Hegel: Texts and Commentary by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel & Walter Kaufmann

Author:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel & Walter Kaufmann [Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: History & Surveys, Philosophy, General, Psychology, Modern
ISBN: 9780268010690
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 1977-12-10T06:00:00+00:00

1.2. Inner necessity that philosophy become scientific

In keeping with the preceding paragraph, Hegel proceeds to discuss, first, the “inner necessity” and then (1.3) the “external necessity.”

1 “notion”: Vorstellung. This German word is usually rendered, by translators of Kant and Schopenhauer, as either “representation” or “idea.” The former is literally correct but often, as in the present context, exceedingly clumsy. “Idea,” on the other hand, is often needed to render the German Idee. An examination of all occurrences of Vorstellung in this long preface shows that Hegel generally means to suggest something vague and distinctly less scientific than a Concept. “Notion” seems just right.

2 “intuition”: Anschauung. This translation seems firmly established in English translations of German philosophy; and according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, “intuition” means in “Mod. Philos. the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process.” This sense, which goes back to 1600, is exactly right here.

3 Mid-twentieth-century readers may associate this view with Paul Tillich, without realizing that Tillich wrote his doctoral dissertation on Schelling and owes much to German romanticism. Lasson, in 1907, associated the views criticized here with “Jacobi, the romantics, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher.”

4 “comprehended”: begriffen. “Concept”: Begriff.

5 “husks” (Treber) alludes to the parable of the prodigal son, Luke 15:16. Cf. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters (1795) : “Nature (sense) unifies everywhere, the understanding differentiates everywhere, but reason unifies again. Hence man, before he begins to philosophize, is closer to the truth than the philosopher who has not yet concluded his inquiry” (note to the 18th Letter). Hegel scorns those who, at the first differentiation when they find they are far from home, turn back instead of persevering, pushing on the inquiry, and comprehending the truth. In his opposition to Schwärmerei, the cult of feeling, and the inspirational philosophizing of the pious, Hegel does not pit reason against passion, or academic pedantry against deep experience; instead he questions the seriousness of the passion and the depth of the experience of the writers he criticizes: they run back home as soon as the going gets rough and hide their lack of strength in a mist of emotion.

6 “the feeling of the essence”: das Gefühl des Wesens. Baillie: “the feeling of existence.”

7 It is the beauty of Hegel’s criticisms that, though directed against some of his contemporaries, they are no less applicable to many well-known writers in other ages.

8 “sense”: the German in both places is Sinn; but Baillie has “sense” the first time and “mind and interest” the second, thus missing some of the contrast.

Hegel juxtaposes the otherworldliness of the past with the worldliness of the present.

Lasson has a note at the point where our 7 appears: “This description of the spiritual situation of the age corresponds to the section on the ‘unhappy consciousness,’” later in the book. But the immediately preceding sentence (split into two sentences in our translation) does not necessarily imply any otherworldliness: it might be applied, for example, to Jaspers and Tillich.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.