Christopher Lauer's The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and Schelling is devoted to elucidating Hegel's and Schelling's conceptions of reason and, perhaps more controversially, to uncovering how each thinker conceives of reason's suspension (Aufhebung). Reason is such a pervasive idea in post-Kantian idealism that it is difficult to isolate it as a distinct concept, and therefore Lauer treats this topic in an appropriately speculative manner. Rather than beginning with a pre-established definition of the term, his topological reading traces how reason takes on different meanings in German idealism by emphasising the place accorded to reason in various texts. In doing so, Lauer provides a fascinating analysis of closely related aspects of Hegel's and Schelling's thought, including their critique of the metaphysics of force and their complication of the distinction between theory and praxis. Most importantly, however, this book unpacks the complex idealist position that sees reality as rationally structured while simultaneously recognising that reason can, and does, go astray. Lauer therefore ultimately argues that Hegel and Schelling present conceptions of reason which allow space for contingency, chance, and irrationality.

According to Lauer, reason's suspension in speculative idealism would remain ‘unintelligible’ without reference to the way Hegel and Schelling explicate and build upon one another's insights (5–6). Thus, rather than pitting Hegel and Schelling against one another, he focuses on ‘the common ground of their inquiries in a network of concerns they associate with reason’ (6). He thereby presents a reading of speculative idealism as such and in doing so displays an uncanny finesse as he moves between Hegel's and Schelling's thought. The result is an erudite study of the intricacies of Hegel's and Schelling's texts that will undoubtedly prove rewarding, provocative, and timely to those working within the idealist tradition.

The chapters of the book are structured according to the chronological development of post-Kantian idealism. But this ordering is less important than their systematic connection. In the first two chapters, Lauer sets the stage for his analysis of reason in speculative idealism by considering the conception of reason in Kant, Fichte, and the early Schelling. To begin with, he discusses the nature of the faculties in the first Critique, where Kant assigns the understanding the task of seeking the conditions of objectivity and reason the task of seeking the unconditioned—definitions which are maintained throughout Hegel's and Schelling's philosophical development. But Lauer also demonstrates how, as early as the third Critique, reason shows itself to be far more than a mere faculty. The subsequent interpretations of reason in Schelling and Hegel can therefore be seen to arise ‘organically’ from the multifaceted conception of reason found in early German idealism.

In the third chapter, Lauer works through Schelling's philosophy of nature, an analysis which is particularly important for structuring the book as a whole. For it is here that Lauer identifies what he calls the ‘grounding and guiding urges’ of reason. To be sure, the analysis of these urges depends upon a reading of the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature which still utilises a Fichtean model of striving in its interpretation of the activity of reason. However, Lauer argues that even once Schelling and Hegel leave this model behind, the idea of grounding and guiding urges never cease to play a role in their thought. According to the Ideas, reason is grounded in an originary separation which it strives to overcome. Thus, reason's ‘grounding urge’ is separation and its ‘guiding urge’ identity (35). To seek the unconditioned, therefore, comes to be equated with disclosing how all separation (between subject and object, ideal and real, thought and being) is only relative, a separation ultimately united in absolute identity.

Although Schelling and Hegel clearly privilege reason over the understanding, Lauer emphasises throughout the book how Schelling and Hegel are dedicated to comprehending the nature of the understanding rather than simply writing it off as a lifeless faculty to be superseded by reason. Thus, in reading Schelling's Ideas Lauer also identifies the grounding and guiding urges of the understanding. Whereas reason is grounded in separation, the grounding urge of the understanding is totality, for the understanding assumes that ‘everything that is…can be explained’ (39). And since the understanding grasps objects in terms of a totality or a common field, its guiding urge is to seek continuity from one object to another, thereby validating its interpretation of objects as totalisable. This is a particularly interesting point, since it illustrates how, for Schelling, the understanding can only provisionally advance an atomistic philosophy of nature, as it incessantly seeks the ontological continuity of natural phenomena (as in the Leibnizian maxim that ‘nature makes no leaps’) (40). Furthermore, in his reading of the Ideas, Lauer convincingly distinguishes between the continuity sought by the understanding and the guiding urge of reason, namely, identity conceived as a return-to-self.

The chapter on Schelling's philosophy of nature is also significant because it is in the latter that ‘reason becomes concretised not just as a regulative method for approaching nature, but as constitutive of nature itself’ (34). Since reason's guiding urge is to overcome the separation between consciousness and nature, reason is no longer seen to be other than nature, as it is in Kant and Fichte. And although the System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800 describes reason as provisionally opposed to its other, reason goes on to become united with nature in the history of self-consciousness.

Following the chapters on Schelling's early philosophy, Lauer tracks this conception of reason as the unity of the subjective and the objective through Hegel's Differenzschrift and Schelling's identity philosophy. In large part, then, the first half of The Suspension of Reason presents Hegel and Schelling as champions of reason. But Lauer also makes the unconventional yet compelling case that, despite this reverence for reason, the early Hegel and Schelling were well aware of reason's limits. Thus, while their conception of reason as organic clearly favours reason over the mechanical understanding, such a metaphor also exposes the fact that reason is ‘as exploitative and as vulnerable as any living being’ (32). These insights into reason's inherent vulnerability are explored in greater depth in the following three chapters which constitute the centerpiece of Lauer's book: his analysis of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.

In Chapter 8, Lauer provides a close reading of the dialectic of reason in the Phenomenology, an especially welcome interpretation given that this shape of consciousness has received far less attention than others in Hegel scholarship. As Lauer describes it, once self-consciousness proves to be reason, it is no longer negatively related to alterity. Instead, reason is positively related to its other, an other with which it knows itself to be essentially united. But the Phenomenology does not end here, for the dialectic of reason exposes how reason's guiding urge for identity is thwarted thanks to its intrinsic perversity (Verkehrtheit). As Lauer shows, such perversity comes into view at every stage of reason's theoretical and practical development.

Aside from detailing the various ways reason realises that ‘its unity with the world is always characterised by a self-absorbed perversity’ (108), Lauer notes that Hegel's chapter on reason is distinctive insofar as it is the only point in the Phenomenology ‘before absolute knowing where spirit stops to reflect on its previous development’ (123). The key difference, however, between the way reason and absolute knowing relate to their history is that reason has a temporal conception of its previous activity and, as such, must relate to its ‘past self’ negatively. In this way, reason fails to affirm the truth of its prior forms of consciousness. Absolute knowing, on the other hand, surpasses this negative, temporal conception of reason, thereby arriving at a spatial self-conception in which the different moments of spirit are held together in a gallery of images (124). Thus, reason is suspended as one of many shapes of consciousness in an absolute knowing that affirms the relative truth of its determinate moments. What is more, absolute knowing is itself suspended at the end of the Phenomenology, as spirit is released into the contingency of nature and history. As Lauer writes in Chapter 10, the release here is analogous to the final paragraphs of the Science of Logic where the absolute Idea freely releases itself into the exteriority of nature (163). But such a suspension, Lauer goes on, does not mean that reason becomes inactive, ‘for the contingency of nature and freedom of spirit assure that reason will never be in want of work’ (164).

In the ninth chapter, Lauer turns to Schelling's Freedom essay of 1809. According to Lauer, reason here no longer takes the centre stage of philosophical investigation but is moved to the periphery of philosophy. This chapter also contains Lauer's highly intriguing description of the new place granted to the understanding. As Lauer argues, Schelling turns on his ‘idealistic roots’ in the Freedom essay, since reason is no longer given ultimate privilege over the understanding: ‘The distinction between reason and the understanding is thus not to be conceived solely by reason, but instead by the freedom that makes both possible’ (145–146). In other words, philosophy must now attend to the existence of human and divine freedom, a freedom which precedes both reason and the understanding. Because reason is now seen to have an origin prior to its own activity, Schelling can no longer interpret being as exclusively rational. Rather, his investigation into the pre-rational production of reason now allows Schelling to interpret being as will.

Although it is not Lauer's central concern, his formulation of this production of reason dramatically raises the stakes in the Schelling-Hegel encounter. From a Hegelian perspective, Schelling's fixation on origins and his distinction between ground and existence (as well as his later distinction between essence and existence) appears to depend upon a logic of essence, whereby reflection attempts to distinguish between the apparent and the hidden, the inessential and the essential. But for Schelling, the notion of indifference (the unground) calls into question reason's urge to simply unite the difference between ground and existence—the same urge that, one might argue, is at work in the transition from essence to the concept in Hegel's Logic. Lauer puts the Schellingian point thus:

Thus, at stake in the Freedom essay is a conception of difference that is not based on two oppositional identities (155). And with such a conception of difference, reason's guiding urge for identity is suspended, i.e., negated as all-encompassing and preserved nonetheless.

How does Lauer understand the relationship between this suspension of reason in Schelling and reason's suspension in Hegel's Phenomenology? ‘Whereas for Hegel the suspension of reason means recognising its essential incompleteness and placing it alongside other moments of spirit, for Schelling it means returning it to the periphery of philosophical inquiry so as to hinder its inevitable urge to make itself the center’ (157). With this description of the suspension of reason, Lauer raises important questions about the nature of Aufhebung. While ‘suspension’ is meant to translate this ‘untranslatable’ term, it seems to me that ‘suspension’ stresses the negating and preserving elements of Aufhebung without necessarily bringing to mind a sense of elevation. Lauer acknowledges the difficulties with this translation and makes the point that although ‘to suspend’ is not ‘to raise’, suspension does involve a spatial preservation of something in its already elevated state (3–4). In this way, Lauer's translation of Aufhebung coincides with his reading of the Freedom essay and the Phenomenology. The suspension of reason Lauer locates in the Freedom essay involves the bracketing, and thus preservation, of reason. Likewise, in its suspension alongside other moments of spirit in Hegel's absolute knowing, reason is negated as all-encompassing and preserved within a gallery of images. But in neither case is reason elevated to a higher sphere.

While this sense of ‘suspension’ certainly describes Schelling's treatment of reason from 1809 onwards, it is more controversial to describe Hegelian Aufhebung in this manner. Accentuating the elevating sense of Aufhebung, one might say that reason only becomes fully rational once it becomes spirit, religion, and absolute knowing. On such a reading, reason is not only preserved as a limited shape of consciousness, but it is also raised to the absolute—an absolute which is, paradoxically, more rational than ‘mere’ reason. For as Lauer shows, absolute knowing is more at home with its other than the nascent form of reason found in the middle of the Phenomenology. By affirming the various determinations of consciousness in its spatial self-conception, this higher form of reason completes the third part (Section C) of the Phenomenology. Indeed, according to this interpretation, reason would become fully rational only once it became the absolute identity of subject and object, thought and being.

This formulation, however, raises the question of reason's suspension again, now at the level of Hegel's system. If absolute knowing achieves the identity of subject and object, and if Hegel's Logic begins where the Phenomenology leaves off, then does the Logic not, much like Schelling's system of identity, interpret being as reason? Hegel's system, on this account, would be fundamentally rational insofar as it begins with the identity of subject and object which the young Schelling and Hegel opposed to their idealist forebears. If speculative logic discloses the movement of reason conceived in terms of such an identity, how do we understand the suspension of reason?

Lauer acknowledges that these questions pose genuine challenges to his interpretation of Hegel, especially if one considers Hegel's comments about reason as the driving force behind logical development (160). In the penultimate chapter, Lauer addresses these concerns and argues that reason is suspended in Hegel's mature system. Defending his decision to focus on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Lauer rightly points out that ‘reason is, in its strictest sense, a phenomenological category’ (158). Indeed, within the system, reason is not a category of being, a determination of essence or the concept; it is not found in the philosophy of nature or the anthropology, but in the Encyclopaedia phenomenology. ‘Thus while there may be formal parallels between the dialectic of reason and other moments of Hegel's system, the movement of reason is not identical with the movement of the whole, but is only a part of it’ (158–159). According to Lauer, although Hegel implores his audience to utilise reason in philosophy, this does not mean that reason is the sole content of the system: ‘Following the Logic and its real counterparts requires reason not because reason is the substance or content of the system, but because reason is capable of the gentle touch that lets its objects be’ (159). Indeed, Lauer argues, in order to understand the relation between the system and reason, we must direct our attention to Hegel's phenomenological account of how reason, as a distinct shape of consciousness, relates to its other.

Questions about the relationship between the system and Phenomenology are, of course, some of the most difficult and contentious in Hegel interpretation. One of the great strengths of Lauer's book is that it tackles them head on and sees the intertwining of Hegel's systematic and phenomenological insights as a virtue. Furthermore, the hermeneutic sensitivity of this perspective contributes to a compelling argument about Hegel and Schelling's essential proximity regarding their mutual refusal to abandon reason even when it reaches its limits.