Hegelianism

“ There are but few orthodox Hegelians left among philosophers nowadays, yet Hegel is still supreme over the minds of our contemporaries. It may even be that certain of his ideas have taken deeper root nowadays than when Hegelianism was in full bloom: for instance, the conception that history is the unfolding of the idea in reality, or, to put it more briefly and in terms more familiar to the modern mind—the idea of progress. ”

“ I have said that the political pluralists are fighting a misunderstood Hegelianism. Do they adopt the crudely popular conception of the Hegelian state as something “above and beyond” men, as a separate entity virtually independent of men? Such a conception is fundamentally wrong and wholly against the spirit of Hegel. As James found collective experience not independent of distributive experience, as he reconciled the two through the “compounding of consciousness,” so Hegel’s related parts received their meaning only in the conception of total relativity. ”

“ Hegelianism was not expected to effect any kind of compromise or reconciliation with empirical science, because any yielding on its own part would have been illogical, and could only have brought about a momentary truce, but no lasting peace. ”

“ Its central conception is that which, in one shape or another, will never cease to appeal to mankind—that existence is, at bottom, spiritual in character—that spirit is the only ultimate reality.
That Hegelianism provides a rational basis for a spiritual religion is obvious enough; nor is it necessary to indicate the possibilities of linking up the Christian doctrine of the Logos with a philosophy for which Reason was the very core and ground of existence. Hegel may indeed be said to have laid the foundation of Christian theology afresh ”

“ At a later date, with the call of Schelling to Berlin in 1841, it became fashionable to speak of Hegelianism as a negative philosophy requiring to be complemented by a “positive” philosophy which would give reality and not mere ideas. ”

“ Even at Berlin the popularity of Hegelianism came suddenly to an end, and after a time no truly scientific man liked to be called a Hegelian. These sudden collapses in Germany are very instructive. As long as a German professor is at the head of affairs and can do something for his pupils, his pupils are very loud in their encomiums, both in public and in private. They not only exalt him, but help to belittle all who differ from him. So it was with Hegel, so it was at a later time with Bopp, and Curtius, and other professors, particularly if they had the ear of the Minister of Education. ”

“ So elastic a solution established a dominant Hegelian school, which is now practically extinct, in Germany, and from Germany spread Hegelianism to France, England, America, and, in fact, diffused it over the civilized world to such an extent that it is still a widespread fashion outside Germany to believe that the world of being is a world of thought. ”

“ Hegelianism appears as a distinct element in modern English ethical thought; but the direct influence of Hegel’s system is perhaps less important than that indirectly exercised through the powerful stimulus which it has given to the study of the historical development of human thought and human society. ”

“ This was the starting point of noumenal idealism in Germany, and showed a reversion to the wider opinions of Aristotle. Hegelianism in which this idealism is carried to its limit is professedly one of the most difficult of philosophies. Hegel said “One man has understood me and even he has not.” His obscurity lies in the manner in which, as William Wallace shows in his article on the philosopher (Vol. 13, p. 204) , he “abruptly hurls us into worlds where old habits of thought fail us.” The influence of Hegel on English thought has been wide and lasting. ”

“ Hegelianism may be said to be a transcendental defence of the world as it is. There is no room for aspiration and no need of any: 'What is actual is rational, what is rational is actual.' But a good man will not readily acquiesce in this aphorism. ”

“ This interest was awakened in him by Hegel. In early student days, when to him as to so many then, the Hegelian Philosophy was the all in all of his thought, he was startled by the unwonted enthusiasm with which the great thinker at the climax of his severest exposition, paused {xix} to pay a warm tribute to 'the excellent Jeláleddín,' when he came into view in the light of the Supreme Idea of his own System. [10] This passage in Hegel, seems always to have impressed the students of his own writings, and it has been frequently referred to both by his German and English expounders. ”

“ The thinkers of Hegel's day were a little weary of static systems, of fixed and motionless metaphysics, of the cold classifications and distinctions of traditional philosophy, and they felt the need of a start, a run, a crack of the whip. The philosophy of Hegel, even in the manner of its utterance, brought this sense of motion, of change, of development. The Hegelian world is rather a promenade for the Idea than a stationary piece of furniture full of drawers and pigeonholes. ”

“ Can you imagine your thought of an object trying to dispossess the real object from its being, and so being negated by it? The great, the sacred law of partaking, the noiseless step of continuity, seems something that Hegel cannot possibly understand. All or nothing is his one idea. For him each point of space, of time, each feeling in the ego, each quality of being, is clamoring, "I am the all,—there is nought else but me." This clamor is its essence, which has to be negated in another act which gives it its true determination. ”

“ The general thought and action of the civilised world has been alternately fascinated and repelled, but always influenced, and to a high degree permeated, by the Christian theory of life, and still more by the faithful vision of that life displayed in the Son of Man. To pass that great cloud of witness and leave it on the other side, is to admit that your system is no key to the secret of the world,—even if we add, as some will prefer, of the world as it is and has been. And therefore the Hegelian system, if it is to be a philosophy at all, must be in this sense Christian. ”

“ What they desired was to make the laws of nature the rule of conduct, to release nature from interdict and ban. [3]
A neo-Hellenism realised in the Hegelian spirit was what was present to their minds.
It did not seem a matter of great consequence to them that Hegel should end his days as a rigid Prussian Conservative, or that his Philosophy of Right should recognise all existing institutions as "holy things," and make out the highest ethical conceptions to be "idols." He had underestimated the strength of the scientific doubt of the day. ”

“ It would be as absurd, and as impossible to be literally and simply a Hegelian,—if that means one for whom Hegel sums up all philosophy and all truth—as it is to be at the present day in the literal sense a Platonist or an Aristotelian. The world may be slow, the world of opinion and thought may linger: e pur si muove. We too have our own problems—the same, no doubt, in a sense, from age to age, and yet infinitely varying and never in two ages alike. ”

“ A more dramatic opposition than the one which ensued between the Heracliteans and the Eleatics can scarcely be imagined—both schools claiming a monopoly of reason and truth, both distrusting the senses, and each charging the other with illusion. Now the significance of Hegel's philosophy can be grasped only when we bear in mind that it was just this profound distinction between the permanent and the changing that Hegel sought to understand and to interpret. He saw more deeply into the reality of movement and change than any other philosopher before or after him. ”

“ Thus Hegel's dialectic modulates only in the sphere of his distance. His being is universal existence, and, as universals have only a logical truth, being in se is equivalent to Nothing. But Nothing hasn't even a logical basis. Lithe as human thought is it can't compass the conception. It is a mere brutum fulmen devised to disguise the absence of thought or its inanition; and Hegel, if he had been wise, would have said no-thought instead of no-thing. For no-thing doesn't express the complete absence of existence. ”

“ And when we are asked to believe the Hegelian to be the sole or universal logic, we naturally reply that there are other ways in which our ideas may be connected. The triplets of Hegel, the division into being, essence, and notion, are not the only or necessary modes in which the world of thought can be conceived. There may be an evolution by degrees as well as by opposites. The word 'continuity' suggests the possibility of resolving all differences into differences of quantity. Again, the opposites themselves may vary from the least degree of diversity up to contradictory opposition. ”

“ Hegel’s philosophy is a monism of reason,—a universalized concept, in which everything has its divine place. It is an all-embracing system, moulding every department. Mind and matter are not aspects of a reality which is behind them, but are the modes of that reality. The cosmic reason is successively mind and matter, and not the principle of mind and nature. In Schelling things proceed from the absolute. In Hegel they are the absolute. The absolute does not exceed things, but is wholly in them as their organic unity. Everything is under the conceptual labor of thought. ”

“ To them thought is discredited because the contradictions of thought are insoluble. Truth does not exist. On the other hand Hegel developed his great dialectic system upon the basis of these contradictions. Is thought self-contradictory? Yes. But is thought discredited because it is self-contradictory? By no means. It is the nature of thought to be self-contradictory, and the highest truth is the knowledge of this. So Hegel, instead of rejecting the conception of reality because thought is contradictory, incorporated contradictions into his conception of the Being of the universe. ”

“ And there is no doubt that, as a movement of reaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelian influence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of a certain kind. Such service, however, ought not to make us blindly indulgent. Hegel's philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption with its scanty merits, and must, now that it has become quasi-official, make ready to defend itself as well as to attack others. ”

“ Dialectic thought of the Hegelian type is a whirlpool into which some persons are sucked out of the stream which the straightforward understanding follows. Once in the eddy, nothing but rotary motion can go on. All who have been in it know the feel of its swirl—they know thenceforward that thinking unreturning on itself is but one part of reason, and that rectilinear mentality, in philosophy at any rate, will never do. ”

“ But in the mean time Idealism too had exaggerated its claims, it had gone forward to Hegel, and while Hegelian thought, about 1830, held in an iron grasp the deepest knowledge of his time, his neglect of positive experience demanded reaction, a counter-movement became necessary, and in the midst of the nineteenth century the great idealistic movement with all its philosophical and historical energies went down, and a new Positivism, full of enthusiasm for natural science and technique and full of contempt for philosophy, gained the day. ”

“ But in this way the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian philosophy in the matter of absolute truth is explained in contradiction to his dialectic, the cutting loose from all dogmatic methods, and thereby the revolutionary side becomes smothered under the dominating conservative. And what can be said of philosophical knowledge can also be said of historical practice. Mankind, that is, in the person of Hegel, has arrived at the point of working out the absolute idea, and must also practically have arrived so far as to make the absolute idea a reality. ”

“ But it is sufficient to observe that, whatever value be assigned to Christianity, he regarded it from the superior standpoint of a purely intellectual philosophy, not as a special revelation of truth, but as a certain approximation to the truth which philosophy alone can reach; and it may be said with some confidence that any one who comes under Hegel’s spell feels that he is in possession of a theory of the universe which relieves him from the need or desire of any revealed religion. His influence in Germany, Russia, and elsewhere has entirely made for highly unorthodox thought. ”

“ Further, the Hegelian philosophy, while giving us the power of thinking a great deal more than we are able to fill up, seems to be wanting in some determinations of thought which we require. We cannot say that physical science, which at present occupies so large a share of popular attention, has been made easier or more intelligible by the distinctions of Hegel. Nor can we deny that he has sometimes interpreted physics by metaphysics, and confused his own philosophical fancies with the laws of nature. ”

“ As thought and thing are identical in the absolute, logic is a creation and creation is a logic; thus the metaphysics of Hegel became a cosmogony in which all things proceed according to the laws of thought, and are therefore developed in a series of contradictions. Now let M. Prudhon be as thorough master of the Hegelian logic, or the Hegelian cosmogony, as he desires to be esteemed, how, in the name of common sense, can he hope to clear up the difficulties of political economy by mixing them with a philosophy like this? ”