VIII. A Note on Hegel
Not very long ago it was the custom for historians of philosophy to give to the immediate successors of Kant—to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—as much honor and space as to all his predecessors in modern thought from Bacon and Descartes to Voltaire and Hume. Our perspective today is a little different, and we enjoy perhaps too keenly the invective leveled by Schopenhauer at his successful rivals in the competition for professional posts. By reading Kant, said Schopenhauer, “the public was compelled to see that what is obscure is not always without significance.” Fichte and Schelling took advantage of this, and excogitated magnificent spider-webs of metaphysics. “But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most bare-faced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity.”61 Is this fair?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born at Stuttgart in 1770. His father was a subordinate official in the department of finances of the state of Würtemberg; and Hegel himself grew up with the patient and methodical habits of those civil servants whose modest efficiency has given Germany the best-governed cities in the world. The youth was a tireless student: he made full analyses of all the important books he read, and copied out long passages. True culture, he said, must begin with resolute self-effacement; as in the Pythagorean system of education, where the pupil, for the first five years, was required to keep his peace.
His studies of Greek literature gave him an enthusiasm for Attic culture which remained with him when almost all other enthusiasms had died away. “At the name of Greece,” he wrote, “the cultivated German finds himself at home. Europeans have their religion from a further source, from the East; . . . but what is here, what is present,—science and art, all that makes life satisfying, and elevates and adorns it—we derive, directly or indirectly, from Greece.” For a time he preferred the religion of the Greeks to Christianity; and he anticipated Strauss and Renan by writing a Life of Jesus in which Jesus was taken as the son of Mary and Joseph, and the miraculous element was ignored. Later he destroyed the book.
In politics too he showed a spirit of rebellion hardly to be suspected from his later sanctification of the status quo. While studying for the ministry at Tübingen, he and Schelling hotly defended the French Revolution, and went out early one morning to plant a Liberty Tree in the market-place. “The French nation, by the bath of its revolution,” he wrote, “has been freed from many institutions which the spirit of man has left behind like its baby shoes, and which therefore weighed upon it, as they still weigh upon others, like lifeless feathers.” It was in those hopeful days, “when to be young was very heaven,” that he flirted, like Fichte, with a kind of aristocratic socialism, and gave himself, with characteristic vigor, to the Romantic current in which all Europe was engulfed.
He was graduated from Tübingen in 1793 with a certificate stating that he was a man of good parts and character, well up in theology and philology, but with no ability in philosophy. He was poor now, and had to earn his bread by tutoring in Berne and Frankfort. These were his chrysalis years: while Europe tore itself into nationalist pieces, Hegel gathered himself together and grew. Then (1799) his father died, and Hegel, falling heir to some $1500, considered himself a rich man, and gave up tutoring. He wrote to his friend Schelling for advice as to where to settle, and asked for a place where there would be simple food, abundant books, and “ein gutes Bier.” Schelling recommended Jena, which was a university town under the jurisdiction of the Duke of Weimar. At Jena Schiller was teaching history; Tieck, Novalis and the Schlegels were preaching romanticism; and Fichte and Schelling were propounding their philosophies. There Hegel arrived in 1801, and in 1803 became a teacher at the University.
He was still there in 1806 when Napoleon’s victory over the Prussians threw the scholarly little city into confusion and terror. French soldiers invaded Hegel’s home, and he took to his heels like a philosopher, carrying with him the manuscript of his first important book, The Phenomenology of Spirit. For a while he was so destitute that Goethe told Knebel to lend him a few dollars to tide him over. Hegel wrote almost bitterly to Knebeclass="underline" “I have made my guiding-star the Biblical saying, the truth of which I have learned by experience, Seek ye first food and clothing, and the kingdom of heaven shall be added unto you.” For a while he edited a paper at Bamberg; then, in 1812, he became head of the gymnasium at Nürnburg. It was there, perhaps, that the stoic necessities of administrative work cooled the fires of romanticism in him, and made him, like Napoleon and Goethe, a classic vestige in a romantic age. And it was there that he wrote his Logic (1812–16), which captivated Germany by its unintelligibility, and won him the chair of philosophy at Heidelberg. At Heidelberg he wrote his immense Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), on the strength of which he was promoted, in 1818, to the University of Berlin. From that time to the end of his life he ruled the philosophic world as indisputably as Goethe the world of literature, and Beethoven the realm of music. His birthday came on the day after Goethe’s; and proud Germany made a double holiday for them every year.
A Frenchman once asked Hegel to put his philosophy into one sentence; and he did not succeed so well as the monk who, asked to define Christianity while standing on one foot, said, simply, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Hegel preferred to answer in ten volumes; and when they were written and published, and all the world was talking about them, he complained that “only one man understands me, and even he does not.”62 Most of his writings, like Aristotle’s, consist of his lecture-notes; or, worse, of the notes taken by students who heard his lectures. Only the Logic and Phenomenology are from his hand, and these are masterpieces of obscurity, darkened by abstractness and condensation of style, by a weirdly original terminology, and by an overcareful modification of every statement with a Gothic wealth of limiting clauses. Hegel described his work as “an attempt to teach philosophy to speak in German.”63 He succeeded.
The Logic is an analysis not of methods of reasoning, but of the concepts used in reasoning. These Hegel takes to be the categories named by Kant—Being, Quality, Quantity, Relation, etc. It is the first business of philosophy to dissect these basic notions that are so bandied about in all our thinking. The most pervasive of them all is Relation; every idea is a group of relations; we can think of something only by relating it to something else, and perceiving its similarities and its differences. An idea without relations of any kind is empty; this is all that is meant by saying that “Pure Being and Nothing are the same”: Being absolutely devoid of relations or qualities does not exist, and has no meaning whatever. This proposition led to an endless progeny of witticisms which still breed; and it proved to be at once an obstacle and a lure to the study of Hegel’s thought.
Of all relations, the most universal is that of contrast or opposition. Every condition of thought or of things—every idea and every situation in the world—leads irresistibly to its opposite, and then unites with it to form a higher or more complex whole. This “dialectical movement” runs through everything that Hegel wrote. It is an old thought, of course, foreshadowed by Empedocles, and embodied in the “golden mean” of Aristotle, who wrote that “the knowledge of opposites is one.” The truth (like an electron) is an organic unity of opposed parts. The truth of conservatism and radicalism is liberalism—an open mind and a cautious hand, an open hand and a cautious mind; the formation of our opinions on large issues is a decreasing oscillation between extremes; and in all debatable questions veritas in medio stat. The movement of evolution is a continuous development of oppositions, and their merging and reconciliation. Schelling was right—there is an underlying “identity of opposites”; and Fichte was right—thesis, antithesis and synthesis constitute the formula and secret of all development and all reality.