Kommentar zum subjektiven Geist, Chapter 38
The Attack (1842)
Franz Serafin Exner (1802–1853) was a Herbartian — and his tract Die Psychologie der Hegelschen Schule [The Psychology of the Hegelian School] (1842) aimed deliberately at subjective spirit as the neuralgic point of the philosophy of real spirit. His method is scientific and sober, not dogmatic like that of the theological opponents, and precisely this made it effective.
The Demand for Laws
His objection is immanent, and that makes it strong. He does not demand that the Hegelians do something else; he holds them to what they themselves promised.
His demand of a psychology: it must state laws of mental states. “One must choose between causes and laws of their operation, or blind chance.” And the fact that human beings are educable settles the choice — there could be no science of the purely accidental.
Then he takes the authors at their word: Rosenkranz calls it “a legitimate demand of empirical consciousness, to find itself again in the concepts of speculation”; Erdmann declares in § 3 that his work encompasses “both empirical and rational psychology.” The tables of contents contain “the current names of the best-known mental states.”
“Thus the task of grasping the given is acknowledged. What is doubtful, however, is whether the authors also consider themselves obliged to state the laws of mental states.”[1]
This is not criticism from outside. Exner does not accuse the Hegelians of failing to be Herbartians — he asks whether they deliver on what they announce.
The Three Objections
He raises three objections, and all three strike passages this volume has dealt with.
The construction charge: Hegel does not describe sensation, consciousness, and memory from experience but constructs them logically — he knows in advance what must come out.
The confusion of logic and reality: Hegel confuses the development of concepts with real causal relations. For Exner as a Herbartian, the soul is a real thing; for Hegel, a moment of spirit.
The divergence argument: He compares the accounts given by Rosenkranz, Michelet, and Erdmann and shows that they do not agree. Were Hegel’s philosophy a science, they would have to be identical.
The second objection is the most interesting, because Hegel had anticipated it. The very warning that Erdmann’s transcript records — that one must “deny oneself such questions as: given that the physical constitution is thus, how is the mental” — states why the causal model does not apply here. Exner alleges a confusion where a distinction is being made.
Drüe sums up the criticism in two points, and the sharpening is more pointed: Exner accuses Hegel “first, that his psychology has remained unfruitful, and second, that dialectic is not applicable to psychology at all.”
The second point carries the main weight. Exner assumes “that Hegel does not acknowledge the existence of the faculties of the soul in their own right, but rather produces them dialectically only to sublate them again. In reality, however, this supposed dialectical production is smuggled in from experience.”
And the core of the dialectic charge: “The dialectical method makes B out of A and Non-A, and so on, in infinitum. Its supposed advance consists merely in taking up concepts it has not itself generated, which are then passed off as its own products.”
This is the charge of smuggling — and it is the strongest of the three, because it attacks not the results but the procedure: what appears as development is in truth an appropriation from outside, disguised after the fact.
Drüe also shows what Exner relies on: the observation that Hegel’s concept-formations are “curiously divided” — in the anthropology, in the ethnographic and physiological sections, they live “almost solely off the intake of external material,” while in other parts it is otherwise.
This observation is correct, and this volume confirms it — it has shown that Hegel’s determinations of nature derive from travel reports and physiologists. The question is whether what Exner concludes actually follows.
It does not follow, and the reason lies in a misunderstanding of what logic does. Exner presupposes that Hegel wants to produce the objects out of the concept — like a conjurer pulling a rabbit from an empty hat. On that assumption, every intake from outside would indeed be a smuggling-in.
Hegel himself anticipated this misunderstanding, with a comparison that settles the matter: it is with thinking as with digesting — one digests without physiology and thinks without logic (Enz. I, § 19).
Physiology produces neither the body nor the food. It expounds what happens anyway — and no one accuses it of having taken digestion from outside and passed it off as its own product.
Likewise logic: it orders the objects and makes their implicit order explicit. That the ordered material comes from elsewhere is not a defect but the condition of the matter. What Hegel claims is not the generation of the material but the adequacy of the order.
This shifts what would need to be examined. Not: did Hegel generate the material himself? But rather: is the order he gives the order of the object — or one imposed upon it from outside? That is a question decidable case by case, and this volume has decided it at several points — sometimes one way, sometimes the other.
Cf. [[kleine-logik]] (optional), Preface.
The divergence argument strikes a real discrepancy — and it is worth examining rather than denying.
Exner is thus right that the versions diverge — and indeed in their architecture, not merely in details. But the divergence has a reason, one that can be examined.
And yet he does strike a point this volume itself has treated. We have shown that Hegel changes the arrangement repeatedly without saying so — the sequence of theoretical spirit, the inversion of the natural alterations, the late insertion of free spirit. Exner could not have known this; he compared only the disciples. Whoever has the lecture transcripts finds more divergences than he claimed.
The difference lies in the inference. Exner concludes: therefore no science. One can equally conclude: therefore a thinking that corrects itself. Which inference holds true depends on whether the changes have reasons — and where these can be given (in the case of memory, in the case of the alterations), this speaks against Exner.
The Replies (1843–1847)
Rosenkranz replies at greatest length. The second edition of his Psychologie (1843) bears an addition on the title page: “Together with a Refutation of the Alleged Refutation of Hegelian Psychology Given by Dr. Exner,” and the appendix works through the points of criticism in twenty-four sections.
Erdmann replies briefly — and this has method. Already in the preface to the second edition (1842) he had explained why he keeps polemic out of a textbook:
“A polemic against views the listener does not know, a defense against attacks that are foreign to him, I consider not merely superfluous but, since it interrupts the continuity of the investigation, positively harmful.”[2]
And at the same time he states how he deals with criticism: where it convinces him, he follows it; where not, he passes over it in silence.
This explains the brevity of the 1847 reply. There he contents himself with a remark at the end of the preface: he has corrected errors that struck him as convincing — but to conclude from this that Hegelian philosophy is false is like claiming that calculus is false because someone made a miscalculation.
This is the better argument, and it strikes precisely at Exner’s procedure: errors in the application of a method do not refute the method.
The Substantive Answer
The answer to this is found in Rosenkranz himself — in the sentence about the scaffolding: that a method can be misused does not show that it is not one. And divergences in execution demonstrate unscientific character only if a science must be unambiguous in its exposition — which holds true of none that develops something rather than merely enumerating it.
Exner’s Rejoinder (1844)
The second pamphlet is titled “The Replies of Messrs. K. Rosenkranz and J. E. Erdmann.” It opens with a complaint about the tone:
“Instead, however, of combating my views with that rigor which I myself desired and invited, people have considered themselves entitled to bring accusations against my person.”[3]
Rosenkranz had headed a section “The Moral Insinuation” and lamented in it “that in philosophical disputes the reproach rarely fails to appear that the opponent is putting forward a doctrine ruinous to morality” — which Exner reads as precisely such a reproach against himself.
And then he turns the tone itself into an argument: “Since, moreover, the spirit at work in the opponents’ refutations is the very same spirit that produced their psychologies, its characterization is not without immediate bearing on our main question: the value of the psychology of the Hegelian school.”
This is a rhetorical move, not a substantive argument — to infer the quality of the doctrine from the manner of the reply presupposes what is to be shown. But it does show how the debate went: it became personal, on both sides.
The Methodological Benefit
And methodically he is useful, like a heretic in biblical hermeneutics: because he sets the versions side by side in order to play them off against one another, he has compared them — and his comparisons can be turned against his own conclusion.
The Impact
Historically, he was in any case the more effective figure. Exner transformed Herbart’s philosophical position into educational policy. As an official in the Austrian Ministry of Education, Exner saw to it that Hegel was not taught at the universities of the monarchy — and this weighs more heavily than exclusion from the schools, because it also meant no successors grew up. Austria had, in the nineteenth century, not a single Hegelian chair.
The contrast with Germany makes clear what this means. There, Hegelians taught until shortly before the end of the century: Rosenkranz in Königsberg, Erdmann in Halle — both for decades in tenured chairs. Michelet, employed as a teacher at the Französisches Gymnasium (a secondary school in Berlin), lectured besides as a docent at the University of Berlin. And alongside these three stood a series of less prominent philosophers who worked in a Hegelian vein or were shaped by it.
The thinning-out came later and for a different reason: not through prohibition, but because no successors grew up. This is a difference worth holding onto — a tradition that runs its course leaves behind something different from one that was never permitted at all.
What took its place in Austria was the direction promoted by Exner: Herbart, and later Brentano and what came of him. That the analytic tradition put down stronger roots there than in the rest of the German-speaking world has one of its causes here.
II.4 The Interpreters
Dirk Stederoth, Hegels Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes. Ein komparatorischer Kommentar (2001). Written before the lecture transcripts appeared in the Collected Works — Stederoth consulted the manuscripts himself and built a comparison of the versions out of them.
The procedure is the exact counterpart to Drüe and Stekeler: Where they comment on the printed text, Stederoth sets the transcripts side by side and asks what changes between them. The appendix contains a comparative table.
What he contributes appears at two points in this volume: the “second genius” and the limit of the Freud parallel (Part One, Anthropology). Both are characteristic of him — he works out proximities and draws the boundary himself.
And his methodological conclusion belongs here too: the excursus was meant to “show, by way of example, how problematic it is to want to prematurely discover the ‘proleptic’ in Hegel’s design.” That is the same test that this work applies to the anticipations of the philosophy of nature.
Hermann Drüe in Schnädelbach’s commentary on the Systemgrundriß — the counterpart to Neuser’s work on the philosophy of nature.
Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer in Realphilosophie (2023). His procedure is the same as with nature: translating sentences that sound ontological into statements about forms of enactment. The question will be whether it carries better here than there — with spirit, what is at stake is something that is actually enacted.
Franz Serafin Exner, Die Psychologie der Hegelschen Schule, beurtheilt aus dem Standpunkte der Erfahrung, first issue, Leipzig 1842, p. 4. The replies by Rosenkranz and Erdmann are treated in the second issue (Leipzig 1844). ↩︎
Johann Eduard Erdmann, Grundriss der Psychologie, 2nd ed., Leipzig 1842, Preface, pp. VI f. ↩︎
Franz Serafin Exner, Die Psychologie der Hegelschen Schule. Zweites Heft: Die Erwiderungen der Herren K. Rosenkranz und J. E. Erdmann, Leipzig 1844, p. 3. Erdmann’s calculus argument follows the preface to the third edition of his Psychologie, Leipzig 1847. ↩︎