THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

HEGEL
VIII. A NOTE ON HEGEL
Not very long ago it was the custom for historians of philosophy to give
to the immediate successors of Kant to .
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel
as much honor and space as to all his predecessors in modern thought
from Bacon and Descartes to Voltaire and Hume. Our perspective today
is a little different, and we enjoy perhaps too keenly the invective leveled
by Schopenhauer at his successful rivals in the competition for professional
posts. By reading Kant, said Schopenhauer, "the public was com-
pelled to see that what is obscure is not always without significance."
Fichte and Schelling took advantage of this, and excogitated magnificent
spider-webs of metaphysics. "But the height of audacity in serving up
mazes of
pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant
words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally
reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most bare-faced
general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will
appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German
stupidity." 61 Is this fair?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born at Stuttgart in 1770. His
father was a subordinate official in the department of finances of the state
of Wiirtemberg; and Hegel himself grew up with the patient and me-
thodical habits of those civil servants whose modest efficiency has given
Germany the best-governed cities in the world. The youth was a tireless
student: he made full analyses of all the important books he read, and
copied out long passages. True culture, he said, must begin with resolute
self-effacement; as in the Pythagorean system of education, where the
pupil, for the first five years, was required to keep his peace.
His studies of Greek literature gave hjm an enthusiasm for Attic culture
which remained with him w r hen almost all other enthusiasms had died
away. "At the name of Greece," he wrote, "the cultivated German finds
himself at home. Europeans have their religion from a further source,
from the East; . . . but what is here, what is present, science and
art, all that makes life satisfying, and elevates and adorns it we derive,
directly or indirectly, from Greece." For a tune he preferred the leligion
of the Greeks to Christianity; and he anticipated Strauss and Renan by
writing a Life of Jesus in which Jesus was taken as the son of Mary and
Joseph, and the miraculous element was ignored. Later he destroyed the
book.
In politics too he showed a spirit of rebellion hardly to be suspected
from his later sanctification of the status quo. While studying for the
ministry at Tubingen, he and Schelling hotly defended the French Revo-
^Caird, HegJL, in the Blackwood Philosophical Classics; pp. 5-8. The biographical
account follows Caird throughout.