THE GERMAN IDEALISTS
=Idealism after Kant.=[59] Kant’s criticism had been a fine dissection
of the processes of knowledge. He had laid scientific knowledge open
and separated it into its parts. In doing this he had acted in the
spirit of his time, which had been inaugurated by Lessing. His doctrine
became the point of departure of many differing systems. A modern
German professor in the University of Berlin has been wont to say,
“There are ten interpretations of Kant’s _Critique_, which are the ten
kinds of philosophy at the present time.” The incoherence of Kant’s
philosophy made it famous. He represented the first stage of a social
movement; and like all social movements the world over, the first
stage was critical, self-inconsistent, and destructive of tradition.
The second stage is the one upon which we now enter, and we shall
find it to be reconstructive along several lines. Criticism is always
an inducement to new systematization. In Germany, after Kant, there
was naturally, therefore, a great systematic movement which its
intellectually virile and many-sided life was ready to express. Culture
and philosophy went hand in hand. Jena was the centre of Kantianism and
was in close proximity to Weimar, the centre of German culture.
At the time that the philosophy of Kant became popular, the teaching
of Spinoza was resurrected from its long sleep and introduced into
Germany. Kant was the “all-crushing” critic; Spinoza was the dogmatic
mystic. Their opposition did not amount to a contradiction, but was of
the correlative sort. Kant and Spinoza became the two intellectual foci
about which revolved the thought of the generation after Kant. All the
succeeding philosophers show Kant’s influence upon them, for they all
accept his epistemology. They show the influence of Spinoza in varying
degrees.
The philosophers whom we shall now meet may be divided into groups.
The first group consists of Rheinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
These took the lead in destroying the Kantian conception of the
thing-in-itself and in constructing a pure idealism. The second
group consists of Herbart and Schopenhauer. These tried in different
ways to develop a metaphysics of the thing-in-itself. A third group
consisted of the old Wolffian rationalistic school, which was, however,
unsuccessful in its opposition to the spread of the doctrines of
Kant and Spinoza. A summary of the leaders of the German thought
of this time would not be complete without mention, lastly, of
the miscellaneous group of literary Romanticists, whose writings
partook of the philosophical spirit. The influence of Spinoza is
especially prominent in this group. Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825)
was the forerunner of this movement, and it included the names of
Tieck, Wackenroder, the two Schlegels, Novalis, the two Romantic
women,――Dorothea and Caroline,――Schiller, and Goethe. The poet Schiller
did much to popularize Kant’s æsthetic and moral doctrines.
Illustration:
MAP SHOWING THE UNIVERSITY TOWNS
AND OTHER IMPORTANT PLACES CONNECTED WITH THE GERMAN IDEALISTS
=Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.= This group of disciples of Kant can
be understood sympathetically only in the light of their age. They
were not philosophical adventurers, otherwise the great representative
of the age, Goethe, would not have associated with Schelling and Hegel
on equal terms. They stood for the revulsion of the period against
all external systems, and for the realization of a spiritual realm of
free spirits. They sought not a factitious and imaginary condition,
but tried rather to discover the essentials of the spiritual life.
They would reclaim reality spiritually, and their only defect was in
their haste in carrying out their principles. Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel are sharers in one common movement. They tried systematically to
present the evolution of the world as an unbroken evolution of thought.
They went back to Kant, but they were bolder than he. They sought to
transcend the limitations of thought which he had laid down. They would
set thought free, and, gazing in upon their own spirits, they would
find there the whole infinite universe. The spiritual realm seemed to
them to be wider than any one had supposed. It was a self-governing
realm, quite different from the world of matter. History to them is
cosmic and develops under one law of progression. It is an upward
movement of assertions, negations, and syntheses. Life is cosmic
spirituality. For Fichte the spirit is a cosmic battle for moral ends;
for Schelling the spirit is a cosmic artistic construction, which
transforms the external and internal worlds into a work of living art;
for Hegel the cosmic spirit unfolds in a strict and rigorous logic,
whose consummation is thought of thought. But while Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel look at the world each in his own way, they are members of
one common movement toward spiritual freedom, and toward the
reëstablishment of metaphysics.
=The Life and Writings of Fichte= (1762–1814).[60] Johann Gottlieb
Fichte was the most notable of the immediate disciples of Kant. In
contrast with the undisturbed and uneventful scholastic retirement of
his master, Fichte’s life looms up as a series of conflicts, sometimes
with extreme poverty and sometimes with hostile forces created by
his own stubborn and irascible disposition. Fichte’s external life
was throughout one of curious contrasts, both of tragedy and romance.
His love for the moral and theological appears in his early youth in
his voluntary self-denial and in his sermons to the geese which he
was herding. Again, he made preparation to become a preacher, but his
intellectual training in the university drove him to abandon it. He
became a necessitarian and tried to square his life with his philosophy,
although it weighed his heart down. Then came the so-called “Atheistic
Controversy” when he was professor at Jena, and his defiance of the
authorities and his dismissal. In the tumultuous days at Berlin he
turned his metaphysics into patriotic appeals, and would have joined
the army, but his death intervened. The inner development of Fichte,
too, was different from that of Kant. Kant’s inner development was
coincident with his long life. Fichte, on the other hand, at the age
of twenty-eight had read and accepted Kant’s philosophy, and four years
later had created his own. This was only slightly modified in his later
years in the direction of the pantheism of Spinoza. Kant’s life was
apart from the political current of his time, while his doctrine became
fundamental for all future philosophy. Fichte’s life and philosophy
were more expressive of his time, but less lasting in their influence.
Fichte is the philosophic preacher to his time; Kant is the instructor
of all time.
Fichte’s life may be divided into four periods, which are marked by
certain external events.
1. _His Education_ (1762–1790). He was the son of a poor ribbon-maker.
As a boy he worked for his father, and again at the equally humble
employment of herding geese. It was during this latter occupation
that his wonderful memory attracted the attention of a philanthropic
nobleman, who gave him means for an education. Fichte studied theology,
philosophy, and philology at Leipsic and Jena; but he had to face
extreme poverty again upon the death of his benefactor. In 1788 he got
a position as tutor in Zurich, and here he met Pestalozzi, Lavater,
and his future wife, a niece of the poet, Klopstock. During this period
his philosophy was a necessitarianism, which he had evolved from the
theology in which he was trained and his reading of certain books on
Spinoza.
2. _Discipleship of Kant_ (1790–1794). Fichte returned from Zurich
to Leipsic, and in the capacity of tutor in philosophy he assisted a
young man in the reading of Kant’s _Critique_. He was at once converted
heart and soul to the Kantian doctrine. In 1791 he called on Kant at
Königsberg and submitted to Kant his _Critique of Revelation_. The next
year he published this work, and by some fortunate accident his name as
author was omitted from the title-page. The work was attributed to Kant,
and was widely read as a masterpiece by Kant. Kant had to correct the
mistake, which, however, made the real author, Fichte, famous. So he
returned to Zurich in 1793 to marry Fräulein Rahn, who was herself now
in comfortable circumstances.
3. _His Life at Jena_ (1794–1799). The year 1794 was another
milestone in the biography of Fichte. In this year he was called to
Jena, then the principal university of Germany, to succeed Rheinhold.
In this year he published his philosophy in his best known work, the
_Wissenschaftslehre_. He remained at Jena only five years. At first his
popularity exceeded that of the popular Rheinhold, but he soon filled
his life with controversies. He quarreled with the students and the
clergy, and in 1799 the so-called “Atheistic Controversy” arose, in
which charges were brought against his teaching as atheism. Brooking no
criticism either of his teaching or of his official position, he defied
the authorities of the university and was dismissed.
4. _His Life at Berlin_ (1799–1814). In 1799 Fichte went to Berlin to
live. At first he had no academic affiliations, but he found a large
and sympathetic public, to whom he lectured. He was warmly received by
the circle of Romanticists,――the Schlegels, Tieck, and Schleiermacher.
His philosophical system got little development; but the influence
of Spinoza appeared in his teaching. He lectured upon the ethical and
religious aspects of his philosophy, and upon political and social
subjects. In 1808 he delivered his famous _Addresses to the German
People_. In 1810 the University of Berlin was founded and he was called
to the chair of philosophy, but he was connected with the university
only two years. For in 1812 came the call to arms, and Fichte was with
difficulty dissuaded from enlisting. He remained in Berlin and preached
to the soldiers in camp. His wife volunteered as hospital nurse and
contracted a fever, from which she recovered. Fichte, however, who
nursed her through her sickness, died of the disease in 1814.
=The Influences upon Fichte’s Teaching.= Any estimate of the
influences upon Fichte would be distorted that did not recognize the
calibre of the man himself. Fichte was essentially a puritan reformer.
He was impetuous and life-loving, but withal a simple-minded man. All
the philosophical influences which he was capable of feeling would
naturally be turned by him into ethical and religious sermons to reach
the life of men. He must be thought of as the crusader armed with
abstract truths, which he wields with a giant’s strength for the moral
uplift of man.
It was natural then that the two principal influences upon Fichte’s
doctrine should be Spinoza and Kant. To be sure, such writers as
Lessing, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi furnished him much material in his
early years, and the Romanticists in his later years. His wife, Johanna
Rahn, was also a source of power to him, and through her influence
after their marriage his aim became clearer and his character lost much
of its harshness. But the two great influences upon Fichte were the
two great philosophical forces of this time, Spinoza and Kant. Fichte’s
philosophy has been described as “Spinoza in terms of Kant,” and also
as “an inverted or idealistic Spinozism.” The influence of Spinoza upon
Fichte’s thought is seen at both ends of his life. At the beginning he
was an amateurish Spinozist. He found that the theological training of
his boyhood was a necessitarianism like Spinozism. He lost his faith
in Christianity, and he was unhappy because he found Spinoza’s doctrine
of necessity was intolerable and yet unanswerable. Then he read Kant
and found a solution of his difficulty without having to change the
doctrine of Spinoza. For Kant had placed behind the necessitated world
the free spirit. In the last period of Fichte’s life the influence of
the mystical side of Spinozism appeared, through Fichte’s intercourse
with the Romanticists in Berlin.
=Why We Philosophize.= To Fichte philosophy was distinctly a personal
problem, and we feel in all his words that he is wrestling with his own
nature. He found in his mind two very different classes of ideas, and
he was certain that philosophical problems arise from their antagonism.
On the one hand there are the ideas about the world of physical nature,
which are only our experiences under the law of necessity. On the
other hand there are the ideas of the individual consciousness, which
are contingent and voluntary. Which of these two classes of ideas is
primal? Fichte felt that all philosophical curiosity arose from the
contrast of these two classes; the solution of philosophy and the
satisfaction of our philosophical curiosity would be reached only by
the reduction of one class to the other. Fichte calls the philosopher
a dogmatist who seeks to reduce voluntary ideas, which compose
our individual consciousness, to the necessitated series. Spinoza
sought to do this, and the philosophy of Spinoza depressed Fichte as
intolerable. But there is the alternative to the philosopher to explain
the necessitated series by voluntary consciousness. This is idealism.
The moment a man begins to reflect, he must choose between dogmatism,
_i. e._ necessitarianism, and idealism. He is always confronted by an
Either-Or, a choice between freedom and necessity.
=The Moral Awakening.= In his early life Fichte saw to his despair no
escape from the philosophy of necessity. When he read the _Critique of
Pure Reason_ a great light came to him. He flung himself immediately
upon the side of idealism. He saw that necessitated events were
phenomena, and therefore the creations of consciousness. Consciousness
cannot be the slave of necessitated events. Kant’s philosophy was to
Fichte a work of art of the free spirit. The world cannot contain man
and compel him. Man may be oppressed by the world, but he can see that
such oppression is not real. In his _Vocation of Man_ (1800) he gave
in autobiographical terms the story of the awakening and development
of the individual mind. At first one is overwhelmed by the sight of
the necessitated events of the world. Next he comes to believe that
all events are mere appearances, and he is weighed down by the still
greater despair that no reality whatever exists. Finally he finds the
rock of hope amid the sea of appearances. He finds an ultimate and
irreducible fact in the categorical imperative of duty. “Thou must”
is above necessity, above the phenomena that are always reducible to
other phenomena. Duty means the freedom of my inner life. That there
is always lodged in me a duty to perform, shows that I am superior to
phenomena, that I am a citizen of the supersensuous world. This “heaven
does not lie beyond the grave, but already encompasses us, and its
light dawns in every human heart.” “That I myself am a freely acting
individual must be the fundamental thought of every true philosopher.”
Every one must therefore choose between dogmatism and idealism, if
he would not fall a victim to skeptical despair. Two motives will
determine one’s choice: one theoretical, the other practical. The
primary motive is the practical one, and since dogmatism and idealism
are equally consistent systems, man’s choice will depend mainly on
the manner of man he is. If the individual has a high sense of duty,
he will be disposed to believe in his moral control over all his
experiences, however much they may seem to be necessitated. Conscious
freedom will seem to him to be the only satisfactory explanation of
practical life. But then there will be the additional theoretical
motive. The man that chooses either dogmatism or idealism must
theoretically make his world consistent. The dogmatist cannot explain
the conscious facts in terms of determinism; but, Fichte thinks, the
idealist can explain the necessitated facts in terms of consciousness.
At any rate the idealist has the task of rethinking his scientific
knowledge.
=The Central Principle in Fichte’s Philosophy.= How does Fichte attempt
to draw up a consistent theory so that he can overcome the dualism
between the necessitated facts of physical nature and the free states
of consciousness? As an idealist he must rethink the knowledge of
science. But how is this to be done? What principle will he place
at the central point of consciousness, so to illuminate the manifold
problems of life that life’s dualism will prove to be only apparent
after all? Here as answer we find the outcome of Fichte’s struggle with
his own nature. He believed that the principle of the true philosophy
of life comes from the study of consciousness. The nature of the Ego
is the subject for philosophical study. What is the essence of the
Ego or the personality? It is activity, will, vitality; not intellect
and changelessness. But can we not get beneath the activity of the
personality and ask, Why does it act? Yes, _because it ought_. When we
have said this we have said all. The essence of the vitality of the Ego
is moral obligation. _Ought_ is the foundation of life; it is ultimate
ground of existence. If we ask why there is an ought, the only answer
is, there ought to be. The duty exists that you and I shall have a
duty. In order to be, the Ego must act; and it acts in response to duty.
This activity is free activity. The Ego is unconditioned because it
is acting out its own nature. Thus when Fichte is talking about the
Ego, the ought, the moral law or freedom, he is talking about the same
thing in different guises. Fichte placed moral freedom as the central
principle of metaphysics and tried to rethink the world of necessitated
experiences in terms of moral freedom. He attempted to construct a
monistic view of life, of which the free moral personality should be
its inner vitality. Monism and liberty was Fichte’s war-cry. Reality is
in us; there can be no reality independent of us. The morally free Ego
is the central principle of life.
Such a message to the German people would appeal to two sides of their
nature. It would appeal as a metaphysics to the mysticism in their
blood; it would find also a practical response in the humanitarian and
revolutionary spirit of that revolutionary time. Be up and be doing,
for reality is not what people commonly think it is. Your environment
is only apparently an independent existence beyond your control.
Reality is not static. Rethink it and make it dynamic. Not being, but
acting, and free acting, is reality. Such was Fichte’s sermon to the
Germans of his day. His theory can be stated in the terms of the Greek
Heracleitus, “All things change,” provided the change be thought of
as moral activity. To philosophize was to Fichte to think the universe
as free moral activity, to see inactivity nowhere, to free ourselves
from dualism and to participate in the universal freedom. Freedom is
higher than truth. Existence is derived from thought in action, and
thus our existence and our environment may be shaped by us. Thought is
essentially action, and we shall educate the world only through our own
activity.
=The Moral World.= Fichte had a philosophy, the principles of which he
repeated over and over again as a kind of habit. He was a man of few
but great ideas. He was inspired by some general conceptions which he
did not carefully elaborate. His philosophy can be expressed in few
words, and his point of view is not difficult to feel. Nevertheless,
there is great difficulty in restating his meaning. He maintained that
Kant’s early philosophy was not truly Kantian, and that he, Fichte,
represented the true Kant. In taking this stand he was obliged to do
two things: to explain away the thing-in-itself, and to rethink the
world of necessitated nature in terms of the activity of the morally
free Ego.
If we start from the heart of existence――the active Ego――the world
spreads out before us as a system of reason which has been created by
the activity of the Ego. On this account Fichte’s philosophy has been
called subjective idealism. In such a scheme of things there is no
place for the Kantian thing-in-itself. All Being is only an extended
product of the active Ego and the object of its knowledge. The Ego acts
because it must, and then reflects upon its activity. Its knowledge of
its activity is in grades from sense-perception to complete knowledge.
Now Kant had referred sensations to the thing-in-itself as their source.
But this is unnecessary, since sensations are only the activity of
the Ego. Sensations are the groundless, free act of the Ego. They
appear to be “given,” because they appear to be foreign and coming
from without. They are, however, only the lowest form of the activity
of the personality――they are unconscious self-limitation of the Ego.
The sensations have no ground that determines them, but as the lowest
form of the activity of the Ego they are absolutely free. Thus the
thing-in-itself becomes superfluous, since it is not necessary to
account for sensations.
The next task for Fichte is to rethink the series of necessitated
events of physical nature. If we will look at these events from the
point of view of the willing Ego, which is reality, they will be seen
to be products of purposive action. Together they will make a world
of connected rational activities rather than a mechanical system. The
necessity in nature is not causal, but teleological. It is not the
necessity linking the series of events together, but rather the linking
of each event to the acting Ego, and thus the connecting of the whole
series. Take the idealist’s position and this illuminating thought will
come to you: a thing is not because something else is, but in order
that something else may be. As moral beings we have tasks. As moral
beings we are the impersonation of duty, and duty is reality. These
phenomena that so trouble us because we think them necessitated are
only contingent upon the performance of our duty. The existence of
one thing is not to be explained by the existence of another, but by
the existence of me, an Ego. Phenomena are little steps toward great
ends. When I rethink the world I see no causal relationship, but the
teleological means for the achievement of purposes by striving souls.
History and nature――these are the material created by human beings for
their own activity. We not only create our human drama, but we create
also the stage upon which it is performed. Being is not the cause of
Doing, but Being is created for the sake of Doing. Whatever is, is to
be explained by what ought to be. “The world is the theatre of moral
action.” “Nature is the sensible material of duty.”
=God and Man.= If Fichte regarded the human personality from this moral
height, he would naturally give a new meaning to God, the absolute
reality. God is not a substance, a something that “is.” God is the
universal moral process, the moral world-order. God is the Universal
Ego, a free, world-creating activity. God was conceived by Fichte as
Matthew Arnold’s “something not ourselves that makes for righteousness.”
When I find in myself that duty is reality and not this or that
fixed and crystallized thing, when I find that my real self is moral
functioning and not a tangible form of flesh and bones, then I take
the next step. I then find that God is universal duty, universal moral
functioning, in which I am participating. We are not only part of
God――yea, we are He. As the Holy Writ says, “Ye are Gods.” The absolute
Ego manifests Itself in our poor finite Egos. How dignified our humble
lot is made by thinking that in our acting, God is acting! We are
fighting God’s battle, and His victory is not won except as we win.
Duty in us is the clarion voice of God, and we are persons so far as
we express that voice. It matters little whether I speak of my own duty
or the moral purpose of the world. They are the same thing.
This enjoined labor upon every rational soul to perform his duty of
reaching high ideals, through his humble tasks, of “fighting the good
fight and keeping the faith,” is to Fichte the meaning of coming to a
consciousness of one’s self. What is myself, my real self? It is not
this phenomenal existence with its appearance of necessity. It is the
eternal and everlasting duty within me. What is it to think myself?
It is to think my duty; and to think duty is to think God. When I
come to consciousness of myself, the cosmic order is coming so far to
self-consciousness. Reality is so far attained. History is the record
of this process of the moral order coming to self-consciousness.
In his later teaching Fichte succumbed to the victorious Spinozism
of the period. He conceived God as an Ego whose infinite impulse is
directed toward Himself; he conceived finite things as products of
this infinitely active consciousness. The finite products find their
vocation in imitating the infinite producer, which imitation consists
not in the activity of producing other finite things through the
categorical imperative, but in the “blessed life” of sinking into the
infinite.
=What a Moral Reality involves.= Since reality is this process of
moral development, its conditions will arise out of itself and be
its own creation. Since the world is reason coming to itself, it must
develop its own conditions out of its original task. All the acts of
history must be explained as the original “deed-act,” as Fichte calls
it. Fichte thought that the whole business of philosophy consists in
showing what is involved in this original “deed-act” of consciousness,
this attempt of consciousness to think itself. Since self-consciousness
is reality, this will be the same as showing what reality involves.
1. In the first place, consciousness always involves the consciousness
of something else. To use Fichte’s technical language, the Ego posits
itself (since it is a moral process) and in the same act it posits a
non-Ego (which is the necessary object of consciousness). “The absolute
Ego asserts a distinguishable Ego against a distinguishable non-Ego.”
It is like a boy who feels the call to become a lawyer. He asserts
himself in that call, and at the same time in that assertion he creates
his life’s career. His career in the law is his non-Ego. Both the
Ego and the non-Ego are creations of that absolute Ego, which is the
ever surging duty or God. While both the Ego and the non-Ego are the
creations of that absolute Ego, which is cosmic duty or God, yet each
limits the other. Ego and non-Ego are correlative terms; both originate
in the free act of God. The world is, therefore, the creation of
the real self as the condition of its own activity. It even creates
its sensations as the given materials of its knowledge. The world is
the material of duty put into sense forms. While we create matter in
order that we may be active in it, the spatial and temporal forms, its
categories, limit our activities.
2. In the second place, this awakening of the Ego to a consciousness
of itself involves a curious contradiction. Duty is by nature
contradictory. Duty calls me to know myself and to perform my task,
and yet in that call duty prevents the task from being performed. In
attempting to know duty completely I am always under the condition of
an opposing and limiting non-Ego. The non-Ego is essential to the Ego
and at the same time thwarts the Ego’s full knowledge of itself. So
long as the non-Ego exists, no complete knowledge of myself is possible.
A limiting non-Ego makes the Ego limited, and therefore prevents
complete knowledge and fulfillment of duty. Duty calls upon us to
perform a task, but under conditions such that it cannot be performed.
So long as the boy strives in his legal profession, duty appears; but
so long is duty rendered incomplete. Moral progress is endless, but
that only shows how contented we must be with the process of striving
and not with some static condition. To strive morally is reality; the
goal is nowhere. The contradiction is seen in the eternal contrast
between what is and what ought to be, between the moral task and the
actual performance. We are under the requirement to perform, and in the
requirement is the restraint. The dialectic process is endless. First
there is the stage which Fichte calls the Thesis in the call of the
absolute Ego. The next stage is the Antithesis, seen in the mutually
limiting Ego and non-Ego. The next stage is the Synthesis, in which
some accomplishment is gained, but which becomes only the Thesis for
another Antithesis; and so on infinitely. The terms Thesis, Antithesis,
and Synthesis are important, for they are employed by Fichte’s
successors, Schelling and Hegel.
=Romanticism.=[61] “We seek the plan of nature in the outside world.
We ourselves are this plan. Why need we traverse the difficult roads
through physical nature? The better and purer road lies within our own
mind.” (Novalis.)
Romanticism was a great European movement which lasted about a century
from 1750 to 1850; and it would be perfectly justifiable to speak of
the intellectual period in Germany from Lessing to Heine as Romanticism.
Rousseau and the French Revolutionists, Ossian, Scott, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wagner were in the forefront of
this world-wide movement. The Storm and Stress Period was a phase of
it; and so even was the Period of Classicism that followed. Goethe and
Schiller were Romanticists, and Classicism was only an episode in their
lives. The Period of German Classicism (1787–1805) was different from
the Classicism of the seventeenth century, because it was thoroughly
infected with Romantic germs. If one is to take account of the
different phases of German thought after Lessing, one mentions first
the Storm and Stress Period, then Classicism, and then the Romantic
movement proper from 1795 to 1850. Some of the literary names connected
with the Romantic movement have already been mentioned,――Richter, Tieck,
♦Wackenroder, Novalis, the Schlegels, Schiller, and Goethe. Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel are the philosophers of this Romantic movement and
embody its spirit in different degrees. The true philosophical exponent
of it is Schelling.
Romanticism is an accidental and inadequate name for this world-wide
literary and philosophical movement. In general it means the exalting
of the individual, “who admits no law above himself.” The Romantic
individuality is dominated by unrestrained fancy, is animated by
feeling and passion, and prefers the vague and mystical to the clear
and defined. In literature Romanticism is contrasted with Classicism.
The Classicist emphasizes the type, the Romanticist the individual. The
Classicist defers to traditional form and law; the Romanticist has no
common canon even with other Romanticists except the right to disagree.
The only common principle among Romanticists is subjective――the truth
of the individual intuitions, which in the case of the historical
Romanticists found expression in the play of fiercely egoistic
wills seeking self-realization. The historical Romantic movement
was a passionate and mighty reaction against the previous shallow
intellectual life with its narrow conventions. Romanticism was a revolt
against the period of the Enlightenment, which scorned what it could
not define. These Romanticists were discontented with typical ideas
and with logical reasoning about them. They challenged the universe,
because it was not obedient to their egoistic cravings.
It is very clear what the dangers as well as the greatness of this
German Romanticism were. The dangers of the movement lay within itself,
in its aristocratic exclusiveness, its reluctance to face the forces
of evil, its lack of strength and of firmness of character. Yet the
age itself may be largely responsible for these. Its strength lay also
within, in its deepening of self-consciousness, in its rejuvenating and
ennobling the whole expanse of being, in its intellectual conception of
man’s most intimate relations to himself, to his companions, and to the
world around him. Sometimes, indeed, the spiritual force of this small
band shows itself quite capable of strong action in the outer world.
Napoleon himself ascribed his downfall not primarily to diplomacy or
to the bayonet, but to the resistance of the German Ideologists.
=Goethe as a Romanticist.= We have already spoken of the resurrection
of Spinoza’s doctrine and its acceptance as a model by this time. The
Romanticists, following Spinoza, conceived of nature as a unity in
which the divine manifests itself in its fullness. Nature is Reason
in Becoming. So fitting, indeed, for the time was Spinoza’s pantheism
that Goethe, the literary exponent of the period, made it the central
principle of his poetic thought. Goethe can be understood only as the
Romantic Spinoza. The philosophy that underlies Goethe’s work is noted
here as an example of the Romantic movement.
Like all the Romantic philosophy, Goethe’s philosophy was a personal
revelation, and not a formulated doctrine for universal application.
Like all the Romanticists, Goethe was a highly strung personality, and
his philosophy was conceived to be true by himself only for himself.
He did not look upon the trivialities and the conventions of life as
mere limitations of his personality, but as a fall from truth. _Truth
is realized by man when he is in vital interchange with the universe._
Therefore Goethe was in full agreement with Spinoza in longing for
emancipation from human littleness and in his desire for the infinite.
Goethe differed from Spinoza’s pantheism in his own way; for Goethe
conceived man to have an independent function in the infinite. Man
makes his contribution to history and does not merely passively
appropriate the products of the world around himself. Man reacts upon
the world, he resists it, and becomes alive to the joy of it.
To Goethe the world had a soul, because the world gives clearness
to the human soul. Nature shows how closely she is related to us by
disclosing to us her inmost soul. Here in Goethe is a mysticism in
modern garb, an artistic view of life. Besides, the world expresses
human experiences on a large scale, and the way to nature’s heart
is not to go behind nature-phenomena, but through them. The facts
of nature are real, and our own life is like nature. Both move in
prescribed orbits, but both are empty if the connection between them
is severed. We find therefore the secret of our life by returning
to nature, and this is a return to the spiritual whole of things.
At different times Goethe was pantheist, naturalist, and theist.
He believed that all finite life is divine, and is a synthesis of
opposite forces, in which individuality has a place. Humanity is ruled
by necessary types, yet within them the individual is free. Such free
individuals take their objects from the world, spiritually endow these
objects, and thus make art and ethics very close to nature.
=Romanticism in Philosophy.=[62] The Romantic movement was
intrinsically speculative and naturally had its representatives
in philosophy, which is systematic speculation. Fichte and Hegel,
but especially Schelling, are the philosophical exponents of the
revolutionary spirit of the age. All three were demonstrators
in philosophy of the truths and dreams held by ardent souls, but
Schelling’s system reflected the spiritual upheaval. Fichte belongs
to the Romantic movement inasmuch as he strives for the infinite, but
Fichte separates himself from that movement by distinguishing between
consciousness and its content. The true Romantic spirit appears in
Schelling――the impulse to revel in intuitions, in symbolism, to run
riot first in nature and art, and afterwards in religion. The Romantic
philosophers were friends and sympathizers of the Romanticists, living
in the same city, sometimes in the same house, and were members of the
same spiritual family. But it must be remembered that there was not
one Romanticist leader with many imitators, but that each Romanticist
followed out his own line. When we speak of Schelling as a Romantic
philosopher we mean that he gives the speculative tendency of the many
Romanticists his own clearer definition and formulation. The background
of Schelling’s philosophy is the source of the Romanticists’ motives.
It may be stated under three headings:――
(1) Man’s ideal is to expand his soul until it becomes one with God.
(2) There is no Thing-in-Itself. The finite world is only a limitation
of the ego.
(3) Man and the nature world are essentially one. Man has a knowledge
of nature when he has a knowledge of himself. In reading his own
history he reads the history of nature. The Romanticist drew a veil
from the face of nature and found there his own spirit.
=The Life and the Writings of Schelling= (1775–1854).[63] Of
Schelling’s long life of seventy-nine years, the fifteen years from
1795 to 1810 were the most important productive period. Like Berkeley,
he was a many-sided genius, and began to write brilliantly in his early
years. He published his first treatise at sixteen years, and before he
was twenty he published several essays of distinct merit on Fichte’s
philosophy, the success of which led to his call to the chair of
philosophy at Jena. All his technical works were written in an academic
atmosphere. After 1812 he, so fond of writing, became silent. He even
ceased to deliver lectures at the University of Berlin when he found
that notes of them were published without his consent. Hegel, in
commenting on Schelling, said that Schelling liked to carry on his
thinking in public.
Schelling and Fichte may be studied together because they are alike
in developing one side of Kant’s doctrine. But their careers were
very different. Contrasted with Fichte’s life of poverty, struggle,
self-created antagonisms, long-delayed victory, and devotion to
rigorous morality, is Schelling’s life of early academic success,
prosperity, and romantic friendships. The life of Kant was one of inner
development and outward routine; that of Fichte of early formulated
thought and external warfare. Schelling’s life, on the other hand, does
not strike us as one of development, either externally or subjectively.
It was rather a series of changes. He looked upon his own philosophy
as a development, but its linkage is thread-like, due to his wonderful
imagination and mobility of thought. With his great suggestive
power, he depended more upon analogy than logic; his argument and
his philosophy lie before us as if ever in process of continuous
readaptation. Schelling possessed all the fervor and insight of
the Romanticists, and all their egoism and caprice. It is even more
difficult to characterize his philosophy than that of Spinoza. He was
monist, pantheist, and evolutionist; parallelist, theosophist, and
believer in freedom; he accepted the doctrine of the Trinity; in all
this he was the true Romanticist. Schelling’s philosophy of nature
is intelligible only in the light of the great artistic ferment of
his time and as the expression of his strong artistic personality.
His ideal of artistic insight into nature became for him his idea
of science. Reality is nature, and nature is a work of art, self
composed and self renewing. The endeavor of Schelling was to fashion
all human existence into artistic form. At first he looked upon nature
as rational, but later he was impressed with its irrationality.
Schelling’s life may be divided into six periods on the basis of the
changes of his thought:――
1. _Earlier Period_ (1775–1797). Schelling was the son of the
chaplain of a cloister school near Tübingen, and was educated in
history and speculative science in the university of that town. After
his university education he held the position of tutor in a nobleman’s
family at Leipsic for two years. During this time he listened to
lectures at the University of Leipsic on medicine and physics. Before
he was twenty he had published several notable essays on speculative
matters, among them _The Ego as a Principle in Philosophy_; and in 1797
_Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature_. These led to his call to a chair
in the University of Jena. Schelling was early acquainted with the
doctrine of Leibnitz, but the most powerful influences upon him at this
time were Kant and, especially, Fichte.
2. _The Philosophy of Nature_ (1797–1800). Schelling was called to Jena
through the influence of Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte; and it was here
that he completed what he had begun at Leipsic――the supplementation
of Fichte’s philosophy with a _Philosophy of Nature_ (written 1798).
He was colleague of Fichte and afterwards a helpful friend of Hegel.
Jena was then the centre of the Romantic movement, the moving spirit
of which was Caroline, the wife of August Schlegel. Schelling was very
successful at Jena as lecturer, and his publications at this time were
very many.
3. _The Transcendental Philosophy_ (1800–1801). While still at Jena
he felt the influence of Schiller, who had united the ideas of Kant
and Goethe into an Æsthetic Idealism. Under this influence Schelling
reconstructed the Fichtean philosophy of the Ego on a Romantic basis.
4. _The Philosophy of Identity_ (1801–1804). Schelling now undertook to
put his recast philosophy of Fichte upon the basis of Spinozism. This
caused a break between him and Fichte and Hegel. In 1803 he married
Caroline, the divorced wife of August Schlegel and the idol of the
Romantic circle, and the same year accepted a call to the University
of Wurzburg, where he remained three years (1803–1806).
5. _The Philosophy of Freedom and God_ (1804–1809). The doctrine of
Schelling now became mystical and showed the influence of Boehme. In
1806 Schelling was called to the Academy of Munich.
6. _The Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation_ (1809–1854). This may
be well called Schelling’s period of silence, so far as publication was
concerned. He who had poured forth his thoughts in print now became
averse to publishing anything. He accepted the call to Munich in 1806
and remained there, excepting his seven years at Erlangen, thirty-five
years (until 1841). During this time he was much under the influence
of Aristotle, neo-Platonism, and the Gnostics. He had first an official
position at the Academy of Munich; then he spent seven years as teacher
at the University of Erlangen (1820–1827); and in 1827 he entered the
newly founded University of Munich. In 1841 he was called to Berlin to
counteract the Hegelian movement, and he became a member of the Academy
with the privilege of lecturing at the University. He was now sixty-six,
and he spent the remaining years in elaborating his system. He died in
1854.
=A Brief Comparison of Fichte and Schelling as Philosophers.= We have
already spoken of the relation of Fichte and Schelling to the Romantic
movement. What is their relation as philosophers? Fichte’s idealism
is commonly called subjective because of his emphasis upon the Ego
at the expense of the non-Ego. In non-technical terms Fichte gave no
adequate philosophy of nature; for his assumption was that nature is
only material for the reason. Nature to Fichte was only the stage upon
which the reason could act. Fichte’s keen insight into human affairs
blinded him to the meaning of nature. The contribution of Schelling to
the philosophy of nature was not therefore unwelcomed by Fichte; for
he saw that such a philosophy could easily be developed from his point
of view, provided nature be regarded as a unity in the service of the
reason. _In brief, the development of Schelling over Fichte was this_:
(1) Schelling added a science of nature to Fichte’s science of mind;
(2) Then he transformed Fichte’s philosophy of mind into an æsthetic
philosophy of mind; (3) Then he tried in several successive attempts
to find a common metaphysical ground for his own philosophy of nature
and his recast philosophy of mind. While the method of Schelling was
not different from that of Fichte, his general motive was different;
for to Schelling the universe must not be regarded as the creation of
an active moral Ego, but as having an existence of its own. While for
Fichte to think is to produce, for Schelling it is to reproduce. To
the investigating mind of Schelling experience and observation are
the sources of knowledge; yet it must not be inferred that Schelling’s
philosophy was inductive or that he _derived_ the Ego from the non-Ego,
as if the Ego had been evolved from the non-Ego. These were the days
before the modern theory of evolution. Mind does not have its source
in nature; on the contrary, mind and nature have a common source in
the Reason. They have a parallel existence and develop according to
the same law. Nature is existing Reason, mind is thinking Reason.
=Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature.= Schelling started with Kant’s
early conception of nature as dynamic――that matter exists through the
interplay of the forces of attraction and repulsion. The human organism
is the highest expression of such dynamic activity. In the world there
is nothing dead. Matter is the lowest expression of dynamic activity;
the vegetable is next, the animal next, and the human brain is the
consummation of this process of productivity. Thus matter on the one
hand and mind on the other are the two poles of reason in nature.
Everything is life movement; everything is the oscillation between two
extremes, the interplay of contrary but correlative forces. In romantic
terms, nature is the Self in Becoming. Nature is a living whole which
manifests itself in an ascending scale of rich and varied forces
between matter and mind.
Such a conception met consistently the demands of this Romantic
period.[64] The high expectations of the physicists of the previous
century had been unfulfilled, for they had not succeeded in obtaining
a purely mechanical explanation of the derivation of life from matter.
Darwin was still to come. Medicine, which was at that time showing
great progress, offered no argument for the mechanical conception of
the world. There had, however, been many discoveries at this time in
electricity and magnetism; and these mysterious qualities seemed to
repudiate the mechanical theory. Vitalism thus usurped the place of
mathematics. Spinoza rather than Galileo was the model of the time.
Nature must be conceived as a unity in which the Divine manifests
itself in its fullness.
All these influences appear in Schelling’s first philosophical
undertaking. He states philosophically what Goethe states poetically.
Nature is not to be described in quantities nor measured by rule.
It transcends measurement. It is to be truly understood only as
productivity having organic life as its goal. Nature is rational life,
not mechanism. Everything has its logically determined place. Schelling
used the natural science of his time to show how the connection of
forces and their transformation into one another were the manifestation
of divine cosmic purpose. The gaps he filled in with teleological
conceptions. He used morphology with the same purpose as Goethe. He
felt the same need of a deeper meaning of nature than mathematics can
give――the need of a rational purposeful meaning. Goethe shows this
in his “Theory of Colors” when he looks upon colors not as atomic
movements, but as something essentially qualitative. Schelling, too,
was not an evolutionist in the modern sense, and he did not regard one
species as derived from another. He thought of species in an ascending
scale, to be sure; but he saw in each only the preliminary stage to the
next, and all as the divine expression. One accomplishment of nature
merely precedes another in time.
The nineteenth century looked back on this Romantic science as merely a
fit of excessive sentiment that has impeded the modern work of serious
investigation. Yet it may safely be said that the nineteenth century
has not settled the question, and that nature will always need a
rational as well as a mechanical explanation.
=Schelling’s Transcendental Philosophy.= _The Philosophy of Nature_
ends with the explanation of sensitivity; and it is there for Schelling
that the philosophy of knowledge begins. When three years later
Schelling was ready to reconstruct Fichte’s philosophy of mind――when he
was ready to break with Fichte――he was influenced by the great change
that had come over the thought of the Jena idealists. This change was
due curiously enough to the philosophy of the intimate friend of Goethe,
the poet Schiller. Here again the proximity of Weimar and Jena was
the cause of the reciprocal influence of philosophy and literature.
Schelling was the first to give this new thought its philosophical
expression. The theory of Schiller is an æsthetic idealism in which
the artistic function supplants the moral law of Fichte and Kant, and
is the fundamental reality of life.
When Schiller[65] reshaped Kant’s moral philosophy he was not
concerned, as might be supposed, merely with æsthetic results, but
with conduct, history, and the whole system of metaphysics. The problem
always uppermost in Schiller’s mind was the place of art and beauty
in the whole system of things. So when he tried to reconcile Kant’s
theoretical reason and Kant’s practical reason, he naturally looked to
art for such reconciliation. What is there that is both necessary and
free? Beauty! “Beauty is freedom in phenomenal appearance.” Æsthetic
contemplation apprehends the beautiful object, and yet in so doing
it transcends all the trammels and bonds of experience. The artistic
ecstasy is freedom in necessity. It is independent of moral as well as
intellectual rules. Beauty is as little an object of sense as of will.
It does not have the quality of need that belongs to sense phenomena,
nor of earnestness that accompanies morality. Sense is obliterated;
the stirrings of the will become silent. That which appears was called
by Schiller the “play impulse.” Toward the education of man Schiller
thus offered art, while Kant had presented religion. Art refines the
feelings, tempers the sensuous will, and makes room for the moral will.
Yet the moral will is not the end; for art is not only the means of
education, but the goal as well. Complete life comes when the conflict
between morality and sense disappears in artistic feeling. “Only as
man plays is he truly man.” The ideal that Schiller formulated for
this Romantic age was the “schöne Seele.” While in the soul of man the
Kantian rigoristic moral law exists when sense stands in opposition to
duty, the “beautiful soul” does not know conflict because its nature
is ennobled by its own inclination. This æsthetic humanism Schiller
expresses for his time in antithesis to Kant’s and Fichte’s rigorism.
Goethe impersonated this ideal in his life and represented it in his
works. The Romanticists carried this conception to its extreme both
in their practice and in their literary productions. Thus they came to
stand for an aristocracy of culture, and in them “ethical geniality”
culminated. The Romanticist contrasted himself with the “Philistine”
who lives according to rules. The Romanticist would live out his own
individuality as valuable in itself. He substituted the endless play of
the imagination for Fichte’s moral law, and was frequently very wayward
and capricious. This is seen in Schlegel’s _Lucinde_. Schleiermacher
the preacher tried to preserve the purity of Schiller’s doctrine.
In his construction of his own philosophy of mind Schelling adopted
completely Schiller’s theory of the æsthetic reason in what he called
_Transcendental Idealism_. He looked upon the Fichtean antithesis
between theoretical and practical reason as the same as that between
the unconscious and the conscious activity of the Self. Theoretically,
or from the point of view of the understanding, consciousness is
determined by the unconscious; practically, or from the point of view
of the will, the unconscious is the creation of consciousness. The
practical or willing Self re-shapes the products of the nature world.
For a thinking being is not merely a reflector or re-presenter of
events as they occur in the nature world――as nature produces them.
Thinking man is not merely passive. He re-shapes and transforms nature
through the freedom of his morality.
But neither the series of passively apprehended events, nor the
series of events transformed by the active moral will, is ever
complete. Neither as a passive product of nature nor as a moral will
is man a perfected being. In either condition man perpetually feels the
contradiction, since he is neither wholly passive nor wholly active.
The antagonism between will and sense is ever present. Man realizes
the fullness of his Ego, when he transcends both will and sense,
both morality and science, in the conscious-unconscious activity of
artistic genius. This is the highest synthesis. In Schelling’s lectures
delivered at Jena on the philosophy of art, after he had written his
_Transcendental Idealism_, he developed and applied this theory and
it determined the subsequent development of æsthetics in the Jena
circle. Kant had previously defined genius as intellect that works like
nature; Schiller had defined it as playing; Schelling looked upon it as
æsthetic reason and the climax of the philosophy of mind. Art, and not
logic, is the instrument by which the reason develops. Artistic reason
is the goal toward which the reason aims.
=The System of Identity.= Schelling published his _Transcendental
Idealism_ in 1800. In the next year he published his _System of
Identity_ in the hope of finding some common ground for his two
preceding points of view. For Nature is not absolute, but is a limited
objective Ego; and Mind is also not absolute, but is also limited,
although subjective. The Self perceives the object as other than itself,
and in subsequent reflection it sees the object as a form of its own
deeper Self. Subject and object, mind and nature, are one in reality.
The question then is, Does the absolute Self exist? Yes, but outside
the conditions of existence and beyond all contradictions. It is itself
the highest condition, the unconditioned condition. But what is the
basis of these two antithetical aspects of life? The most suitable name
that Schelling could give it was Identity or Indifference; for other
names would imply conditions. In this attempt to construct an absolute
Idealism, Schelling shows the influence of Spinoza. Identity reminds
us of Spinoza’s substance,――a reality that is absolutely indifferent
to both mental and nature phenomena, and yet is the reality of both. It
is absolute reason undetermined in its content. It was this turning to
Spinozism on the part of Schelling, that made Hegel break with him and
call his Identity “the night, in which all cows are black.” Schelling
even came so much under the influence of Spinoza as to imitate
Spinoza’s form of presentation in the Ethics. But Schelling regarded
the objective and subjective worlds not after the manner of Spinoza
as independent of each other. On the contrary he looked upon every
phenomenon as both ideal and real, and as having its logical place
according to the degree in which the two elements are combined.
Differences are what constitute phenomena; the Absolute is the
Indifferent. Schelling illustrates this by the magnet, which is itself
an indifference of opposite poles of varying intensity.
In the nature series the objective factor predominates, and in the
mental series the subjective factor. The universe is the most perfect
work of art, the most perfect organism, and the best expression of God.
=Schelling’s Religious Philosophy.= Romanticism took a religious turn
at the beginning of the eighteenth century under the influence of
Schleiermacher.[66] The motive of this movement was the thought that
religious feeling lies below art. Reason can be completed only in
religion, by which is meant not dogma, nor morality, but an æsthetic
relation to the world-ground, a pious feeling of absolute dependence.
It is the feeling of being permeated by the Absolute. Schleiermacher
taught in the true Romantic spirit that religion is an individual
matter and is different from church organization. Thus in this time of
quickly passing shades of imaginative thought Schiller idealized Greece
and Schleiermacher the Middle Ages. Susceptible as he was to every
idea of his time, Schelling embodied this teaching of Schleiermacher
in his later teaching. With the other Romanticists he expected that the
concept of religion would furnish a final basis for the solution of all
problems, overcome all antitheses in an inner harmony, and bring about
the eternal welfare of all.
Schelling now no longer called the Absolute Indifference, but God
or Infinity, and he conceived Him as possessing modes and potencies.
In the development of this new line of thought he introduced the
neo-Platonic doctrine of Ideas as God’s intuitions of Himself, and as
intermediaries with the world. Later Schelling passed through another
change, and this doctrine grew under his hands into a theosophy and a
theory of the irrational. The influence of Schelling was eclipsed by
Hegel after Schelling retired to Munich; and Schelling saw his rival
in control of German academic thought for many years. But he had the
satisfaction in his old age of being called by the authorities to
Berlin as the official spokesman against the Hegelian doctrine.
=Hegel and the Culmination of Idealism.= We have divided the
philosophers after Kant into two groups; (1) Fichte, Schelling and
the Romanticists, and Hegel; (2) Herbart and Schopenhauer. In this
first group, which we have at present under our eye, Fichte is the
ethical exhorter, Schelling the Romantic nature-lover, and Hegel the
intellectual systematizer. Fichte’s conception of Reality is always
an ethical ideal unrealized, in whose cause men are called to fight
for conviction’s sake. Schelling points to the beauty of nature’s
productivity as a reality that lies hidden in mystery. Both these
theories show profound insight into life and both are expressive
of the period in its attitude toward life. Fichte is the type of
the Puritan idealist; Schelling the type of the sentimentalist. Yet
both, even from the point of view of the Idealism of the period, were
partial expressions. Idealism was a social movement; and like all
social movements must run its course. It would not stop until it had
culminated in a full and systematic formulation. This was found in the
philosophy of Hegel. The social forces of the eighteenth century had
been gathering a momentum, which naturally came to a magnificent climax.
On its political side this movement culminated under the leadership of
the greatest of all political idealists, Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1815
at Waterloo. On its intellectual side it reached its completion in the
philosophical system of Hegel. Hegel died in 1831, and his intellectual
kingdom, like the political kingdom of Napoleon, was immediately
shattered. But the observer of the currents of history will find much
significance in the stubborn persistence of the intellectual phase of
the Idealistic movement long after its political dominance had gone.
Hegel ruled the intellectual world of Germany from Berlin for sixteen
years after the battle of Waterloo, and his philosophy was officially
recognized by the Berlin authorities. This stubbornness of the realm of
ideas can be exemplified throughout history, for it requires more than
one political earthquake to demolish a well-organized intellectual
theory.
Hegel may be said to have drawn the scattered threads of the preceding
idealists into a system. Like them, he firmly grounded his philosophy
on the Kantian epistemology. Like them also, he sought to find absolute
reality by means of the conscious Ego. This only means that all three
were idealists. But Fichte’s conception of the Ego was only partially
formed. It could not be an absolute reality, since it needed to be
confronted by a non-Ego in order to assert itself and live. Hegel was
discerning enough to see that Reason was more fundamental than either
action, purpose, or consciousness itself. To him both the Ego and
the non-Ego were in essence Reason. The Ego could not know that it
had created the non-Ego unless the Ego was in the beginning rational.
To distinguish the Ego from the non-Ego, there must be some ground of
similarity upon which both are based. In his search for this ground
Hegel at first allied himself with Schelling. The brilliancy of
Schelling’s thought dazzled him. Then he saw that Schelling only
led back to the abstract universal of Spinoza. A mystical “black
night” Identity was not actual nor did it explain anything actual.
It merely said that the Absolutely Real is unknowable. This is too
easy a solution of the complexity of life. Having neither meaning nor
actuality, it cannot explain the actual concrete and meaningful things.
The Absolutely Real must be a universal, but it must also be concrete.
History has been the Reason in its toil and travail. The Absolutely
Real must include history and it must be Reason. With Fichte the “deed
act” had primacy, with Schelling the æsthetic feeling, with Hegel the
Reason as an articulated series of concepts.
=Why Hegel remains to-day the Representative of Kant.= There were
several reasons why Hegel remains the representative of Kant:――
1. He had more learning and ability than the other post-Kantians.
2. His own interpretation was an interpretation of facts. By the other
post-Kantians things are not represented as they are, but as they have
been transformed. Hegel, however, was a respecter of things as they
are. Hegel was possessed of no sentiment. He was a satirist; although
a romanticist, he was an encyclopædic historian as well. He was a
philosopher in that old-time sense of wishing to know the nature of
things.
3. He was fortunate in his application of Kant’s doctrine to evolution.
It proved to be the beginning of the movement which appeared later in
Darwin. People were going to be evolutionists in the nineteenth century,
and Hegel played into their hands and helped evolution.
4. Hegel gave to his philosophy the air of orthodoxy. In the nineteenth
century there was a desire for Christianity that was orthodox. Hegel
offered no objection to allowing that interpretation to be placed upon
his philosophy.
=The Life and Writings of Hegel= (1770–1831).[67] The slow movement of
Hegel’s diction is paralleled by his gradual development in thought. He
was the most painstaking metaphysician that ever completed a philosophy.
While he was lacking in the painful hesitation that made Kant consume
so much time in introductions as to have little for the body of his
discourses and none for the completion of his philosophy, he was
nevertheless a plodding, careful, and prosaic thinker. As a boy he
showed these traits without showing any predominant taste or capacity.
“He was that uninteresting character――the good boy who takes prizes
in every class, including the prize for good conduct.” As a man he
was shrewd and reserved, overbearing to his inferiors and opponents,
and even patronizing to his superiors. He was the type of the pedantic
teacher who brooks no opposition. Like Kant’s, his life was entirely
academic, but unlike Kant’s, his experience was in many university
circles――Tübingen, Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin. His thirteen years at
Berlin were remarkable, not only for his philosophical dominance, but
for his influence in society and court. The official recognition of
his philosophy by the Berlin authorities was a detriment in the end;
for immediately after his death, in 1831, it lost its influence. Hegel
had succeeded Fichte at Berlin, and by the irony of fate, Schelling,
already an old man in Vienna, was called by the Berlin authorities to
combat Hegel’s influence. Hegel’s followers, after his death, became
engaged in angry disputes over their interpretations of their master’s
philosophy. His philosophy was attacked by Herbart. The intellectual
world turned away from him to empirical discoveries and the doctrine
of evolution. In twenty years Hegel’s influence was insignificant, and
to-day his name is scarcely mentioned in the lecture room of a German
university. His influence is, however, growing and powerful in England
and the United States. Still it must be said that even in Germany
no one has so dominated the direction of jurisprudence, sociology,
theology, æsthetics, and history (a science which Hegel himself
created). Hegel’s erudition, his ability to systematize, his power
of discrimination, are sufficient to explain such influence. The
illumination that his philosophy gives, lies less in his metaphysical
theory than in his application of it to history and tradition. He won
adherents, not by his abstruse arguments that so few can understand,
but by illustration; not by his demonstration of the Absolute, but by
showing how that Absolute is what the religious devotee seeks, what
the moralist presupposes and the historian recognizes. In carrying out
his theory in detail he arbitrarily fitted his facts to his theory,
especially in the philosophy of nature, the history of philosophy, and
history. In the realm of pure thought, where conceptual facts are dealt
with, this is not so apparent. He was successful, for example, in the
science of æsthetics.
Hegel’s literary style is difficult, and his technicalities are almost
barbarous. He uses philosophical and common terms with meanings to
suit himself. He loves paradoxical phrases, and is pedantic in his
insistence on systematic arrangement.
1. _Formative Period_ (1770–1796). Hegel was born at Stuttgart in 1770,
and in the years between 1788 and 1793 he studied philosophy, theology,
and the classics in the University of Tübingen. Among his companions
there were Schelling and Hölderlin. From 1793 to 1796 he was a tutor in
Switzerland, where he made a further study of Kant.
2. _Formulation of his Philosophy_ (1796–1806). Hegel formulated his
philosophy for the first time in the four years (1796–1800) of his life
at Frankfort, where he was acting in the capacity of tutor. In 1801
he became privat-docent at Jena through Schelling’s recommendation. He
edited a philosophical journal with Schelling, and the two were friends
so long as Hegel found Schelling’s assistance of value to himself.
When, in 1803, Schelling left Jena, Hegel began to criticize his former
friend’s philosophy. Hegel was appointed professor of philosophy at
Jena in 1805.
3. _Development of his Philosophy_ (1806–1831).
1806. He wrote the _Phänomenologie_, which was published in 1807.
1807. The university was discontinued after the battle of Jena,
and Hegel went to Bamberg to edit a newspaper.
1807–1815. Hegel was at Nuremberg as teacher in its gymnasium,
and in 1811, at the age of forty-one, he married.
1812–1813. He published his _Logic_.
1816–1817. He was professor of philosophy at Heidelberg. He
published his _Encyclopædia_, which consists of three parts:
Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Mind. This was
enlarged in 1827.
1818. Hegel succeeded Fichte at Berlin, where he met with marked
success, and where he exercised a very wide influence. When
Hegel came to Berlin his philosophical theory was already
formulated, and his thirteen years at Berlin were spent in
illustrating and verifying it in history.
1831. At the height of his fame, he died of cholera.
=Realism, Mysticism, and Idealism.= It will not be amiss at this
point to contrast three of the great types of human thought,――Realism
and Mysticism with the Idealism of which Hegel was the consummate
expression. The Idealistic Period of European thought is confined
within the forty-one years between 1790 and 1831. Moreover it is
a world-wide movement, the philosophical expression of which is
restricted to the German people. Mysticism and Realism represent the
civilizations of longer periods and of many peoples. Mysticism is, for
example, the attitude of mind frequently found in the Middle Ages in
Europe, and may be roughly said to be the philosophy of the Oriental
peoples. Spinoza was a belated mystic and its best European exponent;
and against the revival of Spinoza’s Mysticism during this period Hegel
as an idealist took his stand. Realism has been a popular philosophy
in all civilizations at all times, and it was the irony of fate that
Realism followed directly upon Hegel’s long period of dominance as an
idealist. Modern science is based on Realism, and so, on the whole,
was Greek civilization. In contrast to Realism, Idealism represents a
few years of history and has been confined to a limited civilization,
yet for profundity of insight into the meaning of life Idealism is the
consummation of human reflection.
Since “philosophy lends itself to extended discourse,” it is quite
impossible to contrast these theories briefly in more than a crude
way. From the mystic’s point of view, absolute reality is that which
can be immediately apprehended. However, since immediate intuition is
always undetermined, the mystic’s reality is a very vague and abstract
thing, although for him it is none the less real. Such a reality is
not usually sought in the “world of nature”; for nature objects are
very definite, besides being very transitory. The mystic’s world of
reality is within; therefore God to the mystic is to be found within
the soul and is to be contrasted with the unreality of the world of
sense. There is only one reality, and that is within the soul; all
else is an illusion. Reality is gained by direct knowledge and never
by the process of logical reflection. Mysticism is frequently allied
with æsthetics; the love of God is apparently the same as the love
for a work of art; the immediate intuition that the soul has of God
apparently is the same psychological process as the artistic ecstasy
over a thing of beauty. Both result in the absorption of the soul in
its object, and in the presence of either all else seems illusory.
Now Realism is a theory that is more easily defined than Mysticism. It
is simply the conception of many realities independent of one another
and of the thinking mind. Reality is not one, it is a plurality of
independent things, all of which are independent of the thinking
process. Such realities are not undefined. As in Idealism, our
knowledge of them is a definite matter of reflection; but against
Mysticism, such definite knowledge is proof of their reality.
This can be illustrated by the series 1 + ½ + ¼ + ⅛ ... 2. Let the
number “2” represent the reality or meaning of the infinite series,
which, however far extended, never reaches “2.” Let the series itself
represent the definite processes of phenomenal nature. The Realist
would say that only the increasing series is real, and the “2” is
an unknowable. The Realist admits that the series is fragmentary and
incomplete, but it is quite definite and certainly the best we can
do. It is at least exact and scientific; and the goal of scientific
knowledge belongs to the realm of the attainable. On the other hand the
Mystic maintains that, since exact knowledge attains only the changing
and phenomenal, exact knowledge is illusory. When we cannot attain the
real by effort and sense knowledge, why waste our time in seeking to do
so? Reality is right at hand――in one’s self. To the Mystic the infinite
series of fractions is unreal, because it is and always will be
incomplete. The ideal “2” can be got by direct and intuitive knowledge.
Thus to the Realist the infinite series is real and the goal ”2”
is unreal, while to the Mystic the “2” is real and the fractions of
experience are unreal.
Hegel felt profoundly convinced that neither Realism with its
definite realities nor Mysticism with its undefined goal was an
adequate explanation of the world and life. The truly real must not
only be definite, but it must also be all-inclusive. It must not on
the one hand be incomplete, nor on the other must it be vague. It
must be both the number “2” and the infinite series leading to “2.”
A truly and absolutely real must be the explanation of everything that
happens,――joy, evil, necessity in nature, every least event and change.
In the light of the idealism of Hegel the solutions of the Mystic and
the Realist seem to fade in importance, and the problem of life seems
to grow in significance and meaning.
=The Fundamental Principles of Hegel’s Idealism.= In contrast with
Mysticism and Realism, as well as with the doctrine of Fichte and
Schelling, Hegel tried to formulate a conception of the universe that
would include everything and yet be an organic whole. In what terms can
this world of richness and variety, of coördinations and contradictions,
be conceived as a single whole? How can it be one and still be many?
Hegel saw clearly that this was his problem. The truly absolute must be
a unity, and still be absolute.
There are two fundamental principles upon which his doctrine rests:
(1) _The world must be conceived in terms of consciousness._ To any
one who has studied the principles of psychology, or who has followed
Kant’s epistemological analysis, it is clear that the only real unities
are conscious unities. The characteristic of consciousness is synthesis.
This is what we mean by consciousness, and consciousness is unique in
this. (2) _The world as a conscious whole must be essentially a world
of contradictions._ We must accept contradiction and not consistency
as the fundamental and explanatory principle of life. In science
and our ordinary human problems we try to get results that are
logically consistent. This is useful, but in doing so we do not get
a full explanation. We omit in such calculations life’s negations
and incongruities. But do not inconsistencies and negations and
incongruities exist? They certainly do; everything has its opposite;
and if we will take the pains to observe the processes of thought,
we shall find that thought is fundamentally inconsistent. Why do
we usually regard thought as a self-consistent process? Because our
methods of formal logic are such. In formal logic we reason smoothly
and consistently from the premises to the conclusion. If we look
more deeply into thought, we shall find that such consistency is made
possible by ignoring the inconsistencies necessary to the very being
of thought. The question therefore is not, Can the cosmic whole be
conceived as consistent? but _What is the law of its inconsistencies?_
Let us consider these two principles of the Hegelian philosophy more in
detail.
=The Cosmic Unity.= Hegel insists on the old truth that thought
is self-operating within us. Thought belongs to our nature, yet it
controls our nature. Thought develops consequences without regard
to the will and demands that contradictions shall be solved. It is
not correct to say that we think, but rather that thinking goes on
within us. Thought is the life of the world. Thought is a process which
embraces all things and projects them. Hegel emancipates thought from
all the limitations of human minds. He would make thought objective and
transform reality into thought.
Thus Hegel conceives that this self-operating thought within us
is essentially the reality of the universe. Thought is the great
cosmic undercurrent that includes all things in its sweep. Indeed,
the universe cannot be conceived as a unity unless the universe is
conceived as a cosmic consciousness or reason. The true study of the
nature of the world is cosmic logic, and philosophy becomes in Hegel’s
hands panlogism,――universal logic. Kant restricted the categories of
thought to the human understanding; Hegel universalizes them and they
become categories of the cosmos. For if the reality of the world is
conscious reason, the categories are not only the forms of thought,
but also the modes of being. The categories are, therefore, more
comprehensive than Kant supposed. To use a term from the Middle Ages,
they are “substantial forms.” They are at one and the same time the
forms that mould thought and the stages of eternal creation. The
knowing process and the cosmic process are one and the same――one writ
small and the other writ large. They are not separate from each other,
but are the transformations of one Being. If we would study the cosmic
forms, let us study thought-forms. Logic is really ontology; the study
of the genealogy of thought is the study of Being. The real is reason,
and the reason is real. By reason Hegel does not mean intuition or
even immediate perception, which Fichte and Schelling claimed to
be the fundamental principle of the mind. The reason which Hegel is
talking about is the concept or general notion. All actuality is the
development of the general notion in a necessary and self-creative
movement. History, matter, and thought are exhibitions of the divine
Idea. “All Being is thought realized and all Becoming is a development
of thought.”
Hegel’s philosophy is a monism of reason,――a universalized concept, in
which everything has its divine place. It is an all-embracing system,
moulding every department. Mind and matter are not aspects of a reality
which is behind them, but are the modes of that reality. The cosmic
reason is successively mind and matter, and not the principle of
mind and nature. In Schelling things proceed from the absolute. In
Hegel they are the absolute. The absolute does not exceed things,
but is wholly in them as their organic unity. Everything is under the
conceptual labor of thought. The important thing is to refer all our
complex states to the unifying cosmic concept and have one illuminating
idea. Absolute reason is absolute movement――the perpetual movement
of life. Yet this absolute reason――the reason that refuses to change
according to our likes and dislikes――is its own law and goal. The
cosmos is the law of reason and has as its end its own unfolding
self-consciousness. It is not the purpose of philosophy, according to
Hegel, to tell what the world should be, but to recognize its nature
as rational.
We must, therefore, be careful to distinguish Hegel’s conception of
the unity of God from that other conception of Him as a quantitative,
single, and isolated unity. An isolated and single Being would imply
the existence of other isolated Beings. Such an individual would be
limited by others and dependent upon them. In technical terms sameness
with one’s self implies difference from others. A good example of the
conception of an isolated God can be found in modern theology; such
a God is a unity, but He is only the greatest of the several powers
in the universe. Such an One is not an absolute, for the One to be
absolute must be all that there is. Limitation implies something else.
_Das Wahre ist das Ganze._
But Hegel does not mean by the Oneness of God an aggregation of parts,
nor does he mean a system or arrangement of parts. An aggregation of
parts, however big, is never complete and cannot include all that there
is. An aggregation, even if it includes the past and the present, is
not Absolute. The temporal series points to something else to give
it meaning; and yet Reality must not stand outside any part of the
temporal series. The Absolute Reality must include the temporal series,
and yet the temporal series is not in itself Reality. Neither does
Hegel mean that Reality is a system or society of individuals, whose
knowledge and will imply one another; for such an organization of
individuals also has its meaning in something below it.
The Absolute Reality is a spiritual individual. It is a unifying
consciousness, which is self-moving, subjective, and active. “It is
the Idea that thinks itself and is completely self-identical in its
otherness.” It cannot be abstract thought like Spinoza’s God, for
the Absolute must be actual. Nor does Hegel mean by Reality merely
life or vitality, as Haeckel has conceived it in modern times; for
these, too, are only abstract terms. “It is pure personality which
alone through the absolute dialectic encloses all within itself.”
Reality is an Absolute Cosmic Spirit engaged in its self-discovery and
self-appropriation by means of its own movement; and this movement is
revealed in art, religion, and philosophy. The Absolute is, as Shelley
makes the Earth picture man in _Prometheus Unbound_,
“One harmonious Soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.”
The panorama of _history_ is the progressive knowledge of the
Absolute appearing under successively more adequate forms. _Morality_
is the Absolute in ever enlarging social relations. _Religion_ is the
Absolute in personal relations to man. _Philosophy_ is the Absolute in
reasoned apprehension of himself. The Absolute is not to be conceived
in anthropomorphic terms, but is the world-process realized as an
individual self-consciousness. It is cosmic consciousness become more
significant. It is Being regarded as an individuality and including all
development.
=The Cosmic Law.= If the cosmic unity is a cosmic synthetic
consciousness, it must be subject to the law of reason which is
fundamental in consciousness. The process of consciousness is an
unfolding. It is an evolution, but an evolution that is an unfolding.
Ordinarily biological evolution restricts itself to the particular
type under consideration. It does not take account of the fact that the
growth of one type means the destruction of another. It does not view
nature in a universal way and consider construction and destruction,
action and reaction, equal. It looks upon development as a process
along a tangent or like the infinite series of numbers. But the
destructions, the defeats, the reciprocal retrogressions, must be
accounted for in a truly Absolute consciousness. Evolution is not
therefore an upward advance, but a closed circle. The Absolute is not
therefore a consistency, but includes contradictions; and evolution
cannot truly be interpreted in quantitative but in qualitative
terms, as the unfolding of consciousness. The only way to include
everything in the Absolute is to think of the Absolute as coming to
a consciousness of itself. The Absolute Reality is the same at any
temporal beginning or ending. Its meaning is becoming clearer to
itself alone. Such clearness appears in the clearness with which the
categories which are the forms of any consciousness become related.
The task of philosophy is not to understand these forms together or
_seriatim_, but as moments of a unitary development. They are the links
in the development of Spirit, God, the Idea, or the Absolute.
What is this law of spiritual circular development? What are the
categories of the cosmic Ego? How can the cosmic organism take account
of the contradictions as well as the consistencies of life? The three
necessary categories or three fundamental conceptions of the cosmic
consciousness are “to be,” “to be denied,” “to be transcended,”――Thesis,
its Antithesis, and the Synthesis of the two. In other words they
are Assertion, Contradiction, and Return-to-itself. The cosmic law
is the Law of Negativity. It is a dialectic process in the union of
contradictories, of extremes meeting, of the equality of action and
reaction. In Hegel’s hands contradiction becomes the very principle
of cosmic harmony. It is the struggle of thought to comprehend itself
by using its own contradictory and created experiences for such
comprehension. “The phenomenon is the arising and passing away which
itself does not pass away, but exists in itself. It constitutes
the movement and reality of the life of truth.” The law of human
consciousness is this: Assume the truth of any doctrine. Examine
it and you will find it in some detail asserting not only its own
contradiction or opposite, but also the relation between its assertion
and its contradiction. The truth lies in the assertion that transcends
the two opposites. The law of the cosmic consciousness is the same. Any
stage of history appears in the conscious assurance of the truth of the
principles upon which history is founded. But any such assertion by any
epoch arouses opposition; and the next stage in historical development
is the assertion of principles that synthesize the assertion of the
previous epoch and the opposition to it. The law of consciousness
drives history to oppose its own self-assertions and then to a deeper
apprehension of itself in a higher assertion, until it finds rest in
the knowledge of the Absolute Idea――_that Absolute Truth is continuous
contradiction_. Perhaps Hegel’s most notable contribution to modern
thought was his emphasis upon the tremendous power of negation and the
stimulating force in contradiction. Spiritual advance is made through
opposition.
=Hegel’s Application of his Theory.= Formulating his theory in 1800,
Hegel spent the most of his literary career in exemplifying it. The
_Phänomenologie_ (1807) is an attempt to show the natural history of
thought in experience. He shows there the series of stages through
which the mind passes,――stages corresponding to logic, to the growth
of the individual, and to society. In the dialectic movement,
consciousness views the world in an external way until it becomes
self-conscious; then reason is evolved as a synthesis of the two:
_i. e._ of external consciousness and self-consciousness. Reason then
develops by continually turning back upon itself into an ethical,
religious, and, lastly, an absolute reason. Hegel wrote his _Logic_
(1812) as an application of his theory to thought――regarding thought
as consisting of general concepts. Then came his _Encyclopædia_ (1816),
containing his _Philosophy of Nature_ and _Philosophy of Mind_. In
his _Philosophy of Nature_, nature is regarded as revealing the same
dialectic as logic, but in the external world. Nature, therefore,
stands to logic as its antithesis. The _Philosophy of Mind_ places
mind as the synthesis of logic and nature, and elaborates the subject
as mind, objective mind, and the synthesis of the two, or Absolute
mind. Thus the dialectic of the _Logic_ is repeated and applied to
the _Philosophy of Nature_ and the _Philosophy of Spirit_. Logic and
history are therefore parallel. The content is always the same in both;
and the development is always in logical forms. The Absolute Idea by
differentiation with itself comes to itself: (1) in Logic through Being,
Essence, and Idea; (2) in Nature through matter, individual forms,
and organism; (3) in Spirit through consciousness, self-consciousness,
reason, right, morality, social morality, art, religion, philosophy.
Logic is the Spirit _an-sich_; nature is the spirit _für-sich_; mind
is the Spirit _an-und-für-sich_.