On the Publication of the Essays on Hegel

7The Three Essays on Hegel condition in large measure the received view of Bolzano’s critique of Hegel. According to their first editor, Franz Příhonský, they were written around 1835, while we have notes from Bolzano’s readings of Hegel that date from 1817 to 1827. [5] The essays were not published in the thirties due to the censorship of Bolzano by the regime, coupled with his refusal to have any more than his first two critical writings on Hegel published abroad. The dates given by Příhonský, and also used by Loužil, editor of the Three Essays in the complete works [BGA], should nevertheless be considered with caution, at least when trying to date the final version more precisely, for example, using this letter from Bolzano to Michael Fesl on January 7, 1839:

8

I am busy with the essay “Is All that Is Real Rational?” As soon as I have finished, I hope to start on the essay about Hegel’s views on history, which is why I need your Cieszkowski. When I have finished that one, which hopefully should not take too long, or when I give up on it, I’ll send the three journals back to you, and will submit the completed essays for your judgment. [6]

9The question of publication was far from being resolved, if we are to believe another letter, dated February 2, 1846:

10

I do have the essay on the Hegelian view of history, and I have found a clean copy in my own hand. I had someone read it to me, (Robert may well guess by whom), and I think it may be one of my best. It gives me the courage to follow your recent proposal, dear friend, to publish this work, along with a few other essays and reviews, assuming that we might hope to find a publisher. The essay that was just mentioned, on the concept of philosophy (which I should in any case complete soon and which might be best placed at the beginning of the book), and the essay on Hegel’s proverb of the hunter, according to which all that is real is rational (the same applies here), and then some other shorter essays that I could either find among my papers or dash off for the purpose […]. [7]

11These statements would not be absolutely inconsistent with the idea of a first draft dating from 1835, if one believes Příhonský, cited once again by Loužil, who argues that the corrections sprinkled throughout the manuscript were mainly stylistic, [8] the delay in submission being due only to Bolzano’s perfectionism. The order of publication ultimately adopted by Příhonský, which is also that of the BGA, is as follows: I. “On Hegel’s Famous Formula: All that is Real is Rational, and All that is Rational is Real”; II. “On the Concept of History in General and the History of Philosophy, Especially of Hegel and His Followers”; III. “On the Concept of Organism and Some Related Concepts.” The last essay is not mentioned by Příhonský in his preface, but a letter to Fesl suggests that it was intended to serve as the basis for a colloquium at the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences of which no trace can be found. [9] In fact, the earliest mention of the project found during my research is in the letter of October 5, 1838 to Fesl, where only the first two essays are spoken of, the only ones which discuss Hegel explicitly:

12

Two themes came to my mind, the development of which I immediately embarked upon, although in both cases I never got beyond the planning stage. 1. Whether all that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real (as Hegel is known to have said in his philosophy of right). 2. The conception of history in Hegel, in particular his history of philosophy. I want these two essays to remain as short as possible, and try to compose them in such a way that they might be printed by any popular newspaper. [10]

13The last essay was a late addition, while the “popular essays” were intended to respond to a particular intellectual phenomenon of the time—Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, edited by Eduard Gans, and published in 1833. [11] In the letter to Michael Fesl of January 7 1839 cited above, Bolzano says he has almost finished the essay “Is All that Is Real Rational?” and hopes to finish it as soon as possible, while stressing the necessity of not dispersing his efforts. Fesl’s attempts to have it published along with the essay “What is Philosophy?” in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und spekulative Philosophie or Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift proving fruitless, it seems that Bolzano then proposed the publication of a stand-alone booklet devoted to “Schellingo-Hegelian” philosophy, [12] before the subject disappears from his correspondence until 1846. [13] The project was finally only realized three years after Bolzano’s death, and carries a general title, which alone should quash any temptation to see it as the final word of the author—“Three Philosophical Essays Accessible to the Non-philosopher.” [14] These essays were written with the aim of combatting an influence he considered particularly harmful, and which was dominant in the 1830s: in his edition of 1851, Příhonský tempered this judgment by noting that times had changed since the essays were written. [15]

14We can give credit to Příhonský for his good faith, and therefore for the veracity of the assertions he made on page IV of his preface, that a separate publication of the essays corresponded to Bolzano’s own intention, and that they might even have appeared much earlier. But we must also take seriously the claim made on the following page, that Bolzano also thoroughly revised the first two essays on Hegel, especially his treatise on the concept of history. Stating that Bolzano’s improvements were mainly stylistic in nature, Příhonský seems to regret this reworking (Umarbeitung), which yet again delayed the publication of Bolzano’s work. For us it should suffice to note that the essays were first drafted around 1835, with successive alterations as shown by the correspondence we have mentioned. Bolzano himself describes the versions anterior to his letter to Fesl dated October 5, 1838 as “beginnings,” and while the original manuscripts cannot be found, we will adhere to his point of view, especially insofar as it confirms the reading proposed in this paper, which sees the Three Essays as reactions to the Hegelian and post-Hegelian publications of the time.

The First Essay on Hegel’s Most Notorious Expression

15The first essay is presented as a term by term analysis of the Hegelian dictum on the rationality of reality and the reality of the rational—and in this manner reaches the conclusion with no great difficulty that it is has no meaning. Bolzano considers it necessary to remind his reader that one can only ask beings endowed with reason to be “in conformity with reason”. For him, asking a real being not endowed with reason to conform to reason is the same as asking an odd number (ungerade Zahl) to become an even number (gerade Zahl), or the irregular movement of a clock to become regular. [16] The only interpretation of Hegel’s statement which Bolzano is ready to accept may make sense is the post-Leibnizian notion that assumes a God acting in accordance with the principle of the best:

16

If we believe […] that […] everything that exists and everything that happens in the world only exists or happens by the will of God, then it is true that one can advance the assertion, concerning everything that is real (that is, for all finite reality) that it is rational, taken in a certain sense; just as one can accept the converse assertion, according to which everything that is rational eventually achieves a form of reality. [17]

17Bolzano nonetheless states immediately afterward that this interpretation is not likely to be seen as admissible by the Hegelians, insofar as it is evident that this is “something very old and well-known.” [18] He concludes with a critique, which has since become a classic of anti-Hegelianism, stating that the Hegelian formula is an abdication in the face of the existing order. It is true that Bolzano was able to base his criticism on the published works of the Hegelians even though, for understandable reasons, these are no longer read today, as for example the following words of Dr. Mager [19] from his Letter to a Lady on the Hegelian Philosophy: [20]

18

[Philosophy] has made peace with reality, it does not seek to create or change anything; it does not consider itself to be more intelligent than the World Spirit, in other words, more intelligent than human reason is now, at this time.

19It is clear from this quote that Bolzano had the tribulations that Hegelianism was suffering at the time in mind while formulating his critique.. This is not the place to discuss readings that might exonerate Hegel of this accusation, nor shall I accord this interpretation the status of just one among many that are possible. I will simply note that Bolzano’s anti-Hegelianism has some textual basis, albeit slim, and second-hand.

The Second Essay on Hegel’s Philosophy of History

20The same analysis can be applied to the second anti-Hegelian treatise, devoted to Hegel’s philosophy of history, including the history of philosophy, which extensively quotes Count August von Cieszkowski and his Prolegomena to Historiosophy. [21] Bolzano sums up Hegel’s philosophy of history thus:

21

In the rational and necessary progress of the World Spirit, each successive state of humanity is fundamentally nothing more than a progress issuing from all the previous states. The history of philosophy too, should be nothing but its own development. [22]

22To say that Hegel’s conception of the involvement of the World Spirit within world history did not gain the favor of the “Leibniz of Prague,” who was also a thinker of progress in human history in the Enlightenment sense, is an understatement. The unfurling of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis is accorded a total of three lines, something which is admittedly more an expression of Bolzano’s skepticism than any real argument; the very idea of a classification of philosophical systems following the Hegelian tripartition seems so ridiculous in itself that presenting it in ordinary terms suffices to reveal its flaws. Bolzano nonetheless recognizes “that there is something seductive in these assertions,” which comes from the certainty of having achieved the perfection of philosophy within the prevailing philosophical system, to which he responds with irony:

23

Because we Europeans are clearly the most cultivated men on this Earth, but that nobody in Europe genuinely philosophizes outside of Germany, and finally, in Germany, only Berlin (and perhaps Munich) can present without challenge the most famous philosophers, it is as clear as day (one must think) that only the Hegelian philosophy (or, at most, the Schellingo-Hegelian philosophy) can be called the philosophy of the present day, and all remaining systems must be regarded without exception as non-existent. [23]

24Beyond the irony, acidic to say the least, and which also reflects the concerns of an isolated philosopher, banned from publishing, and facing what he considered to be a wave of thought antithetical to his own work, what we have here is the testimony of a non-German contemporary of German culture, for which Hegel’s philosophy of history is nothing but a form of enthusiasm, characteristic of a nation viewed with growing, and not unjustified concern in the wider circles of the political and intellectual elites of the Austrian Empire. There are no charges of “totalitarianism” in these passages—as there were to be later from commentators with a less acute historical sense—rather only an expression of fear and grievance which, while absolutely failing to anticipate the magnitude of the catastrophes that were to come, were indictment enough of contemporary disasters.

25In his examination of the assumptions of this thought, Bolzano does not reject all possibility of progress or of a directed history; indeed he outlined such a concept himself. However, as noted above, it takes place in a Leibnizian framework where God acts in accordance with the principle of the best, and where each substance has a faculty of representation that can be perfected. Together, these make the progress of mankind possible, provided that the experiences of the past are used by its heirs to make themselves wiser and more prudent, and therefore, as is specified with unshakable faith in the Aufklärung, “better and happier.” Thus:

26

We hope that this merely possible progress, after many interruptions and temporary setbacks, shall never remain completely stopped, at least not across humanity taken as a whole, nor in each individual substance, once it has reached the point where it aspires seriously to the good, in part because increased knowledge comined with good will must lead to a gradual increase in every other perfection, partly because we believe that every good that is not impossible in and of itself shall one day become a reality, under the all-powerful guidance of God. [24]

27There may well be many things to talk about—and to criticize—in Bolzano’s progressivism, [25] but what is certain is that it excludes something which, according to Bolzano, rightly or wrongly, is inseparable from the Hegelian conception of history, namely the vision of continuous progress. One can of course raise the objection to this reading that Hegel’s vision of history is more tragic, but this would miss the substance of Bolzano’s argument, which is that a single World Spirit cannot be incarnated in a plurality of individuals, [26] because a fortiori a plurality of sensibilities cannot be part of a single global mind. Bolzano appears here to have completely overlooked the concept of objective spirit, according to which a specific part of human culture is led to embody the absolute spirit, ultimately in political institutions. But the notion is not so much overlooked, as it is rejected, as when Bolzano asks why the peoples of the Earth, and every people in its entirety, should realize the development of the spirit at its own stage. Bolzano asks if it would suffice for only one man among that people to reach the stage of development in question… or is it necessary for all peoples at a given time, or all men together, to reach the given stage of development? The purpose of these falsely naïve questions is to expose the arbitrary nature of Hegel’s scenario of the expression of spirit, which Bolzano describes as the “new arbitrariness,” [27] which is nothing more than the hasty classifications of the Hegelian philosophy of history, treated by Bolzano with the same casual attitude which he finds in the Hegelian account of historical reality. Bolzano considers the peoples who have and must have existed, among whom no individual has known that he or she was free (Orientals), followed by those such as the Greeks where only some (the Citizens) knew they were free, and arriving at the Christian peoples, where all know they are free. He adds to this the epigonal work of Cieszkowski in which the Chinese mind is the mechanism, Athens is dynamism, and Sparta is static electricity, and so forth. For Hegel, and for his disciples, this arbitrariness culminates in the theory that a people will only reach world history once, in accordance with the theory of the Great Man. Thus:

28

How can one claim there no arbitrariness in his assertion that each of the world’s peoples will only attain world historicity a single time? It is supposed to flow from the fact that a given people will only once be the carrier of the spiritual principle which forms the present phase in the forward march of the World Spirit! Such a limit, so clearly defined, between that which deserves to be called world history and that which does not, absolutely does not exist. [28]

29Even if we posit that history gives no examples of a people having had an influence on the whole of humanity across different times, separated by periods of insignificance, it does not permit the conclusion that this situation is a priori impossible. For Bolzano, the arbitrariness of Hegel culminates in the Great Man theory, against which he warns, at the outset, that one must be careful not to assign the quality of greatness to a man whose situation has allowed him to have significant influence, where others of greater virtue have failed because of circumstances. Against the concept of the Great Man as a representative of his time—for which his time has waited—Bolzano contests that the real great man is one who exceeds the demands of his own time, even if he is not free from the errors proper to it, [29] and whose greatness remains dependent, particularly in the intellectual sphere, upon more modest advances made by others. He gives the example of Newton, who was dependent on Picard’s discovery of the true radius of the Earth. [30] The distinction between what is essential, in an era or in a system of thought, which may be retained by the dialectical succession accomplished by a later period, and what is non-essential, is thus impossible. Before determining what is essential or non-essential in a system, everyone must be in agreement on the truths and non-truths it contains.

Bolzano and the Heirs of Hegel

30Beyond the Hegelian declarations placing the Germany of his time at the heart of world history and true philosophy, it seems clear for Bolzano that the role of Hegelianism is above all political, not primarily through single points of doctrine, but by the collective weight of theses which, under a canopy of rationality, arbitrarily magnify the figure of the Great Man and certain selected historical moments, something made all the easier by the confusion intrinsic to the Hegelian language. On this subject, Bolzano cites a former Hegelian-turned-critic, Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, in an extract from the journal edited by Immanuel Hermann Fichte:

31

After he [Chalybäus], in agreement with many other supporters of Hegel, complained that the central and primary issue of all speculative philosophy, the principle of the identity of being and thought, was explained neither in Wissenschaft der Logik (where it would already be necessary in order to understand the very first sentence), nor in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (to which Hegel referred), nor elsewhere, he criticizes the untenable nature of Hegelian texts in the following terms “Such expressions must, in Hegel, be taken sometimes in one sense, sometimes in another; the truth is sometimes substantial indifference, sometimes existential concretion […] it would be entirely possible to write two columns containing a whole collection of expressions, one facing the other, in which each says the opposite of its neighbor, chosen by the Hegelian school according to its whims, depending on whether they should assert one thing and then another […] this author would joyfully return to the banner of Hegel, where one philosophizes at leisure, and where friendships and protection are quickly to be found, if he could only divest himself of these inconveniences […].” [31]

32We have, here, a case of a thinker making use of the internal debates of Hegelianism for his own ends, which attests at least to Bolzano’s knowledge of the debates agitating those “late idealists” who were his contemporaries. There is a practical reason for this, in that Bolzano largely learned about Hegelian philosophy through the writings of Chalybäus, [32] and he hoped for a time to be published in the journal of Fichte’s son, an extract from which we have just seen. In a letter to Příhonský of October 19, 1837, he congratulates himself on the reception of his work by “Professor Fichte,” and recommends that a copy of Wissenschaft der Logik be sent to him:

33

On the 4th, I received a highly satisfactory letter from Professor Fichte, wherein he speaks very favorably on the richness and rigor of this enterprise, and undertakes to recommend it both publicly and privately. [33]

34This hope was to be disappointed, as evidenced by the letter of September 11, 1840 to the same correspondent:

35

How difficult it is to get these gentlemen even to read the writings in their entirety, is proven by the following facts. Fichte, who glories in rushing to the fore to preserve the meaning of alternative points of view, explained in his letter to the editor (last year) that he has not yet found the opportunity to learn more about these concepts. [34]

36There follow recriminations against Friedrich Eduard Beneke and Reinhold Ernst, whose refutations prove, according Bolzano, that they have not even read his text. He concluded that the only hope left would be the publication of passages and “popular presentations” of his thought in the press, what we would today call popularization. [35] New hopes placed in a draft review bringing together Chalybäus, Heinrich Ritter (a pupil of Schleiermacher), and Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg were also to be dashed very quickly. [36] The failure to be taken into account intellectually, a failure that was mainly political in nature (the censorship of the Empire having already taken from Bolzano all hope of becoming a serious opponent of idealism), might explain the disillusioned judgment in his letter to Michael Fesl of August 24, 1846:

37

I confess, for my part that I see the now quite obvious impotence of our philosophers, fallen from the heights of Olympus, and who, as you say in part yourself, were just a few years ago so exuberant with pride and positivity, as a very favorable development. But I do not flatter myself in any way that we can win these people over to our ideas. Instead, I am still of the opinion that I had in 1805 and have often expressed in different ways, that once stuck in this rambling way of thinking, one can never be completely healed of it. People like Fichte, Chalybäus, Weiße, Lindemann, Ahrens, and I would include the pupils of Herbart, are permanently incapable of understanding an orderly thought process, and even if they do understand it for a few moments, they cannot keep it in their minds for long, nor develop it further, as required. Without noticing, they fall back into their infantile image-based games, incomparably easier as they are, of course and, at least for them, more enjoyable. And because a large, a very large, part of our current generation is already more or less infected with this rambling thought, we shall never have an easy time of it, and can only expect to be well received among the young, the people who are still testa recens. [37]

38He clearly injects a dose of personal disappointment into this judgment, towards Fichte the Younger in particular, but also without doubt to Exner, the Herbartian philosopher with whom Bolzano maintained a correspondence, and who persistently did not understand him. We also see in the firmness of his formulation something of the need to calm the ardor of a “very dear” student whose multiple initiatives—making contact and propositions for writing various essays—were often re-framed by Bolzano, in a manner far more skeptical and cautious than his enthusiastic and perhaps over-dedicated disciple. But this bitterness also derives from a lucidity arising in the face of a very real balance of power, an over-optimistic lucidity insofar as his legacy was to be largely betrayed by the “still young” philosophers around him.

39Beyond the question of personal and political relations with the heirs of Schelling and Hegel, it is clear that it was Bolzano’s reading of the debates between these thinkers that determined the judgment he was to bring to bear upon Hegelianism in the Three Essays. Bolzano was aware of the criticisms formulated within late idealism, particularly the conflict between the “young” and the “old” Hegelians. The author of the Life of Jesus (1835), David Friedrich Strauß, who launched this polemical battle, was known to Bolzano, who at first refused to read him. In a response to Fesl on December 4, 1840, he says he only knows of Strauß’s Doctrine of Faith through what he has learned from his correspondent. He already replies on January 7 that he does not need his copy of the Life of Jesus, although he was supposed to write to Strauß, having decided not to bother, wishing to save his time and strength for the “most necessary work.” [38] While the rejection of Strauß is unequivocal, Bolzano was nonetheless aware of the strategic importance of a reply, as evidenced by this letter to Fesl of August 27, 1841.

40

For the work that Příhonský wants to undertake on Strauß (at the time!), I proposed the title “Dr. D.F. Strauß and Bolzano. A refutation of the former’s Christian Doctrine of faith using concepts that were formulated before he was born.” This proposal pleased Schneider, while Příhonský thought it excessive […] Moreover, it is literally true, as Strauß was born in 1808, and it was in the years 1805 to 1807 that I conceived and explained my views on revelation (concept, possibility, characteristics thereof, the figurative character of its teachings) which refute him; in 1808–1811, I reworked them for myself and have only spoken of them in private and in short critical appendices; then presented in public every year until my dismissal, they have also been available in print since 1834, i.e., for seven years. [39]

41Strauß is even more intolerable for Bolzano since he considers that he has already answered him. In the letter of January 20, 1842, he repeats that Strauß would have written something else entirely if he had read his Lehrbuch der Religionswissenschaft. [40] The “Hegelianism of the left,” which makes Jesus the representative of all mankind, and applies the concept of myth to biblical texts, had little chance of appealing to a philosopher who, while distinguishing philosophy from theology, and trying to reconcile religion with Aufklarung, does not consider Christianity to be a relic of the past, as Strauß was eventually to believe. After some delays, [41] Příhonský took charge of writing the anti-Strauß publication, [42] a work approved of by Bolzano, and written under his direct influence. [43] The manuscript of it can now be found in the Domstift St. Petri library in Bautzen. [44]

42But it was with respect to Feuerbach that Bolzano made clear what was at stake.. He began by treating him little better than Strauß: in his letter to Příhonský of February 25, 1839, he advises him against “reading the book by Feuerbach” and states that the idea for the project of refuting this book comes not from him but from Michael Fesl, [45] once again in the role of Bolzano’s gadfly (Bolzano nicknamed him the Planmacher, “maker of plans”). His intellectual journal of the years 1827–1844 nonetheless contains a long note taken from the work of Feuerbach on Pierre Bayle, a quote he crowns with the title “Sincere confessions of the new philosophy.”

43

In his Pierre Bayle (Ansbach, 1838), Feuerbach writes, p. 241, “Kant, Fichte and Hegel were on the right path, but Schelling’s absolutism, especially his later writing, despite some insights into nature, amounted to a secession [46] of his idea from philosophy. Hegelian philosophy is the restitutio in integrum [47] of philosophy outside of his secession, during the period of his secession. That which was great, that which was truly philosophical in Hegel’s Logik is exactly what brought him most of his opponents: delivered from the foundations of a subject, in particular an absolute subject (God), he studied the forms of metaphysics and logic in and for themselves. However, he was still marked by the spirit that brought us the secession of philosophy and, with it, the return [48] of all the old superstition, whether in theoretical or practical terms, in short, all the barbarism of this world! What is today called speculative philosophy is largely the least clear and least critical of thing in the world.” [49]

44Here, the basis of the opposition to the “Young Hegelians” is clearly articulated around the issue of the religious reference. While the use of religion for the purpose of the conservation of the social order of his time was rejected by Bolzano, he rejected the atheism of the young Hegelians just as much, which was becoming ever more clearly expressed — an atheism which, as evidenced by Feuerbach’s use of theological concepts, was an inverse Christianity. As a logician, Bolzano probably cared little for the type of genealogy Feuerbach sketches in the rest of the citation noted in his journal:

45

Motto. “Nothing is more negligent than to consider criticisms, without subjecting that from which they come from to a rigorosum examination, asking it: Who art thou? Do you let yourself be seen in the light? Do you have even the requisite individuality, or the strength to project yourself beyond your limits through thought, into another who is for you, for subjective reasons that are foreign to him, a repugnant being?”

46Bolzano must have experienced this tactical and intellectual lesson with a certain amount of irony, he who had been subjected to humiliating examinations and trials before being expelled from the university for reasons that were hardly based on logic or philology. Yet Feuerbach’s motto is read here as a confession. Beyond philosophy, the true objectives of the Hegelian “left” are political, and their radicalism seduced him no more than did the Prussian State. He also maintained a strict distinction between the fields which permit the autonomy of philosophy and theology, but also of politics, while giving a decisive status to religion (defined very broadly as all opinions and rules that have an influence on the virtue and happiness of mankind). [51]

47This double rejection, particularly noticeable at the end of the first essay, where Bolzano argues that the fact that some have gone too far in their “thirst for improvement” (Verbesserungssucht) does not justify “making our peace with everything that exists,” [52] also explains Bolzano’s reference to Hegel’s epigone, von Cieszkowski, in the second essay on history. This figure, virtually unknown to the general (and even the philosophical) public, is nonetheless an important link in young Hegelian radicalism: the “philosopher of action,” who saw in history an organic whole of which the future is also a part, saw in praxis a synthesis of thought and being, which, through Moses Hess, was to influence the young Marx. [53] Praxis was destined to resolve the duality of consciousness and action, but already in von Cieszkowski, philosophy was supposed to serve praxis. This was a vision utterly antithetical to that of Bolzano, who took pains to maintain the autonomy of the intellectual sphere, and thus of conscience. Above all, he was not at all inclined to embrace the magical-ritual belief that theoretical or real contradictions resolve themselves through violent political action, a belief whose consequences would become all too apparent later on. Here, too, Bolzano seems to have sensed what would follow, even if he could not begin to imagine the magnitude of the catastrophe that the partisans of the «philosophy of action», placing philosophy at the service of politics, would inflict on the masses in the following century in the course of «liberating» them.

48Before concluding this consideration of the arguments of the second anti-Hegelian treatise, I must insist that while the issues of Bolzano’s criticism are partly theological and religious, they cannot be limited to this dimension, as Bolzano himself emphasizes. After showing that a God unfolding from himself in the universe and achieving consciousness of himself in humanity would not meet external opposition that could disrupt the regularity of his development (because of his omnipotence), he recalls that the author of this way of philosophizing, namely Schelling, had, along with a number of Hegel’s followers (I.H. Fichte, Weiße and others), long since abandoned this form of pantheism. Recognizing the existence of a being with both totality and absoluteness also implies self-awareness, and the authorship of everything:

49

It is not necessary, however, to address your pantheism to prove to you the more or less arbitrary contradictions of your doctrine of the development of the World Spirit in all of humanity. Is the human species then the only one in the universe to be rational so that you can perpetually declare that the World Spirit could only and uniquely come to self-awareness there? If we are surrounded by countless other beings, more or less rational than us (which nobody can deny); and if (as it is well established) these other beings also have an influence on the formation of our fates, [54] by what right do you presuppose that the history of humanity should take such a regular course? [55]

50In reply to the Hegelian-inspired theology and philosophy (while also denying that they have any capability of understanding the future, or indeed the past) Bolzano calls upon a Leibnizian God and universe. His response has a coherence of its own, which led him to the concerns of the later critics of Hegel, although his thought is never limited to this, as both his approach and his situation demonstrate.

The Third Essay and the Question of Organicity

51The third essay on Hegel also admits its dependence on contemporary events, starting by expressing Bolzano’s exasperation with the ubiquity of the words “organic” and “organism” in contemporary philosophy. He seems to find it impossible to read a single book where these two words are not printed at least once per page. [56] I will focus here on his criticism in §25 [57] of the notion of organism coming from Kant, insofar as this criticism is also anti-Hegelian, albeit indirectly: in this essay, which is classified among the “anti-Hegeliana” the name of Hegel does not even appear. Bolzano prefers to focus his critique on the one he considers to be the true source of the philosophy he opposes: the idealists are merely tumbling down a slope whose name is Kantianism. In doing so, he attacks not so much Kant himself as a reformulation of the definition found in §66 of The Critique of Judgment [58] that intends to summarize Kant while removing the notion of purpose:

52

§25. Another popular definition of our time is that first conceived by Kant, but which a German philosopher has but only recently formulated using the following words, after becoming a strong enemy of the presupposition of purpose in research on nature: “There is an organism in a whole when each part only exists through the other, and all only exist through the single force that permeates the whole.” This definition, as it is, contains a literal contradiction. No object A can exist through another object B while the latter exists through the former. If B is the cause of A, then A cannot in return be the cause of B. [59]

53Not content with accusing this definition of being self-contradictory, Bolzano adds that it provides no real criterion: this force that permeates the whole can in fact be nothing other than the final cause of the whole. Yet there is such a cause for all wholes and the parts thereof, which means that the definition does not allow any distinction between a simple whole and an organism. In Bolzano’s ontology, this would mean that every “real” substance, (with the exception of the unconditioned real being), would be the foundation of all the others..

54Bolzano admits that “in the meantime” he came to understand how a definition that misses its goal by so much came to be so widespread. He sees it as further evidence of the disregard in which rigorous thinking was held, but also the need to justify the obvious, namely that the organs of animals and plants do not come into the world for themselves, but assemble themselves (zusammenfügen) or are assembled. Bolzano, however, considers the definition of the organism through the mutual foundation of the parts to be a very vague description of this reciprocal relationship (gegenseitiger Beziehung) or this exchange from one to the other (Füreinanderschicken) which allows one part to contribute to the growth of the other and then to be served by it. [60] To use a vocabulary that is not Bolzano’s, reaction cannot be identical to action or, in Bolzano’s own words:

55

[…] It’s always something different that exercises an action as a cause on the other and that which through the exercise of a retroactive action of the latter on the former is produced in the former. From this point of view absolutely nothing is happening in the parts of an organism that is different from that which is found in any of a thousand other things that are nothing less than organisms; for example, in the interaction of two boys, one on the other, where one brings many things to the other, and receives other things in return […]. [61]

56Bolzano gives many other examples, as if this pedagogical form were the only way left for him to make this point understood that he saw as essential: the idea of teacher and student, the first learning from the second after having taught him, or the collection he forms with the sheet of paper on which he writes, and which offers in return the opportunity to recall his thoughts. From the moment when organicity is defined as reciprocal action, there is no collection in the universe that cannot be defined as an organism. Bolzano concludes that this concept is not adequate to a project of research into nature which intends to distinguish the organic from the inorganic. It should be noted here that while he criticizes the Kantian formulations, he is not hostile to either the idea of self-organization or the notion of totality; he simply denies that Kant and his followers provide a sufficient criterion for the definition of life.