Remark 2: Idealism

[c] Transition of the Finite into the Infinite C Infinity (a) The Infinite in General (b) Alternating Determination of the Finite and the Infinite (c) Affirmative Infinity Transition Remark 1: The Infinite Progress

Remark 2: Idealism

§ 316

Idealism proposes that the finite is ideal.

The idealism of philosophy thinks that the finite has no veritable being.

Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle.

The question is how far this principle is actually carried out.

This is as true of philosophy as of religion.

Religion equally does not recognise finitude as a veritable being, as something ultimate and absolute or as something underived, uncreated, eternal.

Consequently, the opposition of idealistic and realistic philosophy has no significance.

A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existence as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy.

The principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts, universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, that is, in their sensuous individuality — not even the water of Thales.

For although this is also empirical water, it is at the same time also the in-itself or essence of all other things, too, and these other things are not self-subsistent or grounded in themselves, but are posited by, are derived from, an other, from water, that is they are ideal entities.

We have named the principle or the universal the ideal (and still more must the Notion, the Idea, spirit be so named); and then again we have described individual, sensuous things as ideal in principle, or in their Notion, still more in spirit, that is, as sublated.

Here we must note, in passing, this twofold aspect which showed itself in connection with the infinite, namely that on the one hand the ideal is concrete, veritable being, and on the other hand the moments of this concrete being are no less ideal — are sublated in it; but in fact what is, is only the one concrete whole from which the moments are inseparable.

§ 317

By the ideal [dem Ideellen] is meant chiefly the form of figurate conception and imagination, and what is simply in my conception, or in the Notion, or in the idea, in imagination, and so on, is called ideal, so that even fancies are counted as ideals — conceptions which are not only distinct from the real world, but are supposed to be essentially not real.

The spirit is the idealist proper.

In spirit, even as feeling, imagination and still more as thinking and comprehending, the content is not present as a so-called real existence; in the simplicity of the ego such external being is present only as sublated, it is for me, it is ideally in me.

This subjective idealism, either in the form of the unconscious idealism of consciousness generally, or consciously enunciated and set up as a principle, concerns only the form of conception according to which a content is mine; in the systematic idealism of subjectivity this form is declared to be the only true exclusive form in opposition to the form of objectivity or reality, of the external existence of that content.

Such idealism is [merely] formal because it disregards the content of imagination or thought, which content in being imagined or thought can remain wholly in its finitude. In such an idealism nothing is lost, just as much because the reality of such a finite content, the existence filled with finitude, is preserved, as because, in so far as abstraction is made from such finite reality, the content is supposed to be of no consequence in itself; and in it nothing is gained for the same reason that nothing is lost, because the ego, conception, spirit, remains filled with the same content of finitude.

The opposition of the form of subjectivity and objectivity is of course one of the finitudes; but the content, as taken up in sensation, intuition or even in the more abstract element of conception, of thought, contains finitudes in abundance and with the exclusion of only one of the modes of finitude, namely, of the said form of subjective and objective, these finitudes are certainly not eliminated, still less have they spontaneously fallen away.