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In the importance for the mode and manner of philosophizing which circumstances have revived in the eyes of governments, the moment of protection and support cannot be overlooked, of which the study of philosophy seems to have become needy from many other sides. |XVII| For if one reads in so many productions from the field of positive sciences, as well as of religious edification and other indeterminate literature, how not only the aforementioned contempt for philosophy is shown—that those who at the same time prove that they are entirely behind in thought-formation and that philosophy is something completely foreign to them, nonetheless treat it as something settled—but how there they explicitly rail against philosophy and declare its content, the comprehending cognition of God and of physical and spiritual nature, the cognition of truth, to be a foolish, even sinful presumption; how reason, and again reason, and in infinite repetition reason is accused, disparaged, and condemned—or how at least it is made known how uncomfortably the inescapable claims of the concept fall upon a large part of the activity that is supposed to be scientific—if, I say, one has such phenomena before one, one would almost give room to the thought that from this side tradition were no longer venerable or sufficient to secure for philosophical study tolerance and public existence.7) |XVIII| The declamations and pretensions against philosophy current in our time present the strange spectacle that, owing to that shallowness to which this science has been degraded, on the one hand they have their right and on the other hand they themselves take root in this element against which they are ungratefully directed. For since that self-styled philosophizing has declared the cognition of truth to be a foolish attempt, it has, as the despotism of the emperors of Rome made nobility and slaves, virtue and vice, honor and dishonor, knowledge and ignorance equal, leveled all thoughts and all materials—so that the concepts of the true, the laws of the ethical, are also nothing more than opinions and subjective convictions, and the most criminal principles as convictions are placed in equal dignity with those laws, and that likewise every object, no matter how bare and particular, and every material, no matter how strawy, is placed in equal dignity with what constitutes the interest of all thinking men and the bonds of the ethical world.
7) Hegel’s footnote. Such views came to mind in connection with a letter of Joh. v. Müller (Werke [Tübingen 1810-19], part VIII, p. 56), where it is said of the condition of Rome in the year 1803, when that city stood under French rule, among other things: “Asked how matters stood with the public educational institutions, a professor replied: On les tolère comme les bordels.” – The so-called logic can even be heard recommended, perhaps with the conviction that one is no longer concerned with it as a dry and unfruitful science or, if it happens here and there, that one only receives contentless formulas that give nothing and corrupt nothing, so that the recommendation will in no case do harm or any good.
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