German Idealism's Picture
of the World
German Idealism as the
Beholding of Thoughts: Hegel
Through Hegel, the “I think,
therefore I am” seems to spring up again in the evolution of German
world views like a seed, fallen into the earth, arises as a wide-branching
tree. For, what this thinker created as a world view is a comprehensive
thought-painting or, so to speak, a many-membered thought-body, consisting
of numerous single thoughts that mutually carry, support, move, enliven,
and illuminate one another. What is meant here by thoughts does not
stem from the sense impressions of the outer world, nor even from the
everyday experiences of human feeling life (Gemüt); what
is meant is thoughts that reveal themselves in the soul when the soul
lifts itself out of its sense impressions and out of the experiences
of its feeling life and makes itself into an onlooker of the process
by which a thought, free of everything of a non-thought nature, unfolds
into further and ever further thoughts. When the soul allows this process
to occur within itself, it is then supposedly lifted out of its usual
being and interwoven with its activity into the spiritually supersensible
world order. Then it is not the soul that thinks; the world-all thinks
within the soul; the soul becomes a participant in a happening outside
man into which man is merely interwoven; and in this way the soul
experiences within itself what works and weaves in the depths of
the world.
Looking
at this more closely, one can see that Hegel seeks his world view from
a completely different viewpoint than from Descartes's “I
think, therefore I am.” Descartes wants to draw certainty about
the existence of the soul from the soul's thinking. With Hegel
it is a matter of saying nothing at first about the thinking of the
individual human soul. but of shaping the life of this soul in such
a way that its thinking becomes a revelation of world thinking. Then.
Hegel believes, what lives as thought in all world existence will reveal
itself; and the individual soul finds itself as a part in this
thought-weaving of the world. From this point of view the soul must say:
The highest and deepest thing that is and lives in the world is
the creative reigning of thoughts, and I find myself as one of the ways
this reigning element reveals itself.
In this
turn away from the individual thoughts of the soul and toward world
thoughts above and beyond the soul. there lies the significant difference
between Hegel and Descartes; Hegel made this turn; Descartes did not.
And this
difference brings about another one relative to the development of the
world views of both men. Descartes seeks certainty for the thoughts
that the human being forms in the life in which he stands with his senses
and his soul. Hegel at first does not seek within the field of these
thoughts; he seeks a form of thought-life that lies above and
beyond this field.
If Hegel
did in fact remain in the region of thoughts and found himself therefore
to be in opposition to Fichte and Schelling, he did so only because
he believed he felt, in thoughts themselves, the inner power needed
to penetrate into the supersensible realm. Hegel was an enthusiast with
respect to the experience man can have when he gives himself over entirely
to the primal power of thoughts. In the light of a thought raised to an
idea, the soul, for him, extricates itself from its connection with the
sense world. One can feel the power lying in this enthusiasm of Hegel
when one encounters in his writings — in which for many people
there reigns such a repellent, knotty, yes, it seems, horribly abstract
language-passages that often show so beautifully the heart's tones he
can find for what he experiences with his “abstractions.”
Just such a passage, for example, stands at the end of his
Phenomenology.
There he calls the knowing that the soul experiences when it lets world
ideas hold sway within it “absolute knowing.” And at the end
of this book he looks back upon those spirits who have striven for the
goal of “absolute knowing” in the course of mankind's
evolution. Looking back from his era, he finds the following words to say
about these spirits: “The goal — absolute knowing, or
the spirit knowing itself as spirit — has as its path the memory of
spirits, as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization
of their kingdom. Their preservation of their free existence, on the
one hand, appearing in the form of chance happening, is history; but
their preservation of their comprehended organization, on the other
hand, is the science of manifest knowing; both together —
comprehended history — constitute the memory and the Golgotha
(Schädelstätte) of the absolute spirit, the reality,
truth, and certainty of its throne, without which the absolute spirit
would be lifeless and alone; only —
From the cup of this realm of spirits
Foams for it its infinitude:”
This
inwardly powerful element of a thought-life that wants to overcome itself
within itself in order to lift itself into a realm where it is no longer
living in itself but where the infinite thought, the eternal idea, is
living in it: that is the essential element in Hegel's seeking. Through
this, higher striving in knowledge receives a far-reaching character
with him that wants to guide toward one goal directions in this
striving that are often separated and therefore proceeding one-sidedly.
In Hegel one can find a pure thinker who wants to approach the solution
to the riddle of the world only through a human reason free of mysticism.
One can speak of ice-cold abstract thoughts by which alone he wants
to comprehend the world. Thus one will be able to see in him the dry,
mathematically inclined man of intellect. But where does living
in the ideas of one's reason lead him? It leads him to the surrender
of the human soul to the supersensible world powers holding sway in
the soul. Living in these ideas becomes a true mystical experience.
And it is absolutely not nonsensical to recognize mysticism in Hegel's
world view. One must only have a sense for the fact that what they mystic
expresses can be experienced in Hegel's works in connection with
the ideas of one's reason. It is a mysticism that removes the
personal element — which for the mystic of feeling is the main
thing, and the only thing he wants to speak about — as in fact
a personal matter for the soul itself, and that expresses only that
to which mysticism can lift itself when it struggles up out of personal
soul darkness into the radiant clarity of the world of ideas.
Hegel's
world view has its place in the course of mankind's spiritual
evolution through the fact that in it the radiant power of thoughts
lifts itself up out of the mystical depths of the soul, and through
the fact that in Hegel's seeking, mystical power wants to reveal
itself with the power of the light of thought. And this is also how
he sees his place in the course of this evolution. Therefore he looked
back upon Jakob Böhme in the way expressed in these words (to be
found in his
History of Philosophy):
“This Jakob Böhme,
long forgotten and decried as a pietistic visionary, has regained his
rightful esteem only in recent times; Leibniz revered him. His public
has been greatly reduced by the Age of Enlightenment; in recent times
his profundity has been recognized again. ... To declare him a visionary
means nothing. For if one wants to, one can call every philosopher so,
even Epicurus and Bacon. ... But as to the high esteem to which Böhme
has been raised, he owes this particularly to the form of his contemplation
and feeling; for, contemplation and inner feeling ... and the pictorial
nature of one's thoughts the allegories and so on — are partly
considered to be the essential form of philosophy. But it is only the
concept, thinking, in which philosophy can have its truth, in which the
absolute can be expressed and also is as it is in and for itself.”
And Hegel finds these further words for Böhme: “Jakob Böhme
is the first German philosopher; the content of his philosophizing
is truly German. What distinguishes Böhme and makes him remarkable
is ... that he set the intellectual world into his own inner life
(Gemüt), and within his own consciousness of himself he beheld,
knew, and felt everything that used to be in the beyond. This general idea
of Böhme proves on the one hand to be profound and basic; on the
other hand, however, he does not achieve clarity and order in all his
need and struggle for definition and discrimination in developing his
divine views about the universe.”
Such
words are spoken by Hegel, after all, only from the feeling: In the
simple heart of Jakob Böhme there lived the deepest impulse of
the human soul to sink itself with its own experience into world experience
— the true mystical impulse — but the pictorial view, the
parable, the symbol must lift themselves to the light of clear ideas
in order to attain what they want. In Hegel's world view Jakob
Böhme's world pictures are meant to arise again as ideas
of human reason. Thus the enthusiast of thoughts, Hegel, stands beside
the deep mystic, Jakob Böhme, within the evolution of German idealism.
Hegel saw in Böhme's philosophizing something truly German,
and Karl Rosenkranz, the biographer and independent student of Hegel,
wrote a book,
Hegel as the German National Philosopher,
for the celebration of Hegel's hundredth birthday in 1870, in which
these words occur: “One can assert that Hegel's system of thought
is the most national one in Germany, and that after the earlier dominion
of the Kantian and Schellingtan systems, none has reached so deeply
into the national movement, into the furthering of German intelligence,
into the elucidation of public opinion, into the encouraging of the
will ... as that of Hegel.”
With
such words Karl Rosenkranz does in fact, to a high degree, speak the
truth about a phenomenon of German spiritual life, even though, on the
other hand, Hegel's striving had already encountered the most bitter
and scornful opposition in the decades before these words were written
— an opposition whose beginnings were described in significant
words by Rosenkranz himself soon after Hegel's death: “When
I consider the fury with which Hegelian philosophy was attacked, I am
surprised that Hegel's expression, that ‘the idea in its
movement is a circle of circles,’ has not moved people to call
his philosophy Dante's funnel into hell, which narrows toward the end
and finally brings one up against Satan incarnate” (Rosenkrantz:
From My Notebook. Leipzig 1854).
There
can be very different viewpoints from which a person seeks to describe
the impression he gains of a thinker personality like Hegel. In another
place (in his book
Riddles of Philosophy)
the present author
attempted to show the view one can attain about Hegel when one fixes
one's eye on his work as a stage in the philosophical evolution
of mankind. Here this author would like to speak only of what comes
to expression through Hegel as one of the strengths of German idealism
in world views. This is trust in the carrying power of thinking. Every
page in Hegel's works strengthens this trust which finally culminates
in the conviction: When the human being fully understands what he has
in his thinking, then he also knows that he can attain entry into a
supersensible spiritual world. Through Hegel, German idealism has
accomplished the affirmation of the supersensible nature of thinking. And
one can have the feeling that Hegel's strengths, and also his weaknesses,
are connected with the fact that one time in the course of the world
a personality had to stand there for whom all life and work are ensouled
by this affirmation. Then one sees in Hegel's world view a source
from which to draw what can be gained from this affirmation in the way
of strength for life, without perhaps accepting the content of the Hegelian
world view in anyone point.
If one
relates in such a way to this thinker personality, one can receive a
stimulus from him, and along with it the stimulus of one strong element
of German idealism; and from this stimulus one can gain the strength
to form a completely different picture of the world than that painted
by Hegel himself. As strange as it may sound: Hegel is perhaps best
understood when one directs the power of cognitive striving that held
sway in him onto paths that he himself never took at all.
Hegel felt the
supersensible nature of thinking with all the power available to man in
this direction. But he had to expend so much human strength in conducting
this feeling through a complete thinking process for once, that he was
not able himself to lead the supersensible nature of thinking up into
supersensible realms. The exemplary psychologist, Franz Brentano expresses
in his Psychology how modern psychology does indeed investigate
the ordinary life of the soul in a strictly scientific way, but, in these
investigations, has lost all perspective into the great questions of
soul existence. He says: “The laws of mental association,
of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the germinating
of pleasure and love, all these would be anything but a true compensation
for not gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for
the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the
body ... if the modern way of thinking really did signify the elimination
of the question of immortality, then this elimination would have to
be called an extremely portentious one for psychology:” Now one
can say that in many people's view not only the scientific approach
of psychology but the scientific approach altogether seems to signify
the elimination of such questions. Over Hegel's world view there
seems to hover like an evil fate the fact that, with its affirmation
of the supersensible nature of the thought-world, his world view has
walled off the entrance into a real world of supersensible facts and
beings. In someone who is a student of Hegel in the sense Karl Rosenkranz
is, for example, this fate seems to work on. Rosenkranz wrote a psychology
(Psychology or Science of the Subjective Spirit, 1837;
third edition, 1863). There, in the chapter on “Old Age,” one
can read (p. 119): “Psychology touches here on the question of
immortality, a favorite theme of lay philosophers — often with
the preconceived intention of guaranteeing a reunion after death, as
one usually expresses it. If the spirit, as a self-conscious idea-entity,
is qualitatively different from its organism, then the possibility
of immortality makes sense. But as to the how of actual immortality,
we are unable to gain the slightest inkling with any objective value.
We can see that if we continue to exist as individualities, our being
is still unable to change, after all, with respect to having to live
within the true, good, and beautiful; but the modality of an
existence separated from our organism is a riddle for us. Why should
we not then acknowledge here the limits of our knowing? Why
should we either flatly deny the possibility of immortality or offer
for speculation fantastic dreams of a soul sleep, of a soul body, and
of other such dogmas? Where true knowing ceases, faith enters; and we
must leave it up to faith to depict a not impossible hereafter.”
Rosenkranz airs an opinion like this within a psychology completely
permeated with the conviction of having a knowledge about what the
supersensible world-thought brings to earthly reality within the being of
the human soul. This is a science — wishing to weave entirely within
the supersensible — that comes to an immediate halt when it notices
the threshold to the supersensible world. One can deal with this phenomenon
only if one feels in it something of the destiny that is cast over man's
striving in knowledge — and that seems so inextricably interwoven
with Hegel's world view — through the fact that, by focussing with
all its strength upon the supersensible nature of thinking, and, in
order to achieve maximum effect with this focus, his world view loses
the possibility of a different focus upon the supersensible.
Hegel
at first seeks to find the circumference of all the supersensible thoughts
that arise in the human soul when the soul lifts itself up out of all
observation of nature and all earthly soul life. He presents this content
as his Logic. But this logic contains not one single thought
leading out of the region encompassed by nature and earthly soul life.
Then Hegel seeks further
to present all those thoughts which, as supersensible beings, underlie
nature. Nature becomes for him the revelation of a supersensible
thought-world that hides its thought-being within nature and presents
itself as the opposite of itself, as something of a non-thought
kind. But here also there are no thoughts that non-thought kind. But
here also there are no thoughts that I do not express themselves within
the circumference of the sense world.
In his philosophy of the
spirit, Hegel depicts how world I ideas are holding sway in the
individual human soul, in associations of human souls (peoples, states),
in the historical evolution of mankind, in art, religion, and philosophy.
Everywhere in his philosophy is also the view that the supersensible
thought-world absolutely expresses itself within the soul element as
this stands with its being and working within the sense world, and that
therefore everything present in the sense realm is of a spiritual nature
with respect to its true being. Nowhere, however, is there a start in
the direction of penetrating with knowledge into a supersensible region
for which no configuration in the sense realm is present.
One can
acknowledge all this to oneself and yet not seek to judge the expression
of German idealism in Hegel's world view negatively just
because Hegel, in spite of his supersensible idealism, remained stuck
in observation of the sense world. One can arrive at a positive
judgment and can find the essential thing about this world view to lie
in the fact that it contains the affirmation: Whoever observes in its
true form the world
[1]
spread out before
our senses recognizes that it is in reality a spiritual world. And German
idealism has expressed through Hegel this affirmation of the spiritual
nature of the sense-perceptible.
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