Faith and Knowledge

Kant, Jacobi and Fichte put on trial together, as thinkers who put God beyond the reach of knowledge — closing on a speculative Good Friday.

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel262 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Glauben und Wissen
First published: 1802(aged 32)
Original language: German

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Overview

By the turn of the nineteenth century the Enlightenment seemed to have won its long war with religious faith, and Hegel opened this essay by doubting the victory. Reason, he suggested, had won the way barbarian armies sometimes beat a more cultivated people: master on the outside, conquered in spirit by what it had defeated. His evidence was the three most admired philosophies of the day. Kant, Fichte and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi — a novelist and critic of philosophy who had set faith against every system — each declared that the highest reality lies beyond what knowledge can reach, and handed it over to faith, feeling or endless moral striving instead. Hegel called them philosophies of reflection: each sets a knowing subject against a world and then cannot close the gap it has made. He read all three as the Protestant turn inward, pressed into philosophical form, and treated Friedrich Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion of 1799 as the furthest point of that turn. The essay opened the second volume of the Critical Journal in 1802, and its last page names the feeling on which, he said, the religion of the modern age rests: that God himself is dead, a line Lutherans sang on Good Friday in a hymn by Johann Rist. Philosophy, Hegel argued, should neither flee that loss nor console itself for it, but take it up as a moment of its own — a speculative Good Friday, from which the highest truth can rise again. Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God in The Gay Science came eighty years later, and readers since have traced the phrase back through Hegel to the hymn.

Key concepts

What are the 'philosophies of reflection' this book attacks?

They are philosophies that start from a split between a knowing subject and the world it knows, and never overcome it. Hegel's three cases are Kant, Jacobi and Fichte. In each, the finite and the infinite stand opposed as equally absolute, so the highest reality always lies on the far side of knowledge: unknowable for Kant, only felt for Jacobi, only striven for, endlessly, for Fichte.

What does 'faith' mean in the title?

Not church belief, but the place where these philosophies put what knowledge cannot reach. Once reason declares the absolute beyond itself, it must hand the absolute over to a faith, a feeling or a longing that stands outside and above it. In older times, Hegel notes, reason was called the handmaid of faith and fought that label; now philosophy itself volunteers for the role.

What is the 'speculative Good Friday'?

It is Hegel's name for what philosophy must do with the modern feeling that God himself is dead. Good Friday, the day of Christ's death, was once a historical event. Philosophy is to take up that death, with its full harshness and godlessness, as a moment of thought itself, neither denying it nor consoling itself too soon, because only out of that harshness can the highest totality rise again.

What is eudaemonism, and why does Hegel tie it to the Enlightenment?

Eudaemonism is the teaching that happiness is the goal: the individual, just as they are, reconciled with the ordinary world just as it is. Hegel sees it as the Enlightenment's real creed. It turned the poetry of a pain that refused all reconciliation with this world into the prose of satisfaction and a good conscience about it, and Kant, Jacobi and Fichte, he argues, never truly left that ground.

What did Hegel admire in Kant's productive imagination?

In Kant's account of how we come to experience a world, Hegel finds one genuinely speculative idea: the productive imagination, a creative power that shapes what the senses receive. Read rightly, Hegel argues, it is not a go-between inserted between a ready-made self and a ready-made world, but the original unity from which the thinking self and the objective world first emerge. Kant, in his view, glimpsed this and then let it go.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

God placed beyond the reach of knowing

Can reason know God, or only point past itself to faith? Hegel's charge is that the admired philosophies of his day chose the second, and so made reason faith's servant again.

Kant, Jacobi and Fichte share one structure in Hegel's reading: each sets a finite knowing subject against a world and cannot close the gap. For Kant the supersensible cannot be known; for Jacobi reason has only a feeling of its own ignorance; for Fichte knowledge knows that it knows nothing and flees to faith. What once counted as the death of philosophy, reason renouncing the absolute, has become its highest point. Hegel still credits Kant with one glimpse beyond the gap: the productive imagination, from which self and world first arise.

reason
faith
finitude
infinity
subjectivity
knowledge
understanding
reflection
epistemology
kantian philosophy
jacobi
empiricism
practical reason
morality
intellectual intuition
imagination
subject-object relation
absolute

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The heart's religion and the death of God

What becomes of religion when God can be felt but never known? The inward faith of the modern age ends, on Hegel's reading, in the feeling that God himself is dead.

Hegel reads the philosophies of reflection as the Protestant turn inward pressed into concepts: religion builds its temples in the heart and will not look at its God, for fear the understanding would see the sacred grove as so much timber. The Enlightenment then turned the poetry of that pain into the prose of contentment with finite life. The last page names the feeling beneath it all, that God himself is dead, and asks philosophy to take up the loss as a speculative Good Friday, from whose harshness the highest totality can rise again.

religion
faith
subjectivity
reconciliation
absolute
infinity
freedom
finitude
self-consciousness
nature

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Within this work

passages held: 262
distinct concepts: 296
by passages held, corpus-wide: #281

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “finitude” and “infinity”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 74 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
finitude	infinity	16
finitude	subjectivity	15
faith	subjectivity	14
finitude	reason	14
faith	finitude	11
faith	reason	11
finitude	idealism	10
idealism	subjectivity	10
absolute	finitude	9
absolute	subjectivity	8
reason	subjectivity	8
empiricism	finitude	7
empiricism	idealism	7
empiricism	subjectivity	6
infinity	reason	6
absolute	reason	5
empiricism	reason	5
idealism	infinity	5
infinity	subjectivity	5
absolute	faith	4
empiricism	faith	4
absolute	empiricism	3
absolute	idealism	3
absolute	infinity	3
empiricism	infinity	3
faith	idealism	3
idealism	reason	3
faith	infinity	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1801 The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie)
The book that opened Hegel's Jena years and first put his name before the public — as Schelling's ally, a role his essays for their Critical Journal continued.
DE
1802 Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen) you are here DE
1802 How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme)
Of Hegel's reviews for the Critical Journal, the most openly mocking: the journal's programme of severity turned on a single named Kantian.
DE
1802 On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt)
Unsigned, and claimed for both editors ever since: the programme at the head of the journal Hegel and Schelling ran in 1802–03, which Hegel's reviews in its later issues put into practice.
DE
1802 On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law (Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts)
Spread across the Critical Journal's last two issues: Hegel's longest published early writing on law and the state, composed while he was still an unsalaried lecturer at Jena.
DE
1802 Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy (Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie)
Between the Krug review and Faith and Knowledge in the Critical Journal's run, the essay in which Hegel first says what doubt does for philosophy.
DE
1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Die Phänomenologie des Geistes)
Written as Napoleon's army entered Jena and published in 1807, the book Hegel meant as the doorway into his system — and the one many readers still enter him through.
DE
1812 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik)
The larger of Hegel's two versions of the Logic, written away from any university while he ran a Nuremberg school; the metaphysical core the rest of the system rests on.
DE
1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse)
The frame for Hegel's other books: its first part condenses the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right expands one section of its third part. Hegel taught from it and rewrote it twice.
DEEN
1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)
The last book Hegel published in his lifetime apart from new editions of the Encyclopaedia: the textbook of his Berlin law lectures, and the one of his books most argued over by political readers.
DE
1831 On the English Reform Bill (Über die englische Reformbill)
Some three decades after his first, unpublished pamphlets on Württemberg and on the German constitution, Hegel's last venture into the politics of the day.
DE
1833 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie)
Among the posthumous lecture books, the course Hegel carried through nearly his whole teaching life, and the one that closes on his thanks to the students who had followed it.
DE
1835 The Philosophy of Fine Art (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik)
Not a book Hegel wrote but Berlin lectures assembled by a student after his death — the most influential philosophy of art of the nineteenth century, and a contested reconstruction of it.
EN
1835 Who Thinks Abstractly? (Wer denkt abstrakt?)
Hegel in the manner of a magazine essayist: short, comic and aimed at the general reader, though he never published it himself.
DE
1837 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte)
For decades the most widely read of Hegel's works, and now the most contested — lectures on world history, published after his death, reading it as the growth of human freedom.
DE

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