Two tendencies within German Idealism emerge across the volume’s oftentimes diverging contributions. On the one hand, as a series of experiments in de-absolutizing and even annihilating the (modern, Christian-European) world—in affirmatively reducing it to nothingness, chaos, the earth, or indifference—German Idealism may be mobilized to think that which ungrounds and cannot be inscribed into dominant Christian-secular logics. On the other hand, even when German Idealism seeks to think the zero point that precedes the construction of the world, its next move is, all too often, to reconstruct the world as it is starting from this zero point, thereby justifying the (modern, Christian-European) world. In German idealist philosophy of history especially, the path of the absolute goes through world history, justifying it as an image of (and a necessary point of transition on the way to) the absolute. This trajectory points to the ways in which post-Kantian thought not only opens up a thinking of immanence but also, ultimately, forecloses it by realigning it with the modern world in the idealist philosophies of subjectivity, history, and the state.
Thus, in Fichte, the standpoint of the Wissenschaftslehre displaces the world totally, appearing as “the doctrine of nothing” to the dogmatist who would absolutize the way the world is—a standpoint that culminates, in the ethical register, in the idea of blessedness or bliss as refusing the logics of domination and the not-yet. At the same time, however, and from the same standpoint, Fichte proceeds to think the necessity of the progress of history and its culmination in Christian-European modernity as the actualization of the divine in and as the world. The world, and with it the state, strives to dissolve in the life of the divine—and yet this striving necessarily traverses Christianity and modern European history as its contemporary culmination and the closest that humanity has come to its end goal. This is, one could say, the tension between Fichte’s 1806 The Way Towards the Blessed Life and his Characteristics of the Present Age, published in the same year. The former thinks bliss, nonproductivity, non-sovereignty—just as the latter uses them to justify the evils of history (including colonial and state violence), as mere stages toward the final epoch in which bliss would be realized and all domination would cease.
This tension, and this overwriting of immanence by way of its inscription into a theodical project of justifying the world, is generally characteristic of the way German Idealism repeatedly forecloses the utopic immanence of nothingness or bliss by positioning it as the end goal of the world process, thereby, one could say, idealizing the world as it is. Schelling is guilty of this as well. One of his last works, Exhibition of the Purely Rational Philosophy (1847–1852), is particularly explicit in this regard. What the world is meant to do, for Schelling, is to actualize the totality of possibility until its full exhaustion—and what the philosopher is supposed to do is to trace the logic of this actualization in and as world history. The latter follows the natural logic of the Stufenfolge (succession of steps), in which the higher subsumes and builds on the lower, gradually getting closer to the all-encompassing “organic” unity. This naturalization of hierarchy and progress is extended by Schelling to European colonial history and thus becomes indicative of the modern logic of racialization, with Schelling speaking about “lower” races serving as mere possibility for the “higher”—a racialized logic endorsed by him as the way things simply and necessarily are. The lower is, according to this conception, destined to die out naturally as soon as it comes into contact with the higher (as illustrated by Schelling appealing to the disappearance of “the American natives”)—or to be put to use by the higher (as in the transportation of African slaves to America) thereby saving the lower from world-historical abandonment and giving it the possibility of becoming part of something higher—of becoming part of the logic of possibility itself.51 Not unlike in Fichte, the philosopher must refuse all divisions and think their all-dissolution in bliss, as refusing sovereignty and domination—and yet, in order to think this as the end goal of history, the philosopher must think the path to this nondomination as going by necessity through domination—and, furthermore, through domination in its historical forms, culminating in Christian-European modernity.
These two moves—thinking an immanence that refuses domination, sovereignty, or the not-yet, and positioning this immanence as the telos of the world that is not yet ethical, not yet free, not yet fully divine—need at once to be kept separate and grasped in their conjunction within German Idealism. This is, one could say, what happens when nothingness, bliss, and immanence are inscribed into the world’s logic of possibility, into the path of historical development, actualization, and progress: a folding back of immanence into the world of modernity. German Idealism is torn between wanting not to absolutize the world, by affirming that which refuses and even annihilates it—and to think the way the world is, identifying the logic of the world with the logic of ideality and thereby justifying the world. This tension is indicative of the post-Enlightenment, postrevolutionary moment as one in which modernity at once culminates and its cracks begin to show: the Christian-modern paradigm here at once reaches its peak and ceases to be self-evident, becoming a (theoretical and genealogical) problem for thought. This allows an unprecedented series of experiments in deconstructing or ungrounding the modern world, but it also leads to German Idealism’s holding on to the world of modernity that it inherited. In making the first grand attempt to self-reflectively think through the genealogical foundations of modernity, German Idealism ultimately ends up justifying them—and thereby justifying the project of modernity itself.
Can one ever think the world without justifying it? Is it possible to think an immanence that would immanently refuse the world, on the one hand, and the world as the regime of reality through which the subjects of modernity inevitably are required to pass, even as they assert an antagonism toward it, on the other? How is what is foreclosed by the Christian-modern to be thought? How does one think the enactment—the operativity or inoperativity—of this otherwise that would not fall back into the logics of restoration, fulfillment, actualization, or universality? How does one proceed from or out of the zero point of radical immanence—or how does one persist in it while also doing justice to the victims and exclusions of the world? The questions that German Idealism, in all its tensions and ambivalences, bequeaths to political theology are numerous—and remain absolutely central to its future.
Notes
1 1. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 36. Hobbes’s Leviathan is particularly important for Schmitt’s understanding of both how the concept of sovereignty was historically transferred from theology to politics and how modern sovereignty was structurally the same as divine sovereignty. See Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). More generally, Hobbes may be said to be determinate for Schmitt’s entire project of political theology insofar as he defines for Schmitt the paradigm of modernity and modern sovereignty.
2 2. See Walter Benjamin, “On Violence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 236–252; Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 389–400; Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1949); Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); and Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983).
3 3. For Blumenberg’s discussion of immanent self-assertion of reason and the overcoming of Gnosticism, see Legitimacy, esp. 125–226. For more on these implications for and in Blumenberg from a political-theological perspective, see Joseph Albernaz and Kirill Chepurin, “The Sovereignty of the World: Towards a Political Theology of Modernity (after Blumenberg),” in Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg, ed. Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel Whistler