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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
The so called "Tubingen fragment" or "Tubingen essay" of 1793 is G. W. F. Hegel's first significant work. Written at the conclusion of his theological studies in the Tubingen Stift (seminary), the essay occupied Hegel at that point in German intellectual history when the philosophic dominance of the Aufklarung (German Enlightenment) was coming to an end. The tension within the Aufklarung between reason and the world or, in Immanuel Kant's language, between "concept" and "intuition," was soon to give way to the beginning of German idealism, a new philosophic school which attempted to reunite these sundered aspects into a more primordial whole. Hegel, of course, came to play the preeminent role in this movement, eclipsing both Johann Gottlieb Fichte whose Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge) in 1794 could be seen to signal idealism's start, and his seminary friend F. W. J. Schelling in whose steps Hegel seemed initially to closely follow.
Yet in 1793, Hegel's interests were restricted to the practical and religious philosophies of Kant and Fichte, not the profound metaphysical problems which were to lead to German idealism.1 These restricted interests are, at first glance, reflected in the Tubingen essay's most visible concern: finding an appropriately enlightened conception of religion that could be adopted by the whole of a people. Indeed, the bulk of its thirty-odd pages consists of a complex, condensed, and, at times, frighteningly unsystematic analysis of religious phenomena into a constellation of eleven, multiconnected categories: religion, public religion, folk-religion, objective religion, subjective religion, theology, superstition, positive religion, fetish faith, pure rational religion, and private religion--in roughly that order of appearance.
As these categories suggest, the early Hegel does not speak with the unique philosophic voice found in his mature work. We see in these categories not only the specific influence of Fichte's Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792), but also the general Aufklarung and Wolffian idea (taken up later most strongly by Siegmund Baumgarten and his pupil Semler) that reason and religion are compatible. As Laurence Dickey has well developed, Pietistic notions of faith as predominantly a practical, lived community achievable within ordinary feeling and not philosophic reflection are present as well. (2)
Without any immediately identifiable unique voice, the secondary literature has understandably concentrated on identifying and separating out the various threads of influence at work in the Tubingen essay. Underemphasized is the extent to which "the original Problemstellungen [framing concerns] of Hegel's philosophical work"3 might have its own internal logic. The intent of this article is to complement the more historical or contextual approach to the Tubingen essay by systematically bringing to the surface the internal logic of its Problemstellung.
The argument presented here is that the Tubingen essay's Problemstellung is not to be found in its overt religious analysis but in an implicit search for the satisfaction of a nonreligious human nature defined by a specific set of human needs. Despite the way Hegel outwardly expresses human nature in terms familiar to both the Aufklarung and Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) by speaking of the needs of reason and sensibility, this essay will show that his conception of human nature is animated by two ontologically prior needs. These needs give Hegel's Tubingen concept of human nature a logic irreducible to the rich philosophic, cultural, and religious context from which he draws his language. The first of these animating needs is for what we will call "virtue" or the completion of innate human capacity. Hegel adapts its shape from the Aristotelian architectonic virtue of phronesis (prudence or practical wisdom). The second is his intuition that human beings ought to be at home in the concrete cultural, political, and religious world in which they find themselves. Ultimately, this essay argues that Hegel's attempt to philosophically and practically unify the human needs of ancient virtue and modern being at home in the world both animates the Tubingen essay and fundamentally drives forward its more overt analysis of religion and expressions of human nature.
However, the Tubingen essay contains no explicitly presented conception of human nature. Instead, the reader confronts a discussion of religion and religious themes. "Religion," Hegel begins, "is one of the most important concerns of our lives" (TE 3/481). (4) This opening sentence is Hegel's answer to the unstated question "Why should religion be a topic of serious investigation?" His continued answer reveals that religion achieves its status not through its own inherent worthiness, but only because "in all the more important events and activities of the life of man, those on which his personal happiness depends, such as birth, marriage, death, and burial, a religious element is mingled" (TE 3/481). Nonetheless, Hegel does not abandon his investigation of religion for one concerning these "more important" social practices. In acknowledging religion's derivative importance for us, he also condemns it. For if we were only to reflect upon the nature of God, we would discover the pure "concepts" underpinning the cultus. More importantly, we would discover also that these concepts can "be grafted on to a natural need of the human spirit" or "the nature of the soul" (TE 3-4/481).
For Hegel, knowing the "natural need" of the human spirit allows one to distinguish what is necessary in religion from what causes religion to be "attached only by bonds of arbitrariness" (TE 4/481). In order to ultimately grasp the purpose of the Tubingen essay's religious theme, one must know his conception of human nature. If any explicit discussion of the "natural need of the human spirit" were present, it might have been contained in the now missing "inner half of Hegel's first folded quatro sheet" or about four pages (Harris, 481). We have some clues that this might be so: immediately prior to this lacuna, Hegel introduces the idea of a "natural need of the human spirit"; immediately after it, the manuscript resumes with a sentence that speaks of "set[ting] [...] of human life in motion--" (TE 4/481) and then continues with a discussion of human faculties for a dense three-quarters page.
Pending the discovery of the quatro sheet, two options suggest themselves for recovering Hegel's conception of the human spirit. On the one hand, one could try to reconstruct it conceptually out of the fragmentary passage that remains. On the other, one could use the much more abundant material from his religious analysis and then deduce from it the shape of human need. At first the deductive approach seems the most promising because of the amount of material and the way it forms the explicit subject of discussion in the Tubingen essay. And the deductive approach does yield important results. For example, by focusing on the prominent categories of "subjective" and "objective" religion (TE 67/484) as well as "folk-religion" (TE 20/499), one would be able to determine that the highest needs of human activity are not associated with the "mechanical" application of rules, calculations, or customs to the human situation. Instead, as both Harris (129-30) and Stephen Crites (5) conclude, one would discover that the highest needs are satisfied only by the exercise of the full range of the human being's rational and sensible possibilities (TE 11/488, 12-13/489-90, 15/492, 26/504).
However, without further evidence, one cannot simply assume that Hegel adopts the Aufklarung and Sturm und Drang underpinnings when he appropriates their language of reason, heart, and fancy. So, to be able to say with certainty anything further about his conception of human nature requires concentrating on one of three categories of religious analysis, each of which Hegel's discussion implies is congruent with some of these aspects of the human spirit. These categories are "folk-religion," "pure rational religion," and "private religion." The category one chooses to elevate determines what conception of human nature one ends up with. In turn, to select one of these categories over the others requires a sure grip on the relations of coordination and subordination within his constellation of religious categories as a whole. It is this system of internal relations that ultimately must justify the selection of one category over another if one is to proceed deductively.
Unfortunately, here one is denied a more detailed account of the human spirit. As Harris (144, 149, 127-28, 130 n....
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