Preface

[12th Paragraph]

It is therefore to be regarded as a stroke of luck for science—in fact it is, as noted, the necessity of the matter—that that philosophizing, which might have continued to spin itself out as a school wisdom within itself, has placed itself in a closer relationship with actuality, in which the principles of rights and duties are taken in earnest and which lives in the daylight of the consciousness of them, and that it has thus come to an open breach. |XIX| It is precisely this position of philosophy toward actuality that the misunderstandings concern, and I return herewith to what I noted earlier: that philosophy, because it is the exploration of the rational, is precisely the grasping of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a beyond that should be God knows where—or of which one indeed knows quite well where it is, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty reasoning. In the course of the following treatise, I have noted that even the Platonic Republic, which passes as the proverbial example of an empty ideal, essentially grasped nothing but the nature of Greek ethical life; and that then, in the consciousness of the deeper principle breaking into it — which could appear in it immediately only as a still unsatisfied longing, and hence only as corruption — Plato had to seek help against it out of that very longing; but this help, which had to come from above, he could at first seek only in an external particular form of that ethical life, by which he thought to master that corruption, and by which he most deeply injured its deeper drive, the free infinite personality. By this, however, he proved himself the great spirit, in that precisely the principle around which the distinguishing feature of his idea revolves is the pivot upon which the [then]⁸⁾ impending revolution of the world turned.

8) Inserted in Hegel’s Handexemplar.

Skip directly to § 1 →

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20