Will Durant---German Philosophy: 1789 - 1815 (Fichte, Schelling & Hegel)

German philosophy 1789 - 1815 our approach to the idealistic philosophy of content his successors is obstructed by the current preemption of the word ideal for moral excellence and by our habit in an age of Science and Industry of thinking of things perceived and seldom of the process of perception itself the opposite attitudes competed in Greek philosophy where Democritus took Adams as his starting point and Plato took ideas in modern philosophy bacon stressed knowledge of the world they cart began with the thinking self Hobbes reduced everything to matter Bartley to mind Kant gave German philosophy its distinctive character by arguing that its prime task is the study of the process by which we form ideas he admitted the reality of external objects but insisted that we can never know what they objectively are since we know them only has changed by the organs and processes of perception into our ideas philosophical idealism is therefore the theory that nothing is known to us except ideas and that therefore matter is a form of mind one Victor 1762 to 1814 won the radical here as so often in literary history the man has proved more interesting than his books these suffer erosion by the flux of fashions in ideas and forms but the study of a soul picking its way through the labyrinth of life is a living lesson in philosophy an ever moving picture of experience molding character and transforming thought Johann Gottlieb Fichte crowded a brave variety of experience into his 52 years his father was a saxon ribbon weaver his mother prayed that her boy should be a pastor he agreed and after some local schooling he was sent to yenna to study theology the more he studied the more he wondered and doubted a village preacher gave him a refutation of the errors of Spinoza picta was charmed by the error and decided that he was not fit for a pastor it nevertheless he graduated in the Faculty of theology almost penniless he walked from Vienna to Zurich to secure a post as tutor there he fell in love with Johanna Maria Ron and was formally betrothed to her but they agreed not to marry till he was financially adult he moved to Leipzig tutored read Kant's critique of Pure Reason and was fascinated he made his way to Konigsberg and presented gaunt an essay toward a critique of all revelation this in 1792 the old philosopher balked at fickt his request for a loan but helped him to find a publisher for his treatise the printer neglected to state the author's name when a critic ascribed the essay to can't can't named the author and praised the book Victor was at once received into the not quite serene Brotherhood of filosophy illusions for the argument of his treatise was that although revelation does not prove the existence of God we must describe our moral code to God if that code is to be accepted and obeyed by mankind uncommon Dacian victor found remunerative employment as a tutor in Danzig his betrothed now agreed to add her savings to his income and on that basis they were married in 1793 he further signalized the Year by publishing anonymously to vigorous essays in the restoration of freedom of thought by the princes of Europe he began by praising some enlightened rulers and berated Prince's who obstructed the progress of the human mind and he mourned the wave of repression that had followed the death of Freddie gray reform is better than revolution for a revolution can throw man back into barbarism and yet a successful revolution can advance mankind as much in half a century as reform could have done in a thousand years then Victor addressed his readers at a time when feudalism was still enforced through most of Germany hate knocked your Prince's but yourselves one of the sources of your misery is your exaggerated estimate of the personages whose minds are warped by an innovating education indulgence and superstition these are the men who are exhorted to suppress freedom of thought cry aloud to your Prince's that you will never permit your freedom of thought to be filched from you the Dark Ages are over when you were told in God's name that you were herds of cattle set on earth to fetch and carry to serve a dozen mortals in high place and to be their possessions you are not their property not even God's property but your own you will now ask the prince who wishes to rule you by what right if he replies by inheritance you will ask how did the first of your line obtain the right the Prince derives his whole power from the people the second tract si toward the correction of the public's judgment on the French Revolution was still more radical feudal privileges should not be hereditary they exist by consent of the state and should be terminable at the state's convenience likewise with ecclesiastical property it exists through permission and protection by the state and may be nationalized when the nation's need and will so decree the French National Assembly did this and was justified here the fragment ends only by noting that these pronouncements were published anonymously can we understand how Victor won an invitation in December 1793 to the chair of philosophy at yenna Duke Charles Augustus was still an easygoing Lord of vimar Indiana and Goethe who supervised the university faculty had not yet decided that the French Revolution was a romantic disease so Victor began his courses at yenna in the Easter term of 1794 he was a persuasive teacher a lively orator who could put feeling into philosophy and make metaphysics Lord of all but his impetuous temper was thoroughly unprofessional and promised intellectual turbulence five of his early discourses were published in 1794 as some lectures on the vocation of the scholar their thesis if the state will in some enable future disappear and leave men really free was all as anarchistic as Godwin's inquiry concerning political justice published a year before political society is no part of the absolute purpose of human life but is only a possible means to the formation of a perfect society the state constantly tends toward its own annihilation since the final aim of all government is to render itself superfluous we may have to wait for eons but one day all political combinations will become unnecessary to this prospect made palatable to princes by its distance victor added another Pisgah view the ultimate aim of society is the perfect equality of all its members this was a resounding echo of jean-jacques and Victor did not disown the parentage peace be with Russo's ashes and blessings on his memory for he has kindled fires in many souls the romantic rebels who were to congregate in yenna in 1796 welcomed this summons to utopia the greatest metaphysician now alive retreat Rick Vaughn Schlegel - his brother is a popular writer you can see it in his famous book on the revolution contrast the contagious eloquence of the lectures on the scholar with Schiller's declamations every trait in Victor's public life seems to say this is a man - the philosopher what was this metaphysics that so charmed the romantics its central thesis was that the individual self conscious ego whose essences will and whose will is free is the center in some of all reality nothing could have pleased the romantics more but the matter was not as simple as Friedrich von Schlegel's Lucinda Victor himself after publishing his grunt lager Durga's amped envisioned shafts Larra foundation of the whole science of knowledge in 1794 found it necessary to clarify a post factum in 1797 by a vitae enlighten second introduction and by a Noah - tulum new presentation each of which added fresh absurdities the keyword itself needed a key vision shaft lera means a study of the shaft or trunk of knowledge ie the mind or to put it in one forbidding word epistemology Victor began by dividing philosophers into two groups dogmatists or realists who are confident that objects exist independently of the mind and idealists who believe that all experience and all facts are mental percepts and that therefore all reality so far as we can know is part of the perceiving mind he objected to realism that it is logically driven to a mechanistic determinism which makes consciousness superfluous and undermines responsibility and morality whereas freedom of the will is among the most immediate and tenacious of our convictions Fichte objected further that no philosophy which begins with matter can explain consciousness which is manifestly immaterial but the main problems of philosophy concerned this mysterious reality called consciousness so Viktor began with the conscious itself the ego II or I he acknowledged an external world but only as known to us through our perceptions these by their very process the interpretation of sensations through memory and purpose transform the object into a part of the mind so a word as a sound is quite different from that word as interpreted by experience context and aim and a storm which tamir sensation is a confused and meaningless medley of messages falling upon various senses becomes in perception through memory circumstance and desire a stimulus to meaningful action Viktor concluded that we must assume an external object or non ego as cause of our external sensations but that the object as interpreted by perception memory and will is a construct of the mind from this point of view both the subject and the object are parts of the ego and nothing outside of the ego can ever be known all this is but one aspect of victus philosophy behind the self as perceiving is the self as desiring willing the ego is a system of impulses its very nature is tender see your impulse the whole system of our ideas depends upon our impulses and our will here effector touches upon Spinoza's desire is the very essence of man and leads to Schopenhauer's view of the world as we'll and idea this Restless will is not part of that objective world which seems a slave to mechanistic determinism hence the will is free this freedom is the essence of man for it makes him a responsible moral agent capable of freely obeying a moral law as he proceeded Fichte developed concept narration of astronomic and moral order into a new theology which assumed a moral law as governing and supporting the universe as well as the character and communities of men finally he identified this moral order of the universe each part so to speak doing its duty and thereby maintaining the whole with God the goal and duty of the free man is to live in harmony with this divine moral order that cosmic moral order is not a person but a process principally visible in the moral development of mankind the vocation of man is to live in harmony with that divine order all this again recalls Spinoza but in another mood Fichte suggests Hegel the individual self or soul is mortal but it shares in the immortality of that totality of conscious selves which is the absolute ego idea or sol invictus philosophy we feel the anxious groping of a man who has lost his transmitted religious phase but is struggling to find for himself in his readers or pupils a middle way between belief and doubt in 1798 he faced the problem again in on the ground of our belief in a divine governance of the world he reaffirmed his conception of God as the impersonal moral order of the world but he allowed that some might ascribed personality to this deity in order to vivify their concept and devotion however he added that to conceive God as a tyrant on whose favor future pleasures depend is to worship an idol and those who worship it should be called theists an anonymous critic denounced the treatise as irreligious others joined in the attack the government of Saxony confiscated all available copies of Victor's essay and lodged a complaint with the Vimal government for allowing atheism to be taught within its jurisdiction the educational committee at via are trying to quiet the matter with a polite reply to the Saxons but Fichte who was no pacifist issued two pamphlets in public defense of his book this in 1799 one of them are direct Appalachian undestood lucuma the Bymark committee took this appeal to the public as a challenge to its handling of the matter and a rumor reached Fichte that it would ask the university senate to impose a public censure upon him arguing that this would violate academic freedom Fichte wrote to privy councillor FOID to vimar that if such a censure should be issued he would resign and he added that several other professors had agreed in such case to resign with him the vimar committee Schiller and Goethe assenting issued a rescrub to the University Senate desiring it to censure Victor then accepting Victor's threatened challenge it dismissed him to petitions were submitted to the students for a recall of this edict they were ignored in July 1799 Victor and his wife moved to Berlin where he was warmly received by Friedrich von Schlegel Schreyer mocker and others of the romantic circle who sensed the romantic flavor of victus imagination and the heroic egoism of his philosophy to save the cost of a separate household Victor with his unwilling wife accepted Schlegel's invitation to live with him and Rendell Mendelssohn fight the volatile philosopher like the ensemble and proposed to enlarge it if my plan succeeds he wrote the Schlegel's shelling and we ourselves will form one family take a larger house and have only one cook the plan was not carried out for karolina von Schlegel did not get along with Brendel individualism is the snake in every socialist paradise Victor however kept a socialist tinge to the end in 1800 he published an essay the closed commercial state in which he argued that foreign trade and manipulations of currency enabled the richer nations to drain poorer nations of their metallic wealth therefore the government should control all foreign commerce and possess all negotiable bullion and currency armed with this power the state should guarantee to every individual a living wage and an equitable share in the national product in return the individual must yield to the state the power to fix prices and to determine the place and character of his work strangely contemporary with this radical pronouncement was a religious tract the vocation of man of 1800 which described God as the moral order of the universe and rose to an ecstasy of adoration our faith our faith in duty is only faith in him in his reason and his truth that eternal will is assuredly the creator of the world we are eternal because he is eternal sublime and living will named by no name compass by no thought thou are best known to a childlike devoted simple mind I hide my face before thee and lay my hand upon my mouth how thou art and Simas to thine own being I can never know now were cast in me the knowledge of my duty of my vocation in the world of reasonable beings how I know not nor need I know in the contemplation of these thy relations to me will I rest in calm blessedness apparently dependent upon public lectures and their publication for his livelihood Fichte moved more and more toward Christian piety and German patriotism in 1805 he was called to the chair of philosophy at the university of air long and he was making a new reputation for himself there when the entry of Napoleon's army into Germany in 1806 compelled him to seek a safer post he crossed into East Prussia and for time taught in königsberg soon the vicinity of Napoleon's troops at nearby Freedland forced him to move this time to Copenhagen in August 1807 weary of homelessness he made his way back to Berlin there he put philosophy aside and gave his to helping restore the pride and spirit of a shattered and humiliated people 3 the Patriot on Sundays from December 13th 1807 to March 20th 1808 in the amphitheater of the Berlin Academy Victor delivered the lectures later published as Raiden indeed deutsche nazi own they were his passionate appeal to his people to regain their self-respect and courage to take measures for raising themselves out of the desolation brought upon them by the saber-rattling conceit of the Russian military cast the in you main piece of Tilsit and the brutal dismemberment of the Prussian Kingdom by the victorious Corsican meanwhile French soldiers were policing the captured Capitol and French spies were checking every speech these addresses to the German nation are the most living part of Victor's legacy and are still warm with the feeling of the philosopher turned Patriot they put aside the intellectual game of theoretical logic and face the bitter realities of Prussia's darkest year he spoke not to Prussia alone but to all Germans and though they're scattered principalities hardly constituted a nation they used the same language and needed the same goad he sought to bring them some unity by reminding them of German history of famous victories and achievements in statesmanship religion literature and art and by rejecting the hopeless materialism which he claimed to find in English life in theory and the religious denudation of the French enlightenment and revolution he spoke with reasonable pride of the mercantile cities of the older Germany the nuremberg of Albrecht Durer the Augsburg of the fogers the globe running burgers of the Hanseatic League present defeats Victor told his class in his country must be seen in the perspective of a brilliant past this imprisonment of one nation by another could not last the German people had in their national character the resources of body mind and will that would make this present neither end ow Victor answered by a complete reform of education its extension to every German child by governmental financing and compulsion and the transformation of its purpose from commercial success to moral commitment no more talk of revolution there is only one revolution and that is the enlightenment of the mind and the cleansing of the character the child's abilities must be developed by the method of pet salat see they must be directed to national goals determined by the state the state must be led by educated and dedicated men it must be not the power of an army but the direction and implementation of the national will every citizen must be the servant of the state and the state must be the servant of all till now by far the largest part of the state's income has been spent in maintaining a standing army and the education of children has been left to clergymen who used God as a means to introduce self-seeking into other worlds after the death of the mortal body such a religion shall indeed be borne to the grave along with the past age it must be replaced by a religion of moral consciousness based upon an educated sense of communal responsibility to produce this new type of man Victor believes the pupils should be separated from the adult society and form a separate and self-contained community physical exercises farming and trades of various kinds in addition to the development of the mind by learning are included in this Commonwealth so isolated from the corruptions of the dying past the pupils by work and study should be stimulated to create an image of the social order of mankind as it ought to be simply in accordance with the law of reason the pupil is so filled with ardent love for such an order of things that it will be utterly impossible for him not to desire it and to work with all his strength to promote it when freed from the guidance of education it is a splendid dream recalling Plato's Republic and forecasting the socialist prophets who would stir the hopes of succeeding centuries it had little influence on its time and little share though this has been magnified in raising national ardour against Napoleon but Victor was thinking of something larger than the expulsion of the French from Prussia he was trying to find a way than that human character which for good and evil has made much of history in any case it was a noble dream too confident perhaps in the power of Education over heredity and sadly opened to misconception and misuse by authoritarian regimes but Victor said as I care to live only for that hope I cannot give up hoping that I shall convince some Germans that it is education alone that can save us the hardships of his flight from ere long and took earnings beg to Copenhagen to Berlin had permanently weakened him shortly after completing his addresses to the German nation his health broke down he went to Teplitz and partly recovered in 1810 he was made rector of the new University of Berlin when Prussia opened its war of liberation Victor aroused his students to such patriotic fervor that nearly all of them enlisted Victor's wife volunteered for service as a nurse she caught an apparently fatal fever he attended her during the day and lectured at the University in the evening he caught the ailment from her she survived he died January 27th 1814 five years later she was laid beside him in that good old custom of burial which allowed lovers and mates to be joined again even though but hair and bones in symbol of their having been and of being now again one to shelling 1775 to 1854 though he recognized the existence of an external world Victor's philosophy mostly avoided it except as purified by perception Friedrich Vilhelm Yosef on shelling despite his aristocratic preposition readily accepted nature and United it with mind in a condominium constituting God he was the son of a property lutheran pastor inverting Berg was pledged to the ministry and studied in the theological faculty at Tubingen Barre he Hill Dolan and Hegel formed a lusty trio of scholastic radicals celebrating the French Revolution redefining deity and making new philosophic mixtures of Spinoza Conte and Victor Shelley the poem entitled the Creed of an epicurean one could safely predict from the east juvenilia a respectably conservative old age like Victor and Hegel he served for some years as a tutor his essay the I as principal of philosophy published in 1795 when he was 20 caught the attention of Victor and won shelling at 23 an invitation to teach philosophy at yenna he was content for a time to describe himself as a follower of Victor and to accept mind as the sole reality but at yenna and later at Berlin he joined the romantics and gave the body of passing ecstasy I can bear it no longer I must live once more must let my senses have free play these senses of which I have been well nigh deprived by the grand transcendental theories to which they have done their utmost to convert me but I too will now confess how my heart leaps and the hot blood rushes through my veins I have no religion but this but I love a well-shaped knee a fair plump bosom a slender waist flowers with the sweetest odours full satisfaction of all my desires the granting of all that sweet love can ask if I am obliged to have a religion though I can live most happily without it then it must be the Catholic such as it was in the olden days when priests and laity lived together and in the house of God itself there was daily revelry it was fitting that so ardent a lover of tangible reality should startle the idealistic Nimbus that surrounded Victor at yenna and that remained behind him when he left for Berlin in first sketch of a system of natural philosophy of 1799 and in-system dis transcendental an idealist moose of 1800 schelling defined the main problem of philosophy as the apparent impasse between matter and mind it seems impossible to think of either producing the other and he concluded in one more return to Spinoza that the best escape from the dilemma is to think of mind and matter as two attributes of one complex but unified reality all philosophy absolutely which is based upon pure reason alone is or will become spinosum but that philosophy shelling thought was so rigidly logical as to miss vitality a dynamic conception of nature must necessarily bring about one essential change in the views of Spinoza ISM in its rigidity spinosum could be regarded like Pygmalion statue as needing to be given a soul to make this dualistic monism more conceivable Schelling proposed to think of force or energy as the inner essence of both matter and mind in neither case do we know what this force is but since we see a taking in nature progressively subtler forms from the mystery of communicated motion through the attraction or repulsion of articles the sensitivity of plants or the groping grasping pseudopodia of the amoeba to the quick intelligence of the chimpanzee and the conscious reason of man we may conclude that the basic reality the one on the present God is neither matter nor mind by itself but their union in one incredible panorama of forms and powers here shelling was writing poetry as well as philosophy and both Wordsworth and Coleridge found in him a fellow spirit struggling to build a new faith for souls overwhelmed by science and hungering for God in 1803 he left yenna to teach in the recently opened University of würzburg he continued to write philosophical treatises but they lacked the vigor of his natural philosophy in 1809 his stimulating wife Karolina died and seemed to take half of his vitality with her he married again in 1812 and wrote incontinently but he published nothing after 1809 besides by that time heygo had become the unchallenged Napoleon of philosophy in his declining years shelling found comfort in mysticism and transcendental explanations for the apparent contradictions between a loving God and the nature red in tooth and claw and between the determinism of sigh send the free will apparently needed for moral responsibility he took from me aku Burma 1575 to 1624 the idea that god himself is a battleground between good and evil so that nature oscillates between struggling for order and relaxing into chaos and in man - there is something basically irrational ultimately shelling promised his readers all evil will be overcome and divine wisdom will succeed in transforming even the follies and crimes of mankind into good he had now the long discomfort of seeing Hegel gather all the Crown's of philosophy and then to survive him by 23 years while the young Hegelians divided their masters dialectical remains between communism and reaction in 1841 King Frederick William the force called shelling - the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin hoping that his conservatism would stem the radical tied a chela cannot hold his audience and he was left stranded and wandering by the rush of events from philosophy to revolution even so Wordsworth had already put shellings pantheistic vitalism into majestic verse and Coleridge had described to him with certain exceptions the completion and the most important victories of the Kantian revolution in philosophy and half a century after Schelling's death or rebug soul regenerator of vitalism called shelling one of the greatest philosophers of all time Hegel would have demurred three Hegel 1772 1831 by reading Kant Schopenhauer wrote about 1816 the public was compelled to see that what is obscure is not always without significance Victor and shelling he thought took undue advantage of Kant's success with obscurity but Schopenhauer continued the height of absurdity in serving a pure nonsense in stringing together senseless and extravagant masses of words such as had previously been known only in mad houses was finally reached in Hegel and became the instrument of the most beautiful mystification that has ever taken place with the result which will appear fabulous to posterity and will remain as a monument of German stupidity one skeptics progress Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was alive and flourishing when this dirge was published in 1818 he survived another 13 years he came of a Stuttgart middle-class family steeped in mysticism and piety the family property was mortgaged to send Georg to study theology at Tubingen seminary from 1788 to 1793 Berlin was poet there and shelling came in 1790 together they deplored the ignorance of their teachers and applauded the victories of revolutionary France Hegel developed a special fondness for Greek drama and his praise of Greek patriotism foreshadowed his own final political philosophy to the Greek the idea of his fatherland the state was the invisible the higher reality for which he laboured in comparison with this idea his own individuality was nothing it was its endurance its continued life that he sought to desire or pray for permanence or eternal life for himself as an individual could not occur to him after graduating from the seminary with a degree in theology Hegel disappointed his parents by refusing to enter the ministry he supported himself by tutoring at Baron in the home of a patrician with a substantial library there and later at Frankfurt he read through Citadis Machiavelli Hobbes Spinoza Leibnitz Montesquieu Locke Voltaire Hume Conte Victor how could his ailing Christian faith resist such a phalanx of doubters the natural rebellious nosov a vigorous youth reveled in the pagan feast in the Year 1796 he wrote a life of Jesus which remained unpublished till 1905 it was in part in anticipation of das leben Jesu of 1835 with which David Strauss a follower of Hegel launched full-scale attack upon the gospel story of Christ Hegel described Jesus as the son of Joseph and Mary he rejected the miracles ascribed to Christ or explained them naturally he pictured Christ as defending the individual conscience against priestly rules he ended with the burial of the crucified rebel and said nothing of a resurrection and he gave a definition of God which she was to hold to the end pure reason incapable of any limitation is the deity itself in 1799 Hegel's father died leaving him 3154 florins he wrote to schelling asking advice in finding a town with a good library and I'm Goethe Speer shelling recommended Yana and offered to share his quarters with him in 1801 Hegel came and was allowed to lecture at the university as a prefect docent remunerated only by his pupils who numbered eleven after three years of such servitude he was appointed professor extraordinary use and a year later undertows intervention he received his first stipend one hundred dollars he never became a popular teacher but at Vienna as later in Berlin he inspired in several students a special attachment that penetrated the rough surface of his language to the archein vigor of his thought in 1801 he began but left unfinished and unpublished a significant essay on the constitution of Germany published in 1893 looking out upon Germany he was reminded of the petty principalities that had divided Renaissance Italy and opened it to foreign conquest and he remembered Machiavelli's plea for a strong prince who would hammer these scattered pieces into a nation he put no faith in the Holy Roman Empire and foretold its erly collapse Germany is no longer a state a group of human beings can call itself a state only if it is joined together for the common defense of the entirety of its property he called for the unification of Germany but he added event has never been the fruit of reflection but only a force the common multitude of the German people must be gathered into one mass by the force of a conqueror presumably he had no notion of summoning Napoleon but when in 1805 Napoleon overwhelmed both the Austrians and the Russians at Austerlitz eggl may have begun to wonder whether this man was destined to unify not only Germany but all Europe when in the following year the French army was approaching yenna and the future of Europe seemed at stake Hegel saw Napoleon riding through yenna on October 13th 1806 and wrote to his friend meet hammer I saw the Emperor that world soul riding out to reck'n I tore the city it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual concentrated here at a single point astride a single horse yet reaching across the world and ruling it to make such progress from Thursday to Monday as possible only for that extraordinary man whom it is impossible not to admire all now wish good fortune to the French army on the next day the French army prevailed and some French soldiers eluding the eye of the world soul began to plunder in the city one group entered Hegel's rented room seeing the Cross of the Legion of Honor on a corporals coat the philosopher expressed the hope that so distinguished a man would treat a simple German scholar honorably these invaders settled for a bottle of wine but the spread of looting frightened Hegel into taking refuge in the office of the University vice-president On February 5th 1807 Cristina Burkhardt wife of Hegel's landlord gave birth to a boy whom the absent-minded professor recognized as one of his anonymous works as the Duke of saxe-weimar-eisenach 'l t Hegel thought it a good time to try another city woman and task On February 20th he left Hanna to become editor of the bamberger's item amid the turmoil he published in 1807 phenomena logia disguised s no one seems to have suspected that this would later be ranked as his masterpiece and as the most difficult and seminal contribution to philosophy between Conte and Schopenhauer earthed by governmental censorship of his paper Hegel left bamberg in 1808 to become headmaster of a gymnasium in Nuremberg he labored conscientiously in this new field teaching as well as directing but he longed for a secure and fitter birth in a distinguished and solvent university on September 16th 1811 aged 41 he married maria von tucker the 20 year old daughter of a nuremberg senator shortly thereafter Christina Burkhart surprised the couple with a visit in which she offered them Hegel's four-year-old son Ludvig his wife met the situation bravely by adopting the boy into her family dreaming of a post in Berlin Hegel accepted in 1816 an invitation from the University of Heidelberg to be its first professor of philosophy his class began with five students but grew to 20 before the term was over there he published in 1817 his encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences it pleased both the intelligentsia and the government of Berlin much more than his logic which had appeared there in 1812 soon the Prussian Minister of Education invited him to come and fill the chair of philosophy which had been left vacant since the death of Victor in 1814 eagle now 47 bargained until the remuneration finally offered him atoned for his long wait besides the $2,000 yearly salary he asked something to compensate for the high rents and prices in Berlin for the furniture he had bought and would now have to sell at a loss for the cost of travel to Berlin with his wife and children furthermore he would like a certain quantity of produce all this having been granted hey go on October 22nd 1818 began at the University of Berlin the long tenure that would end with his death in those 13 years his lectures notoriously dull but finally meaningful drew larger and larger audiences until students came from almost every kind in Europe and beyond to hear him now he gave form and order to the most complete and influential system of thought in the history of post Conte in Europe to logic as metaphysics he begins with logic not in our modern sense as the rules of reasoning but in the ancient and classic sense as the ratio or rationale or basic meaning and operation of anything as when we use geology biology or psychology for the meaning and operation of the earth life or mind so to Hegel logic studies the meaning and operation of anything generally he leaves the operations to science as science leaves the meaning to philosophy he proposes to analyze not the words in reasoning but the reason or logic in realities to the source and some of these reasons he will give the name of God very much as ancient mystics identified the deity with the logos the reason and wisdom of the world the perceiving mind gives specific meaning to objects by studying their relationships in space and time with other objects remembered or perceived content given to such relationships the name of categories and add listed 12 chiefly unity plurality and totality reality negation and limitation cause-and-effect existence and non-existence contingency and necessity Hegel adds many more determinate being limit multiplicity attraction and repulsion likeness and difference each object in our experience is a complex web of such relationships this table for example has specific place age form strength color weight odor beauty without such specific relations the table would be merely a confusion of obscure and separate sensations with them the sensations become a United perception this perception illuminated by memory and pointed by purpose becomes an idea hence for each of us the world is our sensations external or internal coordinated by the categories into perceptions and ideas mingled with our memories and manipulated by our wills the categories are not things they are ways and tools of understanding giving form and meaning to sensations they constitute the rationale and logic the structure and reason of each experienced feeling thought or thing together they constitute the logic reason logos of the universe as conceived by Hegel the simplest and most universal of the categories through which we may seek to understand our experience is pure being or zine being as applied to all objects or ideas without particular ization the universality of this basic category is its fatality by lacking any distinguishing form or mark it cannot represent any existing object or idea hence the concept of pure being is in effect equivalent to its opposite category non being or nothing NIC's hence they readily mingle that which was not diss added to being and deprives it of its indeterminate Nisour purity being and non-being become something however negative this mysterious becoming or burden is the third category the most useful of all since without it nothing can be conceived as happening or taking form all subsequent categories flow from similar combinations of apparently contradictory ideas this sigelei in' prestidigitation producing the world like Adam and Eve out of a conjunction recalls the medieval idea that God created the world out of nothing but Hegel protests that his categories are not things they are ways of conceiving things of making their behavior intelligible often predictable sometimes manageable he asks us to allow some modification in the principle of contradiction so sacred in the old logic that a cannot be not a very well but a may become not a as water can become ice or steam or reality as conceived by Hegel is in a process of becoming it is not a static Parmen ideon world of being but a fluid Heraklion world of becoming all things flow all reality in Hegel all thoughts and things all history religion philosophy are in constant evolution not by a natural selection of variations but by the development and resolution of internal contradictions and the advance to a more complex stage this is the famous a gillian formerly Fick thien dialectic literally the art of conversation of thesis antithesis and synthesis an idea or situation potentially contains its opposite develops it struggles against it then unites with it to take another transient form a logical discussion would follow the dialectical structure of exposition opposition and reconciliation sensible deliberations the weighing of ideas and desires on the scale or libera of experience would do likewise interruption as Madame de Stahl insisted is the life of conversation but is its death if the contradiction is not pertinent and resolved opposition absorbed is the secret of wisdom and the perfection of victory a true synthesis rejects neither the affirmative nor the negative but finds room for elements of each Karl Marx a disciple of Hegel thought that capitalism contained the seeds of socialism that the rival forms of economic organization must clash in a war to the death and that socialism would prevail a more consistent to galleon would have predicted the union of both as in Western Europe today Hegel was the most thorough going of the galleons he undertook to deduce the categories to show how each of them necessarily resulted from the resolution of contradictions in its predecessors he organized his arguments tried to divide each of his works on a triadic for he applied his dialectic to realities as well as to ideas the repetitive process of contradiction conflict and synthesis appears in politics economics philosophy and history he was a realist in the medieval sense the universal is more real than any of its contained particulars man includes all men briefly alive or durably dead the state is realer more important and longer living than any of its citizens Beauty has immortal power makes many wrecks and rhymes though Pauline Bonaparte is dead and perhaps Aphrodite never lived finally the compulsive philosopher carried his parade of categories to the most real inclusive and powerful of them all the absolute idea that is the universal of all things and thoughts the reason structure or law that upholds the cosmos the logos that crowns and rules the whole three mind the phenomena logia disguised us was written at yenna while the Grand Army was approaching the city it was published in 1807 when the merciless devastation of Prussia by the sons of the French Revolution seemed to prove that somewhere in that historic groping from monarchy through terror to monarchy the mind of man had lost the road to freedom Hegel proposed to study the mind of man in its various phenomena as sensation perception feeling consciousness memory imagination desire will self-consciousness and reason perhaps at the end of that long road he would find the secret of liberty not frightened by that program he would also study the human mind in communities and the state in art and religion and philosophy the product of his quest was his shader vraa eloquent and obscure challenging and discouraging and pregnant with influence upon Marx and Kierkegaard Heidegger and Sartre the difficulty begins with the word Geist which spreads a cloud of ambiguities over ghosts and mind and spirit and soul we shall usually translate it as mind in some contexts it may be better rendered as spirit as in zeitgeist the spirit of the age Geist as mind is not a separate substance or entity behind psychological activities it is those activities themselves there are no separate faculties there are only the actual operations by which experience is transformed into action or thought in one of his many definitions of Geist Hegel identified it with consciousness consciousness of course is the mystery of mysteries for as the organ for interpreting experience it cannot interpret itself nevertheless it is the most immediate as well as the most remarkable fact known to us matter which may be the outside of mind seems less mysterious even though less directly known Hegel agrees with Victor that we know objects only insofar as they become part of us as subjects perceiving but he never questions the existence of an external world when the object perceived is another individual apparently endowed with mind consciousness becomes self consciousness by opposition then the consciously personal ego is born and becomes uncomfortably aware that competition is the trade of life then says our top philosopher each man potentially ultimately and seldom consciously aims at the destruction and death of the other until one of the two accepts subordination or is dead meanwhile the ego is feeding upon experience as if aware that it must arm and strengthen itself for the trials of life all that complex process by which the ego transforms sensations into perceptions stores these in memory and turns them into ideas is used to illuminate color and serve the desires that make up the will be ego is a focus succession and combination of desires percepts ideas memories deliberation like arms and legs are tools of the self or ego seeking survival pleasure or power if the desire is a passion it is thereby reinforced for good or ill it must not be condemned indiscriminately for nothing great in the world is accomplished without passion it may lead to pain but that does not matter if it contributes to the desired result life is made not for happiness but for accomplishment is the will ie our desires free yes but not in the sense of freedom from causality or law it is free in proportion as it agrees with the laws and logic of reality a free will is one enlightened by understanding and guided by reason the only real liberation for the nation or the individual is through the growth of intelligence and intelligence is knowledge coordinated and used the highest freedom is in the knowledge of the categories and their operation in the basic processes of nature and their union and harmony in the absolute idea which is God there are three ways in which man can approach this summit of understanding and freedom through art religion and philosophy briefly in the phenomena logia or fully in his posthumous for lesson an uber aesthetic Hegel tried to bring the nature and history of art under the triadic formulas of his system incidentally he revealed a surprising knowledge of architecture sculpture painting and music and a detailed acquaintance with the art collections of Berlin Dresden Vienna Paris and the Netherlands art he felt was an attempt of the mind by intuition ie direct intense persistent perception rather than by reason to represent spiritual significance through a sensory medium he distinguished three major epochs of art one the oriental in which architecture sought to support the spiritual life and mystical vision through massive temples as in Egypt and India to the greco-roman classical conveying the ideals of reasoned balance and harmony through perfect sculptural forms and three the Christian Romantic which has sought through painting music and poetry to express the emotions and longings of the modern soul in this third stage Hegel found some seeds of degeneration and suggested that the greatest period of art was coming to an end religion troubled and puzzled him in his declining years for he recognized its historic function in moulding character and supporting social order but he was too fond of reason to care for the gropings of theology the ecstasy's and sufferings of saints the fear and worship of a personal God he struggled to reconcile the Christian Creed with the Hegelian dialectic but his heart was not in the effort and his most influential followers interpreted his God as the impersonal law or reason of the universe and immortality as the lingering perhaps endless effects of every Souls moment on the earth toward the end of the phenomena logia he revealed his true love philosophy his ideal was not the saint but the sage in his enthusiasm he recognised no limit to the future extension of human understanding the nature of the universe has no power which can permanently resist the courageous effort of the intelligence it must at last open itself up it must reveal all its depth and riches to the spirit but long before that culmination philosophy will have perceived that the real world is not the world that we touch or see but the relationships and regularities that give them order and nobility the unwritten laws that move the Sun and the stars and constitute the impersonal mind of the world to that absolute idea or cosmic reason the philosopher will pledge his loyalty in it he will find his worship his freedom and a quiet content for morality law and the state in 1821 Hegel sent forth another major work outlines of the philosophy of right rect or right is a majestic word in German covering both morality and law as kindred supports of the family the state and civilization Hegel dealt with all of these in a magisterial volume which had lasting influence upon his people the philosopher was now entering his sixth decade he had become accustomed to stability and comfort he was aspiring to some governmental post he yielded readily to the natural conservatism of age moreover the political situation had drastically changed since he fated France and admired Napoleon Prussia had risen in arms and fury against Napoleon fleeing from Russia had fought under Blucher and had overthrown the usurper and now Prussia had reestablished itself on a federation basis of victorious army and feudal monarchy as stanchions of stability amid a people reduced by the costs of victory to desperate poverty social disorder and hopes and fears of revolution in 1816 Yakov priests then holding the chair of philosophy at the University of Vienna published a treatise on the German Confederation and the political Constitution of Germany in which he outlined a program of reform that frightened the German governments into the harsh decrees of the Carlsbad Congress of 1819 Frese was dismissed from his professorship and was declared an outlaw by the police Hegel gave half the preface of his book to denouncing Frese as a dangerous simpleton and condemning as the quintessence of shallow thinking traces view that in a people ruled by a genuine communal spirit life for the discharge of all public business would come from below from the people itself according to a view of this kind Hegel protested the world of ethics should be given over to the subjective accident of opinion and Caprice by the simple family remedy of ascribing to feeling the labor of reason and intellect all the trouble of rational insight and of knowledge directed by speculative thinking is of course saved the angry professor vented his scorn upon street corner philosophers who construct perfect states any evening out of the rosy dreams of immaturity against such wishful thinking he proclaimed there's the realistic basis of his philosophy political as well as metaphysical the principle that what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational it is what the logic of events made it be what under the circumstances it had to be the Liberals of Germany denounced the author as a time serving place seeker the philosopher laureate of a reactionary government he went on Civilization needs both morality and law since it means living like a citizen and therefore in a community and the community cannot survive unless it limits liberty in order to provide protection morality must be a common bond not an individual preference freedom under law is a constructive force freedom from law is impossible in nature and destructive in society as in some phases of the French Revolution the restrictions laid upon individual liberty by custom morality the ethical judgments developed in the evolution of a community are the oldest and broadest the most lasting and far-reaching measures taken by it for its continuance and growth since such regulations are transmitted chiefly by the family the school and the church these institutions are basic to a society and constitute its vital organs therefore it is foolish to let a family be founded by a love marriage sexual desire has its biological wisdom for continuing the species and the community but it contains no social wisdom for supporting a lifetime partnership in the management of property and children marriage should be monogamous and divorce should be difficult the property of the family should be held in common but be managed by the husband woman has her substantive destiny in the family and to be imbued with family devotion is her ethical frame of mind education should not as in pestalozzi and Victor make finishes of freedom and play discipline is the backbone of character the punishment of children does not aim at justice as such the aim is to deter them from exercising of freedom still in the toils of nature and to raise the universal into their consciousness and will nor should we make a fetish of equality we are equal only in the sense that each of us is a soul and should not be a tool for another person but we are obviously unequal in physical or mental ability the best economic system is one in which superior ability is stimulated to develop its and is left relatively free to transmute new ideas into productive realities property should be the private possession of the family for without that distinguishing reward superior ability would not trained or exert itself for the purpose of civilization of turning savages into citizens religion is an ideal instrument for it relates the individual to the whole since religion is an integrating factor in the state implanting a sense of unity and the depth of men's minds the state should even require all its citizens to belong to a church a church is all that can be said because since the content of a man's faith depends upon his private ideas the state cannot interfere with it the churches should be separate from the state but should look upon the state as a consumer twerp in which the religious goal of the unification of the individual with the totality is as nearly affected as is possible on earth the state then is man's highest achievement it is the organ of the community for the protection and development of the people it has the difficult task of reconciling social order with the natural individualism of men and the jealous conflicts of internal groups law is the freedom of civilized man for it frees him from many and justices and perils in return for his agreement not to inflict them upon other citizens the state is the actuality of concrete freedom to so transform chaos into order Lee Liberty the state must have authority and sometimes must use force police will be necessary and in crisis conscription - but if the state is well-managed it can be called the organization of reason in this sense we may say of the state as of the universe that the rational is real and the real is rational it is not utopic but utopia is unreal was this an idealization of the Prussian state of 1820 not quite unlike that regime it assumed the full success of steins and hardin Burg's reforms it called for a Limited monarchy constitutional government freedom of worship and the emancipation of the Jew it condemned despotism which it defined as any state of affairs where law has disappeared and when the particular will as such whether of a monarch or a mob ogloc recei counts as law or takes the place of law while it is precisely in legal constitutional government that sovereignty is to be found as the moment of ideality Hegel rejected democracy outright the ordinary citizen is ill-equipped to choose competent rulers or to determine national policy the philosopher accepted the french revolutionary constitution of 1791 which called for a constitutional monarchy in which the people voted for a National Assembly but not for a ruler an elective monarchy is the worst of all institutions so Hegel recommended the government composed of a bicameral legislature elected by property owners an executive and administrative cabinet of ministers and an hereditary monarch having the will with the power of ultimate decision the development of the state to constitutional monarchy is the achievement of the modern world it would be unfair to call this philosophy reactionary it was quite in line with the reasoned conservatism of Montaigne and Voltaire Burke and Macaulay bon German Const on advising Napoleon and took veal after studying the French and American governments it left some room for individual freedom of thought and for religious toleration we must view it in its context in place and time we must imagine ourselves in the maelstrom of post-napoleonic Europe with its bankruptcy and depression and its reactionary governments trying to restore the ancien régime to understand the reaction of a thinker to advanced in years to be adventurous in thought to comfortably established to relish the ecstasy of revolution or risk the replacement of an old government with inexperienced theorists or mob rule it was the hasty preface not the carefully organized and considered book that was unworthy of a philosopher the old man was frightened by Freese's eloquence and its excited reception he called for the police and he was not sorry that governments have at last directed attention to this kind of philosophy it is not for age to venture but to preserve five history Hegel students must have loved him for after his death they pored over his notes adding their own records of his lectures arranging the result in some reasonable order and issued it over his name so appeared for posthumous books aesthetics philosophy of religion philosophy of history and history of philosophy they are the most intelligible of his works perhaps because least obscured by the complexity of his thought and style the only thought which philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of history is the simple concept of reason that reason the logic and law of events is the sovereign of the world that therefore the history of the world presents us a rational process here to the actual was rational it was the only logical and necessary result of its antecedents Hegel often speaks of his sovereign reason in religious terms but he defines it by mating Spinoza and Newton reason is the substance of the universe vis that by which and in which all reality has its being and subsistence and on the other hand it is the infinite energy of the universe ie the categories of the logic are based upon means of understanding the operative relations which constitute the infinite complex of things their entire essence and truth if the operations of history are an expression of reason of the laws inherent in the nature of things there must be some method in the apparent whimsy of events Hegel sees method in both the process and the result the process of reason in history as in logic is dialectical each stage or condition thesis contains contradictions and tifos as' which struggle to compose a synthesis so despotism tried to suppress the human hunger for freedom the hunger broke out in revolt their synthesis was constitutional monarchy is there then a general or total design behind the course of history know if this means a conscious supreme power guiding all causes and effects to a determined goal yes insofar as the widening stream of events as a civilization advances is moved by the total of Geist or mind to bring man closer and closer to his absorbing goal which is freedom through reason not freedom from law though that conceivably might come if intelligence should reach its full growth but freedom through law so the evolution of the state can be a boon to Liberty this progress toward freedom is not continuous for in the dialectic of history there are contradictions to be resolved opposition's to be transformed into fusion centrifugal diversities to be drawn toward a unifying Center by the character of the age or the work of exceptional men these two forces the time and the genius are the engineers of history and when they work together they are irresistible Hegel inspiring Carlyle believed in heroes and hero worship geniuses are not necessarily virtuous it is a mistake to think that they are selfish individualist s' Napoleon was no mere conqueror for the sake of conquest he was consciously or not the agent of Europe's greater need for unity and consistent laws but the genius is helpless and less consciously or not he embodies and serves the zeitgeist the spirit of the times such individuals had insight into the requirements of the time what was right for development this was the very truth for their age for their world the species next in order so to speak and which was already formed in the womb of time if the genius is born on such a tide like Galileo Franklin or James Watt he will be a force for growth even if he brings misery for an entire generation the genius is not meant to peddle happiness the history of the world is not the theater of happiness periods of happiness are the blank pages in it for they are periods of harmony when the antithesis is in abeyance and history sleeps the chief obstacle to interpreting history as progress is the fact that civilizations can die or entirely disappear but Hegel was not the man to let such incidents disrupt his dialectic he divided man's past as aforesaid into three periods the oriental the greco-roman and the Christian and saw some progress in their succession the Orient gave freedom to one man as absolute ruler classical antiquity gave freedom to a caste using slaves the Christian world giving each person a soul sought to free all it encountered resistance in the traffic in slaves but this conflict was resolved in the French Revolution at this point about 1820 to Hegel broke out into a surprising pian to that upheaval or to its first two years the political condition of France had presented nothing but a confused mass of privileges altogether contravening fault and reason with the greatest corruption of morals and spirit the change was necessarily violent because the work of transformation was not undertaken by the government was opposed by the court the clergy and the nobility the idea of right asserted its authority and the old framework of injustice could offer no resistance to its onslaught it was a glorious mental dawn all thinking beings shared in the jubilation a spiritual enthusiasm filled the world mob violence darkened that dawn but after the blood was washed away substantial progress remained and Hegel was still cosmopolitan enough to recognize that the French Revolution had brought substantial benefits too much of Germany the code Napoleon the abolition of feudal privileges the enlargement of freedom the spread of property ownership all-in-all Hegel's analysis of the French Revolution in the final pages of the philosophy of history proves that the frightened conservative had not quite repudiated the ideals of his youth he considered it a main fault of the revolution that it made an enemy of religion religion is reasons highest and most rational work it is absurd to mean that priests have thought up religion for the people as a fraud for their own benefit consequently it is folly to pretend to invent and carry out political constitutions independently of religion religion is the sphere in which the nation gives itself the definition of that which it regards as the true the concept of God therefore constitutes the general basis of a people's character conversely the shape which the perfect embodiment of spirit assumes is the state fully developed the state becomes the basis and center of the other concrete elements of the life of a people of art law morals religion science supported and justified by religion the state becomes divine aspiring to produce a system of philosophy unified by one basic formula of explanation Hegel applied his dialectic to one field after another to his philosophy of history his students after his death added his history of philosophy the famous ancient systems of universal analysis in this view followed a sequence basically corresponding to the evolution of the categories in the logic Parmenides stressed being and stability Heraclitus stressed becoming development change Democritus saw objective matter Plato saw subjective idea Aristotle provided the synthesis each system like each category and each generation enclosed and added to its predecessors so that a full understanding of the last system would comprehend them all what each generation has brought forward as knowledge and spiritual creation the next generation inherits this inheritance constitutes its soul its spiritual substance since agels philosophy was the latest in the great chain of philosophical imaginations it included in its authors view all the basic ideas and values of all major preceding systems and was their historical and theoretical culmination six deaths and return his time for a time on the took him at his own estimate his classes grew despite his Durer temper and abstruse style prominent men Cuza and me Schley from france hey bear from Denmark came from afar to see him balance the universe in his categories he was honored in Paris in 1827 and by old Goethe on the way home in 1830 his certainties were shaken by the spread of radical movements and revolutionary agitation he denounced them and in 1831 he issued across the waters an appeal for the defeat of the reform bill that marked the rise of democracy in England he rephrased his philosophy more and more in terms acceptable to Protestant Divine's still only 61 and apparently in full vigor he fell victim to a cholera epidemic and died in Berlin November 14th 1831 he was buried as he had wished beside the grave of Victor as if in testimony to his cautious obscurity his students divided into antipodal groups the Hegelian right led by johann Edmund Kuno Fisher and Karl Rosencrantz and the Hegelian left Ludwig Feuerbach David Strauss Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx the right excelled in scholarship but declined as higher criticism of the Bible grew the left expanded in attacks upon religious and political orthodoxy the left interpreted Hegel's identification of God and reason to mean that nature man and history are subject to invariable and impersonal laws for Bach quoted Hegel as saying man knows about God only insofar as God knows about himself within man ie the reason of the universe becomes conscious only in man only man can think of cosmic laws Marx who knew Hegel chiefly through the Masters writings transformed the dialectical movement of the categories into the economic interpretation of history in which the class war superseded the heroes as a main agent of progress and socialism became the Marxian synthesis of capitalism and its internal contradictions Hegel's reputation faded for a time as open hours sarcastic passions swept the philosophic bored philosophers of history were lost in the advance of historical scholarship Hegelian ism seemed dead in Germany but it had risen to new life in Great Britain with John and edward cared th green JME McTaggart and bernhard buzzin ket when it died in england it rose again in the united states perhaps the echoes of Hegel's worship of the state helped to pave the way for Bismarck and Hitler meanwhile Suren Kierkegaard Karl yah Spurs Martin Heidegger and jean-paul Sartre found in the phenomena lugia disguised as a virile note of human competition in a world apparently shorn of divine guidance and Hegel became the Godfather of existentialism all in all this age of Goethe Beethoven and Hegel was one of the high water points in the history of Germany it had reached or neared such peaks before as in the Renaissance and the Reformation but the 30 Years War had shattered the economic and intellectual life of the people and had darkened the soul of Germany almost to despair through a hundred years slowly the native bigger of her stock the stoic patience of her women the skill of her craftsmen the enterprise of her merchants and the power and depth of her music prepared her to receive and transform to her own taste and character such foreign influences as England's Shakespeare and her Romantic poets the enlightenment and revolution of France she moderated Voltaire into Goethe and violent Rousseau into Schiller and Richter she answered Napoleon with a war of liberation and cleared the way for the manifold achievements of her people in the 19th century civilization is a collaboration as well as a rivalry therefore it is good that each nation has its own culture government economy dress and songs it has taken many diverse forms of organization and expression to make the European spirit so subtle and diverse and to make the Europe of today an endless fascination and an inexhaustible heritage

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Keywords: Will Durant (Author), German Philosophy, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Academic), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (Academic), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Academic)

Id: gGkSepr0Q3s

Length: 77min 44sec (4664 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2015