VI. The Present State of Philosophy and Science

If we speak only of the intellectual side – I know everything that can be objected to what is said now, but the matter will present itself to everyone who penetrates into the spiritual development of the 19th century – if we start with the purely intellectual, then we have to say that in terms of the sharpness of thought, in terms of the crystallization of thought in the soul, a certain peak of philosophical development was indeed reached through Hegel. One misunderstands Hegel when one speaks so carelessly about him, as his opponents in the second half of the 19th century did. They imagined that Hegel's aim was to spin out everything he had to say about the world from pure thought of content. They just did not take into account that Hegel nowhere claims that the human subject wants to lift anything of real world content out of pure thought. One must take into account that Hegel's standpoint is that thought itself, the inwardly living thought, the active and productive thought, is what draws the content of the world out of itself, and that we, with our cognitive subject, are nothing more than the scene on which thought works. If we take the matter as it actually presents itself in the course of intellectual life, we must say: in this tendency of Hegel's lies his entire monumental greatness. But it also means that this is the source of the entire weakness of Hegelian philosophy. Its greatness lies in the fact that Hegel can, in a previously unimagined way, become the teacher of a discipline of thinking for anyone who really wants to penetrate with him, and that we cannot acquire this discipline in any other way. The Theosophist in particular should acquire this strong discipline of thinking. After all, a vast number of errors and misconceptions arise simply because our thinking cannot achieve the crystalline clarity of a discipline of thought, such as can be learned through the Hegelian system. One can educate oneself through the Hegelian system. One should, so to speak, be imbued with the results of such a discipline of thought in every lecture where one feels a responsibility towards knowledge and truth. One should get into the habit of never using a word in any context that has not first been felt and experienced by us in its full scope and content. When one, penetrating through what seems so abstract, so dry and sober to many, penetrating through Hegel's logic, inculcates oneself with this discipline of thinking, then one never speaks of the word being, becoming , existence as in such places where these words may be inserted in the overall structure of the lecture, because one has first followed the entire development of the content of such concepts, from the simplest, most empty concepts to the most substantial. In this inner discipline of thought, the philosophical lecturer of today and all of today's literature are, in fact, very far removed. I could easily show you that in world-famous contemporary philosophical books, the authors are not even able to capture the content of a concept concisely and accurately in three lines, and then after three lines, they use a concept that they used before in a completely different way. It is quite natural that an inner confusion of the whole structure, which is our thoughts, must then occur. It would be easy, as I said, to prove this to you with contemporary world-famous philosophical books.