Abstract

Students of the Hegelian school must acknowledge an abiding debt to Ernst Barnikol. Upon his death in 1968, he left uncompleted a voluminous manuscript on Bruno Bauer, representing over forty years of research. Of this manuscript, conserved at the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, only a fraction has been published, but even this fraction, in its almost six hundred pages, continues to set standards in the field for meticulous scholarship, rigorous analysis, and balanced criticism. Barnikol's interests were primarily theological, though he recognised clearly that Bauer's religious critique was politically motivated. Barnikol also discovered, but did not publish, Bauer's 1829 Latin manuscript on Kant's aesthetics. This text, adjudicated by Hegel and awarded the Prussian royal prize in philosophy, had been deposited among Hegel's correspondence in the archives of the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. It was first published in 1996, in the original Latin, with German translation and commentary. In referring to his discovery, Barnikol made a substantive claim which must be disputed here, that Bauer's early text remained without influence on his subsequent work. Focusing on Bauer's depiction of art, and on the relation of art and religion as manifestations of spirit, we can trace lines of continuity and development in his thought, from his 1829 manuscript to his writings of 1841-42. The central idea of the early manuscript, a Hegelian conception of the unity of thought and being, is the key to deciphering the complex and elusive meaning of Bauer's critical theory in the Vormdrz.