This page explains Hegel\u2019s Preface paragraph by paragraph, in simple language. You find Hegel\u2019s own text through the link at the end of each page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why does this book exist? Hegel says so plainly, right at the start. He is a professor in Berlin. There he gives lectures on the philosophy of right. His students should have something in hand to hold on to: a guide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The thoughts are not new. The basic concepts are already in an earlier book of his, the \u201cEncyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences\u201d of 1817. There, however, they are only sketched in brief. Here Hegel sets them out at greater length and more exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 1 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [2nd Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n At first the book was meant only for his students. Now it goes into print, and other people read it too. So Hegel made some Notes longer. (The Notes are the indented parts below the numbered paragraphs.) They are meant to make hard passages clearer. And they take up opinions that were common in his day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An ordinary textbook only sums up what is already settled in a field. No one expects this from philosophy at all. Many believe that philosophy starts over from scratch every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel compares this with Penelope. In the old legend she weaves a cloth by day and unravels it again at night. So the cloth is never finished. This is exactly how many people picture philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 2 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [3rd Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n What makes this book different from an ordinary textbook? The method. That means the way it moves from one thought to the next, and how it proves things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This method is quite its own. Hegel calls it speculative. He explained it in detail in another book, the \u201cScience of Logic.\u201d Here he takes it as given.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why does this matter so much to him? In his time, philosophy has sunk very low. Many have noticed: the old rules of logic are not enough for philosophy. So they simply threw the rules away, like annoying fetters. Since then they speak from the heart, from the imagination, from whatever just occurs to them. Yet they cannot get by without thinking. So they keep thinking in a quite ordinary way, without noticing it, and badly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So Hegel asks readers to judge his book above all by this: does its line of thought hold? For in science, the content is bound to the form. Anyone who skips over the form loses the content as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 3 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [4th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some people say the form does not matter; only the matter itself counts. A writer should simply find truths and spread them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does this look like in practice? Hegel becomes mocking. People reheat the same old cabbage again and again and hand it out everywhere. And each one acts as if the world had just been waiting for him. As if his truth were new and especially important \u201cat the present time.\u201d Yet what the Bible already says still holds: they have Moses and the prophets. What matters was said long ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then the next one comes along with his truths. They wash away the earlier ones again. And so it goes back and forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this crowd, how does one find what lasts? Not through still more opinions. Only through science, that is, through exact and orderly thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 4 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [5th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n The truth about right, ethical life, and the state is not new. It is old. And it is known: you find it in the laws, in public morality, and in religion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What more does philosophy want, then? It wants to comprehend this truth. The content is already rational. Now it should also get a rational form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why? Because a thinking person is not content simply to take something over. Not because the state orders it, nor because all agree, nor because his feeling says so. He wants to see it for himself. Deep inside, he wants to know that he is one with the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 5 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [6th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many people simply keep to what is generally held to be right. They build their lives on it. Hegel has nothing against that. He calls it the simple attitude of the naive mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now an objection comes up: there are so many opinions. How can anyone know what is really valid? That sounds deeply serious. Hegel sees it differently. Whoever talks like this cannot see the forest for the trees. He has made the difficulty himself. For someone who truly cares about the matter keeps to the commands of ethical life and the state. And he lives by them. But whoever nurses the difficulty really wants something else: something of his own, something particular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But man thinks. And in thinking he seeks his freedom and the basis of what is good. That is a high right, indeed a divine one. But it turns into wrong when one believes free thought means only departing from the universal and inventing something particular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 6 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [7th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the state, this error is rooted most firmly. Many believe: whoever thinks freely must oppose the existing order. And a philosophy of the state must invent a new theory of its own. People act as if there had never been a state. As if one had to start entirely from the beginning now, and this \u201cnow\u201d lasts forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A comparison makes this clear. About nature, everyone admits: it has its own laws. We must study it as it is. Reason lies within nature itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the state, this is not supposed to hold. Chance is supposed to rule the world of right and ethical life. Hegel harshly calls this an \u201catheism of the ethical world.\u201d It is as if God and reason had forsaken this world. And since reason supposedly is not in it, everyone thinks he already carries the philosopher\u2019s stone with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is one difference from nature, of course. The laws of nature simply hold, whether we know them or not. But people made the laws of right. So a person can ask: are they really right? He carries a standard within himself. That is exactly why he must learn to recognize right thoroughly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the way, most people are glad to live in the state and are content. Strictly speaking, all of them are. They laugh at these world-improvers. Sadly, the mockery falls back on philosophy as a whole. The worst contempt is this: everyone thinks he can have his say on philosophy without having learned it. No one thinks this way about any other field. Everyone has fingers and can buy brushes and paints. But that does not make him a painter. It is the same with thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In short: to understand the state, one must seek the reason within it, as in nature. One must not think one has to invent it first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 7 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [8th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the process they twisted a Bible verse: \u201cHe gives to His own in sleep.\u201d Applied to science, this means: everyone who sleeps thinks he is chosen. And what he gets in his sleep is of matching quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then Hegel names a name: Jakob Friedrich Fries, a philosopher. Hegel calls him a \u201cleader of this shallowness.\u201d In 1817 Fries had given a speech at the students\u2019 Wartburg Festival. In it he gushed that in a true nation, life comes from below. Friendship and enthusiasm were to carry everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Goethe\u2019s \u201cFaust,\u201d the devil puts it like this. Whoever despises understanding and science has already given himself to the devil and must perish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 8 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [9th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n This way of talking reveals a bad conscience. Hegel describes it with mockery. It talks most about spirit where there is least spirit. It talks of life where its own talk is most leathery. And it has the word \u201cpeople\u201d on its lips just where it thinks most of itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its surest mark is hatred of the law. Why? In the law, right becomes a clear, universal statement. It applies equally to all and says exactly what is valid. But feeling wants to stay free to do what it likes. That is why it feels the law as a dead letter and a fetter. It does not find itself in the law. For the law asks about the matter, not about its mood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the law becomes a mark of recognition, a Shibboleth. In the Bible, that was a password. The enemies could not say it properly, and that is how people recognized them. The law divides the false brothers and friends of the people from the true ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 9 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [10th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does this lead to? Because such talk calls itself philosophy, it almost counts as a disgrace to speak about the state philosophically. Honest people grow impatient as soon as they hear of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it does not surprise Hegel that the governments have taken notice. He is writing in 1820. Shortly before, the German states began to monitor the universities. For in Germany, philosophy is not a private matter, as it was with the ancient Greeks. Professors in the service of the state teach it in public. The governments trusted these professors. This trust, says Hegel, was often poorly repaid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shallow thinking seems harmless at first. After all, it does not touch anything essential. But of its own accord it leads to the principles of the Sophists. We know them from Plato: right is whatever each person holds and feels to be right. Destruction follows from such principles. They destroy conscience, love, right between people, and in the end public order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is why the state need not simply accept such things just because someone holds a teaching post. No one today takes seriously the old joke: \u201cTo whom God gives an office, He also gives understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In short: for Hegel, bad philosophy about the state is not harmless. It attacks the principles that our life together rests on. That is why the governments must not look away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 10 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [11th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the governments\u2019 attention also has a good side. For philosophy needs protection, and from quite another side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 11 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [12th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even so, Hegel sees a stroke of luck in this. Shallow philosophizing has collided with actuality: with a state that takes rights and duties seriously. It has come to an open breach. Now one sees clearly what is at stake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is about the relation of philosophy to actuality. Philosophy seeks the rational. So it grasps what is there: the present. It does not design a beyond, and nobody knows where that is supposed to be. Or rather, one does know: in empty reasoning that loses itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A famous example is Plato. His book on the state is seen as the model case of an empty, unreachable ideal. Hegel sees it differently. In truth, Plato grasped the life of the Greeks of his own time. But he sensed something new breaking in: the freedom of the individual person, his own conviction. Plato took this for downfall and wanted to ward it off. In doing just that, he wounded this freedom most deeply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet it is here that his greatness shows. For the great upheaval of the world that was coming then turned on exactly this new thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 12 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [13th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now comes the most famous sentence of the book:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat is rational is actual; People have often misunderstood this sentence. Some read it this way: everything that exists is good, so one should change nothing. That is not what Hegel means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The word \u201cactual\u201d has a special meaning for him. Not everything that is at hand is actual. What is actual is what matches its own core. Many things are merely there: by chance, fleeting, mere show. That is not what is meant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the sentence says two things. Reason is not a mere idea in the head; it asserts itself in the world. And what really lasts in the world has reason in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every unprejudiced person thinks this way, says Hegel, and so does philosophy. But whoever thinks he stands above his present and knows better lives in vanity. For only the present is actual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the task is this: to recognize what lasts in what changes and passes. Reason shows itself in countless colorful forms. It wraps itself around its core like a colorful rind. Thinking must pass through this rind to feel the pulse inside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But philosophy has nothing to do with the countless details. It need not give good advice about everything. Plato advised nurses always to rock the children in their arms. Fichte wanted every passport to carry a painted portrait of its holder. That is no longer philosophy. And because it stays out of this, it remains free of the know-it-all\u2019s petty hatred of all that exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In short: the sentence does not say that everything that exists is good. It says that reason becomes actual and that there is reason in the actual. Philosophy should find this reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 13 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [14th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what does this book want to be? Hegel says it clearly: an attempt to comprehend and present the state as something rational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It does not want to sketch a state as it ought to be. It does not want to teach the state how it should be. If it teaches anything, it is this: how one should come to know the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 14 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [15th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Above this passage stands a saying from an old fable. It appears first in Greek, then in Latin: \u201cHere is Rhodes, here leap.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The story behind it: a braggart boasts that he made a mighty leap on the island of Rhodes. There were plenty of witnesses there, he says. So someone tells him: then act as if this were Rhodes, and leap here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does this have to do with philosophy? It should not talk about faraway places and better worlds. Its task is to comprehend what is. For there is reason in what is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every person is a child of his time. In the same way, philosophy is its time grasped in thoughts. It is foolish to think a person could leap over his time. It is just as foolish to think a philosophy gets beyond its world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Someone may still build himself a world as it ought to be. He has it only in his own head. There, one can think up all kinds of things. The head is patient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 15 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [16th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here Hegel makes a pun. The paragraph is short, but the next one rests on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Greek, \u201cRhodos\u201d sounds almost like \u201crhodon,\u201d the rose. And in Latin, the words for \u201cleap\u201d and \u201cdance\u201d lie very close together. So \u201cHere is Rhodes, here leap\u201d turns into the sentence:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHere is the rose, here dance.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The call to prove oneself becomes an invitation to joy: here, in the present, there is something beautiful to find. The next paragraph says what it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 16 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [17th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why do many people not feel at home in their world? They have reason within themselves. Outside them is actuality. The two do not seem to fit together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel says: what separates the two is a fetter. One clings to an abstract thought one has not yet thought through. Think it through, and the fetter falls away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then one achieves what Hegel describes: to recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present. The cross stands for what is hard in the present, for suffering and toil. The rose is reason, blooming right in the midst of it. One need not deny the cross to see the rose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whoever sees this can delight in the present. Hegel calls this the reconciliation with actuality. Philosophy grants it to those who want to comprehend. They do not lose their own freedom in doing so. They find it precisely in what endures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 17 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [18th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the beginning Hegel said: in science, content and form belong together. Now we see more exactly what that means. The form is thinking that comprehends. The content is the reason within the world, both in nature and in our life together. Where the two recognize each other, there is the Idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then Hegel praises a kind of stubbornness. A person refuses to recognize anything he cannot justify by his own thinking. This stubbornness does him honor. It is the mark of the modern age and the principle of Protestantism. Luther began this in faith and in feeling. The more mature spirit now wants to grasp the same thing in the concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a well-known saying: a half-philosophy leads away from God; the true one leads to God. It is the same with the state. Reason is not content with a halfway approach. It is neither cold nor hot. As the Bible says, such a thing gets spat out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But reason is not satisfied with cold despair either. That despair says: in this world things go badly or only so-so. There is nothing better, so we might as well keep the peace. Knowledge brings a warmer peace with actuality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In short: a person may test everything by thinking, and should do so. Whoever does this fully finds no despair, but a warm peace with the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s text: Preface, paragraph 18 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [19th Paragraph]<\/p>\n\n\n\n One more word on whether philosophy can tell the world how it ought to be. For that, it always comes too late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Philosophy is the thought of the world. It appears only when actuality has completed its development and is finished. History shows this too. Only when an age is ripe can one gather it up in thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel puts it in an image. When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a form of life has grown old. With gray in gray one cannot make it young again. One can only understand it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then comes the second image, the most famous one. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk. For the Romans, Minerva is the goddess of wisdom, and the owl is her bird. Wisdom only takes off when the day is over. Only in the evening does one understand what the day was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
and what is actual is rational.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n