Great Ideas of Philosophy

F. To include Hegel within the tradition of Romanticism or German Romantic Idealism requires that we turnto Johann Fichte. Indeed, the famous “Hegelian” triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is actuallyFichte’s contribution and was rarely employed by Hegel himself.1. Fichte recognized a fundamental conflict in Kant’s epistemology: If there is a conceptual or logicalbarrier between reality as it is and reality as it is perceived, philosophy must commit to either bypassmind in every possible way or to accept that it is mind that is the worthy object of attention.2. Fichte argues that the ultimate reality is that of idea, the starting point of philosophy then being thetranscendental ego.3. According to Hegel, we ought to be looking not merely for those causal connections revealed inscientific laws but for the reason behind the laws, because reality is rational.G. To understand an event is finally to identify the reason behind it, and reasons are not “causes” by anothername.1. Causes can be final or merely efficient, but they carry no sense of necessity with them; they are merelycontingent facts of the world.2. But knowing the reason for an event is to understand that the event had to take the form it did.III. Hegel applies this to human history itself. There is a distinct evolutionary perspective in Romanticism. Theremust be a reason for human development: from basic survival to human communities to literacy and rationality,each stage higher than the previous one.A. Romanticism perceives an evolutionary struggle—Sturm und Drang—that produces new and better thingsnot predictable in a mechanistic view.B. Human history is the result of something trying to work itself out or realize itself through this greatevolutionary struggle. It is out of the struggle itself that something gets resolved. And it is in the resolutionthat we find life lived at a higher plane. There is reason in human history.C. Hegel gave several names to this something, most commonly “the Absolute” but also “soul” or “spirit”—Geist.D. In Hegel’s day, the Absolute expresses itself in the state, declared by Hegel to be “the march of God in theworld”! So-called “Hegelians of the right” would defend the claims of the state against any and every claimfrom the mere individuals who live in it.IV. Hegel finds that the state, as the ethical aspect of the Absolute, takes precedence over Kant’s “good will” of theindividual.A. Kant claimed that good will was the only pure good in the universe: the will to bring about, if we could,that which we would bring about in our most rational moments.B. For Hegel, this dependence on the will of the moral agent leaves room for arbitrary and even wickedconduct. The claims of conscience have a moral superiority over mere convention but cannot be substitutedwithout peril for the commands of the just state.C. Hegel prefers the formulations of the brilliant young philosopher Fichte: The greatest freedom of the willconsists in surrendering freedom for the sake of the whole.V. What really exists does so in virtue of an essentially dialectical process. Reality is the synthetic outcome ofaffirming and negating forces.A. Fichte is important philosophically as the architect for the Hegelian ontological logic that features thefamous dialectical triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—the progress through conflict, reality arisingfrom opposing tendencies.B. Fichte’s description of the dialectical realization of human freedom is an example:1. Man is born free (thesis).2. But he cannot know this until his freedom is first opposed and constrained by others (antithesis).3. In the synthesis, or final stage, man passes the stage of freedom for its own sake and comes to knowfreedom as an instrumentality to be used for the good of all.C. The dialectical ontology defended by Fichte enters Hegel’s metaphysics at every point.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 7