Commemorating Dieter Henrich: Subjectivity and Metaphysics

Abstract

This article is a tribute to Dieter Henrich, the outstanding German philosopher, who died in December 2022. It begins by reviewing his life, academic career and general approach to philosophy. It then tracks the development of his theory of subjectivity, beginning with his classic article of the 1960s on ‘Fichte’s Original Insight’. Subsequent sections of the article consider critiques of Henrich’s position by prominent contemporaries and his response to them, his defence of the possibility of a metaphysics grounded in modern subjectivity, and his philosophy of religion.

Ich weiß nicht was ich bin, ich bin nicht was ich weiß;

Ein Ding und nit ein Ding, ein Stüpchen und ein Kreis.

—Angelus Silesius

Dieter Henrich, who died on 17 December 2022, at the age of 95, was one the most influential German philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. He has left behind a large body of work which testifies to the range of his activities amd interests. It includes texts whose originality and penetration make clear why he is often mentioned as a member of a quartet of distinguished post-war thinkers, along with Jürgen Habermas, Michael Theunissen and Ernst Tugendhat.

From early in his career, during the 1950s, Henrich focused much of his intellectual energy on the explosion of philosophical investigation and system-building (he referred to it as a ‘supernova’) which occurred in the wake of Kant’s transcendental turn. He had a deep, lifelong interest in the thought of Kant, Fichte and Hegel and also of the poet Hölderlin, whose philosophical contribution to the emergence of German Idealism he was one of the first to highlight, and which he explored with characteristic intensity (Henrich 1992b; 1997). However, in his approach to classical German philosophy Henrich developed a method of interpretation, which differed markedly from the somewhat incantatory, Heidegger-inflected style of commentary which was common in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Its originality stemmed in large part from the fact that Henrich regarded philosophy emphatically as ‘theory’, as an attempt to identify and propose solutions to deep problems intrinsic to our spontaneous ways of understanding ourselves and the world we inhabit. In a series of path-breaking studies, he displayed a masterly ability to retrieve and elucidate lines of argument in classic texts, to identify the impasses to which they sometimes led, and to explain how such failures could stimulate a thinker’s search for new solutions.

Despite his stress on the theoretical status of philosophy, Henrich did not regard the problems with which it deals as purely intellectual in origin. It was one of his basic convictions that philosophical questions spring from the perplexities which confront every human being in living a self-conscious life. His 1982 book Fluchtlinien begins with the declaration: ‘Jeder Mensch philosophiert’ (‘Every human being philosophizes’) (Henrich 1982b: 7), and similar assertions can be found throughout his mature work. We philosophize because self-conscious life is inherently pulled in conflicting directions by tendencies in our thinking and principles of action which seem almost impossible to reconcile. In Henrich’s view, the thought of Kant and of the great post-Kantian Idealists opens a new epoch in the history of Western philosophy in the sense that, despite its often formidable level of abstraction, it is rooted in the deepest, most elusive impulses of our existence as self-conscious subjects, which it seeks to unify. As he once put it: ‘Classical German philosophy wished to grasp as a single overall complex the inner mobility of the life that is grounded in reason, including its drives, emotions, and ways of striving and acting’ (Henrich 1990: 81).

Henrich also had a gift for more historically oriented research, which he described as ‘scientific’ (wissenschaftlich) rather than strictly philosophical. There was something of the detective about him. As he recounts in his interview-based autobiography, Ins Denken ziehen, he was outstanding in history at school, and the first researcher under whose influence he came, at the University of Marburg, was the distinguished prehistorian Gero Merhart von Bernegg (Henrich 2021: 66–68, 224). The young Henrich earned the admiration of his academic teachers for his ability to piece together an image of the remote past from fragmentary traces. Though he soon decided that his true vocation was philosophy, the lasting influence of this early training became evident in the new type of research project in the history of philosophy which he launched in the mid-1980s, and which he referred to as Konstellationsforschung (research into constellations). His initial focus was the intellectual situation at the University of Jena between 1789 and 1795, and his aim was to bring to light the ‘force field’ (Kraftfeld) or ‘space of thinking’ (Denkraum) constituted by the interaction of the ideas and personalities of a network of thinkers, both minor—and almost entirely forgotten—and major. Henrich argued that the ingrained practice of focusing on the thought of prominent individual philosophers, a tradition originating in the nineteenth century, hampered an adequate understanding of the problems with which they were confronted, and of the motivation for their strategies. As one might anticipate, Henrich described the unfolding nexus of influence, innovation and debate revealed by this kind of historical enquiry as a ‘theoretical process’ (Henrich 1991: 12).

At the other end of the spectrum of Henrich’s output stand books in which he seeks to present his own systematic thinking, with almost no reference to the views of other philosophers, and without any recourse to the standard apparatus of footnotes. The first of these works was Fluchtlinien, a set of five essays published in 1982, a year after he took up his final academic post at the University of Munich (he had previously held chairs at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and then back in Heidelberg, where he had earned his postgraduate degrees). The last and most ambitious, Denken und Selbstsein, appeared 2007, more than a decade after his retirement. Besides his often technical and demanding philosophical writing, Henrich also intervened in the domains of culture and politics. He published two collections of essays and journalism on the process of German reunification and its consequences, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (see Henrich 1990; 1993). In contrast to many left-wing intellectuals in West Germany, whose fear of a resurgence of nationalism made them quite complacent about the political bipartition of the country during the Cold War, Henrich had long regarded the existence of two antagonistic German national states as a kind of spiritual wound. He agreed with Jürgen Habermas, however, with whom he often clashed philosophically, that reunification should have occurred only on the basis of a constitutional convention, and not through a peremptory Anschluss of the GDR. Finally, Henrich’s concern with the central role of art and literature in exploring the possibilities and conflicts of modern existence resulted in incisive interpretations of literary works, most prominently of Hölderlin and of Beckett, the contemporary writer he most admired (Henrich 2003; 2016).

In the realm of academic politics and the forging of connections between diverse intellectual environments, Henrich was active on two main fronts. He learned some Russian immediately after the Second World War, and during the era of the Cold War was active in forging connections with Soviet and East German philosophers through conferences and invitations. But far more important for his own intellectual development was the relation to Anglo-American philosophy. In his autobiography, he recalls an early realization: ‘It was clear to me: if you are a philosopher, then you must learn to master the procedures of analytical philosophy’ (Henrich 2021: 159). This sense that analytical philosophy constituted a crucial, indispensable strand of the discipline’s evolution in the twentieth century was reinforced by much personal contact. From 1968 to 1986 Henrich regularly visited the United States as a guest professor, first at Columbia University, then for a longer period at Harvard. At Harvard he came into close contact with some of the most prominent analytical philosophers of the day, including Willard Van Orman Quine, John Rawls, Hilary Putnam and Robert Nozick. Encouraged by Rawls and Stanley Cavell, in 1973 Henrich delivered a course of lectures at Harvard, subsequently published as Between Kant and Hegel. In the preface to the published version of the lectures, Henrich tells his readers that they were intended to introduce the ‘motivations and systematic structure’ of the thought of Kant and his successors ‘in a way that analytically trained colleagues and students could take seriously’ (Henrich 2008: vii). Nonetheless one cannot help reflecting how exotic his style of exegesis and his speculative bent must have sounded to his audience, how remote from the then-dominant norms of analytical philosophy. The book includes, for example, a sympathetic discussion of Fichte’s late philosophical theology.

At Harvard, Henrich developed an especially warm relationship with Hilary Putnam. But throughout his life he also enjoyed friendships with other prominent analytical philosophers, including Roderick Chisholm, Donald Davidson and Peter Strawson. He was gratified to observe the emergence of a current within analytical philosophy, represented in different ways by thinkers such as Chisholm, Hector-Neri Castañeda and John Perry, which shared many of his convictions concerning the unique character of the problems posed by self-consciousness, and their resistance to naturalistic elimination.¹ Yet, in Henrich’s own accounts of his interaction with North American colleagues, one is struck by a painful sense of discrepancy. His immersion in the cultural atmosphere of crucial turning points in the history of thought, his philosophical interest in Marx and Weber, in literature and politics, in theology and religion, both Western and Eastern, could hardly be further from the constrained professionalism of the analytical guild. In one revealing anecdote from his autobiography, he recounts how he once found himself involved in a discussion about the concept of God, and relatedly about Spinoza, over lunch with two colleagues in the Harvard Faculty Club. At the end of the meal his colleagues pleaded with him not to let the conversation go any further, for fear of damage to their academic reputations. As he remarked ruefully: ‘As far as I can see, the pace setters in the field of analytical work […] have not figured out how to find their own mode of access to the deeper horizons of the “continental” way of thinking’ (Henrich 2021: 173). Attracted though Henrich was by anglophone philosophers’ concern for conceptual precision, and by their quasi-scientific professional ethos, his own conception of the philosopher’s task, and of what he termed ‘interpretation through the analysis of arguments’ (argument-analytische Interpretation), differed vastly from the outlook and procedures of his analytically-schooled peers. In 1984 he asserted frankly in an essay for the cultural journal Merkur that the widespread German importation of the analytical style, forged in such a different sociocultural context, could result, for the most part, only in work marked by provinciality. Furthermore, it endangered the prospects for a renewed creative uptake of Germany’s own world-changing philosophical heritage (Henrich 1984).

I. Henrich on Fichte’s Original Insight

Although Henrich sometimes expounded his views in works devoid of explicit borrowings from—or any substantial reference to—other philosophers, the development of his own thinking is inseparable from his interpretations of the major thinkers of German Idealism. There is no better illustration of this than his celebrated essay, ‘Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht’ (‘Fichte’s Original Insight’), first published in 1966 (Henrich 1982a). The pivotal role this text played in Henrich’s own development as a thinker, and the extent of its influence, is underlined by the fact that his penultimate book, which appeared just a few years before his death, consisted of a republication of the original text, followed by an extensive series of reflections—on the structure and content of the essay, on its intellectual context, and on the path of Fichte’s later thinking after his move from Jena to Berlin 1799. In the foreword to this expanded republication, issued as Dies Ich, das viel besagt (Henrich 2019), Henrich recalls that he wished, with the original essay ‘Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht’, to reassert the importance of a theme whose significance was downplayed at the time by all the dominant philosophical schools. In the text itself, Henrich begins by declaring how embattled his position is. He then goes on to sketch a brief history of how what was once the central post-Kantian question, the nature of self-conscious subjectivity, fell into disrepute. Heidegger is not named, but Henrich implicitly challenges his view that the modern world’s promotion of subjectivity has culminated in what Nietzsche diagnosed as the nihilism of the will to power. Far from being, as in this account, the harbinger of a triumphalist subjectivity turned hollow, Fichte uncovered fundamental problems with the way in which self-consciousness has been understood in the Western philosophical tradition, ever since Descartes. The predominance of movements in the twentieth century that relativized, or even entirely suppressed, the pivotal status of subjectivity, Henrich insists, has in no way disposed of these problems.

Fichte’s original insight, Henrich persuasively argues, concerns the incoherence of the ‘reflection theory’ of self-consciousness. According to this almost taken-for-granted conception, the ‘I’ or self-conscious subject, a being aware of its own status as a thinking and experiencing being, arises when whatever thinks and experiences turns attention back on itself, reflects on itself. Henrich highlights two basic problems with this theory. The first is that, if what is reflected on is the very subject of experience taken as object, if what is required is a numerical identity of knower and known, then the subject must already exist prior to the act of reflection, which cannot therefore establish the structure of self-conscious existence as such. As Henrich puts it, ‘If the I-subject is not I, then the known I, the I-object, cannot be identical with it’ (Henrich 2019: 11). The second problem is that, even to identify a certain object as itself, the subject must already be familiar with itself. Remember that the aim is to explain the origin of the awareness of oneself. Hence one cannot assume that the reflecting subject already knows which of the possible targets of attention its own self might be. But if it does not have such prior knowledge, it is impossible to understand how self-consciousness can get underway in the first place. The point can be made with a simple example: how do I know, when I glance at the security monitor in a shop, that the person on the screen is me? I know because I recognize the hairstyle as mine, or I recognize the clothes as mine, or I recognize the facial features or a gesture I am currently making as mine. But in order to do that, I must already have an awareness of the ‘I’ who I am, and to whom such things pertain. Such a mirroring or self-presenting relation cannot bring self-consciousness into being.

Henrich’s narrative of the successive stages of Fichte’s effort to develop a coherent theory of the self revolves around three formulae, which in his late reflections on his own essay he characterized as Weberian ‘ideal types’ (Henrich 2019: 165). The first of these, which Fichte employs predominantly in the initial version of the Wissenschaftslehre, based on his Jena lectures of 1794/95, is: ‘The I posits itself absolutely’ (Das Ich setzt sich schlechthin). The point of this formula, Henrich suggests, is to underscore the immediacy of the self-relation of the I. As we have seen, self-consciousness cannot be understood as the result of the establishment of a relation. Hence, the ‘I’ as a self-relation must be regarded as coming into being all at once through a single spontaneous act—and this Fichte described as ‘self-positing’. However, the formula did not satisfy Fichte for long. For, as Henrich points out, the notion of a self-constituting activity as such does not imply an inbuilt knowledge of that activity, which is what is required for self-awareness. One of the clearest indications of this problem is that, in Fichte’s early account, the ‘absolute I’ appears to have lost all connection with empirical self-consciousness, which is only brought into being through the impact of a second, independent and contrary principle, which he terms the ‘not-I’.

According to Henrich, Fichte tries to resolve this difficulty with the second formula, on which he focuses in the later 1790s: ‘The I posits itself as positing itself’ (Das Ich setzt sich als sich setzend). Henrich argues that the occurrence of the word ‘as’ in this formula brings out that what is at issue is not simply an immediate process of self-constitution, but also a knowledge of that process as the very activity which the self is: ‘Ichbewußtsein ist Tatbewußtsein’ (Henrich 2019:18). But this means that we now have two components: an activity of the I and the knowledge of that activity, which is nonetheless not something external to the activity itself. The second formula brings out this complexity—but it does not explain how the two elements are related. Rather, in trying to accommodate both elements it seems to revive the problems of the reflection theory.

These difficulties led Fichte to a third, striking formula: the I is an activity (or, in some versions, a force [eine Kraft]) in which an eye is implanted (eine Tätigkeit, der ein Auge eingesetzt ist) (e.g., Fichte 1845: 19). Fichte has now distinguished between the activity of the I and its knowledge of itself as this activity; the two aspects are inseparably related, though not ultimately identical, something which has emerged as a requirement for avoiding circularity. The seeing is now rather immanent to the activity, so that the activity is both internally illuminated and guided, as it were. However, this suggests that Fichte is moving towards the notion of a ground of the ‘I’ or the self which cannot itself be explained from the standpoint of self-consciousness. As Henrich puts it: ‘The self-relation of the I is the being-for-itself of a knowledge which is disclosed to itself as such, but is at the same time a fact starting from which everything can be explained, except for its own existence’ (Henrich 2019: 26). In the later stages of his thinking, after his move from Jena to Berlin, Fichte repeatedly struggled to make sense of this situation philosophically, a struggle which is recorded in the numerous later versions of the Wissenschaftslehre. These texts are formidably difficult, and the attempted exegeses of them scarcely less so.² What emerges unmistakably, however, is that Fichte’s thinking has taken an ontological turn. Transcendental subjectivity is no longer the key to the systematic structure, but rather ‘absolute knowledge’. But even this knowledge is only an ‘image’ or ‘manifestation’ of the absolute itself, which Fichte frequently characterizes simply as ‘being’ (Sein) or––with a view to its pure self-sustaining––as ‘life’ (Leben). It is important for understanding Henrich’s own philosophical development to note that he regards this turn as soundly motivated, and not as a lapse from the standpoint of transcendental philosophy, even though it confronted Fichte with certain problems that he was ultimately unable to resolve.

II. The Evolution of Henrich’s Theory of the Self

Henrich’s principal aim in publishing ‘Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht’ was to put the question of self-consciousness back on the philosophical agenda in a hostile environment, while also showing the inadequacy of reflection theories of the self. But, of course, the essay also brings out the extreme difficulty of developing a viable alternative. The third of the three Fichtean formulae around which Henrich organizes his text, and which could be said to announce the ontological turn, does not provide even the outline of a theoretical solution. It relies on a metaphor. But at the beginning of the 1970s Henrich himself took up the challenge. Starting from Fichte’s realization that, to construct a viable explanation of the self, an activity and the awareness of that activity must be distinguished, he tried to work out a solution, which he presented in second well-known essay: ‘Selbstbewußtsein: Kritische Einleitung in eine Theorie’ (Henrich 1970). In the first part of this text Henrich reviews the difficulties encountered by philosophers in developing a theory of consciousness as such. He begins by reviewing non-egological approaches, which try to explain consciousness either as a feature of the individual elements of experience, or as arising out of their relations, but finds that neither of these is successful. The first fails because, amongst other things, it is unable to explain the unity of a manifold in consciousness; the second because the relation between elements, even between ‘mental’ elements, can be described without implying consciousness of them, so that this relation cannot be what gives rise to consciousness (Henrich 1970: 261–63). Henrich then goes on to consider egological theories (theories which view consciousness as inseparable from self-consciousness), rehearsing the difficulties already explained at length in his classic essay on Fichte.

One novel feature of the essay ‘Selbstbewußtsein’ is Henrich’s insistence that the historical pervasiveness of the reflection theory of self-consciousness cannot be put down simply to philosophical ineptitude. Rather, as he expresses it, the theory seems to have ‘roots in the primary self-interpretation of self-consciousness’ (Henrich 1970: 269). Consequently a basic requirement of a successful theory of self-consciousness is that it should be able to explain this prima facie plausibility. In the second half of the essay Henrich therefore proposes the following view. Self-consciousness cannot be explained in terms of a single principle: a subject constituted by its own cognitive relation to itself. Rather, there are two factors involved: on the one hand, consciousness as such, which he describes as a ‘dimension’ or ‘medium’; and the self, as an active principle of organization of what appears in this medium, which is capable, for example, of selecting for relevance or directing attention. Henrich does not deny, of course, that consciousness always involves a knowledge of its own existence. But he denies that this fact produces the kind of circle generated by reflection theories of the self. For acquaintance with consciousness is not itself the whole of consciousness. And such acquaintance does not provide any perspicuous information concerning how or in what form it is related to consciousness. This means, Henrich argues, that ‘consciousness is not master of itself’ (Henrich 1970: 278). Pursing this line of argument, he now proposes that self-activity ‘belongs to the dimension of consciousness’ (Henrich 1970: 279). Rather than saying that the self consists in consciousness of itself (with all the problems of circularity which this brings), we should rather say that there is a ‘selfless consciousness of the self’ (Henrich 1970: 280). Henrich is fully aware that what he has outlined falls short of a full theoretical explanation. It is rather a characterization of consciousness ‘ex negativo’, as he puts it (Henrich 1970: 284), one which is shaped by the aim of avoiding the problems of reflection theories. We cannot advance any further, it seems, than the assertion that consciousness includes a knowing (Kenntnis) of its own existence.

Very soon, however, Henrich realized that there were problems with this analysis of self-consciousness in terms of factors (Faktorenanalyse). Because, in this account, consciousness is supplied to the self, as it were, by the anonymous field of consciousness, the self-relatedness of the self—which, even though no longer foundational, must remain intact—is deficient. For either it connects only to the functional unity of the self, in which case it leaves a vital element out of consideration; or it does relate to the field of consciousness as such—in which case it is no longer a cognitive self-relation. Because of these problems, in a lecture delivered shortly after ‘Selbstbewußtsein’, but not published until 2007, Henrich introduced a third factor. His theory was now based on three pillars: ‘consciousness’, ‘being a self’, and what he termed a ‘formal self-relation in knowing’ or the ‘idea of the self-relation’ (Henrich 2007). The purpose of this third element was, of course, to structure correctly the core activity of the self. However, even this innovation eventually turned out to be a stop-gap measure. The difficulty comes to light once we perceive that the ‘idea of the self-relation’ as such does not explain the infallibility with which we identify ourselves as the subject of our experiences. We can, of course, misidentify the mood we are in, or a feeling we are experiencing. But, as Henrich states in Fluchtlinien:

We have knowledge of the individuals we are […] in a manner which, in a strict sense, cannot go wrong. For example, if I simply have the thought that I am happy, then I know infallibly that there is someone concerning whom I have this thought, and that I am that someone. In such states of mind I cannot have any doubt that I exist, or that I stand in a relation to myself. (Henrich 1992b: 106)

Related to the inadequacy of the mere ‘idea of a self-relation’ in accounting for this unique knowledge is a difficulty which came increasingly to the fore in Henrich’s thinking: the three-factor analysis which he proposed in ‘Bewußtsein und Selbstbewußtsein’ does not explain how we become aware of ourselves as particular individuated selves. In his late reflections on ‘Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht’ Henrich emphasized that this also remained a stubborn problem for Fichte (Henrich 2019: 178–97).

When ‘Selbstsein und Bewusstsein’ was finally published online in 2007, Henrich added an introduction. Here he recounts that, during the 1970s, he came to the decisive realization that all attempts to explain the ‘self-attribution of a self-relation’ will result in circularity. We have to concede that here we simply run up against a limit of what philosophy can achieve. Self-consciousness is a fundamental, irreducible given. In this regard it is comparable, Henrich suggests, to ‘propositional form’ and the ‘meaning of truth’ (Henrich 2007). However, we can assert that our self-consciousness is not ontologically self-sufficient, that it must have a ground (as Henrich had already begun to imply with his shift to the notion of an anonymous field of consciousness), and that this ground cannot be anything belonging to the worldly domain: the self as a structure is metaphysically unique. Furthermore, the nature and status of this ground cannot be fathomed philosophically—it is ‘unausdenkbar’ (Henrich 1982b: 108). Although it is in some way manifested or present in the structure of the self, we cannot fully specify theoretically what it might be. We can only, as Henrich sometimes says, borrowing from Kant, ‘comprehend its incomprehensibility’. This conviction became a central feature of his thinking from the 1980s onwards.³

III. Defending the centrality of self-consciousness

Henrich’s realization that a complete explanation of the self lies beyond the capacity of philosophy does not automatically invalidate his claim that major trends in twentieth-century thought were based on the misguided assumption that the phenomenon of the self could be displaced from its formerly dominant position, and perhaps accounted for in terms of other factors. In Denken und Selbstsein, Henrich singles out two prominent ways in which the central role of subjectivity has been challenged. The first is adopted by those theories—often influenced directly or indirectly by Hegel’s dialectics of recognition—which propose the genetic priority of intersubjective or collective structures over subjectivity; the second by those currents of thinking which suggest that the emergence of self-consciousness can be explained in terms of the role and functioning of language. It is not unusual, of course, for elements of these two approaches to be intertwined. A particularly clear example of this occurs in the work of the American pragmatist George Herbert Mead. In Mind, Self and Society Mead states unambiguously that ‘The self is not something that exists first and then enters into relationship with others, but it is, so to speak, an eddy in the social current and so still part of the current’ (Mead 1962: 182). Similarly, he argues that ‘We must regard mind […] as arising and developing within the social process, within the empirical matrix of social interactions’ (Mead 1962: 133). The most important feature of the social process in this regard is linguistic communication, which Mead views as emerging out of more primitive, gestural forms of interaction. Given these assumptions, Mead feels entitled to the bold, not to say reckless, claim: ‘Out of language emerges the field of mind’ (Mead 1962: 133).

Mead’s approach exerted a decisive influence on the thinking of Henrich’s leading contemporary Jürgen Habermas, who throughout his career has taken the view that ‘original self-consciousness is not a phenomenon inherent in the subject but one that is communicatively generated’ (Habermas 1992a: 177). The most influential advocate in Germany of the shift from a subject-centred to an intersubjective paradigm, which he takes to be inherent in the evolutionary logic of philosophy as a discipline, Habermas has criticized Henrich’s views on several occasions (e.g., Habermas 1985; 1986: 292–395; 1992b). From Henrich’s perspective, however, the expansion of the reflective relation assumed to be the core of self-consciousness into an intersubjective model of behaviour and response–whether linguistic or gestural–does not alter the basic problem diagnosed in ‘Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht’. For, in order to identify the reaction of the other as directed towards me, I must already have some rudimentary conception of myself. This philosophical argument is bolstered, as Henrich reminds us, by empirical evidence, well established through observation, that small children develop intelligent behaviour and an ability to communicate before they are able to speak (Henrich 2007: 157). His overall view is that ‘the capacity for language only unfolds in unison with the spontaneous emergence of self-relatedness. For its part, we need to throw light on this emergence. And this would require us to speak of an implicit self-relation that already arises or functions in the elementary process of language acquisition’ (Henrich 1987c: 35).

An even more frontal attack than that of Habermas was launched by another prominent contemporary, Ernst Tugendhat. In Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung Tugendhat argued that the aporia with which Henrich eventually found himself confronted simply shows that the ‘unmistakable end point of the traditional theory of self-consciousness’ had been reached (Tugendhat 1979: 54). In proposing a ‘non-egological’ theory of self-consciousness, Henrich puts himself in the absurd position of abandoning the phenomenon, rather than admitting the error of conceptualizing self-consciousness as a peculiar state in which subject and object are one. The way out of the labyrinth, Tugendhat suggests, is to give up relying on supposed ‘inner self-evidence’ (innere Evidenz) and to develop an account of ‘epistemic self-consciousness’ using the tools of linguistic analysis (Tugendhat 1979: 54). In brief, Tugendhat proceeds by separating and distributing cognition and identification between the first- and third-person standpoints. In the self-attributions of psychological states which can be taken as paradigm cases of self-consciousness, he claims, the epistemic component is a proposition, whereas what is identified as the subject of this proposition is oneself as a person: a psycho-physical entity viewed from a third-person perspective, which the speaker adopts on herself. The deictic term ‘I’ does not identify anything, but rather refers to this entity (Tugendhat 1979: 83).

Henrich’s response to this critique, which appeared in print only decade later, has several strands. But his core point is that an ‘I-speaker’ who expresses a psychological state must do more than simply possess the knowledge that a ‘she-speaker’ could attribute this psychological state to her in the third person. She must also know that she has such knowledge. This is because, according Tugendhat’s own theory, such knowledge must be part of what the ‘she-speaker’ attributes to her, in considering her as a person expressing how she is thinking or feeling, and not simply as a noise-producing object. Hence, in envisaging the response of the ‘she-speaker’, the ‘I-speaker’ must be aware of this very envisaging as attributed to her by the other’s response. The result is a regress typical of attempts to devise a theory of the self, since the envisaged envisaging must in turn be envisaged, and so on. The upshot is that, as in the case of Habermas, Tugendhat’s attempt to avoid the problems of direct self-reference, by introducing the mediation of the other, fails. The mediation makes the process more circuitous, but is unable to prevent the problem of immediate self-identification re-emerging sooner or later (Henrich 1989).⁴

It should be stressed that Henrich was far from denying the vital importance of language, culture, and relations to others for the concrete actualization of conscious existence. In Denken und Selbstsein he concedes that

Language, and the insight that human world-disclosure gains its particular profile from a person’s mother tongue, has always provided the weightiest argument against orienting philosophy towards the solitary subject. (Henrich 2007: 155)

Furthermore, although starting from subjectivity makes sense only ‘when one acknowledges the central significance of leading a conscious life’, this does not mean that subjectivity is ‘the source of insight into everything’ (Henrich 2007: 155). Rather, the failure of attempts to prove that subjectivity can be derived from interaction can lead to an understanding that there is a reciprocal relation between the two: ‘subjectivity can no more be comprehended on the basis of interaction than it can become actual [wirklich] without interaction’ (Henrich 2007: 161). Indeed, by insisting on this simultaneous independence and interweaving of the two dimensions, and hence on the basic facticity of our interactions with others, Henrich seeks to turn the tables on the reigning consensus:

Being-with [Mitsein] […] is not a logical triviality for human beings in their status as subjects, and thus not self-evident in the sense which is assumed almost unisono by twentieth-century theory. […] Rather, one cannot avoid suggesting that precisely the deeper forms of being-with remain closed off to those for whom relations with others have acquired overall the character of a trivial taken-for-grantedness. (Henrich 2007: 188–89)

IV. Henrich and Heidegger

Since Henrich was convinced of the weakness of the counter-arguments of social pragmatists and philosophers of language, it is perhaps not surprising that he considered the most serious challenge to the centrality of subjectivity to be found not in this quarter, but rather in the thought of Martin Heidegger. For rather than portraying this centrality as the result of erroneous thinking, Heidegger defines the modern age in terms of the dominance of the subject, which unfolds with an ineluctable inner logic. It is understandable, then, that Henrich regarded him as having developed the ‘interpretation of the distinctiveness of modernity’ which ‘penetrates deepest’ (Henrich 1982c: 95). Heidegger ‘brings the Cartesian element of modern consciousness pre-eminently into view’, although his narrative of decline presents it as the expression of a tendency to understand every entity primarily as an object of methodical knowledge—as the ‘possible theme of a determination which achieves certainty, effected by the knowing subject’ (Henrich 1982c: 95). Henrich, of course, does not try to counter this view of the modern world head-on. His argument, rather, is that the drive to objectify and dominate nature is only one element in the makeup of modern consciousness. For Heidegger, as Henrich puts it,

A subject installed as the principle of philosophy could only be understood as an absolute subject—in other words, as the self-empowered ground of all that it posits. From this assumption he—along with many others—derived the criticism that such a subject cannot avoid the disguise and distortion of its own finitude and of the historical origin of its mode of understanding. (Henrich 2007: 18)

Of course, the conception of subjectivity Henrich arrived at, after successive failed attempts to explain the structure of self-consciousness, is far removed from any such sovereignty. From his standpoint, the Heideggerian critique of the subject, which has exerted such a widespread influence, for example via French post-structuralism, depends on a misleading equation of self-certainty and self-presence. For Henrich, as we have seen, it makes no sense to doubt that we are the subjects of the experiences we take ourselves to be having. But his form of immunity to doubt does not entail that we are present to ourselves. As he puts it:

If we separate our self-certainty in our own thinking from self-presence and self-transparency, then self-certainty and uncertainty concerning what we actually are need not be mutually exclusive. Rather what we experience primordially in our lives is to be found in their inner connection. (Henrich 2007: 21–22)

Throughout Denken und Selbstsein Henrich repeatedly characterizes this experience in terms of ‘being withdrawn from oneself’, or of the ‘withdrawal of the ground’ which is nonetheless ‘the internal possibility of self-activity’ (Henrich 2007: 27; 144; 256). In Henrich’s view, the drive to dominate nature, so emphasized by Heidegger and others, is merely one of the ways in which the modern subject seeks for self-assurance in the face of a deep unknowability concerning itself. In this context he endorses Max Weber’s diagnosis of the restless, world-transforming features of modernity as an expression of human beings’ striving to discover themselves outwardly in what they do (Henrich 1987a: 134). In a related argument, Henrich also sought to show in detail that the drive for self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung) is far from being the very principle of a self-empowered modern subjectivity, as suggested by both its champions and its critics. It arises, rather, from our prior awareness of the self to be preserved, which finds itself in a situation of vulnerability and dependency—an argument which Henrich traces as far back as the Stoic notion of oikeiosis (Henrich 1982d).⁵

V. The defence of metaphysics

It should be clear by now that, despite his many criticisms, Henrich’s thinking stands under the influence of—and in a strained relation of proximity to—that of Heidegger, whom he regarded as one of the two greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, along with Wittgenstein. Both thinkers formulated compelling versions of the thought that ‘the withdrawn, the non-articulated, even the obscure and the non-articulable, are not simply a limit but an inner condition of clarity’ (Henrich 1987a: 138). This thought, for Henrich, was decisive if human beings are to establish a different, less ruthlessly exploitative relation to the natural world. At the same time, Henrich rejected what he saw as both Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s ‘subtle versions of a philosophy of immediacy’, which he characterizes as follows:

Whoever arrives at the first grounds of all understanding achieves an understanding concerning these grounds and concerning herself and can here come to rest. It is only those who assume, in departing from these grounds, that they can rise above them, who get lost in confusion. And if this aberration should prove to be inevitable, as Wittgenstein saw it was, and as Heidegger wished to show it was, then it is all the more important to gain insight into it, to turn around and confront it, and thereby move towards clarity. (Henrich 1982b: 91)

For Henrich, as we have seen, metaphysical questioning is intrinsic to living a conscious life: our ‘original existence’ (ursprüngliches Dasein) is also ‘originally oppressed and confused’ by the ‘opposing tendencies’ built into our self-understanding. As he puts it:

Philosophy begins where all human beings begin in their own thinking. Everyone is drawn into thinking, without being forced into it from the outside. The basic human situation forces one to find a formula in terms of which one can understand oneself (for example: am I a bundle of drives, a free person, only fully myself insofar as I love, the product of a purely material processes? And how come I am this rather than that?). (Henrich 1987a: 128)

Metaphysics, in Henrich’s view, attempts to do justice to, and reconcile, the conflicting elements of our self-understanding. It does so by seeking a vision of the world as a unity able to accommodate the two fundamentally opposed directions in which we are pulled: towards enquiry into the enigmatic ground of our existence as self-conscious beings, on the one hand, and towards an ever more precise determination of the material world we inhabit, on the other. Corresponding to these opposed impulses, we find that we have two distinct statuses. As persons we are psychophysical individuals, each of us one amongst many similar beings located in the natural world investigated by science; as subjects we each are a unique self-consciousness whose existence cannot be explained in terms of empirical features of the world, and which finds everything thinkable and experienceable related to the ‘one’ which it is. This means that, as Henrich puts it: ‘Our life is in itself transcendentally constituted’ (Henrich 1982b: 110). In light of this apothegm, it is not surprising to find him persistently arguing that Kant was the first thinker to essay a new style of metaphysics, which reaches out beyond the empirically given, in order to formulate conceptions capable of integrating the conflicting tendencies of consciousness—conceptions which Kant terms ‘Ideas’, and which Henrich sometimes refers to as Abschlussgedanken (thoughts of closure or completion). In Denken und Selbstsein Henrich describes four basic features of this type of metaphysics. It is extrapolating, in the sense that the concepts at which it arrives cannot be read off from or assimilated to anything in the domain of the actual. It is synthetic, since it seeks to reconcile the conflicting understandings which it extrapolates. It is postulating, since the thoughts at which it arrives cannot be shown as true in any purely theoretical sense. And finally, it is revisionary: it does not seek knowledge of transcendent structures, but rather offers new conceptual forms for interpreting the world we inhabit: ‘The authentic world of the modern metaphysicians was neither a world behind the world (Hinterwelt), nor a world of objectivities, over against which knowledge itself is left standing uninterpreted’ (Henrich 1987a: 27).

In referring to ‘the modern metaphysicians’, Henrich has in mind primarily the speculative thinking of the post-Kantian Idealists, the basic dynamic of which he tries to lay out in his essay ‘Grund und Gang spekulativen Denkens’. Such enquiry begins by following the spontaneous movement of reason, which arises out of subjectivity and its immanent conflicts. This movement culminates, as we have just seen, in the formulation of ‘Ideas’ or ‘Abschlussgedanken’. At this point, however, a reversal (Umkehrung) occurs. What first emerged as the terminus of a process of reasoning, is now understood as the very source of the process of which it is the end-point. By closing the speculative circle in this manner, Abschlussgedanken offer individuals a way of making sense of their lives, an orienting image of how they might be located within the world as a whole. At one point Henrich calls this an ‘ontological embedding of subjectivity’ (Henrich 2007: 340).

Henrich could have made things easier for himself by giving the Ideas an ‘as if’ status—the status of reconciling, life-enhancing fictions. Since he was unwilling to do this, he was confronted with the question: in what sense can modern metaphysics lay claim to truth? Very often he only gestures towards an answer to this question, but in the essay ‘Versuch über Fiktion und Wahrheit’ he tries to address it in a more systematic way. Here he states:

What we cannot provide grounds for, but which emerges as indispensable from the whole of our existence as rational beings—this we are as entitled to orient our lives by as if it were grounded knowledge. We are justified in considering that whatever we accept in this way and whatever is true are in continuity with one another. (Henrich 1999b: 146)

But does such an argument really offer protection against the Nietzschean claim that, in order to make sense of their lives, human beings must devise useful fictions? Henrich answers that the objection would only be valid if there were a residual ‘self’ which could be regarded as making use of the fiction. But this is not how things are. Rather:

When there is a culmination in which everything towards which I am led by the essential tendencies of my life comes together […] then there is nothing left behind in me which could make use of something for some purpose. (Henrich 1999b: 147)

The same point can be made from a somewhat different direction. If my basic convictions concerning what kind of thing I am, in an ultimate sense, and my relation to the world—my Grundpostulat, as Henrich calls it—generate the most comprehensive view of which I am capable, then there is simply no higher vantage point that could in principle be extrapolated from which the extrapolation that results in this comprehensive view could be exposed as a fiction. (Henrich 1999b: 150)

VI. Metaphysics and religion

Unmistakably, the role which Henrich allots to metaphysics has many affinities with that of religion. And it is no exaggeration to say that, in wrestling with the problem of the relation between philosophy and religion, Henrich finds himself replaying scenarios which were central to German Idealism, in its efforts to conserve the existential value of faith in a post-Enlightenment world. From his perspective, the major world religions can be understood as attempts to synthesize and reconcile the conflicting tendencies of life in a comprehensive worldview—and hence, like Hegel, Henrich believes that religion has a rational core. Furthermore, also like Hegel, Henrich argues that philosophy achieves a level of insight superior to that of religion, since it is able to conceptualize the existential sources from which religion springs. Finally, Henrich claims that philosophy emerges from religion, when religion, which is itself a thinking exploration of the basic dynamics of human life, crosses a certain threshold of reflexivity. As he puts it in Fluchtlinien:

There is no myth and no religion which fails to mobilize the thinking that is rooted in the process of subjectivity. Admittedly, in myth and religion this thinking is only tacitly at work, and hence without knowledge of itself. It develops in the medium of elaborated narratives which—precisely because they have life-disclosing and life-sustaining significance—can be taken up and put to work as a mandatory foundation for living. But when this immanent thinking comes to rely on itself, and is set in motion as such, then it becomes philosophy and thus loses the authority of the sacred text and the religious mode of understanding, which blocks off all alternatives. (Henrich 1982b: 252)

Henrich differs from Hegel primarily in denying that the major world religions can be placed in a developmental sequence. Rather he identifies two equally valid, coeval lines of development, in the East and the West. Oriental religions encourage us to transcend our finite personhood by merging with an anonymous, universal consciousness, while their monotheistic counterparts find the unifying ground of all reality in an infinite yet personal life. Yet, despite this divergence, both Hegel and Henrich find themselves confronting the same basic question: what happens when philosophy attains a comprehension of the sources of religion which transcends religion itself, in view of the fact that, throughout history, myth and religion have been the primary manner in which human beings across all societies have made sense of their lives?

In Hegel we find an uneasy division of labour. Speculative philosophy is able to achieve a comprehension of reality which, unlike that of religion, is conceptually coherent and self-grounding. But only religion speaks to the heart and appeals to the senses, thereby helping to secure the ethical basis of social cohesion. Philosophy, therefore, should not seek to supplant religion, even though the symbolic and narrative medium of religious thinking is inferior to the concept, and is not suitable for providing a fully consistent theory of the world process. Henrich confronts a different historical situation, in which globalization has brought the major religions of the world into confrontation with one another, resulting in an exposure of their cultural relativity. He suggests that, in this context, the world religions can only survive by transcending themselves. Indeed Henrich makes an even more ambitious claim for philosophy than Hegel, who sometimes concedes that, although philosophy articulates the definitive truth-content of religion, it is ‘partial’, since it forms an ‘isolated order of priests—a sanctuary—[who are] untroubled about how it goes with the world’ (LPR III: 162/VPR III: 97).⁶ For Henrich, by contrast, the great religious interpretations of what it means to be a self (Selbstdeutungen) need philosophy in a more practical sense:

They are themselves ways of thinking, even if ways where reasons can only achieve validity when connected with evidence of the possibility of a transformed consciousness. And their thinking leads into situations in which they can maintain their universality only by releasing a form of thinking which is able to reach out beyond what they themselves have unfolded. Such thinking can only be philosophy, and indeed in its speculative form. Only philosophy can open up the prospect—if any such exists at all—of gathering conscious life together not only in profound symbols and in thoughts which remain susceptible to error, but in a conceptualization which can hold firm. (Henrich 1982b: 199–200)

It is hard to avoid the feeling that, with such claims, which are scattered throughout his later work, Henrich goes beyond whatever contemporary philosophy can—or could be expected to—achieve. This was certainly the response of Habermas, in his rejoinder to Henrich’s systematic critique of his work, which was itself provoked by the former’s unsympathetic review of Fluchtlinien (Habermas 1985 and Henrich 1987c). In Habermas’s view the ‘totalizing unity of mythological narratives, religious doctrines, and metaphysical explanations’ can no longer be defended, since these take the form of ‘interpretive systems that retain a structure homologous to the lifeworld’s entire structure of horizons’, and hence suffer from a provinciality of which they remain unaware (Habermas 1992b: 17). In short, when the complex differentiation of reason in modernity is taken into account, ‘it is the enlightening role of philosophy in the strict sense, directed towards the totality of life practices, which is controversial’ (Habermas 1992b: 14). At the same time, in his late work Habermas has increasingly recognized the force of one of Henrich’s basic convictions: that ‘no practice of conscious life can become stable without an appropriate self-description of this life, and an image of the world that accommodates this self-description’ (Henrich 1992a: 95). In the modern world, this applies particularly—because of its level of abstraction—to a universalistic, reason-based theory of morality (Vernunftmoral) of the kind founded by Kant, and reformulated by Habermas himself on a new communicative foundation. Habermas has increasingly expressed anxiety that a Vernunftmoral, however well-grounded philosophically, suffers from a lack of motivating power, and argued that religious discourse continues to harbour inspiring and motivating semantic resources, to which philosophy should remain open and receptive. As he once put it: ‘I do not believe that we, as Europeans, can seriously understand concepts like morality and ethical life, person and individuality, or freedom and emancipation, without appropriating the substance of the Judeo-Christian understanding of history in terms of salvation’ (Habermas 1992b: 15).

Ironically, then, there turns out to be a certain parallelism between the positions of Habermas and Henrich, in so far as the two thinkers insist on both a continuity and a break between religious discourse and philosophy. In Munich Henrich became friends with the Protestant theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, with whom he organized a series of highly regarded seminars, and in the final two decades of his life he was involved in numerous other theological discussions. In 2019 Habermas published a two-volume work in which he expanded his initial thoughts concerning the religious inheritance still packed into many central moral and ethical concepts into a grand narrative of the interaction of theology and philosophy in Western thinking ever since the Greeks (Habermas 2022). His aim was to analyse the immense learning process through which modern notions of individual freedom, of the ‘post-conventional’ grounding of moral and social norms and of a ‘democratic ethical life’ eventually emerged from their long period of incubation in religious and theological discourse. He characterizes this enterprise as a ‘vindicatory’ or ‘justifying’ genealogy of modern secular reason—a genealogy able to reconcile historical contextualization with the universal scope of theoretical validity claims (Habermas 2022: vol. 2, 819–20). Henrich, however, understands the continuity in a different way. He insists on the possibility that a speculative form of philosophy could provide a life-orienting substitute for religion, which has lost its former credibility. In Henrich’s view this loss is not due to a splintering of the lifeworld into distinct value spheres, of the kind which Habermas describes, but rather to the fact that late modernity brings with it an advance to the stage of what he terms ‘second reflection’. We have become capable not only of establishing a cautionary distance between ourselves and the experienced world, but also of turning back reflectively and disclosing the implicit dynamic of our own consciousness and our will-to-interpret (Deutungswillen) (Henrich 1982b: 30). This, of course, is precisely what Henrich seeks to do in tracing the roots of religion back to the conflictual structure of conscious life as such—to the rift between the empirical and the transcendental which constitutes what he terms the ‘fundamental relation’ (Grundverhältnis). Only philosophy, Henrich suggests, in overcoming the partiality of the world views extrapolated by religion, which characteristically back one basic tendency of life over another, can conserve the ‘inherent truth’ (innewohnende Wahrheit) of religion, while also providing a form of thinking which more fully corresponds to the Grundverhältnis (Henrich 1982b: 120, 123).

The standpoints of both Habermas and Henrich are problematic. Habermas faces the dilemma that he must either concede that the moral and political discourse of the West is still in some sense dependent on religious sources (and therefore falls under suspicion of failing to achieve the universality which he so prizes), or insist that a Vernunftmoral in the Kantian tradition, and relatedly the principles of the democratic state, can be grounded by means of self-standing philosophical argument—in which case it seems that the religious prehistory is no longer relevant. Furthermore, even when taking the second option, Habermas has to confront the problem of the motivational deficit. He sometimes concedes that religious imagery and discourse can achieve a meaningfulness and resonance which their post-religious counterparts cannot match. As he puts it, ‘Secular languages which simply eliminate what was once intended leave behind a sense of unease. When sin was transformed into guilt, and the transgression of divine commands into the breaking of human laws, something went missing’ (Habermas 2001: 24). Henrich is less inhibited about the Kulturkritik which such statements imply. He openly suggests that ‘culture may have come closer to the truth, but by the same token more distant from its previous form and effectiveness’ (Henrich 1987b: 127). And he laments the ‘speechlessness’ into which contemporary society forces the personal quest for meaning, the ‘subterranean suffering’ of a culture which has lost the capacity to articulate the basic problems of life (Henrich 1987a: 128; Henrich 2007: 92). At the same time, Henrich’s faith in the power of speculative thinking to impart meaning, to provide an interpretation of the world in which the conflicting tendencies of modern existence might achieve a resolution, was surely misplaced—a case of professional overreach. Michael Theunissen, another distinguished contemporary, argued that Henrich’s claim for the reconciling effect of viewing the world as all-encompassing unity (All-Einheit), is still too Hegelian—even Parmenidean. It papers over the gap between the notion of a ground of the self and the notion of a ground of reality as a whole. Furthermore, the thought of an omnipresent ‘absolute’, a term which Henrich does not hesitate to employ, short-circuits the anticipatory, eschatological dimension which, for Theunissen––as a Protestant believer––confers meaning on a human existence which is only ever underway (Theunissen 2002).

Henrich’s overburdening of philosophy with quasi-religious tasks recalls elements of the thought of Karl Jaspers. As a young man he was greatly impressed by Jaspers’s manner and intensity as a lecturer (Henrich 2021: 91), and his mature thinking clearly takes up one of the older philosopher’s central themes: ‘we live from a source that lies beyond the existence that can be made empirically objective, beyond consciousness in general, and beyond spirit [Geist]’ (Jaspers 1974: 18). Jaspers possessed nothing comparable to Henrich’s technical prowess in exploring the structure of human self-consciousness, but the two philosophers share a similar view of its unfathomability, its Unausdenkbarkeit. In consequence, echoes of what Jaspers famously termed ‘the encompassing’ (das Umgreifende) occur throughout Henrich’s later work, as when he writes that cultural history reveals a general tendency

to regard what has significance for life as not exhausted by everyday concerns and everyday knowledge. And everywhere one finds an assumption that the commonplace is encompassed (umgriffen) by a dimension which cannot be disclosed in the same way as what is familiar in daily life. (Henrich 2007: 273)

It is not surprising, then, that Jaspers’ notion of ‘philosophical faith’ (der philosophische Glaube), intended—despite his respect for the disclosive power of religious ‘ciphers’—as an alternative to the cultural provinciality of ‘revelation’, foreshadows the diluted notion of speculation which Henrich derives from German Idealism. Both suffer from the same vagueness and portentousness.

To say this is not to endorse Habermas’s view that the efforts of philosophers over the last century or more to situate reason in history and society, or to elaborate mediating concepts focused on language, tradition, or the lived body, have carried us beyond the transcendental perplexities involved in finding ourselves both the ‘centre of the world’ (Zentrum der Welt) and a ‘fragile, frail thing in the world’ (fragiles, hinfälliges Weltding) (Henrich 1982b: 113). But it could be argued that Henrich’s most illuminating responses to this situation are to be found not in his meta-discourse concerning speculative thinking, but in what he terms his ‘existential analysis’ of such experiences as the intimacy of shared love, or the feeling of sheer thankfulness for one’s being alive in the world (Henrich 2022; 1999a). These experiences lie on the uncertain border between the secular and the religious, between finitude and transcendence—and this no accident. In the face of the spectre of modern nihilism and the moral catastrophes of the twentieth century, Henrich was undoubtedly in search of a kind of salvation. He would have liked to believe—as he puts it at the very end of Denken und Selbstsein—that ‘no life is ever entirely lost’ (kein Leben ganz und gar verloren ist) (Henrich 2007: 365). But philosophy can provide no such assurance. This is why, behind the immense scholarship, the interpretive power and refinement, the high-mindedness and the tinge of edification which characterize Dieter Henrich’s work, one often senses a barely containable pathos.