Hegel

A philosophical revolution ushered in the political collapse:

• in France in the 18th century
• in Germany in the 19th century

But these 2 looked very different!

The French were in open combat against:

• all official science
• the church
• the state.

Their writings were printed across the frontier, in Holland or England, while they themselves were often in jeopardy of imprisonment in the Bastille.

On the other hand, the Germans were professors, state-appointed instructors of youth.

Their writings were recognized textbooks.

The Hegelian system was the termination system of the whole development. It was even raised to the rank of a royal Prussian philosophy of state!

Could a revolution hide behind these professors and their:

• obscure, pedantic phrases
• ponderous, wearisome sentences?

The liberals were the bitterest opponents of this brain-confusing philosophy.

• They were regarded as the representatives of the revolution.

But Heinrich Heine saw, as early as 1833, what the government and the liberals did not see.

Let us take an example. No philosophical proposition has earned more gratitude from

Hegel had a famous statement: “All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real.”

It sanctified the things that exist:

• despotism
• police government
• Star Chamber proceedings
• censorship.

That is how Frederick William III and how his subjects understood it.

The narrow-minded governments were most thankful for this just as the narrow-minded liberals were most angry at it.

But according to Hegel, not everything that exists is also real, without further qualification.

For Hegel, the attribute of reality belongs only to that which at the same time is necessary: “In the course of its development reality proves to be necessity.”

A particular governmental measure — Hegel himself cites the example of “a certain tax regulation” — is therefore for him by no means real without qualification.

That which is necessary, however, proves itself in the last resort to be also rational.

Applied to the Prussian state of that time, the Hegelian proposition, therefore, merely means: this state is rational, corresponds to reason, insofar as it is necessary.

If it nevertheless appears to us to be evil, but still, in spite of its evil character, continues to exist, then the evil character of the government is justified and explained by the corresponding evil character of its subjects.

The Prussians of that day had the government that they deserved.

According to Hegel, reality is, however, in no way an attribute predictable of any given state of affairs, social or political, in all circumstances and at all times.

On the contrary.

The Roman Republic was real, but so was the Roman Empire, which superseded it. In 1789, the French monarchy had become so unreal, that is to say, so robbed of all necessity, so irrational, that it had to be destroyed by the Great Revolution, of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm.

In this case, therefore, the monarchy was the unreal and the revolution the real. And so, in the course of development, all that was previously real becomes unreal, loses it necessity, its right of existence, its rationality.

In the place of moribund reality comes a new, viable reality — peacefully if the old has enough intelligence to go to its death without a struggle; forcibly if it resists this necessity.

Thus the Hegelian proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself: All that is real in the sphere of human history, becomes irrational in the process of time, is therefore irrational by its very destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality, and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict existing apparent reality.

In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish.

But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the close of the whole movement since Kant, we must here confine ourselves), that it once and for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all product of human thought and action.

Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained.

What holds good for the realm of philosophical knowledge holds good also for that of every other kind of knowledge and also for practical action. Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect “state”, are things which can only exist in imagination.

On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher.

Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses vitality and justification.

It must give way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition, and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honored institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it.

For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher.

Dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far.

The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute — the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits.