The Classics of the World and Worldview

Hegel thus grasped the human spirit in its highest activity, thinking, and then attempted to show what meaning this highest activity has within the whole world. It represents the event in which the primordial being poured out into the whole world finds itself again. The highest activities through which this rediscovery takes place are art, religion, and philosophy. The thought is present in the work of nature; but here it is alienated from itself; it does not appear in its original form. When one looks at a real lion, it is nothing other than the embodiment of the idea of a “lion”; but here we are not concerned with the idea of a lion, but with the physical being; this being itself has nothing to do with the idea. Only when I want to understand it do I seek the idea. A work of art depicting a lion carries within itself what I can only comprehend in the real being. The physical form is only there to make the idea appear. Man creates works of art so that he can see before him in external perception what he otherwise only comprehends in thought. In reality, the idea can only appear in its own form in human self-consciousness. What in reality only appears here, man imprints on sensual matter so that it also appears to appear in him. When Goethe stood before the works of art of the Greeks, he was compelled to say: there is necessity, there is God. In Hegel's language, in which God is the content of the world's thoughts, which comprehends itself in human self-consciousness, this would mean: the highest revelations of the world gaze back at us from the works of art, which in reality are only granted to us within our own minds. Philosophy contains the thought in its purest form, in its very essence. The highest manifestation that the divine primordial being, the world of thought, can assume is contained in philosophy. In Hegel's sense, one can say: the whole world is divine, i.e., filled with thought, but in philosophy the divine appears quite directly in its divinity, while in other manifestations it assumes the forms of the non-divine. Religion stands between art and philosophy. Thought does not yet live in it as pure thought, but in images, in symbols. This is also the case with art, but in art the image is one borrowed from external perception; the images of religion are spiritualized.