Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 1 (of 3)
Georg Hegel · en
Now that this Notion has appeared, it has become a more universal
Philosophy, and not so much simple Philosophy as the universal culture
of which every man who did not belong to those devoid of thought,
partook, and necessarily partook. For we call culture just the Notion
as applied in actuality, in so far as it makes its appearance not
purely in its abstraction, but in unity with the manifold content of
all ordinary conceptions. But in culture, the Notion is the predominant
as also the actuating, because in both the determinate is recognized
in its limits, in its transition into something else. This culture
became the general aim of education, and there were hence a number
of teachers of Sophistry. Indeed, the Sophists are the teachers of
Greece through whom culture first came into existence in Greece, and
thus they took the place of poets and of rhapsodists, who before this
were the ordinary instructors. For religion was no instructress, since
no teaching was in it imparted; and though priests certainly offered
sacrifices, prophesied and interpreted the sayings of the oracle,
instruction is something quite different from this. But the Sophists
educated men in wisdom, in the sciences, music, mathematics, &c., and
this was their foremost aim. Before Pericles appeared in Greece, the
desire for culture through thought and through reflection was awakened;
men wished to be cultured in their ideas, and in their various
relations to guide themselves by thought, and no longer merely through
oracles, or through custom, passion, the feelings of the moment. For
the end of the State is the universal, under which the particular is
comprehended. Because the Sophists kept in view and enlarged upon this
culture, they prosecuted teaching as a special calling, business, or
profession, as an office taking the place of schools; they travelled
round the towns of Greece, the youth of which was by them instructed.