Introduction: The Concept of the History of Philosophy

The history of philosophy displays at first sight a spectacle that seems to refute philosophy itself. It shows a series of opinions, each of which has claimed to be the truth, and each of which has been refuted by the next. It looks like a battlefield covered with the bones of the dead — a kingdom not merely of dead and lifeless individuals, but of refuted and spiritually dead systems, each of which has killed and buried the one before it. Or it seems a gallery of follies, or at least of the aberrations of men who have lost themselves in thought and mere concepts.

Hegel sets himself against the common view of the history of philosophy as a mere collection of opinions.

But truth is one, and philosophy is the knowledge of truth. The diversity of philosophies does not contradict this; it is the development of the one truth. Each philosophy has been necessary, and none has passed away; all are preserved as moments of the whole. What has been refuted is not the principle of a philosophy, but only the claim of that principle to be the final and absolute one.

The history of philosophy is itself philosophical. The succession of systems in history is the same as the succession of the determinations of the idea in logic. If the fundamental concepts of the systems that have appeared in history are stripped of their outward form and particular circumstances, we have the various stages of the determination of the idea itself in its logical concept. The first philosophies are the poorest and most abstract; the latest is the richest and most concrete. The latest philosophy is the result of all earlier ones, and must contain the principles of all.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of its own time; it is a link in the whole chain of spiritual development, and can therefore only satisfy the interests that belong to its own time. No one can leap over his own time, any more than he can leap over his own skin. Philosophy is the thought of its time.

Where Philosophy Begins

Philosophy begins where thought is free — where the individual knows himself as universal, as having infinite value. This first happened among the Greeks.

In the East, spirit is sunk in substance: the individual is nothing before the one universal power, whether nature or the despot. Hegel therefore treats "Oriental philosophy" only briefly, as a preliminary. He speaks of Confucius, whose moral teachings he finds sound but ordinary — popular morality, not speculative philosophy; of the Chinese "Book of Changes" and the Taoist teaching of the way; and of Indian philosophy, the Samkhya and Nyaya systems, of which he had learned through the recent work of Henry Colebrooke, and in which he recognises genuine abstract thought, but lost in the infinite, without the free individual.

Hegel's judgements on Asian thought were based on the limited translations available in the 1820s, and are now regarded as one-sided. He himself acknowledged that knowledge of Indian philosophy was only beginning.

With the Greek name we feel at home. Philosophy, properly so called, begins in Greece.