Consequences in Regard to Treating the History of Philosophy

Before we start that one semester is too short a time in which to come quite thoroughly to terms with the history of philosophy, a work of the Spirit which spans millennia.

The field, therefore, has to be narrowed.

From what we have already said concerning the kind of history we want to speak about, there are, in regard to its extension, two conclusions to be drawn.

1. We limit ourselves to principles and to their development in the various philosophies.

This will be particularly true when we are treating of the earlier philosophies, not so much because of the lack of time, but rather because in them only principles can be of interest to us.

They are the most abstract, simplest, and consequently also the most indeterminate principles – i.e., wherein determinateness has not yet been posited, even though in them all determinations are contained. To a certain extent these abstract principles are adequate; they go far enough to be of interest to us.

Because, however, their development is not yet complete, qualitatively they are particular, i.e., in their application they extend only to a delimited sphere. Such, for example, is the principle of mechanism. Were we to consider what Descartes has to say about animal nature on the basis of this principle we should not be satisfied.

Our own more profound concept demands for this a more concrete principle; it would not be enough for us to use this principle in explaining plant or animal nature. There is a sphere of reality suited to an abstract principle; thus the principle of mechanism is valid for inorganic nature, which belongs to the sphere of abstract existence.

(The living is the concrete, the inorganic the abstract.) For a higher sphere, however, the principle of mechanism is inadequate. To give another example, the ancient abstract philosophies looked at the universe from the standpoint of the atomistic principle.

Such a principle is totally inadequate, when there is question of life, of spirit. A consideration, therefore, of its relationship to life or to spirit is of no interest to us. From this point of view, then, it is philosophical interest which determines us to consider here only the principles of these philosophies.

2. In regard to older philosophers, then, we must confine ourselves exclusively to the philosophical, leaving out the historical, biographical, critical, etc.

Thus disregarding what has been written about them, what is only peripheral to them.

In this connection all sorts of extrinsic considerations have been injected, e.g., that Thales was the first to predict an eclipse of the sun, that Descartes and Leibniz were skilled in mathematical analysis, etc. All such considerations we eliminate.

By the same token the historical account of the way systems were disseminated can be of little concern to us here. We treat simply the content of philosophical systems, not their extrinsic history.

We know, for example, a host of Stoic teachers who had a great influence in their own times and even developed this or that detail. We abstract from such details and pass over these men. To the extent that they were famous only as teachers, the history of philosophy is silent about them.

The second point to be taken up in the Introduction is the relationship of philosophy to other manifestations of spirit, the relation of its history to other histories.