Progress in the History of Philosophy

Western Philosophy has 2 great forms as 2 main periods:

1. Greek philosophy

2. Germanic philosophy

This is the philosophy of the Germanic peoples, in the framework of Christianity.

• Through the influence of the Germanic nations the other European nations – Italy, Spain, France, England, etc. – have taken on a new form.

Greek philosophy differs from Germanic philosophy just as much as Greek art does from Germanic art.

Greek influence reaches into the, Germanic world with the Romans being the link between the two.

Greek philosophy settled in the Roman world, because Greek culture was adopted in the Roman world.

The Romans, however, did not have their own philosophy, poetry, nor religion, which is really Greek.

The Greek world developed thought into the Idea.

The Christian or Germanic world comprehended the thought of Spirit.

The line of demarcation is that between idea and spirit.

The first stage is necessarily the most abstract. It is the simplest and most impoverished, in contrast to the concrete.

It is not yet diversified, not yet determined in a variety of ways. Thus, the most ancient philosophies are the poorest of all.

The first stage is totally simple.

After this, more precise determinations and figurations are constructed on this simple basis.

When, for example, it is said that the universal, the absolute, is water or the infinite or being, then the universal has been determined as water, the infinite, or being.

Still, the determinations themselves remain thoroughly general, non-conceptual, and undetermined.

Likewise, when it is said that the universal is the atom, the one, this too is an indeterminate determination.

The next stage in the development is the grasp of the universal as aware of itself, self-determining – it is thought as active in a universal way. What comes at this stage is more concrete, but it is still somewhat abstract.

It is the nous of Anaxagoras or, better still, of Socrates, the beginning of a subjective totality, where thinking comprehends itself, and nous is determined as being thinking activity.

At a third stage this abstract totality has to realize itself, and that in diversified determinations (active thought is that which determines and diversifies), and these diversified, realized determinations are themselves elevated to totalities.

On this level, the universal and the particular are contrasted, as are thinking as such and external reality, or indications of externality, such as sensations, etc.

Stoicism and Epicureanism become contrasting philosophies. These contraries are united in a higher.

This latter can consist in a destruction of the other two, as in skepticism. But the affirmative union of the two is their synthesis (Aufhebung) in a higher totality, in the Idea.

This stage can be called a realization of the concept.

The concept is the universal, which is determined for itself and yet retains its unity along with its determination into individualities in such a way that the latter are transparent to it.

Thus, when I say I, many determinations are involved, but the determinations are mine, they do not become independent. In them I continue to be the same myself.

A further step is the realization of the concept, such that the determinations themselves become totalities (the infinite goodness of the concept), participating fully in the concept, with the result that the latter’s aspects become totalities separated from each other, whether indifferently side by side or in conflict with each other.

This third level is one of unification, where the Idea is such that differences are concrete and at the same time are contained (or have been held) in the unity of the concept. Greek philosophy came that far. It closes with the intellectual, ideal world of Alexandrian philosophy.

In this world, however, in this idea of totality, one determination is still lacking. I said, you will recall, that the Idea is, that the concept determines itself, particularizes itself, that it develops its two major aspects, positing them as identical. In this identity the independent totalities which are the aspects are also posited as negative.

It is through this negation that the identity becomes subjectivity, absolute being-for-itself, i.e., actuality. In this way the Idea is elevated to Spirit. Spirit is the subjectivity which knows itself.

It is its own object.

Its object (i.e., itself) it makes into a totality. Thus, it is itself totality and knows itself as totality for itself. This principle of absolute being-for-itself or of freedom is the principle of the Christian world, wherein the one determination is precisely this, that as such man has an infinite worth.

Christian religion expresses this more precisely by saying that each individual is to attain blessedness. Thereby an infinite worth is attributed to each individual. The principle of the second epoch, therefore, is the Idea knowing itself.

If we want to represent this advance to ourselves imaginatively we can speak of thinking as though it were space. First of all appear the most abstract determinations of space, i.e., points and lines; thereafter the union of these in a triangle.

This latter, it is true, is already concrete, but still in the abstract element of surface; a stage which corresponds to what we called nous.

The next stage is that the three lines which bound it become whole figures, i.e., become the realization of the abstract, of the abstract sides of the whole. At a third stage the three surfaces, triangular sides, are joined together into a body, a totality. That is as far as Greek philosophy goes.

Once we have such a body there enters in a distinction between the center of the [enclosed] space and that which fills it [its area].

This then results in a contrast between what is totally simple and ideal (which the center is) and what is real and substantial.

The uniting of both, then, is the totality of the self-knowing Idea – no longer, however, a disinterested uniting, but such that the center is self-knowing personality over against objective, physical corporeity. Within this totality of the self-knowing idea the substantial is, on the one hand, essentially distinguished from subjectivity.

Yet, on the other hand, the latter as self-positing also becomes substantial. At first, of course, subjectivity is merely formal, but it is the real possibility of the substantial.

Subjectivity in and for itself consists precisely in this, that the subject has the determination of fulfilling its universality, of realizing it, and of positing itself as identical with the substance.

Thus, the principle of philosophy in the modern era on the one hand consists in the moment of ideality or subjectivity being for itself as such or in existing as singularity. With this there comes into being what we call subjective freedom.

This latter, however, is at the same time universal, since the subject as such, i.e., man as man, is free and has the infinite determination of becoming substantial, which is the other determination found in Christian religion, namely that man has the capacity to be spirit.

The sort of subjective and universal freedom which we see here is something entirely different from the partial freedom which we saw in Greece.

Among the Greeks it was properly speaking only contingent that the subjectivity be free. In the Oriental world only one is free, i.e., the substance.

The Spartan or Attic citizen is free, but among them there were also slaves, and so in the Greek world only some are free. What we are now saying is something else again; we say that man as man is free. In this way the characteristic freedom is completely universal. The subject as such is thought of as free, and the characteristic applies to all.

In the Christian religion the principle of which we speak has been rather expressed in the form of feeling and representation than articulated in the form of pure thought.

The religion includes the belief that man as man, each individual, is an object of divine grace and mercy; thus each is a subject for himself and has an infinite, absolute value. More precisely, this principle is to be found in the fact that the Christian religion contains as a dogma the recognition of the unity between divine and human nature, a truth which has been revealed to men through Christ.

Here man and God, the subjective and the objective idea, are one. This latter is the Germanic principle, the uniting of objectivity and subjectivity. The same teaching is already contained in a different guise in the story of the Fall. What is essential in this story is that the tree from which Adam eats is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the rest is simply imaginary. From this point of view the serpent did not deceive man, for God says: “See, Adam has become like one of us; he knows what is good and evil.”

In that is contained the infinite, divine worth of subjectivity. Still, the unity of the subjective principle with substantiality, the unity of knowledge and truth, is not immediate; it is a process, the process of spirit.

This means that in its unity subjectivity divests itself of its natural, immediate manner of being one and makes itself identical with what has been called the simply substantial (subjectivity as such is merely formal). Here, then, the goal of man is announced to be supreme blessedness and perfection – first of all in principle, in abstracto; the goal, then, is subjectivity which has in itself infinite worth, determined in regard to possibility.

We see, then, that speculative thought and religious representation are not separated, above all not so widely separated as is customarily believed.

I have introduced such notions for another reason, i.e., in order that we be not of the opinion that as notions belonging to an earlier stage in the Christian world they are no longer of interest to us, even though we belong to that world.

As a result of this, even though we may well have advanced beyond this stage we have no reason to be ashamed of our ancestors, for whom religious notions such as these were of supreme importance.

Properly speaking, then, we have two ideas, the subjective idea as knowing and the substantial or concrete idea; and the development or extension of this principle in such a way that it comes to consciousness in thought is the concern of modern philosophy.

Here it is, then, that determinations are of a more concrete sort than they were among the ancients, determinations such as distinctions between thought and being, individuality and substantiality, freedom and necessity, etc.

In modern philosophy, subjectivity is for itself but posits itself identically with the substantial or concrete, so that the substantial in question reaches thought. The knowing of what is for itself free is the principle of modern philosophy.

There it is that this knowing, both as immediate certainty and as a knowing which is yet to be developed, is of particular interest, because through it the opposition between certainty and belief or even between belief and the sort of knowing that develops within itself is constructed.

Thus a knowing which is first to be developed in some subject or other and also the belief which is a knowing are opposed to certainty or to the true in general.

Consequently subjectivity and objectivity are opposed to each other. In both, however, the unity of thinking or subjectivity and truth or objectivity is presupposed. The difference is that in the first form it is said: existing man (i.e., natural man in his immediate ordinariness) cognizes the true in immediate knowing, in believing; the way he believes it is, so it truly is.

In the second form, on the other hand, it is true that the unity of knowing and truth is also present, but at the same time there is the fact that man, the subject, raises himself above sensible consciousness, above the immediate manner of knowing, and only through thought makes himself what he is, thus attaining to truth.

On the whole, then, we have two philosophies: (1) Greek and (2) Germanic. With regard to the second of these we must distinguish between the period in which it makes its appearance as philosophy and the period of preparation. We can begin to deal with Germanic philosophy only at the point where it makes its appearance in a form peculiar to itself. Between the two great periods, then, lies a middle period, one of fermentation.

The point at which we now stand is the result of all the work that has been done over a period Of 2300 years; it is what the World-Spirit has brought before itself in its thinking consciousness. We should not wonder at the slowness of this.

Universal, knowing Spirit has time, it is not in a hurry; it has at its disposal masses of peoples and nations whose development is precisely a means to the emergence of its consciousness. Nor should we become impatient because particular insights are not brought out at this time but only later, or that this or that is not yet there – in world-history advances are slow.

Thus, insight into the necessity of such a long time is a remedy for our impatience.

There are 3 periods in the history of philosophy.

1. Greek philosophy from Thales.

This is around 600 B.C. Thales was born in either 640 or 629 B.C. He died in either the 58th or 59th Olympiad around 550 B.C..

It ended with the Neoplatonists, among whom was Plotinus who lived in the third century after Christ.

This period stretched into the 5th century, at which time on the one hand all pagan philosophy is at an end – a fact which is connected with the great migration and the downfall of the Roman Empire.

Proclus was last of the great Neoplatonists. He died in 485 AD. The sack of Rome under Odoacer was in 476.

Neoplatonism continues without interruption in the work of the Church Fathers. Many philosophies within Christendom only have Neoplatonism as their foundation.

The time-span, then, takes in about 1000 years.

2. The Middle Ages, which is the period of fermentation and of preparation for modern philosophy.

Here belong the Scholastics.

There are also Arab and Jewish philosophies to be mentioned, but the most important ones were those of the Christian Church. This period, too, lasts about 1000 years.

3. Modern philosophy formally appears during the Thirty Years’ War

This began with Bacon (d. 1626), Jakob Boehme (d.1624), or Descartes (d. 1650).

With Descartes, thinking began to enter into itself. “Cogito ergo sum” are the first words of his system. It is precisely these words which express the difference between modem philosophy and all that preceded it.