WHY TRANSLATE HEGEL?
'But,' it is urged, 'though it be well to let the stream of foreign
thought irrigate some of our philosophical pastures, though we should
not for ever entrench ourselves in our insularity--why try to introduce
Hegel, of all philosophers confessedly the most obscure? Why not be
content with the study and the "exploitation" of Kant, whom Germans
themselves still think so important as to expound him with endless
comment and criticism, and who has at length found, after some
skirmishes, a recognised place in the English philosophical curriculum?
Why seek for more Teutonic thinking that can be found in Schopenhauer,
and found there in a clear and noble style, luminous in the highest
degree, and touching with no merely academic abstruseness the problems
of life and death? Or--as that song is sweetest to men which is the
newest to ring in their ears--why not render accessible to English
readers the numerous and suggestive works of Eduard von Hartmann,
and of Friedrich Nietzsche--not to mention Robert Hamerling[1]? Or,
finally, why not give us more and ever more translations of the works
in logic, ethics, psychology, or metaphysics, of those many admirable
teachers in the German universities, whom it would be invidious to
try to single out by name? As for Hegel, his system, in the native
land of the philosopher, is utterly discredited; its influence is
extinct; it is dead as a door-nail. It is a pity to waste labour and
distract attention, and that in English lands, where there are plenty
of problems of our own to solve, by an attempt, which must perforce be
futile, to resuscitate these defunctitudes?'
That Hegelianism has been utterly discredited, in certain quarters, is
no discovery reserved for these later days. But on this matter perhaps
we may borrow an analogy. If the reader will be at the trouble to take
up two English newspapers of opposite partisanship and compare the
reports from their foreign correspondents on some question of home
politics, he may, if a novice, be surprised to learn that according
to one, the opinion e. g. of Vienna is wholly adverse to the measure,
while, according to the other, that opinion entirely approves.
It is no new thing to find Hegelianism in general obloquy. Even in 1830
the Catholic philosopher and theologian Günther[2]--an admirer, but by
no means a follower of Hegel--wrote that, 'for some years it had been
the fashion in learned Germany to look upon philosophy, and above all
Hegelian philosophy, as a door-mat on which everybody cleaned his muddy
boots before entering the sanctuary of politics and religion.' What
is true as regards the alleged surcease of Hegelianism is that in the
reaction which from various causes turned itself against philosophy in
the two decennia after 1848, that system, as the most deeply committed
part of the 'metaphysical' host, suffered most severely. History and
science seemed to triumph along the whole line. But it may be perhaps
permissible to remark that Hegelianism had predicted for itself the
fate that it proved had fallen on all other philosophies. After the
age of Idealism comes the turn of Realism. The Idea had to die--had to
sink as a germ in the fields of nature and history before it could bear
its fruit. Above all it is not to be expected that such a system, so
ambitious in aim and concentrated in expression, could find immediate
response and at once disclose all its meaning. His first disciples
are not the--truest interpreters of any great teacher. What he saw
in the one comprehensive glance of genius, his successors must often
be content to gather by the slow accumulation of years, and perhaps
centuries, of experience. It is not to Theophrastus that we go for
the truest and fullest conception of Aristotelianism; nor is Plato to
be measured by what his immediate successors in the Academy managed
to make out of him. It is now more than a century since Kant gave his
lesson to the public, and we are still trying to get him focussed in a
single view: it may be even longer till Hegel comes fully within the
range of our historians of thought. Aristotelianism too had to wait
centuries till it fully entered the consciousness even of the thinking
world.
It is to be said too that without Hegel it would be difficult to
imagine what even teachers, like Lotze, who were very unlike him, would
have had to say. It does not need a very wide soul, nor need one be a
mere dilettantist eclectic, to find much of Schopenhauer's work far
from incompatible with his great, and as some have said, complementary
opposite. It is not indeed prudent as yet for a writer in Germany who
wishes to catch the general ear to affix too openly a profession of
Hegelian principles, and he will do well to ward off suspicion by some
disparaging remarks on the fantastic methods, the overfondness for
system, the contempt for common sense and scientific results which,
as he declares, vitiate all the speculations of the period from 1794
to 1830. But under the names of Spinoza and of Leibniz the leaven of
Hegelian principles has been at work: and if the Philistines solve the
riddle of the intellectual Samson, it is because they have ploughed
with his heifer,--because his ideas are part of the modern stock of
thought,--not from what they literally read in the great thinkers at
the close of the seventeenth century. Last year saw appear in Germany
two excellent treatises describable as popular introductions to
philosophy[3], one by a thinker who has never disguised his obligations
to Hegel, the other by a teacher in the University of Berlin who may in
many ways be considered as essentially kindred with our general English
style of thought. But both treatises are more allied in character to
the spirit of the Hegelian attempts to comprehend man and God than to
the formalistic and philological disquisitions which have for some
years formed the staple of German professorial activity. And, lastly,
the vigorous thinker, who a quarter of a century ago startled the
reading public by the portent of a new metaphysic which should be the
synthesis of Schelling and Schopenhauer, has lately informed us[4] that
his affinity to Hegel is, taken all in all, greater than his affinity
to any other philosopher'; and that that affinity extends to all that
in Hegel has essential and permanent value.
But it is not on Eduard von Hartmann's commendation that we need rest
our estimate of Hegelianism. We shall rather say that, till more of
Hegel has been assimilated, he must still block the way. Things have
altered greatly in the last twenty years, it is true; and ideas of
more or less Hegelian origin have taken their place in the common
stock of philosophic commodities. But it will probably be admitted by
those best qualified to speak on the subject, that the shower has not
as yet penetrated very deeply into the case-hardened soil, still less
saturated it in the measure most likely to cause fruitful shoots to
grow forth. We have to go back to Hegel in the same spirit as we go to
Kant, and, for that matter, to Plato or Descartes: or, as the moderns
may go back--to borrow from another sphere--to Dante or Shakespeare.
We do not want the modern poet to resuscitate the style and matter of
_King Lear_ or of the _Inferno._ Yet as the Greek tragedian steeped his
soul in the language and the legend of Homeric epic, as Dante nurtured
his spirit on the noble melodies of Mantua's poet; so philosophy, if it
is to go forth strong and effective, must mould into its own substance
the living thought of former times. It would be as absurd, and as
impossible to be literally and simply a Hegelian,--if that means one
for whom Hegel sums up all philosophy and all truth--as it is to be at
the present day in the literal sense a Platonist or an Aristotelian.
The world may be slow, the world of opinion and thought may linger: _e
pur si muove._ We too have our own problems--the same, no doubt, in a
sense, from age to age, and yet infinitely varying and never in two
ages alike. New stars have appeared on the spiritual sky; and whether
they have in them the eternal light or only the flash and glare of a
passing meteor, they alter the aspects of the night in which we are
still waiting for the dawn.
A new language, born of new relations of ideas, or of new ideas, is
perforce for our generation the vehicle of all utterances, and we
cannot again speak the dialect, however imposing or however quaint, of
a vanished day.
And for that reason there must always be a new philosophy, couched
in the language of the age, sympathetic with its hopes and fears,
conscious of its beliefs, more or less sensible of its problems--as
indeed we may be confident there always will be. But, perhaps, the
warrior in that battle against illusion and prejudice, against the
sloth which takes things as they are and the poorness of spirit
which is satisfied with first appearances, will not do wisely to
disdain the past. He will not indeed equip himself with rusty swords
and clumsy artillery from the old arsenals. But he will not disdain
the lessons of the past,--its methods and principles of tactics and
strategy. Recognising perhaps some defects and inequalities in the
methods and aims of thought most familiar to him and current in his
vicinity, he may go abroad for other samples, even though they be not
in all respects worth his adoption. And so without taking Hegel as
omniscient, or pledging himself to every word of the master, he may
think from his own experience that there is much in the system that
will be helpful, when duly estimated and assimilated, to others. There
is--and few can be so bigoted__ or so positive-minded as to regret
it--there is unquestionably a growing interest in English-speaking
countries in what may be roughly called philosophy--the attempt,
unprejudiced by political, scientific, or ecclesiastical dogma, to
solve the questions as to what the world really is, and what man's
place and function is. 'The burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the
weary weight of all this unintelligible world' is felt--felt widely
and sometimes felt deeply. To the direct lightening of that burthen
and that mystery it is the privilege of our profoundest thinkers and
our far-seeing poets and artists to contribute. To the translator of
Hegel there falls the humbler task of making accessible, if it may be,
something of one of the later attempts at a solution of the enigma of
life and existence,--an attempt which for a time dazzled some of the
keenest intellects of its age, and which has at least impressed many
others with the conviction, born of momentary flashes from it of vast
illuminant power, that--_si sic omnia_--there was here concealed a key
to many puzzles, and a guard against many illusions likely to beset the
inquirer after truth.
[Footnote 1: A book by V. Knauer published last year (_Hauptprobleme
der Philosophie_), a series of popular lectures, gives one-sixth of its
space to the 'Atomistic of Will' by the Austrian poet Hamerling.]
[Footnote 2: Hegel's _Briefe_, ii. 349.]
[Footnote 3: J. Volkelt, _Vorträge zur Einführung in die Philosophie
der Gegenwart_ (München 1892): F. Paulsen, _Einleitung in die
Philosophie_ (Berlin 1892).]
[Footnote 4: E. v. Hartmann, _Kritische Wanderungen_, p. 74.]