The Classics of the World and Worldview

“In recent times, religion has increasingly contracted the educated expansion of its content and withdrawn into the intensity of piety or feeling, often of a kind that manifests a very meager and barren content.” So wrote Hegel in the preface to the second edition of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1827); and he continued: "As long as it has a creed, a doctrine, a dogma, it has that with which philosophy can concern itself and in which it can unite with religion. However, this is not to be taken in the divisive, poor understanding in which modern religiosity is caught up, and according to which it presents the two as if one excluded the other, or as if they were so separable that they could only be united from the outside. Rather, it is also evident from what has been said so far that religion can exist without philosophy, but philosophy cannot exist without religion; rather, it includes it within itself. True religion, the religion of the spirit, must have such a content; the spirit is essentially consciousness, and thus of the content made objective; as feeling, it is the non-objective content itself [...] and only the lowest level of consciousness, indeed in the form of the soul common to animals. Thinking makes the soul, with which even animals are endowed, into spirit, and philosophy is only an awareness of that content, the spirit and its truth, also in the form and manner of that essence which distinguishes it from animals and makes it capable of religion." The entire intellectual physiognomy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) presents itself to our mind when we hear such words from him, through which he wanted to express clearly and sharply that he sees thinking as the highest activity of man, the one through which he alone can gain a position on the highest questions. Hegel declared the feeling of dependence, regarded by Schleiermacher as the creator of piety, to be genuinely animalistic; and he expressed the paradox: if this feeling of dependence were to constitute the essence of Christianity, then the dog would be the best Christian. Hegel is a personality who lives entirely in the element of thought. “Because man is a thinking being, neither common sense nor philosophy will ever allow itself to be elevated to God from and on the basis of an empirical worldview. This elevation has no other basis than the thinking, not merely sensual, animalistic contemplation of the world.” Hegel makes what can be gained through thinking the content of the worldview. For what man gains by means other than thinking can be nothing more than a preliminary stage to a worldview. "The elevation of thought above the sensual, its transcendence of the finite to the infinite, the leap made by breaking away from the sensual to the supersensual—all this is thought itself; this transition is only thought. If such a transition is not to be made, then this means that there should be no thought. In fact, animals do not make such a leap; they remain with sensory perception and intuition; they therefore have no religion." What humans can elicit from things through thinking is therefore the highest that is available to them in these things. They can therefore only call this their essence. For Hegel, thought is thus the essence of things. All sensory perception, all scientific observation of the world and its processes ultimately boils down to humans forming thoughts about the connection between things. Hegel's work begins where sensory perception and scientific observation have reached their goal — with thought. The scientific observer observes nature; Hegel observes what the scientific observer says about nature. The former seeks, through his scientific method, to reduce the diversity of natural phenomena to a unity; he explains one process from another; he strives for order, for an organic overview of the whole, which presents itself to his senses as a disordered multiplicity. Hegel seeks order and harmonious overview in the results of the natural scientist. He adds to the science of nature the science of thoughts about nature. All thoughts that one has about the world naturally form a unified whole, just as nature is also a unified whole. The scientific observer gains his thoughts from individual things; therefore, they initially appear in his mind as individual things, one next to the other. When we consider them side by side, they come together to form a whole, within which each individual is a link. This whole of thoughts is what Hegel's philosophy aims to be. Just as the natural scientist who seeks to determine the laws of the starry sky does not believe that he can construct the starry sky from these laws, so Hegel, who seeks the lawful connections within the world of thought, does not believe that he can find any scientific laws from thoughts that can only be determined through empirical observation. The repeated assertion that Hegel wanted to draw complete and unlimited knowledge of the whole world from pure thought is based on nothing more than a naive misunderstanding of his view. He said clearly enough: "What is to be understood is the task of philosophy; for what is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable. If philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a form of life has grown old; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only at dusk." This means nothing other than that the actual insights must already be there when the thinker arrives and illuminates them from his point of view. One should not demand of Hegel that he should have derived new laws of nature from pure thought, for that was not his intention at all. No, he wanted nothing more than to shed philosophical light on the sum of the laws of nature that existed in his time. No one demands that the natural scientist create the starry sky, even though he conducts his research on it; Hegel's views are declared fruitless because he, who thought about the connection between the laws of nature, did not at the same time create these laws of nature.