Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 40
Psychology, 2nd edition (1843): the methodological program
The preface formulates how one is to deal with a system that one wants neither to defend nor to reject — and it does so in sentences that have lost none of their edge:
“That Hegel’s philosophy is not the last word in the course of world history he himself knew well enough and expressed with the most good-humored wit. But to refuse to engage with his system at all out of mere concern for progress, to slip past it toward some higher standpoint instead of striving to pass through it, is a perverse undertaking.”[1]
Slipping past instead of passing through — that captures an attitude that persists to this day: treating Hegel as a superseded standpoint without having worked through him.
And the objection to the supposed innovations lands squarely:
“If one already takes mere rearrangements for new creations, then such things are often only deteriorations, because one had not yet even penetrated to Hegel’s actual view, knowledge of which would have made such modifications impossible, while now one is deceived by them as if by new ideas.”
From this follows his program, which matches that of this volume: “Nothing, then, seems to me more rewarding […] than to follow Hegel as closely as possible on his heels, so as first to know with full certainty what he actually thought.”
And the justification for why detailed work is necessary: “The working out of detail, the concrete unfolding into particulars, must best justify or refute the truth of the universal. Critique is then only a consequence of immanent transcendence.”
Critique as a consequence, not as a starting point — whoever carries the universal through into the particular finds its limits, rather than bringing them along ready-made. This is the same claim this volume has made with respect to Michelet and Erdmann, except that Rosenkranz formulates it in 1843.
System of Science (1850): “He is only what he does”
His System of Science treats spirit in the third part, and its opening shows what a student who has understood can achieve.
§ 567 develops four conclusions from a single sentence, and each begins with the same words:
"Spirit is free. Hence it posits everything that it is not immediately itself as ideal within itself. There exists no otherness that it would not be capable of penetrating and sublating into itself, into its ideality.
Spirit is free. Hence the form of its existence is infinite activity, beginning from itself and returning into itself. It is only what it does. But the doing of spirit is not a going-outside- itself; rather, because whatever it does, it itself is, this doing is essentially manifesting.
Spirit is free. Hence it is capable not only, like the animal, of enduring sensuous pain, but also of enduring division within itself.
Spirit is free. It is its self-determination that fulfills it with itself even in the other to which it relates."[2]
This is Hegel’s §§ 382 f. in a version one can retain. Freedom as the enduring of division, manifesting as determinateness — both are present in Hegel, but distributed and expressed in longer sentences.
And the formula “He is only what he does” is Rosenkranz’s own achievement. It says in five words what § 383 develops in a complex sentence: that spirit has no content that it then expresses.
He sharply distinguishes reason from spirit (§ 570): It is “an error to set the concept of reason as identical with that of spirit, as though the latter concept were absorbed into the former.” And with a remark that was as necessary in 1850 as it is today: “Reason is one of those catchwords with which one commits the greatest abuse, not only in ordinary life but also in scholarship, uncritically believing one has already stated the ultima ratio with the bare name alone.”
The distinction he holds onto: “Spirit is not merely rational, as nature is, but as free it has reason.” Nature is rational without knowing it; spirit disposes over its reason — and can therefore also set itself against it.
What he contributes in substance
The finitude of both spheres, determined more clearly than in Hegel:
“Subjective spirit is finite, for on the side of appearance it is bound to nature and has first to sublate its immediate egoity. This doing is that of its freedom. As free in itself it is infinite in its finitude.”
And for the objective: “in its infinity it is also finite, for it is still individual, is bound to nature, has a limited spirituality, is only this particular configuration of spirit.”
Two finitudes, mirroring each other. Subjective spirit is finite through nature and infinite through freedom; objective spirit is infinite in its doing and finite because it is always only this people, this constitution.
And the school’s self-criticism, which he voices in 1843 and which applies to Michelet before Michelet has even written:
“The Hegelian method can […] also be misused as formalism, whether in unconscious error or with conscious intent, in order to feign the appearance of ultimate depth. In that case it is itself not attained. Only its scaffolding is present.”
Only the scaffolding — this is exactly the finding that Was beide unternehmen notes regarding Michelet’s deduction of the cell and Erdmann’s geometrization. Rosenkranz saw the danger before the cases occurred.
His position in the reception
What he does differently: he writes a book where Hegel had paragraphs — that is, he supplies what Hegel himself had left undone. And he calls it “Psychology,” with the subtitle serving as clarification: or the Science of Subjective Spirit.
What he does better: concision. “He is only what he does” is a formula Hegel does not have; the fourfold derivation from “Spirit is free” organizes what in Hegel stands scattered.
What it costs: the form of the book forces smoothing-over. Where Hegel, in a paragraph, leaves a contradiction standing that the remark then develops, Rosenkranz must narrate — and narration easily turns movements into states.