[8th Paragraph]
Now Hegel makes plain whom he is writing against. The philosophy of his time has declared: the true cannot be known. What is true is what rises from each person’s heart, mind, and enthusiasm, above all about state and constitution. They talked the young into this above all, and the young liked to hear it.
In the process they twisted a Bible verse: “He gives to His own in sleep.” Applied to science, this means: everyone who sleeps thinks he is chosen. And what he gets in his sleep is of matching quality.
Then Hegel names a name: Jakob Friedrich Fries, a philosopher. Hegel calls him a “leader of this shallowness.” In 1817 Fries had given a speech at the students’ Wartburg Festival. In it he gushed that in a true nation, life comes from below. Friendship and enthusiasm were to carry everything.
Why is Hegel so angry about this? For him, a state is a finely built structure. Every pillar and every arch has its place and its measure. The strength of the whole comes from just this. Fries, by contrast, lets this structure melt away into a mush of heart, friendship, and enthusiasm. This hands right over to chance and whim. And a home remedy replaces the work of thousands of years: feeling.
In Goethe’s “Faust,” the devil puts it like this. Whoever despises understanding and science has already given himself to the devil and must perish.
This attitude also likes to look pious. It appeals to the Bible in order to despise law and order. True piety does the opposite. When it steps from the inner life into the world, it brings respect for the law with it.
In short: Hegel attacks a philosophy that wants to base right on feeling and enthusiasm. For him, it destroys the state instead of understanding it.
Hegel’s text: Preface, paragraph 8 →