History Of Modern Philosophy
by
Richard Falckenberg
Part 9 out of 13
being, he failed to recognize the dignity of nature, for he deprived it of
all self-dependence, all life of its own, all generative power, and treated
it merely as a dead tool, as a passive, merely posited non-ego. Nature
is not a board which the original ego nails up before itself in order,
striking against it, to be driven back upon itself, to be compelled to
reflection, and thereby to become theoretical ego; in order, further,
working over the non-ego, and transforming it, to exercise its practical
activity: but it is a ladder on which spirit rises to itself. Spirit
develops out of nature; nature itself has a spiritual element in it; it
is undeveloped, slumbering, unconscious, benumbed intelligence. By
transferring to nature the power of self-position or of being subject,
Schelling exalts the drudge of the Science of Knowledge to the throne.
The threefold division, "infinite original activity--nature or
object--individual ego or subject," remains as in Fichte, only that the
first member is not termed pure ego, but nature, yet creative nature,
_natura naturans_. Schelling's aim is to show how from the object a subject
arises, from the existent something represented, from the representable a
representer, from nature an ego. He could only hope to solve this problem
if he conceived natural objects--in the highest of which, man, he makes
conscious spirit break forth or nature intuit itself--as themselves the
products of an original subject, of a creative ground striving toward
consciousness. For him also doing is more original than being. It would not
be exact, therefore, to define the difference between Fichte and Schelling
by saying that, with the former, nature proceeds from the ego, and with the
latter the ego, from nature. It is rather true that with them both nature
and spirit are alike the products of a third and higher term, which seeks
to become spirit, and can accomplish this only by positing nature. In the
Science of Knowledge, it is true, this higher ground is conceived as an
ethical, in the Philosophy of Nature as a physical, power, although one
framed for intelligence; in the former, moreover, the _natura naturata_
appears as the position once for all of a non-spiritual, in the latter as
a progressive articulated construction, with gradually increasing
intelligence. In the unconscious products of nature, nature's aim to
reflect upon itself, to become intelligence, fails, in man it succeeds.
Nature is the embryonic life of spirit. Nature and spirit are essentially
identical: "That which is posited _out of_ consciousness is in its essence
the same as that which is posited _in_ consciousness also." Therefore
"the knowable must itself bear the impress of the knower." Nature the
preliminary stage, not the antithesis, of spirit; history, a continuation
of physical becoming; the parallelism between the ideal and the real
development-series--these are ideas from Herder which Schelling introduces
into the transcendental philosophy. The Kantio-Fichtean moralism, with
its sharp contraposition of nature and spirit, is limited in the
_Naturphilosophie_ by Herder's physicism.
"Nature _is a priori_" (everything individual in it is pre-determined by
the whole, by the Idea of a nature in general); hence the forms of nature
can be deduced from the concept of nature. The philosopher creates nature
anew, he constructs it. Speculative physics considers nature as _subject_,
becoming, productivity (not, like empirical science, as object, being,
product), and for this purpose it needs, instead of individualizing
reflection, an intuition directed to the whole. To this productive nature,
as to the absolute ego of Fichte, are ascribed two opposite activities,
one expansive or repulsive, and one attractive, and on these is based the
universal law of _polarity_. The absolute productivity strives toward an
infinite product, which it never attains, because apart from arrest no
product exists. At definite points a check must be given it in order that
something knowable may arise. Thus every product in nature is the result
of a positive, centrifugal, accelerating, universalizing force, and a
negative, limiting, retarding, individualizing one. The endlessness of the
creative activity manifests itself in various ways: in the striving for
development on the part of every product, in the preservation of the genus
amid the disappearance of individuals, in the endlessness of the series of
products. Nature's creative impulse is inexhaustible, it transcends every
product. Qualities are points of arrest in the one universal force of
nature; all nature is a connected development. Because of the opposition in
the nature-ground between the stimulating and the retarding activity, the
law of duality everywhere rules. To these two forces, however, still a
third factor must be added as their copula, which determines the relation
or measure of their connection. This is the source of the threefold
division of the Philosophy of Nature. The magnet with its union of opposite
polar forces is the type of all configuration in nature.
With Fichte's synthetic method and Herder's naturalistic principles
Schelling combines Kantian ideas, especially Kant's dynamism (matter is
a force-product),[1] and his view of the organic (organisms are
self-productive beings, and are regarded by us as ends in themselves,
because of the interaction between their members and the whole). The three
organic functions sensibility, irritability, and reproduction, on the other
hand, Schelling took from Kielmeyer, whose address _On the Relations of
the Organic Forces_, 1793, excited great attention. The concept of life is
dominant in Schelling's theory of nature. The organic is more original than
the inorganic; the latter must be explained from the former; that which is
dead must be considered as a product of departing life. No less erroneous
than the theory of a magic vital force is the mechanical interpretation,
which looks on life merely as a chemical phenomenon. The dead, mechanical
and chemical, forces are merely the negative conditions of life; to them
there must be added as a positive force a vital stimulus external to the
individual, which continually rekindles the conflict between the opposing
activities on which the vital process depends. Life consists, that is, in
the perpetual prevention of the equilibrium which is the object of the
chemical process. This constant disturbance proceeds from "universal
nature," which, as the common principle of organic and inorganic nature, as
that which determines them for each other, which founds a pre-established
harmony between them, deserves the name of the world-soul. Schelling
thus recognizes a threefold nature: organized, inorganic, and universal
organizing (according to Harms, cosmical) nature, of which the two former
arise from the third and are brought by it into connection and harmony. (As
Schelling here takes an independent middle course between the mechanical
explanation of life and the assumption of a specific vital force, so in
all the burning physical questions of the time he seeks to rise above the
contending parties by means of mediating solutions. Thus, in the question
of "single or double electricity," he ranges himself neither on the side of
Franklin nor on that of his opponents; in regard to the problem of light,
endeavors to overcome the antithesis between Newton's emanation theory and
the undulation theory of Euler; and, in his chapter on combustion, attacks
the defenders of phlogiston as well as those who deny it).
[Footnote 1: Schelling terms his philosophy of nature dynamic atomism,
since it posits pure intensities as the simple (atoms), from which
qualities are to be explained.]
Schelling's philosophy of nature[1] proposes to itself three chief
problems: the construction of general, indeterminate, homogeneous
matter, with differences in density alone, of determinate, qualitatively
differentiated matter and its phenomena of motion or the dynamical process,
and of the organic process. For each of these departments of nature an
original force in universal nature is assumed--gravity, light, and their
copula, universal life. Gravity--this does not mean that which as the force
of attraction falls within the view of sensation, for it is the union of
attraction and repulsion--is the principle of corporeality, and produces
in the visible world the different conditions of aggregation in solids,
fluids, and gases. Light--this, too, is not to be confounded with actual
light, of which it is the cause--is the principle of the soul (from it
proceeds all intelligence, it is a spiritual potency, the "first subject"
in nature), and produces in the visible world the dynamical processes
magnetism, electricity, and chemism. The higher unity of gravity and
light is the copula or life, the principle of the organic, of animated
corporeality or the processes of growth and reproduction, irritability,
and sensibility.
[Footnote 1: This is contained in the following treatises: _Ideas for a
Philosophy of Nature, 1797; On the World-soul, 1798; First Sketch of a
System of the Philosophy of Nature, 1799; Universal Deduction of the
Dynamical Process or the Categories of Physics_ (in the _Zeitschrift fuer
spekulative Physik_) 1800. In the above exposition, however, the modified
philosophy of nature of the second period has also been taken into
account.]
General _matter_ or the filling of space, arises from the co-operation of
three forces: the centrifugal, which manifests itself as repulsion (first
dimension), the centripetal, manifested as attraction (second dimension),
and the synthesis of the two, manifested as gravity (third dimension).
These forces are raised by light to a higher potency, and then make their
appearance as the causes of the _dynamical_ process or of the specific
differences of matter. The linear function of magnetism is the condition
of coherence; the surface force of electricity, the basis of the qualities
perceivable by sense; the tri-dimensional force of the chemical process, in
which the two former are united, produces the chemical qualities. Galvanism
forms the transition to living nature, in which through the operation of
the "copula" these three dynamical categories are raised to _organic_
categories. To magnetism as the most general, and hence the lowest force,
corresponds reproduction (the formative impulse, as nutrition, growth, and
production, including the artistic impulse); electricity develops into
irritability or excitability; the higher analogue to the chemical process
as the most individual and highest stage is sensibility or the capacity
of feeling. (Such at least is Schelling's doctrine after Steffens had
convinced him of the higher dignity of that which is individual, whereas
at first he had made sensibility parallel with magnetism, and reproduction
with chemism, because the former two appear most seldom, and the latter
most frequently. Electricity and irritability always maintained their
intermediate position.) With the awakening of feeling nature has attained
its goal--intelligence. As inorganic substances are distinguished only by
relative degrees of repulsion and attraction, so the differentiation of
organisms is conditioned by the relation of the three vital functions: in
the lower forms reproduction predominates, then irritability gradually
increases, while in the highest forms both of these are subordinated to
sensibility. All species, however, are connected by a common life, all the
stages are but arrests of the same fundamental force. This accentuation
of the unity of nature, which establishes a certain kinship between
Schelling's philosophy of nature and Darwinism, was a great idea, which
deserves the thanks of posterity in spite of such defects as its often
sportive, often heedlessly bold reasoning in details.
The parallelism of the potencies of nature, as we have developed it by
leaving out of account the numerous differences between the various
expositions of the _Naturphilosophie_, may be shown by a table:
I. UNIVERSAL NATURE. II. INORGANIC NATURE III. ORGANIC NATURE.
(ORGANIZING)
3. Copula 3. Organization
or Life. |
___^___ /Chemical \ G | /Sensi- Man.
/ \ |Process (3d| a | |bility. __^__
2. Light 2._Dynamical_|Dimen- | l | | / \
(Soul). _Process_. < sion) | v | |Irritabi- Male
b. At- \ (Determi- |Electri- | a |_|lity. (=Light)
traction.| nate |city (2d Di->n |Animal.
>1. Gra- matter.) | mension.) | i |
| vity 1. Indeter- |Magnetism | s |Repro- Female
a. Re- | (Body) minate |(1st Di- | m |duction (-Gravity)
pulsion / _matter_. \ mension.) / \ Plant.
%1b. Transcendental Philosophy.%
The philosophy of nature explained the products of nature teleologically,
deduced them from the concept or the mission of nature, by ignoring the
mechanical origin of physical phenomena and inquiring into the significance
of each stage in nature in view of this ideal meaning of the whole. It asks
what is the outcome of the chemical process for the whole of nature, what
is given by electricity, by magnetism, etc.--what part of the general aim
of nature is attained, is realized through this or that group of phenomena.
The philosophy of spirit given in the _System of Transcendental Idealism_,
1800, finds itself confronted by corresponding questions concerning the
phenomena of intelligence, of morals, and of art. Here again Schelling does
not trace out the mechanics of the soul-life, but is interested only in the
meaning, in the teleological significance of the psychical functions.
His aim is a constructive psychology in the Fichtean sense, a history of
consciousness, and the execution of his design as well closely follows the
example of the _Wissenschaftslehre_.
Since truth is the agreement of thought and its object, every cognition
necessarily implies the coming together of a subjective and an objective
factor. The problem of this coming together may be treated in two ways.
With the philosophy of nature we may start from the object and observe how
intelligence is added to nature. The transcendental philosophy takes the
opposite course, it takes its position with the subject, and asks, How
is there added to intelligence an object corresponding to it? The
transcendental philosopher has need of intellectual intuition in order to
recognize the original object-positing actions of the ego, which remain
concealed from common consciousness, sunk in the outcome of these acts. The
_theoretical_ part of the system explains the representation of objective
reality (the feeling connected with certain representations that we are
compelled to have them), from pure self-consciousness, whose opposing
moments, a real and an ideal force, limit each other by degrees,--and
follows the development of spirit in three periods ("epochs"). The first
of these extends from sensation, in which the ego finds itself limited, to
productive intuition, in which a thing in itself is posited over against
the ego and the phenomenon between the two; the second, from this point to
reflection (feeling of self, outer and inner intuition together with space
and time, the categories of relation as the original categories); the
third, finally, through judgment, wherein intuition and concept are
separated as well as united, up to the absolute act of will. Willing is
the continuation and completion of intuition;[1] intuition was unconscious
production, willing is conscious production. It is only through action that
the world becomes objective for us, only through interaction with other
active intelligences that the ego attains to the consciousness of a real
external world, and to the consciousness of its freedom. The _practical_
part follows the will from impulse (the feeling of contradiction between
the ideal and the object) through the division into moral law and resistant
natural impulse up to arbitrary will. Observations on legal order, on the
state, and on history are added as "supplements." The law of right, by
which unlawful action is directed against itself, is not a moral, but a
natural order, which operates with blind necessity. The state, like law, is
a product of the genus, and not of individuals. The ideal of a cosmopolitan
legal condition is the goal of _history_, in which caprice and conformity
to law are one, in so far as the conscious free action of individuals
subserves an unconscious end prescribed by the world-spirit. History is the
never completed revelation of the absolute (of the unity of the conscious
and the unconscious) through human freedom. We are co-authors in the
historical world-drama, and invent our own parts. Not until the third (the
religious) period, in which he reveals himself as "providence," will God
_be_; in the past (the tragical) period, in which the divine power was felt
as "fate," and in the present (the mechanical) period, in which he appears
as the "plan of nature," God is not, but is only _becoming_.
[Footnote 1: With this transformation of the antithesis between knowledge
and volition into a mere difference in degree, Schelling sinks back to the
standpoint of Leibnitz. In all the idealistic thinkers who start from Kant
we find the endeavor to overcome the Critical dualism of understanding and
will, as also that between intellect and sensibility. Schiller brings the
contrary impulses of the ego into ultimate harmonious union in artistic
activity. Fichte traces them back to a common ground; Schelling combines
both these methods by extolling art as a restoration of the original
identity. Hegel reduces volition to thought, Schopenhauer makes intellect
proceed from will.]
An interesting supplement to the Fichtean philosophy is furnished by the
third, the _aesthetic_, part of the transcendental idealism, which makes
use of Kant's theory of the beautiful in a way similar to that in which the
philosophy of nature had availed itself of his theory of the organic.
Art is the higher third in which the opposition between theoretical and
practical action, the antithesis of subject and object, is removed; in
which cognition and action, conscious and unconscious activity, freedom and
necessity, the impulse of genius and reflective deliberation are united.
The beautiful, as the manifestation of the infinite in the finite, shows
the problem of philosophy, the identity of the real and the ideal, solved
in sensuous appearance. Art is the true organon and warrant of philosophy;
she opens up to philosophy the holy of holies, is for philosophy the
supreme thing, the revelation of all mysteries. Poesy and philosophy (the
aesthetic intuition of the artist and the intellectual intuition of
the thinker) are most intimately related; they were united in the old
mythology--why should not this repeat itself in the future?
%2. System of Identity.%
The assertion which had already been made in the first period that "nature
and spirit are fundamentally the same," is intensified in the second into
the proposition, "The ground of nature and spirit, the absolute, is the
identity of the real and the ideal," and in this form is elevated into
a principle. As the absolute is no longer employed as a mere ground of
explanation, but is itself made the object of philosophy, the doctrine of
identity is added to the two co-ordinate disciplines, the philosophy of
nature and the philosophy of spirit, as a higher third, which serves as a
basis for them, and in Schelling's exposition of which several phases must
be distinguished.[1]
[Footnote 1: The philosophy of identity is given in the following
treatises: _Exposition of my System of Philosophy, 1801; Further
Expositions of the System of Philosophy, 1802; Bruno, or on the Divine and
Natural Principle of Things, 1803; Lectures on the Method of Academical
Study, 1803; Aphorisms by way of Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature,
Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature_ (both in the _Jahrbuecher fuer
Medizin), 1806_. Besides these the following also bear on this doctrine:
the additions to the second edition of the _Ideas_, 1803, and the
_Exposition_, against Fichte, 1806.]
Following Spinoza, whom he at first imitated even in the geometrical method
of proof, Schelling teaches that there are two kinds of knowledge, the
philosophical knowledge of the reason and the confused knowledge of
the imagination, and, as objects of these, two forms of existence, the
infinite, undivided existence of the absolute, and the finite existence of
individual things, split up into multiplicity and becoming. The manifold
and self-developing things of the phenomenal world owe their existence
to isolating thought alone; they possess as such no true reality, and
speculation proves them void. While things appear particular to inadequate
representation, the philosopher views them _sub specie aeterni_, in their
_per se_, in their totality, in the identity, as Ideas. To construe things
is to present them as they are in God. But in God all things are one;
in the absolute all is absolute, eternal, infinitude itself. (Accord-to
Hegel's parody, the absolute is the night, in which all cows are black.)
The world-ground appears as nature and spirit; yet in itself it is neither
the one nor the other, but the unity of both which is raised above all
contrariety, the indifference of objective and subjective. Although amid
the finitude of the things of the world the self-identity of the absolute
breaks up into a plurality of self-developing individual existences, yet
even in the phenomenal world of individuals the unity of the ground is not
entirely lost: each particular existence is a definite expression of the
absolute, and to it as such the character of identity belongs, though in
a diminished degree and mingled with difference (Bruno's "monads"). The
world-ground is absolute, the individual thing is relative, identity and
totality; nothing exists which is merely objective or merely subjective;
everything is both, only that one or other of these two factors always
predominates. This Schelling terms quantitative difference: the phenomena
of nature, like the phenomena of spirit, are a unity of the real and the
ideal, only that in the former there is a preponderance of the real, in the
latter a preponderance of the ideal.
At first Schelling, in Neoplatonic fashion, maintained the existence of
another intermediate region between the spheres of the infinite and the
finite: absolute knowing or the self-knowledge of the identity. In this,
as the "form" of the absolute, the objective and the subjective are not
absolutely one, as they are in the being or "essence" of the absolute, but
ideally (potentially) opposed, though one _realiter_. Later he does away
with this distinction also, as existing for reflection alone, not for
rational intuition, and outbids his earlier determinations concerning the
simplicity of the absolute with the principle, that it is not only the
unity of opposites, but also the unity of the unity and the opposition or
the identity of the identity, in which fanciful description the dialogue
_Bruno_ pours itself forth. A further alteration is brought in by
characterizing the absolute as the identity of the finite and the infinite,
and by equating the finite with the real or being, the infinite with the
ideal or knowing. With this there is joined a philosophical interpretation
of the Trinity akin to Lessing's. In the absolute or eternal the finite
and the infinite are alike absolute. God the Father is the eternal, or the
unity of the finite and the infinite; the Son is the finite in God (before
the falling away); the Spirit is the infinite or the return of the finite
into the eternal.
In the construction of the real series Schelling proceeds still more
schematically and analogically than in the _Naturphilosophie_ of the first
period, the contents of which are here essentially reproduced. With this is
closely connected his endeavor, in correspondence with the principles of
the theory of identity, to show in every phenomenon the operation of
all three moments of the absolute. In each natural product all three
"potencies" or stages, gravity A(^1), light A(^2), and organization A(^3),
are present, only in subordination to one of their number. Since the third
potency is never lacking, all is organic; that which appears to us as
inorganic matter is only the residuum left over from organization,
that which could become neither plant nor animal. New here is the
cohesion-series of Steffens (the phenomenon of magnetism), in which
nitrogen forms the south pole, carbon the north pole, and iron the point of
indifference, while oxygen, hydrogen, and water represent the east pole,
west pole, and indifference point in electrical polarity. In the organic
world plants represent the carbon pole, animals the nitrogen pole; the
former is the north pole, the latter the south. Moreover, the points of
indifference reappear: the plant corresponds to water, the animal to iron.
Schelling was far outdone in fantastic analogies of this kind by his
pupils, especially by Oken, who in his _Sketch of the Philosophy of
Nature_, 1805, compares the sense of hearing, for example, to the parabola,
to a metal, to a bone, to the bird, to the mouse, and to the horse. As
nature was the imaging of the infinite (unity or essence) into the finite
(plurality or form), so spirit is the taking up of the finite into the
infinite. In the spiritual realm also all three divine original potencies
are every, where active, though in such a way that one is dominant. In
intuition (sensation, consciousness, intuition, each in turn thrice
divided) the infinite and the eternal are subordinated to the finite; in
thought or understanding (concept, judgment, inference, each in three
kinds) the finite and the eternal are subordinated to the infinite; in
reason (which comprehends all under the form of the absolute) the finite
and the infinite are subordinated to the eternal. Intuition is finite
cognition, thought infinite cognition, reason eternal cognition. The forms
of the understanding do not suffice for the knowledge of reason; common
logic with its law of contradiction has no binding authority for
speculation, which starts with the equalization of opposites. In the
_Aphorisms by way of Introduction_ science, religion, and art figure as
stages of the ideal all, in correspondence with the potencies of the real
all--matter, motion, and organization. Nature culminates in man, history
in the state. Reason, philosophy, is the re-establishment of identity, the
return of the absolute to itself.
Unconditioned knowledge, as Schelling maintains in his encyclopedia,
_i.e._, his _Lectures on the Method of Academical Study_, is the
presupposition of all particular knowledge. The function of universities is
to maintain intact the connection between particular knowledge and absolute
knowledge. The three higher faculties correspond to the three potencies in
the absolute: Natural Science and Medicine to the real or finite; History
and Law to the ideal or infinite; Theology to the eternal or the copula.
There is further a faculty of arts, the so-called Philosophical Faculty,
which imparts whatever in philosophy is teachable. The two lectures on
theology (viii. and ix.) are especially important. There are two forms of
religion, one of which discovers God in nature, while the other finds him
in history; the former culminates in the Greek religion, the latter in the
Christian, and with the founding of this the third period of history (which
Schelling had previously postponed into the future), the period of
providence begins. In Christianity mythology is based on religion, not
religion on mythology, as was the case in heathenism. The speculative
kernel of Christianity is the incarnation of God, already taught by the
Indian sages; this, however, is not to be understood as a single event in
time, but as eternal. It has been a hindrance to the development of
Christianity that the Bible, whose value is far below that of the sacred
books of India, has been more highly prized than that which the patristic
thinking succeeded in making out of its meager contents.
If, finally, we compare Schelling's system of identity with its model, the
system of Spinoza, two essential differences become apparent. Although both
thinkers start from a principiant equal valuation of the two phenomenal
manifestations of the absolute, nature and spirit, Spinoza tends to posit
thought in dependence on extension (the soul represents what the body is),
while in Schelling, conversely, the Fichtean preference of spirit is still
potent (the state and art stand nearer to the absolute identity
than the organism, although, principiantly considered, the greatest
possible approximation to the equilibrium of the real and the ideal is as
much attained in the one as in the other). The second difference lies in
the fact that the idea of development is entirely lacking in Spinoza, while
in Schelling it is everywhere dominant. It reminds one of Lessing and
Herder, who also attempted to combine Spinozistic and Leibnitzian elements.
%3a. Doctrine of Freedom.%
The system of identity had, with Spinoza, distinguished two worlds, the
real world of absolute identity and the imagined world of differentiated
and changeable individual things; it had traced back the latter to the
former as its ground, but had not deduced it from the former. Whence, then,
the imagination which, instead of the unchangeable unity, shows us the
changing manifold? Whence the imperfections of the finite, whence evil?
The pantheism of Spinoza is inseparably connected with determinism, which
denies evil without explaining it. Evil and finitude demand explanation,
not denial, and this without the abandonment of pantheism. But explanation
by what? By the absolute, for besides the absolute there is naught. How,
then, must the pantheistic doctrine of the absolute be transformed in order
that the fact of evil and the separate existence of the finite may become
comprehensible? To this task are devoted the _Inquiries into the Nature of
Human Freedom (Philosophical Works_, vol. i., 1809, with which should be
compared the _Memorial of Jacobi_, 1812, and the _Answer to Eschenmayer_,
1813).
As early as in the _Bruno_, the problem occasionally emerges why matters do
not rest with the original infinite unity of the absolute, why the finite
breaks away from the identical primal ground. The possibility of the
separation, it is answered, lies in the fact that the finite is like the
infinite _realiter_, and yet, ideally, is different from it; the actuality
of the coming forth, however, lies in the non-deducible self-will of
the finite. Then after Eschenmayer[1] _(Philosophy in its Transition to
Not-philosophy_, 1803) had characterized the procession of the Ideas out of
the Godhead as an impenetrable mystery for thought, before which philosophy
must yield to faith, Schelling, in the essay _Religion and Philosophy_,
1804, goes more deeply into the problem. The origin of the sense-world is
conceivable only as a breaking away, a spring, a _falling away_,
which consists in the soul's grasping itself in its selfhood, in its
subordination of the infinite in itself to the finite, and in its thus
ceasing to be in God. The procession of the world from the infinite is a
free act, a fact which can only be described, not deduced as necessary. The
counterpart of this attainment of independence on the part of things or
creation is history as the return of the world to its source. They are
related to each other as the fall to redemption. Both the dismission of the
world and its reception back, together with the intervening development,
are, however, events needed by God himself in order to become actual God:
He develops through the world. (A similar thought was not unknown in the
Middle Ages: if God is to give a complete revelation of himself he must
make known his grace; and this presupposes sin. As the occasion of divine
grace, the fall is a happy, saving fault; without it God could not have
revealed himself as gracious, as forgiving, hence not completely.)
Schelling's study of Jacob Boehme, to which he was led by Baader,
essentially contributed to the concentration of his thought on this point.
_The Exposition of the True Relation_, etc., already distinctly betrays the
influence of this mystic. In correspondence with Boehme's doctrine that God
is living God only through his inclusion of negation in himself, it is here
maintained: A being can manifest itself only when it is not merely one, but
has another, an opposition (the many), in itself, whereby it is revealed to
itself as unity. With the addition of certain Kantian ideas, in particular
the idea of transcendental freedom and the intelligible character,
Schelling's theosophy now assumes the following form:
The only way to guard against the determinism and the lifeless God of
Spinoza is to assume something in God which is not God himself, to
distinguish between God as existent and that which is merely the ground of
his existence or "nature in God." In God also the perfect proceeds from the
imperfect, he too develops and realizes himself. The actual, perfect God,
who is intelligence, wisdom, goodness, is preceded by something which is
merely the possibility of all this, an obscure, unconscious impulse toward
self-representation. For in the last analysis there is no being but
willing; to willing alone belong the predicates of the primal being,
groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation. This
"ground of existence" is an obscure "longing" to give birth to self, an
unconscious impulse to become conscious; the goal of this longing is the
"understanding," the Logos, the Word, wherein God becomes revealed to self.
By the self-subordination of this longing to the understanding as its
matter and instrument, God becomes actual God, becomes spirit and love. The
operation of the light understanding on the dark nature-will consists in a
separation of forces, whence the visible world proceeds. Whatever in the
latter is perfect, rational, harmonious, and purposive is the work of the
understanding; the irrational remainder, on the other hand, conflict and
lawlessness, abortion, sickness and death, originates in the dark ground.
Each thing has two principles in it: its self-will it receives from nature
in God, yet, at the same time, as coming from the divine understanding,
it is the instrument of the universal will. In God the light and dark
principles stand in indissoluble unity, in man they are separable. The
freedom of man's will makes him independent of both principles; going over
from truth to falsehood, he may strive to make his selfhood supreme and
to reduce the spiritual in him to the level of a means, or--with divine
assistance--continuing in the center, he may endeavor to subordinate
the particular will to the will of love. Good consists in overcoming
resistance, for in every case a thing can be revealed only through its
opposite. If man yields to temptation it is his own guilty choice. Evil is
not merely defect, privation, but something positive, selfhood breaking
away, the reversal of the rightful order between the particular and the
universal will. The possibility of a separation of the two wills lies in
the divine ground (it is "permitted" in order that by overmastering the
self-will the will of love may approve itself), the actuality of evil is
the free act of the creature. Freedom is to be conceived, in the Kantian
sense, as equally far removed from chance or caprice and from compulsion:
Man chooses his own non-temporal, intelligible nature; he predestinates
himself in the first creation, _i.e._, from eternity, and is responsible
for his actions in the sense-world, which are the necessary results of that
free primal act.
[Footnote 1: K. Ad. Eschenmayer was originally a physician, then, 1811-36,
professor of philosophy in Tuebingen, and died in 1852 at Kirchheim unter
Teck.]
As in nature and in the individual, so also in the history of mankind, the
two original grounds of things do battle with one another. The golden age
of innocence, of happy indecision and unconsciousness concerning sin, when
neither good nor evil yet was, was followed by a period of the omnipotence
of nature, in which the dark ground of existence ruled alone, although
it did not make itself felt as actual evil until, in Christianity, the
spiritual light was born in personal form. The subsequent conflict of good
against evil, in which God reveals himself as spirit, leads toward a state
wherein evil will be reduced to the position of a potency and everything
subordinated to spirit, and thus the complete identity of the ground of
existence and the existing God be brought about.
Besides this after-reconciliation of the two divine moments, Schelling
recognizes another, original unity of the two. The not yet unfolded unity
of the beginning (God as Alpha) he terms _indifference_ or groundlessness;
the more valuable unity of the end, attained by unfolding (God as Omega)
is called _identity_ or spirit. In the former the contraries are not yet
present; in the latter they are present no longer. The groundless divides
into two equally eternal beginnings, nature and light, or longing and
understanding, in order that the two may become one in love, and thereby
the absolute develop into the personal God. In this way Schelling endeavors
to overcome the antithesis between naturalism and theism, between dualism
and pantheism, and to remove the difficulties which arise for pantheism
from the fact of evil, as well as from the concepts of personality and of
freedom.
In the two moments of the absolute (nature in God--personal spirit) we
recognize at once the antithesis of the real and ideal which was given
in the philosophy of identity. The chief difference between the mystical
period and the preceding one consists in the fact that the absolute itself
is now made to develop (from indifference to identity, from the neither-nor
to the as-well-as of the antithesis), and that there is conceded to the
sense-world a reality which is more than apparent, more than merely present
for imagination. That which facilitated this rapid, almost unceasing change
of position for Schelling, and which at the same time concealed the fact
from him, was, above all, the ambiguous and variable meaning of his leading
concepts. The "objective," for example, now signifies unconscious being,
becoming, and production, now represented reality, now the real, in so far
as it is not represented, but only _is_. "God" sometimes means the whole
absolute, sometimes only the infinite, spiritual moment in the absolute.
Scarcely a single term is sharply defined, much less consistently used in a
single meaning.
%3b. Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation.%
Once again Schelling is ready with a new statement of the problem.
Philosophy is the science of the existent. In this, however, a distinction
is to be made between the _what (quid sit)_ and the _that (quod sit)_, or
between essence and existence. The apprehension of the essence, of the
concept, is the work of reason, but this does not go as far as actual
being. Rational philosophy cognizes only the universal, the possible,
the necessary truths (whose contradictory is unthinkable), but not the
particular and factual. This philosophy can only assert: If anything exists
it must conform to these laws; existence is not given with the _what_.
Hegel has ignored this distinction between the logical and the actual, has
confused the rational and the real. Even the system of identity was merely
rational, _i.e., negative_, philosophy, to which there must be added, as a
second part, a positive or existential philosophy, which does not, like the
former, rise to the highest principle, to God, but starts from this supreme
Idea and shows its actuality.
The content of this phase of Schelling's thought[1] was so unfruitful, and
its influence so small, that brief hints concerning it must here suffice.
First of all, the doctrine of the divine potencies and of creation is
repeated in altered form, and then there is given a philosophy of the
history of religion as a reflection of the theogonic process in human
consciousness.
[Footnote 1: On Schelling's negative and positive philosophy, published in
the four volumes of the second division of the _Works_, cf. Karl Groos,
_Die reine Vernunftwissenschaft, systematische Darstellung von Schellings
negativer Philosophie_, 1889; Konstantin Frantz, _Schellings positive
Philosophie_, in three parts, 1879-80; Ed. von Hartmann, _Gesammelte
Studien und Aufsaetze_, 1876, p. 650 _seq_.; Ad. Planck, _Schellings
nachgelassene Werke_, 1858; also the essay by Heyder, referred to above].
The potencies are now called the infinite ability to be (inactive will,
subject), pure being (being without potentiality, object), and spirit,
which is free from the one-sidednesses of mere potentiality and of
mere being, and master of itself (subject-object); to these is added,
further--not as a fourth, but as that which has the three predicates and
is wholly in each--the absolute proper, as the cause and support of these
attributes. The original unity of the three forms is dissolved, as the
first raises itself out of the condition of a mere potency and withdraws
itself from pure being in order to exist for itself; the tension extends
itself to the two others--the second now comes out from its selflessness,
subdues the first, and so leads the third back to unity. In creation
the three potencies stand related as the unlimited Can-be, the limiting
Must-be, and the Ought-to-be, or operate as material, formal, and final
causes, all held in undivided combination by the soul. It was not until the
end of creation that they became personalities. Man, in whom the potencies
come to rest, can divide their unity again; his fall calls forth a new
tension, and thereby the world becomes a world outside of God. History, the
process o progressive reconciliation between the God-estranged world and
God, passes through two periods--heathenism, in which the second person
works as a natural potency, and Christianity, in which it works with
freedom. In the discussion of these positive philosophy becomes a
_philosophy of mythology and revelation_. The irresistible force of
mythological ideas is explained by the fact that the gods are not creations
of the fancy, but real powers, namely, these potencies, which form the
substance of human conciousness.
The history of religion has for its starting-point the relative monotheism
of humanity in its original unity, and for its goal the absolute monotheism
of Christianity. With the separation into nations polytheism arises. This
is partly simultaneous polytheism (a plurality of gods under a chief god),
partly successive polytheism (an actual plurality of divinities, changing
dynasties of several chief gods), and develops from star worship or Sabeism
up to the religion of the Greeks. The Greek mysteries form the transition
from mythology to revelation. While in the mythological process one or
other of the divine potencies (Ground, Son, Spirit) was always predominant,
in Christianity they return into unity. The true monotheism of revelation
shows God as an articulated unity, in which the opposites are contained,
as being overcome. The person of Christ constitutes the content of
Christianity, who, in his incarnation and sacrificial death, yields up the
independence out of God which had come to him through the fall of man.
The three periods in the development of the Church (real, substantial
unity--ideality or freedom--the reconciliation of the two) were
foreshadowed in the chief apostles: Peter, with his leaning toward the
past, represents the Papal Church; Paul the thinker the Protestant Church;
and the gentle John the Church of the future.
CHAPTER XII.
SCHELLING'S CO-WORKERS.
In his period of vigorous creation Schelling was the center of an animated
philosophical activity. Each phase of his philosophy found a circle of
enthusiastic fellow-laborers, whom we must hesitate to term disciples
because of their independence and of their reaction on Schelling himself.
Only G.M. Klein (1776-1820, professor in Wuerzburg), Stutzmann (died 1816
in Erlangen; _Philosophy of the Universe_, 1806; _Philosophy of History_,
1808), and the historians of philosophy Ast and Rixner can be called
disciples of Schelling. Prominent among his co-workers in the philosophy
of nature were Steffens, Oken, Schubert, and Carus; besides these the
physiologist Burdach, the pathologist Kieser, the plant physiologist Nees
von Esenbeck, and the medical thinker Schelver (_Philosophy of Medicine_,
1809) deserve mention. Besides Hegel, J.J. Wagner and Friedrich Krause
distinguished themselves as independent founders of systems of identity;
Troxler, Suabedissen, and Berger are also to be assigned to this group.
Baader and Schleiermacher were competitors of Schelling in the philosophy
of religion, and Solger in aesthetics. Finally Fr. J. Stahl (died 1861;
_Philosophy of Right_, 1830 _seq_..), was also influenced by Schelling.
There is a wide divergence in Schelling's school, as J.E. Erdmann
accurately remarks, between the naturalistic pantheist Oken and the
mystical theosophist Baader, in whom elements which had been united in
Schelling appear divided.
%1. The Philosophers of Nature.%
Henrik Steffens[1] (a Norwegian, 1773-1845; professor in Halle, Breslau,
and Berlin) makes individual development the goal of nature--which is first
completely attained in man and in his peculiarity or talent--and holds that
the catastrophes of the spirit are reflected in the history of the earth.
Lorenz Oken[2] (1779-1851; professor in Jena 1807-27, then in Munich and
Zurich) identifies God and the universe, which comes to self-consciousness
in man, the most perfect animal; teaches the development of organisms from
an original slime (a mass of organic elements, infusoria, or cells); and
looks on the animal kingdom as man anatomized, in that the animal world
contains in isolated development that which man possesses collected in
minute organs--the worm is the feeling animal, the insect the light animal,
the snail the touch animal, the bird the hearing animal, the fish the
smelling animal, the amphibian the taste animal, the mammal the animal of
all senses.
[Footnote 1: Steffens, _Contributions to the Inner Natural History of the
Earth_, 1801; _Caricatures of the Holiest_, 1819-21; _Anthropology_, 1822.]
[Footnote 2: Oken: _On the Significance of the Bones of the Skull_, 1807;
_Text-book of the Philosophy of Nature_, 1809-11, 2d ed. 1831, 3d ed. 1843;
the journal _Isis_, from 1817. On Oken cf. C. Guettler, 1885.]
While in Steffens geological interests predominate, and in Oken biological
interests, Schubert, Carus, and Ennemoser are the psychologists of the
school. Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert[1] (1780-1860; professor in Erlangen and
Munich) brings the human soul into intimate relation with the world-soul,
whose phantasy gives form to all that is corporeal, and delights to dwell
on the abnormal and mysterious phenomena of the inner life, the border-land
between the physical and the psychical, on the unconscious and the
half-conscious, on presentiments and clairvoyance, as from another
direction also Schelling's philosophy was brought into perilous connection
with somnambulism. A second predominantly contemplative thinker was Karl
Gustav Carus[2] (1789-1869; at his death in Dresden physician to the king;
_Lectures on Psychology_, 1831; _Psyche_, 1846; _Physis_, 1851), greatly
distinguished for his services to comparative anatomy. Carus endows the
cell with unconscious psychical life,--a memory for the past shows itself
in the inheritance of dispositions and talents, just as the formation of
milk in the breasts of the pregnant and the formation of lungs in the
embryo betray a prevision of the future,--and points out that with the
higher development of organic and spiritual life the antitheses constantly
become more articulate: individual differences are greater among men than
among women, among adults than among children, among Europeans than among
negroes.
[Footnote 1: G.H. Schubert: _Views of the Dark Side of Natural Science_,
1808; _The Primeval World and the Fixed Stars_, 1822; _History of the
Soul_, 1830 (in briefer form, _Text-book of the Science of Man and of the
Soul_, 1838).]
[Footnote 2: Not to be confused with Friedrich August Carus (1770-1807;
professor in Leipsic), whose _History of Psychology_, 1808, forms the third
part of his posthumous works.]
%2. The Philosophers of Identity.%
It has been said of the Dane Johann Erich von Berger (1772-1833; from
1814 professor in Kiel; _Universal Outlines of Science_, 1817-27) that
he adopted a middle course between Fichte and Schelling. The same may be
asserted of Karl Ferdinand Solger (1780-1819; at his death professor in
Berlin; _Erwin, Four Dialogues on Beauty and Art_, 1815; _Lectures on
Aesthetics_, edited by Heyse, 1829), who points out the womb of the
beautiful in the fancy, and introduces into aesthetics the concept of
irony, that spirit of sadness at the vanity of the finite, though this is
needed by the Idea in order to its manifestation.
In Johann Jacob Wagner[1] (1775-1841; professor in Wuerzburg) and in J.P.V.
Troxler[2] (1780-1866) we find, as in Steffens, a fourfold division instead
of Schelling's triads. Both Wagner and Troxler find an exact correspondence
between the laws of the universe and those of the human mind. Wagner
(in conformity to the categories essence and form, opposition and
reconciliation) makes all becoming and cognition advance from unity to
quadruplicity, and finds the four stages of knowledge in representation,
perception, judgment, and Idea. Troxler shares with Fries the
anthropological standpoint, (philosophy is anthropology, knowledge of the
world is self-knowledge), and distinguishes, besides the emotional nature
or the unity of human nature, four constituents thereof, spirit,
higher soul, lower soul (body, _Leib_), and body _(Koerper)_, and four
corresponding kinds of knowledge, in reverse order, sensuous perception,
experience, reason, and spiritual intuition, of which the middle two are
mediate or reflective in character, while the first and last are intuitive.
For D. Th. A. Suabedissen also (1773-1835; professor in Marburg;
_Examination of Man_, 1815-18) philosophy is the science of man, and
self-knowledge its starting point.
[Footnote 1: J.J. Wagner: _Ideal Philosophy_, 1804; _Mathematical
Philosophy_, 1811; _Organon of Human Knowledge_, 1830, in three parts,
System of the World, of Knowledge, and of Language. On Wagner cf. L. Rabus,
1862.]
[Footnote 2: Troxler: _Glances into the Nature of Man_, 1812;
_Metaphysics_, 1828; _Logic_, 1830.]
The relatively limited reputation enjoyed in his own time and to-day by
Friedrich Krause[1] (born in Eisenberg 1781; habilitated in Jena 1802;
lived privately in Dresden; became a _Privatdocent_ in Goettingen from 1824;
and died at Munich 1832; _Prototype of Humanity_, 1812, and numerous other
works) has been due, on the one hand, to the appearance of his more gifted
contemporary Hegel, and, on the other, to his peculiar terminology. He not
only Germanized all foreign words in a spirit of exaggerated purism, but
also coined new verbal roots, _(Mael, Ant, Or, Om)_ and from these formed
the most extraordinary combinations (_Vereinselbganzweseninnesein,
Oromlebselbstschauen_). His most important pupil, Ahrens (professor in
Leipsic, died 1874; _Course of Philosophy_, 1836-38; _Natural Right_,
1852), helped Krause's doctrine to gain recognition in France and Belgium
by his fine translations into French; while it was introduced into Spain by
J.S. del Rio of Madrid (died 1869).--Since the finite is a negative, the
infinite a positive concept, and hence the knowledge of the infinite
primal, the principle of philosophy is the absolute, and philosophy itself
knowledge of God or the theory of essence. The Subjective Analytic Course
leads from the self-viewing of the ego up to the vision of God; the
Synthetic Course starts from the fundamental Idea, God, and deduces from
this the partial Ideas, or presents the world as the revelation of God. For
his attempted reconciliation of theism and pantheism Krause invented the
name panentheism, meaning thereby that God neither is the world nor stands
outside the world, but has the world in himself and extends beyond it. He
is absolute identity, nature and reason are relative identity, viz., the
identity of the real and ideal, the former with the character of reality,
the latter with the character of ideality. Or, the absolute considered from
the side of its wholeness (infinity) is nature, considered from the side of
its selfhood (unconditionality) is reason; God is the common root of both.
Above nature and reason is humanity, which combines in itself the highest
products of both, the most perfect animal body and self-consciousness. The
humanity of earth, the humanity known to us, is but a very small portion of
the humanity of the universe, which in the multitude of its members, which
cannot be increased, constitutes the divine state. Krause's most important
work is his philosophy of right and of history, with its marks of a highly
keyed idealism. He treats human right as an effluence of divine right;
besides the state or legal union, he recognizes many other
associations--the science and the art union, the religious society, the
league of virtue or ethical union. His philosophy of history
(_General Theory of Life_, edited by Von Leonhardi, 1843) follows the
Fichteo-Hegelian rhythm, unity, division, and reunion, and correlates the
several ages with these. The first stage is germinal life; the second,
youth; the third, maturity. The culmination is followed by a
reverse movement from counter-maturity, through counter-youth, to
counter-childhood, whereupon the development recommences--without
cessation. It is to be regretted that this noble-minded man joined to his
warm-hearted disposition, broad outlook, and rigorous method a heated
fancy, which, crippling the operation of these advantageous qualities,
led his thought quite too far away from reality. Ahrens, Von Leonhardi,
Lindemann, and Roeder may be mentioned as followers of Krause.
[Footnote 1: On Krause cf. P. Hohlfeld, _Die Krausesche Philosophic_, 1879;
B. Martin, 1881; R. Eucken, _Zur Erinnerung an Krause, Festrede_, 1881.
From his posthumous works Hohlfeld and Wuensche have published the _Lectures
on Aesthetics_, the _System of Aesthetics_ (both 1882), and numerous other
treatises.]
%3. The Philosophers of Religion.%
Franz (von) Baader, the son of a physician, was born in Munich in 1765,
resided there as superintendent of mines, and, from 1826, as professor
of speculative dogmatics, and died there also in 1841. His works, which
consisted only of a series of brief treatises, were collected (16 vols.,
1851-60) by his most important adherent, Franz Hoffman[1] (at his death in
1881 professor in Wuerzburg). Baader may be characterized as a mediaeval
thinker who has worked through the critical philosophy, and who, a
believing, yet liberal Catholic, endeavors to solve with the instruments
of modern speculation the old Scholastic problem of the reconciliation of
faith and knowledge. His themes are, on the one hand, the development
of God, and, on the other, the fall and redemption, which mean for him,
however, not merely inner phenomena, but world-events. He is in sympathy
with the Neoplatonists, with Augustine, with Thomas Aquinas, with Eckhart,
with Paracelsus, above all, with Jacob Boehme, and Boehme's follower Louis
Claude St. Martin (1743-1804), but does not overlook the value of the
modern German philosophy. With Kant he begins the inquiry with the problem
of knowledge; with Fichte he finds in self-consciousness the essence,
and not merely a property, of spirit; with Hegel he looks on God or
the absolute spirit not only as the object, but also as the subject
of knowledge. He rejects, however, the autonomy of the will and the
spontaneity of thought; and though he criticises the Cartesian separation
between the thought of the creator and that of the creature, he as little
approves the pantheistic identification of the two--human cognition
participates in the divine, without constituting a part of it.
[Footnote 1: Besides Hoffman, Lutterbeck and Hamberger have described and
expounded Baader's system. See also Baumann's paper in the _Philosophische
Monatshefte_, vol. xiv., 1878, p. 321 _seq_.]
In accordance with its three principal objects, "God, Nature, and Man,"
philosophy divides into fundamental science (logic or the theory of
knowledge and theology), the philosophy of nature (cosmology or the
theory of creation and physics), and the philosophy of spirit (ethics and
sociology). In all its parts it must receive religious treatment. Without
God we cannot know God. In our cognition of God he is at once knower
and known; our being and all being is a being known by him; our
self-consciousness is a consciousness of being known by God: _cogitor, ergo
cogito et sum_; my being and thinking are based on my being thought by
God. Conscience is a joint knowing with God's knowing (_conscientia_).
The relation between the known and the knower is threefold. Cognition is
incomplete and lacks the free co-operation of the knower when God merely
pervades (_durchwohnt_) the creature, as is the case with the devil's
timorous and reluctant knowledge of God. A higher stage is reached when the
known is present to the knower and dwells with him (_beiwohnt_). Cognition
becomes really free and perfect when God dwells in (_inwohnt_) the
creature, in which case the finite reason yields itself freely and in
admiration to the divine reason, lets the latter speak in itself, and
feels its rule, not as foreign, but as its own. (Baader maintains a like
threefoldness in the practical sphere: the creature is either the object
or, rather, the passive recipient, or the organ, or the representative of
the divine action, i.e., in the first case, God alone works; in the second,
he co-operates with the creature; in the third, the creature works with the
forces and in the name of God. Joyful obedience, conscious of its grounds,
is the highest freedom). Knowing and loving, thought and volition,
knowledge and faith, philosophy and dogma are as little to be abstractly
divided as thing and self, being and thought, object and subject. True
freedom and genuine speculation are neither blind traditional belief nor
doubting, God-estranged thinking, but the free recognition of authority,
and self-attained conviction of the truth of the Church doctrine.
Baader distinguishes a twofold creation of the world and a double process
of development (an esoteric and an exoteric revelation) of God himself.
The creation of the ideal world, as a free act of love, is a non-deducible
fact; the theogonic process, on the contrary, is a necessary event by which
God becomes a unity returning from division to itself, and so a living God.
The eternal self-generation of God is a twofold birth: in the immanent
or logical process the unsearchable will (Father) gives birth to the
comprehensible will (Son) to unite with it as Spirit; the place of this
self-revelation is wisdom or the Idea. In the emanent or real process,
since desire or nature is added to the Idea and is overcome by it, these
three moments become actual persons. In the creation of the--at first
immaterial--world, in which God unites, not with his essence, but with
his image only, the same two powers, desire and wisdom, operate as the
principles of matter and form. The materialization of the world is a
consequence of the fall. Evil consists in the elevation of selfhood, which
springs from desire, into self-seeking. Lucifer fell because of pride, and
man, yielding to Lucifer's temptation, from baseness, by falling in love
with nature beneath him. By the creation of matter God has out of pity
preserved the world, which was corrupted by the fall, from the descent into
hell, and at the same time has given man occasion for moral endeavor.
The appearance of Christ, the personification of the moral law, is the
beginning of reconciliation, which man appropriates through the sacrament.
Nature participates in the redemption, as in the corruption.
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born in 1768 at Breslau, and died
in 1834 in Berlin, where he had become preacher at Trinity church in 1809,
professor of theology in 1810, member of the philosophical section of the
Academy in 1811, and its secretary in 1814. Reared in the Moravian schools
at Niesky and Barby, he studied at Halle; and, between 1794 and 1804, was a
preacher in Landsberg on the Warthe, in Berlin (at the Charite Hospital),
and in Stolpe, then professor in Halle. He first attracted attention by the
often republished _Discourses on Religion addressed to the Educated among
those who despise it_, 1799 (critical edition by Puenjer, 1879), which was
followed in the succeeding year by the _Monologues_, and the anonymous
_Confidential Letters on Lucinde (Lucinde_ was the work of his friend Fr.
Schlegel). Besides several collections of sermons, mention must further
be made of his _Outlines of a Critique of Previous Ethics_, 1803; _The
Celebration of Christmas_, 1806; and his chief theological work, _The
Christian Faith_, 1822, new edition 1830. In the third (the philosophical)
division of his _Collected Works_ (1835-64) the second and third volumes
contain the essays on the history of philosophy, on ethical, and on
academic subjects; vols. vi. to ix., the Lectures on Psychology, Esthetics,
the Theory of the State, and Education, edited by George, Lommatsch,
Brandis, and Platz; and the first part of vol. iv., the _History of
Philosophy_ (to Spinoza), edited by Ritter. The _Monologues_ and _The
Celebration of Christmas_ have appeared in _Reclam's Bibliothek_.
Schleiermacher's philosophy is a rendezvous for the most diverse systems.
Side by side with ideas from Kant, Fichte, and Schelling we meet Platonic,
Spinozistic, and Leibnitzian elements; even Jacobi and the Romanticists
have contributed their mite. Schleiermacher is an eclectic, but one who,
amid the fusion of the most diverse ideas, knows how to make his own
individuality felt. In spite of manifold echoes of the philosophemes of
earlier and of contemporary thinkers, his system is not a conglomeration
of unrelated lines of thought, but resembles a plant, which in its own way
works over and assimilates the nutritive elements taken up from the
soil. Schleiermacher is attractive rather than impressive; he is less a
discoverer than a critic and systematizer. His fine critical sense works in
the service of a positive aim, subserves a harmonizing tendency; he
takes no pleasure in breaking to pieces, but in adjusting, limiting, and
combining. There is no one of the given views which entirely satisfies him,
none which simply repels him; each contains elements which seem to him
worthy of transformation and adoption. When he finds himself confronted by
a sharp conflict of opinion, he seeks by careful mediation to construct
a whole out of the two "half truths," though this, it is true, does not
always give a result more satisfactory than the partial views which he
wishes to reconcile. A single example may be given of this conciliatory
tendency: space, time, and the categories are not only subjective forms of
knowledge, but at the same time objective forms of reality. "Not only"
is the watchword of his philosophy, which became the prototype of the
numberless "ideal realisms" with which Germany was flooded after Hegel's
death. If the skeptical and eclectic movements, which constantly make their
appearance together, are elsewhere divided among different thinkers, they
here come together in one mind in the form of a mediating criticism, which,
although it argues logically, is yet in the end always guided by the
invisible cords of a _feeling_ of justice in matters scientific. In its
weaker portions Schleiermacher's philosophy is marked by lack of grasp,
pettiness, and sportiveness. It lacks courage and force, and the rare
delicacy of the thought is not entirely able to compensate for this defect.
In its fear of one-sidedness it takes refuge in the arms of an often
faint-hearted policy of reconciliation.
We shall not discuss the specifically theological achievements of this
many-sided man, nor his great services in behalf of the philological
knowledge of the history of philosophy--through his translation of Plato,
1804-28, and a series of valuable essays on Greek thinkers--but shall
confine our attention to the leading principles of his theory of knowledge,
of religion, and of ethics.
The _Dialectic_[1] (edited by Jonas, 1839), treats in a transcendental part
and a technical or formal part of the concept and the forms of knowledge.
_Knowledge_ is thought. What distinguishes that thought which we call
knowledge from that other thought which does not deserve this honorable
title, from mere opinion? Two criteria: its agreement with the thought of
other thinkers (its universality and necessity), and its agreement with
the being which is thought in it. That thought alone is knowledge which is
represented as necessarily valid for all who are capable of thought, and
as corresponding to a being or reproducing it. These two agreements (among
thinkers, and of thought with the being which is thought) are the criteria
of knowledge--let us turn now to its factors. These are essentially the
two brought forward by Kant, sensibility and understanding; Schleiermacher
calls them the organic function and the intellectual function. The organic
activity of the senses furnishes us, in sensations, the unordered, manifold
material of knowledge, which is formed and unified by the activity of
reason. If we except two concepts which limit our knowledge, chaos and
God--absolute formlessness or chaos is an idea just as incapable of
realization as absolute unity or deity--every actual cognition is a product
of both factors, of the sensuous organization and of reason. But these two
do not play equal parts in every cognitive act. When the organic function
is predominant we have perception; when the intellectual function
predominates we have thought in the strict sense. A perfect balance of the
two would be intuition, which, however, constitutes the goal of knowledge,
never fully to be realized. These two kinds of knowledge, therefore, are
not specifically, but only relatively, different: in all perception reason
is also active, and in all thought sensibility, only to a less degree than
the opposite function. Moreover, perception and thought, or sensibility and
reason, are by no means to relate to different objects. They have the same
object, only that the organic activity represents it as an indefinite,
chaotic manifold, while the activity of reason (whose work consists
in discrimination and combination), represents it as a well-ordered
multiplicity and unity. It is the same being which is represented by
perception in the form of an "image," and by thought in the form of a
"concept." In the former case we have the world as chaos; in the latter, we
have it as cosmos. Inasmuch as the two factors in knowledge represent the
same object in relatively different ways, it may be said of them that they
are opposed to each other, and yet identical. The same is true of the two
modes of being which Schleiermacher posits as real and ideal over against
the two factors in thought. The real is that which corresponds to the
organic function, the ideal that which corresponds to the activity of
reason. These forms of being also are opposed, and yet identical. Our
self-consciousness gives clear proof of the fact that _thought and being_
can be _identical_; in it, as thinking being, we have the identity of the
real and the ideal, of being and thought immediately given. As the ego,
in which the subject of thought and the object of thought are one, is the
undivided ground of its several activities, so God is the primal unity,
which lies at the basis of the totality of the world. As in Schelling, the
absolute is described as self-identical, absolute unity, exalted above
the antithesis of real and ideal, nay, above all antitheses. God is the
negation of opposites, the world the totality of them. If there were
an adequate knowledge of the absolute identity it would be an absolute
knowledge. This is denied, however, to us men, who are never able to rise
above the opposition of sensuous and intellectual cognition. The unity of
thought and being is presupposed in all thinking, but can never actually
be thought. As an Idea this identity is indispensable, but to think it
definitely, either by conception or judgment, is impossible. The concepts
supreme power (God or creative nature) and supreme cause (fate or
providence) do not attain to that which we seek to think in them: that
which has in it no opposition is an idea incapable of realization by man,
but, nevertheless, a necessary ideal, the presupposition of all cognition
(and volition), and the ground of all certitude. All knowledge must be
related to the absolute unity and be accompanied by it. Since, then, the
absolute identity cannot be presented, but ever sought for only, and
absolute knowledge exists only as an ideal, dialectic is not so much a
science as a technique of thought and proof, an introduction to philosophic
thinking or (since knowledge is thought in common) to discussion in
conformity with the rules of the art. With this the name dialectic returns
to its original Platonic meaning.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Quaebicker, _Ueber Schleiermachers erkeuntnisstheoretische
Grundansicht_, 1871, and the _Inquiries_ by Bruno Weiss in the _Zeitschrift
fuer Philosophie_, vols. lxxiii.-lxxv., 1878-79.]
The popular ideas of God ill stand examination by the standard furnished
by the principle of identity. The plurality of attributes which we are
accustomed to ascribe to God agree but poorly with his unity free from all
contrariety. In reality God does not possess these manifold attributes;
they first arise in the religious consciousness, in which his unconditioned
and undivided working is variously reflected and, as it were, divided. They
are only the various reflections of his undivided nature in the mind of
the observer. In God ability and performance, intelligence and will, his
thought of self and his thought of the world coincide in one. Even
the concept of personality must not be ascribed to God, since it is a
limitation of the infinite and belongs to mythology; while the idea of
life, on the contrary, is allowable as a protection against atheism and
fatalism. When Schleiermacher, further, equates the activity of God and the
causality of nature he ranges himself on the pantheistic side in regard
to the question of the "immanence or transcendence of God," without being
willing to acknowledge it. It sounds Spinozistic enough when he says: God
never was without the world, he exists neither before nor outside it, we
know him only _in_ us and in things. Besides that which he actually brings
forth, God could not produce anything further, and just as little does he
miraculously interfere in the course of the world as regulated by natural
law. Everything takes place necessarily, and man is distinguished above
other beings neither by freedom (if by freedom we understand anything more
than inner necessitation) nor by eternal existence. Like all individual
beings, so we are but changing states in the life of the universe, which,
as they have arisen, will disappear again. The common representations of
immortality, with their hope of future compensation, are far from pious.
The true immortality of religion is this--amid finitude to become one with
the infinite, and in one moment to be eternal.
Schleiermacher's optimism well harmonizes with this view of the relation
between God and the world. If the universe is the phenomenon of the
divine activity, then considered as a whole it is perfect; whatever of
imperfection we find in it, is merely the inevitable result of finitude.
The bad is merely the less perfect; everything is as good as it can be;
the world is the best possible; everything is in its right place; even the
meanest thing is indispensable; even the mistakes of men are to be treated
with consideration. All is good and divine. In this way Schleiermacher
weds ideas from Spinoza to Leibnitzian conceptions. From the former he
appropriates pantheism, from the latter optimism and the concept of
individuality; he shares determinism with both: all events, even the
decisions of the will, are subject to the law of necessity.
In the _philosophy of religion_ Schleiermacher created a new epoch by his
separation between religion and related departments with which it had often
been identified before his time, as it has been since. In its origin and
essence religion is not a matter of knowing, further, not a matter of
willing, but a matter of the heart. It lies quite outside the sphere of
speculation and of practice, coincides neither with metaphysics nor with
ethics, is not knowledge and not volition, but an intermediate third: it
has its own province in the emotional nature, where it reigns without
limitation; its essence is intuition and feeling in undivided unity. In
_feeling_ is revealed the presence of the infinite; in feeling we become
immediately aware of the Deity. The absolute, which in cognition and
volition we only presuppose and demand, but never attain, is actually
given in feeling alone as the relative identity and the common ground
of cognition and volition. Religion is _piety_, an affective, not an
objective, consciousness. And if certain religious ideas and actions
ally themselves with the pious state of mind, these are not essential
constituents of religion, but derivative elements, which possess a
religious significance only in so far as they immediately develop from
piety and exert an influence upon it. That which makes an act religious
is always feeling as a point of indifference between knowing and doing,
between receptive and forthgoing activity, as the center and junction
of all the powers of the soul, as the very focus of personality. And as
feeling in general is the middle point in the life of the soul, so, again,
the religious feeling is the root of all genuine feeling. What sort of a
feeling, then, is piety? Schleiermacher answers: A feeling of _absolute
dependence_. Dependence on what? On the universe, on God. Religion grows
out of the longing after the infinite, it is the sense and taste for the
All, the direction toward the eternal, the impulse toward the absolute
unity, immediate experience of the world harmony; like art, religion is the
immediate apprehension of a whole. In and before God all that is individual
disappears, the religious man sees one and the same thing in all that is
particular. To represent all events in the world as actions of a God,
to see God in all and all in God, to feel one's self one with the
eternal,--this is religion. As we look on all being within us and without
as proceeding from the world-ground, as determined by an ultimate cause, we
feel ourselves dependent on the divine causality. Like all that is finite,
we also are the effect of the absolute Power. While we stand in a relation
of interaction with the individual parts of the world, and feel ourselves
partially free in relation to them, we can only receive effects from God
without answering them; even our self-activity we have from him.
Nevertheless the feeling of dependence is not to be depressing, not
humbling merely, but the joyous sense of an exaltation and broadening of
life. In our devotion to the universe we participate in the life of the
universe; by leaning on the infinite we supplement our finitude--religion
makes up for the needy condition of man by bringing him into relation with
the absolute, and teaching him to know and to feel himself a part of the
whole.
From this elevating influence of religion, which Schleiermacher eloquently
depicts, it is at once evident that his definition of it as a feeling of
absolute dependence is only half correct. It needs to be supplemented by
the feeling of freedom, which exalts us by the consciousness of the oneness
of the human reason and the divine. It is only to this side of religion,
neglected by Schleiermacher, that we can ascribe its inspiring influence,
which he in vain endeavors to derive from the feeling of dependence. Power
can never spring from humility as such. This defect, however, does not
detract from Schleiermacher's merit in assigning to religion a special
field of spiritual activity. While Kant treats religion as an appendix to
ethics, and Hegel, with a one-sidedness which is still worse, reduces it to
an undeveloped form of knowledge, Schleiermacher recognizes that it is
not a mere concomitant phenomenon--whether an incidental result or a
preliminary stage--of morality or cognition, but something independent,
co-ordinate with volition and cognition, and of equal legitimacy. The proof
that religion has its habitation in feeling is the more deserving of thanks
since it by no means induced Schleiermacher to overlook the connection of
the God-consciousness with self-consciousness and the consciousness of
the world. Schleiermacher's theory, moreover, may be held correct without
ignoring the relatively legitimate elements in the views of religion which
he attacked. With the view that religion has its seat in feeling, it is
quite possible to combine a recognition of the fact that it has its origin
in the will, and its basis in morals, and that, further, it has the
significance of being (to use Schopenhauer's words) the "metaphysics of the
people."
Although religion and piety be made synonymous, it must still be admitted
that in a being capable of knowing and willing as well as of feeling, this
devout frame will have results in the spheres of cognition and action. In
regard to _cultus_ Schleiermacher maintains that a religious observance
which does not spring from one's own feeling and find an echo therein is
superstitious, and demands that religious feeling, like a sacred melody,
accompany all human action, that everything be done with religion, nothing
from religion. Instead of expressing itself in single specifically
religious actions, the religious feeling should uniformly pervade the whole
life. Let a private room be the temple where the voice of the priest is
raised. Dogmas, again, are descriptions of pious excitation, and take their
origin in man's reflection on his religious feelings, in his endeavor to
explain them, in his expression of them in ideas and words. The concepts
and principles of theology are valid only as descriptions and presentations
of feelings, not as cognitions; by their unavoidable anthropomorphic
character alone they are completely unfitted for science. The dogmatic
system is an envelopment which religion accepts with a smile. He who treats
religious doctrines as science falls into empty mythology. Principles of
faith and principles of knowledge are in no way related to one another,
neither by way of opposition nor by way of agreement; they never come into
contact. A theology in the sense of an actual science of God is impossible.
Further, out of its dogmas the Church constructs prescriptive symbols, a
step which must be deplored. It is to be hoped that some time religion will
no longer have need of the Church. In view of the present condition of
affairs it must be said that the more religious a man is the more secular
he must become, and that the cultured man opposes the Church in order to
promote religion.
So-called natural religion is nothing more than an abstraction of thought;
in reality positive religions alone exist. Because of the infinity of God
and the finitude of man, the one, universal, eternal religion can only
manifest itself in the form of particular historical religions, which
are termed revealed because founded by religious heroes, creative
personalities, in whom an especially lively religious feeling is aroused by
a new view of the universe, and determines (not, like artistic inspiration,
single moments, but) their whole existence. Three stages are to be
distinguished in the development of religion, according as the world is
represented as an unordered unity (chaos), or as an indeterminate manifold
of forces and elements (plurality without unity), or, finally, as an
organized plurality dominated by unity (system)--fetichism with fatalism,
polytheism, mono- (including pan-) theism. Among the religions of the third
stadium Islam is physical or aesthetic in spirit; Judaism and Christianity,
on the other hand, ethical or teleological. The Christian religion is
the most perfect, because it gives the central place to the concept
of redemption and reconciliation (hence to that which is essential to
religion) instead of to the Jewish idea of retribution.
The concept of individuality became of the highest importance for
Schleiermacher's ethics, as well as for his philosophy of religion; and
by his high appreciation of it he ranges himself with Leibnitz, Herder,
Goethe, and Novalis. Now two sides may be distinguished both in regard to
that which the individual is and to that which he ought to accomplish. Like
every particular being, man is an abbreviated, concentrated presentation of
the universe; he contains everything in himself, contains all, that is, in
a not yet unfolded, germinal manner, awaiting development in life in time,
but yet in a form peculiar to him, which is never repeated elsewhere. This
yields a twofold moral task. The individual ought to rouse into actuality
the infinite fullness of content which he possesses as possibility, as
slumbering germs, should harmoniously develop his capacities; yet in this
he must not look upon the unique form which has been bestowed upon him
as worthless. He is not to feel himself a mere specimen, an unimportant
repetition of the type, but as a particular, and in this particularity a
significant, expression of the absolute, whose omission would cause a gap
in the world. It is surprising that the majority of the thinkers who
have defended the value of individuality lay far less stress upon the
micro-cosmical nature of the individual and the development of his
capacities in all directions than on care for his peculiar qualities.
So also Schleiermacher. Yet he gradually returned from the extreme
individualism--the _Monologues_ affect one almost repellently by the
impulse which they give to vain self-reflection--which he at first
defended.
In the _Ethics_ (edited by Kirchmann, 1870; earlier editions by Schweizer,
1835, and Twesten, 1841) Schleiermacher brings the well-nigh forgotten
concept of goods again into honor. The three points of view from which
ethics is to be discussed, and each of which presents the whole ethical
field in its own peculiar way--the good, virtue, duty--are related as
resultant, force, and law of motion. Every union of reason and nature
produced by the action of the former on the latter is called a _good_; the
sum of these unities, the highest good. According as reason uses nature
as an instrument in formation or as a symbol in cognition her action is
formative or indicative; it is, further, either common or peculiar. On the
crossing of these (fluctuating) distinctions of identical and individual
organization and symbolization is based the division of the theory of
goods:
SPHERES. RELATIONS. GOODS.
_Ident. Organ.:_ Intercourse. Right. The State.
_Individ. Organ.:_ Property. Free Sociability. Class, House,
Friendship.
_Ident. Symbol.:_ Knowledge. Faith. School and
University.
_Individ. Symbol.:_ Feeling. Revelation. The Church
(Art).
The four ethical communities, each of which represents the organic union
of opposites--rulers and subjects, host and guests, teachers and pupils
or scholars and the public, the clergy and the laity--have for their
foundation the family and the unity of the nation. Virtue (the personal
unification of reason and sensibility) is either disposition or skill, and
in each case either cognitive or presentative; this yields the cardinal
virtues wisdom, love, discretion, and perseverance. The division of duties
into duties of right, duties of love, duties of vocation, and duties of
conscience rests on the distinction between community in production and
appropriation, each of which may be universal or individual. The most
general laws of duty (duty is the Idea of the good in an imperative form)
run: Act at every instant with all thy moral power, and aiming at thy whole
moral problem; act with all virtues and in view of all goods, further,
Always do that action which is most advantageous for the whole sphere of
morality, in which two different factors are included: Always do that
toward which thou findest thyself inwardly moved, and that to which thou
findest thyself required from without. Instead of following further the
wearisome schematism of Schleiermacher's ethics, we may notice, finally,
a fundamental thought which our philosopher also discussed by itself:
The sharp contraposition of natural and moral law, advocated by Kant, is
unjustifiable; the moral law is itself a law of nature, viz., of rational
will. It is true neither that the moral law is a mere "ought" nor that the
law of nature is a mere "being," a universally followed "must." For, on the
one hand, ethics has to do with the law which human action really follows,
and, on the other, there are violations of rule in nature also. Immorality,
the imperfect mastery of the sensuous impulses by rational will, has an
analogue in the abnormalities--deformities and diseases--in nature, which
show that here also the higher (organic) principles are not completely
successful in controlling the lower processes. The higher law everywhere
suffers disturbances, from the resistance of the lower forces, which cannot
be entirely conquered. It is Schleiermacher's determinism which leads him,
in view of the parallelism of the two legislations, to overlook their
essential distinction.
Adherents of Schleiermacher are Vorlaender (died 1867), George (died 1874),
the theologian, Richard Rothe (died 1867; cf. Nippold, 1873 _seq_.), and
the historians of philosophy, Brandis (died 1867) and H. Ritter (died
1869).[1]
[Footnote 1: W. Dilthey (born 1834), the successor of Lotze in Berlin, is
publishing a life of Schleiermacher (vol. i. 1867-70). Cf. also Dilthey's
briefer account in the _Allgemeine deutsche Biographie_, and Haym's
_Romantische Schule_, 1870. Further, _Aus Schleiermachers Leben, in
Briefen_, 4 vols., 1858-63.]
CHAPTER XIII.
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 Tuebingen
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 _Jahrbuecher fuer 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 Koestlin, 1870, and the essays by Ed. von
Hartmann, _Ueber die dialektische Methode_, 1868, and _Hegels Panlogismus_
(1870, incorporated in the _Gesammelte Studien und Aufsaetze_, 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" _(fuer 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 _(Fuersich)_; 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 _Phaenomenologie_, 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: Populaere 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.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE OPPOSITION TO CONSTRUCTIVE IDEALISM: FRIES, HERBART, SCHOPENHAUER.
In Fries, Herbart, and Schopenhauer a threefold opposition was raised
against the idealistic school represented by Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel. The opposition of Fries is aimed at the method of the constructive
philosophers, that of Herbart against their ontological positions, and that
of Schopenhauer against their estimate of the value of existence. Fries
and Beneke declare that a speculative knowledge of the suprasensible is
impossible, and seek to base philosophy on empirical psychology; to the
monism (panlogism) of the idealists Herbart opposes a pluralism, to their
philosophy of becoming, a philosophy of being; Schopenhauer rejects their
optimism, denying rationality to the world and the world-ground. Among
themselves the thinkers of the opposition have little more in common than
their claim to a better understanding of the Kantian philosophy, and a
development of it more in harmony with the meaning of its author, than it
had experienced at the hands of the idealists. Whoever fails to agree
with them in this, and ascribes to the idealists whom they oppose better
grounded claims to the honor of being correct interpreters and consistent
developers of Kantian principles, will be ready to adopt the name
_Semi-Kantians_, given by Fortlage to the members of the opposition,--a
title which seems the more fitting since each of them appropriates only a
definitely determinable part of Kant's views, and mingles a foreign element
with it. In Fries this non-Kantian element comes from Jacobi's philosophy
of faith; in Herbart it comes from the monadology of Leibnitz, and the
ancient Eleatico-atomistic doctrine; in Schopenhauer, from the religion of
India and (as in Beneke) from the sensationalism of the English and the
French. We can only hint in passing at the parallelism which exists between
the chief representatives of the idealistic school and the leaders of
the opposition. Fries's theory of knowledge and faith is the empirical
counterpart of Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Schopenhauer, in his doctrine
of Will and Idea, in his vigorously intuitive and highly fanciful view of
nature and art, and, in general, in his aesthetical mode of philosophizing,
with its glad escape from the fetters of method, has so much in common with
Schelling that many unhesitatingly treat his system as an offshoot of the
Philosophy of Nature. The contrast between Herbart and Hegel is the more
pronounced since they are at one in their confidence in the power of the
concept. The most conspicuous point of comparison between the metaphysics
of the two thinkers is the significance ascribed by them to the
contradiction as the operative moment in the movement of philosophical
thought. The attitude of hostility which Schleiermacher assumed in relation
to Hegel's intellectualistic conception of religion induced Harms to give
to Schleiermacher also a place in the ranks of the opposition. Following
the chronological order, we begin with the campaign opened by Fries under
the banner of anthropology against the main branch of the Kantian school.
%1. The Psychologists: Fries and Beneke.%
Jacob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843) was born and reared at Barby, studied
at Jena, and habilitated at the same university in the year 1801; he was
professor at Heidelberg in 1806-16, and at Jena from 1816 until his death.
His chief work was the _New Critique of Reason_, in three volumes, 1807
(2d ed., 1828 _seq_.), which had been preceded, in 1805, by the treatise
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