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Bruno Bauer
First published Thu Mar 7, 2002; substantive revision Thu Sep 15, 2005
Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), philosopher, historian, and theologian. His career falls into two main phases, divided by the revolutions of 1848. In the 1840's, the period known as the Vormärz or the prelude to the German revolutionary events of March 1848, Bauer was a leader of the Left-Hegelian movement, developing a republican interpretation of Hegel, which combined ethicaland aesthetic motifs. His theory of infinite self-consciousness, derived from Hegel's account of subjective spirit, stressed rational autonomy and historical progress. Investigating the textualsources of Christianity, Bauer described religion as a form of alienation, which, because of thedeficiencies of earthly life, projected irrational, transcendent powers over the self, whilesanctioning particularistic sectarian and material interests. He criticized the Restoration state, itssocial and juridical base, and its orthodox religious ideology. Analyzing the emergence of modern mass society, he rejected liberalism for its inconsequent opposition to the existing order,and for its equation of freedom with property, but he accused socialism of an inadequateappreciation of individual autonomy. After the defeats of 1848, Bauer repudiated Hegel. He predicted a general crisis of European civilization, caused by the exhaustion of philosophy andthe failure of liberal and revolutionary politics. New prospects of liberation would, he believed,issue from the crisis. His late writings examined the emergence of Russia as a world power,opening an era of global imperialism and war. These writings influenced Nietzsche's thinking oncultural renewal. Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky claimed Bauer's religious criticism for thesocialist movement, while the anti-traditionalist conservatism and anti-Semitism of his late work link him to the revolutionary right in the twentieth century.
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1. Career
In 1815, Bauer's family moved to Berlin from south-eastern Germany (present-day Thuringia).At the University of Berlin (1828 -1834), he studied under Hegel, Schleiermacher, and theHegelians Hotho and Marheineke. His 1829 essay on Kant's aesthetics won the Prussian royal prize in philosophy, on Hegel's recommendation. From 1834 to 1839, he lectured on theologyand biblical texts in Berlin. He was transferred to the theology faculty at Bonn after publishingan attack on his colleague and former teacher Hengstenberg. He taught in Bonn from 1839 tillspring 1842, when he was dismissed for the unorthodoxy of his writings on the New Testament.The dismissal followed a consultation by the ministry of education with the theology faculties of the six Prussian universities, but no consensus emerged from the academic inquest. The order for Bauer's dismissal came directly from the king of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who had decreedthe suspension from state employment of participants in a banquet to honour the South Germanliberal Karl Welcker, held in Berlin in 1841. On that occasion, Bauer had proposed a toast toHegel's conception of the state.
From 1842 to 1849, Bauer was active in political journalism and historical research on theEnlightenment and the French Revolution. He argued against the emancipation of Prussian Jewsin 1842-43, seeing this proposal as a political legitimation of particular religious interests. Hewas the object of polemical attacks by Marx and Engels in
The Holy Family
(1844) and
TheGerman Ideology
(written in 1845-46). With his brother Edgar, Bauer founded theCharlottenburg Democratic Society in 1848, and stood unsuccessfully for election to the Prussian National Assembly on a platform of popular sovereignty.Remaining in Prussia after the defeats of 1848-49, Bauer continued to produce work of biblicalcriticism and political analysis. He wrote in the mid 1850's for
Die Zeit
, a government-sponsorednewspaper, in which his anti-liberalism took a conservative turn. He contributed articles onEuropean affairs to other newspapers, such as
Die Post
, the
Kleines Journal
, and the
New York Daily Tribune
. From 1859-66 he collaborated with F.W.H. Wagener on his conservative
Staats-und Gesellschafts-Lexikon
, editing almost all 23 volumes, and writing numerous articles, severalwith anti-Semitic themes. In 1865 he acquired a small farm in Rixdorf, on the outskirts of Berlin.He died there in April 1882.
2. Bauer's Writings, 1829-50
Bauer was a prolific writer, publishing a dozen substantial books and over 60 articles between1838 and 1848 alone, but no critical edition of these works exists. They included analyses of Hegel, the Bible, modern theologies, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution and itsaftermath. The interpretation of Bauer's work is problematic for several reasons. Because of anonymous, pseudonymous, and collaborative publication, some attributions are disputed; anddivergences exist between Bauer's published texts and private correspondence. In the anonymous
Trumpet of the Last Judgement
(1841) and
Hegel's Doctrine of Religion and Art
(1842), Bauer spoke not in his own voice, but in the ironic guise of a conservative critic of Hegel, attributing toHegel his own revolutionary views.Three lines of interpretation of Bauer can be distinguished. These focus on his early work; hislater writings have attracted little critical attention. The first sees Bauer as a radical subjectivist,whose social and religious criticism was closer to Enlightenment rationalism than to Hegel (Sass,1978; Brudney, 1998). The second, largely influenced by Marx, insists on Bauer's abandonmentof the Hegelian left after 1843 (Rossi, 1974; Pepperle, 1978). The third emphasizes thecontinuity throughout the Vormärz of Bauer's thought and of his republicanism, based on theHegelian idea of the unity of thought and being (Moggach, 2003, 2006).Bauer's prize manuscript of 1829,
De pulchri principiis
, presented the unity of concept andobjectivity as the central idea of Hegel's idealism. It examined this unity as expressed in art,comparing Hegel's aesthetic theory to Kant's Third Critique. The manuscript supplemented thecriticisms of Kant from Hegel's Berlin Aesthetics lectures with the logical analysis of categories provided by the 1827
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
. Bauer argued that while theCritique of Judgement attempted to bridge thought and being, and thus opened the way to Hegel,it reproduced the antinomies characteristic of the first two critiques. Kant's synthesis failed, sincehe continued to define the concept as merely subjective, and the object as the unknowable thing-in-itself, transcending the cognitive power. Self-consciousness, or the subject of thetranscendental unity of apperception, was likewise impervious to cognition from the Kantianstandpoint. In Hegel's syllogisms of the idea, objectivity attained rational form, while the conceptacquired an explicit, material existence. Beauty, life, and idea were moments in the processwhich constituted the actuality of reason. As the immediate unity of thought and objectivity, artillustrated the inexhaustible fecundity of the philosophical Idea. The manuscript underlined the
opposition of faith and reason in its critique of the religious conceptions of the unity of thoughtand being. Faith was taken to be inimical to free inquiry, which is the element of reason.Throughout the 1830's, however, Bauer sought to reconcile thought and being through the idea of rational faith. In
Zeitschrift für spekulative Theologie
, which he edited between 1836 and 1838,and in
Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik
, he offered a speculative account of Christiandoctrines as exemplifications of logical categories. In the 1838
Religion of the Old Testament
,Bauer depicted religious experience as a product of self-consciousness. He proposed both atranscendental account, stressing the conditions of possibility of religious experiences, and a phenomenological sequence of their forms: a legalistic subordination to an authoritarian deity inthe early books of the Old Testament expressed a merely external relation between God and man,while the messianic consciousness of later books heralded a higher form, the immanence of theuniversal in the community; but this consciousness could only point up the inadequacy of thelaw, not yet propose the effective overcoming of estrangement. The texts of the 1830's locatedthe logical structure which, for Bauer, defined the religious consciousness: the immediateidentity between particularity, whether of a subject or a community, and the abstract universal, aunity achieved without self-transformation. By 1839, Bauer deduced the political implications of this view: the religious consciousness asserted this immediate identity as a monopolistic,sectarian claim, excluding other particulars from equivalent status. The essence of religion for Bauer was now a hubristic particularism, which also conferred a transcendent status on theuniversal, as a realm divorced from concrete social relationships. This position received itsfullest exposition in Bauer's
Christianity Revealed
(1843). He already sketched this argument in
Herr Dr. Hengstenberg
, of 1839, publicly breaking with orthodox and conservative versions of Christianity, and stressing the discontinuity between Christianity and Judaism. By 1840-41,Bauer would present the emancipated philosophical self-consciousness as opposed to all forms of religious representation. His political radicalism and republicanism were cemented by hisrecognition of the structural identity between the private interests fostered by the Restorationorder, and the monopolistic religious consciousness.Bauer's political and theoretical radicalization is evidenced in his biblical studies. The series iscomprised of
Critique of the Gospel of John
(1840), and the three-volume
Critique of theSynoptic Gospels
(1840- 42). Together with his 1838 study of the Old Testament, these volumescriticized the stages of revealed religion, and forms of self-alienated spirit in history. Bauer'scritique of John's gospel demonstrated the opposition between the free self-consciousness andthe religious spirit. His stated purpose was to restore the Christian principle to its source increative self-consciousness; he did not yet openly oppose the principle itself, but sought todifferentiate it, as a rational idea, from ecclesiastical dogmatism. The positivity of Christianityderived from the abstract understanding, rather than from speculative reason, which led religiousexperience back to its subjective roots. The rational core of Christianity was the identity of Godand man, but theology had built an untenable doctrinal system on this foundation. Speculationnow undermined dogma; it was not confirmed by it, as Bauer's mid-1830's articles hadmaintained. In his correspondence, though not in this text itself, Bauer indicated that thisrestoration of the Christian principle was also its overthrow, as the unity of universal and particular could now be grasped in more tangible and earthly forms. Christianity was a necessary but now transcended stage in the development of the human spirit, to be supplanted by newexpressions of autonomous self-consciousness.In his critique of the Synoptics, Bauer's object was more openly to negate dogmatic Christianity,mobilized in defence of the absolutist order. The incidents described in the gospels were productsof the religious consciousness, rather than factual reports. Bauer's critique of John convinced him
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Bruno Bauer
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