The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Hegel's Philosophy and its Relevance to the Present

[ 1 ] Today we shall undertake not an anthroposophical, but a purely philosophical examination. But it can be cultivated within an anthroposophical circle because, although the subject matter of spiritual science is to be drawn from experiences in the supersensible world, the synthesis of these experiences into a comprehensive, systematic worldview requires sharp, conscientious, and well-trained thinking in every single detail. And while untrained thinking causes quite a bit of harm in the external sciences, in the anthroposophical movement harm is caused even more so—not merely through incorrect observations—by the fact that for many, interest in supersensible matters does not go hand in hand with an equally strong interest in logical thinking. And this purely logical thinking can be trained particularly well through a study of the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. From such a study, a certain light can also be shed on our present time, in which people do indeed speak now and then of a return to Hegel, but of which one cannot say that the intellectual prerequisites it possesses would facilitate an understanding of Hegel. Hegel, with his entire thought, emerged from that era which had the most intense interest in deriving the foundations of all knowledge and all being from certain highest points of view. And it is no coincidence, but a profound necessity, that Hegel lived in a time when these highest foundations were being sought in the most diverse fields.

[ 2 ] Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart. He entered the Tübingen Seminary (1788–1793), where he was a classmate of Schelling—who for a long, long time far surpassed and outshone him—and of Hölderlin, who was deeply sensitive and soon—though not exactly because of his deep sensitivity—sank into mental derangement. They formed, so to speak, a cloverleaf: the deeply sensitive Hölderlin, searching in mystical chiaroscuro; Schelling, gifted with sharp intellectual energy and an effervescent imagination; and the somewhat ponderous Hegel, laboriously drilling his thoughts from his soul. Schelling and Hegel later worked together again at the University of Jena, which was at that very time a hotbed of intellectual life. Schelling captivated his listeners with the tremendous intellectual vigor with which he addressed philosophical problems; he also captivated those who did not seek to penetrate the questions of existence through feeling and emotion. Schelling pointed to something in human cognition that transcends all thinking—what he called “intellectual intuition,” which he held should be an innate capacity to peer into the depths of existence. Hegel was his colleague as a lecturer (1801–1806). Even then, his thinking was still ponderous, because every thought of his was meant to be so precisely defined that it never encompassed more than it was intended to signify. And because of this slow, penetrating ponderousness of thought, Hegel is not easily understood at first.

[ 3 ] Then came the sad period of 1806. During this time, Hegel undertook, as he himself put it, the truly great voyages of discovery of his mind. Amid the thunder of cannon fire at Jena, he then completed his first work to emerge from a profound and immensely deep contemplation of the spirit, the *Phenomenology of Spirit*. This is a work unlike any other in the entire history of world literature. Through it, Hegel sought above all to clarify for himself what experiences the soul can have when it ascends from, so to speak, subordinate perspectives to the highest, to what Hegel calls the spirit’s self-realization within itself. At first, one lives in a dull, unreflective connection with the external world, where every this or that, every tree and every house, is something with which one coexists, and every opinion is something in which one lives. Only when one reflects on these various things does perception arise. From perception we then proceed, through thinking, to a sense of self at first, to a dim inkling of the self. Only then do we arrive at the first glimmer of true consciousness. But the ego is, so to speak, still enchanted by its surroundings. It works its way out of this enchantment through the content that it is to derive solely from within itself, by increasingly setting aside what has to do with the external world, what is connected to it. Thus self-consciousness comes into being, and with it the interpenetration, the interweaving of self-consciousness with the spirit. It becomes spirit itself, which grasps itself within itself; it becomes spirit that becomes conscious within itself. And when the human being now looks back, he recognizes what is grasping itself as spirit within him; he recognizes the idea that he has, as it were, extracted from the enchantment of the external world. He recognizes that he was previously caught in the contradiction between subject and object, but that he now, in the overcoming of subject and object, in the self-comprehending idea—which is not merely subject and not merely object—grasps what Hegel calls the absolute idea. Thus, through an immense effort of thought, Hegel had arrived at the foundation of what is called absolute idealism.

[ 4 ] Hegel’s life took many twists and turns after his time as a lecturer in Jena. He worked for a time as a political editor in Bamberg (1807–1808), then as a high school teacher and principal in Nuremberg (1808–1816), and through these diverse external experiences became the realistically minded thinker we later encounter. From Nuremberg, Hegel was appointed for a short time to the University of Heidelberg, where he published his *Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences* in 1817. Regarding the reception of the work, Hegel could well have said what legend attributes to him as a remark he is said to have made shortly before his death: “Of all my students, only one understood me, and he misunderstood me.”

[ 5 ] It is indeed a most peculiar feeling to have plunged something so immensely profound into the current of the world and, at the same time, to see how completely all the prerequisites for grasping that profundity were lacking. Only from Hegel’s standpoint can something like a framework of what this “Encyclopedia” was intended to be be sketched out. But I ask that, even as I now speak in Hegel’s spirit, I not be regarded as a Hegelian. Hegel was concerned with elaborating the standpoint he had reached in the “Phenomenology of Spirit”—a standpoint attained by placing himself beyond subject and object onto the standpoint of the Idea—and, if I may say so, using this standpoint to survey the entire scope of human thought and action.

[ 6 ] According to Hegel, the absolute Idea must not contain the concepts of subject and object, of cognition and opinion, and the like. The Idea transcends all these opposites. Hegel seeks to grasp this Idea as if it were presented in its purity—this Idea, which, while operating in subject and object, transcends both. This Idea may well be found in human beings, in the external world, in spirit and nature, but it transcends both; it lies beyond spirit and nature. Thus, in Hegel’s view, one must not initially conceive of the Idea in abstract terms, as, for example, an abstract point. Rather, it is a self-contained whole that, as an Idea, brings forth a rich content from within itself, just as the entire plant with all its individual parts lies implicitly within the plant seed. Thus, according to Hegel, the Idea is to bring forth from itself a content that is independent of mind and nature, which, when applied, must therefore be applied to both. Thus, before engaging with the meaning of spirit and nature, one gains a vantage point above both and then sees in nature a manifestation of the Idea and likewise sees the Idea’s unfolding in the spiritual. We must therefore gain a vantage point from which the Idea is developed as if humanity were not present at all. Man then surrenders himself to the innermost process of the world of ideas developing within itself and out of itself. This standpoint yields what, in Hegel’s sense, can be called the Science of Logic. There one is not dealing with a subject and an object, as in Aristotelian logic, but with a self-movement of the idea standing above subject and object.

[ 7 ] For any mode of thought that wishes to confine itself solely to the things of the external world, it is difficult to find one’s place within the strictly ordered ranks of Hegel’s concepts. One then feels something like violence being done to oneself; one feels thrust into a system of ideas that has absolutely nothing in common with ordinary, everyday rational reasoning. The idea is supposed to think, not I: that is the feeling one has. That is why people usually do not engage with Hegel’s world of ideas at all. But if one does engage with it, well, one might correct Hegel here and there—which is particularly easy with Hegel—but that is not the point; rather, the point is that through the study of Hegel, one undergoes an immense discipline of thought, because nowhere can one learn as much as in Hegelian logic where a system of human concepts, indeed any concept at all, is permitted to arise. A concept can be grasped in its full scope only if one can conceive of it solely at a specific point within an entire conceptual fabric. To make this clear, Hegel begins with the emptiest concept, the concept of Being, which is usually posited without one actually realizing where one is actually placing it. Now, this concept is supposed to be entirely empty in Hegel. We must therefore, right here at the very entrance to Hegel’s logic, set aside all later content that this concept has acquired, and thus already here exercise great self-discipline of thought. Thus, the concept of being is not actually established by human beings; rather, it presents itself to human beings after they have cast all other concepts out of it.

[ 8 ] Now Hegel seeks to discover the method of conceptual development, that is, one concept must develop from another. Thus, if we consider it properly, the concept of being must immediately transcend itself. When we apply the abstract concept of being to a thing, it is already no longer pure. It then already refers to this or that. Thus we come to recognize that being is a nothing—mind you, only within the concept. Through the dialectic that lives within itself, the concept of nothing has thus been drawn out of being.

[ 9 ] Once one has disciplined one’s own thinking, one has already, at this point in Hegel’s Logic, cultivated a mode of thinking that, in Hegel’s subsequent discussions of Being and Nothing, is applied only in the manner that has just emerged. Being and Nothingness now give rise to a third: this is Becoming. But in order for us to grasp Becoming, it must be brought to a standstill. Thus, in fourth place, the concept of Existence springs from the concept of Becoming. Only in this way may the concept of existence be used in Hegel’s further logic: as a Being that has turned itself into a Nothing, which together with this has produced Becoming, which, brought to a standstill, has generated existence. And Hegel proceeds further in this method. He arrives at the concept of the One and the Many; he arrives at the concept of quantity and quality, of measure, and so on.

[ 10 ] Thus, in the first part of Hegel’s *Encyclopedia*, we have an organism of the Idea. Only after we have grasped everything else can we then arrive at the concept of purpose, which stands at the end of Hegel’s Logic. Through such absolute logic, an immense self-discipline of the mind is indeed achieved, which must at least be set before us as an ideal. Through this, one learns to utter a concept only when one has its content fully in one’s consciousness. One must then have nothing in one’s concepts other than what one has at some point in life made clear to oneself as the development of the concept. Within Hegel’s logic, subject and object, cognition, essence, and causality then reappear as later concepts, which one has now clearly grasped.

[ 11 ] Having thus established the complete system of concepts, Hegel was able to show how concepts manifest themselves, so to speak, in enchantment. A concept cannot exist solely within the subject, for then all talk of nature would be meaningless. Rather, our concepts underlie natural phenomena; they have created them. Thus, for the concept, it is irrelevant whether it appears externally or internally. It conceals itself from us externally. Nature is the concept or the idea in its otherness, as Hegel says. Anyone who says anything else about nature goes beyond what they know for certain. Thus, a philosophy of nature and a natural science emerge that seek the development of the idea externally, after it has first been sought in itself, in its purer existence, in logic.

[ 12 ] The Idea initially manifests itself in subordinate phenomena, precisely where the concept is most concealed, so that we might be tempted to speak of natural phenomena as being devoid of ideas. This is what happens in mechanics. But even within mechanical phenomena, Hegel’s discipline of thought introduces a twofold distinction. He distinguishes ordinary mechanics—as it underlies the phenomena of impact, force, and matter, which he calls “relative mechanics”—from absolute mechanics; that is, he considers it inadmissible to apply the ordinary concepts of relative mechanics to the celestial bodies. Only when one develops the concept of absolute mechanics does one find the idea that lies in celestial mechanics. Yet in modern science, one finds no trace of this distinction. Hence Hegel’s polemic against Newton, who, more than anyone else, unhesitatingly transferred the concepts of relative mechanics to those of absolute mechanics.

[ 13 ] From the concept of absolute mechanics, Hegel moves on to the concept of the real organism. He identifies three parts of the organism:

[ 14 ] First, the geological organism. In his view, this means that the entire structure of the Earth should not be understood in such a way that the laws governing a small area are extended to the entire globe, as modern geology does. Hegel sees in every mountain range, in every geological formation, as it were, an organism that has become rigid.

[ 15 ] Second, the plant organism, in which the concept manifests itself, as it were, in indifference to the idea, in uniformity with respect to the idea.

[ 16 ] Third, the animal organism, which in a certain sense already represents the existence of the idea in the external world.

[ 17 ] Thus, the appearance of the idea—the enchanted idea, as it were—is exhausted in earthly existence. Humanity now grows out of these enchanted ideas. It must first be understood in terms of its natural characteristics. This is the concern of anthropology. In his perception, man finds himself, as it were, dulled by external existence, but when he comes to consciousness, and from there to self-consciousness, he in a certain sense tears himself away from external existence. Here, following anthropology, the “Phenomenology of Spirit” now enters the picture. Within this phenomenology, human beings finally grasp themselves as spirit. In doing so, they recognize themselves as subjective spirit by first breaking free from the enchantment of nature. Little by little, the idea itself reappears to them. That which it was in the first, very first concept of being now springs forth. Having thus recognized the Idea in its being-in-itself in logic, in this being-outside-itself in nature, man now grasps it where it is in and for itself.

[ 18 ] Now this initially subjective spirit transforms itself into objective spirit. The Idea reveals what it is in itself through the institutions of the spirit: marriage, family, law, and custom. All of this converges in the state. What emerges in the state as objective spirit, as the realization of the Idea, and what is found in the interplay between states—that is world history. Thus, world history is the existence of the Idea after its passage through the subjective spirit.

[ 19 ] And the question arises: Can we ultimately close the circle like a snake biting its own tail—that is, can we return to the absolute Idea, to a realization of the Idea in which it once again overcomes both subject and object? The Absolute Idea can initially appear in its absolute reality in a preparatory manner, so that it does not enchant or remain hidden as in nature, but rather shines through the phenomenon. This is the case in art. Beyond world history, Hegel thus creates in art the first realization of the absolute idea. But here it still has something of an objective, external nuance about it. It can, however, also have the effect of no longer being a nuance of the external, but a nuance of the internal. This is the case in religion. It is thus the realization of the absolute idea on the second stage.

[ 20 ] But the idea can also overcome the nuance of externality that it possesses in art, and the nuance of interiority that it still possesses in religion. It does so by grasping itself, where it captures itself within itself, in philosophy in the Hegelian sense.

[ 21 ] Thus the circle is complete. There is nothing in the entire realm of history that is as self-contained as Hegel’s system.

[ 22 ] He later elaborated on individual parts in greater detail; for example, in *The Philosophy of Right* (1821), a field in which strictly disciplined thinking has a particularly beneficial effect. And in the preface to *The Philosophy of Right*, Hegel makes a curious statement: When reason grasps the Idea, everything must be understood by seeing the Idea—that is, the workings of reason—in things. — Everything real is therefore rational in the Hegelian sense. This statement can, of course, be immediately refuted by the arbitrariness of ordinary reasoning if one does not take Hegel’s context of thought into account.

[ 23 ] When we sketch out Hegel’s philosophy in our minds, we recognize the core of his philosophy in his extraordinarily disciplined thinking.

[ 24 ] Hegel then taught this philosophy in Berlin from 1818 to 1831, where he died on November 14, 1831—the anniversary of the death of Leibniz, who had once espoused the exact opposite philosophy. In Hegel’s philosophy, the idea that remains entirely within itself is at the center. In Leibniz, the idea disperses into the immense sum of monads. But a single monad, containing the pre-established harmony, would, if it developed, have to take the path of Hegel’s absolute Idea. Thus, Hegel’s system lies in the development of a single monad. Hegel established the strictest monistic system, Leibniz the strictest monadological system. As long as we remain within Hegel’s chains of thought, we are in a strictly closed cycle of the mind. We go beyond it when we measure Hegel’s system against monadology. Indeed, one thinker found that Leibniz’s monadology shattered Hegel’s monism. This was the case with Schelling.

[ 25 ] After remaining silent since 1814, he was appointed to Berlin in 1841, ten years after Hegel’s death, and now sought to move beyond Hegel, with whom he had previously collaborated and edited the *Kritisches Journal der Philosophie* from 1802 to 1803. The lectures he now gave in Berlin were peculiar.

[ 26 ] There is only one way to move beyond Hegel: by drilling a hole from the outside where, in Hegel’s *Phenomenology of Spirit*, the “I” apprehends itself. But one also gets stuck in Leibniz’s monad if one does not drill a hole in the same place there as well. If one starts here, then one emerges beyond the “I” that grasps only itself; then one arrives at supersensory experiences that truly go beyond what Hegel comprehends in his system. And this is indeed what Schelling did. He began to teach “theosophy”—true “theosophy,” albeit in abstract form—and he enjoyed the same success that a person today would have if they sought to teach “theosophy” at a university.

[ 27 ] Schelling taught of a triplicity of the world’s foundation, a threefold power: first, the potential for being; second, pure being; third, synthesis. In this way, he anticipated what is sought today in the threefold Logos. And now Schelling sought to uncover the secrets of the ancient mysteries in his “Philosophy of Mythology.” He sought to teach what we are now exploring—enriched by the supersensible experiences made possible since then—such as what is said in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact” regarding the ancient mysteries. Then Schelling sought to honor the Christian mysteries in his “Philosophy of Revelation,” which attempts to illuminate Christianity in a theosophical sense. Schelling was able to give these lectures only because he had previously stood at a lectern with other views. All the more reason, then, for the fury directed against Schelling. Today, Schelling’s final “theosophical period” is portrayed with great horror in all textbooks and other histories of philosophy, where, having already established the madness of his “intellectual view” earlier, he now went completely mad—or so they claim.

[ 28 ] With this transition from Hegel to Schelling, however, an era had dawned that was entirely under the spell of the natural sciences. And ever since then, we have been witnessing a remarkable spectacle, the observation of which will reveal to us why theosophy and spiritual science must be received today exactly as they are.

[ 29 ] No one can surely admire the findings more than I do, and yet the following must be said. The discovery of the plant and animal cell by Schwann and Schleiden in the 1830s was a great achievement, but it was followed by narrow-minded views. Then came the theory of force and matter, which viewed everything spiritual merely as bubbles of physical processes. The worst manifestation of this way of thinking was the rigorous system in which Büchner encapsulated theoretical materialism in his book *Force and Matter*. Büchner’s bold courage, of course, remains admirable. The other researchers simply did not have the courage to think their ideas through to their logical conclusion.

[ 30 ] But even more refined minds took paths different from those of Hegel and Schelling under the influence of the natural sciences; for example, Hermann Helmholtz, who made truly great contributions in the fields of psychophysics, sensory physiology, physiological optics, and the theory of sound. His discoveries led him—not through reasoning, but through the peculiar nature of the experiments and the suggestive power of the experiments themselves—to reject Hegel, so that he said: “When I open Hegel and read a few sentences from his ‘Philosophy of Nature,’ it is pure nonsense.”

[ 31 ] And once again, a refined mind, well-trained in the arts of thought, was misunderstood: Julius Robert Mayer, who discovered the law of conservation of energy. His law did indeed have enormous physical significance, and this was duly recognized. But Mayer’s lines of thought on the mechanical equivalent of heat in his treatise on “Organic Movement in Its Connection with Metabolism” (1845) were never understood. People preferred to read Helmholtz; he was much easier to understand. Thus, people preferred to read his treatise on the “Interactions of Natural Forces” (1854), in which he demonstrated the validity of Mayer’s law, starting from the impossibility of a perpetual motion machine.

[ 32 ] To this were now added the achievements of Darwinism, and a mind as bold as Haeckel’s—who, however, was averse to any intellectual culture and who therefore could see nothing in Hegel’s philosophy but a thicket of concepts—such a courageous mind was thus called upon to develop the scientific facts in the sense of an external, material history of development. Thus he became the founder of the materialistic Darwinism of the 1860s and 1870s. No philosophical school of thought rose up in opposition to this. At that time, the world could no longer be grasped by philosophy; for it, there was nothing but an interrelationship between philosophy and natural science.

[ 33 ] Thus, a thinker as significant as Eduard von Hartmann, who in his *Philosophy of the Unconscious* (1869) brought materialistic Darwinism, so to speak, before the forum of a spiritual philosophy, was denounced as a dilettante who had no understanding of the natural sciences. Many counter-writings appeared, including a highly witty anonymous one: “The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Philosophy and the Theory of Descent” (1872). Haeckel said of this work that it was so excellent and so thoroughly exposed the errors of Eduard von Hartmann’s philosophy that he (Haeckel) himself could have written it, and Oscar Schmidt, Darwin’s biographer, deeply regretted that his esteemed colleague did not emerge from anonymity. Then a new edition of this work appeared, and Eduard von Hartmann named himself as the author.

[ 34 ] Thus, philosophy had once provided, in the crudest possible way, empirical proof that it is indeed capable of understanding the natural sciences, even if a trained mind leads it to conclusions quite different from those of materialism. This struggle is by no means merely a clash of propositions, but rather a confrontation between cultural forces.

[ 35 ] More discerning minds always retained an appreciation for both philosophy and the natural sciences. But due to the overwhelming influence of the natural sciences, they could only be heard within the narrowest of circles. Thus, Vincenz Knauer’s extraordinarily subtle and far-reaching work on the history of philosophy, *The Main Problems of Philosophy*, could be understood only by a very small circle. Indeed, not even the arguments put forward by Herbart’s narrow philosophy against external materialism were able to make an impact. Thus it came to pass that a strictly logical mind, though schooled in scholasticism, which sought to build within itself a bridge to the scientific method, could not even achieve this within itself. Such was the case with Franz Brentano, who sought to combine the scientific method with strictly logical thinking in his *Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint*, the first volume of which appeared in 1874. But his intellectual self-discipline did not prevail; inwardly, he remained too much under the sway of scientific materialism. He could not come to terms with himself, and so the second volume, announced for the fall, did not appear at first. And today Brentano lives as an elderly gentleman in Florence, and the second volume has still not been published.

[ 36 ] I myself witnessed just how terribly this inner conflict could rage within the individual soul. I saw how the methodological aspect of intellectual training was virtually rendered powerless by the influence of the natural sciences. It was at a formal session of the Vienna Academy in the 1880s, at which I was present, when Ernst Mach gave a lecture on economy in the conception of natural phenomena. He indeed found no way to grasp natural phenomena within his method. With every sentence, one felt painfully how all method of thought vanished, how everything shrank to the principle of the least expenditure of energy in the understanding of nature. Thus, thinking was pressed down from the heart-creation it had been with Hegel to the conceivably least economic significance.

[ 37 ] Thus Hegel remained, as it were, an enchanted spirit himself, and not even Kuno Fischer could redeem him. The truth of what Rosenkranz had said in the introduction to his Hegel biography was proven: We philosophers of the second half of the 19th century are, at best, merely the gravediggers of the philosophers of the first half of the 19th century. And by that he meant—biographers.

[ 38 ] The works of Otto Liebmann, Zeller, and others, which drew on Kant, then seemed to bring about a new surge in the method of thinking. Liebmann wrote one of the most incisive treatises ever written in the field of epistemology. He tried by every means to establish a transcendental epistemology, but in the end he arrived at a kind of epistemology that can roughly be described as something resembling a dog turning in circles. He did not get beyond the starting point of his epistemology.

[ 39 ] And so the current state of affairs came about. Clausius’s seminal formulation of the theory of heat emerged, which had a retroactive effect on sensory physiology and, ultimately, on the theory of knowledge. Here, too, philosophy once again exerted its influence over the natural sciences.

[ 40 ] Thus, those who spoke in the tradition of the old school of thought were not given a voice. It is true that in the 1880s a researcher attempted, building on Kant, to truly advance the theory of knowledge, but he was not heard. Thus, under the pressure of circumstances, he abandoned this field entirely and turned to aesthetics. It was not until 1906 that he—Johannes Volkelt—published another short epistemological work on “The Sources of the Certainty of Our Knowledge.” The conditions for a true epistemology were just as absent as those for a true understanding of Hegel.

[ 41 ] Our age finds itself far more satisfied, for example, with a Spencerian encyclopedia that goes only slightly and superficially beyond the natural sciences. And when the concept of the smallest economic unit, as Mach had introduced it, returned from the New World in the pragmatism of a William James, it was enthusiastically received as something new. However, the strict columns of Hegel’s absolute logic and the entirely unphilosophical reasoning of pragmatism make for a rather curious combination.

[ 42 ] But goodness cannot be completely suppressed; it can only be suppressed temporarily. Where a misunderstood Kantianism could not settle over thought like mildew—arising, so to speak, from the strength of the people—healthy thinking began to take shape. Thus, the Russian philosopher Soloviev did indeed introduce significant new methodological approaches by basing himself on a young popular force which, if you will, has not even yet developed into a proper culture, rather than on an old one like Franz Brentano. The Frenchman Boutroux, too, introduced a new, useful concept into the history of development. But such endeavors are ignored. Beneath the ashes, the truth continues to smolder, as it were. It may be overgrown by prejudice and impotence, but as a discipline of thought, it nevertheless continues to work secretly. And precisely the one who believes he must represent spiritual science must hope that this self-discipline of thought will pave the way for spiritual science. He must find the path to Hegel’s strictest logic and can only thus firmly ground on the foundation of thought that which he must bring down from higher spiritual worlds in often loose forms. Thus, in the realm of the supersensible, if we may put it that way, there is nothing that strictly trained thinking would have to reject. Sharper, self-disciplined thinking will find the transition, the bridge, that leads from the last and highest product of the physical plane—thinking—across to the supersensible.