6.3. Idealism: Fichte and Schelling on Road to Hegel

After I. Kant classical German philosophy was developed by such outstanding philosophers as Fichte and Schelling. Both of them tried to overcome the Kantian opposition of phenomenon and noumenon by grounding cognitive activeness in some unitary principle – the absolute ego, as in Fichte, or the absolute identity of being and thinking, as in Schelling.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was of a poor family in Saxony but through a local nobleman obtained an education, and eventually became Professor of Philosophy at Jena (though he was driven from there in 1799 on suspicion of atheism). At his death he was Rector of the University of Berlin. His most important publication was his “Basis of the Entire Theory of Science” (1794). As well as developing an idealist philosophy he was an important proponent of pan-German nationalism, and a pioneer of socialist thinking. The heart of his interest was morals, but he set this in the context of a kind of absolute realism.

He was impressed with Kant, but saw that his own critique of the master had drastic consequences. He considered that there was some instability at the core of the Kantian worldview, which was the concept of “things in themselves”. If one wanted seriously to tread the path of things one would end up a materialist; if not, then one would end up an idealist. This path he himself took, and criticized Kant for the noumena which in no way, according to Kant’s own principles, could give rise to (that is cause) phenomena. They were superfluous, but their removal meant that the explanation of the world lies on the near side of the subject-object distinction. But to explain the world via an Ego it is impossible to identify this with the individual. So we call on the notion of an Absolute Ego (later he wrote of an Absolute Being). Such a Being is not God, in that the latter has to be a person and a person is finite. This is why Fichte was attracted to Spinoza, and why he was accused of atheism. But at the heart of the Absolute there lies ethical concern, and reverence for what could for Fichte substitute for God. The Absolute Ego creates the non-ego as the field for its moral activity: however, if both are unlimited they will tend to blot each other out. So, there is a third proposition to be affirmed (a synthesis of the prior thesis and antithesis), namely the positing of a divisible non-ego as opposed to a divisible ego. In other words, the Absolute produces finite self-consciousness which arises through its perception of the resistance of the natural world.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) was raised in Württemburg and went to Tübingen University where he was close to Hegel and Hölderlin. At 23 he was appointed to a Chair at Jena. Eventually he taught at Berlin and among those who attended his lectures were an unlikely constellation – Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Engels and Bakunin. In his early philosophy, published in 1800 as his ”System of Transcendental Idealism”, his ideas were a stepping stone between Fichte and Hegel. His absolute idealism, similar to Fichte’s, had a much warmer conclusion, since he saw the philosophy of art as the culmination of his metaphysics. In nature the Absolute partially manifests the fusion of the real and the ideal through the production of organisms, but it is in the free creative world of art that we can find the intuition of the infinite in the finite product of the intelligence. The artist is not, however, thereby a philosopher, since he may not have the self-understanding to appraise the significance of his achievement.

If Fichte and Schelling are a bit dry in the rather unwieldy maneuvering of absolutes and egos, they prepared the way for Hegel’s moving Absolute Idealism, which itself drew together strands from the criticism of Kant, the emergence of romanticism, the greater conclusioness of history and the flowering of the intellectual life as systematized in the German universities, the leaders in their day. His huge synthesis helped to stimulate intellectual development, especially in the humanities, and of course he was a powerful shaper of Marx, who in turn had a huge effect on the emerging social sciences.

6.4. G.W.-F. Hegel, the Giant of XVIII Century German Philosophy

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was born in Stuttgart and educated at Tübingen. He co-operated with Schelling in publishing a critical journal of philosophy, taught at a school in Nüremberg, and in due course (1818) became a Professor of Philosophy in Berlin. His two most important works were the “Phenomenology of Mind” (1807) and “The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” (1817). Also important was “Philosophy of right” (1821); and after his death his writings were edited by a group of friends and came out in eighteen volumes (1832-1834).

If Fichte established the Absolute, Hegel gave it motion. The Absolute is the totality, which is a process, and this process tends towards self-understanding. Like Aristotle’s God it is self-thinking thought, but unlike Aristotle Hegel saw the totality as tending towards self-understanding. He wanted to set this process forth as a dialectical one. And he did this in three parts (Hegel was in love with triads), in regard to logic, nature and spirit (Geist). From a logical point of view we start with the judgment that the Absolute is Being. But pure Being has within itself a kind of instability. In being completely indeterminate it is equivalent to Nothing. In flickering from Being to Nothing and back again it exhibits something which can be understood by a third notion, which rises beyond the first two, but ‘takes them up’ in a synthesis, namely the notion of Becoming. This helps to illustrate Hegel’s dialectical method. He did not think of contradictions as sings of the breakdown of thinking. Rather he saw it as a stimulus to a higher stage, a synthesis, in which the contradiction is taken up and for the time being resolved. He considered that the limited nature of our concepts is bound to give rise to contradictions (there is a reflection here of Kant’s antinomies, or contradictory conclusions arrived at when concepts are used beyond the realm of phenomena).

The final and most important part of Hegel’s encyclopedic work dealt with the philosophy of Spirit or Mind. First of all we have the spirit as sensing and feeling subject which is actual as embodied. It is sunk in a kind of slumber, for so far it has not gained consciousness. But now consider it as aware of outer objects: it has got, so to speak, something to push against. This inevitably leads to a third phase in which the duality between subject and object is overcome, namely self-consciousness. But the ballet of triads goes on, because the self-consciousness individual comes to recognize a universal self-consciousness in which he perceives other selves. Hegel went on to examine at a higher level the nature of finite spirit, and stressed the importance of free will seen as a combination of the theoretical and the practical spirit.

The Totality objectifies itself though nature, which as it were provides resistance for finite spirits and so self-consciousness and then a sort of universal consciousness. But this is not any regular doctrine of creation, though Hegel does have a role for religious language as expressing philosophical insights imaginatively. The Spirit objectifies itself through the ethical substance of human life, which Hegel characterized as the family, civil society and the State. Civil society is something of an abstraction since it is typically or always developed as a State, but it stands for the network of economic relationships and organizations through which individuals mesh with one another. But the State is the highest manifestation of the objective Spirit, in which human beings submit their wills to rules and their feelings to the control of reason. It incorporates individual freedom, but this is nevertheless subordinate to a higher freedom (there is a strong influence from Rousseau here).

It is through the history of States that the World Spirit comes to self-realization. Hegel did not seemingly look forward to a world government. The struggle of States was in its way good in maintaining competition and ethical health. War itself was natural and rational in keeping the dialectic of history in motion. Hegel saw freedom being most fully realized in the Germanic States in which the Reformation played a vital role. The supreme expression of the onward progress was the Prussian State.

Philosophy itself, properly understood, is the coming into full self-consciousness of the Absolute, so the philosopher has a spearhead role in the whole evolution of the universe as it thinks itself. This lofty view of the role or philosophy, combined with the huge sweep of Hegel’s interests and concerns, gave him a formidable inspirational role in the German culture of the period, and stimulated work in varied and manifold direction – in history, in esthetics, in the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of law, to name a few. It was not a lucid system but it was imposing.

The merit of Hegel is that he gave a dialectical analysis of all major categories of philosophy and formed three main laws of dialectics. The dialectical method permits consideration of all phenomena and processes in universal interconnection, interdependence and development. The core of Hegel's dialectics is the category of contradiction as a unity of opposites (the polar concepts). The contradiction is a "motor" of the spirit development. It was Hegel who gave dialectics the most advanced and perfect form. Hegel described dialectics as a driving force in learning the truth, as a principle that brings inner connection and necessity into the content of science. In addition, Hegel's dialectical method involves the following principles of the analysis of reality: the descending from abstract to concrete, coincidence of historical and logical and others. This heritage has entered the treasury of world philosophy.

However, there is a deep inner contradiction in Hegel’s philosophy. What contradiction is that? Hegel’s method is directed towards the infinity of cognition. Since the objective basis is absolute spirit, and the goal, the self-cognition of that spirit, cognition is finite and limited. In other words, passing through a system of cognitive stages, the system of cognition is crowned by the last stage that of self-cognition, of which the realization is Hegel’s system of philosophy itself. The contradiction between the finite Hegel’s method and system is a contradiction between the finite and the infinite. This contradiction in Hegel is by no means dialectical, for it does not become the source for further development.

Classics of Marxism-Leninism subjected Hegel’s idealism to acute and comprehensive critique, but at the same time they highly appreciated the positive elements contained in his work, above all his dialectics.