The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07 Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English. in Twenty Volumes — Inside the Classic

aware, as much as recent exponents of anti-intellectualism, that through "static" concepts we transmute and falsify the "fluent" reality. As Professor James says "The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed ... When we conceptualize we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means a _that-and-no-other_." But are our concepts static, fixed, and discontinuous? What if the very concepts we employ in reasoning should exemplify the universal flow of life? Hegel finds that indeed to be the case. Concepts we daily use, such as quality and quantity, essence and phenomenon, appearance and reality, matter and force, cause and effect, are not fixed and isolated entities, but form a continuous system of interdependent elements. Stated dogmatically the meaning is this: As concavity and convexity are inseparably connected, though one is the very opposite of the other--as one cannot, so to speak, live without the other, both being always found in union--so can no concept be discovered that is not thus wedded to its contradiction. Every concept develops, upon analysis, a stubbornly negative mate. No concept is statable or definable without its opposite; one involves the other. One cannot speak of motion without implying rest; one cannot mention the finite without at the same time referring to the infinite; one cannot define cause without explicitly defining effect. Not only is this true, but concepts, when applied, reveal perpetual oscillation. Take the terms "north" and "south." The mention of the north pole, for example, implies at once the south pole also; it can be distinguished only by contrast with the other, which it thus _includes_. But it is a north pole only by _excluding_ the south pole from itself--by being itself and not merely what the other is not. The situation is paradoxical enough: Each aspect--the negative or the positive--of anything appears to exclude the other, while each requires its own other for its very definition and expression. It needs the other, and yet is independent of it. How Hegel proves this of all concepts, cannot here be shown. The result is that no concept can be taken by itself as a "that-and-no-other." It is perpetually accompanied by its "other" as man is by his shadow. The attempt to isolate any logical category and regard it as fixed and stable thus proves futile. Each category--to show this is the task of Hegel's _Logic_--is itself an organism, the result of a process which takes place within its inner constitution. And all logical categories, inevitably used in describing and explaining our world, form one system of interdependent and organically related parts. Hegel begins with an analysis of a concept that most abstractly describes reality, follows it through its countless conflicts and contradictions, and finally reaches the highest category which, including all the foregoing categories in organic unity, is alone adequate to characterize the universe as an organism. What these categories are and what Hegel's procedure is in showing their necessary sequential development, can here not even be hinted at.

That the logical development of the categories of thought is the same as the historical evolution of life--and _vice versa_--establishes for Hegel the identity of thought and reality. In the history of philosophy, the discrepancy between thought and reality has often been emphasized. There are those who insist that reality is too vast and too deep for man with his limited vision to penetrate; others, again, who set only certain bounds to man's understanding, reality consisting, they hold, of knowable and unknowable parts; and others still who see in the very shifts and changes of philosophic and scientific opinion the delusion of reason and the illusiveness of reality. The history of thought certainly does present an array of conflicting views concerning the limits of human reason. But all the contradictions and conflicts of thought prove to Hegel the sovereignty of reason. The conflicts of reason are its own necessary processes and expressions. Its dialectic instability is instability that is peculiar to all reality. Both thought and reality manifest one nature and one process. Hence reason with its "dynamic" categories can comprehend the "fluent" reality, because it is flesh of its flesh and bone of its bone. Hegel's bold and oft quoted words "What is rational is real; and what is real is rational," pithily express his whole doctrine. The nature of rationality and the nature of reality are, for Hegel, one and the same spiritual process, the organic process of triumphing over and conquering conflicts and contradictions. Where reality conforms to this process it is rational (that which does not conform to it is not reality at all, but has, like an amputated leg, mere contingent existence); the logical formula of this process is but an abstract account of what reality is in its essence.

The equation of the real and the rational, or the discovery of one significant process underlying both life and reason, led Hegel to proclaim a new kind of logic, so well characterized by Professor Royce as the "logic of passion." To repeat what has been said above, this means that categories are related to one another as historical epochs, as religious processes, as social and moral institutions, nay, as human passions, wills, and deeds are related to one another. Mutual conflict and contradiction appear as their sole constant factor amid all their variable conditions. The introduction of contradiction into logical concepts as their _sine qua non_ meant indeed a revolutionary departure from traditional logic. Prior to Hegel, logical reasoning was reasoning in accordance with the law of contradiction, i. e., with the assumption that nothing can have at the same time and at the same place contradictory and inconsistent qualities or elements. For Hegel, on the contrary, contradiction is the very moving principle of the world, the pulse of its life. _Alle Dinge sind an sich selbst widersprechend_, as he drastically says. The deeper reason why Hegel invests contradiction with a positive value lies in the fact that, since the nature of everything involves the union of discrepant elements, nothing can bear isolation and independence. Terms, processes, epochs, institutions, depend upon one another for their meaning, expression, and existence; it is impossible to take anything in isolation. But this is just what one does in dealing with the world in art or in science, in religion or in business; one is always dealing with error and contradiction, because one is dealing with fragments or bits of life and experience. Hence--and this is Hegel's crowning thought--anything short of the whole universe is inevitably contradictory. In brief, contradiction has the same sting for Hegel as it has for any one else. Without losing its nature of "contradictoriness," contradiction has logically this positive meaning. Since it is an essential element of every partial, isolated, and independent view of experience and thought, one is necessarily led to transcend it and to see the universe in organic wholeness.

Thus, as Hegel puts his fundamental idea, "the truth is the whole." Neither things nor categories, neither histories nor religions, neither sciences nor arts, express or exhaust by themselves the whole essence of the universe. The essence of the universe is the _life_ of the totality of all things, not their _sum_. As the life of man is not the sum of his bodily and mental functions, the whole man being present in each and all of these, so must the universe be conceived as omnipresent in each of its parts and expressions. This is the significance of Hegel's conception of the universe as an organism. The World-Spirit--Hegel's God--constitutes, thinks, lives, wills, and is _all_ in unity. The evolution of the universe is thus the evolution of God himself.

The task of philosophy, then, as Hegel conceives it, is to portray in systematic form the evolution of the World-Spirit in all its necessary ramifications. These ramifications themselves are conceived as constituting complete wholes, such as logic, nature, mind, society, history, art, religion, philosophy, so that the universe in its onward march through these is represented as a Whole of Wholes--_ein Kreis von Kreisen_. In Hegel's complete philosophy each of these special spheres finds its proper place and elaborate treatment.

Whether Hegel has well or ill succeeded in the task of exhibiting in each and all of these spheres the one universal movement, whether or no he was justified in reading into logic the same kind of development manifested by life, or in making life conform to one logical formula--these and other problems should arouse an interest in Hegel's writings. The following selections may give some glimpse of their spirit.

In conclusion, some bare suggestions must suffice to indicate the reason for Hegel's great influence. Hegel has partly, if not wholly, created the modern historical spirit. Reality for him, as even this inadequate sketch has shown, is not static, but is essentially a process. Thus until the history of a thing is known, the thing is not understood at all. It is the becoming and not the being of the world that constitutes its reality. And thus in emphasizing the fact that everything has a "past," the insight into which alone reveals its significant meaning, Hegel has given metaphysical expression and impetus to the awakening modern historical sense. His idea of evolution also epitomizes the spirit of the nineteenth century with its search everywhere for geneses and transformations--in religion, philology, geology, biology. Closely connected with the predominance of the historical in Hegel's philosophy is its explicit critique of individualism and particularism. According to his doctrine, the individual as individual is meaningless. The particular--independent and unrelated--is an abstraction. The isolation of anything results in contradiction. It is only the whole that animates and gives meaning to the individual and the particular. This idea of subordinating the individual to universal ends, as embodied particularly in Hegel's theory of the State, has left its impress upon political, social, and economic theories of his century. Not less significant is the glorification of reason of which Hegel's complete philosophy is an expression. Reason never spoke with so much self-confidence and authority as it did in Hegel. To the clear vision of reason the universe presents no dark or mysterious corners, nay, the very negations and contradictions in it are marks of its inherent rationality. But Hegel's rationalism is not of the ordinary shallow kind. Reason he himself distinguishes from understanding. The latter is analytical, its function is to abstract, to define, to compile, to classify. Reason, on the other hand, is synthetic, constructive, inventive. Apart from Hegel's special use of the term, it is this synthetic and creative and imaginative quality pervading his whole philosophy which has deepened men's insight into history, religion, and art, and which has wielded its general influence on the philosophic and literary constellation of the nineteenth century.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY[1] (1837)

TRANSLATED BY J. SIBREE, M.A.

The subject of this course of lectures is the Philosophical History of the World. And by this must be understood, not a collection of general observations respecting it, suggested by the study of its records and proposed to be illustrated by its facts, but universal history itself. To gain a clear idea, at the outset, of the nature of our task, it seems necessary to begin with an examination of the other methods of treating history. The various methods may be ranged under three heads:

I. Original History. II. Reflective History. III. Philosophical History.

I. Of the first kind, the mention of one or two distinguished names will furnish a definite type. To this category belong Herodotus, Thucydides, and other historians of the same order, whose descriptions are for the most part limited to deeds, events, and states of society, which they had before their eyes and whose spirit they shared. They simply transferred what was passing in the world around them to the realm of re-presentative intellect; an external phenomenon was thus translated into an internal conception. In the same way the poet operates upon the material supplied him by his emotions, projecting it into an image for the conceptive faculty.

These original historians did, it is true, find statements and narratives of other men ready to hand; one person cannot be an eye-and-ear witness of everything. But, merely as an ingredient, they make use only of such aids as the poet does of that heritage of an already-formed language to which he owes so much; historiographers bind together the fleeting elements of story, and treasure them up for immortality in the temple of Mnemosyne. Legends, ballad-stories, and traditions must be excluded from such original history; they are but dim and hazy forms of historical apprehension, and therefore belong to nations whose intelligence is but half awakened. Here, on the contrary, we have to do with people fully conscious of what they were and what they were about. The domain of reality--actually seen, or capable of being so-affords a very different basis in point of firmness from that fugitive and shadowy element in which were engendered those legends and poetic dreams whose historical prestige vanishes as soon as nations have attained a mature individuality.

Such original historians, then, change the events, the deeds, and the states of society with which they are conversant, into an object for the conceptive faculty; the narratives they leave us cannot, therefore, be very comprehensive in their range. Herodotus, Thucydides, Guicciardini, may be taken as fair samples of the class in this respect. What is present and living in their environment is their proper material. The influences that have formed the writer are identical with those which have molded the events that constitute the matter of his story. The author's spirit and that of the actions he narrates are one and the same. He describes scenes in which he himself has been an actor, or at any rate an interested spectator. It is short periods of time, individual shapes of persons and occurrences, single, unreflected traits, of which he makes his picture. And his aim is nothing more than the presentation to posterity of an image of events as clear as that which he himself possessed in virtue of personal observation, or lifelike descriptions. Reflections are none of his business, for he lives in the spirit of his subject; he has not attained an elevation above it. If, as in Cæsar's case, he belongs to the exalted rank of generals or statesmen, it is the prosecution of his own aims that constitutes the history.

Such speeches as we find in Thucydides, for example, of which we can positively assert that they are not _bona fide_ reports, would seem to make against our statement that a historian of his class presents us no reflected picture, that persons and people appear in his works in _propria persona_ ... Granted that such orations as those of Pericles--that most profoundly accomplished, genuine, noble statesman--were elaborated by Thucydides, it must yet be maintained that they were not foreign to the character of the speaker. In the orations in question, these men proclaim the maxims adopted by their countrymen and formative of their own character; they record their views of their political relations and of their moral and spiritual nature, and publish the principles of their designs and conduct. What the historian puts into their mouths is no supposititious system of ideas, but an uncorrupted transcript of their intellectual and moral habitudes.

Of these historians whom we must make thoroughly our own, with whom we must linger long if we would live with their respective nations and enter deeply into their spirit--of these historians to whose pages we may turn, not for the purposes of erudition merely, but with a view to deep and genuine enjoyment, there are fewer than might be imagined. Herodotus, the Father, namely the Founder, of History, and Thucydides have been already mentioned. Xenophon's _Retreat of the Ten Thousand_ is a work equally original. Cæsar's _Commentaries_ are the simple masterpiece of a mighty spirit; among the ancients these annalists were necessarily great captains and statesmen. In the Middle Ages, if we except the bishops, who were placed in the very centre of the political world, the monks monopolize this category as naïve chroniclers who were as decidedly isolated from active life as those elder annalists had been connected with it. In modern times the relations are entirely altered. Our culture is essentially comprehensive, and immediately changes all events into historical representations. Belonging to the class in question, we have vivid, simple, clear narrations--especially of military transactions--which might fairly take their place with those of Cæsar. In richness of matter and fulness of detail as regards strategic appliances and attendant circumstances, they are even more instructive. The French "Memoirs" also fall under this category. In many cases these are written by men of mark, though relating to affairs of little note; they not unfrequently contain such a large amount of anecdotal matter that the ground they occupy is narrow and trivial. Yet they are often veritable masterpieces in history, as are those of Cardinal Retz, which, in fact, trench on a larger historical field. In Germany such masters are rare, Frederick the Great in his _Histoire de mon temps_ being an illustrious exception. Writers of this order must occupy an elevated position, for only from such a position is it possible to take an extensive view of affairs--to see everything. This is out of the question for him who from below merely gets a glimpse of the great world through a miserable cranny.

II. The second kind of history we may call the _Reflective._ It is history whose mode of representation is not really confined by the limits of the time to which it relates, but whose spirit transcends the present. In this second order a strongly marked variety of species may be distinguished.

1. It is the aim of the investigator to gain a view of the entire history of a people, of a country, or of the world in short, what we call universal history. In this case the working up of the historical material is the main point. The workman approaches his task with his own spirit--a spirit distinct from that of the element he is to manipulate.

Here a very important consideration is the principles to which the author refers the bearing and motives of the actions and events which he describes, as well as those which determine the form of his narrative. Among us Germans this reflective treatment and the display of ingenuity which it affords assume a manifold variety of phases. Every writer of history proposes to himself an original method. The English and French confess to general principles of historical composition, their viewpoint being more nearly that of cosmopolitan or national culture. Among us, each labors to invent a purely individual point of view; instead of writing history, we are always beating our brains to discover how history ought to be written.