[11th Paragraph]
But the governments’ attention also has a good side. For philosophy needs protection, and from quite another side.
Many books from other fields, and many pious devotional books, despise philosophy. Their authors often understand nothing about thinking themselves. Still, they declare philosophy finished. Some even call it foolish or sinful to want to comprehend God and the world through thinking. They accuse reason, again and again. One could almost think philosophy is now merely tolerated. In a footnote, Hegel tells of a professor in Rome. Asked how the universities were doing, he said: one tolerates them like the brothels.
The strange thing is this: these attacks are partly right. For shallow philosophy provoked them itself. And at the same time they grow from the same soil.
Shallow philosophy declared that the truth cannot be known. In this way it made everything equal. The emperors of Rome once did the same with nobles and slaves, virtue and vice. Now even the laws of ethical life are mere opinions. As convictions, even the worst, criminal principles now count just as much as these laws. And every topic, however dry, stands on the same level as what concerns all thinking people.
Hegel’s text: Preface, paragraph 11 →