Qin Ming: An Introduction to "On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany"
In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels points out: "Just as in France in the eighteenth century, so in Germany in the nineteenth, a philosophical revolution preceded the political collapse... Hegel’s system was even raised, as it were, to the rank of a state philosophy of the Prussian monarchy! Was it possible that a revolution could be hidden behind these professors, behind their pedantic and obscure words, within their heavy and tedious sentences?... But what neither the government nor the liberals saw was seen by at least one man as early as 1833, and that man was Heinrich Heine." It is evident that, in Engels' view, Heine was the first to discover the revolutionary nature of Hegelian philosophy. The exposition of this revolutionary power is primarily manifested in certain perspectives regarding the German philosophical revolution found in Heine’s work On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany. On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany helps us better understand Engels' own writings, and why Marx wrote in the 1843 "Introduction" to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: "For Germany, the critique of religion has been essentially completed, and the critique of religion is the prerequisite of all critique."
On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany was completed in 1834. Its original purpose was to introduce German religion and philosophy to the French, so that the latter might better understand German literary works. For only in this way could the French truly grasp German literature; otherwise, "our literary works remain for them but silent flowers, and the whole of German thought a foreign riddle [1] that rejects them from a thousand miles away."
The book is extremely slim and its table of contents is incredibly simple; it is hailed as an introductory work for the study of Marxist theory and is also a masterpiece among the polemical works of the great German poet Heine. Since it is the work of a poet, its most obvious characteristic lies in its language: it expresses the deepest philosophical ideas through the diction of belles-lettres [2]. This is uncommon in general philosophical works, and even rarer among the works of German philosophers.
One additional perspective should be noted here: it is recognized within philosophical circles that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most difficult works to read in the history of philosophy. The reason for its difficulty lies in Kant’s obscure and convoluted expressions. But did this stem from Kant’s own expressive habits? In fact, it did not, as many of Kant’s other works demonstrate his capacity for clear and accessible expression. The root cause was precisely that Kant did not want to express himself clearly, or was unable to do so, in order to protect himself from persecution by the religious authorities of the time.
To return to the primary content of the text:
In the first part, Heine introduces Germany's great religious revolution, represented by Martin Luther. The logic of the narrative is: What is Christianity? How did it become Roman Catholicism? How did Protestantism emerge from Roman Catholicism? And how did German philosophy emerge from Protestantism?
What is Christianity? To understand this question, one must first understand what religion is. According to Marx’s view, religion is created by man; it is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. Why does religion arise? Marx says: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world... It is the opium of the people." Marx found the fundamental basis for the emergence of religion in the real world. Heine also recognized that Christianity is an idea. He believed that all the wit Voltaire unearthed from church history, and the entire dictionary of philosophical arrows he shot when attacking the clergy, only wounded the soon-to-die flesh of Christianity without touching its inner essence—its spirit and soul.
The core concept of Christianity, which Heine calls its "purest flower," is the incarnation of God, the overcoming of carnal desire, and spiritual introspection, which in turn constitutes an ascetic and contemplative monastic life. Because the body belongs to the material world—the fiefdom of Satan—it must be tormented so that the soul may ascend to the kingdom of light. This Christian concept imprisoned the minds of people throughout almost the entire Middle Ages. Human beings lived, so to speak, prostrate; they could not speak directly to God, as the clergy stood in between, nor could they establish achievements in the secular world, because they were born in sin, and their entire life mission was atonement. The more one could suppress desires and overcome the temptations of the evil attributes of Satan, the more one could stone for sins and assist one's soul in ascending to heaven. The problem lies in the fundamental contradiction between the Christian ideal of annihilating carnal desire and human nature, which can never be fully realized in actual life. Thus, while spirit obtained a theoretical dictatorship over matter, a vent was simultaneously provided for matter: the pursuit of bodily desires was acknowledged as a sin, but the spiritual rule provided a means of redemption for such desires—namely, achieving self-redemption by purchasing indulgences. To some extent, Catholicism completed this compromise between matter and spirit (between Sensualism and Spiritualism, where the former attempts to restore the natural rights of matter by usurping the spirit, while the latter beautifies the spirit by destroying matter). That is to say, the Church allowed people to exchange various physical pleasures for the payment of a fine; all sins had a price.
Who was Martin Luther? In Heine’s eyes, Luther was a complete man—an "absolute man" in whom spirit and matter were never separated. He was both a mystic full of dreams and a man who sought truth from facts.
Martin Luther’s Reformation began with a protest against indulgences, which was in fact an attack on the entire ecclesiastical system. He declared that "one must refute his (referring to the Pope) doctrines using the words of the Bible or rational arguments." Thus began a New Era for Germany, in which human reason was granted the right to interpret the Bible and was considered the highest judge in all religious disputes. From then on, Evangelical Christianity was born; the most urgent demands of matter were not only considered but also legitimized. Religion became truth once again, and from this point forward, walked the path of using reason to verify the truth of doctrine. Thus, spiritual freedom or freedom of thought was produced in Germany. One important flower of world-significance produced by this freedom of thought is what Heine calls German philosophy. Luther's contribution gave us not only the freedom to act but also the means to act; he gave the spirit a body and the thought a language—he created the German language.
In the first part, Heine describes in great detail the different beliefs of various European nations, vividly depicting various legends of elves and demons from different regions. He reveals how Christianity, from a soil filled with pantheistic tendencies, substituted a "divine nature" with a "diabolical nature," and stirred up artificial discord between the body and the soul, which eventually triggered the religious revolution of Dr. Martin Luther.
The second part serves as a transitional chapter, revealing the entire process by which philosophy and religion, amidst constant friction and dispute, eventually led to the rise of the former and the eclipse of the latter. This prepares the ideological ground for the third chapter, which narrates the process of the philosophical revolution initiated by Kant. Fundamentally, all disputes boil down to the nature of human thinking—that is, the ultimate source of spiritual knowledge. One view holds that our spirit is merely an empty container in which various intuitions absorbed by the senses are digested and formed into knowledge; this view is called Sensualism, Empiricism, or Materialism (though there are differences, they are analogous). Another view holds that ideas are innate, the human spirit is the source of all ideas, and experience is merely the means or medium that awakens these ideas; this view is called Spiritualism, Rationalism, or Idealism. (Note that in the first part, Spiritualism refers to the exclusive exaltation pursued by the spirit in Christianity, trampling upon matter, while Sensualism attempts to restore the sacred status of matter.)
Using the appearance of figures in the text as a guide, we can better grasp the relationship between religion and philosophy during this transitional historical stage.
René Descartes, a Frenchman who moved to the Netherlands (which was suitable for philosophy), was the father of modern philosophy and established the independence and autonomy of philosophy. He delved deep into the depths of thinking, grasping thought at the base of self-consciousness, borrowing neither from faith nor from experience, and creating a complete system of philosophy within pure thought. Clearly, the Idealist side of Cartesian philosophy did not suit the actual situation in France at that time. By the end of the 18th century, the French were already on the path toward an imminent political revolution; thus, Spiritualism or Idealism was obviously unsuitable.
John Locke, an Englishman who had been a student of Descartes, inherited his teacher’s Materialist tendencies and advocated that knowledge is obtained from the outside world through experience. He likened the human spirit to a sort of computer; the whole person became an "English machine." His An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was the gospel of the French philosophers. Along with Locke's students, Heine calls them Materialists, among whom Man a Machine can be said to be the most thorough representative work of French philosophy at the time, embodying the conclusion of their entire worldview.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German who also took Descartes as his teacher, inherited his teacher's Idealist tendencies. His New Essays on Human Understanding refuted Locke, awakened the people's spirit, and set off a massive surge of philosophical research in Germany. In Heine’s view, Leibniz’s monadology was the concentrated expression of this thinker’s courage—a most striking hypothesis conceived in a philosopher’s brain, providing a relatively clumsy expression for the recognition of certain important laws known to modern philosophy. Although his Theodicy was his least important work and brought him much vicious slander and unpleasant misunderstanding, as Heine said, he defended the whole of Christianity by opposing half of it. His method was to stand upon his "height of harmony" and recognize that different systems were merely different aspects of the same truth, and that both the orthodox and the opposition were different aspects of the whole of Christianity. Leibniz also wanted to reconcile Plato and Aristotle using the same method. Naturally, he did not succeed.
Plato and Aristotle represent both two systems and two typical human natures. In terms of the two systems, they are Idealism and Materialism. Plato was a thorough Idealist who only recognized innate ideas—those born with us—and viewed learning as the awakening of memories from before birth; in epistemology, this is known as the theory of recollection. Conversely, Aristotle, who believed "I love my teacher, but I love truth more," was the model for Empiricists, emphasizing drawing everything from experience and precisely classifying all things. In terms of two different human natures, one can use the struggles within Christianity as an example, such as the disputes between the Pietists [3] and the Orthodox in Protestantism. Platonic people, who carry an inherent sense of mystery, often manifest Christian ideas and their corresponding symbols from their innermost depths. In contrast, practical people of an Aristotelian temperament tend to build a solid system, a doctrine, and a sect out of these ideas and symbols. Heine evaluated them thus: "The Pietists are mystics without imagination, while the Orthodox are dogmatists without souls." Behind the dispute between these two Protestant sects lay the long-standing struggle between two systems and two natures, which has inspired generation after generation of thinkers to attempt a resolution of this fundamental contradiction.
Benedict de Spinoza was the third disciple of Descartes. His philosophy was neither the Materialism of his fellow student Locke nor the Idealism of his other fellow student Leibniz; he gave us a great synthesis, primarily embodied in his Ethics. Spinoza proposed that there is only one substance, and that is God. This substance is infinite and absolute. All finite substances are derived from this substance and are contained within it; finite substances are merely relative, temporary, and accidental existences. The absolute substance reveals itself to us both under the form of infinite thought and under the form of infinite extension. Infinite thought and infinite extension are but two—and not the only—attributes of this absolute substance. This absolute substance is everything that exists there; it is both matter and spirit, and both are equally sacred.
Why was Spinoza, who expounded upon divinity with such solemnity, solemnly excommunicated to the sound of the shofar [4] and stripped of the title of Jew?
Answering this question first requires an understanding of the difference between the God of the Pantheists and the God of the Deists. The God of the Pantheists exists within this world, permeating it with his divinity (though not entirely subsumed by it); the God of the Deists exists outside or above this world, ruling it from above, with the world being separate from Him. For the Deists, only the spirit is sacred—it is the breath of God.
Therefore, the Jews regarded the flesh as something inferior, a miserable shell for the Holy Spirit, the divine breath, or the mind. Within such a conceptual context, Spinoza—a fellow Jew who held that matter and spirit were equally divine—inevitably could not be tolerated by them. In the square in front of the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, they once attempted to assassinate Spinoza with a longsword.
Whiles the Jews merely despised the flesh, the Christians viewed it as something evil, even a scourge. They attempted to seize absolute dominion for the spirit upon the earth, but in the end, because their ideals were too pure and too noble, they could only remain at the level of theory and could not be put into practice. Christianity surrendered matter to the Emperor and his Jewish henchmen; the outcome was that the representatives of the spirit had to compromise with the Emperor and his servants who had attained supreme power, forming a union that Marx termed the "Holy Alliance" [5].
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Spinoza’s most frantic enemy, was called a "mole" [6] by Heine—a hypocrite cloaked in the garb of philosophy. Blind to the brilliance of reason, he believed that reason would only lead people into a dark labyrinth of error and contradiction, and that only faith could correctly guide humanity.
Christian Wolff, a student of Leibniz and a "grand-student" of Descartes, counts among his greater achievements the inspiration of Germans to think philosophically in their own national language, while his lesser achievement lay in systematizing and popularizing the thoughts of his teacher. However, in Heine’s view, this work of systematization was profoundly unsuccessful because he sacrificed the most important parts of Leibniz’s philosophy. He left us the Philosophical Encyclopedia, which fully displays his encyclopedic mind; he inherited the mathematical form of proof from his predecessors and eventually followed this path into a frenzy for clarity, ceasing all profound inquiry. This spirit dominated Germany for over half a century, leading Kant into the "dogmatic slumber" [7]. He kindly draped a mathematical, demonstrative cloak over poor religion, but because it did not fit, it made religion appear utterly ridiculous. Heine’s evaluation was: "From the moment religion seeks help from philosophy, its downfall is inevitable."
Nicolai was a publisher who was a martyr for reason; he attempted to destroy the traditions within the German spirit to clear the path for a thorough revolution but lacked the capacity to do so. He fought windmills as if they were giants and would mistake true giants for windmills. He founded the German General Library (Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek) and used this journal to struggle against superstition, the Jesuits, and court sycophants. However, his method was to stuff his companions' ears so they could not hear the song of the sirens, without considering that they would likewise be unable to hear the song of the nightingale thereafter. Just as Feuerbach "threw out the baby with the bathwater" by discarding dialectics while critiquing Hegel, Nicolai pulled out the flowers while weeding the garden of nature.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a man in whom wit and honesty were integrated—truthful, firm, simple, and elegant. He was the most eminent German after Luther. Beyond his specific deeds, his greatness lay in how he inspired the German nation from the depths of its soul and initiated a healthy spiritual movement through his critiques and polemics. Luther liberated us from tradition and established the Bible as the sole source of Christianity, after which people fell into a stubborn "worship of the letter" (Buchstabenverdienst); Lessing made the greatest contribution to liberating people from these tyrannical words. In Lessing’s view, the letter is the final skin of Christianity; only by destroying this skin can the spirit emerge. This spirit was the pure Deism [8] that prevailed in various forms in Germany at that time.
In 1781, Lessing passed away, and in the same year, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was published in Königsberg. Germany thus began another spiritual revolution. We shall see how Deism was overthrown in Germany!
In the third part of his work, Heine opens with an English legend [9] to raise a serious and terrifying question: the flesh we create demands a soul from us, and the soul we create demands a body from us. If the former is frightening, the latter is enough to make one tremble. Human thought is the soul created by humanity; once generated, it demands a body—that is, it can only be satisfied by attaining the sensible existence (sensuousness) upon which the thought depends.
In Heine’s view, thought is the precursor to action. Robespierre was merely the practitioner of Rousseau’s thoughts. Compared to the world-shaking impact produced by Robespierre, who killed a king who had already lost his head, the world-shaking impact caused by Kant’s "Copernican Revolution" in the realm of thought seemed to be obscured for a long time by the superficial blandness and monotony of his life. After all, his most important work, the Critique of Pure Reason, was published in 1781 but did not become widely known until 1789. Heine called this book the "guillotine" that lopped off the head of Deism.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant pronounced the death sentence on the mathematical form in philosophy. This is because philosophy cannot have any definition like those in mathematics; mathematical definitions are not inferential but intuitive, capable of being proven in "intuition" (Anschauung). Philosophical definitions can only be tentative and hypothetical propositions put forward in advance; a truly correct definition can only emerge at the end as a conclusion. It can be seen that, for Kant, the mathematization of philosophy is unfeasible, and the philosophizing of mathematics is equally problematic. However, philosophers seem to have a great partiality for using mathematical forms to express philosophy, a trend that can be traced back to Pythagoras. In a number, all sensible and finite things are discarded; numbers are used to express the relationship between one determinate thing and another. Numbers are like ideas; they share the same character and relationships as ideas, but numbers can only be symbols of ideas, not the ideas themselves. This is because thought can neither be calculated with numbers nor weighted and measured. In fact, the "turn" in modern Western philosophy—namely the rise of the philosophy of science—signifies the general decline of speculative philosophy. Its roots can, to some extent, be traced back to the origin and recurrence of the mathematization of philosophy.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason focuses on the scope or limits of human cognitive ability, answering the most fundamental question: how is human knowledge possible? Because humans possess twelve pairs of a priori categories, it is guaranteed that humans can know "phenomena," while the "noumenon" (the thing-in-itself or for-itself) is something humans cannot grasp. God is a noumenon; one can neither prove His existence nor His non-existence. Kant targeted the existence of God using three methods: the ontological, the cosmological, and the physico-theological. As an impartial philosopher, Kant raided the heavens and slew the entire garrison of the celestial kingdom; the supreme ruler of this world fell in a pool of blood, unproven.
As Engels stated, the first aspect of the basic question of philosophy is the question of the primacy of thinking versus being: does thinking determine being, or does being determine thinking? Regarding the answer to this question, anyone who has studied Marxist philosophy knows that the materialist position is clearly that being determines thinking and that matter has primacy. In fact, in the first chapter of Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels clearly pointed out that "philosophy in its previous sense came to its end with Hegel," and the path to truly and effectively understanding the world emerged—a path of positive, scientific cognition rather than a speculative, conservative one.
Returning to Heine’s text, Kant’s project lay in probing human cognitive ability to its full depth and determining all its limits. The so-called "Copernican Revolution" of Kantian philosophy can be understood as a cognition of reason: previously, reason revolved around the world of phenomena like the sun, trying to illuminate it; but Kant made the sun of reason stand still and let the world of phenomena revolve around reason, being illuminated every time it entered the range of this sun.
Kant created a tragedy, announcing the death of Deism within the scope of speculative reason. However, in Heine’s view, a farce follows the tragedy. To solve the problem of "Old Lampe’s" [10] happiness, Kant distinguished between theoretical reason and practical reason. Using practical reason like a magic wand, he resurrected the corpse of Deism that had been slain by theoretical reason.
The immense spiritual impact caused by Kant lay in the "critical spirit" revealed in his works, a spirit that penetrated all sciences. Germany was thus led onto the path of philosophy, and philosophy became a national cause. As Marx and Engels pointed out, in the context of their era, the world leaders were German philosophy, French socialism, and British political economy. The so-called "German philosophy" refers precisely to Classical German Philosophy, which began with Kant and ended with Hegel.
Fichte, a student of Kant, possessed a unity of thought and belief, and he influenced his contemporaries through this great unity. His project was: what grounds do we have for assuming that our representations of things correspond to things outside ourselves? All things have reality only within our spirit. His Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Science) was regarded by Heine as the sequel to the Critique of Pure Reason.
Fichte’s "I" (ego) is not an individual ego, but a conscious, universal "World-I"—a universal thinking manifested within an individual. This omnipotent "I" could only take root in his unyielding and stubborn character. In Fichte’s view, the Wissenschaftslehre knows no existence other than sensible existence; since existence can only be predicated on objects of experience, this predicate should not be applied to God.
Fichte and his student Schelling differed: the former was purely a philosopher whose strength lay in dialectics and demonstration; the latter was a fusion of poet and philosopher who preferred to listen to the spirit, calling himself a member of the "prophetic school," skilled in construction, and fond of poetry rather than logic. In the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte attempted to construct reality from ideas through the structure of intelligence; Schelling attempted to explain ideas from reality. They both started from the fundamental proposition that thought and nature are the same thing. The former reached the phenomenal world through the operations of the spirit, creating nature from thought and reality from ideas; in the latter, the phenomenal world became pure ideas, nature became thinking, and the real became the ideal.
In general, Mr. Schelling’s God is essentially Spinoza's "universal God" (Pantheism). God is nature and thinking; matter and spirit are in absolute identity, neither opposed nor split, and can only be recognized under the forms of the two attributes: "thought" and "extension." It is evident that Mr. Schelling failed to surpass Spinoza. Heine remarked that from the moment Mr. Schelling attempted to perceive the Absolute through intellectual intuition, his philosophical career was over.
But philosophy did not stop there. Schelling’s student, the great Hegel, appeared. He was the greatest philosopher Germany had produced since Leibniz, surpassing Kant and Fichte, and certainly surpassing his teacher Schelling. He was as sharp as Kant, as resolute as Fichte, and possessed the tranquility and harmony of Schelling’s constructive power. Hegel constructed the philosophy of nature into a complete system, using a synthesis of natural philosophy to explain the entire world of phenomena, supplementing the great thoughts of his predecessors with even greater thoughts, and carrying these great thoughts through all disciplines.
In Heine’s view, Germany, as a methodical and step-by-step nation, necessarily had to begin with the Reformation, then engage in philosophy on that foundation, and could only transition to political revolution after philosophy was completed. The German revolution would by no means be made milder simply because Kant’s critique, Fichte’s transcendental idealism, and even the philosophy of nature occurred first. The power of the revolution was precisely developed within these doctrines; once it breaks out, it will surely shock the world. These words fully illustrate what Engels said in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy: "Just as in France in the 18th century, so in Germany in the 19th century, a philosophical revolution preceded the political collapse... The Hegelian system was even raised to the rank of a royal Prussian state philosophy! Was it possible that a revolution could be lurking behind these professors, behind their pedantically obscure words, in their heavy, wearisome periods? ... But what neither the government nor the liberals saw was seen by at least one man as early as 1833, and this man was Heinrich Heine."
Reading Heine not only helps one understand the relationship between religion and philosophy in Germany, and how philosophy broke away from religion to move toward independence and release a world-shaking revolutionary force, but it also helps one understand the "pre-history" of the birth of Marxism and the historical continuity of Marxist theory.
Author: Associate Professor, School of Marxism, Dalian University for Nationalities Online Editor: Tongxin Source: Research on Marxist Classics