HEGEL.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born at Stuttgart on August 27, 1770. He
attended the gymnasium of his native city, and, from 1788, the Tübingen
seminary as a student of theology; while in 1793-1800 he resided as a
private tutor in Berne and Frankfort-on-the-Main. In the latter city the
plan of his future system was already maturing. A manuscript outline
divides philosophy, following the ancient division, logic, physics, and
ethics, into three parts, the first of which (the fundamental science, the
doctrine of the categories and of method, combining logic and metaphysics)
considers the absolute as pure Idea, while the second considers it as
nature, and the third as real (ethical) spirit. Hegel habilitated in 1801
at Jena, with a Latin dissertation _On the Orbits of the Planets_, in
which, ignorant of the discovery of Ceres, he maintained that on rational
grounds--assuming that the number-series given in Plato's _Timaeus_ is the
true order of nature--no additional planet could exist between Mars and
Jupiter. This dissertation gives, further, a deduction of Kepler's laws.
The essay on the _Difference between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling_
had appeared even previous to this. In company with Schelling he edited in
1802-03 the _Kritisches Journal der Philosophie_. The article on "Faith and
Knowledge" published in this journal characterizes the standpoint of Kant,
Jacobi, and Fichte as that of reflection, for which finite and infinite,
being and thought form an antithesis, while true _speculation_ grasps these
in their identity. In the night before the battle of Jena Hegel finished
the revision of his _Phenomenology of Spirit_, which was published in 1807.
The extraordinary professorship given him in 1805 he was forced to resign
on account of financial considerations; then he was for a year a newspaper
editor in Bamberg, and in 1808 went as a gymnasial rector to Nuremberg,
where he instructed the higher classes in philosophy. His lectures there
are printed in the eighteenth volume of his works, under the title
_Propaedeutic_. In the Nuremberg period fell his marriage and the
publication of the _Logic_ (vol. i. 1812, vol. ii. 1816). In 1816 he was
called as professor of philosophy to Heidelberg (where the _Encyclopedia_
appeared, 1817), and two years later to Berlin. The _Outlines of the
Philosophy of Right_, 1821, is the only major work which was written in
Berlin. The _Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik_, founded in 1827 as
an organ of the school, contained a few critiques, but for the rest he
devoted his whole strength to his lectures. He fell a victim to the cholera
on November 14, 1831. The collected edition of his works in eighteen
volumes (1832-45) contains in vols. ii.-viii. the four major works which
had been published by Hegel himself (the _Encyclopaedia_ with additions
from the Lectures); in vols. i., xvi., and xvii. the minor treatises; in
vols. ix.-xv. the Lectures, edited by Cans, Hotho, Marheineke, and
Michelet. The Letters from and to Hegel have been added as a nineteenth
volume, under the editorship of Karl Hegel, 1887.[1]
[Footnote 1: Hegel's Life has been written by Karl Rosenkranz (1844), who
has also defended the master (_Apologie Hegels_, 1858) against R.
Haym _(Hegel und seine Zeit,_ 1857), and extolled him as the national
philosopher of Germany (1870; English by G.S. Hall). Cf., further, the
neat popular exposition by Karl Köstlin, 1870, and the essays by Ed. von
Hartmann, _Ueber die dialektische Methode_, 1868, and _Hegels Panlogismus_
(1870, incorporated in the _Gesammelte Studien und Aufsätze_, 1876). [The
English reader may consult E. Caird's _Hegel_ in Blackwood's Philosophical
Classics, 1883; Harris's _Hegel's Logic_, Morris's _Hegel's Philosophy of
the State and of History_, and Kedney's _Hegel's Aesthetics_ in Griggs's
Philosophical Classics; and Wallace's translation of the "Logic"--from
the _Encyclopaedia_--with Prolegomena, 1874, 2d. ed., Translation, 1892,
Prolegomena to follow. Stirling's _Secret of Hegel, 2_ vols., London, 1865,
includes a translation of a part of the _Logic_, and numerous translations
from different works of the master are to be found in the _Journal of
Speculative Philosophy_. The _Lectures on the Philosophy of History_ have
been translated by J. Sibree, M.A., in Bohn's Library, 1860, and E.S.
Haldane is issuing a translation of those on the _History of Philosophy_,
vol. i., 1892.--TR.]]
We may preface our exposition of the parts of the system by some remarks on
Hegel's standpoint in general and his scientific method.
%1. Hegel's View of the World and his Method.%
In Hegel there revives in full vigor the intellectualism which from the
first had lain in the blood of German philosophy, and which Kant's moralism
had only temporarily restrained. The primary of practical reason is
discarded, and theory is extolled as the ground, center, and aim of human,
nay, of all existence.
Leibnitz and Hegel are the classical representatives of the
intellectualistic view of the world. In the former the subjective
psychological point of view is dominant, in the latter, the objective
cosmical position: Leibnitz argues from the representative nature of the
soul to an analogous constitution of all elements of the universe; from the
general mission of all that is real, to be a manifestation of reason, Hegel
deduces that of the individual spirit, to realize a determinate series of
stages of thought. The true reality is reason; all being is the embodiment
of a pregnant thought, all becoming a movement of the concept, the world a
development of thought. The absolute or the logical Idea exists first as
a system of antemundane concepts, then it descends into the unconscious
sphere of nature, awakens to self-consciousness in man, realizes its
content in social institutions, in order, finally, in art, religion, and
science to return to itself enriched and completed, _i.e._, to attain a
higher absoluteness than that of the beginning. Philosophy is the
highest product and the goal of the world-process. As will, intuition,
representation, and feeling are lower forms of thought, so ethics, art, and
religion are preliminary stages in philosophy; for it first succeeds in
that which these vainly attempt, in presenting the concept adequately, in
conceptual form.
If we develop that which is contained as a constituent factor or by
implication in the intellectualistic thesis, "All being is thought
realized, all becoming a development of thought," we reach the following
definitions: (i) The object of philosophy is formed by the Ideas of things.
Its aim is to search out the concept, the purpose, the significance of
phenomena, and to assign to these their corresponding positions in
the world and in the system of knowledge. It is chiefly interested in
discovering where in the scale of values a thing belongs according to
its meaning and its destination; the procedure is teleological, valuing,
aesthetic. Instead of a causal explanation of phenomena we are given an
ideal interpretation of them. (So Lotze accurately describes the character
of German idealism.) (2) If all that is real is a manifestation of reason
and each thing a stage, a modification of thought, then thought and being
are identical. (3) If the world is thought in becoming, and philosophy has
to set forth this process, philosophy is a theory of development. If each
thing realizes a thought, then all that is real is rational; and if the
world-process attains its highest stadium in philosophy, and this in
turn its completion in the system of absolute idealism, then all that is
rational is real. Reason or the Idea is not merely a demand, a longed for
ideal, but a world-power which accomplishes its own realization. "The
rational is real and the real is rational" (Preface to the _Philosophy of
Right_). Or to sum it up--Hegel's philosophy is _idealism, a system
of identity, and an optimistic doctrine of development_. What, then,
distinguishes Hegel from other idealists, philosophers of identity, and
teachers of development? What in particular distinguishes him from his
predecessor Schelling?
In Schelling nature is the subject and art the conclusion of the
development; his idealism has a physical and aesthetical character, as
Fichte's an ethical character. In Hegel, however, the concept is the
subject and goal of the development, his philosophy is, in the words of
Haym, a "_Logisierung_" of the world, a _logical idealism_.
The theory of identity is that system which looks upon nature and spirit as
one in essence and as phenomenal modes of an absolute which is above them
both. But while Schelling treats the real and the ideal as having equal
rights, Hegel restores the Fichtean subordination of nature to spirit,
without, however, sharing Fichte's contempt for nature. Nature is neither
co-ordinate with spirit nor a mere instrument for spirit, but a transition
stage in the development of the absolute, viz., the Idea in its other-being
_(Anderssein)_. It is spirit itself that becomes nature in order to become
actual, conscious spirit; before the absolute became nature it was already
spirit, not, indeed, "for itself" _(für sich)_, yet "in itself" _(an
sich)_, it was Idea or reason. The ideal is not merely the morning which
follows the night of reality, but also the evening which precedes it.
The absolute (the concept) develops from in-itself _(Ansich)_ through
out-of-self _(Aussersich)_ or other-being to for-itself _(Fürsich)_; it
exists first as reason (system of logical concepts), then as nature,
finally as living spirit. Thus Hegel's philosophy of identity is
distinguished from Schelling's by two factors: it subordinates nature to
spirit, and conceives the absolute of the beginning not as the indifference
of the real and ideal, but as ideal, as a realm of eternal thoughts.
The assertion that Hegel represents a synthesis of Fichte and Schelling is
therefore justified. This is true, further, for the character of Hegel's
thought as a whole, in so far as it follows a middle course between the
world-estranged, rigid abstractness of Fichte's thinking and Schelling's
artistico-fanciful intuition, sharing with the former its logical
stringency as well as its dominant interest in the philosophy of spirit,
and with the latter its wide outlook and its sense for the worth and the
richness of that which is individual.
We have characterized Hegel's system, thirdly, as a philosophy of
development. The point of distinction here is that Hegel carries out with
logical consecutiveness and up to the point of obstinacy the principle
of development which Fichte had discovered, and which Schelling also
had occasionally employed,--the threefold rhythm _thesis, antithesis,
synthesis_. Here we come to Hegel's _dialectic method_. He reached this as
the true method of speculation through a comparison of the two forms of
philosophy which he found dominant at the beginning of his career--the
Illumination culminating in Kant, on the one hand, and, on the other, the
doctrine of identity defended by Schelling and his circle--neither of which
entirely satisfied him.
In regard to the main question he feels himself one with Schelling:
philosophy is to be metaphysics, the science of the absolute and its
immanence in the world, the doctrine of the identity of opposites, of the,
_per se_ of things, not merely of their phenomenon. But the form which
Schelling had given it seems to him unscientific, unsystematic, for
Schelling had based philosophical knowledge on the intuition of genius--and
science from intuition is impossible. The philosophy of the Illumination
impresses him, on the other hand, by the formal strictness of its inquiry;
he agrees with it that philosophy must be science from concepts. Only not
from abstract concepts. Kant and the Illumination stand on the platform
of reflection, for which the antithesis of thought and being, finite and
infinite remains insoluble, and, consequently, the absolute transcendent,
and the true essence of things unknowable. Hegel wishes to combine the
advantages of both sides, the depth of content of the one, and the
scientific form of the other.
The intuition with which Schelling works is immediate cognition, directed
to the concrete and particular. The concept of the philosophy of reflection
is mediate cognition, moving in the sphere of the abstract and universal.
Is it not feasible to do away with the (unscientific) immediateness of the
one, and the (non-intuitive, content-lacking) abstractness of the other,
to combine the concrete with the mediate or conceptual, and in this way
to realize the Kantian ideal of an intuitive understanding? _A concrete
concept_ would be one which sought the universal not without the
particular, but in it; which should not find the infinite beyond the
finite, nor the absolute at an unattainable distance above the world, nor
the essence hidden behind the phenomenon, but manifesting itself therein.
If the philosophy of reflection, in the abstract lifelessness of its
concepts, looked on opposites as incapable of sublation, and Schelling
regarded them as immediately identical, if the former denied the identity
of opposites, and the latter maintained it primordially given (in the
absolute indifference which is to be grasped by intuition), the concrete
concept secures the identity of _opposites through self-mediation_, their
passing over into it; it teaches us to know the identity as the result of a
process. First immediate unity, then divergence of opposites, and, finally,
reconciliation of opposites--this is the universal law of all development.
The conflict between the philosophy of reflection and the philosophy of
intuition, which Hegel endeavors to terminate by a speculation at once
conceptual and concrete, concerns (1) the organ of thought, (2) the object
of thought, (3) the nature and logical dignity of the contradiction.
The organ of the true philosophy is neither the abstract reflective
understanding, which finds itself shut up within the limits of the
phenomenal, nor mystical intuition, which expects by a quick leap to gain
the summit of knowledge concerning the absolute, but reason as the faculty
of concrete concepts. That concept is concrete which does not assume an
attitude of cold repulsion toward its contrary, but seeks self-mediation
with the latter, and moves from thesis through antithesis, and with it, to
synthesis. Reason neither fixes the opposites nor denies them, but has them
become identical. The unity of opposites is neither impossible nor present
from the first, but the result of a development.
The object of philosophy is not the phenomenal world or the relative, but
the absolute, and this not as passive substance, but as living subject,
which divides into distinctions, and returns from them to identity, which
develops through the opposites. The absolute is a process, and all that
is real the manifestation of this process. If science is to correspond
to reality, it also must be a process. Philosophy is thought-movement
(dialectic); it is a system of concepts, each of which passes over into
its successor, puts its successor forth from itself, just as it has been
generated by its predecessor.
All reality is development, and the motive force in this development (of
the world as well as of science) is opposition, _contradiction_. Without
this there would be no movement and no life. Thus all reality is full of
contradiction, and yet rational. The contradiction is not that which is
entirely alogical, but it is a spur to further thinking. It must not
be annulled, but "sublated" _(aufgehoben), _i.e._, at once negated and
conserved. This is effected by thinking the contradictory concepts together
in a third higher, more comprehensive, and richer concept, whose moments
they then form. As sublated moments they contradict each other no longer;
the opposition or contradiction is overcome. But the synthesis is still
not a final one; the play begins anew; again an opposition makes its
appearance, which in turn seeks to be overcome, etc. Each separate concept
is one-sided, defective, represents only a part of the truth, needs to be
supplemented by its contrary, and, by its union with this, its complement,
yields a higher concept, which comes nearer to the whole truth, but still
does not quite reach it. Even the last and richest concept--the absolute
Idea--is by itself alone not the full truth; the result implies the whole
development through which it has been attained. It is only at the end
of such a dialectic of concepts that philosophy reaches complete
correspondence with the living reality, which it has to comprehend; and the
speculative progress of thought is no capricious sporting with concepts
on the part of the thinking subject, but the adequate expression of
the movement of the matter itself. Since the world and its ground is
development, it can only be known through a development of concepts. The
law which this follows, in little as in great, is the advance from position
to opposition, and thence to combination. The most comprehensive example
of this triad--Idea, Nature, Spirit--gives the division of the system; the
second--Subjective, Objective, Absolute Spirit--determines the articulation
of the third part.
%2. The System.%
Hegel began with a _Phenomenology_ by way of introduction, in which (not
to start, like the school of Schelling, with absolute knowledge "as though
shot from a pistol") he describes the genesis of philosophical cognition
with an attractive mingling of psychological and philosophico-historical
points of view. He makes spirit--the universal world-spirit as well as
the individual consciousness, which repeats in brief the stages in the
development of humanity--pass through six stadia, of which the first three
(consciousness, self-consciousness, reason) correspond to the progress
of the intermediate part of the Doctrine of Subjective Spirit, which is
entitled _Phänomenologie_, and the others (ethical spirit, religion, and
absolute knowledge) give an abbreviated presentation of that which the
Doctrine of Objective and Absolute Spirit develops in richer articulation.
%(a) Logic% considers the Idea in the abstract element of thought, only as
it is thought, and not yet as it is intuited, nor as it thinks itself; its
content is the truth as it is without a veil in and for itself, or God in
his eternal essence before the creation of the world. Unlike common logic,
which is merely formal, separating form and content, speculative logic,
which is at the same time ontology or metaphysics, treats the categories as
real relations, the forms of thought as forms of reality: as thought and
thing are the same, so logic is the theory of thought and of being in one.
Its three principal divisions are entitled _Being, Essence, the Concept_.
The first of these discusses quality, quantity, and measure or qualitative
quantum. The second considers essence as such, appearance, and (essence
appearing or) actuality, and this last, in turn, in the moments,
substantiality, causality, and reciprocity. The third part is divided into
the sections, subjectivity (concept, judgment, syllogism), objectivity
(mechanism, chemism, teleology), and the Idea (life, cognition, the
absolute Idea).
As a specimen of the way in which Hegel makes the concept pass over into
its opposite and unite with this in a synthesis, it will be sufficient to
cite the famous beginning of the _Logic_. How must the absolute first be
thought, how first defined? Evidently as that which is absolutely without
presupposition. The most general concept which remains after abstracting
from every determinate content of thought, and from which no further
abstraction is possible, the most indeterminate and immediate concept, is
pure _being_. As without quality and content it is equivalent to _nothing_.
In thinking pure being we have rather cogitated nothing; but this in turn
cannot be retained as final, but passes back into being, for in being
thought it exists as a something thought. Pure being and pure nothing are
the same, although we mean different things by them; both are absolute
indeterminateness. The transition from being to nothing and from nothing to
being is _becoming_. Becoming is the unity, and hence the truth of both.
When the boy is "becoming" a youth he is, and at the same time is not, a
youth. Being and not-being are so mediated and sublated in becoming that
they are no longer contradictory. In a similar way it is further shown
that quality and quantity are reciprocally dependent and united in measure
(which may be popularly illustrated thus: progressively diminishing heat
becomes cold, distances cannot be measured in bushels); that essence and
phenomenon are mutually inseparable, inasmuch as the latter is always the
appearance of an essence, and the former is essence only as it manifests
itself in the phenomenon, etc.
The significance of the Hegelian logic depends less on its ingenious and
valuable explanations of particulars than on the fundamental idea, that the
categories do not form an unordered heap, but a great organically connected
whole, in which each member occupies its determinate position, and is
related to every other by gradations of kinship and subordination. This
purpose to construct a _globus_ of the pure concepts was itself a
mighty feat, which is assured of the continued admiration of posterity
notwithstanding the failure in execution. He who shall one day take it up
again will draw many a lesson from Hegel's unsuccessful attempt. Before
all, the connections between the concepts are too manifold and complex
for the monotonous transitions of this dialectic method (which Chalybaeus
wittily called articular disease) to be capable of doing them justice.
Again, the productive force of thought must not be neglected, and to it,
rather than to the mobility of the categories themselves, the matter of the
transition from one to the other must be transferred.
%(b) The Philosophy of Nature% shows the Idea in its other-being. Out of
the realm of logical shades, wherein the souls of all reality dwell,
we move into the sphere of external, sensuous existence, in which the
concepts take on material form. Why does the Idea externalize itself? In
order to become actual. But the actuality of nature is imperfect, unsuited
to the Idea, and only the precondition of a better actuality, the actuality
of spirit, which has been the aim from the beginning: reason becomes
nature in order to become spirit; the Idea goes forth from itself in
order--enriched--to return to itself again. Only the man who once has been
in a foreign land knows his home aright.
The relation of natural objects to one another and their action upon one
another is an external one: they are governed by mechanical necessity,
and the contingency of influences from without arrests and disturbs their
development, so that while reason is everywhere discernible in nature,
it is not reason alone; and much that is illogical, contrary to purpose,
lawless, painful, and unhealthy, points to the fact that the essence of
nature consists in externality. This inadequacy in the realization of the
Idea, however, is gradually removed by development, until, in "life," the
way is prepared for the birth of spirit.
As Hegel in his philosophy of nature--which falls into three parts,
mechanics, physics, and organics--follows Schelling pretty closely, and,
moreover, does not show his power, it does not seem necessary to dwell
longer upon it. In the next section, also, in view of the fact that its
models, the constructive psychologies of Fichte and Schelling, have already
been discussed in detail, a statement of the divisions and connections must
suffice.
%(c) The Doctrine of Subjective Spirit% makes freedom (being with or in
self) the essence and destination of spirit, and shows how spirit realizes
this predisposition in increasing independence of nature. The subject of
anthropology is spirit as the (natural, sensitive, and actual) "soul" of
a body; here are discussed the distinctions of race, nation, sex, age,
sleeping and waking, disposition and temperament, together with talents and
mental diseases, in short, whatever belongs to spirit in its union with a
body. Phenomenology is the science of the "ego," i.e., of spirit, in so
far as it opposes itself to nature as the non-ego, and passes through the
stages of (mere) consciousness, self-consciousness, and (the synthesis of
the two) reason. Psychology (better pneumatology) considers "spirit" in its
reconciliation with objectivity under the following divisions: Theoretical
Intelligence as intuition (sensation, attention, intuition), as
representation (passive memory, phantasy, memory), and (as conceiving,
judging, reasoning) thought; Practical Intelligence as feeling, impulse
(passion and caprice), and happiness; finally, the unity of the knowing and
willing spirit, free spirit or rational will, which in turn realizes itself
in right, ethics, and history.
%(d) The Doctrine of Objective Spirit%, comprehending ethics, the
philosophy of right, of the state, and of history, is Hegel's most
brilliant achievement. It divides as follows: (1) Right (property,
contract, punishment); (2) Morality (purpose, intention and welfare, good
and evil); (3) Social Morality: (a) the family; (b) civil society; (c) the
state (internal and external polity, and the history of the world). In
right the will or freedom attains to outer actuality, in morality it
attains to inner actuality, in social morality to objective and subjective
actuality at once, hence to complete actuality.
Right, as it were a second, higher nature, because a necessity posited and
acknowledged by spirit, is originally a sum of prohibitions; wherever it
seems to command the negative has only received a positive expression.
Private right contains two things--the warrant to be a person, and the
injunction to respect other persons as such. Property is the external
sphere which the will gives to itself; without property no personality.
Through punishment (retaliation) right is restored against un-right
(_Unrecht_), and the latter shown to be a nullity. The criminal is treated
according to the same maxim as that of his action--that coercion is
allowable.
In the stadium of morality the good exists in the form of a requirement
which can never be perfectly fulfilled, as a mere imperative; there remains
an irrepressible opposition between the moral law and the individual will,
between intention and execution. Here the judge of good and evil is the
conscience, which is not secure against error. That which is objectively
evil may seem good and a duty to subjective conviction. (According to
Fichte this was impossible).
On account of the conflict between duty and will, which is at this stage
irrepressible, Hegel is unable to consider morality, the sphere of the
subjective disposition, supreme. He thinks he knows a higher sphere,
wherein legality and morality become one: "social morality"
(_Sittlichkeit_). This sphere takes its name from _Sitte_, that custom
ruling in the community which is felt by the individual not as a command
from without, but as his own nature. Here the good appears as the spirit
of the family and of the people, pervading individuals as its substance.
Marriage is neither a merely legal nor a merely sentimental relation, but
an "ethical" (_sittliches_) institution. While love rules in the family, in
civil society each aims at the satisfaction of his private wants, and yet,
in working for himself, subserves the good of the whole. Class distinctions
are based on the division of labor demanded by the variant needs of men
(the agricultural, industrial, and thinking classes). Class and party honor
is, in Hegel's view, among the most essential supports of general morality.
Strange to say, he brings the administration of justice and the police into
the same sphere.
The state, the unity of the family and civil society, is the completed
actualization of freedom. Its organs are the political powers (which are
to be divided, but not to be made independent): the legislative power
determines the universal, the executive subsumes the particular thereunder,
the power of the prince combines both into personal unity. In the will of
the prince the state becomes subject. The perfect form of the state is
constitutional monarchy, its establishment the goal of history, which
Hegel, like Kant, considers chiefly from the political standpoint.
History is the development of the rational state; the world-spirit the
guiding force in this development; its instruments the spirits of the
nations and great men. A particular people is the expression of but one
determinate moment of the universal spirit; and when it has fulfilled
its commission it loses its legal warrant, and yields up its dominion to
another, now the only authorized one: the history of the world is the
judgment of the world, which is held over the nations. The world-historical
characters, also, are only the instruments of a higher power, the purposes
of which they execute while imagining that they are acting in their own
interests--their own deed is hidden from them, and is neither their purpose
nor their object. This should be called the cunning of reason, that it
makes the passions work in its service.
History is progress in the consciousness of freedom. At first one only
knows himself free, then several, finally all. This gives three chief
periods, or rather four world-kingdoms,--Oriental despotism, the Greek
(democratic) and the Roman (aristocratic) republic, and the Germanic
monarchy,--in which humanity passes through its several ages. Like the sun,
history moves from east to west. China and India have not advanced beyond
the preliminary stages of the state; the Chinese kingdom is a family state,
India a society of classes stiffened into castes. The Persian despotism is
the first true state, and this in the form of a conquering military state.
In the youth and manhood of humanity the sovereignty of the people replaces
the sovereignty of one; but not all have yet the consciousness of freedom,
the slaves have no share in the government. The principle of the Greek
world, with its fresh life and delight in beauty, is individuality; hence
the plurality of small states, in which Sparta is an anticipation of
the Roman spirit. The Roman Republic is internally characterized by the
constitutional struggle between the patricians and the plebeians, and
externally by the policy of world conquest. Out of the repellent relations
between the universal and the individual, which oppose one another as
the abstract state and abstract personality, the unhappy imperial period
develops. In the Roman Empire and Judaism the conditions were given for the
appearance of Christianity. This brings with it the idea of humanity: every
man is free as man, as a rational being. In the beginning this emancipation
was religious; through the Germans it became political as well. The
remaining divisions cannot here be detailed. Their captions run: The
Elements of the Germanic Spirit (the Migrations; Mohammedanism; the
Frankish Empire of Charlemagne); the Middle Ages (the Feudal System and the
Hierarchy; the Crusades; the Transition from Feudal Rule to Monarchy,
or the Cities); Modern Times (the Reformation; its Effect on Political
Development; Illumination and Revolution).
The philosophy of history[1] is Hegel's most brilliant and most lasting
achievement. His view of the state as the absolute end, the complete
realization of the good, is dominated, no doubt, by the antique ideal,
which cannot take root again in the humanity of modern times. But his
splendid endeavor to "comprehend" history, to bring to light the laws of
historical development and the interaction between the different spheres of
national life, will remain an example for all time. The leading ideas of
his philosophy of history have so rapidly found their way into the general
scientific consciousness that the view of history which obtained in
the period of the Illumination is well nigh incomprehensible to the
investigator of to-day.
[Footnote 1: A well-chosen collection of aphorisms from the philosophy of
history is given by M. Schasler under the title _Hegel: Populäre Gedanken
aus seinen Werken_, 2d. ed., 1873.]
%(e) Absolute Spirit% is the unity of subjective and objective spirit.
As such, spirit becomes perfectly free (from all contradictions)
and reconciled with itself. The break between subject and object,
representation and thing, thought and being, infinite and finite is done
away with, and the infinite recognized as the essence of the finite. The
knowledge of the reconciliation of the highest opposites or of the infinite
_in_ the finite presents itself in three forms: in the form of intuition
(art), of feeling and representation (religion), of thought (philosophy).
(1) _Aesthetics_.--The beautiful is the absolute (the infinite in the
finite) in sensuous existence, the Idea in limited manifestation. According
to the relation of these moments, according as the outer form or the inner
content predominates, or a balance of the two occurs, we have the symbolic
form of art, in which the phenomenon predominates and the Idea is merely
suggested; or the classical form, in which Idea and intuition, or spiritual
content and sensuous form, completely balance and pervade each other, in
which the former of them is ceaselessly taken up into the latter; or
the romantic form, in which the phenomenon retires, and the Idea, the
inwardness of the spirit predominates. Classical art, in which form and
content are perfectly conformed to each other, is the most beautiful, but
romantic art is, nevertheless, higher and more significant.
Oriental, including Egyptian and Hebrew, art was symbolic; Greek art,
classical; Christian art is romantic, bringing into art entirely new
sentiments of a knightly and a religious sort--love, loyalty and honor,
grief and repentance--and understanding how by careful treatment to ennoble
even the petty and contingent. The sublime belongs to symbolic art; the
Roman satire is the dissolution of the classical, and humor the dissolution
of the romantic, ideal.
Architecture is predominantly symbolic; sculpture permits the purest
expression of the classical ideal; painting, music, and poetry bear a
romantic character. This does not exclude the recurrence of these three
stages within each art--in architecture, for example, as monumental
(the obelisk), useful (house and temple), and Gothic (the cathedral)
architecture. As the plastic arts reached their culmination among the
Hellenes, so the romantic arts culminate among the Christian nations. In
poetry, as the most perfect and universal (or the totality of) art, uniting
in itself the two contraries, the symbolic and the classical, the lyric
is a repetition of the architectonic-musical, the epic, of the
plastic-pictorial, the drama, the union of the lyric and the epic.
(2) _Philosophy of Religion_.--The withdrawal from outer sensibility into
the inner spirit, begun in romantic art, especially in poetry, is completed
in religion. In religion the nations have recorded the way in which they
represent the substance of the world; in it the unity of the infinite and
the finite is felt, and represented through imagination. Religion is not
merely a feeling of piety, but a thought of the absolute, only not in the
form of thinking. Religion and philosophy are materially the same, both
have God or the truth for their object, they differ only in form--religion
contains in an empirical, symbolic form the same speculative content which
philosophy presents in the adequate form of the concept. Religion is
developing knowledge as it gradually conquers imperfection. It appears
first as definite religion in two stadia, natural religion and the religion
of spiritual individuality, and finally attains the complete realization of
its concept in the absolute religion of Christianity.
Natural religion, in its lowest stage magic, develops in three forms--as
the religion of measure (Chinese), of phantasy (Indian or Brahmanical), and
of being in self (Buddhistic). In the Persian (Zoroastrian) religion of
light, the Syrian religion of pain, and the Egyptian religion of enigma, is
prepared the way for the transformation into the religion of freedom. The
Greek solves the riddle of the Sphinx by apprehending himself as subject,
as man.
The religion of spiritual individuality or free subjectivity passes through
three stadia: the Jewish religion of sublimity (unity), the Greek religion
of beauty (necessity), the Roman religion of purposiveness (of the
understanding). In contrast to the Jewish religion of slavish obedience,
which by miracle makes known the power of the one God and the nullity of
nature, which has been "created" by his will, and the prosaic severity of
the Roman, which, in Jupiter and Fortuna, worships only the world-dominion
of the Roman people, the more cheerful art-religion of the Hellenes
reverences in the beautiful forms of the gods, the powers which man is
aware of in himself--wisdom, bravery, and beauty.
The Christian or revealed religion is the religion of truth, of freedom, of
spirit. Its content is the unity of the divine nature and the human, God
as knowing himself in being known of man+; the knowledge of God is God's
self-knowledge. Its fundamental truths are the Trinity (signifying that God
differentiates and sublates the difference in love), the incarnation (as a
figure of the essential unity of the infinite and finite spirit), the fall,
and Christ's atoning death (this signifies that the realization of the
unity between man and God presupposes the overcoming of naturality and
selfishness).
(3) _Philosophy_.--Finally the task remains of clothing the absolute
content given in religion in the form adequate to it, in the form of the
concept. In philosophy absolute spirit attains the highest stage, its
perfect self-knowledge. It is the self-thinking Idea.
Here we must not look for further detailed explanations: philosophy is
just the course which has been traversed. Its systematic exposition is
encyclopaedia; the consideration of its own actualization, the history
of philosophy, which, as a "philosophical" discipline, has to show the
conformity to law and the rationality of this historical development, to
show the more than mere succession, the genetic succession, of systems,
as well as their connection with the history of culture. Each system
is the product and expression of its time, and as the self-reflection
of each successive stage in culture cannot appear before this has reached
its maturity and is about to be overcome. Not until the approach of the
twilight does the owl of Minerva begin its flight.