HEGEL'S

DEVELOPMENT
*
Toward the Sunlight
1770-1801

BY

H. S. HARRIS

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
 HEGEL'S
DEVELOPMENT
II
Toward the Sunlight
1770 -1801
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 TO

MAX H. FISCH

Viel hat von Morgen an,

Seit ein Gesprach wir sind und horen voneinander,
Erfahren der Mensch; bald sind wir aber Gesang.
Dnd das Zeitbild, das der groBe Geist entfaltet,
Ein Zeichen liegts vor uns, daB zwischen ihm und andern
Ein BiindniB zwischen ihrn und andern Machten ist.
HOLDERLIN
'I exhort myself always in the words of the Lebens-
liiufe: "Strive toward the sun, my friends, that the
salvation of the human race may soon come to fruition!
VVhat use are the hindering leaves? or the branches?
Cleave through them to the sunlight, and strive till ye
be weary! Tis good so, for so shall ye sleep the betted" ,
(HEGEL to SCHELLING, I6 April I795)
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MOST of the first draft of this book was written in 1964-5 during
a year of sabbatical leave from York University, Toronto. In that
year I was awarded a Senior Fellowship by the Canada Council,
together with a travel grant which enabled me to spend some time
in England and to make a short visit to the Hegel-Archiv (then in
Bonn, now in Bochum). In England I discussed my project with
Sir Malcolm Knox and Warden G. R. G. Mure, and received
valuable advice from both of them. In Bonn I was given access to
typed transcripts of a handful of fragments from Hegel's Frankfurt
period that have not yet been published. I was also able to consult
a number of books which are not easily obtainable elsewhere; and
the kind assistance of Dr. Gisela SchUler and Dr. Heinz Kimmerle
enabled me to clear up several points of difficulty or uncertainty.
Had it not been for the contribution that these two scholars have
made to the task of ordering and dating Hegel's manuscripts in
terms of the handwriting, which was begun by Hermann Nohl and
carried on most notably by Franz Rosenzweig, my undertaking
would have been both more difficult and more perilous than it is.
In an undertaking of this kind one cannot hope to remember all
that one owes to others. I have not even tried to list all the books
that I had occasion to consult. But the enormous extent of my
debt to previous students of Hegel's development will be apparent,
I hope, from my footnotes. There are many to whom I might have
owed more had I been more industrious; but I trust that my notes
will make it clear that I have not approached my task lightly. In
singling out for special mention here the work of three scholars on
whom I have depended heavily I should like to underline the
limitations of my own scholarship. No one can read everything;
not even Hegel did that. But he tried conscientiously to absorb
everything significant in the culture and the heritage of his own
time and his own people. I cannot claim to have done that; were
it not for the more heroic efforts of Carmelo Lacorte in that
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
direction, and the learned zeal of Johannes Hoffmeister in editing
Hegel, and of Adolf Beck in editing H6lderlin's Letters, my work
would be even more imperfect than it is.
The making of a book from a manuscript is a process to which
many people contribute in different ways. There is, to begin with,
the often far from mechanical labour of the typist. My first
protector against slips, errors, and oversights was Mrs. Marja B.
Moens, who typed the whole of my original manuscript. She also
typed most of the final draft, though Miss Beatrice M. Oliver and
Miss Betty Yacoub ian also helped with this. My son David helped
me make the analytical index, and Miss Lorraine Fadden typed it.
The book was brought to the notice of the Clarendon Press by
the sympathetic interest of Professor J. N. Findlay; and the final
stages of its development were greatly influenced by the comments
of the adviser to whom it was submitted by the Press. Not only
did he make many valuable suggestions on points of detail, and
help me to remove a number of errors and blemishes; but also his
more general critical reactions alerted me to some of the dangers
of false perspective that exist in a work conceived on the present
scale. I have tried to obviate these dangers in my Prelude-Coda;
if I have succeeded the Press adviser must have a large share of the
credit.
H. S. H.
Glendon College, York University
Toronto
Gebhard's Day, I970
 CONTENTS

NOTE ON REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS xiii

PRELUDE AND CODA XV

I: STUTTGART 1770-1788: The Vocation of a Scholar I

I. The background of home and school 1

2. The Tagebuch 7
3. The collection of excerpts I4
4. The school essays 30
5. The gaps in the record 44
Appendix A: Rosenkranz's description of Hegel's excerpt
collection compared with the manuscripts discovered by
Thaulow (and other surviving evidence) 47
Appendix B: The chronology of Hegel's earliest manuscripts
(17 85- 1788 ) 52
II: TUBINGEN 1788-1793: The Church Visible and Invisible 57
I. The atmosphere of the Stift 57
2. The philosophy course 72
3. The theology course 88
4. The theory of the €v "at 7Tav 96
5. The sermons 108
6. The function of a folk-religion II9
III: BERNE 1793-1796: Reason and Freedom 154
I. The background of Hegel's life in Berne 154
2. In search of a way forward 161
3. The God of Reason and his Gospel 186
4. The evils born of authority 207
5. A polemical interlude 224
xii CONTENTS
6. The road to Eleusis 231
Appendix: The 'earliest system-programme of German idealism' 249

IV: FRANKFURT 1797-1800: Phantasie und Herz 258

1. The 'crisis of Frankfurt' and the supposed 'revolution in Hegel's
thinking' 258
2. The spirit of Judaism 270
3. Authority and love 287
4. Faith and being 3I 0
5. Prospect and retrospect: 'the Spirit of Christianity' 322
6. Morality and love 332
7. Punishment and fate 346
8. The religion of love 355
9. The fate of love 369
10. Religion and philosophy 379
II. The 'ideal of my youth in reflective form' 399
V: FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802: The 'Way Back to Intervention in
the Life of Men' 409
1. The third canon of folk-religion 409
2. Hegel's first political studies 416
3. The genesis of the Verfassungsschrift 434
4. The 'Constitution of the German Empire': Part I 446
5. The 'Constitution of the German Empire': Part II 464

ApPENDIX: Texts
I. The Tiibingen essay of 1793: Religion ist eine 481
2. The Berne plan of 1794: a) Unter objectiver Religion 508
3. The 'earliest system-programme of German idealism' (Berne
1796): eine Ethik 510
4. The Frankfurt sketch on 'Faith and Being' (1798): Glauben ist
die Art 512
5. H<ilderlin: Ober Urtheil und Seyn (Jena, April? 1795) 515

INDEXES
a. A Chronological Index to Hegel's early writings as cited in this
book 517
h. Bibliographical Index 52 9
c. Analytical Index 535
 NOTE ON REFERENCES AND
ABBREVIATIONS

IN referring to the fragmentary texts of Hegel's juvenilia I have

followed the convention set by Gisela Schiller and Heinz Kimmerle
of identifying each fragment by its opening phrase or incipit. This
practice avoids all the ambiguities of titles supplied by editors, and
it also enables us to distinguish at need between the different drafts
or stages in the composition of any single essay. The source
references indicate clearly where the most accurate published texts
are to be found (except for a few pieces which have never yet been
printed); and wherever an English translation is known to me I
have referred to it. The chronological index (supplemented by
Appendix 2 to Chapter I) provides a full conspectus of all the
juvenilia that can be dated.
Almost all references to sources, whether primary or secondary,
have been abbreviated in the footnotes. In general I have given
the author's (editor's, translator's) name with the page number of
the work referred to. The remaining details can be found quickly
and easily in the Bibliographical Index which is arranged alpha-
betically by author (including all necessary cross references). It
seems to me that this is preferable to hunting for the first occurrence
of a work which recurs perpetually as "Op. cit.'. A few books which
are cited incidentally (and usually only once) are given their full
description in the footnote (but they are also included in the
Bibliography).
The following abbreviations are employed regularly:
Akad. Kants gesammelte Schriften, herausgegeben von der Koniglich
PreuBischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Reimer, Berlin,
1902-3 8.
Briefe Briefe von und an Hegel, herausgegeben von Johannes Hoff-
meister und Rolf Flechsig, F. Meiner, Hamburg, 1961.
Dok. Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung, herausgegeben von Johannes
Hoffmeister, Frommann, Stuttgart, 1936.
xiv NOTE ON REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS
GSA H5lderlin, Siimtliche Werke (GroBe Stuttgarter Ausgabe),
herausgegeben von Friedrich BeiBner und Adolf Beck, Kohl-
hammer, Stuttgart, 1946ff.
Juh. Hegel, Siimtliche Werke, JubiHiumsausgabe in 20 Banden, einer
Hegel-Monographie und einem Lexicon, herausgegeben von
Hermann Glockner, Frommann, Stuttgart, 1927-35.
 PRELUDE AND CODA

THIS book contains the whole of a story, half of a story, and the
beginning of a story. Considered as a whole it is a tale of the
pursuit of an ideal, and of how that ideal, when at last it was
clearly seen and grasped, did not avail against the stubbornness
of actual life. But this is not the whole story, and for this reason
there is nothing tragic in the defeat of the ideal by reality. My
story is, after all, only the first half of an Erziehungsroman, a tale
of a real, live, Wilhelm Meister; and the whole of that story-
which I do hope to complete eventually-is still only a part, per-
haps not even a proper half, of the full story of a great philosopher,
which I have no thought of trying to tell as a whole.
This book tells only of how that philosopher discovered philo-
sophy; indeed it does not even quite do that, for the discovery of
philosophy was, properly speaking, the sequel to the failure of the
quest with which we are here directly concerned. In other words,
the discovery of philosophy is really the subject of the other half
of my Roman, the half that has still to be written. We are here
concerned rather with Hegel's discovery that he must become a
philosopher.
But my story is a true story, not a romance at all; and I have
striven above all else not only to tell the whole truth but to show
that it is the truth. I have tried to present all of the evidence, to
indicate clearly where the evidence is defective, and not to go
beyond the evidence into the realms of fancy and conjecture. No
philosopher-except perhaps Plato-has tempted so many sober,
black-gowned scholars into such wild flights of fancy, such extra-
ordinary feats of imagination, as Hegel. One might almost say with
justice about Hegel's followers what Hobbes said of his own
predecessors, that there is no opinion so absurd that you will not
find it advanced and defended by one of them as the gospel truth.
Yet Hegel himself, for all his Puck-like capacity to make sober men
lose their senses, was no hero of romance, but a model of solid
x.vi PRELUDE AND CODA
bourgeois common sense, outwardly remarkable only for his un-
remitting industry in the pursuit of understanding. And this book
is the plainest chronicle that I can contrive of the first stages in
that industrious pursuit. Only my title, and this prelude, are in any
way fanciful.
Since it has been the historic fate of Hegel to be identified in the
English-speaking world, and perhaps not only there, as the greatest
of the sophists, a veritable wizard of words who was able to deprive
men-even, and quite notably, Englishmen-of their reason and
their common sense; and since there is, as I have said, some
justice in this verdict if we accept history as our court of judgement,
it may seem imprudent to let fancy intrude in this way on my title-
page and at the beginning. For why, when my primary concern is
to lift the spell, should I begin by writing like one of the bewitched?
Why must I insist on presenting this rather subjective concluding
synthesis, which is for me only the coda to my plain chronicle, as a
prelude?
On the level of prudence, my defence is simple. Only a reader
who is already familiar with most of my material could possibly be
expected to follow the thread of my story as the chronicle unrolls
in all of its detail from the middle of the second chapter onwards;
some sort of prospectus is absolutely essential. And I cannot think
of a better way of providing it than by making a sort of general
summary of my own beliefs about the course of Hegel's intellectual
development, indicating as clearly as I can what elements in the
account are tainted by conjecture, but not seeking to justify any of
my assertions for the present. Written out in this way and in this
place it will be obvious, I trust, that my outline neither has nor
claims for itself any authority or independent validity. It simply
serves as a help in need for the uninitiated reader who is about to
embark upon the book, and as a confession of assumptions or
prejudices that may not always have been made explicit in the
course of the argument to the critical reader who has finished the
book. My hope is that if it does successfully explicate the book,
the book in turn will justify it.
The justification of my title must wait till the end of this Prelude.
But I can begin by explaining it. The metaphor of the sunlight,
which I have borrowed from a long-forgotten philosophical novel
that Hegel studied as a student, refers with apt ambiguity to all
the main sources of his youthful inspiration; and the young Hegel
 PREL UDE AND CODA xvii
himself used it to express the goal of all his endeavours. The reader
should think first of the actual sunlight of Greece, the light that is
so brilliantly evoked in Holderlin's Hyperion. For this is the same
sun that shone in the Athens of Aeschylus and Sophocles, of
Pericles and Socrates. And then, secondly, he should think of the
sunlight of Plato's ideal City, the sunlight outside the Cave to
which Plato compared Athens after the death of Socrates. Thirdly,
and most obviously of all to the young Hegel and his contempor-
aries, there is the sunlight of the Aufkliirung, the light of reason
shining in the community of free men. And if, finally, we extend
this Platonic metaphor of the light of reason to embrace the 'inner
light' of the Christian tradition, we can understand why Hegel
chose to speak, with von Hippel, of 'striving toward the sun' as the
way to the 'salvation of the human race'.
If we would picture once more the sun toward which the young
Hegel strove we must allow all these lights to blend into one. We
cannot even begin to understand the culture in which he grew up
unless we are willing to let them blend, however odd the result may
at times appear. For instance when Hegel read the Phaedo of Moses
Mendelssohn as a schoolboy of fifteen, he did not distinguish
between the historical Socrates, the Socrates of Plato, and the
Socrates of Mendelssohn. To have done that would have been, in
his eyes, an insult to all three of them, and to their authors human
and divine. He was perfectly well able to make the distinctions, for
he spent most of his time working on original texts and he displays
from the fi.rst a quite sophisticated interest in historiography. But
he saw himself as a student of the history of mankind seeking to
define his own vocation as a man, and Socrates as the great teacher
of mankind. He could appreciate that 'Socrates' did not use the
same forms of argument in Plato's dialogue that he does in
Mendelssohn's; but the essential doctrine (of human immortality)
was the same, and this great truth about human nature and human
destiny was what mattered, not the technicalities of argument and
proof.
This belief that, as long as one has the right attitude, theoretical
differences do not matter, was the essential error that Hegel had
to overcome before he could begin seriously to be a philosopher in
his own right. It was a belief that was widely prevalent in, indeed
typical of, the Enlightenment; and it goes a long way to account
for the fact that the age produced so little philosophical work of
8248588 B
xviii PRELUDE AND CODA
the first importance. Only Hume, who used theoretical reason with
such extraordinary wit and subtlety to show us why we cannot rely
on it, and Kant, who made 'the right attitude' (the moral law) into
the fundamental form of reason itself, escaped the general medi-
ocrity. Through his long struggle with Kant, Hegel finally found the
way to justify and defend the pragmatic rationalism of his earliest
mentors. We could properly name the young Hegel as one of the
most important thinkers in the main stream of the Enlightenment,
if it were not for the fact that, in finding his way, he transcended
the boundaries of Enlightenment thought altogether, and provided
us rather with a very carefully thought out statement of the
Romantic position.
It may be that I have not brought out the classical humanist
character of Hegel's education clearly enough-though I have
tried to show how sound the scholarship involved in the formula-
tion of his Greek ideal was. The body of evidence that has survived
from his earliest studies is unrepresentative in this respect; it serves
much better to illustrate his heritage from the philosophical culture
of his own time. But it is clear from his school essays on classical
themes that Hegel's relative indifference, not to say actual hostility,
toward theoretical philosophy was nourished even more by his
classical studies than by his readings in contemporary thinkers.
His fundamental concern was to comprehend why knowledge was
'living' (practically effective) in some minds and 'dead' (merely
theoretical) in others. He found his answer to this problem by
contrasting the direct experience of the Greeks, with the indirect,
verbally mediated, experience of his own culture. This contrast
was so familiar as to be a cliche in writers like Lessing, and in less-
known authors like Garve. But, even while he was still a schoolboy,
Hegel endowed it with a depth and import that was hitherto un-
paralleled. The theory of two kinds of abstraction, which he
deliberately injected into an excerpt that he made from Garve, is the
first germ of his mature concept of the concrete universal. This
was his first independent step as a philosopher, and the only impor-
tant positive step that he took until his last summer in Berne (1796).
This significant fact points up one of my reasons for devoting
careful attention even to Hegel's Stuttgart excerpts. But his school-
boy essays and excerpts merit the detailed attention which Lacorte
was, as far as I know, the first to give them, even apart from this
discovery, for which Lacorte must take the credit. For the attitude
 PRELUDE AND CODA xix
toward philosophy which these early papers reveal explains why
Hegel made no important philosophical progress for such a long
time.
When Hegel went to Tubingen he had to come to grips with that
aspect of his own culture to which the 'enlightened' attitude was,
either openly or secretly, opposed-the orthodox religious tradition.
He had by this time defined his own vocation fairly clearly: he
knew that he was going to be, like Socrates, a teacher, an enlight-
ener of his own people in his own time, and ultimately of mankind.
His new circumstances did not affect this resolve. He made it clear
from the start that for him the study of Judaism and of Christian
origins was simply an extension, a new dimension of, his study of
human nature through cultural history, 'the philosophical history
of humanity'. He went serenely on collecting and arranging his
materials to the amusement of his friends and the irritation of at
least some of his teachers.
At the beginning of his second year in the university (and his
twentieth in the world) came the news of the Revolut.ion in France.
To Hegel, and to many of his fellow students, it appeared that the
battle for enlightenment had now moved from the study to the
market-place. For the first time his vocation as a scholar was called
in question; he had already met, in H6lderlin, someone who
shared his ambition to be a Volkserzieher, but who intended to
answer the call in the high Greek fashion as a poet. Now, like
H6lderlin, he thought of fulfilling his destiny through a career in
the law. But his father would not listen to his plea; and he had to
go on to the study of dogmatic theology-which was much less
adaptable to the advancement of his own interests than Old and
New Testament history.
The evidence for Hegel's development in these years is almost
all indirect; and much that is necessary for a balanced understand-
ing of the intellectual life of the Tubingerstift is still unpublished.
It is possible, therefore, that I have given to Hegel's proposal to
transfer to law after the completion of the Master's Degree a focal
importance that it did not really have. I do not think this is likely,
however, for my view rests on the only consistent and intelligible
interpretation of the testimony of Hegel's friend Leutwein; and
while the long brooding of that disappointed old man certainly
distorted his judgement I think it also ensured the reliability of his
factual memories.
xx PREL UDE AND CODA
Leutwein tells us that Hegel was not much interested in the
current discussions of Kantian philosophy in the Stift. This is
confirmed by remarks made and attitudes adopted later by Hegel
himself in his letters. But he certainly studied Kant carefully in
these years. During his second year he read the Critique of Pure
Reason and quite a lot of other philosophical works. If he had not
already read the Critique of Practical Reason by then he certainly
read it before very long. The second Critique was, after all, the
latest, and by universal consent the best, new statement of those
fundamental practical doctrines that the great teachers of humanity
have always preached. For this reason, if for no other, the would-be
Volkserzieher realized that he must master and learn to use the
theoretical structure of concepts in which the latest gospel of reason
was embedded. So Hegel appropriated the doctrine of the first
Critique as the basis for his own articulation of human psychology.
(The evidence for this is in his rewriting of his notes in 1794; but
there is no reason to suppose that his attitude was different when
the notes were first made.)
His study of dogmatic theology under Storr compelled Hegel
for the first time to examine carefully the theoretical foundations
of his own position. This was Storr's great merit, that he forced
Hegel to examine the assumptions of the critical philosophy care-
fully. For Storr and his followers claimed that Kant's arguments
really supported a set of conclusions which absolutely undermined
and overthrew the comfortable faith that there was an invisible
church to which all rational men belonged, and that to follow
reason as well as one could was all that was necessary to salvation.
In defence of this fundamental conviction-which was the basis
for his complacent acceptance of the variety of philosophical
opinions-Hegel had to enter the lists on behalf of the particular
opinion that he had himself espoused. In due course his efforts to
formulate the right interpretation of Kant brought him face to face
with those aspects of Kant's doctrine that were irreconcilable with
his Hellenic ideal. And so, as he turned from defending Kant to
criticizing him, he stumbled backwards and almost involuntarily,
into the attempt to provide a more adequate philosophical basis for
the expression of that ideal.
This gradual retreat from Kant was a retreat from the Critique
of Practical Reason; and specifically from Kant's formulation of the
'postulates of practical reason'. There was no corresponding retreat
 PREL UDE AND CODA xxi
from the Critique of Pure Reason: on the theoretical side the
philosophical expression of the ideal involved rather an advance
from a merely pragmatic adoption of Kant's position (for purposes
of argument and effective communication) to its justification as the
highest expression of reflective thought. But even so the standpoint
of reflection was still subordinated to the higher standpoint of life
itself. Hegel's ideal was not in the end a philosophical but a
religious-aesthetic one; and, though we cannot prove it, there is
every reason to believe that that is what it was at the beginning
too.
Just how this ideal of human existence was articulated into the
'theory' of the EV KD:L 7T(XV in its earliest form I cannot tell. It is just
barely possible, I suppose, that at the very beginning the EY KCXL
7TCXV was more of a philosophical theory than anything we find in

the Frankfurt manuscripts. But in view of the way in which Hegel

subsequently borrows his theoretical terminology wholesale from
Kant and Fichte, from Schelling, and then from Holderlin it seems
certain that he began simply with a contrast between two kinds of
religious experience. At any rate this is all that appears explicitly in
the first major essay that we have-the so-called Tiibingen frag-
ment. This is an important and interesting essay, but it can only be
called 'philosophical' in a very extended sense. All of the important
practical conclusions are taken for granted. The problem is how to
make these conclusions existentially effective, and the answer, so
far as it is explicit at all, is that they must be existentially acquired,
they must: be lived. The only constructive philosophical argument
in the essay is the defence of the three essential conditions for an
effective folk-religion; but these canons are not applied in any
recognizably logical way. We have to infer what they really mean
from what Hegel says about his great historical exemplar, the
Greeks. Thus it is not instantly obvious how 'the teachings' of
Greek religion 'are grounded in universal reason'; and it is fairly
clear that Kant's 'religion within the bounds of reason' does 'send
fancy, heart and sensibility empty away'. But in the body of the
essay the first of these problems is virtually ignored, and the second
is glossed over with only the faintest hint of a blush. The real appeal
is to a kind of aesthetic intuition by which we read off the ideal
from the historical record, and a kind of creative imagination by
which we can reintegrate the fugitive glimpses that the record sup-
plies into a unified and stable vision.
xxii PREL UDE AND CODA
Hegel explicitly tells us that in analysing out the three canons
of folk-religion ('Its teachings must be grounded on universal
reason', 'Fancy, heart and sensibility must not be sent empty
away', and 'It must be so constituted that all the needs of life-the
public affairs of the state are tied in with it') he is treating the con-
cept 'objectively'. There is from the beginning a gulf between
philosophical argument and reasoning-which is bound to be
'objective'-and the 'subjective' reality of religion with which he is
concerned. But although 'reasoning' belongs to the 'objective' plane,
'Reason' itself does not. Socrates talking to his friends on his last
day is a model of subjective rationality, for he knows his audience
well, and his arguments simply bring out the meaning of their actual
life-experience. The young man who packed up his papers for the
journey to Berne no longer believed, like the Stuttgart schoolboy,
that the Deism of the enlightened moderns was an advance over
the polytheism of the unenlightened ancients. He was even
prepared to say that Lessing's Nathan was a work of Verstand. But
he held firmly to the faith in Vernunft as opposed to Verstand
which he owed, in great part, to Nathan. There might be a gulf
between theoretical philosophizing and actual religion; but it was
nevertheless true that actual religion came to its final fruition in
practical philosophy.
For this reason the abstract 'canons' which are so far removed
from the living experience of religion, continue to dominate and
determine the whole course of Hegel's subsequent reflections; and
for this reason too, the first canon-which seems farthest of all
from the living experience of Greek religion-must come first.
When Hegel wrote in 1795 that 'the aim and essence of all true
religion, our religion included, is human morality' he was merely
explaining what the first canon means and why it is placed first.
But the course of his reflections, and particularly the form that he
sought to give to his results, is determined also by the fundamental
imperative of the Volkserzieher-that what is objectively known
must be made subjectively effective. At the end of the Tiibingen
essay he is about to enliven his living image of the Greek spirit
still further by presenting us with a contrasting image of the mod-
ern spirit. But he stops himself and turns aside; and from his
struggles over the next few months we can see why. The moral
effect of that contrast would merely be to induce despair; for the
Greek spirit has 'flown', we cannot bring it to life in practice. Our
 PRELUDE AND CODA xxiii
religion has its origins in a different tradition, and our religious
teacher is not Socrates but Jesus.
The true character of Jesus, and the relation of his message to
that of the modern apostle of reason, Kant, was a focus of con-
troversy in the intellectual life of the Stift. Storr emphasized the
Messianic character of Jesus, his fulfilment of prophetic promises;
and he underlined the prophetic aspect of the Gospel message,
presenting it as a promise, or complex of promises, guaranteed by
miraculous deeds. On the other side, the 'Kantian enrage' Karl
Diez went so far as to claim that Jesus was a deceiver and Kant
himself was the true Messiah. Hegel only became involved when
Storr appealed to Kant's newly published essay on Religion as
evidence for his own view that Vernunft actually needed the super-
natural gu.arantees of the Gospel promise. At this point Hegel
clearly felt that both Jesus and Kant must be defended, if the unity
and self-sufficiency of Reason was to be preserved. He shared the
conviction of all those 'enlighteners' who recognized their own
debt to the Gospel, that Jesus was a true teacher of mankind; but
he shared also their contempt for superstition, and he regarded all
heteronomous ethics, with its twin pillars of reward and punish-
ment, as a merely transitional, though inescapable, aspect of the
growth of Vernunft. The pitch of Kantian orthodoxy to which his
Jesus rises is probably a reaction to the attacks of Diez, just as
much as the rigorous exclusion of everything prophetic and miracu-
lous is a response to the claims of Storr. But Hegel's picture was
meant to be true to life in the same sense that Mendelssohn's
Socrates was meant to be true to life.
Hegel was not the only one in his own circle in the Stift to
conceive the idea of giving a Kantian interpretation of the Scrip-
tures. Holderlin toyed with the same idea and among the earliest,
still unpublished, manuscripts of Schelling are Kantian commentar-
ies on some of the Pauline Epistles. But unlike Schelling Hegel
was no longer in the Stift when he wrote his Life ofJesus. His essay
was the first step in the reintegration of Christianity as a folk-
religion; the restored portrait of its founder as one of the true sages.
Any Christian who accepted this 'restoration' would be bound to
ask how the initial corruption of the record had come about. If
Hegel was to maintain his claim that 'the practical teachings [of
Christianity] are pure' he had to answer this question. And in
essence the problem was very like that of interpreting Socrates'
xxiv PREL UDE AND CODA
last words, a problem which recurs several times in Hegel's early
manuscripts. It differed only in the magnitude of its practical
import. In order to understand Socrates' last words we have to
comprehend Greek religion, especially the place of sacrifice in it,
and the character of Asclepius as the god of healing. In order to
understand why Jesus assumed the Messianic role we have to
comprehend the authoritarian character of Judaism: the only way
in which the autonomy of the free rational agent could be asserted
in this situation of absolute heteronomy was by claiming an authority
equal to that of God himself and directly received from him. The
Messianic hope offered the one way for Jesus to do this, so he
seized on it; but at the same time he strove to make clear in every
way possible that he was not claiming divine authority for himself
exclusively, and he did not exercise authority over others at all.
In the society of the enlightened there can be no authority at all
save that of reason. Hence the spirit of true religion is opposed to
all institutionalized authority. Since all the institutions of his culture
were authoritarian Jesus could not be blamed for turning away
from the public life of his people altogether. But this was the
moment of his failure. For a healthy folk-religion is necessarily a
public religion; it invests and embraces all the normal activities and
institutions of a healthy public life, i.e. a political society of free
citizens. Political freedom, however, is freedom within the bounds
set by a law which is enforced by external authority where
necessary. So how can a genuinely rational religion be public
at all?
This was the problem which Hegel was faced with, when he
completed his purging of Christian doctrine. Christianity was born
in a tyrannous society; it triumphed in a tyrannous world. How
could it take the place proper to true religion in a free world?
Reason, as Hegel understood it, was the synthesis of freedom with
law. Every free man arrives at his conclusions and decisions for
himself; but in their imperative aspect these autonomous conclu-
sions are all expressions of one law. Thus great diversity, even
contradiction of opinions, can subsist along with uniformity or
harmony in action. Religion is the power by which, ideally, the
variety of individual talents and tendencies are harmonized and
reconciled, so that they do not conflict harmfully with one
another or with the law. Reason itself can show us that there
must be conflict of opinion and there must be freedom of con-
 PRELUDE AND CODA xxv
science; but what sort of religion is it, then, that can save us from
anarchy?
The Greek answer, already given in the Tiibingen essay, was:
a religion of the imagination, a religion of myth. When I wrote the
main body of my text, I did not even suspect, stiIlless believe as I
do now, that Hegel was the author of the 'earliest system-
programme of German idealism'. But even without that clinching
piece of evidence I could see that the writing of Eleusis was linked
with the 'continuation' of the essay on 'The Positivity of the
Christian Religion' by Hegel's sense of the superiority of myth as
the medium for the expression of religious truth. In mythical form
the objective truth becomes subjective: it takes hold of us and
moves us to action because 'fancy, heart, and sensibility are not
sent empty away'. But no less important is the fact that in a conflict
of myths we are not forced to choose as we are in a conflict of
opinions. We are not obliged to sacrifice one or the other or else
both for the sake of a third which is better than either. We can
reconcile and harmonize them by perceiving different aspects of
the truth in each. This was the point whose significance Hegel had
not fully grasped in the Tiibingen essay, or he would never have
let religion become merely 'an old friend in the house' of the Greek
spirit in its maturity. Eleusis is Hegel's testimony that the Greek
spirit has not after all 'flown'; the Gods of Olympus are still there
to answer the greeting of their fully enlightened worshipper. And
so within a few months of his first explicit recognition of Kant's
theoretical achievement (in the postscript of the 'Positivity' essay
written in April 1796) the star of Kant's practical philosophy, long
in the ascendant in Hegel's mind, begins to set. The highest act of
Vernunft is no longer a practical one-it is aesthetic.
To find the right application of his new insight, to make his
objective knowledge subjective, was still a problem for Hegel when
he went to Frankfurt. He found his answer when he stopped
concentrating on the myths in which folk-religion is expressed, and
began to study the history of the religious experience of different
peoples in its relation to their political experience. For in this con-
text the aesthetic object of the folk-religion is revealed as the object
of the people's love. The 'philosophical history of humanity' which
Hegel had dreamed of as a schoolboy now peeps out from behind
his sketches and studies of the 'spirit and fate' of Judaism and
Christianity III the shape of an ideal pattern of cultural development
xxvi PRELUDE AND CODA
analogous to the life cycle of the rational individual. Thus the
religion of Abraham is the absolutely exclusive consciousness of the
tribe or blood-clan, which corresponds to the 'primitive unity' of
the undeveloped seed; and the 'fate' of the culture that persists in
this 'oneness' is to be alienated from all other life and to become
slavishly dependent upon the divine source of life-the €V KCXt 7TCXV
of the Tiibingen years-conceived as an absolute Lord and Master.
When a culture is in this disrupted state, Vernunft takes the form of
Verstand: that is to say it takes reflective cognizance of the gulf
(Trennung) between man's 'fallen' state and his 'natural' or ideal
condition, and strives to overcome it by postulating the conditions
for the healing of the rupture and the establishment of universal
peace and harmony. But reason cannot by its own power do away
with the rupture which it has already acknowledged and justified;
and hence all forms of reflective religion-even the highest form,
the religion of reason as we find it in Kant-are forms of positive
religion. It is the peculiar nemesis of the 'religion of reason',
through which man is at last set free from all arbitrary and alien
authorities, that in this form of absolute consciousness the Tren-
nung is made absolute. The light of reason is the light in which no
man living can be justified. Every man becomes his own judge, but
in every case the judge can do nothing but utter sentence of eternal
condemnation. So even Kant must conceive the Divine Lawgiver
as a focus of arbitrary power, for reason cannot reconcile man with
the fate that arises when his nature is once ruptured, and it cannot
comprehend the reconciliation when it occurs.
The power that does enable man to rise above fate, and above
the justice or 'righteousness' that is the absolute object of reflective
rationality, is called by Hegel simply 'love'. For anyone who wants
to understand or to expound Hegel's 'philosophy' at this stage of
its development this is a cause of difficulty, since, on the one hand,
all forms of religion are forms of 'love', and on the other hand, what
Hegel calls the spirit of 'love' absolutely still falls short of what he
calls the spirit of 'religion' absolutely. But Hegel, though he does
now have a 'philosophy' of his own, and is no longer a client of
Kant or of the Enlightenment generally, is still not directly con-
cerned with it, and attaches merely instrumental importance to it.
He now has a second-order theory to account for the gulf between
abstract doctrine and concrete experience in the Tiibingen essay,
but he still regards it as a product of mere reflection; and what
 PRELUDE AND CODA xxvii

matters to him is to show us how to rise above the level of reflection

altogether. For this the stark contrast between the morality of
reason and the spirit of love is quite sufficient.
The spirit of absolute love is the spirit of Jesus-who thus
emerges as a greater sage than Kant after all, and indeed as some-
thing more than a sage altogether. Jesus is reconciled with all life,
and the source of all life is for him no longer a 'Lord' but a 'Father'.
He is thus the exact antithesis of Abraham; and his 'fate'-for
though he rises above fate, and does not fight against it, yet he does
not escape it-is to lose his own life, the one thing that was
guaranteed to Abraham, in his seed, forever. Forfeiture of life is in
Hegel's view the universal fate of Christian love, though the mode
of forfeiture varies with the degree of self-consciousness and actual
effectiveness of the love itself.
The religion of love is the absolute consciousness of that moment
of consummation in individual life when a new life, a human
child, is begotten; and the community of love is the community
of the 'sons of God', the divine power that 'acts and creates' in the
moment when a human union 'has become unsundered' in the
offspring (my little echoes here come, of course, from the cele-
brated fragment on 'Love'). Against this consciousness of unsun-
dered life it would seem that fate cannot arise; and in one sense this
is true. Jesus does not encounter his own acts risen up against him
in the guise of an alien power. But he suffers, none the less; and
his 'fate' in the ordinary sense is to die in circumstances of
extreme suffering. This actually is a limiting case of 'fate' in
Hegel's sense, for although Jesus does not do violence to the
integrity of life in the sense of acting against it, he is guilty of
absolute violence towards it because he refuses to act or to live his
life within the natural bounds of life at all. The 'Son of God'
denies his human parentage, he does not marry or have children,
and he tells his followers to ignore the 'unwritten law' that Antigone
obeys in the burial of her brother. He preserves the innocence of
'oneness', and so incurs the guilt of doing violence to every facet
of his nature by denying its development. The torture of his body
in every part which he undergoes in the Crucifixion is a strikingly
exact image of what he himself does to the 'manifoldness' of life-
the manifoldness of which the infant body as it takes shape in the
womb of the mother is only the primal expression.
The fate of the 'Kingdom of God' is analogous to that of the
xxviii PRELUDE AND CODA
'Son of God'. The community of beautiful souls is marred by any
activity that sets one of them or any group of them apart from the
rest. All that they can really do together is to eat and drink to
maintain life; and all that any of them can do on behalf of the
community as a whole is to 'preach the Gospel'. As Jesus had been
a 'private' person, fleeing from life in 'the world', so his Church
was bound to be a private association. But the zeal for purity and for
the Gospel is easily corrupted into fanaticism and persecution: Jesus
himself was betrayed by one of the supposedly pure souls, and his
Church took the image of the crucified man, who ought to have been
forgotten in the glory of the risen Christ, as its image of divinity.
The presence of the divinity in a permanent and sensible form
is vital to any religion that expresses the consciousness of a har-
monious and fully developed life. This is one of the crucial ways
in which the extreme of 'love', like the extreme of 'hostility', falls
short of 'the middle course of beauty between the extremes'. But
also, as Hegel showed in his brief analysis of the marriage tie, the
love that generates life cannot express itself in the material aspects
of life; in particular all forms of property rights are alien to it.
Thus when this love is raised to the level of religion it becomes an
'otherworldly' thing, and is as impoverished as the 'worldliness' of
the Jewish spirit.
Life itself develops in a non-living environment; and it needs
this opposed material world to work on and to express itself in.
This is what Hegel meant by the dictum, which is almost as
celebrated as it is obscure, that 'life is the union of union and non-
union'. The love which is the perfection of this union, the love
that is the fulfilled harmony of life, is the love that creates beauty;
and the paradigm of the absolute consciousness of this love is
Greek religion-the 'religion of art' as Hegel will call it in the
Phenomenology. It is fairly clear that the last great Frankfurt manu-
script was indeed a statement of Hegel's 'system'. It contained at
least a summary account of Hegel's philosophy, his theory of
'reflection' and of 'life', and it culminated by giving at least the
abstract outline of a new Christian mythology in which the Holy
Family replaced the Crucified Jesus as the focal image. I think it
likely that between these two elements came an outline of Hegel's
political philosophy in its religious aspects, so that the treatise as a
whole showed how Christianity could be reinterpreted to satisfy
not only the second canon of folk-religion but the third as well.
 PRELUDE AND CODA xxix

If so then we may hazard the further surmise that it is only the loss
of this manuscript that has caused any doubt to arise about the
authorship of the 'earliest system-programme'.
In what remains from Hegel's early political and economic writ-
ings there is very little that relates directly to the third canon of
folk-religion. But we have the second half of the 'Positivity' essay,
and some reports of his subsequent reflections on the relation of
Church and State; and in the Verfassungsschrift we have enough
discussion of the problem of the 'religious rights', both of citizens
and of states within the Empire, to enable us to appreciate the
practical function of Hegel's new Christian mythology. And it is
worth noticing in this connection that Hegel's ultimate theoretical
position, which puts religion on a higher plane than philosophical
reflection altogether, coheres with the claim of the 'system-
programme' that there is a realm of spiritual freedom above and
beyond the authority structure of the State altogether; just as, on
the other side, the initial formulation of the third canon confirms
the essentially political character of religious experience.
For the most part, however, Hegel is concerned in his early
political writings with the establishment of constitutional struc-
tures capable of sustaining the political freedom of the Germans as
a single 'folk'. The basic practical premise of all his labours for the
reform of Christianity was the belief that the French Revolution
signalled the birth of a new age for all of Europe. The conditions
for political change, and specifically for the re-establishment of
popular freedom, already existed; and the transformation of exist-
ing authority-structures might begin at any moment. If Germany
was to escape the agonies of France in the Terror, it would be at
least partly because her religious thinkers could produce better
food for the soul than the French revolutionaries with their God-
dess of Reason. It is very noticeable that when the political crisis
seems imminent, Hegel sets aside everything else in order to throw
what weight he can into the scales. And in all of these unpublished
manuscripts he has something of the air, which Marx retained all
his life, of a man straining not to be overtaken by events that are
already in train.
But never was there such a liberal-conservative revolutionary as
the young Hegel. Unlike many of the 'enlighteners' whom he
revered, he did not admire the English constitution. He felt that it
was decadent, that it had become the cloak of ministerial tyranny;
xxx PRELUDE AND CODA
and he felt the same way about the constitution of his native
Wiirttemberg, which was so often compared with that of England.
So his programme of political action for Wiirttemberg was rather
more radical than was fashionable. He wanted to see power placed
in the hands of a group of 'independent citizens', without too much
regard for the constitutional niceties until such time as a reform
had been carried through and stabilized. One is reminded here of
such ancient institutions as the Dictatorship at Rome, and of the
legislators or legislative commissions in Greek cities. And the
parallel is an apt one, because the object of Hegel's proposed com-
mission would have been the restoration of the 'ancestral constitu-
tion'. The new gospel of universal equality was not for him. His
ideal was not Athenian democracy but a corporate body in which
the different 'estates' had differing rights and responsibilities. He
probably knew fairly exactly just who was to be on his Wiirttem-
berg reform commission; but in spite of the precedent of Georg
Forster at Mainz it was probably rather utopian to hope-if
indeed he did hope-that a French army was going to put that
group into power and then let them do as they thought fit. It is
more likely, I think, that Hegel hoped that the fear of French arms
and the spectre of a more radical revolution would scare the Duke
and other interested parties in the establishment into accepting a
'rectification' in the way in which the reforms of the legislator or
dictator were accepted in ancient times.
It was his programme for the Germans as a nation, however, that
was integral to his work as a religious reformer. Here he was at once
more radical and more conservative; and his proposed modus
operandi in this arena was one that was not merely written about,
but actually employed, in the politics of the Enlightenment. The
constitution of 'Viirttemberg, whether one admired it or not, was
still functional, whereas the political structure of the Empire was
in the last stages of ossification and decay. As Hegel said, 'Germany
is a state no longer'; and as he showed in his analysis, it never had
become a modern state at all. But he nevertheless believed that out
of the ruins of the old feudal state a unique synthesis of local
spontaneity and central authority could be built; and he looked to
Austria for an enlightened despot to carry out the plan. In view of
the reforms achieved by Joseph II within Austria itself this was
not an impossible hope. But it presupposed victory for the armies
of Austria with resultant prestige and authority for Archduke Karl.
 PRELUDE AND CODA xxxi

In fact the French triumphed in the field, and were even more
effective in manipulating the German Estates at the conference
table; the material conditions for the realization of Hegel's dream
perished at the hands of Napoleon.
I believe that the triumph of Napoleon within France itself
convinced Hegel, soon after the turn of the century, that the
revolution was not going to take the course that he and his friends
had assumed. He recognized that the kairos, the moment of oppor-
tunity within which his vocation as a Volkserzieher had been con-
ceived and defined, had passed. If this belief is correct, there is a
deeper irony in Hegel's famous remark in 1806 that he had seen
'this world-soul' riding through Jena to a review, than has generally
been recognized. For in r806 'this "vorld-soul' merely happened in
an accidental way to deprive Hegel temporarily of his means of sub-
sistence. But in his actual emergence as 'world-soul' he had already
prevented the birth of the world to which Hegel sought to give a soul.
Whether Hegel laid down his pen in r802 because he actually
perceived this, we shall never know. It may very well be that he
stopped his work for the time being because of the pressure of his
other concerns, and never returned to it because by the time he was
able to do so, which may have been a long time later, he could see
that the moment for it was gone. I feel sure, in any case, that the
reason for his failure to publish any of the manuscripts of these
early years is that he became convinced that his work was not after
all of any practical use. He had striven from the beginning to
'apply' philosophy-first a philosophy borrowed largely from
others, and then a philosophy that was largely his own-to the
realization of an ideal that was very much his own, but which was
always historical and imaginative rather than philosophical. A
reader who is attracted to the kind of existential thinking that
Hegel did in these early years may object to my refusal to give it
the title of 'philosophy'. But I am only following the lead of Hegel
himself. He began, certainly, by using philosophical terminology
for it. He distinguishes for a long time between the theoretical
reflection which is the work of Verstand, and concrete meditation
upon the Ideen of practical reason. But this concrete meditation
is always more intuitive and imaginative than it is logical and dis-
cursive. Historical imagination is always more important than
reasoned understanding in Hegel's 'philosophical history of man-
kind'. And when Hegel arrives at full consciousness of the
 xxxii PREL UDE AND CODA
imaginative, aesthetic character of his own method he firmly denies
that this level of consciousness should be called philosophical. He
calls it religious-thus preserving its practical import-and asserts
that religion is higher than philosophy, i.e. that aesthetic intuition is
higher than either practical reason or theoretical understanding.
With this full consciousness of his own method, however, we
have reached a moment of equilibrium of the kind that can prove
to be either a resting-place or a watershed, a point of radical
conversion. For Hegel it proved to be the latter. For in order to
achieve an adequate theoretical understanding of his own under-
taking he had to take theoretical philosophy far more seriously
than he had done to begin with. The few pages of the Systemfrag-
ment in which he discusses the way in which religious experience
transcends all forms of reflective reason are written not only in a
style that strikes all readers as prophetic of his maturity, but in a
vein of theoretical earnestness that we have hardly encountered
before in Hegel's manuscripts. It is no surprise to find that at
Jena the religious-aesthetic intuition that we meet here, first
becomes a theoretical or intellectual intuition, and then develops
into the discursive mode of expression that typifies Hegel's later
systematic works. When he wrote the Systemfragment Hegel had
already decided to become a professional philosopher if he could.
I think it is fair to say that already, about two years before he
surrenders his old vocation, he has heard the call of the new one.
He has heard it but he does not yet know what it is, or where it
leads. He stands on the brink of becoming a philosopher in the
full sense, committed to understanding the world, rather than to
changing it. But he does not yet know that this is his sun, he has
not yet come out of the Cave into the world of Absolute Know-
ledge, the sunlight of the Absolute Idea. It is a steep and difficult
slope that he has yet to climb-as everyone knows who has tried
to read the J ena manuscripts. The present book is the story of his
sojourn among the shadows and the picture-makers. It is only
meet and right that its title should be a picture-maker's metaphor.
And all of us who find the slope of Hegel's theoretical works
precipitous, and the aether of the Absolute generally rather hard
to breathe, will never cease to be grateful that Hegel did not lose,
forget, or ever quite neglect, the image-making skill that he
learned as a cave-dweller, in the days when he believed that it was
his destiny to be an interpreter of the shadows.
 1. STUTTGART: 1770-1788
The Vocation l' a Scholar

I. The background of home and school

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL was born at Stuttgart on
27 August 1770. He was the eldest son of Georg Ludwig Hegel,
who was a minor financial official in the court of the Duchy of
Wiirttemberg. The family had been in Swabia for nearly a hundred
and fifty years, ever since an artisan named Johannes Hegel left
Carinthia for the sake of his Protestant faith, when the Austrian
emperors sought to stamp out heresy in their dominions after the
Council of Trent. The strength of this ancestor's Lutheran
convictions is less important, however, than the fact that the Duchy
to which he came was itself a Protestant enclave almost entirely
surrounded by Catholic territories. For this circumstance not only
helped to keep alive in his descendants something of the fervour
that brought him there; it also ensured that the young Wilhelm
would grow up with a keen awareness of the existence of religious
differences and with the conviction that these differences have
momentous consequences.
Johannes's descendants were, for the most part, minor civil
servants, teachers, and Lutheran ministers. One of Wilhelm's
uncles was a teacher at the Stuttgart Gymnasium, and the nine-
year-old professor-to-be duly passed through his class.! It seems
I vVas it perhaps this uncle Gariz of whom the fifteen-year-old student was

thinking when he wrote the obituary notice for the much loved and admired
teacher of his first two years, Laffier, in which he comments that Laffier 'was
not low minded, like some others who think, now they have got their living made,
they need not study any more'? Hegel must surely have had some one or more
of his teachers in the higher grades in mind, for he goes on to bewail the ill luck
that compelled Laffier to work 'entirely beneath his proper level' [ganz unter
seine Sphiire]' (Doh., p. 12). It is more probable, however, that he was thinking
of Jonathan Lenz, under whose tutelage he passed his fourth school year (1780-
1). For Lenz was an avowed adherent of the old-fashioned ways and an apologist
8249588 C
2 STUTTGART 1770-1788

to have been clear from the beginning that Wilhelm was destined
for an academic career, or for the Church. He received his first
lessons in Latin from his mother even before he went to the 'Latin
school' at the age of five; and he was an apt and eager learner. His
mother, who was better educated than most women of her time
and station, was delighted with his rapid progress and encouraged
him in all his studies. She died in 1781, when Wilhelm was eleven,
of a 'bilious fever' which threatened also for a time to carry off
Wilhelm and his father. The family by then numbered three
children, the other two being a sister Christiane (born 1773)
and a younger brother Ludwig who grew up to be a soldier.
Christiane always watched the career of her older brother with
deep interest and sisterly affection. It is from a letter of hers
written to Hegel's widow shortly after his death that we learn
what a model student he was at the Gymnasium, heading his class
regularly year after year from the age of ten until he went to the
University of Tiibingen when he was eighteen.!
His gastric illness at eleven was Wilhelm's second serious
sickness; he had already been near to death with the smallpox when
he was six. He was a clumsy child, ungainly in movement and in
speech, a fact which was regretfully noted by his teachers as a
serious hindrance to a career in the ministry. His physical inepti-
tude may well have helped to fix his scholarly inclinations, and to
stir his ambitions in that direction; but he was never shy or with-
drawn, being rather social and friendly by nature, and cheerfully
equable in disposition.
In his school years he would seem to have been an omnivorous
student, who managed to enjoy everything put before him, and
accepted it generally at the valuation placed upon it by his instruc-
tors. Christiane wrote that his favourite science in his last years at
the Gymnasium was physics; but she also remarked on his early
love of Greek tragedy, and from the diary that he kept sporadically
from fourteen to sixteen we can see that a love of history and

for the precept 'Spare the rod and spoil the child'. (On Lenz see Klaiber,
pp. 75 ff., or Lacorte, p. 65; and for a correction of Hoftineister's surmise in
Dok., p. 402, about the identity of C. F. Giiriz see Lacorte, p. 6r n. 6.)
I For the letter of 7 Jan. r832 and other notes about Hegel's youth that stem

from Christiane, see Doh., pp. 392-4. (Most of the letter is translated in
\Vledmann, pp. II-I2.) It appears that Christiane misremembered the year of
her mother's death. According to the family tree given by Hoffmeister (at the
end of Briefe, iv), she died on 20 Sept. r78r (not r783).
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 3
literature was one of his earliest passions. The teacher who did
much to mould his early interests in this direction was a man
named Lamer, who was his first instruci0r at the Gymnasium for
two years (from 1777 to 1779) and gave him special lessons in
Latin and Greek at intervals in following years. Lamer died about
two months before Hegel's fifteenth birthday, and the young
Wilhelm purchased from the widow a number of his teacher's
books. He recorded these purchases in his diary (with the prices
paid), and on the following day he added an account of the classes
and private instruction he had received from LafHer. Finally, the
next day, he concluded with an obituary judgement of LafHer's
character and worth. Hegel praised LafHer for being open-minded
(unparteiisch) and for always keeping up his own studies instead of
sinking into a repetitive classroom routine. One of the most
interesting and indicative comments in the whole record is the
afterthought in which he remarks that Lamer made him a present
of eighteen volumes of Shakespeare's plays (in a German transla-
tion) when he was still only eight.!
The eleven years that Hegel spent at the Stuttgart Gymnasium
Illustre (1777-88) belonged to an important period of transition in
the history of the school. A full-scale reform of the curriculum only
came in the years I794 to 1796, some six years after he had gone
on to the University of Ttibingen; but the great pedagogical
impulse of the Enlightenment and the first stirrings of reform were
felt much sooner, and piecemeal 'modernization' of the curriculum
began about I775. The basic classical emphasis in the curriculum
remained untouched, but there was an attempt to make it serve
'pragmatic' purposes: for instance, it was decreed that passages for
translation should be concerned with 'useful and pleasant' subjects
I Dok., pp. 11-13 (Diary for 5-7 July 1785). The number 'eighteen' is certainly

a mistake of some sort. Rosenkranz says (p. 7) that the Shakespeare gift was
\Nieland's edition (ZUrich, 1762-6, 8 vols.). Hoffmeister thinks this is another
mistake but I do not see how he can be so sure of this, merely on the basis of
Christiane Hegel's remembering (in 1832) that the gift was the Eschenberg
edition (ZUrich, 1775-7, 12 vols.). After all, Rosenkranz had Christiane's letter
in front of him, and was continually referring to it in this part of his work; so we
might well argue that he would not have departed from what she says without
having solid reasons for believing that she was mistaken (e.g. he may have found
the books in Hegel's library). Of course, Rosenkranz may simply have decided
that "XVIII Bande" was meant to be read as "VIII Bande"; and if he was
right about that-which could perhaps be determined by a re-examination of
the manuscript-the gift may still have been eight volumes of the Eschenburg
edition.
4 STUTTGART 1770-1788

related to ordinary life, and the teachers of theology and philosophy

were asked to concentrate especially on the formation of character
(die Bildung des Herzens). The sciences were given a greater place
in the curriculum than before, and the study of German literature,
along with mastery of the native tongue, gradually assumed a
position of fundamental importance. But the 'modern spirit'
(Genius der modernen Zeit) to which official directives often referred
-and the champions of reform doubtless did so even more often-
was not without its opponents; and our 'model student' Wilhelm
must certainly have been forced to use his own judgement about it,
for among the teachers at the Gymnasium were several, notably
Balthasar Haug and one Jonathan Lenz, whose class Hegel passed
through in 1780-1, who were its declared foes. 1
A deep concern with what might be called the 'education of
humanity' in the widest sense forms the main nerve of Hegel's
earliest philosophical speculation, and this concern remained al-
ways one of his fundamental interests. It is tempting to trace the
birth of it to his early awareness of his vocation as a scholar,
combined with his recognition of the great gulf that lies between
the living pursuit of scholarship, and pedantic insistence upon
traditional authority. At the very least we must recognize that from
the time that LafRer's death caused him to reflect upon the matter,
Hegel consciously felt that the pursuit of scholarship must be
enlivened by a moral purpose. Just a few months before this he
had begun to make a systematic record of his studies in and out of
school, thereby establishing a habit which he maintained steadily
for the rest of his life. 2 Only a part of this early record has come
down to us, but we have from Rosenkranz, his first biographer, a
I These summary remarks are based on the discussion in Lacorte, pp. 6 I -5;
some details have also been derived from Klaiber, pp. 71-82.
2 The earliest excerpts from his reading that have come down to us are dated

22 Apr. 1785 ('Plan der Normal-Schulen in RuBland' from Schliizer's Staats-

Anzeigen) and 5 May 1785 (the only date given for the long series from Feder's
Neuer Emil which must certainly have occupied him for a week or two). These
two are the only ones which are earlier than the dramatic script 'Unterredung
zwischen Dreien', which was written for submission to a teacher and which
Rosenkranz (p. 17) calls 'the earliest, first product of Hegel's authorship'.
From one or two indications-such as the incompleteness of the dating and the
fact that Feder's Emil is excerpted continuously rather than topically, so that
Hegel was later obliged to put a cross-reference slip to certain parts of this
excerpt into his files under a new heading, we may fairly infer that these two
extracts were among the first that he made (see Doh., pp. 54, 55, and for the
cross-reference slip, Doh., p. 140 n. 1.).
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 5

fairly complete description of the collection of notes and extracts

which Hegel made at school and University, and which was still
preserved among his papers at the time of his death. I
The fact that Hegel preserved so carefully the accumulated
results of his own first steps in scholarly research, taking them with
him from place to place in later years, along with the manuscripts
of his lectures and all his other academic papers, could, of course,
be dismisBed as merely another manifestation of that same obses-
sive concern with the systematic deployment of all his knowledge
and all hi.s experience, which caused the precocious and rather
priggish would-be professor to begin his records at the age of
fourteen. From this point of view, we should have to regard it as a
mere foible-one of the pedantic frailties of a remarkably compre-
hensive intelligence. But the more carefully we examine the actual
content of this early record, the more clearly we see that its
preservation was justified by the fact of its essential continuity with
all of Hegel's later work. It was, in a fairly literal and self-conscious
sense, the beginning of a life's work, and in all the subsequent
phases of development that we shall discover in his thought, Hegel
remained always so close to the programme which seems to have
guided his earliest researches, that he could reasonably expect to
find many of his schoolboy records useful.
He made his records by carefully excerpting from the books that
he read, or studied, the passages that seemed important for his
purposes. Almost from the beginning he seems to have recognized
that these purposes might vary, or rather (I believe) that the
execution of his purpose would be facilitated if he made his record
in the most flexible way. So he copied the passages that interested
him on to separate sheets of paper with index headings to show as
clearly and conveniently as possible the subject-matter or point of
the extract. He also noted carefully the source of each one and the
date on which he had copied it out. The main idea that guided him
in his selection and arrangement of passages, was the desire to gain
a clear understanding of human nature in all i-cs aspects, and to
understand the historical development of different cultures. As he
would most probably have expressed it himself, he was assembling
materials for a 'philosophical history of humanity'. 2
I Rosenkranz, pp. 12-15; reprinted in Dok., pp. 398-400. For an analysis of
Rosenkranz's account see Table I at the end of this chapter.
2 Compare the discussion in pp. 26-30 below; cf. also p. 52 n. 3.
6 STUTTGART 1770-1788

Behind this project lay a personal concern. Hegel was in all

respects a model student. He did his school work with tremendous
thoroughness, and he enjoyed it. He was almost by instinct a
scholar, and while still young he was accepted as a friend on more
or less equal terms by older men, not only among his teachers, who
were themselves scholars or appreciated scholarship. I He imbibed
both from them and from his reading the general conviction of the
Enlightenment that proper education was the great instrument of
human progress; and both by temperament and by upbringing he
was disposed to believe that each individual must strive to be useful
to society and contribute to its advancement. He recognized his
own vocation as a scholar, and he wished to clarify it for himself:
that is to say he wished to understand the social use and purpose
of the kind of education that he was receiving and enjoying.
Rosenkranz remarks that 'Hegel's education [Bildung] belonged
entirely to the Enlightenment with respect to principle, and entirely
to classical antiquity with respect to curriculum'. 2 This judgement
needs to be interpreted with caution, for we must not be led into
the mistake of thinking that the 'principles' of the Enlightenment
are clearly distinguishable from those of the classical humanistic
tradition. In one of its aspects the Enlightenment was a continua-
tion and development of Renaissance humanism; and it is to this
branch of the Enlightenment--for which the names of Montesquieu
and Gibbon may well serve as representative symbols-that
Hegel's education and earliest inspiration belongs. Nevertheless
Rosenkranz's way of putting the matter is accurate and illuminating
in the sense that it brings clearly into focus the tension for which
this aspect of the Enlightenment provided a resolution. A human-
ist imbued with the Genius der modernen Zeit was bound to face
the question 'What use is all your historical and literary erudition
to the progress of the human race?' This was the question from
which Hegel's independent philosophical and scholarly researches
began.
Of course, the young Hegel did not merely want to understand
the use of humanistic scholarship; he wanted to be a good scholar.
He laboured with passionate assiduity at his Greek and Latin
authors, acquiring in the process an impressive control of both
I For Hegel's friendship with his professors Cless and Hopf and with C. F.

Abel of the Karlsakademie see p. 9 n. 3 below.

• Rosenkranz, p. 10.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 7

languages; and he took delight in accumulating information about

subjects like mathematics and physics, which were not immediately
germane to his 'philosophical' problem, simply because it interested
him, and no doubt helped him to get good marks in schootr But
in the main the record of his independent reading is directed
towards the formation of a general conception of human nature,
and particularly towards the understanding of the function of
cultural and literary values in human history. We can see that this
problem was very much in his mind when he began to make his
collection of excerpts, because it recurs several times in the first
entries in the Tagebuch that he began to keep very soon afterwards.

2. The Tagebuch
What moved Hegel to begin keeping a diary is, of necessity, a
matter for surmise rather than for definite conclusions. The writ-
ing of diaries was a widespread fashion certainly, but Hegel was
not introspective enough to be a natural diarist; and it is scarcely
plausible to suggest that he may nevertheless have aspired to be
one, for even in his earliest entries he made no attempt either to
analyse his feelings or to describe the events of the day. His very
first entry records the historical facts that he had learned from a
sermon on the Augsburg Confession; and next day he noted his
approval of Schrokh's Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte for concentrat-
ing on the really important events of world history and not giving
long lists of kings and of wars. Hegel was especially pleased that
Schrokh took account of literary and cultural history: 'The best
thing of all is that he connects the realm of scholarship [das
Lehrreich] with history; likewise he takes care to refer to the condi-
tion of the scholars and of the sciences in general.'z This is not
I The mature Hegel had an intense interest in the nature and limits of mathe-

matical reasoning as a specifically human power; and of course the 'philosophy

of nature' occupied an important place in his thoughts from r80r onwards. Just
how far this aspect of his philosophy is capable of explanation and interpretation
in terms of his earlier humanistic concerns we shall see in due course. But the
absence of these topics in his philosophical reflections before the Jena period
strongly indicates that he had no ulterior object in his earliest studies and
excerpts in these areas beyond the acquiring of knowledge or technical mastery.
2 27 June [r785]; Dok., p. 7. Hegel also knew and at some time in this period

made excerpts from Meiners's Geschichte der Menschheit, but we cannot, of

course, conclude that he was already acquainted with it at this time. Most
probably he was comparing Schriikh's book with the official history textbook of
the Gymnasium, which was the KU1"ze Einleitullg zur allgemeinen weltlichen
Historie of J. G. Essich (cf. Rosenkranz, p. r4; Lacorte, p. 69).
8 STUTTGART 1770-1788

actually an independent verdict on the book itself, but only on the

programme and criteria which the author sets forth in his introduc-
tion. I But the fact that Hegel believed Schrokh's book to be the
best of its kind that he had come across for these reasons tells us a
great deal about the interests and motives of this young reader of a
manual intended for the use of his teachers.
Four days later we find him reflecting upon the problem of what
'pragmatic history' is. He records that although he has thought
about it for some time and cannot now remember where he got
the idea from, he is still unclear about it.
We have a pragmatic history, I think, when the author does not
merely narrate facts, but brings out the character of a famous man, or
of an entire nation, their customs and mores, their religions etc., and
the notable variations and deviations in these matters from the ways of
other peoples; when he investigates the ruin [ZerJall] and the up-
springing of great kingdoms; when he shows what consequences this
or that event or change of government [Staatsveriinderung] had for the
constitution of the nation, for its character etc., and so on. 2
It seems clear that in this definition Hegel is trying to pull
together what he knows (probably still only indirectly) about the
great 'pragmatic' historians-Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire, and
Gibbon. Lacorte has drawn attention to the defence of pragmatic
history in Schr6kh's History of the Christian Church (1768), which
may quite conceivably have been the occasion of some of the young
Hegel's ponderings, for it contains many of the same ideas. 3 If
it is reasonable tn suppose that his present attempt to come to a
conclusion on the subject was sparked off by his reading of the
Lehrbuch, then we may well begin to suspect that the purpose of
his diary in the author's eyes was to serve as a repository for his

ICf. Hoffmeister's note in Doh., p. 401; and Lacorte, pp. 72-3.

21 July 1785 (Doh., pp. 9-10) Hoffmeister reads Zufall, not Zerfall, but I
have accepted the correction of Glockner (vol. ii, p. II) and Haering (vol. i,
p. 16). There seems to be a clear reference here to Gibbon's Decline and Fall.
The reference to Montesquieu in the following clause is scarcely less trans-
parent; and surely Hume's History of England is in Hegel's mind in the first
clause, as well as Voltaire's Essai sur les ma;urs. This is not to say that
Hoffmeister's note (Doh., pp. 401-2) is altogether justified. We cannot assume
that Hegel has already read, or begun to read, any of these famous authors. The
direct influence that is to be looked for here is rather that of Schrokh, as Lacorte
(pp. 75-7) has recognized.
3 Christliche Kirchengeschichte (2nd edn., 1772), pp. 268 ff. My remarks are
based on the citations and discussion in Lacorte, pp. 74-6.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 9
own reflections upon his reading and excerpting, as well as a
supplementary record of information and events which he con-
ceived to have some significance for himself as a would-be scholar.
Almost all of the early entries fit very conveniently into the
context of this hypothesis. We are offered reflections on the
relativity of men's interests, and how men's pleasures vary with
their ages;1 a hypothesis about the death of Socrates;z notes about,
and reflections arising from, walks with Professor Cless, who was
at this time his form master and also his philosophy teacher, and
with other professors and school friends;3 lists of books bought
from Laffier's library and reflections on his own debt to L6ffier as
a teacher;4 reflections on the nature of woman;5 reflections on,
and examples of, superstition;6 notes about his visits to the ducal
library.7
He had not consciously formulated this purpose when he began
his diary, however, and the conflict between the keeping of a real
diary on the one hand, and his sense of what was worth recording
on the other, soon forced him to adopt a new plan. It was a point
of conscience for someone as methodical as the young Hegel that
in a 'day··book' every day should have its entry-though he soon
I 28 June [1785] (Doh., pp. 8-9). Compare also the walk on 3 July (Doh.,

p. 10: see n. 3 below).

2 2 July [1785] (Doh., p. 10). For Hegel's interest in the death of Socrates

cf. IS July (Doh., p. IS) and the excerpt of 6 Apr. 1786 (Doh., pp. 86-'7).
'Socrates' cock' was one of Hegel's index headings.
3 See 4, 15,21,22 to 25 July for walks with Professor Cless (Doh. pp. 10-II,
IS, 16-18); 14 July (Doh., p. IS) for a walk with Professors Abel and Hopf;
3 July (Doh., p. 10) for the most interesting walk-probably with classmates
since Hegel admits to dominating the conversation-on which the proposition
that 'every good has its bad side' was discussed. The other recorded walk with
classmates (29 June, Doh., p. 9) appears to have been quite unacademic.
Cless taught philosophy to the sixth class only one hour a week. His main
responsibility was to teach them Latin. The recorded topics on his walks with
Hegel are the physics of the solar system, and solid geometry (a topic which
Hegel pursues in the following days). This squares well with Christiane Hegel's
memory of his 'Freude an Physik' at the Gymmsium. The teaching of physics
was the particular responsibility of Hop£ (who also taught Greek to the sixth
class, and was the form master of the seventh).
J. F. Abel was professor of philosophy at the Karlsahademie, the other import-
ant gymnasium in Stuttgart. But in 1790 he was called to the University of
Tiibingen where he thus became one of Hegel's teachers.
4 5-7 July (Dok., pp. II-13). These entries are discussed on p. 3 above;
compare also the entry for I I Dec. (Doh., p. 24).
5 8 July [1785] (Doh., p. 13); cf. 24 Jan. [1786] (Doh., pp. 30-1).
6 9-12 July [1785] (Doh., pp. 13-14); cf. II Mar. 1786 (Doh., pp. 35-6).
7 13 July and 20 July (Doh., pp. 14-15, 16).
10 STUTTGART 1770-1788

began to fail in this respect. But on the other hand he felt it was
wrong to fill his pages with things of no importance. His record
for 29 and 30 June 1785 reveals the conflict in his mind very
clearly. These two entries are just the sort of thing that we should
expect to find in any diary: the news of a riot, and some reflections
on his weaknesses as a chess player, with resolutions for future
improvement in this game that he enjoys so much. But in the first
entry he adds a note: 'To-day was a holiday; but I did not go to
Church, I went walking with Duttenhofer and Autenrieth [two
school friends] in the Bopser Wald.' This seems to be intended as
an explanation for his having nothing more serious to record; and
in the entry about chess which is the nearest thing to a self-
examination in the whole diary, the note of apology becomes
explicit, for Hegel ends: 'I have said so much about chess playing,
only in fugam vacui, in order that the last day of this month should
not be left empty.'! He did not regard personal considerations and
private details as worthy of record, unless they occurred to him as
illustrations of some general philosophical principle. 2 We may
reasonably suppose, for instance, that the mind of a fifteen-year-
old would be occupied at fairly frequent intervals with thoughts
about girls and his relations with them; but all we find on this
topic in Hegel's diary is some rather frigid abstract moralizing. 3
Hegel resolved his difficulty by making his diary-keeping
subservient to the pursuit of scholarship in another way. After he
had been keeping it for just one month, three days were allowed to
pass without a record; then on 29 July 1785, he began to make his
entries in Latin. Doubtless the end of the summer vacation and his
return to school was the direct cause of this change in the character
of the diary. Hegel needed to practise writing in Latin as often as
he could, and during the week his schoolwork took up much of his
time, and almost all of his attention. But any material would serve
exercendi stili et roboris acquirendi causa [for stylistic exercise and
to gain strength in the language]; so Hegel writes notes on Roman

IDok., p. 9. (His political bias against the peasantry should be noted.)

2 For instance when he contrasts his own delight in the sight of a fine house
with that of the women and married men in the company at the news that a
confinement has terminated in successful delivery (28 June 1785, Dok., p. 8).
3 See p. 9 n. 5 above; the first entry concerns a quotation from Horace and the
second is a Latin essay by Hegel himself. For a contrast compare the remarks
about watching pretty girls in the real diary chronicle which Hegel kept for the
first week of 1787 (Dok., p. 39).
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR II

history and retells the story of Adrastus the Phrygian from the
first book of Herodotus-deficiente alia quadam materia [for lack
of other material]. After a week of this sort of thing he finally has
something of his own that he thinks worth recording again-a
visit to a Catholic church to hear Mass-a ceremony which, he says,
displeased him as it would any sane man. He went again the
following Sunday, however, and found the erudition and clarity
with which the Catechism was expounded very admirable; he was
sorry to have missed the sermon that morning 'on virtue'. In the
intervening week there are only two entries, both concerned with
Professor Cless's class on Livy. Livy and the Persian Wars
continued to supply his material for three more days before the
diary was interrupted for three months by preparations for an
examination, immediately followed by several weeks of sickness. 1
Hegel took up his pen again in December, on the ninth to be
precise, or 'A.D.V. Id Dec. A. MDCC LXXXV' as he now begins
to date his entries. The few days remaining before the end of the
school semester on the fourteenth are filled with notes about
happenings in the interval: his own sickness, the departure of his
carissimus amicus Duttenhofer to the Tilbingerstift, whither he was
himself to follow in three years time; the death of a local monu-
ment of learning, J. J. Moser, qui tot, quot perlegere humana non
sufficit aetas perscripsit libros; the books added to his bibliothecula.
In the following days we hear of a public concert, of a house burn-
ing down, and of the hard winter weather; then come moral
reflections about the evils attendant upon the love of money,
before we learn that the Christmas present which most delighted
our young scholar was Scheller's Latin lexicon. On New Year's
day 1786 he writes that he has himself bought Scheller's Praecepta
(intended to aid the development of a Ciceronian Latin style) to go
with it. Then the diary lapses again for six weeks. 2
The next entry records an annual address at the Gymnasium on
the Duke's birthday (II Feb. 1786) which was concerned with the

I 29 JulY-24 Aug. [1785] (Doh., pp. 18-23). Cf. also the excerpts from Gesner

(Doh, pp. 82-6).

2 Doh., pp. 23-7. It would seem that the young Hegel enjoyed concerts;

cf. 1 Jan. 1787 (Doh., p. 39). He continued to do so throughout his life; compare
for instance Letter 22 (to Nanette Endel), Briefe, i, 52. His housekeeping records
'for 18II, and again for 1819, show that while at home he went to concerts
frequently; and his letters from Vienna in 1824 are full of the delights of the
Opera (Briefe, iv, 96 iI., II8--19, iii, 53 ff.)'
12 STUTTGART 1770-1788

scholarly and literary achievements of the Wiirttemberg schools.

Four more entries scattered over the next ten days were devoted to
planning and composing a Latin oration on the conduct proper to
a Gymnasium student, which he expected to have to deliver in
school. The draft of the speech breaks off very near the close, and
unless a page or more has been lost here (as has certainly happened
further on) Hegel wrote no more for two weeks. 1
What follows then is very curious. The Latin date for 6 March
is given with all possible solemnity (,Prid. Non. Martii. A.C. N.
1786') and followed by an essay in German Ober das Excipieren,
which was continued on the 7th, 8th, and 15th and finally com-
pleted on the 2lst(the last two dates being given in German). In the
intervals Hegel wrote two diary entries in Latin (though the
second is dated in German) but on the 22nd he finally reverts to
German altogether. The essay is a well-argued attack on the
practice of dictating a theme in German for transcription by a
class in Latin. Hegel notes that some teachers approve of it, and
use it, while the majority do not. He considers all the arguments
he has heard in its favour but thinks there is little substance in
them. It looks rather as if his own arguments to show that this
practice is reactionary and liable to lead to the development of
bad Latin style rather than a true command of the language (which
must come rather from close and frequent reading and study of
good authors) convinced him that his own habit of writing his
random thoughts in Latin was likewise a bad one. One of the
intervening diary entries is an interesting little meditation on pagan
and Christian superstition, the other a brief sermon on the impor-
tance of always keeping one's temper.
The entry in German for 22 March 1786 concerns the universal-
ity of the desire for happiness. Like the next entry (on 'Enlighten-
ment') it can be directly linked with some of the surviving
'excerpts', so it is especially unfortunate that both entries are
fragmentary. Two or more sheets have been lost from the manu-
script, so that we have only five or six lines of the entry on happi-
ness, and the entry on enlightenment lacks both beginning and
end, and cannot even be securely dated (except for the year),
since Hegel wrote no more in his diary until New Year's Day 1787.z
I Dok., pp. 28-3 I. (It is a pity we do not have the oration De utilitate poeseos

instead.)
2 Dok., pp. 31-8. The entries about superstition, happiness, and enlighten-

ment are considered further below.

 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 13

The record for the first week of 1787 is a diary in the ordinary
sense. We get from it a very clear picture of exactly how Hegel
spent his days. He inserted his weekly time-table of school-work
in the margin of the first entry, and contented himself with the
word 'gewohnlich' as a sort of shorthand for it thereafter. This
first entry is a sort of review of his situation, and the regular entry
for the events of the day follows separately. But after a week his
New Year's resolution failed him; or perhaps he decided that he
had better uses for his time than the maintenance of this record.
The record itself would certainly have provided good grounds for
this decision. On New Year's day he went to a concert after spend-
ing the whole afternoon reading Sophiens Reise because he could
not tear himself away from it. I He talked with his friends and they all
enjoyed looking round at pretty girls. But even this day had begun
with trigonometry, and during the following week Hegel's free
time was given up to trigonometry and to the making of notes
about Virgil and Demosthenes. Even on the two mornings when he
stopped working to visit his friends, he was still devoured by
intellectual curiosity: he examined a musical clock and a star atlas
and borrowed another mathematics book, which he promptly began
to work on. He even spent most of Sunday on his trigonometry.2
The analysis that I have given shows, I think, that it is mis-
leading to speak of the young Hegel's diary as if it were a single
entity. Over a period of some eighteen months he kept very
I Sophiens Reise von Memel nach Sachsen was an enormously long picaresque

novel (Lacorte says about 4,000 pages) by Johann Timotheus Hermes, giving a
moralistic and sentimentalized picture of life in Germany in the period of the
Seven Years "War. It began to appear in 1770 and was completed in five volumes
in 1772; it was immensely popular, reaching its sixth edition in 1778 (all editions
after the first were in six volumes). Hoffmeister's note (Dok., p. 39) refers to the
second edition (Worms, 1776), so it may be that he had evidence that this was
the edition read by Hegel. Haym underlines the fact that the novel (and its
popularity) was a reaction against the new spirit and the new morality of the
Werther generation. He uses Hegel's delight in it, together with his life-long
appreciation of Hippel's Lebensliiufe (on which see below, p. 184 n. 2), as evidence
of his poor literary taste. Schopenhauer seized on Hegel's reading of Sophiens
Reise and contrasted it with his own early love of Homer (as if the young Hegel
read nothing but bad novels!); but his point is, to my mind, more significant
than Haym's, for Hegel's fascination tells us more about his interests than about
his taste. The attraction of Hermes's book for the young student of the 'philo-
sophical history of humanity' was no doubt increased by the wealth of physio-
gnomic descriptions that it contained, which are reported to have impressed
Lavater himself. An abridgement was published by Rec1am at Leipzig in 1941
(edited by Fritz Brtiggemann). See Haym, p. 24; Lacorte, pp. 80-1.
2 Dok., pp. 38-41.
 14 STUTTGART 1770-1788

sporadically three different kinds of daily record, the first two of

which were scarcely diaries at all in the ordinary sense. At first he
set out more or less unconsciously to make a scholarly and philo-
sophical commonplace book, and later he began rather to do
regular composition exercises in Latin. Then his earlier pre-
occupation gradually reasserted itself, and for at least a short time
he consciously and deliberately kept a commonplace book for his
own reflections.! Finally for the first week of I787 he made an
exact chronicle of his daily doings, a diary in the most basic sense
of the word.

3. The collection of excerpts

The exercitium styli aspect of the Tagebuch is of little interest to us.
But as a commonplace book it supplements the collection of
excerpts and the school essays that remain to us; and as a chronicle
it both supplements and illustrates the account Rosenkranz gives
of the total collection of papers that still survived from the
Gymnasialzeit when Hegel died. From it we can see, for instance,
how 'Socrates' cock' came to be a distinct heading in his excerpt
collection. For he records on 2 July I785 that Professor Offterdinger
had raised in class the question why Socrates wished to offer a
cock to Aesculapius as he lay dying. The professor's hypothesis
was that Socrates was by then stupefied and did not know what he
was saying; but Hegel himself suggests that Socrates was merely
I The sheet dated '14 May 1787' and bearing the title 'Some remarks on the

Vorstellung of quantity' forms a sort of pendant to this aspect of the Tagebuch.

It would seem from Hegel's own footnote to have been occasioned by a passage
from Meiners's Briefe fiber die Schweiz about the way a difference in the light
affects our impressions of distances and distant objects. Hegel generalizes from
this example, offering others of the same sort. He is primarily concerned to
identify the controlling factor in his different cases; and he goes on from
estimates of size and distance to consider estimates of time. In both cases we
need a criterion and we employ the one that we are used to or that lies nearest
to hand: we measure the passage of time by the succession of distinct impressions
or ideas that we can recall when we look back over it. Thus the time occupied by
a journey in which we notice everything on the way will seem longer than the
same amount of time occupied in reading a book, unless it happens to be one
with subject-matter of a historical type. (Here the overwhelming influence of
the Lockean tradition in psychology on Hegel's mind is apparent: for we may
be sure that when he sat down to read Sophiens Reise for a while, and could not
tear himself away till evening, the time did not in fact seem as long to him as
when he read some other books-even if he was the sort of model student who
would copy long extracts from a book on spherical trigonometry so as to be able
to work through them in his own time! Cf. Doh., pp. 42-3 and 39.)
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR IS

falling in with an established custom in order not to offend the

religious sensibilities of the 'masses' (Pabel, not Volk). Almost a
year later he found and copied out from Dusch's Briefe zur
Bildung des Geschmacks a conjecture of Racine's that in saying
to Crito 'vVe owe a cock to Aesculapius' Socrates was using a
proverbial expression ironically or jokingly, just as an enlightened
Frenchman might say to a friend 'nous devons une belle chandelle'
without implying any religious commitment. I
One might use this example to argue for the view, which lies
behind Haym's characterization of the schoolboy Hegel as 'eine
sammelnde und lernende Natur',2 that the researches of this
early period were not really organized and directed, but were the
spontaneous outgrowth of whims, accidents, and scholastic tasks,
and were ordered only in ways suggested by the school curriculum
itself. No doubt many of the particular problems and topics that
Hegel followed up in his reading and excerpting were suggested by
questions raised or problems set for him by his teachers, or even by
incidental similarities and contrasts that struck him and aroused
his interest while he was reading. But he had nevertheless one
continuous and controlling concern in all of his philosophical or
semi-philosophical investigations, and closer inspection will show
that his apparently whimsical interest in the explanation of
Socrates' death-bed remark touches that concern very closely.
Socrates, we must realize, was for almost all the writers of the
Enlightenment the type of the enlightened man, the rational seeker
after knowledge; and any problem about the explanation of some-
thing that he said or did was for them not so much a matter of
biographical fact as a question of fundamental principle. The
underlying question in this instance is: 'What attitude should the
enlightened man adopt toward established religious ritual ?'
Socrates could not really have believed that we ought to repay a
god for hils gifts with ours, since that belief is a superstition un-
worthy of the enlightened man. But what then was his attitude, or
in other words, what should the attitude of the enlightened man
I Doh., pp. 10 and 86,.
2 Haym, p. 20. It will not have escaped the attentive reader that I agree with
the judgement there cited: 'Hegel ward zum Philosophen, indem er sich bildete
wie ein Gelehrter.' But I think this was a much more deliberate development
than previous critics have recognized, and that behind the 'objectivity' that has
impressed all who have examined the record there was a conscious and often a
controlling concern on Hegel's part with his own vocation as a scholar.
 STUTTGART 1770-1788

be? Should he quietly conform as long as the practice involved is

harmless? This is the assumption that appears to lie behind the
interpretation of 'Socrates' cock' that Hegel himself proposed in
class. But in other contexts he seems rather to accept the assump-
tion implicit in Racine's interpretation: that the enlightened man
must be resolutely critical, striving always to unmask superstition
as such, and if possible to destroy it. He is extremely scornful, for
instance, about claims which local people made to have seen the
'mutige Heer' (the fairy army or hunting-party which appears in
English folklore as 'Arthur's chase') and about reports of 'ghosts'
in general. I
Of course, ghosts and fairies were a fairly safe target for en-
lightened contempt. But Hegel also waxes quite violent at times
against superstitious aspects of the Christian faith itself. We have
already noted how scornfully he expressed himself about the
Mass;2 and there is another passage in his Tagebuch in which he
begins by remarking on the pagan origins of the popular concep-
tions of the Devil and his ministers, and of the guardian angels, and
goes on to comment on the survival of the rite of sacrifice in
Christianity. In this connection he declares the Catholic belief that
one may acquire the grace of God by giving alms to the priests to
be as superstitious as the sacrifices and offerings of the pagans. He
admits that among Protestants the same superstitions endure still,
but the main weight of his sarcasm falls on the Catholic priesthood
and the laity who foolishly 'stuff their priests with food' in return
for the pronouncement 'by these fat, luxuriating, most profane
men of some words which neither side understand'.3
At Tubingen he later vented his sarcasm privately on many
aspects of Protestant faith and doctrine likewise. But it is a mistake,
nevertheless, to read this passage in the Tagebuch as evincing a
basic antipathy, a polemical attitude towards religion as such. 4 In
general Hegel's attitude as a young student towards religious
belief of all kinds was neutral and objective; he wanted to under-
stand it, because he was convinced that it is a major force in the
I Dok., pp. 13-14.
2 Dok., p. 21; cf. above, p. 11. 3 Doh., pp. 35-6 .
• The quietist view is expressed once more in Hegel's excerpts from Moses
Mendelssohn of a few years later (Dok., pp. 14-0-3, excerpt of 31 May, 1787).
The seeming contradiction in Hegel's attitude is really only a reflection of the
contrast between the private opinions and the public conduct of the enlightened
man (which Mendelssohn's view allows for).
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 17
formation of culture, the primary instrument in social education,
and hence in the eventual development of human nature towards
enlightenment. Thus he was torn between two ideals of enlighten-
ment: on the one side the theoretical ideal of understanding for
which 'tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner', and on the other
side the practical ideal of reform, which is based on faith in the
perfectibility of man through education. As a scholar he had to try
to understand how everything fitted together; but as a human
being 'formed for society' he had to use his knowledge to improve
the state of his fellows:
Every scholar must know the encyclopedia of positive [gewisser]
sciences [he copied dutifully on 22 March 1787 from an essay on
Kastner's lectures]. Most counsels that are given to young men are one-
sided, and cannot help being so. But every head and every community
of men must have its own plan. To restrict oneself to a single science
is admirable: but since this science itself leads on to others, and since
the soul of man has just this peculiar property, that it rapidly grows
fatigued with only one type of occupation and must either have frequent
changes or be idle, should we not therefore let the circle of the sciences
open out?
A natural talent [Genie] for the study of some particular aspect of the
natural order, is soon of itself drawn to its object, as long as it has first
gained enough experience to have discovered it in its place. And are
we not worth more in the end as enlightened citizens, than as teachers
of a particular science; and does not this enlightenment consist precisely
in a certain manifoldness of our knowledge so that each part of it is
explained and defined by the others?!
Hegel wrote down his own views on the meaning of Aufkliirung
in 1786 (probably in March or April) about a year before he copied
out the views of Mendelssohn and Garve. His own reflections read
as follows:
..• I am speaking here of enlightenment through the sciences and
arts. It is therefore confined merely to the class of scholars [auf den
Stand der Gelehrten]. For to sketch the outlines of an enlightenment of
the common man, I think is on the one hand a very difficult task even

I Dok., pp. 138-9. This was the ideal of scholarship that Hegel was already

seeking to achieve (most obviously, for instance, in his excerpts from Sulzer's
Kurzer Begr1ff der Gelehrsamkeit two weeks earlier: Dok., pp. 109-15). And
Kastner's conception of enlightenment here chimes well with the doctrine that
'God has formed man for life in society' which he found in Feder's New Emile
when he first began making his excerpts (Dok., p. 63).
8243588 D
 STUTTGART 1770-1788

for the most learned people, and on the other far harder still for me in
particular, since I have not yet studied history as a whole philosophically
and thoroughly. But anyway I believe this enlightenment of the common
man has always been governed by the religion of his time; it extends
only to enlightenment through handicrafts [Handwerke] and the com-
forts of life. So I am giving my opinion only about the sciences and arts.
With respect to these, my view then is that they flourished first in
the East and South and have spread ever more \Vestwards from there.
Although at the present time the great fame of Egyptian learning has
been justly diminished, at least with respect to philosophy, this much
at least remains certain that at least with respect to the mechanical and
f-ine arts Egypt had achieved such a level of perfection that the very
ruins of her works of art are even now still a cause for wonder, and it is
very likely that their deep and wide ranging practical knowledge had
already been organized into an accurate theory.'
At this point the fragmentary diary entry is unfortunately
broken off by the loss of one or more pages from the manuscript.
But even the slight fragment that remains suffices to make three
things clear: first the social and eminently practical yardstick by
which Hegel felt that all enlightenment was to be judged; secondly
the fact that for him the class of professionally learned men, the
theorists of a culture, constitutes a special elite within it; and
thirdly that the conception of the march of the spirit from East to
West, which played such a large role in his mature thought, is
rooted in his earliest readings and reflections about cultural
development.
The distinction of different levels or senses of Aufklarung was
common enough in the literature of the time. About a year later,
in May 1787, Hegel copied out a passage from Mendelssohn's
essay 'Was heiBt AufkHiren' in the Berlin Monatsschrift for 1784,

I Dok., pp. 37-8. In Dec. 1786 (i.e. in the same year but probably some

months after this diary entry) Hegel copied out a passage from Meiners's
Revision der Philosophie (Gottingen and Gotha, 1772) in which Meiners gives
arguments for minimizing the Egyptian heritage in Greek culture. We know
that he made excerpts from several of Meiners's works-especially the Grundrij3
der Geschichte der Menscheit (1785)-so it is possible that he was already consci-
ously taking up a position vis-a-vis Meiners's views in this passage.
The passage 'On the fame of the Enlightenment of other lands', in which
Eberhard adduces Greek examples (Homer, Plato, Xenophon) of the tendency
of enlightened leaders of thought to claim that the ideals they wish to see
realized in their own societies have already been achieved elsewhere (Persia,
Egypt) shows that Hegel was still reflecting on the question at issue here in 1787
(Dok., pp. 144-5).
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 19

in which 'Bildung' was subdivided into 'Kultur' and 'AufkHirung'

very much along the lines of his own distinction between the
practical Aufkliirung of the common man and the theoretical
Aufkliirung of the learned:
Bildung, Kultur and Aufklarung are modifications of social life,
products of men's industry and of their efforts to improve their social
condition.
The more the social condition of a people is brought by art and
industry into harmony with the vocation of man [die Bestimmung des
Menschen] the more Bildung that people has.
Bildung subdivides into Kultur and Aufklarung. The former appears
to belong more to the practical side: it refers to goods, to refinement and
beauty in handicrafts, arts and social mores (objectively speaking); and
to aptitude, industry and ability in the former [i.e. handicrafts and arts],
and to inclinations, impulses and habits in the latter [i.e. social mores]
(subjectively speaking). The more these correspond in a given people
to the vocation of man, the more Kultur that people is endowed with.-
Aufklarung on the other hand appears to be related more to the
theoretical side. To rational knowledge (objectively) and aptitude
(subjectively) for rational reflection upon the circumstances of human
life with a view to estimating their weight and influence upon the
vocation of man.
A language achieves Aufklarung through the sciences, and Kultur
through social intercourse, poetry and rhetoric. Through the former it
becomes more apt for theoretical purposes, through the latter for
practical. Both together give the Bildung of a language .
. . . The language of a people is the best index of its Bildung, of its
Kultur and of its Aufklarung alike, and equally for its extent and its
depth [Starke].
The Bestimmung des Menschen may be subdivided into:
I. The vocation of man as man, and
2. The vocation of man regarded as a citizen.
As far as Kultur is concerned the two aspects coincide; since all
practical perfections have worth only in relation to soc:iallife they must
be referred only and solely to the vocation of man as member of society.
Man as man needs no culture: but he needs Aufklarung .
. . . The Aufklarung that is the concern of man as man is universal
without distinction of ranks [StandeJ. The Aufklarung of man regarded
as a citizen varies according to rank and calling [Beruf]. But the vocation
of man provides here the criterion and end of his striving....
Menschen-Aufklarung can come into conflict with Biirger-Aufklarung.
20 STUTTGART 1770-1788
If the essential requirements of the human vocation [die wesentlichen
Bestimmungen des Mensclzen] are unhappily brought into conflict with the
accidental concerns of men [mit seinen aufJerwesentlichen Bestimmungen] ;
if some useful and humane [den Menschen zierende] truth cannot be
published abroad without demolishing the currently prevailing principles
of religion and social ethics, then will the virtue-loving Aufkliirer act
with prudence and discretion and put up with the prejudice rather than
cast out along with it the truth fast entwined in it. Certainly this
maxim has long been a shield for hypocrisy and we have it to thank for
so many centuries of barbarism and superstition. Whenever men want
to commit iniquities they turn them into holiness. But for all that the
friend of man must always even in the most enlightened times pay
attention to this aspect of things. It is difficult, but not impossible to
find the boundary lines which even in this regard mark off proper use
from misuse.

A civilized [gebildete] nation knows no other internal danger save for

the overflow of its national happiness, which like the most perfect health
of the human body, can already in and of itself [an und fur sich] be called
a sickness, or the point of transition to a sickness. A nation which
through Bildung, has arrived at the highest apex of national happiness,
is thrust into danger precisely for that reason, because it cannot rise
any higher.!
A few months later, in August 1787, Hegel copied out two passages
from Nicolai's Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die
Schweiz (1785) in which the same distinctions are employed and
developed. The first of them just repeats Mendelssohn's distinc-
tions. Hegel probably noted it because Nicolai goes into consider-
able detail about the relation between Kultur and Politur (which
as Mendelssohn put it is 'Kultur in externals'). Politur is on the
one hand the highest level of Kultur; but it may also on the other
hand be a mere fas:ade borrowed from the culture of another
nation. And what is true of nations is true likewise of individuals.
As we shall see, this was a point which greatly exercised Hegel's
mind. 2
The second passage from Nicolai undoubtedly caught his eye
because of the important role which it assigns to the middle class
with respect to the spreading of enlightenment. To create a strong

I Doh., pp. 140-3. Hegel transcribed the whole of Mendelssohn's article

apart from the introductory paragraph and a few elaborative phrases or examples.
• Doh., pp. 145-6.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 21

middle class, freed from concern about the most basic needs of
life and so able to be reflective and active, is declared to be the
supreme task (hochste Kunst) of a ruler, for
Kultur and Aufklarung will very soon spread from the middle classes
to the lower classes of the people if their spirit is not weighted down by
poverty, superstition, rottenness and dulled sensibility; and it will
spread from there to the higher orders [Stande], if they have not through
riches, pride, superstition, rottenness and refined sensibility, become
indifferent to the things that matter to mankind. If this is true as
history everywhere confirms that it is, it is equally obvious that Kultur
and Aufklarung alike do not need a capital city for a seed bed, but must
at least be introduced from a court focus [nicht notwendig in einer
Residenzstadt zuerst aufkeimen am wenigsten aber vom Hofe aus eingefiihrt
werden mussen].1
One other excerpt concerning Enlightenment has come down to
us, and it is the most revealing of all, for it throws the conflict
between theoretical understanding and practical reform which is
implicit in the concept itself, into high relief. It is the latest of
Hegel's notes on the subject (February 1788), but it directly
echoes his own obituary note on Laffier which is the earliest
indication that we possess of his personal attitude on the question:
Fighting against prejudice is not what makes an enlightened man, and
even less is it crying down the truth under the name of prejudice. When
someone apes the impartial researcher and declares some opinion to be
absurd or unprovable, since research has shown it to be so, is he not
then himself guided by prejudice? And when someone else first
degrades the plain truth with the name of prejudice and then takes the
field against it, does he not give us to understand that he himself is
under the domination of prejudices? A man is not enlightened in virtue
of his acceptance or rejection of this or that proposition, but because
he has so much reverence and respect for the truth, so much resolution
and firmness that he strives with all his might [mit mannlichem Ernste],
and wiIl not be put off by praise or blame, by outraged clamour or by
scornful derision, to investigate calmly why he accepts or rejects some-
thing. 2
The young Hegel did not always live up to this high ideal of
scholarly objectivity as his remarks about Catholicism alone suffice
I Dok., p. 147.
2Dok., p. 147 (an extract from Zollner's Lesebuchfur alle Stiinde found by
Hegel in the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung for Jan. 1788. He noted it down with
remarkable promptitude on I Feb. 1788).
22 STUTTGART 1770-1788

to show. But we can see from his excerpts about Egyptian culture,
which are opposed to his own beliefs on the subject, that he really
strove to achieve it; and the general impression of calm objectivity,
which all who have examined his schoolboy researches have
remarked on, is probably justified. This makes it very dangerous
to take his excerpts as evidence of his opinions rather than simply
as indications of his interests. We can only regard the excerpts as
evidence for his views in cases like the present one, i.e. where we
have some statement made by Hegel himself in propria persona to
begin from. I
This condition can be met in the case of another important topic
that occurs in Hegel's excerpts: the concept of 'true happiness'.
Here again some reflections in his Tagebuch show that he had
already been pondering about this; but unluckily the manuscript
is here again defective and this time it breaks off too soon to provide
a reliable index of his attitude, so that the interpretation of the
excerpts is more difficult.
All men [he wrote on 22 March 1786] have the aim of making them-
selves happy. About certain rare exceptions, who possessed such
sublimity of soul, that they sacrificed themselves in order to make
I In this connection, however, it may be significant that the five passages

dealing with the nature of scholarship and enlightenment are almost unique in
that not one of them has an index heading from Hegel's own hand; this might
be taken as evidence that he did not regard these passages as part of the object-
ive collection of views and information which he was making for scholarly
purposes, but rather as having a bearing on his own attitude and aims in making it.
The difficulty with this interpretation is that there are two other passages,
one on the place of 'chance' in historical development, and another on the
origin of deponent and middle forms in Greek and Latin, which are similarly
unindexed. The suggestion that Hoffmeister makes about the first of these
passages-that the young Hegel found difficulty in classifying it-may well be
valid for both of them. But it is paradoxical to extend this explanation, as
Hoffmeister does, to the passage about the duty of a scholar; and even
Hoffmeister does not venture to suggest it in the case of the passages where
words like Aufkliirung and Bildung are underlined or marked out at the very
beginning. Nevertheless Hoffmeister may have been on the right track. For it is
easily demonstrated that Hegel was growing steadily more sophisticated in his
indexing. Whereas earlier he would head his extracts Hahn des Socrates, Wahre
GlUckseligkeit, Weg zum GlUck in den groj3en Welt, and leave it at that, he wanted
now to classify according to the divisions and subdivisions of the sciences. The
subheadings of his passages on enlightenment and scholarship were easy enough
and could be picked up from the words marked in the early sentences; but what
science did these topics belong to? If this is the right explanation, however, the
suggestion in the text that Hegel was conscious of a difference in the nature of
his concern with these passages can still stand. For a further discussion of the
classification of these excerpts in Hegel's collection see pp. 28-9 below.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 23

others happy, there is this to say: These men, I think, have still not
sacrificed true happiness, but only temporal interests, temporal happi-
ness, even including life. Thus they are not really exceptions here. But
first I must define the concept of happiness. I understand thereby a
... [the remainder is lost] I
This is a very slender guide to use in approaching the twelve and a
half pages of printed text, concerning the happiness of the elect,
that Hegel excerpted from Wunsch's Kosmologische Unterhaltungen
fur die Jugend three months later. But we must, in the first place,
assume that a fifteen-year-old who reasons thus, and then spends
several days writing out someone else's views on heavenly bliss,
really does himself believe in heaven. 2 His commitment to enlight-
ened scepticism and suspension of judgement, and his scornful
disgust about superstition did not touch the essential tenets of the
prevailing faith. The young Hegel may not have believed in
salvation by faith, or in original sin, but he did believe in salvation
by works. 3 'Holy Scripture itself bears witness', he noted in
Wunsch, 'that faith in Jesus without the exercise of virtue is dead,
i.e., it avails us nothing, it is nothing worth.'4 It was 'abhorrent and
I Doh., p. 37. It is suggestive, I think, that the break in the manuscript occurs

just here. I would hazard the guess that Hegel himself may have removed the
next page for use in connection with some subsequent reflections about self-
sacrifice at Tiibingen or Berne.
2 Dok., pp. 87-100. In the light of all that has been said about Hegel's 'object-
ivity' one might argue that this does not follow, since he only claims that all
men aim at happiness. But if he was such an enlightened sceptic as to doubt the
existence of the blessedness for which he supposes men to have sacrificed even
their lives, surely it would have occurred to him that even men as sceptical as
himself might nevertheless have sacrificed their lives; and in that case his
argument would fail. (The enlightened justification for his faith in this respect
was most readily available to him in Mendelssohn's Phaedo; cf. Dok., p. IS.)
3 Lacorte is quite severely critical of earlier interpreters of the Jugendschriften
who have spoken loosely of the 'AufkUirung allemande, et donc chretienne' (the
phrase is actually Asveld's). We may well agree with him that the relation
between 'Enlightenment' and 'Christianity' in German culture needs careful
analysis, not least in discussions of Hegel's background. But he himself is guilty
of the same sort of loose oversimplification when he says that 'to defend this
formula [of Asveld's] in the face of a reading ofthe texts, in which with respect
to Christianity, in the sporadic notes that concern it at all, we find only polemical
sarcasm, when we do not find commonplaces or complete indifference, the
terms "EnlightelL'TIent" and "Christianity" end by being emptied of all definite
significance capable of providing an adequate characterization' (Lacorte,
pp. II2-I3; cf. also 83-4). Lacorte, it may be noted, relegates the long excerpt
from Wiinsch to a short footnote (p. 82 n.).
4 Dok., p. 88. This is the first appearance of the contrast between 'dead' and
'living' religion which plays such a crucial part in Hegel's later reflections.
24 STUTTGART 1770-1788

quite contrary to Christian teaching' that a sinner should be

forgiven in his last hours, while a virtuous man who dies suddenly
should be damned. God judges us according to our intentions, but
we must use all possible foresight to make our virtues profitable to
ourselves and others.
Altogether Wunsch represents quite adequately that near-
Kantian confluence of Enlightenment and Christianity which Hegel
later labelled 'das moralische Weltanschauung'. He declares that
'prudence [Klugheit] is the mistress of Virtue, as understanding
[Verstand] is the father of wisdom'; but he also inclines to a kind
of 'moral sense' theory according to which we shall not go wrong if
we do what our 'heart' tells us is right, unless we have been badly
educated or are blinded by hunger or some natural weakness. This
same Rousseauian doctrine of the natural goodness and nobility of
man Hegel had already encountered of course in Feder's New
Emile. I The doctrine that the moral penetration which is the key to
happiness and success in the world is something intuitive, having
nothing to do with philosophical reflection, sceptical doubt, or
suspension of judgement, he found more explicity formulated in
the way in which he himself held it in his maturity, in Zimmer-
mann's Ober die Einsamkeit a few months later. One would like to
know exactly how Hegel felt about the Zimmermann excerpt when
he copied it out word for word; for it is not easy to reconcile it
perfectly with the practical programme of spreading enlighten-
ment by strictly rational criticism of existing institutions. 2
The most interesting passage in the notes from Wunsch, how-
ever, is that in which he discusses the false concepts that men have
of Heaven and the blessed life. For here we catch a glimpse of the
first origin of some ideas which Hegel himself developed later at
Berne and Frankfurt:
Certainly men make for themselves odd and mostly sensuous concep-
tions of the happiness of the future life ... in that they expect to find
there in the main the very same happiness that they most wished for on
earth but could never achieve. All these mistaken images [Vorstellungen]
are based on their false conception [Begrijf] of Heaven [wrote Wunsch,

I Cf. Doh., p. 92; and Doh., pp. 63 ff. That Hegel himself was committed to
acceptance of views of this sort we may, I think, legitimately infer from what
Leutwein tells us about his attitude to Rousseau at Tiibingen (Hegel-Studien,
iii, p. 56, lines 123-30).
2 Doh., p. 100; see also pp. 26-8 below.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 25
but in Hegel's notes it was transposed to read: 'These mistaken concepts
are mainly based on the inverted image of Heaven'] and of the dwelling
of God with the blessed, since God is really everywhere, in Him we
ever live, in Him we move and in Him we have our being; so we do not
only reach Him for the first time after death. God is here! We find
ourselves in Him [Hegel omitted this sentence]. Our speaking, hearing,
seeing, the beating of our hearts in our breast, the way one thought
follows after another, this is God's doing, in Whom we live and are.
What a sublime, awe-inspiring thoughtl And because of these inverted
images [here Hegel wrote 'mistaken opinions'] men seldom grasp the
right means for the achievement of true happiness. In short for
thousands of years [Hegel inserted this claim on his own initiative] men
have not reflected on the enlightenment of the understanding and the
exercise of virtue, as the things that faith in Jesus consists in, and which
are the unique means of human happiness, and in some religions men
still have not realized this, a fact which has irrational and vicious
consequences. Many men are indeed good even so, and we would be
better and the name of man much worthier, if the wise made it their
business to teach thoroughly and express vividly the great truth that
we are made happy by our own good actions without any further act
of God, and on the other hand we are made immediately unhappy by
bad actions and ignoble impulses. . . . No, the seed of goodness is
planted in all our hearts by a benevolent Providence; but it is up to us
to care fOIr its development and growth. Those who teach the contrary,
lay a heavy burden on their conscience; and likewise those who teach
that we must live virtuously not for our own sakes, but only because
God would have it so. For it is contrary to the nature of a rational man,
to do something, if he does not foresee or surmise that certain advantages
for himself will in some way spring from it. It is contrary to the concep-
tion of God, which we have to form for ourselves, if we believe that He
requires us to render Him a service by our good deeds, for He only
wills that we should do good because it profits us not Him, and directly
makes us happy. People who take the other view, are not heeding the
warning voice of God in their own hearts, because someone has told
them that their own heart too is itself by nature corrupt and utterly evil. 1
I Doh., pp. 92-4. Hegel's transpositions affect the sense little, and do not

improve the style or clarity here. Perhaps they are the accidental result of haste.
But, like the omission that Hoffmeister noted, they are symptomatic of the
significance and importance that the terms VOTstellung and Begriff will come to
have for him, of the interest that the idea of Heaven and the supersensible as a
verhehrte Welt probably already has for him, and of the influence that the idea
of God as a living presence in actual human experience exercised on his mind.
In this connection it deserves also to be mentioned that where WUnsch often
wrote 'sein Geist' or 'unser Geist' Hegel regularly substituted simply 'der
Geist'.
 26 STUTTGART 1770-1788

The general tenor of this passage is very close to the tenor of

Hegel's own attempt to rewrite the life of Jesus, in Berne. Wunsch
is determined to make the Christian gospel consistent with the
rational morality which appears to him to be the gospel of reason.
Hegel's own insertion of the claim that men have not thought about
the identity of the Christian doctrine of salvation and the doctrine
of rational enlightenment 'for thousands of years' throws light
both on his antipathy to Catholicism which undoubtedly prompted
it, and on his later attempts to purify the Christian faith by strip-
ping off the irrational accretions of later centuries.
Behind this obvious affinity lies an even deeper one which took
longer to come to the surface. The sentence that Hegel omitted-
'God is here! We find ourselves in Him'-contains the fundamental
insight behind the essays of the Frankfurt period. The fusion of
the ideal of rational enlightenment with the romantic ideal of
direct experience and living intuition, I led Hegel eventually to a
different and far deeper conception of reason itself. This trans-
formation of the rationalist humanism of his Enlightenment herit-
age was Hegel's life-work and constitutes his essential achievement.
These two ideals were confused and mixed together in his
earliest vague notions of 'the philosophical history of humanity'.
Many of his excerpts seem to be inspired by the belief that there is
an abiding rational essence or pattern of human nature which can
be discovered by critical comparison and analysis of different
institutions and of typical human behaviour in different situations.
The task of the enlightened man is then to strip off all the acciden-
tal excrescences by which this fundamental human nature has been
covered over and even choked; and to become enlightened is to
strip oneself in this way, to be always aware of and always guided
by this essential self. This conception is quite explicit for example
in Feder's New Emile, which Hegel excerpted at great length at the
very beginning of his researches;2 and in studying Feder he came
I That Rousseau was one of the primary sources that inspired this ideal is

apparent from the excerpt we are here considering. But Wunsch's own more
traditional reflections on die Liebe as die erste und edelste unter den Leidenschaften
are also worthy of study in this connection (cf. Doh., pp. 95-6).
2 Dok., pp. 55-81. Hegel's notes on Book I chapters 5 and 6 (Dok., pp. 59-69),

which are the most relevant sections in this connection, were made from the
third edition which differed completely in content from the first edition at this
point (cf. Hoffmeister's note in Dok. p. 417). Several indications suggest that he
was re-examining these chapters in 1787 (he may even have made new excerpts
then and substituted them for his earlier ones in this section). These are the
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR

upon a reference to Garve's Prufung der Fiihigkeiten (Examination

of the Faculties) which he excerpted nearly two years later in March
1787.1 Between these two came his excerpts from Campe's Kleine
Seelenlehre fur Kinder (October 1786) which was altogether too
elementary to be satisfactory for his purposes and which he never
bothered to classify fully.2
On the other hand the unclassified excerpt from the review of
Kastner's lectures, which discusses the nature of historical revolu-
tions, and the place of chance and of great leaders in history, sug-
gests the rather different view that human nature develops in
history and the proper task of an enlightened man is to understand
why things have happened as they have. This excerpt comes
echoing back to our ears in all of Hegel's later writings, from the
early essays on Christianity, from the Preface of the Phenomenology,
and finally from the lectures on world history.3 What is more to the
point for us at this moment is that it chimes with Hegel's own
reflections on the history of enlightenment, with his interest in the
debt of the Greeks to Egyptian culture, and with his school essay
on the religion of the Greeks and Romans, which we shall come to
presently.
This same ambiguity can be found in the source from which the
young Hegel most probably derived his conception of 'philo-
sophical history', the Grundrij3 der Geschichte der Menschheit (1785)
of C. Meiners. This presumably only came into his hands some

first chapters for which the titles are given, and at some time he inserted a slip,
bearing the titles of these chapters, into his collection under the heading
Philosophie.Psychologie. This slip was found by Thaulow and printed by him
immediately after the excerpts from the essay on Kastner (zz Mar. 1787). My
own hypothesis is that the reading of Kastner-following closely upon his
reading of Sulzer, from whom he derived his classification of the philosophic
sciences-inspired Hegel to reorganize his own indexing in a properly scholarly
fashion. It was at this time, if I am not mistaken, that most of the excerpts
received the double or triple headings that they now have. Thus Feder's New
Emile was classified as Philosophie.Pedagogie at this time; but this heading did
not suit Book I chapters 5, 6; he recognized this because the re-examination of
his notes led him to Garve's essay which (although it was also an overtly peda-
gogical work) was classified by Hegel as Philosophie.Psychologie(Priifung der
Fiihigkeiten" I Dok., pp. II5-36.

2 Dok., pp. 101-4. This excerpt was headed simply Seele. Of course Hegel
may have felt the higher classifications, Philosophie.Psychologie, too obvious to
need adding later.
3 Dok., pp. 139-40; for echoes in the.'lugendschriftell, see Hoffmeister's notes,

ibid., pp. 4z4-6; for a direct confrontation with the Preface of the Pheno-
menology, Lacorte, pp. 107-8.
28 STUTTGART 1770-1788

time after Schr6kh's compendium with which he was so delighted

in June ofthat year. His excerpt from it was the only one under the
heading 'Philosophical History' that Rosenkranz thought worthy of
mention, but of course we cannot safely infer anything from that. I
Meiners distinguishes between 'History of Mankind' and 'Uni-
versal History'. Whereas the latter deals with the whole sequence
of actions and events, with all 'that man has done and suffered',
the concern of the 'History of Mankind' is with 'what man was and
still is'. Thus chronological order and temporal sequence was
unimportant in this kind of history, of which Herodotus might
with justice be called the 'father', for it was really concerned with
the comparative description of different races, culture types,
political constitutions, etc., the data being derived from travellers'
reports and other similar sources. The aim of this still rather
primitive form of cultural anthropology was to provide an account
of 'the whole man ... as he is naturally constituted for all time and
in all corners of the world'. Z
Hegel himself made a collection of excerpts under the heading
'Erfahrungen und Physiognomik' in which Zimmermann's Uber
die Einsamkeit played a large part-probably the excerpt that we
have concerning Egyptian monks belonged to this classification. 3
Rosenkranz also mentions in this connection Meiners's Briefe fiber
die Schweiz, Wunsch's Kosmologische Unterhaltungen (so perhaps
the excerpt on 'True Happiness' also belongs here), Rousseau's
Confessions, and Nicolai's Reisen (from which two of our unclassi-
fied excerpts on Enlightenment were derived). If Hegel was
originally inspired to put this collection together by his reading of
Meiners one can see why he may have provisionally placed his
excerpts on the relation of Aufkliirung to Kultur, and even on the
character of an enlightened scholar in this category, for he would
think of it as a branch of, or at least as closely related to, 'Philo-
I Rosenkranz, p. 14 (cf. Doh., p. 400). We have already discussed the passage

from Meiners's Revision der Philosophie, 'Von der Gelehrsamkeit der Agypter',
(Doh., pp. 108-9) which has only one higher heading 'Agypten', but was
presumably classified as Philosophische Geschichte.Agypten. Meiners was one of
Hegel's most favoured authors for he also excerpted the Briefe fiber die Schweiz
(Rosenkranz, p. 13; Dok., p. 399); cf. Hegel's own footnote to his brief essay on
the idea of physical quantity (Doh., p. 43), and his references to Meiners in the
diary of his walking-tour in the Bernese Alps (Doh., pp. 223, 228, 231, 232, etc.).
2 These remarks are founded on the note of Hoffmeister (Doh., p. 419).

3 Doh., p. lOS; for Rosenkranz's description of this part of Hegel's collection

see pages 13-14 of his biography, reprinted also in Doh., p. 399.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR
sophical History', which was a category that he seems to have
employed technically in a sense close to that of Meiners's 'Universal
History'.!
The existence of this collection-and its probable significance
in Hegel's eyes-is enough in itself to invalidate Haering's claim
that 'supra-individual cultural manifestations' formed the central
focus of interest in Hegel's schoolboy researches. z 'Philosophical
History' as Hegel would have preferred to call it, and we may well
agree with him, did gradually absorb more of his attention in 1787
and 1788; and as this happened he gradually moved further away
from the conception of man as an individual possessing an un-
changing, self-contained, rational essence. He became more and
more consciously convinced that 'truth is the whole', and at the
same time that the wholeness of truth was essentially a process of
development. As this happened, the collection of data to illustrate
'human nature' in the manner of Lavater's science of 'physio-
gnomy' or even of Meiners's 'history of mankind', lost most of its
attraction for him. But this conviction was not present in his mind
at the beginning. What was present was a rather different, though
nearly related, conviction which he never abandoned or lost, a
conviction of the essential unity and integrity of human nature in
all its manifestations, a conviction that from every particular case
or event, if we can only understand it rightly, we can discover the
whole truth about man, his nature, and his destiny.
This conviction can express itself equally in an atomic or in a
developmental conception of human nature. It came to Hegel from
his books and his teachers in both forms; but the conception of man
as a rational atom was much more clearly and explicitly formulated
in the thought of the period, which generally took mathematical
analysis, mathematical construction, and mathematical intuition
as its conscious model of rationality. Historical inquiry certainly
came into its own in the eighteenth century, but its genetic and
biological canons of rationality and models of explanation were less
self-consciously adopted, being in any case much harder to formu-
late explicitly. One of Hegel's main aims in the Phenomenology was
I Doh., pp. 145-7 (discussed above, pp. 20-1). For examples of Hegel's use

of the term 'Philosophische Geschichte' see Doh., p. 144. Lacorte (p. 86) draws
attention to the occurrence of the phrase 'die allgemeine Geschichte des
menschlichen Verstandes' in Hegel's excerpts from Feder's Neuer Emil (Doh.,
p.60).
2 Haering, i, 16 (cf. also 18, 21).
30 STUTTGART 1770-1788
to formulate the ideal of historical reasoning as opposed to the
earlier mathematical ideal; this accounts for the sustained polemic
in his mature works against mathematical modes of reasoning in
philosophy in spite of the fact that he greatly enjoyed mathematics
as a boy, and the philosophical foundations of mathematics contin-
ued to fascinate him all his life.
The true focus of Hegel's researches throughout his life was
always, properly speaking, man; and even when he became con-
vinced, as he did around 1788, that the proper approach to the
study of human nature was through the analysis of human social
institutions in their genesis and interrelations, he never lost sight
of the fact that the real object of his concern was the rational
individual agent. His philosophical activity began, if I am not
mistaken, as an attempt to clarify for himself his own social role
as an enlightened scholar and future teacher; and even his mature
philosophy can best be grasped and understood as a philosopher's
attempt to clarify for himself the function of his own science in a
society of free and rational individuals.

4. The school essays

We can observe the gradual emergence of a historical conception
of human nature in the essay 'On the religion of the Greeks and
Romans' which Hegel wrote as a school task in August 1787. Only
a few of his school essays are mentioned by Rosenkranz and it is
probable that Hegel himself deliberately preserved those few, and
did not preserve the others, or at least not many of them. This
view, which rests mainly on the care with which Rosenkranz seems
to have analysed and described everything that he found among
Hegel's papers from this period, is further supported by the fact
that the essays which remain to us, or of which we hear, are easily
linked to what we know of Hegel's collection of excerpts and to the
reflections we find in his Tagebuch.
Before we consider the essay on Greek and Roman religion
however, we must consider briefly the only other school manu-
script that has come down to us complete, the Unterredung
zwischen Dreien which Rosenkranz explicitly says is the earliest
product of Hegel's pen that survived him.1 This is dated 30 May
1785, and is cast in the form of a dramatic conversation between
I Doh., pp. 3-6; Rosenkranz, pp. 17-18.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 31
the members of the second triumvirate, Antony, Lepidus, and
Octavius. Earlier critics have commented on two points: first the
influence of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar which is fairly easily
discoverable in it; and secondly the evidence that it provides of
Hegel's early preoccupation with the role of the hero or great
political leader. What really needs to be noticed are the young
author's political attitudes and commitments which the essay
reveals. Octavius, who is clearly Hegel's hero, consents only
reluctantly to the proscription of Cicero, and is doubtful whether
'the free Romans' will bear a master. He himself declares 'My
unslavish neck is not used to bend before the overbearing glance of
a master' in his closing soliloquy. The idealization of Republican
freedom is patent. This tendency was, of course, typical of the
'enlightened' attitude towards Roman history, and reflects the way
the young student was taught. The attitude of at least some of the
teachers at the Protestant Gymnasium Illustre towards their
Catholic Duke Karl Eugen-a little model of the enlightened
despot who had established a rival institution, the Karlsschule or
military academy, as his own pedagogical experiment in the
proper moulding of youthful minds-was not perhaps quite as
enthusiastic as the ritual effusions on his birthday might have led
outsiders to believe. This is a point worth remembering when we
come to consider Hegel's own valedictory address.
The essay Uber die Religion der Griechen und Romer 1 is the most
important and the most original piece of work that Hegel produced
in his school years. In it we can see the emerging outline of the
concept of a 'national religion' (Volksreligion) as the defining
characteristic of community life and culture which continued to
dominate Hegel's thoughts for quite a number of years. The
influence of his reading and excerpts is everywhere apparent, but
the main line of thought is his own and represents a development
of several entries in his Tagebuch made in the previous year.
With respect to religion [Hegel begins], the Greeks and Romans
followed the way of all nations-the thought of a Godhead is so natural
to man that it has been developed by all peoples. In their childhood,
in the primitive state of nature [Urstand der Natur], they thought of
God as an almighty Being, who ruled them and all things according to
His whim [nach Willkur]. They formed their conception of Him on the
model of the masters that they knew, the fathers and chiefs of families
I Doh., pp. 43-8 .
32 STUTTGART 1770-1788
who held the power of life and death over their subjects absolutely at
their pleasure, and whose bidding they followed blindly in everything,
even in the execution of unjust and inhuman commands; who were
angry as men are, acted rashly, and might be sorry for it. In just this
way they conceived their Godhead, and the ideas [Vorstellungen] ofthe
majority of men in our times of renowned enlightenment are no differ-
ently constituted.
At this stage men viewed physical and even moral evil as
punishments from the Gods and sought to placate them with
sacrifices:
These men had not the insight that the former evil is no real evil,
that happiness and misfortune are dependent on themselves, that the
Godhead never sends misfortune for the hurt of His creatures. Nor did
they reflect on the fact that the Supreme Being will not be won over by
the gifts of men, that men can no more increase than diminish His
riches, His might, or His glory.
The smoke of the burnt offering reached the heavens where the
gods dwelt; and the gods themselves each had a sensible shape and
an individual name. Each tribe had its own image of God and when
tribes were united for a common purpose their gods also came
together in a Pantheon. This was one root of polytheism; but also
men personified the elements and natural forces and the particular
localities of their world. Finally, too, they deified their great
benefactors and heroes. 'The great confusion in their mythology
was greatly aggravated by the efforts of the learned to find out the
meaning of each fable.'
Temples were built and holy places set aside, often on heights,
because their natural sublimity and their nearness to the heavens
made them fit resting places for the gods; but also because of the
effect that a far-reaching landscape has on the sensibilities of a
solitary man. All experiences of strangeness were interpreted fear-
fully, and so all unexpected events became revelations of the power
of the gods for 'those men without enlightenment, but endowed
with vivid imaginations'. Everything was an omen for a super-
stitious Greek, and 'even in our days men read in a comet the life's
end of a monarch, and in the scream of an owl the approach of
death for a man'.
The more astute and cunning members of a social group took
note of these fears and these yearnings for knowledge of fate. They
realized that the peoples 'would be guided by nothing so readily as
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 33
by religion. So they set themselves to feed and cultivate these
beliefs and impulses.' 'Against all the assaults of reason they armed
themselves thus by involving religion with all their actions and so
sanctifying them.' They withdrew the images of the gods into
secrecy, and exercised influence by way of oracles.
But once a nation 'reached a certain stage of civilization [Bildung]' ,
men of greater intellect begin to discover and publish 'better
concepts of the Godhead'. Most of the literature that we have from
classical antiquity belongs to this stage, but even the earlier writ-
ings are valuable at least from the point of view of the 'history of
mankind'. Every poet handles popular beliefs in his own way and
for his own ends but the common faith forms the basis for their
work and this faith in a beneficent ordering providence is common
to all time~; alike:
The ignorant mass [Fabel] of all peoples [Volker] ascribes human
physical characteristics to the Godhead and believes in arbitrary com-
mands and punishments. These opinions are moreover the strongest
bridle of their passions; the grounds of reason and a purer religion are
not powerful enough against them.
The Greek philosophers and their students offer us
far more enlightened and sublime concepts of the Godhead, especially
in respect of the fate [Schicksal] of man. They taught that God gives
to every man sufficient means and power to achieve happiness, and has
so ordered the nature of things that true happiness is achieved through
wisdom and moral goodness.
About these fundamental propositions they agreed, although they
developed different systems of thought about the ultimate nature
of the divine 'and other things incomprehensible to men'. These
excesses will seem more intelligible and less laughable when we
remember that their authors are men like ourselves, endowed with
the same faculties; from them we can learn how hard it is to reach
truth undistorted by errors. From their history we see how habit
and ancient custom make men accept the greatest nonsense as
reason, and utter stupidity as wisdom.
This will make us look carefully at our own inherited and traditional
opinions, ready to test even those about which the hint of doubt has
never entered our heads, or the suspicion that they may perhaps be
entirely false or only half true.
This sentence Hegel himself emphasized in his closing paragraph,
8248588 E
 34 STUTTGART 1770-1788

thus marking it as his most important conclusion. But his closing

sentences turn back to the lesson of tolerance that can be derived
from the comparison of other cultures with our own:
Once these experiences have taught us to consider it possible, even
likely that many of our convictions are perhaps errors, and many of
those of others, who think differently, are perhaps truths, we shall not
then hate them, we shall not judge them without charity. We know how
easy it is to fall into errors so we shall seldom ascribe them to ignorance
and baseness, and hence we shall become ever more just and humane
[menschenliebender] toward others.
This essay is outwardly dominated by the contrast between
'folk-religion' and enlightened religious insight. But we should
particularly notice the assumption that all folk-religion contains a
solid core of rational faith, which is made explicit and separated
from its superstitious overgrowth by enlightened reflection; and
we should notice also that the purely theoretical speculations of the
philosophers are themselves regarded by Hegel as a sort of over-
growth of rational superstition. Thus folk-religion and true
enlightenment are essentially identical in his vision, and only
accidentally opposed or distinct. I Once we grasp this identity the

I This is probably the best point at which to consider the two excerpts of
1788 from reviews written by followers of Kant. For the remarks about philo-
sophical theories in this essay provide the best indications we can get of the
light in which Hegel viewed these excerpts. The first sets forth the Kantian
conception of moral freedom. We can safely assume that Hegel accepted this as
being already implicit in his conception of the enlightened man, though it is not
quite concordant with the ideal of tolerance and charitable insight that he
derived mainly from Lessing and Mendelssohn, which was generally dominant
in his mind and which eventually caused him to react quite violently against
Kantian rigorism.
The second was concerned with 'the relation between religion and meta-
physics' and was taken from a critical essay about an attempt to defend Spinoza's
system along lines suggested by Jacobi. The reviewer attacks it mainly from the
point of view of the Critique of Practical Reason, arguing that Kant has shown
the futility of any theory that rules out the possibility of the three postulates of
practical reason, God, Freedom, and Immortality. One can readily see that in
this perspective the critical philosophy would appeal to Hegel as providing
rational grounds for his own 'purer religion', and the criticism of dogmatic
metaphysics would be concordant with his own distinction between what is
sound and what is erroneous in the productions of the enlightened intellect.
Whether these two excerpts are sufficient to justify Hoffmeister's contention
that even in the Stuttgart period Hegel was 'quite well oriented about the
spirit of the Kantian philosophy' (Doh., p. 427), is something each reader must
decide for himself. Negri (p. 67 n. 27) thinks not; but perhaps Fichte would
have agreed with Hoffmeister.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 35
seemingly violent pendulum swings in Hegel's later development,
before he reached maturity, become much easier to understand.
At Tiibingen, where he felt himself faced only with different
varieties of superstition, his attention seems to shift away from
Christianity altogether, and he looks with longing toward the
healthy folk-religion of Greece and the original birth of enlightened
reflection upon it. But even then his thoughts were already begin-
ning to focus on the project of doing for the Christian religion
what the philosophers had done for Greek religion, and at the
same time avoiding their opposite error of purely theoretical
speculation. In the essay of 1787 it is the parallel in cultural
development that strikes him as important in the first instance,
not the possibility of progress from one culture to another that
succeeds it, although the acceptance of that possibility is more or
less explicit in his concluding paragraph.
The idea of a necessary progress from classical culture to our
own, was not one that could have occurred to the young Hegel as
yet, any more than it would have entered the heads of his teachers.
His whole education was based on the assumption that the heritage
of Greece and Rome contains the highest models of culture and
enlightenment that we possess. The Romantics and Hegel himself
were soon to claim that the masterpieces of modern literature were
in a sense superior to those of the ancient world, but for the young
Hegel it was more natural to assume the superiority of the ancient
models and take that as a datum for explanation. This was the
position which he adopted in his school essay of August 1788, 'On
some characteristics which distinguish ancient writers (from
modern ones)',! and indeed it was an assumption which he never
abandoned as far as purely aesthetic values were concerned. In
this essay he leaned heavily on his reading of an essay of Garve's
on the same topic. 2 After speaking of the way the ancients managed
to identify the interest of the local community with the interest of
humanity, and of the advantage of this for the poet, Hegel goes on:
In our times the poet has no longer any such ready prepared field of
I Doh., pp. 48-51. (For use of angled parentheses here and elsewhere, see

P·4 80 .)
2 'Betrachtung einiger Verschiedenheiten in den \¥erken der llltesten und

neuern Schriftsteller, ins besondere der Dichter' in Neuen Bibliotheh der Schonen
Wissenschaften, vol x (Leipzig, 1770), pp. 189-210. Hoffmeister has provided in
his notes (Doh., pp. 407-14) an exhaustive analysis of the parallels between
Hegel's essay and Garve's text.
 STUTTGART 1770-1788

activity. The famous deeds of our ancient, or even modern, Germans

are not entwined into our constitution, nor is the memory of them
preserved by oral tradition. We learn of them only from the history
books and partly from those of foreign nations, and even this knowledge
is confined to the cultivated classes. The tales that entertain the common
folk are adventurous traditions connected neither with our religious
system nor with the truth of history. I
For this reason, says Hegel, 'our great German epic poet' could
not hope to reach the whole community as a Greek poet could. He
was referring here to Klopstock's Messias; a few years later he
made an exactly analogous contrast between the availability of
English history to Shakespeare and the relative unavailability of
the German tradition to Klopstock and other native poets. 2
An important characteristic of ancient writers was their Simplizi-
tiit: they set the simple image of the thing before us without trying
to be subtle or learned, or to make it more exciting and fascinating
than it is. Whereas we are 'interested in the art of the poet, and no
longer in the thing itself', ancient poets expressed even a complex
sensation (Empfindung) simply, 'without separating the manifold
elements within it that the understanding can distinguish, and
without dissecting out what lies hid'.
This is the first appearance in Hegel's own writings of the
understanding (Verstand) as the power by which we analyse a
complex living entity-and in the process destroy its life. The
concept comes directly from Garve's essay, but as Lacorte has
pointed out, Hegel had already taken possession of it, and made a
more precise and technical term out of it than it was for Garve
himself, in the course of making excerpts from Garve's Examina-
tion of the Faculties a year earlier:
From these materials [supplied by sensibility and imagination]
Reason constructs the system of general concepts by which man governs
I Doubtless Tacitus' Germania is the foreign history book of which Hegel was

primarily thinking.
2 In the continuation of the 'Positivity' essay written in Berne in 1796 (see
Nohl, pp. 216-17; Knox, pp. 148-9), Hegel quotes from Klopstock's Odes the
bitter cry 'Is Achaea then, the Teutons' fatherland?' against the Hellenization
of upper-class culture. He comments that one cannot restore a lost tradition and
its imagery to life, and points out that one might as well ask Klopstock himself
'Is Judaea then, the Teutons' fatherland?', since the only common ground
between the educated and the uneducated in Germany is to be found in the
history of their religion. This common ground is the basis of Klopstock's 'wise
choice' of subject-matter which Hegel speaks of in his Gymnasium essay.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 37
himself and his affairs. Reason abstracts; if this happens repeatedly it is
called Reflection [Nachdenken]; and since language supplies the soul
with these abstract concepts in association with words, before the soul
itself is capable of making abstractions, the understanding [here Hegel
used Verstand where Garve had written Vernunft] is in the first place
concerned to determine the meaning of words and to seek out the true
general idea of which the word should be a sign. r

We can see how from the excerpt cited above a doctrine of two
types of abstraction-direct or legitimate abstraction of concepts
from one's own experience, and indirect or illegitimate abstraction
of meanings for the words that we have learned-can be derived.
The contrast between the two resulting types of knowledge,
personal experience and book-learning as we may call them for
short, was the most primitive and intimate concern of Hegel as
a budding scholar. Book-learning was his particular bete noire.
Ancient 'simplicity' appealed to him as a secure defence against
it:
Further, since their whole system of education and Bildung was so
constituted that everyone had derived his ideas from direct experience
[Erfahrung selbst] and 'the cold book-learning that is just expressed with
dead signs in one's mind' they knew nothing of, but for all they knew
they could still tell 'How? Where? Why? they learned it'; for this
reason everyone had to have his own system of thought, his own
peculiar form of spirit, each one had to be original. We learn from our
youth up, the current mass of words and signs of ideas, and they rest
in our heads without activity and without use; only bit by bit through
experience, do we first come to know what a treasure we have and
to think something with the words, although they are already forms
for us according to which we model our ideas; they already have their

I As far as I am aware Lacorte was the first to appreciate the significance of

this passage. His claim that Hegel's substitution of Verstand where Garve
wrote Vernunft was deliberate, is strongly supported by the fact that Hegel has
already affirmed that it is Vernunft which abstracts (Garve did not say this); and
by the fact that he omits Garve's own definition of abstraction (which would fit
very well with the activity Hegel assigns to Verstand but not with the activity
which both of them assign to Vernunft). Garve's definition of Abstrahieren was:
'Comparing a number of impressions [Empfindungen] with one another, noting
what is similar in them, collecting this in a concept, and letting everything else
which is not similar go' (Doh., p. 122 with Hoffmeister's notes ad loc.). It seems
to me rather unsafe to assume that Hegel already has a clear notion of the abstrac-
tion that he ascribes to Reason. But I think that it is fairly clear that he did
already want to use Vernunft and Verstand as technical terms for two attitudes
toward experience.
 STUTTGART 1770-1788

established range and limits, and are relations according to which we

are accustomed to see everything. l
This passage-all of which is based on more scattered assertions
in Garve, except for the three lines of poetry which Hegel himself
added from Lessing's Nathan the Wise, a work whose enormous
influence on him is here for the first time explicitly documented-
shows us that the modifications Hegel introduced while excerpting
Garve's Examination of the Faculties were intended to establish a
distinction between Vernunft, the faculty by which we acquire
personal knowledge, and Verstand which is the capacity for correct
linguistic behaviour. It would seem that, although Garve, like
Lessing and Rousseau and other pedagogical theorists of the time,
made much of the contrast between personal knowledge and mere
book-learning, and although he connected it with the two different
ways in which we acquire abstract ideas, he did not think of the
two types of abstraction as the work of distinct rational faculties.
But Hegel, for whom the contrast had a burning importance, felt
from the beginning the urgent need to keep the two sorts of mental
operation quite distinct, and hence designated them by different
names, as soon as he recognized their existence. What we have
before us is the distinction between concrete and abstract univer-
sals at the moment of its first conception. It is destined to undergo
much further development, in the course of which all types of
abstract idea, regardless of their process of origin, will eventually
be assigned to the domain of Verstand. But the ideal of the concrete
universal as here stated-the formation of one's own Geist, of
one's own Gedankensystem by and for the interpretation of one's
own experience-remained constant in Hegel's mind. As his
thought developed, the requirement of 'concreteness' -that the
connection between the system and the experience be essential and
indissoluble-became ever more rigorous. Thus we can recognize
immediately how right Haering was to call Hegel a 'spiritual
empiricist'; and we can appreciate to the full the irony of
Kierkegaard's eventual rebellion against 'the System' in the name
of 'subjectivity'. 'Subjectivity' was the original object of Hegel's
most passionate devotion; and he bore witness to the source of his
I Doh., pp. 49-50; for the origins of the passage in Garve see Hoffmeister's

notes, ibid., pp. 411-13. The verses come from Lessing's Nathan der Weise,
Act V, Scene 6 (Everyman edn., pp. 21Q-rr). Hegel refers to this scene again in
the 'Tiibingen fragment'; see below, p. 495.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 39
inspiration when he repeated in the Preface to the Phenomenology
the thesis that we have just quoted from his Gymnasium essay of
1788 :
The manner of study of the ancient world differs from that of the
modern world in this, that the former was the forming to perfection
[Durchbildung] of the natural consciousness. Putting itself to the test
in every aspect of its existence and philosophizing about everything
that happened, it [i.e. the natural consciousness] developed itself into a
thoroughly activated universality [erzeugte es sich zu einer durch und
durch betiitigten Allgemeinheit]. In modern times on the other hand the
individual finds the abstract form ready made ... 1
The echo here is plain, although by 1807 Hegel has come to
regard the 'modern' situation as a progress relative to the situation
of 'natural' consciousness, because it makes possible the achieve-
ment of a higher kind of universality altogether. Even in the essay
of 1788 we can see a hint of the development that is to come, for
Hegel goes on to note as another of his distinguishing characteristics
of ancient poetry an interest in the immediate outward appearance
of things, whereas we moderns are interested in the inward
causes of what appears on the surface. But in the 1788 essay
the point is turned to the disadvantage of the moderns, whereas
in the Phenomenology it is precisely in this that our progress lies. 2
I Phiinomenologie, p. 30; Baillie, p. 94. There are in the immediate context

other echoes to which Hoffmeister has drawn attention (Dok., pp. 412-13).
2 The passage cited above from the Phenomenology continues thus;

'In modern times, on the other hand, the individual finds the abstract form
ready made; the straining to grasp it and make it his own is more the un-
mediated drawing forth of the inward, and truncated production [Erzeugen]
of the universal than its emergence from the concrete and from the manifold-
ness of existence. Hence nowadays the task is not so much to purify the
individual from the immediate mode of sense consciousness, and make it an
object of thought and a thinking substance, but rather to do the opposite; to
actualize the universal and to bring it to life [begeisten] by superseding [das
Aufheben] fixed determinate thought-forms. But it is much harder to bring fixed
thought-forms into a state of flux than it is to do the same to sensible existence
[as happens in the abstraction of a thought-form from sense experience]. The
reason lies in what has been said already; the fixed thought-forms have the
Ego, the might of the negative or the pure actuality, as their substance and the
element of their existence; the determinations of sense on the other hand have
only the impotence of abstract immediacy or being as such [as their substance
etc.]. The thought-fom,s go into flux because pure thought, this inner
immediacy, recognizes itself as a moment, or because the pure certainty of
itself abstracts from itself-it does not let itself go, set itself aside, but it
gives up the fixity of its self-positing, both the fixity of the pure concrete
which is the Ego itself as opposed to distinct contents, and the fixity of the
40 STUTTGART 1770-1788

The rest of Hegel's essay, or rather, the rest of the fragment that
we have, reiterates and further illustrates the two points which
mainly interest him: that the ancient poets could write for the
people as a whole without having to think of a specific audience,
and that they wrote spontaneously, creating the forms which suited
them but which modern poets must now willy-nilly accept. The
hypothesis that he has Klopstock in mind as his representative
modern poet receives further confirmation when he comes to the
conclusion of a very summary account of the history of Greek
tragedy viewed as an illustration of his thesis: 'Had the Germans
gradually civilized [verfeinert] themselves without foreign Kultur,
their spirit would without doubt have taken another way, and we
would have our own German drama instead of borrowing our
dramatic forms from the Greeks.' We know that Hegel's excerpts
included long passages from Klopstock's Odes, and we can hardly
fail to be reminded here of the way he quotes the cry 'Is Achaea
then the Teutons' fatherland' in his essay on 'The Positivity of the
Christian Religion' at Berne. But the fact that his essay closed,
according to Rosenkranz, with an 'encomium of the perfection of
the Greeks' indicates that he did not really regret the foreign
intervention that disturbed the natural course of German cultural
development. The explicit doctrine of his essays is that the
rational essence of humanity expresses itself in the parallel course
of development in all cultures. Anyone who really held this view
would tend to sympathize with Klopstock's complaint. But the
implicit doctrine even in these early essays is that the nature of
humanity expresses itself in cultural history as a whole, that is to
say in the progression from one culture to another. From this point
of view we expect to find each stage of cultural development
perfectly instantiated only once. That one instance must then
serve as the common heritage of all further development and the
distinct contents which, being posited in the element of pure thou!!ht,
participate in that absoluteness [Unbedingtheit] of the Ego. Through this
movement the pure thought-fonns become notions, and are then for the
first time, what they are in truth, self-movements, circ!es-[they are] what
their substance is, spiritual essences.'
We are not yet in a position to throw much light on this passage. But we can at
least understand one mysterious and paradoxical fact. We know how it has come
about that Hegel describes the concrete universal as the result of a kind of
abstraction; and we know what form of abstraction he meant to rule out in this
connection, for the expression 'letting everything else go' occurred in Garve's
definition (given above, p. 37 n. I).
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 41
parallel aspects of more advanced cultures will be partly contami-
nated, partly reduced to irrelevance (like the folk-tradition in
German popular culture according to Hegel), and partly cut off
altogether. Greece already has for Hegel the status of a perfect
exemplar of this type. It is the perfect fulfilment of natural religion
(Volksglaube as Hegel called it in the essay of 1787), of natural
spontaneity or Simplizitiit (as he describes it here in 1788). In the
Phenomenology he explicitly calls it 'the Durchbildung of the natural
consciousness'. In 1795 he is still not perfectly aware of the
assumptions implicit in his position; but he does explicitly recog-
nize the futility of Klopstock's lament, and that recognition is the
crucial step in the transition from the 'history of humanity' as
understood by his teachers to the 'phenomenology of the spirit' as
Hegel came to understand it. I
A few months later Hegel's school career came to an end, and
he was chosen to give the valedictory address for his class. Any
student in this situation anywhere, is expected to show himself
appropriately grateful for the education he has received, and
appreciative of its virtues; and there is no reason to suppose that
Hegel was in any way deficient in this regard. But the way in which
he chose to praise and thank his teachers was certainly a remarkable
one. He 'paid the institution a very fine compliment' ,as Rosenkranz
sardonically put it, by describing the stunted state of the arts and
sciences among the Turks in order to show how much better it
was to have been educated at the Stuttgart gymnasium. 'The
reverential-ceremonial way in which he was wont throughout his
life to open such occasions, is already fully present here [wrote
Rosenkranz]. The uprightness and the solid depth of his piety, and
his sense of official duty so to speak was only satisfied by a certain
breadth and exhaustiveness.'2 The conclusion of his speech which
I Rosenkranz, p. 13 (for his excerpts from Klopstock); ibid., p. 461 (for the
conclusion of the essay); cf. Doh., pp. 398 and 51 respectively. For the quotation
see Nohl, p. 217 (Knox, p. 149) and p. 36 n. 2 above. The hypothesis that in
this essay Klopstock is taken as the representative of 'modem' poetry was first
advanced by Dilthey (Gesammelte Schl-ijten, iv. 7); but we should note that
Hegel cites Lessing's Nathan himself in the essay, and that he analysed Schiller's
Fiesho (a play which, like The Robbers, certainly illustrates the characteristics
and problems of 'modern' poetry, so far as they can be gathered from the essay).
Klopstock is 'our great epic poet' but both Lessing and Schiller are probably in
Hegel's mind as the modem tragedians.
2 Rosenkranz, p. 19; his extract from the speech which immediately follows,

is reprinted in Doh., pp. 52-4, but the personal comments I have quoted are not
there given. (See further the Note on p. 56 below.)
 STUTTGART 1770-1788
Rosenkranz has preserved for us began thus:
So great an influence then, has education upon the general good of a
state! How strikingly we see in this nation [the Turks] the frightful
consequences of its neglect. If we consider the natural capacities of the
Turks and then the crude roughness of their character and all that they
lack in the sciences, we shall come thereby to know our own high good
fortune, and learn to value at its true worth the fact that Providence
caused us to be born in a State whose Prince, convinced of the impor-
tance of education, and of the general and extensive utility of the
sciences, makes both of them together a principal object of his high
care, and has established lasting and unforgettable monuments to his
fame in this respect also, monuments which our distant posterity will
still wonder at and bless. Of his admirable views and of his zeal for the
good of the fatherland, the most eloquent proof and that which touches
us most closely is provided by-the equipment of this institution, at the
basis of which lies the noble intent to educate for the state good citizens
capable of meeting its needs.

A certain element of comedy in the situation strikes all observers;

and if something of the same sort had been credited to Schiller
when he said farewell to the Karlsschule a few years earlier, the
suspicion of a deliberate joke would have arisen very quickly, soon
enough probably to have brought the wrath of that same Duke
Karl Eugen of Wiirttemberg upon him. But because the author of
the deed was Hegel, with his lifelong record of reverential solem-
nity upon academic occasions, the assumption has always been
that the prime humour of the situation arises from his complete
unawareness of anything incongruous in it. Here is a young student,
very earnest in his devotion to learning and inexhaustibly curious
about the 'history of mankind' as opposed to 'natural history', who
has been reading, and perhaps making long extracts from, a book
about the Ottoman Empire, I and who has laid upon him a duty
and an honour which he regards very seriously as something he
must live up to by an appropriate display of his own learning. It

[ Hoffmeister suggests Rycaut, Histoire de l'Etat present de l'Empire Ottoman

(Paris, 1670), as a possible source for Hegel's information. If he was reading it
(or something else like it) at the time that he prepared his speech, we need not
assume that he made excerpts as well. He could keep the speech and put a cross
reference to it (with an indication of the source) into his collection of notes. I
suspect he may have done something of this sort with his essay on the ancient
poets. But, of course, he may simply have kept the essay and speech because
they were germane to his interests, without bothering to index their sources.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 43
appears to him that he can at one and the same time do honour to
his school, and exhibit the particular virtues and uses of the studies
to which he is personally devoted; and the result is the speech of
which Rosenkranz has given us the conclusion.
This is a plausible enough view. But to someone who examines
carefully all the evidence that remains to us of Hegel's attitudes
and interests as a schoolboy, beginning with the excerpt headed
'Education. Plan of the Normal Schools in Russia', which he made
several months before his fifteenth birthday,! a rather different
hypothesis suggests itself. This very serious young student is
deeply interested in educational theory and practice; he is especi-
ally concerned about the social function and duties of professional
scholars and teachers, because he means to become one or at least
to make his education effective in some way calculated to lead to an
increase in general enlightenment. Also he is a thoughtful Protes-
tant, not noticeably devout and certainly not very emotional about
his religion, but disposed to be contemptuous of Catholicism in
general, and finding twin grounds for his contempt in the pheno-
mena of 'superstition' and absolute authority, which he believes to
be causally connected and mutually supportive evils. His ideal is
the achievement of an enlightened society, and it is clear that he
inclines towards the view that it must be achieved by 'republican'
means, rather than by the Platonic absolutism of the enlightened
despots. 2
This young man has heard his teachers give ceremonial addresses
on such occasions as the Duke's birthday which were not perhaps
always perfectly sincere, and he would without doubt be sensible
on any note of irony that could be detected. Now that it is his turn
to perform, his reading suggests to him a way in which he can say
what he believes in a form that will make perceptive listeners
realize that although they should certainly be grateful for the
benefits of life in the Christian city of Stuttgart, it is still far
I Dok., pp. 54-5.
2 This assertion must rest mainly on the general tendency of the authors who
contributed most to Hegel's conception of 'Enlightenment', whom 1 take to have
been Mendelssohn and Lessing. His father was a court official, and certainly no
radical. But we need not assume that no word of criticism of the Duke was ever
uttered in the home. 1 have argued above that signs of 'republican' feeling (1 use
the word in the sense found in Kant's Perpetual Peace) can be observed, in the
'Unterredung zwischen Dreien'; and we may well suspect that it lay behind the
'analysis' which Hegel made 'of the republican tragedy Fiesco' (Rosenkranz,
p. 13)·
44 STUTTGART 1770-1788

removed from the New Jerusalem of the Enlightenment. To

compare Wiirttemberg and its Duke interested in pedagogical
experiments, with the Ottoman Empire and the Grand Turk was
a way of saying that a petty but enlightened despot is better than a
great and unenlightened one. But to say that about a Catholic
ruler to an academic audience of Protestants, was certainly to
suggest, if not strictly to imply, that things would really be far
better in a society which had dispensed with despotic authorities
altogether.
The polite words that he goes on to address to his teachers we
can pass over.! But a few words from his closing adjuration to his
fellow students deserve quoting, because they seem to sum up so
well his own experience and the convictions of his school years:
'The sense of how important your vocation is will always give you
fresh heart and, little by little, a love for your occupation, which
will reward you with a greater, truer, and more lasting pleasure and
happiness than the finest devices [Erfindungen]2 of sense experi-
ence will afford.'

5. The gaps in the record

We have more evidence for the reconstruction of Hegel's formative
years than we have in the case of most great thinkers. But of course
all the evidence that we now have is only a fraction of what was
available to his first biographer; and that in turn was only a partial
record of his school-days, which Hegel himself had preserved. The
manuscript of the Tagebuch still exists, having been preserved
originally, no doubt, because of its personal character and associ-
ations. The essays are preserved for us only because Rosenkranz
chose to quote them wholly or in part in his biography. The
excerpts that we have were discovered in a single packet by G.
I As one reads the account of the organization of study and instruction at the

Gymnasium given by Julius Klaiber (and quoted by Flechsig in Hegel, Brie/e,

iv. 156--9) one is almost inclined to wonder whether the educational chaos in
that institution may not have been one of the targets of Hegel's irony (supposing
that conscious irony was intended). But he did gain much from some of his
teachers and one cannot tell how far the organization of things appeared chaotic
to him-the only sign we have of such an opinion is the regret he expressed
about Lamer's being forced to work so far 'below his proper sphere'. Of course
his interest in the organization of the school system elsewhere (specifically in
Russia) may have sprung from a conviction of this kind.
2 I suspect that this is a misreading by Rosenkranz of Empfindungen (sensa-

tions) in Hegel's manuscript.

 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 45
Thaulow in 1854- and first printed in that year. Thaulow claimed
that they had been put together and in order by Hegel himself, but
this view is hard to reconcile with Rosenkranz's description of the
divisions of the collection as Hegel left it. I A more plausible view,
I think, when we compare what Thaulow printed with what
Rosenkranz wrote, is that the bundle which Thaulow discovered
had been put in order by Rosenkranz or by someone else on his
behalf, as a representative selection for the Stuttgart period from
a larger collection which extended into later years, and which was
not itself chronologically arranged. The purpose of the compiler,
on this hypothesis, was to get a clear view of just what there was
among the surviving excerpts, that, on the one hand, dated back
to the Stuttgart years, and, on the other, was of interest for the
purposes of a philosophical biography.
If this view is accepted, the fact that Thaulow, who believed
that Hegel had made the selection himself, decided that the
connecting thread that would indicate his purpose was to be found
in the heading of the very first excerpt-Erziehung-is very sug-
gestive. On the other hand, if the excerpts were in fact selected for
a philosophical biography in the first place, the whole interpreta-
tion of the surviving evidence proposed above lies open to the
criticism that it takes no account of the selective bias that has
determined what was preserved. It thus makes Hegel out to have
been consciously controlled by a purpose which in his actual
working life as a student he may scarcely have entertained con-
sciously at all, or at best only very intermittently.
I myself believe that Hegel consciously wished from an early
age, certainly before he was fifteen, to become a good and useful
scholar. He was interested in many things, including almost every-
thing that he did at school, and some things that were not much
attended to there. But his concern with the problem of what makes
a scholar good and useful gradually caused his interest in the
general theory of human nature, and particularly in the formative
influences of culture and education upon it, to take on a focal
I Thaulow, Hegel's Ansichten aber Erziehung und Unterricht, Dritter Teil (Kiei,

1854), pp. 33--146 (I quote from Doh., p. 414). It is of course possible that Hegel
himself took the excerpts from various parts of his collection and put them to-
gether for some purpose of his own. But if so he must have done so no later than
1789 (otherwise we should surely find excerpts made at Tlibingen among them),
and I am quite unable to imagine what purpose he could have had in mind in
making this selection at that time.
 STUTTGART 1770-1788
position in his mind; most of his other major interests were literary
and philological and could easily be made subservient to this one.
He learned from Garve (who had in turn learned from Adam
Ferguson) to think of language as the most fundamental and
revealing of human cultural institutions;I and the pedagogical
character of his interest in literature is apparent from virtually
every reference to it that remains to us from the early period (or
from later periods for that matter). He thought of the poets prim-
arily as teachers;2 and we may add that in his time the poets them-
selves, and most of their audience, thought the same way. So I
cannot believe that the preservation of the literary and philological
parts of his collection of notes and excerpts would have materially
changed the picture of Hegel's mind that we get from what does
surVlve.
Only one of his interests remained really outside his concern
with his own vocation as an enlightened scholar, and with the
cultural history of mankind in general. This was his interest in
physics and mathematics. How absorbing he found it, and how it
occupied his time for fairly lengthy periods to the exclusion of
almost everything else, we can judge from passages in his Tagebuch
for I785 and I787. These subjects always continued to fascinate
him, but he was thirty years old before his interests in them began
to coalesce with his cultural and pedagogical concerns; it was
when this happened that his philosophy began to assume the form
that it has in his mature system.
His industry is almost staggering to contemplate. But when we
remember that he did his regular school work with considerable
zeal, and that much of his independent reading and studying was
directly connected with it, it seems plausible to suppose that
the selection of excerpts that we have represents a fairly generous
sample from those that he assembled on philosophy, psychology,
and pedagogy during the Stuttgart years. In particular, we know
from Rosenkranz that his excerpts from the major philosophers
began at Tiibingen. I shall end this chapter with two tabulations
designed to indicate the extent and limitations of our evidence for
Hegel's activities between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. The
first table shows how far Rosenkranz's account can be matched by
documents that we have; and the second shows how much of
Hegel's time we can account for by what we know about his
I Dok., p. 393. 2 Cf. the title of the lost oration De utilitate poeseos.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 47
activities. The first table alone will go far, I think, to confirm the
hypothesis that the excerpts we have were originally picked out to
serve as the basis for the detailed comments made by Rosenkranz;
and I believe that when taken in conjunction with the second table
it will support the further claim that the excerpts we have represent
quite a large proportion of the notes that Hegel assembled in the
Stuttgart period, on the topics that Rosenkranz surveyed in detail.

APPENDIX A
ROSENKRANZ'S DESCRIPTION OF HEGEL'S EXCERPT
COLLECTION COMPARED WITH THE MANUSCRIPTS
DISCOVERED BY THAULOW
(AND OTHER SURVIVING EVIDENCE)

ROSENKRANZ THAULOW
AND OTHER EVIDENCE

I: Philology and Literary History

(a) 'One of the largest of these None of this material has survived.
excerpt collections' contain- [The Tagebuch entry for 30 July
ing descriptions in Latin of 1785 is an indication of Hegel's
the 'life, writings and editions budding interest in the editions
of almost all the ancient of ancient authors.]
authors' (including such less-
known ones as Polyaenus'
book of the battles of famous
generals).
In some cases the extracts [The loss of Hegel's notes on and
amount to small books: e.g. translations from Sophocles-
the notes of Brunk on see (c) below-is particularly
Sophocles are almost all regrettable in view of the in-
copied out. fluence of Greek tragedy upon
(b) Priiparationen: his thought throughout life.]
for the Psalms (Oct. 1785)
for the Iliad (July 1786)
for Cicero, Ad familiares (Nov.
1786)
for Aristotle, Ethics (May 1787)
for Sophocles, Oedipus Coloneus
(July 1787)
for Theocritus ( ? possibly later
at Tubingen)
 STUTTGART 1770-1788
ROSENKRANZ THAULOW
AND OTHER EVIDENCE
Word list for Tyrtaeus(J uly 1786)
(c) Translations:
Sophocles, Antigone'
Epictetus, Enchiridion
Longinus, On the Sublime (Nov. (Compare Tagebuch, 1 Jan. 1787:
1786- Sept. 1787) Dok., 38.)
? Tacitus, Agricola (not seen (The Tacitus translation may be-
and not precisely dated by long to the Stuttgart period; see
Rosenkranz) Moral Philosophy, p. 51 below.)
Extensive selections from (The translation of Thucydides
? Thucydides (no date on almost certainly belongs to the
the manuscript) Berne or Frankfurt period. Com-
pare the fragments of 'historical
studies' printed by Rosenkranz,
PP·5 1 4-32.)
II: Aesthetics
(a) Excerpts Jrom prose writers: It would appear that nothing from
this Sammlung has survived
although Thaulow's Excerpt 4
Dusch, BrieJe zur Bildung des on Hahn des Sokrates was taken
Geschmacks (particularly exten- from Dusch's BrieJe on 6 Apr.
sive excerpts) 1786 (Dok., pp. 86-7).
Ramler (Hegel's interest in Dusch and
Lessing 2 'Ramler' (i.e. Batteux) can be
documented and dated from the
Tagebuch.)3

I Hegel worked on Sophocles for several years both at Stuttgart (see below,

p. 56 n. I) and at Tiibingen. Rosenkranz speaks of 'the surviving translations'

of the Antigone, which indicates that Hegel translated parts of the play several
times. At Tiibingen, probably under the influence of Holderlin, he attempted
metrical versions of passages from Sophocles, which were not very satisfactory.
• Hegel certainly derived some of his extracts on 'Lehrgedicht' from Dusch's
Briefe zur Bildung des Geschrnachs (see Hoffmeister's note in Doh., p. 404). He
tried twice to obtain the work of Dusch from the Ducal Library in July 1785.
But he had then to be content with Ramler's translation of Charles Batteux,
Einleitung in die schiinen Wissenschaften (4 vols., Vienna, 1770, with additions
by the translator; he read at that time the section concerning 'Epic' in volume ii:
see his Tagebuch in Doh., pp. 15-16). Rosenkranz follows Hegel in referring to
this work as 'Ramler'.
3 No excerpts from Lessing's prose or poetry survive (and this is another very
regrettable gap). Hoffmeister (Doh., p. 398) proposes the Literaturbriefe and the
Hamburgische Dramaturgie as probable sources of Hegel's excerpts in this
general category. But we should remember that Hegel himself quotes Nathan in
his essay on the 'Characteristics of Ancient Poets' (see p. 37 above).
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 49
THAULOW
ROSENKRANZ AND OTHER EVIDENCE
Engel'
Eberhard 2
(under topical headings such as
Epopoie, Lehrgedicht, Roman)
(b) Excerpts from poetic sources:
Horace, Epistles (in Wieland's (Hegel cites 'Wieland's Horace in
translation, Dessau, 1782) his essay on the ancient poets
Klopstock, Odes (extensively (Aug. 1788): see Doh., p. 51.)
copied)
Schiller, Fiesco (analytical sum-
mary)
Stammbuchsentenzen (collected
1786)
(c) Excerpts on Language and
sty lis tics :
Gottsched, Kern der Deutschen
Sprachhunst (extensive ex-
cerpts)
Lexicon of German idioms 3

III: Erfahrungen und Physiognomik

Extracts from:
Zimmermann, Ober die Einsamkeit See Weg zum Glilck (Dok., p. 100)
and excerpts 8 and 9 (Dok., pp.
104-7).
Meiners, Briefe uber die Schweiz See Hegel's footnote to Einige
Bemerkungen (Dok., pp. 42-3).4
Wunsch, Kosmologische Unter- See excerpt 6 : Wahre Gliick-
haltungen seligheit (Doh., pp. 87-99).
Rousseau, Confessions From Rousseau nothing survives. s

1 Hoffmeister (loc. cit.) suggests J. J. Engel,Ideen zu einer Mimih (Berlin, 1785).

2 Hoffmeister (loc. cit.) suggests J. A. Eberhard, Theorie der schonen Wissen-
schaften (Halle, 1783).
3 Nicolai's Reisen durch Deutschland und die Schweiz, Part 9, was undoubtedly
one of the main sources for this: d. Doh., p. 399 n.
4 No actual excerpts survive, but there is other evidence of the influence of
this book on Hegel's mind. For instance we know from his remarks in the diary
of his own journey in the Bernese Alps that he was much impressed by Meiners's
descriptions of scenery and of the physical features of the landscape (see Doh.,
pp. 223, 228, etc.).
S I suspect that Hegel may not have read Rousseau until he went to Tiibingen
and that Rosenkranz noticed the excerpts in the collection but did not note the
dates. Quite possibly the genuine Rousseau excerpts were not dated if they were
8243588 F
50 STUTTGART 1770-1788
THAULOW
ROSENKRANZ AND OTHER EVIDENCE
Nicolai, Reisen (from here Hegel See excerpts 17 and 18 (Dok., pp.
gathered detailed physiognomies 145-7).
for German regional types, such
as Bavaria, Brandenburg, Tyrol,
Vienna)
IV: Special Sciences
Excerpts concerning,'
(a) Arithmetic, Geometry, and related mathematical topics
Excerpts mainly from Kastner No mathematical excerpts survive
-but see the Tagebuch entries
School notebook for Geometry for 22-5 July 1785, and Jan.
1787 (Dok., pp. 16-18 and 39-
41).
(b) Physics, Mechanics, Optics
School notebooks Nothing survives. But Christiane
Excerpt on Fal'benlehre from remembered Hegel's 'Freude an
Scheuchzer, Physica (Zurich 1729) Physik' as a schoolboy (D~k.,
P·394).
Other excerpts
(c) Psychology
Campe, Seelenlehrefur Kinder ('plays See excerpt 7: Seele (Dok., pp. 101-
large role' in this category)' 4)·
(d) Moral Philosophy (Die Moral)
Garve See excerpt 13: from Priifung der
Ferguson 2 Fiihigkeiten (Dok., pp. II5-36).
made at Ttibingen. Rosenkranz might then have used the long excerpt from
Feder's New Emile as a guide for dating them.
, There are two reasons for suspecting that at this point Rosenkranz's account
is a little careless. In the first place, the excerpt that we have from Campe's
Seelenlehre, although quite long, is not of very much importance, and almost
certainly Hegel did not attach much importance to it when he began to make
excerpts explicitly catalogued as 'Psychology'. In the second place, these later
excerpts are classified by Rosenkranz under 'Die Moral', which is a category that
Hegel does not appear to have employed. But his classification system evolved
gradually and he may have begun to use this heading to cover Psychology and
Ethics (and Pedagogy?) later on. In any case Rosenkranz is at fault for not
indicating something which the surviving excerpts show quite clearly-that
Psychology, Pedagogy, Philosophical History, and Theology were for Hegel
branches of Philosophy. (Campe's Theophron was more influential on Hegel
than the Seelenlehre-but he would hardly have spent time excerpting from a
book that he possessed--see the Tagebuch for Dec. 1785, Doh., p. 24; and the
'Ttibingen fragment', pp. 137, 139,490, and 493 below. Hoffmeister's surmise
-Doh., p. 405-about Robinson der Jiingere, should also be kept in mind.)
2 Hegel was undoubtedly led to study Adam Ferguson through his reading of
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 51
THAULOW
ROSENKRANZ AND OTHER EVIDENCE

Plato } (categorized excerpts Almost certainly these belonged to

Aristotle concerning nature of the earliest stages of Hegel's
Tacitus justice and the virtues) collection, like the Definitions
Cicero listed below. One excerpt from
Cicero on Happiness has come
down to us dated 27 June 1786
(Doh., p. 100).
(e) Pedagogy
'the ideal of tutorship' (long See excerpt 2 : Feder's neuer Emil
excerpts) (Doh., pp. 55-81).
Schlozer's Staatsanzeiger (copiously See excerpt I (Doh., pp. 54-5).'
used)
(f) Philosophical History
Meiners, Geschichte der Menschheit Cf. excerpt I I (from another work
of Meiners); see further excerpt
16 (review of Eberhard).3
(g) Theology (Natural and Positive)
Critical J oumals (almost entirely)4 See excerpt 14: Vorsehung (Doh.,
p. 137).
Carve, for Carve translated Ferguson's Principles of Moral Philosophy and it
was published with his notes at Leipzig in 1772. This would be the volume from
which Hegel made his excerpts. See Hoffmeister's notes (Dok., pp. 420-3, and
407) for other works of Carve or translated by Carve that Hegel either read or may
have read.
2, To justify Rosenkranz's comment there must obviously have been a number

of other excerpts from this source. The selection of the one that has survived is
easy to understand if we assume, as seems highly probable, that it was the
earliest dated excerpt in Hegel's collection.
3 This is the only category in which there are more surviving excerpts than
there are authors in Rosenkranz's catalogue; and the excerpt that he does
mention does not survive. This is a point against my hypothesis. We can be
certain, moreover, that this category was an important one in Hegel's collection
in its earliest stages. Of course, he owned a number of books in this category-
e.g. perhaps Schriikh-and he would only need to excerpt from these for special
purposes (compare Tagebuch, 27 June 1785, and 'Philosophy' in the collection
of Definitions which was made at the same time. Rosenkranz finds Hegel's de-
pendence on Schriikh for his definition of philosophy-cited in the first note on
the next page-amusing, and he may well have felt that the category of 'philoso-
phical history' was not worth much attention; and of course it probably did not
appear nearly as important in the context of the whole collection as it was in the
early years. This may have led Rosenkranz to discount it somewhat in his account
of the early years. It would be of particular interest to know what excerpts there
were in this part of the collection and when they were made.
4 In spite of the survival of excerpt 14, I cannot help suspecting that
Rosenkranz is here guilty of running together Hegel's Tubingen and even
Berne periods with his Stuttgart studies.
52 STUTTGART 1770-1788

THAULOW
ROSENKRANZ AND OTHER EVIDENCE
(h) Philosophy
Sulzer See excerpt 12 for the Allgemeine
Ubersicht to which Rosenkranz
Definitions (small volume dated
specifically refers (Doh., pp.
10 June 1785). This is the first
109-12; cf. also pp. II2-1S).
sign of philosophical interests
but covers a great variety of
subjects. The first three are:
Superstition (Aberglauben) (Cf. Tagebuch, 9-12July 1785 (Doh.,
Beauty (Schijnheit) pp. 13-1 4).)
Philosophy (Philosophieren)I (from (Cf. Tagebuch, 27 June 1785 (Doh.,
Schrokh) P·7)·)
Others are:
Change (Veranderung)2 (from Men- (Cf. Tagebuch, IS July 1785 (Doh.,
delssohn's Phaedo) p. IS)·)
Logic (Logih)3
State (Staat)4 (from Cicero)
Many definitions were from
Rochau 5

APPENDIX B
THE CHRONOLOGY OF HEGEL'S EARLIEST
MANUSCRIPTS (1785-1788)6
1785
22 Apr. Excerpt I (from Sch15zer's Staats Anzeigen (Doh.,
p. 54) ).
I The definition is 'bis auf den Grund und die innere Beschaffenheit mensch-
licher Begriffe und Kentnisse von den wichtigen Wahrheiten dringen'.
2 'Ein Ding heiJ3t veriindert, wenn unter zweien entgegengesetzten Bestim-

mungen, die ihm zukommen kiinnen, die eine aufhiirt und die andere anfiingt,
wirklich zu sein' (habe sich stands in place of heij3t in Mendelssohn's text).
3 'Ein Inbegriff der Regeln des Denkens abstrahiert aus der Geschichte der
Menschheit.'
4 'Concilia coetusque hominum, jure sociati' (Cicero, Somnium Scipionis,
cap. iii).
5 Hoffmeister conjectures that D. Rochow, Catechismus der gesunden Vernunft
(Berlin, 1786) is meant. If so, Hegel either obtained it very promptly or else he
continued collecting definitions for some time. His excerpts from Sulzer (Mar.
1787) rather tend to show that he still believed philosophical concepts could be
dealt with in dictionary fashion. By the time he went on to TUbingen, however,
he had abandoned this conception in favour of a historical approach (cf.
Rosenkranz, p. 14).
6 Strictly speaking the earliest academic labours that can be definitely dated
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 53
5 May Excerpting of Feder, Neller Emil, begun (Dok., pp. 55-
Sl).!
30 May Unterredung zwischen Dreien (Dok., pp. 3-6).
6 June Letter to Haug (Briefe, i. 3-4).
10 June Collection of Definitions begun; leads to categorization
of views of ancient (and modem?) authors regarding
Justice, the Virtues, etc.(?) (Rosenkranz, p. 14)·
26 June- Tagebuch kept fairly regularly in German (Dok., pp.
25 July 6-18).
July Reading (and almost certainly excerpting) of Charles
Batteux, Einleitung in die schanen Wissenschaften,
especially the section on 'Epic' in vol. 2. Hegel was also
seeking to obtain Dusch, Briefe zur Bildung des Geschmachs
at this time (see Doh., pp. 15-16).
29 July- Tagebuch kept in Latin (mainly for stylistic exercise-
24 Aug. one interval of ten days with no entry) (Dok., pp. 18-23).
25 Aug. Writing of Tagebuch (and most other 'outside' interests?)
set aside in order to prepare for examination.
About I Sept. Hegel begins to feel ill.
4-5 Sept. Hegel takes examination-afterwards confined at home
(Doh., p. 23).
31 Oct. 'Priiparationen' for Psalms begin (Rosenkranz, p. II).
I Nov. Returns to school. (For several weeks he would have to
devote his spare time to the school-work he had missed.)
14 Nov.- 'Priiparationen' for Cicero, Adfamiliares begun. 2
9-25 Dec. Tagebuch recommenced in Latin (Doh., pp. 23-7).

1 Jan. Brief note in Tagebuch (last entry until II Feb.) (Dok.,

P·27)·
are Hegel's studies with Lomer in 1780 and 1783 (see Tagebuch, 6 July 1785
in Doh., p. 12). But we cannot assume that these studies produced anything in
the nature of continuous manuscripts, still less that Hegel preserved them.
Lacorte is mistaken if he supposes that what Rosenkranz says about Hegel's
translation of Vida's Christiad (Rosenkranz, p. 51) implies that he had seen the
manuscript or knew that Hegel had kept it (Lacorte, p. II I).
1 It is obvious that this excerpt was not completed in a day. It may have been

completed in as little as a week (cf. the length of the excerpt from Garve which
was finished in five days) or it may have taken up more than two weeks.
2 Rosenkranz (p. II) gives 14 Nov. I786 as the date here. But this must be a
slip. If the 'Praparationen' were for the year 1786, they were for De officiis (see
Tagebuch for 1 Jan. 1787). If, on the other hand, they were for Ad familiares
then they almost certainly belong to Nov. 1785 (and following months). For
about that time Hegel records the addition of Cicero, Ad Atticum to his library
(Tagebuch, II Dec. 1785). See Doh., pp. 24 and 38-9.
54 STUTTGART 1770-1788
6-17 Feb. Excerpts from Gesner's preface to Livy rewritten m
Hegel's own Latin (Doh., pp. 82-6).
II Feb. Tagebuch recommences (Duke's birthday and school
holiday) (Doh., p. 28).
IS, 16, 18, Tagebuch: draft of Latin oration for future use in school
23 Feb. (Doh., pp. 28-31). After this the Tagebuch breaks off.'
6,7,8, 14, Uber das Excipieren (essay in Tagebuch: Doh., pp. 31-5).
21 Mar.
I I, IS, Tagebuch entries in Latin (Doh., pp. 35-7).
18 Mar.
22 Mar. Tagebuch entry in German (fragment). Some sheets are
lost from manuscript here. One sheet survives with un-
dated fragmentary entry on Aufhliirung (Doh., pp. 37-8).
6 Apr. Excerpt from Dusch, Briefe zur Bildung des Geschmachs
(Doh., pp. 86-7).
5 May Translation of Epictetus, Enchiridion begun (Rosenkranz,
p. II).
5 June Excerpt from Cicero (on Stoics) (Doh., p. 87).
17-22 June Excerpts from W'unsch, Kosmologische Unterhaltungen
(Doh., pp. 87-100).
27 June Excerpt from Cicero added on same sheet (Doh., p. 100).
3 July Word-list for Tyrtaeus begun (Rosenkranz, p. I I).
10 July 'Praparationen' for Iliad begun (Rosenkranz, p. II).
During 1786 Collection of Stammbuchsentenzen. 2
10 Oct. Excerpts from Campe's Kleine Seelenlellre fur Kinder
(Doh., pp. 101-4).
IS Oct. Excerpts from Zimmermann, Uber die Einsamheit (Doh.,
pp. 104-7)·
16 Oct. Excerpt from Zimmermann added to the Wunsch excerpt
of June (Doh., p. 100).
16 Oct. Excerpt from Kastner, Anfangsgriinde der Arithmetih etc.
(Doh., pp. 107-8).
I The break comes in mid sentence but the speech is at a point where the
closing conventionalities follow automatically. It is not clear, therefore, whether
the manuscript is defective at this point. The silence of Hoffmeister suggests
that it did not appear so to him. Of course, if the essay Ober das Excipieren begins
directly on the same sheet, nothing can be missing. It is a pity however that he
did not tell us this explicitly.
2 The three-month gap in the record at this point is one period in which Hegel
may have done quite a lot of work on projects of his own. Of course he may have
begun collecting Stammbuchsentenzen earlier in the year.
 THE VOCATION OF A SCHOLAR 55
Nov. 1786- Study and translation of Longinus, On the Sublime
Sept. 1787 (Rosenkranz, p. !O).
23 Dec. Excerpt from Meiners, Revision der Philosophie (Dok.,
pp. 108-9)·
Dec. Excerpt from J. F. Lorenz's edition of Euclid (see
Tagebuch, I Jan. 1787: Dok., p. 39).
1787
I Jan. Tagebuch recommences. Hegel's review of his scholastic
position makes clear that he is now making excerpts
quite systematically for a certain period of time each day.
(On New Year's Day itself he spent all afternoon reading
Sophiens Reise.)
Dec. 1786 and Excerpts from Heyne's Virgil (Tagebuch, 1-4 Jan.: Dok.,
1--4 Jan. PP·3 8-40 ).
5 Jan. Excerpts from Allgemeine Deutschen Bibliothek on
Demosthenes (Tagebuch: Dok., p. 40).
Reading and study of Kastner's Mathematik, vol. ii, as
well as of Lorenz (Tagebuch: Dok., pp. 39-41).
9--10 Mar. Excerpts from Sulzer, Kurze Begriff der Gelehrsamkeit
(Dok., pp. 109-15).
14-18 Mar. Excerpt from Garve, Prilfung der Fahigkeiten (Dok., pp.
IIS-3 6).'
20, 22 lVlar. Excerpts from Neue Bibliothek der schonen Wissen-
schaften (on Kastner's lectures) (Dok., pp. 137-40).
14 May Einige Bemerkungen iiber die Vorstellung von Groj3e:
Reading (and excerpting?) of Meiners, Briefe tiber die
Schweiz (Dok., pp. 42-3).
31 May Excerpt from M. Mendelssohn, Berlin. Monatsschrift,
Sept. 1784 (Dok., pp. 140-3).
I June 'Praparationen' for Euripides begun (Rosenkranz, p. II).
10 Aug. Ober die Religion der Griechen und Romer (Dok., pp.
43-8).2
16,23 Aug. Excerpts from Nicolai, Reisen (Dok., pp. 145-'7).
28 Sept. Excerpts from Eberhard, Berlin. Monatsschrift, July
1787 (Dok., pp. 144-5).
1788
I Feb. Excerpt from Zollner's Lesebuch (in Allg. Liter. Zeitung,
Jan. 1788) (Dok., p. 147).3
I The source of this excerpt is the Neue Bibliothek dey schiinen Wissenschaften
(vol. viii), as for the Kastner excerpts of the following days.
• Again there is a two-month gap in which Hegel may well have made quite a
lot of excerpts.
3 The break of more than four months here is the worst gap in the record.
56 STUTTGART 1770-1788
18 Mar. Excerpt from review of Kistenmaker (in AUg. Liter.
Zeitung, Feb. 1788) (Dok., pp. 148-9).
May 'Praparationen' for Aristotle, Ethics begun (Rosenkranz,
p. II).
29 July 'Praparationen' for Sophocles, Oedipus Coloneus begun
(Rosenkranz, p. II). I
31 July Excerpts from review of Ulrich's Eleutheriologie (in Allg.
Liter. Zeitung, Apr. 1788) (Dok., pp. 149-55).
7 Aug. Ober einige charakteristische Unterschiede der alten Dichter
(this presupposes study of Garve's essay in Neue
Bibliothek der schonen Wissenschaften, vol. x) (Dok., pp.
48-51 and 407-14).
25 Sept. Valedictory speech (this presupposes study of Rycaut
or some similar source-book on the Ottoman Empire)
(Dok., pp. 52-4; cf. Rosenkranz, p. 19).
29 Sept. Excerpt from review of Rehberg (in Allg. Liter. Zeitlmg,
June 1788) (Doh., pp. 156-66).2
27 Oct. Hegel matriculated at Tiibingen.

But of course school work filled much of Hegel's time, and most of his excerpting
would be from classical literature and mathematics, to judge from the record of
1786-7 for this period.
I Perhaps Hegel's earliest attempts at the translation of the Antigone should be

placed mainly in the preceding summer months.

2 Again, this excerpt was probably not made all in one day.

Note on Hegel's Valedictory Address

The publication by Gunther Nicolin of a report from the Schwiibische
Chronik of I Oct. 1788 has cleared up the main mystery about this speech. The
subject of Turkey was dictated by the professor of Rhetoric, Balthasar I-Iaug,
who arranged the ceremony. Five students who were intending to proceed to
the University, all spoke on the topic, some in Latin, others in the vernacular.
Hegel, the official valedictorian, spoke last. Thus the hypothesis that he was
responsible for the farcical aspect of the proceedings is mistaken; and my
alternative suggestion that he was using the contrast of Turkey and Wiirttem-
berg ironically is not necessary either, but it is still quite possible and I think it
deserves consideration (Nicolin, p. 5).
One of the five, Karl August Braun, did not in fact go on to the Stift. But if
he was intending to go thither at the time of this farewell ceremony, then we
may reasonably infer that Leutwein's memory of Hegel as the first of jive students
from Stuttgart was not really mistaken. He was rather recalling with quite
remarkable vividness the things that Hegel himself said about his priority in the
group from the Gymnasium after the Inspectorate placed Maerklin above him
(see below, pp. 65-6, 82-3).
(Another point cleared up by Nicolin (pp. 563-4) is the identity of the Staudlin
sister who suffered from Hegel's clumsiness as a dancer-see p. 59 n. 2 below.
This was Christiane (Nanette). Nicolin connects the incident not with a
Tubingen ball but with the Stuttagrt dancing class of Christiane Hegel's
notes.)
 II. TUBINGEN 1788-1793
The Church Visible and Invisible

I. The atmosphere of the Stift

I N 1804 in connection with a request for a curriculum vitae on the
part of the Weimar government Hegel prepared the following
account of his education:
I, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was born at Stuttgart, Aug. 27
1770. My parents ... took care for my education in the sciences, both
through private schooling and through the public schooling of the
Gymnasium at Stuttgart, where classical and modern languages as well
as the elements of the sciences were taught. I was admitted at the age
of 18 to the theological college [Stift] at Tiibingen [Oct. 27, 1788]. After
two years spent in the study of philology under Schnurrer, and of
philosophy and mathematics under Flatt and Beckh, I became a
Master of Philosophy [Sept. 27, 1790] and then studied the theological
sciences for three years under Lebret, Uhland, Storr and Flatt. I passed
the theological examination before the Consistory of Stuttgart and was
admitted among the Theology Candidates, Autumn 1793; I had sought
admittance to the ministerial class [den Stand des Predigtamts ergriffen]
in accordance with the wish of my parents, and remained faithful to the
study of theology by natural inclination on account of its connection
with classical literature and philosophy. After being admitted to it, I
chose from among the professions open to theology graduates [der
theologische Stand] the one which, while free from the peculiar responsi-
bilities and concerns of the ministry, secured for me equally the leisure
to devote myself to classical literature and philosophy, and offered the
opportunity to live in other lands and under foreign conditions. I found
these advantages in the two house-tutor posts which I occupied, in
Berne from Autumn 1783 to Autumn 1796, and in Frankfurt from
January 1797 onwards, for my professional duties left me time enough
to keep abreast of the progress of knowledge which I had fixed upon as
my purpose in life [mit den Gang der Wissenschaft zu verfolgen, die ich
zur Bestimmung meines Lebens gemacht hatte].I
I Nohl, pp. viii-ix. The manuscript ofthis curriculum vitae has been lost, but it
58 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

At this time Hegel was seeking a professorial appointment in

philosophy at Jena, where he was then a Privatdozent; and in
documents of this sort the candidate's account of his aims and
purposes in the past is apt to be coloured by his present objective.
But in this case all that we can discover about Hegel's feelings and
attitudes while he was at Tiibingen and immediately afterwards
seems to show that he has here given an accurate and precise
account of his motives from 1788 onwards. His attitude toward the
study of orthodox theology was never better than neutral, and he
never seriously intended to enter the ministry. Certainly his
relative indifference hardened into firm opposition while he was
at Tiibingen.
According to the recollections of his sister, Hegel wished to
proceed to the study of law, not theology, after his magisterial
examination. Several of his fellow students, including H6lderlin,
toyed with the same plan; and one or two of them-notably
H6lderlin's close friend Bilfinger-eventually did make the leap.
It seems clear that the idea was conceived, and began to be gener-
ally discussed, as a direct result of the visit of Duke Karl Eugen
to the Stift in November 1789. The Duke was graciously pleased
to make known at that time that the reform of the Stift was to be
his next great project for the advancement of education in his
dominions. In the context of all the exciting reports from Paris, it
is not surprising that many of his young stipendiaries viewed this
prospect with grave alarm, and began to look for a way of escaping
from their cloister and taking a worthy part in the overthrow of
everything which the Duke, through his 'reforms' was seeking to
strengthen and preserve. l
H6lderlin's father had spent five of the happiest years of his life
as a law student at Tiibingen; and the young poet naturally made
was plainly only a rough draft; we cannot be sure that it was ever sent to anyone,
though it is natural to assume that it was.
I The Duke's visit of 5 Nov. 1789 is described in the documents assembled
and published by Beck (GSA, viii. I, 404-9). Less than two weeks later
H6lderlin was brought before the Ephor for a typical undergraduate trick-
knocking a dame-school usher's hat off. The oddest thing about this little
episode is the absolute indifference that H6lderlin displayed toward the prospect
of punishment for it. He was 'incarcerated' for six hours. A few days later he
applied for and was granted a month's leave on account of a foot wound (24/5
Nov. 1789). He wrote from home to Neuffer about his efforts to persuade his
mother to let him follow in Staudlin's footsteps (Letter 28, lines 32-6; compare
also Letter 27 to his mother and Beck's notes to both letters: GSA, vi. 45-7 and
541-7). For more details about Bilfinger see p. 60 n. 1 below.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 59

much of this precedent in pleading with his mother.! But the

example that counted for most in his own mind was that of the
Sttittgart lawyer G. F. Staudlin (1758-96) who was already a well-
known poet, editor of a successful literary journal, and a close
associate of the great champion and martyr of liberty and enlighten-
ment in Wtirttemburg, the poet Daniel Schubart. Holderlin first
met Staudlin in the spring or summer of 1789. I cannot find
documentary evidence that Hegel met him before June 1793, but
he was in all likelihood acquainted with him much earlier-long
before Holderlin. In any case the example of Staudlin was hardly
less relevant for a would-be Volkserzieher of the prosaic variety
than it was for one with a poetic vocation; so I feel sure that the
career of a lawyer, and the example of Staudlin, were much talked
of between Hegel and Holderlin in the winter semester of 1789/90.2
Holderlin was obliged by his mother's opposition to give up the
idea fairly quickly; Hegel, on the other hand, did not really begin to
argue seriously with his father, until he found himself studying
dogmatics under Storr. 3
I See Letter 27, lines 9-12, with Beck's note (GSA, vi. 46 and 542).
2 Neuffer arranged for H6lderlin to meet both Schubart and Staudlin during
the Easter holiday of 1789 (see GSA, vii. I, 12). H6lderlin did meet Schubart
at that time, but he did not mention Stalidlin when he commented on that
encounter in a letter to his mother a little later (Letter 26, lines 17-24, GSA, vi.
44). He certainly had some converse with him before Dec. 1789, however, for
he wrote to Neuffer then that 'Staudlin ist warlich ein herrlicher Mann' (Letter
28, lines 32-3.).
Both Staudlin and Matthisson wrote album leaves for Hegel when they
visited the Stift in June 1793 (entries 42 and 61, Briefe, iv. 52, 58). It is virtually
certain that the two families-not just Hegel and Staudlin-were mutually
acquainted before this, however. In later life one of Staudlin's three sisters often
told the tale of how she suffered from Hegel's clumsiness at a dance (GSA, vii.
1,400). This was not Rosine Staudlin who was engaged to Neuffer-they were
married in 1793 and she died of consumption in Apr. 1795. But Rosine, at least,
must surely have been at the dance in Tlibingen in Sept. 1789 where Magister
Klett danced so much with Christiane Hegel-see Bilfinger's letter to Nietham-
mer, 29 Sept. 1789, GSA, vii. 402. One of the other sisters-Charlotte-would
gladly have gone to this dance for the sake of Holderlin's bright eyes: see
Neuffer's letter to Holderlin, 24 Oct. 1790, lines 11-17, GSA, vii. I, 23; and
Holderlin's reply, Letter 35, line 28, with Beck's note, GSA, vi. 57 and 567-8.
Perhaps she did go; but whether it was she who had to tolerate Hegel's clumsi-
ness-as well as Holderlin's courteous indifference-I have not been able to
determine. The incident may not have happened in 1789, and it may have
involved the third sister Nannette; but it must have occurred before June 1793.
(In his Tagebuch for 27 June 1785, Hegel refers to a boy named Staudlin who
was either in his class, or-more probably-a year above him. Hoffmeister does
not identify the boy further: Doh., p. 8.) (See further the Note on p. 56 above.)
3 The Duke's reforms were slow to materialize; almost every year a new
60 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

In postulating a fairly close friendship between Hegel and

Holderlin by the end of their first year in the Stift, I realize that I
am setting myself against the received tradition. It appears to be
generally assumed that Holderlin only became especially friendly
with Hegel after the departure of Neuffer and Magenau from the
Stift in 1791. But this is a quite gratuitous and implausible sup-
position. Hegel and Holderlin entered the Stift together as two of
the best students in a class of thirty-one. Holderlin belonged to the
large group of twenty-seven who had already lived and worked
together for years at Denkendorf and Maulbronn. But he already
knew Magenau and was hoping to be in his room (where Neuffer
surely was ?). Within a year he had grown so close to Neuffer that
Bilfinger, who had been his closest friend for years at school, was
quite noticeably jealous. I Hegel, on the other hand, was one of only
commission arrived from Stuttgart until, after some transitional reorganization,
the new order was officially proclaimed in May 1793. (See p. I I3 n. I below.
The interested reader can now find almost all of the story in GSA, vii. 1.) Thus,
quite apart from their private desires, the Stiftler had continual occasion for
public discussion of the need to escape. Bilfinger was only the first to go. A boy
named. W. C. G. Christlieb, from a lower Promotion, followed his example in
Feb. 179z; and at that time Hiilderlin spoke of doing manual labour if the new
order proved as bad as he expected (Letter 49, with Beck's notes, GSA, vi. 74
and 598-600). My hypothesis about Hegel's taking up the idea as a way of escape
from Storr's theology, in 1791, is based on the combination of Christiane's
reminiscences (Dok., pp. 393, 394) with the other evidence set forth below,
p. 63 n. 1. Hegel's wish was certainly opposed by his father, just as Hiilderlin's
was by his mother; and I think it is reasonable to assume that Leutwein's
memory of 'his father's opposition' was occasioned by this conflict (see Hegel-
Studien, iii. 55, lines 100-2; with Henrich's note ad loc.).
1 Magenau wrote to Hiilderlin at Maulbronn (10 July 1788, GSA, vii. 1,5-7);

and a year later Bilfinger wrote to Niethammer-who also apparently had

wished to be more intimate with Hiilderlin than the latter was prepared to be
with him-that 'Genius Neuffer has influence over him [Hiilderlin]. He goes with
him to Stuttgart in a day or so and will honour him with his presence for about a
week. It makes me sad to see the good fellow fall into such hands' (29 Sept.
1789: see p. 59 n. 2 above). Bilfinger seems to have thought of Hiilderlin's plan
to go into law as part of the war between himself and Neuffer for Hiilderlin's
soul. For he was already waiting for his own release (Dimission) from the Stift.
There is an echo of this conflict between the old love and the new in Hiilderlin's
remark to Neuffer: 'Oh if only you had still been in Tubingen all this would
never have happened! 1 would not have had cause [the usher's hat no doubt!]
to press for my Dimission more urgently than ever, 1 would not be troubling my
mother, 1 would not be a burden to myself with my despondency' (Letter 28,
lines 10-14, GSA, vi. 47); and again in his self-comforting reflections after he
gave in to his mother's wish: '1 have friends in my cloister such as 1 would
hardly find anywhere. My Neuffer does his duty when the crickets [i.e. the blue
devils] get at him' (Letter Z9, lines 17-19, GSA, vi. 48).
At that moment (Jan. 1790) the 'friends in the cloister' still included Bilfinger
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 61

four candidates from the Gymnasium at Stuttgart; and Neuffer, who

had come from there two years earlier, was one of the relatively
few people in the Stift with whom we can be sure he was already
acquainted. Thus, even if we ignore the one hundred and one ways
in which Hegel and Holderlin could accidentally have discovered
very rapidly how much they had in common-for instance they sat
regularly atthe same table for meals-they were bound to be brought
together almost immediately by the possession of a common mentor.
A 'mentor' was something that Holderlin needed far more
permanently than Hegel; and although his relation with 'Genius'
Neuffer remained very close after the latter's departure in 1791, he
may very well have come to lean on Hegel more then than he had
earlier. I But if that was so, it was only because they were good
(pace Beck's note in GSA, vi. 495), for Holderlin reports in the same letter that
Bilfinger has hardly anything left to sell and is now wearing the same cassock
all the time. Probably he was released in February. (Two other members of the
class were released at their own request then; one of them, J. C. Klett, trans-
ferred to medicine. I cannot trace what became of K. G. Keller-see GSA, vii.
I, 317-18, and Hegel's Stammbuch, entry 36: BrieJe, iv. 50.) But even then the
release does not seem to have been official, for it did not affect Holderlin's
placing in the class as we would expect. Bilfinger was sixth and Holderlin
eighth. He became seventh only in July 1791 (immediately after Hesler's
expulsion, which would surely have effect instantly in the Lokation?) and sixth
in April 179:\. Both the legal process of release from the Obligation, and the
custom of the Inspectorate in re-ordering a Promotion are obviously in need of
some clarification. Even Beck has been betrayed into a slip by the Apr. 1792
puzzle. He ascribes Holderlin's advance to the departure of Autenrieth (see
p. 62 n. I), who was, of course, below him in the order. (For Holderlin's quarterly
reports see GSA, vii. I, 383.)
I Neuffer writes to Holderlin as 'Dein Genius' (20 July 1793, GSA, vii, 1,33);
and Holderlin says in his reply; 'You're right brother-heart! [Herzens-bruder is
a title he uses quite often for Neuffer, and never for anyone else outside of his
own family, though all his friends are "brothers" to him.] Dein Genius was very
near me in these last days.' Magenau calls Neuffer 'Meister Genius' in a letter to
Holderlin (Dec. 1789, GSA, vii. I, :\2); and Bilfinger refers to him sarcastically
as 'Genie Neuffer' (Sept. 1789; see the preceding note). It looks to me as if
Neuffer (otherwise known as 'der Pelargide' on account of his Greek mother)
adopted the title 'Genius' with specific reference to his relation with Holderlin;
and it may very likely have been bestowed on him, possessively ('you are my
Genius'), by Holderlin. The word does not occur in Letter 28 (GSA, vi. 46-7),
but the relationship of dependence is evident: compare p. 60 n. I above.
Holderlin actually says to Hegel (in a letter forwarded by Neuffer!): 'Du warst
so oft mein Genius' (BrieJe, i. 9: cf. Letter 84 with the postscript to Letter 83
in GSA, vi. 126-8). But the character of his reliance on Hegel is more graphically
illustrated by his shocked reaction when Hegel spoke of accepting his 'guidance
and leadership' in a letter of 1796: 'You have so often been my mentor when
my faint heart was making me into a young fool, and you will often have to be so
again' (BrieJe, i. 45).
62 TtlBINGEN 1788-1793

friends already. In the first two years they took several classes
together, and in the magisterial examination of I790 they were
examined together on the same thesis. I They must certainly have
discussed both their current projects and their plans for the future
during that summer, and a firm friendship was definitely cemented
by then, if not much sooner.
An attitude of not very secret rebellion against, and alienation
from, everything that the institution stood for politically and
socially, was quite widespread among the students in the Stift.
E. F. Hesler, who stood second in Hegel's class, was expelled in
June I79I; and K. C. Renz, the universally admired primus of the
class, crowned his career in the Stift by absenting himself from the
public examination of the graduands in I793, in which he could
hardly have failed to win-and receive from the Duke's own
hands-the first prize. 2 Under the eyes of their Repetenten, the
I On the examination and the individual and common tasks involved in it see
Doh., pp. 435-8 (which supersedes Rosenkranz, pp. 35-8, because Rosenkranz
was under the impression that Hegel himself wrote the thesis-of Bok-which
was in fact publicly discussed by all the candidates). The other candidates
involved, as well as Holderlin, were J. C. F. Fink, who was certainly one of
Hegel's closest friends thereafter, for they often spent vacation periods at one
another's homes (Rosenkranz, p. 34), and J. C. F. Autenrieth, who is identified
by Flechsig (BrieJe, iv. I8S) as the school fellow from Stuttgart with whom
Hegel went walking in the Bopser Wald in 1785 (Doh., p. 9; Hoffmeister's note
ad loco less plausibly suggests the younger J. H. F. Autenrieth, who was later
Chancellor of the University of Tiibingen). J. C. F. Autenrieth transferred to the
Karlsschule to study for the civil service in March 1792 and died in September
of that year (see Hegel's Stammbuch, entry I, BrieJe, iv. 39; and Holderlin,
Letter 34, line IS, with Beck's note, GSA, vi. 80 and 611). Thus of the four of
them only Fink actually became a pastor.
2 For Hesler see Beck's note in GSA, vi. 686. After leaving the Stift he

matriculated in law at Jena (where he was again in the company of Holderlin in

1795). In the interim he corresponded with Holderlin and perhaps with Hegel
also (see for example the remarks in BrieJe, i. la-II).
K. C. Renz had been the primus of his class since a few months before his
fifteenth birthday (GSA, vii. 1,315); and most of his fellows had long been in
what Leutwein (himself the primus of the previous year) correctly calls 'das
Renzsche Promotion' (Hegel-Studien, iii. 54, line 61). Schelling (another primus)
is reputed to have said in later years that he had never met anyone more talented
than Renz (Plitt, i. 69). Hegel inquired at Christmas 1794 whether Renz
had 'buried his talents', and added 'I hope not; it would certainly be worth
the effort to make him reflect, and encourage him to collect together his
very thorough-going investigations of really important topics; this might
perhaps compensate him for the disgust he has suffered for so long'
(BrieJe, i, 12). His 'disgust' was plainly expressed in the affair of the prize
examination; and to cure his 'self-will' he was obliged to remain in the Stift
until the beginning of 1794 (GSA, vii. 1,464-7). He was already a candidate
for a RepetentstelZe in Nov. 1795, actually became a Repetent in 1797, and could
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 63

stipendiaries donned their monkish cassocks, studied their appoin-

ted books, completed the required exercises or essays, and preached
their statutory sermons, rehearsing the expected arguments in
support of the approved doctrines and generally evincing the
appropriate sentiments. Meantime in private they studied Voltaire
and Rousseau, read French newspapers and journals, and preached
the gospel of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity to one another in
speeches and gestures of all kinds. One of them came back from
Strasbourg in 1792 fired by the example of the Jacobin clubs, and
bearing with him the words and music of the 'Marseillaise'. He
formed a club in the Stift and caused a public scandal by organiz-
ing a concert at which the new anthem of the Revolution was sung.
The famous story of the 'Tree of Liberty' planted by a group of
students that included Hegel, H6lderlin, and Schelling, on a fine
Sunday morning in the spring of 1793-or alternatively on 14
July-is an appropriate myth for Hegel's part in this unrest, though
it is almost certainly not grounded in historical fact. 1 Botany
certainly interested Hegel more than theology in 1791 and 1792.2
very soon have become a Theology Professor had he chosen. Instead he became
a pastor (Holderlin, letter 107, line 28, with Beck's note, GSA, vi. 186 and
765-6).
1 Most of the radical students were not really 'Jacobins' (the term was very

freely and loosely applied by enemies of the Revolution in Germany, and hence
perhaps accepted as a badge of honour by its friends); and not all of the 'French'
journals referred to in our tradition were published in France. Hegel writes in
his first letter to Schelling that he has encountered K. E. Oelsner, author of the
'Letters <from Paris) that you know so well in Archenholz's Minerva' (Letter 6,
Christmas Eve 1794, Briefe, i. II). For the (Girondist) polltics and connections
of this journal, and for evidence of Hegel's studies in it see D'Hondt, Hegel
secret, passim. For further discussion of, and references for, Wetzel's 'political
club', the 'Marseillaise' scandal, and the 'Tree of Liberty' legend, see below,
pp. 113-15 and notes.
2 Christiane recorded that in his Studienjahre Hegel spent several months at

home recovering from a long attack of 'tertian fever' and devoting his good days
to the reading of Greek Tragedy and to botany. This illness can definitely be
assigned to the spring and summer of 179 I in the light of the following evidence:
(a) The Consistory records, which show that Hegel requested leave to
remain at home for a 'cure' on IS Feb. 1791 and that several extensions were
granted (the last on 29 July for fourteen days) (Briefe, iv. 79-80).
(b) Hegel's Stammbuch shows by the number of entries for 12 and 13 Feb.
1791 that his friends were trying to give him a good send-off for his journey;
and the entry of Magister Sartorius (7 Sept. 1791) documents his current
interest in botany after his return (Briefe, iv. 39 ff.; esp. p. 56).
(c) Betzendorfer (p. 101) records that Hegel borrowed Linnaeus from the
Library of the Stift in the summers of 1791 and 1792.
It would seem from his Stammbuch that Hegel had to return to Ttibingen
 TtJBINGEN 1788-1793

In part this alienation of the students from their official teachers

and their prescribed studies was a natural and healthy symptom of
the growth of independence and personal judgement. In part too,
it was simply a conformity of rebellion opposed to the conformity
required by the institution. Doubtless many of them made their
inflammatory speeches, and swore their vows of eternal loyalty to
the ideals of the Revolution, and then went quietly off to their
parsonages, to preach the gospel of the established order without
ever feeling any great wrench or strain in passing from the one
posture to the other. They would feel, perhaps, a sense of relief at
being free from the cloistered life of the Stift-as Hegel did when
he wrote 'Adieu Tubingue' on an album leaf for a fellow Stiftler in
1793, and as some of his friends did when they provided leaves for
his Stammbuch dated 'Am letzten Tag meines Klosterlebens'. But
that very relief would soon reveal that their rebellion was only
against the degrading sense of being compelled to do and believe
what they genuinely wanted to do and believe in any case. I
In the case of the three friends Hegel, H6lderlin, and Schelling,
however, their reaction against the Stift, and their devotion to
revolutionary ideals, amounted to more than this. All of them had
entered the Stift only because by doing so they could receive their
education at state expense. They did not mean to fulfil the obliga-
tion which they solemnly undertook upon entry, to follow a career
in the Church or the schools of the Duchy of Wlirttemberg. 2 They
knew already that Wlirttemberg was a very conservative place, in
comparison with others not too far away; and they soon discovered
some time before the second week of May 1791 (see entries 12, 52, 50, 41, 60).
Probably he borrowed the books for his new interest then. But he was soon sick
at home again and he probably remained in Stuttgart until IS Aug. (see entry 69).
He was certainly back in Tlibingen by 24 Aug. (entry 44: cf. entries 13, IS).
I See Briefe, iv. 65 for the Stammbuchblattthat Hegel wrote in 1793; compare
in his own Stammbuch entries 25 and 39. The latter entry is by C. P. F. Leutwein,
who never did, in fact, adjust successfully to his station and his duties as a pastor.
See the article by D. Henrich in Hegel-Studien, iii. 43-50. (We should remember
that by no means all of the Stiftler were radicals. This is attested in the political
sphere by the report of Kllipfel-see Briefe, iv. I66-that they took sides and
fought duels as 'Democrats' and 'Royalists'. No doubt it was true in most, if
not all, areas of common concern.)
2 See Briefe, iv. 74-6 for Hegel's Obligation. In the case of students who, like

HolderIin and Schelling, came from Klosterschulen the obligation was incurred
even earlier. The fact of this 'obligation', which represented at once his mother's
dearest wish, and the only means of obtaining an education and so escaping into
a wider world, weighed particularly heavily upon the mind and conscience of
Holderlin.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 6S
that the Stift was the most conservative institution in a University
where the great oak of the ancien regime flourished still too strongly
for any new-planted saplings of the Goddess of Reason to take root
in its shadow. I
Of the three Hegel was probably by natural temperament and
acquired habit the least rebellious and the most disposed to a
quietly industrious pursuit of learning. He could not match
Schelling's precocious facility, but his school record was remark-
able in its consistency. Yet his record at the Stift was far from
outstanding, even if perhaps it was still rather better than average.
At the Gymnasium he had stood first in his class for years, and he
entered the Stift placed first among the candidates from Stuttgart.
But the authorities of the Stift (very probably the Ephor himself,
Professor Schnurrer) took that distinction from him about six
months or a year after his matriculation, and he was always after-
wards placed below J. F. Maerklin, who was half a year younger
and a class behind him at Stuttgart. Leutwein in his reminiscences
of Hegel at the Stift claims that this caused him great bitterness,
and even goes so far as to suggest that his resentment was the main
spur for his later achievements in philosophy. This latter suggestion
is certainly quite untenable, but probably the bitterness was real
enough. 2
I As Hegel wrote to Schelling from Berne: 'Unless someone like Reinhold or
Fichte gets a chair at Tlibingen, nothing significant [reellesJ will come from
there; nowhere else is the old system so well and truly entrenched [fortgepfianztJ
as there' (Briefe, i. 12). In defence of Tlibingen Haering points out that it is
scarcely legitimate to make the absence of outstanding genius in a University a
ground of complaint. But this misses Hegel's point, which is that nothing less
than outstand.ing genius would make a difference to the climate of the place.
Anyone whose gifts were more modest and whose symputhies were liberal
would only strive and suffer uselessly (cf. I-laering, i. 5I).
Z Students were seated at meals-and presumably in their 'required' classes
as well--according to their Lokation. Thus the top eight or ten students in any
year would be thrown together continually in the routine of the day. (Compare
Henrich's remark about Holderlin and Kllipfel in Hegel-Studien, iii. 279.)
It was the task of the Repetenten to make up the 'location-list' for each class
(Promotion) and submit it to the Inspectorate (the Ephor and two senior
professors-at this time Schnurrer, Uhland, and Storr). The Inspectorate
generally accepted the order recommended by the Repetenten, since they were
the ones who had to read and mark the students' essays and exercises. Changes
in the list once it had been established were very rare, and attracted universal
notice. According to Henrich, Hegel was demoted at the Martinmas report of
1789 (to Nov.), but this is not borne out by the semester reports as printed by
Flechsig (Briefe, iv. 76; see further, p. 82 n. 2 below). Leutwein's reminiscences
show that the demotion was generally believed to be a decision of the Inspectorate
82¥.l588 G
66 TO-BINGEN 1788-1793

The source of his difficulties, and the reason for his bitterness, are
to be found, I think, in the unusual maturity and independence of
judgement that he had gained from his years of self-directed study
at Stuttgart. He had early learned at the Gymnasium what a world
of difference there is between a good and a bad teacher, between
enthusiastic devotion and the following of a routine, between
creative scholarship and pedantry. But at Stuttgart he found most
of the required work congenial, and he was always on terms of
friendship and admiration with at least some of his teachers. At
Tiibingen everything was different. He was removed from home and
subjected continually to a distasteful discipline, and a routine that
was none of his own making. He was compelled to do quite a lot of
work which he regarded as wasted; and worst of all there was no
one among his teachers whom he could admire, or whom he felt
was in sympathy with his aims and ideals. It will not do to say, as
Haering does, that Schnurrer and Storr, who were certainly worthy
and admirable enough as scholars and teachers, were too old. Age
is no barrier to this sort of educational relationship. They were not
in fact older than Professors Cless and Hopf with whom Hegel had
been friendly enough at the Gymnasium. Schnurrer, the Ephor
of the Stift, was internationally known as an orientalist; he had
spent much time in England and France and had there made the
acquaintance of Rousseau-who was Hegel's declared hero in these
years. Schelling and Holderlin both seem to have admired him.
But he did not get on well with Hegel, or Hegel did not get on well
with him-'whichever you like', as Christiane put it. Probably, as
I suggested above, Hegel held Schnurrer responsible for his being
placed below Maerklin. The difficulty must have been a personal
one, for Schnurrer, together with councillor Georgii at Stuttgart,
was known as a defender of educational enlightenment against the
rather than a recommendation of the Repetenten. Schnurrer was the only
member of the board who was in any position to take such a decision, since
Uhland and Storr would not have classroom contact with the students until
they became magistri. Some students even suspected nepotism, since l\1aerklin's
uncle was a colleague of Uhland and Storr on the Theology Faculty. But Hegel
was under Schnurrer's eye in his private class on the Psalms for the whole year
(Rosenkranz, p. 25). So no matter when the Lokation took place I do not think
we need to look further for the explanation of Hegel's antipathy for Schnurrer.
See Leutwein's account in Hegel-Studien iii. 54-5. (Two years later the fifteen-
year-old Schelling had the opposite experience. He came from Maulbronn with
a brilliant record but was placed second, probably by the decision of the
Inspectorate on account of his youth. Then later, through the direct interven-
tion of the Duke, he was made Primus of his Promotion.)
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 67
conservatism of the Duke. I On the other hand, Hegel clearly felt
that Storr was on the wrong side of the battle between the ancien
regime and the forces of the Enlightenment.
The 'testimonial' that Hegel received upon the conclusion of his
studies recorded that his health was 'not constant' and his industry
'sometimes interrupted'. 2 The semester reports give 'bonum,
diligens' as a constant verdict upon his ingenium; but the report on
his conduct shows a quite dramatic deterioration in the spring of
1791, which was his first semester in the theology course, and also
the term in which he received permission to go home on account of
illness. The verdict on his mores for that term and the following one
is 'languidi'. Thereafter, his record recovers into a steady respecta-
bility.3 Of course the final report may not be directly related to the
terminal reports at all in this respect, but it does seem plausible to
suppose that after passing the magisterial examination Hegel began
to neglect the prescribed tasks to the point where it was bound to
be officially noticed.
Apart from the interest in botany, which we have already
remarked on, this was also the spring and summer of Hegel's first
recorded love-affair. He was enamoured of a girl named Auguste
Hegelmeier, daughter of a deceased professor of Theology, who
lived with her mother in the house of a baker. The baker also kept
a wine-shop where the students foregathered to pay court to the
beautiful Auguste. Hegel's passion was well known to his friends,
but he was by no means the young lady's only admirer; and
although it is recorded that he liked to get girls involved in kissing
games, it would seem that he was quite shy with her. At any rate,
she does not seem to have paid him any special attention, and it is
quite likely that the whole affair was more an excuse for drinking
the good baker's wine and for organizing a summer ball than

I Dok., p. 393; a convenient summary of Schnurrer's career and achievements

will be found in Lacorte (pp. 128-9). He gave signal proof of his courage in de-
fence of liberal values in his treatment of August Wetzel in 1792 and 1793 (see
below, pp. II3-14 and notes; for the career and attitude of Councillor Georgii
see Beck's note on Holderlin, Letter 49, lines 12-40, GSA, vi. 74 and 599). For
the probable grounds of Schnurrer's attitude towards Hegel, see further
pp. 69-70 below. It needs to be remembered, however, that coming from the
Gymnasium at Stuttgart, Hegel was almost certainly not as well grounded in
Hebrew as the best students from the Klosterschulen. He may well have felt that
Schnurrer misjudged and underestimated him on this account.
a Briefe, iv. 87.
3 Briefe, iv. 76-7.
68 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

anything else. Probably Hegel had a friendly rival for Auguste's

affections in his close friend Fink. He wrote in Fink's Stammbuch
in October 1791: 'The motto of last summer was: Wine; for this
summer: Love!', and added the inscription 'V.A.!!!' as the
symbol of his love ('Vive Auguste'). Fink for his part had done the
same in Hegel's Stammbuch in August '2 days after the great Ball'.
Hegel's note in Fink's Stammbuch is the last that we hear of the
affair, which has the aura of a student imitation of the age of chivalry
about it. Rosenkranz's report that 'Hegel began to fence with his
boon companion Fink, but soon gave it up' probably refers to the
previous winter, and belongs to this same context. I
Certainly Hegel's love of wine was more lasting than his
affection for 'la belle Augustine'. 2 Leutwein believed that his
conviviality helped to spoil his academic record. But whatever the
authorities may have thought, his fellow students always seem to
have recognized that 'the Old Man', as they called him, was the sort
of scholar who belonged in Faust's study rather than in Auerbach's
cellar; he may have been lax in his attendance at lectures and
Kollegien 3 ; but he was also a byword for spending half the night
studying. And since he was not much more interested in 'Kant
and metaphysics' than he was in his lectures and classes, it is no

I Rosenkranz, pp. 30-2, 34; Hegel's Stammbuch, entries 4, 15,33. Fink's

entry ends: 'Long live the Ballgesellschaft-long live also our KandidatengeseIl-
schaft.' Of the three friends who refer to Auguste in the Stammbuch only one,
the 'Mompelgarder' Bernard, explicitly indicates that his own affections are else-
where engaged, for he wrote 'V. la belle Augustine-pour toil I et la C ... pour
moi seu!!'
The fact that there is no page contributed by Auguste in Hegel's Stammbuch
would suggest either that he was too shy or not really interested enough to ask
for one, and that she for her part was not interested enough to volunteer one.
(Holderlin's request that his foil should be sent on to him from home-Beck,
Letter 39, mid Dec. 1790, GSA, vi. 61-points to the previous winter as a likely
date for Hegel's fleeting interest in fencing.)
2 Ten years later when he was contemplating a move from Frankfurt he

stipulated that wherever he went there must be good beer (Letter 29 to Schelling,
2 Nov. 1800, Briefe, i. 59). He also liked to play cards from his youth onwards-
in his Tagebuch he records a Saturday evening spent in playing 'the geographical
card-game that is somewhat like Tarock' (Dok., p. 41). In later years he preferred
whist. At Frankfurt in 1798 he even wrote a short essay on the significance of
card-playing as 'ein Hauptzug im Charakter unserer Zeit' (Dok., pp. 277-8).
3 The ordinarii lectured every term both 'publicly' and 'privately'; and the
Repetenten similarly gave private classes as well as routine instruction connected
with the prescribed curriculum. Students had some freedom in the choice of
their 'private' classes (called Collegia, Kollegien); and they also paid special fees
for them directly to the instructors concerned.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 69

wonder that he gained the reputation of being a somewhat eccentric

'eclectic' . 1
In the spring of 1793 Hegel was again at home in Stuttgart on
account of his health. His regular Kurzeit-the leave that was
granted to each student during the year-was extended for 'a few
days' on 1 March. But subsequently he went home again for a large
part of the summer. For in September Schnurrer wrote to J. E. H.
Scholl in Amsterdam:
Magister Hegel will be examined now at the close of the academic
year, and at the same time granted freedom to take a post abroad. A
little discretion would not hurt here. I doubt very much whether he
has as yet learned to bear with patience the sacrifices that are always
bound to be associated, at least at first, with a position as private tutor.
He has been absent from the Stift almost all of this summer, on the
pretext of a cure, and his long stay at home, where his own wishes
perhaps are of more consequence than his father's, is surely no proper
preparation for the not exactly unconstrained life of a house-tutor. 2
From this letter it appears that the reason for the strained relations
between Hegel and the Ephor of the Stift may well have been
Schnurrer's feeling that he wanted too much of his own way, and
I See Leutwein's reminiscences (Hegel-Studien, iii. 56-7, lines 133-5, 151).
The more famous phrase lumen obscurum in lines 55-6, like the colourful
Kneipenbehaglichkeit in lines 45-6, has no manuscript authority. The irrespon-
sible way in which Schwegler injected these terms into the text of Leutwein's
letter would be easier to excuse if we could plausibly surmise that Leutwein used
them in face-to-face conversation with him or with someone else to whom he had
access. But in view of the unblushing way in which Schwegler pretended that
Leutwein's letter to the younger Pressel was addressed to himself, we have to
admit that the likeliest hypothesis is that he simply invented everything ascribed
to Leutwein that is not to be found in the letter itself.
2 See Briefe, iv. 82, for the extension of his Kurzeit. For Schnurrer's letter see
Haering, i. 114-15. Compare also Dok., p. 434, where Hoffmeister attempts to
argue on the basis of this citation that Schnurrer's writing to a man in Holland
'otherwise still not known in connection with Hegel's biography or educational
career' proves that Hegel was no lumen obscurum, that the Ephor was watching
him with a keen eye, and that his irritation arose from some awareness of Hegel's
gifts. But to take this view is not only to make Schnurrer very percipient (which
he may have been); it is to make him also a foolish babbler (which he certainly
was not). He would never have written this to a man in Amsterdam, even though
he was a former Stiftler, about Hegel without some good reason. Claims like
Hoffmeister's must be based on a fuller knowledge of the context; they cannot
rest upon our ignorance. All we can say in the light of the quotation is that
Schnurrer thought Hegel might have a rather unpleasant shock awaiting him,
and he knew that Scholl (as a Hoffmeister himself) would appreciate his reasons
for thinking so.
Schnurrer wrote to a number of his former students regularly; and his letters
 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

was not above using his health as an excuse for avoiding things
that he did not like. Whether Schnurrer had any very clear idea
of just how this self-willed young man preferred to spend his time
we cannot be certain. Quite possibly he did, for he certainly knew
quite a lot about the revolutionary fervour of the students, their
political clubs, and their opposition to the established order.
According to one of the most trenchant student critics of the
Stift Schnurrer protected freedom of thought as best he could
by turning a blind eye upon it. But he could not turn a blind eye
when he was faced by a student who neglected the curriculum in
order to pursue his own researches. The young Hegel was beyond
the limits of his tolerance, not to speak of his sympathies. I
How Hegel himself felt and what he did with his time can be
inferred from two comically ironic contributions to his Stammbuch
by unidentified 'cousins'. The first was written at Stuttgart on his
birthday and probably belongs to I791.
Naked came I into the world and naked go I again under the earth.
Naked from hence to go, that calls for sorrow and grief.

That, however, concerns the 100, so Herr Cousin need not be troubled
about the above sayings; we know well he is in good hands. Yes?

are full of general news and gossip about events in the Stift. But we do know of
one possible reason why Scholl may have expressed an interest in Hegel's
progress and prospects. He succeeded Hegel as holder of the Hirschmann-
Gomerischen Stipendium when Hegel relinquished it on receiving his Jena
professorship in 1805 (Briefe, iv. 85). Was he already interested in the prospects
of the four holders of this stipendium in 1793?
1 Cf. the comments by C. F. Reinhardt in Schwiibisches Museum, I (1785):

'The present Ephor [Schnurrer] protects liberty of thought as far as he can,

that is, he does not hinder it . . . . One may read what one will, and one need
have nothing to fear, if one were caught with Voltaire even' (Betzendorfer, p. 15).
Haering (i. 49-50) quotes this passage, but destroys its real import as a personal
tribute to Schnurrer by making it mean that 'die allerweiteste Freiheit' reigned
in the Stift, and that the new ideas of Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling were
welcomed and nourished by their teachers. Betzendorfer himself says that even
after the reform of I793 'the personal freedom of the StiftIer was very limited'.
We can now get a good idea of the actual situation, and of Schnurrer's efforts
to improve it, from his correspondence with Scholl and other documents printed
by Beck in GSA, vol. vii. It is fairly clear that within the limits of the curriculum
Schnurrer did all he could to help his students develop their own interests. It
may well have been he who suggested to Conz, and later to Holderlin, the
comparisons between classical authors and parts of the Old Testament that they
offered as Specimina for the magisterial examination. (It should be noted that
this sort of interest was far removed from the orthodox theology of G. C. Storr.)
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 71

Oh if only there were not the letters from the University!--It doesn't
matter Herr Cousin, (sage his Georgii ganz richtig) as sure as I am
St[uttgart] Your
Written on + + + true and sincere friend and cousin
Gebhard's dayI + + + M.H.-
The other entry is undated; but from internal evidence we can
tell that it belongs to the 'summer of love' in 1791. It was signed
with a pseudonym which cannot now be completely deciphered,
but which may I think have been 'Voltaire'. We get from it a clear
impression of the amused and friendly bewilderment with which
his fellow students regarded 'the Old Man'. But we can also see
that the young scholar of Stuttgart has by no means abandoned his
high ambitions and that some of his friends at least understood
them well enough to poke fun at them effectively:
Experience, Part 396704510, Page 75146 in the Notes.
Crooked are the ways of the old man even into old age and until he
grows gray ..-His legs wobble like the legs of singers and dancing girls.
Therefore 0 Man, old or young, cast from thee the cloth all covered
with fat drippings from the mouth, and take thee a new clean bib, that
thou mayst go to thy heart's desire with firm step!-
Herr Cousin-lam and shall be for all days that God shall bless me
with, a lover of short and pithy moral proverbs. Herr Cousin!-When
the heart is full, then runneth the mouth over-is it not so? Sapienti
sat! Herr Cousin! [etc. etc.] ... and so farewell my dear old acquaintance
and comrade of the Gymnasium. Give X my greetings. Love strives
with gray hairs, even with the Old One it plays its game-oh yes!-but
one is then just as if struck upon the Head and just then one realizes
that is time to take one's place in Charon's skiff. But see now if I
I Entry 64: Briefe, iv. 59. I assume that this leaf was written for Hegel on his

birthday in 1791 just a few days after he had been obliged to return to Tiibingen
because of a 'letter from the University' informing him that no further extension
of his sick leave would be granted. But the text of the last sentence is impossible
to construe, and may have been misread by Flechsig. What I have taken to be a
reference to the quarterly report of St. George's Day (23 Apr.), after which
Hegel would be free to come home again for a month, may perhaps be a reference
to Councillor Georgii. In that case the sheet could have been written in 1793
while Hegel was at home, but had not yet received permission to take a post in
Switzerland.
Hegel's birthday, 27 Aug., was the feast of St. Gebhard, bishop of Constance
in the tenth century. Even in maturity he was mindful of his patron saint-his
friend Rosel, who would surely only have known that 27 Aug. was Gebhard's
day because Hegel told him so, wrote a humorous poem for the occasion in
1825 (Briefe, iii. 93-4).
 72 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

haven't written all the paper full! So it goes, if I once get deep in
thought! I must do violence to myself, to commend you for your
virtues? at last, and to assure you that I-for the rest see Rautenstrauch's
Book of Compliments pages 17-34-'

2. The philosophy course

The Magisterprogramm made up when Hegel received his diploma
in September 1790 certifies that praeter consueta he attended the
lectures of C. F. RosIer novellas tradentem; of J. F. Flatt on
Cicero's De natura deorum and on 'empirical psychology'; and of
Repetent Bardili on the use of profane writings in theology. It
further certifies that he gave his Baccalaureate oration, and defended
a dissertation before Professor Bok 'On the limit of human duties,
immortality being set aside'; and that he offered two specimen
essays 'On the judgement of ordinary common sense regarding the
objectivity and subjectivity of representations' and 'On the study
of the History of Philosophy'. 2
The first stage in this curriculum, after his matriculation in
October 1788, was the Baccalaureate which Hegel received in
December. For this he was examined in languages (i.e. Greek and
Latin), History, Logic, Arithmetic, and Geometry, apart from
delivering the oration already mentioned. Then began the two-
year course for the degree of Magister. For this the regular
requirements (consueta) were Logic, Metaphysics, Natural Law,
Moral Philosophy, History, Greek and Hebrew, Mathematics,
theoretical and experimental Physics. Instruction was partly in the
formal public lectures and private classes given by professors,
partly in small weekly classes (Kollegien) given by Repetenten in the
Stift itself. The regular or required courses were normally devoted
to explanation of, and commentary upon, an appointed Kom-
pendium or textbook. Three lecture courses were ordinarily com-
pulsory in the first year (the Novizenzeit): Logic and Metaphysics,
Greek and Hebrew, and History; and two more were required in
the second year (the Complentenzeit): Moral Philosophy and
I Entry 66, Briefe, iv. 60. Hoffmeister and Flechsig conjecture that the
signature may be V ..... re. The author would seem to be an old friend who
remembered Hegel from the Gymnasium. Perhaps Hegel took the nickname
'the Old Man' to TUbingen with him from there.
(I think also that further study of the manuscript might show that 'GrU/3en
Sie mir X' ought to be read 'GrU/3en Sie mir A'. But in any case the reference to
Auguste Hegelmeier is patent.) 2 Briefe, iv. 169.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 73
Physics. Students could choose for themselves among the
Kollegien, for which they paid supplemental fees. I
In the light of these requirements and all other available indi-
cations it would seem that Hegel's programme of studies for the
philosophy course was as follows:
Winter Semester I788/9
Logic and Metaphysics: J. F. Flatt (public lecture).
History of the Apostles: C. F. Schnurrer (public lecture).
Universal History: C. F. RosIer (public lecture).z
The Psalms: C. F. Schnurrer (private class).
Repetition for the week. 3
Summer Semester I789
Cicero, De natura deorum: J. F. Flatt (public lecture).4
Empirical Psychology and Kant's Critique: J. F. Flatt (private class).5
The Catholic Epistles: C. F. Schnurrer (public lecture).
The Psalms (continued): C. F. Schnurrer (private class).
Repetition.
Winter Semester I789/90
General Moral Philosophy: A. F. Bok (public lecture).6
I Betzendorfer, p. 39.
2 Betzendorfer simply records that Rosier lectured on 'Universal History'
throughout the two-year period. I have tentatively assigned Hegel's attendance
at: this compulsory course to his first term because the second term seems to
have been filled by courses which were praeter consueta, but which either his
Magisterprogramm or the manuscripts available to Rosenkranz show that Hegel
attended.
3 The weekly Repetition (two hours) for the Novitii and Complentes was given
by a Repetent designated for each week. The topic was also frequently designated.
A connection between the Repetition and one or another current lecture course
is sometimes evident, but there was no systematic pattern of connections; and
there is no detectable organic sequence or development in the list of designated
topics for a semester. See Brecht and Sandberger, pp. 53, 54, 6r-5.
4 Betzendorfer's summary of the lecture lists-from which my lecture titles
are derived--does not explicitly state that this was a public lecture course
(Betzendorfer, pp. 40-4). But see the next note.
S Henrich has determined, on the basis of students' notes from this course
which he has discovered and examined, that the central section of Hegel's
'Psychologie' of r794 was excerpted from his notes on this class (Hegel-Studien,
iii. 70-r n.). Since Henrich calls this class a Kolleg I have inferred that Flatt
lectured publicly on the De natura deorum.
6 Again Betzendorfer simply records that Bok lectured on the topics of moral
philosophy and natural law, both publicly and in private classes throughout the
period. But in view of Hegel's own interests, and the part that Bok played in his
Magisterexamen, I think it safe to assume that Hegel took his public lecture
course at the beginning of the year (see further, p. 74 n. 2.).
74 TVBINGEN 1788-1793

Job: C. F. Schnurrer (private class).I

History of Philosophy: C. F. RosIer (private class).
The Use of Profane Authors in Theology: Rep. C. G. Bardili.
Repetition.

Summer Semester I790

Natural Law: A. F. Bok (private class).2
Theoretical Physics: C. F. Pfleiderer (public lecture).3
Ontology and Cosmology (Ulrich's Compendium): J. F. Flatt (public
lecture).4
The Most Recent Political Changes: C. F. RosIer (private class ).5
Repetition.

If we may assume that everything apart from the regular courses

(praeter consueta) would be mentioned on the printed programme
at the time of the examination, the above list can be regarded as
complete. In any case we can assume that Hegel did nothing else
that seemed to him important enough to be worthy of note. 6
, Hegel's attendance at this class is not documented by anything in Rosenkranz
or by his 1IlJagisterprograrmn. But Leutwein speaks of his 'particular enjoyment
of the book of Job on account of its unconventionalized natural speech'. I agree
with Henrich that we have here a fairly conclusive proof that 1789/90 was the
year of closest intimacy between Hegel and Leutwein (see Hegel-Studiell, iii.
56, 63). See further, n. 6 below.
2 For the reasons given above, p. 73 n. 6, I think we can be sure that Hegel

took Bok's private class during the year. The second semester seems the most
natural time for him to have taken it. (For the separation of Bok's public-lecture
and private-class topics see the lecture lists for Schelling's time published by
Fuhrmans, i. 19.)
3 Hegel may have taken this required course in the first semester.
4 Betzendorfer adds: 'und erkHirte sich im Vorlesungsverzeichnis flir dieses
Semester bereit, "potiora Kantianae criticae capita" zu erklaren.' I take this to
refer to a private class that he gave in the same term. Putting together Leutwein's
reminiscences, with the Magisterprogramm and final testimonials of both Hegel
and Holderlin, we can infer that Holderlin attended this class and Hegel did not
(cf. Dok., pp. 429-30; Briefe, iv. 87,169; Betzendorfer, pp. 20, 22, 26-7, 40-5).
(Fuhrmans thinks that it is more probable that the class was never given in 1790.
Flatt certainly lectured on the Critical Philosophy from 1791 onwards.)
5 This is what I take to be referred to by novellas tradentem in the Magister-
programm. One wonders whether this class on 'Neueste statistische Veranderun-
gen' touched on the Revolution of France. If it did it was undoubtedly popular
with the students. But it was probably concerned in the main with constitutional
developments in the German Empire.
6 Holderlin's programme records his attendance at the class of Rep. Conz on
Euripides (as well as the class of Bardili on profane authors). It does not mention
Schnurrer's class on Proverbs which he almost certainly attended, just as Hegel's
does not list the classes on the Psalms (which we know he attended) or the class
on Job. But I assume that for the Stiftler Schnurrer's classes in general, like the
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 75

During his first semester he wrote a discourse 'On some advan-

tages which the reading of ancient classical Greek and Roman
writers secures for us', which according to Rosenkranz is merely
a revised version of his Stuttgart essay on the distinguishing
characteristics of classical poetry. The manuscript is dated
December 1788 and was gone over by one of the Repetenten, so
it was quite clearly submitted in fulfilment of some academic
obligation. In view of the date it seems most probable that it was
written up for the Baccalaureate examination; I think myself that
it served as the oration recorded in the programme of 1790.1 The
basic thesis remains unchanged: through the study of classical
authors we can recapture and appreciate the spontaneous novelty of
experience in all its original freshness, and particularly we can
grasp what the original invention of concepts was like in a natural
language that has not already become ossified into a system of
conventional signs. But the underlying assumption that a common
human essence is revealed everywhere in the history of mankind,
and that every people must therefore go through the same stages
of cultural development, is more explicitly stated than before;2
and so is the view that the proper task of the philosopher is to solve
practical problems through the reconciliation of opposed views
and the finding of a middle way to the truth.
In general the essay is a conflation of the views which Hegel
expressed in his essay of 1787 on the religion of the Greeks
and Romans with the views put forward in the essay on the classical
poets, rather than a direct repetition of the latter-but of course
we must remember that we possess only a fragment of that essay.
In any case the only real novelty in this later version, relative to
the two earlier essays taken together, is to be found in the height-
ening of certain earlier claims on behalf of classical culture, and

classes which other ordinarii held in direct connection with the required courses,
could count as consueta.
I Doh., 169-72. Hopf's verdict on the August essay would be bound to recur
to Hegel's mind when he was faced with the task of giving his first public oration
at the University: 'proprii Martis specimen et felix futurorum omen; vide ut
declamatio commentationi respondeat' (Rosenkranz, p. 18). He was never able
to live up to this final admonition, however.
2 Hoffmeister notes that this view of history was not the one adopted by
Garve himself-who thought of the relation of modern culture to that of the
ancients as one of progress. Like the practical conception of the philosopher's
task, it is one Hegel himself had adopted in 1787 in his essay on the religion of
the Greeks and Romans (cf. Dok., pp. 43-8, and Chapter I, pp. 31-5 above).
 TDBINGEN J 788-1793
specifically of Greek culture. For Hegel accepts the view of Winckel-
mann, which was by now a commonplace, and declares that 'the
Roman writings ... are for the most part only imitations', whereas
the Greeks ... had in their language an astonishingly rich supply of
words with which to express the appearance of changes in sensible
objects and in the visible realm, even to the finest shadings, but particu-
larly the distinct modifications of passions, of states of mind, and of
character; our language has also, indeed, a great stock of such words;
but it would be even greater if they were not mostly provincial, and
some of them vulgar, and so in either case banned from the speech of
polite society and from literature.'
The implied superiority of ancient Greek as against modern
German in respect of expressions for passions and states of mind is
contrary to Garve's view, which Hegel seems in general to have
agreed with, that modern culture is superior in its psychological
and mental vocabulary, its conceptions of the intelligible as
opposed to the visible world. The presence of the Platonic contrast
between visible and intelligible in this passage, which is evident
from expressions like 'der sichtbaren Natur' and 'die feinsten
Schattierungen', even lends some plausibility to Hoffmeister's
suggestion that Hegel never really meant to imply Greek superiority
in the intellectual realm. Z Certainly in the end he carne to hold
that whereas perfection of outward form was achieved in the
Hellenic world, the comprehension of inward meaning was a
distinctively modern, Christian achievement. Nevertheless Hoff-
meister is demonstrably mistaken, for the point that Hegel is making
here is the very one with which the surviving fragment of the
August essay began. He is contrasting the healthy, undivided,
natural consciousness of the Greeks with the corrupt, divided,
artificial consciousness of the moderns; and this, too, is a contrast
that he never abandoned. At Tubingen his mind was increasingly
dominated by this particular contrast, though it never produced in
him-except perhaps momentarily at the end of the Berne period-
the sensations of hopeless yearning toward the lost Arcadia that it
seems to have induced in Holderlin. He was always seeking to
overcome the alienation and corruption of modern consciousness,
and when he finally succeeded in doing so-at least to his own
satisfaction-he was at last able to claim that modern Christian
consciousness really is superior in its inwardness.
I Dok., p. 171. 2 Dok., p. 441.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 77

The present essay shows, however, that his entry into the Stift
immediately intensified his sense of the corruption of modern
consciousness, and of the consequent superiority of the Hellenic
culture as compared with Christianity. The first hint of an explicit
contrast between the two heritages of Achaea and Judaea in his
mind is to be found in his claim that, in virtue of the constancy of
human nature, the study of our classical heritage will enable us
'to explain more naturally and make more comprehensible a great
deal of the culture, the habits, the customs, and the usages of the
people of Israel, who have had, and still have, so much influence
upon us'.r
Even now as at the end of the essay of 1787 Hegel assumes that
enlightened Christianity represents a great progress over the
religion of the Greeks and Romans. Doubtless he introduced the
reference to Christian origins here only because it seemed obvious
and appropriate as he was embarking on a five-year course in
Hellenic philosophy and Judaeo-Christian theology. But the
placing of the Jews on a level with the Greek and Roman heathens,
in an essay with this title, has something defiant about it. Hegel is
proclaiming fairly clearly, though perhaps not deliberately, that he
prefers to seek his salvation by seeking among 'the many contra-
dictions of the ancient philosophers, especially in their speculations
about the practical part of philosophy ... to find the middle way
where the truth lies'.2
Of the essays that Hegel must have written in connection with
his philosophy course, nothing remains except the titles of the
two that he submitted as specimina for the 111agisterexamen. About
the effect that his teachers had upon him, therefore, we can only
speculate. In the curriculum vitae of 1804 he mentions Schnurrer,
Flatt, and Bole But there are two reasons for suspecting that he
mentions these names only because they are the most likely to
carry weight in relation to his current purpose. First, we know that
he disliked Schnurrer and that Schnurrer did not approve of him;
1 Doh., p. 171. Lacorte, p. 300, points out that this idea is to he found in

Mendelssohn's Jerusalem (Berlin, 1783), ii. 26 ff.

2 Doh., p. 172. Hoffmeister in his note (Doh., p. 445) says that this was
precisely Abel's conception of philosophy and quotes a similar view from
Schiller's 'Versuch tiber den Zusammenhang der thierischen Natur des Menschen
mit seiner geistigen' (1780). In this connection it is important to note that Hegel
first expressed this view in his essay of August 1787 at a time when he was still
in frequent contact with Abel. Abel did not, of course, come to Ttibingen until
1790 (cf. Doh., pp. IS and 47-8).
 TtlBINGEN 1788-1793
and secondly he says he did philosophy and mathematics under
Flatt and Bok, which is obviously not accurate. He wishes to
mention his mathematical training, but sees no point in giving the
name of his professor (Pfleiderer). It is altogether likely, I think,
that the two professors (RosIer and Pfleiderer) whom he does not
mention, because they were not philosophers in the narrow tech-
nical sense, influenced him far more than the two whom he does
mention because they were.
About Hegel's relations with Schnurrer I have already spoken
in the preceding section, since he was the Ephor, the most im-
mediately present authority, of the Stift. Hegel's attitude to Flatt
it will be more convenient to discuss in detail in the next section,
since he was primarily a theologian, the most prominent and
probably the most intelligently faithful pupil and disciple of G. C.
Storr, and he transferred to the faculty of theology in 1792. In the
faculty of philosophy it would seem that he performed the necessary
tasks of the professor of Logic and Metaphysics, Gottfried
Plouquet, who died in 1790 but had ceased to lecture in 1782.I
Flatt was greatly interested in, and much influenced by, the philo-
sophy of Kant, about which he was generally regarded as an
authority. In his lectures on metaphysics he used as a textbook the
compendium of Ulrich, in which an attempt was made to combine
the old metaphysics of Wolff with the new methodology of Kant.
But Hegel doubtless got more out of his discussions of Cicero's
De natura deorum, and of empirical psychology in relation to Kant.
The factual content of these lectures no doubt appealed to him,
even if, as seems probable, the general orientation of the lecturer
did not.
A. F. Bok was, at least until the coming of J. F. Abel, which
occurred only after Hegel had passed on to theology, the philosopher
whose attitude and interests were closest to those of Hegel himself
at this time. He was professor of moral philosophy, rhetoric, and
I Quite a lot of ink appears to have been spilt over the question of whether
Plouquet formed a bridge between the logic of Hegel and the school-metaphysics
of Wolff. It seems to me that this question has been decisively settled in the
negative by Lacorte, pp. 130-5. A bridge might perhaps be found, if it is needed,
in the compendium of Ulrich and the lectures of Flatt. But Hegel was being
made to learn the elements of Wolff's metaphysics from the age of twelve on-
wards (see Werke (1832 ff.), xvii. 364) so the influence of any particular teacher
in this respect would be hard to establish; and I cannot believe that any connec-
tion one might wish to make would be interesting enough to merit the labour
involved.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 79
poetry. In moral philosophy he used the compendium of Feder
with which Hegel was already familiar at the Gymnasium; and in
aesthetic theory he followed Mendelssohn. He was a man of conse-
quence at Tiibingen, being vice-rector of the University, but
certainly not an original thinker. His most important work was a
history of the University. Like Hegel himself at this time, he was
not much interested in purely theoretical questions, and not much
affected by the ferment aroused by the Critique of Pure Reason.
Because of this he has generally been written off as unimportant
by modern students. But there is no reason to suppose that Hegel
thought the worse of him on these grounds. The real reason why
we do not need to worry about his influence on Hegel, whether
great or little, is that it did not and could not change anything; it
could only reinforce what was already there. Bok was a typical
product of just those tendencies in the Enlightenment which were
already part of Hegel's background. There are some indications
that Hegel may have felt this himself. It would seem from
Rosenkranz's silence that Hegel kept no notes from his courses
with Bok; and according to the report of Schelling's biographer
Bok was not a stimulating or exciting teacher.! But, of course, no
one who was unmoved by Kant would have been likely to excite
Schelling.
C. F. RosIer, the professor of history, on the other hand, may
well have exercised a really significant influence on Hegel's develop-
ment. Only a close examination of his writings in relation to
Hegel's juvenilia could establish whether this was so, and as far as
I know the question has not yet been investigated. But in the light
of Hegel's known interests before and after the Tiibingen period
the following purely external data are suggestive, to say the least.
For his basic required course on Universal History he used the
compendium of Schrokh, a fact which can hardly have failed to
endear him to Hegel at the beginning; and like Schrokh he was
certainly interested in 'connecting the Lehrreich with history', for
the book that first established his reputation was on the Lehrbegriff
of the early Church (1773). Again, like Schrokh, he was primarily
a church historian; he spent many years editing a great collection
of translated excerpts from the early fathers (10 vols., 1776-86)
which according to Betzendorfer was probably the most frequently
I Cf. Betzendorfer, pp. 40-1; Rosenkranz, p. 25; Lacorte, pp. 128-21Q; Plitt,
i. 27. Bok was a fonner Stiftler.
80 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

borrowed work in the Stift library. In the years in which Hegel

was at Tiibingen he had rather moved on to the study of the
medieval church, but he was also deeply interested in the political
and constitutional history of Germany and modern Europe.
Although himself a Stiftler he was more an enlightened humanist
than an orthodox Lutheran. Betzendorfer tells us that he lectured
on classical bibliography (Biicherkunde der alten Schriftsteller),
and although he does not appear to have done so in the period
I788-90-unlesss perhaps in connection with his class on the
history of philosophy-this raises the question how much of
Hegel's collection of material on this topic, ascribed by Rosen-
kranz to the Stuttgart period, may in fact have been assembled at
Tiibingen. His attitude both as a teacher and as a historian was
one that would certainly have attracted the 'eclectic' Hegel with
his consuming interest in concrete experience. For Betzendorfer
reports that
The students prized his learning, his free SpIrIt, and his lively and
amusing way of lecturing. RosIer spoke mainly without notes, in
Swabian dialect, and he knew how to make his lectures entertaining by
remarks that were both relevant and witty. But he seems often to have
got so involved in the telling of anecdotes that 'scientific understanding
and deeper explanation' suffered. Every attempt to construe the course
of history in accordance with an a priori principle was hateful to him;
he saw in it the death of all historical research. Kliipfel marks him out
as the first real historian that Tiibingen ever had. l

There is thus some reason to doubt, in the case of RosIer at

least, whether Lacorte is altogether correct when he concludes:
Of an active elaboration of contemporary literature and philosophy,
as also of the personality of a maestro capable of guiding the concerns
of the young Hegel in a definite direction, it would be vain to seek traces
in the program and among the teachers of the faculty of philosophy.2
I Betzendorfer, pp. 41-2. It is not recorded that RosIer studied at the Stift
but he began his academic career there as a Repentent in 1763. Once again it
should be noted that the criticisms are not of the kind that would necessarily
have led Hegel to think the worse of him.
2 Lacorte, p. 135. Rosenkranz's cautious comment is surely more nearly

correct: 'As Flatt stood between the Wolffian and Kantian philosophy . . . so
RosIer, the editor of the Library of Church-Fathers . .. stood likewise between
orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and he must have been a not unwelcome teacher for
a young man already so deeply infected by the tendencies of the Enlightenment'
(Rosenkranz, p. 26).
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 81

Finally C. F. Pfleiderer, professor of mathematics and physics,

was a mathematician of some worth, whose principal interest was
in analytical geometry. Betzend6rfer says that he was an admirer
of the Greek mathematicians. Hegel would have appreciated him
for both of these reasons, but his interest in mathematics and
physics remained largely extraneous to his more philosophical
concerns for more than a decade still to come, so the question of
Pfleiderer's possible influence upon him can scarcely concern us
here. I
It does not appear likely that Hegel was much influenced by
any of the Repetenten in the Stift. They were closer to his own
age and he was certainly thrown into fairly continuous and intimate
contact with them, but their interests were in the main oriented
rather towards the orthodox theology which certainly did not
appeal to him.2 Partial exceptions should perhaps be made in the
cases of Bardili and Conz.3 These two had been students to-
gether at the Stift along with C. F. Reinhardt and K. F. Staudlin
(the younger brother of the lawyer poet). The four of them
formed a 'company of poets', who were admirers of Schiller. Both
Bardili and Conz certainly sympathized with the attitude that
Hegel adopted in his baccalaureate oration-if that is indeed what it
was-of December 1788; and it is not at all surprising that both
Hegel and H6lderlin took Bardili's class on 'The Use of Profane
Authors in Theology'. Conz had, of course, far more influence on
Holderlin, but contact with both of them doubtless helped to
develop Hegel's interest in Schiller, which had probably been
aroused in the first instance by Abel at Stuttgart.4 Through

I Betzendorfer, pp. 42-3. Pfleiderer was once again a former Stiftler. Thus
all of the Philosophy Faculty, except Abel when he came, had been associated
with the Stift either as students or as teachers at the beginning of their careers.
7. His own attitude toward orthodox theology was certainly influenced by the
'Kantian enrage', Karl Diez. But the influence may well have been mainly
indirect, since Hegel only became actively involved in the controversy about
Kant's theology after Diez had left the Stift (see below, pp. 107 ff.).
, Another possible exception is I. D. Mauchardt, whose primary interest was
in descriptive psychology, and who may well have contributed significantly to
Hegel's ideas in this area as well as to his stock of information-see p. 175 n. 3.
(A full list of the Repetenten in Hegel's time with all available details of career
and publications can be found in Brecht and Sandberger, pp. 58-61).
4 Cf. p. 9 n. 3. Abel probably had friendly ties with several of the Repetenten.
Mauchardt's Phiinomene der menschlichen Seele (Stuttgart, 1789) was dedicated
to him; and when he came to be professor at Tlibingen (1790) Bardili took his
place at the Karlsschule.
8243588 H
 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

them also, he came to have a personal interest in the career of

C. F. Reinhardt, who was like himself an enthusiastic admirer of
Rousseau.!
At the end of the first term in the Stift the new students were
'placed' by the Inspectorate. Either now (in April 1789) or six
months later in November, Hegel, who had entered the Stift
placed first among the Stuttgart candidates, was ranked fourth in
his class of twenty-seven, below J. F. Maerklin, who had been
second to him in the Stuttgart group. Even without the testimony
of Leutwein who shared a study with Hegel in the following year,
we might fairly have surmised that this was a very grievous blow
to the pride of a student who had always stood first in his class at
the Gymnasium. 2
I Compare Briefe, i. I I where he writes to Schelling from Berne on Christmas
Eve 1794; '[Oelsner] gave me news of some Wiirttembergers in Paris, especially
of Reinhard [sic], who has a post of great importance in the Departement des
affaires etrangeres.' Reinhardt doubtless appeared to all of the young radicals in
the Stift as a model of someone who was actually doing something to further the
ideals in which they believed. He was in France when the Revolution began, and
entered the diplomatic service there in 1791. In 1799 he became minister for
external affairs under the Directory. Under Napoleon he served as an ambassador.
Like Hegel, he went from Tiibingen first to a post in Switzerland (Briefe, i. 187,
433)·
2 Briefe, iv. 76 (for the Semester Reports of the Stift); Hegel-Studien, iii.
54-6 (for the testimony of Leutwein). The further report of Schwegler that
Hegel was spurred for a time into a fury of industry and did not properly go to
bed for weeks at a time (see Hegel-Studien, iii. 60-1) must be dismissed as a
plausible embroidery upon the very strained hypothesis of Leutwein that an
enduring jealousy of the 'Erz Metaphysiker und Kantianer' Maerklin was the
ultimate reason for Hegel's emergence as a major philosopher in his own right.
Henrich states explicitly in two places (Hegel-Studiell, iii. 63 and 65, notes to
line 7 and line 70 in Leutwein's letter) that Hegel was placed fourth at Martinmas
1789 (10 Nov.). But the Semester Report for St. George's Day (23 Apr.)
records him as fourth; and Leutwein's testimony tells firmly against the hypothe-
sis that Hegel was placed third in April and fourth in November. (Hegel-Studien,
iii. 55-6, lines 104-5: 'Ware er der dritte in der Promotion geworden .. .'
strongly suggests that Hegel never was anything but fourth at Tiibingen.)
There is, indeed, an ambiguity in the printed records of Holderlin which might
mean that the initial Lokation in April was regarded as tentative or unofficial.
He is placed eighth in the Semester Report for April 1789 but is still listed as
sixth (i.e. he is ranked only in relation to his fello." students from Maulbronn)
in the quarterly testimonial for April. He is given his Tiibingen rank at the Feast
of St. James (25 July). But the quarterly ranking for April is probably just a
slip. It may even be a misprint, since it is ignored by Beck in his note. He says
that Hillderlin was placed below the two Stuttgart candidates, Hegel and Maerklin,
'in the spring of 1789' (GSA, vii. I, 384); and in his note on the Semester
Reports he says explicitly that the Tiibingen location took effect 'nach den
ersten Semester'. This is confirmed by Letter 32, which ought quite definitely
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 83

In his second term Hegel took Flatt's course on 'Empirical

Psychology and Kant's Critique', and in all probability he studied
and excerpted the Critique of Pure Reason with some care. It seems
likely indeed that much of the excerpting from modern philosophers
mentioned by Rosenkranz was done at this time. I The notes
to be assigned to the spring of 1789, and not, as Beck believes, to the spring of
1790. (The evidence for this claim is in the Aufgabenliste of H6lderlin's mother
(GSA, vii. I, 284.) Letter 32, like many others that H6lderlin wrote to his
mother in these years, is very largely an appeal for more money. So H6lderlin
has to explain where the money she had already given him has gone. He men-
tions first the fate of the last eight florins out of a sum of thirty (lines 9-II).
These thirty florins cannot be directly identified with any amount mentioned in
the Aujgabenliste. They must have come from the monies his mother gave him
for his return to Tlibingen after the Easter vacation, but they could equally well
be the remainder-after travelling expenses ?-from the 41 florins 12 Kreutzer
he received in 1789, or from the 42 florins of 1790 (ibid. 285). A little later,
however, H6lderlin explains what has happened to the '3 florins that I just now
received' (lines 18-19): these must be the three florins sent on 5 May I789-the
first amount sent after Easter 1790 was eleven florins sent on 30 April. Thus
letter 32 can be securely dated 'early May 1789', and all the remarks about
trouble between H6lderlin and Louise Nast arising from his deference to his
mother's wishes must refer to some lover's quarrel before the final break between
them, and not to that breach itself-as Beck so plausibly argues. Even without
the objective certainty provided by the Aufgabenliste I would myself have said
that a love life with as many ups and downs in it as H6lderlin's is a much shakier
ground for dating a letter than the reasonable assumption that agood student will
react to his placement in his class when it happens-not a whole year, or even
six months, later. H6lderlin was, as we might expect, rather upset by the decision
of the Inspectorate: 'DaB ich in der Lokation um die zwei Stutgarder, Hegel u.
Marklin hinuntergekommen bin, schmerzt mich eben auch ein wenig. "Vie gut
habens andre, die ununterbrochen durch solche Schulfuchsereien in ihren
Studien fort machen konnen' (GSA, vi. 53, lines 24-8).
I Rosenkranz, p. 14. Ever since Haering (i. 55) wrote 'es laBt sich mit Sicher-

heit sagen, daB hiernach von einem nennenswerten EinfluB der theoretischen
Philosophie Kants in dieser frliheren Zeit (und wir fligen sofort hinzu: auch
spaterhin wird es nicht anders sein), mindestens nur ein Wort, daB die Probleme
der Kritik der reinen Vernullft ihn naher beschaftigt oder ergriffen hatten',
there has been a tendency to ignore the evidence of Hegel's Kantian studies
which Haering himself carefully records. Lacorte (p. IIO) even tries to argue
Hegel's excerpts out of existence by suggesting that Rosenkranz was probably
referring to the manuscript of 1794 (discussed in the following note). But this is
ridiculous. If Rosenkranz had known that Hegel took this class of Flatt's he
would most certainly have said so. But he did not; and he certainly could not have
known it from these notes. We only know it ourselves from the comparison of
Hegel's JVlagisterprogramm with the lecture lists. Yet Rosenkranz (loc. cit.) is
able to tell us explicitly that 'the earliest study of Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason . .. falls quite definitely [mit Bestimmtheit] in the year I789'. How did he
know this? Surely because the 'Auszug' of which he speaks on pp. 86-7 was a
normal excerpt, headed by the date as almost all of Hegel's excerpts were?
'Vhat Haering says about the influence of Kant on Hegel is probably not far from
the truth; but Lacorte's assertion (p. I35) that 'a systematic study of Kant on
 TOBINGEN 1788-1793
from Flatt's course itself were not seen by Rosenkranz; it is
probable that Hegel threw them away after incorporating all that
he thought worth preserving in his own notes on 'Psychologie'-
the so-called 'Materials for a philosophy of subjective spirit' -in
1794-1
In his third term Hegel was occupied with the book of Job,
which certainly interested him, but probably not in the way in
which it interested his professor (Schnurrer), for Leutwein says
that Hegel 'had a special delight in the Book of Job on account of
its unconventionalized [ungeregelter] natural language'. 2 From
the way in which I have translated 'ungeregelter' it will be seen that
I take this to mean that Hegel found in Hebrew poetry, and
especially in this book, the same sort of spontaneous 'simplicity',
the same direct and natural expression of immediate experience
in concepts 'abstracted' there and then, rather than inherited in
the conventionalized form of established usage, that he admired
in the Greek poets. Obviously therefore he was quite serious in
putting Israel on a level with the Greeks when he began his
University course. In many respects, as we shall see, he soon
came to feel that the Jewish consciousness was somehow im-
poverished by comparison with that of the Greeks, but his
admiration for their poetic and prophetic heritage was as yet
unstinted.
He was at the same time taking his first course in the history
of philosophy with RosIer. But all trace of this has been lost-re-
absorbed doubtless in his many later manuscripts. All that we have
in this connection are reports of the fervour with which H6lderlin
and he read Plato. Doubtless this reading went on all the time,
but the study of Plato together is something that may well have
begun in this term if they were at the same time taking Bardili's
the part of Hegel in these years can be absolutely excluded' is quite unjustified-
indeed it is probably the exact reverse of the truth.
I See Dok., pp. I95-2I7 for the text, and pp. 448-53 for Hoffmeister's notes
on its origins. Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain this manu-
script, but only one needs to be mentioned here. Lacorte (pp. 30I-2) has sug-
gested that it may simply be a revision of Hegel's notes from Flatt's course.
There arc both external and internal grounds for holding that this view is too
extreme-the manuscript is assigned to I794 by SchUler, and the discussion is
based upon Hegel's own division of the faculties-see below, Chapter III,
pp. I74-6. But Lacorte's conjecture has now been in a large measure confirmed
by Henrich on the basis of his examination of another student's Kollegienheft
from this class (Hegel-Studien, iii. 70-I n.).
, Hegel-Studien, iii. 56, lines I 30-3.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 85

course, since of all the 'profane authors' Plato is the most ob-
viously useful in theology.l Bak's lectures, on the other hand,
would give him an excuse, if he felt the need of one, for studying
the Emile, Social Contract, and Confessions of his hero Rousseau,
and the other works governed by like sentiments, through which
one could cast off the 'fetters' and generalized conventions of the
understanding. 2 We cannot say just what these 'fetters' were,
but one suspects that Rousseau's idea of natural spontaneous
self-expression was what attracted Hegel, and that the struc-
ture of modern society may well have seemed to him to mirror
in some way the artificiality that he found in modern thought and
language. 3
In the second term of this year (summer 1790) he must have
been occupied quite a lot of the time with preparations for the
Magisterexamen. He had to write his two specimina,4 and to
prepare his defence of Bak's thesis 'On the limit of human duties,
immortality being set aside'. In connection with the latter task
I Rosenkranz (p. 40) says that Hegel, Holderlin, Fink, Renz, and other friends
read and discussed Plato, and that some Plato translations by Hegel dating from
this time were still extant. Hegel's early concern with Plato is further attested
by the biographical sketch in the Brockhaus Conversation-Lexicon (1827), which
almost certainly stems from Hegel himself: 'He devoted himself with particular
effort to the philosophy lectures, but did not find in metaphysics as it was then
expounded to him, the hoped-for resolution of his deepest problems. This led
him to seek out the writings of Kant, with the study of which he was now earnestly
concerned, without laying those of Plato aside' (Dok., pp. 395). This is surely a
good example to that 'tenacious memory' recalling-with the aid of his Kollegien-
hefte-the lectures of Flatt, first on metaphysics, then on psychology (which led
him to Kant); and in the following year the lectures of Rosier and Bardili (which
brought him back to Plato).
Holderlin's continuous concern with Plato and Kant is attested first by his
leaving testimonial: 'Philologiae, inprimis graecae, et philosophiae, inprimis
Kantianae ... assiduus cultor' (GSA, vii. 1,479); and secondly by his letters-
though not as early as summer 179Q--see p. r02 n. 2 below.
2 See Leutwein's letter, Hegel-Studien, iii. 56, lines 123-30.
3 The connection between the quality of aesthetic awareness and the character
of actual social structures was always a close one in his mind. Cf. his laments
about the alienation of German literature, both refined and vulgar, from their
constitutional history in Aug. 1788 (Dok., pp. 48-9). and the way in which the
study of the 'Staatsverfassung und des Systems ihrer Erziehung' is taken for
granted in connection with Greek literature (Dok., p. 169).
4 Though he probably wrote the first draft for his essay 'On the study of the
history of philosophy' in connection with Rosier's class of the previous term, and
may also, conceivably, have used something he wrote for Flatt's class on empiri-
cal psychology the year before, as a basis for the essay 'On the judgment of
common human understanding about the objectivity and subjectivity of represen-
tations'.
86 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

B6k held a number of practice disputations during the summer.!

But this was the summer of which, as he wrote in Fink's Stammbuch,
'the motto was Winel', so we may be sure that he did not take life
too seriously.
We have some knowledge of the dissertation that Hegel
defended, because Rosenkranz wrote an analysis of it under the
impression that Hegel composed it himself.2 It was in fact
defended by Hegel in common with H6lderlin, Fink, and Auten-
rieth. We may assume that students had at least some measure of
choice in this matter of thesis defence, and in the light of his own
essays we can see why Hegel should have chosen this one. Indeed
it is not difficult if one looks back at the essay of 1787 on the
religion of the Greeks and Romans to see why Rosenkranz had
no hesitation about accepting it as Hegel's own work. The Kantian
distinction between reason and sensibility is accepted in the sense
that morality is derived from the former, but no absolute separation
is envisaged. Morality proceeds by stages in accord with the
development of rational enlightenment, but moral goodness can
never be separated from happiness. It follows that a man of
nobility who has no belief in immortality will develop a utilitarian
ethics containing (I) obligations of immediate necessity or instinct;
(2) obligations of pleasure; (3) obligations of utility; and (4)
obligations of perfection (from a sense of beauty or high minded-
ness). Belief in God will particularly strengthen the sense of
these higher duties, for one who believes in an all-powerful creator
and ruler will view himself as a citizen in the realm of the greatest
and best of rulers. One can see how this structure would offer the
young Rousseau enthusiast a welcome opportunity to sing the
praises of the 'natural man'.
Of the two specimina that Hegel did write himself we have only
the titles. We may reasonably suppose that his essay 'On the
study of the history of philosophy' followed the line indicated by
his remarks about the ancient philosophers first made in the essay
of 1787 and repeated in December 1788: 'the many contradictions
of the ancient philosophers, particularly in their speculation about
the practical part of philosophy have at least lightened the labour
Betzendorfer, p. 4I.
I

2 Rosenkranz, pp. 35-8. There was also a report of it in the Tubingsche

Gelehrte Anzeigen (1790) which is reprinted in Doh., pp. 436-7. Only rarely
were candidates allowed to write their own dissertations, but the privilege was
granted to the seventeen-year-old Schelling in 1792.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 87

of finding the middle way, where the truth lies.'I It would be

interesting to have the essay 'On the judgement of common human
understanding about objectivity and subjectivity of representations',
because we might perhaps have learned from it what Hegel made
of the Critique of Pure Reason. A few moments' reflection on the
title in the light of all that we know about his interests and his
readings is sufficient to make us realize that in all probability several
threads that we can trace separately earlier were brought together
in this essay. Hegel had always been fascinated by the variety of
human sensibility and the consequent differences in opinion
and point of view. His concern with this problem is almost the
only sign of a purely theoretical philosophical interest that can
be found in his early papers. At the beginning of the Tagebuch
in 1785 he was reflecting about the different impressions (Eindriicke)
that things make on different people according to age, sex, and
interest; and as a sort of tailpiece to it in 1787 we have his thoughts
on the ideas (Vorstellungen) of quantity. It is not hard to see why
problems of this sort worried him when we remember how his
fundamental concern with the origin of our abstract ideas arose
out of his sense of the difference between real scholarship and
pedantic routine discipline, between living ideas and abstractions,
between natural language and conventional expressions. 2 For
while it was all very well to praise the Greeks for their originality
and individuality, he could hardly help recognizing as a student of
Plato that the formation of conventional standards of opinion was
unavoidable unless some better way out of the Protagorean anarchy
of sense experience could be provided. If he wished to preserve
at all costs the living concreteness of original direct experience,
it must somehow be reconciled and united with a rational standard
of objectivity. The establishment of this union eventually became
the controlling concern of his Phenomenology. The title of this
essay makes one wonder whether, and how far, he was aware of the
problem in 1790.
Having successfully completed the examen rigorosum in which
he had to write a Latin essay and answer oral questions concerning
the basic curriculum of the course, Hegel celebrated his new
I Doh., p. 172; cf. Doh., pp. 47-8. (This line of argument was probably
suggested initially by Abel.)
2 Doh., pp. 8-9, 42-3; the first sign of his interest in the problem of the
part played by language in the origin of our ideas is the essay Ober das Excipieren
of Mar. 1786: Doh., pp. 31-5.
88 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

dignity at a dance and doubtless went home for the vacation quite
well pleased with himself and with life. I
3. The theology course
When he returned to the Stift in October the prospect before him
was not inviting. For three years he must read orthodox Lutheran
theology of a distinctly conservative type. In the first year, as the
inspectorate had just now decided, he was to take Dogmatics,
Exegesis, and Moral Theology; in the second Polemics would be
added to these three; and in the third there would be only Polemics
and Exegesis. 2 From these indications it is not possible to
identify with certainty more than a few of the courses that he
took. 3 We should know, even if Rosenkranz had not confirmed it
in the light of the remaining manuscripts, that he must have
attended several of the courses of G. C. Storr, who did most of the
lecturing on Dogmatics and New Testament Exegesis. We can
be certain that he attended the lectures of Flatt on Moral Theology
in the summer of 1792;4 and it is probable that he took Chancellor
Lebret's course on controversies concerning the means of grace
in the summer of 1792, and the course on the history of the
deistic controversy in the summer of 1793-but in this last summer
1 Hegel refers to a ball arranged by Niethammer am l'vIagisterium in a letter to

Christiane in October 1814 (Letter 242, Briefe, ii. 44); he does so because
Niethammer asked him to give her his greetings and to remind her of that
occasion when they met. But if am Magisterium means 'at my Magisterium'
then this was not the first occasion when they were together at a ball. There was
a dance in Sept. 1789 when Christiane danced too long with Magister Klett;
and Niethammer was certainly there (see Bilfinger's letter to him, 29 Sept. 1789,
GSA, vii. 1,401-2), though we do not know that he arranged it. It would have
been a natural occasion for him to do something of the sort, since he completed
his formal studies in Theology at that time. But he did remain in the Stift for
another semester (studying Kant and Reinhold under Flatt-see the article of
J. L. Doderlein in Hegel-Studien, iii. 284). After March 1790, as far as I can
determine, he was at Jena. We shall know more about subsequent visits to
Tlibingen-if any-when his correspondence is published. It does at the
moment seem to me quite likely that am Magisterium in Hegel's letter simply
means 'at the time of the annual Magisterial examination', and that the reference
is to the year 1789. Still there may have been a ball in 1790 anyway; and it is
certainly clear that Niethammer had formed ties of friendship with HiHderlin,
Hegel, Bilfinger, and others in the Renzsche-Promotion by the spring of 1789.
2 Betzendorfer, p. 52.

3 See Table on facing page.

4 Since the regulation stipulated that students must take the course in moral
theology given in the summer semester in their first and second years, he must
also have been enrolled in Maerklin's course in 1791. But in this term he was
absent for long periods on account of sickness.
 Note 3 to p. 88: The lecture list for the period, reconstructed from the data given by Betzendorfer and Fuhrmans is as follows. (The courses
which Hegel seems most likely to have taken in fulfilment of the regulations have been marked with an asterisk.)
public 10 a.m. public 9 a.m. public 8 a.m. public II a.m.
Lecturer Lebret Uhland Storr Maerklin/Flatt
private 3 p.m. private 4 p.m. private 5 p.m. private 2 p.m.
winter public Controversien (nach Morus) Micah, Habbakuk, Dogmatik (nach Sar-
1790 /1 Zepha..liah'*" torius·~) >-3
private Kirchengeschichte seit Christliche Altertumer St. John's Gospel Praecepta theologiae ::r:
der Volkerwanderung (nach Baumgarten) moralis de officiis t>:1
(nach Schrokh) (Maerklin) n
summer public Controversien (nach Morus) Haggai, Malachi Dogmatik (nach Sartorius)" Moraltheologie" (Maerklin)
::r:
c:::
1791 private Christliche Altertumer Epistle to the Romans Homiletik (Maerklin) :;c
winter public Controversien (nach Morus)" Zechariah Dogmatik (nach Sartorius)
n
::r:
179 1/2 private Kirchengeschichte von 1100 Einfiihrung in die Symbol. Minor Pauline Epistles Homiletik und Katechetik
an (nach Schrokh) Bucher der lutherischen (Maerklin) <:
....
Kirche"
summer public Polemik: Controversien Hosea Dogmatik (nach Sartorius) Moraltheologie nach
....
Ul

to
1792 de mediis gratiae und de Doderlein (Flatt)· t""
novissimis· t>:1
private Theologische Literatur-
geschichte (nach Noesselt)
Einfiihrung in die Symbol.
Bucher (Forts.)"
Hermeneutik des Neuen
Testaments (nach Ernesti)
Homiletik (Flatt) >
Z
winter public Kirchengeschichte des 18. Isaiah Dogmatik (nach Morus) Intro. to Speculative Theology t:J
1792/3 Jahrhunderts" (Flatt) ....
private Kirchengeschichte vom Einfiihrung in die Matthew, Mark, Luke" Epistles (Flatt) z
Baseler Konzil bis zum
Westfalischen Frieden (nach
lutherische Liturgie ....Ul<:
Henke) ....
to
summer public Geschichte der Deisten Isaiah (continued) Dogmatik (nach Morus) Moraltheologie nach t""
1793 und Antideisten" Doderlein (Flatt) t>:1
private Geschichte der luther- Einfuhrung in die Matthew, Mark, Luke Von der richtigen Art, die
ischen Kirche des 18. Liturgie (Forts.) (continued)" christlichen Dogmen
Jahrhunderts popular zu erklaren OR
Vergleich von Kants Kritik
der praktischen Vernunft mit
der Prinzipien der christl.
Lehre (Flatt) 00

'"
 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

he was absent much of the time. He will have heard some of

Uhland's exegesis of the prophets, and very probably his intro-
duction to the symbolic books (since one imagines that this ful-
filled the requirement in Dogmatics and he could not go on for
ever listening to Storr and studying Sartorius).I
Except perhaps for Lebret's class on deism, and the un-
decidable problem of whether Hegel attended Storr's class on St.
John's Gospel in the first term of his course, none of these details
is of any particular significance. Only the general tenor of the
theology school at Tiibingen is really of any concern to us. The
senior professors were J. F. Lebret (Chancellor of the University)
and Ludwig Uhland (grandfather of the poet) but the dominant
figure was G. C. Storr, founder of the so-called Old Tiibingen
School. Chancellor Lebret was in many ways a model example of
the enlightened Protestant ecclesiastic, for he had been a tutor in
Venice and had worked many years in Italian libraries. He had
written books on the history of the Jesuits and had been on
friendly terms with Cardinal Ganganelli, who later became
Clement XIV. He had been Karl Eugen's guide and companion
on the Grand Tour and was still a trusted friend and counsellor
of the Duke. He used Schrokh's history as the textbook for his
own lectures. But he was not a great teacher or a deep thinker and
he was certainly no match for Storr in either respect. 2
L. J. Uhland had been professor of history and Ephor of the
Stift before passing to the theology faculty, and his most important
work was done in the field oflocal history. He lectured on the history
of the early Church as well as expounding the prophets, so he may
I Storr lectured on the compendium of Sartorius until his own compendium
was printed in 1793; and every year the whole compendium was covered section
by section in the Lokus (repetitio Zoci) a two-hour class on Monday afternoons
taken by a Repetent designated for the week. This session, with its rigidly fixed
syllabus, took the place of the weekly Repetition in the philosophy course. Even
that earlier Repetition was sometimes devoted to Sartorius; and even in the upper
fonns of schools Sartorius' compendium was studied (until it was supplanted by
Storr's). Thus at the beginning of his three-year course in theology Hegel knew
that he must three times 'repeat' a work with which he was already quite
familiar-see Brecht and Sandberger, pp. 52-7, 65-71. (C. F. Sartorius was
professor of theology and Rector of the University of Tiibingen.)
2 See Betzendorfer, pp. 52-3, and Lacorte, pp. 138-9; Lebret was also, it

should be remembered, the father of Holderlin's beloved Elise and of Christoph

Lebret who had been at school with Hegel (Briefe, iv. 156). (The 'Geschichte-
tabellen' mentioned by Rosenkranz (p. 60) may have been made by Hegel between
1791 and 1793 in connection with one of Lebret's courses. But see further,
p. 417 n. 4 below.)
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 91

have contributed something to Hegel's stock of information, but it

is scarcely likely that he had any effect on his ideas or interests. I
G. C. Storr was certainly the most notable and the most
influential of all Hegel's teachers at Tlibingen, and his influence on
Hegel was in fact considerable, though almost entirely negative.
His 'biblical supernaturalism' provided something for Hegel and
Holderlin to react against. He summed up for them everything
they were opposed to, the spirit of the visible Church in general,
and of the Tiibinger Stift in particular. As a theologian he was
remarkable in two main respects. In the first place he was an
extreme conservative in a liberal era. Against all the critical-
historical tendencies of the Enlightenment, which had hitherto
dominated Hegel's intellectual formation virtually unchallenged,
Storr maintained the traditional Lutheran conception of the
Bible as the inspired word of God, a single indivisible revelation
of God's will and purpose in the creation of man. Thus for him
dogmatic theology coincided with New Testament exegesis, and
every passage in the Bible had to be viewed in the context of
the total message. Storr used the weapons of historical research,
just as he did those of philosophical criticism, entirely for apolo-
getic purposes. He was, to use his own term, a 'realist'. Thus in
defending the book of Revelation, which was the obvious weak
point in the New Testament canon the integrity of which he
wished, above all, to defend, he sought first to put the case for its
authenticity as a work of the apostle John as strongly as possible,
and secondly to show that the book was in itself credible as
prophecy because the prophecies contained in it were being
fulfilled in actual historical fact. From the 'realistic' interpre-
tation of Revelation (1783) he passed naturally enough to the
study of the most contentious epistles and then in 1793 he pub-
lished the Doctrinae Christianae pars theoretica e sacris litter is
repetita which more or less immediately became the official text-
book of dogmatics in Wlirttemberg. By that time Hegel had left the
Stift, of course, but there can be no doubt that the contents of
the new compendium were in large part declaimed at him from
the lectern,2 for it was the systematic expression of Storr's
I Betzend5rfer, pp. 53-4, and Lacorte, p. 139.
2 In the 'Tiibingerfragment and even more expli<;:itly in the early Berne frag-
ments Hegel pours scorn on the professor who thinks that the publication (or
the reading) of his new compendium will change the moral situation of the world
(see below, Chapter III, section 2).
92 TOBINGEN 1788-1793

interpretation of the New Testament as a single body of positive

doctrine.
In Storr's work all argument and exposition of doctrine begins
from a direct appeal to the sacred text. As Lacorte puts it: 'The
doctrine that is established in this way cannot be subjected to
testing by any other measure that pretends to prove its validity.'!
The second remarkable thing about Storr's work was the way in
which he used the weapons of the new philosophy to show that,
contrary to the deepest conviction of the Enlightenment, human
reason itself can provide no yardstick for such a test. Pfleiderer's
account of Storr and of the relation between the 'older' and the
'later' Tiibingen school is in this respect both accurate and
revealing:
We may notice as a curiosity that many theologians, both Protestant
and Catholic, beheld in Kant's distinction between phenomena and
noumena and his limitation of knowledge of the former, the means of
rescuing the orthodox system from the onslaughts of neological doubt.
Though in the world of phenomena three persons are not equal to one
person, and one person cannot have two natures, still, they argued, the
possibility of this cannot be disputed in the case of the Divine Persons,
since they belong to the noumena, of which we know nothing except
that in this realm everything is in all respects different from what
prevails in the case of phenomena. A similar position was held by Storr
and his colleagues and disciples, the so-called older Tiibingen school,
who exercised greater freedom with regard to ecclesiastical dogmas, but
held all the more strictly to Biblical supernaturalism, which they rested
upon the traditional theory of inspiration. They maintained their Biblical
system against all the objections and doubts of the Aufklarung by an
appeal to the Kantian philosophy; since, according to the critical
philosophy, reason itself admits its inability to know anything of the
supersensible, it has logically no right to protest against what has been
made known to us concerning supersensible things by historical revela-
tion; with regard to the practical reason, Kant himself allows that it
demands a requiting Deity for the satisfaction of our desire for happi-
ness, and is therefore in its own interest called upon to receive upon
authority the historical revelation concerning God and his government
of the world. Hence the truth of the Biblical doctrines stands higher than
the critique of the speculative reason which confesses its own incom-
petence, and accords with the demands of the practical reason; it has
I Lacorte, p. 156. The present discussion of Storr's theology is heavily
indebted to the summaries given by Lacorte (pp. 139-41, 154-61, 166-72). See
also the Bibliographical Index.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 93
therefore nothing to fear and nothing to expect from philosophy, but
rests entirely upon the positive authority of a supernatural revelation,
which has only to be first historically proved and then reduced to a
system. Storr did this by putting together a dogmatic system, in the
fashion of a mosaic, from detached Biblical texts, without caring for
any other proof of his propositions, either by appealing to the philosophy
or to the religious consciousness. We cannot but recognise the strength
of this position, which meets all rationalistic objections by a sceptical
depreciation of reason; in all periods this standpoint of faith, founded
purely upon authority, has been popular, but especially in those when
philosophic thought was at a low ebb owing to the overweening flights
of previous speculation. Its weak point is the unhistorical arbitrariness
with which individual passages of Scripture, torn from their context, are
used in proof of a system which is foreign to them, because unknown to
any of the Biblical writers. This method of using the Scriptures as one
uniform code of doctrine quite ignores the peculiarities and variety of
the religious habit of thought of the Biblical authors, so different in
point of time, place and character. Hence this Biblical dogmatism could
not survive a really historical examination of the Scriptures, such as was
undertaken by the later Tiibingen school. History had been the sole
basis of the system of the older Tiibingen school, and by means of
history it was overthrown by the younger Tiibingen school. Profound
thinkers, like the youthful Schelling, had, indeed, before this clearly
perceived how little this application of the Kantian philosophy to the
service of theological dogmatism accorded with its real meaning and
spirit. His ridicule of these pseudo-Kantians was not undeserved; and
dislike of this movement may well have been one of the motives which
soon began to lead Schelling himself to subordinate, and this too
absolutely, the critical to the speculative side of Kant's system.!
One would have thought that the effect of 'these pseudo-
Kantians' (i.e. Storr and J. F. Flatt) on the 'youthful Schelling'
(and of course on the 'old man' Hegel as well), and hence on the
subsequent development of post-Kantian idealism as a 'specula-
tive' philosophy, was sufficiently important to make their inter-
pretation of Kant rather more than a 'curiosity'. Certainly it was
more than that to Hegel himself, though he responded to Schelling's
bitter jibes at the local 'Kantians', and his paeans in praise of
Kant, by remarking that 'philosophy at Tiibingen consisted of
saying "yes, yes, quite so!" when faced with something contrary
to one's convictions, and then getting up in the morning, drinking
I Pfleiderer, pp. 85-7. The claim that Storr's dogmatics was an unhistorical
mosaic was in fact first put forward by F. C. Bauer.
94 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

one's coffee and going about one's business as if nothing had

happened'.1 We shall see when we come to examine some of the
fragments of the Berne period that Hegel knew very well that
the Kant-interpretation of Storr and Flatt could not simply be
dismissed with a sociological explanation as a 'System des
Schlendrians'.2
In Storr's system the purpose of historical research was to
remove sceptical doubts concerning the authenticity of the canon,
and the purpose of philosophical research was to raise sceptical
doubts to a rational certainty of reason's incapacity to investigate
the supernatural, while at the same time exhibiting the moral
necessity of supernatural knowledge. Thus the mind would be
prepared to accept the authority of a supernatural revelation
signalized by miraculous events. The positive facts of the Christian
revelation are what endow it with an authority superior to any
reason. The 'spirit' revealed thus in positivity and authority is for
Hegel the spirit of despotism,3 the spirit to which he remained
always unalterably opposed. But in Storr's doctrine of the
authority of faith, the ultimate foundation is provided by the
personality of Christ himself. In his rejection of the rationalizing
tendencies of the preceding generation, the tendency to view
Christianity as continuous with 'natural religion' or with the
operation of reason, Storr turned again to the fundamental appeal
of the Pietists-the appeal to the inner witness of the moral
conscience: 'We ought to believe in his [Jesus'] word, because of
the sort of man he was in thought and act.'4
The view that the 'wonders' in the historical record prove
the divinity of Jesus certainly never had any force in the minds of
Hegel and Holderlin, any more than in that of Schelling. Storr's
'realism', his emphasis on the scripture as literal fact, distinguished
him sharply from all forms of pietism and mysticism-and of
course, as Pft.eiderer says, the development of his methods was
Briefe, i. 16; cf. Kaufmann, i. 302 (Anchor edn.)
I

2 Henrich claims that Storr's interpretation can be derived quite consistently

from Kant's moral philosophy in its earlier critical phases. (See 'Carl Immanuel
Diez' in Hegel-Studien, iii. 281, and 'Some historical presuppositions of Hegel's
system' in D. Christensen (ed.), Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion (The Hague,
1970). Hegel himself analysed out the basic fallacy involved-without explicitly
acknowledging that Kant had been guilty of it-in Ein positiver Glauben (Nohl,
pp. 233-9; end of 1795.)
3 Briefe, i. 31.
4 Betzendorfer, p. 55.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 95

bound to reveal the untenability of his assumptions. But in his

appeal to the witness of the spirit through the moral personality of
Jesus he was striking a chord which re-echoed sympathetically in
the minds of his most 'enlightened' hearers. Holderlin retailed this
part of Storr's argument to the assembled Stiftler in one of the
midday sermons with which they customarily regaled one another
as they ate. I Of course we are not bound to admit that Holderlin
believed all he said on this occasion. But the way in which he
reported the sermon to his mother as the conclusion of a year-long
progress of his knowledge (,der Gang meiner Erkenntnisse') of
divinity would seem to guarantee at least that, of all the arguments
that he heard in the lecture hall, this was the one that seemed to
him to have most substance, the one that he could most easily
bring himself to repeat without that consciousness of cowardice
or hypocrisy in which Hegel said later the whole spirit of
Wiirttemburg was founded. 2
Hegel, like Holderlin, was far more impressed by the moral
argument for the existence of a personal God than Schelling ever
was. 3 Hence he would have followed the Tiibingen interpretation
of the first two critiques willingly enough, up to the point at which
the appeal to revelation as a supra-rational authority was intro-
duced. The conception of a positive authority superior to reason
offended against everything in him, against his reason, his instincts,
his education, call it what you will-how one speaks of this
revulsion on his part will necessarily depend upon one's own
attitude toward the conception that provoked it. There were two
ways in which he could make Storr's appeal to conscience accept-
able and he tried them each in turn. On the one hand he could
claim that Jesus possessed authority indeed but that there was
nothing positive about it, since he was nothing but the mouthpiece
of practical reason. This was the way which he tried first; it
harmonizes neatly with the rationalism of the Enlightenment
and represents an extreme reaction against Storr's conception of

I Letter 41 (probable date 14 Feb. 1791): GSA, vi. 63-4 and 578-81. There is
no reason to distrust any of the facts that Holderlin gives in this letter, though
some of his attitudes, e.g. towards the study of Spinoza, have probably been
disguised a little in order not to hurt his mother's feelings. Vve must assume
therefore that Storr's argument really did have considerable force in his mind,
though not quite the literal force that he allows it to appear to have.
2 Briefe, i. 3 I (Letter 14, to Schelling, 30 Aug. 1795).
3 Cf. Bri~fe, i. 18 (Letter 8, to Schelling, Jan. 1795).
 TDBINGEN 1788-1793
revelation as a matter of concrete historical facts and particular
events. But it was not consistent with Hegel's own 'spiritual
empiricism', the concern with human nature as an integral whole
that drew him to the Greeks, and in primis to the Greek poets,
not to the philosophers. Hence he was bound, in the end, to try the
other way, admitting that the gospel of Jesus had something positive
about it, that a knowledge of his historic personality and destiny
was essentially bound up in it, but arguing that 'authority' was
not a word that properly applied to it.'
I do not want to suggest that Storr's influence was in any
sense, even negatively, decisive for Hegel's subsequent develop-
ment. The tension between eternal reason and historical develop-
ment, between the abstract and the concrete universal was present
in Hegel's mind from the beginning. It was almost bound to come
to a head when he was confronted by Kant's ethics; between Kant
and the Greeks the course of his development could hardly have
been other than it was. But, because of Storr, the pull of Kant was
more powerful than it would otherwise have been, and both the
intensity and the extent of Hegel's experienced awareness of his
heritage of enlightenment rationalism was correspondingly in-
creased. The zeal in defence of Kant which Storr provoked, in turn
increased Hegel's feeling for and comprehension of the historical
aspects of experience. Thus, by setting historical experience and
critical intelligence, the two things which Hegel always meant to
reconcile and unify, into glaring contrast with one another, Storr
did not change Hegel's aims or attitudes or the course of his
development. But he gave to that development a depth and a
poignancy that it might never otherwise have achieved; and no
one who sympathizes with Hegel's initial aims and truly values the
results that he achieved in pursuit of them would wish to under-
estimate the importance of that fact.

4. The theory of the EV Kat 1Tav

But all of this constructive activity lies in the future. Hegel's
immediate reaction was one of withdrawal, almost of flight. Even
before the examination he was probably thinking of transferring
I I am not saying that Hegel came to believe in a 'good' kind of positivity.
Rather, I think he came to see that the whole opposition of rational and positive
authority, the very framing of the question in terms of authority at all, was a
mistake.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 97

to the study of law. Being obliged-at the insistence of his father--

to proceed, he fell victim almost immediately to a lingering
sickness, which while it was clearly genuine enough, was equally
clearly exploited to the limit as a justification for absence from
the Stift. At the half-term report of 20 January 1791, just before
this merciful release sent him home to meditate upon the structure
of plants and the fate of Oedipus and Antigone, he was sentenced
to two hours 'Karzer'; and his conduct report for this term is
'poor' (mores languidi). I This was the term before the great 'ball';
he was probably fencing this winter, and drinking the baker's
wine while talking of his love for the Professor's daughter.:? It
was also the period when enthusiastic interest in the progress of
events in France was at its height among the Stiftler. One of the
accidents of history had endowed Wiirttemberg with a small
slice of French territory, and Hegel was particularly friendly
with at least two of the students in the Stift who came from
there-Billing and Fallot. The album leaves that his friends
presented to him when he left the Stift to go home in February
were filled with appropriate expressions of devotion to liberty, and
of undying fraternity.
H6lderlin's contribution on this occasion was a quotation from
Goethe: 'Lust und Liebe sind I die Fittige zu groBen Taten.'
To this someone, perhaps Hegel himself, perhaps H6lderlin,
added at a later date the 'Sytnbolum' €V Kca 1TCXV.3 Whoever added
I Klaiber in Brie/e, iv. 165; cf. B1"iefe, iv. 77 and 79 for the semester report and

permission to go home. The incarceration was actually brought about by the

escapade reported by Rosenkranz in which Hegel, Fink, and Fallot rode out,
without permission, to a village at some distance, and were unable to get back
before the Stift gate closed because Fallot became ill (cf. Rosenkranz, p. 31:
Dok., p. 432). 2 See above, pp. 67-8 and 68 n. 1.

3 Briefe, iv. 48. The words'S. EV Ka, ",av' are written with a different pen
and ink. Hegel himself added dates and notes a bout the later destiny of the writer
to several entries, but there is no other case of his adding a symholum (there is
also, however, no other case in which, from all that we know, he would have any
reason or incentive to do this).
The collection of leaves made by his friends between 12 and 15 Feb. 1791
(twenty-two in all) formed the first nucleus of his Stammbuch. One of his
friends (Fallot) wrote a postscript on the back of his sheet that same autumn,
and Hegel himself wrote a postscript to his entry in Fink's Stammbuch of the year
before. Fink himself made, at this time, his first contribution to Hegel's
Stammbuch as we have it, though it seems incredible that he should not have
supplied a leaf in February-unless perchance he was himself away at the time.
My own guess would be that Holderlin himself added the Symbolum in the
autumn. (All of them, it may be noted, habitually wrote their Greek without
accents.)
8248588
 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

it, there is no doubt that it was added because Holderlin had

adopted the words as a motto which somehow typified his attitude
to the world. Nor does it greatly matter when the addition was
made, for we know where he got the motto from and, at least
roughly, when he found it. The letter to his mother of February
1791 gives a history of his studies in divinity from which we can
readily gather that some time in the previous autumn, probably,
he read writings 'about and by Spinoza'.I It is also certain that
among the very first 'writings about Spinoza' that came to his
hand were Jacobi's Letters on the Teaching af Spinoza (1785; 2nd
edn., which Holderlin may have possessed, 1789). Rosenkranz says
that 'according to reliable reports' Hegel, Holderlin, Fink, Renz
and other friends 'read together and discussed Plato ... Kant,
Jacobi's Waldemar and Allwill, the Letters on Spinoza and Hippel's
Lebensliiufe nach aufsteigender Linie'. 2 The 'reading together'
(and making of translations) from Plato may well have been
confined to Hegel and Holderlin; but a larger group could study
the German authors together with profit, and they would have had
reason to do it, if they were all enrolled in Flatt's course on 'Meta-
physics and Natural Theology' in the summer term of 1790.3
I Letter 41, GSA, vi. 63-4, lines 24-50. (In November 1790 Hiilderlin

reported to Neuffer that for some days he had been entirely occupied with
'Leibniz and my Hymn to Truth ... the former influences the latter': Letter 35,
lines 19-21, GSA, vi. 56. Hiilderlin's Spinoza studies were probably over by
then; he has almost certainly simplified the course of his reflections about God
in his account for his mother.)
2 Rosenkranz, p. 40. (The 'reliable reporter' is, in all likelihood, Fink.) The

novels of Jacobi and Hippel may very probably (as Beck suggests in GSA, vii.
I, 454) be the non-metaphysical works that Leutwein vaguely remembers in
connection with Hegel's study of Rousseau. Hegel refers to Woldemar in (a)
Unter objektiver Religion (Nohl, p. 49; see pp. 508-9 below).
3 This reading group may also have been the beginning of the group which
seem to have drawn together to defend an enlightened rationalist interpretation
of Kant and his followers against the 'theologisch-Kantianischer Gang' of Storr
and Flatt. At any rate the formation of this group during Flatt's course in summer
1790 would have provided fertile ground for the activities of the 'kantischer
enrage', Diez, who returned to the Stift as Repetent in 1790 and remained until
he transferred to medicine in 1792. From his recently discovered letters and
manuscripts which are soon to be published we know that he developed a
radically sceptical interpretation of the Critical Philosophy as applied to religion.
His conclusions were too radical even for most of his friends, but he argued with
equal cogency and fervour, and his interpretation of Kant was generally accepted
until the publication of [Fichte's] Kritik aller Offenbarung. The comfort which
this last work offered to the orthodox-and specifically to Diez's close friend,
the Repetent F. G. Siiskind-caused the young radicals (including Hegel and
Hiilderlin) to view it with considerable reserve. Diez was the author of many of
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 99

In any case it was about that time that Holderlin acquired his
'symbol'. For he made an excerpt from Jacobi, beginning with
the account of a conversation between Jacobi and Lessing, in
which the latter used the formula to express his own agreement
with Spinoza:
1. Lessing was a Spinozist.page 2. The orthodox concepts of the
Divinity were not for him. He could get no nourishment from them.
'Ev Kat IIav: He knew no other.!
Jacobi's book was addressed to Moses Mendelssohn; and his
avowed aim was to show that the enlightened rationalism of men
like Lessing and Mendelssohn must logically issue in pantheism or
deism of a fatalistic kind. His attack led to the famous 'Pantheismus-
streit', for Mendelssohn refused to accept the characterization of
his dead friend as a deist. There was, he insisted, a higher, 'purer'
Spinozism (geliiuterte Spinozismus) perfectly reconcilable with
theism and with rational moral principles. The progressive develop-
ment of enlightenment certainly did not and could not culminate
in the acceptance of fatalism. Z
Hegel must, without doubt, have been extremely interested in
this controversy, for Lessing and Mendelssohn were old heroes of
his. Nor can there be any question that he sided with Mendelssohn
in the controversy. His own concern, like that of Lessing himself,
was with the 'education of the human race';3 'Reason and
the watchwords of the 'invisible Church' at Tiibingen. But we can, I think, take
Leutwein's word for it that Hegel was not very much involved in the Kant
controversy while Diez was actually present in the Stift; and for my part I am
inclined to believe that the prominence of J. F. Maerklin in the Kant group was
a Gontributory cause of Hegel's holding aloof from it. (This would provide a
plausible basis for the view of Hegel's later career formulated by Leutwein, a
defeated and embittered but still faithful member of the 'invisible Church'.) See
the following sources: Betzendorfer, pp. 19, 24; Hegel-Studien, iii. 56, lines
II4-15, 136-8; on C. I. Diez see the articles of D. Henrich and J. L. Doderlein
in Hegel-Studien, iii. 276-87. I GSA, iv. 207.

2 An die Freunde Lessings (Berlin, 1786). Mendelssohn himself died before

this reply was published, but this did not prevent Jacobi from retorting further
with a violently personal attack. The main documents of the Pantheismusstreit
are collected in H. Scholz, Die HauptschrzJten zum Pantheismusstreit, Berlin,
1916. The passages Holderlin excerpted from Jacobi will be found in Scholz,
pp. 67 and 77-90. The retort of Mendelssohn cited in the text is on page 295.
3 If Hegel had not already read Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780)
at Stuttgart (as I feel sure he had) he certainly read it in his first years at Ttibingen;
and he certainly took it in hand again in 1793, when he began to write out his
views on the religion of Greece. It is a reasonable guess, too, that he read
Lessing's Leben des Sophocles (1790) while he rested at home in 1791.
100 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

Freedom' were his watchwords, as he said to Schelling, and he

would scarcely have taken kindly to the suggestion that the full
development of Reason as he understood it, must lead to the denial
of Freedom. I Schelling, who only came into the picture later, and
whose own background was formed much more by Kant, Jacobi,
and Fichte, could cheerfully accept Jacobi's view of the case, at
least as far as belief in a personal God was concerned, without
sharing Jacobi's feelings-indeed Schelling positively glorified in
his 'Promethean' defiance oftraditional theism. 2 He was therefore
surprised to find that a 'Vertrauter Lessings' like Hegel was still
dallying with the moral argument for the existence of Jacobi's
'verstandige personliche Ursache der Welt' in 1795. 3 But he would
not have been surprised had he been like Hegel a 'Vertrauter
Lessings'. In 1791 neither Hegel nor Holderlin took the EV Kcxt ncxv
of Lessing to involve any surrender of personal identity either for
themselves or for God. Rather than pantheists, they were, in the
modern phrase, panentheists. The sense of union without loss of
individuality, of rationality without loss of spontaneity, the sense of
joyful community, of freedom in friendship or brotherhood; this
was the ideal to which they were devoted. If Holderlin chose
EV Kcxt ncxv as his symbol it was because he found in Lessing's
conception of the All 'nach der Analogie eines organischen
Korpers'4 an appropriate expression for his poet's sense of joyful
communion with all life. The 'union of the mind with the whole of
nature' was for him a matter of feeling not of intellect, of 'Lust und
Liebe' as his Goethe quotation has it, or of Freude and Liebe in
the Schillerian terminology that he generally adopted. It is possible

I Cf. the fonnula in Briefe, i. 18, discussed below .•

2 Cf. Briefe, i. 21-2. The statement Jacobi ascribes to Lessing, 'Die orthodoxen
Begriffe von der Gottheit sind nich mehr fUr mich', which Schelling there
echoes, was supposedly made as a comment on Goethe's Prometheus Ode
(see Scholz, pp. 75-6).
3 Cf. Briefe, i. 18. The phrase of Jacobi is from the Letters on Spinoza (see
Scholz, p. 80); the denial Hegel found worrying in Schelling was of an 'individu-
elle personliche vVesen'.
4 Jacobi, Lette1's (Scholz, pp. 92-3): 'Wenn sich Lessing eine pers{inliche
Gottheit vorstellen wollte, so dachte er sie als die Seele des Alls; und das Ganze,
nach der Analogie eines organischen Korpers' (the italics are mine). Jacobi
could quite fairly object that this was not a normal concept of a personal God;
and certainly it was not orthodox because 'Lessing glaubt keine von der Welt
unterschiedene Ursache der Dinge' (ibid., p. 102). But except for that it is easily
reconciled with such orthodox notions as 'the body of Christ' or the God 'in
whom we live and move and have our being'.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 101

that Kant's critique of the traditional proofs of the existence of

God, along with Jacobi's attack on Spinozism, did leave H6lderlin
momentarily bewildered, having no definite object on which to
focus his essentially religious emotions until Storr presented him
with the argument that the moral personality of Jesus was an
evident sensible proof of his divinity. At least, that is how H6lderlin
presents the matter to his mother. In that case it must have been
some little time before he adopted the Spinozistic symbolum as his
own. But it is more likely, I think, that, like Hegel, he took
Mendelssohn's view of the matter, and that Storr's Jesus simply
fell into place as the perfect model of a citizen of the Kingdom of
God, the 'Son of Man' who 'lived and moved and had his being'
with a perfect consciousness of being the 'Son of God'. I do not
mean to imply that Hegel was in any important sense H6lderlin's
philosophical 'genius' or 'mentor' about the controversy--for I do
not believe that either of them looked to the other as a leader in
that way-but Hegel was an acknowledged expert on Lessing, and
we know that he had begun to think of the Christian 'Kingdom of
God' in this way before he was sixteen years old. I
The general tendency, since Haering's great work appeared,
has been to emphasize that EV KOit 7TCXV was H6lderlin's symbol, not
Hegel's, and to argue that in so far as it possessed a meaning for
Hegel at all its significance was strictly human and social. But
this view is rather in conflict with the few fairly solid facts that
we possess about the interests of the two friends in 1791 and 1792.2
This was the period when we know that H6lderlin became
interested in astronomy, while Hegel for his part was certainly
I Holderlin's remarks about Hegel being his 'mentor' or 'genius' (Briefe, i.

9 and 45) refer mainly to a moral dependence-compare what he says to Neuffer

about Hegel in Letter 136: 'I love calm Verstandesmenschen, because one can
orient oneself so well by them, when one does not rightly know in what case one
is with oneself and the world' (GSA, vi. 236, lines 42-5). The intellectual
relationship between the two friends is aptly summed up in his comment to
Hegel himself in Jan. 1795: 'I have long been mulling over the ideal of a
Volkserziehung, and since you are concerned precisely with religion, which is
one aspect of that same ideal, perhaps 1 may avail myself of your image and your
friendship as a conductor of my thoughts into the external world (die iiuflere
Sinnenwelt) and write what 1 might perhaps have written later (for the public)
to you beforehand in letters which you must criticize and correct' (Briefe, i. 20).
(For Hegel's early encounters with 'enlightened Christianity' see Dok., pp. 87-
100, and Chapter 1 above, pp. 23-6.)
2 The researches of Henrich on Leutwein have shown that the symbolism

of the €V Ka, 1Tav did not belong exclusively to Holderlin. Leutwein-and

probably others too-accepted it as the expression of a shared ideal; and
102 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

studying botany in the summers and may quite possibly have taken
his anatomy course in the winter of 1791-2.1 It would scarcely
be possible for one who had been reading Kant and Jacobi to
turn to the study of astronomy without remembering the closing
paragraphs of the Critique of Practical Reason. When we reflect
further that this same student has been reading Plato with
enthusiasm for some time 2 it seems entirely plausible that he
should conceive of God as 'die Seele des Welt-alls', without
ceasing thereby to regard him both as the creative architect and
as the supreme monarch whom we find in Leibniz. The only serious
conflict between a Platonic conception of the deity in which the
conceptions of the Demiourgos and the World-Soul have been
conflated together, and the Leibnizian conception inherited by
Kant, is that the World-Soul of Plato is more directly involved in
the moral struggle to maintain order in the realm of becoming. It
is in this struggle, rather than in the ideal realm, that he has his
being, and the task of men is to collaborate with him in it. Whereas
the God of Leibniz and of Kant's practical reason has the role of

Leutwein certainly felt, in old age, that he had personally remained faithful to
a youthful ideal which Hegel had abandoned for the sake of worldly success
(see Hegel-Studien, iii. 43-50).
I On Holderlin's interest in astronomy see Letter 47 (dated by Holderlin

himself 28 Nov. 1791) which expressed regret that he had not come to astronomy
sooner and the fixed intention to make it his particular concern in the coming
winter. Hegel's interest in botany is fairly decisively dated by Betzendorfer's
report that he borrowed Linnaeus from the Stift library in the summers of 1791
and 1792 and by the entry of Sartorius in his Stammbuch, 7 Sept. 1791. His
course in anatomy cannot be dated from documentary evidence more precisely
than to the period of the theology course as a whole (Rosenkranz, p. 25). I think
the winter of 1791-2 is a plausible guess because it would fit so neatly with his
botanical interest, but nothing really hangs on this dating.
Z The only definite indications we have about Holderlin's Plato reading are

for Sept. 1792 (when he borrowed volumes from the Stift Library which
probably contained the political dialogues-Republic, Statesman, Minos-
Betzendorfer, pp. 30 and 128) and July 1793 (Letter 60 to Neuffer contains
explicit references to the Phaedrus, Timaeus, Phaedo, and Symposium: GSA, vi.
86). But the references in the letter of 1793 are meant as a general characteriza-
tion of his interest in Plato and it is surely reasonable to assume that the
Pantheismusstreit would have led him to study the Timaeus if he had not already
done so. The Phaedo he would certainly have been familiar with much earlier
and it is reasonable to assume that he would have studied the Symposium
earlier also. The volumes borrowed from the library do not prove anything
either, except that there was some dialogue in them that he did not himself own
but wished to read. He may for instance have had to restore a borrowed copy of
the Republic to its owner, or he may have wished to go on from the Republic to
study the other dialogues on government.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 103

supreme judge as an essential function, and hence he has his being

and his abode necesarily in the courts of the eternal. He is above
the struggle. It is perfectly appropriate to use the personal pro-
noun to refer to either of them, and to conceive either of them as
the object of a personal encounter. One does not have to agree
with Goethe that the Earth-Spirit is too strange and alien for
human converse-indeed the possibility of a real sense of fellow-
ship with God is more obvious if one takes the process of life
itself as a continuation and extension of the original work of
creation.
It is more than probable I think that Hegel shared this Platonic
conception of the World-Soul, and that both he and H6lderlin
saw in the study of astronomy not just a confirmation of the opera-
tion of practical reason in the world, but evidence of the divine
life itself. Thus, it may well be that the incorporation of Hegel's
interests in mathematics and physics into his philosophical concerns
began just at the time when he no longer had external occasion and
incentive to pursue them for their own sake. But his own attention
was focused at this period and for some years to come on the more
limited problem of the nature of life in the sublunary sphere. The
contrast between comprehending the living unity of an organism,
and dissecting a corpse in order to understand its anatomical
structure so as to be able to take it to pieces and put it together
again, is one that frequently recurs in his mature works; so also
does the contrast between living nature as an organic whole,
stable and self-subsistent in spite of all tensions, and the indi-
vidual living organism, with its essential instability, its need of
another in order to overcome in the continuity of the species its
own inevitable mortality. The EV KCXt 7TCXV undoubtedly meant for
Hegel even in 1791 primarily this living unity of all organic life,
this immortal equilibrium of unstable, mortal elements, sustained
by the universal power of life.
Jacobi's interpretation of Lessing's Spinozism would have
appeared to Hegel as a typical example of 'bad' abstraction, i.e.
of determining the meaning of words by reference to how they
function in relation to other words rather than by reference to
actual experience; whereas his own studies in botany and anatomy
gave meaning to the concept of the EV KCXt 7TCXV in the proper,
natural way. But aside from these two kinds of 'meaning' the
concept possessed also a 'use': he would not have devoted his
I04 TilBINGEN 1788-1793

time to the giving of proper or concrete meaning to such a high-

level abstraction as the notion of 'life' if it had not been 'useful'. I
The 'use' of a clear and concrete concept of 'life' (which is what the
EV K!XL 1f!XV represented for Hegel in my view) lies in the fact that
we can derive from it a proper conception of the vocation of man.
Concepts in general, and this one in particular, are 'useful' in
Hegel's sense in so far as they aid us to 'become men'-to employ
a phrase that recurs several times in Holderlin's letters at this
time 2-or show us how to establish the 'Kingdom of God' on
earth.3
It was from the study of Greek culture that Hegel and Holderlin
derived their model of the ideal society in which every individual
expresses his humanity fully, freely, and with natural spontaneity.
The transition from the notion of the EV K!XL 1f!XV to the ideal vision
of the humanity of the future in a world of universal liberty,
equality, and fraternity,4 is made through the Platonic con-
I Hegel explicitly refers to the criterion of 'usefulness' only in his letters to

Schelling some years later (I795, Briefe, i. 16), where he says that he wants to
'learn to apply' Kant's results, whereas he can afford to neglect the work of
Reinhold because it represents an advance 'only from the point of view of
theoretical reason' and does not have 'greater applicability to concepts of more
general usefulness'. But this insistence on the applicability of theories and the
usefulness of concepts is a direct development of the attitude toward theoretical
philosophy that he displays from I787 onwards. In the Stift, as Leutwein tells
us, he hoped to 'get free from his fetters' through the study of Rousseau,
(Hegel-Studien, iii. 56, lines 124-30). The comment on Reinhold in this letter
is another sign of Hegel's relative aloofness from the Diez group-Diez was the
first champion of Reinhold in the Stift.
2 The most important expressions of this ideal in Holderiin's letters are in

letters 86 and I03. But a long list of passages can be cited in which the ideal
expounded in these two letters of 1794 and 1795 is fairly clearly alluded to. See,
for example, the following (all in GSA vi): Letter 36, line 23I (Nov. I790);
Letter 43, lines 26-'7 (Mar.-Apr. I79I); Letter 49, line 25 (Feb.-Mar. 1792);
Letter 76, lines 5 and 53 (Mar. 1794).
3 Briefe, i. 9 (Holderlin to Hegel, 10 July I794): 'Ich bin gewiJ3, daB Du
indessen zuweilen meiner gedachtest, seit wir mit der Losung "Reich Gottes"
voneinander schieden. An dieser Losung wiirden wir uns nach jeder Meta-
morphose, wie ich glaube, wiedererkennen.' Briefe, i. I8 (Hegel to ScheIIing,
Letter 8, Jan. I795): 'Das Reich Gottes komme, und unsre Hande seien nicht
mliBig im SchoJ3e.'
4 Cf. Hiilderlin's letter to his younger half-brother in September I793 (Letter
65): 'I love the race of the coming centuries. For this is my most sacred hope,
the faith, which keeps me strong and active, that our descendants will be better
than we, that freedom must sometimes come to pass, and that virtue will flourish
better in the holy light and warmth of freedom, than it does in the ice cold region
of despotism. We are living in a period when everything works together toward
better days. These seeds of enlightenment, these silent wishes and strivings of
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE lOS

ception of love. The discourse of Diotima in the Symposium

establishes a continuum between the Aristophanic conception of
sexual desire as the primitive expression of life itself, 'the desire
and pursuit of the whole', and the rational passion of the philosopher
king who aims to establish on earth a copy of that 'city in the
heavens' which the scientific study of astronomy reveals. In this
way the lowly aspect of the EV Ka~ 7Tav with which Hegel was
concerned in his botanizing is linked to the moral exaltation of
H6lderlin's study of 'the starry heavens', and the relevance of both
to the coming of the Kingdom is made clear. I But why, when their
inspiration came from classical Greece on the one hand, and from
the rationalist enlightenment on the other, did they choose to employ
Christian language for the 'application' of their fundamental concep-
tion? The language of 1789 would seem to have been more natural
for their purposes than that of St. John or the council of Nicaea.
One might be tempted to think that their choice was the
accidental result of circumstances. They were after all theology
students who were professionally obliged to concern themselves
for much of their time with the language and concepts of Christian
theology; and the 'application' of Platonic philosophy for this
purpose was already a revered tradition. In some part, no doubt,
their choice of terms was governed by their particular circumstances.
This is particularly evident in the use of the expression 'the
invisible Church' as the rallying point for all who were working
for the coming of the Kingdom. 2 But in the main their use of
individuals towards the formation of the human race [Billf.mg des Menschen-
geschlechts] wiII spread and grow stronger, and bear noble fruits.' The whole
context of this passage must be considered, for Holderiin's emphasis on his own
devotion to the human race as a 'universal' throws light on his adoption of the
symbol €V Ka, 7Tav (GSA, vi. 92-3).
I Sym. 205 d-212 a; Rep. 529-30, 592 b. (Holderiin studied botany at some

time before 1796-see Letter 116, GSA, vi. 202; and Hegel was interested in
astronomy from his school years onwards.)
2 Briefe, i. 18 (Hegel to Schelling, Letter 8, Jan. 1795): 'Reason and Freedom
remain our Watchword, and our rallying point the invisible Church.' It seems to
me virtually certain that for Hegel, at any rate, the 'invisible Church' originally
referred to the cosmopolitan ideal of Freemasonry as envisaged by Lessing in
Emst und Fa/h. Rohrmoser ('Zur Vorgeschichte der Jugendschriften Hegels',
p. 194) has found an interesting comparison of the 'fraternity of liberty and the
rights of man' to an 'invisible Church' in one of the political pamphlets of F. K.
von Moser. It is more than likely that one of the Stiftler discovered this and
brought it to general notice. But I agree with D'Hondt (Hegel secret, pp. 328-9)
that if Hegel knew of it he would be more apt to see in it 'un decalque de la
Ma~onnerie "it la Lessing'" than a development of pietism.
106 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

traditional Christian concepts was part of a deliberate policy of

religious enlightenment which they adopted as the best way to
achieve their end, because of the crucial role which religion has to
play in their ideal society. Had they not believed that religion is the
natural and proper expression of the €V K!n 7TCXV at the human
level, the language of the Revolution, which was the ordinary
currency of their secret political club, and of the 'invisible Church'
in general, would have appealed to them precisely because in
using it they could make a clean break with the 'old sourdough'
of the theology school and the pulpit. 'Reason and Freedom' was
what they meant by their talk of 'Kingdom Come'.1 But because
their aim was the transformation of society, and of the quality of
individual life and individual experience itself, the proper use or
application of their theory was to the 'enlightening' of fundamental
theological concepts in order to get rid of the old 'sourdough'. 2

I Compare the remark quoted in the preceding note with the passages cited
above, p. 104 n. 3. It does not seem likely that the Stiftler spoke of the 'Kingdom'
and the 'invisible Church' much at the secret political club. The 'Watchword'
and 'rallying-point' were not regarded as private personal concerns, of course,
but they were more appropriate topics for sermons and doubtless also for study
groups. The 'Watchword' 'Reason and Freedom' on the other hand did occur in
ordinalY conversation. 'Liberte raisonnee' was the 'Symbolum' chosen by Andre
Billing for his entry in Hegel's Stmnmbuch (5 Oct. 1795: Briefe, iv. 44). Compare
also the 'patriotic' entries in the Stammbiicher of L. von Seckendorff and C. F.
Hiller given by Beck in Holderlin, GSA, vii. 1,431-2. In the same way Holderlin
does not write to his brother of the 'invisible Church' though he clearly hopes
to make him a member of it, but of 'enlightenment' and 'freedom' (p. 104 n. 4
above). Schelling does not himself use any of the theological watchwords so far
mentioned (see the following note); but in reply to Hegel's letter (cited on
p. 105 n. 2 above) he says: 'The Alpha and Omega of all philosophy is Freedom'
(Briefe, i. 22).
2 These expressions are applied by Hegel to Schelling's earliest published

essays-the Magisterdissertation and (Jber My then (Briefe i. 1 I). The name

Sauerteig may have been given to the traditional theology by Schelling (cf.
Letter 10,4 Feb. 1795, Briefe, i. 20); his earliest surviving manuscripts are
'enlightened' commentaries on some of the Pauline Epistles. But Schelling
abandoned the programme of theological enlightenment even before he left the
Stift. He became increasingly impatient with classical and theological studies as
he advanced toward mastery of the contemporary disputes in philosophy. It was
through philosophy that he expected the new world to be born; and when Hegel
protested that his interests were too purely theoretical, he retorted that Hegel's
practical urgency was premature: 'Certainly my friend, the revolution that will
be produced by philosophy is still far off' (Letter 13 : Briefe, i. 28); cf. Letter 7
(Briefe, i. 14). Hegel, of course, 'expected a revolution in Germany' from the
perfecting of the Kantian system (Letter I I : Briefe, i. 23), but even in the letter
in which he says so, it is clear that he is preoccupied by the problem of making
people feel the truth of what Kant has shown (ibid., p. 24).
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 10 7

Almost everything that we know about this programme of

theological enlightenment comes from the letters that Hegel
exchanged with Holderlin and Schelling after he had left Tubingen.
By that time he was himself caught up in the enthusiasm of the
other two for the Kantian philosophy. Leutwein tells us, and there
is no reason to doubt the accuracy of his report, that Hegel was not
much interested in the prevalent discussions of the critical philo-
sophy in 1791 and 1792.1 Leutwein himself did not believe that
I Hegel-Studien, iii. 56-7, lines 138-51. The dating is based on a comparison

of the career dates of the students he there mentions. Most of them were in the
Stift together only during those two years, viz.
K. I. Diez Stiftler 1783-8; Repetent 1790-2
J. C. F. Hauff 178( ?)-90
J. F. Duttenhofer 1785-90 (Repetent 1793-8)
C. P. F. Leutwein 1787-92
J. F. Maerklin 1788-93
K. W. F. Breyer 1789-94
K. C. Flatt (brother of 1789-94
Prof. J. F. Flatt)
F. W. J. Schelling 179 0 -5
C. F. Hauber 179 1 - 6
There are several points worth noticing about this list:
(a) The inclusion of the names of Hauff and Duttenhofer, who had left the Stlft
before most of the others achieved the dignity of Magister and did not, like
Diez, return as Repetenten in Hegel's time. Henrich's hypothesis that the
memory of the ageing Leutwein was influenced by Hauff's subsequent successful
career in academic life is possible but to my mind unconvincing. It harmonizes
well enough with his forgetting G. C. Rapp (Repetent 1790-3; died 1794) but
not with certain other omissions. Hauff's later career was as a professor of
mathematics and physics; and if Leutwein's memory was influenced by later
eminence of that sort why did he not mention either Niethammer, who passed
his theological examination in the autumn of 1788 but remained in the Stift for
a further six months for the specific purpose of studying Reinhold under J. F.
Flatt (Hegel-Studien, iii. 284), or that assiduus cultor philosophiae Kantianae
Holderlin? And in any case the mention of Duttenhofer remains unaccounted
for. The most probable hypothesis I think is this: that there was a sort of
'Kantian tradition' in the Stift from 1785 (when Diez became a magister)
onwards; that the tiny minority who carried on this tradition typically became
involved in it through attendance at J. F. Flatt's 'private' classes in their second
year; that this is what happened to Leutewein in the winter of 1788 or the spring
of 1789; that: he then began to look on Hauff and Duttenhofer as his 'mentors'
so to speak; and when they departed and Diez returned, he assumed their role.
(b) This hypothesis provides a natural explanation for the second oddity in the
list: the fact that only Maerklin is named from Hegel's own year (and not, for
example, Holderlin). I assume that Leutwein knew very well who was in the
'apostolic succession', so to speak, and who was not. Everyone with brains
enough was talking about Kant by this time-except Hegel-but Maerklin was
the 'Erz Metaphysiker und Kantianer' of this class.
(c) With th(~ return of Diez the situation changed. But the first class to be
108 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

Hegel would have changed much in this respect in his last year.
But all the evidence we have shows that Hegel did in fact become
deeply interested in the practical and religious philosophy of
Kant and Fichte in 1792-3; and in the following years his interest
gradually extended even to their more theoretical treatises.
Kant's essay 'On the Radical Evil in Human Nature' appeared
in the Berlinische MonatsschnJt in February 1792, and the publi-
cation of the complete text of his Religion at Easter 1793 was soon
followed by Storr's Latin commentary (Annotationes quaedam).
At this point certainly, if not much sooner, Hegel's interest was
aroused. Similarly the visit of Fichte to Tiibingen in June 1793
no doubt aroused general interest among the students in the
Critique of All Revelation, published at Easter 1792 and ac-
knowledged by Fichte in the autumn. Examination of Hegel's
Tiibingen fragments reveals that he had certainly read Fichte's
book and Kant's first essay before he left the StzJt. It is of course
quite possible, though not demonstrable, that he had read the
whole text of the Religion. I

5. The sermons
The very title of Kant's first essay must have had an alarming
ring for the young revolutionaries at the Stift; and there is reason
to believe that on first reading the Critique of All Revelation Hegel,
Holderlin, and Schelling all agreed that Fichte's work exhibited
certain reactionary tendencies. 2 But the appearance of these
noticeably affected was the class of 1789 (the second-year class of 1790). I
assume that this class provided Diez with his first real converts; and Leutwein
did not foresee how much the situation would change again in 1793. Thus he
does not mention F. G. Stiskind (Stijtler 1783-8) who returned as Repetent in
1791-either because he did not count as a 'true' Kantian or because Stiskind
made no memorable impression on Leutwein before he left the Stl!t in Sept.
1792. With the departure of Diez and the publication of the Kritik aller Offen-
barung and of Kant's essay on 'Radical Evil' a completely new situation came
into being by the end of 1792, and Sliskind had a major part to play in it.
(F. G. Stiskind should not be confused with his younger brother J. G. Stiskind,
who was in Schelling's class and is mentioned several times in the correspondence
between Schelling and Hegel.)
I See pp. 142-4 (and particularly p. 142 n. I below). The watchword 'Reich

Gottes' was probably derived from the reading of Kant. For 'das Reich Gottes'
see Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Akad., v. 127-8, 136-7, etc., and Religion,
Akad., vi. 93, 95, 101, IIS, 131, 134, 136, 151, 152, etc. The 'unsichtbare
Kirche' also occurs in Kant's Religion (ibid. 101, 122, 131, 135, 152-3), but for
this watchword see p. 105 n. 2 above.
2 See Letter 8 (Hegel to Schelling, Jan. 1795); Letter 9 (Hiilderlin to Hegel,
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 109

books served as a sort of signal of battle between the radical

disciples of the Critical Philosophy in the Stift and the moderates
who wished to use it in support of Lutheran orthodoxy; and the
extent to which Hegel himself became involved in the struggle can
be seen by examining the texts of the four sermons that remain to
us from his last two years in Tiibingen.
On 10 January 1792 he preached on the justice of God in reward
and punishment (with Isaiah 61: 7-8 as his text). Some effort
toward 'enlightenment' is apparent, and Hegel probably went as
far in 'putting aside the old sourdough' as the censoring eye of his
Repetent would allow. But his whole performance, at least in the
outline that we have, was mechanical in the extreme, and shows
little sign of being part of a struggle for the coming of the King-
dom. 1 Like the Savoyard vicar he regards the voice of conscience
as the voice of God revealing himself to every man. But the voice of
reason alone is insufficient to control the passions--especially in a
state of nature-hence the need for revealed religion, the message
of which agrees exactly with the voice of conscience itself.2
The sermons of 1793 are much less perfunctory.3 On the
feast of St. Philip and St. James (I May) Hegel preached on the
topic of faith in Christ. The topic was obviously suggested by
the story in St. John's Gospel 4 of how Philip interrupted Jesus'
26 Jan. 1795); Letter 10 (Schelling to Hegel, 4 Feb. 1795): Briefe, i. 18-21.
The evidence contained in these passages is discussed below in Chapter Ill,
PP· 18 7-9·
I Doh., pp. 175-9. This would have been a weekday sermon delivered during

the midday meal. Hegel speaks of the natural penalties of wrong-doing, and of
how fear of punishment 'in the future' acts as a sanction against wrongdoing.
But he avoids any explicit assertion that there is punishment in a future life at
all, and what he does say makes it clear that the idea of eternal damnation is
inconsistent with the ascription of justice to God. He is obviously more at ease
when he turns to the topic of reward, and although he makes the appropriate
gestures regarding God's grace in sending his Son and. so freeing us from the
fear of punishment, he emphasizes that we are rewarded for 'faithful exercise of
virtues'. In closing, he envisages the future life as 'a transition to the further
development of man's faculties and to greater joys'.
Z This view of revealed religion is supported by the Savoyard Vicar (Rousseau,

Emile (Everyman edn.), pp. 276-7), by Hegel's own Stuttgart essay (Doh., p. 47),
and by his Berne essays. Hence I think we must take it that he is not here
speaking tongue-in-cheek (cf. also Lessing, 'Education of the Human Race',
§ 7)·
3 This may be very largely because of the new regulations governing the
delivery of sermons which came into effect that spring. See Betzendorfer, p. 57,
and p. I I I n. I below.
4 John 15: 6-9. For the sermon outline see Doh., pp. 182--4.
1I0 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

discourse-'I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh
unto the Father but by me'-with a request to be shown the
Father, and was told emphatically that Jesus was in the Father,
and the Father in him. This passage was clearly a foundation-
stone for Storr's Christo logy, and Hegel's argument seems to have
followed the lines of Storr's exegesis fairly faithfully. The failure
of the disciples to understand that Jesus was truly the 'Son of God'
is put down to the fact that they had not yet experienced the
Resurrection, 'the keystone of Christian belief'.
'Why do we call ourselves Christians?' Hegel asks; and he
answers the question first by citing the claim in Ephesians, 'For
through him [Christ] we both have access by one Spirit to the
Father',! and then claiming (as Storr did) that Jesus must have
'known best whence he came and who it was that sent him'. But
we do not have to rely only on his word, for we have his works
and the 'witness of the Father himself' in the miracles of Jesus'
birth, the descent of the Spirit at his baptism, and above all his
Resurrection and Ascension. Our faith however is not simply a
matter of wonder and amazement at things we cannot understand.
The disciples failed to cure the lunatic boy of whom Matthew
tells us because they lacked faith, they had not the right attitude
and thought only of making a sensation. 2 The true object of
faith is the Spirit, and the true fruit of faith is likewise the possession
of the inward spirit-as is shown by the story of the widow's
mites. 3
In all of this there is still no outward sign of 'enlightenment'.
Hegel simply repeats the sort of thing that Storr doubtless said
himself in lectures. But one cannot help suspecting that the choice
of topic is significant. The passage 'I am the way, the truth, and the
life', the indwelling of the Father in the Son and of the Spirit in
us, are topics to which Hegel recurs in his own independent
attempts at 'enlightened' exegesis in Berne. And his closing on
this occasion strongly hints that the programme of enlightened
exegesis associated with the slogans 'Reich Gottes' and 'die
I Ephesians 2: 18.

• Matthew 17: 14-21. All the 'enlightened' Stiftler must have suffered from
a self-disgust like that of Renz when they were obliged to talk like this.
3 Luke 21: 1-4. Anyone who feels it is legitimate to look as far ahead as 1798
can find in 'The Spirit of Christianity' (Nohl, pp. 337-9; Knox, pp. 295-8),
good evidence that this doctrine of the object of faith is meant as an implicit
critique of the preceding appeal to miracles.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE III

unsichtbare Kirche' is already in his mind. For his outline ends

with the words: 'that we may become perfect, as Christ was
perfect-friendship, freedom, and children of God'.
The suspkion that 'the setting aside of the old sourdough'
has already begun is further confirmed by Hegel's next appearance
in the pulpit on the third Sunday after Trinity (16 June).I For
now he discourses publicly on the Sermon on the Mount, which
became the foundation for his picture of the enlightened Jesus in
Das Leben Jesu and 'Die Positivitat der christlichen Religion'. His
subject now is explicitly the Kingdom of God, and what it means
to be a member of it. He announces that he will show first that the
Kingdom is an inward, not an outward reality, and secondly that
Christ has opened the way to it for us. These claims are orthodox
enough, but by concentrating on 'The Kingdom of God is within
you' and 'Thy Kingdom come ... on earth' one can quite quickly
arrive at the point where the Kingdom of Hea·ven is almost
irrelevant.
The Kingdom is not a 'worldly State'; for, as Christ said to
Pilate, 'My Kingdom is not of this world'. Nor does membership
in the 'visible Church' make one a member of God's Kingdom;
for 'Not everyone that saith unto me "Lord! Lord!", but he that
doeth the will of my Father, shall enter into the Kingdom'. The
Kingdom does not show itself in outward ceremonies: church-
going, baptism, participation in the communion service, the con-
fessions of our lips, do not make us children of God. The letter
killeth but the spirit giveth life. The spirit of Christ must dwell in
us, and we must be born again through the grace of God.
At this point Hegel cited a whole string of texts. Mter John 3: 3
and I Peter I: 22-3 came Ephesians 4: 22-4, about which he speci-
fically notes 'Putting off of the old man and putting on of the new'.
His own nickname was 'the Old Man', and if he read out with full
ceremony 'That ye put off concerning the former conversation the
old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts' he
must have known perfectly well that all of his fellow students
would be inwardly consumed with mirth. Surely he meant them to
I Outline in Doh., pp. 179-82. Under the old regulations the theology students

preached in turn each day, and each could expect the duty to fall upon him
about once every six weeks (cf. Betzendorfer, p. 57). But these two sermons were
probably delivered under the new regulations of 1793, according to which five
candidates preached one after another for two and half hours in the afternoon
on Sundays and feast days.
 II2 TtiBINGEN 1788-1793

laugh at his 'former conversation' about the doctrine of grace?

For in the account of the 'new man' which follows the saving
grace is provided by Kantian morality: 'If we are thus born of
God, if we become new men, i.e. if we die unto sin and become
masters of our sensibility, if our hearts are transformed by the love
of God and Christ so that we obey His commandments freely and
joyfully, then we are citizens of His kingdom, then the Kingdom
of God is come, and then also we are certain of our future blessed-
ness.'r
The orthodoxy of this conception of the Kingdom is un-
impeachable, but the slighting references to the 'visible Church'
and to the outward ceremonies of 'divine service' in a seminary
where great emphasis was laid on regular attendance at public
worship, and the students had to wear cassock and surplice every
time they went beyond the gates, were well calculated to suggest
to all who had ears to hear that the hosts of the orthodox were not
the true followers of Christ.
In the second part of the sermon Hegel begins by saying all the
appropriate things about our weakness and sinfulness, our need
of grace in order to be saved, and how we have received this
grace through Christ who 'freed us from the bondage of the Mosaic
law'. But soon the emphasis on our own efforts, on good works as
the fruits of faith, creeps back, and we can hardly be in doubt
about the esoteric significance which the following passage had for
Hegel himself and at least some of his hearers:
If we [have] a faith of this sort, then we are children of light, i.e. we
hate the works of darkness, of evil which has to hide itself, we love the
truth, which can let itself be seen publicly and freely by anyone . .. then
we are citizens of the kingdom of God-i.e. citizens and members of
that kingdom where God as highest lawgiver and ruler, is worshipped
by us in spirit and in truth-not by crying Lord! Lord! but by imitating
Him within the limits of our human weakness-by being earnest in
good works, and letting His light shine forth among men, and offering
to Him the most acceptable service of our own goodness and righteous-
ness ... 2

I Doh., p. r80. The Kantian inspiration of this passage can hardly be doubted-

even the reference to our 'future blessedness' is easily interpreted in tenus of

Kant's postulate of immortality, which Hegel probably accepted at this time,
just as he accepted the postulates of God and freedom.
2 Doh., p. 183 (my italics). The senuon closes, as students' senuons often did,
with a verse from the Wiirttemberg Songbook-concerned with the grace of
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 1I3

There was a special poignancy about this passage in Hegel's

June sermon because, during the interval which had elapsed since
the feast of St. Philip and St. James, a report of the revolutionary
fervour of the students in the Stift had reached the Duke's ears in
Stuttgart. On 13 May 1793 he came on a state visit for the official
inauguration of the 'new constitution' for the Stift-a project on
which Schnurrer had laboured since 1789-but he also took the
occasion to inquire into such scandalous matters as the reading of
French newspapers and the singing of revolutionary songs. I
The focus of open scandal, so it would seem, was a public concert
organized by a classmate and friend of Schelling's named August
Wetzel, at which 'the Marseillaise' was sung in German. Wetzel
ran off from the Stift shortly before the Duke's visit-quite prob-
ably at the instance and with the connivance of the Ephor,
Schnurrer. Most of the blame for the corruption of his fellow

'being born again'. And it may be significant that his quotation ends with the
words 'How blessed is / Thy Child, Thine Own one, / The true Christian', for
the word 'true' was inserted by Hegel himself and is not in the original text of the
hymn. (The sermon on forgiveness ended in the same way. It seems the students
were taught to lead their congregations directly from the conclusion of the sermon
into the singing of the hymn that was appointed to follow it.)
, For Schn.urrer's 'public' account of the visit, and of the earlier labours for
the reform of the Stift, see Holderlin, GSA, vii. I, 404 £1. (Lebensdokumente
(LD.) 66). For his private opinions and feelings-as expressed in letters to a
former pupil--see LD. 67, 74,80,95. It is worth noting that in LD. 9Sb (GSA,
vii. 1,436), which is an excerpt from a letter to Scholl of 10 Mar. 1793, Schnurrer
expresses the fear that 'the new statutes' will now be too late: 'Unsre junge
Leute sind groBentheils von dem FreyheitsSchwindel angestekt, und das
allzulange Zogern mit der neuen Einrichtung hat viel dazu geholfen. ' We have
here I think a veiled reference to the problem posed by Wetzel and his Club
(as well as to the Unsinnskollegium that Kllipfel tells us about-see further,
p. 114 n. 2 below).
I eannot see any reason to set aside the report in Rosenkranz (p. 33) that the
Club was betrayed to the Duke 'durch einen Apotheker'. The likely source of
this report I take to have been Fink-whose memory for vocations and avoca-
tions was better apparently than his memory for names, since he also recalls
\Vetzel as a notable musician. The view that the Duke came to the Stift without
suspicions and only began inquiries when he heard of Wetzel's flight leaves the
flight itself unaccounted for. Rosenkranz is of course wrong in supposing that
the Duke came in order to make inquiries. But by the same token he is right in
saying that 'the Duke was wise enough not to make too much of the matter'.
The Duke's 'wisdom' consisted first in waiting to inquire until he had another
occasion to visit the Stift; for the rest it was, no doubt, a matter of paying heed
to the advice of Schnurrer. (It appears likely that, as Fuhrmans suggests, the
traitorous 'Apotheker' was S. J. Kob, the student of medicine, himself a Stras-
bourger, who wrote 'Vive la libertC' in Hegel's Stammbuch in Dec. 1792:
Fuhrmans, i. 17 n; Bl·iefe, iv. 35.)
8243588 K
 TOBINGEN 1788-1793

students could be laid on his head, since he had already run away
once before. In April 1792 he had gone off to join a Jacobin club
in Strasbourg. In all probability he brought the text of the
'Marseillaise' with him when he returned to the Stift in August
1792;1 I think myself it is quite probable that he brought the
idea of founding a 'political club' back with him into the Stift as
weltz
I The 'Marseillaise' was in fact written in Strasbourg by Rouget de Lisle at

about this time. It says a great deal for Schnurrer's moral courage as well as
his liberality of mind that Wetzel was readmitted-even allowing for the fact
that C. F. RosIer was his uncle and probably spoke for him. The two professors
must have faced some stinging rebukes from the Duke in May 1793-far worse
than anything endured by Schelling, who on account of his youth would appear
as an innocent misled by an older schoolfellow. (He and Wetzel had been together
at .i\1aulbronn for two years before they entered the Stift.)
Kllipfel's account of the revolutionary fervour in the Stift offers a very plaus-
ible reason for Wetzel's earlier escapade (see Briefe, iv. 166). He says that some
of the French-speaking students began corresponding with General Custine's
forces in the Mainz campaign of 1792. What he reports about Schelling's
involvement and the Duke's inquiry may perhaps involve some confusion be-
tween the events of 1792 and those of 1793; but the Duke certainly visited the
Stift often enough and would not fail to inquire into the matter if any rumours
reached him. I should think that we can take it for granted that Wetzel was
involved in this correspondence. Unlike most of his fellows he properly deserved
the name of Jacobin (Hegel and Holderlin-and probably most of the club
members·-sympathized with the Girondins against Robespierre and the lVIount-
ain). Wetzel went straight to France in 1793, joined the army of the Revolution,
and remained in France for the rest of his life.
2 There is no reason to believe the fairy tale that Schwegler puts into Leut-
wein's mouth to the effect that Hegel was 'the most inspired orator for freedom
and equality' in the Stift. (Schwegler actually does not mention the club
because he knew nothing about it.) But this is not in itself a reason to doubt the
existence of the Club (as Beck seems inclined to do: Holderlin, GSA, vii. I,
450). Even if my hypothesis that Rosenkranz's authority was Fink (see p. I 13
n. I) is not accepted, there is too much indirect evidence (bonds of 'patriotic'
sympathy between Stiftler and non-Stlftler such as Hiller, Kob, Sinclair, von
Seckendorff, and so on) for us to doubt the essential truth of this report. There
is also Hegel's reference in Eleusis to 'the Bund that no oath sealed I For the free
truth alone to live, peace with the established order that dictates opinions and
feelings never never to conclude' (Briefe, i. 38, lines 19-21). This, like the watch-
word of the 'invisible Church', suggests a brotherhood inspired by the ideals of
freemasonry but without formal organization.
Perhaps the only organization that had a formal existence was the Unsinns-
kollegium which Kliipfel records (see Briefe, iv. 166-7). This looks like a normal
reaction of undergraduate high spirits against authority and decorum. But much
political protest could conveniently be disguised as 'ragging'. I cannot help
suspecting that the 'Club' used the Unsinnskollegium as a front; and further that
both the Repetentell and the Ephor knew this was so, and used the cover them-
selves in their official reports. This seems to me particularly evident in the
scandals of the last months of 1793 (cf. p. I IS n. 2 below).
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE lIS

It was Schelling, himself, however who apparently had to take

the blame for translating the words of the 'Marseillaise' into
German verse; and so the Duke had now to rebuke the young man
whom he had earlier caused to be promoted to the position of
Primus in his class. 1 It is only reasonable to suppose that all of
the club members, including Hegel, were very anxious in this
crisis, and that the polite exchanges that Schnurrer recorded for
the public view were the outward mask of some very uncomfort-
able hours for everyone concerned. 2
Immediately after the oldest villain followed the newest hero.
In June 1793 Fichte passed through Ttibingen for the first time.
Hegel and his friends were reading the Kritik aller Offenbarung and
one of the Repetenten, F. G. Stiskind, was writing a commentary to
bring it in line with Storr's interpretation of Kant. It seems likely
I Schelling was placed second in his class at the time of entry and promoted
to first subsequently as the result of a public oration before the Duke (Plitt, i. 29).
There is a difficulty about the report that Schelling was rebuked for translating
the 'Marseillaise'. Sinclair wrote to Jung on 29 Oct. 1793 that J. J. Griesinger
was the translator of the 'Marseillaise' (GSA, vii. I, 471). But the problem is
easily resolved since, in all the circumstances, the translation is likely to have
been the work of more than one hand. It was Griesinger's remarkable control of
French which-along with his 'patriotism'-drew Sinclair's attention to him.
If he was the acknowledged French expert and Schelling the principal German
versifier in a common undertaking then both of them could legitimately claim to
have 'translated the "Marseillaise"'.
2 There was another scandalous report to the Duke in August-this time to

the effect that the execution of Louis XVI had been publicly defended in the
Stift. By now Hegel was back home in Stuttgart, but the affair is of interest to
us nevertheless, because it provides a plausible explanation and a final quietus
for the famous myth of the 'Freedom tree'. This story came to Rosenkranz's
notice through Schwegler-who had nothing but Stift rumours of forty years
later to rely on-and to Kliipfel and Schwab from better-informed, but
still misinformed or misreported sources. Both of the latter say the tree was
'set up in the market-place' and Kliipfel adds that Hegel and Hblderlin were
personally involved; Schwegler mentions Hegel and Schelling and places the
event 'nearby' Tiibingen on a fine Sunday in springtime. (See G.S.A. vii, 448,
Briefe, iv. 166, and Hegel-Studien, iii. 61.) Schnurrer says: 'A few months ago
someone wrote to me from Ulm that it was generally said and believed in those
parts that the students in the Stift had set up the Freedom Tree right before
my very eyes.' He wants to convince the Duke and his advisers that they should
not believe reports about the Stift from distant sources (the August accusation
came from Freiburg); and whatever may have happened on 14 July 1793 it
is safe to assume that it did not occur in a public place. But we can also assume
that the report from Ulm was retailed with great glee by the 'patriots' in the
Stift, who would be delighted at this evidence of the sort of reputation they
enjoyed in the world outside. Nor is it hard to understand how the story of an
accusation could reach Kliipfel (or Schwab) as the account of a fact. (Hegel
was quite probably at home in Stuttgart on 14 July 1793-see p. 116 n. 4 below.)
II6 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

that both Schelling and Hegel met Fichte on this occasion, or at

least saw him, for when Schelling mentioned Fichte's second
visit (May I794) in his first letter to Hegel (5 January I795), he did
not bother to give any description of the 'new hero' whom he
'greeted in the land of the truth'. 1 Certainly at the end of the
month Hegel met the poets Staudlin and Matthisson when they
visited H6lderlin; both of them wrote leaves for his Stammbuch on
this occasion, and Staudlin, who was shortly to be banished by the
Duke for his revolutionary sympathies, doubtless summed up the
feelings of his young friends and admirers in the Stift very aptly
at that moment by recalling the cry of Ulrich von Hutten, 'In
tyrannos'. 2
If we are to believe Schnurrer's perhaps exaggerated comment
that Hegel spent almost all of the summer of I793 at home, this
visit of the two poets must have come virtually at the end of his
studies at Tiibingen. In June, along with eight other candidates,
he defended a thesis of Chancellor Lebret's De ecclesiae Wiirttem-
bergicae renascentis calamitatibus. 3 It was probably early in July
when he went home to Stuttgart to read Kant and Fichte, meditate
on the Kingdom of God, and elaborate his conception of Volks-
religion, as his own contribution toward the coming of the King-
dom. 4 His ideal was mainly Hellenic in its inspiration, though
both the Gospel record and Lessing's Nathan made important
contributions. The influence of his readings in the new religious

I Letter 7, Briefe, i. 14-15. What Hegel and Holderlin call the 'Kingdom of
God' is for Schelling 'the land of the truth': cf. p. 106 nn. I and 2 above.
2 Briefe, iv. 55. Entry 61, by Stiiudlin, is not dated, but Matthisson's quotation

from Horace is dated 27 June 1793, and the visit of the two poets is confirmed
and dated both by Holderlin's letters and by Matthisson's diary. The diary
further records for 24 June 'Besuch bei Mamsel Hegel', which seems to show
that Matthisson was already (like Stiiudlin) a family friend (see GSA, vi. 88 and
Beck's note at 626). (Hegel was very likely present when Holderlin read his
'Hymnus an die Klihnheit' to the two poets: cf. Letter 94, lines 22-4, GSA, vi.
154 and 723.)
3 Rosenkranz, p. 39; Dok., p. 438. The other eight students were Holderlin,
Kllipfel, Mohr, Mogling, Weiss, Schweickard, J. W. Maerklin, Rothacker (see
GSA, ii. 973). The order is according to their Lokation. Rothacker was bottom
of the class-and J. W. Maerklin is not to be confused with the J. F. Maerklin
who was placed above Hegel.
4 His own Stammbuch shows that Hegel was in Tlibingen on 2 July (entry 37);
and his entry in Ehemann's Stammbuch shows that he was back again on 23
Sept. (the period of the annual examination). He was away when Schnurrer
wrote to Scholl on 10 Sept. and we must suppose that he had then been away for
some considerable time (Briefe, iv. 50 and 66; Haering, i. 1I4).
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 117
and moral philosophy of Kant and Fichte is also apparent, but it
is noteworthy that amid all the revolutionary excitements of his
last year Hegel remained true to the programme of using classical
sources to enlighten the study of the Judaic tradition, which he
announced at the outset of his university studies.
Before we can pass on to deal with these private concerns,
however, one other sermon remains to be discussed. There is no
date at the head of the manuscript to indicate when it was
delivered-a fact which is all the more surprising because, unlike
the other sermons, the text of the discourse is fully written out in
the style of a 'fair copy'.1 The content of the sermon presents an
even greater paradox, for it is concerned with the Christian
doctrine of forgiveness, a topic which had already assumed a
central importance in Hegel's speculations about religion, and one
about which his ideas were scarcely orthodox; yet the sermon
itself is so rigidly orthodox that it might have been written by the
most conscientious disciple of Storr in the Stift. The capacity to
forgive is treated as one of the essential marks of true faith, and
several varieties of false forgiveness, behind which the will to
vengeance is still concealed, are distinguished and denounced.
Christian forgiveness is further distinguished from the type of
moral laziness that offers indulgence in return for indulgence, and
the essentially strenuous character of Christian love is affirmed.
But there is no hint in the text of any attempt to interpret forgive-
ness in terms of Kantian ethics, and although what Hegel says
is consistent with the conception of Christian love as the con-
sciousness of union or harmony with the universal spirit of all life,
which he expressed in his Frankfurt essays, nothing of this sort is
explicit in the text. All that is plain is that forgiveness was a topic
in Christian ethics where no strain was created in Hegel's mind
between his own ideals and the requirements of orthodoxy.
Although this sermon is not dated, there is an explicit reference
in the text to 'the gospel for the day' from which it is clear that it
was written for the twenty-second Sunday after Trinity. In 1793
this fell on 27 October, by which time Hegel had already gone to
I Cf. the description by Gisela Schiller in Hegel-Stttdien, ii. 136-'7. On the
basis of the handwriting alone Miss Schiller hazards the guess that this sermon
was somehow bound up with the final examination of the theology candidates
before the Stuttgart consistory. This confirms the hypothesis which I had
already arrived at from analysis of the text as printed by Hoffmeister (Dok.,
pp. 184--92).
!I8 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

Berne. I Setting aside the hypothesis that it was delivered in

1792 (4 November) which is improbable on all counts, we are left
with two possibilities. Either Hegel prepared a sermon for the
twenty-second Sunday after Trinity as an exercise for one of
Flatt's private classes in homiletics in the summer of 1793, or he
prepared it for his final examinations at Tubingen (in the week
following 20 September 1793) or before the Consistory at Stuttgart.
The Consistorial examinations regularly took place in December,2
but Hegel was allowed to take his examination early at the same
time as he was granted permission to take a position as house-
tutor in the family of Hauptmann von Steiger at Berne. He was
summoned on 13 September to appear at 8 a.m. on the nineteenth,
and his successful completion of the examination together with
the permission to take up his post abroad was recorded on the
twentieth. Permission was granted 'on condition that he exercises
himself diligently in preaching, wherein he is still very weak'.3
The extreme caution that is evident in the sermon that we are
considering is easily explicable if it was prepared for the eyes and
ears of the examining committee of the Consistory, which was a
very conservative body, and one that Hegel had to satisfy at all
costs, in order to escape from its authority as he did by going to
Berne. It is less easy to understand why he should be so cautious
in a sermon prepared for Flatt or for an examining committee at
Tubingen. Indeed the absence of explicit references to Kant's
moral philosophy are almost inexplicable on that hypothesis. The
Tubingen records show that Hegel was called on to explicate I
Corinthians I I : 14 at his Consistorialprufung on 20 September, and
that he did not do it very wel1. 4 He would never have chosen this
text, which is part of Paul's discourse on the duty of women to
cover their heads in church, of his own free will; whereas Christian
I For the intended occasion of the"sermon see Miss SchUler's data (loc. cit.);

for his letters to von RUtte and the dating of Hegel's journey to Berne compare
the entries for 8 and 9 Oct. 1793 in his Stammbuch (27, 28, 47a, 53, and 22):
Brie/e, i. 4-6 and iv. 45, 47, 53, 55·
2 Holderlin was summoned on 26 Nov. I793 to appear before the consistory

on 5 Dec. (see Beck's notes in GSA vi. 640, and the summons itself in GSA,
vii. 1,477-8).
3 Brie/e, iv. 83.
4 Brie/e, iv. 87: 'Textum I Cor. II, 14, non plene explicavit, necjusto ordine
orationem S. [i.e. satis?] decenter tamen recitavit.' Anyone who looks at the
remarks about religious practices and ceremonies which Hegel was writing just
about this time (Nohl, pp. 24-6) will know how he must have felt about the
'explication' of this text.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE II9

forgiveness was a topic on which he could discourse in a perfectly

orthodox way without hypocrisy or an unbearable sense of con-
straint. If he was, or expected to be, allowed to preach on a topic of
his own choice, as well as upon one assigned by the examiners, he
may well have prepared the sermon that we have for the occasion. I
6. The function of a folk-religion
If not absolutely certain, it is at least highly probable that what
has often been called the 'Tiibingen fragment' -the first of the
fragments published by Nohl under the general heading Folk-
Religion and Christianity with its associated 'Entwurfe' -was
in fact written in Stuttgart between July and September 1793.
There are a number of signs in the text that Hegel was consciously
embarking on a fairly large-scale project, which indicates that he
expected to have sufficient leisure to proceed without serious
interference; and the explicit reference to Fichte's Kritik aller
Offenbarung in one of the earliest preparatory outlines proves fairly
conclusively that he did not begin even to put his plans on paper
before Mayor June of 1793. z
The explicit object of his studies is, as he says,
not to investigate what religious doctrines are most appealing to the
heart, <or) most apt to elevate and give comfort to the soul-nor [is it
to investigate] how the doctrines of a religion should be constituted in
order to make a people better and happier-but rather what arrange-
ments are requisite in order that the doctrines and the force of religion
should enter into the web of human feelings, become associated with
human impulses to action and prove living and active in them-in
order [that is] that religion should become wholly subjective ... 3
It is important to remember this declaration at the outset, because
the achievement of a completely subjective religion does turn out
I Only further information about the general character of the Consistorial-

j)I'u!ung will really settle this question. There are also other points that need
to be cleared up. Why, for instance, was he summoned for 8 a.m. on the 19th if
the examination took place on the 20th? ,Vas it then that he was instructed to
prepare a discourse on I Corinthians I I : 14 to be delivered on the following day?
2 Nohl, p. 355. The first edition ofthe Versuch einer Kritik aller OjJenbarung

to bear Fichte's name as author appeared in Oct. 1792. The rumour that Kant
himself had written it was not denied till August. But there is no reason to sup-
pose that Hegel was interested in the religious philosophy of either Kant or
Fichte before the publication of Kant's Religion and Storr's Annotationes in
1793. I think it is quite probable that his interest in Fichte was first aroused by
the visit in June 1793 (cf. above, pp. 108 and II5-16).
3 Nohl, p. 8 (italics mine).
120 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

to require the discovery of the doctrines that most appeal to the

heart, and are best calculated to make the 'people' (hereafter used
regularly to express Hegel's das Volk) better and happier; and when
Hegel begins to speak of this ideal, which he found instantiated in
the Greece of the fifth century B.C.,! he loses his analytical ob-
jectivity and is carried away by his enthusiasm, like Machiavelli in
the last chapter of The Prince. 2 The fact that this happens has
led to several mistaken estimates of what Hegel is attempting to do.
Of course what we have before us is only an unrevised first
draft written by a young man whose mind was a ferment of ideas,
which he needed to write down partly in order just to get them
sorted out. So we must expect to find that his aims and purposes
change and develop even while he is writing, and we must not put
absolute faith in the infallibility of his initial pronouncements
about them. But this only makes it all the more essential to study
the actual sequence of his reflections. Certainly we must not allow
ourselves to be carried away just because the author gets carried
away and gives up writing at the point where he can see that what
he is about to embark on will not answer to his purpose and must
be radically recast. That, I think, is what happens at the end of the
fragment Religion ist eine. 3
I There are two main grounds for dating Hegel's Hellenic ideal to the fifth
century: (a) the remark that from its father Chronos the Greek spirit inherited
'trust in its good fortune and pride in its deeds' (Nohl, p. 28), which appears to
be a plain reference to the fortunes of Greece in the Persian War and to the
proud claims of Pericles in the Funeral Oration; (b) the fact that so much of
what Hegel says, and even the way he says it, is inspired by Plato. The very
account of the Greek spirit as a child of Chronos and Politeia, referred to above,
is an example of this, for it is transparently modelled on Plato's myth of love as
the child of Poros and Penia in the Symposium.
2 H6lderlin was recommending Machiavelli's Prince to his brother in Aug.

1793 (Letter 62, GSA, v. 189): 'Seine ganze Schrift beschliftigt sich mit clem
Problem, wie ein Volk am leichtesten zu unterjochen sei.' It may well be that
Hegel had this model in mind in setting himself the opposite problem of how a
people can most easily cast off their fetters.
3 I can see no convincing reason for speaking of 'das Nohlschen Anordnung

der Fragmente' (in the plural) as Haering does (i. 63), followed by Peperzak,
p. II, and Lacorte, pp. 302-3; for a cautious doubt on my own part see p. 132
n. 1 below. The question would be easier to settle if we knew more precisely
where the transitions from sheet to sheet occur in our printed text, and which,
if any, of the sheets were not completely filled by Hegel's manuscript. (For an
explanation of the way in which the opening phrase of incipit is used in referring
to Hegel's manuscripts and fragments from mid 1793 onwards see the Note on
References at the beginning of this volume (p. xiii). The Chronological Index to
Hegel's early writings (pp. 517-26) will enable the reader to discover exactly
what text is referred to by each incipit.)
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 121

This is not the only reason, however, why a properly sequential

analysis of the text is imperative. Another reason is provided by the
set of extremely complex relations that exist between the series of
concepts employed in, and in part uncovered by, Hegel's analysis
of religion as a psychological and social phenomenon. All the
attempts hitherto made to disentangle the 'themes' of his dis-
cussion have resulted in at least a partial falsification or confusion
of his meaning and purpose precisely for this reason. Several
critics have correctly remarked, for example, that the title Folk-
Religion and Christianity is misleading. But the grounds which
have usually been given for this assertion are just as misleading or
misguided as Nohl's editorial attempt to characterize the fragments,
and often more so. The chief reason for objecting to Nohl's title
is that the concepts 'folk-religion' and 'Christianity' are not of
the same type or on the same level. 'Christianity' is an extremely
complex historical phenomenon embracing at least two 'folk-
religions' (Protestantism, Catholicism) and perhaps a third
(Primitive Christianity, if Hegel was willing to count it as a folk-
religion in the full sense) as well as various systems of theological
dogma and private piety which are not folk-religions. If we confine
ourselves to the Protestant Christianity of Germany in the
eighteenth century, this is a particular folk-religion, as well as a
'public' religion, a 'private' religion, a rational religion, and a
'fetish-faith' or system of superstition. As such it can be compared
with other folk-religions such as that of Periclean Greece or the
biblical people of Israel, which also have all of these other aspects. I
'Folk-religion' on the other hand is a pure concept, which we can
arrive at either concretely by considering our own social experience,
or the experience of the Jews or the Greeks, so far as we can recon-
struct and relive it on the basis of the fragmentary records of their
culture that have come down to us; or else abstractly by studying
the different meanings and uses of the general terms 'religious'
and 'religion' and of religious language generally both in our
ordinary and in our learned vocabulary.2
I For practical reasons (and not only from excessive enthusiasm) Hegel some-
times wrote as if the religion of the Greeks was free from the aspects of 'privacy'
and 'fetishism'. But I believe it can be shown that he knew better and would
readily have admitted the presence of the darker side in Greek religion as soon
as he was sure that his audience understood his reasons for concentrating on the
bright side.
2 I think it is possible, and, provided that we do not lose sight of the ambivalent
 TUBINGEN 1788-1793

Hegel's discussion ranges backwards and forwards over the

field of historical actuality, and both types of abstraction. One
of his primary concerns is to show that the theoretical, or viciously
abstract, study of religion is useless for practical purposes. His
aim, as he says, is to discover how religion becomes an active social
force. This leads him inevitably to the Greek experience as the
natural, fully-developed, perfect exemplar of religion as a social
force. But he is not just theoretically interested in discovering how
religion functions in society; he wants to use the power of religion
to reshape his own society. This has two consequences which
mutually reinforce each other in the production of false impressions.
On the one hand he is very cautious and restrained in what he
says-or at least in what he allows to stand when he sees it on the
paper before him-about the religion of his own society, except
when he is dealing with the viciously abstract study of religion as
practised therein. On the other hand, when he sees religion
functioning properly to produce a society which is concretely
rational he cannot restrain his enthusiasm, although his own
principles require him to do so if his own work is to have the desired
effect of advancing concrete rationality in his own society.
In the opening paragraphs of Religion ist eine he describes as
briefly as possible the total parabola of religious experience from
the first religious act of the child (joining his hands in prayer) to
the highest religious ideas of the philosopher with a long and full
life to reflect upon (the 'sublime requirement of Reason').
Religious practice enters into our lives from our earliest years:
it punctuates our daily lives and sanctifies the critical turning
character of all our concepts it may be helpful, to distinguish-abstractly as the
young Hegel would have said-between the vocabularies that typify the 'con-
crete' and the 'abstract' approaches to the concept of 'folk-religion'. Roughly
speaking, when we are approaching the concept concretely we find it (in Hegel's
usage) in the company of other concrete concepts such as 'reason', 'superstition',
'freedom', 'servitude', 'spirit', 'letter'. This is the origin or root of the conceptual
framework that Hegel developed in the Frankfurt period. The name of God (or
the names of the Gods) will certainly figure in our inquiry; but the name of our
religion (Christianity, Protestantism, etc.) will not occur except in an accidental
and peripheral way. 'When we approach the concept abstractly, on the other hand,
the discussion moves in a cloud of metalinguistic terms such as the words
'concrete' and 'abstract' themselves and others like 'subjective', 'objective',
'theology', 'dogma'. Here the names of religions and the concept, rather than
the name, 'God' will occur. Of course, there is a mass of terms-particularly
ethical and psychological terms-which will occur in both types of inquiry, and
even the ones I have listed are not by any means rigidly confined to the
types of inquiry which I believe they nevertheless typify.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 123

points of our existence such as birth, marriage, and death. I But

the theoretical development of religious experience also begins
early. As children we do not only learn the act and habit of prayer;
we also learn a lot of theoretical formulas by heart, although
genuine reflection upon the meaning of the formulas and the
practices is a function of adult reason:
Human nature is so disposed that the practical aspects of the doctrine
of God, the aspects that can become mainsprings of action, sources of
the knowledge of our duties and sources of solace, quickly present them-
selves to the uncorrupted mind [Menschensinne]-and the instruction
that we are given about this from youth up, the concepts [Begrijfe], and
all the external [trappings] pertaining to it which make an impression
011 us, is of such a kind that it can be grafted on to a natural need of the
human spirit-often immediately, but all too frequently alas, it is
attached only by means of bonds rooted in arbitrariness, and not in the
nature of the soul, or in truths engendered and developed from the
concepts themselves. 2
At this point four pages of Hegel's manuscript are missing.
But it is apparent that he means to discover how this arbitrariness
can be eliminated, and how a proper grafting of religion on to the
human spirit, one which is both sensibly harmonious with the
nature of the soul and rationally coherent with the structure of
the religious concepts can be achieved.
The text recommences with the tantalizing words 'to set the
... of human life in motion'. It is fairly clear that Hegel wanted
to set the 'whole' of life in motion, but it would be nice to know for
certain what the subject of the sentence was. It seems likely in the
light of what follows that he was saying that pure reason alone is
not able to set the whole of life in motion. For he goes on to declare
that the 'sublime demand' (erhabene Forderung) that reason makes
of mankind 'whose legitimacy we so often recognize with our whole
heart' ought never to master us to the point that we 'expect to
find many [guiltless or wise men] in the actual world, or believe
that somewhere we shall see and touch this beautiful chimera'.
Again we cannot tell precisely what the 'sublime demand' or the
'beautiful chimera' are but there are some distinctly Kantian
I Originally Hegel mentioned sickness also, but then he struck it out, probably
because the comforting of the sick, in Protestant Christianity at least, is a
private rather than a public function of religion and he wished to emphasize the
publicly recognized functions of religion.
2 Nohl, pp. 3-4.
124 TDBINGEN 1788-1793
overtones in Hegel's language, and Kant is almost certainly his main
target here. For he alludes immediately to the difficulty of deciding
whether the 'Bestimmungsgrund' of the will is mere 'Klugheit'
or 'wirkliche Moralitat', and points out that 'satisfaction of the
impulse to happiness as the highest goal of life' would produce the
same outward pattern of behaviour 'as if the law of reason deter-
mines our will'.
This is an example of the strictly pragmatic attitude towards
theoretical disputes in philosophy which Hegel advocated con-
sistently from the essay of 1787 onwards. We can see in this case
how his faith that pragmatic reconciliation of the differing views
of serious thinkers is always possible, is related to his conception
of life as an organic whole. For no matter what abstract moral
principle one adopts, one has the same problem of applying it to a
life which is both sensitive and rational, and any principle which
adequately expresses the requirements of one side of our nature
will be found to be pragmatically consistent with a principle that
expresses the needs of the other side as long as they are not inter-
preted with an abstract rigorism that simply ignores the compound
character of human nature. Thus the apostle of practical reason
has to accept the fact that 'sensibility is the principal factor in all the
action and striving of men'; and the seeker after happiness has
to be able to 'calculate properly' what will really produce it.
Hegel lays much more emphasis throughout his discussion on
the danger of rationalist rigorism in ethics than on the opposite
excesses of hedonism. But it is fairly clear that although he wants
to defend the claims of human feeling, and particularly of such
social emotions as love and sympathy-which Kant dismissed as
'pathological motives' -against the rigorism of pure 'respect for
the law', he is not really seeking to defend the rational endaemonism
of Wolff and of the many minor moralists of the Enlightenment.
These were, in his eyes, thinkers who did not help us to 'reckon
well' what happiness consists in. The moral philosopher whom he
really admires and follows is Aristotle-though the shadow of
Rousseau looms over much of his discussion also.
Human nature, in Hegel's view, was a mass of sensible im-
pulses, natural needs, and blind instincts, somehow 'pregnant
[geschwiingert] with the Ideas of reason'. The 'ideas of reason
enliven the whole web of [man's] feelings' like light penetrating
everywhere, affecting everything, playing a vital part in the life of
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 125

plants without being itself a substance. I 'They show themselves

seldom in their essence', says Hegel, who does not want to deny
that the ideal of completely rational action can be achieved. He
rejects the Cartesian conception of reason as something quite
separate from sensibility, with the associated view of soul and
body as distinct 'substances'; but he accepts the other view of
reason as the terminus of a social process of education and develop-
ment of the human race as a whole which was prevalent in the
later Enlightenment. Haering tends to treat Hegel's attitude
towards Enlightenment rationalism as rather more simply and
directly negative than it was. Years later, when he was about to
embark at last on his career as a professional philosopher, he wrote
to Schelling that his philosophical development had begun with a
concern for the 'lower' side of man's nature. But he never at any
time felt the slightest inclination to reject 'die erhabene Forderung
der Vernunft and die Menschheit', and when he calls it 'dies schone
Luftbild' he is being quite sincere and not at all satirical as Haering
supposes. 2
The development of religious consciousness, and, as we shall
see, of political consciousness at the same time, is the natural
course by which the 'ideas of reason' are brought from pregnancy
to birth. These 'ideas' are essentially two: God as creator of
the order of nature, and legislator of the laws of morality; and the
immortality of the sou1. 3 But there is more to religion than the
mere knowledge of these ideas, and we may come to this knowledge
either through pure reason or in some other way. 4 Religious
I Hegel was here developing Plato's simile of the sun (Republic, vi) on lines
suggested by his own study of botany.
2 Nohl, p. 4; cf. also p. 357; Briefe, i. 59; Haering, i. 82 (cf. also 63). Haering

wavers somewhat in his account of Hegel's 'realism' in relation to the Enlighten-

ment background. He is generally very fair and balanced on particular issues and
parallels-as for instance when he calls Hegel's notion of human sensibility as
pregnant with reason 'Leibnizian-evolutionary' (i. 65). But he does not distin-
guish carefully enough between the abstract rationalism that Hegel rejected (e.g.
Campe's Theophron) and the concrete 'Ideen der Vernunft' which he accepted.
3 Hegel does not here say that these two conceptions are the 'Ideen der
Vernunft' with which our nature is 'geschwangert'. But the phrase 'Ideen der
Vernunft' has a Kantian ring which makes the identification natural, and it is
confirmed by everything that Hegel says later. If my account of the transition
in his thought here is accepted we cannot doubt that Hegel has thought fairly
hard about the way in which Kant's 'Ideas of pure reason' become 'postulates of
practical reason'.
4 It is not clear what other way there is besides revelation and reason. But
Hegel regards these principles as depending ultimately not on any philosopher's
126 T0BINGEN 1788-1793

consciousness reinforces the sense of duty and strengthens us

against the temptations of impulse; but it does so only because
'for men who live at the level of sense-impulse, religion also has
sensible form'.1
Hegel is now finally able to introduce the twin conceptions of
'public' religion and 'folk' religion, which together form the
central topic of his discussion:
If we speak of public religion-then we mean to include thereunder
the concepts of God and immortality and all that goes with them [was
darunter Beziehung hat], so far as they make up the conviction of a
people, so far as they influence the actions and mode of thought of a
people-to public religion belong also, furthermore, the means by
which these ideas are partly taught to the people, and partly enabled to
penetrate their hearts-in this effect [i.e. the understanding and emo-
tional assimilation of these two conceptions] is included not merely the
immediate <consequence> that I do not steal because God has forbidden
it-the more distant <consequences) should particularly be taken into
consideration and have often to be accorded the most weight. These
are, above all the elevation, the ennobling, of the spirit of a nation-
that the so often slumbering sense of its dignity comes to be awakened
in its soul, that the people does not degrade [i.e. subject] itself and does
not allow itself to be degraded, that it does [i.e. the citizens do] not
merely feel itself [themselves] men, but that gentler tints of humanity
and goodness are also brought into the picture. 2
In this definition three rather disparate influences are definitely
present. There is first the Kantian-Fichtean ideal of religion within
the bounds of reason. This provides the essential core of the idea.
This core Hegel 'applies to', or interprets in terms of, two historical
cases: a minimum case, the Jews, and a maximum case, the Greeks.
The Jews received the Law at the hands of Moses-Hegel chooses
the example 'Thou shalt not steal', first because it is in the
Decalogue, and secondly because regulation of property rights is,
reasoning but on the universal 'good sense' of mankind (cf. Nohl, p. 13); and
his confidence of this rested partly on his knowledge that different philosophers
-such as Plato and Leibniz (Wolff), to take two with whom he was well acquain-
ted-had defended them by very different lines of argument from that followed
by Kant. Plato's Timaeus is certainly 'another way' if 'durch bloB en Vernunft' is
taken in any of the senses it has for Kant. There is also of course the 'feeling' to
which Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar appeals.
I 'Bei sinnlichen Menschen ist auch die Religion sinnlidl.' This was a necessity
that Hegel recognized already in 1787 (cf. Doh., p. 47, discussed above in
Chapter I, pp. 31-4).
a Nohl, p. 5. I have made the translation as literal as I could.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 127

in his view, a minimal condition for the formation of a human

society I-but it did not suffice for them: they 'degraded' them-
selves by demanding a king. 2 The Greeks, on the other hand, once
their lawgivers had done their work, would not suffer tyrants and
developed high ideals of patriotic loyalty and heroic humanity which
they summed up for themselves in their conception of the gods. 3
But what, we may ask, has the philosophical core to do with
these historical examples? What have God and immortality, as
postulates of practical reason, to do with the relative failure of the
Jews and the outstanding success of the Greeks? The Jewish
people were not monotheists in a philosophical sense, as is evident
both from the words of the Commandment 'Thou shalt have
none other gods before me', and from their continual backslidings
in respect of it; and in the case of the Greeks the formation of a
pantheon round Father Zeus, and even the exaltation of human
heroes to a place in it, is clearly viewed by Hegel as one of the
grounds of their superiority.4 As for belief in immortality, he
must surely have known that it played no part in the public or
'folk' religion of the Greeks, or of the Jews either-at least in the
period before their 'degradation'.5
The answer to this problem is quickly given. Rational reflection
is the finall stage in the development of religious consciousness
both for the individual and for the people. It is the mark of full
maturity; and hence, as any botanist or any student of Aristotle
knows, it is the defining characteristic of the species. A folk-
religion has only come to proper maturity when these philosophical
I The same consideration governs his choice of an example when he com-
plains in the Phenomenology that pure reason alone cannot tell us how to regulate
property rights. More is contained in the law of Moses than in the law of Kant,
and the contrary only appears to be the case because the organization of an
actual society is presupposed by the latter: cf. Inwiefern ist Religion (Nohl, p. 356).
2 This is, I think, a reasonable inference from the remarks in Inwiefern ist
Religion (Nohl, p. 355).
3 Cf. Man lehrt unsre Kinder (Nohl, p. 359) and Religion ist eine (Nohl, p. 28;
see p. 507 below).
4 Compare the later discussion of the requirement that the doctrines of a
folk-religion must be rational-especially Nohl, p. 23; pp. 501-2 below-and
the remark about deification of folk-heroes, Nohl, pp. 26-7; p. 505 below.
S Pericles' Funeral Oration I take as a decisive document for Hegel's concep-
tion of the public religion of the Greeks. I have no knowledge of how Mosaic
religion was expounded at Tlibingen, but if I am wrong in thinking that Hegel saw
the need to distinguish the religion of Moses from that of the Psalmist and the
Prophets, this only accentuates the paradoxical fact that the Jewish religion was
more 'rational' than that of the Greeks.
128 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

insights are proclaimed in the form that is appropriate to it-by

Plato, by the prophets, and by Jesus, I or for Protestant Germany
by Kant and Fichte.
One further point needs to be made about the definition. Hegel
seems here to identify 'folk-religion' with the 'public religion'
that he is explicitly defining. The two conceptions are not how-
ever identical, for 'public' religion is something opposed to or
contrasted with 'private' religion, whereas 'folk-religion' is a more
inclusive concept, ultimately indeed an all-inclusive concept. All
the phenomena of 'private' religion-phenomena which arise
either in private consciousness or in group activities which are
consciously distinguished from the politico-legal structure and the
traditions and mores of a 'people'-can also form part of, or have
their analogues in, any fully developed, naturally perfect folk-
religion. Hegel approaches 'folk-religion' through the conception
of public religion, because a folk-religion is minimally a system
of publicly recognized and publicly shared religious observances.
In framing his initial definition Hegel deliberately leaves
Christianity out of account, for a reason which he goes on to
indicate by saying that, although the doctrines have remained the
same since its inception,2 attention and emphasis have been
focused on different aspects at different times. As a result, although
he does not explicitly say so, Christianity cannot be regarded as
a single folk-religion at all. Even in the history of Germany, which
is all that concerns him, we can see from his notes that Hegel
distinguished sharply between the Catholicism of the medieval
feudal society and the Protestantism of his own time. 3
I Jesus is a transitional figure. There is not much evidence in the Tiibingen
fragments that Hegel has begun to ponder the relation of Jesus to the Jews. At
this stage he seems to think of him only as the founder of primitive Christianity,
which is, I think, the model case of a 'private religion' in his mind, rather than
a distinct folk-religion in its own right. But the evidence of the manuscripts is
not decisive on this point.
2 We may well wonder whether he really believed this; and the answer prob-
ably depends on how much is included in 'die Hauptlehren'. Of course if only
the 'Ideen der Vernunft' are meant, the assertion is almost trivially true. But all
of Hegel's explicit references to Christianity have to be interpreted with caution
in the light of his practical aims. Only in the preparatory notes intended for his
own eyes alone does he say exactly what he thinks about the religion of his own
Volk-even his references to the Judaic tradition are somewhat guarded for the
same reason. We must always remember that he meant ultimately to publish his
work as a contribution to the coming of the 'Kingdom of God'.
3 See especially Die Formen der andern Bilder (Nohl, pp. 358-9). It is not
clear how far he regarded Protestantism and Catholicism as distinct folk-
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 129

In any case he felt that his own society had grown old and was
now in decay. The sign of this was that religion had now become
an instrument of political oppression, rather than a fount of
patriotic freedom, and religious observance was now a matter of
gloomy talk rather than joyful activity. 1
With this comment Hegel's introductory section ends. The
next section is concerned with a philosophical analysis of religious
experience in which the central aim is to distinguish practical,
living, concrete religious experience from theoretical, dead,
abstract, theological knowledge. The categories that he employs
for this purpose are 'subjective' and 'objective' religion. He notes
that his distinction is closely analogous to the distinction made by
Fichte in the Kritik aller Offenbarung between 'religion' and
'theology'; but the way that he does so strongly suggests that
he had arrived at his own distinction and terminology independently
before he ever read Fichte. 2 For the moment the Greeks and the
Jews are forgotten and Hegel's interest is focused on the religious
life of his own time.
The fact that the basic dichotomy he wants to make comes so
close to being a direct opposition between theoretical reflection
and practical activity-though it is not really as simple as that-
has caused some misunderstanding on the part of students who
have not paid sufficient attention to the relation between religious
practice and religious reflection established in his opening pages.
'Objective religion' is primarily the content of the faith, the
dogmas of a religion, the creed, but also the ceremonial forms
religions in contemporary Germany. He may well have felt unable to decide this
question and the wish he expressed in 1800 to live in a Catholic city may perhaps
have been conditioned by his uncertainty about it.
I Noh!, p. 6; p. 483-4 below. For the reasons stated on p. 128 n. 2 Hegel leaves

the reader to shade in the darkest patches for himself. He speaks of attachment
to tradition and of 'dragging fetters', but explicit reference to the alliance of
religion and despotism is confined to his Berne notes (Nohl, p. 360) and of
course it is explicit in his correspondence with Schelling two years later (Briefe,
i. 24). Nor does he actually say that Christian sermons are gloomy-he leaves
his radiant picture of Greek festivals to make the point by implication.
2 Nohl, p. 355; cf. also Nohl, p. 9; p. 487 below. The distinctions are not in

fact identical, for objective religion would include practices and observances
carried out mechanically or under duress, whereas theology is a cognitive or
theoretical domain only. The difference here points up one of the main contrasts
between Hegel on the one side and Kant and Fichte on the other. Whereas they
thought of religious experience as a form of individual cognition which led, or
ought to lead, to social action, he thought of it as a form of social action which
led, or ought to lead, to individual cognition.
8243588 L
13 0 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

and procedures one must learn and be trained to perform in order to

take part in public worship. It is a matter of Verstand (which we
might perhaps translate here as 'technical understanding') 1 and
Gediichtnis (memory). It is something that can be taught verbally,
whereas subjective religion is a matter of direct experience in
feeling and action. Thus subjective religion is essentially personal
and individual, whereas objective religion is essentially abstract
and common. The community of subjective religion is like the
order of living nature, where every creature lives its own life and
has its own purposes, but they all nevertheless depend on one
another; whereas the abstract system of objective religion (ex-
pressed in a handbook of faith and practice) is like the cabinet of
the naturalist, where everything is killed and then pinned into
its place in a logical order that answers the singular, purely
theoretical purpose of the investigator.
Hegel does not explicitly say that any religion must have an
objective content that can be communicated and ordered in this
way. But he appears to take this for granted. 2 He is more
interested in the fact that the objective content of any folk-
religion is a small and relatively unimportant part of it. He says,
indeed, that a single objective religion might even be shared by
the whole world, whereas it is not at all certain that he regarded
a universal folk-religion as possible. 3 The subjective meaning
I I cannot agree with Peperzak's claim (p. 41) that Vernunft and Verstand are

used synonymously in the Tiibingen fragment. Indeed I do not think he really

means what he says (although I am not sure what else he means), for his list of
instances is entirely confined to the word Vernunft. Perhaps he means that Hegel
uses Vernunft to refer indifferently to both of the faculties that Kant distin-
guished. But his list of instances does not prove that by any means (the one
example that looks as if it might do so (Nohl, p. 5) turns out to be inaccurately
cited). In general Hegel uses Vernunft and especially bloj3e Vernunft to mean
what Kant calls praktische Vernunft, although in one or two places it may have
the richer meaning that he later gave it himself (and first accorded to it in his
notes from Garve's Priifung der Fiihigkeiten in 1787: see above, Chapter I,
pp. 36-9). He is in difficulty now, because in 1787 he only wanted to contrast
verbal knowledge with real experience, whereas now he wants to distinguish two
types of real experience--one where Vernunft is alienated from sensibility and
one where it is not. Again, even if not alienated, it may be linked with sensibility
in the wrong way, as when one is 'deaf to the voice of conscience' (cf. Nohl,
p. 7, though Hegel does not use the word Vernunft there).
Z It seems to me to follow logically from his definition of 'public' religion and
folk-religion in terms of one another that any folk-religion must have an objective
content.
3 All folk-religion terminates in rational religion. If everyone were to arrive at

this terminus together, we should have the Kingdom of God realized or the
 THE CHURCH VIS IDLE AND INVISIBLE 13 1

and force of the religion will differ for each individual, and
individuals at different stages of human development will be
impressed by different aspects of the objective doctrine and
practice. Some cannot be reached by sensible appeals to the
higher gentler emotions, but only by stimuli that arouse awe and
fear. Some are deaf to the voice of conscience and heedful only
of arguments that appeal to self-interest.
'Man is an entity [Wesen] compounded of sensibility and reason',
as Hegel noted in one of his preparatory outlines. 'But the main
body, the stuff from which everything in him is formed is sensi-
bility.'I Hence it is natural that, here and elsewhere, he regularly
considers the practical impact of religion on the emotions before
its influence on the reason, though that too is of practical impor-
tance. And because instruction about the objective content of
religion is an intellectual process, he is naturally very conscious of
the danger of suffocating religious feeling and thereby preventing
the proper development of reason by placing too much emphasis
upon it. His own 'tenacious memory' had been stuffed with
catechisms and explanations of doctrine for many long years, and
he had himself come to the point where much that he was required
to do and say had lost its proper significance for him.
The right development of Vernunft begins not with religious
instruction, but with the development of the 'moral feelings' of
which the seeds are innate in human nature. There is no need here
to invoke the name of Shaftesbury and the philosophy of the moral
sense, although the idea may well have reached Hegel, directly or
indirectly, from that source. His own text shows clearly enough
that he is thinking of the 'sensibility for the gentler images of
love' (Sinn fur die sanftern Vorstellungen von Liebe) which he
mentioned a little earlier. 2 For right development these feelings
invisible Church made visible. This consummation is definitely not a real
possibility, however, but an ideal of reason, for if a man sins he ceases to be a
member of the invisible Church, but not of his folk-religion (Nohl, p. 357). Now
any folk-religion is distinguished from others by virtue of its distinct history and
traditions. So a universal folk-religion could be conceived if we are willing to
postulate some new and greater Theseus who is able to unite all of our folk-
religions into a new pantheon. Something like this was certainly envisaged by
Mazzini when he founded 'Young Europe'. Holderlin, at least, seems to have
dreamed of something of this sort (Beck, Letter 65: GSA, vi. 92-3), and it is
possible that Hegel did too when he wrote (Letter 8, Briefe, i. 18): 'Das Reich
Gottes komme.'
I Aber die Hauptmasse, Nohl, p. 357.

2 Nohl, pp. 7-8. See Nohl, p. 51 for a passage (written in 1794 at Berne) in
132 TOBINGEN 1788-1793

need to be guided by, and linked with, the two postulates of

practical reason which form the rational core of all subjective
religion. This rational core is to be looked for in the doctrines of
divine providence associated with each religion. Apart from this,
all systems of religious ideas are simply 'theology' (in Fichte's
sense) and are a product of Verstand, not of Vernunft.
At this point the second section of Hegel's discussion ends with
his declaration (cited earlier) that what he is concerned with is the
question of how religion becomes subjective. Accordingly he gives
to the next section the title 'Subjective religion'. It seems that at
first he intended to go on employing Fichte's distinction between
'religion' and 'theology'. For as we saw he has just dismissed all
'scientific or rather metaphysical knowledge of God' as 'theology,
not religion'; and he originally gave to his new section the heading
'The way religion acts: (a) how the mind [Gemiit] must be con-
stituted in order that it may gain entry, (b) once it has gained
entry, how does it act?' It is clear enough, I think, that he aban-
doned this complex title because he found it necessary to recur
quite soon to the topic of Verstand-which is excluded from
Religion in Fichte's usage.!
The opening of the third section is largely a repetition and
expansion of the ideas about subjective religion already set forth.
But the conception of superstition (Aberglauben) is now for the
which Hegel himself invokes the name of Shaftesbury. But the most probable
source of most of his opinions about human sensibility, and particularly about
the emotions oflove, sympathy, and friendship is, in my view, Rousseau.
I In the opening paragraphs of the section the terminology is Fichte's. Hegel's
own distinction (between 'subjective' and 'objective' religion) recurs at the
beginning of the fourth paragraph. At the end of the section the argument shifts
to the opposition of Verstand and Herz and Hegel needs a more inclusive concep-
tion of religious experience within which this contrast can be situated.
Just here however, there is either a lacuna of eight pages caused by the loss of
sheet e, or else, as I am inclined to believe, Hegel made a slip in the marking of
his sheets. (This is a section where it would be very useful to know just where in
our text the transitions from sheet to sheet are. It does rather look as if this
section with the corrected heading 'Subjektive Religion' might be an originally
independent fragment incorporated into his manuscript by Hegel himself.)
Against the view that no sheet marked e has been lost, it must be mentioned
that Rosenkranz inserted in the excerpts from this manuscript that he printed,
a sentence which is not to be found in the manuscripts we have (see Nohl, p. 20).
Nohl suggests that it may have come from sheet e (presumably because he felt it
would fit in with the trend of the argument at the end of sheet d). But if my
analysis of Hegel's introductory section is right it may just as well have come
from the unquestionably missing inside pages of sheet a. (\Ve should remember
also the missing inside pages of Inwiefem ist Religion.)
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE I33
first time introduced. Religion is declared to be superstition in
two cases where it provides what Hegel regards as the wrong sort of
foundation for action. First when it governs our behaviour in
matters where we ought to be governed by ordinary prudence
(Klugheit). One supposes that dietary regulations may well be a
case that Hegel had in mind here. Secondly when we allow our-
selves to be governed by prudence in a religious context: i.e.
when we seek to turn away the wrath of God by actions which are
supposed to placate him. But this superstitious image of God as
behaving like a man, and subject to the limits of our sensibility
is, as Hegel has already said and now repeats once more, the one
that properly belongs to a certain stage in human development;
and though there may not be much morality in it at its crudest, it
can be increasingly moralized through the development of the
sentiments of gratitude to God and reliance upon him in all
undertakings. In other words Hegel concedes that fear is not a
moral moti.ve, and that anthropomorphism is superstition; but
he holds firmly to his view that faith in God's providence and
justice is an essential element in rational religion, which is primi-
tively expressed in these erroneous forms.
He supports his claim that the subjective religion of all good
men is in essence identical, whatever their objective religion may
be, by citing Nathan's remark to the Friar: 'What to you makes me
a Christian, makes you to me a Jew.'I This makes explicit what
was previously only implied-the view that folk-religions are only
distinguishable from each other on their objective side; and
already we can see looming over the ideal of the living folk-
religion that problem of 'positivity', of being unavoidably tied to a
particular set of historical traditions and customs, which contain
the seeds of its decay and death.
Hitherto Hegel has considered the destructive power of Verstand
only as stifling the development of the individual. But now it
appears for the first time as a socially divisive power which sets
men against one another, each side being convinced of the superior
truth and value of its own verbal formulas. Hegel points the
contrast between the freezing power of Verstand and the warmth of
sympathy and natural feeling which the spectacle of devotion to
God, under any of his names, arouses in the heart of any subjectively
religious person. His first impulse at this point was to invoke the
I Lessing, Nathan the Wise, Act IV, Scene 7 (Everyman edn., p. I97).
134 TOBINGEN 1788-1793

example of creative rationality set by Theseus in umtmg the

different tribes into a single city, Athens, by establishing a
pantheon of their Gods; but he struck out Theseus' name and
substituted the examples of Coriolanus and Gustavus Adolphus,
a Roman and a modern Protestant leader who typified for him the
primitive piety of true feeling. The implied connection between
true religion and devotion to the principles of political freedom
is especially noteworthy here.
Having offered a Roman and a Protestant man of action to
exemplify the essential identity of religious feelings, Hegel offers
us a Greek and an early Christian Father, Socrates and Tertullian,
as examples of contrasting types of religious men of thought.
Tertullian takes Socrates as an atheist, who made an offering to the
son of Apollo only because the oracle had recognized his wisdom.
But Hegel now offers his own definitive interpretation of 'Socrates'
Cock' -about which as we know he had been collecting divergent
opinions for some years-as a thank-offering to the god of healing
for the gift of death which Socrates considered as a healing of
mortality. I
The dialectic of his next paragraph, the last of this section as
we have it, is more subtle than most commentators have perceived.
For his initial text is that 'the heart must speak more loudly than
the Verstand'. In support he cites the story of the woman whom
tradition identifies as Mary Magdalen, and of how Jesus justified
her impulsive act in anointing him, against the objections of the
disciples, who quite correctly said that the ointment she had used
might have been sold for charitable ends. He clearly implies that
the disciples were rationalizing their own failure of sympathy,
and that this is what we are always doing if we stop to think it over
whenever we have a generous impulse. Then he turns quite suddenly

I Nohl, p. II; cf. Doh., pp. 10 and 86-7, and Chapter I, pp. 14-16 above.

When we compare this paragraph about Socrates with Hegel's reflections about
the Greek attitude toward atheism in the fragmentary Aber die Hauptmasse we
can see that there was an unresolved problem in Hegel's 'Hellenic ideal'. In the
light of those notes, furthermore, Hegel's switch here, from the example of
Theseus at the beginning of the Athenian experience to that of Socrates at the
end of it, seems to indicate that he has already begun to wrestle with the tragic
destiny of the Greek religion of beauty. It was, after all, not the Romans or the
Christians who put Socrates to death and threatened Aristotle, but those same
Athenians who laughed at the gods with Aristophanes at their great festivals
(cf. Nohl, p. 357). Even when he penned his first eulogy of the Greek spirit,
Hegel had already recognized that it was self-doomed.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 135

to a rather different contrast involving Verstand: Gellert's claim

that a Christian child knows more of God than the wisest of pagan
sages. This, Hegel says, is just like Tertullian's remark that a
Christian artisan easily understands all the things about the
creator of the world, which Plato says are so difficult to discover
and even more difficult to tell about. It is easy to see that both
authors could defend their claim by reference to a text which we
might think Hegel would find rather embarrassing in the present
context: 'Suffer little children to come unto me, for of such is the
Kingdom of God' etc. But Hegel is armoured against this retort
also, for he says that even the heart of Frederick II is worth more
than a manual of morality, which one can ,if one chooses, use to
wrap stinking cheese in; and he then justifies the equation of
Gellert's child and Tertullian's workman with the manual on the
grounds that like the book their minds contain nothing but the
verbal formulas-they lack the experience, which the sinners
Frederick II and Mary Magdalen had, which alone provides
concrete consciousness of what the words mean.! Thus Hegel's
doctrine is that the impulse of the heart must be heeded first-
and not inhibited by reflective criticism-but that it is not sufficient
01' authoritative by itself. We must express it and experience it in
order to arrive at moral consciousness and eventually reach philo-
sophical wisdom. Gellert's child must experience life to the full-
like Frederick II, not like Tertullian's apifex christianus-in order
to achieve the moral consciousness of the repentant Magdalen,2
and finally the philosophical insight of the 'wisest of the pagans',
Plato.
At this point we pass from sheet d of the manuscript to sheet f.
It may be that in sheet e Hegel went on to develop his doctrine of
'experience', and to set it in still sharper contrast with the life that
is effectively insulated against real experience by a cloud of verbal
doctrines fabricated by the understanding. The sentence that
I There is here, I think, an implicit analogy between the stuffing of simple

minds with 'the theological sourdough and the catechism' and tearing the pages
out of a book of moral philosophy to wrap stinking cheese (Nohl, p. I I; p. 489
below. Hegel's references are to Gellert's poem 'Der Christ', and to Tertullian,
Apologeticum 46.)
2 Whereas Frederick had a 'zuweilen ungerechte Herz'-i.e. he was partially
governed by the cold calculations of selfish prudence-the woman of the
Gospel was 'ill-famed' but certainly open to 'the gentler images of love' (d.
Nohl, p. 7). The seeds of Hegel's Frankfurt doctrine of reconciliation with life
through love are quite apparent here.
 TOBINGEN 1788-1793

Rosenkranz inserted in his excerpt from a later section can be

fitted in very naturally here, upon this hypothesis: 'Men, early
immersed in the dead sea of moral verbiage, emerge certainly
invulnerable like Achilles; but their human power is also drowned
in it.' But it is also possible that this sentence comes from the lost
centre leaf of sheet a, and that there never was any sheet e because
in marking his sheets Hegel omitted the letter e by accident; for
the transition here to the next section on 'Enlightenment-the
intent to work through Verstand', is natural enough.
As we already know, Verstand serves only for the elaboration
of objective religion. But in identifying it as the principle of the
Aufkliirung Hegel does not mean to underestimate or misprize
either of them. An index of this is the fact that he names Lessing's
Nathan as one of the fruits of Verstand, and he has already
explicitly indicated how much his own conception of the union
of feeling and reason in subjective religion owes to that work.
We should remember in dealing with his subsequent strictures
against Verstand that since, or in so far as, they apply to Nathan,
they apply also to his own work and he is quite aware of it.
Verstand has no practical direction in itself. All it can do is to
provide the plausible semblance of rational justification for the
impulses of self-love; genuinely rational principles are only
given practical effect by the higher impulses of altruism. Enlighten-
ment of understanding might bring us to accept the utilitarian
principle that we cannot be happy without virtue; but this calcula-
tion is too subtle and too cold to be an effective motive at the
moment of decision or in the general conduct of life. 1
Thus learning the best manual of moral philosophy by heart
and trying to apply it will only result in the making of bad decisions
or no decisions. This is not what the writers of manuals want
students to do, but it is all that one can do with a manual. The idea
that enlightenment of the understanding can prevent the develop-
ment of evil impulses is a mistake, and the use of a manual of
enlightened morality as a censoring authority is in conflict with the
I Nohl, p. 12. There is certainly a flaw in Hegel's reasoning here. It has always

been rightly urged against any moral calculus that we cannot apply it in the
particular circumstances of most moral decisions. But a calculus obviously can
be, and is, applied in making long-term plans; and Hegel generally recognizes
this. His real argument against this 'EinfluB aufs Leben iiberhaupt' is that it is
always pernicious, because it produces an impoverished existence by stifling and
denying the impulses of our nature even before we are aware of them.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 137

fundamental principle of all enlightenment-that a man must act

and decide for himself, not let others act for him. 1
The 'enlightening of a people' is a more appropriate object of
intellectual endeavour. What is involved here is a programme of
removing religious prejudices, which like the enlightenment that
replaces them are products of Verstand. These prejudices are of
two different types: false beliefs on the one hand, and true beliefs
the grounds of which are not understood, on the other. Prejudices
of both kinds can be removed by a clearer understanding of causal
relations, for in general they are based on mistaken concepts of
causality suggested by sense experience, and imaginative extra-
polation. 2 But we must not, of course, suppose that intellectual
analyses can remove the selfish practical impulses that hide behind
the prejudices.
The enlightenment of the understanding, proceeding as it does
by argument and discussion, is an essentially endless process which
cannot produce final results. No mortal man therefore can finally
declare what is true on this level. This does not mean, however,
that we cannot recognize the universal validity of the practical
principles on which all human society is founded. These principles
are evident to 'healthy human understanding' (dem gesunden
Menschenverstande einleuchten) on the one hand, and they lie at the
foundation of 'every religion worthy of the name' on the other.
It is certain that there are not many of these principles, since they
are necessarily very abstract, and indeed 'when they are expressed
in their pure form as reason [Vernunft] requires' they conflict with
experience and sensible appearance. 'They are not a rule for it,
but are only consistent with an opposite order of things.' Hence
I Nohl, p. 12. This is the first of two explicit references by Hegel to Campe's
Theophro1t, 'the experienced adviser to inexperienced youth', which he acquired
in the fall of 1785 (Doh., p. 24). He may well have tried to learn it by heart when
he was fifteen, for he tells us, a little further on, what the subjective consequences
of such an experiment would be. Here he is only concerned with objective results.
There is also, I think, an implicit reference to Kant's '\Vhat is Enlightenment'
(I784) in this passage. My analysis makes this hypothetical allusion rather more
explicit.
2 It should be noted that most religious prejudices are by Hegel's canons a

mixture of true belief with false. To take the example that seems to be implicitly
referred to in his text, belief in miracles is a mere superstition (false belief) in so
far as we hold that the ordinary course of nature can somehow or other be
suspended. 13ut it is a true belief (or so Hegel would argue) in so far as it is the
expression of a calm trust in divine providence which does not look for any
miraculous interventions on its own behalf.
138 TtiBINGEN 1788-1793

they do not easily get 'living recognition' from the people and when
learned by heart 'they still make no part of the spiritual and desirous
system of man' . I
Hegel is now face to face with the difficulty created by the
yoking, in his original definition, of the immortal horse of Kantian
practical reason with the mortal one of religious mythology, to
borrow a Platonic image that he would find appropriate. The
rational principles are found at the basis of every religion 'worthy
of the name'. But the fact that this qualification is needed destroys
most, if not all of the evidential value of the historical record of
human religious experience as a support for the principles. This
does not matter much, since Hegel is concerned not with the
adoption of a theoretical belief on the basis of evidence, but with
the clarification of a practical faith that one already has. But the
unavoidable necessity of an experienced content in that faith, the
impossibility that a folk-religion, a positive religion, as Hegel now
for the first time calls it, should ever be confined within 'the bounds
of reason alone', or should ever do more than point towards the
ideals of practical reason on which it is 'founded', was a focus for
anxious meditation on his part for several years to come. Rational
religion is a terminus at which only a tiny minority of dedicated
and highly gifted men will ever arrive. The moral virtue of ordinary
citizens must rest on the practice of a folk-religion that has been
handed down to us. Enlightened criticism of this religious practice
should not go beyond the setting of it in its right light as a tech-
nique for the development of the sentiment of devotion.
At this point Hegel cannot help asking himself whether en-
lightened criticism can even do this-as he clearly holds that it
must and will do, and indeed already has done in the Reformation
-without destroying the living force of religious devotion. Z He
I Nohl, pp. 13-14; pp. 491 f. below. The reference here is of course to the

doctrine of practical reason in Kant and Fichte, and we have a very clear
instance of Hegel's difficulty over terminology. For he is dealing with something
that is proper to reason in his sense-the Grundsiitze of 'menschlichen Wissen
in concreto'. But what is provided by Kant and Fichte is only technical under-
standing (Verstand) in his sense of the term.
By a slip Hegel left out the verb that expresses the relation of the intelligible
to the sensible world. Nohl supplies widersprechen, which is very plausible in the
light of Kant's doctrine of the antinomies. But I have deliberately tried to be as
neutral as possible-both here and in my translation-and not to supply more
than is absolutely required by the context.
2 To suppose-as Haering and other pious critics do-that when Hegel asks,

as he does here, how far abstract reasoning can enter into religion without
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 139

knew perfectly well from his own personal experience that long
reflection about the origins and social use of religious practices
or the history of dogma destroyed their 'halo of sanctity'. If one
knows that 'divine service' is really a matter of one's daily life, the
knowledge certainly changes one's attitude toward church-going.
But it does not in itself enable one to live any better. Wisdom is
not acquired by the mathematical method any more than it was
earlier by syllogisms. Of course understanding and its science does
not cause one to live any worse either.! It has always its own
proper instrumental value, but that is quite incommensurable with
such higher (moral) values as goodness and purity of heart.
Thus the implicit answer to the question how far abstract
reasoning can enter into religion without destroying it is the one
given at the end of the preceding section. Verstand should not be
allowed to inhibit or strangle the natural expression of the higher
emotions. Just how it may do this is illustrated by considering
more closely the subjective experience of a youth who, in his
innocence, sets himself to learn Campe's Theophron by heart and to
guide his own conduct by it. Real moral knowledge is a product of
long experience, whereas our youth will be quite sick of his experi-
ment in a week. He will be indecisive and worried about every-
thing, which will make him intensely irritating to others; too timid
to enjoy anything properly; always willing to give way from a
sense of his own imperfection. The breaking-point, at least in
Hegel's picture-which may perhaps be autobiographical-is
the nervous strain imposed by shyness in his relations with the
opposite sex. 2
destroying it (Nohl, p. 14; cf. also p. 355), he means to defend religion against
its attack, is to ignore the process of his development and the sources of his
own thought. He was anxious only that we should not throwaway the baby with
the bath-water, and take abstract reasoning as a substitute for the actual experi-
ence that we reason about. We must reason fearlessly, whatever perishes as a
result. Hegel was never one to cry over spilt milk. Even in his eulogy of the
Greeks, where he seems momentarily close to fruitless lamentation, it is obvious
that he never felt any inclination to side with the people against Socrates. Nor did
he at any time sympathize ·with Jacobi's appeal to religious feeling against the
rationalist criticism of his contemporaries.
I This is a point which the critics overlook, although the very paragraph after

the sarcastic comments about mathematical method and syllogism emphasizes

that 'AufkHirung bleibt ... ein schoner Vorzug'. Hegel's view is that Verstand
is morally neutral. Of course, in its capacity as a flattering courtier of self-love
Verstand is always liable to make us worse; but it is equally at the disposition
of the higher kind of love if that has been allowed to develop properly.
2 The experiment, if it took place, occurred when he was fifteen or sixteen
 T0BINGEN 1788-1793

At this point, when we might think the topic exhausted, it

emerges that Hegel really wants to distinguish two types of en-
lightenment-or rather two types of men among those who are
called enlightened. This should not surprise us, for we saw in his
earliest meditations on the subject a tendency to distinguish genuine
spiritual enlightenment from the vainglorious superiority of the
Buchstabenmensch. The concept of the 'man of the letter' was actually
coined by Moses Mendelssohn, from whom Hegel copied his
first notes on Aujklarung; the first reference to the concept itself
in his papers is in a quotation from Lessing's Nathan. It is amusing
to see how with an obvious bow towards these two earliest masters
of his, he makes a little bonfire of all the Buchstaben of the
Enlightenment to which he had himself become addicted at
Stuttgart and Tubingen: Aujklarung, Menschenkenntnis, Ge-
schichte del' Menschheit, Gliickseligkeit, Volkommenheit, all of them
are dismissed almost like the theologische Sauerteig, as a 'sapless
phlegm that cripples free movement in every limb'. But of course
he would not be interested in the death-dealing power of these
'letters' if he did not believe that beneath them flows the life-
giving power of the spirit. I
By clarifying the theological sourdough, the enlightened under-
standing erects the imposing theoretical structures of rational
theology. But this is still only objective religion. It is a palace of
the intellect in which mere men cannot dwell. Every man must
build his own little home for himself in the world-or in other
words he must think for himself and make his own decisions. 2
(see above, p. 137 n. 1). Hegel had already arrived at his conception of the
relation of Vernunft and Verstand by Mar. 1787 when he wrote his notes on
Garve. If we suppose that he took his own Latin eloquence seriously, we could
argue that he was in the right state of mind for the enactment of this solemn
farce in March 1786 (Dok., pp. 28-31). But perhaps nothing much more than a
Gedankenexperiment occurred even at that time.
I Nohl, pp. 16-17 (see pp. 493-5 below). Theword that Hegel uses first is

again Lessing's expression Buchgelehrsamkeit, for which cf. Dok., pp. 49 and
169. Buchstabenmensch occurs on the next page, and there are several references
ro Mendelssohn's Jerusalem in Inwiefern ist Religion which was probably
the earliest of Hegel's outlines for the Tiibingen fragment (Nohl, pp. 355-7).
2 Nohl, pp. 17 (see pp. 494-5 below). Actually Hegel uses two not quite consis-

tent metaphors in successive paragraphs here in a way which reveals that he is

not clear in his own mind what point he wishes to make. First he contrasts living
in a place where one does not even know all the rooms, with living in a small house
one has made for oneself, turning over every stone and personally laying it in
place. Then he contrasts the castle-dweller (the castle being the new one at
Versailles) with the paterfamilias living in his ancestral home (which, obviously,
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 141

The question how far religion can aid us in this brings us back to
our main topic of folk-religion-now contrasted with private
religion.
The transition from objective to subjective religion, from the
realm of the letter to that of the spirit, is marked not only by
reference to Lessing's Nathan again but by the use of the term
Vernunft instead of Verstand. The religion of Nathan is exactly
what Hegel describes under the heading reiner Vernunftreligion;
and there can be no doubt that in Nathan himself it is completely
'subjective'. He is the model case of the wise man who at the end
of a long life of devotion really exemplifies pure reason in its
practical exercise. When compared with his active rational piety,
the traditional forms of piety appear as mere superstition. But
even Nathan recognizes in his parable of the three rings and in
other utterances that 'a universal spiritual church is a mere ideal
of reason', existing only in the realm of the spirit and forever
bound to remain invisible. I The highest achievable ideal in a
visible church, a public folk-religion, is that of minimizing as far
as possible the occasions for literalism and fetishism, and maxi-
mizing as far as possible the acceptance of Vernunftreligion.
Since he accepts not only the conception of obedience to practical
reason as the consummation of ethics, but also the postulate of
he cannot have built for himself). The first metaphor remains within the context
of Hegel's Enlightenment heritage. It expresses Nathan's contrast between
personal knowledge and book learning. The second is more distinctively Hegelian,
since the contrast here is between membership in two types of community, one
that is constitutive of one's 'ethical substance' (the family and the Volk) and one
that is not (the world of Verstand).
Each of the metaphors says something which Hegel regarded as important
and true. But: clearly the second one is more fundamental and the implications
or intimations of the first are false so far as they conflict with it. The 'bourgeois'
overtones of the metaphor(s) have been remarked on by other critics; and there
are clear indications in Hegel's notes that he was quite aware that he was here
invoking a value that was peculiar to his own society and which was not without
its dark side. See Die Formen der andern Bilder, where he contrasts the old
feudal hall in which everyone ate and slept together with the modern private
chamber, in a way which is by no means to the advantage of the latter. The
pattern of life in the Greek city is, of course, exalted above both (Nohl, pp. 358-
9). (It is one of the quaintest ironies of intellectual history that Kierkegaard should
have employed the same metaphor in one of his most celebrated diatribes against
'the System'.)
I Compare Nohl, pp. 17 and 357 (first paragraph), with Kant Religion, Akad.,

vi. IOJ. There is no explicit reference to Nathan in this paragraph of Hegel's

text but the question he is answering is framed in terms derived from that source
and the parallels are, I think, obvious.
142 TUBINGEN 1788-1793

immortality, Hegel has to accommodate the Kantian ideal of holi-

ness in his scheme:
When the ideal [Idee] of holiness is set up in moral philosophy as the
ultimate apex of ethical conduct [Sittlichkeit] and the ultimate limit of
all striving, the objections of those who say that such an ideal is not
attainable by man (which our moralists themselves grant anyway) but
that, apart from pure respect for the law, he needs other motives,
motives which affect his sensibility-these objections do not so much
go to show that man ought not to strive to come ever closer to that
ideal even for all eternity, but only that in savagery [Roheit] and when
there is a powerful propensity toward sensibility [Hang zur Sinnlich-
keit]-in most men (we) frequently have to be content with the produc-
tion of legality ... I
The rather embarrassed and indirect way in which Hegel refers
to his own aims and endeavours here, arises probably from his
consciousness that as far as life in this world is concerned there is a
quite dramatic difference between his attitude and that of Kant, in
spite of his acceptance of the regulative ideal of holiness. He can
afford to concede that holiness is the 'letzte Punkt des Bestrebens'
only because that limit is the terminus of an infinite process. But
in reality his conception of the 'letzte Hohe der Sittlichkeit' for
man is a concrete ideal that can actually be realized, for he believes
that the Greeks realized it; and whatever may be true in eternity
it is quite clear that in this life the regulative ideal of holiness has
only an instrumental role in the achievement of 'the holy, delicate
web of human sensations'.2 Hegel allows it to appear that the
converse is the case, that the moralization of the lower impulses
I Nohl, pp. 17-18. Peperzak (p. 40 n.) has drawn attention to the connection

between this passage and a passage in Kant's essay 'On the radical evil in
human nature' (Berlinische Nlonatschrzjt, Apr. 1792: see Religion, Akad., vi.,
pp. 28-3 0 ).
Z It is almost certainly no accident that Hegel calls the web of sensations 'holy'
immediately before discussing the Kantian ideal (see Nohl, p. 16). The necessary
bridge is provided by his account of how the 'moral feeling' has to send out its
'delicate tendrils' over the 'whole web' of the empirical character. Of course,
once he gave up the Kantian postulates, as a result of the fuller development of
his own postulate of 'Providence', which in the present work appears alongside
of them, the whole Kantian conception of the 'supersensible world' at once took
on the character of an illusory looking-glass land in which all relations are
inverted. But he always continued to hold that the 'inverted world' is a necessary
illusion at a certain stage of rational development, and in the realm of practical
reason at least, we can already see why he thought so. (The metaphor of the web
and of weaving, which plays such a large role in his discussion, is derived, I think,
from Plato's Politicus.)
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 143
is a st;}.ge in the infinite process of approximation to rational
holiness, because this belief does no practical harm, and it would
therefore be almost immoral, by the standards of Lessing's
Nathan, to provoke a theoretical quarrel. It does no harm because
it is quite true that, in order to find the way in which all human
needs and feelings are to be harmonized and all human capacities
fully expressed and enjoyed we must fix our gaze on the 'letzte
Punkt alles Streb ens' , the abstract ideal of holiness. But this self-
discipline that produces virtue is distinct from the experience of
virtue itself. Once the web of human sensations is properly woven
we can enjoy life and its activities for its own sake .
. Because our natural impulses require to be developed under
rational control, Hegel can even assimilate Kant's doctrine that
'respect for the law' is the only moral motive in the same instru-
mental way. Thus he admits in one sentence that 'compassion,
benevolence, friendship' are not moral motives, because they do
not spring from respect for the law. But in the next he asserts that
'the moral sense [das moralische Gefuhl] must send its delicate
threads out through the whole web' of the empirical character, to
which it thus belongs (whatever Kant may say). The bridge
between the 'good tendencies' of nature and the 'moral feeling' is
provided by the concept of love which is the Grundprinzip of the
empirical character. For love is analogous to reason in that
just as love finds itself in other men, or rather forgetting itself-puts
itself outside of its own existence, and, so to speak, lives, feels, and acts
in others-so likewise reason, as the principle of universally valid laws,
knows itself again in every rational being, recognizing itself as fellow
citizen of an intelligible world. The empirical character of man is
certainly affected by desire and aversion [Lust and Un lust] , <-) love,
even if it is a pathological principle of action, is disinterested [uneigen-
niitzig], it does not do good actions because it has calculated that <the)
joys that arise from its actions will be less mixed and longer lasting
than those of sensibility or those that spring from the satisfaction of
any passion-thus it is not the principle of refined self-love, where the
ego is in the end always the ultimate goa1.!
Here Hegel is, as it were, driven into a corner, and is forced to
point out that although what Kant says about love is not exactly
wrong, he has none the less overlooked something which is of
fundamental importance-the great contrast that exists between
I Noh!, p. 18.
I{{ TOBINGEN 1788-1793
selfish and unselfish love. What is not clear in Hegel's own account
is the relation between these two. It is only by taking them to-
gether that he is able to assert plausibly that love is the Grund-
prinzip of the empirical character, and his whole positive ideal of
the 'holy web of human feeling' depends on this principle, so that
for him as for Origen, even the Devil himself must in the end be
saved. 1 As far as we can see from his text his view is that love
only becomes selfish through the premature intervention of
reflection (Verstand); but he probably held (already in 1793, as he
certainly did in 1797) that man's natural needs force upon the
spontaneous sense of life a distinction between self and other that is
originally foreign to it.
Principles can only be derived from rational ideals. But in any
case the question of how to bring men closer to these ideals can
only be settled by considering the situation they are actually in
and the capacities for good that they actually have, says Hegel.
With this he says farewell to the regulative ideals of pure reason,
and begins to develop his own account of folk-religion as the means
by which the concrete ideal is achieved. Folk-religion must
satisfy the demands of pure reason in the end; but first it must
meet the needs of the imagination and the heart. It must stimulate
the sense of beauty and the emotion of love, and it must do so in
such a way as to arouse in what Plato called the 'spirited' part of
the soul, the twin sensations of self-respect and patriotism.
It is because the task of folk-religion is essentially to create a
free society that Hegel has to distinguish between folk-religion and
private religion. The personal virtues of daily life depend upon
private religion for their maintenance. Hegel distinguishes three
tasks that typically belong to it: resolving conflicts of duty,
developing private virtues, and bringing comfort in distress. But
by the time he has finished dealing with them, private religion has
virtually disappeared back into folk-religion. Thus he settles the
problem about conflicts of duty by saying that we must either
'take the advice of upright !lnd experienced men' or decide for
ourselves what is right on the basis of the conviction implanted
in us by public religion 'that duty and virtue are the supreme
I This is I think the best way to express Hegel's rejection of Kant's doctrine

of the 'radical evil in human nature'. To speak as even a careful critic like
Lacorte does of the 'Hegelian denial of the reality of evil' is grievously unjust to
a thinker who even as a schoolboy was maintaining that 'every good has its
bad side' (cf. Lacorte, pp. 90, 92).
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 145

principle'-and this of course is the principle that the 'upright

and experienced man' (Aristotle's man of practical wisdom en-
lightened by Kant) would use if we went to him for advice.
The techniques for 'teaching virtue' are all-as we have already
seen-more harmful than helpful. Even public instruction about
moral philosophy involves an attempt to inject into us from
outside something that can only properly be developed from within;
and the only real comfort in distress is faith in providence (which
is, as we have seen, an essential part of public folk-religion).
In practice, therefore, the distinction between private and
public religion-or private and public virtue and duty-falls
within the concept of folk-religion; and the two questions that
have to be settled-objectively, at the verbal level of Verstand,
which is the level that Kant's discourse, Hegel's discourse, and
even Lessing's Nathan exists on-about folk-religion arise from
the two regulative canons mentioned earlier: maximizing
rationality (the vitality of the spirit) and minimizing fetishism (the
mortality of the letter).
Concrete rationality has three levels-which appear to be in
descending order but are actually in ascending order as counsels
of 'perfection'.
I. Minimally the requirements of practical reason must be met
(the Jewish religion meets this requirement).
2. 'Fancy, heart, and sensibility must not on this account go
empty away' (the Christian religion-especially Catholicism-
meets this requirement).1
3. 'All the needs of life, and the public activities of the state, must
be tied in with it' (only the religion of the Greeks has ever yet
met this most exhaustive standard properly).
Hegel discusses each canon in turn. Much of what he says
merely repeats and sums up what we have already learned, but
he makes some interesting new points. Thus the first requirement
of rational universality opens the way to theoretical discussion and
argument about the doctrines, and hence the doctrines themselves

I For the satisfaction of Phantasie in Christianity, see Nohl, p. 24; p. 502

below. Cf. also Aber die Hauptmasse (Nohl, p. 358); and-with particular
reference to Catholicism-Die Formen der andern Bilder (Nohl, p. 359). For the
satisfaction of Herz und Sinnlichkeit cf. Hegel's defence of love against Kant
(Nohl, p. 18; p. 496 below).
8243588 M
 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

become the focus of intolerance and heresy hunting. So that any

religious creed, as an object of Verstand, remains always 'unnatural'
in relation to 'the true needs and requirements of Vernunft'.1
For this reason the formulations of doctrine must be kept as
simple as possible-and they must be expressed as humanly as
possible.
This requirement of Menschlichkeit is not easy to interpret. It
really means, I think, that we have always to consider the first
canon as an abstraction from the second-and ultimately from
the third. Hegel uses it as if it were equivalent to the pragmatic
principle that we must deal with men as they are and as we find
them, and not as abstract 'rational beings'. As an example he takes
faith in divine providence. Only the few exceptional wise men
arrive at a fully rational conception of providence; the faith of the
populace is shaken by a storm at the wrong moment.
The postulate of providence, which is Hegel's own addition to
the Kantian postulates of God and immortality, is obviously
chosen because it is sufficiently prominent in Greek religion-or
at least in Hegel's image of it-to enable him to draw a parallel
and point to a contrast between Greek religion and Christianity.
Earlier, as we saw, he remarked that the only real consolation in
distress is that which arises from faith in providence. But he
regards the appeal to Providence in private religion, which is
typical of Christian culture, as thoroughly degenerate. In view
of the comforts of our religion we might as well be sorry that we
have not a mother or father to lose every week, he says acidly.

I This may be one answer to the problem of the condemnation of Socrates

which clearly exercised Hegel's mind at this time. Bigotry was certainly one
element involved. But when he goes on to explain the requirement of Menschlich-
heit, he may, by the same token, mean to suggest that Socrates brought his fate
on himself by not conforming to the proper role of the wise man in society (as
Plato did). I am assuming that he has Socrates in his mind here because the
Greeks are very much in his mind throughout his discussion of the three
canons-and we know that he was much struck by the contrast between the
treatment accorded to Aristophanes by the Athenians and the fate of Socrates
(see Aber die Hauptmasse, Nohl, p. 357). For the contrast between Socrates and
Plato see Hegel's excerpt from a review of Tennemann (Doh., p. 174: this
excerpt was probably made in 1794, however; cf. Nohl, p. 35). The reason for
holding that the excerpt expressed Hegel's own view is that he was quite obvi-
ously modelling himself on Plato as described by Tennemann: 'He had the
education of the human race in general, the perfecting of morals as a science, and
the laying of foundations for a philosophical system of law and political constitu-
tion as his aim.'
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 147

When Verstand begins to work on the premiss that God sees the
fall of every sparrow it brings the very foundation of religious
faith into disrepute. l
The Greeks on the other hand believed in the benevolence and
the justice of the Gods, but were never tempted to view mis-
fortune as a blessing in disguise. Fate for them was a blind,
ineluctable power. 'This faith . . . seems humanly appropriate
both to the sublimity of the Godhead, and to the weakness, the
dependence on nature, and the limited vision of man.'
Hegel makes one final point about religion as rational faith,
which is that the doctrines of religion should never interfere with
civic justice or be used as the basis for a moral censorship in private
life. Hence, the power of the priests in a rational religion will be
limited. His point about intervention in civic justice is obviously
that there can be no foundation for separate ecclesiastical courts
or for 'benefit of clergy'. Nor can there be any justification for
a peculiarly religious judicial institution like the Holy Office,
though the trial of Socrates for impiety, since it took place in the
context of civic justice, is left on a very ambiguous border line.
The point about censorship is a more subtle one. Moral censor-
ship-as distinct from public justice-is wrong because it involves
inhibition of the natural growth of the personality and spontaneous
expression of the feelings by Verstand. Like verbal indoctrination
it stifles the only process by which real learning can occur. 2
We turn now to the second canon. The truths of rational
religion must be embodied for the popular imagination in myths.
The historical foundation of Christianity provides scope for the
imagination, but not scope for its joyful use: 'The beautiful colours
of sensibility are excluded by the spirit of our religion-and we are

1 Noh], p. ~z; pp. 500-1 below. This is the beginning of a long process of critical

reflection on the right interpretation of the principle 'Virtue deserves happiness'

which was clearly sparked by Storr's Notes on Kant's Religion.
2 The most portentous philosophical shadows have been detected behind

Hegel's obvious animus against the ancien regime here. Peperzak affects to see in
this passage 'a preference for the State when there is conflict between it and
religion', though he admits it is only embryonic (Peperzak, p. 26). This embryo
was never conceived, and certainly never came to birth. Hegel's conception of
the relation between the State and religion remained all his life rather like that
of Dante-although his conception of the terms was quite different. Religion
cannot 'interfere' because it is on a higher plane altogether. Certainly Hegel
does not 'prefer' the State where there is conflict. If there is conflict, the State
is already on the point of death, since religion is its foundation.
 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

in general too much men of reason [Vernulift] and of words [i.e.

Verstand] to love beautiful pictures.'!
Apart from the presentation of doctrine in pictorial and dramatic
modes there is scope for the imagination and the heart in the
ceremonial forms of religious action. Hegel distinguishes three
elements in religion: concepts, essential practices, and ceremonial.
But the distinction between 'essential' practice and ceremony
immediately turns out to depend on the point of view of the wor-
shipper. For an enlightened worshipper, as we know, the 'essential
practice' of his religion is 'walking acceptably in the sight of God'
and all else, baptism, the eucharist, and 'divine service' generally,
is ceremonial which helps both to stimulate his sentiments of
devotion and to express them for experience and enjoyment. For
someone who is less enlightened this experience itself has the
character of an 'extraordinary benefit' or gift of grace and hence
for him ceremonies become essential practices.
The particular case that Hegel chooses to consider in detail is
that of sacrifice. Probably his choice was dictated by a desire to
defend the 'heathen' practice of the Greeks against the arrogant
misunderstandings of 'enlightened' and unenlightened Christian
critics. But in any case we can see how easy it was for him to come
to the conclusion, once he began to think about it, that sacrifice
is the essential practice of all folk-religion, just as divine providence
is the fundamental doctrine. 2
Sacrifice, he says, can be viewed in two ways: it can be thought
of as an act of expiation for sin, a prayer for pardon, and remission
of punishment. Viewed in this light it is intellectually absurd, and
morally perverse. Nowhere-except perhaps in the Christian
Church-has the rite of sacrifice been so crassly conceived. 3
1 Nohl, p. 24; p. 502 below. Hegel is here referring to Gennan Protestantism;

he recognizes that his criticism applies less to Catholicism because of its Graeco-
Roman heritage (cf. Die Formen der andern Bilder, Nohl, p. 359).
2 The Christian eucharist as at present practised is a ceremony essential to

private religion but not to folk-religion, Hegel remarks (Nohl, p. 26; p. 504 below).
Presumably he means that it makes us feel a private union with God but does
not give us any sense of belonging to a national community of free, self-
detennining citizens (cf. the sarcastic comment a little further on about the
Catholic practice of communion in one kind: Nohl, p. 27; p. 505 below).
3 Nohl, pp. 24-5; p. 503 below. Here Hegel is almost certainly thinking of
the indulgences that Luther protested so vigorously against. But how anyone who
had studied the second book of the Republic could seriously maintain that 'out-
side the Christian Church the sinner's conscience ... was not set at rest' by this
kind of sacrifice (Nohl, p. 25 n.) passes my comprehension.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 149
Even so, we ought not to overlook its value as a stimulus of the
higher religious emotions. The practice of pilgrimage in particular,
ridiculous though its objects may appear to the enlightened
intellect, does not deserve our scorn, since it involves devoting
one's actual life to the service of God.
On the other hand we can view sacrifice, as Hegel believes
the Greeks did, as an act of love and gratitude by which the aid
and protection of the gods is invoked or their provident help
acknowledged. Here the ideas of placation and penitent reparation
are absent. This is 'probably the basic and universal type [Gestalt]
of sacrifice'.
When we come to the final requirement Hegel's enthusiasm
for his Greek ideal overflows all bounds and puts him for a
moment into that posture of yearning that we associate rather
with H6lderlin. Any gap between the doctrine and the way of life
must rouse the suspicion, he says, that there is something wrong
with the 'form of the religion': either it is too subtle in theory, or
too ascetic in practice, or both. Religion ought not to make us
ashamed; rather all the joys of life should be sanctified by it, as in
the great Greek festivals. Whereas our religion mal{es us solemn
and alienates us from all human feelings in order to make us
citizens of heaven.
Folk-religion goes hand in hand with political freedom because
it arouses and nourishes the noble emotions (grofJe Gesinnungen)
that sustain a free constitution. The religion, the historical
tradition, and the political constitution of a people together
constitute the Volksgeist. This political connection causes Hegel
to distinguish once more between folk-religion and private religion,
although, as we saw, the distinction is scarcely tenable in his vision
of the ideal, and is only useful in contrasting that ideal with the
Christianity of his own society.
To express the relation of the three terms in the Greek Volks-
geist Hegel wrote a little Platonic myth in which Chronos (historical
tradition) appears as father, Politeia (the constitution) as the
mother, and Religion as the nurse of the infant spirit of Greece.
Subsequently he crossed it out. I do not think that he cancelled
it immediately, in spite of the fact that his next paragraph contains
a less elaborate analogy which was obviously conceived as an
alternative version. For he made use of his myth in the rest of his
discussion and he had just embarked on a parallel allegory about
ISO TDBINGEN 1788-1793

the spirit of Germany when he stopped and struck that out.

Almost certainly he cancelled the first myth at the same time but
without modifying the subsequent references to it.
In the simpler version of his allegory which Hegel allowed to
stand, the Greek spirit is said to be a 'child of fortune [Gluck]
and freedom ... fettered [like other Volksgeister] to Mother Earth
by the brazen bond of his needs, but he has so worked over it,
refined it, and beautified it, with feeling and fancy, twining it with
roses by the aid of the Graces, that he takes delight in his fetters
as in his own work, as in a part of himself.'! From his father
(i.e. Chronos-also called here 'a darling of fortune and son of
force') he inherited 'faith in his fortune and pride in his deeds'.
I take this to be a fairly transparent reference to Periclean Athens,
with the memory of Marathon and Salamis to look back on. His
gentle mother (i.e. the Constitution) entrusted him to the education
of nature. That is, no censorship of Verstand was imposed on his
discovery of his natural powers-the education of 'nature' is that
which Rousseau's Emile received. His nurse (i.e. Religion) did
not terrify him with the rod and the bogyman (has Hegel forgotten
the Furies and the Gorgons, or does he feel perhaps that even they,
in their total context, are somehow beautiful and menschlich ?), or
feed him the 'sour-sweet sugar-bread of mysticism that weakens
the stomach'. This remark is surely a reference to the inversion of
natural values in Christianity-the doctrines that the last shall be
first, that the meek and the persecuted are blessed, etc., are hardly
calculated to arouse the noble sentiments of patriotism and free-
dom. Nor did the nurse 'keep him in the leading-reins of words
which would have held him in eternal infancy'. Here Hegel has
connected his metaphor with Kant's definition of enlightenment,
which may have suggested it. Enlightenment, said Kant, is 'coming
of age', not needing a nurse or a tutor. But Hegel does not want to
imply that folk-religion can ever be dispensed with, so he goes
on to say that the nurse remained as an intimate companion in the

I N ohl, p. 28. In this alternative version the separation and opposition between

soul and body (Plato) or Reason and sensibility (Kant) is fairly clearly maintained.
The als of the final clause is an als ab. In the cancelled paragraph the imagery is
more strikingly reminiscent of Plato (and of Holderlin) but human nature is
conceived as an organic unity. The 'Ieichtes Band' that ties the 'atherisches
\Vesen' to the Earth 'durch einen magischen Zauber allen Versuchen es zu
zerreiflen widersteht, denn es ist ganz in sein Wesen verschlungen' (see below,
pp. 506-7, for a full translation of both passages in context).
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE lSI

family circle as long as the Greek spirit lived. She brought the
child up on the fresh milk of pure feelings (Empfindungen) and
adorned the 'impenetrable veil that hides the Godhead from our
gaze with the blossoms of free and beautiful fancy' so that the
child saw it as peopled with 'living pictures from which he carried
forward the great ideals of his own heart with all the power [Fiille]
of his higher and more beautiful feelings'. She never lost her
authority over her young friend because it was founded on love,
'and his own conscience punished any slighting of her dignity'.
Probably it is the fall of Alcibiades rather than the trial of Socrates
that Hegel has in mind here, for he did not himself hold Socrates
guilty of slighting the dignity of the Gods.
This genius, he concludes sadly, is known to us now only in
fragments and by hearsay:
We are permitted to gaze in love and wonder at the surviving copies
of his form which awake in us only a sorrowful longing for the original
-He is the beautiful youth, whom we love even in his caprice, followed
by the whole company of the graces, and with them the balsam-breath
of nature, the soul, inspired by them <- >he sucked every flower and
is fled from the world.

I find it hard to understand how anyone who has studied the pages
that close with these words can say, as critics frequently do, that the
young Hegel shows few signs of real aesthetic sensibility. This
claim is usually supported by pointing out that his youthful
attempts at poetry are all very weak, and his Alpine diary of 1796
is very pedestrian; as if no one could rightfully lay claim to a sense
of beauty unless he was either a capable versifier, or was prepared
to say, like Elizabeth Bennet: 'What are men, to rocks and moun-
tains!'-a sentiment which Hegel would certainly never have been
tempted to express, and which Jane Austen's heroine was no longer
inclined to endorse when she stood in the park at Pemberley. To
me, at least, Hegel's prose carries the unmistakable impression of
an ideal vision that was less intellectual than Schiller's, even if it
was not as full-bloodedly human as Goethe's.
Furthermore, although it is highly idealized and extremely one-
sided-the 'brazen fetters' of Mother Earth are so beautified that
slavery goes unmentioned, and no trace of the chthonic under-
world of Greek culture is visible-Hegel's vision rests on a sound
critical intuition with respect to his historical sources. His ideal
152 TDBINGEN 1788-1793

is the ideal of Athens in the golden age, the Athens of the

Pentekontaetia and of Pericles. The original features (nur einige
Ziige) of his picture come from Herodotus, Thucydides, and
Plato; and Hegel is well aware that all else is only 'hearsay' and
'copies', even if his inspiration comes also in part from later
authors like Theocritus. [ He does not deserve therefore to have
quoted against him the ponderous verdict of Wilamowitz upon
Goethe's tastes in classical art, for he seems already to have an
intuitive awareness that his ideal perished with Socrates. 2
On his last page Hegel began to pen a very embittered portrait
of the very different 'Genius of the nations' which the West has
bred:
His form is aged-beautiful he never was-but some slight touches
of manliness remain still faintly traceable in him-his father [i.e. the
historical tradition behind present society] is bowed-he dares neither
to look with joy at the world around him-nor to straighten himself
from a sense of his own life (Gefilhl seiner Selbst)-he is short sighted
and can see only little things one at a time <-) without courage, without
confidence in his own strength he hazards no bold throw, iron fetters
raw and
Here he broke off and struck out what he had written. There is
an indication in his manuscript that he had this contrast of 'the
young genius of a people-and that which is ageing' in mind
from the beginning. But he was right not to develop it here, for
he has in all essentials fulfilled the task that he set himself at the
beginning. 3 Between the spirit of youth with which his inquiry
properly terminates and the ageing spirit of his own time there lay
a career of nearly two thousand years that had first to be investi-
gated before the contrast between them could be rightly under-
stood and the moral correctly drawn, the way to rejuvenation found.
I According to Rosenkranz (p. I r) Hegel wrote 'eine sehr ausfUhrliche Prapara-
tion zum Theokrit' which was undated, but belonged probably to the TUbingen
period.
2 Cf. Peperzak, pp. S, 22. Peperzak seems to want (correctly) to deny that

Hegel was guilty of Goethe's errors of taste; and at the same time--again
correctly-to admit his enormous debt to some authorities-Winckelmann for
example-whom Wilamowitz condemned. The lectures on the Philosophy of Art
bear witness, years later, both to Hegel's careful study of \Vinckelman, and to
his profound awareness of the gulf between fifth-century Athens and the
Hellenistic age.
3 See Nohl, p. 6, for the original contrast, and the passage already quoted on
p. II9 above for his declared aims. Both passages are translated in context on
pp. 483-6 below.
 THE CHURCH VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 153

My conclusion therefore is that Hegel stopped because his

immediate task was complete. The 'Ttibingen fragment' is
improperly called a fragment, even though it may well be com-
posed of fragmentary discussions rather crudely stitched together.
It is the very rough first draft of a complete essay, with one
obvious lacuna of four pages in the manuscript as we have it, and
possibly, but not quite certainly, another one that may be of any
length up to eight pages. In any case nothing essential is lost. and
when the essay is considered in its organic integrity, it reveals
itself as a work of quite striking originality and depth. It is not
the work of a mere eclectic but of one who, as Hegel's leaving-
testimonial from the University quite certainly said, Philosophiae
multam operam impendit. 1
I Briefe, iv. 87. If there is anyone who still takes the reading nul/am seriously

he should heed first the witness of the biography in the Brockhaus Lexicon of
1827 which I take to depend on information supplied by Hegel himself (see
Doh., p. 395). If he desires further evidence he should then consider Betzen-
dorfer's report that there is no parallel for the nul/am reading in other testimonia
(Betzendorfer, p. 128 n. 63). Hegel's own testimonium shows that when the
authorities were somewhat less than happy about a student's perfom"lance, they
indicated the fact in his testimonial by using a double negative. For about his
performance in theology-which we know left much to be desired-we read:
'Studia theologica non neg/exit. Orationem sacram non sine studio elaboravit, in
recitanda non magnus orator visus.' Indeed, although I am scarcely ever tempted
to say with Richard Bentley, ratio atque res ipsa centum codicibus poti01·, I believe
this is a case where the dictum applies. r do not think that the authorities of the
Stift were fools, which is what in the light of the evidence we should have to
think if we accepted the reading nul/am.
 III. BERNE 1793-1796

Reason and Freedom

I. The background of Hegel's life in Berne

EARL y in October 1793 with several album leaves freshly
inscribed by his friends with suitably revolutionary sentiments,
Hegel set out for the 'land of divine freedom' where, like many
of the great figures of German literature and culture in his time,
he was to begin his career as a private tutor. I He had heard in
August through the landlord of the 'Golden Ox' at Stuttgart, of
an opening in the household of Hauptmann von Steiger at Berne,
and he wrote promptly on the 24th to Herr von Riitte in Berne
from whom the news had come, saying that he hoped to be able to
take the post and would write again when he was able to make
a definite commitment. His twenty-third birthday passed as he
waited, perhaps a little anxiously, for official permission to take a
post abroad, but on I I September he wrote again that he could
take the post as soon as his examinations were over if Hauptmann
von Steiger would send a letter for him to deliver to the Consistory
at Stuttgart. 2
I It would seem that he left Stuttgart on 10 Oct. 1793 (if! am right in assuming

that entries 22, 24a, 47a and 48 in his Stammbuch were all written at a farewell
party on 9 Oct.: see Briefe, iv. 45, 46, and 53). For the local tradition of a
'Hofmeisterzeit' in Switzerland see Hofimeister's note in Briefe, i. 433, or
Dok., p. 447; cf. also Rosenkranz, p. 42.
2 It is certain that at some point in the summer Hegel was asked if he would

like to have the post which Holderlin subsequently took with the von Kalbs in
Waltershausen. But it is not clear that he ever really had a choice between this
position and the position in Berne. Charlotte von Kalb asked for Schiller's help
as early as 28 May 1793 (GSA, vii. 440). Schiller presumably sought first for a
suitable candidate in lena; and not finding one, asked the advice of Staudlin.
Staudlin probably recommended Hegel first (Holderlin had still to persuade his
mother to let him follow a career outside the Church). But Holderlin himself
told Staudlin that Hegel was committed to the von Steigers; and on 20 Sept.
1793 Staudlin infonned Schiller of this, and recommended Holderlin (GSA, vii.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 155
Hegel was glad enough, no doubt, to escape from the clutches
of the 'visible Church' in Wlirttemberg at last-though the
Consistory made it a condition of his going 'that he exercise him-
self diligently in preaching, in which he is very deficient'. He was
also obligated to return if called upon, and 'not to neglect the
study of theology', reporting the progress of his studies to the
Consistory from time to time. 1 Until he received this formal
release from his obligations as a stipendiary of the Stift, he probably
suffered like Holderlin from the nightmarish fear that the Con-
sistory would make him a curate somewhere under the stern eye of
an older minister. 2 But he was not too sanguine about the post with
the von Steigers even before he took it-in his very first letter he
complained politely but firmly that the salary was too 10w3-and
his three years in Switzerland were not destined to be happy ones.
The account of Hegel's life in Switzerland that has become
traditional is rather overdrawn in some respects, however. The
von Steigers were an old patrician family of Berne, with a country
estate at Tschugg near Erlach, where they lived during the
summer. The young bourgeois scholar lived with them on terms
that were rather easier and more familiar than one might have
expected. But loneliness was an inevitable occupational curse
of the Hofmeister, typically a young man fresh from the company
of his peers at the University, finding himself suddenly without
peers, since his education set him apart from the other servants
and his position was never quite that of a member of the family.
Even Holderlin, who had certainly no grounds for complaint about
his treatment at the hands of the von Kalbs, and whose letters are full
of their praises, remarks rather wryly in the middle of an enthusi-
astic description of his situation for the benefit of his grandmother:
'1 live indeed pretty much alone, but I find this quite favour-
able for the development [Bildung] of the spirit and the heart.'4
467). Holderlin does write later as if Hegel might have chosen the von Kalbs
(see Briefe, i. 9); but since both of them seem to have believed at the time that
the post waH in the 'Jena region' I find this hard to credit. (For Hegel's letters to
von RUtte see Briefe, i. 4-6.)
1 Briefe, iv. 83 (Consistory records for 20 Sept. 1793).

2 See Holderlin's letter to his mother about the end of Aug. 1793 (Beck,

Letter 64, GSA, vi. 91); compare also his letters to Neuffer and Ebel in 1795:
GSA, vi. 183 and 186,.
3 Briefe, i. 5: cf. the report of v. RUtte to v. Steigel' quoted by Hoffmeister,
ibid. p. 433.
4 Beck, Letter 74, GSA, vi. 107. For the necessary revision of the traditional
 BERNE 1793-1796

In Hegel's letters we hear almost nothing of his personal

circumstances, though I suppose we should know more about
them if his letters to his sister had survived, as so many of Holder-
lin's to his mother and sister have. The duties of a Hofmeister were
not enormously onerous, and we cannot doubt that as a keen
student of Rousseau's Emile Hegel approached his task with a
certain enthusiasm. For the balance of his time he was free to do
as he would, but there was not very much that he could do,
except read, think, and write, so it was fortunate that, on the whole,
these occupations pleased him. I He chafed against his life and was
dissatisfied with himself, however, especially when he received
letters from Schelling about his first publications, and from
Holderlin after the latter went to Jena, where Fichte was lecturing
(along with Schiller) and the whole culture of Germany had for the
moment a living and visible focus. Hegel complained in his replies
that he could not do anything serious because his time was so
broken up and he needed books. 2 Actually he had the use of quite
a good library and one which suited him very well, even if it did
not contain the current works that Schelling and Holderlin were
excited about; and he was quite astonishingly busy about his own
concerns. Even he could not pretend that he was idle; and if he
seemed to himself, as he obviously did, to be getting nowhere in
comparison with his friends, that was perhaps more because his
aims were so ambitious that he often despaired of their achieve-
ment, than because his other commitments stood in the way. He
followed events in France with close attention and interest, and it
must have seemed to him often, that while everyone and everything
in the world was on the move, he was merely dreaming the time
away in his quiet backwater. His dreams were important enough,
picture of Hegel's relations with the family of von Steiger see Hans Strahm,
'Aus Hegels Berner Zeit', Archiv. fur Geschichte der Philosophie, xli (1932),
5 1 4-33.
I Hegel was too sociable a creature to remain for ever in his study, however.

Thus we hear of one family circle in Berne, where he was a welcome guest for
cards and music in the evenings. They kept up a correspondence with him for
a time after he went to Frankfurt, and they used to sing Schiller's 'Ode to Joy'
in his memory (Rosenkranz, p. 43; Briefe, i. 57). (This association, like all of
Hegel's subsequent connections in Frankfurt-as far as these can be traced-
has strong overtones of Freemasonry. See D'Hondt, p. 241.)
2 Briefe, i. 11, 17; it is worth remembering that the letters discovered by Strahm
which show that Hegel was on a friendly, nearly familial footing with the von
Steigers, also provide some evidence to bear out his complaint that his time was
much broken in upon (Letter 12, 9 July 1795: Briefe, i. 26).
 REASON AND FREEDOM 157
at least in his own eyes, but he felt he ought to be contributing
something more concrete to what Schelling spoke of as the
'revolution that will be made by philosophy'. I
A note of political urgency is evident even in the earliest frag-
ments of the Berne period. In part the change of emphasis is a
result of circumstances. In Hegel's fundamentally Hellenic ideal
of a Volksleben in which all human capacities were fully, freely,
and harmoniously expressed, artistic and religious spontaneity
always went hand in hand with political freedom. In Berne he was
in a position to study a different type of 'constitution' and he took
full advantage of it. But the natural development of his reflections
on religion also led him to ponder the problems of political
revolution and the destruction of class distinctions. His fundamental
concern, we must remember, was not metaphysical but moral.
He was not concerned with the nature of God, but with the nature
of man. Rdigion was for him, as for Lessing, the great instrument
of Providence by which human nature is rightly developed and
truly revealed. Thus Haering's perfectly correct insistence that
he was a Volkserzieher does not really conflict with Lukacs's
portrait of him as a kind of proto-Marx. It is in and through
political action that man realizes and displays the power of
Vernullft which it is the providential function of religion to develop.
In Greece Hegel saw the ideal union of constitution and religion
for the achievement of reason and freedom; in his own society he
saw rather an unnatural alliance of throne and altar for the main-
tenance of despotic authority. He had to understand, and ultimately
to make others understand, how this corrupt state of things had
come about, in order to discover the way toward a better condition
of life as a whole.
The library at Tschugg contained a number of books that were
admirably adapted to Hegel's interests. 2 He found there Gibbon,
1 Briefe, i. 21; cf. ibid. 23, 28. Hegel's sarcastic comment in later years that
Schelling had conducted his own education in public (Rosenkranz, p. 45) may
partially reflect a feeling that he actually had at this time. But if this was the case
we must view the remark as a backlash from his own feelings of inferiority and
frustration. It should not lead us to believe that Hegel consciously regarded all
of his undertakings in this period as being merely part of a programme of self-
education. He knew very well how much he had to learn and to master if he was
to fulfil his self-appointed task-he had known since he was fifteen (Doh., p. 37).
But he certainly aimed to set the results and products of his own education
before the public as soon as possible. He did not preserve his manuscripts only
as a kind of philosophical journal. Z See Hans Strahm, pp. 526-32.
 BERNE 1793-1796

Hume's History of England, Montesquieu, Raynal's Histoire des

deux Indes and Schiller's newly published History of the Thirty
Years' War; a fair number of the extracts from various historical
studies printed by Rosenkranz most probably belong, as Rosen-
kranz himself believed, to the Berne period. I Hegel also studied
the constitution and finances of the canton of Berne itself and ob-
served the political processes of the 'land of divine freedom' with
a rather sardonic, and perhaps not quite unprejudiced eye. To
Schelling in April I795 he wrote:
My delay in answering is due partly to my having much to do,
partly to the distractions occasioned by the political festivals that have
been celebrated here. Every 10 years the 'sovereign' council is reconsti-
tuted and about 90 members retire. How humanely [menschlich] it is
all done, how all the intrigues of cousinage and nepotism in princely
courts are as nothing to the combinations that are formed here, I just
cannot describe to you. The father names his son or the son-in-law
who made the best marriage settlement and so on. To gain a real
understanding of an aristocratic constitution, one must have spent a
winter like this one here, before the Easter when the council is reconsti-
tuted. 2
The results of his studies and observations, Hegel largely
incorporated in the introduction and notes to a translation of
J. J. Cart's Lettres confidentielles, which he published a year after
he moved to Frankfurt, and which was thus his first actual venture
into print. The book was published anonymously, and the author
was wrongly stated to be already dead on the title-page in I798.
Also, for a mixture of reasons including fear of the censor's eye,
some letters were omitted from this protest against the tyrannical
oppression by the Berne aristocracy of part of the 'pays de Vaud'
which fell within their domain. Some notion of the polemical
I Rosenkranz's dating of Hegel's manuscripts is not to be relied on, except

where he indicates that Hegel himself put the date on the sheet. He has a general
tendency to date things too early. This may be the reason why Hoffmeister chose
to put these fragments in the Frankfurt period (Doh., pp. 257-17). It seems
likely in the light of their content that many of them may belong to the last year
of Hegel's residence in Berne, but it would be foolish to put too much weight
on this argument. In reconstructing the genesis of Hegel's thought we must
rely first on the manuscripts that we still possess and can date by objective
criteria. Only after this has been done can we hope to place these fragments in
the most plausible context-and we must always recognize that the most
plausible context may still, in fact, not be the right one. (See further, p. 232 nn. 3
and 4; p. 271 n. 2; p. 417 n. 3; and p. 418 nn. 1 and 2.)
2 Briefe, i. 23.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 159

tone of the book can be gathered from the title-page itself, which
reads: Confidential Letters I concerning the former Constitutional /
Relation of the Wadtland (Pays de Vaud) I to the State of Berne. /
A complete Exposition of the earlier Oligarchy of the Berne Nobility
[des Standes Berne] I Translated from the French of a deceased
Swiss author I and supplied with Notes.! The fundamental claim,
of course, was that the constitutional freedom which had earlier
existed had now been destroyed. Doubtless Hegel felt that this was
an apt verdict on the government of Berne itself. It probably gave
him no little pleasure to prepare his little bombshell for the press,
when he had at last escaped to the bourgeois society of Frankfurt,
and found himself again in the company of Holderlin.
Even the Swiss landscape failed to move him as he expected
that it would. We hear of two journeys in this period. In May
1795 he went to Geneva, but we have no record of his impressions
of the birthplace of his 'hero' Jean-Jacques. Then in July 1796
he set out on a walking-tour in the Alps with three Saxons, all of
them tutors like himself, for company.2 On this tour he kept a
very detailed journal-the writing of which must sometimes have
kept him out of bed when he was very weary from a hard day's
walking that usually began at sunrise. As a boy he had read
Meiners's Journeys in Switzerland with considerable enthusiasm,
and he was obviously delighted to be seeing the sights that
Meiners had described, and even meeting the very guides who
had accompanied him. So he had some very definite notions about
what to see and what sensations to expect; but generally speaking
the sights did not come up to his expectations and the sensations
did not materialize. The Jungfrau was just a mountain, and the
glaciers were only muddy masses of ice. He found it more interest-
ing to learn from the peasants about cheese-making and to make

I Vertrauliche Briefe fiber das Vormalige staatsrechtliche Verhiiltnis des Wadt-

landes (Pays de Vaud) zur Stadt Bern (Frankfurt, 1798). The translation was
published anonymously and is only known to be the work of Hegel because it
was listed under his name in Meusel's Lexicon of German Writers in 1805. It
remained unknown to Rosenkranz and was only rediscovered by H. Falkenheim
in 1909. (See Doh., pp. 247-57 and 457-65, for the text of Hegel's introduction
and notes, and p. 529 below for further details. Hegel's aims and attitudes
in this, his first publication, are discussed below in Chapter V, pp. 418-27.)
2 Hegel's journal for this later journey was printed by Rosenkranz (pp. 470-
90) and reprinted by Hoffmeister (Dok., pp. 221-44); the manuscript is lost. The
'pass' through which we know of the earlier journey was first printed by
Hoffmeister (Doh., p. 447) and is now most readily found in Briefe, iv. 88.
 160 BERNE 1793-1796

notes on German-Swiss dialects. Only the mountain streams and

waterfalls really stirred his emotions. Like Heracleitus, he found in
their restless permanence an appropriate symbol of the €V KaL 1Tav:
Through a narrow rock-cleft the water is forced from above, then it
falls straight downwards in spreading waves; waves which draw the
gaze of the spectator ever downward but which he still cannot fix or
follow, for their shape and form breaks up at every instant, it is forced
into a new one at every moment, and in this fall it ahvays looks the same,
and yet at the same time one sees that it is not the same. I
Hegel insisted however that this natural image of life was
beyond the compass of human art, whether verbal or graphic:
'Even in the best pictures the most fascinating, the most essential
thing in a spectacle [Schauspiel] of this sort is lacking: the eternal
life, the powerful mobility in it.'2 Art, and the aesthetic sense
generally, was for Hegel an avenue through which we are able to
explore the whole range of human experience. Thus there was
nothing in the 'formless masses' of a mountain landscape that
appealed to his eye or his imagination; and for Vernunft the
permanence of the mountains in their 'eternal death' offered only
the idea of ineluctable fact: 'It is so.' But he could readily appreciate,
and enter into the consciousness of, those who lived against this
changeless background. He sets the stoical fatalism of those who
live at the mercy of flood and avalanche in sharp contrast with the
self-complacent optimism of the rational theologians, the town
dwellers who tried to make out that everything in nature was
somehow fitted and designed for man's use and enjoyment, and
believed that if anyone denied this he was somehow robbing God
of his honour. The blind might and the indifferent endurance
of natural forces should not be thus disguised to flatter our vanity-
the Stolz 'that is characteristic of our age'; but neither is it properly
an occasion for feelings of sublime awe and exultation. 3
I Dok., p. 231. If we may trust Rosenkranz's editing the underlining both in

this and in the following passage comes from Hegel's own manuscript.
2 Ibid., pp. 231-2. He also remarks (p. 231): 'eine Beschreibung kann so

wenig als ein Gemalde nur einigermassen die Selbstansicht ersetzen'.

3 Ibid., pp. 234-5. I do not think it is fair to accuse Hegel of being without
aesthetic sensibility because his philosophical commitments caused him to set
a low value on certain sensations whose existence he nevertheless recognized.
It would certainly have been difficult, if not impossible, for him to develop the
kind of sensibility associated with an aesthetics of 'significant form'. At this
level the only art that he really appreciated was music-because here the form
is overtly dynamic. Art was only 'significant' for him as an expression of human
 REASON AND FREEDOM 161

The one thing which, by reason of its human associations, Hegel

was doubtless prepared to be exalted by, was Tell's Chapel. But
it proved to be a disappointment too: 'It seemed to be fresh-
painted, and had not, as I expected, anything worthy of reverence
about it by reason of its age and simplicity.'! In short nothing
was right in Switzerland; the 'Devil's Bridge', over another of the
torrents that he found so impressive, provoked him to the comment
that where one might have expected the 'Kindersinn dieser
Hirtenvolker' to have produced a genuine myth, the 'Christian
imagination' had produced 'as always' only an 'absurd legend'.2

2. In search of a way forward

Before he left home, Hegel had managed to put on paper a descrip-
tion of the ideal toward which men ought to aim as rational and
social beings, and at the same time to demonstrate that the ideal
was no mere utopian dream, since the Greeks had actually realized
it. The problem that offered itself for his reflections when he
arrived in Berne was thus obvious enough. He had to find some
way in which his own society could regain possession of the ideal
or at least come closer to it. It was clear to him, as we shall soon
see, that there could be no simple return to the Greek situation.
Modern man could not go 'back to Nature'. He must somehow
go forward from the situation of civilized corruption that he was
now in; and to this end it was necessary to understand how the
corruption had come about.
Precisely because the ideal was not a utopian fancy but a
historic actuality, it was difficult to see how it could be 'regained',
or applied to the situation of another people in another time. Every
nature, and the meaning was always more important than the form for Hegel,
even though he stressed the indissoluble unity of form and content (compare
his remarks about Tell's chapel below). The insistence on meaning is a limit on
Hegel's aesthetic sensibility certainly-but it is a flaw to which one whose
aesthetics is primarily directed towards the appreciation of poetic communication
is typically liable. It is no more serious surely than the opposite excess of pure
formalism, to which theorists of graphic and visual art are peculiarly liable. To
say that it is less serious, would perhaps only be to exhibit my own bias. The
inescapable fact is that all or almost all of us suffer from limitations of sensibility
in one direction or the other. To say this is by no means the same as to say that
someone has no aesthetic sensibility at all (or very little).
I Ibid., p. 242.

2 Ibid., pp. 24!-2. Hegel actually makes this remark about an isolated crag
(ein isoliertes ungeheures Felsenstiick) in the immediate neighbourhood; but he
applies it to the Teufelsbriicke at the same time.
~ru~ N
 162 BERNE 1793-1796

people has its own individual way of life which has been deter-
mined for it by its own historical tradition, political constitution,
and religious experience. The educational system and methods of
a society necessarily reflect the total pattern of the way of life of
which they are a part; and no would-be Volkserzieher can afford
to disregard the accepted conception of the teacher's place in his
society.
But then if a society has become corrupt, and in the process
the conception of education itself has been falsified and the very
means and prerequisites of natural education themselves destroyed,
how can an educational reformer go to work? This is the focal
problem around which all of the early Berne fragments revolve,
and the Life of Jesus represents Hegel's first decided attempt at a
solution to the problem. Once we recognize this focus point it is
easy to understand the 'shift of emphasis' that is apparent in these
fragments as compared with the so-called 'Tiibingen fragment'.
In the earlier essay it is whole patterns of social life and organi-
zation that are contrasted, whereas now it is the typical individual
teachers of the society who occupy the limelight-Socrates, Jesus,
and Professor G. C. StorrI-and the fundamental topic is the
relation between doctrine and life, theory and practice in different
societies.
In what is quite possibly the earliest of the fragments written
at Berne-the little piece beginning AuJ3er dem miindlichen Unter-
richt which has attracted attention hitherto only because of a quite
pointed contrast of Jesus with Socrates that was added some time
later 2-the essential problem is put squarely before us. The only
I The author of the new compendium, whose publication is at last going to put

contemporary society on the right track, remains anonymous in Hegel's manu-

scripts (e.g. Nohl, pp. 60, 360) but I do not think I have mistaken his identity.
Storr's Doctrinae Christianae pars theoretica e sacris litteris repetita was published
in 1793. Hegel doubtless heard a great deal about the blessings that would
descend upon the world with its arrival in the lectures that he attended between
1790 and 1792. (But we should not forget that the compendium Hegel had
himself used and studied most was that of Sartorius. Sandberger has argued
convincingly that one of his earliest comments on compendia-the comparison
between what is emphasized in 'all the compendia' and what is 'taught nowa-
days', Nohl, p. 356, compare also pp. 43-4--is based on the contrast between
the book of Sartorius and the teaching of Storr. See Brecht and Sandberger,
p. 73. Wherever Hegel refers to 'compendia' in the plural he is probably thinking
primarily of Sartorius.)
2 The order in which a particular set of short fragments were written is not
usually of any particular importance as long as we are able, as we are here, to
arrange them in groups that are fairly closely contemporary. But we must take
 REASON AND FREEDOM 163

method of folk-education available to a contemporary reformer is

the writing of a book. This is like mounting an invisible pulpit,
and the invisibility increases the element of distance and im-
personality that is already implicit in the relation of the pulpit
orator to his congregation. The invisible preacher is tempted to
say things about man in general or society in general, things that
he would never want to say to his neighbour or about his face-to-
face society; and people are willing to hear things said about 'men'
which they would never suffer to be said about themselves or their
friends personally. Even in the case of the visible pulpit, the
typical institution of the Judaic tradition, this corruption of con-
sciousness has already begun, and no teacher in the society can
altogether escape it; even Jesus, who taught, like Socrates, by
personal example and face-to-face communication, spoke of his
people as a 'generation of vipers' -a locution which was UIl-
thinkable in the everyday converse of citizens that Socrates engaged
1Il.
Recognizing the corruption of his society Jesus sought to
separate himself and his followers from it. Thus he became
consciously and deliberately a private teacher. Even in this, how-
ever, he had to conform to the spirit of the wider society: his
isolated group had to know themselves as the Twelve, the 'chosen'
from among the Chosen People. While Socrates, on the other hand,
care to keep fragments which are objectively distinguishable distinct, or we may
find ourselves making invalid assumptions. Thus in an article which explicitly
sets out to refine upon the pioneer work of Nohl by the application of statistical
canons, Dr. SchUler classifies Man lehrt unsrer Kinder (Nohl, pp. 359-60) as the
earliest of the Berne fragments on the grounds, already noted by Nohl, that the
first eleven lines (as printed) are written in Hegel's earlier script. Next after this
she places Auj3er dem miindlichen Unterricht (Nohl, pp. 30-5). This will not do
because it conceals several problems and may lead to mistakes.
The fragment properly referred to as Man lehrt unsrer Kinder is just the first
eleven lines indicated by Nohl. There is no continuous argument linking this
with Nicht zu leugnen sind which Hegel added later. And again, what is referred
to as Auj3er dem miindlichen Unterricht is really two fragments, of which the
second-which begins Christus hatte zw6lj Apostel (Nohl, pp. 32-s)-may have
been written quite some time after the first.
I do not mean that a properly critical editor must treat every distinguishable
fresh beginning as a new fragment-though it would be valuable if clearly
distinguishable breaks in the continuity of the writing were indicated. Where it
is clear that Hegel himself meant to continue from the point where he left off,
so to speak, it would be foolish to treat his train of thought as a collection of
fragmentary reflections. But smaller fragments which have not yet definitely
received their place in a larger design (such as Religion ist eine) must be kept
distinct.
 BERNE 1793-1796

did not separate himself in any way from the life and affairs of his
time and his pupils were of all kinds and gave up nothing in order
to become his followers. All that he did for them was to help them
to develop themselves as distinct individuals, everyone with his
own gifts, purposes, and duties, all quite different both from
one another and from Socrates himself, and all engaged to the
full in the active life of their society.
In Greek society a parallel to Jesus is offered not by Socrates
but by Diogenes,I and Hegel admits that by ascetically establish-
ing his independence of all normal social ties and relations Diogenes
'earned a kind of right to be called a great man'. But the contrast,
which he does not himself draw, is an obvious one. Diogenes is
properly just a limiting case in the Greek pattern; asceticism is
simply one way, his way, of establishing his autonomous indi-
viduality. Eccentrics of this kind exist everywhere-whereas the
rebellion of Jesus was a justified rebellion against a society that was
really corrupt.
At this point Hegel for the first time comments on Roman
society as a distinct entity.2 Rome had no teachers of human
rational autonomy. In Rome there were only citizens, not men.
The subjectivity of virtue was ignored and the only standard
recognized was the standard of public law. Already here we can
see the shadow of Hegel's mature conception of the Roman empire
as a society of pure legal right and authority.3

I It is not true, as Haering claims (i. 132), that Hegel offers Socrates and Jesus
as examples of individuals who set themselves apart from their society. One of
the main contrasts between Socrates and Jesus and between their societies lies
in the fact that Socrates did not set himself apart from his society because he did
not have to do so (as Diogenes felt he had to) in order to be an autonomous
individual.
2 There is one reference to Roman society in his notes at Tlibingen-in

InzvieJern ist Religion where he remarks on 'Piety among the Greeks and
Romans-Romans and Greeks in their fatherland, Cato embraced his father-
land wholly and his fatherland fulfilled his whole soul'. In other words Romans
and Greeks alike recognized their city as what Hegel later called their 'ethical
substance'. This passage is quite consistent with the present one, though the
distinction here made between Rome and Athens must be taken to imply that the
society of Cato had not developed to 'perfection' like that of Socrates. Probably
Hegel thought of Lycurgan Sparta in much the same way.
3 By the time he wrote Jetzt braucht die Menge, less than a year later, Hegel
had come very close to his mature conception. Even in the earlier passage men-
tioned in the preceding note there are signs that he already clearly distinguished
Republican Rome (as an 'ethical substance') from the universal society of the
Empire. For his remark about Cato is flanked on one side by a reference to
 REASON AND FREEDOM 165
Thus the proposition is proved, 'the mode of instruction must
always be directed in accordance with the spirit [Genie] and tone
that is established among the people'; and the problem is thereby
raised of how one can reform a society where the established
spirit and tone is corrupt. To exhibit the corruption in accordance
with its own spirit is easy. Just as Jesus could cry out against the
'generation of vipers', so Hegel could preach sermons against
sermons and preachers, and write a compendium against com-
pendiums. But he recognized that it was not just useless to do this;
it was positively harmful. The corruption of moral consciousness
and the useless emptiness of moral education are themes that run
through all of the fragments of this period; but having once said
that it was wrong to declaim abstractly against human vices, Hegel
could see the folly of declaiming abstractly against that vice. We
can be quite sure that, just as he struck out the last lines of
Religion ist eine, so he would never have published any of his
diatribes against the Church and the seminaries unless he could
find a context in which they served some positive purpose.
Quite clearly it was necessary for a corrupt society to understand
the state that it was in, and the reasons and stages through which
it had come to be in that state. All societies, Hegel believed, pass
through a cycle of development like that of the individual in which
the stages of childhood, maturity, and old age are distinguishable;
and just as a mature man or an old one bears with him always some
traces of his childhood, so also a society bears always traces of its
childhood, particularly in the sphere of religious experience-for
religion is peculiarly associated with the 'childhood' of a people.
The mature society, like the mature man, is governed by Vernunft,
which makes the moral character and purpose of religion ever more
explicit, but at the same time destroys its power over our imagi-
nation. vVe feel this loss in a sentimental way but it remains
inevitable. If peculiar responsibility for religion has been given to a
particular class of the people, however, this necessary development
cannot take place normally. Religion becomes then an instrument
by which the governing class strives to keep the mass of the people
in a state of childish dependence. Thus the establishment of the

IVIendelssohn's Jerusalem ('According to the teachings of the Rabbis, all punish-

ments, in so far as they were purely national, must cease to be just with the
destruction of the Temple'), and on the other by the comment: 'Cosmopolitan-
ism is only for separate individuals [einzelne].'
166 BERNE 1793-1796

priesthood as a public authority is the point at which things go

wrong and corruption sets in. I
In this whole process as it took place in the history of Germany,
the spiritual content and purposes of Christianity were irrelevant.
Christianity originated in a private rebellion against an authori-
tarian society, but even in its origin it could not avoid being con-
taminated by the spirit of authority. The original relation of the
Twelve to the Master was necessarily perpetuated in the spreading
of the faith, and became fundamental in the structure of Christianity
as a public religion; it gave rise to heresy-hunting, crusades, and
finally to a situation where the ministers of the Son of Man and the
Prince of Peace serve as chaplains with armies and on slave ships.
The original message of Jesus concerning a kingdom that is 'not of
this world' had to be taken to refer to another life in a quite
different world; for the doctrines of absolute community and perfect
humility or charity ('selling one's goods' and 'turning the other
cheek', etc.) are quite inconsistent with such fundamental principles
of civil life as the rights of private ownership and self defence.2,
The Protestant Reformation coincided, it would seem, with the
passage of the German Volk from childhood to maturity.3 The
Reformers recognized the ideals of Vernunft in Christianity. But
they could not break from the fundamental conception of priestly
authority. They established a moral police force, and thereby all
of their true insights were corrupted. The realities of religious
experience-penitence, conversion, betterment-were reduced to
words and outward forms; and religious knowledge became a
game of Verstand with verbal counters, while in practical life
hypocritical humility and spiritual conceit usurped the places of
energy, self-confidence, and self-respect. 4
I This paragraph summarizes the main line of thought in Die Staatsverfassungen

(Nohl, pp. 36-9). But other contemporary fragments could also be adduced in
support, and I am passing over much that is not new in this fragment. My aim
is to present a sort of logical skeleton of the thought progression that underlies
the fragments, taking them as far as possible in the order in which they were
written.
2 Cf. Wie wenig die objektive Religion (Nohl, pp. 39-42,) in which much of the

thought of Nicht zu leugnen sind (Noh!, pp. 359-360) reappears, but the passion-
ate violence of the earlier fragment is somewhat tempered. (In following Nohl's
order here I do not mean to commit myself to the view he appears to have held
that these fragments are the remains of what was originally a continuous
manuscript.)
3 Cf. Nohl, p. 38 where the Ritterzeit is clearly identified as the kindliche Geist
of contemporary Germany. 4 See offentliche Gewalt (Nohl, pp. 42.-4).
 REASON AND FREEDOM
Thus Hegel arrived again at the problem from which he started:
the contrast between moral education in fifth-century Athens and
eighteenth-century Germany. But now the contrast had its place
as part of the objective diagnosis of a diseased society compared
with a healthy one. The fundamental premiss of the Christian
religion is that this life is only a preparation for life in another
world. Yet we have only to compare the description of Socrates'
last day in the Phaedo with the deathbed of a respectable Lutheran
burgher to see how our alienation from all natural enjoyment of
life in this world has destroyed our ability to face death, and made
death itself the spectral skeleton of an empty life instead of a
friendly spirit,! Whereas Socrates, as Hegel pointed out earlier,
spoke with his disciples before his death about the immortality of the
soul, as a Greek speaks to reason [Vernunft] and to fancy [both to-
gether]-he spoke so vividly [lebendig], he brought this hope so close,
so convincingly before them in its whole essence, <and) they had been
assembling the premisses for this postulate in their whole lives. That
so much should be given to us as to raise this hope to a certainty
contradicts human nature and the capacity of man's spirit-but he
enlivened it to such a point-as the human spirit forgetting its mortal
companion [i.e. the body] can become exalted-even if it should come
to pass that he rose as a spirit from his grave, and brought us greeting
from the Avenging Goddess [the reference is to Schiller's ode 'Resigna-
tion', 64-5, but Hegel is not sure whether he wants to use it, for he
proceeds to write down several alternative continuations for his sentence]
-that he should give us more to hear than the tables of Moses and the
oracles of the prophets which we have in our hearts-that even if this
were to have been against the laws of human nature-he would not
have thought it necessary to confirm it through resurrection-only in
poor spirits, who have not the premisses of this hope alive in themselves,
i.e. the ideal [Idee] of virtue and of the supreme good, is the hope of
immortality itself also weak. 2
In discussing the development of societies Hegel remarked
explicitly that the gradual growth of Vernunft involved the loss
of many feelings and sensations associated with the kindlich stage
I So kann in einem Staate (Nohl, pp. 44-5) and (Jber den Unterschied der Szene

des Todes (Nohl, pp. 45-7), which was probably a quite independent meditation
rather than the next stage in a continuous essay.
2 Christus hatte zw6lj Apostel, Nohl, p. 34. The complexities of the last
sentence arise from Hegel's wish to bring together the three religions and their
contrasting moulds or sources-Greek myth, Hebrew Law, and Christian
miracle-all at once.
168 BERNE 1793-1796
of culture, and said further that this was not something to be
lamented. In another place, discussing methods of education, he
comments that just as children learn more by example than from
correction, so a people coming to manhood will not endure a
religion that keeps them in leading-reins. Children, he goes on,
are led by means of love and fear, while grown men are led by
Vernunft. Putting these two passages together, I we can success-
fully construe a note which is otherwise hard to reconcile with his
general conception of religion as the main educational instrument
in the history of mankind. In Nicht zu leugnen sind he waxes very
bitter about the claim that Christianity was the real agency of the
moral improvement produced by the Enlightenment:
The arts, the Enlightenment have bettered our morality, <and)
afterwards they say the Christian religion would have done this even if
philosophy had not discovered its fundamental principles for it .
. . . Where has a fortunate change in the pattern of scientific culture
ever been seen to be preceded by a change in religious concepts which
would then operate to produce it-has not rather the advance of the
sciences-the spirit of proof in the sciences always first drawn after it
enlightenment of theological concepts, and only indeed over the
strongest possible opposition of the supporters of these concepts?Z
The answers 'Nowhere' and 'Yes', which are rhetorically demanded
here, seem at first sight to be irreconcilable either with the role of
'Nurse' that was explicitly assigned to Greek religion in the
preceding Stuttgart essay, or with the important place which, in
spite of trenchant criticism, Hegel plainly allots to the Reforma-
tion in the immediately subsequent Berne fragments. We might
evade the problem by simply saying that Hegel obviously did not
have Greek religion in mind, or anything in mind except the
contrast between the claims of the Tlibingen theology professors
and the actual behaviour of Lutheran pastors; and that in writing
his rough notes he allowed himself to be carried away into a rather
wild generalization which he would never have wished to maintain
in more sober moments.
But reflection on the passages I have just referred to, and on the
relation asserted to exist between religion and Vernunft even in
ideal conditions, leads us rather to the view that the general
I Die Staatsverfassungen (Noh!, p. 37) and So kann in eillem Staat (Noh!,

P·45)·
2 Noh!, p. 360.
 REASON AND FREEDOM

principle laid down in this emotional outburst really is one that

Hegel fervently believed in, and that his conviction is what lies
behind his indignation. Religion as such has nothing to do with
clarification of concepts. Ideally its proper task is to reconcile man's
active nature with his reason, to keep all of his needs, feelings,
desires, and emotions in harmony with Vernunft and so to supply
the concrete experience out of which genuine Begriffe are abstracted.
The abstraction itself, the uncovering of the rational (moral)
essence of religion, is the work of mature Vernunft, the privilege
and responsibility of a tiny minority of sages. Even in the ideal
society they are opposed, as Socrates was, by defenders of religion;
the death of such a one is, so to speak, the final proof required in
his science. A healthy religion will always be favourable to the
advance of the sciences, for it aims at the enrichment of experience
in all directions. But theological concepts will be the last things
upon which the advance of reason takes effect. The Reformation
was an attempt to restore the spirit of religion to health which
failed because it accepted tht; principle of authority. The concepts
came afterwards and they were all falsified into a verbal mechanism,
a product of Verstand. In this situation religion was no longer
favourable to the advance of science at all: but also the only hope
of salvation now lay in the development of Vernunft through that
advance.
Despite the breakdown of society into classes, and the conse-
quent corruption both of politics and religion by a principle of
social authority other than that of Vernunft itself-or alternatively
despite the breakdown of society which resulted from that cor-
ruption-mankind had achieved maturity and enlightenment. In
France reason was laying claim to its rights in practice; in Germany
Lessing, Mendelssohn, Kant, and Fichte had rediscovered the
rational grounds and ends of religion itself.1 This then was the
gospel to be preached. Mature men can be guided by reason, even
I Fichte's Kl-itik aller Offenbarung (1792) and Mendelssohn's Jel-usalem (1783)

are explicitly mentioned in Hegel's earliest sketches (see Inwiefern ist Religion,
Nohl, p. 355)- The influence of Lessing's Nathan and Kant's essay 'On the
radical evil in human nature' (1792) is visible in Religion ist eine (see above,
Chapter II, pp. 141-3). Hegel may not have studied the rest of Kant's
Religion until after he had embarked upon his project-the first clearly identifi-
able references are in Es sollte eine schwere Aufgabe (Nohl, pp. 51-z-for the
parallels see Peperzak, p_ 50 n). Finally, Allison (p_ 193 n. 1) has pointed out
the close affinity between Hegel's 'Positivity' essay and Lessing's fragment on
'The Religion of Christ'.
 BERNE 1793-1796
though no one, not even a perfectly reasonable man, can escape
the contagion of his society. Nothing can restore to us the simple
faith of uncorrupted natural feelings, but reason can purify our
religious experience. I
Hegel's reflections on religion and society had now reached a
point where he felt able to make a plan in which all of his frag-
mentary essays could be incorporated, and by which his further
efforts could be guided. 2 In this short piece ex) Unter objektiver
Religion, which has tremendous significance for the development
of his thought over the next five years, Hegel uses the concept of
'objective religion' as his starting-point. By identifying this with the
practical aspect of 'theology', he manages to reaffirm his Socratic
heritage and commitments while at the same time plainly accepting
the modern quite un-Socratic position of the teacher in society.
The most important concern of the State is 'to make objective
religion subjective' (where 'subjective' religion means the active
presence and power of this theory as an ideal in men's lives and
actions). This is exactly the task assigned to the Church by Moses
Mendelssohn in his Jerusalem; and Hegel agrees at least that in
modern society it must be the function of 'religious institutions'. 3
But because of his Hellenic ideal of an organic community life
as the substantial bearer and sustainer of freedom and rationality
Hegel could not accept Mendelssohn's distinction of 'Church'
and 'State' and of the doctrine of 'separation of Church and State'
I That is the reason why, once the ideal has been described and the malady of

his society diagnosed, Hegel's thought and language become 'more solid, less
vague and pseudo-poetic' (Peperzak, p. 57 n.). It is not that he has only now
begun upon 'more properly philosophical studies'; rather it is because these
studies are now relevant. As Peperzak himself notes, Hegel does not cease to use
the older vocabulary whenever he has occasion to recur to the description of his
ideal. The thought and language that Peperzak calls 'plus solides', Hegel would
probably have called 'Mehr abstrakt'.
Z The plan, (a) Unter objektiver Religion (Nohl, pp. 48-50), is the last of the

first series of fragments. A complete translation will be found in the Appendix

to this volume (pp. 508-10 below).
3 Hegel himself uses Mendelssohn's word Anstalt. Mendelssohn's Jerusalem,
which appeared in 1783, is cited in Hegel's earliest notes for his project: see
Inwiefern ist Religion, Nohl, pp. 355-6. (The collocation of the excerpt from
Tennemann on the back of the sheet containing Christus hatte zw6!f Apostel is
interesting. It indicates that as a result of his reflections about the types of
Volkserzieher Hegel has come to feel that the whole notion of Volkserziehung by
direct individual action is a mistake. The essential vehicle of Volkserziehung is
the State and all of its institutions; and the would-be Volkserzieher must be
first and foremost a political theorist as Plato was. In this respect Socrates was
just as mistaken as Jesus.)
 REASON AND FREEDOM
that was consequent upon the sharp distinction that Mendelssohn
drew between them. He recognized that if social institutions are
to be distinguished as Mendelssohn distinguished Church and
State, in terms both of function and of method, then the guardian-
ship of morality as a whole, not just of this highest level where it
merges into rational religion, must rest with the 'Church'; the
'State', as the focus of external authority and force, could have
only legality, not morality as its aim and concern. But for Hegel
the politicali community was essentially a moral, not just a legal,
entity.! Like the Greeks he regarded all the institutions of life as
subordinate organs of the political community-the 7T6'\ts in
antiquity, the 'State' in the more complex world of civil relations
at the end of the eighteenth century. 'To make objective religion
subjective, must be the great concern of the State', therefore-and
religious freedom, freedom of conscience, must be seen as the
essential and fundamental expression of political freedom, the
living evidence of the moral character of society itself.
Here, however, I have anticipated the point that Hegel makes
in the fourth section of the plan. In the intervening third section
a contrast is drawn between the true moral spirit of religion, and
the false spirit of authoritarian or sectarian religion with its in-
sistence on formalities of personal allegiance and formal member-
ship. By making this distinction Hegel could remove all such
formal considerations from the moral purview of the State, and so
provide quite different grounds for just that freedom of religion,
and equality of all citizens before the law, which Mendelssohn's
doctrine of separation was designed to secure.
The common concern of both Church and State-or rather of
Religion and the Constitution-with the moral development of the
people forms the topic of section five. Religious education through
teaching and ceremonial is paralleled by political education
through the constitution and the 'spirit of the government [Geist
der Regierung],.

I This essential contrast between Hegel and Mendelssohn is well drawn by

Haering (i. 146 if.). But there is an equally essential agreement between them
regarding the fundamental character of rational freedom, which we must never
forget. Hegel did not just take over Mendelssohn's words and reject his spirit-
he reintegrated that spirit with its Hellenic sources. To put the point another
way, Hegel's ideal is related to that of the enlightened Jew Mendelssohn in
very much the same way that it is related to the ideal of the enlightened Jew
Jesus, and to Christianity as a 'private' religion.
 BERNE 1793-1796

Thus far the argument is statcd only in the broadest outline.

If Hegel wrote anything, subsequently, that was specifically
designed to develop it in detail, the manuscript has been lost.
The probability, however-which amounts in my mind at least
to a virtual certainty-is that he did not. He was only summing up
the position he had already reached. He may have intended for a
time to recast what he had already written, to suit this new
sequence of argument: but there are indications that hc soon
abandoned, or at least greatly simplified, this plan. I The following
section, the sixth or zeta in Hegel's numeration, is what he was
most immediately concerned about.
The plan for this section is worked out in detail, with sub-
sections and sub-subsections to the point where Hegel began to
have trouble in finding index letters that would indicate co-
ordination and subordination unambiguously.2 The main topic
is how far the Christian religion is qualified to perform the
function of developing morality in society. In its origin it was a
private religion, suited to a particular community at a particular
time, but it has since been modified considerably by the social
needs of men and by their prejudices. With respect to doctrine,
however, it meets the standards of practical reason fairly well, and
it has the outstanding advantage that its essential moral message is
I The margin of this 'schema' (see Nohl, p. 48 n.) contains a much simpler

schema as follows: 'A. Introduction. B. (a) Doctrines; (b) Traditions; (c)

Ceremonies; (d) Public Religion.' Nohl suggests plausibly enough that the
'A. I ' at the head of the first sheets of Religion ist eine may refer to this plan.
The subdivisions of 'B' correspond fairly well with the more complex articula-
tion of section 6 (zeta) in the full schema, and aiso with the plan announced in
the introduction to Wenn man von der Christlichen Religion (Nohl, p. 62). The
natural hypothesis therefore is that after writing Es soUte eine schwere Aufgabe
Hegel went back to his original schema and substituted a simpler plan in which
the first five sections were collapsed into one.
2 For some reason he avoids numerals, both Arabic and Roman, altogether.
His main sections are indicated by Greek letters. So when he wished to sub-
divide section zeta he turned naturally to the Latin alphabet. But then he found
it necessary to subdivide subsection (a) so he turned to the Greek alphabet
again. After using (a) and (fJ) however, he apparently began to worry about the
confusion of sub-heads with main heads, for he suddenly turned to the Hebrew
alphabet for his third subdivision. Then he was able to pass on at last to sub-
section (b), and when the problem of subheadings arose once more under
subsection (c) he needed only two, so he simply used (a) and (b) over again.
Thus, using numerals for his principal use of the Greek alphabet and capitals
for his principal use of the Latin alphabet, the formal organization of the schema
is as follows: Sections I, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, with section 6 subdivided as follows: A,
a, fJ, [y]; B; C, a, b.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 173
enshrined in concrete examples of virtuous action. But the great
theoretical statements of Christian morality-such as the Sermon
on the Mount-are peculiarly subject to misunderstanding and have
in fact been misunderstood.
The fact that Christianity is founded on a historical tradition is
a notable disadvantage. For the miraculous elements in the historical
account are bound to arouse some scepticism; and while this does
no harm in a private religion where adherence is entirely voluntary,
the inevitable existence of 'unbelievers' poses a serious problem for
a public religion. Also it is not properly adapted to the needs of the
imagination, as Greek religion was, being altogether too melancholy
and alien. This was a point already made in his earlier essay, and
Hegel probably meant to incorporate some of that discussion here.
There is virtually nothing good to be said for Christian cere-
monial. In the original 'private' religion of the primitive church,
the Eucharist was both an expression and an appropriate symbol
of the true spirit of love and brotherhood. But now it is only a
shibboleth for sectarian bigotry.
Finally Hegel makes two points, one very general, one specific,
about the 'other commands concerning the way of life'. First he
remarks on the withdrawal from public life which makes
Christianity essentially a private religion. Secondly he notes that
the communism of the primitive Church, which is not feasible in
a political community, has been replaced by the giving of alms
but in the process, the original spirit of almsgiving as an act of
private piety has been completely corrupted. Presumably he meant
to treat the degeneration of Christian communism into the formality
of the Sunday collection plate as somehow summing up all those
aspects of Christian moral doctrine that made it unsuitable as a
foundation for the folk-religion of a bourgeois society. The point
that the ideal of Christian communism is quite inconsistent with the
fundamental assumptions of biirgerliche Gesellschaft is one that he
had made in earlier fragments. I But he continued to meditate about
this aspect of primitive Christianity for some time, probably because
he was not sure how to reconcile the obvious egoistic tendencies
of 'civil society' with his ideal of the State as a moral organism.
Having made this plan, Hegel seems to have delayed some time
I See Nicht zu leugnen sind (Nohl, p. 360); the examples of Nathanael and

Diogenes in AuJ3er dem miindlichen Unterricht (Nohl, p. 31); and, most explicitly,
Wie wenig die objektive Religion (Nohl, p. 41).
174 BERNE 1793-1796

before proceeding with it. Apparently he began at about this

time to work over all of the notes that he had by him concerning
psychology and to read, or at least study reviews of, various works'
on the subject which had appeared since he took Flatt's course at
Tiibingen. 1 A plausible explanation for Hegel's voluntary post-
ponement of further work on his new-made plan is provided by
two related hypotheses which are to some extent directly supported
by the evidence. On the one hand Hegel probably felt unequal to
the task which he had now clearly defined for himself in his plan,
and was in the mood to procrastinate about it;2 and on the other
hand he may very well have felt that he must get clear about
individual psychology before he could solve his problem of
religious and social reformation. He remarks in one of his earlier
Berne fragments that the corruption of the spirit of Christianity
by the principle of authority had resulted in the replacing of
genuine religious experience by a kind of routine for the production
of certain states of mind and the substitution of psychology for
real theology in religious education. 3
I Almost certainly Hegel had been reading and making excerpts on philosophi-

cal psychology since he took Flatt's course in 1789. It is reasonable to assume

that almost all of the reading and studying of which the Psychologie of 1794 is a
record was done in the Stlft between 1790 and 1793. But there is no question
that the manuscript as we have it was written in 1794 (and after Unter objektiver
Religion)-see Miss Schiiler's categorical assertion in Hegel-Studien ii. 141.
The evidence for holding that the material was assembled in Tiibingen is given
in the following notes.
2 Hegel was much troubled in his first year at Berne by an inability to settle

firmly to work at anything-see especially his first letter to Schelling, 24 Dec.

1794, Briefe, i. II). In his last year at Tiibingen he had become involved in the
controversy in the Stift about the interpretation of the Critical Philosophy. At
Berne he pined for those discussions and bewailed his lack of the latest philosophi-
cal literature (see Briefe, i. II, 17). That he should have turned back to work
over his old notes and excerpts was natural enough in the circumstances; but
it was also a distraction from the long-pondered project on which he had begun
to work so ea-nestly as soon as he left Tiibingen. I assume that his attention
wandered intermittently from the Psychologie back to his religious concerns, and
that Es sollte eine schwere Aufgabe was written in this same period. If so, he had
good reason for remarking to Schelling that his activity was 'too heterogeneous'.
(The affinity between the reflections in the short essay on Lessing's correspond-
ence with his wife (Ich las neulich Lessings Briefwechsel, Jub. xx. 451-5), and
Hegel's general concern about the relation between abstract principles and
concrete behaviour in 1793 and 1794, seems to me to make 1794-the year of
'heterogeneous' activities-the most probable time for its composition. That it
belongs somewhere in the Tiibingen or the Berne period can hardly be doubted;
and the influence of Lessing during the early years at Berne was probably not
confined to the 'exoteric' Nathan--see p. 169 n. above.)
3 See offentliche Gewalt, Nohl, pp. 43-4.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 175

This reflection upon the education that he had himself received

would have provided Hegel with strong grounds for studying
psychology. But even without taking it into consideration we can
easily see why anyone faced with Hegel's problem about the
relation of an educational reformer to his time, and to its assump-
tions and methods, should feel that he ought to understand as
clearly as possible what was known or believed by the best qualified
of his contemporaries about human nature. It would seem that this
was all that Hegel meant to achieve in his Psychologie-which was
to all intents and purposes his first venture in purely theoretical
philosophy. There is no sign anywhere in his manuscripts at this
period that he meant to incorporate a systematic account of his
theory of human nature into an essay intended for publication.
The compilation that he made, which Hoffmeister published under
the imposing title 'Materials for a Philosophy of Subjective
Spirit', should rather be described more neutrally as 'Notes on
Psychology'.r There is no sign in it of the urgency of personal
conviction that we find in Hegel's sketches and fragments on
social topic8.
Flatt's course at Tlibingen in 1789 or 1790-together with the
notes he made from his reading during the Tlibingen period-
provided an organized body of notes from which he began. 2 But
he had been reading and excerpting from books on the subject
since he was a schoolboy of fifteen, and Hoffmeister has provided
an impressive list of parallels with the works of authors such as
Abel, Meiners, Zimmerman, and Feder whom we know he studied
in those early days. Some of the most obvious and explicit parallels
or references are to works that appeared after 1789-notably to
Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790) and Reinhold's Versuch einer
neuen Theorie des Vorstellungsvermogens (1791).3 What we have
I Reprinted in Doh., pp. 195-217. The lines of the text are numbered consecu-

tively in the margin, which considerably facilitates exact reference.

2 Henrich had discovered some sets of students' notes from one of Flatt's

courses (he does not say definitely which one) on the basis of which he assures
us that Hegel's Psychologie is 'in its middle section an excerpt from Flatt's class'
(Hegel-Studien, iii. 7o-r n.). See Chapter II, pp. 83-4 above.
3 For the Critique of Judgement see lines 696-703; for Reinhold's Versuch,
lines 58-60 with Hoffmeister's notes (Doh., pp. 452-3). Repetent Diez was an
early champion of Reinhold in the Stift, so Hegel may have studied the Versuch
at Tlibingen. (But at line 397 Hegel refers explicitly to a review of the Versuch
which appeared in 1793, and which he probably excerpted at Berne). Hegel
probably read J. Schulze's Erliiuterungen ilber Kants Kritik (1784) at Tlibingen-
though it is conceivable that he had excerpted it as early as 1787 or 1788 (for
 BERNE 1793-1796

before us must therefore be thought of as a mosaic composed by

Hegel himself from his excerpt collection. 1
Regarding the doctrines set forth in the Psychologie there is
perhaps only one point that deserves particular mention. The
basic articulation of the manuscript is in terms of mental faculties:
Empfindung and Phantasie are treated as the 'lower' cognitive
capacities, and Verstand and Vernunft as the 'higher' ones. The
influence of Kant upon the account of Empfindung is evident from
the basic division into 'outer' and 'inner' sense. The discussion
of Phantasie is quite un-Kantian, being filled with empirical
observations and details. But the account of Verstalld and Vernunft
and of the intermediate Vermogen zu urteilen is entirely Kantian
and is full of explicit references to the Critique of Pure Reason.
Vernunft is treated as a power that goes beyond sense experience
altogether, and not as a power by which all experience is integrated.
This Kantian opposition between Vernunft and sense experience
has appeared explicitly in some passages in the fragments already
examined. But in spite of it Hegel has always tended to regard
Vernunft as a faculty that only operates properly as a function of
completed integrated experience. There is no sign of a discussion
of this integrative power in the notes. Indeed Vernunft is not
even allotted a separate heading, but is discussed under the general
heading Verstand. 2
the influence of this book see Hoffmeister's notes, Dok., p. 451); and he was
almost certainly familiar with I. D. Mauchardt's Allgemeine Repertorium fur
empirische Psychologie (Nurnberg, vol. i, 1792) from the moment it began to
appear-if not sooner--since Mauchardt was a Repetent in the Stift until 1793
(Hegel asked Schelling to get J. G. Suskind to send him a review of this work at
Christmas 1794-Briefe, i. 13).
On the other hand, Hegel probably made the excerpt from a review (which
appeared in 1792) of C. C. E. Schmid's Empirische Psychologie (1791), at Berne
in 1794. Hoffmeister prints it as a Tubingen excerpt (Doh., pp. 172-4), but he is
almost certainly wrong (as he is in the case of the excerpt from Tennemann which
was written on the back of Christus hatte zwolf Apostel). No doubt his dating was
influenced by his view that the Psychologie was written at Tubingen. Actually
it is another example of Hegel's conning the reviews while he yearned for access
to the books themselves.
I It is even conceivable that Hegel's notes from Flatt's course were themselves

an 'excerpt' from the notes of Schelling or Holderlin on the Kant course of 1791.
(Schelling is the only one of the three friends who can be conclusively shown to
have attended Flatt's lectures on the Critical Philosophy-see Fuhrmans, i.
20 n.)
2 But the heading Verstand at line 539 should probably be regarded as short-

hand for Verstand (und Vernunft) in view of the way these two are linked both
in the introductory analysis (line 67, 'III Verstand und Vernunft: oberes
 REASON AND FREEDOM 177

The next group of three fragments which comes at the end of

Nohl's first section on 'Folk-religion and Christianity' seems. in
terms of handwriting, to have been contemporary with the last
pages of the Psychologie and with Hegel's first letters to Schelling
(24 December 1794 and late January I795). The two longer ones
are plainly successive attempts to carry out the programme laid
down in the sixth section of the schema Untel' objeJ~tiver Religion.
The sheets were originally numbered in separate series (1, 2, 3,
4 and 0:, (3, y. respectively) and the later version contains two
references back to parts of the earlier one, which Hegel presumably
meant to incorporate in any eventual fair copy. In the end, however,
he simply linked the second essay to the first by renumbering the
sheets 5. 6, 7. and laid them both aside. The third fragment is
briefer and more literally fragmentary, being apparently the second
of another series of sheets. In order of composition it may very
probably have fallen between the other two, though there is
scarcely enough of it to make a secure judgement upon this point
possible. I shall here deal with it after the other two, partly for
obvious reasons of convenience, and partly for reasons which will
appear in the course of the exposition.
The two essays Es sollte eine schwere Aufgabe and Wenn man
von der christlichen Religion are both essentially critical examina-
tions of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity with a view to
deciding how far it meets the requirements of a healthy folk-
religion. I Es sollte eine schwere Aufgabe is written strictly from
the point of view of Vernunftreligion. At the very beginning the
influence of Mendelssohn is apparent, as it was in the schema;
as the discussion proceeds the echoes of themes and doctrines in
Kant's Religion become plainer. In Wenn man von der christlichen
Religion, the influence of Mendelssohn and Kant is still strong.
but it has been digested, as it were, and Hegel is more typically
himself. Probably he went back to his schema and noted how it
could be summarized and simplified before he began this second
(Erkenntnisvermogen)') and in the first sentence of the section (line 540-1, 'Die
Gesetze des Verstundes und der Vernunft sind Gegenstande der Logilc'). In the
body of the following discussion the main division is between the Vermogen der
Begriffe (line 543) and the Vermogen zu urteilen (line 597); Verstand, Refiektie-
(rende Urteilskraft) , and (Vernunft) appear as particular faculties under the
latter heading.
I Nohl, pp. 50-69. In spite of his insistence that he has tried to distil the

essence of Christian tradition (Nohl, p. 61), Hegel's image of orthodox doctrine

probably derives largely from the compendium of Sartorius.
8243588 0
 BERNE 1793-1796

version. For it opens with a brief introduction at the end of which

the four heads of the main discussion are announced as (a)
Doctrines, (b) Traditions, (c) Ceremonies, (d) The Relation of
Religion to the State, or its 'public' character. r Once more, how-
ever, he did not get beyond the first topic in the body of the essay.
In both versions Christianity is fairly severely handled, and in
both Hegel's primary concern is to distinguish the message of the
man Jesus from the Gospel of the God Christ. But in the first
essay he seeks to focus attention on the message of Jesus, while in
the second he concentrates on the concept of 'faith in Christ'.
The two discussions do not overlap a great deal, and Hegel
probably meant to conflate them eventually. I shall therefore
attempt to do so here, following the hints in his discussion as far
as I can and picking up any loose ends afterwards.
The introduction to Wenn man von der christlichen Religion
emphasizes the need to identify the 'aim and essence' of Christianity
correctly, not in terms of what some learned professor says, because
at that level there is always controversy, but by reference to what
is generally believed and universally taught. We must not 'fall into
the error of those who give others the itch in order to have the
pleasure of scratching them', says Hegel, using for the first time
an image from Butler's Hudibras which obviously delighted him
very much, and which he himself had found, most probably, in
Lessing's Letters on Recent Literature (1759).2 The proper
rational purpose of religion, of course, is the strengthening of
Sittlichkeit by establishing the Idee of God as giver of the moral
law and guarantor of the highest good (i.e. the harmony of virtue
and happiness postulated by Kant). From this point of view a
human statesman or lawgiver can concern himself with the religion
of his society, though the most he can do usually is to see that the
traditional folk-religion is directed towards this truth and does not
decay into superstition. In societies where the constitution is
monarchic and there is a hierarchy of classes, however, there is a
danger that the traditional religion may become a reactionary
force, employed by the powerful to maintain their power. Then
proper development is arrested for centuries; and even the revo-

I Nohl, p. 62; cf. also p. 48 n.

2 Nohl, p. 6r; on the origin of the expression and Hegel's three subsequent
uses of it see Wolfgang Ritzel, 'Zur Herkunft eines Hegelschen Ausdrucks',
Hegel-Studien, ii. 278-8r.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 179

lutionary upheaval when it comes is likely to subside again without

getting to the root of the evil. The new insights are corrupted
through their being established with all the old authority. I
With this fairly broad hint of his views about the present state
of the Christian religion Hegel proceeds to his analysis. The
fundamental doctrine of Christianity, he says, is that the hope
of eternal blessedness is more important than anything else.
Christians therefore seek to 'please God' as the giver of eternal
blessedness. The Idee of blessedness agrees 'well enough in its
material aspect' with what Vernunft establishes;2 but the rational
conception of what is chiefly pleasing to God is quite different
from that of orthodox religion. Christianity demands 'faith in
Christ', while what Reason requires is 'adaptation [Angemessenheit]
of the disposition [Gesinnung] to the moral law'. This difference
has led to all the horrors of bigotry and intolerance typified by the
proverbial dismissal of the virtues of the pagans as 'splendid
vices', and to the allied doctrine that men cannot do anything for
themselves but must depend on God's grace and mercy in absolute
humility of spirit. There is a fundamental conflict here between
Christian doctrine and the universal principle of practical reason
that 'virtue deserves happiness'; and when the doctrine of human
helplessness is backed by the dogma of original sin, the very free-
dom which is the condition of all moral responsibility is denied. 3
In his earlier version Hegel attacked the fundamental con-
tention that certain 'mysteries' of the faith are 'above' reason,
arguing that even if, perhaps, they were not contrary to reason, still
it is contrary to reason to believe in them, for only our reason can
tell us what is essential to moral salvation. Thus the conception
of reward and punishment according to desert is rationally bound
up with the postulate of immortality, but the unsoundness of the

I In his earlier version Hegel stresses rather his optimistic conviction that

reason will eventually overthrow all such authoritarian class structures-but he

also mentions the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal States as examples of how
far the corruption of human society can go and yet be maintained by the instinc-
tive goodness of man's nature (Nohl, p. 52).
2 Nohl, p. 62. A remark in the earlier version (Nohl, pp. 50-I) makes it clear

that Hegel is fully conscious of the gulf between 'acting from respect for the
law' and 'acting for the sake of obtaining blessedness'. This may therefore be
part of what is implied by the qualifying phrase 'in Ansehung der Materie'
here.
3 Nohl, pp. 62-4; see also pp. 52-3 for a not quite parallel discussion of
'pleasing God' and the 'means of grace' in the earlier version.
180 BERNE 1793-1796
Christian doctrine of salvation or damnation in the other world is
evidenced by the excesses of arrogance and anxiety which these
conceptions induce among believers in this world. I
To say that moral freedom itself requires 'faith in Christ' is
irrational, because the acquiring of faith is contingent upon
historical testimony, and is not simply a matter of developing the
universally available capacities of Vernunft itself; and since it
conflicts with rational equity to suppose that some men have been
arbitrarily chosen as the 'elect', we cannot maintain that 'faith in
Christ' is the exclusive condition for the achievement of blessed-
ness. 2
This is not the most serious weakness that arises from the
historical character of the Christian faith, however. For even a non-
historical faith may be irrational in this way. What is still worse is
that since a historical tradition of foreign origin cannot by its very
nature be a popular possession, the establishment of a priestly
class with its own peculiar authority is unavoidable in a public
religion founded on such a basis. Furthermore the historical
trappings of the faith make it, if not less subject to rational
criticism, at least less liable to stimulate and arouse it, since
special preparation and training is requisite for intelligent criticism
of a body of historical evidence. Thus the ordinary man is in-
evitably obliged to depend on the Verstand of experts instead of
being spurred to use and rely on his own Vernunft. This dependence
destroys the proper character of religious faith itself, the very
thing that gives religion its practical value and importance. For it
ought to be a 'stretching of the soul' (Spannung der Seele), not a
'function of the memory' (Sache des Gediichtnisses).3
Awareness ofthe peculiar problems that arise from the historical
character of Christianity grew upon Hegel only after he had written
his first version, or perhaps while he was writing it. In his first
draft the conviction that Vernunft both could and would cast
off everything in a folk-tradition that conflicted with its require-
ments remains more or less unclouded and unqualified. He still
holds to this faith in his second draft, but he recognizes that the
rational criticism of a historical religion presents special diffi-
culties. 4
He also holds to the conviction expressed both in his schema
I Noh!, pp. 54-6. 2 Noh!, pp. 64-5 . 3 Noh!, pp. 65-6.
.. Noh!, pp. 66-7; cf. also pp. 50-I.
 REASON AND FREEDOM lSI

and in the first draft, that the historical reality of Jesus is the main
source of strength in the Christian tradition. His final version
contains at this point a laconic note 'Faith in Christ is faith in a
personified ideal' with a reference to his discussion of this thesis
in the first draft. I This topic must therefore be incorporated here.
In his iniltial schematic estimate of Christianity, Hegel remarks,
'its practical doctrines are pure and have the advantage of being
mainly set forth in examples';2 and the practical example of Jesus
is the real kernel of positive value which all the negative criticism
in his first draft is designed to strip bare. For at the beginning of it
he remarks that many moral philosophers-'Spinoza, Shaftesbury,
Rousseau, Kant' -having developed their own sensibilities to
the point where their own heart served as a mirror for the beauty
of the Idee of morality, have reverenced the moral teaching of
Jesus the more, the higher their contempt for everything else in
the Christian faith became. 3 Having demonstrated the justice
of that contempt, as it were, he turns to the justification of the
reverence. Jesus, he says, differs from a teacher like Socrates, in
that for the believer he is not just a model case of the virtuous man,
he is virtue itself personified. How this can be the case may be a
headache for the understanding, but the imagination (Phantasie)
is fired by the visible presence of its ideal, for, as Plato said, if
virtue were to come before us in visible form all mortals must love
it.4
This conception of the significance of the Incarnation was one
which Hegel retained and deepened as the years went on. But no
one who has read his eulogy of Socrates as portrayed in the
Phaedo-the man whose arguments had such force that a return
from the grave would not strengthen them-would expect this
view of Jesus to have for him in 1794 the meaning and value that
it came to have later. 'Why should the supernatural power by
which Christ healed the sick concern us?' he asks. 'Why should the
lives and deaths of Socrates and Jesus not serve as exemplars of
Virtue arousing in us the urge to imitate and emulate them?' The
I Nohl, p. 67; cf. also pp. 56-8.
2 Nohl, p. 49. Hegel is presumably thinking of the parables as well as the acts
of Jesus (many of which were themselves intended as parables, of course). But
he explicitly excludes such discourses as the Sennon on the Mount.
3 N ohl, p. 5 I ; cf. also pp. 58-9 where the agreement between Christian ethics
and Kantian ethics is emphasized.
4 Nohl, pp. 56-7.
182 BERNE 1793-1796
answer is found in the whole Christian doctrine of atonement and
grace, which has caused the name of Christ to become more im-
portant to the Christians than his living example, as Lessing's
Nathan complained.!
This is the reason why the second draft is focused entirely upon
the concept of 'faith in Christ' -and what was originally seen as
the great strength of Christianity is now seen to be also its great
weakness. It is only because we are so corrupted and degraded by
that sense of our own helplessness which Christian doctrine is
calculated to induce and to reinforce, that we feel the need of the
God-Man Jesus, and cannot clasp the hand of the human sage,
Socrates. In the virtuous hero we can recognize flesh of our
flesh and bone of our bone, but not spirit of our spirit and power
of our power. For we have lost our power, it comes to us as an
alien thing, a gift of grace from on high, and only a visible divinity
can bring it to us. But even so, concludes Hegel, the divinity that
we recognize in him is still just our own uncorrupted moral nature
and rational power. Jesus is still virtue personified and it is as such
that he must be worshipped, not as the second person of a mystic
trinity, who was 'begotten before all worlds'. As long as we
remember this we shall not fall into the error of exalting the name
of Jesus at the expense of his essential message. 2
Of course Christianity itself did not originally create the climate
that led to its acceptance. This is the subject of Jetzt braucht die
Menge, which can plausibly be regarded as the second sheet of an
essay on 'Traditions'.3 Not much hangs on the question whether
it was written before or after the second draft of the essay on
'Doctrines', but if, as the handwriting seems to indicate, it was
written before, then the sequence of Hegel's thoughts was some-
thing like this. He began with the normal 'enlightened' idea of
exalting the 'spirit' of Jesus himself, as opposed to the 'letter' of
the gospel preached in his 'name'.4 But when he came to con-
si.der the personal impact of Jesus as compared with that of
Socrates, he realized that the authoritative character of his
I Noh!, pp. 59-60.
2 Noh!, pp. 67-9. Here Hege! makes his second backward reference indicating
that his earlier discussion of this point is to be integrated with his closing attack
on the mystery of the Atonement in the second draft (compare Noh!, pp. 59-60).
3 Noh!, pp. 70-1. That it is the second sheet of some series is indicated by its
being marked with the letter b.
4 Cf. Unter objektiver Religion, section Gamma (Noh!, p. 49); Es sollte eine
schwere Aufgabe (Noh!, pp. 51,60).
 REASON AND FREEDOM

teaching and example, together with all the shibboleths on which

he had remarked earlier as evidence of the influence of the national
tradition upon any teacher, were connected with quite a different
conception of the nature and power of Jesus from that which the
followers of Socrates had of their master. Socrates was the shining
example of how to live life to the full as a citizen of Athens; while
Jesus was the personification of an ideal that is 'not of this world'.
He is the ideal of humanity appearing in a world where life has
lost every vestige of joy and beauty, the morally autonomous
individual existing in a society where men have lost all faith in
their power to exert moral freedom. Hence he can only appear as a
God, and the recovery by his followers of their human status is
necessarily seen as the result of his saving power, and hence as
conditional upon faith in him. This was the condition of the Jews
in bondage to their law and their priesthood as individuals, and to
the Romans as a nation; as the Empire began to decay it became
the condition of the whole world. Thus the spirit which vanished
from the world when the Greek cities passed under a conqueror's
yoke, appeared now, not in its proper guise, but as an individual
who brought news of its existence in another world. But the people
of this worlld would only finally be redeemed by 'faith' in him,
when they recognized the alien power as their own, the life and
joys of the other world as the proper expression of man's social
nature in this world. When this happens, however, the political
quietism of Christianity and its associated ethics of humility will
disappear, and 'constitutions which only guarantee life and property
will never be thought the best'.
This is the burden of Hegel's reflections in Jetzt braucht die
Menge, which offers us the first sketch of what appears in the
Phenomenology as the 'Unhappy consciousness'. It is entirely
plausible to suppose that after writing it he felt moved to turn
back and write a new meditation upon the ambiguity of the con-
cept 'faith in Christ'. I
I On the other hand the insight which first came to Hegel at the end of Es

sollte eine schwere Aufgabe is so much more trenchantly stated in Jetzt braucht
die Menge than in rVenn man von der christlichen Religion that it would not be
surprising to find that Jetzt braucht die Menge was the last of the series. (In that
event it may be linked with Hegel's reading of Gibbon and Forster, which
certainly reinforced his own views about the degeneration of ancient republican
virtues under the Empire. See U1ikunde der Geschichte-for the correction of
NoW's incipit see p. 196 n. below-and In einer Republik, Nohl, pp. 363-4, 365,
366.)
 BERNE 1793-1796

Peperzak has rightly drawn attention to the community of

thought and feeling that is evident in Jetzt braucht die Menge on
the one side, and Hegel's third letter to Schelling on the other.!
This letter was written on 16 April 1795, when Hegel's mind must
already have been set upon The Life of Jesus which he began to
write three weeks later. It shows that his sense of the disastrous
political and social consequences of the promulgation of Christianity
had become even keener as time went on; and so likewise had his
conviction that the time had finally arrived when the real message
of Jesus could be received and understood correctly. His own
Life of Jesus thus emerges as an attempt to undo the evil conse-
quences of the gospel of salvation through faith, by restating the
gospel of salvation through reason. For he writes:
I believe there is no better sign of the times than this, that humanity
is set forth to itself as so worthy of respect; a proof is that the halo
round the heads of the oppressors and gods of the earth is disappearing.
The philosophers are proving this worthiness, the peoples will come to
feel it and not simply ask for their rights which are now brought low in
the dust, but take them back themselves-repossess themselves [sich
aneignen]. Religion and politics have played the same hidden game
together [haben unler einer Decke geopielt] , the former has taught, what
despotism willed, the dishonouring of the human race, its inability to
achieve any good, or to amount to anything on its own. With the spread
of the ideals [der !deen] of how things ought to be, the apathetic tendency
of the solid citizens [die Indolenz der gesetzten Leute] to accept every-
thing always just as it is, will disappear. This enlivening power of ideals
-even though they have always still some limitations-like that of the
fatherland, of its constitution, etc.-will raise men's hearts [Gemiiter]
and they will learn to sacrifice themselves, whereas at present the spirit
ofthe constitutions has made a pact with personal advantage [Eigennutz]
and has based its rule upon that. I exhort myself always in the words of
the Lebensliiufe: 'Strive toward the sun my friends, that the salvation of
the human race may soon come to fruition! What use are the hindering
leaves? or the branches? Cleave through them to the sunlight, and
strive till ye be weary! 'Tis good so, for so shall ye sleep the betterl'z
I Peperzak, pp. 56-7.
2 Briefe, i. 24-5. The italics represent Hegel's own underlining. The quotation
is from Th .G. von Hippel, Lebensliiufe nach aufsteigender Linie (1778-81), a semi-
autobiographical novel, full of philosophical reflections, which Hegel and a
group of friends read together at the Stift (see Rosenkranz, p. 40). In Hippel's
Collected Works (Berlin, 1827-39) the passage can be found in Volume III at
page 137. Hoffmeister gives the reference for the first edition as Teil III, I,
p. 200. Hegel's citation is not quite word perfect.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 18 5

We might sum up the progress of Hegel's reflections during the

eighteen months between his arrival in Berne and the writing of
this letter, in terms of the contrast between Jesus and Socrates
which gradually developed in his mind. He saw both of them
initially simply as great moral teachers who sought to enlighten
the ethical and religious convictions of their own society. The
principal contrast between them arose from the contrast between
those societies. The 'care for the soul' which Socrates preached
to his fellow Athenians did not involve any severing of their social,
political, and economic ties, but if anything a strengthening of
them; whereas the call of Jesus involved forsaking the world.
Thus Socrates was a public teacher, while Jesus was essentially
a private one, not only in the obvious sense, but in the etymological
sense that his teaching had a privative effect. By cutting his
followers off from the world he made it impossible for them to
achieve independence and personal individuality in it. He became
for them a model in a sense in which Socrates was never a model
for his followers. To 'follow the example' of Socrates was only to
be 'like' him in the sense of being unique, and hence as much
different from him as from anyone else. Whereas to follow Jesus
was to become absolutely dependent on him, and on the little group
of the 'brethren'. Out of this dependence arose another far greater
contrast between the roles of Socrates and Jesus in history. The
death of Jesus conferred a halo of divinity upon him, whereas the
death of Socrates merely set the seal upon his perfect humanity.
As Hegel reflected he came to see this contrast as the crucial
one, and even to hold that the initial contrast of public and private
teaching was partially mistaken. Not Socrates but Plato, was the
public educator of the Greeks. l Both Socrates and Jesus were
private teachers who sought to develop particular individuals
rather than to improve society as a whole. Only the contrast between
their attitudes to society, integrative and privative respectively,
was really correctly drawn, and it was from this that the greater

I See the excerpt from the review of Tennemann which Hegel wrote on the

back of Christus hatte zwiilj Apostel (Doh., p. 174; cf. Nohl, p. 35 n. and p. 170
n. 3 above). This distinction between Socrates and Plato was relevant for the
justification of Hegel's own activity (which was modelled on that of Plato rather
than that of Socrates). But it did not affect Hegel's choice of Socrates (not Plato)
as the exemplar of the spirit of popular enlightenment among the Greeks. Cf.
Unkunde der Geschichte (Nohl, p. 363, early 1795) where Socrates, Jesus, and
Kant are compared from this point of view.
186 BERNE 1793-1796

contrast in their historical destinies arose. For the health of modern

society it was vital that this false contrast should be abolished. The
halo must be stripped from the head of the god Christ in order that
the message of the man Jesus might be rightly understood. First
the conception of original sin must be shown to be an illusion,
produced by the historical circumstances that made his followers
so absolutely dependent on him. But then too, and partly as a
means to the destruction of the illusion, the human truth behind
it must be revealed. Thus we see how it was that Hegel could pen
his most violent attack on the evil alliance of throne and altar at the
very moment when he was about to embark on his Life of Jesus. I

3. The God of Reason and his gospel

The correspondence between Hegel and Schelling had so far been
mainly dominated by the interests of the latter, which were already
more purely philosophical than Hegel's. The spur, or perhaps
only the pretext, for Hegel's first letter was provided by the
appearance of Schelling's first published essay Ober My then.
Hegel wrote on Christmas Eve 1794 that from the notice he had
just seen, he could recognize that Schelling was 'on his old track'
seeking 'to enlighten important theological concepts and bit by
bit to set aside the old sourdough'. About his own efforts in the
same direction he spoke rather slightingly, wishing that he might
obtain a place somewhere-'not in Tiibingen'-where he could
'harvest what he had formerly neglected'.2
Schelling's answer, which came fairly promptly (6 January 1795),
can scarcely have fallen kindly upon Hegel's ears. For Schelling
was full of the latest developments in philosophy, and bubbling
with enthusiasm for Fichte; and he reported that his mytho-
logical concerns had been only a marginal interest for 'nearly a
year'.
Who [he asks scathingly] can bury himself in the dust of ancient
times, when his own time is in motion every instant sweeping him along
with it <?>. I live and move presently in philosophy. Philosophy is not
yet finished. Kant has given the results; the premisses are sti11lacking.
And who can understand results without premisses?3
] The violence of his feelings on this topic was no doubt intensified by his
reading of Gibbon at about this time-see Unkunde der Geschichte, Noh!,
pp. 365-6. 2 Letter 6, Briefe, i. 1 I.

3 Letter 7, Briefe, i. 14. Contempt for those who mistake the Staub of historical
 REASON AND FREEDOM

This must have made harsh reading for poor Hegel, buried as he
was in the dust of ancient times still, and trying desperately to
concentrate his efforts and sustain his industry enough to produce
something fit for publication. Schelling did not even bother to send
a copy of his own latest essay 'On the possibility of a form of
philosophy itn general' (I794), so Hegel had to ask for it explicitly
in his reply, a few weeks later. Since Kant's Vernunftreligion
touched so closely on his own concerns he was happy to join in
Schelling's condemnation of the Tubingen interpretation of Kant.
But for him Kant's philosophy provided not theoretical results for
which 'premisses' had still to be found, but theoretical results
which still need to be applied to practical problems, and can so
be made to yield practical premisses, as it were. In what Hegel
says about Fichte there are signs of a mischievous desire to give
Schelling a nasty pill to swallow in his turn. For he suggests that
Fichte is not wholly innocent of responsibility in the matter of
making the new criticism fit in with the traditional dogmatism:
If his principles are taken as fixed once and for all, no limit or barrier
can be set up against the theological logic. He deduces from the holiness
of God what He must do on account of His purely moral nature etc.,
and thereby he has reintroduced the old technique of proof in dogmatics;
it is perhaps worth the effort to clarify this po int.-If I had time, I
would try to determine more precisely how far-after the establishment
of moral faith <-) we may employ the legitimated idea of God back-
wards, e.g. in the clarification of teleology [die Z'loeckbeziehung] etc.,
how far we may take it back with us from ethical theology to physical
theology and still exercise control with it there. This seems to me to be
in general the road people take with the idea of providence-and
equally with miracles and, in Fichte's case, with revelation.!
This complaint that Fichte was returning to the old Leibnizian
tradition of reasoning out the way the world must be, if it is the
work of an absolutely perfect being, seems, whether justified
or not, to reflect a very definite impression which both Hegel and
H6lderlin gained from their first encounter with the Critique of all
Revelation. 2 This is indirectly confirmed by the letter which
r!$earch for the living truth is frequently expressed by Lessing (see especially
Ernst und Falh, Dialogue IV). No doubt Schelling had heard Hegel, that
Vertrauter Lessings, expressing similar sentiments-as he does later again in
Eleusis (lines 57-63). I Briefe, i. 17.

2 If, as I suspect, H6lderlin read the book first, he may have passed on his
impressions before Hegel ever began to read it.
 188 BERNE 1793-1796

Holderlin wrote to Hegel from Jena just at this time-a letter

filled with all the literary excitement of life in Jena and Weimar.
Holderlin devotes the second half of this letter to his impressions
of Fichte-recommending the Grundlage der gesamten Wissen-
schaftslehre and the lectures on the Vocation of the Scholar to
Hegel's notice, but also acknowledging: 'To begin with I held him
very much in contempt for dogmatism; he seems, if I may make a
guess, to have actually stood at the crossroads or to be still standing
there .. .'1
Schelling may have suspected that his first letter had hurt
Hegel's feelings a little, for in his reply to Hegel's second letter
(4 February I795) he echoes Hegel's original opening about 'Dein
alt Weg' and the 'alt Sauerteig': 'we find ourselves on the old tracks
together ... we both want to prevent the great things that our age
has produced from being lumped together with the stale sour-
dough of times past .. .'2 In the body of the letter he bends over
backwards in his efforts to agree with Hegel wherever possible.
He had probably shared the unfavourable initial impression of the
Critique of all Revelation-and of course he knew that Repetent
Stiskind had added an appendix giving the Ttibingen interpre-
tation of it to his German translation of Storr's Notes on the
Kantian Philosophy of Religion (I794.). He now suggests apologeti-
cally that its dogmatic tendencies were due either to 'accommoda-
I Letter 9, 26 Jan. 1795, Briefe, i. 19; Beck thinks that '1m Anfange' refers to

the impression Holderlin formed while reading the first sheets of the Grundlage
at Walterhausen the previous summer: cf. Briefe, i. 20. But it is more likely, I
think, that he is referring to the impression of Fichte that he had before he began
to read the latest work at all. This is all the more probable if, as Beck thinks
possible, Holderlin's letter came as a reply to one from Hegel asking his opinion
of the Grundlage which Schelling was urging Hegel to read (Briefe, i. 15). If
Hegel knew that Holderlin had shared his opinion of the Kritik aller Offenbarung
this would be a natural thing for him to do (see HolderIin, GSA, vi. 723-4, for
Beck's notes on this passage).
(This letter provides also the earliest definite evidence, so far as I know, that
Hegel read Herder at Tiibingen. For in describing his first meeting with
Herder, Holderlin says: 'He spoke often in a wholly allegorical way, just as you
know him already [wie auch Du ihn kennstl.')
2 Letter 10, Briefe, i. 20. It may be fanciful to suggest that Schelling is trying

to smooth Hegel's ruffled feathers here, but it is quite certain that he was extremely
anxious that they should not become 'alienated' (fremd). 'We have not' or 'We
must not' or 'We shall not become strangers', he reiterates in every letter. Hegel
himself chants the same refrain, but the string of Tiibingen watchwords at the
end of his January letter (,Reich Gottes', 'Vernunft und Freiheit', 'die un-
sichtbare Kirche') would certainly have made Schelling realize he must tread
softly in the ancient dust that was the stuff of his old comrade's dreams.
 REASON AND FREEDOM
tion' or to deliberate irony on Fichte's part. He had himself
thought, he says, of satirizing the theological logic, but had been
put off by the knowledge that some people were sure to take him
seriously.
One thing he confesses had surprised him in Hege1's letter.
In his own first letter he had given as a particularly laughable
example of theological logic, the use of Kant's moral proof to
demonstrate the existence of 'the personal individual being who
reigns above in Heaven'. I This disturbed Hegel, who accepted
the moral proof, and had never thought of taking it in any other
way. So he asked Schelling to explain. At this, it was Schelling's
turn to be puzzled; for he knew Hegel to be a convinced follower of
Lessing (Vertrauter Lessings) and it had never occured to him that
Lessing's Spinozism could be taken in any way except the way
Jacobi took it. He himself had moved a step further from Spinoza's
Absolute Substance to Fichte's Absolute Subject, and he now
explains to Hegel why it is a mistake to conceive of Fichte's
transcendental Ego as a conscious individual or person:
For me the highest principle of all philosophy is the pure, absolute
Ego, i.e. the Ego in so far as it is simply [bloj3] Ego, not yet conditioned
by objects, but posited through freedom. The Alpha and Omega of all
philosophy is Freedom.-The absolute Ego embraces an infinite sphere
of absolute being, <and) in this finite spheres form themselves, which
arise through the limiting of the infinite sphere by an object (spheres of
existence-theoretical philosophy). In these there is strict causal
dependence [lauter Bedingtheit] and the unconditioned [das Unbedingte]
leads to contradictions.-But we ought to break through these limits,
i.e. we ought to emerge out of the finite spheres into the infinite one
(practical philosophy). Thus this [practical philosophy] requires the
destruction of finiteness and leads us thereby into the supersensible
world. 'vVhat theoretical reason was incapable of, whereas it was
weakened by the object, that practical reason achieves.' But in it [the
supersensible world] we can find nothing but our absolute Ego, since
only this [the absolute Ego] has described the infinite sphere. There is
no supersensible world for us except that of the absolute Ego.-
God is nothing but the absolute Ego, the Ego inasmuch as it has annihi-
lated everything theoretical [i.e. all limits], is thus equal to zero in
theoretical philosophy. Personality arises through the unity of conscious-
ness. But consciousness is not possible without <an) object; but for
God, i.e., for the absolute Ego<,) there is no object at all, since thereby
I Letter 7. Briefe. i. 14.
 BERNE 1793-1796
[i.e. if there were one] it would cease to be absolute,-hence
there is no personal God and our highest striving is for the destruc-
tion of our personality, <and a) passing over into the absolute sphere
of being, which however is not possible in all eternity;-hence <there
is) only <a) practical approaching toward the absolute, and hence-
Immortality. I
With this letter came Schelling's essay 'On the possibility of
a form of philosophy in general', which expounded this same
doctrine at greater length. Hegel made some attempt to study the
essay, and he probably absorbed and adopted the conception of
God as the impersonal moral order of the world, which Fichte had
put in the place of Spinoza's impersonal natural order. But the
whole form of the discussion was too abstract for his taste, and the
idea of 'striving to destroy our personality' was utterly repugnant
to his own ideal of integral humanism. So when he at length re-
plied, over two months later, in April, he avoided detailed dis-
cussion of Schelling's essay, pleading, rather weakly, that he had
not had time to study it properly, but that, as far as he could
understand it, he saw in it a 'completing of science which will yield
us the most fruitful results';2 and then going on, as we saw
earlier, to enthuse over the political implications of the new moral
philosophy.
Evidence of Hegel's efforts to come to grips with this strange
world of the Ego and the non-Ego, and to relate it to the more
concrete terms of the traditional moral psychology that he was
himself accustomed to use, is supplied by a sheet of notes that
he wrote at about this time concerning the proper use of the
method of moral proof in general, and of the principle 'virtue
deserves happiness' in particular. 3
Even if speculative reason could prove the 'reality and existence'
of a transcendent God, he argues, we would achieve no knowledge
of his properties except through the concept of a final aim or
I Letter 10, Briefe, i. 22. I have preserved Schelling's punctuation and under-

lining, and translated as literally as I could. For the way in which he relates
Fichte's Ego to Spinoza's substance cf. Hiilderlin (Letter 9), ibid., pp. 19-20.
2 Letter 11, Briefe, i. 23. This acknowledgeml;nt is one ground for thinking that

Hegel accepted Schelling's interpretation of the moral proof. Another is that

the conception of God as the moral order agrees with his own conception of
'spirit' as a supra-personal power that unites a community of free individual
persons.
3 Die transzendente Idee von Gott, Nohl, pp. 361-2. The key to a right under-
standing of these notes was found by Haering (i. 198-206).
 REASON AND FREEDOM
purpose in nature. Since this concept fails to help us in any morally
relevant way, only practical reason can ground belief in God.!
Practical reason produces the moral law, which is a fact
experienced as the form of the higher desirous faculty. This
Kantian formula which he has modified to suit himself, Hegel
promptly translates into the Schelling-Fichte terminology as the
determination of the finite Ego by the absolute Ego and the con-
sequent overcoming (Aufhebung) of the non-Ego. Similarly he
equates the sensible impulse of the lower desires with determina-
tion of the Ego by the non-Ego, and identifies Fichte's Willkiir
both in Kantian terms and in the language of Schelling.
Having thus satisfied himself, so to speak, that he knows the
translation rules for his basic terms, Hegel begins to deal in his
own term8 with the question that really interests him. The
sensible impulses when they are ordered by Vernunft, or controlled
by the ethical law ('bestimmt durchs Sittengesetz'), are 'lawful'
(gesetzmiiflig); they are not 'lawlike' (gesetzlich). They are 'morally
possible' (i.e. permissible or hypothetically imperative) but not
'morally actual' (i.e. compulsory or categorically imperative). An
impulse would only have 'lawlike' status, it would only have
categorical force, if it 'governed the whole world of appearances'
(i.e. if the whole of our experience were conformable to it, or if
everyone could have whatever they wanted in the world). Since
conformity to the requirements of practical reason is presupposed
throughout we have here a reformulation of the conditions for
Kant's 'highest good' (the harmony of virtue and happiness)
which does not have the paradoxical appearance that it assumes
in Kant's own discussion, because Hegel begins explicitly from
the premiss that there ought not to be (and hence a priori there
need not be) a conflict between desire and the law, rather than
from the experience of a conflict as revealing our freedom.
For Hegel it is not the fact that our natural desires are not
'lawful', but rather the fact that our 'lawful' desires are not
'lawlike' which reveals our freedom. This idea is the foundation
for a doctrine of reconciliation with our fate in this world, which
will ultimately make any transcendent conception of God, or of

I The influence of the Critique of Judgement is plainest here, but the mention

of 'reality and existence' is perhaps an echo of Schelling's distinction between

the infinite sphere of Sein that belongs to the absolute Ego and the finite spheres
of Dasein that belong to limited egos.
I9 2 BERNE 1793-1796

immortal existence in a supersensible world, unnecessary. Hegel

has certainly not yet seen all of the implications of his view for
the Kantian postulates, but he is moving inexorably toward their
destruction. The problem that he raises is: 'Can the ethical law
take back all the rights it has granted?' and his answer, of course,
is 'No'. If we sacrifice something in doing our duty, the voluntary
abandonment of our right is just what constitutes the sacrifice,
and to suppose that we have only postponed the satisfaction destroys
the fundamental moral dignity of our free act. I But if on the
other hand our 'lawful' desires and purposes are frustrated by
natural forces, or by the unlawful acts of others, our right to
satisfaction remains. It is on this aspect of our experience in this
life that Hegel apparently wants to ground the rational postulates
of God and immortality at this stage in his reflections.
Hegel is, I think, only trying to follow what he regards as the
valid argument in Kant's work-avoiding on the one hand all talk
of a 'radical evil' in human nature, and on the other hand the
theological logic' which asked for a 'recompense' for every moral
sacrifice made in this life. He has probably not yet seen that if
we ground the knowledge of freedom in the experience of sacrijice,
rather than as Kant did in the experience of temptation, the prin-
ciple 'virtue deserves happiness' takes on a somewhat curious
aspect as far as free individuals are concerned. Like Schelling (and
of course Kant also) he was ready to affirm that 'the Alpha and
Omega of all philosophy is freedom'. Hence he could see that the
realization of a 'lawlike' state, where every desire was satisfied,
was not a task that human reason could lay upon itself. But it is
certainly not clear that he also saw that free rational beings cannot
demand it from 'another being' either. His Hellenic ideal of a
society that was happy, because its members were free, and hence
prepared to sacrifice their own happiness whenever the Sitten-
gesetz required it, would certainly incline him to this view; but on
the other hand he did not want to give up the postulate of im-
mortality for which Socrates had died. In view of the fact that
Schelling had just offered him an impersonal conception of God
as identical with the moral realm in which all free individuals
I Hegel actually makes this point about the patriotic sacrifice of life by citizens

of ancient republics in yetzt braucht die Menge. The concept of Elysium or

Valhalla is there invoked to avoid contradiction of the postulate of immortality,
but the element of recompense involved in passing from one life to another is too
obvious for the inconsistency to be glossed over for very long.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 193

immortally exist, it is possible that he did now reject the postulate

of God as 'another being'. But his text is ambiguous:
Reason [die Vemunft] posits as ultimate aim of the world the highest
good, ethical life [Sittlichkeit] and in proportion therewith happiness-
but it does <not?) posit this ultimate aim itself-it requires the realiza-
tion of the aim, therefore from another Being [von einem andern Wesen],
but certainly not from man, or from the causality of reason, so long as
it is limited by sensibility.
Haering thinks the whole tendency of the argument is critical
of Kant's Vernunftreligion; and it is tempting, in the light of Jetzt
brauclzt die Menge, to agree with him that the underlying thought
is: 'As man is, so is his God; the ruptured [zerrissene] man has a
God separated from the world, standing over against him as a
stranger [Fremd].'l But Hegel has not, so far, shown any inclina-
tion to view Vernunftreligion in this way. Quite probably he does
not see himself as criticizing Kant at all, but only as saving him
from his orthodox 'friendly critics' at Tiibingen. This whole
sheet of notes could be taken as tracing the reason why 'another
being' must be postulated. The most plausible view of all, I think,
is that Hegel has not yet made up his mind just what the moral
proof does demonstrate. He was quite content to have made the
terms of the problem, and the method for its settlement, clear to
himself. His notes conclude:
D. The Godhead-the power to follow through, to make effective,
the rights that reason has granted <-) by this criterion [BestimmullgJ
must the knowledge of all its other properties be determined [bestimmt].z
This criterion for the nature of God is exactly the one that forms
I Haering, i. 206. Haering seems to read 'But does it posit this ultimate aim

itself(?)' in the passage cited (Nohl, p. 362) instead of postulating the accidental
omission of a negative as I have suggested. The answer to the question is 'No'
as the following explanation shows. So in any case the sense of the passage is
clear.
2 Nohl, p. 362. Uncertainty about God's existence as an independent agency

seems to be implicit in his notes from the Theological.'Journal of Hanlein and

Ammon (Unlmnde der Geschichte, Nohl, p. 364). In what appears to be a personal
reflection of his own, he asks how divine omniscience is consistent with freedom,
and answers that on his own (Kantian) principles God may control the Lauf der
Natur as long as the Gesetze remain unchanged. His concern is always focused
upon Divine Providence, rather than upon the existence of a Divine Lawgiver.
(His Kantian criterion for ascription of properties to God is reaffirmed in the
same place in a passage which he crossed out, presumably because he realized it
was superfluous.)
8243588 p
194 BERNE 1793-1796

the basic premiss of the life of Jesus which Hegel began on 8 May
1795 and finished on 24 July.! God is there identified at the begin-
ning as 'unlimited Reason' ; and in the light of everything said about
Him in what follows it seems most natural to conclude that Hegel
has accepted from Schelling the identification of God with the
Kingdom of God, or of the 'absolute Ego' with the 'supersensible
world'. He has given up altogether the idea of 'another being' who
governs and judges in that realm, because it conflicts with the
autonomy of reason everywhere, the autonomy on which man's
dignity (Wiirde) is founded. 2
The seemingly rigid Kantian orthodoxy of The Life of Jesus has
occasioned much discussion. On the one side there are students
who believe that Hegel underwent a sort of Kantian 'conversion'
beginning about now and lasting for some years; on the other are
those who follow Haering in regarding the Life of Jesus as a
Gedankene:'Cperiment to which Hegel was only provisionally com-
mitted, and which represented at most only one aspect of his
integral view.
N either of these extreme hypotheses appears to me to be
necessary. There is an element of truth in both views, and it is,
by and large, the same element. There are a few places where
Hegel is so carried away by Kant's strenuous doctrine of practical
reason and virtue, that he almost loses hold of his Greek ideal of
life as characterized properly by grace and spontaneity and an
absence of strain. But this is partly because a strenuous life of self-
sacrificing virtue appears to him to be the only road back to the
golden age of Greek humanism; and partly because the influence
of Kant and Fichte is a new one which he has not as yet fully
digested.
If we survey the progress of Hegel's reflections from the
moment when he escaped from Tiibingen-which coincides
I Die reine aller Schranken, Nohl, pp. 75-136. Hegel gave no title to the

manuscript, but it has always been known as The Life of Jesus. The sub-title
'Harmony of the Gospels according to his own translation' is certainly more
accurate, and may just possibly have some claim to authenticity, since Rosen-
kranz could conceivably have found it in the 'schemata' for this project which
he mentions (Rosenkranz, p. 51). (But see p. 196 n. 3 for what is, to my mind, a
more probable hypothesis.)
2 Peperzak (p. 72 n. 5), points out that Wiirde is not properly a Kantian ideal.

Haering 0.185) suggests, rightly as I think, that Hegel's adoption of it as a name

for his absolute value derives from Schiller. I shall regularly use 'dignity' as a
translation for it.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 195

pretty closely with the moment when he first began to feel the
influence of Fichte and Kant-the writing of The Life of Jesus
becomes a perfectly comprehensible undertaking, and its character
largely predictable and not at all surprising. Before he moved to
Berne Hegel had formulated his own ideal of life as it should be.
In his first eighteen months at Berne he was preoccupied with the
analysis of how life had come to be the way it was, in order to
discover how the ideal could best be restored. He had found that
the only hope lay in the reintegrative powers of Vernunft, and that
the original root of our falling away from the Greek ideal lay in the
acceptance of a non-rational principle of authority in religion and
society. The first essential for the redemption of man's dignity as a
rational being, therefore, was the re-establishment of religion on
its rational foundation.
It is necessary to remind oneself continually that Hegel believed
that all wen-established systems of religious belief and practice
have a common rational foundation. This foundation rises to
consciousness as the postulates of immortality and divine justice
(or 'providence'). It is inevitably articulated in different ways in
the religious and philosophical traditions of different societies,
but it is always the same in substance, and is easily recognized
and identified by any rational man; for it is a matter of Vernunft,
which is an innate human capacity, not of Verstand, which is a
culturally conditioned skill. In the Germany of 1795 the clearest,
articulation of it was to be found in the Critique of Practical Reason
-with which Hegel was 'repeatedly occupied in Switzerland'
(Rosenkranz). Hence the project of rewriting the record of the
Gospels in the language of Kantian moral psychology was almost
a mandatory one for anyone who wished to distinguish its rational
content, or eternal message, from the incidental forms in which
it was originally couched-which were those appropriate to a
very different cultural tradition.
In Hegel's mind this did not involve any falsification of the
historical record, and we can safely assume that he is not con-
sciously or deliberately guilty of any falsification. Rather he is
seeking to undo a certain 'falsification of the record' which is
inherent in its existence as a 'historical' record at all. His account
is not meant to take the place of the historical record, or even to
be read independently of it, but rather to throw light on it. He
obviously believes that in many places the literal sense of the words
 BERNE 1793-1796

he puts into the mouth of Jesus is in fact closer to the literal sense
of what Jesus actually said, than is the language ascribed to him in
the Gospel account that has come down to us; but there are other
places where he explicitly acknowledges that the record itself is
correct, but nevertheless still stands in need of his gloss. I He is
not primarily interested in the question how far the record is an
accurate account of what Jesus said, but rather in the question of
how far it is a safe guide to a right understanding of what Jesus
did or tried to do (including the effects he hoped to achieve by
saying what he said). Hegel seeks with quite dedicated intentness
to give the most literal account possible of what Jesus meant. 2
Rosenkranz tells us that in preparation for his essay Hegel made
'Schemata for the unification of the facts which are partly scattered,
and partly told differently in the separate gospels'. 3 We can see
from the finished product 4 that one purpose of these schemata
I See, for example, his remark about the 'rather strong' expressions that Jesus

employed against the Pharisees (Nohl, p. 104; Luke II: 42-54; cf. Peperzak,
p. 67). Hegel was quite ready to point out examples of provable historical
ignorance on the part of the Evangelists: consider, for example, the laconic
opening, 'U nkunde der Geschichte bei Lk. 2: 3; 3: I' in the notes from thc
Theological Journal (Nohl, p. 362-Nohl's reading Urkunde is a mistake-cf.
Schuler, p. 141 n. 70). But he was not really interested in attacking dogmatic
theology with the weapons of the higher criticism (compare Nohl, p. 363). His
purpose was to 'fulfil' (7TA71pwaat) the Gospel of Jesus in the sense in which Jesus
himself had 'fulfilled' the law.
2 Peperzak quite correctly says that 'Hegel has caused not only religion but

even its poetry to disappear from the four gospels' (p. 66). But he does not seem
to realize that this was Hegel's set intent. He takes it rather as another evidence
of Hegel's essentially prosaic cast of mind (p. 68). Whatever one thinks about
that, we can be certain that Hegel would never have passed over the paradox and
dialectic that is often to be found in the sayings of Jesus, without remark, unless
his deliberate purpose imposed a discipline of silence upon him. Whatever
limitations of aesthetic sensibility he may have suffered under-and it might be
held that they were less serious than those of most of his critics-he was certainly
never deficient in his appreciation of verbal wit (for an example see p. 205 n. I
below).
3 Rosenkranz, p. 5 I. The most probable hypothesis, I think, is that Rosenkranz
had nothing more before him, in this connection, than we do. What he took to be
'schemata' for The Life of Jesus may very well have been some of the later notes
for the 'Spirit of Christianity'. (The fragment B. Nloml. Bergpredigt could
easily be mistaken for part of such a schema; so could the separate sheets of
Zu dey Zeit da Jesus.)
• Among Hegel's early manuscripts The Life of Jesus is the only thing that is
quite definitely finished and complete in the fom1 in which it has come down to
us. The first editor, Paul Roques, printed four words of a new unfinished
sentence at the end of one paragraph and marked a lacuna in the manuscript.
But if there is a lacuna at that point (Nohl, p. 83, line 17) it is plainly no more
than a line or two; and the probability is that, as Nohl seems to have assumed,
 REASON AND FREEDOM 197

(if Hegel really did make them) was to establish if possible a

plausible sequence of events in the fragmentary accounts of Jesus'
ministry. But, except in so far as he was able to trace the gradual
growth of antipathy between Jesus and the Pharisees, and to make
this conflict one of the mainsprings of the story, this was not an
important concern for Hegel. He was content to follow for long
stretches the order of topics as he found it in Luke or Matthew,!
without wanting to make a historical sequence of it at all. His main
aim in comparing parallel passages and integrating divergent
accounts was to discover the rational content which lay behind the
tradition. Sometimes the rational content was directly recoverable
through close attention to the common core of the accounts; and
sometimes it could be reconstructed by postulation and then
justified by showing how a plausible explanation of the divergence
of the actual record from it could be provided.
Hegel supplies a more or less complete key to his sources at
each stage of his discussion, and, if we study his text in the light
of the original texts cited, a number of his fundamental convic-
tions, both about matters of principle and about matters of fact,
become plainly evident, although they are nowhere explicitly
stated or even referred to in his manuscript. 'I think', he wrote to
Schelling at Christmas 1794, 'the time has come when men should
speak more freely, and in part they already can and do.'2 But
Hegel cancelled or at least meant to cancel his abortive continuation. (Compare
Roques, p. I I with Nohl, p. 83: after 'abel' dem Geiste des Gesetzes nach ist er
so strafwlirdig als jener' Roques prints a semicolon and continues 'WeI' abel' aus
Menschenverachtung (Lucke der Handschrift),; Nohl simply begins a new
paragraph with 'So ist est euch befohlen' etc.)
( Of the four Gospels that of John was certainly the most important to Hegel;
but in his present undertaking he seems to have depended most on Luke. He
had a low opinion of Mark, which he appeals to only occasionally for corroboration
or for some additional detail. (For a hypothesis which would account for Hegel's
attitudes and policies in dealing with the four Gospels see p. 367 n. 1 below.)
2 It was not even strictly necessary to Hegel's purpose that Jesus should lose

his halo, although that halo had been both a source and a shield for so many
evils. Hence he preserves silence about almost all of the supernatural elements
in the Gospel story. It would have amused him, doubtless, that a university
professor at Tlibingen should be the one to take advantage of the licence thereby
conceded to simple faith, and argue that he is only analysing the ethical aspect of
religion, and that what he is silent about is meant to be integrated into what he
says (Haering, i. r87-9). The question which he surely expected the university
professor to ask was rather how such integration is possible at all, once the notion
of a personal authority possessed by Jesus (which is the principal object of his
attack) is given up. But it was a Catholic priest who took this point (see Peperzak,
pp. 6z-3).
 BERNE 1793-1796
aside trom the obvious political restrictions on freedom of speech,
which were so dramatically illustrated by Kant's difficulties with
the censorship over the Religion, Hegel had sound reasons of
principle for expressing himself cautiously in his present under-
taking. He certainly accepted Kant's view that full freedom of
expression is essential for scholarly research and intercourse. But
one does not write a LIfe of Jesus for scholars. For them one does
what Kant had already done, one writes an essay on the principles
and criteria of rational religion, and leaves the scholars to apply it
to the texts for themselves. When one is setting out, as Hegel is
here, to provide a model of how the principles can and should be
applied, one assumes all the responsibilities of a public teacher,
who must take care not to do or say anything calculated to disturb
the peace. Hegel's whole conception of public religion required
that he should not wilfully undermine the faith of the devout. His
purpose was rather to see that their devotion was properly directed.
As long as they understood that the only effective way of 'pleasing
God' was the living of a virtuous life, it was not vital for them to
have completely enlightened ideas about such matters as prayer,
fasting, and miracles. I But for those with eyes to see and ears to
hear Hegel made sure the truth was there to be found.
There is only one brief statement of principle in the essay. It is
contained in the opening paragraph and it is meant to provide us
with a ready principle of explanation for all the divergences of
Hegel's account from the sources that he indicates throughout:
Reason [Vernunft] pure and exceeding all limits is the Godhead
itself-According to Reason therefore is the plan of the world in general
ordered (John I); Reason it is which teaches man to recognize his
vocation [Bestimmung] , an unconditional purpose of his life; often
indeed it is obscured but never wholly quenched, even in the darkness
he has always retained a faint glimmer of it-
Among the Jews it was John who made men conscious again of this
their dignity-which ought not to be something foreign to them, but
which is to be sought for in itself, in their true self, not in their lineage,
and not in the urge towards happiness. It is not to be sought in being
servants of a man greatly revered [Moses, explicitly, but by implication
Jesus himself also], but in the development of the divine spark which
has been allotted to them, which bears witness to them, that in a
I The simple faith embodied in hallowed practices and stories withers by
itself as reason advances-and this is not an unmixed blessing-compare Die
Staatsverjassungen, Nohl, p. 37.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 199
sublime sense they are the children of God [rather than of Abraham]-
The development of Reason is the unique source of truth and peace of
mind, which John perchance did not proclaim as belonging exclusively
or exceptionally to him but which on the contrary all men could open
up in themselves.'
Even this opening is clearly marked as an interpretation of the
first verses of the Gospel according to Saint John. But the gap
between the original and the gloss is nowhere wider, and it is wise
to treat it at first as a principle of explanation for what follows and
only return at the end to trace the correspondence which does
exist between it and John I: 1-18.
Jesus and John the Baptist appear throughout Hegel's account
as teachers and exemplars of the gospel of Vernunft, John being
more ascetic, and Jesus presenting the less rigorous, more re-
conciliatory and joyful ideal of a rational harmony of all human
capacities and feelings. The witness of both is identical in essentials;
and the witness of John is necessarily presupposed by that of Jesus,
for otherwise Jesus would have no ready answer to complaints about
his free and easy attitude toward both the pleasures and the con-
ventions of ordinary life. Jesus did not set himself apart from the
ordinary life of his time in any way. He did not seek to establish any
status which could be the foundation of a special authority. All
of the elements that had earlier led Hegel to draw a sharp contrast
between the attitudes of Socrates and Jesus to social life and social
ties as such ('Let the dead bury their dead' etc.) are now either
silently eliminated as distortions of Jesus' views or explained in a
way that makes them consistent with a positive commitment to
social life. 2
Jesus did not, therefore, do miracles. The text of the Gospels
affords Hegel two opportunities to make this point, and the general
enlightenment of his own times made it possible for him to be fairly
explicit about at least two types of miracle stories, the working of
physical wonders and the 'casting-out of devils'.
His first opportunity comes with the biblical account of the
Temptation. Jesus, he says, considered and rejected the possibility
of fulfilling his vocation by studying nature in order to gain

, Nohl, p. 75. The page of comment which Roques prints before this opening
is actually a series of excerpts derived from Hegel's studies in the theological
journals.
2 Compare, for instance, Hegel's gloss on Luke '4: 26: Nohl, p. 109.
200 BERNE 1793-1796

mastery over it, 'perhaps through alliance with higher spirits'. 1

By turning stones into bread he would certainly be solving the main
problem of man's animal existence, but that is not the true human
vocation. Our daily bread has nothing to do with the development
of Vernunft, which involves the fixing of our attention upon the
super-sensible world. 2 And the achievement of physical inde-
pendence of nature-symbolized in the original by the temptation
of Jesus to cast himself from the pinnacle of the temple-would
be an utter degradation of the moral autonomy that is man's true
goal. We can be sure, therefore, though Hegel says nothing further on
this topic, that Jesus did not calm the tempest or walk on the waters.
The authority of the wonder-worker, like political authority
generally-the object of the third and most serious temptation,
which Hegel deals with separately-is rejected as inconsistent with
the preservation of human dignity, above all, one's own dignity.3
For not even the most benevolent of despots can be morally
autonomous while he has to concern himself about the maintenance
of his power. So Jesus rebukes James and John when they suggest
that they should call down fire on the Samaritan village by saying
'Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of'; and all that Hegel
adds by way of a gloss is a clause which transparently implies that
the 'forces of nature' do not 'stand at the command' either of the
disciples or of Jesus himself.4
I Nohl, p. 77. See also in this connection the comment on Luke 4-: 4 given in

Roques, p. j . This is not of course the orthodox definition of a miracle. But

Hegel shows in his notes at this time why the orthodox definition is completely
unusable on (Kantian) theoretical grounds and absolutely illegitimate on practi-
cal grounds (Nohl, p. 365). The Faustian conception of a wonder-worker is the
only one that can be made consistent with the basic tenets of the Critique of Pure
Reason.
2 It ought not to surpise us therefore to find that the reference to 'our daily

bread' has disappeared from Hegel's 'translation' of the Lord's Prayer: Nohl,
p.85·
3 Peperzak complains: 'Hegel does not justify his rationalist reading of the
gospels .... Nowhere ... does Hegeljustif yhis translation of certain words which
receive thereby the opposite sense to that which they have in the Gospel'
(p. 63). This is an unfair comment because Hegel's explicit interpretation of the
temptation to fall down and worship the devil as a temptation to seek personal
authority (i.e. his identification of the temptation with the reward) is surely a
sufficiently clear justification for the policy of direct inversion which he adopts
towards all passages in which Jesus is represented as claiming peculiar authority
or as urging men to have faith in him. Actually, as we shall see, Hegel does give
an explicit justification for his reading of the Gospels in man mag die wider-
sprechendsten Betrachtungen (the main text of the 'Positivity' essay).
4 Nohl, pp. 101-2; Luke 9: 55-6. The words of the rebuke do not, it seems
 REASON AND FREEDOM 201

In Hegel's account of the Temptation the figure of Satan as an

independent character disappears altogether-which is itself a
clear enough indication that his reference to a possible 'alliance
with higher spirits' was made with tongue in cheek. He felt sure,
obviously, that most of his audience would agree with him that
Satan and his angels regarded as demonic personalities were
simply figments of superstitious imagination. I Because of this
he felt able to indicate quite openly what he regarded as the correct
interpretation of the stories in the Gospels about 'casting out
devils'. Thus, where St. Luke writes:
Then he [i.e. Jesus] called the twelve together and gave them power
and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. And he sent them
forth to preach the Kingdom of God and to heal the sick;
Hegel provides the following gloss:
Jesus sent forth his twelve apostles about this time, to strive, as he
did, against the prejudices of the Jews, who took pride in their name
and lineage, which was a greater glory in their eyes, and which they
prized more highly than the unique worth which ethical life [Sittlichkeit]
confers on man. 2
Here 7T(iV7'U Ta Du£p.6vLa is explicitly identified with moral prejudice
generally and specifically with racial pride. And since the power of
healing is also implicitly included in the explanation, this passage
together with the account of the Temptation effectively disposes of
virtually all the miracles credited to Jesus. All the stories about
miracles of healing are taken to refer to experiences of spiritual
conversion and rational illumination. For example, although I do
not think Hegel actually says this anywhere, stories of the restora-
tion of sight and hearing refer to the same experience as Jesus'
injunction: 'He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.' And finally
the forgiving of sins is merely the recognition by Jesus that some-
one has found for himself the courage to begin a new life. 3
rest on good authority, and they were consigned to the margin in the English
Revised Version of 1881. But doubtless Hegel would have invented something
rather like them if he had not been fortunate enough to find them in his text.
I In his own private notes Hegel turns the dogma of original sin against itself,

saying, in the language of Lutheran orthodoxy, that the externalization of evil

in the figures of Satan the tempter and Adam (and Eve) the sinners, has been the
source of a 'universal bankruptcy of humanity' (Unkunde der Geschichte, Nohl,
p. 362). 2 Nohl, p. 94; Luke 9: I ff.

3 This last point is made explicit by Hegel's analysis of the story of the woman
who anointed Jesus at the house of Simon the Pharisee (Noh!, p. 92; Luke 7:
202 BERNE 1793-1796

Once we grasp his principles of interpretation, some of Hegel's

silences speak volumes. Thus immediately before his identification
of devil possession with moral prejudice there occurs a passage
where (as Rosenkranz put it) 'scattered facts' are brought together
and 'divergent accounts' reconciled. Luke records that on a certain
day, for no given reason, Jesus decided to cross the Sea of Tiberias.
After stilling a tempest on the way he reached the Gadarene (or
Gerasene) shore, where he cleansed a man of a legion of devils,
sending them into a herd of swine which were drowned in the lake
as a direct result. Matthew on the other hand, tells us how when
Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist he went away by boat
to a desert place; but a multitude of about five thousand followed
him, and he fed them all with five loaves and a few small fishes.
From these two sources Hegel produces the following abrupt
paragraph: 'On the news of the murder of John, he [Jesus] had
himself taken over to the eastern shore of the sea of Tiberias-
but he spent only a short time among the Gadarenes and then came
back again to Galilee.'I
We might think there is nothing here except the operation of
what Hegel called Verstand-the use of one story to provide the
motivating reason that is not given in the other and the purging
of fantastic elements from both. But it is only really the stilling of
the storm that is simply purged. We know from Hegel's acount
of the Temptation story that Jesus could not arbitrarily create
food and we know also by the light of reason that he would not
arbitrarily destroy it as he is made to do in the story of the
Gadarene swine. These two certainties, allied with a certain
coincidence of multitudes (the legion of men and the legion of
devils) strongly suggest that Hegel had pedagogic grounds for
37-50). In his notes about polemical attacks on dogma (Roques, p. I) Hegel
speaks of 'disturbing those who slumber in the death-sleep of self-satisfaction
untroubled by Vernunft'. Presumably this was one meaning that he attached to
stories of the 'raising of the dead'. But moral despair over one's sinfulness and
corruption is rather more obviously the kind of death from which one could be
'reborn' through hearing the Gospel (compare Hegel's reading of the conversa-
tion between Jesus and Nicodemus, Nohl, pp. 79-80). Thus 'raising the dead'
is a metaphor for 'forgiving sins', which is in turn a metaphor for awakening in
someone the faith in his own power as a rational being to begin again. To be
'born again' is to recognize one's essential freedom.
I Noh!, p. 94. Hegel himself provides the references Luke 8: 22; Matthew I4:

3; and-for the shortness of the visit-a specific reference to (Luke 8) verse 37

is added. (The real purpose of this last reference, I think, is to draw attention to
the presence of a multitude of people in both accounts.)
 REASON AND FREEDOM 203

bringing together the two accounts as he does. If we think about

the stories together we shall realize, he hopes, that what Jesus did
was to 'feed the multitude' by casting out the prejudices existing
in a legion of minds against the eating of pork!!
About the central miracle of the Christian faith, the Resur-
rection itself, Hegel preserves silence. The pointlessness of it is
implied by the parable of Dives and Lazarus, which he records
quite straightforwardly, though he does not call the place of Dives'
punishment 'hell', and does not mention any 'great gulf fixed'
between Dives and Abraham. 2 His account of the Passion ends
with the burial of Jesus, and the only hint of an explanation for all
that follows in the Gospel accounts is to be found in his emphasis
on the haste with which the body had to be removed and buried
at night because of the onset of the Passover festival, 'during which
it was not permitted to have to do with dead bodies'.3 This
deliberately flat and prosaic ending could be taken as offering a
reason why there was a mystery in the popular mind about the
disappearance of the dead body. And this disappearance, in con-
junction with some rather gnomic remarks about the building of a
new temple in three days-which Hegel takes to refer to the fact
that the rational God does not need a temple at all4-would then
become the basis for a Resurrection myth. But the most natural
explanation for Hegel's silence on this topic seems, at this point at
least, to be that he felt we ought not to trouble our heads over the
explanation of the Resurrection story, because there is no moral
lesson to be derived from it.
When we turn from the interpretation of Jesus' deeds to that of
his words the path, both of Hegel and of his readers, is easier and
more direct. Jesus never said anything that was meant to create a
peculiar faith in him or a belief in the authority of his 'name'.
Hence we have to read between the lines of the assertions on which
this faith and authority have been grounded. With this one caveat,
most of the recorded teaching, especially the parables, can be
I It would be reasonable enough to pray 'Give us this day our daily bread' if

all we meant was 'Free us from moral prejudice against wholesome food'; so
there is nothing inconsistent in crediting Jesus with this miracle!
Z Nohl, pp. II!-!2 (Luke !6: !9-31). 'Moses and the prophets' becomes the

'law of Reason' of course. In general Hegel eliminates 'the prophets' altogether.

Where he cannot simply ignore references to them he calls them 'teachers' (cf.
for example the translation of Matthew 7: 15: Nohl, p. 87).
3 Noh!, p. 13 6.
4 Cf. the note on John 2: 19 in Roques, p. 1.
204 BERNE 1793-1796
accepted as it stands. Examination of Hegel's treatment of the
sources in detail would therefore be as superfluous here as it
would be tedious. The Pharisees followed the letter of the law, while
Jesus taught and acted in its spirit, gradually arousing their
enmity until they conspired successfully to have him executed.
This is the basic plot of Hegel's story. But I shall deal briefly with
one sample passage-the Sermon on the Mount-because Hegel
offers alternative exegeses of it in his later essays. I
Hegel's version follows the fuller account given in Matthew
with an eye always on the parallel text in Luke. He translates the
Beatitudes literally except that the pure in heart are not promised
the sight of God but are said to be actually drawing near to him
('sie nahern sich dem Heiligen').2 'Heaven and earth shall pass
away, but not the requirements of the ethical law'; the law of
Moses is a 'dead skeleton' which Jesus came to 'fulfil' by breathing
a new spirit into it. 3
The spirit of the law is viewed by Hegel as an absolute pre-
condition of the harmony of natural feelings and spontaneous
action that characterized his Greek ideal. His Jesus does not go
in for such picturesque metaphors as the plucking out of eyes
or the cutting off of hands-metaphor is something he avoids
because it breeds misunderstanding; but he tells us firmly to 'do
violence to the most natural, the dearest inclination' rather than
let it 'run beyond the line of what is right and bit by bit undermine
. ,
your maXIms.
I Nohl, pp. 82-8 (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6: 20--49). From the beginning Hegel

regarded the Sermon on the Mount as the most basic expression of Jesus'
ethical message (see Unter objektiver Religion, Nohl, p. 49). He returns to it in
the 'Spirit of Christianity'. This later interpretation deserves to be compared
with the present account fairly carefully (see Nohl, pp. 266-75, Knox,pp. 212-24,
and the discussion below, Chapter IV, pp. 337-46).
2 In his letter to Schelling of 30 Aug. 1795 (i.e. five weeks after he finished the

'Life of Jesus') Hegel says: 'I once had the notion of making clear to myself in
an essay, what it might mean to draw near to God [was es heij3en konne, sich Gott
zu nahern] and thought therein to find the satisfaction of the postulate that
practical reason governs the world of appearances, and of the other postulates'
(Briefe, i. 29). It looks very much as if this was the plan behind Die transzen-
dente Idee von Gott (Nohl, pp. 361-2); but Hegel abandoned it in favour of the
more direct application of the Kantian ideal which he makes in The Life of Jesus.
3 The concept of the spirit of reason as a pleroma of the established custom is

the most fundamental and lasting heritage that Hegel retained throughout his
life from his early studies of the New Testament. Compare Unkunde der
Geschichte (Nohl, p. 363). Hegel's essentially reconciliatory cast of mind is very
appropriately summed up in the concept of 7rA1)pWUL,.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 205

Regarding the relation of the new precept 'love your enemies'

to the old law, Hegel is more accurate and more just than the
Evangelist. The principle 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy-
self' is, of course, expressly contained in Leviticus 19: 18. But it
is there interpreted by reference to 'the children of thy people'.
So that, as Hegel's Jesus says, 'Love of your friends and your
nation is commanded, but at the same time hatred of your enemies
and of foreigners is allowed-I say to you on the other hand:
Respect humanity even in your enemies, wish well to them that
curse you, do good to them that hate you' etc. Almsgiving is a
virtue only if done in a virtuous spirit. It is not to be 'announced
from pulpits or in the newspapers', says Hegel, seeking an ap-
propriate contemporary equivalent for the 'sounding of a trumpet'.
Nothing, least of all prayer, should be done for show, since then it
is fruitless. The real fruit of virtue is precisely the consciousness
of having acted rightly.! We should pray in solitude, either in or
out of doors, and the only proper object of prayer is the coming of
the Kingdom of Ends as defined by Kant.
The injunctions about fasting Hegel omits altogether, probably
because, on the basis of a number of other passages, he was con-
vinced that Jesus did not accept or in any way encourage fasting.z
Instead Hegel offers 'participation in brotherly love' as the index
of moral perfection and fitness for forgiveness; and makes in this
way a natural transition from the Lord's Prayer to the injunctions
about laying up treasure in heaven, 'a treasure of morality which
alone can be called your own property in the full sense of the
word since it belongs to your inmost self'. Vernunft is to the soul
what the eye is to the body; if it is darkened, every impulse and
every inclination goes astray. One cannot serve two masters:
I 'Wahrlich ihr Gebet ist ohne Frucht' (Nohl, p. 84) translates the acid irony

of 'Verily I say unto you they have their reward' (lVIatt. 6: 2 and 4). We can
measure the disciplined sacrifice involved in Hegel's self-imposed policy of
prosaic flatness by reflecting that he himself wanted to maintain that those who
act and pray in the right spirit also have their reward because their charity is
fruitful-But only the contrast in objective results ('fruitless' or 'fruitful') is the
concern of Vemunft. The fact that 'virtue is its own reward' in two quite opposite
senses is a matter for the free play of Phantasie.
2 Cf. Nohl, p. 84. Of course arbitrary self-denial was contrary to his Greek

ideal, and in that sense contrary to reason. Doubtless he would have argued that
if Jesus did say anything about fasting, here or on other occasions, he was only
applying the ideal of reason as far as possible to the traditions and circumstances
of his time. So he would presumably read Matthew 6: 16 thus: '(It is best not
to fast at all, but if YOll feel YOll must do it then) be not as the hypocrites' etc.
206 BERNE 1793-1796
reason and sense. Therefore the important thing is to understand
man's spiritual vocation. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God (and
of Sittlichkeit) and all these things will be added unto you. We may
note, in passing, that the declaration that reason is the eye of the
soul shows that, although the Kantian influence is very much the
dominant one, Hegel has by no means given up his Greek ideal of
reconciling and harmonizing all natural impulses. I
The rather conflicting injunctions 'Cast not pearls before
swine' and, on the other hand, 'Knock and it shall be opened'
seem to be reconciled in the Gospel by being referred to our
dealings with men and God respectively. Hegel has no recourse
but to take them as referring to dealings with bad and good men.
Teachers must choose their pupils wisely, but, on the other hand,
if one really seeks for a way of approach to a man's heart one can
find it. Every door will open if you can only find the right knock.
The so-called Golden Rule obviously caused Hegel much heart-
searching. His treatment of it provides the one clear instance of
his tampering with his texts in a way for which the texts them-
selves provide no shadow of excuse. Kant had taught him to think
of the principle 'Do unto others as you would they would do unto
you' as the essential principle of prudential action; thus it epito-
mized for him the rational egoism, the pursuit of personal comfort,
that he found so abhorrent in his own society. At first therefore he
translated the Gospel text as 'the rule of prudence' and contrasted
it with the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative: 'What
you can will, that it should be valid as a universal law among men,
against yourselves also, act ye upon such a maxim' as the ethical
law that Jesus came to preach. Almost immediately he struck out
his own reference to the Gospel altogether, leaving the reader with
a bare opposition between the two texts, that of the Bible and that
of Kant. His cancellation of the earlier version seems to show that
I Hegel was not unconscious of a conflict between his Greek ideal and the

moral rigorism of Kant. He strove continually to reconcile the Platonic-Aristo-

telian conception of <ppoY'r]Ut, with the Kantian Vernunft; and whenever he
encountered arguments tending to show that by the standards of Kantian
morality the virtues of the ancients were really only splendid vices, he rejected
the conclusion quite decisively, even though he did not explicitly renounce any
of the premisses. See for example his comments on a Kantian criticism of the
suicide of defeated political leaders in the ancient world (Unkunde der Geschichte,
Nohl, p. 362). Apparently he does not think that the conclusion validly follows
from the premisses. Suicide in the appropriate circumstances is not inconsistent
with respect for oneself as a rational being.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 2 07

reflection convinced him that one could not here plausibly

suppose that the historical record had been distorted. The
historical Jesus was simply wrong and Kant was right. In reality
it was surely the view of the Golden Rule that Kant had imposed
on him that was mistaken, being inconsistent with the Hellenic,
life-enhancing emphasis in his own attitude to social intercourse.
In the end the simplest and oldest formula, 'Love thy neighbour
as thyself' (of which the Golden Rule is only an expanded form),
triumphed over Kant's abstract rationalism in his mind.!

4. The evils horn of authority

The man who came so close to antIcIpating the Categorical
Imperative, the teacher who taught that men should have faith in
themselves and strive to develop their own reason, rather than
look for a Messiah, the moral hero who lived and died for rational
autonomy and freedom, telling his followers that it was expedient
for them that he should go away, precisely in order that they might
cease to be followers 2-this was the man on whom the halo of
supra-rational (and hence demonic rather than divine) authority
descended. Why had this happened? This was a problem with
which Hegel had been wrestling for almost a year when he
finished The Life of Jesus in July 1795, and he now had his
answer ready. It seems quite probable that he conceived the
essay on 'The Positivity of Christianity'3 at the same time as The
Life of Jesus and as co-ordinate with it. The two essays together
answer the question raised in the plan of 1794: 'How far is the
Christian Religion qualified (for the furthering of morality) ?'4
And much that remains of necessity only implicit in The Life of
Jesus, because of its direct linkage with the Gospel text, is stated
or explained explicitly in the later essay. Furthermore we can
I Nohl, p. 87 (cf. p. 206 n. I above). Hobbes had already pointed out
long before that the only reliable principle of prudence is the more cautious
formula 'Do not unto others what you would not that they should do unto you'
(Leviathan, Chapter I3). The Golden Rule could scarcely function in a pruden-
tial calculus at all; it is only really intelligible as applying to the spirit in which
one should act. (For Kant's strictures on it see the Grundlegung, Akad. iv. 430 n.)
2 Nohl, pp. 12 5-7.
J man mag die widersprechendsten Betrachtungeni(Nohl, pp. 152-313). The
first page of the manuscript is missing. All save the concluding two pages
(added in Apr. 1796) was written before the end of Nov. 1795 (cf. the date in the
margin of the text, Noh!, p. 204). The essay has been translated by Knox in
Early Theological W1·itings, pp. 67-145.
4 Unter objektiver Religion, Nohl, p. 49.
208 BERNE 1793-1796

see from the notes that Hegel made from readings in Ammon's
Theological Journal and in Gibbon that his mind was already full
of ideas for the 'Positivity' essay before he began The Life of
Jesus.!
It seems probable, nevertheless, that Hegel did not begin to
write the 'Positivity' essay immediately after completing The Life
of Jesus. At some point during the next few months he certainly
considered doing for the Pauline Epistles what he had already
done for the Gospels; and he almost certainly contemplated
abandoning his whole undertaking in despair. This much emerges
from Holderlin's letter of 25 November 1795, for Holderlin tells
Hegel that 'a paraphrase of the Pauline Epistles in accordance
with your view [nach Deiner Idee], would certainly be worth the
effort, and urges him 'not to lay your literary concerns aside'. Z
It is clear from the opening of Holderlin's letter that he felt
guilty about his long silence. It is possible, though not in my
opinion likely, that he was prompted to write at the end of
November by an appeal he had just received from Hegel himself.
For Hegel certainly laid the 'Positivity' manuscript aside early in
November, and this would have been a natural moment for him to
have begun thinking about the Epistles. But Hegel's correspondence
with Schelling strongly suggests that there was a hiatus in his work
between the finishing of The Life of Jesus and the beginning of the
'Positivity' essay. Schelling wrote to him on July 21. Hegel delayed
for about a month before replying on August 30; and when he
comes to speak of the state of his own work in this letter he says it
is 'not worth talking about; perhaps I will send you in a little
while the plan of something that I am thinking of working up, a
project in which I would particularly like to ask for your friendly
assistance in matters of Church History, an area in which I am
very weak and in which I can get the best possible advice from
YOU.'3 This was written some five weeks after the completion of
The Life of Jesus (24 July 1795). And Hegel certainly had good
reason to be shy in talking about an undertaking of this sort to
Schelling, who heartily despised the whole field of Church History

I Unlmnde der Geschichte (Nohl, pp. 363, 364, 365, 366). The probability is
that these notes are slightly earlier than Die reine aller Schranken (Schuler,
P·142).
2 Letter IS, Briefe, i. 34. See further, p. 209 n. 2 below.

3 Letter 14, Briefe, i. 33.

 REASON AND FREEDOM 20 9

in which his school record was 'outstandingly good'.r But for

Hegel to speak of his 'Positivity' essay as a 'plan' if he had already
written almost a third of it-as we might expect if he had begun
it as soon as he completed The Life of Jesus-is rather odd, to
say the least. My own conclusion therefore is that he was at this
time making new 'plans' and had not yet seriously embarked on the
next step in their fulfilment.2 Unfortunately, because of the loss
of the first page of the 'Positivity' manuscript, which was probably
headed like The Life of Jesus with a date, the question cannot be
decisively settled. 3
Schelling was certainly as depressed as Hegel could possibly
have been when he wrote on 21 July. He was badly downcast both
about the reception of his first philosophical essay and about the
prospects of his hero Fichte, who had turned the whole student
body against himself at J ena by trying to interfere with the running
of their clubs. For a time Fichte had had to withdraw from the
University altogether. By this time he had returned again, but all
the forces of reaction were now aroused against him; both he and
his youthful disciple were severely handled in reviews, and even
Schiller was criticized for associating with him. The shadow of
the Atheismusstreit, which eventually drove him from J ena alto-
gether, already loomed on the horizon. Schelling, at twenty, was
volatile enough to be deeply depressed. He had been accustomed
ever since he was ten or eleven years old to see everything that he
did greeted with adult admiration and amazement; and this was
x See Fuhrmans, i. 43-4. Of the three reports preserved for this subject, the
first (winter 1793/4) is 'auszeichnend gut', the other two (summer 1794, winter
1794/5) 'sehr gut'.
Z The 'plans' of the 'Old Man' were a byword among his friends at Tiibingen
(cf. Chapter II, p. 71 above). I believe that while he was still writing The Life
of Jesus Hegel wrote to Holderlin about his plans for the Epistles and his desire
to find a new position; and then he wrote again in November in a very dis-
heartened vein, complaining of Holderlin's silence, asking his advice about a
return to Tiibingen and saying that he was going to lay aside-or had laid
aside-all of his 'literary concerns'. This appeal Holderlin answered fairly
promptly in the letter that we have. (Cf. further, p. 244 nn. 1 and 3 below.)
3 If it bore a date then it was certainly lost before Rosenkranz came to examine
the manuscript (see his rather misleading description on p. 54, where the re-
writing of the introduction in 1800 is not distinguished from the original). The
probability is, I thin.1r, that Hegel himself removed the first page, and perhaps
destroyed it, when he made his revision in 1800. The later stages of the revision
were made directly in the margin of the original manuscript: cf. Nohl, p. 139 n.
(Hegel habitually began by folding his sheets down the centre. He then wrote
on the right side of each page leaving the left half blank for his revisions and
additions.)
8243588 Q
ZIO BERNE 1793-1796
probably the first time he had experienced a serious check in his
career as a Wunderkind. Hence when he tells Hegel: 'Certainly, my
friend, the revolution that is to be produced through philosophy
is still far off',I we must not mistake the accents of Chicken Little
for the sober voice of mature reflection as many critics have done.
He sent both his thesis (De Marcione) and his second philosophical
essay Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie for Hegel's inspection
and comment.
Hegel's reply (30 August 1795) makes clear that he did now
fully accept the impersonal conception of God as the Absolute
Ego. He does not say any more about its belonging to the 'esoteric'
philosophy of the time,2 but rather stresses that if Schelling's
discussion of the 'moral proof' does not make the Tiibingen
'Kantians' see the error of their ways, nothing wil1. 3 He realized
that Schelling's pessimism was largely due to his personal dis-
appointment, and he did all he could to raise his friend's spirits,
telling him that the unfavourable reception of his ideas was a
result of his being ahead of his time. 4
I Briefe i. z8. Schelling's three-months' silence is quite sufficiently accounted

for in the letter itself, without any necessity to suppose (as Haering does, i. ZIO)
that he found Hegel's letters boring, misguided, or otherwise unsatisfactory.
He was in his last semester at Tiibingen and had enjoyed the onerous privilege
of writing his own thesis for defence in the final examination. The pressure on
him was such that when he finished it he was ill and had to go home for a time.
He was clearly very happy to be able at last to think about things that were
closer to his heart, and to write just what he thought and felt without the nagging
consciousness of Storr's overseeing eye. There is, if anything, a tone of comfort-
able confidence in this letter which was not present earlier-this is the first
letter in which he does not say anxiously that they must not become fremd.
The longer silence between Hegel's letter in August and Schelling's next in
January is likewise to be accounted for by the pressure of Schelling's other
interests and occupations, not by supposing that he thought the correspondence
was not worth the trouble-even if he is a little ironic about the failure of any of
Hegel's 'plans' to bear any published fruit. Of course in this period he was free
from the boredom of the Stift, so he felt less need to write to Hegel. But he does
still regard him as a potentially important ally. He tells Hegel that he may find
the 'Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism' relevant to his interests; and in June
he duly thanks Hegel for his comments on them (Briefe, i. 36-7).
2 As he had done in April (Briefe, i. Z4).

3 Briefe, i. 30. 'Page 103' of Schelling's essay which Hegel there refers to is to
be found in Siimtliche Werke (1856), i. ZOI.
4 He adds the testimony of a Tiibingen Repetent to the same effect! About
Fichte's adventures he remarks with the sage prudence of a professional Volks-
erzieher that 'perhaps he would have accomplished more if he had left them
their savagery [Roheit] and only set himself to bind a quiet, well chosen little
group to him' (Briefe, i. 3Z-3). Fichte ought to have behaved more like Hegel's
Jesus in fact!
 REASON AND FREEDOM 2II

He excused himself from the task of criticizing Schelling's

essay on the sensible ground that he was 'only a learner' in these
matters. This was quite obviously true; and it was also true that
Hegel's interests were more strictly practical than Schelling's.
But we must be careful not to overstate the contrast between them.
They shared a common enemy in the Tubingen School of theology,
and Schelling's reasons for opposing it were just as political and
moral as Hegel's-in fact they were identical. While Hegel, on
the other hand, was increasingly convinced that the rational
theology, and even the purely theoretical philosophy of Kant and
Fichte, was the great hope of the future. The one criticism that he
ventured concerns Schelling's application of the concept of sub-
stance to the Absolute Ego. He objected on grounds of elementary
Kantian theory that the concept is inapplicable at this noumenal
level. It is clear, at least, that Hegel understood both the relation and
the contrast between Spinoza and Fichte as Fichte himself expressed
it and as Schelling had expressed it in an earlier letter.1 Behind his
present complaint lies the conviction that even the theory of the
Absolute as Ego must remain true to its essentially practical
origins, and not fall back into the use of the old dogmatic cate-
gories. The contrast between the Absolute as Substance and the
Absolute as Subject is not yet clear in Hegel's mind, because he
has surrendered the idea of a personal God without as yet finding
anything very definite to put in its place; but the firm grasp of
Kant's distinction between the theoretical and the practical use of
reason, which is here evident, is the origin of this later distinction. 2
I Briefe, i. 22; cf. Briefe, i. 19-20 for the same point in a letter of Hi:ilderlin's.
2 There is a sense in which the older view, now generally discredited, that
there is a sequence of thought from Kant through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel is
correct. Each of them drew more rigorously than his predecessor the conse-
quences of Kant's restriction of the speculative use of reason to the practical
realm, and each was consciously correcting the 'mistakes' of the thinker before
him.
It is hard to decide, at least without more detailed study than I have been able
to give to the question, how far Hegel actually misunderstood Schelling-as
Haering claims (i. 208-9). I do not think that in the circumstances of this letter
we should take seriously his implied doubt whether Schelling is speaking of the
Absolute Ego or not; in fact I do not think any doubt is implied. The reference
to the empirical ego as 'uniting the highest thesis and antithesis' I take to be a
slip of the pen-either something has been left out, or Hegel just got lost in his
own syntax.
Finally, Hegel's use of Nicht-Ich when he comforts Schelling against adversity
by telling him that the basic trouble is that 'people absolutely will not give up
their non-Ego' is certainly peculiar. But if Schelling did not see why Hegel used
212 BERNE 1793-1796

Schelling's thesis De Marcione prompted Hegel to one comment

that is interesting in the light of his current preoccupations:
I have found in it especially confirmation for one suspicion, which I
had already harboured for a long time, that it would perhaps have
turned out more honourably for us and for mankind, if one or other
(and no matter which) of the heresies damned by Councils and Symbols
had developed into the public system of belief, instead of the orthodox
system maintaining the upper hand.!
Hegel's own essay which was 'not worth talking about' in the letter
to Schelling begins, like Wenn man von der christlichen Religion,
by alluding to the difficulty of establishing what the term 'Christian
religion' properly refers to. Hegel now assumes that the Christian
religion was not originally a doctrine of salvation through faith in
Christ, that there was not originally a contrast between Christian
salvation and salvation through reason, and seeks to account for
the contrast between them which now so obviously exists. Probably
he announced this presupposition and the resulting problem at the
outset, for in the manuscript as we have it he declares that in the
eyes of the orthodox-those 'sustained by the tradition of centuries
and by the public power' -his inquiry is more suspect even than
the rational critique of religion offered by the leaders of the
Enlightenment. He goes on immediately to accept the general
principles of enlightened criticism himself, so we must assume that
he had already said something which distinguished his undertaking
from the work of Kant and Fichte on the one side, or that of
Montesquieu and Gibbon on the other.2
the term in this way, he had only to look at the context of the passage in his own
essay referred to later: 'Gott in theoretischer Bedeutung ist Ich=Nicht-Ich, in
praktischer absolutes Ich, das alles Nicht-Ich zernichtet', etc. (Siimtliche Werke
(1856), i, 201). Since Hegel referred to this page one can hardly suppose that he
misunderstood the concept of the Nicht-Ich, no matter how curiously he chose to
apply it.
t Briefe, i. 32. Schelling's thesis dealt with the problem of whether Marcion
had falsified the text of the Pauline epistles. The reading of it must almost
certainly have had some effect on Hegel's nascent plan to do for the Pauline
epistles what he had already done for the Gospels. But we cannot guess what the
effect was.
Z I take it that he has Kant and Fichte in mind when he speaks of those who
take reason and morality as a basis for testing it [the Christian religion]' and
Montesquieu and Gibbon when he speaks of 'drawing on the spirit of nations
and epochs for help in explaining it'. Of course there are many others who
may have been in his mind also. His own undertaking involves both of these
approaches, as we shall see, but the distinctive assumption that all true religion
 REASON AND FREEDOM 213

As in all of his later works, Hegel found it impossible to write

the sort of preface that was expected, and his introductory
remarks constitute the first sketch for a critical attack on the
writing of prefaces, which appeared full blown in the Preface to
the Phenomenology. One ought not, he felt, to begin with a statement
of faith or a description of one's own peculiar point of view, since
if all one had to offer was a personal opinion one's statement could
have no public or universal significance, while if what one wished
to say did have rational foundations, this could only be made clear
in the body of the work and not in the preface. He began therefore
with a statement of rational principle:
Wholly and entirely in reference to the topic itself, let it here be said
that in general the basic principle to be laid down as a foundation for all
judgements on the varying modifications, forms, and spirit of the
Christian religion is this-that the aim and essence of all true religion,
our religion included, is human morality, and that all the more specific
doctrines of Christianity, all means of propagating them, all duties to
believe and to perform actions that are otherwise in themselves arbi-
trary, are to be appraised for worth and sanctity according to their closer
or more distant connection with that aim. I
Hegel's fundamental thesis is that this was the principle by which
Jesus himself was guided in his attempt to 'raise religion and
virtue to morality'. Jesus did not advance any new moral doctrines
but sought to restore and develop the moral substance and meaning
of existing usage and tradition. 2 Even in his life-time Jesus was
misunderstood by those closest to him, says Hegel, referring to
two cases which he had already examined in The Life of Jesus: the
is essentially rational (moral) makes Hegel closer in spirit to Rousseau's 'Creed of
a Savoyard Vicar' and Lessing's 'Education of the Human Race' than to any of
the other strands in the Enlightenment.
I Nohl, p. 153; cf. Knox, p. 68.

2 Hegel provides a list of Old Testament references to support this claim

(Nohl, p. 154; Knox, pp. 69-70). Knox finds the inclusion of Leviticus 18: 5
in this list puzzling. But it is easy enough to understand once we grasp the
principle by which the series is articulated. First Hegel indicates the source of
the two great Commandments (Matthew 22: 37(-39») in Deuteronomy 6: 5
and Leviticus 19: 18. Then he compares Leviticus 18: 5 ('Ye shall therefore
keep my statutes, and my judgements: which if a man do, he shall live in them:
I am the Lord') with lVlatthcw 5: 48 (,Be ye therefore perfect, even as your
Father which is in heaven is perfect'). Thus Hegel identifies the idea of living in
the law, of gaining life from it in some way, instead of subjecting life to it, as
what is meant by the command 'Be ye perfect'. Finally he gives reasons for
rejecting the Golden Rule as a summary of the moral law.
214 BERNE 1793-1796

request of Zebedee's wife and the betrayal by Judas, and one

other which was there eliminated, the question 'Lord, wilt thou
at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel', directed to Jesus
just before the Ascension.! From the ambiguous relation of Jesus
to his tradition a new religion of authority has sprung; but all the
same, it is clear that Hegel thinks Jesus' policy of giving every
established usage its maximum value by relating it as closely as
possible to the moral end of man is the right one, and the only
one that a rational man can follow when he believes that the
forces of moral corruption are at work in his own society.
Because of this reintegrative attitude Jesus was not the founder
of a philosophical sect which rises superior to custom and tradition
without condemning it (except of course where it leads to immoral
actions), nor yet of a positive sect which makes a moral fetish out of
replacing the existing custom by some new (but equally positive)
pattern of behaviour. 2 Because Jesus did not simply set aside the
customs and traditions of his people as irrelevant, contemporary
philosophical sectarians (Kant) can deny that Christianity is a
virtue religion, and contemporary positive sectarians (the Tubingen
School) can exalt it as a revelation superior to reason. Against the
common assumption of both, that the teaching of Jesus was origin-
ally positive, Hegel urges the evident fact that as a system of
I Nohl, pp. 154-5. See Matthew 20: 20 and Acts 1: 6. Hegel gives no

specific reference for the case of Judas, but from The Life of Jesus we can see
that he followed the versions of Matthew 26 and John 13 (for the parallel
passages in the earlier work see Nohl, pp. 114-15,123-5).
2 Hegel's concept of a 'sect', and of the different types of 'sect', is not easy to

disentangle. I think that Haering (i. 227-8) has the basic doctrine right, although
his view that Hegel means to assert the existence of a good kind of positivity is
misleading. In any pattern of social life there are two elements, one which is
moral (Sittlichkeit) and one which is simply customary. Thus two kinds of sects
are possible: philosophical sects whose members hold special views about
morality and (hence about God as the pure fount of moral reason) and positive
sects who reject the established customs and substitute others, because they
wrongly believe God to be something other than 'pure Reason incapable of
limitations', and so strive to please him in non-rational ways. Established customs,
rooted in the imagination of the people, are not in themselves good, though they
may certainly be susceptible of some good use, and are to be appraised accord-
ingly. In themselves, all such customs are morally indifferent. When someone
believes that a set of customs is good as such, he gives to it an authority that it
ought not to have, he sets up a positive authority, a heteronomous system in the
Kantian sense. Thus any positive authority is ipso facto evil, and though there is
a use of the word 'positive' which is morally neutral, there is no sense in which
positivity is ever 'good'. It is only one's attitude to it that can be good, and the
good attitude is most aptly described as 'making the best of it'.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 2I5

positive doctrine Christianity as we have it is the result of a long

process of historical development. Since much has been added, the
hypothesis that Christianity was originally a virtue religion, in
Hegel's own sense-that is to say a re-evaluation of a positive
tradition by the standard of rational virtue-cannot be ruled out
without investigation. In any case this hypothesis 'will be recog-
nized by all parties of the Christian communion as correct, though
it will also be pronounced very incomplete'. I
For the Jews the law of Moses was the direct deliverance of God
himself, so that anyone seeking to reinterpret it, had of necessity
to claim like authority. To appeal simply to reason would be like
'preaching to fish' because the Jews had lost the awareness of
reason as am autonomous faculty.2 Jesus therefore had to demand
faith in his own person as a step towards the recovery of that
autonomy. Thus one mystery of The Life of Jesus is resolved.
Where St. John makes Jesus say 'He that believeth on me, believeth
not on me, but on him that sent me', Hegel takes this, with what
follows-'If any man hear my words and believe me not, I judge
him not ... the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge
him in the last day. For I have not spoken of myself' etc.-as the
clearest indication Jesus could give that he was not asking for

1 Nohl, pp. 156-7 (Knox, pp. 72-3). As we have seen, this hypothesis is really

a matter of principle for Hegel. To rule it out is to admit that Christianity is not
a 'virtue' religion (i.e. a 'true' religion) at all. As a ground for rewriting the plain
text of the Gospels in an inverse sense this may not satisfy Father Peperzak (see
above, p. 200 n. 3), but it did have some force in the eyes of the Ttibingen
theologians, since their argument was that positive revelation was needed
precisely because practical reason is unable to solve all the problems with which
we are inevitably faced in moral experience. In particular, they emphasized the
omnipresence of sin which made the postulate of gratuitous forgiveness (which
reason cannot justify) necessary. This problem troubled Kant himself gravely.
Hegel alludes to it but, of course, he cannot allow that raising the problem itself
to the rank of a 'postulate' is any solution. His own solution came later in the
Frankfurt essay 'The spirit of Christianity'. (From his own point of view the
concessive allusion to the 'incompleteness' of his hypothesis in the 'Positivity'
essay is very probably an anticipatory reference to the task that he had still to
perform in that later essay.)
2 Nohl, pp. 159; Knox, p. 76. This metaphor echoes the earlier reference to

the pious behaviour of St. Antony of Padua (Nohl, p. 157; Knox, p. 73) in a
way that can hardly be accidental. In the earlier passage it is argued that if we
suppose that Jesus made a positive revelation we must suppose that human
beings are endowed with a faculty to receive it. Here it is argued that one cannot
appeal directly to Vernunft if men have lost the consciousness that they possess
it. Hegel is obviously trying to show how Vernunft itself comes to appear as if it
were, and to be appealed to as if it were, a faculty for receiving divine revelation.
216 BERNE 1793-1796

reverence or faith in his own person, but rather for faith in the
power of reason by which his word was apprehended. Taken in
this way the passage provided Hegel with a warrant for reinter-
preting the many statements about 'believing on me' in John and
elsewhere, without having to assert, or meaning to imply, that they
were wrongly reported. I
Those who accepted the words of Jesus as authoritative were
bound, in the circumstances of Jewish culture, to believe or suspect
that he was the Messiah. Jesus himself could not contradict this
belief without denying the Messianic hope itself, which would have
been contrary to his whole method of procedure, and would also
have prevented him from obtaining an effective hearing at all. He
strove therefore to bring out the spiritual meaning of the Messianic
hope by referring the kingdom and the glory of the Messiah to
another life and another world. The persecution and death of such
a one was bound to make a tremendous impression on his followers,
says Hegel. He still does not allude to the Resurrection directly,
but goes on to discuss the miracles of healing in a way which,
very discreetly, casts doubt upon the literal interpretation of the
record;2 and he specifically says that the miracles did more than
anything else to make the religion of Jesus positive. We can infer,
I think, that Hegel believed that the Resurrection story grew out
of Jesus' attempts to give the Messianic hope a higher meaning;
and certainly it was this story in conjunction with the account of the
Passion which 'fettered the imagination' to him.3
Turning now from the sources of faith in Jesus as a positive
authority or saving power, to its consequences, Hegel comments
that belief in the miracles of Jesus would be all very well if, as
I John 12: 23-50; Nohl, p. II9. It is odd that Peperzak should have chosen

this.passage to make an issue over Hegel's falsification of the record, for it is the
one passage in John that seems most plausibly taken in Hegel's sense, and it is
the key to his frankly Pickwickian interpretation of all the others (cf. Peperzak,
p. 63 n.).
2 He points out that the Scribes and Pharisees were not impressed by miracles

of healing which reportedly took place in their presence, but only by the violation
of the Sabbath where that was involved; and that the curing of demoniacs is
ascribed to others in the Gospels themselves.
3 Nohl, pp. 160-1; Knox, pp. 77-9. Just as there is here (I think) a tacit

allusion to the Ressurrection, so also the remark about 'insignificant traits which
pass unnoticed [gleichgilltig sind] when told of an ordinary man' is a tacit dismis-
sal of the Nativity story. For the significance of the word fesseln in Hegel's
personal vocabulary, see the reminiscences of Leutwein (Hegel-Studien, iii.
56, line 130).
 REASON AND FREEDOM 217

Storr and the Tiibingen theologians held, it really led men to

follow his moral example. But in fact this 'round-about way'
(Umweg) to morality has the effect, first of distracting attention
from morality as the real destination of the journey, and secondly
of making us too humble to believe in our own capacity to be moral
--so that in fact it cannot really lead us to the destination at all,
and according to the principle announced at the outset it ought to
be discarded altogether as mere superstition. I
Hegel clearly wants to maintain that the establishment of a
positive sect was not the deliberate act of Jesus himself. Both in
The Life of Jesus and in the 'Positivity' essay he tries as far as
possible to explain away all evidence to the contrary. His treatment
of the relations between Jesus and the disciples shows this very
clearly, especially when we compare it with the sharp contrast
drawn between Socrates and Jesus in the fragments of I794. 2 This
contrast is still present: the disciples of Jesus were not, like those of
Socrates, men who had their own aims and purposes, and a firm
consciousness of their own capacities. They had given up their
private lives to follow Jesus and they had no share in public life;
and twelve of them were finally singled out. But in The Life of
Jesus three stages are distinguished in the calling of the apostles,
so that the eventual fixing of their number at twelve is seen as
entirely accidental. Jesus simply chose the best available pupils
for more direct and personal instruction, and it was only after his
death that their number became significant because they assumed
in the infant community the authority of a college of magistrates. 3
I NohI, pp. 161-2; Knox, pp. 79-80. This point was first made in Es soUte eine

schwere Aufgabe (Nohl, p. 59).

2 See especially Christus hatte zwiilj Apostel, Nohl, pp. 32-4.

3 Cf. Nohl, pp. 78, 90; and Nohl, pp. 163-4 (Knox, pp. 82-3). It is quite
plain-as Knox indicates in his footnote on p. 84-that Hegel will not allow
Jesus to be held responsible for anything that is credited to the Risen Lord.
His conviction that Jesus certainly never promised that 'He that believeth and
is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned' explains
the antipathy to the Gospel of Mark, which we noted earlier (see p. 197 n. I
above). Hegel points out that Mark 16: 15-18 is inconsistent with the last
discourse of the living Jesus as recorded in John, and seems to be expressly
contradicted at the end of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7: 21-3). In
The Ltfe of Jesus these two discourses are regarded as the basic accounts of
Jesus' own doctrine. This contrast between the teaching of the living Jesus and
the command of the Risen Christ struck him even before he began to study the
Gospels in the light of his principle of 1T>'1JPWUt, (see Christus !latte zwijlj
Apostel, Nohl, pp. 32-3). But it does not seem to have occurred to him in 1794
that the Risen Christ need not be identified with the man Jesus.
218 BERNE 1793-1796

The recorded action of Jesus himself in sending the Twelve

forth to preach did provide a basis for their authoritative position.
As Hegel says, this method of procedure is only suited to the
spreading of positive religion, not to the advance of virtue. In
attempting to account for the story he seems to have wavered.
In The Life of Jesus it is presented as an experiment which
Jesus tried without any very high hopes, and which he im-
mediately recognized as a failure so that he never attempted to
repeat it. In the 'Positivity' essay Hegel seems more inclined
to the view that the story is simply false, for he sandwiches it
into his account of the authority and the command given to the
Twelve after the Resurrection, and about this he is quite overtly
sceptical. I
In any case, whether or not Jesus himself tried any mistaken
experiments, the real degeneration of his mission into the founding
of a positive sect began with the preaching of the Gospel in the
name of the Risen Lord. 2 This involved the transformation of
Jesus' message into a contradictory conception-a positive doctrine
of virtue: the earliest Christian community was a sect that took a
positive attitude toward philosophical tenets. But it was also a
'positive' sect in the ordinary sense of Hegel's definition, for it
regarded the established law and custom as sinful and had distinc-
tive positive ordinances of its own. As long as it was a small
community whose membership was entirely voluntary there was
nothing pernicious in any of this. But as soon as it grew to em-
brace whole societies, leaving individuals without the opportunity
for that employment of free choice from which alone the con-

I On the first view the later 'sending of the seventy' had to be explained

away-and Hegel accounted for it by assuming that it arose from a misunder-

standing of the obviously sensible habit of sending two disciples ahead whenever
Jesus was journeying with the whole company. In the 'Positivity' essay, how-
ever, he alludes to both stories quite neutrally. It is easy to see why he may have
been in some doubt about what line to take. For to admit the sending of the
seventy seemed on the one hand to involve casting a grave slur on Jesus' intellig-
ence; but on the other hand, it could be used to show that the twelve had no
peculiar privilege or authority in his eyes. See Nohl, pp. 102 and 164 (Knox,
p. 83). (Hegel discusses these stories again in his notes for 'The Spirit of
Christianity': see Nohl, pp. 396,400-1; and in that essay he does not distinguish
between them but treats both stories together as evidence of the dream-like
character of Jesus' faith: Nohl, pp. 325-6; Knox, pp. 282-3.)
2 This point was first made in TVenn man von der christlichen Religion (Nohl,

p. 59): 'John's call to the people was: "Repent"; Christ's: "Repent and believe
in the Gospel"; that of the Apostles was: "Believe in Christ".'
 REASON AND FREEDOM 21 9

sciousness of moral autonomy can spring, its positive character

became the root of evil. I
When this happened, both the distinctive institutions (com-
munity of goods etc.) and the distinctive quality of life (brother-
hood and family feeling generally) characteristic of the early
Church disappeared, and purely symbolic observances replaced
them. Thus, for instance, at the Last Supper Jesus enjoined the
disciples to think of him whenever they were eating together; the
early Church made this into a religious rite, and a substitute for
pagan sacrificial feasts; and finally the fraternal character of the
observance has disappeared almost entirely and the private,
mystical aspect of it has been exalted above all else.
But the establishment of Christianity as a 'public' religion had
its good as well as its bad side. Any positive sect is naturally bound
to be zealous in the making of converts, since salvation depends
on adherence to its distinctive (positive) doctrines. 2 While, on the
other hand, any virtuous member of a philosophical sect will
always respect virtue even if it appears to him to be allied with
illogic. Hence if such a one encounters a Christian who has chosen
to cleave to the rational rather than to the purely positive aspect of
hi.s faith, he will be led 'to marvel at the invincible might of the
Ego which triumphs over an intellect [Verstand] full of morally
destructive convictions and a memory packed with learned
phrases'; and really virtuous members of different sects will
recognize one another as brothers, just as Nathan and the Lay
Brother do in Lessing's play. But this 'triumph of the Ego' is not
likely to occur until the anxieties of positive faith have been
allayed by the comforting presence of a multitude of like-minded
believers.3
I This point was first made in (iffentliche Gewalt (Nohl, Pl'. 42, 44) and in So

kann in einem Staate (Nohl, pp. 44~5).

2 Hegel asserts this as if it was a necessary truth about all positive sects. But,
in fact, the beliefs of the sect may be such as to make all proselytizing activity
appear somewhat anomalous-as was the case, for example, with Biblical
Judaism, founded as it was on the covenant of God with his Chosen People, and
on the expectation of a Messiah who would 'restore the kingdom to Israel'.
What Hegel says is, however, necessarily true about a 'positive doctrine of
virtue'.
3 Nohl, pp. 169~73; Knox, pp. 91~5. The missionary impulse is itself
rooted in an urge to escape from the burden of rational freedom; when we try
to convert someone 'our secret reason is often our resentment that another
should be free from fetters [Fesseln] which we ourselves bear and which we have
not the strength to cast off'. The establishment of the consensus gentium relieves
220 BERNE 1793-1796

At this point we might say that the diagnosis of the problem is

complete, and Hegel begins to make recommendations for its
solution. I The decline of zeal in missionary work, and the allied
growth of interest in missionary reports as a source of anthro-
pological and other scientific information, marks the point at
which we can at last recover the true sense of the Gospel that was
to be preached to all nations. The absolute Ego of Schelling-
Hegel's 'reine, aller Schranken unfahige, Vernunft'-can now
exhibit its 'invincible might'. The gospel of Jesus must now be
'fulfilled', as he 'fulfilled' the law of Moses. In other words the
positive aspects of religious faith must be deprived of their
authority, for only then will the adherents of the various religions
be able to recognize the paramount authority of reason-the
moral law-in all of them. Hence the Churches must give up
all coercive power, and become what they originally were, entirely
voluntary associations. There must be complete separation of
Church and State because the establishment of morality, the ulti-
mate goal which they have in common, cannot be achieved by
legal coercion; and in any alliance between the two of them the
Church inevitably requires the State to exercise coercive force on
its behalf.
Hegel's discussion of Church-State relations is heavily indebted
to Mendelssohn's Jerusalem, in which a doctrine of the rigid
separation of Church and State is based on the view that while the
aim of the State is to secure legality by coercive sanctions, the aim
of the Church is to secure morality by voluntary conviction. Hegel
himself says explicitly at one point:
Since an ideal of moral perfection could not in principle [11berhaupt]
be the object of civil codes of law and least of all could the ideal of the

us of the duty and responsibility for rational investigation so to speak; and, as

Hegel remarks, against the terrors of hell we have at least the comfort that a lot
of other people will be there with us. But in gaining this comfort we have
exhausted the missionary impulse, and so finally the power of reason is able to
reassert itself.
I Outwardly his discourse continues to have the form of a diagnosis of the

process by which throne and altar became allied, but from here on (Nohl,
p. I73; Knox, p. 95) his fundamental concern is the proper relation of Church
and State; his primary authority for Church History is Mosheim, and his
inspiration comes mainly from Mendelssohn's Jerusalem. I shall treat this part
of his discussion rather cursorily, because the text is readily available and quite
easy to follow. (The stages of 'positivity' involved are well analysed by Hocevar,
PP·77-87·)
 REASON AND FREEDOM 221

Christians be an objective for Jewish and heathen governments, the

Christian sect attempted to influence the disposition [Gesinnung] and
take that as the standard for determining men's worth and the rewards
or punishments they deserve. I
The highly ironical context in which this passage occurs-Hegel
has just said that both from its methods and its heroes we can see
that the 'holiness' of Christianity is just 'what really pious men
have in common with vagrants, lunatics, and scoundrels, unified
in a single concept'-tends if anything to make Hegel's acceptance
of the principle here stated more certain. The methods of the
Christian Church are condemned precisely because they attempted
to import the methods of civil justice into the moral realm where
the concepts of reward and punishment have no place. But, for all
that, we must not fall into the error of thinking that Hegel agrees
with Mendelssohn's separation of Church and State in terms of
aims and methods. The State, in his view, must have a monopoly
in the use of legal coercion; but it does not thereby cease to be a
moral organism with essentially moral aims. The State is above
both the burgerliche Gesetzgebung and the religiosen Anstalten, as
Hegel indicated in Unter objektiver Religion. The principle of
distinction between these subordinate agencies was first stated in
the second paragraph of that sketch and the whole of his present
discussion is a development of the fourth:
To make objective religion subjective must be the great concern of
the State, the institutions must be consistent with the freedom of
individual dispositions, so as not to do violence to conscience and to
freedom, but to work indirectly on the determining grounds of the will
-how much can the State do? How much must be left to each indivi-
dual man?z
The Church is essentially a voluntary society within the State,
I Nohl, p. 178; Knox, p. 101.
2 Nohl, p. 49. I think it likely that Unter objektiver Religion is the 'Skizze'
referred to in the deleted heading near the beginning of the 'Positivity' essay.
At least the cancelled heading (Nohl, p. 153) 'comparison with the articulation
of a State Constitution (see Outline)' fits in very well with the parallel in para-
graph five of Unter objektiver Religion between Religion and the State as agencies
for advancing morality, just as the present discussion fits paragraphs two and
four. (A hint of what Hegel may have meant to say under the cancelled heading
can be gained from the remarks about the Sermon on the Mount further on
(Nohl, p. 176; Knox, p. 99); and, for that matter, it is not too hard to see how
the parallel applies to the 'state of the Jewish Religion' which Hegel actually
goes on to analyse at that point in his text.)
222 BERNE 1793-1796

and hence the rights a citizen concedes to his Church can never be
such as to result in any infringement of his civil duties. I The State
needs the Church-or rather, as we shall see, it needs the Churches
-because it cannot do anything that will directly cause its citizens
to behave morally. A church which men join freely will aid the
development of morality in so far as it appeals to moral motives;
but it may actually impede the development of morality if it sets
out to terrorize the imagination. A 'State-Church' is bound to
impede the development of morality if civil penalties are appointed
for those who refuse to join it or seek to withdraw from it. Any
society, from the State downwards, has the right to exclude from
its members those who refuse to obey its rules; but just for this
reason ecclesiastical regulations must never be given the force of
State laws.
The main area of difficulty, as Hegel recognizes, is education.
For it is here that the State's moral concern is most apparent, and
also the dangers of sectarian prejudice. A man, he argues, who
disagrees with the political organization of his society, has at least
the freedom to emigrate (if there is any freedom in his society at
all). But a child educated by an authoritarian church may never
become a free man at all; he may grow up in a kind of slavery-
either the mental slavery of one who does not know how to think
for himself, or the psychological slavery of one whose imagination
is so terrorized that he does not dare to do so. Yet to bring up a
child without a positive faith would be to deprive both the state
and the individual of the aid of the imagination in the formation
of the moral character; and although Hegel's echoing of the
shocked sentiments of the Patriarch in Nathan on this point is
transparently ironical, he certainly does not mean to take this way
out.Z
His hope lies rather in the development of what he takes to be
the essential spirit of Protestantism. No child can enjoy freedom
of choice while he is being educated; any freedom secured by law,
or even by the 'law of nature' (i.e. by Vernunft), can only be
exercised on his behalf by his parents. But steps can be taken to
I Nohl, p. 174 (Knox, p. 97). In the following paragraph (Nohl, p. 175) Hegel

draws an explicit distinction between dey Staat als Staat (Mendelssohn's State)
and der Staat als moralische Wesen (his own conception based on the Greek
ideal of the 7T6A,,).
2 Nohl, pp. 188-90; Knox, pp. 114-16. The two occurrences of Fesseln
(verb and noun) indicate Hegel's own attitude.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 223

see that his education is not such that his reason is 'fettered'
(gefesselt) by it. Hegel's own proposal to remove every vestige of
hierarchic authority from the structure of the Church and make
every form of religious observance entirely voluntary and ab-
solutely democratic would certainly ensure this. He does not
propose to restore the communism of the early Church, but he
does propose that the Church should once more be dominated by
the spirit of absolute equality and brotherhood.
To this end he sets himself to show that there cannot be such a
thing as an authoritative declaration of the faith, or an authoritative
interpretation of a commonly accepted symbolic formula or creed.
This is because one cannot, in the nature of things, bind oneself
to believe something. There cannot be a social contract in matters
of faith. One cannot subject one's own opinion to the General
Will. I A Council of the Church can, if it is properly representative,
i.e. if it is democratically elected, declare what the general faith
of the congregation is; but no one can lay down authoritatively,
even for himself, what the faith ought to be. Everyone, always,
must retain the liberty to think again, because this is the pre-
condition of thinking berter, and so of becoming better. Hence, a
civil contract to 'defend the faith' or to 'respect another's faith'
can only be a recognition of the civil obligation to defend and
respect universal freedom in matters of faith. Toleration, which is
a necessary evil for believers, because they are rationally obliged
to recognize that no man can be saved by force, is a rational duty
for citizens and for the political authority.
In discussing religious education, therefore, Hegel does not
appeal to freedom of thought and of conscience, since they are
matters of civil right, but to the quality of religious faith itself. A
cloistered faith, a faith that must be protected against all outside
influence is not a genuine personal conviction at all. It is not, in his
earlier terminology, 'subjective', but only 'objective' or, as he says
I It is noteworthy that Hegel at twenty-five is enough of a revolutionary

democrat to accept the identification of the General Will with the majority vote,
without apparently troubling his head over all the difficulties that this identifica-
tion entails: see Noh!, p. 191 (Knox, p. lI8). Of course we should remember
that he is speaking only of the Church Assembly regarded as an ideal democracy
(which would satisfy Rousseau's conditions perhaps better than any actual
political community ever could) and the whole theory is only postulated as an
Aunt Sally to be knocked down. Also, we should note that the civil contract is
defined as a contract for the maintenance of individual rights. Clearly Hegel's
study of Du contrat social was by no means cavalier or superficial.
224 BERNE 1793-1796

here, it is 'a faith that can be pocketed in the brain, like money'. I
He ends his essay with a long diatribe against this objective con-
ception of faith and morals as something that can be learned from
compendia. Only legality can be produced in this way, and the long
history of proliferating sects which have sprung from the original
Christian heresy within Judaism is the inevitable result of the
assumption that the spontaneity of moral reason can be confined
within the verbal strait jacket of the understanding. Z
Hegel's attack on the disciplinary conception of morality, and on
asceticism generally, is based on the premiss that feelings can no
more be produced or changed at will than opinions can. The
result of all attempts to constrain feelings is either Angst (on the
part of those who recognize their failure) or hypocritical com-
placency (on the part of those who falsely believe they have suc-
ceeded). Religious life must rest on the feelings we actually have
and not on those which we are theoretically supposed to have. 3

5. A polemical interlude
Having arrived at this point Hegel laid his manuscript essay aside
for five months or more. In April 1796 he returned to it and added
a brief conclusion which we shall consider in its due place below.
All the available evidence indicates that for the time being (in
November 1795) Hegel turned away from his historical studies to
write the fragment Ein positiver Glauben. 4
I Nohl, p. 204; Knox, p. 134 (the metaphor comes from Lessing's Nathan).
2 Nohl, pp. 20S-II; Knox, pp. 135-43. (The concluding pages which follow
this passage were added some five months later.)
3 Hegel first advanced this argument explicitly in the fragments of 1794-
offentliche Gewalt and So kann in einem Staate-but behind it lies his Greek
ideal of a natural spontaneous harmony of thought and feeling, and his revision
of the Kantian idea of holiness in this direction in the essay of 1793; see Nohl,
pp. 17-18, 42-5, and 206-10 (Knox, pp. 136-42). Compare also the dis-
cussions above (Chapter II, pp. 142-4 and Chapter III, pp. 191 ff.). The
Pietists are singled out for their emphasis on the discipline of feelings, and the
Calvinists are praised for getting the emphasis in the right place. This is illumin-
ating in a slightly paradoxical way, for though one can see the resemblance
between Calvinism and Kant's rational rigorism, the only affinities between
Geneva and the Greek cities seem to be with Sparta rather than with Athens.
Hegel had visited Geneva a few months earlier (in May 1795); and I suppose
we must always remember the influence of Rousseau's ideal picture on his mind.
4 Nohl, pp. 233-9. For the dating see SchUler, p. 144. Nohl thinks this frag-
ment is connected with the idea Hegel once had of writing an essay on 'What it
may mean "to draw near to God'" (Briefe, i. 29, 30 Aug. 1795); and there is in
fact a thematic connection between it and Die transzendente Idee von Gott (which
represents, in my view, all that Hegel ever did about that project).
 REASON AND FREEDOM 225

Both the thought and the handwriting of this fragment are

closely linked to that of the section on 'The form morality must
acquire in a Church', which was written on and after 2 November
1795. Because of these affinities Miss SchUler has suggested that
Ein positiver Glauben may have been intended as a new introduc-
tion for the 'Positivity' essay. This is at first sight a plausible hypo-
thesis, but in actual fact the fragment is ill suited for insertion at
the beginning of that essay because of its rather aggressive and
polemical tone. If Hegel began it with that idea in mind, he must
soon have realized that the whole essay would have to be recast to
fit it. I am more inclined to the view that, having completed the
most conciliatory defence of his views that he could contrive, he
felt ready to move on to the attack. In other words, this fragment
should be viewed as an attempt to continue his plan rather than as
a revision of part of it. In the end, however, he set it aside, wrote a
new ending to the 'Positivity' essay, and began working on a
different, more positive, kind of continuation for it, in which his
conception of Christianity is brought into direct relation with his
Greek ideal.
Ein positiver Glauben purports to set forth the essential nature of
a faith grounded upon pure authority, and examines the arguments
of the Tiibingen School in defence of such a faith. I A 'positive'
faith is defined as a system of religious propositions accepted as true
upon the command of an authority whom we cannot refuse to
believe. 2 The propositions are 'objective' truths (i.e. they are true
in the abstract, regardless of whether we believe them or not) and
our duty of belief is the duty to make them into 'subjective'
maxims (i.e. principles that guide our actions). This duty of belief
upon authority is quite different from belief upon authority
generally (for example acceptance of historical testimony),
because ordinary belief of this kind is grounded upon a prior
estimate of trustworthiness, whereas positive faith can only rest
initially on recognition of the absolute power of the commanding
I There are signs that the essay may have been occasioned by Stiskind's
essay on Fichte's Kritik aller Offenbarung which formed the appendix to his
German translation of Storr's Notes on Kant (Bemerkungen usw., 1794). Cf.
Asveld, p. 109.
2 Hegel sometimes uses the word 'positive' in a quite neutral, descriptive way.
But in connection with 'religion' or 'faith' it always retains something of the
force that it has in legal theory ('positive law' is that which is established and
maintained by a sovereign authority). As such, 'positive faith' and 'positive
religion' are always regarded by Hegel as evils.
8248588 R
 BERNE 1793-1796
authority. As we take the first steps toward wisdom we become
aware of God's beneficence and of his being the source of truth,
but only the fear of the Lord can be there in the beginning.
About this 'fear of the Lord' Hegel says something very interest-
ing, which reflects his study both of Greek tragedy and of the book
of Job at Tiibingen. Everyone must recognize the supreme might
of 'Nature, Fate, or Providence' over his natural desires; but any-
one who allows this supremacy to extend to his spiritual concerns
will not be able to escape from a 'positive faith'. Thus the choice,
for Hegel, lies between finding a purely 'spiritual' interpretation
of the postulates of practical reason, or else allowing 'revealed' or
'positive' truths to have the status of postulates. The problem of
showing that there is no Ubermacht in the world of the spirit is the
problem of showing that Vernunft is somehow self-sufficient at this
level. Thus we come back to the problem of how Kant's postulates
are to be interpreted, and in the present essay Hegel carries through
the programme of Die transzendente Idee von Gatt.
That Vernunft has an essential tendency to postulate whatever
will satisfy its requirements is common ground for both rational
and positive faith; and Vernunft is accepted on both sides as the
criterion of religious truth. This represents, as Hegel notes, a
considerable shift on the part of the Tiibingen School from the
older tradition of theological exegesis according to which it is
natural to find that 'the thoughts of God are not comprehensible
by human reason'. I Since the defenders of positive religion do not
deny that Reason is able to provide a complete system of moral
principles ('because they cannot deny what happens before their
eyes') all belief or unbelief in a positive faith turns upon the
admission of a power before which Reason is itself helpless. The
content of the positive faith is admitted to be contrary to the laws
of 'a moderately experienced understanding' -for Storr and his
school laid great stress on the miraculous as a sure index of revela-
tion itself. The imagination can picture what is asserted, but
Verstand forbids us to believe it. Verstand now is overruled by
I Nohl, p. 235. Herein lies the justice of Asveld's comment (from the point of
view of the whole tradition of Christian orthodoxy) that 'without doubt Storr
and Siiskind think that the essential truths of Christianity, just as they were then
presented by their church, answer to a universal practical requirement; but in
admitting the primacy of practical reason, in sacrificing to the anthropocentrism
of the Aujkliirung, we hold that they introduced a principle of dissolution into
Christianity' Asveld, p. 74).
 REASON AND FREEDOM 227
Vernunft, which recognizes in the duty of belief the means of
satisfying the almighty power and obtaining the fulfilment of its
own requirements.
The fault in this chain of argument lies in the assumption that
Reason actually requires something lying within the domain of
'Nature, Fate, or Providence'. The confusion of sensible needs and
satisfactions with rational requirements leads to a misunder-
standing of the fundamental postulate of self-sufficiency. The
principle that 'virtue deserves happiness' is made the basis of
demands for the satisfaction of sensible desires (which are at the
mercy of fate), because where the moral will exists in a mind
dominated by sensible desires, its command is interpreted as the
condition of sensible happiness. Where reason itself attains its
full and proper mastery over the mind a man may sacrifice his
whole sensible existence (his life) for an ideal of honour or
patriotism-'and only in our times have men been able to say "That
man was worthy of a better fate".' I
Reduced thus to a powerless arbiter of sensible satisfactions for
which men are dependent on the alien power, reason can only lead
us to the duty of faith. But 'faith' here is only 'lack of consciousness
that reason is absolute and sufficient to itself'. A citizen of a free
republic fighting for his country has an aim in which his own
private happiness, conceived in terms of these sensible satisfactions,
plays no part. He has voluntarily renounced his right in these areas,
and so in this case reason cannot 'take back' its rights.
Having thus disposed of Heaven, Hegel turned to consider the
fear of Hell. This brought him face to face with the problem of the
forgiveness of sins. On the one hand a direct remission of sins
appears to be contrary to every rational principle of equity, and
on the other it is obvious that no human being is quite without sin.
This problem was a very serious one for all the theologians of pure
reason, and the Tiibingen view that the Christian promise answered
to a need of reason was therefore very attractive. It is unfortunate,
therefore, but perhaps not altogether surprising, that Hegel broke
off at this point. We can see from the way he interprets 'forgiveness
of sins' in The Life of Jesus that the first step in his answer would
have been provided by his interpretation of Kant's postulate of
freedom as the power of reason to wipe the slate clean and make a
new beginning. Probably this was all that he had to offer at this
1 Noh!, p. 238.
 BERNE 1793-1796
time; but probably, too, he was dissatisfied with it because it is too
negative-the integrative aspect of reason is lacking. In the case of
the renunciation by reason of its rights in the sensible world,
Hegel's interpretation of Kant is reconcilable with his Greek ideal
because, for instance, the 'free republican' dies in order that his
society may continue to live a completely integrated, rationally
controlled life. I Nothing corresponds to this redemption of sacri-
fice in the case of sin.
My own belief is that Hegel's polemical undertaking foundered
upon this difficulty. He eventually found a solution for it in the
doctrine of reconciliation with fate set forth in the 'Spirit of
Christianity'. But that solution was achieved at the cost of a con-
siderable revolution in his own attitude to Kant's ethics and theo-
logy. He never for a moment accepted the Ttibingen interpretation
of Kant, but he did eventually come to hold that Kant's rational
religion shared some of the basic weaknesses of Storr's positive
religion. 2 He was certainly not thinking along these lines in the
early months of 1796, however. For in April he returned to the
'Positivity' manuscript and added a conclusion which was explicitly
designed to reconcile Kantian terminology with his own (as far as
possible) and the Kantian conception of Vernunft with his Greek
ideal.
Kant has shown us, he says, what the domains of reason and
understanding are. The Church had confused the 'subjective'
principles of Vernunft with the 'objective' principles of Verstand.
It is true that Kant calls the moral laws of Reason 'objective', but
this objectivity is not like the objectivity of the rules of the under-
standing. This seems to be an implicit acknowledgement that
Kant's usage is different from his own, but Hegel does not stop
to investigate the difference. The problem as he sees it is in any

I Hegel is not consciously concerned about this reconciliation with his earlier
ideal here-or at least there is no sign that he is. He is only concerned about the
question of what kind of happiness the virtuous individual is 'entitled' to. For
this purpose only an appeal to the Greek concept of Fate is relevant.
Nor does the postulate of immortality (on which, as we saw, Fichte and
Schelling laid great emphasis) enter into the question; that postulate cannot
have anything to do with a doctrine of future recompense for present sacrifices
in the sensible realm, because (for instance) in the Kingdom of Heaven there is
neither marrying nor giving in marriage: 'the immortal souls who have entered
into the society of pure spirits will lay aside needs of this sort along with the
body' (The Life of Jesus, Nohl, p. 120).
• See Chapter IV, Section 4, pp. 310-22 below.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 229

case to make the 'objective' laws (objective both in Kant's sense

and in his own sense) 'subjective', i.e. 'to make them into
maxims, to find motives for them'. Hegel's use of the plural
'motives' here strictly implies that his use of 'subjective' is different
from Kant's also, since there is only one possible motive for a
moral maxim in Kant's view-pure 'respect'. Hegel is quite well
aware of this difference too, but he chooses to ignore it, because
there is no way in which both usages can be justified in this case,
and he does not want to say outright that Kant is wrong. In his
own view, of course, all of the 'higher feelings', all altruistic
impulses, are good 'subjective' grounds for a maxim, even though
he verbally concedes that 'respect for the moral law' is 'the sole
moral motive'. His notion of autonomy is thus broader than Kant's,
as it must be, since he wishes to replace Kant's legalistic rigor
with the Hellenic conception of reason as an organizing, harmoniz-
ing, and reconciling power. The Greeks, he says, had a naturally
correct feeling for the distinction between morality and legality,
between reason and understanding in practice, even though Kant
was the first to draw the distinction correctly 'for science' (i.e. in
theory). The very conception of a positive Church, a body organized
on the model of the social contract, with its own 'legal system', or
'moral code', violates this distinction and reduces moral reason to
a type of technical understanding, a very complex art, or a special
skill which can be (and of course has to be) learned or developed,
with a due and proper reliance on expert advice and guidance.
Hence: 'The whole authority [Gewalt] of the church is unlawful;
and no man can renounce the right to legislate for himself, and be
responsible to himself alone for the administration of his own
law, for by the alienation [VeriiuJ3erung] of it he would cease to be
a man altogether.'I
I Nohl, p. 212 (Knox, p. 145). In this account ofthe concluding summary of
the 'Positivity' essay I have deliberately sought to elucidate Hegel's clearly
enunciated doctrine, without reference to the textual crux on page 211 (Knox,
p. 143). I do not think we can possibly accept Nohl's emendations for this
passage, since one cannot plausibly suppose that Hegel would have made such
a systematic series of substitutions through any ordinary inadvertence or
momentary confusion. We must therefore re-examine the original text as
reported from the manuscript.
Setting aside, for the moment, our knowledge of Hegel's argument in the rest
of the essay and elsewhere, the only difficulty in construing the text arises from
the phrase 'von der christlichen Kirche hingegen' in the final clause of the sentence.
This phrase is odd because the first half of the sentence also refers to the
'christliche Kirche', and it says the same thing as the last half, so an opposition
23 0 BERNE 1793-1796

The final paragraph of the new conclusion provides a clue to

what Hegel had been doing since he laid the 'Positivity' essay
aside-and probably since he had abandoned his projected attack
on the Tiibingen theologians. In all probability he turned at this
time to the study of German medieval mysticism and made the
excerpts from Eckhart and Tauler of which Rosenkranz tells us.
For in his closing lines Hegel appeals to the rise of all the Christian
sects in the Middle Ages and in modern times 'as evidence of the
right of Vernunft'; and the one excerpt on this topic that remains
to us was taken from Mosheim's Institutiones historiae ecclesiasticae,
which was available to him in the library at Tschugg. I The doctrine
between them is scarcely conceivable. A slight change of punctuation however
is enough to make the whole passage quite intelligible, though it remains
pleonastic. This is the insertion of a bar or a period in place of the comma after
the first aufgestellt. I propose therefore that the sentence be read as follows:
'Die moralischen Gebote der Vernunft werden namlich in der christlichen
Kirche sowie in jeder, deren Prinzip reine Moral ist, gerade wie Regeln des
Verstandes behandelt, und aufgestellt (-) jene sind subjektiv, diese objektiv;
von der christlichen Kirche hingegen wird das subjektive der Vernunft wie
etwas objektives als Regel aufgestellt.'
To understand the text (now that it is self-consistent), in a way consistent with
Hegel's general argument, all we have to remember is the difference between a
religion and a Church. Hegel speaks of the Christian religion, of the Christian
Church, and of the Greek religion; but never of the Greek Church, because
there was no such thing, and, if his conception of Greek religion was correct,
there could not be such a thing. (That is why, although it is conceivable that
he might write 'the Christian religion' when he meant to say 'the Greek religion',
it is almost unthinkable that he should have written, as Nohl supposes him to
have done, 'the Christian Church' instead of 'the Greek religion').
Any true religion has morality as its object (e.g. the Greek religion, the
Jewish religion, the Christian religion); so any true religion that is organized
into a Church (an assembly with a legal structure and a constituted authority,
whether democratic, aristocratic, or monarchic) commits the fallacy of confus-
ing the moral law with legal rules. Haering seems to have grasped the right
interpretation of the passage-but his reading of it is so complicated both by his
preconceptions about Hegel's view of the relation between religion and morality,
and also by the desire to connect Hegel's use of the terms 'subjective' and 'objec-
tive' with Kant's, that the meaning of the sentence is hard to disentangle in his
account (i. 245-6).
I Rosenkranz, p. 102; for the presence of the Mosheim volume in the library
at Tschugg, see Hans Strahm, p. 530; the excerpt is in Nohl, p. 367. This
excerpt cannot possibly have been, as some critics have suggested or implied,
the only one that Rosenkranz had before him. For in the first place Eckhart's
authorship is not mentioned in the excerpt at all; in the second place, Rosenkranz
specifically mentioned Tauler as well as Eckhart; and in the third place he says
the excerpts were from Literaturzeitungen. It is true he did speak rather loosely,
and generalize a trifle rashly at times, but how could he possibly invent so many
concrete details on the basis of an excerpt for which Hegel indicates the actual
source with great exactness? (See Rosenkranz, p. 102.)
 REASON AND FREEDOM 23 1

of The Life of Jesus, and even the very idea of reinterpreting the
Gospel record in accordance with the dictates of our own reason is
clearly expressed in this one short excerpt about the 'Brethren of
the Free Spirit', and it seems certain that Hegel's conviction that the
needs of reason itself lay behind the genesis of sects derives from
this source. I

6. The road to Eleusis

Hegel never for a moment forgot or abandoned his view that the
ideal of human existence was the life achieved in the Greek cities,
and especially in Periclean Athens. The influence of Kant's moral
philosophy, which was dominant in his mind throughout 1795,
sprang, as we have seen, from his conviction that the self-conscious
awareness of the powers and rights of reason which was the most
notable achievement of the Enlightenment, was the principal
instrument and main resource for the regeneration and reintegra-
tion of life in accordance with that ideal. He knew that it was
through the work of his older contemporaries, Rousseau, Lessing,
Mendelssohn, Kant, Fichte, and Schiller that he had been placed
in a position to appreciate the Greek achievement as he did; and
he believed that through the right 'application' of their theories
the wholeness of life could be restored. This was the motive behind
his Kantian reinterpretation of the Gospel. When he first asked
himself the question 'How far is Christianity qualified to serve as
a folk-religion?' he was mainly impressed by the extent to which its
rational doctrines had been corrupted by the fundamental principle
of 'faith' --i.e. passive acceptance of a positive authority. The
attempt made by the defenders of positive faith at Tubingen to
I Mosheim reports that the rescript against the Brethren charged them with
holding that: 'Multa sunt poetica in Evangelio, quae non sunt vera, et homines
credere magis debent conceptibus ex anima sua Deo juncta profectis, quam
Evangelio .. .' This remarkable coincidence with Hegel's doctrine raises the
question whether perhaps it was the reading of Mosheim that first inspired
Hegel to write his Kantian Life of Jesus. We cannot, of course, say when he
began to read Mosheim, but he used him as an authority on Church History in
writing the 'Positivity' essay (Nohl, p. 193; Knox, p. 120) and he quotes him
again at the end of Apr. 1796 (Nohl, p. 210; Knox, p. 142). But the crucial
excerpt Der gute Minsch was almost certainly made in the early months of 1796,
since the last excerpt on the same sheet was taken from the Allgemeine Litera-
turzeitung for Feb. 1796. So it seems best to assume that Rosenkranz's date for
the Eckhart and Tauler excerpts ('at the end of the Swiss period') is correct.
(K. 1. Diez, the 'Kantian enrage', is a somewhat more probable source for the
inspiration of The Life of Jesus.)
232 BERNE 1793-1796

absorb even the latest achievements of reason into their system

of revealed truths, spurred him into a contrary attempt to exhibit
the subordination of religion to reason. Although his fundamental
concern continued always to be with the quality of life as lived
in this world, his attention was thus temporarily, and partially,
deflected on to the problem of the relation between life in this
world and life in the world beyond.! He never meant, certainly, to
commit himself to any position that was inconsistent with his
Hellenic ideal,2 but some problems and tensions remained hidden
and hence unresolved until his thoughts turned again, specifically,
to the Greeks, as they did early in 1796.3
After writing his brief conclusion to the 'Positivity' essay, in
which he adverts to the Greeks explicitly for the first time in some
fifteen months, Hegel began to work on an essay of which the
central topic is the question 'How did Christianity conquer
paganism ?'4 In this new essay he returns first to ideas put forward
I Of course what we may call his 'political' concern (using the term in its
widest Greek sense) was never far from the limelight. This can be seen by
considering the relation between the first part of 'the Positivity of the Christian
Religion' (dealing with the Gospels and the Apostolic Church) and the second part
(dealing with the relations of Church and State). 2 Cf. p. 206 n. 1 above.

3 If the Thucydides translation mentioned by Rosenkranz (p. 60) does indeed

belong to the Berne period as he thought, then it is most reasonable to suppose
that it was made in spring or summer 1796; and some of the 'Fragmente
historischer Studien' can plausibly be assigned to the same period on account
of their affinities either with Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde or with the
study of Thucydides-see especially Fragments 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, II, 17, and
compare the following note and p. 271 n. 2.
It must be emphasized that any attempt to date these fragments is beset with
ambiguities, because of many affinities with the dated manuscripts of the
Frankfurt and even of the Jena period; and it is peculiarly infuriating not to
know how many distinct manuscripts Rosenkranz took the fragments from.
But if we suppose that the Thucydides fragments in particular came from a
sheet headed by some definite date in 1796, we can thereby explain why Rosen-
kranz thought the undated translation of Thucydides 'in all probability belongs
to the period when Hegel lived in Berne' (Rosenkranz, p. 12).
4 The reference to the Greeks in the conclusion of the 'Positivity' essay
(written 29 Apr. 1796) will be found at Nohl, p. 21 I. For reasons which will
appear, I am inclined to think that when Hegel wrote it, he already had (at
least) fairly definite plans for Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde, which is the
subsequent essay referred to here (Nohl, pp. 214-31).
Comparison of the last sentence of the Apr. 1796 addendum to the 'Positivity'
essay with the undated 'historical fragment' 9, Die ungeziigelte Einbildungskraft
(Dok., p. 267), further suggests that Hegel may have tried to write an essay
contrasting the Golden Age of Greece with the Age of Chivalry in this period.
(Fragment 8, Was ein gebildeter Geschmack, would also fit neatly into the context
of such an essay. But see the caution in n. 3 above.)
 REASON AND FREEDOM 233

in the so-called 'Tiibingen fragment' of 1793 (or in the plans and

outlines associated with it) and then to theses expressed in the
early Berne fragments of 1794 (especially Jetzt braucht die Menge).
There is an obvious continuity with the 'Positivity' essay, in that
the polemic against 'positive Christianity' is maintained, but the
'religion of Jesus' which was the central focus of his attention in
1795 drops out of sight altogether, and he returns to the attack on
'faith in Christ' which he mounted in 1794. It comes as a surprise
therefore, and at first sight it seems almost a paradox, that the
pagination of the new manuscript links it to the 'Positivity' essay
in a way which indicates that Hegel regarded it as being somehow
a continuation of the same project.
If we do not fall into the error of regarding the 'Kantian' essays
of 1795 as a sort of hiatus in Hegel's development, but rather ask
as I have done just how they fit into the programme of work that
he hammered out in 1794, the appearance of paradox is soon dis-
sipated, and the surprise is seen to be unjustified. Before he ever
went to Berne Hegel had established the canons by which a 'folk-
religion' was to be judged; he went to Berne with the problem of
how the requisite organic unity of life was to be re-established in
his own society; and after nearly a year spent in diagnosing the
problem he finally focused it in the form 'How far is the Christian
religion qualified [to serve as a folk-religion] ?'.I All of his subse-
quent labours in 1795 and early 1796 were directed towards answer-
ing this question. 2
The connection between the first canon ('Its doctrines must be
founded upon universal reason') and the fragmentary essays, Es
sollte eine schwere Aufgabe and Wenn man von der Christlichen
Religion, is explicit. The polemical tone of these preliminary
efforts obscures the connection between the first canon and The
I See Religion ist eine (Nohl, pp. 20-1) for the first formulation of the canons;
and Unter objektiver Religion (Nohl, p. 49) for the statement of the problem
(with repetition of the canons). I have already argued that the relation between
Unter objektiver Religion and man mag die widersprechendsten Betrachtungen
(the 'Positivity' essay) is close enough to suggest that the former may be the
'Skizze' that Hegel referred to in a cancelled heading of the latter (Nohl, p. 153
n.). Even if this suggestion is set aside, I do not think the focal importance of the
question about the potentialities of Christianity as a folk-religion can be doubted.
• That is to say all of the labours that can be dated. vVe do not know when he
made his studies of the public financial system of Berne, or when he began to
work on his translation of Cart's Vertrauliche Briefe. But if, as it seems plausible
to suppose, these two enterprises were linked, it is most probable that they
lobeng to his last months in Berne.
234 BERNE 1793-1796

Life of Jesus. But if we consider The Life of Jesus in the light of the
summary verdict on Christianity in Unter objektiver Religion: 'its
practical doctrines are pure .. .', the relevance of The Life of Jesus
to the basic problem becomes clear. Finally, in the 'Positivity'
essay, the negative and the reconstructive approaches are com-
bined, and an outline of Christianity re-formed into a folk-
religion is sketched.
With the writing of the 'Positivity' essay the application of the
first canon has now been completed and it is time for Hegel to
move on to the second: 'Fancy, heart and sensibility must not go
away empty.' This is the phase of his task that he seeks to develop
in Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde, and his first approach
to the problem is again negative. In respect of the second canon,
Hegel's initial assumption was that not very much could possibly
be said on the constructive side, as a glance at the relevant sections
of the plan will confirm. This was where the Greek ideal was
particularly powerful in his mind. Greek religion did not in fact
satisfy the canon of rationality very explicitly, and he knew that it
did not. Only in Socrates, and particularly in the argument of the
Phaedo, did it reach the level of self-conscious Vernunft. But the
execution of Socrates posed a problem, and instead of alluding to
Socrates in Religion ist eine Hegel simply adopted the Kantian
postulates of practical reason as the fundamental doctrines of all
true folk-religion, without offering any explanation. Throughout
his application of the first canon to Christianity, he continued to
use Kant's moral philosophy as his yardstick, though it is true that
in the process he reinterprets the postulates of practical reason in
accordance with a criterion of rational self-sufficiency which is
essentially Greek in its inspiration. Thus the origins of his
'Kantian phase' are quite explicitly present in the initial formula-
tion of his Greek ideal, though an explanation of its presence is
not to be found there. The missing explanation is offered only
now, as we turn to the canon which is entirely Greek in origin and
inspiration, and for which Greece remained the exemplar in
Hegel's eyes as long as he lived. The Greeks had a 'sure feel' for
what was rational in practice, but they had not reasoned it out.
Only at the point where the feeling began to go wrong did anyone
grasp the truth consciously.!
I Nowhere in the fragments of Tiibingen or Berne does Hegel actually say that
anything had gone wrong in the Athens of Socrates; but he does remark very
 REASON AND FREEDOM 235

The new essay begins with several points with which we have
long been familiar. Every nation has its own stock of imagery,
expressed in stories about Gods and demons (religious tradition)
or about founding fathers and heroic leaders (political tradition).1
But Christianity has emptied the Valhalla of the German Volk, and,
save perhaps for Luther, whose achievement is celebrated by a
dreary annual reading of the Augsburg Confession and a still more
boring sermon, the Germans have now no heroes. 2 Their traditions
survive only as superstitions among the people, and the attempts
to raise them to the level of art and literature have no popular
appeal or resonance; whereas even an Athenian who had to sell
himself into slavery knew the stories, watched the great dramas,
and worshipped before the great statues. 3 Shakespeare has made
the history of England live for its people, but Klopstock cannot
do this for the Germans, because their great drama is a story not
of political freedom but of subjection to an alien religion. 4
early that the Greeks would not give to philosophers the critical licence which
they accorded to poets (Aber die Hauptmasse, Nohl, p. 357); and his comment on
Cato's recourse to the Phaedo at the last (Nohl, p. 222; Knox, p. 155; discussed
below) certainly bears out the view here maintained.
I Nohl, p. 214; Knox, p. 145. The more carefully we compare this passage
with the cancelled myth (in Religion ist eine) about the Geist who is the child of
Chronos and Politeia and the nursling of Religion, the better we can understand
both that myth and the inadequacies that caused Hegel to cancel it (cf. Nohl,
pp. 27-8, text and footnote). Both the religious and the political tradition are a
product of time, but the constitution is something which abides unchanged
through time, and religious myths are properly distinct from historical tradition
because they have a permanent spatial location or association, rather than a
definite temporal one (cf. Nohl, p. 217; Knox, p. 149).
2 Nohl, p. 215, Knox, pp. 146-7; cf. NIan lehrt unsre Kinder (1793) (Nohl,
p. 359), Die Staatsverfassungen (Nohl, pp. 38-9), So kann in einem Staate (Nohl,
PP·4 6-7)·
3 It is interesting that in recurring here to the very first form in which the
contrast between the integrity of ancient society and the divided, alienated
condition of mOdelTI society struck him (see Ober einige charakteristische Unter-
schiede der alten Dichter (1788), Dok., pp. 48-9), Hegel also makes his first
explicit allusion to ancient slavery. Even the slaves in a free society, he seems to
be hinting, had more real spiritual freedom than the self-seeking individuals
who remained when the free republics perished.
4 This contrast is not absolutely explicit in Hegel's text, but I think there
cannot be much doubt that it was present in his mind-cf. the comment about
the poetic ideals which are seen on a closer look at be 'cut out of the Catechism'.
It is not really the foreign character of Christianity that troubles him either, so
much as its authoritarian character and its emphasis on human helplessness.
His attitude both to the native tradition and to the German hero Luther was
ambiguous to the point of despair, because on the one hand Luther personified
the spirit of joylessness and authority which made religion essentially private; and
236 BERNE 1793-1796

Finally Hegel comes to a point which, as far as I can recollect,

he has not made explicitly before, although it explains certain
comments and notes that he made earlier: that the imagery of a
free people must be linked with places rather than with dates. He
praises the Catholic Church in this respect, for the reverence
accorded everywhere to local patron saints. I But by emphasizing
the historical character of what should properly be only a myth
round which religious observances can be built, Christianity has
generated a theoretical problem about the historical status of
miracles, and a practical problem of intolerance toward all who do
not accept the overriding moral authority of the historical record.
Even when we put aside the 'positive faith' which it is our 'duty'
to believe, even when we try to view our Scriptures as the Greeks
viewed their myths, we are faced with these problems arising
from their supposedly historical character. It seems that either we
must say: 'It all happened, just as it is described' (which violates
the first canon because Storr is wrong in holding that Vernunft
requires us to override our own Verstand); or else we must say:
'Of course it did not happen' -for example Moses did not see
God in the burning bush, because, on the one hand, God is never
a visible object in that way, and on the other hand (as Lessing
makes Recha say), 'Wherever Moses stood it was before his God'.
This solution violates the second canon by sending imagination
away empty. In Hegel's view Moses really was directly and im-
mediately aware of being in the presence of God at some times
yet on the other hand, in making the break with the past which made the earlier
tradition 'as strange as the imagery of Ossian or of India', he was advancing
the cause of reason, for the ideals of the Age of Chivalry were quite irrational (cf.
Fragments 8 and 9 in Dok., pp. 266-8).
Again, Luther and the Teutonic knights represented different ways in which
Christianity had corrupted the native tradition. But Hegel's own hope lay in a
foreign tradition which was not corrupt. At the very least he wanted the 'Teutons'
to reinterpret the traditions of their fatherland in the spirit of Achaea rather
than that of Judaea.
(It should be noted that there may be a lacuna in the text between the para-
graph on the attempt to revive the old German traditions and the paragraph on
the adoption of the Greek traditions by the educated. The fact that the same
points about the alienation of the educated from the vulgar, and of both from
the old German imagery, are made in both paragraphs seems to me, however,
to make it more probable that there is no break. (Cf. Nohl, p. 217 (Knox, p. 148),
and Nohl's footnote on p. 214.)
I Noh!, pp. 217--18 (Knox, pp. 149-50); for an earlier attempt to account for
the imaginative superiority of Catholicism see Die Formen der andern Bilder
(Nohl, p. 359).
 REASON AND FREEDOM 237
and in some places, and not at other times or in other places. At
such moments of awareness God was present in a way in which he
is not usually present. Being a sensible feeling, the awareness must
have an objective aspect (for example, the burning bush, the light
on the road to Damascus, or any other perceptual experience
sufficiently dramatic to express its intensity) which is of no
positive significance, but which somehow satisfies the imagination,
and helps Moses (or Paul) to hold on to the experience, and
communicate something of its enormous significance to others. I
Hegel now poses the contrast between myth and history as a
basis for religion in an even more extreme form, as the next topic
for discussion. His new heading reads: 'Difference between Greek
Imaginative and Christian Positive Religion.' But what he actually
discusses is how the former could ever have given way to the
latter, and his immediate problem is: 'What must life be like in
order for men to feel the need of a divine authority over their
existence as a whole, so that they are ready and eager to accept the
fancies of the imagination as historical facts?' His answer, in a
nutshell, is that when the political freedom of a society is destroyed,
its members lose all confidence in, and even awareness of, their
own moral autonomy, their control over destiny at the spiritual
level. For what after all can they do that is not subject to immediate
nullification by external force? The old myths expressed vividly
the power of natural forces, including of course the forces of man's
I Nohl, pp. 217-19 (Knox, pp. 149-51). Hegel specifically refers us to Herder's
views on this topic. In interpreting what he says I have drawn freely on the
critique of the Tubingen doctrine of the miraculous which he first made (as far
as we know) in Ein positiver Glauben. He repeats the doctrine at the end of the
present essay (Nohl, pp. 230-1; Knox, pp. 165-7), and again in an undated
fragment first printed by Rosenkranz, which may have been the earliest of the
three or may have been written some time later. Nohl adds the Rosenkranz
fragment, Der Streit aber die Moglichkeit, as a footnote (pp. 231-2), but it can
hardly have been part of the present essay because it repeats the argument too
closely. All we can be sure of, I think, is that it was not written before Unkunde
der Geschichte (early 1795), because there Hegel is obviously still feeling his way
toward a theory of the miraculous. I am inclined to think that it was the latest
of the three discussions, precisely because Hegel speaks with such incisive
authority in it. In any case, we should note that once again he refers us to Herder's
views on the subject. Herder's views on the Old Testament would have come to
his notice by 1792 at the latest, through Schelling's concern with them: cf. the
latter's master's thesis, and Hegel's familiarity with the announced topics of
'Dber Mythen' (Briefe, i. II). Herder may well be the ultimate source of
Hegel's second canon; and the failure of Lessing's Nathan with respect to the
second canon explains why it is designated as a product of Verstand in Religion
ist eine (Nohl, p. 12.)
 BERNE 1793-1796

own nature, but men knew these divine powers could be resisted,
for they came into visible conflict with one another. They had to
be respected, but no one supposed that they could compel
obedience. Even reason itself claimed no such right, says Hegel,
anticipating his eventual quarrel with Kant: 'Good men acknow-
ledged, in their own case, the duty of being good, yet at the same
time they respected the freedom of others not to be, and hence
they did not set up either a divine moral code or one which they
had made or abstracted themselves to be exacted from others.'1
The sense of moral autonomy is essentially linked with political
and economic democracy. For as soon as economic classes are
established the rich must bear heavier political burdens and re-
sponsibilities; and where this is the case an unresolvable moral
conflict is created. The poorer voters cannot assert their right to
make an independent decision, by turning out their leaders, without
accusations of treachery and ingratitude being made. There is thus
a conflict between the two essential constituents of republican
'virtue': the sense of loyalty or solidarity and the spirit of free
independence. In this situation there is faction, a state where
force is the only arbiter and the will of the stronger must prevail.
Thus the free citizen becomes either a minister of the sovereign
or a private person with no right to meddle in political matters at
all. In the Hellenistic age 'the picture of the State as a product of
his own activity disappeared from the soul of the citizen'. Z Man

I Nohl, p. 222 (Knox, p. 155); cf. Verachtung der Menschen (Fragment 10) in
Dok., p. 268. We should compare here the earliest formulation of Hegel's Greek
ideal (1788; Doh., pp. 49-50). It is fairly certain that this is one feature of his
ideal for which the source is Hellenistic, not Periclean: see Epictetus, Enchiridion
42•
It is clear here that Hegel has not abandoned his earliest conception of
Vernunft as the power by which we make original or genuine abstractions from
experience. These abstractions cannot be universalizable in the sense in which
Kant is generally assumed to have claimed that they must be. For to apply
them to anyone else's experience or situation is to turn them into bad abstrac-
tions, and to accord the status of Vernunft to Verstand. My reflection upon
experience does not even have authority over my own actions unless I stop
reflecting at some point. But as soon as I do that and begin imposing some
previously reached conclusion upon myself, Verstand has usurped the place of
Vernunft. It is from this usurpation by Verstand that all authority is born.
Verstand is properly only a technical ability to calculate with one's verbal
counters; it must always submit to the test of actual experience, rather than
dictating to us how we ought to feel and to act.
2 Nohl, p. 223 (Knox, p. 156). The text of the preceding paragraph cannot be

construed, and I do not think Knox's suggestions for its revision are at all
 REASON AND FREEDOM 239

became a cog in a machine, and all that he could sensibly do was

to look after himself. His own mortality became an awful thing
to him because there was now nothing beyond himself to live and
die for. Military service became a mercenary matter-and in
order to collect one's pay one has to stay alive.! Whereas 'for the
republican the Republic survived him, and there hovered before
him the thought that it [the Republic which was] his soul was
something immortal'. 'Cato turned to Plato's Phaedo only when
his world, his republic, hitherto the highest order of things in
his eyes, had been destroyed; only then did he take flight to a
higher order stil1.'2
The way Hegel speaks about immortality here, raises the
question whether he has now decisively abandoned his own belief
in the validity of this 'flight to a higher order'. Certainly he
believed in it two years earlier when he wrote so enthusiastically
about the Phaedo himself; and certainly he held later that Socrates
had been a tremendously destructive force in Athenian society, but
that his influence had been both necessary and salutary. But at
this moment he does not seem to be thinking of Socrates as a
critical social force at all, and the substitution of the immortality
of the rational soul for the immortality of the Republic is ob-
viously not one that affords him much pleasure. I have suggested
above that he knew that Greek culture satisfied his second canon
better than the first, and deliberately adopted Kant's philosophy
as his 'rational' standard. But we have already seen how he trans-
formed the rational postulate of God in the process; and one may
wonder if he has already recognized that the postulate of immor-
tality was similarly in need of transformation. On the whole, I
think that this is not the most plausible hypothesis. I think he felt
Cato was right to turn to the Phaedo, and that the destruction of the
Roman Republic-as a direct result of its own destruction of
freedom elsewhere 3-was necessary in order to make clear to all
plausible. But there is no real problem about Hegel's meaning; cf. also In
Italien, wo die politische Freiheit (Fragment 12) in Doh., pp. 269-70. On the
evils of political and economic classes, cf. Die Staatsverfassungen (Nohl, p. 38).
I Cf. Nohl, pp. 229-30 (Knox, pp. 164-5). Hegel connects this point with the
Christian doctrine of pacifism (which is obviously unacceptable as a constituent
in a folk-religion).
2 Nohl, pp. 222-3 (Knox, pp. 155-7).
3 Noh!, p. 221 (Knox, p. 154); it is the destruction of the Greek cities, notthe
death of the Republic, that Hegel really regrets. The way he assimilates the
Romans to the Greeks in the present passage contradicts his own earlier contrast
 BERNE 1793-1796

men the difference between the realm of nature which is subject to

fate and the realm of the spirit which is not.
Cato was right, then, to turn to Socrates; but those who turned
rather to the promise of the God-Man, Christ, were wrong. The
Jews, it seems, were in Hegel's opinion wiser. It was only in their
weakness that they cherished the Messianic hope; when they were
offered a Messiah who cared nothing for national independence,
they chose to die fighting for it themselves. I To have the courage
of despair was better than to wait passively upon God to satisfy
the demands which Vernunft by its nature could never surrender.
But the degradation of human nature in Christianity went further,
for even this ability to wait passively was treated as the 'gift of
faith'. The 'free world of the spirit'Z was surrendered not to God
alone but to the Devil also. As Hegel remarks with caustic irony:
'While the Manichaeans appeared to concede to the evil principle
an undivided dominion in the realm of nature, the orthodox
church vindicated God's majesty against this dishonour by granting
His mastery of most of nature; but at the same time it compen-
sated the evil principle for this loss by granting it a certain power
in the realm of freedom.'3
This absolute corruption of man's moral nature through the
doctrine of original sin was still not the limit of degradation, how-
ever. With the acceptance of Christianity as the official religion of
the Empire, even God was corrupted. The moral perfection of the
between the individuality of the latter and the insistence of the former on
adherence to the common norm (Auj3er dem mundlichen Unterricht (1794),
Nohl, pp. 31-2). 'In Rome there were only Romans, not men' and it certainly
would scarcely occur to Romans as Romans to demand a personal immortality
distinct from that of the Urbs. Equally certainly one who found in Socrates the
example of a Mensch was bound 'filr sein Individuum Fortdauer oder ewiges
Leben zu verlangen'. Hence even if Hegel's enthusiasm for ancient 'virtue' and
his distaste for the Christian 'virtues' did here carry him away for a moment
and make him feel that the 'higher order' was only an illusion born of weakness,
I do not think he would have maintained this seriously, once he began to think
about Socrates and Cato, rather than about Cato and St. Ambrose.
I Nohl, pp. 224-25 (Knox, pp. 158-9). It is easy to see that the young Hegel
would have applauded the refounding of Israel, and the resolution with which
the young nation has defended its right to life. His criticism of Judaism is anti-
racist and anti-clerical, not anti-semitic.
2 Nohl, p. 226. It is a pity I think that Knox, whose Hegel translations are so

much better than anything previously done in English, should here have fallen
into the bad old habit of translating Geist as 'mind' (Knox, p. 160).
3 Ibid. There is probably an echo here of Hegel's remark to Schelling that the
triumph of almost any of the ancient heresies might have proved better 'for
mankincl' ~han the triumph of orthodoxv (Letter 14, Briefe, i. 32).
 REASON AND FREEDOM
Saviour was forgotten. The Church became a hierarchy which
mirrored the mechanical system of social classes, and God became
an object of theoretical contemplation, rather than an ideal of the
will. The practical import of Hegel's doctrine is clear enough
here, I think, but the passage in which he describes this transition
is replete with metaphysical implications which have engendered
a lot of discussion:
The mirror showed no more than the picture of its own time, the
picture of nature put to a purpose that was lent to it at discretion by the
pride and passion of men-'nature' because we see every interest of
knowledge and faith shifted on to the metaphysical or transcendental
side of the idea of God. We see (men, moreover,) occupied less with
dynamical concepts of the understanding [dynamischen Verstandsbegrijfen]
which theoretical reason is capable of stretching to the infinite, than with
numerical concepts [Zahlenbegrijfe] , with the concepts of reflection
[Reflexionsbegrijfe] such as difference [Verschiedenheit] and so on, yes
even with the application to its infinite Object of mere ideas of perception
[Wahrnehmungsvorstellungen] such as origin, creation and begetting, and
with deriving the characteristics of that Object from events in its nature. i
Remembering Hegel's fundamentally moral concern it seems to
me the right approach to this passage is the simplest and most
obvious one. Hegel is not interested in developing any theories of
his own, he is simply trying to describe a transformation that
occurred in early Christian speculation about God, and at the same
time to contrast it with a further transformation that had occurred
in the recent past. Because he speaks in a way which clearly implies
that 'dynamic' categories are somehow more adequate than the
ones which the early councils employed in hammering out the
creeds, some scholars have been led to the mistaken view that he
was moving toward a speculative theology of his own conceived
in 'dynamic' terms. This is certainly not the case-or at least
the present passage cannot possibly provide any evidence for such
a view-since the whole conception of God as an 'object' of con-
templative knowledge is, in Hegel's view, a horrible error.
The 'dynamic concepts of the understanding' to which Hegel
refers in this passage are the concepts of post-Cartesian rational
dogmatism. And if the consequence of the original perversion of
human nature from its proper end (of self-fulfilment) to the arbi-
trary service of pride and the lust for power, was a world in which
1 Nohl, pp. 226-7 (Knox, p. 161).
8243588 s
 242 BERNE 1793-1796

men slew one another for the sake of the iota which made the Son
of 'like' substance with the Father rather than of the 'same'
substance, the consequence of the further perversion of all nature
from its proper end (in the 'natural' theology of the rationalist
metaphysicians) was a complacent quietism in which men no
longer felt they had to act in the interest of reason at all, because
everything in the world had been designed by Providence for their
peculiar convenience and 'everything was for the best in the best
of all possible worlds'. The 'finely painted Providence-and-comfort-
theory of our day'-the eudaemonism of Wolff, and more im-
mediately of the Tiibingen school-represented in Hegel's eyes
not a higher theology (even though it was certainly a more 'en-
lightened' one) but the absolute limit in the corruption of reason
(and hence of God and man alike).I
The regeneration of reason began with Kant, who exposed the
hopelessness of any attempt by 'theoretical reason' to extend the
'concepts of the understanding' so as to embrace the infinite, before
going on to restore speculative reason to its proper throne of
dominion in the practical sphere. The distinction between the
'mathematical' and 'dynamical' categories of the understanding is
one that Kant appeals to several times, and it is one that has a
special relevance to Hegel's second canon. For the 'mathematical'
categories (unity, plurality, totality, reality, negation, limitation)
are, as Kant says in several places, 'constitutive' with respect
to intuition. Thus the theology of the mathematical categories
still deals with a God who can satisfy the needs of the imagination.
But the 'dynamical' categories are only 'regulative' principles of
intuitition: hence the God of 'natural' or 'rational' theology
eludes the imagination altogether. Thus the point of ultimate
corruption is the point at which religion becomes purely a matter
of Verstand, a tissue of verbal subtleties. 2
I The two stages of theological speculation and their counterpart societies are
distinguished in the text immediately after the passage quoted. The relevance
of Hegel's description of the early persecutions and wars over heretical doctrines
is obvious. But Hegel's aside: 'It was still not yet time for the finely painted
Providence-and-comfort-theory of our day which constitutes the keystone of our
eudaemonism' (Nohl, p. 227; cf. Knox, p. 162) parallels his earlier glancing
reference to the pretensions of theoretical reason, stretching its 'dynamic'
concepts to embrace the infinite.
2 The index to Kemp Smith's translation will enable the English reader to

track down all of Kant's remarks about the mathematical/dynamical distinction

in the Critique of Pure Reason. All of them are worth examining in connection
 REASON AND FREEDOM
We should notice that when Hegel was applying the first canon,
the point of absolute breakdown came much sooner. The first
canon requires that God should never be made an object of purely
theoretical study and cognition at all. For Vernunft there is 'ob-
jective religion' (theology, or the abstract theory of moral values),
but not, as here, an 'objective God' (part of the system of nature
or of the world of facts). The absolute Lord of nature, secret and
invisible, but all-seeing and ineluctable, is the God of positive
religion in its pure form. Thus Hegel's original title for this
part of his discussion-'Difference between Greek Imaginative and
Christian Positive Religion' -is seen at the end to be justified.
The question of 'how Christianity conquered paganism' is revealed
as having only an instrumental function; and Hegel's essay ends
by contrasting the Christian concepts of 'piety' and 'sin' (definable
only in terms of obedience to the will of the Lord) with the
nearest available Greek and Latin equivalents:
Pietas and impietas express holy human feelings, and the dispositions
or acts which correspond or conflict with those feelings; they [the
Greeks and Romans] also called them divine commands likewise, but
not in a positive sense, and if the question 'How would you prove the
divine origin of a command or prohibition?' could have occurred to
anyone, he could not have appealed to any historical fact, but only to the
feeling of his own heart and the agreement of all good men. I
There are not many hints in this essay, certainly, of how Hegel
proposed to redeem the Christian tradition for the free imagina-
tion.2 He saw clearly that the 'authority' of Scripture rested on its
claim to be a true historical record of God's dealings with men.
To admit this claim was to open the doors to 'positive' religion;
but to deny it would be to deprive the Scriptures of religious
significance altogether, and so cheat the imagination out of its rights.
Hegel had in fact found a way between the horns of this awkward
with the present passage, but the one that was probably uppermost in Hegel's
mind is A 528-32 (B 556-60). For the constitutive/regulative distinction as it
applies to the two groups of categories see A 664 (B 692).
1 Nohl, p. 229 (Knox, p. 164). The short notes on military service and miracles

which follow are fairly obviously illustrations or developments of points mentioned

earlier in the essay which Hegel intended to work into the body of the essay when
he came to revise it (Nohl, pp. 229-31; Knox, pp. 164-7; cf. above, p. 237 n. I
and p. 239 n. I).
• All that I can find are the admiring comments about Herd.er's work on the
imagery of the Old Testament and the remarks about the Catholic conception
of patron saints (cf. above, p. 236 n. rand p. 237 n. I).
 244 BERNE 1793-1796

dilemma in the works of Herder. It is possible, however, that he

could not see how to go on at this point, but felt rather disheartened
and turned for a while to other things. 1 His work on the public
finances of Berne and perhaps the translation of the Confidential
Letters of J. J. Cart can very plausibly be assigned to this summer,
the last that he spent in Berne. No doubt he went on struggling
with the problems of the Christian imagination-but every com-
parison turned to the advantage of the Greeks. 2
Viewed against this background, the poem Eleusis forms a
very appropriate ending to Hegel's Swiss period. He wrote it in
August 1796, when he knew that H6lderlin was actively seeking a
post for him in Frankfurt and that the prospects of his success were
good. 3 The poem is addressed to H6lderlin, but I do not think this
should be taken to mean that it was conceived as a letter. 4 The
1 Just possibly discouragement with his own project contributed to the

Unentschlossenheit and Niedergeschlagenheit which Schelling strove to spur him

out of in the letter of 20 June 1796. When Hegel wrote to Schelling he must
have been feeling very hopeless about his own job prospects (see n. 3 below).
But Schelling already knew when he replied that Hegel would probably be
getting the post in Frankfurt. So it seems likely that depression on that score
was not all that was involved (Briefe, i. 36-7).
2 Cf. Fragments 5, 6, 8, and 9 in Dok., p. 263-7. See also the suggestions made
on p. 232 nn. 3 and 4 above and p. 271 n. 2 below.
3 Already in Sept. 1795, Hiilderlin was seeking a post for Hegel as well as for
himself (Letter 103, lines 132-7, GSA, vi. 180). He told Hegel in November
there was 'still no news to give either in your affair or in my own'. But actually
there was bad news and he gave it-the child in the family his friend Ebel had
thought of for Hegel was four years old. Then 'early in the summer' (i.e. early
June 1796; cf. n. 1 above) he wrote with news of the post with the Gogel
family. Hegel no doubt answered quickly, and waited anxiously for further news.
But the French invasion disrupted communications and sent Holderlin to
Cassel with the Gontards. Only when things were settled down again and they
were all back in Frankfurt was Hiilderlin able to write definitely offering the
post with the Gogels. Then (Oct. 1796) he said explicitly: 'If we ever come to the
point where we must cut wood or do valet's work [mit Steifelwachs und Pomade
zu handeln], then let us ask whether perhaps it would not be better to become a
Repetent in Tlibingen' (Briefe, i. 41-2; cf. ibid., 33-4).
4 Jacques D'Hondt has recently pointed out (Hegel secret, pp. 227-81) that
the Gogel family were well-known Masons and that the whole poem is full of the
sort of imagery that freemasons habitually employed. He also argues very
plausibly that Hegel's conception of the reverent silence of those initiated in the
Mysteries derives from Lessing's 'Dialogues for Freemasons' Ernst und Falk.
He underestimates Hegel's own historical concern with Greek religion; but his
arguments and interpretations deserve careful study in themselves, and they
provide a plausible reason for Hegel's sending of the poem to Holderlin as part
of his indirect correspondence with the Gogels. What was sent, if anything, was
a revised fair copy, which Holderlin or the Gogels did not preserve. 'What we
have is an early rough draft.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 245

dedication was intended by Hegel as a recognition of the fact that

H6lderlin shared his ideals and attitudes, both with respect to
Greece and with respect to contemporary Germany. For the
inspiration of the poem we must look to Hegel's own current pre-
occupations, and particularly to Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene
Gegenstande, rather than to anything that H6lderlin himself had
written.!
This does not mean that we should expect to find Hegel's
own philosophical views expressed directly in the poem. In fact,
as we shall see, he deliberately tried to keep philosophy out of it.
What he tried to put into the poem was the truth as he believed the
Greeks themselves had grasped it, the truth as intuitively felt and
imaginatively expressed. This, rather than any conscious borrowing
from H6lderlin, explains the 'mystical' tone of Eleusis.
The poem falls into two parts: first there is a proem, in which
Hegel, alone at Tschugg by the shore of Lake Bienne, 2 feels himself
set free by the darkness and silence of the night, freed from the
limitations of time and space, so that he can speak directly to
H6lderlin, and recall immediately the days when they were
together at Tlibingen. This section culminates when the future too
is conquered, and Hegel anticipates their reunion in imagination.
As this moment fades, and the real world breaks in once more,
the main poem begins. Originally Hegel tried at this point to
explain how the imagination achieves the union of finite and
infinite spirit which reflective thought breaks down. But later, he
wisely cancelled these lines, not because he was dissatisfied with
his doctrine but because he had found the proper way to express it
imaginatively in the body of the poem.
As a result of this cancellation the transition to the main poem is
I The poem can be found in Haering immediately after the title page of volume
i. This was the first properly critical edition made from the manuscript, and
Haering supplied also a photo-facsimile of the first half of the manuscript (in
which, among other things, the cancellation of lines 30-8 is plainly visible).
Haering's text was used (but not exactly followed) by Hoffmeister, first in
Dok., pp. 380-3, and finally in Briefe, i. 38-40. The text has now been re-edited
by Beck in GSA, vii. 1,233-41. Beck's is the most exact edition, but I normally
refer to Hoffmeister's edition in the Briefe because it is most generally available.
There are French translations by Asveld (pp. 112-17) and D'Hondt (see p. 244
n. 4 above). Asveld's translation is in some places rather free-for instance he uses
'esprit' to translate Sinn as well as Geist. An English translation can be found in
Mueller, pp. 60-2.
2 D'Hondt has rightly emphasized the intimate associations of Lake Bienne
with Rousseau (see Hegel secret, pp. 231-6).
 BERNE 1793-1796

made directly from the moment of reunion with Holderlin to the

greater moment of reunion with the Athenian people in their
worship at Eleusis. As the real world breaks in upon his reverie
Hegel recognizes in the night stars the Gods of Olympus. His
address to Ceres and his evocation of the Mysteries is couched at
first in terms of longing for what is no longer possible, but the
poem ends triumphantly. Night drowns not only the time and
distance that separate Hegel from Holderlin and from their bond
of fellowship in the old time and in future time; it also brings
Hegel into the presence of the Goddess who abides unconquered,
even when her whole world is lost.
There are two intimately connected key ideas in the poem, and
both are stated at the point of transition from Tschugg to Eleusis.
First, at the end of the cancelled passage Hegel says 'Fancy brings
the eternal nigh to sense, I and marries it with form' (lines 37-8).
Realizing-perhaps immediately, but more probably only later
when his thoughts completed their circle and reached once more
the point at which Phantasie must give place to Vernunft-that
this was his proper starting-point, he cancelled the preceding
lines which already anticipate that consummation.! By the power of
Phantasie he was able in Tschugg in the year 1796 to speak his
welcome to the 'high shades' of the Greek gods, and to have confi-
dence in his other key idea: 'It is the ether of my homeland too I the
solemnity [Ernst], the splendour that surrounds you' (lines 41-2).
He could wish that the gates of the temple might open again,
secure in the knowledge that he could play his part, and under-
stand the symbols and the mysteries. But all that, the actual words
and ceremonial, is irretrievably lost, and the scholars who think the
wisdom of the Goddess, the high secrets of the Mysteries, could be
penetrated if only the formulas could be dug up out of the dust,
have missed the significance of the 'mystery' completely. Their
curiosity dishonours the goddess, whose secret lies in the depth of
an actual felt experience, not in any outward sign. Reflection (der
Gedanke) cannot grasp the experience of a soul which drowns and
forgets itself in the 'presentiment' (Ahnung) of the Infinite beyond
space and time, and then awakes to consciousness again. One who
speaks of this must speak with the 'tongues of angels', and he
must speak only to those who are as aware as he is of the in-
I The fact that this starting-point is itself included in the cancellation is

what suggests to me that Hegel crossed the lines out later rather than at once.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 247

adequacy of language to express what he has lived through. Only

to the initiates, therefore, can he speak. To speak of it is to fall
short and so to sin against it. It is not something for Sophists to
play verbal games with in the market-place; nor is it something
to be put into a creed or a catechism and learned by heart. In that
way the natural vitality of the child, which alone makes the
experience possible, is stifled and destroyed. The real initiate
does not speak of the Goddess with his mouth, because he worships
her in the holy of holies of his own breast. His own life is the
outward expression of this worship. This true worship is still
possible, even though the whole world of the Greeks has perished;
the spirit of the Goddess abides, and she reveals herself to her true
worshipper, Hegel, in the historical record that remains.
Noting that the word-play of the Sophists is assimilated to the
catechetic method of religious instruction,! Asveld has drawn
attention to the animus against 'historical Christianity' that is
evidenced in the last twenty lines of the poem. Even more signi-
ficant, and no less obvious if one is prepared to see them, are the
echoes of Hegel's own interpretation of the Gospels. 2 Hegel's
Jesus condemns the hypocritical showing of religious feeling, and
urges men to worship God in their hearts and their lives; and it is
implicit in what Hegel says that the secrets of the Goddess lie open
to a still unspoiled child, as does the message of the Gospel. The
secret that becomes at last so empty that it has 'the roots of its life
only in the echoes of alien tongues' (lines 89-90) is the Gospel
message itself; and the implication is that before it fell prey to the
'rhetorical hypocrite' it was itself a holy mystery like that of
Eleusis. Unlike the mystery of Eleusis it can be recovered from the
echoes of alien tongues, and Hegel believes he has recovered it.
But how is he to 'bring the eternal nigh to sense'? The funda-
mental conviction expressed in the poem is that the particular
forms to which the eternal truth was 'married' in Greek religion
I Lines 8r-90. The parallel is meant to extend, I think, even to the making of a
profit out of what is holy-cf. Hegel's remarks in his letter to Schelling of Jan.
r795 (Briefe, i. r6), and the general tenor of his proto-Marxist thesis that in an
authoritarian society the profit motive is universally dominant (Jedes Yolk hat
ihm Gegenstande, Nohl, p. 223; Knox, p. r 56-7).
2 Asveld, p. r r 6 n. ; cf. Peperzak, p. 126 n. There is actually a direct parallel in

The Life of Jesus for the passage that caught Peperzak's eye: 'Thy sons, 0
Goddess, do not parade thine honour about street and market place, but guard
it in the inner sanctum of their breast': compare Hegel's interpretation of
Matthew 6: r-5: Nohl, p. 84 (analysed on p. 205 above).
248 BERNE 1793-1796
are not necessary for the reopening of the temple gates. Both the
splendour and the moral substance (Ernst) of that ideal belong to
human life everywhere where men cleave firmly to the spirit of the
'old covenant' between Hegel and Holderlin: 'For the free truth
alone to live, peace with the statute [Satzung] j That ordains
thoughts and feelings, never to conclude' (lines 20-1).
Peperzak seems to me to be right, therefore, to dispose of all the
supposedly 'pantheistic' implications of the poem by saying that
Hegel identifies God with 'the human absolute of the free heart'. 1
The Goddess here is the great Earth-Mother, and the mystic
union the worshipper experiences is the union of his finite life
with the infinite life of nature as a whole. But that is all a figure for
the Phantasie. Hegel has already told us as plainly as he could what
the Godhead is for a rational man at the beginning of The Life of
Jesus. He deliberately adopts in that essay the most flatfootedly
prosaic style that he can manage, avoiding both the subtleties of
the intellect, represented for him by the Fichte-Schelling theory
of the Absolute Ego/ and the ambiguities of metaphor which
appeal strongly to imagination, but are the commonest source of
misunderstanding among ordinary men. But what is there said so
plainly that no literate man of good will can misunderstand it, is
ipso facto deprived of its moving power. The imagination and the
heart go empty away. We can see from the poem that Hegel believed
that the religion of free reason could be brought to life. One is left
wondering just how soon the parallel between the mysteries of
Eleusis and the miracle of Easter struck him. That parallel, surely,
was the required key to the problem of how to apply his second
canon to Christianity in a constructive way?

I Peperzak, p. 126.
2 We have here another reason for the cancellation of lines 30-8 in Eleusis: If
the philosophical use of the term 'ego' was too recherche for The Life of Jesus,
then the line 'was mein ich nannte schwindet' could hardly be allowed to stand
in a poem.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 249

APPENDIX
THE 'EARLIEST SYSTEM-PROGRAMME OF
GERMAN IDEALISM'

According to Miss Schuler's ordering of the surviving manuscripts the

last theoretical essay that Hegel wrote at Berne was the so-called
'earliest system-programme of German idealism'.! It was for a long
time generally held that this essay was written by Schelling, or by
Schelling and H6lderlin together, and sent to Hegel (presumably in a
letter that is now lost), who copied it out, either wholly or in part,
because he found it interesting.
I suppose that the missing letter might still turn up-or the original
manuscript of the essay written in the hand of Schelling or H6lderlin
might be found. But until something of this sort occurs I think it can
be shown that all hypotheses about Hegel's copying the fragment that
we actually have from another author are gratuitous. 2 It is not even
necessary to depart from the chronology proposed by Miss Schiiler-
but since the fragment is a fairly short one we cannot absolutely insist
that those scholars who wish to account for the supposed influence of
H6lderlin upon it by transferring it from 1796 to 1797 are wrong.
The third paragraph of eine Ethik begins with the words 'From
Nature I come to the work of man'. It was presumably this sentence that
suggested the title 'system-programme'. But the previous two para-
graphs are part of a theory of practical reason, and of rational faith in
the Kantian sense, not of a 'philosophy of nature' of the kind that
Schelling was shortly to begin writing. They remind one immediately
of Hegel's remark to Schelling in January 1795 that 'if he had time' he
would try to see how far one could go back from the field of moral
theology to that of 'physical theology'. What he was proposing to do at
the outset of the present manuscript was not quite that, for he does not
begin here from a moral faith in the existence of God but from the
I eine Ethik, Dok., p. 219-21. (The reader should note that Hoffmeister has
silently filled out the abbreviations in the manuscript. For a letter-perfect
transcription see Fuhrmans, i. 69-71).
2 This view has been argued very cogently by Otto Poggeler ('Hegel, dar
Verfasser des iiltesten Systemprogramms des deutschen Iealismus', Hegel-
Studien, Beiheft 4 (1969), 17-32); until I read Poggeler's article I had not
thought of reclaiming the fragment for Hegel. Thus the whole of my reconstruc-
tion of Hegel's early development was completed without reference to it. The
fact that the fragment eine Ethik fits neatly into its place in my account is-I
hope--an argument for the essential soundness both of my views and ofPoggeler's
thesis. But if the missing letter or rough draft were to tum up and the sceptics
were to be vindicated, nothing in my general account of Hegel's development
would be affected in the slightest.
 25 0 BERNE 1793-1796
ideal of the free self-conscious Ego-'the Vorstellung of myself as an
absolutely free being'. This, not the existence of God, is now for him
the first premiss (erste Idee) of metaphysics; and since the first complete
sentence of the fragment that we have roundly asserts that 'the whole
of metaphysics falls for the future in the area of moral philosophy' I do
not see how we can escape the conclusion that, in spite of the topical
division between 'nature' and 'the work of man', the whole essay was
concerned with ethical theory.
'Kant with his pair of practical postulates has only given an example'
of the new moral metaphysics; he has not produced the 'complete
system of all Ideas, or, what is the same thing, the system of all practical
postulates'.' This is what the new Ethics-the metaphysical testament
of the new age, as the Ethics of Spinoza was that of the older one-will
provide. A whole world comes into being out of nothing along with
self-conscious freedom; and this is the only 'creation out of nothing'
that is really conceivable.
Thus far we are promised only a rational reinterpretation of a tradi-
tional theological dogma. But now Hegel tells us how he proposes to
make the transition from Ethikotheologie to Physikotheologie. He will
'give wings' to Physics and endow it with the freedom of the new
creative spirit by starting from the right question: 'How must a world
be constituted for a moral being?' This moral salvation of Physics is a
curious project, and we might be pardoned for wanting to believe that
it was Schelling's, not Hegel's, if we did not know that Hegel had
conceived it when he first began to study Fichte. He probably made a
serious attempt to carry it out in the 'System' manuscript of 1800.
Until then he seems to have been preoccupied with the problem of
applying his new Ethics to 'the work of man'.
The 'Idee der Menschheit', says Hegel, cannot provide us with an
Idea of the 'State' because the 'State' is something mechanical and
Menschheit is a living organic ideal. There cannot be an Idee of the
machine at all because only an objective (Gegenstand) of freedom can be
an Idee. So we must 'go beyond the State', which can only treat free
men as cogs. In dealing with this topic Hegel promises that he will
'lay down the principles for a History of Mankind and strip to the skin
the whole wretched human structure [Menschenwerk] of State, constitu-
tion, government, code of law'.

I Kant enumerates his practical postulates differently in different places; but

it is clear that in his canonical doctrine, so to speak, there are three 'postulates
of pure practical reason': Freedom, God, and Immortality. Only God and
Immortality receive distinct treatment as postulates in the second Critique,
however-and presumably these two are 'seinen beiden praktischen Postulaten'.
This is confirmed by the prominence given to these two Ideen later in the frag-
ment.
 REASON AND FREEDOM :151

This proposed treatment of human politics and its history is the most
surprising novelty in eine Ethik. For this is the first time as far as we
know, that Hegel has ever written as if he might be prepared to give up
his essentially Hellenic conception of the political community as a self-
sufficient-and hence necessarily an ethical-community. We saw him
come to grips with the mechanical-instrumental theory of the State for
the first time in Mendelssohn, and we know why he was ready enough
to make use of it. He could see how neatly it applied to modern society,
and how it could be appealed to in defence of such liberal values as
freedom of conscience. But he has never before accepted it as a com-
plete account of the political community, which is what he appears to
be doing here. Nor does he accept it later, as we shall see, in any of the
drafts for his essay on the German constitution.
This seeming inconsistency can be made to look quite glaring. The
political problem that stood in the forefront of Hegel's mind from 1795
onwards was that of the relation between State and Church. 'To make
objective religion subjective, must be the great concern of the State, its
institutions must be concoriant with freedom of conscience .. .', he
wrote in his plan of 1794; and he recognized then that this involved
distinguishing between the legal system of the State and the moral life
of its citizens.! But then the 'Positivity' essay provided good grounds
for thinking of the political community, rather than the religious com-
munity, as the guardian of moral freedom. Only the State can be a
proper focus of authority, and only the enlightened State can keep the
churches from setting themselves up as authorities. So it is no surprise
to find that some years later, in his commentary on Kant's Rechtslehre,
Hegel maintained that 'the principle of the State is a perfect whole'.
If this was his position in August 1795 and August 1798 why should he
have said, in August 1796 or shortly thereafter, that 'die Idee der
lVIenschheit ... keine Idee vom Staat gibt' ?
The problem is less serious than it looks, however. All that we have to
do is to find a plausible reason why Hegel should momentarily and for
his present purpose have accepted the 'machine State' as the State
sic et simpliciter. And such a reason is not far to seek. For we know that
the 'machine State' which he attacks in the German Constitution
manuscripts is the State of Fichte in theory and of Prussia in practice.
Fichte's Grundlage des Naturrechts appeared at Easter 1796.2 If Hegel

I See (a) Unter objektiver Religion (Noh!, pp. 48-50) and the discussion on
pp. 170-1above.
2 Only the first part of Fichte's Grundlage des Naturrechts appeared in March

1796; and one might be tempted to object that the remarks in eine Ethik about
'the whole wretched human construction of State, constitution, government and
legal system' presuppose a reading of the second part (Sept. 1797) if they
allude to Fichte at all. But Fichte gives notice in his introduction to the
 252 BERNE 1793-1796
read it just after he wrote Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde-not to
speak of working on the budgetary structure of the Canton of Berne in
connection with his Cart translation-there would be nothing wonderful
in his setting himself to show that the whole structure of contemporary
political thought must be discarded. 1 Fichte seems, more than any
other writer, to have had the power to irritate Hegel into plans for
theoretical reconstruction.
The rest of the fragment provides support for this view. For, at this
time, as we have suggested, Hegel probably felt himself to be at an
impasse in his programme of practical religious reform, and it would
be natural enough for him to turn his attention to theoretical reading
and the reformulation of his own ideas. This had already happened
once in 1794, when he temporarily set aside his blueprint for the
rehabilitation of Christianity as a Volksreligion in order to straighten
out his own ideas about psychology. But that was a bypath, and did
not produce any startling results, whereas here we are faced with a
major theoretical development, together with its practical corollary (or
'application'). It is no wonder, therefore, if the excitement of his new
discovery combined with his critical reaction to Fichte and his jaun-
diced observation of the political scene to upset his intellectual balance
a little, and cause him to say things that were valid only within a concep-
tual scheme which he could not finally accept.
It is clear that he does not really accept it even here. For he says that
the treatment of free men as cogs must cease; and some kind of political
life will exist even when we have 'gone beyond the State' and stripped
the 'whole wretched human structure of State, constitution, govern-
ment, and code of law' naked. But Hegel is not interested, for the
moment, in what the 'absolute freedom of all spirits' will be like on the
political level. He has found in the 'Idea of beauty, taken in its higher
first part of what is to come in the second part; and the final chapter of
the first part contains a 'deduction of the concept of a Republic' that is quite
detailed enough to account for Hegel's reaction. Also we must remember that
Fichte had already delivered the whole treatise from the lectern, and students'
reports (including some that were trenchantly critical) were already current.
See Fichte, Werke, i. 3, 322, and 432-60; and compare the editors' introduction,
ibid., 305-6.
I A remark of Holderlin's in his letter of 20 Nov. 1796 makes it clear that
Hegel must have said he was currently occupied with the problem of State and
Church either in the private letter that he certainly sent earlier that same month
along with Letter 20 (which was intended for the eyes of the Gogel family) or
else in a slightly earlier letter that is now lost: 'Mit den Jungen wirst Du,so sehr
der erste Unterricht unsern Geist oft driicken muB, Dich dennoch lieber
beschaftigen als mit Staat und Kirche, wie sie gegenwartig sind' (Briefe, i. 45).
This odd antithesis only seems natural to me upon the hypothesis that Hegel
had not merely spoken of his interest in the problem, but had further suggested
that the Repetentstelle at Tiibingen would be a good position in which to pursue it.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 253
Platonic sense', the supreme moral ideal under which every other Idee
in his Ethics must be subsumed; and he wants to apply it at once to the
problem of reforming Christianity which was always his most immediate
concern.
'I am now convinced that the highest act of Vernunft .•. is an
aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness only become sisters in beauty-
the philosopher must have as much aesthetic power as the poet. The
men without aesthetic sense are our Buchstaben-philosophers.' This
recognition that 'the highest act of Vernunft is an aesthetic act' is a
major advance in Hegel's theory of human nature, for it involves a
revolution in his conception of the relation between Vernunft and
Phantasie. We already know that without aesthetic sense one cannot be
a Volkserzieher; but the discovery that without it one cannot be a
philosopher either, means that as Volkserzieher Hegel must begin to be
his own philosopher; he cannot lean on others, and particularly on
Kant, as he has done in the past.
Is he now leaning not on a philosopher, but on a poet? Did he get
this new insight not from Kant and Schiller but from H61derlin? It is
possible-especially if this piece was written in 1797-but it is by no
means certain, or even highly probable, and the answer to the question
is far less important than some scholars seem to think. Holderlin
certainly had the idea first, and in view of its focal importance in the
development of German thought after Kant, we could make a strong
claim for him as the 'real founder' of absolute idealism. But Holderlin's
inspiration came from the Critique of Judgement and from Schiller's
Aesthetic Letters; and anyone who shared his aims and ideals, as Hegel
did, could have arrived at the idea by the very same route.' We know
how much impressed Hegel was with the Aesthetic Letters when he read
the first instalments in 1795. Considering the problems that he was
himself concerned with, it would have been natural enough for him
to re-read the whole series in the summer of 1796.2
I Holderlin first put forward the thesis that the absolute 'union of subject and
object' was aesthetic in a letter to Schiller (Letter 104,4 Sept. '795, GSA, vi.
,8,), and the source of his inspiration is clear enough when he tells Niethammer
that he is going to put his views into a series of 'New Letters on the Aesthetic
Education of Man' (Letter II7, 24 Feb. 1796, ibid., p. 203).
• Hegel wrote to Schelling in Apr. 1795 (Briefe, i. 25) that Schiller's Letters
were a 'masterpiece'. But he got the title confused with Lessing's 'Education of
the Human Race' and he had not yet read the whole series since the third part
(Letters xvii-xxvii) did not appear until June. Hegel refers to 'the first two
numbers' of Die Horen (Le. Jan. and Feb. 1795). The first appearance of the
idea which I take to have been crucial for the leap that Holderlin and Hegel
made, although Schiller did not-the idea of beauty as the 'consummation of
humanity'-is in Letter xv. 5, which was in the February number. But Letter
xxi. 6 and Letter xxii. 1 are much more suggestive (see 'Wilkinson and
Willoughby, pp. 102-3 and 146-51).
254 BERNE 1793-1796
'Poetry thus acquires a higher dignity, it becomes once again at the
end what it was at the beginning-the teacher oj mankind; for no
philosophy or history remains at last, the bardic art [die Dichtkunst]
will alone survive all other arts and sciences.' This first practical conse-
quence or 'application' that Hegel derives from his new discovery is
the particular element in eine Ethik that reminds us most forcibly of
H6lderlin. But there is not the slightest reason for thinking that Hegel
could not have come to this conclusion by himself in Berne without any
very direct intervention by his friend. From his earliest years he was
impressed by the role of the poet as a teacher in Greek society, and by
the achievement of Shakespeare in making the history of England a
living heritage for his fellow countrymen. Among German poets
Klopstock is the one to whom he refers most explicitly; but Klopstock
is, of course, the poet who failed the supreme test in the eyes of Hegel
as a schoolboy, or the poet of the dying age, as he would say now. The
poetic impulse of the new age is rather to be looked for in Schiller.
Schiller is the modern poet who exemplifies what Hegel means by
claiming that poetry 'survives' philosophy, just as Shakespeare shows
us how poetry 'survives' history.'
Poetry 'survives' in fact as a necessary element in religion; and thus
this fragment heralds the most fundamental development of the Frank-
furt period: the claim that religion is somehow the ultimate or highest
form of experience, and belongs to a different plane altogether from that
occupied by reflective reason. From the beginning Hegel had embraced
the view-held even by the most radical foes of 'superstition' in the
Enlightenment-that the masses need a religion that appeals to their
senses, to set them, or keep them, on the path of morality. But now he
tells us that 'not only the great mob but also the philosopher' needs a
religion of this sort. This is a radical departure from the conception of
rational religion as the goal of human progress which dominates all his
work from the Tubingen fragment of 1793 to the concluding paragraphs
of the 'Positivity' essay written in April 1796. But it is a natural out-
growth of his reflections on the aesthetic and imaginative aspects of
Greek religion, and of his renewed study of Herder, both of which are
clearly documented in Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstande. The first
section of that essay clearly demonstrates that the superiority of Greek
religion over Christianity arose largely from its mythical character. A

I For Hegel's schoolboy reflections on the Greek poets and Klopstock see
Dok., pp. 48-5 I ; for the contrast between Klopstock and Shakespeare see the
first section of Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde, Nohl, pp. 214-19 (Knox,
pp. I45-5I). The contrast between the status of mythology in Greek religion and
culture and its status in Christianity and modern culture, which is the central
topic of this section, provides us with the context for a proper understanding
and appreciation of Hegel's proposal that 'we must have a new mythology'.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 255
'historical' religion, such as Christianity, is bound to be hostile to
myths; and a religion cannot reconcile and unify peoples if it is hostile
to their myths. So Hegel's final promise in this fragment is that he will
explain something which, as he proudly says, no one has thought of
before: that 'we must have a new mythology, which stands at the
service of the Ideen [i.e. of our new Ethics], it must be mythology of
Reason'.l
The last paragraph of the plan might almost have come straight out
of the Tlibingen fragment (Religion ist eine):
Until we express the Ideen aesthetically, i.e. mythologically, they have
no interest for the people, and conversely until mythology is rational the
philosopher must be ashamed of it. Thus in the end enlightened and
unenlightened must clasp hands, mythology must become philosophical
<in order to)2 make the people rational, and philosophy must become
mythological in order to make the philosophers sensible [sinnl<ich)J.
Then reigns eternal unity among us. No more the look of scorn [of the
enlightened philosopher looking down on the mob], no more the blind
trembling of the people before its wise men and priests. Then first awaits
us equal development of all powers, of what is peculiar to each and what
is common to all. No power shall any longer be suppressed, for universal
freedom and equality of spirits will reign!-A higher spirit sent from
heaven must found this new religion among us, it will be the last <and)
greatest work of mankind.
Almost, but not quite. For the 'subjective' religion that makes reason
palpable to the senses in Religion ist eine is only a handmaid of Vernunft,
a childhood governess who remains as an old friend in the house of the
grown man who is governed by his own reason; whereas this 'mytho-
logical philosophy' does away with all 'governors', even-by implication
-with the authority of reason. Religion now is neither a governess nor
an old friend, but a 'new spirit' of equality and freedom.
The fragment eine Ethik fits with perfect logic into the exact sequence
of Hegel's manuscripts that is suggested by graphic analysis. For on the
I The idea of reforming mythology in the service of reason might very well
have occurred to Schelling in 1794; but even allowing for his well-known
volatility it hardly seems plausible to ascribe it to him in 1796. For this reason
alone it seems to me that any claim that Schelling was the original or the main
author of this piece must be set aside. If Hegel did transcribe it from a manuscript
by someone else, the only plausible hypothesis is that it is part of one of Holderlin's
plans for the 'New Aesthetic Letters'. (Cf. Letter II7, line 38: 'And I shall
advance (in the 'Letters'] from philosophy to poetry and religion.') The way
that eine Ethik begins with the moral philosophy of physics tells rather strongly
against this hypothesis however.
2 Here I have ventured to read um in place of the und that appears in our

printed texts. I assume (for reasons of syntactical balance that will I hope be
obvious) that und is simply a lapsus calami. In the rest of the fragment the form
und occurs only three times; the abbreviation u. is used nine times.
 BERNE 1793-1796

one side the essay Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde helps us more
than anything else to understand why Hegel wrote it, and how he came
to conceive the project of a 'mythology of reason'; and on the other side
eine Ethik helps more than anything else to explain why Hegel went on
to write Eleusis. In the light of the doctrine that the highest act of
Vernunft is aesthetic, and that even rational religion must be sinnlich,
Hegel's invocation of the Great Mother appears no longer as a mere
'aside'. It is a contribution to rational mythology, an expression-
however lisping and imperfect-of the new spirit of freedom and
equality. The poetic form is not chosen simply because it is historically
appropriate, but because it is only in the poetry that 'survives' them that
history and philosophy are finally consummated.
There is, in fact, no other point in the sequence of datable manu-
scripts where this fragment could be inserted at all comfortably. We
have already noticed that the political doctrine of eine Ethik is essentially
transitional between that which we find in the 'Positivity' essay, and the
views reported by Rosenkranz from Hegel's Kant studies of 1798 and
worked out in the Verfassungsschrift.' Something similar can be said
about the theory of religion put forward here. The problem of how a
religion is founded holds the centre of the stage in the Frankfurt
manuscripts. Hegel discuses this problem theoretically and studies the
founding of two religions, Judaism and Christianity, in considerable
detail. He is concerned with comparative mythology in his earliest
studies of Judaism; but after that the place of myth in religion is alluded
to only in the most marginal way. Instead the fundamental thesis is that
'Religion ist eins mit der Liebe': all religion, Hellenic as well as J udaeo-
Christian, is analysed as an aesthetic consciousness of love and of an
absolute love-object. Only when this analysis is completed does Hegel
turn from the principle of Herz back to the principle of Phantasie which
was in the forefront of his mind in his last months in Berne. 2 There are
signs that in the great manuscript, of which the so-called Systemfrag-
ment is all that we have, Hegel did attempt finally to provide at least
some elements of a new mythology.3 But this attempt was made in the
total context of a conception of religion that is both broader and deeper
than the one sketched in eine Ethik.
I For a summary account of the evolution of Hegel's political ideas-without
reference to the doctrines of eine Ethik-see the first two sections of Chapter V
below.
2 Even the extremely prosaic Alpine diary bears witness to this concern; see

the remarks about the Teufelsbriicke and the neighbouring crag cited on p. 161
above.
3 See Chapter IV, Section 10 below, pp. 391-7. Of course if we possessed,
and could date, all of the manuscripts from which Rosenkranz took the Fmgmente
historischer Studien the picture might look rather different. It is at least possible
that these 'studies' included an essay on 'comparative mythology'.
 REASON AND FREEDOM 257
My conclusion therefore is that the fragment eine Ethik is indeed a
piece of Hegel's own work, and not something that he copied; and that
he wrote it in Berne-or more precisely at Tschugg-in the summer
of 1796. There is, however, one fact about the manuscript which might
seem to give cause for serious doubt about the authorship, and which
still remains to be dealt with. The plan is presented as a series of
intentional statements in the first person singular, and the last para-
graph rises to a pitch of prophetic enthusiasm that is without parallel
in Hegel's other 'plans'. Hegel did not in any other instance write out
a plan in the first person singular; and when one is making a plan in
this mode it is more natural to write 'Here I must do this' or 'Here I
should do this' than 'Here I shall do this'. This latter mode of expression
-like the little note of self-congratulation about the 'idea which as far
as I know has never yet occurred to anyone else'-is only appropriate
when one is setting forth one's plans for the information of someone
else. Hegel did at least once promise to do this in his correspondence
with Schelling; and we know by inference that he must actually have
done it at least once in his correspondence with Holderlin. Holderlin
would have been by far the most natural recipient for this statement of
intentions, and perhaps it is legitimate to explain the tone of the last
paragraph by supposing that the 'calm Verstandesmensch' Hegel caught
a little of Holderlin's prophetic enthusiasm from the very act of writing
to him about something that he knew would be close to Holderlin's
heart.

8243588 T
 IV. FRANKFURT 1797-1800

Phantasie und Herz

1. The 'crisis of Frankfurt' and the supposed 'revolution in Hegel's

thinking'
CHRISTIANE HEGEL remembered, many years later, that her
brother returned from Switzerland 'very withdrawn, and only
happy in his circle of close friends'. I He was not at all the boy
pictured in her memories of Tubingen; and we may infer from the
general tone of H6lderlin's last two letters to him in Switzerland
(October and November 1796)-especially from the assurance:
'You'll be the "Old Man" again next spring'-that Hegel had
remarked on and openly bewailed the change in himself.2 From
the correspondence with H6lderlin it is clear at least that Hegel
suffered a sort of crisis of confidence during his last year in
Switzerland. His faith in himself, and in his own capacity to carry
out the task of Volkserzieher that he had laid upon himself, wavered.
He seriously contemplated applying for the position of a Repetent
at Tubingen; and he must have said something quite uncharac-
teristic about accepting H6lderlin's guidance and leadership in the
future, for H6lderlin (who regarded the project of a return to
Tubingen as a folly which only the direst economic necessity could
justify) commented thus: 'What you write about guidance and
leadership, my dearest friend, has made me very sad. You have
so often been my mentor when my low spirits made me into a
young fool, and you'll often have to be so again.' 3
I 'Kam in sich gekehrt zuriick, nur in traulichen Zirkel fidel' (Dok., p. 394).
Christiane's recollections were recorded by Hegel's widow for the use of
Rosenkranz.
2 Letter 2I in B"ie/e, i. 45 (20 Nov. 1796).
3 Ibid. We should note also Holderlin's open amazement that Hegel should be
asking him for advice about the Tiibingen plan in the first instance (Letter 15,
Brie/e, i. 34). (It is clear from the passage quoted in the text that Letter 20
represents only the public part of Hegel's reply to Letter 19. It contains nothing
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 259

It has been the view of some scholars that Holderlin's confidence

in Hegel's powers of recovery was somewhat misplaced, and that
Hegel's depression actually continued for some time after his move
to Frankfurt. This hypothesis-for it is certainly no more than
that-is generally advanced as one important element in the
explanation of a supposed 'revolution' which occurred in Hegel's
thinking at Frankfurt. The view-which is developed and defended
at some length and with considerable skill by Lukacs--is expressed
in its barest essentials by T. M. Knox:
The revolution in Hegel's thinking came about because, during his
first two years in 'unhappy Frankfurt', in order to cure himself of
melancholia, he worked with all his energies at Greek literature and
philosophy, as wen as at history and politics, and then brought the
result of these studies to bear anew on the reinterpretation of the life
and message of Jesus. 1
Inasmuch as there was in fact no 'revolution' in Hegel's thought,
which develops with such steady and organic continuity that
we might never have suspected a crisis of self-doubt if it were not
externally documented, the hypothesis of a long period of 'melan-
cholia' is quite gratuitous; and as soon as we take a careful look at
the evidence, the alleged fact of Hegel's unhappiness in Frankfurt
dissolves. Hegel's own reference to 'unhappy Frankfurt' occurs in
the draft of a letter to Sinclair written in October 1810; when it is
read in its context by one who knows something of Hegel's relations
with the intended recipient, and with the other people there
referred to, it is easily recognized as a transparent allusion to the
emotional crisis that Holderlin passed through in the household
of the Gontards-the crisis that culminated in the first onset of
his insanity.
Holderlin always emphasized Sinclair's respect for Hegel. But
Sinclair was essentially Holderlin's friend rather than Hegel's,
being like Holderlin a poet, and an admirer of Schiller; and
philosophically his enthusiasm for Fichte linked him with
Holderlin (and with Schelling who was born like Sinclair in 1775)
rather than with Hegel. It can hardly be doubted that it was
that could have made Hiilderlin 'sad' in this way, and is obviously just the letter
which Hiilderlin advised him to write to be shown to Herr Gogel (Letter 19,
Briefe, i. 42); with it Hegel doubtless enclosed a more personal and confidential
sheet which has been lost.)
1 'Hegel's attitude to Kant's ethics', Kant-Studien, 49 (1957-8), 73 (cf.
Lukacs, Chapter 2, section 1).
260 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

through his friendship with H6lderlin that Sinclair was first

drawn into the circle of Hegel's friends, and it was the memory
of their common friendship with H6lderlin that formed their
closest bond in later years.
They corresponded for a time in 1806 and 1807, mainly about
Sinclair's literary efforts (two tragic dramas); but each of them at
that time displayed also a willingness to help the other as far as he
could in practical difficulties. I In particular Sinclair wished to help
Hegel find a secure position after the disastrous interruption which
the campaigns of Napoleon caused in his career at Jena.
Three years later, when Hegel was comfortably settled as
Rector of the Gymnasium at Nuremberg, Sinclair did at last hear
of something in his own neighbourhood which he thought would
suit Hegel. When he made inquiries into Hegel's whereabouts in
order to write to him, he realized that Hegel would almost
certainly not want to move, but by way of renewing their earlier
friendship he wrote Hegel a long letter about the position, and about
the old friends in Frankfurt who still remembered and wished
to see him. Hegel had no interest in moving, but he appreciated
and reciprocated the friendly memories which had prompted
Sinclair's letter, and suggested that since Sinclair was better able
to leave Homburg for a time than he was to leave Nuremberg,
Sinclair should come to visit him. He sent Sinclair a copy of the
Phenomenology, though it is probable that after reading Sinclair's
comment on 'the charlatanry of Schelling' he scarcely expected
that 'stubborn Fichtean' to approve of it.
The closing paragraph of Hegel's draft, which he made some
seven or eight weeks after receiving Sinclair's letter, deals with
Sinclair's messages from or about old friends. About the death
at Wagram of Zwilling, a young friend of Sinclair and H6lderlin
whom Hegel first met when he arrived in Frankfurt, he wrote in
18IO just what he might well have said in 1797-that it was a
'hero's death' which had 'greatly moved him'.2 The kind remem-
brances of Sinclair's mother he acknowledges with sincere good
I When Sinclair was finally cleared of the charges of treason and conspiracy
against Wlirttemberg. Hegel apparently expressed the intention of inserting an
announcement about it in the Bamberger Zeitung (Letter 91, Briefe. i. 163).
Sinclair for his part had earlier done what he could to forward Hegel's plan to
obtain a post in the nascent University of Berlin (Letter 60, Briefe, i. 107).
2 Letter 167. Briefe, i. 332; compare his comment about death in battle in Ein

positiver Glauben (1796). Noh!, p. 238.

 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 261

feeling. The mention of another old acquaintance, Molitor, he

responds to by recalling an essay on the philosophy of history
which Molitor had sent him in the Bamberg days. Only one of
Sinclair's messages is left without an explicit acknowledgement.
Sinclair writes: 'About the unfortunate [ungliicklichen] Holderlin
I have heard nothing, but his condition has probably not changed
in the meantime; please do tell me what you know of him.' Hegel,
since in all probability he has had no news of Holderlin for even
longer than Sinclair, does not reply directly. Instead he recalls the
happy days which they had passed together at Homburg when he
lived in the city made unhappy for them by the misfortunes of their
friend: 'Give my greetings also to the high Feldberg and Altkonig,
towards which I raised my eyes so often and with so much
pleasure from unhappy [ungliickseligen] Frankfurt, when I knew
you at their feet. Farewell, don't hold my dilatoriness against me
and let me hear from you again .soon.'1 Hegel was, I believe,
scrupulously honest in his letters. But his honesty always went
hand in hand with a tact which sprang from a remarkable sensibility
for the feelings and concerns of his correspondents. To suppose
that he would answer a letter written with such evident goodwill
to urge upon him the advantages of a move to Frankfurt, by saying
that he had been miserable there, is to credit him with an in-
difference to other people's feelings so absolute as to constitute a
kind of moral blindness. If he had in fact been personally unhappy
in Frankfurt he would never have closed his letter thus. The fact
that he wrote as he did clearly indicates that he knew with absolute
certainty that Sinclair would not for a moment be tempted to take
his words in that sense. Thus, the letter tends to show-so far as
it shows anything-that Hegel himself was at least outwardly
quite happy in Frankfurt. 2
The plain truth is that we do not have much evidence about
Hegel's state of mind or his outward disposition while he was in
I Ibid., p. 333.
2 Sinclair's next letter (Letter 179, Briefe, i. 354-5) reached Hegel on 7 May
181 r. It came with his three-volume work on Truth and Certainty (Frankfurt,
181 I) and was mainly devoted to an explanation of the method employed therein.
He thanked Hegel for sending the Phenomenology, but made no comments on
it until Feb. 1812 (Letter 199, Briefe, i. 394-6) after he had received Hegel's
verdict on his own work. Then in Oct. 18 I2 he wrote to announce an impending
visit to NUremberg. He there speaks again of remembering 'our days with
Hiilderlin and Zwilling, which will always remain unforgettable for me' (Letter
210, Briefe, i. 416).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

Frankfurt. His letters to his sister are lost, and he was not now
driven by loneliness to commune with other old friends by letter
as he had been at Berne. But all the evidence we have goes to show
that he recovered his spirits rapidly and completely when he went
to live there, and was perfectly satisfied with his general situation.
When he first arrived in Frankfurt he still felt that the mission
which he had laid upon himself was too much for him, and that
since in his day and age the human race had become degraded to
the level of a wolf pack the only sensible thing to do was to learn
to howl along with them. St. Antony of Padua did more good by
preaching to the fish, he wrote to Nanette Endel in February 1797
when he had been in Frankfurt for only a week or two, than anyone
would do here by trying to set an example like that of St. Alexis. I
But even this earliest letter from Frankfurt is written more in a
spirit of humorous irony than of genuine despair, and in the one
that follows six weeks later Hegel introduces his notes about visits
to the Opera (The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni) and to the theatre
with the remark: 'I am becoming here in Frankfurt more equal
to the world again.'2 On 17 July (the feast of St. Alexis), Hegel
was quite willing to call that remarkable ascetic his patron saint
once more, though he denies the title Magister. 3 In November he
is again reporting: 'I go more often to the theatre [die Komodie]
here than in Stuttgart. lVlusic and some actors are very good'; and
he hopes that Nanette will forgive the habit of running over into
'general reflections' in one 'who was once a Magister and drags
himself along with this title among his belongings like an angel
of Satan that buffets him with its fists'.4 Finally in May 1798, in

I Letter 22, Briefe, i. 49. According to the legend, St. Alexis (fifth-century
Roman, feast day 17 July) returned the betrothal ring of his espoused bride,
and went as a pilgrim to Edessa in Syria, where he lived for seventeen years as a
beggar. After this he returned to Rome, where his betrothed had remained
faithful to him; but he did not reveal himself to her or to his parents, and lived
there as a beggar for a further seventeen years. He then died at the moment
when his sanctity was revealed to Pope and Emperor by an oracular voice from
Heaven. (It is clear from their letters that Nanette Endel and Hegel himself
had between them decided that Alexis was a most fitting patron saint for him.)
2 Letter 23, Briefe, i. 52.
3 Letter 24, Briefe, i. 54-5. After Hegel's signature there follows the post-
script '(Nur immer Magister in der Addresse),.
4 Letter 25, Briefe, i. 56. Cf. 2 Corinthians 12: 7: 'And lest I should be
exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was
given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I
should be exalted above measure.'
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ ::63
what seems to have been the last letter of this rather touching little
interlude, he inquires: 'Have you had no balls in Memmingen?
I am very good at balls; they are the jolliest thing left to us in our
gloomy times.'!
These letters to Nanette Endel, which are virtually all that we
have from the Frankfurt period save the epistle to Schelling
with which it ends, are mainly interesting for what they reveal
about Hegel's state of mind during his short stay in Stuttgart
after the return from Berne. For it was only during that period of
a few weeks at most that he really knew the young Catholic girl
who was living in the house with his father and sister when he came
home. To say that he fell in love with her in that short time would
probably be to overstate the case, but he was interested enough in
her to play with the idea of visiting her 'in a year or two', if they
should chance to be close enough to be within the compass of a
twenty-four-hours' journey.2 The difference of religion put a
barrier between them which Hegel in all likelihood never seriously
thought of crossing. 3 From the beginning Nanette rallied 'Magister'
Hegel about 'the abundance of his revelations' and about his high
hopes of bringing enlightenment to mankind, and he retorted by
poking gentle fun at the confessional, the rosary, and the saints.
He compared himself to St. Antony preaching to the fish, and
she gave him St. Alexis (who fled to Edessa on the day of his
marriage and lived there as a hermit) as a patron and model. When
Hegel compares his title of Magister to St. Paul's 'thorn in the
flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me lest I should be exalted
above measure through the abundance of the revelations', we may,
I think, legitimately infer that Nanette had pointed to the contrast
between the full, free, spontaneous, and joyous life of Hegel's
'revelation', and his own actual withdrawn and introverted con-
dition. He recognized that Nanette was a more 'natural' being than
I Letter 27, B1'iefe, i. 58. This was the passage which particularly amused
D. F. Strauss when he first discovered these letters. Probably (since Rosenkranz's
biography had not appeared) Strauss knew nothing of La belle Augustine and the
ball at Tlibingen, or of Hegel's early love of dancing in general; but he would
not have needed Christiane's notes to tell him that the Herr Professor was never
very good at it. For Strauss the letters had 'almost a comic interest only' (see
Hoffmeister's note on Letter 22, Briefe, i. 442).
2 See Letter 24, Briefe, i. 53.

3 But it might also be argued that their conversation and correspondence

revolved so much around the religious barrier because they really did seriously
consider breaking through it (cf. further, p. 266 n. ! below).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

he was, but he wanted her to understand that the figure of magis-

terial gloom and despair who had appeared before her in Stuttgart
was not his real self; and the self who emerges in the letters from
Frankfurt is indeed very different, even if he does tend to run on
into 'general reflections' all the time. 1
Hegel had felt at Tschugg, and had sought to express in
Eleusis, that communion with the Earth Mother was a healing
power against the ills of civilization. It was a pleasure still in
Frankfurt, where there were operas, concerts, plays, and other
delights which were almost wholly lacking in Berne, to escape to
the country. But the reasons now were different. As he told Nanette
in July:
The memory of those days spent in the country [i.e. at Tschugg]
continually drives me out of Frankfurt, and as there I sought to be
reconciled with myself and with other men in the arms of Nature, so
here I often fly to this true mother, to separate myself again from other
men in her company, and to protect myself from their influence under
her aegis, and to prevent any covenant with them.'
In Berne Hegel felt isolated and cut off from the real life of his
time; he sought to reconcile himself with his lot through his
solitary communing with Nature; but in Frankfurt it was rather
the pleasures and temptations of social life that he had to escape
from. It is not true, therefore, that Hegel's 'psychological' pre-
I Letter 25, (13 Nov. 1797), Briefe, i. 56. The tendency to moralize too much
was a fault which Hegel never lost. The forty-year old professor had to apologize
for it to his twenty-year old bride in 18II (see Letter 187, Briefe, i. 369).
2 Letter 24, Briefe, i. 53. Because of the weight placed on this passage by

Lukacs I give here the original text of the entire paragraph:

'So viel ich mich aus der Geschichte Ihrer bisherigen Schicksale erinnere,
haben Sie noch nicht aus eigner Erfahrung das Landleben kennen gelernt;
und ich zweifle nicht, daB es bei Ihnen nicht erst einer Angewohnung bedurfte,
urn sich darin zu gefallen, sondern daB Sie gleich von Anfang sich selbst
ohne MiBton darin fanden, ohne daB die Stimmung, in die uns eine freie
schone N atur versetzt, einen W iderstand in Ihnen gefunden hatte; - ich
muB gestehen, bei mir brauchte es einige Zeit, ehe ich mich von den Schlacken,
die die Gesellschaft, das Stadtleben, die daraus entspringende Zerstreuungs-
sucht in uns einmischt, von der Sehnsucht darnach, die sich durch Langeweile
auBert, - ein wenig reinigen konnte Aus Frankfurt treibt mich jetzt immer
das Andenken an jene auf dem Lande verlebte(n) Tage, und so wie ich
dort mich im Arme der Natur immer mit mir selbst, mit den Menschen mich
aussohnte, so fltichte ich mich hier oft zu dieser treuen Mutter, urn bei ihr
mich mit den Menschen, mit denen ich in Frieden lebe, wieder zu entzweien
und mich unter ihrer Aegide von ihrem Einfiusse zu bewahren und einen
Bund mit ihnen zu hintertreiben.'
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
occupations at Frankfurt are the reflection of a crisis in his personal
life, as Rosenweig and Lukacs have maintained.
The principal evidence for this rather strained hypothesis is
found in a letter of May 1810, where Hegel speaks of a certain
'hypochondria' which he has himself experienced 'for a couple of
years' and which he believes to be an essential element in human
development; later still in his lectures on the philosophy of spirit
he marked out the decade 'from the twenty-seventh to the thirty-
sixth year' (with particular emphasis on the twenty-seventh year)
as the time of transition from youth to manhood when man has
'to conquer a certain hypochondria'. It can scarcely be accidental
that he should have singled out the decade bounded in his own life
by his return from Berne and the writing of the Phenomenology. I
But the 'hypochondria' of which he speaks in the letter of 1810
is a peculiarly intellectual experience, rather than a psychological
condition in any ordinary sense. It is the feeling-which has
certainly afflicted every author if not every man-that although
one knows where one wants to go, one does not quite know how to
get there:
I know from my own experience this state of mind or rather of the
reason [diese Stimmung des Gemuts oder vielmehr der Vernunft] where
one has once got oneself through one's interest and the intimations that
go with it into a chaos of phenomena, and where one is inwardly certain
of the goal but not thoroughly (in possession of it), one has not yet
achieved a clear articulation of the whole in detail. I have suffered from
this hypochondria for a couple of years to the point of losing my grip
altogether [his zur Entkriiftung]; [I am] every man, surely, has in
general such a turning point in his life, the nocturnal point of contrac-
tion of his being, a narrow strait through which he forces his way,
emerging confirmed and certain of his secure self-possession, of the
security of ordinary everyday life, or, if he has already rendered himself
incapable of fulfilment in that way, with the security of a nobler inner
life. 2
I For a citation of the manuscript lecture notes see Rosenzweig, i. 101;
Rosenzweig's note thereto (i. 236) informs us that the original 'in the twenty-
seventh year' was subsequentiy modified to 'about the twenty-seventh year'. The
next note cites Gabler's record that Hegel spoke of suffering from 'hypochondria'
again in 1805. We should remember, however, that Hegel is not speaking
autobiographically. He was probably thinking of the experience of Hiilderlin at
least as much as of any experience of his own-a glance at his remarks in their
context will speedily confirm this.
2 Letter IS8, Briefe, i. 314. According to Rosenzweig, i. 236, Hegel originally
wrote and cancelled the words 'Ich bin' where 1 have inserted '[I am]'; he
 FRANKFUl{T 179'1-1800
This passage-whether or not it actually refers to this period
rather than, say, to the gestation of the Phenomenology-describes
very well what I believe to have been Hegel's state of mind during
his last summer at Berne and his first spring in Frankfurt. He
knew where he wanted to go-this 'inward certainty of the goal'
is perfectly, if not beautifully, expressed in Eleusis-but he did
not know how to get there. But his bewilderment-which may
well have combined with his loneliness to produce a veritable
agony of self-doubt-was in actual fact almost, if not quite,
irrelevant to the objective progress of Hegel's reflections; and all
the temptations of 'ordinary everyday' happiness which acquain-
tance with Nanette Endel may have introduced into the mind of
this modern votary of St. Alexis, were equally irrelevant in this
respect. I His psychological condition is so far from determining
the direction or providing the explanation of his reflections in the
Frankfurt period, that it would not make any notable difference to
us in seeking to interpret his manuscripts if the letters to Nanette
had perished, if he had never written as he did to Windischmann,
if his notes on the typical pattern of human psychological develop-
ment had not contained those suggestive numbers, and if his widow
had not recorded his sister's recollections about his return from
Berne. The likelihood of a check in the progress of his thought
after Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde can already be fore-
seen in his plan of 1794 (Unter objektiver Religion); the presence
thinks Hegel originally meant to make 'the personal reference stronger'. But it
is more likely, I think, that he simply began to write 'I am <convinced, or some-
thing similar, that) every man' etc. and then decided to express his conviction
as a general categorical proposition. In other words we have here a good example
of his natural tendency to fall into 'general reflections'.
I If the reference in the letter to Windischmann really is to the period of
Hegel's acquaintance with Nanette Endel, it may be that I, like other interpreters
have treated their relationship rather too lightly. Perhaps Hegel seriously thought
of marriage ('the security of everyday life') and deliberately renounced it at
this time. One could, I think, read the evidence that we have as indicating that
Nanette tried to get Hegel to the sticking-point of matrimony, but that Hegel's
own inclination gradually hardened into a firm refusal. (Cf. especially Letter 27-
there is also the poem which Nanette sent to Christiane for Hegel's fifty-seventh
birthday, mentioned in Hoffmeister's note, Briefe, i. 447-and the suggestive
fact that Nanette kept Hegel's letters, whereas that instinctive hoarder of
documents seems not to have kept hers. For the poem see Nicolin, pp. 28-9.)
It is also just possible that Hegel's relations with Nanette Endel contributed
to his analysis of sexual love in welch em Zwecke denn alles iJbrige dient (Nohl,
pp. 378-82; Knox, pp. 302-8). But in any case his experience affected only the
degree of concreteness with which he was able to work out his thought, not the
direction or the structure of the thought itself.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
of all the elements of his eventual solution of the difficulty can
similarly be demonstrated in the fragments of that period--
particularly in the 'Tlibingen fragment' (Religion ist eine) and in
Es sollte eine schwere Aufgabe; finally his secure hold on the clue that
eventually led him to the solution can be proved by analysis of
Jedes Volk hat ilzm eigene Gegenstiinde itself.
The presence of his eventual solution in the manuscripts of
1793-4 is quite dramatically revealed by the remarkable aberra-
tions which it has produced in the work of two students of the
early manuscripts-one of whom has made what will certainly
remain the most monumentally exhaustive analysis of them.
Theodor Haering was so struck by the resemblance between the
way in which the 'Zusatz des Gottlichen bei Jesus' is described in
Es sollte eine schwere Aufgabe and the eventual analysis of the
divinity of Christ in 'The Spirit of Christianity', that he could
not really understand why Hegel wrote The Life of Jesus at all, and
his interpretation of everything else that Hegel wrote in 1795 and
1796 was seriously warped.! While Sofia Vanni-Rovighi has even
gone so far as to suggest, on the basis of an obiter dictum of Nohl
himself about the resemblance between Hegel's handwriting in its
'first' and 'third' stages, that the 'Tlibingen fragment' which Nohl
places before The Life of Jesus really belongs after the 'Positivity'
essay.2
Haering's blindness is illuminating, because it is an exact
counterpart of Hegel's own. ·What Haering does not see was all
that Hegel himself in 1794 could see. The 'Zusatz des Gottlichen
I Nohl, p. 57 (cf. also Nohl, p. 67 for the phrase 'personifiziertes Ideal' so
much beloved of Haering); Haering, i. 173, and passim, i. 454 iI., i. 514 iI.
2 'Osservazioni sulla cronologia dei primi scritti di Hegel', Ii Pensiero, 5,

1960, 157-75; compare Nohl's note on 'The Chronology of the Manuscripts'

(page 402). Gisela Schuler has dealt faithfully with this suggestion in her much
fuller account of the development of Hegel's handwriting and the chronology
of his manuscripts (Hegel-Studien, ii. I II-59-see especially 139 n.). But I do
not think any careful student of the available printed materials would agree
with her that Professor Vanni-Rovighi could legitimately 'stand by this interpre-
tation until a counter-proof is brought forward'. One has only to compare
Roques's edition of the manuscripts with that of Nohl to recognize that anyone
who could bring order out of such a chaos would not be likely to make such an
error. In particular, anyone who could restore the revised version of 'The
Spirit of Christianity' to intelligible sequence, as Nohl did, would not have
overlooked the links that exist between it and the Tubingen fragment. Even
one who has not seen the manuscripts themselves can fully share Miss Schuler's
wonder over Nohl's 'Scharfsinn' and his 'sure eye for connections' (op. cit.,
p. II6).
268 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

bei Jesus' was for Hegel at that time only the halo of authority
which-thanks be to Kant, Lessing and the other heroes of the
Enlightenment!-had at last begun to fall 'from the heads of
the oppressors and the gods of the earth'.r The resurrection of
Jesus, his apotheosis as the Christ, is condemned by Hegel from
various angles, but in very similar terms at the end of 1793
(Christus hatte zwolj Apostel), the end of 1794 (Jetzt braucht die
Menge), and the beginning of 1796 (Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene
Gegenstiinde).2 As one who had believed from his youth up that
'every good has its bad side' Hegel had no difficulty in identifying
the historical aspect of Christianity as its 'bad side'. But the 'good
side' of Christianity-the rationality of its doctrines-had a 'bad
side' all of its own in that it could not satisfy 'imagination and the
heart'. It was quite some time before the young dialectician realized
that the healing of this weakness could be achieved by converting
the maxim of his schooldays and reading 'Every evil has its good
side'. In several places in the early essays and notes, Hegel recog-
nizes that the historical character of Christianity does in a way
answer to the needs of the imagination, but he always remarks
how inadequate it is for this purpose. It is because this point was
made so trenchantly in his plan of 1794 (Unter objektiver Religion),
that I said earlier that the check in the progress of his reflections
is already there foreshadowed. 3 But he had already begun to find
I Letter I I (to Schelling, 16 Apr. 1795) Brieje, i. 24; d. the notes from
Gibbon in Unkunde der Geschichte (Nohl, pp. 365-6).
2 Nohl, p. 34; pp. 70-1; p. 226 (Knox, p. 160). In the last two cases the

resurrection is not specifically mentioned, but the reference to the resurrec-

ted Christ seems to me to be quite clear.
3 Nohl, p. 49, section zeta, subsection (a). On the good side: '( a) its practical
doctrines are pure and have the advantage of being mostly exhibited in examples.'
On the bad side: '(fJ) the historical truths on which it is founded-therein the
miraculous is always subject to unbelief' and secondly it is 'not designed for the
Phantasie-as with the Greeks-it is sad and melancholy-oriental, not native
to our soil, it cannot be assimilated therewith'. (See the full translation in the
Appendix to this volume, pp. 508-10 below.)
For the direct opposition of Vernunft and historische Traditionen (which rests
ultimately on Hegel's rejection of Storr's doctrine of the miraculous) see
Unkunde der Geschichte, Nohl, p. 365: 'It must seem incredible that the primacy
of VernunJt should be so far misunderstood that historical traditions are placed
beside it, yes even exalted above it.'
For critical comments on the imaginative aspect of Christianity, see: Aber die
Hauptmasse, Nohl, p. 358; Die StaatsverJassungen, Nohl, p. 39; Unkunde des
Geschichte, Nohl, pp. 363 and 364; and finally of course Jedes Volk hat ihm
eigene Gegenstiinde, passim (Nohl, pp. 214-29; Knox, pp. 145-64). The first
origin of Hegel's criticism in this respect was his early sense of the alienation of
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
his way out of the difficulty before he left Switzerland. In Jedes
Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde (I797) he offers an interpretation
of the miraculous element in the historical record of Christianity
which meets the worst difficulty mentioned in his plan. I This clue
alone would probably have sufficed in the end to bring him through
his 'narrow strait', for by its aid he could bridge the gulf between the
mythical mystery of Eleusis and the historical mystery of Easter.
In fact he had also a second clue at his disposal, for he had rejected
at the very beginning the Kantian opposition between reason and
the emotions;2 and as soon as he began to think of Christianity,
not from the viewpoint of Phantasie but from that of Herz, he was
bound to reflect that St. John does not only say that God is Reason
('In the beginning was the Logos . .. and the Logos was God') but
also, even more explicitly, that 'God is Love'. Thus from the point
of view of Herz, the 'sad and melancholy' character of Christianity
with its 'heroes in suffering' (all of which is repellent to a healthy
Phantasie) is quite rapidly and naturally transformable into a
joyous sense of communion.
There is only one important respect in which Hegel's 'psycho-
logical crisis' may have contributed, and indeed probably did
contribute, to the advance of his thought. His loneliness at Berne,
his sense of the utter futility of his efforts, his doubting-per haps-
of his own powers, and-even more hypothetically-his feeling
that he was sacrificing worldly happiness for a will-o-the-wisp,
may very well have given him an insight into and a sympathy with
the alienation of Jesus from the society of his time, which he
(Hegel) certainly did not have when he wrote Auj3er dem mundlichen
Unterricht and Christus hatte zwoif Apostel shortly after he arrived
in Switzerland. In saying this I do not mean to suggest for a
moment that Hegel's crisis was of such a magnitude as to be

the literate classes (and consequently of literary artists) from the mass of the
people. In other words it antedates his critical concern with the religion of his
own time altogether (see 'Dber einige charakteristische Unterschiede der alten
Dichter', Dok., pp. 48-9).
1 Nohl, p. 218 (Knox, pp. ISO-I).

2 See Religion ist eine (Nohl, p. 18); the analysis of love there given could
hardly have been absent from Hegel's mind when he paraphrased John 13:
34-5 in The LIfe of Jesus (see Nohl, p. 125). The first hint of 'The Spirit of
Christianity' can perhaps be found when he reaches John IS: 17 ('These things
I command you, that ye love one another') and turns it into 'since now the spirit
of love, the power that inspires [begeistert] you and me, is one and the same'
(Noh!, p. 126).
27 0 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

directly comparable with the Agony in the Garden. H6lderlin, who

would certainly have regarded a return to Tiibingen as tantamount
to crucifixion, would perhaps have considered such a comparison
valid; and for someone like H6lderlin an experience of this sort
really would have been a crisis of that order of magnitude. But
for Hegel it was not. He simply needed to be in contact with others
who shared his interests. The measure of his 'crisis' is that, whereas
after fifteen months in Switzerland he wrote: 'I deeply long for a
place-not in Tiibingen' etc., after another nine months there his
longing was great enough to make him consider even a place in
Tiibingen;I and though we may well be glad that he did not have
to go back there, we can hardly doubt that, whatever H6lderlin
may have thought, it would have been for Hegel a less 'unbearable
trial' than remaining in isolation. 2 Hegel suffered certainly, and
he had fits of black depression; but he was always, probably, as
much the master of himself as any man can reasonably hope to be-
a fact which H6lderlin recognized when he called him a 'ruhig
Verstandesmensch' and spoke of his 'ever cheerful attitude'.3 It was
just because feelings and emotions, spiritual experiences generally,
never went to extremes or rose to the highest pitch of violence in
Hegel's consciousness, that he was able to make them the object
of rational observation and analysis. The sureness of his intuitive
appreciation, even of the extremes of human experience, was a
function not of direct acquaintance with these extremes, but of his
capacity for imaginative empathy, which was greater perhaps than
that of any other philosopher. This is just as true in respect of
Hegel's analysis of suffering as it is in respect of the other human
passions.

2. The spirit of Judaism

I do not quite know what evidence Knox is relying on when he says
that 'during his first two years in "unhappy Frankfurt", in order to
cure himself of melancholia, [Hegel] worked with all his energies
I Letter 6 (to Schelling, 24 Dec. 1794) Briefe, i. I I ; the first that we hear of
the Tlibingen project is in Letter IS (from Holderlin, 25 Nov. 1795), Briefe, i.
34. But Hegel may have mentioned it as early as July: see p. 209 n.2.
2 'Seriously, my dear fellow, you ought not so wantonly to put your spirit to
such an unbearable trial', wrote Holderlin in Oct. 1796, when he had found the
post with the Gogels for Hegel; but he had earlier admitted that Renz would
make good company at the Repetententisch at Tlibingen (see Briefe, i. 34 and 42).
3 Letter 136, line 42, GSA, vi. 236 (to Neuffer, 16 Feb. 1797); and Letter 128,
lines 39-40, ibid., p. 222 (Briefe, i. 45).
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
at Greek literature and philosophy as well as at history and politics'. I
It is true that some, perhaps most, of the 'fragments of historical
studies' published by Rosenkranz probably belong to this period.
But there is not really a lot, even in them, that can fairly be said to
indicate a serious and continuous study of 'Greek literature and
philosophy' -even if, as I expect Knox would wish, we count
Thucydides in that category rather than under 'history and
politics'.2 Most of the manuscripts that can be firmly dated to
1797 and 1798 are concerned with the Judaic tradition from the
Flood to the birth of Jesus. Plato's Phaedrus and Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet certainly played a part in Hegel's reflections about
love in this period. 3 But until he took up Kant's Metaphysik der
Sitten in August 1798, I suspect that the Old Testament, Josephus,
and Herder 4 occupied more of his attention than any works of
I 'Hegel's attitude to Kant's Ethics', Kant-Studien, 49 (1957-8), 73.
2 Fragments 2, 3, 4, 5,6,7,8,9, I 1,13,14, and 17 are concerned to a significant
degree with classical themes (though I should say that the historical-political
interest predominates over the literary-philosophical one). The concern with
Phantasie which is evident in almost all of these fragments strengthens my
conviction that they belong to the last year at Berne and the first year at Frankfurt.
On the whole I am inclined to suspect that most of the more distinctively
Hellenic fragments belong to the last summer in Berne (when Hegel wrote
Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde and Eleusis) rather than to the first year in
Frankfurt (where most of the datable manuscripts are concerned with the history
of the Jews). It seems certain that Fragments I and 7 belong to Frankfurt; so I
should guess do 13 and 17.
3 The Phaedrus is quoted in so wie mehrere Gattungen (summer 1797) and
Romeo and Juliet in welchem Zwecke denn alles tJbrige dient (about Nov. 1797;
revised a year or more later); see Nohl, pp. 378 and 380 (Knox, p. 307).
4 Of all the major influences on the young Hegel, Herder's is the hardest to
estitnate reliably, but I suspect that it was great. From a remark of Holderlin's
we know that Hegel must have read some of Herder's work at Tiibingen (Letter
9, 26 Jan. 1795, Briefe, i. 19). It may well be that they read Gott together in
connection with their study of the Pantheismusstreit.
The influence of Herder's theory of culture upon Hegel's own study of the
Old Testament is certified by what he says in Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegen-
stiinde (Nohl, p. 218; Knox, p. ISO). This only takes us back to 1796. But Hegel's
remark in his first letter to Schelling about 'meeting you on your old track'
shows that he was quite familiar with the latter's Master's Thesis (De prima
malorum humanorum origine); and this essay would quite certainly have made
him conscious of the relevance of Herder's works on the general philosophy of
culture to his own concerns. I myself think that he needed no prompting in
this respect even as early as 1793. I am strongly inclined to believe that his
concept of a Volk and of a Volksreligion owes a great deal to Herder's Ideen, and
that the essay Religion ist eine (the 'Tiibingen fragment') is already a more or
less conscious attempt to mediate the disagreement between Herder and Kant.
Only a close comparison of all the relevant texts (and a conscientious considera-
tion of the equally plausible parallels that can be drawn with alternative sources)
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

literature or philosophy in the ordinary sense, either classical or

modern.
The earliest of Hegel's sketches of Jewish history, Die Geschichte
der Juden lehrt, may quite possibly have been written in his last
month or two at Berne. It is primarily concerned with the con-
dition and attitude of the Jewish people at the time of the Exodus,
and already expounds the conception of Moses and the Exodus
which Hegel set forth in the final version of his essay on 'The
Spirit of Judaism' about two years later (Abraham in Chaldiia
geboren hatte schon).! In his subsequent sketches Abraham
gradually came to occupy a key position comparable to that of
Moses. Hegel tried for a time to push his inquiry back to the
Flood, but eventually decided that the true beginning of Jewish
history was to be found in the story of Abraham:
With Abraham, the true progenitor of the Jews, the history of this
people begins, i.e. his spirit is the unity, the soul that governs the whole
fate of his posterity; it appears in a different guise after every battle
against different forces, or whenever it has defiled itself by adopting an
alien nature [Wesen] after giving way to force or to temptation. Thus it
appears in a distinct form of the appeal to arms and conflict, or of the
way in which it endures the fetters of the stronger; this form is called
'fate'.2
We meet here for the first time (somewhere around August 1798)
the conjunction of 'spirit' and 'fate' which was crucial for the
development of Hegel's thought in the Frankfurt period. In order
to understand properly both the preliminary notes and drafts from
which this conjunction gradually emerged and the great essay on
'The Spirit of Christianity' for which it provided the basis, we
offers any prospect of confirmation (or the reverse) here; and quite probably we
must resign ourselves, in the end, to uncertainty and ignorance. Herder's own
views are capable of a considerable variety of interpretations, so the initial
belief of the investigator is bound to prejudice any inquiry into his influence on
Hegel.
t Nohl, pp. 370-1 and 245-60 (Knox, pp. 185-205). For the dating, cf. Gisela
Schiiler, Hegel-Studien, ii. 146. Unambiguous reference to the final version
(itself a revision of a first draft) is made difficult by the fact that between Die
Geschichte der Juden lehrt and it lie two short sketches which both begin Abraham
in Chaldaa--Nohl prints these as 'Entwurf II' and 'Entwurf IV', so I shall refer
to them as II. Abraham in Chaldaa and IV. Abraham in Chaldiia respectively,
and to the final version as Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hattB schon.
Z Mit Abraham dem wahren Stammvater, Nohl, p. 243 (Knox, p. 182). On the

relation of this piece to Hegel's essays on 'the Spirit of Judaism' and 'the Spirit
of Christianity' see p. 280 n. 3, p. 330 n. 2, and p. 332 n. 2, below.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 273

must get a firm grip on the underlying theory of human culture,

which Hegel never articulated fully anywhere, I but which can be
reconstructed from his hints and obiter dicta if we consider his
development in a sufficiently broad perspective.
In the so-called 'Tiibingen fragment' the concept of 'spirit', as
the operative form in which a community is conscious of its unity,
is already central. But in that essay Hegel was concerned about the
Greek 'spirit' as an achieved ideal. We can see that a process of
achievement was involved, and we know that the hero of this
process was Theseus, who reconciled a number of natural com-
munities (tribal or blood-clans) into a city. But Hegel does not
dwell on this process, probably because he could not yet see any
obvious lessons to be learned from it for the reintegration of life
in his own society, which was his ultimate goal.
The concept of 'fate' also appears in the Tiibingen fragment.
But it is not a 'fate' that belongs to the Greek spirit or to any other
determinate spirit; it is simply the impersonal might before which
all things mortal and immortal must yield. This power, against
which not even the Gods can contend, is the natural necessity that
is the correlate of rational freedom generally, not the 'fate' which is
the correlate of 'spirit' in the Frankfurt manuscripts.
However, the Greek spirit as Hegel presents it to us in the
'Tiibingen fragment' was certainly distinguished by its particular
attitude towards this absolute fate. The Greek never conceived of
the possibility of a 'mastery of fate'. He accepted fate and was
reconciled with it as far as possible. This was the right or rational
attitude. Positive religion, the religion of an absolute Lord, who
was master of all things, even of Ananke, seeks to justify itself by
making moral claims on behalf of reason against the power of fate.
But the justification is spurious because the demands are illegitimate.
When Hegel's reflections reached this point-in the fragment
Ein positiver Glauben written at the end of 179S-he was in a
position to say, as soon as he turned his mind to the problem, that
the essential difference between the spirit of the Hellenes and that
of the Jews was expressed in the contrasting attitudes to the might
of nature revealed in their respective myths about the Flood. But
he could not yet have said why the history of the Jews begins with
Abraham rather than with Noah, or the history of the Greeks with
I Unless, perhaps, he did so in the lost manuscript of which the so-called

Systemfragment of 1800 is all that remains to us. (See further pp. 379-82 below.)
8248588 u
274 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

Theseus and Lycurgus rather than with Deucalion. We have, so

far, found reason to speak of distinctive attitudes to fate, but not of
distinct fates. We have identified, perhaps, the beginning of uni-
versal history in the breach of the 'State of nature' produced by
some cataclysmic manifestation of the might of nature herself, I
but not the beginning of any particular history.
vVe can regard the original breach with the state of nature as a
'beginning of history' in some sense, because although the breach
is, ex hypothesi, quite involuntary, the attitude that men adopt
towards it is not. But the genuine spiritual self-awareness of a
'people' (Volh) does not begin with their spontaneous reaction to
this breach. It begins only when they deliberately adopt towards
other peoples the attitude which they have reactively adopted
towards the revealed might of universal fate. Thus the involuntary
breach (which usually produces what Hegel calls a state of 'need'
(Not» generates the possibility of a voluntary breach (which is what
Hegel generally uses the word Trennung to refer to); and the
character and manner of that voluntary breach, if it occurs,
determines a 'fate' that is peculiar to the spirit that makes the
breach.
'Fate' in this new sense is quite distinct from the universal might
of fate over all things. Abraham made explicit in history the breach
between God and Nature which is implicit in the myth of Noah,
and basic to faith in God's promise that mankind would not again
be threatened with extinction by natural catastrophe. Through
Abraham's conscious decision the people of the promise were
separated from all others, as the Lord of creation is separated from
His creatures. In an analogous way the work of Theseus expressed
historically the religious attitude symbolized by that confident
trust in Mother Earth that is symbolically represented in the myth
of Deucalion and Pyrrha.
'Fate' now-the fate that arises in the context of a voluntary
I Hegel is very shy about the aboriginal state that exists before the primitive
breach that makes men aware of Not. The analogy of the Garden of Eden story
with Greek myths of the Golden Age and with Rousseau's 'State of Nature' is
obvious enough. In Mit Abraham dem wahren Stammvater (Noh1, pp. 243-4,
Knox, p. 182) Hegel speaks of the 'loss of the state of nature' as if it was distinct
from the cataclysmic breach with which history begins. But in another place
he acknowledges that this breach need not be cataclysmic (see the remark about
the ancient Gennans in Joseph. jiid. Alterth, Nohl, p. 368). In that case I do not
see how we can distinguish it from 'the loss of the state of nature'. (See further,
p. 281 n. 4 below.)
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 275
Trennung between man and his fellows, and hence within human
nature itself-is something very different from the almighty
impersonal power of Ananke that is acknowledged in Greek
religion. It is the 'Nemesis' of Greek drama; it is 'poetic justice'.!
The action of fate is 'poetic' because the individual or community
that is subject to it is also the agent who brings it about; and 'just'
because it is retribution exacted for the violence done to human
nature in its integrity. This Fate always appears as involuntary,
because the agent is not conscious of doing violence to himself. He
does conscious violence only to others, or to some aspect of his own
being which he does not regard as part of his true nature, but as
evil or alien. But it is always a voluntary rupture within the self
that causes this fate to arise, and when the rupture is voluntarily
healed, the fate disappears or at least ceases to appear as hostile.
We can see how gradual the full emergence of the doctrine of
'spirit' and 'fate' was, if we compare Hegel's first sketches and
notes about Judaism with his mature treatment of the same topics
a year or so later. As we have said, the earliest sketch already
expresses his considered view of Moses and the Exodus. But he
does not yet think of the fate of the Jews as something that they
made for themselves. He insists rather that their political develop-
ment was not spontaneous, or independent of the influence of other
nations, and indeed it was not voluntary at all. The transition from
a pastoral patriarchal society to a political constitution (vom
Hirtenleben zum Staate) was forced on them by the domination
of the Egyptians. They were on the whole content that this should
be so, and Moses (who had been educated by the Egyptian priests
in isolation from his people, and so felt the inadequacy of this
slavish mode of existence) could only rouse in them a vague
aspiration toward the free life of their forefathers. They were
passively willing to believe in his divine mission, and through this
belief, he was able to bring about the Exodus. But he could not
bring them to an imaginative grasp of his own vision of free
I 'Nemesis' appears in the Tiibingen fragment as a form of fate which is

clearly distinguished as moral rather than a natural necessity. It is clear enough,

I think, that Hegel's developed concept of Schicksal arose from the application
to the Jewish tradition of the idea of Nemesis as 'law of moral equilibrium'
(Nohl, pp. 25-6; see p. 504 below) which he got from Sophocles. But there is no
sign that this development had begun at Tiibingen. Of the two occurrences of
Schicksal that I have noted in Religion ist eine, one seems to refer primarily to
natural necessity, though it may very probably be meant to cover Nemesis as
well (Nohl, p. 29; see p. 507 below. See also Nohl, p. 6; p. 484 below).
276 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

political existence; and because of this failure they bore the suffer-
ings of the forty years in the wilderness very grudgingly and with
frequent backsliding. This fact dictated the positive, authoritarian
character of much of the Mosaic Law. In place of the genuine
republican equality of free citizens, the Jews enjoyed an 'equality
of insignificance'. 1 Only with the establishment of the monarchy
did they come to recognize, through the explicit establishment of
inequality, that individual men could really count for something.
In his final account of the bondage of Israel in Egypt, on the
other hand (Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon), Hegel treats
Joseph as the architect of the Egyptian constitution under which
the Jews became for the first time a settled nation. Thus their
transition vom Hirtenleben zum Staate is shown up as a spon-
taneous or natural expression of their native genius, even though
it was still something passively endured by the people as a whole;
for Joseph's work as a statesman expressed the Judaic conception
of the relation between 'the Lord' and his 'servants'. 2 The account
of Moses' work is in all essentials unchanged. 3
The period of Israel's existence as an independent nation, before
and after the Babylonian captivity, receives only the most cursory
notice, either in Hegel's preparatory sketches or in the final essay.
As we have just noted, Hegel took the establishment of the
monarchy to be the only possible means by which the Jews could
come to an appreciation of true human dignity and freedom. The
work of the prophets during and after the Captivity in Babylon he
alludes to only indirectly in his first sketch, and all that is added
in his later essay is an explanation of why he takes it to be irrelevant
to the 'fate' of the Jews, though relevant to the birth of Christianity.
This explanation, however, illustrates once more how greatly the
perspective has changed in the final account:
Inspired men [Begeisterte] had tried from time to time to cleave to
I Nohl, p. 370; cf. Abraham in Chaldaageborenhatte schon, Nohl, p. 255 (Knox,

p. 198).
2 Nohl, p. 248 (Knox, pp. 188-9).

3 In the final version Hegel emphasizes Moses' use of conjuring and wonder-
working as a means of maintaining his authority (Nohl, p. 249; Knox, pp. 180-
90). He first remarked on this in the unpublished part of Fortschreiten der
Gesetzgebung (about a year after his initial sketch). Another point that seems to
be quite new in the final version is the comparison of the 'Spoiling of the
Egyptians' to the behaviour of the robber bands during the plague of 1720 at
Marseilles---on the origin and import of this comparison see D'Hondt, pp.
184-20 3.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 277
the old genius of their nation and to revivify it in its death throes; but
when the genius of a nation has fled, inspiration cannot conjure it back,
it cannot turn away the fate of a people by its spell, though it may call
forth a new spirit from the depths of life if it be pure and living. But the
Jewish prophets kindled their flame from the torch of a flagging
daemon; they tried to restore its old vigour, and, by destroying the
many-sided interests of the time, its old dread sublime unity. Thus they
could become only cold fanatics, circumscribed and ineffective when
they were involved in policies and statecraft; they could only bring
back the memory of bygone ages, and thereby add to the confusion of
the present, without resurrecting the past. The mixture of passions
could never again turn into uniform passivity; on the contrary, arising
from passive hearts they were bound to rage all the more terribly.'
In the first sketch the prophets were not thus saddled with
partial responsibility for the civil strife and patriotic wars of the
Maccabees, and the fanaticism of the Jews in defence of their
religion was blamed at least partly on the intolerance of their
'masters or enemies'. In the final version the view that fanaticism
was a late development is abandoned, and the story of the
vengeance of the sons of Jacob for the ravishing of their sister
Dinah is cited as evidence of the primitive Jewish hostility to life.
Hostility to life, first in the form of outward aggression and later,
when their independence is taken from them, in the form of internal
faction and sectarianism, was the only way in which the conscious-
ness of freedom, once it had been awakened, could be harmonized
with the Jewish sense of passive belonging to their God. The whole
'fate' of the Jewish nation as Hegel analyses it in the final version
is contained in this destructive tension.
This tension did not become actively destructive, it did not reveal
its whole nature, until the twelve tribes began to come into close
contact with other settled nations. But Hegel finds the explanation
for the tension, and hence for the subsequent fate of the children
of Abraham, in the story of Abraham himself. Abraham represents
the pure 'spirit' of the Jewish people, while the history of the
twelve tribes is the 'fate' of that spirit when it seeks to express
itself in the world, a fate which is 'inevitable' in the sense of being
self-wrought, or explicable directly by examination of the contrast
between the goal which Abraham set for his own life and the
natural tendencies or propensities of human life itself.
I Noh!, p. 259 (Knox, p. 203).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

Let us now observe just how Hegel reached this conclusion.

Beginning, as he did, with the work of Moses, it was not easy for
him at first to see how the 'fate' of the Jews could be self-wrought
in any but a negative sense (i.e. they voluntarily accepted the
sufferings and trials that befell them as sent by God). In this
perspective their backsliding appeared only as a form of passivity,
and their zeal as a late (and fundamentally irrelevant) development.
But as he thought about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob Hegel realized
more and more how complex the 'spirit' behind the passivity of the
Jews was, how little of it could be captured by an intellectual
analysis of what he would have called their 'objective theology'.
This growing awareness explains why his reflections-which
ranged over the whole tradition from Noah to Joseph and his
brethren-focused quite soon upon the figure of Abraham, though
they reached their final form only after much drafting and re-
drafting.!
The way in which Hegel's thoughts ranged before he had
definitely located the beginning of Jewish history, is evidenced by
the first fragment that can be definitely assigned to the Frankfurt
period. This is a sheet of notes (Joseph. jiid. Alterth.) about the
patriarchal tradition, which were worked up in subsequent sketches.
The first notes are about Nimrod, the tower of Babel, and the
'breach with Nature' created by the Flood. Then follows a para-
graph about the blessing that Isaac mistakenly bestowed on Jacob,
and finally some reflections about Moses and Abraham-not, as
Nohl reports, about Abraham alone-which were incorporated
almost verbatim in later sketches. 2

I Unluckily for us Nohl felt that two of Hegel's four meditations upon
Abraham (prior to his final statement in Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte
schon) could be omitted as repetitive. He eliminated the first of the four (con-
tained in Joseph. jiid. Alterth., Nohl, p. 368, spring 1797) and the fourth (Zu
Abrahams Zeiten which preceded the notes Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung on the
same sheet-written in spring 1798 ?). The two he has given us both begin with
the same sentence: II. Abraham in Chaldiia (Nohl, pp. 368-70) was written
immediately after the notes Joseph. judo Alterth., and IV. Abraham in Chaldiia
(Nohl, pp. 371-3) a few months later; Miss SchUler dates it 'before July 1797'.
2 Nohl, p. 368. Nohl did not print the reflections on Nimrod, or those on

Moses and Abraham. He quotes only a single sentence: 'The Spirit of the
Greeks is beauty; the spirit of the Orientals sublimity and greatness'. This
occurs as an isolated reflection after two paragraphs about lVIoses (mostly
repeated in Nohl, p. 249, Knox, pp. 189-90), and before the concluding para-
graph on Abraham. No doubt this is the reason for Nohl's oversight when he
says 'what follows about Abraham is omitted'.
 PHANTASIE UND I-IERZ 279

The most interesting point in Hegel's first notes on the 'breach

with nature' is his aside about the Germans. A breach (Entzweiung)
is necessary, he claims, if human political existence is to begin, but
it may come about in a variety of ways. For the Israelites it resulted
from the Flood, and for the ancient Germans 'perhaps by ac-
quaintance with the products of a milder climate'. The effect of
two such disparate events would obviously be very different; and
since the intervention of another human cultural group would
almost certainly be involved in the second case, the two events
cannot properly be assimilated to one another in Hegel's own
conceptual scheme as they are here. But the German tribes
are very much in Hegel's mind, because he is always think-
ing of the 'application' of his results; and he must have felt
that the differences were of less practical importance than the
analogy.
Everything that Hegel noted about Nimrod and the tower of
Babel in the spring of I797, he incorporated into lV1it Abraham
dem wahren Stammvater which he wrote about eighteen months
later. But he built his notes into the larger structure of a contrast
between Nimrod, Noah, and Deucalion and Pyrrha. Nimrod
responded to the hostility of Nature, as revealed in the Flood, by
seeking to establish human mastery over Nature. He sought the
'supreme unity of mastery' in something actual. Noah on the other
hand found the 'supreme unity of mastery' in something that he
conceived in his own mind-his God. Noah's God granted to him
a legal authority over the animal creation, saving only the life
principle itself (contained in the blood which Noah was forbidden
to eat). This was the beginning of the legal covenant relationship
to God and the world, which was the essential expression of the
Jewish spirit. I Nimrod on the other hand defied Nature and its
Lord, becoming a hunter and seeking to build the Tower of Babel
as a defence against all natural perils. But Nimrod's call to men to
trust in their own strength and assert a de facto mastery of their
world only issued in the founding of a despotism. In the Greek
myth on the other hand the idea of mastery simply does not occur.
Deucalion and Pyrrha are reconciled with nature after the flood.
They 'made a peace of love, were the progenitors of more beautiful
I Cf. the note in Fortschreiten det· Gesetzgebung (early 1798 and hence inter-
mediate between Joseph. judo Alterth. and Mit Abraham dem wahren Stamm-
vater), Nohl, p. 373.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

nations, and made their age the mother of a new-born nature which
maintained its bloom of youth'. I
Both the Judaic and the Greek myth are regarded by Hegel as
'different ways of returning from the barbarism [Roheit] which
followed the loss of the state of nature to the union [Vereinigung]
which had been destroyed'.2 We shall have to discuss the meaning
of the term Vereinigung later. For the moment I simply want to
point out that in this sentence Hegel has, by implication, pushed
his inquiry back to the very beginnings of the Hebraic tradition,
and is putting the story of the Garden of Eden alongside the Greek
myths of the Golden Age. But, as he says in this same place, 'only
a few dim traces of this important period have been preserved
for us'. By the time he wrote Mit Abraham dem wahren Stammvater
he had decided, as the opening sentence tells us, that the real
beginning of Jewish history was with Abraham. His object in this
piece was to pull together his reflections upon Jewish prehistory;
but he seems to have decided after trying it that this was not the
right approach to his problem. All available indications point to
the conclusion that he was minded, in the end, to set aside his
reflections on the first eleven chapters of Genesis altogether. 3
N ext in order after Nimrod in his first sheet of notes, Hegel
offers us a reflection upon the blessing which Isaac mistakenly
bestowed on Jacob. He does not seem to have made use of this

I Nohl, pp. 244-5 (Knox, pp. 182-4). We may note that Noah and Nimrod

seem to prefigure the Church and the Empire respectively; but it is not clear
that Hegel meant to draw this parallel.
2 Nohl, p. 243 (Knox, p. 182).
3 The fragment Mit Abraham, dem wahren Stammvater (Nohl, pp. 243-5) is
printed by Nohl as if Abraham in Ghaldlia geboren hatte schon were a direct
continuation of it. But it is not in fact part of the continuous manuscript, and
was certainly never included by Hegel in his revision of it. This is shown by
Hegel's note about the length of his continuous manuscript and by the fact that
there is another (unpublished) sketch-Die schonen ihrer Natur nach-on the
last page of the sheet that contains Mit Abraham dem wahren Stammvater. (Nohl
sought to evade the former difficulty through the hypothesis that Mit Abraham
dem wahren Stammvater was written later than the continuous manuscript. But
in the light of Miss Schiller's re-examination of the handwriting it seems that
we can safely reject this suggestion. The piece was almost certainly written a
few months earlier (Schiller, p. 151). That Hegel intended at the time of
writing it to incorporate it in a continuous study of the development of Jewish
religious law and custom is fairly clearly indicated by the sheet of notes on the
topic written shortly before it (Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung, partially published
as 'Entwurf V' in Nohl, pp. 373-4. But those notes also reveal the difficulties
involved in this plan.)
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 2,81

subsequently, I but it is interesting because it reveals what an

enormous change of perspective is involved when we turn from
the requirements of Vernunft to those of Phantasie. It must seem
strange, Hegel says, that anyone could think of a blessing or a
curse as irrevocable, since blessing and cursing are essentially
linked with subjective feelings, and are consciously voluntary acts.
From the point of view of Vernunft, therefore, they can have no
validity as mere outward forms. But the story of how Jacob ob-
tained the blessing reveals 'the sublimity [das Hohe] of a purely
subjective thing'. It is clear that Hegel has fastened on this treating
of the verbal act as inviolable as a typical expression of the legalistic
spirit of the Jews. Noah's God (and Abraham's) as Hegel later
describes him is similarly only 'an ideal produced by thought and
made into an existing object'.2 Already we can see why Hegel's
reflections on the history of the Jews went hand in hand with further
meditation about the nature of God in positive religion generally.
As we have already said, the final paragraphs of this sheet of
notes were incorporated almost verbatim in Hegel's later sketches.
The remarks about Abraham in particular were repeated in the
immediately following sketch II. Abraham in Chaldiia 3 (spring
1797), to which we shall now turn.
Abraham grew up, says Hegel, in a state of undisturbed peace
with nature, symbolized by his worship of the nature gods of his
own people; but he ruptured this stable relation by his own choice,
and became a wanderer, first in the plains of Mesopotamia and
then in Canaan. 4 He wanted to have no ties. He was the supreme
I A reference back to it in Zu Abrahams Zeiten shows that Hegel did at least
consider making some use of it at one point subsequently.
2 Nohl, p. 2,44 (Knox, p. 183), for the God of Noah; the point is also made

specifically about Abraham's God in Zu Abrahams Zeiten (which Nohl did not
print). 3 Nohl, pp. 368-70.
4 It is obvious that Hegel would have found it difficult to reconcile this
account of Abraham's rupture with nature with his interpretation of the Flood
as an involuntary rupture which determined the form of the Jewish state.
Noah is a prototype of Moses, but Abraham, who stands between them in the
tradition, is logically prior to them both. This becomes apparent when Hegel
declares that Abraham's original stable relation to nature was one of enjoyment,
and that when he ruptured that relation by his own act, he only changed the
form of the enjoyment. This point-which becomes explicit only at the end of
II. Abraham in Chaldiia-is introduced at the beginning of IV. Abraham in
Chaldiia; and that is where we find it again in the final version Abraham in
Chaldiia geboren hatte schon (Nohl, pp. 2,45-6; Knox, p. 185). The Biblical
authority for Hegel's account is Joshua 2,4: 2,-3. (On the comparative situations
of Noah and Abraham see further, p. 283 n. I below.)
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

egoist, for whom his own existence was the ultimate concern. His
God was for him not a friend bringing gifts (like the Greek gods),
but the protector and guarantor of his existence. The promise of
progeny was part of that existence, but Abraham had none the
less to be sure of his own ability to sacrifice Isaac in order to
establish his fidelity to his ideal of freedom from all the bonds of
natural existence and natural love.
The crucial difference between Abraham and his descendants
is that for Abraham nothing appeared as fate. He was at one with
his God, so that in everything that happened, whether joyful or
painful, he saw the hand of Providence. The division (Trennung)
in his consciousness was between the natural world (which he had
left behind) on the one side, and himself and his God on the other.
Both the word Trennung and its correlate Vereinigung already
appear in Hegel's first continuous draft.! In the second draft
Abraham's God is simply 'the Union (Vereinigung) of all that he
did, or was, or enjoyed, envisaged as one great whole or object'.2
By thus projecting (to use the Freudian term) the image of his own
happiness into an external being Abraham was able to rupture all
of his natural links with the world without giving up his enjoyment
of it. The world owed him a happy existence, but he owed it
nothing and he was resolved never to owe it anything. In his
relations with outsiders he was studiously careful to pay his debts,
and he avoided all permanent connections of feeling or of blood. 3
I The first occurrence of Vereinigung is interesting: 'His [Abraham's] Einheit
was security, his manifold was the circumstances conflicting with it, his Supreme
[Being or Value] the Vereinigung of both. The Trennung had not yet become so
complete in him as to make him set himself and Schicksal in opposition to one
another; the particular Vereinigungen that the Greeks had the courage to make
with fate were their Gods' (II. Abraham in Chaldiia, Nohl, p. 369). It is not
quite clear here whether Schicksal is being used in the new sense. But it seems
certain that the new concept is at least on the point of birth, and probable that
it is not yet quite born (by spring r797).
2 IV. Abraham in Chaldiia, Nohl, p. 37I. In the final version Hegel employs

the Kantian term Ideal for Abraham's God. The passage cited from Kant by
Knox (p. r87 n.) highlights the reason behind this transition very neatly.
Abraham's God is his life idealized.
3 Nohl, pp. 246-7 (Knox, pp. r86-7). In the first draft of Abraham in Chaldiia
geboren hatte schon Hegel inserted here a reference to the driving forth of Hagar
and Ishmael. But in the revision he cancelled it, probably because it was a
blemish upon the Einheit which he wanted Abraham to represent. He wished
to make the contrast between Abraham's untroubled isolation and the 'satanic
atrocity' of the sons of Jacob as sharp as possible. (He does however refer to the
story of how Abraham smote the five kings in order to rescue his brother Lot:
Genesis r4: r3-r6.)
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ

In place of union with nature he could claim union with nature's

Lord.
But his descendants served the Lord without enjoying an equal
certainty of their union with him. They felt the pressure of natural
necessity, and they had to obey God's law-neither of which weighed
upon Abraham.! As they grew in numbers, they had to serve God
with whole heart as individuals, but they could only enjoy his
favour as a group, and the needs of the group became more
various. Thus the Trennung with nature became for the children
of Abraham what it had never been in Abraham's simple existence
as a wandering stranger, a barrier to enjoyment. For the first time
they became subject to fate. Joseph's brothers cast him into the
pit, and avenged 'with satanic atrocity' the violation of their sister
Dinah; the recompense of marriage offered by Shechem would,
of course, have involved the re-establishment of the most funda-
mental of those natural ties that Abraham had broken. These
two examples show forth the need of the children of Abraham for
laws to regulate their relations both with one another and with
other peoples. Thus, although the acceptance of a settled abode was
contrary to the spirit of the herdsman Jacob, the subjection of
his sons to Pharaoh in Egypt was unavoidable;2 and by re-
organizing Egypt as an absolute despotism in which Pharaoh
played the role of Abraham's God, Joseph made the state of political
subjection acceptable to them. 3
I The point about Abraham not being under the pressure of natural necessity
is made most explicitly in the passage which Nohl omits from IV. Abraham in
Chaldiia because it is largely repeated in Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte
schon: cf. Nohl, pp. 371 and 246 (Knox, pp. 185-6).
We have here at least part of the explanation of the reciprocal relation between
Trenllung and Not established in Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung (Nohl, p. 373).
The more one is able to break natural ties the less one is subject to the pressure
of natural necessity; and where one is not under this pressure there is no need
for divine prohibition. Thus Noah, who is under the most violent pressure of
need, receives laws from God. Moses receives more laws. But Abraham does
not need them. He lives a simple life in virtual isolation against a relatively
stable natural background. The development of culture (as Hegel goes on to
notice in the same place) disturbs the simple reciprocal relation that he lays down.
2 Jacob like Abraham is the patriarch of a single tribe of wanderers. But in

the history of his sons we behold the breach of one tribe into twelve. This is the
point at which the spirit of Judaism brings its own fate upon itself; and on the
other hand, the salvation of the Greek spirit from fate is first revealed when
Theseus reconciles the warring tribes of Attica without recourse to despotic
authority or enslavement.
3 The general point about the difference between God's relation to Abraham
as an individual and his relation to Abraham's descendants as a group is made in
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

The ambiguity of the terms Trennung and Vereinigung which

seem to refer sometimes to man's relations to God, sometimes to
the satisfaction of his natural desires, and sometimes to both
together, has seriously impeded the understanding of Hegel's
text. The important thing to realize is that where the Trennung
between man and nature is consciously voluntary and absolute,
there is no Trennung between man and God, and hence no actual
sacrifice of material happiness. But wherever the Trennung between
man and nature appears as involuntary and burdensome, a
Trenrtung between man and God appears, in the shape of the
commandment of the Lord, and the worshipper himself is
threatened by God's jealous wrath. Moses, like Abraham, felt no
barrier between himself and God. But he could not raise the
enslaved Jews to the sense of a Vereinigung with God. So he had
first to convince them by signs and wonders that he was sent from
God, and then to give them the law and threaten them with God's
wrath. The religion of Abraham was the faith of a happy or
fortunate people, the religion of Moses is the religion of an un-
happy, unfortunate one. The Jews who trembled before the might
of Pharaoh, and groaned over the hardships of life in the wilderness,
could be aware of God only as an awful commanding and punishing
presence. Thus Mosaic Judaism is the perfect type of a positive
religion in which every aspect of life is directly subjected to the
authoritative command of God. I
Abraham's original covenant with God expresses the spirit of
Judaism; in the law of Moses we are presented with its fate.
Everything that happens to the Jews thereafter is a 'consequence
or development' of that fate, says Hegel in his final version.
IV. Abraham in Chaldiia (Nohl, p. 372). The detailed development is all given
in Abraham in Chaldiia hatte schon (Nohl, p. 248; Knox, pp. 188-9) except for
the mention of Joseph's being cast into the pit, which is my own addition.
I IV. Abraham in Chaldiia (Nohl, p. 372). Hegel here dissents explicitly from

Mendelssohn's view that Judaism is not a positive religion because moral

principles are not transformed into authoritative commands in it. Mendelssohn
distinguishes between the (moral) Jewish religion and the Judaic Law which
applied only to Israel as a political community. Hegel had been pondering on
this distinction-with evident scepticism-since 1793 (see Inwiefern ist Religion,
Nohl, p. 356). See further Nohl, pp. 253-4 (Knox, pp. 195-6).
The analysis of Mosaic religion here given is based on IV. Abraham in
Chaldiia (Nohl, p. 372), Zu Abmhams Zeiten, Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung
(Nohl, pp. 373-4), and Abraham in Chaldiia hatte schon (Nohl, pp. 249-56;
Knox, 189-99). Since this last is readily available in English, I have passed over
the mass of illustrative detail and elaboration which it contains.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 285
Initially, as we saw earlier, he held that the establishment of the
monarchy was an event of some considerable significance; and,
as we have already remarked, he repeats in his final account more
or less everything about the later history of Israel that was con-
tinued in his earliest sketch; he even elaborates upon it somewhat.!
But when it is all placed in the context of his final discussion it
sinks into relative insignificance. The successors of Moses and
Aaron in Hegel's developed vision are not the kings but the priests.
Israel is not so much a monarchy as a theocratic tyranny. Hegel
spares an unkind word for the 'very oppressive glory' of Solomon;2
but it was the hierarchy of the sons of Levi that maintained the
unity of the people through all their misfortunes. The high priests,
the Pharisees, and the Sadducees were the direct heirs of Moses,
and even in his preliminary sketches (after the first) Hegel tends
to move directly from Moses to them. 3 We have already quoted
what he says about the prophetic tradition; we are now in a
position to identify the 'flagging daemon' that the prophets sought
to revive as the simple life of the wandering herdsmen Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob. It was Hegel's view that Abraham's decision in
favour of a life of this sort was a regressive or reactionary one in the
first place. 4 To revive it in the circumstances of a settled com-
munity was quite impossible. But from this hopeless endeavour
the Messianic hope itself was born (and hence ultimately the new
spirit of Christianity). Hegel regarded the Essenes and John the
Baptist as the first stirrings of the new spirit that was born with
Jesus:
In a period of this sort, when upon one who thirsts after inward life
(with the objects around him he cannot be united, he has to be a slave
to them and live in contradiction with the better part of himself, he is
treated by them only as an enemy, and he treats them in the same

'One of the intervening drafts contains a point that is not brought out again
in the final version. In Zu Abrahams Zeiten Hegel sums up the history of the
Jewish nation after Moses as an alternation of foreign slavery and native
independence, and remarks that in the latter state the Jews were 'either dis-
united among themselves or in prosperity they served alien Gods; prosperity
[das Glilck] silenced hatred and union with other peoples resulted. These unions
appeared as Gods.'
2 Nohl, p. 258 bottom; Knox, p. 202.

3 Cf. IV. Abraham in Chaldiia (Nohl, pp. 372-3).

4 Zu Abrahams Zeiten begins by suggesting that even in Abraham's time the
adoption of a nomadic existence was a reactionary or regressive move in a world
where there was no longer any place for it.
286 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
way-), when upon one who seeks something better in which he might
live, a cold privileged dead command is laid, and he is told moreover
'This is life itself'. In a period of this sort the Essenes, or a man like
John or Jesus, brought life to birth in themselves and rose up in battle
against the eternally dead. I
Abraham's spirit was the spirit of enjoyment, of mastery, and of
independence; the fate of his people was to become slaves both of
their law and of the world that Abraham left behind him-to
become persecuted, needy, and despised. Throughout his final
connected account Hegel draws contrasts and parallels with the
Greeks: Abraham's departure from his homeland is contrasted with
Greek colonization myths, and the wrath of Jehovah is compared
with the petrifying power of Medusa; the secret emptiness of the
Holy of Holies is contrasted with the shared experience of the
E1eusinian mysteries; the property regulations of Moses are com-
pared with those of Solon and Lycurgus, and the civic equality
of the G reeks is contrasted with the equal serfdom of the Jews. 2
But for the Jewish fate the best parallel he can find is not a Greek
tragedy but a modern one: 'The fate of the Jewish people is the
fate of Macbeth who stepped out of nature itself, clung to alien
beings [Wesen] , and so in their service had to trample and slay
everything holy in human nature, had at last to be forsaken by his
gods (for they were objects and he their slave) and be dashed to
pieces on his faith itself.'3
I Die Geschichte der Juden lehrt (Nohl, p. 371); compare the remark about the

Essenes at the end of Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon (Nohl, pp. 259-
60; Knox, pp. 203-4) and the opening of the revised version of 'The Spirit of
Christianity' (Jesus trat nicht lange, Nohl, p. 26,; Knox, pp. 205-6). It may
perhaps be worth pointing out that all of these passages written between the end
of 1796 and the end of 1799 are only echoing a passage in the 'Positivity' essay
that was probably written in Aug. or Sept. 1795 (Nohl, p. '53; Knox, p. 69).
2 Nohl, pp. 246, 248, 251, 254, 255 (Knox, pp. 185, 188, '93, '97, 198).

Sometimes the contrast or comparison is obvious but tacit, as, for instance, in
the comment about Abraham's attitude to the groves where he sometimes
encountered his God (Nohl, p. 246; Knox, p. 186). (Hegel's use of the 'sacred
grove' as a symbol of Greece does not derive from Holderlin's poetry as Peperzak
seems to think (p. 138 n. 3); both Hegel and Holderlin got it from Klopstock's
ode 'Der HUgel und der Hain'. No doubt Klopstock's contrast is in Hegel's
mind here.)
Another of these tacit examples is the ironic contrast between the 'truth' of
Hebrew monotheism and the 'beauty' of Greek polytheism (which is not
directly mentioned): Nohl, pp. 253-4 (Knox, pp. 195-6).
J Nohl, p. 260 (Knox, pp. 204-5). There is of course an implicit Greek
parallel here too, since Macbeth's 'weird sisters' are fairly obviously the three
Fates.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ

3. Authority and love

As Hegel studied Josephus and the five books of Moses his
thoughts recurred continually to the fundamental contrast between
an objective 'positive' religious faith and a subjective 'living' faith.
The history of Judaism is the story of the decline and fall of a
living folk-religion to the status of a system of positive law; and in
this story the crucial step is the step from Abraham to Moses. It
is not surprising, therefore, that as Hegel began to formulate his
view of these two folk-heroes, he was moved to record also his
general conclusions about positive religion and living religion as
such. We must always remember that Hegel was not concerned
with the criticism of Judaism for its own sake. He was more
interested in the errors of G. C. Storr than in those of Moses
Mendelssohn let, alone those of the author of the Pentateuch.
Doubtless he would have argued that his extremely selective
emphasis on some elements in the Judaic tradition, some parts of
the Old Testament, at the expense of others, was justified because
it enabled him to account for the historic fate of the Jews. But the
continual contrast that he draws between the Jews and the Greeks
takes no account of the historic fate of the latter. The fate of Israel
had for him an exemplary significance, while that of Athens had
none-at least, as yet. It was the spirit, not the fate, of Hellas that
interested Hegel, for he wished to see his own society enlivened by
a Periclean spirit, and so preserved, or rather rescued, from a
Mosaic fate.
For Hegel himself, the fruit of his labours on the Pentateuch
was the validation of his theoretical analysis and critique of
'positive faith'; and similarly, by comparing Israel with Greece
he sought to establish his fundamental contention that 'Religion
is identical with 10ve.'1 Certainly the drawing of the contrast
between Greece and Israel rather than, as previously, between
Greece and Protestant Germany, helped him in his revaluation
of the New Testament. But here again we must realize that Hegel
was not so much concerned with the faith and fate of Jesus, as
with the actual establishment of a religion of love in his own
society; and just as the fragments Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt
and Glauben ist die Art show us what he thought to gain from the
study of the Old Testament, so the fragment on love (welchem
I so zoie mehrere Gattungen (summer I797), Nohl, p. 377.
288 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

Zwecke denn alles Obrige dient) illustrates what he was hoping

for as he turned back again to the New Testament. These more
theoretical excursions certainly appear very slight when compared
with the imposing mass of his historical studies. But it is possible
that if we possessed the whole of the manuscript to which the so-
called 'fragment of a system' (absolute Entgegensetzung gilt)
belonged, we should find that Hegel actually wove his more
theoretical reflections into a fabric as impressive as the essay on
'The Spirit of Christianity'. 1
The division between historical interpretation and theoretical
construction in the surviving manuscripts is not, of course, a clear
and sharp one, precisely because Hegel's ultimate objective was
always in his mind. Much of his technical vocabulary occurs in
contexts of both kinds, and has to be interpreted with this fact in
mind. In fact, it is fortunate for us that we can usually locate the
abstract terms in a historical context, since the theoretical pro-
nouncements are often extremely enigmatic because of their
fragmentary character and their extreme brevity. Hegel derived
his technical terms from various sources-he flirted with Schelling's
language at Berne, and in Frankfurt he seems to have adopted
H6lderlin's terminology wholesale-but he seems to have felt that
the problem of discovering what the terms meant was identical
with the problem of 'applying' them to his historical cases, and it
is therefore clear that if we want to understand what he meant we
must study his own 'applications'.
To take one example which we have already followed through
several stages, the terms 'object' and 'objective' play an important
role both in the historical and in the theoretical fragments of this
period. In the notes on Judaism these terms are applied variously
to God as conceived by Abraham and by Moses;2. but the most
revealing comment is contained in a single terse note: 'Objektivitat
Gottes Ex(odus) 20';3 for the twentieth chapter of Exodus con-
tains the most familiar statement of the Decalogue. The notion of
I For the fragments mentioned see Nohl, pp. 374-7, 378-85, and 345-51.
welchem Zwecke denn alles Obrige dient has been translated by T. M. Knox and
absolute Entgegensetzung gilt by R. Kroner in Knox, pp. 302-19.
2 For Abraham's God as 'Objekt' see II. Abraham in Chaldiia, and IV.

Abraham in Chaldlia (Nohl, pp. 369,371-2); Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte

schon (Nohl, p. 246; Knox, p. 186). For the God of Moses see IV. Abraham in
Chaldiia (Nohl, p. 373), Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung (in a passage which Nohl
omits), Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon (Nohl, p. 250; Knox, p. 191).
3 Zu Abrahams Zeiten (not printed by Nohl).
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
God as the 'infinite Object' is inseparable from the conception of
him as a commanding authority. Once we are in possession of this
clue we soon realize that Objekt in Hegel's usage at this time
generally denotes an external compulsive power or authoritative
purpose. But there still remain a few difficult cases-as for instance
when Hegel says that 'in misfortune there is separation and we are
aware of ourselves as objects' (im Ungliick ist die Trennullg vor-
handen, da fuhlen wir uns als Objekte);' and when he sums up the
legislation of Moses in his final draft (i.e. when he comes to explain
the laconic memorandum quoted above) we find him using the
term Objekt in two explicitly different senses:
The principle of the entire legislation was the spirit inherited from
his forefathers-the infinite Object, the sum [Inbegriff] of all truth and
all relations, and hence strictly the sole infinite subject-for it can only
be called 'object' inasmuch as man with the life given him is pre-
supposed and taken as the living or the absolute subject-<it is) so to
speak the sole synthesis and the antitheses are the Jewish nation on the
one hand, and the whole remainder of the human race and the world
itself on the other. These antitheses are the true, or pure objects [die
wahren, rein en Objekte] , that is what they are as against an existent
infinite outside of them, empty and without import, without life, not
even dead but nothing-they only are something, in so far as the infinite
object makes them something, <and then they are only) something made,
not something with an existence of its own [kein Seiendes], or life, or
rights, or a love of its own. A universal hostility leaves only physical
dependence, an animal existence which can only be assured at the
expense of the rest, and which the Jews received as their fief.2
It is apparent from this passage that the 'infinite object' is
properly speaking just as much subject as object, and can only be
viewed as object simply, if the viewing intelligence assumes the
role of subject. But when we adopt this posture everything else
except the object loses all value and significance. 'God', the name
by which we mean to denominate the source of all our practical
and moral values, ought not to be thus objectified, for when he is,
the existence that remains to us is reduced to the level of blind
natural impulse. If we try to formulate the conception of God as
an 'object', the net result is that we reduce ourselves to mere
objects, in what is for Hegel the proper sense of the word-i.e. we
I Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung (Nohl, p. 373).
2 Nohl, 250 (Knox, p. 191). This passage represents a working up of some
unpublished notes in Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung.
8243588 x
290 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

become simply part of the order of nature, and our 'absolute

object' is simply the inevitability of the natural law itself. When we
feel the pinch of some natural necessity, then 'we are aware of
ourselves as objects' ; if we reduce everything to this level, then the
avoidance of this sensation, union with the absolute object, the
harmony of the course of nature itself with our own finite natural
impulses is the highest ideal we can conceive; and the inevitable
conclusion is that Nature will be concordant with our desires, if
we for our part are obedient to Nature's Lord. This is the moral
reasoning of a being who is in conflict with the world. For in a
world where natural needs and impulses appear as the bondage of
necessity, freedom can only appear as mastery, and the moral law
has to be thought of as the will of a master.
The injection of the idea of mastery into our relations with other
people, and the world in general, is a fundamental moral error
which comes about naturally enough when our 'animal existence'
is seriously threatened (as for instance by a major natural disaster
like the Flood). If we react as Nimrod did, however, the error will
be less serious in its effects than if we react as Noah did, for any
human tyrant must die, whereas the Lord God abides forever.
Thus, when Noah, or Abraham, or Moses, projected the theoreti-
cally rational 'ideal' of the harmony of nature into the postulate of
an 'ideal' divine creator and governor of the world, I the original
fall of man (the sin of hostility which natural needs and necessities
continually urge upon us) became an irrevocable fact. The very
possibility of moral action was made dependent on the existence
of the divine Lord, since moral action was defined in terms of
obedience to his will; and the absolute duty of obedience entailed
the maintenance of at least a potential hostility towards everything
else. The sacrifice of Isaac is an apt symbol for the absolute
mastery, the absolute authority, of God. When that which is
absolutely subjective, essentially practical, is conceived theoreti-
cally as an absolute object, we find ourselves faced with the ultimate
moral horror. 2
I Hegel employs the Kantian term 'ideal' more or less synonymously with
absolute object'. It is first used in connection with Moses in Die Geschichte der
Juden lehrt (Nohl, p. 370); applied to Noah's God in Mit Abraham dent wahren
Stammvater (Nohl, p. 244; Knox, p. 183); and to the God of Abraham and of
the sons of Jacob in Abraham in Ghaldlia geboren hatte schon (Nohl, pp. 247,
248; Knox, pp. 187, 188).
2 Hegel's treatment of the sacrifice of Isaac in his final version (Nohl, p. 247;
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ

Hegel's doctrine of God as the 'sale synthesis', the absolute

object who is at the same time the absolute subject, is expressed in
language that was probably borrowed from H6lderlin; but it seems,
at the same time, to be a direct 'application' on his part of Schelling's
theory of the Ego. For Schelling writes, in a passage which we
know Hegel had studied carefully: 'God in the theoretical sense
is Ego = Non-ego, and in the practical sense absolute Ego which
annihilates all non-Ego.'! This hypothesis is certainly supported
by the first section of Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt which is
a rather threadbare restatement of part of the argument of Ein
positiver Glauben (Berne, early 1796) in the Ego/Non-ego termino-
logy:
A faith is called positive, [Hegel begins] in which what is practical is
present in theoretical form-the originally subjective only as something
objective, a religion which offers representations of something objective
which cannot become subjective as the principle of life and of action .
. . . Moral concepts do not have objects in the sense in which theoretical
concepts have them. The object of the former is always the Ego, and of
the latter the Non-ego.-The object of the moral concept is a certain
determination of the Ego .... A concept is a reflected activity. A moral
concept which does not arise in this way, a concept without the activity
is a positive concept; yet it has at the same time to be practical; it is
only something recognized, a datum, something objective which gets
its force and power, its effectiveness, only through an object that
awakens reverence or fear ... 2

Knox, p. 187) evolved gradually through the whole sequence of drafts (II.
Abraham in Chaldiia, IV. Abraham in Chaldiia, Nohl, pp. 369, 372); the parallel
reference to Hagar and Ishmael appeared in Zu Abrahams Zeiten and in the first
draft of Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon but was deleted in the final
revision (see p. 282 n. 3 above). No doubt Abraham's relations with his sons
were in the forefront of Hegel's mind when he wrote the pungent comments on
family relations in Mosaic law which are contained in the hitherto unpublished
fragment Die schonen, ihrer Natur nacho That fragment begins: 'Nothing is
more opposed to the beautiful relations which are naturally grounded in love
than lordship and bondage.'
I Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (1795), Werke (1856-64), i. 201; compare
Hegel's remarks in Briefe, i. 30, and the discussion above, Chapter III, pp. 210-
II. All of Holderlin's philosophical reflections in 1796 and the following years
were focused on the Vereinigung and Trennung of Subjekt and Objekt: see
especially Letter II7, lines 29-39 (to Niethammer, 24 Feb. 1796), GSA, vi.
203. He also made use of the concepts of Not and Schicksal in a way that Hegel
may have found suggestive (see for instance Letter 147, lines 23-32, GSA, vi.
254)·
• Nohl, pp. 374-5.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
He goes on to say that a positive concept can lose its pOSItIve
character if it can derive its active force from within itself (i.e. if
we can autonomously impose it upon ourselves), but that what is
ordinarily called 'positive' is essentially something objective (i.e.
imposed by external agency). While on the other hand a moral
concept can be objectified for theoretical study; but from that
point of view it has no practical force, although we are aware of, or
can always restore, its practical force as an expression of our free
reflective activity. 'In the ordinary sense "moral" and "objective"
are exact opposites.'
Even for theoretical cognition, the ways in which the infinite
object acts are 'positive', i.e. they are imposed arbitrarily and not
in accordance with the laws of our understanding. The operative
cause of divine manifestations such as miracles, revelations, visions
is not related to its effects as cause and effect are normally related
in our experience. Because its actions are theoretically incompre-
hensible we cannot regard it either as an Ego (whose moral action
is theoretically comprehensible as part of the order of nature,
although it belongs to the realm of freedom) or as a mere non-Ego
(something that belongs simply to the order of Nature) . Yet we
assign to it a moral purpose, which means that however incompre-
hensible it may be on the theoretical side, we suppose that its action
is rational on the practical side at least.
Thus far Hegel seems to be simply repeating his critique of
Storr. But now he begins to look at the problem constructively
for the first time. Under the heading 'Religion, (and the) founding
of a religion' he examines the whole question of how a synthesis
of subjective (practical) and objective (theoretical) elements can
give rise to the sense of divinity.!
At the opposite extreme from 'positive' religion, the fear of an
external power, lies the religion of pure reason in which 'righteous-
ness' (Rechtschaffenheit) is all that counts and there is no 'objective'
content at all. From some remarks in Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene
Gegenstande we know that the paradigm case of this extreme in
Hegel's mind was the education that Nathan gave to his adopted
daughter Recha in Lessing's play; and what he means here when
he speaks of 'fearing objects, flying from them, fear of union
I For reasons given below, p. 294 n. 2, Henrich thinks that this heading
indicates the beginning of a new meditation, which should be treated as a separ-
ate fragment.
 PIIANTASIE UND IlERZ 293
[Verein~ung], supreme subjectivity' is beautifully illustrated by
the passage which he there cites:
Templar: What? Whether it is true
That still the self-same spot is to be seen
'Where Moses stood with God, when ...
Recha: No, not that
';Yhere'er he stood, 'twas before God; whereof
All that I need, I know.- I
This 'enlightened' attitude is less pernicious in practice than the
naive faith of a positive believer, but it is nevertheless wrong for an
analogous reason. The positive believer is mastered by the object;
the enlightened rationalist insists on mastering it. 'Begreifen ist
beherrschen' -'to comprehend is to master' -says Hegel succinctly
but enigmatically. He is probably thinking of Kant's doctrine that
in cognitive experience the mind gives laws to objects, for he goes
on to draw a contrast between viewing the flow of a brook as the
result of the operation of the law of gravity, and 'enlivening' it,
'making it a God' by imaginatively endowing it with an indwelling
spirit.2 The spirit of a brook cannot be more than a demigod,
however, because the brook itself remains a natural phenomenon
spatio-temporally located and subject to natural law. The divine
is only really present where Subject and Object (which Hegel
now explicitly identifies as Freedom and Nature respectively) are
thought of as so inseparably united that 'Nature is freedom ...
such an ideal is the object of every religion.'
How is such a synthesis possible? It cannot be 'theoretical' (i.e.
it cannot be an a priori synthesis of intuition and concept by means
of the categories of pure reason) for a theoretical synthesis is
I Nathan the Wise, Act III, Scene ii (Everyman edn., p. 158); Nohl, p. 218;
Knox, pp. ISO-I. Although the interval between the writing of these two
passages is not less than a year, and may be as much as eighteen months, I think
that it is legitimate to bring them together in this way for two reasons. In the
first place Moses' receipt of the Law on Mount Sinai can hardly have been
absent from Hegel's mind when he wrote his new heading in Positiv wird ein
Glauben genannt; and secondly there is an evident continuity in the doctrine of
the imagination contained in the two fragments.
• Running water as a symbol of the divine (the power of life) exercised a great
fascination for Hegel (cf. his Alpine diary of July 1796: Doh., p. 224). It was
significant in his mind that Abraham drew his water laboriously from deep
wells, so that it was for him always still, and not a thing that 'plays' or should be
played with (cf. Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon, Nohl, p. 246; Knox,
p. 186: the point that it 'was not to be played with' is made in the passage that
Nohl omits from IV. Abraham in Chaldiia).
294 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

'wholly objective' (i.e. it is absolutely 'necessary' and leaves no

room for freedom). On the other hand 'practical activity annihilates
the object and is wholly subjective'. We can understand this re-
markable dictum from the religious point of view if we remember
Recha's claim that 'Wherever Moses stood, 'twas before God'; in
its literal sense I take it to be an allusion to the endlessness of the
striving for moral perfection; in moral action the finite Ego has
always to overcome some limitation: duty (the absolute Ego) must
triumph over inclination (the non-Ego, the Object). Putting the
doctrine in more familiar terms, the aim of moral action is always
somehow or other to exercise mastery over nature. I
The principle of union (Vereinigung) that is superior both to
reason (the principle of mastery) and to positive authority (the
principle of slavery) is love:
Only in love are we at one with the object, it does not assert mastery
[as in positive faith] and it is not mastered [as it is by pure reason].-
This love made by the imagination into the Wesen is the Godhead. The
sundered [getrennte] man stands then in dread or awe of it-the love
that is whole in itself [in sich einige]; his bad conscience-his awareness
of dismemberment [Zerteilung]-makes him afraid before it. 2
I The sacrifice of Isaac and the 'satanic atrocity' of the revenge that the sons of
Jacob took on the men of Shechem illustrate how 'Practical activity annihilates
the object' when the fanatics of a positive religion presume to act for the absolute
subject (Nohl, p. 248; Knox, p. 188: the original draft for this passage was in
Zu Abrahams Zeiten).
2 Nohl, p. 376. Henrich argues that the sudden appearance of this doctrine of

love here does constitute something like a 'revolution' in Hegel's thought; and
he further claims that the revolution was produced by Hegel's discussions with
Hi:ilderlin and Sinclair concerning a criticism of Fichte put forward by Hi:ilderlin
and systematically developed by Sinclair. After studying Hi:ilderlin's little piece
'Dber Urtheil und Seyn' (written about Apr. 1795), which I had completely
overlooked, I feel certain that he was indeed a catalyst for Hegel's reflections
(and that he provided the new conceptual framework for them). But I do not
agree that any sudden transformation is involved. I think that the demonstration
I have given of the continuity of development in Hegel's reflections, especially
during the last six months at Berne, when he probably felt that his programme
for religious reform had reached an impasse, is sufficient to indicate clearly that
he was prepared to be influenced by Hi:ilderlin's critique of Fichte before he
heard of it. Of course, if my hypothesis that the 'revolutionary' concept of
love has its origins in the theory of the EV Kat 7Tav as formulated in 1791 is
correct, then the question of priority or influence in this development of their
shared ideal is of relatively minor importance. The evidence of Eleusis alone-
read in the context of Jedes Volk hat ihm e£gene Gegenstiinde and against the
background provided by Religion ist eine-is enough to convince me that Hegel
did not absolutely need any inspiration or conceptual assistance that he may have
got from Hi:ilderlin. (The nature of the 'revolution' that does occur is discussed
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 295
Love is the uniting of subject and object, freedom and nature, on a
basis of equality, of likeness, and of reciprocity. I The myths of 'the
old days' when God or the gods walked among men, symbolize
this state of nature from which we have become so far removed
(entfernt) that now we can be united with God only by force.
It is wiser not to speculate too much about what the word 'love'
means for Hegel at this point; the picture will be rather clearer
when we have more material before us. At the same time, it is
obviously important to approach the interpretation of our material
with the right preconceptions, or at least without any radically
mistaken ones. Since Hegel is not primarily thinking of any
relationship between persons (unless we want to call the image of
the divinity created by the worshippers' imagination a person) we
must be wary both about the ordinary usage of the term, and about
its traditional use in Christian theology. Both the ordinary canons
of human sex relations and the Christian ideal of charity contribute
in an important way to Hegel's conception of die Liebe, but it is
best not to anticipate what he himself will tell us on those topics.
The safest starting-points for an understanding of his doctrine are
to be found in Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus, and in the romantic
Spinozism of his own time. As we shall shortly see, Hegel himself
refers us to the Phaedrus; and the whole tenor of his discussion
strongly suggests that his own guiding light was the contrast
between natura naturans and natura naturata as reinterpreted (for
instance) in Herder's Gott. 2 Religion is the experience of natura
naturans, the universal power of life, the EV Kat Trav; whereas
reason, whether theoretical or practical, deals with the world as a
system of determinable objects, with natura naturata.
In this perspective, for example, the assertion 'Religion ist eins
mit der Liebe', which makes no sense on any ordinary view of
below on pages 322-30.) For an outline of Henrich's views see Holderlin-
Jahrbuch, xiv (1965/6), 73-96, and 'Some historical presuppositions of Hegel's
philosophy' in Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion (ed. D. Christensen, The
Hague, 1970).
I 'Love can only t8ke place towards our equal, the mirror, the echo of our
being', says Hegel in his last sentence. It is important to realise that he is not
here thinking primarily of the relation between the sexes (where equality would
be a principle of reason) but of the general relation between God and man,
reason and nature, duty and inclination, man and his organic environment.
2 The terms natura naturans and natura llaturata do not occur in Herder's

first edition (1787). But the reference to the distinction in the second conversa-
tion (Suphan xvi. pp. 457-8) is plain enough. Herder made it explicit only in
the second edition of 1800 (compare Burkhardt, pp. 107-8 and 196).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

love, becomes intelligible. The form of words was no doubt

suggested by the Christian doctrine that 'God is love', but from
the context it is plain that Hegel is not thinking primarily of any-
thing described in the New Testament. The remark occurs in the
brief fragment so wie sie mehrere Gattungen, which was part of a
manuscript written perhaps a month or two after Positiv 'lvird ein
Glauben genannt. I
It is not easy to decide whether this fragment was part of one of
Hegel's meditations on Judaism, or of his more theoretical re-
flections on religion in general. The contrast between Hellenic
religion and Judaism is in the forefront of his consciousness, and
some of the points he makes were developed later in Fortschreiten
der Gesetzgebung and incorporated in Abraham in Chaldiia geboren
hatte schon. But the concluding quotation from the Phaedrus,
together with the proposition that we have just quoted, suggests
that it was not really the religion of the Jews (or of the Greeks for
that matter) but religion as such which is the principal focus of
Hegel's interest here.
The first page of the fragment is lost. At the beginning of what
remains Hegel is discussing the formation of a Pantheon (like that
of Athens). When two tribes come together in amity, they accept
one another's gods and say: 'Your god shall be ours also.' On the
other hand, 'a people which despises all foreign gods, must carry
in its breast hatred for the whole human race'. 2 It is difficult, though
not impossible, for a people to maintain this attitude of universal
hostility in a time of prosperity. 3 Only a God who was worshipped
I Nohl, pp. 377-8 (about July 1797). Probably only the first page is missing,
as what we have appears to be the inner half of a quarto sheet (eight sides).
There is no definite evidence of incompleteness at the end, and I am inclined
to suspect that the fragment printed by Nohl did not fill four sides in Hegel's
script. But we must keep in mind that it may well have been one of a loose
sequence of fragments (like the notes and sketches on Judaism) which were
eventually taken up into the manuscript of which the Systemfragmellt is all that
now remains: welchem Zwecke denn alles Ubrige dient (written about Nov. 1797
and revised roughly a year later) was almost certainly part of such a sequence.
2 Nohl, p. 377; compare Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon, Nohl, pp.

247-8,252-3 (Knox, pp. 188, 194-5).

3 Hegel seems to waver a little on this point. In Zu Abrahams Zeiten he says
explicitly: 'Good fortune silenced hatred and produced union with other
peoples.' A few months later in Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon he
firmly rejects this proto-Marxist view, declaring that 'what unites men is their
spirit and nothing else, and what now separated the Jews from the Canaanites
was their spirit alone' (Nohl, p. 253, Knox, p. 194). But since the spirit of hatred
is itself a perversion of the human spirit as a result of misfortune, it was never
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 297
in fear could inspire his people to maintain it. In other words,
hostility is an attitude that belongs essentially to a positive faith,
and originates in the experience of misfortune. Where the mis-
fortune is serious enough to contribute what Hegel calls 'sorrow'
(Schmerz) men postulate a God who is angry or hostile; but if they
have the memory of happier days to look back on they do not think
of their God as being essentially hostile, but rather as punishing
them for sin. The idea of kissing the rod of a divine master will
not occur, however, to men who know (as Job knew) that they
have not sinned, and who are strong enough to endure extreme
misfortune. They will postulate an inscrutable divine power but
will not seek to be reconciled with it through the acceptance of
servitude. I
\iVhere this strength of mind is lacking, a positive religion is born.
'''When what is eternally sundered by nature, when that which
cannot be united is united, we have positivity. This unity, this
ideal is then Object, and there is something in it which is not
Subject.' The interpretation of this passage poses severe problems.
For how can there be 'eternal Trennung in nature', how can there be
elements that are unvereinbar, if the divinity itself is properly the
union of nature itself with freedom? It is plain from a passage
which Hegel cancelled in revising his first draft that he was
thinking primarily of the Trennung between 'the world' and 'the
Kingdom of Heaven'; and if we take the notions of 'virtue as
obedience' and 'happiness as reward' as examples of 'positivity' we
can soon see what he means by speaking of the uniting of what is
sundered by nature. Virtue and happiness, far from being sundered,
are in Hegel's view inseparable; but the virtuous obedience that
springs from fear is not happy, and the heavenly bliss that rewards
it is not virtuous (no moral activity is involved). These 'positive'
states occur in experience, for example in the tribulation of Israel
in the wilderness, followed by entry into the land flowing with
milk and honey, but they are 'eternally sundered' in the sense that
their true character is destroyed by the way they are related (or
'united'). The virtue is not genuine virtue and the happiness is not
human happiness. The ideal of positive Christianity (Heaven)

wholly dominant, and could in fact be 'silenced' by good fortune. Hegel's real
view seems to be that the spirit produces union, but that material causes may
produce division by perverting it (or rather by occasioning its perversion).
I Both versions of this passage are translated below, p. 498 n 2.
298 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

belongs to another world, it is an enjoyment which does not arise

directly from our own rational activity.
The true ideal is rational enjoyment of union with nature, which
is both within us and without. This is the union of love, and hence
'Religion is identical with love'. In the experience of love we find
ourselves in another being which is not opposed to us but merged
in our being; and yet it remains other than we are-'a miracle,
which we cannot grasp'.
To express his doctrine of the identity of religion with love,
Hegel takes over a passage from the Phaedrus about how the initial
awe of the lover before the beloved passes over into an attitude of
worship like that of one sacrificing to a god. I The real point of the
analogy here is the implication that the relation between a man
and the divine being whom he worships must in a certain sense be a
relation between equals. As Hegel wrote in Positiv wird ein Glauben
genannt, 'Love can only take place towards an equal, the mirror,
the echo of our own being.' This explains why the Greeks were
naturally led to represent their gods as human beings of ideal beauty.
Ordinary human love falls short of this level of religious experience
but it does, nevertheless, provide Hegel with his paradigm for the
'miracle, which we cannot grasp'. The extremely difficult fragment
welch em Zwecke denn alles Ubrige dient offers us an analysis of
sexual love in this same context of the contrast between 'positive
union' and 'real union'.2 The manuscript (at least half of which is
1 Hegel knew of course that Plato was speaking of a homosexual relationship,

and his own account of heterosexual relations does not terminate in a religious
experience. It is worth while to examine the citation (Phaedrus 251 a) in its
context, for this will enable us to see, among other things, how far Hegel's
doctrine of love is from Plato's:
'Now he whose vision of the mystery is long past, or whose purity has been
sullied, cannot pass swiftly hence to see Beauty's self yonder, when he
beholds that which is called beautiful here; wherefore he looks upon it with
no reverence, and surrendering to pleasure he essays to go after the fashion
of a four-footed beast, and to beget offspring of the flesh; or consorting with
wantonness he has no fear or shame in running after unnatural pleasure.
But when one who is fresh from the mystery, and saw much of the vision, beholds
a godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty, first there comes upon
him a shuddering and a measure of that aue which the vision insph-ed, and then
reverence as at the sight of a god; and but for fear of being deemed a very mad-
man he would offer sacrifice to his beloved, as to a holy image of deity.'
Hegel cites only the passage in italics. He had no sympathy with Plato's sharp
separation of the love of the spirit from the love of the flesh.
2 Nohl, pp. 378-82. There is an English translation of the manuscript in its
second (revised) state in Knox, pp. 302-8. The text of the first draft cannot be
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 299
lost) was written about November 1797 and radically revised about
a year later, when Hegel was writing, or had just written, the first
draft of 'The Spirit of Christianity' (i.e. the fragment (leben)digen
Modifikation). I
At the beginning of the sheet that remains Hegel is speaking of
the relation between a certain kind of community and its God-
the absolute purpose of its existence:
... to which end everything else is subordinate, nothing can contend
with this, or is of equal status with it; as, for example, Abraham set
himself and his family and afterwards his people up as the ultimate end,
or Christianity as a whole sets itself up-But the more widely this whole
extends, the more it is transposed into an equality of dependence-
(to the point) where the [Stoic] citizen of the world comprehends the
whole human race in his whole-and so much the less of the lordship
over objects and of the favour of the Ruling Being falls to the lot of any
one individual; every individual loses that much more of his worth, his
pretensions, and his independence; for his worth was his share in lord-
ship; without the pride of being the centre of things, the end of the
collective whole is for him supreme, and he despises himself for being
as small a part of that as any other individual.
The interpretation of this opening paragraph is, of necessity,
slightly conjectural. But the historical context is clearly the whole
parabola from Abraham's sense of being uniquely chosen by
reconstructed with certainty from Nohl's edition-though Miss Schuler has
told us that the two phases can be perfectly separated in the manuscript-first
because Nohl did not print all of the cancelled passages, and secondly because
he does not tell us where the revisions and additions in his printed text end.
(Ocular evidence of the difficulties and uncertainties involved on both scores is
provided by a comparison of Roques, p. 105, with Nohl, p. 381. No doubt Nohl's
text is in general more reliable. But it is hard to have perfect confidence in his
separation of the two versions.)
In the following discussion I shall indicate what, to the best of my belief,
belongs to the first stage, what to the second, and what is common to both. But
I do not feel very sanguine about the reliability of my own judgement at some
points and my one comfort is that I believe we shall find that nothing very
crucial hangs upon it.
I See Nohl, p. 261. The first state of this manuscript cannot now be recon-
structed with certainty (see discussion below). The handwriting resembles that
of the revisions in welchem Zwecke denn alles (Jbrige dient (Schuler, pp. 147, 152).
Miss SchUler is inclined to guess that the revision of welchem Zzoecke is later;
and it is a plausible hypothesis that' Hegel was led to rethink and hence revise
the earlier fragment while writing the later essay. The state of the manuscript
(leben)digen Modifikation is such as to suggest that it was not originally a continu-
ous discussion but a collection of related fragments. Hegel may quite possibly
have regarded his revised draft of welchem Zwecke as one of these.
300 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

God to the absolute humiliation of the individual in the Roman

Empire at the time of the final triumph of Christianity; and if we
read the passage in the light of Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung and
Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt it can be quite easily and plausibly
construed. To begin with, we learn from Fortschreiten der Gesetz-
gebung that 'Need [die Not] has Zwecke and acts on the basis of
Zwecke, but Joy does not, nor does Sorrow, nor yet Love'; but
'the legal system of Israel, like every other, only served to help out
need' . I And we know from Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt that in
a positive faith there is an absolute authority of which we stand in
awe. We are in a state of absolute dependence upon a power which
does not in any way need or depend upon us. Our very existence
is evidence of God's loving grace and favour toward us. 2 That any
created things should exist at all is an inscrutable mystery, but
being what we are, i.e. creatures possessing moral reason, we
cannot avoid presuming to have some insight into God's purpose
with respect to ourselves (the 'Zweck to which everything else is
subordinate'.) As Hegel put it a few months before this: 'In
assigning a moral purpose to the providence of the Divinity, we
do not reflect on the divine nature [Wesen] which is otherwise
unknown to us, but we judge at this point, that his activity is in this
respect the activity of an Ego.'3 Once the basic premiss of positive
faith is granted, that 'the Lord is our God', the only moral purpose
that can possibly be assigned to Divine Providence is 'the helping
out of need'. For we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.
We must be obedient to the will of the Almighty Power, so as to
receive in return the lordship over nature which will enable us to
satisfy all of our natural needs and desires.
The first commandment of all positive faith therefore is 'Thou
I Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung (last paragraph), Nohl, p. 374.
2 Compare the following remark from the unpublished notes in Fortschreiten
der Gesetzgebung: 'Wenn das unendliche Objekt alles ist, so ist der Mensch nichts;
was er noch ist, ist er durch jenes Gnade.'
3 Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt, Nohl, p. 375. It should be noted that the
same interpretation of the Zweck mentioned in the opening phrase will force
itself upon us, if we follow the obvious path suggested by Hegel's first example
(Abraham's conception of his family and people as 'chosen'), and turn both
back and forward from the present fragment to what Hegel says elsewhere about
Abraham's relations with his God (see especially II. Abraham in Chaldiia (Nohl,
p. 369, bottom) and IV. Abraham in Chaldiia (Nohl, p. 372, middle)). But the
connection between Abraham's folk-hedonism and universal cosmopolitanism
still has to be made via the generalized theory of Ein positiver Glauben and
Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 3 01
shalt love the Lord thy God', etc.; and the ground for it is 'that it
may be well with thee, and that ye may increase, mightily, as the
Lord God of thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that
Howeth with milk and honey'.I But the character of the duty en-
joined will vary considerably according to our conception of the
nature of the reward promised. Not only is it the case that we
must limit God by ascribing some moral purpose to him, but also
the particular purpose that we ascribe to him is bound to be a
mirror image of our own moral horizon. Abraham's God differed
from other family gods because Abraham recognized no moral ties
save the family tie between himself and his descendants. The grace
and favour of the Lord was extended to him and his seed uniquely,
and the reward of obedience was conceived as a de jure, and
ultimately a de facto, mastery over all the rest of the Lord's creatures. 2
The highest object of Abraham's love was his own existence and
the multiplication of his seed after him; for this and this alone
could he love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. The
outward sign of the covenant-circumcision-became in the
vengeance of the sons of Jacob upon the men of Shechem, merely
an instrument of the wrath of their God against those who sought
to defile the honour and the blood of the tribe. 3
This is the ultimate extreme of positive faith, 'where there is
universal hostility' and 'nothing left save ... an animal existence
I Deuteronomy 6. The duty of obedience even to this law of love rests on the
fear of the Lord: 'That thou mightest fear the Lord thy God, to keep all his
statutes and commandments etc.' I have chosen to refer to Deuteronomy 6
rather than to Exodus 20 (which we know Hegel was more preoccupied with at
this time: cf. p. 288 above), partly because of the explicit reference to love,
which makes this formulation of the law more appropriate to the present context
in any case, but mainly because the law is here formulated in terms which apply
to all the forms of positive faith, to Abraham with his family, to Moses and
Israel, to the 'preaching of the Gospel', and to a positive interpretation of the
'rational postulate' that 'virtue deserves happiness'. In all cases 'love' is synony-
mous with 'gratitude' for rewards and favours either already received ('I am the
Lord thy God which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the
house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other Gods before me', Exodus 20: 2-3)
or promised and covenanted for.
• In Zu Abrahams Zeiten Hegel accuses Abraham of dreaming of a world
dominion for his descendants: 'sollte in seiner Familie herrschen tiber alles;
aber sein Gedanke war der Wirklichkeit entgegen, denn in dieser war er
beschriinkt und wand sich mit Noth tiberall durch; also die Herrschaft seiner
Ideal, in diesem alles vereinigt durch Unterdrtikkung-Abraham Tyrann in
Gedanken.'
3 Cf. IV. Abraham in Ghaldlia (Nohl, p. 372 top); Abraham in Ghaldlia
geboren hatte schon (Nohl, pp. 247-8, Knox, pp. 187-8).
3 02 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

which can be assured only at the expense of all other existence'. I

But where man is conscious of himself as a rational being, not
merely as an animal, the reward is envisaged as a spiritual salvation
offered alike to all men if they will only accept the faith. At this
level the external sign becomes a thing of crucial importance,
because it really does mark off those who are included in the
covenant from those who are not. Hence the highest aim of the
Christian, the purpose to which all else is subordinate, is 'that all
the world may be baptized'. When the irrationality of a special
revelation is finally recognized, and dependence on an outward
sign is discarded, we finally reach the opposite extreme of en-
lightened optimism or stoic cosmopolitanism, where the positive
(authoritarian) element is reduced to the minimum assumption of
the 'Author of Nature', who is a supremely just Judge and Monarch
in his own kingdom of the spirit. As this transformation of positive
faith occurs, the dominion which the positive believer originally
hoped to receive over the rest of the created world, diminishes to
the vanishing point. For, in order not to be secured at the expense
of other rational beings, the reward has to be projected into a future
life, where we are face to face with the Lord and hence absolutely
conscious always of his Lordship and our own dependence. In a
positive faith like that of the crusaders, the believer still exercises
mastery on behalf of his Lord over the heathen, but in the positive
faith of reason itself the authority of the Divinity becomes at all
times direct and absolute. The absolute powerlessness of man is
now revealed, and, since power is the measure of reality in all
positive faith, the individual despises himself. 2
In all the forms of positive faith the love of man for God is 'love
for the sake of a dead thing'. Since the second paragraph begins
without further ado to speak of 'this love' we can safely infer that

I Abraham in Chaldaa geboren hatte schon, Nohl, p. 250 (Knox, p. 191). (The
fullest discussion is in Zu Abrahams Zeiten.)
2 This conclusion points to the Stoic sage as the Kosmopolit of whom Hegel

is thinking. The problem is really how we are to take 'ohne den Stolz der
Mittelpunkt der Dinge zu sein'. On the one hand this was Abraham's pride-
and to be rid of it in that sense was an advance; on the other hand it is also Kant's
-and to regain it in that sense is the key to a final overcoming of positive faith.
One who does not have it (in either sense) can only interpret Kant's moral
philosophy in the way Hegel analyses it in Ein positiver Glauben, where he is
clearly thinking of the 'theological Kantians' at TUbingen. The following
context of the fragment shows that Hegel has them in mind also, so it is best to
take the Stolz both ways.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
the context of the fragmentary first paragraph and so of the
fragment as a whole is a discussion of the kinds of love relationship
that need to be distinguished in human experience. The special
attitude that marks off all forms of authoritarian religion is one of
gratitude for happiness received or promised as a reward for obedience.
The paradoxical thing is that this love is demonstrated only through
indifference to the happiness that is looked for as a reward.
The world in which the positive believer lives is just a complex
of 'dead' matter, and he proves his love for God by showing his
indifference towards it. Being on the side of God he is 'set against
it' (entgegengesetzt). He knows that by the grace of God he is
independent of it:-that is his reward. From the way that Hegel
describes the content and structure of positive faith in this para-
graph we can see that he is thinking mainly of the Tubingen School.
The fundamental article of faith is that
man is in his inmost nature an opposite rein Entgegengesetztes] , an
independent being [Selbstandiges] , everything is for him an outside
world, which is thus just as eternal as himself, the objects of his experi-
ence change, but they do not fail; as surely as he is, they are and his
Divinity is; hence his tranquillity in loss and his sure confidence that
his loss will be made up to him, since a substitute for it can be provided.!
Without the grace of God the positive believer could not have this
confidence either in his own immortality or in the eternity of
his world. For his experience of his own being is only a set of
contingent experiences of the outside world; but if he did not
exist the world would not exist for him. Consciousness and the
material world are strictly correlative notions having no self-
subsistent independence. The material world has absolute being

I In the unpublished section of Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung Hegel asserts

roundly that there is 'no immortality' in Mosaic Judaism, 'since it is independ-
ence of man'. In the final version Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon nothing
is said about immortality; but actually there is no inherent difEculty involved in
reconciling Hegel's thesis about positive faith generally with his account of
Judaism in all its details. In positive faith generally the confidence of immortality
is what the believer owes to the grace of God. It is not guaranteed by reason-
in that sense there is 'no immortality', no 'independence of man' in any positive
faith. On the other hand, a kind of immortality (the immortality of his seed) is
what was promised to Abraham; and thus Abraham's religion satisfies the formula
for positive faith as here laid down. (Indeed the remark about 'tranquillity in
loss' and 'sure confidence that the loss will be made up, since a substitute can be
provided' seems to refer to the sacrifice of Isaac just as plainly as the rest of the
passage points to the Tlibingen school.)
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

for consciousness, because the option of solipsism, though it is

conceivable, is not bearable. Man has to 'think of himself outside
of himself', that is to say he has to believe that the world of
which he is the experience exists outside of him. But this absolute
existence for him is not an absolute existence in and for itself. Only
the absolute might of the Lord guarantees the reciprocally depen-
dent existence of man and his world. I
The material world has absolute existence for the positive
believer because he does not realize that what really lies 'outside'
of his collection of limitations is 'the self-completed, eternal
Vereinigung'. The true union of love has no place in this world of
dead mechanism and opposed forces. Genuine love can only exist
between living beings who are equal in power so that each is in all
respects alive for the other, never dead. In the sight of the 'living
God' of the Jews no man living can be justified; and the ways of the
living God are not man's ways. Thus a man must either be aware
of his own 'death' through sin, or else of God's 'death' through
incomprehensibility. Here there is certainly no 'equality of power'
-whatever that may mean as between man and God. It is clear at
least that in order for two parties to count as 'entirely alive for one
another', the kinds of things that they can do and feel must be
commensurate enough to be imaginatively communicated. Being
'entirely alive' is not a matter of Verstand, which reduces the
integral unity of our world to a complex equilibrium of opposed
forces. 2 It is not even a matter of Vernunft, for both theoretical
and practical reason legislate for phenomena, and practical reason
preserves always the distinction between duty and inclination, the
higher and the lower nature. Love gives no laws and recognizes
none of these boundaries; it is a feeling.
I The key to an understanding of Hegel's argument in this paragraph (Nohl,
p. 378, Knox, pp. 303-4) lies in giving full weight to the word sein. The question
is about the kind of absolute self-subsistence that belongs to Spinoza's substance.
If man is, then he is eternally-that he might be is conceivable, but to exist alone
in the void is unbearable. On the other hand, what could guarantee the perman-
ence of the world if consciousness itself were not permanent? It is as a guarantee
of permanence for both of the 'opposites' equally, that God's existence is
necessary. (The argument should be compared with that which we shall find a
little later on in Glauben ist die Art. I suspect that it owes much to Hamann.
See pp. 3II-18 below.)
2 'It is not Verstand whose relations always leave the manifold as a manifold
and whose unity itself (the) opposites are' (Nohl, p. 379). We can recognize here
for the first time, I think, the world view which is analysed in the Phenomenology
under the heading 'Kraft und Verstand'.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
The explanation of this psychological term (Gefuhl) gave Hegel
some trouble. In his 1797 draft he thought it sufficient simply to say
that he is not talking about a phenomenon at the level of Verstand.
In the feeling of love we cannot distinguish the subject from the
object, the activity of feeling from what it is that is felt. A year later
he felt it necessary to be a bit more explicit. Love is not a particular
feeling among a range of others, for in that sense a feeling is
only a 'life-clement' (Teilleben), whereas the feeling of love is the
sense of life itself. To be alive is to experience a whole gamut of
these transitory elements ebbing and flowing, but love is not to be
thought of as the equilibrium of this manifold.
In the version of 1798 the word Verstand does not occur; the
experience is concretely described instead of being abstractly
characterized and labelled. Love is the sense of one's own life
as doubled, and yet still one's own. Through love the original
organic unity of the living thing (the life which is subject to
analysis as an equilibrium of tensions) runs through a cycle of
development to achieve in it maturity, a different kind of unity
altogether.
Here again Hegel was dissatisfied with his first attempt at
explanation, but his second try was certainly not clearer. In the
higher union of love, he wrote in 1797, life is perfected, because
here the requirements of reflection are satisfied (i.e. life is raised to
self-consciousness). For the original organic unity, the possibility of
reflection, of Trennung (i.e. of encountering another being in which
it sees itself reflected, and which it recognizes as its 'like') is 'opposed'
to it (i.e. such another being is by nature hostile, a competitor for
the very things which the organism itself needs); while in the
completed unity, the separation actually exists but the opposition
is not absolute. 'Einigkeit and Trennung are united' because each
party is aware how the other feels; they experience their life as
common to them both. 'Thus in love all problems, the self-
destructive onesidedness of reflection, and the infinite opposition
of the unconscious undeveloped unity, are resolved' (i.e. one does
not lose one's individual identity in the universality of the species,
and one does not lose the sense of the other's life in the blind
hostility of natural instinct towards all obstacles).
The revised version of 1798 is again rather more concrete, but
the basic doctrine has not changed. Not only 'the possibility of
Trennung' but also 'the world' is now said to stand against the
8243588 y
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

organism initially;! out of this opposition reflection produces in

the course of life a whole series of oppositions (i.e. the organism
becomes conscious of things which it needs and obstacles in its path)
until the limit is reached when 'the whole of man' is set against the
reflecting consciousness. (We may think here of Hobbes and the
bellum omnium contra omnes, or of Hegel's later analysis of 'bondage'
in the Phenomenology; but I suspect that Hegel himself has Abra-
ham's discovery of God in mind. This was the supreme achieve-
ment of 'reflection' and it distinguishes both the warfare and the
bondage of the Jews from the struggles and sufferings of other
less 'reflective' peoples.) Finally 'love transcends [aufhebt] re-
flection in complete objectlessness' (if Abraham's God was in
Hegel's mind before, it is safe to say that here we have the God
of Jesus and the doctrine of 'pure life' which, if Miss Schuler's
dating is right, Hegel has just finished writing about in the first
draft of 'The Spirit of Christianity').2
Thus, in the second draft, if my interpretation is correct, the
revision gives to this paragraph on eigentliche Liebe a religious
dimension which was not present in the original version, but
which was certainly required by the context of the discussion. As
a result of this religious concern there is a very slight shift of
emphasis in his attitude toward 'reflection'. The 1797 version
culminates, like that of 1798, in the Aufhebung of reflection. But
the word aufheben is not used till 1798; in the earlier version
love is viewed more as the experience that satisfies the re-
quirements of reflection than as the power that does away with
them.
The difference is not very great, but it seems to have resulted in
the transfer of one point from the third paragraph in the original
version to the opening of the fourth paragraph in the second draft.
The complete union of love is one that can only be broken by
I A reader who is dependent on the translation of Knox should eliminate all
the explanatory phrases, derived mainly from Haering's commentary, which
Knox has generally taken scrupulous care to put into square brackets. Most of
these additions are singularly unfortunate because they employ the terminology
of reflective opposition (subject/object etc.) which Hegel is explicitly trying to
get away from. In one place Knox has been led by his dependence on Haering's
interpretation to misrepresent Hegel's text. He writes: 'there still stood over
against it the world and the possibility of a cleavage between itself and the
world', where Hegel's text has simply: 'stand die Moglichkeit der Trennung
und die Welt gegentiber'. The word-order is here vital to a correct understanding.
• SchUler, p. 147; see below, pp. 330-1.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 30 7
death. J This is a point about ordinary love relations between one
human being and another; and from here onwards Hegel is clearly
thinking primarily of love between the sexes, and of how the
'complete' unity produces, in the child, a new 'undeveloped' unit.
In the thought of their mortality the lovers are faced again with the
'possibility of Trennung', but it is not now (as it was for the isolated
individual) the sort of possibility which becomes actual through
the 'addition of being'. 2 If one of the parties were to die this would
not produce an actual Trennung of living beings (a situation where
each regards the other as 'dead', i.e. simply as an object to be
manipulated) but rather the confrontation of a living being with
something that actually is dead. The 'matter' of a living thing is
simply its mortal aspect. So lovers, being wholly alive for each
other, have in them no 'matter' (here the contrast is between real
love and the positive relationship of gratitude for a material
benefit). Love strives to overcome even the mortal aspect which
gives rise to the thought of distinction. It seeks to immortalize the
union of mortal beings. 3 In the original versions (inspired probably
by the speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium), 4 Hegel referred
I 'Sie k6nnen sich nur in Ansehung des Sterblichen unterscheiden' (first
draft; NoW, p. 379 note a); 'so k6nnen Liebende sich nur insofern unter-
scheiden, als sie sterblich sind' (first sentence of next paragraph in second draft:
Nohl, p. 379). It is clear, I think, that Hegel is speaking of how lovers feel about
their destiny in the world. He is not saying that love itself cannot perish-the
way he uses 'dead' in the preceding context shows that living organisms can be
'dead' to one another in this sense. But natural mortality is different in that it
imposes a terminus on 'living' relationships from outside. One can fall out of
love certainly; but this does not produce a separation between lover and beloved.
The thought of this separation is what makes the awareness of mortality terrifying.
• There can be no doubt, I think, that Knox is right in suggesting that the
allusion here is to Baumgarten's doctrine (originally Wolff's: see L. W. Beck,
p. 453) that 'being is the complement of possibility'. No doubt it pleased Hegel
to contrast this formula from the old metaphysics with his own doctrine of
love as the complement of natural life, the 7T>'~pwJl.a of the law and of reason
(compare his explicit reference to the dictum in 'The Spirit of Christianity',
Nohl, p. 268; Knox, p. 214). (I am assuming that the first sentence of the
paragraph belongs to the second draft and that we return to the original version
with 'An Liebenden ist keine Materie usw.'.)
3 Compare here Diotima's comment that physical love is 'an immortal
principle in the mortal creature' (Symposium 206 c-e). This dictum is a guiding
principle for Hegel's whole discussion.
4 Symposium 189 c-193 d. The definition of love as 'the desire and pursuit of
the whole' (193 a) is another of Hegel's guiding principles; and although
Diotima's sarcastic comment, 'I know it has been said that lovers are people who
are looking for their other halves, but as I see it, Socrates, Love never longs for
either the half or the whole of anything except the good' (205 d-e), is reflected
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

quite directly at this point to the physical act of copulation as an

instinctive attempt to overcome (aufheben) the awareness of
separateness at the level of sense experience (Anschauung). A year
later he apparently replaced this brief comment with a much
lengthier analysis of the emotions of shame and modesty as
experienced by lovers who are prevented from coming together by
social and moral taboos; in this context the reference to copulation
becomes more delicate and slightly more indirect, but I think that
the real force of the doctrine comes through more convincingly as
a result.!
'The separable [das Trennbare], as long as it is still a private
possession, before the consummated [vollstandigen] union, is a cause
of embarrassment for the lovers.' Out of this embarrassment
arises shame. In conventional morality lovers are supposed to be
held back by 'self-respect' from consummating their union before
it has been publicly sanctioned and recorded; and girls, particularly,
are taught to hold back from motives of prudence, out of a fear of
being abandoned or 'let down' if the union has not been publicly
acknowledged. But 'self-respect' and prudence of this sort can have
no place in true love: the girl who will not sleep with her beloved
till she has a wedding-ring is a paradigm case of Liebe um des Toten
willen. Shame in true love is rather aroused by the desire to hold
back: it is anger directed at one's own selfish desire to retain
independence, or one's fear of being 'betrayed'. Only in the face
of force does loving shame become self-defensive anger. If we do
not distinguish between shame and self-defensive indignation, if
we insist that a loving surrender of oneself is shameful, then we
shall be forced to regard tyrants and prostitutes as models of self-
respect, and to treat the coquette who wishes to 'make a conquest'
in Hegel's conception of the relation between human love and religious experi-
ence, the 'Aristophanic' element plays a far greater role in his over-all view than
it does in Plato's.
I I am assuming here that virtually a whole page of Nohl's text, from p. 380
line 4 'Das Trennbare usw.' down to p. 381 line 2 ' . . . der Aufhebung aller
Unterscheidung', was inserted into the manuscript in 1798 in place of the single
clause given by Nohl in his footnote on p. 380. My reason for this is not only that
we have to read on this far in N ohl's text before we come to a restatement of the
cancelled passage, but also that a comparison with Roques' edition (pp. 103-4)
shows that the sequence of the manuscript is not clear between these points.
I do not see how confusions as serious as those which Roques's transcription of
the manuscript reveals could have arisen unless Hegel's revised version ran over
on to the right-hand side of several following pages (or unless he inserted a loose
page at this point).
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
without surrendering herself as an exemplar of modesty. Prostitutes
and femmes fatales do not exhibit in their attitude a modest reluc-
tance to 'lower' themselves to the animal level; rather they show
how much importance they attach to their right of property in their
own body (i.e. they make their own living unity into a dead thing,
an object). This is the essence of shamelessness in Hegel's analysis.
True love is a gradual conquest of one's own mortal, prudent
concerns, a conquest first of the fear that one's love will be
rejected, then of the fear that it will be betrayed; and true shame
is what one feels in this process: it is love which 'has no fear of its
fear but is led by it to overcome separateness [hebt die Trennungen
auf], . I Copulation is, at it were, the ultimate expression of this
sharing of experience at the physical limit: 'What is most private to
oneself [das Eigenste] is united in mutual contact and shared feeling
to the point of unconsciousness, of the transcending (Aufhebung)
of all distinction.'
When the twain become one flesh, a child is conceived and the
immortality of the life-cycle reveals itself: this is the joining of God
which no man shall put asunder. The new life which now begins
is a mere potentiality, an unconscious seed. It must develop its own
consciousness, distinguishing itself and setting itself against the
world and the rest of life in the process, till it arrives at the point
where the circle is once more closed in love.2- 'The united lovers
separate, but in the child the union itself has become inseparable',
says Hegel in his second draft; this is much plainer than the
curious remark in the original version: 'The child is the parents
themselves.' But the relation of the parents after their union is only
properly discussed in the earlier version:
The separable returns to the state of separability; but the spirits are
more united than before and what was still separated by finite con-
sciousness [i.e. all former differences of opinion etc.] is all put aside.
All the points at which one has impinged on the other, or been impinged
upon, and hence has felt or thought alone, are equalized, the spirits are
mutually exchanged.
I At this point (Nohl, p. 380; Knox, p. 307) Hegel quotes from the balcony

scene in Romeo and juliet to illustrate the enrichment of life which follows the
free surrender of love. It is probable, I think, that this scene as a whole provided
him with his model case for the analysis of shame as the conquest of external
impediments to love, and of love's fearfulness.
2 In the first version Hegel wrote simply: 'The seed becomes a plant, from the

utmost unity it goes through the animal level to human life.'

3 10 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

This passage is eliminated in the second draft, not because

Hegel ceased to believe it-it is easy to prove that he held to this
ideal of marriage all his life-but probably because he wished in
1798 to emphasize the imperfection of ordinary love as against
union with God in religious experience. This seems to be the
underlying purpose of the concluding paragraph of the fragment,
which is devoted to proving that two individuals cannot really
have common property. Spiritual experience is such that each
party is enriched by sharing; but material things can only be
shared out. Ownership is essentially a relation of mastery and it is
only an illusion to suppose that mastery can be shared in any sense
other than that of alternation. I We shall see how important this
limitation is when we come to study Hegel's analysis of the religion
of Jesus.

4. Faith and being

The way of authority and the way of love are different approaches
to religious experience-the discovery of 'being'. The analysis of
'life' in welchem Zwecke denn alles Ubrige dient strongly suggests
that all men are bound to begin with the way of authority, and
certainly they ought finally to achieve the insight of love. We are
bound to begin upon the way of authority, because the alternative
that faces us as we mature into self-conscious reflective beings is:
'Is it the subject or the object that is ultimately real?' When the
question is once posed in these terms it must normally be decided
in favour of the object. We cannot speak of a 'right' and a 'wrong'
answer here, but Hegel does seem to have held that there was a
natural course of development leading from the 'normal' answer,
through the experience of absolute opposition, to reconciliation. 2

I Hegel rewrote virtually all of this paragraph (Nohl, pp. 381-2; Knox, p. 308)

in 1798. But I cannot find any significant differences of meaning or intent in the
two versions. The rather surprising transition to the question of property rights
between lovers may well have been prompted by Hegel's desire to contrast his
conception of the marriage relation with the orthodox Christian doctrine
established by St. Paul: see I Corinthians 6: 15-7: I I.
2 The 'normal' course of development is indicated fairly plainly in welchem

Zwecke denn alles tlbrige dient (Nohl, p. 379; Knox, p. 305). But Hegel's
interpretation of the myth of Nimrod and his Tower shows that he believed that
a spontaneous decision in favour of the subject could be given before human
culture had arrived at the limit of philosophical reflection represented by the
work of Fichte and the young Schelling. The example of Nimrod also serves to
show, however, that no progress is possible from an initial claim to absolute
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 3 11
It is the question itself that is 'wrong'; the very attitude of 're-
flection' which generates the exclusive alternatives is what has to
be overcome.
When he reached this conclusion it was natural, not to say
imperative, for Hegel to reconsider the rational religion of Kant
which represented for him the highest achievement of 'reflection'.
In all of his own reflections about theology hitherto there had been
a great gulf fixed between 'positive' and 'rational' religion; and it
is fairly plain that one of his prime objects was to save the Kantian
philosophy from perversion at the hands of the Tubingen school.
But he had now arrived at a standpoint from which the 'positive',
authoritarian character of Kant's own doctrine had to be acknow-
ledged.
The acknowledgement is first made at the end of the extremely
difficult and abstract sketch Glauben ist die Art, written around the
beginning of 1798, shortly after the first draft of welchem Zwecke
denn alles Obrige dient and about the same time as the important
set of notes on the Judaic tradition, Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung. I
In the main body of the piece Hegel developed the theory of
positive faith which he had already employed in welchem Zwecke
denn alles Ubrige dient; but it is clear both from the terminology
employed and from the notes in the concluding paragraph that
his object in doing this was to prepare the ground for a demonstra-
tion that Kant's 'religion within the bounds of reason' is a form of

being on the part of the subject (Mit Abraham dem wahren Stammvater, NoW,
pp. 244-5; Knox, p. 184).
(That reflective alienation must reach the extreme of absolute hostility if the deve-
loped unity of 'religion' is to be achieved is shown by the way Hegel conceived of
the achievement of Theseus in reconciling the warring tribes of Athens.)
I Nohl, pp. 382-5; a complete translation is given below. Miss Schiiler groups
Zu Abrahams Zeiten, Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung, and Glauben ist die Art
together as 'v6llig gleich'. They are later than welchem Zwecke denn alles Ubrige
dient (which Nohl places with letter 25, 13 Nov. 1797) and earlier, Miss Schiiler
thinks, than Daj3 die Magistrate (Lasson, pp. 150-4), which was certainly
written before Aug. 1798.
When I wrote the following analysis I did not realize that H6lderlin had
already developed a Spinozist theory of Being as the primordial Union of
Fichte's Ego and Non-ego three years earlier. (See the little piece 'Dber Urtheil
und Seyn', GSA, iv. 216-17-translated in the Appendix below-and D.
Henrich in Holderlin-Jahrbuch, xiv (1965/6), 73-96). If I had known this, my
task would have been easier. I have no doubt that in the present piece Hegel is
applying H6lderlin's insight in a Kantian context (but with critical side glances
at Fichte). The reader can see for himself by comparing the translations in the
Appendix, pp. 512-16 below.
3 12 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

positive faith. This demonstration he provided in due course m

'The Spirit of Christianity'.
Glauben ist die Art begins with a definition of Glauben: 'Faith
[Belief] is the mode in which the unity, whereby an antinomy
has been united, is presented in our Vorstellung. The union [Ver-
einigung] is the activity; this activity reflected as object [Objekt]
is what is believed.' There is much that is unclear about this
definition, but it does have the merit of situating the new concept
Vereinigung fairly definitely in relation to the established termino-
logy of the critical philosophy. In this context Vereinigung takes
the place of Kant's conception of 'synthesis'. 'Synthesis', wrote
Kant, 'is that which gathers the elements for knowledge, and unites
[vereinzgt] them into a definite content.'! At all levels this Kantian
'synthesis' results in a Vorstellullg; and Hegel's basic complaint
against religious faith, whether of the traditional positive kind, or
of the new Kantian rational kind, is that it postulates a 'union' on
the level of, or in the mode of, Vorstellungen; and this is somehow
inadequate. Assuming, for the sake of argument only, that Hegel's
reflections began with the dogma of the eventual 'union' of the
'saved' Christian with God in the Kingdom of Heaven, we can
follow the explicit chain of reasoning in the present piece back-
wards, and suggest that it was reflection on the 'union' which
faith is supposed to produce between the 'sundered' extremes of
our life in this world and our destiny in the other world, which led
Hegel to recognize the general problem of empirical belief in the
existence of a world of 'independent' things as the ultimate root
of difficulty, and the source of all the paralogisms by which 'faith'
is exalted above 'reason'. 2
I Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 103; for the classification of the logical species

of Vorstellung see B 376-7. (Henrich points out that the terms Vereinigung and
Trennung are Platonic technical terms adapted for use in the interpretation of
Spinoza by Hemsterhuis-Hiilderlin-Jahrbuch, xiv (1965/6), 80. I suspect that
we have here another link with those 'writings by and about Spinoza' that
H61derlin and Hegel read in the Stift.)
2 In the context of the theological controversies of his own time it is not at

all surprising that Hegel should have arrived at this conclusion. Hamann had
already turned Hume's theory of belief to fideistic account in a celebrated passage
of his Socratic Memorabilia which begins: 'Our own existence and the existence
of all things outside us, must be believed and cannot be settled upon in any other
way', and concludes: 'Faith is in no way the work of reason, and cannot therefore
succumb to any attack by it; for faith arises just as little from rational grounds
as tasting and seezng do.' (Sokratische Denkwilrdigkeiten, Siimtliche Werke
(ed. Nadler), ii. 73 lines 21-2 and 74 lines 2-5; translation by J. C. O'Flaherty
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
But in what way, precisely, does our ordinary perceptual
experience involve the presence 'in our Vorstellung' of a 'unified
antinomy' ? I see my desk and the paper on which I write and I feel
their solidity as I press against them with hand and pen. But there
is an 'antinomy' between everything that I directly experience, and
everything that I believe about the existence of the things ex-
perienced. This is because my experience is all of it a function,
in a variety of ways, of my sensible and intellectual capacities;
whereas the objects of my belief are things which must, if my
belief is to be true, be self-subsistent beings quite independent
of and sundered from all my modes of being aware of them. The
'union' of the antinomy is my actually believing at one and the
same time that the awareness is all mine, and that it is true, i.e.
that the things I am aware of do exist with all of the properties
etc. of which I am aware. This set of existential propositions, the
abstract content or object of my actual experience, is das Geglaubte.
In the ordinary course of events we are not initially conscious of any
'antinomy'. 'Seeing is believing', as the proverb has it. The idea
that our experience needs to be measured or tested against a
'standard' of some sort, before it can be warranted as veridical,
only comes to birth when our naively accepted, untested beliefs
prove to be mistaken. The resulting development of 'philo-
sophical realism' out of 'naive realism' is an intellectual elaboration,
a recognition at the theoretical level of the felt conflict between that
independent existence of things which is the standard of truth, and
our contingent consciousness of them which is the condition of
belief. We can prove that 'the real nature of things must be know-
able', since the postulate that there is something real would other-
wise be unintelligible. But this 'must' is a sollen; it does not follow
from the proposition that 'the real nature of things is knowable'
that anything really is or ever will be truly known. We cannot
prove that we know anything without first knowing (without need
of proof) what the canon of proof is to be; and this knowledge
without proof is impossible if the reality to be known is opposed
to our cognizing consciousness as a permanent independent being
(Baltimore, I967), pp. I66-9. For Hamann's acknowledgement of his debt to
Hume here, see the letter to Jacobi cited by O'Flaherty, pp. 4I-2.)
'\Ie cannot be sure, of course, that this passage was in Hegel's mind when he
wrote Glauben ist die Art. But it seems, to me at least, very likely; and upon that
hypothesis Hegel's acceptance of Hamann's contention would go a long way to
explain his lifelong antipathy toward empiricist theories of knowledge.
314 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
set against a contingent and dependent awareness. We must
always begin from a belief; and this means that the supposedly
independent term is really an 'opposite' which ought to be one of the
dependent terms, and would be a dependent term if the inadequate
'pictured' union of belief were replaced by a real union of knowledge.
At this point in the argument (at the end of his first paragraph),
Hegel makes a remark which is pregnant with implications for the
future: 'what is independent in respect to these opposites, may
certainly be in another respect a dependent term, an opposite
in its turn; and then there has to be once more a progression to a
new union which is now once more what is believed.' We shall have
to defer our consideration of what Hegel meant by this until we
have examined the rest of the argument, since the best clues to his
meaning are to be found further on. But whatever it meant to
Hegel in 1798, the most important fact about this sentence is that
it contains the germ of the programme that he eventually carried
through in the Phenomenology of the Spirit. The explicit object of
that work, as stated in the Einleitung. is to arrive at absolute
knowledge through the critical demoliti'<Jn of a sequence of funda-
mental beliefs about knowledge which succeed one another in a pro-
gression that is, in some sense, natural and necessary; and when
Hegel referred to his completed programme in the Vorrede as a
'highway of despair' he was pointing up its moral and religious
aspect. The Phenomenology, like Glauben ist die Art, is a practical
critique of faith, not just a theoretical critique of cognitive belief.
The second paragraph of the sketch is extremely condensed and
difficult. It begins with the assertion that 'Union and Being are
synonymous'; and Hegel justifies this claim by pointing to the
way in which the verb 'to be' functions as a copula to 'unite sub-
ject and predicate'. This argument, which might well be dismissed
as a typically W olffian sophism, actually serves to introduce Hegel's
doctrine of the different 'modes of being' -specifically actual and
possible being, or existence and conceivability. Actual being,
independent existence, is something that can only be believed in.
It is something that we have to accept because we stumble against
it.! It is what it is whether we stumble upon it or not, but if we do
not stumble on it, it can only enter our consciousness as a possi-
bility. On the other hand, it is equally true that a logical possibility
I I suspect that we have here not only a conscious justification of Hamann's
theory of belief, but also a glancing reference to Fichte's doctrine of the Anstoj3.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
remains a possibility whether it is actualized or not, and whether
we think of it or not. So we have two 'sundered' modes of being,
the actual and the possible; and just as we cannot help believing
in the independent existence of actual being when we stumble over
it, so also we cannot help believing in the merely dependent
existence of all possible being as long as we are merely thinking of
it. 'What is, is not bound to be believed, but what is believed must
be [or else the belief would be false].'
The last sentence of the paragraph is again very hard to inter-
pret. It can, perhaps, be most plausibly construed as a reference
to the 'thought-ideal' which Abraham, like Noah before him,
projected into an absolute reality as his God.! The mere con-
ception of a self-subsistent almighty power is not 'an existent
thing'. God must reveal himself before he can be believed in. But
the revelation is really Noah's (or Abraham's or any subsequent
worshipper's) actual thinking, and it is this that is the 'union' (of
conception with actuality) in which faith finds its necessary basis.
This line of interpretation finds some support in what follows.
For the 'distinct being in One Respect' which we meet in the next
paragraph is very reminiscent of the 'thought-ideal' of Abraham
and Noah. But we have now come to the point at which the
influence of Hegel's study of the Spinoza controversy at Tiibingen
becomes apparent: 'The sundered thing finds its union only in One
Being', i.e. in Spinoza's God as the living God, the God who is
subject rather than substance. The expression das Getrennte now
refers indifferently to both of the 'sundered' modes of being: to
God as a pure possibillity still unrevealed, or to man as an existent
consciousness seeking union with the whole. 'For a distinct being
in One Respect' -i.e. something that from the point of view of
actual consciousness is a pure thought-ideal, or something that
from the point of view of reflective thought is an absolute (inde-
pendent) existence-'presupposes a nature which would also not
be nature.' The God of orthodox faith is in himself an ens
realissimum; but for us he is a pure object of thought, a conceptual
possibility. These two opposite 'modes of being' take the place of
Spinoza's two attributes in Hegel's analysis of reflective conscious-
ness; and their absolute separation results in a 'nature which is
I Mit Abraham dem wahren Stammvater (Nohl, p. Z44; Knox, p. 183);
Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon (Nohl, p. 247; Knox, p. 187): cf.
pp. z81-z above.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

not nature', because there is no intelligible relation between natura

naturans, the creative activity of God, and natura naturata, the
system of created things. The 'union' of the mind with God, in a
revelation which comes by faith, is at the same time no union, for
it does not make God in any way intelligible; the grace of revelation
only reveals the mystery of creation. Even the pure conception of a
free creator turns out to be incomprehensible because, although
we assert that God is pure activity, we also deny that he needs to
create anything, or to reveal himself. I
Thus positive faith puts an incomprehensible mystery in the
place of the genuine experience of the divine life which we enjoy
in love. Love is the 'only possible union' and the 'only possible
being' in which the two 'modes' sundered by reflection are
properly reintegrated. 2 This has important implications for the
I The problem that Hegel is struggling with in this third paragraph is that of

the relation between possible and actual being. From the standpoint of reflec-
tion it is natural to say with Wolff and Baumgarten-and ultimately with Leibniz
-that 'Being is the complement of possibility'. And as soon as we say this we
have to have recourse to a positive faith when we seek to explain why a particular
set of possibilities-our world-has been 'complemented with being'. The
'creation of the world' must be thought of as the 'free' act of an almighty Lord
and all free creative activity remains strictly within the Lord's prerogative. Thus
the converse, or 'Spinozist', view of the relationship between possibility and
actuality-that possibility is the complement of being-offers the only hope of
preserving freedom and independence in the realm of human consciousness and
action. The whole principle of Entgegensetzung is an illusion. Only the £V Ka' Tray
is real; and the free spontaneity of life belongs to it just as much as the mechani-
cal necessity of the 'laws of nature'. We shaH not achieve the one and only genu-
ine 'union of the mind with the whole of nature' until we discover how the terms
of this antinomy can be reconciled. (I do not mean to assert positively that Hegel
had the dictum of Wolff or Baumgarten in mind here; but see p. 307 n. 2 above.
I do think, however, that the contrast produced by the converse of this dictum
illuminates his 'Spinozism'.)
2 This is quite conclusively shown by some passages in the other 'theoretical'

fragments of this same period. Consider for example the following notes from
Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt, which also bear out the contention that
Vereinigung replaced the Kantian 'reflective' term synthesis in Hegel's new
terminology:
'The theoretical syntheses are wholly objective, wholly opposed to the
subject-Practical activity annihilates the object, and is wholly subjective-
only in love alone are we at one with [ist man eins mit] the object, so that there
is no mastery or being mastered-this love made by the imagination into the
entity [~Vesen] is the Godhead; the sundered man stands then in dread or
awe of it-love in its oneness [der in sich einige Liebe]; his bad conscience-
his awareness of dismemberment-makes him afraid before it.'
'That union we may call union of subject and object, of freedom and nature,
of actual and possible' (Nohl, p. 376).
Or this from so wie sie mehrere Gattungen:
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 317

development of the concept. Hegel would not want to call his

'one and only possible union' a 'miracle that we cannot grasp'.
Love is something that cannot be comprehended by reflection cer-
tainly; but it is also, as Hegel insisted in the first draft of welchem
Zwecke denn alles Obrige dient, an experience that comprehends
reflection. It is a self-conscious mode of experience in which the
exigencies both of life and of reflection are for the first time really
satisfied. I
Just what the 'incomplete' or 'imperfect' unions are, which are
put in the place of love in positive religions, we shall find it easier
to decide if we first consider what Hegel says in his next paragraph
about the knowledge of God by faith. This paragraph certainly
offers powerful evidence in support of the claim that Hegel's
lifelong antipathy to empiricist theories of knowledge was directly
rooted in his rejection of 'revelation by grace'. All the knowledge
that comes by positive faith must have its origin in some sort of
sense experience-it must be 'given' as sensible objects are. And
so, although it is voluntary in a way in which ordinary empirical
belief obviously is not, religious faith remains a theoretical mode
of knowledge, in which the object is not 'brought to life', so that
we are not united with it as we are with the other self of the be-
10ved. 2 The God of positive faith is a 'living God', who stands
opposed to the believer precisely in respect of the immortal life
with which we endow him in thought; or he is a 'dead Saviour',
opposed to us precisely in respect of his actual humanity which
lies now in the tomb. The believer accepts an imperfect mode of
knowledge or of being (Abraham's thought-ideal, Storr's dead
Saviour) in lieu of one which is 'perfect' (i.e. not 'opposed' to the
worshipper) in the respect in which it is supposed to be perfect.
Examples of this 'perfect' union can be found wherever the

'If things that cannot be united are united we have positivity. This unified
result, this ideal is thus [an] object, and there is something in it which is not
subject.
'We cannot posit the ideal outside of ourselves, or it would be an object-
nor yet merely within us, or it would be no ideal.
'Religion is one with love. The beloved is not opposed to us, he is one with
our own essence [Wesen]; we see only ourselves in him-and yet also on the
other hand he is not we-a miracle that we cannot grasp' (Nohl, p. 377).
I welchern Zwecke derm alles tJbrige dient (Nohl, p. 379 n. [b]); cf. also Jesus
trat nicht lange (Nohl, pp. 293-6; Knox, pp. 244-7).
2 Cf. Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt: 'To conceptualize is to make oneself
master. To bring objects to life is to make them into gods' (Nohl, p. 376).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

worshipper is not deceived about the way in which the divine object
of his love is present. The Greek, for example, recognized Apollo
not in the stone but in the beauty which was the work of the
artist; while the young Hegel and Holderlin (probably) recognized
the true conception of the EV Ka~ 7Tav in the Gott of Herder. I
The discussion of the 'determining' and 'determined' factors in
'union' which follows, has its roots in Hegel's interpretation of the
way in which the Kantian understanding 'gives laws to experience'.
Begreifen ist beherrschen, he says trenchantly in Positiv wird ein
Glauben genannt. In 'The Spirit of Christianity' he develops this
view at length as a critique of the Kantian doctrine of practical
reason, according to which the rational moral agent becomes a
slave to himself, since his relation as a living being to the moral
law of his own reason is that of a slave to a master. But the positive
believer is in a still more curious position, which Hegel here inter-
prets on the analogy of the Kantian doctrine of sense intuition.
The knowledge of God comes to the positive believer by faith;
but faith itself is the gift of God-it comes by grace. In the same
way the knowledge of God's will comes to the believer by faith;
and even if the will to do what God wills somehow belongs to the
believer himself, the power to do God's will is necessarily held
by the believer to be the gift of grace. 'The determining factor is
supposed, even so far as it determines to be determined.' The
believing Christian, however, or the believing Jew, receives the
will of God through the gospel of Jesus or the mouths of Moses
and the prophets, who were real men in whom existence and
thought were united. And in the former instance the Christian
believer holds that Jesus did not simply have faith in God, he was
at one with him. Thus in the case of Jesus, at least, 'the doing was
active'. But the relation of the believing Christian, even of the
disciples themselves, to Jesus is a 'lower form of union'. Peter, for
example, could recognize Jesus as the Christ, but he did not
realize that in grasping the relation of Jesus to God, he was also
grasping his own relation to God. His was the relation of 'trust'
which Hegel here defines as 'identity of person, of will, of ideal,
with difference of accidental aspect'.

I For the Greek attitude to Apollo see Jesus trat nicht lange (Nohl, p. 300;
Knox, p. 252); and there is surely an echo of Herder a little earlier on: 'To love
God is to feel one's self in the "All" of life, with no restrictions, in the infinite'
(NoW, p. 296; Knox, p. 247).
 PIIANTASIE UND IIERZ 319
The 'difference of accidental aspect' between Peter and Jesus
ought not to be accorded any essential significance. But it is just
this error of mistaking accident for essence which distinguishes
'trust' from the fully self-conscious state of 'love'. Thus, for Peter
salvation depended on the presence of 'the lYlaster'. 'The Master'
was someone quite different from himself and it was only by
'following' him that Peter could be saved. Peter's faith and his
following were his own act, but the 'form' of his activity was laid
upon him by the 'command' of the 'Master'.r
For the believing Jew, on the other hand, the commandment
he receives is laid not only upon him but also upon the human
source from whom he receives it, so that all mankind becomes on
his view 'an exclusively passive thing, an absolutely determined
factor'. The insight into the universal fatherhood of God or the
perfect union of 'pure life' which Peter might have achieved,
though in fact he did not, is not even a possibility for the Pharisee
in the parable. But, of course, even at the extreme of Mosaic
Judaism men are assumed to be free agents with respect to the
life of the senses. As Hegel wrote a few months later in his essay
on 'The Spirit of Judaism': 'In this thoroughgoing passivity there
remained to the Jews, apart from testifying to their servitude,
nothing save the sheer empty need of maintaining their physical
existence and securing it against necessity.'z
Positive faith is faith in a promise of salvation; it sunders
experience into the actual world of here and now and that other
merely possible world that is the object of faith. The positive
believer holds that the future 'Kingdom of God' does indeed
already exist, but elsewhere. He prays that God's will may be done
on earth, 'as it is in Heaven'. This 'sundering of feeling' with
respect to the will of God is analogous to the antinomy which
arises when we formulate our sensible awareness of things as a
belief in their 'absolute' or 'external' existence. The reference
I Cf. Jesus trat nicht lange (Nohl, pp. 313-14; Knox, pp. 267-8, 171).
2 Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon (Nohl, p. 252; Knox, p. 194). I may
be wrong in assuming that Hegel has Mosaic and Pharisaic Judaism specifically
in mind at this point in GZauben ist die Art. The consequence of being 'an
exclusively passive thing' applies even more clearly to some Christian traditions
in which God's gift of grace is viewed by the believer as an act of predestination
or election on his part. But this Christian doctrine of election has its origins in
God's 'choice' of the Jews; and Hegel does explicitly reduce the free life of the
Jewish believer to the minimum level of animal need and satisfaction (and
meaningless ceremonial).
320 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
to the future contained in the promise of salvation-which would
be the 'union' of our actual consciousness with the ideal formulated
in our thought-corresponds to that knowledge of the 'truth' which
is the ideal goal of ordinary empirical belief. But this 'union' is
precisely what is formulated and presented, in both cases, only
as a Vorstellung. The 'opposition' between our actual state of sin
(or error) and our ideal of redemption (or knowledge) is what
really exists in fact; but the 'union' is what really exists in thought
(i.e. it is what we claim to believe in as the permanent and inde-
pendent reality). This supposedly self-subsistent 'ideal' or standard
is a 'union' because it can only be formulated by 'picturing' the
reintegration of our actual consciousness out of its fallen state, or
the coincidence of our belief with the truth of 'what is'.
The 'religion of reason' as formulated in Kant's Critical
Philosophy is therefore exactly analogous to positive religion in
respect of the fundamental reflective antinomy of 'possibility' and
'being'. 'Rational' faith does not, like 'positive' faith, involve any
recourse to a miraculous source or a supernatural guarantee; but
all the paradoxes of the reflective dichotomy between 'is' and 'ought'
arise equally in both: 'Kant(ian) philosophy-positive religion.
(Divinity holy will, man absolute negation; in the Vorstellung it
[this antinomy] is united, Vorstellungen are unified-Vorstellung
is a thinking process, but the thing thought of is no existent
being).'
'Divinity holy will, man absolute negation' : this was the contrast
that Hegel planned to dwell on when he was ready to develop the
startling conclusion that he has here arrived at. Just two years
earlier in Ein positiver Glauben (somewhere round Christmas I795)
he had tried without any visible success to face the problem posed
for practical reason by the forgiveness of sins. He is ready now to
concede Storr's claim that the upshot of rational theology is the
recognition that we are absolutely dependent on God's grace. vVe
cannot be certain that he broke off his discussion earlier because
he could not find an answer to Storr that satisfied him at that time.
But it is reasonable to suppose that the chain of reflection which
leads through the assimilation of rational and positive faith in
Glauben ist die Art to the treatment of crime and punishment in the
'Spirit of Christianity' had its origin in his continuing meditation
upon the problem of forgiveness.
The assimilation of rational faith to positive faith and the conse-
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 321

quent rejection of Kant's conception of practical reason is the most

obvious and radical novelty in the present essay. The lesson here
compressed into a few laconic notes is spelled out explicitly in the
long discussion of slavery to the moral law, and of just retribution
for breach of the law in 'The Spirit of Christianity'. But the analysis
of the concept of 'belief' which underlies Hegel's attack on Kant
here has a long-term significance that is far greater. The whole
logical structure of the Phenomenology of the Spirit rests on the
antinomy between the experience of belief and the ideal of
knowledge that is first analysed here. It is true that the idea of a
systematic progression towards absolute knowledge through the
reflective criticism of the forms of belief which present themselves
in a genetically necessary sequence-i.e. a sequence in which the
breakdown of each form of consciousness leaves the germ of the
next one as its natural residue-is not yet present in Hegel's mind.
The mysterious sentence at the end of his first paragraph, to
which we must now finally return, speaks of a 'progression' from
one state of belief to another in search of a more complete 'union'.
In the light of our analysis of the fragment as a whole it would
seem that the simplest and most consistent interpretation of this
sentence is to take it as a reference to the substitution of faith in an
'other-worldly' promise of salvation for faith in a promise of
salvation in this world. Thus when Jesus died the object of the
disciples' faith was shown to be 'in anderer Riicksicht (i.e. on the
side of actuality) ein Abhangiges', and they had to progress from
faith in 'the Master' to faith in the Risen Lord and the 'kingdom
that is not of this world'. If this view is right there is no hint here
of a conviction in Hegel's own mind that the progressive develop-
ment of belief in this way leads to an eventual transcendence of
belief altogether. Hegel 'seems at this stage to have held that the
'antinomy' of belief could only be overcome by a single great leap
out of the 'sundered' condition of reflective consciousness into the
'union' of the mind with 'God or nature' that is experienced in
love. But even in this supposedly 'mystical' phase of his thought
the seeds of his later 'rationalism' are easy to detect. On the one
hand we shall observe in 'The Spirit of Christianity' what is
plainly meant to be a phenomenological progression from the
positive religion of Moses through the rational religion of Kant
to the religion of love as proclaimed by Jesus-and from that to
the religion of the Greeks; and on the other hand, even in the
8~'3588 z
322 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

experience of love the requirements of reflective reason are not

simply abrogated. Love itself is a reflective condition, though
it is not a 'sundered' one; and because it is not sundered the needs
of reason can for the first time be satisfied or fulfilled. Just how
Hegel believed that the demands of reason were met by the
experience of love we are not yet in a position to say. But the
fact that he never ceased to believe that its demands both can and
should be met is a point that has not been properly noted by many
critics.

5. Prospect and retrospect: the 'Spirit of Christianity'

A willingness to criticize Kant openly, and indeed an explicit
rejection of Kant's conception of practical reason, is one of the
most obvious and most remarkable novelties of the long series of
manuscripts concerned with the spirit of Jesus and of the com-
munity that he founded. As a consequence of his demonstration of
the mutually exclusive character of authority and love, Hegel can
now explicitly declare what he had long believed, that is, that the
conception of reason as an authority that gives laws to sensibility
is fundamentally mistaken. From the beginning (in Religion ist eine)
he was convinced that the enlightened ideal of critical rationality
and autonomy must be so interpreted as to refer to a harmony of
all the faculties, propensities, and needs of human nature; and
because of this he rejected from the beginning the Kantian op-
position of reason and sensibility. His own conception of rationality
was always more Platonic than Kantian. His earliest comments
about the function of love in human nature show this clearly in
two ways. On the one hand, he replaces Kant's simple antithesis
of reason and sensibility with a more complex hierarchy of human
capacities, in which love is certainly placed below reason, but is not
on that account deprived of all intrinsic moral significance. On
the other hand, the distinct though cognate thesis that love is an
'analogue' of reason has no really plausible interpretation if we
try to work out the analogy in terms of the critical philosophy;
while its affinity with Plato's general view of the relation between
love and reason is obvious. [
Plato, Kant, and Hegel were at one in affirming that only the
I Religion ist eine, Nohl, p. 18. That aesthetic sensibility is an analogon rationis
was of course a Leibnizian doctrine, which Hegel would certainly have been
familiar with in the works of Baumgarten.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 32 3

completely rational man is really free, and that the freedom of

rational autonomy is the ultimate goal of human practical activity.
It seems that because of this basic agreement, Hegel initially felt
that it would be a fairly simple matter to reintegrate the con-
temporary ideal of enlightened rationality back into the older
Greek ideal of a rational harmony of life to which he was always
drawn. It was natural enough that he should believe this, for Plato
and Aristotle insisted just as firmly as Kant on the authority of
reason, its natural right to rule the rest of man's capacities, even if
they did not insist that reason was the only source of value, that
only by the use of reason could man decide what is right. No doubt
this was why Hegel placed the requirement that 'Its doctrines must
be founded upon universal reason' first among his canons for a
genuine folk-religion;! and it is clear that, when he had finished
applying this canon to Christianity, he felt he had, among other
things, vindicated both the Greeks and Kant. It was Kant's
achievement to have provided a clear account in theory of what
the Greeks had achieved in practice. The problem that remained
was to find a way to make Kant's theory effective in practice once
more; and in this respect-in his theory of human motivation-
Kant was weak. 2
But when Hegel turned to the problem of how this gulf between
theory and practice, this 'Trennung zwischen Leben und Lehre', 3
was to be removed, he found that it could only be achieved by
going altogether beyond the point of view of 'reflection'-the point
of view which it was Kant's great achievement to have clarified.
The whole conception of the authority of the 'higher' nature
over the 'lower', common to Kant and to Plato and Aristotle, is
fundamentally inadequate; and the idea of a complex hierarchy of
human capacities-the idea found in Plato and Aristotle, through
which Kant's simple reflective opposition between 'reason' and
I Nohl, p. 20.
Z See the brief conclusion added to man mag die widersprechendsten Betrach-
tungen on 29 Apr. 1796 (Nohl, pp. zrr-I3; Knox, pp. 143-5).
3 Cf. Religion ist eine, Nohl, p. 26: 'Sobald eine Scheidewand zwischen Leben
und Lehre - oder nur Trennung und weite Entfernung beider voneinander ist--
so entsteht der Verdacht, daB die Form der Religion einen Fehler habe •. .'
This first appearance of the term Trennung in Hegel's manuscripts is very
revealing. In his usage, it refers almost always, if I am not mistaken, to a
separation of theoretical from practical consciousness; of thought (Gedanken)
from sensation (Empfindung), of consciousness (Bewuj3tsein) from actual existence
(Wirklichkeit), of desire (Sehnen usw.) from consummation (Vollendung usw.).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
'sensibility' was to be healed-must not be conceived in terms of
an abstract system of 'faculties', but rather in terms of a sequence
of phases in the proper development of a mature human being
in actual life.
How far this development-the need to move from the plane
of 'reflection', with its hierarchy of faculties under the control of
reason aided by love in a subordinate capacity, to the plane of
'life', with its succession of phases through which love develops
to full self-consciousness-came as a surprise to Hegel himself we
cannot be certain. Before we could decide the question definitely,
we should have to know far more than we do about the nature and
extent of his undergraduate studies in connection with the Spinoza
controversy, and about his original conception of the EV Kat 7Tav. I
have suggested above that Hegel's whole formulation of the stand-
point of 'reflection' has its origins in his study of Spinozism, and it
seems unarguably obvious that his conception of 'life' is derived
from the ideal of the EV Kat 7TUV. On these grounds we might argue
that even while he was arguing on the plane of reflection, he knew
that it was destined ultimately to be aufgehoben.
This does seem, however, to be psychologically implausible.
The contrast between theoretical abstraction and actual living
experience was never absent from Hegel's mind, from the time
that his own independent reflection began at about the age of
sixteen. Hence the idea that the theoretical standpoint ought some-
how to be surpassed would occur naturally to him, and may have
been in his mind already when he wrote Religion ist nne in 1793.
But it seems safe to assert that he did not then, or at any time
before June 1796, have a clear idea of how the transformation was
destined to take place. He gives no sign of believing in 1793 that
love as an experience was on a different plane from Vernunft (i.e.
practical reason) altogether. He thought of it rather as the essential
complement of Vernunft, and as properly subordinate to the
authority of reason from an abstract point of view. Love was an
analogue of reason at a 'lower' (i.e. more primitive) level of develop-
ment: it was a sensible appetite for the beautiful, as compared with
the intellectual appetite for the good. Because of the essential
identity between the beautiful and the good, reason itself must
be guided by the ideals of beauty and harmony in all of its dealings
with the sensible world; rational appreciation both of its own nature,
and of the nature of things, would lead reason to be persuasive
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
rather than imperious. But this did not affect the theoretical
superiority of reason in the hierarchy of nature at all; its essential
authority, its natural right to command remained intact. The idea
that there was a level of experience where this right of reason (and
the whole system of rights deriving from it) was altogether sus-
pended did not at that time occur to Hegel at all.
The evidence of a check in the progress of Hegel's reflections
during 1796, which has already been discussed at some length,
provides some further support for this view. But that evidence is
rather tenuous, and the main root of any psychological crisis that
Hegel may have passed through was certainly not his theoretical
difficulties. Much more solid grounds for holding that Hegel did
not recognize a higher level of consciousness than rational reflection
are provided by certain overt assertions of his own. First there are
his remarks in April 1796 about 'the healthy separation (Trennung)
of the domain of the powers of the human spirit which Kant has
made for science', and about the 'ignoring of the rights of every
faculty of the human spirit, especially of the first among them,
reason' . I It is true that these assertions can be taken in a sense that
is quite consistent with all that Hegel wrote in the next two years,
and hence they cannot be held to imply unequivocally that he has
not yet recognized a higher point of view. But, in the second place,
there is one crucial passage in The Life of Jesus that does seem to
point firmly to this conclusion. If Hegel believed in a higher level
than that of moral right in 1795, then it is odd that he should have
accepted Kant's view that the 'Golden Rule' is only the most
general counsel of prudence, and hence far below the level of the
categorical imperative; yet his first impulse was to make Jesus say
exactly this.2 By crossing out the reference to the Golden Rule
altogether, he produced in the end a text that is completely con-
sistent with his subsequent views. But the presence in the manu-
script of those two cancelled lines makes the inference that he did
not at that time believe in a higher level, and that his conception of
the relation between love and reason was the Platonic one outlined
in the preceding paragraph, almost inescapable. If that was indeed
Hegel's position at the end of July 1795, then it is natural to inter-
pret his remarks about Kant and about der Vernunft in April 1796
I Der Grundfehler, der bei dem ganzen System, Nohl, p. 211 (cf. Knox,
p. 143). The italics are mine.
, Die reine aller Schranken, Nohl, p. 87.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

in accordance with it. The earliest unassailable evidence that he has

begun to have any qualms about the absoluteness of reason's
rights, and the final supremacy of its laws, is to be found in Positiv
wird ein Glauben genannt; and it is only when we come to Glauben
ist die Art that we can say definitely that Hegel's doubts have
crystallized into certainty. I
It would never have occurred to Hegel, however, to regard his
discovery as involving a 'revolution' in his thought. Everything
that he had already written retained its validity, and the new
dimension that was now added to his reflections arose directly
from the maturing of ideas and commitments that he had embraced
at the beginning. I have been careful to speak of the 'plane of
reflection' and the 'plane of life', because the antithesis between
the 'standpoint of reason' and the 'standpoint of love', which is so
frequent in the literature concerning the Jugendschriften, is one
that is alien to Hegel's own attitudes and preoccupations, and
results in a falsification of his beliefs. It is not the case that whereas
in I795 he believed in the supremacy of 'reason', in I798 he came
to believe in a mystical supremacy of 'love'. It is the case that from
I793 onwards he believed, like Plato and Kant, in the natural
authority of reason, and he believed, like Plato, that love is itself
the most important manifestation of reason as a living force (i.e.
of Vernunft, as distinct from Verstand, the faculty for abstract
calculation and 'reasoning'). But the word Vernunft had been
pre-empted for the plane of reflection by Kant; and it was Kant's
great achievement to have shown precisely why Vernunft was 'first'
among man's faculties on that plane. When Hegel moved in I798
to the quite different plane of 'life' he hesitated, at least for a time,
to use the word Vernunft in any but a 'reflective' sense, precisely
because on the plane of 'life' the notions of supremacy and

I If the contention that Hegel is the author of the 'earliest system-programme'

is accepted (see Chapter III, Appendix), we can say fairly definitely that Hegel
has begun to have doubts about the authoritative character of reason in 1796.
The most plausible sequence (with dates) is as follows: Jedes Volk hat ihm
eigene Gegenstiinde (May 1796) led Hegel to recognize that the 'highest act of
Vernunft' is an aesthetic, not a legislative one (eine Ethik (? June 1796)). Continu-
ing reflection on this aesthetic-religious act led to the conclusion that 'Religion
ist eins mit der Liebe' (Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt (? June 1797), and so zvie
sie mehrere Gattungen (? July 1797)). After Glauben ist die Art (early 1798) Hegel
breaks off for a period of political pamphleteering. Then in Aug. 1798 he returns
to the criticism of Kant's ethics (commentary on the Metaphysik der Sitten)
and makes his first attempt at 'The Spirit of Christianity'.
 PI-JANTASIE UND HERZ
authority, of 'higher' and 'lower' faculties no longer make any
sense. 'Life' goes through a cycle of development, in which we can
distinguish 'higher', more developed phases from 'lower', more
primitive ones; but the activity of distinction, and particularly the
characterizing of what is distinguished as 'higher' and 'lower', is
typical of just one of those phases, the phase of reflection. Reflective
life develops out of, and is thus in a certain sense an advance from
a level of unreflective consciousness which Hegel calls 'oneness'
(Einigkeit); but to say that reflection is 'higher' than 'oneness' is,
from the point of view of reflection itself, extremely Pickwickian,
since the whole aim and purpose of all reflective life is to return to
'oneness'. Reflection attempts to re-establish 'oneness' through
the establishment of a 'hierarchy of powers', but in the systems of
reflective thought there is no 'living' union: the elements in the
hierarchy retain their separate identities and are 'opposed' to one
another; at the best there is only a relatively stable equilibrium of
opposed 'forces'. The difference between such a balance and a
living union is made apparent to reflection itself in the actual ex-
perience of a living union. The genuine, reflective, return to 'one-
ness' is love as a self-conscious experience. This return has two
aspects (which Hegel generally refers to as 'consciousness' and
'actuality'), and it can vary in both respects. In either respect it is
liable either to fall short or to exceed the mean which is the natural
harmony of life, i.e. it may be either too reflective or not reflective
enough, and either inclusive or exclusive in some inappropriate
way. The expression of reflection's ideal of living union is 'religion';
and whenever the ideal of a religion departs in some way from the
natural ideal of human life itself, man's actual existence becomes
in some respect alienated from his consciousness and appears as
'fate'.
To take the most elementary example, which has been discussed
in some detail already, Abraham's ideal of living union was just
the primitive, undeveloped, unreflective consciousness of the
living organism with its natural urge to perpetuate itself. The 'fate'
of his love was therefore to find all other life hostile to it, and to
be subjected in all things, save only for the saving of life itself, to a
law emanating from an alien life. This is the situation where both
consciousness and actuality are rendered to a minimum. At the
opposite extreme stands Jesus. His love was absolutely self-
conscious and all-inclusive, nothing was alien to him, except, as we
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

shall see, the natural bounds of life itself-and his fate was to forfeit
that life. Forfeiture of life is, in Hegel's view, the universal fate of
Christian love, though the mode of forfeiture varies with the degree
of self-consciousness and actual effectiveness of the love itself.
Between these two extremes lies the false mean of reflective life
itself-instantiated perfectly in Kant's religion of moral reason-
and the true mean of Greek religion (in which the moral law is
preserved but aufgehoben).I
It is clear enough from the sequence of the manuscripts that
Hegel meant to move on from his first canon of true religion (which
we can now call the canon of reflective criticism) to his second
(which we can call the canon of living experience); and it is also
clear from his first outline of his aims and ideals in Religion ist eine
that when he did so the Greeks were bound to replace Kant and
Lessing as his exemplars. What I have called the 'plane of life' is
an analysis of human experience which satisfies the requirement
that 'Phantasie, Herz, and Sinnlichkeit must not be sent empty
away'. On the plane of reflection (or abstract theory) it is legitimate,
I think, to distinguish four levels in Hegel's hierarchy of the facul-
ties. There is, first, a 'lower sensibility' (the 'desirous part' in
Plato's terminology, except that in Hegel's view sexual desire
certainly does not belong simply to this level); then there is the
abstract understanding (Verstand), which has no practical function
except that of prudence; above that (because of its potentially
moral character) there is the 'higher sensibility', the part of the soul
with which Phantasie and Herz are themselves associated (and,
although Hegel never explicitly says so, everything that Plato
assigns to the 'spirited part' probably belongs here);2 finally, at the
top, there is Vernunft. If each of these levels is imaginatively
embodied and ensouled, if we try to envisage and to feel what it
would be like to experience our life from each successive level in
turn, we shall find we have pictured the four phases in the cycle of
'life' .

I The evidential basis for this summary must be looked for in the more detailed
discussion of the texts themselves which follows.
2 The main reason for believing this is Hegel's evident admiration for the

public-spiritedness of the Greeks and Romans. The devotion of the spirited

part to the cause of the city is, I take it, the 'courage' of Plato's auxiliaries. I do
not think that this patriotic feeling can be plausibly identified with 'respect for the
law', but it is quite certain that it belongs at least to the level of the 'gutartigen
Neigungen' (Nohl, p. IS).
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 329
The only equivalence which is not perhaps immediately obvious
is that of Verstand, the faculty of abstract reasoning and of
prudence, with reflection itself, as a level of life. It would certainly
have been a strange idea to Kant himself that the faculty which
makes the theoretical distinction between Verstand and Vernunft,
the faculty that produces the theoretical critique of Vernunft (both
'pure' and practical), is really Verstand. But even in I793 Hegel
was already saying explicitly that Lessing's Nathan is a fruit of
Verstand, and fairly clearly implying the same about Fichte's
Critique of all Revelation. I Even so, the claim that on the plane of
life the prudential function of Verstand takes ideal shape as Kant's
rational religion and ethics may well seem too paradoxical to be
ascribed to a critic as serious and as consciously indebted to Kant
as Hegel unquestionably was. Anyone who doubts that this was in
fact Hegel's belief,2 must suspend judgement until we have had
time to examine his account of how Verstand does 'picture' the
world (i.e. how it satisfies Phantasie and Sinnlichkeit if not Herz)
and to compare it with the 'fate' of Kantian religion and morality.
It should be clear from what has already been said that there is a
'religion' for each phase of development. Vernunft, therefore, does
not correspond on the plane of religion to any and every religion
but to the perfect harmony of life exemplified in the Greek
experience. Thus Greek religion was the absolute religion, the ideal
of 'Religion' as a phase of life itself; the ultimate consummation of
experience in which life and love, actuality and consciousness, are
finally and completely united and satisfied, is exemplified neither
in the Vernunftreligion of a German professor nor in the Sermon
on the Mount, but in the discourse of Socrates in the Phaedo.
It is important to realize this, because there are no more explicit
comparisons between Jesus and Socrates in the manuscripts that
we have now to examine. If the texts are attentively examined,
Hegel's continuing belief in the superiority of the Greek ideal to
that of Jesus does become apparent; but the fact that Jesus' religion
of love is the highest phase of living experience that he actually
I See Religion ist ein2, Nohl, p. I2.
2 There have already been many hints of this in his various discussions of the
principle 'virtue deserves happiness' (e.g. in Ein positiver Glauben). In the material
that we have so far examined Hegel comes closest to an explicit avowal of this
belief in Glauben ist die Art (Nohl, p. 385). The belief itself would seem less
paradoxical (perhaps) if, like Hegel, we were always accustomed to think of
Kant's ethics in context of his Religion.
330 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

discusses, together with the hardly less evident fact that his whole
conception of 'love' owes more to the New Testament than to any
other source, have combined with certain other less relevant
factors-notably the Christian background and prejudices of many
interpreters, and the knowledge shared by all of them that, for
the mature Hegel, Christianity was the 'absolute' religion I-to
obscure the essentially critical, dissatisfied attitude of the young
Hegel towards both the early Church and its founder.
It will be best to delay further argument upon this point until
we have examined the texts. The present attempt to sum up Hegel's
conclusions in this anticipatory way is only justified because the
extreme subtlety of the doctrine is almost matched by the confused
state of the manuscripts. The long essay published by Nohl as
'The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate'2 is really a series of essays
with no absolutely determinate sequence. The essays themselves
were put together by Hegel during 1799, or even perhaps early in
1800, by cutting up, revising, and making lengthy additions to, a set
of meditations written in the last few months of 1798 and the first
few months of 1799. The earlier version may have been no more
than a series of fairly lengthy fragments gradually worked up from
I For the mature Hegel, Christianity is the 'absolute' religion; but religion
itself is no longer 'absolute knowledge' as it was for Hegel in 1798. The recon-
ciliation of all experience into final harmony belongs now to philosophy-and
any reader of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy will know how highly
he rated the achievement of the Greeks in that direction. One could plausibly
argue that the 'ideal of his youth' never lost its pre-eminence in Hegel's mind.
2 N ohl, pp. 243-342. The proper incipit of this complex is Abraham in Chaldiia

geboren hatte schon (Nohl, p. 245; cf. p. 332 n. 2 below). The opening fragment
Mit Abraham, dem wahren Stammvater belongs properly to the category of
'Entwurfe' (cf. p. 280 n. 3 above). But the section on Judaism (Nohl, pp. 245-
60) was drafted earlier and has already been discussed; and the sequence of the
subsequent sections was not definitely indicated by Hegel himself, but imposed
by Nohl (on the basis ofl,ints in Hegel's preparatory sketches). I do not generally
use any incipit for Nohl, pp. 261-342 as a whole (referring to it as 'The
Spirit of Christianity' where necessary); but I do cite the incipits of the various
sections. Occasionally, where it seems advisable, I shall give the incipits of
fragments which appear to be distinguishable within Nohl's sections. The
reasons for doing this will vary in particular cases, and will be explained as the
occasions arise. One general consideration that is relevant in this connecticn
however is that the manuscript is a conflation of two separate drafts throughout-
though it is generally not possible to separate them with certainty in Nohl's
edition. Thus the incipit ofthe first draft of the first section in N ohl (so far as it
survives) is <leben)digen Modifikation, and I sometimes use this to refer to the
first draft as a whole. The incipit in Nohl's edition Jesus trat nicht lange I
sometimes use for the second draft as a whole, and sometimes to refer only to
the new first page that Hegel wrote for his second draft (Nohl, p. 261).
 PfIANTASIE UND fIERZ 331
notes and memoranda like those which we find intermingled with
passages of continuous argument in the two surviving fragments
which Nohl classes as 'Entwlirfe'.1 In any case the sequence of the
manuscript in its original form cannot now be restored; all we can
say with certainty is that the ordering of topics and arguments was
in places very different from that of the second draft.
The sequence of composition cannot be restored either. Vle
cannot tell which of his interwoven themes Hegel chose to dis-
entangle first-if indeed he wrote about them in any definite order
at all: morality and love, punishment and fate, virtue, the fate of
Jesus, etc. The dating of the manuscripts is rendered exceptionally
difficult in this period by two circumstances: first Hegel's hand-
writing was in a more stable condition than at any time hitherto-
only the single letter z was now in process of evolution-and
secondly there are very few securely dated exemplars of his hand-
writing during this period to provide standards for measuring such
evolution as there was. All that can be certainly established is that
a considerable interval occurred between the composition of the
first draft and the subsequent revision and additions. This interval
very probably began not later than February 1799. How long it
lasted, just when the manuscript as we have it was begun and
completed, it is impossible to say.2
In view of the almost astounding consistency of Hegel's develop-
ment up to this time, which our investigation has already revealed,
the impossibility of pursuing our inquiry in strict chronological
sequence at this stage does not matter very much. It will be
sufficient to study the text as Hegel finally left it, making use of
any information available about its earlier states simply in order to
throw light upon the meaning of the final version. Generally
speaking, the final text is fuller and more explicit than any earlier
version; but this is not universally the case, and even where it is
so, we can sometimes get important clues from the earlier, more
I Zu der Zeit, da Jesus, Nohl, pp. 385-98 (the so-called Grundkonzept); and
B. Moral. Bergpredigt, Nohl, pp. 398-402; no doubt these fragments belonged
to a slightly earlier phase of the evolution of the manuscript. In view of the way
in which the essay on Judaism (Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon) evolved,
it seems likely that there were other sets of notes and brief fragments like these.
Hegel also drew material, no doubt, from his notes on Kant's Metaphysik deT
Sitten; and his revision of welchem Zwecke denn alles tJbrige dient, at about that
time, indicates that he may have thought of this piece too as belonging to the
same complex.
2 See Schiller, pp. 15 1-3.
332 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

condensed statements, because the stimulus or occasion of Hegel's

thought is more apparent in them than in the final version, where
he is trying to put his case for an outside audience rather than to
get his ideas clear for himself.

6. Morality and love

The earliest notes for 'The Spirit of Christianity' seem to indicate
that Hegel had it in mind to deal with five topics in sequence.!
There was first of all the spirit of 'positive faith' or legality,
enshrined in the religion of Moses and represented in the time of
Jesus by the Pharisees. This was dealt with in the first essay on
'The Spirit of Judaism', which we have already examined. z
I In Zu dey Zeit, daJesus the four levels Positivitllt, Moral (Gesinnung), Liebe,
Religion are distinguished at the foot of Nohl, p. 389. See also pp. 393-4 where
the first level appears as Ceremonien: the levels of Liebe and Religion are there
run together under one heading (no title is given, but the one supplied by
B. Moral. Bergpredigt is Religion). B. Moral. Bergpredigt also supplies the fifth
heading D. Geschichte (Nohl, p. 400) which is thematically required in Zu der
Zeit, da Jesus at the top of Nohl, p. 396. It is apparent that as his reflections
developed Hegel found that he could not effectively separate the topics of
lVloralitiit and Liebe except on the negative side. Thus he decided to write an
essay on the moral ideal of Jesus, and another on punishment and forgiveness;
then one on the religion of love, and finally one on the 'fate' of that religion (in
the 'history' of Jesus and the Church).
2 There cannot be any doubt that Nohl is right to print Abraham in Chaldiia

geboren hatte schon as the first section of the final version. The figure '5' added
by Hegel to the note '24 Bogen' on the manuscript must refer to the essay on
Judaism, since the preparatory notes for 'The Spirit of Christianity' total not
five but six double sheets. Hegel himself indicates that B. Moral. Bergpredigt
is a supplement to Zu der Zeit, da Jesus. Compare the cancelled heading 'Moral
in der Bergpredigt Mt 5-7', Nohl, p. 393, with the incipit of the supplementary
fragment; also the second heading in B. Moral. Bergpredigt: 'Zu C. Religion'
(Nohl, p. 400), shows that the material there following was to be added to Zu
der Zeit, da Jesus at the corresponding point 'c' (Nohl, p. 394).
Thus the ambiguity IVIiss Schuler suggests about the possible reference of the
added numeral (Hegel-Studien, ii. ISO) does not exist. The essay Abraham in
Chaldiia gcboren hatte schon occupies five sheets and Hegel marked it accordingly,
in order to distinguish it from all the previous drafts and fragments-including
Mit Abraham, dem wahren Stammvater. (As Miss Schuler has shown, Noh! is
not simply mistaken in thinking this was added later, but mistaken in thinking
that Hegel meant to include it at all.) On the other hand the preparatory notes
for 'The Spirit of Christianity' occupied six sheets at least (there may possibly
have been more) and if Hegel had felt concerned about keeping them together
he would have marked them as six or more. He could not simply number them
because the material is not in order on the sheets. But this did not matter in the
case of the preliminary notes, whereas it was vital to keep his manuscript to-
gether; so he noted the extent of the two complexes which contained his final
version, precisely in order to facilitate keeping them separate from everything
else.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 333
Secondly there was the spirit of rational faith or morality. Hegel
had already written The Life of Jesus as a story of opposition
between Jesus and the Pharisees, of the ideal of autonomy against
the tradition of heteronomy. This opposition is still acknowledged
in 'The Spirit of Christianity'. I But it is now viewed as part of
Jesus' 'fate', being contrary to his deliberate intent. Jesus now
appears as the protagonist of the higher spirit of love, which
refuses to be 'opposed' to anything, and can therefore fairly be
said to be 'opposed' to the whole spirit of opposition. In this sense
Jesus 'opposes' the whole 'fate' of Judaism; but he also 'opposes'
Kant in a different way. On the positive side the spirit of love
'fulfils' the spirit of morality; but it is 'opposed' to it in its relation
to what morality itself is opposed to: it is opposed to morality as
punishment. Thus, Hegel had to write two essays, one on love as
the 7Tt..~PWILa of the moral law, and another on the contrast between
penal justice and forgiveness.
The ideal of perfect reconciliation takes us beyond love as a
simple mode of consciousness to the level of religion as the perfect
self-consciousness of reconciled life; but then, finally, actual
experience-the history of Jesus and his Church-shows that the
Christian ideal of perfect reconciliation, absolute fatelessness, is
only a noble dream.
The first problem that now faced Hegel, therefore, was to
characterize Christian love, for which I shall hereafter use the
traditional term 'charity', as an 'actuality', to show how it appears
in the world as a working relation between men. Charity is the
spirit which is 'raised above fate', since by 'fate' we mean the
reaction of some living power upon the consciousness that sup-
presses it, mutilates it, or regards it as alien. For charity there can
be no fate, because nothing in life is alien to it. It stands therefore
at the opposite pole from the life that regards all other life with
hostility, and hence is everywhere subjected to external authority,
or else to suffering and violence. The Jews had experienced the
extremity of this fate when they lost their national independence.
They looked now for a Messiah to save them from it, but since they
could not recognize it as their own self-wrought fate, only death
in battle (in the great revolt of A.D. 70) could overpower it. Jesus
could bring the gospel of peace only to those who no longer had a
I Cf. B. Moral. Bergpredigt, Noh!, p. 401; Mit dem jVIute und dem Glauben,
Noh!, pp. 326-7 (Knox, p. 283).
3H FRANKFURT 1797-1800

share in 'fate', because they had given up the fight and had nothing
left to uphold or defend, i.e. no 'spirit' to express. I
In this state of absolute subjection to authority, a fully self-
conscious observer can perceive three distinct levels: religious
law; moral law; civil law. An 'enlightened'-i.e. reflective-critic
(Kant's rational man) will perceive only moral law and civil law,
since for him the law of God must coincide with the law of reason.
But for an unreflective man, who simply recognizes his own absolute
subjection, there is simply 'the law', which is the condition of his
self-preservation. This is, in Hegel's view, the condition of the
law-abiding Jew before his God: '(Even relations which) we might
recognize as grounded in (the liv)ing modification of human
nature [i.e. in the conscious individual]-rights which he himself
surrenders when he establishes dominions [Gewalten] over him-
were positive throughout.'z
There really are only two levels of law and right: the moral level
where the rational man preserves autonomy, and the civil level
where all men, whether rational or not, recognize that they must
surrender the right to judge and execute judgement to a constituted
I See Jesus trat nicht lange (Nohl, p. Z6I; Knox, pp. 205-6) and Zu der Zeit,
da Jesus (Nohl, pp. 385-6). I assume that the latter gives us a fairly clear idea
of the general tenor of Hegel's opening in the first version. In that event the
main difference here between the first and the second version consisted in
the elimination of much concrete detail in the latter (e.g. the reference to the
attitudes of Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes). In a continuous account this material
belonged more naturally to the preceding section on the spirit of Judaism.
Knox is mistaken, I think, in taking 'keinen Anteil mehr an dem Schicksal' to
refer specifically to the fate of the Jewish people. The Jews did not heed the
Gospel precisely because they were preoccupied with their fate. The 'publicans
and sinners' with whom Jesus himself consorted and the subjects of the Roman
Empire who were later converted to the new religion had these two things in
common: they were subjected to an absolute authority in this world, and they
had 'no longer any share in fate' (of any kind) because they did not claim any
right to live their own lives as they saw fit.
2 This is a conservative reconstruction of the opening sentence of the first

draft, (leben)digen Modifikation, Nohl, p. 261. Cf. Knox, p. 206, for a translation
of Haering's slightly more ambitious reconstruction. We should naturally assume
that what is 'grounded in the living modification of human nature' is a complex
of harmonious ties of affection and love. In that case Hegel is speaking, as Haering
supposes, 'in the spirit of Jesus'; but the immediate introduction of the word
'Rechte' in apposition to whatever it is that is 'grounded etc.' brings us down to
the level of practical reason. It may be, of course, that this use of 'Rechte' is only
accidental, being imposed as it were by the contextual reference to the establish-
ment of civil law. But the whole tenninology of 'grounding' and 'surrendering'
'rights' suggests that the Metaphysik der Sitten is in Hegel's mind rather than
St. John's Gospel.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 335

authority, the sovereign power (Gewalt) that keeps us all in awe.

But there is also a higher level-our relations with the divine-
which is not properly a matter of laws and regulations at all. When
we feel ourselves to be in the presence of the divine we act
reverently because reverent action expresses what we feel, not
because we have decided that we ought to act thus, sti11less because
it has been decreed by God, or anyone else, that we must act thus.
The pressure of natural necessity may destroy the feeling of
reverence, or prevent its natural expression, as when David ate
the shewbread. But when the need is slight, there is a stark con-
trast between the holiness of the object or command and the
attitude expressed in its desecration. I Hence, when Jesus cited the
example of David in justification of the plucking of the corn by
his disciples on the Sabbath he was not simply saying that
reverence for the Sabbath must be bounded by reason; he was
implying that the most trivial and momentary impulses of life are
more holy than the command that God gave to Moses.
In the case of moral laws (and of civil laws also in so far as they
have a basis in moral reason and hence have the force of moral
imperatives for the rational man)2 we might have expected, says
Hegel, that Jesus would concentrate upon revealing their rational
character, and so do away with their merely positive aspect as part
of the total complex of Jewish law. This is in fact what Hegel's
Jesus does in Das Leben Jesu. 3 But a transformation of this sort is no
longer sufficient. All moral laws, whether capable of civil enforce-
ment or not, have a positive aspect that cannot be eliminated, in-
asmuch as they enforce the authority of reason over the rest of
human nature. They are civilly enforceable when they govern
relations between different individuals, whereas when they concern
only the personal attitudes and conduct of the rational individual

I Nohl, p. 262 n. [a]. This was in the first version of the paragraph beginning
on p. 207 of Knox's translation.
2 According to Roques's edition (p. 90) the cancelled passage given by Nohl,

p. 264 n. [a], continues as follows: 'Alle biirgerlichen Gesetze sind zugleich

moralische, und sie unterscheiden sich von den rein moralischen, die nicht
flihig sind, biirgerliche Gesetze zugleich zu werden, dadurch daB sie ihre
Bed(ingungen 1) .. .'; the continuation is lost but at least it is clear that the
sentence which Nohl does print has to be interpreted along the lines of my
parenthesis here.
3 The cancelled passage from the first draft given by Nohl, p. 265 n. [a],
seems to have been specifically directed against Hegel's own earlier position. (It
was probably cancelled and rewritten precisely for this reason.)
336 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

they are purely and simply moral laws. But the very fact that
purely moral laws about private attitudes can be made positive,
as they were in the Mosaic Law, by being thought of as the com-
mands of God, the reflective consciousness 'from whom no secrets
are hid', reveals the unresolved dualism that is implicit in a
legalistic ethics: 'Since laws are unitings of opposed terms in a
concept, which thus leaves the terms as opposites-and the concept
itself exists in opposition to actuality, it follows that the concept
expresses an ought.' j

In the case of laws which are not laws of reason, or in cases

where we are not conscious of them as laws of reason-i.e. where
we consider only the content of the law (as a command) rather than
its form (as a concept)-the abiding opposition between the terms
(sovereign and subject) is obvious enough and needs no dwelling
upon. But even the laws of reason which 'express natural relations
of men in the form of commands' retain their objective validity
whether we obey them or not; and because they thus 'exist in
opposition to actuality' the opposition between the actual element
(inclination) and the conceptual element (duty) persists in them.
It is always legitimate to distinguish the form from the content
of a moral act, because they are not essentially united, they exist
as elements in the quite distinct orders of freedom and nature, of
reason and necessity, of moral and natural law. Thus Reason in
virtue of its independent status becomes a kind of internal sovereign,
and the man who prides himself on his enlightenment is really only
a slave to himself, instead of being a slave to someone else.
The spirit of love is just as much 'opposed to opposition' in this
form as it is opposed to the less subtle forms of hostility and bond-
age. It is 'raised above morality'. The law, so far as it is a require-
ment of human nature itself, must be fulfilled; it cannot be flouted
in the interests of a momentary whim (as Jesus flouted the positive
'law of God': 'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy'). But
love must overcome the opposition between concept and actuality,
I Nohl, p. 264; Knox, p.'209. Knox's explanatory note on this passage begins
to go wrong when he says th~t 'Law is only a concept, because it can be disobeyed,
etc.'. If this point were crucial, we could create a problem for Hegel by retorting
that 'Love is only an ideal because it can be sinned against etc.'. The point is that
moral laws possess as 'concepts' an independent status which stands opposed to
the actual situation, whether it is concordant with the law or not. Their validity
is quite independent of our obedience. Whereas when love is sinned against,
either love must perish, or the sin itself must be aufgehobell in forgiveness and
reconciliation.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 337
duty and inclination, in a union such that the terms no longer have
independent status. Instead of being commanded to achieve some-
thing whose possibility has been rationally demonstrated, men
must be made aware of the actual presence in themselves of a state
of being. Living actuality is essentially prior to conceived possi-
bility; only when this has been made manifest can the point of
view of reflection be transcended.
It is easy enough to say this; but to make its truth or validity
manifest is not easy, because language is the natural mode of
reflection. The obvious and explicit opposition between what is
and what is said makes it difficult for us to realize that a prophetic
statement about the true character of human relations is not meant
as an impossible command or as a paradox. The beatitudes with
which Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount, like the prophetic
remarks and 'inadequate parables' with which it closes (Matthew
7: 6-2 9), are intended, Hegel thinks, to put us on our guard against
this temptation. The 'commands' of the new law are not concepts
of a possible order of things; they are evocations of the potentialities
for life which are actually present in human nature.
As a starting-point, Hegel took from Kant himself the term
Gesinntmg to express the living union of reason with inclination.
I t is not clear how far he regarded his own use of the term as
concordant with Kant's--and I do not, for my part, wish to express
an opinion as to how far it is concordant-but it is probable at least
that he deliberately decided that this was the best growing-point
in Kant's theory. In the place of Kant's 'moral disposition'he
put 'the disposition of Nlenschenliebe'. I In Zu der Zeit, da Jesus there
is a formula which sums up his doctrine thus: 'Gesinnung cancels
(aufhebt) the positivity, objectivity of the command; Love (cancels)
the limits of the Gesinnung, Religion the limits of love.'2 A passage
in the first version of 'The Spirit of Christianity' shows us how
Gesinnung and Tugend, as the moral aspect of 'life', are distin-
guishable from Liebe, yet so intrinsically connected with it that the
I Nohl, p. 268 and the cancelled passage in n. [c) (cf. Knox, p. 215 and n. 40).
'Die Gesinnung der Menschenliebe' is not here explicitly accorded a status of
equivalence in generality with 'die moralische Gesinnung'; but this passage,
together with the discussion of how love reconciles the virtues (Nohl, pp. 293-
6; Knox, pp. 244-7), makes the interpretation of the bare term 'die Gesinnung'
in the axiom cited from Zu der Zeit, daJesus fairly plain sailing.
? Nohl, p. 389. The first two clauses of this axiom are echoed in Die Liebe

versl}hnt aber (Nohl, p. 295; Knox, p. 246): 'Just as virtue is the complement of
obedience to law, so love is the complement of the virtues.'
S2435B8 A a
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

distinction can never constitute an opposition; and the subsequent

revision of this passage shows how, once Hegel had clarified his
attitude to Kant's ethics for himself, he began to remove all
explicit indications of a direct relationship between his view and
Kant's, in order to eliminate the danger of a 'reflective' interpre-
tation of his view, and perhaps also in order to accentuate the
contrast between his view and Kant's. In the first version Hegel
wrote: 'Against complete subjection to the law of an alien lord,
Jesus set, not a partial subjection to a law of one's own, the self-
coercion of Kantian virtue, but the virtuous disposition-the
expression "disposition" has the disadvantage, that it does not
include a direct reference to the activity, the virtue in action.'1 In
the second draft he substituted 'virtues without lordship and
without submission, modifications of love' for 'the virtuous dis-
position etc.'; and his remark about the inadequacy of the term
'disposition' explains the cancellation. We may well remember
at this point that Aristotle gave much the same reason for refusing
to identify 'happiness' with 'virtue'. Hegel's Liebe, like Aristotle's
d!)a~fLovta, is 'activity of soul (the life principle) in accordance with
virtue'. He decided to speak of the different virtuous activities as
'modifications of love' rather than as actualizations of different
dispositions, because in that way the artificiality of all talk about
I Die Liebe versohnt aber, Noh!, p. 293 with n. [b]; for the second version see
Knox, p. 244. I prefer to regard the part of the manuscript beginning on Noh!,
p. 289, Daj3 auch Jesus den Zusammenhang, as a series of discrete fragments,
because it is clear from Nohl's note at that point that Hegel himself never quite
decided what the sequence of his discussion should be. Nohl thinks it likely that
he meant to pass on to 1m Geiste der Juden (Nohl, p. 290). In Roques's edition
(pp. 178-9) the paragraph Kiihnheit, die Zuversicht (Nohl, p. 290) is printed
immediately before Die Liebe versohnt aber (Nohl, p. 293). The connection of
Die Liebe verscihnt aber with the following discussion of the Last Supper, Der
Abschied, den Jesus (Noh!, p. 297), is unquestionable, since the manuscript is here
continuous. But I have decided to lift it out of this context nevertheless, because
of its obvious relevance to the discussion of the ethics of Jesus as presented in
the Sermon on the Mount.
Apparently Hegel thought of making the transition from his discussion of
punishment and forgiveness to the level of religion by way of a new discussion
of love as an achieved state of being. But this plan would really have required
the incorporation of almost all of the earlier essay (leben)digen Modijikation at
this point.
When we take into account the cancelled passage (Nohl, p. 296 n. [b]) which
trails off into notes as Hegel's first drafts so often do, it becomes quite clear that
Dey Abschied, den Jesus, even though it began on the same sheet (cf. Roques,
p. 94 for the break between the sheets), is the beginning of a new meditation on
Hegel's part.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 339

'collisions' between the virtues or 'conflicts of duty' is most clearly

revealed. From the beginning he felt that one of the most evident
weaknesses of the Kantian approach to ethics was that it led to
the raising of problems of this kind,1 and his study of the Meta-
physik der Sitten fully confirmed this opinion. He admitted that
even upon Kant's view it was not really correct to speak of a
collision of virtue with itself, but this is only true because in actual
life Kant's assumptions are aufgehoben:
We may indeed say that the virtuous disposition considered by itself
and in general, i.e. abstracted from the virtues here posited [two
different virtues of a virtuous man], does not come into collision, since
the virtuous disposition is one and one only. But with that assertion the
presupposition [of different virtues] is aufgehoben; and if both virtues
are posited, then the exercise of one removes [aufhebt] the matter and
thereby the possibility of exercising the other, which is just as absolute
as the first, and the justified claim of the other is rejected. 2
The best way to understand what Hegel is driving at here is to
consider the way in which Kant discusses his 'casuistical questions'
in the Metaphysik der Sitten. One case that must have made a most
forcible impression upon Hegel, because Kant's attitude and
approach is so far removed from his own, is the discussion of sexual
love. But although Kant himself speaks of a 'collision of the
determining grounds of morally-practical reason' in this con-
nection, his view of sexual love is so low that we can hardly interpret
this as a case of 'collision of virtues'. 3 So it will be both easier and
I Cf. Religion ist eine, Nohl, pp. 19-20 (pp. 497-8 below).
2 Nohl, p. 294; Knox, pp. 244-5.
3 'Nature's purpose in the intercourse of the sexes is procreation, i.e. the
preservation of the race. Hence one may not, at least, act contrary to that end.
But is it permissible to use the sexual power without regard for that end (even
within marriage)?
'For example, if the wife is pregnant or sterile (because of age or sickness),
or if she feels no desire for intercourse, is not the use of the sexual power
contrary to nature's purpose and so also contrary to duty to oneself as well, in
one way or another-just as in unnatural lust? Or is there, in this case, a
permissive law of morally-practical reason, which in the collision of its
determining grounds makes permissible something that is in itself not permit-
ted (indulgently, as it were), in order to prevent a still greater transgression?
At what point can we call the limitation of a wide duty a purism (a pedantry
in the observance of duty, so far as the wideness of the duty is concerned) and
allow the animal inclinations a play-room, at the risk of abandoning the law
of reason?
'Sexual inclination is also called "love" (in the narrowest sense of the term)
and is, in fact, the strongest possible sensuous pleasure in an object. It is not
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

fairer to take the simpler example of conviviality (which both

Kant and Hegel enjoyed). Kant writes:
Although a banquet is a formal invitation to intemperance in both
food and drink, there is still something in it that aims at a moral end,
beyond mere physical well-being: it keeps a lot of people together for a
long time so that they may exchange their ideas. And yet the very
number of the guests (if, as Chesterfield says, it exceeds the number of
the Muses) permits only a limited exchange of ideas (between people
sitting next to each other); and so the arrangement is at variance with
that [moral] end, while the banquet remains a temptation to immorality
-intemperance, which is a violation of duty to oneself. How far can we
extend the moral title to accept these invitations to intemperance?1
Here we have a genuine 'collision of virtues'. The rational man
must be temperate, but he must also do all that he can do to stimu-
late and advance the rational exchange of ideas. Conviviality on a
large scale, as at a banquet, is unjustifiable, but there is clearly a
sort of no-man's-land where, if we think of virtue in terms of
rational obligation, we are always subject to the imputation of
guilt with respect to one obligation precisely because we have chosen
to fulfil the other. The very existence of a 'casuistical question', a
merely a pleasure of the senses, such as we experience in objects that are pleasing
when we merely contemplate them (capacity for which pleasure is called
taste). It is rather pleasure from the use of another person, which therefore
belongs to the appetitive power and, indeed, to the appetitive power in its
highest degree, passion. But it cannot be classed with either the love that is
mere affection or the love of benevolence (for both of these stop short of
carnal enjoyment). It is a unique kind of pleasure (sui generis), and sexual
burning [das Brunstig-seinJ really has nothing in common with moral love,
though it can enter into close connection [VerbindungJ with it under the
limiting conditions of practical reason' (Akad., vi. 426; Gregor, pp. 89-90).
It is evident that Kant, like St. Paul, thinks of marriage as a contract for the
enjoyment of one another's body. The contract would be absolutely immoral,
the reduction of humanity to the status of a mere means both in one's own
person and in that of the other partner, if entered into simply for the sake of
carnal pleasure. What justifies it, and makes sexual intercourse itself a duty for
the rational man, is 'nature's purpose' in making men 'burn'-the preservation
of the race. The 'collision' is not here a collision of virtues, but of reason and
nature, the two 'determining grounds' of all duty; it is a collision of rational
purpose with natural instinct. Kant's view appears to be that every rational
person must decide how much 'play-room' his animal instincts need in order to
remain healthy. But this 'play-room' is at best only tolerated by reason. The
instinct itself has 'nothing in common' with rational love, although it can be
'closely bound up with it'. In this 'Verbindung' we have the 'Aufhebung' of
Kant's assumptions to which Hegel refers; he analyses it in u'elchem Zwecke denn
alles tlbrige dient.
1 Kant, Akad., vi. 428; Gregor, pp. 91-2.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 34 1

question which can only be solved in living experience, bears witness

to the collision; and the intuitive decision of the virtuous man
restores the unity of 'virtuous disposition' and overthrows the
basic assumption of the casuistical approach: the assumption that
there really are distinct obligations. If we recognize that the
virtues are 'modifications of love' we are not tempted to approach
them casuistically in the first place, for we realize that it is not a
matter of making a hierarchy of creditors but of living in charity
with one's neighbours and oneself. One does not reflect within
oneself about the varying claims upon one, and strive to balance
the rights of the claimants; rather one seeks to get all the claimants
to reconcile their claims and join in amity.
As far as duties to oneself are concerned the difference between
Hegel's attitude and Kantian casuistry is one of feeling. If Hegel
ever suspected on one of those convivial evenings at the Sonnen-
scheins's in the dark days of his loneliness in Berne that he was on
the verge of getting drunk, he was not restrained by the categorical
imperative, or by the thought of a rational exchange of ideas as the
moral justification for his indulgence, but by the feeling of friend-
shi p itself.I
But where duties to others are concerned, there is a difference
not just in feeling, but in action; for one will not reason with
oneself (as the casuist does) but rather try to establish com-
munity with the others involved, treating them as one's neighbours
and seeking to make them neighbourly to one another. Only if
that fails does one descend to the level of a weighing of obligations
and balancing of rights. '''Love has conquered" does not, like
"Duty has conquered", mean that it has subdued its enemies, but
that it has overcome enmity.'2 Love cannot be commanded, it has
to be spontaneous; but it is voluntary in its spontaneity, and it can
evoke a voluntary response.
This was the 'righteousness greater than that of the scribes and
Pharisees'3 which Jesus sought to evoke in his hearers: 'an inclina-
tion to act as the laws would command, not the underpinning of
I See Rosenkranz, p. 43, for the evenings at the Sonnenscheins's. Compare
also Leutwein's memories of Hegel's j'v[oralitiit being better than his Legalitiit
etc. (Hegel-Studien, iii. 54, lines 38-58).
• Die Liebe versohnt aber, Nohl, p. 296 (Knox, p. 247).
3 (leben)digen Modifikation, Roques, p. 93; this is an explicit reference in the
first version which was not printed by Nohl. The echo at the bottom of Nohl,
p. :a67 (Knox, p. 214) appears to be the revised version.
342 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

the moral disposition (Gesinnullg) by inclination (Neigung) but a

naturally inclined moral disposition (eine geneigte moralische
Gesinnung) , i.e. a moral disposition without conflict.'I Thus the
law loses its form as law; for it is not right to speak of being obliged
to do something when one is really doing it because one wants to.2
The correspondence of Neigung with Gesetz in Hegel's geneigte
moralische Gesinnung is the correspondence of 'actuality' with
'concept' in such a way that they cannot be separated without
being destroyed. In place of the empty abstraction, 'Thou shalt
not kill', Jesus sets a willingness to be reconciled for which the
command is superfluous; and indeed the 'rending' of life by the
attitude of reflective neutrality, which is all that the law requires,
is the one thing which the new attitude excludes. Even anger,
being an uprush of living impulse, the expression of a living sense
of injustice, is not so opposed to the spirit of reconciliation as the
reflective attitude that we adopt in declaring someone else to be a
fooL 3
Love 'requires the Aufhebung of right';4 but when love fails,
there is necessarily a return to the level of right. Hegel's inter-
pretation of what Jesus says about adultery and divorce shows that
not only the rational principle of 'equal rights', but also the
positive principle of 'natural lordship' is present, though aufgehoben
in his doctrine of love. The husband cannot put away a loving wife
simply because he has ceased to love her; but on the other hand if
the wife has given her love to another, the husband 'cannot remain
I (leben)digen Modifikation, Nohl, p. 268 and n. raJ. The contrast between

Kantian and Hegelian Gesinnungen is eliminated in the second draft.

• For Kant's extremely subtle analysis of the ways in which we can and
cannot, should and should not, like to do what we ought, see Kritik der prak-
tischen Vernunft, Part I, Chapter III (Akad., v. 71-89). The best gloss on my
remark in the text occurs on pp. 83-4: 'A law would not be needed if we already
knew of ourselves what we ought to do and moreover were conscious of liking to
do it .... To such a level of moral disposition no creature can ever attain ....
Consequently, it is ... always necessary to base the intention of the creature's
maxims on moral constraint and not on ready willingness . . . . This would be
true even if the mere love for the law (which would in this case cease to be a
command, and morality, subjectively passing over into holiness, would cease
to be virtue) were made the constant but unattainable goal of its striving'
(Beck, pp. 86-7).
3 The questionable accuracy of Hegel's biblical exegesis here (see Knox,
p. 216 n.) is less interesting than the comparison of his doctrine with Kant's-
which undoubtedly suggested it (see 'Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der
Tugendlehre', § 39, Akad., vi. 463-4; Gregor, pp. 132-4).
4 (leben)digen ]}fodifikation, Nohl, p. 270 n. raJ.
 PHANTASJE lJND HERZ 343
her bondsman [Knecht],. Apparently there is a natural relation of
subordination involved in loving relations between the sexes such
that, although the duty of fidelity continues to hold good equally
for both partners even where love fails, the right to declare the
existence of a breach in the event of a betrayal of that duty is not
reciprocal, but devolves upon the husband. Hegel's theory reveals
at this point Aristotelian rather than Platonic affinities.!
All that needs to be noticed about Hegel's discussion of oaths
and retributive justice-the next topics of the Sermon on the
Mount in Matthew 5-is that he takes both oaths and the principle
of reciprocity to be natural to the viewpoint of reflection. There is
nothing superstitious about oath-taking, because for reflection the
visible world is only the manifestation of invisible power and law;
the idea of an oath is to guarantee the truth of an assertion by
equating it with an element in the order of nature. The more
clearly we understand the order of nature the more powerful does
the oath become, and the more surely we invite and deserve retri-
bution if we swear falsely. But love rises above the whole principle
of mechanical reciprocity.2
The discussion of almsgiving provides us with an interesting
example of the contrast between the standpoint of love and the
standpoint of reflection. The precept 'Let not thy left hand know
what thy right hand doeth' is now seen as a condemnation of the
I The notes in B. Moral. Bergpredigt, Nohl, p. 398, should be compared with
Nohl, p. 270 (Knox, pp. 216-17). The worst difficulty in this passage is to decide
just what Hegel means by saying that 'ceasing to love a wife, in whom love still is,
makes love become untrue to itself and sin'. The point is, I think, that husband
and wife form one 'whole'-the 'whole' against which 'one of man's many
sides' (e.g. sexual instinct) may rise up and claim its 'rights' or its independence
in the absence of love. The 'whole' of human nature is man and woman united
in love. Knox misses this Aristophanic meaning of the 'whole' in his translation.
(In his notes Hegel speaks of the marriage bond as one of 'friendship', which
was Kant's term for the ideal of moral love and implies strict reciprocal equality:
cf. Gregor, pp. 46-7, 140-5.)
2 Since the explicit verdict on oath-taking remains exactly what it was in The
Life of Jesus (that the principle violates the essential autonomy of the will), we
must ask ourselves why Hegel bothers to prove that there is nothing superstitious
in swearing 'by the hair of one's head' etc. The answer, probably, is that he
wished to maintain a place for oaths in 'living' religion. We should remember
that the Greeks were as ready with oaths by all manner of things as any follower
of Moses. But the religion of love, like the reflective religion of reason, goes to
an unhealthy extreme in this matter. Being bound to the exegesis of Jesus' text
Hegel cannot say this explicitly, but it is implicit in his critique of the 'en-
lightened' attitude. (We should compare here what he says about Isaac's
blessing in Joseph. judo Altel·th., Nohl, p. 368.)
 344 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

reflective distinction between reason and inclination, not just as a

metaphor for the absolute avoidance of ostentation (as in The Life
of Jesus). Hegel connects the precept plausibly enough with the
parable of the Pharisee and the Publican; and, by ascribing every-
thing 'positive' in the Pharisee's attitude to his 'modesty', Hegel
contrives to exhibit him as a paradigm case of Kant's virtuous
man. The consciousness of righteousness, which Kant declares to
be a duty to oneself, is to be condemned on two counts. First, and
most immediately, on practical grounds, because it must inevit-
ably sully the motive for the good action of which one is conscious;
secondly, on theoretical grounds, because it involves the assump-
tion that virtue is a sum or system of dispositions, and the analysis
of virtue in these terms is inexhaustible in principle and self-
defeating in practice. The number of the virtues is forever in-
creasing and so is the complexity of the collisions between their
competing claims. I
Prayer and fasting, which follow the giving of alms in the text of
Jesus' discourse, are not of course moral duties in the Kantian sense
at all. As ritual practices they are like Sabbath observance and the
washing of hands; and as expressions of a felt need they belong to the
higher level of religion and hence discussion must be postponed. 2
I 'Impartiality in judging oneself in comparison with the law and sincerity in

avowing to oneself one's inner moral worth or unworth are duties to oneself that
follow immediately from that first command of self-knowledge' (Kant, 'Tugend-
lehre', § IS, Akad., vi. 441-2; Gregor, p. 108). In connection with the Pharisee's
'modesty' compare Kant's definition of the 'duty of religion': 'the duty of
recognizing all our duties as if [ins tar] they were divine commands' (ibid., § 18,
Akad., vi. 443; Gregor, p. 110). Even Hegel's use of 'modest' (bescheiden) here
is not without Kantian overtones. Kant defines Bescheidenheit as 'the willing
limitation of one man's self-love by the self-love of others' but from his subse-
quent definition of 'anogance' we can see that his definition of 'modesty' in a
moral context would be 'the willing limitation of one's claims to respect out of
respect for others'. If we extend this to cover relations with God as our inner
Judge (ibid., § 13, Akad., vi. 439; Gregor, p. 105) we shall see how the close
analogy between positive religion and the religion of reason enables Hegel to
give the parable a Kantian interpretation in spite of the distinction Kant draws
between 'duty to' beings other than men and 'duty with. regard to' them (ibid.,
§ 16, Akad., vi. 44Z; Gregor, p. 108).
Of course Kant himself seems to regard 'that first command of self-knowledge'
as one that we can only strive to fulfil (cf. ibid., § ZI-Z, Akad., vi. 446-7; Gregor,
pp. 113-14). But this Aufhebung of the reflective assumption only leads to the
opposite extreme of perpetual Angst (the state of the Publican seen from a
reflective point of view). Hegel will examine this side of Kant's doctrine in his
next essay (Der Positivitiit der Juden, Nohl, pp. z76-80).
2 Knox's note on 'moral duties' (p. zzo), 'i.e. duties as they are conceived in
what Hegel takes to be Kant's ethics', is unjust, I think, in the implicit suggestion
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 345
At this point we reach the essential limit of love as an expression
of life: the world of material, non-living things, the world of
property. Hegel has already argued in welchem Zwecke denn alles
Ubrige dient that the ideal community of perfect love is only an
illusion when applied to property. This is a realm where reflective
analysis in terms of rights and duties properly holds sway, and the
collisions of the virtues, the conflicts of rights, cannot here be
overcome by love. The act of virtue does not here create a com-
munity between the agent and his neighbour, it expresses no 'whole'
in which they are organs; on the contrary, it involves always a
fixing of the boundary between meum and tuum, and whichever
way the decision goes as between justice and generosity it will be
'opposed' to one virtue so far as it satisfies the requirements of the
other. Love can only express itself in this realm as absolute in-
difference, as contempt. Material property is an alien master and
the ideal of justice as fairness belongs to an alien world.
This, as Hegel says, is 'a litany pardonable only in sermons and
rhymes, for such a command is without truth for us'. 1 In large
part, as we shall see, the fate both of the religion of love and of its
founder is traceable in Hegel's view to the excess involved in this
'flight from the world'. From Hegel's point of view it was this
weakness that rendered Christianity incapable of becoming in its
original form a true folk-religion, since the public life of men as
citizens was ipso facto excluded from its purview, and thus the
third canon of a folk-religion was flouted. 2
that 'what Hegel takes to be Kant's ethics' is not really Kant's view. Compare,
as the probable source of Hegel's remark, 'Tugendlehre', § 16 (Gregor, pp.
108-9)·
I (leben)digen lvIodijikation, Nohl, p. 273 (Knox, p. 221).

2 The third canon requires that 'it must be so constituted that all the needs of
life-the public activities of the State are tied in with it-' (Nohl, p. 20). I am
inclined to suspect that through haste and inadvertence Hegel did not quite
complete his sentence here, and that what he meant to write was 'that all the
needs of life-the public affairs of the State being tied in with it--(are satisfied
by it)'. But there is no need to make an issue about the insertion, since the text
as we have it can hardly bear any meaning but this in any case. In Zu der Zeit,
da Jesus there is a mysterious reference to 'Montesquieus mit Robert in Mars'
(Nohl, p. 389), which casts considerable light on Hegel's conception of the
relation between love and property once the key to it is found. D'Hondt (Hegel
secret, pp. 1.54-82) has shown that it refers to L.-S. Mercier's play IVlontesquieu a
Marseille, in which the action turns upon Montesquieu's determination not to
allow the merchant Robert or his family to discover that he is the anonymous
benefactor who ransomed Robert from captivity by pirates. When he is dis-
covered, his last recourse is flight to escape the banquet that Robert arranges in
 PRANKFURT 1797-1800

We ourselves stand close to the opposite pole where reflection

annihilates love, and strict justice (honesty) leaves no room for
mercy (generosity). We see the folly of attempting to evade the
fate of property; but we also suffer the tyranny of legal regulation
over all living relations. The impulse behind our reflection upon
our own actions and those of others may be the supremely moral
one of mutual improvement. But one who sets out in the friend-
liest way to show another man his error (the 'mote in his eye') falls
right out of the realm of love ('ist unter das Reich der Liebe
gesunken'), because he has to set up a standard whose validity is
absolutely independent of actual human relations. His whole
world, himself included, is made subject to the higher authority
whose mouthpiece he claims to be. This was the weakness of John
the Baptist; but his mission (symbolized by 'the baptism of water')
was, none the less, a necessary preamble to that of Jesus ('the
baptism of the spirit and of fire'), because having the will to
righteousness in this sense, and actually experiencing its fate, are
preconditions for achieving the higher goal of life reconciled with
itself in love. I

7. Punishment and fate

The righteousness of John is the righteousness of Kant; this, even
more than the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees-'the
virtue of positive obedience' -is the target of Hegel's criticism in
his second essay. The subject of this second essay is atonement for
wrong, as it appears on the plane of reflection and on the plane of
life respectively. Positive disobedience and actual criminal justice
are really below the level of the discussion altogether; but the
historical context forces Hegel to begin by distinguishing the

his honour. The way in which the 'beautiful soul' is forced to violate the
reciprocity of feelings essential to 'love' in order to preserve its purity, and the
fact that both Montesquieu's good deed and Robert's gratitude depend on
the possession of property and on a canny regard for its preservation, reveal the
inadequacy and one-sidedness of 'pure love' as a moral principle.
I I have here ventured to interpret the 'contrast' that Hegel makes between
John and Jesus (Nohl, p. 275; Knox, pp. 223-4) in the light of his comments
about the relation of Moralitiit and Liebe in Zu der Zeit, da Jesus (Nohl, p. 394).
The justification for this is, first, the remark about John's relation to 'he that
cometh after me'; secondly, what Hegel says elsewhere about the sacrament
of baptism (Nohl, pp. 3I8-21; Knox, pp. 273-7); 8nd thirdly the fact that
Matthew 7: 13 ff. (the 'allgemeines Bild des vollendeten Menschen' (B. Moral.
Be1-gpredigt, Nohl, p. 399)) begins with 'Enter ye in at the strait gate etc.'.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 347
different ways in which virtue is opposed to positive obedience and
to vice respectively. The man who 'obeys the law' is immoral in
respect of what he omits to do (for no system of imposed duties
can exhaust duty as such); but in respect of what he does he is
simply non-moral (because he does what he has a duty to do but
does it for the wrong reason). Thus 'the immorality of positivity
refers to a different aspect of human relations from the positive
obedience'I (always assuming of course that the positive law in-
volved is capable of becoming a moral law).
Virtue is opposed to mere obedience therefore as something
neutral; but it is opposed to vice (including the inevitable blind
spots involved in mere obedience) as what is directly contrary to it.
In a passage which clearly reveals his own underlying concern,
Hegel goes on to argue that whereas the theoretical moralist should
properly be concerned with the definition of virtue and the
'deduction' of a system of duties from it, the Volkslehrer must be
concerned with the destruction of vice. The whole enterprise of
the theorist takes place on an eternal plane where change and
development is unthinkable. He can only either calculate with his
concepts (dispassionately) or (passionately) denounce the whole
realm of living men for failing to live up to his standards. The
problem of how to bring life closer to the ideal belongs to the
Volkslehrer, and his instrument is punishment, a 'necessary evil
consequence' of transgression that is such as to turn men away
from it. 2
The only thing that is clear about this passage at first sight is
Hegel's underlying concern with the difference between his own
enterprise and that of Kant in the Metaphysik der Sitten. The
characterization of the Volkslehrer does not seem to correspond at
all with Hegel's portrait of Jesus; though it chimes in very well
with certain aspects of Jesus' recorded teaching which he habitually
passes over in silence. 3 Still less does it correspond with anything
in Hegel's own work. But it is obviously written from the reflective
point of view, and it serves appropriately enough to introduce the
I Der Positivitat der Juden, Nohl, p. 276 and n. [aJ; cf. Knox, p. 224.
2 Nohl, p. 277 n. [bJ.
3 For instance, the passage in the Sermon on the Mount summed up in
Hegel's notes as an 'allgemeines Bild des vollendeten Menschen' and dismissed
in his text as 'inadequate parables' contains the forthright assertion: 'Every
tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire'
(Matthew 7: 19). For the explanation of Hegel's silence see p. 348 n. I.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
topic of punishment at that level. This is the key to our problem in
understanding it. Hegel wanted, first of all, to show that once
the reflective point of view is adopted the Volkslehrer's task
becomes impossible. Then by expounding the ideal of 'recon-
ciliation with fate' -in which the reciprocity of punishment is
preserved though in a different form-he could show how the
Volkslehrer does in fact perform his task.
Fate is not, like punishment, a concept; it is experience itself
viewed in a certain way. By getting people to view their actual
experience in this way the Volkslehrer does in fact show them the
'necessary evil consequence of transgression'; but also, in that very
recognition, they find the path to reconciliation, so that the 'evil
consequence' does have the good effect which is required by the
concept of punishment. Thus the work of the Volkslehrer (whether
Jesus or Hegel) does in fact correspond to the abstract definition
provided by reflection, but the authority, the judicial dominion
that appears to belong to him in the concept, does not pertain to
him in actual life at all. l
When he came to revise his manuscript, Hegel decided, here as
elsewhere, to eliminate the explicit contrast between his point of
view and Kant's. He substituted instead a simple characterization
of Kantian morality in practice (i.e. with the necessary 7T>"~pwf-ta or
complement that the virtues are 'modifications of love') and pro-
ceeded directly to the practical problem of retributive justice.
Love can absorb moral law which is only 'formally' opposed to it
(i.e. in its character as a command) just as moral law absorbs
positive law which is formally opposed to it (in its character as an
alien command). But how can it deal with transgression which is
'materially' opposed to them all alike?
At the conceptual level the transgressor deserves punishment.
The right he has cancelled (aufgehoben) is cancelled for him. This is
simply a matter of conceptual implication, of practical reason as a
dispassionate calculative function. But the judge who calculates
and assesses the penalty in practice is not simply 'justice ensouled',
to use a phrase of Aristotle's. He is a living man. He may not be
I Thus the doctrine of 'fate' is Hegel's account of all the 'inadequate parables'
in which Jesus appears to speak of punishment. He passes over these dicta, for
the most part, because he wished to emphasize that not 'fate' but 'reconciliation
with fate' was the real concern of Jesus. From this point of view only the 'sin
against the Holy Spirit' posited by Jesus as being beyond the limit of reconcila-
bility, required specific notice-which Hegel duly accorded to it.
 PHANTASIE UND IlERZ 349

able to execute judgement on the one hand; or he may choose to

remit the penalty voluntarily, on the other. So that in actuality,
retribution is not inevitable; it is not 'necessary', but only con-
tingent. But the proposition 'Transgression deserves retribution'
remains a necessary truth; and hence, although the burden of
retribution can be remitted in fact, there is no way in which it can
be transferred to, or assumed by, anyone other than the trans-
gressor. Thus no consistent account of the Atonement is possible
in terms of the concepts of transgression and retribution.
Furthermore, once we move from the plane of positive law with
its appointed penalties for transgression, to the plane of rational
moral autonomy, not only does the possibility of evading punish-
ment or being pardoned disappear, but even paying the penalty,
though it may satisfy the law, cannot satisfy the conscience of the
transgressor. The laws of freedom are different from the laws of
nature in this, that the restoration of equilibrium never means a
return to the previous situation. Even an immoral man, after being
punished, has always the knowledge that the law is there, that any
further transgression of his will once more bring the penalty upon
him. One who is roused by the experience to moral awareness,
realizes further that the punishment does not change his status in
relation to the concept of rational humanity. He is forever a trans-
gressor, and he must live always with the gnawing consciousness
that what he is, does not, and cannot ever, correspond with what
he ought to be. He may cry 'Lord have mercy on me, a sinner', but
this 'dishonest wish' for mercy is simply a pollution of his own
rational consciousness. Not even God can change the past; and so
not even God can cancel his eternal status as a transgressor. I As we
have already noticed, the prerogative of mercy is one of the things
that creates the gulf between the actual and the ideal. There can be
no place for it in a world where this gulf is supposed by reflective
consciousness to be abolished.
The principle of retribution is an analogue at the level of free-
dom for the natural principle of reciprocity. Just as in physics 'for
every action there is an equal and opposite reaction' so in ethics
'an eye for an eye' -the transgressor must suffer the effect of his

I From this point of view God is 'only the power of the highest thought, only
the administrator of the law' (Nohl, p. 281; Knox, p. 230); compare Kant,
'Tugendlehre', § 13, Akad., vi. 438-9, especially the footnote (Gregor, pp.
1 0 4-5).
350 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

own transgression. I And just as in nature it is the succession of

action and reaction that is visible, whereas the abiding equilibrium
is something discoverable only by the mind, so in penal justice it is
the succession of transgression and retribution that is visible, the
law itself remains a pure concept.
Fate, on the other hand, is the actual experience of reciprocal
action and reaction in the abiding equilibrium of a living whole.
There can be here no question of evasion or of pardon because no
law is invoked. The Eumenides and the ghost of Banquo speak not
for the law but for the life that Orestes and Macbeth destroyed.
Transgression of law may be, as we saw in the case of the plucking
of the ears of corn on the Sabbath, a rebellion against slavery, a
return to life from a condition of death. 2 But transgression against
life can never be this. Life is never wiped out; to destroy life, or to
mutilate it, is only to sunder one's own life, to raise the ghost of the
slain against oneself. There is only the one 'living' God, in whom
we all 'live, move, and have our being'. 3 All that is destroyed by
transgression against life is the harmony of life, its 'friendliness';
in place of the harmony of love, a balance of natural forces is set
up, and reflective consciousness is able to discover the law that
governs the equilibrium. But this law, the law of life, is plainly only
a reflex of life itself. Life in its integrity is above the law which
governs it in its disruption. Thus if a transgressor can be recon-
ciled with the fate he has roused against himself, he will not be
troubled afterwards by the mighty shadow of the law of reason.
Reconciliation with fate is possible because no pollution of
something that is pure is involved; the transgressor need not cry
to a just Judge to have mercy and thereby cease to be just. He does
not appeal to an independent, self-sufficient 'power' existing on a
different plane, the universal realm of pure thought. Rather he
surrenders voluntarily to the vengeance of the life he has injured.
He recognizes that the might of fate is not that of an alien master,
I Der Positivitat deT Juden, Nohl, pp. 279-80; Knox, p. 228. \Vith this passage,

and Knox's illuminating note 54, compare the remark about the lex talionis in
Jesus trat nicht lange (Nohl, p. 27r; Knox, p. 218). That this remark is almost
certainly an addition made by Hegel in the process of revision can be inferred
from the disorder apparent in Roques's edition, p. r86.
2 Der Positivitiit der Juden, Nohl, p. 280.
3 Compare: 'Es [das Leben] ist unsterblich ... denn Leben ist vom Leben
nicht verschieden, wei I das Leben in der einigen Gottheit ist' (Nohl, p. 280;
Knox, p. 229). This 'living' God should be contrasted with the God of reflection
referred to above, p. 349 n. r.
 HANTAsIE UND HERZ
before whom he must at all costs preserve his dignity at least; it is
only his own life made hostile to itself by his own act.
Transgression and retribution do not stand in a causal relation
to one another. If they did there could be no breaking of the chain of
vengeance, no transformation of the Furies, the Erinyes, into the
Kindly Ones, the Eumenides, because the law would be absolute.
But if one who has roused the law of life against himself voluntarily
accepts his fate, the original harmony is restored. Earlier we
pointed out that Kant's 'law of freedom' is not like the 'law of
nature' in this respect. But the experience of freedom is like the
operation of nature. The law of freedom cannot restore the status
quo as the law of nature does, precisely because the law of freedom
is below freedom, whereas the law of nature is above nature. I
In the first draft the expressions 'life' and 'self-consciousness'
were used interchangeably, and the reconciliation of life with itself
was referred to indifferently as 'love', as 'friendship', or as 'faith of
consciousness in itself'. In his revised version Hegel settled fairly
consistently on the terms 'life' and 'love' respectively, though most
of the others still occur here and there. 2 The reason for this
development is fairly plainly Hegel's desire to minimize the use of
'reflective' terms. He decided, as we shall shortly see, that the first
chapter of John employs the most 'authentic' language available-
while his own earlier terminology was all of it spoiled in some way.
'Friendship' (Freundschaft), the natural antonym of 'hostility' or
'enmity' (Feindschaft), had the disadvantage of being the term
Kant had employed for an ideal which so far as it went was almost
identical with Hegel's own, but which was sharply distinguished

I This seems to be the thought behind the cancelled passage, Nohl, p. 281
n. raJ. The student should perhaps be warned that a comparison of Nohl's
edition with that of Roques reveals a state of confusion in Roques's text extend-
ing from about the middle of Nohl, p. 280, to the middle of Nohl, p. 288 (cf.
Roques, pp. 150-9). The natural hypothesis is that Roques did not understand
the relation between the first draft (on the left half of the page) and the revisions
and additions (written mainly on the right half of the page). In that case the
text as we have it is a patchwork of first draft with many later explanations and
expansions. One can only guess which passages are earlier and which later, but
it does not seem to matter because nothing more serious than a few variations
in terminology appears to be involved. Even where Hegel cancelled his first
draft (as here), only a change of direction, so to speak, not one of doctrine, is
involved.
2 For cancellations and changes which demonstrate the interchangeability of

the terms, see especially Nohl, p. 283 n. [aJ and Reines Leben zu denken (Nohl,
p. 302 with nn. [bJ and [c)).
35:: FRANKFURT 1797-1800

by Kant from the more general term 'love'. 1 'Consciousness' is,

of course, only one side of the reflective duality united in 'love',
and even the term 'self-consciousness' tends to obscure the fact
that 'pure life' or 'love' is not just the harmony and spontaneous
free expression of all the powers and faculties of an individual (who
is only a 'modification of life')2 but also refers, usually quite directly,
to his integration into a wider 'whole' (minimally, the marriage
tie). 'Faith of consciousness in itself' is a direct development of the
interpretation of rational moral autonomy given in The Life of
Jesus, and thus we have in it another connecting link between that
work and 'The Spirit of Christianity'. 3
Of course, the favoured terms 'life' and 'love' are meant in any
case to retain the 'reflective' connotations of 'consciousness' and
'self-consciousness' even though the oppositions of subject and
object, self and other, are done away with in them. Love is self-
conscious, it is 'the feeling of life which finds itself again', 4 and the
cycle of 'life' from birth to new birth is a cycle of developing
awareness in which we move from the situation of the new-born
babe to that of the parents who have brought the birth about.
The principal reason why Hegel now gives such prominence to
the term 'love' (which he managed very largely to avoid in The
Life of Jesus) is exactly the reason why Kant distrusted it, and was
obliged usually to add a qualifying adjective when he used it: it
applies to such a wide range of experience. It applies at one
extreme to the 'feeling of life which finds itself again' in the sexual
I Cf. 'Tugendlehre', §§ 46-7, Ahad., vi. 469-73; Gregor, pp. 140-5.
2 If 'modification of life' means simply 'an individual man or woman' (the
most basic 'modifications' appear to be the two sexes just as the most basic
expression of 'love' is their union) we might expect to find that a 'modification
of love' is not 'one of the virtues' but rather 'a man or woman inspired by love'.
But Hegel explicitly identifies the virtues as 'modifications of love'. Of course,
one of his purposes in speaking this way is to emphasize that what he is here
calling a 'virtue' is an activity, not a disposition. But in order to appreciate the
coherence of his usage we only need to recognize that 'modifications' of 'life'
are living mortals (transient 'modes' of an immortal life-line which is an 'infinite
mode' of the life of God, the one real 'substance': cf. p. 366 n. 3 below).
'Modifications' of 'love' on the other hand are different natural ties between
living mortals: e.g. husband-wife, parent-child, etc. These felt relations 'fulfil'
the reflective duties of men to one another (the 'virtues' of Kant).
3 For the interpretation of Kantian moral autonomy see the discussion with
Nicodemus (Nohl, pp. 79-80); the development into a doctrine of 'faith in
oneself' is implicit in what Jesus there says of himself, but is best seen in his
remarks to the repentant 'Magdalen' (Nohl, p. 9::).
4 Der Positivitiit der Juden, Nohl, p. ::83 (Knox, p. ::3::)·
 PHANTASIE aND HERZ 353
act, and at the other to the cry of Jesus on the cross: 'Father
forgive them for they know not what they do.' It covers the whole
range of fate, for it can reconcile not only the guilty but also the
innocent with their fate. The Crucifixion is for Hegel the type of
'the most exalted guilt, the guilt of innocence [der Schuld der
Unschuld], . I If someone suffers 'innocently' then he is guilty of
injury to life even though he may be quite unwitting of it, or his
conscience may be perfectly clear in respect to it. Jesus is the perfect
model of the 'pure soul' who quite consciously does injury to life
in order to maintain the supreme value (das Hochste).z Because
pure love was his motive his honour is the greater; otherwise the
fact that he perfectly understood what he was doing would make
his transgression so much the worse.
In the case of a 'pure soul' and generally in other cases also,3
fate appears to arise from an 'alien deed'. But in reality, no matter
how life may treat us, our fate arises from the attitude that we
adopt toward what happens. Whether we fight back, or simply
grieve over the unfairness of our lot, we are reflecting on our life,
judging it, and laying claim to our rights. But in fighting back we
know that we are appealing to might, not simply to right, and we
recognize that our might may be overcome; we accept the risk of
failure and assume responsibility. Passive grief, on the other hand,
is denial of responsibility, and deserves its fate for that reason.
Again, those who appeal to arbitration give up even the reflective
disrupted life of grief and 'surrender themselves dead', for they no
longer insist on living their own lives in their own way. The
'beautiful soul', finally, preserves its freedom (as thus defined) and
I Ibid. Knox (p. 233 n.) is wrong in thinking that the reference here is prim-
arily to the 'fate' of a Greek tragic hero such as Oedipus. No doubt Hegel's
concept of reconciliation owes a great deal to the Oedipus Coloneus. But Oedipus
killed a man and married a woman. One could not say of him therefore either
that he was innocent of all offence, or that his fate 'appears to arise only through
alien action [fremde Tat]'. The fate of Jesus does appear to arise this way for he
seeks not to act (either with hostility-as in the killing of Laius-or by establish-
ing natural ties of love-as in the marriage of Jocasta).
2 Nohl, p. 284. The injury that Jesus did to life consisted in not living it
properly (and in encouraging his disciples not to live it either). He did not, like
Socrates, marry and beget children; and he even denied that he had any family
ties. See further below, pp. 369-72.
3 In order to understand the assertion that 'a fate appears to arise only through
alien action' we have to take the Furies pursuing Orestes, or Banquo's Ghost
appearing to Macbeth, as the objective presences which they appear to be in
Aeschylus and Shakespeare. The 'alien deed' in the case of Oedipus must
presumably be the pestilence that falls upon his city.
82'8688 B b
35+ FRANKFURT 1797-1800

avoids the disruption of its consciousness into the world of 'right'

(things as they ought to be) and the world of 'might' (things as they
are), by voluntarily surrendering whatever is seized, and not
grieving over it. But in so doing it is guilty of grievous injury to
life, for it withdraws from all the relationships in and through
which life itself is developed. Jesus both fights (but not against
others) and grieves (but not over what others have done to him).
Through absolute forgiveness he sets himself above fate; but in
his willingness to go to any lengths to preserve his freedom, to
keep himself unspotted from the world, he must in the end give up
life itself. He does no injury to life, but he is guilty of supreme
injury to it. I
The 'beautiful soul' is a topic that does not properly belong in
this essay, however; the 'fate' of Jesus is something to which we
must return later. It is only relevant here because through the
forgiveness of others (the attitude of the beautiful soul) we receive
forgiveness ourselves (and so heal the ugliness of our sinful souls)
In forgiveness we rise above all claims about rights and all judge-
ment of wrongs. But we are not thereby pardoned, or exempted
from any penalties that may be due at that level; recognition of the
'justice' of fate is part of what it means to forgive others.
Wherever Jesus found this attitude-Lebensfiille, the 'fulness of
life' that gives one a sympathetic understanding even of those who
injure one-he could confirm the 'faith' of whoever had it by
assuring him that his sins were indeed forgiven. 'Faith in Jesus'
was the recognition of the 'fulness of life' in him on the part of
those in whom the same fulness was only implicitly present. This
recognition is the 'light', the conscious aspect of the experience of
love. The man who 'believes in the light' is aware of the actuality
of love in his relation with Jesus, but not yet aware that it is his own
actuality as well as that of Jesus. 2 Jesus on the other hand was
never in this condition of faith: the beautiful soul knows its own
I The 'relationships' (Beziehungen) whose surrender is mentioned in Nohl,

p. 285, are not, as Knox thinks. property relations-or even relationships of

ordinary friendship. They are the natural ties of life mentioned in Nohl, p. 286,
in the citation from Luke 14: 26.
z Da/3 auch Jesus den Zusammenhang, Nohl. p. 289 (Knox, p. 239): 'Faith is a
knowledge of spirit through spirit and only like spirits can know and understand
one another.' 'Faith' is here the conscious aspect of love as distinct from its
actuality. Thus it is a rather special case of the 'faith' analysed in Glauben ist die
Art. To have 'faith' here is to be conscious of the actuality of love in another but
not yet clearly aware that what one is conscious of is a 'whole' that includes oneself.
 PHANTAS1E UND HERZ 355
beauty, and thereby knows the whole range of human possibilities.
For the being of a human spirit is nothing but its actual and
possible relations with others, so that to say that Jesus 'knew'
himself logically implies that he knew also whose sins were
'forgiven', i.e. who could be reconciled with him. I To a people
who believed that righteousness was a matter of obedience, and
mercy the prerogative of a superhuman external judge, one who
went about telling his fellows that their sins were forgiven could
only appear to be either a shameless blasphemer or a madman.
They hoped to purchase forgiveness from their God by 'paying
their debts'. The attitude of one who desires to be reconciled
(typified by Mary Magdalen) is different, in that he offers what he
has freely, without any thought of 'making up for' the wrongs he
has done. There was nothing that Mary Magdalen could say in
the company of those who are righteous according to the law,
because any words she might use would introduce, at least by
implication, such reflective concepts as 'duty' or 'recompense'.
Hegel declares that what she did is the only really 'beautiful' action
in the Gospel, and that when Jesus described it as a Ka'\6v EPYOV
he was using the term Ka'\6v in its proper living sense, as one
'beautiful soul' naturally would in speaking of another.2 On the
other side, the comment of Simon the Pharisee shows what
Lebensfiille looks like from the standpoint of positivity: 'If this
man were a prophet he would know the woman is a sinner'; and
the attitude of the disciples is that of reflective rationality: 'The oil
could be sold and the money given to the poor.'

8. The religion of love

When Peter recognized the divinity of Jesus he showed that he had
realized the essential priority and superiority of life in its integrity,
I I have offered here an interpretation which goes beyond the text of Kuhnheit,
die Zuversicht, Nohl, p. 290 (Knox, p. 240), and seeks to explain why 'a whole
nature has in a moment penetrated another through and through and sensed its
harmony or disharmony'. 'Wholeness', if I understand Hegel aright, never
belongs to any individual in isolation. This explains why Jesus was bound to go
about 'forgiving sins'.
2 1m Geiste der Juden, Nohl, pp. 292-3 (Knox, pp. 242-4). Hegel knew, of
course, that the ordinary use of the adjective in moral contexts had little connec-
tion with 'beauty'. In its ordinary use he even calls it 'meaningless' (i.e. it does
not have its proper living meaning, but only a dead conventional one). Even
Jesus uses it 'meaninglessly' in a discourse for a general audience: see the note
on Matthew 26: 10, as compared with Matthew 26: 24, in Zu der Zeit, da
.'Jesus, Nohl, p. 397.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

over all the conceptions of reflective consciousness: law and

obedience, justice and mercy, were no longer relevant in his
relations with God. He knew that God and man were one in love-
hence he too, like Jesus, could speak for God and say: 'Thy sins
are forgiven.'! With this recognition, the need for Jesus as an
individual focus of faith ceased; it became necessary, rather, that
he should 'go away'.
The leave-taking of Jesus took its appropriate form as a love-
feast, a sharing of life at its most primitive level, self-maintenance. 2
By symbolizing his own surrender of existence in the feast itself
Jesus gave the last supper a quasi-religious significance. But Hegel
is anxious that we should understand that in so far as it was a love-
feast, it was not symbolic, it was an actual experience and expression
of fellowship. Eating together with one's enemies is against all
natural feeling, and the guest-relation in a Middle Eastern society
is not a ceremonial matter in which the understanding uses the
imagination to symbolize the establishment of friendship; it is,
rather, the direct and appropriate imaginative expression of friend-
ship. The solemn declaration 'This is my body, etc.', though it
brought the experience of love to the verge of religion, did not really
make the supper a religious act, precisely because the religious
symbol was consumed in the experience. The twelve could ex-
perience their union, the ceremony made it a visible fact which
they could imaginatively grasp. They drank from the same cup,
and Jesus called the wine his 'blood', knowing well that for the
Jews the blood was the life principle, the bearer of the spirit,
which the Lord has forbidden them to touch in the first law that
was ever given to them. 3 Thus in the feast they felt the whole range
of their fellowship. But it was not a religious experience, because
the abiding presence of God was nowhere represented in it. In a
religious experience, objectivity must be overcome but not done
away with altogether (as it is in eating and drinking). The abiding
presence of a beautiful object-the statue of the God-achieves
this end, because sensibility takes its pleasure, but the thing is not
thereby consumed. The thing can of course be consumed (ground
I 1m Geiste der Juden, Nohl, pp. 29!-2 (Knox, p. 242).
2 Der Abschied, den Jesus, Nohl, pp. 297-30r (Knox, pp. 248-53).
3 Cf. Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung, Nohl, p. 373 and Mit Abraham, dem
wahren Stammvater, Nohl, p. 244 (Knox, p. r83). (When Hegel says: 'Not only
is the wine blood, the blood is spirit' (Nohl, pp. 298-9), he must surely have
Genesis 9: 4 in mind.)
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 357
into dust, for example), but then its divine aspect (its beauty)
vanishes also.
In this consuming of the Godhead, this 'promise of something
divine which melted away in the mouth', the inadequacy of the
religion of love is revealed. For the attitude of love in its purest
form, the material world is simply a limit, an unsurpassable barrier.
The God of love reconciles all life, and vanquishes forever the need
to slip back into the reflective attitude, which threatens the
integrity of love at every moment in ordinary experience; but his
kingdom is not of this world, and he cannot be adequately repre-
sented in this world. I
Given that we cannot picture the 'Father' -any more than a
man could see the face of Moses' 'Lord' and live-how are we to
think of him? We must abstract from everything that man does and
suffers, from the whole material sensible world against which his
life expresses itself, and fasten upon the pure character of human
activity. We must leave aside everything temporal, what man was
or will be, and grasp what he eternally is; we must somehow grasp
life in its 'oneness' before it develops and becomes reflective. But
we must retain the consciousness that it is our life-for if we think
of ourselves as determined by the universal power of life, we shall
be faced with the 'living God' of positive religion (the Absolute
Lord), or with the 'dominant universal' (the God of reflective
Reason). Above the iron order of Nature (das All der Objekte)
there is only the awful presence of the Author of Nature and
Nature's law (' die leere Einheit des Alls der Objekte als herrschendes
Wesen tiber dieselben').2 This totality of causal connection (das
Ganze der Bestimmtheiten) is quite another thing from the whole-
ness of life, the one fount from which all separate lives, all spon-
taneous impulses, and all free actions spring. Jesus expressed this
relation of origin by speaking of the 'Father', though he did not
mean to refer to anything other than life as he himself knew and
experienced it. He had to speak in this way because he was only a
I Am interessantesten wird es sein, Nohl, p. 302 (Knox, p. 253). This appears to

be a loose page which Hegel lifted, perhaps, from the beginning of an early
complex of notes on the religion of Jesus and inserted here in order to make a
bridge between the earlier discussion and Reines Leben zu denken, which contains
his reflections on the first chapter of John (cf. Roques, pp. 201-2 where it
appears as an appendage to Zu der Zeit, da Jesus; and Nohl, p. 394 (at heading
'C') for the notes of which it is a developed form).
Z Reines Leben zu denken, Nohl, pp. 302-3 and 303 n. [a]. The comment about

das All der Objekte occurs in the cancelled passage.

 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

mortal man, setting his own life against the 'infinity of lordship
and subjection to a lord' in Jewish life. The wholeness of life is not
really something above or external to the living man, although it
must appear so to those who are aware of it as an ideal in which
they have faith.
One who really has the experience is in a difficulty about how to
communicate it to those who are in this condition of faith. The
reflective distinction between the actual and the possible, and the
conceptions of power and causal agency, are so deep-rooted in
language that he must either speak falsely or speak in riddles. He
can only use those elements and strata of the language which are
normally used to refer to bonds of spontaneous feeling in which
freedom is preserved. He cannot properly speak in the 'reciprocal'
style of the understanding ('Virtue deserves happiness', 'With
whatsoever measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again',
'For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction') because
to do so involves accepting the assumptions of 'right' and 'law'
which belong to life in its sundered state. But in a society where
the spirit of lordship and obedience has penetrated even into the
most intimate living relations-that of 'son' to 'father', to take the
most crucial example I-SO that all loving activity is forced into
the language of mercy, or of material benevolence, and appears as
the capricious bounty or grace of a lord, even the Wechselstil (i.e. the
language of the reflective understanding) may sound less harsh
than the materialistic images that we find in the gospel of John.
Hegel believed, apparently, that it was because the Jews could
only conceive of a loving God as a bounteous provider of material
gifts that Jesus spoke of himself as the bringer of salvation to men
as a gift, and spoke of his gift in terms of material enjoyment; and
because even a father was for the Jews a 'Lord' Jesus could not
avoid speaking of the reintegration of life as a kingdom. 2
'The beginning of St. John's Gospel contains a series of propo-
sitions about God and the divine expressed in more authentic
language.' To say that the Logos 'was in the beginning' and that it
'was with God' and so on is to speak in reflective, temporal terms
I In this connection the unpublished fragment Die schonen, ihrer Natur nach
is particularly significant (cf. p. 290 n. 2 above).
2 Reines Leben zu denken, Nohl, pp. 305-6 (Knox, pp. 255-6); cf. Das Wesen
des Jesus, Noh!, p. 321 (Knox, p. 278), and Mit dem Mute und dem Glauben,
Nohl, p. 328 (Knox, p. 285). As Knox says, the meaning of Wechselstil is doubt-
ful; I hope that my interpretation will be found persuasive.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 359
about something which is a living experience. Two ways of
interpreting John's assertions naturally suggest themselves-both
of them equally one-sided. If we think of them as propositions
about a matter of fact, the Logos becomes an individual thing;
while if we think of them as asserting relations of ideas, the Logos
is identifiable as reason. Hegel himself seemed in The Life of Jesus
to interpret the text in the latter way. But it was clear that even
there he was not talking of conceptual relations but of an actual
living power in the world. Reason in The Life of Jesus is not an
abstract aspect of the world, an ens rationis. It is the life of the
world itself: and the world as a living whole is God; or, as Hegel
expresses it now, 'God is the matter in the form of the Logos'.
God and Logos are reflectively distinguishable as matter and form;
but in the primitive stage of 'oneness' (,before the creation', to use
the theological metaphor) they are not distinct but identical ('the
Logos was with God, the Logos was God'). The creation is the
work of the Logos: that is to say life only achieves full expression
through conscious development in a multiplicity of instances. In
each instance the distinction of God and Logos appears as that
between 'life' and 'light'. The 'light' is in every living man, but
only in Jesus was this conscious side of his being developed to the
perfect awareness of his own life. To others who are aware of the
human order (the cosmos into which every man comes), the light
appears as an ideal of what life ought to be: something to which,
like John the Baptist, they 'bear witness' (as rational beings). The
'light' in fact is in the human order (i.e. it is the natural harmonious
expression of human life itself) but those who 'bear witness' to it
think of it as coming from elsewhere. Life and light in harmony
produce the whole human order, but the members of that order do
not realize this, and think of them as opposed (as the life of man and
the law of the Lord, the living God whose glory no man may
behold and live).l Moses and other great leaders and transformers
I 'He (i.e., according to Hegel, every man as he comes into the world lighted by
the true light) was in the cosmos and the cosmos was made by him and the
cosmos knew him not. He came unto his own and his own received him not'
(i.e. men reached the point of development where they perceived the ideal of
rational existence but they did not 'receive' that ideal into their own order of
existence: compare, for instance, the inspiration of Moses).
This interpretation assumes that Hegel is serious when he says that until
verse 14 the Evangelist speaks of 'truth' and 'man' in universal terms. But even
as he says this he notes that the Logos has revealed itself already as an individual
in the avlipw1ToV lpX6p.€vOV d, TOV K6ap.ov to which he refers aVT6v in verse 10.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
of human society have been lighted by the true light, and have felt
the kinship between man and God; but only in Jesus did life
achieve perfect self-consciousness. Thus his name is the name
of the Logos, of the light itself; and through him men can learn
that they are not lighted by the light that comes from God above
them, but by the light of the life itself that is in them.
This whole discussion of the difficulty of expressing the true
relation between man and God for Jewish ears, with the accom-
panying exegesis of the first chapter of John, was inserted by
Hegel in his second draft. Having made this major insertion he
proceeded to fill out somewhat the rather spare outline of the
discussion of Jesus as 'Son of God' and 'Son of man', which was
all that he had originally written down. 'Father and son' is not a
relation of 'likeness', discoverable by reflective abstraction (the
'conceptual oneness' of things which are of the same type); it is a
'living relation of living beings, likeness oflife'. Father and son are
'modifications of the same life', not separate substances. The sub-
stance that is modified in these ways is the life of the tribe or clan;
and the relation of a clan to its members is not that of whole to
part, for the whole nature of the clan, the community of blood, is
expressed in each clan member. This character of living relations-
that the 'whole' is present in every 'part' if it is a properly isolated
part-may seem to the eyes of enlightened Europeans to be an
oriental fancy, but it is evident enough in the most primitive form
of life, the life of plants. Jesus himself used the analogy of the vine
and the branches. Hegel takes this up, and pushes it further, in
what appears to be a reference to the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity:
A tree which has three branches makes up together with them One
I do not see how Hegel could say that 'thus far we have heard only of
truth itself and man in universal terms', unless he held that the human world
is the work of the true light in every individual man. But the point of his com-
ment on verse 14 probably is that when we reach it, we realise that only one man
has actually come into the world lighted perfectly by the true light. So the
reference to 1TaV'ra av9pW7TOV now becomes singular. Jesus is 'everyman', he
is the Logos itself in the shape of an individual, because the absolute 'power'
of light (consciousness), already present in each and every man, is in his case
exactly equal to the impulse of life. Each and every man can thus receive from
'everyman' not a new power, but a new direction of the light that he has.
Instead of being lighted from outside by the eternal holiness of the Lord 'in
whose sight shall no man living be justified', he can recognize that the light is in
him, that he is a 'son of God'.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
tree; but every son of the tree, every branch (also its other children,
leaves and blossoms) is itself a tree; the fibres bringing sap to the
branch from the trunk, are of the same nature as the roots; a tree stuck
upside down in the earth will put forth leaves from the roots spread in
the air, and the boughs will root themselves in the earth-and it is just
as true that there is only One tree here, as that there are three trees.!
I do not know whether there is in fact any plant in which all of
these properties are in fact combined; but this is Hegel's version of
that will-o'-the-wisp of Goethe's, the Ur-Pjlanze. We have here
three triads, two of them naturally given, and one stipulated by
Hegel himself; and all are essential for the expression of his mean-
ing. In the first place there is the stipulated triad of branches.
Jesus himself said: 'I am the vine and you are the branches.' Thus
ordinary men are related to Jesus, the 'light of the world', as the
branches are to the trunk from which they receive the life-giving
sap; and Jesus, 'the Son', is related to God, 'the Father', as the
trunk is to the roots (there ought, I suppose, to be three of them
too, for perfect symmetry when the tree is replanted upside down).
Thus Hegel's supposition that if the tree were turned upside down
or the branches were cut off and planted separately life would go
on in the one tree or the three trees just as before, carries the
implication that 'the Father', 'the Son', and 'those that believe on
his Name', are only accidentally distinguishable. A branch can
become a root or a trunk (but the root we may note must become a
branch before it can become a trunk: the 'word' must be 'made
flesh' if it is to be the 'true light').
This is not all, however. The natural triad of root, trunk, and
branch is not the only reason why Hegel himself stipulated three
branches. We have to consider also his reference to the 'other
children' of the tree, the leaves and the blossoms. 2 Branches,
leaves, and blossoms are the three moments of the process of
development through which the propagation of the tree takes
place in the ordinary way. The dividing or overturning of the tree
is not, after all, a natural occurrence. But in the normal course of
nature we do have the seasonal cycle of bare branches (oneness-
the Father), bud and leaf (reflective consciousness-the Son),
and pollination of blossoms (love--the Spirit), to produce the seed
I Reines Leben zu denken, Nohl, p. 309 (Knox, p. 261).

• The original nucleus of Hegel's analogy was the relation of the trunk to
'boughs, foliage, and fruit': see the passage quoted below, p. 362 n.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
through which the cycle of new life is generated. Hegel's tree has
three branches because the three Persons of the Trinity express
the three phases in the development of human life towards the
'true light'. The 'One Substance' of this tree is the life, which in
the shape of the sap goes up and down from root to branches no
matter which way the tree is set. This movement of the sap is the
'proceeding of the Spirit' from the 'Father' to all of the 'sons'.
For although the Spirit is on the one hand only one of the 'Persons'
-one phase of life-yet that phase is the moment of perfect
development (the tree in blossom), and if we ask what God is,
or what life is, or what the One Substance is of which we and
everything else are 'modifications', the only correct answer is
'Spirit'.
The clear statement of this doctrine presupposes a full under-
standing of the nature of freedom, which was only achieved at
the theoretical level by Kant. Jesus could only utter paradoxes
which seemed blasphemous to the 'positive' consciousness of the
Jews, and are taken by enlightened reflection to be mere meta-
phors. Now, some metaphors really are only plays of intellect.
But metaphor and imagery are the natural mode in which life and
living relations express themselves; and if these expressions are
regarded as mere play, forms whose truth content is entirely
translatable into terms of the abstract concepts of Verstand, their
real meaning may be lost. The name 'Son of God', for example,
which appears to the enlightened man to be a 'mere' metaphor,
really expresses the essential nature of Jesus as 'everyman'; while
the name 'Son of man', which appears quite obviously applicable
to him and to the rest of us, really does represent only an intellec-
tual conceit. For no one can be the son of the abstract universal
'Manhood', and the expression 'Son of man' is only a picturesque
way of saying 'a man'. The 'Son of man' is a member of the
abstract class of men, as distinct from a member in the 'brother-
hood of man' which is the brotherhood of sons of God.
For the enlightened man-for Kant-it is a 'holy mystery' that
the 'Son of God' should also be 'Son of man', that the rational
ideal of manhood should be an actual man. But this is only a
mystery for reflective thought which takes its abstract definitions
to have an absolute status. The function of judgement is assigned
to the 'Son of man', not, as Kant thinks,I because it is only from a
I Reines Leben zu denken, Noh!, pp. 309-10 (Knox, p. 262). The context of the
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
human point of view that there can be a 'judgement of merit' (as
against a 'judgement of guilt' pronounced in conscience by the
Holy Spirit), but because it is only from the abstractly human point
of view that there can be judgement at all. God the Father does
not judge anyone because there is no one standing over against
Him to be judged; and the function of the Son of God is not to
condemn but to save (precisely in the sense of rescuing men from
the abstract point of view under which they are bound in conscience
to condemn themselves). It is, however, only as Son of God that
the Son of man can have divine authority to judge; for only in the
consciousness of being a son of God does one have the proper
criterion by which men must be judged (the 'true light'). By this
criterion those who are condemned are precisely the men who
judge by the criteria of abstract reflection and are incapable of
recognizing any other. This is the 'sin against the Spirit for which
there can be no forgiveness'. I
In ordinary judgement, exemplified in the justice meted out in
'clear cases' where no discretionary power or prerogative of
mercy is invoked, the judge is first (on the material side) invested
with positive authority: he has the power to execute judgement,
that is to say he can compel the accused to stand trial before him,
and in the event of condemnation to suffer punishment according
to his sentence. But secondly (on the formal side) he is only able
to use this power because he has rational authority, he knows the
law and can compare the actual deed of the accused with the
conceptual ideal contained in the law. Where they are 'sundered'
he condemns, where they are 'bound together' he acquits.
whole discussion of the dogmas of the Trinity and of the Last Judgement is
provided by Kant's comments on these matters in the 'General Remark' to his
Religion (cf. Akad. vi. 137-47; Greene and Hudson, pp. 129-38). As Nohl says,
the point about the 'holy mystery' is plainer in the first version (given on p. 304,
footnote, [b]):
'The connection [Zusammenhang] of the infinite with the finite is of course a
holy mystery, because it is life, and hence the secret of life; once we begin
to speak of a twofold nature, the divine and the human, no joining [Verbindung]
is to be found, because in every joining they still remain two if both have been
posited as absolutely distinct. This relation [Verhaltnis] of a man to God, his
being the son of God, as a trunk is father of the boughs, the foliage and the
fruit was bound to shock the Jews to the depths, since they had placed an
unbridgeable gulf between human and divine being [Wesen] and granted to
our nature no share in the divine.'
I Cf. here Reines Leben Z!l denken, Nohl, pp. 310-II (Knox, pp. 262-4); first

draft of same, Nohl, p. 304 n.; and Das Wesen des Jesus, Nohl, pp. 316 (Knox,
p. 270) and 318 (Knox, pp. 272-3).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

Divine judgement is very different. First the aspect of material

dominance is altogether lacking. The 'Son of God' has authority
but no power. He does not need power, for his judgement as 'Son
of man' is only the rational recognition of the cleavage existing
between those who are 'sons of God' and those who are 'sons of
men'. What he has to decide as Son of man is whether the par-
ticular 'son of man' before him still has the capacity to become a
'son of God' or not. The question then is: 'Does this man himself
judge and condemn by ordinary reflective standards, and if so can
he be brought, by the fate that befalls those who do this, to surrender
his rational authority and adopt the ideal of reconciliation through
forgiveness?' If he can, then the Son of God in his 'saving'
capacity can say: 'Thy sins be forgiven thee.' If he cannot, then by
his own unchangeable standards he is condemned already. No
judgement is declared by the Son of God as such; but speaking
on the finite human level, which is the only one on which com-
munication is here possible, he must say 'Depart from me', for he
cannot live with those who are simply 'sons of men'. The world of
ordinary human judgement is one from which the Son of God
must sunder himself by flight.
If we try to think of divinity and humanity as 'two natures'
combined in the person of the particular individual Jesus then we
'posit the understanding', that is to say we operate on the assumption
that 'everything is what it is and not another thing', and at the very
same time we 'destroy' it, for we contradict the assumption by
supposing that the two natures are united in one individual. 1 This
suicide of the intellect shows, first, that the relation of Jesus to
God cannot be grasped as an item of reflective knowledge (Er-
kenntnis); but in the readiness for such a suicide the practical
experience of faith is already present, at least in so far as the
superiority of love to all reflective canons of judgement is granted.
In spite of the absolute inequality between God and man, we find
in Jesus thus paradoxically conceived a ground for hoping that
God may feel real 'compassion' (Mitleiden) toward us-a bond
very different from that between a rich lord and a poor servant on
whom he bestows largesse. 2

I Reines Leben zu denken, Nohl, p. 3II (Knox, p. 264).

2 Wenn Jesus so sprach, Nohl, p. 312 (Knox, p. 265). I take this to be a bridge
fragment written to link the second version of Reines Leben zu denken to Dar
Wesen des Jesus. In the first version it appears that Hegel wrote only a brief
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
Religious faith differs from ordinary belief-and from Kant's
rational faith-in being directed towards a Gegenstand which can
never be an Objekt. God is not a distinct entity belonging to the
actual order of things-even if we include here a 'supersensible'
order. God is spirit and can only be known in spirit, that is by
discovering the presence of the divine in oneself, and at the same
time discovering that it overflows the boundaries of one's finite
self. This overflowing of the self, the discovery that some 'other'
is involved in the 'whole' which is one's real self, is what is meant
by 'spirit'. But at first the identity of self and other (or in the most
nearly analogous reflective terms, their reciprocal dependence,
their complementary character) is not recognized. Only the
dependence of oneself on the other is felt. This is precisely the state
of faith (which Hegel identifies as the mean condition between
ignorance and knowledge, and-like Plato-as love in its unful-
filled condition).I When Peter declared Jesus to be the 'Son of
God', Jesus took his recognition as the sign that he had achieved
'knowledge', but as soon as he tested this by speaking of his own
death Peter's condition was revealed as still only one of faith. Peter
did not realize that his faith in Jesus sprang from the same presence
of God in himself that he recognized in Jesus. In fact Jesus had to
essay, Reines Leben zu denken, which gave only the barest outline of his argument
and tailed off finally into mere notes (Nohl, pp. 302-3 with nn. [a] and [b]). Then
he went on directly to write the first version of lVlit dem lVlute und dem Glauben
(Nohl, pp. 324-6, 326 n. [a], 331, 333-5). When he came to revise what he had
written he realized that considerable development was required. So he first
wrote Das Wesen des Jesus (four numbered sheets, N ohl, pp. 3 I 2-24) and marked
the point at which it was to be inserted (see Nohl's note on p. 304). Then he
cancelled his original discussion of Kant's 'General Remark' to Part III of the
Religion and wrote his exegesis of John I: 1-15 and a discussion of the titles
'Son of God' and 'Son of man'. Only the much less perfunctory discussion of
this last title (Nohl, pp. 309-II) directly corresponds to the passage crossed out
(if the cancellation had been correctly indicated by Roques, pp. 189-90), but by
this time Hegel found he could discard some other parts of his first draft. He
had to move Das Wesen des Jesus (which had originally been marked for insertion
in the middle of the cancelled passage), so he rewrote his original 'lead-in
passage' in expanded form on a separate sheet (see Roques, p. 202). In doing so
he was struck by the fact that the 'two natures' view is itself a bridge or half-way
house between the 'rational faith' of Kant and the 'living faith' with which Das
Wesen des Jesus begins. (That Das Wesen des Jesus is part of the revision, not
of the first draft, is certified by SchUler, p. 152, note 99. But we could, very
plausibly, have inferred this from the absence of subsequent corrections, except
'einem' for 'dem' on Nohl, p. 3I4.)
I Das Wesen des Jesus, Nohl, p. 3I3 (Knox, p. 266). The name of Plato is not
here mentioned, but his influence is obvious, and it is soon to receive explicit
recognition (Nohl, p. 316; Knox, p. 270).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

die before the disciples could become properly conscious of God

in the spirit. I
Against the God who said 'I am', Jesus set his own Ego: 'I am
the way, the truth, and the life.' But his God does not say '1', and
Jesus continually tries to make clear to his disciples that his own
existence as a separate individual is of no special significance.
Wherever two or three are gathered in his spirit he will be.
Knowledge of one's union with God is a self-conscious return of
life in its fully developed form to the 'oneness' from which it
began. Jesus said that we must become as little children because
'in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my father which
is in heaven' (Matthew 18: 10). Hegel expounds this passage in the
light of his own interpretation of Plato's myth about the condition
of the soul before birth. 2 Both the 'angels' and the pre-natal
existence of the soul represent the conscious aspect of 'pure life'
individualized (hence distinct from God), but not yet 'restricted'
by the physical limits of life on earth (hence 'in the sight of God').
The 'angel' simply is the immediate vision of God (i.e. the
consciousness of pure life). As we 'grow up' the 'angel' of each
one of us must cease to be in the sight of God, because the world
is too much with us and we are forced to reflect upon a life that is
alien to us. To become as a little child is to be reconciled with this
alien life, and so come again into the 'sight of God', but bringing
with us now our whole world of developed relations, so that the
'vision of God' is not now simple but infinitely complex. If 1 have
understood Hegel rightly this is the only real 'vision of God'. The
child at the moment of birth (or perhaps only at conception) is
pure life, but he is not the consciousness of it.3 His consciousness
I This theme is directly taken up at this point (Nohl, pp. 313-14; Knox,

pp. 267-8) but it is further developed when Hegel comes back once more to
Peter's avowal a bit further on (Nohl, pp. 317-18; Knox, p. 272). He recurs often
to the passages in which Jesus speaks of his own death, because it is in these
passages that the Holy Spirit makes its first appearance.
2 Das Wesen des Jesus, Nohl, pp. 315-16 (Knox, pp. 269-70). Compare also
the first version of this passage in B. Moral. Bergpredigt, Nohl, p. 400; and the
remark about the cycle of devltlopment from childhood to the descent of the
Spirit a little further on (Nohl, p. 318; Knox, p. 273).
3 Knox (p. 270 n. 92) is quite mistaken in thinking that Hegel is actually
referring to the 'angels', not the children, when he says that 'unconsciousness,
undeveloped oneness, being and life in God, are here severed from God because
it is to be represented as a modification of divinity in the existing children'. The
'angels' represent 'being and life in God' as 'severed from God', because the
children (whose angels they are) are in fact 'modifications' severed from God
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
is an 'angel', something that is not here but 'yonder' in the other
world (or at another time). One who has 'become as a child' knows
that the vision is eternally there, and so must speak of it, as Plato
and Jesus do, as something which the existing children have lost
by being born; or at least as something that they do not now have
and must find again (actually for the first time). The 'angels in the
sight of God' are immediately identical with him. Their only
distinct significance lies in their plurality: that they are all, in
their simple multiplicity, identical with God, shows forth the
crucial fact that God the Father is not an individual ego. Even the
'Son of God' can only truthfully say 'I am' when he knows that it
means 'We are'. 'Pure life' is actually the 'Spirit', although, in
order to 'think' it (as Hegel sets out to do in this present essay), we
must begin with the 'Father'.
The relation of the 'sons of men' to the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, is the Gospel which the glorified Jesus commands the
disciples to preach. 1 Their teaching is to be combined with
baptism. This 'baptism' refers in Hegel's view to the 'baptism of
fire and the Spirit' that John the Baptist foretold. It is related to
John's own practice of baptism by immersion in the way in which
the gospel of love is related to John's preaching of repentance and
duty. For both John and Jesus baptism by immersion was an
appropriate Vorstellung for the beginning of a new life, 'the entire
(though they do not know it yet, because they do not know anything, they are
'das BewuBtlose', their awareness is directly identical with the spark of life in
them).
I Das Wesen des Jesus, Nohl, pp. 318-21. The comparative remarks about the
synoptic Gospels are quite revealing. It is noticeable that whereas The Life of
Jesus leans most heavily on Luke, 'The Spirit of Christianity' depends more
upon Matthew. If it were not for the present passage we might think that the
concentration on Matthew in Zu der Zeit, da Jesus and B. Moral. Bergpl'edigt,
merely reflected the fact that Hegel already had a sufficiency of notes about Luke
at hand in The Life of Jesus. But Hegel's discussion of the last words of Jesus
definitely suggests that his choice may have been guided by the conviction that
Mark is the 'positive' Gospel, Luke the 'rational' Gospel, and Matthew the
Gospel of 'life'; he does of course specifically assert that John is the 'religious'
Gospel (see Nohl, p. 304; Knox, p. 255). No doubt his estimate ofthe Synoptics
was mainly determined by their respective treatments of the Sermon on the
Mount. But it is notable that Matthew as the Gospel of 'life' begins with the
life-stem of Jesus; in Luke the Gospel of Reason, the genealogy, like his baptism,
is presented only as a symbolic apanage of his coming-of-age. From Hegel's
point of view it is right that there is no genealogy at all in Mark, but we ought
to find the Virgin Birth there instead of in Luke. (No doubt Hegel's low estimate
of Mark was influenced by Storr's high estimate of it. Storr recognized the
historical priority of Mark among the synoptic Gospels.)
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

consecration of spirit and character', but whereas for John it

showed forth the cleansing force of repentance and the new life of
rational autonomy, for Jesus it meant more than this. Hegel
describes it in terms which come so close to a 'return to the womb'
that (in view of the remark of Jesus to Nicodemus about being
'born again') it is surprising that he does not call it that. Of course,
he is only speaking of John's baptism of Jesus, not of something
done by Jesus himself; and it is only a 'symbol', an outward
ceremony, for which Hegel therefore selects the version of Mark,
the 'positive' Gospel. 1 The important thing about it is the descent
of the Spirit, which was what distinguished the baptism of Jesus
from the others performed by John. Jesus was inspired by a new
spirit; he had returned to the 'oneness' of the child, and he with-
drew to the wilderness in order that his new life should not be
corrupted by the temptations and pressures of the world. But of
course his conscious ties with the world went with him even into
the wilderness: he had to be sure he had conquered them and put
them aside before he returned to the world.
The 'baptism of the spirit' which is outwardly symbolized in the
ceremony of immersion, makes the 'sons of men' into 'sons of
God', members of the Kingdom of God. 2 This kingdom is the
developed consciousness of the harmony of life as it exists in the
'oneness' of childhood; but as a self-conscious, developed whole
it is only possible in a free society of perfect friendship, for which
'kingdom' is a most unfortunate and misleading title. The best
term for it, Hegel thinks, is Gemeine, a communion. The members
of the communion live 'in God', i.e. in charity with one another.
They are aware of one another as individuals, as different modi-
fications of life; but they know that it is the same life in all of them
and they want that life to be as rich and varied as possible without
becoming the private or personal possession of anyone. Their
I The event is recorded, together with the descent of the Spirit and the

following period of temptation in the wilderness, by Matthew (3: 13-4: 17)

and by Luke (3: 21-2 and 4: 1-13). In Luke the emphasis falls on the descent of
the Spirit, baptism itself being almost an incidental circumstance; and only
preaching of repentance and remission of sins in his name (not baptism) is
commanded by the risen Jesus. But why should Hegel discuss the record of
Mark rather than that of Matthew, whom he generally relies on in 'The Spirit
of Christianity'? It can scarcely be accidental. The clue is provided by what he
says about the 'characteristic tone' of Mark (Nohl, pp. 320-1; Knox, p. 277).
2 Das Wesen des Jesus, Nohl, pp. 321-3 (Knox, pp. 277-81). Compare the
earlier version in Nohl's footnote on p. 305.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
consciousness is to be communal, however variously modified their
existence may become. For this reason they must share the
activities of life as far as possible and the tools of life absolutely.
The limit of this communion would be community of wives, where
even the most primitive and restricted, but also for that reason the
most intense, form of love is resolved into charity (with which
according to the canon of reflection it has nothing in common).
I-Ience the scandals alleged against the early Church by reflective
critics were founded at least on a correct understanding of the ideal
of love. The resolution of the natural bonds of instinctive life (life
in its unselfconscious 'oneness') into a self-conscious universal
harmony of charity is what the Kingdom of God, as the final
escape from the toils of fate, actually requires. From the Christian
point of view there was no shame in the accusation therefore.
Perfect love casts out fear. The shame lay rather in their failure
to deserve the accusation; it was here in the sphere of family
relations that the alienation of Christian love from actual life began.
Here at last love was overtaken by fate.

9. The fate of love

The ideal of love is to be 'fateless' in the sense of being perfectly
reconciled to life. Jesus achieved this goal. But we can also think
of fate in another sense. We can ask whether the reconciliation is
a 'happy' or an 'unhappy' one. I Jesus was reconciled with his
enemies, but they were not reconciled with him; his life therefore
was bound to be unhappy. Only in the 7TA~PWatS of love provided
by his religion could he find comfort. His religion was a vision of
forgiveness reciprocated and love fulfilled in the happy harmony
of natural life:
This ideal of a Kingdom of God completes and comprises the whole
of religion as Jesus founded it, and we have still to consider whether it
completely satisfies nature, or what need drove his disciples to some-
thing beyond it .... Is there a more beautiful idea than that of a nation
[Volk] of men who are related to one another by love? Or one more
uplifting than that of belonging to a whole, which as a whole, as one,
I Compare here the cancelled remark in the first draft of Am interessantesten
wird es sein (Nohl, p. 302; Knox, p. 253 n. 71): 'But love itself is still nature
unperfected [unvollstandige Natur]; it may be happy or unhappy.' I take it that in
all his uses of 'unvollstandig', 'unvollstandigkeit', etc. Hegel intends a reference
hoth to the theological doctrine that 'grace perfects nature' and to Aristotle's
doctrine that 'happiness' must be 'complete'.
8243588 cc
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

is the spirit of God-and whose members are the sons of God? Was
there still to be an imperfection [Unvollstiindigkeit] in this idea, so that
a fate would have power over it? Or would this fate be the Nemesis
raging against a too beautiful endeavour, against an overleaping of
nature ?'
With these words Hegel introduces, at the end of Das Wesen des
Jesus, the final topic of his study, the fate of Jesus and his com-
munion as revealed in their history. He had already written down
in the first draft of Mit dem Mute und dem Glauben his views about
the fate of Jesus himself. The closing pages of Das Wesen des Jesus
provide a summary account of the nemesis that raged against the
overleaping of nature in the early Church. When he came to revise
Mii dem Mute und dem Glauben he decided to combine both topics
in a fuller treatment. But he did not in this case manage to inter-
weave the old and the new material into one continuous argument
very well; and Nohl has managed to make a bad job worse by
presuming, on the one hand, to finish what Hegel himself may
possibly have abandoned in despair, and by attempting, on the
other hand, to divide the two topics that Hegel wanted to bring
together. 2 I shall do my best to keep the successive drafts separate
in my discussion; but my primary concern will be to indicate the
complementary relation existing between the fate of Jesus and that
of his communion, which was what led Hegel to try to treat them
antiphonally.
In The Life of Jesus the fate of Jesus is brought upon him by the
leaders of the established 'positive' order, especially the Pharisees.
In that essay he was the voice of reason, though of a reason which
reconciles and harmonizes impulses rather than judging and curb-
ing them; if he was optimistic it was with a confidence that could
be understood, even if not shared, by all rational observers. But now
he is the prophet of a new life, something that exists only as a
dream, and cannot be explained to the understanding of anybody.
In this perspective the Pharisees can hardly appear culpable, as
they did before, for their opposition to him. Their opposition is
something Jesus expects and discounts. 3 He hopes to win the
, Nohl, pp. 32I-2 (Knox, p. 278).
2 See Nohl's note at the end of p. 326 n. [aJ; and the notes to pp. 330 and 331.
3 'Never once does he treat them with faith in the possibility of their conversion'
(Nohl, p. 327; Knox, p. 283). This (like the following remarks about the Jewish
people and the mission of the disciples) was an addition in the second draft. But
these additions are only expansions of the passage from the first draft which was
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 371

people with his call to a life of natural harmony, and Hegel thinks
that, had the capacity for spontaneous living not been completely
corrupted and dead in them, the Jews would certainly have re-
sponded to him. After the failure of the mission of the Twelve!
Jesus gave up hope of a national rebirth, and devoted himself to the
salvation of a small group. This was where the fate of his com-
munion became linked with his own. Jesus was perfectly recon-
ciled with fate, but only at the cost of a life 'undeveloped and
unenjoyed'. 'In the Kingdom of God there can be no relation save
that which proceeds from the most disinterested love and so from
the highest freedom, that which acquires from beauty alone the
form of its appearance and its link with the world.'2
Because of this ideal, the world of property relations must be
surrendered to Mammon; and in a society where all civic relations
were reduced to that level it seemed necessary to surrender the
whole political sphere. All the legal structures of the State are of
course below the level of love and beauty. But there are many
'beautiful' relations involved in political life (bonds of voluntary
community, of friendship, and of loyalty, which the parties enter
into on a basis of equality) which have to be surrendered by a
love that seeks to be 'pure'; and this surrender means, moreover,
that the Kingdom of God is always and necessarily faced by an
Earthly City. In Jewish life the authority of the law reached into
every human relation. Hence Jesus could not enter into any natural
relation at all. He had to accept the paradoxical role of a prophet
who proclaimed a gospel of living equality, but lived in a relation
allowed to stand (Nohl, p. 326). Cf. the notes in Zu der Zeit, da Jesus (Nohl,
p. 396) and in B. Moral. Bergpredigt (Nohl, pp. 400 bottom-40r top).
I Hegel continued to waver about the interpretation of this episode. He notes

in Ztt der Zeit, daJesttS (Nohl, p. 396) that the Twelve were not sent 'to reconcile
men, and make the human race friends'. It is true enough that Matthew (10: r),
Mark (9: 6), and Luke (9: I) all give first place to authority over unclean spirits;
after that comes healing the sick; preaching the coming of the Kingdom is
mentioned third by IVlatthew and Luke; Mark merely says: 'And they went out
and preached that men should repent.' But if one takes Hegel's earlier view
about 'unclean spirits' and 'healing the sick' it is hard to defend the claim that
the Twelve were not sent 'to reconcile men'. We have here, I think, a clear
instance of how Hegel's interpretation of the 'spirit' of Christianity grew; for
in his subsequent notes (B. Moral. Bergpredigt, Nohl, pp. 400-r) on the instruc-
tion of the Twelve, the announcing of the Kingdom is given prominence-as it
is in his final text (Nohl, p. 325, Knox, p. 282). By then he has come to see that
'authority over unclean spirits', 'healing the sick', and 'preaching the kingdom'
are all the same thing.
2 Mit dem Mute und dem Glauben, Nohl, p. 328 (Knox, p. 285).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

of equality with no one; even to those who loved him he was 'the
Master', though the Kingdom that he preached was one in which
there were no masters. He had to fly from the world, and live his
own life in a dream. But at the same time his proclaiming of the
Kingdom in this world, his acceptance of the role of 'Master', was
a fight against the world, in which his 'mastery' was set against the
established order. He knew that for this opposition he must perish.
From the point of view of the 'sons of men' he merely risked the
potential fate of all who try to be 'master'; but from his own
point of view the risk became a certainty, the sacrifice of life a
necessity. His vision required that his enemies should have their
will in order that his 'mastery' might perish. I
Jesus foresaw the full horror of the opposition between the
Kingdom of God and the life of this world. He required of those
who followed him that they should abandon all the natural ties of
love in doing so. He believed that even a small group would
suffice for the establishment of the Kingdom. In this faith he died
willingly, though he did not seek death, and found it hard to leave
the stage where his dream was to come to pass. 2
After his death his disciples were at first like sheep without a
shepherd. With the death of Jesus, their faith in the new life died.
But with the Resurrection it was reborn. Hegel's interpretation of
the Resurrection is not in all respects as explicit as we might like,
but it is at least plain that he does not regard it as a historical
event, a return to life of the man Jesus. In his first draft he took
note of the fact that it occurred two days after the Crucifixion.3
Subsequently he cancelled this passage, probably because any
time reference seemed to him inappropriate here. With the passing
of time the immortality of the spirit would have made itself felt in
any case; but the individual 'modification of life' would then, in
the ordinary course of events, be remembered as closed, finished,
1 This last point Hege! does not make in his discussions of the fate of Jesus,

though he has made it previously (e.g. Nohl, p. 317). The discussion thus far
and in the following paragraph is based on the first draft (and on some passages
in the second draft which are expansions of the first: see Noh!, pp. 325-6,
326 n. raj, 331, with pp. 327-9, which are an expansion of p. 326 n. [aJ).
Z lvIit dem Mute und dem Glauben, Noh!, p. 326 n. [a] with the revised version,

Noh!, p. 329; and Nohl, p. 331 (Knox, pp. 286-7, with the footnote to pp. 288-
9)·
3 Nach dem Tode Jesll, Noh!, p. 333 n. [b]; Knox, p. 291 n. 107. Instead of this
brief remark Hegel!ater wrote Es ist nicht die Knechtsgestalt (Noh!, pp. 335-6;
Knox, pp. 293-5).
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 373
and complete. The memory of the man as dead would persist
along with the growing consciousness of the real significance of his
life. Thus love would not possess its object. It would still be mere
love, not religion; a state of longing, not of fulfilment.
Religion is distinct from love in that the immediate living of life
does not predominate over the conscious appreciation of it. In all
love there is the self-conscious aspect; where this aspect is com-
pletely overborne we have not love, but what Hegel calls 'need'
(Not), the blind instinctual drive of hunger, thirst, and presumably
sex.! On the other hand, where the 'actuality' of love (the harmony
of desires achieving satisfaction in the normal course of life) is in
perfect balance with its 'consciousness' love passes over into
religion. This perfect balance can be achieved only in religious
experience, because all other forms of experience are infected, even
at their best, by the consciousness of mortality. The image of Jesus
as 'Risen' differs from the memory of the crucified 'Master'
because it is the image of a man alive. The image of the God, the
element that was lacking at the Last Supper, is present at the love-
feast of the Christian communion in the shape of the risen Lord.
N ow even among the Greek gods there were human heroes
who had undergone apotheosis. But they were not, like Jesus,
deified for their simple humanity. The god who arose from the
funeral pyre of Hercules, for instance, was just the spirit of
Valour personified. 2 There was in his case no 'monstrous combina-
tion' (ungeheure Verbindung)3 of the tortured man with the risen
God. The particular circumstances of the Greek hero's life and
death were only a shroud burned away on the pyre or left behind
in the tomb (as they should have been in the case of Jesus).
I This is the Platonic triad. \Vhat Hegel says about David and the shewbread

(N ohl, p. 262; Knox, p. 208) makes it clear that he admitted that hunger and
thirst can rise to the pitch of 'supreme need'. I do not remember any passage
where he is clearly committed to the same view about sex. But what he says
about the state of Not should in general be read in the light of Plato's doctrine
of the 'necessary desires'.
2 Nach dem Tode Jesu, Noh!, p. 335 (Knox, p. 293). Hercules is mentioned

because, like Jesus, he rose 'only through the funeral pyre'. Theseus presents a
more interesting parallel in other respects. He was not reverenced simply for
one-sided virtue but for political leadership. But just because he led a politically
active life he could only be the hero of Athens (as opposed to other cities).
3 Nach dem TodeJesu, Nohl, p. 335 (Knox, p. 293). The explanatory remarks
at the beginning of Es ist nicht die Knechtsgestalt (ibid.) make it clear that the
intended meaning of 'ungeheuer' here is 'monstrous' or 'outrageous' rather than
'tremendous' as Knox thinks.
374 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

The offering of prayer and worship to the individual who

suffered and died on the cross is the index of Jesus' failure. Jesus
certainly did not die in the hope that men would make an
absolute value out of suffering itself. For him the continual sacri-
fice of natural ties and impulses and the culminating sacrifice of
life itself was acceptable because he was 'one with the Father', he
had the vision of life in its undisrupted state. But the purpose of
his sacrifice was to enable those who had faith in him to begin
living a reconciled life. If they could have succeeded in doing that,
they would never have been tempted to think that it was the 'Son
of God' who died on the cross, but only the 'son of man'. But in
fact they needed an image of divine suffering, because their love
could only show itself in the sacrifice of life, in suffering.
The fate of the Christian community has two sides, negative and
positive. 1 On the negative side, they sundered themselves, as Jesus
had done, from the actual life of the world, the Kingdom of
Mammon: they abolished private property. This constitutes in
Hegel's view a negative bond, because common ownership is not
possible-they were united with one another in not owning anything
rather than in owning things together. But the whole world of
property, legal rights, and political organizations stood over
against their common life, continually encroaching upon it and
threatening it with corruption. Their flight from it was thus infected
with fear, and their fighting against it with a fanaticism which was
really hostility masquerading under the false cloak of benevolence.
Instead of achieving a genuine life of reconciliation in the world,
they went from the Jewish promise of a land flowing with milk and
honey as the reward for obedience to the law, to the opposite
extreme of a love so pure that it could only despise all material
things.
On the positive side their own actual life was informed by the
spirit of love. But what living activities were there in which this
spirit could express itself? Apart from the minimal ones of eating
and drinking in order to maintain life, there was only the religious
I For the 'negative side' see Mit dem lVIute und dem Glauben, Nohl, p. 330

(Knox, pp. 287-8); for the 'positive side' see Der negativen Seite, Nohl, pp.
332-3 (Knox, pp. 289-90). These two sections were (as in Knox) a single
continuous development in the second draft. Compare also Das Wesen des
Jesus, Nohl, pp. 322-4 (Knox, pp. 278-81). 'Positive' does not, of course, have
in this context the legal sense that it generally has in Hegel's writings in this
period.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 375
act of contemplating their ideal, and the common task of spreading
the Gospel. The members of the group could not engage in joint
activity outside of this narrow range, without in the process setting
themselves against the common life that was their ideal, and being
false to the love that bound them together. Two lovers can share
life as a whole; more than two can share it wholly only by im-
poverishing it, by eliminating whatever is not a matter of interest
to all of them. The community, like Jesus himself, had to lose its
life in order to preserve its consciousness of love; and the main
reason for this was its surrender of the political realm to the
dominion of Mammon.
Judaism was the religious consciousness of law, and of pure
legal right. Christianity is at the opposite extreme. It is the religious
consciousness of pure life, of the highest love and the most perfect
freedom. On both sides the emphasis on purity destroys the actual
enjoyment of life, because life remains obstinately impure: the
intensity and vividness of living experience is always proportionate
to its exclusiveness, except in the shared activities of religion itself.
In place of 'der Herr, der unsichtbare Herr' Jesus set 'Schicksal-
losigkeit'. I But the fate of 'fatelessness' was to find itself post-
poned to another 'world and another life. Religion remained
separate from the actual experience of life. 'Christ risen' belongs
to another world; only 'Christ crucified' belongs to this one.
Jesus died in vain, he proved after all to be only a dreamer,
because his followers could not give up the image of the dead man
in their memory. They needed him still as they had done in his
lifetime, as a model of how to live, because they could not live the
life of which the risen Christ is the image. The more widely the
gospel of love was accepted, the deeper and more absolute this
cleavage between religion and life became. The necessity of life
in the world being accepted with the success of their preaching,
their religious consciousness became less and less a matter of living
experience, more and more a matter of hope.
The early Church stands condemned for perpetuating its
founder's flight from the world. Like the Jews they 'rigidified the
modifications of nature, the relations of life into brute facts
[Wirklichkeiten], but they regarded them with the shame and
humiliation of the slave, rather than the pride of the master. The
ties of this world were all in one way or another exclusive or
I The phrases occur in Zu der Zeit, daJesus (Noh!, p. 386).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

selective. Hence they were bound either to live always with the
humiliating consciousness of betraying their ideal of 'pure' love,
or else not to live in any real sense at all but rather to practise
the mortification of the flesh. They could not unite the 'un-
limited' aspect ofliving harmony (freedom, 'pure li.fe', 'the Father')
with the 'limit' (inclination, 'love', 'the Son') in the stable equi-
librium or 'mean' of beauty as the Greeks had done. I
Only the glorified Jesus, not the 'form of the servant', is really
divine; and the glorified Jesus is the spirit that unites the com-
munity of Christians. This community is the proper embodiment
of divinity. Jesus as an individual had no alternative save to
sacrifice real existence, remaining in a state of undeveloped 'one-
ness'. But he died in the faith that, through his sacrifice, the Spirit
would descend and the Kingdom would come. When a whole
community 'lived in God' the development of life in its perfect
form would be possible. Instead of this his own undeveloped life,
the very negation of divinity, was exalted to divine status.
The divinity of the man Jesus was supposed to be attested
by the miraculous stories of his birth and transfiguration. 2 But in
the glare of this supernatural light his humanity only appears the
more degraded; and when he is himself pictured as doing super-
natural deeds, the conflict between the two natures that are
supposed to be united in him is even more violent. The miraculous
deed is done on the level of physical causality-which is the sphere
of Verstand. But the causal agent is supposed to be quite outside
of that sphere. That there is a spiritual realm outside that sphere is
I Compare NIit dem Mute und dem Glauben (second draft), Nohl, p. 330

(Knox, p. 288) with the remark about how Jesus was for his followers 'ihr
lebendiges Band und das geoffenbarte, gestaltete Gottliche, in ihm war ihnen
Gott auch erschienen, sein Individuum vereinigte ihnen das Unbestimmte der
Harmonie und das Bestimmte in einem Lebendigen' (Nach dem Tode Jesu,
Nohl, p. 334; Knox, p. 291). I have tried in the text both to indicate what 'das
Unbestimmte' and 'das Bestimmte' are, and to bring out the Platonic and
Aristotelian associations that were operating, I think, in Hegel's mind.
2 Es ist nicht die Knechtgestalt, Nohl, p. 337. Hegel does not here tell us very

explicitly what we are to make of the miraculous deeds ascribed to Jesus himself.
But what he says about 'how a god acts [wirktJ' makes it clear that, as far as
stories of healing and casting out evil spirits are concerned, the rationalizations
implied in The Life of Jesus only need to be lifted from the plane of reflection to
the plane of life in order to provide adequate explanations. In Hegel's view
Jesus had .gova{a ('authority') but not ovva/L';; ('power') over evil spirits.
See Reines Leben zu denken, Nohl, p. 3 I I (Knox, pp. 263-4); and Roques,
p. 130, where explicit reference to the Greek terms represented by Macht and
Gewalt is made.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 377
true. But it is absolutely contrary to the nature of spirit for it to
operate as if it were itself a body capable of exerting force. Spirit
and body are 'absolute opposites', they have 'nothing in common',
that is to say they cannot operate on one another causally or be
'linked' (verkniipft). They can, indeed, be 'united' (~'ereinigt) in a
living body which is a 'configured spirit' (gestaltete Geist); but the
condition of the union is that each preserves its own nature.
The conjoining of the two natures, their fusion to the point where
their mode of causal operation is not distinguished, is a play of the
imagination which is harmless enough as long as it is taken in the
higher, subjective (spiritual) sense. But it becomes pernicious when
it is taken in the lower, objective (physical) sense. The modern
enlightened outlook is the extreme of reflection, in which every-
thing, and particularly the imagination, is subjected to the scientific
intellect. The oriental outlook, including that of the Jews and the
early Church, is the extreme of 'oneness' in which the standpoint
of the imagination and that of the intellect have not even been
distinguished. Thus, for the enlightened intellect, the immortality
of the soul is a 'postulate of pure practical reason', and the soul
itself is only conceivable as belonging to a 'supersensible world'.
For the oriental fancy, on the other hand, immortality means the
resurrection of the body. Between these two extremes there lies
the truth perceived by the Greeks: 'While for the Greeks body
and soul persist in one living shape, in both extremes on the other
hand, death is a sundering of body and soul; and in one case the
body of the soul exists no longer, whereas in the other it also
persists through without life.'I
Inasmuch as our whole philosophical tradition about the im-
mortality of the soul, and the conception of death as a sundering of
soul and body, goes back to Plato, it is rather puzzling that Hegel
should say that for the Greeks 'body and soul persist [bleiben] in
one living shape', since he is apparently using bleiben to mean
'remain [after death]'. But the 'Greek' view here is the view of
Aristotle, for whom the soul was the 'form' of the body, and that
form is the species that persists in 'one living shape' throughout
the cycle of life from birth to death, and remains identical in the
unending succession of the generations. In Hegel's first draft there
is a passage which indicates fairly clearly how he wove together
this Aristotelian theory of 'life' with the Platonic theory of 'love'
I Es ist nicht die Knechtgestalt, Noh!, p. 339 (Knox, p. 298).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

to produce a synthesis which he could legitimately regard as 'the

Greek view'. 'Miracle', he wrote, 'is the exposition of the undivine,
of mastery over the dead; not a free marriage of beings that are
kin, and the begetting of new ones, but the lordship of the spirit.'!
Hegel's doctrine of immortality is a doctrine of the 'marriage of
beings that are kin, and the begetting of new ones'. The Platonic
strand in this doctrine is to be found in Diotima's exposition of
sexual love as 'an immortal principle in the mortal creature'. The
soul is immortal because it immortalizes the body by generating
new life to replace that which dies. But it does also inhabit a 'super-
sensible' realm of its own, the realm of the 'spirit'. This realm is
precisely the actual world of human social intercourse, in so far as
that intercourse is 'spiritual' rather than 'material'. The world of
the spirit is the world of goods that can be common possessions,
things that can be shared without being 'shared out'. Thus the
'immortality of the soul' has nothing 'personal' about it. The
doctrine does require that some individual life-lines should be
immortal, in order that the body may 'persist' in its living union
with the spirit. But from the point of view of the spirit itself, it
does not matter which life-lines are maintained-though it does of
course matter that they should be strong and healthy.
With this resolution of the last surviving 'postulate of practical
reason' into the impersonality of 'life' on the side of existence and
the inter-personality of 'communion' on the side of consciousness
Hegel's essay reaches its culmination. Before summing up the fate
of Christianity for the third time, 2 he discusses the difference
between the intellectual truth of history and the imaginative truth
of prophecy. But nothing that he says raises any new difficulty, and
since he does not discuss the Greek mean between the extremes
in this instance we do not need to concern ourselves with it for its
own sake. All that needs to be said about it has already been said
in connection with Jesus' own 'prophecy' ofthe Kingdom. Doubt-
less Hegel only discussed the relation of Jesus to prior prophecy
I Es ist nicht die Knechtgestalt, Nohl, p. 338 n. raj. lVIy remarks above about

how body and spirit can be so opposed as to have 'nothing in common' and yet
be 'united' are largely based on this cancelled passage.
2 If the last paragraph of the essay belongs (as I feel fairly certain that it does)

to the second draft, then Nohl is wrong in saying that the material in Die
lebenverachtende Schwiirmerei (Nohl, p. 33!; Knox, pp. 288-9 n.) was never
incorporated in the second version. For the other summing-up (which also
belongs, fairly certainly, to the second draft) see the end of Das Wesen des Jesus
(Nohl, pp. 323-4; Knox, pp. 280-1.)
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 379
here, because miracle and prophecy were the two main props of
Storr's historical argument for Christianity as a positive revelation.
It is noticeable, however, that at this stage in the exposition of his
views he is concerned at least as much to defend the attitude of the
early Christians against their enlightened critics as to expose the
mistakes of their fundamentalist interpreters.

10. Religion and philosophy

We must now turn from the most unfinished to what may well
have been the most finished of all Hegel's early manuscripts-the
longest sustained argument of his early years, and the only one which
has come down to us so badly mutilated that we are obliged to
guess even at its general outline and purpose. There is only one of
Hegel's early essays (The Life of Jesus) of which we possess every
word. In all of the others a page or several pages are missing here
and there. But in the case of this essay we have only two widely
separated sheets from the second half of a manuscript that may well
have been about twice as long as the revised version of 'The
Spirit of Christianity'-less than one-twentieth of the whole. I
We can get some clues as to the probable aim and purpose of
this lost essay in two ways. On one side there is the analogy of
Hegel's procedure in the past; and on the other there are some
remarks that he makes in the new introduction to the 'Positivity'
essay which he wrote immediately after finishing the lost essay.
These later remarks we shall have to consider in more detail in
their appropriate place. What they indicate, briefly, is that Hegel
may, very probably, have come to view the first part of the

I The two fragments absolute Entgegensetzung gilt and ein objektiver Mittel-

punkt are quarto sheets marked 'hh' and 'yy' respectively. The second one is
definitely the conclusion of the whole (see p. 391 n. 3 below). Nohl reasons
therefore that the manuscript may have consisted of forty-seven sheets. As far
as r can see from the notes of Nohl and Miss Schi.iler, Hegel's utilization of the
letters of the alphabet after 't' for the purposes of numeration is so erratic that
this manuscript may have consisted of anything from forty-five to forty-nine
sheets-which means that it would have filled anything from 150 to 180 pages
of Nohl's text. (All the indications available suggest that a full sheet-eight
sides-of Hegel's manuscript constitutes on the average slightly under three and
a half pages of printed text in Nohl's edition. The best guide is provided by Das
Leben Jesu and the main text of the 'Positivity' essay (man mag die wider-
sprechendsten Betrachtungen), which consist of nineteen sheets each and fill
sixty-two pages each. 'The Spirit of Christianity' itself is an unsafe guide,
because both the extent of the manuscript and the volume of the text are hard
to estimate reliably.)
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

'Positivity' essay as an inquiry into the 'death' of the religion of

Jesus, designed to stand alongside two others: first an inquiry into
its 'life' (,The Spirit of Christianity') and secondly a 'metaphysical
treatise on the relation of the finite to the infinite' (including the
answers to a whole series of 'special' questions about religion in
general and the Christian religion in particular). The first surviving
fragment of our manuscript would fit very well into the context of
such a 'metaphysical treatise'; and the second fragment is directly
relevant to the 'special' problems about religion which Hegel
enumerates. I
Support for the hypothesis that Hegel had written a treatise of
this sort, and was not simply talking in his revised introduction
about things that ought to be done (which was never a habit of his),
can be derived from an analysis of the structural relations that are
discernible in his earlier work, and from reflection upon certain
general facts that we know about the nature and origin of his
guiding principles.
Let us consider, to begin with, The Life of Jesus. This essay
provides a concrete, individualized ideal for rational contempla-
tion. But when we compare it with the Gospel record we discover
that it contains a number of implicit assumptions which are quite
paradoxical. An explanation and justification of these assumptions
is provided in the first part of the 'Positivity' essay, which plainly
presupposes The Life of Jesus. In the 'Positivity' essay as a whole,
Hegel first traces the causes of the deformation of his rational
ideal, and then seeks to draw practical lessons from its restoration.
The whole inquiry is carried out on the plane of reflective ration-
ality, but there is no conflict or opposition between reason and
feeling. We are on the level of what Hegel calls, in the first version
of 'The Spirit of Christianity', Gesinnung. At this level (rational
morality informed by the spirit of love) the Gospel record was
virtually self-sufficient. Save for the introduction of the categorical
imperative it needed no supplement from outside; and by 1799
Hegel would probably have admitted that he was mistaken in
making that one emendation. 2
But Hegel knew from the beginning that when he moved on to

I The passages here referred to (Der Begriff der Positivitiit, Nohl, pp. 143 and

146-7; Knox, pp. 172 and 176) are quoted and discussed below, pp. 405-7.
2 Cf. Nohl, p. 87 and the discussions of this passage above, Chapter III, pp.

206-7 and Chapter IV, p. 325.

 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 321
consider the needs of Phantasie und Herz, Christianity would no
longer be adequate. It is not like the religion of the Greeks, a
happy religion.! Just as The Life of Jesus exhibits a rational ideal,
so 'The Spirit of Christianity' exhibits once more a concretely
individualized imaginative ideal-the ideal of the 'beautiful soul'.
But it is a 'too beautiful effort' which 'overleaps nature'. Z Unlike
the ideal rational society, therefore, the ideal society of 'beautiful
souls' cannot simply be reconstructed and used directly for the
drawing of practical conclusions. The fault in the ideal itself must
first be corrected and a proper ideal constructed. In order to exhibit
the fault, the whole theory of 'life' in its four phases must be
expounded; and the construction of an adequate ideal must then
follow as the culmination or application of the theory. These two
tasks were, I assume, completed in the lost manuscript, which
would thus have been parallel to the 'Positivity' essay as 'The
Spirit of Christianity' is parallel to The Life of Jesus. But in place
of the earlier sequence, 'Ideal defeated by circumstances, redis-
covered, and restored', we have this time the sequence 'Ideal
encountering its fate (i.e. self-defeated), fate comprehended,
adequate ideal formulated'.
Thus far my hypothesis is, I think, directly supported by the
evidence of the surviving fragments absolute Entgegensetzung gilt
and ein objektiven Mittelpunkt, as well as by all the indications of
the hidden presence of the higher Greek ideal against which the
religion of Jesus as well as that of Abraham and Moses is measured
and found wanting in 'The Spirit of Christianity'. I shall now
offer some further surmises, which cannot in the nature of things
be more than guesses, since they rest on indirect and external
analogies and indications.
First, the analogy of the 'Positivity' essay strongly suggests that
the first half of the new essay would have been constituted by a
historical analysis of the fate of Christianity. In other words, some
parts of the final revision of 'The Spirit of Christianity' were built
into it. If this was the case, then the two essays (the 'Positivity'
I See particularly his original plan in Unter objektivel' Religion (section zeta,
part a, subsection Gimel), Nohl, p. 49 (translated on p. 509 below).
2 Nohl, p. 322 (Knox, p. 278). Hegel actually uses these expressions about the

social ideal of Jesus (The Kingdom of God) which was what he needed to
restore for purposes of 'application'. But what he says about the 'guilt of inno-
cence' (Nohl, p. 283; Knox, pp. 232-3) shows that he regarded the fate of the
individualized ideal as the work of the same 'Nemesis'.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

essay and the one that is lost) together formed a systematic state-
ment of Hegel's philosophy of religion and of his programme for
religious reform.
But in the second place we can be fairly sure, from what Hegel
says in the revised introduction of the 'Positivity' essay, that he
meant to work up 'The Spirit of Christianity' manuscript into a
separate account of Christianity as a 'living' religion. I think it
probable therefore that his programme embraced four parts-two
concerned with the religion of Jesus, and two concerned with the
historic fate of that religion and the regeneration of religious life in
Hegel's Germany. Each topic was dealt with first on the plane of
rational reflection and then on the plane of 'life'. I
It is time, however, to leave these general speculations and
hypotheses, and to turn to the analysis of the text that remains to
us. The first fragment opens with the words 'absolute Entgegen-
setzung gilt', which form the tail end of a sentence. In what follows
Hegel discusses the 'multiplicity (Vielheit) of living beings' as a
type of Entgegensetzung which is clearly not 'absolute'. Hence, the
hypothesis that comes most immediately to mind is that Hegel
has just been discussing opposition in the inorganic sphere, and
that, as Kroner surmises, he has just said that 'Absolute opposition
holds good (in the realm of the dead)'. Z If we look back to 'The
Spirit of Christianity', however, we shall find that Hegel has
actually said more than once that there is an absolute opposition
between spirit and body, that is, between the realm of the living and

! This hypothesis has the advantage that it avoids two slight objections that

might be raised against the more radical view that Hegel's programme was
completely contained in two essays. First there is the fact that Hegel speaks of the
historic rehabilitation of the Christian religion in one place and of the 'meta-
physical treatise' in another (the references are given above, p. 380 n. I).
Secondly, there is the fact that he preserved the confused mass of incompletely
revised manuscripts for 'The Spirit of Christianity', which might be taken to
indicate that there were at least some parts of it which he never did work up as
he had hoped to do. I am not sure whether the further fact that there is a place
for The Life of Jesus in the more moderate hypothesis can be claimed as an
advantage. Perhaps the fact that Hegel obviously told Holderlin about it, and
even spoke of a similar treatment of the Epistles, should tip the balance in favour
of the view that he did regard it as integral to his design, even when he had
written most of the 'Positivity' essay (which might well be held to incorporate
everything of philosophical importance in it).
2 Kroner's translation of the two fragments (Nohl, pp. 345-8 and 349-51

respectively) are given in Knox, pp. 309-19. The reference here is to his conjec-
tural reconstruction on page 309.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
the realm of the dead, rather than within either one of them. It is
best to leave the opening words alone and admit that we cannot
reconstruct the sentence at all with enough verisimilitude for it
to be either convincing or useful. I
The proper key to the discussion of 'living opposition' that
follows, was pointed out by Haering. 2 Hegel wants to show how
both 'joining' (Verbindung) and 'opposition' (Entgegensetzung) are
involved in the concept of a human being as an 'individual life'.
He is concerned both with the living organism as an entity that
maintains itself against the flux of the inorganic environment,
although it is made up of the same inorganic elements, and with
the conscious individual prepared to maintain his own life against
(and if necessary at the cost of) other living things, whether
conscious or not. Hence much, but not all, of what he says can be
applied to living things in general-even to plants, in which as we
know he was greatly interested. But the only safe course is always
to think first of life at the human level.
Whenever we consider any conscious living being 'the multi-
plicity of life becomes opposed'. On one side there is the conscious
individual, who is 'himself an infinite multiplicity since he is alive' :
in other words, we have to think not of the mortal individual but of
the immortal life-line that maintains itself through him. Abraham,
the paradigm case of the human individual set against the world,
is set against it on behalf of his 'seed'.3 On the other side is the
I See Es ist nicht die Knechtgestalt, Nohl, p. 338; inasmuch as the assertion

'Geist und Korper ... sind absolut Entgegengesetzte' is taken straight from the
first version (p. 338 n. [a]) into the second, which Hegel had finished or aban-
doned only a few months before, it seems to me most likely that this is the
'absolute Entgegensetzung' referred to in the present passage. But, of course,
we cannot be certain of this. Hegel may have been discussing inorganic opposites;
or he may even have been saying something about 'the war of all against all'. If
we had four words from this sentence and the first were als the hopeless ambiguity
of the situation would be apparent. Luckily, nothing much hangs on the ques-
tion-unless there is someone who still believes that the lost manuscript con-
tained the first outline of a 'philosophy of nature'.
2 Haering, i. 539. The terrifying ambiguities that have arisen as a result of

Hegel's decision to use 'living being' in place of the traditional (and specifically
Kantian) expression 'rational being', 'life' for 'self-consciousness', and so on,
are graphically illustrated in the different interpretations which Asveld and
Peperzak (for instance) have given of this fragment.
3 The clue to the meaning of Hegel's assertion that 'this part is itself an
infinite multiplicity since it is alive'-which seems to have escaped most of his
interpreters-is provided by the example of the tree in Reines Leben zu denken
(Nohl, p. 309; Knox, p. 261). In the divisibility of the one tree into three the
multiplicity of life is spatially presented; at the human level it appears only in
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

world of which the individual is conscious, a world made up of

things which maintain themselves as 'separate' from him, not
(like his seed) 'simply in relation [BeziehungJ' or 'only as union
[VereinzgungJ' with himself. It is 'self-evident', says Hegel, that
the individualized life whose manifoldness is considered only in
relation, whose being is this relation, 'can also be regarded as
differentiated into a mere multiplicity'. This is in fact the ordinary
way of looking at things. We do not think of Isaac, Jacob, and the
twelve tribes as being somehow united in Abraham, but of the
succeeding generations and the mortal individuals as distinct
entities. But when we think of them in this way we are certainly
not considering them as 'living beings'; for Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob are long dead. The point that is vital for Hegel is that
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not, like Bohun, Mowbray,
Mortimer, and Piantagenet, in the famous phrase of Chief Justice
Crewe 'entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality'. They
live still in the twelve tribes; and just as it is essential to the
concept of an individual as living to remember the descendants
that he can have (and the forbears that he must have had) so also
is it essential to the concept of life itself that there should always
be some individuals who do in fact have living descendants. Life
exists only in the form of determinate individuals who are the
mortal sustainers of immortal family-lines. That is what Hegel
means by saying that the 'relation [of this life whose manifoldness
is considered only in relation] is not more absolute than the
separation of this related [manifoldness],. The immortality of life
is not more essential than its mortality.
But of course, the individual does not produce his successors
unaided. In order to achieve the 'separation of this related mani-
fold' he must enter into a living relation (Beziehung) with at least
part of the world that is initially excluded from him. Hence the
world of a living consciousness cannot simply be an inorganic
the fonn of temporal mortality, and the succession of generations which is
essentially characteristic of all life, not merely (like divisibility) a VOTstellung
offered only by its lower forms.
Of course, in the case of the tribe member who is 'a son of the stem of Koresh'
(Nohl, p. 308; Knox, p. 260) the 'related life' is both temporally and spatially
presented. But in one who feels his identity with a tribal stem the 'multiplicity
of life' has not yet 'become opposed'. Unless the tribe is exogamous, for example,
mating will not have for the tribe member the aspect of 'relation with the excluded'
that Hegel describes. The model that we need is Abraham, the individual who
has broken from his tribe in order to become a tribal-father in his own right.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ

manifold, something made up of parts that are 'absolutely mani-

fold' (i.e. indefinitely divisible); it has to contain another living
individual (in sich in Beziehung stehend) with whom the first is so
'joined' that in the juncture (Verbindung) both of them 'lose their
individuality' .
This 'loss of individuality' is what was described in welchem
Zwecke denn alles Ubrige dient; Hegel even speaks at this point
as if the lover really could find his whole world in the beloved, just
as the lover hopes to do in that earlier fragment. For Hegel does
not say that the excluded manifold must be so constituted that it
contains another living being. He says that it must be another
living being: it must be 'posited on the one hand, not as absolutely
manifold in and for itself, but as in itself related, and on the other
hand joined with the living being excluded from it'. Influenced,
no doubt, by the way Hegel has spoken of the excluded manifold
up to this point and by the fact that in the definition that follows
the inorganic as well as the organic environment of the living
individual is explicitly mentioned, Nohl tried to avoid the paradox
of this sentence by assuming that Hegel meant to write 'teils,
nicht (nur) usw.': 'on the one hand not simply as absolutely
manifold etc.' This, however, is a mistake. Hegel is tracing the
development of 'opposition' in consciousness. First, the individual
is conscious of himself as set against a world which is all of it
equally 'dead' for him. But as he becomes more sharply aware of
the life in him his whole 'world' is focused upon his mate, and in
the moment when he loses his individuality in Verbindung (in the
act of coition) his whole world is this excluded, self-related being
with whom he is joined. After the act (in which, if it is successful, a
new individual life is conceived) his experience becomes once more
reflective, and now for the first time he can fully appreciate and
express what it is to be a living individual.!
The concept of individuality includes opposition to infinite manifold-
ness and juncture with it; a man is an individual life, inasmuch as he is
distinct from rein anderes ist] all elements, and from the infinity of
individual lives external to him, but he is only an individual life inas-
much as he is one with all elements, with all the infinity of lives external
to him; he is only inasmuch as the totality [das All] of life is divided, he
being one part and everything else the other part; he is only inasmuch
as he is no part, and nothing is sundered from him. I
I absolute Entgegensetzung gilt, Noh!, p. 346 (Knox, p. 3!0).
8243588 D d
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
Except for our ignorance of what Hegel meant by 'all elements' we
should now be able to understand this definition. The differential
emphasis on 'he' and 'is' which I have introduced will be enough,
I hope, to make the meaning plain. A man is, first of all, a complex
physical organism involving all the elements (whatever they are)
but distinct from them in that he is alive; secondly, he is a singular
individual distinct from all others, yet containing an infinity of
lives in himself (his ancestors and descendants). But in this
infinite aspect (his immortal being, as distinct from his mortal
individuality) as life incarnate, he is not sundered either from the
inorganic environment or from the other existing living things.
Life depends for its maintenance on the total physical environment
and more particularly on the conjunction of the sexes. The living
individual (the man conscious of this dependence) is aware, there-
fore, both that he is a 'part' set against the whole world of which
he is conscious, and that he is 'no part', that everything of which
he is conscious is essential to him and not really sundered from
him.
For reflection there are two ways of viewing this situation. vVe
can think of life as 'undivided', as the abiding, immortal, substance
which 'manifests' itself equally in Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and so
on ad infinitum, but which cannot manifest itself adequately in any
finite chain, although each mortal link is fixed by reflection as a
'stable, subsistent, fixed point', an individual. Or we can think of
it from our own point of view as 'stable, subsistent, fixed points'.
When we do this what is revealed is not the immortality of 'life' in
time, but the infinity of 'nature' in space. Here it is not just the
manifestations of life, but life itself, in its infinite aspect, that is
'posited' or 'fixed' by reflection. 'Nature' is the concept in which
the reflective intellect freezes 'life'; all of the essential aspects of
'life' are involved, but the emphasis falls upon the finite, mortal
aspect of things, whereas in the other view the emphasis is upon
immortality. Hence the living spectator of 'nature' feels the one-
sidedness of his attitude and corrects it by turning from the
contemplation of an infinity of finite elements back to the aware-
ness of an infinity of living beings. This infinity of life he calls
God.
Each of these points of view, the one in which we stand in the
presence of the living God and the one in which we discover the
infinity of nature, is one-sided. In our total conception of life in
 PHANTASIE r:1.:v HERZ
the world they are always united somehow. OUf whole attitude
toward our own lives will be determined by the way in which this
union is consummated. The problem is always to overcome the
'fixing' of life by the reflective intellect. Finite life (the reflective
individual) must raise itself to the infinite life of God. God is spirit,
for spirit is the living oneness [Einigkeit] of the manifold in contrast
with the manifold as its embodiment [Gestalt], not in contrast with it as
separated, dead, bare multiplicity; for in that case it would be the bare
unity [blasse Einheit] which is called 'law', which is merely something
thought of, not something alive [ein blaJ3 Gedachtes, Unlebendiges].
Spirit is an enlivening law in union with the manifold which is then
itself enlivened.!
Any student of 'The Spirit of Christianity' will be prepared for
the contrast drawn here between the abstract 'law' of 'nature' and
the actual 'spirit' of life. But it is a surprise to find-after his
trenchant critique of both the Mosaic law and the Kantian moral
law from the point of view of the spirit of love, which is opposed
to law altogether-that Hegel is prepared finally to assimilate the
conceptions of 'law' and 'life'. I must confess that I am not sure
how the consciousness of being an 'organ' in a living whole can
properly be called a 'law', though I suppose it does 'govern' one's
behaviour. But it is probable, I think, that Hegel has in mind the
attitude of one of his idealized Greeks toward the 'laws of the city'.
In any case, the way in which he speaks of an 'enlivening law'
here is one more sign that he did not regard the morality of pure
love as final or sufficient.
The conception of God as spirit is identical with the vision of
conscious life lived harmoniously and to the full. But in this
conception, the dead world, the necessary inorganic background of
life, is still excluded. In the living God we all live, move, and have
our being. But in this 'spiritual' life there is nothing dead; spirit
is 'absolutely opposed' to matter. Life as a self-maintaining process
is the 'joining of opposition and relation' (i.e. of two distinct but
fertile individuals of opposite sex); but life absolutely is the
'joining of joining and non-joining' (i.e. of spirit and matter, of
the organic and the inorganic). God and nature, therefore, though
they are opposed are somehow one. This unity is something
that cannot be expressed reflectively without contradiction. In
I absolute Entgegensetzllnggilt, Nohl, p. 347 (Knox, p. 311).
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
philosophy we cannot get beyond the thought of the living God;
but that is the thought of something which exists. It is through the
appeal to existence, to the actual experience of life that we avoid
the infinite regress that is generated by thought's attempt to grasp
its own opposite without contradiction. Religion is therefore
higher than philosophy, because it is not simply a form of thought
but a form of life. In philosophic thought we discover the finite-
ness of every part of nature and postulate what is needed to make
it whole; to this end pure reason must criticize itself and recognize
the transcendental illusions generated by its own infinite (the
conception of nature as a whole). But as a result of this criticism
the true infinite is shown to be something outside of the sphere of
theoretical reason altogether.
Religion differs from philosophical theory in that the elevation
of finite to infinite life in religious experience is not a matter of
striving towards an ideal set up by reflective thought (whether it
be an objective ideal, as in the case of obedience to the God of
Moses, or a subjective one, as in the case of conformity with the
Kantian 'holy will'). Any success in a rational striving of this sort
is only an advance to a new point of view from which a further
limit, a fresh imperfection to be overcome, is revealed. We advance
perpetually towards a goal which by definition we can never reach.
The infinite towards which we elevate ourselves exists only in
thought, never in experience.
At this point the fragment breaks off-indeed my last sentence is
really only a guess at what Hegel was about to say in the inter-
rupted sentence. I Critics have generally been struck by two
points in this discussion of the relation between religion and
philosophy: the way in which the description of reflection antici-
pates Hegel's later conception of the dialectic, and the fact that
philosophy is subordinated to religion. They point to the seeming
revolution that occurs in this latter respect with the emergence of
the ideal of 'absolute knowledge' within a year of Hegel's move to
Jena. Richard Kroner's note expresses this general attitude very
clearly, though perhaps in a rather extreme form:
1 Kroner thinks Hegel was about to stigmatize the infinite of Vernunft as a

'false one'. Possibly he is right, although the fact that Hegel has just referred
to Kant's achievement in the 'Dialectic' of the Critique of Pure Reason as
'placing the true infinite outside its sphere' makes me rather doubtful of this.
In any case, if he is right my view that in the closing contrast between Religion
and Vemunft Hegel is thinking of practical reason, becomes inescapable.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
This statement [i.e. most immediately the sentence, 'Within the living
whole there are posited at the same time death, opposition, and under-
standing, because there is posited a manifold that is alive itself and that,
as alive, can posit itself as a whole', but the general reference seems to be
to the whole paragraph down to this point], almost as dialectical as
Hegel's later method, forecasts what Hutchison Stirling calls 'the secret
of Hegel'--the reconciliation of understanding with life. But still he
believes that this reconciliation is reserved to religion. Philosophical
reflection always 'kills' life by distinguishing oppositions, and it cannot
give up those distinctions without killing itself. Desperately but as yet
unsuccessfully, Hegel gropes after a method which would understand
life by both positing and uniting opposites. Nowhere else can the
fountain-head of Hegel's dialectic be better studied than in the intellec-
tual struggle reflected in this paper.!

It is because there is so much obvious truth in the first three

sentences of this note that I feel moved to protest vigorously
against the dangerous misrepresentation of Hegel's own position
and attitude in the last two sentences. The claim that Hegel is
'desperately but as yet unsuccessfully' groping after a method is
simply false; and the implied claim that we have in this passage
'the fountain-head of Hegel's dialectic', though not quite false,
as we shall see, is at least dangerously misleading.
To begin with, what Hegel is 'desperately groping for' is a way
of convincing the enlightened public of his time that Kant's
critical philosophy cannot provide a 'rational faith' that is superior
to other types of religious experience. His whole argument that
'philosophy stops short of religion' is directed against Kant's
practical philosophy, and is founded on Kant's own conception of
theoretical philosophy as Hegel understands it. As far as he is
concerned, the Critique of Pure Reason has revealed once and for all
the inevitably dialectical character (in Kant's sense of the word) of
theoretical reflection about actual existence. It is in practical
philosophy-when it tries to deal with life-that 'reflection is
driven on and on without rest'; in theoretical philosophy it is only
thrown back and forth between the thesis and antithesis of an
antinomy. Hegel believes that the infinite progress of Kant's
practical reason towards an unattainable ideal arises directly from
the antinomic character of pure reason. This conviction is his only
personal contribution to 'philosophy' as here portrayed. He was
I Knox, pp. 312-13 (n. 6).
390 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
not in the least concerned himself about the inevitable failure of
reflection, and he never changed his mind about it.
As for the 'fountain-head of the dialectic' it is really a mistake
to look for any such thing, because the word 'dialectic' means
several different things in Hegel's mature thought. In one sense,
the narrowest and most precise, but not the one most commonly
intended by the critics who speak of it, what we have here is not so
much the 'fountain-head of the dialectic' as the dialectic itself.
This can be seen from Hegel's eventual distinction between
'dialectic' and 'reflection' in the Encyclopedia:
In its proper character dialectic is ... the real and true nature of the
determinations of understanding, the nature of things and of the finite
generally. To begin with, reflection is the movement out beyond the
isolated determination and a relating [Beziehen] of it, whereby it is
placed in connection [Verhaitnis] , but otherwise maintained in its
isolated validity. Dialectic, on the other hand, is this immanent going
beyond, wherein the onesidedness and limitedness of the determinations
of understanding reveals itself as what it is, namely as their negation.'
It is clear, I think, that the conception of reflection in this passage
from the mature system is identical with that expressed in absolute
Entgegensetzung gilt; and the definition of dialectic corresponds
perfectly with the attitude that Hegel adopts toward reflection in
that fragment. We could hardly ask for a more graphic demonstra-
tion that Hegel's attitude toward 'philosophical reflection' did
not change in later years. But the expression 'Hegel's dialectic'
usually refers to 'what Hutchison Stirling calls "the secret of
Hegel" -the reconciliation of understanding with life'. The
'fountain-head' of this, so far as there is one, is not to be found in
anything that Hegel says here or elsewhere about 'reflection', but in
the continuous evolution of his conceptions of 'life', 'religion', and
particularly 'love'.
One of the most remarkable things about the development of
Hegel's philosophy is that ideas mature in a sort of steady succession
and, once matured, remain fairly stable even while other ideas are
developing around and above them. His conception of 'reflection'
is already mature in 1800. The conception of religion is not yet
mature, for Hegel's ideal model is still the religion ofthe Greeks, or
what he called in the Phenomenology the 'religion of art'. In the
I Encyclopcedia (,830), section 81. I have translated the passage as faithfully
as I can: cf. Wallace, p. '47, for a slightly more relaxed and readable rendering.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 39 1

end this ideal is identified with 'art' simply, rather than with 're-
ligion'. 'Absolute knowledge', the highest conception of all,
develops out of the conception of 'love' as the self-consciousness
of 'life', and hence as the reconciliation of thought (or 'reflection')
with existence. In this development the already clarified concep-
tions of 'reflection', 'understanding', and 'representation' (Vorstel-
lung) all playa part; but the role of the still-evolving notions of
'art' and 'religion' is more important.
We could perhaps say that the 'fountain-head' of it all is the
dialectic between the Kantian and the Hellenic conceptions of
reason. But 'dialectic' is used here in its reconciliatory sense to
refer to what Hegel later calls the 'speculative or positively-
rational phase' (which is not what 'dialectic' refers to in the strict
sense).l It is the 'reconciliation of Reason (Vernunft), not of
Understanding (Verstand), with life' that is the 'secret of Hegel'.
And if we want to understand that secret we must not allow our-
selves to be misled by the fact that the words 'philosophy' and
'religion' are put in one relation at this stage in his development,
and in the opposite relation a year later; we must attend to what
the words mean. When we do this we find that what is called
'philosophy' in the first instance does not subsequently change its
status, and that what is called 'philosophy' later grows out of what
was called 'religion' before. 2
Confirmation of the view that the religion of the Greeks, not
Christianity, is still for Hegel the 'absolute religion' in r800, and
some idea of what sort of experience it is that he looks to for a
solution of the antinomies of practical reflection and 'rational
faith' can be gained from the second surviving fragment of our
present manuscript, ein objektiven Mittelpunkt. In this, the last
quarto sheet of the essay, he seems to be finishing his description
of an ideal system of religious worship.3 He has reached the
I See Encyclopcedia, sections 79 and 82.
2 This point has been well taken and felicitously expressed by Peperzak
(pp. 199-200).
3 This is apparent when he reaches his conclusion: 'It only needs to be briefly
touched on, that the remaining external spatial surroundings (of the place where
the people assemble for worship) ought not so much to occupy the mind with
purposeless beauty as point towards something else [i.e. the God] through
purposeful adornment' (Nohl, p. 350; Knox, p. 3l6). Up to this point we might
have taken his account of temple worship as part of a theoretical analysis of
folk-religion rather than as a practical recommendation.
(Lukacs, p. 275 n., has expressed doubt as to whether this really is the last
392 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

problem of the temple or church as the 'house of God', and of just

how and where God is conceived to dwell in it:
<The religious experience of a people has to have?) an objective
centre. For all peoples [Valkern] it was the dawn-region [Morgen-
gegend] of the temple, and for the worshippers of an invisible God [the
Jews] only this emptiness [Gestaltlose] of the determinate space, only a
place. But this mere opposite, this purely objective, merely spatial
<centre) need not necessarily remain in this imperfection [Unvoll-
standigkeit] of perfect objectivity; it can itself, i.e. as self-maintaining,
revert to its own subjectivity through the figure [durch die Gestalt, sc.
of the God]. Divine feeling, the infinite sensed by the finite, is thereby
perfected [vervollstandigt] for the first time, in that reflection is added
and dwells on it. I
Anyone who compares this passage with Hegel's critique of the
Eucharist in 'The Spirit of Christianity' will speedily perceive
that he is here making the same comparison between Jewish and
Greek worship that he there made between the love feast of the
early Christians and that of the Greek mysteries. 2 Religion is the
fulfilment of love because in religion reflection is satisfied by being
given an objective image of the divine being to focus upon. The
object abides and is not done away with or consumed, as it is in
love, or in the ordinary process of life, yet in its religious aspect it is
not set against the subject, for it is only the beauty of the Vorstellung
that is divine, and that was created entirely by the imaginative
genius of the artist, who is himself a member of the worshipping
communion. Love itself is, of course, a reflective state, but the
reflection is something separate from the actual feeling (that is
why Christian charity, the attempt to be faithful to life, leads in
sheet of the essay. Hegel did, of course, sometimes put the date into the margin
of work in progress when he began a new day's work (perhaps after an interval of
some days for study and reflection, or an interruption caused by the pressure
of other duties and concerns). See, for instance, the dates in man mag die
20idersprechendsten Betrachtungen, Nohl, pp. 204 and 2I I. But he did not, I think,
ever put the date at the end of a sheet unless he wished to mark the completion
of a project: cf. Nohl's note at the end of Das Leben Jesu (Nohl, p. I36). Thus,
even if the sheet is full, as it may well be, the recording of the date I4 Sept.
I800 at the end of it proves fairly conclusively that in Hegel's mind some sort
of a terminus had here been reached.)
I Nohl, p. 349 (Knox, pp. 3 I 3-I4). The addition at the beginning is, of course,
only a conjecture (upon which no weight should be placed). If Morgen-gegend
is translated simply as 'the east' we lose the echo of sun-worship which I am
confident that Hegel meant us to catch.
2 Der Abschied, den Jesus, Nohl, pp. 297-30I (Knox, pp. 248-53).
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 393
the end only to the sacrifice of life). When religious consciousness
is focused on the Gestalt of the divine, the unity and harmony of
the whole community (its 'spirit') is not merely felt but known.
The Jewish people could come together in the Temple and in that
way feel their union. But they were expressly forbidden to 'make
unto themselves any graven image'. The emptiness of the Holy of
Holies offered for reflection only an 'actual objectivity', a Vorstellung
of the non-living. Whereas in the Greek temple the people came
together before the image of the God, an objectivity which 'is, at
the same time, what it ought to be, in virtue of the subjectivity
bound up with it [sc. that of the artist], not an actual but only a
potential objectivity'. One could make this potential objectivity
actual by smashing the statue or grinding it to powder, but then, as
Hegel says in 'The Spirit of Christianity', one could not afterwards
turn and worship the dust. I
Because it is the Vorstellung that matters, the presence of an
actual physical work of art is not essential, but the fancy must have
an image of beauty to play on. In Hegel's theory of 'life' we have
seen how everything culminates in the conception of the child.
The period between conception and birth is the period of 'oneness'.
In the 'determinate space' of the womb the whole of life, the whole
significance of the world, the infinity which the reflective ideal of
'nature as a whole' could not contain, actually is. Here we have the
perfect image of that 'life in God' which Plato expressed in the
myth of the soul's life before birth, and Jesus in the parable about
the 'angels of the children'. 2 But we have also what Hegel calls 'the
objective antinomy with respect to the Gegenstand'. The thing that
'stands against' life in its 'oneness' as its necessary objective
complement is the womb of the mother, an environment which is
itself alive; but the thing that 'stands against' life in the fulness of
self-consciousness is the whole physical universe which is not
alive. What reflection cannot grasp in its rational use, when it
rises from the concept of 'Nature' to that of 'pure life', is the
necessity of embodiment; this is what it captures, in its imaginative
use, in the Vorstellung of God's Incarnation. But the gulf between
the rational and the imaginative employment of reflection remains.
This was the unsolved problem from which Hegel's conception
I Der Abschied, den Jesus, Noh!, pp. 300-1 (Knox, p. 252).
2 See Das WesendesJesus, Noh!, pp. 315-16 (Knox, pp. 269-70), and B. Moral.
Bergpredigt, Noh!, p. 400; compare the discussion above, pp. 366-7.
394 FRANKFURT 1797-1800
of 'absolute knowledge' sprang. The 'Father' and the 'Son', the
two aspects of this antinomy, have yet to be united in the
'Spirit'.
Hegel mentions at this point another antinomy: 'just as, above
the antinomy of time, the moment and the time of life, was posited
as necessary'. He must have posited this antinomy in the part of
the manuscript now lost. Just what it was depends on the meaning
to be attached here to die Zeit des Lebens. At first sight it would
seem that der Moment des Lebens can hardly be anything but an
actual present moment of consciousness; if this is taken as the
minimum requirement of life in its 'oneness' (the instant when
the parents 'lose their individuality' in 'union' and a new life is
conceived, but also every instant of consciousness in its 'purity',
every instant in which we are or at least can be 'born again'), then
die Zeit des Lebens must be the time required by life in its 'fullness'.
But how long is this? Is it simply the normal life span of a healthy
individual? Or is it rather the 'whole of time' (because only the
immortal chain of the generations can properly be called a living
being)? The analogy with the 'objective antinomy' suggests the
latter view. But now that the alternative is squarely before us, we
can see that der Moment des Lebens could quite easily be taken as a
technical term for the 'individual life'. In that case what we have
here is the antinomy between the immortal and the mortal aspects
of life that was 'posited' in a passage of absolute Entgegensetzung
gilt which we have already analysed: '(Life's) relation is not more
absolute, than (the) separation of the related (manifold)'. Any of
these three interpretations (or some combination of more than one
of them) may be what Hegel means here by 'the antinomy of time'.
We must resign ourselves to uncertainty on this point, and turn
back again to the 'objective antinomy'. I
Religious experience makes us aware on the one hand that we
I It is in the highest degree unlikely that any more of this manuscript will

turn up in the future. Rosenkranz does not appear to have possessed any more
of it than we do (Rosenkranz, p. 94: 'einige mit Buchstaben bezeichnete Bogen
vorhanden sind'). Haym, p. 492 n. 10, claims to be going 'back to the complete
original manuscript' for the passage quoted and paraphrased on p. 85-6 of his
book. But it is fairly clear that he only means the actual text of the fragmentary
manuscript as against the paraphrased extract given by Rosenkranz. My own
guess is that Hegel utilized much of the manuscript himself in later years in
some way that made its destruction either necessary (e.g. he cut it up) or at
least a matter of indifference to him subsequently. Some of it probably survives
in the Differenzschrift and in Glauben und Wissen.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 395
stand in a living relation to the world; but it also brings us face to
face with the fact that we must admit the objectivity of the world.
Judaism failed because it sought to deny the living relation;
primitive Christianity failed because it sought to deny the ob-
jectivity, and set up the 'Kingdom of God' in opposition to the
kingdom of Mammon. 'It may be', says Hegel, 'that in the relations
of living beings, objectification [i.e. hostility or opposition] only
has to last for a moment'; but it is nevertheless part of the human
'fate' to 'make living beings into objects'. From the way he speaks
of the ending of this 'moment' -'life once more withdraws from
(making and being made an object), frees itself therefrom, and
leaves the oppressed to its own life and the resurrection of it' -it
is probable that he is thinking here of ancient slavery and of the
appeal of Christianity to a world where everyone was in bondage
to the Roman Emperor.! We have here the first explicit declaration
on Hegel's part that war to the death and the master-slave relation
is a necessary phase in the natural development of human
conSCiOusness.
But apart from the moment of subjection on the part of life
itself, we have to recognize the 'fate' of property. Life involves both
the possession and the consumption of objects. In order to keep
ourselves alive, we have to treat some living things as objects even
to the point of actually destroying their life and consuming their
dead bodies; and by building houses and cultivating the land (as
Abraham refused to do) we admit the permanence and inevita-
bility of life's dependence upon the non-living environment.
In religious experience, as we rise from finite to infinite life, we
need to express somehow the fact that this relation to objects (the
lower orders of organic life, and the inorganic world) is a universal
relation. It belongs to life itself as the 'joining of joining and non-
joining', not merely to us as finite individuals. This is the sig-
nificance of the religious ceremony of sacrifice. At a Greek sacrifice
the assembled people solemnly burned part of the offering (mainly

I Cf. Jetzt braucht die Menge, Nohl, pp. 70-1; Unkunde d£r Geschichte, Nohl,
pp. 364-5; and Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde, Nohl, pp. 223-4 (Knox,
pp. 157-8), for the continuous presence and gradual evolution of this idea in
Hegel's mind from 1794 onwards. It seems not to be directly referred to in 'The
Spirit of Christianity', which is concerned more directly with the resurrection
of Jewish life from servitude to the Mosaic Law. Hegel can hardly be thinking
of that here, because he certainly did not regard the Jewish 'fate' as the typical
or natural fate of humanity.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

the inedible part) as the share of the God, and then ate the rest
in a communal feast. The love-feast aspect of this procedure is the
closest approximation possible to 'spiritual' possession of the object:
its character as private property is as nearly as possible destroyed;
and the purposeless destruction of what is burned on the altar is
'the only religious relation to absolute objects', because it both
makes us aware, and signifies our awareness, that in consuming
things purposefully in order to live we are not simply maintaining
ourselves till death comes in the ordinary course of nature, we are
maintaining the immortal life of which 'the course of nature' is only
an abstract image. In this sense the 'destruction for destruction's
sake' that takes place on the altar 'makes good (the> other par-
ticular connection [Verhiiltnis] of (man's> purposeful destruction'.
Thus, at last, Hegel has justified the central position of com-
munal sacrifice in the religious practice of his idealized Hellas.
From the beginning, in Religion ist eine (1793), he had to face the
fact that both the conservatives and the radicals, both the pious
and the enlightened, in his own society were agreed that the
practice of sacrifice was barbarous and superstitious. Furthermore,
he himself agreed with the enlightened critics that much of the
religious ceremonial of his own time which had an ascetic and
quasi-sacrificial aspect was only fetishism and superstition. He
maintained always that the sacrificial feasts of the Greeks were
different, but it is only now that he has finally managed to show
why. I
This was the climax of Hegel's account. Having shown why the
God must be visibly present in the temple,2 and what the people
are to do in his presence, he turns briefly to externals. Physically
the place of worship should be beautiful, but beautiful only in such
a way as to focus attention upon the central Gestalt of the God;
the forms of worship on the other hand should be such as to
'transcend' (aufheben) the passive contemplation (both rational and
imaginative) of the 'objective God' which the whole physical design
of the temple is calculated to encourage. Aufheben, which Hegel
still uses primarily in a 'cancelling' sense, struck him as rather too

I Cf. Religion ist eine, Nohl, pp. 24-6 (pp. 503-4 below).

• Presumably Joseph, Mary, and the child Jesus would have to be before the
worshipper's eyes in his Christian temple--or perhaps only the Risen Lord.
Certainly not the Crucifixion, which sets before us the fate of Christianity that
he wishes to overcome.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 397
strong an expression here, so he adds: 'or rather to fuse [ver-
schmelzen] it with the subjectivity of living beings in joy'. The
people come before their God to sing, dance, and hear 'solemn
orations'-more like Pericles' Funeral Oration, doubtless, than
like a Lutheran sermon. In what Hegel says about dancing we get
a glimpse, perhaps, of his reason for calling 'spirit' an 'enlivening
law': he calls dancing 'a kind of subjective manifestation that
becomes objective and beautiful through rules' (durch Regel). In
the preface to the Phenomenology, we may remember, he finds the
perfect image of the spirit in the most celebrated example of Greek
religious dancing, the Bacchic revel; but there the emphasis is on
spontaneity, rather than on the grace of voluntary control, for, as
he says, all the revellers are drunk. I The ideal of worship here is
more measured and Sophoclean. The whole order of worship is to
be presided over by a priest 'who, if an outer life full of needs has
greatly sundered man, will likewise be a sundered person', i.e.
someone whose main social function is to be a priest. If we compare
this relatively neutral remark with the polemical tone of Hegel's
comments about the sundering of society into classes and pro-
fessions in the fragments of I794,2 we shall see that his reflections
upon the fate of the classless society of the 'Kingdom of God', have
led to the removal from Hegel's own ideal of certain traits which
were derived originally from the ideology of I789 rather than from
Periclean Athens.
In his last paragraph Hegel compares this ideal of the religion
of a 'happy people' with the typical deformations that it undergoes
among unhappy peoples. A happy people knows that the infinite
life is their life; in their religious experience the opposition of
subject and object is reduced to a minimum, since the beauty on
which their attention is fixed is produced by the inspired imagina-
tion of one among them. 'Unhappy peoples' cannot achieve this:
'in the separation they have to take anxious care for the preserva-
tion of one of the separated terms, for independence'. In other
words, their religious experience is the awareness of the infinite life
as self-sufficient and independent; it is the reflective complement
of their everyday life in which nothing is independent, everything
I Phiinomenologie des Geistes, Hoffmeister, p. 39 (Baillie, p. 105).
2 The present passage may be neutral in that a certain degree of 'sundering'
is implicitly accepted as necessary. But it is clear that in the basic sense of a
breach of natural familial ties 'sundering' is an evil. Hegel is not offering a
justification for clerical celibacy.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

is finite, causally determined, subject to law. The Trennung to

which Hegel refers here is the Trennung between God and
Nature which must exist for any man who has achieved reflective
awareness of his own place in the natural order. For the reflective
awareness of his dependence rests on a conscious contrast with an
ideal standard of free and independent life that he has formulated
for himself. He can conceive this contrast in two ways: positively
or rationally. The one absolutely independent being set against the
system of dependent creatures may be regarded as an inscrutable
power, or as an independent rational subject. The more clearly and
sharply one is aware of the Trennung, the more necessary it becomes
to conceive of God both ways at once. I He is the absolute substance,
the law of nature, and the absolute Ego, the law of duty. It does
not make much difference in the end which of these roles is taken
as fundamental to begin with. Positive religion and Kantian moral
reason both arrive at the same terminus: the subjection of life to an
almighty object (i.e. a commanding, compelling law). In both
cases our human nature is taken as absolutely finite, and the divine
nature as absolutely infinite (self-sufficient, independent). Our life,
our experience, our world, is reduced to the status of a passing
phenomenon, the existence or non-existence of which is ultimately
indifferent so far as the one eternal being is concerned. When we
rise towards the one eternal being we must leave that phenomenal
nature behind us. We cannot draw near to God as individuals who
share the powers of sensibility, and the capacity to exercise them
creatively in imagination. We must be content to lose all of that, to
rise above it and be purely rational beings. This exaltation of the
Ego to 'blessedness' (in Kant, Fichte, and Schelling) is 'at bottom
equivalent to' the original exaltation of an infinite Lord above
all of Nature in the minds of Noah, Abraham, and Moses. Far
from being modern and 'enlightened', therefore, the conception of
God in 'rational religion' is elementary and primitive; it is the
reflection of a life of hardship and 'need'. But even so it is nobler
and more worthy than the orthodox Christian view, according
to which the infinite power 'humbled itself', and in one unique
I This seems to me to be the upshot of that passage in Schelling's essay Vom

Ich which made such an impression on Hegel's mind (see Briefe, i. 30, and
Schelling, Siimtliche Werke, i. 201). But the immediate reference-the implicit
quotation (Nohl, p. 351) which Kroner notices but cannot identify is to Fichte's
Appellation an das Publikum (Jan. 1799). The quotation is supplied by Fuhrmans,
pp. 459-60 n. 8.
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 399
historical event exhibited itself miraculously in a phenomenal life
which was for it only 'the form of a servant'. I

II. The 'ideal of my youth in reflective form'

On 24 September 1800, just ten days after he had thus identified

the achievements of Kant and Fichte with those of Abraham and
Moses, and dismissed the orthodox conception of the Incarnation
in a way which echoes the trenchant condemnation of 'faith in
Christ' with which his long struggle with the Christian religion
opened, 2 Hegel turned back again to his essay on 'The Positivity
of the Christian Religion', which represents, if I am right, the
fruition of the first stage of his inquiry. In the course of his Frank-
furt researches he had gained a new insight into the relation between
positive religion and the religion of reason. This insight did not
affect his practical attitude towards either of them. But it did
make it necessary for him to revise his original introduction to
the essay of 1795, in which they were treated simply as opposite
extremes.
The new introduction begins with the antithesis of 'natural' and
'positive' religion, because the ambiguities of this distinction
enable Hegel to show up very clearly the contrast between his own
integrated point of view and the two opposed reflective standpoints
that he wishes to set aside. But whereas in the earlier version the
main target of his criticism was the 'positive' religion of Storr and his
followers at Tubingen, his criticism is now directed primarily
against the enlightened religion of Lessing, Mendelssohn, Kant,
Fichte, and Schelling. What is new in his discussion is the insistence
that it isnotenoughtounderstand that a religion is 'positive', which
is all that rational criticism can do. When we go further and ask how it
came to be positive, how it came to deviate from the canons of reason,
the right answer reveals not so much a superfluity in the religion
analysed, as a lack in the standpoint of reflective criticism itself.
I Hegel consistently anticipates Feuerbach in his interpretation of all
'otherworldly' conceptions of the divine as reflections of physical need: cf.
especially Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung, Nohl, pp. 373-4, on the Judaic
tradition. Christianity as a miracle-religion reflects a need which is spiritual
as well as physical, because the culture to which it appealed was so much more
developed. Freedom and spontaneity were frustrated, but the memory of
a beautiful existence (not merely of 'a land flowing with milk and honey') was
present.
2 Compare the discussion of Es soUte eine schwere Aufgabe and ~Venn man von

der christliche1l Religion (Nohl, pp. 50--69) in Chapter III above, pp. 177-83.
 FHANKFURT 1797-1800

The antithesis of 'positive' and 'natural' religion (like that

between 'positive' and 'natural' law) requires that all variation and
multiplicity be assigned to th~ positive side. There can be only
one 'natural' law or 'natural' religion, because the human nature
that is governed by it or expressed in it is ex hypothesi uniform.
From the point of view of a rational critic of positive religion,
therefore, the natural norm must be defined before his critical
attack can begin.! It was characteristic of the champions of 'en-
lightenment' to believe that they could define man's Bestimmung
by the light of natural reason, and that in this concept they had a
standard by which to define religion itself.2 But from the standpoint
of 'life in its integrity' which Hegel's investigations have now led
him to adopt, it is apparent that the reflective concept of 'human
nature as such' must have a long history of cultural development
behind it. It is equally clear from either standpoint that 'pure
human nature' has never actually existed. 'Pure human nature' is
a universal concept, while actual humanity exists only in individuals.
Something more than 'freedom of the will' -the standard which
Fichte used to define man's Bestimmung-is needed to make aman.3
Religion is man's consciousness of his humanity in its integrity.
Hence it is bound to contain more than the pure rational principles
of human morality which are the 'laws of freedom'. And so, once
I From the point of view of someone like Storr, who believed that religion must
be positive, it was not strictly true that the concept of human nature must be
defined first, though that concept and 'man's relation to God' were bound to
playa crucial role in his argument to show that the positive revelation contained
in the Bible was the true religion. From the way Hegel defines positive religion
we can see that at this stage he does not any longer feel that he needs to take
Storr's perversion of Kant seriously. It was only a further extension of the
perversion of nature begun by Kant himself.
2 Der Begriff der Positivitiit, Nohl, p. 139 (Knox, p. ! 67). It may welJ be that
Hegel has the recent publication of Fichte's Die Bestimmung des Menschen in
mind here, as Knox (p. 167 n. 44) suggests (see the following note). But we should
remember that use of the tenn was widespread and fashionable for twenty years
before the appearance of Fichte's book. Hegel seems to have encountered it
for the first time in Moses Mendelssohn (see his excerpt of 31 May 1787
from Mendelssohn's article 'Was heiBt aufkl1iren?' of 1784: Dok., pp. 140-3).
3 Der Begriff der Positivitiit, Nohl, p. 141 (Knox, p. 169). There cannot be
much doubt that Hegel is here thinking of Fichte's use of this 'one-sided stand-
ard' to show that man's Bestimmung is not really a thing of this world. See the
whole argument in the last stages of Die Bestimmung des lVlenschen (Fichte,
Siimtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte, ii. 288-319; Chisholm, pp. 124-54) and
particularly the following dictum: 'The absolute freedom of the will, which we
bring down from the Infinite into the world of time, is the principle of this our
life' (Siimtliche Werke, ii. 300; Chisholm, p. 125).
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ 4 01
the integrity of life has been ruptured, once man has come to think
of his life as governed by law, his religion is bound to assume a
positive character. This 'positivity', however, is only the character
that it has, as an external authority, for the reflective consciousness
that has advanced to the point of recognizing the rupture-the
opposition between existence and concept. For one who is simply
in the state of rupture, the authoritative character of his religion
is quite 'natural'. His religion provides him with a perfectly true
and adequate consciousness of his actual condition as a living being.
He is only conscious of it as 'positive', as an external authority,
when this correspondence has ceased, when the 'spirit' that links
his religion to his life has died or flown. I
This does not imply that we ought not to condemn any religion
as positive or superstitious. It only means that our judgements
about religion must be based on an 'ideal of human nature', not a
definition of the 'human vocation'.2 Haering has remarked on the
difference between Hegel's concept of an 'ideal' here and the Kant-
ian definition of an 'ideal' as distinct from an 'idea'.3 There is in
fact an important difference, but it has not generally been properly
identified. Hegel's use of the term 'ideal' is fairly clearly derived
from Kant's,4 but whereas Kant says: 'By the ideal I understand
the idea, not merely in concreto but in individuo', the ideal of which
Hegel is speaking is concrete but not individual. Not Jesus or
Socrates, but the 'Kingdom of God' or 'the City' is the ideal of
human nature.
There is of course a tremendous difference in the function which
the 'ideal' has in Hegel's theory as against Kant's; this is generally
confused with the difference in character just pointed out. The

I Compare Der immer sich vergrofJernde Widerspruch (Lasson, pp. 138-41)

discussed on pp. 44.0-5 below.

2 In the earlier version-man mag die widersprechendsten Betrachtungen, Nohl,

p. 153 (Knox, p. 68)-Hegellays it down as his Grundsatz, 'as a foundation for

all judgements about the different form [Gestalt], modifications, and spirit of
the Christian religion' that 'the Zweck and Wesen of all true religion is human
morality'. This proposition still holds true, but it is no longer the 'Grundsatz'
for all judgements. The 'foundation' for judgements is now human nature in its
fullness; unlike human nature in its purity, this Maj3stab cannot be contained in
a Grundsatz at all--cornpare Der Liebe versohnt aber, Nohl, pp. 294-5 (Knox,
PP.245-6).
3 See Haering, i. 179; and cf. i. 454 and 580.
4 Cf. Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon, Nohl, p. 247 (Knox, pp. 187-
8). Knox quotes the relevant passage from the Critique of Pure Reason, A 568-
9 in his note ad loco
8U3588 E e
402 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

two differences are connected-for a 'personified ideal' such as

Jesus could not perform the function Hegel assigns to the 'ideal
of human nature' I-but they ought to be clearly distinguished. In
Kant's theory it is the 'idea' (freedom, virtue, the moral law), not
the ideal (the free, virtuous, rational man), that plays the decisive
role. The ideal could not usurp this place because it is a work of
imagination not of reason. But this is exactly why it becomes the
more important of the two in Hegel's theory. 'Whereas Kant wanted
to seat authority in the right place, Hegel wished from the beginning
to eliminate the appeal to authority altogether. The ideal of the
imagination does not command; it evokes love and a spontaneous
desire to imitate. If anyone tries to make the ideal into a source of
authority it immediately becomes 'positive'. In terms of 'authority'
the imagination cannot set itself against the 'higher' functions of
Verstand and Vernunft. But this is because the whole sphere of
authority and hierarchy is 'lower'; the ordering of the inorganic
world and of property generally is a function of reason and
understanding; the sphere of life belongs rather to the imagi-
nation. 2
The question to be asked about any religion, and in particular
about our own, therefore, is not how far it meets the requirements
of human reason, though it must do that, but how far it satisfies
the highest longings of the human imagination. The claim that
Christianity contains positive elements, that it commands things
that are contrary to the law of reason or upon grounds that are not
rational, is not in itself very interesting; for it does not touch upon
the status of Christianity as religion. Where a claim of this sort is
established as true, it only shows that in certain respects the religion
has ceased to fulfil its proper function, that there is dead wood in it.
We need rather to have the contrary proved, says Hegel: we need
to be shown that all this 'discarded dogmatics'-which men like
Storr have used to bolster up despotism-originally expressed an
ideal of the imagination. 3 For to suppose that there was never

I Cf. Es sollte eine schwere Aufgabe, Nohl, p. 57, and Wenn man von der
christ lichen Religion, Nohl, p. 67; Hegel saw from the beginning that the 'ideal'
has to be iibermenschlich. Just for this reason it cannot be instantiated in a
particular person.
2 As Jesus said, one does not give stones to children crying for bread; but as
Hegel adds, neither does one give bread to men who want to build a house.
Der Begriff der Positivitiit, Nohl, p. 142 (Knox, p. 171).
3 Ibid., Nohl, p. 143 (Knox, p. 172). Of course Hegel himself had already
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
anything but superstitious folly and shameless trickery in it, is the
height of intellectual conceit.
Of course, if that ideal itself was a positive one, if authority, or
lordship and bondage (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft), were the
'ideal of human nature' set forth by the Christian religion in its
original form, then Christianity really would be a 'positive'
religion. This is the ideal which Hegel ascribes to Noah, to Abraham,
to Joseph, and to Moses. I But that the Christian religion was in
fact grounded upon the accidental circumstance that Jesus claimed
to be the Messiah, that something like this was the central core of
Jesus' message, is a 'claim that would be rejected by reason and
repudiated by freedom'. Hence the real object of Hegel's essay
is the discovery of the particular circumstances which directly gave
occasion to a positive interpretation. 2
Thus Hegel shifts his ground. For although he announces that
his purpose is to investigate whether the Christian religion is
positive 'as a whole', he in fact takes it for granted that it is not
positive in this sense; his real purpose is to show how something
which was not positive originally, became positive because of the
particular circumstances with which Jesus had to contend. He
repeats this revised version of his purpose-which certainly
corresponds with the actual content of the first part of the essay
more closely than the programme taken over from the original

performed this task in 'The Spirit of Christianity'. The fact that he now asserts
that it is a 'need of the time' shows that he regards the results of that investigation
as co-ordinate with those of the present essay. Compare the division of the
inquiry about Christianity as positive doctrine into a question about the religion
'as a whole' and another about its 'content', Nohl, p. 144 (Knox, pp. 173--4).
See also the hypothesis and discussion above, pp. 379-82.
I For Noah see Mit Abraham dem wahren Stammvater, NoW, p. 244 (Knox,

p. 183); for Abraham, Joseph, and Moses see Abraham in Chaldlia geboren hatte
schon, Nohl, p. 247 (Knox, p. 187); p. 248 (Knox, p. 188); and pp. 250-1
(Knox, pp. 191-3) respectively. The ideal of Jesus, of course, was exactly that
'love' which Abraham's religion compelled him to renounce in the sacrifice of
Isaac.
2 Hegel's question (NoW, p. 145, first complete sentence) is whether there

were particular circumstances which led to mere accidents being taken as

eternally valid, and to the Christian religion's being founded on such an accident.
He rejects this last claim out of hand (though it corresponds with the purpose
that he has only just announced), but he goes on to explain that 'the accident
from which a necessity has been supposed to proceed ... is called in general
authority'. I think that I am justified therefore in asserting that the particular
'accident' which he has in mind is Jesus' acceptance of the Messianic role.
(Compare further the passage referred to below, p. 404 n. 2.)
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

introduction of I7951-a little further on, at the end of his new

introductory section. 2
The perceptible wavering in Hegel's statement of his objective
arises from the fact that orthodox Christianity, as a doctrine of
salvation through grace, is a positive religion. It does rest on the
claim that Jesus possessed a peculiar authority, that he was the
eternal Lord himself in the 'form of a servant'; and this claim is
based on the 'accidental circumstance' that Jesus made use of the
Messianic hope. But Hegel was anxious to insist that this 'claim
which reason would reject and freedom would repudiate' is not
the whole truth about Christianity. Even though the accidental
circumstance was given an absolute and fundamental significance,
the substance of the Gospel, the 'spirit' or 'whole' of the religion
of Jesus, which was distorted into the 'content' of positive
Christianity, has always been there for those with eyes to see and
ears to hear. 3 Jesus proclaimed one religion; his followers founded
another. The 'Positivity' essay tells us how this came about, and
'The Spirit of Christianity' explains the fate that overtook the
original religion of Jesus, within this accidental framework of
authority.
By this time the new introduction has already impinged to some
extent upon the substance of the earlier manuscript. The first part
of the fourth section in the earlier version (which was headed
'Whence came the positive ?') is directly incorporated into the
new introductory section.4 There is no need to say anything here
about straightforward repetitions of this sort. Nor do we need to
say much about the new versions of the second and third sections

I Only the first part of the essay corresponds directly with the purpose

announced in either version of the introduction. With the section 'How a moral
or religious society grows into a State' (Nohl, p. 173; Knox, p. 95) the topic
begins to shift towards the related question of relations between the religious
(voluntary) society of the Church, and the civil (compulsory, hence positive)
society of the State. This part of the essay is the practical application of the
historical investigation that precedes.
2 Nohl, pp. 147-8 (Knox, p. 177).

3 Thus the enlightened dismissal of the 'conviction of many centuries' as a

'relic of the dark ages' is unjustified on two counts. First it does not treat the
millions of believers with the respect due to them as rational beings; and secondly
it does not do justice to the ideal which enlightened thinkers have always
recognized in the Gospels. (Compare Hegel's earliest statement of the problem
in Es sollte eine schwere Aufgabe, which is guilty on the first count, perhaps, but
not guilty on the second: see Nohl, pp. 51 and 58.)
4 The passage beginning in the middle of Nohl, p. 145. from 'DaB die christ-
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
(on the 'state of Judaism' and 'Jesus') except that they reflec'l, the
greatly deepened understanding of the relation between Jesus
and the tradition and spirit of Judaism that Hegel has now
achieved; and they provide us with yet another source with which
to fill the lacuna at the beginning of 'The Spirit of Christianity'. I
But there is one other addition in the new introduction which
deserves special notice because, as I indicated earlier, I think we
can find in it a hint of what was in the lost manuscript that Hegel
had just completed.
It is obvious [he writes] that the investigation [of man's consciousness
of the good and the divine] if it were carried out thoroughly on a con-
ceptual basis [durch Begriffe] would pass over in the end into a meta-
physical treatise on the relation of the finite to the infinite; but this is
not the concern of this essay ...

Since we have already seen that his remark about 'what the time
needs', a few pages earlier, can be very plausibly construed as a
reference to what he had done in 'The Spirit of Christianity', we
are bound to wonder whether this is not another reference to
something that he has himself just finished. Certainly the fragment
absolute Entgegensetzung gilt would fit very neatly into the context
of such a 'metaphysical treatise'; and the programme that Hegel
implicitly lays out for the putative treatise provides a plausible
bridge between that fragment and the Hellenic ideal of ein
objektiven Mittelpunkt:
But this is not the concern of this essay which assumes as a foundation
that the need to recognize a higher being [Wesen] than human action as
we are conscious of it, the need to make the intuition of its perfection
into the enlivening spirit of life, and to devote time, institutions, and
feelings simply to this intuition, quite unconnected [ohne Verbindung]
with other purposes, is necessarily rooted in human nature itself. This
liche Religion sich auf Autoritlit griinde, usw.' to the middle of p. 146, ' ... in
ilmen gewirkt werden kanne', should be compared with man mag die wider-
sprechendsten Betrachtungen, Nohl, pp. 155-7. (See Knox, pp. 174-6 and 71-3.)
I It is worthy of note, however, that the earlier claim, 'To the latter [i.e.

obedience to the moral law] alone, not to descent from Abraham, did Jesus
ascribe value in the eyes of God' (Nohl, p. 154; Knox, p. 70), disappears in the
new version. From the standpoint of 'life' descent does have a significance. It
helps one to recognize the union between one's own life and life as a whole.
Hence this assertion in the first version is replaced by the comment that
'his [Jesus'] new teaching led to a religion for the world rather than for his
nation alone' (Nohl, p. 149; Knox, p. 179). The earlier version stressed the
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

universal need of a religion contains within it many particular needs;

how far the satisfaction of these needs belongs to nature, how far nature
itself can provide the solution of the contradictions in which it becomes
involved with itself, whether the Christian religion contains the only
possible solution of them, and whether this solution lies altogether
outside nature, whether man can grasp it only through passivity of
faith-these questions, the investigation of their true significance, and
their proper development may perhaps find a place somewhere else.!
Not all of these questions, probably, were dealt with fully in the
missing manuscript. But we have here, if I am not mistaken, a
fairly detailed prospectus of what Hegel meant when he told
Schelling in November: 'In my scientific development, which
began from the more subordinate needs of men, I was bound to be
driven on to science, and the ideal of my youth had to be trans-
formed at the same time into reflective form, into a system. I ask
myself now, while I am still occupied with this, how I am to find
a way back to intervention in the life of men.'2
The question Hegel asks himself here we must leave to our
next chapter. But what he says about his 'scientific development'
corresponds precisely with the whole course of his reflections and
his labours, as we have reconstructed it from his last semester at
Tlibingen onwards. He began with an 'ideal of human nature',
and a determination to 'intervene' effectively on its behalf 'in the
life of men'. Both the ideal and the commitment to intervention
caused him to focus his attention on the 'more subordinate needs
of men', the needs of the heart, the imagination, and the senses.
For on the one hand, it was in respect of these needs that the
culture of his own society was most glaringly deficient in comparison
with his ideal; and on the other hand, it was in these aspects of
human nature that the motive forces, the means of effective inter-
vention were to be found. Rational theory, the 'higher need' of
role of Jesus as a would-be national reformer (Nohl, p. 154; Knox, p. 69). (All
these changes have to be considered together, otherwise we shall run the risk of
mistaking a shift of emphasis for a material change in Hegel's own convictions.)
I Der Begrif.f der Positivitiit, Nohl, pp. 146-7 (Knox, p. 176) (this is the

principal passage referred to in our earlier discussion, pp. 379-82 above).

There is at least a half-promise to deal with these questions 'somewhere else' in
the final sentence here; and we should note how all the themes that Hegel
enumerates are present in the more 'theoretical' fragments of the Frankfurt
period. It is only reasonable to suppaJe that all of these preliminary studies were
utilized in the lost manuscript.
2 Letter 29, 2 Nov. 1800 (Briefe, i. 59-60).
 PHANTASIE UND HERZ
man, was the one respect in which his society seemed not to be
deficient; and in so far as even the best rational theory (the rational
religion of Kant and Fichte) reflected to some extent the defects
of contemporary culture in respect of the 'more subordinate
needs', that appeared to be fairly easy to correct in the light of his
ideal. So he began his reconstructive effort at this higher level. But
as soon as he began seriously trying to reintegrate the defective
aspects of human nature in accordance with the ideal, he found
that the whole body of theory that he had taken for granted needed
re-setting in a wider context. The needs which were 'subordinate'
in that theory were not subordinate, but were even in a sense
'higher' in the more general theory that his ideal required. Thus
he was 'driven on to science', that is to the pure theorizing in
which he had never hitherto had any personal interest, because
the whole 'reflective' conception of the actual and the possible as
'separate' was mistaken. He found that he needed a conception
of human religious experience which was not simply a 'deduction'
of his ideal, but embraced the whole range of religious experience,
from that ideal at one end to the positive supernaturalism of Herr
Professor Storr with his new-printed manual of dogmatics at the
other. So Hegel's ideal had to take on 'the form of reflection'; it
had to become a 'system'-the 'system of life', the outlines of
which were sketched in section 5 of this chapter. When he tells
Schelling that he is still occupied with this in November, we may
well believe him. But we need not on that account assume that he
was then engaged on another manuscript of which we know
nothing. All of the manuscripts that we have discussed, from the
so-called 'Tiibingen fragment' onwards, contribute something to
the solution of the series of problems raised in the last of them that
we know anything about before he wrote this letter to Schelling; and
knowing, as we already do, how cautious he was in all that he said
about his own researches to the spectacularly successful Schelling, I
I Thus, when he wrote to Schelling about his work in 1795, he spoke of
sending a 'plan' for Schelling's criticism, although he may by that time have
already written a large part of the 'Positivity' essay (Letter 14, 30 Aug. 1795,
Briefe, i. 33; but see Chapter III, pp. 208-9, and p. 209 n. 2 above). To
Hoiderlin on the other hand he seems to have been ready to write about ideas
which really were only half-formed plans in his mind (compare the remark of
Holderlin in Letter 15,25 Nov. 1795, Briefe, i. 34, which is discussed above in
the same place). Whatever the actual state of Hegel's researches may have been
at the end of Aug. 1795, the contrast in his attitude to his two friends remains
striking.
 FRANKFURT 1797-1800

we can be certain that, as far as his reports to Schelling were

concerned, he would continue to be 'occupied' with his 'system'
until he had not one, but several interconnected manuscripts,
completely ready for the press.
With this letter to Schelling in November 1800 we come to the
end of Hegel's Frankfurt period, and almost to the end of the story
of the 'ideal of his youth'. Only the tale of that political question
about the 'way back to intervention in the life of men' remains to
be told. Even this belongs in essence to the Frankfurt period,
although the most important testament of it-the essay on the
Constitution of Germany-was written after Hegel had gone on to
Jena. At Jena his life enters on a new phase. In this new phase the
practical dedication to an ideal was still present, but the place
occupied by purely theoretical questions was much larger. At
Jena Hegel could no longer refer to the theory that sufficed for his
immediate needs, his theory of human life and of the human spirit
as 'science' sic et simpliciter; nor could he call it a 'system', for it
contained only part of what a system of philosophy had to contain
according to the Jena professors--especially the young Herr
Professor Schelling; and many of Hegel's closest concerns could
hardly creep in among the footnotes of a 'system' as they under-
stood it.
Schelling was already deeply involved in the 'philosophy of
nature'. If Hegel wished to defend his theory of 'life' as a university
professor, he could not avoid a similar involvement, which was no
doubt attractive enough to him personally in any case. I Thus he
became, of necessity, the author of a 'system' in the academic sense
of the term. But I see no reason to suppose that he was thinking of
anything like this when he wrote to Schelling about something
that had already happened to his ideal by 1800. He certainly was
not yet occupied with the production of his first 'academic'
system.
I The original formulation of the ideal of the EV Kat 1Tav was almost certainly
related to Hegel's early interest in botany-which is still in evidence at Jena and
was probably maintained throughout the intervening period. And Kroner may
be right in suggesting that we have a testimony to Hegel's interest in Schelling's
philosophy of Nature in the remark 'Die Natur nicht selbst Leben, sondern
ein von der Reflexion ob zwar aufs wlirdigste behandeltes fixiertes Leben ist'
(absolute Entgegensetzung gilt, Nohl, p. 347; Knox, p. 3 I I and n. 3).
 V. FRANKFURT-lENA 1798-1802
The' Way Back to Intervention in the Life if Men'

I, The third canon of folk-religion

ACCORDING to Hegel's original formulation of the ideal of a folk-
religion in 1793: 'It must be so constituted that all the needs
[Bediirfnisse] of life-the public State activities [Staatshandlungen]
are tied in with it.'! This was the third and final canon that he laid
down, and from one point of view it was the minimal one. A folk-
religion must express the people's consciousness of itself as a
people. The requirements that public life must somehow be tied in
with (sich a1lschliej3en) the common faith, would seem to follow
more or less analytically from its being characterized as the religion
of the 'folk'. Every faith that we do recognize, or could possibly
recognize, as a folk-religion, must meet this requirement.
From this point of view, we might well be tempted to say that
the young Hegel had his canons in reverse order. In order for a
system of belief to qualify as a 'folk-religion', we could argue, it is
necessary that it should satisfy the third canon, and at least natural,
though not perhaps absolutely necessary, that it should satisfy the
second: 'Phantasie, Herz, and Sinnlichkeit must not go empty
away.'2 But it seems neither necessary nor natural, and perhaps
I Religion ist eine, Nohl, p.
20. (On the formulation of this canon see p. 345
n. 2above.)
Z Ibid. What we may, for convenience, call 'Temple Judaism'-i.e. Judaism

from the time of Solomon to the Dispersion-was an example of a religion which

satisfied the third canon, but in which the proper satisfaction of the second canon
was effectively barred. Judaism was, in the most stringent sense of the word, a
'folk-religion'; it was the religion of a people who were aware of themselves as
'chosen' by their God; but when it became the religion of a settled nation the
fundamental law against the making of graven images meant that Phantasie, at
least, must be sent empty away. Abraham and Moses could experience Erschei-
nungen of their God in the course of nature without violating the law; but
Pompey found to his amazement that the Holy of Holies was only an empty
room. Cf. Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde, Nohl, pp. 218-19 n. (Knox,
410 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802
not even possible, for an effective folk-religion to satisfy the first
canon properly: 'Its doctrines must be grounded on universal
reason.'
Hegel's answer to this objection is clear enough even in the
earliest formulation of his ideal, though he did not give it succinct
expression as a basic principle until late in 1795: 'the aim and
essence of all true religion . . . is human morality.'1 Before a
system of beliefs and practices can count as a folk-religion it must
first qualify as a religion of any sort. In order to count as a religion
at all it must be such as to impress upon us the fear of God and the
hope of immortality in such a way as to forward the development
of moral reason. Otherwise it is 'mere superstition' or the 'fetish-
faith' which masquerades as folk-religion but which must be most
scrupulously avoided by the 'folk'.2
In fact, the order of the requirements is vitally important. The
ideal folk-religion must meet the needs of Vernunft, Phantasie,
Herz, and Sinnlichkeit in that order; and then finally it must inform
the whole of public life. It must meet the needs of Vernunft in
order to be a religion at all; it must be the ultimate controlling or
guiding power in the public life of an organized community in order
to count as a folk-religion; and only by keeping Phantasie, Herz,
and Sinnlichkeit in their proper order and due relationship can any
system of common belief and practice do both of these things at
once. This was the achievement of the Greeks, that they made the
supersensible world of reason sensible through the might of the
imagination and so gave it power over the heart of man, and control
over the lower self-seeking urges of his senses.
It is fairly clear that Hegel had all this in mind when he first
formulated his canons. For this would explain the central position
pp. 150-1 n.); IV. Abraham in Chaldda, Nohl, p. 371; Abraham in Chaldda
geboren hatte schon, Nohl, pp. 246 and 250-1 (Knox, pp. 186, 190-1); ein
objektiven Mittelpunkt, Nohl, p. 349 (Knox, pp. 313-14).
Of course, Judaism did not send Phantasie, Herz, and Sinnlichkeit quite
empty away. But, as Hegel saw it at least, it took them in reverse order. Phantasie
and Herz were subordinated to the most primitive requirements of Sinnlichkeit.
The ideal of the Jews was to live long in a land 'given' to them by their God,
and 'flowing with milk and honey'; and their love of God was gratitude for this
bounty, 'Liebe um des Toten willen' (see welchem Zwecke denn alles (Jbrige
dient, Nohl, p. 378; and cf. II. Abraham in Chaldaa, Nohl, p. 369, and Abraham
in Chaldaa geboren hatte schon, Nohl, p. 250 (Knox, p. 191).
I man mag die widersprechendsten Betrachtungen, Nohl, p. 153 (Knox, p. 68);

the italics are mine.

2 Religion ist eine, Nohl, pp. 9-10, 17, and 20; see below, pp. 487, 495, and 499.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 4Il

that he gave to Phantasie even in the early stages, when he still

conceived the primacy of moral reason as something absolute, and
before there was any suggestion that religious experience is some-
how superior to all forms of rational reflection. The opposition of
the noumenal and phenomenal, the supersensible and the visible
worlds, was a postulate which Hegel accepted initially from Plato
and Kant; the idea that through the experience of beauty we are
enabled to bridge the gulf between the phenomenal and the
noumenal, to penetrate the veil between the visible and the intel-
ligible, was one that he found in Plato and in Kant's disciple
Schiller. 1 Thus Greek religion was the ideal folk-religion,
precisely because it remained at the imaginative level; although it
was 'grounded upon universal reason' it did not itself aspire to
rational form:
The wet nurse [Religion] ... did not rear him [the Greek spirit] or
wish him to grow up in the leading reins of words which would have
made him forever a minor-but she gave him to drink the cleaner and
more wholesome milk of pure feelings [Empfindungen]-with the aid of
free and beautiful fancy [Phantasie] she adorned with its flowers the
impenetrable veil that withdraws divinity from our view-by enchant-
ment she peopled the realm behind it with living images [Eilder] from
I Cf. Es soUte eine schwere Aufgabe (1794), Nohl, pp. 56-7, for definite evidence
of Hegel's debt to Plato in this respect: 'If virtue, said Plato, appeared visibly
among men, all mortals would be bound to love it.' The reference may well be,
I think, to just that passage in the Phaedrus where Plato speaks most explicitly
about the special position of beauty among the ideas in virtue of its direct
availability to the sense of sight: 'Now beauty, as we said, shone bright amidst
these visions, and in this world below we apprehend it through the clearest of
our senses, clear and resplendent. For sight is the keenest mode of perception
vouchsafed us through the body; wisdom, indeed, we cannot see thereby-how
passionate had been our desire for her, if she had granted us so clear an image
of herself to gaze upon-nor yet any other of those beloved objects, save only
beauty; for beauty alone this has been ordained, to be most manifest to sense
and most lovely to them all.' Either because he was writing from memory, or
deliberately, because he was applying Plato's view to Jesus (as an 'ideal' of
virtue in the Kantian sense) Hegel put 'virtue' in the place of 'wisdom' here.
Some years later (1797) he quoted from the Phaedrus the passage that immediately
follows this one (in so wie sie mehrere Gattungen, Nohl, p. 377; cf. p. 298 n. 1
above). Probably the whole passage had stood in his excerpt collection since the
Tlibingen years.
Schiller's Aesthetic Letters appeared too late to have influenced Hegel at this
early stage. But no doubt he found the same fundamental ideas in the earlier
essays (e.g. Ober Anmut und Wurde) and poems that he did read. (If my hypo-
thesis about the 'earliest system-programme' is right, Hegel's reading of the
Aesthetic Letters in 1795 and 1796 was a catalyst for his view that the 'highest
aet of Vernunft' is an 'aesthetic act': see the Appendix to Chapter III above.)
412 FRANKFURT-JEN A 1798-1802
which he carried forward the great Ideas of his own heart with all the
fullness of higher and more beautiful feelings.'
In this ideal, religion has the function of bringing man to full
rational consciousness. For someone who reaches that state of
spiritual maturity, religion is like the old nurse in a Greek house-
hold-a familiar friend but not a guardian or guide. Religion is
not one of the parents of the spirit: her role as wet-nurse is a vital
one, but only temporary. The concern of the grown man is with
politics-the affairs of his 'father', Chronos, 'on whom he remains
dependent in some degree ['in einiger Abhiingigkeit] all his life (the
circumstances of the time)" and of his 'mother', the constitution,
the stable structure of social life, which it is his task to maintain
against all the changes and chances of time that define the limits
of his free rational choice. 2
The fundamental weakness of Christianity, in Hegel's eyes, at
the outset, was its failure to satisfy the third canon. His main
complaint against it in Religion ist eine was that it was a 'private'
religion, not a 'public' one. It did, in a way, inform all the activities
of private life, but the great ideals of public life-patriotic loyalty,
military courage, and the whole complex of cognate values-were
alien to it. In fact the whole of this visible world was alien to it,
so that Hegel was soon led to remark that in addition to failing in
respect of the third canon, Christianity fails in respect of the
second: it is 'not designed for the fancy-as among the Greeks-
it is sad and melancholy'.3
Only in respect of the first canon did Christianity seem fully
adequate. Here the task of the would-be reformer appeared simple,
and Hegel set to work with a will. In the development of Christian
doctrine the free play of the imagination, far from encouraging
the development of reason, had actually come to impede it. The
danger of this was already clearly present even in Greek experience;
and the remedy was pointed out by Plato in his rational criticism
of the poets and the traditional myths. But in Christianity the
danger was much greater, and the resulting evils were harder to
escape from, because the widely different functions of the inspired
I Religion ist eine, Nohl, p. 28. We should notice the influence of Hegel's

early theory of language and the two types of abstraction here. (The 'leading-
reins of words' are of course such formulas as the Decalogue and the Creeds.)
2 Ibid., Nohl, p. 27 n. [aJ (p. 506 below).

3 (a) Unter objektiver Religion (1794), Nohl, p. 49 (p. 509 below).

 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 413

messenger of the Gods (like Orpheus) who imaginatively creates

a religion, and the religious sage (like Socrates in the Phaedo) who
rationally interprets it, were here united in the single figure of
Jesus. Thus the imaginative revelation of the truth came to have a
kind of positive authority that is absolutely inimical to the proper
functioning both of the fancy itself, and of reason. The first task
therefore was to strip away from the Christian religion the whole
overlay of positive authority that had arisen from this confusion.
Once this was done the possibility of a public religion founded
on the Christian revelation could be assessed. This assessment
Hegel attempted to make in the latter half of the 'Positivity' essay.
His conclusion is outwardly completely negative. The rise of
Christian sects, the inevitable privacy of Christian religious
experience, is found to arise directly from the nature of rational
freedom; a rational man can bind himself to act in preordained
ways whenever certain defined conditions exist or come to pass,
but he cannot bind himself to think or feel certain things. Hence,
in any rational society, citizenship, membership in the political
community, can only be contingently related with membership in
the national church if church-membership is defined in terms of
shared beliefs and feelings.
The further conclusion to be drawn, however, is that church-
membership ought not to be so conceived. A folk-religion must
be such that it can readily embrace a proliferation of sects. Theseus
gave the Athenians both a monarchical constitution and a Pantheon.
In Religion ist eine Hegel seems disposed to regard the second as
subordinate to the first and primarily instrumental to its preser-
vation. But, as a result of his study of the Judaic tradition and the
gospel of Jesus, he came to regard this reconciliation of men's
feelings at the level of Phantasie as the supreme achievement of
political genius. I Paradoxically, the most significant result of his
coming to terms with the deepest insights of Jesus, was an upward
1 Of course this political genius has to be thought of as belonging to peoples

rather than individuals. Theseus was not a greater genius than Jesus; but his
people reacted differently to the pressures of physical need (Not): compare the
first sentence of so wie sie mehrere Gattungen (Nohl, p. 377) with the remarks
about Deucalion and Pyrrha in Mit Abraham dem wahren Stammvater (Noh!,
p. 245; Knox, pp. 184-5), and about the Lares and Penates in Abraham in
Chaldiia geboren hatte schon (Nohl, pp. 247-8; Knox, p. 188). (These last two
passages show that whatever immediate range of reference the fragmentary
opening clause of so wie sie mehrere Gattullgen may have had, it can properly be
applied to the Greeks and Romans.)
414 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802
revaluation of just those aspects of religious and political experience
in which he had always recognized that the Greeks were supreme.
He always recognized that the unity of a folk-religion must exist at
the level of spontaneous feeling and emotion, it must have its focus
in Phantasie, because it can neither be commanded nor otherwise
secured at the level of rational reflection. But through the gospel
of love and the ideal of the Kingdom of God, Hegel was led to
recognize that the spontaneity of feeling and fancy was not sub-
ordinate to the freedom of moral duty and rational reflection but
superior to it.
On the plane of reflection Hegel recognized two levels of social
co-operation and community: the State, as a system of civil rights
and duties maintained by legally constituted authority; and the
Church, as a paradigm case of an entirely voluntary, non-contractual
type of collaboration for supra-personal ends. On the plane of life
he found himself obliged to distinguish no less than four. First
there was the realm of physical necessity (Not), where power is all
that counts and legal compulsion is properly applicable. This is the
sphere of external authority in general, and hence of the State as
the central focus of all authority. Secondly there is the level of
moral freedom. Here the rational man is still subject to authority,
but not to compulsion, since he freely obeys his own reason. This
level can be conceived in contractual terms, but only at the cost
of a continual conflict of obligations (either possible or actual).
Thirdly there is the level of love. Here two or more people are
united in a whole in which all ideas of authority and contract
have become irrelevant, because the union is at the level of feeling,
and cannot possibly be expressed in reflective terms. Fourthly
there is the level of religion, where the felt union is itself the object
of aesthetic awareness for the group, and the direct focus of the
common activity. Both the awareness and the activity must be
imaginative rather than reflective, because reflective oppositions
cannot be allowed to corrupt the union. At the reflective level, we
must expect difference of opinion and argument. This will not
threaten the imaginative union as long as we are prepared for it.
On the plane of Phantasie there is no question of an appeal to
authority. The union is entirely voluntary and there is nothing in
it that can give occasion for conflict. Wherever the feelings of love
and friendship are present it can be readily extended to include
other groups. When peoples or sects unite in this way their gods
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 415
are first formed into a Pantheon, and then, where the Pantheon is
already full, so to speak, or where it is a question of uniting Pan-
theons, the gods of the uniting peoples are identified one with
another. What is requisite here is a fundamental willingness to be
friends, a willingness on each side to treat with love and reverence
what the other side regards as holy, and a general readiness to
concede that the same god can be worshipped in different ways.
All these things are practical matters rather than questions of
intellectual belief; but they can hardly be reduced to moral duties
of the Kantian type without the settlement of a great many intel-
lectual questions about which dispute is always possible. Hence a
religious union can only rest securely on the moral attitude which
Hegel calls love, an attitude which has risen above the sense of
duty and obligation altogether.
If, in the light of this conclusion, we ask ourselves now the
question with which Hegel set out, 'How far is the Christian
religion qualified to serve as a folk-religion?', we can see at once
that the problem is to establish the right relation between Church
and State. Jesus wished to have no relation to the State at all; as a
result the fate of his Church was to become a sort of state in itself
at a level of life where authority is impossible and compulsion
illegitimate. Reflection on this situation can only reveal its inward
contradiction. The Christian principle of love is corrupted on one
side into rational anarchy, and on the other into positive tyranny.
If we consider the voluntary character of the bond of love it
ceases to have any effective binding power. If we consider it as
binding we find ourselves obliged to employ force to maintain it.
The Christian Church thus swings between two extremes, one
where everyone is a heretic and there is no community, and the
other where there is a community which has heresy-hunting as its
essential common task. Religious union cannot exist on this
reflective level at all. But we can escape from this reflective level
only if the original Trennung between Church and State can some-
how be healed. For authority has no place in religion; but it cannot
be banished from life. Life has to maintain itself against a back-
ground of natural necessity; the organism must exert force in a
great many ways in order to live. Men living together must regulate
this exertion of force either morally or legally or in both ways. A
free people must have a constitution as well as a religion; and only
when the two together form a living whole will authority cease
 FRANKFURT.-JENA 1798-1802

to be a problem at the religious level. I Thus when Hegel wrote to

Schelling in November 1800 that, while still occupied with his
'system' at the reflective level, he was asking himself 'what way
back to intervention in the life of men is to be found', he was
following the natural sequence of his initial programme of research;
he was referring to the studies of the constitution and political life
of his own nation (the German Volk) which he had begun in 1799
and in which he was deeply engrossed by the time he wrote. 2
2. Hegel's first political studies
An interest in economic and political affairs was by no means a new
departure in Hegel's development. From the beginning Theseus
was his hero, and Plato rather than Socrates was his model;3 and,
of course, we must never forget the extent to which his imagination
was fired by the spectacle of the Revolution in France. He always
took a keen interest in local political affairs wherever he found
himself, and his comments regularly reflect his commitment both
to the ideal of a representative democracy (a 'republic'), and to
Rousseau's philosophical conception of the General Will. He
observed the workings of the 'aristocratic' constitution of the
Berne Canton with a keen but scarcely a dispassionate interest.
How far his visit to Geneva in May 1795 may have been motivated
1 Compare especially the comments cited by Rosenkranz from Hegel's
critique of Kant's views on this subject. He there takes the Quakers and the
Jesuits as representative of the two extremes and concludes: 'But if the principle
of the State is a complete whole [ein vollstiindiges Ganze] then Church and
State cannot possibly be distinct [verschieden], (Rosenkranz, pp. 87-8: Aug.
179 8).
2 The first sketch for the Verfassungsschrift was probably written between the

completion of the first version of 'The Spirit of Christianity' and the beginning
of the revision. Rosenzweig has given fairly convincing reasons for holding that
it was written before the end of the Congress of Rastatt (April, 1799). See Sollte
das Resultat des verderblichen Krieges (Dok., pp. 282-8) and Rosenzweig, i.
231-2. The fragments aber ihre Entstehung (Lasson, pp. 141-2) and Der immer
sich vergroj3ernde Widerspruch (Lasson, pp. 138-41) also belong to 1799 or 1800
(see Dok. pp. 468-70, and Schliler, p. 154). I think it not unlikely that Hegel
began studying Plitter, Moser, and the rest as soon as he set Der Begriff der
Positivitiit (the revised introduction of the 'Positivity' essay) aside (see Rosen-
zweig, i. 108 and 236-7). (For the ordering of the lena fragments see H. Kimmerle
in Hegel-Studien, iv. 125-76; corrected and augmented, ibid., Beiheft viii,
3 13- 23.)
3 See Religion ist eine, Nohl, p. 10, where Hegel at first wrote 'Theseus', then
crossed it out and wrote instead 'the greatest men'; and Dok., p. 174, for an
excerpt from Tennemann (late 1793 or early 1794) about the respective roles of
Socrates and Plato-I do not think there can be any question of Hegel's attitude
to the contrast there drawn.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 417

by a comparative interest we cannot be sure, for it appears to have

left no visible mark in his surviving manuscripts. But the suspicion
of some such a concern on his part is a natural one, in view of his
attachment to Rousseau. I
Rosenkranz tells us that Hegel 'worked through the financial
organization of Berne in the most minute detail, right down to the
Chausseegeld etc.'.2 From this one remark we know that Hegel's
interest in 'political economy' dates back to the Berne period. But
almost everything else that Rosenkranz says about Hegel's political
and historical studies in the Swiss period has to be treated with
considerable caution, because none of the manuscripts to which he
refers has survived, and it is probable both on external and internal
grounds that many of the extracts that he prints actually belong to
the Frankfurt period, or even to the early years at Jena. 3
The loss of these manuscripts and the consequent impossibility
of an objective dating even for the extracts that we have, is the
most serious lacuna in our knowledge of Hegel's early development.
Thus, if we possessed the manuscript of those 'great carefully
laid out tables' in which, so Rosenkranz tells us, 'he [Hegel] set
out side by side chronologically the history of the Kirchenstaat in
the left hand column, that of the German Empire on the right and
in the middle between the two extremes the history of the different
Italian States', we might find that Rosenkranz was right in assign-
ing them to the Berne period. 4 If we also found that the fragment
I See Letter I I (to Schelling, Apr. 1795, Briefe, i. 23) for Hegel's comments on
the recent elections to the council in Berne. The surprisingly appreciative
remark about Calvinism in man mag der widersprechendsten Betrachtungen
(NoW, p. 210; Knox, p. 142) is the one possible 'visible mark' of his visit to
Geneva. See p. 224 n. 3 above.
2 Rosenkranz, p. 61.

3 The external grounds for this assertion are that Rosenkranz was demon-
strably guilty of this sort of error in his classification of other manuscripts that
were not dated by Hegel himself; and he seems always to have tended to date
them too early. He assigned 'The Spirit of Christianity' to Berne and the first
Jena system to Frankfurt (cf. Rosenkranz, pp. 58-9, 102).
The extracts that he prints are none of them dated, which strongly suggests
that there were no dates on the manuscripts themselves; and in some cases the
affinity with the Frankfurt essays in respect of content is so strong that one
cannot escape the conclusion that the only reason that Rosenkranz had for
assigning them to the Berne period was his belief that 'The Spirit of Christianity'
was written there. This does not in itself prove that they were in fact written at
Frankfurt; but it does mean that we have no reason to attach any weight at all
to Rosenkranz's dating.
4 The most probable view is that these Tabellen were made by Hegel for
purposes of his comparison of the destinies of the different European nations,
8243588 F f
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

In Italien, wo die politische Freiheit belonged to the Berne period,

we could be fairly sure that Hegel was already contemplating the
composition of something like the Verfassungsschrift then. I As it
is, however, we have no definite knowledge of any such plan before
1798, and in the context of what we do know about the chronology
of Hegel's manuscripts the likeliest date both for the Tabellen and
the fragment appears to be 1801. 2
Apart from the detailed study of the cantonal budget there is
nothing that we know of among Hegel's political writings that can
be assigned with certainty to the period before he moved to Frank-
furt at the beginning of 1797. His translation of J. J. Cart's Con-
fidential Letters was published at Easter 1798. It is likely that it
was at least begun before he left Berne. But the task of preparing
it for the press, reading the proofs, etc., belongs to the spring of
1798, and in the course of doing this Hegel appears to have been
taken with the idea of becoming a political pamphleteer on his own
account, for in the early months of the year he wrote an essay in
support of the thesis 'That the magistrates of Wiirttemberg should
be chosen by the citizens'.3 For reasons that will emerge, it seems
while he was working on the Verfassungsschrift (see n. 2 below). But the
following alternatives can also be plausibly defended:
(i) That he made them in connection with one of RosIer's courses at Tiibingen
on Modern European or on Papal History (1789). (The difficulty with this
view is that the evidence about the course that Hegel took is not very
clear-cf. Rosenkranz, p. 26, and p. 74 n. 5 above).
(ii) That he made them in connection with one of Lebret's courses on Modern
Church History (sometime between Sept. 1791 and June 1793).
(iii) That he made them at Berne in connection with his study of the problem of
relations between Church and State. (This hypothesis is supported by the
description that Rosenkranz provides).
(iv) That the tables were built up gradually, beginning in one of the above ways
and receiving subsequent additions (or being redrafted in an enlarged form)
when Hegel was working on the Verfassungsschrift.
I Rosenkranz, p. 526 (Fragment 12 in Dok., p. 269). We can be fairly sure, at

east, that there was no ostensible connection between the manuscript of this
fragment and any part of the Verfassungsschrift, for Rosenkranz believed that
the latter was written between 1806 and 1808.
2 It is virtually certain that Hegel did at least layout thehistoryofthe German
Empire in tabular form while engaged with the Verfassungsschrift (cf. Deutsch-
land ist kein Staat mehr: Lasson, p. 56); and for a parallel to In Italien, wo die
politische Freiheit, see Diese FOJ"m des deutschen Staatsrechts (Lasson, pp. 109-10).
3 Daj3 die Magistrate, Lasson, pp. 150-4. (See also Haym, pp. 65-8, for an
outline of that part of the text which is now lost, with a few further quotations.)
The title was at first: 'That the magistrates of Wfuttemberg should be chosen by
the people [Volk].' Hegel himself changed it to 'by the citizens [Burgern]'; then
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 419

to me better to consider these two productions together in the

context of the first notes and sketches on Judaism and the earliest
fragments on love, than to study the Cart translation and notes
separately against the background of man mag die widersprechendsten
Betrachtungen and Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstiinde.
There is reason to believe that both the Cart translation and the
essay on the Wiirttemberg constitution were occasioned by the
political situation which Hegel found at home when he returned
to Stuttgart for a few weeks in December 1796 and January 1797.
Wiirttemberg was remarkable among the German princedoms in
that the old structure of feudal government had never collapsed into
princely absolutism. Duke Karl Eugen managed, for more than
twenty years, to give a very fair imitation of an eniightened despot,
by not summoning the Landtag after 1770. But, before that, he had
encountered serious opposition from that body, organized and led
by the great jurist J. J. Moser-that same worthy whose death was
recorded in the young Hegel's diary in 1785 with the epitaph 'He
wrote more books than human life allows time to read'I-who was
their official legal adviser. The Duke used his summary judicial
powers to imprison Moser for more than five years (1759-65) on
sedition charges, but the full constitutional rights of the Estates
were maintained, so that looking round Europe shortly after Karl
Eugen's death Charles James Fox could declare that Wiirttemberg,
alone in Europe, enjoyed a parliamentary constitution comparable
to that of England.
Actually the comparison, popular as it no doubt was, was mis-
leading. Wiirttemberg did not have a constitution firmly founded
upon parliamentary sovereignty, but rather one in which there were
two separate sovereign powers. The Landtag had its own emissaries
in foreign capitals, and under Moser's leadership they had even
concluded their own agreements at the risk of civil war. The
Landtag met in full session only at the call of the Duke, but it had
a standing committee of eight members (the Ausschuj3), 'which
consented to taxation, and watched over the budget, controlled
someone else-probably one of the friends in Stuttgart to whom he sent the
manuscript, for the change can hardly have been made much later-crossed out
Hegel's title altogether and substituted: 'Concerning the most recent domestic
affairs ofWiirttemberg, especially the inadequacy of the municipal constitution.'
(See Schiiler, p. 148 n. 89, for this correction of the erroneous tradition which
Lasson accepted from Rosenkranz, and Knox from Lasson.)
I Doh., p. 24 (cf. p. I I above).
 420 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

foreign policy along with the Duke, and exercised a right

of surveillance over the recruitment and command of the
army'.!
After the death of Karl Eugen in 1793, his no more reactionary,
but far less canny, brother Ludwig Eugen abandoned the policy
of cautious neutrality that Karl had followed in foreign affairs, and
joined the first coalition against the French Republic. In conse-
quence, Wiirttemberg, which had no army to speak of, and no
revenue sufficient to raise or maintain one, was invaded and over-
run by the army of Moreau in 1796. Ludwig's successor Friedrich
Eugen (the third brother)-about whose 'enlightened disposition'
Hegel and Schelling had entertained some hopes in the Tiibingen
daysZ-managed to conclude a separate peace with the Directory
on 7 August 1796, and so secured the withdrawal of Moreau's
troops. In some parts of the Duchy the French had been welcomed
when they came, but their departure was regretted by none save a
few Jacobin clubs and small groups of revolutionary enthusiasts,
including, very probably, Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling, who
were not, after all, actually in the Duchy when it was overrun.
The finances of the Duchy were by this time in a parlous con-
dition. The various feudal dues and other sources of Ducal income
over which the Landtag had no control were quite insufficient to
pay the war indemnity levied by Moreau, and the Ausschufi which
had done all that it could to resist the raising of military levies for
the war, and had carried on its own separate peace negotiations,
refused to consent to increases of taxation or to new taxes. 3 In
these circumstances the Duke was compelled to summon the
Landtag. No doubt he hoped to find the larger body more tractable,
I J. Droz, L'Aliemagne et la Revolution franraise, P.U.F., Paris, 1949, p. 112.
According to Hegel himself (in the article on the 'Wiirttemberg Estates Assembly
of 1815-1816' cited in n. 3 below) the source of all the power of the Ausschuj3
was its control of the Exchequer, which during the long period when the
Estates were not summoned resulted in the outrageous abuses and speculations
that came to light when the Landtag met in 1797. (See Lasson, pp. 193-5;
Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 278-9.)
2 Cf. Letter 13, Schelling to Hegel, 21 July 1795, Briefe, i. 27.

3 'Only too often the Estates have seen in times of crisis nothing but a favour-
able opportunity to put the Government in a difficulty, or to prescribe conditions
for making the efforts it demanded for the sake of its own and its people's
honour and welfare, and to acquire privileged rights against it' (Hegel, 'Pro-
ceedings of the Estates Assembly in the Kingdom of Wiirttemberg 1815-
1816', Heidelbergische Jahrbucher, 1817, Lasson, p. 181; Knox-Pelczynski,
P· 26 7)·
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 421

and to get a new AusschuJ3 elected which would be more co-opera-

tive.! The Landtag which opened in March 1797 contained four-
teen prelates nominated by the Duke, and representatives chosen
by the local councils of towns and villages, which were generally
self-perpetuating bodies of magistrates in which vacancies were
filled by co-option. The power and effectiveness which it had
managed to retain-as compared, for example, with the Landtag
of Saxony, which was described by a satirical critic in 1795 as 'a
farce performed every six years, in which all the actors have to say
is "Yes" '2-was in large part due to its solid bourgeois homo-
geneity. The nobility had freed themselves from the Duke's
suzerainty, and so had not come to dominate the Landtag as they
did elsewhere. It was hardly a body in which sympathy for the
ideals of 1789 was to be looked for, but everyone knew that reforms
were in the offing, and its opening was greeted by a veritable flood
of pamphlets and open letters addressed to it.
It is as part of this flood that Hegel's Cart translation should be
viewed. To understand this we must add to the above summary
of events in Wiirttemberg a thumbnail history of the Canton of
Vaud from 1790 to 1797. French-speaking Vaud had been under
the suzerainty of the German-speaking Canton of Berne since
1564-, but in 1791 there was a popular uprising sparked by natural
sympathy with the Revolution in France. The uprising was quelled
in 1792, and the rule of the Berne oligarchy was restored and to all
outward appearances strengthened. The Confidential Letters of
J. J. Cart, which appeared in 1793, were, in essence, a protest
against the infringement or abrogation of various traditional or
constitutionally guaranteed rights and privileges of the inhabitants
of Vaud by the restored oligarchy. Most of the abuses of which
Cart complained were of long standing and in order to expose them
he went back to early charters or appealed to the traditional
customs of the territory; but the present stimulus and occasion of
his antiquarian zeal was the persecution of the 'Patriots'. Cart
himself fled to Paris, and travelled to North America before
I As Hegel himself records, the Ausschuj3 was, in fact, dissolved by this

last meeting of the Landtag before the dissolution of the Empire. The Duke
could reasonably count on a revulsion of public opinion against it, when its
accounts were examined. (See Lasson, pp. 92-5; Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 276-9.)
2 Quoted in W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge,
1935, p. 23. Compare further Bruford's description of the Diet of Weimar,
ibid., p. 35.
422 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

returning to Vaud in 1798.1 By that time the revolutionary armies

had fulfilled the hopes of the 'Patriots', and Vaud had broken
away from the governance of Berne and was united with France.
It was this turn of events that prompted Hegel to publish his
translation. 2 He wanted to underline the lesson that reaction and
repression achieve nothing in the long run, in circumstances where
reform is called for:
From the comparison of the contents of these letters with the latest
events in Vaud, from the contrast between the semblance of peace
imposed in 1792 and the pride of the government in its victory on the
one hand, and its real weakness in the country and its sudden downfall
there on the other, a multitude of useful lessons could be derived; but
the events speak for themselves loudly enough; all that remains to be
done is to appreciate them in all their fullness; they cry aloud over the
whole earth:
Discite Justitiam moniti,
but upon those who are deaf their fate will smite hard. 3
Thus the publication of the translation should be viewed as the
first shot in a campaign for 'justice' in Wurttemberg. Rosenzweig
has pointed out that 'Gerechtigkeit' is the watchword of Daj3 die
Magistrate just as it is of the translation; and several students have
commented on the ambiguity of the term in both contexts. 4 Cart
I Hegel believed Cart was dead when the translation appeared. On the title-

page the work was ascribed to a 'deceased Swiss'; and at the beginning of his
VOI'erinnerung Hegel says: 'The letters, from which this translation offers an
excerpt, have as their author the advocate Cart, who has since died in Philadel-
phia' (Dok., p. 247). A facsimile of the translation appeared in 1970 (see
Bibliographical Index).
2 This hypothesis is supported by the words 'Vormalige Staatsrechtliche

Verhaltnis des Wadtlandes [(Pays de Vaud)] zur Stadt Bern' and 'ehemaligen
Oligarchie des Standes Bern' on the title-page as well as by the concluding
sentences of the Vorerinnerung which are quoted below. According to Hoff-
meister's notes (Doh., pp. 458-9) Hegel could hardly have known about the
revolution in Vaud before the translation appeared. But I assume that he was in
direct touch with 'patriotic' sympathizers and that the idea of printing his
translation (which he probably made for his own use while in Berne) occurred
to him as soon as he heard of the uprising of Jan. 1798. In view of the direct
involvement of French military power it would not have required prophetic
powers or any great measure of political insight to see that this time the revolu-
tionaries would be successful.
3 Dok., p. 348. The Latin tag comes from Aeneid vi. 620: 'Dis cite justitiam
moniti et non temnere divos.' This appeal to 'learn justice and take warning not
to despise the gods' is uttered by Phlegyas, the most unfortunate of those whom
Aeneas sees being tormented in Had.es.
4 See Rosenzweig, i. 56-7; and for sample comments on the ambiguity of the
term, Pelczynski in Knox--Pelczynski, pp. 32-3.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 423

and Hegel both seem at times to be speaking of the justice of com-

mon law, the justice of precedent and custom, and the maintenance
of old-established rights and privileges; but it is generally evident
that they are in essence appealing to the justice of natural law and
equity, and to the 'rights of mau'. In Cart the appeal to precedent
may well be a matter of practical expediency. He argues his case in
terms of documents and customs, because that is how a case is
established at law; but his own conviction of the rightness of his
cause is grounded in Rousseau and the Declaration of the Rights of
NIan. In Hegel's case, however, it is a mistake to suppose that there
was any real ambiguity or conflict involved. The laws and ways of
life that a 'folk' establishes spontaneously in times of prosperity
and amity are the direct expression of the 'law of nature'. Of course
nothing is 'just' simply because one can cite legal precedent or
ancient custom in defence of it, no matter how venerable its
authority may be. But in a time of strife and faction it is natural to
appeal to the laws and customs adopted in friendship in the old
days before the strife and faction arose. Those laws and customs are
'just', because they express and articulate the unity and freedom of
the folk at the level of economic existence, the level of physical
dependence and property claims, where law and justice are in-
escapably necessary. I
The American War of Independence was in Hegel's view another
example of the Nemesis that looms over all political authorities
who are deaf to the voice of 'justice'. Both the nature and the
strength of his republican sympathies can be judged from the way
in which he takes issue with Cart for an admiring remark about
the British constitution:
It is a very great mistake [writes Cart] to measure the goodness of a
constitution by whether the levies paid under it are high or low. In this
case the constitution of England would be the worst of all, for nowhere
else do men pay so many taxes. And yet there is no people [Volk] in
Europe which enjoys greater apparent prosperity or so much individual
and national respect.-Because the Englishman is free, because he

I 'When Hegel found in one of his sources a defence of the nepotism of the
Berne aristocracy on the grounds that it was 'an ancient usage of all times, all
countries, and all places', he wrote in the margin of his excerpt 'An abuse, not a
right' (see Dok., p. 462, n. 2). The first canon of folk-religion applies mutatis
mutandis to all institutions. Compare here Hegel's comments on the 'gute alte
Recht' of Wtirtternberg in 1817 (e.g. Lasson, pp. 199,221-2; Knox-Pelczynski,
pp. 282-3, 53 11..).
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

enJoys the rights inherent in freedom, in a word, because he taxes

himself.!

Hegel comments rather acidly:

The author has not lived to see how gravely in these latest years the
security of property has been compromised in many respects and
the rights of domestic privacy restricted by the power conceded to the
receivers of the higher taxes, how personal freedom has been limited by
suspension of the constitution on the one hand [the allusion is doubtless
to the suspension of the right of Habeas Corpus in 1794] and civil rights
limited by positive laws on the other;-how strikingly clear it has
become that a minister can scorn public opinion if he has a parliamentary
majority at his command [ein zu eigen gemachte Majoritat] , that the
nation is so inadequately represented that it cannot make its voice
effective in Parliament, and its security depends more upon fear of its
unconstitutional might, upon the prudence of the minister, or upon the
discretion of the House of Lords [der hiihern Stande]. Through this
insight and on account of these facts even the respect toward the English
nation itself of many of its strongest admirers, has fallen ...

The tax, which the English Parliament imposed on tea imported into
America, was very small; but the feeling of the Americans, that along
with the quite insignificant sum which the tax would have cost them,
their most important right would be lost to them, made the American
Revolution. 2

The 'justice' Hegel is concerned about is primarily the right of

the people to govern itself. But it was not simply the principle of
democratic representation on which he wished to focus attention.

I Vertrauliche Briefe, p. 71; Dok., pp. 248-9. Pelczynski quotes this passage
mistakenly as one of Hegel's own notes (Knox-Pelczynski, p. I I n.).
2 Dok., p. 24.9. This passage, and the other reference to the English Crown
(cited below), should be remembered when we are faced with Hoffmeister's
contention that 'Hegels Fuhrer ist durchaus Montesquieu nicht Rousseau'
(ibid., p. 464). For, as Hoffmeister points out, Cart is here following Montesquieu
(ibid., p. 463). The mistake here lies in opposing Montesquieu and Rousseau in
a way which would never have occurred to Hegel himself. There can, of course,
be no question of the enormous influence of Montesquieu upon Hegel's political
and social thought from 1794 onwards. The first explicit reference is in Wie
wenig die objektive Religion (1794; Nohl, p. 46); and the note on the election of
the council at Berne (Dok., pp. 255-7), in which Montesquieu's criteria for a
healthy aristocracy are applied (see Hoffmeister's notes, ibid., p. 465), was
almost certainly written in 1795 (cf. Letter lIto Schelling, 16 Apr. 1795,
Briefe, i. 23). See also the note to Cart's Ninth Letter (Dok., p. 254), and the
excerpt from L'Etat et les delices de la Suisse (ibid., p. 462).
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 4~5

One of Cart's basic complaints against the government of Berne

was that it had robbed Vaud of 'the most precious right of
freedom', representation in a national assembly. This was an
abuse of long standing, since the Estates had not been summoned
since 1536; but Hegel adds a long note on the way that the govern-
ment functioned in those far off days when Vaud belonged to
the Dukedom of Burgundy. The main body of the note is made up
of direct quotations from two antiquarian sources (Seigneux's
Criminal Jurisprudence and Muller's History of Switzerland), and
it is clear I think that Hegel thought there was one point of con-
temporary relevance to be derived from each. Seigneux remarks:
'The German Reichstag is the closest model of these Estate
Assemblies'; and Muller reports:
No venal baron could betray the land to the Prince in the hope of
becomi.ng a count, nor could the conceit of lesser nobles seeking the
title of Freiherr; for the ratification of the Estates was necessary in
the first case (it is well known [adds Hegel] what powerful influence the
Crown has retained in the Parliament of England because it has the
prerogative of creating Lords) and no one could take his place among
the Freiherren, unless he had five and twenty vassals and at least three
thousand pounds income. A resolution of the Estates did not become
law unless confirmed in the Prince's Council; nor did an ordinance
which was approved by the Prince become law, against the will of the
Estates.'

I t is, I think, clear that Hegel wished to see this particular model
of an organic society re-established in his own time. His sympathy
with the revolutionary aspirations of Vaud and of the American
colonists might be taken to indicate a complete commitment to the
ideals of 1789 and, in particular, to 'equality'. There are, however,
many indications that he regarded 'liberty' and 'fraternity' as
living ideals, but distrusted 'equality' as an abstract extreme. His
Greek ideal, though it was primarily Athenian in origin, was always
more aristocratic than democratic in its inspiration. He regarded
class-consciousness as an evil, but he seems never to have doubted
that certain natural divisions must exist in society which correspond

I Dok., pp. 459-60 (Vertrauliche Briefe, pp. 58-60); Hegel gives the references

to Seigneux, Systeme abrege de jurisprudence criminelle accommodee aux lois et a la

constitution du pays (Lausanne, 1756), and MUller, Geschichte det' Schzveiz,
Book I, chapter 16, p. 463. (He certainly made these excerpts in the Berne
period-compare Strahm, pp. 530 and 531-~).
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

to differences of function and must be separately represented in

any effective expression of the popular will. I Every citizen must
think of himself as an 'organ of a living whole', not as a member of
a social class; but this does not alter the f"ct that the organs have
distinguishable functions, and from the point of view of reflection
these functions form a certain natural hierarchy. Pericles' Funeral
Oration expressed for Hegel what it felt like to be an organ of a
living whole; but Plato's Republic comes nearer to being a reflective
picture of what the living whole looks like. 2 Throughout his life
Hegel remained wedded to this ideal of a corporate society organized
into 'Estates' with distinct functions. The essential thing, and the
thing that is by no means clear in Plato's picture,3 is that every
part of the organism must operate with full spontaneity, and must
speak with its own voice in the communion of the whole. It is in
this respect that 'Justice' or 'giving to each his due' means more
to Hegel than it did to Plato. No king, not even a philosopher-
king, can be empowered to 'make Lords'; but neither can anyone,
even a philosopher-king like Robespierre, altogether unmake
them. 4 Society itself, the 'living whole', must make and unmake
I We might perhaps try to argue that Hegel simply believed that the Volk
must govern itself in freedom in whatever way was natural to it in terms of its
traditions as a nation (the heritage of Father Chronos imposing a certain form
on Mother Politeia). Thus democratic equality would be right for the Americans
while the distinction of the Estates was more appropriate for the Germans. Hegel
did believe this. But there are passages in the various drafts of the Verfassungs-
schrift which indicate that he also believed that 'German freedom', properly
restored, would be the most rational, and hence the stablest form of popular
sovereignty. He m<1y already have felt by 1800 that the Terror was the 'fate' of
the abstract ideals of 1']89; and it is quite likely that he would have said then, as
he did twenty years later, that it was not yet possible to see what the 'fate' of the
American Republic would be.
2 Seigneux explains that the Plail G elleral was macle up of the lords spiritual

(die Geistlichkeit), the lords temporal (der Adel), and the commons (das Gemeine).
If we remember Hegel's pedagogic conception of religion, the paraIlel with
Plato's three classes (Guardians, Auxiliaries, and Citizens) becomes plain
enough. I-legel himself indicates that Adel represents milite in Seigneux (Dok.,
p. 460).
3 It is more apparent in the Laws than in the Republic or the Statesman. But
there is no way of establishing how far Hegel was acquainted with that work.
(The Lectures on the History of Philosophy suggest that he was not.)
4 Cf. the remark about the executing of Carrier in Letter 6 to ScheIling,
Christmas Eve 1794, Briefe, i. 12. When we examine the notes that Hegel added
to Cart, we can hardly doubt that the reason for at least one of his omissions
(Letter I, 'tiber die Verwerilichkeit des Kriegs und des K6nigstums sowie des
Adels', Rosenzweig, i. 51) was not so much fear of the censorship as the simple
conviction that the doctrine contained in it was mistaken.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 427

them, or perhaps we had better say that it must confirm that they
have made or unmade themselves. I
vVe are now in a position to understand what Hegel meant when
he wrote in his pamphlet on the Wiirttemberg constitution that
'Justice is the unique criterion for deciding' what is untenable in it.
It is plausible to suppose that he began to write his own pamphlet
as soon as the Cart translation had gone to the printers. Certainly
his defence of the thesis 'That the magistrates should be chosen by
the citizens' was in the hands of friends in Stuttgart before the end
of July, for on 7 August 1798 one of them sent him the dismaying
verdict that its publication at that moment would be a disservice
to the cause of popular freedom. This unknown referee also made
some fairly trenchant criticisms of his proposals, and may very
probably have suggested that he should concentrate on the critical
part of his argument. Someone other than Hegel himself, certainly,
wrote a new title on the manuscript: 'Concerning the most recent
domestic affairs of Wurttemberg, especially the inadequacy of the
municipal constitution [Magistratsverfassung].' The 'few fragments'
that remained in Rosenkranz's time Vi'ere probably those parts of
the original manuscript that were most usable for this revised
topic. z
Most of the contemporary pamphlets were addressed to the
Landtag. But Hegel directed his essay 'To the people of Wiirttem-
berg'.3 He called on them to stop 'wobbling between fear and
I Hegel's notes on the Tenth Letter underline how essential this is for the

'spiritual order' as well as for the temporal (see Doh., pp. 254 and 461; Vertrau-
liche Briefe, pp. 169-71).
2 Rosenkranz, p. 91. In spite of Rosenkranz's assertion that the manuscript

was fragmentary in 1844, Haym summarized the argument in 1857 without any
explicit acknowledgement of lacunae. Possibly the 'few fragments' were more
nearly complete than Rosenkranz realized; almost certainly the original essay
was quite short. A more likely hypothesis, however, is that of Rosenzweig, who
notes that Hayrn's summary says very little about the two major demands of the
reforming pamphlets of this period-election (rather than co-option) of the
magistrates and periodicity (rather than life tenure)-although Hegel's original
title clearly indicates that these demands were in the forefront of his mind.
Rosenzweig surmises that perhaps 'the text that Haym had before him was
either incomplete or derives from a later state of the essay'. I take it that both
of these alternatives were true (see Rosenzweig i. 61-2).
3 The first change in the title (the substitution by Hegel himself of 'chosen by
the citizens' for 'chosen by the people') I take to have no doctrinal significance.
Having decided to address his pamphlet to the people of Wiirttemberg (collec-
tively) Hegel saw that he must refer to them distributively in his title in order to
avoid a stylistically intolerable repetition of Volh ('That the magistrates should
be chosen by the people. To the people of Wurttemberg'). Haering's hypothesis
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

hope, and oscillating between expectancy and disappointment'.

Contemptuously dismissing those who think only of their personal
interest or the interests of their Stand, Hegel appealed to 'men of
nobler wishes and purer zeal' to direct their effort to the reform
of 'those parts of the constitution that are based on injustice'. The
summoning of the Estates after a lapse of twenty-seven years was
itself evidence of a crisis which contented conservatives might
dismiss as a 'fit of fever, but it is a fit that ends only in death or
after the diseased matter has been sweated out. It is the straining of
the still healthy force to expel the illness.'
The source of the sickness of the living whole must be identified
and destroyed. Translated into the language of reflection this was
the problem of reforming those parts of the constitution that 'no
longer correspond to human habits, needs and attitudes [den
Sitten, den Bediirfnissen der Meinung der MenschenJ'. 'Justice is the
unique criterion in making this decision.' If the reforms were not
introduced in time, there would be 'a much more frightful out-
burst in which revenge joins hands with the need for reform and
the mob [die Menge], ever deceived and oppressed, visits injustice
with punishment'.
In these opening pages Hegel is quite transparently using the
bogy of Robespierre and the Terror to frighten the self-interested
into behaving 'justly'. The only hint of how 'der einzige MaBstab'
is to be applied, comes at the end of the surviving manuscript,
when he calls on 'every individual and every Stand to begin of its
own accord to weigh up their relations [Verhiiltnisse] and their
rights and if they find themselves possessed of inequitable rights
let them strive to restore the balance between themselves and the
rest'. Both the traditional Greek notion of 'giving each his due'
and the Platonic definition of justice as 'minding one's own busi-
ness and not meddling' are here in evidence; and we may note that
the only 'individual' who needed to look specifically to his own
rights and privileges was the Duke. For the rest justice consisted
in a certain equilibrium of classes.!
that he did not want to set up the Volk and the magistrates as distinct is
possible, but rather too fine-drawn for my taste (i. 588).
I All the quotations in the preceding two paragraphs are from Lasson, pp. 150-

3 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 243-5). What follows derives from the summary and
quotations of Haym. Verhaltnis and Recht are corresponding terms on the plane
of life and the plane of reflection respectively. (Anyone familiar with earlier
discussions of this pamphlet will notice that I agree with Rosenkranz (p. 9I) as
against Haym (p. 66) about its Platonic inspiration.)
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 429

It is clear from Haym's account that Hegel went on to argue that

this stock-taking was only a necessary preliminary to a thorough-
going reform, in which the Landtag would have to take the
initiative since the administration and civil service had a vested
interest in maintaining things as they were. The root of the sick-
ness was in the inequities and ,veaknesses of the representative
system, so it was through the reform of the representative system
that the sickness was to be cured. But reform was something to
be tackled cautiously unless the reformer had the liberty of experi-
menting and could withdraw reforms that did not produce the
expected results. The safest way would be to concentrate on 'stop-
ping up the sources of abuse', among which the principal one was
the power enjoyed by legal and financial officials. These officials
were like political 'father-confessors' of the AusschuJ3, and when
one of them was dismissed by the Permanent Committee he would
demand to have his case heard before the Duke, 'to whom he had
betrayed the interest of the country'. I
The administrative officials had lost 'all feeling for innate
human rights'; and the whole constitution 'revolves around one
man who ex providentia majorum unites all power in himself, and
gives no guarantee of his recognition of or respect for the rights
of man'. In order to cure this condition 'the essential thing is that
the right of election [of the Landtag or possibly of the AusschuJ3]
be placed in the hands of a body of enlightened and upright men
independent of the Court'. 2, But Hegel admits in despair that he
I This paragraph is founded on Haym, p. 65 and the excerpt he gives on pp.

483-5 (reprinted in Lasson, pp. I53-4, but not translated by Knox). The con-
cluding remark quoted here should be compared with the comment about the
'venal barons' in the Estates Assembly of Vaud (quoted on p. 425 above).
2 Quoted by Haym, p. 66. It is not quite clear what Wahlrecht Hegel is talking

about. The natural and obvious assumption is that he is thinking of the election
of the Landtag (which rested in the hands of the magistrates who 'should be
elected by the citizens'). But Haym's earlier quotation about the dangers of
giving the masses the right to choose their Vertreter suggests that Hegel may
have had the right of the Lamltag to choose the Ausschuj3 in mind. It was, in any
case, the existing Landtag that he wanted to have replaced-for his Stuttgart
correspondent objected that his proposal to dissolve it was 'nothing less than
arbitrary' .
This objection is the strongest evidence for the view of Droz (pp. I 24-6) that
Hegel was the only real radical among the pamphleteers of I797; and it is
surprising, not to say ironic, that Lukacs failed to recognize in Hegel's proposal
the idea of a 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie' which foreshadows Lenin's
'dictatorship of the proletariat'. But Droz certainly goes too far when he excepts
Hegel from the general habit of 'resting on the ground of historic rights'. Hegel
43 0 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

does not know what sort of franchise or method of election could

be expected to produce such a body in existing circumstances. To
give 'an unenlightened mass of men, accustomed to blind obedience
and at the mercy of every momentary impulse, suddenly the right
to choose their defender' would merely complete the ruin of the
constitution. In support of this view he cited a speech of Charles
James Fox; and it is clear, I think, that the ruin Hegel foresaw in
this radical democratic proposal was the one which in his view had
overtaken the British Constitution; a 'pocket-majority' for the
Duke thanks to an unholy alliance of throne and altar. 1
If this was the explicit conclusion of the original essay, then
Hegel must have abandoned in the end his initial assumption that
the constitution of Wiirttemberg was still healthy enough to heal
its own infirmities. It is clear that what he wanted was a representa-
tive system based on indirect election, in which small communities
elected their own councils, and those councils elected delegates
may have believed that 'it was necessary to create an entirely new political
system'; but he wanted it to be constructed on the traditional model of 'German
freedom'.
I See Haym, pp. 66-7. The speech of Fox which Hegel cited in this connec-

tion was almost certainly his oration of 26 May 1797 in support of 'Mr. Grey's
motion for a reform in Parliament' (Speeches, vi. 339-70). There were many
things in this speech which would have attracted Hegel's favourable attention;
but in the present connection the following is especially noteworthy:
'I have always deprecated universal suffrage, not so much on account of the
confusion to which it would lead, as because 1 think that we should in reality
lose the very object which we desire to obtain; because 1 think it would in its
nature embarrass, and prevent the deliberative voice of the country from
being heard. 1 do not think that you augment the deliberative body of the
people by counting all the heads, but that in truth you confer on individuals,
by this means, the power of drawing forth numbers, who, without deliberation,
would implicitly act upon their will. My opinion is, that the best plan of
representation is that which shall bring into activity the greatest number of
independent voters, and that that is defective which would bring forth those
whose situation and condition take from them the power of deliberation. 1 can
have no conception of that being a good plan of election which would enable
individuals to bring regiments to the poll' (p. 363; cf. further p. 355).
Cf. also:
'I know well that a popular body of 558 gentlemen, if truly independent of
the crown, would be a strong barrier to the people; but the House of Commons
should not only be, but appear to be, the representatives of the people; the
system should satisfy the prejudices and the pride, as zvell as the reason of the
people; and you never can expect to give the just impression which a House
of Commons ought to make on the people, until you derive it unequivocally
from them' (p. 357; my italics).
Compare finally the way Fox speaks of the French example as a model to be
followed rather than a 'Phantom' to be terrified by (pp. 352-5).
 INTERVEN'I'loN IN THE LIFE OF MEN 431

to the council of the realm, to represent the interests of the

Landschaft advising and guiding the executive power of the
Herrschaft. But he did not believe that this representative system
would work properly if it was introduced directly, by a con-
stitutional reform. The Volh did not 'know its rights' and 'no
Gemeingeist was present'. I For this reason the enlightened bour-
geoisie must look after the rights of the people until it was educated
to proper political consciousness.
The clue to an explanation for Hegel's curiously ambivalent
attitude towards his own central thesis in this essay is to be found
in the circumstances of his life in Frankfurt, and in the recent
vicissitudes of yet another German community, the city of Mainz.
We must remember, first, that at Frankfurt Hegel was no
longer thinking and working in isolation, as he had been in Berne.
He was now one of a group of young radicals who looked forward
to the fulfilment of all the hopes of 1789 in Germany in the not too
distant future. Writing to his young half-brother in February or
March 1798,2 H6lderlin remarks: 'How goes it then in your
political world? The Landtagsschriften I have still not been able to
find again. I have lent them to someone, and I don't know to whom.'
The chances are very good indeed that the borrower was Hegel. 3

I Quoted by Haym, p. 66. Notice that here again we have the same situation

described f.rom the two different viewpoints of 'reflection' and 'life'.

2 The letter (Beck, Letter 152) was begun on 12 Feb. 1798 and sent on

14 Mar. 1798, and the manuscript is now lost so that stages in its composition
cannot any longer be distinguished. But the part that begins with the passage
here quoted, is markedly different from the first half both in topic and in tone.
My own guess would be that it was written in March.
3 Letter 152, lines 81-3. The idea that the borrower was Hegel has already
occurred to Adolf Beck (see his notes ad loc., GSA, vi. 2,867). If this view is
accepted, my suggestion that Hegel began the pamphlet as soon as the Cart
translation went to the printer can be taken as confirmed. There is no way of
knowing just which Landtagsschriften were involved. But H6lderlin's library at
the time of his death contained the anonymous pamphlet (ascribed by Holzle
to the radical leader K. F. Baz) Uber das Petitionsrecht dey V.1irternbergischen
Larldstande (1797); and in view of the fairly close and enduring tie that was
formed between Holderlin and J. F. Gutscher it is reasonable to suppose that he
had Gutscher's Die wichtigsten Reformen der landstandischen Ausschiisse Wirtem-
bergs (1797). Gutscher's pamphlet of 1798, Unparteyische Beleuchtung del'
neuesten Staatseinrichtung in dem He1'zogthum Wiirtemburg, was presumably
published too late to have been read by Hegel before he began his own, but I
think it is highly likely that Gutscher was one of Hegel's Stuttgart referees. He
was certainly a typical moderate, and he survived the political crisis of 1797-
1800 without losing his place in the civil service of the Duchy: see Beck's note
to Letter 209, line 23, in GSA vi. 1028-30.
432 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

For the rest of the group (whose existence is attested, inter alia, by
H6lderlin's very uncertainty) were less concerned about con-
stitutional developments in Stuttgart than about the progress of
the Congress of Rastatt. They hoped for nothing less than a
Swabian Republic, to be established like the revolutionary republics
in Italy and Switzerland through French intervention.
At that particular moment their eyes were fixed on Mainz.
Hegel himself visited Mainz in the spring of 1798; and both
H6lderlin and his friend Sinclair knew personally several members
of the J acobin Club there, I which under the leadership of Georg
Forster had declared Mainz to be part of the French Republic and
the left bank of the Rhine to be its natural and proper boundary.
Forster himself was a convinced democrat; but the Mainz 'Con-
vention' of March 1793 which authorized him to announce this
decision to the National Convention in Paris, was a far from
representative one. The bulk of the bourgeoisie were certainly
opposed to the annexation, and the peasantry were indifferent at
best. The 'Convention' was only made possible by the presence of
the army of Custine; and its work had been speedily undone by the
army of Frederick William of Prussia. But now the Congress of
Rastatt had reconfirmed it; and H6lderlin ends this same letter to
his brother with the hope that 'the Cisrhenaner will soon become
more really and actively [lebendiger] republican. In Mainz, par-
ticularly, the military despotism which itself sought to stifle every
seed of freedom, will now soon be stopped.'z
Just what Hegel thought about these events at the time we
cannot be sure. He did not sympathize with the Kantian cosmo-
politanism of Forster as much as H6lderlin; and it is hard to
believe that he would have conceded that the Rhine was the
natural boundary of the French Republic, though we cannot be too
sure about this.3 But he did certainly approve of the way in which
I For Hegel's visit see Letter 27 to Nanette Endel, 25 May 1798, Briefe, i. 58.

The main link between Homburg and Mainz was F. W. Jung. For the Mainz
connections of Hiilderlin and Sinclair see Beck's notes to the following passages
from Hiilderlin's Letters: Letter I IS, line 48, and Letter 183, line 6 (on F. W.
Jung); Letter 138, line 26 (on N. Vogt); Letter 190, line I I (on J. Neeb); and
Letter 206, introduction (on F. Emerich). Hegel went to Mainz again in Sept.
1800, but no one, as far as I know, has traced his personal connections there.
The Frankfurt 'pass' for this later journey is in Briefe, iv. 90.
2 Letter 152, lines 105-8.

3 One might think this point was settled by the sorrowful way in which he
speaks of the consequences of the Congress of Rastatt in Sollte das Resultat. But
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 433

a group of intellectuals had seized the initiative at Mainz and he

did believe that in the period when an old Gemeingeist was dying
and a new one was being born, such a group could better represent
the interests of the 'people' than anyone whom the people them-
selves might be persuaded to elect. It is virtually certain, as we
shall see presently, that he shared the hope of the group that a
renewal of the war would lead to a revolution in Southern
Germany, and he was ready and eager to support a minority
government of 'patriots' in a Republic of Wurttemberg established
by French arms. A group of this sort is in all likelihood what he is
thinking of, when he speaks of 'a body of enlightened and upright
men, independent of the court'. I
It is reasonable to suppose that Hegel agreed with his Stuttgart
correspondents Z that the publication of his pamphlet at that time
would do more harm than good. In any case, he returned for the
time being to his theoretical studies, both antiquarian and con-
temporary. He made notes on Kant and wrote the first draft of
'The Spirit of Christianity' before he turned again to current
political problems. The passage which Rosenkranz quotes from his
commentary on Kant's Rechtslehre shows how his mind continued
to revolve around the reintegration of the 'spiritual' and 'temporal'
estates. Having summed up Kant's doctrine in the thesis 'Church
and State should leave one another alone', he argues that once they
are conceived as separate entities this policy is quite impossible

it is by no means clear that he really means to bewail the losses of the Empire
in that fragment. 'What is truly lamentable in his eyes is that the war had no
positive consequences. It did not make Germans conscious of themselves as a
nation. The Volk, we should remember, was not strictly a natural entity for
Hegel. His hero was Theseus, who made one city out of a collection of warring
tribes.
I The driving force of the conspiracy in vVlirttemberg itself was probably
K. F. Baz. But the man whom the conspirators planned to put at the helm of the
new Republic was none other than Councillor Georgii, who had inherited the
mantle of J. J. Moser. Georgii himself was far too circumspect to express any
really radical sentiments publicly. (Cf. Beck's notes to Letter 155, line 20,
Letter 168, line 9, Letter 175, line IS, and Letter 209, line 23, in GSA, vi. 2,
872,898,923, 1028-30; and Droz, pp. 126-7, 129.)
2 There were actually three friends in Stuttgart who were allowed to see

Hegel's manuscript. The fact that Rosenkranz failed to name them, though he
must have known their names, is one more indication of the conspiratorial
background of the pamphlet. The correspondents 'added to his stock of materials'
among other things. Probably they gave him anonymous pamphlets of their own.
The preservation of this anonymity may well have been one reason for Rosen-
kranz's reluctance to identify them.
8243588 G g
43+ FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

to follow, because their laws with respect to the material world

as a whole are absolutely opposed.
But the principle of the State is a perfect whole, so that Church and
State cannot possibly be separated. What for the State is the sovereign
power, recognized by reflection, that same thing is for the Church a
living whole, set forth by the fancy. This living whole of the Church
becomes just a mere fragment, if man in his wholeness is shattered into
the two distinct roles of citizen and churchman. I
We can easily understand, in the light of this passage, why, until
religion itself had been reintegrated, Hegel anticipated only
political ruin from a democratic extension of the suffrage.

3. The genesis of the Verfassungsschrift

From 19 February till r6 May 1799 Hegel occupied himself (for
at least some part of his spare time) in making a commentary on
the Political Economy of Sir James Steuart. 2 In the light of Miss
Schuler's ordering of the manuscripts it is a plausible hypothesis
that he had completed the first draft of 'The Spirit of Christianity'
and was moving on logically to the next step in his theoretical
investigation. 3 For in his study of Christianity Hegel had recognized
from the beginning that the crucial difficulty in the transformation
of the religion of Jesus from a 'private' to a 'public' one, was the
attitude of the founder towards property and 'the things of this
world' generally.4 He had now reached the point where this
problem posed itself for him as that of the relation between the
I Rosenkranz, p. 88; reprinted in Doh., p. 281. The significance of this passage

in relation to the Berne essays has already been alluded to (see pp. 415-16 above).
2 Rosenkranz, p. 86. The Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy

(2 vols., London, 1767) appeared twice in German (2 vols., Hamburg, 1769;

and 2 vols., Tubingen, Cotta, 1769-72). On the relationship between the two
versions see Chamley in Hegel-Studien, iii. 235-9.
3 The reader should be warned that the appeal to Miss Schiiler's ordering of
the manuscripts here is to some extent circular, since her dating is partly guided
by a similar hypothesis. Almost all of the firmly dated manuscripts of this period
(e.g. the commentaries on Kant and on Steuart) have been lost. Thus the
relating of these dated works to the definite order of the surviving manuscripts
is necessarily rather hypothetical (see Schuler, pp. 151-3).
4 Cf. Wie wenig die obJehtive Religion, N ohl, p. 41 ; for the extremely trenchant
critique of Jesus' views in 'The Spirit of Christianity' itself, and for Hegel's
recognition of the problem involved, see Nohl, pp. 273-4 (Knox, pp. 221-2).
(It is not possible from examination of the printed texts to say with certainty
whether this passage belongs to the first or to the second draft. My own guess is
that it belongs to the first, but the point is of no great importance.)
 INTERVENTION IN THE L1FE OF MEN 435
living community and its indispensable material, economic, and
legal base. That was why he concentrated on the transition from
the theory of law to the theory of morality in his study of Kant's
Tugendlehre; and it is in this light that Rosenkranz's account of the
Steuart commentary, and of Hegel's political and economic
studies in this period generally,r should be read:
All of Hegel's reflections about the nature of civil society, about need
[Bedurfnis] and labour, about the division of labour and resources among
the classes, about poor relief [Armenwesen] and the police, about taxes
etc. were concentrated finally in a running commentary on the German
translation of Stewart's [sic] Political Economy . ••. In it there are many
Impressive views on politics and history, many fine observations.
Stewart was still a supporter of the mercantile system. With noble
feeling, with a wealth of interesting examples Hegel fought against
what was dead in it, as he strove to save the heart [Gemut] of man amidst
the competition and mechanical interaction of labour and of commerce. 2
While I am ready enough to join in the laments of Hoffmeister
and Lukacs over the loss of this manuscript, I do not feel there is
any reason to hold, as Lukacs does, that Rosenkranz has mis-
understood and misrepresented it.3 What Rosenkranz says does
not imply that Hegel adopted any position opposed to that of
Steuart in economic theory, but only that he had a certain purpose
in studying economics. It is not hard, in my view, to see what that
purpose was, but it is virtually impossible for us now to gain any
clear idea of how he achieved it.4 The economic world of competi-
tion and mechanical interaction is presumably all that is left of
political life when the living spirit of the State dies. Thus the best
guide that we have to Hegel's conception of economic life is to be
found in his account of Judaism in its decadence as a religion of
self-preservation through obedience to law. When we compare
I Of course we do not know how far Rosenkranz's dating of all the other

studies which he takes to have culminated in the Steuart commentary is correct.

A concern with the Prussian criminal code fits in well enough both with the
study of Kant's philosophy of law and with the essay on punishment in 'The
Spirit of Christianity'; and Hegel's interest in the English Constitution and in
Poor Law reform at this time is attested by the notes to the Cart translation. But
both of these concerns doubtless continued throughout the following years in
which he was occupied with the Verfassungschrift.
2 Rosenkranz, p. 86.
3 Lukacs, pp. 228-9.
4 Hoffmeister has, however, drawn attention to a few passages in Steuart that
were bound to have aroused Hegel's interest (Dok. pp. 466-7).
 436 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

the analysis of Judaism with all that we know of his views on

economic theory in later years, there is every reason to suppose
that Hegel himself adopted the most 'satanic view' (the adjective
is one that Hoffmeister applies to Steuart's work) of the con-
temporary economic scene. Such a view was the appropriate
logical counterpart to Christian other-worldliness; and thus, in
studying Steuart Hegel could feel certain that he had before him
the problem of the sundering of human nature in its starkest form.
To reintegrate human nature was his problem.
Hegel's study of Steuart was preceded or accompanied by the
writing of the first draft of what eventually became the introductory
section of the essay on the German Constitution. 1 But at this
stage Hegel seems to have regarded what he was writing as another
occasional pamphlet rather than as a logical development of his own
research. The occasion for it was the news he received through
H6lderlin of the latest developments at the Congress of Rastatt.
H6lderlin had left the house of the Gontards in Frankfurt in
September 1798 and moved to Homburg at the instance of his
friend Isaac von Sinclair. z In November Sinclair was sent to
Rastatt on official business for the Count of Hessen-Homburg and
he took H6lderlin with him. H6lderlin stayed only about two
weeks, but Sinclair remained in Rastatt until early February 1799.
Both of them, while in Rastatt, met and talked with the emissaries
of the Wiirttemberg Landtag at the Congress, as well as with other
young radicals, some of whom subsequently visited them in
Homburg. In the months following his return to Homburg in
December 1798, H6lderlin was certainly buoyed up by the belief
that once hostilities began again, new French victories would lead
to a political revolution in Swabia. He wrote to his mother early in
March 1799:
It is likely that the war which is just now breaking out again will not

I Sollte das Resultat, Doh., pp. 282-8. The dating is much less conjectural than

that of 'The Spirit of Christianity' drafts because of the references to the Congress
of Rastatt. Even so I-Iaering has tried to cast doubt on Rosenzweig's arguments.
I hope that by connecting the fragment with Holderlin's return from Rastatt in
Dec. 1798 and indicating who the German 'patriots' were whom Hegel had in
mind, I have finally disposed of all doubts on this point. My own guess is that
the fragment was written in Dec. 1798 and/or Jan. 1799 before Hegel began to
study Steuart. But in any case it was certainly begun before the renewal of
~stilities in March (see Rosenzweig, i. 231-3; Haering, ii. 316-17).
Z See Letter 165, line 21, and Beck's notes, GSA, vi. 283 and 888-9.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 437
leave our \Vurttemberg in peace, though I have it upon sure authority
that the French will respect the neutrality of the Imperial states
[Reichliinder] including, of course, Wurttemberg, as long as possible.
. . . In the event that the French are victorious there may perhaps be
some changes in our fatherland [i.e. Wurttemberg] .... That you may
not in certain possible circumstances come to any harm, for this I
would look to it with all my might, and perhaps not without avail. But
all this is still very far off.r
It is obvious that H6lderlin's 'sure authority' was Sinclair, and
that, even if not actively involved in any plotting, H6lderlin was
privy to a great part of Sinclair's dealings, and expected, in one
way or another, to have some influence with the revolutionary
government once it was established. He was not any longer in
frequent contact with Hegel,2 but they must surely have been
eager to see one another and discuss the latest news when he came
back from Rastatt. It was from their meeting and talking then that
the spur for yet another political pamphlet came.
Hegel begins by speaking of the bitter disappointment of 'many
German patriots' that the outcome of the war (and of the Congress)
was so negative in relation to all their hopes. Germany had
suffered grievous losses in territory, population, and material
resources, and the fact that 'no higher aims' were pursued at the
Congress 'has almost wholly deprived them [i.e. the patriots] of the
hope (of what would be> the stopping of the source of all ills, a
fundamental improvement of the defects of the constitution'.3 Of
his own attitude he wrote:
The following pages are the voice of a heart [Gemut] that is unwilling
to bid farewell to its hope of seeing the German State raised up from
its utter insignificance, and before being absolutely parted from its
hopes would like once more to recall to life its gradually failing wishes,
I Letter 175, lines 8-15, 26-9, GSA, vi. 317-18. For H6lderlin's stay in Rastatt

see Letters 167-70 and Letter 200, lines 14-22 (with Beck's notes throughout).
2 He wrote to his sister in February that his circle was now 'mainly restricted

to just two friends Sinclair and Muhrbeck' (a young philosophy professor from
Greifswald who had come back from Rastatt with Sinclair for a visit of some
months). See Letter 174, lines 48-59, GSA, vi. 316.
3 SaUte das Resultat, Dok., pp. 282-3 (italics mine). Compare the remarks of

the anonymous correspondent of 7 Aug. 1788 (Rosenkranz, p. 9 I); and for the
Verstopfung aUes tlbels compare also Daj3 die Magistrate (Lasson, p. 153, or
Haym, p. 484). It is not quite true, as Lukacs claims, that there is no trace of
resentment towards the French in Hegel's notes. He fairly clearly associates
himself here with the strictures of 'German patriots' like his unknown correspon-
dent (Lukacs, p. 188).
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802
and once more to nourish with a mental image [im Bilde genieJ3en] its
willing faith in the fulfilment of those hopes.

Even while he was writing he cancelled this passage, and in the

revision of I800 he cancelled all reference to these patriotic
'hopes' and roundly asserted that the lesson of the Congress of
Rastatt was that Germany was not a State at all. I Probably, like
Holderlin, he was 'absolutely parted from his hopes' by the defeats
which befell the French armies in the renewed fighting.2 But he
may have continued working on his pamphlet-if that is indeed
what it was-for some time, for we have another fragment, which
seems quite definitely to belong to it, but which Miss Schuler is
tentatively inclined to place some months later.3
The bulk of what remains to us from the pamphlet is concerned
with the historical origins of the German Constitution. Hegel
analyses the feudal system as 'the saga of German freedom'. In
the beginning 'the individual' (der Einzelne, the feudal lord who
established his lordship by force of arms, the Herr who triumphs
over the Knecht in the Phenomenology) was 'unbowed before the
Universal'. The feudal lord 'belonged to a whole' (i.e. to the German
nation) but he did not realize this fact. He carved out his own
fief for himself with his sword, or he died in the attempt. The
nation as a whole was ruled by customs which grew up naturally,
and acquired the force of law as the situation became stabilized and
the victorious fathers bequeathed their conquests to their children
as a kind of property. Thus it was that, as men came to be directly
aware of their membership in a wider society, the rights of property
and of inheritance became the foundation of all political association.
Towns, guilds, and 'Estates' (Stiinde) came later and established

I The dictum 'Deutschland ist kein Staat mehr' which is the opening theme

and a recurrent leitmotiv in later drafts, first occurs as a marginal comment in the
revision which probably took place in the winter of r8oo-r.
2 This is certainly true for Holderlin. Sometime in the summer-perhaps in

June, perhaps in August, the date depends on which French defeat he was
bewailing-he wrote to Susette Gontard that he and Muhrbeck wept and com-
forted each other over 'another defeat for the French in Italy' (Letter r82,
lines 27-32, GSA, vi. 337. The presence of Muhrbeck makes the June date
more likely-see Beck's note, GSA, vi. 2,943.) Hegel's emotions were no doubt
calmer, but we cannot doubt that they were fairly similar.
3 fiber ihre Entstehung, Lasson, pp. r 4I-2. Miss Schlilerthinks the handwriting
is contemporary with the revision of 'The Spirit of Christianity'. But Hegel's
handwriting was relatively stable all through r799 so nothing very definite can
be said about the interval (if any) between this fragment and Sollte das Resultat.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 439

their place in the system in the same way, by seizing whatever they
could, and getting their possession legalized afterwards.
A political system that is based in this way on private rights is
inevitably at the mercy of the centrifugal tendency that is innate
in 'German freedom'. Everyone tries to make their own authority
as absolute as possible. In the second fragment Hegel describes
the resulting situation as being like that of a mob on a frozen river,
where everyone is engaged in grabbing as much of the ice as he
can, and is breaking it up in the process, quite oblivious of the fact
that all of them will drown in the end if they do not stop before it
is too late. He still believed, however, that it was not too late, that
there were forces which could arrest the fatal trend towards
isolation:
If this tendency toward isolation is the only moving principle in the
German Empire then Germany is now sinking irresistibly into the abyss
of her dissolution, and to utter a cry of warning is a sign of zeal, but
only of the foolish zeal of a wasted effort. But may not Germany still be
at the cross roads between the fate of Italy and unification [Verbindung]
into one State? There are notably two circumst2nces that raise hope for
the second alternative, two circumstances which can be viewed as a
tendency opposed to its dissolving principle.!
The manuscript breaks off in the middle of the next sentence,
so we cannot tell what the circumstances were that raised Hegel's
hopes, but it looks rather as if one of them was the alienation
between the prince and his people since the time of the Peace of
Augsburg. 2 One of the things which had kept the Estates of
Wurttemberg alive as a genuinely representative body, for example,
was the accession of a Catholic Duke in that very Protestant Duchy
in 1733;3 and certainly resentful contempt for dynastic politics and
I fiber ihre Entstehung, Lasson, p. 14.2. For the significance of the term Verbin-
dung in Hegei's thought at this time see the discussion of absolute Entgegen-
setzung gilt in Chapter IV, pp. 383-8 above.
2 From the way the fragmentary last sentence begins it looks as if Hegel was
going to argue that whereas in former times 'German freedom' really was in
harmony with the freedom of the Volk, this is no longer the case (and hence the
urge toward popular freedom would be one force that could be harnessed against
feudal particularism): 'Of old on the one hand the local majesty [Landeshoheit] of
the prince or the town flowed together with freedom, especially with religious
freedom, on the other hand the Verbindung of the Empire .. .' In the margin,
against the word Landeshoheit, Hegel added (in the revision of 1800/1 ?) the even
more explicit comment: 'Religious and political freedom were contained in it.'
3 Cf. F. L. Carsten, Princes and Parliaments in Germany, Oxford, 1959, pp.
12 3-4.
440 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

traditional privilege was one of the most potent sources of bour-

geois intellectual sympathy with the ideals of 1789 in Germany.
The next political fragment, Der immer sich vergroJ3ernde
Widerspruch,I belongs, fairly certainly, to the year 1800, and is
quite different in style and character from all of the other fragments
and drafts that are in any way connected with the Verfassungsschrift.
In its general tone it is more reminiscent of 'The Spirit of
Christianity' and of the so-called 'System-fragment' (absolute
Entgegensetzung gilt and ein objektiven Mittelpunkt) than of any-
thing else,2 and it really ought to be regarded as a restatement of
Hegel's political views in the theoretical vocabulary of his 'system'.
Perhaps it was precisely of this endeavour that Hegel was thinking
when he wrote to Schelling that even while still engaged with his
system he was asking himself about a 'way back to influencing the
life of men'.3 But, be this as it may, one thing is clear: we are not
any longer dealing with a political pamphlet but with an essay
meant for the eyes of professors.
There is, according to the manuscript, an ever increasing contrast
-Hegel says 'contradiction'-between the unknown goal which
men generally-we soon discover that he means specifically the
I Lasson, pp. 138-41. I have learned a great deal from Luporini's extended

analysis of the very difficult opening paragraphs of this fragment, though I do

not agree with his interpretations of some of the key terms.
2 Haering recognized this, but wished to assign the fragment tothe Jena period

because he could not reconcile the doctrines of the two manuscripts to his own
satisfaction. He hesitated, and finally hedged altogether about the dating because
he could also see the essential continuity of the doctrine with that of the other
Frankfurt fragments on politics (i. 595-6 and 785 n. 2). I do not myself find
any serious difficulty in reconciling this fragment with ein objektiven Mittelpunkt,
so I see no reason to doubt, and every reason to accept, Miss Schuler's conclusion
that Der immer sich vergroj3ernde Widerspruch comes between the second version
of 'The Spirit of Christianity' and the Systemfragment (SchUler, p. 154; cf.
Hoffmeister in Dok., pp. 469-70).
3 If we could accept a very fine-drawn inference from the handwriting,
proposed by Hoffmeister (Dok., p. 470), we might claim that the first sheet of
Der immer sich vergroj3ernde Widenpruch was a fair copy or revision of the
original opening and was made later than the rest, precisely in Nov. 1800. But,
unless some more definite evidence of a break in the manuscript, or of a later
revision, can be produced, the argument from handwriting alone must be set
aside as too speculative. There is a general tendency to write the opening pages
of a well-pondered manuscript more self-consciously and deliberately; and it is
natural to find that the handwriting grows freer as the ideas themselves begin to
flow spontaneously. Newer habits of writing, which are not firmly established,
may well give way to older ones when this happens. (Of course it is also probable
that the letter of 2 Nov. 1800 was long-pondered and carefully written; see
Fuhrmans, i. 453 ff.)
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 441

people of Germany-are unconsciously seeking, and the actual

life which existing social conditions permit. This unconscious
'contradiction' has come to full consciousness in the minds of a
few isolated individuals who have 'elaborated Nature within
themselves to the level of the Idee'. These few have a known goal,
but it is merely an object of 'yearning', not of effective action. But
the two situations involve, as Hegel says, a 'straining towards one
another'; each side has what the other needs. The enlightened
minority know the end, the ignorant populace has the means to
overcome the 'limits' of existing society and make a life in
accordance with the ideal of 'Nature' possible.
The enlightened individual cannot live alone in enjoyment of
his ideal-as the 'beautiful soul' strives to do. He must either
endure 'perpetual death', not even trying to express his vision in
his outer behaviour but simply living by routine and doing what
is socially required or expected; or he must strive to 'overcome
(aufheben) the negative power of the subsisting world' . I Either way
his life will be one of suffering, consciously willed and accepted,
because everything he does is frustrated, or compromised and
made ambiguous, and in general limited by the social context. He
suffers precisely because he will not accept the limits from which
he cannot escape-his attitude towards the social order is one of
contempt. By the moral standards of that order, therefore, he
deserves to be unhappy, he brings it all on himself.
On the other hand the ordinary man is unhappy too, but not by
any deliberate fault of his own. He suffers without knowing why,
I It may be that Hegel holds that all men equally are 'driven by the time into

an inner world'. In that case the 'perpetual death' of routine is the lot of the
ordinary man, who has no conscious inner life at all, while the conscious minority
are all of them 'driven to life by Nature (which they have elaborated in themselves
to the level of Idee)'. This interpretation is very attractive-there is a parallel
for it in Der Begriff der Positivitiit (Nohl, p. 148; Knox, p. 178) where the
mass of the Jewish people are contrasted with 'men of finer clay'. But I think
that in the present context Hegel wants to make clear that someone 'of finer
clay' who is 'driven into an inner world' has then the choice of enduring the
'perpetual death' of ordinary life or else of reacting in some practical way. I am
not sure that it would make sense to say that the state of the ordinary man
is 'perpetual death' wenn er sich in dieser erhalten will; for the ordinary man seems
to have no choice in the matter. But perhaps I am oversimplifying the issue. It
may be rather that Hegel sees everyone as having the choice that he describes-
thus the 'Messiahs' mentioned in Der Begriff der Positivitiit might well belong
to the group who have elaborated an ideal of Nature in themselves, but certainly
not all of the 'robber bands' were led by a Karl Moor-even if the hypothesis, so
often adopted by novelists, that Barabbas was a Jewish national patriot is correct!
442 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802
and certainly without deserving it, for he respects all the existing
social values and accepts willingly all the sacrifices that they
impose upon himself and others. He does not understand his fate,
he does not recognize that he has brought it upon himself, so how
can he be said to will it? Whereas one of the marks of something
that we recognize as our destiny is that we do willingly accept it.
'The overcoming of what is from the point of view of Nature
negative, but from that of the moral will positive, is not to be
brought about by violence, neither by the violence which a man
does to his own fate, nor by that which is done to it from without.'I
Violence done to fate from without fails because the intent is not
understood, and the act is regarded as unwarranted interference,
as a breach of private property rights or of social privilege or
prerogative. Robin Hood or Karl Moor, even Gustavus Adolphus
leading the German Protestants against the Catholic League, is
only one 'particular' element of the universal social structure set
against another, and whatever successes he may achieve are merely
momentary disturbances of the balance of destiny which steadily
returns to its old equilibrium until the time is ripe for a genuine
change in the pattern of life.
The violence of a people or an individual against its (or his) own
fate fails for the same reason but with a rather different result. For
in trying to do violence to our own fate we raise it to consciousness,
we discover that what we are trying to set aside or do away with is
our own substance, our most cherished possession, 'forgotten'
but not 'dead' as it appeared to us to be when we rebelled against
it. Thus the moment of 'enthusiasm' in which we seek to throw off
our 'bonds' is a moment of fearful self-discovery, and the hoped-
for revolution, whether personal or social, perishes in a failure of
nerve.
This was, of course, to be the fate of the German Revolution
that Hegel and his friends were dreaming of and working for-so
far as it can be said to have come to pass at all. Instead of making
the unknown known and the unconscious self-conscious, they were
labouring on the Begeisterung eines Gebundenen. Thus, when he
declares magisterially that the 'feeling of the contradiction between

I Lasson, p. I39. It seems to me that Luporini goes quite wrong in his interpre-

tation of 'external violence' here (pp. 90- 3) and that the value of his commentary
is gravely vitiated at some points subsequently as a consequence of his meta-
physical analysis of Schicksal.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 443

Nature and the subsisting life is the need that it should be over-
come; and it gets to this point [of being an actual need] when the
subsisting life has lost its power and all its worth, when it has
become a pure negative', he is forecasting his own failure. But he
knows that he can show (as he does later in the Verfassungsschrift)
that the 'universal' structure of Germany has 'lost its power and
all its worth'. This causes him to believe that the time is now ripe:
All the manifestations of the present age show that satisfaction is no
longer to be found in the old life; the old life was one of restriction
[Beschriinkung] to an orderly dominion over one's property, a contempla-
tion and enjoyment of one's completely subservient little world, and
then finally, to make the restriction palatable [diese Beschriinkung
versohnende], a self-annihilation and ascension into Heaven in thought,!
The 'subservient little world' has been corrupted by the increase
of poverty on the one side, and luxury on the other. In this 'dry
Verstandesleben' the pretence of a divinely ordained order has
broken down, and man himself stands revealed as the Herr whose
personal right of property is the only thing that is sacrosanct.
Hence the trend of the time is towards a new life altogether; and
this tendency is 'nourished by the actions of individual men of
greatness' (i.e. probably Napoleon, but also some earlier heroes of
the National Convention), 'by the movements of whole peoples'
(we should think here not only of France, but of Switzerland,
Italy, and the Rhineland), 'by the expression [Darstellung] of
human nature and human destiny by poets' (Goethe, Schiller,
Holderlin). 'Through metaphysics the bounds are set to the
restrictions themselves' -or in other words the standards of 'Life'
and 'Reason' as interpreted by Hegel and other children of the
Kantian Revolution, provide criteria for the evaluation of the
'gute alte Recht'.
This revolutionary situation is bound to involve violence
(Gewalt). For as soon as the ideal of Nature 'comes to power' and
can begin to affect real life it has to face repressive violence on the
part of the old order. The replacement of the old order by the new
will normally begin spontaneously (as in 1789) and so far as there
is a 'plan' it will have the appearance of an external interference
with the pattern of destiny that hitherto existed. It will be a case
of 'particular against particular'. But when the defenders of the
I Lasson, p. I40 •
+44 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

old order as a whole are forced to enter the lists as partisans, the
truth is made manifest that the old 'universal' has perished, and a
new basis for social rights is being proclaimed. This was the 'truth'
of the old order-that it was the basis of all 'rights' -which can be
'refuted' only by 'Nature' (i.e. by the actual expression of popular
feeling, as in the storming of the Bastille, not by putting forward
proposals for a new constitution, as for instance in the work of
Sieyes).
Lukacs finds here a proof that Hegel viewed the struggle against
feudalism in a way that was typical of 'ideological champions of the
bourgeoisie'.r That is to say, he admitted it was a class struggle, but
insisted nevertheless that it was not a struggle merely of class
interests. In the light of his known sympathy for the 'patriots' of
Switzerland and Germany, this is a very plausible interpretation.
But I think it should be added that Hegel's ideal of 'Nature' as
the harmony of unrestricted life did provide for him a standard for
non-partisan political activity. He was not a radical bourgeois
partisan because his acceptance of the ideals of 1789 stopped short
of 'egalite'. The life that he looked for was a 'harmony' of all the
warring 'classes'.
As he saw it, political life in Germany had decayed into a class
war because the 'universal sovereign power' (machthabende
Allgemeinheit) had disappeared, or decayed into a partisan force.
The 'universal' is present only as a 'thought', not as an 'actuality'.
He seems almost ready to say in 1800, what he did not yet say in
1799, that 'Germany is a state no longer'. But once more, as he
broke Off,2 he was restating his view that Germany was still at the
cross-roads between the fate of Italy and the establishment of
genuine national unity.
The use of the term 'negative' as a dialectical correlate of
'positive' in this fragment is a novelty; but there is nothing very
startling about it, if we view it in the context of Hegel's critique
of Kant in 'The Spirit of Christianity'. If even the moral law,
conceived rigorously, is a positive authority, then anything which is
I Lukacs, p. 195.
2 From the descriptions of the manuscript given by SchUler and Hoffmeister,
it seems natural to suppose, though I may be wrong about this, that there is a
blank space remaining on the third sheet. In that case Hegel laid down his pen,
for some reason, at the very beginning of a sentence, and never returned to
complete it (see SchUler, p. 145, and Doh., p. 470). The manuscript is a Rein-
schrift (Dok., p. 469).
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 445

'positive' (i.e. authoritative) for the will is 'negative' (i.e. restrictive)

for 'Nature', and in these circumstances what is 'negative' for the
will (rebellion against authority) may be 'positive' (liberating) for
'Nature'. We must beware of saying, however, that what is positive
for the will must always or necessarily be negative for Nature and
vice versa. That would be the extreme of 'love' (exemplified by
Jesus) as opposed to the extreme of 'reflection' (exemplified by
Kantian rigorism). The proper harmony of life only exists when
what is positive for the will (or on the plane of reflection) is not
negative for Nature (or on the plane of life) and vice versa. Only
then is freedom actually achieved.
During most of this same year 1800 Hegel was occupied with
the long manuscript of which the' System-fragment' is all that now
remains. It seems clear from the concluding sheet which has sur-
vived that he described in it at least the 'conscious' or 'religious'
aspect of the completely fulfilled life, the ideal which he refers to
as 'Nature' in Der immer sich vergroj3ernde Widerspruch. In view of
what we have now discovered about his studies in economics
and politics, it may be that he also sketched the 'actual' (economic
and political) aspects of the ideal in that manuscript-though
the fact that he turned directly from it to the revision of the
'Positivity' essay, and the way in which he expressed himself in
that revision, suggests rather that the whole 'system' was con-
cerned with 'consciousness', or in plain language that it was a
philosophy of religion and a theory of human values. In any case,
when it was done, the problem of its 'application', or of a 'way
back to influence in the life of men', was finally posed for Hegel
as the logical next step in his own programme. In the winter of
18oo-after a second visit to Mainz of which all we know is that
he spent some time studying geometry and began to revise his
introduction to the 'Positivity' essay I-Hegel began to work
I See the 'Geometrische Studien' in Dok., pp. 288-300, the first of which is

dated from Mainz, 23 Sept. 1800. The ordering of these two fragments is a case
where the danger of relying on some of Hoffmeister's more fine-drawn inferences
about the order in which manuscripts were written (cf. p. 440 n. 3 above) has
been clearly brought out by Miss SchUler (compare Dok., pp. 469-70; SchUler,
p. 155)·
The revision of the 'Positivity' essay, Der Begrif.! der Positivitiit, is dated
24 Sept. 1800 at the head. Travelling conditions being what they were I think
Hegel could hardly have written anything on that day unless he were still in
Mainz. (He travelled to Mainz on 19 Sept.: see the 'pass' from Frankfurt in
Briefe, iv. 90.)
 FRANkFURT-JENA 1798-1802

seriously on the problem of how the constitution of Germany was

to be reconstructed. He read and made notes from Putter's
Historical Development of the Present Constitution! and from other
authors, 2 he revised his draft of 1799 to serve as the introduction
for his new study, he began in his usual way to write fragmentary
drafts for different sections of it, and finally he made a plan and
wrote a continuous essay.
4. The 'Constitution of the German Empire' : Part I
It is possible to distinguish three phases in the composition of the
essay on the German Constitution. 3 But the basic conception was
already fairly definitely fixed in the plan that Hegel made early in
the second phase. We can see this if we compare that first plan
with the final structure of the manuscript in its latest condition as
is done in the following table:
Initial Plan (about May 1801)4 Final State (late 1802)

Germany is no longer a State [Introduction b] 'Germany is no

(a) Is no improvement to be hoped longer a State' etc. (Lasson, pp. 3-
for in the Peace [i.e. the Treaty 7)
of Luneville] ?
I See Versuche der katholischen Religion, Dok., pp. 309-12. J. S. Putter's

Historische Entwickelung der heutigen Staatsverfassung des teutschen Reichs

appeared in three volumes at Gottingen in 17S6 and 1787, and in an English
translation at London in 1790.
2 Notes from other authors are not preserved. But the manuscripts attest to

their existence, and Rosenzweig has managed to identify with a considerable

degree of plausibility many of the works and authors that Hegel consulted (see
the notes in Rosenzweig, i. 237-40).
3 The first phase begins with the sketch Religion. 2. In Rilksicht auf-which may
have been written before Hegel moved to Jena-and embraces a group of
sketches, and some fragments of a larger whole which seems to have possessed
a modicum of continuity. This phase ends about Mar. IS01. But it was not
sharply divided from the second phase-the first continuous manuscript that
survives-which began in May 1801 and was completed before August. There
is then a considerable break before the final phase-the second draft of the
manuscript as a fair copy which was begun about Nov. IS02 and abandoned
unfinished. (The ordering of the manuscripts is given by H. Kimmerle in
Hegel-Studien, iv. 137-41; see also Rosenzweig, i. 236-7, and Haering, ii. 317-19,
for earlier discussions of the chronology of the Verfassungsschrift).
4 Deutschland kein Staat mehr, Lasson, p. 13S. Kimmerle places this little
piece after the main manuscript of the second phase, but the objective ground
for his ordering is very slight here (he has to date it in terms of the excerpt that
was subsequently added on the back of the sheet) and cannot outweigh the a
priori probability that it was written before the main manuscript. This proba-
bility is strengthened by the clear reference to the Treaty of Luneville (9 Feb.
1801) which it contains.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 447
Initial Plan (about May 1801) Final State (late 1802,)
Staatsrecht has passed into Privat- [Introduction a] 'The form of
recht German Staatsrecht' etc. (Lasson,
7- 16)'
(b) What IS essential to a State? I. Begriff of the State (Lasson,
Not community of religion, pp. 17--3 2 )
etc.
(c) There is no supreme authority (Lacuna in our text)
in Germany:
(a) The apportioning of con-
stitutional authority is in-
heritable and judicial,
courts of judgement
(f3) Power (Aleph) Military 2. lMilitary Power] (Lasson, pp.
32-9)2
(Beth) Financial 3. [Finances] (Lasson, pp. 39-49)
(Gimel) War and 4. [Territories of the Realm]
Peace (Lasson, pp. 49-57)3
(d) (a) Judiciary 5. [The organization of justice]
(Lasson, pp. 58-73)
6. [Religion]4 (Lasson, pp. 73-82)
7. [The power of the Estates]
(Lasson, pp. 82-97)
8. [The independence of the
Estates] (Lasson, pp. 97-106)
9. [The formation of States in
the rest of Europe] (Lasson,
pp. 106-16)
I The two headings 'Deutschland kein Staat mehr' and 'Deutsches Staatsrecht

ist Privatrecht' were inserted in the margin of SaUte das politische Resultat (see
Lasson, pp. [3] and [ro). The first is the theme of Deutschland ist kein Staat mehr
(Lasson, pp. 3-7)' the introduction to the final quarto-manuscript; and the
second that of Diese Form des deutschen Staatsrechts (Lasson, pp. 7-r6), with
which the earlier folio manuscript begins. That Lasson is probably right in
linking the two versions into a single continuous introduction in the way that
he does is borne out by the marginal transition indicated at the beginning of
WiT kO'nnen eine Menschenmenge (see Lasson, p. [r7]).
2 The beginning of this section is fragmentary. Perhaps along with its opening

pages a chapter corresponding to section C, subsection a, of the initial plan

has been lost.
3 What Lasson takes to be the history of the Reich-boundaries is actually the
history of the wars it has made and the peaces it has concluded, regarded as :m
index of its existence as a recognized sovereign power in international relations.
Thus the parallel holds good here still.
4 From this point onwards only the earlier draft of the manuscript exists. The
fact that the plan marches so well with the second draft, and both cease at the
same point, can hardly be more than a coincidence, however, since upon any
reckoning there must have been a lapse of more than a year between them.
 FRANKFUR'I'- JENA 1798-1802
Initial Plan (about May 1801) Final State (late 1802)
10. [The two German major
powers] (Lasson, pp. II6-27)
I!. [Freedom of Citizens and
Estates] (Lasson, pp. 128-32)
12. [The unification of Germany]
(Lasson, pp. 133-6)

In analysing the manuscripts it seems best therefore, to follow

the basic plan common to all stages and to discuss any notable
developments in the successive drafts as we consider the separate
topics. It is clear from the plan that Hegel had two complementary
critical (or theoretical) aims; and from the structure of the
manuscript itself it emerges that he had a third aim, which we
might call his constructive (or practical) purpose. By the method
of comparative historical analysis he wanted first to show what was
necessary for the existence of a State, and secondly to prove that
it was at present lacking in the constitution of the German Empire;
and finally he wanted to point out how what was lacking could best
be brought into existence or restored to life.
It is true that there is one difficult passage in the introduction
to the final draft which seems to suggest that Hegel had, by that
time, only the theoretical aims, and not the practical aim in mind:
The thoughts contained in this essay cannot by their public expression
have any other aim or effect than to promote the understanding of
things as they are and thereby lead to a calmer outlook and a sensible
acceptance [gemiifJigtes Ertragen] of things as they are, both in our
practical dealings and in our discussion. For it is not the way things are
that makes us passionately disturbed, but the fact that they are not as
they ought to be; but when we realize that things are the way they have
to be, i.e. that it is not chance or caprice that makes them so, we realize
also that they ought to be just the way they are. I
But a little reflection upon this passage in its context will be
enough to convince the reader that Hegel is not here abandoning
the ideal of 'Nature' that he has been striving to bring into being
for ten years. I do not myself believe that he ever abandoned it,
but in any case even a cursory analysis of the Verfassungsschrift
will suffice to prove that he had not given it up at the end of 1802.
His point in the introduction is that the whole attitude of reflective
moral judgement has to be abandoned if that ideal is to be achieved.
I Lasson, p. 5; cf. Knox-Pelczynski, p. 145.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 449
'Germany is a State no longer: The life has gone out of a certain
political structure, and it is dead. This is the fact that has to be
reckoned with, and to say that it ought not to be so is not a sensible
way of reckoning with it. If we understand how it came to be so
we shall not be tempted either to pretend that it is not so, or to
repine because it is so. Only then will the new life come into
existence and into consciousness. Like Spinoza, Hegel holds that
rational understanding, once it is achieved, becomes itself the
actuality of freedom. So he can quite truthfully say at the beginning
of his essay that he seeks only to advance rational understanding
of things as they are, without ceasing to believe that things can
come to be otherwise as a result of that understanding. There can
be life where there was death, free creative action where there was
passion and suffering. This regeneration will not occur, however,
as the result of preaching.
To realize that the object of political essayists must be to teach,
not to exhort, to advance understanding, not to advocate action,
is a great step forward; for this recognition is itself the achieve-
ment of freedom on the side of 'consciousness'. The 'life' of the
mind itself, begins with the surrender of all claims to exercise
moral authority. Thus Hegel logically could not have any other
aim, or claim to do more than advance the understanding of things
as they are, if he wished to be faithful to his ideal of 'Nature' and
to contribute as much as he could to the regeneration of Germany
as a 'living whole'. It was precisely because he could not do more
than this with his pen-i.e. show people that 'Germany is a
State no longer' -that he had to look for a new Theseus to create
the new Germany.!
In fact, Hegel emphasizes in his introduction what an enormous
practical difference there is between understanding one's ex-
perience, and merely suffering it, at a time when everything has
gone wrong. He seems to be thinking of the creation of that group
of 'enlightened and upright men independent of the Court', of
whom he had written in his Wiirttemberg pamphlet, when he says:
From the experience of mistakes which is an outburst of inner weak-
ness and ineptitude, those who have made the mistakes are less likely
I Rosenzweig infers that Hegel is addressing private citizens and not the new

Theseus (i. 129). If I am right this is a false distinction. Hegel could not appeal
to his Theseus except as one free citizen to another. His appeal is different from
Machiavelli's appeal to the Prince, in that his Theseus can only be a leader of
free men.
8243588 Hh
45 0 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

to learn than others-indeed they only build up even further the habit
of making mistakes. Others [i.e. the new men unconnected with the
Court?] can recognize the mistakes [instead of reacting with panic and
ineptitude and so making more] and through this insight put themselves
into a position to benefit from the experience. I
That Germany is not a State is the lesson of the war with France.
War is the experience in which such a lesson can be learned, for
we can know the strength of a bond only when it is tested, and we
feel the lack of power and authority only when it is needed. The
German Constitution is no longer a real bond but only a memory,
no longer a focus of force or authority but only a system of legal
forms by recourse to which any action or policy can be either clothed
in legitimacy or assailed as unjust according to the interests of the
constitutional theorist concerned.
Hegel argues, reasonably enough, that this fate has overtaken
the German Constitution because in the rest of Europe the feudal
system (with the earlier tribal life and organization out of which it
developed) has given place to a system of sovereign national
States. In the old days each baron spoke for his 'people', and thus
through him personally the people had a share in the sovereign
power of the Empire. Elsewhere the system of personal fealties
has given place to a system of public legal obligations, but in
Germany the tendency has rather been for every baron or vassal
to become a little emperor on his own, a despot whose will is not
opposed to law because it is not subject to it.
In the picture Hegel gives of the 'German freedom' from which
the feudal constitution developed, the outlines of the dialectic of
'Lordship and Bondage' as developed later in the Phenomenology
are even clearer than they were in Sollte das Resultat, though most
of the substance of his discussion is directly taken over from the
earlier drafts. 2 The 'makeshift' law of the Empire, the 'justice'
I Lasson, p. 5 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 144-5).
2 Some sentences are taken over more or less intact, and some material simply
disappears (for example the comment that it is a mistake either to idealize the
era of tribal freedom as a 'state of nature' or to vilify it as 'barbarism', which was
added in the revision of 1800-1: Dok., p. 284 n. 10). But for the most part the
earlier discussion is enriched or amplified along lines already suggested in that
earlier revision. For example Sollte das Resultat (spring 1799) reads:
'The individual ... without fear or self-doubt set his own boundaries by
his own lights [durch seinen Sinn]; this state of things in which character
without laws was lord of the world, is rightly called "German freedom". The
sphere [Kreis] of possessions which each created for himself, the gains he
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 451

that consists simply in adjusting political rights as if they were

private property rights, was originally only a legalization of a de
facto situation; but when what was once a matter of life and death
became a matter of private property, the living unity of the old
life perished. From the earliest draft onwards Hegel pours scorn
upon the efforts of legal theorists to make sense out of the political
and legal dealings of the Empire. But in the final version his irony
rises to a new pitch of violence because their activity is now seen as
a kind of active deceit by which a fictional political life is main-
tained. I He declares at the outset that 'Germany is no longer a
State'; but his real view is that Germany never became a State in
the modern sense of a society founded on law. It existed once as a
living whole, but in those days custom, not law, was the bond of
the Volk in peace, and common interest, not a sovereign command,
earned, were fixed bit by bit with the passage of time which brought men's
needs and individualities closer together, even while they smote one another
in enmity. For all enemies as they fight with one another become more like
one another.'
In SoUte das politische Resultat (Feb.-Mar. 1801) this became:
'The individual ... without fear or self-doubt set his own boundaries by
his own lights. This state, in which a mass of men was bound into one people
not by laws but by customs, and the people as a State represented similarity
of interest not a universal command, is rightly called "German freedom".
The sphere of authority which each by character and fortune made for him-
self, the possessions which each gained for himself, these variable things were
fixed bit by bit by the passage of time, and inasmuch as the exclusive rights of
property wholly sundered the individuals from one another, concepts became
the bonds by which they were bound together and makeshift [notdiirftige]
laws began to govern.'
(Here the remark about its being equally mistaken to vilify or to idealize this
condition was added in the margin.)
Finally, in Diese Form des deutschen Staatsrechts (about June 1801) we find a
considerably expanded version (translated in Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 147-8) in
which the following passage is specially notable: 'He [the individual] set his own
boundaries all by himself without fear or doubt; but what lay within his sphere
was so much and so completely himself, that we could not even call it his
property. For what belonged in his eyes to his sphere-for something which we
would call a part [of our property or our rights] and so would risk only a part of
ourself [i.e. of our energies and efforts]-he risked life and limb, soul and
salvation, etc.'
I It looks as if the fragmentary last sentence of SoUte das politische Resultat

may have been leading into a peroration something like that which is before us
in revised form in the closing paragraphs of Diese Form des deutschen Staatsrechts
(beginning with 'Der Staatsrechtslehrer, der Deutschland usw.', Lasson, p. IS).
But it is a fair inference in any case that the closing pages of this later version
were largely new.
45 2 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

was the effective unity of the State in war. l The view of Putter,
which was generally accepted, was that Germany was a 'Staat aus
Staaten'. Hegel's view was rather that the old Germany was a
community of Estates, which could not now become a State
precisely because it did now consist of States. 2
Unity for the common defence of all property belonging to
members of the group is what Hegel takes to be the conceptual
minimum of Statehood. As long as this Staatsmacht exists and
is effective, everything else in the constitution can vary freely over
a wide range even within the political life of one Volk; and it is
clearly Hegel's view that local autonomy with consequent variety
in almost all directions, is something that ought to be preserved and
fostered.
Even the form of the central authority itself 'belongs to chance'.
It does not matter whether the government is a hereditary or an
elected monarchy, an aristocratic or an elected assembly, or whether
all citizens have equal rights or there are many recognized types
of civic status. There need not even be one single system of law
in the State, says Hegel, citing the example of France before the
Revolution. 3 It is a little surprising to find him taking this view,
since he seems generally to distinguish fairly sharply between the
undeveloped society founded on custom and the fully developed
State that is founded on law. Of course, he is only talking about
the essential or minimal unity, which even the old Reich had once
I Sollte das politische Resultat, Dok., p. 284 n. 6. For a translation of the

passage see p. 450 n. 2 above. Compare also Da die deutsche Verfassung, Lasson,
p. 147, where the dialectic of lordship and bondage is again briefly alluded to;
and the concluding paragraphs of the final draft (Lasson, pp. [70]-[71]) cited on
p. 463 below.
2 The ambiguity of the question whether Germany is 'no longer' a State or

'not yet' a State is illustrated in the two drafts of his Introduction which Hegel
finally yoked into one. In the final version, as in all the preceding ones, Hegel
brings out two points about the peace with France. First that the burden of
war debts is unequally borne (being more severe for the South than the North)
and secondly that apart from territories ceded to the conquerors 'many States
will lose what is their supreme good, namely their existence as independent
States' (Deutschland ist kein Staat mehr, Lasson, p. 4; Knox-Pelczynski, p. 144).
But in Diese Form des deutschen Staatsrechts, Lasson, p. 14 (Knox-Pelczynski,
p. 151), the emphasis falls on the unequal war effort of different 'Estates'. The
ambivalence of terminology reflects the ambivalence of the situation.
3 I. Begriff des Staats, Lasson, p. 21 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 156); d. II. 3. Die
Publicisten selbst, Lasson, p. [21]. (This latter fragment originally belonged to the
first phase in the evolution of the manuscript-Feb.-Apr. 1801-but was
subsequently revised to stand as part of the first continuous draft-d. Rosen-
zweig, i. 108 and Z36.)
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 453
possessed and which a feudal empire like Russia still possessed.
He clearly believed that as the national consciousness developed, a
coherent legal system must be created and customary barriers to
free change of social status must be swept away. But we should
remember that Hegel's conception of society was organic rather
than egalitarian; against his undoubted sympathy with the
Revolution, we have to weigh both his trenchant criticisms of
rational legal theories like that of Fichte, and the fact that in his
Hellenic ideal serfdom was accepted as a social status that was
both necessary to society and natural to man.!
The maintenance of a central authority presupposes secure
possession of the necessary financial and material resources. About
this problem Hegel's view is slightly clearer. It is not absolutely
necessary that the central authority should have the right to levy
taxes, for a feudal authority could maintain itself without this
right. But it is essential in a modern State. As we shall see
presently, however, Hegel thinks that the centralized financial
organization of the 'modern' State has the seeds of many dangers
within it. Here again, in spite of his criticisms, he displays a
sympathy with feudal modes of thought which ceases to be
surprising when we reflect upon his conception of society as a
'living whole'.2
Apart from these essentials-the Staatsmacht, which is a con-
centration of power and resources sufficient to defend the property
of the community, and the Staatsgewalt, which is a central authority
that controls and administers this power-everything else in the
structure of a political constitution belongs on the theoretical side
(fur den Begrif.!) to the 'sphere of the better or worse', and on the
practical side (fur die Wirklichkeit) to the 'sphere of chance and
caprice'. But the criterion of what is better rather than worse, the
criterion that raises Willkur to rationality, is the fostering of the
I Hegel may well have believed, with Aristotle, that serfdom is a proper or

'natural' condition for many men. His political theory of rural life always
remained aristocratic. The proper 'representative' of the land in his eyes was the
hereditary landlord. But the existence of serfdom as an unchangeable legal
status is hard to reconcile with his ideal of 'Nature'. Hegel must have held from
the beginning therefore that this aspect of the feudal system had to be over-
thrown.
2 Lasson, p. 24; cf. Knox-Pelczynski, p. 157 and especially n. 3. The fact that

Hegel was the son of a financial official and was always interested in public
finance makes the loss of all his manuscripts concerned with economic matters
especially regrettable.
454 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

'living freedom and personal will [Wille], of the cltIzens. 1 This

principle governs and explains Hegel's treatment of all the 'non-
essential' aspects of the constitution. The original unity of the
Volk was built on a cultural community of language and religion;
but the conscious union of a large modern State cannot rest on
this foundation. Europe was briefly united in the great Crusades
of Christendom to save the Holy Land from the infidels, but,
since the Reformation, Church and State have had to be separated
as they were when the Church began; and quite apart from
empires that embrace many tongues, every national language con-
tains a variety of dialects which are often more divisive than
different languages would be. Government and administration
should be decentralized as far as possible, because this variety of
life and culture, which was impossible in an ancient city-state,
must be preserved and developed. The reconciliation of differences,
which is essential if peace is to be preserved, must be achieved at
the level of Phantasie rather than at the level of intellect.2 This is
the suppressed premiss which explains why Hegel shows through-
out his discussion a marked preference for the Athenian model of
the Hapsburgs as against the Spartan model of the Hohenzollerns;
and it is also why he condemns both the practical experiments of
Robespierre and the rationalist theories of Fichte in the same
breath. 3
Hegel's position is grounded explicitly in his own revision of
enlightened moral reason: 'Quite apart from considerations of
utility, nothing should be so sacred for it [the Government] as
guaranteeing and safeguarding the free activity of citizens in such
affairs [as do not touch the security of the State]. For this freedom
is in itself sacred.'4 He declares himself to be quite prepared to
argue his case for the free organic society as against the 'machine-

I Lasson, p. 19 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 154-5). This paragraph appears only

in the final version. (The Kantian contrast of Willkilr and Wille should be
carefully attended to here.)
2 Hegel does not say this in the Verfassungsschrift; but it is the burden of all

his studies of the relation of Church and State from man mag die widersprechend-
sten Betrachtungen to ein objektiven Mittelpunkt.
3 Lasson, p. 26 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 159). No earlier draft of these closing
pages of the first section have survived. (Thus, as far as our evidence goes, no
explicit contrast between the 'living' State and the 'machine State' was drawn
by Hegel before the last months of 1802. But possibly the unpublished fragment
Der Nahme fur die Staatsverfassung will fill this lacuna.)
4 Lasson, p. 29 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 161-2).
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 455
State' on grounds of utility and economic efficiency as well. But
the real purpose of his supplementary argument is to show why
civic freedom is the summum bonum of political life.
He claims first that a completely centralized administration is
more expensive because motives of charity and public recognition
cannot be enlisted in the public service. But what is important in
Hegel's eyes is clearly not the supposed monetary saving, but the
different quality of civic experience when public service is per-
formed for love rather than for money, and the people is 'treated
with trust and freedom' rather than, as in the 'machine-State',
'with reason and according to necessity'. I
When he turns from the calculation of material costs and savings
to what he calls 'the second and third mode of reckoning', he says
explicitly that the different quality of experience is what is impor-
tant. The 'second mode of reckoning' is concerned with the develop-
ment of Verstand and technical competence, and the third with
Lebendigkeit and 'free self-respect'. But Hegel does not discuss
the second mode separately at any length. He merely remarks that
it is bad for a government to act on the assumption that private
citizens do not have the intellectual capacity to do what is in their
own best interests, because public spirit can only be founded on
self-confidence, and thus he comes to his 'third mode'. The 'free
loyalty [Anhiinglichkeit], the self-awareness, and the individual
effort of the people' is
an all-powerful invincible spirit which that hierarchy [of the machine-
State] has renounced, and which has its life only where the supreme
State authority leaves as much as possible to the personal charge of the
citizens. How dull and spiritless a life is engendered in a modern State
of the sort where everything is regulated from the top downwards,
I Lasson, p. 30. Knox's translation of this tangled sentence is not easy to

follow. I construe it thus:

'Both circumstances [i.e. points (i) and (ii) in Knox] make a difference-
even if in connection with the first more money might have to be contributed
by the people, which is not really to be credited. The first makes the difference
that no one pays out money for something that he does not need, for something
that is a non-universal need of the State [i.e. not a matter for legislation by the
General Will]; the second produces an actual saving for everybody. Both
together make the difference that the people feels itself treated in the one case
[dart-over there in the machine-State] with reason and according to necessity
[compare Fichte's Geschlassene Handelstaat] and in the other case [hier-
here, in the living state] with trust and freedom. <This last point is) a circum-
stance which constitutes the most important difference in the second and third
modes of reckoning.'
456 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

where nothing which has implications for the community as a whole

[was eine allgemeine Seite hat] is left to the management and execution
of those parts of the people that have an interest in it-in a State such as
the French Republic has made itself into-this we have still to experi-
ence in the future, if indeed mastery can maintain itself at this pitch of
pedantry. But what life and what sterility reigns in another equally
regulated State-in Prussia-strikes anyone who sets foot in the first
village across the border or considers the complete lack of scientific or
artistic genius in Prussia, and does not assess its strength by the
ephemeral level of energy which a single man of genius was able to force
it up to for a time.!
This attack on Prussia forms the rhetorical climax of Hegel's
opening chapter on the 'Concept of the State'. But just when he
seems to be about to embark on the next topic in his plan-'There
is no supreme authority in Germany (a) Apportioning of sovereign
authority is inheritable and judicial'-there is a break in our
manuscript. The continuous drafts begin again at different points
in the section on the military power of Germany. Lasson says
comfortably that the lacuna here is clearly not a great one. 2 But
there seem to be no grounds of his confidence. All the evidence
points rather to the existence of a fairly considerable gap. That
Hegel was in all likelihood following his plan is attested first by the
final paragraph of the fragment Deutschland ist kein Staat mehr,
and secondly by the cancellation of a paragraph about Germany's
failure to meet the minimal criterion of Statehood in the revision of
the earlier fragment II. 3. Die Publicisten selbst. 3 Finally, and most
important of all, the account of Hegel's argument given by Rosen-
kranz makes it clear that he possessed more of the manuscript
than we do; and the fact that some of the information he provides
can be assigned with reasonable confidence to the lost part of
the section on 'Military power', provides strong support for the
already plausible supposition that what he had before him was the
content of the lacuna as a whole. 4
I Lasson, p. 31 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 163-4).
2 See his 'Feststellung des Textes', p. 505.
3 Lasson, p. [21]. This fragment was first written, probably, before the plan
was made. But in its revised form (which begins Wir kiinnen eine Menschenmenge:
Lasson, p. [17]) it served as the answer to the question 'What is essential to a
State?' in the first continuous draft .
.. This hypothesis seems preferable to the suggestion of Kimmerle (Hegel-
Studien, v. 86-7, 93) that Rosenkranz may have been depending on another draft
of the introduction which is now lost. The evidence that there ever was another
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 457

The report of Rosenkranz clearly shows that Hegel's manuscript

originally contained a discussion of feudal Germany that is now
lost:
Hegel asked in his essay whether the decadence [Untergang] of the
German Empire should rightly be ascribed to lack of courage [Tapfer-
keit] or personal morale? This view, he answered, is contradicted by
history which justified the renown of the individual soldier for military
proficiency everywhere, even in the army of the Empire. Hence military
defeat must be laid to the charge of the fragmented character of Ger-
many and the bad leadership of the troops. [Compare Lasson, p. 39.]
He asked further whether the decadence had perhaps arisen from a
national bankruptcy? This, he thought, was just as far from being the
case. For with all the bad housekeeping of the individual States, Ger-
many was still not acquainted with all those serious problems which
sprang in other States from a National debt, whose management
occupied the most oustanding minds, and in which even small errors
could lead to the most fearful consequences. [Compare Lasson, pp. 40-1.]
Finally he asked whether perhaps lack of ethics [Sittlichkeit], of
education [Bildung], of religious feeling [Religiositiit] could be the cause
of the weakness? This, he countered, could least of all be asserted. Not
in the indi7Jidual, therefore, but in the mechanism of the whole must the
principle of corruption lie. I
draft for the introduction is very slight and unreliable. The report of Rosenkranz
(p. 236) that Hegel rewrote his Eingang 'three or four times', beginning always
with the words 'Deutschland ist kein Staat mehr', is sufficiently accounted for by
the following data in the manuscripts that we have:
(a) the fact that the final draft (Chronological Index, item 131) does begin with
these words precisely.
(b) Deutschland kein Staat mehr is the incipit of Hegel's outline-plan (item 125).
(c) Hegel cancelled the second and third paragraphs of Sollte das politische
Resultat (item II6) and inserted the words Deutschland kein Staat mehr in
the margin beside paragraph 4. This was taken as marking a new beginning
by Lasson [3] and almost certainly by Rosenkranz before him.
My own guess is that Rosenkranz himself created the lacuna in our text by
removing one or two sheets which struck him as interesting enough to deserve
summary notice in the biography. (Kimmerle also mentions the possibility that
Rosenkranz was using some pages now lost from the still unpublished draft Der
N ahme fur die Staatsverfassung. But in view of what Rosenkranz says about the
constancy of Hegel's Eingang I am more inclined to believe that he was completely
unacquainted with this draft.)
I This paragraph could be regarded as a confused account of Lasson, pp.

31-2; but, in spite of the other parallels indicated in square brackets, the order
in which Rosenkranz puts Hegel's 'questions' strongly suggests that he is not
working from any of the manuscripts that we possess. The guide-line that he
used in summarizing all of Hegel's discussion of military prowess, finance, and
religion may well have been the sentence immediately before the break in the
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802
This principle of corruption Hegel now found in the fact that the
German Empire still sought to operate always in the form of the
medieval feudal system in which the relatively sovereign vassal had to
furnish to his sovereign the contingent that was fixed by his contract,
and thus the sovereign was more or less dependent on the goodwill of
his liegeman. In actuality, however, feudalism had long since disap-
peared; the petty princes had in effect become sovereign and their
dependence on the Empire was a mere sham. The art of war [Krieg-
filhrung] had been wholly transformed by the ever more widespread use
of gunpowder, as a result of which the form of battle as a personal combat
between two opponents was done away with [aufgehoben] , and the
disciplined movement of the individual as an element in a mass rGlied
einer Masse] became essential. With this change the patchwork-quilt
formation of an army from a multitude of contingents with different
uniforms, different weapons and so on, had come into contradiction
with the absolute instrument of death, gunpowder.-On the financial
side the middle ages still kept in many respects the form of contributions
in the form of natural produce, wbereas the modern era has everywhere
made the power of money central in this realm as the universal worth of
all things and as the most readily transferred medium.-Finally, with
respect to education and religion, in the middle ages the latter had been
politically important and had for this reason dominated culture. The
German Empire had never been able to free itself from this attitude.
Almost all of its wars had had a religious tinge ... 1
From this point onwards, Rosenkranz's account is clearly based
on the text that we have-except for one isolated remark about
Mainz which we shall have to consider later.2 Only what he says
about the military revolution produced by gunpowder is quite
without parallel in our text. But I am inclined to think that the
contrast between the medieval and the modern economic system,
and the remarks about the authority of the medieval Church, also
come from the missing text. 3
manuscript: 'DaB also in Deutschland die unfreie Forderung nicht erfiillt ist,
Gesetze, Rechtspflege, Auflegung und Erhebung der Abgaben usw., Sprache,
Sitten, Bildung, Religion von einem Mittelpunkt reguliert und guberniert zu
wissen, sondern dariiber die disparateste IVlannigfaltigkeit stattfindet, dies wiirde
nicht hindem, daft Deutschland einen Staat konstituierte, wenn es anders als eine
Staatsgewalt organisiert (ware) ... ' (for an English version see Knox-Pelczynski,
p. 164). And it seems very likely that the order of Rosenkranz's 'questions' was
suggested by the order of topics, military, financial, religious, in the lost discussion
of feudal Germany summarized in the next paragraph of the quotation.
I Rosenkranz, pp. 236-8. 2 See below, p. 475 n. 1.
3 If we accept the plan Deutschland kein Staat mehr as our guide to Hegel's
objectives in this lost discussion of the feudal system we can get some further
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 459

At the point where the main manuscript begins again, I Hegel is

speaking of the military reputation of the Germans as mercenaries.
The German states, even the larger ones, had been turning their
military resources into money for generations. Yet Germany as a
political unit was quite unable to defend itself properly. Foreign
hints of its probable content from the drafts and sketches which have survived
from the first phase in the development of the manuscript. The set of notes on
the feudal constitution of the Reich Da die deutsche Verfassung (for which see
p. 461 n. I below) and the fragment of the first continuous discussion of this
topic C. Die Lehensverfassung ist durch (Lasson, pp. 144-9 and [83]-[87]) are
obviously relevant in this connection. But the most interesting piece is the
fragment d. politischer Grundsatz (Lasson, pp. [62]-[65]) which is, in essence, a
meditation on the theme 'German constitutional law is private law'. (Lasson
took this fragment to be an early draft for the section on the juridical organization
of the Empire. Some of the points that it contains are taken up in that section,
and some are also echoed in the later section on the independence of the 'Estates'.
But the degree of overlap and repetition is no greater than that between Hegel's
own opening chapter on the Begriff of the State, and the subsequent chapters
in which he develops and deploys his argument in detail.)
Briefly the argument of d. politischet' Grundsatz is as follows: There is a funda-
mental difference between matters of political authority (Staatsgezualt) and
matters of judicial right (Rechtsgegenstand). For this reason claims for constitu-
tional sovereignty are not subject to judicial settlement. The first examples that
Hegel considers-the way in which the German princes have arrogated to
themselves the right to make war on one another and not to support, or even to
oppose, the Reich in its wars belong properly to the topic 'War and Peace' in a
later subsection of Hegel's plan. But they could well receive notice in a prelimi-
nary statement of the main thesis 'There is no supreme authority in Germany';
and the remaining topic of this fragment fits almost perfectly under subhead
alpha-'The apportioning of constitutional authority in inheritable and judicial'.
'State authority', says Hegel, 'cannot be private property; it flows from the
State and there is no right to it save that of the State; its extent and its possession
depends on the State and is only valid in relation to the State; it is not an object
for judicial settlement [Behandlung]. Inheritance of private property is a matter
of chance and caprice. State authority must remain intimately connected with
the whole; the State is the supreme ruler-though only in One Respect-of the
defence of the laws, and (of the people) against foreign (powers)-so then in
this matter all right derives from it, it must decide, not chance, not charters or
other legal titles.' (In the 'Other Respect'-Consciousness as opposed to actual-
ity-the Church would be the guardian, but hardly the 'ruler', of the religious
values of the community.)
The fragment continues by analysing how the Imperial Courts, in seeking to
make decisions about inheritance and other legal claims to political authority,
are at the mercy of a powerful claimant, even where, as in the case of a foreign
monarch, the claim ought to be rejected on political grounds regardless of its
legality. This example (which is taken up several times in later sections of our
surviving manuscripts) reveals the most serious weakness involved in treating
political authority as a matter of private property and legal right.
I Die Fortpjlanzung dieses kriegerischen Talents (Lasson, p. 32) is the incipit of

the first draft. The final draft begins again with jedes Gesicht auf at the top of
Lasson, p. 34. From the middle of page 34 to page 48 the first draft is printed at
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

powers were quite eager to hire German soldiers, yet the Imperial
Army of Germany was a laughing-stock. This was because the
free cities and smaller States, on the one hand, could not maintain
forces large enough to generate a military tradition or esprit de
corps. Their armies were only princely playthings, quite unfit for
active service, as the call to battle regularly revealed. The larger
States, on the other hand, only answered the Empire's call if it
suited them, so that, in fact, the contending parties in the civil
wars which tore Germany to pieces could and did raise more
formidable armies than the Empire ever raised in its own defence.
Even if the larger contingents came, they remained under separate
commands, so that the army was not one but several mutually
jealous forces. I
The same situation, Hegel goes on, prevails in the financial
sphere. In this field the centralized administration of the 'machine-
State' lies at one extreme, and the anarchy of the Empire at the
other. Because of its decentralization the finances of the central
authority of the Empire are simple, and 'no Pitt is required for their
management'.2 The smaller Estates had finally begun to commute
their feudal military obligations to money payments, and in this
Hegel saw the beginning of the transformation of the older
society into a modern State. But this transformation had begun
too late and had not gone far enough: and the existing constitution
was full of loop-holes by which the payment of contributions to
the imperial treasury could be avoided.
One of the methods by which the Diet sought to fill the Imperial
treasury without actual cost to themselves offered an irresistible
target for ironic humour. The Diet had voted that the revenues of
the foot of the page. It breaks off very near the end of the section on finances.
jedes Gesicht auf continues unbroken to page 68 and its final paragraphs are
reprinted at the foot of pages 68 to 71. The first draft begins at the foot of page 66
(wer)den kann, wodurch die Freyheit and continues unbroken to the end. From
the foot of page 68 onwards Lasson treats it as the principal text; and from page
71 onwards it is the only text we have (apart from a few sketches from the
first phase).
I Lasson, pp. 32-9 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 164-9). Cf. also Reichsfeind, der

dritte, Lasson, pp. 142-3. The references to the Thirty Years' war and the
Seven Years' war are made explicit in the first draft (Lasson, pp. [34]-E3s]).
2 Lasson, p. 41 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 169). Cf. Die Fortpjlanzung dieses
kriegerischen Talents, Lasson, p. [41]. Behind this remark there lies, almost
certainly, bitter resentment of the way Pitt manipulated the coalition against
France by means of subsidies, thus contriving to combat the Revolution with
German blood and English money.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 461

lost provinces should go to the Imperial Treasury when those

provinces were recovered. As Hegel remarks: 'The Empire has
managed always so to arrange matters as to lose more territory and
so to increase the Imperial fund. Consequently the loss of the left
bank of the Rhine has its more comforting aspect: it is a route to
the possibility of founding an Imperial exchequer.'1 This curious
piece of never-never-Iand finance provided a natural transition to
the sad tale of the Empire's ever-shrinking boundaries. Hegel
takes as his starting-point, in this connection, the Peace of West-
phalia (1648) at the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War. We can
reasonably infer, I think, that in his view the older spontaneous
natural unity of the Volk perished in that war. From that time the
principle was accepted that a Protestant minority was not bound
by a majority decision of the Reichstag; and thereby the very possi-
bility of real federal union and centralized authority was destroyed. 2
The impotence of the State thereafter showed itself in two ways:
first in actual loss of territories ceded to victorious enemies, and
secondly in the acceptance of foreign princes as fief-holders of the
Reich. The kings of France and Sweden had seats in the Diet
under the settlement of 1648, and with the accession of the Elector
of Hanover as George I in 1714, the English king arrived also. 3
I Lasson, p. 46 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 172). The earlier draft for this section

(Die Fortpjlanzung dieses kriegerischcn Talents, Lasson, pp. [39]-[48]) contains

rather fuller discussions of the old feudal arrangements, and some remarks
about the judicial system of the Reich which may have been eliminated from the
revised version because Hegel felt they were, or could be, sufficiently dealt with
in the fuller discussions in later sections. The earliest draft, Da die deutsche
Verfassung, Lasson, pp. 144-9, is actually a set of notes for the discussion of:
[A: Finance], pp. 144-5.
[B: Justice and judicial finance], pp. 145-6.
C: Lack of supreme power in Germany
(a) in theory [legal rights of the Estates], pp. 146-8.
(b) in practice [religious divisions], p. 148.
[D: Cultural and economic divisions], p. 149.
E: History since the Peace of Westphalia, p. 149.
(The unbracketed headings are used by Hegel himself. Compare further the
account quoted from Rosenkranz on pp. 457-8 and p. 458 n. 3 above.)
• See especially Da die deutsche Verfassung section C (b), Lasson, p. 148. In
this section of his essay Hegel depends heavily on J. S. Plitter. A fairly clear
idea of how critical he was in his use of Plitter's work can be gained by comparing
the notes in Dok., pp. 309-12 (and Hoffmeister's notes, Dok., p. 474) with the
text in Lasson, pp. 52-7 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 175-9).
3 Compare the following passages in the final drafts: Lasson, pp. 53-7 (Knox-
Pelczynski, pp. 175-8); Lasson, pp. 87-92 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 197-201).
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

Among these 'foreign sovereigns' Hegel counts Prussia.! Elector

Frederick II forced the Emperor to recognize him as 'King' of
Prussia in 1701, but it was really the achievement of his father, the
'Great Elector', in holding together the various scattered in-
heritances of the Hohenzollern house from 1640 onwards, which
made Brandenburg-Prussia to all intents and purposes an inde-
pendent power in the north of Germany. With Prussia on the one
side, Austria on the other, and several foreign powers liable to
become involved in any domestic quarrel, the constitutional
justice meted out to the Estates by the Imperial courts, virtually
the last surviving vestige of central authority, could hardly be very
even-handed. Every smaller princedom speedily realized that it
was better to have powerful allies than a costly and dilatory
judgement which could not be executed. Thus the German
Empire became after 1648 a Gedankenstaat: all the forms of
constitutional unity remained, but in reality several of the estates
managed to make themselves into viable independent states, and the
existence of the rest was at the mercy of circumstance. 2
The Gedankenstaat is essentially a legal fiction. Its natural and
proper sphere is the courts. But even within this sphere the
sovereign authority of Germany was only a thought, not a reality.
Even where the legal situation was clear, the actual process of
delivering judgement could be paralysed by legal and diplomatic
means; the courts were absolutely clogged with litigation, some
of which had dragged on for generations, and though the Diet
resolved to increase the number of judges it failed to find any money
to pay them with.
The administration of the law is so constituted that if the legal
verdict is declared in constitutional relations it cannot be executed
except where the interests concerned are those of an estate without
political power; but if this is not the case, as it usually is not, the case
does not come up for legal settlement, but is decided by power and
political relations. 3
At this point in his final draft, Hegel began a new chapter with
the heading 'Legitimacy [RechtmiiJ3igkeit] (of the fact) that the
execution of the constitutional laws does not come to pass.' The
1 Lasson, p. 53 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 176); cf. also Lasson, p. 88 (Knox-

Pelczynski, p. 198).
2 Lasson, pp. 70-2 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 187-9).

• Lasson, p. [68].
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 463

manuscript breaks off soon afterwards, but it was clearly his

intention to argue that Germany had returned in a quite consti-
tutional way to the state of anarchy that preceded the establishment
of the 'imperial peace' (the Landfriede of 1495). Unlike the rest of
Europe, Germany failed to make the transition from barbarism to
civilization:
In the struggle out of savagery into culture, the crucial question was
which of the two, the universal, the State, or the individual, would gain
the upper hand; in most European countries the State has won a com-
plete victory here, in some its victory is incomplete, in none so in-
adequate as in Germany with its mere pretence of being a State. The
state of barbarism consists precisely in this, that a mass of men [eine
Menge] is a people without being at the same time a State, that the
State and the individual exist in opposition and in a state of separation
[in einer Trennung]; the ruler is in his own person the State authority;
and the bulwark [Rettung] against his personality is nothing but the
opposition of (the baron's) personality. In a civilized [gebildeten] State the
laws, or universality, stand between the personality of the monarch, and
the individual (burgher); the individual deed of the monarch concerns
all, it burdens or injures all, or it benefits all. But that the monarch
should eo ipso be the State authority, that he should have the sovereign
power, that the State should in fact exist, all come to the same thing.
The contradiction (between the requirement) that the State should be
the sovereign authority, and (the requirement) that the individual
should not be oppressed by it, is resolved by the power of the laws.
Lack of faith in the power of the laws is what stems from that failure of
wisdom which wavers between the necessity of giving sovereign power
to the State, and the fear that the individual will be oppressed by it.
All wisdom in the organization of States turns on the solution of this
problem; but the first essential is that the State should exist, hence the
first essential is that its power should be sovereign, and that directly
implies also that there are laws ... (breaks off)!
'German freedom' was originally the arbitary power of a local
lord; when this was embodied in a system of law it represented
I Lasson, pp. [70]-[7I]. For the relation of the two drafts in Lasson's edition
see p. 459 n. I above. The manuscript of the final version was 'uncompleted'
(unvollendet), Rosenzweig, i. 237. The germ of this new 'chapter' (the only
chapter heading given in the manuscript after '1. Begriff des Staats') is plainly
to be seen in a marginal insertion in the final paragraph of the section on consti-
tutionallaw in the first draft (Lasson, p. [72]). The justification for holding that
'individual' refers initially to the baron is provided by his account of Germany
in the days before the Imperial Peace, which follows almost immediately and is
discussed below.
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

nothing but a 'failure of wisdom' and a lack of faith in the law,

which perpetually justified itself because it effectively prevented
the growth of a constitutional monarchy or sovereign power.

5. The 'Constitution of the German Empire' : Part II

Probably Hegel meant to illustrate this thesis by comparing the
fate of Germany with that of Italy-the other exception in Europe
-as he does in the first draft. In any case there is no reason to
suppose that the course of the discussion in his second draft, if
he had completed it, would have been very different from the
argument of the first draft, which continues unbroken from slightly
before this point to the end. But whereas the first half of the
treatise is mainly concerned with the 'fate' of Germany, the second
half is devoted rather to the regeneration of the 'spirit of German
freedom' which Hegel identifies with the 'spirit' of Europe as a
whole. I
In the days before the imperial peace, when the Germans knew
that they were a nation but did not yet pretend to be a State, there
was a certain Zusammenhang of all the conflicting parties which
arose from the homogeneity of their interests and the essential
similarity of their characters. They were all of them free lords, not
driven by economic need to think of their own private interests
separately from the interests of the whole, as free 'Burgers' are. 2
Thus Germany was closer to becoming a State at the inception of
the Landfriede than it ever was afterwards. The Reformation and
the wars of religion 'divided the peoples for ever', just when the
diversification of society made the establishment of constitutional
sovereignty essential. Hegel clearly implies that it was precisely
because of its Unbiindigkeit that Germany became the cockpit of the
religious upheaval. All of the causes that historians might appeal to in
an account of German history are only 'tools in the hands of higher
powers, of primordial fate and of time that conquers all things'. 3
I In this latter half of the essay we have therefore the first statement of the

reasons why Hegel called the modern period the 'Christian-Teutonic World' in
his lectures on the philosophy of history twenty years later. (The structure of
the Verfassungsschrift-a negative, critical analysis, followed by a positive,
reconstructive one-should be compared with that of the 'Positivity' essay of
1795.)
2 The marginal addition, 'The prince(ly) and noble sense (is) freer, not

subjected to the need of earning [Not des Erwerbs], (Lasson, p. [73]), is another
hint of the dialectic of Herr and Knecht. Cf. p. 450 above (with n. 2).
3 Lasson, p. 74 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 190).
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 465

The settlement of the religious question in the treaty of West-

phalia was in the main a reaffirmation of the basic premiss of the
Peace of Augsburg. Every princedom had its own 'established
religion' and civil recognition was denied to other faiths. Hegel's
attitude to this problem of religious toleration and the civil rights
of dissenters is by no means easy to expound, because he applies
his own doctrine of the relation of the realm of 'right' to the realm
of 'love' in more than one way. On the one hand religious tolera-
tion ought to be a matter of 'grace', not of 'right', because the
'community of religion is deeper than community of physical
needs, of property, or of gain', and 'grace' is higher than 'right'.
This leads Hegel to say that the 'grace' extended by Prussia to
Catholics and by Austria to Protestants was 'infinitely higher'
than the 'rights' guaranteed by the treaty. But he also says that this
grace of religious toleration 'accords with the higher natural rights
of freedom of conscience and the non-dependence of civil rights
on faith'. This latter statement is the general burden of the essay
on 'The Positivity of Christianity', and it is clear from the argu-
ment in that essay that the proper interpretation of the superiority
of 'grace' is that matters of grace should not be regulated by law
at all. The Nemesis of the claim for 'religious rights' was the
doctrine of itia in partes, by which a religious minority could refuse
to accept a majority decision of the Diet. The failure to resolve the
religious division properly by making a clear separation of Church
and State reduced the sovereign power itself to a partisan position.
It is fair to say, I think, that Hegel viewed the Peace of Augsburg
itself as a necessary transition from primitive spontaneity to
conscious freedom of conscience. 'The times were not ripe' for a
proper separation of Church and State, I-and in that context the
'grace' extended by the Prince in violation of the 'rights' of the
established religion was 'higher'. But it is only by legal recognition
that religion does not ultimately concern the State at all-the
proper fulfilment of the right of itia in partes-that the realm of
'right' is brought into its true harmony with the realm of 'grace'. 2
Freedom of conscience in combination with the principles of
private property, produced finally a breach in the constitutional

I Cf. Lasson, pp. 77 and 80.

• In this connection Hegel's remarks about the contrast between Richelieu's

policy in France and his policy in Germany (quoted on p. 469 below) are
illwninating.
8243588 Ii
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

theory of 'German freedom'. The maxim cuius regio eius religio

presupposed that the prince would be at one with his people in all
fundamental matters of conscience. But by the natural operation
of the rights of free inheritance a Catholic prince could succeed
to a Protestant princedom and vice versa. In this event the prince
could no longer be a natural 'representative' of his people. How-
ever the problem might be politically or legally resolved, the
personality of the prince was then clearly distinct from and opposed
to the unity of the people. Thus religion-which is the foundation
of the natural unity of the Volk, and ought to be, as it was in the
work of Theseus, the foundation of their political union into a
State-was for Germany not only the most effective barrier
against her becoming a State, but even a force which disrupted the
natural unity that was originally possessed by the parts. And yet,
as Hegel says, the fact that Germany is nevertheless supposed to be
a State, shows that in principle the possibility of a separation of
Church and State is acknowledged. I
The religious division alone would not have been sufficient to
prevent Germany from advancing from a feudal community into a
national State. The crucial development that prevented this was
the emergence in Prussia of a single power capable of standing
alone against all the might that the Emperor could muster. Hegel
speaks in the plural of 'disproportionate aggrandisement of single
Estates', and he draws an analogy with the peculiar case of Poland,
where an alliance of vassals exercised an influence which ulti-
mately led to the downfall of the kingdom; but it is quite clear
that in his eyes the unity of Germany was effectively prevented
by the emergence of Brandenburg-Prussia, and its impossibility
demonstrated by Frederick the Great's successful defiance of the
Imperial ban.
Prussia represents that aspect of the German spirit which appears
in the alien guise of 'fate'. She was the closest of the 'Teutonic'

I Lasson, p. 79 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 193-4). Hegel never alludes explicitly

to the 'secularization' of the ecclesiastical principalities, discussed at the Congress

of Rastatt and carried into effect by the Peace of Luneville. Yet the way in which
the various states holding territory on the left bank of the Rhine were 'compen-
sated' for their loss by receiving ecclesiastical lands within the body of the
Empire is as ludicrous from the point of view of the 'whole' as the financial
resolutions that he pokes fun at. The natural inference is that he regarded this
aspect of the negotiations and treaties as a definite gain for the Reich (compare
further p. 473 n. I below).
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 467

but external powers who were able to use the normal channels of
dynastic politics to become fief-holders within the Empire. 1 Even
the power of Austria-through which the feudal constitution of
Germany was preserved, so far as it survived at all-was an alien
power. Ignoring, for the moment, the influence of France,2 Hegel
views the history of Germany as a struggle among the Teutonic
nations Denmark, Sweden, England, Prussia, and Austria. He
speaks in terms of glowing admiration of the intervention of
Gustavus Adolphus on behalf of the Protestants in the Thirty
Years' War; but in the next breath he condemns those who believe
that a 'human work of justice and dreams realized' could be
'secure against the higher justice of nature and truth'. A foreign
hero could only bring about the triumph of foreign power. 3
The foreign powers whose influence in Germany Hegel chooses
to consider are just the ones he is primarily thinking of when he
says that 'most of the European States were founded by Germanic
peoples, and out of the spirit of these peoples their constitution
has developed'. 4 In the tribal system of the German forests, and
even in the early days of the feudal system, before the development
of the towns, 'every free man's arm was counted on.... Princes
I Hegel's theory of fate as the nature of a man (or a community) separated

from him (or it) by his (or its) own act, and appearing over against him (or it) as
an alien force, explains the ambivalence that is continually apparent in his
treatment of Prussia. Prussia was inside the Reich, yet outside it, not only in
practice but in constitutional theory (the same was true of Austria, of course).
But the way Hegel switches from speaking of Prussia's refusal to pay the
Kammerzieler, or of the status of the Margrave of Brandenburg within the Reich,
to discussing the role of Prussia as one of the 'foreign powers from the North' is
bewildering, unless we realize that for Hegel all of those powers are 'Germanic'
and Prussia is simply the latest of the states 'founded by Germanic peoples'. Its
constitution, moreover, is the extreme of modernity and economic efficiency.
The 'machine-State' is the 'fate' of 'German freedom'. (Cf. Lasson, pp. 83,
85-6, 88, 92; Knox-Pe1czynski, pp. 196-202.)
2 Since Hegel mentions France first among the national states of Europe

(Lasson, p. 92; Knox-Pelczynski, p. 202), and alludes also (Lasson, p. 85;

Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 196-7) to the use of Charlemagne's regalia in the corona-
tion of the Emperor, he does not mean to slight the Frankish contribution to
European history. He presumably counts the Franks as 'Germanic peoples' of
some sort. But the fate of France, like that of Germany itself, was peculiar. The
feudal system did not develop properly, and the spirit of 'German freedom' was
lost as the monarchy became absolute and the nobility lost its 'representative'
character (cf. Lasson, pp. 95-6; Knox-Pelc7.ynski, pp. 205-6). All the same,
France did manage to become a viable State and overcome its crisis (Lasson,
pp. 107-9; Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 215-17).
3 Lasson, pp. 89-90 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 199).
4 Lasson, p. 92 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 202).
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

were chosen by the people, and. .. anyone who wished took part
in the council.' The development of free towns broke this pattern,
for the burghers were no longer 'free' in the sense of having
serfs to labour and provide for them economically. But also, as the
feudal system itself developed, the political business of the nation
grew further and further away from the immediate concerns of
noble landlords. Hence a system of parliamentary representation
developed in which the different Estates of the realm were
represented. This is the ideal mean between the extremes of
despotism (the universal slavery of oriental empires) and republi-
canism (the civic equality of the Roman Empire). I When
the empire of the Romans gave place in the West to that of the
Germans, parliamentary representation was the form that the
principle of 'German freedom' had to assume.
The feudal system itself was only a transitional phase. The
arrival on the scene of free men other than nobles, meant that two
types of 'Estates' had to be represented. In the case of the noble
representative of a landed estate, primogeniture was the natural
principle of representation. But in the case of the free commoners,
free election and a career open to talent were equally natural.
Hegel has a good word here for both England and Austria, and he
finds in the decay of Estates-General the reason for the 'mis-
fortune' of the ancien regime in France. In a marginal addition to
his text he condemns the 'new Etats Generaux' (i.e. the National
Convention) for abolishing the distinction of Estates altogether.
In his view the two principles of noble birth ('character') and
bourgeois equality of opportunity (,skill and expertise') have to
be harmonized together. 'Nature and most modern States' tend
to diminish the distinction between the nobility and the ordinary
burghers; in France 'that which is purely personal [i.e. the skill
and expertise that an individual acquires for himself, not the
'character' that he has as one link in an immortal life-line] has
been made into a principle and the career of public service has
been closed to the nobility altogether. 2
I Lasson, p. 93 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 203). The Greeks cannot have a place

in this schema because they did not create a world empire. But they expressed
the ideal in its fully developed form at the level of the face-to-face society.
Hegel is careful to point out that the German tribes in their forests did not
and could not do this. Theirs was the simple life of the avaYKawTaT1J 1TO'\'S of
which Plato speaks in Republic ii.
2 Lasson, pp. 94-6 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 204-6). The two principles of
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 469

In Germany itself German freedom was institutionalized as the

spirit of constitutional legality. All problems were thought of as
questions of established 'rights'. But the assumption that any
system of rights can be absolutely stable ignores the many-
sidedness of human relations which renders conflicts of rights
inevitable. I There are situations where the opposed parties have
both a 'just cause' for war, and war is the only way to settle the
issue, precisely because the right of both sides is well grounded.
Hegel speaks with bitter contempt of the pretexts which the
German princes found for some of their wars after the Land/riede.
But he clearly holds that in the absence of a central authority
strong enough to impose a judicial settlement, nothing better
could be expected. His contempt springs from the fact that the
pretexts were found and the wars were fought in pursuit of private
interests, since political power had been reduced to a kind of private
property.
At this point Hegel embarks on a comparison of the 'fate' of
Germany with that of France and that of Italy. Both France and
Germany had faced the same problem of religious division; and
one man, Richelieu, had been the architect both of unity for France
and of dissolution for Germany:
While annihilating the Huguenot state, he left them freedom of
conscience, churches, worship, civil and political rights on a parity with
the Catholics. By doing what was logical for him as a statesman, he
discovered and exercised the toleration which was finally recognized as
rationally valid [geltend gemacht] more than a hundred years later as
the product of a more civilized age and as the most brilliant achievement
of philosophy and of more humane manners [Milderung der Sitten];
and it was not ignorance and fanaticism in the French, when, in the war
and in the Peace of Westphalia, they did not think of the separation of
State and Church in Germany, but made religion the basis of a distinc-
tion in political and civil rights, thereby granting validity to a principle
in Germany which they cancelled [aufgehoben] in their own country.2
representation were united in the tribal society in which 'the people chose the
princes', and their joint influence was still evident in the ceremonial election
of the Emperor.
I The whole section on 'The Independence of the Estates' should be read as

an exemplar of Hegel's critique of Kant's ethics in 'The Spirit of Christianity'.

Hegel himself refers, as is natural at this point, to the political application of
Kant's philosophy in Perpetual Peace (Lasson, p. 99; Knox-Pelczynski, p. 208).
2 Lasson, p. 108 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 217). Of course France and Germany
were opposite extremes that needed to be reconciled now that the ancien regime
had perished-see further, p. 467 n. 2 above.
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

France and Germany were opposites. Italy, on the other hand,

had followed 'the same course' as Germany somewhat earlier.
'The desire of the Emperors to keep both countries [Germany and
Italy] under their rule has destroyed their power in both.'I Times
had changed but Hegel thought that nevertheless there was a
valid parallel between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and the
'parties' of Prussia and Austria among the German States; and the
fate that had overtaken the Italian city-states and petty princedoms,
of being subjected to foreign domination, now loomed over
Germany.
When Italy stood at the cross-roads of fate that Germany had
only just now reached, Machiavelli had analysed her situation and
pointed the way to national union as the only path of salvation.
By quoting from his appeal at the end of the Prince and by insisting
(rightly) that Machiavelli's essay was 'the following through of an
idea [Idee] generated directly from insight [Anschauung] into the
situation of Italy', not a 'compendium of moral-political principles
equally suited to all situations, or in other words suitable for none',
Hegel manages implicitly to point to the parallel between
Machiavelli's endeavours and his own; and by pointing out that
no prince-not even Machiavelli's most famous princely critic
Frederick the Great-has yet lived up to the ideal requirements
that Machiavelli lays down for his prince, Hegel strikes another
blow at the villain of his story, Prussia. Everything that appears
immoral in what Machiavelli counsels his prince to do, is justi-
fiable as punishment for the crime of 'engineering anarchy', which
is the ultimate crime against the State, the sum and epitome of all
civil offences. 2
After his brief excursion on the fate of Italy, and the example of
I Lasson, p. I09 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 2I8). This whole section is concerned

more with the fate of Germany and Italy, which had not become States, than
with 'The formation of States in the rest of Europe'.
2 Lasson, pp. IIO-I6 (Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 2I9-23: the excerpt from The
Prince was among the earliest notes that Hegel made for the Verfassungsschrift.
(Hegel does not think, however, that Machiavelli showed a sound insight in
supposing that Cesare Borgia might have been the saviour of Italy had it not
been for accidental circumstances. Cesare Borgia was not, like Richelieu, a
statesman, but only 'an instrument for the founding of a State'-the State which
his uncle Alexander VI acquired for the Papacy. Hegel seems to have had a
higher opinion of the statesmanship of Julius II, the enemy who inherited
the Borgia's work. The Papal State, however, was not a creation upon which
Hegel could look with any great favour, for reasons which must, by now, be
obvious.)
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 471

Machiavelli,! neither of which is ever out of his mind from this

point onwards, Hegel comes to grips finally with the actual situa-
tion of Germany. Although he has said that Italy's fate followed
'the same course' as Germany's, he does not deny that the changing
of the times has actually introduced important differences in the
German situation. The Italian states could survive in their time,
even when attacked by much greater powers; and in particular
no one or two of them could gain a preponderance of power over
all the rest. Neither of these conditions held true for Germany,
in which two major powers could now be distinguished, a group
of middle-sized 'neutrals', and a large mass of small States, whose
very existence depended absolutely on the maintenance of the
Imperial constitution in some form.2
Of the two great powers Prussia possessed greater freedom of
political manccuvre and could exercise its power freely in pursuit
of its own interests, without instantly arousing universal suspicion
and a reaction of defensive solidarity such as was generated by any
'unconstitutional' action on the part of Austria in its relations with
the rest of the Reich. Just for this reason, because of the long
tradition of constitutional relations, Hegel feels that the salvation
of the Reich must lie with Austria. Prussia (like the French
Republic) was a 'modern' State where all that counted was
r In the course of his discussion of Machiavelli Hegel interjects a comment
upon the suicide of Cato of Utica which took place at a comparable moment in
the history of Rome, when the structure of the old Republic had broken down
into anarchy, but the new imperial constitution was not yet established. Cato
killed himself, says Hegel, 'not because what the Romans still called freedom, i.e.
anarchy, had been suppressed' but simply because he wished Pompey to have
supreme power and could not endure to see it fall to Octavius (Lasson, p. 114;
Knox-Pelczynski, p. 222).
This verdict is a correction of his own earlier view, that Cato sought death
because the free Republic upon which his whole existence depended had
perished, and hence life had no meaning for him any more (Jedes Volk hat ihm
eigene Gegenstiinde (1796), Nohl, p. 222; Knox, p. ISS). Apart from increased
knowledge of the circumstances, the probable ground for Hegel's change of
opinion lies in his new conception of world history in terms of the sequence of
Empires (cf. p. 468 n. 1 above). Whereas previously he had thought primarily
of the analogy between the Roman Republic and the Greek city states, he now
thought rather of the Empire as a 'State' on a different level of political existence
altogether, and he was willing to suppose that Cato did likewise.
2 Hegel only noted the existence of the 'neutral' group (Bavaria, Baden,

Saxony) in a revision of his manuscript. Originally he sought to treat Germany

as a collection of small units all clinging uneasily to their constitutional 'rights'
as best they could between two major powers, one Protestant, the other Catholic
(cf. Lasson's note, p. II7; Knox-Pelczynski, p. 225).
 472 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

efficiency, the foresighted calculation of physical necessity. A

Germany unified by the power of Prussia could only be founded on
force and authority; it would be without real freedom because the
modern world of the Enlightenment knew no freedom save that of
rational calculation:
Prussia's modern politics has not proceeded from the kingly majestic
principle, but from the bourgeoisie, and in contrast to the Austrian
power, for instance, she is now like a bourgeois who has made his fortune
[Schiitze] toilsomely penny by penny, by his own labour, as compared
with the free nobleman who has inherited wealth, whose income
[Besitz] rests on his land and remains the same even if he lets his
servants or neighbours look after the details of arrangements. His wealth
is not a sum-which of course is diminished by the subtraction of a
single part-but something permanent and unchangeable. I
In the body of his essay Hegel's attitude towards 'German
freedom', especially in its institutionalized form, is critical to the
point of being merciless. He insists continually that the survival
of any political organization depends on the maintenance of its
Macht against enemies or transgressors and the effective recog-
nition of its Gewalt by its own members. This makes it easy to
overlook the fact that for Hegel, Macht and Gewalt, force and
authority, are not ends in themselves-they are only instruments
of freedom. Their existence in a political organization is justified,
first, by natural needs and the unavoidable necessities of physical
existence; but once they are securely established they should be so
employed as to make possible a kind of life that is free from the
pressure of need and the compulsion of necessity. The Greeks had
shown how the State which comes into existence for the sake of life,
could continue to exist for the sake of the good life; and the insti-
tutionalization of 'German freedom' in the other Germanic nations
pointed the way by which this lesson could be applied in national
States. Hegel recognized and apparently approved (as productive
of harmony) a certain tendency toward the assimilation of the
nobility with the bourgeoisie. But he thought of the monarchy,
the 'majestic principle', as a point of balance between these two

1 Lasson, pp. 122-3 (Knox-Pe!czynski, pp. 229-30). Note the contrast between

the personal fortune of the bourgeois and the family patrimony of the noble.
We can see in this passage why Hegel's conception of the human spirit and its
immortality made it impossible for him to be an ideological partisan of the
bourgeoisie.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 473

classes, and he preferred to see it resting more on the nobility, as

the Austrian monarchy did, than on the bourgeoisie, as was the
case in Prussia and in revolutionary France. This preference
reveals once more the essentially Platonic origins of his inspiration.
It was in this way that he hoped to save the Gemiit of man amid
the mechanical necessities of mercantilist economics.
In pleading the cause of Austria, however, he faced one serious
problem. It was the religious issue which had divided Germany
in a way which made the rise of Prussia possible, by reducing
Imperial House itself to the status of a partisan. Individual
statesmen like Richelieu had perceived the path of wisdom in this
matter, but religious mistrust could never perish as long as there
was the fear that a new ruler or a new situation might lead to a
reversal of the policy of toleration. Hegel argued that there was
no reason to believe that the liberal reforms of Joseph II in the
I780s could be undone in this way. Presumably he felt that the
spreading of the ideals of I789 had now made them irreversible.
He also pointed out that the religious problem in the Palatinate
had now been settled finally, and that long experience had shown
that the acceptance of a Catholic prince need not pose any threat
to the Protestant faith of his subjects. 1
Hegel's argument in defence of religious toleration is, as we
know from his theoretical 'system', only the negative side of his
own philosophy of religion. He seems to have cherished the hope
that the liberal policies of Joseph II would make it possible for
some equally enlightened successor to establish a national Church
within which Protestants and Catholics could worship side by
side, conscious of their community at the level of Phantasie and
mutually respectful or even sympathetically appreciative of their
differences at the level of Verstand. 2
This was the 'revolution to be produced by philosophy' for
I Lasson, pp. 124-6 (Knox-Pe1czynski, pp. 231-3). Toleration was established

in the Palatinate and elsewhere by the French annexation and 'compensations'.

For Hegel's reflections on the problem of Catholic persecution of Protestants,
compare his notes on Plitter (1m Deutschen Reich, Dok., p. 310): 'The examples
are too old; litany against Catholic principles, but the Catholic princes make this
separation [Trennung: sc. of Church and State] ever increasingly.' Where the
prince was a bishop, however, the 'separation of Church and State' was 'especi-
ally hindered'.
2 Some ideal of this sort was the goal of his 'way back to influence in the life

of men', unless our reconstruction of what he called his 'system' is radically

mistaken.
474 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802

which the French Revolution had opened the way. I But the
Revolution did not only mark the end of religious intolerance; it
was also the death knell of the old European pattern of dynastic
politics, in which the 'Universal monarchy' of the Emperor was
something that had to be continually guarded against. 'Universal
monarchy' had always been an imaginary bugaboo, or so Hegel
affects to think; but now men had realized that political freedom
was not merely a negative thing, but a concept that had positive
content. This positive content, which the terror and the depre-
dations of the warring armies had made clear, consists of a strong
central government operating in accordance with laws made by a
body that represents the people. In particular, the representative
assembly must have control of the public purse, the modern
equivalent of the feudal service which the council of vassals voted
upon in the old time. Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary had this kind
of representative system, whereas in Prussia the power of the old
Estates Assembly had been nullified.
The French armies had taught most of the German 'Estates' the
folly of their anarchic independence; and by the standards of the
Revolution itself it was apparent that the older system of repre-
sentative government had decayed into oligarchic corruption, or
autocratic tyranny, ever since princely independence had been
established absolutely by the Peace of Westphalia. 'German
freedom', as interpreted by the Germans, had proved the worst
enemy of 'German freedom', as interpreted and achieved by the
rest of Europe. 'To whom does Germany mean anything, where
could patriotic feeling for Germany come from?', asks Hegel
bitterly, at the very moment when he is about to lay down the
conditions for the regeneration of the Reich. 2
Germany, if it is to be a State, must first of all have a single
national army, in which every prince is a general by right of birth,
and commander of his own regiment. Secondly, in order to secure
constitutional control of this national army, there must be a

I The phrase occurs in Letter 13, Schelling to Hegel 21 July 1795, Briefe, i.

28 (for the interpretation of Schelling's pessimism in this letter see above,

Chapter III, pp. 209-10).
2 Lasson, p. 132 (Knox-Pelczynski, 238). It seems entirely likely to me that

the whole section about the Peace of Westphalia (from Lasson, p. 129 bottom
to the end of p. 132; Knox-Pelczynski, pp. 236-8) was originally written quite
separately from the rather more positive-not to say optimistic-diagnosis of the
preceding and following pages.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 475

national parliament of representatives elected from constituencies

of equal population, which are themselves subdivisions of the
provincial divisions which would be needed for the levying and
administration of the national army. This new 'House of Commons'
(so to speak) could be created through an enlargement of the
'College of Cities' in the existing Diet of the realm. 1
There are three points to be noted about this proposal. First
we should observe how Hegel links the political organization of the
Reich with its military organization; secondly, that he explicitly
acknowledges the principle of noble birth in what he says about
the officer-corps of the army; and thirdly, that he emphasizes
the elective principle in what he says about the national Diet. He
clearly envisages that his new 'House of Commons' will have the
power of the purse, and that in this way the deadlock of the Diet
when the three Colleges (Electors, Princes, Cities) disagreed
would be avoided.
Along these lines some modern Theseus could adapt the prin-
ciples of ancient Greek democracy to modern circumstances. z He
would have to use force because, as Hegel says in his concluding
paragraph:
Once the social nature of man is distorted and compelled to throw
itself into private particular concerns [EigentilmlichkeitenJ, such a radical
perversion comes over it, that it spends its strength now upon this
alienation [EntzweiullgJ from others, and in the maintenance of its
separation [Absonderung] it goes to the pitch of madness [Wahnsinn]; for
madness is nothing else but the complete separation of the individual from
his kind [GeschlechtJ. And though the German nation is not capable
of pushing its stubborn adherence to particularism [Hartniickigkeit
I Rosenkranz, p. 238, says: 'For foreign affairs an administrative centre should
be established, perhaps at Mainz, in which all the federated states would have a
common government.' Except for the reference to Mainz the context plainly
shows that he is summarizing the present passage (Lasson, pp. 133-5; Knox-
Pelczynski, pp. 239-41). It is just possible that he noticed some chance reference
to Mainz in an aside in the lost discussion of feudal Germany. But my own guess
is that he has injected into his summary some remark made by Hegel in a letter
of the period 1806-8 (the period to which Rosenkranz believed the Verfassungs-
schrift belonged). We may note that if Hegel made some such remark, even at
that date, his sympathy with the policy of Forster in 1798 must be considered
doubtful.
2 Hegel speaks of 'a democratic constitution such as Theseus gave his people'
(Lasson, pp. 135-6; Knox-Pelczynski, p. 241). But the constitution he describes
owes more to Plato than to any Athenian statesman after Theseus himself. For
the work of Theseus and his fate, Hegel's authority is almost certainly Thucy-
dides, ii. 15.
 FRANKFURT-JENA 1798-1802
in dem Besondern] to the pitch of madness achieved by the Jewish
nation, the nation that cannot be united with others in friendly com-
panionship and community of life [Geselligkeit und Gemeinschaftlichkeit]
-though they cannot arrive at such a frenzy of separation as to murder
and be murdered till the State is wiped out, yet particular interest and
prerogative and precedence are so intimately personal to them, that
conceptual understanding [der Begriff] or insight into necessity is far
too weak to produce action by itself. Conceptual insight brings with it
such mistrust and opposition that it has to be validated by authoritative
power [Gewalt]; only then does man submit to it.!
But this Theseus would also have to have the courage and mag-
nanimity to trust those who mistrusted him, and share power with
those who resented what he had done. Dilthey thought that Hegel's
hopes were focused on Napoleon. 2 But in the light of his com-
ments about the achievements of Gustavus Adolphus, whom he
greatly admired, it seems clear that he could not put much faith
in the lasting power of anything created by a foreign lawgiver. The
whole tenor of his discourse indicates that he was hoping rather for
a worthy successor to Joseph II in the Imperial House itself.
Archduke Karl is, as Rosenzweig says, the only possible candidate. 3
Still, the example set by Napoleon was no doubt in Hegel's mind.
He hoped that the native German military hero, the outstanding
representative of the old order of things, would be inspired to copy
the First Consul. Instead it was the First Consul who became an
Emperor.
Indeed, if there was any reason, apart from the pressure of his
University work, that caused Hegel to stop working on his essay
with the fair copy half finished, around the end of 1802, it was
almost certainly the decisive intervention of Napoleon in German
politics. The First Consul followed the example of Richelieu by
seeking to stabilize the fragmented situation of Germany. The
settlement which the Reichsdeputation produced under his aegis,
in fulfilment of the terms of the Peace of Luneville, abolished a
large number of the smallest, worst governed and least viable
states, especially the ecclesiastical ones, which were most prone
to look to the leadership of Austria. But the surviving small states,
I Lasson, p. 136 (Knox-Pelczynski, p. 242). With the remarks about the Jewish

resistance to the emperor Titus compare especially Abraham in Chaldiia geboren

hatte schon (Nohl, p. 260; Knox, pp. 204-5).
Z Dilthey, iv. 136--'7.

3 Rosen2weig, i. 126-7.
 INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF MEN 477

and those of middle size, were strengthened and confirmed in their

independence, and inclined to be grateful to their benefactor.
Both of the German great powers profited materially, but the
prestige of Austria suffered a bad blow, and it was made abundantly
clear that no German Theseus would be suffered to arise either in
the north or in the south.!
Thus der Begriff und die Einsicht gave way before Gewalt. The
German Machiavelli fared no better than his Florentine pre-
decessor. His 'way back to intervention in the life of men' was
blocked; and at Jena he began on quite a new path toward the
sunlight, not of Plato's City but of the Idea. In that new journey,
however, which took Hegel so far from the agora, the earlier
Odyssey was by no means forgotten. It reappeared transmuted into
an ideal pilgrimage, the 'Phenomenology of the Spirit'.
I The proposals of France and Russia were put before the Deputation on

8 Sept. 1802; with modifications mainly designed to make them more palatable
to Austria, they were accepted by the Diet on 25 Feb. 1803, and finally ratified
by the Emperor on 27 Apr. (The last excerpts in Hegel's papers connected with
the Verfassungsschrift are from a Va tum of Brandenburg in the Deputation,
14 Sept. 1802, and from other diplomatic exchanges on that day or the previous
one; and finally extracts from speeches by Bonaparte and Fox, reported in
French newspapers in Nov. 1802: see Rosenzweig, i. 237, and Kimmerle, p. lSI.
Hegel probably began writing his final draft at about this time and abandoned it
early in 1803.)
 APPENDIX
Texts

I. THE TtJBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793

Religion ist eine

2. THE BERNE PLAN OF 1794

(a) Unter objektiver Religion

3. THE 'EARLIEST SYSTEM-PROGRAMME OF

GERMAN IDEALISM' (BERNE 1796)
eine Ethik

4. THE FRANKFURT SKETCH ON

'FAITH AND BEING' (1798)
Glauben ist die Art

5. UOLDERLIN

'Ober Urtheil und Seyn'

(Jena, April 1795)
 PREFATORY NOTE TO THE TRANSLATIONS

I HA VE added here translations of the so-called 'Tubingen fragment'

and of three other short pieces that have not been translated into
English before. All of them are rough drafts or even (in parts) rough
notes in Hegel's manuscript, and I have done my best not to 'improve'
them in any way, preferring faithfulness to elegance even in such purely
stylistic matters as the use of the dash (-) in place of normal punctuation.
I have had to make some insertions in order to get a translatable sense at
all, but I have tried scrupulously to indicate these by the use of brackets.
Words which I believe Hegel omitted accidentally are enclosed in angled
parentheses <>; additions which merely indicate my interpretation of
what he wrote are enclosed in square brackets []; normal parentheses
( ) represent the brackets which are part of the text: i.e. they belong to
Hegel's own very rough and ready system of punctuation. (I have
'improved' this very slightly by adding some necessary commas and
deleting a few superfluous ones.)
For ease of reference I have also inserted (in square brackets) the
page numbers of the German text from which the translations were
made (except for the 'earliest system-programme' which was not
printed by Nohl); and in the case of the shorter fragments I have num-
bered the paragraphs.
Last of all, I have translated the two paragraphs 'On Judgement
and Being' which H6lderlin wrote on opposite sides of the flyleaf of
a book early in 1795. It seems to me that Henrich is right in arguing
that this piece marks the beginning of a new approach toward the critical
theory of knowledge in which Hegel subsequently participated. It should
be compared carefully with the sketch on 'Faith and Being' that he
wrote about three years later.
 I. THE TUBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793:
Religion ist eine
[3] Religion is one of the most important concerns of our life-already
as infants we were taught to lisp our prayers to the divinity, shown how
to place our hands together in order to raise them to the Supreme Being,
and had our memories burdened with a heap of then still unintelligible
formulas intended for our future use and comfort in life-
As we grow older, the business of religion occupies a great part of our
life, indeed for many the whole cycle of their thoughts and inclinations
turns <on it)-even as the outer rim of a wheel turns on the hub.-
Apart from other feast days in between, we devote the first day of every
week to it, and from our youth up that day shines with a more beautiful,
more festal light, than all the others. We see among us a special class of
men, who are called exclusively to the service of religion; in all the
more important events and activities of the life of man, those on which
his personal happiness depends, such as birth, marriage, death and burial,
a religious element is mingled-[The following sentence was cancelled
by Hegel: The sick and the afflicted are supported by the comfort of
religion, which sustains and enlivens their hope,<- )how many still
sentiments of thanks and compassion rise up to God-feelings that are
known only to the soul who prays and to God.]
But then, when he is older, does man reflect upon the nature and
attributes of this Being to which all his feelings are directed, and
especially upon the relation of the world to it?-Human nature is so
constituted, that the practical aspects of the doctrine of God, the
aspects that: can become mainsprings of action, sources of the knowledge
of [our] duties, and sources of solace-quickly present themselves to
the uncorrupted mind [Menschensinne]-and the instruction that we are
given about this from youth up, the concepts, and all the external
[trappings] pertaining to it [4] which make such an impression on us, are
of the sort that can be grafted on to a natural need of the human spirit
-often immediately, but all too frequently alas, it is attached only by
bonds rooted in arbitrariness, and not in the nature of the soul, or in
truths engendered and developed from the concepts themselves.
[Here there is a lacuna of four pages in the manuscript. The inner
half of Hegel's first folded quarto sheet is missing.]
... to set <the whole?) of human life in motion--The sublime demand
that Reason imposes on mankind, whose legitimacy we recognize with
whole heart whenever our heart is filled with it, and the alluring descrip-
tions of guiltless or wise men which a pure and beautiful fancy may
8248688 K k
 APPENDIX
produce-these must never so far overpower us that we begin hoping
to find many such men in the actual world, or believing we can see and
catch hold of this beauteous cloud picture as a solid reality here or some-
where else; <then we shall be less subject to) dissatisfaction with what
we do find, and ill humour will less often cloud our minds-Hence we
shall not be shocked when we are obliged to admit that sensibility [i.e.
the needs and pleasures of the senses] is the principal factor in all the
action and striving of men; how hard it is to decide-whether mere
prudence or actual morality is the determining ground of the will.
If the satisfaction of the drive toward happiness is taken as the highest
goal of life, then if one only knows how to calculate the means to it
properly the same pattern of action will result to all outward appear-
ance, as if the law of Reason were determining our will. Just as [on the
one hand] pure morality must in the abstract be sharply distinguished
from sensibility in a system of morals, since sensibility is placed far
below it-even so [on the other hand] in dealing with human nature and
human life in general we must take particular account of man's sensi-
bility, his dependence on external and internal nature, upon his sur-
roundings and the environment in which he lives, and upon sense
impulses and blind instinct-the nature of man is, as it were, only
pregnant with the Ideas [Ideen] of Reason-just as salt permeates a
dish, and if it be well prepared, never reveals itself all in a lump, but
spreads its savour through the whole, or as the light penetrates and fills
all spaces and has its effect throughout the whole of nature; yet it
cannot be conceived as a substance, and still it gives objects their shape,
and is reflected from each differently, and from the plants it evolves
wholesome air, even so the Ideas of Reason enliven the whole web of
his [i.e. man's] feelings, even so as a result of their influence his actions
appear to him in a speciallight,<-)they themselves [the Ideas] seldom
reveal their essence, but still their operation penetrates everything [i.e.
every human feeling] like a subtle matter and gives a peculiar tinge to
every inclination and impulse-
[5] It is inherent in the concept of religion that it is not mere science
of God, of his attributes, of our relation and the relation of the world to
him and of the enduring survival of our souls-all of this might be
admitted by mere Reason, or known to us in some other way-but
religion is not a merely historical or rational knowledge, it is a concern
of the heart, it has an influence on our feelings and on the determination
of our will-partly because our duties and the laws make a stronger
impression on us when they are presented to us as the laws of God;
and partly because the image [Vorstellung] of the sublimity and the
goodness of God towards us fills our hearts with wonder and with a
sense of humility and gratitude.
 THE TUBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793
Thus religion gives to morality and its motive powers a new and a
more exalted light, it furnishes a new and a more solid barrier against
the might of the sensual impulses. For men whose experience is all at
the level of sense [sinn lichen Menschen] religion also is at that level-the
religious motives to good action must be sensible in order that they may
work upon the senses; because of this, of course, they generally lose
some part of their proper worth as moral motives-but they have thereby
taken on such a human aspect, they are so exactly adapted to our
feelings that we are led on by our hearts and beguiled by the beauty of
fancy, and we frequently and easily forget that a cool reason disap-
proves of picture images of this kind or even forbids saying anything
about them.
Where we speak of public religion--we mean to include in it the
concepts of God and immortality and all that goes with them, so far as
they make up the conviction of a people, and so far as they influence
the actions and mode of thought of that people-and further there
belongs to it also the means whereby these Ideas [Ideen] are on the one
hand taught to the people, and on the other hand enabled to penetrate
their hearts-this operative aspect involves not merely the immediate
[consequence] that I do not steal because God has forbidden it-the
more distant [consequences] should be given special consideration, and
have often to be accorded the most weight. These more distant conse-
quences are, above all, the elevation, the ennobling of the spirit of a
nation-the fact that the all-too-often slumbering sense of its dignity
is awakened in the soul, that the people does not degrade itself or allow
itself to be degraded, that it does not merely feel itself to be (a com-
munity of) men, but also that gentler tints of humanity and goodness
are brought into the picture.
The principal doctrines of the Christian religion have [6] indeed
remained the same since the beginning, but, according to the circum-
stances of the time, one doctrine would be pushed completely into the
shadows while another was specially emphasized, and placed in the
limelight, and distorted at the expense of the eclipsed doctrine, being
either stretched too far or restricted too narrowly-
The whole mass of religious principles, and of feelings that spring
from them, and particularly the degree to which they can influence how
men act, is the main thing in a folk-religion.-Religious ideas [Ideen]
can make but little impression upon an oppressed spirit which has lost
its youthful vigour under the burden of its chains and is beginning to
grow old-
The youthful genius of a people-[in contrast with one that is]
growing old-the former senses itself and rejoices in its strength, it
falls ravenously upon anything new and is most vitally concerned with
 APPENDIX
it, but turns again perhaps and leaves it to seize on something else, but
never can this be something that would put fetters on its own proud
and free neck-the ageing genius is marked out particularly by firm
adherence to tradition in every respect, it gets its fetters from there like
an old man with the gout, grumbling about it but unable ever to have
done with it-it allows itself to be pushed around as its ruler [Herrscher]
wills-but it takes its pleasures only semiconsciously, not freely and
openly, with the more serene and beautiful joy that invites the sym-
pathy of others-its festivals are gossip times, like an old man it does
not get beyond a quiet chat-no loud outcry-no full-blooded enjoy-
ment.

Exposition of the distinction between objective and subjective religion; the

importance of this exposition in the context of the total problem.
Objective religion is fides quae creditur [the faith that is held], the
understanding and the memory are the powers that are operative in it,
they examine evidences, think it through and preserve it or, if you like,
believe it-Practical evidences may also form part of objective religion,
but then they are only an unemployed capital fund-objective religion
suffers itself to be arranged in one's mind, organized into a system, set
forth in a book, and expounded to others in discourse; subjective
religion expresses itself only in feelings and actions-if I say of a man
that he has religion, this does not mean that he has much knowledge
about it, but rather that he feels in his heart the deeds, the miracles, the
nearness of the Deity, his heart knows and sees God in its own nature,
in the destinies [Schicksalen] of men, that he casts himself down before
God, gives praise and thanks to him in his own deeds-that in his
actions he does not merely consider whether some course is good or
prudent, but also the thought 'It is pleasing to God' is a motive for
him-and often his strongest motive; when he feels happy or [7] when
he has good fortune he looks also to God and gives him thanks for it-
Subjective religion is alive, it is effective in the inwardness of our being,
and active in our outward behaviour. Subjective religion is fully indivi-
duated [etwas Individuelles] , objective religion is abstraction<:) the
former is the living book of nature, plants, insects, birds and beasts, as
they live with one another and upon one another, each living its life
and getting its pleasure, all mixed together, so that one comes across
all kinds everywhere-the latter is the cabinet of the naturalist wherein
the insects have been killed, the plants dried, the animals stuffed or
pickled-and the things that Nature divided [trennte] are put side by
side-all organized for one single end where nature had interlaced an
infinite variety of ends in a friendly bond-
The whole mass of religious evidences that go to make up objective
 THE TDBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793
religion may be the same for a great people, in principle they might be
the same over the whole earth; it is interwoven in subjective religion,
but makes up only a small and rather ineffective part of it-it takes a
different form in every man-the most important point at issue in
subjective religion is whether, and to what extent, the mind [Gemilt] is
disposed to let itself be controlled by religious motives-how far it is
susceptible to religion; and further what kinds of images [Vorstellungen]
make a special impression on the heart-what kinds of feelings have
been most cultivated and are most easily produced in the soul-the one
man has no sense for the gentler images of love; motives derived from
the love of God do not strike upon his heart-his organs of feeling, being
coarser, are only stirred up by the arousing of fear, by thunder and
lightning; the strings of his heart sound not at the gentle touch of love;
other ears are deaf to the voice of duty-it is useless to draw their
attention to conscience, to the inward judge of actions who has set up
his court right in the heart of man-this voice never sounds in them-
self-interest is the pendulum whose swinging keeps their machine going.
Upon this disposition-upon this receptivity depends the character
that subjective religion takes on in each particular person. We are taught
objective religion in the schools from our youth up; they stuff our
memories with it quite early enough, so that often the still immature
understanding, the fair and delicate plant of the free and open mind
[Sinn], is borne down by the burden, or just as roots work their way
through a light soil, and are entwined in it and get their nourishment
from it, but are turned aside by a stone and seek another path, so the
burden laid on the memory remains lying there unbroken until the
mature intellectual faculties [SeelenkriifteJ [8] either shake it right off
or let it lie on one side and draw no nourishing sap from it.
Nature has buried in every man a seed of the finer feeling that springs
from morality, it has placed in him a sense for what is moral, for ends
that go beyond the range of mere sense; to see that this seed of beauty
is not choked, that a real receptivity for moral Ideas [Ideen] and feelings
actually grows out of it, this is the task of education, of culture [Bildung]
-religion is not the first thing that can put down roots in the mind
[GemiitJ, it must have a cultivated plot there before it can flourish.
Everything depends on subjective religion-it is this that has true
and genuine worth-let the theologians contend about the dogmas,
about all that belongs to objective religion, about the more precise
interpretation of the propositions; a few fundamental propositions lie
at the base of every religion; they are merely modified or deformed to a
greater or lesser degree in the different religions, expressed more or less
purely [reinJ-they constitute the basis of all the faith and all the hopes
that religion offers to us. When I speak of religion here, I abstract
 APPENDIX
absolutely from all scientific or, more precisely, metaphysical knowledge
of God, and of our relation to him, or that of the whole world, etc.
Evidence of this sort, with which only the discursive understanding is
concerned, is theology, not religion any longer. I include here under
religion only such knowledge of God and immortality as the need of
practical reason demands, and all that stands in an easily perceived
connection with it-Thus more precise deductions about special
arrangements of God for the benefit of man are not excluded.
With objective religion I am concerned only in as much as it consti-
tutes one factor in subjective religion-
It is not my object to investigate what religious doctrines are most
appealing to the heart, <or) most apt to elevate and give comfort to the
soul-not how the doctrines of a religion should be constituted in order
to make a people better and happier-but rather to inquire what
institutions are requisite in order that the doctrines and the force of
religion should enter into the web of human feelings, become associated
with human impulses to action, and prove living and active in them-
in order that religion should become wholly subjective-When it is
subjective it does not manifest its presence merely in putting the hands
together, bending the knees, and abasing the heart before that which is
holy; rather it spreads out into every budding branch of human impulse
(without the soul being even quite aware of it) and is everywhere active
-though only indirectly-it is active negatively, so to speak, in the gay
fulfilment of human joys-or in the doing of high [9] deeds and the
exercise of the gentler virtues of benevolence [Menschenliebe]; even if
it does not operate directly here, still it has this subtler influence, that at
least it lets the soul express itself [jortwirken] freely and openly, and
does not distort the longing of its activity-the expression of a human
capacity, be it courage or compassion [Menschlichkeit], is like gaiety
and enjoyment of life-it involves freedom from an evil disposition of
the soul toward envy-and things of that sort, it involves innocence and
a clear conscience, and religion helps to foster these two qualities
[innocence and freedom from evil tendencies]. In the same way, too,
religion has an influence such that innocence when combined with it
knows precisely how to recognize the point at which gaiety passes over
into debauchery, and courage and resolution into aggression against the
rights of others.

[Here follows a cancelled heading and two subheads:

How Religion acts
(a) What the mind must be like for religion to gain entry to it,
(b) How it acts when it gains entry.]
 THE TUBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793
Subjective Religion
If theology is a matter of the understanding and the memory-no
matter where it originates from-<even) from religion itself-while
religion is a matter of the heart, important on account of a requirement
of practical reason, then it is self-evident that different psychological
faculties are operative in religion and in theology, and that different
mental preparation is required for each of them-In order to justify the
hope that the supreme good, of which the realization of a constituent
part is laid upon us as our duty, will be realized as a whole, practical
reason requires faith in a Deity-<and) in immortality.
This is at least the seed from which religion springs--and conscience,
the inward sense of right and wrong and the feeling that punishment
must attend upon wrongdoing and happiness upon righteousness-is
analysed into clear concepts in this deduction of religion only in its
essential structure. Whether the Idea [Idee] of a mighty, but invisible
Being was generated in the soul of man through some fearful natural
phenomenon, whether God first revealed himself to men in the tempest
where everyone senses the near proximity of God, or in the gentle
murmur of the evening breeze, the Idea linked itself to that moral sense,
which found it wholly concordant with its own requirement-·
Religion becomes mere superstition if one derives one's determining
grounds for action from it in situations where simple prudence ought to
be one's guide, or if the fear of God causes one to do certain actions
through which one believes his displeasure can be averted. [IO] This is
precisely the character of religion among many sense-oriented [sinnlich]
people. Their image [Vorstellung] of God and of his dealings with man
is restricted to this, that he acts according to the laws of human sensi-
bility and only upon our sensible nature-and the moral element in this
concept is very slight-<but) the concept of God and of devoting
onselfto him (worship) is already rather moralized, i.e. it points already
more toward the consciousness of a higher order directed to ends greater
than those that are determined by sense-and though indeed the super-
stition referred to above is mixed in with it--yet the feeling that every-
thing depends on God's decisions goes along with questioning him
about the future<,) or calling upon him to aid the success of an under-
taking, and in general there lies at the root the faith that God allots
happiness only to the just, and ordains unhappiness for the unjust and
the overweening-or at least this faith has its place beside the faith in
destiny [Schicksal], and natural necessity-wherever moral motives for
action are derived from religion.
In good men subjective religion is very nearly the same, while their
objective religion may be of almost any stripe--'What makes me to
you a Christian, makes you to me a Jew' says Nathan [Act IV, Scene 7]
 APPENDIX

-since religion is a matter of the heart which often acts in a way

inconsistent with the dogmas that are accepted in the understanding or
the memory-the men most worthy of veneration are indeed not always
those who have speculated most about religion, for all too often they
transform their religion into theology, i.e. they often substitute frigid
arguments and verbal exercises for the full and heartfelt experience of
faith.-
Religion gains very little from the understanding, whose operations,
whose doubts, are on the contrary more apt to numb the heart than to
warm it-and the man who has discovered that the ways in which other
nations, the heathens as they are called, represent <their religious
beliefs) contain much that is absurd, and for this reason congratulates
himself heartily upon his own higher insights, his understanding which
allows him to see further than [Theseus-deleted] the greatest men saw-
that man does not know what religion is. The man who calls his Jehova
'Jupiter' or 'Brahma'-and is a true worshipper of God-brings his
thanks and his offering as childlike as the true Christian-<he knows
what religion is.) Who is there that is not moved by the beautiful
simplicity with which innocence is mindful of its greatest benefactor
amid all the good things that nature supplies, and offers him the best,
the most spotless, the first fruits of corn and flock-who does not
admire Coriolanus, who feared Nemesis at the height of his fortune,
and besought the gods to humble him and not the spirit of Roman
greatness, [I I] just as Gustavus Adolphus humbled himself before God
at the battle of Liitzen.-
Signs of this kind are for the heart, and are to be appreciated by the
heart, in simplicity of spirit and of feeling, not coldly and critically
evaluated by the understanding-Only the self-conceit of a sect, which
accounts itself wiser than all men of other parties, can let the guiltless
last wish of Socrates to offer a cock to the god of health, his noble sense
that he should thank the gods for his death, which he saw as a healing,
go unappreciated, and produce the ugly comment that Tertullian makes
about it in Chapter 46 of the Apologeticum. I
Where the heart does not speak louder than the understanding, as it
did for the Friar in that scene from Nathan from which our earlier
quotation was borrowed, where it remains closed, and leaves the under-
standing time to syllogize about an action-such a heart is not worth

The remark Hegel refers to is as follows: 'He ordered a cock to be sacrificed

I

~o Aesculapius, at the very last, I think for the honour of Aesculapius' father,
because Apollo prophesied that Socrates was the wisest of all. Oh heedless
Apollo! He awarded the palm of wisdom to that fellow who denied that the gods
existed!' (No doubt this chapter of Tertullian was excerpted in Hegel's collection
under the heading: 'Socrates' Cock': see Chapter I, pp. 14-15 above).
 THE TOBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793
much, love does not dwell in it. Nowhere is the voice of the pure heart
and of uncorrupted feeling more beautifully set against the righteous-
ness of the understanding than in the story in the Gospel where Jesus
accepted with love and goodwill the anointing of his body by a woman
who had formerly lived a life of ill fame, accepting it as the free out-
pouring of a beautiful soul pierced by repentance, faith, and love, and
not allowing itself to be turned aside by the surrounding company, while
some of his apostles were too cold-hearted to empathize with the depth
of her womanly feeling, her beautiful offering of faith, and made
marginal comments in which their coldness was bedecked with a
pretended concern for charitable purposes.-What a cold and un-
natural comment is the good Gellert's remark somewhere-that a small
child today knows more of God-than the wisest pagan; just like
Tertullian with his deum quilibet opifex in the Apologeticum chapter 46.1
As if the compendium of morals that I have here on my bookshelf,
which I may use, since I have it at hand, as the wrapping for a stinking
cheese, had more worth than the perhaps sometimes unrighteous heart
of a Frederick II; for the difference between Tertullian's craftsman or
Gellert's child who has been imprinted with the catechism, stuffed with
the theological sourdough-and the paper, on which the morality is
printed, is on the whole [12] not very great from this point of view-
both of them lack precisely and almost to the same degree the conscious-
ness that is acquired through experience.
[Here sheet d ends. The next sheet in the manuscript that we have is
marked f. Thus sheet e, If there was one, is missing]

Enlightenment-the intent to work through understanding

The understanding serves only objective religion.-To clarify the
principles, to set them forth in their purity-it has brought forth noble
fruits, Lessing's Nathan, and it deserves the eulogies which are con-
tinually offered in its honour-
But it is never through understanding that the principles are rendered
practical.
The understanding is a courtier who adapts himself complaisantly to
the caprices of his lord. It knows how to scare up justifying arguments
for every passion, and every undertaking-it is especially a servant to
self-love, which is always on the lookout for ways to set faults already
I This is another reference to the same source (and probably to the same

excerpt): 'Any Christian craftsman both finds God and points him out . . .
although Plato can assert that the creator of the universe is not easy to find, and
is difficult to describe to everyone once he is found.' (This passage identifies who
the 'wisest pagan'-of Gellert's poem 'Der Christ'-was in Hegel's mind.)
 490 APPENDIX
committed or about to be committed in a good light, and often
takes credit to itself for this~that it has thus found a good excuse
for itself.
Enlightenment of the understanding makes us cleverer certainly, but
not better. And if we reduce virtue to prudent cleverness, if we reckon
it up that man cannot be happy without virtue, the reckoning is too
cold and too hairsplitting to be effective in the moment of action or in
general to have influence on our lives.
Anyone who picked up the best manual of morality, made himself
conversant with the most exact definitions both of the general principles
and of the particular duties and virtues, and then wanted to reflect on
this heap of rules and exceptions at the moment of actual decision,
would produce such a tangled pattern of behaviour~a pattern of
perpetual anxiety and inner conflict.--Even the author of a moral
manual would not expect to find a man who would either learn the book
by heart, or consult his manual about everything he did or every
impulse that he had to see whether it was ethical or whether it was
permitted~And yet it is precisely this demand that one makes upon
the reader of one's manual~No printed manual can bring it about that
evil impulses should never arise at all, or that they should not develop
to any great extent~no enlightenment of the understanding can
achieve this~this negative effect( ~ )Campe's Theophronl~a man
must act for himself, [13] do his own work, make up his own mind,
not let others act for him~for then he is no more than a piece of
machinery.
\Vhen we speak of' enlightening a people' that presupposes that errors
are prevalent among them~popular prejudices~errors in the matter of
religion~and for the most part they are more of less or this character,
they are based on sensibility, on the blindly irrational expectation that
something will happen which has absolutely no connection with the
cause which is supposed to bring it about as an effect~among a people
that has many (such) prejudices, the concept of cause seems mainly to
be based still on the concept of mere succession~for (not) infrequently
too, when they speak of causes they leave out and fail to notice the
intervening links in the chain of causal succession-Sense and fancy
[PhantaS'ie] are the source of prejudice, and even right opinions are
prejudices in the popular mind if they are held prior to investigation by

I Hegel read J. H. Campe's Theophron or the Experienced Adviser for In-

experienced Youth (Hamburg, 1783, and elsewhere) while he was at the Gym-
nasium in Stuttgart. His note here probably indicates that he intended to
appeal to his own experience in trying to use it as a guide of life as an example
when he filled in the brief outline given here (compare what he writes a little
further on, p. 493 [Nohl, pp. 15-16]).
 THE TUBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793 491

the understanding, inasmuch as people can only have faith in them

since they do not have any cognitive grounds for them.
Thus prejudices can be of two kinds:
(a) actual errors,
(b) beliefs which are actually true, but which are not grasped as truths,
not known by reason simply but recognized by faith and taken on trust
-and in this case no greater benefit <than before) comes to pass on
the subjective side <through their establishment as truths)-Since we
are not here discussing prejudices of the practical sort, i.e. those that
influence the basic orientation of the will, and have quite different
origins and consequences, popular enlightenment, the removal of
popular prejudices means so forming the popular understanding in
respect of certain objects that, on the one hand, it is actually set free
from the belief in and subjection to errors-and, on the other hand, it
is given grounds for its convictions of actual truth-But in the first
place, what mortal man can definitively distinguish what is true? Well,
let us grant here, as we must if we are going to speak of human know-
ledge in a concrete sense, and one must grant it simply from the
political point of view too, if human society is to be establishable, that
there are universally valid principles which are not only evident to
healthy common sense, but which must also lie at the basis of every
religion that is worthy of the name, even though they may be rather
deformed <in it)-
(IX) it is certain, then, that there are only a few of them, and that just
for this reason, since for one thing they are so general and abstract, and
for another if they are to be set forth purely, as reason demands,-they
do not <agree) with experience and sense appearance, since they are
not a rule for sense appearance but [14] can only agree with an opposed
[i.e. non-sensible] order of things-they are not easily adapted for a
living recognition on the part of the people, and even if they have been
learned by heart--they still do not form any part of the spiritual system
of human desires,
([3) since it is impossible to constitute a religion for the general
populace out of universal truths, which only outstanding men in every
age have arrived at and have grasped with whole heart and cloven to
with love--so that, on the one hand, additional elements always have to
be mixed in which have to be taken on trust as matters of faith-or
[to put it another way] the pure principles must be made coarser,
embedded in a sensible shell, if they are to be understood and made
palpable to the senses,-and, on the other hand, religious practices
must be introduced, whose necessity or utility is persuasively established
by the sincerity of faith once more, or by habituation from youth
 49 2 APPENDIX
upwards: because of this it is evident that a folk-religion whose doctrines
are to be effective in life and work (which is something that is already
involved in the very concept of religion) cannot possibly be founded on
mere Reason-Positive religion rests necessarily on faith in the tradi-
tions through which it has been transmitted to us-and so with its
religious practices, it is only on this same ground that we can be con-
vinced of our obligation to perform them, or have the faith that God
requires them of us as duties because they are pleasing to him. But from
the point of view of Reason pure and simple, we can only say this much
about them, that they serve to arouse and build up the sense of holiness,
and their aptness for this purpose can be investigated. And as soon as I
have become convinced that God is not really honoured by these prac-
tices, by our 'service' ,-that right action is the service that is most
pleasing to him, though I am still aware that these practices serve the
purpose of edification, yet even so these practices have lost a great part
of the influence that they could formerly have had on me.
Since religion in general is a thing of the heart, the question might be
raised, how far abstract argument [Rasonnement] can be involved in it,
if it is to go on being religion at all. When one thinks a lot about the
genesis of one's emotions, about the practices that one must join in, and
through which feelings of holiness are to be aroused, about their
historical origin, about their aptness to their purpose and so forth, they
are certainly deprived of the aura of sanctity, within which we were ever
wont to view them, just as the dogmas of theology lose their authority
when we examine them in the light of Church history-How little
such cold reflection helps to sustain men, we see frequently enough
where they get into situations where the heart is rent and needs
a stronger staff, where despair [15] often then tries to seize once
more on that which gave it comfort of old, and to which it cleaves
all the more tightly and anxiously now, so that it shall not be deprived
of it again, and shuts its ears diligently against the sophistries of the
understanding.
Wisdom is something different from enlightenment, from abstract
argument-But wisdom is not science--it is an elevation of the soul,
which has raised itself above dependence on opinions and upon the
impressions of sensibility through experience conjoined with reflection,
and if it is practical wisdom and not mere self-satisfaction or ostenta-
tion, it must necessarily be accompanied by a quiet heat, a gentle fire;
it argues little, and it does not begin from concepts with a 'mathematical
method', and arrive at what it takes for truth through a string of syllo-
gisms like Barbara and Baroco-it has not purchased its conviction at the
general market where they give out knowledge to everyone who pays the
fair price, nor would it know how to pay for it in the current hard cash that
 THE 'rtlBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793 493
gleams on the counter'-it speaks rather from the fullness of the heart.
The cultivation of the understanding and its application to the objects
that attract our interest to themselves-for this enlightenment remains
a great advantage, as does clear knowledge of duties, enlightenment
about practical truths-but these types of enlightenment are not the
kind of thing that can make men moral-they stand infinitely far below
goodness and purity of heart in moral worth, they are <not) properly
even commensurable with it.
To be cheerful is a basic trait in the character of a well-natured
youth; if circumstances hinder its expression so that he has to withdraw
mainly into himself, and he makes the resolution to mould himself into
a man of virtue, and he has not yet enough experience to know that
books cannot make him one-then, perhaps, he may take Campe's
Theophron in hand-with the idea of making these counsels of wisdom
and prudence the guide-line of his life-he reads a section of it night
and morning, and thinks upon it all day long-what will the result be?
Actual perfection of character perhaps? Knowledge of men? Practical
competence? For these the experience and usage of years is needed-
and the meditation on Campe and Campe's straight-edge will become
intolerable in a week! Gloomy and anxious he goes out into society,
where no one is welcome save he who knows how to be amusing,
hesitantly he tastes of some pleasure which satisfies only one who brings
a cheerful heart to it-Pierced right through by the sense of his own
imperfection, he abases himself before everyone-The company of the
other sex does not amuse him, [16] because he is afraid that the light
touch of some girl or other may set a blazing fire coursing through his
veins-and this makes him stiff and gauche-but he will not put up
with it for long, he will shake off the control of this surly tutor, and will
find himself better off as a result.
If enlightenment really does produce all that its greatest encomiasts
claim for it, if it does deserve its praises, then it is true wisdom, but
otherwise it is usually sham wisdom that gives itself airs, and plumes
itself upon its manieres in which it supposes itself to have the advantage
over so many weaker brethren. This conceit is commonly found in most
youths or men who get new points of view from books, and are begin-
ning to give up the beliefs that they formerly shared with most of the
people around them,-vanity often plays an especially important part
here-The man who can talk at length about the unbelievable stupidity
I Nohl rightly detects here an echo of Nathan the Wise, Act III, Scene 6:
. . . I came prepared
For money, and he asks for truth-for truth!
And wants it paid in ready cash, as though
The truth were coinage.
(Trans. W. A. Steel, Everyman, p. 165.)
494 APPENDIX

of men, the man who demonstrates to one with absolute precision that
it is the very height of folly for a people to have such-and-such a
prejudice, the man who is always throwing around such terms as
'enlightenment', 'knowledge of men', 'history of mankind', 'happiness',
'perfection', is nothing else but a gossip of the Enlightenment, a market
huckster crying stale panaceas for sale-these folk feed one another on
cold words, and overlook the holy, delicate web of human feeling-
Everyone, perhaps, has heard chatter of this kind going on around him;
and many, probably, have found themselves involved in it personally,
since this trend of culture is very widespread in our hyper-literary
times.-If one or another learns through life itself to understand better
something that previously lay in his soul like unemployed capital, yet
still in every stomach there remains a clutter of undigested book learning
-and since this gives the stomach quite enough to do, it gets in the way of
any more healthy nourishment-it will not let any nourishing sap flow to
the rest of the body-the swelled-up appearance gives perhaps the illusion
of health, but in every limb a sapless phlegm cripples free movement-
It is one task of the enlightening understanding to sift objective
religion-But just as the power (of understanding) is of no great
moment where human betterment, education to great and mighty
dispositions, to noble emotions, to a resolute independence is what is
in issue-so likewise the product, objective religion, has little weight in
this connection.
It is a delight to the human understanding to look upon its work-a
great high edifice of divine knowledge and of the knowledge of human
[17] duties and of nature-And, to be sure, it has, itself, assembled the
building materials and equipment for this; it has made a building with
them, and it goes on ornamenting it all the time, and even making florid
designs on it; but the more extensive and the solider the building
becomes, on which humanity as a whole is working, the less it belongs
to each single individual privately-The man who only copies this uni-
versal building, and simply gets material from it for his own use, the
man who does not build in and from his own personality, a little house
of his own to dwell in, so as to be at home within his own walls and under
his own roof, where if he has not hewn every stone from the rough him-
self-at least he has turned it over in his hands and laid it in its proper
place-this man [i.e. one who has not built for himself] is a Buchstaben-
mensch I-he has not lived his own life and woven his own character-
The man who builds himself a palace on the model of the great house
I Literally 'man-of-the-letter'. The term was coined, or at least it was first

used in print, by Moses Mendelssohn. The implicit contrast is with a 'man-of-

the-spirit' and the underlying reference is to St. Paul's remark that 'the letter
killeth, but the spirit giveth life'.
 THE TDBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793 495
-lives in it like Louis XIV in Versailles, he hardly knows all the rooms
in his property, and occupies only a very small sitting-room-whereas
the father of a family is better informed in every way about his ancestral
home, he knows every screw and every tiny cupboard, and can explain
its use and tell its story-Lessing's Nathan-'In most cases I still can
tell, how, where, and why I learned it' [Act V, Scene 6].1-
Religion must help man build his own little house, a home which
he can call his own, how much can it help him in this?
Given that the difference between pure rational religion, which
worships God in spirit and in truth, and makes his service consist only
in virtue-and the fetish faith that believes it can gain God's love for
itself through something <other) than a will that is good in itself-is
so great that the latter [fetish faith] is of absolutely no worth as against
the former, the two of them are of quite distinct species, and it is quite
crucial for mankind, that it be led up ever closer to rational religion and
that fetish faith should be got rid of; and since a universal Church of
the spirit is only an ideal of reason, and it is not really possible that a
public religion should be established which removed every possibility
of reviving a fetish faith from it; the question arises as to how a folk-
religion has to be set up in order (a) negatively, to give as little occasion
as possible for cleaving to the letter and the ceremonial observance, and
(b) positively-that the people may be led to rational religion, and
become receptive to it.
When the Idea [Idee] of holiness, is set up in moral philosophy as the
ultimate apex of ethical conduct and the ultimate limit of all striving,
the objections of those who say that such an ideal is [18] not attainable
by man (which our moralists themselves grant anyway), but that, apart
from pure respect for the law, he needs other motives, motives which
affect his sensibility-these objections do not so much go to show that
man ought not to strive to come ever closer to that ideal even for all
eternity, but only that in savagery [Roheit] and when there is a powerful
propensity toward sensibility-we frequently have to be content to
produce only a law abiding habit in most men, and no purely ethical
motives, for which they have little sense, are required to produce this
(compare Matthew 19: 16)2--and that it is already a gain if grosser
I In this scene Nathan's adopted daughter Recha is discussing with Saladin's
sister, Sittah, the way Nathan brought her up. She has not learned to read well
because 'My father loves not much / That cold book learning, which dead letters
cram / Into the brain'. But she knows many things 'from his mouth ... and of
most of them etc.'. She thinks Sittah also has not read much because she is
genuine and unaffected, and 'Books, you know, / Too seldom leave us so, my
father says'. All this occurs in the context of Recha's new-made discovery that
Nathan is not her father in the literal sense (Steel, pp. 210-11).
2 The reference here is to the story of the young man who askcd Jesus what he
 APPENDIX
sensibility is merely refined-or at the lowest just if concern for
something higher is awakened-and in place of strictly animal drives,
feelings which are more apt to come under the influence of reason, and
closer in themselves to moral feelings are awakened, or merely those
whose presence makes it possible for moral feelings to germinate as well,
once the loud outcry of the senses is somewhat damped down-in
short, sheer culture is already something gained-they [the objectors]
claim just this much, that it is certainly not probable, that anywhere
on this earth, either mankind generally or even any individual man
could altogether dispense with non-moral motives-and in our nature
itself [i.e. our character as rational beings] this kind of feeling is woven-
feelings, which though they are not moral, they do not spring from
respect for the law, and hence they are neither quite fixed and reliable
nor do they have a [moral] worth in themselves so as to be themselves
deserving of respect, yet they are worthy of love, they inhibit evil
tendencies and they further the highest development [das Beste] of
man-of this type are all benign tendencies, such as compassion,
benevolence, friendship, etc. To this empirical character, enclosed
within the circle of the inclinations, the moral feeling also belongs,
which must send out its delicate threads through the whole web; the
fundamental principle of the empirical character is love-which has
something analogous to Reason in it, thus far-just as love finds itself
in other men, or rather by forgetting itself-puts itself outside of its
own existence, and, so to speak, lives, feels, and acts in others-even
so Reason as the principle of universally valid laws knows itself again
in every rational being, recognizing itself as fellow citizens of an
intelligible world. The empirical character of man is certainly affected
by desire and avcrsion,-love, even if it is a pathological principle of
action, is disinterested, it does not do good actions, because it has
calculated that (the) joys that arise from its actions will be less mixed
and longer lasting than those of sensibility or those that spring from
the satisfaction of any passion-thus it is not the principle of refined
self-love, where the ego is in the end always the ultimate goal-
[19] In the establishment of principles, empirical evidence [Empirismus]
is certainly not worth anything at all-but when we are discussing how
to influence men, we must take them as they are, and seek out all the
good impulses and sentiments through which their nature can be

must do to gain eternal life. Jesus said first that he should keep the command-
ments, and when he claimed that he was already doing this, instructed him to
sell all he had and give to the poor and then come and follow him. The way
Hegel here assimilates Jesus' instructions to the Kantian distinction between
Legalitat and Moralitat shows that he was already interpreting the Gospel in
rather narrowly Kantian terms before he left Tiibingen.
 THE TtiBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793 497
ennobled even if their freedom is not directly increased-In a folk-
religion particularly, it is of the greatest moment, that heart and fancy
should not go unsatisfied, that fancy should be fulfilled with great and
pure images, and that the more beneficent feelings should be aroused in
the heart-That both should be well directed is all the more important
in religion, whose object is so great and so sublime, [and lies in a region]
where both can all too easily make their own way, or let themselves be
led astray, either because the heart, misled by false opinions or by its
own convenience, hangs upon externals or nourishes itself on base
feelings of mock-humility, and believes it is serving God thereby-or
because the fancy connects things as cause and effect, whose sequence is
merely accidental, and promises extraordinary effects that are against
nature. Man is such a many-sided being that one can make anything
of him, the web of his feelings is interwoven so many ways with so
many loose ends that anything can be tied on to it-if not in one place
then in another. That is why he is capable of the most stupid super-
stition, of the most abject ecclesiastical [hierarchischen] and political
slavery-to weave these beautiful threads into a bond concordant with
his nature-this must be the special task of folk-religion-
Folk-religion is distinguished from private religion particularly in
this respect, that inasmuch as it powerfully affects the imagination and
the heart, its aim inspires the whole soul with power and enthusiasm-
with the spirit that is indispensable for greatness and sublimity in
virtue-The development of the individual in accord with his character,
instruction about cases of conflict of duties, the particular means for
the advancement of virtue, comfort, and support in particular states
of suffering and calamity, these things must be left to private religion
for development-that they do not qualify as part of a public folk-
religion is plain from the following considerations:
(a) Instruction about cases of conflict of duties-these are so various
that I can only help myself out of them in a way that satisfies my
conscience either through the counsel of just and experienced men-or
through the conviction that duty and virtue are the supreme principle-
a conviction which has in any case been firmly established already, and
made capable of becoming the maxim of my action through public
religion: public instruction like instruction in morality-discussed
above-is too dry and just as incapable as moral instruction of con-
trolling [20] with its rules of casuistry, the way we make up our minds
at the moment of action; or else an endless train of scruples would arise,
which is absolutely opposed to the resolution and strength that is
requisite for virtue-
(b) Since virtue is not a product of teaching and preaching, but a
plant which-though it needs proper care-develops in its own direction
8243688 L I
 APPENDIX
and under its own power-therefore the manifold arts which have
supposedly been discovered for producing virtue in a greenhouse where
it virtually cannot fail, do more to corrupt it in man, than if it were left
to grow wild I-Public religious instruction essentially involves not just
the enlightening of the understanding about the Idea of God and our
relation to him, but also an attempt to deduce all other duties from the
obligations that we have <to) God-an attempt to make us feel them
more keenly, to bring their binding force before our eyes [sie als desto
bindender vorzustellen]-But this deduction has already something
rechercluf, something far-fetched about it, it is the sort of tie where only
the understanding perceives the connection-a connection which is
often very artificial or at any rate not apparent to ordinary common
sense-and what usually happens is that the more moving grounds
one adduces for a duty, the cooler one becomes towards it.
(c) The one true comfort in suffering [Leiden] (for sorrows [Schmerzen]
there is no comfort-against them one can only set strength of soul)2

I In the excerpts that he printed in 1842, Rosenkranz here inserted the

following sentence, which does not appear in the manuscript as we have it:
'Men bathed early in the dead sea of moral preachments, go forth again invulner-
able like Achilles, certainly, but their human power has been drowned in it as
well.' He probably found this sentence in a sheet that is now lost; see further,
p. 132 n. I above.
2 The opposition between Leiden and Schmerzen here is not easy to interpret,

since it is not referred to elsewhere in this essay. Lacorte takes it to refer to a

contrast between mental distress [Leiden] and physical pain [Schmerzen]. It
seems more likely to me that the contrast is between two ways in which the will
of the sufferer is related to his suffering generally. There is 'suffering' which is
perceived as imposed simply by external power, and 'sorrow' which arises from
a spontaneous emotional commitment on the part of the sufferer. (If my
interpretation is right Hegel's thoughts have already begun to move along the
lines that led to his theory of 'spirit' and 'fate' in the Frankfurt period.) It is
interesting to note that the term Schmerz recurs in so wie sie mehrere Gattungen-
Hegel still seems to regard it as something for which there is no legitimate form
of comfort or consolation. What he there says is natural, and consistent with my
interpretation of the concept here, but cannot be said to require it: 'Where the
Trennung between impulse and actuality is so great that actual Schmerz arises,
union [die Vereinigung] is impossible and if man has still strength enough to
bear this Trennung he sets himself against fate without submitting to it; if he has
not the strength, he posits this Vereinigung in a future state, and hopes to get it
from an alien unifying object ... ' (about July 1797).
Some time later (about a year as in the case of the fragment on 'Love'?)
Hegel rewrote the passage as follows:
'Where the Trennung between impulse and actuality is so great that actual
Schmerz arises, he posits an independent activity as the ground of this suffering
[Leiden] , and enlivens it, but since union with the Schmerz is impossible, since
it is suffering [ein Leiden] , so also is union with that cause of suffering impos-
sible, and he sets it over against himself as a hostile being; had he never enjoyed
any favour from it, he would ascribe to it a hostile nature that never changes;
 THE TtiBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793 499
is trust in the providence of God, all the rest is empty preaching that
slides off of the heart [without affecting it].
How must folk-religion be constituted? (Folk-religion is here taken
objectively.)
(a) With respect to objective doctrines
(b) With respect to ceremonies.
A. I. Its doctrines must be grounded on universal Reason.
II. Fancy, heart, and sensibility must not thereby go empty
away.
III. It must be so constituted that all the needs of life-the
public affairs of the State are tied in with it.
B. What must it steer clear of?
Fetish faith-under this head especially the faith so common in our
word-rich epoch that one has done enough to meet the requirement of
Reason through [21] tirades about enlightenment etc.-so that men
are forever at loggerheads about dogmas and do less than no good to
themselves and others in the process.
I
Even if their authority rests on a divine revelation the doctrines must
necessarily be so constituted that they are authorized really by the
universal Reason of mankind, so that every man sees and feels their
obligatory force when it is drawn to his attention-for <otherwise)
such doctrines [the doctrines of a folk-religion], apart from either
furnishing us with a special means of obtaining God's goodwill, or
else promising to provide us with some special higher knowledge, more
precise information about unattainable objects, and that too for the
purpose of Reason, not just those of fancy-apart from sooner or later
becoming an object of critical attack for thinking men, and an object of
controversy, which always means the loss of their practical import or
the setting up of precise-intolerant-symbols on account of the
controversy-since their linkage with the true needs and requirements
of Reason remains always unnatural and they give easy occasion for
but if he has already had joy from it, if he has loved it, then he must think of
the hostile disposition as merely transient, and if he is conscious of any guilt
within himself, then he recognizes in his Schmerz the punishing hand of God,
with whom he lived once in amity-But if he is conscious of his own purity,
and has strength enough to bear this complete 7'rennung, he confronts an
unknown power, mighty over his fate, in which there is nothing human,
without submitting to it, or finding any other kind of union with it, since
union with a mightier being could only be slavery of some sort' (Noh!, p. 377).
Cf. also the undated 'historical' fragment Klageweiber bei der offentlichen Toten-
feier (Berne, summer 1796?, Dok., pp. 262-3).
500 APPENDIX
misuse even where this connection has been firmly fixed by custom-
[for all these reasons doctrines not directly authorized by Reason] can
certainly never acquire in our feelings the significance of a pure and
authentic practical moment that has direct bearing upon morality-
But these doctrines must also be simple, for if they are truths of
Reason, they must be simple on that account alone, since as such they
cannot be in need either of a scholarly apparatus or of a great display
of laborious proofs; and by reason of this property of simplicity they
will exercise all the more power and impact upon the mind [Gemut] ,
and upon the determination of the will to action-being thus concen-
trated they will have far more influence, they will playa much greater
part in the formation of the spirit of a people, than if the commandments
are piled high, and artificially organized and precisely for that reason
need an ever increasing number of exceptions-
These universal doctrines must at the same time be humane
[menschlich]-a requirement which is both important and hard to
satisfy-they must be humane in the sense that they are appropriate
to the spiritual culture and stage of morality that a people has reached-
some of the most sublime Ideas, and those which are of the greatest
import for humanity, are just the ones which are hardly in any way fit
to be adopted as universal maxims-they appear rather to be the private
possession of a few men who have proven themselves and forced their
way through to wisdom over long experience, and for whom these
Ideas have come to be not a quaking conviction but a firm faith, a
faith that is operative in just those situations where it [22] ought to be-
Of this kind particularly is the faith in a wise and clement Providence,
which is bound up with complete resignation to God's will whenever
it is a genuine living faith.
Certainly this doctrine and everything that goes with it is a basic one
within the Christian community, since all that is ever talked about within
it reduces to the surpassing love of God and it all comes out to that-
and furthermore God is presented to us year in, year out, as ever near
and ever present, as the agent in all that happens around us-and certainly
the doctrine is not just presented to us as something that is necessarily
connected with our morality and with the things that are holiest for us,
but is also rendered perfectly certain by heaps of assurances from God
himself and by other deeds [of his] which ought to convince us of it in-
controvertibily-yet we see in experience-among the masses-that a
stroke of bad weather, a night frost, will suffice to bring this trust in
Providence and patient resignation to the will of God to a very low ebb-
that it is in general the part of a wise man to put aside impatience,
vexation over frustrated hopes, and low spirits in misfortune-
The sudden downfall of trust in God, and rapid transition to dis-
 THE T0BINGEN ESSAY OF 1793 501

satisfaction with him- is made all the easier by the fact that the Christian
congregation is not merely accustomed to pray incessantly from youth
up, but also the attempt is always made to persuade them of the supreme
necessity of this practice by promising them the fulfilment of their
prayers.
Furthermore such a heap of reasons for comfort in misfortune
has been brought together from all corners of the earth for the use and
benefit of suffering humanity, that it might well be a cause for grief to
one in the end that one does not lose one's father or mother or is not
stricken with blindness every week-the argument has here taken the
tack of following out physical and moral effects to the limit with in-
credible precision and in hairsplitting detail; and since these effects are
then set out as the goals of Providence, the belief that we have thereby
achieved clearer insight into God's plans, not only for mankind
generally, but even for particular individuals is fostered-
In this connection, as soon as we are no longer content to put our
finger to our lips and keep silence, full of reverential awe, nothing is
more common than for the most arrogant knowingness to put itself
forward, presuming to be master of the ways of Providence, a tendency
which is strongly reinforced, though not indeed among the common
people, by the many idealistic notions [Ideen] that are current. All of
which [the idealistic Ideen] has very little to do with the furtherance of
resignation to God's [23] will and of contentment. It would be very
interesting to compare the faith of the Greeks [with this contemporary
attitude]-On the one hand they had the basic faith that the Gods are
gracious to the good man and subject the evil-doer to the terror of
N emesis--built upon the deep moral need of Reason, and enlivened
with love through the warm breath of their feelings-not on the cold
conviction, deduced from particular cases, that everything will turn out
for the best-[a conviction] which can never be brought into real life-
on the other hand misfortune for them was misfortune-sorrow was
sorrow-something that had happened and could not be altered-they
could not puzzle over the inner meaning of these things, for their JLotpa,
their avaYKata TVXTJ was blind-but they submitted willingly and with
all possible resignation to this necessity, and gained at least this
advantage, that men can more easily bear what they have been accus-
tomed to regard as necessary from youth up, and that, apart from the
sorrow or suffering to which it gives birth, misfortune does not also
bring forth that multitude of heavier, more intolerable [evils, such as]
anger, sullenness, discontent-This faith, since it <is) reverence for the
flow of natural necessity on the one hand, and at the same time the
conviction that men are ruled by the Gods according to moral laws-
seems to be humanly appropriate [both] to the sublimity of the Deity,
502 APPENDIX
and to man's weakness, his dependence upon nature, and his limited
range of vision-
Simple doctrines founded on universal Reason are compatible
with every level of folk-culture, and the culture will gradually modify
the doctrines in accord with its changes, though mainly in respect of
their outward expression, all the imaginative paintwork of the fancy-
These doctrines, if they are doctrines founded on universal human
Reason, must be characterized by reference to no other aim than this,
that they affect the spirit of the people only in great matters, partly
directly, and partly through the wonder of profoundly impressive
ceremonies that are bound up with them; so that they are not involved
in the practice of civic justice, they do not presume to become a private
code of judgement, and since they are formulated simply they do not
easily give occasion for strife about their interpretation-and since they
require and establish but little in the way of positive [institutions],
the lawgiving of Reason being only formal, the thirst for power
[Herrschsucht] of the priests in a religion of this sort is limited.

II
Every religion that is to count as a folk-religion, must necessarily be so
constituted as to keep heart and fancy occupied-Even the purest [24]
religion of Reason becomes embodied in the soul of [the individual]
man-still more in that of the people-and it would surely be a good
thing to link myths with the religion itself from the start, in order to
avoid adventurous rovings of the fancy by showing it at the least a
beautiful path for it to strew with flowers-the doctrines of the Christian
religion are for the most part bound up with history or set forth in
history, and the theatre is this earth, even if the actors in the play are
not mere men; thus an easily comprehended goal is here presented in
the fancy-but there remains still plenty of spare room to allow it free
play, and if it is tempered with black gall it can paint for itself a fearful
world, but on the other side it falls easily into childishness, for it is
just the fair and lovely colours derived from [mature] sensibility that are
excluded by our religion-and we are generally too much men of Reason
and of words to love beautiful images. As far as ceremonies are con-
cerned, on the one hand a folk-religion is quite unthinkable without
them, and on the other hand nothing is more difficult certainly than to
prevent them from being taken as the essence of religion by the general
populace [dem Pobel]-
Religion is made up of three elements, (a) concepts, (b) essential
practices, (c) ceremonies. If we regard baptism and the Eucharist as
rites, to which certain extraordinary benefits and graces are attached,
 THE TOBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793 50 3
the performance of which is laid upon us as a duty in itself, and makes
us more moral and more perfect as Christians, then they belong to the
second class-But if we regard them merely as means, the purpose and
effect of which is only the arousing of pious feelings, then they belong
in the third class-
Sacrifices too belong here [in this ambiguous category], but they
cannot properly be called ceremonies since they are essential to the
religion with which they are connected-they belong to the structure
itself-whereas ceremonies are only the decorations-the formal
aspects of the structure.
Still sacrifices too can be considered from a double point of view.
(a) In part they were brought to the altars of the Gods as atonement
offerings, indulgence fees, commutations of a physical or moral punish-
ment that was feared into a money payment, or as a way of sneaking
back into the lost good graces of the overlord, the dispenser of rewards
and punishments-from this point of view the irrational absurdity and
the perversion of the concept of morality is properly condemned in
judgements of the unworthiness of any such practice--but at the same
time it must be remembered that the Idea of sacrifice has never in fact
existed anywhere in such an utterly crass form (except perhaps in the
Christian church)! [zs]-and then too the worth of the feelings that
were at work in it should not go quite unrecognized, even if they were
not quite unmixed-the reverent awe before the holy Being, the humble
prostration and contrition of the heart before him-the trust that drew
the oppressed soul, yearning for peace back to this harbour-A pilgrim
borne down by the burden of his sins-one who leaves comfort, wife
and child, and the soil of his fatherland-to wander barefoot through
the world in a hair shirt, who seeks trackless regions to make torments
for his feet-and bedews the holy place with his tears, seeking peace
for his strife-torn spirit-with every tear shed, with every penance-
with every sacrifice he is solaced--and by the thought that here has
Christ passed, here was he crucified for me-he is cheered, he regains a
little strength-a little confidence in himself-should such a pilgrim as
this with his simplicity of heart call forth in us the response of the
Pharisee: 'I am wiser than such men as he' just because a way of life
such as his is no longer possible for us on account of the different
intellectual climate [anderer Begriffe] of our time-should his holy
feelings be an object of scorn for us.-Such penances as his are a
sub-species of the type of sacrifices to which I was referring here,
I Hegel added here the following marginal note: 'Outside the Christian

Church it was at the most a drop of balsam for the soul of the transgressor (for
certainly no example of the moral corruption of a whole people in this way can
be given), and his conscience was not set at rest by this means [alone].'
 APPENDIX
sacrifices which are offered in the very same spirit as that in which those
penances were performed-
(b) another, gentler, form in which sacrifice appears, and one that
sprang up in a milder climate, is probably more primitive and more
universal-it is founded on thanfulness and goodwill-where there is the
sense of a Being that is more exalted than man-the consciousness that
we have to thank it for everything, and that it does not disdain anything
that we offer it in a spirit of innocence-and the disposition to implore
its aid first at the inception of every undertaking-to think of it first in
every joy, and in every achieved good fortune, of Nemesis first before
every allotted pleasure-to it the first fruits, the first flower of every good
is offered, this Being we invite [to share with us], and we hope that it
will tarry with us men in amity-the disposition in which a sacrifice
such as this was offered-was far removed from the thought of having
done penance for some part of one's sins and the punishments that they
deserve, nor did conscience persuade him [who made the sacrifice] that
by this means Nemesis would be satisfied, and would [26] surrender its
claims on him for this reason, and suspend its laws by which moral
equilibrium was maintained-
The essential practices of religion-such as this, do not have to be
more closely concordant with it than they are with the spirit of the
people, and it is from the latter that they really ought to spring-
otherwise they are gone through without life, coldly, without force,
the emotions to which they give rise are artificially pumped up-or
there are practices which are not essential to the folk-religion-though
they may be essential to private religion-thus the Eucharist in the form
that it now has among Christians [is one such] in spite of its original
character as a meal to be enjoyed in company.
Necessary properties of the ceremonies of a folk-religion are: (a)
and in chief, that they give as little as possible occasion for fetish worship,
that <as far as possible) they <are not so) constituted, that the outward
act, the mechanical performance, stands by itself-and the spirit
disappears-their purpose must only be to enhance devotion, and
heighten pious feelings-and as one such pure means, which is only
minimally capable of misuse, but produces this effect, sacred music
and the song of a whole people is perhaps all that there is-or perhaps
also there are folk festivals, in which religion should be involved-

III
As soon as there is a dividing wall between life and doctrine-or even
just a severance [Trennung] and long distance between the two of them-
there arises the suspicion that the form of religion is defective-either
 THE Ttl BINGEN ESSAY OF 1793 505
it is too much occupied with idle word-games, or it demands a level of
piety from men that is hypocritical because it is too high [an die 1'vlenschen
zu groJ3e frommelnde Forderungen macht]-it is in conflict with their
natural needs, with the impulses of a well-ordered sensibilitY-T7]s
aw~poavv7]s-or it is a case of both [faults] together-If the joys, the
gaiety of men have to be ashamed before religion-if one who makes
merry at a public festival-must sneak into the temple unobtrusively-
then the form of religion is too gloomy on its outward side to dare give
any pledge that men would surrender the joys of life in response to its
demands-
It must abide in amity with all the emotions of life-not want to
force its way in-but be everywhere welcome. If religion is to be able
to work on the people it must go along with them amicably everywhere-
stand beside them in their [public?] business and on the more serious
occasions of life as well as at their festivals and rejoicings-but not so
that it appears to be intruding or is like a harsh school-governess-
rather as if it were the ring leader urging things on-The popular
festivals of the [27] Greeks were indeed all religious festivals in the
honour of a god, or of a man who had been deified because he had
deserved well of the State-Everything, even the excesses of the Bac-
chants, was sacred to a god-even their public theatrical performances
had a religious origin-which was never disavowed in their later develop-
ment-Agathon did not forget the gods when he gained the prize for
tragedy at one of them-the next day he held a festival for the gods.
Symposium, p. 168. 1
Folk-religion-which generates and nourishes noble clispositions-
goes hand in hand with freedom.
Our religion aims to educate men to be citizens of Heaven whose
gaze is ever directed thither so that human feelings become alien to
them. At our greatest public festival, one draws near to enjoy the
heavenly gifts, in a garb of mourning and with lowered gaze-at the
festival-which ought to be the feast of universal brotherhood-many
a man is afraid he will catch from the common cup the venereal infection
of the one who drank before him, so that his mind is not attentive, not
occupied with holy feelings, and during the function itself he must
reach into his pocket and lay his offering on the plate-unlike the
Greeks with the friendly gifts of nature-crowned with flowers and
arrayed in joyful colours-radiating gaiety from open faces that invited
I Hegel's reference is to the introductory discussion of the dialogue in the

Stephan us edition. The clearest evidence on this point in the text itself is at
r73 a: 'It was given, I [Apollodorus] told him [Glaucon], when you and I were
in the nursery, the day after Agathon's celebrations with the players when he
had won the prize with his first tragedy.' Socrates himself (r74 bc) compares the
party to a Homeric celebration after a sacrifice.
 50 6 APPENDIX
all to love and friendship--[thus] they approached the altars of their
benevolent gods.
The spirit of the people (is) its history, its religion, the level of its
political freedom-[thcse things] cannot be treated separately either
with respect to their mutual influence, or in characterizing them [each
by itself]-they are woven together in a single bond-as when among
three expert colleagues none can do anything without the others but
each gets something [essential] from the others-to form the moral
character of individual men is a matter of private religion, of parental
training, of personal effort, and of particular circumstances-to form
the spirit of the people is in part again a matter of the folk-religion, in
part of political relations-
[The following paragraph was cancelled by Hegel some time after he had
written it:] The father of this Genius is Time on which he remains
dependent in a way all his life (the circumstances of the time)-his
mother the 7To.\tTEta, the Constitution-his midwife, his wet-nurse,
Religion-who took the fine arts into her service to aid in his education-
and the music of physical and spiritual motion-an aetherial essence-
that is drawn down to the earth and held fast by a light bond which
resists through a magic spell all attempts to break it, for it is completely
intertwined in his essence. This bond, whose main foundations are our
needs, is [28] woven together from the manifold threads of nature; and
because he [the Volksgeist] binds himself more firmly to nature with
every new thread, he is so far from feeling any constraint, that he rather
finds an amplification of his enjoyment, an extension of his range of life
in this voluntary augmentation, this multiplying variety of the threads.
All the finer and fairer feelings have developed within him [in this way],
and they bring a thousand differing shades of delight to experience and
joy.
[The uncancelled te.r:t continues thus:] Ah yes! from the far-off days
that are gone a radiant picture shines for the soul that has a feeling for
human beauty, for greatness in great men-the picture of a Genius
among the peoples-a son of fortune and of freedom, a pupil of beautiful
fancy. The brazen bond of his needs fetters him too [like other Volks-
geister] to Mother Earth, but he worked over it, refined it, beautified it
with feeling and fancy, twining it with roses by the aid of the Graces,
so that he could delight in these fetters as his own work, as a part of
himself. His servants were joy, gaiety, and grace; his soul filled with the
consciousness of its power and its freedom, his more serious companions
at play [were] friendship and love, not the woodland faun, but the
sensitive and soulful Amor adorned with all the charms of the heart and
of sweet dreams.
From his father, a darling of fortune and a son of force, he received
 THE TDBINGEN ESSAY OF 1793
as his heritage faith in his fortune and pride in his deeds. His indulgent
mother, no scolding, harsh woman, left her son to the education of
nature, and did not swaddle his delicate limbs in tight bands-and like
a good mother she fell in with the whims and humours of her darling
more than she repressed them-In harmony with her the wet-nurse
could not rear the child of nature, or seek to bring him up to adolescence
with [such methods as] the fear of the rod or of a ghost in the dark, nor
[did she feed him] on the sour-sweet sugar-bread of mysticism that
weakens the stomach-nor did she keep him in the leading reins of
words, which would have made him forever a minor-but she gave him
the cleaner more wholesome milk of pure feelings to drink-with the
aid of fancy, fair and free, she adorned with its flowers the impenetrable
veil that withdraws divinity from our view-by enchantment she
peopled the realm behind it with living images [Eilder] from which he
carried forward the great Ideas of his own heart with all the fullness of
higher and more beautiful feelings-As the nurse in a Greek household
remained in the family circle and was a friend to her charge all his life,
so was she [Religion] ever his [the Greek spirit's] friend, and he offered
her his thanks and his love with unspoiled spontaneity, he shared his
joy and his games with her as a friendly comrade and was not kept from
his joys by her [29]-but she kept her dignity inviolate, and his own
conscience punished every slightto it-she kept her authority [Herrschaft]
always, for it was founded on love and gratitude, on the noblest
emotions of her charge-she flattered his finery--heeded the humours of
his fancy-but she taught him to respect iron necessity, she taught him
to follow the path of unalterable destiny [Schicksal] without grumbling.-
We know this Genius only by hearsay, only a few traits of his character
are we permitted to gaze on in love and wonder in surviving copies of
his form, [traces] which merely awaken a sorrowful yearning for the
original-He is the beautiful youth, whom we love even in his thought-
less moments, along with the whole company of the Graces, and with
them the balsam breath of nature, the soul, which is inspired by them,
he sucked from every flower, he is flown from the earth.-
[Hegel began the following paragraph but cancelled it ill midsentence,
leaving the above as his peroration:] A different Genius of the nations has
the West hatched-his form is aged-beautiful he never was-but
some slight touches of manliness remain still faintly traceable in him-
his father is bowed [with age]-he [i.e. the Western Genius?] dares not
stand up straight either to look round gaily at the world nor from a
sense of his own dignity [Gefiihl seiner selbst]-he is short-sighted and
can see only little things one at a time(-)without courage, without
confidence in his own strength, he hazards no bold throw, iron fetters
raw and [here the manuscript ends].
508 APPENDIX

2. THE BERNE PLAN OF 1794

(a) Unter objektiver Religion
[page 48] [paragraph I] (Alpha) Under the heading 'objective religion'
I take to be included this whole system of the connection of our duties
and wishes with the Idea [Idee] of God and of the immortality of the
soul-and thus it may also be called 'Theology', as long as 'Theology'
does not merely concern itself with the knowledge of the existence and
attributes of God, but deals with this problem in relation to men and
to the needs of their reason-
[2] (Beta) So far as this theory does not merely exist in books, but
embraces the actual concepts of men [die Begriffe von Menschen begriffen] ,
love of duty and respect for the moral law, so far as they are enlivened
[verstarkt] by the Idea-[so far as] they are actually felt, to that extent
religion is subjective-But now since the public legal system [die
biirgerliche Gesetzgebung] does not have morality, but only legality as its
immediate purpose-and no specific institutions [Anstalten] are estab-
lished with a view to the advancement of respect for the moral law and
of the disposition to fulfil the laws in spirit [not just according to the
letter]-since this is rather to be regarded as belonging also to religion,
we do not want to separate these topics [i.e. subjective religion and
moral education] from one another here, but to treat morality in
general as the purpose of religious institutions, not just the advancement
of morality through the Idea of God.
[3] (Gamma) Not all the instincts of human nature, for instance the
reproductive instinct and so on, have morality as their purpose-but
the supreme purpose of man is to be moral, and among the tendencies
[Anlagen] that contribute to this end, his tendency toward religion is
one of the most important-Of its own nature, the knowledge of God
cannot be dead, it has its origin in the moral nature of man, in his practi-
cal needs, and from it [the knowledge of God] in turn springs [49]
moral life-or if the spreading of the name and fame of Christ-or
Mahomet<- )ought to be its ultimate purpose, then Orpheus and
Homer deserved to be celebrated and honoured in Greece just as much
as Jupiter and Pallas-and they [the Christians] have reason to be most
proud of Karl the converter of Saxony-or the Spanish missionaries
in America, or the Jew-seeker Schulz-or [should the ultimate purpose
of religion be] the absolute authority of the name of God? in that case
there would be no better Christians than the hymn-singing Brigitten-
schwalben-and the Pope at High Mass in St. Peter's would be a more
worthy object of God's favour than the corporal ([in Jacobi's novel]
 THE BERNE PLAN OF 1794 509
Woldemar) who saved thirteen persons in the shipwreck by the sacrifice
of his own life, and died with the fourteenth in the service of mankind.
[4] (Delta) To make objective religion subjective must be the great
concern of the State, the institutions must be compatible with freedom
of moral dispositions [Gesinnungen] , they must not do violence to
conscience and freedom, but must operate indirectly on the determining
grounds of the will-how much can the State do? How much must be
left to every man?
[5] (Epsilon) Advancement of morality, this purpose of religion is
achieved (a) through its teachings (b) ceremonies. Every religion has
always had a care for both of these and always involves a tendency
towards both-the State through the constitution, through the spirit of
the government.
[6] (Zeta) How far is the Christian religion qualified for this purpose?
The Christian religion is originally a private religion, modified according
to the requirements of the circumstances of its establishment, the
requirements of men, and the requirements of prejudice-
(a) [With respect to teachings]:
(a) Its practical teachings are pure and have the advantage of
being expressed mainly in examples-for where, [as in] Matthew
5: 6 if., the spirit of morality is expressed in universal terms-
and the expression is not limited to the formal aspect, but contains
material prescriptions-it is subject to misunderstandings and
has in fact been misunderstood.
(f3) Historical truths upon which it is founded--therein the miraculous
element is always subject to incredulity; as long as it is a private
religion-it remains open to everyone to believe or not, but as a
public religion there are always bound to be unbelievers.
(Gimel) Not designed for the imagination-as with the Greeks-
it is sad and melancholy-oriental, not grown on our soil,
cannot be assimilated therewith.
(b) [With respect to ceremonies]:
The ceremonies appropriate to it as private religion have quite
lost their sense and spirit, since it has become a public religion-
apart from their function as means of grace-they are not fraternal
in a spirit of joyfulness--for then they would be public-but they
could have been promoters of tolerance if they had not [50] been
bound up by force with exclusive hypotheses-now, alas, they are
distinguishing marks for sects, when they could have been just the
opposite.
510 APPENDIX
(c) Other commands concerning the way of life:
(a) Withdrawal from public affairs.
(b) Distribution of alms-the collecting together of a common
fund possible in a private religion, not feasible in the State-
also what was once a work of piety-now bound up with public
honour.

3. THE 'EARLIEST SYSTEM-PROGRAMME OF

GERMAN IDEALISM' (BERNE, 1796)1
eine Ethik
[I] ... an Ethics. Since the whole of metaphysics falls for the future
within moral theory-of which Kant with his pair of practical postulates
has given only an example, and not exhausted it,<-)this Ethics will be
nothing less than a complete system of all Ideas [Ideen] or of all practical
postulates (which is the same thing). The first Idea is, of course, the
presentation [Vorst(ellung)] oj my self as an absolutely free entity
[Wesen]. Along with the free, self-conscious essence there stands forth-
out of nothing--an entire world-the one true and thinkable creation out
of nothing.-Here I shall descend into the realms of physics; the
question is this: how must a world be constituted for a moral entity?
I would like to give wings once more to our backward physics, that
advances laboriously by experiments.
[2] Thus-if philosophy supplies the Ideas, and experience the
data, we may at last come to have in essentials the physics that I look
forward to for later times. It does not appear that our present-day
physics can satisfy a creative spirit such as ours is or ought to be.
[3] From nature I come to the work oj man. The Idea of mankind
[being] premised-I shall prove that it gives us no Idea of the State,
since the State is a mechanical thing, any more than it gives us an Idea
of a machine. Only something that is an objective [Gegenstand] ofJreedom
is called an Idea. So we must go even beyond the State!-for every
State must treat free men as cogs in a machine; and this it ought not to
do; so it must stop. It is self-evident that in this sphere all the Ideas, of
perpetual peace etc., are only subordinate Ideas under a higher one. At
I For the curious background of this piece see the Appendix to Chapter III

(p. 249 above). It has been reprinted among the works of Hegel (Dok., pp. 219-
21), the works of HOlderlin (GSA, iv. 297-9), and those of Schelling (Fuhrmans,
i. 69-71). The present translation has been made from Fuhrmans's text because
the meticulously exact 'Lesarten' of Beissner (GSA, iv. 801-2) show that Fuhr-
mans's text is in letter-perfect accord with the manuscript.
 THE EARLIEST SYSTEM-PROGRAMME (1796) 5Il
the same time I shall here lay down the principles for a history of mankind,
and strip the whole wretched human work of State, constitution, govern-
ment, legal system-naked to the skin. Finally come the Ideas of a moral
world, divinity, immortality-uprooting of all superstition, the prosecu-
tion of the priesthood which of late poses as rational, at the bar of Reason
itself.-Absolute freedom of all spirits who bear the intellectual world in
themselves, and cannot seek either God or immortality outside themselves.
[4] Last of all the Idea that unites all the rest, the Idea of beauty
taking the word in its higher Platonic sense. I am now convinced that
the highest act of Reason, the one through which it encompasses
all Ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness only become
sisters in beauty-the philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic
power as the poet. Men without aesthetic sense is what the philoso-
phers-of-the-letter of our times [unsre Buchstabenphilosophen] are. The
philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy. One cannot be
creative [geistreich] in any way, even about history one cannot argue
creatively-without aesthetic sense. Here it ought to become clear
what it is that men lack, who understand no ideas-and who confess
honestly enough that they find everything obscure as soon as it goes
beyond the table of contents and the index.
[5] Poetry gains thereby a higher dignity, she becomes at the end
once more, what she was in the beginning-the teacher of mankind;
for there is no philosophy, no history left, the maker's art alone will
survive all other sciences and arts.
[6] At the same time we are told so often that the great mob must
have a religion of the senses. But not only does the great mob need it,
the philosopher needs it too. Monotheism of Reason and heart, poly-
theism of the imagination and of art, this is what we need.
[7] Here I shall discuss particularly an idea which, as far as I know,
has never occurred to anyone else-we must have a new mythology,
but this mythology must be in the service of the Ideas, it must be a
mythology of Reason.
[8] Until we express the Ideas aesthetically, i.e, mythologically,
they have no interest for the people, and conversely until mythology is
rational the philosopher must be ashamed of it. Thus in the end en-
lightened and unenlightened must clasp hands, mythology must become
philosophical in order t01 make the people rational, and philosophy
I Here I read um in place of the MS. undo The correction was proposed by

Ludwig Strauss, and the reasons for adopting it are obvious enough. But, of
course, I do not believe, as he did, that it is a copying error (or at least not one
that arose from the difficulties of copying from someone else's script). See further,
p. 255 n. 2.
 APPENDlX
must become mythological in order to make the philosophers sensible
[sinnl(ich)]. Then reigns eternal unity among us. No more the look of
scorn [of the enlightened philosopher looking down on the mob], no
more the blind trembling of the people before its wise men and priests.
Then first awaits us equal development of all powers, of what is peculiar
to each and what is common to all. No power shall any longer be
suppressed for universal freedom and equality of spirits will reign!-A
higher spirit sent from heaven must found this new religion among us,
it will be the last (and) greatest work of mankind.

4. THE FRANKFURT SKETCH ON

'FAITH AND BEING' (1798)
Glauben ist die Art!
[1] [382] Faith [Belief] is the mode, in which the unity, whereby an
antinomy has been united, is present in our Vorstellung. The union
is the activity; this activity reflected as object is what is believed. In
order to unite, the terms of the antinomy must be felt as conflicting,
their relation to one another as an antinomy must be recognized; but
what is conflicting can only be recognized as conflicting because it has
already been united; the union is the standard [measuring rod] against
which the comparison is made, against which the opposites appear as
such, appear as unsatisfied [unfulfilled]. So if it is shown that the
opposed limited terms could not subsist as such, that they would have to
cancel themselves [or one another-sich aufheben muJ3ten] , and that
even to be possible they [383] presuppose a union (just to be able to
show that they are opposed, the union is presupposed) then it is thereby
proven, that they have to [miissen] be united, that the union ought to
exist [sein soll]. But that the union itself does exist, is not thereby
proven, rather this mode of presence of the Vorstellung of it is believed
[matter of faith]; and it cannot be proved, since the opposites are the
dependent terms, [and] in respect to them the union is what is inde-
pendent [self-subsistent]; and to prove means (to show) the dependence;
what is independent in respect to these opposite [dependent terms] may
certainly be in another respect a dependent term, an opposite, in
its turn; and then there has to be once more a progression to a new
union which is now once more what is believed [a matter of faith].
I In the translation of this piece I have received much helpful advice from my

colleague, Dr. Walter Beringer, with whom I have discussed the text at length.
But he cannot be held responsible for any mistakes that there may be in my
interpretation since his own views about the argument of the sketch are in many
respects different from mine.
 THE FRANKFURT SKETCH (1798) 513
[2] Union and Being are synonymous; in every proposition the
copula 'is' expresses the union of subject and predicate-a being; being
can only be believed in; belief [faith] presupposes a being [as its content];
it is therefore contradictory to say that in order to believe [in something]
one must first be convinced of [its] being. This independence [self-
subsistence], the absoluteness of being is what people stumble over; it
[the independent being] is certainly assumed to be, but just because it is
[on its own account] it need not on that account be for us; the inde-
pendence [self-subsistence] of being is assumed to [soIl] consist precisely
in the fact that it is, be it for us or not, being is supposed to be some-
thing that may be utterly sundered from us, something in which there
lies no necessity that we should enter into relation with it; how far can
something be, of which it would yet be possible that we did not believe
lin] it? i.e. it is something possible, thinkable, which yet we do not
believe [in], i.e. which is still not on that account [as merely thinkable]
necessary-from thinkability being does not follow; it [the thinkable
something] is indeed so far as it is something thought of; but something
thought of is a sundered thing, opposed to the thinker; it is no existent
being. Only through this [way of arguing] can a mistaken view arise,
that there are different modes of union, of being, and hence that one can
in virtue of that say: 'there is something, but it is not on that account
necessary that I should believe [in] it'-along with one mode of being
it is not eo ipso entitled to acquire another mode of being; furthermore
belief [faith] is not being, but a reflected being; and in virtue of this one
may say that that which is, still is not on that account [i.e. just because
it simply is] bound <to be> reflected, it is not bound to come to conscious-
ness. That which is, does not have to be believed [in], but what is be-
lieved [in] does have to be. Thus, what is thought of as a sundered thing
must become something united, and only then can it be believed [in] ; the
thinking is a union, and is believed, but what is thought of [is] not yet.
[3] The sundered thing finds only in One Being its union; for a
distinct being in One Respect presupposes a nature, which would
also not be nature, hence a contradiction; a union could in the same
respect [i.e. the respect in which the being is distinct] also not be a
union; thus a positive faith [belief] is a union of the sort that in the
place of the one and only possible union sets up another one; in the
place of the one and only possible being it puts [posits] another being;
and thus it unites the opposites in a mode whereby they are indeed
united, but incompletely, i.e. they are not united in the respect in
which they ought to be united.

[4] [384] In positive religion any union is supposed [soU] to be some-

thing given; [but] what is given, that one still does not have till onC1
S2435SS Mm
514 APPENDIX
receives [accepts] it; and after the reception something given is still
supposed to be able to remain on the one side. But from this point of
view something given is nothing else but an opposed term, and conse-
quently the union would be an opposed term, and that too just so far
as it is united, which is a contradiction. The contradiction arises from
an illusion: [these are] less complete modes of union, which in another
respect are still opposed, an imperfect being <is substituted for) the
being which in the respect in which it is supposed to be united is
perfect, and one mode of being is substituted for another. The different
modes of being are the more complete or incomplete unions. In every
union there is a determining and a being determined, which are one,
but in positive religion the determining factor is supposed, even so far as
it determines, to be determined; its doing is not supposed to be an
activity, but a suffering; but the determining factor, whereby it suffers,
is again something united, [and] in this union the doing might have
been active; but this is a lower form of union; for in the deed, which is
done out of positive faith, that which has been united is itself once more
an opposite, which determines its opposite, and [so] there is here
only imperfect [incomplete] union, since both terms remain opposed,
the one is the determining factor and the other the determined; and
the determining factor itself is [what it is] qua active, but the form
of the activity is determined by another; i.e. what has been given,
the active factor, so far as it is active, is supposed to be a determined
factor; that which determines the activity must [muJ3] as an existent
being have previously been united, and if in this union too the deter-
mining factor is supposed to have determined, then it was determined
by another and so on, [and] the positive believer would have to be
an exclusively passive thing, an absolutely determined factor, which
is contradictory.-Hence all positive religions set up a more or less
narrow boundary within which they confine [human] activity; they allot
certain unions to it, e.g. [sensible] intuition, they concede a certain
being to men, e.g. that he is a being that sees-hears-moves, is an
agent, but with an empty activity, in every determinate activity the
active factor has not determined [what is], but since it is active only up
to a point it is a determined agent.

[5] The determining factor is a power, through which the activity

receives its direction, its form; even if there is believing and doing on
the basis of trust-trust is identity of person, of will, of ideal, with
difference of accidental aspect-if I, in the case where I am not he and
he is not I, believe in him and act according to his will, then I am
determined, he is a power facing me and I assume a positive relation
in the face of him.
 THE FRANKFURT SKETCH (1798) SIS
[6] Positive faith requires faith in something that is not-that which
is not, can only either come to be-or not come to be-the factor that is
determined [as something that is not] is so far no existing being, but
since it is supposed to be believed in, it is supposed none the less to be
an existing being. A power is felt, one [385] suffers in the face of it,
and it is not [it does not have its being] in this feeling, but in the
sundering of the feeling, in which the suffering party, which in this
passive mode becomes [the] object, is opposed to the party that produces
the suffering (which becomes from this point of view [the] subject).
[7] All positive religion starts from something opposed, a thing that
we are not, and we ought to be; it sets up an ideal prior to its own
being; in order for faith in the ideal to be possible, it must be a power-
in positive religion the existent thing, the union is only a Vorstellung, a
something thought of-'I believe that it is' means 'I believe in the
Vorstellung', 'I believe that I am presenting something to myself', 'I
believe in something that has been believed [something that has been
formulated in the mode of faith J' (Kant, [the] Divinity); Kant<ian)
philosophy-positive religion. (Divinity holy will, man absolute
negation; in the Vorstellung it [this antinomy] is united, Vorstellungen
are unified-Vorstellung is a thinking process, but the thing thought
of is no existent being.)

5. HOLDERLIN:

[Ober Urtheil und SeynJ

(Jena, April? 1795)1
[1] Being [Seyn]-expresses the joining [Verbindung] of Subject and
Object.
Where Subject and Object are absolutely, not just partially united
[vereiniget] , and hence so united that no division can be undertaken,
without destroying the essence [Wesen] of the thing that is to be sundered
I This piece was written on the flyleaf of a book and subsequently torn out.
The section on Judgement was written on the recto of the leaf and the section
on Being on the verso. For this reason Beissner-who supplied the title-prints
them in that order (GSA, iv. 216-17). But I agree with Henrich (Holderlin-
Jahrbuch, xiv (1965/6), 84) that Hiilderlin almost certainly began writing on the
verso-as one very naturally might when writing one's reflections on the flyleaf
of a book one has been studying-and continued on the recto. Beissner hazards
the conjecture that the book was Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. It is not possible
to confirm this because the book was published in parts (beginning June 1794)
so that the binding would vary with the whims of buyer and binder. But Henrich
says the hypothesis is 'not excluded' by the dimensions of the sheet.
516 APPENDIX
[getrenntJ, there and not otherwise can we talk of an absolute Being, as
is the case in intellectual intuition.
But this Being must not be equated [verwechseltJ with Identity.
When I say: I am I, the Subject (Ego) and the Object (Ego) are not so
united that absolutely no sundering can be undertaken, without destroy-
ing the essence of the thing that is to be sundered; on the contrary the
Ego is only possible through this sundering of Ego from Ego. How can
I say'!' without self-consciousness? But how is self-consciousness
possible? Precisely because I oppose myself to myself; I sunder myself
from myself, but in spite of this sundering I recognize myself as the
same in the opposites. But how far as the same? I can raise this question
and I must; for in another respect [RiiksichtJ it <i.e. the Ego) is opposed
to itself. So identity is not a uniting of Subject and Object that takes
place absolutely, and so Identity is not equal to absolute Being.
[2J Judgement: is in the highest and strictest sense the original
sundering of Subject and Object most intimately united in intellectual
intuition, the very sundering which first makes Object and Subject
possible, the Ur-Theilung. In the concept of division [Theilung] there
lies already the concept of the reciprocal relation [Beziehung] of Object
and Subject to one another, and the necessary presupposition of a
whole of which Object and Subject are the parts. 'I am l' is the most
appropriate example for this concept of Urtheilung in its theoretical
form, but in practical Urtheilung, it [the ego] posits itself as opposed to
the Non-ego, not to itself.
Actuality and possibility are to be distinguished, as mediate and
immediate consciousness. When I think of an object [Gegenstand] as
possible, I merely duplicate the previous consciousness in virtue of
which it is actual. There is for us no thinkable possibility, which was
not an actuality. For this reason the concept of possibility has absolutely
no valid application to the objects of Reason, since they come into
consciousness as nothing but what they ought to be, but only the concept
of necessity <applies to them). The concept of possibility has valid
application to the objects of the understanding, that of actuality to the
objects of perception and intuition.
 A CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX
TO HEGEL'S EARLY WRITINGS
AS CITED IN THIS BOOK

Note: All items are identified (as far as possible) by the titles used by
Hegel himself or by the opening words of the text as it now survives.
(In the case of some excerpts the incipit here given is preceded by a date
and/or indication of source. I have generally preferred not to use these for
identification because of the ambiguities that would arise where two
excerpts were made on the same day or from the same source.)

1. THE STUTTGART PERIOD

(For this period only the texts that survive are here listed. The full
calendar of Hegel's known scholarly activities as a schoolboy is given in
Appendix II to Chapter I.)
I. Erziehung. Plan der Normal-Schulen in Ru.f3land [excerpt], 22 Apr.
17 85 (Dok., pp. 54-5), 4 n., 43, 44 n., 51, 52.
2. Philosophie. Pi:idagogik. Feders neuer Emil [excerpt], begun 5 May
1785 (Dok., pp. 55-81),4 n., 17 n., 24, 26-7, 50 n., 51, 53, 175.
3. Unterredung zwischen Dreien [Dramatic Scene], 30 May 1785 (Dok.,
pp. 3-6), 4 n., 30-1, 43 n., 53.
4. Definitionen von allerhand Gegenstiinden, begun 10 June 1785 (see
Rosenkranz, pp. 14-15), 5 I, 52, 53·
5. Tagebuch, 26 June 1785-7 Jan. 1787 (Dok., pp. 6-41), In., 2-3, 7-14,
16, 17-18, 22-3, 30, 31,44,46,47,48, 50, 52-5,59 n., 68,87,134 n.,
137 n., 140 n., 157 n., 419.
6. Excerpta ePraefatione Gesneri, 6-17 Feb. 1786 (Dok., pp. 82-6), 11,54.
7. Ober das Excipieren [essay in the Tagebuch], 8-21 Mar. 1786 (Dok.,
pp. 31-5), 12, 54, 87 n.
8. Hahn des Sokrates [excerpt], 6 Apr. 1786 (Dok., pp. 86-7), xxiv, 9 n.,
14-16, 22 n., 48, 54, 134 n., 488 n.
9. Stoiker [excerpt], 5 June 1786 (Dok., p. 87), 54.
10. Wahre GlUckseligkeit [excerpt], 17-22 June 1786 (Dok., pp. 87-100),
22 n., 23-6, 28, 49, 54, 101 n.
I I. Plurimos vitae prosperae [excerpt], 27 June 1786 (Dok., p. 100),51,54'
12. Seele [excerpt], 10 Oct. 1786 (Dok., pp. 101-4), 27, 50, 54, 175.
13. Weg zum GlUck in der gro.f3en Welt [excerpt], 16 Oct. 1786 (Dok.,
p. 100), 22 n., 24, 49, 54.
 A CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX
14. Akademei. Ober akademische Vorstellungsarten [excerpt], 15 Oct. 1786
(Dok., pp. 104-5), 49, 54, 175·
15. Monche [excerpt], 15 Oct. 1786 (Dok., pp. 105-7), 28, 49, 54, 175.
16. Lehrart [excerpt], 16 Oct. 1786 (Dok., pp. 107-8), 50, 54.
17. Agypten. Von der Gelehrsamkeit der Agypter [excerpt], 23 Dec. 1786
(Dok., pp. 108-9), 18 n., 22, 28 n., 51, 55.
18. Philosophie. Allegmeine Obersicht [excerpt], 9-10 Mar. 1787 (Dok.,
pp. 109-12), 52, 55·
19. Rechtgelehrsamkeit. Allgemeine Obel'sicht [excerpt], 10 Mar. 1787
(Dok., pp. II2-15), 52, 55.
20. Philosophie. Psychologie. Priifung der Fiihigkeiten [excerpt], 14-18
Mar. 1787 (Dok., pp. II5-36), xviii, 27, 36-8, 50, 55, 130 n., 140 n.,
175·
21. PhiZosophie. Natiirliche Theologie. Vorsehung [excerpt], 20 Mar. 1787
(Dok., p. 137), 51, 55.
22. Philosophie. Psychologie. Witz [excerpt], 22 Mar. 1787 (Dok., p.
13 8), 55, 175·
23. Jeder gelehrte soll [excerpt], 22 Mar. 1787 (Dok., pp. 138-9), 17,22 n.,
28,55.
24. Oft ist das, was man [excerpt], 22 Mar. 1787 (Dok., pp. 139-40),
22 n., 27, 55.
25. Einige Bemerkungen iiber die Vorstellung von GroJ3e [essay], 14 May
1787 (Dok., pp. 42-3), 14 n., 49, 55, 87·
26. Bildung, Kultur, und Aufkliirung sind [excerpt], 31 May 1787 (Dok.,
pp. 140-3), 16 n., 18-20, 22 n., 28, 55, 140, 400 n.
27. Ober die Religion der Griechen und Romer [essay], 10 Aug. 1787
(Rosenkranz, pp. 454-8; or Dok., pp. 43-8), 27, 30-5, 55, 75, 77, 86,
109 n., 124, 126 n.
28. Kultur und Aufkliirung sind [excerpt], 16 Aug. 1787 (Dok., pp.
145-6), 20, 22 n., 28, 50, 55.
29. Wohltiitige Verbesserungen [excerpt], 23 Aug. 1787 (Doh., pp. 146-7),
20-I, 22 n., 28, 50, 55.
30. Philosophie. Philos. Geschichte. My then [excerpt], 28 Sept. 1787
(Dok., p. 144), 29 n., 51, 55·
3 I. PhiZosophie. Philosophische Geschichte. Ober den Ruhm der Aufkliirung
alter Liinder [excerpt], (28 Sept. 1787?) (Dok., pp. 144-5), 18, 22,
29 n., 51, 55.
32. Nicht die Bestreitung [excerpt], I Feb. 1788 (Dok., p. 147), 21, 22 n.,
28,55·
33. Die reziproken Formen [excerpt], IS Mar. 1788 (Dok., pp. 148-9),
22 n., 56.
34. Philosophie. Ober Freiheit [excerpt], 3 I July 1788 (Dok., pp. 149-55),
34 n., 56, 175·
35. Ober einige charakteristische Unterschiede der alten Dichter [essay],
7 Aug. 1788 (Rosenkranz, pp. 458-61; or Dok., pp. 48-51), 35-4 1,
42 n., 48 n., 49, 56, 75, 7 6 , 77 n., 86-7, 238 n., 254, 269 n.
36. So groJ3en EinfiuJ3 hat [Valedictory for the Gymnasium], Sept. 1788
(Rosenkranz, pp. 19-21; or Dok., pp. 52-4), 31,41-4, 56.
 TO HEGEL'S EARLY WRITINGS 5 19
37. Philosophie. Verhiiltnis der Metaphysik zur Religion [excerpt], 29
Sept. 1788 (Dok., pp. 156-66), 34 n., 56.

1 I. THE TUBINGEN PERIOD

38. Ober einige Vorteile [oration or essay], Dec. 1788 (Dok., pp. 169-72),
72, 75-7, 81, 86.
39. (a) Ober das Urteil des gemeinen Menschenverstands,
(b) Ober das Studium der Geschichte der Philosophie [essays], summer
1790 (specimina for Magisterexamen, Sept. 1790: see Briefe, i.
169),72,77, 85 n., 86-7·
40. Jes. 6I: 7. 8 [sermon outline], 10 Jan. 1792 (Dok., pp. 175-9), 109.
41. Am Feiertag Phil. u. Jak. [sermon outline], I May 1793 (Dok., pp.
182-4), 109-11.
42. Predigt uber Matth. 5, I-I6 [sermon outline], 16 June 1793 (Dok.,
pp. 179-82), I II-13.
43. Inwiefern ist Religion [outline], (early 1793?) (Nohl, pp. 355-7), II9,
127 n., 129 n., 131-2 nn., 139-41 nn., 164-5 nn., 169-70 nn., 284 n.
44. Aber die Hauptmasse [outline], (early 1793?) (Nohl, pp. 357-8), 13 In.,
134 n., 145-6 nn., 235 n., 268 n.
45. Die Formen der andern Bilder [outline], (early 1793?) (Nohl, pp.
358-9), 128 n., 141 n., 145 n., 148 n., 236 n.
46. Religion ist eine [essay: the 'Tiibingen fragment'], July-Aug. 1793?
(Nohl, pp. 3-29; see pp. 481-507 above). See Analytical Index, s.v.
Tiibingen fragment.
47. Man lehrt unsre Kinder [outline], (September 1793?) (Nohl, p. 359),
127 n., 163 n.
48. Eins der vorzuglichsten Verdienste [sermon], (September 1793?)
(Dok., pp. 184-92), II7-19.

I I I. THE BERNE PERIOD

49. Nicht zu leugnen sind [outline], (late 1793?) (Nohl, pp. 359-60),
129 n., 163 n., 166 n., 168, 173.
50. AufJer dem mundlichen Unterricht [draft], (late 1793 or early 1794?)
(Nohl, pp. 30-2), 162-3, 173 n., 240 n., 269.
51. Christus hatte zwolj Apostel [draft], (early 1794?) (Nohl, pp. 32-5),
162-4, 167, 170 n., 176 n., 185 n., 217, 268-9.
52. Sokrates' Zweck ging nicht [excerpt], (early 1794?) (Dok., p. 174),
146 n., 170 n., 176 n., 185 n., 198 n., 239 n., 416 n.
53. Die Staatsverfassungen [draft], (1794) (Nohl, pp. 36-9), 165-6, 166 n.,
168,268.
54. Wie wenig die objektive Religion [draft], (1794) (Nohl, pp. 39-42),
166, 173, 424 n., 434 n.
55. offentliche Gewalt [draft fragment], (1794) (Nohl, pp. 42-4), 166,
174, 219 n., 224 n.
56. So kann in einem Staate [draft], (1794) (Nohl, pp. 44-5), 167, 168,
219 n., 224 n.
 520 A CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX
57. Ober den Unterschied der Szene des Todes [draft], (1794) (Nohl, pp.
45-7), 167 n.
58. Unter objektiver Religion [outline plan], (1794) (Nohl, pp. 48-50; see
pp. 508-10 above), xxiii, 170-4, 177, 181,207,221,233-4,251,266,
268, 381 n., 412.
59. Psychologie [notes], (1794) (Dok., pp. 195-217), xx, 73 n., 83 n., 84,
174-7,252.
60. Vorstellungsvermogen ist [excerpt], (1794?) (Dok., pp. 172-4), 176 n.
61. Es sollte eine schwere Aufgabe [draft], (1794) (Nohl, pp. 50-60),13 1-2n.,
169 n., 174 n., 177-83, 217 n., 233, 267, 399, 401 n., 404 n., 411 n.
62. Jetzt braucht die Menge [draft], (1794) (Nohl, pp. 70-1), 164 n., 177,
182-4, 192 n., 193, 233, 268, 395 n.
63. Wenn man von der christlichen Religion [draft], (1794) (Nohl, pp.
60-9), 162 n., 172 n., 177-83, 212, 218 n., 233, 267 n., 399, 401 n.
64. Die transzendente Idee von Gott [outline], {Feb.-Mar. 1795) (Nohl,
pp. 361-2), 190-4, 204 n., 226.
65. Unkunde der Geschichte [excerpts and outlines], (early 1795) (Noh!,
pp. 362-6), 183 n., 185-6 nn., 193 n., 196 n., 201 n., 204 n., 206 n.,
208, 237 n., 268 n., 395 n.
66. 1m Anbeginn war die Weisheit [excerpts from a theological journal],
(early 1795) (Roques, p. I), 199-200 nn., 202-3 nn.
67. Die reine aller Schranken [essay: The Life of Jesus], 9 MaY-24 July
1795 (Nohl, pp. 75-136). See Analytical Index, s.v. Life of Jesus.
68. In einer Republik [excerpts], 1795 (Nohl, pp. 366-7), 183 n.
69. man mag die widersprechendsten Betrachtungen [essay: 'The Positivity
of the Christian Religion'], (Aug. ?)-Nov. 1795 (Nohl, pp. 152-21 I;
Knox, pp. 67-143), xxii, xxix, I I I, 169 n., 200 n., 207-9, 212-24,228,
233-4,251,254,256,267,286 n., 379-82, 392 n., 399,401 n., 403-4,
405 n., 407 n., 410, 413, 417 n., 454 n.
70. Ein positiver Glauben [draft], (between Dec. 1795 and Mar. 1796)
(Nohl, pp. 233-9), 94 n., 224-8, 237 n., 260 n., 273, 291, 300 n.,
302 n., 320, 329 n.
71. Der gute Minsch [excerpt], (Apr. 1796?) (Nohl, p. 367), 230-1.
72. Die Bekehrung im Kerker [excerpts], (Apr. 1796?) (Dok., pp. 217-18).
73. Prinzipien der Gesetzgebung [excerpt from Jena Literatur Zeitung,
Feb. 1796], (Apr. 1796?) (Dok., pp. 218-19).
74. Der Grundfehler, der bei dem ganzen System [conclusion of 'Positivity'
essay], 29 Apr. 1796 (Nohl, pp. 211-13; Knox, pp. 143-5), xxv, 224,
228-30, 232, 323, 325.
75. Jedes Volk hat ihm eigene Gegenstande [draft], May-June 1796?
(Nohl, pp. 214-31; Knox, pp. 145-67), xxv, 36 n., 40, 225, 232-44,
245,247 n., 252, 254, 256, 266-9, 271 n., 292-4, 326 n., 395 n., 409 n.,
471 n.
76. eine Ethik [outline: the 'earliest system-programme'], <June or July
1796?) (Dok., pp. 219-21; see pp. 510-12 above), xxv, xxix, 249-57,
326 n., 41 In., 480.
77. Tagebuch, 25 July-Aug. 1796 (Rosenkranz, pp. 470-90; or Dok.
pp. 221-44),28 n., 49 n., 151, 159-61,293 n.
 TO HEGEL'S EARLY WRITINGS 521
78. Eleusis [poem], Aug. 1796 (Dok., pp. 380-3; or Brilie, i. 38-40). See
Analytical Index.
IV. THE FRANKFURT PERIOD

79. Die Geschichte der Juden lehrt [draft], (Jan. 1797; possibly earlier)
(Nohl, pp. 370-1), 272, 275-7, 278, 285-6, 290 n.
80. Joseph. jiid. Alterth. [outlines], (early 1797) (Nohl, p. 368; in part
only), 271, 274 n., 278-81, 343 n.
81. II. Abraham in Chaldiia [draft], (early 1797) (Nohl, pp. 368-70),
272 n., 278, 281-3,288, 290-1, 300 n., 410 n.
82. IV. Abraham in Chaldiia [draft], (mid 1797; before July) (Nohl,
pp. 371-3; one sentence omitted), 272 n., 278, 281 n., 282, 283-4 nn.,
285, 288, 290-1, 293 n., 300 n., 410 n.
83. Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt [outlines], (mid 1797; before July)
(Nohl, pp. 374-5), 291-2, 293 n., 296, 298, 3 00, 3 18 , 326.
84. Religion, eine Religion stiften [outline], (mid 1797; before July) (Nohl,
pp. 376-7), 292-5, 298, 316-17 nn.
85. so wie sie mehrere Gattungen [fragment of an outline], (July-Aug.
1797) (Nohl, pp. 377-8), 27 1 n., 287, 295-8, 316-.17 n., 326, 4II n.,
413 n., 498-9 n.
86. welchem Zwecke denn alles Ubrige dient [fragment of a draft], (Nov.
1797) (see Nohl, pp. 378-82; passages subsequently revised or can-
celled are given only partially in the footnotes), xxvii, xxviii, 266,
271 n., 287-8, 296 n., 298-310, 3II, 317,498 n.
87. Zu Abrahams Zeiten [draft], (early 1798) (unpublished), 278 n., 281 n.,
284-5 nn., 288, 290-1, 294 n., 296 n., 301-2 nn., 3II n.
88. Fortschreiten der Gesetzgebung [outlines], (early 1798) (Nohl, pp. 373-
4, in part only), 276 n., 279 n., 280 n., 283 n., 284 n., 288, 289, 296,
300, 303 n., 3II, 356 n., 399 n.
89. Glaube ist die Art [draft], (early 1798) (Nohl, pp. 382-5; see pp.
512-15 above), 304 n., 3II-22, 326, 329 n., 354 n.
90. Vertrattliche Briefe [translation with notes], (1796 (-early 1798; pub-
lished, Easter 1798) (see Bibliographical Index), 158-9, 233 n., 244,
252,418-27,431 n., 435 n.
91. Daj3 die Magistrate [essay fragment], (Apr.-July 1797) (Lasson, pp.
150-4), xxix-xxx, 3II n., 418-23, 427-33, 449-50.
92. Notes on Kant's Metaphysik der Sitten, begun 10 Aug. 1798 (men-
tioned and quoted, Rosenkranz, pp. 87-8), 251, 256, 271, 326 n.,
331 n., 339,416 n., 423-4, 435.
93. Mit Abraham dem wahren Stammvater [draft], (autumn 1798?)
(Nohl, pp. 243-5; Knox, pp. 182-5), 272, 274 n., 279-80, 290 n.,
3II n., 315, 330 n., 332 n., 356,403 n., 413 n.
94. Die schiinen, ihrer Natur nach [outline], (autumn 1798?) (unpublished),
291 n., 358 n.
95. Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon [draft], (autumn 1798?)
(see Nohl, pp. 245-60; passages subsequently revised or cancelled
are given only partially in footnotes), 272 n., 282 n., 284 n., 290-1,
296, 331 n., 403 n.
522 A CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX
96. Zu der Zeit, cia Jesus [outlines], (autumn 1798?) (Nohl, pp. 385-98),
196 n., 218 n., 331-4, 337,345-6 nn., 355 n., 357 n., 367 n., 371 n.,
375·
97. B. Moral. Bergpredigt [outlines], (late 1798 or early 1799) (Nohl, pp.
398-402),190 n., 218 n., 33 I, 332, 333 n., 343 n., 346-7 nn., 366-7 nn.,
371 n., 393.
98. Abraham in Chaldiia geboren hatte schon [essay], (late 1798 or early
1799?) (Nohl, pp. 245-60; Knox, pp. 185-205), 272, 276-7, 280 n.,
281-2 nn., 284-6, 288, 289, 290-1, 293-4 nn., 296 n., 301-2, 303 n.,
315, 319, 33 0- 1 nn., 332, 401 n., 410 n., 413 n., 476 n.
99. (leben)digen Modifikation [complex of drafts], (late 1798 and/or early
1799?) (see Nohl, pp. 261-342; cancelled or revised passages are
given only partially in the footnotes; the original order of the complex
cannot now be recovered), 299, 306, 326 n., 330-2, 335 n., 337-8,
342,347,348,351-2,357 n., 360, 363 n., 364-5 n., 368-72 nn., 377-8,
380, 383 n., 4 16 n., 433, 434·
100. welchem Zwecke denn aUes Ubrige dient [fragment of revised draft],
(late 1798 or early 1799?) (Nohl, pp. 378-82; Knox, pp. 302-8),
xxvii, xxviii, 266, 271 n., 287-8, 296-'7 nn., 298-310, 33 In., 340 n.,
345, 385, 4 10 n., 498 n.
101. Neigung zum Kartenspiel, 1798 (Rosenkranz, pp. 23-4; or Dok.,
pp. 277-8), 68 n.
102. Er rennt in weiten Kreisen [end of a poem to his poodle], 10 Dec.
1798 (Rosenkranz, p. 83; or Dok., p. 383).
103. Deine Freunde trauern [opening of a poem to Nature], 12 Dec. 1798
(Rosenkranz, pp. 83-4; or Dok., p. 384).
104. SoUte das Resultat [draft], (Dec. 1798 or Jan. 1799) (Dok., pp. 282-8,
the earlier version of the text, indicated completely in the footnotes),
416 n., 432-3 nn., 436-9, 450, 451 n.
105. Commentary on Steuart's Inquiry into the Principles of Political
Economy, 19 Feb.-16 Mar. 1799 (described by Rosenkranz, p. 86;
see also Dok., pp. 280, 466-7), 434-6.
106. iiber ihre Entstehung [fragment of a draft], (early 1799?) (Lasson,
pp. 141-2), 416 n., 43 8, 439-40.
107. Jesus trat' nicht lange [essays], (summer 1799, perhaps not finished
before early 1800) (Nohl, pp. 261-342; Knox, pp. 205-301), 215 n.,
218 n., 228, 267, 272, 288, 307 n., 311, 318, 321, 322, 330-79, 380-3,
384 n., 387, 395 n., 402 n., 404-5, 416-17 nn., 438 n., 44 0 , 444-5,
469 n.
The following essays and bridge fragments are distinguished in
Chapter IV above:
(a) Jesus trat nicht lange [fragment of revised opening] (Nohl, p.
261; Knox, p. 205), 286 n., 330 n., 333-4.
(b) (leben)digen Modifikation [remainder of first essay] (Nohl, pp.
261-75; Knox, pp. 206-24), 334-7, 338 n., 341-6, 350 n.
(c) Der Positivitiit der Juden [second essay, part I] (Nohl, pp.
276-89; Knox, pp. 224-39), 321, 344 n., 346-54, 381 n., 435 n.
 TO HEGEL'S EARLY WRITINGS 52 3
(d) Daj3 auch Jesus dell Zlisammenhang [bridge fragment? There is a
break here and the sequence is uncertain] (Nohl, pp. 289-90;
Knox, pp. 239-40), 338 n., 354·
(e) Kiihnheit, die Zuversicht [second bridge fragment?] (Nohl, p.
290; Knox, p. 240), 338 n., 355.
(f) 1m Geiste der Juden [second essay, part 2] (Nohl, pp. 290-3;
Knox, pp. 240-4), 338 n., 355-6.
(g) Die Liebe versohnt aber [second essay, part 3] (Nohl, pp. 293-6;
Knox, pp. 244-7), 317 n., 318 n., 337-9, 341,401 n.
(h) Der Abschied, den Jesus [second essay, parq] (Nohl, pp. 297-301;
Knox, pp. 248-53), 318 n., 338 n., 356-7, 392, 393·
(i) Am interessantesten wird es sein [third essay, connecting prelude]
(Nohl, p. 302; Knox, p. 253), 357, 369 n.
(j) Reines Leben zu denken [third essay, part I] (Nohl, pp. 302-1 I;
Knox, pp. 254-64. Probably this section ought to be further
divided at Man kann den Zustand: Nohl, p. 306; Knox, p. 256),
357-64, 365 n., 367 n., 376 n., 383-4 n.
(k) WennJesus so sprach [bridge passage?] (Nohl, p. 312; Knox, p.
265), 364, 365 n.
(l) Das Wesen des Jesus [third essay, part 2] (Nohl, pp. 312-24;
Knox, pp. 266-81), 319, 358 n., 363-4 nn., 365-70, 372 n.,
378 n., 381, 393.
(m) Alit dem Mute und dem Glauben [fourth essay, part I] (Nohl,
pp. 325-30; Knox, pp. 281-8. Nohl believes there is a lacuna
in the manuscript at the end of this part), 333 n., 358 n., 365 n.,
370-2, 374, 376 n.
(n) Der negativen Seite [fourth essay, part 2] (Nohl, pp. 332-3;
Knox, pp. 289-9 1), 374-5.
(0) Die lebenverachtende Schwiirmerei [displaced fragment of first
draft; not clearly disposed of in the revision] (Nohl, p. 331;
Knox, pp. 288-9, footnote), 372 n., 378 n.
(p) Nach dem TodeJesu [fourth essay, part 2 continued: the opening
is that part of the first draft which was preceded by (0) above]
(Nohl, pp. 333-5; Knox, pp. 291-3), 372-4, 376 n.
(q) Es ist nicht die Knechtgestalt [fourth essay, part 3] (Nohl, pp.
335-42; Knox, pp. 293-301), 372-3 nn., 376-9, 382-3.
108. Der immer sich vergroj3ernde Widerspruch [unfinished essay], (early
1800?) (Lasson, pp. 138-41),401 n., 416 n., 440--5.
109. Gegen des Stromes [opening of a poem], 21 Aug. 1800 (Rosenkranz,
p. 81; or Dok., p. 384).
IIO. (a) absolute Entgegensetzung gilt [fragment of essay], (before Sept.
1800) (Nohl, pp. 345-8; Knox, pp. 309-13), xxviii, xxxii, 250,
25 6 , 288, 296 n., 379-92, 394, 4 0 5-8 , 439 n., 44 0 , 445.
(b) ein objektiven Mittelpunkt [concluding fragment of essay],
finished 14 Sept. 1800 (Nohl, pp. 349-51; Knox, pp. 313-19),
379-82, 391-9, 405-8, 410 n., 440, 454 n.
III. I B I. S dient [geometrical studies], 23 Sept. 1800 (Dok., pp. 288-
3 00.)
524 A CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX
II2. Der BegrijJ der Positivitiit [revised introduction for 69 above], begun
24 Sept. 1800 (Nohl, pp. 139-51; Knox, pp. 167-81), 379-80, 382,
399-407, 4 16 n., 445.
II3. Der unmittelbare Eindruck [essay], (late 1800 or possibly early 1801)
(Jub., xx. 456-8).

v. THE JENA PERIOD

(Only the essays and fragments discussed in the present volume are here
listed.)
II4. Religion. 2. in Rilcksicht auf [fragment of a draft], (Jan.-Feb. 1801)
(Lasson, pp. [75-82]), 446 n.
II5. Macch. richtet sich an Laurent. [excerpt in French], (Jan.-Feb.
1801?) (Lasson, pp. II 1-12, in German; Knox-Pelczynski, pp.
219-20, in English. The dating is doubtful since the handwriting
provides no reliable evidence in this case. The excerpt is on the back
of one sheet of I 14. There may be a considerable lapse of time between
them),47°·
II6. Sollte das politische Resultat [revision of 104], (Feb.-Mar. 1801)
(Dok., pp. 282-8),438-9,446,447,451-2,457 n.
II7. 1m deutschen Reich gibts [outline], (Feb.-Mar. 1801) (Lasson, p.
149; or Dok., p. 309).
II8. Versuche der katholischen Religion [notes and excerpts], (Feb.-Mar.
1801) (Dok., pp. 309-12), 446, 473 n.
II9. II. 3. Die Publicisten selbst [draft complex], (Feb.-Mar. 1801) (see
below), 45211., 456.
The following fragments are distinguished in Chapter V above:
(a) Wir konnen eine Menschenmenge [fragment of introduction]
(Lasson, pp. [17-25]), 447 n., 456 n.
(b) d. politischer Grundsatz [fragment] (Lasson, pp. [62-5]), 459 n.
(c) Reichsfeind, der dritte [fragment] (Lasson, pp. 142-3), 460 n.
(d) Da diedeutsche Verfassung [fragment] (Lasson, pp. 144-9),452 n.,
459 n., 461 n.
(e) C. Die Lehensverfassung ist durch [fragment] (Lasson, pp. [83-7]),
459 n .
(f) II. Ein Staat, dem die Kraft [fragment] (Lasson, pp. [49-56]).
120. 1ch § (a) Menschenliebe, Freundschaft [outline], (Feb.-Mar. 1801)
(Doh., p. 467; the date is determined by the fact that 121 begins on
the back of the sheet).
121. (a) and (b) Kaiserliches KommissionsDekret [excerpts from decrees of
5 and 7 Apr. 1801], (Apr. 1801) (unpublished).
122. Schreiben der Reichsstiinde [excerpts from a brief of 8 May 1801],
(May 1801) (unpublished).
123. Diese Form des deutschen Staatsrechts [draft], <June-July 1801)
(Lasson, pp. 7-16), 447, 450-2.
124. (a) and (b) Der Nahmefilr die Staatsverfassung [fragments of a draft],
(June-July 1801) (unpublished), 454 n., 457 n.
125. Deutschland kein Staat mehr [outline plan], <June-July 1801)
 TO HEGEL'S EARLY WRITINGS 525
(Lasson, p. 138). (See p. 446 n. 4 above. This may be earlier than
123 but 127 is on reverse side), 446-7, 457-8 nn.
126. Die Fortpjlanzung des kriegerischen Talents [fragments of essay
sequence], (June-July 1801) (Lasson, pp. 32-4, [34-48], [66-8],
68-136), xxix-xxxi, 251, 256, 418 n., 447, 453 n., 459 n., 460-77.
127. Gustav hatte kaum die Schlacht [excerpts], (June-July 1801) (unpub-
lished).
(At this point there was a break of rather more than a year before Hegel
returned to the Verfassungsschrift. The essays and manuscripts of this
period are here omitted.)
128. Sitzung I4ten Sept. I802 [excerpts], (Sept. 1802) (unpublished)
477n.
129. (a) and (b) Nouvelles de Paris 2 Nov. [excerpts], (Nov. 1802) (un-
published). (I29(b) is from a French report of a speech of C. J. Fox
on 23 Nov. 1802 [but there is no parliamentary ad.dress recorded or
printed for any date in the month in Fox's Speeches]. 130 is on the
back of the sheet), 477 n.
130. Botschaft der Regierung [excerpt], (Dec. 1802) (unpublished), 477 n.
131. Deutschland ist kein Staat mehr [fragments of fair copy. Revision of
126], (Dec. 1802 or early 1803) (Lasson, pp. 3-7, 17-32, 34-68,
[68-7 1]), xxix-xxxi, 251, 256, 418 n., 447, 448-50, 452-7, 459 n.,
460-4,476,477 n.
VI. UNDATED WRITINGS
The following items cannot be dated with certainty or with any degree of
precision. The order in which they are here placed, and even the assign-
ment to a particular period, are in most instances conjectural.
132. Translation of Tacitus' Agricola, (Stuttgart period?) (mentioned by
Rosenkranz, p. 12), 48.
133. Analysis of Schiller's Fiesko, (Stuttgart period?) (mentioned by
Rosenkranz, p. 13), 41 n., 43 n.
134. Oration: De utilitate poeseos, (Stuttgart period?) (mentioned by
Rosenkranz, p. 16), 12 n.
135. Excerpts from Locke, Hume, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, etc.,
(Tilbingen, 1789-90?) (mentioned by Rosenkranz, pp. 14, 86--'7),46,
83·
136. Translations from Plato, (Tilbingen, 1789? and after) (mentioned by
Rosenkranz, p. 40), 85, 98.
137. Translations from Sophocles (especially Antigone), (Tilbingen,
179I? and after) (mentioned by Rosenkranz, p. II) 48 n., 56 n.
13 8. Ich las neulich Lessings Briefwechsel, (Berne, 1794 ?)(Jub., xx. 451-5),
174 n.
139. Notes and excerpts from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, (Berne,
1795?) (mentioned by Rosenkranz, pp. 86--'7), 195.
140. Studies of the finances of the Canton of Berne, (Berne period)
(described by Rosenkranz, p. 61), 158, 233 n., 244, 252, 417, 418.
141. (a) L' Etat et les dr!lices de la Suisse [excerpts], (Berne period) (Dok.
pp. 4 62-3), 423 n., 424 n.
526 A CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX
(b) Systeme abrege de jurisprudence [excerpts], (Berne period> (see
Rosenzweig, i. 229-30; Dok., pp. 463, 459-60), 425 n., 426 n.
(c) Du gouvernement de Berne [excerpts], (Berne period> (see
Rosenzweig, i. 230; also Dok., p. 461: Hegel's note to Cart, p.
82), 425.
142. Notes and/or excerpts from Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes, (Berne
period> (see Rosenkranz, p. 60, and, for the dating, Strahm, p. 530),
157-8.
143. Rousseau a M. D'Alembert [excerpt], (Berne period?> (Dok., pp.
174-5)·
144. Der Streit uber die Moglichkeit, (Berne, 1796?> (Rosenkranz, pp.
510-12; or Nohl, pp. 231-2), 237 n.
145. Translation of a 'considerable part' of Thucydides, (Berne, 1796?>
(mentioned by Rosenkranz, pp. 12, 60),48, 232 n., 27I.
146. Fragments of historical studies as follows:
(a) Geist der Orientalen, (Frankfurt, 1798?> (Rosenkranz, pp. 515-
18; or Dok., pp. 257-61), 271 n.
(b) Das Gediichtnis ist der Galgen, (Berne, 1796?> (Rosenkranz, pp.
518-19; or Dok., pp. 261-2), 271 n.
(c) Klageweiber bei der offentlichen Totenfeier, (Berne, 1796?>
(Rosenkranz, pp. 519-20; or Dok., pp. 262-3), 232 n., 271 n.,
499 n.
(d) Thukydides B. AP, (Berne, 1796?> (Rosenkranz, p. 520; or Dol~.,
p. 263), 232 n., 27I.
(e) Ehe Lykurg, (Berne, 1796 or later?> (Rosenkranz, pp. 520-1; or
Dok., pp. 263-4), 232 n., 271 n.
(1) Nach dem Untergange, (Berne, 1796?> (Rosenkranz, pp. 521-2;
or Dok., pp. 264-5), 232 n.
(g) In der Reihe der Offenbarungen, (Frankfurt period, 1799-1800?>
(Rosenkranz, pp. 522-3; or Dok., pp. 265-6), 232 n., 271 n.
(h) Was ein gebildeter Geschmack, (Frankfurt period?> (Rosenkranz,
pp. 523-4; or Dok., pp. 266-7), 232 n., 236 n.
(i) Die ungezugelte Einbildungskraft, (Berne, 1796? or later?
(Rosenkranz, p. 524; or Dok., p. 267), 232 n., 236 n., 271 n.
(j) Verachtung der Menschen, (Berne, 1796?> (Rosenkranz, pp. 524-
5; or Dok., p. 268), 238 n.
(k) In den Staaten der neueren Zeit, (Frankfurt, 1798-9?> (Rosen-
kranz, p. 525; or Dok., pp. 268-9), 232 n., 271 n.
(l) In Italien, wo die politische Freiheit, (Frankfurt or Jena, 1798-
1801 ?> (Rosenkranz, p. 526; or Dok., pp. 269-70),239 n., 417-18.
(m) (Jffentliche Todesstrafe (Berne, 1796? or later?> (Rosenkranz, pp.
526-9; or Dok., pp. 270-2), 271 n.
(n) Hume charakterisiert sich (Berne, 1796? or later?> (Rosenkranz,
pp. 529-30; or Dok., pp. 273-4).
(0) Aber Johann Georg's, (after 1793> (Rosenkranz, pp. 530-2; or
Dok., pp. 274-6).
(p) Dans la monarchie, (Berne period?> (Rosenkranz, pp. 61-2; or
Dok., p. 276).
 TO HEGEL'S EARLY WRITINGS
(q) Achilles starb, (Frankfurt period?) (Rosenkranz, pp. 60-1; or
Dok., p. 2.77), 2.32 n., 271 n.
(r) Die Stimme der katholischen Geistlichen, (Tiibingen-Beme 1793-
4)? (Dok., p. 2.77).
147. Es ist gefragt worden [fragment], (Frankfurt, 1798-9?) (Rosenkranz,
pp. 8S-6; or Dok., pp. 2.79-80).
148. Der Jiingling [poem], (Frankfurt period?) (Dok., pp. 379-80).
149. Der Friihling droht [opening lines of poem], (Frankfurt period)
(Rosenkranz, pp. 84-S; or Dok., p. 38S).
ISO. Historical tables, (Jena, 1801?) (mentioned by Rosenkranz, p. 60),
90 n., 417-18.
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX

Note: What follows is an index for the sources and references in this book,
not an exhaustive survey of the literature-or even of the works that I
have myself used and consulted. All sources I have actually used which are
explicitly referred to in the text or the notes (except classical authors) are
here listed by author in alphabetical order. Translations are listed im-
mediately after the texts translated. In cases where an editor's or trans-
lator's name has been used to identify a work in the footnotes the necessary
cross references are here supplied.
(For a key to Abbreviations the reader should consult the note on page xiii.)

ALLISON, HENRY E., Lessing and the Enlightenment, U. of Michigan Press,

Ann Arbor, 1966.
ASVELD, PAUL, La Pensee religieuse du jeune Hegel, Publications Uni-
versitaires, Louvain, and Desclee de Brouwer, Paris, 1953.
BAILLIE, SIR JAMES BLACK (translator), see HEGEL, Phenomenology.
BECK, ADOLF (ed.), see HOLDERLIN.
BECK, LEWIS WHITE, Early German philosophy, Harvard (Belknap),
Cambridge, Mass., 1969. (See also KANT.)
- - (translator): See KANT, Critique of practical reason.
BETZENDORFER, WALTER, Holderlins Studierzjahre im Tiibinger Stift,
Salzer, Heilbronn, 1922.
BRECHT, MARTIN, and SANDBERGER, JORG, 'Hegels Begegnung mit der
Theologie im Ttibinger Stift', Hegel-Studien, v (1969), 47-81.
BRUFORD, WALTER HORACE, Germany in the eighteenth century, C.U.P.,
Cambridge, 1935 (paperback, 1965).
- - Culture and society in classical Weimar, C.U.P., Cambridge, 1962.
BURKHARDT, FREDERICK H. (translator), see HERDER, God.
CARSTEN, F. L., Princes and parliaments in Germany, Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1959.
CHAMLEY, PAUL, 'Les origines de la pensee economique de Hegel', Hegel-
Studien, iii (1965), 225-61.
CHISHOLM, RODERICK M. (ed.), see FICHTE, The vocation of man.
CHRISTENSEN, DARRELL E. (ed.), Hegel and the philosophy of religion,
Nijhoff, The Hague, 1970.
D'HoNDT, JACQUES, Hegel secret, P.U.F., Paris, 1968.
DILTHEY, WILHELM, 'Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels', in vol. lV of
Gesammelte Schriften, B. G. Teubner, Stuttgart, 1962-5.
DODERLEIN, JOHANN LUDWIG, see HENRICH.
DROZ, JACQUES, L'Allemagne et la Revolutionfranraise, P.U.F., Paris, 1949.
Edinburgh Review: 'The States of Wirtemberg', Edinburgh Review, XXlX
(Feb. 1818), 337-63.
8243588 Nn
53 0 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX
FICHTE, JOHANN GOTTLIEB, Samtliche Werke (Gesamtausgabe der
Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenshaften), ed. R. Lauth and H. Jacob,
Frommann, Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 1964- (in progress). [This
edition provides the texts of Kritik der Offenbarung, Wissenschaftslehre
(1794), and Die Bestimmung des Gelehrten as Hegel first read them;
also it contains the best collection of Fichte's letters to 1793.
Unfortunately it has not yet progressed beyond the publications
of 1795.]
- - Siimtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte, 8 vols., Veit, Berlin, 1845-
56.
- - Science of knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre, 1794, with the First and
Second Introductions), edited and translated by Peter Heath and John
Lachs, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1970.
- - The vocation of man (translated by William Smith), ed. R. M.
Chisholm, Bobbs-Merrill (The Library of Liberal Arts), Indianapolis-
New York, 1956.
- - Briefwechsel, z vols., ed. Hans Schulz, Georg Olms, Hildesheim,
19 67.
FLECHSIG, ROLF (ed.), see HEGEL, Briefe.
Fox, CHARLES J AMES, Speeches in the House of Commons, 6 vols., Longman,
Hurst, et al., London, 1815.
FURRMANS, HORST (ed.), see SCHELLING, Briefe.
GIBBON, EDWARD, The decline and fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols., Dent
(Everyman), London, 1910 (reprinted 1963).
GLOCKNER, HERMANN, B-egel, z vols., Frommann, Stuttgart, 19z9-40
(Jub., xxi-xxii).
GREENE, THEODORE M., and HUDSON, HOYT H. (translators), see KANT,
Religion.
GREGOR, MARY J. (translator), see KANT, Doctrine of virtue.
GUERENU, ERNESTO M. D. DE, Das Gottesbild des jungen Hegel, Verlag
Karl Alber, FreiburgjMunich, I969 (Symposium Z9).
HAERING, THEODOR LORENZ, liegel, sein Wollen und sein Werk, z vols.,
Scientia Verlag, Aalen, 1963.
HAMANN, JOHANN GEORG, Socratic Memorabilia (text with translation and
commentary by J. C. O'Flaherty), The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore,
1967·
I-IAYM, RUDOLF, Hegel und seine Zeit, Georg alms, Hildesheim, 196z.
HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH, Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. J.
Hoffmeister and R. Flechsig, 4 vols., F. Meiner, Hamburg, 1961
(Brie.fe).
- - Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung, ed. J. Hoffmeister, Frommann,
Stuttgart, 1936 (Dok.).
- - Enzyklopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, ed. F. Nicolin and
O. P6ggeler, F. Meiner, Hamburg, 1959.
- - The logic of Hegel, translated by William Wallace, znd edn., Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1892.
--- Das Leben Jesu, ed. P. H. Roques, Diderichs, Jena, 1906.
- - Vie de Jesus, traduit par D. D. Rosca, Gamber, Paris, 19Z8.
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX 531
HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH, Phiinomenologie des Geistes, ed.
J. Hoffmeister, F. Meiner, Hamburg, 1952.
- - Phenomenology of mind, translated by J. B. Baillie, 2nd edn., Allen &
Unwin, London, I93I.
- - Siimtliche Werke, ed. H. Gloclmer, Jubilee edn. in 20 vols., a Hegel-
Monograph and a Lexicon, Frommann, Stuttgart, 1927- (Jub.).
- - Schriften zur Politik und Rechtsphilosophie, ed. G. Lasson, F. Meiner,
Leipzig, I913 (Lasson).
- - Hegel's political writings, translated by T. M. Knox, with an intro-
ductory essay by Z. A. Pelczynski, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964.
- - TheologischeJugendschriften, ed. H. Nohl, J. C. B. Mohr, Ttibingen,
190 7.
- - Early theological writings, translated by T. M. Knox, with an
introduction and fragments translated by R. Kroner, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1948 (paperback, Harper and Row Torchbooks,)
New York, 1961).
- - Vertrauliche Briefe (von Jean-Jacques Cart) aus dem Franzosischen
ubersetzt und ,kommentiert. Faksimiledruck der Ausgabe von 1798
herausgegeben von Wolfgang Wieland, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970.
- - Werke, complete edn. by a group of friends of the deceased, 17 vols.,
Duncker and Humblot, Berlin, 1832 ff.
Hegel-Studien, ed. F. Nicolin and O. Poggeler, Bouvier, Bonn, 1961-
HENRICH, DIETER, 'Leutwein tiber Hegel. Ein Dokument zu Hegels
Biographie', Hegel-Studien, iii (1965), 39-77.
- - 'Holderlin tiber U rteil und Sein', Holderlin-Jahrbuch, XIV
(1965/6),73-96.
- - 'Some presuppositions of Hegel's System', in D. Christensen (ed.),
Hegel and the philosophy of religion, Nijhoff, The Hague, 1970.
- - and DODERLEIN, JOHANN LUDWIG, 'Carl Immanuel Diez. Anktindi-
gung einer Ausgabe seiner Schriften und Briefe', Hegel-Studien, iii
(1965), 276-86.
HERDER, JOHANN GOTTFB.IED, Siimtliche Werke, 33 vols., ed. B. Suphan
and others, Weidmann, Berlin, 1877-1913.
- - God, some conversations, translated by F. H. Burkhardt, Bobbs-
Merrill (Library of Liberal Arts), Indianapoiis-New York, 1940.
HERMES, JOHANN TIMOTHEUS, Sophiens Reise, ed. F. Brtiggemann,
Reclam, Leipzig, 1940.
HIPPEL, THEODOR GOTTLIEB VON, Samtliche Werke, 14 vols., Reimer,
Berlin, 1827-39.
HOCEVAR, ROLF K., Stande und Repriisentation beim jungen Hegel, C. H.
Beck, Munich, 1968.
HOFFMEISTER, JOHANNES (ed.), see HEGEL, Briefe, Dokumente, and
Phiinomenologie.
HOLDERLIN, JOHANN CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH, Siimtliche Werke (GroBe
Stuttgarter Ausgabe), ed. F. Beissner and A. Beck (to be completed in
8 vols.), Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1943- (GSA).
KANT, IMMANUEL, Kritik der rein en Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt,
F. Meiner, Hamburg, 1930.
532 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX
KANT, IMMANUEL, Critique of pure reason, translated by N. Kemp Smith,
Macmillan, London, 1929.
- - Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian Academy of
Sciences, Reimer, Berlin, 1902-38 (Akad.).
- - Critique of practical reason, translated by L. W. Beck, Bobbs-
Merrill (Library of Liberal Arts), Indianapolis-New York, 1956.
- - Foundations of the metaphysics of morals and What is enlightenment,
translated by L. W. Beck, Bobbs-Merrill (Library of Liberal Arts),
Indianapolis-New York, 1959.
- - The metaphysical elements of justice, translated by John Ladd, Bob bs-
Merrill (Library of Liberal Arts), Indianapolis-New York, 1965.
- - The doctrine of virtue, translated by M. J. Gregor, Harper and Row
Torchbooks, New York, 1964. (Another translation by J. Ellington is
available in the Library of Liberal Arts.)
- - Religion within the limits of reason alone, translated by T. M.
Greene and H. H. Hudson, 2nd edn., Harper and Row Torchbooks,
New York, 1960.
KAUFMANN, WALTER, Hegel, a reinterpretation, Doubleday, New York,
1965 (paperback, Anchor Books, 1966).
KELLY, GEORGE ARMSTRONG, Idealism, politics and history, C.U.P., Cam-
bridge, 1969.
KIMMERLE, HEINZ, 'Zur Chronologie von Hegels Jenaer Schriften',
Hegel-Studien, iv (1967), 125-76.
- - 'Die von Rosenkranz iiberlieferten Texte Hegels aus der Jenaer
Zeit', Hegel-Studien, v (1969), 83-94.
- - Das Problem der Abgeschlossenheit des Denkens, Bouvier, Bonn,
1970 (Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 8).
KLAIBER, JULIUS, Holderlin, Hegel und Schelling in ihren schwiibischen
Jugendjahren, Stuttgart, 1877.
KNOX, SIR T. MALCOLM, 'Hegel's attitude to Kant's ethics', Kant-
Studien,49 (1957-8), 70-81. (See also HEGEL, Early theological writings
and Political writings.)
LACORTE, CARMELO, II primo Hegel, Sansoni, Florence, 1959.
LASSON, GEORG (ed.), see HEGEL, Schriften zur Politik.
LESSING, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM, Siimtliche Schriften, ed. K. Lachmann,
3rd edn. revised by F. Muncker, 23 vols., De Gruyter, Berlin and
Leipzig, 1886-1924 [reprint of 1968].
- - Laocoon, Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, translated by
W. A. Steel and A. Dent, Dent (Everyman), London, 1930. (There is a
more adequate translation of Laocoon in the Library of Liberal Arts.)
- - Theological zvritings, translated by Henry Chadwick, A. & C.
Black, London, 1956 [includes 'The Education of the Human Race'].
LUKAcs, GYORGY, Der junge Hegel (Ober die Beziehungen von Dialektik
und Okonomie) (Werke, vol. 8), Luchterhand, Neuwied and Berlin, 1948.
LUPORINI, CESARE, 'Un frammento politico giovanile di G. F. Hegel', in
Filosofi vecchi e nuovi, Sansoni, Florence, 1949.
MENDELSSOHN, MOSES, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. G. B. Mendelssohn,
7 vols. in 8, Brockhaus I.eipzig, 1843-5.
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX 533
MENDELSSOHN, MOSES, Jerusalem, and other writings on Judaism, translated
by Alfred Jospe, Schocken, New York, 1969.
MONTESQUIEU, CHARLES DE SECONDAT, BARON DE, (Euvres completes,
2 vols., ed. R. Caillois, N.R.F. (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade), Paris,
1949-5 I.
- - The spirit oj the laws, translated by T. Nugent, Bobbs-Merrill
(Library of Liberal Arts), Indianapolis-New York, 1949.
MUELLER, GUSTAV EMIL, Hegel: Denkgeschichte eines Lebendigen,
A. Francke Verlag, Berne-Munich, 1959.
- - Hegel: The Man, his Vision and Work, Pageant Press Inc., New
York, 1968.
NEGRI, ANTONIO, Stato e diritto nel giovane Hegel, Cedam, Padua, 1958.
NOHL, HERMANN (ed.), see HEGEL, Theologische Jugendschrijten.
PELCZYNSKI, see HEGEL, Political writings.
PEPERZAK, ADRIEN T. B., Le Jeune Hegel et la vision morale du monde,
Nijhoff, The Hague, 1960.
PFLEIDERER, OTTO, The development oj theology in Germany since Kant,
translated by J. F. Smith, 2nd edn., Sonnenschein, London, 1893.
PLATO, Phaedrus, translated by R. Hackforth, C.D.P., Cambridge, 1952.
(Also in The collected dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns,
Pantheon, New York, 1961 (Bollingen Series lxxi).)
PLITT, G. L. (ed.), Aus Schellings Leben: In BrieJen, 3 vols., Hirzel,
Leipzig, 1869-"79.
RITTER, JOACHIM, Hegel und die Jranzosische Revolution (Arbeits-
gemeinschaft fUr Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Heft
63), Westdeutscher Verlag, Cologne and Opladen, 1957.
RITZEL, WOLFGANG: 'Zur Herkunft eines Hegelschen Ausdrucks',
Hegel-Studien, ii (1963), 278-81.
ROHRMOSER, GUNTHER, 'Zur Vorgeschichte der Jugendschriften Hegels',
Zeitschrijt Jur philosophische Forschung, xiv (1960), 182-208.
- - Subjektivitiit und Verdinglichung, G. Mohn, Giitersloh, 196I.
ROQUES, PAUL HENRI (ed.), see HEGEL, Das Leben Jesu.
ROSENKRANZ, KARL, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben, Wissen-
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1963.
ROSENZWEIG, FRANZ, Hegel und der Staat (2 vols. in I), Scientia, Aalen,
1962.
ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES, (Euvres completes, ed. B. Gagnebin and
M. Raymond, Gallimard, Paris, 1959- . [The 4 vols. so far published
contain everything that Hegel can be shown to have read except the
Lettre 11 Mr. D'Alembert.]
- - Lettre 11 Mr. D' Alembert sur les spectacles, ed. M. Fuchs, Giard
(Lille) and Droz (Geneva), 1948.
- - Emile, translated by Barbara Foxley, Dent (Everyman), London, 19 I I .
- - The Social Contract and Discourses, translated by G. D. H. Cole,
Dent (Everyman), London, 1913.
- - Confessions, translated by J. M. Cohen, Penguin Books, 1953.
SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH, Siimtliche Werke, 14 vols.,
Cotta, Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1856-61.
534 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX
Briefe und Dokumente, vol. i, ed. H. Fuhrmans, Bouvier, Bonn,
1962.
SCHILLER, JOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH, Werke (Nationalausgabe), ed.
L. Blumenthal and B. von Wiese, H. Bohlau, Weimar, 1943- (in
progress). (The principal philosophical treatises are in volume 20.)
- - Siimtliche Schrijten, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. K. Goedeke,
Cotta, Stuttgart, 1867-76 [vol. x contains the text of '-aber die
Asthetische Erziehung des Menschen' as it first appeared in Die Horen].
- - On the aesthetic education of man, edited and translated by E. M.
Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967.
SCHOLZ, HEINRICH (ed.), Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit
zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn, Reuther & Reichard, Berlin, 1916.
SCHULER, GISELA, 'Zur Chronologie von Hegels Jugendschriften', Hegel-
Studien, ii (1963), I I I-59.
SHAFTESBURY, A. A. COOPER, 3RD EARL, Characteristics, Bobbs-Merrill
(Library of Liberal Arts), Indianapolis-New York, 1964.
STEUART, SIR JAMES DENHAM, An inquiry into the principles of political
economy, 2 vols., Millar & Cadell, London, 1767.
STIRLING, JAMES HUTCHISON, The secret of Hegel, 2nd edn., Oliver & Boyd,
Edinburgh, 1898.
STORR, GOTTLOB CHRISTIAN, Annotationes quaedam theologicae ad
philosophicam Kantii de religione doctrinam, apud Bornium, Tiibingen,
1793·
- - Bemerkungen uber Kant's philosophische Religionslehre,Nebst
einigen Bemerkungen des Uebersetzers (F. G. Siiskind), iiber den
aus Principien der praktischen Vernunft hergeleiteten Ueberzeugungs-
grund von der Moglichkeit und Wirklichkeit einer Offenbarung in
Beziehung auf Fichte's Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung, Cotta,
Tiibingen, 1794; reprinted photographically in the series Aetas
Kantiana, Culture et Civilisation, Brussels, 1968.
- - An elementary course of biblical theology, translated from the work
of Professors Storr and (K. C.) Flatt, with additions by S. S.
Schmucker, D.D. Reprinted from the second American edition (1836),
T. Ward & Co., London.
STRAHM, HANS, 'Aus Hegel's Berner Zeit', Archiv fur Geschichte der
Philosophie, xli (1932), 514-33.
VANNI-ROVIGHI, SOFIA, 'Osservazioni sulla cronologia dei primi scritti di
Hegel', Il Pensiero, v (1960), 157-75.
WALLACE, WILLIAM (translator), see HEGEL, Logic.
WIEDMANN, FRANZ, Hegel, an illustrated biography, translated by J.
Neugroschel, Pegasus, New York, 1968.
WILKINSON, ELIZABETH M., and WILLOUGHBY, L. A. (translators), see
SCHILLER, On the aesthetic education of man.
 ANALYTICAL INDEX

AARON,285 aim. See Zweck

ABEL, Jakob Friedrich von (1751- ALCIBIADES: fall of, 151
1829), 9 n., 78, 81, 175 ALEXANDER VI (Pope) (1431-1503),
ABRAHAM: religion of, xxvi, xxvii, 470 n.
281-3,299-300,301, 302 n., 303 n., ALEXIS, Saint (d. 417): as H's patron,
327, 381, 409; tribal father, 199, 262, 263, 266
383-4,386,405 n.; and Jewish spirit, alienation. See Trennung
272, 277, 278, 280, 284, 285; and Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek : excerp-
Noah, 273, 274, 278, 281 n., 283 n.; ted, 55
unpublished sketches on, 278 n.; Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung: excerp-
career of, 281-3; his God, 281, 282, ted, 21 n., 55, 56,231 n.
288, 290, 301, 306, 315, 317, 398, ALLISON, Henry E., 169 n.
399,403; and Moses, 281 n., 283 n., almsgiving: in Christianity, 173, 510;
284; reactionary, 285, 395; spirit of, Jesus on, 205, 343-4
286; his family relations, 29 I n.; AMBROSE, Saint (d. 397), 240 n.
attitude to water, 293 n. American revolution, 423, 424, 426 n.
Absolute, the: as Substance and Sub- AMMON, Christoph Friedrich (1766-
ject, 21 I 1850): Neues Theologisches Journal,
abstraction: good and bad types, xviii, 193 n., 196 n., 208
36-40, 84, 87, 103, 121-3; as act of Ananke, 273, 275, 501
Vernunft, 37 n., 238 n.; exemplified, anarchy: and tyranny, 415; legal,463,
121, 122 n., 170 n. 471 n.; ultimate crime, 470
abstract universal: and concrete, 38, anatomy: H's study of, 102, 103
96, 121-2 n.; in modern conscious- ancien regime: 'Royalists' in Stift,
ness, 39 64 n.; H's attitude, 65 n., 67,
academic record, Hegel's: at Gym- 147 n.; in France and Germany,
nasium, 2, 65, 82; in Stift, 65, 67, 452, 4 68 , 4 69
68,82 angels, 16, 393
Achaea and Judaea. See Greek ideal Angst, 224
ACHILLES, 136 ANTHONY, of Padua (II95-1231):
actuality (Wirklichkeit): mode of being, preached to fish, 215 n., 262, 263
314-16, 513; and possibility, 314- ANTIGONE: and 'unwritten law', xxvii.
16, 336-7, 342, 358, 513; and See also SOPHOCLES
consciousness, 323 n., 327-9, 366-'7, antinomy: of faith, 3II-14, 319-21,
373, 375-6, 378, 445; and concept, 512-15; and dialectic, 389-90, 391;
453-4,458; in Holderlin, 516 objective, 393-5; of time, 394
adultery. See marriage antithesis. See synthesis
AESCHYLUS: Oresteia, 350, 353 n.; ANTONY (M. Antonius), 3 I
mentioned, xvii ApOLLO, 134, 318,488 n.
AESCULAPIUS. See Asclepius ApOLLODORUS, 505 n.
aesthetics: in excerpt collection, 48-9 arbitration: and fate, 353
aesthetic sense: in philosophy, xxi, 253, ARCHENHOLZ, Johann Wilhelm von
5II; highest act of Vernunft, xxv, (1748-1812), 63 n.
xxxii, 253, 256, 41 In., 414, 5II; ARISTOPHAN s: on love, 105, 307-8,
H's own, 151, 160-1 n., 196 n., 270 343 n.; impiety tolerated, 134 n.,
AGATHON (tragic poet), 505 146n .
 ANALYTICAL INDEX
ARISTOTLE: Nicomachean Ethics studied authority: in positive religion, 92-3,
(1787), 47, 56; excerpts on virtues, 94, 95, 220, 229, 23 1, 237-9, 334;
51,53; influence on H's ethics, 124, of Jesus, 95-6, 197 n., 200 n., 203,
145, 338 n.; definition of species, 207, 214-18; legal, 164, 171, 220,
127; prosecution for impiety, 134 n.; 334,363,414-15; corrupts religion,
and authority of reason, 323; on 166, 169, 174, 179-80, 182-4, 195,
happiness, 338, 369 n.; on family, 207,235 n., 237-9, 413; of reason,
343; concept of judge, 348; theory 220, 324-6, 334, 348 , 3 63, 414-15;
of soul, 377-8; natural slavery, in education, 222-4; of testimony,
453 n. 225-6; divine, 225-6, 363, 364; of
art: religion of, xxviii, 390-1; and Verstand, 238 n.; and objectivity,
experience, 160, 161 n. 289-94; and love, 310, 323-4,402
Ascension, the, I 10 autonomy: rooted in free choice, 218-
asceticism: and Vernunft, 199,205 n.; 19, 222; essential to man, 229; and
folly of, 224; in Christianity, 376 political freedom, 237, 238-9; of
AsCLEPIUS, xxiv, 14, 134 reason, 292-4, 333, 334-5; and bad
astronomy: and £V Ka, 1Tav, 102; H's conscience, 349; as faith in self, 352.
study of, 105 n. See also moral freedom
ASVELD, Paul: on 'Aufklarung alle-
mande', 23 n.; on Tlibingen school, Babel, Tower of, 278, 279
226 n.; H's animus against Chris- Babylon: Jews in, 276
tianity, 247; referred to, 225 n., Baccalaureate: H's, 72, 75
245 n. Bacchants, 397, 505
Athens: Theseus and, 134 n., 283 n., BAILLIE, Sir James Black, 397 n.
413; and Greek ideal, 152, 183, 185, Bamberger Zeitung, 260 n.
23 1, 246-7, 397,425; and Sparta, BANQUO, 350, 353 n.
164 n.; and Germany, 167; and baptism: of Jesus, lIO; POSItIve
Geneva, 224 n.; decline of, 234-5 n., ceremony, I I 1,302,502-3; of water,
239; and Eleusis, 246; and Israel, 346, 367-8; of the spirit, 346, 367-8
287; religion of, 296; and Austria, BARABBAS, 441 n.
454 barbarism (Roheit): and state of nature,
atonement: dogma of, 182, 349; 31-3,280; and morality, 142,495;
reflective and loving, 346-55 and German freedom, 450 n.;
aufheben, Aufhebung: H's use of, 191; defined, 463
of reflection, 306, 308, 396-7; of BARDILI, Christoph Gottfried (1761-
moral law, 339, 340 n.; oflegal right, 1808): course at Tiibingen, 72, 74,
34 2 81, 84-5
Aufkliirung. See Enlightenment baron: as self made, 425-7, 438; voice
Augsburg: confession, 7, 235; peace, of his people, 450, 453 n.; as
439-40 ,46 5 personality, 463; relation to whole,
Ausschuss: powers and policies, 41 9-2 I, 464. See also nobility
4 27,4 2 9 Basle, Council of, 89 n.
AUSTEN, Jane (1775-1817), 151 Bastille, 444
Austria: H's attitude to, xxx, 473; BATTEUX, Charles (17 I 3-80) : Einleitung
toleration in, 465; and Reich, 466, in die schonen Wissenschaften ex-
467 n., 471; Constitution praised, cerpted, 48 n., 53
468,472,473; defeat of, 476-7 BAUMGARTEN, Alexander Gottlieb
AUTENRIETH, Johann Christoph Fried- (1714-62): theory of being, 309 n.,
rich (1770-92): at Gymnasium, 10, 3 I 6 n.; aesthetic theory, 322 n.
62 n.; at Tlibingen, 61 n., 62 n., BAUMGARTEN, Siegmund Jakob (1706-
86 57): Compendium, 89 n.
AUTENRIETH, Johann Heinrich Ferdi- BAUR, Ferdinand Christian (1792-
nand (1772-1835), 62 n. 1860), 93 n.
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 537
BAZ, Karl Friedrich (1764-1808): Beziehung(en): of family, 291 n.; of
Ueber das Petitionsrecht, 431 n.; life, 354 n., 394; within organism,
conspiracy, 433 n. 384-7; in dialectic, 390
beatitudes: interpreted, 204, 337 Bildung: H's, 2-7; H's interest in,
beautiful soul: fate of, xxvii-xxviii, 4-7, 43-7; and enlightenment, 19-
345, 353-5; Montesquieu as, 345- 20, 33; in Greece, 37, 39, 75-'7,
6 n.; overleaps nature, 381, 441 167,185,254, 5II; in Turkey, 41-3,
beauty: H's early concern, 52; and 56 n.; of humanity, 104-5 n., 125,
morality, 86, 353-5, 381, 482-5, 146 n., 157, 485, 496-7; of Volk,
489; in Greek ideal, 134n., 187, 161-7,490; of Germany, 167, 457,
376; in religion, 144, 286 n., 298, 458; Christianity and, 172-3,222-4,
356-7, 392-3, 396-7; as highest 505 ; State concern, 222-3 ; catechetic
Idee, 252-3, 51 I; in social relations, method,247
291 n., 371, 374, 375, 489; object of BILFINGER, Christian Ludwig (1770-
love, 324 1850): friend of Holderlin, 58, 60,
BECK, Adolf: on the Lokation, 82-3 n.; 60-1 n.; transfers to law, 58, 59 n.,
on Leutwein, 98 n.; on political 60 n.; date of release, 61 n.; letter
club, 114 n.; on Fichte's influence, to Niethammer, 88 n.
188 n.; referred to, ix, 58-70 nn. BILLING, Andre (b. c. 1770): friend of
passim, 106 n., II8 n., 131 n., 245 n., H, 97; patriot, 106 n.
431-8 nn. passim blasphemy: of Jesus, 355, 362, 363 n.
BECK, Lewis White, 307 n., 342 n. blood: as life principle, 279, 356
Begriff. See concept body: and soul, 125; and spirit, 167,
being (Sein): absolute and dependent, 377, 378 n., 383 n.
303-4, 513-15; and Vereinigung, BOEK, August Friedrich (1739-1815):
304,314,513; and possibility, 307, in H's curriculum vitae, 57, 77-8;
314-17; object of faith, 310, 512; thesis for Magisterexamen, 62 n.,
and Verbindung, 515-16 72, 85, 86; course on moral philo-
BEISSNER, Friedrich, 510 n., SIS n. sophy, 73, 85 i influence on H,
belief: and religious faith, 225-6, 312- 78-9
21,512-15; and Vorstellung, 312 n., BOHUN family, 384
3 13-14,5 12 , SIS bondage. See lordship and bondage
bellum omnium, 383 n. book-learning. See Buchstabenmensch,
BENTLEY, Richard (1662-1742), 153 n. literalism
BERINGER, Walter, 512 n. BORGIA, Cesare (1476-1507): H's
Berlin, University of, 260 n. verdict, 470 n.
Berlinische M onatsschrift: excerpted, botany: study of, 63, 67, 97, 102,
18, 55 125 n., 408 n.; Holderlin's interest
BERNARD (student from Montbeliard), in, 105 n.; abstract system in, 130,
68 n. 4 84
Berne, Canton of: H's life in, 154-9, bourgeoisie: H's attitude to, 20-1,
174 n., 244, 258, 262-6, 269-'70, 4 29-3 1, 432-3, 444, 472; life of,
341; H's criticism, 158, 416, 417 n., 140-1 n. See also burghers
423 n.; finances, study of, 158, breach. See Trennung
233 n., 244 n., 252, 417, 418; and BRECHT, Martin: on Repetition, 73 n.;
Vaud,158-9,421- 2 referred to, 81 n., 90 n., 162 n.
BETZENDOERFER, Walter: H's botanical brethren of the Free Spirit, 231
studies, 63 n.; atmosphere of Stift, BREYER, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich
70 n.; Tiibingen lecture lists, 73 n., (1771-1818), 107 n.
89 n. ; on Rosler, 79-80; on British constitution. See England
Pfleiderer, 81; on H's testimonial, Brockhaus Conversations-Lexicon: bio-
153 n.; referred to, 73-109 nn. graphical sketch of H, 85 n., 153 n.
passim BRUEGGEMAN, Fritz, 13 n.
 ANALYTICAL INDEX
BRUFORD, vValter Horace, 421 n. 367-8, 509; essential and external,
BRUNK, Richard Franz Philipp (1729- 148-9, 396, 502-4; as category,
1803): Sophocles excerpted, 47 172 n., 178; Greek, 246-8; Catholic,
Buchstabenmensch: concept, 140, 494; 263; private and public, 509-10
philosopher as, 253 CHAMLEY, Paul: on Steuart, 434 n.
Bund: at Tubingen, II4n., 246, 248; chance (Zufall): in history, 22 n.; in
as object of avoidance, 264 n. politics, 452, 453, 459 n.
burgher(s): and barons, 438-9; accu- charity: ideal of, 166, 295, 368-9; fate
mulative, 464, 472; representation of, 328, 333-4, 39 2-3
of, 468, 475 CHARLEMAGNE (742-814) 467 n., 508
BURKHARDT, Frederick H., 295 n. cheerfulness: H's, 2, 258, 270
BUTLER, Samuel (1612-80): Hudibras, chess: H's love of, 10
17 8 CHESTERFIELD, Lord (1694-1773), 340
childhood: of Volh, 165, 166, 167-8;
Calvinism: praised, 224 n., 417 n. of spirit, 366-8, 393
CAMPE, Joachim (1746-1818): Kleine CHISHOLM, Roderick M., 400 n.
Seelenlehre filr Kinder, excerpted, Chivalry, Age of: childhood of German
27, 50, 54; Robinson der Jungere, Geist, 166 n.; putative essay on,
50 n.; Theophron, 50 n., 125 n., 232 n.; H's comments, 236 n.
137 n., 139,490,493 CHRISTENSEN, Darrel E., 94 n., 295 n.
Canaan: Jews in, 281, 296 n. Christianity: and enlightenment, xvii,
caprice (Willkilr): and Sollen, 448-9; 23 n., 24,35,77,101,105-12,168-9,
and Wille, 453-4; in politics, 459 n. 182-6; as folk religion, xxiii, 126-7,
card-playing, 68 n. 145, 172, 233-4, 252-3, 409-16,
CARRIER, Jean-Baptiste (1756-94): 473, 509; spirit of, xxv-xxvii, 228,
execution of, 426 n. 285-6, 327-8, 33 2-79, 39 2-3, 395;
CARSTEN, Francis Ludwig, 439 n. fate of, xxvii (see fate); other world-
CART, Jean-Jacques (1748-1813): liness of, xxviii, 167, 179, 216, 345,
Lettres confidentielles, H's translation, 374,434-6, 510; as positive religion,
158-9, 233 n., 244, 252, 418-19, 91-6, 207, 212- 19, 23 1-43, 297-8,
421-7; H's omissions, 426 n.; and 302, 3 12 , 317- 19, 379, 402.-6, 407,
Wurttemberg pamphlet, 431 n.; H's 413; forgiveness in, 117-18, 201,
notes, 435 n. 202 n., 353-6, 364; constancy of
casuistry: mistake of, 339-41,497 doctrine, 128, 483; complexity of,
categories: categorical imperative, 206- 121,128; education in, 134-7, 162-
7, 325, 380; of pure reason, 211, 5; and canons of folk religion, 145,
293-4; dynamic and mathematical, 172-82,234,323; as private religion,
241-2. See also concept 146,171 n., 172-3,218-19,235-6 n.,
Catholicism: catechism, I I; Mass, I I, 345, 412, 505, 509; historical
16, 148 n., 505, 508; priesthood, 16; character, 147, 172, 182-3, 268,
H biased against, 2I, 26, 43; as folk 502; melancholy character, 147-8,
religion, 121, 128; satisfies Phantasie, 149; sacrifice in, 148-9, 219; inver-
145 n., 148 n.; myth in, 236, sion of values in, ISO, 183; and
243 n.; ceremony in, 263 authority, 166, 207; as public
CATO UTICENSIS, M. Porcius: suicide religion, 166, 172-3,218-19,409-16;
of, 164 n., 235 n., 239, 240, 471 n. death in, 167; miracle in, 167 n.,
causality: sphere of Verstand, 137, 199-203, 216-17, 269; and pagan
376-7; order of nature, 357, 358 religion, 179, 182-3, 230 n., 232-3,
celibacy: of clergy, 397 234-43, 254-5, 300, 395; as rational
censorship: moral, 147, ISO, 166, religion, 193-207, 213, 215, 268;
223-4,5 02 founding of, 207, 215, 256, 276-7,
ceremonial: in positive faith, I I 1-12, 285-6, 371-2; as virtue religion,
II8 n., 129-30, 173, 301-2, 322 n., 212-1 7; Phantasie in, 234-44,254-5,
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 539
269;10vein,256,269,295-6,327-8, comfort: in private religion, 144-5,
329-30, 375-6; as absolute religion, 14 6, 48r, 497, 498-9, 501
330, 390- 2 communion: of primitive church, 368-
Christian theology: H's attitude, xix, 9; as God, 376; and life, 378; poli-
57-8,67, 8r, 153 n., 157; study of tical, 426; and civil society, 434-5
xx, 23-6, 88-96; enlightening of, communism: Christian, 166,219,345,
23-6, 109-12, 186-234; and critical 368-9, 374; impossible in folk
philosophy, 81 n., 92-3, 187-9, religion, 173, 223, 345, 510
194-209; in H's sermons, 109-12, compendia: use at Tubingen, 72, 89 n.,
117-19; criticism of, 168-9, 177- 90 n., 91-2, 162 n.; morally useless,
82. See also Tubingen School 135, 13 6-7, 224, 4 8 9, 490, 493
CHRISTLIEB, W. C. G. (Stijtler) , concept (Begriff): in Wunsch, 24-5;
60n. Inbegriff, 52 n., 289; application of,
Church: and State, xxix (see Church 104,105,106 n., 186,231,254,279,
and State); visible, 91, III-12, 288; types of, 121-2n., 241-2;
130-1 n., ISS; invisible, 98-9 n. moral and theoretical, 291-4; as
(see Invisible Church); universal, possible being, 314-16, 513; and
130-1 n., 141, 495; function of, mastery, 317 n., 318; law as, 336-7,
170-1; distinguished from religion, 342; and experience, 34-7-51, 363,
230 n.; voluntary association, 220-3; 400-1,452-3,476-7; of life, 386-8;
and living whole, 415, 434, 459 n. of State, 453-4, 458
Church and State: problem, xxix, 251, concerts: H's love of, II n., 13, 264
252 n.; proper relation, 147 n., 170- concrete universal: origins of, xviii,
I, 221, 251, 403 n., 413-16, 433-4, 38, 39-40 n.; and abstract, 96, 121-
439 n., 459 n.; alliance of, 157,184, 2 n.; as sovereign power, 444, 463.
186, 212; separation of, 170-1, See also abstraction, dialectic
220-3, 439-40, 465, 466, 469; conduct record, Hegel's: at Tubingen,
relation prefigured, 280 11.; history 67,97
of, 417,418 n., 454; crucial problem conscience: as voice of God, 94, 95,
for Reich, 4-73 109; freedom of, 171, 222-4, 238,
CICERO, M. Tullius: Ad]amiliares, 47, 465,469,509; bad, 294, 316 n., 349,
53, 54; excerpt on virtues, 51, 53; 363; defined, 485
Somnium Scipionis excerpted, 52; consciousness: natural and artificial,
De officiis, 53 n., 54; Ad Atticum, 76; reflective, 314-16, 323 n., 327-9,
53 n.; excerpt on Stoics, 54; De 366-7,373,375-6,378,383-8; love
natura deorum, 73, 78; referred to, as, 352; and ignorance, 440-2, 448-
II,3 1 50; political, 445
civil society: and Cemiit of man, 435-6 consensus gentium: escape from Ver-
classes, socio-economic: to be elimi- nun]t, 219-20 n.
nated (1794), 157, 169; source of Consistory (Stuttgart): H's examina-
faction, 238-9, 444; in the Church, tion (1793), 57, 69, II7 n., II8-19,
241; accepted (1800), 397, 425-6. 154-5; records, 63 n.
See also estates constitution: British, xxix, 419-20,
CLEMENT XIV (Pope) (1705-74), 90 423-4, 425, 430, 435 n.; of "Vurt-
CLESS, Heinrich David von (1741- temberg, xxx, 427-3 I ; and education,
1820): H's philosophy teacher, 9, 85 n., 146 n.; and Volksgeist, 149-
I I ; relations with H, 66 51, 162,412,413,414-15, 506-7;
coercion, legal: prerogative of State Greek, ISO (see polis) ; of Berne, 157,
alone, I'll, 220-1; limits of, 222-4, 158-9; as moral entity, 171, 173,
335,4 14- 15 25 1, 4 15, 433-4-, 509; despotic and
College of Cities: new House of free, 183-4, 250-2, 510-11; of
Commons, 475 Israel, 275-6; of Egypt, 276, 283.
Collegia. See Kollegien See also State
540 ANALYTICAL INDEX
constitutive categories: and regulative, deism: Lebret's course, 88, 89 n., 90
242 democracy: 'democrats' in Stift, 64 n.;
contradiction. See antinomy critique of, 429-34; ideal of, 475 n.
conviviality: H's, 68, 86; Kant and H DEMOSTHENES: H's study of, 13;
on, 340-1 excerpted, 55
CONZ, Karl Philipp (1762-1827): as Denkendorf (cloister-school), 60 n.
Stiftler, 70 n., 8 I; influence on DESCARTES, Rene (1596-1650): soul
H6lderlin, 74 n. and body, 125; and rationalism,
copulation: as Vereinigung, 307-9, 241-2
394; as Verbindung, 385; and birth, despotism: enlightened, xxx; and
35 2-3, 393, 394 superstition, 43; spirit of, 94, 129;
CORIOLANUS, 134, 488 of throne and altar, 157, 165-6,
cosmopolitanism, 165 n., 299, 302 178-9, 184, 220 n.; Oriental, 279,
covenant: in Judaism, 219 n., 274, 283, 284, 468; theocratic, 285; of
279, 284, 299, 374; in positive Reason, 346; parliamentary, 424-5,
religion, 299-304 43 0
Creation, 250, 316, 510 DEUCALION: and Greek history, 274,
creed: work of Verstand, 129,241,247 279, 413 n.
CREWE, Sir Ranulphe (1558-1646), devil(s): superstition, 16, 161; casting
38 4 out, 199-203; power of, 240; as
Critical Philosophy, the: Storr's use thorn in flesh, 262, 263
of, 91, 92-3; Diez' interpretation, D'HoNDT, Jacques: on H's Masonic
98 n.; Stift controversy, 108-9, connections, 63 n., 105 n., 156 n.,
174 n., 186-9; H'sconversion, 119 n. 244 n.; on Rousseau, 245 n.; on
See also FICHTE, KANT plague of 1720, 276 n.; on Mercier,
CruTO (friend of Socrates), 15 345-6 n.
Crucifixion, the, xxvii, xxviii, 203, dialectic: origin of, 388--91
372-5 dialects: H's interest in, 49, 160
Crusades, the, 166, 302, 454 Diary. See Chronological Index 5 and
curriculum vitae: H's, 57, 77 77
CUSTINE, Adam Philippe, Comte de dictatorship: at Rome, xxx; of the
(1740-93), 114 n., 432 bourgeoisie, 429 n., 432-3
custom: morality and, 213-15, 423; Diet, Imperial, 425,460,461,465,475,
bondage of, 285-6, 442-3; as bond 477 n.
of Volh, 438; and law, 450-3 DIEz, Karl Immanuel (1766-96): in-
fluence, xxiii, 81 n., 99 n., 107-8 n.,
dancing: at H's Magistet-ium, 88 n.; 231 n.; career, 98 n.; H's attitude
the Ball of 1791, 97; H's love of, to, 104 n., 175 n.; mentioned, 94 n.
263; religious, 397 dignity, human: nature of, 194, 195;
DANTE ALlGHIERI (1265-1321), 147 n. ideal of, 198,200; in Judaism, 276,
DAVID, King: and shewbread, 335, loss of, 299-300, 302
373 n. DILTHEY, Wilhelm: on Hand Klop-
death: sacramental moment, 122-3, stock, 41 n.; on German Theseus,
481; as inorganic realm, 160, 377-8, 47 6
382-3; Greek view, 167, 377; DINAH: ravishing of, 277, 283
Christian view, 167; moral, 202, DIOGENES of Sinope: and Jesus, 164_
350, 353; of patriot, 227, 260; of 173 n.
God, 304; and love, 306-7; and DIOTIMA of Mantineia: on love, 307-
resurrection, 365-6, 372-3, 378 8 nn., 378
Decalogue, 126, 288-9, 301 n. Directory, the, 420
defence: origin of State, 452 divine service: literal and spiritual,
definitions: H's collection, 5 In., 52, 111-12, 139, 179, 198, 492
53 divorce, 342-3
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 541
DOEDERLEIN, Johann Christoph (1746- EHEMANN (Stiftler), II6 n.
92): Institutio theologiae, 89 n. election: contingently representative,
DOEDERLEIN, Johann Ludwig, 88 n., 427, 429-34, 452; bourgeois prin-
99 n. ciple, 468; rational use of, 475
dogmatic theology. See Christian elements: inorganic, 383, 385-6
theology, Tiibingen School Eleusis, 231, 246, 247, 248, 269, 286
dogmatism: Fichte's, 187-9 Eleusis: significance of, xxv, 187 n.,
DROZ, Jacques: on H's Wiirttemberg 244-8, 266, 294 n.; myth in, xxv,
pamphlet, 420 n., 429-30 n., 433 n. 256, 264; Bund in, 114 n., 248; not
Ducal Library (Stuttgart), 9, 48 n. a letter, 244; and historical frag-
DUSCH, Johann Jakob (1725-87): Briefe ments, 271 n.
zur Bildung des Geschmacks excerp- Elysium, 192 n.
ted, 15, 48, 54 EMERICH, Friedrich (1773- I 802),432 n.
DUTTENHOFER, Jacob Friedrich (1768- empires: historic importance, 468
1823): Stuttgart walks with H, 10; empiricism: H's antipathy, 312 n., 317
at Tiibingen, I I; in Kant group, ENDEL, Nanette (c. 1775-1840/1):
107 n. relations with H, 262-4, 266;
duty: conflicts of, 144-5,339-41, 347, mentioned, I I n.
497; of belief, 236; and autonomy, ENGEL, Johann Jakob (1741-1802):
238; and inclination, 294, 295 n., Ideen zu einer Mimik, 49 n.
336-7, 342; to self, 341, 344; to England: constitution of, xxix, 423-4,
others, 341 ; reflective concept, 425, 430, 435 n., 468; political his-
344 n., 345, 347; and feeling, 413-15 tory, 36, 235, 254; and Wiirttem-
berg, 419-20; and colonies, 423-4;
Earthly City: and Kingdom of God, and Germany, 461, 467
37 1 €V J(at 7Tav: evolution of, xxi, 97-105,
Earth Mother, 150, 151, 246-8, 256, 408 n.; Judaic concept of, xxvi;
264, 274, 506 waterfall image, 160; and Frankfurt
Easter, 248, 269 theory, 294 n., 316 n., 318, 324
EBEL, Johann Gottfried (1764-1830), enlightenment: earliest reflections, 12,
244 n. 16-22,28; practical ideal of, 17,21,
EBERHARD, Johann August (1739- 24, 25, 43-4; theoretical ideal of,
18°9): excerpt on Enlightenment, 17, 21-2, 25; learned and vulgar,
18 n., 5 I, 55; Theorie der sch6nen 17-20, 255, 44[, 490-1, 511; in
Wissenschaften, 49 n. Greek religion, 33-5; stages in, 86;
ECKHART, Johannes (c. 1260-1327): of Christian doctrine, 101, 105-12,
excerpts, 230, 23 I n. 140,212-13,268; work of Verstand,
eclectic: Has, 69, 80 136-40, 168-9, 489-95, 498; endless
economics: H's studies, xxix, 158,416, process, 137; destructive aspect,
417 n., 423 n., 434-6; realm of Not, 138-9, 492; letter and spirit in,
473 140-1,148-9,493-4,497-8,499; as
Eden, Garden of, 274 n., 280 reflective, 334-6
education. See Bildung, Volkserzieher Enlightenment, the: Socrates in, xvii,
Ego: might of, 39 n., 219-20; theory 15-16; rationalism of, xvii-xviii, 26,
of, 189-94, 291-2, 294; H accepts 95,195; Storr's opposition to, xviii,
theory, 210,211,250, 510; not in 91-3; attitude to Jesus, xxiii, 95,
Eleusis, 248; God as, 300, 366; in 181; H as critic of, xxvi, 124-5,
H6lderlin, 5 I 6 140, 242; political theory of, xxx,
egoism: origin of, 143-4; spirit of, 43-4; H's heritage from, 3-4, 6, 26,
184,281-2, 301 79, 212; complexity of, 6, 26-7;
Egypt: enlightenment in, 18, 22; eudaemonism of, 124, 242; revolu-
Greek debt to, 27, 28 n.; Jews in, tionaryaspect, 168-9, 184,268,441;
275, 276, 283; constitution of, 276 German, 169,226 n.
542 ANALYTICAL INDEX
epic: readings on, 4811.,49 FABER, Jonathan Heinrich (1771-
EPICTETUS: Enchiridion translated, 48, 1835), 56 n.
54,238 n. facuItie5: hierarchy of, 84 n., 176, 324,
equality: H's attitude to, xxx, 425, 326-9
444,453 n., 468; legal, 171,453 n.; fairies: belief in, 16
ideal of, 255, 256, 512; Jewish and faith: importance of, I, 16-17 (see
Greek, 276, 286; and love, 295 n., Bildung); and reason, 92-3, 179-80,
29 8 , 30 4 212,215-16,227,241,312,365-6;
equilibrium: natural and moral, 349- in Jesus Christ, 109-1 I, 178, 179-
51 86, 215-19, 233, 354-6, 399; and
Erinyes, 351, 353 n. forgiveness, 117, 227, 354-5; posi-
ERNEST!, Johann August (1707-81): tive, 220, 225-8,231-2,287, 291-2,
compendium, 89 n. 293, 296-304, 310-21, 405-6, 5 12-
esprit de corps: of German army, IS; rational, 220, 365, 389-90, 391;
4 60 and authority, 223-4; living, 287,
Essenes, 285-6, 334 n. 365; and love, 310; and being, 310-
ESSICH, J. G: Einleitung zur allge- 22, 512-15; definition of, 311-12,
meinen weltlichen Historie, 7 n. 512; as trust, 318-19, 365, 514; and
estate(s): in social theory, xxx, 468; life, 351-2, 354-6, 358. See also
ongm of, 438-9; growth into fetish-faith
State, 452 FALKENHEIM, Hugo, 159 n.
Estates Assembly: as organ of Volk, Fall, the, 201 n., 290
425-6, 429-30 n., 475; in Austria FALLOT, Gustave Frederic (c. 1770--?),
and Prussia, 474. See also Diet 97
ethics: and physics, 187, 349-50. See family relations: in Judaism, 283, 290,
also autonomy, heteronomy 291 n.; husband-wife, 309, 342-3,
Eucharist: as outward ceremony, I I I; 352 n., 369; parent-child, 309,
as essential practice, 148 n., 219; 352 n., 358, 360 ; in primitive church,
institution of, 219, 356-7; as religious 368-9, 374-5
act, 356-7, 373, 392 fanaticism: Christian, xxviii, 166, 374;
Eudaemonism: criticized, 124, 136, Jewish, 277, 278; positive, 294 n.
242 fancy. See Phantasie
Eumenides, 350, 351 fasting: ceremonial, 133, 198, 205,
EURIPIDES: preparation for, 47, 55; 344
Conz' course on, 74 n. fate (Fatum): proper attitude to, 147,
Europe: spirit of, 454, 464 160,273,275; and reason, 226, 227,
evil: H's theory of, 144 n.; dialectic of, 228 n. ; m Tiibingen fragment,
268 501
excerpt collection: beginnings, 4-5, fate (Schicksal): of Christianity, xxvii,
43; Stuttgart period, 14-30; classi- 327-8, 33 1, 332 n., 333-4, 346-55,
fication system, 22 n., 26-7 n., 50 n.; 369-79, 381-2, 395; in Stuttgart
topics and organization, 42 n., 47- essays, 33; reconciliation with, 191-
52; mss. and reports, 44-7; Tilbin- 2, 228, 348-51; and autonomy,
gen period, 46, 49-50 n., 5 In., 80, 237-8; of Jews, 272-86, 287-90,
83, 175-6; chronology, 49-50 n., 395,475-6; theory of, 272-5,327-8;
52-6, 80. See also Chronological first occurrence, 282 n.; in Holder-
Index lin, 291 n.; alien character of, 327-8,
Exodus, the, 272 353; of religious love, 327-8, 345,
expiation: formal, 148-9. See also 369-79; and punishment, 348-5 I ;
forgiveness of Jesus, 370-2, 375-6, 381-2;
external world: as opposite, 303-4; violence against, 441-3, 476; of
belief in, 312 n., 313-14, 319-- Germany, 439, 444, 464, 470-1,
21 475-6; ofItaly, 439, 444,464, 47 0 - 1 ;
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 543
of 'German freedom', 465-9; of 186-9, 250, 25 1- 2, 453, 454-6 ;
France, 467 n., 469-70; in Tiibingen H6lderlin and, 108, 156, 187-8.
fragment, 484, 487 190 n., 259, 294 n., 312 n., 515-16;
fatelessness: a dream, 333; ideal of rational religion in, 126, 128, 212,
love, 369; fate of, 375 228 n., 398, 399,406; Jena lectures,
Fates, the, 286 n. 156, 252 n.; vVissenschaftslehre
fear: in Greek religion, 32-3; of God, (1794), 188,515 n.; Bestimmung des
133, 226, 291-2, 296--7, 301 n.; and Gelehrten, 188; and Spinoza, 189-
hostility, 296-7 90, 2I1; Ego theory, 189-91, 248,
FEDER, Johann Georg Heinrich (1740- 310-1 In.; Atheismusstreit, 209,
1821): Neuer Emil, excerpts, 4 n., 210 n.; Grundlage des Naturrechts,
17 n., 24, 26, 27 n., 29 n., 50 n., 51, 251-2; influence on Sinclair, 259-
53; compendium, 79; in B.'s Psycho- 60; Anstoss, 3 14 n.; Appellation an
logie, 175 das Publikum, 398 n.; Bestimmullg
feeling: and reason, 131-2, 169-70, des M enschen, 400; Geschlossene
234, 485; no authority, 139 n.; Handelstaat, 455 n.; mentioned, 34
spontaneity of, 224; higher, 229; finances: of Berne, 158, 233 n., 244 n.,
religious, 243, 411-15; love as, 252, 417, 418; feudal and modern,
304-5; Trennung of, 319-20, 515 453; of Reich, 457, 458, 460-1;
fencing: H practised, 97 control by Commons, 475
FERGUSON, Adam (1723-1816): influ- FINDLAY, John Niemeyer, x
ence on Garve, 46, 51 n.; Principles finite . See infini te
of Moral Philosophy, 50-1 n. FINK, Johann Christian Friedrich
Fesseln: H's use, 85, 129 n., 216 n., (1770-1844): friendship with H,
219 n., 222 n., 223 62 n., 68, 86, 97 n.; in reading group,
festivals: Christian, 129, 484; Greek, 85 n., 98; political club, 113 n.,
129 n., 134 n., 149, 484, 505 114 n.
fetish-faith: in folk religion, 121,396; FLATT, Johann Friedrich (1759-1821):
to be minimized, 141,145,410,495, H studied under, 57, 77-8, 88; his
499, 504; of positive sect, 214. See courses, 72, 73, 74, 83, 84 n., 85 n.,
also literalism 89 n., 98, 107 n., I18, 174, 175,
feudalism: communal life in, 141 n.; 176 n.; his views, 78, 80 n., 93-4.
origins of, 438-9, 450, 463; deca- See also Tiibingen School
dence of, 439, 443-4, 44 6-7, 450, FLATT, Karl Christian (1772-1843),
451, 458, 474; and modern state, 107 n.
450, 453, 460, 463, 466, ~,68; de- FLECHSIG, Rolf, 62 n., 65 n., 71 n.,
veloped form, 450-2, ",58, 468-9; 72 n.
H's sympathy for, 453; finances of, Flood, the: Judaic myth, 271, 272,
453,458,474; in Russia, 453; and 273-4,278,279,281 n., 290; Greek
European unity, 454 myth, 273-4, 279-80, 295
FEUERBACH, Ludwig (1804-72): H folk-religion: first canon, xxi, xxii,
anticipates, 39911. xxiii, 144, 145--7, 172-3,213,233-4,
FrcHTE, Immanuel Hermann (1797- 243, 323, 328, 402, 410-13, 423 n.,
1879),400 n. 499-502; second canon, xxi, xxii,
FICHTE, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814): xxv, xxviii, 144, 145, 147-9, 173,
influence on H, xxi, 129,132,190-1, 234,236-7,239,242,328,402,409-
194-5,231; and German revolution, 13,502-4,509; Christianity as, xxiii,
65, 169; Kritik aller Offenbarung, 172-3, 233-4, 25 2-3, 409-16, 509;
98 n., 108, 1I6-17, I19, 129, 169 n., and public religion, xxiv, 126-8,
187-8, 225 n., 329; influence on 483; as ideal of harmony, xxiv-xxv,
Schelling, 100, 186-90; Tiibingen 329, 391-3, 395-7; third canon,
visit, 108, 116, 119 n.; H's critical xxiv, xxviii-xxix, 33, 145, 149, 345,
reactions, 108, 129 n., 132, 138 n., 409-13,504-7; principle of love in-
544 ANALYTICAL INDEX
folk-religion (cont.): See also autonomy, moral freedom,
xxv-xxvi, 296-303; in Stuttgart political freedom
essays, 31-5,41; and enlightenment, Freedom Tree: mythical, 63, 115 n.
34 (see first canon); concept of, I I 6, freemasonry: influence on H, 105 n.,
121, 122 n., 126, 127, 128; positive 114 n., 244 n.; H's connections,
aspect of, 138, 287, 491-2; and 156 n., 244 n.
private religion, 141, 144-5; sacri- French newspapers: read in Stift, 63,
fice in, 148-9, 395-6; concern of 113
lawgiver, 178; founding of, 255, French Revolution: significance of,
292-5, 5 I2; hedonism as, 300-2; xxix, 169, 473-4; reaction in Stift,
temple worship in, 391-3, 396-7, 58, 63-5, 74 n., 97, 105-6, 113-17,
409 n. 154; H's interest in, 64-5, 97,104-6,
'Folk-Religion and Christianity': 115-16, 156-7; influence on H, 397,
Nohl's title, 119; criticized, 121 4 16 , 453; influence in Germany,
forgiveness: TUbingen sermon on, 420-1,440; fate of, 426 n.
117; in Life of Jesus, 201, 202n.; FREUD, Sigmund, 282
problem of, 215 n., 227-8, 320; FRIEDRICH EUGEN, Duke of Wiirttem-
solution, 202 n., 332 n., 333, 353, berg (1732-97): his policy, 420-1;
354-6; limit of, 363-4; fate of, 369- his duty, 428; mentioned, xxx
71 friendship: as Gesinnung, 341, 343 n.;
FORSTER, Johann Georg Adam (1754- and love, 351, 368-9, 371; Oriental
94): at Mainz, xxx, 432, 475 n.; H's concept, 356; political, 371, 414-15
study of, 183 n. FUHRMANS, Horst: on political club,
Fox, Charles James (1749-1806): on 113 n.; on letter of Nov. 1800,
Wiirttemberg, 419; H cites, 430; 440 n.; referred to, 74 n., 89 n.,
Speeches, 430 n.; excerpt, 477 n. 176 n., 209 n., 249 n., 398 n.,
'Fragments of Historical Studies': 510 n.
dating, 158, 232 n., 236 n., 238- Furies, the, 150, 350, 351, 353 n.
9 nn., 256 n., 271, 417-18; Schmerz
in, 499 n. GABLER, Georg Andreas (1786-1853):
France: Republic, 432, 456, 471-2; on H's hypochondria, 265 n.
ancien regime, 452, 468, 469; and GANGANELL!. See CLEMENT XIV
Germany, 461, 469, 476; and GARVE, Christian (1742-98): and con-
Teutonic Europe, 467 n., 469 n. See crete universal, xviii, 36-8; on
also French Revolution enlightenment, 17; Priifung der
Frankfurt: H's move to, 244, 258-9; Fahigkeiten, 27, 36-8, 50, 55, 130 n.,
'unhappy', 259, 261, 270; Sinclair's 140 n.; essay on poetry, 35-6, 37-
invitation, 260; H's life in, 261-5, 40, 56; definition of abstraction,
266 37 n., 40 n.; on language, 46; con-
FREDERICK I of Prussia (1657-1713), cept of progress, 75 n., 76
462 GEBHARD, bp. of Cologne (10 cent.),
FREDERICK II, Emperor (1194-1250), 71 n.
135, 489 Gediichtnis: in religion, 130, 180,484,
FREDERICK II (the Great) of Prussia 487, 488
(1712-86): H attacks, 456; defiance Gegenstand: and Objekt, 365; antinomy
of Reich, 466; and Machiavelli, of,393-4
47 0 Geist: translation of, 240 n. See spirit
FREDERICK-WILLIAM (the Great Elec- GELLERT, Christian Furchtegott (17 I 5-
tor) (1620-88), 462 69): 'Der Christ', 135,489
FREDERICK-WILLIAM II of Prussia Gemeingeist. See Volksgeist
(1744-97), 432 Gemiit: salvation of, 435, 473; in
freedom: of thought, 70, 223; of Tiibingen fragment, 485, 500
choice, 218-19, 222; of the will, 400. general will. See ROUSSEAU
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 545
Geneva: H visits, 159, ZZ4 n., 416-17; 183 n., 186 n., 208; as enlightener,
and Greek cities, 224 n. 212; mentioned, 157
genius: political, 413 Gironde: H's sympathy with, 63 n.,
GEORGE I (of England) (1660-1727): 114 n.
in German Diet, 461 GLAUCON (brother of Plato), 505 n.
GEORGII, Eberhard Friedrich (1757- GLOCKNER, Hermann: emendation of
1830): defender of enlightenment, Tagebuch, 8 n.
66, 67 n.; and Swabian Republic, GOCK, Johanna Christiane (Holderlin's
433 n.; mentioned, 71 n. mother) (1748-1828), 58 n., 59,
German: poetry, 36, 40-1, 235, 254, 60 n., 83 n., 95, 98, 154 n., ISS n.,
443; language, 49, 76, 159-60 43 6-7
German culture: alienation of, 36,40, GOCK, Karl (Holderlin's half-brother)
41, 85 n., 236 n., 268-9 n. (1776-1849),104-5 n., 106 n., 120n.,
'German freedom': and American 43 1 ,43 2
democracy, 426 n.; restoration of, God: as Lord, xxvi, 31-2, 226, 240,
429-30 n., 472-3, 474; before Land- 243,276,279,281-6,290-2,296-7,
friede, 438, 450-1, 467-8; after 299-304, 3 19, 334-6 , 33 8 , 357-8 ,
Landfriede, 439, 451; failure of, 359,398; as Father, xxvi, 199, 3 19,
463-4, 4 6 5-6 353,357,360,367,394; as iVKUt1TUV,
German history: alienated from cul- 25-6,100-3,318; anthropomorphic,
ture, 36,40, 41, 85n.; alienated 31-2, 133; as moral postulate, 34,
from religion, 36 n., 166,235,236 n.; 86, 95, 100, 109, II2 n., 123, 125--'7,
beginning of, 274 n., 279; tables on, 133, 146, 187-94, 239, 249-50, 290,
417- 18 410, 481, 482, 486, 487, 511; as
German Revolution: expectation of, person, 95, 99-103; as World Soul,
104-5 n., 106 n., 157, 184, 209-10, 100,102-3; as Demiourgos, 102; as
473-4; philosophical nature, 169, Judge, 102, 302, 344 n., 349, 355;
184, 440--4; fate of, 442-3 Kingdom, 104 (see Kingdom of
Germany: regeneration of, xxix-xxxi, God); Jesus as, IIO, 178, 182, 183,
382,437-8,471-6; not a State, xxx, 185-6, 218, 267-8, 317, 321, 373-4,
43 8 , 444, 44 6 , 449, 45 0- 2 , 4 62 -3, 376, 396 n.; as lawgiver, II2,
466, 472; constitution of, xxx, 36, 193 n., 194; name and concept,
416, 425, 434-77; spirit of, 129, 122 n.; as incarnate, 181-3, 185-6,
149-50, 166, 464, 507; tribal, 279, 293, 294--5; in 'theological logic',
463, 464, 468 n.; legal theory of, 187-9; as transcendental Ego, 189-
450-2, 462; community of Estates, 94, 210, 21 I, 291, 398; impersonal
451; feudalism in, 457-61; and concept, 189-94,211, 366-7; Ver-
France, 469 n., 470 nunft as, 194, 198-9, 269, 335-6,
Geschichtetabellen, 90 n., 417-18 357, 359-60, 398; drawing near to,
Gesinnung: and moral law, 179, 337; 204, 224 n., 398; as incomprehen-
in Christian ethics, 221; meaning, sible, 226, 300, 316-20; perception
337; virtue as, 337 n., 338, 341-2; of, 236-7, 356-7, 392-4, 396-8; as
in Berne essays, 380, 509; In Objekt, 241-3, 282, 288-92, 365; as
Tiibingen fragment, 485, 505 love, 269, 294-6, 316-17, 321; as
GESNER,J ohann Matthias (1691-1761): thought ideal, 281-2, 315, 317,
excerpt, II, 54 349 n. ; union with, 282-3 (see
Gestalt: organic, 377; as individuality, Vereinigung) ; as harmony of peoples,
386, 387; of God (statue), 393, 396 285 n.; as synthesis, 289, 2,91-4; as
Gethsemane: agony of, 269-70 infinite subject, 289, 291; as Author
Ghibellines. See Guelphs of Nature, 302, 357; death of, 304;
ghosts: belief in, 16 as substance, 315, 357, 398; as
GIBBON, Edward (1737-94): as prag- 'living', 317, 350, 357, 359, 387-8 ;
matic historian, 8; H's study of, as pure life, 319, 352 n., 355-6, 357-
8249588 00
 ANALYTICAL INDEX
God (cant.): Kant, xx-xxi, 96, II6-17, 142, 192,
67, 386-8, 397; as holy will, 320.. 206 n., 228-9,231-2,234,238,239,
398; as Spirit, 362, 365-6, 376, 387, 323, 391; religious-aesthetic char-
394, 40.5; as Gegenstand, 365; as acter, xxi, xxv, 35, 40., 96,234,239,
religious community, 376 245-8, 252-6, 392-3, 396-7; Achaea
Goddess of Reason, xxix, 65 and Judaea, 36 n., 40, 77, 84, 96,
GOERlZ, Christian Friedrich (1738- 116-17, 236 n., 243, 273-4, 279-80,
93): teacher of H, I, 2 n. 286, 287, 296-7, 392-3, 410-15;
GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang von (1749- natural harmony in, 37, 39, 194,
1832): Wilhelm Meister, xv; Werther, 20.4, 20.6, 20.7, 224 n.; and EV Kat
13n.; Faust, 68,10.3, 2ccn.; and 7Tav, 10.4-5; H's enthusiasm for, 120.,
Holderlin, 97, 100.; 'Prometheus 122, 149-51,50.6-7; sources, 120 n.,
Ode', 100 n.; and Greek ideal, 151, 151-2, 238 n.; political character,
152; Ur-Pjlanze, 361; and German 134, 157, 170.-1, 192,227-8,237-8,
revolution, 443 251,387,40.9-16,472 ; fate of, 134 n.,
GOGEL, Johann Noe (1758-1825), 183, 234, 238-9; slavery in, 151,
259 n. 235, 452; Athens and, 152 (see
GOGEL family, 244 n., 252 n., 270 Athens); application of, 161-2, 195,
Golden Age: myth of, 274 n., 280. 247-8, 391-3, 396-7, 40.5; and
Golden Rule, 20.5-6, 213 n., 325 asceticIsm, 20.5 n. ; superior to
GONTARD, Susette (1769-1802),438 n. Christian, 329-30., 376-8, 381, 391-
GONTARD family, 244 n., 436 3; not democratic, 425-6, 473; and
Gorgons, ISO. German freedom, 468 n.
Gospel(s): of reason, xx, xxi, 26, 220; Greek religion: and canons of folk-
and Enlightenment, xxiii; preaching religion, xxi, 127 n., 145,234,328-9,
of, xxviii, 218, 367, 375; historical 410-12, SCI, 50.5-7; sacrifice in,
corruption, 166, 218-19, 404; H's xxiv, 32, 148-9, 395-6, 504; myth
attitude, 178, 182, 184, 231; H in, xxv, 167, 234-8, 243-4, 273-4,
rewrites, 194 n., 195-207; and 279-80., 295; aesthetic character,
Eleusis, 247. See also MATTHEW, xxviii, 134 n., 173, 234-40., 243,
MARK, LUKE, JOHN 245-8,254-5,298,318,328-9,376,
GOTTSCHED, Johann Christoph (170.0- 392-3, 396-7, 410-12, 509; in
66): Kern del" deutschen Sprachkunst Stuttgart essays, 31-5; and Judaism,
excerpted, 49 77, 126-7, 273-4, 279-80., 286 n.,
grace: Lebret's course, 88, 89 n.; H's 287, 296-7, 321, 392-3; as ideal
attitude, 109 n., I II-12; and salva- folk-religion, 121, 126, 127, 145,
tion, 179-80., 182; required by 321, 328-9, 376, 381 , 390.-2, 395-7,
reason, 2 I 5 n. ; in positive faith, 30.0., 410.-15; polytheism in, 127, 296,
30.1, 303, 316-21,358; and revela- 373, 414-15; atheism and, 134;
tion, 316, 317-21; in politics, 465. providence in, 147, 50.1-2; nurse of
See also forgiveness spirit, ISO, 168, 4II, 50.7; and
gratitude: as form of love, 300.-3, 30.7, Roman, 164 n.; death in, 167, 239-
358,410. n. 40.; enlightened contempt for, 179,
Greek: Stuttgart studies, 3, 6-7, 22 n., 396; no Church in, 230 n.; triumph
47-8,51,53-6,57; Tubingen stud- of Christianity, 232-3, 234-43;
ies, 47, 4 8,57,74,75-7,80,81,84, Mysteries in, 246-7, 248, 269, 392;
97; Berne studies, 232 n., 271 n.; love in, 256; oaths in, 343 n.;
Frankfurt studies, 259, 270-2 Temple in, 392-3, 396; dancing in,
Greek comedy: impiety of, 134 n., 397
146 n., 234-5 n. Greek spirit: and modern, xxii, 149-
Greek history: beginning of, 273-4 51,507; has 'flown', xxii, 151, 50.7;
Greek ideal: dominated H's develop- has not 'flown', xxv, 246-7; attitude
ment, xv, xvii-xix, 76; tension with to fate, 273, 282 n.; and Jewish.
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 547
273-4, 283 n., 286. See also Greek 22-6,51; virtue and, 86, 136, 147 n.,
ideal 178-9,191-2,227,297,301 n., 338;
Greek tragedy: H's early love, 2, 47, goal of life, 124, 482; temptation of,
48,56,63 n., 97, 226; and German, 266, 269; reward of faith, 284, 290,
40; influence of, 226, 275, 353 n. 297, 301, 302-3; of Volk, 284,
GREENE, Theodore M., 363 n. 285 n., 296
GREGOR, Mary J., 340 n., 342 n., HAPSBURG family, 454
343 n., 344 n., 345 n., 349 n., 352 n. harmony: Greek ideal, xxviii (see
GREY, Mr., 430 n. Greek ideal); Judaic ideal, 290;
GRIESINGER, Johann Jakob (1772- ideal of love, 350, 355 n.; in Chris-
183 I): translated 'Marseillaise', tian communion, 369-70,373,376;
1I5 n. ideal of Reason, 370-1; of organic
grove, sacred: symbol of Hellas, 286 n. and inorganic, 387-8; political ideal,
Guelphs and Ghibellines: German 444, 472-3; in folk-religion, 504-7
parallel, 470 'Harmony of the Gospels', 194 n., 196
guilt: of innocence, xxvii, 353-4, HAUBER, Karl Friedrich (1775-1851),
381 n.; conscientious, 363 107 n.
gunpowder: significance of, 458 HAUFF, Johann Karl Friedrich (1769-
GUSTAVUS II, ADOLPHUS of Sweden 1846), 107 n.
(1594-1631): example of true piety, HAUG (Gymnasium student, b. 1770):
134,488; his failure, 442, 467, 476 letter to, 53
'gute alte Recht', 423 n., 443-4 HAUG, Balthasar (1731-92), 4, 56 n.
GUTSCHER, Jakob Friedrich (1760- HAYM, Rudolf: on Sophiens Reise,
1834): pamphlets, 431 n. 13 n.; on H's Stuttgart researches,
Gymnasium Illustre: H's career at, 15; on \Vtirttemberg pamphlet,
Chapter I, passim; H's account of, 427 n., 428 n., 429-31; referred to,
57; and Stift, 61, 66; record at, 65 394 n., 418 n.
health, Hegel's: at Ttibingen, 63-4 n.,
HAERING, Theodor Lorenz: on H's 67, 69, 97
Stuttgart researches, 29; H's 'spiri- heart. See Herz
tual empiricism', 38; defence of Heaven: alienated concept, 24-5, 149,
Stift, 65 n., 66, 70 n.; H's Kant 166, 167, 179-80, 227, 297-8, 312,
studies, 83 n., 190 n., 193, 401; EV 3 19, 443, 50 5
Kat Trav, 101; Ttibingen fragment, Hebrew: H's knowledge of, 47, 53,
120 n.; on Enlightenment, 125, 67 n.
138-9 n.; H's vocation, 157; Hand hedonism: and rigorism, 124; as
Mendelssohn, 171 n.; H and Schil- religion, 300-2. See also eudaemon-
ler, 194 n.; on Life oj Jesus, 197 n., ism
267-8; H and Schelling, 210 n., HEGEL, Christiane Luise (sister) (1773-
21 I n.; H's theory of sects, 214 n.; 1832): reminiscences, 2, 3 n., 9 n.,
religion and Church, 230 n.; edited 50, 58, 60 n., 63 n., 66, 258, 263 n.,
Eleusis, 245 n.; fragment on love, 266; at Ttibingen ball, 59 n., 88 n.;
306 n.; Systemjragment, 383; Wtirt- visit of Matthisson, 116 n.; H's
temberg pamphlet, 427-8 n.; politi- letters, 155, 262
cal fragments, 436n., 440n., 446n.; HEGEL, Georg Ludwig (father) (1733-
referred to, 8 n., 69 n., 116 n. 99); and H's education, xix, 57, 59,
HAGAR: expulsion of, 282 n., 291 n. 69, 97; position and views, 1,43 n.,
HAMANN, Johann Georg (1730-88); 453 n.
theory of belief, 304 n., 312-13 n., HEGEL, Georg Ludwig (brother)
314 n.; Socratic Memorabilia, 312 n. (1775-1812), 2
HANLEIN, Carl Alexander (1762-1829), HEGEL, Johannes (b. c. 1550), I
193 n., 196 n. HEGEL, Maria Magdalena [Fromm]
happiness: Stuttgart reflections, 12, (mother) (1741-81), 2, 57
 ANALYTICAL INDEX
HEGEL, Marie [von Tucher] (wife) 32-3,109,133; superstitious, 148-9;
(1791-1855), 2, 264 n., 266 in Christianity, 179-80, 221; des-
HEGELMEIER, Auguste: H's love for, troys dignity, 191-2; of positive
67-8, 71, 72 n., 97, 263 n. sect, 214 n.; in positive religion, 290,
Heidelbergische Jahrbiicher (1817): H's 297, 299-304; in Judaism, 30D-l,
essay in, 420 n., 421 n., 423 n. 333, 374. See also reward
Hell: unsound concept, 109 n., 179- HEYN, Johanna Rosina (Holderlin's
80; superstition, 203; fear of, 220 n. ; grandmother) (1725-1802), 155
problem of, 227-8, 363 HEYNE, Christian Gottlob (1729-
Hellenic ideal. See Greek ideal 1812): his Virgil excerpted, 55
HEMSTERHUIS, Frans (1721-90): puta- HILLER, Christian Friedrich (1773-
tive study of, 312 n. 1819): 'patriot', 106 n., 114 n.
HENRICH, Dieter: on Leutwein, 60 n., HIPPEL, Theodor Gottlieb von (1741-
64 n., 74 n.; on H's Lokatioll, 65 n., 96): Lebenslaufe, xvi-xvii, 13 n., 98,
82 n.; on H's Psychologie, 73 n., 184
84 n., 175 n.; 8torr and Kant, 94 n.; Hirschmann-Gomerischen Stipendillm,
fV Ka, way, 101-2 n.; Kant group, 70 n.
107 n.; Frankfurt revolution, 294- historical testimony: faith in, 180,225
5n., 312n.; 'V,·teil und Seyn' , historical tradition: 'father' of Volks-
294 n., 312 n., 5 IS n. geist, 149-51, 162, 412, 509; in
Hercules: valour personified, 373 Christianity, 172 n., 173, 178-83,
HERDER, Johann Gottfried (1744- 243-4; living and dead, 186-7,
1803): H's study of, 188 n., 254, 188 n.; and freedom, 235; and myth,
271 n.; on miracle, 237 n.; influence 235 n., 237-9, 243-4, 246-8, 269;
of, 243-4, 271-2 n.; on Old Testa- and Phantasie, 243-4, 268-9; and
ment, 243 n., 271; Ideen, 271 n.; Reason, 268 n.
Gott, 271 n., 295, 317 history: of mankind, xvii (see philo-
heresy: concern of Verstand, 145-6, sophical history); H's early love, 2;
499; in Christianity, 166, 240 n.; pragmatic, 8; chance in, 27; univer-
and persecution, 242, 415; III sal, 28-9, 79; and poetry, 36, 235,
Judaism, 278, 285 n. 254-6; Frankfurt studies, 271, 288;
HERMES, Johann Timotheus (1738- beginning of, 273-4; and prophecy,
1821): Sophiens Reise, 13, 1411., 55 378-9
HERODOTUS: H's study of, II; and historical reasoning: model of ration-
'history of mankind', 28; and H's ality, 29-30
Greek ideal, 152 HOBBES, Thomas (1588-1679): Levia-
Herz: as moral guide, 24, 243; and than, 207 n.; bellum omnium, 306
Verstand, 132 n., 247, 488-9, 492; HOCEVAR, Rolf K., 220 n.
in second canon, 144, 145, 148-9, HOELDERLlN, Heinrich Friedrich
150-1,328,329,409-15,496,502-4, (father) (1736-72), 58-9
506-'7; and factual proof, 243; and HOELDERLlN, Johann Christian Fried-
mystery, 246-8; and Phantasie, 256, rich (1770-1843): Hyperion, xvii;
269; in Christianity, 269; happy his Hellenic ideal, xvii, 76, 149-
and unhappy, 371-3, 374-5, 381; 50 n., 286 n.; his poetic vocation,
religion and, 482, 486, 487; seat of xix, 59; influence on H, xxi, 48 n.,
emotions, 485; needs monotheism, 253-4, 288, 291, 294n., 312n.;
5 11 and Kant, xxiii, 85 n., 107 n.; and
HESLER, Ernst Friedrich (1771-1822): law career, 58-9, 60 n.; and 8taudlin,
expelled from Stift, 61 n., 62; at 59; friendship with H, 60-2; hatred
Jena, 62 n. of Stift, 60 n., ISS, 244 n., 258,
HESSEN-HoMBURG, Countof (Friedrich 270; dependence on H, 61, 101 n.,
V, 1748-1820), 436 258; revolutionary fervour, 63, 64;
heteronomy: transitional phase, xxiii, and 8chnurrer, 66, 70 n.; his
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 549
Magister programm, 74 n., 86; and Homburg vor der Hohe: H's memories
Conz, 8 I; and Lokation, 82-3; of,260-I
Plato studies, 84, 85 n., 98, I02 n.; homebuilding: metaphor of, I40-I n.
and Niethammer, 88 n., 253 n., HOMER: H's study of Iliad (1786),47,
291 n.; and Storr, 94-5; and £v 54; messenger of the Gods, 508;
Kat ~av, 97-9, IOI-6, 3I8; and mentioned, 13 n., 18 n., 505 n.
Spinoza, 98, 2II n., 312 n.; study of honesty: of H's letters, 26I
astronomy, I02, 103, I05; ideal of HOPF, Philipp Heinrich (I 747-1 804) :
humanity, 104-5 n., 13I n.; corre- H's Greek teacher, 9 n.; friendship
spondence with H, 107 n., 208, with H, 66; on essay of I788, 75 n.
209 n., 244 n., 252 n., 257, 258, HORACE (Q. Horatius Flaccus): H's
259 n., 270 n., 27I n., 382 n., 407 n.; study of, IO n.; Epistles, excerpted,
and Fichte, 108 (see FICHTE); final 49; mentioned, II6 n.
examinations, II 6 n., I I 8 n.; and Horen, Die, 253 n.
Machiavelli, I20 n.; and von Kalbs, hostility: in religion, xxviii; of fate,
I54-5 n., I55; and H's 'plans', 208, 275, 35 I , 353-4; of nature, 274,
209 n., 252 n., 257, 382 n., 407 n.; 279; Jewish, 277, 285 n., 289-90,
and Eleusis, 244-6, 248; and 'sys- 296 n., 301-2, 333; and prosperity,
tern-programme', 249,253-4,255 n., 296-7; and positive faith, 30I-2,
257, 510 n.; founder of idealism, 310-1 I; and love, 341
253; and Sinclair, 259-60; his house tutor: Has, 57, I54-8
insanity, 259, 261, 265 n.; 'Urteil HUDSON, Hoyt H., 363 n.
und Seyn', 294 n., 312 n., 515-16; humanity: Hiilderlin's ideal, 104-5 n.;
and revolutionary politics, 420, as community, 299
43 1- 2 ,43 6-'7, 438n., 443; men- human nature: atomic concept, 26-30,
tioned, x, 65 n., 67 n., I59, 176 n. 349, 400-2; developmental concept,
HOELDERLIN, Maria Eleanore Heinrike 27,30,75,96, 165,400-2,440-5;
(sister) (1772-1850),437 n. focus of H's interest, 30, 45-6, 248,
Holderlin-Jahrbuch, 312 n. 250; natural spontaneity, 40, I35,
HOELZLE, Erwin, 43 I n. I43, I50-I,263,488-9,497-8, 505;
HOFFMEISTER, Johannes: on H's Stutt- harmonious development of, I23-6,
gart studies, 3 n., 8 n., 22 n., 25 n., I57, I69, I90, 229, 323-9, 40I- 8 ;
26-'7 n., 28, 34 n., 42 n., 48-52 nn.; Phantasie and, I50-1, I60, I6I n.,
on Garve, 35 n., 75 n., 76; on 253-6, 506-7, 5IO-I2; theory of
Schnurrer's view of H, 69 n.; on faculties, I75-6, 323-5, 326-7; cor-
H's Psychologie, 84 n., 175, I76 n.; ruption of, 240-2,475-6,497; and
and the 'historicalfragments', I 58 n.; hypochondria, 265-6; social ideal of,
on Montesquieu's influence, 424 n.; 440 -5
on H's Steuart commentary, 435-6; HUME, David (171 I-'76): and En-
on H's handwriting, 440 n., 444 n., lightenment, xviii; pragmatic his-
445 n.; referred to, ix, 2 n., 62 n., torian, 8; History of England, IS8;
72 n., II7 n., I54 n., I59 n., 184 n., and Hammann, 3I2-13 n.
245 n., 249 n., 263 n., 266 n., 397 n., humility: corruption by, 2I7
46I n. HUTTEN, Ulrich von (I488-I523), II6
HOHENZOLLERN family, 454, 462 hypochondria: in human development,
holiness: rational ideal, I42-3, 224 n., 26 5-6
320, 342 n., 388, 492, 495; in hypocrisy, 166, 224
theological logic, I89; positive ideal,
221, 320, 388; object of reverence, Idea (Hegelian), 477
335 ideal(s): personified, I81, I83, 267 n.;
Holy Family: in H's mythology, regulative and constitutive, 242;
xxviii, 396 n. God as, 282 n.; of human nature,
Holy of Holies, 392-3, 409 n. 40I - 8
55 0 ANALYTICAL INDEX
Idee(n) (Kantian): of practical reason, Israel: and Greece, 36 n. (see Greek
xxxi, 124-5, 144, 482-4, 500, 501; ideal); as Volk, 77, 126, 240, 275-
of God, 125-6,250 n., 508, 511; of 86, 384, 476; law of, 126 (see Jewish
immortality, 125-6, 250 n., 51 I; of law); monarchy in, 126-7,276,285;
holiness, 142; of man, 250, 251, 510; Chosen People, 163, 219 n., 274,
mythology of, 255; of Nature, 441. 300 n.; theocracy, 183, 285; re-
See also postulates founding of, 240 n.; fate of, 271-2,
immortality: postulate, 34 n., 86, 28 5-6, 28 7, 333, 334 n., 395 n.,
109 n., 112 n., 125-7, 141-2, 146, 475-6; spirit of, 272 (see Judaism);
167, 178-9, 190, 192, 195, 228 n., Abraham and, 272, 277-8, 281-3;
239,250 n., 303, 377,410,482,486, tribal life, 275-6, 279; Moses and,
487, 5 I I; in Greek religion, 134, 275-6, 284-5, 289; constitution of,
377-8; and resurrection, 372-3, 377; 276, 285, 289; captivity of, 276,
H's concept of, 378, 383-7 296-7 n., 441 n.
impiety: Greek concept of, 134 n., Italy: fate of, 439, 444, 464, 470-1
146 n., 234-5, 243 itio in partes: consequences, 465
Incarnation, the: significance, 181-3,
185-6; mystery of, 362, 364; form JACOB: and his sons, 277, 282 n., 283,
of servant, 376, 398-9 285,290 n., 294 n., 301; his blessing,
inclination: and duty, 294, 295 n., 278, 280-1; and Israel, 384
336-7; and Gesinnung, 341-2 JACOBI, Friedrich Heinrich (1743-
individual (Einzelne): baron as, 450- 1819): and Spinoza, 34n., 188;
In., 463; in war, 458; burgher as, Letters on Spinoza, 98-101, 102,
4 63 103; Woldemar, 98,508-9; Allwill,
individuality: of life, 383-6, 387-8; 98; appeal to feeling, 139 n.; and
defined, 385 Hamann, 312-13 n.
indulgences, 148 n. Jacobins: influence in Stift, 63, II4;
infinite: and finite, 245, 376, 380, 395, in Wiirttemberg, 420
398, 405; in living organism, 385- JAMES, the Apostle, 200
8; in Fichte, 400 n. Jehovah, 286, 488
innocence: fate of, 353-4 Jena: manuscripts of, xxxii; H's career
inorganic: in Vereinigung, 385-6, 387- at, 57-8, 70 n., 408
8,395-6 Jesuits: extreme of tyranny, 416 n.
Inquisition, 147 JESUS: problem of, xxiii; spirit of,
Inspectorate: at Ttibingen, 65-6 n., xxvii, 332-46; fate of, xxvii, 331,
82, 83, 88 332 n., 333, 370-2, 374; as Son of
institutions (Anstalten): religious, 170 God, xxvii, 101, 360-4; and Kant,
n., 221, 251, 486, 508 xxvii, 194-209, 322, 325, 445; as
intolerance: and grace, 179; and Christ, xxviii, 217 n., 240, 399; faith
miracle, 236. See also fanaticism in, 23, 25, 109-11, 178-86, 233,
intuition: aesthetic, xxxii, 26, 253; 240-1; H's Life, 26 (see Life of
intellectual, xxxii; in H6lderiin, Jesus); Storr's view, 94-6, 379; as
515-16 enlightener, 95, III-I2, 128, 171 n.,
'Invisible Church': influence of Diez, 210 n., 213-14, 220, 247, 370;
98-9; rallying point, 105, 106 n., authority of, 95-6, 197 n., 200 n.,
IIo-II, 188 n.; concept, 105 n., 203, 207, 214-18; as Son of Man,
108 n.; Masonic overtones, II4 n.; 101, 360, 362-4; as Volkslehrer,
relation to visible, 130-1 n.; ideal of 128 n., 162-5, 170 n., 347-8,405 n.;
reason, 141, 495 and Mary Magdalen, 134-5,352 n.,
ISAAC: and Jacob, 278, 280, 285, 343 n., 355, 489; his Kingdom, 166; and
384, 386; sacrifice of, 282, 290, Socrates, 170 n., 183, 185-6, 217,
291 n., 294 n., 303 n. 329,353 n., 401, 413; and Pharisees,
ISHMAEL, 282 n., 291 n. 196 n., 197,204,216 n., 333, 370-1;
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 551
as personified ideal, 181, 182, 183, 204, 215, 275-6, 279, 284, 288-90,
411 n.; temptation of, 199-201, 303 n., 311, 319, 375, 403; spirit
368; not miracle worker, 199-203; and fate of, xxv-xxvi, 201, 272-4,
Resurrection of, 203, 268, 372-4, 279, 284, 286, 332-3, 371; world-
376; founded virtue religion, 214- liness of, xxviii, 282-3,301,435-6;
17, 233, 404; as Messiah, 216-17, and Hellenism, 77 (see Greek ideal);
403, 404; as 'dreamer', 218n.; as folk-religion, 121, 126-7, 145, 163,
evolution of H's view, 259, 267-9; 230 n., 271-2, 275-86, 296-7, 300-
end of era, 271, 285-6; religion of 2, 392-3, 395, 409 n., 476; mono-
love, 287-8, 306, 310, 321, 322 n., theism in, 127, 277, 282, 286 n.,
355-69, 380-1; as Saviour, 317, 289-90; development of, 127 n.,
318-19, 321, 405 n.; as prophet, 271-2, 275-86; Messianic hope in,
337, 378-9, 413; as beautiful soul, 207,216,219 n., 240, 285, 333,403,
353-5; and 'this world', 345, 415, 404; covenant in, 219 n., 274, 279,
434; divinity of, 355-6, 376, 396 n.; 284, 297-302; founding of, 256,
and his communion, 368-'72, 374-6, 275-6, 289, 293 n.; love in, 256,
415; his failure, 374; as suffering 300-2, 410 n.; God in, 288-90, 304,
servant, 376; on childhood, 393 317-19, 357-8; oaths in, 343 n.;
Jewish Law: bondage, 112, 183, blasphemy in, 362, 363 n.; temple
395 n.; Moses and, 126, 276, 284, worship in, 392-3, 409 n.
288-9, 293 n.; Jesus and, 204, 220, JUDAS ISCARIOT, 214
333, 336-8; God-given, 215, 284, judgement: faculty, 176, 177 n.; re-
293 n.; 'authoritarian', 276, 284, flective function, 342, 346-50, 353-
288-9, 301 n.; development of, 4; of merit and guilt, 362-3
280 n., 283 n.; Mendelssohn on, judiciary: of Reich, 459 n., 462
284 n.; family relations in, 291 n.; JULIUS II, Pope (1443-1513), 470 n.
helped out need, 293 n., 300; uni- JUNG, Franz Wilhelm (1757-1833),
formly positive, 334-6 115 n., 432 n.
Jewish religion. See Judaism justice: divine, 109, 147, 195; civil,
JOB: Book of, 74, 84, 226; dignity of, 221,422-9; poetic, 275 (see Nemesis);
297 and love, 343, 345-6, 348-50; offate,
JOCASTA, 353 n. 354; of natural and common law,
JOHN the Baptist: and Jesus, 198, 199, 423,467; criterion of reform, 427-9,
285-6,346; his mission, 218 n., 359; 437; in Reich, 450-1, 462
baptism of, .367-8; mentioned, 202
JOHN (Apostle): Gospel, 89 n., 90, KAESTNER, Abraham Gotthelf (1719-
109, 197 n., 199, 214, 215-16, 269; 1800): on Enlightenment, 17; other
Revelation, 91; Kingdom of God in, excerpts, 27, 50, 54, 55
105; Epistle of, I I I ; H's view of, KALB, Charlotte von (1761-1843),
217 n., 367 n.; first chapter of, 351, 154 n., 155
357 n., 358-60, 365 n. KANT, Immanuel (1724-1804): H'g
JOSEPH (son of Jacob): as lawgiver of struggle with, xviii, xxvi, 123-4,
Egypt, 276, 283; and his brethren, 129 n., 142-3, 190-3, 224 n., 229,
278, 283, 284 n.; his God, 403 269, 271 n., 320-2, 346-51, 383 n.,
JOSEPH (husband of Mary), 396 n. 387; early indifference to, xx, 68,
JOSEPH II, of Austria (1741-90): his 79, 107-8; first study of, xx, 83-4 n.,
reforms, xxix, 473, 476 85 n., 86, 87, 175; Critique of Pure
JOSEPHUS, Flavius: study of, 271, 278- Reason, xx, 83, 87, 176, 200 n.,
81, 287 242 n., 388 n., 389, 401 n.; Critique
joy: ideal of life, 100; aimless, 300; in of Practical Reason, xx, 102, 195,
religion, 397, 484, 486 342 n.; Tiibingen interpretation,
Judaism: and philosophical history, xx, xxiii, 88 n., 89 n., 92-6, 98 n.,
xix, 77; positivity of, xxiv, 167 n., 107-8, 187-8, 193, 210-11, 215 n.,
55 2 ANALYTICAL INDEX
KANT (cont.): KARL, converter of Saxony. See
227-8, 302 n., 3II, 320, 400 n.; CHARLEMAGNE
apostle of reason, xx, xxiii, 145, KARL EUGEN, Duke of Wiirttemberg
185 n.; H as client of, xx-xxi, (1728-93): birthday celebrations,
104 n., II6-17, 175-6, 186-7, 194- 11,31,43,54; educational reforms,
207, 231, 233-4, 239, 268, 454 n.; 31,42,44,58,59-60 n., 67, II3; and
postulates in, xx-xxi, 34, 112 n., Grand Turk, 42, 43-4, 56 n.; Stift
125, 142 n., 146, 178, 192-3, 195, visits, 58, 113, 114 n., II 5; and
227-8, 234, 239, 250, 388; Religion, Lebret, 90; and Staudlin, II6;
xxiii, 108, II6-17, 119 n., 169 n., policy of, 419-20
177, 198, 329 n., 362-3, 365 n.; Karlsschule, 9 n., 31, 42
theoretical achievement, xxv, 228-9, KAUFMANN, Walter, 94 n.
234; positivity of, xxvi, 238 n., 293-4, KELLER, Karl Gottlob (1770-?), 61 n.
3II, 318, 320-1, 322, 348-51, 387, KEMP SMITH, Norman, 242 n.
398, 399, 444-5; Stuttgart excerpts KIERKEGAARD, S0ren Aabye (1813-55),
on, 34 n.; Perpetual Peace, 43 n., 38, 141 n.
469 n.; and the Greeks, 96, II7, KIMMERLE, Heinz: J ena mss. and
228-9, 322-3, 326, 328, 391; and dates, 416 n., 446 n., 456-7 n.,
Schelling, 100; his God, 101, 102-3; 477 n.; referred to, ix
and German Revolution, I06n., 169, Kingdom of God: fate of, xxvii--
443; 'Radical evil' essay, 108, 142 n., xxviii, 381, 397; Stuttgart con-
144 n., 169 n.; 'Kingdom of God' in ception, 24-6, 101; Tiibingen
108 n., II2; rational religion in, 126, watchword, 101, 104-6, 188 n.;
128,21 I, 212, 320-1,406; and Moses, Kantian ideal, 108 n., 205, 206; H's
127 n.; Vernunft and Verstand in, commitment to, I Io-II, II6; ser-
130 n., 138 n., 145, 238 n., 329; mon on, III-I2; achievement of,
What is Enlightenment?, 137 n., ISO, 130-1 n.; identical with God, 194,
198; antinomies in, 138 n., 389; 376; doctrine of Jesus, 201, 358,
noumenal world, 142 n., 21 I, 4II; 368-'70, 414; positive concept of,
ideal of holiness, 142-3, 224 n., 320, 319; and this world, 371-2, 374, 395
388, 5 IS; unique moral motive, Kingdom of Heaven. See Heaven
142, 143; on love, 143-4, 145 n., KISTENMAKER, J. H. (1754-1834):
339-40 n., 352; and Jesus, 181, excerpt, 56
194, 206-7, 214; moral proof, KLAIBER, Julius: H's Stuttgart years,
189, 190-3, 2II; Critique of Judge- 2 n., 4 n., 44 n., 97 n.
ment, 175, 191 n., 253; summum KLETT, Johann Christian (I768-?),
bonum in, 178, 191; kingdom of ends, 61 n.
205; and Golden Rule, 206-7, 325; KLETT, Magister: at dance in 1789,
mathematical and dynamical cate- 59 n., 88 n.
gories, 242; 'Rechtslehre' com- KLOPSTOCK, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724-
mentary, 251, 256, 433-4; Meta- 1803): Messias, 36; his lament, 36,
physics of Ethics, 271, 326 n., 331 n., 40, 41; Odes, excerpted, 36 n., 40,
339-52 passim, 433-5; Ideal in, 288, 49, 286 n.; as modern poet, 40; as
290 n., 401-2; synthesis in, 293-4, German epic poet, 235, 254
312,316; cosmopolitanism, 302 n., KLUEPFEL, August Friedrich (1769-
432; Gesinnung in, 337-8, 342 n. ; 1841),65 n., II6 n.
conflict of duties, 339-44, 415; KLUEPFEL, Karl August (1810-94): on
friendship in, 343 n., 351-2; Church RosIer, 80; revolutionary scandals,
and State, 416 n., 433-4; 'Tugend- 113 n., 114 n., lIS n.; referred to,
lehre' commentary, 435 64 n.
KARL, Archduke of Austria (1771- knowledge: 'living' and 'dead', xviii,
1847): as German Theseus, xxix, 37-8, 87, 103, 129-30, 135, 140,
47 6 253, 324; belief and, 313-14, 317,
 ANALYTICAL INDEX SS3
319-20, SI2-IS; absolute, 321, LAVATER, Johann Kaspar (1741-1801):
330 n., 388-91. See also truth and Sophiens Reise, 13 n.; influence
KNOX, Sir T. Malcolm: translation, on H, 29
240 n., 306 n., 334 n., 353 n., 366 n.; law: and folk-religion, 126,434-6; and
H's Frankfurt crisis, 259, 270-I; morality, 142, 171,221,229,230 n.,
referred to, ix, 36 n., 41 n., 110 n., 332,334-6,341 n., 349, 400-1, 414-
213-43 nn. passim, 266-413 nn. pas- 15; Roman principle, 164; Jewish
sim, 419-29 nn. passim, 433 n., principle, 167 n., 283, 287, 288-90;
434 n., 441 n., 448-76 nn. passim State concern, 220-I; helps out
KOB, S. J.: betrayer of political club, need, 300; levels of, 334-7; form
I13 n., 114 n. and content in, 336-7, 342, 363;
Kollegien, 68 n., 72, 73 moral and natural, 336, 349-SI;
KRONER, Richard, 288 n., 382-3, 388- reflective and living, 387, 434-6;
9, 398 n., 408 n. natural and positive, 399-400; and
Kultur: and Aufkliirung, 19-20,21,28 custom, 423, 450-3; mediates Ver-
Kurzeit: at Tiibingen, 63 n., 69 bindung, 463
lawgiver: God as, xxvi (see God);
LACORTE, Carmelo: on H's theory of Greek, xxx, 273-4, 283 n., 475 n.;
abstraction, xviii, 36-7; on Schrokh's Jewish, 126-7,215,283 n., 284, 289
influence, 8; on Sophiens Reise, LEBRET, Christoph Immanuel (c.
13 n.; on Aufkliirung allemande, 1770-?), 90 n.
23 n.; H's earliest studies, 53 n.; on LEBRET. Johann Friedrich (1732-
Plouquet, 78 n.; on RosIer, 8o; on 1807): H studies under, 57; courses,
H's Kant studies, 83-4 n.; on Storr, 88, 89n., 90, 417n.; career, 90;
92; on Tiibingen fragment, 120 n. ; thesis of, 116
H's theory of evil, 144 n.; on LEBRET, Marie Elisabethe (1774-
Schmerz, 498 n.; referred to, ix, 2 n., 1839), 90 n.
4 n., 7 n., 67 n., 78 n., 79 n., 80 n., Lectures on the History of Philosophy,
90 n., 91 n. 330 n., 426 n.
LAIVS, King of Thebes, 353 n. Lectures on the Philosophy of Fine Art,
Landeshoheit, 439 n. 152 n.
Landfriede, 463, 464, 469 Lectures an the Philosophy of History,
Landtag (of Wiirttemberg): powers 27,464 n.
and policies, 419-21; Vertreter of legal career: H's plan for, xix, 58, 59,
Volk, 429-31; and Catholic dukes, 96-7
433-4; at Rastatt, 436-7 Lehrgedicht: excerpts on, 48 n., 49
language: enlightenment of, 19; natural LEIBNIZ, Gottfried Wilhelm von
and conventional, 36-9, 84, 8S, 87; (1646-1716): Holderlin's study of,
fundamental institution, 46; H's, 98 n.; concept of God, 102-3; and
170n.; limits of, 246-'7, 337; ofre- H's ideal, 125 n.; rational theology
flection and love, 337, 3S8, 428 n., in, 126 n., 187; actual and possible
43 I n.; and political unity, 454 in, 3 I 6 n.; analogon rationis, 322 n.
Lares and Penates, 413 n. LENIN, Vladimir Ilyich, 429 n.
LASSON, Georg: on Verfassungsschrift LENZ, Jonathan (teacher at Gym-
lacuna, 456; referred to, 311 n., nasium), 1-2 n., 4
416-429 nn. passim, 437-76 nn. LEPIDUS,3 1
passim LESSING, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-
Last Judgement, 362-4 81): 'living' and 'dead' knowledge,
Last Supper: significance of, 219, 356, xviii, 37-8, 186-7 n.; Nathan, work
373 of Verstand, xxii, 136, 145, 236,
Latin: H's study of, 3, 6-7, 9 n., 10- 237 n.; Nathan, H's use of, 37-8,
12,14, 22n., 47-8,51,52,53-5; cul- 41, 48 n., 116, 133, 140, 141, 143,
ture derivative, 76 169 n., 174 n., 182, 219, 224 n.,
554 ANALYTICAL INDEX
LESSING (cont.): 207-8,213-14,215-16,217;forgive-
292-4, 329; models of enlighten- ness in, 227; marriage in, 228 n. ;
ment, 34 n., 43 n., 231, 268, 328, and Eleusis, 247 n., 248; and 'Spirit
329,399; lost excerpts, 48 n.; Litera- of Christianity', 269 n., 344, 352;
turbriefe,48 n., 178; Hamburgische oaths in, 343 n.; Logos in, 359; and
Dramaturgie, 48 n.; his Spinozism, Gospels, 367 n.; fate in, 370; miracle
99-101, 103, 189; Education of the in, 376 n.; ms., 379, 392 n.
Human Race, 99, 109 n., 213 n., light: as symbol of Vernunft, xvii,
253 n.; Sophocles, 99 n.; Has Ver- xxvi, 112, 124-5, 359-60, 482
tmuter Lessings, 100, 187 n., 189; limit: and unlimited, 376
Ernstund Falk, 105 n., 187n., 244n.; LINNAEUS (Carl Linne) (1707-78):
Bildung of humanity, 157; and H's study of, 63 n., 102 n.
German revolution, 169; 'Religion literalism: letter and spirit, 4, 37-8, 87,
of Christ', 169 n.; Briefwechsel mit II I, 122 n., 135, 140, 182-3,253; in
seiner Frau, 174 n. Storr, 91-5; in positive Christianity,
L' Etat et les delices de la Suisse, 423 n., 111-12, 182-3; in enlightenment,
424 n. 140, 493, 499; in folk religion, 141;
letter (and spirit). See literalism in Judaism, 204
LEUTWEIN, Christian Philipp (1768- LIVY (T. Livius): H's study of, 11,54
1838): reminiscences of H, xix-xx, LOEFFLER, Johann Jakob (1750--85):
65, 66 n., 69 n., 74 n., 98-9 n., and H's earliest studies, In., 3,4, 9,
104 n., 216 n., 341; on Rousseau's 21, 53 n.; H's obituary note, 21,
influence, 24 n., 85; on attitude of 44n.
H's father, 60n.; career, 60n., 64n.; logic: derived from history, 52 n.; not
H's conviviality, 68; Schwegler and, path to wisdom, 139, 492; theo-
69 n.; intimacy with H, 74 n.; H's logical, 187-9
demotion, 82; H's love for Job, 84; Logos: in Life of Jesus, 198-9, 359; in
and EV Kat 7Tav, 101-2; and Kant 'Spirit of Christianity', 358-60
group, 107-8 Lokation, 61 n., 65 n., 82, 83 n.,
LEVI (son of Jacob), 285 116 n.
liberty. See political freedom Lokus. See Repetition
life: higher than 'reflection', xxi, 130, LONGINUS: On the Sublime translated,
326-9, 351, 406-7, 484; definition, 4 8 , 55
xxviii; God as, 25-6, 100-1, 103-4, Lord's Prayer, 200 n., 203 n., 205
376, 386-8, 393, 405 n.; organic lordship and bondage: in Judaism,
ideal of, 103-4, 124-5, 304-9, 381, 275-86, 288-90, 291 n., 403; in
382-8,482; fulness of, 135 n., 354-5, family relations, 291 n., 342-3, 358;
394,401 n.; and law, 213 n., 348-52; necessary moment, 395; in Reich,
hostility to, 277, 282 n.; and love, 438, 450, 451 n., 452 n. See also
304-9; plane of, 324, 326-9, 382, mastery
407,414,428 n., 431 n.; whole and LORENZ, Johann Friedrich (1738-
sundered,350- 1,353-4, 357-8; and 1807): his Euclid excerpted, 55
consciousness, 359-60, 383-8; im- LOT: Abraham and, 282 n.
mortality of, 377-8, 383-7, 394, LOUIS XIV of France (1638-1715):
405 n.; and the inorganic, 377-8, and Versailles, 495
382-6, 395; H's 'system' of, 406-8; LOUIS XVI of France (1754-93):
and ideal of 'Nature', 443 execution scandal, 115 n.
Life of Jesus: Kantian orthodoxy of, love: ideal of life, xxv-xxviii, 100-1,
xxiii, 194-5, 267, 333, 335-6; object 304-9, 326-30; basis of religion,
of xxiii, 162, 184, 186, 195-8, 231, xxv, 256,287,294-6,298,310, 316-
233-4, 380-1; anticipated, 26, I I I; 18; Christian, xxvii, 112, 117, 205,
analysed, 194-207; Golden Rule in, 206-7, 295-6, 414-15; religion of,
206-7, 325; and Positivity essay, xxvii, 287-8, 327-8, 329-30, 356-79,
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 555
445; fragment on, xxvii, 298-310; 460; fate of Reich, 467 n. ; in Prussia
in individual life, xxvii, 291 n., 298, and France, 471-2
304-10; noblest passion, 26 n., 131- MAERKLIN, Jakob Friedrich (1771-
2, 143-4, 32 2 , 324-5, 455, 485; 1841): promoted over H, 65, 66,
Platonic, 105,295,298 n., 326, 365; 82-3 n.; Kant scholar, 99 n., 107 n.;
sexual, 105, 266 n., 295, 298, 306- mentioned, II6 n.
10; reconciliation with life, 135 n., MAERKLIN, Jeremias Wilhelm (1770-
348, 350, 351-3; Grundprinzip of 1820), II6 n.
character, 143-4, 495; selfish, 143- MAERKLIN, Johann Friedrich (1734-
4, 282, 296-7, 299, 300-3, 307, 358, 1804): Tiibingen course, 88 n.,
410 n., 495; analogous to reason, 89 n.; mentioned, 66 n.
143-4, 322, 324-5; meaning, 295-6, MAGENAU, Rudolf (1767-1846), 60,
304-5; miracle, 298, 317 n.; has no 61 n.
aim, 300; reflective state, 305, 321, Magister: H as, xix, 262, 263-4;
352,392,414-15; and property, 310, examination, 57, 62, 67, 73 n.; H's
345-6; and authority, 323-4, 402, course for, 72-88; dissertation
4 14; and mortality, 331, 332-46, (Bak's), 62 n., 72, 85-6; H's
3 67, 375; fate of, 369-79; overleaps Magisterprogramm, 72, 73 n., 74 n.,
nature, 369-70 83 n.; H's specimina, 72, 77, 85, 86-
love affairs: Stuttgart reflections, 10, 7; Halderlin's Magisterprogramm,
13; Auguste Hegelmeier, 67, 71, 74 n.; Schelling's dissertation, 86 n.,
72 n., 97, 263 n.; Tiibingen re- 106 n., 271 n.; examen rigorosum, 87
flections, 139, 493; Nanette Endel, MAHOMET,508
262-4, 266; Frankfurt reflections, Mainz: and Revolution, 431-2; H
306-9 visits, 432, 445; centre for new
LUDWIG EUGEN, Duke ofVviirttemberg Reich, 458, 475 n.
(1731-95): policy of, 420 Mammon: God and, 371, 374, 375,
LUKACS, Gyorgy: on H's vocation, 157; 395
on H's Frankfurt crisis, 259, 264 n., Manichaeans: doctrine of, 240
265; on Systemjragment, 391-2 n.; MARCION, 210, 212 n.
H's political-economic mss., 429n., MARK, Evangelist: Gospel, 197 n.,
435; H's political sympathies, 437 371 n.; H's view of, 217 n., 367 n.,
n·,444 3 68
LUKE, Evangelist: Gospel, IIO n., marriage: and property, xxviii, 310;
197-204 passim, 371 n.; Gospel of sacramental moment, 122-3, 481;
Vernunjt, 367 n., 368 n. none in Heaven, 228 n.; H con-
Luneville, Peace of, 446, 452 n., templates, 263 n., 266 n.; love and,
466 n., 476-7 308-10; as contract, 340, 342-3;
LUPORINI, Cesare, 440 n., 442 n. adultery, 342-3; as minimal whole,
LUTHER, Martin (1483-1546): German 35 2 ,37 8
hero, 235; H's attitude, 235-6 n.; 'Marseillaise', the: translation scandal,
mentioned, 91, 148 n. 63, II3-I5
LYCURGUS, 164 n., 273-4, 286 Marseilles, Plague of, 276 n.
MARX, Karl (1818-83), xxix, 157,
MACABEES, the, 277 296 n.
MACBETH: and Jewish fate, 286; MARY MAGDALEN, 134-5, 352 n., 355,
mentioned, 350, 353 n. 489
MACHIAVELLI, Nicolo (1469-1527): as MARY (the Virgin), 396 n.
H's model, 120,470-1,477; Prince, Masonry. See freemasonry
120,449 n., 470; excerpt, 470 n. Mass. See Catholicism, Eucharist
m',lchine State: origin of, 239; critically Master's Degree. See Magister
accepted, 250, 251-2; critically re- mastery: of nature, 199-200, 279, 300,
jected, 454-6; opposite of Reich, 301, 378; of fate, 273; spirit of, 273,
55 6 ANALYTICAL INDEX
mastery (cont.): Menge: violence of, 428; in Reich, 439;
286, 290, 293-4, 375; conceptual, Volk without constitution, 463
293, 317 n., 318; and love, 294; of Menschenliebe: ideal of virtue, 337; in
Jesus, 319, 321, 372, 373. See also Tubingen fragment, 486
lordship and bondage Menschlichkeit: and first canon, 146,
mathematics: H's early love of, 7, 9 n., 500; ironic use, 158; in Tubingen
13, 14 n., 30, 46, 81; and Natur- fragment, 486, 500
philosophie, 7 n., 1°3; mathematical mentor: Neuffer as, 61; Hand
reasoning, 7 n., 29-30, 139, 492; Holderlin, 61 n., 101, 258
excerpts on, 50, 54, 55, 56 n. MERCIER, Louis-Sebastien (1740-
matriculation: H's, 56, 57, 72 1814): Montesquieu Ii Marseille, 345-
matter: as forces, 304; and spirit, 6 n.
realms of, 376-8, 382-3 mercy: and justice, 346, 349; in
MATTHEW, Evangelist: Gospel, 110, positive faith, 355, 356. See also
197, 204, 205 n., 213 n., 214 n., forgiveness
217 n., 337-8, 341-6, 347 n., 355, Mesopotamia: Abraham in, 281
366, 368 n., 371 n., 495; H's view Messiah: Kant as, xxiii; Jesus as,
of, 367 n. xxiii-xxiv, 183, 207, 216-17; Mes-
MATTHISSON, Friedrich von (1761- sianic hope, 216 (see Judaism)
1831): Tubingen visit, 59, II6 metaphysics: H's lack of interest, 33-4,
MAUCHARDT, Immanuel David (1764- 68, 104 n.; and moral philosophy,
1826): interest in psychology, 81 n.; 104 n., 250, 510
Repertorium, 176 n. MEUSEL, Johann Georg (1743-1820):
Maulbronn (cloister school): Renz Lexicon, 159 n.
Promotion at, 60 n.; Schelling at, might: and right, 353-4, 422, 442-4,
66 n., 114 n. 44 8-5 0
MAZZINI, Guiseppe (1805-72), 131 n. military service: patriotic and mercen-
mechanics: excerpts on, 50 ary, 227, 239, 243 n., 260; in Reich,
mechanism: death of spirit, 435-6 45 6- 60 , 474-5
Medusa, 286 Minerva: H's study of, 63 n.
MEINERS, Christoph (1747-1810): Ministry, Church: H destined for, 2;
Geschichte der Menschheit, excerpted, attitude, 57-8, II8, ISS
7 n., 18 n., 27-8,51; Briefe uber die miracle(s): Storr's concept, 94, IIO,
Schweiz, excerpted, 14 n., 28, 49, 226-7,237 n., 268 n., 399; true and
55, 159; Revision der Philosophie, false belief, 137 n., 237, 377;
excerpted, 18 n., 28 n., 55; philo- principle of Christianity, 167 n.,
sophical history in, 28; and H's 182-3, 216-17, 236, 268-9, 399;
Psychologie, 175 source of incredulity, 173, 236,
melancholia: H's, 258, 265-6, 269- 268 n., 5°9; of Jesus, 181, 199-203,
7° 216-17, 376; irrelevance of, 181,
MENDELSSOHN, Moses (1729-86): 197-8; in theological logic, 187;
Phaedo, xvii, 23 n., excerpt, 52; rationalization of, 199-203, 216;
model of enlightenment, 34 n., definition of, 200 n., 226-7, 237 n.,
43 n., 169, 231; 'Was heisst Auf- 243 n., 268 n., 292, 376-8; love as,
kliiren?', excerpt, 17, 18-20, 55, 298, 317 n.; mark of positive faith,
400 n. ; and Bilk, 79; in Pantheismus- 320
streit, 99-101; An die Freunde misfortune: and Trennung, 289; as
Lessings, 99; and Buchstabenmensch, punishment, 296-7
140, 494 n.; Jerusalem, 140 n., modesty (Bescheidenheit), 344
165 n., 169n., 170, 220; on Church modification: of love, 338-9, 341,
and State, 170-1,220-1, 222n., 251; 352 n. ; of life, 352 n., 360, 362, 368,
rational theology, 177, 284n., 287, 372-3; defined, 352 n.; of nature,
399 375
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 557
MOEGLING,'Friedrich Heinrich \Volf- ideal of harmony, 204; as positive, 238
gang (1771-1813), II6 n. MOREAU, Jean Victor (1763-1813), 420
MOlm, Eberhard Heinrich (1769- mortality, 306-7, 383-4 n., 386
1831), II6 n. MORTIMER family, 384
MOLITOR, Franz Joseph (1779-1860), MORUS, Samuel Friedrich Nathanael
261 (1736-92): compendium, 89 n.
monarchy: Jewish, 127, 276, 285; MOSER, Friedrich Karl von (1723-98),
despotic tendency, 178; in Athens, 105 n.
413; monarch and Volk, harmony, MOSER, Johann Jakob (1701-85): H's
425, 430-1; monarch and Volk, obituary note, II, 419; study of,
opposition, 425-7, 428, 429-31, 416 n.; his policies, 419, 433 n.
439-40, 463; not essential, 452; MOSES: positive lawgiver, 112, 126,
universal,474 198, 203 n., 204, 215, 220, 276, 278,
money: as motive for service, 455; 283 n., 284, 288-9, 291 n., 293 n.,
universal measure, 458. See also 301 n., 335, 336, 387, 395 n.; and
finances, Mammon Kant, 127 n.; religion of, 127 n.,
monotheism: Judaic, 126 (see Juda- 343 n., 381; apostle of reason, 167,
ism); philosophical, 127, 5 II; and 359-60; and burning bush, 236, 237,
polytheism, 286 n. 409 n.; and Exodus, 272, 275, 278;
Montbeliard, county of, 97 as wonderworker, 276 n., 284; and
MONTESQUIEU, Charles, baron de Abraham, 281 n., 283 n., 284; and
(1689-1755): as pragmatic historian, Jewish fate, 284--5; and Solon, 286;
8; Berne study, 158, 212; in Mer- H's study of, 287; his God, 288-90,
cier's play, 345-6 n.; influence on 293, 294, 357, 398 , 399, 403; and
H,424 n . immortality, 303 n. ; agent of revela-
moral: sense, 24, 131-2, 143; proof, tion, 318; extreme of positivity,
187, 189-91, 193, 210; theology, 319,321, 332
249,250,510; theory, 347-8 lVloSHEIM, Johann Lorenz von (1694-
moral freedom: postulate, 34 n., 1755): Institutiones historiae ecclesi-
112 n., 227-8, 250 n.; 'Reason and asticae, 220 n., 230, 231 n.
Freedom', 99-100, 106; and faith in MOWBRAY family, 384
Christ, 179, 180, 183, 184; and MOZART, Johann Wolfgang Amadeus
political freedom, 183, 184, 237, (1756-91): H's love of, 262
238-9; sum of philosophy, 189, 192, MUELLER, Gustav Emil, 245 n.
250; and Providence, 193 n.; and MUELLER, Johannes von (1752-18°9):
forgiveness, 202 n., 227-8; as free- Geschichte der Schweiz, 425
dom to err, 218-19, 222-3,238; and MUHRBECK, Friedrich Philipp Albert
proselytizing, 219--20 n.; and fanati- (1775-1827), 437 n., 438 n.
cism, 277, 282; and positivity, 292- multiplicity: in living union, 382-6
4; and nature, 293, 349-51; and MURE, Geoffrey R. G, ix
reason, 322-3; of beautiful soul, mystery: in Christianity, 179, 247,
353-4; and comprehension, 448-50 392; in Greek religion, 246-7, 248,
moralische Weltanschauung, 24 392; mythical and historical, 269;
morality: of reason, xxvii (see Ver- in positive faith, 300, 316, 362, 364
nunft); of love, xxvii, 331, 342-6; mysticism: H's study of, 230-1; in
and expediency, 124, 131; and Eleusis, 245-8 ; in Frankfurt wri tings,
legality, 142 (see law); concern of 321-2,326
Church and State; 170-1, 220-3; mythology: principle of Greek re-
essence of religion, 213, 217, 230 n., ligion, xxv, 167, 234-8, 243-4, 273-
410; and positivity, 400-1; goal of 4, 279-80, 295; in Eleusis, xxv; of
man, 508 Reason, xxviii-xxix, 254-6, 5 I 1-12;
moral law: and civil, 171, 229, 230 n., tension with Vemunft, 138; neces-
334-6; and desire, 191-2; and sityof, 147,502; of Volksgeist, 149-
558 ANALYTICAL INDEX
mythology (cont.): Nemesis: of rational religion, xxvi; in
5 I, 506-7; genuine and super- fate of Jesus, xxvii, 381 n.; in
stitious, 161; Garden of Eden, Schiller, 167; fate as, 275; of
201 n., 274 n.; and historic tradition, Christian love, 370; of political in-
235 n., 236, 237-9, 243-4, 246-8, justice, 423; of religious freedom,
269; Indian, 236 n.; Judaic, 273-4, 465; in Greek religion, 501, 504
279-80; of Flood, 271, 272, 273-4, nepotism: in Berne politics, 158,
278,279-80, 281 n., 290; of o.Vcl!-,V- 423 n.
?JUL" 3 66 -7 Neue Bibliothek der schonen Wissen-
schaften: excerpted, 55, 56
NAPOLEON I (1769-1821): as world- NEUFFER, Christian Ludwig (1769-
spirit, xxxi, 260, 443; intervention 1839): friend of Holderlin, 58 n.,
in Germany, 476-7; excerpt, 477 n. 59n.,60, 61 n.,98n.;ofH,61,270n.
NAST, Louise (1768-1839), 83 n. New Testament: Tiibingen lectures,
NATHANAEL, 173 n. 89 n.; Storr's view of, 9 1-2; Acts,
nation-state: law mediates Verbindung, 214 n. ; spirit of, 287-8; love in, 296.
451; finances of, 460 See also MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE,
natural law: Bok's course, 74; and JOHN, PAUL, PETER
positive, 399-400; and common Nicaea, Council of, 105
law, 423 NICODEMUS, 202 n., 352 n., 368
natural religion: beginnings of, 3 I ; NICOLAI, Christoph Friedrich (1733-
and positive, 399-401 18II): Reisen excerpted, 20-1, 28,
nature: state of, 3 I; return to, 161; 49, 50, 55
ideal of, 86, 440-5, 448-50, 467; NIETHAMMER, Friedrich Immanuel
breach with, 274, 278-9, 280, 284; (1766-1848): Tiibingen friendships,
and God, 282, 290, 315-16, 398, 59 n., 60 n., 88 n.; and Kant group,
513; and freedom, 349-5 I; order of 107 n.; Holderlin's letters, 253 n.,
necessity, 357; and life, 386-8; con- 291 n.
tradictory, 513 Night: in Eleusis, 246
Naturphilosophie: H's interest in, 7 n., NIMROD, 278, 279,280,290, 310-II n.
103, 408; in Systemprogramm, 249, NOAH: and Jewish history, 273-4, 278,
250, 5 10 279; and Abraham, 273, 274, 281 n.;
NEEB, Johannes (1767-1843), 432 n. his God, 279, 281, 290, 315, 398,
need (Bedurfnis): religion and, 123, 403; his covenant, 279, 283 n.
481; in third canon, 145, 409, 499, nobility: of Wiirttemberg, 421; of
505, 506; H's concern with, 406; England, 424, 425; natural estate of
aspect of justice, 428; potential and realm, 425-7, 438, 472; representa-
actual, 443; in German freedom, tive function, 450, 453 n., 463, 467-
451 n. 8,474-5; free of need, 464, 472
need (Not): origin of egoism, 144; and NOESSELT, Johann August (1734-
Trennung, 274, 28311.,290; pressure 1807): Anweisung zur Bucher in
of, 283; and hostility, 290; in Theologie, 89 n.
Holderlin, 291 n.; helped out by NOHL, Hermann: achievement of, ix,
law, 293 n., 300, 414; generates 267 n.; mistakes of, 183 n., 196 n.,
aims, 300; destroys reverence, 335; 280 n., 332 n., 370, 385; conjecture
overrides consciousness, 373; and of, 224 n.; emendations, 229 n.,
otherworldly religion, 399n.; Greek 385; editing of Frankfurt drafts,
attitude, 413 n.; noble superiority 272 n., 278 n., 280 n.; omissions,
to, 464 n.; and basis of state, 472 278, 299 n.; editing of 'Spirit of
negative and positive: aspects of fate, Christianity', 332 n., 338 n., 370;
374; for nature and will, 441-3, referred to, 36 n., 41 n., 57 n., 98 n.,
444-5 110 n., lI8-52 nn. passim, 162-
NEGRI, Antonio, 34 n. 243 nn. passim, 247 n., 260 n., 266-
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 559
417 nn. passim, 433 n., 434 n., xxvii, 305, 327, 366, 393; moment of
441 n., 471 n., 499 n. religion, 316 n., 359, 387; reflective
non-Ego: and Ego, 190-1,291-2,294; concept, 360, 387
H's use of, 2II-12 n.; in Holderlin, 'On the Religion of Greeks and Ro-
5 16 mans'. See Chronological Index, 27
noumena: and phenomena, 92, 137, opera: H's love of, I In., 262, 264
410-1 I; as moral realm, 137-8, 143, opposition: in positive faith, 303-4,
189, 200; as inverted world, 142 n.; 371-2,512-15; mistaken principle,
redundant, 191-2; Ego and, 189, 310-II, 316; reflective, 314, 315,
194,211; God and, 365 320, 512-15; of forces, 327, 350;
Nuremberg: Hat, 260 and love, 333, 336-7; neutral and
contrary, 347; absolute, 377, 378 n.,
oaths: natural to reflection, 343 382-8; relative, 382-8; of nature
obedience: duty of positive faith, 290, and life, 393
300-1, 346-7, 388; and mercy, 355, optics: excerpts on, 50
356; and reward, 374 ORESTES, 350, 353 n.
Objekt: God as, 241-3 (see God); and organism: model of whole, 100, 103,
subject, 288-95, 297, 305; enliven- 105; development of, 305, 309,
ing of, 293, 317 n., 356-7, 392-3, 310 n.; unity of, 383-6, 387-8
396-7; in feeling, 305; as ultimate, Orient: spirit of, 278 n., 377; universal
3 10; of belief, 3 I I , 3 I 3 ; and slavery in, 468
Gegenstand, 365 ORIGEN (185-254), 144
objective and subjective: rationality, original sin: H rejects dogma, 23, 179,
xxii; truth, xxv, 225; in perception, 186, 201 n., 240-1
85 n., 87; religion, 129-35 (see ORPHEUS, 413, 508
religion); maxims, 225; Kant's use, OSSIAN, James Macpherson (1736-96),
228-9; morality, 388; in worship, 236 n.
293, 317 n., 356-7, 392-3, 396-7
Obligation: release from, 61 n., 155: pacifism: inconsistent with folk-
nature of, 64 religion, 239 n.
OCTAVIUS CAESAR, 31, 471 n. panentheism: of H, 25, 26, 100-5,
OEDIPUS, 353 n. 1I0-II
OELSNER, Konrad Engelbert (1764- pantheism: and <Iv Ka< '1Tav, 99-105; and
1828), 63 n. Eleusis, 248
OFFTERDINGER, Philipp August (b. Pantheismusstreit: attitude of H, 98-
c. 1740), 14 101, 189, 315
O'FLAHERTY, James C., 312 n. Pantheon: formation and political
'Old Man': H's nickname, 68, 71,72 n., aspect, 32, 296, 413, 414-15
93, II 1-12, 209 n., 258 Papal State: H's study of, 417;
Old Testament: Psalms studied, 47, creation of, 470 n.
53, 66 n., 73, 127 n.; Job, 74, 84, parables: of Jesus, 181 n., 203-4, 337
226, 297; Tiibingen lectures, 89 n.; parliament: English, 424, 430 n. ;
and New, 205 (see '1T>'~PWIJ<s); Reichstag, 425 (see Diet); National
Leviticus, 205, 213 n.; Deuteronomy, ConYention, 432, 456, 468; German
213 n., 301; Herder's view, 237 n.; principle, 468; reformed, 475
Frankfurt studies, 271,287; Genesis, pastoralism: of Swiss, 161; of Jews,
280,282n., 356 n.; Exodus, 288, 301 n. 275, 281-2, 283
Olympian Gods, xxv, 246, 282 patriarchal society: of Jews, 275,
'On ancient writers'. See Chrono- 283 n.
logical Index, 35 and 38 patriotism: in folk-religion, 144, 149,
oneness: phase of cultural develop- 183-4,238-40; alien to Christianity,
ment, xxvi, 277, 282-3, 359, 377; 183,24°,371, 374-5,412; and self-
phase of individual development, sacrifice, 227, 260
560 ANALYTICAL INDEX
'patriots': in Stift, 106 n., 114 n., Christianity, 145 n., 141-8, 173,
115 n.; in Vaud, 421-2; Swabian, 216, 222, 234-44, 268'-9, 393, 412-
43 1-3, 43 6-7 13, 502, 509; and inorganic nature,
PAUL, Apostle: Storr on, 89 n., 91; 160; and Vernunft, conflict, 165,
Epistles, 106n., 208, 212n., 382n.; 167, 196 n., 202, 204, 205 n., 248,
Ephesians, 110, I I I; I Corinthians, 328-9, 377, 402, 481-3; fettered by
II8, 310 n.; H's plan for Epistles, resurrection myth, 167, 216; and
208, 21 I n.; Damascus light, 237; Empfindung, 76, 328; and Verstand,
II Corinthians, 262, 263; on marri- 181, 226-7, 246-8, 304, 328-9, 356,
age, 3 Ion., 340 n.; letter and Spirit, 360,362,377,402,473; and custom,
494 n . 214 n.; terrorization of, 222; highest
peasantry: H's political bias against, act of Vernunft, 253, 254, 293-5,
10 n., 453 n. 304, 316n., 402,511; and Herz,
pedagogy: branch of philosophy, 50 n.; 25 6 , 26 9,293-5,3 04, 316n., 356-7;
excerpts on, 5 I and divinity, 293-5, 298, 304,
PELCZYNSKI, Zygmunt A., 420-75 nn. 316 n., 356-7; happy and unhappy,
passim 373-6, 381, 392-3; in ideal folk-
penitence: and moral knowledge, 134- religion, 391-3,409-16; and politi-
5. See also forgiveness cal community, 434; source of pre-
Pentateuch, 287 judices, 490, 497; polytheistic, 5 I I
PEPERZAK, Antoine T. B.: on Tiibingen Pharaoh, 283, 284
fragment, 120 n.; on Life of Jesus, Pharisees: Jesus and, 196 n., 197, 204,
196 n., 197 n., 200 n., 215 n., 216 n., 216 n., 333, 370-1; representatives
247 n.; on H's language, 130 n., of positivity, 204, 332-3, 334 n.,
170 n., 391 n.; on H's Kant studies, 341, 346, 370-1; political authority
142 n., 169 n.; on H's politics, of, 285; as Kantian model, 344
147 n., 184; on H's Hellenism, Phenomenology of Spirit: Greek culture
152 n.; on Eleusis, 248; referred to, in, xxviii, 39, 40 n., 41, 87, 390-1,
194 n., 286 n., 383 n. 397; verkehrte -Welt in, 25 n., 142 n.;
perception: judgements of, 14 n., 87; historical aspects of, 27, 29-30;
antimony of, 313-14, 317, 319-21 concept of, 41, 87, 314, 321, 477;
PERICLES: and H's Greek ideal, xvii, property in, 127 n.; Preface, 213;
150,152,231,238 n., 287; Funeral sent to Sinclair, 260; and hypo-
Oration, 120 n., 127 n., 397, 426 chondria, 265-6; force and under-
Persia: Persian War, II, 120 n., ISO; standing, 304 n. ; lordship and
Enlightenment in, 17 n. bondage,306,438,450
personality: of God, 95, 99-103, 189- PHILIP, Apostle, II 0-1 I
90; of baron, 438, 463 philosopher king: as model, 105;
PETER, Apostle: Epistle of, I I I ; Robespierre as, 426, 454; H's hope
relation to Jesus, 318-19, 355-6, for, 473, 476
365, 366 n. philosophical history: as H's central
PFLEIDERER, Christoph Friedrich concern, xvii, xix,S, 7, 13 n., 29;
(1736-1821): course on Physics, in Frankfurt mss., xxv-xxvi; aes-
74; influence on H, 78, 81 thetic character, xxxi; influence of
PFLEIDERER, Otto, 92-3, 94-5 Schrokh, 7-8, 51 n., 52 n.; influence
Phantasie: principle of harmony, xxv, of Meiners, 7 n., 28, 29; two con-
150-1,296,434,473,483; in Greek flicting conceptions, 26-30; in
culture, 32, 149-51, 167, 173, 234- excerpt collection, 28-9, 50 n., 5 I;
5, 245-'], 268 n., 271 n., 298, 377, ancient culture in, 33; and pheno-
390-3,412-13,505-7; alienation of menology, 41; and natural history,
German, 36, 235; in second canon, 42; source of logic, 52 n.; lampoon-
144, 145, 328-9, 496, 502-4; ed, 71; as shibboleth, 140, 494:
Catholic, 145 n., 236, 473; in in Systemprogramm, 250-1, 5 I I
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 561
philosophical sect: and positive, 214, 239, 329, 413; apostle of reason,
218, 219 xvii, 18 n., 126 n., 128; and H's
philosophy: H's initial hostility, xviii- political theory, 43, 426, 428, 468 n.,
xix, xx, 33-5, 68, 85 n., 104 n.; H's 473,475 n.; excerpts on virtues, 51,
Kantian conversion, xxi, 108, 210- 53; theory of experience, 76, 87,
II, 228-9, 231, 250, 510; depen- 41 I; study of, 84-5, 98; H's trans-
dence on others, xxi, :Uo-II, 288; lations, 85 n., 98; Minos, 102 n.;
H's 'application' of, xxxi-xxxii, 104- Phaedrus, 102 n., 271, 295 n., 298,
6,170 n., 186-7,231,254,288,445; 41 I n.; Symposium, 102 n., 104-5,
H's vocation as philosopher, xxxii, 120 n., 295 n., 307-8 n., 50S; Re-
406-8; earliest concern with, 4, 6, public, 102 n., 105, 125 n., 148 n.,
57, 87; in excerpt collection, 27 n., 426,468n.; Statesman, 102n., 142n.,
46-'7,50-2,83; Greeks and, 33-4, 426 n.; Timaeus, 102-3, 126 n.,
84-5, 127-8, 167, 228-9, 246-'7, 135;onlove, 104-5,324-6, 365;psy-
271; definition from Schrokh, 52; chology, 144, 150 n., 328, 373 n.;
Tiibingen course, 72-88, 153; task as H's model, 146 n., 149, 170 n.,
of,75,76,86-7, 124,186-7,210-11; 185, 416; ideal of beauty, 181,252-
history of, 74, 84, 85 n., 86-7; first 3, 5 I I; Vereinigung and Trennung
theoretical interest, 87, 175; agent of in, 312 n.; and Kant, 322-3, 326;
revolution, 106 n., 169, 184,209-10, on family, 343; anamnesis in, 366-7,
443, 473-4; and poetry, 235 n., 393; limit and unlimited, 376 n.;
245-6, 253-6, 5II; excluded from immortality in, 377-8; critique of
Eleusis, 245, 248; as reflection, 388- myths, 412; Laws, 426 n.
9 I. See also reflection .".}.~pwu,s, .".}.~pwp,a: Jesus' principle,
philosophy of nature. See Natur- 196 n., 204 n., 217 n.; of positive
philosophie law, 220, 333, 336-'7; of Gospel,
physical theology: and moral, 187,249, 220; of Gesinnung, 337; oflove, 337,
250, 510 369, 373; of moral law, 348
physics: H's early love, 2, 7, 9 n., 46, PLITT, G. L., 79 n., lIS n.
81; excerpts on, So; Tiibingen PLOUQUET, Gottfried (1716-90), 78 n.
course, 74; and Naturphilosophie, Pobel: and Volk, IS, 33
103, 250, 255 n., 510; and ethics, POEGGELER, Otto, 249 n.
349-50 poetry: educational function, 33, 36,
physiognomy: H's interest in, 13 n.; 40, 46, 48 n., 49, 59, 254, 443, 5 II;
in excerpt collection, 28, 29, 49-50 ancient and modern, 33-41, 75-'7,
pietism, 94, 224 n. 235-6; Greek, 35-41,75-'7,96, ISO-
piety: Christian and Greek, 243 1,271,275,412; and history, 36, 40,
PILATE, Pontius, III 235-6, 254-6, 5 II; in excerpt col-
pilgrimage: practice of, 149, 503 lection, 48-9; and philosophy,
PITT, William (1759-1806), 460 196 n., 235 n., 248, 253-6; and
'plans', Hegel's: lampooned, 7 I; first religion, 254-6, 275, 412, 511-12.
Berne plan, 170-4, 266, 268, 508- See also Phantasie
10; for Life oj Jesus, 194n., 196-7; Poland: fate of, 466
for 'Positivity' essay, 207-9; method .".6}.,s: law,in, xxx, 127, 387, 425-6,
of writing, 209 n.; Schelling's criti- 428; as supreme institution, 35,
cism, 210 n.; Systemprogramm and, 141 n., 164 n., 170-1, 183, 192, 251,
257; for 'Spirit of Christianity', 425-6,472; passing of, 183,239-:-40,
330-2; for Systemjragment, 379-82, 468 n., 471 n.
40 5-8 political club: in Stift, 63, 106, II3-15
PLANTAGENET, line of, 384 political freedom: and folk-religion,
PLATO: and H, xv; and H's Greek xxiv, 125, 134, 144, 149-51, 157,
ideal, xvii, xxxii, 120 n., 152, 477; 239-40, 50S, 506; of Germany,
Phaedo, xvii, 102 n., 181, 234, 235, xxix-xxxi, 450-4 (see German
8243588 Pp
 ANALTYICAL INDEX
political freedom (cont.): 225,232,233,235-44,2S4;checkin
freedom); H's abiding concern, 30; H's project, 244, 266-8, 326 n.; and
and education, 35-6, 40, 222-3; and 'historical fragments', 271 n.; Juda-
historic tradition, 149-51, 235; and ism in, 286 n., 292-4, 409 n.; new
Roman Empire, 183,239-40,471 n.; introduction, 379, 399-406, 416 n.,
and Christianity, 183, 184,239-40; 445
and moral autonomy, 237, 238-<); of possibility: mode of being, 314-16,
Jews, 240, 276-7, 285 n.; goal of 513; and actuality, 314-16, 336-7,
man, 255-6, 454-6, 511-12; as 342,513; of Trennung, 307, 358; in
custom and as right, 423-4; and Ho1derlin, 5 I 6
equality, 425, 468 postu1ate(s): of Providence, 33, 133,
political theory: in Frankfurt 'system'. 146, 148,187,195,226-7,487,500;
xxviii-xxxi; in 'system-programme', of God, 34 n., 86, 95, 100, 109,
250-2,256, 510-Il; object of, 448- Il2 n., 123, 125-'7, 133, 146, 187-
50 94,239,249-50,290,410,482,486,
POLYAENUS: study of, 47 487,51 I; of Vernunft, 124-5,204 n.,
polytheism: in folk-religion, 127-8, 226, 234, 250; of freedom, 34 n.,
286 n., 5Il. See also Pantheon 112 n., 227-8, 250 n.; of immortal-
POMPEY (Gn. Pompeius), 409 n., ity, 34 n., 86, 109 n., 112 n., 125-7,
471 n. 141-2, 146, 167, 178-9, 190, 192,
poor law reform: H's interest in, 435 195,228 n., 239, 250 n., 303, 377-8,
positive: H's usage, 225 n.; and 410,482,486,487, 5Il; revelation
negative, 374 as, 92-3, 187, 215 n., 226-'7; of
positive religion: Judaism as, xxiv noumena1 world, 137-8, 142 n.,
(see Judaism); and reflection, xxvi; 189, 410-1 I; of summum bonum,
Christianity as, 91-6 (see Christi- 147 n., 178-9, 190-1, 227, 290,
anity); Tiibingen view, 91-6, IlO, 301 n., 487; dissolution of, 142 n.,
214-15, 225-8, 231-2, 236, 29 1- 2, 19 1-3, 226-7, 239, 376-7
300-4, 3 11 , 3 17-21, 37 8-9, 399, prayer: as religious act, 122, 198, 205,
400 n.; and rational, 138, 214, 228, 344,4 81
292-3, 310-22, 344 n., 37 6-'7, 398- prehistory: concept of, 274 n.; Jewish
9,512-15; analysed, 225-8, 288-92, and Greek, 273-4, 279-80; German,
296-8, 492; attitude to fate in, 226, 279, 463, 468 n.
273; and living religion, 287, 293-5, prejudice: two types, 132-3, 137,490-
298; love in, 298-304, 362, 363 n.; I; as devil-possession, 201-3. See
God in, 357-8; and natural, 399-401 also superstition
positive sect: defined, 214; Christi- PRESSEL, Theodor E. F. C. (1819-77),
anity as, 217-18,488 69 n.
positivity: never good, 96 n., 214 n.; priesthood: authority of, 147, 165-6,
problem in folk-religion, 133, 138; 180, 255, 502, 5Il, 512; in Israel,
root of evil, 218-19; spirit of, 273- 183, 285; Egyptian, 275; in ideal
86,289-92,319,332-4; and forgive- cult, 397
ness, 355 primitive Christianity: not a fo1k-
'Positivity Essay': myth in, xxv, 236, religion, xxviii, 121, 128 n., 166,
256; Kant in, xxv, 228-31; Church 173, 223, 345, 510; and commun-
and State in, xxix, 220-4, 251, 413, ism, 166, 173,219,223,368-9, 374,
454 n., 465; culture in, 36 n., 40; 510; and modern, 173,219; evolu-
anticipated, I I I ; Lessing and, tion of, 212-19, 372-6
169 n.; and Life of Jesus, 200 n., primogeniture: natural representation
217; writing of, 207-9, 379 n., bY,4 68 ,475
392 n.; analysis, 212-24; object of, private religion: primitive Christianity
212-15, 379-82, 410; conclusion as, xxviii, 121, 128 n., 166, 173,223,
added, 228-3 I, 254; continuation of, 345, 510; and public, 128,218-19;
 ANALYTICAL INDEX
and folk-religion, 141, 144-5. 149. Prussia: as machine State, 251, 455-6,
171 n.; tasks of, 144-5,497-8, 506; 471-2; study of criminal code,
providence in, 146-7, 500-1; cere- 435 n.; and Reich, 462, 466-7, 470-
mony in, 148 n., 173, 219; Christi- I; toleration in, 465; Protestant
anity as, 173-4, 235-6 n., 412 champion, 471 n., 473
PROECK, Auguste Wilhelmine von Psychologie: evidence of Kant study,
(Sinclair's mother, d. 1815), 260 xx, 83 n., 84; excerpt from Flatt,
progress: in cultural development, 35, 73 n.; check in H's progress, 174,
39,40 252; analysed, 174-7
promise: of salvation, 319-21. See also psychology: early studies, xx, 174-6,
covenant 252; influence of Locke, 14 n.; in
Promotion: at TUbingen, 61 n., 65 n., excerpt collection, 46-7, 50; Flatt's
66 n.; Renzsche-Promotion, 62 n. ; course, 73 n., 78, 85 n.; debt to
H's place in, 65-6, 82; Holderlin's Mauchardt, 81; displaces real theo-
place in, 82-3 n. logy, 174
Property: in marriage, xxviii, 310; publication: H's failure, xxxi; H's
condition of society, 126-7, 166, plans for, 157 n., 379-82; Schelling's
173, 395-6; not end of society, 183, comment, 210 n.
443; in Mosaic law, 286; and love, public opinion: and parliamentary
310, 345-6, 371, 374; and despot- despotism, 424, 430-1
ism, 424; basis of feudal law, 438, public religion: and rational religion,
450-1, 465-6, 469; noble and xxiv, 141, 145, 495; concept, 121,
bourgeois, 472 126, 178, 198, 483; and folk-
prophecy and prophets: TUbingen religion, 128; deformation of gospel
courses, 89 n., 90; positive view of, in, 166; Christianity as, 166, 172-3,
91, 318, 378-9; Jewish, 127 n., 128, 218-19,409-16; authority in, 180;
276-'7, :<,85, 318; rational view of, and private, 218-19
128, 167,203 n.; transcends reflection PUETTER, Johan Stephan (1725-1807):
337,378--9; Jesus as, 337, 37 1-2, 378 H's studies, 416 n.; Constitution
proselytizing: in Christianity, 166, of German Empire, excerpts, 446,
218-20, 302, 375 46 In., 473 n.; his view of Reich,
PROTAGORAS, 87 452
Protestantism: supersition in, 16; of pulpit: visible and invisible, 163
H, 43; as folk-religion, 121, 122 n., punishment: principle of heteronomy,
128; Phantasie in, 148 n.; spirit of, xxiii, 221; divine, 32, 109, 179-80,
222-4; in Reich, 465-'74, See also 203, 227-8, 297; and fate, 331-3,
Christianity, Christian theology, 338 n., 346-55; definition, 347
Reformation, TUbingen School purity: of love, xxvii-xxviii (see beau-
providence: in WUnsch, 25; postulate tiful soul); of reason, 292 (see
of, 33, 133, 146, 148, 187, 195,226- righteousness); pure life, 319 (see
7, 487, 500-1; Greek religion, 33, God); of law, 375; negates actuality,
146, 147, 501; in H's valedictory, 375-6
42; in excerpt collection, 5 I; and PYRRHA, 274, 279, 413 n.
superstition, 133, 137 n., 487; in
private religion, 145, 146-'7, 242, Quakers: extreme of anarchy, 416 n.
500-1; and Bildung, 157; in theo- 'quartan fever': H suffers, 63 n.
logical logic, 187; how possible, quietism: of Christianity, 183, 184
193 n.; positive concept, 226-7,
300; Abraham's concept, 282 racial pride: of Jews, 201, 282-3,404-
prudence (Klugheit): and virtue, 24; 5 n.
and superstition, 133; law of, 206, RACINE, Jean (1639-99), 15-16
207 n.; and love, 308-9; and RAMLER, Karl Wilhelm (1725-98),
Vernunft, 325, 329 48 n.
 ANALYTICAL INDEX
RAPp, Gottlob Christian (1763-1794), 329; judgement of, 342, 346-50,
107 n. 353-4, 362-3; and reciprocity, 343,
Rastatt, Congress of: and H's political 349-50, 355, 358; dialectic of, 388-
studies, 416 n., 436-8; and hopes of 91; positive and rational, 399; cold,
'patriots', 432, 436----7, 466 n. 4 89,492
rational religion: moral essence, xxii, Reformation, the: significance of, 138,
213, 410; absolute Trennung in, 166, 168, 169, 454, 464
xxvi, 228, 348-50; in Wunsch, 24-6; REHBERG, August Wilhelm (1757-
in Bok, 86; Storr and, 94; influence 1836): excerpt, 56
of Kant, 108 (see KANT); influence Reich. See Germany
of Fichte, 108 (see FICHTE); goal of Reich Gottes. See Kingdom of God
folk-religion, 121, 126-8, 137-8, Reichstag. See Diet
145,254,491,495, 5II-rz; influence REINHARDT, Karl Friedrich (1761-
of Nathan, 141 (see LESSING); 1837): on Stift, 70 n.; Stiftler, 81;
rational theology, 129, 140-1, 160, H's interest, 82
187-9, 249; and positive, 138, 214, REINHOLD, Karl Leonhard (1758-
228, 292-3, 310-12, 344 n., 376----7, 1823): H's comments, 65, 104n.;
398-9, 512-15; and Christianity, influence in Stift, 88 n., 107 n.;
17 1-3, 177-82, 193-207, 213, 2I5, Versuch, 175
268,403-4; and Ego theory, 189-93, relation. See Beziehung, Verhdltnis
210; false mean, 321, 328, 329 religion: moral essence, xxi-xxv, 165,
RAYNAL, Guillaume T. F. (1713-96): 168----70,213,230 n., 410; living and
Histoire des deux Indes, 158 dead, xxi, 129,247-8; true and false,
realism: philosophical and naive, 313 xxiv, 171, 212-13, 231-2, 246-8,
reason. See Vernunft 400 n., 401 n., 491; absolute, xxvi,
'Reason and Freedom': watchword, 329-30, 390-2; of art, xxviii, 390-1 ;
99-100, 106, 188 n. and philosophy, xxxii, 34 n., 254,
Recht: and Verhdltnis, parallel, 428 n. 380, 387-91, 400-1, 405; in free
See also right society, 106, 134; action and thought
reciprocity: principle of reflection, in, 122-3, 481, 504; and Sinnlich-
343, 358; natural and moral, 343, keit, 32-3, 125-6, 131,485, 5II-12;
348-51,355; spiritual, 3 6 5 subjective and objective, 119, 129-
reconciliation: with fate, 191-2, 348, 35, 13 6, 140-1, 170-1, 221, 223-4,
350-1, 353-5; with men, 264, 243, 255, 484-9, 494-5, 508 ;
336 n.; with nature, 279-80; with universal, 130-1 n., 484-5; feeling
God, 310; with life, 333, 342, 346, and reason in, 139 n., 254, 5II; and
364; happy and unhappy, 369; of Volksgeist, 149-56, 165, 166, 168,
Verstand and life, 389-91; of 412,454, 457-8, 466; and Bildung,
Vernunft and life, 391. See also 157, 161-71, 222-4, 509; and
Vereinigung Church distinguished, 230 n.; and
reflection: and life, xxi, 304-8, 321-4, myth, 235-6, 254-5, 5II-12; highest
326-9, 376 n., 377, 402, 428 n., form of experience, 254, 388, 41 I,
431 n., 445; standpoint of philo- 414, 51 I; founding of, 255-6, 292,
sophy, xxvi-xxviii, 291, 293-4, 512; happy and unhappy, 284, 397-
347-8, 380-2, 386-91, 406-8, 4 14- 8; identical with love, 287, 295-6,
15; in Garve, 37; concepts of, 241, 298, 316-17, 327-8; phase of life,
291, 293-4, 360; transcended by 327, 329; distinguished from love,
Phantasie, 181, 246-8, 293-5, 304, 337,356-7,369,373; and needs, 405·
328-9,362,377,402; aspect of love, See also Christianity, folk-religion,
305, 321,352,392,414-15; error of Greek religion, Judaism, positive
opposition, 310-17, 336-7, 338, religion, private religion, public
346-8, 356, 512-15; phase of life, religion, rational religion
327, 385; identified with Verstand, RENZ, Karl Christoph (1770-1829):
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 565
primus of H's class, 62; career, 62- righteousness: in rational religion,
3 n.; in reading group, 85 n., 98; 292-4; critique of, 344, 346-50
his disgust, 110 n.; Repetent, 270 n. rigorism: in Kant, 34 n.; bad conse-
Repetent(en): duties, 62-3, 65-6 n., quences, 124
68 n., 72, 75, 90 n.; influence on H, RITZEL, Wolfgang, 17811.
81-2; Holderlin on, 244n., 27on.; ROBESPIERRE, Maximilien (1758-94):
H plans to become, 252 n., 258, 270 H's antipathy, II4n. ;as philosopher
Repetition: in philosophy course, 73 n.; king, 426, 454; political bogy, 428
in theology course, 90 n. ROBIN HOOD, 442
representation: H's ideal of, 416; of RocHAU,52
Volk, 424-7; independence of ROCI-IOW, D.: Catechismus der gesunden
voters, 429-31, 432-3, 449-50; Vernunft, excerpted, 52 n.
feudal, 450, 466, 467-8, 469 n.; ROESEL, Johann Gottlob (1768-1843),
evolution of, 452-3. See also parlia- 71 n.
ment ROESLER, Christian Friedrich (1736-
republic: H's political ideal, 31, 43, 1821): Tiibingen courses, 72, 73,
416, 423 74, 80, 84, 85 n., 417 n.; influence
respect: not sole moral motive, 142-3, on H, 78, 79-80; Bibliothek der
229, 495-6. See also Gesinnung Kirchenvater, 79-80
resurrection: significance of, xxviii, ROHRMOSEH, GUnther, 105 n.
321, 372-8; in Tiibingen sermon, Roman Empire: and Republic, 30-1,
IIO; condemned, 167, 268; mythi- 164,239--41; spirit of, 164,395,468;
cal, 203, 216, 217 n., 218; in Greek and Christianity, 183,240-1,300
religion, 373, 377-8 romanticism: influence on H, 26, 35
retribution: justice as 275, 348-51 ROQUES, Paul Henri: edition of mss.,
revelation: positive concept of, 91-6, 196----7 n., 200 n., 299 n., 308 n.,
226----7, 236, 315, 3 16 , 3 17- 20 , 379, 335 n., 338 n., 341 n., 350 n., 351 n.,
400n.; as postulate, 92-3,187, 357 n., 365 n.
21 5 n., 226-7; H's 263; role in ROSENKRANZ, Johann Karl Friedrich
Bildung, 109, 125-6 n.; poetic and (1805-79): use of evidence, 3 n.,
positive, 413; natural origin, 487 50 n., 7g--80, 83 n., 113 n., 114 n.,
reverence: spontaneity of, 335; volun- 158 n., 196 n., 230 n., 231 n., 232 n.,
tariness of, 415 417-18, 427, 435, 45 6 , 457-8 nn.,
revolution: causes and results, 178-9, 475 n.; on H's excerpt collection,
422-4,427-8,439-44; in H's views, 4-5, 14, 28, 45, 46-52, 80, 83; on
259, 264----70, 294 n., 326. See also Stuttgart essays, 30, 40, 41-2, 44;
American Revolution, French Revo- editing ofmss., 44, 132n., 136, 158,
lution, Gennan Revolution 159 n., 160 n., 237 n., 498 n.; errors,
reward: principle of heteronomy, 62n., 209n., 417n.,418n., 419n.; on
xxiii, 192,221,290,297; happiness RosIer, 80 n.; on H's Kant studies,
as, 92, 109, 147 n., 178-80, 191,227, 83 n., 84,195,256, 416n., 433-4; on
290, 297, 300--1; of faith, 180, 284, H'sPlato studies, 85 n., 98; on Bok's
29 0 , 300-4, 374 thesis, 86; on H's theology course,
Rhine: as Reich boundary, 432, 461 88, II6; on political scandals, 1I3 n.,
RrcAuLT. See RYCAUT 1I4n., II5n.; on H's 'historical
RrCHELIEU, Cardinal (1585-1642): fragments', 158,232 n., 417, 418 n.;
achievement of, 465 n., 469, 470 n., on Lije of Jesus, 194 n., 196, 202; on
473,47 6 Gennan mystics, 230 n., 231 n.; on
right (Recht): Roman principle, 164; H's political studies, 416 n., 417,
and love, 345, 348 , 353-4,371, 374; 418 n., 435; on Wiirttemberg
as religion, 375; natural, 423, 429; pamphlet, 418-19 n., 427, 428 n.,
contingency of, 452-3; religious, 433 n., 437 n.; and Verfassungs-
465. 469. See also law schrijt lacuna, 456-8, 461 n., 475 n.;
566 ANALYTICAL INDEX
ROSENKRANZ (cont.): SARAH, wife of Abraham, 386
referred to, 7 n., 12 n., 66 n., 68, SARTORIUS, Christoph Friedrich (1701-
74 n., 90 n., 102 n., 152 n., 156 n., 85): Compendium theologiae dog-
157 n., 184 n., 263 n., 341 n., 394 n. maticae, 89 n., 90 n., 162 n.
ROSENZWEIG, Franz: on H's Frank- SARTORIUS, Magister, 63 n., 102 n.
furt 'crisis', 265; on Verfassungs- Satan. See devil(s)
schrift, 416 n., 446 n., 449 n., 452 n., Saxony, Landtag of, 42 I
463 n., 477 n.; on H's political SCHELLER, Immanuel Johann Gerhard
pamphlets, 427 n., 436 n.; on the (1735-1803), I I
German Theseus, 476; referred to, SCHELLING, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
ix, 426 n. (1775-1854): and H's language, xxi,
ROTHACKER, Ferdinand Wilhelm 288; early mss., XXlll, 106 n.;
Friedrich (1770-1830), 116 n. revolutionary fervour, 63, 64, I I 3-
ROUGET DE LISLE, Claude Joseph 15; Wunderkind, 65, 66 n., 115,
(1760-1836), 114 n. 157 n., 208-10; correspondence with
ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques (1712-78): H, 65 n., 104 n., 105 n., 106 n., 107,
and natural man, 24, 86, 274 n.; 108 n., 129, 156, 158, 174, 176 n.,
influence on H, 26 n., 104 n., 109, 177, 184, 186-90, 197, 208-9, 240 ,
124, 132 n., 156, 213 n., 231, 416, 244 n., 247 n., 253 n., 424 n., 426 n.,
424 n.; Confessions, excerpted, 28, 474 n.; and Schnurrer, 66; Magister-
49,85; educational theory, 38,150, dissertation, 86 n., 106 n., 271 n.;
156; influence in Stift, 63,82; and and Tubingen School, 93-4, 21 I;
Schnurrer, 66; Emile, 85, 109 n., and Pantheismusstreit, 100; Ueber
150, 156; Social Contract, 85; H's My then., 106 n., 186, 237 n.; and
study of, 98 n., 104 n.; 'Savoyard Kant, 107 n., 176 n.; and Fichte,
Vicar', 109, 126 n., 213 n.; and 108, 116; H's letter of 1800, 125,
Switzerland, 159,224 n., 245 n.; and 129 n., 263, 406-7, 416, 440; 'Die
Jesus, 181; General Will, 223, 416, Miiglichkeit einer Form der Philo-
455 n. sophie', 187, 190,209; Ego theory,
Riicksicht(en): of being, H's use, 315- 189-91, 192-3, 220, 228 n., 248,
16,513; state and church as, 459 n.; 291, 310-11 n., 398; Philosophische
Hiilderlin's use, 516 Briefe, 210 n.; De Marcione, 210,
RUETTE, von, 118 n., 154 n., 155 n. 212; Vom Ich, 210-11, 291 n.,
rupture. See Trennung 398 n.; and Systemprogmmm, 249,
Russia: feudal society, 453 250,255 n., 510 n.; and H's 'plans',
RYCAUT, Sir Paul (1628-1700) : Histoire 257; and Sinclair, 259, 260; philo-
de l'Empire Ottoman, 42 n., 56 sophy of nature in, 408; and
revolutionary politics, 420; men-
Sabbath: not holy, 335, 336, 350; cere- tioned, 70 n., 74 n., 399
monial status, 344 SCHEUCHZER, Johannes (1672-1733):
sacrifice: in Greek religion, x..'{iv, 32, Physica excerpted, 50
148-9, 395-6, 504; two concepts, SCHILLER, Johann Christoph Friedrich
148-9, 503-4; essential practice, von (1759-1805): Fiesko analysed,
148, 395-6; and Eucharist, 219 41 n., 43 n., 49; Robbers, 41 n., 422;
Sadducees, 285, 334 n. influence in Stift, 8 I; ideal of
salvation: by faith, 23, 178-86, 212, Freude, 100; and Greek ideal, 151,
302; by works, 23-4, 109, 112; 231; and von Kalbs, 154 n.; .Tena
through reason, 26, 178, 184, 212; lectures, 156; 'Ode to Joy', 156n.;
in positive faith, 302, 318-21, 515; Thirty Years' War, H's notes, 158;
as gift, 358; as reconciliation, 363-4 'Resignation' Ode, 167; ideal of
SANDBERGER, Jorg: 1-1's theology Wiirde, 194 n.; Aesthetic Letters,
course, 162 n.; referred to, 73 n., 253, 411 n.; and Systemprogramm,
81 n., 90 n. 253, 254; On Grace and Dignity,
 ANALYTICAL INDEX
41 I n.; and German revolution, 443 ; SECKENDORFF, Franz Karl Leopold
mentioned, 42, 209 von (1775-1809), 106 n., 114 n.
SCHLOEZER, August Ludwig (1735- sect(s): authoritarian, 171, 179-80,
1809): H's earliest excerpt, 4 n., 52; 214-18, 509; philosophical, 214-15,
Staats Anzeigen, 4 n., 51 218, 23 I ; proliferation of, 224, 230-
Schmerz. See sorrow I ; in Judaism, 277; in folk-
SCHMID, Karl Christian Erhard (1761- religion, 413-15
1812): Empirische Psychologie, secularization: in Reich, 466 n., 473
176 n. n.
SCHNURRER, Christian Friedrich SEIGNEUX, Charles: Jurisprudence cri-
(1742-1822): H studied under, 57, minelle, 425, 426 n.
77; work as Ephor, 58 n., 113-15; self-consciousness: goal of love, 324,
relations with H, 65-6, 67, 69-70, 333; and life, 351-2, 360; of beauti-
78; career and attitudes, 66, 67 n., ful soul, 356
70,113-.15; Tiibingencourses, 66 n., self-respect: in public service, 455
73, 84; letters, 69, 70 n., 116 n. self-sacrifice: Stuttgart reflections, 22-
scholarship: living and dead, 4, 66, 87, 3; ethical significance, 191-2; patri-
140 , 253; H's vocation for, 4 (see otic, 227, 228, 260
vocation, Hegel's); social value of, sensibility. See Sinnlichkeit
7-8, 17, 42-3 serfdom. See slavery
SCHOLL, Johann Eberhard Heinrich Sermon on the Mount: Tubingen
(17 61 -1820): 69, 70 n., 113 n. sermon, 111-1.2; subject to mis-
SCHOLZ, Heinrich, 99 n., 100 n. understanding, 173, 181 n., 221 n.,
SCHOPENHAUER, Arthur (1788-1860), 509; basic in Life of Jesus, 204-'7,
13 n. 217 n.; and Phaedo, 329; analysed,
SCHROECKH, Johann Mathias (1733- 337-8, 341-6; punishment in, 347-
1808): influence on H, 7-8, 51 n.; 8 nn.; in Synoptics, 367 n.
Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte, 7-8, 28, sermons: H's, 108-13, 117-19; Stift
79; Christliche Kirchengeschichte, 8, regulations, 109 n., I I I n.; useless-
89 n., 9(); excerpts, 52 n. ness of, 129 n., 163, 165
SCHUBART, Christian Friedrich Daniel Seventy: sending of, 218 n.
(1739-9 1), 59 Seven Years' War: in Sophiens Reise,
SCHUELER, Gisela von Einem: on H's 13 n.; significance for Reich, 466
Psychologie, 84 n., 174 n.; dating of sexes, relation of: Stuttgart reflections,
Tiibingen mss., 117 n., 118 n., 10, 13; Tiibingen reflections, 139,
267 n.; of Berne mss., 162-3 n., 140 n., 493; and love, 295, 298, 306-
19 6 n., 224n., 225, 249; of Frank- 9,369; and marriage, 309- 10 , 342-
furt drafts, 272 n., 278 n., 280 n., 3; in reflective theory, 328; Kant's
299, 306; of 'Spirit of Christianity', view, 339-40 n.; as need, 373; and
299 n., .306, 330-1, 332 n., 434 n., immortality, 307, 378; as Verbin-
438 n.; of political fragments, 416, dung, 385-7
4 19 n., 434, 438, 440 n., 444 n., SHAFTESBURY, A. A. Cooper, 3rd Earl
445 n.; referred to, ix, 365 n., 379 n. (1671-1713): and moral sense, 131,
SCHULZ (the Jew-seeker), 508 132 n.; and Jesus, 181
SCHULZE, Johann (1739-1805): Erliiu- SHAKESPEARE, William (1564-1616):
terungen iiber Kants Kritik, 175 n. Laffier's gift, 2; Julius Caesar, 3 I ;
SCHWAB, Christoph Theodor, 115 n. and English history, 36, 235, 254;
Schwiirmerei: of Jesus, 218 n., 372, 375 Romeo and Juliet, 271, 309 n.;
SCHWEGLER, Albert (1819-57): un- Macbeth, 350, 353 n.
reliable source, 69 n., 82 n., 114 D., shame: real and conventional, 308-9,
115 n. 36 9
SCHWEICKARD, Eberhard Friedrich sharing: spiritual and material, 310,
(1770-1825), 116 n. 37 8
5 68 ANALYTICAL INDEX
SIEVES, Emanuel Joseph, comte de SOLOMON, King, 285,4°9 n.
(174 8- 18 3 6), 444 SOLON,286
SIMON the Pharisee, 201 n., 355 Son(s) of God: Jesus as, xxvii-xxviii,
Simplizitiit: in Greek poetry, 36, 37, 101, 360-4, 365 n.; Christians as,
41,84; in Hebrew poetry, 84 I II-12
sin: original, 23 (see original sin); Son of Man: Jesus as, 101, 360-4,
problem, 201, 227-8, 320, 354-6; 365 n.
moral death, 202 n., 304; and SONNENSCHEINS, of Berne, 341
impietas, 243; and misfortune, 297; Sophiens Reise. See HERMES, J. T.
and love, 336 n., 342-3; against the Sophists: agents of Verstand, 247
spirit, 348 n., 363-4 SOPHOCLES: study and translation, 47,
SINCLAIR, Isaak von (1775-1815): 48,56; Oedipus Coloneus, 47,56,97,
'patriot', II411., II5, 432; relations 353 n.; Antigone, 48, 56n., 97;
with H, 259-61; influence on H, nemesis in, 275 n.; influence of,
294. See also PROECK, A. W. von 397; mentioned, xvii
Sinnlichkeit: and heteronomy, 33, 109, sorrow (Schmerz): and sin, 297: aim-
126, 227-8, 483, 491-2; and Ver- less, 300: and fate, 353-4: and
nunft, 86, 123-6, 131, 150 n., 176, Leiden, 498-9 n.
19 1-3, 204-6, 227-8, 255-6, 322-4, soul: and body, 125, 376-8
482, 491-2, 5II; and objective sourdough: metaphor, 106, 109, III,
values, 87; and love, II2, 143-4, 135 n., 140, 186, 188, 489, 490
308, 324, 358, 496; primary motive sovereign(ty): necessity of, 334-5; of
force,I24,131,142,482,495;higher Wiirttemberg, 419-20; popular,
and lower, 143-4, 328, 496; in 427: as partisan, 444: national, 450;
second canon, 145, 409-10; and not judicially decidable, 459 n.;
Phantasie, 147, 328, 329, 356-7, 398, personal and constitutional, 463-4
409-10, 502; in positive religion, space: and time, 383-4 n., 386-7
282,288,290,301-3,319,409-10 n.; Sparta: and Athens, 164 n. ; and
in free religion, 356-7, 409-10, 505; Geneva, 224 n.: and Prussia, 454
in rational religion, 398; source of SPINOZA, Baruch (1632-'77): and
prejudice, 490, 497 Pantheismusstreit, 34 n., 95 n., 98-
Sittlichkeit: achievement of, 142-5, 101, 189, 315, 324; and EV Ka' 7Ta"
495-8; object of religion, 178, 206; 98-101, 295, 312 n., 315-16, 324;
in Reich, 457 and Jesus, 181; substance in, 189-90,
slavery: in Greek ideal, 151,235,453; 2II, 304 n.: Ethics, 250; freedom
rational, 318, 321, 336; religious, in, 449 n.
350, 375; necessary moment, 395. spirit: Greek, xxii (see Greek spirit):
See also lordship and bondage Jewish, xxv-xxvi (see Judaism):
social contract: impossible in faith, Christian, xxv-xxvii (see Christi-
223,229 anity): and fate, xxv-xxviii, 272-5;
SOCRATES: apostle of reason, xvii, 167, concept, 25 n., 38, 122 n., 365-7;
234, 239, 240; model for H, xix, and letter, 37-8 (see literalism); of
146 n., 170, 185,416; Volkserzieher, Volk, 126, 149,483,506; and body,
xxiii, 162-4, 185; last words, xxiii- 167, 298 n., 376-7, suprapersonal,
xxxiv, 9, 14-16, 134,488; problem of, 190 n. ; finite and infinite, 245; Holy
134 n., 139 n., 146 n., 147,234,239; Spirit, 361-2; as law, 386, 397; and
not impious, 151; end of era, 152; matter, 376-8, 382-3. See also Greek
death of, 167, 169; and immortality, ideal
167, 192; and Jesus, 170 n., 181-2, 'Spirit of Christianity': and Berne
183, 185-6, 199,217,329,401,413; essays, 215 n., 217 n., 228, 267;
exemplar of sage, 181-2; mentioned, spirit and fate in, 228, 272; and Life
48,505 n. of Jesus, 267, 335, 351; opening,
~olipsism, 304 286 n.; and Frankfurt fragments,
 ANALYTICAL INDEX
288-9, 306; critique of Kant in, 3 I I, STEUART, Sir James Denham (1712-
3 18 , 3 21 -2, 334-4 2 , 347-5 2, 362-5, 80): Principles of Political Economy,
469 n.; mss. and dates, 330-2, 370, H's commentary, 434-6
379; analysed, 330-79; worship in, Stift. See Tiibingen, University of
393; purpose of, 380-2, 402 n.; STIRLING, James Hutchinson: 'secret
lacuna, 404; Rosenkranz's view, of Hegel', 389-91
417 n.; and political studies, 433, Stoicism, 299, 302
435 n., 436 n., 440; and ideal of STORR, Gottlob Christian (1746-1805):
'Nature', 444-5 significance for H, xx, 59, 60 n.,
'Spirit of Judaism': mss., 272, 330 n., 70'n., 9J, 93-6, 108-9, 117, 287,
331 n.; extreme of positivity, 319 292, 399, 407; and Kant, xx, xxiii,
spontaneity: of ancient culture, 40, 41 ; 92-3, 228, 320, 400 n.; Christology
ideal of, 263; of love, 300, 316 n., of, xxiii, 93-5,101,110,317; miracle
317; and obligation, 413-14; and in, xxiii, 94, 268 n., 379; revelation
natural right, 423; of political com- in, xxiii, 91-5, 226, 236, 379, 400 n.;
munity, 426 H studies under, 57, 59, 65 n., 66-7,
Staats An.~eigen, 4 n., 51 88, 90; and Flatt, 78; Tiibingen
Staatsgewalt: none in Reich, 447, 469; course, 89 n.; his school, 90 (see
inheritance of, 447, 459 n.; con- Tiibingen School); Doctrina Christi-
tingent in form, 452; definition, ana, 90 n., 91, 162 n., 407; life and
453; and rule of law, 4 69, 474 work, 91-3; Annotationes (on Kant),
Staatsmacht: definition, 452, 453 108, 115, 119 n., 147 n., 188, 225 n.;
Staatsrecht: as Privatrecht, 447, 450-1, as Volkserzieher, 162; on Gospels,
459 n., 469; conflicts of, 469 367 n.
STAEUDLIN (Gymnasium schoolboy), STRAHM, Hans, 156 n., 157 n., 230 n.,
59 n. 425 n.
STAEUDLIN, Charlotte, 59 n. STRAUSS, David Friedrich (1808-74),
STAEUDLIN, Gotthold Friedrich (1758- 263 n.
96): and H's career, 58 n., 59, 116, STRAUSS, Ludwig, 511 n.
154 n. subject: God as impersonal, 189-90;
STAEUDLIN, Karl Friedrich (1761- Absolute as, 21 I; and object, 288-
1826), 81 95, 297, 305, 318, 515-16. See also
STAEUDLIN, Nannette (Christiane Ego
Vischer), 59 n. subjective. See objective and sub-
STAEUDLIN, Rosine (1767--95), 59 n. jective
Stammbuch: H collects Sentenzen, 49, sublimity: in nature, 160; in religion,
54; evidence of H's, 61-4 nn., 68, 277,281,357,397-8; oriental spirit,
70-2, 102 n.; Fink's, 68, 86; 278 n.; in personal relations, 281
Hiilderlin's symbolum, 97-8; politics substance: and subject, 189-90; abso-
in H's, 97, 113n., 116, 154; origin lute as, 21 I; and attributes, 315-16;
of H's, 97 n. as life, 352 n., 360, 362, 386; and
State: Church and, xxix (see Church modes, 352 n., 360, 362
and State); Cicero's definition ex- SUESKIND, Friedrich Gottlieb (1767-
cerpted, 52; moral organism, 171-2, 1829): friend of Diez, 98 n., 108 n.;
221, 251, 434, 509; and religion, essay on Fichte, II5, 188, 225 n.,
171-2, 409-16; human creation, 226 n.
238-9,250; as mechanism, 239 (see SUESKIND, Johann Gottlob (1773-
machine State); and religious com- 1828), 108 n., 176 n.
munion, 371, 374; living whole, suffering: as Christian value, 150, 183,
434, 454- 6 , 459 n. 269,374; H's understanding of, 265,
STEIGER, Karl Friedrich von (1754- 26 9-7 0
1841), 118, 154-5, 156 n. suicide: morality of, 206 n. See also
STEPHANUS, Henricus, 505 n. CATO
 570 ANALYTICAL INDEX
SULZER, Johann Georg (1720-79): TERTULLIAN (c. 16o-230): Apolo-
KU1"zer Begriff der Gelehrsamkeit, geticum, 134. 135, 488, 489
excerpt, 17 n., 52, 55 testimonial: Tiibingen, 67, 153
sunlight: metaphor, xvi-xvii, xxxii, THAULOW, Gustav: editor of excerpts,
184,477 27 n., 44-5, 47-52
sun worship, 392 n. theatre: H's love of, 262, 264
superstition: and enlightenment, xxiii, THEOCRITUS: study of, 47; and Greek
9, 12, 16, 254; in Greek religion, ideal, 152
32; and despotism, 43, 178; in Theological Journal. See AMMON
folk-religion, T 32-3, 137, 410, theology: in excerpt collection, 50 n.,
487, 497; and belief in miracle, 51; and religion, 129 n., 132, 170,
199-201, 217. See also fetish-faith, 243, 508; work of Verstand, 130,
prejudice 140, 494-5; ethical and physical,
SUPHAN, Bernhard, 295 n. 187; science of God, 482, 484, 485-
Sweden: king in Diet, 461. See also 6, 487, 488, 494. See also Christian
GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS theology, Tiibingen School
Switzerland: H's life in, 154-61; im- theory and practice: H's pragmatism,
pressions of, 158-6 I xvii--xviii, 33-5, 86-7, 103-4, 124,
synthesis: unites thesis and antithesis, 482, 496; original Trennung, xxvi,
21 I n.; unites antitheses, 289; and 149, 323-4, 504; contrast of, 129,
Vereinigung, 291-4, 312, 316 n. 140, 493-4; problem of, 162, 187,
Systemfragment : tone of, xxxii, 388-9; 21 I; Greeks and Kant, 228-9, 323
mythology in, 256; aim and design, THESEUS: achievement of, 131 n., 134,
273 n., 379-82, 405-8; and Frank- 273-4, 28311., 3II n., 413, 466,
furt sketches, 288, 296 n.; ms., 379, 475 n.; H's hero, 134, 416, 433 n.,
391-2 n., 394 n.; analysed, 382-99; 488; apotheosis of, 373 n.; of
and political fragments, 439 n., 440, Germany, 449 n., 475-7
445 Thirty Years' War: significance of,
'System', Hegel's: character, xxviii, 4 61 , 4 67
406-8; 445; politics in, 4 16, 440-5, THUCYDIDES: study and translation,
473 48, 232 n., 271; and Greek ideal,
'System-programme'. See Chrono- 152; on Theseus, 475 n. See also
logical Index, 76 PERICLES
time: and space, 383-4n., 386-7;
TACITUS, Cornelius: Germania, 36 n. ; antimony of, 394; as Weltgeist, 464
Agricola, translation, 48; excerpts TITUS, Emperor, 476 n.
on virtues,s I, 53 toleration: of theoretical error, 33-4;
TAULER, Johann (1300-61): excerpts, as duty, 223; of practical error, 238;
230, 231 n. as grace and right, 465-6, 469; now
taxation system: of Wiirttemberg, secured, 469, 473; ceremony and,
420-I; and self-government, 423-4; 509
feudal and modern, 453 tragedy. See Greek tragedy
TELL, William, 161 tree: metaphor, 360-2, 383-4 n.
Temple: in Greek religion, 32, 391 n., Tree of Liberty. See Freedom Tree
392-3; in Judaism, 286, 391 n., 392- Trennung: reflective, xxvi, 297, 315-
3,409 n. 16,321-2,342,364,4°0-1,513; of
temptation: ethical significance, 192; theory and practice, xxvi, 149, 323-
of Jesus, 199-201,202,368 4, 5°4; of faculties, 229, 325; from
TENNEMANN, Wilhelm Gottlieb (1761- Nature, 274, 278-84, 303-4; and
1819): excerpt, 146 n., 170 n., fate, 274-5, 327; from other men,
176 n., 185 n., 416 n. 274-5, 282-3; from God, 284,
Terror (of 1793): fate of Revolution, 363 n.; and Vereinigung, meaning.
xxix. 426 n., 428, 474 284; and misfortune. 289. 296-7 n.,
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 57 1
498-9n.; in HolderIin, 291 n., 294n., love in, 124, 131, 143-4,269 n., 322,
5 I 5-1 6; and bad conscience, 294; of 485,496; higher sensibility in, 131,
peoples, 296; of virtue and happiness, 143-4,328 n., 485, 496; Theseus in,
297 ; possibility of, 305, 307; and love, 134,413,416,488; spirit and fate
305-9; of feeling, 3 I 9-20, 5 I 5; first in, 147, 149, 273, 275 n., 501, 504,
occurrence, 323 n., 504; of love 506; Religion as nurse, 149-51,
from world, 364, 375-6; of soul and 168, 4II-12, 506-7; and Berne
body, 377; and Beziehllng, 384; and essays, 161-2, 232-3, 267, 294 n.;
Verbindllllg, 38$; of Vernllnft and influence of Herder, 271 n., transla-
Phantasie, 393-4; of social classes, tion of, 481-507
397; of God and nature, 397-8; of Tiibingen School: and Kant, xx (see
Church and State, 415, 433-4, 465, KANT); Storr and, 90, 399; 'older'
466, 469, 473 n.; of monarch and and 'later', 92-3; as positive sect,
subjects, 463, 465-6; and Schmerz, 214, 303-4, 399; on positive faith,
498-9 n. 225-8, 231-2; miracle in, 237n.;
Trent, Council of, I eudaemonism of, 242. See also
tribe: substance of life, 360; and STORR
member, 384 n. Tiibinger Stijt. See Tiibingen, Uni-
Trinity: Storr on, 92; tree analogy, versityof
360-2 Tiibingsche Gelehrte Anzeigen, 86 n.
truth: objective and subjective, xxv, Turkey, 41-2, 44, 56 n.
225; criterion of, 313, 320, 512; of Twelve Apostles, the: and followers
Vernlll1ft, 500. See also Vernllnft of Socrates, 163--4; and Church
Tschugg, 155, 157-8, 230 authority, 166; calling of, 217;
Tiibingen, University of: atmosphere, sending of, 218, 371
xix, 57--72, 112-16, 245-8; H tyranny: and anarchy, 415
matriculates at, 2, 3, 56, 57; teachers TYRTAEUS: study of, 48, 54
at, 9 n., 77-82, 88-96; H's attitude,
35, 58-9,64-'7,69-72,94-7, 114 n., Ueber das Excipieren, 12, 54, 87 n.
U5, 186,245-8,406,420; reform of UHLAND, Ludwig Josef (1722-1803):
Stijt, 58, I I I n., 113; lecture lists, H studied under, 57,65-6 n., 89 n.;
73-4, 89 n.; Spinoza controversy, 90-1
97-104; Kant controversy, 92-4, ULRICH, Johann August (1746-1813):
107-12, 116-17, 119; H plans career Eleutheriologie, review excerpted,
at, 252 n., 258, 270 56; compendium, 74, 78
Tiibingen fragment: object, xxi-xxii, unbelief: problem of, 173, 509
119, 122-3, 163 n., 165, 406-7; understanding. See Verstand
three canons in, xxii, 145-51,233-4, unhappiness: unhappy consciousness,
323, 409-13, 499; myth in, xxv, 183-4; in religion, 284, 289, 296-7,
120 n., 149, 235 n., 254-5, 411-12, 353, 369, 498-9 n.; and compre-
502, 506--7; Trennung in, xxvi, 149, hension of fate, 441-2
323,505; Nathan in, 38 n., 133, 136, universal. See concrete universal
139,140-1,145,169 n., 237 n., 329, universal suffrage: Fox on, 430 n.; H
487,488, 489, 493 fl., 495; on com- on, 430-1, 434
pendia, 91 n., 135, 136, 489, 490, Unsichtbare Kirche. See Invisible
493; and Fichte, 125 n.; influence Church
of Kant, 108, II6-17, 125 n., 126, Unsinnskollegium, 113 n., I14n.
129, 132, 137 n., 138, 141 n., 142-4, utilitarianism: in Bok, 86; moral
145, 146 , 150, 169 n., 234, 329, 339, calculus unusable, 136, 347-9, 490
406, 496 n.; ceremony in, 118 n.,
148-9, 396, 502-4; analysed, II9- valedictory: at Gymnasium, 31, 41-4,
53; rns. and lacunae, 120 n., 123, 56 n.
132 n., 135-6, 153, 172 n., 481, 489; Valhalla, 192 n., 235
572 ANALYTICAL INDEX
VANNI-ROVIGHI, Sofia, 267 238 n., 327-9, 347-50, 3 88 -9 1,
Vaud, canton of: and Berne, 157-8, 400-2, 448-9; contrasted with
421-2, 429 n. Verstand, xxxi-xxxii, 36-8, 130 n.,
Verbindung: of Verb in dung and Nicht- 176, 177 n., 195, 219, 228-9, 4 8 5-
verbindung, XXVlll, 385-8, 395; 94; and Sinnlichkeit, 33, 86, 10 9,
Kant's use, 340 n.; of divine and 123-5,131, ISO n., 176, 191-3,485;
human nature, 363 n., 373, 376; of demands of, 92, 122-3, 125, 178-82,
spirit and matter, 377; of individual 321-2, 481; and revelation, 92,
life, 383-6; copulation as, 385; of 215 n., 232, 236, 300-4, 499; Jesus
nation state, 439, 454; of the Reich, and, 95 (see JESUS); and history, 9 6 ,
4-39 n., 450-1; of custom, 451-2, 268 n.; and freedom, watchword,
454; in H6lderlin, SIS 99-100, 106; in nature, 103, 160;
Vereinigung: with Nature, 280, 281, and love, 112, 131-2, 143-4, 269,
283, 298, 315-18, 321, 513; with 294-5,3 0 4,322,3 24-5,337-8,34 1-
God, 282-3, 366; first occurrence, 3, 485, 495-6; chimera, 123, 12 5,
282 n.; and Trennung, meaning, 482; Ideas of, 124-6, 482, 500;
284; and prosperity, 285 n., 296-- postulates of, 125 n. (see postu-
7 n.; and synthesis, 289-94, 312, late(s)); essence of religion, 132,
316 n.; in H6lderlin, 291 n., 294 n., 137-8, 180, 195, 197, 212-13 n.,
5 IS; positive and real, 292-5, 298, 485, 491; socially unifying, 134;
3 0 4, 315-22, 327, 366, 377-8, 5 12- noumenal, 137-8, 143, 200, 481-2;
IS; love as, 294-5, 298,304-9; of tension with myth, 138; first canon
peoples, 296, 414-15; and being, of folk-religion, 144 (see fo!k-
304, 314, 5 I 3; copulation as, 307-9; religion); and Phantasie, 148-9 (see
and synthesis, 3 I 2, 3 I 6 n.; reflec- Phantasie); in Christianity, 166,
tive, 314, 319-21, 327; in love feast, 194-6, 207; 213-15, 233-4, 268,
356; of spirit and body, 377-8; 333-9; and positive authority, 184,
synonymous with Beziehung, 384; 195, 207, 212, 215-16, 380, 4 0 0-4,
and Schmerz, 498-9 n. See also 443,491-2; and existence of God,
Verb in dung 190-4; God as, 198-9; eye of soul,
VerJassungsschrift: H's object in, xxix- 205-6; Greek and Kantian, 206 n.,
xxxi, 448-50; and Systemprogramm, 228-9,231,234,238-9,322-7,391;
251, 256; machine State in, 251; invincible, 219-20; and sects, 231;
phases of composition, 407-8, 446- and objectivity, 243; harmonized
8; first phase, 416 n., 418, 446 n., with myth, 254-6, 5 I I; Kant's
452 n., 456 n., 459 n.; earliest concept rejected, 318, 321, 322,
studies for, 436-46; two intro- 338-42, 346, 400-2; in Luke,
ductions, 447 n., 452 n.; bcuna, 367 n.; monotheistic, 5 I I ; in H6I-
447, 45 6-9; analysed, 448-77; last derlin, 516
phase, 477 n. Versailles, palace of, 140 n., 495
Verhiiltnis(se): of man and God, Verstand: and VernunJt, xxii (see
363 n.; of life, 375; in dialectic, VernunJt); in Wunsch, 24; and en-
390; of man and nature, 396; and lightenment, 25, 136-40,448-9,455,
Recht, 428 489-95; in Garve, 36-8; fetters of,
VernunJt: religion of, xxi (see rational 85; Verstandesmensch, Has, 101 n.,
religion); goal of religion, xxi-xxii, 257,27°; in objective religion, 13 0-5,
157, 165, 168-70, 178,410-13,499- 241-2,484,487-92; and theological
502; self-sufficiency of, xxiii, 226-7, concepts, 169; suffocates feeling, 13 I,
240; authority of, xxiv, 204 n., 242, 133, 139, 147, ISO, 247; and Herz,
292-4, 295, 322-8, 346; synthesis of 132 n., 247, 488-9, 492; socially
freedom and law, xxiv, 292-3, 334.- divisive, 133, 145-6, 4-15; perceives
7; highest act of, xxv, 253, 5II; principles of VernunJt, 137, 138 n.,
identified with Verstand, xxvi, 491; morally neutral, 136, 139,489-
 ANALYTICAL INDEX 573
90; and selfishness, 144; and provi- 198, 253-5, 412-16, 511-12; and
dence, 146-7; corrupts religion, 166; moralist, 347-8. See also Bildung
and historical testimony, 180, 202; Volksgeist: constitution of, 126--8,
and Phantasie, 181 (see Phantasie); 149, 161--2,506-7; ideal of, 149-52,
and miracle, 236, 237 n., 292, 376- 157 (see Greek ideal); youth and
7; and dynamical concepts, 241-2; age, 152, 165, 483-4, 507; corrupt
and love, 304-5 ; faculty of reflection, and healthy, 161-70; of Germany,
328-9,402; freezes life, 386-7, 389- 166 (see Germany); death and re-
91; Verstandesleben, 443; in H61- birth, 276-7, 43 1, 433, 443-4, 448-
derlin, 516 50. See also Greek spirit
VertrauZiche Briefe. See CART VoZZstandigkeit: and UnvoZZstandigkeit,
vice. See virtue 317,369 n., 370, 392, 514
VIDA, Marco Girolamo (1480-1566), VOLTAIRE, Fran~ois Marie Arouet de
Christiad, translation, 53 n. (1694-1778): pragmatic historian,
violence: of fate, 350,422,428,443-4; 8; influence in Stift, 63, 70 n.
against fate, 353, 441-3 voluntary: and involuntary in fate,
vine: metaphor, 360-1 275, 278, 441-2
VIRGIL (P. Vergilius Maro) : excerpted, VorsteZZung: in Wunsch, 24-5; of God,
13,55 32; variability of, 86-7; and con-
Virgin Birth, 110, 367 n. cepts, 241; mode of faith, 3II-13,
virtue(s): and happiness, 86 (see 320,512,515; and life, 384 n., 391-
happiness); private, 144-5, 497-8; 3
premiss of rational faith, 167; its
own reward, 205; ancient, 206 n.; Wagram, battle of, 260
religion, 215-17; positive doctrine WALLACE, William, 390 n.
of, 218, 219 n., 346-7; as Gesinnung, war: personal combat, 458; absolute
337 n., 338, 341; modifications of combat, 458; and sovereign right,
love, 338-9, 341, 352 n.; collisions 459 n., 4 69
of, 339-41, 344, 345; and vice, 347 water: image of divine life, 160,293 n.,
vocation, Hegel's: as Volkserzieher, 439
xvii, xix-xx, 4, 59, 157, 210n.; web: metaphor, 1I9, 124, 142-4,482,
failure of, xxxi, 476-7; as philoso- 486, 494, 49 6
pher, xxxii, 407-8; as scholar, 4, 6, Wechselstil, 358
9, 30, 45-6, 66, 71; crisis in, 244, WEISS, Eberhard F. P. (1770-1807),
252,258,259,263-6; Nanette Endel II6n.
on, 263 Wesen: God as, 294, 300, 316 n., 357,
vocation of man: Mendelssohn on, 363 n., 405; man as, 317 n.; in
19-20; in Valedictory, 44; and H6lderlin, 5 I 5
EV KaL ?ray, 104; and Kingdom of Westphalia, Peace of: significance for
God, I I 1-12; as norm of duty, 200, Reich, 461, 465, 469, 474
400-1 WETZEL, August (1772-after 1827):
VOEGT, Nicolaus (1756-1836), 432 n. and political club, 63 n., 67 n., 113-
Volk: and Plibel, 15, 33, 503; barbaric 14
and civilized, 31-3, 463; spirit of, whole: God as, 282, 299, 350, 357-9;
126 (see Volksgeist); pastoral, 161; man as, 306, 352, 355 n.; spirit as,
birth of a, 272-4; Christian com- 365,369-70; life as, 383-8; state as,
munion as, 369-71; German, 440-4, 4 1 5,42 5-7,45 2-3
450-1, 453-4; madness of, 475-6. WIEDMANN, Franz, 2 n.
See also Greek ideal, Israel WIELAND, Christoph Martin (1733-
Volkserzieher: H's vocation, xvii (see 1813): his Horace excerpted, 49
vocation, Hegel's); uses Verstand, WILAMOWITz-MoELLENDORF, Ulrich
137, 174-5; Platonic model, 146 n., von, 152
185; task of, 162-5, 169-70, 185-6, WILKINSON, Elizabeth M., 253 n.
574 ANALYTICAL INDEX
\VILLOliGHBY, LA., 253 n. crisis (1797), 419-21, 427, 432-3;
WINCKELMANN, Johann Joachim Estates, see Landtag
(1717-68), 152 n.
WINDISCHMANN, Karl Joseph H., 265, XENOPHON, 18 n.
266
Wirklichkeit. See actuality ZEBEDEE, wife of, 214
WOLFF, Christian von (1679-1754): ZIMMERMAN, Johann Georg (1728-
influence at Tlibingen, 78, 80 n.; 95): Ueber die Eillsamkeit excerp-
H's early study of, 78 n.; ethics, ted, 24, 28, 49, 54, 175
124, 126 n., 242; theory of being, ZOELLNER, Johann Friedrich (1753-
309,314,316 n. 1804): Lesebuch excerpted, 21 n.,
vVorld Soul, 100, 102-3 55
WUENSCH, Christian Ernst (1744- Zusammenhallg: unconscious Verbin-
1828): Kosmologische Unterhal- dung, 464
tungen excerpted, 23-6, 28, 49, 54 Zweck: of religion, xxii, 178,213,410;
Wlirttemberg: H's pamphlet on, xxx ofJudaism,299-301 ; of Christianity,
(see Chronological Index, 91); re- 302
ligion and culture, I, 44, 64-5, 91, ZWILLING, Jakob (1776-1809): death
95; French county of, 97; political of,260
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