The Classics of the World and Worldview

Hegel's conception of cognition does not understand it as the grasping of content that exists somewhere in the world without it, nor as an activity that creates images of real events. What is created in Hegel's sense of thinking cognition does not exist anywhere else in the world, only in cognition. Just as a plant produces a flower at a certain stage of its development, so the universe produces the content of human cognition. And just as the flower does not exist before its creation, so too does the content of thought not exist in the world before it emerges in the human mind. A worldview that believes that cognition should only produce images of already existing content makes humans idle spectators of the world, which would be perfectly complete without them. Hegel, on the other hand, makes humans active participants in world events, which would lack their culmination without them.