The German Cla.s.sics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
Vol. VII.
by Various.
THE LIFE OF GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
BY J. LOEWENBERG, PH.D.
a.s.sistant in Philosophy, Harvard University
Among students of philosophy the mention of Hegel"s name arouses at once a definite emotion. Few thinkers indeed have ever so completely fascinated the minds of their sympathetic readers, or have so violently repulsed their unwilling listeners, as Hegel has. To his followers Hegel is the true prophet of the only true philosophic creed, to his opponents, he has, in Professor James"s words, "like Byron"s corsair, left a name "to other times, linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.""
The feelings of attraction to Hegel or repulsion from him do not emanate from his personality. Unlike Spinoza"s, his life offers nothing to stir the imagination. Briefly, some of his biographical data are as follows: He was born at Stuttgart, the capital of Wurtemberg, August 27, 1770.
His father was a government official, and the family belonged to the upper middle cla.s.s. Hegel received his early education at the Latin School and the Gymnasium of his native town. At both these inst.i.tutions, as well as at the University of Tubingen which he entered in 1788 to study theology, he distinguished himself as an eminently industrious, but not as a rarely gifted student. The certificate which he received upon leaving the University in 1793 speaks of his good character, his meritorious acquaintance with theology and languages, and his meagre knowledge of philosophy. This does not quite represent his equipment, however, for his private reading and studies carried him far beyond the limits of the regular curriculum. After leaving the University he spent seven years as family tutor in Switzerland and in Frankfurt-on-the-Main.
Soon after, in 1801, we find him as _Privat-Docent_; then, in 1805, as professor at the University of Jena. His academic activities were interrupted by the battle of Jena. For the next two years we meet him as an editor of a political journal at Bamberg, and from 1808 to 1816 as rector of the Gymnasium at Nuremberg. He was then called to a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg. In 1818 he was called to Berlin to fill the vacancy left by the death of Fichte. From this time on until his death in 1831, he was the recognized dictator of one of the most powerful philosophic schools in the history of thought.
It is no easy task to convey an adequate idea of Hegel"s philosophy within the limits of a short introduction. There is, however, one central thought animating the vast range of his whole philosophic system which permits of non-technical statement. This thought will be more easily grasped, if we consider first the well-known concept of permanence and change. They may be said to const.i.tute the most fundamental distinction in life and in thought. Religion and poetry have always dwelt upon their tragic meaning. That there is nothing new under the sun and that we are but "fair creatures of an hour" in an ever-changing world, are equally sad reflections. Interesting is the application of the difference between permanence and change to extreme types of temperament. We may speak loosely of the "static" and the "dynamic" temperaments, the former clinging to everything that is traditional, conservative, and abiding in art, religion, philosophy, politics, and life; the latter everywhere pointing to, and delighting in, the fluent, the novel, the evanescent. These extreme types, by no means rare or unreal, ill.u.s.trate the deep-rooted need of investing either permanence or change with a more fundamental value. And to the value of the one or the other, philosophers have always endeavored to give metaphysical expression.
[Ill.u.s.tration: SCHLIESINGER GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL]
Some thinkers have proclaimed change to be the deepest manifestation of reality, while others have insisted upon something abiding behind a world of flux. The question whether change or permanence is more essential arose early in Greek philosophy. Herac.l.i.tus was the first one to see in change a deeper significance than in the permanence of the Eleatics. A more dramatic opposition than the one which ensued between the Herac.l.i.teans and the Eleatics can scarcely be imagined--both schools claiming a monopoly of reason and truth, both distrusting the senses, and each charging the other with illusion. Now the significance of Hegel"s philosophy can be grasped only when we bear in mind that it was just this profound distinction between the permanent and the changing that Hegel sought to understand and to interpret. He saw more deeply into the reality of movement and change than any other philosopher before or after him.
Very early in his life, judging by the recently published writings of his youth, Hegel became interested in various phases of movement and change. The vicissitudes of his own inner or outer life he did not a.n.a.lyze. He was not given to introspection. Romanticism and mysticism were foreign to his nature. His temperament was rather that of the objective thinker. Not his own pa.s.sions, hopes, and fears, but those of others invited his curiosity. With an humane att.i.tude, the young Hegel approached religious and historical problems. The dramatic life and death of Jesus, the tragic fate of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," the discrepancies between Christ"s teachings and the positive Christian religion, the fall of paganism and the triumph of the Christian Church--these were the problems over which the young Hegel pondered. Through an intense study of these problems, he discovered that evil, sin, longing, and suffering are woven into the very tissue of religious and historical processes, and that these negative elements determine the very meaning and progress of history and religion. Thereupon he began a systematic sketch of a philosophy in which a negative factor was to be recognized as the positive vehicle in the development of the whole world. And thus his genius came upon a method which revealed to him an orderly unfolding in the world with stages of relative values, the higher developing from the lower, and all stages const.i.tuting an organic whole.
The method which the young Hegel discovered empirically, and which the mature rationalist applied to every sphere of human life and thought, is the famous Dialectical Method. This method is, in general, nothing else than the recognition of the necessary presence of a negative factor in the const.i.tution of the world. Everything in the world--be it a religious cult or a logical category, a human pa.s.sion or a scientific law--is, so Hegel holds, the result of a process which involves the overcoming of a negative element. Without such an element to overcome, the world would indeed be an inert and irrational affair. That any rational and worthy activity entails the encounter of opposition and the removal of obstacles is an observation commonplace enough. A preestablished harmony of foreseen happy issues--a fool"s paradise--is scarcely our ideal of a rational world. Just as a game is not worth playing when its result is predetermined by the great inferiority of the opponent, so life without something negative to overcome loses its zest.
But the process of overcoming is not anything contingent; it operates according to a uniform and universal law. And this law const.i.tutes Hegel"s most central doctrine--his doctrine of Evolution.
In order to bring this doctrine into better relief, it may be well to contrast it superficially with the Darwinian theory of transformation.
In general, Hegel"s doctrine is a concept of value, Darwin"s is not.
What Darwinians mean by evolution is not an unfolding of the past, a progressive development of a hierarchy of phases, in which the later is superior and organically related to the earlier. No sufficient criterion is provided by them for evaluating the various stages in the course of an evolutionary process. The biologist"s world would probably have been just as rational if the famous ape-like progenitor of man had chanced to become his offspring-a.s.suming an original environment favorable for such transformation. Some criterion besides the mere external and accidental "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest" must be furnished to account for a progressive evolution. Does the phrase "survival of the fittest" say much more than that those who happen to survive _are_ the fittest, or that their survival proves their fitness? But that survival itself is valuable: that it is better to be alive than dead; that existence has a value other than itself; that what comes later in the history of the race or of the universe is an advance over what went before-that, in a word, the world is subject to an immanent development, only a comprehensive and systematic philosophy can attempt to show.
The task of Hegel"s whole philosophy consists in showing, by means of one uniform principle, that the world manifests everywhere a genuine evolution. Unlike the partic.i.p.ants in the biological "struggle for existence," the struggling beings of Hegel"s universe never end in slaying, but in reconciliation. Their very struggle gives birth to a new being which includes them, and this being is "higher" in the scale of existence, because it represents the preservation of two mutually opposed beings. Only where conflicts are adjusted, oppositions overcome, negations removed, is there advance, in Hegel"s sense; and only where there is a pa.s.sage from the positive through its challenging negative to a higher form inclusive of both is there a case of real development.
The ordinary process of learning by experience ill.u.s.trates somewhat Hegel"s meaning. An individual finds himself, for instance, in the presence of a wholly new situation that elicits an immediate, definite reaction. In his ignorance, he chooses the wrong mode of behavior. As a consequence, trouble ensues; feelings are hurt, pride is wounded, motives are misconstrued. Embittered and disappointed with himself, he experiences great mental sorrow. But he soon learns to see the situation in its true light; he condemns his deed and offers to make amends. And after the wounds begin to heal again, the inner struggles experienced commence to a.s.sume a positive worth. They have led him to a deeper insight into his own motives, to a better self-comprehension. And he finally comes forth from the whole affair enriched and enlightened. Now in this formal example, to which any content may be supplied, three phases can be distinguished. First, we have the person as he meant to be in the presence of the new situation, unaware of trouble. Then, his wrong reaction engendered a hostile element. He was at war with himself; he was not what he meant to be. And finally, he returned to himself richer and wiser, including within himself the negative experience as a valuable a.s.set in the advance of his development.
This process of falling away from oneself, of facing oneself as an enemy whom one reconciles to and includes in one"s larger self, is certainly a familiar process. It is a process just like this that develops one"s personality. However the self may be defined metaphysically, it is for every self-conscious individual a never-ceasing battle with conflicting motives and antagonistic desires--a never-ending cycle of endeavor, failure, and success through the very agency of failure.
A more typical instance of this rhythmic process is Hegel"s view of the evolution of religion. Religion, in general, is based on a dualism which it seeks to overcome. Though G.o.d is in heaven and man on earth, religion longs to bridge the gulf which separates man and G.o.d. The religions of the Orient emphasize G.o.d"s infinity. G.o.d is everything, man is nothing.
Like an Oriental prince, G.o.d is conceived to have despotic sway over man, his creature. Only in contemplating G.o.d"s omnipotence and his own nothingness can man find solace and peace. Opposed to this religion of the infinite is the finite religion of Greece.
Man in Greece stands in the centre of a beautiful cosmos which is not alien to his spirit. The G.o.ds on high, conceived after the likeness of man, are the expression of a free people conscious of their freedom. And the divinities worshiped, under the form of Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite--what are they but idealized and glorified Greeks? Can a more complete ant.i.thesis be imagined? But Christianity becomes possible after this struggle only, for in Christianity is contained both the principle of Oriental infinity and the element of h.e.l.lenic finitude, for in a being who is both G.o.d and man--a G.o.d-man--the gulf between the infinite and finite is bridged. The Christian, like the Greek, worships man--Jesus; but this man is one with the eternal being of the Orient.
Because it is the outcome of the Oriental and Greek opposition, the Christian religion is, in Hegel"s sense, a higher one. Viewing the Oriental and the h.e.l.lenic religions historically in terms of the biological "struggle for existence," the extinction of neither has resulted. The Christian religion is the unity of these two struggling opposites; in it they are conciliated and preserved. And this for Hegel is genuine evolution.
That evolution demands a union of opposites seems at first paradoxical enough. To say that Christianity is a religion of both infinity and finitude means nothing less than that it contains a contradiction.
Hegel"s view, strange as it may sound, is just this: everything includes a contradiction in it, everything is both positive and negative, everything expresses at once its Everlasting Yea and its Everlasting No.
The negative character of the world is the very vehicle of its progress.
Life and activity mean the triumph of the positive over the negative, a triumph which results from absorbing and a.s.similating it. The myth of the Phoenix typifies the life of reason "eternally preparing for itself," as Hegel says, "a funeral pile, and consuming itself upon it; but so that from its ashes it produces the new, renovated, fresh life."
That the power of negativity enters const.i.tutively into the rationality of the world, nay, that the rationality of the world demands negativity in it, is Hegel"s most original contribution to thought. His complete philosophy is the attempt to show in detail that the whole universe and everything it contains manifests the process of uniformly struggling with a negative power, and is an outcome of conflicting, but reconciled forces. An impressionistic picture of the world"s eternal becoming through this process is furnished by the first of Hegel"s great works, the _Phenomenology of Spirit_. The book is, in a sense, a cross-section of the entire spiritual world. It depicts the necessary unfolding of typical phases of the spiritual life of mankind. Logical categories, scientific laws, historical epochs, literary tendencies, religious processes, social, moral, and artistic inst.i.tutions, all exemplify the same onward movement through a union of opposites. There is eternal and total instability everywhere. But this unrest and instability is of a necessary and uniform nature, according to the one eternally fixed principle which renders the universe as a whole organic and orderly.
Organic Wholeness! This phrase contains the rationale of the restless flow and the evanescent being of the Hegelian world. It is but from the point of view of the whole that its countless conflicts, discrepancies, and contradictions can be understood. As the members of the body find only in the body as a whole their _raison d"etre_, so the manifold expressions of the world are the expressions of one organism. A hand which is cut off, as Hegel somewhere remarks, still looks like a hand, and exists; but it is not a real hand. Similarly any part of the world, severed from its connection with the whole, any isolated historical event, any one religious view, any particular scientific explanation, any single social body, any mere individual person, is like an amputated bodily organ. Hegel"s view of the world as organic depends upon exhibiting the partial and abstract nature of other views. In his _Phenomenology_ a variety of interpretations of the world and of the meaning and destiny of life are scrutinized as to their adequacy and concreteness. When not challenged, the point of view of common sense, for instance, seems concrete and natural. The reaction of common sense to the world is direct and practical, it has few questions to ask, and philosophic speculations appear to it abstract and barren. But, upon a.n.a.lysis, it is the common sense view that stands revealed as abstract and barren. For an abstract object is one that does not fully correspond to the rich and manifold reality; it is incomplete and one-sided.
Precisely such an object is the world of common sense. Its concreteness is ignorance. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by common sense. Its work-a-day world is not even a faint reflex of the vast and complex universe. It sees but the immediate, the obvious, the superficial. So instead of being concrete, it is, in truth, the very opposite. Nor is empirical science with its predilection for "facts"
better off. Every science able to cope with a mere fragmentary aspect of the world and from a partial point of view, is forced to ignore much of the concrete content of even its own realm. Likewise, art and religion, though in their views more synthetic and therefore more concrete, are one-sided; they seek to satisfy special needs. Philosophy alone--Hegelian philosophy--is concrete. Its aim is to interpret the world in its entirety and complexity, its ideal is to harmonize the demands of common sense, the interests of science, the appeal of art, and the longing of religion into one coherent whole. This view of philosophy, because it deals with the universe in its fulness and variety, alone can make claim to real concreteness. Nor are the other views false. They form for Hegel the necessary rungs on the ladder which leads up to his own philosophic vision. Thus the Hegelian vision is itself an organic process, including all other interpretations of life and of the world as its necessary phases. In the immanent unfolding of the Hegelian view is epitomized the onward march and the organic unity of the World-Spirit itself.
The technical formulation of this view is contained in his _Logic_.
This book may indeed be said to be Hegel"s master-stroke. Nothing less is attempted in it than the proof that the very process of reasoning manifests the same principle of evolution through a union of opposites.
Hegel was well aware, as much as recent exponents of anti-intellectualism, that through "static" concepts we trans.m.u.te and falsify the "fluent"
reality. As Professor James says "The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed ... When we conceptualize we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means a _that-and-no-other_." But are our concepts static, fixed, and discontinuous? What if the very concepts we employ in reasoning should exemplify the universal flow of life? Hegel finds that indeed to be the case. Concepts we daily use, such as quality and quant.i.ty, essence and phenomenon, appearance and reality, matter and force, cause and effect, are not fixed and isolated ent.i.ties, but form a continuous system of interdependent elements. Stated dogmatically the meaning is this: As concavity and convexity are inseparably connected, though one is the very opposite of the other--as one cannot, so to speak, live without the other, both being always found in union--so can no concept be discovered that is not thus wedded to its contradiction. Every concept develops, upon a.n.a.lysis, a stubbornly negative mate. No concept is statable or definable without its opposite; one involves the other. One cannot speak of motion without implying rest; one cannot mention the finite without at the same time referring to the infinite; one cannot define cause without explicitly defining effect. Not only is this true, but concepts, when applied, reveal perpetual oscillation. Take the terms "north" and "south." The mention of the north pole, for example, implies at once the south pole also; it can be distinguished only by contrast with the other, which it thus _includes_. But it is a north pole only by _excluding_ the south pole from itself--by being itself and not merely what the other is not. The situation is paradoxical enough: Each aspect--the negative or the positive--of anything appears to exclude the other, while each requires its own other for its very definition and expression. It needs the other, and yet is independent of it. How Hegel proves this of all concepts, cannot here be shown.
The result is that no concept can be taken by itself as a "that-and-no-other." It is perpetually accompanied by its "other" as man is by his shadow. The attempt to isolate any logical category and regard it as fixed and stable thus proves futile. Each category--to show this is the task of Hegel"s _Logic_--is itself an organism, the result of a process which takes place within its inner const.i.tution.
And all logical categories, inevitably used in describing and explaining our world, form one system of interdependent and organically related parts. Hegel begins with an a.n.a.lysis of a concept that most abstractly describes reality, follows it through its countless conflicts and contradictions, and finally reaches the highest category which, including all the foregoing categories in organic unity, is alone adequate to characterize the universe as an organism. What these categories are and what Hegel"s procedure is in showing their necessary sequential development, can here not even be hinted at.
That the logical development of the categories of thought is the same as the historical evolution of life--and _vice versa_--establishes for Hegel the ident.i.ty of thought and reality. In the history of philosophy, the discrepancy between thought and reality has often been emphasized.
There are those who insist that reality is too vast and too deep for man with his limited vision to penetrate; others, again, who set only certain bounds to man"s understanding, reality consisting, they hold, of knowable and unknowable parts; and others still who see in the very shifts and changes of philosophic and scientific opinion the delusion of reason and the illusiveness of reality. The history of thought certainly does present an array of conflicting views concerning the limits of human reason. But all the contradictions and conflicts of thought prove to Hegel the sovereignty of reason. The conflicts of reason are its own necessary processes and expressions. Its dialectic instability is instability that is peculiar to all reality. Both thought and reality manifest one nature and one process. Hence reason with its "dynamic"
categories can comprehend the "fluent" reality, because it is flesh of its flesh and bone of its bone. Hegel"s bold and oft quoted words "What is rational is real; and what is real is rational," pithily express his whole doctrine. The nature of rationality and the nature of reality are, for Hegel, one and the same spiritual process, the organic process of triumphing over and conquering conflicts and contradictions. Where reality conforms to this process it is rational (that which does not conform to it is not reality at all, but has, like an amputated leg, mere contingent existence); the logical formula of this process is but an abstract account of what reality is in its essence.
The equation of the real and the rational, or the discovery of one significant process underlying both life and reason, led Hegel to proclaim a new kind of logic, so well characterized by Professor Royce as the "logic of pa.s.sion." To repeat what has been said above, this means that categories are related to one another as historical epochs, as religious processes, as social and moral inst.i.tutions, nay, as human pa.s.sions, wills, and deeds are related to one another. Mutual conflict and contradiction appear as their sole constant factor amid all their variable conditions. The introduction of contradiction into logical concepts as their _sine qua non_ meant indeed a revolutionary departure from traditional logic. Prior to Hegel, logical reasoning was reasoning in accordance with the law of contradiction, i. e., with the a.s.sumption that nothing can have at the same time and at the same place contradictory and inconsistent qualities or elements. For Hegel, on the contrary, contradiction is the very moving principle of the world, the pulse of its life. _Alle Dinge sind an sich selbst widersprechend_, as he drastically says. The deeper reason why Hegel invests contradiction with a positive value lies in the fact that, since the nature of everything involves the union of discrepant elements, nothing can bear isolation and independence. Terms, processes, epochs, inst.i.tutions, depend upon one another for their meaning, expression, and existence; it is impossible to take anything in isolation. But this is just what one does in dealing with the world in art or in science, in religion or in business; one is always dealing with error and contradiction, because one is dealing with fragments or bits of life and experience. Hence--and this is Hegel"s crowning thought--anything short of the whole universe is inevitably contradictory. In brief, contradiction has the same sting for Hegel as it has for any one else. Without losing its nature of "contradictoriness," contradiction has logically this positive meaning.
Since it is an essential element of every partial, isolated, and independent view of experience and thought, one is necessarily led to transcend it and to see the universe in organic wholeness.
Thus, as Hegel puts his fundamental idea, "the truth is the whole."
Neither things nor categories, neither histories nor religions, neither sciences nor arts, express or exhaust by themselves the whole essence of the universe. The essence of the universe is the _life_ of the totality of all things, not their _sum_. As the life of man is not the sum of his bodily and mental functions, the whole man being present in each and all of these, so must the universe be conceived as omnipresent in each of its parts and expressions. This is the significance of Hegel"s conception of the universe as an organism. The World-Spirit--Hegel"s G.o.d--const.i.tutes, thinks, lives, wills, and is _all_ in unity. The evolution of the universe is thus the evolution of G.o.d himself.
The task of philosophy, then, as Hegel conceives it, is to portray in systematic form the evolution of the World-Spirit in all its necessary ramifications. These ramifications themselves are conceived as const.i.tuting complete wholes, such as logic, nature, mind, society, history, art, religion, philosophy, so that the universe in its onward march through these is represented as a Whole of Wholes--_ein Kreis von Kreisen_. In Hegel"s complete philosophy each of these special spheres finds its proper place and elaborate treatment.
Whether Hegel has well or ill succeeded in the task of exhibiting in each and all of these spheres the one universal movement, whether or no he was justified in reading into logic the same kind of development manifested by life, or in making life conform to one logical formula--these and other problems should arouse an interest in Hegel"s writings. The following selections may give some glimpse of their spirit.
In conclusion, some bare suggestions must suffice to indicate the reason for Hegel"s great influence. Hegel has partly, if not wholly, created the modern historical spirit. Reality for him, as even this inadequate sketch has shown, is not static, but is essentially a process. Thus until the history of a thing is known, the thing is not understood at all. It is the becoming and not the being of the world that const.i.tutes its reality. And thus in emphasizing the fact that everything has a "past," the insight into which alone reveals its significant meaning, Hegel has given metaphysical expression and impetus to the awakening modern historical sense. His idea of evolution also epitomizes the spirit of the nineteenth century with its search everywhere for geneses and transformations--in religion, philology, geology, biology. Closely connected with the predominance of the historical in Hegel"s philosophy is its explicit critique of individualism and particularism. According to his doctrine, the individual as individual is meaningless. The particular--independent and unrelated--is an abstraction. The isolation of anything results in contradiction. It is only the whole that animates and gives meaning to the individual and the particular. This idea of subordinating the individual to universal ends, as embodied particularly in Hegel"s theory of the State, has left its impress upon political, social, and economic theories of his century. Not less significant is the glorification of reason of which Hegel"s complete philosophy is an expression. Reason never spoke with so much self-confidence and authority as it did in Hegel. To the clear vision of reason the universe presents no dark or mysterious corners, nay, the very negations and contradictions in it are marks of its inherent rationality. But Hegel"s rationalism is not of the ordinary shallow kind. Reason he himself distinguishes from understanding. The latter is a.n.a.lytical, its function is to abstract, to define, to compile, to cla.s.sify. Reason, on the other hand, is synthetic, constructive, inventive. Apart from Hegel"s special use of the term, it is this synthetic and creative and imaginative quality pervading his whole philosophy which has deepened men"s insight into history, religion, and art, and which has wielded its general influence on the philosophic and literary constellation of the nineteenth century.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY[1] (1837)
TRANSLATED BY J. SIBREE, M.A.
The subject of this course of lectures is the Philosophical History of the World. And by this must be understood, not a collection of general observations respecting it, suggested by the study of its records and proposed to be ill.u.s.trated by its facts, but universal history itself.
To gain a clear idea, at the outset, of the nature of our task, it seems necessary to begin with an examination of the other methods of treating history. The various methods may be ranged under three heads:
I. Original History.
II. Reflective History.
III. Philosophical History.
I. Of the first kind, the mention of one or two distinguished names will furnish a definite type. To this category belong Herodotus, Thucydides, and other historians of the same order, whose descriptions are for the most part limited to deeds, events, and states of society, which they had before their eyes and whose spirit they shared. They simply transferred what was pa.s.sing in the world around them to the realm of re-presentative intellect; an external phenomenon was thus translated into an internal conception. In the same way the poet operates upon the material supplied him by his emotions, projecting it into an image for the conceptive faculty.