Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2 (of 3)Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2 (of 3)
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy -- History
The second misapprehension that prevails with regard to these Ideas
takes place when they are not transferred beyond our consciousness,
but pass for ideals of our reason, which are no doubt necessary, but
which produce nothing that either has reality now or can ever attain to
it. As in the former view the Beyond is a conception that lies outside
the world, and in which species are hypostatized, so in this view
our reason is just such a realm beyond reality. But when species are
looked on as if they were the forms of reality in us, there is again a
misapprehension, just as if they were looked at as æsthetic in nature.
By so doing, they are defined as intellectual perceptions which must
present themselves immediately, and belong either to a happy genius
or else to a condition of ecstasy or enthusiasm. In such a case they
would be mere creations of the imagination, but this is not Plato’s nor
the true sense. They are not immediately in consciousness, but they
are in the apprehending knowledge; and they are immediate perceptions
only in so far as they are apprehending knowledge comprehended in its
simplicity and in relation to the result; in other words, the immediate
perception is only the moment of their simplicity. Therefore we do not
possess them, they are developed in the mind through the apprehending
knowledge; enthusiasm is the first rude shape they take, but knowledge
first brings them to light in rational developed form; they are in this
form none the less real, for they alone are Being.
On this account Plato first of all distinguishes Science, the Knowledge
of the True, from opinion. “Such thinking (διάνοιαν) as of one who
knows, we may justly call knowledge (γνώμην); but the other, opinion
(δόξαν). Knowledge proceeds from that which is; opinion is opposed to
it; but it is not the case that its content is Nothing—that would be
ignorance—for when an opinion is held, it is held about Something.
Opinion is thus intermediate between ignorance and science, its content
is a mixture of Being and Nothing. The object of the senses, the object
of opinion, the particular, only participates in the Beautiful, the
Good, the Just, the Universal; but it is at the same time also ugly,
evil, unjust, and so on. The double is at the same time the half. The
particular is not only large or small, light or heavy, and any one of
these opposites, but every particular is as much the one as the other.
Such a mixture of Being and non-Being is the particular, the object
of opinion;”[19]—a mixture in which the opposites have not resolved
themselves into the Universal. The latter would be the speculative
Idea of knowledge, while to opinion belongs the manner of our ordinary
consciousness.
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