recently deceased philosophers must now be conversing in a heaven of monads, waiting for their return to the world of living.

The main text of the work is dedicated to describing the relations between Hegelian philosophy – or as Göschel prefers to call it most of the time, speculative philosophy – and the contemporary culture of the times. He begins with what he calls Umsicht – literally, a look from outside. In other words, he is interested in what the contemporaries who are not Hegelians think of Hegelian philosophy.

Göschel begins from the end of Hegel’s philosophical system or religion (one could point out that Hegel continues with philosophy after religion, but Göschel may be betraying his interests here somewhat). He notes that Hegelianism sits squarely in the middle between two major factions in the philosophy of religion: rationalism, which emphasises the role of reason in deciding what to believe, and supernaturalism, which endorses divine revelation as the foundation of religious certainty. Just like rationalism, Göschel says, Hegelian philosophy thinks that reason should be used as the “form” or method for studying religion by the subject, while the content or object of this method Hegel takes to agree in its essentials with Lutheranism, just like supernaturalists state.

Göschel thinks the position he describes as Hegelian is reasonable, if we just assume that the two sides – the investigating subject or individual human reason and the investigated object or divine revelation – are in a sense identical or connected to one another, even when they are seen as different. More particularly, Göschel adds, we should, firstly, assume that both these opposites have their worth, secondly, admit that this coexistence involves some contradiction or tension between the two poles, and finally, solve this tension by noting that opposites share something in common – human reason agrees with divine revelation, since the latter is also caused by reason, just that of divinity. Göschel at once points out that this mediating stance doesn’t still satisfy the extremes, which question the justifiability of the other extreme, but not of themselves: for rationalists, Hegelian philosophy of religion appears irrational in accepting orthodox dogmas, while for supernaturalists, it seems blasphemous in subjugating Bible to standards of human reason.

Göshcel considers similarly contemporary evaluations of other parts of Hegelian system (more particularly, he goes through it in reverse, continuing from philosophy of religion to philosophy of state, then to philosophy of religion, philosophy of nature, particularly medicine, and mathematics, ending finally with what philologists, historians and other philosophers have to say about Hegelianism), but his main point is clear from the first example. Hegelian philosophy often takes a mediating position between two extreme positions, of which one usually corresponds to subjective, human reason ready for revolution, while the other extreme then corresponds to objective, divine reason upholding traditions. Hegelianism solves the seeming contradiction of these two positions by noting their interconnectedness and essential unity, leading it to endorse moderation between radicalism and conservatism, which just makes the extreme positions reject this middle stance.

From different standpoints, Göschel concludes, Hegel’s system could be taken as too eclectic – in combining all systems – or too exclusive – as taking itself as the final truth; too poetic and mystic – as upholding contradictions as truth – or as too pedantic and scholastic – as using hierarchic classifications; as too realistic – as dealing only with the world around us – or as too idealistic – as seeing material world as a mere appearance of reason; as too pantheistic – as seeing God everywhere – or as too atheistic – as seeing God nowhere.

After this look from outside, Göschel moves to Einsicht or a look inside the Hegelian system. As we noted in the previous post about him, Göschel knows his Hegelian liturgy. He also shares some basic faults common to many so-called Hegelians. Thus, after quite correctly insisting that Hegel wants to develop the basic structures of his philosophy from a standpoint where we abstract from everything given – indeed, he wants to begin from nothing definite at all – but then when the truly interesting question how this development occurs at crucial points of the system is presented, Göschel merely answers with the general consideration that it happens “by immanent negation”, which in Hegelese really says nothing more than “by finding out how the matter at hand shows how to arrive at the next step”.

Göschel even makes the comparison – even if not outright identification – of the supposed steps of Hegelian method with the trivison of thesis, antithesis and synthesis at the beginning of the first version of Fichtean Wissenschaftslehre. In this often criticised comparison that loses the distinctness of Hegelian philosophy, Göschel also errs in not noting that this Fichtean trivision is rather different in holding the thesis (positing of an existing I) as higher than the two others, because in its pure form it describes what an absolute or divine I would be like, while the antithesis (positing I against not-I) describes the standpoint of human I and the resulting synthesis (I and not-I being divisible and thus able to share the consciousness of I) just tries to explain how the human standpoint could be possible from the standpoint of divine consciousness.

Moving back to his take on Hegelianism, Göschel makes the very common error of immediately assuming that the supposed three steps in Hegel’s method (abstraction of pure starting point, “negation” or development of new structures out of the first and “second negation” or consideration of this string of structures as forming a unified system) agree literally with the various trivisions of Hegel’s system. This assumption makes then possible to just ignore the question how the individual transitions in Hegel’s system work, although Göschel does at one place admit that the trivisions might sometimes appear arbitrary (no wonder, as Hegel himself reworked them from time to time and suggested they were more to help the reader than anything else).

We need not thus go in any detail to Göschel’s reconstruction of Hegelian logic, which is really just a summary of its table of contents. We can therefore skip at once to his peculiar understanding of its end, where Göschel outright assumes that the absolute idea concluding the book simply is God, not in any metaphorical sense, but as the same personality as described by orthodox Lutheranism. The development of pure thinking in Hegelian philosophy should then end with faith in the certainty of a personal God, who unites e.g. subject and object or infinite and finite by showing that the former has the power to “overreach” into the latter – in other words, to be the controlling and even creating principle in their organic fusion.

Göschel then continues to summarise the Hegelian philosophy of the concrete, or as Göschel emphasises, created nature and created spirit (we could say, humanity), which we for the just mentioned reason can also skip and jump into his take on absolute spirit. The final point of Göschel’s interpretation is that nature and humanity are not independent, but exist merely in relation to absolute spirit, which is then again God, but as related to their creations. The structures of logic were supposedly just developments of divine thought, which then in the concrete world appear as distinct and seemingly independent entities. World is thus, in a sense, fuller than logic, but it also mirrors the latter’s structure, showing analogies between different levels of the natural and the human world.

Another major point in the latter part of Hegel’s philosophy, according to Göschel, is that it shows the divine to be present in the here and now of the world we are living: just like theology said, God is omnipresent. Furthermore, Göschel adds, it also shows that these individual heres and nows form a larger continuity, where individuals unite into an organic whole.

Finally, Göschel presents as mediating between the Umsicht and the Einsicht the Aussicht – literally, a look toward the outside. In other words, he wants to deal with various problems that hinder the contemporary reader from understanding Hegelian philosophy, as he understands it. The central obstacle, he thinks, is our natural thinking, which as natural is still moored in some immediate presuppositions, which the absolute thinking has learned to put aside. Göschel admits this change of standpoint is difficult, since it involves us resisting the stubborn independence of concrete individuals in order that we can recognise that the light of reason is able to penetrate the essence of all things.

A particularly interesting shape of this stubborn attitude is found in the objection that what is actual seems not always reasonable, especially when this actual is evil and sinful. Göschel can quite correctly point out that this objection involves just a misunderstanding of Hegelian terminology. Actual does not mean for Hegel just anything that exists, but only the lawlike structures upholding what exists. Evil and sin, on the other hand, are mere existences, which may or may not appear – they are contingent. Then again, Göschel adds with conviction, such non-actual or contingent existences are then bound to be destroyed by the divine necessity and thus evil and sin are fated to find their retribution.

Quite characteristic is also Göschel’s answer to the question whether the absolute idea and the absolute spirit are just symbolic names for what is human. Göschel affirms this, but with a twist: it is not just any individual human Hegel is talking about, but the universal humanity embodied in Christ. Thus, he continues, while Father of the Christian Trinity is the exemplary infinite, Christ is the exemplary finite, in whose image the individual humans are then created. With this move Göschel reveals his cards: the Hegelian system is just a cover for quite a literal understanding of Christianity.

Ludwig Feuerbach: Pierre Bayle. Article on history of philosophy and humanity (1839)

While Leibniz was a natural continuation of Feuerbach’s work on the history of philosophy, Pierre Bayle seems an odd choice. Indeed, Feuerbach himself finally concludes his Pierre Bayle. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Menschheit by noting that Bayle never really brought anything positive to philosophy, and indeed, failed to understand the worth of thinkers like Spinoza, confusing in his criticism of latter the level of sense individuals with the level of one substance behind these individuals.

Yet, what was of worth in Bayle’s writings, Feuerbach says, is the contradiction of faith and reason – a question which appears to haunt Feuerbach himself more and more in his writings. Feuerbach begins again from the consideration of Christianity, which he sees as characterised by dualism. True, Feuerbach admits, the pre-Christian culture did also speak of oppositions, but only of natural oppositions, while Christianity added to these certain metaphysical dualisms, like that of God and world, of heaven and earth, of spirit and flesh and of faith and reason, all of which were externally expressed in the battle between the Church and the state.

Characteristic dualism in Catholicism, Feuerbach notes, was the opposition between sensuous flesh and supersensous spirit, where the latter was placed above the former. Thus, the highest virtue for the Catholic Church was not natural love, but unnatural chastity, and although the Church seemingly allowed marriage, the practice of the saints showed the true preference. Catholic artists, like Dante and Petrarca, appeared to value natural love as the highest shape in which heavenly can appear on earth, but, Feuerbach says, these artists were for Church mere adopted children in comparison to real children or saints. Even a Christian artist must do beautiful works that appeal also to non-Christians, because a true work of art belongs to no specific religion, but unites the whole humanity, and therefore religion is just an external covering to an artist. Thus, beautiful Catholic works of art are contrary to the very idea of Catholicism, and seeing sensual Madonnas pictured in cloisters just shows that monks were never truly able to leave their earthly lusts behind.

Just as the Catholic Church related to art, similarly it related to science, Feuerbach insists. True, Catholic monks did develop science, but this was opposed to the original spirit of Catholicism, which appreciated only devotional books. Scientific spirit contradicts Catholicism, Feuerbach thinks, and therefore it will either turn against Catholicism or be suppressed as mere means for spreading faith.

Protestantism rebelled against the practical contradiction of flesh and spirit, Feuerbach continues, but retained the theoretical opposition between faith and reason. Feuerbach thinks that the battle of the reformers against celibacy was not just based on the Bible, but the true reason justifying this turn was human understanding. Thus, Feuerbach finds it even more puzzling why Protestantism then turned against reason. A Catholic saint can at least cut away tempting organs – Feuerbach is probably referring to the famous rumour of Origen castrating himself – but a Protestant cannot cut away their reason.

It is this opposition of reason and faith that Feuerbach thinks is the most interesting aspect of Bayle. Feuerbach thinks it particularly poignant that Bayle was no professional theologian, since that showed him to start his criticism from a standpoint of freedom. Theology, Feuerbach states, thinks it has a monopoly over other sciences. The interest of theology is not to study anything scientifically, but to interpret and comment on the truth of faith. Doubts, on the other hand, are a sin for it and science is a mere means for the goal of faith. In other words, Feuerbach concludes, the spirit of theology is not the spirit of science, since science is universal for both Christians and non-Christians, while theology limits itself to the former.

When theology reigned, Feuerbach continues, other sciences were considered only as means for theology and subservient to it. Nature was studied for the sake of finding signs of God in nature and was thus regarded in a mechanical fashion as a mere external means for a goal. Thus, humans were forcefully turned toward heaven by theologians arguing teleologically from various phenomena of nature, and only Giordano Bruno and Spinoza understood that nature has its own reason. Theology, Feuerbach thinks, opposes science, because the main principle of theology is miracle and arbitrary will, which is opposed to reason as the principle of science. Thus, philosophy regards moral principles as laws of reason, while theology sees them as commands of God. More generally, theology derives everything from the will of God, while philosophy tries to explain it.

Feuerbach regards Bayle as an antitheologian and thus a person of reason. For instance, Bayle saw comets as natural phenomena and not as divine signs and argued for this by noting that by using comets as signs God would have just increased superstition, which Bayle regarded as worse than atheism. Indeed, Bayle went even so far as to note that atheists often lived better lives than Christians.

Bayle’s criticism, Feuerbach says, concerned religion as differing from morality and philosophy, in other words, positive religion like Catholicism that had solidified into a church and was limited by certain articles of faith. In such a positive religion the believer does not need to do anything else, but what its dogmas say to be sanctified (the official sacraments). Although Protestantism was a sort of liberation from Catholicism, it also became a positive religion. Thus, even Protestantism makes God into an object of devotion that demands service, while duties toward humans become subservient to this and filled only because so God is also served. Protestantism, Feuerbach concludes, binds itself to a specific time and place – church Sundays, when the priest is preaching – and religion becomes a mere custom one has to regularly follow.

Feuerbach thus agrees with Bayle that it is not the positive religion that has combined barbarians into society, but that humans have done it themselves, because of their conscience. Christians do not do good because they are Christians, but because they are humans. On the other hand, a bad person remains a bad person, even if Christianity would frighten him not to do bad things. Furthermore, paradoxically the belief in the dogma of the original evil in human nature just shows that the believer of this dogma does not believe themselves to be good.

Feuerbach notes that Bayle endorsed the independency of ethics from religion and criticised the habit of explaining away the immoralities of Biblical figures. Feuerbach regards Bayle’s endeavour to separate ethics from religion as noble. According to Feuerbach, it is foolish to try to ground ethics on the notion of God. True, one could try to base ethics on the idea of God as the epitome of goodness, but actually, it is not the goodness as the goodness of God that is here important, but merely goodness as such. Furthermore, Feuerbach continues, although the goodness of God might be in line with ethics, the notion of divine omnipotence contradicts the idea of goodness, since it is just a notion of a magical demon capable of anything. Indeed, he adds, even the devil seems capable of miracles, which then are just an unethical and immoral concept.

Scholastic theology could not do proper ethics, Feuerbach explains, since it founded everything on the will of God. Truly independent ethics didn’t appear, Feuerbach thinks, before the Kantian categorical imperative, which gave ethics a sacred and independent position. Feuerbach praises Fichte for raising ethics even further to an ideal that an empirical human being could never fully achieve, but still has to strive to for its own sake, while in comparison, a theologian does good only for the sake of God and paradise. If one does not do good for its own sake, one is merely seeking for one’s own interest and making good serve as a means for one’s pious goal, Feuerbach insists and adds that only ethics is the true religion and true love of God is the love of humanity.

According to Feuerbach, separation of ethics from theology shows most strikingly that spirit has broken away from theology. He thinks that Bayle expounded this contradiction especially in discussion with rationalists theologians, who thought that dogmas could not contradict reason. Against them, Bayle argued that especially original sin was an unreasonable dogma: the Biblical story of the fall of humankind makes God into a literal instigator of sin. Leibniz had argued against Bayle that God had other ends beyond human virtue (perhaps the preservation of certain plants, as the Bible story suggests), but Feuerbach thinks this justification is not available to the theological standpoint, which sees God working only for humanity. Leibniz and rational theologians objected also that divine goodness and justice meant no ordinary human goodness and justice, but Bayle could answer that they must still be recognisable as goodness and justice. Indeed, Bayle was only holding on to a philosophical ideal of good and just God, while the theologian’s God was very passionate and deceived humans into sin, although this God also wanted to retain the appearance of not doing so.

Bayle found dogmas of religion problematic, Feuerbach continues, not because they contradicted lower passions, but because they contradicted natural reason. While for an orthodox theologian reason was just a concubine, for Bayle it was a life companion. Feuerbach sees Bayle’s relation to faith as exhibiting a more general sign of his time: faith was not anymore natural, but felt as contradictory to reason or as a mere object, first of reflection, then of doubt and criticism and finally of denial.

Feuerbach notes that Descartes had particularly shared a similar idea of faith: both Descartes and Bayle knew objectively the contradiction of positive faith with reason, while their own faith was subjectively contradicting their reason. Descartes did not doubt his own faith, but just with this lack of doubt he showed that it contradicted the universal reason. Philosophy cannot exist, when assertions have to be just assumed as true, which Feuerbach thinks is true of Church dogmas. Thus, if Descartes had been a good Catholic, he would have just accepted dogmas and not thought of anything. Yet, as an instigator of modern philosophy he could not accept any determined fundament or limitation for thinking, but had to follow its own necessity.

Descartes, Feuerbach thinks, had based his philosophy on self-certainty, which is something completely antidogmatic. Positive effects of any philosophy, Feuerbach says, are not visible to the senses and do not limit to mere formal consequences, but to change of spirit. Cartesian philosophy especially taught us to think, Feuerbach insists, and to distinguish material from spiritual and to reduce study of nature to mechanism.

A particular point where Feuerbach sees Descartes contradicting the dogmas of Catholicism was his idea of body as characterised by extension. Feuerbach thinks that this notion of extension cannot be reconciled with the idea of transsubstantiation, where the same extension of bread supposedly changes its very substance into the flesh of Christ. By ignoring such dogmas, Feurbach notes, Cartesian thinking showed its lack of interest in matters of faith. Faith was thus not anymore based on self-consciousness, but was only an external addition or historical faith. Historical matters can be believed only historically, that is without any further justification, since while present facts we are forced to believe, historical facts of past lack this feeling of necessity and are something we must always doubt. Similarly, Feuerbach suggests, true faith in dogmatic facts could occur only when these facts were felt as a living part of human self-consciousness, while from Descartes onward such living faith was more and more just a thing of the past.

Feuerbach admits that there was still something making faith very much a living force at the time of Descartes, namely, the community of believers or the Church representing faith in the actual world. Because of the Church, faith was a universal opinion, while reason was in comparison a mere subjective opinion. Feuerbarch notes that Bayle also was a part of such a community, although in his case it was not Catholic, but Reformed church. Still, Feuerbach insists, Bayle’s faith was an act of self-denial: Bayle rejected reason in favour of historically grounded faith, or after placing doubts on dogmas he still leaped to faith.

Feuerbach sees Bayle as an intellectual ascetic, abstaining from the use of reason, but at the same time contradicting himself. For Feuerbach, Bayle was a sophist in defending faith. Feuerbach considers earthly satisfaction to be truly more divine than mere blind faith, which is just human invention. Indeed, Feuerbach says, even the believers understand this, because they think God is the most blessed and happiest of all beings, who does not require any faith at all, but knows everything with full clarity.

Although Feuerbach thus is ultimately let down by Bayle’s choice of faith over reason, he congratulates Bayle for his otherwise impartial polemics against all positive forms of religion. He is especially fond of Bayle’s criticism against all religious authority and particularly the Catholic reliance on the power of tradition. Bayle was correct, Feuerbach says, in rejecting the idea that the Church could force the conscience of individual people into believing something. Instead, Bayle demanded unlimited tolerance of all creeds, which Feuerbarch wholeheartedly agrees with: truth is tolerant, because it is always sure of itself.

Carl Friedrich Göschel: Monism of thought (1832)

(1784–1861)

Right after Hegel’s death in 1831, the interpreters dashed like vultures to feed on the carcass of Hegel’s system – for what was left of Hegel’s philosophy after his death was certainly not anymore a living, developing organism, but a mere dead corpse that could be used by other thinkers as nutriments for developing their own philosophies. After a while, two broad extremes of Hegel-interpretation rose: the so-called Young or Left Hegelians and the opposing Old or Right Hegelians, the dividing line being roughly determined by the political stances

An example of the Right Hegelianism is provided by Göschel’s Der Monismus des Gedankens, which is a perfect example of an interpreter reading more into a philosopher’s texts than could be gleaned from the text itself. The occasion for Göschel’s text is provided by Christian Hermann Weisse, whose Hegel-inspired book on aesthetics we have considered. Weisse did not even present himself as a pure Hegelian, but wanted to improve Hegel’s philosophy, while Göschel then suggests he wants to defend Hegel against this perceived attack.

Since we have dealt only with a part of Weisse’s suggested improvement, I will go through it in a summarised fashion. Firstly, he had said that he didn’t want to remove anything from Hegel’s logic, but thought it had to be supplemented in a fashion. Logic, Weisse had said, was a science of necessity, so all necessities should be handled in it. Thus, he continued, the final chapter of the logic had to still contain another trivision: logical method, as an undivided continuum of all the previous structures of logic, should be transformed into a differentiated space, which would then be transformed further, through connecting these differentiations into a new process or time.

Now, speaking as a Hegel-scholar, I see nothing to object in the process of developing space and time out of the logical method, as presented by Weisse, since this is in fact how Hegel himself does it. What is against Hegel’s intentions is only the grouping of space and time within logic, on the pretext that logic is somehow a science of necessities, compared with other parts of his philosophy, which should be sciences of freedom, according to Weisse. In other words, what Weisse is saying is that while logic describes what must be, the later parts of Hegel’s philosophy should describe only what exists, because of the free choice of God.

The problem is that Weisse’s notion of necessity is very different from the manner in which Hegel understands the word: of course, Weisse is really using the ordinary notion of necessity, so the confusion is understandable. For Hegel, necessity means in a sense the necessity of connections, in the sense that it is necessarily possible to move from what is described in an earlier part of his philosophy to what is described in a later part. Thus, for instance, once one has discovered the logical method, one can then divide the moments of the method and so form a sort of mental space of them. Of course, since such a necessarily existing possible connection need not still be used – we can freely choose whether to think space after the logical method – this necessity does not in any manner hinder our freedom. Then again, this duality of necessity and freedom occurs in all parts of Hegel’s philosophy and even in logic. What is novel in the further parts of Hegel’s philosophy, as opposed to his logic, is that one can then also find dedicated empirical counterparts for such logical models or concepts discovered through these connections – for example, the experienced, geometrical space.

What Weisse had considered as a necessary outcome of his emphasis on the difference of necessity and freedom is that the next part of Hegel’s philosophy – the philosophy of nature, should have begun with matter, which is something that does not necessarily exist, but is created by God. As something freely created, Weisse had added, matter is something of more worth than mere thinking, and in addition, something thinking can never completely penetrate. Of course, the truly Hegelian counterpoint would be to point out that all Hegel needs is to show that a model of space and time is necessarily connected to a model of matter – something moving within space and time – in the sense that we can, as it were, construct the latter model from the former. This connection of models is then in a sense reinforced by Hegel’s conviction that empirical space and time are nothing but ephemeral sets of relations that could not empirically exist without anything having those relations (that is, matter we can empirically observe). Furthermore, there would then be no question of not understanding what matter is, since the construction of its model just would be this required understanding.

From matter, Weisse had jumped straight to spirit, noting that like nature, spirit must also be something that is not describable by mere logical categories, but also something freely created by God. We probably need not repeat the basic fault in Weisse’s reading, but just in case let’s do it: jump from nature to spirit does not say that spirit would be somehow necessary, but only that a) given a model of nature (a realm of disparate entities), we can move to a model of spirit (a self-regulating process using these entities consciously for its own purposes) and b) empirically natural processes can in some measure be controlled by such a conscious self-regulating process.

Within Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, Weisse had ignored the so-called subjective spirit, mostly because he wanted to concentrate on both objective and absolute spirit, instead. Weisse had envisioned the realm of objective spirit to be divided into parts on language – which Hegel studied in the division on subjective spirit – on state – which Weisse apparently thought to contain almost all of what Hegel had studied in his philosophy of right – and finally, on world history – which for Hegel was only a final part of a study on state. From this short summary it is difficult to judge what Weisse really meant with this division, and the analogy he gives is not that much more helpful: language being like mechanism (perhaps because speaking persons are still independent of one another?), state like chemism (perhaps because persons unite into communities?), and finally, world history like teleology (perhaps because it is supposed to be a process with an end?).

Weisse’s theory of absolute spirit we are already very familiar with. He had begun with truth or science as life of spirit, then proceeded to beauty and art as spirit’s cognition of the external world and finally ended with divinity or religion as the most absolute phase of spirit. I have discussed this part of Weisse’s system (or more particularly, the second division of beauty) in more detail earlier, so I’ll overlook it here.

As for Göschel's critique of Weisse, he clearly knows the Hegelian liturgy, since he can at the right places state some key phrases loved by many followers of Hegel. Thus, when Weisse criticises Hegel of formalism, Göschel can at once point out that Hegel's philosophy is just the opposite of formalism, avoiding mere application of all external schemas. He connects this point at once with the idea that the universal beginning of Hegel’s philosophy particularises itself, thus becoming more determined with its development. Weisse’s supposed improvement, Göschel says, is on the contrary dualist, because it assumes something beyond logical method – content – which the method has to grapple with. All this liturgy has a proper Hegelian meaning – thinking is, for Hegel, an activity that can create content even when nothing else is given and can thus be used to model anything in the empirical world - but it is unclear how Göschel understood these words.

This unclarity becomes clear when we see how Göschel wants to solve the dilemma of necessity and freedom that led Weisse to improve the Hegelian philosophy. Göschel says explicitly that the thinking we follow throughout the Hegelian philosophy is not human, but divine thought – or at least it would be that, if this system could repeat exactly all the intricacies of the world around us. Thus, he says, the world around us is the creation of divine thought and therefore necessary, but there is much that seems contingent for us as mere humans. This is, of course, completely against the spirit of Hegelian philosophy, where the idea of necessary contingency is explicitly endorsed and no divine viewpoint outside the human viewpoint is accepted.

Göschel, on the other hand, is clearly committed to the Christian notion of God. Hence, while he recognises that Hegelian philosophy just begins, from nothing, he at once adds that beginning differs from beginner, thus, that it is God doing this beginning. This does not mean, he explains, that we should begin from God, since then we could never move away from God, which would drive us to pantheism. Similarly, he adds, we should not start from unconscious nature, consciousness or both together, since these beginnings would lead us, respectively, to realism, idealism and dualism.

A further example of Göschel’s tendencies is his choice of example for the supposed cyclical nature of Hegel’s philosophy, where the beginning and end should coincide. This example is the incarnated God that, Göschel says, is both the basis of true human cognition – because according to him, we would know nothing without Christ – but also the end of all human cognition. Thus, moving toward Christ, Göschel says, a person moves, on the one hand, to their beginning, but also to their end.

Göschel moves on to consider the specifics of Weisse’s reimagination of the Hegelian system. Beginning from Weisse’s derivation of method, space and time, Göschel notes quickly – and quite correctly – that actually these three are implicitly present much earlier in the development of Hegelian philosophy than Weisse thinks. Indeed, method is, of course, used through Hegel’s logic, and furthermore, abstract spaces and “times” or processes have appeared almost from the beginning of the logic (i.e. when Hegel starts by pointing out that thinking nothing begins a process – or becoming, as he calls it – which results in a construction of a space of qualities), and the later philosophy of nature really adds just the discovery of empirical counterparts for both of them.

Just like space and time, Göschel says, so is matter to be found already in Hegel’s logic, even if Weisse thought it was something unique to philosophy of nature. Indeed, the move from space and time to something that is spatial and temporal is similar to many moves in Hegel’s logic, where he moves from the thinking of e.g. existence to the thinking of something existent. As Göschel points out, we do a similar movement in our ordinary thought, when we introduce the notion of matter – we perceive something and then decide something or matter must be the basis of these perceptions. In fact, he continues, matter just is a hypothesis of thought and not something thought couldn’t understand. Göschel also suggests that while Weisse saw matter and even whole nature as inimical to thought, nature in its innermost essence really is at least an analogy to spirit – in other words, it is not just a passive receptacle, but an active striving toward self-organisation and even self-knowing. Therefore, it is just natural that matter will next give rise to motion.

Although Göschel at first appears to understand the introduction of matter in a manner faithful to Hegel, he then adds the un-Hegelian point that we should also investigate the genesis of matter or of nature in general, or in the more poetic terms he uses, how the water of thought solidifies into the ice of matter. Hegel really isn’t interested in the question of how things have temporally begun, especially in the case of nature – philosophy, for him, deals with what is present. Göschel, on the other hand, explicitly answers this question by saying that it must have been absolute spirit – in essence, God – that has created matter.

From matter, Göschel jumps straight to the end of Hegel’s philosophy of nature, that is, to living organisms, which are the most spiritlike forms nature can produce. In other words, while the realm of nature, Göschel says, differentiates and solidifies the moments of the fluid process of thought, its forms become more and more unified, in the sense that in the more complex forms and especially in organisms their parts are less and less independent of one another. Yet, even organisms are still no spirits. Göschel, following Hegel, suggests that we could thus call the whole nature sick in the sense that it always dissatisfies the demand of becoming spirit.

Since Weisse ignored the first part of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit – the so-called subjective spirit – Göschel does not say much about it, but he does reprimand Weisse for not taking it seriously. Subjective spirit should be the first step away from nature and still partially linked with nature, and because this necessary first step is missing, Göschel insists, Weisse’s account of objective spirit appears to lack objectivity, which it then has to find beyond thought. It is for this reason, Göschel suggests, that Weisse considers human community or state to be mere means to an end – the world history. On the other hand, Göschel, following Hegel, thinks that world history is just the highest shape of the human community – the court of the whole world.

More sympathetically Göschel relates to Weisse’s idea that language is part of the objective spirit, while Hegel had restricted it to the subjective spirit. In fact, Göschel thinks that logic already as pure thought is some type of language, as the etymology suggests (logos meaning word). Subjective spirit, then, is the place where language is generated, Göschel continues, but objective spirit does have its own language, and the deepest shape of language can be found in absolute spirit, and more particularly, in art.

It is no wonder that Göschel finds Weisse’s account of absolute spirit very wanting, since it is based on the very idea that philosophy and thought is not enough and that there’s something more to be found beyond it. Göschel himself, on the other hand, suggests another way to amend the end of Hegel’s philosophy. In a rather formalistic manner – and in a manner followed by many Hegel-interpreters after him – Göschel takes a bit too seriously the trivisions of Hegelian philosophy and tries to correct Hegel by suggesting a better trivision, thinking he has thus made considerable progress. Thus, while logic is for Göschel the natural first point of the system, the second point should not be the philosophy of nature, but the whole philosophy of creation, dealing with nature (passive beginning), soul (separation of something active from nature) and human spirit (free activity). The third point, then, would be theology, as the study of God. Although he does not explicate this idea more closely, it clearly appears opposed to basic ideas of Hegel’s philosophy – God is not just something completely removed from creation and especially from human life, but merely one form of human existence.

Ludwig Feuerbach: Thoughts concerning death and immortality (1830)

(1804 - 1872)

 If at all, Feuerbach is today remembered most often as a mere link from Hegel to Marx. This is at least so far true that the very first published writings of Feuerbach do bear the distinct mark of Hegelianism. Thus, in his dissertation De ratione, una, universali, infinita, Feuerbach contrasts in quite a Hegelian fashion individuality of sense life, where everything is distinct and separate from one another, with the universality of reason and thinking, by which any human being is inherently connected with all the other humans in a mutual act of recognition.

His next major work, Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit, continues in the same vein, but connects this distinction especially to the question of personal immortality. Feuerbach considers this question rather modern: ancient Greeks and Romans believed only in current life, lived in and for a community, while mediaevals merely hoped for immortality in some distant future, where everyone would be resurrected and good deeds rewarded and evil punished. It is only the protestantism and the rationalist philosophy, he insists, that suggested an individual subject to be of such importance that it deserved immortality in itself.

Yet, Feuerbach leaps to a conclusion, such an emphasis on individuals has made us forget that there is something much more important and perfect than mere individual life. This more perfect or infinite Feuerbach now calls God or spirit (again, in quite a Hegelian fashion). Just like reason in Feuerbach’s dissertation, God unites individuals, although now Feuerbach likens it more to love: in loving one another, humans lose their distinct individuality and merge into a wider community of persons. Indeed, God exists just through such a process of mortals losing their own individuality, in other words, by constant death of new human beings - God is the unity behind everything variable.

Such a pantheistic notion of God does not then leave any room for personal immortality, Feuerbach insists. Only in this particular life exists this particular human being, and when that life ends, there is nothing sensuous left of this person (thoughts about this person do remain, but these are not individual). If a person would continue to exist as an individual, it would have to exist somewhere, but where could this place be?

Feuerbach does consider the possibility that life after death would continue on other planets and stars, but ultimately refuses it. Life must have its spatial limits, in addition to temporal limits, that is, Feuerbach insists, there can be no life beyond Earth. His line of argument is very flimsy: life on other planets couldn’t be equally perfect to ours - nature shouldn’t just repeat things - but there couldn’t be life less perfect than the least perfect life on Earth - then it wouldn’t even be life - nor life more perfect than the most perfect life on Earth - what could be more perfect than thinking? Still, one cannot but laugh at Feuerbach’s idea that making stars into homes of reborn humans would just turn space into a comfortable hotel. Instead, he suggests, stars are not creations of utility, but are dreams of a still youthful nature.

Another point speaking against personal immortality, Feuerbach continues, is that individual life is always embodied. Spirit or God does live without a body - it is the process, where bodies are generated and destroyed - but an individual person cannot. Indeed, Feuerbach points out, when we think of an individual's immortality, we think of the soul as a kind of body, trapped in another body. Yet, he continues, soul is not a body nor is it even an individual thing, but an activity of living, just like fire is an activity in a burning body. And like fire stops, when a thing is burned up, soul vanishes when the body dies.

Feuerbach also relies on the Hegelian idea that a limit of something does not just end something, but also makes it what it is. In other words, mortality just is what makes us human beings what we are. This is nothing to be afraid of, he adds, since when this limit of ours or death is present, we are not. What death adds to our life is meaning, just like a melody adds meaning to fleeting sounds.

The analogue to melody in human life is the common memory of humankind, Feuerbach suggests. The first years of our life is something that we learn of only from the memories of other persons. Our own individual personality is thus something made by humanity outside us. The whole of our life is then a steady creation of more memories, which could be transmitted to other persons and thus universalised. When the process has finished, we still exist in spirit, as these idealised memories.

Christian Hermann Weisse: System of aesthetics - History of an ideal beauty

The development of beauty, with Weisse, had to contend with immediate beauty not necessarily conforming to the sublime infinity beyond it and being thus ugly. Now, while we can see what an ideal beauty corresponding to the sublime should be like, he continues, originally the discovery of ideal beauty required the effort of generations, and indeed, several historical cultures.

Weisse connects the notion of ideal beauty especially to the notion of mythology. Mythologies at their best are for Weisse not just arbitrary creations of fantasy, but reflect the life and thoughts of a people. A mythology sums up the hopes and fears of a culture in a symbolic shape of mythical personalities. These symbols, Weisse says, resemble the previous aesthetic shape of comical humour, in that they both rise above the ordinary life of finite, momentary and decaying shapes, the difference being that while humour merely notes and rises above this decay, mythological symbols try to grasp something stable from this play of finite entities.

Mythology as such is not yet beauty. It is no surprise that Weisse would follow the general trend in thinking that the ancient Greek were the people responsible for transforming mythology into an ideal beauty, because Hellenic mythology was a particularly natural creation of the spirit of Greek life. Hellenic mythology, as Weisse envisions it, had two different types of mythological shapes. Firstly, the mythology tells about heroes living in the distant past, who express the essence of what the Greek thought being a Greek meant. Secondly, the heroes interact with the beautiful gods, who represent various aspects of the superhuman realm beyond human history.This mythology is then embodied in the Hellenic cult, which represents the relations of humans to this supernatural realm.

Just like Hellenic ideal was a result of historical development, it was also subject to further development, Weisse notes. While in Hellenic mythology gods were characterised by their beauty, such an external appearance was revealed to be frivolous compared to god being a self-conscious entity: beauty is replaced by something more valuable. This does not mean that beauty was completely ignored after this historical transformation, but its place in the hierarchy of values was just lowered.

With this transformation, Weisse explains, the ancient ideal of beauty turned into a romantic ideal, with its own mythology. While Hellenic gods were present as beautiful shapes, romantic God is something beyond the mythological or legendary figures - an unreachable infinity. This doesn’t mean that romantic God would never be thought to appear in the finite world, Weisse admits, but the relation of the divine and the finite was just reversed. While Hellenic gods were embodied divinities, romantic God could divinise a body - an obvious reference to the notion of incarnation. Furthermore, Weisse continues, unlike with Hellenic gods, this appearance of the romantic God in the world of finity was meant to be just temporary and God returned to the realm beyond.

The divination or at least spiritualisation of the corporeal world in the romantic mythology happened also in an opposite fashion from incarnation, Weisse notes. The finite world or at least some part of it still appeared to be severed from God - in terms of earlier concepts, it was an ugly world. Now, this inherent ugliness of the human world, Weisse continues, was presented in a non-bodily form as evil spirits opposing God. Indeed, often the beautiful gods of antiquity were now interpreted as these evil spirits or demons. Human world was then seen as a battleground between the spiritual forces of good and evil.

This battle was not supposed to be never ending, Weisse notes, but it was assumed to end with the overcoming of the forces of evil. Yet, this final victory was not really thought of as occurring at some definite point of time, but only in the hazy future - or, one might say, it had already been won, since nothing could hinder God's plans. This victory or salvation of the finite world was wrapped in the notion of divine love of the finite world.

While Hegel had ended the development of aesthetics with romanticism, which made his contemporaries assume he had assumed the death of aesthetics, Weisse continues further. Indeed, this very next step he assumes is inherent in the notion of divine love of finity - like the romantic God was supposed to do in the future or have done in an atemporal manner, we humans have again come to appreciate the beauty of the world around us. When this change has happened, yet another form of ideal has appeared - the modern ideal.

While many German romantics had supposed that a new ideal would require a new mythology, Weisse comments that all we really need now is the science of beauty itself or speculative aesthetics. Indeed, we need not even a complete aesthetical theory, but just a certainty that beauty is something equally eternal as truth and God are. This certainty is then accompanied with the historical appreciation of the former shapes of ideal beauty and with the expectation of further beauties of innumerable measure.

The historical development of the aesthetic ideals has stopped now, Weisse emphasises, but this does not mean that no further beauties would not be found. Instead, quite the opposite has happened, since by understanding beauty as such, we have liberated it from any necessary connection to further mythologies. We have thus learned to appreciate beautiful objects, which each in their unique manner express the modern ideal of beauty. In other words, Weisse implies, we now appreciate art for its own sake, not just as an expression of religious notions.