Hegel frequently practices self-censorship in his published texts, sometimes quite deliberately, sometimes unconsciously. Hegel’s student Heinrich Heine even argued that German philosophers aren’t difficult to understand because they are incapable of writing clearly, but because “they fear the results of their own thinking, which they thus do not dare to communicate to the public.”1 Hegel especially practices self-censorship when it comes to matters of religion and politics, a practice that occurs frequently in German authors prior to the revolution of 1848. Hegel himself says that in Germany “sacrifices and distortions were made in order to maintain at least the appearance of the recognition of religion.”2
Hegel’s lectures are often much less restrained. As Domenico Losurdo points out: “In his lectures, Hegel expresses himself with a bold language that could never be found in one of his printed texts.”3 For example, Hegel clearly states in his lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit that a starving person has the right to steal bread. The same conceptual argument appears in the printed Philosophy of Right, yet omits the bread example.Hegel was quite aware that Fichte was dismissed from the University of Jena after being charged with atheism. Fichte had claimed: “The living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God. We require no other God, nor can we grasp any other.”4 Hegel often gives readers an impression of feigned piety. His classes, moreover, were a hotbed for radical students. Yet even in his lectures, Hegel sometimes resorts to obscuring his more political points, especially when it comes to positions that would appear atheistic or politically radical.One such remark occurs in the third volume of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Here, Hegel introduces his students to Kant’s philosophy by stating:
For Kant, God cannot, on the one hand, be found in experience. He can neither be found in outward experience—as Lalande discovered when he swept the whole heavens and found no God—nor can he be discovered within.5
Here, Hegel refers to Jérôme Lalande, a major French astronomer who was a prominent atheist. Lalande, in fact, founded the Masonic Lodge “Les Sciences” in Paris with the French materialist philosopher Helvétius. Hegel thus alludes to the tradition of French materialism and atheism. He then continues:
Kant argues to prove the existence of God, who is for him a hypothesis necessary for the explanation of things, a postulate of practical reason. But in this connection another French astronomer made the following reply to the Emperor Napoleon: Je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse. According to this, the truth underlying the Kantian philosophy is the recognition of freedom.6
This passing remark by Hegel is quite interesting. He gives the quote in French, knowing it would fall primarily on the ears of French-speaking students. He alludes here to “another French astronomer” named Pierre-Simon Laplace. Laplace is one of the two physicists credited with the discovery of the nebular hypothesis, the most widely accepted astronomical model explaining the formation of the Solar System. Yet Laplace was only partially responsible for the nebular hypothesis. The other person responsible for theorizing the formation of the solar system was none other than Immanuel Kant himself
The Kant-Laplace Hypothesis
In 1755, Kant anonymously published the text Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In this text, Kant agues that nebulae (clouds of dust) collected together due to gravity, forming into disks before finally developing into the sun and the planets. This text draws upon the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton, yet is also heavily influenced by Lucretian atomism. Kant’s nebular hypothesis strongly resonates with how physics currently understands the formation of the solar system. Kant also speculates in this text that there are other galaxies besides the Milky Way and that galaxies form out of clouds of dust through a similar natural process.
Laplace developed the nebular hypothesis around the same time as Kant, formulating it within his five-volume astronomical work Mécanique céleste, which Laplace began publishing in 1799. While Laplace perhaps read Kant, he did not cite Kant’s earlier text.
Allegedly, the Emperor Napoleon read Laplace’s text and was furious, stating: “You give the laws of all creation in your book, yet you do not once speak of the existence of God!” Laplace allegedly replied: Je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse. “I have no need of this hypothesis.”
Hegel is quite aware that Kant developed the nebular hypothesis long before Laplace. This sly allusion to Laplace thus refers to a strain of materialism that runs through Kantian philosophy. The idea that the solar system and earth had a beginning was a radical suggestion for this time period. Frederick Engels, in fact, regarded it as one of Kant’s most important achievements, writing:
The first breach in this petrified outlook on nature was made not by a natural scientist but by a philosopher. In 1755 appeared Kant’s Allgemeine Naturgesehichte und Theorie des Himmels. The question of the first impulse was abolished; the earth and the whole solar system appeared as something that had come into being in the course of time … Kant’s discovery contained the point of departure for all further progress. If the earth were something that had come into being, then its present geological, geographical, and climatic state, and its plants and animals likewise, must be something that had come into being; it must have had a history not only of co-existence in space but also of succession in time. If at once further investigations had been resolutely pursued in this direction, natural science would now be considerably further advanced than it is.7
In Kant’s nebular hypothesis, Engels recognizes the germ of further discoveries: Darwin’s law of natural selection and Marx’s laws of history. Yet Kant’s discoveries, regrettably, would not firmly grip the scientific consciousness until a century later.
Hegel indirectly alludes to the Kant-Laplace hypothesis in the aforementioned quote after comparing Kant to the French atheist philosopher Lalande. Yet Hegel does not quote Laplace in reference to Kant’s nebular hypothesis, but in relation to his moral proof for the existence of God.
Kant’s Moral Proof
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues against the classical proofs for the existence of God. We cannot, Kant thinks, prove God exists using theoretical reason. Kant nevertheless claims that human cognition only deals with appearances (which are indeed “empirically real”), yet we cannot know things in-themselves, that is, things as they are independently of how they appear to us. Kant thus maintains that while the ideas like God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul are unprovable, they remain possible and thinkable.
In the Critique of Practical Reason, however, Kant develops what he calls the “moral proof” for the existence of God. Rather than trying to prove that God exists through a metaphysical argument, Kant argues that we should believe in God for moral reasons.
Kant does not think that one has to believe in God to be moral. Morality, according to Kant, follows from reason alone. For Kant, we can know whether an action is moral by formulating it as a maxim and positing it as a universal law. For example, suppose I believe that I am allowed to cut in line. If I make this into a law of nature, then everyone is allowed to cut in line. At this point, the line would cease to exist and everyone would just “go.” Yet if nobody else stands in line, I can no longer cut. Cutting is only possible if I make an exception for myself, if everyone else stands in line, but I am allowed to cut in front of them. Kant calls this the categorical imperative: We shouldn’t will any maxims that we wouldn’t wish to become a moral law.
Our only motive for acting morally, Kant thinks, should be a love of duty for its own sake. We should do the right thing because it’s right, out of a pure respect for the moral law. If something else motivated us to act morally, such as receiving praise or the promise of a heavenly reward, we would no longer be acting morally, just lawfully. Similarly, Kant thinks that we cannot allow the consequences of our moral actions to influence our unconditional duty to the moral law—this would make our duty conditional on whether we can predict the outcomes of our actions. However, Kant also claims that we have a duty to “cultivate” our moral feeling, which means removing any stumbling blocks to moral behavior.
We especially feel morally discouraged when we look at all of the horrors in the world today. In the face of hunger, suffering, war, and genocide, morality seems futile. The wicked are rewarded with tremendous wealth, receiving public honor and praise, while the innocent struggle to find work, starve in the streets, or are murdered in horrific acts of genocide. When confronted with such extreme evil, we have a duty to act to bring about a better world. Yet such actions often feel in vain, causing us to be discouraged. What’s the point of being moral if it doesn’t amount to anything?
We cannot help but ask, Kant thinks, questions about the meaning or purpose of life. Such questions are hardwired into human reason. We cannot help but ask, accordingly, “What then is the result of this right conduct of ours?”
We cannot find, Kant says, any empirical causal connection between morality and happiness. Just because I act morally doesn’t mean that my actions will produce greater happiness in the real world. Yet Kant famously claims that we cannot know reality in-itself, only reality as it appears to us. This means that just because there is no empirical connection between moral actions and good results doesn’t mean that there isn’t a causal connection at the level of things in-themselves. There could be, accordingly, a supersensible force steering the world so that our good deeds bring about good results in the end, even if we cannot see it.
If we choose to believe that good actions produce good consequences, even if we cannot see them, this keeps us from becoming discouraged. We have a duty, not just to act morally, but to keep acting morally. Kant thus argues that we should believe in God in order to strengthen our moral resolve. God, for Kant, is a “moral postulate” of practical reason. While we cannot prove the existence of God, Kant nevertheless claims that “it is morally necessary to assume the existence of God.”8 Belief in God, Kant claims, keeps us from becoming morally discouraged, helping us more consistently fulfill our moral duty.
Kant’s “Unnecessary Hypothesis”
By quoting Laplace in his Lectures, Hegel is saying that God, for Kant, is an unnecessary hypothesis. Just as Laplace thought that the existence of a creator was not needed to explain the formation of the universe, Hegel thinks that belief in the existence of God is not necessary for Kant’s philosophy of freedom. Hegel thus states: “the truth underlying the Kantian philosophy is the recognition of freedom.”9
Now, we must ask: How would have Hegel’s left-wing students understood this remark about Kant and Laplace? Let’s hear what one of them has to say:
With a truly joyful soul Hegel tells us—after all he had called Kant’s “Proof of God” a “Hypothesis of the Aüfklarung”—how a “French astronomer made the following reply to the Emperor Napoleon: Je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse. But finally, after Fichte had destroyed all reality outside of self-consciousness, the philosopher comes to his homeland, to self-consciousness. Now Hegel is satisfied, for God has been totally and completely pushed aside, and has not even the value of a hypothesis. The Ego has stepped into his place, just as it stepped into the place of substance … God is dead for philosophy, and only the Ego as self-consciousness “as in itself self-differentiating and opposition positing”—lives, creates, acts, and is all.10
To left-wing students like Bruno Bauer (quoted here), this allusion to Laplace signals philosophical atheism, a sublation of Christianity and identification of God with the freedom of self-consciousness. Bauer called this the “rational kernel” of Hegelian dialectic, hidden from the authorities within a “mystical shell” of piety.
As Domenico Losurdo writes: “it is with Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, that the French Revolution finds its theoretical expression.” Kant claims that we have a duty to treat every human being as an end in themselves. To treat human beings as a means to an end, he argues, destroys the dignity of human freedom. Kant thus “moralizes” the ideas of the French Revolution.
The young Hegel understood Kantian philosophy to contain a radical philosophy of freedom, one that could provide an ideological weapon in a revolutionary struggle against the monarchy and aristocracy. As he wrote to Schelling in 1799: “From the Kantian system and its highest completion I expect a revolution in Germany.”11 He continues:
The philosophers are proving the dignity of man. The people will learn to feel it. Not only will they demand their rights, which have been trampled in the dust, they will take them back themselves, they will appropriate them.12
The younger Hegel, in his correspondence with Schelling and Hölderlin, quite clearly subscribes to this philosophy of freedom. The trio spoke of creating a new religion and “moral metaphysics” out of the philosophies of Fichte and Spinoza, one appropriate to the spirit of a revolutionary age. The older Hegel (although cautious) does not stray far from this path. Numerous examples can be cited of Hegel equating God or “the absolute” with the concept, with thought thinking itself through philosophy, or with the idea of freedom.
Take, for example, this passage from the Encyclopedia Logic:
Freedom presupposes necessity and contains it sublated within itself. The ethical person is conscious of the content of his action as something necessary, something that is valid in and for itself, and this consciousness is so far from diminishing their freedom, that, on the contrary, it is only through this consciousness that their abstract freedom becomes a freedom that is actual and rich in content … Generally speaking, the highest independence of a human being is to know themselves as totally determined by the absolute idea. This is the consciousness and attitude that Spinoza calls amor intellectualis Dei (EL §158A).
Hegel holds that there is a dialectical connection between freedom and necessity. When a person acts ethically, they understand their action to be necessary, yet by determining their actions through an ethical principle in this way, they obtain the highest freedom. Freedom, for Hegel, is achieved through self-determination, by acting knowingly according to one’s own self-conception, rather than being ignorantly determined by outside forces. Engels explains this point beautifully:
The freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control.13
Keeping this notion of freedom as self-determination in mind, let’s turn to the following statement from the first volume of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy:
God is the absolutely perfect being, and can therefore will nothing but Himself—His own will. The nature of His will—that is, His nature itself—is what we here call the idea of freedom, putting the religious representation in terms of thought.14
Here, Hegel describes the concept of freedom in Neoplatonic terms as the perfect being that wills nothing but itself. Yet any attempt to “represent” or “picture” the idea of freedom as an actually existing entity, Hegel thinks, should be completely rejected. Hegel’s absolute is not a supernatural entity, but a pure conceptual movement that occurs in thought, the immanent self-movement of the concept, thought thinking itself, a conceptual movement that occurs whenever real human individuals do philosophy, a concept that becomes actual whenever freedom becomes a concrete actuality through human activity.
It is the actual “I”,” the universal knowledge of itself in its absolute opposite, in the knowledge which remains internal, and which, on account of the purity of its separated being-within-itself, is itself completely universal. The reconciling Yea, in which the two “I’s” let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the “I,” which has been expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses certainty of itself: it is God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge.—Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶671.
Notes:
1 Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, trans. Howard Pollack-Milgate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9.2 Quoted in Domenico Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns, trans. by Marella and Jon Morris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 4.
3 Domenico Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns, trans. by Marella and Jon Morris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 10
4 J.G. Fichte, “On the Ground of Our Belief in World Governance,” J.G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute, trans. Curtis Bowman (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010), 26.
5 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 425.
6 Ibid.
7 Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch01.htm
8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: The Bobs-Merrill Company, 1956), 130.
9 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, 425.
10 Bruno Bauer, The Last Trumpet of Judgment Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist: An Ultimatum, trans. Lawrence Stepelevich (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 122.
11 Hegel, The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 35.
12 Ibid.
13 Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch09.htm
14 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1: Greek Philosophy to Plato, trans. E.S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 18.