Hegel's Philosophy of Mind — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Georg Hegel · en
inner standards, but a certain, though, for our part-by-part vision,
incalculable proportion between what is done and suffered. And in this
liberation of the moral from its restrictions, Art renders no slight aid.
Thus in different ways, religion presupposes morality to fill up its
vacant form, and morality presupposes religion to give its laws an
ultimate sanction, which at the same time points beyond their limitations.
But art, religion, and philosophy still rest on the national culture and
on the individual mind. However much they rise in the heights of the ideal
world, they never leave the reality of life and circumstance behind, and
float in the free empyrean. Yet there are degrees of universality, degrees
in which they reach what they promised. As the various psychical _nuclei_
of an individual consciousness tend through the course of experience to
gather round a central idea and by fusion and assimilation form a complete
mental organisation; so, through the march of history, there grows up a
complication and a fusion of national ideas and aspirations, which, though
still retaining the individuality and restriction of a concrete national
life, ultimately present an organisation social, aesthetic, and religious
which is a type of humanity in its universality and completeness. Always
moving in the measure and on the lines of the real development of its
social organisation, the art and religion of a nation tend to give
expression to what social and political actuality at its best but
imperfectly sets in existence. They come more and more to be, not mere
competing fragments as set side by side with those of others, but
comparatively equal and complete representations of the many-sided and
many-voiced reality of man and the world. Yet always they live and
flourish in reciprocity with the fullness of practical institutions and
individual character. An abstractly universal art and religion is a
delusion—until all diversities of geography and climate, of language and
temperament, have been made to disappear. If these energies are in power
and reality and not merely in name, they cannot be applied like a panacea
or put on like a suit of ready-made clothes. If alive, they grow with
individualised type out of the social situation: and they can only attain
a vulgar and visible universality, so far as they attach themselves to
some simple and uniform aspects,—a part tolerably identical everywhere—in
human nature in all times and races.