Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 3 (of 3) — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 3 (of 3)
Georg Hegel · en
self-consciousness, as the whole development of its reality. The
Neo-Platonists had found that principle of realization—namely, this
real substance which again places itself in quite opposed, though in
themselves real determinations—but having got so far they did not find
the form, the principle of self-consciousness.
On the Teutonic nations the world-spirit imposed the task of developing
an embryo into the form of the thinking man. What comes first is the
mind as apprehended, and to that is opposed the subjectivity of will
which has not been taken up into mind; the kingdom of truth and that of
the world are bound together and at the same time evidently divided. An
intelligible world has thus in the conception of men established itself
in the mode of this same actuality, like a far-away land that is just as
really conceived of by us, peopled and inhabited, as the world we see,
but which is hidden from us as though by a mountain. It is not the Greek
or any other world of gods and of mythology—a simple, undivided faith;
for there is likewise present in it the highest negativity, that is, the
contradiction between actuality and that other world. This intellectual
world expresses the nature of real absolute existence. It is on it that
Philosophy tries its powers, and on it that thought also moils and
toils. We have in general outline to deal with these not very pleasing
manifestations.
Our first view of Philosophy, as revealed in Christianity (pp. 10-21)
is that of a dim groping which is carried on within the depths of the
Idea—as being the forms assumed by the same, which constitute its
moments; we see a hard struggle made by reason, which cannot force
its way out of the imagination and popular conceptions to the Notion.
There is no venture too rash for the imagination to undertake, because,
impelled by reason, it cannot satisfy itself with beautiful images, but
has to pass beyond them. There is likewise no extravagance of reason
into which it does not fall, because it cannot obtain the mastery of
the image, but within this element is merely in the act of warfare
with it. Later on than this Western self-immersion, there arose in the
East expansion, negation of all that is concrete, abstraction from
all determinations; this pure contemplation or pure thought present
in Mohammedanism corresponds to the Christian descent into self.
Within Christianity itself, however, the intellectual world is set in
opposition to that first Cabalistic principle; in it pure conceptions
rule which constitute the ideas present in thought, and with this we
enter upon the Scholastic philosophy. Philosophy, like the arts and
sciences, when, through the rule of the Barbarians of Germany, they
became dumb and lifeless, took refuge with the Arabians, and there
attained a wonderful development; they were the first sources from
which the West obtained assistance. Through the presupposition of the
immediately present and accepted truth, thought had lost its freedom and