History of Modern Philosophy

by Alfred William Benn

G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), in the opinion of some good judges Germany's greatest philosopher, was, like Schelling, a Suabian, and intimately associated with his younger contemporary, first at Tübingen and afterwards at Jena, where the two friends jointly conducted a philosophical review. But they gradually drifted apart. Hegel was not a romanticist, but a classic; not a naturalist, but a humanist. Largely influenced by Greek thought and Greek literature, for which he continued to be an enthusiast through life, he readily accepted, as against Kant and Fichte, the change from a purely subjective to an objective point of view. But, although he gave some attention to physical science, Hegel was less interested in it than his colleague, with whose crude and fanciful metaphysics he also failed to sympathise. With the publication of Hegel's first important work, the Phenomenology of Mind (1807), things came to a breach; for its preface amounts to a declaration of war against the philosophy of Romanticism. Schelling himself is not named; but there is no mistaking the object of certain picturesque references to "exploding the Absolute on us," and "the darkness in which every cow is black." Next year Hegel became what we should call headmaster of a public school at Nuremberg, filling that post for eight years, during which his greatest work, the System of Logic, in three volumes, was composed and published. He then obtained a chair of philosophy at Heidelberg, passing thence to Berlin in 1818, where he taught until his death by cholera in 1831. David Strauss, who saw the revered teacher a few days before the fatal seizure, describes him first as he appeared in the lecture-room, "looking ever so old, bent and coughing"; then in his home, "looking ten years younger, with clear blue eyes, and showing the most beautiful white teeth when he smiled." He had published a summary of his whole system, under the name of an Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences, in 1817, and a Philosophy of Law—which is really a treatise on Government—in 1821. His

sympathies were with bureaucratic absolutism in a modernised form, with Napoleon against the German patriots, with the restored Prussian Government against the new Liberalism, with English Toryism against the Whigs of the Reform Bill, and finally with the admirers of war against the friends of peace.

Hegel's collected works, published after his death, fill over twenty good-sized volumes. Besides the treatises already mentioned, they include his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the Philosophy of History, the Philosophy of Religion, Æsthetics, etc., made up with much literary skill from the Professor's own notes and from the reports of his hearers. The most permanently valuable of these is the Æsthetics; but any student desirous of getting a notion of Hegelianism at first hand had better begin with the Philosophy of History, of which there is a good and cheap English translation in one of Bohn's Libraries. Some general points of view serving to connect the system with its predecessors are all that room can be found for here.

As compared with Kant, Hegel is distinguished above all by his complete abjuration of the agnostic standpoint in epistemology. "The universe is penetrable to thought": an unknowable thing in itself does not exist. Indeed, the intelligible reality of things is just what we know best; the unaccountable residuum, if any, lurks in the details of their appearance. So also in Greek philosophy Hegel holds that the truth was not in the ideal world of Plato, but in the self-realising Forms of Aristotle. As against Fichte, Hegel will not allow that the reconciliation of the subjective with the objective is an infinitely "far-off divine event"; on the contrary, it is a process being continually realised by ourselves and all about us. In his homely expression, the very

animals as they eat turn their food into consciousness, in utter disregard of prejudice. But Fichte's condemnation of Schelling's Indifferentism is quite right. The Absolute is Mind. Nature exists only as the lower stage, whence Spirit emerges to contradict, to confront, and to explain her as the necessary preparation for his supreme self-assertion. And Fichte was right in working out his system by the dialectical method of contradiction and solution, as against the dogmatism that summarily decrees the Absolute, without taking the trouble to reason it out, in imitation of the plan pursued by the universe in becoming conscious of itself.

The most portentous thing about Hegel's philosophy is this notion of the world's having, so to speak, argued itself into existence. To rationalise the sum of being, to explain, without assumptions, why there should be anything, and then why it should be as we know it, had been a problem suggested by Plato and solved rather summarily by Spinoza's challenge to conceive Infinite Power as non-existing. Hegel is more patient and ingenious; but, after all, his superiority merely consists in spinning the web of arbitrary dialectic so fine that we can hardly see the thread. The root-idea is to identify, or rather to confuse, causal evolution with logic. The chain of causes and effects that constitutes the universe is made out to be one with the series of reasons and consequents by which the conclusion is demonstrated. As usual, the equation is effected by a transference of terms from each side to the other. The categories and processes of logic are credited with a life and movement that belongs only to the human reasoner operating with them. And the moving, interacting masses of which the material universe consists are represented as parties to a dialectical

discussion in which one denies what the other asserts until it is discovered, on lifting the argument to a higher plane, that after all they are agreed. Nor is this all. The world as we know it is composed of co-existent elements grouped together or distinguished according to their resemblances and differences as so many natural kinds; and of successive events linked together as causes and effects. But while there is no general law of coexistence except such as may be derived from the collocation of the previously existing elements whence they are derived, there is a law of causal succession—namely, this, that the quantities of mass and energy involved are conserved without loss or gain through all time. Now, Hegel's way of rationalising or, in plainer words, accounting for the coexistent elements and their qualities, is to bring them under a supposed law of complementary opposition, revived from Heracleitus, according to which everything necessarily involves the existence, both in thought and reality, of its contradictory. And the same principle is applied to causal succession—a proceeding which would be fatal to the scientific law of conservation.

There is another way of rationalising experience—namely, the theological hypothesis of a supreme intelligence by which the world was created and is governed with a view to the attainment of some ultimate good. And there is a sort of teleology in Hegel evidently inspired by his religious education. But the two do not mean the same thing. For he places conscious reason not at the beginning but at the end of evolution. The rationality of things is immanent, not transcendent. Purposes somehow work retrospectively so as to determine the course of events towards a good end. That end is self-consciousness—not yours or mine, but the

world-spirit's consciousness and possession of itself. And this is reached in four ways: in Art by intuition, in Religion by representation, in Philosophy by conception, in History and Politics by the realisation of righteousness through the agency of the modern State.