1817. Preface to the First Edition

The need to put into the hands of my hearers a guide to my philosophical lectures is the immediate occasion of my letting this survey of the entire range of philosophy see the light sooner than I should otherwise have intended.

The nature of an outline not only excludes a more exhaustive development of the ideas as regards their content, but in particular also cramps the development of their systematic derivation, which must contain what used formerly to be understood by proof, and which is indispensable to a scientific philosophy. The title was meant to indicate partly the range of a whole, and partly the intention of reserving the detail for oral exposition.

In an outline, however, what chiefly comes into consideration is a merely external suitability of arrangement and disposition, when the content to be set forth in an intentional brevity is one already presupposed and familiar. The present exposition is not in this case: it puts forward a new treatment of philosophy, according to a method which, I hope, will yet be recognised as the only true one, the one identical with the content. I might therefore have thought it more to its advantage with the public, had circumstances allowed me to let a more detailed work on the other parts of philosophy precede it, such as I have given to the public on the first part of the whole, the Logic. In the present exposition the side by which the content lies nearer to representation and to empirical acquaintance had to be restricted. Nevertheless I believe that, in regard to the transitions, which can only be a mediation effected through the notion, I have made it sufficiently noticeable that the method of the advance is distinguished both from the merely external order which the other sciences seek, and from a manner that has become customary in philosophical subjects. This manner presupposes a schema, and with it sets the materials in parallel just as externally as the first way does, and still more arbitrarily; and, by the strangest misunderstanding, it claims to have satisfied the necessity of the notion with the contingency and arbitrariness of its connexions.

We have seen this same arbitrariness take possession of the content of philosophy as well, set out on adventures of thought, and for a time impose upon genuine and honest endeavour, though otherwise it was taken for a folly heightened even to madness. Instead of something imposing or mad, its substance more properly, and more often, let familiar trivialities be seen; and its form, the mere manner of a deliberate, methodical and easily acquired wit of baroque connexions and a forced eccentricity; and, in general, behind the air of earnestness, a deceit practised on itself and on the public. On the other side, again, we have seen shallowness stamp the want of thoughts as a self-wise scepticism and a criticism modest about reason, and increase its conceit and vanity in the same degree as its emptiness of ideas. — These two tendencies of the mind have for a considerable time aped German earnestness, wearied its deeper philosophical need, and brought about an indifference, and even such a contempt for the science of philosophy, that now even a self-styled modesty thinks it may presume to talk and pass judgment on the deepest matters of philosophy, and to deny them that rational cognition whose form used formerly to be comprehended under proofs.

The first of the phenomena mentioned may in part be regarded as the youthful zest of the new epoch which has dawned in the realm of science as in the political. If this zest greeted the dawn of the rejuvenated spirit with giddy rapture, went straight to the enjoyment of the Idea without deeper labour, and for a time revelled in the hopes and prospects which the Idea offered, it is the more easily forgiven its excesses, because a kernel lies at their base, and the superficial haze it has spread around this kernel must of itself disperse. The other phenomenon, however, is more repugnant, because it betrays exhaustion and impotence, and strives to cover them with a conceit that plays the master over the philosophical minds of all the centuries, misunderstands them, and most of all misunderstands itself.

It is all the more gratifying to perceive, and still to mention, how against both of these the philosophical interest and the earnest love of higher cognition have maintained themselves, without prejudice and without vanity. If this interest has at times thrown itself rather upon the form of an immediate knowledge and of feeling, it nevertheless attests the inner, farther-reaching impulse of rational insight, which alone gives man his dignity; and it attests it most of all in this, that even that standpoint becomes for it only the result of philosophical knowledge, so that what it seems to disdain is at least acknowledged by it as a condition. — To this interest in the cognition of truth I dedicate this attempt to furnish an introduction, or a contribution, towards its satisfaction; may such a purpose win it a favourable reception.

Heidelberg, May 1817.