4) The Revealed Mystery of the " Standpoint"
"Rudolph does not remain at his lofty" (!) "standpoint ... he does not shirk the trouble of adopting by free choice the standpoints on the right and on the left, above and below" (Szeliga).
One of the principal mysteries of Critical Criticism is the "standpoint" and judgment from the standpoint of the standpoint. For Criticism every man, like every product of the spirit, is turned into a standpoint.
Nothing is easier than to see through the mystery of the standpoint when one has seen through the general mystery of Critical Criticism, that of warming up old speculative trash.
First of all, let Criticism itself expound its theory of the "standpoint" in the words of its patriarch, Herr Bruno Bauer.
"Science ... never deals with a given single individual or a given definite standpoint.... It will not fail, of course, to do away with the limitations of a standpoint if it is worth the trouble and if these limitations have really general human significance; but it conceives them as pure category and determinateness of self-consciousness and accordingly speaks only for those who have the courage to rise to the generality of self-consciousness, i.e., who do not wish with all their strength to remain within those limitations" (Anekdota, t. II, p. 127).(1)
The mystery of this courage of Bauer's is Hegel's Phänomenologie. Because Hegel here substitutes self-consciousness for man, the most varied manifestations of human reality appear only as definite forms, as determinateness of self-consciousness. But mere determinateness of self-consciousness is a "pure category", a mere "thought", which I can consequently also transcend in " pure " thought and overcome through pure thought. In Hegel's Phänomenologie the material, sensuously perceptible, objective foundations of the various estranged forms of human self-consciousness are allowed to remain. The whole destructive work results in the most conservative philosophy because it thinks it has overcome the objective world, the sensuously perceptible real world, by transforming it into a "Thing of Thought", a mere determinateness of self-consciousness, and can therefore also dissolve its opponent, which has become ethereal, in the "ether of pure thought". The Phänomenologie is therefore quite consistent in that it ends by replacing human reality by "absolute knowledge" — knowledge, because this is the only mode of existence of self-consciousness, and because self-consciousness is considered the only mode of existence of man—absolute knowledge for the very reason that self-consciousness knows only itself and is no longer disturbed by any objective world. Hegel makes man the man of self-consciousness instead of making self-consciousness the self-consciousness of man, of real man, i.e., of man living also in a real, objective world and determined by that world. He stands the world on its head and can therefore in his head also dissolve all limitations, which nevertheless remain in existence for bad sensuousness, for real man. Moreover, everything that betrays the limitations of general self-consciousness— all sensuousness, reality, individuality of men and of their world — is necessarily held by him to be a limit. The whole of the Phänomenologie is intended to prove that self-consciousness is the only reality and all reality.
Herr Bauer has recently re-christened absolute knowledge Criticism, and given the more profane sounding name standpoint to the determinateness of self-consciousness. In the Anekdota both names are still to be found side by side, and standpoint is still explained as the determinateness of self-consciousness.
Since the "religious world as such" exists only as the world of self-consciousness, the Critical Critic — the theologian ex profes-