Paths and Goals of Spiritual Man

GA 125 — 26 May 1910, Hamburg

II. Hegel's Philosophy and Its Connection to the Present Day

Today we shall be considering Hegel not from an anthroposophical but from a purely philosophical point of view. This is possible in an anthroposophical circle because, although the object of spiritual science is to be drawn from experiences in the supersensible world, the process of combining these experiences into a comprehensive, systematic world view requires clear and conscientious thinking that is well-trained in every single point. And if even untrained thinking causes quite a lot of harm in external science, in the anthroposophical movement, more harm is caused by this than by incorrect observations, because in many people the interest in supersensible things does not go hand in hand with an equally strong interest in logical thinking. And this purely logical thinking can be particularly trained by a study of the thinking of George William Frederick Hegel. From such a study, a certain light can also be shed on our present time, in which one speaks occasionally of a return to Hegel, but of which one cannot say that the intellectual prerequisites that it has would meet with an understanding of Hegel. Hegel, with his whole system of thought, has outgrown the time when it was the chief concern of philosophy to deduce the foundations of all knowledge and being from certain supreme points of view. It is no mere accident, but a profound necessity, that Hegel should have lived in an age when these supreme foundations were being sought in the most diverse fields.

Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart. He entered the Tübingen seminary (1788-1793), which was so important for the development of German intellectual life at that time, as a pupil, where he was a fellow student of Schelling, who towered over him for a long, long time, and Hölderlin, who was deeply predisposed and soon sank into mental derangement, albeit not precisely because of his deep predisposition. They formed a kind of cloverleaf: the deeply intuitive Hölderlin, who sought in mystical chiaroscuro; Schelling, who was endowed with a sharp intellectual energy and an effervescent imagination; and Hegel, who was somewhat ponderous, with thoughts that came hard from the soul. Schelling and Hegel later worked together again at the University of Jena, which was a center of intellectual life at the time. Schelling carried his audience away with the powerful intellectual momentum with which he dealt with the problems of thought; he also carried away those who did not seek to penetrate the questions of existence out of feeling and mind. Schelling pointed out that in human knowledge there is something that goes beyond all thinking, an intellectual intuition, as he called it, which is supposed to be an original faculty for looking into the depths of existence. Hegel was his colleague as a lecturer (1801-1806). Even then, his thinking was still cumbersome because he wanted to shape every thought so that it never included more than it was supposed to mean. And because of this slowly drilling cumbersomeness of thinking, Hegel is not easily understood at first.

Then came the sad time of 1806. It was during this period that Hegel undertook, as he himself expressed it, the actual great voyages of discovery of his mind. It was under the thunder of the guns at Jena that he completed his first work, the “Phenomenology of Spirit”, which arose out of an intensive and tremendously deep concentration of the mind. It is a work that the whole of world literature has no equal. Above all, Hegel wanted to make clear to himself what experiences the soul can have when it ascends from the subordinate points of view, so to speak, to the highest, to what Hegel calls the self-comprehension of the spirit within itself. At first, one lives in a very close connection with the outside world, where every this or that, every tree and every house is something one lives with, every opinion is something one lives in. Only when one reflects on this and that, does perception arise. From perception, we then come through thinking to a sense of self at first, to a dark inkling of the self. Only then do we arrive at the first glimmer of true consciousness. But here the I is still, so to speak, enchanted with its surroundings. It works itself out of this enchantment through the content, which it is supposed to have only from itself, by increasingly leaving out what has to do with the outside world, what is connected with it. This is how self-awareness comes about and with it the interweaving of self-awareness with the spirit. It becomes spirit itself, which comprehends itself, becomes spirit that becomes aware of itself. And when a person now looks back, he recognizes what is comprehending itself as spirit, he recognizes the idea that he has, as it were, taken out of the enchantment of the outside world. He recognizes that he used to be stuck in the contradiction between subject and object, but that now, in the overcoming of subject and object, he grasps what Hegel calls the absolute idea in the idea that grasps itself, which is not only subject and not only object. Thus, through an immense effort of thought, Hegel had arrived at the foundation of so-called absolute idealism.

Hegel's life took many twists and turns after his time as a lecturer in Jena. He worked for a time as a political editor in Bamberg (1807-1808), then as a grammar school teacher and headmaster in Nuremberg (1808-1816), and through manifold external experiences he became the realistically thinking mind with whom we are later confronted. From Nuremberg, Hegel was briefly appointed to the University of Heidelberg, where he published his “Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften” (Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences) in 1817. Regarding the reception of the work, Hegel could well have said what legend attributes to him as a saying shortly before his death: “Of all my students, only one understood me, and he misunderstood me.

It is indeed a most remarkable feeling to have sunk something so tremendously deep into the stream of the world and at the same time to see how completely all the preconditions for absorbing the depth were absent. Only from Hegel's standpoint can something like a skeleton be drawn of what this “encyclopedia” should be. But when I now speak in Hegel's sense, I beg not to be looked upon as a Hegelian. For Hegel, it was about implementing the standpoint he had attained in the Phenomenology of Spirit by placing himself beyond subject and object on the standpoint of the idea – and now, if I may say so, to use this standpoint to gain an overview of the full scope of human thought and action.

According to Hegel, the absolute idea must not contain the concepts of subject and object, of knowing and believing, and the like. The idea is beyond all these contradictions. Hegel wants to grasp this idea as if it were being presented in its purity, this idea that does indeed operate in subject and object but goes beyond both. This idea can certainly be found in man, in the external world, in spirit and nature, but it is precisely beyond both, it lies beyond spirit and nature. So in Hegel's sense, one must not grasp the idea in the first instance in the abstract, like an abstract point. Rather, it is a complete entity in itself, which allows a rich content to sprout out of itself as an idea, just as the whole plant with all its individual parts is implicit in the plant germ. Thus, according to Hegel, the idea should allow a content to sprout out of itself that is independent of spirit and nature, and which, when applied, must therefore be applied to both. So before you get involved with the meaning of spirit and nature, you gain a point of view above both and then see a manifestation of the idea in nature and also see the idea being realized in the spiritual. So we have to gain a point of view from which the idea is developed as if the human being were not even there. The human being then abandons himself to the very own process of the world of ideas developing in and out of himself. This point of view results in what can be called the science of logic in Hegel's sense. Here one is not dealing with a subject and object, as in Aristotelian logic, but with the self-movement of the idea that stands above subject and object.

For any thinking that wants to devote itself only to the things of the external world, it is difficult to get used to the strictly closed columns of Hegelian concepts. One feels as if one is being subjected to violence, as if one is being thrust into a system of ideas that has absolutely nothing in common with the usual everyday rational argument. It is the idea that should think, not I: that is the feeling one has. That is why most people do not even try to get into the world of Hegelian ideas. But if you do, well, you might want to correct Hegel here and there – that is especially easy with Hegel – but that is not the point. The point is that by studying Hegel, a person undergoes a tremendous self-discipline of thought, because there is nothing like Hegel's logic to teach you where a system of human concepts, in general, a concept, may occur. A concept can only be recognized in its full scope if it can only be thought at a certain point in a whole fabric of concepts. In order to make this clear, Hegel begins with the most empty concept, the concept of being, which is usually presented without one actually being aware of where it is actually placed. Now, according to Hegel, this concept should be completely empty. So we have to disregard all later content that this concept has acquired, right from the very beginning of Hegel's logic. Thus the concept of being is not actually established by man, but rather it presents itself to man after man has thrown all other concepts out of it.

Now Hegel wants to find the method of developing the concept, that is, one concept must develop from another. Thus, if we look at it correctly, the concept of being must immediately rise above itself. When we apply the abstract concept of being to a thing, it is no longer pure. It then already refers to a this or that. Thus we come to recognize that being is a nothing, mind you, only within the concept. Through the dialectic living in itself, one has thus drawn out of being the concept of nothingness.

If you have disciplined yourself in thinking, you are already educating yourself at this point in Hegelian logic to think in a way that is only ever applied in Hegel's further discussions of being and nothingness as it has just emerged. Being and nothingness now give rise to a third: that is becoming. But in order for us to grasp becoming, it must be brought to a standstill. Thus, in the fourth place, the concept of existence emerges from the concept of becoming. The concept of existence may only be used in this way in Hegel's further logic, as a being that has turned into a nothing, that together with this has produced becoming, which, brought to a standstill, has produced existence. And in this method Hegel goes further. He arrives at the concept of the one and the many, he arrives at the concept of quantity and quality, of measure and so on.

Thus in the first part of Hegel's “Encyklopädie” we have an organism of the idea. Only when we have grasped everything else before that, can we then arrive at the concept of the end, which stands at the end of Hegel's logic. Through such absolute logic, an immense self-discipline of the spirit is indeed achieved, which at least as an ideal must be presented to our time. Through this, one learns to express a concept only when one has its content fully in consciousness. One must then have in one's concepts only what one has at some time in life made clear to oneself as a development of the concept. Within Hegel's logic, the following then emerge as later concepts: subject and object, knowledge, essence, causality, which one now has clearly in consciousness.

Once Hegel had established the complete system of concepts, he was able to show how the concepts reveal themselves, so to speak, in enchantment. The concept cannot only be in the subject, because then all talk about nature would make no sense. Rather, our concepts underlie natural phenomena; they have made them. Thus, it is immaterial to the concept whether it appears outside or inside. To us, it hides itself outside. Nature is the concept or the idea in its otherness, as Hegel says. Anyone who says something different about nature goes beyond what he knows for sure. So a natural philosophy arises, a natural science, that seeks the development of the idea outside, after it has first been sought in itself, in its purer existence, in logic.

The idea first realizes itself in subordinate phenomena, where the concept is most hidden, so that we might be tempted to speak of natural phenomena that are entirely without ideas. This happens in mechanics. But even within mechanical phenomena, Hegel's discipline of thought makes a distinction on two levels. He distinguishes between ordinary mechanics, as it underlies the phenomena of impact, force, and matter, which, as he says, is relative mechanics, and absolute mechanics; that is, he considers it inadmissible to apply the ordinary concepts of relative mechanics to the heavenly bodies. Only when one develops the concept of absolute mechanics does one find the idea that lies in celestial mechanics. But in today's science, nothing is to be found of this distinction. Hence Hegel's polemic against Newton, who has most readily transferred the concepts of relative mechanics to the concepts of absolute mechanics.

From the concept of absolute mechanics, Hegel moves on to the concept of the real organism. He recognizes three members of the organism:

Firstly, the geological organism. In his view, this does not mean that the whole structure of the earth can be understood by extending the laws of a small area to the whole world, as is the case with today's geology. Hegel sees in every mountain range, in every geological form, an organism that has become rigid.

Secondly, the plant organism, in which the concept manifests itself as it were in indifference to the idea, in uniformity for the idea.

Thirdly, the animal organism, which in a certain sense already represents the existence of the idea in the external world.

Thus the appearance of the idea, as it were the enchanted idea, is exhausted in earthly existence. Man now outgrows these enchanted ideas. He must first be understood in terms of his natural characteristics. This is the subject of anthropology. In his perception, man finds himself, as it were, dulled in external existence. But when he comes to consciousness, and from there to self-consciousness, he breaks away from external existence in a certain respect. This is where “phenomenology of the spirit” now enters the picture, following on from anthropology. Within this phenomenology, man finally grasps himself as spirit. In so doing, he recognizes himself as subjective spirit by first breaking free from the enchantment of nature. Gradually, the idea itself appears to him again. What it was in the first, very first concept of being now springs forth. Having recognized the idea in its being-in-itself in logic, in this being-out-of-itself in nature, man now comprehends it where it is in and for itself.

Now this initially subjective spirit becomes objective spirit. The idea reveals what it is in itself in what the spiritual institutions are: marriage, family, law, custom. All this comes together in the state. What emerges in the state as objective spirit, as the realization of the idea, what is found in the interplay from state to state, that is world history. Thus world history is the existence of the idea after its passage through the subjective spirit.

And the question arises: can we ultimately close the circle like a snake biting its own tail, that is, can we come back to the absolute idea, to a realization of the idea where it overcomes subjectively and objectively again? The absolute idea can appear in its absolute reality, initially in a preparatory way, so that it is not enchanted, hidden as in nature, but so that it shines through the appearance. That is the case in art. Beyond world history, Hegel thus creates the first realization of the absolute idea in art. But here it still has something of an objective, external nuance about it. But it can also work in such a way that it no longer has a nuance of the external, but a nuance of the internal. That is the case in religion. It is thus the realization of the absolute idea on the second level.

But the idea can also overcome the nuance of externality, which it still has in art, and the nuance of inwardness, which it still has in religion. It does this in the comprehension of itself, where it captures itself in itself, in philosophy in the Hegelian sense.

And so the circle is complete. In the whole field of history, there is nothing as complete as the Hegelian system.

He later developed some of its individual parts in more detail, such as the philosophy of law (1821), an area in which a strictly disciplined way of thinking has an especially beneficial effect. And in the preface to the “Outlines of the Philosophy of Right” Hegel makes a remarkable statement: When reason grasps the idea, everything must be grasped by seeing the idea, that is, the working of reason in things. Everything real is therefore reasonable in the Hegelian sense. This proposition can, of course, be immediately refuted by the arbitrariness of the usual reasoning, if one does not take into account Hegel's context of thought.

If we sketchily present Hegel's philosophy to ourselves, we have recognized the basic nerve of his philosophy in the most tremendously disciplined thinking.

Hegel then taught this philosophy in Berlin from 1818 to 1831, where he died on November 14, 1831, the anniversary of the death of Leibniz, who had once put forward the completely opposite philosophy. In Hegel's philosophy, the idea, which remains entirely with itself, is at the center. In Leibniz, the idea disperses into the immense sum of monads. But only a single monad, which contains the pre-established harmony, would have to take the path of the Hegelian absolute idea if it develops. Thus, Hegel's system lies in the development of a single monad. Hegel has set up the strictest monistic system, Leibniz the strictest monadological system. As long as we remain within Hegel's trains of thought, we are in a strictly closed cycle of the mind. We go beyond him when we measure Hegel's system against monadology. Indeed, one thinker found that Leibniz's monadology exploded Hegel's monism. This is how Schelling felt.

After remaining silent since 1814, he was appointed to Berlin in 1841, ten years after Hegel's death, and now tried to go beyond Hegel, with whom he had previously worked and co-edited the “Critical Journal of Philosophy” in 1802-03. These were peculiar lectures that he now gave in Berlin.

There is only one way to get beyond Hegel, and that is by drilling a hole from the outside where, in Hegel, the self grasps itself in the “Phenomenology of Spirit”. But one also gets stuck in Leibnitz's monad if one does not drill the hole at the same place. If one starts here, one goes beyond the ego, which only grasps itself, and arrives at supersensible experiences that really go beyond what Hegel comprehends in his system. And that is what Schelling did in fact. He began to teach 'theosophy', real 'theosophy', though in an abstract form, and he had the same success that a person would have today who wanted to teach 'theosophy' at a university.

A triplicity of the world ground, a threefold potency, Schelling taught: first, the being-can; secondly, pure being; thirdly, the summary. In this way he foreshadowed what is being sought today in the threefold Logos. And now Schelling sought to recognize the secrets of the ancient mysteries in his 'Philosophy of Mythology'. He sought to teach what we are exploring today, enriched by the possibility of supersensible experiences since then. Schelling then strove to do justice to the Christian mysteries in his Philosophy of Revelation, which attempts to elucidate Christianity in a theosophical sense. Schelling was only able to give these lectures because he had once before stood at a professorship with different views. All the more was the rage against Schelling now. Today, in all the textbooks and other histories of philosophy, this last 'theosophical period' of Schelling is presented with great horror, where he, having already asserted the madness of his 'intellectual view', now went completely mad — so they think.

With this transition from Hegel to Schelling, however, an era had now come of age that lived entirely under the spell of natural science. And since then we have been witnessing a remarkable spectacle, through the observation of which we shall recognize why Theosophy, spiritual science, must be received today as it is received.

No one can marvel more at the results than I do, and yet the following must be said. The discovery of the plant and animal cell by Schwann and Schleiden in the 1830s was a great achievement, but it was followed by little in the way of opinions. There was the doctrine of force and matter, which regarded everything of a spiritual nature as no more than a bubble on the surface of physical processes. The worst result of this school of thought was the rigid system in which Baechner, in his book “Kraft und Stoff” (Force and Matter), conceived theoretical materialism. Of course, Baechner's bold courage remains to be admired. The other researchers simply did not have the courage to think their thoughts through to the end.

But even more refined minds went other ways than Hegel and Schelling under the constraint of natural science, for example, Hermann Helmholtz, who made truly great contributions in the fields of psychophysics, sensory physiology, physiological optics, and phonetics. His discoveries led him, through the nature of the experiments and their suggestive power, not through thinking, to reject Hegel, so that he said: “When I open Hegel and read a few sentences from his ‘Natural Philosophy’, it is pure nonsense.

And again, a fine mind that was also trained in thinking was not understood in his thoughts, Julius Robert Mayer, who discovered the law of conservation of energy. His law did indeed have an enormous physical significance, and this was also appreciated. But Mayer's train of thought on the mechanical equivalent of heat in his paper on “The Organic Movement in its Connection with Metabolism” (1845) was never understood. People preferred to read Helmholtz, who was much easier to understand. So people preferred to read his work “On the Interaction of Natural Forces” (1854), in which he proved the validity of Mayer's Law, starting from the impossibility of perpetual motion.

Then came the achievements of Darwinism, and a bold mind like Haeckel's, who was averse to all intellectual culture and therefore could see nothing in Hegelian philosophy but a tangle of concepts, was thus called upon to expand the scientific facts in the sense of an external, material history of development. Thus he became the founder of the materialistic Darwinism of the sixties and seventies. No school of philosophical thought rose up against it. At that time, the world could no longer be grasped by philosophy; for it there was nothing but an interrelationship between philosophy and natural science.

Thus a thinker as important as Eduard von Hartmann, who in his “Philosophy of the Unconscious” (1869) dragged materialistic Darwinism, so to speak, before the forum of an intellectual philosophy, was decried as a dilettante who had no idea of natural science. Many refutations appeared, including a highly ingenious anonymous one: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Philosophy and Descent Theory” (1872). Haeckel said of this writing that it was so excellent and so thoroughly demonstrated the errors of Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy that he himself (Haeckel) could have written it, and Oscar Schmidt, the biographer of Darwin, vividly regretted that his esteemed colleague did not emerge from his anonymity. Then a new edition of this writing appeared, and Eduard von Hartmann himself named himself as the author.

Thus philosophy had once provided the most brutal proof of the fact that it can very well understand natural science, even if trained thinking leads it to completely different results than those of materialism. This struggle is not just about sentence against sentence, but about cultural forces that confront each other.

More subtle minds always retained an understanding of both, of philosophy and of natural science. But due to the dominant power of suggestion of natural science, they could only be heard in the narrowest of circles. Thus Vincenz Knauer's extraordinarily fine and comprehensive history of philosophy, 'Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie', could only be understood by a very limited circle. Not even what the narrow Herbartian philosophy put forward against external materialism was able to have an effect. And so it came about that a strictly logical mind, even though schooled in scholasticism, which wanted to build within itself the bridge to the scientific method, could not even do this within itself. This was the case with Franz Brentano, who wanted to combine the scientific method with strictly logical thinking in his Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Psychology from an Empirical Point of View), the first volume of which appeared in 1874. But his mental self-discipline did not prevail; inwardly he was still too much under the sway of natural-scientific materialism. He could not come to terms with himself, and so the second volume, announced for the fall, was not published for some time. And today Brentano lives as an old man in Florence, and the second volume has still not been published.

I myself was a witness to the terrible conflict that this conflict could have on the individual soul. I saw how the methodical in the training of thought almost lost its power through the suggestion of natural science. It was at a solemn session of the Vienna Academy in the 1880s, at which I was present, when Ernst Mach gave a lecture on the economy of natural phenomena. He could not find a way to grasp natural phenomena in his method. In each sentence, it was painfully felt how all method of thinking disappeared, how everything shrank to the principle of the least expenditure of energy in the recognition of nature. Thus, thinking was pushed from the central position it had with Hegel to the lowest conceivable economic significance.

Thus Hegel himself remained, as it were, an enchanted spirit, and even a Kuno Fischer could not release him. The truth of what Rosenkranz had said in the introduction to his Hegel biography proved to be true: we philosophers of the second half of the 19th century are, at best, only the gravediggers of the philosophers of the first half of the 19th century. And by that he meant – biographers.

The works of Otto Liebmann, Zeller and others, which went back to Kant, seemed to bring a new impetus to the method of thinking. Liebmann wrote one of the most ingenious treatises ever written in the field of epistemology. He tried by all means to found a transcendental epistemology, but in the end he arrived at a kind of epistemology that can be roughly described as something akin to a dog running around in circles. He did not get beyond the starting point of his epistemology.

And so the present situation developed. There was the important formulation of the theory of heat by Clausius, which had an effect on the physiology of sense and this finally again on the theory of knowledge. Here also, therefore, a subjection of philosophy under natural science.

Thus, those who spoke in terms of the old way of thinking were not heard. In the 1880s, one researcher did attempt to advance epistemology on the basis of Kant, but he was not listened to. Under the pressure of the circumstances, he left the field entirely and turned to aesthetics. It was only in 1906 that he published another small epistemological work, by Johannes Volkelt, on “The Sources of the Certainty of our Knowledge”. The conditions for a true epistemology were as little present as they were for a true understanding of Hegel.

Our time finds itself far more satisfied with a Spencerian encyclopedia, which goes beyond natural science by very little and very superficially. And when the view of the smallest economic measure, as proposed by Mach, was brought back from the New World in the pragmatism of William James, it was enthusiastically received as something new. However, the strict columns of Hegel's absolute logic and the completely unphilosophical raisonnement of pragmatism make a rather strange combination.

But the good cannot be completely suppressed, it can only be suppressed temporarily. Where a misunderstood Kantianism could not lie like a mildew on the thinking, so to speak, out of the strength of the people, a healthy thinking stirred. Thus the Russian philosopher Solowjow brought in fact new significant methodological approaches by the fact that he based on a young national strength, which, if you want, has not even brought it to a right culture, but not on an old one like Franz Brentano. The Frenchman Boutroux also introduced a new useful concept into the history of development. But such efforts are ignored. Under the ashes, the truth continues to glow, as it were. It can be overgrown by prejudice and impotence, but as a self-discipline of thought it continues to work secretly. And precisely those who believe they have to represent spiritual science must hope that this self-discipline of thought will pave the way for spiritual science. They must find the way to Hegel's strictest logic, for only in this way can they firmly establish on the foundation of thought that which they must often bring down from higher spiritual worlds in loose structures. Thus, in the supersensible realm, if we may be permitted the expression, there is nothing that strictly trained thinking must reject. ke more acute and self-trained mind will find the transition, the bridge that leads from the highest product of the physical plane, thinking, to the supersensible.