Douglas Moggach. The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 290 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-81977-0.

Reviewed by Joe McCoy (School of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America)
Published on H-German (November, 2004)

Hegel Turned on His Side

The logic of modern revolutions seems to require not only a conservative reaction but also a renewed radicalism upon the failure to usher in a new era of peace, equality, and rationality. The radical view holds that the revolution lapsed into error because it did not go far enough in liberating the human spirit from the past and because its guiding principles were still too mired in the institutions from which it attempted to break free. Thus, this view finds renewed hope and encouragement in the very failure of the revolution, which is interpreted as a necessary--and necessarily incomplete--stage in the advance of history. Moreover, in the post-revolutionary environment, where traditional religion and customary allegiances have been eroded, there is a new and expanded role for the intellectual to interpret historical facts and to articulate their significance, mediating between "the people," the ostensible beneficiaries of the coming order, and "reason" or "history," its motive forces and transcendental causes. Douglas Moggach's The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer is a detailed and exciting account of the life of one such priest of modernity who made it his life's work to herald the coming age of reason and freedom in view of the failed revolutions of the past.

Moggach's treatment of Bauer's thought is organized primarily around the major themes and principle texts with which Bauer was engaged over the course of his life.[1] The introduction entitled "Friend of Freedom" gives a perspicuous overview of the political and intellectual environment in which Bauer lived and of the concerns that animated his work: freedom and history, the criticism of religion, the critique of Hegelian philosophy, and also the key notions of infinite self-consciousness, Sittlichkeit, and republicanism. The subsequent divisions and chapters of the book are organized in both a thematic and biographical manner, beginning from the period of Bauer's prize-winning essay on Kant's aesthetics (reprinted in English as an appendix), to his work in the Vormaerz (some of the crucial texts of this period being Posaune des juengsten Gerichts and Hegels Lehre von der Religion und Kunst), to the final episode of Bauer's life when he lived as the "hermit of Rixdorf," turning his back on European culture as a fruitful ground for the reconciliation of the rational and the real. With extensive notes, bibliography, and index, Moggach's work constitutes a comprehensive, in-depth, and scholarly investigation that situates Bauer's work in its historical and intellectual milieu and explores the philosophical and political motivations of his writings. It will certainly come to be a central text in the study of Bauer and post-Hegelian philosophy.

Bruno Bauer operated in the intellectual atmosphere created by Hegel, who dominated the German academy of his day. Generally speaking, Hegelian philosophy can be understood as the systematic preservation of the major themes of modernity, especially the primacy of human freedom and the account of both culture (politics, art, religion) as well as nature (being, substance) as works of Spirit. In classical philosophy, human freedom was understood in reference to some natural end or object toward which the soul was directed but from which it was essentially distinct. By grounding freedom in external objects, classical philosophy established an objective basis to morality and grounded the intentions and strivings of the soul in the nature of things. Yet this separation, or "diremption," between soul and end implies that the soul's strivings--specifically, the intellectual love of knowledge--can never be fully satisfied. The modern principle of the primacy of freedom (a principle that finds its most systematic elaboration in Hegel) attempts to overcome the diremption of Spirit and its ends: terms such as "object," "substance," and "nature" describe modes of thought by which Spirit conceptualizes the world in order to realize and become conscious of its freedom. In the language that Bauer adopts from Hegel, this process shows that the real is not distinct from the realm of thought and so it is not a hindrance or barrier to purposes of Spirit. At the most fundamental level, the real is a product of Spirit, a fact of which it comes to be increasingly aware in the advance of time. The delicate balancing act achieved by the Hegelian system is to maintain that the real is the work of Spirit but to forestall the conclusion that its free productions are arbitrary and contingent. Rather, the modes of Spirit that manifest themselves in history are both necessary and free: each mode of thought--whether its character is logical, scientific, or religious--represents the manner in which Spirit must conceive of itself and the world. Absolute freedom, therefore, comes only with complete knowledge of all domains of the Spirit arranged in their proper hierarchical order, that is, with knowledge of the necessary order of the world, or wisdom. It is this daring claim that the Hegelian system advances, and it is the point of departure for Bauer's work.

Like other Left Hegelians, Bauer continues along the path of the promotion of freedom while objecting to the hierarchical and allegedly final articulation of the modes of freedom that constitutes the Hegelian system. Moggach's study carefully and thoroughly demonstrates how Bauer's theoretical reworking of Hegel is fused with a deeper, more visceral objection to the social order that his system appears to legitimate (see, e.g., pp. 9, 13, 32, 44, 82-84 for comments on constitutional monarchy as a false universal). Moggach also elaborates Bauer's method for approaching political questions through the philosophical domain and attaining what in Bauer's view would be a more complete integration of the rational and the real. In general, there seem to be two aspects to Bauer's strategy: first, there is the destructive task of undoing the remaining institutional forms that hold up transcendent ideals of morality and thus which continue to produce alienation and subservience (see, e.g., p. 110 on the power of dialectic to "dissolve the positivity of the existing order"). Accordingly, a parallel attack is directed against the lingering modes of transcendence in Hegelian philosophy--constitutional monarchy in the political realm, God in the religious realm, and separate substance in the metaphysical. Secondly, there is an ongoing concern to prevent the liberating results of this destructive task from degenerating into a chaos of heterogeneous forms or from relapsing into a rigid politico-religious order (see, e.g., pp. 6 and 34 for comments on "spurious infinity"). As Moggach shows, this concern explains Bauer's lifelong opposition both to liberalism--the philosophy of self-interest and private desire--as well as to various types of communalism found in contemporaries such as Feuerbach, Marx, and Strauss, all of whom advocated forms of religious consciousness in new guise: a fetishism of class or tribe, particularism falsely represented as universal, and the suppression of rational freedom.

Bauer's central theoretical device for describing and implementing both of these aspects of his agenda is that of "infinite self-consciousness." According to this notion, the historical process of human development is an "open-ended striving" and a "permanent process of transformation," but one that simultaneously disciplines and transfigures consciousness such that the individual is liberated from the tyranny of external, "heteronomous" ends and also from the narrow constraints of private interest and petty desire. The resultant social state would be a "republic," defined as a community of rational agents who harmonize their own interests with the common good, or rather, whose own interests reflect the common good and who adjust themselves on an ongoing basis to the fluctuating modes of history and the ethical life. "Infinite self-consciousness" thus describes a dynamical mode of being in which the individual incarnates reason in history and so unifies the universal demands of reason within the particular scope of his life. The social correlative to infinite self-consciousness is Bauer's notion of Sittlichkeit, which refers to the complex of social relations in which an individual finds himself and in which he acts. The genuine "ethical life" is not, however, a set of heteronomous ends imposed upon the individual agent by an external authority nor does it stem from his own private inclinations; rather, it is achieved by a community of individuals who through reflection upon their lives, social circumstances, and history are able to rid themselves of their excessive attachment to particulars. Accordingly, they are able to rise to the level of the rational universal and to true freedom.

One of the virtues of Moggach's analysis is that it shows the interplay of Bauer's philosophical thinking and political activities that accompanies an ongoing narrative of the circumstances of his life. This approach is certainly true to Bauer's understanding of his own work in which there can be no ultimate distinction between one's theoretical life and one's practical activities and pursuits. As a standard for the reconciliation of the rational and the real, infinite self-consciousness demands the emergence of the universal through reflection upon the particular conditions of one's life, and precisely for this reason this reconciliation is open-ended, adjusting and readjusting to fluctuating circumstances. Yet this very open-endedness leads to a lack of specificity in Bauer's recommendations for political organization, an indeterminacy that appears to result from the very nature of his enterprise, which understands itself as a freeing-up for the development and (in principle) unbounded progress of reason. Just as each concrete or "positive" political arrangement would constitute a hindrance to the flow of history, each concrete recommendation for political society and individual morality would appear as a stipulation or heteronomous command imposed upon society and the individual and so would reinforce the separation of universal and particular. Consequently, Bauer's method must eschew any stable points of reference in history--established customs and institutions, long held practices and beliefs, prominent historical events and personages--which could play a normative role in forming infinite self-consciousness, and any state resulting from historical change, any determinate form that history adopts, is rendered suspect. Hence, by stressing the dynamic aspects of reason and the fluid character of history, Bauer appears to be left without any formal standard by which "progress" can be measured. Thus, his conception of history teeters on the verge of an incoherent flux and his notion of reason comes close to the "spurious infinity" described in Hegelian philosophy.

The indeterminacy in Bauer's outlook leads to a number of paradoxical results, to which Moggach's study points and which I will briefly recount: without the possibility of appealing to stable principles in characterizing "rationality" and "freedom," Bauer's thought tends in the direction of a purely negative critique of all existing historical circumstances. Thus, despite the veneration of history as the domain in which Spirit actualizes its freedom, the concrete historical conditions through which mankind has developed come to be viewed with increasing suspicion and as debilitating. As a result, the notion of "history" becomes for Bauer an increasingly abstract and formal category that is divorced from actual historical events and institutions. Similarly, "the people," whose activity constitutes Spirit, become "the masses," who are recalcitrant and seemingly unmoved by the call of history. Bauer's view of history represents a critique of existing conditions that is empty of positive content, and "infinite self-consciousness" and Sittlichkeit are the purely formal devices for dislodging consciousness from such conditions. It follows, therefore, that infinite self-consciousness constitutes a type of heteronomy, albeit in a concealed form. As a mode of pure criticism, it represents a purely negative stance over and against actually existing conditions, precluding a reconciliation of the rational and the real and guaranteeing the ongoing alienation of Spirit.

Contrary to what it purports to be, Bauer's philosophy represents a rebellion against the historical conditions in which man's spiritual life has been conducted. As one of the many outgrowths of the modern turn in philosophy that elevates freedom and seeks to make man a "master and possessor of nature," Bauer veers toward the abolition of what it seeks to liberate: human nature and its historical products. Indeed, human nature's seeming unwillingness to be liberated comes to be seen as evidence of its deep corruption, which gives encouragement for further destruction of false idols, especially religion and existing political institutions, in order to insure that the prospects for freedom are to remain open. In this way, Bauer's life and work can be seen as paradigmatic for the modern philosophical experiment in freedom and reason, both in its great daring and revolutionary claims as well as in its ultimate failure to accomplish them. Moggach's work is therefore an extremely valuable resource for those interested in late German idealism and also for those more broadly concerned with the modern project as it was advanced by figures such as Bauer.

Note

[1]. For an overview of Bauer's life and work, see Moggach's entry on Bauer in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bauer/.

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Citation: Joe McCoy. Review of Moggach, Douglas, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10006

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