The Rudolf Steiner Archive

German Idealism as a View of Thought: Hegel

[ 1 ] Through Hegel, the "I think, therefore I am" seems to come to life again in the development of the German worldview, just as a seed that falls into the earth emerges as an all-round developed tree. For what this thinker has created as a world-view is a comprehensive thought-painting or, as it were, a multi-layered body of thought, which consists of numerous individual thoughts that support, sustain, move, enliven and illuminate each other. And these thoughts should be those that do not come from the sensory impressions of the outside world, nor from the daily experiences of the human mind; they should reveal themselves in the soul when it lifts itself out of the sensory impressions and experiences of the mind and makes itself a spectator of the process through which the thought, free of all non-thought, unfolds into further and ever further thoughts. When the soul allows this process to take place within itself, it is said to be freed from its ordinary being and to be interwoven with its actions into the spiritual and supersensible world order. It does not then think; the universe thinks itself in it; it becomes a participant in an extra-human event in which the human being is merely woven; and in this way it experiences within itself what works and weaves in the depths of the world.

[ 2 ] On closer inspection, it becomes clear that Hegel's worldview is sought from a completely different point of view than Descartes' "I think, therefore I am". Descartes wants to extract the certainty of the soul's being from the thinking of the soul. In Hegel's case, it is a matter of initially leaving the thinking of the individual human soul entirely aside and shaping the life of this soul in such a way that its thinking becomes a revelation of the thinking of the world. Then, according to Hegel, what lives as thought in all world existence is revealed; and the individual soul finds itself as a link in the world's web of thought. From this point of view, the soul must say: The highest and deepest thing that exists and lives in the world is creative thought, and I find myself as one of the manifestations of this activity.

[ 3 ] The significant difference between Hegel and Descartes lies in the turn from the individual thought of the soul to the supersoul thought of the world. Hegel made this turn, Descartes did not. - And this difference brings about another, which relates to the formation of the worldviews of the two minds. Descartes seeks certainty for the thoughts that man forms of the world in the life in which he stands with his senses and his soul. Hegel searches in the field of these thoughts initially not, he searches for a form of the life of thought that lies above this field.

[ 4 ] If Hegel thus remained in the realm of thought and thus found himself in opposition to Fichte and Schelling, he did so only because he thought he felt the inner power in thought itself to penetrate the supersensible realms. Hegel was enthusiastic about the experience that man can have when he surrenders completely to the primal power of thought. In the light of thought elevated to an idea, for him the soul escapes its connection with the world of the senses. One can sense the power that lies in this enthusiasm of Hegel's when one comes across passages in his writings, in which a language so repulsive, gnarled, even seemingly horribly abstract for many prevails, in which it often shows so beautifully what heartfelt tones he can find for what he experiences with his "abstractions". One such passage, for example, can be found at the end of his "Phenomenology". There he calls the knowledge that the soul experiences when it lets the world ideas rule within itself "absolute knowledge". And at the end of this work he looks back at the spirits who have striven towards the goal of this "absolute knowledge" in the course of humanity's development. Looking at these spirits from his own time, he finds the words: "The goal, the absolute knowledge, or the spirit knowing itself as spirit, has for its path the memory of the spirits as they are in themselves and accomplish the organization of their realm. Their repository on the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency is history, but on the side of their conceived organization is the science of appearing knowledge; both together, the conceived history, form the memory and the skull of the absolute spirit, the reality, truth and certainty of its throne, without which it would be the lifeless solitary; only from the chalice of this spirit realm does its infinity foam."

[ 5 ] This inner strength of the life of thought, which wants to overcome itself in order to rise into a realm in which it no longer lives itself, but rather the infinite thought, the eternal idea within it, is the essence of Hegel's quest. This gives the higher human striving for knowledge a comprehensive character, which wants to lead directions of this striving, which often run separately and thus one-sidedly, to one goal. One can find in Hegel a pure thinker who only wants to approach the solution of the world's riddles through mysticism-free reason. One can speak of icy, abstract thoughts through which alone he wants to understand the world. Thus one can see in him the dry, mathematical man of reason. - But what is his life in the ideas of reason for? To surrender the human soul to the supersensible forces of the world that rule within it. It becomes a true mystical experience. And it is not at all absurd to recognize mysticism in Hegel's world view. One only has to have a sense for the fact that in Hegel's works what the mystic expresses can be experienced in the ideas of reason. It is a mysticism that defines the personal, which is the main thing for the emotional mystic and of which alone he wants to speak, precisely as a personal matter of the soul within itself and only expresses that to which mysticism can rise when it struggles up from the personal darkness of the soul into the light clarity of the world of ideas.

[ 6] Hegel's worldview has its position in the spiritual development of humanity in that in it the light power of thought rises from the mystical depths of the soul, that in his search mystical power wants to reveal itself with intellectual light power. And so he also finds himself standing within this process of development. This is why he looked back on Jakob Boehme as expressed in his words (found in his "History of Philosophy"): "This Jakob Boehme, long forgotten and decried as a pietistic enthusiast, has only come to honor again in more recent times; Leibniz honored him. Through the Enlightenment his audience was very limited; in more recent times his profundity has been recognized again ... To qualify him as an enthusiast means nothing more. For if one wishes, one can qualify any philosopher in this way, even Epicurus and Bacon. ... But as for the high honors to which Boehme has been raised, he owes them especially to his form of perception and feeling; for perception and inner feeling ... and the imagery of thought, allegories and the like are sometimes regarded as the essential form of philosophy. But it is only the concept, thinking, in which philosophy has its truth, in which the absolute can be expressed, and also is as it is in itself." And Hegel goes on to find the following sentences for Böhme: "Jakob Böhme is the first German philosopher; the content of his philosophizing is genuinely German. What distinguishes Böhme and makes him remarkable is ... to put the intellectual world into his own mind, and in his self-consciousness to look at and know and feel everything that was otherwise beyond. On the one hand, Böhme's general idea shows itself to be profound and thorough; on the other hand, however, for all his need and struggle for determination and differentiation in the development of his divine views of the universe, he does not arrive at clarity and order." Such words are spoken by Hegel only out of feeling: In the simple mind of Jakob Böhme lives the deepest urge of the human soul to immerse itself in the experience of the world with its own experience - the true mystical urge; but the figurative view, the parable, the symbol must rise to the light of the clear idea in order to achieve what they want. Jakob Böhme's images of the world are to be resurrected as ideas of reason in Hegel's world view. Thus Hegel, the enthusiast of thought, stands alongside the profound mystic Jakob Böhme within the development of German idealism. Hegel saw something "genuinely German" in Böhme's philosophizing, and Karl Rosenkranz, the biographer and independent student of Hegel, wrote a book on the centenary of Hegel's birth in 1870 entitled "Hegel as a German National Philosopher", in which he wrote: "One can claim that Hegel's system is the most national in Germany, and that, after the earlier dominance of Kant's and Schelling's, none is so deeply involved in the national movement, in the promotion of the German intelligentsia, in the clarification of public opinion, in the encouragement of the will. .. than Hegel's."

[ 7 ] With such words, Karl Rosenkranz speaks the truth to a high degree about a phenomenon of German intellectual life, even if, on the other hand, Hegel's striving had already met with the most bitter and hollow-filled opposition in the decades before these words were written, an opposition whose initial development soon after Hegel's death Rosenkranz himself characterized with the significant sentences: "When I consider the fury with which Hegelian philosophy is persecuted, I am surprised that Hegel's expression: the idea in its movement is a circle of circles, has not yet given occasion to draw it as the Dantean funnel of hell, which, narrowing at the bottom, finally lets us come upon Satan incarnate. " (Rosenkranz: From my diary. Leipzig 1854. p.42.)

[ 8 ] There can be very different points of view from which one tries to describe the impression one gains of a thinker personality such as Hegel. Elsewhere (in his book "The Riddles of Philosophy"), the author of this essay has attempted to describe the view one can gain of Hegel if one considers his work as a stage in the philosophical development of humanity. Here he wishes to speak only of what is expressed through Hegel as one of the forces of German idealism in the world view. This is the trust in the sustaining power of thought. Every page in Hegel's works is an affirmation of this confidence, which ultimately culminates in the conviction: If man fully understands what he has in his thinking, he also knows that he can gain access to a supersensible-spiritual world. Through Hegel, German idealism made a commitment to the supersensible nature of thought. And one can have the feeling that Hegel's strengths and also his weaknesses are connected with the fact that in the course of the world there once had to be a personality in whom all life and work is permeated by this confession. Then one sees in Hegel's world view a source from which one can draw what vitality can be gained with this confession, without perhaps accepting the content of Hegel's world view for oneself in any point.

[ 9 ] If one stands by this thinker personality in this way, one can receive his stimulation, and thus the stimulation of a force of German idealism, and with this stimulation gain the reinforcement for a completely different world view than the one painted by Hegel. Strange as it may sound, Hegel is perhaps best understood when the force of cognitive striving in him is guided along paths that he himself did not follow. - He perceived the supersensible nature of thought with all the power available to man in this direction. But he had to expend much human strength to carry this perception through a full thinking activity, so that he could not have led the supersensible nature of thinking up into supersensible realms himself. The excellent soul researcher Franz Brentano expresses in his "Psychology" how the newer science of the soul investigates the ordinary life of the soul in a strictly scientific manner, but how this research has lost its view of the great questions of the soul's existence. "For the hopes of Plato and Aristotle - says Brentano - to gain certainty about the survival of our better part after the dissolution of the body, the laws of the association of ideas, the development of convictions and opinions and the germination of desire and love would be anything but a true compensation... and if "the newer way of thinking" really meant the exclusion of the question of immortality, it would be a very important one for psychology." Well, one can say that, in the opinion of many, not only the scientific nature of psychology, but scientificity in general seems to imply the exclusion of such questions. And it seems to hover over Hegel's worldview like a doom that, by professing the supersensible nature of the world of thought, it has walled off access to a real world of supersensible facts and entities.

[ 10 ] And anyone who is a disciple of Hegel in this sense, such as Karl Rosenkranz, seems to continue to be affected by this fate. Rosenkranz has written a "science of the soul". (Psychology or Science of the Subjective Mind, by K. Rosenkranz. 1837, 3rd ed. Königsberg 1863.) In the chapter "Old age" we read (p.119): "Psychology here touches on the question of immortality, a favorite topic for lay philosophy, often with a preconceived tendency to vouch for a reunion after death, as one is wont to express it. If the spirit as a self-conscious ideality is qualitatively distinct from its organism, then the possibility of immortality is obvious. However, we cannot have the slightest idea of how it is realized, which would be able to address an objective value. We can realize that, if we continue to exist as individualities, our essence cannot change, namely that we must live in the true, the good and the beautiful, but the modality of an existence separate from our organism is a mystery to us. Why should we not admit the limit of our knowledge here? Why should we either downright deny the possibility of immortality, or why should we pass off fanciful dreams of a soul sleep, a soul life and similar dogmas as speculation? Where real knowledge ends here, faith enters, which must be left to imagine a not impossible hereafter. "Rosenkranz reveals such an opinion in a science of the soul that is completely imbued with the conviction of having knowledge of what the supersensible world thought in the essence of the human soul makes into earthly reality. A science that wants to weave completely in the supersensible, which stops immediately where it notices the threshold to the supersensible world. One can only do justice to this phenomenon if one senses in it something of the fate that is poured out over the human striving for knowledge, and which appears so interwoven in Hegel's world view that it is attuned with all its power to the supersensible nature of thought, and in order to have a great effect in this attitude, loses the possibility of another attitude for the supersensible.

[ 11 ] Hegel first of all searches for the sphere of all the supersensible thoughts that arise in the human soul when it rises above all views of nature and all earthly soul life. He presents this circle as his "logic". However, this logic does not contain a single thought that leads beyond the area enclosed by nature and the earthly life of the soul. - Furthermore, Hegel seeks to represent all thoughts that underlie nature as supersensible entities. For him, nature becomes the revelation of a supersensible world of thought that conceals its thought entity in nature and presents itself as something unthought, as the counter-image of itself. But even here there are no thoughts that are not lived out in the environment of the sensory world. - In the philosophy of mind, Hegel presents the reign of world ideas in the individual human soul, in the associations of human souls (in peoples, states), in the historical development of humanity, in art, religion and philosophy. Everywhere, too, there is the view that in the soul, as it stands with its being and working in the sense world, the supersensible world of thought is definitely lived out, that therefore everything existing in the sensible is spiritual in its true essence. Nowhere, however, is there an attempt to penetrate with knowledge into a supersensible realm for which there is no form in the sensory realm.

[ 12 ] One can admit all this to oneself and yet not seek the expression of German idealism through Hegel's worldview in the judgment of denial that Hegel, despite his supersensible idealism, has remained stuck in the contemplation of the sensory world. One can arrive at a judgment of affirmation and find the essence of this worldview in the fact that the confession is present here: Whoever sees the world spread out before the senses in its true form recognizes that it is in reality a spirit world*. And this confession of the spiritual nature of the sensible was expressed by German idealism through Hegel.

[ 13 ] In an excellent book, Otto Willmann has dealt with the "History of Idealism". He points out with comprehensive expertise the weaknesses and one-sidednesses which have come into the development of the world view of the nineteenth century through the continuing influence of Kantian questions and schools of thought. The account given in this paper has sought out those impulses and currents in the worldview of the nineteenth century through which thinkers freed themselves from those questions and schools of thought. Through which they have trodden paths that those who judge from such a comprehensive view as that on which Willmann's book is based could do justice to. Much of what in more recent times seeks to tie in with Kant, without sufficient insight into the preceding development of the world view, in fact falls back into views that are rightly characterized by Willmann in the following words: that "according to Aristotle, our knowledge of things begins and first forms the concept on the basis of sense perceptions ... that this formation of concepts occurs through a creative act in which the mind grasps the conceptual in things ... The sensualist platitude must still be pointed out that perception cannot rise to thinking, that sensations are not able to aggregate themselves into a concept, that these must rather be constituted on the basis of the thought in things ... which alone is able to give us necessary and general knowledge" (Willmann, Geschichte des Idealismus II, 449). Anyone who thinks in this way can also speak with understanding and approval of Schelling's and Hegel's way of thinking, and of many things that, like them, turn away from "sensualistic platitude", from Willmann's point of view, if he frees himself from certain misunderstandings that - understandably - prevail among the advocates of Willmann's way of thinking. The time will also come when this way of thinking will judge more impartially in this direction than is the case now. It will then be just as right in its recognition of that which, in the more recent development of the world view, has been wrested from "sensualistic platitude" as it is now in its condemnation of that which has fallen prey to this and many other "platitudes".