Hegel: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern

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      In 1796 his friend Hölderlin secured him a tutoring job in Frankfurt, where the poet was living at the time. But when Hegel arrived he found that Hölderlin was deliriously in love with a banker’s wife whom he believed to be the incarnation of ancient Greece, and once again Hegel found himself on his own. In order to distract himself from his increasing melancholia, Hegel studied even harder. During the little free time he allowed himself, he began composing excruciatingly depressive poems in ill-constructed meter:

      ‘A wise law forbad poorer spirits from making known

      what he in holy night has seen, heard, and felt

      so that his higher self be not disturbed in contemplation by their noisy nonsense,

      so that their twaddle not provoke his anger towards Holiness itself,

      so that the Holy not be trodden so in dirt…’

      Hegel’s forte was ever the prosaic, despite his equivocal attitude toward ‘noisy nonsense’ and ‘twaddle’.

      In the midst of these solitary years Hegel experienced some sort of profound mystic vision. This appears to have been in the form of an insight into the divine unity of the cosmos, where all finite division was seen as illusory, everything was interdependent, and the ultimate reality was the whole. Hegel had been reading the seventeenth-century Jewish pantheist Spinoza during this period, and Spinoza’s philosophy seems to have greatly influenced this vision.

      Spinoza’s system was in many ways as daunting as Kant’s. It was constructed in the style of Euclidian geometry. Starting out from a few basic axioms and definitions, it proceeded by a series of theorems to build up an infinite system of extreme purity and rationalism. This universe-as-geometrical-system was God, and He alone was completely real. He (and thus the infinite universe of which He consisted) contained no negation and was ruled by absolute logical necessity, as in Spinoza’s proofs. The negative, evil, finite, and accidental world seen by humanity was due to our nature as finite beings who were able to grasp the absolute necessity and true reality of the infinite whole.

      As a result of his Spinozistic vision, Hegel decided to abandon such distractions as poetry, blasphemy, and keeping a diary in the form of an encyclopedia. Instead he would devote himself entirely to philosophy. From now on Hegel was to spend the rest of his life articulating his mystic vision of the cosmos and giving it a rational intellectual basis. The result would be his own all-embracing system.

      From the outset this system was to bear many resemblances to Spinoza’s – apart, of course, from geometric clarity. When it came to presentation, Hegel still favored the Kantian approach: monumental obfuscation. But it was Spinoza who had shown Hegel how to break free of Kant’s overwhelming influence. Kant’s was not the only possible philosophic system.

      In 1799 Hegel’s father died, and he was left a small inheritance – of $1,500, according to Durrant, which means it may have been 1,500 thalers (from which the word dollar derives). Hegel now had just enough to live on, and he wrote to his friend Schelling asking if he could recommend a German city where Hegel could live cheaply – one with a simple local cuisine, a comprehensive library, and ‘ein gutes bier’ (a drinkable draft). At the time Schelling was the precocious star professor of the University of Jena, and he immediately encouraged Hegel to join him. (Unusually for philosophers, it appears that neither of them had good taste in beer. The local beer I tasted in Jena was certainly not in the Bundesliga of Great German Beers. I was later ominously informed that it originated from the local hospice.)

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