Michael Steinberg - Enlightenment Interrupted: The Lost Moment of German Idealism and the Reactionary Present

History writing is a political act; it either confirms or questions the present, and it is all the more necessary if it does the latter. The thought that the world might have become something different may clear the path for critique and action. That aside, tracing the currents that lead from the past to the present helps us see which of our problems may be soluble within our cultures particular terms and which ones derive from the deep structures of thought and experience that tie a culture together and for just that reason are difficult to undo. Without this preparation we may well grant assumptions which in fact dictate the very practices and ideas which we want to criticize, abolish or transform.

That particular trap is one we are all too apt to fall into today, where the regime of liberal democracy and market economics seems to express nothing less than the natural order of things. Virtually everyone, on the left as well as on the right, takes for granted the primacy of the individual, the self which is logically and ethically prior to anything else and who is or should be protected by fundamental human rights and is or should be free to engage with other free and sovereign individuals in properly leveled playing fields of political and economic life.

From those premises, however, there is little that one can construct except a world much like this one, with a few adjustments here and there to restrain misconduct and corporate power and to assuage the misery of the less fortunate. Neither parliamentary democracy nor market economics is questioned in itself. The future, should we have one, is thus only a kinder, gentler version of the present.

Behind the specific focus of this work, which concerns itself with the philosophical movement in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Germany we call German idealism or classical German philosophy, is a different set of premises. It is that the individuality from which we elaborate our thinking and practice does not exist as a fact of nature but is an element within our cultural history and social milieu. The experience of being an individual is a cultural construct and our introspective self-identification with an apparently inner and pre-social essence is not self-validating. We may be very different from the way we appear to ourselves.

In an earlier book, The Fiction of a Thinkable World, I argued that the separation of self and world in experience is all that is necessary for the emergence of capitalist modernity. The contemporary confidenceor dreadthat there is no alternative, that we have reached a point where social process has assumed its final form, arises from the self-evidence of liberal capitalisms necessary and sufficient conditions. But self-evidence is no proof. Every child believes her parents to be normal, even when they beat her savagely. The members of any community are apt to assume that their way of life reflects the real nature of humanity. We in the modern world are no different, and we are no more justified in thinking this than is any other group.

In one important sense we are deeper in delusion than the Azande, the Greeks of Homers day and the sages of the Upanishads. While we humans of whatever group do indeed experience ourselves as separate from others, it is only in the modern world that this notion has been made into the foundation of the social order. In virtually every other human community the independence of the individual has been contested and generally dismissed as illusion. The reality from which human life emerges is thought to be a larger complex of activity which is imagined as the life of the spirit and figured in myth and enacted in ritual, and there are good reasons for thinking that these practices do point to something real. As I have argued in another book, A New Biology of Religion, the omnipresence of religious life is far from being a sign of humanitys incorrigible fear of reality. It is, instead, testimony to the widespread discovery that everyday experience does not correspond to the deep structures of human life. This is a discovery and not a fantasy; the shape of the world disclosed in religious practices is strikingly close to the shape of the world implied by much recent biology.