From the beginnings of philosophical investigation, there has been widespread recognition that reason must be autonomous to think the truth and that philosophy must be the freest of all disciplines. The freedom reason and philosophy must wield has two sides.

On the one hand reason must possess the negative freedom to liberate itself from all determining conditions. If reason fails to do so and lets itself be guided by any external authority, every claim reason makes will be relative to the particular grounds that rule its operation. To overcome the hold of unexamined opinion, reason must emancipate itself of all presuppositions regarding its subject matter and methodology. Otherwise, thought remains bound by dogmatic claims about its topic and procedure, unable to obtain knowledge that surmounts particular opinion and enjoys unconditioned universal validity.

By casting aside the hold of assumed foundations, such liberation indicates how the autonomy of reason and philosophy is tied to the attainment of the unconditioned universality that gives thought its special role as a vehicle of truth. Nonetheless, by itself, this emancipation leaves liberated reason utterly empty unless it can exercise an autonomy that is not just negative but positive as well.

The negative freedom that revokes acceptance of given opinion may free thought of all predetermined form and content, but this liberation leaves thought with a universality that is devoid of any particular content, rendering its unconditioned character a vacant promise. Only if reason can determine by itself what its subject matter and method should be, can reason move from its empty negative emancipation to a positive constitution of philosophical wisdom. Philosophy can proceed from repudiating dogmatism to being fully responsible for all its own claims only if it exercises the positive self-determination where the unconditioned universality of thought shows itself to be pregnant with content.

To be the freest of all sciences, as the search for wisdom requires, philosophy must commence as logic. Any nonlogical starting point automatically leaves thought encumbered with given assumptions about both its form and its content. Whereas logic is a thinking of thinking, nonlogical investigation thinks what is different from thought. As such, nonlogical investigation cannot account for the thinking it employs, since it enquires into something distinct from the reasoning it exercises.

I first came across Julia Wedgwood in the selection of Browning's work and letters edited by Adam Roberts. Her surname was, of course, familiar. I assumed that she was some comfortably off lady who happened to know Browning socially and was intimate enough with him to offer her thoughts on his work. But as I read on through their letters, I discovered someone quite different: clearly very intelligent and at ease with a surprising range of literary references from Homer to Shakespeare, Shelley to Newman, but also quirky and unpredictable. Sometimes her sentences were complex and confusing: at others she came up with striking aphorisms. Though her criticisms of Browning's work were remarkably fearless, she could be self-deprecatory too. Browning's reactions to her criticisms suggested he set great store by them. ‘I take all your blame far better than other folks’ praise’, he wrote to her after she said that The Ring and the Book showed what he had lost as a poet through the death of his wife. He also valued her as a person. ‘I lost something peculiar in you, which I shall not see replaced,’ he told her when their friendship ended. Roberts published more of Browning's correspondence with her than with anyone else, apart, of course, from Elizabeth Barrett. Who was this ‘Dear Friend’? And what exactly was their relationship?

Turning to the Wedgwood family history written by Barbara and Hensleigh Wedgwood, I found a more orthodox figure: a woman keenly interested in the history of her family, brave and gifted, dutiful and only partly fulfilled – in other words, yet another example of the stereotypical middle-class Victorian spinster author. Following up on the hundreds of her letters in the Wedgwood Archive at Barlaston, the variety of her connections surprised me: not only Browning but her uncle, Charles Darwin, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, Carlyle, Ruskin, George Eliot, F. D. Maurice, most of the leading feminists, and, in her later years, E. M. Forster. Reading these letters I was also struck by the contradictory elements in her character. She could be morose but funny, acerbic as well as compassionate, both needy and generous and high-minded yet commonsensical.

The role of art has never been more contested than today. Whereas Plato could at least banish art from the polis with a clear idea of the rogue exile, contemporary aestheticians, art critics, and artists all seem so perplexed over the erosion and instability of aesthetic boundaries as to be unable to tell whether art has come to an end. Compounding the confusion is the uneven vitality of different arts. Whereas technological developments have spawned new arts, such as film and video, to which vast resources, talent, and attention have been lavished, older, supposedly perennial arts have languished. Does this mean that certain arts have slipped irretrievably into the past, that somehow certain media are no longer capable of giving artistic expression to the self-understanding of our time?

Sculpture might seem to be the living or, should one say, embalmed proof that if not all then at least some arts are dead. Although sculptors remain at work and political upheavals have put many a pedestal in need of a new occupant, the contemporary position of sculpture stands in stark contrast to the golden age of plastic expression, when no temple could be without its statue, no battlefield without its trophy, and no artist more venerated than a Phidias or Praxiteles.

Sculpture today may still provide the two satisfactions that plastic shaping can always offer. Simply by impressing matter with its most elementary form, spatial configuration, sculpture can furnish the juvenile pleasure of seeing our imagination and agency become the master of material. And, if the joy of making mud-pies is not enough, a purely formal, nonrepresentative sculpture can always decorate, adding charm to architectural or natural surroundings. But if sculpture aspires to provide a plastic expression of some self-understanding fundamental to modern humanity, the possibilities are less obvious. If abstract sculpture is to rise above plastic gratification and decoration, it might aim at exhibiting the sheer subjective mastery of an artistry for whom no objective configuration retains any essential significance, much as abstract painting or serial music might do. Yet when art proclaims the superfluity of every sensuous shape, can it avoid diminishing the stature of its own productions? When, by contrast, sculpture remains figurative, can it mold any form whose frozen surface gesture can be congruent with a modern subjectivity for whom an inner life of conscience, psychological reflection, and private concerns cannot be ignored?

Philosophy, Logic, and Ethics

Truth and right are fundamentally tied to self-determination.

The quest for truth cannot free itself of opinion unless it liberates inquiry from the hold of given opinion and validates all its claims through its own independent labors. Philosophy must wield an autonomous reason, free in both the negative sense of overcoming dependence upon presuppositions and the positive sense of determining what its own method and subject matter should be. As such, philosophy cannot begin with any determinate claims about what is or about knowing. It must start from utter indeterminacy and generate from that presuppositionless commencement determinacy that is not grounded on any given or given procedure of specification. This indeterminate commencement allows philosophy to be a theory of determinacy, accounting for determinacy without begging the question by beginning with some given determinacy. Moreover, since philosophy develops determinacy as something generated in its own presuppositionless process, it develops self-determined determinacy. Philosophy thus begins as a development of self-determination per se.

To do so, however, philosophical investigation cannot begin by examining anything distinct from its own thinking. Any inquiry that addresses a topic different from its own knowing is doubly conditioned and relative. On the one hand, such an investigation must take its method for granted since it investigates not its own thinking but something distinct from method. On the other hand, such an investigation must presuppose the boundaries of its subject matter, since it only addresses something different from its method by confronting a topic with a given content distinguishing it from the thinking that addresses it. Hence, any investigation that begins by distinguishing its method from its subject matter, or its knowing from its object, is relative to both the given method it employs and the given determination of its topic. Philosophy can overcome this dual relativity if it overcomes the opposition of knowing and its object. This is why philosophy must begin with logic, whose thinking of thinking proceeds upon the elimination of the distinction of method and subject matter. Logic is equally autonomous in the dual sense that it proceeds without any given method or subject matter and instead generates both at once in thinking thinking. As such, logic, with which philosophy must begin is autonomous reason. Instead of beginning with any given determination of knowing or its object, logic must establish what thinking is in the process of thinking thinking.

Thinking back to her college education 50 years later, Julia wrote that the difference between the sexes then was as great as the difference between rich and poor.

Given the surplus of women in the population, however, a lively point of concern amongst male commentators in the 1850s and 1860s, marriage was not available to all. ‘Women’, Julia crisply wrote in 1869, ‘spend the best part of their lives in preparing for an event which may never happen,’ ‘the time thus spent is not only wasted and unsatisfactory, but unreal.’

Living through this limbo of uncertainty at the end of an incomplete college education that opened intellectual doors but offered no obvious way through them, Julia struggled. Aimlessness never suited her. ‘I do not believe’, she later wrote, perhaps comparing herself with the feckless but reasonably successful Erny, ‘the idlest youth who just saves his degree at College, wastes more of his undergraduate years than an energetic girl of the corresponding period of her life.’ She concluded quite early on that she was unlikely to marry. This left her with a life-long sense of incompleteness but not the willingness to fall back on a shadowy life of spinster friends like Alice Bonham-Carter, attending to demanding elderly parents and relatives, supporting married siblings or friends and working unobtrusively for good causes. Julia had always had a sense of mission that grew in response to two serious bouts of illness in the early 1850s. It took time and some false starts before she found her way to a successful career as a writer and thinker.

A back cover of the first edition of David Herbert Lawrence's Apocalypse bears information in three languages—in the original, German and French—about the exact thing the reader is holding in their hands. It reads:

A few words about the man to begin.

Life in Motion

D. H. Lawrence was born in 1885, in the small mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where he attended local schools. He had a slight cough from his early days. His father worked down the mine; his mother was a teacher of artistic and intellectual ambition and, for the most part, the son's upbringing was her responsibility. In 1907, Lawrence became a teacher at the Davidson Road School in Croydon (now a district of London), which made his financial situation stable. He takes his first steps in literature propped up by Ford Madox Ford, who makes his poetry debut as well as publication of The White Peacock (1911) possible. Around this time, his mother dies of cancer, causing a nervous breakdown in the young writer and forcing him to resign from his teaching position. In March or April 1912, he makes the acquaintance of Frieda Weekley (née: von Richthofen), a mother of three children six years his senior, a Baroness and his former university lecturer's wife.

There are books that should be required reading but—let us not kid ourselves—not at all times and not for everyone. I mean books that grow out of a radical experience, from facing an event too rich in meanings or, conversely, devoid of any meaning at all, not making any sense. Jean Améry's writing belongs in the second category. A response to the absurdity of the twentieth-century history, it constitutes its ultimate result. Améry is not a historian, or, if he is one, he is the historian of his own suffering. He infects us with a knowledge that then becomes addictive; we can no longer do without it. It is the kind of knowledge one does not inherit, but painstakingly acquires.

The Loss of Language

In At the Mind's Limits, his only book where he explicitly refers to his incarceration, first at Fort Breendonk, then in Auschwitz, Améry tries, in my opinion, to relate the helplessness of his mind, its uselessness and powerlessness in face of extreme oppression. Because only in the fiery pit of genuine hell one learns whether the mind—thinking, rationality—is everything or serves no purpose at all.

Intellectuals, that is, a certain species of creatures for whom the “natural” environment is the system of intellectual references—be it a poem, some sheet music or Bach's Brandenburg Concertos—usually trust the power of their intellect as it constitutes an important support, hell; in fact it is their lives’ very essence.

In the first chapter, “At the Mind's Limits,” Améry revises this view. There are conditions, he says, in which the mind is of no use; it can even do harm. In a death camp, for someone suffering from cachexia, the mind is not just useless; it actually lowers one's chances of survival. An intellectual who in his previous life worked with his brains not his hands cannot cope with the new kind of work that mainly consists in digging holes and backfilling them.

The end of the nineteenth century was, inevitably, a time for both taking stock and trying to look forward. For some, particularly in the younger generation, it brought the exhilaration of freedom from old orthodoxies. While older generations had more regrets over the loss of settled authority, they too sensed the possibility of re-definition in the aftermath of a heroic age of dominant personalities in politics, religion and literature. In this freer climate the antagonism between science and religion became less acute, while agnosticism was more pervasive and less guilt-ridden. In politics, Gladstone's adoption of Home Rule broke up old party loyalties, while concern about social disintegration was met with a new emphasis on the importance of family and community and more diverse approaches towards tackling the problems of the poor. In literature, new and distinctive voices emerged, ranging from Oscar Wilde to H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson to Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne to Thomas Hardy. The fluidity was equally evident in religion, where, as José Harris has suggested, a ‘disorderly pluralism’ prevailed. Julia observed the same phenomenon: ‘ideas and aspirations which we have hitherto recognized under the name of Christianity are taking up new aspects and appearing in unexpected quarters’. Alongside the traditional forms of faith, Theosophy, Transcendentalism, Eastern mysticism and other ‘varieties of religious experience’ attracted new adherents, while interest in Spiritualism revived. With old doctrinal certainties weakening and Darwinism losing some of its assurance, the 1890s were, Julia believed, a time when people had to think for themselves.

Politically, she moved to the right after the Home Rule split. Dicey's critique of the destabilizing effects of the establishment of a separate Parliament in Dublin impressed her. In 1890 she published what can only be described as a reactionary article in Murray's Magazine, warning of the dangers of majoritarian democracy. Home Rule, she claimed, would legitimize the Irish Land League that had ‘martyred’ the law-abiding Irish minority.

For all her nostalgia over what had been lost, however, she welcomed the new challenges in her own stock-take of the nineteenth century, ‘The Old Order Changeth’ published in 1897 in the Contemporary Review.

In this chapter, I explore women's activism and the Progressive Writers’ movement in the first half of the twentieth century to see where the fault lines lie between secular modernity and religious affiliations. Poetry as a medium for change also inspired Progressive women poets, who initially started off in the inner sanctum of the zenana under the watchful gaze of a religious community that placed its visible Islamic representation on the shoulders of women, and subsequently found themselves in the public spaces of the post-Partition nation actively taking part in national and political culture. It is their story that is lesser known and important to contextualize as the community transformed into nation. The poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz played an important role in the nurture of women poets as he imbued the lyric form with a progressive modernity. His linkages to women poets and female music artists, along with an emphasis on a secular Urdu aesthetic, facilitated an opening up of gender borders that had been tightly drawn into sacred spaces in the lead-up to Partition.

In the post-Partition nation, sharif women's performative poetry inhabited the public sphere at a time when iconic women's voices in the associated world of music and song ruled the sound waves – notably, the flamboyant Madam Noor Jehan and the restrained Malika Pukhraj. Both sang Faiz Ahmed Faiz's verse, immortalizing his poems through electronic media. Their presence as musicians in Pakistan highlighted both the enduring popularity of the craft and heritage of a long-standing Indic music tradition, as well as the new urban middle class's historical distancing of itself from the musical gharana family in order to represent respectable values. The modernizers sought to spiritualize, standardize and eventually nurture a new middle-class taste in music. These bifurcating affiliations with the performing arts for women in the postcolonial nation had been ideologically framed in reformist texts. For instance, Mirza Rusva avoids any reference to the mujra dance in Umrao Jan Ada, although it features heavily in film adaptations of the novel. The mujra is used as a reminder of a decadent past and one of the causes of the downfall of Muslim rule in India, while in Hindi films it serves as a nostalgic reference to the Muslim other.

Poseur, scribbler, provocateur, seducer, trifler, uncompromising theologian, thinker of such broad scope that the shrewdest rabbis of his time could not follow—these are all masks, costumes in which Jacob Taubes chose to dress up his uninhibited thought, his unique way of being. A little kitschy, always provocative, undoubtedly a genius, he saw everywhere “signs of the approaching End”; at the same time, as one can tell from his chaotic writing, he wanted—like Rabbi Ben Levi—to capture the first moment of the apocalypse, to spot the rising tide and even to outstrip it.

Curriculum Vitae

He was born in 1923 in Vienna into a rabbinical family. In 1936 the whole family moved to politically neutral Switzerland where Taubes's father was appointed chief rabbi. He completed his education in Basel and Zurich. In 1947 in Zurich he defended a doctoral thesis on Messianic ideas in Western culture (Abendländische Eschatologie), which he then published as a book—the only one published in his lifetime. He became friends with Armin Mohler, the author of the term “conservative revolution,” a would-be SS man (they did not want him), later the secretary of Ernst Jünger. At the same time he maintained close intellectual ties with the Protestant theologian Karl Barth and with Hans Urs von Balthasar, the influential Catholic priest and prominent theologian. In 1949 he was employed at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He attended Leo Strauss's seminar held at the New School for Social Research. While in the United States, he also met Hannah Arendt and Paul Tillich. It's a small world.

In 1951 Taubes was awarded the Warburg scholarship and went to work at a university in Jerusalem. He was admitted by the rector of the Hebrew University, Hugo Bergman, who would later describe Taubes's intellectual abilities as “absolutely exceptional” while pointing to his characteristic “disreputable behavior […] his chutzpah and his verve.”

For all the confidence of her early articles in the Spectator about confronting the challenges to religion through intellectual rigour, Julia was beset by doubt in the 1870s. The disparity between her reassuring public voice and her private despair troubled her. ‘I have used good words and sometimes have struck out high thoughts in collision with other minds,’ she wrote to Emily Gurney in 1871, ‘but when it comes to endurance […] there is no strength in me […] there is in me a perpetual thirst and craving which repels others and makes any word I have said of the peace of God hypocrisy.’ The 1870s were a time of ‘strange, dreadful misery […] the problem of [my wretchedness] was unremitting […] I saw nothing around me but evil […] it seemed put there by an omnipotent power’. ‘Sometimes’, as she confessed to Jane Gourlay, the rather dour Scottish teacher she had got to know at Linlathen, ‘an icy despair comes instead of patience when I try to wait for [spiritual assurance]. And then the plausible rational views of all my acquaintances press upon me like a choking vapour. I feel how like all this is to there being no God.’

She felt too that her idols had failed her. Had she been less prone to ‘idolatry’, this might not have mattered so much. Mack had died without any word of consolation, her friendship with Browning was broken, Erskine had turned away from her in his last unhappy months, Mary Rich was a burden on everyone at the end of her life, Maurice became over-fond of religious controversy and even her new friendship with the charismatic George Eliot came up against its inevitable limits after a couple of years. Though her deep affection for Aunt Emma remained, she also became increasingly disillusioned by Darwin's refusal to see his discoveries as part of the ‘religious education’ she believed them to be. Plagued by migraines and increasing deafness and left isolated by the marriages of both her sisters, Julia was profoundly depressed. Only Richard Hutton remained a reliable guide alongside the constant and solicitous Emily Gurney.

What is metaphysics? Is it the study of being qua being, that foundational ontology with which philosophy must begin to obtain the universal wisdom grounding knowledge of all particular domains? Or is metaphysics the entirety of synthetic a priori knowledge, where reason obtains new knowledge relying on thought alone? Or is metaphysics simply the enterprise of knowing things in themselves, searching for conceptual determinations in the given cognition confronts, certain of the correspondence of thought and being?

Each of these projects of metaphysics has come under withering attack so as to leave us in a post-metaphysical predicament. The alleged outcomes of those attacks have, however, all been called into question by arguments developed by Hegel. Has Hegel thereby rehabilitated metaphysics? Or has Hegel left us a systematic philosophy without metaphysics?

The Repudiation of Foundational Ontology and Its Hegelian Critique

The critique of foundational ontology has its great pioneer in Kant, whose transcendental turn proceeds from the seemingly irrefutable insight that beginning philosophy by conceiving being takes for granted the authority of philosophical knowing. Insupportable dogmatism cannot be avoided if one begins by making claims about what is without first examining knowing and establishing cognition's ability to know objects. Foundational ontology must accordingly cede first philosophy to epistemology. The knowing of knowing should be the preliminary undertaking of philosophical investigation and only if and when foundational epistemology secures some authority for cognition can philosophy turn to investigate what is.

This might seem to reprieve metaphysics by allowing ontology to operate after epistemology. Kant's own transcendental philosophy, however, shows that making epistemology primary can only make sense if the object of knowing is determined by the structure of knowing. Unless this is the case, knowing has no way of determining the objectivity of its claims, for immediate access to being is precisely what is called into question by the transcendental turn away from foundational ontology. Yet, if knowing can know its objects only insofar as they are at least in part determined by the structure of knowing, objectivity becomes something posited by knowing. Instead of being determined in and through itself, objectivity is subject to an external necessity of efficient causality, for all objects are conditioned by the same structure of cognition, no matter what they are.