[8th Paragraph]
Indeed, what we have seen emanating from the philosophy of recent times with the greatest pretension regarding the state justified anyone who felt like joining in the conversation in the conviction that they could make such a thing straight away on their own, and thus provide proof of being in possession of philosophy. Besides, the self-styled philosophy has explicitly stated that the true itself cannot be known, but rather that what is true is what everyone allows to rise out of their heart, mind, and enthusiasm regarding ethical objects, especially state, government, and constitution. What has not been said to please the ears of the young in particular? And the young have likely taken it to heart. He gives to His own in sleep has been applied to science, and thus every sleeper has counted himself among His own; what he thus received in the sleep of concepts was certainly of corresponding quality. A leader of this shallowness that calls itself philosophizing, Mr. Fries3), did not hesitate, on a solemn public occasion that became notorious, to offer the following notion in a speech on the subject of the state and constitution: ‘in the nation in which a true common spirit prevails, life would come from below out of the people to every business of public affairs; living associations, indissolubly united by the holy chain of friendship, would dedicate themselves to every individual work of national education and popular service,’ and the like4). This is the main sense of the shallowness: to base science on immediate perception and random imagination instead of on the development of the thought and concept; likewise, to let the rich articulation of the ethical within itself, which is the state—the architectonic of its rationality, which makes the strength of the whole emerge from the harmony of its members through the distinct differentiation of the spheres of public life and their rights and through the rigor of the measure in which every pillar, arch, and buttress holds itself—to let this cultivated structure melt away into the mush of the “heart, friendship, and enthusiasm.” Like the world in general according to Epicurus, so the ethical world is not, but according to such a notion it should be handed over to the subjective contingency of opining and caprice. With the simple home remedy of basing on feeling what is the work—and indeed the work of several millennia—of reason and its understanding, all the effort of rational insight and knowledge guided by the thinking concept is certainly spared. Mephistopheles in Goethe—a good authority—says roughly what I have also cited elsewhere:
Despise but understanding and science,
the highest gifts of man —
so you have given yourself to the devil
and must perish.5)
3) *Of the shallowness of his science I have elsewhere given testimony; see Science of Logic (Nuremberg 1812), Intro. p. XVII.
4) Jakob Friedrich Fries, 1773-1843—as professor of philosophy and mathematics Hegel’s predecessor in Heidelberg—had given a speech at the Wartburg Festival in 1817 and was temporarily suspended from teaching; see “Festival Speech of Prof. Fries to the German Burschen… “, Oppositionsblatt oder Weimarische Zeitung, 1817, No. 257.
5) “Despise but reason and science,
Man’s very highest strength,
…
And even if he had not given himself to the devil,
He would nonetheless have to perish!”
Goethe, Faust, Part 1, Study, V. 1851-52, 1866-67
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.