I. Various Forms of Contemporary Philosophising

Preface

The few public utterances in which a feeling for the difference between Fichte's and Schelling's systems can be recognised seem more concerned to evade the fact than to discuss it. Neither of the two systems has yet been presented to the public as a whole. Kant's philosophy needed to have its spirit separated from its letter; its purely speculative principle had to be lifted out of the remainder that belonged to arguing reflection. In the principle of the deduction of the categories, Kant's philosophy is authentic idealism; and it is this principle that Fichte extracted in a pure and rigorous form, and called the spirit of Kant's philosophy.

Fichte's "Science of Knowledge" (Wissenschaftslehre, 1794) claimed to complete Kant by deriving everything from the self-positing "I."

The Historical View of Philosophical Systems

An age which has so many philosophical systems lying behind it as its past must apparently arrive at the same indifference which life acquires after it has tried all forms. It seeks the truth in a collection of opinions. But the essence of philosophy is that it is without any special domain of its own; every philosophy is complete in itself, and, like an authentic work of art, carries the totality within itself. Just as the works of Apelles or Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, could not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but as a kindred force of the spirit, so reason cannot find in its own earlier shapes only useful preliminary exercises for itself.

Unlike his later view of the history of philosophy as a progressive development, here Hegel stresses that each true philosophy is a complete expression of the one reason.

The Need of Philosophy

When we look more closely at the particular form worn by a philosophy, we see that it arises, on the one hand, from the living originality of the spirit, whose work and spontaneity have re-established and shaped the harmony that has been torn; and on the other hand from the particular form of the dichotomy from which the system emerges.

Dichotomy is the source of the need of philosophy; and as the culture of the age, it is the unfree and given aspect of the whole configuration. In culture, the appearance of the Absolute has become isolated from the Absolute and fixed into independence. But at the same time the appearance cannot disown its origin, and must aim to constitute the manifold of its limitations into one whole.

When the power of union vanishes from the life of men, and the oppositions lose their living connection and reciprocity and gain independence, the need of philosophy arises.

"Entzweiung" — dichotomy, division, being split in two — is the key word of the essay. Hegel means the divisions of modern life: between mind and body, subject and object, reason and sense, freedom and nature, the individual and the community.

To sublate such fixed oppositions is the sole interest of reason. This interest does not mean that reason is opposed to opposition and limitation as such; for the necessary dichotomy is one factor in life, which eternally forms itself by opposing; and totality, at the highest pitch of life, is possible only through its restoration out of the deepest separation. What reason opposes is only the absolute fixing of the dichotomy by the understanding.

Reflection as the Instrument of Philosophising

The understanding, the faculty of reflection, divides and fixes: it sets up finite determinations, each opposed to the others. Reason uses reflection as its instrument; but it goes beyond it, by relating the limited to the Absolute. Reflection, insofar as it relates itself to the Absolute, is reason. Then reflection destroys itself and all its products — it "annihilates" the finite, by showing its relation to the infinite.

The Absolute is the night, and the light is younger than it; and the difference between the two, as well as the emergence of light out of night, is an absolute difference. Nothingness is the first out of which all being, all the manifoldness of the finite, has emerged.

One of the most quoted sentences in the essay. Six years later, in the Preface to the "Phenomenology," Hegel would mock the Absolute as "the night in which all cows are black" — a sign of how far he moved from Schelling.

Speculation and Common Sense

Speculation and common sense do not understand each other. For common sense, the products of speculation seem a world turned upside down. Common sense holds fast to the finite, to fixed oppositions, and believes in them; but it has the Absolute in it too, as feeling, as faith. Philosophy makes this faith conscious, and so seems to common sense to destroy it.

The Principle of Philosophy

The task of philosophy consists in constructing the Absolute for consciousness. The principle of philosophy is the identity of identity and non-identity: opposition and unity are both in the Absolute.

"Die Identität der Identität und der Nichtidentität" — the formula Hegel first sketched as "the union of union and non-union" in his Frankfurt fragment of 1800.

Philosophy cannot begin from a single proposition, from a first principle from which everything else is deduced, as Reinhold and Fichte tried; for every proposition is a product of reflection, and has its opposite. The Absolute can only be presented in a whole — a system — in which every proposition is sublated in the totality. It is grasped in transcendental intuition, which unites the opposites of subject and object, intelligence and nature.