Lauer Christopher. - The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and Schelling

The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and Schelling

Continuum Studies in Philosophy

Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA

Continuum Studies in Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the whole field of philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research.

Aesthetic in Kant, James Kirwan

Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion, Aaron Preston

Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus, Christopher Brown

Augustine and Roman Virtue, Brian Harding

The Challenge of Relativism, Patrick Phillips

Demands of Taste in Kants Aesthetics, Brent Kalar

Descartes and the Metaphysics of Human Nature, Justin Skirry

Descartes Theory of Ideas, David Clemenson

Dialectic of Romanticism, Peter Murphy and David Roberts

Duns Scotus and the Problem of Universals, Todd Bates

Hegels Philosophy of Language, Jim Vernon

Hegels Philosophy of Right, David James

Hegels Theory of Recognition, Sybol S. C. Anderson

The History of Intentionality, Ryan Hickerson

Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory, Alison Assiter

Kierkegaards Analysis of Radical Evil, David A. Roberts

Leibniz Re-interpreted, Lloyd Strickland

Metaphysics and the End of Philosophy, H. O. Mounce

Nietzsche and the Greeks, Dale Wilkerson

Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Delbert Reed

Philosophy of Miracles, David Corner

Platonism, Music and the Listeners Share, Christopher Norris

Poppers Theory of Science, Carlos Garcia

Role of God in Spinozas Metaphysics, Sherry Deveaux

Rousseau and the Ethics of Virtue, James Delaney

Rousseaus Theory of Freedom, Matthew Simpson

Spinoza and the Stoics, Firmin DeBrabander

Spinozas Radical Cartesian Mind, Tammy Nyden-Bullock

St. Augustine and the Theory of Just War, John Mark Mattox

St. Augustine of Hippo, R. W. Dyson

Thomas Aquinas & John Duns Scotus, Alex Hall

Tolerance and the Ethical Life, Andrew Fiala

Christopher Lauer

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Christopher Lauer 2010

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For all my teachers, past and present.

Over the past five or six years, Americans have heard an increasing number of calls, as Derrida put it, to save the honor of reason. luminaries from Al Gore to Pope Benedict XVI have presented faith in reason as a necessary bulwark against a battery of brute expressions of will whose only justification is a relativistic indifference to providing reasons. It is all well and good to question our most deeply shared assumptions, the defense of reason typically runs, but this does not justify abandoning the carefully wrought standards by which we have learned over the millennia to distinguish compelling from specious arguments. While this defense has a provenance at least as old as Socratess answer to Callicles in the Gorgias, the alternatingly plaintive and apocalyptic tone in which Gore et al. make it suggests that more is at stake than a weariness of rational defeatism. After seeing so many political and legal institutions crumble at the hands of both malicious neglect and active dismantling, the defenders of reasons honor have grown increasingly frantic in their efforts to reconstruct the reasons behind these institutions.

These defenses typically (and wisely) decline their opponents disingenuous entreaties to provide a definition of reason or to specify with finality how one can distinguish reason from unreason. Instead, they assume that reason carries with it the whole of human experience and cannot be analyzed into any series of rules. If it could, it would be a product of what the German idealists called the intellect or understanding (Verstand), which is defined precisely by its ability to draw connections based upon concrete rules. Such assurances will surely be unsatisfying to those who believe that each persons reason is nothing but an idiosyncratic collection of prejudices and habits of thought, but the paralyzing force of this skepticism is for the misologist can feel an exquisite pleasure in coupling reminders of the modern worlds loss of reason with the bare hint of the operation of a transpersonal reason.

But such suspicions can also come from reason itself. As Immanuel Kant so eloquently observes in the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, the impulse to retrace the reason(s) behind decaying institutions is nothing but the impulse of self-criticism, which inevitably turns back on itself (A xii). To the extent that such calls to and for reason demand that everything submit to critique, they cannot assume that reason is simply given, but must continually question their own justification. For Johann Gottlieb Fichte, this called for reasons endless striving for self-justification and self-grounding, the very sound of which was already too exhausting for some readers to absorb. Two of the most impassioned of these readers were G. W. F. Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling, one-time seminary roommates and later professional collaborators who came of age intellectually during the waning years of Kants productive life and grew to appreciate both the achievements of human reason and the need for its suspension (Aufhebung). Frustrated by what Hegel would later dismiss as the ages near-universal idle, indeterminate chatter about reason (H 20: 192, 181), both devoted substantial quantities of time and ink to working out exactly what it would mean to distinguish a general faculty of reason from a rule-bound understanding and then to showing how even this more general sort of intelligence is capable of steering us wrong. In a generation raised on both the promise of perennial Foucauldian critique and the disillusion of the American rights appropriation of philosophical relativism, I suspect that many will find their nuanced approach at least attractive, and perhaps even timely, and it is the thesis of this book that despite the variations of its formulations, there is also truth to be found in Schelling and Hegels conception of a suspension of reason.

To frame my discussion of reason (Vernunft) in the early writings of Schelling and Hegel in terms of its suspension (